Midas - Friedrich Georg Jünger
Midas
You look like one
Who has swallowed gold:
One day they must slit open your guts! ...
- Nietzsche
In the kingdom ruled by Midas, there is no agon of gods and heroes; he is not one of the hero-kings. Epic poetry does not tell us who he was; the epic is silent about him. Did Herodotus, did Orpheus, did the satyr plays - where he entertained his great audience - know who he was? It is as if they retained only an echo, a voice from the reeds that whispered his name, the resonance of the event. There is a murmur of forgotten wisdom and folly surrounding Midas, and it is with this murmuring that those who came later mention his name. They had forgotten who he was, they no longer knew him, and have distorted through misunderstanding the immensely glorious myth. Thus they closed the door to his kingdom. This account, which has become a fairy tale, conceals the shock that emanated from him. No one who has recognised Midas can speak of him without a great shock to their being.
In Zeus, the son of Dionysus already appears preformed. There, where he transforms into a bull, where he rains gold on Danaë, where he strikes Semele with a bolt of lightning. But what is it about this king, covered in gold, who shines like the sun? Everything he touches turns to pure, flourishing gold. Ever since Midas bathed in the Pactolus, which flows along the Tmolos, it poured gold from out of its waters. At Midas' plea, Dionysus releases the golden spring, gushing forth. Midas throws the gold into a chasm, torn from the earth and filled with water. He erects a golden altar to Zeus, the Idaean. He is regarded as the richest of mortals, the king of fortune. And Midas is called to as one of the luckiest throws in dice games.
The god who arrives as a madman turns the world upside down. He crushes every nomos that resists him; he seems to destroy everything in his onslaught. But where there is no resistance, everything seems different, as in the Dionysian royal house, where Midas is king. Abundance emanates from him so strongly that, according to tradition, he becomes fairy-tale-like and takes on a stone splendour. Not everyone is strong enough to bear such abundance. There are few such people, so the stories of the rich man who is tormented, haunted, and crushed by abundance are related to Midas' wealth. For him, everything he touches turns to gold, even food and drink turn to gold; he suffocates, starves in the wealth he has received from Dionysus. It is said that Dionysus fulfilled the king's wish: that everything he touched be turned to gold. Dionysus also tells the king how he can be freed from this golden doom by bathing in the Pactolus. The riches of Croesus come from the Tmolian Pactolus. The mythical event takes a paradoxical turn. He who strives to enrich himself is poor. He who is rich no longer strives to become even richer; he gives, he offers. The more one gives away, the richer he is. But if his wealth is so great that the greatest gifts do not exhaust it, if it surpasses all giving, then he is Midas-like – the wealth begins to torment the rich man with the "agony of overflowing torments." Nietzsche captured this situation in the Dionysus' dithyramb "On the Poverty of the Richest"; he penetrated, at the brink of annihilation, into the mythical event. What is said about Midas is both true and false. That he was richer than all others remains true, but such wealth is now misjudged. Midas himself is misjudged when it is said that his wealth was vain, barren, that only the fool could desire such wealth, that Midas himself was a fool, a donkey with long donkey ears which he hid, but of which the reeds still whispered. This whispering is that of barber talk. Midas' wealth is placed in having, a lust for gold that makes him miserable himself. But Midas was rich from the start, and he did not need to aspire to riches. He is the most festive of all kings, the sun king. And he did not need to toil, as heroes toil; his wealth is one with effortlessness. He does not live, act, or suffer in a world of the Agon.
Why is the glow that surrounds him, that emanates from him, so strong and dazzling? Because here we are in the midst of the Dionysian realm, where everything is transformed, where transformation follows transformation. Everything the king touches - stones, sand, flowers, food and drink - is transformed into pure gold. The king himself shines and is illuminated by this lustre. The Dionysian procession moves powerfully in the midst of Midas' kingdom and the king appears in the midst of a Bacchic procession and circle. In the Dionysian thiasoi, in a festive swarm of bacchantes, he appears as a dancer, as a reveler accompanied by the god who is his friend and patron. The wealth of Midas is the wealth of Dionysus. The god who is his guest, whom he receives in festive forms, projects his splendour on him. Midas does not resist the god, like Pentheus and Lycurgus; he joyfully opens his kingdom to him and allows him to reign there. He invites Dionysus the golden-haired, the enchanter, the flower-god, the vine-planter, the soothsayer of sorrows, the horned and festive wanderer. Along with the god, there is wealth. Midas' kingdom is a blossoming vineyard, a garden of roses. It is in the rose gardens of Midas, on Mount Bromion, that the drunken Silenus falls asleep. Like Dionysus, Midas visits Silenus, feasts and talks to him. The king sympathises with the satyrs, he is the king of the satyrs, he is related to the family of the satyrs and resembles a satyr himself. It is said that he caught the satyr at the fountain of wine; that Silenus comes to him bound in garlands of flowers. But he did not have to search for and capture Silenus; he went out and welcomed the king, who looked like Silenus, he was at home with him, like Marsyas, another Silenus, wielding the Dionysian flute. The antagonism between the gods is played out in a duel between Marsyas and Apollo, who plays the kithara, and Marsyas is defeated. Apollo is said to have made Midas grow donkey ears as punishment after his musical duel with Pan, in which Midas gave his flute as a prize to Pan. Here we see how the myth is misunderstood, how the essence of the Dionysian king is no longer understood. The ears of the donkey do not come from Apollo and have nothing to do with him; they are part of the appearance of the Satyr king and testify to his origins.
The mind no longer penetrates these realms of supreme intoxication; everything it hears becomes an old wives' tale or a didactic fable. Sober reason is nothing but a reckoning of human poverty; therein lies its economy. The further man removes himself from the Dionysian festival, the more incomprehensible the festival becomes to him, until it appears to him only as destructive foolishnesss, annihilating madness. What this folly is, this madness, escapes his mind; he no longer peers into this world of wealth, its flourishing and blossoming, he is preoccupied only with himself and his poverty. Seilenos' statement about man's miserable fortress refers to a man who lives in the exploration of this poverty and is thus far removed from Dionysus and his festivals.
It is strange that statues of Marsyas stood in the market squares of Rome and the Roman colonies as symbols of a strict court, as embodiments of the Roman legal system, for the poverty of allegory comes from these guardians of the law. It is a pathetic tale, of Midas hiding his donkey ears under a hood that his barber, overwhelmed by mystery, whispered into a hole in the ground and betrayed him. Here the mythical event is lost in anecdotal and flat fables and comedies, and all access to it is lost. Knowledge of the origins of the Midasian riches has been lost. It lies at the springs; the golden springs bursting forth from the kingdom of Midas. Through the fertile shores of the reed-rich, gold-bearing Pactolus, the flourishing king wanders, through the land between Tmolos and Hermos. Like a god, he is ampelophytic and lazy, a roe-herder and wine-presser. And like the second Pactolus, mighty and golden, he leads the Dionysian procession in his land, and sacrifices his kingdom to Dionysus Thesmophorus, the lawgiver Dionysus.