Education, writes Roberto Calasso in The Ruin of Kasch, comes with a paradox: “it consists above all of things that cannot be learned — or of things that represent what cannot be learned.” Calasso drops the remark almost in passing, and without much further explanation. While he himself was an eminent product of the Italian system of humanist education (still one of the best anywhere), and lectured at major universities around the world, throughout his life Calasso held a fundamental distrust towards the university as an institution. He would advise youth of intellectual promise not to go to university, because "a sterile academic imprint could be dangerous to the more open-minded". While formal education may play a role in formulating the big questions, it is unable to answer them. Indeed, these questions are of such a nature that we cannot learn their answers from someone else; we need to discover them within ourselves.
For about 40 years, between the early Eighties and his death in 2021, Roberto Calasso produced a body of bewilderingly interdisciplinary work combing such fields as literary studies, political theory, religion, anthropology, philosophy, and art history, and dedicated to topics as diverse as Kafka, Tiepolo, Baudelaire, the French Revolution and the Bible, not to mention the Indian, Greek, and Sumerian mythologies. One wonders if there is anything Calasso did not write or know abundantly about. The result is a series of over a dozen closely interrelated books, starting with The Ruin of Kasch (1983) and ending with Under the Eyes of the Angel, which he was still working on when he died and was published in 2022. When the former came out, Italo Calvino, in an attempt to summarise it, observed that the book was about two main subjects: the first was the French diplomat and politician Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and the second, tutto il resto (“everything else”). Calvino failed in his attempt, then, but he does get his point across succinctly: that it is almost impossible to state what exactly the book is about. And that has been the case with most of Calasso’s work ever since.
Nevertheless, whatever they may focus on, Calasso’s books very often revolve around one central topic: sacrifice. For him, sacrifice is what ties humans to the gods, what brings order into the world and meaning into our lives. In the many mythological traditions that he explores, the cosmos — and the humans within it — came into existence through a primordial sacrificial gesture. That act needs to be constantly re-enacted, through ritual and ceremonies, for the ties between Earth and Heaven to be maintained. Christians partake in such a ritual every time they attend Mass.
Yet for Calasso, sacrifice is not only religious. Indeed, before being a religious event or sacramental practice, sacrifice is life at its most fundamental. In an illuminating interview for The Paris Review, Calasso sketches a philosophy of sacrifice that casts a helpful light on some of the main arguments of his work. The fact is, observes Calasso, that we have “a surplus of energy” which we have to “dispose of”. It all starts with that excess.
"That surplus is simply life. There is no life without surplus. Whatever one does with that surplus, that decides the shape of a culture, of a life, of a mind. There were certain cultures that decided they had to offer it in some way. It is not clear to whom, why, and how, but that was the idea."
Calasso’s books act as so many signposts on one’s way to the kind of true knowledge that formal education promises but cannot provide — knowledge that will eventually redeem us. That road is long, solitary, and arduous because we are so remote from where we should be. (If this sounds Gnostic, that’s because it probably is.) The problem with our secularised world is that, while sacrifice lies at the heart of life itself, we are no longer willing to accept it. In an age where everything is done for a clear reason, or for certain profit, sacrifice as a supremely gratuitous act has become “entirely useless and obsolete”. [su_unherd_related fttitle="More from this author" author="Costica Bradatan"]https://staging.unherd.com/2022/12/power-has-poisoned-academia/[/su_unherd_related] And yet, suggests Calasso, since such acts “have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years and have thus left their traces in our minds”, ignoring them comes at a price. Deprived of the deeper significance of sacrifice, we can no longer make sense of a series of fundamental human experiences: of loss and grief, of transience and impermanence, of our fundamental precariousness and finitude, and in general of all that makes us what we are. In the ancient kingdom of Kasch, when people stop making sacrifices and following rituals, it seems to make their lives easier, but certain ruin follows. In The Unnameable Present, another important piece of his multi-volume project, Calasso describes the contemporary secularised society as one largely relieved of religious duties and rituals, and yet eaten up by the sense of its own insubstantiality, by spiritual disorientation, and a lack of clear purpose. For all their religious emancipation, “the secularists are not happy”, he observes. “Nor do they feel relieved of great burdens. They feel the insubstantiality of all that surrounds them. At times they recognise something ominous in it… The same insubstantiality exists in they themselves.” The fact that we no longer follow explicitly religious rituals does not mean that we don’t practice other, disguised rituals. “Tacitly, though firmly, the secular brain has resigned itself to thinking that it cannot do without repeated and rigidly formalised acts,” writes Calasso. “Secular life is increasingly interspersed with situations that must involve behaving in a certain way.” We are religious without knowing it. Which is not without its irony, considering how anti-religious we usually think we are. Calasso wants to do something about this situation. In his books, he seeks to “unearth”, as he put it, the deeper significance of sacrifice and to show that we have much to gain — spiritually, intellectually, culturally — from a renewed relationship with it. His monumental body of work is meant to teach us a novel way of approaching the world by giving the unknown and the mysterious — all that which transcends us — their due. Such humility should do us some good. He writes:"In the act of sacrifice, you establish a relation with something that you recognise as enigmatic and powerful... The unknown itself is in our own mind as well — our mind is in its largest part totally unknown to us. Therefore, it is not only a relation to the exterior world, it is a relation to ourselves."
Key to Calasso’s programme of re-enchanting the world is a better relationship to myth. As he says in another interview, “myths are a special way of knowledge” — one that’s based not in argument, scientific methodology or empirical evidence, but in stories, storytelling and, in general, in a narrative mode of making sense of the world. “Knowledge is made not only with concepts, not only with experiments, it’s made with stories.” In a godless world like ours, only storytelling, as a reflection of myth, can reconnect us not only to the gods, but to our deeper selves. Not only does Calasso operate primarily as a storyteller, regardless of what he writes about, but much of his work is also a re-telling of the great mythical narratives of the past. That’s what writing is all about; as he puts it in the same interview, “literature is, from the beginning, re-telling”. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, he retells the Greek myths, in Ka and Ardor, the Indian ones, and in The Book of All Books, he re-tells much of the Bible. [su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Tom Holland"]https://staging.unherd.com/2020/08/the-end-of-secularism-is-nigh/[/su_unherd_related] And that’s where The Tablet of Destinies, the last book-length work Calasso published in his lifetime, comes in. Calasso re-tells here some of the Sumerian myths we know from other sources (such as The Epic of Gilgamesh), but with some twists. “Shortly before the Flood, I was king of Shuruppak. It wasn’t the centre of the world, but it wasn’t far off.” That’s how the narrator, Utnapishtim, introduces himself. The god Ea entrusted him with the mission of building a ship that would allow the human race to survive the Flood. The Mesopotamian Noah dutifully obliges and escapes not just the Flood, but somehow death itself. He now lives, in a perpetual present, in a deserted place called Dilmun, from where he observes, with ironical detachment, the unfolding of the human and godly affairs. That’s how he met Gilgamesh, as he was desperately seeking immortality: “I was the one who would have to explain to Gilgamesh that his adventures were to no avail. Man is as fleeting as a dragonfly that flits for a day over the waters of the Euphrates and is gone.” And that’s also how he meets Sindbad the Sailor, of Arabian Nights fame (anything is possible in the timelessness of storytelling), to whom he recounts the story that is the object of The Tablet of Destinies. Like any great mythical narrative worth its salt, the story starts with — and the world it brings into being relies on — a series of sacrificial events: “Apsu was killed by his son Ea. Then Tiamat by Ea’s son Marduk. The world continued to be made up of their measureless bodies, from the fresh subterranean waters to the vault of the havens, Tiamat’s back, which Ea neatly flattened out and studded with stars.” This is a cosmogonic story, about how the world came into being, but also the story of its gradual disenchantment. The tamer the gods become, the emptier the cosmos. Eventually, the gods withdraw altogether. After Marduk, Utnapishtim says, “all other gods ceased to appear, as if they had become extinct, or killed one another off”. But if you think humans miss the gods, you are wrong. “Living without gods, people found, was not only acceptable, but easy.” Rooted in Sumerian mythology, The Tablet of Destinies is about prehistorical happenings, or even about worlds that did not come to pass. From time to time, however, we are jolted when we realise that Utnapishtim is describing us. As when he talks of the withdrawal of the gods, and what the world is like without them. “When they do reappear, very likely no one notices. For some they have become an object of curiosity. Chance, on the other hand, is now dominant, it is worshiped. And is no less inflexible. It does no one any favours. This is all that I have been given to see.” The story that Calasso, through Utnapishtim’s mouth, tells us here, then, is also our own story — from enchanted, if bloody beginnings, to a disenchanted and awfully bland end. [su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Paul Kingsnorth"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/09/western-culture-is-dead/[/su_unherd_related] Unlike other books in his multi-volume corpus, in which Calasso routinely engages with specialist scholarship and unfolds complicated theoretical trappings, The Tablet of Destinies is a slim and straightforward work. Pure, unadulterated narrative, it draws a straight line between storytelling and keeping the world in continuous existence. One day Utnapishtim realises that his compulsive narration was the reason why the gods kept him immortal. They “had wanted this; they had arranged it all”. The gods needed “a voice to tell the stories that had happened before the Flood. And I was the only one still alive. I had been part of those stories, or they had been told to me”. Roberto Calasso is certainly one of the great unappreciated minds of our time, but beyond the strictly intellectual worth of his work, which is considerable, we detect here a heightened spiritual sensitivity that allows him to sense, like few others, the great dangers lurking beneath the joyous surface of our time: self-idolatry and self-deception on a planetary scale, doubled by the sense of our own insubstantiality, a great propensity for inessential and boundless vanity, as well as a fundamental inability to place ourselves within a larger frame of reference. There is indeed something of the doomed prophet about Calasso. In a conversation with his translator, Tim Parks, he speaks at one point of a “terror of election”, of one’s designation for a higher mission as “gift and condemnation” at once. He must have known something about this terror from personal experience. He must have known, too, how important doomed prophets are when “time is out of joint”, as it seems to be now. Not necessarily as teachers, but because the incandescence of their sacrifice may bring, at last, some light into our lives.
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SubscribeGreat article. I was vaguely aware of Roberto Calasso, probably from some passing reference in this magazine, but this has promoted me to read him. Thanks for pointing me in his direction.
Great article. I was vaguely aware of Roberto Calasso, probably from some passing reference in this magazine, but this has promoted me to read him. Thanks for pointing me in his direction.
“While formal education may play a role in formulating the big questions, it is unable to answer them. Indeed, these questions are of such a nature that we cannot learn their answers from someone else; we need to discover them within ourselves.”
How true this is. Reading and learning as much as possible is best done outside formal education. Some may need the framework of a specific course to point them in a particular direction, but as often as not, that course will be engineered to a fairly narrow curriculum and as we see today, captured by a reductive ideology.
The point is, to lead oneself towards self-knowledge. That can indeed involve sacrifice, such as distancing oneself from attractive but negative influences, having understood their significance. It also, i believe, requires us to live as full a life as possible rather than absenting ourselves from the world. Only in that way can we really test ourselves and broach the imperative moral issues central to self-knowledge. This is often where academic careers fall down. In the process of moving from school, to university, to a fellowship, life goes on around that passage but not necessarily within it. It’s telling, for instance, how someone like Wittgenstein gave up his academic work for periods of time to take up gardening. It’s fair to assume he felt the need to live too, among organic, growing things.
Mercifully, the author of this essay, although a distinguished academic, seems to have escaped the confines that such a career might involve sufficiently to bring us this enlightened piece at the start of 2023. Unherd is undoubtedly on the right track.
“While formal education may play a role in formulating the big questions, it is unable to answer them. Indeed, these questions are of such a nature that we cannot learn their answers from someone else; we need to discover them within ourselves.”
How true this is. Reading and learning as much as possible is best done outside formal education. Some may need the framework of a specific course to point them in a particular direction, but as often as not, that course will be engineered to a fairly narrow curriculum and as we see today, captured by a reductive ideology.
The point is, to lead oneself towards self-knowledge. That can indeed involve sacrifice, such as distancing oneself from attractive but negative influences, having understood their significance. It also, i believe, requires us to live as full a life as possible rather than absenting ourselves from the world. Only in that way can we really test ourselves and broach the imperative moral issues central to self-knowledge. This is often where academic careers fall down. In the process of moving from school, to university, to a fellowship, life goes on around that passage but not necessarily within it. It’s telling, for instance, how someone like Wittgenstein gave up his academic work for periods of time to take up gardening. It’s fair to assume he felt the need to live too, among organic, growing things.
Mercifully, the author of this essay, although a distinguished academic, seems to have escaped the confines that such a career might involve sufficiently to bring us this enlightened piece at the start of 2023. Unherd is undoubtedly on the right track.
I’ve just started reading this article and can I just say the ‘animated’ advert at the side is extremely off-putting, constantly distracting my eyes. I don’t mind if you want to put up adverts – I’d prefer if you didn’t, as I’m a paying customer – but if you must then please make them so that they don’t interfere with the reading experience.
I’ve just started reading this article and can I just say the ‘animated’ advert at the side is extremely off-putting, constantly distracting my eyes. I don’t mind if you want to put up adverts – I’d prefer if you didn’t, as I’m a paying customer – but if you must then please make them so that they don’t interfere with the reading experience.
Joshua Mitchell might disagree (that ‘sacrifice has lost its significance’) when he argues that the New Order has appropriated the invisible (Christian) economy as part of the visible (material) economy where transgressions are now measured and assigned to a specific group that must be sacrificed in perpetuity for the sake of the innocent. See Mitchell, J. (2020). American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time accessible online via YouTube.
Rene Girard spent his career arguing that sacrifice was the foundation of *all* culture – whether we are aware of it or not. I’ve not read Calasso – and so wonder how he matches up. Excellent article/introduction.
Thank you for your reply. Indeed. I did a close study of Girard’s Things hidden since the beginning of time and sense Mitchell has too. The Mitchell (Napa Institute) presentation to which I referred helped me join all the dots. The next book I order (I live off grid in South Africa) will be Mitchell’s American awakening, thereafater, possibly, a Calasso.
Thank you for your reply. Indeed. I did a close study of Girard’s Things hidden since the beginning of time and sense Mitchell has too. The Mitchell (Napa Institute) presentation to which I referred helped me join all the dots. The next book I order (I live off grid in South Africa) will be Mitchell’s American awakening, thereafater, possibly, a Calasso.
Thanks, I will look up the video. Sounds like the analysis Tom Holland provides in Dominion. We need to learn from our past without being captured by an obscuring nostalgia for it. It is important to allow Sumerian myths to resonate with us today but still recognise the singular momentousness of our contemporary world.
For the first time in humanity’s existence, we are eight billion people in an instantly and globally connected world society whose everyday life is operationalised through Artificial Intelligence, and which is poised to settle on the Moon and Mars and discover intelligent life on some far exoplanet.
We are struggling to comprehend this, but to say as the author does that “..our own story — from enchanted, if bloody beginnings, to a disenchanted and awfully bland end” is to lose sight of the present by looking back to the past. Maybe the atavistic urge to sacrifice needs to be transformed.
Rene Girard spent his career arguing that sacrifice was the foundation of *all* culture – whether we are aware of it or not. I’ve not read Calasso – and so wonder how he matches up. Excellent article/introduction.
Thanks, I will look up the video. Sounds like the analysis Tom Holland provides in Dominion. We need to learn from our past without being captured by an obscuring nostalgia for it. It is important to allow Sumerian myths to resonate with us today but still recognise the singular momentousness of our contemporary world.
For the first time in humanity’s existence, we are eight billion people in an instantly and globally connected world society whose everyday life is operationalised through Artificial Intelligence, and which is poised to settle on the Moon and Mars and discover intelligent life on some far exoplanet.
We are struggling to comprehend this, but to say as the author does that “..our own story — from enchanted, if bloody beginnings, to a disenchanted and awfully bland end” is to lose sight of the present by looking back to the past. Maybe the atavistic urge to sacrifice needs to be transformed.
Joshua Mitchell might disagree (that ‘sacrifice has lost its significance’) when he argues that the New Order has appropriated the invisible (Christian) economy as part of the visible (material) economy where transgressions are now measured and assigned to a specific group that must be sacrificed in perpetuity for the sake of the innocent. See Mitchell, J. (2020). American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time accessible online via YouTube.
“Equality only comes into being through initiation. It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn’t be able to conceive of the idea if it weren’t structured and articulated by initiation. Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it – and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite”
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ch 8
“Equality only comes into being through initiation. It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn’t be able to conceive of the idea if it weren’t structured and articulated by initiation. Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it – and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite”
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ch 8
I appreciate the insights about formal education, but perhaps the term he uses for sacrifice connotes more service in his culture than it does, say, in the US? I guess I just don’t understand carving up God’s life force into a kind of inventory of energy with surpluses.
First, the majority of humans until very recently had much “surplus energy.” Most females certainly didn’t, particularly in the lower classes/castes or slavery, where their bodies’ “energy” in the form of sexual exploitation and reproductive labor and literal blood and calories most definitely weren’t “surplus.” Most men pressed into labor and/or warfare (and boys who were sexually exploited too) probably didn’t have a lot of extra energy either.
More, his frame as described here (though I gave up half way through) surprisingly differs from non-dualists, Christian mystics, and/or liberation theologists, wherein “energy” in the form of God/universal consciousness incarnates in form, including humans, and to the degree we can get our egos out of the way, we can enjoy acting as an ego-enhanced human channel of God in service to life, while our bodies hold out in this earthly plane.
I appreciate the insights about formal education, but perhaps the term he uses for sacrifice connotes more service in his culture than it does, say, in the US? I guess I just don’t understand carving up God’s life force into a kind of inventory of energy with surpluses.
First, the majority of humans until very recently had much “surplus energy.” Most females certainly didn’t, particularly in the lower classes/castes or slavery, where their bodies’ “energy” in the form of sexual exploitation and reproductive labor and literal blood and calories most definitely weren’t “surplus.” Most men pressed into labor and/or warfare (and boys who were sexually exploited too) probably didn’t have a lot of extra energy either.
More, his frame as described here (though I gave up half way through) surprisingly differs from non-dualists, Christian mystics, and/or liberation theologists, wherein “energy” in the form of God/universal consciousness incarnates in form, including humans, and to the degree we can get our egos out of the way, we can enjoy acting as an ego-enhanced human channel of God in service to life, while our bodies hold out in this earthly plane.