Plato’s Silence

The god-king of Rwanda exists in equation with a certain bull, which is immolated when the king dies. The bull’s skin is wrapped around the king’s corpse. Similarly, “mothers in Rwanda wrap their infants in a sheepskin that they call placenta” (Heusch, 1986: 182). The bull’s skin is like a placenta to the king, a membrane in which the king exists.

The very body of the king of Rwanda is identified with the space of his kingdom - and its men, women and cattle are part of him. If the king should bend his legs at his knees, his kingdom correspondingly shrinks. [Heusch, 1986: 173]

In the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus, the heavens have the same value as the Rwandan placenta. Within the heavens, sacrificer and sacrificed, demiurge and soul, are fused in an act of sacrifice. Out of the sacrifice appear the forms: disembodied geometric transformations, modulations in sonority (the music of the spheres), and possibly a correlation of planetary movement. The forms exist on the threshold between time as agent for eternity and time conceived of as chronology.

The body of the god-king of Rwanda affirms that embodiment is a conjugation from the void. The excessive physicality of a body in ritual, its fetish quality, arises as a reaction from its being deriving from non-Being.1 The life-span of the king’s body is the calendar of his people; and when it ceases to exist, or when it undergoes symbolic death in ceremonies of initiation, it is equated with some eclipse in the very idea of sequence.

Its charisma, its fusion with its environment, its coming from and returning to “nowhere”, are consequences of its being an agent for non-Being.

Thinking, which asks, in a religious way, why the “nowhere” of the celestial domain (the threshold) should determine terrestrial events, is thinking that engages with the problem of the origins of symbol formation. How does the “nowhere” of the celestial realm transmit rain, sunlight, or the silence that conducts a music inaudible to the human ear? “The soul writes and is written upon” (Proclus, in Morrow, 1970: 17).2 The crisscrossing of snow as it falls is wonderfully silent. Coleridge compares “the Life of the Siminole playful from infancy to Death ... compared to the Snow, which on a calm day falling scarce seems to fall & plays & dances in & out, to the very moment that it reaches the ground” (Notebooks, 1: 228).

The equation of a god-king with a Rwandan placenta, conceived of as a plane surface on which a dynasty and its people appear as “writing”, invites the conjecture that in certain pre-birth myths the foetus has an imaginary sibling, who is thought to exist within the skin-surface of the placenta, as well as inside the placenta itself. In this regard, Bion’s imaginary-twin theory is a precursor of his incomplete (and, in my view, metaphysical) theory of the optic pit. If the imaginary twin brings the foetus into existence, in order that the imaginary twin might be incarnated,3 then some imperceptible “inner light” brings the eye of the psyche into existence, in order that psychic luminosity should be a means of transmission through sensation.

The placenta, as a mother who serves the foetus, appears to be absorbed, and even fused, with the other twin, who carries the burden and glory of royal godliness.4 In prototype, the placenta, as a symbol that reflects the first gleanings of consciousness, presents — in a very persecuting guise — the otherness of the primal scene. The space it represents is disturbing because it is as inaccessible as Plato’s celestial domain. The mirror in this case does not reflect an image of the one who looks into it. Or, rather, it is a plane surface that emits a text whose source is unknown: does the text come from one or more otherworlds, which may or may not be the same place? This question is relevant to the meaning of the spatio-temporal instability that characterises traditional cosmology.

At one time, at full moon, the god-king of Uganda would contemplate the presence of his imaginary twin “in the form of the stump of his own severed umbilical cord” (Blackman, 1916: 249). The stump was kept wrapped. Containment transformed it from being a token of a catastrophe to being a relic, out of which a new cosmos might be formed.

The placental dyad transmits into the foetus, who is apart from it, the notion that life of the god-king must be offered up in sacrifice to enable it, the foetus, to live out a life. The severance of the umbilical cord is a stage in a series of “initiations”, whose pain is transmitted into the god-king as scapegoat. The placenta-mother and the god-king are a source for a pieta, such as Michelangelo might have imagined.
In many creationist myths, the destroying of a cosmos is the basis for a cosmic renewal out of vestiges of a former cosmos.5 In Plato’s cosmology, as in the textual fragments associated with the names of Pythagoras and Parmenides, there is some attept to modify the ritual belief that an ancestral blood-pact determines creation and the sacrifice.