The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [22]
When the history has been told, the talk stops. Now the true return gift appears, these formalities having merely raised the exchange into the general area of this copper’s worth. Now the receiving chief, on his own, announces he would like to “adorn” his guests. He brings out two hundred more blankets and gives them individually to the visitors. Then he adds still another two hundred, saying, “You must think poorly of me,” and telling of his forefathers.
These four hundred blankets are given without any of the dialogue that marked the first part of the ceremony. It is here that the recipient of the copper shows his generosity, and it is here that the copper increases in worth. The next time it is given away, people will remember how it grew by four hundred blankets in its last passage.
Before I comment on this exchange, I must describe a second situation in which coppers were felt to increase in value. Several occasions called for the actual destruction of a ceremonial copper. The Tsimshian tribes, for example, would break a copper when they held a potlatch to honor a dead chief and recognize his heir. During this “feast for the dead,” a masked dancer would come forward with a copper and instruct the new chief to break it into pieces and then give these pieces to his guests. The chief would take a chisel and cut the copper apart. Among the Kwakiutl when Boas studied them, a man would sometimes break a copper and give the pieces to a rival, who would then try to find a copper of equivalent value, break it, and give back the pieces of both. The man who had initiated the exchange was then obliged to hold a potlatch, distributing food and valuables at least equal to the new (and broken) copper he had received. Sometimes the initial recipient of a broken copper would find a second one, break it, and then throw them both into the sea, an action that brought him great prestige. Most coppers did not end up in the water, however; even when broken, the pieces were saved and continued to circulate. And if someone succeeded in gathering up the parts of a dismembered copper, Boas reports, they were “riveted together, and the copper… attained an increased value.”
It is clear in the literature that coppers increased in worth as they were broken, but I’m not sure it is clear why. To suggest an explanation, I want to introduce an image of dismemberment and increase from a very different culture. There are several ancient gods whose stories involve being broken and then brought back to life—Osiris in Egypt, Dionysos in Crete and Greece, and Bacchus in Rome, to name a few. I shall take Dionysos as my example here.
Carl Kerényi, the Romanian historian of religion, introduces his book on Dionysos by saying that his first insight into the god of wine came to him in a vineyard—he was looking at the grapevine itself and what he saw was “the image of indestructible life.” The temples are abandoned, but the vine still grows over the fallen walls. To explain the image, Kerényi distinguishes between two terms for “life” in Greek, bios and zoë. Bios is limited life, characterized life, life that dies. Zoë is the life that endures; it is the thread that runs through bios-life and is not broken when the particular perishes. (In this century we call it “the gene pool.