Throughout Understanding Media, McLuhan consistently returns to the myth of Cadmus as a primary explanatory origin story of the development of literacy and technology in Western civilization. One of the most overlooked points in the history of Western Civilization, McLuhan argues, is the emergence of a universal phonetic alphabet. It’s this fundamental event that sets the trajectory for everything that follows in the West, and it is mythically connected to the story of Cadmus.
Cadmus was the son of the king of Sidon and he is remembered as the founder of the (tragic) city of Thebes. His sister was Europa, the girl whom Jupiter seduced by transforming himself into a white heifer and then carried her to the island of Crete. When Europa disappeared, Cadmus was sent by his father–on pain of exile–to look for her. He never finds her, but he does found Thebes after defeating Apollo’s python. He sows the teeth of the python into the ground, from which spring an army of warriors that replace the men Cadmus had previously lost to the python.
Cadmus, more importantly, is credited with having introduced a universal phonetic alphabet in Greece. Herodotus is one of the earliest historians to attribute the development of the Greek alphabet to Cadmus who, he claims, had taken the idea from the Phoenicians. The myth of the python and the origins of a phonetic alphabet are intimately linked. McLuhan reads the Cadmus myth in an allegorical register, arguing that it captures a deeper truth about the how and why of Wester civilization’s development:
The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus, reputedly the king who introduced the phonetic letters into Greece, sowed the dragon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men. Like any other myth, this one capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power…The easier alphabet and the light, cheap, transportable papyrus together effected the transfer of power from the priestly to the military class. All this is implied in the myth about Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth, including the fall of the city states, the rise of empires and military bureaucracies. (82-83)
This is a somewhat bleak take on the history of the phonetic alphabet, though I don’t think McLuhan intends it to be. It’s primarily descriptive and serves to underscore the point that we fool ourselves if we don’t recognize the profound implications of technological developments that stem from a system of written language.
5,000 years later, the phonetic alphabet is now such a defining feature of human civilization and experience–I don’t think I could overstate this–that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to conceive of living in a culture without one. I also find it difficult to imagine what it would be like merely to think in a language without a corresponding phonetic alphabet.
Yet, the phonetic alphabet is an invention. When it was invented, there was a “sudden breach between the auditory and the visual experience of man. Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience, giving to its user an eye for an ear, and freeing him from the tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship” (McLuhan 84).
McLuhan’s observations raise a number of important questions. Just to give one example: McLuhan has given me a whole new set of questions, about my own area of research in medieval studies. Classical and medieval writers were obsessed with the idea of the “Book” and writing in general. So many of their works are preoccupied with writing about writing. One of Dante’s final images in Paradiso is an image of the book as a metaphor for the cosmos. Chaucer is always referring to “olde bookes” and questioning the posterity of his own poetry in the middle of his own poems. In Phaedrus, Plato presents a story about the potential negative effects writing will have on the soul; but then, in Timaeus, an Egyptian priest tells Solon that the Greeks are perpetual infants because they do not have any written record of their cultural history. Had Dante, Chaucer, or Plato lived long enough to see the emergence of the Gutenberg press, I wonder a) what would their reactions have been, and b) how it would change the substance and style of their writing. (On these points, I’m looking forward to reading Ivan Illych’s book In the Vineyard of the Text.)
Nicholas H. Dalbey 