Columns - Mythologies
by Matteo Trevisani



I always say, perhaps without fully grasping what it implies, that if I had not done what I do—more than that, if I were not what I am—I would have been a cook. Every time I stand at the stove, now that I cook for my family, above all, and for my friends, the implications of what happens when, through heat, the raw passes into the cooked are perfectly clear to me. A few years ago I discovered a Sanskrit term: lokapakti, meaning the “cooking of the world,” a concept closely connected to the idea of sacrifice in general and, more specifically, to self-sacrifice. Through the rite, the officiant turns the world—raw and indigestible—into digestible matter, a cosmic transformation that passes through the generative power of fire. As often happens with Hindu philosophy, the idea is specific and yet illuminating, one of those words that can change the way a person approaches things. How much must I change, along with the things I cook? How much of me is cooked on that same fire that burns in front of me, so that I myself might become something different, something better? One might then see the work on oneself—the work we all constantly do to make up for our mistakes, so as not to be a person who causes gratuitous suffering—as a form of cooking. But the heat? I do not forget that there is always a sacrifice to be made. Perhaps it is the self, first of all: the idea of truly possessing things, the notion that what we have is objective. It is not. In the myth of Prometheus, before fire is stolen, another deception takes place. At Mekone, where men and gods still feasted together, it falls to Prometheus to divide an ox for the first apportionment between the two species. He hides the good meat and the entrails beneath the stomach lining, ugly to look at; he wraps the stripped bones in a covering of glistening, appetizing fat. He offers Zeus the choice. Zeus chooses the handsome package, and from that day on men burn only bones and fat for the gods, and keep the meat to be cooked for themselves. It is a myth that founds a rite born, therefore, of a separation: fire is what makes it possible to travel two different roads at once—one that rises toward the gods, one that remains on earth. Alchemy knew this well, because the matter they sealed in their flasks, heating it, dissolving it, and recomposing it, was not only an external substance to be turned into gold. The Great Work also takes place inside us. The purification of the metals had to be matched by that of the operator; every passage of the matter was also a spiritual trial, a death and a rebirth. The alchemist had to let himself be changed along with what he handled. Every evening I tell myself that cooking preserves a residue of this ancient wisdom. While I wait for the fire to do its work, I too am tested by time, by care, and by the need to offer others something that did not exist before. We cook the world, but in the meantime the world cooks us. Until we are cooked.