BOOK REVIEW : A Mosaic Celebration of Language Keeps the Gods of Mythology Alive : THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY <i> by Roberto Calasso Translated by Tim Parks</i> Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 410 pages

“Little songs, Claire. Very important, little songs,” an English friend once counseled my 8-year-old daughter.

*

The English are good at childhood magic, or at remembering it, anyway. For my friend, the songs he held on to from nursery days did more than recall the magic; they could actually recreate it.

Something of this echoes in Roberto Calasso’s strange and alluring book about Greek myths and their power upon us. “We enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments,” he writes. “More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul casts on itself.”

Calasso, an Italian writer and editor, retells, rambles and meditates his way through a tangled and overgrown wilderness he hasn’t the slightest intention of grooming into a garden.

“The mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo, which he pretends to want to resolve,” he writes. “But while on the one table he puts generations and dynasties in order, like some old butler who knows the family history better than his masters, you can be sure that on another table the muddle is getting worse and the threads ever more entangled.”

In a sense, that describes “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.”

Calasso’s writing is gnomic and down to earth, colloquial and abstract, brilliantly focused and digressive to the point where it wanders off, gets lost and reappears in another quarter. As he tells about Theseus, Zeus, Persephone, Achilles, Helen and hundreds of others, he ranges from full-fledged poetic drama to interrupted fragments of story in contradictory variations--all amid a profusion of reflections and epigrams.

He brandishes a shining array of keys; sometimes, it is hard to find the locks.

But his style, though it can be knotty, is appropriate to this provocative celebration of the Greek myths. The variations and contradictions among their many versions are part of their power, Calasso argues. Other narrative forms, such as the novel, achieve complexity by the variety of levels in a single text. With myths, an equivalent and, perhaps, greater complexity is achieved by a mosaic.

Western thought and Western narrative art, after their mythical beginnings, acquired a linear movement comparable to a stream. Calasso likens myths to the crests of waves breaking. An oceanic formlessness crystallizes for a moment and breaks up, giving way endlessly to new crystallizations and new break-ups.

Among the many themes that take brief form in the crests of Calasso’s waves, one that recurs is the shifting relationship between mortals and gods.

First, the author writes, came conviviality; the kind of mingling that occurred when the gods attended the marriage of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and Harmony, his bride. Then came violent and arbitrary incursions, when the gods would come down to rape, seduce and play out their own quarrels by managing the Trojan War. Finally, of course, came two-way indifference.

It is the middle stage, the one where most of the best-known myths are set, that chiefly occupies the author. Retelling, varying and glossing stories from a wealth of sources--Homer, Herodotus, Ovid, Pausanias, among others--he limns a portrait of Greek belief.

Like men, the gods were subject to the somber figures--always female--that represented fate, necessity and universal order. The Olympians could cheat, transgress and postpone necessity, but they couldn’t alter.

Such gods, remarkably human except in their immortality, reflected the Greeks’ idea of themselves. It is this idea that Calasso keeps coming back to. Zeus--clearly his favorite god--is both entirely subject to the law of the universe and entirely free. The concept is supremely liberating and supremely modest. It does not resolve contradictions but maintains them. The result is a transfiguring electric spark between positive and negative poles.

Men, like gods, were marked by their actions and bore the consequences, but they were never defined by them. Among men, an evil action was attributed to the interference of one or another of the quarreling deities. And when men and gods transgressed, they could be hideously punished--damned, even--but there was something resilient that floated up beyond good and evil.

Apart from the the passions and atrocities, Calasso sees in the Greek myths a perduring buoyancy that remains vital and mysterious. “Toujours gai,” Archie would tell Mehitabel; “Cast a cold eye,” Yeats would tell us.

“What happened in ancient Greece that had never happened before?” the author writes. “A lightening of our load. The mind shrugged off the world with a brusque gesture that was to last a few centuries.”

A few centuries, perhaps. But the author suggests that Zeus deliberately caused Trojan war heroes to obliterate each other to create a space. The space would allow for stories, for the written words that would come to keep the heroes alive. It would keep the gods alive, as well. As Calasso’s words do.