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Title: Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison
Release date: March 19, 2026 [eBook #78248]
Language: English
Original publication: Cambridge: University Press, 1903
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROLEGOMENA TO THE STUDY OF GREEK RELIGION ***
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MARIA LANE.
Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET.
[Illustration]
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
[_All Rights reserved._]
Prolegomena to the
Study of Greek Religion
by
JANE ELLEN HARRISON,
HON. D.LITT. (DURHAM), HON. LL.D. ABERDEEN,
FELLOW AND LECTURER OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
Cambridge
at the University Press
1903
Cambridge:
PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
ARTURO ET MARGARITAE VERRALL
HUIC AMICAE MEAE CONSTANTISSIMAE
ILLI ET AMICO ET MAGISTRO
HUNC LIBRUM DEDICO
INTRODUCTION.
The object of the following pages is to draw attention to some neglected
aspects of Greek religion.
Greek religion, as set forth in popular handbooks and even in more
ambitious treatises, is an affair mainly of mythology, and moreover of
mythology as seen through the medium of literature. In England, so far
as I am aware, no serious attempt has been made to examine Greek ritual.
Yet the facts of ritual are more easy definitely to ascertain, more
permanent, and at least equally significant. What a people _does_ in
relation to its gods must always be one clue, and perhaps the safest, to
what it _thinks_. The first preliminary to any scientific understanding
of Greek religion is a minute examination of its ritual.
This habit of viewing Greek religion exclusively through the medium of
Greek literature has brought with it an initial and fundamental error in
method—an error which in England, where scholarship is mainly literary,
is likely to die hard. For literature Homer is the beginning, though
every scholar is aware that he is nowise primitive; for theology, or—if
we prefer so to call it—mythology, Homer presents, not a starting-point,
but a culmination, a complete achievement, an almost mechanical
accomplishment, with scarcely a hint of _origines_, an accomplishment
moreover, which is essentially literary rather than religious, sceptical
and moribund already in its very perfection. The Olympians of Homer are
no more primitive than his hexameters. Beneath this splendid surface lies
a stratum of religious conceptions, ideas of evil, of purification, of
atonement, ignored or suppressed by Homer, but reappearing in later poets
and notably in Aeschylus. It is this substratum of religious conceptions,
at once more primitive and more permanent, that I am concerned to
investigate. Had ritual received its due share of attention, it had not
remained so long neglected.
I would guard against misapprehension. Literature as a starting-point
for investigation, and especially the poems of Homer, I am compelled to
disallow; yet literature is really my goal. I have tried to understand
primitive rites, not from love of their archaism, nor yet wholly from
a single-minded devotion to science, but with the definite hope that
I might come to a better understanding of some forms of Greek poetry.
Religious convention compelled the tragic poets to draw their plots
from traditional mythology, from stories whose religious content and
motive were already in Homer’s days obsolete. A knowledge of, a certain
sympathy with, the _milieu_ of this primitive material is one step to the
realization of its final form in tragedy. It is then in the temple of
literature, if but as a hewer of wood and drawer of water, that I still
hope to serve.
As the evidence to be set before the reader is necessarily somewhat
complex in detail, and the arguments of the successive chapters closely
interdependent, it may be well at the outset to state, as simply as may
be, the conclusions at which I have arrived, and to summarize briefly the
steps of the discussion.
* * * * *
In Chapter I. it is established that the Greeks themselves in classical
times recognized two forms of ritual, Olympian and Chthonic. It is
further seen that the characteristic ritual of Homeric days was of the
kind known to them as Olympian. Sacrifice in Homer takes the form of an
offering to the god to induce his favour. Its formulary is _do ut des_.
Moreover the sacrificial banquet to which the god is bidden is shared by
the worshipper. In sharp contradistinction to this cheerful sacrificial
feast, when we examine the supposed festival of Zeus at Athens, the
Diasia, we find rites of quite other significance; the sacrifice is a
holocaust, it is _devoted_, made over entirely to the god, unshared by
the worshipper, and its associations are gloomy. The rites of the Diasia,
though ostensibly in honour of Zeus, are found really to be addressed to
an underworld snake on whose worship that of Zeus has been superimposed.
In the three chapters that follow, on the festivals of the Anthesteria,
Thargelia, and Thesmophoria, held respectively in the spring, summer,
and autumn, the Olympian ritual superimposed is taken as known and only
alluded to in passing. The attention is focussed on the rites of the
underlying stratum.
In the Anthesteria, ostensibly sacred to Dionysos, the main ritual is
found to be that of the placation of ghosts. Ghosts, it is found, were
placated in order that they might be kept away; the formulary for these
rites is not, as with the Olympians, _do ut des_, but _do ut abeas_. The
object of these rites of Aversion, practised in the spring, is found to
be strictly practical; it is the promotion of fertility by the purgation
of evil influences.
The ritual of the Thargelia is even more primitive and plain-spoken.
In this festival of the early summer, ostensibly dedicated to Apollo,
the first-fruits of the harvest are gathered in. The main gist of the
festival is purification, necessary as a preliminary to this ingathering.
Purification is effected by the ceremonial of the pharmakos. Though the
festival in classical days was ‘sacred to’ Apollo, the pharmakos is
nowise a ‘human sacrifice’ to a god, but a direct means of physical and
moral purgation, and again with a view to the promotion and conservation
of fertility.
Thus far it will be seen that the rites of the lower stratum are
characterized by a deep and constant sense of evil to be removed and of
the need of purification for its removal; that the means of purification
adopted are primitive and mainly magical nowise affects this religious
content.
This practical end of primitive ceremonies, the promotion of fertility
by magical rites, comes out still more strongly in the autumn sowing
festival of the Thesmophoria. Here the women attempt, by carrying certain
magical _sacra_, the direct impulsion of nature. In connection with
these _sacra_ of the Thesmophoria the subject of ‘mysteries’ falls to be
examined. The gist of all primitive mysteries is found to be the handling
or tasting of certain _sacra_ after elaborate purification. The _sacra_
are conceived of as having magical, i.e. divine, properties. Contact
with them is contact with a superhuman potency, which is taboo to the
unpurified. The gist of a mystery is often the removal of a taboo. From
the Olympian religion ‘mysteries’ appear to have been wholly absent.
In Chapter V. we pass from ritual to theology, from an examination of
rites performed to the examination of the beings to whom these rites
were addressed. These beings, it is found, are of the order of sprites,
ghosts, and bogeys, rather than of completely articulate gods, their
study that of demonology rather than theology. As their ritual has been
shown to be mainly that of the Aversion of evil, so they and their
shifting attributes are mainly of malevolent character. Man makes his
demons in the image of his own savage and irrational passions. Aeschylus
attempts, and the normal man fails, to convert his Erinyes into Semnai
Theai.
In Chapter VI. the advance is noted from demonology to theology, from
the sprite and ghost to the human and humane god. The god begins to
reflect not only human passions but humane relations. The primitive
association of women with agriculture is seen to issue in the figures of
the Mother and the Maid, and later of the Mother and the Daughter, later
still in the numerous female trinities that arose out of this duality.
In Chapter VII. the passage from ghost to god is clearly seen, and the
humane relation between descendant and ancestor begets a kindliness which
mollifies and humanizes the old religion of Aversion. The culminating
point of the natural development of an anthropomorphic theology is here
reached, and it is seen that the goddesses and the ‘hero-gods’ of the
old order are, in their simple, non-mystic humanity, very near to the
Olympians.
* * * * *
At this point comes the great significant moment for Greece, the
intrusion of a new and missionary faith, the religion of an immigrant
god, Dionysos.
In Chapter VIII. the Thracian origin of Dionysos is established. In his
religion two elements are seen to coexist, the worship of an old god of
vegetation on which was grafted the worship of a spirit of intoxication.
The new impulse that he brought to Greece was the belief in _enthusiasm_,
the belief that a man through physical intoxication at first, later
through spiritual ecstasy, could pass from the human to the divine.
This faith might have remained in its primitive savagery, and therefore
for Greece ineffective, but for another religious impulse, that known to
us under the name of Orpheus. To the discussion of Orphism the last four
chapters IX.-XII. are devoted.
In Chapter IX. I have attempted to show that the name Orpheus stands for
a real personality. I have hazarded the conjecture that Orpheus came
from Crete bringing with him, perhaps ultimately from Egypt, a religion
of spiritual asceticism which yet included the ecstasy of the religion
of Dionysos. Chapter X. is devoted to the elucidation of the Orphic and
Dionysiac mysteries. It has been shown that before the coming of the
Orphic and Dionysiac religion the mysteries consisted simply in the
handling of certain _sacra_ after elaborate purification. By handling
these _sacra_ man came into contact with some divine potency. To this
rudimentary mysticism Orphism added the doctrine of the possibility of
complete union with the divine. This union was effected in the primitive
Cretan rite of the Omophagia by the physical eating of the god; union
with the divine was further symbolically effected by the rite of the
Sacred Marriage, and union by adoption by the rite of the Sacred Birth.
The mission of Orphism was to take these primitive rites, originally of
the crudest sympathetic magic, and inform them with a deep spiritual
mysticism. The rite of the Omophagia found no place at Eleusis, but the
other two sacramental rites of union, the Sacred Marriage and the Sacred
Birth, formed ultimately its central mysteries.
With the doctrine and ritual of union with the divine there came as
a necessary corollary the doctrine that man could attain the divine
attribute of immortality. Orphic eschatology is the subject of Chapter
XI. Its highest spiritual form, the belief that perfect purity issued
in divinity and hence in immortality, is found expressed in the Orphic
tablets. Its lower expression, the belief in a Hades of eternal
punishment as contrasted with the shadowy after-world of Homer, is seen
in the vases of Lower Italy and the eschatology denounced by Plato.
Finally in Chapter XII. it is shown how, as a concomitant to their
Eschatology, the Orphics, unlike Homer, evolved a Cosmogony, and with
this Cosmogony was ultimately bound up a peculiar and philosophic
theology. In the fifth century B.C. the puppet-show of the Olympians was
well-nigh played out, but the two gods of the Orphics remained potent.
In ritual they worshipped Dionysos, but their theoretical theology
recognized Eros as source of all things. The Eros of the Orphics was a
mystery-being, a _daimon_ rather than a _theos_, a potency wholly alien
to the clear-cut humanities of Olympus.
* * * * *
With the consideration of Orphism it has become, I hope, abundantly
clear why at the outset attention was focussed on the primitive rites of
Aversion and Purification rather than on the Service of the Olympians.
The ritual embodied in the formulary _do ut des_ is barren of spiritual
content. The ritual embodied in _do ut abeas_ contains at least the
recognition of one great mystery of life, the existence of evil. The
rites of the Olympians were left untouched by the Orphics; the rites
of purification and of sympathetic magic lent them just the symbolism
they needed. Moreover even in theology the crude forms of demons were
more pliant material for mysticism than the clear-cut limitations and
vivid personality of the Olympians. Orphism was the last word of Greek
religion, and the ritual of Orphism was but the revival of ancient
practices with a new significance.
* * * * *
The reader will note that in the pages that follow, two authors, Plutarch
and Euripides, have been laid under special contribution. Plutarch’s
gentle conservatism made him cling tenaciously to antique faith.
According to him, one function of religion was to explain and justify
established rites, and in the course of his attempted justification he
tells us many valuable ritual facts. Euripides, instant in his attack on
the Olympian gods, yet treats with respect the two divinities of Orphism,
Dionysos and Eros. I have suggested that, born as he was at Phlya, the
ancient home of Orphic mysteries, his attitude on this matter may have
been influenced by early associations. In any case, a religion whose
chief divinities were reverently handled by Euripides cannot be dismissed
as a decadent maleficent superstition.
* * * * *
I would ask that the chapters I have written be taken strictly as they
are meant, as Prolegomena. I am deeply conscious that in surveying
so wide a field I have left much of interest untouched, still more
only roughly sketched in. I wished to present my general theory in
broad outline for criticism before filling in details, and I hope in
the future to achieve a study of Orphism that may have more claim to
completeness. If here I have dwelt almost exclusively on its strength and
beauty, I am not unaware that it has, like all mystical religions, a weak
and ugly side.
* * * * *
If in these Prolegomena I have accomplished anything, this is very
largely due to the many friends who have helped me; the pleasant task
remains of acknowledging my obligations.
* * * * *
My grateful thanks are offered to the Syndics of the University Press
for undertaking the publication of this book; to the Syndics of the
University Library and the Fitzwilliam Museum for the courtesy they have
shown in allowing me free access to their libraries; to my own College,
which, by electing me to a Fellowship, has given me for three years the
means and leisure to devote myself to writing.
For the illustrations they have placed at my disposal I must record my
debt to the Trustees of the British Museum, to the Hellenic Society,
the German Archaeological Institute, and the École Française of Athens.
The sources of particular plates are acknowledged in the notes.
The troublesome task of drawing from photographs and transcribing
inscriptions has been most kindly undertaken for me by Mrs Hugh Stewart.
* * * * *
Passing to literary obligations, it will be evident that in the two first
chapters I owe much, as regards philology, to the late Mr R. A. Neil. His
friendship and his help were lost to me midway in my work, and that loss
has been irreparable.
It is a pleasure to me to remember gratefully that to Sir Richard Jebb I
owe my first impulse to the study of Orphism. The notes in his edition
of the _Characters_ of Theophrastos first led me as a student into the
by-paths of Orphic literature, and since those days the problem of
Orphism, though often of necessity set aside, has never ceased to haunt
me.
To Professor Ridgeway I owe much more than can appear on the surface. The
material for the early portion of my book was collected many years ago,
but, baffled by the ethnological problems it suggested, I laid it aside
in despair. The appearance of Professor Ridgeway’s article, ‘What people
made the objects called Mycenaean?’ threw to me an instant flood of light
on the problems of ritual and mythology that perplexed me, and I returned
to my work with fresh courage. Since then he has, with the utmost
kindness, allowed me to attend his professorial lectures and frequently
to refer to him my difficulties. I have thought it best finally to state
my own argument independently of his ethnological conclusions, first
because those conclusions are, at the time I write, only in part before
the public, but chiefly because I hoped that by stating my evidence
independently it might, in the comparatively narrow sphere in which
I work, offer some slight testimony to the truth of his illuminating
theories.
To all workers in the field of primitive religion Dr Frazer’s writings
have become so part and parcel of their mental furniture that special
acknowledgement has become almost superfluous. But I cannot deny myself
the pleasure of acknowledging a deep and frequent debt, the more as from
time to time I have been allowed to ask for criticism on individual
points, and my request, as the notes will show, has always met with
generous response.
Mr F. M. Cornford of Trinity College has, with a kindness and patience
for which I can offer no adequate thanks, undertaken the revision of
my proof-sheets. To him I owe not only any degree of verbal accuracy
attained, but also, which is much more, countless valuable suggestions
made from time to time in the course of my work. Many other scholars have
allowed me to refer to them on matters outside my own competency. Some of
these debts are acknowledged in the notes, but I wish specially to thank
Dr A. S. Murray, Mr Cecil Smith and Mr A. H. Smith of the British Museum
for constant facilities afforded to me in my work there, and Mr R. C.
Bosanquet and Mr M. Tod for help in Athens; and, in Cambridge, Dr Haddon,
Dr Hans Gadow, Mr Francis Darwin, Mr H. G. Dakyns and Mr A. B. Cook.
My debt to Dr A. W. Verrall is so great and constant that it is hard to
formulate. If in one part of my book more than another I am indebted to
him it is in the discussion of the Erinyes. Chapter V. indeed owes its
inception to Dr Verrall’s notes in his edition of the _Choephoroi_, and
its final form to his unwearied criticism. Throughout the book there is
scarcely a literary difficulty that he has not allowed me to refer to
him, and his sure scholarship and luminous perception have dissipated
for me many a mental fog.
Mr Gilbert Murray has written for me the critical Appendix on the
text of the Orphic tablets, a matter beyond my competence. Many verse
translations, acknowledged in their place, are also by him, and uniformly
those from the _Bacchae_ and _Hippolytus_ of Euripides. It is to Mr
Murray’s translation of the _Bacchae_ that finally, as regards the
religion of Dionysos, I owe most. The beauty of that translation, which
he kindly allowed me to use before its publication, turned the arduous
task of investigation into a labour of delight, and throughout the later
chapters of the book, the whole of which he has read for me in proof, it
will be evident that, in many difficult places, his sensitive and wise
imagination has been my guide.
JANE ELLEN HARRISON.
NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, _September 9, 1903_.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
OLYMPIAN AND CHTHONIC RITUAL.
Mr Ruskin on the absence of fear in the Greek genius,
Religion, to writers of the fifth century B.C., mainly a
matter of festivals. In the _Euthyphron_ religion is ‘doing
business with the gods,’ a form of ‘tendance’ (θεραπεία).
Contrast of δεισιδαιμονία, ‘fear of spirits.’ Plutarch on
‘fear of spirits.’ Distinction drawn by Isocrates and others
between Olympian and apotropaic ritual. Contrast between
‘Tendance’ (θεραπεία) and ‘Aversion’ (ἀποτροπή). Sacrifice
to Zeus in Homer is a banquet shared. Contrast of the ritual
of the Diasia. The holocaust or uneaten sacrifice. Ritual
of the Diasia addressed primarily to an underworld snake.
Superposition of the Homeric Zeus. Evidence of art. The ‘Dian’
fleece, not the ‘fleece of Zeus’ but the fleece of magical
purification. Examination of the Attic calendar. The names of
festivals not connected with the names of Olympian divinities.
The ritual of these festivals belongs to a more primitive
stratum than that of the Olympians, pp. 1-31.
CHAPTER II.
THE ANTHESTERIA. THE RITUAL OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES.
The Anthesteria, ostensibly dedicated to Dionysos, a spring
festival of the revocation and aversion of ghosts. Examination
of the rites of the three days. Meaning of the Chytroi, the
Choes and the Pithoigia. Derivation of the word _Anthesteria_.
Rites of purgation among the Romans in February. The Feralia
and Lupercalia. The ritual of ‘devotion’ (ἐναγισμοί).
Contrast of θύειν and ἐναγίζειν. The word θύειν used of burnt
sacrifice to the Olympians, the word ἐναγίζειν of ‘devotion’
to underworld deities. The ritual of ἀπόνιμμα. Gist of the
word ἐναγίζειν is purgation by means of placation of ghosts.
Contrast of ἱερεῖον, the victim sacrificed and eaten, with
σφάγιον, the victim sacrificed and ‘devoted.’ The σφάγια in
use for the taking of oaths, for purification, for omens, for
sacrifice to winds and other underworld powers. Elements of
‘tendance’ in the ritual of ‘aversion,’ pp. 32-74.
CHAPTER III.
HARVEST FESTIVALS. THE THARGELIA, KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.
The Thargelia an early summer festival of first-fruits. The
Eiresione. Object of the offering of first-fruits a release
from taboo. The Australian Intichiuma. Removal of taboo
developes into idea of consecration, dedication, sacrifice.
The material of sacrifice. The god fares as the worshipper,
but sometimes, from conservatism, fares worse. Instances in
ritual of survival of primitive foods. The οὐλοχύται, the
pelanos and the nephalia. The fireless sacrifice. The bringing
in of first-fruits preceded by ceremonies of purification.
The pharmakos. Details of the ritual. The pharmakos only
incidentally a ‘human sacrifice.’ Its object physical and
spiritual purgation. Meaning of the term. The pharmakos in
Egypt, at Chaeronea, at Marseilles. Analogous ceremonies. The
Charila at Delphi. The Bouphonia. The Stepterion. Further
ceremonies of purification. The Kallynteria, Plynteria,
Vestalia. General conclusion: in the Thargelia the gist of
sacrifice is purification, a magical cleansing as a
preparation for the incoming of first-fruits, pp. 75-119.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WOMEN’S FESTIVALS. THESMOPHORIA, ARREPHORIA, SKIROPHORIA,
STENIA, HALOA.
Importance of these festivals as containing the germ of
‘Mysteries.’ Detailed examination of the ritual of the
Thesmophoria. The Kathodos and Anodos, the Nesteia, the
Kalligeneia. Gist of the rites the magical impulsion of
fertility by burying _sacra_ in the ground. Magical rites
preceded by purification and fasting. Analogy of Arrephoria,
Skirophoria and Stenia with Thesmophoria. Meaning of the word
_Thesmophoria_, the carrying of magical _sacra_. Magical
spells, curses and law. θεσμός and νόμος. The curse and
the law. The Dirae of Teos. The Haloa, a festival of the
threshing-floor, later taken over by Dionysos. Tabooed foods.
Eleusinian Mysteries a primitive harvest-festival. Order of the
ritual. The pig of purification. Other rites of purification.
The _tokens_ of the mysteries. Ancient confessions rather
of the nature of _Confiteor_ than _Credo_. The fast and
the partaking of the _kykeon_. The Kernophoria. Ancient
mysteries in their earliest form consist of the tasting of
first-fruits and the handling of _sacra_ after preliminary
purification, pp. 120-162.
CHAPTER V.
THE DEMONOLOGY OF GHOSTS, SPRITES AND BOGEYS.
Primitive demonology constantly in flux. Various connotations
of the word Ker. The Ker as evil sprite, the Ker as bacillus of
disease. The Keres of Old Age and Death. The Ker as Harpy and
Wind-Daimon. The Ker as Fate in Homer and Hesiod. The Ker as
Gorgon. Origin of the Gorgoneion. Apotropaic masks. The Gorgon
developed from the Gorgoneion. The Graiae. The Evil Eye. The
Ker as Siren. The Sirens of Homer. Problem of the bird-form
in art. The Siren as midday daimon. The Siren on funeral
monuments. The bird-form of the soul in Greece and Egypt.
Plato’s Sirens. The Ker as Sphinx. Mantic aspect of Sphinx.
The Sphinx as Man-slaying Ker, as Funeral Monument. The Ker
as Erinys. The Erinyes as angry Keres. Erinys an adjectival
epithet. The Erinyes primarily the ghosts of slain men crying
for vengeance. The Erinyes developed by Homer and Herakleitos
into abstract ministers of vengeance. The Erinyes of Aeschylus
more primitive than the Erinyes of Homer. The blood-curse
in the _Choephoroi_. The Erinyes of the stage. The Erinyes
analogous to Gorgons and Harpies, but not identical. The
wingless Erinyes of Aeschylus. The winged Erinyes of later art.
The Poinae. The Erinys as snake. The _Semnai Theai_. New cult
at Athens. New underworld ritual. The transformation of Erinyes
into Semnai Theai. The Eumenides at Colonos, at Megalopolis,
at Argos, pp. 163-256.
CHAPTER VI.
THE MAKING OF A GODDESS.
Anthropomorphism. Gradual elimination of animal forms. The
gods begin to mirror human relations and at first those of
‘matriarchal’ type. The Mother and the Maid, two forms of
one woman-goddess. The Great Mother as Πότνια θηρῶν, as
Kourotrophos. Influence of agriculture. Relation of women
to primitive agriculture. Demeter and Kore as Mother and
Maid rather than Mother and Daughter. Gradual predominance
of the Maid over the Mother. The Anodos of the Maiden.
Influence of mimetic agricultural rites. The evidence of
vase-paintings. Pandora Mother and Maid. The Hesiodic story.
The Maiden-Trinities. Origin of Trinities from the duality
of Mother and Maid. Korai, Charites, Aglaurides, Nymphs. The
Judgment of Paris a rivalry of three dominant Korai—Hera,
Athene and Aphrodite. Evidence of vase-paintings. Development
of Athene, her snake- and bird-forms. Athene finally a frigid
impersonation of Athens. Developement of Aphrodite. Myth of her
sea-birth. Its origin in a ritual bath. The Ludovisi throne.
Ultimate dominance of the mother-form of Aphrodite as Genetrix.
Hera as maiden. Her marriage with Zeus. Intrusion of Olympian
‘patriarchal’ cults on the worship of the Mother and the Maid.
Evidence from art, pp. 257-322.
CHAPTER VII.
THE MAKING OF A GOD.
The passage from ghost to god more plainly seen in the
cult of heroes than in that of heroines. Instances from
heroine-worship. Helen and Hebe. The hero as snake. Origin of
the bearded snake. Heroes called by adjectival cultus-titles
rather than personal names. The ‘nameless’ gods of the
Pelasgians. The name ‘hero’ adjectival. Origin of supposed
‘euphemistic’ titles. The ‘Blameless’ Aigisthos. The
‘Blameless’ Salmoneus. Antagonism between the gods proper
of the Olympian system and local heroes. Beneficence of
the heroes. Asklepios and the heroes of healing. Asklepios
originally a hero-snake. Evidence of votive reliefs. Amynos and
Dexion. The ‘Hero-Feasts.’ Cult of Hippolytus. Zeus Philios.
Hero-Feasts lead to Theoxenia. Type of the Hero-Feast taken
over by Dionysos. Evidence from reliefs, pp. 323-363.
CHAPTER VIII.
DIONYSOS.
Mystical character of the religion of Dionysos. Dionysos
an immigrant Thracian. The legend of Lycurgus. Historical
testimony. In Euripides Dionysos an oriental. Explanation
of apparent discrepancy. The Satyrs. Analogy with the
Centaurs. The Satyrs represent an indigenous people who became
worshippers of Dionysos. Cheiron the good Centaur. The Maenads
not merely mythological. The Thyiades of historical times. The
Maenads, Thyiades, Bacchants, women possessed by Dionysos. They
are the nurses of the god and worship him as Liknites. Dionysos
son of Semele. Semele the Earth-Mother. Cult of thunder-smitten
places. Dionysos son of Zeus. Zeus adopts Dionysos as god
of the grape. Examination of the titles Bromios, Braites,
Sabazios. All three are titles of a god of a cereal intoxicant.
The cereal intoxicant preceded in the North the intoxicant
made from the grape. Tragedy the song of the cereal drink.
Dionysos emerges from obscurity as god of the grape. Dionysos
the tree and vegetation god. Evidence of art. The ‘Principle
of Moisture.’ Dionysos the Bull-god. Animal incarnations. The
‘return to nature.’ Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb. Dithyrambos
the Mystery-Babe. Plutarch on the Dithyramb. Possible
association with the Bee-Maidens, the Thriae. Moderation of
the Greek in the use of wine. Sacramentalism of eating and
drinking. The ecstasy of asceticism, pp. 364-454.
CHAPTER IX.
ORPHEUS.
Problem of relation between Orpheus and Dionysos. Analogy
and contrast between the two. Orpheus a Thracian; a magical
musician. Possible Cretan origin of Orpheus. The island route
from Crete to Thrace. The death of Orpheus. Representations on
vase-paintings. Orpheus an enemy of the Maenads. His burial and
the cult at his tomb. His oracle at Lesbos. His relation to
Apollo. Orpheus a real man, a reformer, and possibly a martyr;
heroized but never deified. Orpheus as reformer of Bacchic
rites. Influence of Orphism at Athens. New impulse brought
by Orphism into Greek religion. Spiritualization of the old
Dionysiac doctrine of divine possession. Contrast with the
anthropomorphism of Homer and Pindar. Consecration the
keynote of Orphic religion, pp. 455-478.
CHAPTER X.
ORPHIC AND DIONYSIAC MYSTERIES.
Our chief source a fragment of the _Cretans_ of Euripides.
The Idaean Zeus the same as Zagreus. The _Omophagia_ or
feast of raw flesh. The bull-victim. Bull-worship in
Crete. The Minotaur. Evidence of Clement of Alexandria
as to the _Omophagia_. Narrative of Firmicus Maternus.
Analogous _Omophagia_ among primitive Arabs. Account of
Nilus. Sacramental union with the god by eating his flesh.
Reminiscences of human sacrifice in Greek tradition. The
Titans and the infant Zagreus. The Titans white-earth men. The
smearing with gypsum. The Orphic doctrine of the dismembered
god. The Mountain Mother. Her image on a Cretan seal
impression. The Kouretes her attendants. The final consecration
of the mystic. Meaning of the word ὁσιωθείς, ‘consecrated.’
Orphic taboos. Orphic formalism. Parody of Orphic rites of
initiation in the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes. The ‘shady side’
of Orphism. The Liknophoria. Dionysos Liknites. Symbolism
of the _liknon_. Purification, rebirth. The _liknon_ and
the Homeric _ptyon_. The _liknon_ in marriage ceremonies.
The Sacred Marriage. Orphic elements in Eleusinian Ritual.
Iacchos at Eleusis. The Liknophoria at Eleusis. The Sacred
Marriage and the Sacred Birth at Eleusis. Thessalian influence,
Brimo. Thracian influence, Eumolpos. Dionysos at Eleusis. As
child, and as grown man. The pantomime element in the cult
of Dionysos. Its influence on the Eleusinian Mysteries, pp. 479-572.
CHAPTER XI.
ORPHIC ESCHATOLOGY.
The tablets our chief source for Orphic doctrines. Their
_provenance_ and general character. The Petelia tablet of
the British Museum. Analogous tablets from Crete. The Well
of Mnemosyne. Parallels in Fiji and Egypt. Lethe in Greek
Literature. Lethe in the ritual of Trophonios. The river of
Eunoë, Good Consciousness, in Dante. The Sybaris tablets. The
tablet of Caecilia Secundina. The confession of Ritual Acts
on the Sybaris tablets. The attainment of divinity through
purification. The escape from the Wheel. The kid and the
milk. The formulary of adoption. Eschatology on Orphic vases
from Lower Italy. Orpheus in Hades. The tortured criminals.
Developement by Orphism of doctrine of eternal punishment.
The Danaides and the Uninitiated, pp. 573-624.
CHAPTER XII.
ORPHIC COSMOGONY.
Orphic theology as seen in the Hymns. The World-Egg. Use of
eggs in Orphic ritual of purification. Birth of Eros from
World-Egg. Complex origin of Orphic Eros. Eros as Herm. Eros
as Ker of life. Evidence of art. Eros as Ephebos. Eros and
the Earth-Mother. Eros present at the Anodos. Evidence of
art. The Mystery-cult at Phlya, the birthplace of Euripides.
Pythagorean revival of the cult of the Mother. The mystic Eros
as Phanes and Protogonos. _Contaminatio_ of Eros and Dionysos.
Popular Orphism on vases from Thebes. Eros as Proteurhythmos.
The divinities of Orphism are demons rather than gods. Orphism
resumed, pp. 625-659.
CRITICAL APPENDIX ON THE ORPHIC TABLETS pp. 660-674.
INDEX
I. Greek pp. 675, 676.
II. General pp. 676-680.
CHAPTER I.
OLYMPIAN AND CHTHONIC RITUAL.
‘δαίμοσι μειλιχίοισιν ἱλάσματα καὶ μακάρεσσιν
οὐρανίοις.’
In characterizing the genius of the Greeks Mr Ruskin says: ‘_there is no
dread in their hearts; pensiveness, amazement, often deepest grief and
desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in the presence of all
Fate, and joy such as they might win, not indeed from perfect beauty,
but from beauty at perfect rest._’ The lovely words are spoken of course
mainly with reference to art, but they are meant also to characterize the
Greek in his attitude towards the invisible, in his religion—meant to
shew that the Greek, the favoured child of fortune yet ever unspoilt, was
exempt from the discipline to which the rest of mankind has been subject,
never needed to learn the lesson that in the Fear of the Lord is the
beginning of Wisdom.
At first sight it seems as though the statement were broadly true. Greek
writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of, an attitude
towards, religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joyful confidence,
a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is but a high festival
for man. In Homer sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet
of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, of
cleansing, and atonement. This we might perhaps explain as part of the
general splendid unreality of the heroic saga, but sober historians of
the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit. Thucydides is assuredly
by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him in the main ‘a rest from
toil.’ He makes Pericles say[1]: ‘Moreover we have provided for our
spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games
and sacrifices throughout the year.’
Much the same external, quasi-political, and always cheerful attitude
towards religion is taken by the ‘Old Oligarch[2].’ He is of course
thoroughly orthodox and even pious, yet to him the main gist of religion
appears to be a decorous social enjoyment. In easy aristocratic fashion
he rejoices that religious ceremonials exist to provide for the less
well-to-do citizens suitable amusements that they would otherwise lack.
‘As to sacrifices and sanctuaries and festivals and precincts, the
People, knowing that it is impossible for each poor man individually to
sacrifice and feast and have sanctuaries and a beautiful and ample city,
has discovered by what means he may enjoy these privileges. The whole
state accordingly at the common cost sacrifices many victims, while it
is the People who feast on them and divide them among themselves by
lot’; and again[3], as part of the splendour of Athens, he notes that
‘she celebrates twice as many religious holidays as any other city.’ The
very language used by this typical Athenian gentleman speaks for itself.
Burnt-sacrifice (θυσία), feasting, agonistic games, stately temples are
to him the essence of religion; the word sacrifice brings to his mind not
renunciation but a social banquet; the temple is not to him so much the
awful dwelling-place of a divinity as an integral part of a ‘beautiful
and ample city.’
Thucydides and Xenophon need and attempt no searching analysis of
religion. Socrates of course sought a definition, a definition that
left him himself sad and dissatisfied, but that adequately embodied
popular sentiment and is of importance for our enquiry. The end of the
_Euthyphron_ is the most disappointing thing in Plato; Socrates extracts
from Euthyphron what he thinks religion is; what Socrates thought he
cannot or will not tell[4].
Socrates in his enquiry uses not one abstract term for religion—the
Greeks have in fact no one word that covers the whole field—he uses
two[5], piety (τὸ εὐσεβές) and holiness (τὸ ὅσιον). Euthyphron of
course begins with cheerful confidence: he and all other respectable men
know quite well what piety and holiness are. He willingly admits that
‘holiness is a part of justice,’ that part of justice that appertains
to the gods; it is giving the gods their due. He also allows, not quite
seeing to what the argument is tending, that piety and holiness are ‘a
sort of tendance (θεραπεία) of the gods.’ This ‘tendance,’ Socrates
presses on, ‘must be of the nature of service or ministration,’ and
Euthyphron adds that it is the sort of service that servants shew their
masters. Socrates wants to know in what particular work and operation the
gods need help and ministration. Euthyphron answers with some impatience
that, to put it plainly and cut the matter short, holiness consists in
‘a man understanding how to do what is pleasing to the gods in word
and deed, i.e. by prayer and sacrifice.’ Socrates eagerly seizes his
advantage and asks: ‘You mean then that holiness is a sort of science of
praying and sacrificing?’ ‘Further,’ he adds, ‘sacrifice is giving to the
gods, prayer is asking of them, holiness then is a science of asking and
giving.’ If we give to the gods they must want something of us, they must
want to ‘do business with us.’ ‘Holiness is then an art in which gods and
men do business with each other.’ So Socrates triumphantly concludes, to
the manifest discomfort of Euthyphron, who however can urge no tenable
objection. He feels as a pious man that the essence of the service or
tendance he owes to the gods is of the nature of a freewill tribute of
honour, but he cannot deny that the gods demand this as a _quid pro quo_.
Socrates, obviously unfair though he is, puts his finger on the weak
spot of Greek religion as orthodoxly conceived in the fifth century
B.C. Its formula is _do ut des_. It is, as Socrates says, a ‘business
transaction’ and one in which, because god is greater than man, man gets
on the whole the best of it. The argument of the _Euthyphron_ is of
importance to us because it clearly defines one, and a prominent, factor
in Greek religion, that of _service_ (θεραπεία), and in this service,
this kindly ‘tendance,’ there is no element of fear. If man does his part
in the friendly transaction, the gods will do theirs. None of the deeper
problems of what we moderns call religion are even touched: there is no
question of sin, repentance, sacrificial atonement, purification, no fear
of judgment to come, no longing after a future complete beatitude. Man
offers what seems to him in his ignorance a reasonable service to gods
conceived of as human and rational. There is no trace of scepticism; the
gods certainly exist, otherwise as Sextus Empiricus[6] quaintly argues
‘you could not serve them’: and they have human natures. ‘You do not
serve Hippocentauri, because Hippocentauri are non-existent.’
To the average orthodox Greek the word θεραπεία, service, tendance,
covered a large, perhaps the largest, area of his conception of religion.
It was a word expressing, not indeed in the Christian sense a religion
whose mainspring was love, but at least a religion based on a rational
and quite cheerful mutual confidence. The Greeks have however another
word expressive of religion, which embodies a quite other attitude of
mind, the word δεισιδαιμονία, _fear of spirits_; fear, not tendance,
fear not of gods but of spirit-things, or, to put it abstractly, of the
supernatural.
It is certainly characteristic of the Greek mind that the word
δεισιδαιμονία and its cognates early began to be used in a bad sense,
and this to some extent bears out Mr Ruskin’s assertion. By the time of
Theophrastos ὁ δεισιδαίμων is frankly in our sense ‘the superstitious
man,’ and superstition Theophrastos defines as not just and proper
reverence but simply ‘cowardice in regard to the supernatural.’ Professor
Jebb[7] has pointed out that already in Aristotle the word δεισιδαίμων
has about it a suspicion of its weaker side. An absolute ruler,
Aristotle[8] says, will be the more powerful ‘if his subjects believe
that he fears the spiritual beings’ (ἐὰν δεισιδαίμονα νομίζωσιν εἶναι)
but he adds significantly ‘he must shew himself such _without fatuity_’
(ἄνευ ἀβελτερίας).
Plutarch has left us an instructive treatise on ‘the fear of the
supernatural.’ He saw in this fear, this superstition, the great element
of danger and weakness in the religion that he loved so well. His
intellect steeped in Platonism revolted from its unmeaning folly, and
his gentle gracious temperament shrank from its cruelty. He sees[9] in
superstition not only an error, a wrong judgment of the mind, but that
worse thing a ‘wrong judgment inflamed by passion.’ Atheism is a cold
error, a mere dislocation of the mind: superstition is a ‘dislocation
complicated, inflamed, by a bruise.’ ‘Atheism is an apathy towards the
divine which fails to perceive the good: superstition is an excess of
passion which suspects the good to be evil; the superstitious are afraid
of the gods yet fly to them for refuge, flatter and yet revile them,
invoke them and yet heap blame upon them.’
Superstition grieved Plutarch in two ways. He saw that it terrified men
and made them miserable, and he wanted all men to be as cheerful and
kindly as himself; it also made men think evil of the gods, fear them as
harsh and cruel. He knew that the canonical religion of the poets was
an adequate basis for superstitious fear, but he had made for himself
a way out of the difficulty, a way he explains in his treatise on ‘How
the poets ought to be taken.’ ‘If Ares be evil spoken of we must imagine
it to be said of War, if Hephaistos of Fire, if Zeus of Fate, but if
anything honourable it is said of the real gods[10].’ Plutarch was too
gentle to say sharply and frankly:
‘If gods do aught that’s shameful, they are no gods[11],’
but he shifted the element of evil, of fear and hate, from his
theological ideals to the natural and purely human phenomena from which
they had emerged. He wants to treat the gods and regard them as he
himself would be treated and regarded, as kindly civilized men. ‘What!’
he says[12], ‘is he who thinks there are no gods an impious man, while he
who describes them as the superstitious man does, does he not hold views
much more impious? Well anyhow I for my part would rather people would
say of me there never was or is any such a man as Plutarch, than that
they should say Plutarch is an unstable, changeable fellow, irritable,
vindictive, and touchy about trifles; if you invite friends to dinner and
leave out Plutarch, or if you are busy and omit to call on him, or if
you do not stop to speak to him, he will fasten on you and bite you, or
he will catch your child and beat him, or turn his beast loose into your
crops and spoil your harvest.’
But though he is concerned for the reputation of the gods, his chief
care and pity are for man. Atheism shuts out a man, he says, from the
pleasant things of life. ‘These most pleasant things,’ he adds[13] in
characteristic fashion, ‘are festivals and feastings in connection with
sacred things, and initiations and orgiastic festivals, and invocations
and adorations of the gods. At these most pleasant things the atheist
can but laugh his sardonic laugh, but the superstitious man would fain
rejoice and cannot, his soul is like the city of Thebes:
“It brims with incense and burnt sacrifice
And brims with paeans and with lamentations.”
A garland is on his head and pallor on his face, he offers sacrifice and
is afraid, he prays and yet his tongue falters, he offers incense and
his hand trembles, he turns the saying of Pythagoras into foolishness,
“Then we become best when we approach the gods, for those who fear
spirits when they approach the shrines and dwellings of the gods make as
though they came to the dens of bears and the holes of snakes and the
lairs of sea-monsters.”’ In his protest against the religion of fear
Plutarch rises to a real eloquence[14]. ‘He that dreads the gods dreads
all things, earth and sea, air and heaven, darkness and light, a voice,
a silence, a dream. Slaves forget their masters in sleep, sleep looses
their fetters, salves their gangrened sores, but for the superstitious
man his reason is always adreaming but his fear always awake.’
Plutarch is by temperament, and perhaps also by the decadent time in
which he lived, unable to see the good side of the religion of fear,
unable to realize that in it was implicit a real truth, the consciousness
that all is not well with the world, that there is such a thing as evil.
Tinged with Orphism as he was, he took it by its gentle side and never
realized that it was this religion of fear, of consciousness of evil and
sin and the need of purification, of which Orphism took hold and which it
transformed to new issues. The cheerful religion of ‘tendance’ had in it
no seeds of spiritual development; by Plutarch’s time, though he failed
to see this, it had done its work for civilization.
Still less could Plutarch realize that what in his mind was a
degradation, superstition in our sense, had been to his predecessors
a vital reality, the real gist of their only possible religion. He
deprecates the attitude of the superstitious man who enters the
presence of his gods as though he were approaching the hole of a snake,
and forgets that the hole of a snake had been to his ancestors, and
indeed was still to many of his contemporaries, literally and actually
the sanctuary of a god. He has explained and mysticized away all the
primitive realities of his own beloved religion. It can, I think, be
shewn that what Plutarch regards as superstition was in the sixth and
even the fifth century before the Christian era the _real_ religion of
the main bulk of the people, a religion not of cheerful tendance but of
fear and deprecation. The formula of that religion was not _do ut des_ ‘I
give that you may give,’ but _do ut abeas_ ‘I give that you may go, and
keep away.’ The beings worshipped were not rational, human, law-abiding
_gods_, but vague, irrational, mainly malevolent δαίμονες, spirit-things,
ghosts and bogeys and the like, not yet formulated and enclosed into
god-head. The word δεισιδαιμονία tells its own tale, but the thing itself
was born long before it was baptized.
Arguments drawn from the use of the word δεισιδαιμονία by particular
authors are of necessity vague and somewhat unsatisfactory; the use of
the word depends much on the attitude of mind of the writer. Xenophon[15]
for example uses δεισιδαιμονία in a good sense, as of a bracing
confidence rather than a degrading fear. ‘The more men are god-fearing,
spirit-fearing (δεισιδαίμονες), the less do they fear man.’ It would be
impossible to deduce from such a statement anything as to the existence
of a lower and more ‘fearful’ stratum of religion.
Fortunately however we have evidence, drawn not from the terminology of
religion, but from the certain facts of ritual, evidence which shews
beyond the possibility of doubt that the Greeks of the classical period
recognised two different classes of rites, one of the nature of ‘service’
addressed to the Olympians, the other of the nature of ‘riddance’ or
‘aversion’ addressed to an order of beings wholly alien. It is this
second class of rites which haunts the mind of Plutarch in his protest
against the ‘fear of spirits’; it is to this second class of rites that
the ‘Superstitious Man’ of Theophrastos was unduly addicted; and this
second class of rites, which we are apt to regard as merely decadent,
superstitious, and as such unworthy of more than a passing notice and
condemnation, is primitive and lies at the very root and base of Greek
religion.
First it must clearly be established that the Greeks themselves
recognised two diverse elements in the ritual of their state. The
evidence of the orator Isocrates[16] on this point is indefeasible. He is
extolling the mildness and humanity of the Greeks. In this respect they
are, he points out, ‘like the better sort of gods.’ ‘Some of the gods are
mild and humane, others harsh and unpleasant.’ He then goes on to make a
significant statement: ‘_Those of the gods who are the source to us of
good things have the title of Olympians, those whose department is that
of calamities and punishments have harsher titles; to the first class
both private persons and states erect altars and temples, the second is
not worshipped either with prayers or burnt-sacrifices, but in their case
we perform ceremonies of riddance._’ Had Isocrates commented merely on
the _titles_ of the gods, we might fairly have said that these titles
only represent diverse aspects of the same divinities, that Zeus who is
Maimaktes, the Raging One, is also Meilichios, Easy-to-be-Intreated,
a god of vengeance and a god of love. But happily Isocrates is more
explicit; he states that the two classes of gods have not only diverse
natures but definitely _different rituals_, and that these rituals not
only vary for the individual but are also different by the definite
prescription of the state. The ritual of the gods called Olympian is of
burnt-sacrifice and prayer, it is conducted in temples and on altars: the
ritual of the other class has neither burnt-sacrifice nor prayer nor,
it would seem, temple or altar, but consists in ceremonies apparently
familiar to the Greek under the name of ἀποπομπαί, ‘sendings away.’
For ἀποπομπαί the English language has no convenient word. Our religion
still countenances the fear of the supernatural, but we have outgrown the
stage in which we perform definite ceremonies to rid ourselves of the
gods. Our nearest equivalent to ἀποπομπαί is ‘exorcisms,’ but as the word
has connotations of magic and degraded superstition I prefer to use the
somewhat awkward term ‘ceremonies of riddance.’
Plato more than once refers to these ceremonies of riddance. In the
_Laws_[17] he bids the citizen, if some prompting intolerably base occur
to his mind, as e.g. the desire to commit sacrilege, ‘betake yourself
to ceremonies of riddance, go as suppliant to the shrines of the gods of
aversion, fly from the company of wicked men without turning back.’ The
reference to a peculiar set of rites presided over by special gods is
clear. These gods were variously called ἀποτρόπαιοι and ἀποπομπαῖοι, the
gods of Aversion and of Sending-away.
Harpocration[18] tells us that Apollodorus devoted the sixth book of his
treatise _Concerning the gods_ to the discussion of the θεοὶ ἀποπομπαῖοι,
the gods of Sending-away. The loss of this treatise is a grave one for
the history of ritual, but scattered notices enable us to see in broad
outline what the character of these gods of Aversion was. Pausanias[19]
at Titane saw an altar, and in front of it a barrow erected to the hero
Epopeus, and ‘near to the tomb,’ he says, ‘are the gods of Aversion,
beside whom are performed the ceremonies which the Greeks observe for
the averting of evils.’ Here it is at least probable, though from the
vagueness of the statement of Pausanias not certain, that the ceremonies
were of an underworld character such as it will be seen were performed
at the graves of heroes. The gods of Aversion by the time of Pausanias,
and probably long before, were regarded as gods who presided over the
aversion of evil; there is little doubt that to begin with these gods
were the very evil men sought to avert. The domain of the spirits of the
underworld was confined to things evil. Babrius[20] tells us that in the
courtyard of a pious man there was a precinct of a hero, and the pious
man was wont to sacrifice and pour libations to the hero, and pray to him
for a return for his hospitality. But the ghost of the dead hero knew
better; only the regular Olympians are the givers of good, his province
as a hero was limited to evil only. He appeared in the middle of the
night and expounded to the pious man this truly Olympian theology:
‘Good Sir, no hero may give aught of good;
For _that_ pray to the gods. We are the givers
Of all things evil that exist for men.’
It will be seen, when we come to the subject of hero-worship, that this
is a very one-sided view of the activity of heroes. Still it remains,
broadly speaking, true that dead men and the powers of the underworld
were the objects of fear rather than love, their cult was of ‘aversion’
rather than ‘tendance.’
A like distinction is drawn by Hippocrates[21] between the attributes,
spheres and ritual of Olympian and chthonic divinities. He says: ‘we
ought to pray to the gods, for good things to Helios, to Zeus Ouranios,
to Zeus Ktesias, to Athene Ktesia, to Hermes, to Apollo; but in the case
of things that are the reverse we must pray to Earth and the heroes, that
all hostile things may be averted.’
It is clear then that Greek religion contained two diverse, even
opposite, factors: on the one hand the element of _service_ (θεραπεία),
on the other the element of _aversion_[22] (ἀποτροπή). The rites of
_service_ were connected by ancient tradition with the Olympians, or as
they are sometimes called the Ouranians: the rites of _aversion_ with
ghosts, heroes, underworld divinities. The rites of service were of a
cheerful and rational character, the rites of aversion gloomy and tending
to superstition. The particular characteristics of each set of rites will
be discussed more in detail later; for the present it is sufficient to
have established the fact that Greek religion for all its superficial
serenity had within it and beneath it elements of a darker and deeper
significance.
So far we have been content with the general statements of Greek writers
as to the nature of their national religion, and the evidence of these
writers has been remarkably clear. But, in order to form any really just
estimate, it is necessary to examine in detail the actual ritual of some
at least of the national festivals. To such an examination the next three
chapters will be devoted.
* * * * *
The main result of such an examination, a result which for clearness’
sake may be stated at the outset, is surprising. We shall find a series
of festivals which are nominally connected with, or as the handbooks say,
‘celebrated in honour of’ various Olympians; the Diasia in honour of
Zeus, the Thargelia of Apollo and Artemis, the Anthesteria of Dionysos.
The service of these Olympians we should expect to be of the nature of
joyous ‘tendance.’ To our surprise, when the actual rites are examined,
we shall find that they have little or nothing to do with the particular
Olympian to whom they are supposed to be addressed; that they are rites
not in the main of burnt-sacrifice, of joy and feasting and agonistic
contests, but rites of a gloomy underworld character, connected mainly
with purification and the worship of ghosts. The conclusion is almost
forced upon us that we have here a theological stratification, that
the rites of the Olympians have been superimposed on another order of
worship. The contrast between the two classes of rites is so marked, so
sharp, that the unbroken development from one to the other is felt to be
almost impossible.
To make this clear, before we examine a series of festivals in regular
calendar order, one typical case will be taken, the Diasia, the supposed
festival of Zeus; and to make the argument intelligible, before the
Diasia is examined, a word must be said as to the regular ritual of this
particular Olympian. The ritual of the several Olympian deities does not
vary in essentials; an instance of sacrifice to Zeus is selected because
we are about to examine the Diasia, a festival of Zeus, and thereby
uniformity is secured.
Agamemnon[23], beguiled by Zeus in a dream, is about to go forth to
battle. Zeus intends to play him false, but all the same he accepts the
sacrifice. It is a clear instance of _do ut des_.
The first act is of prayer and the scattering of barley grains; the
victim, a bull, is present but not yet slain:
‘They gathered round the bull and straight the barley grain did take,
And ’mid them Agamemnon stood and prayed, and thus he spake:
O Zeus most great, most glorious, Thou who dwellest in the sky
And storm-black cloud, oh grant the dark of evening come not nigh
At sunset ere I blast the house of Priam to black ash,
And burn his doorways with fierce fire, and with my sword-blade gash
His doublet upon Hector’s breast, his comrades many a one
Grant that they bite the dust of earth ere yet the day be done.’
Next follows the slaying and elaborate carving of the bull for the
banquet of gods and men:
‘When they had scattered barley grain and thus their prayer had made,
The bull’s head backward drew they, and slew him, and they flayed
His body and cut slices from the thighs, and these in fat
They wrapped and made a double fold, and gobbets raw thereat
They laid and these they burnt straightway with leafless billets dry
And held the spitted vitals Hephaistos’ flame anigh—
The thighs they burnt; the spitted vitals next they taste, anon
The rest they slice and heedfully they roast till all is done—
When they had rested from their task and all the banquet dight,
They feasted, in their hearts no stint of feasting and delight.’
Dr Leaf[24] observes on the passage: ‘The significance of the various
acts of the sacrifice evidently refers to a supposed invitation to the
gods to take part in a banquet. Barley meal is scattered on the victim’s
head that the gods may share in the fruits of the earth as well as in
the meat. Slices from the thigh as the best part are wrapped in fat to
make them burn and thus ascend in sweet savour to heaven. The sacrificers
after roasting the vitals taste them as a symbolical sign that they are
actually eating with the gods. When this religious act has been done, the
rest of the victim is consumed as a merely human meal.’
Nothing could be simpler, clearer. There is no mystic communion, no
eating of the body of the god incarnate in the victim, no awful taboo
upon what has been offered to, made over to, the gods, no holocaust.
Homer knows of victims slain to revive by their blood the ghosts of those
below, knows of victims on which oaths have been taken and which are
utterly consumed and abolished, but the normal service of the Olympians
is a _meal shared_. The god is Ouranios, so his share is burnt, and the
object of the burning is manifestly sublimation not destruction.
With the burnt-sacrifice and the joyous banquet in our minds we turn to
the supposed festival of Zeus at Athens and mark the contrast, a contrast
it will be seen so great that it compels us to suppose that the ritual of
the festival of the Diasia had primarily nothing whatever to do with the
worship of Olympian Zeus.
THE DIASIA.
Our investigation begins with a festival which at first sight seems of
all others for our purpose most unpromising, the Diasia[25]. Pollux, in
his chapter[26] on ‘Festivals which take their names from the divinities
worshipped,’ cites the Diasia as an instance—‘the Mouseia are from the
Muses, the Hermaia from Hermes, the Diasia and Pandia from Zeus (Διός),
the Panathenaia from Athene.’ What could be clearer? It is true that
the modern philologist observes what naturally escaped the attention of
Pollux, i.e. that the _i_ in Diasia is long, that in Διός short, but
what is the quantity of a vowel as against the accredited worship of an
Olympian?
To the question of derivation it will be necessary to return later, the
nature of the cult must first be examined. Again at the outset facts
seem against us. It must frankly be owned that as early as the middle of
the seventh century B.C. in common as well as professional parlance, the
Diasia was a festival of Zeus, of Zeus with the title Meilichios.
Our first notice of the Diasia comes to us in a bit of religious history
as amusing as it is instructive, the story of the unworthy trick played
by the Delphic oracle on Cylon. Thucydides[27] tells how Cylon took
counsel of the oracle how he might seize the Acropolis, and the priestess
made answer that he should attempt it ‘on the greatest festival of Zeus.’
Cylon never doubted that ‘the greatest festival of Zeus’ was the Olympian
festival, and having been (B.C. 640) an Olympian victor himself, he felt
that there was about the oracle ‘a certain appropriateness.’ But in
fine oracular fashion the god had laid a trap for the unwary egotist,
intending all the while not the Olympian festival but the Attic Diasia,
‘for,’ Thucydides explains, ‘the Athenians too have what is called the
Diasia, the greatest festival of Zeus, of Zeus Meilichios.’ The passage
is of paramount importance because it shows clearly that the obscurity
lay in the intentional omission by the priestess of the cultus epithet
Meilichios, and in that epithet as will be presently seen lies the whole
significance of the cult. Had Zeus _Meilichios_ been named no normal
Athenian would have blundered.
Thucydides goes on to note some particulars of the ritual of the
Diasia; the ceremonies took place outside the citadel, sacrifices
were offered by the whole people collectively, and many of those who
sacrificed offered not animal sacrifices but offerings in accordance
with local custom. The word ἱερεῖα, the regular ritual term for _animal_
sacrifices, is here opposed to θύματα ἐπιχώρια, local sacrifices. But
for the Scholiast the meaning of ‘local sacrifices’ would have remained
dubious; he explains, and no doubt rightly, that these customary ‘local
sacrifices’ were cakes made in the shape of animals. The principle _in
sacris simulata pro veris accipi_ was and is still of wide application,
and as there is nothing in it specially characteristic of the Diasia it
need not be further exemplified.
Two notices of the Diasia in the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes[28] yield
nothing. The fact that Strepsiades bought a little cart at the Diasia
for his boy or even cooked a sausage for his relations is of no
significance. Wherever any sort of religious ceremony goes on, there
among primitive peoples a fair will be set up and outlying relations
will come in and must be fed, nor does it concern us to decide whether
the cart bought by Strepsiades was a real cart or as the Scholiast
suggests a cake-cart. Cakes in every conceivable form belong to the
common fund of _quod semper quod ubique_. Of capital importance however
is the notice of the Scholiast on line 408 where the exact date of the
Diasia is given. It was celebrated on the 8th day of the last decade of
the month Anthesterion—i.e. about the 14th of March. The Diasia was a
Spring festival and therein as will be shown later (p. 52) lies its true
significance.
From Lucian we learn that by his time the Diasia had fallen somewhat into
abeyance; in the _Icaro-Menippos_ Zeus complains that his altars are as
cold as the syllogisms of Chrysippos. Worn out old god as he was, men
thought it sufficient if they sacrificed every six years at Olympia. ‘Why
is it,’ he asks ruefully, ‘that for so many years the Athenians have left
out the Diasia?’ It is significant that here again, as in the case of
Cylon, the Olympian Zeus has tended to efface from men’s mind the ritual
of him who bore the title Meilichios. The Scholiast[29] feels that some
explanation of an obsolete festival is desirable, and explains: ‘the
Diasia, a festival at Athens, which they keep with a certain element
of chilly gloom (στυγνότης), offering sacrifices to Zeus Meilichios.’
This ‘chilly gloom’ arrests attention at once. What has Zeus of the
high heaven, of the upper air, to do with ‘chilly gloom,’ with things
abhorrent and abominable? Styx is the chill cold water of death, Hades
and the Erinyes are ‘chilly ones’ (στυγεροί), the epithet is utterly
aloof from Zeus. The Scholiast implies that the ‘chilly gloom’ comes in
from the sacrifice to Zeus _Meilichios_. Zeus quâ Zeus gives no clue, it
remains to examine the title Meilichios.
Xenophon in returning from his Asiatic expedition was hindered, we are
told[30], by lack of funds. He piously consulted a religious specialist
and was informed that ‘Zeus Meilichios’ stood in his way and that he must
sacrifice to the god as he was wont to do at home. Accordingly on the
following day Xenophon ‘sacrificed and offered a holocaust of pigs in
accordance with ancestral custom and the omens were favourable.’
The regular ancestral ritual to Zeus Meilichios was a holocaust of
pigs, and the god himself was regarded as a source of wealth, a sort
of Ploutos. Taken by itself this last point could not be pressed, as
probably by Xenophon’s time men would pray to Zeus pure and simple for
anything and everything; taken in conjunction with the holocaust and the
title Meilichios, the fact, it will presently be seen, is significant.
There is of course nothing to prove that Xenophon sacrificed at the time
of the Diasia, though this is possible; we are concerned now with the
cult of Zeus Meilichios in general, not with the particular festival
of the Diasia. It may be noted that the Scholiast, on the passage of
Thucydides already discussed, says that the ‘animal sacrifices’ at the
Diasia were πρόβατα, a word usually rendered ‘sheep’; but if he is basing
his statement on any earlier authority πρόβατα may quite well have meant
pig or any four-legged household animal; the meaning of the word was only
gradually narrowed down to ‘sheep.’
It may be said once for all that the exact animal sacrificed is not of
the first importance in determining the nature of the god. Pigs came to
be associated with Demeter and the underworld divinities, but that is
because these divinities belong to a primitive stratum, and the pig then
as now was cheap to rear and a standby to the poor. The animal sacrificed
is significant of the status of the worshipper rather than of the content
of the god. The argument from the pig must not be pressed, though
undoubtedly the cheap pig as a sacrifice to Zeus is exceptional.
The manner of the sacrifice, not the material, is the real clue to
the significance of the title Meilichios. Zeus as Meilichios demanded
a holocaust, a whole burnt-offering. The Zeus of Homer demanded and
received the tit-bits of the victim, though even these in token of
friendly communion were shared by the worshippers. Such was the custom
of the Ouranioi, the Olympians in general. Zeus Meilichios will have all
or nothing. His sacrifice is not a happy common feast, it is a dread
renunciation to a dreadful power, hence the atmosphere of ‘chilly gloom.’
It will later be seen that these _un_-eaten sacrifices are characteristic
of angry ghosts demanding placation and of a whole class of underworld
divinities in general, divinities who belong to a stratum of thought
more primitive than Homer. For the present it is enough to mark that the
service of Zeus Meilichios is wholly alien to that of the Zeus of Homer.
The next passage makes still clearer the nature of this service.
Most fortunately for us Pausanias, when at Myonia in Locris, visited[31]
a sanctuary, not indeed of Zeus Meilichios, but of ‘the Meilichians.’ He
saw there no temple, only a grove and an altar, and he learnt the nature
of the ritual. ‘The sacrifices to “the Meilichians” are at night-time and
it is customary to consume the flesh on the spot before the sun is up.’
Here is no question of Zeus; we have independent divinities worshipped
on their own account and with nocturnal ceremonies. The suspicion begins
to take shape that Zeus must have taken over the worship of these dread
Meilichian divinities with its nocturnal ceremonial. The suspicion is
confirmed when we find that Zeus Meilichios is, like the Erinyes, the
avenger of kindred blood. Pausanias[32] saw near the Kephissos ‘an
ancient altar of Zeus Meilichios; on it Theseus received purification
from the descendants of Phytalos after he had slain among other robbers
Sinis who was related to himself through Pittheus.’
Again Pausanias[33] tells us that, after an internecine fray, the Argives
took measures to purify themselves from the guilt of kindred blood, and
one measure was that they set up an image of Zeus Meilichios. Meilichios,
Easy-to-be-entreated, the Gentle, the Gracious One, is naturally the
divinity of purification, but he is also naturally the other euphemistic
face of _Maimaktes_, he who rages eager, panting and thirsting for blood.
This Hesychius[34] tells us in an instructive gloss. Maimaktes-Meilichios
is double-faced like the Erinyes-Eumenides. Such undoubtedly would have
been the explanation of the worship of Zeus Meilichios by any educated
Greek of the fifth century B.C. with his monotheistic tendencies. Zeus he
would have said is all in all, Zeus Meilichios is Zeus in his underworld
aspect—Zeus-Hades.
Pausanias[35] saw at Corinth three images of Zeus, all under the open
sky. One he says had no title, another was called He of the underworld
(χθόνιος), the third The Highest. What earlier cults this triple Zeus had
absorbed into himself it is impossible to say.
Such a determined monotheism is obviously no primitive conception, and it
is interesting to ask on what facts and fusion of facts it was primarily
based. Happily where literature and even ritual leave us with suspicions
only, art compels a clearer definition.
The two reliefs in figs. 1 and 2 were found at the Peiraeus and are
now in the Berlin Museum[36]. From the inscription on the relief in
fig. 1 and from numerous other inscribed reliefs found with it, it is
practically certain that at the place in which they were found Zeus
Meilichios was worshipped. In any case the relief in fig. 1 is clearly
dedicated to him. Above the splendid coiled beast is plainly inscribed
‘to Zeus Meilichios’ (Διὶ Μειλιχίῳ). We are brought face to face with
the astounding fact that Zeus, father of gods and men, is figured by his
worshippers as a snake.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
So astonishing is the inscription that it drove a man of M. Foucart’s
learning and ability into strange straits. He was the first to attempt
the interpretation of these remarkable reliefs, and so determined is
he that the Hellenic Zeus _is_ not, cannot be, a mere snake that he
resorts to the perfectly gratuitous assumption that Meilichios is
Moloch (Melek) and that the reliefs are dedicated by foreigners to
their foreign god[37]. We have no evidence that Moloch was figured as a
snake, but anything is good enough for a foreigner. This explanation,
though supported by a great name, was too preposterous long to command
attention and another way was sought out of the difficulty. The snake,
it was suggested, was not the god himself, it was his attribute. Again
the assumption is baseless. Zeus is one of the few Greek gods who never
appear attended by a snake. Asklepios, Hermes, Apollo, even Demeter and
Athene have their snakes, Zeus never. Moreover when the god developed
from snake form to human form, as, it will later be shown, was the case
with Asklepios, _the snake he once was_ remains coiled about his staff
or attendant at his throne. In the case of Zeus Meilichios in human form
_the snake he once was not_ disappears clean and clear.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
The explanation of the snake as merely an attribute is indeed impossible
to any unbiassed critic who looks at the relief in fig. 2. Here clearly
the snake is the object worshipped by the woman and two men who approach
with gestures of adoration. The colossal size of the beast as it towers
above its human adorers is the _Magnificat_ of the artist echoed by the
worshippers. When we confront the relief in fig. 3, also found at the
Peiraeus, with those in figs. 1 and 2, the secret is out at last. In
fig. 3 a man followed by a woman and child approaches an altar, behind
which is seated a bearded god holding a sceptre and patera for libation.
Above is clearly inscribed ‘Aristarche to Zeus Meilichios’ (Ἀριστάρχη
Διὶ Μειλιχίῳ). And the truth is nothing more or less than this. The
human-shaped Zeus has slipped himself quietly into the place of the
old snake-god. Art sets plainly forth what has been dimly shadowed
in ritual and mythology. It is not that Zeus the Olympian has ‘an
underworld aspect’; it is the cruder fact that he of the upper air, of
the thunder and lightning, extrudes an ancient serpent-demon of the lower
world, Meilichios. Meilichios is no foreign Moloch, he is home-grown,
autochthonous before the formulation of Zeus.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.]
[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
How the shift may have been effected art again helps us to conjecture.
In the same sanctuary at the Peiraeus that yielded the reliefs in figs.
1 and 2 was found the inscribed relief[38] in fig. 4. We have a similar
bearded snake and above is inscribed ‘Heracleides to the god.’ The
worshipper is not fencing, uncertain whether he means Meilichios or
Zeus; he brings his offering to the local precinct where the god is a
snake and dedicates it to _the_ god, the god of that precinct. It is not
monotheism, rather it is parochialism, but it is a conception tending
towards a later monotheism. When and where the snake is simply ‘the god,’
the fusion with Zeus is made easy.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
In fig. 5 is figured advisedly a monument of snake worship, which it must
be distinctly noted comes, not from the precinct of Zeus Meilichios at
the Peiraeus, but from Eteonos in Boeotia. When we come to the discussion
of hero-worship, it will be seen that all over Greece the dead hero
was worshipped in snake form and addressed by euphemistic titles akin
to that of Meilichios. The relief from Boeotia is a good instance of
such worship and is chosen because of the striking parallelism of its
art type with that of the Peiraeus relief in fig. 3. The maker of this
class of votive reliefs seems to have kept in stock designs of groups
of pious worshippers which he could modify as required and to which
the necessary god or snake and the appropriate victim could easily be
appended. Midway in conception between the Olympian Zeus with his sceptre
and the snake demon stands another relief[39] (fig. 6), also from the
Peiraeus sanctuary. Meilichios is human, a snake no longer, but he is
an earth god, he bears the cornucopia, his victim is the pig. He is
that Meilichios to whom Xenophon offered the holocaust of pigs, praying
for wealth; he is also the Zeus-Hades of Euripides. We might have been
tempted to call him simply Hades or Ploutos but for the inscription
[Κριτο]βόλη Διὶ Μειλιχίῳ, ‘Kritoboule to Zeus Meilichios,’ which makes
the dedication certain.
By the light then of these reliefs the duality, the inner discrepancy of
Zeus Meilichios admits of a simple and straightforward solution. It is
the monument of a superposition of cults. But the difficulty of the name
of the festival, _Diasia_, remains. There is no reason to suppose that
the name was given late; and, if primitive, how can we sever it from Διός?
[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
It is interesting to note that the ancients themselves were not quite at
ease in deriving Diasia from Διός. Naturally they were not troubled by
difficulties as to long and short vowels, but they had their misgivings
as to the connotation of the word, and they try round uneasily for
etymologies of quite other significance. The Scholiast on Lucian’s
_Timon_[40] says the word is probably derived from διασαίνειν ‘to fawn
on,’ ‘to propitiate.’ Suidas[41] says it comes from διαφυγεῖν αὐτοὺς
εὐχαῖς τὰς ἄσας, because in the Diasia ‘men escaped from curses by
prayers.’ If etymologically absurd, certainly, as will be seen, a happy
guess.
Such derivations are of course only worth citing to show that even in
ancient minds as regards the derivation of Diasia from Διός misgiving
lurked.
The misgiving is emphasized by the modern philologist. The derivation
of Diasia with its long from Διός with its short _i_ is scientifically
improbable if not impossible. Happily another derivation that at least
satisfies scientific conditions has been suggested by Mr R. A. Neil.
Not only does it satisfy scientific conditions but it also confirms
the view arrived at by independent investigation of the ritual and art
representations of Zeus Meilichios. Mr Neil[42] suggests that in several
Greek words showing the stem δῑο this stem may stand by the regular
falling away of the medial σ for δῑσο and is identical with the Latin
_dīro_[43]. _dirus_, he notes, was originally a purely religious word.
Such words would be the Dīasia, whatever the termination may be, the Δῖα
of Teos (p. 143) and perhaps the Πάνδια of Athens. Seen in the light of
this new etymology the Diasia becomes intelligible: it is the festival
of curses, imprecations; it is nocturnal and associated with rites of
placation and purgation, two notions inextricably linked in the mind of
the ancients.
We further understand why Meilichios seems the male double of Erinys
and why his rites are associated with ‘chilly gloom.’ The Diasia has
primarily and necessarily nothing to do with Διός, with Zeus; it has
everything to do with ‘dirae,’ magical curses, exorcisms and the like.
The keynote of primitive ritual, it will become increasingly clear, is
exorcism.
In the light of this new derivation it is possible further to explain
another element in the cult of Zeus Meilichios hitherto purposely left
unnoticed, the famous Διὸς κώδιον, the supposed ‘fleece of Zeus.’ The
Διὸς κώδιον is, I think, no more the fleece of Zeus than the Diasia is
his festival.
Polemon, writing at the beginning of the second century B.C., undoubtedly
accepted the current derivation, and on the statement of Polemon most of
our notices of ‘the fleece of Zeus’ appear to be based. Hesychius[44]
writes thus: ‘The fleece of Zeus: they use this expression when the
victim has been sacrificed to Zeus, and those who were being purified
stood on it with their left foot. Some say it means a great and perfect
fleece. But Polemon says it is the fleece of the victim sacrificed to
Zeus.’
But Polemon is by no means infallible in the matter of etymology,
though invaluable as reflecting the current impression of his day. Our
conviction that the Διὸς κώδιον is necessarily ‘the fleece of Zeus’ is
somewhat loosened when we find that this fleece was by no means confined
to the ritual of Zeus, and in so far as it was connected with Zeus, was
used in the ritual only of a Zeus who bore the titles Meilichios and
Ktesios. Suidas[45] expressly states that ‘they sacrifice to Meilichios
and to Zeus Ktesios and they keep the fleeces of these (victims) and call
them “Dian,” and they use them when they send out the procession in the
month of Skirophorion, and the Dadouchos at Eleusis uses them, and others
use them for purifications by strewing them under the feet of those who
are polluted.’
It is abundantly clear that Zeus had no monopoly in the fleece supposed
to be his; it was a sacred fleece used for purification ceremonies in
general. He himself had taken over the cult of Meilichios, the Placable
One, the spirit of purification; we conjecture that he had also taken
over the fleece of purification.
Final conviction comes from a passage in the commentary of Eustathius[46]
on the purification of the house of Odysseus after the slaying of the
suitors. Odysseus purges his house by two things, first after the slaying
of the suitors by water, then after the hanging of the maidens by fire
and brimstone. His method of purifying is a simple and natural one, it
might be adopted to-day in the disinfecting of a polluted house. This
Eustathius notes, and contrasts it with the complex magical apparatus
in use among the ancients and very possibly still employed by the
pagans of his own day. He comments as follows: ‘The Greeks thought such
pollutions were purified by being “sent away.” Some describe one sort of
purifications, some others, and these purifications they carried out of
houses after the customary incantations and they cast them forth in the
streets with averted faces and returned without looking backwards. But
the Odysseus of the poet does not act thus, but performs a different and
a simpler act, for he says:
“Bring brimstone, ancient dame, the cure of ills, and bring me fire
That I the hall may fumigate.”’
In the confused fashion of his day and of his own mind Eustathius sees
there is a real distinction but does not recognise wherein it lies. He
does not see that Homer’s purification is actual, physical, rational, not
magical. He goes on: ‘Brimstone is a sort of incense which is reputed to
cleanse pollutions. Hence the poet distinguishes it, calling it “cure of
ills.” In this passage there are none of the incantations usual among
the ancients, nor is there the small vessel in which the live coals were
carried and thrown away vessel and all backwards.’
What half occurs to Eustathius and would strike any intelligent modern
observer acquainted with ancient ritual is that the purification of
the house of Odysseus is as it were scientific; there is none of the
apparatus of magical ‘riddance.’ Dimly and darkly he puts a hesitating
finger on the cardinal difference between the religion of Homer and
that of later (and earlier) Greece, that Homer is innocent, save for an
occasional labelled magician, of magic. The Archbishop seems to feel
this as something of a defect, a shortcoming. He goes on: ‘It must be
understood that purifications were effected not only as has just been
described, by means of sulphur, but there are also certain plants that
were useful for this purpose; at least according to Pausanias there is
verbena, a plant in use for purification, and the pig was sometimes
employed for such purposes, as appears in the _Iliad_.’ This mention
of means of purification in general brings irresistibly to the mind
of Eustathius a salient instance, the very fleece we are discussing.
He continues: ‘Those who interpret the word διοπομπεῖν say that they
applied the term δῖον to the fleece of the animal that had been
sacrificed to Zeus Meilichios in purifications at the end of the month of
Maimakterion[47] when they performed the Sendings and when the castings
out of pollutions at the triple ways took place: and they held in their
hands a sender which was they say the kerukeion, the attribute of Hermes,
and from a sender of this sort, _pompos_, and from the δῖον, the fleece
called “Dian,” they get the word διοπομπεῖν, divine sending.’
From this crude and tentative etymological guessing two important points
emerge. Eustathius does not speak of the ‘fleece of Zeus,’ but of the
_Dian_ or perhaps we may translate _divine_ fleece. δῖος is with him an
adjective to be declined, not the genitive of Ζεύς. This loosens somewhat
the connection of the fleece with Zeus, as the adjective δῖος could be
used of anything divine or even magical in its wonder and perfection.
Further, and this is of supreme importance, he connects the Dian fleece
with the difficult word διοπομπεῖν, and in this lies the clue to its
real interpretation. ‘That this,’ he goes on—meaning his derivation
of διοπομπεῖν from πομπός the kerukeion of Hermes and δῖον the divine
fleece—‘is so we find from special investigation, but in more general
parlance by διοπομπεῖν and ἀποδιοπομπεῖν is meant the sending away of
unclean things in the name of Zeus Averter of Evil.’ Eustathius evidently
gets nervous; his ‘special investigation’ is leading him uncomfortably
near the real truth, uncomfortably far from the orthodox Zeus, so he
pulls himself up instinctively.
The explanation of the strange word ἀποδιοπομπεῖν, to which Eustathius at
the close of his remarks piously reverts, is still accredited by modern
lexicons. ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι—the middle form is the most usual—means, we
are told, ‘to avert threatened evils by offerings to Zeus[48].’ Are
scholars really prepared to believe that ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι means, to put
it shortly, ‘to Zeus things away’? The lexicons after this desperate
etymology proceed ‘hence, to conjure away, to reject with abhorrence,’
and finally, under a heading apart, ‘ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι οἶκον to purify a
house.’ Surely from beginning to end the meaning inherent in the word
is simply ‘to rid of pollution’; ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι is substantially the
same as ἀποπέμπειν, to send away, to get rid of, but—and this is the
important part—the element διο emphasizes the means and method of the
‘sending.’ The quantity of the ι in ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι we have no means of
knowing, the ι in Diasia the feast of Zeus Meilichios is long, the ι in
the δῖον κώδιον used in his service is long, the δῖον κώδιον is used in
ritual concerned with διοπομπούμενα, its purpose is ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι. Is
it too bold to see in the mysterious διο the same root as has been seen
in Diasia and to understand ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι as ‘to effect riddance by
magical imprecation or deprecation’?
The word _dirus_ is charged with magic, and this lives on in the Greek
word δῖος which is more magical than divine. It has that doubleness, for
cursing and for blessing, that haunts all inchoate religious terms. The
fleece is not divine in our sense, not definitely either for blessing or
for cursing; it is taboo, it is ‘medicine,’ it is magical. As magical
medicine it had power to purify, i.e. in the ancient sense, not to
cleanse physically or purge morally, but to rid of evil influences, of
ghostly infection.
Magical fleeces were of use in ceremonies apparently the most diverse,
but at the bottom of each usage lies the same thought, that the skin
of the victim has magical efficacy as medicine against impurities.
Dicaearchus[49] tells us that at the rising of the dog-star, when the
heat was greatest, young men in the flower of their age and of the
noblest families went to a cave called the sanctuary of Zeus Aktaios,
and also (very significantly it would seem) called the Cheironion; they
were girded about with fresh fleeces of triple wool. Dicaearchus says
that this was because it was so cold on the mountain; but if so, why
must the fleeces be fresh? Zeus Aktaios, it is abundantly clear, has
taken over the cave of the old Centaur Cheiron; the magic fleeces, newly
slain because all ‘medicine’ must be fresh, belong to his order as they
belonged to the order of Meilichios.
Again we learn that whoever would take counsel of the oracle of
Amphiaraos[50] must first purify himself, and Pausanias himself adds
the explanatory words, ‘Sacrificing to the god is a ceremony of
purification.’ But the purification ceremony did not, it would appear,
end with the actual sacrifice, for he explains, ‘Having sacrificed a
ram they spread the skin beneath them and go to sleep, awaiting the
revelation of a dream’; here again, though the name is not used, we have
a δῖον κώδιον, a magic fleece with purifying properties. It is curious
to note that Zeus made an effort to take over the cult of Amphiaraos, as
he had taken that of Meilichios; we hear of a Zeus Amphiaraos[51], but
the attempt was not a great success; probably the local hero Amphiaraos,
himself all but a god, was too strong for the Olympian.
* * * * *
The results of our examination of the festival of the Diasia are then
briefly this. The cult of the Olympian Zeus has overlaid the cult of
a being called Meilichios, a being who was figured as a snake, who
was a sort of Ploutos, but who had also some of the characteristics
of an Erinys; he was an avenger of kindred blood, his sacrifice was a
holocaust offered by night, his festival a time of ‘chilly gloom.’ A
further element in his cult was a magical fleece used in ceremonies of
purification and in the service of heroes. The cult of Meilichios is
unlike that of the Olympian Zeus as described in Homer, and the methods
of purification characteristic of him wholly alien. The name of his
festival means ‘the ceremonies of imprecation.’
* * * * *
The next step in our investigation will be to take in order certain
well-known Athenian festivals, and examine the ceremonies that actually
took place at each. In each case it will be found that, though the
several festivals are ostensibly consecrated to various Olympians, and
though there is in each an element of prayer and praise and sacrificial
feasting such as is familiar to us in Homer, yet, when the ritual is
closely examined, the main part of the ceremonies will be seen to be
magical rather than what we should term religious. Further, this ritual
is addressed, in so far as it is addressed to any one, not to the
Olympians of the upper air, but to snakes and ghosts and underworld
beings; its main gist is purification, the riddance of evil influences,
this riddance being naturally prompted not by cheerful confidence but by
an ever imminent fear.
In the pages that follow but little attention will be paid to the
familiar rites of the Olympians, the burnt sacrifice and its attendant
feast, the dance and song; our whole attention will be focussed on the
rites belonging to the lower stratum. This course is adopted for two
reasons. First, the rites of sacrifice as described by Homer are simple
and familiar, needing but little elucidation and having already received
superabundant commentary, whereas the rites of the lower stratum are
often obscure and have met with little attention. Second, it is these
rites of purification belonging to the lower stratum, primitive and
barbarous, even repulsive as they often are, that furnished ultimately
the material out of which ‘mysteries’ were made—mysteries which, as will
be seen, when informed by the new spirit of the religions of Dionysos and
Orpheus, lent to Greece its deepest and most enduring religious impulse.
ATTIC CALENDAR.
NOTE. Names of Festivals selected for special discussion are printed in
large type. Names of Festivals incidentally discussed in italics.
1. Hecatombaion July, August Kronia, Panathenaia
2. Metageitnion Aug., September Metageitnia
3. Boedromion Sept., October Eleusinia and _Greater Mysteries_
4. _Pyanepsion_ Oct., November THESMOPHORIA. Pyanepsia and
Oschophoria [Id. Oct. (Oct. 15)
October Horse]
5. Maimakterion Nov., December ‘Διὸς κώδιον’
6. Poseideon Dec., January _Haloa_
7. Gamelion Jan., February Gamelia (Lenaia?)
8. _Anthesterion_ Feb., March ANTHESTERIA, DIASIA, _Lesser
Mysteries_ [XV. Kal. Mart.
(Feb. 15) Lupercalia] [(Feb.
21) Feralia]
9. Elaphebolion March, April Dionysia
10. Munychion April, May Munychia, Brauronia
11. _Thargelion_ May, June THARGELIA, _Kallynteria_,
_Plynteria_ (May 15 Argei,
June 15 Vestalia,
Q. St. D. F.)
12. Skirophorion June, July _Skirophoria_, _Arrephoria_,
Dipolia, Bouphonia
The Athenian official calendar began in the month Hecatombaion
(July-August) at the summer’s height. In it was celebrated the great
festival of the Panathenaia, whose very name marks its political import.
Such political festivals, however magnificent and socially prominent, it
is not my purpose to examine; concerning the gist of primitive religious
conceptions they yield us little. The Panathenaia is sacred rather to
a city than a goddess. Behind the Panathenaia lay the more elementary
festival of the Kronia, which undoubtedly took its name from the faded
divinity Kronos; but of the Kronia the details known are not adequate for
its fruitful examination.
A cursory glance at the other festivals noted in our list shows that
some, though not all, gave their names to the months in which they were
celebrated, and (a fact of high significance) shows also that with one
exception, the Dionysia, these festivals are not named after Olympian or
indeed after any divinities. _Metageitnia_, the festival of ‘changing
your neighbours,’ is obviously social or political. The Eleusinia are
named after a place, so are the Munychia and Brauronia. The Thesmophoria,
Oschophoria, Skirophoria and Arrephoria are festivals of _carrying
something_; the Anthesteria, Kallynteria, Plynteria festivals of persons
who _do something_; the Haloa a festival of _threshing-floors_, the
Thargelia of _first-fruits_, the Bouphonia of _ox-slaying_, the Pyanepsia
of _bean-cooking_. In the matter of nomenclature the Olympians are much
to seek.
The festivals in the table appended are arranged according to the
official calendar for convenience of reference, but it should be noted
that the agricultural year, on which the festivals primarily depend,
begins in the autumn with sowing, i.e. in Pyanepsion. The Greek
agricultural year fell into three main divisions, the autumn sowing
season followed by the winter, the spring with its first blossoming
of fruits and flowers beginning in Anthesterion, and the early summer
harvest (ὄπωρα) beginning in Thargelion, the month of first-fruits; to
this early harvest of grain and fruits was added with the coming of the
vine the vintage in Boedromion, and the gathering in of the later fruits,
e.g. the fig. All the festivals fall necessarily much earlier than the
dates familiar to us in the North. In Greece to-day the wheat harvest is
over by the middle or end of June.
No attempt will be made to examine all the festivals, for two practical
reasons, lack of space and lack of material; but fortunately for us we
have adequate material for the examination of one characteristic festival
in each of the agricultural seasons, the Thesmophoria for autumn, the
Anthesteria for spring, the Thargelia for early summer, and in each case
the ceremonies of the several seasons can be further elucidated by the
examination of the like ceremonies in the Roman calendar. To make clear
the superposition of the two strata[52], which for convenience’ sake may
be called Olympian and chthonic, the Diasia has already been examined. In
the typical festivals now to be discussed a like superposition will be
made apparent, and from the detailed examination of the lower chthonic
stratum it will be possible to determine the main outlines of Greek
religious thought on such essential points as e.g. purification and
sacrifice.
It would perhaps be more methodical to begin the investigation with
the autumn, with the sowing festival of the Thesmophoria, but as the
Thesmophoria leads more directly to the consummation of Greek religion in
the Mysteries it will be taken last. The reason for this will become more
apparent in the further course of the argument. We shall begin with the
_Anthesteria_.
CHAPTER II.
THE ANTHESTERIA.
THE RITUAL OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES.
Our examination of the unpromising Diasia has so far led us to the
following significant, if somewhat vague, results. The festival in
all probability did not originally belong to Zeus, but to a being
called Meilichios, a snake god or demon. The worship of this being was
characterized by nightly ceremonies, holocausts which the sun might not
behold, it was gloomy in character, potent for purification. The name of
the festival is probably associated with _dirae_, curses, imprecations.
The Diasia, gloomy though it is, is a spring festival and its
significance will be yet more plainly apparent if we examine another,
_the_ other spring festival of the Greeks, i.e. the Anthesteria, which
gives its name to the first spring month Anthesterion.
If we know little about the Diasia, about the Anthesteria[53] we know
much. Apollodorus, quoted by Harpocration, tells us that the whole
festival collectively was called _Anthesteria_, that it was celebrated in
honour of Dionysos, and that its several parts, i.e. its successive days,
were known as Pithoigia (cask-opening), Choes (cups), Chytroi (pots). The
exact date of the festival is fixed, the three successive days falling
from the 11th to the 13th of Anthesterion[54].
On the first day, the 11th of Anthesterion, i.e. the Pithoigia,
Plutarch[55] tells us ‘they broached the new wine at Athens. It was an
ancient custom,’ he adds, ‘to offer some of it as a libation before they
drank it, praying at the same time that the use of the drug (φαρμάκου)
might be rendered harmless and beneficial to them.’ This is a clear case
of the offering of first-fruits[56]. Among his own people, the Boeotians,
Plutarch adds, ‘the day was called the day of the Good Spirit[57], the
Agathos Daimon, and to him they made offerings. The month itself was
known as Prostaterios.’ The scholiast to Hesiod[58] tells us that the
festival was an ancestral one (ἐν τοῖς πατρίοις), and that it was not
allowable to hinder either household slaves or hired servants from
partaking of the wine.
The casks once opened, the revel set in and lasted through the next day
(the Choes or Cups) and on through the third (the Chytroi or Pots). The
day of the Choes seems to have been the climax, and sometimes gave its
name to the whole festival.
It is needless to dwell on all the details of what was in intent a
three days’ fair. A ‘Pardon’ in the Brittany of to-day affords perhaps
the nearest modern analogy. The children have holidays, fairings are
bought, friends are feasted, the sophists get their fees, the servants
generally are disorganized, and every one down to the small boys, as
many a vase-painting tells us, is more or less drunk. The drinking bore
of course its ritual aspect; there is a drinking contest presided over
by the King Archon, he who first drains his cup gets a cake, each man
crowns his cup with a garland and deposits the wreath in keeping of the
priestess of the sanctuary of Dionysos in the Marshes. On the day of the
_Cups_ takes place the august ceremony of the wedding of the wife of the
King Archon to the god Dionysos. On that day alone in all the year the
temple of Dionysos is opened[59]; the wedding ceremony itself takes place
in the Boukoleion.
On the third day, the _Chytroi_ or Pots, there was a dramatic contest
known as Χύτρινοι, Pot-contests. During this third day the revel went
on; Aristophanes[60] has left us the picture of the drunken mob thronging
the streets at the holy Pot-Feast:
‘O brood of the mere and the spring,
Gather together and sing
From the depths of your throat
By the side of the boat
Coäx, as we move in a ring.
As in Limnae we sang the divine
Nyseïan Giver of Wine,
When the people in lots
With their sanctified Pots
Came reeling around my shrine.’
The scholiast on the _Acharnians_[61], a play which gives us a lively
picture of the festival, says that the Choes and the Chytroi were
celebrated on one day. The different days and acts of the whole
Anthesteria were doubtless not sharply divided, and if each day was
reckoned from sunrise to sunset confusion would easily arise.
* * * * *
So far a cursory inspection clearly shows that the Anthesteria was a
wine-festival in honour of Dionysos. Moreover we have the definite
statement of Thucydides[62] that ‘the more ancient Dionysia were
celebrated on the 12th day of the month Anthesterion in the temple of
Dionysos in the Marshes.’ The reference can only be to the Choes, so that
the festival of the Choes seems actually to have borne the name Dionysia.
Harpocration[63] goes even further; he says, quoting Apollodorus, that
‘the whole month was sacred to Dionysos.’
A more searching examination of the sources reveals beneath the surface
rejoicings, as in the case of the Diasia, another and more primitive
ritual, and a ritual of widely different significance. It has escaped no
student of Greek festivals that through the Anthesteria there ran ‘a note
of sadness.’ Things were not altogether so merry as they seemed. This
has been variously explained, as due to the ‘natural melancholy of the
spring,’ or more recently as evidence of the fact that Dionysos had his
‘chthonic side’ and was the ‘Lord of souls.’ A simpler explanation lies
at the door.
The clue to the real gist of the Anthesteria is afforded by a piece
of ritual performed on the last day, the _Chytroi_. The Greeks had a
proverbial expression spoken, we are told, of those who ‘on all occasions
demand a repetition of favours received.’ It ran as follows: ‘Out of the
doors! ye Keres; it is no longer Anthesteria.’ Suidas[64] has preserved
for us its true signification; it was spoken, he says, ‘implying that
in the Anthesteria the ghosts are going about in the city.’ From this
fragmentary statement the mandate, it is clear, must have been spoken at
the close of the festival, so we cannot be wrong in placing it as the
last act of the Chytroi.
The statement of Suidas in itself makes the significance of the words
abundantly clear, but close parallels are not wanting in the ritual
of other races. The Lemuria at Rome is a case in point. According to
Ovid[65] each father of a family as the festival came round had to
lay the ghosts of his house after a curious and complex fashion. When
midnight was come and all was still, he arose and standing with bare
feet he made a special sign with his fingers and thumb to keep off any
ghost. Thrice he washes his hands in spring water, then he turns round
and takes black beans into his mouth; with face averted he spits them
away, and as he spits them says, ‘These I send forth, with these beans I
redeem myself and mine.’ Nine times he speaks, and looks not back. The
ghost, they believe, picks them up and follows behind if no one looks.
Again he touches the water and strikes the brass of Temesa and begs the
ghost to leave his house. When nine times he has said, ‘Shades of my
fathers, depart’ (Manes exite paterni!), he looks back and holds that
the rite has been duly done. We cannot impute to the Anthesteria all the
crude minutiae of the Lemuria, but the content is clearly the same—the
expulsion of ancestral ghosts. The Lemuria took place not in the spring
but in the early summer, May—a time at which ceremonies of purification
were much needed.
A second striking parallel is recorded by Mr Tylor[66]. He says of a like
Sclavonic custom, ‘when the meal was over the priest rose from the table
and hunted out the souls of the dead like fleas with these words: “Ye
have eaten and drunk, souls, now go, now go”.’ Dr Oldenberg[67] calls
attention to another analogy. In sacrifices in India to the dead the
souls of ancestors are first invoked, then bidden to depart, and even
invited to return again after the prescribed lapse of a month.
The formula used at the close of the Anthesteria is in itself ample proof
that the Anthesteria was a festival of All Souls; here at last we know
for certain what was dimly shadowed in the Diasia, that some portion at
least of the ritual of the month Anthesterion was addressed to the powers
of the underworld, and that these powers were primarily the ghosts of
the dead. The evidence is not however confined to an isolated proverbial
formulary. The remaining ritual of the Chytroi confirms it. Before they
were bidden to depart the ghosts were feasted and after significant
fashion.
The scholiast on Aristophanes[68] commenting on the words τοῖς ἱεροῖσι
Χύτροισι, ‘at the holy Pot-feast,’ explains the ceremonies as follows:
‘The Chytroi is a feast among the Athenians; the cause on account of
which it is celebrated is explained by Theopompos who writes thus: ...
“They have the custom of sacrificing at this feast, not to any of the
Olympian gods at all, but to Hermes Chthonios”; and again in explaining
the word χύτρα, pot: “And of the pot which all the citizens cook none of
the priests tastes, they do this on the (13th) day”; and again: “Those
present appease Hermes on account of the dead”.’ The scholiast on another
passage in Aristophanes[69] says substantially the same, but adds, again
on the authority of Theopompos, that the practice of cooking the dish of
seeds was observed by those who were saved from the deluge on behalf of
those who perished. The deluge is of course introduced from a desire to
get mythological precedent; the all-important points are that the χύτρα,
the dish of grain and seeds, was offered to none of the Olympians, not
even to Dionysos in whose honour the festival was ostensibly celebrated,
but only to Hermes Chthonios, Hermes of the Underworld, and that of this
sacrifice _no man tasted_. It was no sacrifice of communion, but like
the holocaust made over utterly to dread chthonic powers, and behind
this notion of sacrifice to the underworld deities lay the still earlier
notion that it was dead men’s food, a supper for the souls.
Before we leave the χύτρα it is necessary to examine more precisely the
name of the day, Chytroi. August Mommsen[70] has emphasized the fact, too
much neglected, that the name of the festival is masculine, οἱ χύτροι
not αἱ χύτραι. The feminine form χύτραι means pots artificially made;
the masculine form χύτροι, which occurs far less frequently, means in
ordinary parlance natural pots, i.e. holes in the ground. Pausanias[71]
speaks of a certain natural bath at Thermopylae which the country people
called ‘the Chytroi of the women’; and Herodotus[72] describes it in
the same terms. Theophrastos[73] in his _History of Plants_ speaks of a
certain plant as growing in a place between the Kephisos and the Melas,
‘the place being called Pelekania, i.e. certain hollows in the marsh,
the so-called Pot-holes.’ Hesychius[74], interpreting οἱ χύτρινοι, says
they are ‘the hollow places of the earth through which springs come up.’
The word κολυμβήθρα itself, in classical Greek a natural pool, became in
mediaeval Greek a font, and it may be noted that the natural chasms that
occur in western Yorkshire still locally bear the name of ‘Pots.’
It is possible therefore that the festival took its name from natural
holes in the ground in the district of the Limnae where it was
celebrated, a district to this day riddled with Turkish cisterns made of
great earthen jars (πίθοι). Such holes may have been used for graves, and
were in many parts of Greece regarded as the constant haunt of ghosts
going up and down. They were perhaps the prototypes of the ‘chasms in the
earth’ seen in the vision of Er[75]. Near akin were the megara or chasms
of Demeter at Potniae[76], and the clefts on and about the Pnyx where
the women celebrated the Thesmophoria (p. 125). Such chasms would be the
natural sanctuaries of a Ge and ghost cult.
It is obvious that the two forms χύτροι and χύτραι would easily pass over
into each other, and it is hard to say which came first. It is also to be
noted that, though the masculine form more often means natural hole, it
is also used for artificial pot. Pollux[77], in discussing ‘the vessels
used by cooks,’ says that when Delphilos speaks of the big pot (χύτρον
μέγαν) at the cook’s, he clearly means the χύτρα, not the foot-pan
(χυτρόποδα). Though the form χύτροι ultimately established itself, the
associations of χύτρα, artificial pot, seem to have prevailed, and these
associations are important and must be noted.
Hesychius[78] says that by φαρμακή is meant the χύτρα which they prepared
for those who cleansed the cities. From the scholiast on the _Choephoroi_
of Aeschylus[79] we learn that the Athenians purified their houses with a
censer made of a pot; ‘this they threw away at the meeting of three ways
and went away without turning back.’ Here we have of course the origin
of ‘Hecate’s suppers.’ These were primarily not feasts for the goddess
but purification ceremonies, of which, as no mortal might taste them, it
was supposed an infernal goddess partook. The day of the Chytroi was a
day of such purifications. From some such notion arose the Aristophanic
word ἐγχυτρίζειν, ‘to pot,’ i.e. to utterly ruin and destroy, to make
away with. The scholiast[80] explains it as referring to the practice
of exposing children, but Suidas[81] knows of another meaning; he says
the ἐγχυτρίστριαι were those ‘women who purified the unclean, pouring
upon them the blood of the victim,’ and also those who ‘poured libations
to the dead,’ those in a word who performed ceremonies of placation and
purgation.
It is curious that, though most modern writers from Crusius onwards
have recognised that the Chytroi was a _dies nefastus_ and in the main
a festival of ghosts, this day has been separated off from the rest of
the Anthesteria, and the two previous days have been regarded as purely
drinking festivals:—the Pithoigia the opening of the wine-cask, the
Choes the drinking of the wine-cups. And yet for the second day, the
Choes, literary testimony is explicit. Spite of the drinking contest, the
flower-wreathed cups and the wedding of Dionysos, all joyful elements of
the service of the wine-god, the Choes was a _dies nefastus_, an unlucky
day, a day to be observed with apotropaic precautions. Photius[82], in
explaining the words μιαρὰ ἡμέρα, ‘day of pollution,’ says such a day
occurred ‘in the Choes in the month of Anthesterion, in which (i.e.
during the Choes) they believed that the spirits of the dead rose up
again. From early morning they used to chew buckthorn and anointed their
doors with pitch.’ Buckthorn, known to modern botanists as _Rhamnus
catharticus_, is a plant of purgative properties. The ancient Athenian,
like the modern savage, believed that such plants have the power of
keeping off evil spirits, or rather perhaps of ejecting them when
already in possession. Chewing a substance was naturally a thorough
and efficient way of assimilating its virtues. The priestess of Apollo
chewed the laurel leaf. It seems possible that she may have primarily
had to do this rather as a means of ejecting the bad spirits than to
obtain inspiration from the good. Fasting is a substantial safe-guard,
but purgation more drastically effective. The prophylactic properties of
_rhamnus_, buckthorn, were well known to the ancients. Dioscorides[83]
in his _Materia Medica_ writes, ‘it is said that branches of this plant
attached to doors or hung up outside repel the evil arts of magicians.’
Possibly, in addition to the chewing of buckthorn, branches of it were
fastened to doors at the festival of the Choes, and served the same
purpose as the pitch. Pitch, Photius tells us in commenting on _rhamnus_,
was on account of its special purity used also to drive away sprites at
the birth of a child—always a perilous moment[84].
It is not easy to imagine an enlightened citizen of the Athens of the
fifth century B.C., an Aeschylus, a Pericles, chewing buckthorn from
early dawn to keep off the ghosts of his ancestors, but custom in such
matters has an iron hand. If the masters of the house shirked the
chewing of buckthorn, the servants would see to it that the doors were
at least anointed with pitch; it is best to be on the safe side in these
matters, and there is the public opinion of conservative neighbours to
be considered. Be this as it may, it is quite clear that the day of the
_Choes_ was a day of ghosts like the day of the _Chytroi_.
But, if the ceremonies of the Choes clearly indicate the ‘unlucky’ nature
of the day, what is to be made of the name? Nothing, as it stands.
_Choes_, _Cups_, are undeniably cheerful. But, as in the case of Chytroi,
there _may_ have been a confusion between approximate forms; the two
words χοή, funeral libation, and χοῦς, cup, have a common stem χοϝ.
May not χόες have superimposed itself on χοαί, wine-cups upon funeral
libations? A scholiast on Aristophanes[85] seems to indicate some such
a _contaminatio_. In explaining the word χοάς, he says the meaning is
‘pourings forth, offerings to the dead or libations. An oracle was
issued that they must offer libations (χοάς) yearly to those of the
Aetolians who had died, and celebrate the festival so called.’ Here the
name of a festival Χοάς is oxytone, and though we cannot assume that
it was identical with the Athenian Choes, it looks as if there was some
confusion as to the two analogous forms.
If we view the Choes as Χοαί, the Cups as Libations, the anomalous
and, as it stands, artificial connection of Orestes with the festival
becomes at once clear. At the drinking bout of the Choes, we learn from
Athenaeus[86] and other authorities, the singular custom prevailed that
each man should drink by himself. A mythological reason was sought to
account for this, and the story was told[87] that Orestes, polluted by
the blood of his mother, came to Athens at the time of the celebration of
the Choes. The reigning king, variously called Pandion and Phanodemus,
wished to show him hospitality, but religious scruple forbade him to let
a man polluted enter the Sanctuaries or drink with those ceremonially
clean. He therefore ordered the Sanctuaries to be shut and a measure of
wine (χοῦς) to be set before each man severally, and bade them, when
they had finished drinking, not to offer up the garlands with which
they had been crowned in the Sanctuaries, because they had been under
the same roof with Orestes; but he bade each man place his wreath round
his own cup, and so bring them to the priestess at the precinct of the
Limnae. That done, they were to perform the remaining sacrifices in
the Sanctuary. From this, Athenaeus adds, the festival got the name of
_Cups_. The mad Orestes in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_[88] tells the same
tale and naïvely states that, though he was hurt by the procedure, he
dare not ask the reason, knowing it all too well.
The whole account is transparently aetiological. Some mythological
precedent is desired for the drinking bout of the Choes, based as it was
on a ceremony of funeral libations; it is sought and found or rather
invented in the canonical story of Orestes, and he is made to say in a
fashion almost too foolish even for a madman:
‘And this I learn, that my mishaps became
A rite for the Athenians; and Pallas’ folk
Have still this custom that they reverence
The Choan vessel.’
If we suppose that the Cups (χόες) were originally Libations (χοαί), the
somewhat strained punctilio of the host becomes at least intelligible.
Orestes is polluted by the guilt (ἄγος) of his mother’s blood, he finds
the people in the Limnae[89], close to the Areopagos, celebrating the
Χοαί, the libations to the dead; till he is purified from kindred blood
he cannot join: all is simple and clear.
If the Choes were in intent χοαί, the Cups Libations, the ceremony has
an interesting parallel in a rite performed at the Eleusinian mysteries.
Athenaeus[90], in discussing various shapes of cups says: ‘The plemochoë
is an earthen vessel shaped like a top that stands fairly steady; some
call it, Pamphilos tells us, the cotyliscus. And they use it at Eleusis
on the last day of the mysteries, which takes its name Plemochoai from
the cup. On this day they fill two plemochoae and set them up, the one
towards the East, the other towards the West, and pronounce over them a
magic formula. The author of the _Peirithous_ mentions them, whether he
be Ktesias the Tyrant or Euripides, as follows:
“That these plemochoae down the Chthonian chasm
With words well-omened we may pour.”’
It is at least significant that a compound of the word χοή should both
give its name to a festival day and to a vessel used in chthonic ritual.
The Chytroi and Choes then bear unmistakeably a character of gloom,
and in their primary content are festivals of ghosts. But what of the
Pithoigia? Surely this day is all revel and jollity, all for Dionysos?
Had we been dependent on literature alone, such would have been our
inevitable conclusion. In Plutarch’s account of the Pithoigia (p.
33), the earliest and fullest we possess, there is no hint of any
worship other than that of the wine-god, no hint of possible gloom.
Eustathius[91] indeed tells of a Pithoigia or Jar-opening which was
‘not of a festal character, but in every respect unlucky,’ but this is
the Pithoigia, the Jar-opening, of Pandora. Here we have a hint that a
Pithoigia need not be an opening of wine-jars; there are other jars,
other openings, but save for the existence of one small fragile monument
the significance of the hint would have escaped us.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
In the vase-painting in fig. 7 from a lekythos in the University Museum
of Jena[92] we see a Pithoigia of quite other and more solemn intent. A
large _pithos_ is sunk deep into the ground. It has served as a grave.
In primitive days many a man, Diogenes-like, lived the ‘life of the
jar’ (ζωὴ πίθου), but not from philosophy, rather from dire necessity.
During the Peloponnesian war, when the city was crowded with refugees,
a jar (πιθάκνη) was a welcome shelter[93]. A man’s home during his life
is apt to be his grave in death. In the Dipylon Cemetery at Athens, at
Aphidna[94], at Corfu, at Thoricus, and in many another burying place,
such grave _pithoi_ have come to light. From the grave-jar in fig. 7 the
lid has been removed; out of it have escaped, fluttering upward, two
winged Keres or souls, a third soul is in the act of emerging, a fourth
is diving headlong back into the jar. Hermes Psychopompos, with his magic
staff in his hand, is evoking, _re_voking the souls. The picture is a
speaking commentary on the Anthesteria; we seem to hear the mandate ‘Out
of the doors! ye souls; it is no longer Anthesteria!’ The Pithoigia of
the Anthesteria is the primitive Pithoigia of the _grave_-jars, later
overlaid by the Pithoigia of the _wine_-jars.
The vase-painting in fig. 7 must not be regarded as an actual conscious
representation of the Athenian rite performed on the first day of the
_Anthesteria_. It is more general in content; it is in fact simply a
representation of ideas familiar to every Greek, that the _pithos_
was a grave-jar, that from such grave-jars souls escaped and to them
necessarily returned, and that Hermes was Psychopompos, Evoker and
Revoker of souls. The vase-painting is in fact only another form of the
scene so often represented on Athenian white lekythoi, in which the souls
flutter round the grave-stele. The grave-jar is but the earlier form of
sepulture; the little winged figures, the Keres, are identical in both
classes of vase-painting.
The nature of these Keres will be further analysed when we come to the
discussion of primitive demonology. For the present it is enough to note
that the Keres in the vase-paintings and the Keres of the Anthesteria
are regarded as simply souls of dead men, whereas the little winged
phantoms that escape from Pandora’s jar are indeed ghosts, but ghosts
regarded rather as noisome sprites than as spirits; they are the source
of disease and death rather than dead men’s souls. The jar of Pandora is
not so much a grave as a store-house of evil; the _pithos_ as store-house
not only of wine but of grain and all manner of provisions was familiar
to the Greeks. The ordinary _pithos_ was pointed at the base and buried
permanently in the earth like a Turkish cistern; a row of such pithoi,
like those recently unearthed at Cnossus, might serve equally as a
wine-cellar or a granary or a cemetery.
The attributes of Hermes in the vase-painting in fig. 7 are noticeable.
In one hand he holds his familiar herald’s staff, the kerykeion. But, and
this is the interesting point, he is not using it; it is held in the left
hand, inert; it is merely attributive, present out of convention. The
real implement of his agency in revoking the souls is held uplifted in
the right hand; it is his rhabdos, his magic wand.
This _rhabdos_ is, I think, clearly to be distinguished from the
kerykeion, though ultimately the two became contaminated. The kerykeion
or herald’s staff is in intent a king’s sceptre held by the herald as
deputy; it is a staff, a walking-stick, a βάκτρον, by which you are
supported; the _rhabdos_ is a simple rod, even a pliable twig, a thing
not by which you are supported but with which you sway others. It is in a
word the enchanter’s wand.
It is with a rhabdos that Circe[95] transforms the comrades of Odysseus
into swine; it is as magical as the magic potion they drink:
‘Straight with her rhabdos smote she them and penned them in the sties.’
With the rhabdos Hermes[96] led the ghosts of the slain suitors to Hades.
He held in his hand
‘His rhabdos fair and golden wherewith he lulls to rest
The eyes of men whoso he will, and others by his hest
He wakes from sleep. He stirred the ghosts; they followed to their doom
And gibbered like the bats that throng and gibber in the gloom.’
This magic wand became the attribute of all who hold sway over the dead.
It is the wand, not the sceptre, that is the token of life or death, as
Pindar[97] shows:
‘Nor did Hades the king
Forget his wand to wave
Whereby he doth bring
Shapes of men dying
Adown the hollow roadway of the grave.’
The rhabdos as magic wand was πεισίβροτος, _enchanter_ of the dead,
before it became as sceptre πεισίβροτος, _ruler_ of mortals.
Eustathius tells us in the passage already discussed[98], that the
kerykeion was also called πομπός, conductor, and that it was carried
in the hands of those who performed ceremonies of purification. He
is trying, it will be remembered, to derive the words διοπομπεῖν and
ἀποδιοπομπεῖν. When an ancient author is trying to derive words, we
are bound to accept his statements only with the utmost caution; still
in this particular instance there seems no reason for suspecting the
statement that the kerykeion was called πομπός; it is dragged in quite
gratuitously, and does not help out the proposed derivation. What
Eustathius says is this: ‘At the end of the month Maimakterion they
perform ceremonies of sending, among which was the carrying of the magic
fleece, and there take place then throwings out of purifications at the
crossways, and they hold in their hands the _pompos_ (i.e. conductor),
the which they say is the kerykeion, the attribute of Hermes.’ The object
of the whole ceremony is ‘to send out polluted things.’ It is, I think,
significant that the kerykeion, or rather to be strictly accurate the
rhabdos[99], was carried in apotropaic ceremonies, presumably with a view
to exorcise bad spirits, which as will appear later were regarded as the
source of all impurities. It is the other face of revocation; the rhabdos
is used either for the raising or the laying of ghosts, for the induction
(ἐπαγωγή) of good spirits, for the exorcism (ἀποτροπή) of bad.
In discussing the Anthesteria on a previous occasion[100], I felt
confident that in the opening of the grave-jars we had the complete
solution of the difficulty of the unlucky character of the day Pithoigia.
It seems to me now in the light of further investigation that another
ritual element may have gone to its determination.
Plutarch[101], in discussing the nature of the sacred objects committed
to the care of the Vestal Virgins, makes the following notable statement:
‘Those who pretend to have most special knowledge about them (i.e. the
Vestal Virgins) assert that there are set there two jars (πίθοι) of no
great size, of which the one is open and empty, the other full and sealed
up, and neither of them may be seen except by these all-holy virgins. But
others think that this is false, and that the idea arose from the fact
that the maidens then placed most of their sacred things in two jars, and
hid them underground below the temple of Quirinus, and that the place
even now is called from that by the title _Pithisci_ (Doliola).’ We have
two other notices of these Doliola. Varro[102] says: ‘The place which is
called Doliola is at the Cloaca Maxuma, where people are not allowed to
spit. It is so called from the jars beneath the earth. Two accounts are
given of these jars: some say they contain the bones of dead bodies,
others that after the death of Numa Pompilius certain sacred objects
(religiosa quaedam) were buried there.’ Festus[103] gives substantially
the same account, but he says that the sacred objects were buried there
when the Gauls invaded the city.
Of jars containing ‘sacra’ we have in Greece no knowledge, but it is
significant to find that Zeus, who was the heir to so much antique
ritual, had on his threshold in Olympus two jars, one containing good the
other evil[104]:
‘Jars twain upon Zeus’ threshold ever stood;
One holds his gifts of evil, one of good.’
With some such notion as that of the Pithoigia must have been connected
the ceremony of the opening of the _mundus_ or round pit on the Palatine.
Festus[105] tells us that on three days in the year, August 24, October
5, November 6, the _lapis manalis_ that covered it was removed. Varro,
quoted by Macrobius[106], adds: ‘when the _mundus_ is open, the gate of
the doleful underworld gods is open.’
* * * * *
It has been shown that the ritual of each of the several days points
determinedly ghost-wards. The names in each case _admit_ at least of
chthonic interpretation. It remains to examine the collective name
_Anthesteria_.
The ancients sought and found what was to them a satisfactory etymology.
Istros, writing in the third century B.C. and quoted by Harpocration,
says that Anthesterion is the blossoming month because then ‘the most
of the things that spring from the earth blossom forth[107].’ The
_Etymologicon Magnum_[108] offers an easy-going alternative: feast and
month bear their names either because the earth then began to blossom, or
because they offered flowers at the festival.
It was not the habit of those days to trouble about ‘verb-stems’ and
‘nouns of the agent in τηρ,’ but it is surprising to find that the
dubious guess hazarded by Istros should have passed so long unchallenged
by modern science, the more so as flowers have but a general and
accidental connection with the ritual of the feast. Are scholars really
content with an etymology that makes of the Anthesteria the festival of
those who ‘did the flowers’?
In a recent paper in the _Hellenic Journal_[109] Dr A. W. Verrall has
faced the difficulty and offered a new solution. The names of festivals,
he points out, are no exception to the rule that nouns in τηριο are
normally formed from verb-stems through the ‘noun of the agent’ in τηρ,
and take their sense from the action described by the verb, as σωτήριος,
λυτήριος, βουλευτήριον. In like fashion the names of festivals ending
in τηρια describe the action in which the ceremony consisted, or with
which it was chiefly connected. Thus ἀνακλητήρια is a feast or ceremony
of ἀνάκλησις, ἀνακαλυπτήρια of ἀνακάλυψις and so on. _Prima facie_ then
a derivation of _Anthesteria_, should start from the assumption that the
stem is verbal.
“But we need not assume that the verbal stem is ἀνθεσ-. Perhaps ἀνθεσ-
itself needs analysis; and for the first syllable there is an obviously
possible origin in the preposition ἀν- (ἀνά), of which so many examples
(e.g. ἄνθεμα = ἀνάθεμα) are preserved in the poets. The verb-stem
will then be θεσ-, which is in fact a verb-stem and has more than one
meaning. The meaning which would perhaps in any case have suggested
itself first, and which now seems especially attractive, is that which
appears in the archaic verb θέσασθαι or θέσσασθαι _to pray_ or _pray
for_[110], and in the adjectives πολύθεστος and ἀπόθεστος. Prayers and
invocations addressed to the dead were a regular part of the proceedings
by which they were brought back to the world of the living. The compound
ἀναθέσσασθαι would, after the analogy of ἀνακαλεῖν and the like, bear the
sense _to raise by prayer_ or _to recall by prayer_, literally ‘to pray
up’ or ‘pray back.’ And ἀνθεστήρια, derived from ἀναθέσσασθαι, would be
the _feast of revocation_, the name, as usual, signifying the action in
which the ceremony consisted and which was the object of it[111].”
In connection with this new and illuminating etymology, it is interesting
to note that even in their misguided derivation from ἄνθος the ancients
themselves lay stress not so much on the flowers as on the rising
up[112], the ἀνθεῖν ἐκ τῆς γῆς. Under the word Ἄνθεια the _Etymologicon
Magnum_ says ‘a title of Hera when she sends up (ἀνίησι) fruits,’ where
there seems a haunting of the true meaning though none of the _form_[113].
Dr Verrall declines to assert positively the derivation of _Anthesteria_
he propounds, but a second philological argument brings certain
conviction. Mr R. A. Neil suggests that the root which appears in Greek
as θες may appear as _fes fer_ in Latin. This gives us the delightful
equation or rather analogy ἀν-θεσ-τήρια, _in-fer-iae_. Of course
_inferiae_ is usually taken as from _inferi_, _infra_ etc., but no Latin
word ought to have medial _f_ except when preceded by a separable prefix.
To make certainty more certain we have the Feralia, the festival of All
Souls, kept from the 13th to the 31st of the month of Fe(b)ruary. The
month of _purification_ is the month of rites to the dead, in a word
_purgation is the placation of souls_. This is true for Latin and Greek
alike and will emerge more clearly when we come to study in detail the
ritual of the month of February.
ANTHESTERION AND FEBRUARY.
The general analogy between the months of Anthesterion and February,
and the fact that both alike were unlucky and given over to the service
of the dead, was clear to the ancients themselves. The scholiast on
Lucian’s _Timon_[114], commenting on the word _Diasia_, says: ‘The day is
unlucky ... there were among the Greeks certain days which brought with
them complete idleness and cessation of business, and which were called
unlucky (ἀποφράδες). On these days no one would accost any one else,
and friends would positively have no dealings with each other, and even
sanctuaries were not used. These times were so accounted on the analogy
of the month of February, when also it was the custom to sacrifice to
those below, and all that month was dedicated to the dead and accompanied
by gloom, everything going on in an unusual fashion just as the Athenians
celebrated the Diasia in gloom.’ Clearly to the scholiast the Diasia is
but one element of a month given over to the dead.
The meaning of Anthesterion, the significance of its ceremonies, have
been effectively overlaid by the wine-god and his flower garlands, but
with the Romans there was no such superposition and consequently no
misunderstanding. They clearly realized two things, that February was the
month of the dead, and that it was the month of purification. Plutarch in
his _Roman Questions_[115] asks ‘Why was Decimus Brutus wont to sacrifice
to the dead in December, whereas all other Romans offered libations and
sacrifices to the dead in the month of February?’ In his twenty-fifth
Question[116], while discussing the reasons why the days following
respectively the Calends, Nones and Ides of each month were unlucky,
he tells us that the Romans ‘used to consecrate the first month of the
year to the Olympian gods, but the second to the gods of the earth,
and in this second month (February) they were wont to practise certain
purifications and to sacrifice to the dead.’ Athenaeus[117] states that
‘Juba the Mauretanian said that the month of February was so called from
the terrors of the lower world, with regard to means taken for riddance
from such alarms at the time when the winter is at its height, and it
is the custom to offer libations to the dead on several days.’ Juba the
Mauretanian must have known quite well that in February the winter was
not at its height. He states correctly the fact that February was a month
devoted to ceremonies for the riddance of terrors from the underworld,
but carelessly adds an impossible reason for the selection of this
particular month.
Ovid is of all witnesses the most weighty because his testimony is
in part unconscious. In the opening words of the second book of the
_Fasti_[118], after an invocation to Janus, he goes straight to the
question of what the Romans meant by the word _februum_; he notes that
the term was applied to many things, wool, a branch from a pine-tree,
grain roasted with salt, and finally concludes that ‘any thing by which
the soul was purged was called by his rude ancestors _februum_.’
‘Denique quodcumque est, quo pectora nostra piantur,
Hoc apud intonsos nomen habebat avos.’
The month he feels sure got its name from these ‘februa’ or
purifications, but he asks ‘was it because the Luperci purified all
the soil with the strips of skin and accounted that a purification or
atonement, or was it because when the _dies ferales_ were accomplished
then _owing to the fact that the dead were appeased_ there was a season
of purity?’
‘Mensis ab his dictus secta quia pelle Luperci
Omne solum lustrant idque piamen habent?
Aut quia placatis sunt tempora pura sepulcris,
Tunc cum ferales praeteriere dies?’
Both the ceremonials, the Lupercalia and the Feralia, were, he
knows, cathartic: that Fe(b)rua and Feralia were etymologically and
significantly the same naturally he does not guess. Still less could he
conjecture that etymologically February and Anthesterion are in substance
one.
The two great February festivals[119] to which Ovid alludes are of course
the Feralia and the Lupercalia, celebrated respectively on the 21st and
15th of February.
The Feralia was but the climax of a series of days beginning on Feb. 13th
and devoted to ceremonies of the worship of ancestors, Parentalia. It is
curious that, though the Lemuria (May 9-13) were marked as Nefasti, none
of the days of the Parentalia were so marked: still from the 13th to the
21st marriages were forbidden, temples closed, and magistrates appeared
without their insignia; clearly there was some lingering dread of ghosts
that might be about. Parentalia and Feralia alike were ceremonies wholly
devoted to the placation of ghosts.
In the Lupercalia, on the other hand, it is purification rather than
placation that is the prominent feature in the rites. Much in the
Lupercalia is obscure, and especially the origin of its name, but one
ritual element is quite certain. Goats and a dog were sacrificed, two
youths girt themselves in the skins of the slain goats, they held in
their hands strips of the hides of the victims. They ran round a certain
prescribed portion of the city, and as they ran smote the women they
met with the strips of skin. These strips of skin were among the things
known as _februa_, _purifiers_, and by their purifying power they became
fertility charms.
‘Forget not in your speed, Antonius,
To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say
The barren touchèd in this holy chase
Shake off their sterile curse[120].’
There has been much needless discussion as to whether in ceremonies
where striking and beating occur the object is to drive out evil spirits
or to stimulate the powers of fertility. Primitive man does not so
narrowly scrutinize and analyse his motives. To strike with a sacred
thing, whether with a strip of skin from a victim or a twig from a holy
tree, was to apply what the savage of to-day would call ‘good medicine.’
Precisely how it worked, whether by expulsion or impulsion, is no
business of his.
When the Catholic makes the sacred sign of the Cross over his food, is
he, need he be quite clear as to whether he does it to induce good or to
exorcise evil? The peasant mother of to-day may beat her boy partly with
a view to stirring his dormant moral impulses, but it is also, as she is
careful to explain, with intent to ‘beat the mischief out of him.’ In the
third Mime of Herondas[121] the mother is explicit as to the expulsive
virtue of beating. Her boy is a gambler and a dunce, so she begs the
schoolmaster to
‘Thrash him upon his shoulders till his spirit,
Bad thing, is left just hovering on his lips.’
She is in the usual primitive dilemma: his spirit is bad but it is his
life; it is kill and cure.
The strips of goat-skin were _februa_[122], purifying, and thereby
fertility charms. As such they cast sudden illumination on the ‘magic
fleece’ already discussed. The animal sacrificed, be it sheep or goat
or dog, is itself a placation to ghosts or underworld powers; hence its
skin becomes of magical effect: the deduction is easy, almost inevitable.
The primary gist of the sacrifice is to appease and hence keep off evil
spirits; it is these evil spirits that impair fertility: in a word
_purification is the placation of ghosts_.
The question ‘What was purity to the ancients?’ is thus seen to be
answered almost before it is asked. Purity was not _spiritual_ purity in
our sense—that is foreign to any primitive habit of thought, nor was it
physical purity or cleanliness—it was possible to be covered from head to
foot with mud and yet be ceremonially pure. But so oddly does the cycle
of thought come round, that the purity of which the ancients knew _was_,
though in a widely different sense, _spiritual_ purity, i.e. freedom from
bad spirits and their maleficent influence. To get rid of these spirits
was to undergo purification. In the month of February and Anthesterion
the Roman or Greek might, _mutatis mutandis_, have chanted our Lenten
hymn:
‘Christian, dost thou see them
On the holy ground
How the hosts of Midian
Prowl and prowl around?
Christian, up and smite them!’
Till the coming of the new religion of Dionysos, the Greek notion
of purity seems not to have advanced beyond this negative combative
attitude, this notion of spiritual forces outside and against them.
* * * * *
The question yet remains ‘Why did this purification need to take place
in the spring?’ The answer is clear. Why did our own near ancestors have
spring cleanings?
‘Winter rains and ruins are over
And all the season of snows and sins,
...
While in green underwood and cover
_Blossom by blossom the Spring begins_.’
Winter is a reckless time with its Christmas and its Saturnalia. There is
little for the primitive agriculturist to do and less to fear. The fruits
of the earth have died down, the gods have done their worst. But when the
dead earth begins to awake and put forth bud and blossom, then the ghosts
too have their spring time, then is the moment to propitiate the dead
below the earth. Ghosts were placated that fertility might be promoted,
fertility of the earth and of man himself.
It is true that the primitive rites of February and Anthesterion, of
Romans and Greeks, were in the main of ‘riddance.’ The ghosts, it would
seem from the ritual of the Choes and Chytroi, the chewing of buckthorn,
anointing with pitch, the mandate to depart, were feared as evil
influences to be averted; but there is curious evidence to show that at
the time of the Anthesteria the coming of the ghosts was regarded as a
direct promotion of fertility. Athenaeus[123], quoting the Commentaries
of Hegesander[124], tells us of a curious tradition among the natives
of Apollonia in Chalkis. ‘Around Apollonia of Chalkidike there flow two
rivers, the Ammites and the Olynthiacus and both fall into the lake
Bolbe. And on the river Olynthiacus stands a monument of Olynthus,
son of Herakles and Bolbe. And the natives say that in the months of
Elaphebolion and Anthesterion the river rises because Bolbe sends the
fish apopyris to Olynthus, and at that season an immense shoal of fish
passes from the lake to the river Olynthus. The river is a shallow one,
scarcely overpassing the ankles, but nevertheless so great a shoal of
the fish arrives that the inhabitants round about can all of them lay up
sufficient store of salt fish for their needs. And it is a wonderful fact
that they never pass by the monument of Olynthus. They say that formerly
the people of Apollonia used to perform the accustomed rites to the dead
in the month of Elaphebolion, but now they do them in Anthesterion, and
that on this account the fish come up in those months only in which they
are wont to do honour to the dead.’ Here clearly the dead hero is the
source of national wealth, the honours done him are the direct impulsion
to fertility. The gloomy rites of _aversion_ tend to pass over into a
cheerful, hopeful ceremonial of ‘tendance.’
To resume, the Anthesteria was primarily a Feast of All Souls: it
later[125] became a revel of Dionysos, and at the revel men wreathed
their cups with flowers, but, save for a vague and unscientific
etymology, we have no particle of evidence that the Anthesteria was ever
a Feast of Flowers. The transition from the revocation of ghosts with
its dire association to a drunken revel may seem harsh, but human nature
is always ready for the shift from Fast to Feast, witness our own Good
Friday holiday.
THE RITUAL OF Ἐναγισμοί.
In the light of the ceremonies of the spring month February and
Anthesterion, it is now possible to advance a step in the understanding
of Greek ritual terminology and through it of Greek religious thought.
In the first chapter the broad distinction was established between
sacrifice to the Olympians of the upper air—sacrifice which involved
communion with the worshipper, and sacrifice to chthonic powers which
forbade this communion—in which the sacrifice was wholly made over to the
object of sacrifice. The first, the Olympian sacrifice, is expressed by
two terms, θύειν and ἱερεύειν; the second, if the sacrifice is burnt, by
ὁλοκαυτεῖν, and as will presently be seen by σφάζειν, also more generally
by the term ἐναγίζειν.
As regards the Olympian terms, it is only necessary to say definitely
what has already been implied, that θύειν strictly is applicable only
to the portion of the sacrifice that was actually burnt with a view
to sublimation, that it might reach the gods in the upper air; whilst
ἱερεύειν applies rather to the portion unburnt, which was sacred indeed,
as its name implies, to the gods, but was actually eaten in communion by
the worshipper. With the growing prevalence of burnt sacrifice and the
increasing popularity of the Olympians and their service, the word θύειν
came to cover the whole field of sacrifice, and in late and careless
writers is used for any form of sacrifice burnt or unburnt without any
consciousness of its primary meaning.
The term ἱερεύειν is strictly used only of the sacrifice of an animal;
ἱερεῖον is the animal victim. Among the Homeric Greeks sacrifice and
the flesh feast that followed were so intimately connected that the
one almost implied the other; the ἱερεῖον, the animal victim, was the
material for the κρεοδαισία, the flesh feast. So prominent in the
Homeric mind was the element of feasting the worshipper that the feast
is sometimes the only stated object. Thus Odysseus[126] gives command to
Telemachus and his thralls:
‘Now get you to my well-built house, the best of all the swine
Take you and quickly _sacrifice_ that straightway we may dine.’
Here the object is the meal, though incidentally sacrifice to the gods
is implied. It is not that on the occasion of sacrifice to the gods man
solemnly communicates, but that when man would eat his fill of flesh food
he piously remembers the gods and burns a little of it that it may reach
them and incline their hearts to beneficence.
In the Homeric sacrifice there is communion, but not of any mystical
kind; there is no question of partaking of the life and body of the god,
only of dining with him. Mystical communion existed in Greece, but, as
will be later seen, it was part of the worship of a god quite other than
these Homeric Olympians, the god Dionysos.
Before we leave the ἱερεῖον, the animal sacrificed and eaten, one word
of caution is necessary. It is sometimes argued that animal sacrifice,
as contrasted with the simpler offerings of grain and fruits, is the
mark of a later and more luxurious civilization. Such was the view of
Porphyry[127] the vegetarian. Flesh-eating and flesh sacrifice is to
him the mark of a cruel and barbarous licence. Such too was the view
of Eustathius[128]. In commenting on the οὐλοχύται, the barley grain
scattered, he says, ‘after the offering of barley grain came sacrifices
and the eating of meat at sacrifices, because after the discovery of
necessary foods the luxury of a meat diet and imported innovations in
food were invented.’ As a generalization this is false to facts; it
depends on the environment of a race whether man will first eat vegetable
or animal food; but as regards the particular case of the Greeks
themselves, the observations of Porphyry and Eustathius are broadly
true. The primitive dwellers in Greece and round the Mediterranean
generally lived mainly on vegetarian diet, diversified by fish, and the
custom of flesh-eating in large quantities was an innovation brought from
without[129] (ἐπείσακτον). Athenaeus[130] in his first book discusses
the various kinds of food, and dwells with constant astonishment on the
flesh-eating habits of the Achaean heroes of Homer. He quotes the comic
poet Eubulos as asking
‘I pray you, when did Homer ever make
An Achaean chief eat fish? ’tis always flesh,
And roasted too, not boiled.’
Achaean chiefs, he notes—and in this they resemble their northern
descendants—‘do not care for made-dishes, kickshaws and the like. Homer
sets before them only roast meat, and for the most part beef, such as
would put life into them, body and soul.’ It is true Athenaeus is arguing
about the simplicity of the Homeric as contrasted with later Greek life,
but the fact he states is beyond dispute, i.e. that the Homeric diet was
mainly of flesh and unlike the vegetarian and fish diet of the ordinary
Greek. Given a flesh diet for man, and the sacrifice of flesh to the gods
he makes in his own image follows.
The terms θύειν and ἱερεύειν belong then to sacrifice regarded as a
feast; it remains to consider the term ἐναγίζειν, in the definition of
which we come, I think, to the fullest understanding of the ideas of the
lower stratum of Greek religion.
First it is necessary to establish the fact that in usage the terms θύειν
and ἐναγίζειν are clearly distinguished. A passage in Pausanias is for
this purpose of capital importance. Pausanias is visiting a sanctuary of
Heracles at Sicyon. He makes the following observations[131]: ‘In the
matter of sacrifice they are accustomed to do as follows. They say that
Phaestos, when he came to Sicyon, found the Sicyonians devoting offerings
to Heracles as to a hero. But Phaestos would do nothing of the kind, but
would sacrifice to him as to a god. And even now the Sicyonians, when
they slay a lamb and burn the thighs upon the altar, eat a portion of the
flesh as though it were a sacrificial victim, and another part of the
flesh they make over as to a hero.’ The passage is not easy to translate,
because we have no English equivalent for ἐναγίζειν. I have translated
the word by ‘devote’ because it connotes entire dedication—part of the
sacrifice is shared, eaten by the worshipper in common with Heracles
regarded as a _god_, the other part is utterly consecrated to Heracles
as a hero; it is dead men’s food. Pausanias, who is often careless in
his use of θύειν, here carefully marks the distinction. The victim is an
animal: part of it is offered to an Olympian—that portion is shared; part
of it is offered, like the offerings at the _Chytroi_, to no Olympian,
but to a ghost, and of that portion no man eats.
A second passage from Pausanias adds a further element of
differentiation. At Megalopolis, Pausanias visited a sanctuary of the
Eumenides. Of their ritual he speaks as follows[132]: ‘They say that when
these goddesses would drive Orestes mad they appeared to him black, but
that after he had bitten off his finger they seemed to him white, and his
senses returned to him, and therefore he made over an offering to the
black goddesses to turn away their wrath, but to the white ones he did
sacrifice.’
Language and ritual could scarcely speak more plainly: θύειν is to the
Olympians, a joyous thanksgiving to gods who are all white and bright,
beneficent, of the upper air; ἐναγίζειν is to those below who are black
and bad and malignant: θύειν is for θεραπεία, tendance; ἐναγίζειν for
ἀποτροπή, riddance.
* * * * *
The distinction between the two forms of ritual having been thus
definitely established, it remains to examine more closely the word
ἐναγίζειν and the ritual it expresses, that of the dead—a ritual which,
it must at this point be remembered, is also concerned with purification.
The word ἐναγίζειν can only mean the making of or dealing with something
that is of the nature of an ἄγος, or, as the word sometimes appears, a
ἅγος. It did not escape that acute observer of man and his language,
Archbishop Eustathius[133], that this word and its cognate ἅγιος, holy,
had in ancient days a double significance, that holy was not only
pure but also polluted; this, he says, ‘is on account of the double
meaning of ἅγος.’ To put the matter into modern phraseology, ἅγος is
the thing that is _taboo_, the thing consecrated to the gods, and hence
forbidden to man, the thing ‘devoted.’ The word lies deep down in the
ritual of ancient sacrifice and of ancient religious thought; it is the
very antithesis of communion; it is tinged with, though not quite the
equivalent of, expiation.
Fortunately we are not left to conjecture as to what was the precise
nature of the ceremonies covered by the word ἐναγίζειν. We know what
was done, though we have no English word fully to express that doing.
This fact may well remind us that we have lost not only the word but the
thought, and must be at some pains to recover it. In the discussion that
follows no translation of ἐναγίζειν will be attempted: I shall frankly
use the Greek word and thereby avoid all danger from misleading modern
connotations[134].
Quite accidentally, in the middle of a discourse on the various sorts of
soap and washing basins, Athenaeus[135] has preserved for us a record of
the exact ritual of ἐναγισμοί. After stating that the word ἀπόνιπτρον,
washing off, is applied alike to the water in which either feet or hands
are washed, he goes on to note that the word ἀπόνιμμα, ‘offscouring,’
slightly different in form but substantially the same in meaning,
has among the Athenians a technical ritual usage. ‘The term ἀπόνιμμα
is specially applied _to the ceremonies in honour of the dead_ and to
_those that take place in the purification of the polluted_.’ The word
translated ‘polluted’ is ἐναγεῖς, i.e. under or in a state of ἄγος. He
then proceeds to quote from a lost treatise on ceremonies of ἐναγισμός,
the exact details of the ritual. ‘Kleidemos, in his treatise called
_Exegeticus_, writes on the subject of ἐναγισμοί as follows: “Dig a
trench to the west of the tomb. Then, look along the trench towards the
west, pour down water, saying these words: A purification for you to whom
it is meet and right. Next pour down a second time myrrh.” Dorotheos adds
these particulars, alleging that the following prescription is written
also in the ancestral rites of the Eupatridae concerning the purification
of suppliants: “Next having washed himself, and the others who had
disembowelled the victim having done the same, let him take water and
make purification and wash off the blood from the suppliant who is being
purified, and afterwards, having stirred up the washing, pour it into the
same place.”’
The conjoint testimony of the two writers is abundantly clear: either
alone would have left us in doubt as to the real gist of the ceremony.
Kleidemos tells us that it was addressed to the dead; the trench near the
tomb, the western aspect of the setting sun, the cautious formulary, ‘To
you to whom it is meet and right,’ all tell the same tale. It is safest
not even to name the dead, lest you stir their swift wrath. But Kleidemos
leaves us in the dark as to why they want an ἀπόνιμμα, ‘an offscouring,’
water defiled: why will not pure water or water and myrrh suffice?
Dorotheos supplies the clue—those who have slain the victim wash the
blood from their hands and _wash it off him who has been purified_, and
then stirring it all up pour it into the trench. The ghost below demands
the _blood of the victim washed off from the polluted suppliant_: when
the ghost has drunk of this, then, and not till then, there is placation
and purification.
That the ghost should demand the blood of the victim is natural enough;
the ghosts in the Nekuia of the _Odyssey_ ‘drink the black blood’ and
thereby renew their life; but in ceremonies of purification they demand
polluted water, the ‘offscourings,’ and why? The reason is clear. The
victim is a surrogate for the polluted suppliant, the blood is put upon
him that he may be identified with the victim, the ghost is deceived
and placated. The ghost demands blood, not to satisfy a physical but so
to speak a spiritual thirst, the thirst for vengeance. This thirst can
only be quenched by the water polluted, the ‘offscourings’[136] of the
suppliant.
The suppliant for purification in the ritual just described was
identified with the victim, or rather perhaps we should say the victim
with the suppliant, by pouring over the suppliant the victim’s blood.
There were other means of identification. It has already been seen (p.
27) that the suppliant sometimes put on the whole skin of the victim,
sometimes merely stood with his foot on the fleece. Another and more
attenuated form of identification was the wearing of fillets, i.e.
strands of wool confined at intervals by knots to make them stronger.
Such fillets were normally worn by suppliants and by seers: the symbolism
for suppliants is obvious, for seers evident on a closer inspection.
The seer himself was powerless, but he could by the offering of a
sacrifice to ghosts or heroes invoke the mantic dead; he wears the
symbols of this sacrifice, the wreath and the fillets. Later their
significance was forgotten, and they became mere symbols of office. The
omphalos at Delphi, itself a mantic tomb, was covered with a net-work of
wool-fillets, renewed no doubt at first with the offering of each new
victim, later copied in stone[137], but always the symbol of recurring
sacrifice.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
Fillets of wool became as it were the attributes of the sacrificial
victim. In the curious vase-painting[138] in fig. 8 Salmoneus, himself
the victim, is wreathed, decorated all over with fillets, which of
course, as there was no animal slain, are merely symbolic[139]. Animal
victims in like fashion are adorned for sacrifice with these merely
routine fillets. The animal sacrifice is to the ghost the surrogate of
the human victim, the fillet in its turn the surrogate of the animal.
The dread ceremonial of ἐναγισμός in its crudest, most barbarous
form, is very clearly shown on the vase-painting in fig. 9, from a
‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora now in the British Museum[140]. The scene depicted
is the sacrifice of Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles. In the _Hecuba_ of
Euripides[141], Neoptolemos takes Polyxena by the hand and leads her
to the top of the mound, pours libations to his father, praying him to
accept the ‘soothing draughts,’ and then cries
‘Come thou and drink the maiden’s blood
Black and unmixed.’
In the centre of the design in fig. 9 is the omphalos-shaped grave[142],
which is in fact the altar. Right over it the sacrifice takes place.
Neoptolemos, as next of kin to the slain man, is the sacrificer;
Polyxena, as next of kin to the slayer, is the sacrifice. The ghost of
the slain man drinks her blood and is appeased, and thereby the army is
purged.
The blood only is offered to the ghost—the blood is the life, and it is
vengeance, not food, the ghost cries for. It is so with the Erinyes, who
are but angry ghosts[143]; when they hunt Orestes they cry[144],
‘The smell of human blood smiles wooingly.’
Earth polluted has drunk a mother’s blood, and they in turn
‘Will gulp the living gore red from his limbs[145].’
When the ghost of Achilles has drunk the fresh blood of the maiden her
body will be burnt, not that it may rise as a sweet savour to the gods
above, but as a holocaust; it is a θυσία ἄδαιτος, a sacrifice without
feast. It will be burnt on the low-lying _eschara_ or portable hearth
that stands on the grave. The _eschara_ was by the ancients clearly
distinguished from the altar proper, the βωμός. The _eschara_, says the
scholiast on the _Phoenissae_[146] of Euripides, is ‘accurately speaking
the trench in the earth where they offer ἐναγισμοί to those who are gone
below; the altar is that on which they sacrifice to the heavenly gods.’
Porphyry[147], who is learned in ritual matters, draws the same
distinction. ‘To the Olympian gods they set up temples and images and
altars, but to the Earth-gods and to heroes, escharas, while for those
below the earth there are trenches and megara.’
It is on an _eschara_ that Clytaemnestra does her infernal service to the
Erinyes[148]. She cries to them in bitter reproach:
‘How oft have ye from out my hands licked up
Wineless libations, sober offerings,
And on the hearth of fire banquets grim
By night, an hour unshared of any god!’
Her ritual was the ritual of the underworld abhorred of the Olympians.
The eschara on which the holocaust to the underworld gods is burnt
lies low upon the ground; the βωμός, the altar of the Olympians, rises
higher and higher heavenwards. There is the like symbolism in the actual
manner of the slaying of the victim. Eustathius[149], in commenting
on the sacrifice of Chryses to Phoebus Apollo, when they ‘drew back
the victims’ heads,’ says ‘according to the custom of the Greeks, for
if they are sacrificing to those above they bend back the neck of the
sacrificial animal so that it may look away towards the sky, but if
to heroes or to the dead in general the victim is sacrificed looking
downwards.’ Eustathius[150] again says of the prayer of Achilles, ‘by
looking heavenwards he expresses vividly whither the prayer is directed,
for Achilles is not praying to Zeus of the underworld, but to Zeus of the
sky.’ The Christian of to-day, though he believes his God is everywhere,
yet uplifts his hands to pray. For the like reason the victim for the
dead was black and that for the Olympians frequently white; that for the
dead sacrificed at the setting of the sun, that for the Ouranians at the
dawn[151]. Upon certain holocausts, as has already been seen, the sun
might not look.
The ritual of the ἐναγισμοί is then of _purgation by placation of the
spirits of the underworld_. The extreme need of primitive man for
placation is from the stain of bloodshed; purgation from this stain is at
first only obtained by the offering of the blood of the murderer himself,
then by the blood of a surrogate victim applied to him.
It is, I think, probable that at the back of many a mythological legend
that seems to us to contain what we call ‘human sacrifice’ there lies,
not the slaying of a victim for the pleasure of a Moloch-like god, but
simply the appeasement of an angry ghost. So long as primitive man
preserves the custom of the blood-feud, so long will he credit his dead
kinsman with passions like his own.
* * * * *
In this connection it is interesting to note some further details of the
ritual terminology of ἐναγισμοί as contrasted with that of the service of
the Olympians.
The sacrifice burnt that the Olympians may eat of it is θῦμα, the
thing burned to smoke; the sacrificial victim slain to be eaten by the
worshipper is ἱερεῖον; the victim slain for placation and purification
is by correct authors called by another name, it is a σφάγιον, a thing
slaughtered. The word explains itself: it is not the sacrifice burnt,
not the sacred thing killed and carved for a meal, but simply the victim
hacked and hewn to pieces. Such a victim was not even necessarily
skinned. Of what use to carefully flay a thing doomed to utter
destruction? In the _Electra_ of Euripides[152] the old man describes
such a σφάγιον:
‘I saw upon the pyre with its black fleece
A sheep the victim, and fresh blood outpoured.’
It is interesting to note in this connection that the word σφάγιον is
always used of human victims, and of such animals as were in use as
surrogates. The term is applied to all the famous maiden sacrifices of
mythology. Ion[153] asks Creousa:
‘And did thy father sacrifice thy sisters?’
And Creousa with greater ritual precision makes answer:
‘He dared to slay them as _sphagia_ for the land.’
As a σφάγιον Polyxena[154] is slain on the tomb of Achilles; she dies as
an atonement, a propitiation, as ‘medicine of salvation.’
The normal and most frequent use of σφάγια was, as in the case of
ἐναγισμοί in general, for purification by placation. In stress of great
emergency, of pestilence, of famine, and throughout historical times at
the moment before a battle, σφάγια were regularly offered. They seem to
have been carried round or through the person or object to be purified.
Athenaeus[155] records an instructive instance. The inhabitants of
Kynaetho, a village in Arcadia, neglected the civilizing influences of
dancing and feasting, and became so savage and impious that they never
met except for the purpose of quarrelling. They perpetrated at one time
a great massacre, and after this, whenever their emissaries came to any
other of the Arcadian cities, the citizens by public proclamation bade
them depart, and the Mantineans after their departure made a purification
of the city, leading the slaughtered victims round the whole circuit of
the district.
As purifications the use of σφάγια needs no further comment. It is less
obvious at first why σφάγια were always employed in the taking of oaths.
The expression τέμνειν σφάγια is the equivalent of the familiar τέμνειν
ὅρκια. In the _Suppliants_ of Euripides[156] Athene says to Theseus:
‘Hearken whereinto thou must cut the _sphagia_.’
She then bids him write the oaths in the hollow of a tripod-cauldron
and then cut the throats of the victims into the cauldron, thus clearly
identifying the oaths and the blood.
In the ordinary ritual of the taking of oaths, the oath-taker actually
stood upon the pieces of the slaughtered animal. Pausanias[157], on the
road between Sparta and Arcadia, came to a place called ‘Horse’s Tomb.’
There Tyndareus sacrificed a horse and made Helen’s suitors take an oath,
causing them to stand on the cut-up pieces of the horse,—having made them
take the oath, he buried the horse. At Stenyclerum[158] in Messenia was
another monument, called ‘Boar’s Monument,’ where it was said Herakles
had given an oath to the sons of Neleus on the cut pieces of a boar. Nor
is the custom of swearing on the cut pieces recorded only by mythology.
In the Bouleuterion at Elis was an image of Zeus, ‘of all others,’ says
Pausanias[159], ‘best fitted to strike terror into evildoers.’ Its
surname was Horkios, He of the Oath. Near this image the athletes, their
fathers, brothers, and trainers had to swear on the cut pieces of a boar
that they would be guilty of no foul play as regarded the Olympian games.
Pausanias regrets that he ‘forgot to ask what they did with the boar
after the oath had been taken by the athletes.’ He adds, ‘With the men of
old days the rule was as regards a sacrificial animal on which an oath
had been taken that it should be no more accounted as eatable for men.
Homer,’ he says, ‘shows this clearly, for the boar on the cut pieces of
which Agamemnon swore that Briseis had not been partner of his bed is
represented as being cast by the herald into the sea:
“He spake and with the pitiless bronze he cut
The boar’s throat, and the boar Talthybios whirled
And in the great wash of the hoary sea
He cast it to the fish for food[160].”
This in ancient days was their custom about such matters.’
The custom of standing on the fragments of the victim points clearly to
the identification of oath-taker and sacrifice. The victim was hewn in
bits; so if the oath-taker perjure himself will he be hewn in bits: the
victim is not eaten but made away with, utterly destroyed, _devoted_; a
like fate awaits the oath-breaker: the oath becomes in deadly earnest a
form of self-imprecation.
Still less obvious is it why sacrifices to the winds should uniformly
have taken the form of σφάγια rather than ἱερεῖα. At first sight the
winds if anything would appear to be Ouranian powers of the upper air,
yet it would appear that sacrifices to the winds were buried, not burnt.
What astonished Pausanias[161] more than anything else he saw at Methana
in Troezen was a ceremony for averting the winds. ‘A wind called Lips,
which rushes down from the Saronic gulf, dries up the tender shoots of
the vine. When the squall is upon them two men take a cock, which must
have all its feathers white, tear it in two, and run round the vines in
opposite directions, each of them carrying one half of the cock. When
they come back to the place they start from they bury the cock there.
This is the device they have invented for counteracting Lips. I myself,’
he adds, ‘have seen the people keeping off hail by sacrifices and
incantations.’ The Methanian cock is a typical σφάγιον: it is carried
round for purification, the evil influences of the wind are somehow
caught by it, in rather proleptic fashion, and then buried away. It is
really of the order of pharmakos ceremonies, to be considered later,
rather than a sacrifice proper. For a σφάγιον we should expect the cock
to be black, but on the principle of sympathetic magic it is in this
case white. The normal sacrifice to a wind was a black animal. When in
the _Frogs_[162] a storm is brewing between Aeschylus and Euripides, and
threatens to burst, Dionysos calls out:
‘Bring out a ewe, boys, bring a black-fleeced ewe,
Here’s a typhoon that’s just about to burst.’
Winds were underworld gods, but when propitious they had a strong and
natural tendency to become Ouranian, and the white sacrifices with intent
to compel their beneficence would help this out. They are an exact
parallel to the black and white Eumenides already noted. Virgil[163] says:
‘To Storm a black sheep, white to the favouring West.’
Equally instructive is the account given by Pausanias[164] of the
ceremonies performed at Titane to soothe the winds, though with his
customary vagueness Pausanias describes them by the word θύειν when they
are really ἐναγισμοί. They are performed on one _night_ in each year, and
Pausanias adds, the priest also ‘does secret ceremonies into four pits,’
soothing the fury of the winds, and he chants over them as they say
Medea’s charms. Each of the four winds dwelt, it is clear, as a chthonic
power in a pit; his sacrifice was after the fashion of heroes and ghosts.
It is possible, indeed probable, that the pits were in connection with
the tomb of some hero or heroine. The sacrifice of Iphigeneia was
παυσάνεμος[165], with power to stay the winds; that of Polyxena at the
tomb of Achilles had the like virtue. Be that as it may, it will be seen
when we come to demonology that the winds were regarded as ghosts, as
breaths: as such their cult was necessarily chthonic.
Another of their functions σφάγια share with the ordinary
animal-sacrifices, the ἱερεῖα. Like the ἱερεῖα they could be used for
purposes of divination. Used as they were for purification in any great
emergency, mere economy may have suggested that they should be further
utilized for oracular purposes. The greater solemnity of σφάγια would
lend to the omens taken from them a specially portentous virtue[166]. It
is amusing to find that even Porphyry[167], averse though he is to human
sacrifice, still seems to feel a dim possibility that for mantic purposes
human entrails may have special virtue. ‘But it will be urged,’ he says,
as though stating a possible and reasonable argument, ‘that the future
may be more clearly divined from the vitals of a man.’
Precise authors who know about ritual always distinguish between the
omens taken from ordinary animal sacrifice and those from σφάγια. Thus
Xenophon[168] in the _Anabasis_ says, ‘The sacrifices (ἱερεῖα) are
propitious to us, the omens favourable, the σφάγια most propitious.’ The
practice of using σφάγια for omens before a battle would seem to have
been uniform. When women, says Eteocles[169], are wailing and making a
commotion, it is the part of men
‘To slay the victims, take therefrom the omens
Before the gods, at the onset of the foe.’
It is probably to this oracular function of σφάγια that we owe the very
frequent use of the middle σφαγιάζεσθαι, as in the parallel case of
θύειν, the sacrifice by fire. For θύειν and θύεσθαι the distinction is
familiar, and expressly stated by Ammonius[170]: ‘of those who simply
sacrifice (active) the victims the word θύουσι is used, of those who
take omens from the entrails θύονται.’ The active is of the nature of
thanksgiving, the middle partakes of prayer and impulsion. In the case of
σφάγια the active is very rarely in use, and naturally, for the sacrifice
of σφάγια has in it no element of thanksgiving[171].
The ritual then of σφάγια and of ἐναγισμοί, of slaughter and of
purification, is based on the fear of ghosts, of ghosts and their action
on men alive, whether as evil winds, or for dread portents, or for
vengeance on the broken oath, or, first and foremost, for the guilt of
shed blood. Its essence is of ἀποτροπή, _aversion_.
Nowhere perhaps is this instinct of aversion so clearly seen, seen in
a form where the instinct has not yet chilled and crystallized into
definite ritual, as in the account of the murder of Absyrtos by Jason
and Medea as given by Apollonius Rhodius[172]. The murder was by a
treacherous ambuscade set for Absyrtos at the threshold of the temple of
Artemis; Jason smites him like a bull for sacrifice, while Medea stands
by.
‘So by that portal old kneeling he fell,
And while the last of life yet sobbed and passed,
Craving, clasped both hands to the wound, to hold
The dark blood back. But the blood reached, and sprang,
And, where the veilèd woman shuddered from him,
Lay red on the white robe and the white veil.
Then swift a sidelong eye, a pitiless eye,
The Erinys all subduing, that knoweth Sin,
Awoke, and saw what manner of deed was there.
And Aeson’s son smote from that sacrifice
Red ravine, and three times ravined with his mouth
Amid the blood, and three times from him spewed
That horror of sin; as men that slay by guile
Use, to make still the raging of the dead.’
Apollonius tries to make a ritual of the awful instinct of physical
fear. The body is mangled that the angry ghost may be maimed, the blood
actually licked up that the murderer may spit it forth and rid himself of
the fell pollution. Only then can the corpse be safely buried[173]. But
it is too late, for Absyrtos has put the blood upon Medea.
Clytaemnestra, when she murdered Agamemnon, followed the same horrid
practice of ‘aversion.’ Sophocles[174] makes Electra say:
‘She lopped his limbs as though he were a foe
And for libations wiped upon his head
The blood stains.’
By the time of Apollonius the Erinys is no longer the actual ghost but a
separate spirit of vengeance, and even the primitive ritual of _aversion_
is explained as a sort of tendance; the lopped limbs are ἐξάργματα,
first beginnings, a sort of hideous sacrifice to the murdered man rather
than mainly the means of maiming him[175]. But the scholiast[176] on the
_Electra_ clearly explains the gist of the ceremonial. He says these
things were done ‘as taking away the force of the dead so that later they
may suffer nothing fearful from them.’
It may perhaps be felt that such instances are purely mythological, and
that fear of the ghost had wholly waned in historical times. The horrid
practice of mutilation no doubt fell into abeyance, but the fear of the
ghost and the sense that purification from guilt could only be obtained
by direct appeal to the ghost itself lived on.
The case of Pausanias gives curious evidence as to the procedure of
an educated murderer of the fifth century B.C. Pausanias[177] the
traveller tells how his namesake sought protection from the Goddess
of the Brazen House, but failed because he was defiled by blood. This
pollution he tried by every possible means to expiate: he had recourse
to purifications of all kinds, he made supplication to Zeus Phyxios, a
being obviously akin to Meilichios—and he resorted to the Psychagogi, the
Ghost-Compellers of Phigalia. They seem to have failed, for Plutarch[178]
tells us he sent to Italy for experts, and they, after they had done
sacrifice, _wrenched the ghost out of the sanctuary_.
The historical case of Pausanias is exactly parallel to that of the
mythological Orestes. Man expects that the dead man will behave as he
would behave were he yet living—pursue him for vengeance; the ghost is an
actual, almost physical reality. It needed a Euripides to see that this
ghost was a purely subjective horror, a disordered conscience. He makes
Menelaos ask the mad Orestes[179]:
‘What dost thou suffer? What disease undoes thee?’
and Orestes makes answer:
‘Conscience, for I am conscious of fell deeds.’
Anthropomorphism is usually regarded as a humane trait in Greek religion;
it is noted as a thing distinguishing their cultus from the animal
worship of less civilized nations. But anthropomorphism, as is clearly
seen in ghost-worship, looks both ways. To be human is not necessarily
to be humane. Man is cruel and implacable, and he makes the ghost after
his own image. Man is also foolish and easily tricked, so he plays tricks
upon the vengeful ghost, cheating him of his real meed of the murderer’s
or kinsman’s blood. Hence the surrogate victims, hence the frequent
substitution stories. Another element enters in. The gods, and specially
the ghost-gods, are conservative; man gets in advance of the gods he
has made, and is ashamed of the rites he once performed with complete
confidence in their rightness. Then he tries by a cheat to reconcile his
new view and his old custom. Religion, which once inspired the best in
him, lags behind, expressing the worst.
Suidas[180] tells a story which curiously expresses this state of
transition, this cheating of the god to save the conscience of the
worshipper. The Greeks had a proverb, Ἔμβαρός εἰμι, ‘I am Embaros,’ which
they used, according to Suidas, of a ‘sharp man with his wits about him,’
and, according to one of the collectors of proverbs, of those who ‘gave
a false impression, i.e. were out of their minds.’ The origin of the
proverb was as follows: There was a sanctuary of Artemis at Munychia. A
bear came into it and was killed by the Athenians. A famine followed,
and the god gave an oracle that the famine should cease if some one
would sacrifice his daughter to the goddess. Embaros was the only man
who promised to do it, on condition that he and his family should have
the priesthood for life. He disguised his daughter and hid her in the
sanctuary, and ‘dressed a goat in a garment and sacrificed it as his
daughter.’ The story is manifestly aetiological, based on a ritual with a
hereditary priesthood, and the sacrifice of a surrogate goat dressed as a
woman.
It is probable, though not certain, that behind the figure of the
Olympian Artemis, of the goddess who was kindly to lions’ cubs and
‘suckling whelps,’ there lay the cult of some vindictive ghost or heroine
who cried for human blood. In moments of great peril this belief in
the vindictiveness of ghosts, a belief kept in check by reason in the
day-time, might surge up in a man’s mind and haunt his dreams by night.
Plutarch[181] tells an instructive story about a dream that came to
Pelopidas before the battle of Leuctra. Near the field of battle was a
field where were the tombs of the daughters of Scedasos, a local hero.
The maidens, who were obviously local nymphs, were called from the place
Leuctrides. The night before the battle, as Pelopidas was sleeping in his
tent, he had a vision which ‘caused him no small disturbance.’ He thought
he saw the maidens crying at their tombs and cursing the Spartans, and
he saw Scedasos their father bidding him sacrifice to his daughters a
maiden with auburn hair if he wished to overcome his enemies on the
morrow. Being a humane as well as a pious man, the order seemed to him
a strange and lawless one, but none the less he told the soothsayers
and the generals about it. Some of them thought that it ought not to
be neglected, and brought forward as precedents the ancient instances
of Menoiceus, son of Creon, and Macaria, daughter of Heracles, and,
in more recent times, the case of Pherecydes the philosopher, who was
put to death by the Spartans and whose skin was preserved (no doubt as
‘medicine’) by their kings in accordance with an oracle; also the case
of Leonidas, who sacrificed himself for Greece; and, lastly, the human
victims sacrificed to Dionysos Omestes before the battle of Salamis, all
which cases had the sanction of success. Moreover, they pointed out,
Agesilaus, when he was about to set sail from Aulis itself, had the same
vision as Agamemnon, and disregarding it through misplaced tenderness,
came to grief in consequence. The more advanced section of the army used
the argument of the fatherhood of God and the superior nature of the
supreme deities; such sacrifices were only fit for Typhons and Giants
and inferior and impotent demons. Pelopidas, while they were discussing
the question in the abstract, only got more and more uncomfortable,
when on a sudden a she-colt got loose from the herd and ran through the
camp; the laymen present only admired her shining red coat, her proud
paces and shrill neighing, but Theocritus the soothsayer saw the thing
in his heart, and cried aloud to Pelopidas, ‘Happy man, here is the
sacred victim, wait for no other maiden, use the one the god has given
thee.’ And they took the colt and led her to the tombs of the maidens,
and prayed and wreathed her head and cut her throat and rejoiced and
published the vision of Pelopidas and the sacrifice to the army. Whether
Plutarch’s story is matter of fact or not is of little moment; it was
felt to be _probable_, or else it would never have been narrated.
* * * * *
I have purposely dwelt on the dark side of ἐναγισμοί, of the service of
the placation of ghosts, because in the vengeance of the ghost exacted
for bloodshed lies the kernel of the doctrine of purification. But since
man’s whole activity is not bounded by revenge, ghosts have other and
simpler needs than that of vengeance. The service of the underworld is
not all _aversion_, there is also some element of _tendance_.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.]
In the vase-painting in fig. 10, a design from a rather late red-figured
krater in the Bibliothèque Nationale[182] in Paris, we have a
representation of a familiar scene, the raising of the ghost of Teiresias
by Odysseus, as described in the _Nekuia_. Vase-paintings of this date
tend to be rather illustrations than independent conceptions, but they
sometimes serve the purpose of vivid presentation. Odysseus[183] has
dug the trench, he has poured the drink-offering of mead and sweet wine
and water, and sprinkled the white meal, and he has slain the sheep;
the head and feet of one of them, seemingly a black ram, are visible
above the trench. He has sat him down sword in hand to keep off the
throng of lesser ghosts, and he and his comrades wait the up-rising of
Teiresias. Out of the very trench is seen emerging the bald ghost-like
head of the seer. This is a clear case, not of deprecation but of
invocation. Teiresias by the strength of the black blood returns to
life. There is a clear reminiscence of the ghost-raising[184] that went
on at many a hero’s tomb, for, as will later be seen in the discussion
of hero-worship, every hero was apt to be credited with mantic powers.
The victims slain are in a sense, as Homer calls them, ἱερήια; they
are sacrificed and eaten, but eaten by a ghost. As such they have been
accompanied by offerings that could only be intended for drink-offerings,
not the ἀπόνιμμα, the offscourings, but libations of mead and wine and
pure water. Here again the ghost is made in the image of man: the Homeric
hero drinks wine in his life and demands it after his death. The service
of the dead is here very near akin to that of the Olympians; it is no
grim atonement, but at worst a bloody banquet, at best a human feast, too
human, too universal to need detailed elucidation. It is a ritual founded
on a belief deep-rooted and long-lived; with the Greeks it was alive in
Lucian’s[185] days. Charon asks Hermes why men dig a trench, and burn
expensive feasts, and pour wine and honey into a trench. Hermes answers
that he cannot think what good it can do to those in Hades, but ‘anyhow
people believe that the dead are summoned up from below to the feast, and
that they flutter round the smoke and fat and drink the honey draught
from the trench.’ Here the ghosts invade the late and popular burnt
sacrifice of the Olympians, but the principle is the same.
* * * * *
The Anthesteria was a festival of ghosts, and so far the _riddance_
of ghosts by means of placation has been shown to be an important
element in ancient sacrifice and in the ancient notion of purification.
But placation of ghosts does not exhaust the content even of ancient
sacrifice: another element will appear in the festival of early summer
that has next to be considered, the _Thargelia_.
CHAPTER III.
HARVEST FESTIVALS.
THE THARGELIA, KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.
‘λοιδορούμενοι εὐλογοῦμεν, διωκόμενοι ἀνεχόμεθα, βλασφημούμενοι
παρακαλοῦμεν· ὡς περικαθάρματα τοῦ κόσμου ἐγενήθημεν πάντων
περίψημα.’
Spring-time, it has been seen in the last chapter, is the season for
_purification_ by means of the _placation of ghosts_. But spring-time
is not the only anxious time for primitive man. As the year wears on, a
season approaches of even more critical import, when purification was
even more imperatively needed, the season of harvest; in the earliest
days the gathering in of such wild fruits as nature herself provides, in
later times the reaping and garnering of the various kinds of cereals.
In the North with our colder climate we associate harvest with autumn;
our harvest festivals fall at the end of September. September was to the
Greek the month of the grape harvest, the vintage, but his grain harvest
fell in ancient days as now in the month Thargelion, the latter part of
May and the beginning of June. This month is marked to the Greeks by
three festivals, the Thargelia, which gave its name to the month, the
Kallynteria, and the Plynteria. No festival has been more frequently
discussed than the Thargelia, and on no festival has comparative
anthropology thrown more light. The full gist of the ceremony has never,
I think, been clearly set forth, owing to the simple fact that the
Thargelia has usually been considered alone, not in connection with the
two other festivals[186]. In the present chapter I shall consider first
that element in the festival to which it and the month owe their names,
i.e. the first-fruits; second, the ceremony of the Pharmakos, which has
made the festival famous; third the connection with the Kallynteria and
Plynteria and the light thrown on both by the Roman festival of the
Vestalia. Finally from the consideration of the gist of these harvest
festivals it will be possible to add some further elements to our
conception of Greek religious thought, and especially of the Greek notion
of sacrifice.
THARGELION AND THARGELIA.
About the meaning[187] of the word Thargelia there is happily not the
slightest doubt. Athenaeus[188] quotes a statement made by Krates, a
writer of about the middle of the 2nd century A.D., in his book on the
Attic dialect as follows: ‘The _thargelos_ is the first loaf made after
the carrying home of the harvest.’ Now a loaf of bread is _not_ a very
primitive affair, but happily Hesychius[189] records an earlier or at
least more rudimentary form of nourishment: ‘Thargelos,’ he says, ‘is
a pot full of seeds.’ From Athenaeus[190] again we learn that the cake
called _thargelos_ was sometimes also called _thalusios_. The Thalusia,
the festival of the first-fruits of Demeter, is familiar to us from the
lovely picture in the Seventh Idyll of Theocritus[191]. The friends meet
Lycidas the goatherd and say to him:
‘The road on which our feet are set it is a harvest way,
For to fair-robed Demeter our comrades bring to-day
The first-fruits of their harvesting. She on the threshing place
Great store of barley grain outpoured, for guerdon of her grace.’
Homer[192] tells how the plague of the Calydonian boar came to waste the
land of the Aetolians, because Oineus their king forgot to celebrate
the Thalusia, and Eustathius, commenting on the passage, says: ‘The
first-fruits are the _thalusia_.’ He adds that some of the rhetoricians
call the _thalusia_ ‘feasts of the Harvest-Home.’
It is then abundantly clear that the festival of the Thargelia is in
the main a festival of the offering of first-fruits on the occasion of
harvest, and the month Thargelion the month of harvest rites. Of one
of these harvest rites, the carrying of the _Eiresione_[193], we have
unusually full particulars.
In the _Knights_ of Aristophanes[194], Cleon and the Sausage-Seller are
clamouring at the door of Demos. Demos comes out and asks angrily:
‘Who’s bawling there? do let the door alone,
You’ve torn my Eiresione all to bits.’
The scholiast explains. ‘At the Pyanepsia and the Thargelia the Athenians
hold a feast to Helios and the Horae, and the boys carry about branches
twined with wool, from which they get the name of _Eiresiones_, and
they hang them up before the doors.’ It is very probable that the wool
(εἶρος), taken perhaps from a sacred animal, gave its name to the
Eiresione, but there were many other things besides wool hung on the
branch. Our fullest account comes from the rhetorician Pausanias, who is
quoted by Eustathius[195] in his commentary on the _Iliad_. Eustathius is
explaining that the term ἀμφιθαλής means a child with both parents alive,
and he adds by way of illustration that children of this sort were chosen
by the ancients to deck out the Eiresione. He then quotes from the works
of Pausanias the following account of the ceremony: ‘The Eiresione is
a branch of olive twined with wool, and having hanging from it various
fruits of the earth; a boy, both of whose parents are alive, carries it
forth and places it in front of the doors of Apollo’s sanctuary, at the
feast of Pyanepsia.’ He then goes on to an aetiological legend about
Theseus, and finally records the words of the song sung by the children
who carried or attended the Eiresione:
‘Eiresione brings
All good things,
Figs and fat cakes to eat,
Soft oil and honey sweet,
And brimming wine-cup deep
That she may drink and sleep.’
The boy who actually carried the Eiresione must have both parents alive,
because any contact with death even remote was unlucky; the ghost of
either parent might be about. The song is of some interest because of
the half-personification of Eiresione. The Maypole or harvest-sheaf is
halfway to a harvest Maiden; it is thus, as will be seen later, that a
goddess is made. A song is sung, a story told, and the very telling fixes
the outline of personality. It is possible to worship long in spirit,
but as soon as the story-telling, myth-making, instinct awakes you have
anthropomorphism and theology.
What was hung on the Eiresione no doubt depended on the wealth of
particular worshippers; we hear of white wool and purple wool, vessels
of wine, figs, strings of acorns, cakes; nothing in the way of natural
produce came amiss. The Eiresione once fixed over the door remained
there, a charm against pestilence and famine, till the next year; then
it was changed for a new one. The withered branch must have been a
familiar sight at Athens. When in the _Plutus_[196] of Aristophanes the
young rough is insulting the old woman and thrusting his torch into her
withered face, she cries:
‘For pity’s sake don’t bring your torch so near me,’
and Chremylus says:
‘Yes, right she is, for if she caught a spark
She’d burn up like an old Eiresione.’
The Eiresione, Pausanias says, was fastened before the door of the
sanctuary of Apollo. Plutarch[197], in his rather clumsy aetiological
account of the Oschophoria, connects the Eiresione with vows paid to
Apollo by Theseus on his return from Crete to Athens. Harpocration[198]
says ‘The Thargelia was celebrated in the month of Thargelion, which
is sacred to Apollo,’ and the author of the _Etymologicon Magnum_[199]
states ‘The Thargelia, a festival at Athens. The name is given from
the _thargelia_, and thargelia are all the fruits that spring from the
earth. The festival is celebrated in the month Thargelion to Artemis and
Apollo.’ From Suidas[200] we learn that there was a musical contest at
the Thargelia, and that the actors dedicated their prize tripods in the
sanctuary of Apollo known as the Pythion.
All this makes it quite clear that at some time or other the festival of
the Thargelia was connected with the Olympian Apollo, and more vaguely
with his sister Artemis, but the connection is obviously loose and late.
The Eiresione was fastened up not only over the door of the sanctuary
of Apollo, but over the house-door of any and every Athenian. The house
of Demos was no sanctuary of Apollo. Moreover, when the scholiast on
Aristophanes[201] is commenting on the Eiresione, he says, to our
surprise, that it was carried and hung at the Thargelia and Pyanepsia
in honour, not of Apollo and Artemis, but of ‘Helios and the Horae.’
Porphyry[202] does not definitely name the Eiresione, but he is clearly
alluding to it when he speaks of the procession that still took place at
Athens in his own day to Helios and the Horae. It is evidence, he says,
that in early days the gods desired in their service not the sacrifice of
animals, but the offering of vegetable first-fruits. ‘In this procession
they carried wild herbs as well as ground pulse, acorns, barley, wheat, a
cake of dried figs, cakes of wheat and barley flour, and a pot (χύτρος).’
It is abundantly clear that the Eiresione is simply a harvest-home,
an offering of first-fruits that was primarily an end in itself,
but that could easily be affiliated to any dominant god. It will be
remembered[203] that Oineus got into trouble because, when all the other
gods had their feasts of hecatombs, he did not offer first-fruits to
Artemis, great daughter of Zeus. Oineus, we may conjecture, was the
faithful conservative worshipper of earlier gods; the Athenians were
wiser in their generation; their ancient service of the primitive Helios
and the Horae they somehow affiliated to that of the incoming Olympians.
* * * * *
It remains to ask more precisely what was the primitive significance
of the offering of first-fruits. At first sight it may seem as if the
question were superfluous. Surely we have here the simplest possible
instance of the service of ‘tendance’ (θεραπεία), the primitive sacrifice
that embodies the very essence of _do ut des_, a gift given to the god to
‘smooth his face,’ a gift that necessarily presupposes the existence of a
god with a face to be smoothed.
Such seems to have been the view of Aristotle[204]. He says in
characteristically Greek fashion, ‘They hold sacrifices, and meetings in
connexion therewith, paying rites of worship to the gods while providing
rest and recreation for themselves. For the most ancient sacrifices
and meetings seem to be as it were offerings of first-fruits after the
gathering in of the various harvests. For those were the times of year
when the ancients were especially at leisure.’ Aristotle clearly takes
the view of sacrifice already discussed, that sacrifice is mainly an
occasion for enjoyment and the result of leisure, but his remark as to
its early connection with first-fruits goes deeper down than he himself
knows. Regarded as a θυσία, a sacrifice, the offering of first-fruits
presupposes, as we have said, a god or spirit to whom sacrifice is made,
and a god of human passions. But it must not be forgotten that in this
view we are making a very large assumption, i.e. that of the existence
of some such god or spirit. It is instructive to note that among other
primitive races ceremonies have been observed which apparently are not
addressed to any god or spirit, and yet which seem to contain in them a
possible germ of some idea akin to sacrifice.
Such are the ceremonies of the Australian Arunta, observed and described
in detail by Messrs Spencer and Gillen[205]. These ceremonies, consisting
of lengthy and elaborate mummeries, are called _Intichiuma_, and their
object seems to be to secure the increase of the animal or plant
associated with a particular totem. The pantomimes enacted seem to be of
the nature of sympathetic magic, and they are interspersed with chanted
invitations to the particular plant or animal to be fertile. The point
of special interest is that the ceremonies are closely connected with
certain taboos on particular foods. Mr Lang[206] suggests that the
removal of the taboo at the time of the _Intichiuma_ may indicate that
the necessary ‘close time’ is over. The imposition of the taboo is on
this showing not due to any primary moral instinct in man, but simply a
practical necessity if the plant or animal is not to become extinct. The
removal of the taboo after a suitable lapse of time is, if man himself
is not to become extinct, equally practical and necessary. This sort of
taboo is in fact a kind of primitive ‘game law.’ Philochoros[207] gives
an instance: ‘At Athens,’ he says, ‘a prohibition was issued that no
one should eat of unshorn lamb on the occasion of failure in the breed
of sheep.’ If at the end of the close time it was customary to eat a
little of a plant or animal, the eating being accompanied by certain
solemn ceremonials, the food itself would easily come to be regarded as
specially sacred and as having sacramental virtue, and the further step
would soon be taken of regarding it as consecrated to certain spirits or
divinities. This _may_ have been in part the origin of the offering of
first-fruits.
The removal of a taboo is assuredly not the same thing as the worship
of a god, but it is easy to see how the one might slide over into the
other. A taboo is by common consent placed upon the harvest fruits till
all are ripe: such harvest-fruits are _sacred_, forbidden, dangerous.
Why? As soon as primitive man has fashioned for himself any sort of god
in his own image, the answer is ready, ‘The Lord thy God is a jealous
God.’ Primitive man is so instinctively anthropomorphic that it seems to
me rash to assert that the notion of taboo _precedes_ that of sacrifice.
The natives of Central Australia appear to have taboo without the notion
of sacrifice, i.e. of any spirit to whom sacrifice is made; another race
might have a primitive notion of a spirit to be placated without the
notion of taboo; or the two might be inextricably blended and only our
modern habit of pitiless analysis separate them.
Late writers on ritual, and it is only late that there are such writers,
always explain taboo as consecration rather than prohibition. Festus[208]
says ‘they called the juice of the vine _sacrima_ because they sacrificed
(or consecrated) it to Liber with a view to the protection of the
vineyards and the vessels and the wine itself, just as they sacrificed
to Ceres a first harvest from the ears they had first reaped.’ Here the
‘sacramental’ wine is clearly a sacrifice of the Olympian kind; but in
the Pithoigia, already discussed, the more primitive notions of release
from taboo and ‘aversion’ of evil influences clearly emerge. ‘Libation of
the new wine is poured out that the use of the magical thing (φαρμάκου)
may become harmless and a means of safety[209].’ In the Thargelia we
have no definite information as to a solemn _eating_ as well as offering
of first-fruits, but this element will appear when we reach the great
harvest festival commonly known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.
* * * * *
It remains to note some details as to the material of sacrifice. The
general principle is clear and simple. The god fares as his worshipper.
Porphyry[210], in discussing the various kinds of animals sacrificed,
observes with much common sense, ‘No Greek sacrifices a camel or an
elephant to the gods, because Greece does not produce camels and
elephants.’
It might not be necessary to state a fact so obvious but that writers on
the subject of ritual seem haunted by the notion that certain animals
are sacrificed to certain gods because they are in some mystical
sense ‘sacred to them,’ and this notion has introduced much needless
complexity. It is quite true that locally we find certain taboos on the
sacrifice of certain animals, the cause of which is unknown, but these
taboos are local and by no means uniform. Moreover the animal ‘sacred’
to the particular god is by no means always the material of sacrifice;
the owl, for reasons to be later discussed, is ‘sacred’ to Athene, but we
hear of no sacrifice of owls. Broadly then, as noted before, the material
of sacrifice is conditioned, not by the character of the god, but by the
circumstances of the worshipper.
The principle that the god fares as his worshipper is however crossed
by another, _he sometimes fares worse_. This was noticed by writers on
ritual such as Porphyry[211] and Eustathius[212], and they explain it
as a sort of survival of a golden age of simple manners, dear to the
conservatism of the gods. This conservatism of the gods mirrors, of
course, the natural and timid conservatism of their worshippers. They
have begun by offering just what they eat themselves, and, from the
fact that they have once offered it, they attach to this food special
sanctity. They advance in civilization, and their own food becomes more
delicate and complex, but they dare not make any change in the diet of
their gods; they have learnt to bake and eat fermented bread themselves,
but the gods are still nurtured on barley grains and porridge.
Porphyry[213] reduces the successive stages of sacrifice to a regular
system of progressive vegetarianism. First men plucked and offered grass,
which was like the ‘soft wool’ of the earth; then the fruit of trees and
their leaves, the acorn and the nut; then barley appeared first of the
grains, and they offered simple barley-corns; then they broke and bruised
grain and made it into cakes. In like fashion they made libations first
of water, then of honey, the natural liquid prepared for us by bees,
thirdly of oil, and last of all of wine; but after each advance the older
service remained ‘in memory of the ancient manner of life.’ Last, through
diverse influences of ignorance and fear, came ‘the luxury of flesh and
imported forms of diet[214].’
The incoming of the luxury of flesh diet was, it has already been noted,
due not to ignorance and fear but to the inroad of a flesh-eating
Northern race whose splendid physical stature and strength Porphyry
was little likely to appreciate. They were not wholly flesh-eaters;
hence, as has been seen, they offered the sacrifice of the barley grains
(οὐλοχύται), and offered these at a time when they were themselves eating
some form of manufactured bread. The primitive character of the rite is,
I think, marked by the ritual precedence. The οὐλοχύται, the sprinkling
of grains, has usually been explained as the sprinkling of meal on the
heads of the victims, as the equivalent of the _mola salsa_ of the
Romans; but Eustathius is probably right when, in commenting on the
sacrifice of Nestor[215], he says, ‘the sprinkled grains are in memory
of the food of old times which consisted in grains, i.e. barley-corns’.
‘Hence,’ he adds, ‘one of the ancient commentators explains the sprinkled
grains as barley-corns.’ That οὐλοχύται were nothing more nor less than
the actual barley-corns is also shewn by a passage from Strato[216]. A
cook, who apparently from his use of archaic terminology is according to
his master more like a male sphinx than a cook, calls for οὐλοχύται:
‘Οὐλοχύται—why what on earth is that?’
And the answer is
‘Just barley-corns.’
The first act in a Homeric sacrifice was uniformly prayer and the
sprinkling of grain[217], and it is important to observe that
Eustathius[218] expressly notes this as a previous sacrifice (πρόθυμα);
the οὐλοχύται were, he says, a mixture of grain and salt poured on
the altar before the sacrificial ceremony began. By the ‘sacrificial
ceremony’ Eustathius means the slaying of the animal victim. It is
important to note that the grain was poured _on the altar_ and was
therefore in itself a sacrifice, as it is sometimes stated that it was
merely thrown on the head of the victim. The statement of Eustathius
is confirmed by the account in Euripides[219] of the sacrifice made
by Aegisthus to the Nymphs. Here, before the elaborate slaying of the
bull, we have, just as in Homer, the sprinkling of the grain, and _it is
sprinkled on the altar_. The Messenger tells Electra that when all was
ready Aegisthus
‘Took the grains for sprinkling and he cast them
Upon the altar and these words he spake.’
The sprinkling of _salted_ meal (_mola salsa_) was, if we may believe
Athenaeus[220], a later innovation. He tells us distinctly, quoting
Athenion as his authority, that the use of salt for seasoning was
a comparatively late discovery and therefore excluded from certain
sacrifices to the gods.
‘Whence even now, remembering days of old,
The entrails of their victims for the gods
They roast with fire and bring no salt thereto,
Because at first they knew no use for salt.
And even when they knew and loved its savour
They kept their fathers’ sacred written precepts.’
The sacrifice of the animal victim never in Homer takes place without
the ‘previous sacrifice’ of grain-sprinkling and prayer, but prayer and
grain-sprinkling can take place, as in the prayer of Penelope[221],
without the animal sacrifice. This looks as though the animal sacrifice
were rather a supplementary later-added act than a necessary climax.
Later, when animal sacrifice became common and even as a rule imperative,
the real sacrificial intent of the preliminary grain-sprinkling would
naturally become obscured and it would be brought into connection with
animal sacrifice by the practice of sprinkling grain on the heads of the
victims.
By Plutarch’s[222] time the sprinkling of grain was regarded as something
of an archaeological curiosity. He asks in his _Greek Questions_ ‘Who is
he who is called among the Opuntians _krithologos_,’ i.e. the ‘barley
collector’? The answer is ‘Most of the Greeks make use of barley for
their very ancient sacrifices when the citizens offer first-fruits. And
the man who regulates these sacrifices and gets in these first-fruits is
called _krithologos_.’ He adds a curious detail illustrative of the two
strata of worship, ‘and they had two priests, one to supervise divine
things, one for those of things demonic.’ In like archaic fashion, when
Pisthetairos[223] would inaugurate the blessed simplicity of bird-rule,
he revives the ancient ritual of the sprinkling of barley-corns:
‘O better than worship of Zeus Most High
Is the service of Birds that sing and fly.
They ask for no carven temple’s state,
They clamour not for a golden gate.
The shrine they ask of a mortal’s vow
Is leave to perch on an olive bough.
In the little thickets of ash and oak
They dwell anigh us. We humble folk
Never need fare to the far-off lands
Of Ammon or Delphi, but lift our hands
Under our vine and our fig-tree’s shade.
For a slender grace let our prayer be said,
As we cast up our barley in little showers
And a little grace from the Birds is ours.’
The barley grain sprinkled is part of the ritual of the Olympians, but
in the case of the two survivals to be next considered, the _pelanos_
and the _nephalia_, their use was almost wholly confined to, and
characteristic of, the lower stratum of worship, that of ghosts and
sprites and underworld divinities.
After the sacrifice of the natural fruits of the earth, the παγκαρπία,
comes the most primitive form of artificial food, i.e. the _pelanos_, a
sort of porridge.
We speak of Bread and Wine as sacramental _elements_, but both are
far removed from being elemental. Leavened bread, the Greek ἄρτος,
is a product of advanced civilization, and with a true conservative
ritual instinct the Roman Church prescribes to this day the use of the
unleavened wafer. Athenaeus[224], citing the author of a play called the
_Beggars_, tells us that when the Athenians set a meal in the Prytaneum
for the Dioscuri they serve upon the tables cheese and barley-porridge
(φυστήν) and chopped olives and leeks, making remembrance of their
ancient mode of life. And Solon bids them supply to those who had free
meals in the Prytaneum barley cake (μᾶζαν), but at feasts to place in
addition loaves of bread (ἄρτον), and this in imitation of Homer. For
Homer, when he brought the chiefs together to Agamemnon, says ‘they
stirred up meal.’ The words ‘they stirred up meal,’ φύρετο δ’ ἄλφιτα, do
not occur in our text, but the author of the _Beggars_ clearly refers
to the ordinary Homeric meal, and takes us straight back to the real
primitive meaning of _pelanos_. On the shield of Achilles[225] we have
the picture of a harvest feast:
‘The heralds dight the feast apart beneath a spreading oak,
The ox they slew, and much white barley-meal the women folk
Sprinkled, a supper for the thralls.’
The lord and his fellows feast on flesh-meat, the workmen have their
supper of primitive porridge. So the Townley scholiast clearly
understands the passage; he comments: πάλυνον, ἔμασσον ἢ ἔφυρον, ‘they
sprinkle, i.e. they knead or mix together.’ It is noticeable that he
employs the exact word, ἔφυρον, quoted by Athenaeus as in the text of
Homer[226]. To explain the passage as ‘sprinkle on the heads of the
victims or on the roast flesh’ is to miss the whole antithesis between
master and man. Eustathius[227], that close observer of primitive fact,
saw what was being done in Homer and doubtless still by the poor of his
own days. He says ‘to sprinkle barley-meal does not mean bread-making but
a sort of paste in ordinary use among the ancients.’ To any one who has
watched the making of porridge, the shift of meaning from παλύνειν, to
_sprinkle_, to φύρειν and μάσσειν, to stir and to knead, is natural and
necessary. You first sprinkle the meal on the water, you then stir it,
so far you have porridge; if you let it get thicker and thicker you must
knead it and then you have oat-cake. It has of course frequently been
noted that a _pelanos_ may be either fluid or solid, and herein lies the
explanation. When the _pelanos_ is thick and subjected to fire, baked, it
becomes a _pemma_, an ordinary cake. The Latin _libum_[228], a cake, is a
strict parallel; it was primarily a thing out-poured, a _libation_, then
a solid thing cooked and eaten.
A _pelanos_ was then primarily the same as _alphita_, barley-meal. The
food of man was the food of the gods, but the word was early specialized
off to ritual use. There is, I believe, no instance in which a _pelanos_,
under that name, is eaten in daily life or indeed eaten at all save by
Earth and underworld gods, their representative snakes and other Spirits
of Aversion[229]. The comic poet Sannyrion[230] puts it thus:
‘We gods do call it pelanos,
You pompous mortals barley-meal.’
To us the pomposity seems on the side of the gods.
As there was a time when leavened bread was not, and men ate porridge
cooked or uncooked, so before the coming of the vine men drank a honey
drink. And as the conservative gods, long after men ate fermented bread,
were faithful to their porridge, so long after men drank wine they
still offered to the gods who were there before the coming of the vine
‘wineless libations,’ nephalia[231].
The ritual of the underworld gods is in many respects identical with
that of the ghosts out of which they are developed, but with this
difference—ghosts are less conservative than fully developed gods; the
habits and tastes of ghosts are more closely akin to those of the men who
worship them. Quite early, it would appear, man offered to ghosts the
wine he loved so well himself.
Atossa[232] brings for the ghost of Darius a _pelanos_, as was meet. She
brings also all manner of ‘soothing gifts’ (μειλικτήρια), but she pours
wine also:
‘A holy heifer’s milk, white, fair to drink,
Bright honey drops from flowers bee-distilled,
With draughts of water from a virgin fount,
And from the ancient vine its mother wild
An unmixed draught, this gladness; and fair fruit
Of gleaming olive ever blossoming
And woven flowers, children of mother earth.’
The dead fare as the living; wine is added to milk and honey and olive
oil and water, but wine perhaps significantly as an innovation is never
_named_. Atossa seems also consciously to insist over much on its being
wild, primitive, ancient, and therefore permissible. We are reminded of
the religious shifts to which the Romans were put by the introduction of
wine into their daily life and thence into their ritual. Plutarch[233] in
his _Roman Questions_ says that ‘when the women poured libations of wine
to Bona Dea, they called it by the name of milk,’ and Macrobius[234] adds
‘that wine could not be brought in under its own name, but the wine was
called milk and the vessel containing it a honey-jar.’
The ghosts of the dead admit and even welcome the addition of wine, but
actual chthonic divinities are stricter. When Oedipus[235] came to the
precinct of the Semnae, the Chorus bid him make atonement, because,
though unwittingly, he has violated the precinct. He asks the precise
ritual to be observed. The answer, though it is thrice familiar, is so
important for the understanding of chthonic ceremonies that it must be
given in full:
‘_Oed._ And with what rites, O strangers? teach me this.
_Chor._ First, fetch thou from an ever-flowing fount,
Borne in clean hands, an holy drink-offering.
_Oed._ And next, when I have brought the holy draught?
_Chor._ Bowls are there next, a cunning craftsman’s work,
Crown thou their lips and handles at the brim.
_Oed._ With branches, woollen webs, or in what wise?
_Chor._ Of the ewe-lamb take thou the fresh-shorn wool.
_Oed._ So be it, and then to what last rite I pass?
_Chor._ Pour thy drink offerings, facewards to the dawn.
_Oed._ With these same vessels do I pour the draught?
_Chor._ Yes, in three streams, the last pour wholly out.
_Oed._ And filled wherewith this last? teach me this also.
_Chor._ _Water and honey—bring no wine thereto._
_Oed._ When the dark shadowed earth hath drunk of this?
_Chor._ Lay on it thrice nine sprays of olive tree
With both thine hands, and make thy prayer the while.
_Oed._ That prayer? vouchsafe to teach, for mighty is it.
_Chor._ Pray thou that, as they are called the Kindly Ones,
With kindly hearts they may receive and bless.
Be this thy prayer, thine own or his who prays
For thee. Whisper thy prayer nor lift thy voice,
Then go, look not behind, so all is well.’
The Kindly Ones, though their name is only adjectival, have crystallized
into divinities; they are no longer ghosts, and none may tamper with
their archaic ritual.
For the dread counterpart of the Eumenides, the Erinyes, there is the
same wineless service, witness the reproach of Clytaemnestra. The Erinyes
have deserted her, yet she has given them of the ritual they exact[236]:
‘Full oft forsooth from me have ye licked up
Wineless libations, sober balms of wrath.’
To offer wine was the last outrage done by the parvenu Apollo to ancient
ritual, hence the bitter protest[237]:
‘Thou hast bewildered the old walks of life,
With wine the Ancient Goddesses undone.’
The wineless service of the Eumenides in the _Oedipus Coloneus_
is of course no mere invention of the poet. At Titane near Sicyon
Pausanias[238] came to a grove of evergreen oaks and a temple of the
goddesses whom, he says, the Athenians call Semnae, but the Sicyonians
Eumenides, and every year on one day they celebrate a festival in their
honour, ‘sacrificing sheep with young and a _libation of water and
honey_.’
The scholiast in the _Oedipus Coloneus_[239] gives a list of the
divinities to whom at Athens wineless sacrifices were made. He quotes as
his authority Polemon. ‘The Athenians were careful in these matters and
scrupulously pious (ὅσιοι) in the things that pertain to the gods, and
they made wineless sacrifices to Mnemosyne the Muse, to Eos, to Helios,
to Selene, to the Nymphs, to Aphrodite Ourania.’ The list is at first
surprising. We associate _nephalia_ with the Underworld powers, but
here it is quite clear that, in primitive days, side by side with the
Earth-gods were worshipped sky-gods, but in their own simple being as
Dawn and Sun and Moon, not as full-blown human Olympians. Mnemosyne[240],
it will later be seen, had a well of living water herself; she needed no
wine. The Heavenly Aphrodite is more surprising, but her honey libation
is further attested by Empedokles[241]. He tells of the days long ago
when the god Ares was not, nor King Zeus, nor Kronos, nor Poseidon, but
only
‘Kypris the Queen
Here they adored with pious images,
With painted victims and with fragrant scents,
With fume of frankincense and genuine myrrh.
Honey of yellow bees upon the ground
They for libation poured.’
But though here and there a very early ‘Heavenly One’ claimed the honey
service, it was mostly the meed of the dead. Porphyry knew that honey was
used to embalm the body of the dead because it prevented putrefaction,
and this custom of honey burial is echoed in the myth of Glaukos and the
honey-jar. The marvellous sweetness of honey lent itself to the notions
of propitiation and placation—‘sweets to the sweet’ or rather, as it
seemed to the practical primitive mind, ‘sweets to the spirits to be
sweetened,’ the Meilichioi, ghosts and heroes to be appeased[242].
One more element in archaic ritual yet remains to be considered—the
fireless sacrifice.
Fire, it has been seen, was used in the Homeric burnt sacrifice _for
sublimation_. By fire, Eustathius[243] says in speaking of the burning
of the dead among the northern nations, ‘the divine element was borne
on high as though in a chariot and mingled with the heavenly beings.’
In like fashion we may suppose the burnt victim was freed from the
grosser elements and in purified vaporous form ascended to the gods of
the upper air. This is what Porphyry[244] means when he says that in
burnt sacrifice we ‘immortalize the dues of the heavenly gods by means
of fire.’ Fire again in the service of the underworld gods was used, it
has further been seen, for utter destruction, for the holocaust. But in
certain rituals established, it may be, before the discovery of fire, it
was definitely prescribed that the sacrifice should be fireless. Diogenes
Laertius[245] relates that according to tradition there was but one altar
in Delos at which Pythagoras could worship, the ‘Altar of Apollo the
Sire,’ which stood behind the great Altar of the Horns, because on this
altar wheat and barley and cakes are the only offering laid and the
sacrifice is without fire and there is no sacrificial victim—so Aristotle
stated in his _Constitution of the Delians_. This altar was also known as
the Altar of the Pious. The foundation of the great blood-stained Altar
of the Horns may still be seen in Delos; the primitive Altar of the Sire
has left no trace, but in some bygone time a voice, it would seem, had
been heard on Mount Cynthus saying, ‘Thou shalt not hurt nor destroy in
all my Holy Mountain.’
What ancient worship of a ‘Sire’ Apollo had taken to himself in Delos we
do not know, but in remote Arcadia a fireless sacrifice of a specially
simple kind went on right down to the time of Pausanias[246] in honour
of a home-grown goddess, Demeter. At Phigalia Pausanias visited the
cave-sanctuary of the Black Demeter; indeed he says in his pious way
it was chiefly for her sake that he went to Phigalia, and he adds ‘I
sacrificed no victim to the goddess, such being the custom of the people
of the country. They bring instead as offerings the fruit of the vine and
of other trees they cultivate, and honey-combs and wool which is still
unwrought and full of the natural grease; these they lay on the altar
which is set up in front of the cave, and having laid them there they
pour on them olive oil. Such is the rite of sacrifice observed by private
persons and once a year by the Phigalian people collectively.’ Everything
here prescribed is in its most natural form, grapes rather than wine,
honey-comb rather than honey, unwrought wool not artificial fillets, and
the service is fireless. It was a service to content even Pythagoras.
That there was between the early fireless sacrifice and the burnt
sacrifice of the Olympian in some prehistoric time a rivalry and clashing
of interests, is clear from the Rhodian tradition of the Heliadae.
Pindar[247] tells how:
‘Up to the hill they came,
Yet in their hand
No seed of burning flame,
And for the Rhodian land
With fireless rite
The grove upon the citadel they dight.’
And the scholiast commenting on the passage says: ‘The Rhodians going
up to the Acropolis to sacrifice to Athene, forgot to take fire with
them for their offerings (ἐναγίσμασι) and made a fireless sacrifice.
Hence it came about that, as the Athenians were the first to sacrifice
by fire, Athene thought it best to live with them.’ Athene was always
a prudent goddess, ready to swim with the tide; she was ‘all for the
father,’ all for the Olympians, and she had her reward. Philostratos[248]
tells the same story with something more of emphasis. He contrasts
the Acropolis of Athens and the Acropolis of Rhodes; the Rhodians had
only a fireless cheap service, the people of Athens provide the savour
of burnt sacrifice and fragrant smoke; the goddess went to live with
them because ‘they were wiser in their generation (σοφωτέρους) and
good at sacrificing.’ From Diodorus[249] we learn that it was Cecrops
who introduced the fire-sacrifice at Athens. On Cecrops were fathered
many of the innovations of civilized life, among them marriage. He was
halfway between the old and the new, half civilized man, half snake. He,
Pausanias[250] significantly tells us, was the first to give to Zeus the
name of the Highest. He too became all for the Olympian.
These forms of primitive sacrifice—the _pelanos_, the barley grains,
the _nephalia_, the fireless rites—have been considered at some length
because, though in part they went over to the Olympians, they remain
broadly speaking and in their simplest forms characteristic of the
lower stratum and of the worship of underworld spirits. Moreover it is
these primitive rites which were, as will later be seen, taken up and
mysticized by the religion of Orpheus.
It remains to consider the second and by far the most important element
in the harvest festival of the Thargelia, the ceremony of the Pharmakos.
THE PHARMAKOS.
That the leading out of the _pharmakos_ was a part of the festival of
the Thargelia we know from Harpocration[251]. He says in commenting on
the word: ‘At Athens they led out two men to be purifications for the
city; it was at the Thargelia, one was for the men and the other for the
women.’ These men, these pharmakoi, whose function it was to purify the
city, were, it will later be seen, in all probability put to death, but
the expression used by Harpocration is noteworthy—they were led out. The
gist of the ceremony is not death but expulsion; death, if it occurs, is
incidental.
The ceremony of expulsion took place, it is again practically certain,
on the 6th day of Thargelion, a day not lightly to be forgotten, for it
was the birthday of Socrates. Diogenes Laertius[252] says in his life
of Socrates: ‘He was born on the 6th day of Thargelion, the day when
the Athenians purify the city.’ The pharmakos is not expressly named,
but it will be seen in the sequel that the cleansing of the city by the
expulsion of the pharmakos was regarded as _the_ typical purification of
the whole year. The etymology of the word will be best considered when
the nature of the rites has been examined[253].
The ceremony of the pharmakos has been often discussed, but I think
frequently and fundamentally misapprehended. It appears at first sight to
involve what we in our modern terminology call ‘Human Sacrifice.’ To be
told that this went on in civilized Athens in the 5th cent. B.C. shocks
our preconceived notions of what an Athenian of that time would be likely
to do or suffer. The result is that we are inclined to get out of the
difficulty in one of two ways: either we try to relegate the ceremony of
the pharmakos to the region of prehistoric tradition, or we so modify and
mollify its main issues as to make it unmeaning.
The issue before us is a double one and must not be confused. We have to
determine what the ceremonial of the pharmakos was, and next, did that
ceremonial last on into historic times?
My own view is briefly this: that we have no positive evidence that it
did last on into the 5th century B.C., but that, if the gist of the
ceremonial is once fairly understood, there is no a priori difficulty
about its continuance, and that, this a priori difficulty being removed,
we shall accept an overwhelming probability. The evidence for the
historical pharmakos is just as good as e.g. the evidence for the
chewing of the buckthorn at the Anthesteria.
It should be noted at the outset that the pharmakos, i.e. the human
scape-goat, though it seems to us a monstrous and horrible notion,
was one so familiar to the Greek mind as to be in Attic literature
practically proverbial. Aristophanes[254] wants to point the contrast
between the old mint of sterling state officials and the new democratic
coinage: he says, now-a-days we fill offices by
‘Any chance man that we come across,
Not fit in old days for a pharmakos,
These we use
And these we choose,
The veriest scum, the mere refuse,’
and again in a fragment[255]:
‘_Your_ kinsman! how and whence, you pharmakos,’
and in the _Knights_[256] Demos says to Agoracritos:
‘I bid you take the seat
In the Prytaneum where this pharmakos
Was wont to sit.’
Pharmakos is in fact, like its equivalent ‘offscouring’ (κάθαρμα), a
current form of utter abuse, disgust and contempt.
Moreover its ritual import was perfectly familiar. Lysias[257] in his
speech against Andokides is explicit: ‘We needs must hold that in
avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andokides we purify the city
and perform apotropaic ceremonies, and solemnly expel a pharmakos and rid
ourselves of a criminal; for of this sort the fellow is.’
For the fullest details of the horrid ceremony we are indebted to a
very late author. Tzetzes[258] (A.D. 1150) in his _Thousand Histories_
describes it as follows: ‘The pharmakos was a purification of this sort
of old. If a calamity overtook the city by the wrath of God, whether it
were famine or pestilence or any other mischief, they led forth as though
to a sacrifice the most unsightly of them all as a purification and a
remedy to the suffering city. They set the sacrifice in the appointed
place, and gave him cheese with their hands and a barley cake and figs,
and seven times they smote him with leeks and wild figs and other wild
plants. Finally they burnt him with fire with the wood of wild trees and
scattered the ashes into the sea and to the winds, for a purification,
as I said, of the suffering city. Just as, I think, Lycophron records it
of the Locrian maidens, speaking somewhat after this manner, I do not
remember the exact verse, “when, having consumed their limbs with fuel
from fruitless trees, the flame of fire cast into the sea the ashes of
the maidens that died on the hill of Traron.”’
Tzetzes is not inventing the ceremonies, and in his awkward confused
way he goes on to tell us his source—the iambic poet Hipponax. ‘And
Hipponax gives us the best complete account of the custom when he says,
‘_to purify the city and strike_ (the pharmakos) _with branches_’; and
in another place he says in his first iambic poem, ‘_striking him in the
meadow and beating him with branches and with leeks like a pharmakos_’;
and again in other places he says as follows: ‘_we must make of him a
pharmakos_’; and he says, ‘_offering him figs and a barley cake and
cheese such as pharmakoi eat_’; and ‘_they have long been waiting
agape for them, holding branches in their hands as pharmakoi do_’; and
somewhere else he says in the same iambic poem, ‘_may he be parched with
hunger, so that in (their) anger he may be led as pharmakos and beaten
seven times_.’
Tzetzes quotes for us six fragmentary statements from Hipponax, and the
words of Hipponax correspond so closely in every detail with his own
account that we are justified in supposing that his account of the end
of the ceremonial, the burning and scattering of the ashes, is also
borrowed; but the evidence of this from Hipponax he omits.
Hipponax makes his statements apparently, not from any abstract interest
in ritual, but as part of an insult levelled at his enemy Boupalos. This
is made almost certain by another fragment of Hipponax[259] in which
he says, ‘as they uttered imprecations against that abomination (ἅγος)
Boupalos.’ The fragments belong obviously to one or more iambic poems
in which Hipponax expresses the hope that Boupalos will share the fate
of a pharmakos, will be insulted, beaten, driven out of the city, and
at last presumably put to death. Hipponax is _not_ describing an actual
historical ceremony, but to make his insults have any point he must have
been alluding to a ritual that was, in the 6th century B.C., perfectly
familiar to his hearers.
Some of the statements of Hipponax as to the details of the ritual are
confirmed from other sources, and are given in these with certain slight
variations which seem to show that Hipponax was not the only source of
information.
Helladius[260] the Byzantine, quoted by Photius, says that ‘it was the
custom at Athens to lead in procession two pharmakoi with a view to
purification; one for the men, one for the women. The pharmakos of the
men had black figs round his neck, the other had white ones, and he says
they were called συβάκχοι.’ Helladius added that ‘this purification was
of the nature of an apotropaic ceremony to avert diseases, and that it
took its rise from Androgeôs the Cretan, when at Athens the Athenians
suffered abnormally from a pestilential disease, and the custom obtained
of constantly purifying the city by pharmakoi.’
The man and woman and the black and white figs are variant details.
Helladius is our sole authority for the curious name συβάκχοι: what this
means is not certain. The term may have meant ‘pig-Bacchoi.’ The Bacchoi,
as will later be seen, were sacred and specially purified persons with
magical powers, and the term may have been applied to mark analogous
functions. Crete was the home of ceremonies of purification.
Harpocration, in the passage already quoted, confirms the view that there
were two pharmakoi, but he says they were both men: one for the women,
one for the men. The discrepancy is not serious. It would be quite easy
if necessary to dress up a man as a woman, and even a string of white
figs would be sufficient presentment of gender; _simulata pro veris_ is a
principle of wide acceptation in primitive ritual.
The beating of the pharmakoi was a point of cardinal importance. It was
a ceremonial affair and done to the sound of the flute. Hesychius[261]
says, ‘The song of the branches is a measure that they play on the flute
when the pharmakoi are expelled, they being beaten with branches and fig
sprigs. The pharmakos was actually called “he of the branches.”’ It must
have been a matter of very early observation that beating is expulsive.
You beat a bush, a bird escapes; you beat a garment, the dust comes
out; you beat a man, the evil, whatever it be, will surely emerge. We
associate beating with moral stimulus, but the first notion is clearly
expulsive.
Probably some notion of the application or instigation of good as well
as the expulsion of evil early came in. This may be conjectured from the
fact that rods made of special plants and trees were used, notably leeks
and fig-trees. Plants with strong smells, and plants the eating of which
is purgative, are naturally regarded as ‘good medicine’; as expulsive of
evil, and hence in a secondary way as promotive of good.
Pythagoras[262] taught that to have a leek hung up over a doorway was a
good thing to prevent the entrance of evil, and Dioscorides[263] records
the same belief. Lucian[264] makes Menippus relate how before he was
allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he was ‘purged and wiped clean
and consecrated with leek and torches.’
The _locus classicus_ on beating with leek is of course the beating of
the god Pan by his Arcadian worshippers. Theocritus[265] makes Simichidas
sing:
‘Dear Pan, if this my prayer may granted be
Then never shall the boys of Arcady
Flog thee on back and flank with leeks that sting
When scanty meat is left for offering;
If not, thy skin with nails be flayed and torn
And amid nettles mayst thou couch till morn.’
And the scholiast remarks, ‘they say that a festival was held in Arcadia
in which the youths beat Pan with leeks when the officials sacrificed a
small victim, and there was not enough to eat for the worshipper; or the
Arcadians when they went out hunting if they had good sport paid honour
to Pan; if the reverse they maltreated him with leeks because, being a
mountain god, he had power over the produce of the chase.’ The first
explanation confuses cause with effect, the second is undoubtedly right.
Pan is beaten because, as lord of the chase, he has failed to do his
business.
It is sometimes said that Pan is beaten, and the pharmakoi beaten, in
order to ‘stimulate their powers of fertility.’ In a sense this is
ultimately true, but such a statement gives a false and misleading
emphasis. The image and the pharmakoi are beaten partly to drive out evil
influences, partly, it should not be forgotten, to relieve the feelings
of the beaters. When the evil influences are beaten out, the god will
undoubtedly do better next time, but it is only in this sense that the
powers of fertility are stimulated. The pharmakos has no second chance.
He is utterly impure, so that the more purifying influences, the more
good medicine brought to bear upon him, the better; but he is doomed to
death, not to reform. In the Lupercalia, already discussed (p. 51), the
women are struck by the _februum_ as a fertility charm, but even here the
primary notion must have been the expulsion of evil influences.
The beating, like the pharmakos, became proverbial. Aristophanes[266]
makes Aeacus ask how he is to torture the supposed Xanthias, and the real
Xanthias makes answer:
‘Oh, in the usual way, but when you beat him
Don’t do it with a leek or a young onion.’
Here undoubtedly the meaning is, ‘don’t let this be a merely ceremonial
beating, a religious performance,’ and the allusion gains in point by the
fact that the supposed slave was a real god to be treated worse than a
pharmakos. Lucian[267] says that the Muses, he is sure, would never deign
to come near his vulgar book-buyer, and instead of giving him a crown of
myrtle they will beat him with myrrh and mallow and _get rid of him_, so
that he may not pollute their sacred fountains. Clearly here the vulgar
book-buyer is a pharmakos.
We have then abundant evidence that the pharmakos was beaten; was he also
put to death? Tzetzes, as has been seen, states that he was burnt with
the wood of certain fruitless trees, and that his ashes were scattered
to the sea and the winds. The scholiast on Aristophanes[268] also states
expressly that by δημόσιοι, i.e. people fed and kept at the public
expense, was meant ‘those who were called pharmakoi, and these pharmakoi
purified cities by their slaughter.’ So far his statement is of the
most general character, and it need not have been inferred that he was
speaking of Athens, but he goes on, ‘for the Athenians maintained certain
very ignoble and useless persons, and on the occasion of any calamity
befalling the city, I mean a pestilence or anything of that sort, they
sacrificed these persons with a view to purification from pollution and
they called them purifications’ (καθάρματα). Tzetzes said a pharmakos was
excessively ungainly (ἀμορφότερον), the scholiast, worthless and useless.
Aristophanes himself regarded them as the ‘scum’ of humanity.
The scholiast is of course a late and somewhat dubious authority, and did
the fact of the death of the pharmakos rest on him and on Tzetzes alone,
we might be inclined to question it. A better authority is preserved for
us by Harpocration[269]; he says, ‘Istros (_circ._ B.C. 230), in the
first book of his Epiphanies of Apollo, says that Pharmakos is a proper
name, and that Pharmakos stole sacred _phialae_ belonging to Apollo, and
was taken and stoned by the men with Achilles, and the ceremonies done at
the Thargelia are mimetic representations of these things.’ The aetiology
of Istros is of course wrong, but it is quite clear that he believed the
ceremonies of the Thargelia to include the stoning of a man to death.
That in primitive pharmakos-ceremonies the human pharmakos was actually
put to death scarcely admits of doubt: that Istros believed this took
place at the ceremony of the Thargelia in honour of Apollo may be
_inferred_ from his aetiology. There still remains in the minds of some a
feeling that the Athens of the fifth century was too civilized a place to
have suffered the actual death of human victims, and that periodically,
as part of a public state ritual. This misgiving arises mainly, as was
indicated at the outset, from a misunderstanding of the gist of the
ceremony. Tzetzes, after the manner of his day, calls it a θυσία, a burnt
sacrifice; but it was not really a sacrifice in our modern sense at all,
though, as will later be shown, it was one of the diverse notions that
went to the making of the ancient idea of sacrifice.
The pharmakos was not a sacrifice in the sense of an offering _made to
appease an angry god_. It came to be associated with Apollo when he took
over the Thargelia, but primarily it was not intended to please or to
appease any spirit or god. It was, as ancient authors repeatedly insist,
a καθαρμός, a purification. The essence of the ritual was not atonement,
for there was no one to atone, but riddance, the artificial making of an
ἄγος, a pollution, to get rid of all pollution. The notion, so foreign
to our scientific habit of thought, so familiar to the ancients, was
that evil of all kinds was a physical infection that could be caught and
transferred; it was highly catching. Next, some logical savage saw that
the notion could be utilized for artificial riddance. The Dyaks[270]
sweep misfortunes out of their houses and put them into a toy-house made
of bamboo; this they set adrift on a river. On the occasion of a recent
outbreak of influenza in Pithuria ‘a man had a small carriage made, after
a plan of his own, for a pair of scape-goats which were harnessed to it
and driven to a wood at some distance where they were let loose. From
that hour the disease completely ceased in the town. The goats never
returned; had they done so the disease must have come back with them.’
It is needless for our purpose to accumulate instances of the countless
varieties of scape-goats, carts, cocks, boats, that the ingenuity of
primitive man has invented. The instance chosen shows as clearly as
possible that, as the gist of the ceremony is magical riddance, it is
essential that the scape-goat, whatever form he takes, _should never
return_.
This necessity for utter destruction comes out very clearly in an account
of the way the Egyptians treated their scape-goats. Plutarch[271] in his
discourse on Isis and Osiris says, on the authority of Manetho, that in
the dog-days they used to burn men alive whom they called Typhonians,
and _their ashes they made away with by winnowing and scattering them_.
The winnowing-fan in which the corn was tossed and by means of which
the chaff was blown utterly away was to Clement of Alexandria[272] the
symbol of utter ruin and destruction. In his protest against the ruinous
force of convention among pagan people, he says finely: ‘let us fly from
convention, it strangles men, it turns them away from truth, it leads
them afar from life; convention is a noose, a place of execution, a pit,
a winnowing-fan; convention is ruin.’
The pharmakos is killed then, not because his death is a vicarious
sacrifice, but because he is so infected and tabooed that his life is
a practical impossibility. The uneducated, among whom his lot would
necessarily be cast, regard him as an infected horror, an incarnate
pollution; the educated who believe no such nonsense know that the
kindest thing is to put an end to a life that is worse than death.
Moreover nearly every civilized state to this day offers ‘human
sacrifice’ in the shape of the criminals it executes. Why not combine
religious tradition with a supposed judicial necessity? Civilized Athens
had its barathron; why should civilized Athens shrink from annually
utilizing two vicious and already condemned criminals to ‘purify the
city’?
The question of whether the pharmakos was actually put to death in
civilized Athens is of course for our purpose a strictly subordinate one.
It has only been discussed in detail because the answer that we return
to it depends in great measure on how far we realize the primary gist
of a pharmakos, i.e. the two notions of (_a_) the _physicalness_, the
actuality of evil, and (_b_) the possibility of contagion and transfer.
Our whole modern conception of the scape-man is apt to be unduly
influenced by the familiar instance of the Hebrew scape-goat. We remember
how
‘The scape-goat stood all skin and bone
_While moral business, not his own,_
_Was bound about his head_.’
And the pathos of the proceeding haunts our minds and prevents us from
realizing the actuality and the practicality of the more primitive
physical taboo. It is interesting to note that even in this moralized
Hebrew conception, the scape-goat was not a sacrifice proper; its
sending away was _preceded by sacrifice_. The priest ‘made an atonement
for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year,’ and when
the sacrifice of bullock and goat and the burning of incense, and the
sprinkling of blood was over, then and not till then the live goat was
presented to the Lord[273]. The Hebrew scriptures emphasize the fact that
the burden laid upon the goat is not merely physical evil, not pestilence
or famine, but rather the burden of moral guilt. ‘And Aaron shall lay
both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all
the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in
all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send
him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And the goat shall
bear upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited.’
But so close is the connection of moral and physical that even here,
where the evil laid upon the scape-goat is moral only, there is evident
danger of infection; the goat is sent forth into a land not inhabited and
it would be manifestly undesirable that he should return. At Athens we
hear of no confession of sins, it is famine and pestilence from which a
terror-stricken city seeks riddance.
This physical aspect of evil is still more clearly brought out in a
ceremony performed annually at Chaeronea. Plutarch[274] himself, when he
was archon, had to preside over the ritual and has left us the account.
A household slave was taken and ceremonially beaten with rods of agnus
castus—again a plant of cathartic quality—and driven out of doors to
the words, ‘Out with hunger, in with wealth and health.’ The ceremony
was called the ‘expulsion of hunger,’ and Plutarch speaks of it as an
‘ancestral sacrifice.’ It was performed by each householder for his own
house, and by the archon for the common hearth of the city. When Plutarch
was archon he tells us the ceremony was largely attended. The name of
the ‘ceremony’ is instructive, it is ἐξέλασις, riddance, expulsion, not
as the pharmakos was, καθαρμός, purification; both are called θυσίαι,
sacrifices, only by concession to popular usage when every religious
ceremony is regarded as of the nature of burnt sacrifice. The ceremony of
the pharmakos was taken on by Apollo, but in the Chaeronea ‘expulsion’
there is no pretence that any god is worshipped; the performance remains
frankly magical.
At Chaeronea the slave was merely beaten and expelled. At Delphi a
pharmakos ceremony of still milder form took place in which the victim
was merely a puppet.
In his 12th _Greek Question_ Plutarch asks, ‘What is Charila among the
Delphians?’ His answer is as follows: ‘Concerning Charila they tell a
story something on this wise. The Delphians were afflicted by a famine
following after a drought. They came to the gates of the king’s palace
with their children and their wives to make supplication. And the king
distributed grain and pulse to the noblest of them as there was not
enough for all. And there came a little girl who had lost both her father
and mother, and she made supplication. But he struck her with his shoe
and threw the shoe into her face. Now she was poor and desolate but of
noble spirit, and she went away and loosed her girdle and hanged herself.
As the famine went on and pestilence was added thereto, the Pythia gave
an oracle to the king that he must appease Charila, a maiden who had died
by her own hand. After some difficulty they found out that this was the
name of the girl who had been struck. So they performed a sacrifice which
had in it some admixture of a purification, and this they still perform
every nine years.’
The tale told of Charila is, of course, pure aetiology, to account for
certain features in an established ritual. The expression Plutarch uses,
a ‘sacrifice with admixture of purification’ (μεμιγμένην τινὰ καθαρμοῦ
θυσίαν), is interesting because it shows that though by his time almost
every religious ceremony was called a θυσία, his mind is haunted by
the feeling that the Charila ceremony was in reality a purification,
a καθαρμός; he would have been nearer the truth had he said it was a
‘purification containing in it a certain element of sacrifice.’
He then proceeds to give the actual ritual. ‘The king is seated to
preside over the pulse and the grain and he distributes it to all, both
citizens and strangers: there is brought in an image of Charila as a
little girl, and when they all receive the corn, the king strikes the
image with his shoe and the leader of the Thyiades takes the image and
conducts it to a certain cavernous place, and there fastening (a rope)
round the neck of the image they bury it where they buried the strangled
Charila.’
The festival Charila, festival of rejoicing and grace, is like the
Thargelia, a festival of first-fruits containing the ceremony of the
Pharmakos, only in effigy. Charila is beaten with a shoe: leather is to
this day regarded as magically expulsive, though the modern surrogate is
of white satin. On a curious vase in the National Museum at Athens[275],
we have a representation of a wedding procession at which a man is in the
act of throwing a shoe. It is still to-day regarded as desirable that
bride and bridegroom should be hit, evil influences are thereby expelled,
and the shower of fertilizing rice is made the more efficacious. The
effigy of Charila is buried, not burnt, possibly a more primitive form of
destruction. The origin of the ceremony is dated back to the time when
the king was priest, but the actual celebrants are women.
A pharmakos ceremony that is known to have taken place at Marseilles adds
some further instructive details. Servius, in commenting on the words
_auri sacra fames_[276] ‘accursed hunger of gold,’ notes that _sacer_
may mean accursed as well as holy, and he seems, rather vaguely, to
realize that between these two meanings is the middle term ‘devoted.’
The use of the term, he says, is derived from a custom among the Gauls:
‘Whenever the inhabitants of Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of
the poorer class offers himself to be kept at the public expense and fed
on specially pure foods. After this has been done he is decorated with
sacred boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the whole
city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon him may fall all
the ills of the whole city, and thus he is cast headlong down.’
Here we have the curious added touch that the vehicle of impurity is
purified. To our modern minds pure and impure stand at two opposite
poles, and if we were arraying a scape-goat we certainly should not
trouble about his preliminary purification. But the ancients, as Servius
dimly feels, knew of a condition that combined the two, the condition
that the savage describes as ‘taboo.’ For this condition the Latins used
the word ‘sacer,’ the Greeks, as has already been seen, the word ἄγος. It
is in such complex primitive notions as those of _sacer_ and ἄγος, that
our modern habit of clear analysis and differentiation causes us to miss
the full and complex significance.
* * * * *
The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical ceremony based
on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice to Apollo or to any
other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony of physical expulsion.
It is satisfactory to find that the etymology[277] of the word confirms
this view, φαρμακός means simply ‘magic-man.’ Its Lithuanian cognate is
_burīn_, magic; in Latin it appears as _forma_, formula, magical spell;
our _formulary_ retains some vestige of its primitive connotation.
Φάρμακον in Greek means healing drug, poison, and dye, but all, for
better for worse, are magical. To express its meaning we need what our
language has lost, a double-edged word like the savage ‘medicine.’ The
pharmakos of the Thargelia shows us a state of things in which man does
not either tend or avert god[278] or ghost, but seeks, by the ‘medicine’
he himself makes, to do, on his own account, his spring or rather
Whitsuntide ‘thorough cleaning.’ The ceremony of the pharmakos went in
some sense to the making of the Greek and modern notion of sacrifice, but
the word itself has other and perhaps more primitive connotations.
Tzetzes, looking back at the ceremony of the expulsion of the pharmakos,
calls it a sacrifice (θυσία), but we need not imitate him in his
confusion of ideas new and old. The rite of the Thargelia was a rite of
expulsion, of riddance, which incidentally, as it were, involved loss
of life to a human being. The result is, indeed, in both cases the same
to the human being, but the two ceremonials of sacrifice and riddance
express widely different conditions and sentiments in the mind of the
worshipper.
It may indeed be doubted whether we have any certain evidence of ‘human
sacrifice’ in our sense among the Greeks even of mythological days. A
large number of cases which were by the tragedians regarded as such,
resolve themselves into cases of the blood feud, cases such as those
of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, when the object was really the placation
of a ghost, not the service of an Olympian. Perhaps a still larger
number are primarily not sacrifices, θυσίαι, but ceremonies of riddance
and purification, καθαρμοί. The ultimate fact that lies behind such
ceremonies is the use of a human pharmakos, and then later, when the real
meaning was lost, all manner of aetiological myths are invented and some
offended Olympian is introduced.
The case of the supposed ‘human sacrifice’ of Athamas is instructive,
both as to its original content and as to the shifting sentiments with
which it was regarded. When Xerxes came to Alos in Achaia his guides,
Herodotus[279] tells us, anxious to give him all possible information as
to local curiosities, told him the tradition about the sanctuary of Zeus
Laphystios: ‘The eldest of the race of Athamas is forbidden to enter the
Prytaneion which is called by the Achaians the _Leïton_. If he enters
he can only go out to be sacrificed.’ It was further told how some,
fearing this fate, had fled the country, and coming back and entering
the Prytaneion were decked with fillets and led out in procession to
be sacrificed (ὡς θύεταί τε ἐξηγέοντο στέμμασι πᾶς πυκασθεὶς καὶ ὡς
σὺν πομπῇ ἐξαχθείς). Here there is obvious confusion, as the man who
left the country to avoid death would never have been so foolish as,
immediately on his return, to enter the forbidden place. The point is
clear: great stress is laid on the leading forth in procession—the
descendant of the royal race was a scape-goat. Herodotus makes this
quite clear. Athamas was sacrificed because the Achaeans _were making
a purification of the land_ (καθαρμὸν τῆς χώρης ποιευμένων Ἀχαιῶν).
Herodotus gives as the cause of this primitive and perfectly intelligible
custom various conflicting reasons which well reflect the various stages
of opinion through which the thinking Greek passed. We have first the
real reason—Athamas as a scape-goat. Then the public conscience is
uneasy, and we have a legend that the ‘sacrifice’ is interrupted at the
moment of consummation either by Herakles (according to Sophocles in the
lost _Athamas_) or by Kytissoros. It is wrong to sacrifice; hence the
sacrifice is interrupted, but it is wrong to interrupt sacrifice, so
the descendants of Kytissoros are punished. Then, finally, it is felt
that the sacrifice must go on, but it is a dreadful thing, an ἄγος, so
a chance of escape is given to the victim. Finally in the same complex
legend we have the substitution of a ram for the human victim Phrixos.
Sometimes incidentally we learn that other peoples adopted the device
which may have satisfied the Athenians, i.e. needing a pharmakos they
utilized a man already condemned by the state. Thus in the long list
of ‘human sacrifices’ drawn up by Porphyry[280] in his indictment of
human ignorance and fear he mentions that on the 6th day of the month
Metageitnion a man was sacrificed to Kronos, a custom, he says, which
was maintained for a long time unchanged. _A man who had been publicly
condemned to death_ was kept till the time of the festival of Kronia.
When the festival came they brought him outside the gates before the
image (ἕδους) of Aristobule, gave him wine to drink and slew him. The
victim is already doomed, and it would seem intoxicated before he is
sacrificed.
In noting the substitution of animal for human sacrifice, one curious
point remains to be observed. The step seems to us momentous because to
us human life is sacrosanct. But to the primitive mind the gulf between
animal and human is not so wide. The larger animals, and certain animals
which for various reasons were specially venerated, were in early days
also regarded as sacrosanct, and to slay them was murder, to be atoned
for by purification.
This notion comes out very clearly in the ritual of the Murder of the Ox,
the _Bouphonia_[281], or, as it was sometimes called, the Dipolia[282].
The Bouphonia by the time of Aristophanes[283] was a symbol of what was
archaic and obsolete. After the Just Logos in the _Clouds_ has described
the austere old educational _régime_ of ancient Athens, the Unjust Logos
remarks:
‘Bless me, that’s quite the ancient lot Dipolia-like, chock-full
Of crickets and Bouphonia too.’
And the scholiast comments, ‘Dipolia, a festival at Athens, in which
they sacrifice to Zeus Polieus, on the 14th day of Skirophorion. It is
a mimetic representation of what happened about the cakes (πέλανοι) and
the cows[284].’ What happened was this: ‘Barley mixed with wheat, or
cakes made of them, was laid upon the bronze altar of Zeus Polieus, on
the Acropolis. Oxen were driven round the altar, and the ox which went
up to the altar and ate the offering on it was sacrificed. The axe and
knife with which the beast was slain had been previously wetted with
water, brought by maidens called “water-carriers.” The weapons were then
sharpened and handed to the butchers, one of whom felled the ox with
the axe and another cut its throat with the knife. As soon as he had
felled the ox, the former threw the axe from him and fled, and the man
who had cut the beast’s throat apparently imitated his example. Meantime
the ox was skinned and all present partook of its flesh. Then the hide
was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal was set
on its feet and yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then
took place in an ancient law court, presided over by the king (as he
was called), to determine who had murdered the ox. The maidens who had
brought the water accused the men who had sharpened the axe and knife,
the men who had sharpened the axe and knife blamed the men who had handed
these implements to the butchers, the men who had handed the implements
to the butchers blamed the butchers and the butchers blamed the axe and
knife, which were accordingly found guilty and condemned and cast into
the sea.’
The remarks of the Unjust Logos are amply justified. That a mummery so
absurd, with all its leisurely House-that-Jack-built hocus-pocus, should
be regularly carried on in the centre of civilized Athens was enough to
make the most careless and the most conventional reflect on the nature
and strength of religious conservatism. But the rite was once of real and
solemn import, and, taken as such, the heart of a terror-stricken service
of Aversion. The ox had to be killed, man imperatively demanded his feast
of flesh-meat, but it was a dreadful ἄγος, an abomination, to kill it, as
bad as, perhaps worse than killing a man, and the ghost of the ox and the
spirits of vengeance generally must at all costs be tricked or appeased.
So great is the terror that no one device is enough. You pretend that the
ox is not really dead, or at least that he has come to life: if that is
not enough you pretend that he was himself an offender: he ate the sacred
cakes, not by compulsion, but of his own free, wicked will. Last you
pretend that you did not do it yourself, it was some one else. No, not
some one else, but some_thing_ else. Finally that thing is got rid of;
the ἄγος, the pollution, is thrown into the sea.
The important point for the moment is that the ox, though no surrogate
for human sacrifice, is as good as human, is a man. His murdered ghost,
or at least the pollution of his murder, cries for placation and
purification. It is satisfactory to note that if you had to be purified
yourself for murdering an ox, an ox, even a bronze ox, had to be
purified for murdering you. Pausanias[285] was told the following story
about a bronze ox, dedicated at Olympia by the Corcyreans. A little boy
was sitting playing under the ox, and suddenly he lifted up his head
and broke it against the bronze, and a few days after he died of the
wounds. The Eleans consulted as to whether they should remove the ox out
of the Altis, as being guilty of blood, but the Delphic oracle, always
conservative in the matter of valuable property, ordained ‘that they were
to leave it and perform the same ceremonies as were customary among the
Greeks in the case of involuntary homicide.’
To return to the Bouphonia, the confused notion that a thing must be
done, and yet that its doing involves an ἄγος, a pollution, comes out
in all the rituals known as Flight-ceremonies. The gist of them is
very clear in the account given by Diodorus[286] of the ceremonies
of embalming among the Egyptians. He tells us ‘the man called
He-who-slits-asunder (παρασχίστης) takes an Aethiopian stone, and, making
a slit in the prescribed way, instantly makes off with a run, and they
pursue him and pelt him with stones, and heap curses on him, _as though
transferring the pollution of the thing on to him_.’
The _Flight-Ceremony_ recorded by Plutarch[287] is specially instructive,
and must be noted in detail, the more so as it, like the Bouphonia,
is connected with rites of the threshing-floor. In his 12th _Greek
Question_, Plutarch says that among the three great festivals celebrated
every eighth year at Delphi was one called _Stepterion_[288], and in
another discourse (_De defect. orac._ XIV.) he describes the rite
practised, though he mixes it up with so much aetiological mythology that
it is not very easy to disentangle the actual facts. This much is clear;
every eighth year a hut (καλιάς) was set up about the threshing-floor
at Delphi. This hut, Plutarch says, bore more resemblance to a kingly
palace than to a snake’s lair; we may therefore safely infer that
it held a snake. A boy with both his parents alive was led up by a
certain prescribed way[289] with lighted torches; fire was set to the
hut, a table overturned, and the celebrants took flight without looking
back through the gates of the precinct; afterwards the boy went off
to Tempe, fasted, dined, and was brought back crowned with laurel in
solemn procession. Plutarch never says that the boy killed the snake,
but as the ceremony was supposed to be a mimetic representation of the
slaying of the Python and the banishment of Apollo, this may be inferred.
Plutarch is of course _more suo_ shocked at the idea that Apollo could
need purification, and at a loss to account decently for the curious
ceremonial, but he makes one acute remark: ‘finally the wanderings and
the servitude of the boy and the purifications at Tempe raise a suspicion
of some great pollution and deed of daring’ (μεγάλου τινὸς ἄγους καὶ
τολμήματος ὑποψίαν ἔχουσι). This hits the mark: a sacred snake has been
slain; the slayer has incurred an ἄγος, from which he must be purified.
The slaying is probably formal and sacrificial, for the boy is led to
the hut with all due solemnity, and has been carefully selected for the
purpose; but the τόλμημα, the outrage, the deed of daring, is an ἄγος, so
he must take flight after its accomplishment. Sacred snake, or sacred ox,
or human victim, the procedure is the same.
* * * * *
To resume. The outcome of our examination of the ceremony of the
pharmakos is briefly this: the gist of the pharmakos rite is physical
purification, καθαρμός, and this notion, sometimes alone, sometimes
combined with the notion of the placation of a ghost, is the idea
underlying among the Greeks the notion we are apt to call Human
Sacrifice. To this must be added the fact that in a primitive state of
civilization the line between human and animal ‘sacrifice’ is not sharply
drawn.
KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.
Plutarch[290] tells us that it was on a day of ill-omen that Alcibiades
returned to Athens: ‘On the day of his return they were solemnizing
the Plynteria to the Goddess. For on the 6th day of the third part of
Thargelia the Praxiergidae solemnize the rites that may not be disclosed:
they take off the adornments of the image, and cover it up. Hence the
Athenians account this day as most unlucky of all, and do no work on it.
And it seemed as though the Goddess were receiving him in no friendly or
kindly fashion, as she hid her face from him and seemed to banish him
from her presence.’ At the Plynteria, as at other ‘unlucky’ festivals,
the sanctuaries, Pollux[291] tells us, were roped round. The object was
in part to keep out the common herd, perhaps primarily to ‘avert’ evil
influences.
Photius[292] discusses the two festivals, the Kallynteria and the
Plynteria, together, placing the Kallynteria first; they have indeed
practically always been bracketed in the minds of commentators as
substantially identical in content. The Plynteria, it is usually stated,
was the washing festival. The image of Pallas was taken in solemn
procession down to the sea, stripped of its gear, veiled from the eyes
of the vulgar, washed in sea-water, and brought back. At the Kallynteria
it was re-dressed, re-decked, ‘beautified.’ This simple explanation of
the sequence of rites presents only one trifling difficulty. Photius
expressly tells us that the Kallynteria preceded the Plynteria; the
Kallynteria took place on the 19th of the month Thargelion, and the
Plynteria on the second day of the 3rd decade, i.e. on the 22nd[293]. It
would be strange if the image was first ‘beautified’ and then washed.
The explanation of the seeming incongruity is of course a simple one.
The word καλλύνειν means not only ‘to beautify’ but to brush out, to
sweep, ‘to give a shine to.’ The Greek for broom is καλλύντριον, also
καλ<λ>υντρόν in Hesych. s.v. σαρόν; and καλλύσματα, if we may trust
Hesychius[294], means sweepings (σάρματα). In a word the Kallynteria is a
festival of what the Romans call _everruncatio_, the festival of ‘those
who do the sweeping.’ They swept out the sacred places, made them as we
say now-a-days ‘beautifully clean,’ and then, having done their sweeping
first like good housewives, when the house was ready they washed the
image and brought it back in new shining splendour.
It is evident that when we hear of sweeping out sanctuaries and washing
an image we have come to a religious stage in which there is a definite
god worshipped, and that god is conceived of as anthropomorphic. There
may have been rites of the Thargelia, including the Pharmakos, i.e. the
ceremony of the expulsion of evil, before there were any Kallynteria or
Plynteria. Be this as it may, the Kallynteria and Plynteria throw light
on the purport of the pharmakos, and emphasize the fact that all the
cleansing, whether of image, sanctuary or people, was but a preliminary
to the bringing in of the first-fruits.
This connection between first-fruits and purification explains a
feature in the Plynteria that would otherwise remain obscure. In the
procession that took place at the Plynteria, probably, though not quite
certainly, the procession in which the image was taken down to the sea,
Hesychius[295] tells us they carried a cake or mass of dried figs, which
went by the name of _Hegeteria_. Hesychius is at no loss to account for
the strange name. Figs were the first cultivated fruit of which man
partook; the cake of figs is called Hegeteria because it ‘Led the Way’ in
the matter of diet!
We may perhaps be allowed to suggest a possible alternative. May not
the fig-cake be connected with the root of ἅγος rather than with ἄγω?
Figs were used in purification. Is not the Hegeteria the fig-cake
of purification? A necklace of figs was hung about the neck of the
pharmakos, and the statues of the gods had sometimes a like adornment.
Primitive man is apt to get a little confused as to cause and effect. He
performs a rite of purification to protect his first-fruits; he comes
to think the offering of those first-fruits is in itself a rite of
purification.
As usual when we come to consider the analogous Roman festival the
meaning of the rites practised is more baldly obvious. Plutarch[296] in
his _Roman Questions_ asks, ‘Why did not the Romans marry in the month
of May?’ and for once he hits upon the right answer: ‘May it be that
in this month they perform the greatest of purificatory ceremonies?’
What these purificatory ceremonies, these καθαρμοί, were, he tells us
explicitly: ‘for at the present day they throw images from the bridge
into the river, but in old times they used to throw human beings.’ We
must here separate sharply the fact stated by Plutarch, the actual ritual
that took place in his own day, from his conjecture about the past. We
_know_ images, puppets, were thrown from the bridge, we may conjecture,
as Plutarch did, that they were the surrogates of human sacrifice, but
we must carefully bear in mind that this is pure conjecture. The _fact_
Plutarch certifies in another of his _Questions_[297], and adds the name
of the puppets. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘is the reason that in the month of May
they throw images of human beings from the wooden bridge into the river,
calling them Argeioi?’ Ovid[298] tells us a little more: ‘Then (i.e. on
May 15th) the Vestal is wont to throw from the oaken bridge the images of
men of old times, made of rushes.’ He adds that it was in obedience to an
oracle: ‘Ye nations, throw two bodies in sacrifice to the Ancient One who
bears the sickle, bodies to be received by the Tuscan streams.’ Ovid and
Plutarch clearly both held that the _Argei_ of rushes were surrogates. It
seems possible, on the other hand, that the myth of human sacrifice may
have arisen from a merely dramatic apotropaic rite. The one certain thing
is that the _Argei_[299] _were_ pharmakoi, were καθάρματα.
That the time of the Argei, and indeed the whole month till the Ides of
June, was unlucky is abundantly proved by the conduct of the Flaminica.
Plutarch[300] goes on to say that the Flaminica is wont to be gloomy
(σκυθρωπάζειν) and not to wash nor to adorn herself. Ovid[301] adds
details of this mourning; he tells us that he consulted the Flaminica
Dialis as to the marriage of his daughter, and learnt that till the Ides
of June there was no luck for brides and their husbands, ‘for thus did
the holy bride of the Dialis speak to me: “Until tranquil Tiber has borne
to the sea in his tawny waters the cleansings from Ilian Vesta it is not
lawful for me to comb my shorn locks with the boxwood, nor to pare my
nails with iron, nor to touch my husband though he be priest of Jove....
Be not in haste. Better will thy daughter marry when Vesta of the Fire
shines with a cleansed hearth.”’
The Roman Vestalia fell a little later than the Kallynteria and
Plynteria, but their content is the same. I borrow the account of the
ritual of the Vestalia from Mr Warde-Fowler[302]. On June 7 the _penus_,
or innermost sanctuary of Vesta, which was shut all the rest of the year
and to which no man but the pontifex maximus had at any time right of
entry, was thrown open to all matrons. During the seven following days
they crowded to it barefoot. The object of this was perhaps to pray for
a blessing on the household. On plain and old-fashioned ware offerings
of food were carried into the temple: the Vestals themselves offered
the sacred cakes made of the first ears of corn, plucked as we saw in
the early days of May; bakers and millers kept holiday, all mills were
garlanded and donkeys decorated with wreaths and cakes. On June 15 the
temple (_aedes_) was swept and the refuse taken away and either thrown
into the Tiber or deposited in some particular spot. Then the _dies
nefasti_ came to an end, and the 15th itself became _fastus_ as soon
as the last act of cleansing had been duly performed. _Quando stercus
delatum fas_, ‘When the rubbish has been carried away.’
Dr Frazer[303] has collected many savage parallels to the rites of the
Vestalia. The most notable is the _busk_ or festival of first-fruits
among the Creek Indians of North America, held in July or August when
the corn is ripe. Before the celebration of the _busk_ no Indian would
eat or even touch the new corn. In preparation for its rites they got
new clothes and household utensils: old clothes, rubbish of all kinds,
and the old corn that remained were carefully burnt. The village fires
were put out and the ashes swept away, and in particular the hearth and
altar of the temple were dug up and cleaned out. The public square was
carefully swept out ‘for fear of polluting the first-fruit offerings.’
Before the sacramental eating of the new corn a strict fast was observed,
and (for the precautions taken by the savage ritualist are searching and
logical) a strong purgative was swallowed. With the new corn was solemnly
dispensed the freshly-kindled fire, and the priest publicly announced
that the new divine fire had purged away the sins of the past year. Such
powerful ‘medicine’ was the new corn that some of the men rubbed their
new corn between their hands, then on their faces and breasts.
To resume. In the Anthesteria we have seen that sacrifice was in intent
purification, and that this purification took the form of the placation
of ghosts. In the Thargelia, purification is again the end and aim of
sacrifice, but this purification, though it involves the taking of a
human life, is of the nature of a merely magical cleansing to prepare for
the incoming first-fruits.
We pass to the consideration of the autumn festival of sowing, the
_Thesmophoria_.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WOMEN’S FESTIVALS.
THESMOPHORIA, ARREPHORIA, SKIROPHORIA, STENIA, HALOA.
‘τὰ θεσμοφόρι’ ἄγουσιν ὥσπερ καὶ πρὸ τοῦ.’
_The Thesmophoria._
With the autumn festival of the Thesmophoria[304] we come to a class of
rites of capital interest. They were practised by women only and were
of immemorial antiquity. Although, for reasons explained at the outset,
they are considered after the Anthesteria and Thargelia, their character
was even more primitive, and, owing to the conservative character of
women and the mixed contempt and superstition with which such rites were
regarded by men, they were preserved in pristine purity down to late
days. Unlike the Diasia, Anthesteria, Thargelia, they were left almost
uncontaminated by Olympian usage, and—a point of supreme interest—under
the influence of a new religious impulse, they issued at last in the most
widely influential of all Greek ceremonials, the Eleusinian Mysteries.
To the primitive character and racial origin of these rites we have the
witness of Herodotus[305], though unhappily piety sealed his lips as
to details. He says, ‘Concerning the feast of Demeter which the Greeks
call Thesmophoria I must preserve an auspicious silence, excepting in
so far as every one may speak of it. It was the daughters of Danaus who
introduced this rite from Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women;
but after the upset of the whole of Peloponnesos by the Dorians the rite
died down completely, and it was only those of the Peloponnesians who
were left, and the Arcadians who did not leave their seats who kept it
up.’ Herodotus oddly enough does not mention the Athenians, who were as
stable and as untouched as the Arcadians, but his notice is invaluable as
fixing the pre-Dorian character of the rites. Knowing that they were of
immemorial antiquity, _more suo_ he attributes them to the Egyptians, and
as will later be seen (p. 128) there may be some element of probability
in his supposition.
The Thesmophoria, like the Anthesteria, was a three days’ festival. It
was held from the 11th-13th of Pyanepsion (October-November); the first
day, the 11th, was called both _Kathodos_ and _Anodos_, Downgoing and
Uprising, the second _Nesteia_, Fasting, and the third _Kalligeneia_,
Fair-Born or Fair-Birth[306]. The meaning of the name Thesmophoria and
the significance of the three several days will appear later: at present
it is sufficient to note that the Thesmophoria collectively was a late
autumn festival and certainly connected with sowing. Cornutus[307] says,
‘they fast in honour of Demeter ... when they celebrate her feast at
the season of sowing.’ Of a portion of the ritual of the Thesmophoria
we have an unusually detailed account preserved to us by a scholiast on
the _Hetairae_ of Lucian; and as this portion is, for the understanding
of the whole festival, of capital importance it must at the outset be
examined in detail. In the dialogue of Lucian, Myrto is reproaching
Pamphilos for deserting her; ‘the girl,’ says Myrto, ‘you are going to
marry is not good-looking; I saw her close at hand at the Thesmophoria
with her mother.’ The notice is important as it has been asserted that
the Thesmophoria was a festival of married women only, which, in Lucian’s
time, was clearly not the case.
The scholiast[308] on the passage comments as follows, and ancient
commentators have left us few commentaries more instructive: ‘The
Thesmophoria, a festival of the Greeks, including mysteries, and these
are called also Skirrophoria.’ According to the more mythological
explanation they are celebrated in that Kore when she was gathering
flowers was carried off by Plouton. At the time a certain Eubouleus, a
swineherd, was feeding his swine on the spot and they were swallowed down
with her in the chasm of Kore. Hence in honour of Eubouleus the swine
are thrown into the chasms of Demeter and Kore. Certain women who have
purified themselves for three days[309] and who bear the name of ‘Drawers
up’ bring up the rotten portions of the swine that have been cast into
the _megara_. And they descend into the inner sanctuaries and having
brought up (the remains) they place them on the altars, and they hold
that whoever takes of the remains and mixes it with his seed will have
a good crop. And they say that in and about the chasms are snakes which
consume the most part of what is thrown in; hence a rattling din is made
when the women draw up the remains and when they replace the remains by
those well-known (ἐκεῖνα) images, in order that the snakes which they
hold to be the guardians of the sanctuaries may go away.
‘The same rites are called Arretophoria (carrying of things unnamed) and
are performed with the same intent concerning the growth of crops and
of human offspring. In the case of the Arretophoria, too, sacred things
that may not be named and that are made of cereal paste, are carried
about, i.e. images of snakes and of the forms of men[310]. They employ
also fir-cones on account of the fertility of the tree, and into the
sanctuaries called _megara_ these are cast and also, as we have already
said, swine—the swine, too, on account of their prolific character—in
token of the growth of fruits and human beings, as a thank-offering to
Demeter, inasmuch as she, by providing the grain called by her name,
civilized the human race. The interpretation then of the festival given
above is mythological, but the one we give now is physical. The name
Thesmophoria is given because Demeter bears the title Thesmophoros, since
she laid down a law or Thesmos in accordance with which it was incumbent
on men to obtain and provide by labour their nurture.’
The main outline of the ritual, in spite of certain obscurities in the
scholiast’s account, is clear. At some time not specified, but during
the Thesmophoria, women, carefully purified for the purpose, let down
pigs into clefts or chasms called μέγαρα or chambers. At some other time
not precisely specified they descended into the _megara_, brought up the
rotten flesh and placed it on certain altars, whence it was taken and
mixed with seed to serve as a fertility charm. As the first day of the
festival was called both _Kathodos_ and _Anodos_ it seems likely that the
women went down and came up the same day, but as the flesh of the pigs
was rotten some time must have elapsed. It is therefore conjectured that
the flesh was left to rot for a whole year, and that the women on the
first day took down the new pigs and brought up last year’s pigs.
How long the pigs were left to rot does not affect the general content
of the festival. It is of more importance to note that the flesh seems
to have been regarded as in some sort the due of the powers of the
earth as represented by the guardian snakes. The flesh was wanted by
men as a fertility charm, but the snakes it was thought might demand
part of it; they were scared away, but to compensate for what they did
not get, surrogates made of cereal paste had to be taken down. These
paste surrogates were in the form of things specially fertile. It is not
quite clear whether the pine-cones etc. or only the pigs were let down
at the Thesmophoria as well as the Arrephoria, but as the scholiast is
contending for the close analogy of both festivals this seems probable.
It does not indeed much matter what the exact form of the _sacra_ was:
all were fertility charms.
The remarks of the scholiast about the double λόγος, i.e. the double
_rationale_ of the festival, are specially instructive. By his time, and
indeed probably long before, educated people had ceased to believe that
by burying a fertile animal or a fir-cone in the earth you could induce
the earth to be fertile; they had advanced beyond the primitive logic
of ‘sympathetic magic.’ But the Thesmophoria was still carried on by
conservative womanhood:
‘They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do.’
An origin less crude and revolting to common sense is required and
promptly supplied by mythology[311]. Kore had been carried down into
a cleft by Plouton: therefore in her memory the women went down and
came up. Pigs had been swallowed down at the same time: therefore they
took pigs with them. Such a mythological _rationale_ was respectable if
preposterous. The myth of the rape of Persephone of course really arose
from the ritual, not the ritual from the myth. In the back of his mind
the scholiast knows that the content of the ritual was ‘physical,’ the
object the impulsion of nature. But even after he has given the true
content his mind clouds over with modern associations. The festival, he
says, is a ‘thank-offering’ to Demeter. But in the sympathetic magic of
the Thesmophoria man attempts direct compulsion, he admits no mediator
between himself and nature, and he thanks no god for what no god has
done. A thank-offering is later even than a prayer, and prayer as yet
is not. To mark the transition from rites of compulsion to rites of
supplication and consequent thanksgiving is to read the whole religious
history of primitive man.
Some details of the rites of the Thesmophoria remain to be noted. The
Thesmophoria, though, thanks to Aristophanes, we know them best at
Athens, were widespread throughout Greece. The ceremony of the pigs went
on at Potniae in Boeotia. The passage in which Pausanias[312] describes
it is most unfortunately corrupt; but he adds one certain detail,
that the pigs there used were new-born, sucking pigs (ὗς τῶν νεογνῶν).
Among nations more savage than the Greeks a real Kore took the place of
the Greek sucking pig or rather reinforced it. Among the Khonds, as Mr
Andrew Lang[313] has pointed out, pigs and a woman are sacrificed that
the land may be fertilized by their blood; the Pawnees of North America,
down to the middle of the present century, sacrificed a girl obtained by
preference from the alien tribe of the Sioux, but among the Greeks there
is no evidence that the pigs were surrogates.
The _megara_ themselves are of some importance; the name still survives
in the modern Greek form Megara. _Megara_ appear to have been natural
clefts or chasms helped out later by art. As such they were at first the
natural places for rites intended to compel the earth; later they became
definite sanctuaries of earth divinities. In America, according to Mr
Lang’s account, Gypsies, Pawnees, and Shawnees bury the sacrifices they
make to the Earth Goddess in the earth, in natural crevices or artificial
crypts. In the sanctuary of Demeter, at Cnidos, Sir Charles Newton[314]
found a crypt which had originally been circular and later had been
compressed by earthquake. Among the contents were bones of pigs and other
animals, and the marble pigs which now stand near the Demeter of Cnidos
in the British Museum. It is of importance to note that Porphyry[315],
in his _Cave of the Nymphs_, says, that for the Olympian gods are set
up temples and images and altars (βωμούς), for the chthonic gods and
heroes hearths (ἐσχάραι), for those below the earth (ὑποχθονίοις) there
are trenches and _megara_. Philostratos[316], in his Life of Apollonius,
says, ‘The chthonic gods welcome trenches and ceremonies done in the
hollow earth.’
Eustathius[317] says that _megara_ are ‘underground dwellings of the two
goddesses,’ i.e. Demeter and Persephone, and he adds that ‘Aelian says
the word is μάγαρον not μέγαρον and that it is the place in which the
mystical sacred objects are placed.’ Unless this suggestion is adopted
the etymology of the word remains obscure[318]. The word itself, meaning
at first a cave-dwelling, lived on in the _megaron_ of kings’ palaces
and the temples of Olympian gods, and the shift of meaning marks the
transition from under to upper-world rites.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.]
Art has left us no certain representation of the Thesmophoria; but in the
charming little vase-painting from a lekythos in the National Museum at
Athens[319], a woman is represented sacrificing a pig. He is obviously
held over a trench and the three planted torches indicate an underworld
service. In her left hand the woman holds a basket, no doubt containing
_sacra_. There seems a reminiscence of the rites of the Thesmophoria,
though we cannot say that they are actually represented.
* * * * *
It is practically certain that the ceremonies of the burying and
resurrection of the pigs took place on the first day of the Thesmophoria
called variously the _Kathodos_ and the _Anodos_. It is further probable
from the name _Kalligeneia_, Fairborn, that on the third day took place
the strewing of the rotten flesh on the fields. The second, intervening
day, also called μέση, the middle day, was a solemn fast, _Nesteia_;
probably on this day the magical _sacra_ lay upon the altars where the
women placed them. The strictness of this fast made it proverbial. On
this day prisoners were released, the law courts were closed, the Boule
could not meet[320]. Athenaeus mentions the fast when he is discussing
different kinds of fish. One of the Cynics comes in and says: ‘My
friends too are keeping a fast as if this were the middle day of the
Thesmophoria since we are feasting like _cestreis_’; the _cestreus_ being
non-carnivorous.
[Illustration: FIG. 12.]
The women fasted sitting on the ground, and hence arose the aetiological
myth that Demeter herself, the desolate mother, fasted sitting on the
‘Smileless Stone.’ Apollodorus[321], in recounting the sorrows of
Demeter, says: ‘and first she sat down on the stone that is called after
her “Smileless” by the side of the “Well of Fair Dances.”’ The ‘Well of
Fair Dances’ has come to light at Eleusis, and there, too, was found a
curious monument[322] which shows how the Eleusinians made the goddess in
their own image. In fig. 12 we have a votive relief of the usual type,
a procession of worshippers bearing offerings to a seated goddess. But
the goddess is not seated goddess-fashion on a throne; she is the Earth
mother, and she crouches as the fasting women crouched on her own earth.
A passage in which Plutarch speaks of the women fasting is of great
importance for the understanding of the general gist of the festival.
In the discourse on Isis and Osiris[323] he is struck by the general
analogy of certain agricultural ceremonies in Egypt and Greece, and makes
the following instructive remarks: ‘How are we to deal with sacrifices
of a gloomy, joyless and melancholy character if it be not well either
to omit traditional ceremonies, or to upset our views about the gods or
confuse them by preposterous conjectures? And among the Greeks also many
analogous things take place about the same time of the year as that in
which the Egyptians perform their sacred ceremonies, e.g. at Athens _the
women fast at the Thesmophoria seated on the ground_, and the Boeotians
stir up the _megara_ of _Achaia_, calling that festival grievous
(ἐπαχθῆ), inasmuch as Demeter was in grief (ἐν ἄχει), on account of the
descent of her daughter. And that month about the rising of the Pleiades
is the month of sowing which the Egyptians call Athor, and the Athenians
Pyanepsion (bean month), and the Boeotians Damatrion. And Theopompos
relates that those who dwell towards the West account and call the Winter
Kronos, and the Summer Aphrodite, and the Spring Persephone, and from
Kronos and Aphrodite all things take their birth. And the Phrygians think
that in the Winter the god is asleep, and that in the Summer he is awake,
and they celebrate to him revels which in winter are Goings-to-sleep and
in summer Wakings-up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in winter the god
_is bound down_ and imprisoned, and in spring aroused and set free again.’
Whatever be the meaning of the difficult _Achaia_[324] Plutarch has hit
upon the truth. Common to all the peoples bordering on the Aegean and,
had he known it, to many another primitive race, were ceremonies of which
the gist was pantomime, the mimicking of nature’s processes, in a word
the ritual of sympathetic magic. The women fasted seated on the ground
because the earth was desolate; they rose and revelled, they stirred the
_megara_ to mimic the impulse of spring. Then when they knew no longer
why they did these things they made a goddess their protagonist.
Plutarch[325] has made for himself in his own image his ‘ideal’ Greek
gods, serene, cheerful, beneficent; but he is a close observer of facts,
and he sees there are ceremonies—‘sacrifices’ (θυσίαι) in his late
fashion he calls them—which are ‘mournful,’ ‘gloomy,’ ‘smileless.’ Who
and what are these gods who demand fasting and lamentation? He must
either blink the facts of acknowledged authorized ritual—this he cannot
and will not do, for he is an honest man—or he must confuse and confound
his conceptions of godhead. Caught on the horns of this dilemma he
betakes himself to comparative anthropology and notes analogies among
adjacent and more primitive peoples.
Of two other elements in the Thesmophoria we have brief notice from
the lexicographers. Hesychius[326] says of the word δίωγμα (pursuit),
‘a sacrifice at Athens, performed in secret by the women at the
Thesmophoria. The same was later called ἀποδίωγμα.’ From Suidas[327]
we learn that it was also called Χαλκιδικὸν δίωγμα, the ‘Chalcidian
pursuit,’ and Suidas of course gives a historical explanation. Only one
thing is clear, that the ceremony must have belonged to the general class
of ‘pursuit’ rituals which have already been discussed in relation to the
Thargelia.
The remaining ceremony is known to us only from Hesychius[328]. He says,
‘ζημία (penalty), a sacrifice offered on account of the things done at
the Thesmophoria.’
Of the Thesmophoria as celebrated at Eretria we are told two
characteristic particulars. Plutarch, in his _Greek Questions_[329],
asks, ‘Why in the Thesmophoria do the Eretrian women cook their meat
not by fire but by the sun, and why do they not invoke Kalligeneia?’ The
solutions suggested by Plutarch for these difficulties are not happy.
The use of the sun in place of fire is probably a primitive trait; in
Greece to-day it is not difficult to cook a piece of meat to a palatable
point on a stone by the rays of the burning midday sun, and in early days
the practice was probably common enough; it might easily be retained in
an archaic ritual. Kalligeneia also presents no serious difficulty, the
word means ‘fair-born’ or ‘fair-birth.’ It may be conjectured that the
reference was at first to the good crop produced by the rotten pigs’
flesh. With the growth of anthropomorphism the ‘good crop’ would take
shape as Kore the ‘fair-born,’ daughter of earth. Of such developments
more will be said when we discuss (p. 276) the general question of ‘the
making of a goddess.’ A conservative people such as the Eretrians seem to
have been would be slow to adopt any such anthropomorphic development.
Another particular as regards the Thesmophoria generally is preserved
for us by Aelian in his _History of Animals_[330]; speaking of the plant
_Agnos_ (the _Agnus castus_), he says, ‘In the Thesmophoria the Attic
women used to strew it on their couches and it (the _Agnos_) is accounted
hostile to reptiles.’ He goes on to say that the plant was primarily used
to keep off snakes, to the attacks of which the women in their temporary
booths would be specially exposed. Then as it was an actual preventive of
one evil it became a magical purity charm. Hence its name.
The pollution of death, like marriage, was sufficient to exclude the
women of the house from keeping the Thesmophoria. Athenaeus[331] tells us
that Democritus of Abdera, wearied of his extreme old age, was minded to
put an end to himself by refusing all food; but the women of his house
implored him to live on till the Thesmophoria was over in order that they
might be able to keep the festival; so he obligingly kept himself alive
on a pot of honey.
An important and easily intelligible particular is noted by Isaeus[332]
in his oration About the Estate of Pyrrhos. The question comes up, ‘Was
Pyrrhos lawfully married?’ Isaeus asks, ‘If he were married, would he not
have been obliged, on behalf of his lawful wife, to feast the women at
the Thesmophoria and to perform all the other customary dues in his deme
on behalf of his wife, his property being what it was?’ This is one of
the passages on which the theory has been based that the Thesmophoria was
a rite performed by married women only. It really points the other way;
a man when he married by thus obtaining exclusive rights over one woman
violated the old matriarchal usages and may have had to make his peace
with the community by paying the expenses of the Thesmophoria feast.
Before passing to the consideration of the etymology and precise meaning
of the word Thesmophoria, the other women festivals must be briefly
noted, i.e. the Arrephoria or Arretophoria, the Skirophoria or Skira, and
the Stenia.
ARREPHORIA, SKIROPHORIA, STENIA.
The scholiast on Lucian, as we have already seen, expressly notes that
the Arretophoria and Skirophoria were of similar content with the
Thesmophoria. Clement of Alexandria[333], a dispassionate witness,
confirms this view. ‘Do you wish,’ he asks, ‘that I should recount for
you the Flower-gatherings of Pherephatta and the basket, and the rape
by Aïdoneus, and the cleft of the earth, and the swine of Eubouleus,
swallowed down with the goddesses, on which account in the Thesmophoria
they cast down living swine in the _megara_? This piece of mythology
the women in their festivals celebrate in diverse fashion in the
city, dramatizing the rape of Pherephatta in diverse fashion in the
Thesmophoria, the Skirophoria, the Arretophoria.’
The Arretophoria or Arrephoria was apparently the Thesmophoria of the
unmarried girl. Its particular ritual is fairly well known to us from the
account of Pausanias. Immediately after his examination of the temple
of Athene Polias on the Athenian Acropolis, Pausanias[334] comes to the
temple of Pandrosos, ‘who alone of the sisters was blameless in regard
to the trust committed to them’: he then adds, ‘what surprised me very
much, but is not generally known, I will describe as it takes place. Two
maidens dwell not far from the temple of Polias: the Athenians call them
Arrephoroi, they are lodged for a time with the goddess, but when the
festival comes round they perform the following ceremony by night. They
put on their heads the things which the priestess of Athena gives them to
carry, but what it is she gives is known neither to her who gives nor to
them who carry. Now there is in the city an enclosure not far from the
sanctuary of Aphrodite, called Aphrodite in the Gardens, and there is a
natural underground descent through it. Down this way the maidens go.
Below they leave their burdens, and getting something else which is wrapt
up, they bring it back. These maidens are then discharged and others
brought to the Acropolis in their stead[335].’
From other sources some further details, for the most part insignificant,
are known. The girls were of noble family, they were four in number
and had to be between the ages of seven and eleven, and were chosen by
the Archon Basileus. They wore white robes and gold ornaments. To two
of their number was entrusted the task of beginning the weaving of the
peplos of Athene. Special cakes called ἀνάστατοι were provided for them,
but whether to eat or to carry as _sacra_ does not appear. It is more
important to note that the service of the Arrephoroi was not confined to
Athene and Pandrosos[336]. There was an Errephoros (_sic_) to Demeter
and Proserpine[337], and there were Hersephoroi (_sic_) of ‘Earth with
the title of Themis’ and of ‘Eileithyia in Agrae[338].’ Probably any
primitive woman goddess could have Arrephoria.
Much is obscure in the account of Pausanias; we do not know what the
precinct was to which the maidens went, nor where it was. It is possible
that Pausanias confused the later sanctuary of Aphrodite (in the gardens)
with the earlier sanctuary of the goddess close to the entrance of
the Acropolis. One thing, however, emerges clearly, the main gist of
the ceremonial was the carrying of unknown _sacra_. In this respect
we are justified in holding with Clement that the Arrephoria (held in
Skirophorion, June-July) was a parallel to the Thesmophoria.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.]
It is possible, I think, to go a step further. A rite frequently throws
light on the myth made to explain it. Occasionally the rite itself is
elucidated by the myth to which it gave birth. The maidens who carried
the sacred _cista_ were too young to know its holy contents, but they
might be curious, so a scare story was invented for their safeguarding,
the story of the disobedient sisters who opened the chest, and in horror
at the great snake they found there, threw themselves headlong from the
Acropolis. The myth is prettily represented on an amphora in the British
Museum[339], reproduced in fig. 13. The sacred chest stands on rude
piled stones that represent the rock of the Acropolis, the child rises
up with outstretched hand, Athene looks on in dismay and anger, and the
bad sisters hurry away. Erichthonios is here a human child with two great
snakes for guardians, but what the sisters really found, what the maidens
really carried, was a snake[340] and symbols like a snake. Snake and
child to the primitive mind are not far asunder; the Greek peasant of
to-day has his child quickly baptized, for till baptized he may at any
moment disappear in the form of a snake. The natural form for a human
hero to assume is, as will later be seen, a snake.
The little girl-Arrephoroi in ignorance, as became their age, carried the
same _sacra_ as the full-grown women in the Thesmophoria. The perfect
seemliness and reverence of the rite is shown by the careful precautions
taken. When goddesses began to take shape the _sacra_ were regarded, not
as mere magical charms, but as offerings as was meet to Ge, to Themis,
to Aphrodite, to Eileithyia, but always the carrying was a reverent
‘mystery.’
* * * * *
The Skira or Skirophoria[341] presents more difficulties. It was
specially closely associated with the Thesmophoria of which it may have
formed part. The chorus in the _Thesmophoriazusae_ of Aristophanes[342]
says, ‘If any of us bear a good citizen to the state, a taxiarch or
strategos, she ought to be rewarded by some honourable office, the
presidency ought to be given her at the Stenia and the Skira and at any
other of the feasts which we (women) celebrate.’ The scholiast remarks,
‘both were feasts of women; the Stenia took place before the two days of
the Thesmophoria on the 7th of Pyanepsion, and the Skira, some say, are
the sacred rites that took place on this feast (i.e. the Thesmophoria)
to Demeter and Kore. But others say that sacrifice was made ἐπὶ Σκίρῳ to
Athene.’ On the other hand in an inscription, usually a most trustworthy
authority, the two ceremonies are noted as separate though apparently
analogous. In the inscription in question[343] which is of the 4th
century B.C., certain regulations are enforced ‘when the feast of the
Thesmophoria takes place, and at the Plerosia, and at the Kalamaia and
the Skira, and if there is any other day on which the women congregate by
ancestral usage.’
The ancients themselves had raised the question whether the Skira were
sacred to Athene or to Demeter and Kore. This question is not really
relevant to our enquiry; Athene, as will be seen later, when the ‘making
of a goddess’ is discussed, is simply ἡ Ἀθηναία κόρη, the κόρη, the
_maiden of Athens_, and any festival of any Kore—any maiden—would early
attach itself to her.
More important is the question, What does the word σκίρα mean? Two
solutions are offered. The scholiast on Aristophanes[344] says σκίρον
means the same as σκιάδειον, umbrella, and the feast and the month took
that name from the fact that at a festival of Demeter and Kore on the
12th of Skirophorion, the priest of Erechtheus carried a white umbrella.
A white umbrella is a slender foundation for a festival, but the element
of white points in the right direction. The scholiast on the _Wasps_ of
Aristophanes[345] commenting on σκῖρον has a happier thought: he says a
certain sort of white earth, like gypsum, is called σκιρράς, and Athene
is called Σκιρράς inasmuch as she is daubed with white, from a similarity
in the name.
The same notion of white earth appears in the notice of the _Etymologicon
Magnum_ on the month _Skirophorion_, ‘the name of a month among the
Athenians; it is so called from the fact that in it Theseus carried
σκίραν by which is meant gypsum. For Theseus, coming from the Minotaur,
made an Athene of gypsum, and carried it and as he made it in this month
it is called Skirophorion.’
But, it will be asked, supposing it be granted that Skira means things
made of gypsum and Skirophoria the carrying of such things, what, in
the name of common sense, has this to do with a festival of women
analogous to the Thesmophoria? Dr A. Mommsen[346], who first emphasized
this etymology, proposes that the white earth was used as manure; this,
though possible and ingenious, seems scarcely satisfactory. I would
suggest another connection. The scholiast on Lucian has told us that
the surrogates deposited in the _megara_ were shaped out of paste made
of grain. Is it not possible that the Σκίρα were such surrogates made
of gypsum alone or part gypsum, part flour-paste? That such a mixture
was manufactured for food we learn from Pliny[347]. In discussing
the preparation of _alica_ from _zea_ (spelt) he says, ‘astonishing
statement, it is mixed with chalk.’ In the case of a coarse sort of _zea_
from Africa, the mixture was made in the proportion of a quarter of
gypsum to three of _zea_. If this suggestion be correct, the Skirophoria
is simply a summer Thesmophoria.
If the Skirophoria must, all said, remain conjectural, the gist of the
Stenia is clear and was understood by the ancients themselves. Photius
remarks on _Stenia_—‘a festival at Athens in which the Anodos of Demeter
is held to take place. At this festival, according to Euboulos, the women
abuse each other by night.’ Hesychius[348] explains in like fashion and
adds: στηνιῶσαι, ‘to use bad language,’ ‘to abuse.’ According to him
they not only abused each other but ‘made scurrilous jests.’ Such abuse,
we know from Aristophanes[349], was a regular element of the licence of
the Thesmophoria. The _Gephyrismoi_, the jokes at the bridge, of the
Eleusinian Mysteries, will occur to every one: similar in content is the
stone-throwing, the Lithobolia of Damia and Auxesia.
It is interesting to note that in the primitive festivals of the Romans,
the same scurrility contests appear. At the ancient feast of the _Nonae
Capratinae_, Plutarch[350] tells us, ‘the women are feasted in the fields
in booths made of fig-tree branches, and the servant-maids run about and
play; afterwards they come to blows and throw stones at one another.’
The servant-maids represent here as elsewhere a primitive subject
population; they live during the festival in booths as the women did at
the Thesmophoria. How precisely this fight and this scurrility serve the
end proposed, the promotion of fertility, is not wholly clear, but the
throwing of stones, the beating and fighting, all look like the expulsion
of evil influences. The scurrilous and sometimes to our modern thinking
unseemly gestures savour of sympathetic magic, an intent that comes out
clearly in the festival of the Haloa, the discussion of which must be
reserved to the end.
* * * * *
We come next to the all-absorbing question, What is the derivation,
the real root-meaning of the term _Thesmophoria_ and the title
_Thesmophoros_? The orthodox explanation of the Thesmophoria is that it
was the festival of Demeter Thesmophoros, the law-carrier or law-giver.
With Demeter, it is said, came in agriculture, settled life, marriage
and the beginnings of civilized law. This is the view held by the
scholiast on Theocritus[351]. In commenting on various sacred plants,
which promoted chastity, he adds, ‘It was a law among the Athenians that
they should celebrate the Thesmophoria yearly, and the Thesmophoria is
this: women who are virgins and have lived a holy life, on the day of
the feast, place certain customary and holy books on their heads, and as
though to perform a liturgy they go to Eleusis.’
The scholiast gives himself away by the mention of Eleusis. He confuses
the two festivals in instructive fashion, and clearly is reconstructing a
ritual out of a cultus epithet. Happily we know from the other and better
informed scholiast[352] that the women carried at the Thesmophoria not
books but pigs. How then came the pigs and other _sacra_ to be Thesmoi?
Dr Frazer proposes a solution. He suggests that the _sacra_, including
the pigs, were called θεσμοί, because they were ‘the things laid down.’
The women were called Thesmophoroi because they carried ‘the things laid
down’; the goddess took her name from her ministrants.
This interpretation is a great advance on the derivation from
Thesmophoros, Law-giver. Thesmophoros is scarcely the natural form for
law-_giver_, which in ordinary Greek appears as Thesmothetes. Moreover
the form Thesmophoros _must_ be connected with actual _carrying_
and must also be connected with what we know _was_ carried at the
Thesmophoria. But Thesmoi in Greek did certainly mean _laws_, and Demeter
_Thesmophoros_ was in common parlance supposed to be Law-giver. What we
want is a derivation that will combine both factors, the notion of law as
well as the carrying of pigs.
In the light of Dr Verrall’s new explanation of Anthesteria (p. 48) such
a derivation may be found. If the Anthesteria be the festival of the
charming up, the magical revocation of souls, may not the Thesmophoria
be the festival of the carrying of the _magical sacra_? To regard the
θεσμοί, whether they are pigs or laws, as simply ‘things laid down,’
deriving them from the root θε, has always seemed to me somewhat frigid.
The root θεσ is more vivid and has the blood of religion, or rather
magic, in its veins. Although it came, when man entered into orderly and
civilized relations with his god, to mean ‘pray,’ in earlier days it
carried a wider connotation, and meant, I think, to perform any kind of
magical ceremonies. Is not θέσκελος alive with magic?
THE CURSE AND THE LAW.
But what has law, sober law, to do with magic? To primitive man, it
seems, everything. Magic is for cursing or for blessing, and in primitive
codes it would seem there was no commandment without cursing. The curse,
the ἀρά, is of the essence of the law. The breaker of the law is laid
under a ban. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ was the first commandment
‘with promise.’ Law in fact began at a time long before the schism of
Church and State, or even of Religion and Morality. There was then no
such thing as ‘civil’ law. Nay more, it began in the dim days when
religion itself had not yet emerged from magic, in the days when, without
invoking the wrath of a righteous divinity, you could yet ‘put a curse’
upon a man, bind him to do his duty by magic and spells.
Primitive man, who thought he could constrain the earth to be fertile by
burying in it fertile objects, by ‘sympathetic magic,’ was sure to think
he could in like fashion compel his fellow. Curse tablets deposited in
graves and sanctuaries have come to light in thousands; but before man
learnt to write his curse, to spell out the formulary καταδῶ, ‘I bind you
down,’ he had a simpler and more certain plan. In a grave in Attica was
found a little lead figure[353] which tells its own tale. It is too ugly
for needless reproduction, but it takes us into the very heart of ancient
malignant magic. The head of the figure has been wrenched off, both
arms are tightly swathed behind the back, and the legs in like fashion;
right through the centre of the body has been driven a great nail. Dr
Wünsch[354], in publishing the figure, compares the story recorded of a
certain St Theophilos[355] ‘who had his feet and hands bound by magic.’
The saint sought relief in vain, till he was told in a dream to go out
fishing, and what the fishermen drew up would cure him of his malady.
They let down the net and drew up a bronze figure, bound hand and foot
and with a nail driven through the hand: they drew out the nail and the
saint immediately recovered.
The _locus classicus_ on ancient magic and spells is of course the
second Idyll of Theocritus[356], on Simaetha the magician. Part of her
incantation may be quoted here because a poet’s insight has divined the
strange fierce loveliness that lurks in rites of ignorance and fear,
rites stark and desperate and non-moral as the passion that prompts them.
Delphis has forsaken her, and in the moonlight by the sea Simaetha makes
ready her magic gear:
‘Lo! Now the barley smoulders in the flame.
Thestylis, wretch! thy wits are woolgathering!
Am I a laughing-stock to thee, a Shame?
Scatter the grain, I say, the while we sing,
“The bones of Delphis I am scattering.”
_Bird[357], magic Bird, draw the man home to me._
Delphis sore troubled me. I, in my turn,
This laurel against Delphis will I burn.
It crackles loud, and sudden down doth die,
So may the bones of Delphis liquefy.
_Wheel, magic Wheel, draw the man home to me._
Next do I burn this wax, God helping me,
So may the heart of Delphis melted be.
This brazen wheel I whirl, so, as before
Restless may he be whirled about my door.
_Bird, magic Bird, draw the man home to me._
Next will I burn these husks. O Artemis,
Hast power hell’s adamant to shatter down
And every stubborn thing. Hark! Thestylis,
Hecate’s hounds are baying up the town,
The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong.
...
Lo, now the sea is still. The winds are still.
The ache within my heart is never still.’
The incantations of Simaetha are of course a private rite to an
individual end. That the practice of such rites was very frequent long
before the decadent days of Theocritus is clear from the fact that
Plato[358] in the _Laws_ regards it as just as necessary that his ideal
state should make enactments against the man who tries to slay or injure
another by magic, as against him who actually does definite physical
damage. His discussion of the two kinds of evil-doing is curious and
instructive, both as indicating the prevalence of sorcery in his days,
and as expressing the rather dubious attitude of his own mind towards
such practices. ‘There are two kinds of poisoning in use among men, the
nature of which forbids any clear distinction between them. There is the
kind of which we have just now spoken, and which is the injury of one
body by another in a natural and normal way, but the other kind injures
by sorceries and incantations and magical bindings as they are called
(καταδέσεσι), and this class induces the aggressors to injure others as
much as is possible, and persuades the sufferers that they more than any
other are liable to be damaged by this power of magic. Now it is not easy
to know the whole truth about such matters, nor if one knows it is one
likely to be able lightly to persuade others. When therefore men secretly
suspect each other at the sight of, say, waxen images fixed either at
their doors or at the crossways or at the tombs of their parents, it
is no good telling them to make light of such things because they know
nothing certain about them.’ Evidently Plato is not quite certain as
to whether there _is_ something in witchcraft or not: a diviner or a
prophet, he goes on to admit, may really know something about these
secret arts. Anyhow, he is clear that they are deleterious and should be
stamped out if possible, and accordingly, any one who injures another
either by magical bindings (καταδέσεσιν) or by magical inductions
(ἐπαγωγαῖς) or by incantations (ἐπῳδαῖς) or by another form of magic is
to die.
The scholiast[359] on the Idyll of Theocritus just quoted knows that one
at least of the magical practices of Simaetha was also part of public
ritual:
‘The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong.’
Hecate is magically _induced_, yet her coming is feared. The clash of
the bronze gong is apotropaic. The scholiast says that ‘they sound the
bronze at eclipses of the moon ... because it has power to purify and
to drive off pollutions. Hence, as Apollodorus states in his treatise
_Concerning the Gods_, bronze was used for all purposes of consecration
and purgation.’ Apollodorus also stated that ‘at Athens, the Hierophant
of her who had the title of Kore sounded what was called a gong.’ It was
also the custom ‘to beat on a cauldron when the king of the Spartans
died.’ All the ceremonies noted, relating to eclipses, to Kore and to
the death of the Spartan king, are on _public_ occasions, and all are
apotropaic, directed against ghosts and sprites. Metal in early days,
when it is a novelty, is apt to be magical. The _din_ (κρότος) made by
the women when they took down the _sacra_, whether it was a clapping of
hands or of metal, is of the same order. The snakes are feared as hostile
demons. These apotropaic rites are not practised against the Olympians,
against Zeus and Apollo, but against sprites and ghosts and the
divinities of the underworld, against Kore and Hecate. These underworld
beings were at first dreaded and exorcised, then as a gentler theology
prevailed, men thought better of their gods, and ceased to exorcise
them as demons, and erected them into a class of ‘spiritual beings who
preside over curses.’ Pollux[360] has a brief notice of such divinities.
He says ‘those who resolve curses are called “Protectors from evil
spirits,” Who-send-away, Averters, Loosers, Putters-to-flight; those who
impose curses are called gods or goddesses of Vengeance, Gods of Appeal,
Exactors.’ The many adjectival titles are but so many descriptive names
for the ghost that cries for vengeance.
The ‘curse that binds,’ the κατάδεσμος, throws light on another element
that went to the making of the ancient notion of sacrifice. The
formula[361] in cursing was sometimes καταδῶ ‘I bind down,’ but it was
also sometimes παραδίδωμι ‘I give over.’ The person cursed or bound
down was in some sense a gift or sacrifice to the gods of cursing, the
underworld gods: the man stained by blood is ‘consecrate’ (καθιερωμένος)
to the Erinyes. In the little sanctuary of Demeter at Cnidos[362] the
curse takes even more religious form. He or she dedicates (ἀνιεροῖ),
or offers as a votive offering (ἀνατίθημι, for ἀνατίθησι), and finally
we have the familiar ἀνάθεμα of St Paul. Here the services of cursing,
the rites of magic and the underworld are half way to the service of
‘tendance,’ the service of the Olympians, and we begin to understand why,
in later writers, the pharmakos and other ‘purifications’ are spoken of
as θυσίαι. It is one of those shifts so unhappily common to the religious
mind. Man wants to gain his own ends, to gratify his own malign passion,
but he would like to kill two birds with one stone, and as the gods are
made in his own image, the feat presents no great difficulty. Later as
he grows gentler himself, he learns to pray only ‘good prayers,’ _bonas
preces_[363].
The curse (ἀρά) on its religious side developed into the vow[364] and
the prayer (εὐχή), on its social side into the ordinance (θεσμός) and
ultimately into the regular law (νόμος); hence the language of early
legal formularies still maintains as necessary and integral the sanction
of the curse. The formula is not ‘do this’ or ‘do not do that,’ but
‘cursed be he who does this, or does not do that.’
One instance may be selected, the inscription characteristically known as
‘the Dirae of Teos[365].’ The whole is too long to be transcribed, a few
lines must suffice.
‘Whosoever maketh baneful drugs against the Teans, whether against
individuals or the whole people:
‘_May he perish, both he and his offspring._
‘Whosoever hinders corn from being brought into the land of the Teans,
either by art or machination, whether by land or sea, and whosoever
drives out what has been brought in:
‘_May he perish, both he and his offspring._’
So clause after clause comes the refrain of cursing, like the tolling of
a bell, and at last as though they could not have their fill, comes the
curse on the magistrate who fails to curse:
‘Whosoever of them that hold office doth not make this cursing, what time
he presides over the contest at the Anthesteria and the Herakleia and the
Dia, let him be bound by an overcurse (ἐν τῇ ἐπάρῃ ἔχεσθαι), and whoever
either breaks the stelae on which the cursing is written, or cuts out the
letters or makes them illegible:
‘_May he perish, both he and his offspring._’
It is interesting to find here that the curses were recited at the
Anthesteria, a festival of ghosts, and the Herakleia, an obvious hero
festival, and at the Dia—this last surely a festival of imprecation like
the Diasia.
On the strength of these _Dirae_ of Teos, recited at public and primitive
festivals, it might not be rash to conjecture that at the Thesmophoria
some form of θεσμοί or binding spells was recited as well as carried.
This conjecture becomes almost a certainty when we examine an important
inscription[366] found near Pergamos and dealing with the regulations
for mourning in the city of Gambreion in Mysia. The mourning laws of
the ancients bore harder on women than on men, a fact explicable not by
the general lugubriousness of women, nor even by their supposed keener
sense of convention, but by those early matriarchal conditions in which
relationship naturally counted through the mother rather than the father.
Women, the law in question enacts, are to wear dark garments; men if
they ‘did not wish to do this’ might relax into white; the period of
mourning is longer for women than for men. Next follows the important
clause: ‘the official who superintends the affairs of women, who has
been chosen by the people at the purifications that take place _before
the Thesmophoria_, is to invoke blessings on the men who abide by the
law and the women who obey the law that they may happily enjoy the goods
they possess, but on the men who do not obey and the women who do not
abide therein he is to invoke the contrary, and such women are to be
accounted impious, and it is not lawful for them to make any sacrifice
to the gods for the space of ten years, and the steward is to write up
this law on two stelae and set them up, the one _before the doors of the
Thesmophorion_, the other before the temple of Artemis Lochia.’
From the _Thesmophoriazusae_ of Aristophanes we learn almost nothing
of the ritual of the Thesmophoria, save the fact that the feast was
celebrated on the Pnyx[367]: but the fashion in which the woman-herald
prays is worth noting; she begins by a real prayer[368]:
‘I bid you pray to Gods and Goddesses
That in Olympus and in Pytho dwell
And Delos, and to all the other gods.’
But when she comes to what she really cares about, she breaks into the
old habitual curse formularies:
‘If any plots against the cause of Woman
Or peace proposes to Euripides
Or to the Medes, or plots a tyranny,
Or if a female slave in her master’s ear
Tells tales, or male or female publican
Scants the full measure of our legal pint—
_Curse him that he may miserably perish,_
_He and his house_,—but for the rest of you
Pray that the gods may give you all good things.’
It is of interest to find that not only were official curses written
up at the doors of a Thesmophorion, but, at Syracuse, an oath of
special sanctity ‘the great oath’ was taken there. Plutarch[369] tells
us that when Callippus was conspiring against his friend Dion, the
wife and sister of Dion became suspicious. To allay their suspicions,
Callippus offered to give any pledge of his sincerity they might desire.
They demanded that he should take ‘the great oath’ (ὀμόσαι τὸν μέγαν
ὅρκον). ‘Now the great oath was after this wise. The man who gives this
pledge has to go to _the temenos of the Thesmophoroi_, and after the
performance of certain sacred ceremonies, he puts on him the purple
robe of the goddess, and taking a burning torch he denies the charge
on oath’ (ἀπόμνυσι). It is clear that this ‘great oath’ was some form
of imprecation on the oath-taker, who probably by putting on the robe,
dedicated himself in case of perjury to the goddess of the underworld.
That the goddess was Kore we know from the fact that Callippus eventually
forswore himself in sacrilegious fashion by sacrificing his victim on the
feast of the _Koreia_, ‘the feast of the goddess by whom he had sworn.’
The curse is the dedication or devotion of others; the oath, like its
more concrete form the ordeal, is the dedication of the curser himself.
The connection between primitive law and agriculture seems to have been
very close. The name of the earliest laws recorded—they are rather
precepts than in our sense laws—the ‘Ploughman’s Curses’ speaks for
itself. Some of these Ploughman’s Curses are recorded. We are told by
one of the ‘Writers of Proverbs[370]’ that ‘the Bouzyges at Athens, who
performs the sacred ploughing, utters many other curses and also curses
those who do not share water and fire as a means of subsistence and
those who do not show the way to those who have lost it.’ Other similar
precepts, no doubt sanctioned by similar curses, have come down to us
under the name of the Thrice-Plougher _Triptolemos_[371], the first
lawgiver of the Athenians. He bade men ‘honour their parents, rejoice the
gods with the fruits of the earth and not injure animals.’ Perhaps these
were to the Greeks the first commandments ‘with promise.’
Such are the primitive precepts that grow up in a community which
agriculture has begun to bind together with the ties of civilized life.
In the days before curses were graven in stone and perhaps for long
after, it was well that when the people were gathered together for sowing
or for harvest, these salutary curses should be recited. Amid the decay
of so much that is robust and primitive, it is pleasant to remember that
in the Commination Service of our own Anglican Church with its string of
holy curses annually recited
‘_They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do._’
THE HALOA.
The consideration of the _Haloa_ has been purposely reserved to the
end for this reason. The rites of the Thesmophoria, Skirophoria and
Arrephoria are carried on by women only, and when they come to be
associated with divinities at all, they are regarded as ‘sacred to’
Demeter and Kore or to analogous women goddesses Ge, Aphrodite,
Eileithyia and Athene. Moreover the _sacra_ carried are cereal cakes and
nephalia: but the rites of the _Haloa_, though indeed mainly conducted
by women, and sacred in part to Demeter, contain a new element, that of
wine, and are therefore in mythological days regarded as ‘sacred to’ not
only Demeter but Dionysos.
On this point an important scholion[372] to Lucian is explicit. The
Haloa is ‘a feast at Athens containing mysteries of Demeter and Kore and
Dionysos on the occasion of the cutting of the vines and the tasting of
the wine made from them.’ Eustathius[373] states the same fact. ‘There
is celebrated, according to Pausanias, a feast of Demeter and Dionysos
called the Haloa.’ He adds, in explaining the name, that at it they were
wont to carry first-fruits from Athens to Eleusis and to sport upon
the threshing-floors, and that at the feast there was a procession of
Poseidon. At Eleusis, Poseidon was not yet specialized into a sea-god
only; he was _Phytalmios_, god of plants, and as such, it will be later
seen (p. 427), his worship was easily affiliated to that of Dionysos.
The affiliation of the worship of the corn-goddess to that of the
wine-god is of the first importance. The coming of Dionysos brought a new
spiritual impulse to the religion of Greece, an impulse the nature of
which will later be considered in full, and it was to this new impulse
that the Eleusinian mysteries owed, apart from political considerations
which do not concern us, their ultimate dominance. Of these mysteries the
Haloa is, I think, the primitive prototype.
As to the primitive gist of the Haloa, there is no shadow of doubt:
the name speaks for itself. Harpocration[374] rightly explains the
festival, ‘the Haloa gets its name, according to Philochorus, from
the fact that people hold sports at the _threshing-floors_, and he
says it is celebrated in the month Poseideon.’ The sports held were of
course incidental to the business of threshing, but it was these sports
that constituted the actual festival. To this day the great round
threshing-floor that is found in most Greek villages is the scene of the
harvest festival. Near it a booth (σκηνή) is to this day erected, and
in it the performers rest and eat and drink in the intervals of their
pantomimic dancing.
The Haloa was celebrated in the month Poseideon (December-January), a
fact as surprising as it is ultimately significant. What has a threshing
festival to do with mid-winter, when all the grain should be safely
housed in the barns? Normally, now as in ancient days, the threshing
follows as soon as may be after the cutting of the corn; it is threshed
and afterwards winnowed in the _open_ threshing-floor, and mid-winter is
no time even in Greece for an open-air operation.
The answer is simple. The shift of date is due to Dionysos. The rival
festivals of Dionysos were in mid-winter. He possessed himself of the
festivals of Demeter, took over her threshing-floor and compelled the
anomaly of a winter threshing festival. The latest time that a real
threshing festival could take place is Pyanepsion, but by Poseideon it is
just possible to have an early _Pithoigia_ and to revel with Dionysos.
There could be no clearer witness to the might of the incoming god.
As to the nature of the Haloa we learn two important facts from
Demosthenes. It was a festival in which the priestess, not the
Hierophant, presented the offerings, a festival under the presidency of
women; and these offerings were bloodless, no animal victim (ἱερεῖον)
was allowed. Demosthenes[375] records how a Hierophant, Archias by name,
‘was cursed because at the Haloa he offered on the _eschara_ in the court
of Eleusis burnt sacrifice of an animal victim brought by the courtezan
Sinope.’ His condemnation was on a double count, ‘it was not lawful on
that day to sacrifice an animal victim, and the sacrifice was not his
business but that of the priestess.’ The epheboi[376] offered bulls at
Eleusis, and, it would appear, engaged in some sort of ‘bull fight[377],’
but this must have been in honour either of Dionysos or of Poseidon who
preceded him: the _vehicle_ of both these divinities was the bull. It
was the boast of the archon at the Haloa that Demeter had given to men
‘gentle foods.’
Our fullest details of the Haloa, as of the Thesmophoria, come to us from
the newly discovered scholia on Lucian[378]. From the scholiast’s account
it is clear that by his day the festival was regarded as connected with
Dionysos as much as, or possibly more than, with Demeter. He definitely
states that it was instituted in memory of the death of Ikarios after
his introduction of the vine into Attica. The women he says celebrated
it alone, in order that they might have perfect freedom of speech. The
sacred symbols of both sexes were handled, the priestesses secretly
whispered into the ears of the women present words that might not be
uttered aloud, and the women themselves uttered all manner of what seemed
to him unseemly quips and jests. The _sacra_ handled are, it is clear,
the same as those of the Thesmophoria: that their use and exhibition were
carefully guarded is also clear from the exclusion of the other sex. The
climax of the festival, it appears, was a great banquet. ‘Much wine was
set out and the tables were full of all the foods that are yielded by
land and sea, save only those that are prohibited in the mysteries, I
mean the pomegranate and the apple and domestic fowls, and eggs and red
sea-mullet and black-tail and crayfish and shark. The archons prepare the
tables and leave the women inside and themselves withdraw and remain
outside, making a public statement to the visitors present that the
“gentle foods” were discovered by them (i.e. the people of Eleusis) and
by them shared with the rest of mankind. And there are upon the tables
cakes shaped like the symbols of sex. And the name Haloa is given to the
feast on account of the fruit of Dionysos—for the growths of the vine are
called _Aloai_.’
The materials of the women’s feast are interesting. The diet prescribed
is of cereals and of fish and possibly fowl, but clearly not of flesh.
As such it is characteristic of the old Pelasgian population before
the coming of the flesh-eating Achaeans. Moreover—a second point of
interest—it is hedged in with all manner of primitive taboos. The precise
_reason_ of the taboo on pomegranates, red mullet and the like, is lost
beyond recall, but some of the particular taboos are important because
they are strictly paralleled in the Eleusinian mysteries. That the
pomegranate was ‘taboo’ at the Eleusinian mysteries is clear from the
aetiological myth in the Homeric hymn to Demeter[379]. Hades consents to
let Persephone return to the upper air.
‘So spake he, and Persephone the prudent up did rise
Glad in her heart and swift to go. But he in crafty wise
Looked round and gave her stealthily a sweet pomegranate seed
To eat, that not for all her days with Her of sable-weed,
Demeter, should she tarry.’
The pomegranate was dead men’s food, and once tasted drew Persephone back
to the shades. Demeter admits it; she says[380] to Persephone:
‘If thou hast tasted food below, thou canst not tarry here,
Below the hollow earth must dwell the third part of the year.’
Porphyry[381] in his treatise on _Abstinence from Animal Food_, notes
the reason and the rigour of the Eleusinian taboos. Demeter, he says,
is a goddess of the lower world and they consecrate the cock to her.
The word he uses, ἀφιέρωσαν, really means put under a _taboo_. We are
apt to associate the cock with daylight and his early morning crowing,
but the Greeks for some reason regarded the bird as chthonic. It is a
cock, Socrates remembers, that he owes to Asklepios, and Asklepios, it
will be seen when we come to the subject of hero-worship, was but a
half-deified hero. The cock was laid under a taboo, reserved, and then
came to be considered as a sacrifice. Porphyry goes on ‘It is because of
this that the mystics abstain from barndoor fowls. And at Eleusis public
proclamation is made that men must abstain from barndoor fowls, from fish
and from beans, and from the pomegranate and from apples, and to touch
these defiles as much as to touch a woman in child-birth or a dead body.’
The Eleusinian Mysteries were in their enactments the very counterpart of
the Haloa.
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES.
The Eleusinian Mysteries[382] are usually treated as if they were a thing
by themselves, a ceremony so significant, so august, as to stand apart
from the rest of Greek Ritual. If my view be correct, they are primarily
but the Eleusinian _Haloa_: all their ultimate splendour and spiritual as
well as social prestige are due to two things, first the fact that Athens
for political purposes made them her own, second that at some date we
cannot exactly fix, they became affiliated to the mysteries of Dionysos.
To Athens the mysteries owe their external magnificence, to Dionysos
and Orpheus their deep inward content. The external magnificence, being
non-religious, does not concern us; the deep inward content, the hope
of immortality and the like are matters of cardinal import, but must
stand over till a later chapter, after the incoming of Dionysos has
been discussed. For the present what concerns us is, setting aside all
vague statements and opinions as to the meaning and spiritual influence
attributed by various authors, ancient and modern, to the mysteries, to
examine the actual ritual facts of which evidence remains.
Mysteries were by no means confined to the religion of Demeter and
Kore. There were mysteries of Hermes, of Iasion, of Ino, of Archemoros,
of Agraulos, of Hecate. In general mysteries seem to occur more
usually in relation to the cult of women divinities[383], of heroines
and earth-goddesses; from the worship of the Olympians in Homer they
are markedly absent. In general, by a mystery is meant _a rite in
which certain sacra are exhibited, which cannot be safely seen by the
worshipper till he has undergone certain purifications_.
The date of the mysteries at Eleusis is fortunately certain. The
ceremonies began on the 13th of Boedromion, i.e. about the end of
September, an appropriate date for any harvest festival which was
to include the later fruits and notably the grape. Our evidence for
this date is an imperial Roman inscription[384], but this inscription
expressly states that its enactments are ‘according to ancient
usage.’ ‘The people has decided to order the Kosmeter of the Epheboi
in accordance with ancient usage to send them to Eleusis on the 13th
day of Boedromion, in their customary dress, for the procession that
accompanies the _sacra_, in order that on the 14th they may escort them
to the Eleusinion which is at the foot of the Acropolis. Also to order
the Kosmeter of the Epheboi to conduct them on the 19th to Eleusis in
the same dress, escorting the _sacra_.’ The inscription is of great
importance, as it is clear evidence that _sacra_ were part of the regular
ritual. What precisely these _sacra_ were we do not know; presumably they
were objects like those in use at the Thesmophoria. The going to and
fro from Eleusis to Athens is purely political. The _sacra_ were really
resident at Eleusis, but Athens liked to think she brought them there.
The Epheboi _escorted_ the _sacra_, but, as was fitting, they were really
in charge of, and actually carried by, _priestesses_[385].
On the 15th of Boedromion took place the ἀγυρμός or assembling of the
candidates for initiation, and the proclamation by the Hierophant in
the Stoa Poikile interdicting those whose hands were defiled and those
whose lips spoke unintelligible words[386]. Some such interdiction,
some ‘fencing of the tables,’ took place in all probability before
all mysteries. It is this _prorrhesis_ of course that is parodied by
Aristophanes in the _Frogs_[387], who actually dares to put his burlesque
into the mouth of the Hierophant himself.
The 16th of Boedromion saw the accomplishment of a rite of cardinal
importance. The day was called in popular parlance ‘ἅλαδε μύσται,’ ‘To
the sea ye mystics,’ from the cry that heralded the act of purification.
Hesychius[388] in commenting on the expression says ‘a certain day of the
Mysteries at Athens.’ Polyaenus[389] is precise as to the date. He says
‘Chabrias won the sea-fight at Naxos on the 16th of Boedromion. He had
felt that this was a good day for a battle, because it was one of the
days of the Great Mysteries. The same thing happened with Themistocles
against the Persians at Salamis. But Themistocles and his troops had
the “Iacchos” for their call, while Chabrias and his troops had “To
the sea ye mystics.”’ The victory of Chabrias was won, as we know from
Plutarch[390], at the full moon, and at the full moon the Mysteries were
celebrated.
The procession to the sea was called by the somewhat singular name
ἔλασις, ‘driving’ or ‘banishing[391],’ and the word is instructive. The
procession was not a mere procession, it was a driving out, a banishing.
This primary sense seems to lurk in the Greek word πομπή[392], which in
primitive days seems to have mainly meant a conducting out, a sending
away of evil. The bathing in the sea was a purification, a conducting
out, a banishing of evil, and each man took with him his own pharmakos, a
young pig. The ἔλασις, the driving, may have been literally the driving
of the pig, which, as the goal was some 6 miles distant, must have
been a lengthy and troublesome business. Arrived at the sea, each man
bathed with his pig—the pig of purification was itself purified. When
in the days of Phocion[393] the Athenians were compelled to receive a
Macedonian garrison, terrible portents appeared. When the ribbons with
which the mystic beds were wound came to be dyed, instead of taking
a purple colour they came out of a sallow death-like hue, which was
the more remarkable as when it was the ribbons belonging to private
persons that were dyed, they came out all right. And more portentous
still—‘when a mystic was bathing his pig in the harbour called Kantharos,
a sea-monster ate off the lower part of his body, by which the god made
clear beforehand that they would be deprived of the lower parts of the
city that lay near the sea, but keep the upper portion.’
[Illustration: FIG. 14.]
The pig of purification was a ritual element, so important that when
Eleusis was permitted (B.C. 350-327) to issue her autonomous coinage[394]
it is the pig that she chooses as the sign and symbol of her mysteries.
The bronze coin in fig. 14 shows the pig standing on the torch: in
the _exergue_ an ivy spray. The pig was the cheapest and commonest of
sacrificial animals, one that each and every citizen could afford.
Socrates in the _Republic_[395] says ‘if people are to hear shameful and
monstrous stories about the gods it should be only rarely and to a select
few in a mystery, and they should have to sacrifice not a (mere) pig but
some huge and unprocurable victim.’
Purification, it is clear, was an essential feature of the mysteries, and
this brings us to the consideration of the meaning of the word mystery.
The usual derivation of the word is from μύω, I close the apertures
whether of eyes or mouth. The _mystes_, it is supposed, is the person
vowed to secrecy who has not seen and will not speak of the things
revealed. As such he is distinguished from the _epoptes_ who has seen,
but equally may not speak; the two words indicate successive grades of
initiation. It will later be seen (p. 480) that in the Orphic Mysteries
the word _mystes_ is applied, without any reference to seeing or not
seeing, to a person who has fulfilled the rite of eating the raw flesh
of a bull. It will also be seen that in Crete, which is probably the
home of the mysteries, the mysteries were open to all, they were not
mysterious. The derivation of mystery from μύω, though possible, is not
satisfactory. I would suggest another and a simple origin.
The ancients themselves were not quite comfortable about the connection
with μύω. They knew and felt that _mystery_, secrecy, was not the main
gist of ‘a mystery’: the essence of it all primarily was purification
in order that you might safely eat and handle certain _sacra_. There
was no revelation, no secret to be kept, only a mysterious _taboo_ to
be prepared for and finally overcome. It might be a _taboo_ on eating
first-fruits, it might be a taboo on handling magical _sacra_. In the
Thesmophoria, the women fast before they touch the _sacra_; in the
Eleusinian mysteries you sacrifice a pig before you offer and partake of
the first-fruits. The gist of it all is purification. Clement[396] says
significantly, ‘Not unreasonably among the Greeks in their mysteries do
ceremonies of purification hold the initial place, as with barbarians
the bath.’ Merely as an insulting conjecture Clement[397] in his
irresponsible abusive fashion throws out what I believe to be the real
origin of the word _mystery_. ‘I think,’ he says, ‘that these orgies and
mysteries of yours ought to be derived, the one from the wrath (ὀργή) of
Demeter against Zeus, the other from the pollution (μύσος) relating to
Dionysos.’ Of course Clement is formally quite incorrect, but he hits on
what seems a possible origin of the word _mystery_, that it is the doing
of what relates to a μύσος, a pollution, it is primarily a ceremony of
purification. Lydus[398] makes the same suggestion, ‘Mysteries,’ he says,
‘are from the separating away of a pollution (μύσος) as equivalent to
sanctification.’
The bathing with the pig was not the only rite of purification in
the mysteries, though it is the one of which we have most definite
detail. From the aetiology[399] of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, we may
conjecture that there were, at least for children, rites of purification
by passing through fire, and ceremonies of a mock fight or stone-throwing
(λιθοβολία, βαλλητύς). All have the same intent and need not here be
examined in detail.
On the night of the 19-20th[400] the procession of purified mystics,
carrying with them the image of Iacchos, left Athens for Eleusis, and
after that we have no evidence of the exact order of the various rites
of initiation. The exact order is indeed of little importance. Instead
we have recorded what is of immeasurably more importance, the precise
formularies in which the mystics avowed the rites in which they had taken
part, rites which we are bound to suppose constituted the primitive
ceremony of initiation.
Before these are examined it is necessary to state definitely what
already has been implied, i.e. the fact that at the mysteries there was
an offering of first-fruits; the mysteries were in fact the _Thargelia_
of Eleusis. An inscription[401] of the 5th century B.C. found at Eleusis
is our best evidence. ‘Let the Hierophant and the Torch-bearer command
that at the mysteries the Hellenes should offer first-fruits of their
crops in accordance with ancestral usage.... To those who do these things
there shall be many good things, both good and abundant crops, whoever
of them do not injure the Athenians, nor the city of Athens, nor the two
goddesses.’ The order of precedence is amusing and characteristic. Here
we have indeed a commandment with promise.
The ‘token’ or formulary by which the mystic made confession is preserved
for us by Clement[402] as follows: ‘_I fasted, I drank the kykeon, I took
from the chest, (having tasted?) I put back into the basket and from the
basket into the chest_.’ The statement involves, in the main, two acts
besides the preliminary fast, i.e. the drinking of the kykeon and the
handling of certain unnamed _sacra_.
It is significant of the whole attitude of Greek religion that the
confession is not a confession of dogma or even faith, but an avowal of
ritual acts performed. This is the measure of the gulf between ancient
and modern. The Greeks in their greater wisdom saw that uniformity in
ritual was desirable and possible; they left a man practically free
in the only sphere where freedom is of real importance, i.e. in the
matter of thought. So long as you fasted, drank the _kykeon_, handled
the _sacra_, no one asked what were your opinions or your sentiments in
the performance of those acts; you were left to find in every sacrament
the only thing you could find—what you brought. Our own creed is mainly
a _Credo_, an utterance of dogma, formulated by the few for the many,
but it has traces of the more ancient conception of _Confiteor_, the
avowal of ritual acts performed. _Credo in unam sanctam catholicam
et apostolicam ecclesiam_ is immediately followed by _Confiteor unum
baptismum_, though the instinct of dogma surges up again in the final
words _in remissionem peccatorum_.
The preliminary fast before the eating of sacred things is common to most
primitive peoples; it is the simplest negative form of purification:
among the more logical savages it is often accompanied by the taking
of a powerful emetic. The _kykeon_ requires a word of explanation. The
first-fruits at Eleusis were presented in the form of a _pelanos_[403].
The nature of a _pelanos_ has already been discussed, and the fact noted
that the word _pelanos_ was used only of the half-fluid mixture offered
to the gods. Its equivalent for mortals was called _alphita_ or sometimes
_kykeon_. Eustathius in commenting on the drink prepared by Hekamede
for Nestor, a drink made of barley and cheese and pale honey and onion
and Pramnian wine, says that the word _kykeon_ meant something between
meat and drink, but inclining to be like a sort of soup that you could
sup. Such a drink it was that in the Homeric Hymn Metaneira prepared for
Demeter, only with no wine, for Demeter, as an underworld goddess ‘might
not drink red wine’: and such a wineless drink, made in all probability
from the _pelanos_ and only differing from it in name, was set before the
mystae.
Some ceremony like the drinking of the _kykeon_ is represented in the
vase-painting[404] in fig. 15. Two worshippers, a man and a woman, are
seated side by side; before them a table piled with food, beneath it a
basket of loaves. They are inscribed _Mystae_ (Μυστα). A priest holding
in the left hand twigs and standing by a little shrine, offers to them a
cylix containing some form of drink. The presence of the little shrine
has made some commentators see in the priest an itinerant quack priest
(ἀγύρτης), but it is quite possible that shrines of this kind containing
sacra were carried at the Eleusinian mysteries. Anyhow the scene depicted
is analogous.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.]
Of the actual _sacra_ which the initiated had to take from the chest,
place in the basket, and replace in the chest, we know nothing. The
_sacra_ of the Thesmophoria are known, those of the Dionysiac mysteries
were of trivial character, a ball, a mirror, a cone, and the like: there
is no reason to suppose that the _sacra_ of the Eleusinian mysteries were
of any greater intrinsic significance.
Clement[405] in a passage preceding that already quoted gives the
Eleusinian ‘tokens,’ with slightly different wording and with two
additional clauses: he says ‘the symbols of this initiation are, I ate
from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the _kernos_, I
passed beneath the _pastos_.’ The scholiast[406] on Plato’s _Gorgias_
makes a similar statement. He says ‘at the lesser mysteries many
disgraceful things were done, and these words were said by those who
were being initiated: I ate from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal,
I carried the _kernos_’; he further adds by way of explanation ‘the
_kernos_ is the _liknon_ or _ptuon_,’ i.e. it is some form of winnowing
fan.
There has been much and, I think, needless controversy as to whether this
form of the tokens belongs to the mysteries at Eleusis or not. From the
words that precede Clement’s statement, a mention of Attis, Kybele and
the Korybants, it is quite clear that he has in his mind the mysteries
of the Great Mother of Asia Minor, but from his mentioning Demeter also,
it is also clear that he does not exactly distinguish between the two.
The mention of the ‘tokens’ by the scholiast on Plato is expressly made
with reference to the Lesser Mysteries, and these, it will later (Chap.
X) be seen, are related especially to Kore and Dionysos. The whole
confusion rests on the simple mythological fact that Demeter and Cybele
were but local forms of the Great Mother worshipped under diverse names
all over Greece. Wherever she was worshipped she had mysteries, the
timbrel and the cymbal came to be characteristic of the wilder Asiatic
Mother, but the Mother at Eleusis also clashed the brazen cymbals. In her
‘tokens’ however her mystics ate from the _cista_ and the basket, but the
distinction is a slight one.
The question of the _kernos_ is of some interest. The scholiast states
that the _kernos_ was a winnowing fan, and the winnowing fan we shall
later see (p. 548) was, at least in Alexandrine days, used in the
mysteries of Eleusis. It was a simple agricultural instrument taken
over and mysticized by the religion of Dionysos. From Athenaeus[407]
however we learn of another kind of _kernos_. In his discussion of the
various kinds of cups and their uses he says: ‘_Kernos_, a vessel made
of earthenware, having in it many little cups fastened to it, in which
are white poppies, wheat, barley, pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils; and he
who carries it after the fashion of the carrier of the _liknon_, tastes
of these things, as Ammonius relates in his third book On Altars and
Sacrifices.’ A second and rather fuller notice of the _kernos_ is given
by Athenaeus[408] a little later in discussing the _kotylos_. ‘Polemon
in his treatise “On the Dian Fleece” says, “And after this he performs
the rite and takes it from the chamber and distributes it to those who
have borne the _kernos_ aloft.”’ Then follows an amplified list of
the contents of the _kernos_. The additions are italicized: ‘_sage_,
white poppies, wheat, barley, pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils, _beans_,
_spelt_, _oats_, _a cake_, _honey_, _oil_, _wine_, _milk_, _sheep’s wool
unwashed_.’
The list of the παγκαρπία, the offering of all fruits and natural
products, is in some respects a primitive one: the unwashed wool reminds
us of the simple offering made by Pausanias at the cave of Demeter at
Phigalia; but there are late additions, the manufactured olive oil and
wine. Demeter in early days would assuredly never have accepted wine.
The _kernos_, like the offerings it contained, is comparatively late
and complex. Vessels exactly corresponding to the description given by
Athenaeus have been found in considerable numbers in the precinct at
Eleusis, both vessels meant for use and others obviously votive. In
the accounts[409] of the officials at Eleusis for the year 408-7 B.C.
there is mention of a vessel called κέρχνος, which in all probability is
identical with the _kernos_ of Athenaeus. The shape and purport of the
vessel are clearly seen in the very perfect specimen[410] in fig. 16.
Such a vessel might well be called a _separator_; each of the little
_kotyliskoi_ attached would contain a sample of the various grains and
products. It is easy to see how the scholiast might explain it as a
_liknon_. The _liknon_ was an implement for winnowing, _separating_
grain from chaff, the _kernos_ a vessel in which various sorts of grain
could be kept _separate_. The _Kernophoria_ was nothing but a late and
elaborate form of the offering of first-fruits. In the simple primaeval
form of the Mysteries as certified by the tokens, we have but two
elements, the presentation and tasting of first-fruits and the handling
of _sacra_. All later accretions will be discussed in the chapter on
Orphic Mysteries.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.]
In discussing the Anthesteria (p. 42) mention has already been made of
a rite which, according to Athenaeus[411], took place on the final day
of the Mysteries. On this day, which took its name from the rite, two
vessels called _plemochoae_ are emptied, one towards the east, the other
towards the west, and at the moment of outpouring a mystic formulary was
pronounced. Athenaeus explains that a _plemochoè_ was an earthenware
vessel ‘shaped like a top but standing secure on its basis’: it seems to
have been a vessel in general use for the service of the underworld, for
he quotes a play called _Peirithous_ in which one of the characters said:
‘That these _plemochoai_ with well-omened words
We may pour down into the chthonian chasm.’
What the mystic formulary was we cannot certainly say, but it is tempting
to connect the libation of the _plemochoè_ with a formulary recorded
by Proclus[412]. He says ‘In the Eleusinian mysteries, looking up to
the sky they cried aloud “Rain,” and looking down to earth they cried
“Be fruitful.”’ The simplicity of the solemn little prayer cannot be
reproduced in English. It was a fitting close to rites so primitive.
Last of all, over those who had been initiated were uttered, if we may
trust Hesychius[413], the mysterious words Κὸγξ ὄμπαξ.
* * * * *
It remains to resume the results of the last four chapters. It has been
seen in examining four of the great public festivals of Athens, the
Diasia, the Anthesteria, the Thargelia, the Thesmophoria, that neither
their names, nor primarily their ritual, were concerned with the worship
of the Olympian gods to whom the festivals were ostensibly dedicated.
When the nature of that ritual was examined, it was seen to consist not
in sacrifice like that paid to the Olympians, which was of the nature of
_tendance_ and might be embodied in the formula _do ut des_, but rather
of ceremonies of _aversion_ based on ignorance and fear. Its formula was
_do ut abeas_. In the Anthesteria the ceremonies known as ἐναγισμοί were
seen to be purifications (καθαρμοί), and by purifications were meant
placations of Keres, of ghosts and sprites. In the Thargelia the ceremony
of the pharmakos was seen to be also a purification, but in the sense
not of the placation or riddance of ghosts and sprites but of a magical
cleansing from physical evil. In the Thesmophoria the ceremony with the
pigs was preceded by ceremonies of purification, and was in itself of
magical intent. Moreover the element of cursing and _devotion_ was seen
to lie at the root of the later notion of _consecration_. To these three
festivals, taken from the three seasons of the agricultural year, has
now been added the rite of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the gist of which
has been shown to be purification as preliminary to the handling of
magical _sacra_ and to the partaking of first-fruits.
The only just way of understanding the religious notions of a particular
race is to examine the terminology of the language of that race. Our
modern notion of ancient religion is largely summed up by the word
‘sacrifice.’ We are too apt to ask ‘what was the nature of sacrifice
among the Greeks?’ If we follow the lead of their language instead of
imposing our language on them, it is abundantly clear that sacrifice,
with all our modern connotations of vicarious expiation and of mystical
communion, they had not. All the ancient ceremonies, so far considered,
point to a thought simpler and nowise less beautiful or less deeply
religious, and that thought is _purification_. Purification practically
unknown to Olympian worship is the keynote of the lower stratum.
It is all important that this should be clearly and emphatically stated
at this point in order that the sequel may be intelligible. When the
new impulse connected with the names of Dionysos and Orpheus entered
Greece, it left aside the great and popular Olympian system embodied in
the formula _do ut des_, and, by a true instinct, fastened on an element
which, if in some respects it was lower, was truer to fact and had in it
higher possibilities, a religion that recognized evil, though mainly in
physical form, and that sought for purification.
The essence of that new religion was, as will later be shown, the belief
that man could become god: the new ritual feature it introduced, a
feature wholly lacking in the old uneaten ‘sacrifices,’ was mystical
communion by the eating of the body of the god. But, because man was
mortal, there was mortality to be purged away; and hence, although with a
new faith and hope, men reverted to the old ritual of purification.
So much by anticipation; but before we come to the study of the new
impulse it is necessary to leave ritual and turn to theology, which is
in fact mythology: the rites have been considered, and now in the next
three chapters something must be said of the beings worshipped,—at first
in vague shifting outlines as ghosts and sprites,—later crystallized into
clear shapes as goddesses and gods.
CHAPTER V.
THE DEMONOLOGY OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES AND BOGEYS.
‘ὦ μεγάλαυχοι καὶ φθερσιγενεῖς
Κῆρες Ἐρινύες.’
In the preceding chapters the nature of Greek ritual has been discussed.
The main conclusion that has emerged is that this ritual in its earlier
phases was mainly characterized by a tendency to what the Greeks called
ἀποτροπή, i.e. the turning away, the _aversion_ of evil. This tendency
was however rarely quite untouched by an impulse more akin to our modern
notion of worship, the impulse to θεραπεία, i.e. the induction, the
fostering of good influences.
Incidentally we have of course gathered something of the nature of the
objects of worship. When the ritual was not an attempt at the direct
impulsion of nature, we have had brief uncertain glimpses of sprites
and ghosts and underworld divinities. It now remains to trace with more
precision these vague theological or demonological or mythological
outlines, to determine the character of the beings worshipped and
something of the order of their development.
In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to formulate
than in ritual. Ritual, i.e. what men _did_, is either known or not
known; what they meant by what they did—the connecting link between
ritual and theology—can sometimes be certainly known, more often
precariously inferred. Still more hazardous is the attempt to determine
how man thought of the objects or beings to whom his ritual was
addressed, in a word what was his theology, or, if we prefer the term,
his mythology.
At the outset one preliminary caution is imperative. Our minds are
imbued with current classical mythology, our imagination peopled with
the vivid personalities, the clear-cut outlines of the Olympian gods;
it is only by a somewhat severe mental effort that we realize the fact
essential to our study that _there were no gods at all_, that what we
have to investigate is not so many actual facts and existences but only
conceptions of the human mind, shifting and changing colour with every
human mind that conceived them. Art which makes the image, literature
which crystallizes attributes and functions, arrest and fix this shifting
kaleidoscope; but, until the coming of art and literature and to some
extent after, the formulary of theology is ‘all things are in flux’
(πάντα ῥεῖ).
Further, not only are we dealing solely with conceptions of the human
mind, but often with conceptions of a mind that conceived things in a
fashion alien to our own. There is no greater bar to that realizing of
mythology[414] which is the first condition of its being understood, than
our modern habit of clear analytic thought. The very terms we use are
sharpened to an over nice discrimination. The first necessity is that
by an effort of the sympathetic imagination we should think back the
‘many’ we have so sharply and strenuously divided, into the haze of the
primitive ‘one.’
Nor must we regard this haze of the early morning as a deleterious mental
fog, as a sign of disorder, weakness, oscillation. It is not confusion
or even synthesis; rather it is as it were a protoplasmic fulness and
forcefulness not yet articulate into the diverse forms of its ultimate
births. It may even happen, as in the case of the Olympian divinities,
that articulation and discrimination sound the note of approaching
decadence. As Maeterlinck[415] beautifully puts it, _la clarté parfaite
n’est-elle pas d’ordinaire le signe de la lassitude des idées?_
There is a practical reason why it is necessary to bear in mind this
primary fusion, though not confusion, of ideas. Theology, after
articulating the one into the many and diverse, after a course of
exclusive and determined discrimination, after differentiating a number
of departmental gods and spirits, usually monotheizes, i.e. resumes the
many into the one. Hence, as will be constantly seen, _mutatis mutandis_,
a late philosophizing author is often of great use in illustrating a
primitive conception: the multiform divinity of an Orphic Hymn is nearer
to the primitive mind than the clear-cut outlines of Homer’s Olympians.
* * * * *
In our preliminary examination of Athenian festivals we found underlying
the Diasia the worship of a snake, underlying the Anthesteria the
revocation of souls. In the case of the Thesmophoria we found magical
ceremonies for the promotion of fertility addressed as it would seem
directly to the earth itself: in the Thargelia we had ceremonies of
purification not primarily addressed to any one. In the Diasia and
Anthesteria only was there clear evidence of some sort of definite being
or beings as the object of worship. The meaning of snake-worship will
come up for discussion later (p. 326), for the present we must confine
ourselves to the theology or demonology of the beings worshipped in the
Anthesteria, the Keres, sprites, or ghosts, and the theological shapes
into which they are developed and discriminated.
THE KER AS GHOST AND SPRITE.
That the Keres dealt with in the Anthesteria—‘worshipped’ is of course
too modern a word—were primarily ghosts, admits, in the face of the
evidence previously adduced (pp. 43, 44), of no doubt. That in the
fifth century B.C. they were thought of as little winged sprites the
vase-painting in fig. 7 clearly shows, and to it might be added the
evidence of countless other Athenian white lekythi where the _eidolon_ or
ghost is shown fluttering about the grave. But to the ancients _Keres_
was a word of far larger and vaguer connotation than our modern _ghosts_,
and we must grasp this wider connotation if we would understand the later
developments of the term.
Something of their nature has already appeared in the apotropaic
precautions of the Anthesteria. Pitch was smeared on the doors to catch
them, cathartic buckthorn was chewed to eject them; they were dreaded
as sources of evil; they were, if not exactly evil spirits, certainly
spirits that brought evil: else why these precautions? Plato has this in
his mind when he says[416] ‘There are many fair things in the life of
mortals, but in most of them there are as it were adherent Keres which
pollute and disfigure them.’ Here we have not merely a philosophical
notion, that there is a soul of evil in things good, but the reminiscence
surely of an actual popular faith, i.e. the belief that Keres, like a
sort of personified bacilli, engendered corruption and pollution[417].
To such influences all things mortal are exposed. Conon[418] in telling
the story of the miraculous head of Orpheus (p. 468) says that when it
was found by the fisherman ‘it was still singing, nor had it suffered
any change from the sea nor any other of the outrages that human Keres
inflict on the dead, but it was still blooming and bleeding with fresh
blood.’ Conon is of course a late writer, and full of borrowed poetical
phrases, but the expression human Keres (ἀνθρώπιναι κῆρες) is not
equivalent to the Destiny of man, it means rather sources of corruption
inherent in man.
[Illustration: FIG. 17.]
In fig. 7 we have seen a representation of the harmless Keres, the souls
fluttering out of the grave-pithos. Fortunately ancient art has also left
us a representation of a baleful Ker. The picture in fig. 17 is from a
pelike[419] found at Thisbe and now in the Berlin Museum[420]. Heracles,
known by his lion skin and quiver, swings his rudely hewn club (κλάδος)
against a tiny winged figure with shrivelled body and distorted ugly
face. We might have been at a loss to give a name to his feeble though
repulsive antagonist but for an Orphic Hymn to Heracles[421] which ends
with the prayer:
‘Come, blessed hero, come and bring allayments
Of all diseases. Brandishing thy club,
Drive forth the baleful fates; with poisoned shafts
Banish the noisome Keres far away.’
The primitive Greek leapt by his religious imagination to a forecast of
the truth that it has taken science centuries to establish, i.e. the fact
that disease is caused by little live things, germs—bacilli we call them,
he used the word Keres. A fragment of the early comic poet Sophron[422]
speaks of Herakles throttling Hepiales. Hepiales must be the demon of
nightmare, well known to us from other sources and under various confused
names as Ephialtes, Epiales, Hepialos. The _Etymologicon Magnum_[423]
explains ‘Hepialos’ as a shivering fever and ‘a daimon that comes upon
those that are asleep.’ It has been proposed to regard the little winged
figure which Herakles is clearly taking by the throat as Hepiales[424],
demon of nightmare, rather than as a Ker. The question can scarcely be
decided, but the doubt is as instructive as any certainty. Hepiales is a
disease caused by a Ker; i.e. it is a special form of Ker, the nightmare
bacillus. Blindness also was caused by a Ker, as was madness; hence
the expression ‘casting a black Ker on their eyes[425].’ Blindness and
madness, blindness of body and spirit are scarcely distinguished, as in
the blindness of Oedipus; both come of the Keres-Erinyes.
To the primitive mind all diseases are caused by, or rather _are_, bad
spirits. Porphyry[426] tells us that blisters are caused by evil spirits
which come at us when we eat certain food and settle on our bodies.
He goes to the very heart of ancient religious ‘aversion’ when he adds
that it is on account of this that purifications are practised, _not
in order that we may induce the presence of the gods, but that these
wretched things may keep off_. He might have added, it is on account of
these bad spirits that we fast; indeed ἁγνεία, the word he uses, means
abstinence as well as purity. Eating is highly dangerous because you
have your mouth open and a Ker may get in. If a Ker should get in when
you are about to partake of specially holy food there will naturally be
difficulties. So argues the savage. Porphyry being a vegetarian says that
these bad spirits specially delight in blood and impurities generally
and they ‘creep into people who make use of such things.’ If you kept
about you holy plants with strong scents and purging properties, like rue
and buckthorn, you might keep the Keres away, or, if they got in, might
speedily and safely eject them.
The physical character of the Keres, their connection with ‘the lusts of
the flesh,’ comes out very clearly in a quaint moralising poem preserved
by Stobaeus and attributed to Linos. It deals with the dangers of Keres
and the necessity for meeting them by ‘purification.’ Its ascetic tone
and its attribution to Linos probably point to Orphic origin. It runs as
follows[427]:
‘Hearken to these my sayings, zealously lend me your hearing
To the simple truth about all things. Drive far away the disastrous
Keres, they who destroy the herd of the vulgar and fetter
All things around with curses manifold. Many and dreadful
Shapes do they take to deceive. But keep them far from thy spirit,
Ever watchful in mind. This is the purification
That shall rightly and truly purge thee to sanctification
(If but in truth thou hatest the baleful race of the Keres),
And most of all thy belly, the giver of all things shameful,
For desire is her charioteer and she drives with the driving of
madness.’
It is commonly said that diseases are ‘personified’ by the Greeks. This
is to invert the real order of primitive thought. It is not that a
disease is realized as a power and then turned into a person, it is that
primitive man seems unable to conceive of any force except as resulting
from some person or being or sprite, something a little like himself.
Such is the state of mind of the modern Greek peasant who writes Χολέρα
with a capital letter. Hunger, pestilence, madness, nightmare have each a
sprite behind them; _are_ all sprites.
Of course, as Hesiod[428] knew, there were ancient golden days when these
sprites were not let loose, when they were shut up safe in a cask and
‘Of old the tribes of mortal men on earth
Lived without ills, aloof from grievous toil
And catching plagues which Keres gave to men[429].’
But alas!
‘The woman with her hands took the great lid
From off the cask and scattered them, and thus
Devised sad cares for mortals. Hope alone
Remained therein, safe held beneath the rim,
Nor flitted forth, for she thrust to the lid[430].’
Who the woman was and why she opened the jar will be considered later (p.
283); for the moment we have only to note what manner of things came out
of it. The account is strange and significant. She shut the cask too late:
‘For other myriad evils wandered forth
To man, the earth was full, and full the sea.
Diseases, that all round by day and night
Bring ills to mortals, hovered, self-impelled,
Silent, for Zeus the Counsellor their voice
Had taken away[431].’
Proclus understands that these silent ghostly insidious things _are_
Keres, though he partly modernizes them. He says in commenting on the
passage, ‘Hesiod gives them (i.e. the diseases) bodily form making them
approach without sound, showing that even of these things spirits are the
guardians, sending invisibly the diseases decreed by fate and scattering
the Keres in the cask.’ After the manner of his day he thinks the Keres
were presided over by spirits, that they were diseases sent by spirits,
but primitive man believes the Keres _are_ the spirits, _are_ the
diseases. Hesiod himself was probably not quite conscious that the jar or
pithos was the great grave-jar of the Earth-mother Pandora (p. 286), and
that the Keres were ghosts. ‘Earth,’ says Hesiod, ‘was full and full the
sea.’ This crowd of Keres close-packed is oddly emphasized in a fragment
by an anonymous poet[432]:
‘Such is our mortal state, ill upon ill,
And round about us Keres crowding still;
No chink of opening
Is left for entering.’
This notion of the swarm of unknown unseen evils hovering about men
haunts the lyric poets, lending a certain primitive reality to their
vague mournful pessimism. Simonides of Amorgos[433] seems to echo Hesiod
when he says ‘hope feeds all men’—but hope is all in vain because of the
imminent demon host that work for man’s undoing, disease and death and
war and shipwreck and suicide.
‘No ill is lacking, Keres thousand-fold
Mortals attend, woes and calamities
That none may scape.’
Here and elsewhere to translate ‘Keres’ by fates is to make a
premature abstraction. The Keres are still physical actual things not
impersonations. So when Aeschylus[434] puts into the mouth of his Danaid
women the prayer
‘Nor may diseases, noisome swarm,
Settle upon our heads, to harm
Our citizens,’
the ‘noisome swarm’ is no mere ‘poetical’ figure but the reflection of a
real primitive conviction of live pests.
The little fluttering insect-like diseases are naturally spoken of for
the most part in the plural, but in the _Philoctetes_ of Sophocles[435]
the festering sore of the hero is called ‘an ancient Ker’; here again
the usage is primitive rather than poetical. Viewing the Keres ‘as
little inherent physical pests,’ we are not surprised to learn from
Theognis[436] that
‘For hapless man wine doth two Keres hold—
Limb-slacking Thirst, Drunkenness overbold.’
Nor is it man alone who is beset by these evil sprites. In that
storehouse of ancient superstition, the Orphic _Lithica_[437], we hear of
Keres who attack the fields. Against them the best remedy is the Lychnis
stone, which was also good to keep off a hailstorm.
‘Lychnis, from pelting hail be thou our shield,
Keep off the Keres who attack each field.’
And Theophrastus[438] tells us that each locality has its own Keres
dangerous to plants, some coming from the ground, some from the air,
some from both. Fire also, it would seem, might be infested by Keres.
A commentator on Philo says that it is important that no profane fire,
i.e. such as is in ordinary use, should touch an altar because it may be
contaminated by myriads of Keres[439]. Instructive too is the statement
of Stesichorus[440], who according to tradition ‘called the Keres by
the name Telchines.’ Eustathius in quoting the statement of Stesichorus
adds as explanatory of Keres τὰς σκοτώσεις: the word σκοτώσεις is late
and probably a gloss, it means darkening, killing, eclipse physical
and spiritual. Leaving the gloss aside, the association of Keres with
Telchines is of capital interest and takes us straight back into the
world of ancient magic. The Telchines were the typical magicians of
antiquity, and Strabo[441] tells us that one of their magic arts was to
‘besprinkle animals and plants with the water of Styx and sulphur mixed
with it, with a view to destroy them.’
Thus the Keres, from being merely bad influences inherent and almost
automatic, became exalted and personified into actual magicians.
Eustathius in the passage where he quotes Stesichorus allows us to see
how this happened. He is commenting on the ancient tribe of the Kouretes:
these Kouretes, he says, were Cretan and also called Thelgines (_sic_),
and they were sorcerers and magicians. ‘Of these there were two sorts:
one sort craftsmen and skilled in handiwork, the other sort pernicious
to all good things; these last were of fierce nature and were fabled to
be the origins of squalls of wind, and they had a cup in which they used
to brew magic potions from roots. They (i.e. the former sort) invented
statuary and discovered metals, and they were amphibious and of strange
varieties of shape, some were like demons, some like men, some like
fishes, some like serpents; and the story went that some had no hands,
some no feet, and some had webs between their fingers like geese. And
they say that they were blue-eyed and black-tailed.’ Finally comes the
significant statement that _they perished struck down by the thunder of
Zeus or by the arrows of Apollo_. The old order is slain by the new. To
the imagination of the conqueror the conquered are at once barbarians
and magicians, monstrous and magical, hated and feared, craftsmen and
medicine men, demons, beings endowed like the spirits they worship, in a
word Keres-Telchines[442]. When we find the good, fruitful, beneficent
side of the Keres effaced and ignored we must always remember this fact
that we see them through the medium of a conquering civilization[443].
THE KERES OF OLD AGE AND DEATH.
By fair means or foul, by such ritual procedures as have already been
noted, by the chewing of buckthorn, the sounding of brass, the making
of comic figures, most of the Keres could be kept at bay; but there were
two who waited relentless, who might not be averted, and these were Old
Age and Death. It is the thought that these two Keres are waiting that
with the lyric poets most of all overshadows the brightness of life.
Theognis[444] prays to Zeus:
‘Keep far the evil Keres, me defend
From Old Age wasting, and from Death the end.’
These haunting Keres of disease, disaster, old age and death
Mimnermus[445] can never forget:
‘We blossom like the leaves that come in spring,
What time the sun begins to flame and glow,
And in the brief span of youth’s gladdening
Nor good nor evil from the gods we know,
But always at the goal black Keres stand
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death within her hand.
And all the fruit of youth wastes, as the Sun
Wastes and is spent in sunbeams, and to die
Not live is best, for evils many a one
Are born within the soul. And Poverty
Has wasted one man’s house with niggard care,
And one has lost his children. Desolate
Of this his earthly longing, he must fare
To Hades. And another for his fate
Has sickness sore that eats his soul. No man
Is there but Zeus hath cursed with many a ban.
Here is the same dismal primitive faith, or rather fear. All things are
beset by Keres, and Keres are all evil. The verses of Mimnermus are of
interest at this point because they show the emergence of the two most
dreaded Keres, Old Age and Death, from the swarm of minor ills. Poverty,
disease and desolation are no longer definitely figured as Keres. The
vase-painter shows this fact in a cruder form. On a red-figured amphora
(fig. 18) in the Louvre[446] Herakles is represented lifting his club
to slay a shrivelled ugly little figure leaning on a stick—the figure
obviously is an old man. Fortunately it is inscribed γῆρας. It is not
an old man, but Old Age itself, the dreaded Ker. The representation is
a close parallel to Herakles slaying the Ker in fig. 17. The Ker of Old
Age has no wings: these the vase-painter rightly felt were inappropriate.
It is in fact a Ker developed one step further into an impersonation.
The vase may be safely dated as belonging to about the middle of the 5th
century B.C. It is analogous in style, as in subject, to an amphora[447]
in the British Museum bearing the love-name Charmides.
[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
Gradually the meanings of Ker became narrowed down to one, to the
great evil, death and the fate of death, but always with a flitting
remembrance that there were Keres of all mortal things. This is the
usage most familiar to us, because it is Homeric. Homer’s phraseology
is rarely primitive—often fossilized—and the regularly recurring ‘Ker
of death[448]’ (κὴρ θανάτοιο) is heir to a long ancestry. In Homer we
catch the word Ker at a moment of transition; it is half death, half
death-spirit. Odysseus[449] says
‘Death and the Ker avoiding, we escape,’
where the two words death and Ker are all but equivalents: they are both
death and the sprite of death, or as we might say now-a-days death and
the angel of death. Homer’s conception so dominates our minds that the
custom has obtained of uniformly translating ‘Ker’ by fate, a custom that
has led to much confusion of thought.
Two things with respect to Homer’s usage must be borne in mind. First,
his use of the word Ker is, as might be expected, far more abstract
and literary than the usage we have already noted. It is impossible to
say that Homer has in his mind anything of the nature of a tiny winged
bacillus. Second, in Homer Ker is almost always defined and limited by
the genitive θανάτοιο, and this looks as though, behind the expression,
there lay the half-conscious knowledge that there were Keres of other
things than death. Ker itself is _not_ death, but the two have become
well-nigh inseparable.
Some notion of the double nature, good and bad, of Keres seems to survive
in the expression two-fold Keres (διχθάδιαι Κῆρες). Achilles[450] says:
‘My goddess-mother silver-footed Thetis
Hath said that Keres two-fold bear me on
To the term of death.’
It is true that both the Keres are carrying him deathward, but there is
strongly present the idea of the diversity of fates. The English language
has in such cases absolutely no equivalent for Ker, because it has no
word weighted with the like associations.
In one passage only in the Iliad[451], i.e. the description of the shield
of Achilles, does a Ker actually appear in person, on the battlefield:
‘And in the thick of battle there was Strife
And Clamour, and there too the baleful Ker.
She grasped one man alive, with bleeding wound,
Another still unwounded, and one dead
She by his feet dragged through the throng. And red
Her raiment on her shoulders with men’s blood.’
A work of art, it must be remembered, is being described, and the feeling
is more Hesiodic than Homeric. The Ker is in this case not a fate but a
horrible she-demon of slaughter.
THE KER AS HARPY AND WIND-DEMON.
In Homer the Keres are no doubt mainly death-spirits, but they have
another function, they actually _carry off_ the souls to Hades. Odysseus
says[452]:
‘Howbeit him Death-Keres carried off
To Hades’ house.’
It is impossible here to translate Keres by ‘fates,’ the word is too
abstract: the Keres are πρόσπολοι, angels, messengers, death-demons,
souls that carry off souls.
[Illustration: FIG. 19.]
The idea that underlies this constantly recurring formulary, κῆρες
ἔβαν θανάτοιο φέρουσαι, emerges clearly when we come to consider those
analogous apparitions, the Harpies. The Harpies betray their nature
clearly in their name, in its uncontracted form ‘Ἀρεπυια,’ which
appears on the vase-painting in fig. 19; they are the Snatchers, winged
women-demons, hurrying along like the storm wind and carrying all things
to destruction. The vase-painting in fig. 19 from a large black-figured
vessel in the Berlin Museum[453] is specially instructive because, though
the winged demons are inscribed as Harpies, the scene of which they form
part, i.e. the slaying of Medusa, clearly shows that they are Gorgons;
so near akin, so shifting and intermingled are the two conceptions. On
another vase (fig. 20), also in the Berlin Museum[454], we see an actual
Gorgon with the typical Gorgon’s head and protruding tongue performing
the function of a Harpy, i.e. of a Snatcher. We say ‘an actual Gorgon,’
but it is not a Gorgon of the usual form but a bird-woman with a Gorgon’s
head. The bird-woman is currently and rightly associated with the Siren,
a creature to be discussed later (p. 197), a creature malign though
seductive in Homer, but gradually softened by the Athenian imagination
into a sorrowful death angel.
[Illustration: FIG. 20.]
[Illustration: FIG. 21.]
The tender bird-women of the so-called ‘Harpy tomb’ from Lycia (fig. 21),
now in the British Museum, perform the functions of a Harpy, but very
gently. They are at least near akin to the sorrowing Sirens on Athenian
tombs. We can scarcely call them by the harsh name of the ‘Snatchers.’
And yet, standing as it did in Lycia, this ‘Harpy tomb’ may be the
outcome of the same stratum of mythological conceptions as the familiar
story of the daughters of the Lycian Pandareos. Penelope[455] in her
desolation cries aloud:
‘Would that the storm might snatch me adown its dusky way
And cast me forth where Ocean is outpour’d with ebbing spray,
As when Pandareos’ daughters the storm winds bore away,’
and then, harking back, she tells the ancient Lycian story of the fair
nurture of the princesses and how Aphrodite went to high Olympus to plan
for them a goodly marriage. But whom the gods love die young:
‘Meantime the Harpies snatched away the maids, and gave them o’er
To the hateful ones, the Erinyes, to serve them evermore[456].’
Early death was figured by the primitive Greek as a snatching away by
evil death-demons, storm-ghosts. These snatchers he called Harpies, the
modern Greek calls them Nereids. In Homer’s lines we seem to catch the
winds as snatchers, half-way to their full impersonation as Harpies.
To give them a capital letter is to crystallize their personality
prematurely. Even when they become fully persons, their name carried to
the Greek its adjectival sense now partly lost to us.
* * * * *
Another function of the Harpies links them very closely with the Keres,
and shows in odd and instructive fashion the animistic habit of ancient
thought. The Harpies not only snatch away souls to death but they give
life, bringing things to birth. A Harpy was the mother by Zephyros of
the horses of Achilles[457]. Both parents are in a sense winds, only the
Harpy wind halts between horse and woman. By winds as Vergil tells us
mares became pregnant[458].
[Illustration: FIG. 22.]
As such a Harpy, half horse, half Gorgon-woman, Medusa is represented
on a curious Boeotian vase (fig. 22) of very archaic style now in the
Louvre[459]. The representation is instructive, it shows how in art as
in literature the types of Gorgon and Harpy were for a time in flux;
a particular artist could please his own fancy. The horse Medusa was
apparently not a success, for she did not survive.
It is easy enough to see how winds were conceived of as Snatchers,
death-demons, but why should they impregnate, give life? It is not, I
think, by a mere figure of speech that breezes (πνοιαί) are spoken of
as ‘life-begetting’ (ζωογόνοι) and ‘soul-rearing’ (ψυχοτρόφοι). It is
not because they are in our sense life-giving and refreshing as well
as destructive: the truth lies deeper down. Only life can give life,
only a soul gives birth to a soul; the winds _are_ souls as well as
breaths (πνεύματα). Here as so often we get at the real truth through
an ancient Athenian cultus practice. When an Athenian was about to be
married he prayed and sacrificed, Suidas tells us, to the Tritopatores.
The statement is quoted from Phanodemus who wrote a book on _Attic
Matters_[460]. Suidas tells us also who the Tritopatores were. They
were, as we might guess from their name, fathers in the third degree,
forefathers, ancestors, ghosts, and Dêmon in his _Atthis_ said they
were winds. To the winds, it has already been seen (p. 67), are offered
such expiatory sacrifices (σφάγια) as are due to the spirits of the
underworld. The idea that the Tritopatores were winds as well as ghosts
was never lost. To Photius and Suidas they are ‘lords of the winds’ and
the Orphics make them ‘gate-keepers and guardians of the winds.’ From
ghosts of dead men, Hippocrates[461] tells us, came nurture and growth
and seeds, and the author of the _Geoponica_[462] says that winds give
life not only to plants but to all things. It was natural enough that
the winds should be divided into demons beneficent and maleficent, as it
depends where you live whether a wind from a particular quarter will do
you good or ill.
[Illustration: FIG. 23.]
In the black-figured vase-painting in fig. 23, found at Naukratis and
now in the British Museum[463], a local nymph is depicted: only the
lower part of her figure is left us, drapery, the ends of her long hair
and her feet, but she must be the nymph Cyrene beloved of Apollo, for
close to her and probably held in her hand is a great branch of the
silphium plant. To right of her approaching to minister or to worship are
winged genii. It is the very image of θεραπεία, tendance, ministration,
fostering care, worship, all in one. The genii tend the nymph who is the
land itself, her and her products. The figures to the right are bearded:
they can scarcely be other than the spirits of the North wind, the
Boreadae, the cool healthful wind that comes over the sea to sun-burnt
Africa. If these be Boreadae, the opposing figures, beardless and
therefore almost certainly female, are Harpies, demons of the South wind,
to Africa the wind coming across the desert and bringing heat and blight
and pestilence[464].
[Illustration: FIG. 24.]
It might be bold to assert so much, but for the existence of another
vase-painting on a situla from Daphnae (fig. 24), also, happily for
comparison, in the British Museum[465]. On the one side, not figured
here, is a winged bearded figure ending in a snake, probably Boreas:
such a snake-tailed Boreas was seen by Pausanias[466] on the chest of
Cypselus in the act of seizing Oreithyia. There is nothing harsh in the
snake tail for Boreas, for the winds, as has already been noted (p.
68), were regarded as earth-born. Behind Boreas is a plant in blossom
rising from the ground, a symbol of the vegetation nourished by the North
wind. On the reverse (fig. 25) is a winged figure closely like the left
hand genii of the Cyrene cylix, and this figure drives in front of it
destructive creatures, a locust, the pest of the South, two birds of
prey attacking a hare, and a third that is obviously a vulture. The two
representations taken together justify us in regarding the left hand
genii as destructive. Taking these two representations together with a
third vase-painting, the celebrated Phineus cylix[467], we are further
justified in calling these destructive wind-demons Harpies. On this
vase[468] the Boreadae, Zetes and Kalais, show their true antagonism. The
Harpies have fouled the food of Phineus like the pestilential winds they
were, and the clean clear sons of the North wind give chase. It is seldom
that ancient art has preserved for us so clear a picture of the duality
of things.
[Illustration: FIG. 25.]
* * * * *
On black-figured vase-paintings little winged figures occur not
unfrequently to which it is by no means easy to give a name. In fig. 26
we have such a representation[469]—Europa seated on the bull passes in
rapid flight over the sea which is indicated by fishes and dolphins.
In front of her flies a vulture-like bird, behind comes a winged figure
holding two wreaths. Is she Nike, bringing good success to the lover?
is she a favouring wind speeding the flight? I incline to think the
vase-painter did not clearly discriminate. She is a sort of good Ker, a
fostering favouring influence. In all these cases of early genii it is
important to bear in mind that the sharp distinction between moral and
physical influence, so natural to the modern mind, is not yet established.
[Illustration: FIG. 26.]
We return to the Keres from which the wind demons sprang.
THE KER AS FATE.
One Homeric instance of the use of Ker remains to be examined. When
Achilles[470] had the fourth time chased Hector round the walls of Troy,
Zeus was wearied and
‘Hung up his golden scales and in them set
Twain Keres, fates of death that lays men low.’
This weighing of Keres, this ‘Kerostasia,’ is a weighing of death fates,
but it is interesting to find that it reappears under another name, i.e.
the ‘Psychostasia,’ the weighing of souls. We know from Plutarch[471]
that Aeschylus wrote a play with this title. The subject was the weighing
of the souls or lives not of Hector and Achilles, but Achilles and
Memnon. This is certain because, Plutarch says, he placed at either
side of the scales the mothers Thetis and Eos praying for their sons.
Pollux[472] adds that Zeus and his attendants were suspended from a
crane. In the scene of the Kerostasia as given by Quintus Smyrnaeus[473],
a scene which probably goes back to the earlier tradition of ‘Arctinos,’
it is noticeable that Memnon the loser has a swarthy Ker while Achilles
the winner has a bright cheerful one, a fact which seems to anticipate
the white and black Erinyes.
The scene of the Psychostasia or Kerostasia, as it is variously called,
appears on several vase-paintings, one of which from the British
Museum[474] is reproduced in fig. 27. Hermes holds the scales, in either
scale is the Ker or _eidolon_ of one of the combatants; the lekythos is
black-figured, and is our earliest source for the Kerostasia. The Keres
or ψυχαί are represented as miniature men, it is the _lives_ rather than
the fates that are weighed. So the notion shifts.
[Illustration: FIG. 27.]
In Hesiod, as has already been noted (p. 169), the Keres are more
primitive and actual, they are in a sense fates, but they are also
little winged spirits. But Hesiod is Homer-ridden, so we get the ‘black
Ker,’ own sister to Thanatos and hateful Moros (Doom) and Sleep and the
tribes of Dreams[475]. We get also[476] the dawnings of an Erinys, of an
_avenging_ fate, though the lines look like an interpolation:
‘Night bore
The Avengers and the Keres pitiless.’
Hesiod goes on to give the names usually associated with the Fates,
Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and says they
‘To mortals at their birth
Give good and evil both.’
Whether interpolated or not the passage is significant both because it
gives to the Keres the functions Homer allotted to the Erinyes, and also
because with a reminiscence of earlier thought it makes them the source
of good and of evil. It is probably this last idea that is at the back of
the curious Hesiodic epithet Κηριτρεφής, which occurs in the _Works and
Days_[477]:
‘Then, when the dog-star comes and shines by day
For a brief space over the heads of men
Ker-nourished.’
‘Men nourished for death’ assuredly is not the meaning; the idea seems
to be that each man has a Ker within him, a thing that nourishes him,
keeps him alive, a sort of fate as it were on which his life depends.
The epithet might come to signify something like _mortal_, subject to,
depending on fate. If this be the meaning it looks back to an early stage
of things when the Ker had not been specialized down to death and was not
wholly ‘black,’ when it was more a man’s luck than his fate, a sort of
embryo Genius.
Κηριτρεφής, Ker-nourished, would then be the antithesis of Κηρίφατος
‘slain by Keres,’ which Hesychius[478] explains as those who died of
disease; and would look back to a primitive doubleness of functions when
the Keres were demons of all work. In vague and fitful fashion they begin
where the Semnae magnificently end, as Moirae with control over all human
weal and woe.
‘These for their guerdon hold dominion
O’er all things mortal[479].’
In such returning cycles runs the wheel of theology.
* * * * *
But the black side of things is always, it would seem, most impressive
to primitive man. Given that the Ker was a fate of death, almost a
personified death, it was fitting and natural that it should be tricked
out with ever increasing horrors. Hesiod, or the writer of the _Shield_,
with his rude peasant imagination was ready for the task. The Keres of
Pandora’s jar are purely primitive, and quite natural, not thought out at
all: the Keres of the _Shield_ are a literary effort and much too horrid
to be frightening. Behind the crowd of old men praying with uplifted
hands for their fighting children stood
‘The blue-black Keres, grinding their white teeth,
Glaring and grim, bloody, insatiable;
They strive round those that fall, greedy to drink
Black blood, and whomsoever first they found
Low lying with fresh wounds, about his flesh
A Ker would lay long claws, and his soul pass
To Hades and chill gloom of Tartarus[480].’
Pausanias[481] in his description of the chest of Cypselus tells of the
figure of a Ker which is thoroughly Hesiodic in character. The scene
is the combat between Eteokles and Polyneikes; Polyneikes has fallen
on his knees and Eteokles is rushing at him. ‘Behind Polyneikes is a
woman-figure with teeth, as cruel as a wild beast’s, and her finger-nails
are hooked. An inscription near her says that she is a Ker, as though
Polyneikes were carried off by Fate, and as though the end of Eteokles
were in accordance with justice.’ Pausanias regards the word Ker as the
equivalent of Fate, but we must not impose a conception so abstract on
the primitive artist who decorated the chest.
We are very far from the little fluttering ghosts, the winged bacilli,
but there is a touch of kinship with those other ghosts who in the
Nekuia draw nigh to drink the black blood (p. 75), and—a forecast of
the Erinyes—the ‘blue-black[482]’ Keres are near akin to the horrid
Hades demon painted by Polygnotus on the walls of the Lesche at Delphi.
Pausanias[483] says, ‘Above the figures I have mentioned (i.e. the
sacrilegious man, etc.) is Eurynomos; the guides of Delphi say that
Eurynomos is one of the demons in Hades, and that he gnaws the flesh of
the dead bodies, leaving only the bones. Homer’s poem about Odysseus, and
those called the _Minyas_ and the _Nostoi_, though they all make mention
of Hades and its terrors, know no demon Eurynomos. I will therefore say
this much, I will describe what sort of a person Eurynomos is and in what
fashion he appears in the painting. The colour is blue-black (κυανοῦ
τὴν χρόαν μεταξύ ἐστι καὶ μέλανος) like the colour of the flies that
settle on meat; he is showing his teeth and is seated on the skin of a
vulture.’ The Keres of the _Shield_ are human vultures; Eurynomos is the
sarcophagus incarnate, the great carnivorous vulture of the underworld,
the flesh-eater grotesquely translated to a world of shadows. He rightly
sits upon a vulture’s skin. Such figures, Pausanias truly observes,
are foreign to the urbane Epic. But rude primitive man, when he sees
a skeleton, asks who ate the flesh; the answer is ‘a Ker.’ We are in
the region of mere rude bogeydom, the land of Gorgo, Empusa, Lamia and
Sphinx, and, strange though it may seem, of Siren.
To examine severally each of these bogey forms would lead too far afield,
but the development of the types of Gorgon, Siren and Sphinx both in art
and literature is so instructive that at the risk of digression each of
these forms must be examined somewhat in detail.
THE KER AS GORGON.
The Gorgons are to the modern mind three sisters of whom one, most evil
of the three, Medusa, was slain by Perseus, and her lovely terrible face
had power to turn men into stone.
The triple form is not primitive, it is merely an instance of a
general tendency, to be discussed later—a tendency which makes of each
woman-goddess a trinity, which has given us the Horae, the Charites, the
Semnae, and a host of other triple groups. It is immediately obvious that
the triple Gorgons are not really three but one + two. The two unslain
sisters are mere superfluous appendages due to convention; the real
Gorgon is Medusa. It is equally apparent that in her essence Medusa is a
head and nothing more; her potency only begins when her head is severed,
and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body
later appended. The primitive Greek knew that there was in his ritual a
horrid thing called a Gorgoneion, a grinning mask with glaring eyes and
protruding beast-like tusks and pendent tongue. How did this Gorgoneion
come to be? A hero had slain a beast called the Gorgon, and this was its
head. Though many other associations gathered round it, the basis of the
Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood. The ritual
object comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it; then
the hero is supplied to account for the slaying of the monster.
Ritual masks are part of the appliances of most primitive cults. They
are the natural agents of a religion of fear and ‘riddance.’ Most
anthropological museums[484] contain specimens of ‘Gorgoneia’ still in
use among savages, Gorgoneia which are veritable Medusa heads in every
detail, glaring eyes, pendent tongue, protruding tusks. The function of
such masks is permanently to ‘make an ugly face,’ _at_ you if you are
doing wrong, breaking your word, robbing your neighbour, meeting him in
battle; _for_ you if you are doing right.
Scattered notices show us that masks and faces were part of the apparatus
of a religion of terror among the Greeks. There was, we learn from the
lexicographers[485], a goddess Praxidike, Exactress of Vengeance, whose
images were heads only, and her sacrifices the like. By the time of
Pausanias[486] this head or mask goddess had, like the Erinys, taken on a
multiple, probably a triple form. At Haliartos in Boeotia he saw in the
open air ‘a sanctuary of the goddesses whom they call Praxidikae. Here
the Haliartans swear, but the oath is not one that they take lightly.’ In
like manner at ancient Pheneus, there was a thing called the Petroma[487]
which contained a mask of Demeter with the surname of Cidaria: by this
Petroma most of the people of Pheneus swore on the most important
matters. If the mask like its covering were of stone, such a stone-mask
may well have helped out the legend of Medusa. The mask enclosed in the
Petroma was the vehicle of the goddess: the priest put it on when he
performed the ceremony of smiting the Underground Folk with rods.
[Illustration: FIG. 28.]
[Illustration: FIG. 29.]
[Illustration: FIG. 30.]
[Illustration: FIG. 31.]
The use of masks in regular ritual was probably a rare survival, and
would persist only in remote regions, but the common people were slow to
lose their faith in the apotropaic virtue of an ‘ugly face.’ Fire was a
natural terror to primitive man and all operations of baking beset by
possible Keres. Therefore on his ovens he thought it well to set a Gorgon
mask. In fig. 28, a portable oven now in the museum at Athens[488], the
mask is outside guarding the entrance. In fig. 29 the upper part of a
similar oven is shown, and inside, where the fire flames up, are set
three masks. These ovens are not very early, but they are essentially
primitive. The face need not be of the type we call a Gorgon. In fig.
30 we have a Satyr type, bearded, with stark upstanding ears and hair,
the image of fright set to frighten the frightful. It might be the
picture of Phobos himself. In fig. 31 we have neither Gorgon nor Satyr
but that typical bogey of the workshop, the Cyclops. He wears the typical
workman’s cap, and to either side are set the thunderbolts it is his
business to forge. The craftsman is regarded as an uncanny bogey himself,
cunning over-much, often deformed, and so he is good to frighten other
bogeys. The Cyclops was a terror even in high Olympus. Callimachus[489]
in his charming way tells how
‘Even the little goddesses are in a dreadful fright;
If one of them will not be good, up in Olympos’ height,
Her mother calls a Cyclops, and there is sore disgrace,
And Hermes goes and gets a coal, and blacks his dreadful face,
And down the chimney comes. She runs straight to her mother’s lap,
And shuts her eyes tight in her hands for fear of dire mishap.’
This fear of the bogey that beset the potter, and indeed beset every
action, even the simplest, of human life, is very well shown in the
Hymn[490] ‘The Oven, or the Potters,’ which shows clearly the order of
beings against which the ‘ugly face’ was efficacious:
‘If you but pay me my hire, potters, I sing to command.
Hither, come hither, Athene, bless with a fostering hand
Furnace and potters and pots, let the making and baking go well;
Fair shall they stand in the streets and the market, and quick shall
they sell,
Great be the gain. But if at your peril you cheat me my price,
Tricksters by birth, then straight to the furnace I call in a trice
Mischievous imps one and all, Crusher and Crasher by name,
Smasher and Half-bake and Him-who-burns-with-Unquenchable-Flame,
They shall scorch up the house and the furnace, ruin it, bring it to
nought.
Wail shall the potters and snort shall the furnace, as horses do snort.’
How real was the belief in these evil sprites and in the power to avert
them by magic and apotropaic figures is seen on a fragment of early
Corinthian pottery[491] now in the Berlin Museum reproduced in fig. 32.
Here is the great oven and here is the potter hard at work, but he is
afraid in his heart, afraid of the Crusher and the Smasher and the rest.
He has done what he can; a great owl is perched on the oven to protect
it, and in front he has put a little ugly comic man, a charm to keep off
evil spirits: he might have put a Satyr-head[492] or a Gorgoneion; he
often did put both; it is all the same. Pollux[493] tells us it was the
custom to put such comic figures (γελοῖα) before bronze-foundries; they
could be either hung up or modelled on the furnace, and their object was
‘the aversion of ill-will’ (ἐπὶ φθόνου ἀποτροπῇ). These little images
were also called βασκάνια or by the unlearned προβασκάνια, charms against
the evil eye; and if we may trust the scholiast on Aristophanes[494] they
formed part of the furniture of most people’s chimney corners at Athens.
Of such βασκάνια the Gorgon mask was one and perhaps the most common
shape.
[Illustration: FIG. 32.]
* * * * *
In literature the Gorgon first meets us as a Gorgoneion, and this
Gorgoneion is an underworld bogey. Odysseus[495] in Hades would fain have
held further converse with dead heroes, but
‘Ere that might be, the ghosts thronged round in myriads manifold,
Weird was the magic din they made, a pale-green fear gat hold
Of me, lest for my daring Persephone the dread
From Hades should send up an awful monster’s grizzly head.’
Homer is quite non-committal as to who and what the awful monster is; all
that is clear is that the head only is feared as an ἀποτρόπαιον, a bogey
to keep you off. Whether he knew of an actual monster called a Gorgon is
uncertain. The nameless horror may be the head of either man or beast, or
monster compounded of both.
In this connection it is instructive to note that, though the human
Medusa-head on the whole obtained, the head of any beast is good as a
protective charm. Prof. Ridgeway[496] has conclusively shown that the
Gorgoneion on the aegis of Athene is but the head of the slain beast
whose skin was the raiment of the primitive goddess; the head is worn on
the breast, and serves to protect the wearer and to frighten his foe; it
is a primitive half-magical shield. The natural head is later tricked out
into an artificial bogey.
[Illustration: FIG. 33.]
We are familiar with the Gorgoneion on shields, with the Gorgoneion on
tombs, and as an amulet on vases. On the basis[497] in fig. 33 the
Gorgoneion is set to guard a statue of which two delicate feet remain. On
two sides of the triangular statue we have the Gorgon head; on the third,
serving a like protective purpose, a ram’s head. The statue, dedicated
in the precinct of Apollo at Delos, probably represents the god himself,
but we need seek for no artificial connection between Gorgon, rams and
Apollo; Gorgoneion and ram alike are merely prophylactic. The basis has
a further interest in that the inscription[498] dates the Gorgon-type
represented with some precision. The form of the letters shows it to have
been the work and the dedication of a Naxian artist of the early part of
the 6th century.
[Illustration: FIG. 34.]
On a Rhodian plate[499] in the British Museum in fig. 34 the Gorgoneion
has been furnished with a body tricked out with wings, but the mask-head
is still dominant. The figure is conceived in the typical heraldic
fashion of the Mistress of Wild Things (πότνια θηρῶν); she is in fact the
ugly bogey-, Erinys-side of the Great Mother; she is a potent goddess,
not as in later days a monster to be slain by heroes. The highest
divinities of the religion of fear and riddance became the harmful bogeys
of the cult of ‘service.’ The Olympians in their turn became Christian
devils.
Aeschylus[500] in instructive fashion places side by side the two sets of
three sisters, the Gorgons and the Graiae. They are but two by-forms of
each other. Prometheus foretells to Io her long wandering in the bogey
land of Nowhere:
‘Pass onward o’er the sounding sea, till thou
Dost touch Kisthene’s dreadful plains, wherein
The Phorkides do dwell, the ancient maids,
Three, shaped like swans, having one eye for all,
One tooth—whom never doth the rising sun
Glad with his beams, nor yet the moon by night—
Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged,
With snakes for hair—hated of mortal man—
None may behold and bear their breathing blight.’
The daughters of Phorkys, whom Hesiod[501] calls Grey Ones or Old Ones,
Graiae, are fair of face though two-thirds blind and one-toothed; but
the emphasis on the one tooth and the one eye shows that in tooth and
eye resided their potency, and that in this they were own sisters to the
Gorgons.
The Graiae appear, so far as I know, only once in vase-paintings, on
the cover of a pyxis in the Central Museum at Athens[502], reproduced
in fig. 35. They are sea-maidens, as the dolphins show; old Phorkys
their father is seated near them, and Poseidon and Athene are present in
regular Athenian fashion. Hermes has brought Perseus, and Perseus waits
his chance to get the one eye as it is passed from hand to hand. The eye
is clearly seen in the hand outstretched above Perseus; one blind sister
hands it to the other. The third holds in her hand the fanged tooth. The
vase-painter will not have the Graiae old and loathsome, they are lovely
maidens; he remembers that they were white-haired from their youth.
The account given by Aeschylus of the Gorgons helps to explain their
nature:
‘None may behold, and bear their breathing blight[503].’
[Illustration: FIG. 35.]
They slay by a malign effluence, and this effluence, tradition said,
came from their eyes. Athenaeus[504] quotes Alexander the Myndian as his
authority for the statement that there actually existed creatures who
could by their eyes turn men to stone. Some say the beast which the
Libyans called Gorgon was like a wild sheep, others like a calf; it had
a mane hanging over its eyes so heavy that it could only shake it aside
with difficulty; it killed whomever it looked at, not by its breath but
by a destructive exhalation from its eyes.
What the beast was and how the story arose cannot be decided, but it is
clear that the Gorgon was regarded as a sort of incarnate Evil Eye. The
monster was tricked out with cruel tusks and snakes, but it slew by the
eye, it _fascinated_.
* * * * *
The Evil Eye itself is not frequent on monuments; the Gorgoneion as a
more complete and more elaborately decorative horror attained a wider
popularity. But the prophylactic Eye, the eye set to stare back the
Evil Eye, is common on vases, on shields and on the prows of ships (see
fig. 38). The curious design in fig. 36 is from a Roman mosaic dug up
on the Caelian hill[505]. It served as the pavement in an entrance
hall to a Basilica built by a certain Hilarius, a dealer in pearls
(_margaritarius_) and head of a college of Dendrophoroi, sacred to the
Mother of the Gods. The inscription prays that ‘God may be propitious to
those who enter here and to the Basilica of Hilarius,’ and to make divine
favour more secure, a picture is added to show the complete overthrow
of the evil eye. Very complete is its destruction. Four-footed beasts,
birds and reptiles attack it, it is bored through with a lance, and as a
final prophylactic on the eye-brow is perched Athene’s little holy owl.
Hilarius prayed to a kindly god, but deep down in his heart was the old
savage fear[506].
[Illustration: FIG. 36.]
The Gorgon is more monstrous, more savage, than any other of the
Ker-forms. The Gorgoneion figures little in poetry though much in
art. It is an underworld bogey but not human enough to be a ghost, it
lacks wholly the gentle side of the Keres, and would scarcely have
been discussed here, but that the art-type of the Gorgon lent, as will
be seen, some of its traits to the Erinys, and notably the deathly
distillation by which they slay:
‘From out their eyes they ooze a loathly rheum[507].’
THE KER AS SIREN[508].
The Sirens are to the modern mind mermaids, sometimes all human,
sometimes fish-tailed, evil sometimes, but beautiful always. Milton
invokes Sabrina from the waves by
‘... the songs of Sirens sweet,
By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb,
And fair Ligeia’s golden comb
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks
Sleeking her soft alluring locks.’
Homer by the magic of his song lifted them once and for all out of the
region of mere bogeydom, and yet a careful examination, especially of
their art form, clearly reveals traces of rude origin.
Circe’s warning to Odysseus runs thus[509]:
‘First to the Sirens shalt thou sail, who all men do beguile.
Whoso unwitting draws anigh, by magic of their wile,
They lure him with their singing, nor doth he reach his home
Nor see his dear wife and his babes, ajoy that he is come.
For they, the Sirens, lull him with murmur of sweet sound
Crouching within the meadow: about them is a mound
Of men that rot in death, their skin wasting the bones around.’
Odysseus and his comrades, so forewarned, set sail[510]:
‘Then straightway sailed the goodly ship and swift the Sirens’ isle
Did reach, for that a friendly gale was blowing all the while.
Forthwith the gale fell dead, and calm held all the heaving deep
In stillness, for some god had lulled the billows to their sleep.’
The song of the Sirens is heard[511]:
‘Hither, far-famed Odysseus, come hither, thou the boast
Of all Achaean men, beach thou thy bark upon our coast,
And hearken to our singing, for never but did stay
A hero in his black ship and listened to the lay
Of our sweet lips; full many a thing he knew and sailed away.
For we know all things whatsoe’er in Troy’s wide land had birth
And we know all things that shall be upon the fruitful earth.’
It is strange and beautiful that Homer should make the Sirens appeal to
the spirit, not to the flesh. To primitive man, Greek or Semite, the
desire to know—to be as the gods—was the fatal desire.
Homer takes his Sirens as already familiar; he clearly draws from popular
tradition. There is no word as to their form, no hint of parentage: he
does not mean them to be mysterious, but by a fortunate chance he leaves
them shrouded in mystery, the mystery of the hidden spell of the sea,
with the haze of the noon-tide about them and the meshes of sweet music
for their unseen toils,—knowing all things yet for ever unknown. It is
this mystery of the Sirens that has appealed to modern poetry and almost
wholly obscured their simple primitive significance.
‘Their words are no more heard aright
Through lapse of many ages, and no man
Can any more across the waters wan
Behold these singing women of the sea.’
Four points in the story of Homer must be clearly noted. The Sirens,
though they sing to mariners, are _not_ sea-maidens; they dwell on an
island in a flowery meadow. They are mantic creatures like the Sphinx
with whom they have much in common, knowing both the past and the future.
Their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that
song is death. It is only from the warning of Circe that we know of
the heap of bones, corrupt in death—horror is kept in the background,
seduction to the fore.
* * * * *
It is to art we must turn to know the real nature of the Sirens. Ancient
art, like ancient literature, knows nothing of the fish-tailed mermaid.
Uniformly the art-form of the Siren is that of the bird-woman. The
proportion of bird to woman varies, but the bird element is constant. It
is interesting to note that, though the bird-woman is gradually ousted
in modern art by the fish-tailed mermaid, the bird element survives in
mediaeval times[512]. In the _Hortus Deliciarum_ of the Abbess Herrad
(circ. A.D. 1160), the Sirens appear as draped women with the clawed feet
of birds; with their human hands they are playing on lyres.
The bird form of the Sirens was a problem even to the ancients. Ovid[513]
asks:
‘Whence came these feathers and these feet of birds?
Your faces are the faces of fair maids.’
Ovid’s aetiology is of course beside the mark. The answer to his
pertinent question is quite simple. The Sirens belong to the same order
of bogey beings as the Sphinx and the Harpy; the monstrous form expresses
the monstrous nature; they are birds of prey but with power to lure by
their song. In the Harpy-form the ravening snatching nature is emphasized
and developed, in the Sphinx the mantic power of all uncanny beings, in
the Siren the seduction of song. The Sphinx, though mainly a prophetess,
keeps Harpy elements; she snatches away the youths of Thebes: she is
but ‘a man-seizing Ker[514].’ The Siren too, though mainly a seductive
singer, is at heart a Harpy, a bird of prey.
[Illustration: FIG. 37.]
This comes out very clearly in representations on vase-paintings. A
black-figured aryballos[515] of Corinthian style (fig. 37), now in the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is our earliest artistic source for the Siren
myth. Odysseus, bound to the mast, has come close up to the island: on
the island are perched ‘Sirens twain.’ Above the ship hover two great
black birds of prey in act to pounce on the mariners. These birds
cannot be merely decorative: they in a sense duplicate the Sirens. The
vase-painter knows the Sirens are singing demons sitting on an island;
the text of Homer was not in his hands to examine the account word by
word, but the Homeric story haunts his memory. He knows too that in
popular belief the Sirens are demons of prey; hence the great birds. To
the right of the Sirens on the island crouches a third figure; she is
all human, not a third Siren. She probably, indeed all but certainly,
represents the mother of the Sirens, Chthon, the Earth. Euripides[516]
makes his Helen in her anguish call on the
‘Winged maidens, virgins, daughters of the Earth,
The Sirens,’
to join their sorrowful song to hers. The parentage is significant.
The Sirens are not of the sea, not even of the land, but demons of the
underworld; they are in fact a by-form of Keres, souls.
* * * * *
The notion of the soul as a human-faced bird is familiar in Egyptian,
but rare in Greek, art. The only certain instance is, so far as I know,
the vase in the British Museum[517] on which is represented the death of
Procris. Above Procris falling in death hovers a winged bird-woman. She
is clearly, I think, the soul of Procris. To conceive of the soul as a
bird escaping from the mouth is a fancy so natural and beautiful that
it has arisen among many peoples. In Celtic mythology[518] Maildun, the
Irish Odysseus, comes to an island with trees on it in clusters on which
were perched many birds. The aged man of the island tells him, ‘These are
the souls of my children and of all my descendants, both men and women,
who are sent to this little island to abide with me according as they
die in Erin.’ Sailors to this day believe that sea-mews are the souls of
their drowned comrades. Antoninus Liberalis[519] tells how, when Ktesulla
because of her father’s broken oath died in child-bed, ‘they carried her
body out to be buried, and from the bier a dove flew forth and the body
of Ktesulla disappeared.’
The persistent anthropomorphism of the Greeks stripped the bird-soul
of all but its wings. The human winged _eidolon_ prevailed in art: the
bird-woman became a death-demon, a soul sent to fetch a soul, a Ker that
lures a soul, a Siren.
Later in date and somewhat different in conception is the scene on a
red-figured stamnos in the British Museum[520] (fig. 38). The artist’s
desire for a balanced design has made him draw two islands, on each of
which a Siren is perched. Over the head of one is inscribed Ἱμε(ρ)οπα
‘lovely-voiced.’ A third Siren flies or rather falls headlong down on to
the ship. The drawing of the eye of this third Siren should be noted.
The eye is indicated by two strokes only, without the pupil. This is
the regular method of representing the sightless eye, i.e. the eye in
death or sleep or blindness. The third Siren is dying; she has hurled
herself from the rock in despair at the fortitude of Odysseus. This is
clearly what the artist wishes to say, but he may have been haunted by
an artistic tradition of the pouncing bird of prey. He also has adopted
the number three, which by his time was canonical for the Sirens. By
making the third Siren fly headlong between the two others he has neatly
turned a difficulty in composition. On the reverse of this vase are three
Love-gods, who fall to be discussed later (Chap. XII.). Connections
between the subject matter of the obverse and reverse of vases are
somewhat precarious, but it is likely, as the three Love-gods are flying
over the sea, that the vase-painter intended to emphasize the seduction
of love in his Sirens.
[Illustration: FIG. 38.]
* * * * *
The clearest light on the lower nature of the Sirens is thrown by
the design in fig. 39 from a Hellenistic relief[521]. The monument
is of course a late one, later by at least two centuries than the
vase-paintings, but it reflects a primitive stage of thought and one
moreover wholly free from the influence of Homer. The scene is a rural
one. In the right-hand corner is a herm, in front of it an altar, near
at hand a tree on which hangs a votive syrinx. Some peasant or possibly
a wayfarer has fallen asleep. Down upon him has pounced a winged and
bird-footed woman. It is the very image of obsession, of nightmare, of a
haunting midday dream. The woman can be none other than an evil Siren.
Had the scene been represented by an earlier artist, he would have made
her ugly because evil; but by Hellenistic times the Sirens were beautiful
women, all human but for wings and sometimes bird-feet.
[Illustration: FIG. 39.]
The terrors of the midday sleep were well known to the Greeks in their
sun-smitten land; nightmare to them was also daymare. Such a visitation,
coupled possibly with occasional cases of sunstroke, was of course the
obsession of a demon[522]. Even a troubled tormenting illicit dream was
the work of a Siren. In sleep the will and the reason are becalmed and
the passions unchained. That the midday nightmare went to the making of
the Siren is clear from the windless calm and the heat of the sun in
Homer. The horrid end, the wasting death, the sterile enchantment, the
loss of wife and babes, all look the same way. Homer, with perhaps some
blend of the Northern mermaid in his mind, sets his Sirens by the sea,
thereby cleansing their uncleanness; but later tradition kept certain
horrid primitive elements when it made of the Siren a hetaira disallowing
the lawful gifts of Aphrodite.
There remains another aspect of the Sirens. They appear frequently as
monuments, sometimes as actual mourners, on tombs. Here all the erotic
element has disappeared; they are substantially Death-Keres, Harpies,
though to begin with they imaged the soul itself. The bird-woman of the
Harpy tomb, the gentle angel of death, has been already noted (p. 177).
The Siren on a black-figured lekythos in the British Museum[523] (fig.
40) is purely monumental. She stands on the grave stele playing her great
lyre, while two bearded men with their dogs seem to listen intent. She
is grave and beautiful with no touch of seduction. Probably at first the
Siren was placed on tombs as a sort of charm, a προβασκάνιον, a soul to
keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with apotropaic
ritual (p. 196), that the charm itself is used as counter-charm. So the
dreaded Death-Ker is set itself to guard the tomb. Other associations
would gather round. The Siren was a singer, she would chant the funeral
dirge; this dirge might be the praises of the dead. The epitaph that
Erinna[524] wrote for her girl-friend Baukis begins
‘Pillars and Sirens mine and mournful urn.’
[Illustration: FIG. 40.]
On later funeral monuments Sirens appear for the most part as mourners,
tearing their hair and lamenting. Their apotropaic function was wholly
forgotten. Where an apotropaic monster is wanted we find an owl or a
sphinx.
Even on funeral monuments the notion of the Siren as either soul or
Death-Angel is more and more obscured by her potency as sweet singer.
Once, however, when she appears in philosophy, there is at least a
haunting remembrance that she is a soul who sings to souls. In the
cosmography with which he ends the _Republic_, Plato[525] thus writes:
‘The spindle turns on the knees of Ananke, and on the upper surface of
each sphere is perched a Siren, who goes round with them hymning a single
tone. The eight together form one Harmony.’ Commentators explain that the
Sirens are chosen because they are sweet singers, but then, if music be
all, why is it the evil Sirens and not the good Muses who chant the music
of the spheres? Plutarch[526] felt the difficulty. In his _Symposiacs_ he
makes one of the guests say: ‘Plato is absurd in committing the eternal
and divine revolutions not to the Muses but to the Sirens; demons who
are by no means either benevolent or in themselves good.’ Another guest,
Ammonius, attempts to justify the choice of the Sirens by giving to them
in Homer a mystical significance. ‘Even Homer,’ he says, ‘means by their
music not a power dangerous and destructive to man, but rather a power
that inspires in the souls that go from Hence Thither, and wander about
after death, a love for things heavenly and divine and a forgetfulness
of things mortal, and thereby holds them enchanted by singing. Even
here,’ he goes on to say, ‘a dim murmur of that music reaches us, rousing
reminiscence.’
It is not to be for a moment supposed that Homer’s Sirens had really any
such mystical content. But, given that they have the bird-form of souls,
that they ‘know all things,’ are sweet singers and dwellers in Hades, and
they lie ready to the hand of the mystic. Proclus[527] in his commentary
on the _Republic_ says, with perhaps more truth than he is conscious
of, ‘the Sirens are a kind of souls living the life of the spirit.’
His interpretation is not merely fanciful; it is a blend of primitive
tradition with mystical philosophy.
The Sirens are further helped to their high station on the spheres by the
Orphic belief that purified souls went to the stars, nay even _became_
stars. In the _Peace_ of Aristophanes[528] the servant asks Trygaeus,
‘It is true then, what they say, that in the air
A man becomes a star, when he comes to die?’
To the poet the soul is a bird in its longing to be free:
‘Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,
On the hill-tops, where the sun scarce hath trod,
Or a cloud make the place of mine abiding,
As a bird among the bird-droves of God[529].’
And that upward flight to heavenly places is as the flying of a Siren:
‘With golden wings begirt my body flies,
Sirens have lent me their swift winged feet,
Upborne to uttermost ether I shall meet
And mix with heavenly Zeus beyond the skies[530].’
But, though Plato and the poets and the mystics exalt the Siren,
‘half-angel and half-bird,’ to cosmic functions, yet, to the popular
mind, they are mainly things, if not wholly evil, yet fearful and to be
shunned. This is seen in the myth of their contest with the Muses[531].
Here they are the spirits of forbidden intoxication; as such on vases
they join the motley crew of Centaurs and Satyrs who revel with Dionysos.
They stand, it would seem, to the ancient as to the modern, for the
impulses in life as yet unmoralized, imperious longings, ecstasies,
whether of love or art or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man
from his ‘Land of Heart’s Desire’ and to which if he hearken it may be he
will return home no more—voices too, which, whether a man sail by or stay
to hearken, still sing on.
The Siren bird-woman transformed for ever by the genius of Homer into the
sweet-voiced demon of seduction may seem remote from the Ker of which
she is but a specialized form. A curious design[532] on a black-figured
cylix in the Louvre (fig. 41) shows how close was the real connection.
The scene is a banquet: five men are reclining on couches, two of them
separated by a huge _deinos_, a wine-vessel, from which a boy has drawn
wine in an oinochoë. Over two of the men are hovering winged figures,
each holding a crown and a spray; over two others hover bird-women, each
also holding a crown and a spray. What are we to call these ministrant
figures, what would the vase-painter himself have called them? Are the
human winged figures Love-gods, are the bird-women Sirens? For lack of
context it is hard to say with certainty. Thus much is clear, both kinds
of figures are favouring genii of the feast, and for our purpose this
is all-important: the bird-women, be they Sirens or not, and the winged
human figures, be they Love-gods or merely Keres, _perform the same
function_. The development of the Love-god, Eros, from the Ker will be
discussed later (Chap. XII.); for the present it is best to regard these
bird-women and winged sprites as both of the order of Keres, as yet
unspecialized in function.
[Illustration: FIG. 41.]
THE KER AS SPHINX.
Two special features characterize the Sphinx: she was a Harpy carrying
off men to destruction, an incarnate plague; she was the soothsayer
with the evil habit of asking riddles as well as answering them. Both
functions, though seemingly alien, were characteristic of underworld
bogeys; the myth-making mind put them together and wove out of the two
the tale of the unanswered riddle and the consequent deathly pest.
On the vase-painting in fig. 42 from a cylix[533] in the Museo Gregoriano
of the Vatican, we have a charming representation of the riddle-answering
Oedipus, whose name is written _Oidipodes_, sitting meditating in
front of the oracle. The Sphinx on her column is half monument, half
personality; she is a very human monster, she has her lion-body, but she
is a lovely attentive maiden. From her lips come the letters και τρι,
which may mean _and three_ or _and three (-footed)_. In the field is a
delicate decorative spray, which, occurring as it does on vases with a
certain individuality of drawing, seems to be, as it were, the signature
of a particular master[534].
[Illustration: FIG. 42.]
The Sphinx in fig. 42 is all oracular, but occasionally, on vases of the
same date, she appears in her other function as the ‘man-snatching Ker.’
She leaves her pedestal and carries off a Theban youth. The 5th century
vase-painter with his determined euphemism, even when he depicts her
carrying off her prey, makes her do it with a certain Attic gentleness,
more like a death-Siren than a Harpy. Aeschylus[535] in the _Seven
against Thebes_ describes her as the monster she is; the Sphinx on the
shield of Parthenopaeus is a horrid bogey, the ‘reproach of the state,’
‘eater of raw-flesh,’ with hungry jaws, bringing ill-luck to him who
bears her on his ensign.
[Illustration: FIG. 43.]
In the curious vase-painting in fig. 43, a design from a late Lower Italy
krater[536] in the museum at Naples, the Sphinx is wholly oracular, and
this time she must answer the riddle, not ask it. The Sphinx is seated
on a rocky mound, near which stands erect a snake. The snake is not, I
think, without meaning; it is the oracular beast of the earth-oracle.
The Silenus who has come to consult the oracle holds in his hand a bird.
The scene would be hopelessly enigmatic but for one of the fables that
are current under the name of Aesop[537], which precisely describes the
situation. ‘A certain bad man made an agreement with some one to prove
that the Delphic oracle was false, and when the appointed day came, he
took a sparrow in his hand and covered it with his garment and came to
the sanctuary, and standing in front of the oracle, asked whether the
thing in his hand was alive or dead, and he meant if the oracle said it
was dead, to show the sparrow alive, but if the oracle said it was alive,
to strangle it first and then show it. But the god knew his wicked plan,
and said to him, “Have done, for it depends on you whether what you hold
is dead or living.” The story shows plainly that the divinity is not
lightly to be tempted.’
The story, taken in conjunction with the vase-painting it explains,
shows clearly another thing. The Sphinx was mainly a local Theban bogey,
but she became the symbol of oracular divinity. At Delphi there was an
earth-oracle guarded by a snake, and in honour of that earth-oracle the
Naxians upreared their colossal Sphinx[538] and set it in the precinct of
Gaia. As time went on, the savage ‘man-snatching’ aspect of the Sphinx
faded, remembered only in the local legend, while her oracular aspect
grew; but the local legend is here as always the more instructive.
[Illustration: FIG. 44.]
The next representation of the Sphinx (fig. 44), from the fragment of
an oinochoë in the Berlin Museum[539], is specially suggestive. The
monster is inscribed, not with the name we know her by, ‘Sphinx,’ but
as ‘Kassmia,’ the Kadmean One, the bogey of Kadmos. The bearded monster
with wings and claws and dog-like head has lost her orthodox lion-body,
and lent it perhaps to Oedipus who stands in front of her. The scene is
of course pure comedy, and shows how near to the Greek mind were the
horrible and the grotesque, the thing feared and the thing scoffed at.
The Kassmia, the bogey of Kadmos, may have brought her lion-body with
Kadmos from the East, but the supposition, though very possible, is not
necessary. Cithaeron was traditionally lion-haunted[540]. The Sphinx may
have borrowed some of her traits and part of her body from a real lion
haunting a real local tomb.
It is worth noting in this connection that Hesiod[541] calls the monster
not Sphinx but Phix:
‘By stress of Orthios, she, Echidna, bare
Disastrous Phix, a bane to Kadmos’ folk.’
The scholiast remarks that ‘Mount Phikion where she dwelt was called
after her,’ but the reverse is probably true. Phix was the local bogey
of Phikion. The rocky mountain which rises to the S.-E. corner of Lake
Copais is still locally known as Phaga[542]. By a slight and easy
modification Phix became Sphix or Sphinx, the ‘throttler,’ an excellent
name for a destructive bogey.
[Illustration: FIG. 45.]
The last representation of the Sphinx, in fig. 45, brings us to her
characteristic as tomb-haunter. The design is from a krater[543] in
the Vagnonville Collection of the Museo Greco Etrusco at Florence. The
Sphinx is seated on a tomb-mound (χῶμα γῆς) of the regular sepulchral
type. That the mound is sepulchral is certain from the artificial stone
basis pierced with holes[544] on which it stands. Two lawless Satyrs
attack the mound with picks. The Sphinx is a tomb-haunting bogey, a Ker,
but ultimately she fades into a decorative tomb monument, with always
perhaps some prophylactic intent. In this, as in her mantic aspect, she
is own cousin to the Ker-Siren, but with the Sphinx the mantic side
predominates. The Sphinx, unlike the Siren, never developed into a
trinity, though when she became decorative she is doubled for heraldic
purposes.
* * * * *
It is time to resume the various shifting notions that cluster round the
term Ker, perhaps the most untranslateable of all Greek words. Ghost,
bacillus, disease, death-angel, death-fate, fate, bogey, magician have
all gone to the making of it. So shifting and various is the notion that
it is hard to say what is primary, what developed, but deep down in the
lowest stratum lie the two kindred conceptions of ghost and bacillus. It
is only by a severe effort of the imagination that we can think ourselves
back into an adequate mental confusion to realize all the connotations of
Ker.
When the lexicographers came to define the word they had no easy
task. Their struggles—they are honest men, if not too intelligent—are
instructive. Happily they make no attempt at real formulation, but jot
things down as they come. Hesychius, after his preliminary statement
‘κηρ (neuter, with circumflex accent) the soul, (oxytone, feminine)
death-bringing fate, death,’ gives us suggestive particulars: κῆρας·
ἀκαθαρσίας, μολύσματα, βλάβας, where we see the unclean bacilli;
κηρόν· λεπτὸν νοσηρόν, which reminds us of the evil skinny Ker of the
vase-painting (fig. 17); κηριοῦσθαι· ἐκπλήττεσθαι, where the bogey Ker is
manifest; κηριωθῆναι· ὑπὸ σκοτοδινοῦ ληφθῆναι, where the whirlwind seems
indicated, though it may be the dizziness of death. Kerukainae were the
female correlatives of Kerykes, ‘women whose business it was to collect
things polluted’ and carry them off to the sea[545]. Most curious and
primitive of all, we are told[546] that κήρυκες itself means not only
messengers, ministers, a priestly race descended from Hermes, but ‘they
call the insects that impregnate the wild fig κήρυκας.’ Here are bacilli
indeed, but for life not for death.
THE KER AS ERINYS.
It has been already indicated that a Ker is sometimes an avenger, but
this aspect of the word has been advisedly reserved because it takes us
straight to the idea of the Erinys.
Pausanias[547], _à propos_ of the grave of Koroibos at Megara, tells us
a story in which a Ker figures plainly as an Erinys, with a touch of
the Sphinx and of the death-Siren. Psamathe, daughter of Krotopos, King
of Argos, had a child by Apollo, which, fearing her father’s anger, she
exposed. The child was found and killed by the sheep-dogs of Krotopos.
Apollo sent Poine (Penalty or Vengeance) on the city of the Argives.
Poine, they say, snatched children from their mothers until Koroibos, to
please the Argives, slew her. After he had slain her, there came a second
pestilence upon them and lasted on. Koroibos had to go to Delphi to
expiate his sin; he was ordered to build a temple of Apollo wherever the
tripod he brought from Delphi should fall. He built of course the town of
Tripodisci. The grave of Koroibos at Megara was surmounted by the most
ancient Greek stone images Pausanias had ever seen, a figure of Koroibos
slaying Poine. There were elegiac verses carved on it recounting the tale
of Psamathe and Koroibos. Now Pausanias mentions no Ker, only Poine; but
the Anthologists[548] have preserved for us verses which, if not actually
those carved on the grave, at all events refer to it, and in them occur
the notable words:
‘I am the Ker, slain by Koroibos, I dwell on his tomb,
Here at my feet, on account of the tripod, he lies for his doom.’
Poine is clearly the avenging ghost of the child of Psamathe causing a
pest which snatched babes from their mother, and Poine the ghost-pest is
a Ker and practically a Ker-Erinys.
The simple truth emerges so clearly as to be almost self-evident, yet
is constantly ignored, that primarily the Keres-Erinyes are just what
the words say, the ‘Keres Angry-ones.’ There is no reason to doubt the
truth of what Pausanias[549] tells us, that the Arcadians and, with
the Arcadians, probably the rest of the primitive Greeks, called ‘being
in a rage’ ἐρινύειν. Demeter at Thelpusa had two surnames and even two
statues. When she was wroth they called her _Erinys_[550] on account
of her wrath, when she relented and bathed they called her _Lousia_.
Pausanias gives as literary authority for the surname Erinys, Antimachus
who wrote (4th cent. B.C.) of the expedition of the Argives against
Thebes.
The Erinyes, on this showing, are one form of the countless host of
divine beings whose names are simply adjectival epithets, not names
proper. Such others are the Eumenides the Kindly Ones, the Potniae the
Awful Ones, the Maniae the Madnesses, the Praxidikae the Vengeful Ones.
With a certain delicate shyness, founded possibly on a very practical
fear, primitive man will not address his gods by a personal name; he
decently shrouds them in class epithets. There are people living now,
Celts for the most part, who shrink from the personal attack of a proper
name, and call their friends, in true primitive fashion, the Old One, the
Kind One, the Blackest One, and the like.
It is apparent that, given these adjectival names, the gods are as many
as the moods of the worshipper, i.e. as his thoughts about his gods.
If he is kind, they are Kindly Ones; when he feels vengeful, they are
Vengeful Ones.
* * * * *
The question arises, why did the angry aspect of the Keres, i.e. the
Erinyes, attain to a development so paramount, so self-sufficing, that
already in Homer they are distinct from the Keres, with functions, if not
forms, clearly defined, beyond possibility of confusion. It is precisely
these functions that have defined them. A Ker, as has been seen, is for
good and for evil, is active for plants, for animals, as for men: a
Ker when angry is Erinys: a Ker is never so angry as when he has been
killed. The idea of Erinys as distinct from Ker is developed _out of a
human relation intensely felt_. The Erinys primarily is the Ker of a
human being unrighteously slain. Erinys is not death; it is the outraged
soul of the dead man crying for vengeance; it is the Ker as Poine. In
discussing the Keres it has been abundantly shown that ghost is a
word too narrow: Keres denote a wider animism. With Erinys the case is
otherwise: the Erinyes are primarily human ghosts, but all human ghosts
are not Erinyes, only those ghosts that are angry, and that for a special
reason, usually because they have been murdered. Other cases of angry
ghosts are covered by the black Ker. It is the vengeful inhumanity of the
Erinyes, arising as it does from their humanity, which marks them out
from the Keres.
That the Erinyes are primarily the vengeful souls of murdered men can and
will in the sequel be plainly shown, but it would be idle to deny that
already in Homer they have passed out of this stage and are personified
almost beyond recognition. They are no longer souls; they are the
avengers of souls. Thus in Homer, in the prayer of Althaea, Erinys[551],
though summoned to avenge the death of Althaea’s brethren, is clearly not
the ghost of either of them; she is one, they are two; she is female,
they are male. Althaea prays:
‘And her the Erinys blood-haunting[552]
Heard out of Erebos’ depths, she of the soul without pity.’
There is nothing that so speedily blurs and effaces the real origin of
things as this insistent Greek habit of impersonation. We were able to
track the Keres back to something like their origin just because they
never really got personified. In this respect poets are the worst of
mythological offenders. By their intense realization they lose all touch
with the confusions of actuality. The Erinyes summoned by Althaea were
really ghosts of the murdered brothers, but Homer separates them off into
avengers.
In other Homeric Erinyes there is often not even a _fond_ of possible
ghosts. Phoenix transgresses against his father Amyntor[553], and Amyntor
for his unnatural offence invokes against him the ‘hateful Erinyes’:
they are no ancestral ghosts, they are merely avengers of the moral law,
vaguer equivalents of ‘Underworld Zeus and dread Persephone.’ Ares[554]
offends his mother Aphrodite, who is certainly _not_ dead and has no
ghost, and the wounds inflicted on him by Athene appease the ‘Erinys of
his mother.’ In a word, in Homer, as has frequently been pointed out, the
Erinyes are avengers of offences against blood-relations on the mother’s
and father’s side, of all offences against moral, and finally even
natural law.
The familiar case of Xanthus, the horse of Achilles[555], marks the
furthest pole of complete abstraction. Xanthus warns Achilles that, for
all their fleetness, his horses bear him to his death, and
‘When he thus had spoken
The Erinyes stayed his voice.’
The intervention of the Erinyes here is usually explained by a reference
to the saying of Heracleitus[556] that ‘the sun could not go out of his
course without the Erinyes, ministers of justice, finding him out.’ I
doubt if the philosophy of Heracleitus supplies the true explanation. The
horse speaks as the mouthpiece of the fates, the Erinyes; they tell of
what fate (μοῖρα) will accomplish; nay more, _as fates_ they, reluctant
but obedient, carry him to his death. When Xanthus has uttered the
mandate of fate, the Fates close his mouth, not because he transgresses
their law, but because he has uttered it to the full.
Be that as it may, the view stated by Heracleitus is of capital
importance. It shows that to a philosopher writing at the end of the
6th century B.C. the Erinyes were embodiments of law, ministers of
Justice. Of course a philosopher is as little to be taken as reflecting
popular faith as a poet, indeed far less; but even a philosopher cannot,
save on pain of becoming unintelligible, use words apart from popular
associations. Heracleitus was indeed drunk with the thought of law, of
Fate, of unchanging ‘moral retribution,’ with the eternal sequence
of his endless flux; his Erinyes are cosmic beyond the imagination of
Homer, but still the fact remains that he uses them as embodiments of the
vengeance that attends transgression. By his time they are not Keres, not
souls, still less bacilli, not even avengers of tribal blood, but in the
widest sense ministers of Justice[557] (Δίκης ἐπίκουροι).
THE ERINYES OF AESCHYLUS.
Heracleitus has pushed abstraction to its highest pitch. When we come to
Aeschylus we find, as would be expected, a conception of the Erinyes that
is at once narrower and more vitalized, more objective, more primitive.
In the _Septem_[558] the conception is narrower, more primitive than in
Homer; the Erinys is in fact an angry ghost. This is stated with the
utmost precision.
‘Alas, thou Fate—grievous, dire to be borne,
And Oedipus’ holy Shade,
Black Erinys, verily, mighty art thou,’
chant the chorus again and again. Fate is close at hand and nigh akin,
but the real identity and apposition is between the shade, the ghost of
Oedipus, and the black Erinys.
Here and in the _Prometheus Bound_[559] Aeschylus is fully conscious that
it is the actual ghost, not a mere abstract vengeance that haunts and
pursues. Io is stung by the oestrus[560] because she was a cow-maiden,
but the real terror that maddens her is that most terrifying of all
ancient ghosts, the phantom of earth-born Argus.
‘Woe, Woe!
Again the gadfly stings me as I go.
The earth-born neatherd Argos hundred-eyed,
Earth, wilt thou never hide?
O horror! he is coming, coming nigh,
Dead, with his wandering eye.
Uprising from the dead
He drives me famished
Along the shingled main,
His phantom pipe drones with a sleepy strain.
Ye gods, what have I done to cry in vain,
Fainting and frenzied with sting-driven pain?’
But when we come to the Oresteia, the Erinyes are envisaged from a
different angle. The shift is due partly to the data of the plot, the
primitive saga out of which it is constructed, partly to a definite moral
purpose in the mind of the tragedian.
* * * * *
The primitive material of the trilogy was the story of the house of
Atreus in which the motive is the blood-curse working from generation
to generation, working within the narrow limits of one family and
culminating in the Erinys of a slain mother. At the back of the Orestes
and Clytaemnestra story lay the primaeval thought so clearly expressed by
Plato in the _Laws_[561]. ‘If a man,’ says the Athenian, ‘kill a freeman
even unintentionally, let him undergo certain purifications, but let
him not disregard a certain ancient tale of bygone days as follows: “He
who has died by a violent death, if he has lived the life of a freeman,
when he is newly dead, is angry with the doer of the deed, and being
himself full of fear and panic on account of the violence he has suffered
and seeing his murderer going about in his accustomed haunts, he feels
terror, and being himself disordered[562] communicates the same feeling
with all possible force, aided by recollection, to the guilty man—both
to himself and to his deeds.”’ Here the actual ghost is the direct
source of the disorder and works like a sort of bacillus of madness. It
is not the guilty conscience of the murderer, but a sort of onset of
the consciousness of the murdered. Its action is local, and hence the
injunction that the murderer must leave the land. How fully Aeschylus was
conscious of this almost physical aspect of crime as the action of the
disordered ghost on the living comes out with terrible vividness in the
_Choephori_[563]:
‘The black bolt from below comes from the slain
Of kin who cry for vengeance, and from them
Madness and empty terror in the night
Comes haunting, troubling.’
It is ‘the slain of kin’ who cries for vengeance. As Pausanias[564]
says of the same house, ‘the pollution of Pelops and the avenging ghost
of Myrtilos dogged their steps.’ ‘Fate,’ says Polybius[565], ‘placed
by his (Philip’s) side Erinyes and Poinae and Pointers-to-Vengeance
(προστροπαίους).’ Here clearly all the words are synonymous. Apollo
threatens the slayer of his mother with
‘Yet other onsets of Erinys sent
Of kindred blood the dire accomplishment,
Visible visions that he needs must mark,
Aye, though he twitch his eyebrows in the dark[566].’
To cause these ‘onsets,’ these προσβολαί, or, as they are sometimes
called, ἔφοδοι, was, Hippocrates[567] tells us, one of the regular
functions of dead men.
Behind the notion of these accesses of fright, these nocturnal
apparitions caused by ghosts, there is in the mind of Aeschylus the
still more primitive notion that the shed blood not only ‘brings these
apparitions to effect,’ but is itself a source of physical infection.
Here we seem to get down to a stratum of thought perhaps even more
primitive than that of the bacillus-like Keres. The Chorus in the
_Choephori_ sings[568]:
‘Earth that feeds him hath drunk of the gore,
Blood calling for vengeance flows never more,
But stiffens, and pierces its way
Through the murderer, breeding diseases that none may allay.’
The blood poisons the earth, and thereby poisons the murderer fed by
earth. As Dr Verrall (_ad loc._) points out, it is the old doctrine of
the sentence of Cain, ‘And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath
opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou
tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength.’
In the crudest and most practical form, this notion of the physical
infection of the earth comes out in the story of Alcmaeon. Pausanias[569]
tells us that when Alcmaeon had slain his mother Eriphyle, he came to
Psophis in Arcadia, but there his disease nowise abated. He then went to
Delphi, and the Pythia taught him that the only land where the avenger
of Eriphyle could not dog him was the newest land which the sea had laid
bare subsequently to the pollution of his mother’s blood, and he found
out the deposit of the river Acheloüs and dwelt there. There, by the new
and unpolluted land he might be nourished and live. Apollodorus[570]
misses the point: he brings Alcmaeon to Thesprotia and purifies him, but
by the _waters_ of Acheloüs.
The case of Alcmaeon does not stand alone. It has a curious parallel in
the fate that befell Bellerophon, a fate that, I think, has not hitherto
been rightly understood.
In Homer[571] the end of Bellerophon is mysterious. After the episode
with Sthenoboea, he goes to Lycia, is royally entertained, marries the
king’s daughter, rules over a fair domain, begets three goodly children,
and then, suddenly, without warning, without manifest cause, he comes to
be
‘Hated of all the gods. And in the Aleïan plain apart
He strayed, shunning men’s foot-prints, consuming his own heart.’
Homer, with a poet’s instinct for the romantic and mysterious, asks no
questions; Pindar[572] with his Olympian prejudice saw in the downfall
of Bellerophon the proper meed of ‘insolence.’ Bellerophon’s heart was
‘aflutter for things far-off,’ he had vainly longed for
‘The converse of high Zeus.’
But the mythographers knew the real reason of the madness and the
wandering, knew of the old sin against the old order. Apollodorus[573]
says: ‘Bellerophon, son of Glaukos, son of Sisyphos, having slain
unwittingly his brother Deliades, or, as some say, Peiren, and others
Alkimenes, came to Proetus and was purified.’ On Bellerophon lay the
_taboo_ of blood guilt. He came to Proetus, but, the sequel shows, was
_not_ purified. In those old days he _could_ not be. Proetus sent him on
to the king of Lycia, and the king of Lycia drove him yet further to the
only land where he could dwell, the Aleïan or Cilician plain[574]. This
Aleïan plain was, like the mouth of the Acheloüs, _new land_, an alluvial
deposit slowly recovered from the sea, ultimately in Strabo’s time most
fertile, but in Bellerophon’s days a desolate salt-marsh. The madness of
Bellerophon—for in Homer he is obviously mad—is the madness of Orestes,
of the man blood-stained, Erinys-haunted; but the story of Bellerophon,
like that of Alcmaeon, looks back to days even before the Erinys was
formulated as a personality, to days when Earth herself was polluted,
poisoned by shed blood.
* * * * *
Aeschylus then in the _Oresteia_ is dealing with a primitive story and
realizes to the uttermost its primaeval savagery. But he has chosen
it for a moral purpose, nay more, when he comes to the Eumenides,
with an actual topical intent. He desires first and foremost by the
reconciliation of old and new to justify the ways of God to men, and next
to show that in his own Athenian law-court of the Areopagus, those ways
find their fullest practical human expression. That court, he somehow
contrived to believe, or at least saw fit to assert, was founded on a
fact of tremendous moral significance, the conversion of the Erinyes
into Semnae. The conception of the Erinyes comes to Aeschylus from Homer
almost full-fledged; his mythological data, unlike his plots, were
‘slices from the great feasts of Homer,’ and this in a very strict sense,
for, owing no doubt partly to the primitive legend selected, he has had
to narrow somewhat the Homeric conception of the Erinyes and make of
them not avengers in general, but avengers of tribal blood. Moreover he
has emphasized their legal character. It is noteworthy that when Athene
formally asks the Erinyes who and what they are[575], their answer is not
‘Erinyes’ but
‘Curses our name in haunts below the earth.’
And when Athene further asks their function and prerogatives (τιμαί) the
answer is:
‘Man-slaying men we drive from out their homes[576].’
The essence of primitive law resided, as has already (p. 142) been seen,
in the curse, the imprecation. Here the idea is not that of a cosmic
Fate but of a definite and tangible curse, the curse of blood-guilt. It
is scarcely possible to doubt that in emphasizing the curse aspect of
the Erinyes, Aeschylus had in his mind some floating reminiscence of a
traditional connection between the Arae and the Areopagus. He is going to
make the Erinyes turn into Semnae, the local Athenian goddesses invoked
upon the Areopagus: the conception of the Erinyes as Arae makes as it
were a convenient bridge. The notion of the Erinyes as goddesses of
Cursing is of course definitely present in Homer, but it is the notion
of the curse of the broken oath rather than the curse of blood-guilt. In
the great oath of Agamemnon[577] he, as became an Achaean, prays first to
Zeus, but also to Earth and to the Sun and to the Erinyes who
‘Beneath the earth
Take vengeance upon mortals, whosoe’er
Forswears himself.’
Hesiod[578], borrowing from Melampus, tells us that
‘On the fifth day, they say, the Erinyes tend
Oath at his birth whom Eris bore, a woe
To any mortal who forswears himself.’
Aeschylus narrows the Homeric and Hesiodic conception of the Erinyes
to the exigencies of the particular legend he treats; they are for him
almost uniformly the personified Curses that attend the shedding of
kindred blood, though now and again he rises to the cosmic conception of
Heracleitus, as when the chorus in the _Eumenides_ exclaim[579]
‘O Justice, O ye thrones
Of the Erinyes,’
and chant the doom that awaits the transgressor in general; but the
circumstances of the plot compel a speedy return within narrower limits.
THE TRAGIC ERINYES.
The Erinyes in Homer are terrors unseen: Homer who lends to his Olympians
such clear human outlines has no embodied shape for these underworld
Angry Ones; he knows full well what they do, but not how they look. But
Aeschylus can indulge in no epic vagueness. He has to bring his Erinyes
in flesh and blood actually on the stage; he must make up his mind what
and who they are. Fortunately at this point we are not left with a mere
uncertain stage tradition or the statements of late scholiasts and
lexicographers. From Aeschylus himself we know with unusual precision
how his Erinyes appeared on the stage. The priestess has seen within
the temple horrible things; she staggers back in terror to give—for her
horror-stricken state—a description remarkably explicit. The exact order
of her words is important[580]:
‘Fronting the man I saw a wondrous band
Of women, sleeping on the seats. But no!
No women these, but Gorgons—yet methinks
I may not liken them to Gorgon-shapes.
Once on a time I saw those pictured things
That snatch at Phineus’ feast, but these, but these
Are wingless—black, foul utterly. They snore,
Breathing out noisome breath. From out their eyes
They ooze a loathly rheum.’
The whole manner of the passage arrests attention at once. Why is
Aeschylus so unusually precise and explicit? Why does he make the
priestess midway in her terror give this little archaeological lecture
on the art-types of Gorgons and Harpies? The reason is a simple one; the
Erinyes _as Erinyes_ appear for the first time in actual definite shape.
Up to the time when Aeschylus brought them on the stage, no one, if he
had been asked what an Erinys was like, could have given any definite
answer; they were unseen horrors which art up to that time had never
crystallized into set form. The priestess is literally correct when she
says[581]:
‘This race of visitants ne’er have I seen.’
Aeschylus had behind him, to draw from, a great wealth of bogey types; he
had black Keres, such as those on the shield of Herakles; he had Gorgons,
he had Harpies, but he had no ready-made shape for his Erinyes, only the
Homeric horror of formlessness. What will he do? What he _did_ do is
clearly set forth by the priestess. When she first, in the gloom of the
adyton, catches sight of the sleeping shapes, she thinks they are women,
they have something human about them; but no, they are too horrible for
women, they must be Gorgons. She looks a little closer. No, on second
thoughts, they are not Gorgons; they have not the familiar Gorgon mask;
there is something else she has seen in a picture, Harpies, ‘those that
snatch at Phineus’ feast.’ Can they be Harpies? No, again, Harpies have
wings, and these are wingless. Here precisely came in the innovation of
Aeschylus; he takes the Harpy-type, loathsome and foul, and rids them of
their wings. It was a master-touch[582], lifting the Erinyes from the
region of grotesque impossible bogeydom to a lower and more loathsome,
because wholly human, horror.
The ‘Gorgon shapes,’ which indeed amount almost to Gorgon _masks_—so
characteristic is the ugly face with tusks and protruding tongue—have
been already fully discussed (p. 187), but for clearness’ sake
another illustration, which can be securely dated as before the time
of Aeschylus, may be added here. The design in fig. 46 is from a
black-figured _olpe_ in the British Museum[583]. It is signed by the
potter Amasis (Ἄμασίς μ’ ἐποίησεν), and dates about the turn of the 6th
and 5th centuries B.C. The scene depicted is the slaying of the Gorgon
Medusa by Perseus. Medusa is represented with the typical ugly face,
protruding tusks and tongue. On her lower lip is a fringe of hair; four
snakes rise from her head. She wears a short purple chiton, over which
is a stippled skin with two snakes knotted at the waist. She has high
huntress-boots and two pairs of wings, one outspread the other recurved.
The essential feature of the Gorgon in Greek art is the hideous mask-like
head; but she has usually, though not always, snakes somewhere about
her, in her hair or her hands or about her waist. The wings, also a
frequent though not uniform appendage, are sometimes two, sometimes
four. In common with the Harpy, to whom she is so near akin, she has the
bent knee that indicates a striding pace. That Harpy and Gorgon are not
clearly distinguished is evident from the vase-painting already discussed
(p. 176, fig. 19), in which the Gorgon sisters of Medusa are inscribed
Harpies (Ἀρεπυια).
[Illustration: FIG. 46.]
[Illustration: FIG. 47.]
Broadly speaking the Gorgon is marked off from the Harpy by the
mask-face. The Harpy is a less monstrous form of Gorgon, but at worst
there was not much to choose between them. We sympathize with the
hesitation of the priestess, when we compare the Medusa-Gorgon of
the Amasis vase (fig. 46) with the undoubted Harpies of the famous
Würzburg[584] cylix (fig. 47). Here we have depicted the very scene
remembered by the priestess, ‘those pictured things that snatch at
Phineus’ feast.’ The vase is in a disastrous condition, and the
inscriptions present many difficulties as well as uncertainties, but
happily those that are legible and certain are sufficient to place the
subject of the scene beyond a doubt. It would indeed be clear enough
without the added evidence of inscriptions. Phineus to the right reclines
at the banquet, attended by women of his family, whose names present
difficulties and need not here be discussed. The Harpies[585] (Ἀρε...),
pestilential unclean winds as they are, have fouled the feast. But for
the last time they are chased away by the two sons of Boreas, Zetes and
Kalais, sword in hand. The sons of the clean clear North Wind drive away
the unclean demons. All the winds, clean and unclean, are figured alike,
with four wings each; but the Boreadae are of course male, the women
Harpies are draped.
[Illustration: FIG. 48.]
Before returning to the tragic Erinyes, another vase must be discussed.
The design, from an early black-figured cylix in the Louvre[586], is
reproduced in fig. 48. The centre of interest is clearly the large dog,
a creature of supernatural size, almost the height of a man. To the
left of him a bearded man is hastening away; he looks back, apparently
in surprise or consternation. Immediately behind the dog comes a winged
figure, also in haste, and manifestly interested in the dog. Behind her
is Hermes, and behind him, as quiet spectators, two women figures. There
is only one possible explanation of the general gist of the scene. It
is the story of the golden dog of Minos stolen from Crete by Pandareos,
king of Lycia, and by him from fear of Zeus deposited with Tantalos. The
scholiast on the _Odyssey_[587] tells the story in commenting on the
lines ‘As when the daughter of Pandareos the bright brown nightingale’
as follows. ‘There is a legend about the above-mentioned Pandareos,
that he stole the golden dog of Zeus in Crete, a life-like work of
Hephaistos, from the precinct of Zeus, and having stolen it he deposited
it with Tantalos. And when Zeus demanded the stolen thing by the mouth
of Hermes Tantalos swore that he had it not. But Zeus when he had got
the dog again, Hermes having secretly taken it away, buried Tantalos
under Sipylos.’ Another scholiast[588] gives a different version,
in which judgment fell on the daughters of Pandareos. ‘Merope and
Kleothera (daughters of Pandareos) were brought up by Aphrodite; but
when Pandareos, having received the dog stolen from Crete in trust for
Tantalos, denied that he ever took it, Merope and Kleothera were snatched
away by the Harpies and given to the Erinyes.’
In the light of this version the vase-painting is clear. The moment
chosen is the coming of Hermes to claim the dog. It is no use Pandareos
denying he had it, for there it is, larger than life. The vase-painter
had to put the dog in, to make the story manifest. The two women
spectators are the daughters of Pandareos, Merope and Kleothera. Who is
the winged figure? Archaeologists variously name her Iris, a Harpy, an
Erinys. Iris I unhesitatingly reject. Between a Harpy and an Erinys the
choice is harder, and the doubt is instructive. Taking into consideration
the Lycian character of the story, and the not unimportant fact that the
design of the reverse represents a Lycian myth also, Bellerophon and
the Chimaera, I think we may safely say that the figure is a Harpy,
but it is a Harpy performing the functions of an Erinys, avenging the
theft, avenging the broken oath, come also to fetch the two maidens whom
she will give to be handmaids to the hateful Erinyes—so near akin, so
fluctuating are the two conceptions.
* * * * *
The fact then that Aeschylus brought them on the stage and his finer
poetical conception of horror compelled the complete and human
formulation of the Erinyes; before his time they have no definite
art-type. The Erinyes of Aeschylus are near akin to Gorgons, but
they lack the Gorgon mask; nearer still to Harpies, but wingless.
It is curious and interesting to note that at the close of the
_Choephori_[589], where they do not appear on the stage, where they are
visible only to the imagination of the mad Orestes, he sees them like the
shapes he knows—
‘These are like Gorgon shapes
Black-robed, with tangled tentacles entwined
Of frequent snakes.’
[Illustration: FIG. 49.]
Aeschylus felt the imaginative gain of the purely human form, but his
fellow artist the vase-painter will not lightly forego the joy of drawing
great curved wings. In vases that are immediately post-Aeschylean the
wingless type tends to prevail, though not wholly; later it lapses and
the great fantastic wings reappear. On the red-figured vase-painting[590]
in fig. 49—the earliest of the series and dating somewhere towards the
end of the 5th century—we have the scene of the purification of Orestes.
He is seated close to the omphalos—sword in hand. Above his head Apollo
holds the pig of purification, in his left hand the laurel; to the right
is Artemis as huntress with spears; to the left are the sleeping wingless
Erinyes; the ghost of Clytaemnestra beckons to them to wake. From the
ground rises another Erinys, a veritable earth demon. The euphemism of
the vase-painter makes the Erinyes not only wingless but beautiful, as
fair to see as Clytaemnestra.
[Illustration: FIG. 50.]
The next picture[591] (fig. 50) is later in style, but far more
closely under dramatic influence. We have the very opening scene of
the _Eumenides_. The inner shrine of the temple, a small Ionic naos,
the omphalos, and the supplicant Orestes, with no Apollo to purify;
the frightened priestess holding the symbol of her office, the great
temple key with its sacred fillet. All about the shrine are lying the
Erinyes, wingless and loathly; the scanty dishevelled hair and pouting
barbarous lips are best seen in the rightmost Erinys, whose face is drawn
profile-wise.
[Illustration: FIG. 51.]
In the third representation[592] from a krater formerly in the Hope
Collection (fig. 51) the style is late and florid, and the vase-painter
has shaken himself quite free from dramatic influence. Orestes crouches
in an impossible pose on the great elaborately decorated omphalos; Apollo
is there with his filleted laurel staff. The place of Artemis is taken
by Athene, her foot resting on what seems to be an urn for voting. To
the left is an Erinys, in huntress garb, with huge snake and high curved
wings; but the vase-painter is indifferent and looks for variety: a
second Erinys, who leans over the tripod, is well furnished with snakes,
but has no wings.
In the last and latest of the series, a kalpis in the Berlin Museum[593]
(fig. 52), the Erinys is a mere angel of vengeance; her wings are no
longer fantastic, she is no huntress, but a matronly, heavily draped
figure; she holds a scourge in her hand, she is more Poine than Erinys,
only about her is still curled a huge snake.
[Illustration: FIG. 52.]
* * * * *
Aeschylus then, we may safely assert, first gave to the Erinyes outward
and visible shape, first differentiated them from Keres, Gorgons, or
Harpies. In this connection it is worth noting that the Erinyes or Poinae
were not infrequently referred to in classical literature as though they
were almost the exclusive property of the stage. Aeschines[594], in his
oration against Timarchus, exhorts the Athenians not to imagine ‘that
impious men _as in the tragedies_ are pursued and chastized by Poinae
with blazing torches.’ Plutarch[595] in his life of Dion tells how,
when the conspiracy of Callippus was on foot against him, Dion had a
‘monstrous and portentous vision.’ As he was meditating alone one evening
he heard a sudden noise and saw, for it was still light, a woman of
gigantic size, ‘in form and raiment exactly like a tragic Erinys.’ She
was sweeping the house with a sort of broom.
On Lower Italy vases the Erinyes as Poinae frequently appear (Chap.
XI.). They are sometimes winged, sometimes unwinged. From the august
ministers of the vengeance of the dead they have sunk to be the mere
pitiless tormentors of hell. They lash on Sisyphos to his ceaseless task,
they bind Peirithoös, they fasten Ixion to his wheel. But it is curious
to note that, though the notion of pursuit is almost lost, they still
wear the huntress garb, the short skirt and high boots. It is needless to
follow the downward course of the Erinys in detail, a course accelerated
by Orphic eschatology, but we may note the last stage of degradation in
Plutarch’s treatise ‘On those who are punished by the Deity late[596].’
The criminals whom Justice (Dike)—the Orphic divinity of purification
rather than vengeance—rejects as altogether incurable are pursued by an
Erinys, ‘the third and most savage of the ministrants of Adrasteia.’ She
drives them down into a place which Plutarch very properly describes as
‘not to be seen, not to be spoken of.’ The Erinyes are from beginning to
end of the old order, implacable, vindictive; they know nothing of Orphic
penance and purgatory; as ‘angels of torment[597]’ they go to people a
Christian Hell.
THE ERINYS AS SNAKE.
We return to Aeschylus. His intent was to humanize the Erinyes that
thereby they might be the more inhuman. The more horrible the shape of
these impersonations of the old order the greater the miracle of their
conversion into the gentle Semnae, and yet the easier, for so early as we
know them the Semnae are goddesses, human as well as humane.
In his persistent humanizing of the Erinyes Aeschylus suffers one lapse,
the more significant because probably unconscious. When Clytaemnestra
would rouse the Erinyes from their slumber, she cries[598],
‘Travail and Sleep, chartered conspirators,
Have spent the fell rage of the _dragoness_.’
It is of course possible to say that she uses the word ‘dragoness’
(δράκαινα) ‘poetically,’ for a monster in general, possibly a human
monster; but the question is forced upon us, why is this particular
monster selected? why does she say ‘dragoness’ and not rather ‘hound
of hell’? In the next lines[599] comes the splendid simile of the dog
hunting in dreams, and it would surely have been more ‘poetical’ to keep
the figure intact. But language and associations sometimes break through
the best regulated conceptions, and deep, very deep in the Greek mind
lay the notion that the Erinys, the offended ghost, was a snake. The
notion of the earth demon, the ghost as snake, will be considered when
hero-worship is dealt with (p. 326). For the present it can only be noted
in Aeschylus as an outcrop of a lower stratum of thought, a stratum in
which the Erinys was not yet an abstracted or even humanized minister of
vengeance, but simply an angry ghost in snake form.
The use of the singular number, ‘dragoness,’ is, in itself, significant.
The Erinyes as ministers of vengeance are indefinitely multiplied, but
the old ghost-Erinys is one, not many; she is the ghost of the murdered
mother. Clytaemnestra herself is the real ‘dragoness,’ though she does
not know it, and by a curious unconscious reminiscence the Erinyes sleep
till she, the true Erinys, rouses them.
The mention by Aeschylus of the ‘dragoness’ does not stand alone. To
Euripides also the Erinys is a snake. In the _Iphigeneia in Tauris_[600]
the mad Orestes cries to Pylades,
‘Dost see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes
To slay me, with dread vipers, open-mouthed?’
Here it can hardly be said that the conception is borrowed from
Aeschylus, for assuredly the stage Erinyes of Aeschylus, as he
consciously conceived them, were in no wise snakes. Moreover the
‘Hades-snake’ confuses the effect of the ‘dread vipers’ that follow. In
his _Orestes_ also[601] Euripides makes the Erinyes ‘maidens with the
forms of snakes,’ where it is straining language, and quite needlessly,
to say that the word δρακοντώδεις means ‘having snakes in their hands or
hair.’
Art too has these harkings back to the primitive snake form. The design
in fig. 53 is from a black-figured amphora in the Vatican Museum[602],
dating about the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. We have the
usual striding flying type, the four wings, the huntress boots—a type
of which, as has been shown, it is hard to say whether it represents
Gorgon or Harpy. There is no context to decide. One thing is clear.
The vase-painter is afraid that we shall miss his meaning, shall not
understand that this winged thing striding through the air is an earth
demon, so he paints below, moving _pari passu_, a great snake. The winged
demon _is_ also a snake[603].
[Illustration: FIG. 53.]
[Illustration: FIG. 54.]
Most clearly of all the identity of ghost and snake comes out in the
vase-painting in fig. 54 from an archaic vase of the type known as
‘prothesis’ vases, in the Museum at Athens[604]. They are a class used
in funeral ceremonies and decorated with funeral subjects. Two mourners
stand by a grave tumulus, itself surmounted by a funeral vase. Within the
tumulus the vase-painter depicts what he believes to be there. Winged
eidola, ghosts, and a great snake, also a ghost. Snake and eidolon are
but two ways of saying the same thing. The little fluttering figures here
represented are merely harmless Keres, not angry vindictive Erinyes, but
when the Erinys developes into an avenger she yet remembers that she is a
snake-ghost.
[Illustration: FIG. 55.]
The Gorgon, too, has her snakes. To the primitive Greek mind every bogey
was earth-born. In the design in fig. 55[605] we have the slaying of the
Gorgon Medusa. The inscriptions are not clearly legible, but the scene
is evident. Perseus attended by Athene and one of the nymphs, who gave
him the kibisis and helmet and winged sandals, is about to slay Medusa.
Medusa is of the usual Gorgon type, but she holds in her hand a huge
snake, the double of herself.
But the crowning evidence as to the snake-form of the Erinys is literary,
Clytaemnestra’s dream in the _Choephori_. Clytaemnestra dreams that she
gives birth to and suckles a snake[606]. Dr Verrall (ad loc.) has pointed
out that the snake is here the regular symbol of things subterranean and
especially of the grave, and he conjectures that the snake may have been
presented to the eyes of the audience by ‘the visible tomb of Agamemnon
which would presumably be marked as a tomb in the usual way.’ I would go
a step further. The snake is more than the symbol of the dead; it is, I
believe, the actual vehicle of the Erinys. The Erinys is in this case not
the ghost of the dead Agamemnon, but the dead Agamemnon’s son Orestes.
The symbol proper to the ghost-Erinys is transferred to the living
avenger. Orestes states this clearly[607]:
‘Myself in serpent’s shape
Will slay her.’
And this, not merely because he is deadly as a snake, but because he _is_
the snake, i.e. the Erinys.
Again, when Clytaemnestra cries for mercy, Orestes answers[608]:
‘Nay, for my father’s fate _hisses_ thy doom.’
The snake-Erinys in the _Eumenides_, and here again in the _Choephori_,
remains of course merely an incidental survival, important mainly
as marking the road Aeschylus has left far behind. It is an almost
unconscious survival of a tradition that conceived of the Erinyes as
actually ghosts, not merely as the ministers of ghostly vengeance.
Before we leave the snake-Erinys, one more vase-painting must be cited,
which brings this conception very vividly before us. The design in
fig. 56 is from an early black-figured amphora of the class known as
‘Tyrrhenian,’ formerly in the Bourguignon collection at Naples[609]. The
figure of a woman just murdered lies prostrate over an omphalos-shaped
tomb. The warrior who has slain her escapes with drawn sword to the
right. But too late. Straight out of the tomb, almost indeed out of the
body of the woman, rises a huge snake, mouthing at the murderer. The
intent is clear; it is the snake-Erinys rising in visible vengeance. The
murderer is probably Alcmaeon, who has just slain his mother Eriphyle.
His story, already discussed (p. 220), is as it were the double of that
of Orestes. The interpretation as Alcmaeon is not quite certain. It
does not however affect the general sense of the scene, i.e. a murderer
pursued by the instant vengeance of a snake-Erinys.
[Illustration: FIG. 56.]
* * * * *
Before passing to the shift from Erinyes to Semnae it may be well to note
that another tragedian—priest as well as poet—held to the more primitive
view, realized definitely that the Erinyes, the avengers, were merely
angry implacable Keres. To Sophocles in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_[610]
Apollo is the minister, not, as in the _Eumenides_, of reconciliation,
but of vengeance. He has taken over the functions of the Erinyes. With
the lightning and fire of his father Zeus he leaps full-armed upon the
guilty man; but even Apollo cannot dispense with the ancient avengers.
With him
‘Dread and unerring
Follow the Keres.’
The Keres here are certainly regarded as a kind of Fate, but to translate
the word ‘Fates’ is to precipitate unduly the meaning. The words calls up
in the poet’s mind[611], not only the notion of ministers of vengeance,
but also the reminiscence of ghostly fluttering things. He says of the
guilty man:
‘Fierce as a bull is he,
Homeless, with desolate foot he seeks to flee
The dooms of Gaia’s central mound.
In vain, they live and flit ever around.’
Again, in the _Electra_ of Euripides[612], though the Erinyes are fully
personified as dog-faced goddesses, yet they are also Keres.
‘They hunt you like dread Keres, goddesses
Dog-faced, in circling madness.’
Here the word Keres seems to be used because Moirae is of too beneficent
and omnipotent association; Keres keeps the touch of personal ghostly
vengeance.
* * * * *
To resume: the Erinyes are attributive epithets of ghosts, formless in
Homer, but gradually developed by literature, and especially by the
genius of Aeschylus, into actual impersonations. In accordance with
this merely attributive origin it is not strange that quâ Erinyes their
cult is practically non-existent. In only one instance do we hear of
a definite place of worship for the Erinyes _as such_. Herodotus[613]
tells us that at Sparta the children of the clan of the Aegidae ‘did
not survive.’ Accordingly in obedience to an oracle the Aegidae ‘made a
sanctuary to the Erinyes of Laios and Oedipus.’
Here the Erinyes are plainly offended ancestral ghosts destructive to
the offspring of their descendants, and demanding to be appeased. In
so far as they are ghosts, the ghosts of murdered or outraged men,
the Erinyes were of course everywhere propitiated, but rarely under
their ‘Angry’ name. That the natural prudence of euphemism forbade. As
abstract ministers of vengeance we have no evidence of their worship.
Clytaemnestra[614] indeed recounts in detail her dread service to
the Erinyes, but when closely examined it is found to be merely the
regular ritual of the dead and of underworld divinities; it has all
the accustomed marks, the ‘wineless libations’ and the ‘nephalia for
propitiation, the banquets by night’ offered on the low brazier (ἐσχάρα)
characteristic of underworld sacrifice (p. 62). The hour was one, she
adds, ‘shared by none of the gods.’ What she means is none of the gods
of the upper air, the Olympians proper: it was an hour shared by every
underworld divinity. Aeschylus has in a word transferred the regular
ritual of ghosts to his partially abstracted ministers of vengeance, and
has thereby left unconscious witness to their real origin.
THE ‘SEMNAI THEAI.’
To these Erinyes, adjectival, cultless, ill-defined, the Venerable
Goddesses (σεμναὶ θεαί) present a striking contrast. If the Erinyes owe
such substance and personality as they have mainly to poets, to Homer
first, later to Aeschylus and the other tragedians, with the Semnae it
is quite otherwise. Their names are of course adjectival—almost all
primitive cultus names are—but from the first, as we know them, they are
personal and local. The Erinyes range over earth and sea, the Semnae
are seated quietly and steadfastly at Athens. They are the objects of a
strictly local cult, never emerging to Pan-Hellenic importance. But for
the fact that Aeschylus was an Athenian we should scarcely have realized
their existence; they would have remained obscure local figures like the
Ablabiae and the Praxidikae.
In this connection it is of cardinal importance that, though we are apt
to speak of them as the Semnae, the Venerable Ones, this is not their
cultus title, not the fashion in which they were actually addressed
at Athens. They are uniformly spoken of, not as the Venerable Ones,
but as the Venerable Goddesses[615] (αἱ σεμναὶ θεαί). The distinction
is important. It marks the fact that the Semnae from the first moment
they come into our view have attained a complete anthropomorphism,
have passed from ghosts to goddesses[616]; they are clearly defined
personalities with a definite cultus; they are primitive forms, in
fact _the_ primitive forms, of earth goddesses, of such conceptions
as culminated finally in the great figures of Demeter and Kore. Other
such figures are, for Athens the two Thesmophoroi, who are indeed
but developments, other aspects, of the Semnae; for Eleusis the ‘two
goddesses,’ τὼ θεώ, known to us by inscriptions and reliefs; for Aegina
Damia and Auxesia; and for the rest of Greece many another local form,
dual or triune, which need not now be enumerated. The process of this
gradual anthropomorphism, this passage from sprite and ghost and demon
to full-fledged divinity will be fully traced when we come to the
‘making of a goddess’ (p. 257). For the present it can only be noted
that the term ‘goddesses’ sharply differentiates the Semnae from the
Erinyes, who, save for sporadic literary mention, never attained any such
rank. Euripides[617] does indeed make Orestes call the Erinyes ‘dread
goddesses,’ but Aeschylus[618] is explicit: ‘their adornment (κόσμος)
was neither human nor divine.’ It must be distinctly understood that,
as the Semnae are goddesses, they are dealt with at this point only by
anticipation, to elucidate the transformation effected by Aeschylus.
What we certainly know of the Semnae, as distinct from kindred figures
such as the Eumenides, is not very much, but such as it is, is
significant. We know the site of their sanctuary, something of the aspect
of their images, something also of their functions and of the nature of
their ritual. We know in fact enough, as will be shown, to feel sure that
like the Erinyes they were underworld potencies, ghosts who had become
goddesses. The origin of the two conceptions is the same, but their
development widely different, and moreover we catch it arrested at a
different stage.
It is obvious from the play of the _Eumenides_ that the worship of
the Semnae at Athens was of hoary antiquity. It is true that Diogenes
Laertius[619] states (on the authority of the augur Lobon) that the
sanctuary of the Semnae at Athens was founded by Epimenides. The scene
of the operations of Epimenides was undoubtedly the Areopagos, but, as
the purification of Athens took place in the 46th Olympiad, the statement
that he founded the sanctuary must be apocryphal. Very likely he may
have revived and restored the cult. Diogenes says that he took a number
of black and white sheep and led them up to the Areopagos and thence let
them go whither they would, and he commanded those who followed them to
sacrifice each of them wherever the sheep happened to lie down, and so
the plague would be stayed. Whence even now, adds Diogenes, you may find
in the Athenian demes nameless altars in memory of this atonement. Some
such altar as this was still to be seen at or near the Areopagos when St
Paul preached there, and such an altar may have got associated with the
Semnae, who like many other underworld beings were Nameless Ones.
The site of the worship of the Semnae was undoubtedly some sort of cave
or natural chasm amplified artificially into a sanctuary. Such caves,
clefts or chasms are, as has already been shown (p. 125), the proper
haunts of underworld beings; they are also usually, though not uniformly,
primitive. Of the sanctuary and the cultus images Pausanias[620] speaks
as follows. After describing the Areopagos and the two unwrought stones
called ‘Transgression’ (ὕβρις) and ‘Pitilessness’ (ἀναιδεία) on which
accused and accuser stood, he says ‘And near is a sanctuary (ἱερόν)
of the goddesses whom the Athenians call Semnae, but Hesiod in the
_Theogony_ calls Erinyes. Aeschylus represents them with snakes in their
hair, but in their images there is nothing frightful, nor in the other
images of the underworld gods that are set up. There is a Pluto also and
a Hermes and an image of Ge. And there those who have been acquitted in a
suit before the Areopagos sacrifice. And others besides sacrifice, both
strangers and citizens, and within the enclosure there is the tomb of
Oedipus.’
Pausanias by his reference to Aeschylus betrays at once the source of
his identification of the Semnae with the Erinyes. The statement cannot
be taken as evidence that prior to Aeschylus any such identification was
current. After the time of Aeschylus, classical writers, except when they
are quoting ritual formularies, begin to accept the fusion and use the
names Erinyes, Eumenides, and Semnae as interchangeable terms. A like
laxity unhappily obtains among modern commentators.
The statement of Pausanias, that about the cultus images of the Semnae
there was nothing frightful, is important, as showing how foreign to the
Semnae was the terror-haunted conception of the tragic Erinys. Aeschylus
might fuse the Erinyes and the Semnae at will, but the cultus images
of the Semnae take on no attribute of the Erinyes. About these cultus
images we learn something more from the scholiast on Aeschines[621].
Commenting on the Semnae he says ‘These were three in number and were
called Venerable Goddesses, or Eumenides, or Erinyes. Two of them were
made of lychnites stone by Scopas the Parian, but the middle one by
Kalamis.’ Here again we must of course discount the statement as regards
the triple appellation, at least for a date preceding Aeschylus. The
number of the statues is noticeable. At the time when the scholiast
or his informant[622] wrote the images were unquestionably three. The
origin and significance of the female trinities will be considered later
(p. 286). For the present it is sufficient to note that the trinity was
probably a later stage of development than the duality. From the notice
of the scholiast we cannot be certain that the images were _originally_
three; nay more, it looks as if there was some reminiscence of a duality.
Moreover the scholiast on the _Oedipus Coloneus_[623] expressly states
that according to Phylarchus the images of the Semnae at Athens were two
in number. He adds that according to Polemon they were three. That the
number three ultimately prevailed is highly probable, indeed practically
certain. The scholiast on Aeschines goes on to say ‘the court of the
Areopagos adjudged murder cases on three days in each month, assigning
one day to each goddess.’ The three days were probably a primitive
institution, three being a number sacred to the dead, and these three
days may have helped the development of the threefold form of the Semnae.
Later in considering the Charites and other kindred shapes (p. 286)
it will be shown that many different strands went to the weaving of a
trinity. The strictly definite number of the Semnae, be it two or three,
is in marked contrast to the indefinite ‘wondrous throng’ (θαυμαστὸς
λόχος) of the Aeschylean Erinyes. The contrast may have been softened,
if in the concluding scene the chorus of Erinyes filed away in groups of
three.
The sanctuary of the Semnae was, in the narrower sense of the word
‘sanctuary,’ a refuge for suppliants. This is, of course, a trait that
it has in common with many other precincts. Thucydides[624] tells how in
the conspiracy of Kylon some of the conspirators sat down at the altars
of the Venerable Goddesses, and were put to death at the entrance. A
monument, the Kyloneion, was put up close to the Nine Gates to expiate
the pollution. Plutarch[625], in his account of this same conspiracy,
adds a curious primitive touch: the conspirators connected themselves
with the image of ‘the goddess’ by a thread, believing thereby they would
remain immune; the thread broke of its own accord when they reached the
Semnae; this was taken as an omen of rejection and they were put to
death. Aristophanes twice alludes to the precinct of the Semnae as a
place of sanctuary. In the Knights[626], he makes the outraged triremes
say
‘If this is what the Athenians like, we must needs set sail forthwith
And sit us down in the Theseion or in the Semnae’s shrine.’
In the _Thesmophoriazusae_[627], when Mnesilochus is about to make off in
a fright, Euripides asks
‘You villain, where are you off to?’
and the answer is
‘To the shrine of the Semnae.’
It is noticeable that in both these cases the name given to the goddesses
of sanctuary is Semnae, not Erinyes or Eumenides. The confusion of the
three was never local, only literary, and by the time of Aristophanes it
has not yet begun.
Euripides[628] is our solitary authority for the fact that the sanctuary
was also oracular. At the close of the _Electra_ he makes the Dioscuri,
in a speech not untinged by irony, prophesy that Orestes, pursued by the
Erinyes, will come to Athens and be acquitted by the equal vote, and
that in consequence the baffled Erinyes will descend in dudgeon into a
subterranean cleft hard by the Areopagos:
‘A mantic shrine,
Sacred, adored of mortals.’
Oracular functions were ascribed to most, if not all, underworld
divinities, so that it is quite probable that the description of the
Dioscuri is correct.
* * * * *
The sanctuary of the Semnae was open to suppliants and to those who
sought oracular counsel, but to one unfortunate class of the community,
happily a small one, it was rigidly closed. These were the people known
as ‘second-fated’ or ‘later-doomed.’ Hesychius[629], in explaining
the term ‘second-fated’ (δευτερόποτμος), says ‘he is called by some
“later-doomed.” So a man is termed when the accustomed rites have been
performed as though he were dead, and later on he reappears alive; and
Polemon says that to such it was forbidden to enter the sanctuary of the
Venerable Goddesses. The term is also used of a man who is reported to
have died abroad and then comes home, and again of a man who passes a
second time through the folds of a woman’s garment, as was the custom
among the Athenians in a case of second birth.’
This curious statement is fortunately explained to us in instructive
detail by Plutarch in the answer to his 5th _Roman Question_. He there
says ‘Those who have had a funeral and sepulture as though they were dead
are accounted by the Greeks as not pure, and they will not associate
with them, nor will they permit them to approach sanctuaries. And they
say that a certain Aristinus, who believed in this superstition, sent to
Delphi to enquire of the god and to ask release from the disabilities
this custom imposed on him, and the Pythian made answer:
“Whatsoe’er is accomplished by woman that travails in childbed,
That in thy turn having done, sacrifice thou to the gods.”
And Aristinus being a good and wise man gave himself up, like a new-born
child, to the women to wash and swaddle and suckle, and all the others
who were called “later-doomed” did the like.’ ‘But,’ adds Plutarch, and
doubtless most justly, ‘some say that these things were done with respect
to the “later-doomed” before Aristinus did them, and the custom was an
ancient one.’
Plutarch says the exclusion was from all sacred rites. In this he
is probably mistaken. Anyhow in the case of the Semnae, and of all
underworld divinities, the significance is clear. If a man comes back to
life after burial rites, the reason to the primitive mind is that there
is something wrong with him; he is rejected by the powers below and
unfit to mingle with his fellows in the world above; he is highly taboo.
Despised of the gods, he is naturally rejected of his fellow men. The
only chance for him is to be born again.
When we come to the ritual of the Semnae every detail confirms the view
that they are underworld beings. From Aeschylus himself[630] we know that
σφάγια, animal sacrifices consumed but not eaten, were offered to them.
Athene bids the Erinyes, after they have turned Semnae,
‘pass below the earth
With these your sacred sphagia.’
The underworld nature of _sphagia_—the word has no English equivalent—has
been fully discussed (p. 63). In careful writers, as has been seen, it is
never interchangeable with ἱερεῖα, victims sacrificed and eaten.
The scholiast on Sophocles[631] speaks of the holocaust of a black
sheep to the Eumenides, whom he identifies with the Semnae; but, as he
expressly states that this sacrifice took place in the Peloponnese, we
cannot safely attribute it to the local Semnae of Athens. It is probable
that σφάγια formed part of the regular sacrifice mentioned by Pausanias
as offered to the Semnae by the acquitted; σφάγια belong, as has already
been shown, to the class of expiatory offerings. It was on σφάγια, which
were also called τόμια, that oaths were taken (p. 64) in the law courts,
oaths the extraordinary solemnity of which Demosthenes[632] emphasizes.
A man so swearing stood on the fragments of victims officially and
solemnly slain, and devoted himself and his household to destruction
in case of perjury. By standing on the slain fragments he identifies
himself proleptically with them. We have no explicit statement that the
divinities by whom these awful oaths on the τόμια had to be taken were
the Semnae, but as the Semnae were the underworld divinities resident on
the Areopagos, and as they were frequently invoked with the local heroes,
and as sacrifice was done to them by the acquitted, it seems highly
probable. If they were the goddesses of oaths, this is another link with
the Erinyes, the avengers of oaths. It is notable that in an ordinary
imprecation in the law-courts they take precedence of Athene herself.
Thus Demosthenes[633] says, ‘I call to witness the Venerable Goddesses,
and the place they inhabit, and the heroes of the soil, and Athene of
the city, and the other gods who have the city and the land in their
dominion.’
We learn from Philo[634] that no slave was allowed to take part in the
processions of the Semnae. This in a worship of special antiquity and
solemnity is natural enough. But it is strange to hear from Polemon[635]
that there was the same taboo on all the Eupatrids. Strange at first
sight, but easily explicable. The Semnae are women divinities, and in
this taboo on the Eupatrids there seems to lurk a survival of matriarchal
conditions. Aeschylus in the _Eumenides_ is not concerned, save
incidentally, to emphasize the issue between matriarchy and patriarchy,
between kinship through the mother and through the father, but it lies
at the back of the legend he has chosen for his plot. The stories of
Orestes and Clytaemnestra, of Alcmaeon and Eriphyle, are deep-rooted in
matriarchy—both look back to the days when the only relationship that
could be proved, and that therefore was worth troubling about, was that
through the mother; and hence special vengeance attends the slayer of
the mother. In the light of this it is easy to understand why in the
worship of the Semnae the family of Eupatrids—those well-born through
their fathers—had no part. For them Apollo Patrôos was the fitter
divinity. The family of the Eupatrids had their own rites of expiation,
ancestral rites significantly called πάτρια, paternal. These rites as
described by Dorotheos have been already discussed (p. 60).
The name of the family that held the priesthood of the Semnae is also
recorded; they were the Hesychidae whom Hesychius[636] describes as ‘a
family of well-born people at Athens.’ Polemon is again our authority
for connecting these ‘Silent Ones’ with the cult of the Semnae. He is
quoted by the scholiast already cited (p. 246 note). In commenting on
the expression ‘uttering words inaudible’ the scholiast says ‘This is
from the sacrifice performed to the Eumenides. For they enact the sacred
rites in silence, and on account of this the descendants of Hesychos
(the Silent One) sacrifice to them, as Polemon says in his writings
about Eratosthenes, thus: “the family of the Eupatrids has no share in
this sacrifice”; and then further, “in this procession the Hesychidae,
which is the family that has to do with the Venerable Goddesses, take the
lead.” And before the sacrifice they make a preliminary sacrifice of a
ram to Hesychos ... giving him this name because of the ritual silence
observed. His sanctuary is by the Kyloneion outside the Nine Gates.’
Though these remarks of the scholiast are prompted by the cult of the
Eumenides at Colonos, it is quite clear that Polemon is speaking of the
Semnae at Athens. He states three important facts. The cult of the Semnae
was in the hands of a clan descended from a hero called aetiologically
‘the Silent One.’ Sacrifice to the goddesses was regularly preceded by
the sacrifice of a ram to the eponymous hero. That hero had a sanctuary
of his own outside the Nine Gates of the old Pelasgic fortification, and
near the historic monument of Kylon. The name ‘Silent One’ is possibly
a mere cultus epithet, used to preserve safely the anonymity of the
hero; heroes, as will later (p. 340) be seen, are dangerous persons to
mention. On the other hand Hesychos may have been the actual name of a
real hero, and after his death it may have seemed charged with religious
significance. This seems quite possible, the more so as the name was
adopted by the whole family. The female form Hesychia was a proper name
in the days of Nikias, and it is curious to find that even then an omen
could be drawn from it. Plutarch[637] recounts that when the Athenians
were taking omens before the Syracusan expedition an oracle ordered them
to fetch a priestess of Athene from Clazomenae. They found, when they got
her, that her name was Hesychia; and this seemed ‘a divine indication
that they should remain quiet.’
The scholiast speaks of Hesychidae, male members of the family of
Hesychos, but if we may trust Callimachus[638] it was the women of the
family who brought burnt-offerings; and these offerings were, as we
should expect, wineless libations and honey-sweet cakes. The name of
the priestesses was according to Callimachus λῄτειραι, and it is no
doubt from this source that Hesychius[639] gets his gloss, ‘Leteirai,
priestesses of the Semnae.’
The Semnae were women divinities served by priestesses, and it is
noticeable that Athene, who was ‘all for the father,’ promises to the
Erinyes that, if they become Semnae, they shall have worshippers, both
men and women[640]. But when the procession to the cave is actually
formed, in strict accordance no doubt with the traditional ritual of the
place, it is women attendants who bring the ancient image,
‘A goodly band,
Maidens and wives and throng of ancient dames[641].’
It can scarcely be doubted that among these ancient dames were members of
the clan of Hesychids.
Aeschylus[642] has left us other notes of underworld significance in the
ritual of the Semnae. When the procession is forming for the cave Athene
speaks:
‘Do on your festal garments crimson-dyed
For meed of honour, bid the torches flame—
So henceforth these our visitants shall bless
Our land and folk with shining of their grace.’
Athene proffers for guerdon to the Semnae the ritual that as underworld
goddesses was already theirs, torches and crimson raiment.
In connection with the torches it cannot be forgotten that some, though
possibly not all, the sittings of the court of the Areopagos took place
by night, doubtless in honour of the underworld goddesses who presided.
In Lucian’s time, at least, these sittings were almost proverbial. He
says of a man perceiving with difficulty[643], ‘unless he chance to be
stone-blind or like the Council of the Areopagos which gives its hearing
by night’: and again in the _Hermotimus_[644] ‘he is doing it like the
Areopagites who give judgment in darkness.’ To these sittings in the
night-time it may be that Athene refers when she says[645]
‘This court I set, untouched of gain, revered,
Alert, a wakeful guard o’er those who sleep.’
The garments of crimson or purple dye point to a ritual of placation
and the service of the underworld. This is clearly shown in the details
given by Plutarch[646] of the rites of placation performed annually for
those who fell in the battle of Plataea. ‘On the 16th day of the month
Maimakterion the archon of Plataea, who on other days may not touch iron
nor wear any garment that is not white, puts on a crimson chiton and
taking a hydria and girded with a sword goes to the sepulchres. There
with water from the spring he washes the stelae and anoints them with
myrrh; he slays a black bull, prays to Zeus and Hermes Chthonios, and
invokes to the banquet and the bloodshed the heroes who died for Greece.’
The crimson-purple is blood colour[647], hence it is ordained for the
service of the dead. It has already been noted (p. 144) that Dion[648]
when he took the great oath in the Thesmophorion identified himself with
Kore of the underworld by putting on her crimson robe and holding a
burning torch. Purple, Pliny[649] tells us, was employed when gods had to
be appeased.
The purple robes, the torches, the night-time, above all the σφάγια,
point to a dread underworld ritual, a ritual that shows clearly that the
darker side of the Venerable Ones was not far remote from the Erinyes.
But Aeschylus, whose whole mind is bent on a doctrine of mercy, naturally
emphasizes the brighter side of their functions and worship. Athene[650]
herself knows that they are underworld goddesses, that they must have
low-lying altars and underground dwellings; only so seated will they
ever feel really at home. She remembers even that for their feast they
must have the wineless sacrifice that drives them mad[651]; but she bids
them leave this madness, and they for their part promise that the earth,
their kingdom as vengeful ghosts, shall cease to drink the black blood of
citizens. Henceforth they will be content with the white side of their
service[652].
‘From this great land, thine is the sacrifice
Of first-fruits offered for accomplishment
Of marriage and for children[653].’
[Illustration: FIG. 57.]
Again Athene offers what was theirs from the beginning. Underworld
goddesses presided over marriage: in later days, as Plutarch[654] tells
us, it was the priestess of Demeter; earlier we can scarcely doubt it was
the Semnae. Here they stand in sharp contrast to the Erinyes, who are
all black. Who would have bidden an Erinys to a marriage feast? as well
bid Eris who, in form (fig. 57) and function as perhaps in name, was but
another Erinys, Eris
‘The Abominable, who uninvited came
And cast the golden fruit upon the board.’
The Erinyes transformed to Semnae ask Athene what spells they shall chant
over the land. She makes answer[655]:
‘Whatever charms wait on fair Victory
From earth, from dropping dew and from high heaven,
The wealth of winds that blow to hail the land
Sunlit, and fruits of earth and teeming flocks
Untouched of time, safety for human seed.’
The chorus accept these functions of health and life, and chant their
promised guerdon[656].
‘No wind to wither trees shall blow,
By our grace it shall be so;
Nor that nor shrivelling heat
On budding plants shall beat
With parching drouth
To waste their growth,
Nor any plague of dismal blight come creeping;
But teeming, doubled flocks the earth
In her season shall bring forth,
And evermore a wealthy race
Pay reverence for this our grace
Of spirits that have the rich earth in their keeping.’
We are reminded that Ploutos himself, the Wealth of the underworld,
had, according to Pausanias[657], a statue in the precinct of the
Venerable Goddesses. Moreover it is impossible to hear the words ‘no
wind to wither trees shall blow’ without recalling the altar of the
Wind-stillers (Εὐδάνεμοι), which stood somewhere on the western slope
of the Areopagos. Arrian[658], speaking of the statues of Harmodios and
Aristogeiton, says ‘they stand at Athens in the Cerameicus where we go
up to the citadel, just opposite the Metrôon not far from the altar of
the Wind-stillers. Whoever has been initiated in the Eleusinia knows the
altar of the Wind-stillers which stands on the ground.’ A low-lying altar
doubtless, an eschara, for, as has already been shown (p. 65), the winds
were to primitive thinking ghosts or caused by ghosts and worshipped with
underworld sacrifices. Hesychius[659] tells us that there was at Corinth
a family called the Wind-calmers. The Areopagos was a wind-swept hill.
It was thence, according to a form of the legend recorded by Plato[660],
that Boreas caught up Oreithyia.
The Semnae claim as their special ‘grace[661]’ control over the winds.
As goddesses who bring the blessings of marriage and of fertile breezes,
they are but good fructifying Keres like the Tritopatores already
discussed (p. 179); the Erinyes are blighting poisonous Keres, who
Harpy-like foul the food by which men live.
* * * * *
The Erinyes, in the play of Aeschylus, are transformed into Semnae, into
the local goddesses of Athens. Of this there is no shadow of doubt. They
accept the citizenship of Pallas[662], and they are actually hailed as
Semnae[663]. Aeschylus it is true never definitely states that they
entered the cleft of the Areopagos, but Euripides, manifestly borrowing
from him, is as has been seen explicit.
Such a conversion may have been gratifying to the patriotism of an
Athenian audience, but Athenian though he is, it is not the glorification
of a local cult that inspires Aeschylus; it is the reconciliation of
the old order of vengeance with the new law of mercy. It is significant
in this connection that Aeschylus, or some one who took his meaning,
gave to the play the title, not as we should expect of _Semnae_, but of
_Eumenides_. The moral of the play is thereby emphasized.
It is, to say the least, curious that a play called traditionally, if
not by the author, the ‘_Eumenides_’ should contain no single mention
of the Eumenides by this name. Harpocration[664], commenting on the
word Eumenides, says ‘Aeschylus _in the Eumenides_, recounting what
happened about the trial of Orestes, says that Athene, having mollified
the Erinyes so that they did not deal harshly with Orestes, called them
Eumenides.’ Aeschylus says no such thing. The text of the play contains
no mention of the Eumenides, though in the hypothesis prefixed to the
text occur the following words: ‘Having prevailed by the counsel of
Athene, he (Orestes) went to Argos, and when he had mollified the Erinyes
he addressed them as Eumenides[665].’ Harpocration attributes to Athene
in the play what the hypothesis notes as done by Orestes in the sequel
at Argos. By his use of the word ‘mollified’ (πραΰνασα) he betrays, I
think, the source of his information. It must always be remembered that
the Orestes legend was native to Argos and at Argos the local cult was of
Eumenides not Semnae.
THE EUMENIDES.
The worship of divinities bearing the name of Eumenides, though unknown
at Athens[666], was wider-spread than that of the Semnae, which is found
nowhere outside Attica. It was possibly for this reason that Aeschylus
or later tradition gave this name to the play. The Semnae were familiar
figures at Athens, and, spite of many underworld analogies, the shift
from Erinyes to Semnae must have been a difficult one. A great deal is
borne for the glory of the gods, but there must have been among the
audience men conservative and hard-headed who would be likely to maintain
that, all said and done, the Erinyes were not, could not be, Semnae. If
asked to believe that the Erinyes became Eumenides, they would feel and
probably say: that is a matter for Colonos, for Argos, for Sekyon to
consider; it affects no Athenian’s faith or practice. At Colonos it is
certain that goddesses were worshipped who bore the name of Eumenides,
goddesses of function and ritual precisely identical with the Semnae, but
addressed by a different cultus epithet. We have the express statement
of Sophocles[667], who, as a priest himself and a conservative, was not
likely to tamper with ritual titles. He makes Oedipus ask the stranger
who they are whose dread name he is to invoke. The answer is explicit:
‘Eumenides all-seeing here the folk
Would call them: other names please otherwhere.’
Sophocles no doubt shows the influence of Aeschylus in his ‘other names
please otherwhere.’ He realizes that Eumenides and Semnae are ‘one form
of diverse names[668].’ This truth it was the mission of the reconciling
monotheist always to preach, but he would scarcely dare to tamper with
the familiar titles of a local cult. In fact by this very statement, that
elsewhere the goddesses bore other names, he makes the local appellation
certain. He may indeed have brought Oedipus to Colonos rather than to the
Areopagos, where he had also a grave, just because the local attributive
title of the goddesses at Colonos suited the gentle moral of his play.
Again when Oedipus asks to be taught to pray aright, the Chorus lay
emphasis on the title Eumenides.
‘That, as we call them Kindly, from kind hearts
They may receive the suppliant[669].’
So strong is the exclusiveness of local cults that, had the title of
Eumenides occurred only at Colonos, neither Aeschylus nor tradition would
perhaps have ventured to assume it for the Semnae. But from Pausanias
we learn of sanctuaries of the Eumenides at Titane[670] near Sekyon,
at Cerynaea[671] in Achaia, and in Arcadia near Megalopolis[672]. The
sanctuary between Sekyon and Titane consisted of a grove and a temple.
Pausanias expressly says these belonged to the goddesses whom the
Athenians called Semnae and the Sikyonians Eumenides. The festival in
their honour was a yearly one, and has already been discussed (p. 56).
Tradition said that the sanctuary at Cerynaea was founded by Orestes, and
that ‘if any one stained by blood or any other pollution, or impious,
entered the sanctuary wishing to see it, he straightway went out of his
wits by the terrors he beheld. The images in it were made of wood[673]
... and they were not large.’ The ritual of the sanctuary at Megalopolis,
with its black and white sides, addressed severally to the goddesses as
Madnesses (Maniae) and Kindly Ones (Eumenides), has already been noted
(p. 56). To the Madnesses Orestes sacrifices, it will be remembered, with
underworld rites to avert their wrath; to the Kindly Ones when healed,
and after the same fashion as to the gods; the clearest possible instance
of two stages of development in ritual and theology, of ἀποτροπή side by
side with θεραπεία.
[Illustration: FIG. 58.]
To these four instances of the cult of the Eumenides a fifth may safely
be added, the sanctuary at or near Argos. Of any such sanctuary we have
no literary record, but we have what is of even greater value—monumental
evidence. Three votive reliefs dedicated to the Eumenides have been
found at the little church of Hag. Johannes, about half-an-hour to the
east of the modern village of Argos[674]. They are still preserved in
the local museum of the Demarchy. The material of all three is the hard
local limestone, and they must have been set up in a local sanctuary. The
sanctuary of Titane was nearly twenty miles away, too far to admit of
any theory of transportation. All three are inscribed, and in each the
dedicator is a woman. The relief reproduced in fig. 58 was found built
into the outside of the Church of Hag. Johannes. It is clearly inscribed
Εὐμενίσιν εὐχάν, a vow or prayer to the Eumenides. The beginning of the
inscription is lost, but enough remains, ...η Α...εία, to show that a
woman dedicated it, and that she was probably an Argive. It is a woman’s
offering, but she likes to have her husband carved upon it and she lets
him walk first. Perhaps he went with her to the sanctuary and offered
sacrifice of honey and water and flowers and a ewe great with young[675].
‘The first-fruits offered for accomplishment
Of marriage and for children.’
About the figures of the Eumenides at Argos, as of the Semnae at Athens,
‘there is nothing frightful.’ These are not the short-girt huntress women
of the vases, nor yet the loathly black horrors of tragedy; they are
gentle, staid, matronly figures, bearing in their left hands, for tokens
of fertility, flowers or fruit, and in their right, snakes[676] as the
symbols, not of terror and torture, but merely of that source of wealth,
the underworld; but for the snakes, which lend a touch of austerity,
they would be Charites (p. 297). From the inscriptions these reliefs are
certainly known to be later than Aeschylus, but because a poet writes
a great play at Athens the local stonemason does not alter the type of
the votive offerings he supplies. Why should he frighten pious women
and perhaps lose his custom? The Erinys of tragedy took strong hold of
literature, but even at Athens there was a sceptic to whom the great
conversion scene was merely absurd. If we may trust Suidas[677], the
comic poet Philemon held to it that ‘the Semnae were quite other than the
Eumenides,’ and we may be sure that the humour of the situation attempted
would lose nothing in his hands. Great though the influence of Aeschylus
over the educated undoubtedly was, it was powerless to alter traditional
types in art; equally powerless we may be sure to abate or alter one
jot or one tittle of hieratic ceremonial. The Erinyes remained Erinyes,
and in popular bogey form went, as has been seen (p. 232), to people
with horrors a Christian hell. Man was not ready yet to worship only the
Kindly Ones. For generations, nay centuries, he must bear the hard yoke
of ἀποτροπή before he might offer to gods remade in his own image the
free-will offering of a kindly θεραπεία.
CHAPTER VI.
THE MAKING OF A GODDESS.
‘οὐ γὰρ γῆ γυναῖκα μεμίμηται κυήσει καὶ γεννήσει ἀλλὰ γυνὴ γῆν.’
In the last chapter we have traced the development from Keres to Erinyes,
and have seen that, on the whole, this development was a downward course.
The Erinyes are in a sense more civilized than the Keres; they are beings
more articulate, more clearly outlined and concerned with issues moral
rather than physical; but the career they start as angry souls they end
as Poinae, ministers of vindictive torment; there is in them no element
of hope, no kindly impulse towards purification, they end where they
began as irreconcileable demons rather than friendly gods.
We have further marked the attempt of Aeschylus to turn the vindictive
demons of the old religion into the gentler divinities of the new, and
we have seen that, for all his genius, the attempt failed wholly. The
Erinyes never, save here and there to a puzzled antiquarian, became
really Semnae; the popular instinct of their utter distinctness remained
sound. We have now to note that, where the genius of a poet fails, the
slow-moving widespread instinct of a people may prevail; ghosts are not
wholly angry, and the gentler form of ghost may and does become a god.
The line between a spirit (δαίμων) and a regular god (θεός) is drawn with
no marked precision. The difference is best realized by remembering the
old principle that man makes all the objects of his worship in his own
image. Before he has himself clearly realized his own humanity—the line
that marks him off from other animals, he makes his divinities sometimes
wholly animal, sometimes of mixed, monstrous shapes. His animal-shaped
gods the Greek quickly outgrew; something will be said of them when we
come to the religion of the Bull-Dionysos. Mixed monstrous shapes long
haunted his imagination; bird-woman-souls, Gorgon-bogeys, Sphinxes,
Harpies and the like were, as has been seen, the fitting vehicles of a
religion that was mainly of vague fear. But as man became more conscious
of his humanity and _pari passu_ grew more _humane_, a more complete
anthropomorphism steadily prevailed, and in the figures of wholly human
gods man mirrored his gentler affections, his advance in the ordered
relations of life.
Xenophanes[678], writing in the 6th century B.C., knew that God is
‘without body, parts or passions,’ but he knew also that, till man
becomes wholly philosopher, his gods are doomed perennially to take and
retake human shape. His thrice-familiar words still bear repetition:
‘One God there is greatest of gods and mortals;
Not like to man is he in mind or body.
All of him sees, all of him thinks and hearkens....
But mortal man made gods in his own image
Like to himself in vesture, voice and body.
Had they but hands, methinks, oxen and lions
And horses would have made them gods like-fashioned,
Horse-gods for horses, oxen-gods for oxen.’
We are apt to regard the advance to anthropomorphism as necessarily a
clear religious gain. A gain it is in so far as a certain element of
barbarity is softened or extruded, but with this gain comes loss, the
loss of the element of formless, monstrous mystery. The ram-headed
Knum of the Egyptians is to the mystic more religious than any of the
beautiful divine humanities of the Greek. Anthropomorphism provides a
store of lovely motives for art, but that spirit is scarcely religious
which makes of Eros a boy trundling a hoop, of Apollo a youth aiming
a stone at a lizard, of Nike a woman who stoops to tie her sandal.
Xenophanes put his finger on the weak spot of anthropomorphism. He
saw that it comprised and confined the god within the limitations
of the worshipper. It is not every religion that advances as far as
anthropomorphism, but the farthest of anthropomorphism is not very far.
Traces of animal form are among the recognized Greek gods few and
scattered. Pausanias[679] heard at Phigaleia of a horse-headed Demeter,
and again of a fish-bodied Eurynome[680] whom some called Artemis, but
for the most part by the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. mixed forms, half
animal, half human, belong to beings half-way between man and god, demons
rather than full-fledged divinities and demons malignant rather than
beneficent. Such are Boreas, Echidna, Typhon and the snake-tailed giants.
[Illustration: FIG. 59.]
In the design from a black-figured cylix[681] in fig. 59 we have a
curious and rare instance of beings of monstrous form, yet obviously
beneficent. The scene is a vineyard at the time of vintage. On the
reverse (not figured here) we have the same vintage-setting, but goats,
the destroyers of the vine, are nibbling at the vine-stems. On the
obverse (fig. 59) we have snake-bodied nymphs rejoicing in the grape
harvest. Two of them hold a basket of net or wicker in which the grapes
will be gathered, a third holds a great cup for the vine-juice, a fourth
plays on the double flutes.
Unhappily we can give no certain name to these kindly grape-gathering,
flute-playing snake-nymphs. They are δρακοντώδεις κόραι, but assuredly
they are not Erinyes and we dare not even call them Eumenides. Probably
any Athenian child would have named them without a moment’s hesitation,
but we must be content to say that, in their essence, they are Charites,
givers of grace and increase, and that their snake-bodies mark them not
as malevolent, but as earth-daemons, genii of fertility. They are near
akin to the local Athenian hero, the snake-tailed Cecrops, and we are
tempted to conjecture that in art, though not in literature, he may have
lent his snake-tail to the Agraulid nymphs, his daughters. Later it will
be seen that earth-born goddesses, though they shed their snake-form,
keep as their vehicle and attribute the snake they once were.
THE MOTHER AND THE MAID.
The gods reflect not only man’s human form but also his human relations.
In the Homeric Olympus we see mirrored a family group of the ordinary
patriarchal type, a type so familiar that it scarcely arrests attention.
Zeus, Father of Gods and men, is supreme; Hera, though in constant and
significant revolt, occupies the subordinate place of a wife; Poseidon is
a younger brother, and the rest of the Olympians are grouped about Zeus
and Hera in the relation of sons and daughters. These sons and daughters
are quarrelsome among themselves and in constant insurrection against
father and mother, but still they constitute a family, and a family
subject, if reluctantly, to the final authority of a father.
But when we come to examine local cults we find that, if these mirror
the civilization of the worshippers, this civilization is quite other
than patriarchal. Hera, subject in the Homeric Olympus, reigns alone
at Argos; Athene at Athens is no god’s wife, she is affiliated in some
loose fashion to Poseidon, but the relation is one of rivalry and
ultimate conquest, nowise of subordination. At Eleusis two goddesses
reign supreme, Demeter and Kore, the Mother and the Maid; neither Hades
nor Triptolemos their nursling ever disputes their sway. At Delphi in
historical days Apollo held the oracle, but Apollo, the priestess[682]
knows, was preceded by a succession of women goddesses:
‘First in my prayer before all other gods
I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess.
Next Themis on her mother’s oracular seat
Sat, so men say. Third by unforced consent
Another Titan, daughter too of Earth,
Phoebe. She gave it as a birthday gift
To Phoebus, and giving called it by her name.’
Gaia the Earth was first, and elsewhere Aeschylus[683] tells us that
Themis was but another name of Gaia. Prometheus says the future was
foretold him by his mother:
‘Themis she
And Gaia, one in form with many names.’
In historical days in Greece, descent was for the most part traced
through the father. These primitive goddesses reflect another condition
of things, a relationship traced through the mother, the state of society
known by the awkward term matriarchal[684], a state echoed in the lost
_Catalogues of Women_, the _Eoiai_ of Hesiod, and in the Boeotian
heroines of the _Nekuia_. Our modern patriarchal society focusses its
religious anthropomorphism on the relationship of the father and the son;
the Roman Church with her wider humanity includes indeed the figure of
the Mother who is both Mother and Maid, but she is still in some sense
subordinate to the Father and the Son.
Of the many survivals of matriarchal notions in Greek mythology one
salient instance may be noted. St Augustine[685], telling the story
of the rivalry between Athene and Poseidon, says that the contest was
decided by the vote of the citizens, both men and women, for it was the
custom then for women to take part in public affairs. The men voted for
Poseidon, the women for Athene; the women exceeded the men by one and
Athene prevailed. To appease the wrath of Poseidon the men inflicted on
the women a triple punishment, ‘they were to lose their vote, _their
children were no longer to be called by their mother’s name_ and they
themselves were no longer to be called after their goddess, Athenians.’
The myth is aetiological, and it mirrors surely some shift in the social
organization of Athens. The citizens were summoned by Cecrops, and it
is noticeable that with his name universal tradition associates the
introduction of the patriarchal form of marriage. Athenaeus[686] quoting
from Clearchos, the pupil of Aristotle, says, ‘At Athens Cecrops was the
first to join one woman to one man: before connections had taken place
at random and marriages were in common—hence, as some think, Cecrops
was called “Twy-formed” (διφυής), since before his day people did not
know who their fathers were, on account of the number (of possible
parents).’ A society that had passed to patriarchy naturally misjudged
the marriage-laws of matriarchy and regarded it as a mere state of
promiscuity. Cecrops, tradition[687] said, was the first to call Zeus the
Highest, and with the worship of Zeus the Father it is possible that he
introduced the social conditions of patriarchy. Apollo, the son of Zeus,
was worshipped at Athens as _Patrôos_.
The primitive Greek was of course not conscious that he mirrored his
own human relations in the figures of his gods, but, in the reflective
days of Pythagoras, the analogy between human and divine was not left
unnoted. The evidence he adduces as to the piety of women is perhaps the
most illuminating comment on primitive theology ever made by ancient or
modern. ‘Women,’ he[688] says, ‘give to each successive stage of their
life the same name as a god, they call the unmarried woman _Maiden_
(Κόρη), the woman given in marriage to a man _Bride_ (Νύμφη), her who
has borne children _Mother_ (Μήτηρ), and her who has borne children’s
children _Grandmother_ (Μαῖα).’ Invert the statement and we have the
whole matriarchal theology in a nutshell. The matriarchal goddesses
reflect the life of women, not women the life of the goddesses.
Of these various forms of the conditions of woman, woman as maiden,
bride, mother and grandmother, the last, grandmother, comes little
into prominence; it only lends a name to Maia, the mother of Hermes.
Nymphs we have everywhere, but the two cardinal conditions are obviously
to a primitive society Mother[689] and Maiden. When these conditions
crystallized into the goddess forms of Demeter and Kore, they appear
as Mother and _Daughter_, but primarily the conditions expressed are
Mother and Maid, woman mature and woman before maturity, and of these
two forms the Mother-form as more characteristic is, in early days, the
more prominent; Kore _as daughter_ rather than maiden is the product of
mythology. When we come to the religion of Dionysos, it will be seen that
the Mother-goddess has for her attribute of motherhood a son rather than
a daughter.
THE EARTH-MOTHER AS KARPOPHOROS OR LADY OF THE WILD THINGS.
The Mother-goddess was almost necessarily envisaged as the Earth. The
ancient Dove-priestesses at Dodona[690] were the first to chant the
Litany:
‘Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be, O great Zeus.
Earth sends up fruits, so praise we Earth the Mother.’
The two lines have no necessary connection; it may be that their order
is inverted and that long before the Dove-priestesses sang the praises
of Zeus they had chanted their hymn to the Mother. It was fitting that
women priestesses should sing to a woman goddess, to Ga who was also
Ma. Mother-Earth bore not only fruits but the race of man. As the poet
Asius[691] said:
‘Divine Pelasgos on the wood-clad hills
Black Earth brought forth, that mortal man might be.’
Pelasgos claimed no father, but he, the first father, had a mother.
And here it must be noted that the local mother must necessarily have
preceded Gaia the abstract and universal. Primitive man does not tend
to deal in abstractions. Each local hero claimed descent from a local
earth-nymph or mother[692]. Salamis, Aegina and ‘dear mother Ida’ are not
late geographical abstractions; each is a local mother, a real parent,
and all are later merged in the great All-Mother Ge.
[Illustration: FIG. 60.]
The Earth-Mother and each and every local nymph was mother not only of
man but of all creatures that live; she is the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’
(πότνια θηρῶν). Art brings her figure very clearly before us. On an early
stamped Boeotian amphora[693] in the National Museum at Athens (figs. 60
and 61) she is vividly presented. The Great Mother stands with uplifted
hands exactly in the attitude of the still earlier figures recently
discovered in the Mycenaean shrine at Cnossos. To either side of her is
a lion, heraldically posed like the lions of the Gate at Mycenae; below
her is a frieze of deer. The figure is supported or rather encircled by
two women figures, one at either side. These seem to be part of a ring of
encircling worshippers[694].
[Illustration: FIG. 61.]
[Illustration: FIG. 62.]
The design in fig. 62 from a painted Boeotian amphora[695], also in the
Museum at Athens, shows a similar and even more complete conception of
the ‘Lady of the Wild Things.’ Her two lions still keep heraldic guard,
above her outstretched arms are two birds[696], her gown is decorated
with the figure of a great fish. We are reminded of the Eurynome of
Phigalia with her fish-tailed body.
The interesting thing about these early representations, these and
countless others, is that we can give the goddess no proper name. We
call her rightly the Great Mother and the ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ but
farther we cannot go. She has been named Artemis and Cybele, but for
neither name is there a particle of evidence.
[Illustration: FIG. 63.]
The Great Mother is mother of the dead as well as the living. The design
in fig. 63 is from the interior of a rock-hewn tomb in Phrygia[697]. The
great figure of the Mother and her lions occupies the whole height of the
back wall of the tomb. ‘All things,’ as Cicero[698] says, ‘go back to
earth and rise out of the earth.’ ‘Dust we are, and unto dust we shall
return,’ and more tenderly Aeschylus[699]:
‘Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life
And rears and takes again into her womb.’
And so the Mother herself keeps ward in the _metro_polis of the dead, and
therefore ‘the Athenians of old called the dead “Demeter’s people”[700].’
On the festival day of the dead, the _Nekusia_ at Athens, they sacrificed
to Earth. To a people who practised inhumation, such ritual and such
symbolism were almost inevitable. When the Earth-Mother developed into
the Corn-Mother, such symbolism gained new life and force from the
processes of agriculture. Cicero[701] records that in his day it was
still the custom to sow the graves of the dead with corn: ‘that which
thou sowest is not quickened except it die[702].’ Out of the symbolism of
the corn sown the Greeks did _not_ develope a doctrine of immortality,
but, when that doctrine came to them from without, the symbolism of the
seed lay ready to hand.
THE MOTHER AS KOUROTROPHOS.
Early art figures the Mother in quaint instructive fashion as
_Kourotrophos_, the Child-Rearer. As such she appears in the design in
fig. 64 taken from an early black-figured amphora of the 6th century
B.C. in the British Museum[703]. This figure of the Mother is usually
explained as Leto with the twins Apollo and Artemis, but such an
interpretation is, I think, over-bold, and really misleading. The artist
knows that there is a Mother-Goddess; one child would be sufficient
as an attribute of motherhood, but in his quaint primitive fashion he
wishes to emphasise her motherhood, he gives her all the children she can
conveniently hold, one on each shoulder.
[Illustration: FIG. 64.]
We have no right to name the children Apollo and Artemis, unless
inscribed or marked as such by attributes. This is clear from the
fact that, on a fragment of a vase found in the Acropolis excavations
and unhappily still unpublished, we have a figure closely analogous,
though later in style, to our Kourotrophos, bearing on her elbows two
little naked imps _who are inscribed_: the one is _Himeros_, the other
_E_(ros). The mother can in this case be none other than Aphrodite. The
attribution is confirmed by another fragment[704] in which only half of
the Mother-goddess is preserved and one child seated on her elbow; the
child is not inscribed, but against the mother, in archaic letters, is
written _Aphrodi_(te); near her as on our vase is standing Dionysos.
Pausanias[705], when examining the chest of Cypselos, saw a design on
which was represented ‘a woman carrying a white boy sleeping on her right
arm; on the other arm she has a black boy who is like the one who is
asleep; they both have their feet twisted (ἀμφοτέρους διεστραμμένους τοὺς
πόδας); the inscriptions show that the boys are Death and Sleep, and that
Night is the nurse of both.’ He adds the rather surprising statement that
it ‘would have been easy to see who they were without the inscriptions.’
A woman with a child on each arm can then represent Aphrodite with
Himeros and Eros; if one child is white and asleep and the other black,
the group represents Night with Death and Sleep; if the group is to
represent Leto and her twins, there must be something to mark the twins
as Apollo and Artemis. On another amphora in the British Museum[706]
there does exist just the necessary differentiation: the child on the
left arm is naked, the child on the right though also painted black
wears a short chiton. We are justified in supposing that the one is a
boy the other a girl, and there is at least a high probability that the
differentiation of sex points to Apollo and Artemis.
I have dwelt on this point because vase-paintings are here, as so
often, highly instructive in the matter of the development and slow
differentiation and articulation of theological types. At first all is
vague and misty; there is, as it were, a blank formula, a mother-goddess
characterized by twins. If we give her a name at all she is Kourotrophos.
As her personality grows she differentiates, she is Aphrodite with Eros
and Himeros, she is Night with Sleep and Death. When Apollo and Artemis
came from the North they became _the_ twins _par excellence_, and they
are affiliated to the old religion; the Mother as Kourotrophos became
Leto with Apollo and Artemis.
The like process goes on in literature, though it is less obviously
manifest. At the opening of the Thesmophoria the Woman-Herald in
Aristophanes[707] makes proclamation as follows:
‘Keep solemn silence. Keep solemn silence. Pray to the two
Thesmophoroi, to Demeter, and to Kore, and to Plouton, and
to Kalligeneia, and to Kourotrophos, and to Hermes, and the
Charites.’
Discussion from the time of the scholiast onwards has raged as to who
Kourotrophos is—is she Hestia, is she Ge? The simple truth is never
faced that she is _Kourotrophos_, an attribute become a personality.
Her personality, it is true, faded before the dominant personality of
the Mother of Eleusis, but her presence in the ancient ritual-formulary
speaks clearly for her original actuality. Once she had faded, all the
other more successful goddesses, Ge, Artemis, Hekate, Leto, Demeter,
Aphrodite, even Athene, contend for her name as their epithet. There is
no controversy so idle and apparently so prolific as that which seeks to
find in these ancient inchoate personalities, such as Kourotrophos and
Kalligeneia, the epithets of the Olympians they so long predated.
* * * * *
The figure of the Mother as Kourotrophos lent itself easily to later
abstractions. Themis is one of the earliest, and she attains a real
personality; her sisters Eunomia and Dike are scarcely flesh and blood,
they are beautiful stately shadows. The ‘making of a goddess’ is always
a mystery, the outcome of manifold causes of which we have lost count.
At the close of the 5th century B.C. at the end of the weary, fatal
Peloponnesian war, Eirene, Peace, almost attained godhead, and godhead as
the Mother. Cephisodotos, father of Praxiteles, made for the market-place
at Athens a statue of her carrying the child Ploutos, the Athenians built
her an altar and did sacrifice to her, Aristophanes brings her on the
stage, but it is all too late and in vain, she remains an abstraction as
lifeless as Theoria or Opora, and finds no place among the humanities of
Olympus.
[Illustration: FIG. 65.]
Tyche, Fortune, another late abstraction of the Mother, though she
is scarcely more human than Eirene, obtained a wide popularity.
Pausanias[708] saw at Thebes a sanctuary of Tyche; he remarks after
naming the artists, ‘it was a clever plan of them to put Ploutos in
the arms of Tyche as his mother or nurse, and Cephisodotos was no less
clever; he made for the Athenians the image of Eirene holding Ploutos.’
These abstractions, Tyche, Ananke and the like, were popular with the
Orphics. Their very lack of personality favoured a growing philosophic
monotheism. The design in fig. 65 is carved in low relief on one of the
columns of the Hall of the Mystae of Dionysos, recently excavated at
Melos[709]. Tyche holds a child—presumably the local Ploutos of Melos—in
her arms. Above her is inscribed, ‘May Agathe Tyche of Melos be gracious
to Alexandros, the founder of the holy Mystae.’ Tyche, Fortune, might
be, to the uninitiated, the Patron, the Good Luck of any and every city,
but to the mystic she had another and a deeper meaning; she, like the
Agathos Daimon, was the inner Fate of his life and soul. In her house,
as will later be seen (Chap. XI.), he lodged, observing rules of purity
and abstinence before he was initiated into the underworld mysteries of
Trophonios, before he drank of the waters of Lethe and Mnemosyne. It is
one of the countless instances in which the Orphics went back behind the
Olympian divinities and mysticized the earlier figures of the Mother or
the Daughter.
DEMETER AND KORE.
So long as and wherever man lived for the most part by hunting, the
figure of the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’ would content his imagination.
But, when he became an agriculturist, the Mother-goddess must perforce
be, not only Kourotrophos of all living things, but also the Corn-mother,
Demeter.
The derivation of the name Demeter has been often discussed[710]. The
most popular etymology is that which makes her Δαμήτηρ, Earth-mother,
Δᾶ, which occurs in such interjections[711] as φεῦ δᾶ, οἰοῖ δᾶ, being
regarded as the equivalent of Γᾶ. From the point of view of meaning this
etymology is nowise satisfactory. Demeter is _not_ the Earth-Mother, not
the goddess of the earth in general, but of the fruits of the civilized,
cultured earth, the _tilth_; not the ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ but
She-who-bears-fruits, _Karpophoros_. Mannhardt was the first to point
out another etymology, more consonant with this notion. The author
of the _Etymologicon Magnum_[712], after stringing together a whole
series of senseless conjectures, at last stumbles on what looks like
the truth. ‘Deo,’ he says, ‘may be derived from τὰς δηάς, for barley
grains are called by the Cretans δηαί.’ The Cretan word δηαί is near
akin to the ordinary Greek ζειά, the word used for a coarse wheat or
spelt; the fruitful field in Homer[713] bears the epithet ζείδωρος,
‘spelt-yielding.’ Demeter, it will later be seen (p. 565), probably came
from Crete, and brought her name with her; she is the Earth, but only in
this limited sense, as ‘Grain-Mother.’
To the modern mind it is surprising to find the processes of agriculture
conducted in the main by women, and mirroring themselves in the figures
of women-goddesses. But in days when man was mainly concerned with
hunting and fighting it was natural enough that agriculture and the
ritual attendant on it should fall to the women. Moreover to this
social necessity was added, and still is among many savage communities,
a deep-seated element of superstition. ‘Primitive man,’ Mr Payne[714]
observes, ‘refuses to interfere in agriculture; he thinks it magically
dependent for success on woman, and connected with child-bearing.’ ‘When
the women plant maize,’ said the Indian to Gumilla, ‘the stalk produces
two or three ears. Why? Because women know how to produce children. They
only know how to plant corn to ensure its germinating. Then let them
plant it, they know more than we know.’ Such seems to have been the mind
of the men of Athens who sent their wives and daughters to keep the
Thesmophoria and work their charms and ensure fertility for crops and man.
It was mainly in connection with agriculture, it would seem, that the
Earth-goddess developed her double form as Mother and Maid. The ancient
‘Lady of the Wild Things’ is both in one or perhaps not consciously
either, but at Eleusis the two figures are clearly outlined; Demeter and
Kore are two persons though one god. They take shape very charmingly in
the design in fig. 66, from an early red-figured skyphos[715], found
at Eleusis. To the left Demeter stands, holding in her left hand her
sceptre, while with her right she gives the corn-ears to her nursling,
Triptolemos, who holds his ‘crooked plough.’ Behind is Kore, the maiden,
with her simple chiton for dress, and her long flowing hair, and the
torches she holds as Queen of the underworld. Mother and Maid in this
picture are clearly distinguished, but not infrequently, when both appear
together, it is impossible to say which is which.
[Illustration: FIG. 66.]
* * * * *
The relation of these early matriarchal, husbandless goddesses, whether
Mother or Maid, to the male figures that accompany them is one altogether
noble and womanly, though perhaps not what the modern mind holds to be
feminine. It seems to halt somewhere half-way between Mother and Lover,
with a touch of the patron saint. Aloof from achievement themselves, they
choose a local hero for their own to inspire and protect. They ask of
him, not that he should love or adore, but that he should do great deeds.
Hera has Jason, Athene Perseus, Herakles and Theseus, Demeter and Kore
Triptolemos. And as their glory is in the hero’s high deeds, so their
grace is his guerdon. With the coming of patriarchal conditions this high
companionship ends. The women goddesses are sequestered to a servile
domesticity, they become abject and amorous.
It is important to note that primarily the two forms of the Earth or
Corn-goddess are not Mother and _Daughter_, but Mother and Maiden,
Demeter and Kore. They are, in fact, merely the older and younger form of
the same person, hence their easy confusion. The figures of the Mother
and _Daughter_ are mythological rather than theological, i.e. they arise
from the story-telling instinct:
‘Demeter of the beauteous hair, goddess divine, I sing,
She and the slender-ancled maid, her daughter, whom the king
Aïdoneus seized, by Zeus’ decree. He found her, as she played
Far from her mother’s side, who reaps the corn with golden blade[716].’
The corn is reaped and the earth desolate in winter-time. Aetiology is
ready with a human love-story. The maiden, the young fruit of the earth,
was caught by a lover, kept for a season, and in the spring-time returns
to her mother; the mother is comforted, and the earth blossoms again[717]:
‘Thus she spake, and then did Demeter the garlanded yield
And straightway let spring up the fruit of the loamy field,
And all the breadth of the earth, with leaves and blossoming things
Was heavy. Then she went forth to the law-delivering kings
And taught them, Triptolemos first.’
Mythology might work its will, but primitive art never clearly
distinguished between the Mother and the Maid, never lost hold of the
truth that they were one goddess. On the Boeotian plate[718] in fig.
67 is figured the Corn-goddess, but whether as Mother or Maid it is
difficult, I incline to think impossible, to decide. She is a great
goddess, enthroned and heavily draped, wearing a high polos on her
head. She holds ears of corn, a pomegranate, a torch; before her is an
omphalos-like altar, on it what looks like a pomegranate—is she Demeter
or Persephone? I incline to think she is both in one; the artist has not
differentiated her.
[Illustration: FIG. 67.]
The dead, according to Plutarch’s[719] statement, were called by the
Athenians ‘Demeter’s people.’ The ancient ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’
with her guardian lions, keeps ward over the dead in the tombs of
Asia Minor, and every grave became her sanctuary. But in Greece
proper, and especially at Eleusis, where the Mother and the Maid take
mythological, differentiated form as Demeter and her daughter Persephone,
their individual functions tend more and more to specialize. Demeter
becomes more and more agricultural, more and more the actual corn. As
Plutarch[720] observes—with full consciousness of the anomalous blend of
the human and the physical—a poet can say of the reapers:
‘What time men shear to earth Demeter’s limbs.’
The Mother takes the physical side, the Daughter the spiritual—the Mother
is more and more of the upper air, the Daughter of the underworld.
Demeter as Thesmophoros has for her sphere more and more the things of
this life, laws and civilized marriage; she grows more and more human and
kindly, goes more and more over to the humane Olympians, till in the
Homeric Hymn she, the Earth-Mother, is an actual denizen of Olympus. The
Daughter, at first but the young form of the mother, is in maiden fashion
sequestered, even a little _farouche_; she withdraws herself more and
more to the kingdom of the spirit, the things below and beyond:
‘She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born,
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn.
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.’
And in that kingdom aloof her figure waxes as the figure of the Mother
wanes:
‘O daughter of earth, my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also I also thy brother, I go as I came unto earth.’
She passes to a place unknown of the Olympians, her kingdom is not of
this world.
‘Thou art more than the Gods, who number the days of our temporal
breath,
For these give labour and slumber, but thou, Proserpina, Death.’
All this is matter of late development. At first we have merely the
figures of the Two Goddesses, the Two Thesmophoroi, the Two Despoinae.
Demeter at Hermione is Chthonia, in Arcadia[721] she is at once Erinys
and Lousia. But it is not surprising that, as will later be seen, a
religion like Orphism, which concerned itself with the abnegation of this
world and the life of the soul hereafter, laid hold rather of the figure
of the underworld Kore, and left the prosperous, genial Corn-Mother to
make her way alone into Olympus.
THE ANODOS OF THE MAIDEN EARTH-GODDESSES.
In discussing the Boeotian plate (fig. 67), it has been seen that it
is not easy always to distinguish in art the figures of the Mother and
the Maid. A like difficulty attends the interpretation of the series of
curious representations of the earth-goddess now to be considered (figs.
68-72).
[Illustration: FIG. 68.]
We begin with the vase-painting in fig. 68, where happily an inscription
makes the interpretation certain. The design is from a red-figured
krater, now in the Albertinum Museum at Dresden[722]. To the right is a
conventional earth-mound (χῶμα γῆς). In front of it stands Hermes. He
holds not his _kerykeion_, but a rude forked _rhabdos_. It was with the
_rhabdos_, it will be remembered (p. 44), that he summoned the souls from
the grave-_pithos_. Here, too, he is present as Psychagogos; he has come
to summon an earth-spirit, nay more, _the_ Earth-goddess herself. Out
of the artificial mound, which symbolizes the earth itself, rises the
figure of a woman. At first sight we might be inclined to call her Ge,
the Earth-_Mother_, but the figure is slight and maidenly, and over her
happily is written (Phe)rophatta. It is the Anodos of Kore—the coming of
the goddess is greeted by an ecstatic dance of goat-horned _Panes_. They
are not Satyrs: these, as will later be seen (p. 380), are horse demons.
By the early middle of the 5th century B.C., the date of this red-figured
vase, the worship of the Arcadian Pan was well-established at Athens, and
the goat-men, the Panes, became the fashionable and fitting attendants of
the Earth-Maiden. The inscriptions above their heads can, unfortunately,
not be read.
[Illustration: FIG. 69.]
A vase of much later date (fig. 69) shows us substantially the same
scene. The design is from a red-figured krater[723] in the Berlin
Antiquarium. The goddess again rises from an artificial mound decorated
with sprays of foliage. The attendant figures are different. A
goat-legged Pan leans eagerly over the mound, but Dionysos himself, with
his thyrsos, sits quietly waiting the Anodos, and with him are his real
attendants, the horse-tailed Satyrs. In the left-hand corner a little
winged Love-god plays on the double flutes. The rising goddess is not
inscribed, and she is best left unnamed. She is an Earth-goddess, but
the presence of Dionysos makes us suspect that there is some reminiscence
of Semele (p. 407). The presence of the Love-god points, as will be
explained later (Chap. XII.), to the influence of Orphism.
[Illustration: FIG. 70.]
More curious, more instructive, but harder completely to explain, is the
design in fig. 70, from a black-figured lekythos in the Bibliothèque
Nationale[724] at Paris. The colossal head and lifted hands of a woman
are rising out of the earth. This time there is no artificial mound, the
scene takes place in a temple or sanctuary, indicated by the two bounding
columns. Two men, not Satyrs, are present, and this time not as idle
spectators. Both are armed with great mallets or hammers, and one of them
strikes the head of the rising woman.
Some possible light is thrown on this difficult vase by the consideration
of two others. First we have two designs from the obverse and reverse
of an amphora[725], shown together in fig. 71. On the obverse to the
left we have a scene fairly familiar, a goddess rising from the ground,
watched by a youth, who holds in his hand some sort of implement, either
a pick or a hammer. The meaning of the reverse design is conjectural.
A man, short of stature and almost deformed in appearance, looks at
a curious and problematic figure, half woman and half vase, set on a
quadrangular basis. Before it, if the drawing be correct, is a spiked
crown; round about, in the field, a number of rosettes. A design so
problematic is not likely to be a forgery. Before its meaning is
conjectured, another vase, whose interpretation is perfectly clear and
certain, remains to be considered. Its meaning may serve to elucidate the
others.
[Illustration: FIG. 71.]
The design in fig. 72 is from a red-figured amphora[726] of the finest
period, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. At a first glance, when we
see the splendid figure rising from the ground with outstretched arms,
the man with the hammer and Hermes attendant, we think that we have the
familiar scene of the rising of Kore or Ge. As such, had no inscriptions
existed, the design would certainly have been interpreted. But, as it
happens, each figure is carefully inscribed. To the left _Zeus_, next to
him _Hermes_, next _Epimetheus_, and last, not Ge or Kore, but _Pandora_.
Over Pandora, to greet her uprising, hovers a Love-god with a fillet in
his outstretched hands.
[Illustration: FIG. 72.]
Pandora rises from the earth; she _is_ the Earth, giver of all gifts.
This is made doubly sure by another representation of her birth or rather
her making. On the well-known _Bale_-cylix of the British Museum[727]
Pandora, half statue half woman, has just been modelled by Hephaistos,
and Athene is in the act of decking her. Pandora she certainly is, but
against her is written her other name (A)nesidora[728], ‘she who sends up
gifts.’ Pandora is a form or title of the Earth-goddess in the Kore form,
entirely humanized and vividly personified by mythology.
* * * * *
In the light of this substantial identity of Pandora and the Earth-Kore,
it is possible perhaps to offer an explanation of the problematic vase
in fig. 71. Have we not on obverse and reverse a juxtaposition of the
two scenes, the Rise of Kore, the Making of Pandora? On this showing the
short deformed man would be Hephaistos, and Pandora, half woman half
vase, may be conceived as issuing from her once famous _pithos_.
The _contaminatio_ of the myths of the Making of Pandora and the Anodos
of Kore may explain also another difficulty. In the making and moulding
of Pandora, Hephaistos the craftsman uses his characteristic implement,
the hammer[729]. This hammer he also uses to break open the head of Zeus,
in representations of the birth of Athene (p. 366). On vases with the
Anodos of Kore the Satyrs or _Panes_ carry and use sometimes an ordinary
pick, sometimes a hammer, like the hammer of Hephaistos. The pick is the
natural implement for breaking clods of earth, the spade appears to have
been unknown before the iron age—the hammers have always presented a
difficulty. May they not have arisen in connection with the myth of the
making of Pandora, and then, by confusion, passed to the Anodos of Kore?
Finally, returning to the difficult design in fig. 70, I would offer
another suggestion. The fact that the scene takes place in a sanctuary
seems to me to indicate that we have here a representation of some sort
of mimetic ritual. The Anodos of Kore was, as has already been seen (p.
131), dramatized at certain festivals; exactly how we do not know. At the
festival of the _Charila_ (p. 107) a puppet dressed as a girl was brought
out, beaten, and ultimately hanged in a chasm. Is it not possible that
at some festival of the Earth-goddess there was a mimetic enactment of
the Anodos, that the earth or some artificially-formed chasm was broken
open by picks, and that a puppet or a real woman emerged. It is more
likely, I think, that the vase-painter had some such scene in his mind
than that the Satyrs with their picks or hammers represent the storm and
lightning from heaven beating on the earth to subdue it and compel its
fertility[730]. At Megara, near the Prytaneion, Pausanias[731] saw ‘a
rock which was called Anaklethra[732], “Calling Up,” because Demeter,
if anyone like to believe it, when she was wandering in search of her
daughter, called her up there.’ He adds, ‘the women of Megara to this day
perform rites that are analogous to the legend told.’ Unhappily he does
not tell us what these rites were. Lucian devotes a half-serious treatise
to discussing the scope and merits of pantomimic dancing, Xenophon[733]
in his _Banquet_ lets us see that educated guests after dinner preferred
the acting of a myth to the tumbling of a dancing girl, but the actual
_ritual_ pantomime of the ancients is to us a sealed book. Of one thing
we may be sure, that the ‘things done’ (δρώμενα) of ritual helped to
intensify mythological impersonation as much as, or perhaps more than,
the ‘things spoken’ (ἔπη) of the poet.
PANDORA.
To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess,
in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the
time of Aristophanes[734] she had become a misty figure, her ritual
archaic—matter for the oracles of ‘Bakis.’ The prophet instructing
Peisthetairos reads from his script:
‘First to Pandora sacrifice a white-fleeced ram.’
The scholiast gives the correct and canonical interpretation ‘to Pandora,
the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life.’ By his
time, and long before, explanation was necessary. Hipponax[735] knew of
her; Athenaeus, in his discussion of cabbages, quotes from memory the
mysterious lines:
‘He grovelled, worshipping the seven-leaved cabbage
To which Pandora sacrificed a cake
At the Thargelia for a pharmakos.’
The passage, though obscure, is of interest because it connects Pandora
the Earth-goddess with the Thargelia, the festival of the first-fruits
of the Earth. Effaced in popular ritual she emerges in private
superstition. Philostratos[736], in his _Life of Apollonius_, tells how
a certain man, in need of money to dower his daughter, ‘sacrificed’ to
Earth for treasure, and Apollonius, to whom he confided his desire,
said, ‘Earth and I will help you,’ and he prayed to Pandora, sought in a
garden, and found the desired treasure.
* * * * *
Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but
in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely
changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature,
the handiwork of Olympian Zeus. On a late, red-figured krater in the
British Museum[737], obviously inspired by Hesiod, we have the scene
of her birth. She no longer rises halfway from the ground, but stands
stiff and erect in the midst of the Olympians. Zeus is there seated with
sceptre and thunderbolt, Poseidon is there, Iris and Hermes and Ares
and Hera, and Athene about to crown the new-born maiden. Earth is all
but forgotten, and yet so haunting is tradition that, in a lower row,
beneath the Olympians, a chorus of men, disguised as goat-horned Panes,
still dance their welcome. It is a singular reminiscence, and, save as a
survival, wholly irrelevant.
Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to
his own _bourgeois_, pessimistic ends; he tells it twice. Once in the
_Theogony_[738], and here the new-born maiden has no name, she is just
a ‘beautiful evil,’ a ‘crafty snare’ to mortals. But in the _Works and
Days_[739] he dares to name her and yet with infinite skill to wrest her
glory into shame:
‘He spake, and they did the will of Zeus, son of Kronos, the Lord,
For straightway the Halting One, the Famous, at his word
Took clay and moulded an image, in form of a maiden fair,
And Athene, the gray-eyed goddess girt her and decked her hair.
And about her the Graces divine and our Lady Persuasion set
Bracelets of gold on her flesh; and about her others yet,
The Hours with their beautiful hair, twined wreaths of blossoms of
spring,
While Pallas Athene still ordered her decking in everything.
Then put the Argus-slayer, the marshal of souls to their place,
Tricks and flattering words in her bosom and thievish ways.
He wrought by the will of Zeus, the Loud-thundering giving her voice,
Spokesman of gods that he is, and for name of her this was his choice,
PANDORA, because in Olympus the gods joined together then
And _all_ of them gave her, a _gift_, a sorrow, to covetous men.’
Through all the magic of a poet, caught and enchanted himself by the
vision of a lovely woman, there gleams the ugly malice of theological
animus. Zeus the Father will have no great Earth-goddess, Mother and
Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, but her figure _is_ from the
beginning, so he re-makes it; woman, who was the inspirer, becomes the
temptress; she who made all things, gods and mortals alike, is become
their plaything, their slave, dowered only with physical beauty, and
with a slave’s tricks and blandishments. To Zeus, the archpatriarchal
_bourgeois_, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian
jest[740]:
‘He spake and the Sire of men and of gods immortal laughed.’
Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to
patriarchy, and the shift itself, spite of a seeming retrogression, is
a necessary stage in a real advance. Matriarchy gave to women a false
because a magical prestige. With patriarchy came inevitably the facing
of a real fact, the fact of the greater natural weakness of women. Man
the stronger, when he outgrew his belief in the magical potency of
woman, proceeded by a pardonable practical logic to despise and enslave
her as the weaker. The future held indeed a time when the non-natural,
mystical truth came to be apprehended, that the stronger had a need, real
and imperative, of the weaker. Physically nature had from the outset
compelled a certain recognition of this truth, but that the physical was
a sacrament of the spiritual was a hard saying, and its understanding
was not granted to the Greek, save here and there where a flicker of the
truth gleamed and went through the vision of philosopher or poet.
* * * * *
So the great figure of the Earth-goddess, Pandora, suffered eclipse:
she sank to be a beautiful, curious woman; she opened her great
grave-_pithos_[741], she that was Mother of Life; the Keres fluttered
forth, bringing death and disease;—only Hope remained. Strangely enough,
when the great figure of the Earth-Mother re-emerges, she re-emerges, it
will later be seen, as Aphrodite.
THE MAIDEN-TRINITIES.
So far we have seen that a goddess, to the primitive Greek, took twofold
form, and this twofold form, shifting and easily interchangeable, is seen
to resolve itself very simply into the two stages of a woman’s life, as
Maiden and Mother. But Greek religion has besides the twofold Mother and
Maiden a number of _triple_ forms, Women-Trinities, which at first sight
are not so readily explicable. We find not only three Gorgons and three
Graiae, but three Semnae, three Moirae, three Charites, three Horae,
three Agraulids, and, as a multiple of three, nine Muses.
First it should be noted that the trinity-form is confined to the
women goddesses. Greek religion had in Zeus and Apollo the figures of
the father and the son, but of a male trinity we find no trace. Zeus
and Apollo, incomers from the North, stand alone in this matter of
relationship. We do not find the fatherhood of Poseidon emphasized, nor
the sonship of Hermes; there is no wide and universal development of the
father and the son as there was of the Mother and the Maiden. Dualities
and trinities alike seem to be characteristic of the old matriarchal
goddesses.
Evidence is not lacking that the trinity-form grew out of the duality.
Plutarch[742] notes as one of the puzzling things at Delphi which
required looking into, that two Moirae were worshipped there, whereas
everywhere else three were canonical. It has already been seen (p. 242)
that the number of the Semnae varied between two and three, and that,
as three was the ultimate canonical number, we might fairly suppose the
number two to have been the earlier. It is the same with the Charites.
Pausanias[743] was told in Boeotia that Eteocles not only was ‘the first
who sacrificed to the Charites,’ but, further, he ‘instituted three
Charites.’ The names Eteocles gave to his three Charites the Boeotians
did not remember. This is unfortunate, as Orchomenos was the most ancient
seat of the worship of the Charites; their images there were natural
stones that fell to Eteocles from heaven. Pausanias goes on to note that
‘among the Lacedaemonians two Charites only were worshipped; their names
were Kleta and Phaenna. The Athenians also from ancient days worshipped
two Charites, by name Auxo and Hegemone.’ Later it appears they fell
in with the prevailing fashion, for ‘in front of the entrance to the
Acropolis there were set up the images of three Charites.’ The ancient
Charites at Orchomenos, at Sparta, at Athens, were two, and it may be
conjectured that they took form as the Mother and the Maid.
The three daughters of Cecrops[744] are by the time of Euripides ‘maidens
threefold’; the three daughters of Erechtheus[745], who are but their
later doubles, are a ‘triple yoke of maidens,’ and yet—in the case of
the daughters of Cecrops—there is ample evidence[746] that originally
they were two, and these two probably a mother and a maid. Aglauros and
Pandrosos are definite personalities; they had regular precincts and
shrines, known in historical times, Aglauros on the north slope of the
Acropolis[747], where the maidens danced, Pandrosos to the west of the
Erechtheion[748]. But of a shrine, precinct, or sanctuary of Herse we
have no notice. Ovid[749] probably felt the difficulty; he lodges Herse
in a chamber midway between Aglauros and Pandrosos. The women of Athens
swore by Aglauros and more rarely by Pandrosos[750]. Aglauros, by whom
they swore most frequently, and who gave her name to the Agraulids, was
probably the earlier and mother-form. Herse was no good even to swear
by; she is the mere senseless etymological eponym of the festival of
the Hersephoria, a third sister added to make up the canonical triad.
The Hersephoria out of which she is made was not in her honour; it was
celebrated to Athene, to Pandrosos, to Ge, to Themis, to Eileithyia.
The women trinities rose out of dualities, but not every duality became a
trinity. Plutarch[751], in discussing the origin of the nine Muses, notes
that we have not three Demeters, or three Athenes, or three Artemises.
He touches unconsciously on the reason why some dualities resisted the
impulse to become trinities. Where personification had become complete,
as in the case of Demeter and Kore, or of their doubles, Damia and
Auxesia, no third figure could lightly be added. Where the divine pair
were still in flux, still called by merely adjectival titles that had
not crystallized into proper names, a person more or less mattered
little. Thus we have a trinity of Semnae, of Horae, of Moirae, but the
Thesmophoroi, who _as_ Thesmophoroi might have easily passed into a
trinity, remain always, because of the clear outlines of Demeter and
Kore, a duality.
When we ask what was the impulse to the formation of trinities, the
answer is necessarily complex. Many strands seem to have gone to their
weaving.
* * * * *
First, and perhaps foremost, in the ritual of the lower stratum, of the
dead and of chthonic powers, three was, for some reason that escapes us,
a sacred number[752]. The dead were thrice invoked; sacrifice was offered
to them on the third day; the mourning in some parts of Greece lasted
three days; the court of the Areopagus, watched over by deities of the
underworld, sat, as has been seen (p. 242), on three days; at the three
ways the threefold Hecate of the underworld was worshipped. It was easy
and natural that threefold divinities should arise to keep ward over a
ritual so constituted. When the powers of the underworld came to preside
over agriculture, the transition from two to three seasons would tend in
the same direction. For two seasons a duality was enough—the Mother for
the fertile summer, the Maid for the sterile winter—but, when the seasons
became three, a trinity was needed, or at least would be welcomed.
Last, the influence of art must not be forgotten. A central figure of the
mother, with her one daughter, composes ill. Archaic art loved heraldic
groupings, and for these two daughters were essential. Such compositions
as that on the Boeotian amphora in fig. 60 might easily suggest a
trinity[753].
* * * * *
Once the triple form established, it is noticeable that in Greek
mythology the three figures are always regarded as _maiden_ goddesses,
not as mothers. They may have taken their rise in the Mother and the
Maid, but the Mother falls utterly away. The Charites, the Moirae, the
Horae, are all essentially maidens. The reverse is the case in Roman
religion; trinities of women goddesses of fertility occur frequently in
very late Roman art, but they are Matres, Mothers[754]. Three Mothers are
rather heavy, and do not dance well.
[Illustration: FIG. 73.]
In the archaic votive relief[755] in fig. 73 we have the earliest
sculptured representation of the maiden trinity extant. Had the relief
been uninscribed, we should have been at a loss how to name the three
austere figures. Two carry fruits, and one a wreath. They might be
Charites or Eumenides, or merely nymphs. Most happily the sculptor
has left no doubt. He has written against them Κορας Σοτιας, ‘Sotias
(dedicated) the Korai’ the Maidens.’ Sotias has massed the three
stately figures very closely together; he is reverently conscious that
though they are three persons, yet they are but one goddess. He is half
monotheist.
The same origin of the maiden trinity is clearly indicated in the
relief[756] in fig. 74, found during the ‘Enneakrounos’ excavations in
the precinct of Dionysos, at Athens. The main field of the relief is
occupied by two figures of _Panes_, with attendant goats; between them
an altar. The Panes are twofold, not because they are father and son,
but because there were two caves of Pan, and the god is thought of as
dwelling in each. After the battle of Marathon the worship of Pan was
established in the ancient dancing-ground of the Agraulids; by the time
of Euripides[757], Pan is thought of as host and they as guests:
‘O seats of Pan and rock hard by
To where the hollow Long Rocks lie,
Where before Pallas’ temple-bound
Agraulos’ daughters three go round
Upon their grassy dancing-ground
To nimble reedy staves,
When thou, O Pan, art piping found
Within thy shepherd caves.’
But Pan was a new-comer; the Agraulids were there from the beginning, as
early as Cecrops, their snake-tailed father. Busy though he is with Pan,
the new-comer, the artist cannot, may not forget the triple maidens. He
figures them in the upper frieze, and in quaint fashion he hints that
though three they are one. In the left-hand corner he sets the image of a
threefold goddess, a Hecate[758].
[Illustration: FIG. 74.]
But, as time went on, the fact that the three were one is more and more
forgotten. They become three single maidens, led by Hermes in the dance;
by Hermes _Charidotes_, whose worship as the young male god of fertility,
of flocks and herds, was so closely allied to that of the Charites.
[Illustration: FIG. 75.]
There is no more frequent type of votive relief[759] than that of which
an instance is given in fig. 75. The cave of Pan is the scene, Pan
himself is piping, and the three maidens, led by Hermes, dance. The cave,
the artist knows, belonged in his days to Pan, but the ancient dwellers
there, the Maidens, still bulk the largest. As a rule the reliefs are
not inscribed, sometimes there is a dedication ‘to the Nymphs.’ The
personality of the Agraulids has become shadowy, they are merely Maidens
or Brides.
The ancient threefold goddesses, as all-powerful Charites, paled before
the Olympians, faded away into mere dancing attendant maidens; but
sometimes, in the myths told of these very Olympians, it is possible to
trace the reflection of the older potencies. A very curious instance
is to be found in the familiar story[760] of the ‘Judgment of Paris,’
a story whose development and decay are so instructive that it must be
examined in some detail.
THE ‘JUDGMENT OF PARIS.’
The myth in its current form is sufficiently patriarchal to please the
taste of Olympian Zeus himself, trivial and even vulgar enough to make
material for an ancient Satyr-play or a modern _opera-bouffe_.
‘Goddesses three to Ida came
Immortal strife to settle there—
Which was the fairest of the three,
And which the prize of beauty should wear.’
The bone of contention is a golden apple thrown by Eris at the marriage
of Peleus and Thetis among the assembled gods. On it was written, ‘Let
the fair one take it,’ or, according to some authorities, ‘The apple for
the fair one[761].’ The three high goddesses betake them for judgment to
the king’s son, the shepherd Paris. The kernel of the myth is, according
to this version, a καλλιστεῖον, a beauty-contest.
[Illustration: FIG. 76.]
On one ancient vase, and on one only of all the dozens that remain,
is the Judgment so figured. The design in fig. 76 is from a late
red-figured krater in the Bibliothèque Nationale[762]. Paris, dressed as
a Phrygian, is seated in the centre. Hermes is telling of his mission.
Grouped around, the three goddesses prepare for the beauty-contest in
characteristic fashion. Hera needs no aid, she orders her veil and gazes
well satisfied in a mirror; Aphrodite stretches out a lovely arm, and a
Love-God fastens ‘a bracelet of gold on her flesh’; and Athene, watched
only by the great grave dog, goes to a little fountain shrine and,
clean-hearted goddess as she is, lays aside her shield, tucks her gown
about her, and has—a good wash. Our hearts are with Oenone when she cries:
‘“O Paris,
Give it to Pallas!” but he heard me not,
Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me!’
It is noteworthy that even in this representation, obviously of a
beauty-contest, the apple is absent.
[Illustration: FIG. 77.]
It is quite true that now and again one of the goddesses holds in her
hand a fruit. An instance is given in the charming design in fig. 77,
from a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum[763]. Fruit and flowers
are held indifferently by one or all of the goddesses, and the reason
will presently become clear. In the present case Hera holds a fruit, in
fig. 81 the two last goddesses hold each a fruit. In fig. 77, against
both Aphrodite and Hera, is inscribed Καλή, ‘Beautiful,’ and before the
blinding beauty of the goddesses Paris veils his face. The inscription
Χαρμίδης enables us to date the vase as belonging to the first half of
the 5th cent. B.C.
Turning to black-figured vases, a good instance is given in fig. 78
from a patera[764] in the Museo Greco-Etrusco at Florence. The three
goddesses, bearing no apple and no attributes, the centre one only
distinguished by the spots upon her cloak, follow Hermes into the
presence of Paris. Paris starts away in manifest alarm. In the curious
design[765] in fig. 79, Hermes actually seizes Paris by the wrist to
compel his attendance. There is here clearly no question of voluptuous
delight at the beauty of the goddesses. The three maiden figures are
scrupulously alike; each carries a wreath. Discrimination would be a hard
task. The figures are placed closely together, as in the representation
of the Maidens in fig. 73.
[Illustration: FIG. 78.]
[Illustration: FIG. 79.]
Finally, in fig. 80, a design from a black-figured amphora[766], we
have the type most frequent of all; Hermes leads the three goddesses,
but in the Judgment of Paris _no figure of Paris is present_. Without
exaggeration it may be said that in three out of four representations of
the ‘Judgment’ in black-figured vase-paintings the protagonist is absent.
The scene takes the form of a simple procession, Hermes leading the three
goddesses.
This curious fact has escaped the attention of no archaeologist who
has examined the art types of the ‘Judgment.’ It has been variously
explained. At a time when vase-paintings were supposed to have had
literary sources, it was usual to attempt a literary explanation.
Attention was called to the fact that Proklos[767], in his excerpts
of the _Kypria_, noted that the goddesses, ‘by command of Zeus were
led to Ida by Hermes’; of this leading it was then supposed that the
vase-paintings were ‘illustrations.’ Such methods of interpretation are
now discredited; no one supposes that the illiterate vase-painter worked
with the text of the _Kypria_ before him. Art had its own traditions.
[Illustration: FIG. 80.]
Another explanation, scarcely more happy, has been attempted. ‘Archaic
art,’ we are told, ‘loved processions.’ Archaic art, concerned to fill
the space of a circular frieze surrounding a vase, did indeed ‘love
processions,’ but not with a passion so fond and unreasonable, and it
loved something else better, the lucid telling of a story. In depicting
other myths, archaic art is not driven to express a story in the terms of
an inappropriate procession; it is indeed largely governed by traditional
form, but not to the extent of tolerating needless obscurity. The
‘Judgment’ is a situation essentially stationary, with Paris for centre;
Hermes is subordinate.
We are so used to the procession form that it requires a certain effort
of the imagination to conceive of the myth embodied otherwise. But, if we
shake ourselves loose of preconceived notions, surely the natural lucid
way of depicting the myth would be something after this fashion: Paris in
the centre, facing the successful Aphrodite, to whom he speaks or hands
the apple or a crown; behind him, to indicate neglect, the two defeated
goddesses; Hermes anywhere, to indicate the mandate of the gods. Such a
form does indeed appear later, when the vase-painter thought for himself
and shook himself free of the dominant tradition. The procession form,
as we have it, _was not made for the myth_, it was merely adapted and
taken over, and instantly the suggestion occurs, ‘Did not the myth itself
in some sense rise out of the already existing art form, an art form in
which Paris had no place, in which the golden apple was not?’ That form
was the ancient type of _Hermes leading the three Korai or Charites_.
In the design in fig. 80, the centre figure Athene is differentiated by
her tall helmet and her aegis. Athene is the first of the goddesses to
be differentiated—and why? She was not victorious, but the vase-painter
is an Athenian, and he is concerned for the glory of ἡ Ἀθηναία Κόρη, the
Maiden of Athens.
[Illustration: FIG. 81.]
In the design in fig. 81, from a black-figured amphora in the Berlin
Museum[768], the three goddesses are all alike: the first holds a flower,
the two last fruits, all fitting emblems of the Charites. Hermes, their
leader, carries a huge irrelevant sheep—irrelevant for the herald of the
gods on his way to Ida, significant for the leader of the Charites, the
god of the increase of flocks and herds. Does the picture represent a
‘Judgment,’ or Hermes and the Charites? Who knows? The doubt is here, as
often, more instructive than certainty.
From vases alone it would be sufficiently evident, I think, that the
‘Judgment of Paris’[769] is really based on Hermes and the Charites,
but literary evidence confirms the view. The Κρίσις, the Decision,
of Paris is always as much a Choice as a Judgment; a Choice somewhat
like that invented for Heracles by the philosopher Prodicus, though at
once more spontaneous and more subtle than that rather obvious effort
at edification. The particular decision is associated in legend with
the name of a special hero, of one particular ‘young man moving to and
fro alone, in an empty hut in the firelight[770].’ It is an anguish of
hesitancy ending in a choice which precipitates the greatest tragedy of
Greek legend. But before Paris was there the Choice was there. The exact
elements of the Choice vary in different versions. Athene is sometimes
Wisdom and sometimes War. But in general Hera is Royalty or Grandeur;
Athene is Prowess; Aphrodite of course is Love. And what exactly has the
‘young man’ to decide? Which of the three is fairest? Or whose gifts he
desires the most? It matters not at all, for both are different ways of
saying the same thing. Late writers, Alexandrian and Roman, degrade the
story into a beauty-contest between three thoroughly personal goddesses,
vulgar in itself and complicated by bribery still more vulgar. But early
versions scarcely distinguish the goddesses from the gifts they bring.
There is no difference between them except the difference of their gifts.
They are Charites, Gift-bringers. They are their own gifts. Or, as the
Greek put it, their gifts are their σημεῖα, their tokens. And Hermes
had led them long since, in varying forms, before the eyes of each and
all of mankind. They might be conceived as undifferentiated, as mere
Givers-of-Blessing in general. But it needed only a little reflection
to see that Χάρις often wars against Χάρις, and that if one be chosen,
others must be rejected[771].
* * * * *
As gift-givers the same three goddesses again appear in the myth of the
daughters of Pandareos, but this time they are not rivals; and with them
comes a fourth, Artemis, whose presence is significant. Homer tells the
story by the mouth of Penelope[772]:
‘Their father and their mother dear died by the gods’ high doom,
The maidens were left orphans alone within their home;
Fair Aphrodite gave them curds and honey of the bee
And lovely wine, and Hera made them very fair to see,
And wise beyond all women-folk. And holy Artemis
Made them to wax in stature, and Athene for their bliss
Taught them all glorious handiworks of woman’s artifice.’
[Illustration: FIG. 82.]
The maiden goddesses tend the maidens, but to Homer _the_ Maiden above
all others is Artemis, sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus[773]. He puts
the story into the mouth of Penelope as part of a prayer to Artemis.
It is curious and significant that the early vase-painter, in dealing
with the story of the daughters of Pandareos, knows of three goddesses
only. The design in fig. 82 is from the lid of a pyxis, of early
black-figured style, in a private collection at Athens[774]. The
vase-painter is concerned mainly with the story of the theft of the
great golden dog of Crete. He makes the dog of supernatural size, with
a splendid high-curled tail. Pandareos has stolen it, and the theft has
been discovered by Hermes, who comes hurriedly up to seize the prize.
Pandareos[775] is just making off in eager haste. His two daughters,
quaintly enveloped in one cloak to show their close relationship, stand
by. Behind Hermes, with his huge kerykeion, come in familiar procession
the three ancient maidens—Aphrodite with a wreath, her hair arrayed in
a quaint twisted pigtail; Hera with a ram-headed sceptre; Athene with
a helmet nearly as big as herself. The goddesses have come a little
proleptically; Pandareos is still there, the maidens are not yet ‘alone
within their home,’ but the vase-painter wants to tell all he knows, and,
not being inspired by Homer, he is faithful to the old three goddesses.
Artemis is—nowhere[776].
But, owing to the influence of Homer and the civilization he represented,
the figure of Artemis waxes more and more dominant, and this especially
by contrast with the Kore of the lower stratum, Aphrodite. In the
_Hippolytus_ of Euripides they are set face to face in their eternal
enmity. The conflict is for the poet an issue of two moral ideals, but
the human drama is played out against the shadowy background of an
ancient racial theomachy, the passion of the South against the cold
purity of the North.
Belonging as she does to this later Northern stratum, the figure of
Artemis lies properly outside our province, but to one of the ancient
maiden trinity, to Athene, she lent much of her cold, clean strength. An
epigram[777] to her honour in the _Anthology_ is worth noting, because
it shows, clearly and beautifully, how the maidenhood of the worshipper
mirrors itself in the worship of a maiden, whether of the South or of the
North:
‘Maid of the Mere, Timaretè here brings,
Before she weds, her cymbals, her dear ball
To thee a Maid, her maiden offerings,
Her snood, her maiden dolls, their clothes and all,
Hold, Leto’s Child, above Timaretè
Thine hand, and keep her virginal like thee.’
* * * * *
It would be a lengthy though in some respects a profitable task to take
each maiden form that the great matriarchal goddess assumed and examine
it in turn, to enquire into the rise and development of each local Kore,
of Dictynna, of Aphaia, of Callisto, of Hecate, of Bendis and the like.
Instead it will be necessary to confine ourselves to the three great
dominant Korai of the ‘Judgment,’ Hera, Athene and Aphrodite.
ATHENE.
The doubt has probably long lurked in the reader’s mind, whether two
of the three, Hera and Aphrodite, have any claim to the title maiden.
Happily in the case of Athene no such difficulty arises. She is _the_
Parthenos, _the_ maiden; her temple is the maiden-chamber, the Parthenon;
natural motherhood she steadfastly refuses, she is the foster-mother of
heroes after the old matriarchal fashion; Ge, the real mother, bears
Erichthonios, and Athene nurtures him to manhood; she bears the like
relationship to Herakles, she is the maiden of Herakles (Ἡρακλέους
κόρη[778]).
Moreover it has been frequently observed that the early form of her
name _Athenaia_ is purely adjectival[779], she is the Athenian one, the
Athenian Maid, Pallas, our Lady of Athens. Plato[780] in the _Laws_ sees
clearly that Athenaia is but the local Kore, the incarnation of Athens,
though, after the fashion of his day, he inverts cause and effect; he
makes the worshipper in the image of the worshipped. Speaking of the
armed Athene, he says, ‘and methinks our Kore and Mistress who dwells
among us, joying her in the sport of dancing, was not minded to play
with empty hands, but adorned her with her panoply, and thus accomplished
her dance, and it is fitting that in this our youths and our maidens
should imitate her.’ It was she who imitated her youths and maidens, she
who was the very incarnation of their life and being, dancing in armour
as they danced, fighting when they fought, born of her father’s head when
they were reborn as the children of Reason and Light.
Athene’s other name, Pallas, tells the same tale. If Athene is the Kore
of the local clan of the Athenians, Pallas is the Kore of the clan of the
Pallantidae, the foes of Athenian Theseus; later their male eponym was
Pallas[781]:
‘Pallas had for lot
The southern land, rough Pallas, he who rears
A brood of giants.’
The very name Pallas means, it would seem, like Kore, the maiden. Suidas
in defining the word says, ‘a great maiden, and it is an epithet of
Athene.’ More expressly Strabo[782], in discussing the cults of Egyptian
Thebes, says, ‘To Zeus, whom they worship above all other divinities,
a maiden of peculiar beauty and illustrious family is dedicated; _such
maidens the Greeks call Pallades_.’ This local Pallas had for her
dominion the ancient court of the Palladium; her image as Pallas, not
as Athene, was carried in procession by the epheboi[783]; but with the
subjection of her clan her figure waned, effaced by that of Athenaia.
Pallas became a mere adjectival _praenomen_ to Athene, as Phoebus to
Apollo. It may be conjectured that this ancient image of Pallas was
resident on the Areopagos, home of the ancient Semnae, a place probably
of sacred association to a local clan long before the dominance of the
Acropolis; it is by her name of Pallas that the Semnae[784] hail the
goddess:
‘I welcome Pallas’ fellowship.’
In such a matter a poet might well have been instinctively, though
unconsciously, true to fact.
To tell the story of the making of Athene is to trace the history of the
city of Athens, to trace perhaps, in so far as they can be severed, its
political rather than its religious developement. At first the maiden
of the elder stratum, she has to contend for supremacy with a god of
that stratum, Poseidon. Poseidon, the late Mr R. A. Neil[785] has shown,
was the god of the ancient aristocracy of Athens, an aristocracy based,
as they claimed descent from Poseidon, on patriarchal conditions. The
rising democracy not unnaturally revived the ancient figure of the Kore,
but in reviving her they strangely altered her being and reft from her
much of her beauty and reality. They made her a sexless thing, neither
man nor woman; she is laden with attributes like the Parthenos of
Pheidias, charged with intended significance, but to the end she remains
manufactured, unreal, and never convinces us. She is, in fact, the Tyche,
the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the worship of the
citizens was not the goddess but the city herself, ‘immortal mistress of
a band of lovers[786]’:
‘The grace of the town that hath on it for crown
But a head-band to wear
Of violets one-hued with her hair,
For the vales and the green high places of earth hold nothing so fair
And the depths of the sea know no such birth of the manifold births
they bear,’
a city,
‘Based on a crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.’
Nowhere is this artificiality, this unreality of Athene as distinct from
Athens so keenly felt as in the famous myth of her birth from the brain
of Zeus. A poet may see its splendour:
‘Her life as the lightning was flashed from the light of her Father’s
head,’
but it remains a desperate theological expedient to rid an earth-born
Kore of her matriarchal conditions. The Homeric Hymn[787] writer
surrounds the Birth with all the apparatus of impressiveness, yet it
never impresses; the goddess is manifestly to him Reason, Light and
Liberty; she is born at the rising of the Sun:
‘Hyperion’s bright son stayed
His galloping steeds for a space.’
The event is of cosmic import:
‘High Olympus reeled
At the wrath in the sea-grey eyes and Earth on every side
Rang with a terrible cry, and the Deep was disquieted
With a tumult of purple waves and outpouring of the tide
Suddenly.’
Fear takes hold of all the Immortals, and ‘the Councillor Zeus is glad,’
but the mortal reader remains cold. It is all an unreal, theatrical show,
and through it all we feel and resent the theological intent. We cannot
love a goddess who on principle forgets the Earth from which she sprang;
always from the lips of the Lost Leader we hear the shameful denial[788]:
‘There is no mother bore me for her child,
I praise the Man in all things (save for marriage),
Whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.’
[Illustration: FIG. 83.]
Politics and literature turned the local Kore of Athens into a non-human,
unreal abstraction. It is pleasant to find that the art of the simple
conservative vase-painter remembered humbler beginnings. The design in
fig. 83 is from a Corinthian alabastron in the Museum at Breslau[789]. In
the centre of the design, Herakles is engaged in slaying a Hydra with an
unusually large number of heads. Iolaos comes up from the right to engage
some of the heads, the charioteer of Iolaos, Lapythos, waits in the
chariot. Throughout the design all the figures are carefully and legibly
inscribed in early Corinthian letters, dating about the beginning of
the 6th century B.C. ‘Athena,’ the Maiden of Herakles, has also come up
(to the left) in her chariot to help her hero. Just behind her, perched
on the goad, is a woman-headed bird. Had there been no inscription
we should at once have named it a ‘decorative Siren,’ but against the
woman-headed bird is clearly written Ϝοῦς. At first sight the inscription
does not seem to help much, but happily the lexicographers enable us
to explain the word[790]. The _Etymologicon Magnum_ tells us that by
πώυγγες are meant αἴθυιαι, and that another form of the word was βοῦγγες.
Hesychius merely states that the πῶυξ is ‘a kind of bird,’ and refers
us to Aristotle[791] ‘On Animals.’ Our text of Aristotle gives the form
φῶυξ. It seems clear that the Ϝοῦς of the Corinthian vase is a variant
form of a name given to the Diver-bird.
The inscriptions prove the vase to be Corinthian, and Corinth is not
far remote from Megara. Pausanias[792], in discussing the genealogies
of Athenian kings, tells us that Pandion fled to Megara. There he fell
sick and died, and by the sea in the territory of Megara is his tomb,
on a cliff which is called the cliff of Athene Aithuia, i.e. Athene the
Diver-bird. Bird myths haunt the family of Pandion: Procne, Philomela,
Itys and Tereus[793] all turn into birds, and Tereus, the hoopoe, had a
regular cult at his grave. There, they say, the hoopoe first appeared,
and the story looks like a reminiscence of a bird soul seen haunting
a grave. Lycophron knows of a maiden goddess, a Diver-bird; he makes
Cassandra in her prophetic madness foresee the outrage of Ajax and her
own empty prayers[794]:
‘In vain shall I invoke the Diver-Maid.’
Returning, with this evidence in our minds, to the woman-headed bird in
fig. 83, the conclusion seems inevitable that we have in her an early
local form of Athene. The vase-painter had advanced to an anthropomorphic
conception of the goddess, so he draws her in full human form as
Athene, but he is haunted by the remembrance of the Megarian Diver,
Aithuia, so he adds her figure, half as the double of Athene (hence
the parallelism of attitude), half as attendant, and calls her Ϝοῦς.
Athene on the Acropolis had another attendant bird, the little owl that
still at evening haunts the sacred hill and hoots among the ruins of
the Parthenon. Whatever bird was locally abundant and remarkable would
naturally attach itself to the goddess, and be at first her vehicle
and later her attribute: at seaside Megara the diver, at Athens the
owl. The vase-painter remembers Athens as well as Megara, and adds for
completeness a little owl.
[Illustration: FIG. 84.]
The design in fig. 84 is from a black-figured lekythos in a private
collection in Sicily[795]. The scene represents Cassandra flying from
Ajax and taking refuge at the xoanon of Athene. To the left stands old
King Priam, in helpless anguish. The notable point about the scene is
that Athene, who, statue though she be, is apparently about to move to
the rescue, has sent as her advance guard her sacred animal, a great
snake. The snake is clearly regarded as the vehicle of the wrath of the
goddess. Just such a snake did Chryse, another local Kore, send out
against the intruder Philoctetes[796], and the snake of Chryse, Sophocles
expressly tells us, was the secret guardian of the open-air shrine. This
‘house-guarding snake,’ we may conjecture, was the earliest form of every
earth-born Kore. At Athens, in the chryselephantine statue of Pheidias,
it crouched beneath the shield, and tradition said it was the earth-born
hero Erichthonios, fostered by the goddess. But almost certainly this
guardian snake was primarily the guardian genius and fate of the city,
before that genius or fate emerged to the status of godhead. When the
Persians besieged the citadel, Herodotus[797] says, the guardian snake
left the honey cake that was its monthly sacrificial food untouched, and,
‘when the priestess told this, the Athenians the more readily and eagerly
forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had abandoned
the citadel.’
[Illustration: FIG. 85.]
The design in fig. 85 is from a late red-figured lekythos in the National
Museum at Athens[798]. The scene represented is a reminiscence of the
Judgment of Paris, but one goddess only is present, Athene, and by her
side, equal in height and majesty, a great snake. The artist seems dimly
conscious that the snake is somehow the double of Athene[799]. To the
left is the figure of a woman, probably Helen; she seems to be imploring
the little xoanon of Athene to be gracious. Eros is apparently drawing
the attention of Paris away from Athene to Helen.
Athene, by the time she appears in art, has completely shed her animal
form, has reduced the shapes she once wore of snake and bird to
attributes, but occasionally in black-figured vase-paintings she still
appears with wings. On the obverse of the black-figured cup[800] in fig.
86 the artist gives her wings: but for her helmet we might have called
her an Erinys. In the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, a play in which Athene
is specially concerned to slough off all traces of primitive origin,
she lays suspicious emphasis on the fact that she can _fly without
wings_[801]:
‘With foot unwearied haste I without wings,
Whirred onward by my aegis’ swelling sail.’
On the reverse of the vase she is wingless: the artist has no clear
conviction. The vase is instructive as showing how long the art type of a
divinity might remain in flux.
[Illustration: FIG. 86.]
APHRODITE.
The next of the three ‘Maidens’ to be considered is Aphrodite. A doubt
perhaps arises as to her claim to bear the name. Kore she is in her
eternal radiant youth: Kore as virgin she is not. She is rather _Nymphe_
the Bride, but she is the Bride of the old order; she is never wife,
never tolerates permanent patriarchal wedlock. In the lovely Homeric hymn
it is clear that her will is for love, not marriage. Admitted to the
patriarchal Olympus, an attempt foolish and futile is made to attach her
to one husband, the craftsman Hephaistos, and, significantly enough, her
other name as his bride is Charis[802]. She is the Charis of physical
beauty incarnate.
In Homer it is evident that she is a new-comer to Olympus, barely
tolerated, an alien, and always thankful to escape. Like the other alien,
Ares, she is fain to be back in her own home. Her Homeric titles, Kypris
and Kythereia, show that originally and locally she is goddess of the
island South, never really at home in the cold austere North, where
Artemis loved to dwell. She has about her too much of the physical joy of
life ever to find an abiding home far from the sunshine.
Another note of her late coming into Greece proper is that she is in
Homer a departmental goddess, having for her sphere one human passion.
The earlier forms of divinities are of larger import, they tend to
be gods of all work. When the fusion of tribes and the influence of
literature conjointly bring together a number of local divinities,
perforce, if they are to hold together, they divide functions and
attributes, i.e. become departmental. Poseidon, who locally was
Phytalmios, is narrowed down to the god of one element; Hermes, who at
home had dominion over flocks and herds and all life and growth, becomes
merely a herald.
Some such process of narrowing of functions has, we may suspect, gone on
in the shaping of the figure of Aphrodite. It would be rash to assert
that she was primarily an earth-goddess, but certain traits in her cult
and character show clearly that she had analogies with the ‘Lady of the
Wild Things.’ Fertile animals belong to her, especially the dove and the
goat, the dove probably from very early days. In the Mycenaean shrine
recently discovered by Mr Arthur Evans, one of the figures of goddesses,
a quaint early figure with cylindrical body and upraised hands, bears on
her head a dove. Such a figure, dating more than a thousand years B.C.,
may be the prototype of Aphrodite. About the cylindrical bodies of other
similar figures snakes are coiled, as though to mark an earth-goddess.
In those early days differentiation was not sharply marked, and as yet we
dare not give to these early divinities Olympian names.
[Illustration: FIG. 87.]
At Pompeii the excavations have recently brought to light the charming
relief in fig. 87[803], a relief which from its style must date about the
turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. A goddess is seated Demeter-like
upon the ground, and holds her sceptre as Queen. Worshippers approach,
man and wife and children. The offerings they bring, a sheep and a dove,
mark the goddess as Aphrodite.
* * * * *
The myth of her birth from the sea—a myth which probably took its rise in
part from a popular and dubious etymology—seems, at first sight, to sever
Aphrodite wholly from the company of the earth-born Korai. And yet, even
here, when we come to examine the art-forms of the myth, it is at once
manifest that the Sea-birth is but the Anodos adopted and adapted.
The design in fig. 88 is from a red-figured hydria[804] now in the
museum of the Municipio at Genoa. It dates about the middle of the
5th century B.C. and is, so far as I know, the only instance of the
birth of Aphrodite in a vase-painting. In the centre of the picture a
goddess, clad only in a chiton, rises up from below, but whether from
sea or land the vase-painter is apparently not concerned to express.
Had he wished to utter his meaning more precisely nothing would have
been easier than to represent the sea by the curved lines that in his
day were the conventional indication of waves. But he is silent and I
think significantly. The goddess on the vase-painting is received by a
slender winged Eros; she uplifts her hands to take the taenia with which
he greets her. Eros is here grown to young manhood and his presence at
once makes us think of Aphrodite; but we are bound to remember that on
the Ashmolean amphora already discussed (fig. 72) it is the Anodos of
Pandora, not of Aphrodite, that is greeted by the Love-god with a taenia.
Moreover, it must also be remembered that on the Berlin krater (fig. 69)
a Love-god greets the rising of an Earth-goddess, be she Ge or Kore or
Semele[805].
[Illustration: FIG. 88.]
So far then all that can safely be said is that on the Genoa hydria we
have the Anodos of _a_ goddess greeted by Eros. But to the right of the
picture, behind the rising goddess, stands another figure, a woman, and
she holds out a piece of drapery with which she is about to clothe the
rising goddess. This is a new element in the Anodos type and it is this
element that inclines me, with certain reservations and qualifications,
to call the goddess Aphrodite, though I am by no means sure that the
vase-painter conceives her as _rising from the sea_.
On two occasions, according to ancient tradition, Aphrodite is received
and decked by her women attendants, be they Charites or Horae, on her
Birth from the Sea and after her sacred Bath in Paphos. Of the Bath we
hear in the lay of Demodocus[806]. He tells how after the joy and terror
of her marriage with Ares she uprose
‘And fast away fled she,
Aphrodite, lover-of-laughter, to Cyprus over the sea,
To the pleasant shores of Paphos and the incensed altar-stone,
Where the Graces washed her body, and shed sweet balm thereon,
Ambrosial balm that shineth on the Gods that wax not old,
And wrapped her in lovely raiment, a wonder to behold.’
Of the bedecking at the Birth we learn in a Homeric Hymn[807]:
‘For the West Wind breathed to Cyprus and lifted her tenderly
And bore her down the billow and the stream of the sounding sea
In a cup of delicate foam. And the Hours in wreaths of gold
Uprose in joy as she came, and laid on her fold on fold
Fragrant raiment immortal, and a crown on the deathless head.’
The two events, the ritual Bath and the Sea-birth, are not I think
clearly distinguished, and both have somehow their counterpart in the
making and decking of Pandora, The ritual bath[808] Aphrodite shared with
the two other Korai, Athene and Hera. Callimachus devotes a Hymn to the
‘Bath of Pallas.’ Pallas in her austerity, even when she contends for
the prize of beauty, rejects the mirror and gold ornaments and mingled
unguents; but, because she is maiden goddess, year by year she must renew
her virginity by the bath in the river Inachus. The renewal of virginity
is no fancy. Pausanias[809] saw at Nauplia a spring called Canathus
and the Argives told him that every year Hera bathed in it and became a
virgin. He adds significantly, ‘this story is of the mysteries and is
their explanation of a rite which they celebrate to Hera.’ Virginity
was to these ancients in their wisdom a grace not lost but perennially
renewed, hence the immortal maidenhood of Aphrodite.
The artist of the Genoa hydria _probably_ knew of the birth of Aphrodite
from the sea, he _certainly_ knew of her reception by Eros; but that he
remembered also the ritual bath is, I think, clear from the fact that the
scene is laid in a sanctuary, indicated in the vase-painter’s fashion
by the altar and sacred palm-tree standing to the right just below the
handle. Probably the sanctuary at Paphos is intended.
The Genoa hydria is of great importance because it helps to the
understanding of another monument, earlier and far more beautiful.
The design in fig. 89 is from a sculptured slab[810], one of three that
served to decorate the so-called ‘Ludovisi Throne’ now in the Boncompagni
collection in the Museo delle Terme at Rome. Again we have manifestly
an Anodos, again the like uncertainty as to who the goddess is and
whence she uprises. The two women who support her, and to whom in her
uprising she clings, stand on a sloping bank of shingle. Between the
edges of the banks is no indication of the sea, simply a straight line.
Is the goddess rising from earth or sea or sacred river or ritual bath?
Archaeologists offer explanations apparently the most diverse, and it
is this doubt and diversity that instruct. One sees in the design the
Birth of Aphrodite from the Sea, another a ceremonial Bath at the lesser
mysteries of Agrae, another the Anodos of Kore. No one, so far as I am
aware, sees that the artist is haunted by, is as it were halting between,
reminiscences of each and all. Or rather the Anodos, the Bath, the Birth
are as yet undifferentiated. By their articulation and separation we have
immeasurably lost.
[Illustration: FIG. 89.]
One other point remains. On the Ludovisi relief we have no Eros. The
relief is archaic. The straight folds of the drapery, the delicate
over-long feet, the strong chin, the over-emphasis of the lovely breasts,
all remind us vividly of red-figured vases of the severe style; they
belong to the last bloom of archaism just before the perfect utterance of
Pheidias. Pheidias[811] on the pedestal of the image of Zeus at Olympia
sculptured ‘Eros receiving Aphrodite as she rises from the sea and Peitho
crowning Aphrodite.’ Pheidias was much, perhaps over, inspired by Homeric
tradition, hence a certain sense of literary chill in his conceptions. He
forgets the ritual Bath, and remembers the mythological Birth. The artist
of the Genoa hydria is very near to his tradition, but the drapery held
by Peitho, the altar and the palm-tree, recall rather the Bath than
the Birth. But the sculptor of the relief embodies a tradition more
theological, less mythological, than either Pheidias or the vase-painter.
He is inspired by the Anodos[812] and the Bath, which was but one of
its ritual humanized forms, and a form that we may venture to call
matriarchal. What he is concerned to show is the birth and re-birth of
Aphrodite, Aphrodite untouched of Eros, eternally virgin, central figure
of a Trinity of Maidens and, as Ourania, She of the Heavens.
Aphrodite as island queen comes to have a birth from the sea, but a poet
remembers that, though she is of the sea and of the air, she is of earth
also:
‘We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair, thou art goodly, O Love,
Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove;
Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea,
Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.’
* * * * *
Aphrodite the earth-born Kore is also sea-born, as became an island
Queen, but more than any other goddess she becomes Ourania, the Heavenly
One, and the vase-painter sets her sailing through heaven on her great
swan[813]. She is the only goddess who in passing to the upper air yet
kept life and reality. Artemis becomes unreal from sheer inhumanity;
Athene, as we have seen, becomes a cold abstraction; Demeter, in Olympus,
is but a lovely metaphor. As man advanced in knowledge and in control
over nature, the mystery and the godhead of things natural faded into
science. Only the mystery of life, and love that begets life, remained,
intimately realized and utterly unexplained; hence Aphrodite keeps her
godhead to the end. For a while, owing to special social conditions, and,
as will be seen, owing to the impulse of Orphism, her figure is effaced
by that of her son Eros, but effaced only to re-emerge with a new dignity
as Mother rather than Maid. In the image of Venus Genetrix[814] we have
the old radiance of Aphrodite, but sobered somehow, grave with the
hauntings of earlier godheads, with shadows about her cast by Ourania, by
Harmonia, by Kourotrophos, by Eirene, by each and every various form of
the ancient Mother of Earth and Heaven:
‘Of Rome the Mother, of men and gods the pleasure,
Fostering Venus, under heaven’s gliding signs
Thou the ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing land
Still hauntest, since by thee each living thing
Takes life and birth and sees the light of the sun.
Thee, goddess, the winds fly from, thee the clouds
And thine approach; for thee the daedal earth
Sends up sweet flowers, the ocean levels smile,
And heaven shines with floods of light appeased.
Thou, since alone thou rulest all the world
Nor without thee can any living thing
Win to the shores of light and joy and love,
Goddess, bid thou throughout the seas and land
The works of furious war quieted cease.’
HERA.
The figure of Hera remains. At first sight she seems all wife, not
maiden; she is the great typical bride, Hera Teleia, queen in Olympus by
virtue of her marriage with Zeus; their Sacred Marriage is the prototype
of all human wedlock. This is true for Homeric theology, but a moment’s
reflection on the facts of local cultus and myth shows that this marriage
was not from the beginning. The Hera who in the ancient Argonautic
legend is queen in Thessaly and patron of the hero Jason is of the old
matriarchal type; it is she, Pelasgian Hera, not Zeus, who is really
dominant; in fact Zeus is practically non-existent. In Olympia, where
Zeus in historical days ruled if anywhere supreme, the ancient Heraion
where Hera was worshipped alone long predates the temple of Zeus. At
Argos the early votive terra-cottas[815] are of a woman goddess, and the
very name of the sanctuary, the Heraion, marks her supremacy. At Samos,
at the curious festival of the _Tonea_[816], it is the image of a woman
goddess that is carried out of the town and bound among the bushes, and
Strabo[817] tells us that in ancient days Samos was called Parthenia, the
island of the Maiden. At Stymphalus, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias[818]
says that Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames: while yet a
girl she was called Child, married to Zeus she was called Complete or
Full-Grown (τελεία), separated from Zeus and returned to Stymphalus she
was called Chera (Widow). Long before her connection with Zeus, the
matriarchal goddess may well have reflected the three stages of a woman’s
life; Teleia, full-grown, does not necessarily imply patriarchal marriage.
Homer himself was dimly haunted by the memory of days when Hera was no
wife, but Mistress in her own right. Otherwise, unless the poet was the
lowest of low comedians, what means her ceaseless turbulence and the
unending unseemly strife between the Father of Gods and Men and the woman
he cannot even beat into submission? What her urgent insistent tyranny
over Herakles whom Zeus loves yet cannot protect? Is the tyrannous
mistress really made by the Greek housewife even of Homeric days in her
own image? The answer is clear: Hera has been forcibly married, but she
is never really wife, and a wife’s submission she leaves to the shadowy
double of Zeus, who echoed his nature and (significant fact) took his
name, she who was the real Achaean patriarchal double—Dione[819].
[Illustration: FIG. 90.]
[Illustration: FIG. 91.]
Once fairly married, Zeus and Hera became Sharers of one Altar
(ὁμοβώμιοι), and against the conjunction the older women divinities
are but too often powerless. In the designs[820] in figs. 90 and 91 we
have a curious instance of the ruthless fashion in which the Olympian
pair extrude the objects of an ancient local cult. In fig. 90 we have a
votive relief to the Nymphs of the familiar type: three maiden figures
linked together. That the figures are Nymphs is certain, for above is
the inscription, ‘To the Mistress Nymphs (Κυρίαις Νύμφαις).’ The relief,
one of a large series found together at Orochák and now in the local
Museum at Sofia, is of late Roman style. The design in fig. 91 shows
a theological shift. The two dominant Olympians, of large stature to
mark their supremacy, occupy the forefront; they hold each an expectant
_phiale_ for libations; to them only is sacrifice to be made. It is
they who hold the sceptres. Humbly in the background, minished and
all but effaced, are the three ancient Maidens. The local peasant is
conservative[821], and we may hope they too had their meed of offering.
[Illustration: FIG. 92.]
The intrusion of Zeus[822] and Hera on the local cultus of the Nymphs
brings to mind a story preserved by Diogenes Laertius[823] in his Life of
Epimenides. Theopompus in his ‘Wonderful Things’ told how when Epimenides
was preparing the sanctuary of the Nymphs a voice was heard from heaven
saying, ‘Epimenides, not of the Nymphs, but of Zeus.’ Perhaps Epimenides
went further than the orthodox Olympian religion could tolerate in the
matter of the revival of ancient cults. To him, as has been already seen
(p. 241), was credited the founding of the sanctuary of the Semnae; he
introduced ceremonies of purification brought from Crete, and wholly
alien to Olympian ritual. It was time for Zeus to reassert himself.
The conflict of theological conceptions is very clearly seen in the
design in fig. 92, from a votive relief[824] found at Eleusis and now
in the National Museum at Athens. The general type of the design, which
belongs to the class known in English as ‘Funeral Banquets,’ will be
discussed more in detail later, when we come to hero-worship. For the
present it is enough to note that on the left side of the relief we have
the two Goddesses of Eleusis, the old matriarchal couple, seated side
by side as equals, on the right a patriarchal couple, man and wife, the
man reclining at the banquet and holding a great _rhyton_, the wife
submissively seated by his side. In naming them it is safest at present
not to go beyond what is written. The artist has inscribed over their
heads the non-committal words, ‘To the God,’ and ‘To the Goddess.’
[Illustration: FIG. 93.]
It was not only the Olympian Father Zeus who victoriously took over to
himself the cult of the Earth-Mother and the Earth-Maidens. Even more
marked is the triumph of the Olympian Son, Apollo[825]. The design
in fig. 93 is from a rather late red-figured amphora in the Naples
Museum[826]. A wayfarer, possibly Orestes, has come to Delphi to consult
the god; he finds him seated on the very omphalos itself, holding the
laurel and the lyre in his hands. So Hermes found him in the prologue to
the _Ion_ of Euripides[827]:
‘To Delphi, where
Phoebus, on earth’s mid navel o’er the world
Enthronèd, weaveth in eternal song
The sooth of all that is or is to be.’
The vase-painter knows quite well that it is really a priestess who
utters the oracles. Only a priestess can mount the sacred tripod, and he
paints her so seated, the laurel wreath on her head and the sacred taenia
in her hand, but he knows also that Apollo is by this time Lord of All.
[Illustration: FIG. 94.]
In the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, where the contest is between the old
angry ghosts, the Erinyes envisaged as merely the spirits of the blood
feud, and the mild and merciful god, our sympathies are at least in part
with the new-comer. But even here, so stately and yet so pitiful are
the ancient goddesses that our hearts are sore for the outrage on their
order. And on the vase-painting, when we remember that the omphalos is
the very seat and symbol of the Earth-Mother[828], that hers was the
oracle and hers the holy oracular snake that Apollo slew, the intrusion
is hard to bear.
The triumph of the Olympian order is still more clearly presented in
the design in fig. 94, from a votive relief[829] in the local Museum at
Sparta. The centre of the design is occupied by the omphalos on a low
basis. It looks very humble and obscure. At either side of it are perched
new guardians, the great eagles of Olympian Zeus. The story[830] said
that starting from either end of the world they met at Pytho, at the
omphalos. The birds were variously said to be swans or eagles. Neither
swans nor eagles have anything to do with the Earth-goddess; they are
Ouranian eagles for Zeus or swans for Apollo, and, standing over the
omphalos, they mark the dominion of the Father and the Son. But the
artist has uttered his meaning still more emphatically. Towering over the
omphalos is the great figure of Apollo with his lyre. He holds out a cup,
and libation to him is poured by his sister Artemis. The Olympian victory
is complete.
* * * * *
So far we have dealt with the _Making of a goddess_; we have seen one
woman-form take various shapes as Mother and Maiden, as duality and
trinity; we have seen these shapes crystallize into Olympian divinities
as Athene, as Aphrodite, as Hera, and as it were resume themselves again
into the great monotheistic figure of Venus Genetrix. We have noted
evidence, very scattered and fragmentary, of earlier animal forms of the
goddess as bird and snake. But it has been obvious enough that the weak
point in the argument is just this transitional phase. The goddesses,
when they first come into our ken, _are_ goddesses, fully human and
lovely in form, figures whose lineaments have been fixed and beautified
by art, and of mythological rather than of ritual content. In a word
links are wanting in the transition from ghost or snake or bogey to
goddess. Two reasons may be suggested. The full development of the women
divinities seems to have been earlier accomplished, the sublimation
earlier complete, and hence the early phases of that development are more
effaced; and next these goddess figures became more completely material
for poetic treatment. In the _Making of a god_ we catch in some figures
the process at an earlier stage, and many missing links in the passage
from ghost and snake to Olympian will thereby become manifest.
CHAPTER VII.
THE MAKING OF A GOD.
‘ἰὼ θεοὶ νεώτεροι, παλαιοὺς νόμους
καθιππάσασθε.’
Frequently, in his wanderings through Greece, Pausanias came upon the
sanctuaries of local heroines, and these sanctuaries are almost uniformly
tombs at which went on the cultus of the dead. At Olympia[831] inside the
Altis he noted the _Hippodameion_ or sanctuary of Hippodameia, a large
enclosure surrounded by a wall. Into this enclosure once a year women
were permitted to enter to sacrifice to Hippodameia and do other rites
in her honour. The tomb of Auge[832] was still to be seen at Pergamos, a
mound of earth enclosed by a stone basement and on the top the figure of
a naked woman. At Leuctra[833] in Laconia there was an actual _temple_
(ναός) of Cassandra with an image; the people of the place called her
Alexandra, ‘Helper of Men.’ At Sparta[834] Helen had a sanctuary, and in
Rhodes she was worshipped as She of the Tree, ‘Dendritis,’ and to her as
Dendritis, if we may trust Theocritus[835], maidens brought offerings. At
her wedding they sing:
‘O fair, O gracious maiden, the while we chant our lay,
A wedded wife art thou. But we, at dawning of the day,
Forth to the grassy mead will go, to our old racing place,
And gather wreaths of odorous flowers, and think upon thy face,
Again, again, Helen, on thee, as young lambs in the dew
Think of the milk that fed them and run back to mother ewe.
For thee the first of Maidens shall the lotus creeping low
Be culled to hang in garlands where the shadowy plane doth grow;
To thee where grows the shadowy plane the first oil shall be poured,
Drop by drop from a silver cruse, to hold thy name adored:
And letters on the bark be wrought, for him who goes to see,
A message graven Dorian-wise: “Kneel; I am Helen’s tree.”’
[Illustration: FIG. 95.]
Helen as local heroine had, it would seem, not only a sanctuary and a
sacred tree but a very ancient image. The design in figs. 95 and 96
is from a lekythos[836] in the Louvre, of the kind usually known as
‘proto-Corinthian.’ Its style dates it as not later than the 7th century
B.C., and it is our earliest extant monument of ‘the rape of Helen.’ The
subject seems to have had a certain popularity in archaic art, as it
occurred on the throne of Apollo at Amyclae[837]. In the centre of the
design stands a woman-figure of more than natural size. Two men advance
against her from the right; the foremost seizes her by the wrist. In
his left hand he holds a sceptre. He is Theseus, and behind him comes
Peirithoös, brandishing a great sword. To the left of Helen are her two
brothers, the horsemen Kastor and Polydeukes. It is important to note
that Helen is here more image than living woman. Dr Blinkenberg, who
rightly interprets the scene as the rape of Helen, says ‘ses mains levées
expriment la surprise et l’effroi,’ but since the discovery of the early
image of the Mycenaean goddess with uplifted hands[838] it will at once
be seen that the gesture is hieratic rather than human. This early 7th
century document suggests that ‘the rape of Helen’ was originally perhaps
the rape of a xoanon from a sanctuary, rather than of a wife from her
husband. Be that as it may, the great dominant hieratic figure on the
vase is more divine than human.
[Illustration: FIG. 96.]
For Homer, poet of the immigrant Achaeans, Helen of the old order of
daughters of the land is a mortal heroine, beautiful and sinful, yet in
a sense divine. To the modern poet she is altogether goddess, for she is
Beauty herself:
‘O Light and Shadow of all things that be,
O Beauty, wild with wreckage like the sea,
Say, who shall win thee, thou without a name?
O Helen, Helen, who shall die for thee?’
Hebe, another local heroine, has at Phlius[839] a sacred grove and a
sanctuary, ‘most holy from ancient days.’ The goddess of the sanctuary
was called by the earliest authorities of the place Ganymeda, but later
Hebe. Her sanctuary was an asylum, and this was held to be her greatest
honour that ‘slaves who took refuge there were safe and prisoners
released hung their fetters on the trees in her grove.’ That a sanctuary
should be an asylum is a frequent note of antiquity. When the immigrant
conqueror reduces the whole land to subjection, he, probably from
superstitious awe, leaves to the conquered their local sanctuary, the
one place safe from his tyranny. Hebe-Ganymeda, female correlative of
Ganymedes, is promoted to Olympus, but significantly she is admitted only
as cupbearer and wife of Herakles. Olympus here as always mirrors human
relations. Hera by marriage with Zeus is admitted to full patriarchal
citizenship, her shadowy double Hebe is but her Maid of Honour.
As a rule then the local heroine remains merely the object of a local
cult. Where she passed upward to the rank of a real divinity, the steps
of transition are almost wholly lost. We feel inwardly sure that Hera and
Aphrodite were once of mere local import, like Auge or Iphigeneia, but we
lack definite evidence. In the case of Athene the local origin, it has
been shown (p. 301), is fairly clear.
The reason why the local heroine failed to emerge to complete godhead
is sometimes startlingly clear. Her development was checked midway by
the intrusion of a full-blown goddess of the Olympian stock. Near to
Cruni in Arcadia Pausanias[840] saw the grave of Callisto. It was a high
mound on which grew trees, some of them fruit-bearing, some barren. ‘On
the top of the mound,’ Pausanias adds, ‘is a sanctuary of Artemis with
the title Calliste.’ Nothing could be clearer. Over the tomb of the old
Bear-Maiden, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis the Northerner, the
Olympian, has superposed her cult, and to facilitate the shift she calls
herself _Calliste_, the Fairest. Possibly here, as at Athens under the
title of Brauronia, she kept up the ancient bear-service[841].
The passage from ghost to goddess is for the most part lost in the mists
of time, but of the analogous process from ghost to god the steps are
still in historical times clearly traceable. The reason is clear. The
intrusion of the patriarchal system, the practice of tracing descent from
the father instead of the mother, tended to check, if it was powerless
wholly to stop, the worship of eponymous heroines. Conservatism compelled
the worship of old established heroines, but no fresh canonizations
took place. The ideal woman of Pericles was assuredly not the stuff of
which goddesses were made. If we would note the actual process of the
manufacture of divinity, it is to _hero_-worship we must turn[842].
THE HERO AS SNAKE.
The design in fig. 97 is from an archaic relief[843] of the sixth century
B.C., now in the local Museum at Sparta. It forms one of a series of
reliefs found near Sparta, all of which are cast approximately in the
same type. A male and a female figure are seated side by side on a great
throne-like chair. The female figure holds her veil, the male figure a
large cantharus or two-handled cup, as if expecting libation. Worshippers
of diminutive size approach with offerings—a cock and some object that
may be a cake, an egg or a fruit. The reliefs are, for the most part,
uninscribed, but on some of rather later date names are written near the
figure, and they are the names of mortals, e.g. ‘Timocles[844].’ It is
clear that we have in these monuments representations of the dead, but
the dead conceived of as half divine, as heroized—hence their large size
compared with that of their worshipping descendants. They are κρείττονες,
‘Better and Stronger Ones.’
[Illustration: FIG. 97.]
The artist of the relief in fig. 97 is determined to make his meaning
clear. Behind the chair, equal in height to the seated figures, is a
great curled snake, but a snake strangely fashioned. From the edge
of his lower lip hangs down a long beard; a decoration denied by
nature. The intention is clear; he is a _human_ snake, the vehicle,
the incarnation of the dead man’s ghost. Snakes lurk about tombs, they
are uncanny-looking beasts, and the Greeks are not the only people who
have seen in a snake the vehicle of a ghost. M. Henri Jumod[845], in
discussing the beliefs of the Barongas, notes that among this people the
snake is regarded as the _chikonembo_ or ghost of a dead man, usually
of an ancestor. The snake, so regarded, is feared but not worshipped.
A free-thinker among the Barongas, if bored by the too frequent
reappearance of the snake ancestor, will kill it, saying ‘Come now, we
have had enough of you.’
Zeus Meilichios, it has been seen (p. 18), was worshipped as a snake. If
we examine the great snake on his relief in fig. 1 (p. 18) it is seen to
be also bearded. The beard in this case is not at the end of the lip, but
a good deal further back.
The addition of the beard was no doubt mainly due to frank
anthropomorphism; the snake is in a transition stage between animal
and human, and human for the artist means divine. He gives the snake
a beard to mark his anthropomorphic divinity, just as he gave to the
bull river-god on coins a human head with horns. The further question
arises, ‘Was there anything in nature that might have acted as a possible
suggestion of a beard?’ An interesting answer to this question has been
suggested to me by an eminent authority on snakes, Dr Hans Gadow, and to
him I am indebted for the following scientific particulars.
The snake represented in fig. 1 (p. 18) Dr Gadow believes to be the
species known as _Coelopeltis lacertina_. It occurs from Spain to Syria
and specimens of 6 ft. long are not uncommon. The creature’s head,
according to Dr Gadow, is reproduced with admirable fidelity; the name
_lacertina_ is due to the lizard-like, instead of snake-like, depressed
head. Moreover this species is really poisonous, but only to its proper
prey, e.g. mice, rats, lizards, etc., while it is practically harmless to
man, on account of the position of the poison fangs, which are far back
in the mouth instead of near the front. This is a somewhat exceptional
arrangement and probably well known to the ancients. In fact the
_Coelopeltis lacertina_ is a snake with poison that does not ordinarily
strike. On occasion it could bite a man’s hand, i.e. if it opened its
mouth _very_ wide, as wide as a striking cobra. This position of the
dropped jaw, according to Dr Gadow, is very noticeable and must have
been observed by the ancients. The angle of the dropped jaw is just that
of the beard on the snake in fig. 1 (p. 18). It seems possible and even
highly probable that the dropped jaw, seen at a distance, might have
suggested a beard, or that an artist representing an actual dropped jaw
may have been copied by another who misinterpreted the jaw into a beard.
In any case the scheme of the dropped jaw would be ready to hand and
would help to soften the anomaly of the bearded snake[846].
* * * * *
In snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb, and to indicate this fact not
uncommonly on vase-paintings we have a snake depicted on the very grave
mound itself. The design in fig. 98, from a black-figured lekythos[847]
in the Museum at Naples, is a good instance. The funeral mound which
occupies the centre of the design is, on the original vase, white, and on
it is painted a black snake; the mound itself is surmounted by a black
stele: whether the vase-painter regards his snake as painted actually
_outside_ the tomb or as representing the snake-hero actually resident
_within_, is not easy to determine. The figure of a man on the left of
the tomb with uplifted sword points probably to the taking of an oath, it
may be of vengeance.
[Illustration: FIG. 98.]
[Illustration: FIG. 99.]
In the curious design in fig. 99, from a kotylos also in the Naples
Museum[848], we have again a funeral mound, again decorated with a huge
snake, this time represented with dropped jaw and beard. The tomb seems
to have become a sort of mantic shrine. Two men are seated watching
attentively the portent of the eagle and the snake. On the reverse of
the vase, to the right, the tomb-mound is decorated with a stag, and the
portent is an eagle devouring a hare.
Herodotus[849] notes that among the Libyan tribe of the Nasamones tombs
were used for two purposes, for the taking of oaths and for dream
oracles. ‘In their oaths and in the art of divination they observe the
following practice: they take oaths by those among them who are accounted
to be most virtuous and excellent, by touching their tombs, and when
they divine they regularly resort to the monuments of their ancestors,
and having made supplication they go to sleep, and whatever vision they
behold of that they make use.’ Herodotus like many travellers was more
familiar, it would seem, with the customs of foreigners than with those
of his own people. He notes the two customs as though they were alien
curiosities, but the practice of swearing on a tomb must have been
familiar to the Greeks. The slave in the _Choephori_ says to Electra[850]:
‘Reverencing thy father’s tomb like to an altar,
Mine inmost thoughts I speak, doing thy hest.’
By the hero Sosipolis at Olympia[851] oaths were taken ‘on the greatest
occasions’—by Sosipolis who in true hero-fashion was wont to appear in
snake-form. That these oaths were taken on his actual tomb we are not
told, but the sanctuary of a snake-hero can scarcely in its origin have
been other than his tomb. Almost every hero in Greece had his dream
oracle. Later as the hero was conceived of as in human rather than animal
shape the connection between hero and snake is loosened, and we get the
halting, confused theology of Aeneas[852]:
‘Doubtful if he should deem the gliding snake
The genius of the place, or if it were
His father’s ministrant.’
In fig. 100 we have an altar to a hero found in Lesbos[853], not the
old primitive grave mound which was the true original form, but a
late decorative structure such as might have served an Olympian. It
is inscribed in letters of Roman date, ‘The people to Aristandros the
hero, son of Cleotimos,’ and that the service is to a hero is further
emphasized by the snakes sculptured on the top round the hollow cup which
served for libations. There are two snakes; it is no longer realized that
the hero himself is a snake, but the snake reminiscence clings.
[Illustration: FIG. 100.]
* * * * *
If the question be raised, ‘why did the Greeks image the dead hero
as a snake?’ no very certain or satisfactory answer can be offered.
Aelian[854] in his treatise on ‘The Nature of Animals’ says that the
backbone of a dead man when the marrow has decayed turns into a snake.
The chance, sudden apparition of a snake near a dead body may have
started the notion. Plutarch[855] tells how, when the body of Cleomenes
was impaled, the people, seeing a great snake wind itself about his
head, knew that he was ‘more than mortal’ (κρείττονος). Of course, by
the time of Cleomenes, the snake was well established as the vehicle of
a hero, but some such coincidence may very early have given rise to this
association of ideas. Plutarch adds that ‘the men of old time associated
the snake most of all beasts with heroes.’ They did this because, he
says, philosophers had observed that ‘when part of the moisture of the
marrow is evaporated and it becomes of a thicker consistency it produces
serpents.’
The snake was not the only vehicle. As has already been noted (p. 305),
the spirit of the dead could take shape as a human-headed bird or even
perhaps, if a bird happened to perch on a tomb, as a mere natural
hoopoe or swallow. Between the bird-souls and the snake-souls there is
this difference. So far as we know, the human-headed bird was purely a
creature of mythology, whereas the bearded human snake was the object of
a cult. Also the bird-soul, though sometimes male, tends, on the whole,
to be a woman; the snake, even when not bearded, is usually the vehicle
of a male ghost; as such he is the incarnation rather of the hero than
the heroine. So close is the connection that it gave rise to the popular
expression ‘Speckled hero,’ which arose, Photius[856] explains, because
snakes which are speckled are called heroes. Of these snake-heroes and
their cultus Homer knows absolutely nothing, but the belief in them is
essentially primitive and recrudesces with other popular superstitions.
THE CULTUS-TITLES.
The great snake, later worshipped as Zeus Meilichios, was, we have
already seen (p. 21), not Zeus himself, but an underworld being addressed
by the title Meilichios, gracious, kindly, easy to be intreated. It
will now be evident that his snake form marks him as the vehicle or
incarnation of a ghost, a local hero. He was only one of a large class of
local divinities who were invoked not by proper names but by adjectival
epithets, descriptive of their nature, epithets which gradually
crystallized into cultus-titles. That these titles were really adjectival
is shown sometimes by the actual word, e.g. _Meilichios_, which retains
its adjectival sense, sometimes by the fact that it is taken on as a
distinguishing epithet by an Olympian, e.g. Zeus-Amphiaraos. These
cultus-titles mark an important stage in the making of a god and must be
examined somewhat more in detail.
Herodotus[857] in discussing the origins of Greek theology makes the
following significant statement: ‘The Pelasgians formerly made all sorts
of sacrifice to the gods and invoked them in prayer, as I know from what
I heard in Dodona, but they gave to none of them either name or eponym,
for such they had not yet heard: they addressed them as gods because they
had set all things in order and ruled over all things. Then after a long
lapse of time they learnt the names of the other gods which had come from
Egypt and much later that of Dionysos. As time went on they inquired of
the oracle at Dodona about these names, for the oracle there is held to
be the most ancient of all the oracles in Greece and was at that time the
only one. When therefore the Pelasgians inquired at Dodona whether they
should adopt the names that came to them from the barbarians, the oracle
ordained that they should use them. And from that time on they sacrificed
to the gods making use of their names.’
If the gods were in these primitive days invoked in prayer, some sort
of name, some mode of address they must have had. Is it not at least
possible that the advance noted by Herodotus is the shift from mere
cultus-title, appropriate to any and every divinity, to actual _proper_
name which defined and crystallized the god addressed? Any and every
hero or divinity might rightly be addressed as _Meilichios_, but a
single individual personality is caught and crystallized in the proper
name _Zeus_. When an epithet lost its adjectival meaning, as is the case
with Amphiaraos, then and not till then did it denote an individual god.
Apollo, Artemis, Zeus himself, may have been adjectival to begin with,
mere cultus epithets, but their meaning once lost they have become proper
and personal.
It is significant that the shift is said to have taken place owing to
an oracle at Dodona. There, accepting Prof. Ridgeway’s[858] theory, was
the first clash of Pelasgian and Achaean, there Zeus and his shadow-wife
Dione displaced the ancient Earth-Mother with her dove-priestesses;
there surely the Pelasgians with their ‘nameless’ gods, their heroes
and heroines addressed by cultus epithets, met and mingled with the
worshippers of Zeus the Father and Apollo the Son and Artemis his
sister, and learnt to fix the personalities of their formless shifting
divinities, learnt the lesson not from the ancient civilized Egyptians
but from the northern ‘barbarians.’
The word _hero_ itself is adjectival. A gloss in Hesychius[859] tells
us that by hero was meant ‘mighty,’ ‘strong,’ ‘noble,’ ‘venerable.’ In
Homer the hero is the strong man _alive_, mighty in battle; in cultus the
hero is the strong man _after death_, dowered with a greater, because a
ghostly, strength. The dead are, as already noted, κρείττονες, ‘Better
and Stronger Ones.’ The avoidance of the actual proper name of a dead man
is an instructive delicate decency and lives on to-day. The newly dead
becomes, at least for a time, ‘He’ or ‘She’; the actual name is felt too
intimate. It is a part of the tendency in all primitive and shy souls, a
tendency already noted (p. 214), to remove a little whatever is almost
too close, to call your friend ‘the kind one,’ or ‘the old one,’ or
‘the black one,’ and never name his silent name. Of course the delicate
instinct soon crystallizes into definite ritual prescription, and
gathers about it the practical cautious utilitarianism of _de mortuis nil
nisi bene_.
* * * * *
It is often said that the Greeks were wont to address their heroized
dead and underworld divinities by ‘euphemistic’ titles, Eumenides for
Erinyes, χρηστέ, ‘Good One,’ when they meant ‘Bad One.’ Such is the ugly
misunderstanding view of scholiasts and lexicographers. But a simpler,
more human explanation lies to hand. The dead are, it is true, feared,
but they are also loved, felt to be friendly, they have been _kin_ on
earth, below the earth they will be _kind_. But in primitive days it is
only those who have been kin who will hereafter be kind; the ghosts of
your enemies’ kin will be _un_kind; if to them you apply kindly epithets
it is by a desperate euphemism, or by a mere mechanical usage.
Of such euphemism Homer[860] has left us a curious example. Zeus would
fain remind the assembled gods of the blindness and fatuity of mortal man:
‘Then spake the Sire of Gods and Men, and of the Blameless One,
Aigisthos, he bethought him, whom Agamemnon’s son,
Far-famed Orestes, slew.’
Aigisthos, traitor, seducer, murderer, craven, is ‘the Blameless One.’
The outraged morality of the reader is in instant protest. These
Olympians, these gods ‘who live at ease,’ go too far.
The epithets in Homer are often worn very thin, but here, once the point
is noted[861], it is manifest that ἀμύμων, ‘the Blameless One,’ is a
title perfectly appropriate to Aigisthos _as a dead hero_. Whatever his
life on the upper earth, he has joined the company of the κρείττονες,
‘the Stronger and Better Ones.’ The epithet ἀμύμων in Homer is applied
to individual heroes, to a hero’s tomb[862], to magical, half-mythical
peoples like the Phaeacians and Aethiopians[863] who to the popular
imagination are half canonized, to the magic island[864] of the god
Helios, to the imaginary, half-magical Good Old King[865]. It is used
also of the ‘convoy[866]’ sent by the gods, which of course is magical
in character; it is never, I believe, an epithet of the Olympians
themselves. There is about the word a touch of what is dead and demonic
rather than actually divine.
Homer himself is ignorant of, or at least avoids all mention of, the dark
superstitions of a primitive race; he knows nothing at least ostensibly
of the worship of the dead, nothing of the cult at his tomb, nothing of
his snake-shape; but Homer’s epithets came to him already crystallized
and came from the underlying stratum of religion which was based on the
worship of the dead. And here comes in a curious complication. To Homer,
though he calls him mechanically, or if we like ‘euphemistically,’ the
‘Blameless One,’ Aigisthos is really bad, though not perhaps so black
as Aeschylus painted him. But was he bad in the eyes of those who first
made the epithet? The story of Aigisthos is told _by the mouth of the
conquerors_. Aigisthos is of the old order, of the primitive population,
there before the coming of the family of Agamemnon. Thyestes, father of
Aigisthos, had been banished[867] from his home; Aigisthos is reared as
an alien and returns to claim his own. Clytaemnestra too was of the old
order, a princess of the primitive dwellers in the land, regnant in her
own right. Agamemnon leaves her, leaves her significantly in the charge
of a bard[868], one of those bards pledged to sing the glory of the
conquering Achaeans, and the end is inevitable: she reverts to the prince
of the old stock, Aigisthos, to whom we may even imagine she was plighted
before her marriage to Agamemnon. Menelaos in like fashion marries a
princess of the land and his too are the sorrows of the king-consort.
The tomb of Aigisthos was shown to Pausanias[869]. We hear of no cult;
possibly under the force of hostile epic tradition it dwindled and died,
but in old days we may be sure ‘the Blameless One’ had his meed of
service at Argos, and the epithet itself remains as eternal witness.
Salmoneus to the Achaean mind was scarcely more ‘Blameless’ than
Aigisthos and yet he too bears the epithet. In the Nekuia[870] Odysseus
says:
‘Then of the throng of women-folk first Tyro I did see,
Child of Salmoneus, Blameless One, a noble sire he.’
The case of Salmoneus is highly significant. He too belongs to the old
order, as indeed do all the Aeolid figures connected with the group of
dead heroines, and more, in his life he was in violent opposition to the
new gods. To Hesiod[871] he is ‘the Unjust One’ (ἄδικος). He even dared
to counterfeit the thunder and lightning of Zeus, and Zeus enraged slew
him with a thunderbolt. The vase-painting already discussed (p. 60) is
the very mirror of the picture drawn by Vergil[872] of the insolent king:
‘Through the Greek folk, midway in Elis town
In triumph went he; for himself, mad man,
Honours divine he claimed.’
To every worshipper of the new order his crime must have seemed heinous
and blasphemous, but among his own people he was glorious before death
and probably ‘Blameless’ after.
The case of Tityos, Son of Earth, presents a close parallel, though
Tityos never bore the title of ‘Blameless.’ To the orthodox worshipper of
the Olympians he was the vilest of criminals; as such Homer[873] knew him:
‘For he laid hands on Leto, the famous bride of Zeus,
What time she fared to Pytho through the glades of Panopeus.’
And for this his sin he lay in Hades tortured for ever. This is from
the Olympian point of view very satisfactory and instructive, but when
we turn to local tradition Tityos is envisaged from quite another point
of view. Strabo[874], when he visited Panopeus, learnt that it was the
fabled abode of Tityos. He reminds us that it was to the island of Euboea
that, according to Homer[875], the Phaeacians conducted fair-haired
Rhadamanthys that he might see Tityos, Son of Earth. We wonder for a
moment why the just Rhadamanthys should care to visit the criminal.
Homer leaves us in doubt, but Strabo makes the mystery clear. On Euboea,
he says, they show a ‘cave called Elarion from Elara who was mother
to Tityos, and a hero-shrine of Tityos, and some kind of honours are
mentioned which are paid to him.’ One ‘blameless’ hero visits another,
that is all. Golden-haired Rhadamanthys found favour with the fair-haired
Achaeans; but for Tityos, _the son of Earth_, there is no place in the
Northern Elysium.
* * * * *
We may take it then that the ‘euphemistic’ epithets were applied at first
in all simplicity and faith to heroes and underworld gods by the race
that worshipped them. The devotees of the new Achaean religion naturally
regarded the heroes and saints of the old as demons. Such was in later
days the charitable view taken by the Christian fathers of the Olympian
gods in their turn. All the activities that were uncongenial, all the
black side of things, were carefully made over by the Olympians to the
divinities they had superseded. Only here and there the unconscious use
of a crystallized epithet like ‘Blameless’ lets out the real truth. The
ritual prescription that heroes should be worshipped by night, their
sacrifice consumed before dawn, no doubt helped the conviction that as
they loved the night their deeds were evil. Their ritual too was archaic
and not lacking in savage touches. At Daulis[876] Pausanias tells of the
shrine of a hero-founder. It was evidently of great antiquity, for the
people of the place were not agreed as to who the hero was; some said
Phocos, some Xanthippos. Service was done to him every day, and when
animal sacrifice was made the Phocians poured the blood of the victim
through a hole into the grave; the flesh was consumed on the spot. Such
plain-spoken ritual would go far to promote the notion that the hero was
bloodthirsty.
Sometimes a ritual prescription marks clearly the antipathy between old
and new, between the hero and the Olympian. Pausanias[877] describes in
detail the elaborate ceremonial observed in sacrificing to Pelops at
Olympia. The hero had a large _temenos_ containing trees and statues
and surrounded by a stone wall, and the entrance, as was fitting for a
hero, was towards the west. Sacrifice was done into a pit and the victim
was a black ram. Pausanias ends his account with the significant words:
‘Whoever eats of the flesh of the victim sacrificed to Pelops, whether he
be of Elis or a stranger, _may not enter the temple of Zeus_.’ But we are
glad to know from Pindar[878] that no spiteful ritual prescription of
the Olympian could dim the splendour of the local hero:
‘In goodly streams of flowing blood outpoured
Upon his tomb, beside Alpheios’ ford,
Now hath he still his share;
Frequent and full the throng that worship there.’
The scholiast comments on the passage: ‘Some say that it was not (merely)
a tomb but a sanctuary of Pelops and that the followers of Herakles
sacrificed to him before Zeus.’
At yet another great Pan-Hellenic centre there is the memory, though more
faded, of the like superposition of cults. The scholiast on Pindar[879]
says that the contest at Nemea was of the nature of funeral games
(ἐπιτάφιος) and that it was in honour of Archemoros, but that later,
after Herakles had slain the Nemean lion, he ‘took the games in hand and
put many things to rights and ordered them to be sacred to Zeus.’
More commonly there is between the Olympian and the hero all appearance
of decent friendliness. A compromise is effected; the main ritual is
in honour of the Olympian, but to the hero is offered a preliminary
sacrifice. A good instance of this procedure is the worship of Apollo at
Amyclae[880] superposed on that of the local hero Hyakinthos. The great
bronze statue of Apollo stood on a splendid throne, the decorations
of which Pausanias describes in detail. The image itself was rude and
ancient, the lower part pillar-shaped, but for all that the god was
a new-comer. ‘The basis of the image was in form like an altar, and
they say that Hyakinthos was buried in it, and at the festival of the
Hyakinthia _before_ the burnt sacrifice (θυσίας) to Apollo, they devote
offerings (ἐναγίζουσιν) to Hyakinthos into this altar through a bronze
door.’
Apollo and Hyakinthos established a _modus vivendi_. Apollo instituted
his regular Olympian sacrifices (θυσίαι) and left to Hyakinthos his
underworld offerings (ἐναγίσματα). But not every Olympian was so
successful. Ritual is always tenacious. So too at Delphi, Apollo may
seat himself on the omphalos, but he is still forced to utter his
oracles through the mouth of the _priestess_ of Gaia. Zeus, we have
seen, arrogated to himself the title of Meilichios; he had the old snake
reliefs dedicated to him, but he was powerless to change the ritual
of the hero, and had to content himself, like an underworld god, with
holocausts. All that he could do was to emphasize the untruth that he,
not the hero, was Meilichios, Easy to be intreated.
All that could be effected by theological _animus_ was done. It has
been seen (p. 9) how in the fable of Babrius the hero-ancestor is
positively forbidden to give good things, and meekly submits; and, long
before Babrius, the blackening process had set in. The bird-chorus in
Aristophanes[881] tells of the strange sights it has seen on earth:
‘We know of an uncanny spot,
Very dark, where the candles are not;
There to feast with the heroes men go
By day, but at evening, oh no!
For the night time is risky you know.
If the hero Orestes should meet with a mortal by night,
He’d strip him and beat him and leave him an elegant sight.’
Orestes was of course a notable local thief, but the point of the joke
is the ill-omened character of a hero. The scholiast says that ‘heroes
are irascible and truculent to those they meet and possess no power
over what is beneficial.’ He cites Menander as his authority, but adds
on his own account that this explains the fact that ‘those who go past
hero-shrines keep silence.’ So easy is it to read a bad meaning into a
reverent custom. So possessed are scholiasts and lexicographers by the
Olympian prejudice that, even when the word they explain is dead against
a bad interpretation, they still maintain it. Hesychius[882], explaining
κρείττονας, ‘Better or Stronger Ones,’ says ‘they apply the title to
heroes, and they seem to be a bad sort of persons; it is on this account
that those who pass hero-shrines keep silence lest the heroes should do
them some harm.’ Among gods, as among mortals, one rule holds good: the
king can do no wrong and the conquered no right.
ASKLEPIOS AND THE HEROES OF HEALING.
Heroes, like the ghosts from which they sprang, had of course their
black angry side, but, setting aside the prejudice of an Olympianized
literature, it is easy to see that in local cultus they would tend rather
to beneficence. The ghost you worship and who by your worship is erected
into a hero is your kinsman, and the ties of kinship are still strong in
the world below. ‘In almost all West African districts,’ says Miss Mary
Kingsley[883], ‘is a class of spirits called “Well-disposed Ones” and
this class is clearly differentiated from “Them,” the generic term for
non-human spirits. These “Well-disposed Ones” are ancestors and they do
what they can to benefit their particular village or family fetish who is
not a human spirit or ancestor.’ So it was with the Greek; he was careful
not to neglect or offend his local hero, but on the whole he relied on
his benevolence:
‘When a man dies we all begin to say
The sainted one has passed away, he has ‘fallen asleep,’
Blessed therein that he is vexed no more.
And straight with funeral offerings we do sacrifice
As to a god and pour libations, bidding
Him send good things up here from down below[884].’
The cult of heroes had in it more of human ‘tendance’ than of demonic
‘aversion.’
The hero had for his sphere of beneficence the whole circle of human
activities. Like all primitive divinities he was of necessity a
god-of-all-work; a primitive community cannot afford to departmentalize
its gods. The local hero had to help his family to fight, to secure
fertility for their crops and for themselves, act as oracle when the
community was perplexed, be ready for any emergency that might arise, and
even on occasion he must mend a broken jug. But most of all he was adored
as a Healer. As a Healer he rises very nearly to the rank of an Olympian,
but through the gentleness of his office he keeps a certain humanity that
prevents complete deification. A typical instance of the Hero-Healer is
the god Asklepios.
* * * * *
We conceive of Asklepios as he is figured in many a Greek and
Graeco-Roman statue, a reverend bearded god, somewhat of the type of
Zeus, but characterized by the staff on which he leans and about which is
twined a snake. The snake, our hand-books tell us, is the ‘symbol of the
healing art,’ and hence the attribute of Asklepios, god of medicine.
[Illustration: FIG. 101.]
The design in fig. 101, from a votive relief[885] found in the
Asklepieion and now in the National Museum at Athens, gives cause for
reflection. The god himself stands in his familiar attitude, waiting
the family of worshippers who approach with offerings. A little happy
honoured boy is allowed to lead the procession bringing a sheep to the
altar. Behind the god is his attribute, a huge coiled snake, his head
erect and level _with the god he is_. Take away the human Asklepios and
the scene is yet complete, complete as on the Meilichios relief in fig.
2, the great hero snake and his worshippers.
[Illustration: FIG. 102.]
The relief in fig. 101 is under a foot in length, the offering probably
of some poor man who clung to his old faith in the healing snake-hero. It
forces us in its plain-spoken simplicity to face just the fact that the
dedicator of the next relief[886] (fig. 102) is so anxious to conceal.
This second relief is the offering of a rich man, the figures are about
half life-size; it was found in the same Asklepieion on the S. slope of
the Acropolis. Asklepios no longer stands citizen-fashion leaning on
his staff: he is seated in splendour, and beside him is coiled a very
humble attributive snake. Behind are two figures, probably of a son and
a daughter, and they all three occupy a separate chapel aloof from their
human worshippers.
In token of his humble birth as the ghost of a mortal the snake always
clings to Asklepios, but it is not the only evidence. An essential part
of his healing ritual was always and everywhere the ἐγκοίμησις[887],
the ‘sleeping in’ his sanctuary. The patient who came to be cured must
sleep and in a dream the god either healed him or revealed the means of
healing. It was the dream oracle sent by Earth herself[888] that Apollo
the Olympian came to supersede. All the strange web of human chicanery
that was woven round the dream cure it would here be irrelevant to
examine: only the simple fact need be noted that the prescribed ritual
of sleep was merely a survival of the old dream oracle of the hero.
It was nowise peculiar to Asklepios. When men came to the beautiful
little sanctuary of Amphiaraos[889] at Oropus they purified themselves,
sacrificed a ram, and spreading the skin under them they went to sleep
‘awaiting a revelation in a dream.’
The dream oracle remained always proper to the earth-born heroes; we
hear of no one _sleeping_ in the precinct of Zeus, or of Apollo, and the
belief in the magic of sleep long outlasted the service of the Olympians.
To-day year by year on the festival of the Panagia a throng of sick
from the islands round about make their pilgrimage to Tenos, and the
sick sleep in the Church and in the precinct and are healed, and in the
morning is published the long list of miraculous cures (θαύματα). It is
only the truth and the true gods that lived. The Panagia has taken to
herself all that was real in ancient faith, in her are still incarnate
the Mother and the Maid and Asklepios the Saviour. Like most primitive
faiths the belief in the dream cure appealed to something very deep-down
and real, however misunderstood and perverted, something in the secret
bidding of nature that said, that always will say:
‘Sleep Heart, a little free
From thoughts that kill.
Nothing now hard to thee
Or good or ill.
And when the shut eyes see
Sleep’s mansions fill,
Night might bring that to be
Day never will.’
The worship of Asklepios, we know from the evidence of an
inscription[890], was introduced at Athens about 421 B.C.: it was still
no doubt something of a new excitement when Aristophanes wrote his
_Plutus_. But Athens was not left till 421 B.C. without a Hero-Healer.
Asklepios came to Athens as a full-blown god, came first from Thessaly,
where he was the rival of Apollo, and finally from his great sanctuary
at Epidauros, and, when he came, we have definite evidence that his
cult was superimposed on that of a more ancient hero. ‘Affiliated’ is
perhaps the juster word, for when a hero from without took over the cult
of an indigenous hero there is no clash of ritual as in the case of an
Olympian, no conflict between θυσίαι and ἐναγισμοί; both heroes alike are
content with the simple offering of the _pelanos_.
* * * * *
In the course of the ‘Enneakrounos’ excavations Dr Dörpfeld came upon
a small sanctuary consisting of a precinct, an altar, and a well[891].
The precinct wall, the well and the conduit leading to it were clearly,
from the style of their masonry, of the date of Peisistratos. Within and
around the precinct were votive offerings that pointed to the worship of
a god of healing, reliefs representing parts of the human body, breasts
and the like, a man holding a huge leg marked with a varicose vein,
reliefs of the usual ‘Asklepios’ type, and above all votive snakes. Had
there been no inscriptions the precinct could have been at once claimed
as ‘sacred to Asklepios,’ and we should have been left with the curious
problems, ‘Why had Asklepios two precincts, one on the south, one on
the west of the Akropolis; and, if the god had already a shrine on the
west slope in the days of Peisistratos, why did he trouble to make a
triumphant entry into Athens on the south slope in 421 B.C.?’
Happily we are left in no such dilemma. On a stele found in the precinct
we have the following inscription[892]: ‘Mnesiptolemè on behalf of
Dikaiophanes dedicated (this) to Asklepios Amynos.’ If the inscription
stood alone, we should probably decide that Asklepios was worshipped
in the precinct _under the title of Amynos_, the Protector. Whatever
the original meaning of the word Asklepios—and we may conjecture it was
merely a cultus-title—it soon became a proper name, and could therefore
easily be associated with an adjectival epithet.
A second inscription[893] happily makes it certain that Amynos was not
merely an adjective, but an adjectival title of a person distinct
from Asklepios. It runs as follows: ‘Certain citizens held it just to
commemorate concerning the common weal of the members of the thiasos
of Amynos and of Asklepios and of Dexion.’ Here we have the names of
three personalities manifestly separate and enumerated in significant
order. We know Asklepios and most fortunately Dexion. The author of the
_Etymologicon Magnum_[894], in explaining the word _Dexion_, says: ‘The
title was given by the Athenians to Sophocles after his death. They say
that when Sophocles was dead the Athenians, wishing to give him added
honours, built him a hero-shrine and named him Dexion, the Receiver, from
his reception of Asklepios—for he received the god in his own house and
set up an altar to him.’ For the heroization of Sophocles we have earlier
evidence than the _Etymologicon Magnum_. The historian Istros[895] (3rd
cent. B.C.) is quoted as saying that the Athenians ‘on account of the
man’s virtue passed a vote that yearly sacrifice should be made to him.’
It seems an extraordinary story, but, if we do not press too hard the
words of the panegyrist, the explanation is natural enough. Sophocles
was not exactly canonised ‘because of his virtue.’ He became a hero,
officially, because he had officially received Asklepios, and the
‘Receiver’ of a god, like the ‘Founder’ of a town, had a right to ritual
recognition. ‘Dexion’ is the Receiver of the god, and from the fact
that the inscription with his name is set up in the little precinct
on the west slope of the Acropolis we may be sure his worship went on
there. It was in that little precinct, we may conjecture, that he served
as priest. This conjecture is made almost certain by the fact that a
later inscription[896] (1st cent. B.C.), with a dedication to Amynos
and Asklepios, is dated by the priesthood of a ‘Sophocles,’ probably a
descendant of the poet. Sophocles as a hero was not a success, probably
he was too alive and human as a poet; he was in his own precinct
completely submerged by the god he ‘received.’
The theological history of the little precinct is quite clear. The
inscription preserves the ritual order of precedence. The sanctuary
began, not later than Peisistratos, as an Amyneion, shrine of a local
hero worshipped under the title of Amynos, Protector. At some time,
probably owing to the recent pestilence which the local hero had failed
to avert, it was thought well to affiliate a Healer-god who had attained
enormous prestige in the Peloponnesus. The experiment was quietly and
carefully tried in the little Amyneion before the foundation of the great
Asklepieion on the south slope. It was a very simple matter. A sacred
snake would be sent for[897] from Epidauros, to join the local snake of
Amynos. Both were snakes, both were healers; the same offerings served
for both, the votive limbs, the _pelanoi_. Sophocles the human Receiver,
who had introduced Asklepios in due course, naturally enough dies, and
a third healing hero is added to the list. Dexion fades, and Asklepios
gradually effaces Amynos and takes his name as a ceremonial title.
* * * * *
Because Athens alone is really alive to us, because we know Sophocles as
human poet, Asklepios as divine Healer, the case of Amynos, Asklepios,
Sophocles seems specially vital and convincing. But we must take it
only as one instance of the ladder from earth to heaven that had its
lowest rungs planted in every village scattered over Greece—a ladder
that reached sometimes, but not always or even often, up to high Olympus
itself. Whether a local hero became a god depended on a multitude of
chances and conditions, the clue to which is lost. If a local hero became
famous beyond his own parish the Olympian religion made every effort to
meet him half-way. Herakles was of the primitive Pelasgian[898] stock.
His name, if the most recent etymology[899] be accepted, means only
_the_ young dear Hero—_the_ Hero _par excellence_. No pains were spared
to affiliate him. He is allowed the Olympian burnt sacrifice[900], he
is passed through the folds of Hera’s robe to make him her child by
adoption[901], he is married in Olympus to Hebe, herself but newly
translated, the vase-painter[902] diligently paints his reception into
Olympus, he is always elaborately entering, yet he is never really
_in_, he is too much a man to wear at ease the livery of an Olympian,
and literature, always over-Olympianized, makes him too often the
laughing-stock of the stage.
[Illustration: FIG. 103.]
More often it is the fate of a hero to become locally a divinity of
healing, but never to emerge as a Pan-Hellenic god. In the design in
fig. 103 we have a good instance—from a vase[903] found in Boeotia and
now in the National Museum at Athens. On the obverse a bearded man,
wearing a wreath, reclines at a banquet. A table with cakes stands by his
couch. An enormous coiled snake is about to drink from the wine-cup in
his hand. On the reverse a woman-goddess holding a sceptre is seated, a
girl brings offerings—an oinochoë, cakes, a lighted taper. Above are hung
votive offerings—a hand, two legs, such as hang in the shrines of saints
in Brittany and Italy to-day. An interpreter unversed in the complexity
of hero-cults would at once name the god with the snake on the obverse
Asklepios, the goddess with the votive limbs on the reverse Hygieia;
but to these names they have no sort of right. Found as the vase was in
Boeotia, the vase-painter more probably intended Amphiaraos, or possibly
Trophonios, and Agathe Tyche. All we can say is that they are a couple of
healing divinities—hero and heroine divinized.
[Illustration: FIG. 104.]
The vase is of late style, and the artist has forgotten that the snake is
the hero; he makes him a sort of tame attributive pet, feeding out of the
wine-cup. The snake is not bearded, but he has a touch of human unreality
in that he is about to drink out of the wine-cup. These humanized snakes
are fed with human food; their natural food would be a live bird or a
rabbit. Dr Gadow kindly tells me that a snake will lap milk, but if he is
to eat his sacrificial food, the _pelanos_, it must be made _exceedingly
thin_; anything of the nature of a cake or even porridge he could not
swallow. And yet the snake on the Acropolis had for his monthly due a
‘honey cake,’ and at Lebadeia[904] in the shrine of Trophonios, where it
was a snake who gave oracles, the inhabitants of the country ‘cast into
his shrine flat cakes steeped in honey.’
Representations of the hero reclining at a feast occur very frequently
on votive reliefs of a class shortly to be discussed. They appear very
rarely on vases and only on those of late style. A good instance is
the design in fig. 104 from a late red-figured krater in the Berlin
Museum[905]. The attempt to give a name to the recumbent man is quite
fruitless: the great snake marks him as a dead hero. The woman and boy
can scarcely be said to be worshippers, though the boy brings cakes and
fruit; it is rather the feast that went on in life figured as continuing
after death.
* * * * *
It remains to examine some of the class of votive reliefs closely
analogous to the vase-painting in fig. 104, reliefs usually known as
‘Hero-Feasts’ or ‘Funeral Banquets.’ They are monuments especially
instructive for our purpose, because nowhere else is seen so clearly the
transition from hero to god, and also the gradual superposition of the
Olympians over local hero-cults.
THE ‘HERO-FEASTS.’
Plato[906] in the _Laws_ arranges the objects of divine worship in a
regular sequence: first the Olympian gods together with those who keep
the city; second the underworld gods whose share are things of unlucky
omen; third the daemons whose worship is characterized as ‘orgiastic’;
fourth the heroes; fifth ancestral gods. He concludes the list with
living parents to whom much honour should be offered. As early as
Hesiod[907] theology attempted some differentiation between heroes and
daemons; daemons being accounted divine in some higher sense. Of all
this minute departmentalism ritual knows nothing. The only recognized
distinction is that burnt offerings are the meed of the Olympians,
offerings _devoted_ (ἐναγισμοί) of the chthonic gods. Between the
chthonic gods and the whole class of dead men, heroes and daemons, the
only distinction observed is, as already noted, that certain chthonic
gods from sheer conservatism reject the service of wine, whereas it is
apparently acceptable to dead men, to heroes and to daemons not fully
divinized.
In like fashion votive reliefs of the type known as Hero-Feasts
draw no distinction between hero and daemon, nor indeed do they
clearly distinguish between ordinary dead man and hero. As a rule the
‘Hero-Feasts’ are depicted on reliefs set up in sanctuaries rather than
graveyards, but they occur sometimes on actual tombstones[908] set up in
actual cemeteries.
[Illustration: FIG. 105.]
The ‘Hero-Feast’ is found broadcast over Attica, the Peloponnese and
the islands; there is scarcely a local museum that does not contain
specimens. The design in fig. 105 is from a relief in the local museum
at Samos[909]. Three heroes are lying at the banquet; one holds a large
rhyton. A snake coiled about a tree is about to drink from it. Snake
and tree mark a sanctuary, otherwise the scene is very homelike and
_non_-hieratic. Of the inscription only two letters remain, and they tell
nothing. The round shield and the horse’s head and the dog tell us we
have to do with actual heroes, but who they were it is impossible to say.
[Illustration: FIG. 106.]
The relief in fig. 106 is also from Samos[910]. It is of the usual
type—the recumbent man, the seated woman, the boy about to draw wine. The
field is full of characteristic tokens; for the man, the horse’s head,
the cuirass, helm, shield and greaves; for the woman, the work-basket of
the shape so often occurring on Athenian grave-reliefs, and, it may be,
the tame bird which stands on the casket pecking at a fruit. The snake
is for both, for both are dead. The inscription at first surprises us;
it is as follows: ‘Lais daughter of Phoenix, heroine, hail.’ There is no
mention of the hero, but on examination of the stone it is seen that a
previous inscription has been erased[911]. Some one cared more for Lais
than for her husband, hence the palimpsest.
These two specimens from Samos have been selected out of countless
others because in them it is quite certain that heroized mortals are
represented. The earliest specimens of the ‘Hero-Feast’ discovered had no
inscriptions, and though horse and snake were present an attempt was made
to interpret them as sacred to Asklepios; the snake was ‘the symbol of
healing,’ the horse that mysterious creature the ‘horse of Hades[912].’
The most ardent devotee of symbolic interpretation can scarcely make
mythology out of the greaves and the work-basket.
* * * * *
Reliefs of the ‘Hero-Feast’ type are all of late date. The earliest one
is doubtfully assigned to the end of the 5th century; the great majority
are much later. The reason is not far to seek. In the fine period of
Greek Art, the period to which we owe most of the grave-reliefs found at
Athens, hero-worship is submerged. It is a time of rationalism, and the
funeral monuments of that time tend to represent this life rather than
the next. I have tried elsewhere to show that early Attic grave-reliefs
are cast in the _type_ of the Sparta hero-reliefs, but nowhere in Attic
grave-reliefs of the 5th century do we find the dead heroized. But once
the age of reason past, hero-worship re-emerged, and it would seem in
greater force than before.
In the fine period of art hero-reliefs do exist, but not as funeral
monuments. One of the earliest and finest[913] we possess is represented
in fig. 107. It is not at all of the same type as the ‘Hero-Feast,’ and
is figured here partly for its beauty and interest, partly to mark the
contrast. A hero occupies the central place, leading his horse, followed
by his hound. That he _is_ a hero we are sure, for in front of him is
his low, omphalos-like altar, and to the left a worshipper approaches.
Unhappily there is no inscription, but yet we are tempted to give the
hero a name.
[Illustration: FIG. 107.]
Horse and horseman are set against a rocky background. The marble
of which the relief is made is Pentelic, the style Attic, with many
reminiscences of the Parthenon marbles. It is therefore not too bold to
see in the rocky background a slope of the Acropolis. To the right above
the hero is a seated figure, with only the lower part of the body draped.
Zeus is so represented and Asklepios. Zeus has no shrine in the slopes
of the Acropolis, nor is it probable he would be depicted on a relief of
this date seated in casual fashion as a spectator. The figure is almost
certainly Asklepios. Given that the figure is Asklepios, the narrative of
Pausanias[914] supplies the clue to the remaining figures. ‘Approaching
the Acropolis by this road, next after the sanctuary of Asklepios is the
temple of Themis, and in front of this temple is a mound upreared as a
monument to Hippolytos.’ Then Pausanias tells the story of Phaedra and
Hippolytos; he does not actually mention the sanctuary of Aphrodite, but
he says ‘the old images were not there in my time, but those I saw were
the work of no obscure artists.’ Images of course presuppose a sanctuary,
and such a sanctuary we now know from inscriptions and votive offerings
found on the spot to have existed, and that it was dedicated to Aphrodite
Pandemos. The figures on the relief exactly correspond to the account
of Pausanias. To the right, i.e. to the East, the figure of Asklepios;
next Themis with her temple, clearly indicated by the two columns between
which she stands; immediately in front of her Hippolytos with his sacred
altar-mound. Above it Aphrodite, literally ‘_over_ Hippolytos’ (Ἱππολύτῳ
δ’ ἔπι). It is as Euripides[915] knew it:
‘And Phaedra then, his father’s Queen high born,
Saw him, and as she saw her heart was torn
With great love by the working of my will.
And there, when he was gone, on Pallas’ hill
Deep in the rock, that Love no more might roam,
She built a shrine and named it _Love-at-Home_.
And the rock held it, but its face always
Seeks Trozen o’er the seas.’
It is worth noting that the relief, now in the Torlonia Museum at
Rome, was found not far from Aricia, where the hero Virbius, the Latin
equivalent of Hippolytos, was worshipped.
It is possible that in the tragedy of the wrath of Aphrodite against
the hero who worshipped Artemis, and in the title of the goddess ‘over
Hippolytos,’ later misunderstood as ‘because of,’ ‘for the sake of’
Hippolytos, we have a reminiscence of a superposition of cults—that the
actual contest was between a local hero and Aphrodite who had waxed to
the glory of an Olympian. Such a view can however scarcely be deduced
from the relief in question, which seems to present relations merely
topographical and perfectly peaceful.
* * * * *
The design in fig. 108, from a relief in the Jacobsen[916] collection
at Ny Carlsberg, Copenhagen, shows a clearer case of supersession. The
design is not earlier than the 4th century B.C. and of the usual type
of ‘Hero-Feast’; we have the reclining man, seated wife, attendant
cupbearer, and, to make the scene quite complete, three worshippers of
smaller size. The procession of worshippers is a frequent, though not
uniform, element in the reliefs representing ‘Hero-Feasts.’ When present
they serve to show very clearly that the hero and his wife are objects
of worship. As a rule it is, we have seen, safest not to name the hero.
In the cases so far where he or the heroine is inscribed, the name has
been that of a mortal. In the present case the inscription has a surprise
in store for us. Assuredly no one, without the inscriptions, would have
ventured to conjecture the inscribed names. The inscription runs as
follows:
‘Aristomache and Theoris dedicated (it) to Zeus Epiteleios
Philios, and to Philia the mother of the god, and to Tyche
Agathe the wife of the god.’
[Illustration: FIG. 108.]
Philia, the Friendly One, is mother not wife of Zeus Philios, ‘Zeus the
Friendly’; it is the old matriarchal relation of Mother and Son (p. 273).
But the dedicators, wedded themselves no doubt after patriarchal fashion,
seem to feel a need that Zeus Philios should be married; they give him
not his natural shadow-wife Philia—she has been used up as mother—but
Tyche Agathe, ‘Good Fortune.’ In the procession of worshippers there are
two women with a man between them: probably they are his mother and wife
and wish to see their relation to him mirrored in their dedication. But
they are content with the traditional type of Hero-Feasts, possibly the
only type that the conservative workman kept in stock in his workshop.
It is worth noting that this interesting relief came from a precinct
of Asklepios in Munychia down at the Peiraeus, the same precinct which
yielded the snake reliefs (figs. 1 and 2) dedicated to Meilichios. There
were also found the relief in fig. 4, several reliefs adorned with
snakes only, some reliefs representing Asklepios, and various ritual
inscriptions. The precinct seems to have become a sort of melting-pot of
gods and heroes. Tyche we know at Lebadeia as the wife of the Agathos
Daimon, the Good or Rich Spirit, and it is curious to note that Zeus
on the relief holds a cornucopia, symbol of plenty. His other title
_Epiteleios_ points the same way. Hesychius[917] tells us that the word
ἐπιτελείωσις means the same as αὔξησις, ‘increase,’ and Plato[918] gives
the name ἐπιτελειώσεις, ‘accomplishments,’ to family feasts held in
thanksgiving for the birth _and welfare_ of children.
It seems obvious that the precinct once belonged to a hero, worshipped
under the form of a snake, and as Meilichios, god of the wealth of the
underworld—a sort of Agathos Daimon or Good Spirit. He must have had two
other titles—Epiteleios, the Accomplished, and Philios, the Friendly
One. At some time or other Asklepios took over the shrine of Meilichios,
Philios, Epiteleios, as he took over the shrine of Amynos, but Zeus also
put in a claim and the two divided the honours of the place. The old
snake-hero was forgotten, overshadowed by the Olympian and the great
immigrant healer; but the Olympian does not wholly triumph. He cannot
change the local ritual, and he must consent to a certain interchange of
attributes.
[Illustration: FIG. 109.]
This is quaintly shown in the two reliefs placed side by side in
fig. 109[919]. The larger one to the left shows a seated god holding
a cornucopia; beneath his chair is an eagle. In deference to this
characteristically Olympian bird we should expect the dedication
to be to Zeus. We find it is to the ‘Good Spirit.’ In the smaller
relief a similar bird is perched below the chair, and a humble pig is
the sacrifice, as it is to Zeus Meilichios; the inscription tells us
that ‘the Club-men dedicated it to Zeus Philios in the archonship of
Hegesios.’ The relief is dated by this archonship as set up in the year
324/3 B.C. The Friendly Zeus was the god of good fellowship and was of
wide popularity[920]. To cheerful, hilarious souls it was comforting to
think that there was another Zeus, less remote, more of the cornucopia
and less of the thunderbolt, and that he was ready to join a human feast.
The diner-out needs and finds a god in his own image, and Zeus—Zeus with
his title of Philios, accustomed as he was to Homeric banquets, was ready
for the post. So the comic parasite reasons[921]:
‘I wish to explain clearly
What a holy orthodox business this dining-out is—
An invention of the gods; the other arts
Were invented by men of talent, not by the gods.
But dining-out was invented by Zeus the Friendly,
By common consent the greatest of all the gods.
Now good old Zeus comes straight into people’s houses
In his free and easy way, rich and poor alike.
Wherever he sees a comfortable couch set out
And by its side a table properly laid,
Down he sits to a regular dinner with courses,
Wine and dessert and all, and then off he goes
Straight back home, and he never pays his shot.’
The fooling is obviously based on ritual practice in the ‘Hero-Feast’
that developed into the Feasts of the Gods, the Theoxenia.
* * * * *
Our argument ends where it began—with Zeus Meilichios, an early chthonic
stratum of worship, a later Olympian supersession. The two religions,
alien in ritual, alien in significance, never more than mechanically
fused. We have also seen that the new religion was powerless to alter the
old save in name; the Diasia becomes the festival of Zeus, the ritual
is a holocaust offered to a snake; Apollo and Artemis take over the
Thargelia, but it remains a savage ceremony of magical purification.
It might seem that we had reached the end. In reality, for religion in
any deep and mystical sense, we have yet to watch the beginning; we have
yet to see the coming of a god, who came from the North and yet was no
Achaean, no Olympian, who belonging to the ancient stock revived the
ancient ritual, the sacrifice that was in its inner content a sacrifice
of purification, but revived it with a significance all his own, the god
who took over the ritual of the Anthesteria, Dionysos.
DIONYSOS ON HERO-RELIEFS.
The passing from the old to the new is very curiously and instructively
shown in the two designs in figs. 110 and 111. The design in fig. 110 is
from a relief found in the harbour of Peiraeus and now in the National
Museum at Athens[922]. The material is Pentelic marble; in places the
surface has suffered considerably from the corrosion of sea-water. The
fine style of the relief dates it as probably belonging to the end of 5th
century B.C.
[Illustration: FIG. 110.]
The general type of the relief is of course the same as that of the
‘Hero-Feast[923].’ A youth on a couch holds a rhyton, the usual woman
is seated at his feet, the usual procession stands to the left. But it
is a ‘Hero-Feast’ with a difference. The group of ‘worshippers’ are not
worshippers; they are talking among themselves, they hold not victims or
other offerings, but the implements of the drama—a mask, a tambourine.
This is clearly seen in the case of the middle figure, a woman[924]. The
worshippers are tragic actors. This prepares us for the fact disclosed
by the inscriptions beneath the figures of the youth and the attendant
woman. Under the youth is written quite clearly _Dionysos_: under the
woman was an inscription of which only two certain letters remain, the
two last, ια. These inscriptions, it should clearly be noted, are later
than the relief itself, probably not earlier than 300 B.C. The name of
the woman attendant cannot certainly be made out: the most probable
conjecture is (Paid)ia, Play, a natural enough name for a nymph attendant
on Dionysos.
The name of the god is certain, and, though the inscription is an
afterthought, it certainly voices the intention of the original artist.
It is to the honour of Dionysos, not to that of a hero, that the actors
with their masks assemble—to his _honour_ rather than to his definite
worship. But none the less there remains the significant fact that the
god has taken over the art-type of the ‘Hero-Feast.’
The second relief[925] in fig. 111 tells in slightly different and more
elaborate form the same tale. The design is from a relief in the Museum
at Naples, and is an instance of a type long known as the ‘Ikarios
reliefs.’ Its style dates it as about the 2nd cent. B.C. It clearly
presents a blend of the ‘Hero-Feast’ to the left and the triumphal entry
of Dionysos, drunken, elderly, attended by a train of worshippers to
the right. The immigrant god is received by the local hero. What local
hero receives him we cannot say. Legend tells of such receptions by
Ikarios, by Pegasos, by Amphictyon, by Semachos. The hero must remain
unnamed; anyhow he plays to Dionysos the part played by Sophocles, he
is _Dexion_, Receiver, Host. It is a Theoxenia, a feasting of the god.
The ‘Ikarios’ reliefs are late, and, in the euphemistic manner of the
time, the representation is all peace and harmony. The hero, be he who
he may, receives in awe and reverence and gladness the incoming divine
guest. But Herodotus tells another tale—a tale of the forcible wresting
of the honours of the hero to the glory of the god. In telling the early
history of Sekyon under the tyrant Cleisthenes he[926] makes this notable
statement: ‘The inhabitants of Sekyon paid other honours to Adrastos and
they celebrated his misfortunes by tragic choruses, for at that time
they did not honour Dionysos, but honoured Adrastos. Now Cleisthenes
_transferred these choruses_ (from Adrastos) _to Dionysos_, but the rest
of the sacrifice he gave to Melanippos.’ It is a sudden glimpse into a
very human state of affairs. To put down the cult of Adrastos, the hero
of a family alien to his own, Cleisthenes introduced the worship of a
Theban hero Melanippos. He dared not for some reason give the tragic
choruses to Melanippos; rather than the local enemy should still have
them he hands them over to a popular immigrant god, Dionysos.
[Illustration: FIG. 111.]
The recumbent hero in the ‘Hero-Feasts’ is usually represented as
reclining at a feast and as drinking from a large wine-cup, attended by
a cupbearer. It may be conjectured that this type, which does not appear
till late in the 5th century, came in with the worship of Dionysos. The
idea of future bliss as an ‘eternal drunkenness’ came, it will later
be seen (Chap. XI.), with the religion of Dionysos from the North. By
anticipation we may note a curious fact. On the late Roman coins of
the Bizuae[927], a Thracian tribe, the type of the Hero-Feast occurs.
An instance is given in fig. 112. A hero is represented—of that we are
sure from the cuirass suspended on the tree, from the horse and from the
snake—but a hero, I would conjecture, conceived of as transfigured into
the feasting god, Dionysos himself.
[Illustration: FIG. 112.]
To the examination in detail of the cult of Dionysos we must now turn.
CHAPTER VIII.
DIONYSOS.
‘ὦ μάκαρ ὅστις εὐδαί-
μων τελετὰς θεῶν
εἰδὼς βιοτὰν ἁγιστεύει.’
So far the formula for Greek theology has been, ‘Man makes the gods in
his own image.’ Mythological development has proceeded on lines perfectly
normal, natural, intelligible. In so far as we understand humanity we can
predicate divinity. The gods are found to be merely magnified men, on the
whole perhaps better but with frequent lapses into worse, _quot homines
tot sententiae, quot sententiae tot dei_.
As man grew more civilized, his image, mirrored in the gods, grew more
beautiful and _pari passu_ the worship he offered to these gods advanced
from ‘aversion’ (ἀποτροπή) to ‘tendance’ (θεραπεία). But all along we
have been conscious that something was lacking, that even these exquisite
presentations of the Nymphs and the Graces, the Mother and the Daughter,
are really rather human than divine, that their ritual, whether of
ignorant and cruel ‘aversion’ or of genial ‘tendance,’ was scarcely in
our sense religious. These perfect Olympians and even these gracious
Earth-goddesses are not really Lords over man’s life who made them, they
are not even ghosts to beckon and threaten, they are lovely dreams, they
are playthings of his happy childhood, and when full-grown he comes to
face realities, from kindly sentiment he lets them lie unburied in the
lumber-room of his life.
Just when Apollo, Artemis, Athene, nay even Zeus himself, were losing
touch with life and reality, fading and dying of their own luminous
perfection, there came into Greece a new religious impulse, an impulse
really religious, the mysticism that is embodied for us in the two names
Dionysos and Orpheus. The object of the chapters that follow is to try
and seize, with as much precision as may be, the gist of this mysticism.
Dionysos is a difficult god to understand. In the end it is only the
mystic who penetrates the secrets of mysticism. It is therefore to poets
and philosophers that we must finally look for help, and even with this
help each man is in the matter of mysticism peculiarly the measure of his
own understanding. But this ultimate inevitable vagueness makes it the
more imperative that the few certain truths that can be made out about
the religion of Dionysos should be firmly established and plainly set
forth.
DIONYSOS AN IMMIGRANT THRACIAN.
First it is certain beyond question that Dionysos was a late-comer into
Greek religion, an immigrant god, and that he came from that home of
spiritual impulse, the North. These three propositions are so intimately
connected that they may conveniently be dealt with together.
In the face of a steady and almost uniform ancient tradition that
Dionysos came from without, it might scarcely be necessary to emphasize
this point but for a recent modern heresy. Anthropologists have lately
recognized[928], and rightly, that Dionysos is in one of his aspects
a nature-god, a god who comes and goes with the seasons, who has like
Demeter and Kore, like Adonis and Osiris, his Epiphanies and his
Recessions. They have rashly concluded that these undoubted appearances
and disappearances adequately account for the tradition of his
immigration, that he is merely a new-comer year by year, not a foreigner;
that he is welcomed every spring, every harvest, every vintage,
exorcised, expelled and slain in the death of each succeeding winter.
This error is beginning to filter into handbooks.
A moment’s consideration shows that the actual legend points to the
reverse conclusion. The god is first met with hostility, exorcised
and expelled, then by the compulsion of his might and magic at last
welcomed. Demeter and Kore are season-goddesses, yet we have no legend
of their forcible entry. Comparative anthropology has done much for the
understanding of Dionysos, but to tamper with the historical fact of his
immigration is to darken counsel.
Ancient tradition must be examined, and first as to the lateness of his
coming.
* * * * *
In Homer Dionysos is not yet an Olympian. On the Parthenon frieze he
takes his place among the seated gods. Somewhere between the dates of
Homer and Pheidias his entry was effected. The same is true of the
indigenous Demeter, so that this argument alone is inadequate, but the
fact must be noted.
[Illustration: FIG. 113.]
The earliest monument of art showing Dionysos as an actual denizen of
Olympus is the curious design from an amphora[929] now in the Berlin
Museum. The scene depicted is the birth of Athene and all the divinities
present are carefully and sometimes curiously inscribed. Zeus with his
thunderbolt is seated on a splendid throne in the centre. Athene springs
from his head. To the right are Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, and last of
all Apollo. To the left Eileithyia, Hermes, Hephaestos, and last Dionysos
holding his great wine cup.
From the style of the inscriptions the design can scarcely date later
than the early part of the sixth century. The position and grouping of
the different gods is noteworthy. Of course someone must stand on the
outside, but Dionysos is markedly aloof from the main action. Hermes
seems to come as messenger to the furthest verge of Olympus to tell him
the news. At the right, the other Northerner, Apollo, occupies the last
place.
[Illustration: FIG. 114.]
Moreover on vase-paintings substantially earlier than the Parthenon
marbles the scene of his entry into Olympus is not infrequent. As we have
no literary tradition of this entry, the evidence of vase-paintings is
here of some importance. The design selected (fig. 114) is from a cylix
signed by the potter Euxitheos[930] and can be securely dated as a work
executed about the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. On the
obverse is an assembly of the Olympians all inscribed; Zeus himself with
his thunderbolt and Ganymede about to fill his wine cup, Athene holding
helmet and lance, Hermes with a flower, Hebe, Hestia with flower and
a branch, Aphrodite with dove and flower, Ares with helmet and lance.
We might not have named them right but for their inscriptions. Hera and
Poseidon are absent, Demeter not yet come. At this time the vase-painter
is still free to make a certain choice, the twelve Olympians are not
yet canonical. On the obverse the gods are seated waiting, and on the
reverse the new god is coming in all his splendour in his chariot with
vine and wine-cup in his hand. With him, characteristically, for he is
never unaccompanied, come the Satyr Terpes playing on the lyre and the
Maenad Thero with thyrsos and fawn and snake, and behind the chariot
another Maenad Kalis with thyrsos and lion and a Satyr Terpon playing on
the flute. At the close of the sixth century when Pratinas and Choirilos
and Phrynichus were writing tragedies in his honour, the gates of that
exclusive epic Olympus could no longer be closed against the people’s
god, and the potter knew it. But there had been a time of doubt and
debate. We do not have these entries of Athene or Poseidon or even Hermes.
* * * * *
Homer is of course our first literary source and his main notice of
Dionysos is so characteristic it must be quoted in full. The fact that
the passage stands alone—elsewhere through all Homer Dionysos is of no
real account—has led critics to suspect that it is of later and local
origin. Be that as it may, the story glistens like an alien jewel in a
bedrock of monotonous fighting. Diomede[931] meets Glaucus in battle, but
so great is the hardihood of Glaucus that Diomede fears he is one of the
immortals and makes pious, prudent pause:
‘I, Diomedes, will not stand ’gainst heavenly Gods in war.
Not long in life was he of old who raised ’gainst gods his hand
Strong Lycoörgos, Dryas’ son. Through Nysa’s goodly land
He Dionysos’ Nursing Nymphs did chase, till down in fear
They cast their wands upon the ground, so sore he smote them there,
That fell king with the ox-smiter. But Dionysos fled,
And plunged him ’neath the salt sea wave. Him sore discomfited
Fair Thetis to her bosom took. Great fear the god did seize.
With Lycoörgos they were wroth, those gods that dwell at ease,
And Kronos’ son did make him blind, and he was not for long,
The immortal gods they hated him because he did them wrong.’
Homer is somewhat mysterious as to the end of Lycurgus—‘Not long
in life was he.’ Sophocles[932] is more explicit, both as to his
nationality and his doom. He is a Thracian king, son of Dryas, and he
was ‘rock-entombed.’ When Antigone is going to her death the chorus sing
how in like fashion others had been forced to bend beneath the yoke of
the gods, Danae, Lycurgus, the sons of Phineus, Oreithyia—three of them
Thracians; and of Lycurgus they tell:
‘He was bound by Dionysos, rock-entombed,
Dryas’ son, Edonian king; swiftly bloomed
His dire wrath and drooped. So was he wrought
To know his blindness and what god he sought
With gibes mad-tongued. Yea and he set his hand
To stay the god-inspired band,
To quell his women and his joyous fire
And rouse the fluting Muses into ire.’
The loss of the Lycurgus trilogy of Aeschylus is hard to bear. One scene
at least must have been something like a forecast of the _Bacchae_ of
Euripides. The dialogue between Lycurgus and the stranger-god captured
and brought into his presence, is parodied by Aristophanes in the
_Thesmophoriazusae_ and the scholiast[933] tells us that the words:
‘Whence does the womanish creature come?’
occurred in the _Edonians_.
Neither Homer nor Sophocles knew anything of the murder of the children.
Who first piled up this fresh horror we do not know. Vase-paintings of
the rather late red-figured style (middle of the fifth century B.C.)
are our first sources. The punishment of sin was to the primitive mind
always incomplete unless the offender was cut off with his whole family
root and branch, and the murder of the children may have been an echo of
the story of the mad Heracles. It is finely conceived on a red-figured
krater[934]. On the obverse is the mad Lycurgus with his children dead
and dying. He swings a double axe (βουπλήξ). The ‘ox-feller’ of Homer
is probably a double axe, not a goad. It is the typical weapon of the
Thracian, and with it the Thracian women regularly on vases slay Orpheus
(p. 463). Through the air down upon Lycurgus swoops a winged demon of
madness, probably Lyssa herself, and smites at the king with her pointed
goad. To the left, behind a hill, a Maenad smites her timbrel in token of
the presence of the god. On the reverse of the vase we have the peace of
Dionysos who made all this madness. The god has sent his angel against
Lycurgus, but no turmoil troubles him or his. About him his thiasos of
Maenads and Satyrs seem to watch the scene, alert and interested but in
perfect quiet.
The exact details of the fate of Lycurgus, varying as they do from author
to author, are not of real importance. The essential thing, the factor
which recurs in story after story, is the rage against the dominance of
a new god, the blind mad fury, the swift sudden helpless collapse at the
touch of a real force. This is no symbol of the coming of the spring
or the gathering of the vintage. It is the mirrored image of a human
experience, of the passionate vain beating of man against what is not man
and is more and less than man.
The nature and essence of the new influence will be in part determined
later. For the present the question that presses for solution is ‘whence
did it come?’ ‘where was the primitive seat of the worship of Dionysos?’
* * * * *
The testimony of historians, from Herodotus to Dion Cassius, is uniform,
and confirms the witness of Homer and Sophocles. Herodotus[935] tells
how Xerxes, when he marched through Thrace, compelled the sea tribes to
furnish him with ships and those that dwelt inland to follow by land.
Only one tribe, the Satrae, would suffer no compulsion, and then come
the significant words: ‘The Satrae were subject to no man so far as
we know, but down to our own day they alone of all the Thracians are
free, for they dwell on high mountains covered with woods of all kinds
and snow-clad, and they are keenly warlike. These are the people that
possess an oracle shrine of Dionysos and this oracle is on the topmost
range of their mountains. And those among the Satrae who interpret the
oracle are called Bessi; it is a priestess who utters the oracles as it
is at Delphi, and the oracles are nothing more extraordinary than that.’
Herodotus is not concerned with the religion of Dionysos; he does not
even say that the religion of Dionysos spread southward into Greece, but
he states the all-important fact that the Satrae were never conquered.
They received no religion from without. Here among those splendid
unconquerable savages in their mountain fastnesses was the real home of
the god.
Herodotus speaks of the Bessi as though they were a kind of priestly
caste among the Satrae, but Strabo[936] knows of them as the wildest
and fiercest of the many brigand tribes that dwelt on and around Mt.
Haemus. All the tribes about Mt. Haemus were, he says, ‘much addicted to
brigandage, but the Bessi who possessed the greater part of Mt. Haemus
were called brigands by brigands. They are the sort of people who live in
huts in very miserable fashion, and they extend as far as Rhodope and the
Paeonians.’ He mentions the Bessi again[937] as a tribe living high up on
the Hebrus at the furthest point where the river is navigable, and again
emphasizes their tendency to brigandage.
The evil reputation of the Bessi lasted on till Christian days, till they
bowed beneath the yoke of a greater than Dionysos. Towards the end of
the fourth century A.D. the good Bishop of Dacia, Niketas, carried the
gospel to these mountain wolves and, if we may trust the congratulatory
ode written to him by his friend Paulinus, he carried it not in vain.
Paulinus celebrates the conversion of the Bessi as follows:
‘Hard were their lands and hard those Bessi bold,
Cold were their snows, their hearts than snow more cold,
Sheep in the fold from roaming now they cease,
Thy fold of peace.
Untamed of war, ever did they refuse
To bow their heads to servitude’s hard use,
’Neath the true yoke their necks obedient
Are gladly bent.
They who were wont with sweat and manual toil
To delve their sordid ore from out the soil
Now for their wealth with inward joy untold
Garner heaven’s gold.
There where of old they prowled like savage beasts,
Now is the joyous rite of angel feasts.
The brigands’ cave is now a hiding place
For men of grace[938].’
Thucydides[939] in his account of Thracian affairs is silent about the
Bessi and his silence surprises us. It is probably accounted for by the
fact that in his days the Odrysae had complete supremacy, a supremacy
that seems to have lasted down to the days of Roman domination. The
autochthonous tribes were necessarily obscured. He mentions however
certain mountain peoples who had retained their autonomy against Sitalkes
king of the Odrysae and calls them by the collective name Dioi. Among
them were probably the Bessi, for we learn from Pliny[940] that the Bessi
were known by many names, among them that of Dio-Bessi. It seems possible
that to these _Dio_-Bessi the god may have owed one of his many names.
* * * * *
In the face of all this historical evidence, it is at first a little
surprising to find that, in the _Bacchae_ of Euripides, Dionysos is
no Thracian. He is Theban born, and comes back to Thebes, after long
triumphant wanderings not in Thrace but in Asia, through Lydia, Phrygia
to uttermost Media and Arabia. On this point Euripides is explicit. In
the prologue[941] Dionysos says:
‘Far now behind me lies the golden land
Of Lydian and of Phrygian—far away
The wide, hot plains where Persian sun-beams play,
The Bactrian war-holds and the storm-oppressed
Clime of the Mede and Araby the blest,
And Asia all, that by the salt sea lies
In proud embattled cities, motley-wise
Of Hellene and Barbarian interwrought,
And now I come to Hellas, having taught
All the world else my dances and my rite
Of mysteries, to show me in man’s sight
Manifest God.’
Dionysos is made to come from without, not as an immigrant stranger
but as an exile returned. Moreover, if historical tradition be true, he
is made to come from the wrong place. He comes also attended by a train
of barbarian women, Asiatic not Thracian. They chant their oriental
origin[942]:
‘From Asia, from the day-spring that uprises,
From Tmolus ever glorying we come,’
and again[943]:
‘Hither, O fragrant of Tmolus the golden.’
Yet Euripides wrote the play in Macedonia and must have known perfectly
well that these Macedonian rites that so impressed his imagination were
from Thrace; that, as Plutarch tells us[944], ‘The women called Klodones
and Mimallones performed rites which were the same as those done by the
Edonian women and the Thracian women about the Haemus.’ He knows it
perfectly well and when he is off his guard betrays his knowledge. In
the epode of the third choric song[945] he makes Dionysos come to bless
Pieria and in his coming cross the two Macedonian rivers, the Axios and
Lydias:
‘Blessed land of Pierie,
Dionysos loveth thee,
He will come to thee with dancing,
Come with joy and mystery,
With the Maenads at his hest
Winding, winding to the west;
Cross the flood of swiftly glancing
Axios in majesty,
Cross the Lydias, the giver
Of good gifts and waving green,
Cross that Father Stream of story
Through a land of steeds and glory
Rolling, bravest, fairest River
E’er of mortals seen.’
Euripides as poet can afford to contradict himself. He accepts popular
tradition, too careless of it to attempt an irrelevant consistency.
It matters nothing to him _whence_ the god came[946]. The Theban
birth-place, the home-coming were essential to the human pathos of his
story. But for that we should have missed the appeal to Dirce[947]:
‘Acheloüs’ roaming daughter,
Holy Dirce, virgin water,
Bathed he not of old in thee
The Babe of God, the Mystery?’
and again[948]:
‘Why, O Blessed among Rivers,
Wilt thou fly me and deny me?
By his own joy I vow,
By the grape upon the bough,
Thou shalt seek him in the midnight, thou shalt love him even now.’
He came unto his own and his own received him not.
[Illustration: FIG. 115.]
When we examine the evidence of art, we find that the simple vase-painter
accepts the fact that Dionysos has become a Greek, and does not raise the
question whence he came. In black and early red figured designs Dionysos
is almost uniformly dressed a Greek and attended by Greek Maenads. Later
the artist becomes more learned and dresses Dionysos as a Thracian or
occasionally as an Oriental. The vase-painting[949] in fig. 115, from a
late aryballos in the British Museum, has been usually interpreted as
representing the Oriental triumph of Dionysos. Rightly so, I incline to
think, because the figure on the camel is attended not only by Orientals
but by Greek maidens playing on cymbals. Their free upward bearing
contrasts strongly with the strange abject fantastic posturings of the
Orientals. It must however be distinctly borne in mind that the figure
on the camel carries no Dionysiac attributes and cannot be certainly said
to be the god.
* * * * *
The question remains—why did popular tradition, accepted by Euripides and
embodied occasionally in vase-paintings, point to Asia rather than to the
real home, Thrace? The answer in the main is given by Strabo[950] in his
important account of the provenance of the orgiastic worships of Greece.
Strabo is noting that Pindar, like Euripides, regards the rites of
Dionysos as substantially the same with those performed by the Phrygians
in honour of the Great Mother. ‘Very similar to these are,’ he adds, ‘the
rites called Kotytteia and Bendideia, celebrated among the Thracians. Nor
is it at all unlikely that, as the Phrygians themselves are colonists
from the Thracians, they brought their religious rites from thence.’ In a
fragment[951] of the lost seventh book he is still more explicit. He is
mentioning the mountain Bernicos as formerly in possession of the Briges,
and the Briges, he says, were ‘a Thracian tribe of which some portion
went across into Asia and were called by a modified name, Phrygians.’
The solution is simple and is indeed almost a geographical necessity. If
the Thracians dwelling in the ranges of Rhodope and Haemus went south at
all, they would inevitably split up into two branches. The one would move
westward into Macedonia, across the Axios and Lydias into Thessaly and
thence downwards to Delphi, Thebes and Attica; the other eastward across
the Bosporus or the Hellespont into Asia Minor. Greek colonists in Asia
Minor would recognize in the orgiastic cults they found there elements
akin to their own worship of Dionysos. Wise men are not slow to follow
the star that leads to the east, and it was pleasanter to admit a debt to
Asia Minor than to own kinship with the barbarous north. Similarity of
names, e.g. Lydias and Lydia, may have helped out the illusion and most
of all the Theban legend of the Phoenician Kadmos[952].
[Illustration: FIG. 116.]
But mythology is too unconscious not to betray itself. Herodotus[953]
says that the Thracians worship three gods only: Ares, Dionysos
and Artemis. Between Ares and Dionysos there would seem to be but
little in common, but in one current myth their kinship comes out all
unconsciously. It is just these unconscious revelations that are in
mythology of cardinal importance. The story is that known as ‘the bonds
of Hera’ (Ἥρας δεσμοί). Hephaistos, to revenge himself for his downfall
from heaven, sent to his mother Hera a golden throne with invisible
bonds. The Olympians took counsel how they might free their queen. None
but Hephaistos knew the secret of loosing. Ares[954] vowed he would bring
Hephaistos by force. Hephaistos drove him off with firebrands. Force
failed, but Hephaistos yielded to the seduction of Dionysos and was
brought in drunken triumph back to Olympus. It was a good subject for
broad comedy, and Epicharmus used it in his ‘Revellers or Hephaistos.’
It attained a rather singular popularity in art; the subject occurs on
upwards of thirty vase-paintings black and red figured. Earlier than any
literary source for the myth is unquestionably the famous François[955]
vase (early sixth century B.C.) in the Museo Civico at Florence, where
the scene is depicted in broad epic fashion and with some conscious
humour. All the figures are inscribed. Zeus is there and Hera, seated
on the splendid, fatal throne. Dionysos leads the mule on which sits the
drunken Hephaistos. Up they come into the very presence of Zeus with
three attendant Silenoi carrying respectively a wine-skin, a flute, a
woman. It is the regular revel rout. Behind the throne of Hera crouches
Ares in deep dejection, on a sort of low stool of repentance, while
Athene looks back at him with scorn. Why are Ares and Dionysos thus set
in rivalry? Not merely because wine is mightier than war, but because the
two, Ares and Dionysos, are Thracian rivals, with Hephaistos of Lemnos
for a third. It is a bit of local mythology transplanted later to Olympus.
The diverse fates of these two Thracian gods are instructive. Ares was
realized as a Thracian to the end. In Homer he is only half accepted in
Olympus, he is known as a ruffian and a swashbuckler and like Aphrodite
escapes[956] to his home as soon as he is released:
‘Straightway forth sprang the twain;
To savage Thrace went Ares, but Kypris with sweet smile
Hied her to her fair altar place, in pleasant Paphos’ isle.’
The newly admitted gods, such as Ares and Aphrodite, are never really
at home in Olympus. Dionysos, as has already been seen (p. 366), has no
place in the Homeric Olympus, but, once he does force an entry, his seat
is far more stable. In the _Oedipus Tyrannos_ Sophocles[957] realizes
that Dionysos and Ares are the great Theban divinities, but Ares is of
slaughter and death, Dionysos of gladness and life. He makes his chorus
summon Dionysos to banish Ares his fellow divinity:
‘O thou with golden mitre band,
Named for our land,
On thee in this our woe
I call, thou ruddy Bacchus all aglow
With wine and Bacchant song.
Draw nigh, thou and thy Maenad throng,
Drive from us with bright torch of blazing pine
The god unhonoured ’mong the gods divine.’
Sophocles just hits the theological mark, Ares _is_ a god but he is
unhonoured of the orthodox gods, the Olympians.
Euripides[958] too lets out the kinship with Ares. He knows of
‘Harmonia, daughter of the Lord of War,’
Harmonia, bride of Kadmos, mother of Semele, and though his Dionysos is
at the outset all gentleness and magic, his kingdom scarcely of this
world, Teiresias[959] knows that he is not only Teacher, Healer, Prophet,
but
‘of Ares’ realm a part hath he.
When mortal armies mailèd and arrayed
Have in strange fear, or ever blade met blade,
Fled, maddened, ’tis this god hath palsied them,’
and though the panic he sends is from within not without, yet the mention
is significant. Dionysos, for all his sweetness, is to the end militant,
he came not to bring peace upon the earth but a sword, only in late
authors his weapons are not those of Ares. On vase-paintings he is not
unfrequently depicted doing on his actual armour, but Polyaenus[960], in
the little treatise on mythological warriors with which he prefaces his
_Strategika_, notes the secret armour of the god, the lance hidden in
ivy, the fawn-skin and soft raiment for breastplate, the cymbals and drum
for trumpet. To the end the god of the brigand Bessi was Lord of War.
Art tells the same tale, that the Thracian Dionysos succeeded where
the equally Thracian Ares failed. Among the archaic seated gods on the
frieze of the treasury of Cnidos recently discovered at Delphi[961]
Ares has found a place, but a significant one, at the very end, on a
seat by himself, as though naïvely to mark the difference. Even on the
east frieze of the Parthenon, where all is softened down to a decent
theological harmony, there is just a lingering, semi-conscious touch
of the same prejudice. Ares is admitted indeed, but he is not quite at
home among these easy aristocratic Olympians. He is grouped with no one,
he leans his arm on no one’s shoulder; even his pose is a little too
consciously assured to be quite confident.
It is abundantly clear that the remote Asiatic origin of Dionysos is
emphasized to hide a more immediate Thracian provenance. The Greeks
knew the god was not home-grown, but he was so great, so good, so
all-conquering, that they were forced to accept him. But they could not
bear the truth, that he came from their rough north-country kinsmen
the Thracians. They need not have been ashamed of these Northerners,
who were as well born as and more bravely bred than themselves. Even
Herodotus[962] owns that ‘the nation of the Thracians is the greatest
among men, except at least the Indians.’
* * * * *
Once fairly uprooted from his native Thracian soil, it was easy to
plant Dionysos anywhere and everywhere wherever went his worshippers.
His homeless splendour grows and grows till by the time of Diodorus his
birthplace is completely apocryphal. In Homer, as has been seen (p.
368), Nysa or as it is called Nyseïon, whether it be mountain or plain,
is clearly in Thrace, home of Lycurgus son of Dryas. But already in
Sophocles[963], in the beautiful fragment preserved by Strabo, wherever
it may be, it is a place touched by magic, a silent land which
‘The horned Iacchus loves for his dear nurse,
Where no shrill voice doth sound of any bird.’
Euripides[964] never expressly states where he supposes Nysa to be, but
the name comes to his lips coupled with the Korykian peaks on Parnassos
and the leafy haunts of Olympus, so we may suppose he believed it to be
northwards. As the horizon of the Greeks widened, Nysa is pushed further
and further away to an ever more remote _Nowhere_. Diodorus[965] with
much circumstance settles it in Libya on an almost inaccessible island
surrounded by the river Triton. It mattered little so long as it was a
far-off happy land.
Convinced as he was of this remote African Nysa and of the great Asiatic
campaign of Dionysos, it is curious to note that even Diodorus cannot
rid his mind of Thrace. He knows of course the story of the Thracian
Lycurgus and mentions incidentally that it was in a place called Nysion
that Lycurgus set upon the Maenads and slew them, he knows too of the
connection between Dionysos and Orpheus[966] and never doubts but that
Orpheus was a Thracian, a matter to be discussed later. Most significant
of all, when he is speaking[967] of the trieteric ceremonies instituted
in memory of the Indian expedition, he automatically records that these
were celebrated not only by Boeotians and the other Greeks but _by
the Thracians_. Thrace is obscured by the glories of Phrygia, Lydia,
Phoenicia, Arabia and Libya, but never wholly forgotten.
THE SATYRS.
Dionysos then, whatever his nature, is an immigrant god, a late-comer,
and he enters Greece from the north, from Thrace. He comes not
unattended. With him are always his revel rout of Satyrs and of Maenads.
This again marks him out from the rest of the Olympians; Poseidon,
Athene, Apollo, Zeus himself has no such accompaniment. As man makes the
gods in his own image, it may be well before we examine the nature and
functions of Dionysos to observe the characteristics of his attendant
worshippers, to determine who and what they are and whence they come.
[Illustration: FIG. 117.]
The Satyrs first—they are (what else should they, could they be?) the
_Satrae_[968]; and these Satrae-Satyrs have many traits in common with
the more mythological Centaurs. The evidence of the coins of Macedonia
is instructive. On the coins of Orreskii[969], a centaur, a horse-man,
bears off a woman in his arms. At Lete close at hand, with a coinage
closely resembling in style, fabric, weight the money of the Orreskii and
other Pangaean tribes, the type is the same in _content_, though with an
instructive difference of form—a naked Satyr or Seilenos with the hooves,
ears and tail of a horse seizes a woman round the waist. These coins are
of the sixth century B.C. Passing to Thasos, a colony of the Thracians
and like it rich in the coinage that came of gold mines, we find the
same type. On a series of coins that range from _circ._ 500-411 B.C. we
have again the Satyr or Seilenos bearing off the woman. An instance, for
clearness’ sake one of comparatively late date[970], is given in fig. 117.
This interchange of types, Satyr and Centaur, is evidence about which
there can be no mistake. Satyr and Centaur, slightly diverse forms of the
horse-man, are in essence one and the same. Nonnus[971] is right: ‘the
Centaurs are of the blood of the shaggy Satyrs.’ It remains to ask—who
are the Centaurs?
* * * * *
There are few mythological figures about which more pleasant baseless
fancies have been woven; woven irresponsibly, because mythologists
are slow to face solid historical fact; woven because, intoxicated by
comparative philology, they refuse to seek for the origin of a myth in
its historical birthplace. The Centaurs, it used to be said, are Vedic
Gandharvas, cloud-demons. Mythology now-a-days has fallen from the
clouds, and with it the Centaurs. They next became mountain torrents, the
offspring of the cloud that settles on the mountain top. The Centaurs
have possession of a wine-cask, the imprisoned forces of the earth’s
fertility are left in charge of the genius of the mountain. The cask is
opened, this is the unlocking of the imprisoned forces at the approach of
Herakles, the sun in spring, and this unlocking is the signal for the mad
onset of the Centaurs, the wild rush of the torrents. Of the making of
such mythology truly there is no end.
Homer[972] knew quite well who the opponents of Peirithoös were, not
cloud-demons, not mountain torrents, but real wild _men_ (φῆρες), as real
as the foes they fought with. He tells of the heroes Dryas, father of
Lycurgus, and Peirithoös and Kaineus:
‘Mightiest were they, and with the mightiest fought,
_With wild men mountain-haunting_.’
No one has, so far as we know, reduced the mighty Peirithoös, Dryas and
Lycurgus to mountain torrents or sun myths. Why are their mighty foes to
be less human?
Again in the Catalogue of the Ships[973] we are told how Peirithoös
‘Took vengeance on the shaggy mountain-men,
Drave them from Pelion to the Aithikes far.’
In the name of common sense, did Peirithoös expel a storm-cloud or a
mountain torrent and force it to leave Pelion and settle elsewhere? The
vengeance of Peirithoös is simply the expulsion of one wild tribe by
another.
In these passages from the _Iliad_ the foes of Peirithoös are simply
a tribe of wild men, Pheres. In the _Odyssey_, Homer[974] calls these
same foes by the name Kentauri, and implies that they are _non_-human.
Speaking of the peril of ‘honey-sweet wine’ he says:
‘Thence ’gan the feud ’twixt Centaurs and mankind.’
For the right understanding of this later non-humanity of the Centaurs
the development of their art type is of paramount importance.
* * * * *
We are apt to think of the Centaurs exclusively somewhat as they appear
on the metopes of the Parthenon, i.e. as splendid horses with the head
and trunk of a man. By the middle of the fifth century B.C. in knightly
horse-loving Athens the horse form had got the upper hand. In archaic
representations the reverse is the case. The Centaurs are in art what
they are in reality, men with men’s legs and feet, but they are shaggy
mountain men with some of the qualities and habits of beasts; so to
indicate this in a horse-loving country they have the hind-quarters of a
horse awkwardly tacked on to their human bodies.
A good example is the vase-painting in fig. 118 from an early
black-figured lekythos in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Vases of this
style cannot be dated later than the beginning of the sixth century B.C.
and may be somewhat earlier[975]. The scene represented is the fight
of Herakles with the Centaurs. To the left is a Centaur holding in his
right hand a branch, the primitive weapon of a primitive combatant. He is
figured as a complete man with a horse-trunk appended. In the original
drawing the horse-trunk is made more obviously an extra appendage from
the fact that the human body is painted red and the horse-trunk black.
Herakles too is a fighter with rude weapons; he carries his club, which
in this case is plainly what its Greek name indicates, a rough hewn trunk
or branch or possibly root of a tree. The remainder of the design is not
so clear and does not affect the present argument. The man with the sword
to the right is probably Iolaos. The object surmounted by the eagles I am
quite unable to explain.
[Illustration: FIG. 118.]
[Illustration: FIG. 119.]
[Illustration: FIG. 120.]
The next stage in the development of the Centaur is seen in the archaic
gem from the British Museum[976] in fig. 120. Here the noticeable point
is that the Centaur, though he has still the body of a man, is beginning
to be more of a horse. He has hoofs for feet. He is behaving just like
the Satyr on the coin in fig. 117, or the aggressor on the François vase
(fig. 116), he is carrying off a woman. It is the last step in the
transition to the Centaur of the Parthenon, i.e. the horse with head and
trunk of a man. Between Satyr and Centaur the sole difference is this:
the Centaur, primarily a wild man, became more and more of a horse, the
Satyr resisted the temptation and remained to the end what he was at the
beginning, a wild man, with horse adjuncts of ears, tail and occasionally
hoofs. Greek art, as has been already seen in discussing the Gorgon, was
liberal in its experiments with monster forms, the horse Medusa failed
(p. 179), the horse Centaur prevailed[977].
The Parthenon type of the Centaur, the type in which the horse-form is
predominant, obtains later in red-figured vase-paintings for all Centaurs
save one, the virtuous Cheiron. Cheiron always keeps his human feet
and legs and often wears a decent cloak to mark his gentle civilized
citizenship. Pausanias[978] when examining the chest of Kypselos at
Olympia, a monument dedicated in the seventh century B.C., noted this
peculiarity: ‘And the Centaur has not all his feet like a horse, but the
front feet are the feet of a man.’ Pindar[979] does definitely in the
case of Cheiron identify φήρ and Κένταυρος, but art kept for Cheiron the
more primitive and human type to emphasize his humanity, for he is the
trainer of heroes, the utterer of wise saws, the teacher of all gentle
arts of music and medicine, he has the kind heart of a man.
[Illustration: FIG. 121.]
The charming little design in fig. 121 is from an oinochoë in the
British Museum[980]. Though the technique is black-figured the delicate
soft style is archaistic rather than archaic and the vase is probably not
older than the middle of the fifth century B.C. The good Cheiron is a
quaint blend of horse and middle-aged citizen. The tree branch he still
carries looks back to the primitive habits he has left far behind, and
the little tree in front marks the woodland home. But there is nothing
shaggy about his neat decorous figure. Even the dog who used to go
hunting with him is now alert to give a courteous welcome to the guest.
A father is bringing his child, a little miniature copy of himself, to
be reared in the school of Cheiron. Father and son are probably Peleus
and Achilles, but the child might be Jason or even Asklepios. It is the
good Centaur only who concerns us. How has he of the mountains, fierce
and untameable, come to keep a preparatory school for young heroes? The
answer to this question is interesting and instructive.
* * * * *
Prof. Ridgeway[981] has shown that in the mythology of the Centaurs
we have a reflection of the attitude of mind of the conquerors to the
conquered. This attitude is, all the world over, a double one. The
conquerors are apt to regard the conquered with mixed feelings, mainly,
it is true, with hatred and aversion, but in part with reluctant awe.
‘The conquerors respect the conquered as wizards, familiar with the
spirits of the land, and employ them for sorcery, even sometimes when
relations are peaceable employ them as foster-fathers for their sons, yet
they impute to them every evil and bestial characteristic and believe
them to take the form of wild beasts. The conquered for their part take
refuge in mountain fastnesses and make reprisals in the characteristic
fashion of Satyrs and Centaurs by carrying off the women of their
conquerors.’
Nonnus is again right, it was jealousy that gave to the Satyrs their
horns, their manes, tusks and tails, but not, as Nonnus supposed, the
jealousy of Hera, but of primitive conquering man who gives to whatever
is hurtful to himself the ugly form that utters and relieves his
hate[982]. It should not be hard for us to realize this impulse; our own
devil, with horns and tail and hoofs, died hard and recently.
Most instructive of all as to the real nature of the Centaurs and their
close analogy to the Satrai-Satyroi is the story of the opening of the
wine cask. Pindar[983] tells how
‘Then when the wild men knew
The scent of honeyed wine that tames men’s souls,
Straight from the board they thrust the white milk-bowls
With hurrying hands, and of their own will flew
To the horns of silver wrought,
And drank and were distraught.’
Storm-clouds and mountain torrents, nay even four-footed beasts do not
get drunk, the perfume of wine is for the subduing of man alone. The wild
things (φῆρες) are all human, ‘they thrust with their hands.’
[Illustration: FIG. 122.]
The scene is a favourite one on vases. One of the earliest
representations is given in fig. 122 from a skyphos in the Louvre[984].
It dates about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. The scene is the
cave of the Centaur Pholos. The great pithos or wine jar is open. Pholos
himself has a large wine-cup in his hand. Pholos is sober still, he is
a sort of Cheiron, but not so the rest. They are mad with drink and are
hustling and fighting in wild confusion. Herakles comes out and tries to
restore order. Wine has come for the first time to a primitive population
unused to so strong an intoxicant. The result is the same all over the
world. A like notion comes out in the popular myth of the wedding feast
of Peirithoös; the Centaurs taste wine and fall to fighting and in
Satyr fashion seek to ravish the bride. These stories are of paramount
importance because they point the analogy between two sets of primitive
worshippers of Dionysos, the Centaurs and the Satrai-Satyroi.
To these Satrai-Satyroi we must now return. It is now sufficiently clear
that, whatever they became to a later imagination, to Homer and Pindar
and the vase-painters these horse-men, these attendants of Dionysos, were
not fairies, not ‘spirits of vegetation,’ though from such they may have
borrowed many traits, but the representatives of an actual primitive
population. They owe their monstrous form, their tails, their horses’
ears and hoofs, not to any desire to express ‘powers of fertilization’
but to the malign imagination of their conquerors. They are not
incarnations of a horse-god Dionysos[985]—such a being never existed—they
are simply Satrai. It is not of course denied that they ultimately
_became_ mythological, that is indeed indicated by the gradual change
of form. As a rule the Greek imagination tends to anthropomorphism, but
here we have a reverse case. By lapse of time and gradual oblivion of
the historical facts of conquest, what was originally a primitive man
developes in the case of the Centaurs into a mythological horse-demon.
* * * * *
The Satyrs undergo no such change, they remain substantially human. The
element of horse varies but is never predominant. The form in which there
is most horse is well shown in fig. 123. This picture is from the reverse
of the cylix in the Würzburg Museum[986], on which is depicted the feast
of Phineus already discussed (p. 225). The fact is worth noting that
both representations come from a Thracian cycle of mythology. Phineus is
a Thracian hero, Dionysos a Thracian god. Dionysos stands in a chariot
to which are yoked a lion and a stag. By his side is a woman, probably a
goddess, but whether Ariadne or Semele cannot certainly be determined,
nor for the present argument does it matter. The god has stopped to water
his steeds at a fountain. Satyrs attend him, one is drawing water from
the well basin, another clambers on the lion’s back. Some maidens have
bathed at the fountain, and are resting under a palm tree, one is just
struggling back into her clothes. Two prying Satyrs look on with evil in
their hearts. They are wild men with shaggy bodies, rough hair, horses’
ears and tails, and they have the somewhat exceptional addition of hoofs;
the human part of them is closely analogous to the shaggy Centaurs of
fig. 122.
[Illustration: FIG. 123.]
The Satyrs are not pleasant to contemplate; they are ugly in form and
degraded in habits, and but for a recent theory[987] it might not be
needful to emphasize so strongly their nature and functions. This
theory, which has gained wide and speedy popularity, maintains that the
familiar horse-men of black and red figured vases are not Satyrs at
all. The Satyrs, we are told, are goat-men, the horse-men of the vases
are Seilenoi. This theory, if true, would cut at the root of our whole
argument. To deny the identity of the horse-men with the Satyrs is to
deny their identity with the Satrai, i.e. with the primitive population
who worshipped Dionysos.
Why then, with the evidence of countless vase-paintings to support us,
may we not call the horse-men who accompany Dionysos Satyrs? Because, we
are told, _tragedy_ is the _goat-song_, the goat-song gave rise to the
Satyric drama, hence the Satyrs must be _goat_-demons, hence they cannot
be _horse_-demons, hence the _horse_-demons of vases cannot be Satyrs,
hence another name must be found for them. On the François-vase (fig.
116) the horse-demons are inscribed Seilenoi, hence let the name Seilenoi
be adopted for all _horse_-demons. Be it observed that the whole complex
structure rests on the philological assumption that _tragedy_ means
the goat-song. What _tragedy_ really does or at least _may_ mean will
be considered later (p. 421); for the present the point is only raised
because I hold to the view now discredited[988] that the familiar throng
of idle disreputable vicious _horse_-men who constantly on vases attended
Dionysos, who drink and sport and play and harry women, are none other
than Hesiod’s[989]
‘race
Of worthless idle Satyrs.’
That they are also called Seilenoi I do not for a moment deny. In
different lands their names were diverse.
THE MAENADS.
It is refreshing to turn from the dissolute crew of Satyrs to the
women-attendants of Dionysos, the Maenads. These Maenads are as real,
as actual as the Satyrs; in fact more so, for no poet or painter ever
attempted to give them horses’ ears and tails. And yet, so persistent is
the dislike to commonplace fact, that we are repeatedly told that the
Maenads are purely mythological creations and that the Maenad orgies
never appear historically in Greece.
It would be a mistake to regard the Maenads as the mere female
correlatives of the Satyrs. The Satyrs, it has been seen, are
representations of a primitive subject people, but the Maenads do
not represent merely the women of the same race. Their name is the
corruption of no tribal name, it represents a state of mind and body, it
is almost a cultus-epithet. Maenad means of course simply ‘mad woman,’
and the Maenads are the women-worshippers of Dionysos of whatever race,
possessed, maddened or, as the ancients would say, inspired by his spirit.
Maenad is only one, though perhaps the most common, of the many names
applied to these worshipping women. In Macedonia Plutarch[990] tells us
they were called Mimallones and Klodones, in Greece, Bacchae, Bassarides,
Thyiades, Potniades and the like. Some of the titles crystallized into
something like proper names, others remained consciously adjectival. At
bottom they all express the same idea, women possessed by the spirit of
Dionysos.
Plutarch in his charming discourse on Superstition[991] tells how
when the dithyrambic poet Timotheos was chanting a hymn to Artemis he
addressed the daughter of Zeus thus:
‘Maenad, Thyiad, Phoibad, Lyssad.’
The titles may be Englished as Mad One, Rushing One, Inspired One, Raging
One. Cinesias the lyric poet, whose own songs were doubtless couched in
language less orgiastic, got up and said: ‘I wish you may have such a
daughter of your own.’ The story is instructive on two counts. It shows
first that Maenad and Thyiad were at the date of Timotheos so adjectival,
so little crystallized into proper names, that they could be applied not
merely to the worshippers of Dionysos, but to any orgiastic divinity,
and second the passage is clear evidence that educated people, towards
the close of the fifth century B.C., were beginning to be at issue with
their own theological conceptions. Cultus practices however, and still
more cultus epithets, lay far behind educated opinion. It is fortunately
possible to prove that the epithet Thyiad certainly and the epithets
Phoibad and Maenad probably, were applied to actually existing historical
women. The epithet Lyssad, which means ‘raging mad,’ was not likely to
prevail out of poetry. The chorus in the _Bacchae_[992] call themselves
‘swift hounds of raging Madness,’ but the title was not one that would
appeal to respectable matrons.
* * * * *
We begin with the Thyiades. It is at Delphi that we learn most of their
nature and worship, Delphi where high on Parnassos Dionysos held his
orgies. Thus much even Aeschylus, though he is ‘all for Apollo,’ cannot
deny. To this he makes the priestess[993] in her ceremonial recitation of
local powers bear almost reluctant witness:
‘You too I salute,
Ye nymphs about Korykia’s caverned rock,
Kindly to birds, haunt of divinities.
And Bromios, I forget not, holds the place,
Since first to war he led his Bacchanals,
And scattered Pentheus, like a riven hare.’
Aeschylus[994], intent on monotheism, would fain know only the two
divinities who were really one, i.e. Zeus and
‘Loxias utterer of his father’s will,’
the Father and the Son, these and the line of ancient Earth-divinities to
whom they were heirs. But religious tradition knew of another immigrant,
Dionysos, and Aeschylus cannot wholly ignore him. On the pediments of the
great temple were sculptured at one end, Pausanias[995] tells us, Apollo,
Artemis, Leto and the Muses, and at the other ‘the setting of the sun and
Dionysos with his Thyiad women.’ The ritual year at Delphi was divided,
as will later be seen, between Apollo and Dionysos.
[Illustration: FIG. 124.]
The vase-painting in fig. 124 from a krater in the Hermitage Museum at St
Petersburg[996] is a brief epitome of the religious history of Delphi,
marking its three strata. In the foreground is the omphalos of Gaia
covered with fillets:
‘First in my prayer before all other gods
I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess[997],’
Gaia, of whom her successors Themis and Phoebe are but by-forms. Higher
up in the picture are other divinities superimposed on this primitive
Earth-worship. Apollo and Dionysos clasp hands while about them is a
company of Maenads and Satyrs. It is perhaps not quite certain which is
regarded as the first comer, but the balance is in favour of Dionysos
as the sanctuary is already peopled with his worshippers. His dress has
something of Oriental splendour about it as compared with the Hellenic
simplicity of Apollo. Each carries his characteristic wand, Apollo a
branch of bay, Dionysos a thyrsos.
In this vase-painting, which dates about the beginning of the fourth
century B.C., all is peace and harmony and clasped hands. The Delphic
priesthood were past masters in the art of glossing over awkward passages
in the history of theology. Apollo had to fight with the ancient mantic
serpent of Gaia and slay it before he could take possession, and we may
be very sure that at one time or another there was a struggle between the
followers of Apollo and the followers of Dionysos. Over this past which
was not for edification a decent veil was drawn[998].
A religion which conquered Delphi practically conquered the whole Greek
world. It was probably at Delphi, no less than at Athens, that the
work of reforming, modifying, adapting the rude Thracian worship was
effected, a process necessary to commend the new cult to the favour of
civilized Greece. If then we can establish the historical actuality of
the Thyiads at Delphi we need not hesitate to believe that they, or their
counterparts, existed in the worship of Dionysos elsewhere.
* * * * *
Pausanias[999] when he was at Panopeus was puzzled to know why Homer
spoke of the ‘fair dancing grounds’ of the place. The reason he says was
explained to him by the women whom the Athenians call Thyiades. He adds,
that there may be no mistake, ‘these Thyiads are Attic women who go every
other year with the Delphian women to Parnassos and there hold orgies in
honour of Dionysos. On their way they stopped to dance at Panopeus, hence
Homer’s epithet.’ Of course this college of sacred women, these Thyiades,
were provided with an eponymous ancestress, Thyia. She is mythological.
Pausanias[1000] says in discussing the origin of Delphi that ‘some would
have it that there was a man called Castalius, an aboriginal, who had a
daughter Thyia, and that she was the first priestess of Dionysos and held
orgies in honour of the god, and they say that afterwards all women who
were mad in honour of Dionysos have been called Thyiades after her’ (ὅσαι
τῷ Διονύσῳ μαίνονται Θυιάδας καλεῖσθαί φασιν ὑπὸ ἀνθρώπων). If ‘those who
are mad in honour of Dionysos’ are not substantially Maenads, it is hard
to say what they are. It is fortunate that Pausanias saw and spoke to
these women or else his statement[1001] that they raved upon the topmost
peaks of Parnassos in honour of Dionysos and Apollo would have been
explained away as mere mythology.
Plutarch was a priest in his own Chaeronea and intimately acquainted with
the ritual of Delphi, and a great friend of his, Klea, was president
(ἀρχηγός) of the Thyiades at Delphi[1002]. He mentions them more than
once. In writing to Favorinus[1003] on ‘the First Principle of Cold’
he argues that cold has its own special and proper qualities, density,
stability, rigidity, and gives as an instance the cold of a winter’s
night out on Parnassos. ‘You have heard yourself at Delphi how the people
who went up Parnassos to bring help to the Thyiades were overtaken by
a violent gale with snow, and their coats were frozen as hard as wood,
so that when they were stretched out they crumbled and fell to bits.’
The crumbling coats sound apocryphal, but the Thyiades out in the cold
are quite real. You do not face a mountain snow-storm to succour the
mythological ‘spirits of the spring.’
It may have been from his friend Klea that Plutarch learnt the pleasant
story of the Thyiades and the women of Phocis, which he records in his
treatise on the ‘Virtues of Women[1004].’ ‘When the tyrants of Phocis had
taken Delphi and undertook against them what was known as the Sacred War,
the women who attended Dionysos whom they call Thyiades being distraught
wandered out of their way and came without knowing it to Amphissa. And
being very weary and not yet having come to their right mind they flung
themselves down in the agora and fell asleep anyhow where they lay.
And the women of Amphissa were afraid lest, as their city had made an
alliance with the Phocians and the place was full of the soldiery of
the tyrants, the Thyiades might suffer some harm. And they left their
houses and ran to the agora and made a ring in silence round them and
stood there without disturbing them as they slept, and when they woke up
they severally tended them and brought them food and finally got leave
from their husbands to set them on their way in safety as far as the
mountains.’ These Thyiades are the historical counterparts of the Maenads
of countless vases and bas-reliefs, the same mad revelry, the same utter
exhaustion and prostrate sleep. They are the same too as the Bacchant
Women of Euripides[1005] on the slopes of Cithaeron:
‘There, beneath the trees
Sleeping they lay, like wild things flung at ease
In the forest, one half sinking on a bed
Of deep pine greenery, one with careless head
Amid the fallen oak-leaves.’
In the reverence shown by the women of Amphissa we see that though the
Thyiades were real women they were something more than real. This brings
us to another of the cultus titles enumerated by Timotheos, ‘Phoibad.’
Phoibas is the female correlative of Phoebus, a title we are apt to
associate exclusively with Apollo. Apollo, Liddell and Scott say, was
called Phoebus because of the purity and radiant beauty of youth. The
epithet has more to do with purity than with radiant beauty; if with
beauty at all it is ‘the beauty of holiness.’ Plutarch in discussing this
title of Apollo makes the following interesting statement[1006]: ‘The
ancients, it seems to me, called everything that was pure and sanctified
_phoebic_ as the Thessalians still, I believe, say of their priests
when they are living in seclusion apart on certain prescribed days that
they are living phoebically.’ The meaning of this passage, which is
practically untranslateable, is clear. The root of the word Phoebus meant
‘in a condition of ceremonial purity, holy in a ritual sense,’ and as
such specially inspired by and under the protection of the god, under a
taboo. Apollo probably took over his title of Phoebus from the old order
of women divinities to whom he succeeded. Third in order of succession
after Gaia and Themis[1007]:
‘Another Titaness, daughter of Earth,
Phoebe, possessed it, and for birthday gift
To Phoebus gave it, and he took her name.’
Apollo, we may be sure, did not get his birthday gift without substantial
concessions. He took the name of the ancient Phoebe, daughter of
earth, nay more he was forced, woman-hater as he always was, to utter
his oracles through the mouth of a raving woman-priestess, a Phoibas.
Herodotus in the passage already quoted (p. 370) justly observed that in
the remote land of the Bessi as at Delphi oracular utterance was by the
mouth of a priestess. Kassandra was another of these women-prophetesses
of Gaia. She prophesied at the altar-omphalos of Thymbrae, a shrine
Apollo took over as he took Delphi[1008]. Her frenzy against Apollo is
more than the bitterness of maiden betrayed; it is the wrath of the
prophetess of the old order discredited, despoiled by the new; she breaks
her wand and rends her fillets and cries[1009]:
‘Lo now the seer the seeress hath undone.’
The priestess at Delphi, though in intent a Phoibas, was called the
Pythia, but the official name of the priestess Kassandra was, we know,
Phoibas[1010]:
‘The Phoibas whom the Phrygians call Kassandra,’
and the title, ‘she who is ceremonially pure,’ lends a bitter irony to
Hecuba’s words of shame.
The word Phoibades is never, so far as I know, actually applied to
definite Bacchantes, though I believe its use at Delphi to be due to
Dionysiac influence, but another epithet _Potniades_ points the same
way. In the _Bacchae_[1011], when the messenger returns from Cithaeron,
he says to Pentheus:
‘I have seen the wild white women there, O king,
Whose fleet limbs darted arrow-like but now
From Thebes away, and come to tell thee how
They work strange deeds.’
The ‘wild white women’ are in a hieratic state of holy madness, hence
their miraculous magnetic powers. Photius[1012] has a curious note on
the verb with which ‘Potniades’ is connected. He says its normal use was
to express a state in which a woman ‘suffered something and entreated
a goddess’ and ‘if any one used the word of a man he was inaccurate.’
By ‘suffering something’ he can only mean that she was possessed by the
goddess (ἔνθεος or κάτοχος), and he may have the Maenads and kindred
worshippers in his mind. Madness could be caused by the Mother of the
gods or by Dionysos, in fact by any orgiastic divinity.
* * * * *
It may possibly be objected that Maenads are not the same as either
Thyiades or Phoibades. My point is that they _are_. The substantial
basis of the conception is the actual women-worshippers of the god;
out of these were later created his mythical attendants. Such is the
natural order of mythological genesis. Diodorus[1013] like most modern
mythologists inverts this natural sequence, and his inversion is
instructive. In describing the triumphal return of Dionysos from India he
says: ‘And the Boeotians and the other Greeks and the Thracians in memory
of the Indian expedition instituted the biennial sacrifices to Dionysos
and they hold that at these intervals the god makes his epiphanies to
mortals. Hence in many towns of Greece every alternate year Bacchanalian
assemblies of women come together and it is customary for maidens to
carry the thyrsos and to revel together to the honour and glory of the
god, and the married women worship the god in organized bands and they
revel, and in every way celebrate the presence of Dionysos _in imitation
of the Maenads_ who from of old, it was said, constantly attended the
god.’ Diodorus is an excellent instance of mistaken mythologizing.
Mythology invents a reason for a fact, does not base a fact on a fancy.
It is not denied for a moment that the Maenads _became_ mythical. When
Sophocles sings[1014]:
‘Footless, sacred, shadowy thicket, where a myriad berries grow,
Where no heat of the sun may enter, neither wind of the winter blow,
Where the Reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs will go,’
we are not in this world, and his nursing nymphs are ‘goddesses’; but
they are goddesses fashioned here as always in the image of man who made
them.
* * * * *
The difficulty and the discrepancy of opinion as to the reality of the
Maenads are due mainly to a misunderstanding about words. Maenad is to us
a proper name, a fixed and crystallized personality; so is Thyiad, but in
the beginning it was not so. Maenad is the Mad One, Thyiad the Rushing
Distraught One or something of that kind, anyhow an adjectival epithet.
Mad One, Distraught One, Pure One are simply ways of describing a woman
under the influence of a god, of Dionysos. Thyiad and Phoibad obtained as
cultus names, Maenad tended to go over to mythology. Perhaps naturally
so; when a people becomes highly civilized madness is apt not to seem,
save to poets and philosophers, the divine thing it really is, so they
tend to drop the mad epithet and the colourless Thyiad becomes more and
more a proper name.
Still Maenad, as a name of actual priestly women, was not wholly lost.
An inscription[1015] of the date of Hadrian, found in Magnesia and now
in the Tschinli Kiosk at Constantinople, gives curious evidence. This
inscription recounts a little miracle-story. A plane tree was shattered
by a storm, inside it was found an image of Dionysos[1016]. Seers were
promptly sent to Delphi to ask what was to be done. The answer was, as
might be expected, the Magnesians had neglected to build ‘fair wrought
temples’ to Dionysos; they must repair their fault. To do this properly
they must send to Thebes and thence obtain three Maenads of the family of
Kadmean Ino[1017]. These would give to the Magnesians orgies and right
customs. They went to Thebes and brought back three ‘Maenads’ whose names
are given, Kosko, Baubo and Thettale; and they came and founded three
thiasoi or sacred guilds in three parts of the city. The inscription
is of course late; Baubo and Kosko are probably Orphic, but the main
issue is clear: in the time of Hadrian at least three actual women of a
particular family were called ‘Maenads.’
We are so possessed by a set of conceptions based on Periclean Athens, by
ideas of law and order and reason and limit, that we are apt to dismiss
as ‘mythological’ whatever does not fit into our stereotyped picture.
The husbands and brothers of the women of historical days would not,
we are told, have allowed their women to rave upon the mountains; it
is unthinkable taken in conjunction with the strict oriental seclusion
of the Periclean woman. That any woman might at any moment assume the
liberty of a Maenad is certainly unlikely, but much is borne even by
husbands and brothers when sanctioned by religious tradition. The men
even of Macedonia, where manners were doubtless ruder, did not _like_
the practice of Bacchic orgies. Bacchus came emphatically not to bring
peace. Plutarch[1018] conjectures that these Bacchic orgies had much to
do with the strained relations between the father and mother of Alexander
the Great. A snake had been seen lying by the side of Olympias and
Philip feared she was practising enchantments, or worse, that the snake
was the vehicle of a god. Another and probably the right explanation
of the presence of the snake was, as Plutarch tells us, that ‘all the
women of that country had been from ancient days under the dominion of
Orphic rites and Dionysiac orgies, and that they were called Klodones
and Mimallones because in many respects they imitated the Edonian and
Thracian women round about Haemus, from whom the Greek word θρησκεύειν
seems to come, a word which is applied to excessive and overdone
ceremonials. Now Olympias was more zealous than all the rest and carried
out these rites of possession and ecstasy in very barbarous fashion and
introduced huge tame serpents into the Bacchic assemblies, and these kept
creeping out of the ivy and the mystic likna and twining themselves round
the thyrsoi of the women and their garlands, and _frightening the men out
of their senses_.’
[Illustration: FIG. 125.]
However much the Macedonian men disliked these orgies, they were clearly
too frightened to put a stop to them. The women were possessed, magical,
and dangerous to handle. Scenes such as those described by Plutarch as
actually taking place in Macedonia are abundantly figured on vases. The
beautiful raging Maenad in fig. 125 from the centre of a cylix with white
ground at Munich[1019] is a fine example. She wears the typical Maenad
garb, the fawn-skin over her regular drapery; she carries the thyrsos,
she carries in fact the whole gear (σκεύη) of Dionysos. When Pentheus
would counterfeit a Bacchant he is attired just so; he wears the long
trailing chiton and over it the dappled fawn-skin, his hair flows loose,
in his hand is the thyrsos. For snood (μίτρα) in her hair the Maenad has
twined a great snake. Another Maenad[1020] is shown in fig. 126. She is
characterized only by the two snakes she holds in her hand. But for her
long full drapery she might be an Erinys.
[Illustration: FIG. 126.]
[Illustration: FIG. 127.]
The snakes emerging from the sacred cistae are illustrated by the class
of coins[1021] known as cistophoroi, a specimen of which is reproduced
in fig. 127. These coins, of which the type is uniform, originated,
according to Dr Imhoof, in Ephesus a little before B.C. 200, and spread
through all the dominions of Attalos the First. They illustrate a phase
of Dionysos worship in Asia Minor closely akin to that of Macedonia.
Macedonia is not Athens, but the reforms of Epimenides allow us to
divine that Athenian brothers and husbands also had their difficulties.
Plutarch[1022] again is our informant. Athens was beset by superstitious
fears and strange appearances. They sent to Crete for Epimenides, a
man beloved of the gods and skilled in the technicalities of religion,
especially as regards enthusiastic and mystic rites. He and Solon
made friends and the gist of his religious reforms was this: ‘he
simplified their religious rites, and made the ceremonies of mourning
milder, introducing certain forms of sacrifice into their funeral
solemnities and abolishing the cruel and barbarous elements to which
the women were addicted. But most important of all, by lustrations and
expiations and the foundings of worships he hallowed and consecrated
the city and made it subserve justice and be more inclined to unity.’
The passage is certainly not as explicit as could be wished, but the
words used—κατοργιάσας and καθοσιώσας—and the fact that Epimenides was
an expert in _ecstatic_ rites, that they gave him the name of the new
Koures, the special attention paid to the rites of women, though they
are mentioned in relation to funerals, make it fairly clear that some of
the barbarous excesses were connected with Bacchic orgies. This becomes
more probable when we remember that many of Solon’s own enactments were
directed against the excesses of women. ‘He regulated,’ Plutarch[1023]
tells us, ‘the outgoings of women, their funeral lamentations and their
festivals, forbidding by law all disorder and excess.’ Among these dreary
regulations comes the characteristically modern touch that they are not
to go out at night ‘except in a carriage and with a light before them.’
It was the going out at night that Pentheus could not bear[1024]. When he
would know what were the rites of Dionysos he asks the god:
‘_P._ How is this worship held, by night or day?
_D._ Most oft by night, ’tis a majestic thing
The Darkness.
_P._ Ha, with women worshipping?
’Tis craft and rottenness.’
DIONYSOS LIKNITES.
The Maenads then are the frenzied sanctified women who are devoted to
the worship of Dionysos. But they are something more; they tend the god
as well as suffer his inspiration. When first we catch sight of them in
Homer (p. 368) they are his ‘nurses’ (τιθῆναι). One of the lost plays of
Aeschylus bore the title ‘Rearer of Dionysos’ and Sophocles[1025], here
as so often inspired by Homer, makes his chorus sing:
‘There the reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs doth go.’
In Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles, though Dionysos has his goddess
nurses, he is himself no nursling. A child no longer, he revels with them
as coevals. Mythology has half forgotten the ritual from which it sprang.
Fortunately Plutarch[1026] has left us an account, inadequate but still
significant, of the actual ritual of the Thyiades[1027], and from it we
learn that they worshipped and tended no full-grown god, but a baby in
his cradle.
Plutarch is speaking of the identity of Osiris and Dionysos, both being
embodiments according to him of the ‘moist principle.’ ‘You, Klea,’ he
says, ‘if any one, should know that Osiris is the same as Dionysos, you
who are leader of the Thyiades at Delphi and were initiated by your
father and mother into the rites of Osiris.’ After pointing out various
analogies, he adds: ‘For the Egyptians, as has been said, point out
tombs of Osiris in many places, and the Delphians hold that they possess
the relics of Dionysos buried by the side of their oracular shrine; the
Hosioi make a secret sacrifice in the sacred precinct of Apollo _when
the Thyiades raise up Liknites_.’ It will later (p. 483) be seen that
Dionysos was represented in ritual as slain and dismembered; from this
passage it is clear that there was some sort of resurrection of the god,
a new birth as a little child. Liknites can be none other than the babe
in the cradle. Hesychius in commenting on the word Liknites says: ‘a
title of Dionysos from the cradle in which they put children to sleep.’
In primitive agricultural days, the _liknon_, a shovel-shaped basket,
served three purposes: it was a ‘fan’ with which to winnow grain, it was
a basket to hold grain or fruit or sacred objects, it was a cradle for
a baby. The various forms of _likna_ and the beautiful mysticism that
gathered round the cradle and the winnowing fan, will be considered when
Orphic ceremonial is discussed (p. 518). For the present it is enough to
note that the ceremony of raising or waking Liknites marks clearly the
worship of a child-god.
* * * * *
The worship by women of Liknites, of the child in the cradle, reflects
a primitive stage of society, a time when the main realized function of
woman was motherhood and the more civilized, less elemental, function of
wedded wife was scarcely adventured. It is at once a cardinal point and
a primary note in the mythology of Dionysos that he is _the son of his
mother_. The religion of the Mother and the Daughter is already familiar
(p. 271); it reflected, as has been seen, primarily not so much the
relations of mother and daughter as the two stages of woman’s life, woman
as maid, and woman as mother. If we are to have the relation of parent
and child mirrored in mythology, assuredly the closest relation is not
that even of mother and daughter but of mother and son. Father and son,
Zeus and Apollo, reflect a still further advance in civilization.
Before leaving the Thyiades, it is important to note that they had a cult
not only of Liknites, the child in the cradle, but of the mother who bore
him, Semele, and this too at Delphi. Plutarch is again our authority.
In his _Greek Questions_[1028], he treats of the three great enneateric
festivals of Delphi, the Stepterion, Heroïs and Charila. Of the Heroïs he
says: ‘Its inner meaning is for the most part mystical as is known to the
Thyiades, but from the rites that are openly performed one may conjecture
that it is a Return of Semele.’ Plutarch’s conjecture was undoubtedly
right. The Heroïs was a resurrection festival, with rites of Return and
Uprising, such as have been already (p. 276) fully discussed in relation
to Demeter and Kore.
The relation of Dionysos to his father Zeus was slight and artificial.
He is, as aforesaid, essentially the son of his mother, ‘child of
Semele[1029].’ The meaning of the fatherhood of Zeus and the strange
hieratic legend of the double birth will be discussed later: the question
must first be asked ‘Who is Semele?’
DIONYSOS SON OF SEMELE.
Dionysos, we have seen, was a Thracian; if his mother can be shown to be
Thracian too, each will confirm the other. The certain remains of the
Phrygio-Thracian tongue are but scanty, happily however they suffice for
the certain interpretation of the name Semele.
Prof. Ramsay in his Phrygian explorations[1030] has brought to light a
number of inscriptions from tombs which run after this fashion:
δη διως ζεμελω.
με ζεμελω κε δεος.
δεος κε ζεμ(ελω).
με ζεμελω.
These various permutations and combinations are followed by a curse
formulary as follows: ιος σεμουν κνουμανει κακουν αδδακει ετιττετικμενος
ειτου, which is Phrygian for ὃς τούτῳ (τῷ) μνήματι κακὸν ἐπέθηκε
ὑποκατάρατος ἔστω, ‘Cursed be he that does any damage to this tomb.’ The
inscriptions which all date after the Christian era belong to a time
when the well-to-do classes spoke and wrote Greek, but, in the case of
a curse, it was well to couch your inscription in a tongue understanded
of the people. με and δη would appear to be affirmative curse particles;
με has for cognates μά, μήν and possibly μέν, as well as the Latin _me_
in _me Hercle, me Dius Fidius_. δη is cognate not only to the ordinary
affirmative Greek δή but also to the _de_ of the Latin oath _e-de-pol_.
The divinities sworn by remain to be considered. δη διως can scarcely be
other than νὴ Δία, ‘by Zeus.’ ζεμελω at once brings Semele to mind. But
who and what is Semele? Phrygian and Thracian are now admitted to belong
to the Indo-European family of languages, and a conjoint consonantal
characteristic of the two is that they replace the palatals _g_ and
_gh_ (Greek γ and χ) by a spirant; this spirant the Greeks rendered
indifferently by their nearest equivalents ζ and σ. The Phrygian ζεμελω
is the Greek γῆ (earth) appearing in nasalized form as χαμαί, χθαμαλός,
χθών, in Latin as _humus_, _humilis_, _homo_, in Sclavonic, to quote only
a familiar and convincing instance, in Nova _Zembla_, ‘new earth.’ The
Greek form γῆ looks remote but we have also its nasalized form Χαμύνη
(Lit. _Zemyna_). At Elis Pausanias[1031] saw, opposite the place where
the umpires stood, an altar of white marble. On that altar sat the
priestess of Demeter Chamyne, to behold the Olympic games. ‘She of the
Ground’ was probably at Olympia long before the coming of Zeus.
* * * * *
Semele, mother of Dionysos, is the Earth. This the vase-painter
knew well. In dealing with the Earth-Mother (p. 276) a number of
vase-paintings have been considered, in which Kore, the earth in her
young form as maiden, has been seen represented as rising out of the
actual earth she really is. To these as counterpart must now be added
the curious vase-painting in fig. 128, now in the Hope collection at
Deep-dene[1032]. Out of the earth-mound rises a youthful figure, a male
Kore; he holds a sceptre as king and is welcomed, or rather heralded, by
a little winged Nike. His worshippers await him: a Maenad with thyrsos
and tray of offerings to the right, a Satyr also with thyrsos to the
left. The rising figure can be none other than the child of Semele, the
earth-Dionysos himself. It is rash, I think, to give the rising god any
special name, to call him Iacchos or Brimos; all we can be sure that the
vase-painter meant was that the god is earth-born.
[Illustration: FIG. 128.]
[Illustration: FIG. 129.]
The same notion comes clearly out in the second design in fig. 129 from
a kalpis in the British Museum[1033]. Here the familiar type[1034] of
the birth of Erichthonios from the earth is taken over and adapted to
the birth of Dionysos. The vase-painter thus in instructive fashion
assimilates the immigrant stranger to his own heroic mythology. Ge is
rising from the earth; she presents, not Erichthonios, but another
sacred child to a foster-mother, Athene. It is practically certain that
the child is Dionysos, not Erichthonios, for the maiden who in such
familiar fashion leans on the shoulder of Zeus in inscribed ‘Wine-bloom,’
Oinanthe. Zeus himself with his thunderbolt is a reminiscence of the
thunder-smitten birth. On authentic representations of the birth of
Erichthonios, Hephaistos, his putative father, is present, not Zeus. As
in fig. 128 the new-born hero is welcomed by a winged Victory, who brings
a taenia to crown him. It is clear that the vase-painter wants to make
the new-born child as Athenian as possible, almost to substitute him for
the autochthonous Erichthonios; he is welcomed and received not by Satyrs
and Maenads, his own worshippers and kinsfolk, but by his new relations,
Athene and Athenian Victory.
[Illustration: FIG. 130.]
The third vase-painting in fig. 130 from a cylix in the Museum at
Naples[1035] is a much earlier piece of work. It dates about the middle
of the sixth century, and is free from any specifically Athenian
influence. Out of the ground rise two great busts inscribed severally
Διόνυσος (Dionysos) and Σεμέλη (Semele). Even without the inscriptions
there could be no doubt as to Dionysos. The vase-painter in his primitive
eager fashion makes assurance doubly sure. The god holds aloft with
pardonable pride his characteristic high-handled wine-cup, the kantharos;
behind him and Semele a great vine is growing, up one side of which a
Satyr is clambering. Dionysos is not Liknites here; he is in the full
bloom of his youth, not elderly though bearded, coeval with fair Semele.
* * * * *
At Thebes the legend of the birth of Dionysos took on a special form. He
is not only son of Semele, of Earth[1036], but son of Semele as Keraunia,
Earth the thunder-smitten.
This aspect of Semele as Keraunia is familiar in classical literature.
Sophocles[1037] has ‘thou and thy mother, she of the thunder.’ To
Euripides[1038] in the _Hippolytus_ Semele thunder-smitten is the stuff
of which is made perhaps the most splendid poetry he ever wrote:
‘O mouth of Dirce, O god-built wall
That Dirce’s wells run under;
Ye know the Cyprian’s fleet foot-fall,
Ye saw the heavens round her flare
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there
The Bride of the bladed thunder:
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.’
And this splendid poetry is based, it seems, not merely on mythology
but on a local cult, a cult of thunder and a place thunder-smitten. The
prologue[1039] of the _Bacchae_, spoken by Dionysos, opens thus, with a
description of the sanctuary of Semele:
‘Behold god’s son is come unto this land
Of Thebes, even I, Dionysos, whom the brand
Of heaven’s hot splendour lit to life, when she
Who bore me, Cadmus’ daughter Semele,
Died here. So, changed in shape from god to man,
I walk again by Dirce’s stream, and scan
Ismenus’ shore. There by the castle side
I see her place, the Tomb of the Lightning’s Bride,
The wreck of smouldering chambers and the great
Faint wreaths of fire undying, as the hate
Dies not that Hera held for Semele.
Ay Cadmus hath done well: in purity
He keeps this place apart, inviolate
His daughter’s sanctuary, and I have set
My green and clustered vines to robe it round.’
Nor again is this merely the effective scenic setting of a play.
Any place that was struck by lightning was regarded as specially
sacred[1040]. If the place was the tomb of a local heroine there was
a double sanctity. Such a tomb there unquestionably was at Thebes.
Pausanias[1041] asserts the fact though he does not state that he
actually saw the tomb: ‘There are also the ruins of the house of
Lycus and Semele’s monument.’ Primarily of course the sanctity of a
thunder-smitten place was more of the nature of a _taboo_ than of
consecration in our sense of the word. It would lend itself easily to a
legend of judgment on a heroine or of a divine Epiphany. The figure of
the great Earth-goddess Semele faded before the splendour of Zeus.
Possibly the cult of these thunder-smitten places may serve to answer
a question asked by Plutarch[1042]—‘Who among the Boeotians are the
Psoloeis (Smoky Ones) and who the Aioleiai?’ Plutarch tells a confused
story of the daughters of Minyas who went mad with desire for human flesh
and slew the child of one of them. The dreadful deed was commemorated by
a ‘flight ceremony’ that formed part of the Agrionia, in which the priest
of Dionysos pursued with a sword the women of the clan in which the men
were called Psoloeis and the women Aioleiai, and if he caught one, had
leave to slay her. Zoilos, a priest in the time of Plutarch, actually
availed himself of the permission. Bad luck followed. Zoilos sickened and
died, and the priesthood ceased to be hereditary and became elective. The
story is very obscure, but Lydus[1043] in discussing thunderbolts says
there are two kinds, the one is swift and rarefied (μανός) and fiery and
is called ἀργής, the other is slow and smoky and is called ψολόεις. The
family of the Smoky Ones _may_ have been worshippers of the smoky kind of
thunderbolt.
Be this as it may, the cult and mythology of Dionysos are haunted by
reminiscences of lightning and sudden fiery apparitions that are probably
not merely poetical but primitive. In the _Bacchae_ not only is Dionysos
fire-born and attended by the light of torches, but his Epiphany is
marked by a manifest thunderstorm, a storm that takes the shape of a
resurgence of the flame on Semele’s tomb. A voice is heard[1044]:
‘Unveil the Lightning’s Eye, arouse
The fire that sleeps, against this house.’
And the chorus make answer:
‘Ah saw ye, marked ye there the flame
From Semele’s enhallowed sod
Awaken’d? Yea the Death that came
Ablaze from heaven of old—the same
Hot splendour of the shaft of God.’
And again on Cithaeron[1045] there is not only the mysterious voice and
the awful silence, but the manifestation of the pillar of fire:
‘So spake he and there came
’Twixt earth and sky a pillar of high flame:
And silence took the air, and no leaf stirred
In all the forest dell. Thou hadst not heard
In that vast silence any wild thing’s cry.’
The Epiphany by fire is of course common to many theologies; we have the
Burning Bush and the Pentecostal tongues, but it is interesting to find
that, in far-away Thrace, the favour of Dionysos was made manifest by a
great light. The evidence comes from Aristotle[1046]. He says: ‘There is
in the same place (i.e. in Krastonia near the district of the Bisaltae) a
large and beautiful sanctuary of Dionysos, in which it is reported that
at the time of the festival and the sacrifice, if the god intends to send
a good season, _a great blaze of fire appears_, and this is seen by all
those whose business is in the temenos; but if the god intends a barren
season, the light does not make its appearance, but there is darkness
on the place as on other nights.’ It would be vain to ask what natural
fact, whether of summer lightning or burning bush, caused the belief;
the essential point is the primitive Epiphany by fire, an Epiphany not
vengeful but beneficent.
* * * * *
Dionysos is then the son of an ancient Thracian Earth-goddess, Semele,
and she is Keraunia, thunder-smitten, in some sense the bride, it would
seem, of our old sky and thunder-god, a sort of Ouranos later effaced
by the splendour of the Hellenic Zeus. If some such old nature-god
existed as is probable in the far background of primitive mythology, the
affiliation of Zeus and Dionysos would be an easy matter.
In this connection it is interesting to note that not only Zeus himself
was associated with the thunder and the lightning, but also the ancient
‘Mother of the Gods.’ Pindar[1047], who all through the third Pythian has
in his mind the sore sickness of Hieron, not only bethinks him of Cheiron
the primitive Healer but also sings:
‘I would pray to the Mother to loose her ban,
The holy goddess, to whom and to Pan
Before my gate, all night long,
The maids do worship with dance and song.’
The scholiast tells us how it came that Pindar prayed to the Mother
for healing. One day while Pindar was teaching a pupil on a mountain,
possibly Cithaeron itself, ‘there was heard a great noise, and a flame
of lightning was seen descending, and Pindar saw that a stone image of
the Mother had come down at their feet, and the oracle ordained that
he should set up a shrine to the Mother.’ The story is transparent—a
thunderstorm, lightning and a fallen aerolite, the symbol of the Mother,
surely of Keraunia. And the Mother, the scholiast further tells us,
‘had power to purify from madness.’ She had power to loose as well as
to bind. In this she was like her son Dionysos. The magical power for
purification of aerolites and indeed of almost any strange black stone is
attested by many instances[1048]. Orestes[1049] was purified at Trozen
from his madness, mother-sent, by a sacred stone. Most curious of all,
Porphyry[1050] tells us that Pythagoras when he was in Crete met one of
the Idaean Dactyls, worshippers of the Mother, and was by him purified
with a thunderbolt.
With a mother thunder-smitten, it was not hard for Dionysos to become
adopted child of the Hellenic Zeus, God of the Thunderbolt. Theologians
were ready with the myth of the double birth. Semele fell into partial
discredit, obscured by the splendour of the Father. Matriarchy pales
before the new order of patriarchy, and from henceforth the name
Dionysos[1051], ‘son of Zeus,’ is supreme.
DIONYSOS SON OF ZEUS.
[Illustration: FIG. 131.]
The fatherhood of Zeus is charmingly set forth by the lovely little
vase-fragment in fig. 131 from a red-figured cylix[1052], found in the
excavations on the Acropolis and now in the National Museum at Athens.
Zeus with his sceptre holds the infant Dithyramb and displays him proudly
to the other Olympians. Semele is ignored, perhaps half forgotten.
Dionysos in the new order is ‘all for the father.’
The all-important question is forced upon us—why did Zeus adopt him?
Dionysos is the child of the Earth-goddess, but why was this particular
earth-child adopted? Why did his worship spread everywhere with
irresistible might, overshadowing at the end even the cult of his adopted
father? Kore too is daughter of Earth, she too in awkward fashion was
half affiliated to Zeus, yet he never takes her in his arms and her cult
though wide-spread has no militant missionary aspect.
Zeus holds the infant Dionysos in his arms, and Dionysos holds in his
the secret of his strength, the vine with its great bunch of grapes. But
for that bunch of grapes Zeus would never have troubled to adopt him. To
the popular mind Dionysos was always Lord of the Vine, as Athene was Lady
of the Olive. It is by the guerdon of the grape that his Bacchants appeal
to Dirce[1053]:
‘By his own joy I vow,
By the grape upon the bough.’
It is by his great gift of Wine to sorrowful man that his kingdom is
established upon earth[1054]:
‘A god of Heaven is He,
And born in majesty,
Yet hath he mirth in the joy of the Earth
And he loveth constantly
Her who brings increase,
The Feeder of children, Peace.
No grudge hath He of the great,
No scorn of the mean estate,
But to all that liveth, his Wine he giveth,
Griefless, immaculate.
Only on them that spurn
Joy may his anger burn.’
It is the usual mythological inversion, he of the earth is translated to
heaven that thence he may descend.
Dionysos as god of the grape is so familiar that the idea needs no
emphasis. It is more important to note that the vine as the origin of his
worship presents certain difficulties.
It has clearly been seen that Dionysos was a Northerner, a Thracian. Wine
is not the characteristic drink of the North. Is it likely that wine, a
drink characteristic to this day of the South, is the primitive essence
of the worship of a god coming into Greece from the North?
The answer to this difficulty is an interesting one. The main
distinguishing factor of the religion of Dionysos is always the cult of
an intoxicant, but wine is not the only intoxicant, nor in the North the
most primitive. Evidence is not wanting that the cult of the vine-god was
superimposed on, affiliated to, in part developed out of, a cult that had
for its essence the worship of an early and northern intoxicant, cereal
not vinous.
To this conclusion I have been led by the consideration of the cultus
titles of the god.
BROMIOS. BRAITES. SABAZIOS.
Dionysos is a god of many names; he is Bacchos, Baccheus, Iacchos,
Bassareus, Bromios, Euios, Sabazios, Zagreus, Thyoneus, Lenaios,
Eleuthereus, and the list by no means exhausts his titles. A large
number of these names are like Lenaios, ‘He of the Wine-Press,’ only
descriptive titles; they never emerge to the dignity of proper names.
Some, like Iacchos and probably Bacchos itself, though they ultimately
became proper names, were originally only cries. Iacchos was a song even
down to the time of Aristophanes[1055], and was probably, to begin with,
a ritual shout or cry kept up long after its meaning was forgotten. Such
cries from their vagueness, their aptness for repetition, are peculiarly
exciting to the religious emotions. How many people attach any precise
significance to the thrice repeated, stately and moving words that form
the proœmium to our own Easter Hymn?
‘Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.’
They are a homage beyond articulate speech. Then, as now, these excited
cries became sacred titles of the worshippers who used them: ‘Evian
women’ (εὔιοι γυναῖκες) were the ancient and more reverent counterpart of
our ‘Hallelujah lasses.’
The various titles of the god are of course of considerable use in
determining his nature, for they all express some phase of emotion in the
worshipper, and it is of these phases that a god is compounded. Certain
names seem to cling to certain places. Sabazios is Thracian, Zagreus
Cretan, Bromios largely Theban, Iacchos Athenian. Some of the epithets
have unquestionably shifted their meaning in the course of time. The
Greeks were adepts at false etymology, and an excellent instance of this
is a title of the first importance for our argument, _Bromios_.
* * * * *
The title Bromios has to our modern ears a poetical, somewhat mystical
ring[1056]. It never occurs in Homer, nor in Sophocles. Pindar and
Aeschylus both use it, Euripides often. The poets, by their usage,
clearly show that they connect the title with the verb βρέμω, which
means ‘to make a confused sound.’ Pindar in a dithyrambic fragment[1057]
says:
‘We hymn thee Bromios and Him of the loud cry.’
The address it may be noted is to the Cadmean Dionysos.
Sometimes the association is definitely with thunder (βροντή). Thus in
the second Olympian[1058] we have:
‘High in Olympus lives for evermore
She of the delicate hair,
Semele fair,
Who died by the thunder’s roar.’
Here the title Bromios can scarcely have been remote from Pindar’s mind,
though he does not care to press the allusion. In the _Bacchae_ there
seems no consciousness of etymology. The titles Dionysos and Bromios come
haphazard, but throughout the play Dionysos is in some degree a god of
thunder as well as thunder-born, a god of mysterious voices, of strange,
confused, orgiastic music, music which we know he brought with him from
the North.
Strabo[1059] has preserved for us two fragments from the lost _Edonians_
of Aeschylus which deal with this music of orgy and madness. Aeschylus,
he says, speaks in the _Edonians_ of the goddess Kotys and the
instruments of her worship, and immediately introduces the worshippers of
Dionysos, thus:
‘One on the fair-turned pipe fulfils
His song, with the warble of fingered trills
The soul to frenzy awakening.
From another the brazen cymbals ring.
The shawm blares out, but beneath is the moan
Of the bull-voiced mimes, unseen, unknown,
And in deep diapason the shuddering sound
Of drums, like thunder, beneath the ground.’
Of the ‘bull-voiced mimes’ we should have been glad to know more details,
but the fragment, obscure as it is, leaves at least the impression of
weird exciting ceremonial, and most of all of mysterious music.
All this must have helped to make of Bromios the god of sounds and
voices; yet it is probable, indeed almost certain, that the title had
another origin, simpler, less poetical. We owe the clue to this primitive
meaning to the Emperor Julian.
* * * * *
Julian in his northern campaign saw and no doubt tasted with compunction
a wine, made not from the grape but from barley. After the fashion of his
age he wrote an epigram[1060] to this new, or rather very old, Dionysos.
From the number of instructive puns it contains this epigram is almost
untranslateable, but as its evidence is for our purpose of paramount
importance it may be roughly Englished as follows:
_To wine made of barley_[1061].
‘Who and whence art thou, Dionyse? Now, by the Bacchus true
Whom well I know, the son of Zeus, say—‘Who and what are you?’
_He_ smells of nectar like a god, _you_ smack of goats and spelt,
For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt
Made you. Your name’s Demetrios, but never Dionyse,
Bromos, Oat-born, not Bromios, Fire-born from out the skies.’
The emperor makes three very fair puns, as follows: βρόμος oats, βρόμιος
of the thunder; πυρογενῆ wheat-born, πυριγενῆ fire-born; τράγος goat
and τράγος an inferior kind of wheat, spelt. The gist of the third pun
will be considered more fully at a later stage of the argument. For the
present it is sufficient to note that all three have the same substantial
content, there is a Dionysos who is not of heaven but of earth. Julian
propounds as an elegant jest the simple but illuminating mythological
truth that the title Bromios points to a god born not of the lightning
and thunder but of an intoxicant made from the cereal βρόμος. Bromios is
Demetrios, son of Demeter the Corn-Mother, before he becomes god of the
grape and son by adoption of Olympian Zeus.
Julian is not precise in his discrimination between the various edible
grasses. His epigram is headed, ‘To wine made of barley (κριθῆς)’; the
god, he says, smacks of _spelt_ (τράγος), he is _wheat_-born (πυρογενῆ)
and he is of _oats_ (βρόμος). It matters to Julian nothing, nor is it
to our argument of first importance, of _what_ particular cereal this
new-old Dionysos is made. The point is that it is of some cereal, not
of the grape. The god is thus seen to be son of Semele, Earth-goddess
in her agricultural aspect as Demeter, Corn-Mother. We shall later (p.
518) see that he was worshipped with service of the winnowing-fan, and
we shall further see that, when he-of-the-cereal-intoxicant became
he-of-the-wine-of-grapes, the instrument that had been a winnowing-fan
became a grape-basket.
* * * * *
The possibility of this simple origin of Bromios grows when we consider
another epithet of the god. In the Paean to Dionysos recently discovered
at Delphi[1062] there occurs the title hitherto unexplained—Braites. The
hymn opens thus with a string of cultus epithets:
‘Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come,
Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come,
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.’
Nowhere else does the title Braites occur; but the hymn, as an actual
ritual composition, inscribed and set up at Delphi, is an important
source. Braites has been explained as the Breaker or Striker, but this
is scarcely a happy epithet for the Spring-god. In the light of Bromios
it may be suggested that the epithet is connected with the late Latin
word _braisum_, which means ‘grain prepared for the making of the beer
_braisum_[1063].’ Braites would then like Bromios be an epithet derived
from a cereal intoxicant.
* * * * *
An examination of the title Sabazios leads to results more certain and
satisfactory. The name Sabazios has a more foreign sound than Dionysos,
even than Bromios. Sabazios was never admitted even to the outskirts of
Olympus. In the time of Demosthenes[1064] his rites were regarded by the
orthodox as foreign, outrageous, disreputable. One of the counts in the
unmannerly attack of Demosthenes on Aeschines is that Aeschines had been
instructed by his mother in mysteries and rites that were certainly those
of Sabazios, that having performed various degrading ceremonials he ‘led
those admirable thiasoi about the streets, they being crowned with fennel
and poplar, and gesticulated with great red snakes, waving them over his
head and shouting Euoi Saboi.’ The Saboi were the worshippers of Sabazios
as the Bacchae of Bacchos. Of course Demosthenes is grossly unjust. The
ceremonies of Sabazios could be closely paralleled by the perfectly
orthodox ritual of Dionysos, but they passed under another name, were
not completely canonical, and above all things were still realized as
foreign. That pious men of good repute might quietly worship Sabazios is
clear from the account of the ‘Superstitious Man’ in Theophrastos[1065].
Against his moral character nothing can be urged, but that he was a
little over-zealous, and ‘whenever he chanced to see a red snake he would
invoke Sabazios.’
Down to Christian days the snake was an important feature in the cult
of Sabazios. Clement and Arnobius[1066] both state that one of the
‘tokens’ of the mysteries of Sabazios was ‘the god (gliding) through the
bosom.’ The snake was of course associated also with Dionysos—he may have
inherited it from the earlier god—but his more characteristic vehicle was
the bull. Sabazios seems always to have been regarded as more primitive
and savage than Dionysos. Diodorus[1067], puzzled by the many forms of
Dionysos, says: ‘Some people fable that there was another Dionysos very
much earlier in date than this one, for they allege that there was a
Dionysos born of Zeus and Persephone, the one called by some Sabazios,
whose birth and sacrifices and rites they instance as celebrated by night
and in secret on account of shameless ceremonies attending them.’ These
last words probably refer to the mystic marriage of the god with the
initiated (p. 535).
The symbolism of the snake has already (p. 326) been discussed. A god
whose vehicle was the snake would find easy affiliation in Greece, where
every dead hero was a snake.
Sabazios is left unsung by tragic poets, but the realism of comedy
reflects the popular craze for semi-barbarian worship. The temper of
Demosthenes was not, if Strabo[1068] be right, characteristically
Athenian. ‘As in other matters,’ Strabo says, ‘the Athenians were always
hospitable to foreign customs, so with the gods. They adopted many sacred
customs from abroad and were ridiculed in comedies for doing so, and this
especially as regards Phrygian and Thracian rites. Plato mentions the
Bendidean, and Demosthenes the Phrygian, rites in his accusation against
Aeschines and his mother on the count that Aeschines joined his mother in
her rites and went about in a thiasos and cried aloud Euoi Saboi and Hyes
Attes, for these cries are of Sabazios and the Mother.’
It is then to comedy, to Aristophanes, that we owe most of our references
to Sabazios, hints of his real character and his inner kinship with
Dionysos. In an untranslateable pun in the _Birds_[1069] he tells us that
Sabazios is a Phrygian, and from the _Lysistrata_[1070] we learn that his
worship was orgiastic and much affected by women. The ‘deputation man’
exclaims:
‘Has the wantonness of women then blazed up,
Their tabourings, Sabazios all about,
Their clamour for Adonis on the roofs?’
But most instructive of all is the mention of Sabazios in the opening of
the _Wasps_[1071]. The two slaves Sosias and Xanthias are watching over
their master Bdelycleon. They know he is a dangerous monster and they
ought to keep awake.
‘_Xan._ I know, but I _do_ want a little peace.
_Sos._ Well, chance it then. Some sweet and drowsy thing
Is falling drop by drop upon my eyes.
_Xan._ What? Are you clean mad or a Korybant?
_Sos._ No, a sleep holds me from Sabazios.
_Xan._ And I too herd the same Sabazios.
Just now a very Mede of a nodding sleep
Came down and made an onset on my eyes.’
Sabazios is here clearly not so much the god of ecstasy and orgy as of
compelling irresistible sleep. And why? A late historian gives the simple
answer.
Ammianus Marcellinus[1072] tells us that, when the Emperor Valens was
besieging Chalcedon, the besieged by way of insult shouted to him
‘Sabaiarius.’ He adds in explanation ‘_sabaia_ is a drink of the poor
in Illyria made of barley or corn turned into a liquor.’ ‘Sabaiarius’
is then ‘Beer-man,’ beer-drinker or brewer. S. Jerome, himself a
Dalmatian, says in his commentary on Isaiah[1073] that ‘there is a sort
of drink made from grain and water, and in the provinces of Dalmatia and
Pannonia it is called, in the local barbarian speech, _sabaium_.’ To the
wine-drinker the beer-drinker seemed a low fellow. Wine was in itself a
rarer, finer beverage, probably at first more expensive. Even to-day in
some parts of beer-drinking Germany to drink beer at the solemn midday
dinner is almost a vulgarity. Sabazios, god of the cheap cereal drink,
brings rather sleep than inspiration.
The testimony of Sabazios is now added to that of Bromios and Braites.
Separately the conjectured etymology of each epithet might fall far short
of conviction, but the cumulative force of the three together offers
evidence that seems conclusive.
A fourth link in the chain still remains. The emperor Julian’s third pun
τράγος, goat, and τράγος, spelt, has yet to be considered:
‘_He_ smells of nectar like a god, _you_ smack of goats and spelt.’
The word τράγος is usually rendered ‘goat,’ and the meaning ‘spelt’
ignored. There is of course a reference to the time-honoured jest about
the animal, but that the primary reference is to grain, not the goat, is
clear from the words that immediately follow:
‘For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt
Made you.’
In translating I have therefore used both the meanings; the formal pun is
untranslateable.
It is an odd fact that the ancients seem to have called certain _wild_
forms of fruits and cereals by names connecting them with the goat[1074].
The reason is not clear, but the fact is well-established. The Latins
called the wild fig _caprificus_; Pausanias expressly tells us that the
Messenians gave to the wild fig-tree the name τράγος, goat. Vines, when
they ran wild to foliage rather than fruit, were said τραγᾶν. I would
conjecture that the inferior sort of spelt called τράγος, goat, owes its
name to this unexplained linguistic habit. It is even possible that the
beard with which spelt is furnished may have helped out the confusion.
Tragedy I believe to be not the ‘goat-song,’ but the ‘harvest-song’ of
the cereal τράγος, the form of spelt known as ‘the goat.’ When the god
of the cereal, Bromios-Braites-Sabazios, became the god of the vine, the
fusion and confusion of τραγῳδία, the spelt-song, with τρυγῳδία, the song
of the winelees[1075], was easy and indeed inevitable. The τραγῳδοί, the
‘beanfeast-singers,’ became τρυγῳδοί or ‘must-singers.’
The difficulties in the way of the canonical etymology of _tragedy_
are acknowledged to be great[1076]. In discussing the Satyrs it has
already been shown that the primitive followers of Dionysos are
mythologically conceived of not as _goat_-men, but as _horse_-men. The
primitive ‘_goat_-song,’ we are asked to believe, was sung by a chorus
of _horse_-men. The case in fact stands thus. We are confronted on
the one hand by the undoubted fact that on countless vase-paintings
of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. the attendants of Dionysos are
_horse_-men, while _goat_-men attend the Earth-goddess (p. 277); on the
other hand we have the _supposed_ fact that tragedy is the _goat_-song.
But this supposed fact is merely an etymological assumption. If another
etymology be found for _tragedy_, the whole discrepancy disappears.
Such an etymology is, I think, offered by τράγος ‘spelt,’ with the
further advantage that it contains in itself a hint of how the goat
misunderstanding arose.
* * * * *
A fragment of Aeschylus cited, but I think erroneously, as evidence of a
goat chorus remains to be examined. In a lost tragedy[1077] a Satyr on
the stage sees for the first time fire just given to mortals, and he runs
to kiss her as though she were a beautiful maiden. Prometheus warns him:
if you do this
‘You’ll be a goat mourning his beard.’
The passage is used as evidence for the goat form and dress of the
Satyric chorus. Surely such an inference is needless; the point of the
jest is the morals and manners of the Satyr. To reconstruct a goat-chorus
out of a casual joke is labour in vain.
* * * * *
We have then found four several titles, Bromios, Braites, Sabazios and
tragedy, for which the supposition of a cereal drink affords a simple,
satisfactory explanation. It remains to show that, though the words
_bromos_, _braisum_, _sabaia_ and _tragos_ have become to us dim and
almost forgotten in the lapse of time, a cereal drink such as they imply
was widely in use in ancient days, and that among Northern nations.
* * * * *
The history of fermented drink in Europe seems to have been briefly
this. Never, so far back as we can look into mythology, was miserable man
without some rudimentary means of intoxication. Before he had advanced
to agriculture he had a drink made of naturally fermented honey, the
drink we now know as mead, which the Greeks called μέθυ or μέθη. The
epithet ‘sweet’ which they constantly apply to wine surprises us, but as
a characteristic of ‘mead’ it is natural enough. This mead made of honey
appears in ancient legends. When Zeus would intoxicate Kronos he gave him
not wine, Porphyry[1078] says, for wine was not, but a honey-drink to
darken his senses. Night says to Zeus:
‘When prostrate ’neath the lofty oaks you see him
Lie drunken with the work of murmuring bees,
Then bind him,’
and again Plato[1079] tells how when Poros falls asleep in the garden
of Zeus he is drunk not with wine but with nectar, for wine was not
yet. Nectar, the ancient drink of the gods, is mead made of honey; and
men know this, for they offer to the primitive earth-god libations of
honey (μελίσπονδα). The gods like their worshippers knew the joys of
intoxication before the coming of the grape-Dionysos. Plutarch[1080]
says mead (μέθυ) was used as a libation before the appearance of the
vine, and ‘even now those of the barbarians who do not drink wine drink
honey-drink’ (μελίτειον). The _nephalia_ are but intoxicants more
primitive than wine.
Next in order came the drinks made of cereals fermented, the various
forms of beer and crude malt spirit. These gave to the Thracian Dionysos
his names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, but they never seem to have found
a real home in Greece. Mention of them occurs in classical writers, but
they are always named as barbarian curiosities, as drinks in use in
Thrace, Armenia, Egypt, but never like mead even in primitive times the
national drink of Hellas. Isis in Egypt is addressed as not only Our Lady
of Bread but also Our Lady of Beer[1081], but Bromios when he comes to
Greece forgets the oats from which he sprang.
The first beer was probably a very rude product, like the drink mentioned
by Xenophon[1082] as still in use among the Armenians of his day; the
grain was pounded and allowed to ferment with the grains still floating
about in the drinking-cups. The Lithuanians in the Middle Ages are said
to have made their beer over-night and drunk it next morning[1083].
Beer of this primitive kind was best sucked up through a pipe.
Archilochus[1084] alludes to the practice:
‘As through a reed Phrygian and Thracian men
Suck up their brew.’
The name given to the drink, βρῦτον, means simply something brewed or
fermented. Aeschylus[1085] in his _Lykurgos_ makes some one, probably
Lykurgos the Thracian, drink βρῦτον:
‘Thereat he drank the _bruton_ and waxed strong
And boasted thus within the hero’s halls.’
Athenaeus, in the passage in which he quotes Archilochus, cites quite
a number of authorities about the making of these rude cereal drinks.
According to Hellanicus in his _Origins_, _bruton_ could be made also
of roots. ‘Some people,’ he says, ‘drink _bruton_ made of roots as the
Thracian drink is made of barley.’ Hecataeus in his _Journey round
Europe_ notes that the Paeonians drank _bruton_ made from barley and an
admixture of millet and endive.
Another name for this drink made from grain was _zythos_. Diodorus[1086]
draws a lamentable picture of the straits to which the peoples of Gaul
were put because ‘from the excessive cold and intemperate character of
the climate, the land could not bring forth either wine or oil. Bereft
of these products the Gauls make of barley the drink that is called
_zythos_; they likewise wash out their honeycombs with water and use the
rinsings. They had only imported wine, but to this they were excessively
addicted (κάτοινοι), they drank it intemperately and either fell asleep
dead drunk or became stark mad.’ Here we have the living historical
prototype of the Centaurs, the uncivilized men who cannot support the
taste of wine, the lamentable story of _imported_ intoxicants told in all
ages all the world over.
The number of primitive beers—_cervisia_, _korma_, _sabaia_, _zythos_—is
countless and it would be unprofitable to discuss them in detail. All
have this in common, and it is sufficient for our purpose, that they
are spirituous drinks made of fermented grain, they appear with the
introduction of agriculture, they tend to supersede mead, and are in turn
superseded by wine. To put it mythologically the worship of Bromios,
Braites and Sabazios pales before the Epiphany of Dionysos. Sabazios is
almost wholly left behind, a foreigner never naturalized[1087]. Bromios
is transformed beyond recognition; to the old name is given a new
meaning, a new etymology.
It is important to note that had there been only Sabazios, had Bromios
never emerged from himself, both would probably have remained in
Thracian obscurity. The Thracians never conquered Greece; there was,
therefore, no historical reason why their god should impose himself.
His dominance is unquestionably due to the introduction and rapid
spread of the vine. Popular tradition enshrined as it usually does a
real truth—the characteristic gift (χάρις) of Dionysos by which he won
all hearts was wine, wine made not of barley but of the juice of the
grape. A new, incoming plant attaches itself to the local divinity,
whoever and whatever he be. The olive attached itself to Athene who was
there before its coming, and by the olive the prestige of Athene was
sensibly increased; but the olive, great glory though it was and though
a Sophocles sang its praises, had never the divine omnipotence of the
vine. Olive oil over all the countries of Southern Europe supplanted the
other primitive grease, butter[1088]. Butter is hard to keep fresh in
hot countries, as every traveller finds to his cost in Italy and Greece
to-day. But the supersession of butter by oil was a quiet, unnoticed
advance, not a triumphant progress like the Coming of the Vine.
* * * * *
We are now at last in a position to say what was the characteristic
essence of the worship of Dionysos. The fact however repugnant must
be fairly faced. This essence was intoxication. But by the very nature
of primitive thought this essence was almost instantly transformed
into something more, something deeper and higher than mere physical
intoxication. It was intoxication thought of as possession. The savage
tastes of some intoxicant for the first time, a great delight takes him,
he feels literally a new strange life within him. How has it come about?
The answer to him is simple. He is possessed by a god (ἔνθεος), not
figuratively but literally and actually: there is a divine thing within
him that is more than himself, he is mad, but with a divine madness.
All intense sorrow or joy is to him obsession, possession. When in the
_Hippolytus_[1089] the chorus see Phaedra distraught with passion,
instinctively they ask:
‘Is this some spirit, O child of man,
Doth Hecate hold thee perchance or Pan,
Doth She of the Mountains work her ban
Or the dread Corybantes bind thee?’
They utter not poetical imagery but a real belief.
To what beautiful imaginations, to what high spiritual vision this
Bacchic cult of intoxication led will best be considered when we come
to speak of Orpheus. For the present some other primitive elements in
Dionysiac worship remain to be considered, elements essential to the
understanding of his cult.
DIONYSOS THE TREE-GOD (DENDRITES).
Intoxication is of the essence of the god Dionysos, it is the element
that marks him out from other gods, it is the secret of his missionary
impulse; but to suppose that it exhausts his content would be a grave
misunderstanding. There go to his making not only this distinctive
element of intoxication but certain other primitive factors common to the
gods of other peoples.
Thinking people even in antiquity, when the study of comparative
mythology scarcely existed, were struck by analogies between Dionysos
and other divinities. Plutarch, who thought much, if somewhat vaguely,
on religious matters, was very sensible of this. In the enlightened and
instructive parallel that he draws[1090] between Osiris and Dionysos,
he sees that Dionysos like the gods of many other peoples is a god who
in some sense embodies the life of nature that comes and goes with the
seasons, dies and rises again with the fruits of the earth. In a passage
full of insight he draws attention to the analogies of the diverse cults
he had observed. ‘The Phrygians think that the god is asleep in the
winter, and is awake in summer, and at the one season they celebrate with
Bacchic rites his goings to bed and at the other his risings up. And the
Paphlagonians allege that in the winter he is bound down and imprisoned
and in the spring he is stirred up and let loose.’ The passage and
others that will later be quoted are as it were a forecast of the whole
comparative method.
The truth that Dionysos, like many another god, was a god of the impulse
of life in nature was not only apprehended by the philosopher, it was
also evidenced in cultus. This is seen very clearly in two popular phases
of the worship of Dionysos, his worship as a tree-god and his worship as
a bull.
The vine is a tree; but Dionysos is Dendrites, Tree-god, and a plant-god
in a far wider sense. He is god of the fig-tree, Sykites; he is Kissos,
god of the ivy; he is Anthios, god of all blossoming things; he is
Phytalmios, god of growth. In this respect he differs scarcely at all
from certain aspects of Poseidon, or from the young male god of Attica
and the Peloponnese, Hermes. Probably this aspect of the god, at once
milder and wider, was always acceptable in Southern Greece and made his
affiliation with the indigenous Hermes an easy matter. This affiliation
is clearly shown by the fact that in art Hermes and Dionysos appear, as
they were worshipped in cultus, as herms; the symbol of both as gods
of fertility is naturally the phallos. The young Dionysos, a maturer
Liknites, is not distinguishable from Hermes.
[Illustration: FIG. 132.]
On the beautiful cylix by Hieron[1091] reproduced in fig. 132, perhaps
the most exquisite thing that ancient ceramography has left us, this
affiliation is clearly shown. In the centre design Dionysos is all
vine-god. He holds a great vine-branch in his left hand, in his right
his own sceptre the thyrsos; his worshipper is a horse-Satyr piping on
the double flutes. But on the exterior of the cup, a scene of cultus
rather than mythology, he is of wider import, he is Dendrites. The god
round whom the lovely Maenads dance in circle is a rude pillar or plank
draped with a splendid ritual garment. It is a primitive herm decorated
with great bunches of grapes, but also with ivy sprigs and honeycombs
and a necklace of dried figs, such as the Greek peasant now-a-days takes
with him for food on a journey. He is god of all growing things, of every
tree and plant and natural product, and only later exclusively of the
vine. He takes to himself ivy and pine and honeycomb. The honey-drink he
supersedes, yet honey is sacred to him. Only the olive he never takes,
for Athene had it already. Ivy especially was sacred to him; his Maenads
chewed ivy leaves[1092] for inspiration, as the Delphic prophetess chewed
the bay. Pliny[1093] says: ‘Even to this day ivy is used to decorate the
thyrsos of the god and the helmets and shields used by the peoples of
Thrace in their rites,’ and this ritual ivy is remembered by Dionysos
when he comes to Thebes[1094]:
‘I cry to Thebes to waken, set her hands
To clasp my wand, mine ivied javelin,
And round her shoulders hang my wild fawn-skin.’
[Illustration: FIG. 133.]
Very primitive in form but wholly of the vine-god is the xoanon on a
krater in the Campana collection of the Louvre[1095] (fig. 133). The
image of the god is a column treated as a herm, and reminds us that
Dionysos was called by the name Perikonios, He-about-the-pillar. The two
representations in figs. 133 and 132 are characteristically different.
The rude Satyrs have but one way of worshipping their god, they fall upon
the wine-cup; the Maenads, worshipping the god of life, bend in ritual
ecstasy to touch the earth, mother of life; the wine-jar in Hieron’s vase
is present as a symbol, but the Maenads revel aloof.
The worship of the tree-god was probably indigenous in Thrace long before
the coming of the vine. We have evidence that it lingered on there down
to Roman times. An inscription on a cippus recently discovered in a
mosque at Eski Djoumi[1096] and now in the museum at Saloniki affords
curious evidence. The cippus marked the grave of a priestess of Dionysos.
Her name is lost, but the word priestess (ἱερεία) is followed by two
characteristically Bacchic epithets, θύσα and εὐεία. She is priestess of
the thiasos of the ‘Carriers of the Evergreen Oak’ (πρινοφόροι), and she
leaves to her guild certain property in vineyards. If they do not fulfil
the conditions of the bequest, including the offering of a wreath of
roses, the property is to go to another thiasos, that of the ‘Carriers of
the Oak’ (Δροιοφόροι), and on the same conditions.
* * * * *
The tree-god was too simple for the philosopher. He wanted to abstract
Dionysos, rid him of not only his anthropomorphic but his zoomorphic
and phytomorphic shapes. Still he used the tree-god as a stepping-stone
to his ‘principle of moisture.’ Plutarch[1097] says the Greeks regard
Dionysos as not merely lord and originator of wine, but of the whole
principle of moisture. Of this, he adds, Pindar is in himself sufficient
witness when he says:
‘Of all the trees that are
He hath his flock, and feedeth root by root,
The Joy-god Dionysos, the pure star
That shines amid the gathering of the fruit.’
Plutarch is fond of this beautiful little bit of Pindar. He quotes it
again in his _Symposiacs_[1098]. A friend who is a farmer objects that
Plutarch has shut out his calling from the worship of the Muses, whereas
he had hoped that at least Thalia, goddess of increase, might be his to
worship. Plutarch says the charge is not a just one, for farmers have
Dendrites, He-of-the-Trees, and Anesidora, She-who-sends-up-gifts; and
then he quotes his favourite passage. Pindar is of course no evidence for
a Principle of Moisture. Neither poets nor primitive people use any such
philosophical jargon; but all the world over primitive man did and still
does welcome the coming and lament the going of the something or someone
who makes the trees and plants to grow and beasts and man to bring forth.
Later, though they are little the wiser as to what that something is,
they will call it the ‘Principle of Moisture,’ or if they are poets Love
or Life.
The ‘Principle of Moisture’ was in fashion among theologists long before
Plutarch. In the _Bacchae_ of Euripides the new wine of the religion
of Dionysos has to be poured into some very old bottles. Teiresias in
a typically orthodox fashion, characteristic of the timid and kindly
priest all the world over, tries to water it down with weak rationalism.
Dionysos, he urges, is not new at all, he is very old, as old and
respectable as Demeter herself; she is the Principle of Dryness, he of
Moisture, nothing could be more safe and satisfactory. He thus instructs
honest Pentheus[1099]:
‘Two spirits there be,
Young prince, that in man’s world are first of worth.
Demeter one is named. She is the Earth—
Call her what name thou wilt!—who feeds man’s frame
With sustenance of things dry. And that which came
Her work to perfect, second, is the Power
From Semele born. He found the liquid shower
Hid in the grape[1100].’
This is the rationalism not of the poet Euripides, but of the priest
Teiresias. This is clear, for the poet in the next line breaks clean away
from the tiresome Dryness and Moisture and is gone to the magic of sleep
and the blood of the God outpoured.
Plutarch quotes Pindar as authority for the Principle of Moisture, and
undoubtedly the sap of trees and plants sacred to Dionysos may have
helped out the abstraction. But, had Plutarch known it, the notion is
associated not so much with Dendrites, the Tree-God, as with a figure
perhaps still more primitive, Dionysos the Bull.
DIONYSOS THE BULL-GOD.
Dionysos Dendrites is easy to realize; he is but a step back from the
familiar, canonical Vine-god. The Bull-god Dionysos is harder to accept
because we have lost the primitive habit of thinking from which he
sprang. The Greeks themselves suffered the like inconvenience. They
rapidly advanced to so complete an anthropomorphism that in Periclean
Athens the dogma of the Bull-incarnation was, we cannot doubt, a
stumbling-block, a faith as far as possible put out of sight.
The particular animal in which a god is incarnate depends of course on
the circumstances of the worshippers. If he is in a land lion-haunted
his god will be apt to take shape as a lion; later the lion will be
his attendant, his servitor. Lions attend the Mountain-Mother of Asia
Minor, guard her as has been seen (p. 265) in heraldic fashion, draw her
chariot, watch her throne[1101]. In like manner Dionysos, son of Semele,
who is but one form of the same Earth-Mother, has a chariot drawn by
lions (fig. 123), and sometimes, though not so frequently as his Mother,
an attendant lion.
In the vase-painting in fig. 134 from an amphora in the British
Museum[1102] Dionysos, with kantharos and great spreading vine, stands
between two great prophylactic eyes. A little lion looks up at him,
dog-like, adoring his master. On the reverse Hephaistos with his mallet
carries the vine in token of the power of the god. The lion in this
picture is losing his reality, because the lion has ceased to be a
dominant terror in Greece. The god of a civilized, agricultural people
must reincarnate himself in other animal shapes, in the Snake, in the
Kid, most of all in the Bull. The Bull-god may have been too savage
for Periclean Athens, but Euripides must have found him in full force
in Macedonia. To a people of goat-herds like the Arcadians the goat
is the impersonation of life and generation; to a people of cow-herds
the bull is the more potent and splendid vehicle. In the _Bacchae_
there are Snake-Epiphanies, Lion-Epiphanies, but first and foremost
Bull-Epiphanies. At the mystery of the Birth[1103]
‘A Horned God was found
And a God with serpents crowned.’
[Illustration: FIG. 134.]
In the supreme Orphic mystery, to be discussed later (p. 483), the
worshipper before he became ‘Bacchos’ ate the raw flesh of a bull, and,
probably in connection with this sacrament, the Bull form of the god
crystallized into a mystery dogma. When Pentheus has imprisoned the
‘Bacchos’ he finds in the manger not the beautiful stranger but a raging
bull; the hallucination was doubtless bred of ancient faith and ritual.
Again when in the _Bacchae_[1104] Dionysos leads him forth enchanted to
his doom on Cithaeron, Pentheus in his madness sees before him strange
sights:
‘Yea and mine eye
Is bright! Yon sun shines twofold in the sky,
Thebes twofold and the Wall of Seven Gates,
And is it a Wild Bull this, that walks and waits
Before me? There are horns upon thy brow!
What art thou, man or beast? For surely now
The Bull is on thee!’
and last when at the moment of their uttermost peril the Bacchants invoke
their Lord to vengeance, the ancient incarnations loom in upon their
maddened minds[1105]:
‘Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name,
O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads,
Lion of the Burning Flame!
O God, Beast, Mystery, come!’
All this madness is based not only on a definite faith, but that faith
is the utterance of a definite ritual. In discussing the name Bromios
we have seen (p. 415) that in the ritual of Dionysos in Thrace there
were ‘bull-voiced mimes’ who bellowed to the god. The scholiast[1106]
on Lycophron’s _Alexandra_ says that the ‘women who worshipped Dionysos
Laphystios wore horns themselves, in imitation of the god, for he is
imagined to be bull-headed and is so represented in art.’ Plutarch[1107]
gives more particulars. ‘Many of the Greeks represent Dionysos in their
images in the form of a bull, and the women of Elis in their prayers
invoke the god to come to them with his bull-foot, and among the Argives
there is a Dionysos with the title Bull-born. And they summon him by
their trumpets out of the water, casting into the depths lambs to the
Door-keeper; they hide their trumpets in their thyrsoi, as Socrates has
told in his treatise on the Hosioi.’ A bull-god is summoned and _he
emerges from water_.
It will later (p. 496) be seen to what strange theological uses the
Orphics put their bull and lion and snake-shaped Epiphanies; for the
present it must be noted how near akin these were to the shapes that the
Southern Greeks gave to their own indigenous gods. Zeus and Athene and
even Poseidon had, by the fifth century B.C., become pure human shapes,
but the ministrants of Poseidon at Cyzicus were down to the time of
Athenaeus known as Bulls[1108], and lower divinities like rivers still
kept their bull shape, witness the pathetic story of Deianeira and
Acheloüs[1109]:
‘A river was my lover, him I mean
Great Acheloüs, and in threefold form
Wooed me, and wooed again; a visible bull
Sometimes, and sometimes a coiled gleaming snake,
And sometimes partly man, a monstrous shape
Bull-fronted, and adown his shaggy beard
Fountains of clear spring water glistening flowed.’
In those old divine days a wooer might woo in a hundred shapes, and a
maiden in like fashion might fly his wooing. It is again Sophocles[1110]
who tells us of the marriage of Pentheus:
‘The wedlock of his wedding was untold,
His wrestling with the maiden manifold.’
[Illustration: FIG. 135.]
The red-figured vase-painting in fig. 135 looks almost like an
illustration of the _Trachiniae_[1111]. Here is the monster; but he is
man-fronted, his body that of a bull, and from his mouth flows the water
of his own stream Acheloüs. Herakles is about to break off his mighty
horn, the seat of his strength; Deianeira stands by unmoved. With odd
insistence on his meaning the vase-painter draws in a horn parallel
with the stream to show that the stream is itself a cornucopia of growth
and riches. The vase-painting is many years earlier than the play of
Sophocles.
[Illustration: FIG. 136.]
I know of no instance where an actual bull-Dionysos is represented on a
vase-painting, but in the design in fig. 136 from an amphora[1112] in
the Würzburg Museum his close connection is indicated by the fact that
he rides on a bull. From the kantharos in his hand he pours his gift of
wine. This representation is of special interest because on the reverse
of the same vase Poseidon holding his trident is represented riding on a
white bull. This looks as though the vase-painter had in his mind some
analogy between the two divinities of moisture and growth.
With the bull-Poseidon and the bull river-god at hand, the assimilation
of the bull-shaped Dionysos would be an easy task, the more as he was god
of sap and generation and life, as well as of wine. Water and wine were
blended in theology as in daily life, and the Greeks of the South lent
the element of water.
Dionysos then by his tree-shape and his bull-shape is clearly shown to
be not merely a spirit of intoxication, but rather a primitive nature
god laid hold of, informed by a spirit of intoxication. Demeter and Kore
are nature-goddesses, they have their uprisings and down-goings, but to
the end they remain sedate and orderly. Dionysos is as it were the male
correlative of Kore, but informed, transfigured by this new element of
intoxication and orgy.
This double nature of the god finds expression in one of his titles,
the cultus epithet of Dithyrambos, and it is only by keeping his double
aspect clearly in mind that this difficult epithet can at all be
understood.
DITHYRAMBOS AND THE DITHYRAMB.
The title Dithyrambos given to Dionysos and the Dithyramb, the song sung
in his honour, must be considered together, in fact this title like
‘Iacchos’ seems to have arisen out of the song.
The epithet Dithyrambos was always regarded by the Greeks themselves
as indicating and describing the manner of the birth of the god.
Disregarding the quantity of the vowel _i_ in _Di_ they believed it to
be derived from Δῐ and θύρα, double door, and took it to mean ‘he who
entered life by a double door,’ the womb of his mother and the thigh of
his father. This was to them the cardinal ‘mystery’ of the birth. So much
is clear from the birth-song of the chorus in the _Bacchae_[1113]:
‘Acheloüs’ roaming daughter,
Holy Dirce, virgin water,
Bathed he not of old in thee
The Babe of God, the Mystery?
When from out the fire immortal
To himself his God did take him,
To his own flesh, and bespake him:
“Enter now life’s second portal,
Motherless mystery; lo I break
Mine own body for thy sake,
Thou of the Two-fold Door, and seal thee
Mine, O Bromios”—thus he spake—
“And to this thy land reveal thee.”’
Dithyrambos was ‘he of the miraculous birth,’ Liknites conceived
mystically. The mistaken etymology need not make us distrust the
substantial truth of the tradition.
As Dithyrambos is the Babe mystically born, so the Dithyramb was
uniformly regarded as the Song of the Birth. Plato states this, though
somewhat tentatively, in the _Laws_[1114]. When discussing various kinds
of music he says: ‘Another form of song, the Birth of Dionysos called, I
think, the dithyramb.’
It has already been seen that Dionysos as the principle of life and
generation was figured as a bull, it is therefore no surprise to learn
from Pindar[1115] that the Dithyramb ‘drives’ the bull:
‘Whence did appear the Charites who sing
To Dionyse their king
The dithyramb, the chant of Bull-driving?’
The Charites here halt half-way between ritual and poetry. They are half
abstract rhythmical graces, half the Charites of an actual cult. The song
of invocation to the Bull sung by the women of Elis has been already
noted. It is the earliest Dithyramb preserved, and happily in his _Greek
Questions_ Plutarch[1116] has left us a somewhat detailed account. He
asks, ‘Why do the women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be
present with them with his bull-foot?’ He goes on to give the exact words
of the little ritual hymn:
Hero, Dionysos, come
To thy temple-home
Here at Elis, worshipful
We implore thee
With thy Charites adore Thee,
Rushing with thy bull-foot, come!
Noble Bull, noble Bull.’
The fact that ‘Hero’ precedes ‘Dionysos’ in the invocation makes it
tempting to conjecture that we have here a superposition of cults, that
the women of Elis long before the coming of Dionysos worshipped a local
hero in the form of a bull and that Dionysos affiliated his cult; but
another possibility is perhaps more probable, that Hero is in the hymn
purely adjectival. It has already been shown that the word meant to begin
with only ‘strong’ and then ‘strong one.’
The mention of the Charites is important. They are the givers of increase
(p. 298), who naturally attend the coming of the life-god; they seem here
analogous to the nurses of Dionysos, the sober form of his Maenads. They
attend alike his coming and his birth.
In the Delphic Paean (p. 417), where the birth of Dionysos in the spring
is celebrated, the title Dithyrambos[1117] is first and foremost, before
Bacchos, Euios, Braites and Bromios:
‘Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come,
Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come,
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.
_Evoe, Bacchos, hail, Paean, hail_,
Whom in sacred Thebes the mother fair,
She, Thyone, once to Zeus did bear.
All the stars danced for joy. Mirth
Of mortals hailed thee, Bacchos, at thy birth.’
The new-born god is Dithyrambos, and he is born at the resurrection of
earth in the spring-time.
The epithet Paean, belonging to Apollo, is here given to Dionysos. At the
great festival of the finishing of the temple all is to be harmony and
peace; theology attempts an edifying but impossible syncretism. Nothing
in mythology is more certain than that the Paean and the Dithyramb were
to begin with poles asunder, and it is by the contrast between them that
we best understand not only the gist of the Dithyramb itself but the
significance of the whole religion of Dionysos.
* * * * *
The contrast between Apollo and Dionysos, Paean and Dithyramb, has been
sharply and instructively drawn by Plutarch, himself a priest at Delphi.
The comparison instituted by Plutarch between the rites of Osiris and
those of Dionysos has been already noted (p. 402). In the discourse
about Isis and Osiris[1118], it will be remembered, Plutarch says ‘the
affair about the Titans and the Night of Accomplishment accords with what
are called in the rites of Osiris “Tearings to pieces,” Resurrections,
Regenerations. The same,’ he adds, ‘is true about rites of burying. The
Egyptians show in many places burial chests of Osiris, and the Delphians
also hold that the remains of Dionysos are deposited with them near to
the place of the oracle, and the Consecrated Ones (ὅσιοι) perform a
secret sacrifice in the sanctuary of Apollo what time the Thyiades awaken
Liknites.’ In a word, at Delphi there were rites closely analogous to
those of Osiris and concerned with the tearing to pieces, the death and
burial of the god Dionysos, and his resurrection and re-birth as a child.
In another discourse (_On the Ei at Delphi_) Plutarch[1119] tells us
that these ceremonials were concerned with the god as Dithyrambos, that
the characteristic of the Dithyramb was that it sang of these mutations,
these re-births, and that it was thereby marked off sharply from the
Paean of Apollo. The passage is so instructive both as to the real nature
of Dionysos and as reflecting the attitude of an educated Greek towards
his religion that it must be quoted in full. Plutarch has been discussing
and contrasting Dionysos and Apollo apropos of the worship of Dionysos
at Delphi, a worship every detail of which he must certainly have known.
Dionysos, he says, has just as much to do with Delphi as Apollo himself,
a statement rather startling to modern ears. Then he begins to work out
the contrast between the two gods after the philosophic fashion of his
day. Apollo is the principle of simplicity, unity and purity, Dionysos of
manifold change and metamorphosis. This is the esoteric doctrine known to
experts, cloaked from the vulgar. Among these experts (σοφώτεροι) were
probably, as will be seen later (p. 463), Orphic theologians. He goes on
to tell how these esoteric doctrines were expressed in popular ritual.
He of course inverts the natural order of development. He believes that
the doctrine known only to the few gave rise to a ritual intended to
express it in popular terms for the vulgar; whereas of course in reality
the ritual existed first and was then by the experts made to bear a
mystical meaning. Bearing this proviso in mind Plutarch’s account is full
of interest. ‘These manifold changes that Dionysos suffers into winds
and water and earth and stars and the births of plants and animals they
enigmatically term “rending asunder” and “tearing limb from limb”; and
they call the god Dionysos and Zagreus and Nyktelios and Isodaites, and
tell of certain Destructions and Disappearances and Resurrections and
New-Births which are fables and riddles, appertaining to the aforesaid
metamorphoses. And to him (i.e. Dionysos) they sing _dithyrambic_
measures full of sufferings and metamorphosis, which metamorphosis has
in it an element of wandering and distraction. For “it is fitting,” as
Aeschylus says, that “the dithyramb of diverse utterance should accompany
Dionysos as his counterpart, but the ordered Paean and the sober Muse
should attend Apollo.” And artists in sculpture represent Apollo as ever
young and ageless, but Dionysos they represent as having many forms and
shapes. In a word, they attribute to the one uniformity and order and an
earnest simplicity, but to the other a certain incongruousness owing to
a blend made up of sportiveness and excess and earnestness and madness.
They invoke him thus:
“Euios, thou Dionysos, who by the flame of thy rite
Dost women to madness incite.”’
Plutarch goes on to tell of the division of the ritual year at Delphi
between Apollo and Dionysos. Apollo as incoming conqueror has taken the
larger and the fairer portion.
‘And since the time of the revolutions in these changes is not equal, but
the one which they call Satiety is longer, and the other which they call
Craving is shorter, they observe in this matter a due proportion. For the
remainder of the year they use the Paean in their sacrificial ceremonies,
but at the approach of winter they wake up the Dithyramb and make the
Paean cease. For three months they invoke the one god (Dionysos) in place
of the other (Apollo), as they hold that in respect to its duration the
setting in order of the world is to its conflagration as three to one.’
Plutarch’s use of technical terms, e.g. conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις),
betrays that he is importing into his religious discussion philosophic
speculations, and especially those of Heraclitus. Into these it is
unnecessary to follow him; the important points that emerge for the
present argument are that the Dithyramb was a ritual song sung in the
winter season, probably at festivals connected with the winter solstice,
of an orgiastic character and dealing with the god as an impersonation of
natural forces, dealing with his sufferings, his death and resurrection,
and as such contrasted with the sober simple Paean. In a word the
Dithyramb, and with it the title Dithyrambos, resume the two factors that
we have detected in the religion of Dionysos, the old spirit of life and
generation, and the new spirit of intoxication.
It remains to enquire if any light can be thrown on the difficult
etymology[1120] of the word.
* * * * *
The popular etymology, that saw in Dithyrambos the
god-of-the-double-door, is of course impossible. Dithyrambos, all
philologists agree, cannot etymologically be separated from its cognate
_thriambos_, which gave to the Latins their word _triumphus_. The word
_thriambos_ looks as if it were formed on the analogy of _iambos_. It
may be that Suidas[1121] among his many confused conjectures as to the
meaning of the word throws out accidentally the right clue. He says
‘they call the madness of poets _thriasis_.’ May not _thriambos_ mean
the mad inspired orgiastic measure? The first syllable with its long _i_
may possibly be referred to the root Δι already discussed under Diasia
(p. 23). At a time when in etymology the length of syllables was wholly
disregarded the Δι in Διός might help out the confusion, and last some
brilliant theologian intent on edification thought of the double doors.
Mythology has left us dim hints as to the functions of certain ancient
maiden prophetesses at Delphi called Thriae. May they not have been the
Mad Maidens who sang the mad song, the _thriambos_?
Of the Thriae we are told by Philochoros[1122] that they were nymphs of
Parnassos, nurses of Apollo. Save for this mention we never hear that
Apollo had any nurses, he was wholly the son of his father. Is it not
more probable that they were nurses of Dionysos?
The account of these mysterious Thriae given in the Homeric Hymn[1123] to
Hermes is strange and suggestive. Hermes is made to tell how his first
gift of prophecy came not from Zeus, but from three maiden prophetesses:
‘For there are sisters born, called Thriae, maiden things,
Three are they and they joy them in glory of swift wings.
Upon their heads is sprinkled fine flour of barley white,
They dwell aloof in dwellings beneath Parnassos’ height.
They taught me love of soothsaying, while I my herds did feed,
Being yet a boy. Of me and mine my father took no heed.
And thence they flitted, now this way, now that, upon the wing,
And of all things that were to be they uttered soothsaying.
What time they fed on honey fresh, food of the gods divine,
Then holy madness made their hearts to speak the truth incline,
But if from food of honeycomb they needs must keep aloof
Confused they buzz among themselves and speak no word of sooth.’
The Thriae are nurses like the Maenads, they rave in holy madness
(θυΐουσιν) like the Thyiades, but their inspiration is not from Bacchos,
the wine-god, not even from Bromios or Sabazios or Braites, the
beer-gods; it is from a source, from an intoxicant yet more primitive,
from honey. They are in a word ‘Melissae,’ honey-priestesses, inspired
by a honey intoxicant; they are bees, their heads white with pollen;
they hum and buzz, swarming confusedly. The honey service of ancient
ritual has already been noted (p. 91), and the fact that not only the
priestesses of Artemis at Ephesus were ‘Bees,’ but also those of Demeter,
and, still more significant, the Delphic priestess herself was a Bee.
The oracle of the Bessi (p. 370) was delivered by a priestess, and the
analogy with Delphi is noted by Herodotus; may not the priestess of the
Bessi have also been a Bee? The Delphic priestess in historical times
chewed a laurel leaf, but when she was a Bee surely she must have sought
her inspiration in the honeycomb.
* * * * *
With all these divine associations about the bee, a creature wondrous
enough in nature, it is not surprising that she was figured by art as a
goddess and half human. In fig. 137 we have such a representation[1124],
a woman with high curled wings and a bee body from the waist downwards.
The design is from a gold embossed plaque found at Camiros.
[Illustration: FIG. 137.]
When Euripides would tell of the dread power of Aphrodite haunting with
her doom all living things, Aphrodite who was heir to all the sacred
traditions of the Earth-Mother, the image of the holy bee comes to his
mind charged with mysterious associations half lost to us. He makes the
chorus of maidens in the _Hippolytus_ sing[1125]:
‘O mouth of Dirce, O god-built wall
That Dirce’s wells run under;
Ye know the Cyprian’s fleet foot-fall,
Ye saw the heavens round her flare
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there
The Bride of the bladed thunder,
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.’
The _thriambos_[1126] was then, if this conjecture be correct, the song
of the Thriae or honey-priestesses, a song from the beginning like
the analogous Dithyramb confused, inspired, impassioned. The title
Dithyrambos through its etymology and by its traditional use belonged
to Dionysos, conceived of in his twofold aspect as the nature-god born
anew each year, the god of plants and animals as well as of human life,
and also as the spirit of intoxication. It remains to ask what was the
significance of such a god to the Greeks who received him as an immigrant
from the North. How far did they adopt and how far modify both elements
in this strange and complex new worship?
First, what significance had Dionysos to the Greeks as a nature-god, in
his animal and vegetable forms as bull and tree?
* * * * *
Long before the coming of Dionysos the Greeks had nature-gods: they had
Demeter goddess of the corn, they had Poseidon Phytalmios god of the
growth of plants, they had the Charites givers of all increase. But it
should be distinctly noted that all these and many another nature-god had
passed into a state of complete anthropomorphism. They represent human
rather than merely physical relations, they have cut themselves as far as
possible loose from plant and animal nature. Demeter is far more mother
than corn. Hermes is the young man in his human splendour, and spite of
his Herm-form and phallic worship has well nigh forgotten that he was
once a spirit of generation in flocks and plants. Athene, like her mother
the earth, had once for her vehicle a snake (p. 306), but she has waxed
in glory till she comes to be a motherless splendour born of the brain
of Zeus, an incarnate city of Athens. These magnificent Olympians have
shed for ever the slough of animal shapes. Dionysos came to Greece at an
earlier stage of his development when he was still half bull half tree,
and this earlier stage was tolerated, even welcomed, by a people who had
themselves outgrown it.
It is not hard to see how this came to be. Man when he worships a bull
or a tree has not, even to himself, consciously emerged as human.
He is still to his own thinking brother of plants and animals. As
he advances he gains but also loses, and must sometimes retrace his
steps. The Greeks of the sixth century B.C. may well have been a little
weary of their anthropomorphic Olympians, tired of their own magnified
reflection in the mirror of mythology, whether this image were distorted
or halo-crowned. They had taken for their motto ‘Know Thyself,’ but at
the fountain of self-knowledge no human soul has ever yet quenched its
thirst. With Dionysos, god of trees and plants as well as human life,
there came a ‘return to nature,’ a breaking of bonds and limitations
and crystallizations, a desire for the life rather of the emotions than
of the reason, a recrudescence it may be of animal passions. Nowhere
is this return to nature more clearly seen than in the _Bacchae_[1127]
of Euripides. The Bacchants leave their human homes, their human work
and ordered life, their looms and distaffs, and are back with the wild
things upon the mountains. In token of this their hair flows loose, they
clothe themselves with the skin of beasts, they are girt with snakes,
and crowned with ivy and wild briony, and leaving their human babes they
suckle the young of wolves and deer[1128]:
‘And one a young fawn held, and one a wild
Wolf-cub, and fed them with white milk and smiled
In love, young mothers with a mother’s breast,
And babes at home forgotten.’
Euripides, it may be, utters his own longing to be free from the tangle
and stress of things human, but it is into the mouths of the chorus of
Maenads that he puts the lovely song[1129]:
‘Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long, long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses?
O feet of a Fawn to the greenwood fled,
Alone in the grass, and the loveliness;
Leap of the Hunted, no more in dread,
Beyond the snares and the deadly press.
Yet a voice still in the distance sounds,
A voice and a fear and a haste of hounds,
O wildly labouring, fiercely fleet,
Onward yet by river and glen—
Is it joy or terror ye storm-swift feet?—
To the dear lone lands untroubled of men,
Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green
The little things of the woodland live unseen.’
Nor is it only that the Maenads escape from their humanity to worship
on the mountain, they find there others, a strange congregation, that
worship with them[1130]:
‘There
Through the appointed hour, they made their prayer
And worship of the Wand, with one accord
Of heart, and cry “Iacchos, Bromios, Lord,
God of God born!” And all the mountain felt
And worshipped with them; and the wild things knelt,
And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness
Was filled with moving voices and dim stress.’
This notion of a return to nature[1131] is an element in the worship of
Dionysos so simple, so moving and in a sense so modern that we realize
it without effort. It is harder to attain to anything like historical
sympathy with the second element—that of intoxication.
* * * * *
It is not easy to deal with the worship of Dionysos without rousing in
our own minds an instinctive protest. Intoxication to us now-a-days means
not inspiration but excess and consequent degradation; its associations
are with crime, with the slums, with hereditary disease, with every form
of abuse that abases man, not to the level of the beasts but far beneath
them.
In trying to understand how the Greeks felt towards Dionysos we must bear
in mind one undoubted fact. The Greeks were not as a nation drunkards.
Serious excess in drink is rare among southern nations, and the Greeks
were no exception to the general rule. When they came in contact with
northern nations like the Thracians, who drank deep and seriously, they
were surprised and disgusted.
Of this we have ample evidence, much of it drawn from the discussion
in the _Deipnosophistae_ of Athenaeus[1132] on Wine and Wine-cups.
The general tone of the discourse, while it is strongly in favour of
drinking, is averse to drunkenness. ‘The men of old time were not wont
to get drunk.’ The reason given is characteristically Greek; they
disliked the unbridled license that ensued. It was well said by the
inventors of proverbs, ‘Wine has no rudder.’ Plato[1133] in the sixth
book of the _Laws_ said it was unfitting for a man to drink to the
point of drunkenness, except on the occasions of festivals of that god
who was the giver of wine. An occasional and strictly defined license
under the sanction of religion is widely different from a general habit
of intemperance. In the first book of the _Laws_[1134], in speaking of
various foreign nations Northern and Oriental, e.g. Celts, Iberians,
Thracians, Lydians and Persians, he says ‘nations of that sort make a
practice of drunkenness.’
The Greek habit of drinking was marked off from that of the Thracians
by two customs, they drank their wine in small cups and they mixed it
freely with water. One of the guests in Athenaeus remarks[1135] that
it is worth while enquiring whether the men of old times drank out of
large cups. ‘For,’ he adds, ‘Dicaearchus the Messenian, the disciple of
Aristotle, in his discourse on Alcaeus says they used small cups and
drank their wine mixed with much water.’ He goes on to cite a treatise
‘On Drunkenness’ by Chamaeleon of Heracleia, in which Chamaeleon stated
not only that the custom of using large cups was a recent one but that
it was imported from the barbarians. Imported indeed but never really
naturalized, for he goes on to say, ‘They being devoid of culture rush
eagerly to excess in wine and provide for themselves all manner of
superfluous delicacies.’ It is clear that in respect of wine and food as
of everything else the Greek was in the main true to his motto ‘Nothing
too much.’ Drunkenness was an offence in his eyes against taste as well
as morals.
Large drinking cups were a northern barbarian characteristic[1136];
they were made originally of the huge horns of the large breed of
cattle common in the North, they were set in silver and gold, and later
sometimes actually made of precious metals and called _rhyta_. Chamaeleon
goes on to say, ‘in the various regions of Greece neither in works of art
nor in poems shall we find any trace of a large cup being made save in
such as deal with heroes.’ That to the dead hero was allowed even by the
Orphics the guerdon of ‘eternal drunkenness’ will be seen later (Chap.
XI.), but the living hero only drank of large cups of unmixed wine out
of ceremonial courtesy to the Northerner. Xenophon in the seventh book
of the _Anabasis_ describes in detail the drinking festival given by the
Thracian Seuthes. When the Greek general and his men came to Seuthes they
embraced first and then _according to the Thracian custom_ horns of wine
were presented to them. In like manner the Macedonian Philip pledged his
friends in a horn of wine. It was from silver horns that the Centaurs
drank (p. 386). A flatterer and a demagogue might drink deep for his own
base purposes. Of the arch-demagogue Alcibiades Plutarch[1137] says:
‘At Athens he scoffed and kept horses, at Sparta he went close-shaved
and wore a short cloak and washed in cold water, in Thrace he fought
and drank.’ War and drink, Ares and Dionysos, have been in all ages
the chosen divinities of the Northerner. Diodorus[1138] in speaking of
ceremonial wine-drinking makes a characteristically Greek statement:
‘They say that those who drink at banquets when unmixed wine is provided
invoke the Good Genius, but when after the meal wine is given mixed with
water they call on the name of Zeus the Saviour; for they hold that wine
drunk unmixed produces forms of madness, but that when it is mixed with
the rain of Zeus the joy of it and the delight remain, and the injurious
element that causes madness and license is corrected.’ The Good, or
perhaps we ought to call him ‘Wealthy,’ Spirit is the very essence of
the old wine-god of Thrace and Boeotia; the blending with the rain of
Zeus is the taking of it over to the mildness and temperance of the Greek
character.
* * * * *
Excess was rare among the southern Greeks, and, even when they exceeded,
because they were a people of artists they euphemized. No one but a Greek
could have conceived the lovely little vase-painting from an oinochoë in
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts[1139] in fig. 138. A beautiful maiden is
the centre of the scene. She is a worshipper of Dionysos. In her left
hand is a tall thyrsos and she holds the cup of Dionysos, the kantharos,
in her right. It is empty, and she seems to ask the Satyr who stands
before her to refill it from his oinochoë. But he will not, she has had
too much already. Over her beautiful head, slightly inclined as if in
weariness, is inscribed—and who but a Greek would have dared to write
it?—her name ‘Kraipale.’ Behind her comes a kindly sober friend bearing
in her hand a hot drink, smoking still, to cure her sickness.
[Illustration: FIG. 138.]
Perhaps because the extreme of drunkenness, its after degradation and
squalid ugliness, was rare among the Greeks, they were better able to
realize that in its milder forms it lent lovely motives for art. Wine
by the release it brings from self-consciousness unslacks the limbs
and gives to pose and gesture the new beauty of abandonment. Degas has
dared to seize and fix for ever the beauty he saw in that tragedy of
degradation—a woman of the people besotted by absinthe. The peeping
moralist that lurks in most of us intrudes to utter truth beside the mark
and say that she is wicked. To the Greek artist there was no such extreme
issue between art and morality. To him, whether poet or vase-painter,
to drink and fall asleep was if not a common at least a beautiful
experience, one he painted on many a vase and sang in many a song. A
festival without the grace and glory of wine would to him have been shorn
of well nigh all its goodliness. On this it is needless to insist. To him
peace and wine and sleep are playfellows loving and lovely[1140]:
‘Eyelids closed and lulled heart deep
In gentle, unforbidden sleep,
Street by street the city brims
With lovers’ feasts and burns with lovers’ hymns.’
Another point remains to be noted. Not only did the Greeks mix their
Thracian wine with water, tempering the madness of the god, but they saw
in Dionysos the god of spiritual as well as physical intoxication. It
cannot be forgotten that the drama sprang from the religion of Dionysos;
his nurses are not only Maenads, they are Muses; from him and him only
comes the beauty and magic of their song:
‘Hail Child of Semele, only by thee
Can any singing sweet and gracious be.’
The contrast between sheer Thracian madness and the Athenian notion
of inspiration is very clearly seen in the two figures of Dionysos
as represented on the two vase-paintings in fig. 139 and fig. 140,
vase-paintings roughly contemporaneous, the first in the style of
Hieron, the second in that of Brygos. In fig. 139 from a red-figured
stamnos[1141] in the British Museum we have the Thracian Dionysos drunk
with wine, a brutal though still splendid savage; he dances in ecstasy
brandishing the fawn he has rent asunder in his madness. In the second
picture[1142] (fig. 140), a masterpiece of decorative composition, we
have Dionysos as the Athenian cared to know him. The strange mad Satyrs
are twisted and contorted to make exquisite patterns, they clash their
frenzied crotala and wave great vine branches. But in the midst of the
revel the god himself stands erect. He holds no kantharos, only a great
lyre. His head is thrown back in ecstasy; he is drunken, but with music,
not with wine.
[Illustration: FIG. 139.]
[Illustration: FIG. 140.]
Again, with the Maenad worshippers there is the same transformation.
The delicate red-figured kotylos[1143] in fig. 141 from the National
Museum in Athens is like a little twofold text on the double aspect of
the worship of Dionysos. On the obverse is a Maenad about to execute her
old savage ritual of tearing a kid asunder. In a moment she will raise
her bent head and chant[1144]:
‘O glad, glad on the Mountains
To swoon in the race outworn,
When the holy fawn-skin clings
And all else sweeps away,
To the joy of the quick red fountains,
The blood of the hill-goat torn,
The glory of wild-beast ravenings
Where the hill-top catches the day,
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains
’Tis Bromios leads the way.’
[Illustration: FIG. 141.]
On the reverse for counterpart is a sister Maenad. She dances in gentle
ecstasy, playing on her great timbrel. She is all for the service of the
Muses, and she might sing[1145]:
‘But a better land is there
Where Olympus cleaves the air,
The high still dell, where the Muses dwell,
Fairest of all things fair.
O there is Grace, and there is the Heart’s Desire,
And peace to adore thee, thou Spirit of guiding Fire.’
* * * * *
There are some to whom by natural temperament the religion of
Bromios, son of Semele, is and must always be a dead letter, if not a
stumbling-block. Food is to such a troublesome necessity, wine a danger
or a disgust. They dread all stimulus that comes from without, they
would fain break the ties that link them with animals and plants. They
do not feel in themselves and are at a loss to imagine for others the
sacramental mystery of life and nutrition that is accomplished in us day
by day, how in the faintness of fasting the whole nature of man, spirit
as well as body, dies down, he cannot think, he cannot work, he cannot
love, how in the breaking of bread, and still more in the drinking of
wine, life spiritual as well as physical is renewed, thought is re-born,
his equanimity, his magnanimity are restored, reason and morality rule
again. But to this sacramentalism of life most of us bear constant, if
partly unconscious, witness. We will not eat with the man we hate, it is
felt a sacrilege leaving a sickness in body and soul. The first breaking
of bread and drinking of wine together is the seal of a new friendship;
the last eaten in silence at parting is more than many words. The
sacramental feast of bread and wine is spread for the newly married, for
the newly dead.
Those to whom wine brings no inspiration, no moments of sudden
illumination, of wider and deeper insight, of larger human charity
and understanding, find it hard to realize what to others of other
temperament is so natural, so elemental, so beautiful—the constant shift
from physical to spiritual that is of the essence of the religion of
Dionysos. But there are those also, and they are saintly souls, who know
it all to the full, know the exhilaration of wine, know what it is to
be drunken with the physical beauty of a flower or a sunset, with the
sensuous imagery of words, with the strong wine of a new idea, with
the magic of another’s personality, yet having known, turn away with
steadfast eyes, disallowing the madness not only of Bromios but of the
Muses and of Aphrodite. Such have their inward ecstasy of the ascetic,
but they revel with another Lord, and he is Orpheus.
CHAPTER IX.
ORPHEUS.
‘πολλοὶ μὲν ναρθηκοφόροι, παῦροι δέ τε Βάκχοι.’
Mythology has left us no tangle more intricate and assuredly no problem
half so interesting as the relation between the ritual and mythology of
Orpheus and Dionysos.
By the time of Herodotus[1146] the followers of Orpheus and of Bacchus
are regarded as substantially identical. In commenting on the taboo
among the Egyptians against being buried in woollen garments he says:
‘In this respect they agree with the rites which are called Bacchic and
Orphic but are really Egyptian and Pythagorean.’ The identification is of
course a rough and ready one, an identification of race on the precarious
basis of a similarity of rites, but one thing is clear to the mind of
Herodotus—Orphic and Bacchic and Egyptian rites are either identical or
closely analogous. The analogy between Orpheus and Bacchus passed by the
time of Euripides into current language. Theseus[1147] when he would
taunt Hippolytus with his pseudo-asceticism says:
‘Go revel thy Bacchic rites
With Orpheus for thy Lord,’
and Apollodorus[1148] in his systematic account of the Muses states
that Orpheus ‘invented the mysteries of Dionysos.’ The severance of the
two figures by modern mythologists has often led to the misconception
of both. The full significance, the higher spiritual developments of
the religion of Dionysos are only understood through the doctrine of
Orpheus, and the doctrine of Orpheus apart from the religion of Dionysos
is a dead letter.
And yet, clearly linked though they are, the most superficial survey
reveals differences so striking as to amount to a spiritual antagonism.
Orpheus reflects Dionysos, yet at almost every point seems to contradict
him. The sober gentle musician, the precise almost pedantic theologist,
is no mere echo, no reincarnation of the maddened, maddening wine-god.
Diodorus expresses a truth that must have struck every thinker among the
Greeks, that this real and close resemblance veiled an inner, intimate
discrepancy. He says[1149], in telling the story of Lycurgus, ‘Charops,
grandfather of Orpheus, gave help to the god, and Dionysos in gratitude
instructed him in the orgies of his rites; Charops handed them down
to his son Oiagros, and Oiagros to his son Orpheus.’ Then follow the
significant words: ‘Orpheus, being a man gifted by nature and highly
trained above all others, _made many modifications in the orgiastic
rites_: hence they call the rites that took their rise from Dionysos,
Orphic.’ Diodorus seems to have put his finger on the secret of Orpheus.
He comes later than Dionysos, he is a man not a god, and his work is to
modify the rites of the god he worshipped.
It is necessary at the outset to emphasize the humanity of Orpheus. About
his legend has gathered much that is miraculous and a theory[1150] has
been started and supported with much learning and ability, a theory which
sees in Orpheus an underworld god, the chthonic counterpart of Dionysos,
and that derives his name from chthonic darkness (ὄρφνη). This is to my
mind to misconceive the whole relation between the two.
ORPHEUS AS MAGICAL MUSICIAN.
Like the god he served, Orpheus is at one part of his career a Thracian,
unlike him a magical musician. Dionysos, as has been seen (p. 452),
played upon the lyre, but music was never of his essence.
In the matter of Thracian music we are happily on firm ground. The
magical musician, whose figure to the modern mind has almost effaced the
theologist, comes as would be expected from the home of music, the North.
Conon[1151] in his life of Orpheus says expressly, ‘the stock of the
Thracians and Macedonians is music-loving.’ Strabo[1152] too is explicit
on this point. In the passage already quoted (p. 415), on the strange
musical instruments used in the orgies of Dionysos, he says: ‘Similar
to these (i.e. the rites of Dionysos) are the Kotyttia and Bendideia
practised among the Thracians, and with them also Orphic rites had their
beginning.’ A little further he goes on to say that the Thracian origin
of the worship of the Muses is clear from the places sacred to their
cult. ‘For Pieria and Olympus and Pimplea and Leibethra were of old
Thracian mountains and districts, but are now held by the Macedonians,
and the Thracians who colonized Boeotia consecrated Helicon to the Muses
and also the cave of the Nymphs called Leibethriades. And those who
practised ancient music are said to have been Thracians, Orpheus and
Musaeus and Thamyris, and the name Eumolpus comes from Thrace.’
The statement of Strabo is noticeable. As Diodorus places Orpheus two
generations later than Dionysos, so the cult of the Muses with which
Orpheus is associated seems chiefly to prevail in Lesbos and among
the Cicones of Lower Thrace and Macedonia. We do not hear of Orpheus
among the remote inland Bessi. This may point to a somewhat later date
of development when the Thracians were moving southwards. That there
were primitive and barbarous tribes living far north who practised
music we know again from Strabo. He tells[1153] of an Illyrian tribe,
the Dardanii, who were wholly savage and lived in caves they dug under
dung-heaps, but all the same they were very musical and played a great
deal on pipes and stringed instruments. The practice of music alone does
not even now-a-days necessarily mark a high level of culture, and the
magic of Orpheus was, as will later be seen, much more than the making of
sweet sounds.
Orpheus, unlike Dionysos, remained consistently a Northerner. We have
no universal spread of his name, no fabulous birth stories everywhere,
no mystic Nysa; he does not take whole nations by storm, he is always
known to be an immigrant and is always of the few. At Thebes we hear of
magical singers Zethus and Amphion, but not of Orpheus. In Asia he seems
never to have prevailed; the orgies of Dionysos and the Mother remained
in Asia in their primitive Thracian savagery. It is in Athens that he
mainly re-emerges.
* * * * *
To the modern mind the music of Orpheus has become mainly fabulous, a
magic constraint over the wild things of nature.
‘Orpheus with his lute made trees
And the mountain tops that freeze
Bow themselves when he did sing.’
This notion of the fabulous music was already current in antiquity. The
Maenads in the _Bacchae_[1154] call to their Lord to come from Parnassos,
‘Or where stern Olympus stands
In the elm woods or the oaken,
There where Orpheus harped of old,
And the trees awoke and knew him,
And the wild things gathered to him,
As he sang among the broken
Glens his music manifold,’
and again in the lovely song of the _Alcestis_[1155], the chorus sing to
Apollo who is but another Orpheus:
‘And the spotted lynxes for joy of thy song
Were as sheep in the fold, and a tawny throng
Of lions trooped down from Othrys’ lawn,
And her light foot lifting, a dappled fawn
Left the shade of the high-tressed pine,
And danced for joy to that lyre of thine.’
In Pompeian wall-paintings and Graeco-Roman sarcophagi it is as magical
musician, with power over all wild untamed things in nature, that Orpheus
appears. This conception naturally passed into Christian art and it is
interesting to watch the magical musician transformed gradually into the
Good Shepherd. The bad wild beasts, the lions and lynxes, are weeded out
one by one, and we are left, as in the wonderful Ravenna[1156] mosaic,
with only a congregation of mild patient sheep.
It is the more interesting to find that on black and red-figured
vase-paintings, spite of this literary tradition, the power of the
magical musician is quite differently conceived. Orpheus does not appear
at all on black-figured vases—again a note of his late coming—and on
red-figured vases never with the attendant wild beasts.
[Illustration: FIG. 142.]
On a vase found at Gela and now in the Berlin Museum[1157], reproduced
in fig. 142, we have Orpheus as musician. He wears Greek dress and
sits playing on his lyre with up-turned head, utterly aloof, absorbed.
And round him are not wild beasts but wild _men_, Thracians. They wear
uniformly the characteristic Thracian dress, the fox-skin cap and the
long embroidered cloak, of both of which Herodotus[1158] makes mention as
characteristic. The Thracians who joined the Persian expedition, he says,
‘wore fox-skins on their heads and were clothed with various-coloured
cloaks.’ These wild Thracians in the vase-painting are all intent on the
music; the one to the right looks suspicious of this new magic, the one
immediately facing Orpheus is determined to enquire into it, the one just
behind has gone under completely; his eyes are shut, his head falling, he
is mesmerized, drunken but not with wine.
This beautiful picture brings to our minds very forcibly one note of
Orpheus, as contrasted with Dionysos, his extraordinary quiet. Orpheus
never plays the flute ‘that rouses to madness’ nor clangs the deafening
cymbals; he plays always on the quiet lyre, and he is never disturbed or
distraught by his own music. He is the very mirror of that ‘orderliness
and grave earnestness’ (τάξις καὶ σπουδή) which, as we have seen (p.
441), Plutarch took to be the note of Apollo. Small wonder that Apollo
was imaged as Orpheus.
Orpheus, before the dawn of history, had made his home in Thrace. His
music is all of the North, but after all, though mythology always
emphasizes this music, it was not the whole secret of his influence.
He was more priest than musician. Moreover, though Orpheus has certain
Apolline touches, the two figures are not really the least like. About
Apollo there is no atmosphere of mysticism, nothing mysterious and
ineffable; he is all sweet reasonableness and lucidity. Orpheus came to
Thrace and thence to Thessaly, but he came, I believe, from the South. It
will later be seen that his religion in its most primitive form is best
studied in Crete. In Crete and perhaps there only is found that strange
blend of Egyptian and primitive Pelasgian which found its expression in
Orphic rites. Diodorus[1159] says Orpheus went to Egypt to learn his
ritual and theology, but in reality there was no need to leave his native
island. From Crete by the old island route[1160] he passed northwards,
leaving his mystic rites as he passed at Paros, at Samos, at Samothrace,
at Lesbos. At Maroneia among the Cicones he met the vine-god, among the
Thracians he learnt his music. All this is by anticipation. That Crete
was the home of Orphism will best be seen after examination of the
mysteries of Orpheus (p. 565). For the present we must be content to
examine his mythology.
The contrast between Orpheus and Dionysos is yet more vividly emphasized
in the vase-painting[1161] next to be considered (fig. 143), from a
red-figured hydria of rather late style. Again Orpheus is the central
figure, and again a Thracian in his long embroidered cloak and fox-skin
cap is listening awe-struck. It is noticeable that in this and all
red-figured vases of the fine period Orpheus is dressed as a Greek; he
has been wholly assimilated, nothing in his dress marks him from Apollo.
It is not till a very late date, and chiefly in Lower Italy, that the
vase-painter shows himself an archaeologist and dresses Orpheus as a
Thracian priest. Not only a Thracian but a Satyr looks and listens
entranced. But this time Orpheus will not work his magic will. He may
tame the actual Thracian, he may tame the primitive population of Thrace
mythologically conceived of as Satyrs, but the real worshipper of
Dionysos is untameable as yet. Up from behind in hot haste comes a Maenad
armed with a great club, and we foresee the pitiful end.
[Illustration: FIG. 143.]
THE DEATH OF ORPHEUS.
The story of the slaying of Orpheus by the Thracian women, the Maenads,
the Bassarids, is of cardinal importance. It was the subject of a lost
play by Aeschylus, but vases of the severe red-figured style remain our
earliest extant source. Manifold reasons, to suit the taste of various
ages, were of course invented to account for the myth. Some said Orpheus
was slain by Zeus because Prometheus-like he revealed mysteries to man.
When love came into fashion he suffers for his supposed sin against the
Love-God. Plato[1162] made him be done to death by the Maenads, because,
instead of dying for love of Eurydice, he went down alive into Hades. But
serious tradition always connected his death somehow with the cult of
Dionysos. According to one account he died the death of Dionysos himself.
Proklos[1163] in his commentary on Plato says: ‘Orpheus, because he was
the leader in the rites of Dionysos, is said to have suffered the like
fate to his god.’ It will later be shown in discussing Orphic mysteries
(p. 484) that an important feature in Dionysiac religion was the rending
and death of the god, and no doubt to the faithful it seemed matter of
edification that Orpheus, the priest of his mysteries, should suffer the
like passion.
But in the myth of the death by the hands of the Maenads there is
another element, possibly with some historical kernel, the element of
hostility between the two cults, the intimate and bitter hostility of
things near akin. The Maenads tear Orpheus to pieces, not because he
is an incarnation of their god, but because he despises them and they
hate him. This seems to have been the form of the legend followed by
Aeschylus. It is recorded for us by Eratosthenes[1164]. ‘He (Orpheus)
did not honour Dionysos but accounted Helios the greatest of the gods,
whom also he called Apollo. And rising up early in the morning he climbed
the mountain called Pangaion and waited for the rising of the sun that
he might first catch sight of it. Therefore Dionysos was enraged and
sent against him his Bassarids, as Aeschylus the poet says. And they
tore him to pieces and cast his limbs asunder. But the Muses gathered
them together and buried them in the place called Leibethra.’ Orpheus
was a reformer, a protestant; there is always about him a touch of the
reformer’s priggishness; it is impossible not to sympathize a little with
the determined looking Maenad who is coming up behind to put a stop to
all this sun-watching and lyre-playing.
The devotion of Orpheus to Helios is noted also in the hypothesis to the
Orphic _Lithika_[1165]. Orpheus was on his way up a mountain to perform
an annual sacrifice in company with some friends when he met Theiodamas.
He tells Theiodamas the origin of the custom. When Orpheus was a child
he was nearly killed by a snake and he took refuge in a neighbouring
sanctuary of Helios. The father of Orpheus instituted the sacrifice and
when his father left the country Orpheus kept it up. Theiodamas waits
till the ceremony is over, and then follows the discourse on precious
stones.
That there was a Thracian cult of the Sun-god later fused with that of
Apollo is certain. Sophocles[1166] in the _Tereus_ made some one say:
‘O Helios, name
To Thracian horsemen dear, O eldest flame!’
Helios was a favourite of monotheism, as we learn from another fragment
of Sophocles[1167]:
‘Helios, have pity on me,
Thou whom the wise men call the sire of gods
And father of all things.’
The ‘wise men’ here as in many other passages[1168] may actually be
Orphic teachers, anyhow they are specialists in theology. Helios, as
all-father, has the air of late speculation, but such speculations are
often only the revival in another and modified form of a primitive faith.
By the time of Homer, Helios had sunk to a mere impersonation of natural
fact, but he may originally have been a potent sky god akin to Keraunios
and to Ouranos, who was himself effaced by Zeus. Orpheus was, as will
later be seen, a teacher of monotheism, and it was quite in his manner to
attempt the revival of an ancient and possibly purer faith.
Be this as it may, it is quite certain that ancient tradition made him
the foe of Dionysos and the victim of the god’s worshippers. His death
at their hands is depicted on numerous vase-paintings of which a typical
instance is given in fig. 144. The design is from a red-figured stamnos
in the Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican[1169]. The scheme is usually much
the same; we have the onset of the Thracian women bearing clubs or double
axes or great rocks for weapons. Usually they are on foot, but on the
Vatican stamnos one Maenad appears mounted, Amazon fashion. Before this
fierce onset the beautiful musician falls helpless, his only weapon of
defence the innocent lyre. On a cylix[1170] with white ground about the
date of Euphronios, the Thracian Maenad who slays Orpheus is tattooed;
on the upper part of her right arm is clearly marked a little stag.
Popular aetiology connected this tattooing with the death of Orpheus.
The husbands of the wicked women tattooed them as a punishment for their
crime, and all husbands continued the practice down to the time of
Plutarch. Plutarch[1171] says he ‘cannot praise them,’ as long protracted
punishment is ‘the prerogative of the Deity.’ Prof. Ridgeway[1172] has
shown that the practice of tattooing was in use among the primitive
Pelasgian population but never adopted by the Achaeans.
[Illustration: FIG. 144.]
The Maenads triumphed for a time.
‘What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,
The Muse herself for her enchanting son,
Whom universal nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?’
The dismal savage tale comes to a gentle close. The head of Orpheus,
singing always, is found by the Muses, and buried in the sanctuary at
Lesbos. Who are the Muses? Who but the Maenads repentant, clothed and in
their right minds.
That Maenads and Muses, widely diverse though they seem to us, were not
by classical writers sharply sundered is seen in the variant versions
of the story of Lycurgus. Dionysos in Homer is attended by his nurses
(τιθῆναι) and these, as has already been shown (p. 402), are Maenads,
but, when we come to Sophocles, these same nurses, these ‘god-inspired’
women, are not Maenads, but Muses. The chorus in the _Antigone_[1173]
sings of Lycurgus; how he
‘Set his hand
To stay the god-inspired woman-band,
To quell his Women and his joyous fire,
And rouse the fluting Muses into ire.’
Nor is it poetry only that bears witness. In the introduction to the
eighth book of his _Symposiacs_ Plutarch[1174] is urging the importance
of mingling improving conversation with the drinking of wine. ‘It is
a good custom,’ he says, ‘that our women have, who in the festival of
the Agrionia seek for Dionysos as though he had run away, and then they
give up seeking and say that _he has taken refuge with the Muses_ and
is lurking with them, and after some time when they have finished their
feast they ask each other riddles and conundrums (αἰνίγματα καὶ γρίφους).
And this mystery teaches us....’ In some secret Bacchic ceremonial extant
in the days of Plutarch and carried on by women only, Dionysos was
supposed to be in the hands of his women attendants, but they were known
as Muses not as Maenads. The shift of Maenad to Muse is like the change
of Bacchic rites to Orphic; it is the informing of savage rites with the
spirit of music, order and peace.
THE HERO-SHRINE OF ORPHEUS.
Tradition says that Orpheus was buried by the Muses, and fortunately
of his burial-place we know some definite particulars. It is a general
principle in mythology that the reputed death-place of a god or hero
is of more significance than his birth-place, because, among a people
like the Greeks, who practised hero-worship, it is about the death-place
and the tomb that cultus is set up. The birth-place may have a mythical
sanctity, but it is at the death-place that we can best study ritual
practice.
Philostratos[1175] in the _Heroicus_ says: ‘After the outrage of the
women the head of Orpheus reached Lesbos and dwelt in a cleft of the
island and gave oracles in the hollow earth.’ It is clear that we have
here some form of _Nekyomanteion_, oracle of the dead. Of such there were
many scattered all over Greece; in fact, as has already been seen (p.
341), the tomb of almost any hero might become oracular. The oracular
tomb of Orpheus became of wide repute. Inquirers, Philostratos[1176]
tells us, came to it even from far-off Babylon. It was from the shrine of
Orpheus in Lesbos that in old days there came to Cyrus the brief, famous
utterance: ‘Mine, O Cyrus, are thine.’
Lucian[1177] adds an important statement. In telling the story of the
head and the lyre he says: ‘The head they buried at the place where
now they have a sanctuary of Bacchus. The lyre on the other hand was
dedicated in a sanctuary of Apollo.’ The statement carries conviction.
It would have been so easy to bury head and lyre together. The truth
probably was that the lyre was a later decorative addition to an old
head-oracle story; the head was buried in the shrine of the god whose
religion Orpheus reformed.
Antigonus[1178] in his ‘History of Wonderful Things’ records a lovely
tradition. He quotes as his authority Myrtilos, who wrote a treatise on
Lesbian matters. Myrtilos said that, according to the local tradition,
the tomb of the head of Orpheus was shown at Antissaia, and that
the nightingales sang there more sweetly than elsewhere. In those
wonder-loving days a bird had but to perch upon a tomb and her song
became a miracle.
The oracle shrine of Orpheus is depicted for us on a somewhat late
red-figured cylix of which the obverse[1179] is reproduced in fig. 145.
It is our earliest definite source for his cult. The head of Orpheus is
prophesying with parted lips. We are reminded of the vase-painting in
fig. 10, where the head of Teiresias emerges bodily from the sacrificial
trench near which Odysseus is seated. A youth has come to consult the
oracle and holds in his hands a tablet and style. Whether he is putting
down his own question or the god’s answer is uncertain. We know from
Plutarch[1180] that at the oracle shrine of another hero, Mopsos,
questions were sometimes sent in on sealed tablets[1181]. In the case
cited by Plutarch a test question was set and the oracle proved equal to
the occasion. The vase-painting calls to mind the lines in the _Alcestis_
of Euripides where the chorus sings[1182]:
‘Though to high heaven I fly,
Borne on the Muses’ wing,
Thinking great thoughts, yet do I find no thing
Stronger than stern Necessity.
No—not the spell
On Thracian tablets legible
That from the voice of Orpheus fell,
Nor those that Phoebus to Asklepios gave
That he might weary woe-worn mortals save.’
[Illustration: FIG. 145.]
Orpheus on the vase-painting is a voice (γῆρυς) and nothing more. As
to the tablets, if we may trust the scholiast on the passage, tablets
accredited to Orpheus actually existed. He quotes Herakleitos[1183]
the philosopher as stating that Orpheus ‘set in order the religion of
Dionysos in Thrace on Mount Haemus, where they say there are certain
writings of his on tablets.’ There is no reason to doubt the tradition,
and it serves to emphasize the fact that Orpheus was an actual person,
living, teaching, writing, writing perhaps in those old ‘Pelasgian’
characters which Linos used long before the coming of Phoenician letters,
characters which it may be are those still undeciphered which have come
to light in Crete[1184].
Above the head of Orpheus in the vase-painting (fig. 145) stands Apollo.
In his left hand he holds his prophetic staff of laurel, his right
is outstretched, but whether to command or forbid is hard to say. A
curious account of the oracle on Lesbos given by Philostratos[1185] in
his Life of Apollonius of Tyana informs us that the relations of Apollo
and Orpheus were not entirely peaceable. Apollonius, says Philostratos,
landed at Lesbos and visited the adyton of Orpheus. They say that in this
place of old Orpheus was wont to take pleasure in prophecy until Apollo
took the oversight himself. For inasmuch as men no longer resorted to
Gryneion for oracles nor to Klaros nor to the place of the tripod of
Apollo, but the head of Orpheus, recently come from Thrace, alone gave
responses, the god came and stood over him as he uttered oracles and
said: ‘Cease from the things that are mine, for long enough have I borne
with thee and thy singing.’ Apollo will brook no rivalry even of his most
faithful worshipper. The quaint story is evidence of the intolerance of a
dominant and missionary cult.
Most circumstantial of all accounts of Orpheus is that given by
Conon[1186]. No one would of course accept as evidence _en bloc_ the
statements of Conon, concerned as he mainly is to compile a complete and
interesting story. Certain of his statements however have an inherent
probability which makes them of considerable value. He devotes to
Orpheus the whole of one of his narrations. He tells all the orthodox
details, how Orpheus won the hearts of Thracians and Macedonians by his
music, how he charmed rocks and trees and wild beasts and even the heart
of Kore, queen of the underworld. Then he proceeds to the story of the
death. Orpheus refused to reveal his mysteries to women, whom since the
loss of his own wife he had hated _en masse_. The men of Thrace and
Macedonia were wont to assemble in arms on certain fixed days, in a
building at Leibethra of large size and well arranged for the purpose
of the celebration of rites. When they went in to celebrate their
orgiastic rites they laid down their arms before the entrance gate. The
women watched their opportunity, seized the arms, slew the men and tore
Orpheus to pieces, throwing his limbs into the sea. There was the usual
pestilence in consequence and the oracular order that the head of Orpheus
should be buried. After some search the head was found by a fisherman at
the mouth of the river Meles. ‘It was still singing nor had it suffered
any change from the sea, nor any other of the outrages that the Keres
which beset mortals inflict on the dead, but it was still blooming
and even then after the long lapse of time it was bleeding with fresh
blood.’ Other stories of bleeding miraculous heads occur in antiquity.
Aelian[1187] records several and Phlegon[1188] in his ‘Wonders’ tells of
the miracle that happened at the battle against Antiochus in 191 A.D. A
bleeding head gave an oracle in elegiac verse and very wisely ordained
that the spectators were not to touch it but only to listen.
The details supplied by Conon are of course aetiological, but we seem to
discern behind them some possible basis of historical fact, some outrage
of the wild women of Thrace against a real immigrant prophet in whose
reforms they saw contempt of their rites. The blood of some real martyr
may have been the seed of the new Orphic church. How this came to be
Conon at the end of his narrative explains: ‘When the miraculous head,
singing and bleeding, was found, they took it and buried it beneath a
great monument and fenced it in with a sacred precinct, a precinct that
no woman might ever enter.’ The significant statement is added that the
tomb with its precinct was at first a _heroön_, but later it obtained as
a _hieron_ and the proof was that it was honoured with burnt sacrifices
(θυσίαις) and all the other meeds of the gods.
* * * * *
Conon has undoubtedly put his finger on the truth. Orpheus was a real
man, a mighty singer, a prophet and a teacher, bringing with him a new
religion, seeking to reform an old one. He was martyred and after his
death his tomb became a mantic shrine. So long as it was merely a hero
shrine the offerings were those proper to the dead (ἐναγίσματα), but an
effort was made by the faithful to raise him to the rank of an upperworld
Olympian. Locally burnt sacrifices, the meed of the Olympians of the
upper air, were actually no doubt offered, but the cult of Orpheus _as
a god_ did not obtain. Translation to the Upper House of the Olympians
was not always wholly promotion. What you gain as a personage you are
apt to lose as a personality. Orpheus sacrificed divinity to retain his
beautiful humanity. He is somewhere on the same plane with Herakles and
Asklepios (p. 347), too human ever to be quite divine. But the escape was
a narrow one. Probably if a greater than he, Apollo, had not ‘taken the
oversight,’ the sequel would have been otherwise.
Conon writing in the time of Augustus believed Orpheus to have been
a real man. So did Strabo[1189]. In describing the Thermaean gulf he
says that the city of Dium is not on the coast but about seven stadia
distant and ‘near the city of Dium is a village called Pimpleia where
Orpheus lived.... Orpheus was of the tribe of the Cicones and was a man
of magical power both as regards music and divination. He went about
practising orgiastic rites and later, waxing self-confident, he obtained
many followers and great influence. Some accepted him willingly, others,
suspecting that he meditated violence and conspiracy, attacked and slew
him.’ He adds that ‘in olden times prophets were wont to practise the art
of music also.’
Still more completely human is the picture that Pausanias[1190] draws of
the life and work of Orpheus. In the monument to Orpheus that he saw on
Mt. Helicon the spell-bound beasts are listening to the music, and by
the musician’s side is the figure of _Telete_, ‘Rite of Initiation.’
Pausanias comments as follows: ‘In my opinion Orpheus was a man who
surpassed his predecessors in the beauty of his poems and attained to
great power, because he was believed to have discovered rites of the
gods and purifications for unholy deeds and remedies for diseases and
means of averting divine wrath.’ And again, at the close of his account
of the various miraculous legends that had gathered about Orpheus he
says: ‘Whoever has concerned himself with poetry knows that all the hymns
of Orpheus are short and that the number of them all is not great. The
Lycomids[1191] know them and chant them over their rites. In beauty they
may rank as second to the hymns of Homer, but they have attained to even
higher divine favour.’
Pausanias puts the relation between Homer and Orpheus in much the same
fashion as Aristophanes[1192], who makes Aeschylus recount the service of
poets to the state:
‘It was Orpheus revealed to us holy rites, our hands from bloodshed
withholding;
Musaeos gave us our healing arts, oracular words unfolding;
And Hesiod showed us to till the earth and the seasons of fruits and
ploughing;
But Homer the god-like taught good things, and this too had for his
glory
That he sang of arms and battle array and deeds renowned in story.’
Homer sang of mortals, Orpheus of the gods; both are men, but of the two
Orpheus is least fabulous. About both gather alien accretions, but the
kernel remains human not divine.
Orpheus then halted half way on the ladder between earth and heaven,
a ladder up which many mortals have gone and vanished into the remote
unreality of complete godhead.
S. Augustine admirably hits the mark when he says[1193]: ‘After the same
interval of time there came the poets, who also, since they wrote poems
about the gods, are called theologians, Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus. But
these theologians were not worshipped as gods, though in some fashion the
kingdom of the godless is wont to set Orpheus as head over the rites of
the underworld.’
The line indeed between hero and underworld god was, as has already been
abundantly seen, but a shifting shadow. It is useless however to urge
that because Orpheus had a local shrine and a cult he was therefore a god
in the current acceptation of the term. Theseus had a shrine, so had
Diomede, so had each and every canonical hero; locally they were potent
for good and evil, but we do not call them gods. Athenaeus[1194] marks
the distinction. ‘Apollo,’ he says, ‘the Greeks accounted the wisest and
most musical of the gods, and Orpheus of the semi-gods.’
Once we are fairly awake to the fact that Orpheus was a real live man,
not a faded god, we are struck by the human touches in his story, and
most by a certain vividness of emotion, a reality and personality of like
and dislike that attends him. He seems to have irritated and repelled
some as much as he attracted others. Pausanias[1195] tells how of old
prizes were offered for hymns in honour of a god. Chrysothemis of Crete
and Philammon and Thamyris come and compete like ordinary mortals, but
Orpheus ‘thought such great things of his rites and his own personal
character that he would not compete at all.’ Always about him there
is this aloof air, this remoteness, not only of the self-sufficing
artist, who is and must be always alone, but of the scrupulous moralist
and reformer; yet withal and through all he is human, a man, who
Socrates-like draws men and repels them, not by persuading their reason,
still less by enflaming their passions, but by sheer magic of his
personality. It is this mesmeric charm that makes it hard even now-a-days
to think soberly of Orpheus.
ORPHEUS AT ATHENS.
Orpheus, poet, seer, musician, theologist, was a man and a Thracian,
and yet it is chiefly through his influence at Athens that we know him.
The author of the _Rhesos_ makes the Muse complain that it is Athene
not Odysseus that is the cause of the tragedy that befell the Thracian
prince. She thus appeals to the goddess[1196]:
‘And yet we Muses, we his kinsmen hold
Thy land revered and there are wont to dwell,
And Orpheus, he own cousin to the dead,
Revealed to thee his secret mysteries.’
The tragedian reflects the double fact—the Thracian _provenance_, the
naturalization in Athens.
Orpheus, we know, reorganized and reformed the rites of Bacchus. How
much he was himself reorganized and reformed we shall never fully know.
The work of editing and popularizing Orpheus at Athens was accredited
to Onomacritos, he who made the indiscreet interpolation in the oracles
of Musaeus and was banished for it by the son of Peisistratos[1197]. If
Onomacritos interpolated oracles into the poems of Musaeus, why should he
spare Orpheus? Tatian[1198] writes that ‘Orpheus was contemporary with
Herakles,’ another note that he is heroic rather than divine, and adds:
‘They say that the poems that were circulated under the name of Orpheus
were put together by Onomacritos the Athenian.’ Clement[1199] goes
further. He says that these poems were actually by Onomacritos who lived
in the 50th Olympiad in the reign of the Peisistratidae. The line in
those days between writing poems of your own and editing those of other
people was less sharply drawn than it is to-day. Onomacritos had every
temptation to interpolate, for he himself wrote poems on the rites of
Dionysos. Pausanias[1200] in explaining the presence of the Titan Anytos
at Lycosura says: ‘Onomacritos took the name of the Titans from Homer and
composed orgies for Dionysos and made the Titans the actual agents in the
sufferings of Dionysos.’
Something then was done about ‘Orpheus’ in the time of the Peisistratidae
as something was done about ‘Homer,’ some work of editing, compiling,
revising. What form precisely this work took is uncertain. What is
certain is that somehow Orphism, Orphic rites and Orphic poems had,
before the classical period, come to Athens. The effect of this Orphic
spirit was less obvious, less widespread, than that of Homer, but
perhaps more intimate and vital. We know it because Euripides and Plato
are deep-dyed in Orphism, we know it not only by the signs of actual
influence, but by the frequently raised protest.
* * * * *
Orpheus, it has been established in the mouth of many witnesses,
modified, ordered, ‘rearranged’ Bacchic rites. We naturally ask—was this
all? Did this man whose name has come down to us through the ages, in
whose saintly and ascetic figure the early Church saw the prototype of
her Christ, effect nothing more vital than modification? Was his sole
mission to bring order and decorum into an orgiastic and riotous ritual?
Such a notion is _a priori_ as improbable as it is false to actual fact.
Externally Orpheus differs from Dionysos, to put it plainly, in this.
Dionysos is drunken, Orpheus is utterly sober. But this new spirit of
gentle decorum is but the manifestation, the outward shining of a lambent
flame within, the expression of a new spiritual faith which brought to
man at the moment he most needed it, the longing for purity and peace in
this life, the hope of final fruition in the next.
Before proceeding to discuss in detail such records of actual Orphic
rites as remain, this new principle must be made clear. Apart from it
Orphic rites lose all their real sacramental significance and lapse into
mere superstitions.
THE CARDINAL DOCTRINE OF ORPHISM.
The whole gist of the matter may thus be summed up. Orpheus took an
ancient superstition, deep-rooted in the savage ritual of Dionysos, and
lent to it a new spiritual significance. The old superstition and the new
faith are both embodied in the little Orphic text that stands at the head
of this chapter:
‘Many are the wand-bearers, few are the Bacchoi.’
Can we be sure that this is really an Orphic text or was it merely a
current proverb of any and every religion and morality? Plato[1201] says:
‘Those who instituted rites of initiation for us said of old in a parable
that the man who came to Hades uninitiated lay in mud, but that those
who had been purified and initiated and then came thither dwell with the
gods. For those who are concerned with these rites say, They that bear
the wand are many, the Bacchoi are few.’ Plato does not commit himself to
any statement as to who ‘those who are concerned with these rites’ were,
but Olympiodorus commenting on the passage says: ‘He (Plato) everywhere
misuses the sayings of Orpheus and therefore quotes this verse of his,
“Many are the wand-bearers, few are the Bacchoi,” giving the name of
wand-bearers and not Bacchoi to persons who engage in politics, but the
name of Bacchoi to those who are purified.’
It has already been shown that the worshippers of Dionysos believed
that they were possessed by the god. It was but a step further to pass
to the conviction that they were actually identified with him, actually
_became_ him. This was a conviction shared by all orgiastic religions,
and one doubtless that had its rise in the physical sensations of
intoxication. Those who worshipped Sabazios became Saboi, those who
worshipped Kubebe became Kubeboi, those who worshipped Bacchos Bacchoi;
in Egypt the worshippers of Osiris after death became Osiris. The mere
fact of intoxication would go far to promote such a faith, but there is
little doubt that it was fostered, if not originated, by the pantomimic
character of ancient ritual. It has been seen (p. 415) that in the
Thracian rites ‘bull-voiced mimes’ took part, Lycophron (p. 435) tells
that the women who worshipped the bull-Dionysos wore horns. It is a
natural primitive instinct of worship to try by all manner of disguise to
identify yourself more and more with the god who thrilled you.
Direct evidence of this pantomimic element in the worship of Dionysos
is not wanting, though unhappily it is of late date. In the course of
the excavations on the west slope of the Acropolis, Dr Dörpfeld laid
bare a building known to be an ‘Iobaccheion,’ superimposed on an ancient
triangular precinct of Dionysos, that of Dionysos in the Limnae. On this
site was discovered an inscription[1202] giving in great detail the
rules of a thiasos of Iobacchoi in the time of Hadrian. Among a mass
of regulations about elections, subscriptions, feast-days, funerals of
members and the like, come enactments about a sacred pantomime in which
the Iobacchoi took part. The divine persons to be represented were
Dionysos, Kore, Palaemon, Aphrodite, Proteurhythmos, and the parts were
distributed by lot.
The name Proteurhythmos, it will later (p. 656) be shown, marks the
thiasos as Orphic, and thoroughly Orphic rather than Dionysiac are the
regulations as to the peace and order to be observed. ‘Within the place
of sacrifice no one is to make a noise, or clap his hands, or sing,
but each man is to say his part and do it in all quietness and order
as the priest and the Archibacchos direct.’ More significant still and
more beautiful is the rule, that if any member is riotous an official
appointed by the priest shall set against him who is disorderly or
violent the thyrsos of the god. The member against whom the thyrsos
is set up, must if the priest or the Archibacchos so decide leave the
banquet hall. If he refuse, the ‘Horses’ appointed by the priest shall
take him and set him outside the gates. The thyrsos of the god has become
in truly Orphic fashion the sign not of revel and license, but of a
worship fair and orderly.
We have noted the quiet and order of the representation because it is so
characteristically Orphic, but the main point is that in the worship of
Dionysos we have this element of direct impersonation which helped on the
conviction that man could identify himself with his god. The term Bacchae
is familiar, so familiar that we are apt to forget its full significance.
But in the play of Euripides there are not only Bacchae, god-possessed
women worshippers, but also a Bacchos, and about his significance
there can be no mistake. He is the god himself incarnate as one of
his own worshippers. The doctrines of possession and incarnation are
complementary, god can become man, man can become god, but the Bacchic
religion lays emphasis rather on the one aspect that man can become
god. The Epiphany of the Bacchos, it may be noted, is after a fashion
characteristically Orphic; the beautiful stranger is intensely quiet,
and this magical quiet exasperates Pentheus just as Orpheus exasperated
the Maenads. The real old Bromios breaks out in the Epiphany of fire and
thunder, in the bull-god and the madness of the end.
The savage doctrine of divine possession, induced by intoxication and
in part by mimetic ritual, was it would seem almost bound to develope a
higher, more spiritual meaning. We have already seen (p. 453) that the
madness of Dionysos included the madness of the Muses and Aphrodite,
but, to make any real spiritual advance, there was needed it would seem
a man of spiritual insight and saintly temperament, there was needed an
Orpheus. The great step that Orpheus took was that, while he kept the old
Bacchic faith that man might become a god, he altered the conception of
what a god was, and he sought to obtain that godhead by wholly different
means. The grace he sought was not physical intoxication but spiritual
ecstasy, the means he adopted not drunkenness but abstinence and rites of
purification.
All this is by anticipation, to clear the ground; it will be abundantly
proved when Orphic rites and documents known to be Orphic are examined.
Before passing to these it may be well to emphasize one point—the
salient contrast that this new religious principle, this belief in the
possibility of attaining divine life, presented to the orthodox Greek
faith.
* * * * *
The old orthodox anthropomorphic religion of Greece made the gods in
man’s image, but, having made them, kept them aloof, distinct. It never
stated in doctrine, it never implied in ritual, that man could become
god. Nay more, against any such aspiration it raised again and again
a passionate protest. To seek to become even _like_ the gods was to
the Greek the sin most certain to call down divine vengeance, it was
‘Insolence.’
Pindar is full of the splendour and sweetness of earthly life, but
full also of its insuperable limitation. He is instant in warning
against the folly and insolence of any attempt to outpass it. To one
he says[1203], ‘Strive not thou to become a god’; to another[1204],
‘The things of mortals best befit mortality.’ It is this limitation,
this constant protest against any real aspiration, that makes Pindar,
for all his pious orthodoxy, profoundly barren of any vital religious
impulse. Orphic though he was in certain tenets as to a future life, his
innate temperamental materialism prevents his ever touching the secret
of Orphism ‘werde was du bist,’ and he transforms the new faith into
an other-worldliness. He is compounded of ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing
too much.’ ‘In all things,’ he says, ‘take measure by thyself[1205].’
‘It behoveth to seek from the gods things meet for mortals, knowing the
things that are at our feet and to what lot we are born. Desire not,
thou soul of mine, life of the immortals, but drink thy fill of what
thou hast and what thou canst[1206].’ In the name of religion it is
all a desperate unfaith. We weary of this reiterated worldliness. It
is not that he beats his wings against the bars; he loves too well his
gilded cage. The gods are to him only a magnificent background to man’s
life. But sometimes, just because he is supremely a poet, he is ware
of a sudden sheen of glory, an almost theatrical stage effect lighting
the puppet show. It catches his breath and ours. But straightway we are
back to the old stock warnings against Tantalos, against Bellerophon,
whose ‘heart is aflutter for things far off[1207].’ Only one thing he
remembers, perhaps again because he was a poet, that winged Pegasos
‘dwelt for ever in the stables of the gods[1208].’
* * * * *
The cardinal doctrine of Orphic religion was then the possibility
of attaining divine life. It has been said by some that the great
contribution of Dionysos to the religion of Greece was the hope of
immortality it brought. Unquestionably the Orphics believed in a future
life, but this belief was rather a corollary than of the essence of
their faith. Immortality, immutability, is an attribute of the gods. As
Sophocles says[1209]:
‘Only to gods in heaven
Comes no old age nor death of anything,
All else is turmoiled by our master Time.’
To become a god was therefore incidentally as it were to attain
immortality. But one of the beautiful things in Orphic religion was that
the end completely overshadowed the means. Their great concern was to
become divine now. That could only be attained by perfect purity. They
did not so much seek purity that they might become divinely immortal,
they needed immortality that they might become divinely pure. The choral
songs of the _Bacchae_ are charged with the passionate longing after
purity, in the whole play there is not one word, not one hint, of the
hope of immortality. Consecration (ὁσιότης), perfect purity issuing in
divinity, is, it will be seen, the keynote of Orphic faith, the goal of
Orphic ritual.
CHAPTER X.
ORPHIC MYSTERIES.
‘ἁγνὸν χρὴ νηοῖο θυώδεος ἐντὸς ἰόντα
ἔμμεναι· ἁγνείη δ’ ἐστὶ φρονεῖν ὅσια.’
_a._ THE OMOPHAGIA.
The most important literary document extant on Orphic ceremonial is a
fragment of the _Cretans_ of Euripides, preserved for us by Porphyry in
his treatise on ‘Abstinence from Animal Food’—a passage Porphyry says he
had ‘almost forgotten to mention.’
From an allusion in Aristophanes[1210] to ‘Cretan monodies and unhallowed
marriages’ it seems probable that the _Cretans_ dealt with the hapless
wedlock of Pasiphaë. The fragment, Porphyry tells us, was spoken by the
chorus of Cretan mystics who have come to the palace of Minos. It is
possible they may have come to purify it from the recent pollution[1211].
The mystics by the mouth of their leader make full and definite
confession of the faith, or rather acknowledgement of the ritual acts,
by which a man became a ‘Bacchos,’ and they add a statement of the
nature of the life he was thereafter bound to lead. Though our source
is a poetical one, we learn from it, perhaps to our surprise, that to
become a ‘Bacchos’ it was necessary to do a good deal more than dance
enthusiastically upon the mountains. The confession runs as follows[1212]:
‘Lord of Europa’s Tyrian line,
Zeus-born, who holdest at thy feet
The hundred citadels of Crete,
I seek to thee from that dim shrine,
Roofed by the Quick and Carven Beam,
By Chalyb steel and wild bull’s blood
In flawless joints of cypress wood
Made steadfast. There in one pure stream
My days have run, the servant I,
Initiate, of Idaean Jove;
Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove;
I have endured his thunder-cry[1213];
Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts;
Held the Great Mother’s mountain flame;
I am Set Free and named by name
A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests.
Robed in pure white I have borne me clean
From man’s vile birth and coffined clay,
And exiled from my lips alway
Touch of all meat where Life hath been.’
This confession must be examined in detail.
* * * * *
The first avowal is:
‘the servant I,
Initiate, of Idaean Jove[1214].’
It is remarkable that the mystic, though he becomes a ‘Bacchos,’ avows
himself as initiated to Idaean Zeus. But this Idaean Zeus is clearly the
same as Zagreus, the mystery form of Dionysos. Zeus, the late-comer (p.
319, n. 2), has taken over an earlier worship, the nature of which will
become more evident after the ritual has been examined.
Zeus has in a sense supplanted Zagreus, but only by taking on his nature.
An analogous case has already been discussed in dealing with Zeus
Meilichios (p. 19). At a time when the whole tendency of theology, of
philosophy and of poetry was towards monotheism these fusions were easy
and frequent. Of such a monotheistic divinity, half Zeus, half Hades,
wholly Ploutos, we are told in another fragment of Euripides preserved
by Clement of Alexandria[1215]. His ritual is that of the earth-gods.
‘Ruler of all, to thee I bring libation
And honey cake, by whatso appellation
Thou wouldst be called, or Hades, thou, or Zeus,
Fireless the sacrifice, all earth’s produce
I offer. Take thou of its plenitude,
For thou amongst the Heavenly Ones art God,
Dost share Zeus’ sceptre, and art ruling found
With Hades o’er the kingdoms underground.’
It has been conjectured that this fragment also is from the _Cretans_,
but we have no certain evidence. Clement says in quoting the passage that
‘Euripides, the philosopher of the stage, has divined as in a riddle that
the Father and the Son are one God.’ Another philosopher before Euripides
had divined the same truth, and he was Orpheus, only he gave to his
Father and Son the name of Bacchos, and, all important for our purpose,
gave to the Son in particular the title of Zagreus.
In discussing the titles of Dionysos (p. 414), it has been seen that the
names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, were given to the god to mark him as a
spirit of intoxication, of enthusiasm. The title Zagreus has been so far
left unconsidered because it is especially an Orphic name. Zagreus is
the god of the mysteries, and his full content can only be understood in
relation to Orphic rites.
Zagreus is the mystery child guarded by the Kouretes, torn in pieces by
the Titans. Our first mention of him is a line preserved to us from the
lost epic the _Alcmaeonis_[1216], which ran as follows:
‘Holy Earth and Zagreus greatest of all gods.’
The name of Zagreus never occurs in Homer, and we are apt to think that
epic writers were wholly untouched by mysticism. Had the _Alcmaeonis_ not
been lost, we might have had occasion to modify this view. It was an epic
story the subject-matter of which was necessarily a great sin and its
purification, and though primarily the legend of Alcmaeon was based, as
has been seen, on a curiously physical conception of pollution (p. 220),
it may easily have taken on Orphic developments. Zagreus appears little
in literature; he is essentially a ritual figure, the centre of a cult
so primitive, so savage that a civilized literature instinctively passed
him by, or at most figured him as a shadowy Hades.
But religion knew better. She knew that though Dionysos as Bromios,
Braites, Sabazios, as god of intoxication, was much, Dionysos as
Zagreus, as Nyktelios, as Isodaites[1217], he of the night, he who is
‘a meal shared by all’ was more. The Orphics faced the most barbarous
elements of their own faith and turned them not only quâ theology into
a vague monotheism, but quâ ritual into a high sacrament of spiritual
purification. This ritual, the main feature of which was ‘the red and
bleeding feast,’ must now be examined.
* * * * *
The avowal of the first certain ritual act performed comes in the line
where the mystic says
‘I have ...
Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts[1218].’
The victim in Crete was a bull.
The shrine of Idaean Zeus, from which the mystics came, was cemented
with bulls’ blood[1219]. Possibly this may mean that at its foundation
a sacred bull was slain and his blood mixed with the mortar; anyhow it
indicates connection with bull-worship. The characteristic mythical
monster of Crete was the bull-headed Minotaur. Behind the legend of
Pasiphaë, made monstrous by the misunderstanding of immigrant conquerors,
it can scarcely be doubted that there lurks some sacred mystical ceremony
of ritual wedlock (ἱερὸς γάμος) with a primitive bull-headed divinity. He
need not have been imported from Thrace; zoomorphic nature-gods spring
up everywhere. The bull-Dionysos of Thrace when he came to Crete found a
monstrous god, own cousin to himself.
Such a monstrous god is depicted on the curious seal-impression found by
Mr Arthur Evans[1220] at Cnossos and reproduced in fig. 146. He is seated
on a throne of camp-stool shape, and before him stands a human figure,
probably a worshipper. That the monster is a god seems clear from the
fact that he is seated; that he is a _bull_-god is not so certain. The
head is not drawn with sufficient exactness for us to be sure what beast
is intended. He has certainly no horns, but the hoof and tail might be
those of a bull. The seal-impressions found by Mr Hogarth[1221] in such
large numbers at Zakro show how widespread in Crete were these fantastic
forms. The line between man and beast is a faint one. Mr Hogarth holds
that the majority of these sealings have nothing to do with cults—they
are the product, he thinks, of an art which has ‘passed from monsters
with a meaning to monsters of pure fancy.’ He excepts however certain
sealings where a Minotaur is represented[1222], a monster with horned
bull-head, pronounced bovine ears and tail, but apparently human trunk,
arms and legs. Like the monster in fig. 146, this Minotaur is seated,
but with his left leg crossed human-fashion over his right knee and with
human hands extended.
[Illustration: FIG. 146.]
The traditional Minotaur took year by year his tale of human victims. Of
the ritual of the bull-god in Crete, we know that it consisted in part of
the tearing and eating of a bull, and behind is the dreadful suspicion of
human sacrifice.
* * * * *
Part of the avowal of the Cretan mystic is that he has accomplished the
ὠμοφαγία, the rite of ‘the feast of raw flesh.’ That a feast of raw flesh
of some sort was traditionally held to be a part of Bacchic ceremonial,
is clear from the words Euripides[1223] put into the mouth of his Maenads:
‘The joy of the red quick fountains,
The blood of the hill-goat torn,’
where the expression in the original, ὠμοφάγον χάριν ‘joy in eating raw
flesh,’ admits of no doubt.
An integral part of this terrible ritual was the tearing asunder of the
slain beast, in order, no doubt, to get the flesh as raw as might be,
for the blood is the life. Plutarch[1224], in his horrified protest
against certain orgiastic rites, joins the two ritual acts together, the
‘eatings of raw flesh’ and the ‘rendings asunder.’ ‘There are certain
festivals,’ he says, ‘and sacrificial ceremonies as well as unlucky
and gloomy days, in which take place eatings of raw flesh and rendings
asunder, and fastings and beatings of the breast, and again disgraceful
utterances in relation to holy things, and mad ravings and yells upraised
with a loud din and tossing of the neck to and fro.’ These ceremonies,
he goes on to explain, are, to his thinking, not performed in honour of
any _god_, but ‘they are propitiations and appeasements performed with a
view to the riddance of mischievous _demons_; such also, he says, were
the human sacrifices performed of old.’ Plutarch’s words read like a
commentary on the Orphic ritual under discussion: we have the fasting, we
have the horrid feast; he sees the savage element of ‘riddance,’ but he
misses the saving grace of enthusiasm and mystic significance.
If the sympathetic religious-minded Plutarch was horrified at a ritual
so barbarous, it filled the Christian Fathers with unholy joy. Here was
an indefeasible argument against paganism, and for once they compel our
reluctant sympathy. ‘I will not,’ cries Clement[1225], ‘dance out your
mysteries, as they say Alcibiades did, but I will strip them naked, and
bring them out on to the open stage of life, in view of those who are
the spectators at the drama of truth. The Bacchoi hold orgies in honour
of a mad Dionysos, they celebrate a divine madness by the Eating of Raw
Flesh, the final accomplishment of their rite is the distribution of the
flesh of butchered victims, they are crowned with snakes, and shriek
out the name of Eva, that Eve through whom sin came into the world,
and the symbol of their Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent.’ And
again[1226]: ‘the mysteries of Dionysos are wholly inhuman; for while he
was still a child and the Kouretes were dancing their armed dance about
him, the Titans stole upon him, deceived him with childish toys and tore
him to pieces.’
Arnobius[1227] pretends that the Bacchanalia are so horrible he must
pass them by, and then goes on to revel in revolting detail over the
rites ‘which the Greeks call Feasts of Raw Flesh (ὠμοφαγίαι) in which
with feigned frenzy and loss of a sane mind you twine snakes about you,
and, to show yourselves full of the divinity and majesty of the god, you
demolish with gory mouths the entrails of goats bleating for mercy.’
The gentle vegetarian Porphyry[1228] knows that in Chios, according to
tradition, there had been a Dionysos called Omadius, the Raw One, and
that the sacrifice he used to exact was the tearing of a man to pieces.
Istros[1229] stated that of old the Kouretes sacrificed children to
Kronos. On Kronos all human sacrifice was apt to be fathered, but the
mention of the Kouretes, coupled with the confession of the Cretan
mystic, shows that the real divinity is Zagreus.
* * * * *
To these vague though consistent traditions of the eating and tearing
of raw flesh, whether of man or goat or calf, in honour of some form
of Dionysos, evidence more precise and definitely descriptive of
Cretan ritual has been left us, again by a Christian Father, Firmicus
Maternus[1230]. The festival he describes was, like many others in honour
of Dionysos, trieteric, i.e. celebrated each alternate year.
Firmicus in the fashion of his day gives first a long and purely
aetiological narrative of the death of the son of a king of Crete, to
appease whose wrath the ceremony, it was believed, was instituted. ‘The
Cretans commemorated the death of the boy by certain ceremonies, doing
all things in regular order which the boy did or suffered.’ These
ceremonies included an enactment of the scene of the child playing with
the toys and surprised by the Titans, and perhaps originally the slaying
and tearing to pieces of a real child, but in the festival as described
by Firmicus a bull was surrogate. ‘They tear in pieces a live bull with
their teeth and by howling with discordant shouts through the secret
places of the woods they simulate the madness of an enraged mind.’
Firmicus, by his obviously somewhat inaccurate statement, has gone far
to discredit his own testimony. After the performance of a religious
ceremony that involved the tearing of a _live_ bull’s flesh by human
teeth[1231] the surviving worshippers would be few. But, because of this
exaggeration, we need not discredit the whole ritual of the bull-slaying,
nor the tearing and eating of _raw_, though not actually living, flesh.
The bull indeed comes in so awkwardly in the midst of the aetiological
story of the child, that we may be practically sure this account of a
bygone ritual is authentic.
* * * * *
Some light is thrown on the method, and much on the meaning, of the
horrible feast by an account left us by S. Nilus[1232], a hermit of Mt.
Sinai in the 4th century, of the sacrifice of a camel among the Arabs
of his time. S. Nilus seems to have spent some of his abundant leisure
in the careful examination of the rites and customs of the heathen
around, and it is much to be regretted that in his ‘Narrations’ he has
not recorded more of his observations. The nomadic condition of the
Arabs about Sinai impressed him much; he notes that they are without
trade, arts or agriculture, and if other food failed them, fed on their
camels and only cooked the flesh just enough to enable them to tear it
with their teeth. They worshipped no god, either in spirit or through an
image made by hands, but sacrificed to the morning star at its rising.
They by preference sacrificed boys in the flower of their age and of
special beauty, and slew them at dawn on a rude heap of piled-up stones.
He pathetically observes that this practice of theirs caused him much
anxiety; he was nervous lest they should take a fancy to a beautiful
young boy convert he had with him and sacrifice ‘his pure and lovely
body to unclean demons.’ But, he goes on, ‘when the supply of boys was
lacking, they took a camel of white colour and otherwise faultless,
bent it down upon its knees, and went circling round it three times in
a circuitous fashion. The leader of the song and of the procession to
the star was either one of their chiefs or a priest of special honour.
He, after the third circuit had been made, and before the worshippers
had finished the song, while the last words were still on their lips,
draws his sword and smites the neck of the camel and eagerly tastes of
the blood. The rest of them in like fashion run up and with their knives
some cut off a small bit of the hide with its hairs upon it, others hack
at any chance bit of flesh they can get. Others go on to the entrails
and inwards and leave no scrap of the victim uneaten that might be seen
by the sun at its rising. They do not refrain even from the bones and
marrow, but overcome by patience and perseverance the toughness of the
resistance.’
The account of Nilus leaves no doubt as to the gist of the ceremony: the
worshippers aim at devouring the victim before the life has left the
still warm blood. Raw flesh, Prof. Robertson Smith points out, is called
in Hebrew and Syriac ‘living’ flesh. Thus, in the most literal way, all
those who shared in the ceremony absorbed into themselves part of the
victim’s life.
For _live_ bull then we substitute _raw_ bull, and the statement of
Firmicus presents no difficulties. Savage economy demands that your
_juju_, whatever it may be, should be as fresh as possible. Probably, at
first, the bull may have been eaten just for the sake of absorbing its
strength, without any notion of a divine sacrament.
The idea that by eating an animal you absorb its qualities is too
obvious a piece of savage logic to need detailed illustration. That the
uneducated and even the priestly Greek had not advanced beyond this
stage of sympathetic magic is shown by a remark of Porphyry’s[1233].
He wants to prove that the soul is held to be affected or attracted
even by corporeal substances of kindred nature, and of this belief he
says we have abundant experience. ‘At least,’ he says, ‘those who wish
to take unto themselves the spirits of prophetic animals, swallow the
most effective parts of them, such as the hearts of crows and moles and
hawks, for so they possess themselves of a spirit present with them and
prophesying like a god, one that enters into them themselves at the time
of its entrance into the body.’ If a mole’s heart can make you see into
dark things, great virtue may be expected from a piece of raw bull. It
is not hard to see how this savage theory of communion would pass into a
higher sacramentalism, into the faith that by partaking of an animal who
was a divine vehicle[1234] you could enter spiritually into the divine
life that had physically entered you, and so be made one with the god. It
was the mission of Orphism to effect these mystical transitions.
* * * * *
Because a goat was torn to pieces by Bacchants in Thrace, because a bull
was, at some unknown date, eaten raw in Crete, we need not conclude
that either of these practices regularly obtained in civilized Athens.
The initiated bull-eater was certainly known of there, and the notion
must have been fairly familiar, or it would not have pointed a joke
for Aristophanes. In the audacious prorrhesis of the _Frogs_[1235] the
uninitiated are bidden to withdraw, and among them those
‘Who never were trained by bull-eating Kratinos
In mystical orgies poetic and vinous.’
The worship of Dionysos of the Raw Flesh must have fallen into abeyance
in Periclean Athens; but though civilized man, as a rule, shrinks from
raw meat, yet, given imminent peril to rouse the savage in man, even
in civilized man the faith in Dionysos Omestes burns up afresh. Hence
stories of human sacrifice on occasions of great danger rise up and are
accepted as credible. Plutarch[1236], narrating what happened before the
battle of Salamis, writes as follows: ‘As Themistocles was performing
the sacrifice for omens (σφαγιαζομένῳ) alongside of the admiral’s
trireme, there were brought to him three captives of remarkable beauty,
attired in splendid raiment and gold ornaments; they were reputed to be
the sons of Artaÿktes and Sandauke sister to Xerxes. When Euphrantides
the soothsayer caught sight of them, and observed that at the same
moment a bright flame blazed out from the burning victims, and at the
same time a sneeze from the right gave a sign, he took Themistocles by
the hand and bade consecrate and sacrifice all the youths to Dionysos
Omestes, and so make his prayer, for thus both safety and victory would
ensue to the Greeks. Themistocles was thunderstruck at the greatness
and strangeness of the omen, it being such a thing as was wont to occur
at great crises and difficult issues, but the people, who look for
salvation rather by irrational than rational means, invoked the god
with a loud shout together, and bringing up the prisoners to the altar
imperatively demanded that the sacrifice should be accomplished as the
seer had prescribed. These things are related by Phanias the Lesbian, a
philosopher not unversed in historical matters.’ Phanias lived in the 4th
century B.C. Plutarch evidently thought him a respectable authority, but
the fragments of his writings that we possess are all of the anecdotal
type, and those which relate to Themistocles are evidently from a hostile
source. His statement, therefore, cannot be taken to prove more than that
a very recent human sacrifice was among the horrors conceivably possible
to a Greek of the 4th century B.C., especially if the victim were a
‘barbarian.’
The suspicion is inevitable that behind the primitive Cretan rites of
bull-tearing and bull-eating there lay an orgy still more hideous, the
sacrifice of a human child. A vase-painting in the British Museum[1237],
too revolting for needless reproduction here, represents a Thracian
tearing with his teeth a slain child, while the god Dionysos, or rather
perhaps we should say Zagreus, stands by approving. The vase is not
adequate evidence that human children were slain and eaten, but it shows
that the vase-painter of the 5th century B.C. believed such a practice
was appropriate to the worship of a Thracian god.
A very curious account of a sacrifice to Dionysos in Tenedos helps us to
realize how the shift from human to animal sacrifice, from child to bull
or calf, may have come about. Aelian[1238] in his book on the Nature of
Animals makes the following statement: ‘The people of Tenedos in ancient
days used to keep a cow with calf, the best they had, for Dionysos, and
when she calved, why, they tended her like a woman in child-birth. But
they sacrificed the new born calf, having put cothurni on its feet. Yes,
and the man who struck it with the axe is pelted with stones in the holy
rite and escapes to the sea.’ The conclusion can scarcely be avoided that
here we have a ritual remembrance of the time when a child was really
sacrificed. A calf is substituted but it is humanized as far as possible,
and the sacrificer, though he is bound to sacrifice, is guilty of an
outrage[1239]. Anyhow, that the calf was regarded as a child is clear;
the line between human and merely animal is to primitive man a shifting
shadow.
The mystic in his ritual confession clearly connects his feast of raw
flesh with his service of Zagreus:
‘Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove;
I have endured his thunder-cry;
Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts.’
It remains to consider more closely the import of the sacred legend of
Zagreus.
* * * * *
That the legend as well as the rite was Cretan and was connected with
Orpheus is expressly stated by Diodorus[1240]. In his account of the
various forms taken by the god Dionysos, he says ‘they allege that the
god (i.e. Zagreus) was born of Zeus and Persephone in Crete, and Orpheus
in the mysteries represents him as torn in pieces by the Titans.’
When a people has outgrown in culture the stage of its own primitive
rites, when they are ashamed or at least a little anxious and
self-conscious about doing what yet they dare not leave undone, they
instinctively resort to mythology, to what is their theology, and say
the men of old time did it, or the gods suffered it. There is nothing
like divine or very remote human precedent. Hence the complex myth of
Zagreus. When precisely this myth was first formulated it is impossible
to say; it comes to us in complete form only through late authors[1241].
It was probably shaped and re-shaped to suit the spiritual needs of
successive generations. The story as told by Clement and others is
briefly this: the infant god variously called Dionysos and Zagreus was
protected by the Kouretes or Korybantes who danced around him their
armed dance. The Titans desiring to destroy him lured away the child
by offering him toys, a cone, a rhombos, and the golden apples of the
Hesperides, a mirror, a knuckle bone, a tuft of wool. The toys are
variously enumerated[1242]. Having lured him away they set on him, slew
him and tore him limb from limb. Some authorities add that they cooked
his limbs and ate them. Zeus hurled his thunderbolts upon them and sent
them down to Tartaros. According to some authorities, Athene saved the
child’s heart, hiding it in a cista. A mock figure of gypsum was set up,
the rescued heart placed in it and the child brought thereby to life
again. The story was completed under the influence of Delphi by the
further statement that the limbs of the dismembered god were collected
and buried at Delphi in the sanctuary of Apollo.
The monstrous complex myth is obviously aetiological through and through,
the kernel of the whole being the ritual fact that a sacrificial bull, or
possibly a child, was torn to pieces and his flesh eaten. Who tore him to
pieces? In actual fact his worshippers, but the myth-making mind always
clamours for divine precedent. If there was any consistency in the mind
of the primitive mythologist we should expect the answer to be ‘holy men
or gods,’ as an example. Not at all. In a sense the worshipper believes
the sacrificial bull to be divine, but, brought face to face with the
notion of the dismemberment of a god, he recoils. It was primitive
bad men who did this horrible deed. Why does he imitate them? This is
the sort of question he never asks. It might interfere with the pious
practice of ancestral custom, and custom is ever stronger than reason.
So he goes on weaving his aetiological web. He eats the bull; so the bad
Titans must have eaten the god. But, as they were bad, they must have
been punished; on this point primitive theology is always inexorable. So
they were slain by Zeus with his thunderbolts.
Other ritual details had of course to be worked in. The Kouretes,
the armed Cretan priests, had a local war or mystery dance: they
were explained as the protectors of the sacred child. Sacred objects
were carried about in cistae; they were of a magical sanctity,
fertility-charms and the like. Some ingenious person saw in them a new
significance, and added thereby not a little to their prestige; they
became the toys by which the Titans ensnared the sacred baby. It may
naturally be asked why were the Titans fixed on as the aggressors? They
were of course known to have fought against the Olympians in general, but
in the story of the child Dionysos they appear somewhat as bolts from the
blue. Their _name_ even, it would seem, is aetiological, and behind it
lies a curious ritual practice.
* * * * *
The _Dionysiaca_ of Nonnus[1243] is valuable as a source of ritual
and constantly betrays Orphic influence. From it we learn in many
passages[1244] that it was the custom for the mystae to bedaub themselves
with a sort of white clay or gypsum. This gypsum was so characteristic
of mysteries that it is constantly qualified in Nonnus by the epithet
‘mystic.’ The technical terms for this ritual act of bedaubing with clay
were ‘to besmear’ and ‘to smear off’ (περιμάττειν and ἀπομάττειν), and
they are used as roughly equivalent for ‘to purify.’ Harpocration[1245]
has an interesting note on the word ‘smear off’ (ἀπομάττων). ‘Others use
it in a more special sense, as for example when they speak of putting a
coat of clay or pitch on those who are being initiated, as we say to take
a cast of a statue in clay; for they used to besmear those who were being
purified for initiation with clay and pitch. In this ceremony they were
mimetically enacting the myth told by some persons, in which the Titans,
when they mutilated Dionysos, wore a coating of gypsum in order not to
be identified. The custom fell into disuse, but in later days they were
plastered with gypsum out of convention (νομίμου χάριν).’ Here we have
the definite statement that in rites of initiation the worshippers were
coated with gypsum. The ‘some persons’ who tell the story of Dionysos and
the Titans are clearly Orphics. Originally, Harpocration says, the Titans
were coated with gypsum that they might be disguised. Then the custom, by
which he means the original object of the custom, became obsolete, but
though the reason was lost the practice was kept up out of convention.
They went on doing what they no longer understood.
Harpocration is probably right. Savages in all parts of the world, when
about to perform their sacred mysteries, disguise themselves with all
manner of religious war-paint. The motive is probably, like most human
motives, mixed; they partly want to disguise themselves, perhaps from
the influence of evil spirits, perhaps because they want to counterfeit
some sort of bogey; mixed with this is the natural and universal instinct
to ‘dress up’ on any specially sacred occasion, in order to impress
outsiders. An element in what was at once a disguise and a decoration
was coloured clay. Then having become sacred from its use on sacred
occasions it became itself a sort of _medicine_, a means of purification
and sanctification, as well as a ceremonial sign and token of initiation.
Such performances went on not only in Crete but in civilized Athens. One
of the counts brought by Demosthenes against Aeschines[1246] was, it will
be remembered (p. 418), ‘that he purified the initiated and wiped them
clean with mud and pitch’—_with_, be it noted, not _from_. Cleansing
with mud does not seem to us a practical procedure, but we are back in
the state of mind fully discussed in an earlier chapter (p. 39), when
purification was not physical cleansing in our sense of the word, but a
thing at once lower and higher, a magical riddance from _spiritual_ evil,
from evil spirits and influences. For this purpose clay and pitch were
highly efficacious.
But what has all this to do with the Titans? Eustathius[1247], commenting
on the word Titan, lets us into the secret. ‘We apply the word _titanos_
in general to dust, in particular to what is called _asbestos_, which
is the white fluffy substance in burnt stones. It is so called from the
Titans in mythology, whom Zeus in the story smote with his thunderbolts
and consumed to dust. For from them, the fine dust of stones which has
got crumbled from excessive heat, so to speak Titanic heat, is called
_titanic_, as though a Titanic penalty had been accomplished upon it. And
the ancients call dust and gypsum _titanos_.’
This explanation is characteristically Eustathian. In his odd confused
way the Archbishop, as so often, divines a real connection, but inverts
and involves it. The simple truth is that the Titan myth is a ‘sacred
story’ (ἱερολογία) invented to account for the ritual fact that Orphic
worshippers, about to tear the sacred bull, daubed themselves with white
clay, for which the Greek word was _titanos_: they are Titans, but not as
giants, only as white-clay-men. It is not exactly a false etymology, as
the mythological Titan giant probably owed his name to the fact that he
was clay-born, earth-born, like Adam, only of white instead of red earth;
but it was of course a false connection of meaning[1248].
That this connection of meaning, this association of white-clay-men
of the mysteries with primaeval giants, was late and fictitious is
incidentally shown by the fact that it was fathered on Onomacritus. In
the passage from Pausanias[1249] already quoted (p. 473), we are told
that Onomacritus _got the name of the Titans from Homer_, and composed
‘orgies’ for Dionysos, _and made the Titans the actual agents in the
sufferings of Dionysos_. He did not invent the white-clay worshippers,
but he gave them a respectable orthodox Homeric ancestry. What confusion
and obscurity he thereby introduced is seen in the fact that a bad
mythological precedent is invented for a good ritual act; all consistency
was sacrificed for the sake of Homeric association.
* * * * *
But nothing, nothing, no savage rite, no learned mythological confusion,
daunts the man bent on edification, the pious Orphic. The task of
spiritualizing the white-clay-men, the dismembered bull, was a hard one,
but the Orphic thinker was equal to it. He has not only taken part in
an absurd and savage rite, he has brooded over the real problems of man
and nature. There is evil in the universe, human evil to which as yet
he does not give the name of sin, for he is not engaged with problems
of free-will, but something evil, something that mixes with and mars
the good of life, and he has long called it impurity. His old religion
has taught him about ceremonial cleansings and has brought him, through
conceptions like the Keres, very near to some crude notion of spiritual
evil. The religion of Dionysos has forced him to take a momentous step.
It has taught him not only what he knew before—that he can rid himself
of impurity, but also that he can become a Bacchos, become divine. He
seems darkly to see how it all came about, and how the old and the new
work together. His forefathers, the Titans, though they were but ‘dust
and ashes,’ dismembered and ate the god; they did evil, and good came of
it; they had to be punished, slain with thunderbolts; but even in their
ashes lived some spark of the divine; that is why he their descendant can
himself become Bacchos. From these ashes he himself has sprung. It is
only a little hope; there is all the element of dust and ashes from which
he must cleanse himself; it will be very hard, but he goes back with
fresh zeal to the ancient rite, to eat the bull-god afresh, renewing the
divine within him.
Theology confirms his hope by yet another thought. Even the wicked
Titans, before they ate Dionysos, had a heavenly ancestry; they were
children of old Ouranos, the sky-god, as well as of Ge, the earth-mother.
His master Orpheus worshipped the sun (p. 462). Can he not too,
believing this, purify himself from his earthly nature and rise to be the
‘child of starry heaven’? Perhaps it is not a very satisfactory theory of
the origin of evil; but is the sacred legend of the serpent and the apple
more illuminating? Anyhow it was the faith and hope the Orphic, as we
shall later see (p. 571), carried with him to his grave.
There were other difficulties to perplex the devout enquirer. The god in
the mysteries of Zagreus was a bull, but in the mysteries of Sabazios (p.
419) his vehicle was a snake, and these mysteries must also enshrine the
truth. Was the father of the child a snake or a bull; was the ‘horned
child’ a horned snake? It was all very difficult. He could not solve the
difficulty; so he embodied it in a little dogmatic verse, and kept it by
him as a test of reverent submission to divine mysteries:
‘The Snake’s Bull-Father—the Bull’s Father-Snake[1250].’
The snake, the bull, the snake-bull-child[1251]—not three
Incomprehensibles, but one Incomprehensible. On the altar of his Unknown
God through all the ages man pathetically offers the holocaust of his
reason.
The weak point of the Orphic was, of course, that he could not, would
not, break with either ancient ritual or ancient mythology, could not
trust the great new revelation which bade him become ‘divine,’ but must
needs mysticize and reconcile archaic obsolete traditions. His strength
was that in conduct he was steadfastly bent on purity of life. He could
not turn upon the past and say, ‘this daubing with white clay, this
eating of raw bulls, is savage nonsense; give it up.’ He could and
did say, ‘this daubing with white clay and eating of raw bulls is not
in itself enough, it must be followed up by arduous endeavour after
holiness.’
This is clear from the further confession of the Cretan chorus, to which
we return. From the time that the neophyte is accepted as such, i.e.
performs the initiatory rites of purification and thereby becomes a
_Mystes_, he leads a life of ceremonial purity (ἁγνόν). He accomplishes
the rite of eating raw sacrificial flesh and also holds on high the
torches to the Mountain Mother. These characteristic acts of the
_Mystes_, are, I think, all preliminary stages to the final climax, the
full fruition, when, cleansed and consecrated by the Kouretes, he is
named by them a Bacchos, he is made one with the god.
* * * * *
Before we pass to the final act consummated by the Kouretes, the place of
the Mountain Mother has to be considered. The mystic’s second avowal is
that he has
‘Held the Great Mother’s mountain flame[1252].’
In the myth of Zagreus, coming to us as it does through late authors,
the child is all-important, the mother only present by implication. Zeus
the late-comer has by that time ousted Dionysos in Crete. The mythology
of Zeus, patriarchal as it is through and through, lays no stress on
motherhood. Practically the Zeus of the later Hellenism has no mother.
But the bull-divinity worshipped in Crete was wholly the son of his
mother, and in Crete most happily the ancient figure of the mother has
returned after long burial to the upper air. On a Cretan seal Mr Arthur
Evans found the beast-headed monster whom men called Minotaur; on a
Cretan seal also he found the figure of the Mountain Mother, found her at
Cnossos, the place of the birth of the bull-child, Cnossos overshadowed
by Ida where within the ancient cave the holy child was born and the
‘mailed priests’ danced at his birth.
The design in fig. 147 is from the clay impression of a signet ring
found at the palace at Cnossos[1253]. It is a veritable little manual
of primitive Cretan faith and ritual. On the very apex of her own great
mountain stands the Mountain Mother. The Mycenaean women of Cnossos
have made their goddess in their own image, clad her, wild thing though
she was, in their own grotesque flounced skirt, and they give her for
guardians her own fierce mountain-ranging lions, tamed into solemn
heraldic guardians. We know the lions well enough; they came to Mycenae
to guard the great entrance-gate. Between them at Mycenae is a column,
a thing so isolated and protected, that we long suspected it was no
dead architectural thing but a true shrine of a divinity, and here on
the Cretan seal the divinity has come to life. She stands with sceptre
or lance extended, imperious, dominant. Behind her is her shrine of
‘Mycenaean’ type, with its odd columns and horns, these last surely
appropriate enough to a cult whose central rite was the sacrifice of a
bull; before her in rapt ecstasy of adoration stands her Mystes.
[Illustration: FIG. 147.]
Pre-historic Crete has yielded, I venture to think will yield, no
figure of a _dominant_ male divinity, no Zeus; so far we have only a
beast-headed monster and the Mountain Mother. The little seal impression
is a standing monument of matriarchalism. In Greece the figure of the
Son was developed in later days, the relation of Mother and Son almost
forgotten; child and parent were represented by the figures of the Mother
and the Daughter. It matters very little what names we give the shifting
pairs. In Thrace, in Asia Minor, in Crete, the primitive form is the
Mother with the Son as the attribute of Motherhood; the later form the
Son with the Mother as the attribute of Sonship. A further development is
the Son with only a faded Mother in the background, Bacchos and Semele;
next the Son is made the Son of his Father, Bacchos is Dionysos; finally
he eclipses his Father and reigns omnipotent as Zeus-Hades. The Mother
with the Son as attribute came back from Asia Minor to Greece when in
Greece the Mother was but the appendage of the Son, and coming made sore
confusion for mythology. But for prehistoric Crete, for the Cretan mystic
of Euripides in the days of Minos, the ritual is of the Mother and the
Son.
* * * * *
The ‘mystic’ holds aloft the torches of the mother. Fire as well as water
is for cleansing. He is finally consecrated (ὁσιωθείς) by the Kouretes:
‘I am Set Free and named by name
A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests[1254].’
The Kouretes need not long detain us. They are the Cretan brothers of the
Satyrs, the local Satyrs of Crete. Hesiod[1255] knows of their kinship:
from the same parent
‘The goddesses, nymphs of the mountain, had their being,
And the race of the worthless do-nothing Satyrs,
And the divine Kouretes, lovers of sport and dancing.’
Hesiod’s words are noteworthy and characteristic of his theological
attitude. The Satyrs, we have seen (p. 380), are _Satrai_, primitive
Dionysos-worshippers of Thrace and Thessaly. Seen through the hostile
eyes of their conquerors they have suffered distortion and degradation
in form as in content, they are horse-men, worthless, idle. The Kouretes
have just the same beginning in actuality, but their mythological
ending is different. They are seen, not through the distorting medium
of conquest, but with the halo of religion about their heads; they are
divine (θεοί) and their dancing is sacred. It all depends on the point of
view.
Strabo, in his important discussion of the Kouretes and kindred figures,
knows that they are all ministers (πρόσπολοι) of orgiastic deities, of
Rhea and of Dionysos; he knows also that Kouretes, Korybantes, Daktyloi,
Telchines and the like represent primitive populations. What bewilders
him is the question which particular form originated the rest and where
they all belong. Did Mother Rhea send her Korybants to Crete? how do
the Kouretes come to be in Aetolia? Why are they sometimes servants of
Rhea, sometimes of Dionysos? why are some of them magicians, some of them
handicraftsmen, some of them mystical priests? In the light of Prof.
Ridgeway’s investigations, discussed in relation to the Satyrs (p. 385),
all that puzzled Strabo is made easy to us.
The Kouretes then are, as their name betokens, the young male population
considered as worshipping the young male god, the _Kouros_; they are
‘mailed priests’ because the young male population were naturally
warriors. They danced their local war-dance over the new-born child, and,
because in those early days the worship of the Mother and the Son was not
yet sundered, they were attendants (πρόσπολοι) on the Mother also. They
are in fact the male correlatives of the Maenads as Nurses (τιθῆναι). The
women-nurses were developed most fully, it seems, in Greece proper; the
male attendants, in Asia Minor and the islands.
In the fusion and confusion of these various local titles given to
primitive worshippers, this blend of Satyrs, Korybants, Daktyls,
Telchines, so confusing in literature till its simple historical basis
is grasped, one equation is for our purpose important—Kouretes = Titans.
The Titans of ritual, it has been shown, are men bedaubed with white
earth. The Titans of mythology are children of Earth, primitive giants
rebellious against the new Olympian order. Diodorus[1256] knows of a
close connection between Titans and Kouretes and attempts the usual
genealogical explanation. The Titans, he says, are, according to some,
sons of one of the Kouretes and of a mother called Titaia; according to
others of Ouranos and Ge. Titaia is mother Earth. The Cretans, he says,
allege that the Titans were born in the age of the Kouretes and that the
Titans settled themselves in the district of Cnossos ‘where even now
there are shown the site and foundations of a house of Rhea and a cypress
grove dedicated from ancient days.’ The Titans as Kouretes worshipped the
Mother, and were the guardians of the Son, the infant Zagreus, to whom
later monotheism gave the name of Zeus.
* * * * *
From the time that the neophyte enters the first stage of initiation,
i.e. becomes a ‘mystic’ (μύστης), he leads a life of abstinence (ἁγνόν).
But abstinence is not the end. Abstinence, the sacramental feast of raw
flesh, the holding aloft of the Mother’s torches, all these are but
preliminary stages to the final climax, the full fruition when, cleansed
and consecrated, he is made one with the god and the Kouretes name him
‘Bacchos.’
The word ἁγνόν, i.e. ‘pure,’ in the negative sense, ‘free from evil,’
marks, I think, the initial stage—a stage akin to the old service of
‘aversion’ (ἀποτροπή). The word ὁσιωθείς, ‘set free,’ ‘consecrated,’
marks the final accomplishment and is a term of positive content. It is
characteristic of orgiastic, ‘enthusiastic’ rites, those of the Mother
and the Son, and requires some further elucidation.
THE HOSIOI AND HOSIA.
At Delphi there was an order of priests known as Hosioi. Plutarch is our
only authority for their existence, but, for Delphic matters, we could
have no better source. In his 9th _Greek Question_ he asks[1257] ‘who
is the Hosioter among the Delphians, and why do they call one of their
months Bysios?’ The second part of the question only so far concerns
us as it marks a connection between the Hosioter and the month Bysios,
which, Plutarch tells us, was at the ‘beginning of spring,’ the ‘time of
the blossoming of many plants.’ On the 8th day of this month fell the
birthday of the god and in olden times ‘on this day only did the oracle
give answers.’
Plutarch’s answer to his question is as follows: ‘They call Hosioter the
animal sacrificed when a Hosios is designated.’ He does not say _how_
the animal’s fitness was shown, but from another passage[1258] we learn
that various tests were applied to the animals to be sacrificed, to see
if they were ‘pure, unblemished and uncorrupt both in body and soul.’
As to the body Plutarch says it was not very difficult to find out. As
to the soul the test for a bull was to offer him barley-meal, for a
he-goat vetches; if the animal did not eat, it was pronounced unhealthy.
A she-goat, being more sensitive, was tested by being sprinkled with cold
water. These tests were carried on by the Hosioi and by the ‘prophets’
(προφῆται), these last being concerned with omens as to whether the god
would give oracular answers. The animal, we note, became _Hosios_ when
he was pronounced unblemished and hence fit for sacrifice: the word
ὅσιος, it appears, carried with it the double connotation of purity and
consecration; it was used of a thing found blameless and then made over
to, accepted by, the gods.
The animal thus consecrated was called Hosioter, which means ‘He
who consecrates.’ We should expect such a name to be applied to the
consecrating priest rather than the victim. If Plutarch’s statement
be correct, we can only explain Hosioter on the supposition that the
sacrificial victim was regarded as an incarnation of the god. If the
victim was a bull, as in Crete, and was regarded as divine, the title
would present no difficulties.
That the Hosioter was not merely a priest is practically certain from
the fact that there were, as already noted, priests who bore the cognate
title of Hosioi. Of them we know, again from Plutarch, some further
important particulars. They performed rites—as in the case of the testing
of the victims—in conjunction with the ‘prophets’ or utterers of the
oracle, but they were not identical with them. On one occasion, the
priestess while prophesying had some sort of fit, and Plutarch[1259]
mentions that not only did all the seers run away but also the prophet
and ‘those of the Hosioi that were present.’
In the answer to his ‘Question’ about the Hosioter, Plutarch states
definitely that the Hosioi were five in number, were elected for life,
and that they did many things and performed sacred sacrifices with the
‘prophets.’ Yet they were clearly not the same[1260]. A suspicion of
the real distinction dawns upon us when he adds that they were reputed
to be descended from Deucalion. Deucalion marks Thessalian ancestry and
Thessaly looks North. We begin to surmise that the Hosioi were priests of
the immigrant cult of Dionysos. This surmise approaches certainty when we
examine the actual ritual which the Hosioi performed.
It will be remembered[1261] that when Plutarch is describing the ritual
of the Bull Dionysos, he compares it, in the matter of ‘tearings to
pieces’ and burials and new births, to that of Osiris. Osiris has his
tombs in Egypt and ‘the Delphians believe that the fragments of Dionysos
are buried near their oracular shrine, and the Hosioi offer a secret
sacrifice θυσίαν ἀπόρρητον in the sanctuary of Apollo at the time when
the Thyiades wake up Liknites.’ To clinch the argument Lycophron[1262]
tells us that Agamemnon before he sailed
‘Secret lustrations to the Bull did make
Beside the caves of him the God of Gain
Delphinios,’
and that in return for this Bacchus Enorches overthrew Telephos, tangling
his feet in a vine. The scholiast commenting on the ‘secret lustrations’
says, ‘because the mysteries were celebrated to Dionysos in a corner.’ It
is, I think, clear that the mysteries of Liknites at Delphi, like those
of Crete, included the sacrifice of a sacred bull, and that the bull at
Delphi was called Hosioter, that, in a word, Hosioi and Hosioter are
ritual terms specially linked with the primitive mysteries of Dionysos.
The word Hosios was then, it would seem, deep-rooted in the savage ritual
of the Bull; but with its positive content, its notion of consecration,
it lay ready to hand as a vehicle to express the new Orphic doctrine of
identification with the divine. Its use was not confined to Dionysiac
rites, though it seems very early to have been specialized in relation
to them, probably because the Orphics always laid stress on _fas_ rather
than _nefas_. In ancient curse-formularies, belonging to the cult of
Demeter[1263] and underworld divinities, the words ὅσια καὶ ἐλεύθερα,
‘consecrated and free,’ are used in constant close conjunction and are
practically all but equivalents. The offender, the person cursed, was
either ‘sold’ or ‘bound down’ to the infernal powers; but the cursing
worshipper prays that the things that are accursed, i.e. tabooed to the
offender, may to him be ὅσια καὶ ἐλεύθερα, ‘consecrated and free,’ i.e.
to him they are freed from the taboo. It is the dawning of the grace in
use to-day ‘Sanctify these creatures to our use and us to thy service’;
it is the ritual forecast of a higher guerdon, ‘Ye shall know the truth
and the truth shall make you free.’
This primitive notion of release from _taboo_, which lay at the root of
the Orphic and Christian notion of spiritual freedom, comes out very
clearly in the use of the word ἀφοσιοῦσθαι. For this word we have no
exact English equivalent, but it may be rendered as ‘to purify by means
of an expiatory offering.’ Plato in the _Laws_ describes the ceremonial
to be performed in the case of a man who has intentionally murdered one
near of kin. The regular officials are to put him to death, and this
done ‘let them strip him, and cast him outside the city into a place
where three ways meet, appointed for the purpose, and on behalf of the
city collectively let the authorities, each one severally, take a stone
and cast it on the head of the dead man, and thereby purify (ἀφοσιούτω)
the city.’ The significance of this ritual is drastically explicit.
The taint of the murder, the taboo of the blood-guilt, is on the whole
city; the casting of the stones, on behalf of the city, _purifies it
off_ on to the criminal; it is literally conveyed from one to other by
the stone. The guilty man is the _pharmakos_, and his fate is that of a
_pharmakos_; ‘this done let them carry him to the confines of the city,
and cast him out unburied, as is ordained.’ Dedication, _devotion_ of
the thing polluted, ἀφοσίωσις, is the means whereby man attains ὁσίωσις,
consecration. The scholiast[1264] on the passage has an interesting
gloss on the word ἀφοσιούτω. ‘It is used,’ he says, ‘as in this passage,
to mean “to purify,” or “to bring first-fruits,” or “to give honour,”
or “to give a meed of honour on the occasion of death,” or “to give
fulfilment.”’ He feels dimly the shifts and developments of meaning.
You can devote, ‘make over’ a _pharmakos_; you can devote, consecrate
first-fruits, thereby releasing the rest from taboo; you can consecrate a
meed of honour on the occasion of death.
In this connection it is interesting to note the well-known fact that in
common Greek parlance ὅσιος is the actual opposite of ἱερός. Suidas[1265]
tells us that a ὅσιον χωρίον is ‘a place on which you may tread, which is
_not_ sacred, into which you may go.’ He quotes from the _Lysistrata_ of
Aristophanes, where a woman with child prays:
‘O holy Eileithyia, keep back the birth
Until I come unto a _place allowed_.’
He further notes the distinction often drawn by the orators between
goods that are _sacred_ (ἱερά) and those that are (in the Latin sense)
_profane_ (ὅσια). The contrast is in fact only fully intelligible when we
go back to the primitive notions, under a taboo, released from a taboo.
The notion ‘released from a taboo’ was sure to be taken up by a spiritual
religion, a religion that aimed at expansion, liberation, enthusiasm
rather than at check, negation, restraint. If we may trust Suidas, the
word ὅσιοι was applied to those who ‘were nurtured in piety, even if
they were not priests.’ The early Christians owed some of their noblest
instincts to Orphism.
As we find ὅσιος contrasted with ἱερός, so also between the two kindred
words καθαίρω and ὁσιόω a distinction may be observed. Both denote
purification, but ὁσιόω marks a stage more final and complete. It is the
word chosen to describe the state of those who are _fully_ initiated.
Plutarch[1266] says that the souls of men pass, by a natural and divine
order, from mortal men to heroes, from heroes to daemons, and finally, if
they are completely purified and consecrated (καθαρθῶσι καὶ ὁσιωθῶσιν),
as if by a rite of initiation they pass from daemons to the gods.
Lucian[1267] again in speaking of the final stage of initiation reserved
for hierophants uses the word ‘consecrated’ (ὡσιώθησαν).
Plutarch[1268] makes another interesting suggestion. In a wild attempt
to glorify Osiris and make him the god of everything, he derives his
name from the two adjectives ὅσιος and ἱερός, and incidentally lets fall
this suggestive remark, ‘the name of Osiris is so compounded because his
significance is compounded of things in heaven and things in Hades. It
was customary among the ancients to call the one ὅσια the other ἱερά.’
The things of the underworld are ὅσια; of the upper sky, things Ouranian,
ἱερά. Translated into ritual, this means that the old underworld rites
already discussed, the rites of the primitive Pelasgian stratum of the
population, were known as ὅσια, the new burnt sacrifices of the Ouranians
or Olympians were ἱερά. Dionysos was of the old order: his rites were
ὅσια, burial rites were ὅσια. It was the work of Orpheus to lift these
rites from earth to heaven, but spiritualized, uplifted as they are,
they remain in their essence primitive. It is because of this peculiar
origin that there is always about ὅσιος something of an antique air; it
has that ‘imprint of the ancient,’ that ‘crust and patina’ of archaism,
which Iamblichus[1269] says were characteristic of things Pythagorean,
and which, enshrining as it does a new life and impulse, lends to Orphism
a grace all its own.
Moreover, though ὅσιος is so ‘free’ that it verges on the profane, the
secular, yet it is the freedom always of consecration, not desecration;
it is the negation of the Law, but only by the Gospel. Hence, though
this may seem paradoxical, it is concerned rather with the Duty towards
God, than the Duty towards our Neighbour. Rising though it does out of
form, it is so wholly aloof from formalism, that it tends to become
the ‘unwritten law.’ Hence such constant oppositions as οὐ θέμις οὐδ’
ὅσιον, ‘allowed by neither human prescription nor divine law,’ and again
οὐδ’ ὅσιον οὐδὲ δίκαιον, ‘right neither in the eye of God nor of man.’
Plato[1270] says ‘he who does what is proper in relation to man, would
be said to do just things (δίκαια), he who does what is proper towards
God, holy things (ὅσια).’ Hence finally the spiritual illumination and
advance of ὅσια πανουργήσασ’[1271], breaking through human Justice for
the Divine Right, the duty, sacred, sacrosanct, of rebellion.
* * * * *
The Greeks had their goddess Dike, she who divides and apportions
things mortal, who according to Hesiod[1272] was sister of the lovely
human figures, Fair Order and Peace. But, because she was human, she
carried the symbol of human justice, the sword. She lapses constantly
into Vengeance. The Bacchants of Euripides[1273] are fully initiated,
consecrated as well as cleansed, yet in their hour of extreme need it is
to this Goddess of Vengeance they cry for visible, physical retribution
on the blasphemer Pentheus:
‘Hither for doom and deed,
Hither with lifted sword,
Justice, Wrath of the Lord,
Come in our visible need,
Smite till the throat shall bleed,
Smite till the heart shall bleed
Him the tyrannous, lawless, godless, Echion’s earth-born seed.’
Orpheus did all he could to raise the conception of Dike. We are
expressly told that it was he who raised her to be the ‘Assessor of
Zeus.’ Demosthenes[1274] pleads with his fellow citizens to honour Fair
Order (Εὐνομία), who loves just deeds and is the Saviour of cities and
countries, and Justice (Dike), holy and unswerving, _whom Orpheus who
instituted our most sacred mysteries declares to be seated by the throne
of Zeus_. The dating of Orphic hymns is precarious, but it looks as
though Demosthenes had in his mind the Orphic Hymn to Dike[1275] or at
least its prototype:
‘I sing the all-seeing eye of Dike of fair form,
Who sits upon the holy throne of Zeus
The king, and on the life of mortals doth look down,
And heavy broods her justice on the unjust.’
The Orphic could not rid himself of the notion of Vengeance. Dike
as avenger finds a place, it will be seen later (p. 612), in the
Orphic Hades. Hosia, the real Heavenly Justice, she who is Right and
Sanctity and Freedom and Purity all in one, never attained a vivid and
constant personality; she is a goddess for the few, not the many; only
Euripides[1276] called her by her heavenly name and made his Bacchants
sing to her a hymn:
‘Thou Immaculate on high;
Thou Recording Purity;
Thou that stoopest, Golden Wing,
Earthward, manward, pitying,
Hearest thou this angry king?’
It was Euripides, and perhaps only Euripides, who made the goddess Hosia
in the image of his own high desire, and, though the Orphic word and
Orphic rites constantly pointed to a purity that was also freedom, to a
sanctity that was by union with rather than submission to the divine, yet
Orphism constantly renounced its birth-right, reverted as it were to the
old savage notion of abstinence (ἁγνεία). After the ecstasy of
‘I am Set Free and named by name
A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests,’
the end of the mystic’s confession falls dull and sad and formal:
‘Robed in pure white I have borne me clean
From man’s vile birth and coffined clay,
And exiled from my lips alway
Touch of all meat where Life hath been[1277].’
He that is free and holy (ὁσιωθείς) and divine, marks his divinity by a
dreary formalism. He wears white garments, he flies from death and birth,
from all physical contagion, his lips are pure from flesh-food, he fasts
after as before the Divine Sacrament. He follows in fact all the rules of
asceticism familiar to us as ‘Pythagorean.’
Diogenes Laertius[1278] in his life of Pythagoras gives a summary of
these prescriptions, which show but too sadly and clearly the reversion
to the negative purity of abstinence (ἁγνεία). ‘Purification, they say,
is by means of cleansings and baths and aspersions, and because of this
a man must keep himself from funerals and marriages and every kind of
physical pollution, and abstain from all food that is dead or has been
killed, and from mullet and from the fish melanurus, and from eggs, and
from animals that lay eggs, and from beans, and from the other things
that are forbidden by those who accomplish holy rites of initiation.’
The savage origin of these fastings and taboos on certain foods has been
discussed; they are deep-rooted in the ritual of ἀποτροπή, of aversion,
which fears and seeks to evade the physical contamination of the Keres
inherent in all things. Plato[1279], in his inverted fashion, realizes
that the Orphic life was a revival of things primitive. In speaking of
the golden days before the altars of the gods were stained with blood,
when men offered honey cakes and fruits of the earth, he says then it
was not holy (ὅσιον) to eat or offer flesh-food, but men lived a sort of
‘Orphic’ life, as it is called.
Poets and philosophers, then as now, sated and hampered by the
complexities and ugliness of luxury, looked back with longing eyes to the
old beautiful gentle simplicity, the picture of which was still before
their eyes in antique ritual, in the ὅσια, the rites of the underworld
gods—those gods who in their beautiful conservatism kept their service
cleaner and simpler than the lives of their worshippers. Sophocles[1280]
in the lost _Polyidos_ tells of the sacrifice ‘dear to these gods’:
‘Wool of the sheep was there, fruit of the vine,
Libations and the treasured store of grapes.
And manifold fruits were there, mingled with grain
And oil of olive, and fair curious combs
Of wax compacted by the yellow bee.’
Some of these gods, it has been seen, would not taste of the fruit
of the vine: such were at Athens the Sun, the Moon, the Dawn, the
Muses, the Nymphs, Mnemosyne and Ourania. To them the Athenians[1281],
who were careful in matters of religion (ὅσιοι), brought only sober
offerings, _nephalia_; and such an offering we have seen was brought to
Dionysos-Hades. Philochoros[1282], to our great surprise, extends the
list of wineless divinities to Dionysos. Plutarch[1283] knows the custom
of the wineless libation to Dionysos, and after the fashion of his day
explains it as an ascetic protest. In his treatise on ‘the Preservation
of Health’ he says, ‘We often sacrifice _nephalia_ to Dionysos,
accustoming ourselves rightly not to desire unmixed wine.’ The practice
is manifestly a survival in ritual of the old days before Dionysos took
possession of the vine, or rather the vine took possession of him.
Empedokles had taught men that ‘to fast from evil’ was a great and
divine thing; it is not surprising that the ‘wineless’ rites became to
those who lived the Orphic life the symbol, perhaps the sacrament, of
their spiritual abstinence. Plutarch we know (p. 628) was suspected by
his robuster friends of Orphism, and probably with good reason. In his
dialogue on ‘Freedom from Anger’ he[1284] makes one of the speakers, who
is transparently himself, tell how he conquered his natural irritability.
He set himself to observe certain days as sacred, on which he would not
get angry, just as he might have abstained from getting drunk or taking
any wine, and these ‘angerless days’ he offered to God as ‘Nephalia’ or
‘Melisponda,’ and then he tried a whole month, and then two, till he
was cured. To a greater than Plutarch, a priest who was poet also, the
wineless sacrifice of the Eumenides[1285] is charged with sacramental
meaning; the rage of the king is over, in his heart is meekness, in his
hands olive, shorn wool, water and honey; so only may he enter their
sanctuary, ‘he sober and they wineless.’
In the confession of the Orphic there is no mention of wine, no avowal of
having sacramentally drunk it, no resolve to abstain. The Bacchos, with
whom the mystic is made one, is the ancient Bull-god, lord of the life
of Nature, rather than Bromios, god of intoxication. Also it must not be
forgotten that the mystic is a votary of the Mother as well as the Son,
and though the Mother is caught and carried away in the later revels of
the Son, she is never goddess of the vine. It is noteworthy that the
later Orphics turned rather to the Mother than the Son; they revived
the ancient rite of earth to earth burial, supplanted for a time by
cremation, and the house of Pythagoras[1286] was called by the people of
Metapontum the ‘temple of Demeter.’ Pythagoras never insisted on ‘total
abstinence,’ but he told his disciples that if they would drink plain
water they would be clearer in head as well as healthier in body. In the
ancient rites of the Mother, rites instituted before the coming of the
grape, they found the needful divine precedent[1287]:
‘Then Metaneira brought her a cup of honey-sweet wine,
But the goddess would not drink it, she shook her head for a sign,
For red wine she might not taste, and she bade them bring her meal
And water and mix it together, and mint that is soft to feel.
Metaneira did her bidding and straight the posset she dight,
And holy Deo took it and drank thereof for a rite.’
It is strange that Orpheus if he came from the North, the land of Homeric
banquets, should have preached abstinence from flesh: if he was of
Cretan origin the difficulty disappears. Perhaps also such abstinence is
a necessary concomitant of a mysticism that asks for nothing short of
divinity. The mystic Porphyry[1288] says clearly that his treatise on
‘Abstinence from Animal Food’ is not meant for soldiers or for athletes;
for these flesh food may be needful. He writes for those who would
lay aside every weight and ‘entering the stadium naked and unclothed
would strive in the Olympic contest of the soul.’ And a great modern
mystic[1289], looking more deeply and more humbly into the mystery of
things natural, writes as follows:
‘_Toute notre justice, toute notre morale, tous nos sentiments et toutes
nos pensées dérivent en somme de trois ou quatre besoins primordiaux,
dont le principal est celui de la nourriture. La moindre modification de
l’un de ces besoins aménerait des changements considérables dans notre
vie morale._’ Maeterlinck believes, as Pythagoras did, that those who
abstain from flesh food ‘_ont senti leurs forces s’accroître, leur santé
se rétablir ou s’affermir, leur esprit s’alléger et se purifier, comme au
sortir d’une prison séculaire nauséabonde et misérable_.’
But the plain carnal man in ancient Athens would have none of this. What
to him are ὅσια, things hallowed to the god, as compared with νόμιμα,
things consecrated by his own usage? So Demosthenes taunts Aeschines,
because he cries aloud ‘Bad have I fled, better have I found’; so
Theseus[1290], the bluff warrior, hates Hippolytos, not only, or perhaps
not chiefly, because he believes him to be a sinner, but because he is an
Orphic, righteous overmuch. All his rage of flesh and blood breaks out
against the prig and the ascetic.
‘Now is thy day! Now vaunt thee; thou so pure,
No flesh of life may pass thy lips! Now lure
Fools after thee; call Orpheus King and Lord,
Make ecstasies and wonders! Thumb thine hoard
Of ancient scrolls and ghostly mysteries.
Now thou art caught and known. Shun men like these,
I charge ye all! With solemn words they chase
Their prey, and in their hearts plot foul disgrace.’
Happily there were in Athens also those who did not hate but simply
laughed, laughed aloud genially and healthily at the outward absurdities
of the thing, at all the mummery and hocus-pocus to which the lower
sort of Orphic gave such solemn intent. Among these genial scoffers was
Aristophanes.
* * * * *
There is no more kindly and delightful piece of fooling than the scene
in the _Clouds_[1291] in which he deliberately and in detail parodies
the Orphic mysteries. The tension of Orphism is great; it is, like all
mysticisms, a state of mind intrinsically and necessarily transient, and
we can well imagine that, in his lighter moods, the most pious of Orphics
might have been glad to join the general fun. In any case it helps us to
realize vividly both the _mise-en-scène_ of the mysteries themselves and
the attitude of the popular mind towards them. Exactly what particular
rite is selected for parody we do not know; probably some lesser mystery
of purification, for there is no allusion to the supreme sacramental
feast of bull’s flesh nor to the idea that the neophyte is made one with
the god.
The old unhappy father Strepsiades comes to the ‘Thinking-Shop’ of
Sokrates that he may learn to evade his creditors by dexterity of speech
and new-fangled sophistries in general. A disciple opens the door with
reluctance and warns Strepsiades that he cannot reveal these ‘mysteries’
to the chance comer. Strepsiades enters and sees a number of other
disciples lost in the contemplation of earth and heaven. He calls for
Sokrates and is answered by a voice up in the air.
‘_Sok._ Why dost thou call me, Creature of a Day?
_Str._ First tell me please, what are you doing up there?
_Sok._ I walk in air and contemplate the Sun.’
Here is the first Orphic touch. Sokrates instead of climbing a mountain
has taken an easier way: he is suspended in a basket, and, Orpheus-like,
reveres the Sun. The mysteries are not Eleusinian, not of the underworld.
The comedian might and did dare to bring the Mystics of Kore and Iacchos
in Hades on the stage, but a direct parody of the _actual_ ceremony of
initiation at Eleusis would scarcely have been tolerated by orthodox
Athens. The Eleusinian rites had become by that time a state religion,
politically and socially sacred (νόμιμα). The Orphics were Dissenters,
and a parody of Orphic mysteries was an appeal at once to popular
prejudice and popular humour. Sokrates explains that he is sitting aloft
to avoid the intermixture of earthly elements in his contemplation;
again we have a skit on the Orphic doctrine of the double nature of man,
earthly and heavenly, and the need for purification from earthly Titanic
admixture.
After some preliminary nonsense Strepsiades tells his need, and Sokrates
descends and asks:
‘Now, would you fain
Know clearly of divine affairs, their nature
When rightly apprehended?
_Str._ Yes, if I may.
_Sok._ And would you share the converse of the Clouds,
The spiritual beings we worship?
_Str._ Why, yes, rather.
_Sok._ Then take your seat upon this sacred—campstool.
_Str._ All right, I’m here.
_Sok._ And now, take you this wreath.
_Str._ A wreath—what for? Oh mercy, Sokrates,
Don’t sacrifice me, I’m not Athamas!
_Sok._ No, no. I’m only doing just the things
We do at initiations.’
Strepsiades is of the old order; he knows nothing of these new ‘spiritual
beings’ worshipped by Orphics and sophists. Something religious and
uncomfortable is going to be done to him, and his thoughts instinctively
revert to the old order. A wreath suggests a sacrificial victim, and
the typical victim is Athamas (p. 61). Sokrates at once corrects him,
and puts the audience on the right scent. It is not a common old-world
sacrifice; it is an ‘initiation’ into a new-fangled rite, in which it
would appear the mystic was crowned, probably by way of consecration to
the gods. Strepsiades is not clear about the use of such things:
‘_Str._ Well, what good
Shall I get out of it?
_Sok._ Why, just this, you’ll be
A floury knave, uttering fine flowers of speech.
Now just keep still.
_Str._ By Jove, be sure you do it,
Come flour me well, I’ll be a flowery knave[1292].’
If any doubt were possible as to the nature of the ceremonies parodied,
the words translated ‘flour’ (τρῖμμα, παιπάλη) to preserve the pun,
settle the matter. The word τρῖμμα means something rubbed, pounded,
κρόταλον the noise made in rubbing and pounding; it might be rendered
‘rattle.’ παιπάλη is the fine flour or powder resulting from the process.
Strepsiades is to become subtle in his arguments, a rattle in his speech.
The words would have no sort of point but for the fact that Sokrates
at the moment takes up two pieces of gypsum, pounds them together and
bespatters Strepsiades till he is white all over like a Cretan mystic.
The scholiast[1293] is quite clear as to what was done on the stage.
‘Sokrates while speaking rubs together two friable stones, and beating
them against each other collects the splinters and pelts the old man
with them, as they pelt the victims with grain.’ He is quite right as to
the thing done, quite wrong as to the ritual imitated. Strepsiades, as
Sokrates said, is not being sacrificed; it is not the ritual of sacrifice
that is mimicked, but of initiation.
The certainty that the scene is one of initiation, not sacrifice, is
made more certain by the fact that Strepsiades is sitting all the while,
not on an altar, but on a sort of truckle-bed or campstool (σκίμπους).
We have no evidence of the use of a σκίμπους in mystic ritual, but it
is clearly the comic equivalent of the seat or throne (θρόνος) used
in Orphic rites. The candidate for initiation, whether Eleusinian or
Orphic, was always seated, and the ceremony was known as the ‘seating’
or enthronement. Dion Chrysostom[1294] says those who perform initiation
ceremonies are wont in the ceremony called ‘the seating’ to make the
candidates sit down and to dance round them. It is to this ceremonial
that Plato[1295] alludes in the _Euthydemus_. ‘You don’t see, Kleinias,
that the two strangers are doing what the officials in the rites of the
Korybantes are wont to do, when they perform the ceremony of “seating”
for the man who is about to be initiated.’ Kleinias is undergoing
instruction like the neophyte in the mysteries; he has to sit in silence
while his instructors dance argumentatively round him, uttering what seem
to him unmeaning words.
So far Strepsiades is a _mystic_ in the first stage of initiation, i.e.
he is being prepared and purified. All this ceremonial is preliminary
to the next stage, that of full vision (ἐποπτεία). He is seated on the
stool, he is covered with chalk, to one end only, and that is that he may
behold clearly, may hold communion with, the heavenly gods. Sokrates, in
regular ritual fashion, first proclaims the sacred silence, then makes
preliminary prayer to the sophistic quasi-Orphic divinities of Atmosphere
and Ether[1296], and finally invokes the Holy Clouds in pseudo-solemn
ritual fashion:
‘_Sok._ Silence the aged man must keep, until our prayer be ended.
O Atmosphere unlimited, who keepst our earth suspended,
Bright Ether and ye Holy Clouds, who send the storm and thunder,
Arise, appear above his head, a Thinker waits in wonder.
_Str._ Wait, please, I must put on some things before the rain has
drowned me,
I left at home my leather cap and macintosh, confound me.
_Sok._ Come, O come! Bring to this man full revelation.
Come, O come! Whether aloft ye hold your station
On Olympus’ holy summits, smitten of storm and snow,
Or in the Father’s gardens, Okeanos, down below,
Ye weave your sacred dance, or ye draw with your pitchers gold
Draughts from the fount of Nile, or if perchance ye hold
Maiotis mere in ward, or the steep Mimantian height,
Snow-capped, hearken, we pray, vouchsafe to accept our rite
And in our holy meed of sacrifice take delight.’
The address is after the regular ritual pattern, which mentions, for
safety’s sake, any and every place where the divine beings are likely to
wander. That such an invocation formed part of Orphic Dionysiac rites
is not only a priori probable but certain from the Iacchos song in the
_Frogs_ (p. 541). In a word the ‘full revelation,’ the ἐποπτεία, of these
and all mysteries, was only an intensification, a mysticizing, of the old
Epiphany rites—the ‘Appear, appear’ of the Bacchants, the ‘summoning’ of
the Bull-god by the women of Elis (p. 438). It was this Epiphany, outward
and inward, that was the goal of all purification, of all consecration,
not the enunciation or elucidation of arcane dogma, but the revelation,
the fruition, of the god himself. To what extent these Epiphanies were
actualized by pantomimic performances we do not know; that some form of
mimetic representation was enacted seems probable from the scene that
follows the Epiphany of the Clouds, when Strepsiades confused and amazed
gropes in bewilderment, and bit by bit attains clear vision of the
goddesses.
That the new divinities are _goddesses_ is as near as Aristophanes dare
go to a skit on Eleusinian rites; that they are goddesses of the powers
of the air, not dread underworld divinities, saves him from all scandal
as regards his Established Church. He guards himself still further by
making his Clouds, in one of their lovely little songs, chant the piety
of Athens, home of the mysteries.
The Clouds themselves were as safe as they were poetical. Even the
Orphics did not actually _worship_ clouds; but their theogony, their
cosmogony, is, as will later (Chap. XII.) be seen, full of vague
nature-impersonations, of air and ether and Erebos and Chaos, and the
whirlpool of things unborn. No happier incarnation of all this, this and
the vague confused cosmical philosophy it embodied, than the shifting
wonder of mists and clouds.
The scene, though it goes on far too long, must have been exquisitely
comic. With no stage directions probably half the trivial and absurd
details have been lost, but we can imagine that the whole hocus-pocus
of an Orphic mystery was carefully mimicked. We can even imagine that
Sokrates was dressed up as an initiating Silen, such a one as is depicted
in the relief in fig. 149.
* * * * *
We can also imagine that in Athens it was hard to be an Orphic, a
dissenter, a prig, a man overmuch concerned about his own soul. We have
seen how against such eccentrics the advocate Demosthenes could appeal
to the prejudices of a jury. We know that to Theophrastos[1297] it was
the characteristic of a ‘superstitious man’ that he went every month to
the priest of the Orphic mysteries to participate in these rites, and we
gather dimly that he did not always find sympathy at home; his wife was
sometimes ‘too busy’ to go with him, and he had to take the nurse and
children.
Plutarch[1298], sympathetic as he is to some aspects of Orphism, yet, in
his protest against superstition, says, ‘these are the sort of things
that make men atheists, the incantations, wavings and enchantments and
magic, runnings round and tabourings, _unclean purifications_, filthy
cleansings, barbarous and outrageous penances in sanctuaries, and
bemirings.’ And again[1299], when he is describing the hapless plight of
the man who thinks that affliction comes to him as a punishment for sin,
‘It is useless to speak to him, to try and help him. He sits girt about
with foul rags, and many a time he strips himself and rolls about naked
in the mud; he accuses himself of sins of omission and commission, he has
eaten something or drunk something or walked in some road the divinity
forbade him.’ This morbid habit of self-examination is a thoroughly
Orphic trait. Pythagoras[1300] advised his disciples to repeat these
lines to themselves when they went home at night:
‘What have I done amiss? what of right accomplished?
What that I ought to have done have I omitted to do?’
‘When he is at his best,’ Plutarch goes on, ‘and has only a slight attack
of superstition on him he will sit at home, becensed and bespattered,
with a parcel of old women round him, hanging all sorts of odds and ends
on him as though, as Bion says, he were a peg.’ Such rites as those
described by Plutarch were not late decadent inventions, though we hear
of them mainly from late authors; they were primitive savageries revived
with new spiritual meaning by the Orphics. Herakleitos[1301] refers to
them: ‘polluted they are purified with blood, as though if a man stepped
into mud he should be purified by mud.’
This is the shady side of Orphism, the way it had of attaching to itself
ancient, obscure and even degraded rites, the more obscure the easier
to mysticize. It was this shady side that Plato hated, against which he
protested. In the _Republic_[1302] he says ‘seers and mendicant quacks
besiege rich men’s doors, exhibiting books by Musaeus and Orpheus ...
and in accordance with these they perform sacrifices, inducing not only
individual persons but whole cities to believe that you can obtain
freedom and purification from sins, while you are still alive, by
sacrifices and performances that might please a child, and that there
are things they call “rites,” which will release us from suffering after
we are dead, and that if we do not perform them, then there are fearful
things in store for us.’ The Orphics, alas, fell before the temptation,
always assailing the theologist, to enforce his moral and religious
precepts by the terrors of another world; there can be little doubt
that the lower class of Orphic priest in some fashion sold indulgences.
The fearful things with which the uninitiated were threatened, will be
discussed when we come to the question of Orphic eschatology.
THE LIKNOPHORIA.
The tearing of the bull is, however mysticized, a savage orgy; the
purification by mud and clay can never have been pleasing. It is a
relief to turn to another Orphic ceremonial of more genial content—the
Liknophoria, the carrying of the _liknon_.
In discussing the worship of Dionysos Liknites at Delphi, a worship
attended, it will be remembered, by a secret sacrifice performed by
priests who bore the specially Orphic name of Hosioi, Holy Ones, we have
seen the _liknon_ in use as a cradle for the infant god (p. 402). It
will further be noted that Dionysos Liknites is, like the infant Ploutos
in the cornucopia, only an anthropomorphic presentation of the new-born
fruits of the earth, of the fruits whether of spring or autumn; he is a
male form of Kore the earth-daughter. The ceremony of ‘waking’ him was
primarily but a mimetic summons to the earth to bring forth her fruits in
due season.
[Illustration: FIG. 148.]
On the relief in fig. 148 in the Glyptothek at Munich[1303] we see a
shovel-shaped _liknon_, of a shape that might well serve for a cradle;
but it contains not a child, only grapes and leaves, and the phallic
symbol of animal life. The relief, of Hellenistic date, represents a
peasant going to market; he carries fruits and some animal slung on a
stick over his shoulder, and he drives in front of him a cow with her
calf tied on to her. He is passing a sanctuary of Dionysos; a wine cup
and torches and a thyrsos are seen to the left. Up above is a second
little shrine with a Herm, whether of Hermes or Dionysos it is impossible
to say. High in the middle of the main building is an elaborate erection,
on the top of which is set up the sacred _liknon_.
We are at once reminded of a fragment of Sophocles[1304]:
‘Go on your road,
All ye the folk of handicraft who pray
To Ergane, your bright-eyed child of Zeus,
With service of your posted winnow-corbs.’
[Illustration: FIG. 149.]
The passage is of interest because it shows that the _liknon_, the
harvest basket, though undoubtedly used in the cult of Dionysos, was
nowise confined to him. Athene Ergane, goddess at first no doubt of
‘works’ in the Hesiodic sense, of tilth[1305] rather than of weaving and
handicraft, was, as has been previously shown (p. 301), only another
Kore, the local Earth-daughter of Athens. To her rather than to the
work-fellow of Hephaistos, the _liknon_ full of fruits was a fit
offering, and in solemn consecration it was set up, erected (στατόν), as
on the relief. The word ‘_erected_’ is used no doubt to mark the contrast
with other ceremonies of the _carrying_ of the _liknon_ (Liknophoria).
This setting up of the _liknon_ was too open and public a matter to be
a mystery. It was a mere offering of first-fruits whether to Athene or
Kore or Liknites. But in the service of Liknites there was an element of
mystery, the birth of the divine child, and it is largely in connection
with the cult of Dionysos that the _liknon_ takes on mystic developments.
It is an excellent instance of determined Orphic mysticizing.
In the relief[1306] reproduced in fig. 149 we have what is manifestly a
Dionysiac mystery. The neophyte is in the act of being veiled; he may
not look at the _liknon_, with its fruit and sacred symbol, which will
presently be placed upon his head. A satyr holds it in readiness, and
behind the neophyte is a Maenad with her cymbal.
* * * * *
The veiling of the head marks the mysterious character of the ceremony.
We see it again in the delicate piece of stucco-work from the Farnesina
palace reproduced in fig. 150, and now in the Museo delle Therme
at Rome[1307]. The scene is clearly one of initiation; the thyrsos
carried by the boy with head closely veiled marks it as a mystery of
Dionysos. A priest is unveiling an object on what seems to be an altar.
Unfortunately the stucco is much damaged and what the object is cannot
be certainly made out; it looks like a _liknon_ in shape[1308]. In any
case the ceremony of veiling at a Dionysiac mystery is clear. Behind the
officiating priestess is a cista, containing no doubt the further _sacra_
of the rite. The scene takes place in a sanctuary, indicated by a column
and a sacred tree.
[Illustration: FIG. 150.]
The custom of veiling survives for us in the ritual veil of the bride and
the widow, but we have almost emptied it of its solemn ancient content.
The bride veils herself, it is usually supposed, out of modesty. It
is therefore with some surprise we learn that in the primitive church
bridegroom as well as bride were veiled. This custom, according to the
Abbé Duchesne[1309], obtained till quite recently in France and still
obtains in the Armenian Church. At the actual moment of the ceremony,
apparently as an integral part of it, the priest spreads over bride and
groom together a long red veil, the _flammeum_ of the Romans. In the
Coptic ritual the veil is white, but is spread alike over man and woman.
The real symbolism of the veil, which indicates neither modesty nor
chastity, comes out when we examine classical usage. The question was
raised long ago by Plutarch[1310] ‘Why do men veil their heads when they
worship the gods and uncover them when they wish to do honour to men?’
Plutarch is better at asking questions than at answering them, but,
among the various odd solutions he propounds, he gives one suggestive
clue, viz. that the custom was analogous to those of the Pythagoreans.
Pythagorean, as we have seen, spells Orphic revival of primitive usage.
The real reason of the custom comes out in the ceremonial known as the
Sacred Spring (ver sacrum), which Festus[1311] describes as follows: ‘The
Sacred Spring was a rite of dedication among the Italians. Under the
pressure of extreme disasters they used to make a vow that they would
sacrifice all animal things born to them in the spring next ensuing. But
as it seemed to them a barbarous thing to slay innocent boys and girls,
when they came to adult years they _veiled them_ and drove them out
beyond the boundaries of their state.’ Whether the horrid practice of the
‘Sacred Spring’ is real or imaginary, does not for our purpose greatly
matter. One thing is clear: the practice of veiling symbolized, was the
equivalent of, _dedication_. The bride and bridegroom alike are veiled
because they are dedicated in the mystery of marriage, consecrated, made
over to the powers of life. The penitent is veiled because he dedicates
himself as atonement for sin; the widow is made over to the powers
of death, primarily no doubt as a substitute for her sacrifice, her
‘devotio’ of herself to the ghost of her dead husband. Alcestis[1312]
when she returns to the upper air is veiled and silent, and must so
remain for the space of three days; she is consecrate to Hades:
‘Thou mayst not hear sound of her spoken words
Till she be disenhallowed from the gods
Of the nether earth and see the third day’s light.’
The old meaning of _devotion_ to the gods survives now-a-days only in the
beautiful ceremonial of the Roman Church, known in popular parlance as
‘taking the veil,’ and even here its dread significance has been softened
down by the symbolism of a mystic marriage; the ‘devotio’ for life is
blended with the ‘devotio’ for death[1313].
In fig. 148 the _liknon_ has been set up (στατόν), on high, in open
evidence; it contains simply an offering of first-fruits with the added
symbol of the phallos; it is sacred, but nowise mysterious. It forms in
this particular monument a part of the worship of Dionysos, but it might
belong, as already noted, equally well to any and every god or goddess of
harvest to whom first-fruits were due. In figs. 149 and 150 the _liknon_
has become part of a mystery cult; it is about to be put on the head
of the worshipper: he is veiled and may not look upon it. What are the
elements of mystery and how were they imported?
In discussing the religion of Dionysos it has been seen that, at Delphi,
he was worshipped as Liknites. Hesychius[1314] thus explains the title:
‘Liknites, a name of Dionysos, from the cradle in which they put children
to sleep.’ The _liknon_, the shovel-shaped basket used for the carrying
of fruits, served in primitive days another purpose, that of cradle for a
child.
[Illustration: FIG. 151.]
On the vase-painting[1315] in fig. 151, from a red-figured cylix in the
Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, we see the wicker-work _liknon_ in use
as a cradle. The baby Hermes, wearing his broad petasos, sits up in
his _liknon_ looking at the oxen he has just stolen. One of them turns
round surprised at the strange little object he sees, and gently snuffs
the cradle. Maia, the mother of Hermes, comes up in consternation and
holds out a protesting hand. It is the scene described in the Homeric
hymn[1316], though, as usual, the vase-painter is independent in matters
of detail:
‘Straightway did goodly Hermes back to his cradle hie,
And round his shoulders pulled the clothes, as when a babe doth lie
All snug and warm in swaddling bands. And—for he loved it well—
Tight in his left hand held he his lyre of tortoise-shell.’
The Thyiades, as has been noted (p. 402), awakened the child Liknites.
Of the actual ceremony of ‘awakening’ ancient art has left us no record;
but on a sarcophagus in the Fitzwilliam Museum[1317] at Cambridge (fig.
152) we have a scene depicted that looks like a reminiscence of some
such ceremonial. On the front face of the sarcophagus is represented the
triumphant procession of Bacchos; at one of the ends is the scene of the
carrying of the infant god. The two men, one bearded, the other youthful,
grasp the _liknon_ by its convenient handles, and emerge hurriedly from
behind a curtain slung between two trees. The curtain and the flaming
torches point to a mystery scene enacted by night. Nothing certain is
known of the details of the ceremony, but it may be conjectured that
at a given signal the birth of the sacred child was announced, and the
attendants issued from behind a screen of some kind, bearing the child in
a _liknon_.
[Illustration: FIG. 152.]
The vase-painting in fig. 153 from a hydria in the Museum at
Constantinople[1318] offers a close analogy to Liknites, the child in the
cradle, and throws instant light on his primitive significance. The vase
is of somewhat late style, about the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries
B.C., the drawing only indifferent, but the subject-matter all important.
The scene is at Eleusis. Of that we are sure, because Triptolemos is
present with his winged car and the corn-ears he is about to carry
through the world. The side figures in the top row of vases of this class
are always subordinate, usually difficult of interpretation. The figure
in the left-hand corner is Aphrodite, by this time tediously omnipresent.
The group to the right cannot certainly be named, but the seated woman
is known to be a priestess from the great temple-key she holds over her
right shoulder. On the lower row the interpretation of the central group
is certain. Ge rises from the ground, watched by two goddesses; one to
the right bears a gold lance; she is obviously Athene. The group to the
left, of two women, one holding a torch, represents Kore and Demeter.
[Illustration: FIG. 153.]
The scene represented is clearly the birth of a divine child at Eleusis.
The birth of such a child[1319] was, as will later be seen (p. 552),
proclaimed by the hierophant at some moment during the celebration of the
Mysteries: ‘Brimo has borne a child Brimos,’ but such a mystery would
scarcely be represented openly on a vase-painting. A simpler name lies
to hand. _The child rises out of a cornucopia, symbol of fertility._ He
_is_ the fruits of the earth. He is solemnly presented to Athene because
Eleusis gave to Athens her corn and her mysteries. Art could speak no
plainer. On vases representing Eleusinian scenes, e.g. the sending forth
of Triptolemos, Plouton, who is none other than Ploutos, Wealth, is
represented as an aged man, white-haired, carrying a cornucopia full
of fruits[1320]; but here we have the young Ploutos, the babe who _is_
wealth itself. In like fashion the _liknon_ is either a basket for
fruits or a cradle for a child. It is all the same beautiful symbolism
that refuses coldly to discriminate between the human and the natural,
that sees in marriage the plough, in man the sower, in earth the mother,
and in the fruits of the earth the new-born child.
When we realize that the _liknon_ is, as it were, a cornucopia that for
human fruit becomes a cradle, we naturally expect that, in its mystical
sense, it will be a symbol of new birth, that Liknites will be connected
with a doctrine of _palingenesia_, a sort of spiritual resurrection. The
Orphics had their doctrine of _palingenesia_, but the symbolism of the
_liknon_ was to them mainly of purification, to which they added that of
rebirth. The history of how this came to be is a curious and instructive
chapter in the development of primitive mysticism.
* * * * *
The _locus classicus_ on the _liknon_ is the commentary of Servius on
Vergil’s[1321] words in the first _Georgic_, where among the stock
implements of Demeter he notes the _mystica vannus Iacchi_. So confused
and confusing is the commentary that it has gone far to make the _liknon_
or _vannus_ mysterious.
Virgil first enumerates all the heavy agricultural implements: the
ploughshare’s heavy strength, the slow rolling waggons, the irksome
weight of the mattock, and next he notes
‘Slight wares entwined of wicker work that Celeus made for man,
Frames of arbutus wood compact, Iacchus’ mystic fan.’
If we were left with Virgil only we should conclude that the fan _was a
fan_, i.e. a thing with which to cause wind, to _ventilate_[1322], and,
as it was an instrument of Demeter, we should further suppose that this
fan was used for _ventilating_, for winnowing her corn. We should still
be left with two unanswered questions: (1) ‘why was a winnowing fan, a
thing in constant use in everyday life, “mystic”?’ and (2) ‘how had the
winnowing fan of the corn-goddess become the characteristic implement of
the wine-god?’ These two difficulties presented themselves to the mind
of Servius, and he attempts to answer them after his kind. He does not
fairly face the problem, but he tells us everything he can remember that
anybody has said about or around the matter. His confused statement is so
instructive it must be quoted in full:
‘The mystic fan of Iacchus, that is the sieve (_cribrum_) of the
threshing-floor. He calls it the mystic fan of Iacchus, because the rites
of Father Liber had reference to the purification of the soul, and men
were purified through his mysteries as grain is purified by fans. It is
because of this that Isis is said to have placed the limbs of Osiris,
when they had been torn to pieces by Typhon, on a sieve, for Father Liber
is the same person, he in whose mysteries the fan plays a part, because
as we said he purifies souls. Whence also he is called Liber, because
he _liberates_, and it is he who, Orpheus said, was torn asunder by the
Giants. Some add that Father Liber was called by the Greeks _Liknites_.
Moreover the fan is called by them _liknon_, in which he is said to have
been placed directly after he was born from his mother’s womb. Others
explain its being called ‘mystic’ by saying that the fan is a large
wicker vessel in which peasants, because it is of large size, are wont to
heap their first-fruits and consecrate it to Liber and Libera. Hence it
is called “mystic”.’
If by ‘mystic’ is meant hopelessly and utterly unintelligible, the fan of
Iacchos certainly justifies its name. Servius leaves us with a ‘vannus’
that is at once a sieve, a winnowing fan and a fruit basket, with
mysterious contents that are at once a purified soul, an infant and a
dismembered Dionysos, leaves us also with no clue to any possible common
factor that might explain all three uses and their symbolism.
To solve the problems presented by Servius it is necessary briefly to
examine the evidence of classical authors as to the process of winnowing
and the shape of winnowing fans[1323]. So far we have assumed that a
winnowing fan is a basket, but when we turn to Homer we are confronted by
an obvious difficulty.
It happens by an odd chance that we know something of the shape of
the instrument for winnowing used in Homeric days. It was a thing so
shaped that by a casual observer it could be mistaken for an oar.
Teiresias[1324] in Hades foretells to Odysseus what shall befall him
after the slaying of the suitors: he is to go his way carrying with
him a shapen oar, until he comes to a land where men have no knowledge
of sea-things, and a sign shall be given to him where he is to abide.
Teiresias thus instructs him:
‘This token manifest I give, another wayfarer
Shall meet thee and shall say, on thy stout shoulder thou dost bear
A winnowing fan, that day in earth plant thou thy shapen oar
And to Poseidon sacrifice a bull, a ram, a boar.’
The word used is not _liknon_; it is ἀθηρηλοιγός, chaff-destroyer, but
none the less it is clear that the ancient instrument of winnowing was,
roughly speaking, shaped like an oar[1325]; confusion between the two
was possible. Such an instrument might well be called a fan, and of some
such shape must have been the primitive winnower. It is obviously quite
a different thing from the _liknon_ of the reliefs, the fruit basket. A
thing shaped like an oar would not be easily carried on the head, nor
would it suggest itself as a convenient cradle for a baby.
The way in which this primitive winnowing fan was used is clear from
another Homeric passage[1326]. In the fray of battle the Achaeans are
white with falling dust, just as
‘When in the holy threshing floors away the wind doth bear
The chaff, when men are winnowing. She of the golden hair
Demeter with the rushing winds the husk from out the grain
Divideth, and the chaff-heaps whiten and grow amain.’
The wind is the natural winnower, but man can help the wind by exposing
the mixed chaff and grain. This he throws up on the winnowing fan against
the wind, the wind blows away the chaff and the heavier grain falls
to the ground. The best instrument with which to do this is naturally
an oar-like pole, broadened at the end to serve as a shovel. Such an
instrument was the πτύον or winnowing fan:
‘As when from a broad winnowing fan, in a great threshing floor,
The pulse and black-skinned beans leap out the whistling wind before
Sped by the winnower’s swinging, so the bitter arrow flew
From Menelaos glancing far nor pierced his corslet through[1327].’
Here the joint work of the wind and the human winnower is clearly shown.
A basket of the shape of an old-fashioned coal-scuttle could be used
to scoop up the grain and toss it against the wind. It would not be so
convenient as the oar-shaped winnowing fan, because the labourer would
have to stoop to shovel up the grain, but it would hold more grain and
would serve the second purpose of an ordinary basket and of a child’s
cradle. Primitive man is not averse to these economies.
The _liknon_ and the _vannus_ alike begin as winnowing fans and end as
baskets for corn or fruit. The _liknon_ of the Hellenistic reliefs and
the _vannus_ of Virgil are made of wicker-work; the fan of Homer shaped
like an oar was made of sterner stuff, probably of wood. This may be
gathered from a pathetic fragment of the _Proteus_ of Aeschylus[1328]
where some one tells of
‘The piteous dove who feeding beats and breaks
Her hapless breast amid the winnowing fans.’
The winnowing fan is essentially and necessarily an instrument of
Demeter. This Virgil knew, though he knew also that it had passed into
the service of Iacchos. Theocritus[1329] at the end of his harvest Idyll
prays
‘O once again may it be mine to plant
The great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands
Smiling, with sheaves and poppies in her hands.’
The ‘great fan’ here, as the word πάξαιμι ‘fix’ or ‘plant’ shows, must
have been the oar-shaped fan, not the basket. The basket, the light thing
of osier carried on the head, is mainly characteristic of Dionysos. An
epigram in the _Anthology_[1330] enumerates the various instruments of
the worship of Bacchus, the rhombos, the fawn-skin, the cymbals, the
thyrsos, and
‘The timbrel lightly carried with its deep and muttering sound,
The liknon often borne aloft on hair with fillet bound.’
We have then, it is clear, two implements in use in ancient days for
winnowing; distinct in shape and made of different materials. The
‘chaff-consumer’ of Homer, called also a _ptuon_, made of wood and later
of iron, is an oar-shaped implement with a long handle; the _liknon_
proper, the _vannus_ of Vergil, is a shovel-shaped basket made of wicker
work. The only factor common to the two is that they are both winnowers.
There the resemblance ends. The _ptuon_ remained a simple agricultural
tool, the _liknon_, the winnow-_corb_, became ‘mystic’ because of its
function as a purifier and because of its second use as a cradle for the
mystery-babe. In it was carried the phallos, the symbol of life; hence it
was reverently veiled. The confusion between the two is entirely caused
by our modern terminology, which uses the word ‘fan’ to translate both
λίκνον, ‘winnow-corb,’ and πτύον, ‘winnow-fork’ or ‘shovel.’ The religion
of Dionysos, and with it the Orphic mysteries, adopted the _liknon_, the
winnow-corb, and left the _ptuon_, the winnow-shovel, to Demeter.
* * * * *
The diverse shapes of the _liknon_ have been discussed at length because
they are of vital importance for the understanding of Orphic mysteries
and Orphic mysticism. The shift from winnowing fan to fruit basket marks
the transition from agriculture to vine culture, from Demeter to Bacchus,
and the connecting link is Bromios. The vine-growers have no use for
the winnowing fork but they were once grain-growers, and they keep the
_liknon_-basket in their worship.
Moreover, and this is the most curious and conclusive evidence, though
they have turned their winnowing fans into fruit-baskets, they by an
instructive and half unconscious confusion take over from the winnowing
fan its proper symbolism and apply it to the fruit-basket.
The winnowing fan symbolized purification; as the husk is separated from
the grain so is evil winnowed away from good; it mattered little whether
the separation was effected by an actual fan (πτύον) or by a sieve
(κόσκινον)[1331]. Plato[1332], whose mind was charged with Orphism, knew
that all purification is _discernment_, separation, from the outward
cleansing of the body to that innermost purification which is ‘the
purging away by refutation of all prejudice and vain conceit within the
soul.’ We have kept among our sacraments the outward washing with water,
but we have lost the lovely and more intimate symbolism of the _liknon_.
Yet we still remember that ‘His fan is in his hand and he will throughly
purge his floor.’
The symbolism of the basket of first-fruits was quite other; it was the
sign of plenty, of new life, of the birth of fruits and children. But
the Orphic cannot forget purification; his fusion of new and old is at
the back of all his confused mysticism that baffled Servius. The fan
he knows symbolizes purification, but the basket is the cradle of the
new-born Liknites. He sees in a flash how he can connect the two. Was not
the child torn asunder? is it not that divine dismembered life by which
all men are purged and consecrated and born anew? It even seems to him
full of a wondrous significance that this divine dismembered life should
be carried on the head, the seat of the divine reason, and he invents
a story of a nymph, with an old Satyr name, Hippa[1333], who carried
the _liknon_ on her head and symbolized the soul. Charged with all this
symbolism we cannot wonder that the _liknon_ as fan for winnowing,
as sieve for sifting, as basket for first-fruits, as cradle for a
child, was, as Harpocration[1334] tells, ‘serviceable for every rite of
initiation, for every sacrifice.’
The rite in which the _liknon_ was used, and that a rite of supreme
importance for the understanding of Orphic mysteries, has been reserved
to the end—the rite of marriage.
[Illustration: FIG. 154.]
On the engraved gem[1335] in fig. 154, signed by the artist Tryphon,
the scene represented is the marriage, or possibly the initiation and
marriage ceremonies in one, of Eros and Psyche. The subject is of course
mythological, but none the less is it a transcript of actual usage. Eros
and Psyche, _both_ closely veiled, are led by a sacred fillet in the
hand of the Eros who bears the nuptial torch. Another Eros to the right
unveils a seat or couch. Over the veiled heads of bride and groom a third
Eros holds the _liknon_ full of fruits.
That the _liknon_ was carried at marriage ceremonies is known also from
literary sources. Plutarch[1336] says it was the custom at Athens
at marriages that a boy both whose parents were alive should carry a
_liknon_ full of loaves and then pronounce the words ‘Bad have I fled,
better have I found.’ The fact that the boy must have both parents alive,
i.e. that he should be uncontaminated by any contact however remote with
the unlucky spirits and influences of the dead, shows clearly that here
again the carrying of the _liknon_ was a fertility charm, a charm to
induce the birth of children and all natural wealth and increase. In a
marriage rite the symbolism of Liknites, of fruit and child, could not
be forgotten. The scholiast to Kallimachos[1337] says ‘in old days they
were wont to lull babies to sleep in _likna_ as an omen for wealth and
fruits,’ and Servius says, as already noted (p. 528), it was the custom
to do this the moment the child was born.
But the _liknon_ in the marriage rite became not merely a fertility
charm but the symbol of spiritual grace. This is clear from the words of
Suidas[1338]. The boy, he says, carried branches of acanthus and acorns
as well as loaves. If Suidas is right, these ruder natural products
were only present as being earlier first-fruits before man made loaves
of corn, but Suidas says he carried them and pronounced the formulary
_signifying as in a riddle_ the change to what is better, for the wreath
of oak and acanthus signified what was bad. It was this mysticizing of
everyday things that irritated the plain man, that seemed to him at
once foolish and pretentious; this it was that raised Demosthenes to
his angry protest: ‘You bid your mystics,’ he says to Aeschines[1339],
‘when you have daubed them with mud and purified them with clay, say
“Bad have I fled, better have I found,” pluming yourself that no one has
ever before uttered such words, you,’ he goes on, ‘who are kistophoros
and liknophoros.’ Had not every plain man pronounced the words at his
marriage and meant by them—increase of income and family?
The ‘mystic fan of Iacchos’ was used in marriage rites. This brings us
face to face with the question—did Orphic mysteries include a mystic
marriage[1340]? The Orphics worshipped, as has been seen (p. 499), both
Mother and Son; they mysticized the birth of the Son; did they look back
before the birth and mysticize the marriage of the Mother? On _a priori_
grounds we should expect they did. A religion based on the belief of
possible union with the divine had everything to gain from the symbolism
of marriage. Happily we are not left to _a priori_ speculation; we have
positive evidence that Dionysiac mysteries contained a sacred marriage
and that Orphics mysticized it.
THE SACRED MARRIAGE.
By a most unhappy chance our main evidence as to the Sacred Marriage of
the mysteries comes to us from the Christian Fathers; their prejudiced
imaginations see in its beautiful symbolism only the record of unbridled
license. We may and must discredit their unclean interpretations, but we
have no ground for doubting the substantial accuracy of their statements
as to ritual procedure. They were preaching to men who had been initiated
in the very mysteries they describe, and any mis-statement as to ritual
would have discredited their teaching.
Clement[1341] in his ‘Exhortation’ wishes to prove the abominable
wickedness of Zeus and says that he became the husband of his daughter
in the form of a snake. He adds: ‘The token of the Sabazian mysteries is
_the snake through the bosom_, and this snake gliding through the bosom
of the initiated is the proof of the license of Zeus.’ Arnobius[1342]
too holds that the ceremony of the snake is but a witness against Zeus.
He adds the important detail that the snake was of gold. It was let down
into the bosom and taken away from below. The _gold_ snake is in itself
evidence of the simple symbolic innocence of the rite.
The snake ceremony of Sabazios is of course the relic of a very primitive
faith, of the time when the snake was the god. We are reminded of the
story told of Philip of Macedon (p. 398) and his fear that Olympias was
the bride of a divine snake. As civilization advanced the sacred marriage
would take a purely human form.
Clement[1343] again gives invaluable evidence. Happily he has preserved
for us the symbols or _tokens_ of initiation into the mysteries of the
Great Mother in her Asiatic form as Cybele. ‘The symbols,’ he says, in
his gross and ignorant blasphemy, ‘will abundantly excite your laughter,
though on account of the exposure you will not be in laughing condition:
I have eaten from the timbrel, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have
carried the kernos, I have gone down into the bridal chamber.’ The first
three _tokens_ are, as has been already shown (p. 155), practically
identical with the _tokens_ of Eleusis and relate to the solemn partaking
of first-fruits; the last is a manifest avowal of a Sacred Marriage. The
word παστός[1344] here used means bridal chamber or bridal bed. It is
roughly the equivalent of θάλαμος, and like it had a hieratic as well as
a secular use. The houses of the gods are built after the pattern of the
dwellings of men.
It is curious and interesting to find that a παστάς, a bridal chamber,
existed in the sanctuary of the Great Mother at Phlya. The anonymous
author of the _Philosophoumena_[1345] or ‘Refutation of all Heresies’
tells us the Bacchic rites of Orpheus ‘were established and given to men
at Phlya in Attica before the establishment of the Eleusinian rite of
initiation.’ These rites were those of her called the Great One. At Phlya
there was a bridal chamber (παστάς) and on the chamber were paintings,
existing to the author’s own time, representing the whole semblance
of what has been described. On the subject of the many representations
Plutarch wrote in his ten books against Empedokles. Unhappily the
treatise by Plutarch is lost and the author of the _Philosophoumena_
only describes one painting, which will be discussed later (Chap. XII.)
in relation to the theogony of Orpheus. At present it is important to
note the one fact that in a primitive home of Orphism there was a sacred
bridal chamber. In such a chamber must have been enacted a mimetic
marriage.
Nor was it only at Phlya that a marriage chamber existed and a marriage
ceremonial was enacted. At Athens itself was such a chamber, and our
evidence for its existence is no less an authority than Aristotle[1346].
In his discussion of the official residences of the various archons he
notes that in past days the King Archon used to live in a place called
the Boukolion near to the Prytaneion, ‘And the proof of this is that
to this day the union and marriage of the wife of the King Archon with
Dionysos takes place there.’
In a place called the ‘cattle shed’ the Queen Archon was married to
Dionysos. The conjecture lies near to hand that in bygone days there
was a marriage to a sacred bull. We are reminded that the worshipper of
Sabazios was said to ‘herd’ the god (p. 420). Be that as it may, at the
festival of the Anthesteria the Queen Archon was ‘given in marriage’ to
Dionysos, and from the author of the Speech against Neaira[1347] we learn
how dread and sacred was the rite.
The mother of Neaira, a base-born alien, had on behalf of the city
performed the ‘unspeakable sacrifice’; she had seen what none but an
Athenian woman might see; she had entered where none but the Queen Archon
might enter; she had heard what none might hear; she had administered the
oath to her celebrants, fourteen in number, one for each of the altars
of Dionysos, administered it on the sacred baskets before they touched
the holy things. The oath was written on a stone stele set up by the
altar in the ancient sanctuary of Dionysos in the marshes, opened but
once in the year at the festival of the marriage. It was set there in
secret because it was too holy to be read by the many; the letters were
dim with age; so the orator called for the sacred herald and bade him
read it that the court might hear how ‘holy and pure and ancient were its
prescriptions.’
_The Oath of the Celebrants._
‘I fast[1348] and am clean and abstinent from all things that
make unclean and from intercourse with man and I celebrate the
Theoinia and the Iobaccheia to Dionysos in accordance with
ancestral usage and at the appointed times.’
Unhappily though we have the oath of purity we know nothing definite of
either the Theoinia or the Iobaccheia[1349]. Only this much is certain, a
sacred marriage was enacted by a woman high-born and blameless, and that
marriage was a mystery.
* * * * *
At Athens Dionysos is bridegroom, not new-born child. This is one of
the shifts from Son to Father that constantly occur in Greek mythology.
The Christian Fathers see in it evidence of incest, but the horrid
supposition is wholly gratuitous. It has been shown in detail (p. 260)
that the Mother and the Maid are two persons but one god, are but the
young and the old form of a divinity always waxing and waning. It is the
same with the Father and the Son; he is one but he reflects two stages
of the same human life. We are perplexed because both Father and Son in
the religion of Dionysos take on many names: Sabazios, Dionysos, Bacchos,
Iacchos, Zagreus. Each reflects some special function, but each is apt to
be both Father and Son. The Romans in their dull way, with little power
for intense personification, leave the simple truth more manifest. Libera
the Mother has a Son Liber, a _child_, but even with them the inevitable
confusion arises, the _child_ Liber grows up and becomes ‘Father Liber.’
Another bridal chamber in the cult of Dionysos remains to be noted,
and one of special significance. On his way from Sekyon to Phlius
Pausanias[1350] came to a grove called Pyraea. In it there was a
sanctuary of Demeter the Protectress and of Kore. ‘Here the men celebrate
a festival by themselves, and they give up the place called the Bridal
Chamber (Νυμφῶνα) to the women for their festival. Of the images of
Dionysos and Demeter and Kore in the Bridal Chamber the faces only are
visible.’ Here, as manifestly at Athens, the marriage service of Dionysos
was accomplished by women; the men leave them alone with their god. If
any one, Pentheus-like, charges these holy women with license, this plain
primitive prescription refutes his impiety.
From the evidence of Aristotle and Pausanias we may be sure that the
marriage rites, so grossly libelled by Christian Fathers, were not
the products of their own imaginations. Their wilful misunderstanding
is an ugly chapter in the history of human passion and prejudice. Now
and again, when they seek an illustration for their own mysteries,
they confess that the pagan mysteries of marriage were believed by the
celebrants to be spiritual. Epiphanios[1351] says ‘some prepare a bridal
chamber and perform a mystic rite accompanied by certain words used to
the initiated, and they allege that it is a spiritual marriage’; and
Firmicus[1352] by a happy chance records the social formularies. ‘Not
only words,’ he says, ‘but even nuptial rites occur in their sacred
mysteries, and the proof of this is the greeting in which the mystae hail
those just initiated by the name of “brides”:
“A light upon the shining sea—
The Bridegroom and his Bride”.’
A mimetic marriage was, it is clear, an element in the rites of Dionysos
and an element mysticized by the Orphics. Equally clear is it that in
the ceremony of waking Liknites and in the story of Zagreus we have as
another element the birth of a child. At present we have no evidence of
definite connection between the two. At Athens in the Boukolion we have
a marriage rite but no birth rite, at Delphi in the waking of Liknites we
have a birth but no marriage. When the mysteries at Eleusis are examined
we find, as will shortly be seen, that the two rites—the marriage and the
birth—were in close and manifest connection.
ORPHIC ELEMENTS IN ELEUSINIAN RITUAL.
The question may fairly be asked—are we entitled to use evidence drawn
from Eleusinian mysteries to elucidate Orphic ceremonial? or in other
words have we any clear evidence that the worship of Dionysos in the form
known as ‘Orphic’ came to Eleusis and modified the simple rites of the
Mother and the Maid?
These simple rites have been already examined. It has been shown from the
plain evidence of the Eleusinian ‘tokens’ that the rites of Eleusis were
primarily rites of a harvest festival, that the ceremonies consisted of
elaborate purification and fasting, followed by the removal of the taboo
on first-fruits, and the consequent partaking of the sacred _kykeon_
and the handling of certain sacred objects. I have advisedly devoted no
separate chapter to the Eleusinian Mysteries because all in them that
was not a primitive harvest festival, all or nearly all their spiritual
significance, was due to elements borrowed from the cult of Dionysos.
We have now obtained some notion, fairly clear if fragmentary, of the
contents of Orphic and Dionysiac rites; we have examined the Omophagia of
Crete, the Liknophoria of Delphi and the Sacred Marriage of Athens and
Phlya, and we are able to begin the enquiry as to whether and how far
these rites are part of the ritual of Eleusis.
Before attempting to answer this question it may be well to resume
briefly the literary evidence for the affiliation of Dionysos to the
Eleusinian goddesses. The actual fact of his presence at Eleusis must be
established before we consider the extent and nature of his influence on
Eleusinian rites.
_a. Iacchos at Eleusis._
Dionysos at Eleusis is known by the title of Iacchos. The _locus
classicus_ for Iacchos of the mysteries is of course the chorus of the
Mystae in the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes[1353]:
CHORUS (_unseen_).
Iacchus, O Iacchus!
Iacchus, O Iacchus!
XANTHIAS.
That’s it, sir. These are the Initiated
Rejoicing somewhere here, just as he told us.
Why, it’s the old Iacchus hymn that used
To warm the cockles of Diagoras!
DIONYSUS.
Yes, it must be. However, we’d best sit
Quite still and listen, till we’re sure of it.
CHORUS.
Thou that dwellest in the shadow
Of great glory here beside us,
Spirit, Spirit, we have hied us
To thy dancing in the meadow!
Come, Iacchus; let thy brow
Toss its fruited myrtle bough;
We are thine, O happy dancer; O our comrade, come and guide us!
Let the mystic measure beat:
Come in riot fiery fleet;
Free and holy all before thee,
While the Charites adore thee,
And thy Mystae wait the music of thy feet!
XANTHIAS.
O Virgin of Demeter, highly blest,
What an entrancing smell of roasted pig!
DIONYSUS.
Hush! hold your tongue! Perhaps they’ll give you some.
CHORUS.
Spirit, Spirit, lift the shaken
Splendour of thy tossing torches!
All the meadow flashes, scorches:
Up, Iacchus, and awaken!
Come, thou star that bringest light
To the darkness of our rite,
Till thine old men dance as young men, dance with every thought forsaken
Of the dulness and the fear
Left by many a circling year:
Let thy red light guide the dances
Where thy banded youth advances
To be joyous by the blossoms of the mere!
The lovely hymn to Iacchos, as choragos of the mystae of Demeter, is
speedily followed by a second hymn[1354] to the goddess herself—the
Fruit-bearer:
One hymn to the Maiden; now raise ye another
To the Queen of the Fruits of the Earth.
To Demeter the Corn-giver, Goddess and Mother,
Make worship in musical mirth.
The blend of the smell of roast pork and the odour of mystic torches, of
buffoonery and ecstasy, is the perfect image of the fusion of old and new.
In the ritual hymn of Delphi, already noted (p. 417), Dionysos, who in
the proœmium is addressed by his titles as god of a cereal drink, as
Bromios and Braites, is when he leaves Parnassos and comes to Eleusis
hailed by his new name Iacchos[1355]:
‘With thy wine cup waving high,
With thy maddening revelry,
To Eleusis’ flowery vale
Comest thou—Bacchos, Paean, hail!
Thither thronging all the race
Come, of Hellas, seeking grace
Of thy nine-year revelation,
And they called thee by thy name,
Loved Iacchos, he who came
To bring salvation,
And disclose
His sure haven from all mortal woes.’
Sophocles[1356] in the _Antigone_ invokes the god of many names for the
cleansing of sin-stricken Thebes, but being an Athenian he remembers the
god of the mysteries of Eleusis:
‘Thou of the Many Names, delight and wonder
Of the Theban bride, Child of the pealing thunder,
Thou who dost rule over Italia’s pride
And at Eleusis in Deo’s bosom wide
Dwellest, Deo, she the mother of all,
Bacchos, Bacchos, on thee we call.’
Bacchos at Thebes, but, when the poet remembers the nocturnal rites of
the mysteries, the name Iacchos comes irresistibly back:
‘Thou who dost lead the choir
Of stars aflame with fire,
Of nightly voices King,
Of Zeus offspring,
Appear, O Lord, with thine attendant maids The Thyiades,
Who mad and dancing through the long night chant
Their hymn to thee, Iacchos, Celebrant.’
For Iacchos at the Eleusinian mysteries we are not left to the evidence
of poetry alone. Herodotus[1357] tells how, when Attica was being laid
waste by Xerxes, Dicaeus, an exile, happened to be with Demaratus, a
Lacedaemonian, in the Thriasian plain. They saw a great cloud of dust
coming from Eleusis, so great that it seemed to be caused by thirty
thousand men. They were wondering at the cloud, and they suddenly heard
a sound, and the sound seemed to Dicaeus to be ‘the mystic Iacchos.’
Demaratos did not know about the sacred rites at Eleusis, and he asked
what it might be that they heard. Dicaeus, who took the sound to be
of ill omen to the Persians, explained it as follows: ‘The Athenians
celebrate this festival every year to the Mother and the Maiden, and any
Athenian or other Greek who wishes is initiated, and the sound that you
hear is the cry “Iacchos,” which they raise at this feast.’
The account is interesting because it shows that ‘the Iacchos’ was a
ritual cry, one easily recognizable by an Athenian, just as now-a-days we
should recognize Alleluia or Hosanna. That the mysteries at Eleusis were
still in the main of local import is clear from the fact that a Spartan
did not recognise the cry.
Iacchos gave his name to one of the days of the Eleusinian mysteries—the
20th of Boedromion (Sept., Oct.). On this day he was taken from his
sanctuary in Athens, the Iaccheion, and escorted in solemn procession to
Eleusis. Plutarch[1358], in commenting on lucky and unlucky days, says
he is aware that unlucky things sometimes happen on lucky days: for the
Athenians had to receive a Macedonian garrison ‘even on the 20th of
Boedromion, the day on which they lead forth the mystic Iacchos.’
* * * * *
Iacchos then was the name by which Dionysos was known at Eleusis, his
mystery name _par excellence_ for Athens. It is important to note what
special form of the god the name expressed.
Strabo[1359] says vaguely, ‘they call Dionysos, Iacchos, and the spirit
(δαίμονα) who is leader of the mysteries of Demeter’; but vagueness
is pardonable in the particular connection in which he speaks, as
he is concerned to show the general analogy of all orgiastic rites.
Mythologists have too readily concluded that Iacchos is a vague title
denoting a sort of ‘genius of the mysteries,’ and ‘the mystic Iacchos’
has come to mean anything and nothing in particular.
But Suidas[1360] is quite precise; he notes that Iacchos means ‘a certain
day,’ ‘a certain song,’ but he puts, first and foremost, what is the root
idea of Iacchos, he is ‘Dionysos at the breast.’ Iacchos at Eleusis is
not the beer-god, not the wine-god, but the son-god, ‘child of Semele,
the wealth-giver[1361],’ the same as Liknites, ‘He of the cradle,’ whom,
year by year on Parnassos, the Thyiades wakened to new life (p. 402).
Iacchos had his sanctuary at Athens and was received as a guest at
Eleusis. Never, so far as we know, had he temple precinct or shrine at
Eleusis, and his name occurs very rarely in inscriptions. He is a god
made by the Athenians in their own image; they were guests at Eleusis, so
their god was a guest. He is as it were a reflection of the influence of
Athens at Eleusis.
Another point must be noted. Zagreus, it has been seen, is a god of
ritual rather than poetry, Iacchos is of poetry rather than ritual, of
poetry touched and deepened by mysticism. He is just so much of the
religion of Dionysos as the imaginative Athenian can face. We never hear
that Iacchos was a bull, there is no legend that he was torn to pieces.
Sophocles[1362], the most orthodox of poets, knows he has horns, but he
sends his horned Iacchos to dwell in fabulous Nysa,
‘Where no shrill voice doth sound of any bird,’
and for the rest he is compact of torchlight and dancing.
The learned Nonnus[1363], who is steeped in Orphism and a most careful
ritualist, seems to hit the mark when he makes Iacchos the latest born
of the divine Bacchic incarnations. According to Nonnus, Iacchos is the
child of Aura by Bacchus, and is presented by his father to Athene, and
Athene adopted him, and gave him the breast that before him none but
Erechtheus had sucked. Here we have a manifest reminiscence of Iacchos
as ‘Dionysos at the breast.’ Nonnus goes on to say how the nymphs, the
Bacchae of Eleusis, received the new-born child with dance and song, and
they hymned first Zagreus son of Persephone, next Bromios son of Semele,
and third in order Iacchos.
So shadowy, so poetical are the associations that cluster round the name
Iacchos, that, if Iacchos were our only evidence of Dionysos at Eleusis,
I should be inclined to believe his influence was in the main late and
literary. It is to ritual we must look for evidence more substantial.
* * * * *
It is perhaps worth noting that Pausanias[1364], in mentioning a trivial
ritual taboo, notes that it is common to the mysteries of Eleusis and
the teaching of Orpheus. He is speaking of the temple of the Bean-Man
(Cyamites), but is uncertain of the origin of the name and cult, and
knows he is treading on delicate ground, so he contents himself with
saying darkly, ‘Whoever has seen the rite at Eleusis, or has read what
are called the sayings of Orpheus, knows what I mean.’ More than once,
in examining a sanctuary of Demeter or Kore, he stops to note that local
tradition attributed its foundation to Orpheus. Thus at Sparta[1365] he
saw a temple of Kore the Saviour, and ‘some say Orpheus the Thracian made
it, but others Abaris who came from the Hyperboreans.’ Here the diverse
tradition is unanimous as to Northern influence. The Lacedaemonians
believed, he says, that Orpheus taught them to worship Demeter of the
Underworld, but Pausanias himself thinks that they, like other people,
got it from Hermione[1366]. No great importance can be attached to these
floating traditions, but they serve to show that popular belief connected
the worship of the Mother and the Maid with Orpheus and the North. We are
inclined to connect the rise of their worship exclusively with Eleusis,
so that local tradition to the contrary is of some value.
But the real substantial evidence as to the presence and influence of
Orphic rites and conceptions at Eleusis is drawn from the Eleusinian
ceremonial itself. Of the three main Orphic mysteries examined, the
Omophagia, the Liknophoria, and the Sacred Marriage, two, the Liknophoria
and the Sacred Marriage, are known with absolute certainty to have been
practised at Eleusis.
The first and perhaps the most profound and characteristic of Orphic
rites, the Omophagia, is wholly absent[1367]. The reason is not far to
seek. The Omophagia, deep though its spiritual meaning was, is in its
actual ritual savage and repulsive. We have seen a rite closely analogous
practised by primitive nomadic Arabs. The cultus at Eleusis is, as has
already been shown, based on agricultural conditions; the emergence of
Eleusis was primarily due to the fertile Rarian corn plain. A god who
comes to Eleusis, who is affiliated by this agricultural people, will
shed the barbarous side of his worship, and develope only that side of
his nature and ritual that is consonant with civilized life. A god can
only exist so long as he is the mirror of the people who worship him.
Accordingly we find, as might be expected, that it is the Dionysos of
agriculture, and of those marriage rites that go with agriculture, who is
worshipped at Eleusis, worshipped with the rites of the Liknophoria and
of the Sacred Marriage.
_b. The Liknophoria at Eleusis._
[Illustration: FIG. 155.]
The Liknophoria as an element in the rites at Eleusis is clearly shown in
the monument reproduced in figs. 155-157. The design forms the decoration
of a cinerary urn[1368] (fig. 155) found in a grave near a Columbarium
on the Esquiline Hill. The scenes represented are clearly rites of
initiation. In fig. 156 we see Demeter herself enthroned; about her is
coiled her great snake caressed by the initiated mystic[1369]. To the
left stands a female torch-bearer; she is probably Persephone. This scene
represents the final stage of initiation (ἐποπτεία), where the _epoptes_
is admitted to the presence and converse of the goddesses.
The remainder of the design (fig. 157) is occupied by two preliminary
ceremonies of purification, the sacrifice of the ‘mystic ’ pig already
discussed (p. 152) and the _liknon_ ceremonial. It is on this last
that attention must be focussed. The candidate is seated on a low seat
(θρόνος); his right foot rests on a ram’s head which doubtless stands
for the ‘fleece of purification’ (p. 24); he is veiled and in his left
hand carries a torch; above his head a priestess holds a _liknon_. It
is remarkable that the _liknon_ in this representation, unlike those
previously discussed, contains no fruits. This can scarcely, I think, be
accidental. When the artist wishes to show fruits in a sacred vessel,
he is quite able to do so, as is seen in the dish of poppy heads held
by the priest to the right, where perspective is violated to make the
content clear. The absence of the fruits is best, I think, explained
on the supposition that the _liknon_ is by this time mysticized. It is
regarded as the winnowing fan, the ‘mystic fan of Iacchos,’ rather than
as the basket of earth’s fruits. It is held empty over the candidate’s
head merely as a symbol of purification. This explanation is the more
probable, if the scene be, as is generally supposed, a representation of
Eleusinian mysteries, but of Eleusinian mysteries held not at Eleusis but
at Alexandria. The vertical corn-ears on the head of Demeter, the fringed
garment of the youth who handles the snake, and the scale pattern that
decorates the cover of the urn itself (fig. 155), all find their closer
analogies in Egyptian rather than indigenous Greek monuments.
[Illustration: FIG. 156.]
[Illustration: FIG. 157.]
* * * * *
A Liknophoria, it is clear, was part of Eleusinian ritual. But the
question naturally arises—did not Dionysos borrow the _liknon_ from
Demeter rather than Demeter from Dionysos? It is almost certain that
he did not. Dionysos was worshipped as Liknites at Delphi before he
came to Eleusis. Moreover, in the Eleusinian ‘tokens’ the confession is
not ‘I have carried the _liknon_,’ but ‘I have carried the _kernos_.’
That Kernophoria and Liknophoria were analogous ceremonies, both being
the carrying of first-fruits, is possible; that they were identical is
improbable. Dionysos borrowed the _liknon_ from his own mother, not from
her of Eleusis.
Far more complete and satisfactory is the evidence for the Sacred
Marriage and the Birth of the holy child. These were as integral a part
of the mysteries of Eleusis as of the rites of Sabazios and Dionysos.
_c. The Sacred Marriage and the Sacred Birth at Eleusis._
Iacchos, we have seen, was defined as the child Dionysos ‘at the breast,’
but for any ceremony of his birth or awakening under the name of Iacchos
we look in vain. Iacchos is Athenian; no one ventured to say he was
born at Eleusis, but by a most fortunate chance the record is left us
of another Mother and Son at Eleusis, and we know too that the marriage
of this Mother and the birth of this Son were the central acts, the
culmination, of the whole ritual of its mysteries. We owe this knowledge
to the anonymous treatise which has already furnished the important
details as to the Mysteries of Phlya.
The author of the _Philosophoumena_[1370] is concerned to prove that
the heretical sect of the Naassenes got their doctrine from ceremonials
practised by the Phrygians. The Phrygians, the Naassene says, assert that
god is ‘a fresh ear of grain reaped.’ He then goes on to make a statement
to us of supreme importance. ‘And following the Phrygians the Athenians,
when they initiate at the Eleusinian rites, exhibit to the epoptae the
mighty and marvellous and most complete epoptic mystery, an ear of grain
reaped in silence. And this ear of grain the Athenians themselves hold
to be the great and perfect light that is from that which has no form,
as the Hierophant himself, who is not like Attis, but who is made a
eunuch by means of hemlock and has renounced all carnal generation, he,
by night at Eleusis, accomplishing by the light of a great flame the
great and unutterable mysteries, says and cries in a loud voice “Holy
Brimo has borne a sacred Child, Brimos,” that is, the mighty has borne
the mighty; and holy, he (i.e. the Naassene) says, is the generation that
is spiritual, that is heavenly, that is from above, and mighty is he so
engendered.’
The evidence of the writer of the _Philosophoumena_ is indefeasible, not
indeed as to the mystical meaning either he or the Naassene he quotes
attached to the rites, but as to the rites themselves. He describes the
rites only to discredit them and he quotes an actual ritual formulary. We
may take it then as certain that to the epoptae at Eleusis was shewn as
the supreme revelation a ‘fresh ear reaped’ and that by night there was
declared to these epoptae the birth of a sacred Child: ‘Unto us a Child
is born, unto us a Son is given.’ The close conjunction in which the two
rites are placed makes it highly probable, though not absolutely certain,
that the one, the human birth, was but the anthropomorphic form of the
other, that in fact we have here the drama of Liknites, child and fruit,
reenacted; the thought is the same as that expressed by the vase-painter
(fig. 153) where the new-born child rises out of the cornucopia of
fruits. And last it is highly satisfactory to learn, and that from the
mouth of a Christian writer, that the birth and the begetting were
symbolical. The express statement that the Hierophant partook of some
drug compelling abstinence cannot have been invented[1371].
The author of the _Philosophoumena_ says nothing of the Sacred Marriage,
though from the birth of the holy Child it might be inferred. The
confession ‘I have gone down into the bridal chamber’ is one of the
‘tokens’ of the mysteries of the Great Mother, but we cannot certainly
say that it was a ‘token’ at Eleusis; neither Clement nor Firmicus nor
Arnobius includes it in his enumeration. We cannot therefore assert that
each mystic at Eleusis went through a mimetic marriage, but we do know
that the holy rite was enacted between the hierophant and the chief
priestess of Demeter. Asterius[1372], speaking of the various procedures
of initiation at Eleusis, asks—‘is there not there the descent into
darkness and the holy congress of the hierophant and the priestess, of
him alone and her alone?’
Lucian[1373] adds incidental testimony. In his account of the doings of
the false prophet Alexander he describes how the impostor instituted
rites that were a close parody of those at Eleusis, and he narrates the
details of the blasphemous travesty. Among the mimetic performances were
not only the Epiphany and Birth of a god but the enactment of a Sacred
Marriage. All preliminaries were gone through, and Lucian says that but
for the abundance of lighted torches the marriage rite would actually
have been consummated. The part of the hierophant was taken by the false
prophet himself. A short time after the parody of the marriage ceremony
he came in wearing the characteristic dress of the hierophant, and, amid
a deep silence, announced in the usual loud voice ‘Hail, Glykon,’ and
‘some fellows attending him, Paphlagonians, wearing sandals and smelling
of garlic and supposed to be Eumolpidae and Kerykes, cried in answer
“Hail, Alexander.”’
Lucian’s account of this scurrilous travesty is not pleasant reading, but
it serves one important end—it enables us to put together the two rites,
the Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the holy Child; but for Lucian
the sequence must have remained conjectural. We may now be certain that
in silence, in darkness and in perfect chastity the Sacred Marriage was
first enacted, and that immediately after the Hierophant came forth, and,
standing in a blaze of torchlight, cried aloud that the supreme mystery
was accomplished, ‘Holy Brimo has borne a sacred Child, Brimos.’
* * * * *
The Sacred Marriage[1374] formed part of the ritual of Eleusis, as it
formed part of the Orphic mysteries of Sabazios and the Great Mother,
but the further question arises—was this Sacred Marriage indigenous at
Eleusis or did it, like the religion of Dionysos, come from the North?
Was Brimo only a title of the Eleusinian Demeter? This it would seem was
the view of Clement[1375] who is not strong in ethnography, but it can
I think be shown that Clement was wrong. Brimo _is_ a form of the Great
Mother who is also the Maid, but she is a Northern not an Eleusinian
form. This is clearly evidenced by what we know of her apart from the
mysteries.
_d. Thessalian influence at Eleusis. Brimo._
Of Brimos we know nothing save as the mystery child; he is the
attributive son marking by identity of name the function of his mother.
Brimo we know as an underworld goddess, and, a fact all important for the
argument, she comes from Pherae in Thessaly.
In the _Alexandra_ of Lycophron Cassandra thus addresses her mother
Hecuba[1376]:
‘Mother, unhappy mother, not untold
Shall be thy fame, for Brimo, Perses’ maid,
The Threefold One, shall for her ministrant
Take thee, to fright men with dire sounds at night,
Yea such as worship not with torchlit rites
The images of her who Strymon holds,
Pherae’s dread goddess leaving unassoiled.’
For once Lycophron is intelligible; Hecuba is to be transformed into a
hound of the triple Hecate, Thessalian goddess of the underworld, and
Brimo is but her other name: she is the Thessalian Kore. The mystic child
at Eleusis was born of a maiden; these ancients made for themselves the
sacred dogma, ‘A virgin shall conceive and bear a son.’ It was left to
Christian fathers, blending the motherhood of Demeter with the virgin
mother and the parentage of Zeus, things they did not and would not
understand, to make of the sacred legend a story of vile human incest.
Brimo, though we find her, in late times, in the very heart of the
mysteries, belongs with her hell-hounds to a _couche_ of mythology
obviously primitive. To the popular mind of the uninitiated she lapsed
into mere bogeydom. Lucian[1377] in his _Oracle of the Dead_ brings her
in with the rest of the comic horrors of Hades. When the underworld
decree is passed the magistrates of Hades record their votes, the
populace holds up its hands, ‘Brimo snorts approval, Cerberus yelps his
aye.’
But Apollonius Rhodius[1378], writing of things Thessalian, and by
natural temper inclined always to the serious and beautiful, knows
of Brimo as terrible and magical, but yet as the Nursing Mother
(Kourotrophos). When Medea is about to pluck the awful underworld root
for the undoing of Jason,
‘Seven times bathed she herself in living founts,
Seven times called she on Brimo, she who haunts
The night, the Nursing Mother. In black weed
And murky gloom she dwells, Queen of the dead.’
And the scholiast commenting on the passage says she is Hecate, ‘whom
sorceresses were wont magically to induce (ἐπάγεσθαι); and they called
her Brimo because of the terror and horror of her; and she sent against
men the apparitions called Hekataia; and she was wont to change her
shape, hence they called her Empusa.’ He goes off into fruitless
etymology but drops by the way a suggestion that may contain some truth,
that the name Brimo is connected with ὄβριμος ‘raging,’ the epithet of
another Thracian, Ares.
Brimo then, some said, meant the Mighty, some the Angry One. The two,
for minds obsessed by the atmosphere of ‘aversion,’ are not far apart:
the Angry-Raging One is own sister to the Angry Demeter, Demeter Erinys.
But by their Angry name it is not well to address the gods, lest by
sympathetic magic you rouse the very anger you seek to allay. Brimo may
well have been one of the Silent Names.
Brimo is Thessalian, and Thessalian often spells ‘later Thracian.’ Brimo
is near akin to the Mother Kotys, the mystery goddess of the Thracians,
but we cannot say that she is herself certainly Thracian. For definite
evidence of a Thracian element at Eleusis we must look to its chief
hereditary priesthood, the family from which the Hierophant was taken,
the Eumolpidae.
_e. Thracian influence at Eleusis. Eumolpos._
The Eumolpidae must also be the keystone of any contention as to Thracian
influence at Eleusis, and fortunately we are fairly well informed as to
their _provenance_.
Sophocles[1379] in the _Oedipus Coloneus_ makes the chorus sing:
‘O to be there
Upon the sea shore, where,
Ablaze with light,
The Holy Ones for mortals their dread rite
Nurse, and on mortal lips the golden key
Is set of celebrant Eumolpidae.’
The scholiast[1380] asks the very pertinent question—‘Why in the world
have the Eumolpidae presidency over the rites, when they are foreigners?’
He proceeds as usual to make several puzzled and contradictory
suggestions. Perhaps the reason is that it was Eumolpos, son of Deiope
daughter of Triptolemos, who first instituted the mysteries at Eleusis,
and not the Thracian, and this was the view taken by Istros in his book
on ‘Things out of Order,’ or perhaps Akesidorus was right; his theory was
that the Eumolpos who founded the rites was fifth in descent from the
first Eumolpos.
Unpleasant facts are always apt to be classed as ‘Things out of Order.’
Facts are facts, but Order is what you happen to like yourself. The
simple fact cheerfully accepted at Eleusis was that the Eumolpidae
were Thracians, but the Athenians did not like the Thracians, so when
they came to Eleusis they proceeded to get the unpalatable fact into
‘order.’ One of two things must be done, either the Eumolpidae, whose
respectability was above impeachment, must be provided with a new and
local parentage, they must be affiliated to Triptolemos, or the old
parentage must be removed to a safe and decorous antiquity. Few people
feel very acutely about what happened five generations ago.
But all the time historians knew perfectly well what really had happened,
and Akesidorus proceeds to state it quite simply: ‘Tradition says that
Eleusis was first inhabited by an autochthonous population, and then
by those Thracians who came with Eumolpos to help in the war against
Erechtheus.’ He lets out at last what was at the bottom of the whole
complication, a fight between Eleusis and Athens and a contingent of
Thracian auxiliaries. The war had been internecine, for the legend says
the single combat between Erechtheus and Eumolpos ended in the death of
both. Athens ultimately emerged to political supremacy, but Eleusis,
to which Eumolpos first brought his rites, maintained her religious
hegemony. Athens did what she could. She even built herself an Eleusinion
and instituted Lesser Mysteries; there was much to-ing and fro-ing of
sacred objects, the ἱερά are brought from Eleusis and Iacchos makes a
return visit, but the actual final initiation takes place at Eleusis and
the chief celebrant is still to all time a Thracian Eumolpid[1381].
[Illustration: FIG. 158.]
Art is not without its evidence as to Eumolpos at Eleusis. The simple
vase-painter is untroubled by the Eleusinian blend of Dionysos and
Demeter, and the Thracian origin of Eumolpos. On the kotyle in fig.
158, signed by the potter Hieron, and now in the British Museum[1382],
he has brought together in friendly comradeship a group of Eleusinian
personages, some of the ancient local stock, some of the northern
immigrants. All the figures are carefully inscribed, so that there is
no question of doubtful interpretation. On the obverse, and plainly
occupying the central important place, the young local hero Triptolemos
starts in his winged chariot to carry his ears of corn to the world.
Demeter in her splendid robe stands behind him, and ‘Pherophatta’
pours out the farewell cup. Triptolemos was, as has already been noted
(p. 273), originally a local king; it may be he became young out of
complimentary rivalry with the child Iacchos. Behind ‘Pherophatta’
stands a nymph whom, but for the inscription, we should not have dared
to name, ‘Eleusis.’ Beneath one handle, looking back at the group of
local divinities, is the seated Eumolpos, and near him is a great
swan—for Eumolpos is the sweet singer. He is the Thracian warrior when
he fights Erechtheus, but here he holds the sceptre as priestly king;
he is, Thracian-fashion, compounded of Ares and Orpheus. The centre of
this reverse picture is occupied by the Thracian Dionysos, with his great
vine branch, and behind him comes his father Zeus, with thunderbolt and
sceptre. Dionysos a full-grown man, not babe, balances Triptolemos.
Eumolpos is _vis à vis_ to Poseidon, with whom he had close relations.
Amphitrite completes the picture, a veritable little manual of the
mythology of Eleusis.
_f. The Delphic Dionysos at Eleusis and Agrae._
[Illustration: FIG. 159.]
Another class of vase-paintings, in date nearly a century later than that
of Hieron, bring before us Dionysos at Eleusis, but they depict him as
an incomer, not from Thrace, but from the half-way station of Delphi.
A polychrome vase of the 4th century B.C., formerly in the Tyskiewicky
Collection[1383] (fig. 159), puts the matter very clearly. The central
figure is Demeter, crowned and sceptred, sitting on an altar-like throne.
To the right is Kore with her torches. She turns towards Dionysos. He
too is seated, as becomes a god, and he holds his thyrsos. He is seated,
but on what a throne! He is seated on the _omphalos_. To the ancient
mind no symbolism could speak more clearly; Dionysos is accepted at
Eleusis; he has come from Delphi and brought his omphalos with him. We
are apt to regard the omphalos as exclusively the property of Apollo,
and it comes as something of a shock to see Dionysos seated quietly upon
it. We have already (p. 320) seen that Apollo took it from Ge, took the
ancient symbol of Mother Earth and made it his oracular throne; but at
Delphi men knew that it had another and earlier content. It was the tomb
of the dismembered Dionysos. The tradition that Dionysos was buried at
Delphi is recorded again and again by lexicographers, Christian Fathers,
and Byzantine historians; but the common source of their information
seems to be the _Atthis_ of Philochoros (3rd cent. B.C.). Cedrenus[1384],
in his history of the whole world, tells the story of how Dionysos was
chased from Boeotia, and ended his days at Delphi, ‘and the remains of
him are buried there in a coffin (ἐν σορῷ). And his gear is hung up in
the sanctuary, as the learned Demarchus says in his history of him. And
the learned Philochoros gives the same account in his exposition about
Dionysos himself; his tomb is to be seen near the gold Apollo. It may
be conjectured that there is a sort of basis on which he writes “Here
lies the dead Dionysos the son of Semele”.’ We need not attach serious
importance to what is ‘conjectured,’ as the conjecture seems to be rather
of Cedrenus than Philochoros, but it is clear that Philochoros recorded
a tradition that the tomb of Dionysos was at Delphi. Tatian[1385]
identifies the tomb of Dionysos with the omphalos.
* * * * *
The vase in fig. 159 does not stand alone. The Ninnion pinax[1386],
though details in its interpretation remain obscure, is clear on this one
point—the influence of Delphi on the Mysteries.
In the discussion of this difficult and important monument I shall
confine myself to such points as seem to me certain and immediately
relevant. The inscription at the base tells us that it was dedicated by
a woman ‘Ninnion’ to the ‘Two Goddesses.’ The main field of the pinax
is occupied by two scenes, occupying the upper and lower halves, and
divided, according to the familiar convention of the vase-painter, into
two parts by an irregular white line, indicating the ground on which
the figures in the upper part stand. In each of these two parts some of
the figures, distinguished by their larger size, are divine, e.g. the
seated goddesses to the right; others, of smaller stature, are human.
Among the human figures in both the upper and lower row one is marked
out by the fact that she carries on her head a _kernos_ (see p. 159).
She is a dancing _Kernophoros_[1387]. She is the principal figure among
the worshippers, and she can scarcely be other than Ninnion[1388],
who dedicated the pinax. In a word, Ninnion, in her votive offering,
dedicates the representation of one, and certainly an important, element
in her own initiation, her _Kernophoria_.
[Illustration: FIG. 160.]
Of this initiation why does she give a twofold representation? The
answer, once suggested, is simple and convincing. Each and every
candidate was _twice_ initiated, once in the spring, at Agrae, in
the Lesser Mysteries; once in the autumn, at Eleusis, in the Greater
Mysteries. The scene in the lower half is the initiation at Agrae, that
in the upper half the initiation at Eleusis. It is the scene in the lower
half that specially concerns us.
The two seated goddesses to the right are clearly the ‘Two Goddesses,’
and the lower one is, it is equally evident, the younger, Kore. She is
seated in somewhat curious fashion on the ground; near her is _an empty
throne_. Some interpreters have said that the vase-painter _meant_ her to
be seated _on_ the throne, but by an oversight drew in her figure seated
a little above it. But the artist’s intention is quite clear. Kore is
seated on the ground, indicated by the curved white line beneath her. The
empty throne is intentional and emphatic. Demeter, who should be seated
on it, who in the upper tier _is_ seated on a throne precisely identical,
is absent. A vase-painter could not speak more clearly.
The explanation is again as simple as illuminating. The lower tier
represents the initiation of Ninnion into the Lesser Mysteries at Agrae.
These were sacred to Persephone, not Demeter. The scholiast[1389] on
the _Plutus_ of Aristophanes says: ‘In the course of the year two sets
of mysteries are performed to Demeter and Kore, the Lesser and the
Greater ... the Greater were of Demeter, the Lesser of Persephone her
daughter.’ He further tells us that these Lesser Mysteries were a sort
of pre-purification (προκάθαρσις) for the Greater, and that they were
founded later than the great Eleusinian Mysteries, tradition said, in
order that Herakles might be initiated. To these statements Stephen[1390]
of Byzantium adds an important fact: ‘the Lesser Mysteries performed
at Agra or Agrae were,’ he says, ‘an imitation of _what happened about
Dionysos_.’
With these facts in our minds we are able to interpret the lower row of
figures. Kore alone receives the mystic Ninnion, and Dionysos himself
acts as Dadouchos. That the figure holding the torches is a god is
clear from his greater stature, and, if a god, he can be none other than
Dionysos, who, as Iacchos, led the mystics in their dance. Dionysos has
come from Delphi and brought his great white omphalos[1391], his Delphic
grave, with him. Below it are depicted two of the bundles of myrtle
twigs, which are frequently the emblems of initiation, and which bore the
name of ‘Bacchoi[1392].’
This interpretation is confirmed when we turn to the upper tier.
‘Ninnion,’ having been initiated by Dionysos into the mysteries at
Agrae, which he shared with Kore, now comes for the Greater Mysteries to
Eleusis. Kore herself brings her mystic, and leads her into the presence
of Demeter enthroned. The scene is the telesterion of Eleusis marked by
two columns, which, be it noted, extend only half-way down the pinax. In
the Lesser Mysteries, a later foundation, Dionysos shares the honours
with Kore; in the Greater and earlier to the end he is only a visitant.
* * * * *
The direct influence of Delphi on Eleusis as evidenced by these vases,
and by many inscriptions, may have been comparatively late, but in a
place to which Eumolpos had already brought the worship of Dionysos it
would have easy access. At home Delphi became in the lapse of time more
and more ‘all for Apollo,’ but abroad, as Athens, Eleusis, and Magnesia
testify, she remembered sometimes to promote the worship of a god greater
than Apollo, a god who was before him, and who never ceased, even at
Delphi, to be his _paredros_, Dionysos.
Both on the kotylos of Hieron (fig. 158) and on the Tyskiewicky vase
(fig. 159) Dionysos at Eleusis is represented as a full-grown man, not as
a mystery babe. This fact is highly significant. The son has ceased to
be a child, and growing to maturity forgets his relation to his mother.
In the old Thracian religion, preserved in its primitive savagery in
Asia Minor, the Mother, by whatever name she be called, whether Kotys or
Kybele or Rhea or the Great Mother, is the dominant factor; the Son is,
as is natural in a matriarchal civilization, at first but the attribute
of motherhood. When a cult is mainly in the hands of primitive women they
will tend to keep their male god in the only condition they _can_ keep
him, i.e. as child. But if that cult is to advance with civilization, if
the god is to have his male worshippers, he must grow to be a man; and
as the power of the Son waxes and he becomes more and more the Father,
the power of the Mother wanes, and she that was the Great Mother sinks
to be Semele the thunder-stricken. If we bear in mind the old principle
that man makes the gods in his own image, that a god only _is_ because he
reflects the life of his worshipper, the constant shift of Dionysos from
child to full-grown man, from Son of his Mother to Son of his Father,
becomes intelligible, nay more, necessary.
In all probability the development of Dionysos from child to man was
helped and precipitated by his appropriation of the vine—a spirit of
intoxication will be worshipped by man as much and perhaps more than
by women. But the interesting thing about Dionysos is that, develope
as he may, he bears to the end, as no other god does, the stamp of his
matriarchal origin. He can never rid himself of the throng of worshipping
women, he is always the nursling of his Maenads. Moreover the instruments
of his cult are always not his but his mother’s. It is not enough to say
that all orgiastic cults have analogies, nor, as is usually maintained,
that the worship of Kybele came in classical times from Asia Minor, and
was _contaminated_ with that of Dionysos. All this is true, but the roots
of the analogy lie deeper down. The Mother and the Son were together
from the beginning. Brimos never came to Eleusis without Brimo. Demeter
at Eleusis did not borrow her cymbals from Rhea; she had her own, and
Dionysos shared them. Pindar knows it, if only half consciously:
‘Or this, O Thebes, thy soul hath for its pride,
That Dionysos thou to birth didst bring,
Him of the flowing hair, who sits beside
Deo for whom the brazen cymbals ring.’
Strabo[1393], as we have already seen (p. 375), knew that the orgies of
Thrace and Phrygia and Crete were substantially the same, that Kuretes
and Satyrs and Korybants, attendants on the Son, are also satellites of
the Mother—and he cites Euripides[1394]. The Bacchae never forget that
their worship is of the Mother as of the Son:
‘But the Timbrel, the Timbrel is another’s,
And away to Mother Rhea it must wend;
And to our holy singing from the Mother’s
The mad Satyrs carried it, to blend
In the dancing and the cheer
Of our third and perfect Year;
And it serves Dionysos in the end!’
But the modern mind, obsessed and limited by a canonical Olympus, an
Olympus which is ‘all for the Father,’ has forgotten the Great Mother,
robbed the Son of half his grace, and left him desolate of all kinship
save adoption.
It is not hard to see why at Eleusis the mother of Dionysos should fade
into obscurity, fade so all but entirely that save for the one mention
in the _Philosophoumena_ we should have had no certainty of the birth of
the holy child. Eleusis, before the coming of Eumolpos and Dionysos, had
its Mother-goddess Demeter, and she would not lightly brook a rival. The
old matriarchal couple, the Mother and the Maid, who though they were
two persons were yet but one goddess, had for their foster-child now
one local hero, now another, now Demophon, now and chiefly Triptolemos.
At the coming of the northern Mother and Son, of Brimo and Brimos or
Semele and Dionysos, matters had to be adjusted between the immigrant
and the indigenous divinities. The northern Mother fades almost wholly,
but in the Mysteries her Thessalian name is still proclaimed aloud. The
attributive child Brimos is merged, partly in the Athenian Iacchos,
partly in the local hero Triptolemos, who, to meet him half way,
descended from his high estate as local chieftain to become a beautiful
boy in a chariot drawn by snakes.
The hopeless fusion and confusion is well evidenced by monuments like the
relief from Eleusis[1395] in fig. 161. Here are the Mother and the Maid,
the Mother with her sceptre, the Maid with her torch, and between them is
a boy, their nursling. Is he Triptolemos, is he Iacchos? The question may
be asked, learned monographs may be and have been written in favour of
either name, but it is a question that can never certainly be answered.
He is the young male divinity of Eleusis, the nursling of the goddesses;
beyond that we cannot go.
* * * * *
The rite of the Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the Holy Child have
been considered in detail because they were, I believe, _the_ central
mystery. Asterius[1396], in his ‘Encomium on the Blessed Martyrs’ already
cited, protests against the Eleusinian Mysteries as the head and front of
heathen idolatry and speaks of the Sacred Marriage as its crowning act.
‘Are not the Mysteries at Eleusis the chief act of your worship and does
not the Attic people and the whole land of Hellas assemble that it may
accomplish a rite of folly? Is there not there performed the descent into
darkness, the venerated congress of the Hierophant with the priestess, of
him alone with her alone? Are not the torches extinguished and does not
the vast and countless assemblage believe _that in what is done by the
two in darkness is their salvation_?’
[Illustration: FIG. 161.]
Making all allowance for the fact that Christian Fathers naturally
focus their attention on rites they chose to regard as immoral, it is
yet abundantly clear that at Eleusis the Marriage and the Birth were
the culminating ritual acts, acts by which _union with the divine_,
the goal of all mystic ceremonial, was at first held to be actually
effected, later symbolized. Preceded by rites of purification such
as the Liknophoria, amplified, emphasized by endless subordinate
scenes, reenacted in various mythological forms, as e.g. in the rape of
Persephone, they yet remained at Eleusis, at Samothrace and elsewhere,
_the_ cardinal mysteries. Man makes the rites of the gods in the image
of his human conduct. The mysteries of these man-made gods are but the
eternal mysteries of the life of man. The examination of endless various
and shifting details would lead us no further.
Before we leave the Sacred Marriage, an ethnographical point of some
interest remains to be considered.
_g. Cretan influence on the mysteries at Eleusis._
In Crete we found the _Omophagia_ and the Mother, but no marriage rite,
and yet there is evidence that makes it highly probable that Demeter and
her marriage developed in Crete and came thence to Eleusis.
Such is the tradition of the Homeric Hymn[1397]:
‘Dos is the name that to me my holy mother gave,
And I am come from Crete across the wide sea-water wave.’
This may be a mere chance pirate legend, but such legends often echo
ethnographical fact.
Again at the close of the Hymn[1398] the poet seems to remember the
island route by which Demeter passed to Thessaly:
‘Goddess who holdst the fragrance of Eleusis in thy hands,
Mistress of rocky Antron and Paros’ sea-girt strand,
Lady revered, fair Deo, gift-giver year by year,
Thou and thy fair Persephone, to us incline thine ear.’
Whether Demeter brought her daughter from Crete must remain for the
present unconsidered; but from mythology, not ritual, we learn that in
Crete she had a Sacred Marriage. Calypso, recounting the tale of ancient
mortal lovers of whom the gods were jealous, says[1399]:
‘So too fair-haired Demeter once in the spring did yield
To love, and with Iasion lay in a new-ploughed field.
But not for long she loved him, for Zeus high overhead
Cast on him his white lightning and Iasion lay dead.’
It is one of the lovely earth-born myths that crop up now and again in
Homer, telling of an older simpler world, of gods who had only half
emerged from the natural things they are, real earth-born flesh and blood
creatures, not splendid phantoms of an imagined Olympic pageant. To smite
and slay these primitive divinities of the order he supersedes, Zeus is
always ready with his virtuous thunderbolt.
Hesiod[1400], if later in date, is almost always earlier in thought than
Homer. He knows of the Marriage and knows that it was in Crete:
‘Demeter brought forth Ploutos; a glorious goddess she,
And yet she loved Iasion, a mortal hero he.
In Crete’s rich furrows lay they; glad and kindly was the birth
Of him whose way is on the sea and over all the Earth.
Happy, happy is the mortal who doth meet him as he goes,
For his hands are full of blessings and his treasure overflows.’
Theocritus[1401] knows that this Marriage of Iasion was a Mystery:
‘Oh, happy, happy, in his changeless fate,
Endymion dreaming; happy, Love, and great
Iasion, who won the mystic joy
That ye shall never learn, Unconsecrate!’
Hesiod is all husbandman; he knows of no mystery child[1402], only of
the old agricultural mimetic rite and the child who is the fruits of the
earth and of the sea. Zeus with his thunder has not yet come to make of
innocent bliss a transgression. Hesiod might have written the ancient tag
preserved for us by his scholiast[1403]:
‘Ah for the wheat and barley, O child Ploutos.’
The writer of the Homeric Hymn[1404] is altogether Zeus-ridden, hence
many of the anomalies and absurdities of the tale he so beautifully
tells; he is Homeric in his aloofness from things primitive, he is also
Orphic in his emphasis on the spiritual bliss of the initiated and in his
other-worldliness. He is concerned to show their future weal rather than
their present wealth:
‘Blessed is he among men who is given these rites to know,
But the uninitiate man, the man without, must go
To no such happy lot when dead in the dusk below.’
And yet, so strong is the ancient agricultural tradition and association
of the rites that the primitive sacred child of Crete, the Wealth-god,
reemerges[1405] almost automatically at the close, though in half
abstracted fashion, born of heaven not earth:
‘Then when the goddess all things had ordered of her grace,
She fared to high Olympus, their great assembly place.
There do they dwell with Father Zeus, who thunders through the sky,
Holy and reverend are their names, and great his earthly joy
Whom they vouchsafe to love. Above all mortals is he blest,
Swiftly they send to his great home Ploutos to be his guest.’
The mimetic marriage of Crete, a bit of sympathetic magic common to
many primitive peoples, became a cardinal _mystic_ rite. Diodorus[1406]
in a very instructive passage tells us that in Crete ‘mysteries’ were
not mysterious, and we shall not, I think, be far wrong if we suppose
that the Cretan non-mysterious form was the earlier. After discussing
Cretan mythology he says: ‘The Cretans in alleging that they from Crete
conferred on other mortals the services of the gods, sacrifices and rites
appertaining to mysteries, bring forward this point as being to their
thinking the principal piece of evidence. The rite of initiation, which
is perhaps the most celebrated of all, is that which is performed by
the Athenians at Eleusis, and the rite at Samothrace and that in Thrace
among the Cicones, the country of Orpheus, inventor of rites, all these
are imparted as mysteries, whereas in Crete at Cnossos the custom from
ancient times was that these rites should be communicated openly and to
all, and things that among the other peoples were communicated in secrecy
among the Cretans no one concealed from any one who wished to know.’
The Cretans, like most patriots, went a little too far. The gods had
not left themselves without witness among other peoples till they, the
elect Cretans, started on their missionary enterprise. But, as regards
certain mystery rites, as regards two of those discussed in detail, the
Omophagia and the Sacred Marriage, may not their statement have been
substantially true? Before the downward movement of Dionysos from the
North, may there not have been an upward movement of (shall we say)
Orpheus from the South? May not the Orphic mysteries of the Mother have
started, or at least fully developed, in matriarchal Crete[1407], Crete
that was to the end ‘of the Mother,’ that refused even in her language
to recognize the foolish empty patriarchalism, ‘Father-land’? In Crete
the discoveries of Mr Arthur Evans have shown us a splendid and barbarous
civilization, mature, even decadent, before the uprising of Athens. From
Crete to Athens came Epimenides, who is but a quasi-historical Orpheus,
and with him he brought rites of cleansing. In Cretan ‘Mycenaean’
civilization[1408] and only there, is seen that strange blend of Egyptian
and ‘Pelasgian’ that haunted Plutarch and made him say that Osiris was
one with Dionysos, Isis with Demeter.
* * * * *
Diodorus, quoting the local tradition, knows the very route by which the
rites of Crete went northward, by way of the islands, by Samothrace home
of the mysteries, up to the land of the Cicones. There, it would seem,
Orpheus the sober met the raging wine-god, there the Maenads slew him,
and repented and upraised his sanctuary. Thence the two religions, so
different yet so intimately fused, came down to Greece, a conjoint force,
dominant, irresistible. Mysticism and ‘Enthusiasm’ are met together, and,
for Greek religion, the last word is said.
Orpheus for all his lyre-playing is a priest or rather a ‘religious.’
Dionysos is, at least as we know him at Athens, less priest than artist.
Most primitive religions have δρώμενα, but from the religion of Dionysos
sprang the drama. The analogy between δρώμενα, things done, actions, and
δρᾶμα, a Thing Acted in the stage sense, has been often observed, but the
problem still remains—why was the transition effected in the religion of
Dionysos and in his only, why have Athene and Zeus and Poseidon no drama,
only δρώμενα?
_h. The Drama of Dionysos and the δρώμενα of Eleusis._
The question would not be raised here but that the answer I would suggest
comes mainly from religion, and some stages of the transition are, I
believe, to be found in the ritual of Eleusis.
Epic, lyric and dramatic poetry succeed each other in our handbooks
and our minds in easy and canonical fashion. Lyric poetry asks no
explanation, or finds it instantly in our common human egotism. But we
are apt to forget that from the _epos_, the narrative, to the _drama_,
the enactment, is a momentous step, one, so far as we know, not taken
in Greece till after centuries of epic achievement, and then taken
suddenly, almost in the dark, and irrevocably. All we really know of
this momentous step is that it was taken some time in the sixth century
B.C. and taken in connection with the worship of Dionysos. Surely it is
at least possible that the real impulse to the drama lay not wholly in
‘goat-songs’ and ‘circular dancing places’ but also in the cardinal, the
essentially dramatic, conviction of the religion of Dionysos, that the
worshipper can not only worship, but can become, can _be_, his god[1409].
Athene and Zeus and Poseidon have no drama because no one, in his wildest
moments, believed he could become and be Athene or Zeus or Poseidon. It
is indeed only in the orgiastic religions that these splendid moments of
conviction could come, and, for Greece at least, only in an orgiastic
religion did the drama take its rise.
In the rites at Eleusis of which most details are known we have the very
last stage of the development before the final step was actually taken,
we have δρώμενα on the very verge of _drama_.
* * * * *
Late authors in describing the Eleusinian rites use constantly the
vocabulary of the stage. Take the account of Psellus[1410], whose
testimony has been too much neglected. Psellus is recording ‘what the
Greeks believe about demons’ and he passes from theology to ritual. ‘Yes
and the mysteries of these (demons), as for example those of Eleusis,
enact the double story of Deo or Demeter and her daughter Pherephatta
or Kore. As in the rite of initiation love affairs are to take place,
Aphrodite of the Sea is represented as uprising. Next there is the
wedding rite for Kore. And the initiated sing as an accompaniment “I have
eaten from the timbrel, I have drunk from the cymbals, I have carried the
_kernos_, I have gone down into the bridal chamber.” Then also they enact
the birth-pains of Deo. At least there are cries of entreaty of Deo, and
there is the draught of gall and the throes of pain. After these there is
a goat-legged mime because of what Zeus did to Demeter. After all this
there are the rites of Dionysos and the cista and the cakes with many
bosses and the initiated to Sabazios and the Klodones and Mimallones who
do the rites of the Mother and the sounding cauldron of Thesprotia and
the gong of Dodona and a Korybas and a Koures, separate figures, mimic
forms of demons. After this is the action of Baubo[1411].’
Psellus shows us the sacred pantomime in full complexity. From other
sources we know that it was not all dumb-show, that other words were
spoken besides the confession of the ‘tokens.’ Galen[1412] when he is
urging his readers to attend to natural science no less than theology
says: ‘Lend me then your whole attention even more than you did supposing
you were initiated in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries or any
other holy rite and gave yourself up wholly _to the things done and the
things spoken_ by the Hierophants.’
The fashion in which the ‘things spoken’ supplemented and helped out the
‘things done’ comes out very clearly in the curious fictitious legal
case which occurs among the collection of rhetorical exercises made by
Sopater[1413]. A young man dreams that he is initiated, and sees the
‘things done.’ He recounts the ‘things done’ to an initiated friend and
asks if they correspond to the actual Eleusinian rite. The friend nods
assent. Is the friend guilty of impiety, i.e. has he revealed the ‘things
done’ to one uninitiated? No, argues the initiated man, for the dreamer
was really initiated by the goddesses themselves; only one thing was
lacking to him, he had not heard the voice of the hierophant so as to
understand clearly the sense of the symbols uttered by him. The symbols
uttered must have been words corresponding to, explanatory of, the things
done, dark enough no doubt, but felt to be illuminating. The Hierophant
acted as sacred showman to the pantomime. Here we have brought into
close, inevitable conjunction the narrative element of the epos and the
action element of the drama. We have all the apparatus of the stage, the
appearances and disappearances, the dancing and the singing, the lights,
the voices and the darkness. Religion gave all the circumstances and the
scenery, religion woke the instinct of intense impersonation, some genius
made the dumb figures speak themselves and tragedy was born.
* * * * *
Dionysos gave men tragedy to gladden and to greaten their toilsome life
on earth. His other great gift was, as has been already shown, the hope
that by attaining divinity they would as a necessary consequence attain
immortality. To the dim forecast of some sort of after guerdon that
Demeter gave, he brought something as near conviction as the human mind
can get. Plutarch[1414] writes to his wife when they have lost their
little girl, who was so like the father and so dear to the mother, and
he bids her remember both her traditional faith and ‘the mystic symbols
of the rites of initiation to Dionysos.’ These, he says, will prevent
her from thinking that the soul suffers nothing after death, that it
ceases to be. He reads into these rites of course his own Platonism;
they teach him that the soul is like a bird caught in a cage, caught
and recaught ever in new births, that the evil of old age is not its
wrinkles and grey hairs but, hardest thing of all, the dimness and
staleness of the soul to the memory of things ‘there’ not here; and the
soul that leaves the body soon is not cramped and bent but only softly
and pliantly moulded and soon shakes its mane and is free, just as fire
that is quenched and relighted forthwith flames and sparkles anew. The
customs of his country forbade him to make libations for children, and
he reads into the old barbarous convention, based on the harmlessness of
the child-ghost, the doctrine that children have no part in earth and
earthly things, but have passed straightway to a better and more divine
fate. Still in the mystic symbols of Dionysos he sees only what was there
implicit if only in dim fashion.
* * * * *
It has been thought that the rites of Eleusis and other Orphic mysteries
contained among these ‘things done’ mimetic presentations of a future
life, a sort of revelation and instruction for the conduct of the soul in
the world below. Elements of this kind, it will later be seen, may easily
have been interpolated from Egypt, but for Eleusis we have no certain
evidence. The best witness to the faith of the Orphic as to the future
life are his own confessions buried with him in his tomb, inscribed
happily for us on imperishable gold, and to this witness we must now turn.
CHAPTER XI.
ORPHIC ESCHATOLOGY.
‘Χαίρετ’, ἐγὼ δ’ ὔμμιν θεὸς ἄμβροτος, οὐκέτι θνητός.’
_a._ THE ORPHIC TABLETS.
The monuments in question are a series of eight inscribed tablets
all of very thin gold, which have come to light in tombs. Six out of
the eight were found in Lower Italy, in the neighbourhood of ancient
Sybaris, one near Rome, one in Crete. In the first and third cases, it
should be noted, the place _provenance_ is an ancient home of Orphism.
These tablets are of such cardinal importance that they will need to be
examined separately and in detail. But all have this much in common:
buried with the dead they contain instructions for his conduct in the
world below, exhortations to the soul, formularies to be repeated,
confessions of faith and of ritual performed, and the like. They belong
to the domain of ritual rather than of literature, and therefore offer
evidence the more unimpeachable; but, though defective in style and
often regardless of metre, they are touched with a certain ecstasy of
conviction that lifts them sometimes to a high level of poetry.
The Orphic tablets have frequently been discussed[1415], but their full
importance as documents for the history of Greek religion has perhaps as
yet not been fully realized. Their interpretation presents exceptional
difficulties; the shining surface and creased condition of the gold-leaf
on which they are written make them difficult to photograph and irksome
to decipher; moreover the text, even when deciphered, is in some cases
obviously fragmentary. It has been thought best to reserve all textual
difficulties for separate discussion[1416].
The series of tablets or scrolls is as follows:
I. _The Petelia tablet_[1417] (fig. 162).
[Illustration: FIG. 162.]
‘Thou shalt find on the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this Well-spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory,
Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it.
Say: “I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves.
And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.”
And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy
Well-spring,
And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship....’
The text breaks off at this point. The scattered words that remain make
no consecutive sense. Of the last line, written from bottom to top of the
right edge of the tablet, the two last words only are legible, ‘darkness
enfolding’ (σκότος ἀμφικαλύψας).
As sequel to this tablet comes a second found in Crete:
II. _The Eleuthernae tablet_[1418].
‘I am parched with thirst and I perish.—Nay, drink of Me,
The well-spring flowing for ever on the Right, where the Cypress is.
Who art thou?...
Whence art thou?—I am son of Earth and of Starry Heaven.’
The soul itself speaks to the Well of Mnemosyne and the Well makes answer.
Both tablets contain the same two elements, the Well of Remembrance, and
the avowal of origin. The avowal of origin constitutes in each the claim
to drink of the Well.
The origin claimed is divine. Hesiod[1419] uses exactly the same words in
describing the parentage of the gods. He bids the Muse
‘Sing the holy race of Immortals ever existing,
Who from Earth were born and born from Starry Heaven.’
We have in the avowal of the soul the clearest possible statement of the
cardinal doctrine of Orphic faith—immortality is possible only in virtue
of the divinity of humanity. The sacrament of this immortality is the
drinking of a divine well.
THE WELL OF MNEMOSYNE.
On the first tablet the soul is bidden to avoid a well on the left hand.
This well is left nameless, but contrasted as it is with the Well of
Mnemosyne or Remembrance, we may safely conclude that the forbidden well
is Lethe, Forgetfulness.
The notion that in death we forget, forget the sorrows of this
troublesome world, forget the toilsome journey to the next, is not
Orphic, not even specially Greek; it is elemental, human, and may occur
anywhere.
The Fiji islanders[1420] have their ‘Path of the Shades’ beset with
perils and their Wai-na-dula, a well from which the dead man drinks and
forgets sorrow. ‘He passed the twin goddesses Nino who peered at him
and gnashed their terrible teeth, fled up the path and came to a spring
and stopped and drank, and, as soon as he tasted the water, he ceased
weeping, and his friends also ceased weeping in his home, for they
straightway forgot their sorrows and were consoled. Therefore this spring
is called the Wai-na-dula, Water of Solace.’ After many other perils,
including the escape from two savage Dictynnas who seek to catch him in
their nets, the soul at last is allowed to pass into the dancing grounds
where the young gods dance and sing.
This Fiji parallel is worth noting because it is so different. The Fiji
soul drinks of forgetfulness, and why? Because his friends and relations
must put a term to their irksome mourning, and till the soul sets the
example and himself forgets they must remember. His confession of faith
is also somewhat different. Before he can be admitted to his Happy Land
he must prove that he has died a violent death, otherwise he must go back
to the upper air and die respectably, i.e. violently.
I have noted the Lethe of the Fiji islands to shew that I am not unaware
that savage parallels exist, that a well may be drunk on the ‘Path of the
Shades’ in any land, and that there is no need to suppose that the Greeks
borrowed their well either from Fiji or from Egypt; and yet in this
particular case it can, I believe, be shewn that the Orphic well came
from Egypt[1421], came I believe to Crete, and passed with Orpheus from
Crete by the islands to Thrace and to Athens, and thence to Magna Graecia.
Osiris in Egypt had a ‘cold’ well or water of which he gave the souls to
drink. On tombs of Roman date[1422] the formulary appears: ‘May Osiris
give thee the cold water.’ Sometimes it is Aïdoneus sometimes Osiris who
is invoked, for by that time the two were not clearly distinguished.
In so far as Osiris was a sun-god the well became a well of light, in
which the sun-god Ra was wont to wash his face. In one of the magical
papyri[1423] the line occurs
‘Hail to the water white and the tree with the leaves high hanging,’
which seems to echo vaguely the white cypress and the forbidden well.
The well of Osiris, whatever the precise significance of its Egyptian
name, would easily to the Greeks become of double significance; ψυχρόν
would suggest ψυχή, and the well would be both cool and fresh and
_life_-giving; by it the soul would _revive_ (ἀναψύχειν), it would become
‘a living water, springing up into everlasting life.’
A ‘living water’ given by Osiris to the thirsty soul was part of the
eschatology of Egypt, but, so far as we know, Egypt had neither Lethe nor
Mnemosyne. In the _Book of the Dead_ there occurs indeed the _Chapter
of making a man possess memory in the underworld_ (No. XXV.), but the
process has no connection with the drinking from a well. The _Chapter of
drinking water in the underworld_ (No. LXII.) is quite distinct. Lethe
and Mnemosyne are, I think, Greek developments from the neutral _fonds_
of Egypt, and developments due to the influence of Orpheus.
* * * * *
Lethe as a person is as old as Hesiod[1424]. She is bad from the
beginning:
‘Next hateful Strife gave birth to grievous Toil,
Forgetfulness and Famine, tearful Woes,
Contests and Slaughters.’
By the time of Aristophanes the ‘plain of Lethe’ is part of the stock
furniture of Hades. In the _Frogs_[1425] Charon on the look-out for
passengers asks:
‘Who’s for the plain of Lethe? Who’s for the Donkey-shearings?
Who’s for the Cerberus folk? or Taenarus? Who’s for the Rookeries?’
The mystic comic Hades of Aristophanes is thoroughly Orphic. He mentions
no well, but he knows of a _Stone of Parching_[1426], where it may be the
thirsty soul sat down to rest.
Lethe as a water, a river, first appears in the _Republic_ of Plato[1427]
and in such fashion that it seems as though it was by that time
proverbial. ‘Our story,’ says Socrates, ‘has been saved and has not
perished, and it will save us if we are obedient to it, and we shall make
a good passage of the river of Lethe and shall not be defiled in our
souls.’ It is noticeable that to Plato Lethe is of death and pollution.
Just before, Socrates has recounted the myth of Er, a myth steeped in
Orphic eschatology of metempsychosis and retribution. The souls have
been forced to pass each one into the plain of Lethe through scorching
suffocating heat, for the plain of Lethe was devoid of trees and of
plants that spring from the earth. Towards evening they took shelter by
the river of Unmindfulness whose water no vessel can hold[1428]. Of this
all were compelled to drink a certain measure, and those who were not
safe-guarded by wisdom drank more than the measure, and each one as he
drank forgot all things. The river _Ameles_, Unmindfulness, is of course
Lethe: Plato likes to borrow a popular notion and slightly rechristen
it. Just so he takes Mnemosyne, Remembrance, and makes of her Anamnesis,
Remembering-again. It was not the fashion of his day to give chapter and
verse for your borrowings, and Plato so detested the lower side of Orphic
rites that perhaps he only half realized the extent of his debts. It is a
human and rather malicious touch, that in the order of those who remember
again, the man who lives the ‘initiated life’ comes only fifth, side by
side with the seer, below the philosopher and the lover and the righteous
king and the warrior, below even the economist and the man of business;
but after all he cannot much complain, for low though he is, he is above
the poet and the artist. Moreover Plato would take as clearly and vividly
known to the initiated all that through lapse of time has become dim to
us, and his constant use of the technical terms of initiation is adequate
acknowledgement. He tells[1429] of the uninitiate (ἀμύητος), the partly
initiate (ἀτέλεστος), the newly initiate (νεοτελής), wholly initiate
(ἀρτιτελής), of the man rapt by the divine (ἐνθουσιάζων), whom the vulgar
deem distraught, of how before we were caught in the prison of the body
we celebrated (ὠργιάζομεν) a most blessed rite, being initiated to
behold dimly and see perfectly (μυούμενοι καὶ ἐποπτεύοντες) apparitions
complete, simple, quiet and happy, shining in a clear light.
For Mnemosyne and Lethe in Greek religion we are not however dependent
on the myths and philosophy of Plato. We have definite evidence in local
ritual. Mnemosyne herself takes us straight to the North, the land of
Eumolpos and the Muses, to Pangaion, to Pieria, to Helicon. If Orpheus
found in Egypt, or as is more probable in Crete, a well of living water,
that well was I think nameless, or at least did not bear the name of
Mnemosyne. It may of course be accidental, but in the tablet from Crete
the well, though obviously the same as that in the Petelia tablet, is
unnamed. The name Mnemosyne was found for the well when Orpheus took
it with him to the land of the Muses, where he himself got his magic
lyre. Not ten miles away from the slopes of Helicon, at the sanctuary of
Trophonios at Lebadeia, we find a well not only of Mnemosyne but also of
Lethe, and we find the worshipper is made to drink of these wells not in
the imagined kingdom of the dead, but in the actual ritual of the living.
Man makes the next world in the image of this present.
Pausanias[1430] has left us a detailed account of the ritual of the
oracle of Trophonios of which only the essential points can be noted
here. Before the worshipper can actually descend into the oracular
chasm, he must spend some days in a house that is a sanctuary of the
Agathos Daimon and of Tyche; then he is purified and eats sacrificial
flesh. After omens have been taken and a black ram sacrificed into a
trench, the inquirer is washed and anointed and led by the priests to
certain ‘springs of water which are very near to one another, and then
he must drink of the water called Forgetfulness (Λήθης), that there may
be forgetfulness of everything that he has hitherto had in his mind, and
after that he drinks of yet another water called Memory (Μνημοσύνης), by
which he remembers what he has seen when he goes down below.’ He is then
shown an image which Daedalus made, i.e. a very ancient xoanon, and one
which was only shown to those who are going to visit Trophonios; this he
worships and prays to, and then, clad in a linen tunic—another Orphic
touch—and girt with taeniae and shod with boots of the country he goes
to the oracle. The ritual that follows is of course a descent into the
underworld, the man goes down into the oven-shaped cavity, an elaborate
artificial chasm, enters a hole, is dragged through by the feet, swirled
away, hears and sees ‘the things that are to be’ (τὰ μέλλοντα), he comes
up feet foremost and then the priests set him on the seat, called the
seat of Memory, which is near the shrine. They question him and, when
they have learnt all they can, give him over to his friends, who carry
him possessed by fear and unconscious to the house of Agathe Tyche and
Agathos Daimon where he lodged before. Then he comes to himself and, one
is relieved to hear, is able to laugh again. Pausanias says expressly
that he had been through the performance himself and is not writing from
hearsay.
The Orphic notes in this description are many. To those already discussed
we may add that Demeter at Lebadeia was known as Europa, a name which
points to Crete. Another Cretan link indicates that the worship of
Trophonios was, as we should expect if it is Dionysiac, of orgiastic
character. Plutarch[1431], in a passage that has not received the
attention it deserves, classes together certain daemons who ‘do not
always stay in the moon, but descend here below to have the supervision
of _oracular shrines_, and they are present at and _celebrate the
orgies of the most sublime rites_. They are punishers of evil deeds
and _watchers_ over such.’ The word watchers (φύλακες) is the same as
that used in the tablet of the guardians of Mnemosyne’s well. If in the
performance of their office they themselves do wrong either through fear
or favour, they themselves suffer for it, and in characteristically
Orphic fashion they are thrust down again and tied to human bodies.
Then comes this notable statement. ‘Those of the age of Kronos said
that they themselves were of the better sort of these daemons, and the
Idaean Daktyls who were formerly in Crete, and the Korybantes who were
in Phrygia, and the Trophoniads in Lebadeia, and thousands of others
throughout the world whose titles, sanctuaries and honours remain to this
day.’ The rites of Daktyls, Korybants and Trophoniads are all the same
and all are orgiastic and of the nature of initiation, all deal with
purgation and the emergence of the divine. All have rites that tell of
‘things to be’ and prepare the soul to meet them.
Pausanias of course understands ‘things to be’ (τὰ μέλλοντα) as merely
the future, his attention is fixed on what is merely oracular and
prophetic. The action of Lethe is to prepare a blank sheet for the
reception of the oracle of Mnemosyne, to make the utterance of the oracle
indelible. In point of fact, no doubt, the Trophoniads, the Orphics,
found when they came to Lebadeia an ancient hero-oracle. That is clear
from the sacrifice of the ram in the trench, a sacrifice made, be it
observed, not to Trophonios but to Agamedes, the old hero. That the
revelation at Lebadeia of ‘things to be’ was to the Orphic a vision
of and a preparation for the other world (τὰ ἐκεῖ) is clear from the
experiences recounted by Timarchos[1432] as having occurred to him in the
chasm of Trophonios. Socrates, it is said, was angry that no one told
him about it while Timarchos was alive, for he would have liked to hear
about it at first hand. What Timarchos saw was a vision of heaven and
hell after the fashion of a Platonic myth, and his guide instructed him
as to the meaning of things and how the soul shakes off the impurities
of the body. The whole ecstatic mystic account beginning with the
sensation of a blow on the head and the sense of the soul escaping,
reads like a trance-experience or like the revelation experienced under
an anaesthetic. It may be, and probably is, an invention from beginning
to end. The important point is that this vision of things invisible is
considered an appropriate experience to a man performing the rites of
Trophonios.
The worshipper initiated at Lebadeia drank of Lethe; there was evil
still to forget. The Orphic who, after a life spent in purification,
passed into Hades, had done with forgetting; his soul drinks only of
Remembrance. It is curious to note that in the contrast between Lethe and
Mnemosyne we have what seems to be an Orphic protest against the lower,
the sensuous side of the religion of Dionysos. To Mnemosyne, it will be
remembered (p. 509), as to the Muses, the Sun and the Moon and the other
primitive potencies affected by the Orphics, the Athenians offered only
wineless offerings, but ‘ancestral tradition,’ Plutarch[1433] tells us,
‘consecrated to Dionysos, Lethe, together with the narthex.’ It is this
ancestral tradition that Teiresias[1434] remembers when he tells of the
blessings brought by the god, and how
‘He rests man’s spirit dim
From grieving, when the vine exalteth him.
He giveth sleep to sink the fretful day
In cool forgetting. Is there any way
With man’s sore heart save only to forget?’
To man entangled in the flesh, man to whom sleep for the body, death
for the soul was the only outlook, Lethe became a Queen of the Shades,
Assessor of Hades[1435]. Orestes[1436], outworn with madness, cries
O magic of sweet sleep, healer of pain,
I need thee and how sweetly art thou come.
O holy Lethe, wise physician thou,
Goddess invoked of miserable men.’
Orpheus found for ‘miserable men’ another way, not by the vine-god, but
through the wineless ecstasy of Mnemosyne. The Orphic hymn[1437] to the
goddess ends with the prayer
‘And in thy mystics waken memory
Of the holy rite, and Lethe drive afar.’
Lethe is to the Orphic as to Hesiod wholly bad, a thing from which he
must purge himself. Plato[1438] is thoroughly Orphic when he says in the
_Phaedrus_ that the soul sinks to earth ‘full of forgetfulness and vice.’
The doctrine as to future punishment which Plutarch[1439] expounds in
his treatise ‘On Living Hidden’ touches the high water mark of Orphic
eschatology. The extreme penalty of the wicked in Erebos is not torture
but unconsciousness (ἄγνοια). Pindar’s ‘sluggish streams of murky
night,’ he says, receive the guilty, and hide them in unconsciousness
and forgetfulness. He denies emphatically the orthodox punishments, the
gnawing vulture, the wearisome labours; the body cannot suffer torment or
bear its marks, for the body is rotted away or consumed by fire; ‘the one
and only instrument of punishment is unconsciousness and obscurity, utter
disappearance, carrying a man into the smileless river that flows from
Lethe, sinking him into an abyss and yawning gulf, bringing in its train
all obscurity and all unconsciousness.’
* * * * *
The Orphic well of Mnemosyne lives on not only in the philosophy of
Plato, but also, it would seem, in the inspired vision of Dante. At the
close of the _Purgatorio_, when Dante[1440] is wandering through the
ancient wood, his steps are stayed by a little stream so pure that it
hid nothing, and beside it all other waters seemed to have in them some
admixture. The lady gathering flowers on the further bank tells him he
is now in the Earthly Paradise: the Highest Good made man good and for
goodness and gave him this place as earnest of eternal peace. Man fell
away,
‘changed to toil and weeping
His honest laughter and sweet mirth.’
Then she tells of the virtue of the little stream. It does not rise, like
an earthly water, from a vein restored by evaporation, losing and gaining
force in turn, but issues from a fountain sure and safe, ever receiving
again by the will of God as much as on two sides it pours forth.
‘On this side down it flows and with a virtue
That takes away from man of sin the memory,
On that the memory of good deeds it bringeth.
Lethe its name on this side and Eunoë
On that, nor does it work its work save only
If first on this side then on that thou taste it.’
Dante hears a voice unspeakable say _Asperges me_, and is bathed in
Lethe, and thereafter cannot wholly remember what made him to sin.
Beatrice says to him smiling,
‘And now bethink thee thou hast drunk of Lethe;
And if from smoke the flame of fire be argued,
This thine oblivion doth conclude most clearly
A fault within thy Will elsewhere intended.’
And she turns to her attendant maid saying,
‘See there Eunoë from its source forth flowing.
Lead thou him to it, and as thou art wonted
His virtue partly dead do thou requicken.’
And Dante comes back from ‘that most holy wave’:
‘Refect was I, and as young plants renewing
Their new leaves with new shoots, so I in spirit
Pure, and disposed to mount towards starry heaven.’
The Eunoë[1441] of Dante is Good-Consciousness, or the Consciousness of
Good. It is the result of a purified, specialized memory, from which
evil has fallen away. On the tomb-inscriptions the formulary occurs
εὐνοίας καὶ μνήμης χάριν ‘for good thought and remembrance’ sake,’ where
the two are very near together. It is just what the Orphic meant by his
Remembrance of the Divine, and, when we come to the next tablet, it will
seem probable that not only the idea of Good-Consciousness but the very
name _Eunoia_ may perhaps have been suggested to Dante by an analogous
Orphic well _En_noia.
THE SYBARIS TABLETS.
Six tablets still remain to be considered. Of these five were all found
in tombs in the territory of ancient Sybaris, in the modern commune of
Corigliano-Calabro. Two of them (III and IV) were found together in a
tomb known locally as the _Timpone grande_. They were folded closely
together, and lay near the skull of the skeleton. Their contents, so far
as they can be deciphered, are as follows:
III. _Timpone grande tablet (a)_[1442].
‘But so soon as the Spirit hath left the light of the sun,
To the right...............................of Ennoia
Then must man..............being right wary in all things.
Hail, thou who hast suffered the Suffering. This thou hadst never
suffered before.
Thou art become God from Man. A kid thou art fallen into milk.
Hail, hail to thee journeying on the right.........
...Holy meadows and groves of Phersephoneia.’
The second line seems to be a fragment of a whole sentence or set of
sentences put for the whole, as we might put ‘Therefore with Angels and
Archangels,’ leaving those familiar with our ritual to supply the missing
words. Popular quotations and extracts always tend to make the grammar
complete or at least intelligible.
The name of the well, ‘Ennoia,’ depends on a conjectural emendation. The
tablet of course cannot be the actual source of Dante’s Eunoë. It is,
however, very unlikely that Dante invented the name; he may have known
of _En_noia, and modified it to _Eu_noia. It has been seen that Lethe is
regarded as the equivalent of Agnoia, Unconsciousness, and to _Ag_noia
_En_noia would be a fitting contrast.
The formularies that occur at the end, the ‘Suffering,’ the ‘kid’ and the
‘groves of Phersephoneia,’ will be considered in relation to other and
more complete tablets (p. 586).
* * * * *
With the ‘Ennoia’ tablet was found
IV. _Timpone grande tablet (b)_[1443]. The inscription on this tablet is
unhappily as yet only partially read. It appears to be in some cryptic
script.
The broken formularies of tablet (_a_) and the cryptic script of (_b_)
mark a stage in which the Orphic prescriptions are ceasing to be
intelligent and intelligible, and tending to become cabalistic charms.
Orphism shared the inevitable tendency of all mystic religions to lapse
into mere mechanical magic. In the _Cyclops_ of Euripides[1444], the
Satyr chorus, when they want to burn out the eye of the Cyclops, say they
know
‘A real good incantation
Of Orpheus, that will make the pole go round
Of its own accord.’
Three tablets found near Sybaris yet remain. All these were found in
different tombs in the same district as the _Timpone grande_ tablets. In
each case the tablet lay near the hand of the skeleton. The tombs were on
the estate of Baron Compagno, who presented the tablets to the National
Museum at Naples. In form of letters and in content they offer close
analogies. They are all three reproduced in the Appendix, and will be
considered together[1445].
V. _Compagno tablet (a)_[1446].
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,
Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.
For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,
But Fate laid me low and the other Gods immortal
..............starflung thunderbolt.
I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.
I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.
I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.
I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.
Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.
A kid I have fallen into milk.’
VI. _Compagno tablet (b)_[1447].
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of the Pure below,
Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods and Daemons.
For I also, I avow me, am of your blessed race.
I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous
Whether Fate laid me low or.......
with starry thunderbolt.
But now I come a suppliant to holy Phersephoneia
That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.’
VII. _Compagno tablet (c)_[1448].
But for one or two purely verbal differences tablet (_c_) is precisely
the same as (_b_). It is written carelessly on both sides of the gold
plate, and but for the existence of (_b_) could scarcely have been made
out. Tablet (_b_) has itself so many omissions that its interpretation
depends mainly on the more complete contents of (_a_).
The last tablet to be considered presents two features of special
interest. First, the name of its owner Caecilia Secundina[1449] is
inscribed, and from this fact, together with the loose cursive script in
which it is written, the tablet can be securely dated as of Roman times.
Second, the contents show but too plainly that the tablet was buried with
magical intent.
VIII. _Caecilia Secundina tablet._
‘She comes from the Pure, O Pure Queen of those below
And Eukles and Eubouleus.—Child of Zeus, receive here the armour
Of Memory, (’tis a gift songful among men)
Thou Caecilia Secundina, (armour) in due rite to avert evil for ever.’
The tablet reads like a brief compendium from the two sets of formularies
already given. We have the statement made to Despoina, Eukles and
Eubouleus on behalf of Caecilia that she comes from the congregation of
the pure, but it is not followed by the detailed confession of ritual
performed—that is, so to speak, ‘taken as read.’ Mention is further made
of the divine origin of Caecilia and of Mnemosyne, but in both cases
after significant fashion. The ‘gift of Mnemosyne’ is now not water from
a well, but rather the tablet itself, a certificate of Caecilia’s purity,
in verse (ἀοίδιμον), and graven on imperishable gold. Caecilia claims
divine descent not from the Orphic Zagreus but from Zeus, who as has
already been shown (p. 480) took on, in popular monotheism, something
of the nature and functions of Zagreus. Caecilia’s theology, like that
of the Lower Italy vases (pp. 602, 603), is Orphism made orthodox,
Olympicized, conventionalized. The word νόμῳ ‘in due rite’ seems to
imply that the tablet has been ‘certified and found correct’ by human
authority. It is the usual priestly confusion: the soul _is_ divine—that
no Orphic priest dare deny; and yet this divine soul needs the ὅπλα,
the ‘armour’ forged by mortal hands. The concluding words αἰεὶ ἀπαγωγά,
‘averting evil for ever,’ make it certain that the intent is magical.
The Orphic reverts to the spirit and the vocabulary of the old ritual
of ‘Aversion.’ The ὅπλον, the armour, is perhaps touched with symbolism
like ‘the whole armour of God,’ but it is also in part the magic gear of
the charlatan. The ‘Superstitious Man’ of Theophrastus[1450] is ‘apt to
purify his house frequently, alleging that there has been an induction
(ἐπαγωγή) of Hecate,’ Caecilia Secundina brings a tablet engraved with
Orphic formularies, and thereby secures means for ‘the _aversion_ of evil
for ever.’
* * * * *
If the mutilated condition of tablet VII, the illegible character of IV
and the express statement of VIII are evidence of the lower, the magical
side of Orphism, the complete text of tablets V and VI are the expression
of its highest faith, of a faith so high that it may be questioned
whether any faith, ancient or modern, has ever out-passed it.
Tablets V and VI both begin with a prayer or rather a claim addressed
to the queen of the underworld, later defined as Phersephoneia or
Despoina, and to two gods called Eukles and Eubouleus. The two are
manifestly different titles of the same divinity. Eukles, ‘Glorious One,’
is only known to us from a gloss in Hesychius[1451], who defines it as
a euphemism for Hades. Eubouleus, ‘He of good Counsel,’ the local hero
and underworld divinity of Eleusis, the equivalent of Plouton, occurs
frequently in the Orphic Hymns as an epithet of Dionysos[1452]. Eukles
and Eubouleus are in fact only titles of the one god of Orphism who
appears under many forms, as Hades, Zagreus, Phanes and the like. The
gist of this monotheism will fall to be discussed when we come to the
theogony of Orpheus (Chap. XII.). For the present it is sufficient to
state that the Eukles-Eubouleus of the tablets, whom the Orphic invokes,
is substantially the same as the Zagreus to whom the Cretan Orphic (p.
480) was initiated. To the names named, i.e. the Queen of the Underworld,
Eukles and Eubouleus, the Orphic adds ‘the other gods and daemons.’ This
is a somewhat magical touch. The ancient worshipper was apt to end his
prayer with some such formulary; it was dangerous to leave any one out.
The word δαίμονες, daemons or subordinate spirits, is significant at once
of the lower, the magical side of Orphism, and as will be seen later (p.
656) of its higher spirituality. Orphism tended rather to the worship of
potencies (δαίμονες) than of anthropomorphic divinities (θεοί).
* * * * *
The Orphic then proceeds to state the general basis of his claim: he is
of divine birth,
‘For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race.’
By this he means, as has been shewn in examining the legend of Zagreus,
that some portion of the god Zagreus or Eubouleus or whatever he be
called was in him; his fathers the Titans had eaten the god and he sprang
from their ashes. That this is the meaning of the tablets is quite clear
from the words
‘But Fate laid me low ... starflung thunderbolt.’
He identifies himself with the whole human race as ‘dead in trespasses
and sins.’ If this were all, his case were hopeless; ‘dust we are and
unto dust we must return.’ He urges at the outset another claim,
‘Out of the pure I come.’
That is, as an Orphic I am purified by the ceremonials of the Orphics.
He presents as it were his certificate of spiritual health, he is free
from all contagion of evil. ‘Bearer is certified pure, coming from a
congregation of pure people.’ In like fashion in the Egyptian _Book of
the Dead_ (No. CXXV.) after the long negative confession made to Osiris
the soul says, ‘I am pure,’ ‘I am pure,’ ‘I am pure,’ ‘I am pure.’ He
then proceeds to recite his creed, or rather in ancient fashion[1453] to
confess or acknowledge the ritual acts he has performed. The gist of them
each and all is, ‘Bad have I fled, better have I found,’ or as we should
put it, ‘I have passed from death unto life.’ He does not himself say, I
am a god—that might be overbold—but the answer he looks for comes clear
and unmistakeable,
‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’
The confession he makes of ritual acts is so instructive as to his
convictions, so expresses his whole attitude towards religion that it
must be examined sentence by sentence.
I say advisedly confession of _ritual acts_, because each of the little
sentences describes in the past tense an action performed, ‘I have
escaped,’ ‘I have set my feet,’ ‘I have crept,’ ‘I have fallen.’ These
several acts described are, I believe, statements of actual ritual
performed on earth by the Orphic candidate for initiation, and in the
fact that they have been performed lies his certainty of ultimate bliss.
They are the exact counterpart of the ancient Eleusinian confession
formularies, ‘I have fasted, I have drunk the _kykeon_’ (p. 155).
THE RITUAL FORMULARIES.
The first article in the creed or confession of the Orphic soul is
κύκλου δ’ ἐξέπταν βαρυπενθέος ἀργαλέοιο.
‘I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.’
The notion of existence as a Wheel, a cycle of life upon life ceaselessly
revolving, in which the soul is caught, from the tangle and turmoil
of which it seeks and at last finds rest, is familiar to us from the
symbolism of Buddha. Herodotus[1454] expressly says that the Egyptians
were the first to assert that the soul of man was immortal, born and
reborn in various incarnations, and this doctrine he adds was borrowed
from the Egyptians by the Greeks. To Plato[1455] it was already ‘an
ancient doctrine that the souls of men that come Here are from There
and that they go There again and come to birth from the dead.’ It was
indeed a very ancient saying or doctrine. It has already been observed
in discussing (p. 179) the mythology of the Keres and Tritopatores.
Orpheus took it as he took so many ancient things that lay to his hand,
and moralized it. Rebirth, reincarnation, became for him _new_ birth.
The savage logic which said that life could only come from life, that
new souls are old souls reborn in endless succession, was transformed by
him into a Wheel or cycle of ceaseless purgation. So long as man has not
severed completely his brotherhood with plants and animals, not realized
the distinctive marks and attributes of his humanity, he will say with
Empedocles[1456]:
‘Once on a time a youth was I, and I was a maiden,
A bush, a bird, and a fish with scales that gleam in the ocean.’
To Plato the belief in the rebirth of old souls was ‘an ancient
doctrine,’ but because the Orphics gave it a new mystical content the
notion was for the most part fathered on Orpheus or Pythagoras. Diogenes
Laertius[1457], who is concerned to glorify Pythagoras, said that he was
the first to assert that ‘the soul went round in a changing Wheel of
necessity, being bound down now in this now in that animal.’ A people
who saw in a chance snake the soul of a hero would have no difficulty in
formulating a doctrine of metempsychosis. They need not have borrowed it
from Egypt, and yet it is probable that the influence of Egypt, the home
of animal worship, helped out the doctrine by emphasizing the sanctity
of animal life. The almost ceremonial tenderness shown to animals by the
Pythagorean Orphics is an Egyptian rather than a Greek characteristic.
The notion of kinship with the brute creation harmonized well with the
somewhat elaborate and self-conscious humility of the Orphic.
What precisely the ritual of the Wheel was we do not know. That there
was an actual Wheel[1458] in the rites and that some form of symbolical
release was enacted is probable. It is indeed almost certain, as
we know that Wheels formed part of the sacred furniture of certain
sanctuaries. It is worth noting that on Orphic vases of Lower Italy to
be discussed later (p. 600) wheels are suspended in the palace of Hades
and Persephone, and these are of two kinds, solid and spoked, designed
probably for quite different uses. The grammarian Dionysios, surnamed
the Thracian, wrote a book on ‘The Interpretation of the Symbolism that
has to do with Wheels,’ which probably contained just the necessary
missing information. Clement[1459] has preserved for us one valuable
sentence which makes the ritual use of Wheels a certainty. ‘People
signify actions,’ he says, ‘not only by words but by symbols, by words
as in the case of the Delphic utterances “Nothing too much” and “Know
thyself,” and in like manner by symbols as in the case of the Wheel that
is turned round in the precincts of the gods and that was derived from
the Egyptians.’ Dionysios is probably right. The Wheel like the Well may
have come from Egypt, or from Egyptianized Crete.
Hero of Alexandria[1460] in his curious treatise on ‘Machines moved by
air’ twice mentions Wheels as in ritual use. ‘In Egyptian sanctuaries
there are Wheels of bronze against the door-posts, and they are moveable
so that those who enter may set them in motion, because of the belief
that bronze purifies; and there are vessels for purifying so that those
who enter may purify themselves. The problem is how to arrange so that
when the Wheel is turned the water may flow mechanically so that as
aforesaid it may be sprinkled for purifying.’ The problem which Hero
faced mechanically the Orphics solved in metaphor—how to connect the
Wheel with purification. It was not difficult. Bronze, as Hero notes,
was supposed to be a purifier; in another section he says the Wheel was
actually called _Hagnisterion_, the thing for purification. Each metal
when first it comes into use is regarded as having magical properties.
A resonant metal was of special use because it frightened away bogeys.
Simaetha[1461] in her incantations cries
‘The goddess at the Crossways. Sound the gong,’
and the Scholiast on the passage remarks instructively that bronze was
sounded at eclipses of the moon, inasmuch as it was held to be pure and
to have the power of warding off pollutions, and he quotes the treatise
of Apollodorus ‘Concerning the Gods’ as his authority for the statement
that bronze was in use in all kinds of consecration and purification. It
was appropriate to the dead, he adds, and at Athens the Hierophant beats
a gong when Kore is invoked.
Here again we have a primitive superstition ready to the hand of the
Orphic. He is familiar with bronze-beating as a piece of apotropaic
ritual; he sees, probably in an Egyptian temple, a bronze wheel known
by some name that he translates as ‘a thing for purifying’; he has a
doctrine of metempsychosis and an ardent longing after purification; he
puts them all together and says with Proclus[1462] the one salvation
offered by the creator is that the spirit free itself from the wheel of
birth. ‘This is what those who are initiated by Orpheus to Dionysos and
Kore pray that they may attain, to
“Cease from the Wheel and breathe again from ill.”’
The notion of escape whether from the tomb of the body, or from the
restless Wheel or from the troubled sea, haunts the Orphic, haunts
Plato, haunts Euripides, lends him lovely metaphors of a fawn escaped,
makes his Bacchants sing[1463],
‘Happy he, on the weary sea
Who hath fled the tempest and won the haven.
Happy whoso hath risen free
Above his striving.’
The downward steps from purification to penance, from penance to
vindictive punishment, were easy to take and swiftly taken. Plato, in
the vision of Er, though he knows of purification, is not free from this
dismal and barren eschatology of vengeance and retribution. On Lower
Italy vases under Orphic influence, as will later be seen (p. 606), great
Ananke, Necessity herself, is made to hold a scourge and behave like a
Fury. That such notions were not alien to Orphism is clear from the line
in tablet VI:
‘I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.’
The deeds unrighteous are not only the soul’s own personal sins but
his hereditary taint, the ‘ancient woe’ that is his as the heir of the
earth-born Titans.
* * * * *
The next avowal is
ἱμερτοῦ δ’ ἐπέβαν στεφάνου ποσὶ καρπαλίμοισι.
‘I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.’
It occurs in a second form, thus:
ἱμερτοῦ δ’ ἀπέβαν στεφάνου ποσὶ καρπαλίμοισι.
‘I have passed with eager feet _from_ the Circle desired.’
It is impossible to say which form is correct. It may be that both were
indispensable, that the neophyte had to pass first _into_ and then _out
of_ a ring or circle.
The word ἐπιβαίνω (I step on or over) is of course frequently used
metaphorically with the meaning ‘I entered on, embarked on.’ It might
therefore be possible to translate the words as ‘with eager feet I
entered on, i.e. I obtained, the crown I longed for.’ But as the word
στέφανος means not only a crown for the head, but a ring or circle, a
thing that encloses, it is perhaps better to take it here in its wider
sense[1464]. The mystic has escaped from the Wheel of Purgation, he
passes with eager feet over the Ring or circle that includes the bliss
he longs for, he enters and perhaps passes out of some sort of sacred
enclosure. As to the actual rite performed we are wholly in the dark.
Possibly the innermost shrine was garlanded about with mystic magical
flowers. This is however pure conjecture. We know[1465] that the putting
on of garlands or στέμματα was the final stage of initiation for
Hierophants and other priests, a stage that was as it were Consecration
and Ordination in one; but the putting on of garlands is not the entering
of a garlanded enclosure, and it is the entering of an enclosure that the
‘eager feet’ seem to imply.
* * * * *
Next comes the clause,
δεσποίνας δ’ ὑπὸ κόλπον ἔδυν χθονίας βασιλείας.
‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.’
That this clause is an avowal of an actual rite performed admits of no
doubt. It is the counterpart of the ‘token’ of the mysteries of the
Mother: ‘I have passed down into the bridal-chamber,’ but here the
symbolism seems to be rather of birth than marriage. In discussing the
ritual of the Semnae (p. 244), it has been seen that the ‘second-fated
man’ had to be reborn before he could be admitted to the sanctuary,
and the rebirth was a mimetic birth[1466]. The same ceremony was gone
through among some peoples at adoption[1467]. Dionysos himself in Orphic
hymns is called ὑποκόλπιε, ‘he who is beneath the bosom.’ If the rites
are enumerated in the order of their performance this rite of birth or
adoption must have taken place _within_ the Circle, after the entrance
_into_ and before the exit _from_.
In the highest grades of initiation not only was there a new birth but
also a new name given, a beautiful custom still preserved in the Roman
Church. Lucian[1468] makes Lexiphanes tell of a man called Deinias, who
was charged with the crime of having addressed the Hierophant and the
Dadouchos by name, ‘and that when he well knew that from the time they
are consecrated they are nameless and can no longer be named, on the
supposition that they have from that time holy names.’
* * * * *
The last affirmation of the mystic is
ἔριφος ἐς γάλ’ ἔπετον,
‘A kid I have fallen into milk,’
a sentence which occurred, it will be remembered, in the second person,
on tablet III.
The quaint little formulary is simple almost to fatuity. Mysticism, in
its attempt to utter the ineffable, often verges on imbecility.
Before we attempt to determine the precise nature of the ritual act
performed, it may be well to consider the symbolism of the kid and
the milk. It is significant that in both cases the formulary occurs
immediately after another statement:
‘Thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’
It would seem that about the kid there is something divine. Eriphos
according to Hesychius[1469] was a title of Dionysos. Stephanus[1470]
the Byzantine says that Dionysos bore the title Eriphios among the
Metapontians, i.e. in the very neighbourhood where these Orphic tablets
were engraved. It is clear that there was not only a Bull-Dionysos
(Eiraphiotes) but a Kid-Dionysos (Eriphos), and this was just the sort of
title that the Orphics would be likely to seize on and mysticize. In the
_Bacchae_ it has been seen (p. 446) that there seems to attach a sort of
special sanctity to young wild things, a certain mystic symbolism about
the fawn escaped, and the nursing mothers who suckle the young of wolves
and deer. It may be that each one thought her nursling was a Baby-God.
Christian children to this day are called Christ’s Lambs because Christ
is the Lamb of God, and Clement[1471] joining new and old together says:
‘This is the mountain beloved of God, not the place of tragedies like
Cithaeron but consecrated to the dramas of truth, a mount of sobriety
shaded with the woods of purity. And there revel on it not the Maenads,
sisters of Semele the thunderstruck, initiated in the impure feast of
flesh, but the daughters of God, fair Lambs who celebrate the holy rites
of the Word, raising a sober choral chant.’
The initiated then believed himself new born as a young divine animal,
as a kid, one of the god’s many incarnations; and as a kid he falls
into milk. Milk was a god-given drink before the coming of wine, and
the Epiphany of Dionysos was shown not only by wine but by milk and
honey[1472]:
‘Then streams the earth with milk, yea streams
With wine and honey of the bee.’
Out on the mountain of Cithaeron he gives his Maenads draughts of
miraculous wine, and also[1473]
‘If any lips
Sought whiter draughts, with dipping finger-tips
They pressed the sod, and gushing from the ground
Came springs of milk. And reed-wands ivy-crowned
Ran with sweet honey.’
The symbolism of honey, the nectar of gods and men, does not here
concern us, but it is curious to note how honey, used in ancient days to
embalm the dead body, became the symbol of eternal bliss. A sepulchral
inscription of the first century A.D. runs as follows[1474]:
‘Here lies Boethos Muse-bedewed, undying
Joy hath he of sweet sleep in honey lying.’
Boethos lies in honey, the mystic falls into milk, both are symbols taken
from the ancient ritual of the _Nephalia_ and mysticized.
The question remains—what was the exact ritual of the falling into
milk? The ritual formulary is not ἔπιον γάλα ‘I _drank_ milk,’ but
ἔπετον ἐς γάλα ‘I _fell into_ milk.’ Did the neophyte actually fall
into[1475] a bath of milk, or, as in the case of ‘I stepped on the crown
I longed for,’ is the ritual act of drinking milk from the beginning
metaphorically described? The question unhappily cannot with certainty be
decided. The words ‘I fell into milk’ are not even exactly what we should
expect if a rite of Baptism were described; of a rite of immersion in
milk we have no evidence.
It is however from primitive rites of Baptism that we get most light as
to the general symbolism of the formulary. In the primitive Church the
sacrament of Baptism was immediately followed by Communion. The custom
is still preserved among the Copts[1476]. The neophyte drank not only of
Wine but also of a cup of Milk and Honey mixed[1477], those ‘new born in
Christ’ partook of the food of babes. Our Church has severed Communion
from Baptism and lost the symbolism of Milk and Honey, nor does she any
longer crown her neophytes after Baptism[1478].
S. Jerome[1479] complains in Protestant fashion that much was done in
the Church of his days from tradition that had not really the sanction
of Holy Writ. This tradition which the early Church so wisely and
beautifully followed can only have come from pagan sources. Among the
unsanctioned rites S. Jerome mentions the cup of Milk and Honey. That the
cup of Milk and Honey was pagan we know from a beautiful prescription
preserved in one of the Magic Papyri[1480] in which the worshipper is
thus instructed: ‘Take the honey with the milk, drink of it before the
rising of the sun, and there shall be in thy heart something that is
divine.’ The milk and honey can be materialized into a future ‘happy
land’ flowing with milk and honey, but the promise of the magical papyrus
is the utmost possible guerdon of present spiritual certainty. We find in
every sacrament what we bring.
* * * * *
If the formularies inscribed on the tablets have been actually recited
while the Orphic was alive we naturally ask—When and at what particular
Mysteries? To this question no certain answer can be returned. Save for
one instance,
‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld,’
the formularies of the tablets bear no analogy either to the tokens of
Eleusis or to those of the Great Mother. The Greater Mysteries at Eleusis
were preceded, we know, by Lesser Mysteries celebrated at Agra[1481],
a suburb of Athens. These mysteries were sacred to Dionysos and Kore
rather than to Demeter, and it is noticeable that in the tablets there
is no mention of Demeter, no trace of agricultural intent; the whole
gist is eschatological. But, found as they are in Crete and Lower
Italy, it is more probable that these tablets refer to Orphic mysteries
pure and simple before Orphic rites have blended with those of the
Wine-God. Pythagoras, tradition[1482] says, was initiated in Crete; he
met there ‘one of the Idaean Daktyls and at their hands was purified by
a thunderbolt; he lay from dawn outstretched face-foremost by the sea
and by night lay near a river covered with fillets from the fleece of a
black lamb, and he went down into the Idaean cave holding black wool and
spent there the accustomed thrice nine hallowed days and beheld the seat
bedecked every year for Zeus, and he engraved an inscription about the
tomb with the title “Pythagoras to Zeus” of which the beginning is:
“Here in death lies Zan, whom they call Zeus,”
and after his stay in Crete he went to Italy and settled in Croton.’
The story looks as if Pythagoras had brought to Italy from Crete Orphic
rites in all their primitive freshness. The religion of Dionysos was not
the only faith that taught man he could become a god. The dead Egyptian
also believed that he could become Osiris. The Orphic in Crete and Lower
Italy may have had rites dealing with his conduct in the next world more
directly than those of the Great Mother or of Eleusis.
This is made the more probable from the fact that we certainly know
that the sect of the Pythagoreans had special burial rites, strictly
confined to the Initiated. Of this Plutarch[1483] incidentally gives
clear evidence in his discourse of ‘The Daemon of Socrates.’ A young
Pythagorean, Lysis, came to Thebes and died there and was buried by his
Theban friends. His ghost appeared in a dream to the Pythagorean friends
he had left in Italy. The Pythagoreans, more skilled in these matters
than modern psychical experts, had a certain sign by which they knew
the apparition of a dead man from the phantasm of the living. They got
anxious as to how Lysis had been buried, for ‘there is something special
and sacrosanct (ὅσιον) that takes place at the burial of the Pythagoreans
and is peculiar to them, and if they do not attain this rite they think
that they will fail in reaching the very happy end that is proper to
them.’ So concerned were some of the Pythagoreans that they wished to
have the body of Lysis disinterred and brought to Italy to be reburied.
Accordingly one of them, Theanor, started for Thebes to make enquiries as
to what had been done. He was directed by the people of the place to the
tomb and went in the evening to offer libations, and he invoked the soul
of Lysis to give inspired direction as to what was to be done. ‘As the
night went on,’ Theanor recounts, ‘I saw nothing, but I thought I heard
a voice say “Move not that which should not be moved,” for the body of
Lysis was buried by his friends with sacrosanct ceremonies (ὁσίως), and
his spirit is already separated from it and set free into another birth,
having obtained a share in another spirit.’ On enquiry next morning
Theanor found that Lysis had imparted to a friend all the secret of the
mysteries so that the funeral rites had been performed after Pythagorean
fashion.
What precisely the ὅσια, the sacrosanct rites, were we cannot in detail
say, but we may be tolerably sure that something special was done for
the man who had been finally initiated, who was like the Cretan mystic
ὁσιωθείς, ‘consecrated.’ This something may have included the burial with
his body of tablets inscribed with sentences from his ‘Book of the Dead.’
This I think is implied in a familiar passage of Plato. Socrates in the
_Phaedo_[1484] says that ‘the journey to Hades does not seem to him a
simple road like that described by Aeschylus in the _Telephos_. On the
contrary it is neither simple nor one. If it were there would be no need
of guides. But it appears in point of fact to have many partings of the
ways and circuits. And this,’ he adds, ‘I say conjecturing it from the
customary and sacrosanct (ὁσίων) rites which we observe in this world.’
The customary rites (νόμιμα) were for each and all; the sacrosanct rites
(ὅσια) were for the initiated only, for they only were sacrosanct (ὅσιοι).
The Pythagoreans we know revived the custom of burial in the earth,
which had been at least in part superseded by the Northern practice of
cremation. It was part of their general return to things primitive. Earth
was the kingdom of ‘Despoina, Queen of the underworld,’ who was more
to them than Zeus of the upper air. To their minds bent on symbolism
burial itself would be a consecration, they would remember that to the
Athenians the dead were Δημητρεῖοι[1485], Demeter’s people, that burial
was refused to the traitor because he was unworthy ‘to be consecrated
by earth[1486],’ and burial in itself may well have been to them as to
Antigone a mystic marriage:
‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.’
_b._ ORPHIC VASES OF LOWER ITALY.
Orphic religion, as seen on the tablets just discussed, is singularly
free from ‘other-worldliness.’ It is a religion promising, indeed,
immortality, but instinct not so much with the hope of future rewards
as with the ardent longing after perfect purity; it is concerned with
the state of a soul rather than with its circumstances. We have the
certainty of beatitude for the initiated, the ‘seats of the blessed,’ the
‘groves of Phersephoneia,’ but the longing uttered is ecstatic, mystic
not sensuous; it is summed up in the line:
‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’
None knew better than the Orphic himself that this was only for the few:
‘Many are they that carry the narthex, few are they that are made one
with Bacchus.’ For the many there remained other and lower beatitudes,
there remained also—a thing wholly absent from the esoteric Orphic
doctrine—the fear of punishment, punishment conceived not as a welcome
purification, but as a fruitless, endless vengeance. Of the existence of
this lower faith or rather _un_faith in the popular forms of Orphism we
have definite and curious evidence from a class of vases, found in Lower
Italy, representing scenes in the underworld and obviously designed under
Orphic influence.
* * * * *
Two specimens[1487] of these ‘Apulian’ vases are given in figs. 163 and
164. It will be obvious at the first glance that the composition of both
designs is substantially the same. This need not oblige us to conjecture
any one great work of art of which these two and the other designs not
figured here are copies; it only shows that some vase-painter of note in
the 4th century B.C. conceived the scheme and it became popular in his
factory.
The main lines of both compositions are as follows: in the centre the
palace of Hades with Plouton and Persephone. Immediately below, and
also occupying a central position, is Herakles, carrying off Cerberus.
Immediately to the left of the temple and therefore also fairly central,
is the figure of Orpheus. About these central figures various groups of
criminals and other denizens of Hades are diversely arrayed.
With this scheme in our minds we may examine the first specimen, the most
important of the series, because inscribed. The vase itself, now in the
Naples Museum and usually known from the place where it was found as the
‘Altamura’ vase[1488], is in a disastrous condition. It was put together
out of hundreds of fragments, painted over and freely restored after
the fashion of the day, and it has never yet been subjected to a proper
chemical cleaning. Much therefore in the drawing remains uncertain,
and only such parts and inscriptions will be dealt with as are above
suspicion.
The palace of Hades, save for the suspended wheels (p. 591), presents no
features of interest. In the ‘Altamura’ vase many of its architectural
features are from the hand of the restorer, but from the other vases the
main outlines are sure. In the Altamura vase both Hades and Persephone
are seated—in the others sometimes Persephone, sometimes Plouton
occupies the throne. Had the designs been exclusively inspired by
Orphic tradition, more uniform stress would probably have been laid on
Persephone.
[Illustration: FIG. 163.]
The figure of Orpheus, common to both vases, is interesting from its
dress, which reminds us of Vergil’s[1489] description,
‘There too the Thracian priest in trailing robe.’
The vase-painter of the late 4th cent. B.C. was more archaeologist than
patriot. In the Lesche picture of Polygnotus, Pausanias[1490] expressly
notes that Orpheus was ‘Greek in appearance,’ and that neither his
dress nor the covering he had on his head was Thracian. The Orpheus of
Polygnotus must have been near akin to the beautiful Orpheus of the
vase-painter in fig. 142. Polygnotus, too, made him ‘seated as it were
on a sort of hill, and grasping his cithara with his left hand; with
the other he was touching some sprays of willow, and he leant against a
tree.’ Very different this from the frigid ritual priest.
[Illustration: FIG. 164.]
* * * * *
About this figure of Orpheus an amazing amount of nonsense has been
written. The modern commentator thinks of Orpheus as two things—as
magical musician, which he _was_, as passionate lover, which in early
days he was _not_. The commentator’s mind is obsessed by ‘Che farò senza
te, Eurydice?’ He asks himself the question, ‘Why has Orpheus descended
into Hades?’ and the answer rises automatically, ‘To fetch Eurydice.’
As regards these Lower Italy vases there is one trifling objection to
this interpretation, and that is that _there is no Eurydice_. Tantalos,
Sisyphos, Danaides, Herakles, but no Eurydice. This does not deter the
commentator. The figure of Eurydice is ‘inferred rather than expressed.’
Happily this line of interpretation, which might lead us far, has been
put an end to by the discovery of a vase in which Eurydice _does_ appear;
Orpheus leads her by the wrist and a love-god floats above. It is evident
that when the vase-painter wishes to ‘express’ Eurydice he does not leave
her to be ‘inferred.’
It may be taken as an axiom in Greek mythology that passionate lovers are
always late. The myth of Eurydice is of considerable interest, but not as
a love-story. It is a piece of theology taken over from Dionysos, and,
primarily, has nothing to do with Orpheus. Anyone who realizes Orpheus at
all would feel that the intrusion of desperate emotion puts him out of
key. Semele, the green earth, comes up from below, year by year; with her
comes her son Dionysos, and by a certain instinct of chivalry men said he
had gone to fetch her. The mantle of Dionysos descends on Orpheus.
Eurydice is one of those general, adjectival names that are appropriate
to any and every goddess: she is the ‘Wide-Ruler.’ At Trozen,
Pausanias[1491] saw ‘a Temple of Artemis the Saviour, and in it were
altars of those gods who are said to rule below the earth, and they
say that in this place Semele was brought up from Hades by Dionysos,
and that here Herakles dragged up the hound of Hades.’ Pausanias is
sceptical: ‘But I do not the least believe that Semele died, she who
was the wife of Zeus, and as to the beast called the hound of Hades, I
shall state what I am sure is the truth about him in another place.’ The
cult of Artemis is clearly superposed over an ancient, perhaps nameless,
anyhow forgotten cult of underworld gods. There was probably a cleft at
hand and a legend of a rising Earth-goddess, as at the rock of Recall,
_Anaklethra_ (p. 283), and the Smileless Rock at Eleusis (p. 127); and
of course, given somebody’s _Anodos_, a Kathodos is soon supplied, and
then a formal descent into Hades. At the Alcyonian lake, near Argos,
which Nero tried in vain to sound, the Argives told Pausanias[1492] that
Dionysos went down to Hades to fetch Semele, and Polymnos, a local hero,
showed him the way down, and ‘there were certain rites performed there
yearly.’ Unfortunately, as is mostly the case when he comes to the real
point, Pausanias found it would ‘not be pious’ to reveal these rites to
the general public. At Delphi, too, it will be remembered (p. 403), the
Thyiades knew the mystic meaning of the festival of Heroïs, and ‘even an
outsider could conjecture,’ Plutarch says, ‘from what was done, that it
was an upbringing of Semele.’
Orpheus, priest of Dionysos, took on his resurrection as well as his
death; that is the germ from which sprang the beautiful love-story. A
taboo-element, common to many primitive stories, is easily added. You
may not look back when spirits are about from the underworld. If you do
you may have to join them. Underworld rites are often performed ‘without
looking back’ (ἀμεταστρεπτί, see p. 24 note 2).
* * * * *
There is another current fallacy about these underworld vases.
Commentators are not only prone to the romantic tendency to see a
love-story where none is, but, having once got the magical musician into
their minds, they see him everywhere. In these vases, they say, we have
‘the power of music to stay the torments of hell.’ They remember, and
small wonder, the amazing scene in Gluck’s opera, where Orpheus comes
down into the shades playing on his lyre, and the clamour of hell is
spell-bound; or they bethink them of Vergil:
‘The very house itself, the inmost depths
Of Death stood still to hearken.’
But the vase-painter of the 4th cent. B.C. is necessarily guiltless of
Vergil as of Gluck. Moreover his work is untinged by any emotion, whether
of poetry or religion; his composition is simply an _omnium gatherum_ of
conventional orthodox dwellers in Hades. Orpheus is there because, by
that time, convention demanded his presence. The vase-painter’s wealthy
clients—these Apulian vases were as expensive as they are ugly—would have
been ill-pleased had the founder of popular mysteries not had his fitting
place. But if interest focusses anywhere in a design so scattered and
devitalized, it is on the obvious ‘record’ of Herakles, who, tradition
said, had been initiated, not on the secret magic of Orpheus. It is true
that the ‘Danaides,’ when they appear, are doing nothing but dangling
their pitchers in attitudes meant to be decorative, but Tantalos still
extends a hand to keep off his rock, and Sisyphos still uprolls the
‘pitiless’ stone; there is no pause in their torments.
It remains to note the figures in the side groups. In the top row to the
left are Megara and her sons, placed there by a pardonable anachronism,
out of compliment to Herakles and Athens. We should never have guessed
their names, but the inscriptions are certain. Opposite them to the
right a group which on the Altamura vase is almost certainly due to
restoration. The figures are Myrtilos, Pelops, and Hippodameia. To
the left of Orpheus are two _Poinae_, developments, as has been seen
(p. 231), of the tragic Erinyes. Above Sisyphos is another figure,
a favourite of the Orphics, Ananke, Necessity. Only three letters
(ναν) of the name remain, but the restoration is practically certain.
Opposite Orpheus are the three ‘Judges’ of Hades, Triptolemos, Aiakos,
Rhadamanthys. Below the Judges are women bearing water-vessels, to whom
provisionally we may give the canonical name of ‘Danaides.’ The sea horse
is probably due to the restorer.
* * * * *
Turning to the Canosa vase, now in the Old Pinakothek at Munich[1493], we
find that, though none of the figures are inscribed, most can easily be
traced. Some modifications of the previous scheme must be noted. Tantalos
the Phrygian takes the place of the Danaides. Near Orpheus, in place of
the _Poinae_, is a group, man, wife and child, who are hard to interpret.
No mythological figures quite suit them, and some authorities incline to
see in the group just a human family initiated by Orpheus in his rites.
In face of the fact that all the other figures present are mythological,
this is, I think, difficult to accept. The figures are best left unnamed
till further evidence comes to light. On the right hand, in the top row,
is a group of great interest, Theseus, Peirithoös and Dike, armed with a
sword.
To resume, we have as certain elements in these vases Orpheus, the three
Judges of Hades, two heroes, Herakles and Theseus, who go down into Hades
and return thence, two standard Homeric criminals, Sisyphos and Tantalos,
and, in the case of the Altamura vase, the Danaides. The question
naturally rises, is there in all these figures any common factor which
determines their selection, or is it a mere haphazard aggregate?
The answer is as simple as instructive, and may be stated at the outset:
_All the canonical denizens of the underworld are hero and heroine
figures of the older stratum of the population_. Hades has become a sort
of decent Dower-house to which are relegated the divinities of extinct or
dying cults.
* * * * *
In discussing hero-worship, we have already seen (p. 336) that Tityos and
Salmoneus are beings of this order. Once locally the rivals of Zeus, they
paled before him, and as vanquished rivals became typical aggressors,
punished for ever as a warning to the faithful. Tityos does not appear
on Lower Italy vases, but Pausanias[1494] saw him on the fresco of
Polygnotus at Delphi, a ‘dim and mangled spectre,’ and Aeneas[1495] in
the underworld says:
‘I saw Salmoneus cruel payment make,
For that he mocked the lightning and the thunder
Of Jove on high.’
It was an ingenious theological device, or rather perhaps unconscious
instinct, that took these ancient hero figures, really regnant in the
world below, and made the place of their rule the symbol of their
punishment. According to the old faith all men, good and bad, went below
the earth, great local heroes reigned below as they had reigned above;
but the new faith sent its saints to a remote Elysium or to the upper air
and made this underworld kingdom a place of punishment; and in that place
significantly we find that the tortured criminals _are all offenders
against Olympian Zeus_.
We must confine our examination to the two typical instances selected by
the vase-painter, Sisyphos and Tantalos.
We are apt to think of Sisyphos and Tantalos as punished for overweening
pride and insolence, and to regard their downfall as a warning of the
ephemeral nature of earthly prosperity.
‘Oh what are wealth and power! Tantalus
And Sisyphus were kings long years ago,
And now they lie in the lake dolorous;
The hills of hell are noisy with their woe,
Aye swift the tides of empire ebb and flow.’
Kings they were, but kings of the old discredited order. Homer says
nothing of their crime, he takes it as known; but in dim local legends we
can in both cases track out the real gist of their ill-doing: they were
rebels against Zeus.
This is fairly clear in the case of Tantalos. According to one
legend[1496] he suffered because he either stole or concealed for
Pandareos the golden hound of Zeus. According to the epic author[1497]
of the ‘Return of the Atreidae,’ he had been admitted to feast with the
gods, and Zeus promised to grant him whatever boon he desired. ‘He,’
Athenaeus says, ‘being a man insatiable in his desire for enjoyment,
asked that he might have eternal remembrance of his joys and live after
the same fashion as the gods.’ Zeus was angry; he kept his promise, but
added the torment of the imminent stone. It is clear that in some fashion
Tantalos, the old hero-king, tried to make himself the equal of the new
Olympians. The insatiable lust is added as a later justification of the
vengeance. Tantalos is a real king, with a real grave. Pausanias[1498]
says, ‘In my country there are still signs left that Pelops and Tantalos
once dwelt there. There is a famous grave of Tantalos, and there is
a lake called by his name.’ The grave, he says elsewhere[1499], he
had himself seen in Mount Sipylos, and ‘well worth seeing it was.’ He
mentions no cult, but a grave so noteworthy would not be left untended.
* * * * *
The legend of Sisyphos, if more obscure than that of Tantalos, is not
less instructive. The _Iliad_ knows of Sisyphos as an ancient king. When
Glaukos would tell his lineage to Diomede he says[1500]:
‘A city Ephyre there was in Argos’ midmost glen
Horse-rearing, there dwelt Sisyphos the craftiest of all men,
Sisyphos son of Aiolos, and Glaukos was his son,
And Glaukos had for offspring blameless Bellerophon.’
Ephyre is the ancient name of Corinth, and on Corinth Pausanias[1501] in
his discussion of the district has a highly significant note. He says, ‘I
do not know that anyone save the majority of the Corinthians themselves
has ever seriously asserted that Corinthos was the son of Zeus.’ He
goes on to say that according to Eumelus (circ. B.C. 750), the ‘first
inhabitant of the land was Ephyra, daughter of Okeanos.’ The meaning is
transparent. An ancient pre-Achaean city, with an eponymous hero, a later
attempt—discredited of all but the interested inhabitants—to affiliate
the indigenous stock to the immigrant conquerors by a new eponymous
hero, a son of Zeus.
The epithet ‘craftiest,’ κέρδιστος, is, as Eustathius[1502] observes, a
‘mid-way expression,’ i.e. for better for worse. ‘Glaukos,’ he says in
his observant way, ‘does not wish to speak evil of his ancestor.’ The
word he uses means very clever (συνετώτατος), very ready and versatile
(εὐτρεχέστατος). It is in fact no more an epithet of blame than
πολύμητις, ‘of many wiles,’ the stock epithet of Odysseus. Eustathius
goes on to explain the meaning of the name Sisyphos. Sisyphos, he says,
was among the ancients a word of the same significance as θεόσοφος,
divinely wise, σιός being among the Peloponnesians a form of θεός. He
cites the oath used by comic poets, ναὶ τὼ σιώ for νὴ τοὺς θεούς, ‘by
the gods.’ Whether Eustathius is right, and Sisyphos means ‘divinely
wise,’ or whether we adopt the current etymology[1503] and make Sisyphos
a reduplicated form of σοφός, i.e. the ‘Very Very Wise One,’ thus much is
clear. The title was traditionally understood as of praise rather than
blame, and it is not rash to see in it one of the cultus epithets of the
old religion like ‘The Blameless One.’
It is as a benefactor that Sisyphos appears in local legend. It was
Sisyphos, Pausanias[1504] says, who found the child Melicertes, buried
him, and instituted in his honour the Isthmian games. It was to Sisyphos
that Asopos[1505] gave the fountain behind the temple of Aphrodite, and
for a reason most significant. ‘Sisyphos,’ the story says, ‘knew that it
was Zeus who had carried off Aegina, the daughter of Asopos, but he would
not tell till the spring on Acrocorinthus was given him. Asopos gave it
him, and then he gave information, and for that information he, if you
like to believe it, paid the penalty in Hades.’ Pausanias is manifestly
sceptical, but his story touches the real truth. Sisyphos is the ally
of the indigenous river Asopos. Zeus carries off the daughter of the
neighbouring land; Sisyphos, hostile to the conqueror, gave information,
and for that hostility he suffers in Hades. But though he points a moral
in Olympian eschatology, he remains a great local power. The stronghold
of the lower city bore his name, the Sisypheion. Diodorus[1506] relates
how it was besieged by Demetrius, and when it was taken the garrison
surrendered. It must have been a place of the old type, half fortress
half sanctuary. Strabo[1507] notes that in his day extensive ruins of
white marble remained, and he is in doubt whether to call it temple or
palace.
As to the particular punishment selected for Sisyphos, a word remains
to be said. It bears no relation to his supposed offence, whether that
offence be the cheating of Death or the betrayal of Zeus. His doom is
ceaselessly to upheave a stone. Reluctant though I am to resort to
sun-myths, it seems that here the sun counts for something. The sun
was regarded by the sceptical as a large red-hot stone: its rising and
setting might very fitly be represented as the heaving of such a stone
up the steep of heaven, whence it eternally rolls back. The worship of
Helios was established at Corinth[1508]; whether it was due to Oriental
immigration or to some pre-Hellenic stratum of population cannot here be
determined. Sisyphos was a real king, the place of his sepulture on the
Isthmus was known only to a few. It may have been kept secret like that
of Neleus[1509] for prophylactic purposes. But a real king may and often
does take on some of the features and functions of a nature god[1510].
* * * * *
On the ‘Canosa’ vase, immediately above Tantalos, is a group of three
Judges, carrying sceptres. On the Altamura vase are also three Judges,
occupying the same place in the composition, and happily they are
inscribed—Triptolemos, Aiakos, and Rhadamanthys. Two of the three,
Triptolemos and Aiakos, certainly belong to the earlier stratum.
Triptolemos had never even the shadowiest connection with any Olympian
system; there is no attempt to affiliate him; he ends as he began, the
foster-child of Demeter and Kore, and by virtue of his connection with
the ‘Two Goddesses’ of the underworld he reigns below. Demeter and Kore,
the ancient Mother and Maid, were strong enough to withstand, nay to
out-top, any number of Olympian divinities. To tamper with the genealogy
of their local hero was felt to be useless and never attempted.
In striking contrast to Triptolemos, Aiakos seems at first sight entirely
of the later stratum. He is father of the great Homeric heroes, Telamon
and Peleus, and when a drought afflicts Greece it is he who by sacrifice
and prayer to Pan-Hellenian Zeus procures the needful rain. Recent
investigation[1511] has, however, clearly shown that Aiakos is but one of
the countless heroes taken over, affiliated by the new religion, and his
cult, though overshadowed, was never quite extinguished. One fact alone
suffices to prove this. Pausanias[1512] saw and described a sanctuary
in Aegina known as the Aiakeion. ‘It stood in the most conspicuous part
of the city, and consisted of a quadrangular precinct of white marble.
Within the precinct grew ancient olives, and there was there also an
altar rising only a little way from the ground, and it was said, as a
secret not to be divulged, that this altar was the tomb of Aiakos.’ The
altar-tomb was probably of the form already discussed (p. 63) and seen in
fig. 9. Such a tomb, as altar, presupposes the cult of a hero.
Minos does not appear on these Lower Italy vases. In his place is
Rhadamanthys, his brother and like him a Cretan. The reason of the
substitution is perhaps not far to seek. Eustathius[1513] notes that
some authorities held that Minos was a pirate and others that he was
just and a lawgiver. It is not hard to see to which school of thinkers
the Athenians would be apt to belong, and the Lower Italy vases are
manifestly under Attic influence. If the old Cretan tradition had to
be embodied, Rhadamanthys was a safe non-committal figure. He is most
at home in the Elysian fields, a conception that was foreign to the
old order. As brother of Minos, Rhadamanthys must have belonged to
the old Pelasgian dark-haired stock, but we find with some surprise
that he is in the _Odyssey_ ‘golden-haired’ (ξανθός), like any other
Achaean. Eustathius hits the mark when he says[1514], ‘Rhadamanthys is
golden-haired, out of compliment to Menelaos, for Menelaos had golden
hair.’
Herakles and Theseus remain, and need not long detain us. Herakles is
obviously no permanent denizen of Hades; he is triumphant, not tortured;
he hales Cerberus to the upper air, and that there may be no mistake
Hermes points the way. It has already been seen (p. 55) that Herakles was
a hero, _the_ hero well worth Olympianizing though he never became quite
Olympianized. In the _Nekuia_, when the poet is describing Herakles, he
is caught on the horns of a dilemma between the old and the new faith,
and instinctively he betrays his predicament. Odysseus[1515] says:
‘Next Herakles’ great strength I looked upon,
His shadow, for the man himself is gone
To join him with the gods immortal; there
He feasts and hath for bride Hebe the fair.’
The case of Theseus is different. In the Hades of Vergil[1516] he is a
criminal condemned for ever:
‘There sits, and to eternity shall sit,
Unhappy Theseus.’
But on these Lower Italy vases we have again to reckon with Athenian
influence. Theseus is of the old order, son of Poseidon, but Athens was
never fully Olympianized, and she will not have her hero in disgrace.
Had he not a sanctuary at Athens, an ancient asylum[1517]? Were not his
bones brought in solemn pomp from Skyros[1518]? So the matter is adjusted
with considerable tact. Theseus, never accounted as guilty as Peirithoös,
is suffered to return to the upper air, Peirithoös has to remain below;
and this satisfies Justice, Dike, the woman seated by his side. That
the woman holding the sword is none other than Dike herself is happily
certain, for she appears inscribed on the fragment of another and similar
amphora in the Museum at Carlsruhe[1519]. Near her on this fragment is
Peirithoös, also inscribed.
So far in our consideration of the criminals of Hades it might seem as
though they owed their existence purely to theological _animus_. They
are, we have seen, figures of the old religion degraded by the new.
But to suppose that this was the sole clue to their presence would
be a grave mistake. The notion of punishment, and especially eternal
punishment, cannot be fairly charged to the account of Homer and the
Olympian religion he represents. This religion was too easy-going, too
essentially aristocratic to provide an eternity even of torture for the
religious figures it degraded and despised. Enough for it if they were
carelessly banished to their own proper kingdom, the underworld. It is,
alas, to the Orphics, not to the Achaeans, that religion owes the dark
disgrace of a doctrine of eternal punishment. The Orphics were concerned,
as has fully been seen, with two things, immortality and purification;
the two notions to them were inseparable, but by an easy descent the
pains that were for purification became for vengeance. The germ of such a
doctrine is already in the line:
‘I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.’
The lower kind of Orphic could not rid of vengeance the Hades he made in
his own vindictive image. We have seen (p. 507) the heights to which Dike
could rise as Heavenly Justice, as Purity; here in Hades she descends to
another and more human level.
[Illustration: FIG. 165.]
The figure of Dike in art was not invented by the artist of the Lower
Italy vases. She is quaintly figured in the design in fig. 165, from an
amphora in the Museum at Vienna[1520]. Dike, with uplifted mallet, is
about to pound the head of an ugly speckled woman, Adikia, Injustice.
The vase, though not signed by Nikosthenes, is manifestly of his school,
and therefore dates about the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.
The figure of Dike smiting with the mallet or club was familiar to
literature. Theseus, when he learns the death of Hippolytos, asks:
‘How then did Justice smite him with her club,
My son who shamed me?’
The Hades, then, of the Lower Italy vases is a popular blend of Orphism
and of Olympian theology, or rather of ancient Pelasgian figures viewed
through the medium of Olympianism. The old stratum provides the material,
the new stratum degrades it, and Orphism moralises it.
THE DANAIDES.
We have left to the end the figures of the ‘Danaides,’ the maiden-figures
carrying water-jars, who on the Altamura vase[1521] stand in the lowest
row on the right hand. The ‘Danaides’ have been reserved advisedly,
because in their case we have positive evidence of the blend between new
and old.
When mention is made of the water-carriers in Hades, maidens who carry
water in a leaky vessel, to the modern mind the name ‘Danaides’ instantly
occurs:
‘O Danaides, O sieve.’
The association is real and valid, but its cause and origin have been
misunderstood, and thereby much confusion has arisen.
The water-carriers of Hades are familiar to us mainly through the famous
attack made by Plato[1522] in the _Republic_ on Orphic eschatology.
Seizing, according to his fashion, on the lower side of Orphism, Plato
complains that it is riddled through and through with other-worldliness.
Homer and Hesiod promise to the just man good in this life, ‘bees’ and
‘woolly sheep,’ and ‘trees laden with fruit,’ and ‘wealthy marriages’
and ‘high offices.’ That in Plato’s eyes is bad enough, but religious
poets, among them Orpheus, do worse. ‘Still more lusty are the blessings
that Musaeus and his son give on behalf of the gods to the just, for on
their showing they take them down into Hades and set them on couches and
prepare a Banquet of the Blest; they crown them with garlands and make
them spend their whole time being drunk, accounting eternal drunkenness
to be the fairest reward of virtue; and others lengthen out still longer
the recompense given by the gods, saying that there shall be children’s
children and a posterity of the blessed and those who keep faith. In
such and the like fashion do they sing the praise of justice. But the
impious and unjust they bury in a kind of mud in Hades, and compel them
to carry water in a sieve.’
The ‘immortal drunkenness’ promised as guerdon to the blessed was of
course conceived of by the higher sort of Orphic as a spiritual ecstasy,
by the lower Orphic as merely eternal banqueting. The notion was easily
popularized, for the germ of it existed in the ‘Hero-feast’ already
discussed (p. 350), and these ‘Hero-feasts,’ we have seen, were taken
over by Dionysos.
* * * * *
The mud and the sieve to which the impious were condemned remain to be
considered. They can only be understood in relation to Orphic ritual,
and in this relation are instantly clear. Daubing with mud was, we have
seen (p. 492), an integral rite in certain Orphic mysteries. The rite
neglected on earth by the impious must be performed for ever in Hades.
The like notion lies at the bottom of the water-carrying. He who did not
purify himself on earth by initiation must for ever purify himself in
Hades. But the vindictive instinct, always alive in man, adds, it is too
late, he carries water in a pierced vessel, a sieve, and carries it for
ever.
It is often said by modern commentators who have made no trial of eternal
burning that fruitless labour is the greatest of all punishments. Goethe
was the first offender. ‘The ancients,’ he says, ‘rightly considered
fruitless labour as the greatest of all torments, and the punishments
which Tantalos, Sisyphos, the Danaides and the Uninitiated undergo in
Hades bear witness to this.’ But it is not in this reflective fashion
that primitive mythology and eschatology are made.
The word used by Plato for those who carry the water in the sieve
is noteworthy, it is ἀνόσιοι, which perhaps is best translated
‘unconsecrated ones.’ The word ὅσιοι we have already seen denoted
complete initiation, the full and final stage; ἀνόσιοι is almost, though
not quite, ‘uninitiated.’ In the _Phaedo_, Plato does not mention the
water-carriers, but he says explicitly what he here implies, that those
who lie in mud are those uninitiated in the mysteries. ‘I think,’ says
Socrates, ‘that those who founded our mysteries were not altogether
foolish, but from old had a hidden meaning when they said that whoso goes
to Hades uninitiated (ἀμύητος), and not having finally accomplished the
rites (ἀτέλεστος), will lie in mud.’
Again, when in the _Gorgias_ Plato[1523] notes the moralization of
the notion of the water-carrying, he quite clearly states that the
water-carriers are the uninitiated. Socrates is refuting the notion
propounded by Callicles that the full satisfaction of the passions is
virtue. ‘You make of life a fearful thing,’ he says, and I think perhaps
Euripides was right when he said:
‘Life may be death, death life—who knows?’
‘A certain philosopher,’ he goes on, ‘has said we are dead, and that the
body (σῶμα) is a tomb (σῆμα).’ This doctrine, it will be remembered, was
fathered in the _Cratylus_ on the Orphics. Then with the notion of the
tomb-body (σῶμα σῆμα) still in his mind, Socrates continues: ‘A certain
ingenious man, probably an Italian or a Sicilian, playing on the word,
invented a myth in which he called that part of the soul which is the
seat of the desires a _pithos_, because it was _bid_able (πιθανὸν) and
persuadable, and he called the ignorant “unshutting” (ἀμυήτους) ...
and he declared that of the souls in Hades the uninitiated were most
miserable, for they carry water into a _pithos_ which is pierced, with a
sieve that is pierced in like manner.’ Whether the ‘ingenious man’ was
Empedocles or Pythagoras is not for our purpose important; both held
Orphic doctrines, and one of these doctrines was that the uninitiated
carried water in Hades. It has not, I think, been noticed that the tomb
(σῆμα) as a symbol of the body evidently suggests the _pithos_ or jar
as symbol of the seat of the desires. We have seen in discussing the
Anthesteria (p. 43) that the souls rise from a grave-_pithos_.
So far it must be distinctly noted that Plato nowhere calls the
water-carriers in Hades _Danaides_. The first literary source for the
Danaides _as water-carriers in Hades_ is the pseudo-Platonic dialogue
the _Axiochus_[1524]. In Hades, we are there told, is the region of the
unholy (χῶρος ἀσεβῶν) and the ‘unaccomplished water-carryings of the
Danaides’ (Δαναΐδων ὑδρεῖαι ἀτελεῖς). The word ἀτελεῖς, ‘unaccomplished,’
means also uninitiated, and we are left in doubt—a doubt probably
intentional, as to which meaning is here proposed. The whole purport
of the _Axiochus_ is to prepare a coward to face death decently, and
the dialogue is full of mysticism. We have as the meed of the blessed
‘flowery meadows,’ streams of ‘pure water,’ ‘drinking feasts with songs,’
and the like. Moreover and most significant of all, the uninitiated have
‘some sort of _proedria_’ or right of the first place, and even in Hades
they ‘_go on performing their pure and sanctified rites_.’ It is the very
mirror of the heaven where
‘Congregations ne’er break up and Sabbaths have no end.’
To Plato, then, the water-carriers of Hades are ‘uninitiated’; by the
time of the _Axiochus_ they are Danaides: what is the connecting link?
The answer must wait till the evidence of art has been examined.
[Illustration: FIG. 166.]
The evidence of vase-painting is of high importance, because we possess
two black-figured vases which antedate Plato by more than a century.
The design in fig. 166 is from an amphora in the old Pinakothek[1525]
in Munich. The scene is laid in the underworld; of that we are sure
from the figure of Sisyphos. On the reverse of the vase (not figured
here) Herakles is represented with Cerberus. On the obverse (fig.
166), four little winged _eidola_ (ghosts) are climbing carefully up a
huge _pithos_, and into it they pour water from their water-jars. The
_pithos_, it should be noted, is sunk deep into the earth; it is in
intent the mouth of a well. Such _pithoi_ are still to be found sunk in
the earth at Athens, and served the Turks for cisterns. The upper part
of the _pithos_ is intact, so are the water-jars, but it is possible and
indeed almost certain that the _pithos_ is thought of as pierced at the
bottom so that the water poured in flows away into the ground:
‘inane lymphae
dolium fundo pereuntis _imo_.’
The vase in fig. 166 is usually figured as an illustration of the
‘Danaid’ myth, but there is not the faintest adducible evidence that the
winged _eidola_ are Danaides.
[Illustration: FIG. 167.]
The design in fig. 167, from a black-figured lekythos in the museum at
Palermo[1526], allows us to go a step further. The water-carriers are
emphatically _not_ Danaides. Of the six figures who rush in grotesque
hurry to fill the _pithos_, three are men, three women. If we give them
a name, it must be not Danaides but ‘Uninitiated.’ They are burlesqued,
in the spirit of Aristophanes; the uninitiated soul pauses to refresh
his mind by pulling the donkey’s tail. The donkey, it may be noted, is
further evidence that the vase-painter has the mysteries in his mind.
He has fallen on his knees, and his burden has dropped from his back.
The seated old man gazes at it helplessly. There seems a reminiscence
of the ‘ass who carried the mysteries,’ and in this topsy-turvy Hades,
as in Aristophanes, he turns and will carry them no more. The ass and
the old man, sometimes called Oknos, are stock figures in the comic
Hades, and they are variously moralized. The closest literary analogy to
our picture is offered centuries later by Apuleius[1527]. Psyche, when
about to descend into the lower world, is warned that when she has gone
some distance on the ‘deadly way’ she will come upon a lame ass and a
lame ass-driver. The driver will ask her to pick up for him some of the
bundles that have fallen from the ass’s pack. She is to remain silent and
pass on.
It is of course matter for regret that neither of the black-figured vases
that we possess is inscribed. It would have been most instructive to
learn what that echo of popular tradition, the vase-painter, actually
_called_ the water-carriers. Happily we have, not indeed a work of art
itself, but the literary record of such a work in which an inscription
_did_ occur—the painting by Polygnotus of the descent of Odysseus into
Hades, frescoed on the wall of the Lesche of Delphi, and minutely
described by Pausanias.
‘Above the figure of Penthesilea,’ Pausanias[1528] says, ‘are women
carrying water in broken earthen sherds.’ The vessels are here described
as broken, not pierced, and Pausanias says nothing about whether the
vessel into which they pour is pierced or not. ‘One of the women is
represented as in the flower of her youth, the other of advanced years.’
There were certainly no _old_ Danaides. There is no separate inscription
over each woman, but there is an inscription common to both which says
they are ‘of those who have not been initiated.’ Pausanias then goes on
to describe some other mythological figures unconnected with these women,
among them Sisyphos, who is ‘struggling to push a rock up a precipice.’
He then adds, ‘There is also in the picture a _pithos_ and an elderly
man, a boy and two women, one just below the rock, who is young, and
near to the old man a woman of similar age. The others are going on
carrying water, but the old woman seems to have broken her hydria, but
what is left in the potsherd she is pouring into the _pithos_.’ As in
the black-figured vase-paintings it is a hydrophoria into a _pithos_,
but the hydriae are in some cases at least broken. How many figures in
all Pausanias saw is not clear, owing to his disjointed account, nor
does it matter, the essential thing is that they are of both sexes and
any age—they are nowise Danaides. Nor did Pausanias, charged though he
was with later mythological associations, suppose them to be so—that the
inscription forbade. He concludes his account thus: ‘We inferred that
these also (i.e. the last group mentioned by him) were persons who held
the rites at Eleusis to be of no account. For the Greeks of early days
held initiation at Eleusis to be of as much more account than any other
matter as the gods are compared to the heroes.’
Polygnotus and Plato certainly, the black-figured vase-painter probably,
regarded the water-carriers of Hades not as mythical Danaides, but
as real human persons uninitiated. By the date of the _Axiochus_ the
fruitless water-carriers are Danaides. The question still remains to
be answered, Why are the Danaides selected as typically Uninitiate? It
was, it must be noted, perfectly natural that popular theology, when it
made of the Uninitiate water-carriers in Hades, should seek a mythical
prototype, but why were the Danaides selected? The reason is primarily
simple and obvious, though later it became curiously complex.
The Danaides of mythology were _well-nymphs_. One of the sisterhood was
called Amymone: she gave her name to the spring near Lerna, still called
in Strabo’s time Amymone. Strabo[1529] preserves for us a line from an
epic poet,
‘Argos, waterless once, the Danai made well-watered.’
Long before the tragedy about their husbands, the Danaides were at work
watering, fertilizing thirsty Argos. The Danaides, _as merely Danaides_,
might fitly be represented as filling a great well-_pithos_.
But, it must next be observed, the Danaides belong to the old stratum of
the population, the same stratum as Tantalos, as Sisyphos, as Tityos:
they are of the old matriarchal order, their prayer persistently iterated
is:
‘We, the great seed of a Holy Mother, ah me!
Grant us that we
Unwed, unsubdued, from marriage of men may flee[1530].’
In the _Suppliants_ of Aeschylus it is from a marriage they deem lawless
that the Danaides flee, and their act is justified. Behind the legend we
seem to discern, though dimly, the reflection of some shift of old to
new, some transition from matriarchal freedom to patriarchal marriage
enactments. In any case, in the late orthodox form of the myth, we meet
the Danaides as criminals, and their crime is clearly not only that of
murder, but of rejection of marriage. What was justified by the old order
was criminal in the new. Here was an opportunity for the moralist. Of old
the Danaides carried water because they were well-nymphs; the new order
has made them criminals, and it makes of their fruitful water-carrying a
fruitless punishment—an atonement for murder[1531].
It will readily be seen that the well-nymphs, regarded by the new order
as guilty maidens seeking purification, offered just the mythological
prototype needed for the uninitiated water-carriers. Once the analogy was
seized, many further traits of resemblance would eagerly be added. At
the lake of Lerna, near which was the spring known as Amymone, expiatory
purifications were, Strabo[1532] tells us, actually performed. Hence,
he says, arose the expression ‘a Lerna of ills.’ It was the custom no
doubt at Lerna as in many another swamp and lake to bury ‘purifications’
(καθάρματα). Such rites of the old order were the ‘mysteries’ of
primitive religion. Herodotus[1533] expressly tells us that it was the
Danaides who taught to the Pelasgian women the sacred rites of Demeter,
which the Greeks called Thesmophoria, and of which Herodotus dares not
disclose the full details. The Danaides, who later became types of the
Uninitiated, were, it would seem, the prime Initiators. So does theology
shift.
* * * * *
Another ritual fact helped out the fusion and confusion. To the Roman
Church marriage is a sacrament, to the Anglican still ‘an excellent
mystery.’ In like fashion to the Greeks marriage was conceived of as a
rite of initiation, and through initiation of consummation; the word
τέλη in its plural form was used of all mysteries, the singular form
was expressly applied to marriage. Pollux[1534], in discussing wedding
ceremonies, says, ‘and marriage is called τέλος, i.e. a rite that
completes, and those who have been married are called complete, and on
this account the Hera of marriage is called Teleia, the Complete One.’
It has already been seen (p. 533) that one special rite of purification,
the _Liknophoria_, was common to marriage and the mysteries. The same is
true of the _Loutrophoria_, carrying of the bath. Is it surprising that
in the figures of the well-nymphs some ingenious person saw the Danaides
as ἀτελεῖς γάμου, ‘uninitiated in marriage,’ and therefore condemned
to carry for ever in vain the water for their bridal bath in Hades?
The more so as, if we may trust Eustathius[1535], it was the custom
to place ‘on the grave of those who died unmarried a water jar called
_Loutrophoros_[1536] in token that the dead had died unbathed and without
offspring.’ Probably these vases, as Dr Frazer[1537] suggests, were at
first placed on the graves of the unmarried with the kindly intent of
helping the desolate unmarried ghost to accomplish his wedding in the
world below. But once the custom fixed, it might easily be interpreted as
the symbol of an underworld punishment.
Some versions of the story say that the water was carried in a sieve
(κοσκίνῳ). This notion may have arisen from another ritual practice. It
is noticeable that the sieves of the stone age seem to have been simply
pierced jars. Sieve and _pithos_ were one and the same. Carrying water in
a sieve was an ancient test of virginity. Pliny[1538] tells us that the
test of the sieve was applied to the Vestal Tuccia. If the water-carrying
of the Danaides was conceived as a virginity test, the forty-nine sisters
married before the murder would fail at the test, and Hypermnestra alone
would carry the water in the leaky sieve:
‘Splendide mendax et in omne _virgo_
Nobilis aevum[1539].’
Finally, it will be remembered (p. 575) that the Orphics had their Well
of Memory, which was in effect a Well of Life. It would not escape a
mystic who saw the figures of the water-carriers that these were drawing
water for ever but in vain from the Well of Life. So the scholiast[1540]
to Aristides in quaint fashion interprets the myth: ‘the pierced _pithos_
of the Danaides,’ he says, ‘signifies that the Danaides after the murder
of their dearest can never obtain from another man the grace of the
living water of marriage.’ The notion of a ‘Water of Life’ haunts him,
but he knows the real gist of the symbolism, for he adds: they have
‘become suspected on account of their pollution.’ Of the making of such
mysticism there is clearly no end.
* * * * *
The symbolism of marriage, of virginity tests, of living water might,
doubtless did, gather about the figures of the Danaides, but the primary
notion that fitted them to be mythical prototypes of the ‘Uninitiated’
was that they were polluted, uncleansed. They are Choephoroi, but in
vain; the libations that they pour into the grave-_pithoi_ of their
husbands are a χάρις ἄχαρις, an attempted offscouring, ἀπόνιμμα, but no
real purification. Of such a vain Choephoria performed by Clytaemnestra
Electra[1541] says:
‘It is not right or meet
By law of gods or men that from a hateful wife
Grave-dues and washings should be brought my father.
Give them the winds, or in the deep dug earth
Go hide them.’
The water-carriers in Hades have been discussed at some length[1542],
because they afford an instance typical of the methods of Orphic
procedure. In discussing the mysteries it has been repeatedly seen
that Orphism did not invent new rites, but mysticized and moralized
old ones. In like fashion when Orphism developes eschatology, it takes
for its material the mythology of the older stratum[1543], invents
no new figures but gives to the old ones an intensified and moralized
significance.
The Orphic tablets showed us the heights to which Orphism could rise. If
we are inclined to estimate over highly the general level of the Orphic
faith, the Lower Italy vases may correct the error. They mirror Orphism
as it seemed to the many. In the matter of doctrine, instead of or at
best in addition to purification, we have vindictive punishment; in the
matter of theology, in place of what was practically monotheism on the
tablets, the vases restore the old popular polytheism.
* * * * *
It is natural to ask, Is this the end? Did Orphism create no new figure,
make no new god in its own purified image? The answer to this question
will be found in our concluding enquiry as to the nature of Orphic
Cosmogony.
CHAPTER XII.
ORPHIC COSMOGONY.
‘Ὡραῖος καὶ Ἔρως ἐπιτέλλεται....’
If, in attempting to understand Orphic Theogony, we turn to the
collection of hymns known as ‘Orphic,’ hymns dating for the most part
about the 4th century A.D., we find ourselves at once in an atmosphere
of mystical monotheism. We have addresses to the various Olympians,
to Zeus and Apollo and Hera and Athene and the rest, but these are no
longer the old, clear-cut, departmental deities, with attributes sharply
distinguished and incommunicable; the outlines are all blurred; we feel
that everyone is changing into everyone else. A few traditional epithets
indeed remain; Poseidon is still ‘dark-haired,’ and ‘Lord of Horses’—he
is a stubborn old god and hard to fuse; but, for the most part, sooner or
later, all divinities greater or less, mingle in the mystery melting-pot,
all become ‘multiform,’ ‘mighty,’ ‘all-nourishing,’ ‘first-born,’
‘saviours,’ ‘all-glorious,’ and the like. In a word the several gods by
this time are all really one, and this one god is mystically conceived as
a potency (δαίμων) rather than a personal divinity (θεός).
The doctrine of the mutation of the gods, now into one shape, now into
another, was, it would seem, part of the regular symbolic teaching of
the mysteries. It is easy to see that such a doctrine would lend itself
readily to the notion of their interchangeability. Proclus says[1544]:
‘In all the rites of initiation and mysteries the gods exhibit their
shapes as many, and they appear changing often from one form to another,
and now they are made manifest in the emission of formless light, now
taking human shape, now again in other and different form.’
By the date of the ‘Hymns’ monotheism was of course in some degree the
common property of all educated minds, and cannot therefore be claimed
as distinctive of Orphism. Wholly Orphic, however, is the mystical
joy with which the Hymns brim over; they are ‘full of repetitions and
magniloquence, and make for emotion[1545].’ They are like learned,
self-conscious, even pretentious echoes of the simple ecstasy of the
tablets.
It would therefore be idle to examine the Orphic Hymns severally and in
detail, in order to extract from them the Orphic characteristics of each
particular god. Any one who reads them through will speedily be conscious
that, save for the proœmium, and an occasional stereotyped epithet, it
would usually be impossible to determine which hymn was addressed to what
god. With whatever attempt at individualization they begin, the poet is
soon safe away into a mystical monotheism. A more profitable enquiry is,
how far did primitive Orphism attempt monotheism, and of what nature was
the one God whom the Orphic made in his own image? Here, fortunately, we
are not left wholly without evidence.
THE WORLD-EGG.
In the _Birds_ of Aristophanes[1546], the chorus tells of a time, when
Earth and Air and Heaven as yet were not, only Chaos was, and Night and
black Erebos:
‘In the beginning of Things, black-winged Night
Into the bosom of Erebos dark and deep
Laid a wind-born egg, and, as the seasons rolled,
Forth sprang Love, gleaming with wings of gold,
Like to the whirlings of wind, Love the Delight—
And Love with Chaos in Tartaros laid him to sleep;
And we, his children, nestled, fluttering there,
Till he led us forth to the light of the upper air.’
This is pure Orphism. Homer knows of no world-egg[1547], no birth of
Love. Homer is so dazzled by the splendour of his human heroes and their
radiant reflections in Olympus that his eyes never look back to see
from whence they sprang. He cares as little, it seems, for the Before
as for the Hereafter. The two indeed seem strangely linked together. An
eschatology and a cosmogony are both pathetic attempts to answer the
question Homer never cared to raise, Whence came Man and the Good and
Evil of humanity?
We have of course a cosmogony in Hesiod, Hesiod who is a peasant and a
rebel, a man bitter and weary with the hardness of life, compelled by
rude circumstances to ask why things are so evil, and always ready, as in
the myth of Pandora, to frame or borrow a crude superstitious hypothesis.
How much Hesiod borrowed from Orphism is hard to say. He knows of Night
and Chaos and the birth of Eros, but he does _not_ know, or does not care
to tell, of one characteristic Orphic element, the cosmic egg. He only
says[1548]:
‘First Chaos came to be and Gaia next
Broad-bosomed, she that was the steadfast base
Of all things—Ge, and murky Tartaros
Deep in the hollow of wide earth. And next
Eros, most beautiful of deathless gods,
Looser of limbs, Tamer of heart and will
To mortals and immortals.’
Hesiod is not wholly Orphic, he is concerned to hurry his Eros up into
Olympus, one and most beautiful among many, but not for Hesiod the real
source of life, the only God.
By common traditional consent the cosmic egg was attributed to Orpheus.
Whether the father was Tartaros or Erebos or Chronos is of small moment
and varies from author to author. The cardinal, essential doctrine is the
world-egg from which sprang the first articulate god, source and creator
of all, Eros.
Damascius[1549], in his ‘Inquiry concerning first principles,’ attributes
the egg to Orpheus. For Orpheus said:
‘What time great Chronos fashioned in holy aether
A silver-gleaming egg.’
It is fortunate that Damascius has preserved the actual line, though
of course we cannot date it. Clement of Rome[1550] in his Homilies
contrasts the cosmogonies of Hesiod and Orpheus. ‘Orpheus likened Chaos
to an egg, in which was then a blending of the primaeval elements; Hesiod
assumes this chaos as a substratum, the which Orpheus calls an egg, a
birth emitted from formless matter, and the birth was on this wise....’
Plato, usually so Orphic, avoids in the _Timaeus_ all mention of the
primaeval egg; his mind is preoccupied with triangles, but Proclus in his
commentary[1551] says ‘the “being” (τὸ ὄν) of Plato would be the same as
the Orphic egg.’
The doctrine of the egg was not a mere dogmatic dead-letter. It was
taught to the initiated as part of their mysteries, and this leads
us to suspect that it had its rise in a primitive taboo on eggs.
Plutarch[1552], in consequence of a dream, abstained for a long time from
eggs. One night, he tells us, when he was dining out, some of the guests
noticed this, and got it into their heads that he was ‘infected by Orphic
and Pythagorean notions, and was refusing eggs just as certain people
refuse to eat the heart and brains, because he held an egg to be taboo
(ἀφοσιοῦσθαι) as being the principle of life.’ Alexander the Epicurean,
by way of chaff, quoted,
‘To feed on beans is eating parents’ heads.’
‘As if,’ Plutarch says, ‘the Pythagoreans meant eggs by _be_ans because
of _be_ing (ὡς δὴ κυάμους τὰ ᾠὰ διὰ τὴν κύησιν αἰνιττομένων τῶν ἀνδρῶν),
and thought it just as bad to eat eggs as to eat the animals that laid
them.’ It was no use, he goes on, in talking to an Epicurean, to plead a
dream as an excuse for abstinence, for to him the explanation would seem
more foolish than the fact; so, as Alexander was quite pleasant about it
and a cultivated man, Plutarch let him go on to propound the interesting
question, which came first, the bird or the egg? Alexander in the course
of the argument came back to Orpheus and, after quoting Plato about
matter being the mother and nurse, said with a smile,
‘I sing to those who know
the Orphic and sacred dogma (λόγος) which not only affirms that the egg
is older than the bird, but gives it priority of being over all things.’
Finally, the speaker adds to his theorizing an instructive ritual fact:
‘and therefore it is not inappropriate that in the orgiastic ceremonies
in honour of Dionysos an egg is among the sacred offerings, as being the
symbol of what gives birth to all things, and in itself contains all
things.’
Macrobius[1553] in the _Saturnalia_ states the same fact, and gives a
similar reason. ‘Ask those who have been initiated,’ he says, ‘in the
rites of Father Liber, in which an egg is the object of reverence,
on the supposition that it is in its spherical form the image of the
universe’; and Achilles Tatius[1554] says, ‘some assert that the universe
is cone-shaped, others egg-shaped, and this opinion is held by those who
perform the mysteries of Orpheus.’
But for the bird-cosmogony of Aristophanes we might have inclined to
think that the egg was a late importation into Orphic mysteries, but, the
more closely Orphic doctrines are examined, the more clearly is it seen
that they are for the most part based on very primitive ritual. A ritual
egg was good material; those who mysticized the kid and the milk would
not be likely to leave an egg without esoteric significance.
How, precisely, the egg was used in Orphic ritual we do not know.
In ordinary ceremonial it served two purposes: it was used for
_purification_, it was an _offering to the dead_. It has been previously
shown in detail (p. 53) that in primitive rites purgation often _is_
propitiation of ghosts and sprites, and the two functions, propitiation
and purgation, are summed up in the common term _devotions_ (ἐναγίσματα).
_Lucian_[1555] in two passages mentions eggs, together with Hecate’s
suppers, as the refuse of ‘purification.’ Pollux is bidden by Diogenes
to tell the Cynic Menippus, when he comes down to Hades, to ‘fill his
wallet with beans, and if he can he is to pick up also a Hecate’s supper
or an egg from a purification or something of the sort’; and in another
dialogue, the ‘Landing,’ Clotho, who is waiting for her victims, asks
‘Where is Kyniskos the philosopher who ought to be dead from eating
Hecate’s suppers and eggs from purification and raw cuttle fish too?’
Again in Ovid’s _Art of Love_[1556] the old hag who makes purifications
for the sick woman is to bring sulphur and eggs:
‘Then too the aged hag must come,
And purify both bed and home,
And bid her, for lustration, proffer
With palsied hands both eggs and sulphur.’
That eggs were offered not only for a purification of the living, but
as the due of the dead, is certain from the fact that they appear on
Athenian white lekythoi among the objects brought in baskets to the
tomb[1557].
We think of eggs rather as for nourishment than as for purification,
though the yolk of an egg is still used for the washing of hair.
Doubtless, in ancient days, the cleansing action of eggs was more magical
than actual. As propitiatory offerings to the dead (ἐναγίσματα) they
became ‘purifications’ in general; then connection with the dead explains
of course the taboo on them as food.
Still, primitive man though pious is also thrifty. A Cynic may show his
atheism, and also eke out a scanty subsistence by eating ‘eggs from
purification’; and even the most superstitious man may have hoped that,
if he did not break the egg, he might cleanse himself and yet secure a
chicken. Clement[1558] says, ‘you may see the eggs that have been used
for purifications hatched, if they are subjected to warmth’: he adds
instructively, ‘this could not have taken place if the eggs had taken
into themselves the sins of the man who had been purified.’ Clement’s own
state of mind is at least as primitive as that of the ‘heathen’ against
whom he protests. The Orphics themselves, it is clear, merely mysticized
an ancient ritual. Orphism is here as elsewhere only the pouring of new
wine into very old bottles.
* * * * *
We may say then with certainty that the cosmic egg was Orphic, and was
probably[1559] a dogma based on a primitive rite. The origin of the
winged Eros who sprang from it is more complex. Elements many and diverse
seem to have gone to his making.
EROS AS HERM.
Homer knows nothing of Eros as a person; with him love is of Aphrodite.
From actual local cultus Eros is strangely and significantly absent.
Two instances only are recorded. Pausanias[1560] says, ‘The Thespians
honoured Eros most of all the gods from the beginning, and they have
a very ancient image of him, an unwrought stone.’ ‘Every four years,’
Plutarch[1561] says, ‘the Thespians celebrated a splendid festival to
Eros conjointly with the Muses.’ Plutarch went to this festival very
soon after he was married, before his sons were born. He seems to have
gone because of a difference that had arisen between his own and his
wife’s people, and we are expressly told by his sons that he took his
newly-married wife with him ‘for both the prayer and the sacrifice were
her affair.’ Probably they went to pray for children. Plutarch, if we
may trust his own letter to his wife, was a kind husband, but the intent
of the conjoint journey was strictly practical, and points to the main
function of the Thespian Eros. The ‘unwrought stone’ is very remote from
the winged Eros, very near akin to the rude Pelasgian Hermes himself,
own brother to the Priapos[1562] of the Hellespont and Asia Minor. There
seems then to have gone to the making of Eros some old wide-spread
divinity of generation.
Pausanias did not know who instituted the worship of Eros among the
Thespians, but he remarks that the people of Parium on the Hellespont,
who were colonists from Erythrae in Ionia, worshipped him equally. He
knew also of an older and a younger Eros. ‘Most people,’ he says, ‘hold
that he is the youngest of the gods and the son of Aphrodite; but Olen
the Lycian (again Asia Minor), maker of the most ancient hymns among the
Greeks, says in a hymn to Eileithyia that she is the mother of Eros.’
‘After Olen,’ he goes on, ‘Pamphos and Orpheus composed epic verses, and
they both made hymns to Eros to be sung by the Lycomids at their rites.’
EROS AS KER OF LIFE.
[Illustration: FIG. 168.]
The Orphic theologist found then to his hand in local cultus an ancient
god of life and generation, and in antique ritual another element quite
unconnected, the egg of purification. Given an egg as the beginning of
a cosmogony, and it was almost inevitable that there should emerge from
the egg a bird-god, a winged thing, a source of life, more articulate
than the egg yet near akin to it in potency. The art-form for this winged
thing was also ready to hand. Eros is but a specialized form of the Ker;
the Erotes are Keres of life, and like the Keres take the form of winged
_Eidola_. In essence as in art-form, Keres and Erotes are near akin. The
Keres, it has already been seen, are little winged bacilli, fructifying
or death-bringing; but the Keres developed mainly on the dark side; they
went downwards, deathwards; the Erotes, instinct with a new spirit, went
upwards, lifewards.
The close analogy, nay, the identity of the art-form of Keres and Erotes
is well seen in the two vase-paintings in figs. 168 and 169. The design
in fig. 168 is from a vase-fragment in the Museum at Palermo[1563]. A
warrior lies fallen in death. From his open mouth the breath of life
escapes. Over him hovers a winged Ker, and with his right hand seems
as though he would tenderly collect the parting soul. A ghost has come
to fetch a ghost. Among the Romans this gentle office of collecting
the parting breath was done with the lips, by the nearest of kin. So
Anna[1564] for Dido:
‘Give water, I will bathe her wounds, and catch
Upon my lips her last stray breath.’
[Illustration: FIG. 169.]
The design in fig. 169 is from a red-figured cylix[1565] in the
Municipal Museum at Corneto. Theseus, summoned by Hermes, is in the act
of deserting Ariadne; he picks up his sandal from the ground and in a
moment he will be gone. Ariadne is sunk in sleep beneath the great vine
of Dionysos. Over her hovers a winged genius to comfort and to crown
her. He is own brother to the delicate Ker in fig. 168. Archaeologists
wrangle over his name. Is he Life or Love or Sleep or Death? Who knows?
It is this shifting uncertainty we must seize and hold; no doubt could be
more beautiful and instructive. All that we can certainly say is that the
vase-painter gave to the ministrant the form of a winged Ker, and that
such was the form taken by Eros, as also by Death and by Sleep.
* * * * *
If we would understand at all the spirit in which the Orphic Eros is
conceived we must cleanse our minds of many current conceptions, and
in effecting this riddance vase-paintings are of no small service. To
black-figured vase-paintings Eros is unknown. Keres of course appear, but
Eros has not yet developed personality in popular art. As soon as Eros
takes mythological shape in art, he leaves the Herm-form under which he
was worshipped at Thespiae, leaves it to Hermes himself and to Dionysos
and Priapos, and, because he is the egg-born cosmic god, takes shape as
_the_ winged Ker. Early red-figured vase-paintings are innocent alike of
the fat boy of the Romans and the idle impish urchin of Hellenism. Nor
do they know anything of the Eros of modern romantic passion between man
and woman. If we would follow the safe guiding of early art, we must be
content to think of Eros as a Ker, a life-impulse, a thing fateful to
all that lives, a man because of his moralized complexity, terrible and
sometimes intolerable, but to plants and flowers and young live things in
spring infinitely glad and kind. Such is the Eros of Theognis[1566]:
‘Love comes at his hour, comes with the flowers in spring,
Leaving the land of his birth,
Kypros, beautiful isle. Love comes, scattering
Seed for man upon earth.’
[Illustration: FIG. 170.]
Such little spirits of life the vase-painter Hieron makes to cluster
round their mother and mistress, Aphrodite. The design in fig. 170
is from a cylix in the Berlin Museum[1567] and is part of a scene
representing the Judgment of Paris. Aphrodite, she the victorious
Gift-Giver, greatest of the Charites, stands holding her dove. About her
cluster the little solemn worshipping Erotes, like the winged Keres that
minister to Kyrene (fig. 23): they carry wreaths and flower-sprays in
their hands, not only as gifts to the Gift-Giver, but because they too
are spirits of Life and Grace.
[Illustration: FIG. 171.]
Just such another Eros is seen in fig. 171, from the centre of a
beautiful archaic red-figured cylix[1568] in the Museo Civico at
Florence. The cylix is signed by the master Chachrylion: he signs
it twice over, proudly, as well he may, ‘Chachrylion made it, made
it, Chachrylion made it.’ His Eros too carries a great branching
flower-spray, and as the spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters.
So Sophocles[1569]:
O Thou of War unconquered, thou, Erôs,
Spoiler of garnered gold, who liest hid
In a girl’s cheek, under the dreaming lid,
While the long night time flows:
O rover of the seas, O terrible one
In wastes and wildwood caves,
None may escape thee, none:
Not of the heavenly Gods who live alway,
Not of low men, who vanish ere the day;
And he who finds thee, raves.
[Illustration: FIG. 172.]
The Erotes retain always the multiplicity of the Keres, but as Eros
developes complete personality he becomes one person, and he changes
from a delicate sprite to a beautiful youth. But down to late days
there linger about him traces of the Life-Spirit, the Grace-Giver. The
design in fig. 172 is from a late red-figured vase in the Museum at
Athens[1570]. Here we find Eros employed watering tall slender flowers
in a garden. Of course by this time the Love-God is put to do anything
and everything: degraded to a god of all work, he has to swing a
maiden, to trundle a hoop, to attend a lady’s toilet; but here in the
flower-watering there seems a haunting of the old spirit. We are reminded
of Plato[1571] in the _Symposium_ where he says ‘The bloom of his body
is shown by his dwelling among flowers, for Eros has his abiding, not in
the body or soul that is flowerless and fades, but in the place of fair
flowers and fair scents, there sits he and abides.’
EROS AS EPHEBOS.
[Illustration: FIG. 173.]
Vase-paintings with representations of Eros come to us for the most
part from Athens, and it was at Athens that the art-type of Eros as the
slender ephebos was perfected. This type appears with marked frequency
on the vases of early red-figured technique which bear the inscription
καλός ‘beautiful,’ vases probably made to sell as love-gifts. Eros is
represented bearing a torch, a lyre, a hare, sometimes still a flower.
Perhaps the finest of these representations left us is the Eros in fig.
173. The design is from an amphora[1572] which bears the inscription
‘Charmides is beautiful.’ Eros is armed, he carries shield and spear, he
flies straight downward, the slender naked body making a clean lovely
line. A poet thinks as he will, but these Love-gods of the vase-painter,
these Keres of Life and Death, and most of all this Eros, armed,
inevitable, recall the prayer of the chorus in the _Hippolytus_ of
Euripides[1573]:
‘Erôs, Erôs, who blindest, tear by tear,
Men’s eyes with hunger, thou swift Foe that pliest
Deep in our hearts joy like an edged spear;
Come not to me with Evil haunting near,
Wrath on the wind, nor jarring of the clear
Wing’s music as thou fliest.
There is no shaft that burneth, not in fire,
Not in wild stars, far off and flinging fear
As in thine hands the shaft of All Desire,
Erôs, Child of the Highest.’
Most often the presentments of painting hinder rather than help the
imagery of poetry, but here both arts are haunted by the same august
tradition of Life and Death.
[Illustration: FIG. 174.]
The Eros of the vase-painter is the love not untouched by passion of man
for man, and these sedate and even austere Erotes help us to understand
that to the Greek mind such loves were serious and beautiful, of the
soul, as Plato says, rather than of the body, aloof from common things
and from the emotional squalour of mere domestic felicity. They seem to
embody that white beat of the spirit before which and by which the flesh
shrivels into silence.
It is curious to note that, as the two women Charites, Mother and
Daughter, became three, so there is a distinct effort to form a trinity
of Erotes. On the vase-painting in fig. 174 from a red-figured _stamnos_
in the British Museum[1574] we have three beautiful Erotes flying over
the sea. The foremost is inscribed Himeros; he carries a long taenia, and
he looks back at the others; one of these carries a tendril, the other
a hare. Near each of them is written καλός. But the triple forms, Eros,
Himeros and Pothos, never really obtain. The origin of the countless
women trinities has been already examined. Male gods lack the natural
tie that bound the women types together; the male trinity is in Greek
religion felt to be artificial and lapses.
EROS AND THE MOTHER.
The mention of these women trinities brings us back to the greatest of
the three Grace-Givers, Aphrodite. At the close of the chapter on _The
Making of a Goddess_ her figure reigned supreme, but for a time at Athens
she suffered eclipse; we might almost say with Alcman[1575]:
‘There is no Aphrodite. Hungry Love
Plays boy-like with light feet upon the flowers.’
We cannot fairly charge the eclipse of Aphrodite wholly to the count of
Orphism. Legend made Orpheus a woman-hater and credited him with Hesiodic
tags about her ‘dog-like’ nature; but such tradition is manifestly
coloured and distorted by two influences, by the orthodox Hesiodic
patriarchalism, and by the peculiar social conditions of Athens and
other Greek states. Both these causes, by degrading women, compelled the
impersonation of love to take form as a youth.
To these we must add the fact that as Orphism was based on the religion
of Dionysos, and as that religion had for its god Dionysos, son of
Semele, so Orphism tended naturally to the formulation of a divinity
who was the Son of his Mother. By the time the religion of Dionysos
reached Athens the Son had well nigh effaced the Mother, and in like
fashion Eros was supreme over Aphrodite; and significantly enough the
woman-goddess, in so far as she was worshipped by the Orphics, was rather
the old figure of Ge, the Earth-goddess, than the more specialized
departmental Love-goddess Aphrodite.
* * * * *
This blend of the old Earth-goddess and the new Love-god is shown in very
instructive fashion by representations on late red-figured vases. The
design in fig. 175 is from a late red-figured hydria[1576]. It will at
once be seen that we have the representation of a scene exactly similar
to that in figs. 68 and 70, the Anodos of an Earth-goddess. The great
head rises from the ground, the Satyr worshippers of the Earth-goddess
are there with their picks. But a new element is introduced. Two Erotes
hover over the goddess to greet her coming. In like fashion in fig. 72
Eros receives Pandora, and in fig. 88 receives Aphrodite at her Birth or
Bath. It is usual to name the goddess in fig. 175 Aphrodite. This is, I
think, to miss the point. She is an Earth Kore like Persephone herself.
She is the new life rising from the ground, and she is welcomed by the
spirits of life, the Keres-Erotes. Beyond that we cannot go. Nothing
could better embody the shift from old to new, and the blend of both,
than the presence together of the Satyrs, the primitive Ge-worshippers,
and the Erotes, the new spirits of love and life.
[Illustration: FIG. 175.]
If we bear in mind the simple fact that Aphrodite and Persephone are
each equally and alike Kore, the Maiden form of the Earth-goddess, it
is not hard to realise how easily the one figure passes into the other.
The Orphic, we have seen (p. 594), put his faith in the Kore who is
Persephone; to her he prays:
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below’;
his confession is
‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld,’
and again
‘But now I come a suppliant to holy Phersephoneia
That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed’;
but from the fragment of an epic poet preserved for us by the anonymous
author of the _Philosophoumena_[1577], we learn that, according to some,
in the underworld grove another Kore, or rather Kore by another name, was
believed to rule. ‘The Lesser Mysteries,’ he says, ‘are of Persephone
below, in regard to which Mysteries and the path that leads there, which
is wide and large and leads the dying to Persephone, the poet also says:
“And yet ’neath it there is a rugged track,
Hollow, bemired; yet best whereby to reach
All-hallowed Aphrodite’s lovely grove.”’
The figures of the two Maidens, Persephone and Aphrodite, acted and
reacted on each other; Persephone takes on more of Love, Aphrodite
more of Death; as Eros the Son waxes, Aphrodite the Mother wanes into
Persephone the underworld Maid.
The blend of the two notions, the primitive Earth-goddess and the Orphic
Eros, is for art very clearly seen on the vase in fig. 175. Happily we
have definite evidence that in local _cultus_ there was the like fusion,
and that at a place of associations specially sacred, the deme of Phlya
in Attica, the birthplace of Euripides[1578].
THE MYSTERIES OF EROS AND THE MOTHER AT PHLYA.
Phlya, as the birthplace of Euripides, has special claims on our
attention. Here, it will be shown, were mysteries reputed to be more
ancient than those of Eleusis, mysteries not only of the Mother and the
Maid but of Eros the cosmic spirit of the Orphics. Euripides, obviously
hostile as he is to orthodox Olympian theology, handles always with
reverence the two gods or spirits of Orphism, Dionysos and Eros; it seems
not improbable that, perhaps unconsciously, the mysteries of his early
home may have influenced his religious attitude.
From Pausanias[1579] we learn that Phlya had a cult of the Earth-goddess.
She was worshipped together with a number of other kindred divinities.
‘Among the inhabitants of Phlya there are altars of Artemis the
Light-Bearer, and of Dionysos Anthios, and of the Ismenian Nymphs, and of
Ge, whom they call the Great Goddess. And another temple has altars of
Demeter Anesidora, and of Zeus Ktesios, and of Athene Tithrone, and of
Kore Protogene, and of the goddesses called Venerable.’
The district of Phlya[1580] is still well watered and fertile, still
a fitting home for Dionysos ‘of the Flowers,’ and for Demeter ‘Sender
up of Gifts’; probably it took its name from this characteristic
fertility[1581]. Plutarch[1582] discussed with some grammarians at
dessert the reason why apples were called by Empedocles ὑπέρφλοα, ‘very
fruitful.’ Plutarch made a bad and unmetrical guess; he thought the word
was connected with φλοιός, husk or rind, and that the apple was called
ὑπέρφλοιον ‘because all that was eatable in it lay outside the inner
rind-like core.’ The grammarians knew better; they pointed out that
Aratus[1583] used the word φλόον to mean verdure and blossoming, the
‘greenness and bloom of fruits,’ and they added the instructive statement
that ‘certain of the Greeks sacrificed to Dionysos Phloios, “He of
blossom and growth.”’ Dionysos Phloios and Dionysos Anthios are one and
the same potency.
Among this family group of ancient earth divinities Artemis and Zeus
read like the names of late Olympian intruders. Artemis as Light-Bearer
may have taken over an ancient mystery cult of Hecate, who also bore the
title of Phosphoros; Zeus Ktesios, we are certain, is not the Olympian.
Like Zeus Meilichios he has taken over the cult of an old divinity of
‘acquisition’ and fertility. ‘Zeus’ Ktesios was the god of the storeroom.
Harpocration[1584] says, ‘they set up Zeus Ktesios in storerooms.’
The god himself lived in a jar. In discussing the various shapes of
vessels Athenaeus[1585] says of the _kadiskos_, ‘it is the vessel in
which they consecrate the Ktesian Zeuses, as Antikleides says in his
“Interpretations,” as follows—the symbols of Zeus Ktesios are consecrated
as follows: “the lid must be put on a new _kadiskos_ with two handles,
and the handles crowned with white wool ... and you must put into it
whatever you chance to find and pour in ambrosia. Ambrosia is pure water,
olive oil and all fruits (παγκάρπια). Pour in these.”’ Whatever are
the obscurities of the account of Antikleides, thus much is clear—Zeus
Ktesios is not the Olympian of the thunderbolt, he is Zeus in nothing
but his name[1586]. _Ktesios_ is clearly an old divinity of fertility,
of the same order as Meilichios; his σημεῖα are symbols not statues,
symbols probably like the _sacra_ carried in chests at the Arrephoria;
they are θεσμοί, magical spells kept in a jar for the safe guarding of
the storeroom. Zeus Ktesios is well in place at Phlya. The great _pithoi_
that in Homer stand on the threshold of Olympian Zeus (p. 47) may be the
last reminiscence of this earlier _Dian_ daemon who had his habitation,
genius-like, in a jar.
* * * * *
But this old daemon of fertility who took on the name of Zeus only
concerns us incidentally. In the complex of gods enumerated by Pausanias
as worshipped at Phlya, the Great Goddess is manifestly chief. The name
given to Kore, _Protogene_, suggests Orphism, but we are not told that it
was a mystery cult, and of Eros there is no notice. Happily from other
sources we know further particulars. In discussing the parentage of
Themistocles Plutarch[1587] asserts that Themistocles was related to the
family of the Lycomids. ‘This is clear,’ he says, ‘for Simonides states
that, when the Telesterion at Phlya, which was the common property of
the gens of the Lycomids, was burnt down by the barbarians, Themistocles
himself restored it and decorated it with paintings.’ In this
Telesterion, this ‘Place of Initiation,’ the cult of Eros was practised.
The evidence is slight but sufficient. In discussing the worship of Eros
at Thespiae Pausanias states incidentally, we already noted (p. 471),
that the poets Pamphos and Orpheus both composed ‘poems about Eros to be
chanted by the Lycomids over their rites.’
This mystery cult, we further know, was also addressed to a form of the
Earth goddess. When actually at Phlya, Pausanias, as already noted,
curiously enough says nothing of _mysteries_; he simply notes that the
Great Goddess and other divinities were worshipped there. Probably by his
time the mystery cult of Phlya was completely overshadowed and obscured
by the dominant, orthodox rites at Eleusis. But, _apropos_ of the
mysteries at Andania in Messene[1588], he gives significant details about
Phlya. He tells us three facts which all go to show that the cult at
Phlya was a mystery-cult. First, the mysteries of Andania were, he says,
brought there by a grandson of Phlyos; and this Phlyos, we may conclude,
was the eponymous hero of Phlya. Second, for the Lycomids, who, we have
seen, had a ‘Place of Initiation’ at Phlya and hymns to Eros, Musaeus
wrote a hymn to Demeter, and in this hymn it was stated that Phlyos was a
son of Ge. Third, Methapos, the great ‘deviser of rites of initiation.’
had a statue in the sanctuary of the Lycomids, the metrical inscription
on which Pausanias quotes. In view of this evidence it cannot be doubted
that the cult of Phlya was a mystery-cult, and the divinities worshipped
among others were the Mother and the Maid and Eros.
At Phlya then, it is clear, we have just that blend of divinities that
appears on the vase-painting in fig. 175. We have the worship of the
great Earth-goddess who was Mother and Maid in one, and, conjointly,
we have the worship of the Orphic spirit of love and life, Eros. It is
probable that the worship of the Earth-goddess was primaeval, and that
Eros was added through Orphic influence.
* * * * *
The Eros of the Athenian vase-painting is the beautiful Attic boy, but
there is evidence to show that the Eros of Phlya was conceived of as
near akin in form to a Herm. In discussing the Orphic mysteries (p.
536), we found that at Phlya according to the anonymous author of the
_Philosophoumena_ there was a παστάς or bridal-chamber decorated with
paintings. This bridal chamber was probably the whole or a part of
that Telesterion which was restored and decorated by Themistocles. The
subjects of these paintings Plutarch had fully discussed in a treatise
now unhappily lost. The loss is to be the more deeply regretted because
the account by Plutarch of pictures manifestly Orphic would have been
sympathetic and would greatly have helped our understanding of Orphism.
The author of the _Philosophoumena_[1589] describes briefly one picture
and one picture only, as follows: ‘There is in the gateway the picture
of an old man, white-haired, winged; he is pursuing a blue-coloured
woman who escapes. Above the man is written φάος ῥυέντης, above the
woman περεηφικόλα. According to the doctrine of the Sethians, it seems
that φάος ῥυέντης is light and that φικόλα is dark water.’ The exact
meaning of these mysterious paintings is probably lost for ever; but it
is scarcely rash to conjecture that the male figure is Eros. He pursues a
woman; he is winged; that is like the ordinary Eros of common mythology.
But this is the Eros of the mysteries; not young, but very ancient, and
white-haired, the ἀρχαῖος ἔρως[1590] of Orphic tradition, eldest of
all the Gods. And the name written above him as he pursues his bride
inscribed ‘Darkness’ or ‘Dark Water’ is ‘Phaos Ruentes,’ ‘The rushing or
streaming Light.’ We are reminded of the time when ‘the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters.’ The ancient Eros of Thespiae, who
was in intent a Herm, has become the principle not only of Life but of
Light—Light pursuing and penetrating Darkness. Exactly such a being, such
a strange blend of animal and spiritual, is the egg-born Protogonos of
the Orphic hymn[1591]:
‘Thou tempest spirit in all the ordered world
On wild wings flashing; bearer of bright light
And holy; therefore Phanes named, and Lord
Priapos, and the Dawn that answereth Dawn.’
So chants the mystic, seeking to utter the unutterable, and the
poet[1592], born in the home of mysticism, sings to Mother and Son:
‘Thou comest to bend the pride
Of the hearts of God and man,
Cypris; and by thy side
In earth’s encircling span
He of the changing plumes,
The Wing that the world illumes,
As over the leagues of land flies he,
Over the salt and sounding sea.
For mad is the heart of Love,
And gold the gleam of his wing;
And all to the spell thereof
Bend, when he makes his spring;
All life that is wild and young,
In mountain and wave and stream,
All that of earth is sprung
Or breathes in the red sunbeam.
Yea and Mankind. O’er all a royal throne,
Cyprian, Cyprian, is thine alone.’
PYTHAGOREAN REVIVAL OF THE MOTHER.
The development of the male Eros, the beautiful youth, was due, we may be
sure, to influences rather Athenian than Orphic. In this connection it is
important to note that the Orphic Pythagoreans tended to revive religious
conceptions that were matriarchal rather than patriarchal. The religion
of Dionysos, based on the worship of Mother and Son, gave to women a
freedom and a consequence possible only perhaps among the more spiritual
peoples of the North. Under Pythagoras we have clear indications of a
revival of the like conditions, of course with a difference, a resurgence
as it were of matriarchal conditions, and with it a realization of the
appeal of women to the spirit as well as the flesh.
According to Aristoxenus[1593] Pythagoras got most of his ethical lore
from a woman, Themistoclea, a priestess of Delphi. We are reminded of
Socrates and Diotima, Diotima the wise woman of Mantinea, which has
yielded up to us the great inscription dealing with the mysteries of
Demeter at Andania[1594]. We are reminded too of the close friendship
between Plutarch and the Thyiad, Clea. It was to a woman, his daughter
Damo, that Pythagoras entrusted his writings with orders to divulge
them to no outside person. Diogenes further[1595] records with evident
surprise that men ‘gave their wives into the charge of Pythagoras to
learn somewhat of his doctrine,’ and that these women were called
‘Pythagoreans.’ Kratinos wrote a comedy on these Pythagorean women in
which he ridiculed Pythagoras; so we may be sure his women followers
were not spared. This Pythagorean woman movement probably suggested some
elements in the ideal state of Plato, and may have prompted the women
comedies of Aristophanes. Of a woman called Arignote we learn[1596] that
‘she was a disciple of the famous Pythagoras and of Theano, a Samian
and a Pythagorean philosopher, and she edited the Bacchic books that
follow: one is about the mysteries of Demeter, and the title of it is the
_Sacred Discourse_, and she was the author of the _Rites of Dionysos_ and
other philosophical works.’ That this matriarchalism of Pythagoras was
a revival rather than an innovation seems clear. Iamblichus[1597] says,
‘whatever bore the name of Pythagoras bore also the stamp of antiquity
and was crusted with the patina of archaism.’
It is not a little remarkable that, in his letter[1598] to the women of
Croton, Pythagoras says expressly that ‘women as a sex are more naturally
akin to piety.’ He says this reverently, not as Strabo[1599] does taking
it as evidence of ignorance and superstition. Strabo in discussing the
celibate customs of certain among the Getae remarks, ‘all agree that
women are the prime promoters of superstition, and it is they who incite
men to frequent worshippings of the gods and to feasts and excited
celebrations (ποτνιασμούς).’ He adds with charming frankness ‘you could
scarcely find a man living by himself who would do this sort of thing.’
It is to Pythagoras, as has already been noted (p. 262), that we owe the
fertile suggestion that in the figures of the women goddesses we have the
counterpart of the successive stages of a woman’s life as Maiden, Bride
and Mother.
The doctrine of the Pythagoreans in their lifetime was matriarchal and in
their death they turned to Mother Earth. The house of Pythagoras[1600]
after his death was dedicated as a sanctuary to Demeter, and Pliny[1601]
records—significant fact—that the disciples of Pythagoras reverted to the
ancient method of inhumation long superseded by cremation and were buried
in _pithoi_, earth to earth.
EROS AS PHANES, PROTOGONOS, METIS, ERIKAPAIOS.
The Eros of Athenian poetry and painting is unquestionably male, but
the Protogonos of esoteric doctrine is not male or female but bisexed,
resuming in mystic fashion Eros and Aphrodite. He is an impossible,
unthinkable cosmic potency. The beautiful name of Eros is foreign to
Orphic hymns. Instead we have Metis, Phanes, Erikapaios, ‘which being
interpreted in the vulgar tongue are Counsel, Light and Lifegiver[1602].’
The commentators on Plato are conscious of what Plato himself scarcely
realizes, that in his philosophy he is always trying to articulate the
symbolism of these and other Orphic titles, trying like Orpheus to utter
the unutterable; he puts νοῦς for Metis, τὸ ὄν for Erikapaios, but, in
despair, he constantly lapses back into myth and we have the winged soul,
the charioteer, the four-square bisexed man. Proklos[1603] knows that
τὸ ὄν is but the primaeval egg, knows too that Erikapaios was male and
female[1604]:
‘Father and Mother, the mighty one Erikapaios,’
and Hermias[1605] knows that Orpheus made Phanes four-square:
‘He of the fourfold eyes, beholding this way, that way.’
It was ‘the inspired poets,’ Hermias[1606] says, ‘not Plato, who invented
the charioteer and the horses,’ and these inspired poets are according to
him Homer, Orpheus, Parmenides.
The mention of Homer comes as something of a shock; but it must be
remembered that the name _Homer_ covered in antiquity a good deal more
than our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. It is not unlikely that some of the
‘Homeric’ poems were touched with Orphism. The name _Metis_ suggests it.
The strange denaturalized birth of Athene from the brain of Zeus is a
dark, desperate effort to make _thought_ the basis of being and reality,
and the shadowy parent in the _Kypria_ is the Orphic Metis. Athene, as
has already been shown (p. 301), was originally only one of the many
local Korae; she was ἡ Ἀθηναία (Κόρη), the ‘maiden of Athens,’ born of
the earth, as much as the Kore of Eleusis. Patriarchalism wished to rid
her of her matriarchal ancestry, and Orphic mysticism was ready with the
male parent Metis. The proud rationalism of Athens, uttering itself in a
goddess who embodied Reason, did the rest.
There is a yet more definite tinge of Orphism in the story of Leda and
the swan. Leda herself is all folklore and faery story based probably
on a cultus-object. In the sanctuary of the ancient Maidens Hilaira and
Phoebe at Sparta[1607] there hung from the roof suspended by ribbons an
egg, and tradition said it was the egg of Leda. But the author of the
_Kypria_[1608] gave to Zeus another bride, Nemesis, who belongs to the
sisterhood of shadowy Orphicized female impersonations, Dike, Ananke,
Adrasteia and the like. The birth of the child from the egg appears on no
black-figured vase-painting, and though it need not have been originated
by the Orphics, the birth of Eros doubtless lent it new prestige. The
charming little design in fig. 176 is from a red-figured lekythos in the
Berlin Museum[1609]. On an altar lies a huge egg. Out of it breaks the
figure of a boy. The boy is not winged; otherwise we should be inclined
to call him Eros. The woman to whom the child stretches out his hands
must be Leda. The scene is the birth of one of the Dioscuri, but probably
with some reminiscence of Eros. On most vases in which the birth from the
egg is represented it takes place in a sanctuary.
[Illustration: FIG. 176.]
Homeric theology, as we know it in our canonical Homer, was wholly
untouched by Orphism. The human figures of the Olympians, clear-cut and
departmental as they are, have no kinship with the shifting mystical
Protogonos. The Olympians lay no claim to be All in All, nor are they
in any sense Creators, sources of life. Homer has no cosmogony, only a
splendid ready-made human society. His gods are immortal because death
would shadow and mar their splendour, not because they are the perennial
sources of things. It is noticeable that Zeus himself, the supreme god
of Homeric theology, can only be worked into the Orphic system by making
him become Eros[1610], and absorb Phanes[1611]; only so can he become
_demiourgos_, a feat which, to do him justice, he never on his own
account attempted. Proklos says ‘Orpheus in inspired utterance declares
that Zeus swallowed Phanes his progenitor, and took into his bosom all
his powers.’ This mysticism was of course made easy by savage cosmogonies
of Kronos and the swallowing of the children.
The Olympians concern themselves as little with the Before as with
the Hereafter; they are not the source of life nor are they its goal.
Moreover, another characteristic is that they are, with the strictest
limitations, _human_. They are not one with the life that is in beasts
and streams and woods as well as in man. Eros, ‘whose feet are on the
flowers,’ who ‘couches in the folds,’ is of all life, he is Dionysos,
he is Pan. Under Athenian influence Eros secludes himself into purely
human form, but the Phanes[1612] of Orpheus was polymorphic, a
beast-mystery-god:
‘Heads had he many,
Head of a ram, a bull, a snake, and a bright-eyed lion.’
He is like Dionysos, to whom his Bacchants cry[1613]:
‘Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name,
O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads,
Lion of the Burning Flame!
O God, Beast, Mystery, come!’
In theology as in ritual Orphism reverted to the more primitive forms,
lending them deeper and intenser significance. These primitive forms,
shifting and inchoate, were material more malleable than the articulate
accomplished figures of the Olympians.
The conception of Phanes Protogonos remained always somewhat esoteric, a
thing taught in mysteries, but his content is popularized in the figure
of the goat-god who passed from being ὁ Πάων the feeder, the shepherd, to
be τὸ πᾶν Pan the All-God.
* * * * *
Pan came to Athens[1614] from Arcadia after the Persian War, came at
a time when scepticism was busy with the figures of the Olympians
and their old prestige was on the wane. Pan of course had to have his
reception into Olympus, and a derivation duly Olympian was found for
his name. The Homeric Hymn[1615], even if it be of Alexandrian date, is
thoroughly Homeric in religious tone: the poet tells how
‘Straight to the seats of the gods immortal did Hermes fare
With his child wrapped warmly up in skins of the mountain hare,
And down by the side of Zeus and the rest, he made him to sit,
And showed him that boy of his, and they all rejoiced at it.
But most of all Dionysos, the god of the Bacchanal,
And they called the name of him PAN because he delighted them ALL.’
Dionysos the Bull-god and Pan the Goat-god both belong to early
pre-anthropomorphic days, before man had cut the ties that bound him
to the other animals; one and both they were welcomed as saviours by a
tired humanity. Pan had no part in Orphic ritual, but in mythology as the
All-god[1616] he is the popular reflection of Protogonos. He gave a soul
of life and reality to a difficult monotheistic dogma, and the last word
was not said in Greek religion, until over the midnight sea a voice[1617]
was heard crying ‘Great Pan is dead.’
* * * * *
Our evidence for the mystic Phanes Protogonos, as distinguished from the
beautiful Eros of the Athenians, has been, so far, drawn from late and
purely learned authors, commentators on Plato, Christian Fathers, and the
like. The suspicion may lurk in some minds that all this cosmogony, apart
from the simple myth of the world-egg vouched for by Aristophanes, is a
matter of late mysticizing, and never touched popular religion at all, or
if at all, not till the days of decadence. It is most true that ‘the main
current of speculation, as directed by Athens, set steadily contrariwise,
in the line of getting bit by bit at the meaning of things through hard
thinking,’ but we need constantly to remind ourselves of the important
fact ‘that the mystical and “enthusiastic” explanation of the world was
never without its apostles in Greece[1618].’ That the common people
heard this doctrine gladly is curiously evidenced by the next monument
to be discussed, a religious document of high value, the fragment of a
black-figured vase-painting[1619] in fig. 177.
[Illustration: FIG. 177.]
In the sanctuary of the Kabeiroi near Thebes[1620] there came to light
a mass of fragments of black-figured vases, dating about the end of the
5th or the beginning of the 4th century B.C., of local technique and
obviously having been used in a local cult. The important inscribed
fragment is here reproduced. The reclining man holding the kantharos,
would, if there were no inscription, be named without hesitation
Dionysos. But over him is clearly written _Kabiros_.
Goethe makes his Sirens say of the Kabeiroi that they
‘Sind Götter, wundersam eigen,
Die sich immerfort selbst erzeugen
Und niemals wissen was sie sind.’
They have certainly a wondrous power of taking on the forms of other
deities; here in shape and semblance they are Dionysos, the father and
the son. Very surprising are the other inscribed figures, a man and a
woman closely linked together, Mitos and Krateia, and a child Protolaos.
What precisely is meant by the conjunction is not easy to say, but the
names Mitos and Protolaos take us straight to Orphism. Clement[1621] says
in the _Stromata_ that Epigenes wrote a book on the poetry of Orpheus and
‘in it noted certain characteristic expressions.’ Among them was this,
that by warp (στήμοσι) Orpheus meant furrow, and by woof (μίτος) he meant
seed (σπέρμα).
Did this statement stand alone we might naturally dismiss it as late
allegorizing, but here, on a bit of local pottery of the 5th or 4th
century B.C., we have the figure of Mitos in popular use. All the Theban
Kabeiroi vases are marked by a spirit of grotesque and sometimes gross
caricature. Mitos, Krateia and Protolaos it will be noted have snub
negro faces. This gives us a curious glimpse into that blending of the
cosmic and the mystic, that concealing of the sacred by the profane,
that seems inherent in the anxious primitive mind. It makes us feel that
Aristophanes, to his own contemporaries, may have appeared less frankly
blasphemous than he seems to us.
The vase fragment has another interest. The little Orphic cosmogonic
group, _Seed_ and _Strong One_ and _First people_, the birth of the
human world as it were, is in close connection with Dionysos, the father
and the son. It is all like a little popular diagram of the relation of
Orphic and Bacchic rites, and moreover it comes to us from the immediate
neighbourhood of Thebes, the reputed birthplace of the god.
[Illustration: FIG. 178.]
The vase fragment from Thebes shows plainly the influence of mystery
doctrines on popular conceptions of Dionysos. It is worth noting that in
red-figured vase-paintings of a somewhat late style Eros comes to be a
frequent attendant on Dionysos, whereas in vases of severe style he is
wholly absent, Maenads and Satyrs revel either together or alone. The
design in fig. 179, from the lid of a red-figured lekane (fig. 178) in
the Museum at Odessa[1622], is a singularly beautiful instance of Eros
as present at a Bacchic revel. A Maenad and a Satyr dance in ecstasy,
holding between them a little fawn, as though in the act of rending it
asunder. Over her long chiton, that trails and swirls about her feet in
oddly modern fashion, the Maenad wears a fawn-skin; a second dancing
Maenad strikes her timbrel. One half of the design is all ecstasy
and even savagery, the other half is perfectly quiet. Two Maenads
stand talking, at rest; the god Dionysos is seated and Eros offers
him the wine-cup. Here it is Eros the son, not Aphrodite the mother,
who is linked with Dionysos, but we remember how in the _Bacchae_ of
Euripides[1623] the Messenger thus pleads with Pentheus:
‘Therefore I counsel thee,
O King, receive this Spirit whoe’er he be
To Thebes in glory. Greatness manifold
Is all about him—and the tale is told
That this is he who first to man did give
The grief-assuaging vine.—Oh, let him live,
For if he die, then Love herself is slain;
And nothing joyous in the world again.’
[Illustration: FIG. 179.]
Eros and Dionysos, the poet sees, are near akin; both are spirits of Life
and of Life’s ecstasy.
Dionysos like Eros is a _daimon_, a spirit rather than a clear-cut
crystallized god; he is as has been already seen of many shapes, of
plants and animals as well as man, so he like Eros becomes Phanes:
‘Therefore him we call both Phanes and Dionysos[1624].’
Dionysos is but a new ingredient in the monotheistic mystery melting-pot:
‘One Zeus, one Hades, one Helios, one Dionysos,
Yea in all things One God, his name why speak I asunder[1625]?’
In becoming the Orphic Phanes Dionysos lost most of his characteristics.
In spite of his persistent monotheism we are somehow conscious
that Orpheus did not feel all the gods to be really one, all equal
manifestations of the same potency. He is concerned to push the claims of
the cosmic Eros as against the simpler wine god. Possibly he felt that
Dionysos needed much adjustment and was not always for edification. Of
this we have some hint in the last literary document to be examined.
* * * * *
In the statutes of the Iobacchoi[1626] at Athens, we have already seen
(p. 476), the thyrsos became the symbol not of revel but of quiet
seemliness. We shall now find that though by name and tradition they are
pledged to the worship of Dionysos the Iobacchoi have introduced into
their ceremonies a figure more grave and orderly, a figure bearing in
the inscription a name of beautiful significance, Proteurhythmos. A part
of their great festival consisted in a sacred pantomime, the _rôles_
in which were distributed by lot. The divine persons represented were
‘Dionysos, Kore, Palaimon, Aphrodite, and Proteurhythmos[1627].’ Who
was Proteurhythmos, First of fair rhythm? The word defies translation
into English, but its initial syllable πρωτ, first, at once inclines
us to see in it an Orphic title like Protogonos or Protolaos. The
word has indeed been interpreted[1628] as a title of Orpheus himself,
Orpheus Proteurhythmos, First dancer or singer. Such an interpretation
argues, I think, a grave misunderstanding. It ignores the juxtaposition
of Proteurhythmos with Aphrodite and rests for support on the initial
error that Orpheus himself is a faded god. Proteurhythmos is, I think,
not Orpheus, but a greater than he, the god whom he worshipped, Eros
Protogonos. Orpheus is a musician, but it was Eros, not Orpheus, who gave
impulse and rhythm to the great dance of creation when ‘the Morning Stars
sang together.’ Eros, not Orpheus, is demiourgos.
Lucian[1629] knew this. ‘It would seem that dancing came into being at
the beginning of all things, and was brought to light together with Eros,
that ancient one, for we see this primaeval dancing clearly set forth
in the choral dance of the constellations, and in the planets and fixed
stars, their interweaving and interchange and orderly harmony.’
It is the primaeval life that Eros, not Orpheus, begets within us, that
wakes now and again, that feels the rhythm of a poem, the pulse of a
pattern and the chime of a dancer’s feet.
‘In the beginning when the sun was lit
The maze of things was marshalled to a dance.
Deep in us lie forgotten strains of it,
Like obsolete, charmed sleepers of romance.
And we remember, when on thrilling strings
And hollow flutes the heart of midnight burns,
The heritage of splendid, moving things
Descends on us, and the old power returns.’
Eros is Lord of Life and Death, he is also Proteurhythmos, but because
of the bitter antinomy of human things to man he is also Lord of Discord
and Misrule. And therefore the chorus in the _Hippolytus_[1630], brooding
over the sickness and disorder of Phaedra, prays:
‘When I am thine, O Master, bring thou near
No spirit of evil, make not jarred the clear
Wings’ music as thou fliest.’
The gods whose worship Orpheus taught were two, Bacchus and Eros; in
actual religion chiefly Bacchus, in mystical dogma Eros, and in ancient
Greek religion these are the only real gods. Orpheus dimly divined the
truth, later to become explicit through Euripides of Phlya:
‘I saw that there are first and above all
The hidden forces, blind necessities
Named Nature, but the things self-unconceived.
We know not how imposed above ourselves,
We well know what I name the god, a power
Various or one.’
Through all the chaos of his cosmogony and the shifting, uncertain
outlines of his personifications, we feel, in these two gods, lies the
real advance of the religion of Orpheus—an advance, not only beyond
the old _riddance_ of ghosts and sprites and demons, but also beyond
the gracious and beautiful _service_ of those magnified mortals, the
Olympians. The religion of Orpheus _is_ religious in the sense that it
is the worship of the real mysteries of life, of potencies (δαίμονες)
rather than personal gods (θεοί); it is the worship of life itself in its
supreme mysteries of ecstasy and love. “_Reason is great, but it is not
everything. There are in the world things, not of reason, but both below
and above it, causes of emotion which we cannot express, which we tend to
worship, which we feel perhaps to be the precious things in life. These
things are God or forms of God, not fabulous immortal men, but ‘Things
which Are,’ things utterly non-human and non-moral which bring man bliss
or tear his life to shreds without a break in their own serenity[1631]._”
It is these real gods, this life itself, that the Greeks, like most men,
were inwardly afraid to recognize and face, afraid even to worship.
Orpheus too was afraid—the garb of the ascetic that he always wears
is the token at once of his realization and his fear—but at least he
dares to worship. Now and again a philosopher or a poet, in the very
spirit of Orpheus, proclaims these true gods, and asks in wonder why to
their shrines is brought no sacrifice. Plato[1632] in the _Symposium_
makes Aristophanes say, ‘Mankind would seem to have never realized the
might of Eros, for if they had really felt it they would have built him
great sanctuaries and altars and offered solemn sacrifices, and none
of these things are done, but of all things they ought to be done.’
Euripides[1633] in the _Hippolytus_ makes his chorus sing:
‘In vain, in vain by old Alpheus’ shore,
The blood of many bulls doth stain the river,
And all Greece bows on Phoebus’ Pythian floor,
Yet bring we to the Master of Man no store,
The Keybearer that standeth at the door
Close barred, where hideth ever
Love’s inmost jewel. Yea, though he sack man’s life,
Like a sacked city and moveth evermore,
Girt with calamity and strange ways of strife,
Him have we worshipped never.’
To resume: the last word in ancient Greek religion was said by the
Orphics, and the beautiful figure of Orpheus is strangely modern.
Then, as now, we have, for one side of the picture, a revived and
intensified spirituality, an ardent, even ecstatic enthusiasm, a high
and self-conscious standard of moral conduct, a deliberate simplicity of
life; abstinence from many things, temperance in all, a great quiet of
demeanour, a marvellous gentleness to all living things.
And, for the reverse, we have formalism, faddism, priggishness, a
constant, and it would seem inevitable lapse into arid symbolism,
pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy, the ignorant revival of obsolete
rites, the exhibition of all manner of ignoble thaumaturgy and squalid
credulity. The whole strange blend redeemed, illuminated by two impulses,
in practice by the strenuous effort after purity of life, in theory by
the ‘further determination of the Absolute’ into the mysticism of Love.
CRITICAL APPENDIX ON THE ORPHIC TABLETS.
I. _The Petelia Tablet._
Found in excavations near Petelia, S. Italy: now in the British Museum.
Kaibel, _CIGIS_, No. 638. Cf. Comparetti, _J.H.S._ III. p. 112.
[Illustration]
ΕΥΡΗΣΣΕΙΣ Δ’ ΑΙΔΑΟ ΔΟΜΩΝ ΕΠ’ ΑΡΙΣΤΕΡΑ ΚΡΗΝΗΝ,
ΠΑΡ Δ’ ΑΥΤΗΙ ΛΕΥΚΗΝ ΕΣΤΗΚΥΙΑΝ ΚΥΠΑΡΙΣΣΟΝ·
ΤΑΥΤΗΣ ΤΗΣ ΚΡΗΝΗΣ ΜΗΔΕ ΣΧΕΔΟΝ ΕΜΠΕΛΑΣΕΙΑΣ.
ΕΥΡΗΣΕΙΣ Δ’ ΕΤΕΡΑΝ ΤΗΣ ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗΣ ΑΠΟ ΛΙΜΝΗΣ
ΨΥΧΡΟΝ ΥΔΩΡ ΠΡΟΡΕΟΝ, ΦΥΛΑΚΕΣ Δ’ ΕΠΙΠΡΟΣΘΕΝ ΕΑΣΙΝ
ΕΙΠΕΙΝ· ΓΗΣ ΠΑΙΣ ΕΙΜΙ ΚΑΙ ΟΥΡΑΝΟΥ ΑΣΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΟΣ,
ΑΥΤΑΡ ΕΜΟΙ ΓΕΝΟΣ ΟΥΡΑΝΙΟΝ· ΤΟΔΕ Δ’ ΙΣΤΕ ΚΑΙ ΑΥΤΟΙ·
ΔΙΨΗΙ Δ’ ΕΙΜΙ ΑΥΗ ΚΑΙ ΑΠΟΛΛΥΜΑΙ· ΑΛΛΑ ΔΟΤ’ ΑΙΨΑ
ΨΥΧΡΟΝ ΥΔΩΡ ΠΡΟΡΕΟΝ ΤΗΣ ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗΣ ΑΠΟ ΛΙΜΝΗΣ
ΚΑΥΤ<ΟΙ ΣΟ>Ι ΔΩΣΟΥΣΙ ΠΙΕΙΝ ΘΕΙΗΣ ΑΠ<Ο ΛΙΜΝ>ΗΣ
ΚΑΙ ΤΟΤ’ ΕΠΕΙΤ’ Α<ΛΛΟΙΣΙ ΜΕΘ’> ΗΡΩΕΣΣΙΝ ΑΝΑΞΕΙΣ
····· ΙΗΣ ΤΟΔΕ ····· ΘΑΝΕΙΣΘ ····
······· ΤΟΔΕΓΡΑΨ ·····
···· ΓΛΩΣΕΙΠΑ (?) ··· ΣΚΟΤΟΣ ΑΜΦΙΚΑΛΥΨΑΣ
‘Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this Well-spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory,
Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it.
Say: “I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves.
And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.”
And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy
Well-spring,
And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship....’
Kaibel (l.c.) says “pertinet lammina, ut nunc apparet, ad saeculum iii
vel summum iv ante Chr. n.” It had formerly been supposed to be much
later. He confidently attributes the accompanying tablet (No. V.) to
the fourth century, and this one seems to me to be quite as early or
earlier. It is altogether more carefully written, which detracts from
its appearance of age. The use of the diphthong ου for instance, where
No. V. has ο, is probably a sign of careful writing, not of lateness.
The letters are very well formed and early in shape. Subscript ι is
never neglected. Elision only once (εἰμὶ αὔη) and then, it would seem,
of set purpose to avoid ambiguity. Weight must also be allowed to the
completeness and accuracy with which the text of the “ancient Orphic
poem” (see below on No. V.) is given, with no compendia or corruptions.
The dialect, also, is pure literary epic; i.e., one may presume, the pure
dialect of the “ancient poem” itself, with no admixture of local forms
such as have crept by process of time into the formulae on the other
tablets. The double σ of εὑρήσσεις in l. 1 may indeed be dialectical;
cf. ἀσστεροβλῆτα, Δεσσποίνας in V., but that scarcely affects the main
impression.
II. Three tablets from Crete (Eleuthernae?) now in the National Museum at
Athens.
[Illustration: A.
Length 55 mm.; breadth 7 mm.]
[Illustration: B.
Length 62 mm.; breadth 8 mm.]
[Illustration: C.
Length 56 mm.; breadth 10 mm.]
The general formula represented by these tablets is:
Δίψαι αὖος ἐγὼ καὶ ἀπόλλυμαι—Ἀλλὰ πίε μμου
Κράνας αἰερόω [or αἰενάω] ἐπὶ δεξιὰ, τῆ κυφάρισος.
Τίς δ’ ἔσι;.....................
πῶ δ’ ἔσι;...Γᾶς υἱὸς ἠμὶ καὶ ὠρανῶ ἀστερόεντος.
‘I am parched with thirst and I perish.—Nay, drink of Me,
The well-spring flowing for ever on the Right, where the Cypress is.
Who art thou?..................
Whence art thou?—I am son of Earth and of Starry Heaven.’
Tablet C was published, with some inaccuracies, by M. Joubin in _Bull.
de Corr. Hell._ xvii. p. 122, where it is said to have been found at
Eleuthernae in Crete. I subjoin an account of the three tablets kindly
sent by Mr Marcus Tod, Assistant Director of the British School at
Athens, to whom are also due the above fac-similes.
“The inscription is at present in the _Ethnikon Mouseion_ here, and
along with it are two others almost exactly similar. I could get no
information about them, save that they also, according to the Εὑρετήριον
of the Museum, are ‘from Crete.’ All three are on thin strips of gold,
roughly rectangular, and are traced in very small and fine letters with
a needle point. The execution is in all three instances rough, but C
is considerably better in this respect than A; B holds an intermediate
position. I worked with a powerful magnifying glass, and in most cases am
quite sure of my readings even where I differ from _Bull. Corr. Hell._”
NOTES: l. 1. What comes between αὖος and ἐγὼ in A, Mr Tod cannot
decipher. Was it αὖος written twice?
πιε μοι C: πιε μου B (and C, according to Joubin). I had conjectured
from Joubin’s reading πίε μμου, the initial μ being doubled as in ἐνὶ
μμεγάροισιν, etc., in the so-called Aeolic poetry (Cretan = Arcadian =
‘Urgriechisch’), and this proves to be the reading of A.
l. 2. αιειροω C and B. Joubin gave αἰεὶ ῥέω: αιεναω A. Evidently the
Doric genitive of an adj. αἰέροος or αἰέναος. Mr Tod (and I also) had
conjectured αἰὲ ῥέω, and he would also take αἰενάω as a verb.
τῆ κυφάρισος: sc. ἐστί.
As to the metre and reading of the last line, see below p. 672.
III. _Timpone Grande Tablet (a)._
A thin rectangular slip of gold, like the others, found in a large tomb
in the commune of Corigliano-Calabro, S. Italy. (Published in the _Atti
d. R. Accad. dei Lincei_, Serie III. 1878-79; _Memorie_, p. 328: cf.
Kaibel, _CIGIS_, 642.) The fac-simile that follows was kindly furnished
by Prof. Comparetti.
[Illustration]
Ἀλλ’ ὁπόταμ ψυχὴ προλίπηι φάος ἀελίοιο
δεξιὸν ἐν̣·οιας δ̣ειτινα
............πεφυλαγμένον εὖ μάλα πάντα.
Χαῖρε παθὼν τὸ πάθημα, τόδ’ οὔπω π̣ρ̣όσθε ἐπεπόνθεις.
θεὸς ἐγένου ἐξ ἀνθρώπου.
ἔρυφος ἐς γάλα ἔπετες.
χαῖρε, χαῖρε, δεξιὰν ὁδοιπορ<ῶν>
λειμῶνάς τε ἱεροὺς κατά <τ’> ἄ<λ>σεα Φεσε<φο>νείας.
‘But so soon as the Spirit hath left the light of the sun,
To the right................................. of Ennoia
Then must man..............being right wary in all things.
Hail, thou who hast suffered the Suffering. This thou hadst never
suffered before.
Thou art become God from Man. A kid thou art fallen into milk.
Hail, hail to thee journeying on the right.........
... Holy meadows and groves of Phersephoneia.’
l. 2. The reading is doubtful. The strip of gold has been folded over
and over, making eight little divisions by vertical lines and four by
horizontal. The curious thing is that in some cases the fold has been
allowed for in the writing, in others not. For instance, the first
vertical fold would cut, as a rule, the seventh or eighth letter from the
beginning. A large space has been left for it between ἐξ and ἀνθρώπου
in line 5 (the gold is worn into a little hole at this point, and may
have been somehow injured before the writing was made); and in lines
1, 3, 4 and 7 the letters successfully dodge it. But the χ of χαῖρε is
half obliterated, and the letter following ε in l. 2 is lost in a mass
of crumpled gold. It might be ΕΙΟΙΑΣ = ἠοίας, supposing a space to be
vacant in the crumple, as between ἐξ and ἀνθρώπου. But ΕΝΟΙΑΣ is the
most probable, standing presumably for ΕΝΝΟΙΑΣ. The following word has
generally been read as ΔΕΙ, though ΑΕΙ is equally probable.
l. 3. τόδ’ οὔπω: τό τ’ οὔπω coni. Kaibel.
ἐγένου. The γ is clear.
As to the interpretation of l. 2, we may accept Kaibel’s judgment:
“videtur versus ex duobus coaluisse: nam hoc quoque carmen ex antiquiore
archetypo derivatum est.” But any attempt to restore the original “carmen
antiquum” is utterly uncertain. How uncertain, it may be worth while
illustrating from a parallel instance.
There is a small oval Christian amulet (_CIGIS_ 2413, 18) containing
verses from an elegiac poem of Gregory Nazianzene in an abbreviated form.
One passage, for instance, runs in the original
Χριστὸς ἄναξ κέλεταί σε φυγεῖν ἐς λαῖτμα θαλάσσης
ἠὲ κατὰ σκοπέλων ἠὲ συῶν ἀγελήν,
ὡς Λεγεῶνα πάροιθεν ἀτάσθαλον.
This appears on the amulet (I divide the words):
Χσ ἄναξ κέλετέ σε φυγε͂ν ἐσ λε͂τμα θαλάσσης
ὲ ὰ σκοπέλων ὲ συῶ ἀὴν
ὡ εενα πάροι ἀτάσθαλον.
The accented letter alone, or the first and last, or a group of letters
in the middle are made to stand for a word. On this principle we might
find in ΔΕΙΤΙΝΑ
Δεξιόν, Ἐννοίας Δ̣ε̣σποί̣νας ὕδατ̣ι̣ λίμν̣α̣ς
or various other formulae built up in the same manner. (I mark the
letters which occur, not those which are omitted.)
But, is this the process that has taken place at all? The same amulet, a
few lines earlier, in place of
φεῦγ’ ἀπ’ ἐμῶν μελέων, φεῦγ’ ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ βιότου,
κλώψ, ὄφι, πῦρ, βελιάρ, κακίη, μόρε
gives
φεῦγ’ ἀπ’ ἐμῶν μελέων ψόφι πῦρ βελιάρ κακίη μόρε
through mere lipography, the writer’s eye having wandered from φ to ψ.
On this principle we may here be dealing with an original such as
Δεξιόν, Ἐννοίας ἀεί τινα ποσσὶ φέρεσθαι
χριμπτόμενον κρανᾶς, πεφυλαγμένον εὖ μάλα πάντα.
Such conjectures are merely illustrative. The basis of sound conclusion
seems to be that we have here fragments of formulae, not a complete
sentence. (See below p. 672.)
The word δεξιὸν must, I think, certainly bear its ordinary meaning
“right,” “on the right”: cf. l. 6 δεξιὰν ὁδοιπορῶν, and, for the syntax,
δεξιὸς ἀίξας ὑπὲρ ἄστεος Ω 320; ὧδε κατάστας, δεξιὸς, ἀθανάτοις θεοῖσιν
ἐπευχόμενος Theogn. 943. “On the right, by the Spring of Ennoia” means,
perhaps “by the Spring of Thought issuing from the Lake of Memory.”
Such a sense would suit the doctrines of tablets I. and II., and
might even help to explain the origin of Dante’s _Eunoë_. (Professor
Comparetti, who takes δεξιὸν in the metaphorical prose sense of “clever,”
considers the introduction of such a word to be due to Euripidean or
sophistic influence.)
IV. _Timpone Grande Tablet (b)._
[Illustration]
Prof. Comparetti examined the tablet when it was discovered in 1879,
and reported (_Notizie d. Scavi_, 1880, p. 328) that it contained names
of divinities belonging to the Orphic theology. Of these he then read
_Protogonos_, _Gê_, _Pammêtor_, _Kybelê_, _Korê_, _Dêmêtêr_ and _Tychê_.
For his later results we must await his publication and discussion of the
new fac-simile which, by his kindness, is reproduced above. Prof. Diels
published the tablet with a full discussion in 1902 (_Ein Orphischer
Demeter-Hymnus, Festschrift Theodor Gomperz_, p. 1). He also with great
kindness has allowed his photographs of the tablet to be used for the
purposes of the present book.
I examined the tablet itself in the Naples Museum and was able here
and there to make out a few more letters than Prof. Diels; but, as it
evidently did not contain any special Orphic doctrines, and was besides
very trying to the eyes, I did not attempt a complete transcript. This
note is based chiefly on Prof. Comparetti’s fac-simile.
That the tablet is unintelligible as it stands, no one will deny. It
seems indeed to belong to that class of magical or cryptic writings in
which, as Wünsch puts it, “singulari quadam scribendi ratione id agitur
ne legi possint.”
Prof. Diels, however, did not view it in this light. He adopted the
hypothesis that the tablet was the simple and _bonâ fide_ work of an
Apulian engraver who knew very little Greek, but was copying a Greek
original which already contained various readings. He often got his
letters down in the wrong order; often mistook one letter for another;
often tried to correct his mistakes by repeating words or syllables.
Much of this seems perfectly true. Cf. for transpositions ισελαβροντα
= ἐλασίβροντα, ρσαπια = σάραπι, πτεν αματα = πέντ’ ἄματα, μαιτιετη =
μητίετα, οσειιταιν = ὁσίη παῖς (?).
Confusions: τλταιτταταπτα Ζεῦ (= πάντοπτα? or ἄττα, ἰᾶτα written
backward?), so παννυανταντης, if that is what is written, must be an
attempt to get some word right by repeated correction.
Ignorance of Greek: Ηανοπτα = Πανόπτα, επιτιημαρ = ἑπτῆμαρ are typical,
but the above transpositions and confusions point to the same conclusion.
On the other hand, there is knowledge of the Greek alphabet, as is
shown by the varying shapes of many letters, e.g. δ, ρ [sometimes R],
π [sometimes P], and the use of compendia: cf. especially the curious
compounds with Ν.
Prof. Diels, however, goes a good deal further than this. He attempts
to shew that the original from which the tablet is copied is a Hymn
to Demeter, written in hexameters; and he proceeds to its conjectural
reconstruction—while observing that “_Niemand die Unsicherheit der
Ergänzung verkennen oder die Barbarei der Formen beanstanden wird._”
The conjecture was worth making, and is carried out with the learning and
ability which mark all Prof. Diels’s work. So it is less surprising than
it would otherwise be, to find the tablet described by scholars[1634],
without further qualification, as a _Demeter-hymnus_! But it remains a
highly improbable hypothesis, not only because of the violent changes
necessary to get any consecutive sense suitable to a _Demeter-hymnus_,
but more definitely because among the few really legible passages in the
tablet, the very clearest are certainly not in dactylic metre; νυξὶν
ἢ μεθ’ ἡμέραν, ἰητρὸς Ἥλιε, εὔκλητε δαῖμον. True, there are fragments
also which seem dactylic; ῥεῦμ’ ἄστακτα πυρός, Νίκαις ἠδὲ Τύχαις ἐφάνης
παμμήδεσι Μοίραις(?). But this need not surprise us. The words of a
charm, for instance, are sometimes found set in the midst of a hexameter
verse; cf. the Tanagra Tablet in Wünsch, _App. CIA_, Praef. p. viii:
Ἑρμῆν κικλήσκω χθόνιον
(καταδίδημι Διονυσίαν)
καὶ Φερσεφόνηαν. (δῆσαι Διονυσίας
γλῶσαν κτλ.)
This parallel would account easily for all the hexameter fragments that
we have in this tablet.
On the other hand, the strange corruptions and repetitions of the tablet
are more than can be explained by the mere ignorance of a copy-maker.
They are not indeed similar to the rows of abracadabra-like syllables
found in magical papyri (cf. Dieterich, _Abraxas_, p. 178 θηθουθη ααθω
αθηρουωραμια θαρ μιγαρναχφουρι κτλ.) but they do bear a fairly close
resemblance to some of the cryptic curses, in which, as said above, the
writing is deliberately confused by transpositions and the like, so as to
be unintelligible. Cf. Wünsch, 110:
ΠΡΩΤΟΝΩΣΠΕΡΤΑΥΤΑΑΝΑΤΙ ΟΤΩΣΚΑΙΤΟΣΑΓΟΡΑΙΑΣΠΡΩΤΟ
ΝΑΝΑΤΙΑΕΗΑΠΑΤΑΚΑΙΗΜΑΙΟΙΤΟΙΣΤΟΙΣΤΙΜΑΤΙ ΙΤΑΤΟΠΩΑΕ
ΤΟΙΠΑΡΑΠΡΩΤΟΙΟΤΟΚΑΙΟΤΟΠΩΛΟΤΙΚΑΝΔΕΚΑΙΑΥΤΟΣΚΑΙΤΗΤΗΧΝΗ
(Πρῶτον ὥσπερ ταῦτα ... οὕτως καὶ ὁ Ἀρισταγόρας ... then at the
end καταδέω (?) αὐτοὺς καὶ τὴν τέχνην.)
ΤΟΣΑΓΟΡΑΙΑΣ = ὁ Ἀρισταγόρας is just like what we find in our tablet, and
examination will show many other resemblances.
I have here attempted no reconstruction. I have merely copied the
inscription and tried to collect such intelligible words or phrases
as presented themselves at once or were to be reached by very slight
emendations. The result so obtained is a patchwork of a few ritual
phrases and fragmentary formulae; rows of titles of gods, heroes and
daemons, including possibly Phanes and certainly Rhadamanthys; and
lastly, an unintelligible residuum.
The whole seems to be a charm of some kind, concerned with healing and
fasting. I can find no signs of its being a curse; nor indeed was gold,
unless I am mistaken, used for writing curses. The long lists of titles
of gods can be paralleled in abundance from magical inscriptions and
papyri.
Transcript:
ΠΡΩΤΟΤ̣ΟΝΟΤΗΜΑΙΤΙΕΤΗΓΑΜΜΑΤΡΙΕΠ̣ΑΚΥΒΕΛΕΙΑΚΟΡΡΑΟΣ
ΕΝΤΑΙΝΔΗΜΗΤΡΟΣΗΤ̣ |
ΤΛΤΑΠ̣ΤΑΤΑΠΤΑΖΕΥΙ̣ΑΤΗΤΥΔΕΡΣΑΠΙΑΗΔΙΕΠΥΡ̣Α̣Υ̣ΗΙ̣ΑΝΤΑΣΤΗΙ̣ΑΝΤΑΣΤ
ΗΝΚΑΤΟΤΙΕΝ̣ΙΚΑΙΙ
ΣΗΔΕΤΥΧΑΙ̣Τ̣ΕΦΑΝΗΣΠΑΜΜΗ·ΕΟ̣ΙΜΟΙΡΑΙΣΣΤΗΤΟΙΓΑΝΝΥΑΝ̣
ΑΝΤΗΣΥΚΛΗΤΕΔΑΙΜΟΝΔΕ
ΣΠΑΤΡΙΑΤΙ·ΠΑΝΤΑΔΑΜΑΣΤΑΡ̣ΑΝΤΗΡΝΥΝΤΑΙΣ̣ΕΛΑΒΡΟΝΤΑ
ΔΕΠΑΝΙΕΜΟΙΒΝ̣Τ̣ΣΤΛΗΤΕΑΠΑ
·ΤΗΜΗΑΕΡΙΠΥΟΜΕΜΜΑΙΕΡ̣ΑΥΕΣΤΙΣ··Δ·ΕΠ̣ΤΑΤΟΝΗΣΣΙΝ
ΝΥΞ̣ΙΝΗΜΕΘΗΜΕΡΑΝΕΓΩ̣···
ΕΠΙΤΙΗΜΑΡΤΙΝ̣Ν̣·Σ·ΙΑΣΤΑΝΖΕΥΕΝΟΡΥΤΤΙΕΚΑΙΗΑΝΟΠΤΑ
ΔΙΕΝΑΜΙΝ̣Α̣Μ̣ΑΤΕΙΟΜ̣ΑΣΕΠ
·ΠΙΔΥΣΕ̣Ι̣·ΕΡ̣ΕΥΜ̣ΑΣΤΑΚΤΑΠΥΡΟΣ·ΛΚΑΠΕΔΙΟΝ̣ΑΜΗΓΕΜΟΝ
ΚΑΝ̣ΝΑΔΙΕΡΑΔΑΜΑ̣ΝΘΥΔΑΜΝΥΙ
ΤΑΣΤΗΟΤΕΞ̣ΑΜΑΡ̣Ι̣Ε···ΝΤΕΑΡΓ̣ΙΖΕΥΚΕΤΗΞ̣ΕΙΔΑ···ΤΡΑΒ̣··
ΙΗΤΡΟΣΗ̣ΛΙΣ̣ΤΙ̣Ι̣ΟΝ̣Τ̣ΕΙ
ΗΙ·ΩΣΝΗΓ̣Σ̣ΥΝΝΑΟΣΕΣΠΤ̣ΕΝΑΜΑΤΑΜΗΤΗ̣Ν··ΤΗΣΝΝΣΥΜ
ΜΕΣΤΟΡΕ̣ΜΕ··ΩΡΗΜ̣
·Α····ΗΡ̣···ΝΟΣΣ·····ΕΥ̣ΤΟΛΑΕΡΤΑΙ· ΜΥΗ·ΦΑΕΝΑ
ΙΝ̣ΑΙ
Πρωτόγ̣ονε̣ Γῆ Μητίετα παμματριεί̣α (?) Κυβελεία Κόρρα, ὁσίη π̣αῖς̣ (?)
Δήμητρος ηταται (?) παταπτα (= παντόπτα?) Ζεῦ Ἰάτη, τὺ δὲ Σάραπι (?)
Ἥλιε πυραύη φανταστὴ φ̣ανταστὴ ἑκατο··ιε (?) Νίκα ἴση δὲ Τύχα· ἴτε Φάνης
πάμμησ̣τ̣οι Μοῖραι [or Νίκαις ἠδὲ τύχαις ἐφάνης παμμήδ̣ε̣σι Μοίραις]
Στῆτοι (?) παντανυσταὶ (?) εὔκλητε Δαῖμον δέσπο̣τα Ἰάτη (?) παντο̣δάμαστα
παντήρνυντα (= παντοκράτυντα?) ἐλασίβροντα δρ̣επάνιε (?)·····τλητέα
πάντη. Μὴ ἀέρι πύωμ’ ἔμ μο̣ι ἐπ̣αύης, (?) τίσω····ἑπτατόνηστιν. Νυξὶν
ἢ μεθ’ ἡμέραν ἐγὼ····ἑπτῆμαρ τὴ̣ν νηστιαστὺ̣ν (?) Ζεῦ ἐνορύττιε καὶ
π̣ανόπτα δῖε ναματιαῖε (?)···ἐκ̣πιδύσετε ῥεῦμ’ ἄστακτα πυρὸς···καπ πεδίον
(?)···ἡγεμὸν·····δῖε Ῥαδάμανθυ·······ἑξᾶμαρ·····Ζεῦ···Δά<μα>τρα···ἰητρὸς
Ἥλιε (?)············ὡς <ἂ>ν ἡ σύνναος πέντ’ ἄματα μὴ·········συμμηστόρε
(?)···ωρην···················
One might translate tentatively: “O First-Born, Earth, Counsellor,
All-Motherly, Cybelean, Kora, Holy Child of Demeter (?) ..., All-Seeing
Zeus, Healer, and thou Sarapis, Sun, Fire-Kindler, Maker-of-Appearances,
Far-Seeing (??)
Victory and equal Fortune; come ye, Phanes, All-Counselling Fates (or
With victories and Fortunes thou didst appear, with the All-Devising
Fates)
Stayers (?), All-Accomplishers (?), Well-named Daemon, Master, Healer
(?), All-Subduer, All-Controller, Driver of Thunder, Sickle-Bearer (?),
... to be endured in all wise. That thou mayest not with vapour make to
burn a tumour in me (??) ... I will pay ... sevenfold fasting. In the
nights or after daybreak I ... for seven days the fasting.
Zeus Penetrator (?) and All-seeing, Divine, Ruler of Streams, ... ye will
make to spring a stream not in drops of fire....
Plain ... guide ... Divine Rhadamanthys ... for six days.... Zeus ...
Demeter ... Healer, Sun ... that She sharing the Shrine for five days may
not....”
V., VI. and VII. _The Compagno Tablets._
Published _Notizie degli Scavi_, 1880. Cf. Kaibel, _CIGIS_, 481, _a_,
_b_, _c_. These three tablets were found on the estate of the Baron
Compagno, near Naples, not far from the Timpone Grande. The tablets were
close to the hand of the skeleton in each case.
V. _Compagno Tablet (a)._
[Illustration]
ΕΡΧΟΜΑΙ ΕΚ ΚΟΘΑΡΟν, ΚΟΘΑΡΑ ΧΘΟΝΙ<ων>; ΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΑ,
ΕΥΚΛΗΣ ΕΥΒΟΛΕΥΣ ΤΕ ΚΑΙ ΑΘΑΝΑΤΟΙ ΘΕΟΙ ΑΛΛΟΙ.
ΚΑΙ ΓΑΡ ΕΓΩΝ ΥΜΩΝ ΓΕΝΟΣ ΟΛΒΙΟΝ ΕΥΧΟΜΑ<ι>; ΕΙΜΕΝ,
ΑΛΑ ΜΕ ΜΟΡΑ ΕΔΑΜΑΣΕ ΚΑΙ ΑΘΑΝΑΤΟΙ ΘΕΟΙ ΑΛΛΟΙ
········ ΚΑΙ ΑΣΣΤΕΡΟΒΛΗΤΑ ΚΕΡΑΥΝΟΝ.
ΚΥΚΛΟ Δ’ ΕΞΕΠΤΑΝ ΒΑΡΥΠΕΝΘΕΟΣ ΑΡΓΑΛΕΟΙΟ·
ΙΜΕΡΤΟ Δ’ ΕΠΕΒΑΝ ΣΤΕΦΑΝΟ ΠΟΣΙ ΚΑΡΠΑΛΙΜΟΙΣΙ·
ΔΕΣΣΠΟΙΝΑΣ ΔΕ ΥΠΟ ΚΟΛΠΟΝ ΕΔΥΝ ΧΘΟΝΙΑΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΑΣ
ΙΜΕΡΤΟ Δ’ ΑΠΕΒΑΝ ΣΤΕΜΑΝΟ ΠΟΣΙ ΚΑΡΠΑΣΙΜΟΙΣΙ.
ΟΛΒΙΕ ΚΑΙ ΜΑΚΑΡΙΣΤΕ, ΘΕΟΣ Δ’ ΕΣΗΙ ΑΝΤΙ ΒΡΟΤΟΙΟ.
ΕΡΙΦΟΣ ΕΣ ΓΑΛ’ ΕΠΕΤΟΝ.
Kaibel remarks with regard to these three documents: “Fuit aliquando
Saeculo Quarto antiquius apud Sybaritas carmen, quod Orphico, ut ita
dicam, dicendi genere conceptum lamminis aureis inscriptum defunctorum
corporibus imponi solebat, quo ipsi vitae ante actae quasi testimonio
fidei deorum inferorum commendarentur. Quod carmen cum in usum
sepulcrorum saepius describeretur, sensim corrumpebatur et in brevius
redigebatur, omissis aliis, aliis additis, pluribus denique mutatis, ut
tamen primaria indoles non oblitteraretur. Tria nunc exempla inventa
sunt.... Antiquius primum est, quod ad IV a. Chr. n. saeculum referri
iubet ipsa ratio orthographica (ΚΥΚΛΟ, ΙΜΕΡΤΟ, ΣΤΕΦΑΝΟ) sed haud ita
multo recentiora reliqua duo, quod docet scripturae genus simillimum.”
The letters are ancient and well formed, approaching more closely to
those of fourth and fifth century inscriptions than to the papyrus of,
say, Timotheus.
l. 1. The form κοθαρός is dialectical. It occurs in Elean and Thurian
inscriptions, e.g. the Heraclean Tables. Contrast this peculiarity with
the style of Tablet I.
I punctuate after κοθαρῶν: “I come from the Pure, O Pure Queen,” not
“Pure I come from the Pure, O Queen.” The rhythm of the line points
strongly to this. Only by a definite system of punctuation, such as did
not exist in ancient Greek, could you in such a sentence make a reader
pause elsewhere than in the natural pause of the metre. The sense is: “I
come from the Orphically-initiated, O Queen of the Orphically-initiated.”
3, 4, 5, 8. εἶμεν, Μο͂ρα (= Μοῖρα: cf. the next tablet), ἀσστεροβλῆτα,
Δεσσποίνας are all dialectical forms.
7 and 9. Observe the difference of reading. _V._ 9 is wrong in στεμάνο
and καρπασίμοισι, so ἀπεβαν, in itself an interesting variant, must be
suspected to be mere mistake also.
VI. _Compagno Tablet (b)._
[Illustration]
ΕΡΧΟΜΑ Ε ΚΑΡΩΙΣ ΧΟΝΩΝ ΚΑΘΑΡΑ ΧΟΝΙΩΝ ΒΑΣΙΛΗΕΙ ΕΥΚΛΕ ΚΑΙ ΕΥΒΟΥΛΕΥΙ ΚΑΙ
ΘΕΟΙ <και> ΔΑΙΜΟΝΕ<ϲ> ΑΛΛΟΙ ΚΑΙ ΓΡΑ ΕΓΩΝ ΥΜΩ ΓΕΝΟ ΕΥΧΟΜΑΙ ΟΛΒΙΟΙΝ Ε̣ΙΝΑΙ
ΠΟΝΑΝ̣ Δ ΑΝΤΑΠΕΙΓ̣ΕΣΕΙ ΕΡΓΩΙ ΕΝΕΚΑ ΟΥΣ̣Ι Δ<ι>ΚΑΩΝ ΕΙΤΕ ΜΕ ΜΟΡΑ ΕΔΑΜΑΣΑΤΟ
ΕΙΤΕ ΑΣΤΕΡΟΠΗΤΙ Κ<ε>ΡΑΥΝΩΝ ΝΥΝ Δ ΙΚΕΤΙ ΙΚΩΙ ΠΑΙ̣ ΑΓΝΗν ΦΕΣΕΦΟΝΕΑΝ ΩΣ ΜΕΙ
ΠΡΟΦΩ ΠΕΙΨΗ Ε̣ΔΡΑΙ̣Σ ΕΣ ΕΥΑΓΕΙΩΙ
1. Κ may be compendium for ΚΘ; ΙΣ seems to be a mistake for Ν.
3. ΕΙΝΑΙ either begun _per compendium_ and then written in full, or else
the Ν of ολβιον is compounded with the Ε. Cf. the next tablet.
4. Sc. ποινὰν δ’ ἀνταπέτεισ’ ἔργων ἕνεκ’ οὐχὶ δικαίων.
6, 7. Sc.
Νῦν δ’ ἱκέτης ἵκω παρ’ ἁγνὴν (or ἀγαυὴν?) Φερσεφόνειαν
ὡς με πρόφρων πέμψῃ ἕδρας ἐς εὐαγέων.
VII. _Compagno Tablet (c)._
[Illustration]
ΕΡΧΟΜΑΙ Ε ΚΑΘΑΡΩ ΚΑ[symbol] Ο ΒΑΣΙΛΕΑΕ̣
Ε̣ΥΚΛΕ<ΥΑ> ΚΑ ΕΥΒΟΛΕΥ ΚΑΙ ΘΕΟΙ ΟΣΟΙ ΔΜΟΝΕΣ ΑΛΛΟ
ΚΑΙ ΓΑΡ ΕΩ ΥΩ̣ ΓΕΝΟΣ ΕΥΧΟΜΑΙ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΟΛΒΙΟ
ΠΟΙΝΑΝ ΝΑΤΑΠΕΤΕ ΕΡΓΩ ΟΤΙ ΔΙΚΑΩΝ
ΕΤ ΜΕ ΜΟΙΡ·······ΑΣΤΕΡΟΠΗΤΙ <ΚΑ̣Ι> ΚΕΡΑΥΝΟ
ΝΥΝ ΔΕ ΚΕ ΙΚΩ ΛΚΩ ΠΑΡΑ ΦΣΕΦ
ΩΣ ΜΕ ΡΟΦ ΠΕΨΕ Μ ΕΔΡΑΣ ΕΣ ΕΥΓΩ
1. Perhaps ΕΚΚΑΘΑΡΩ, a double Κ being written _per compendium_.
ΚΑ[symbol] apparently ΚΑΘΡΟ _per compendium_, or even καθαρά. The letter
given as Ο is more like Π, but really illegible.
After ΒΑΣΙΛΕΑ (ΕΑ _per compendium_) a letter like Ε or R. The name Eukles
seems to have puzzled the scribe.
2. ΕΥΚΛΕΥΛ. The last letter may be Α or Λ. Probably there is some
confused dittography, as if the Ε suggested beginning ΕΥΚΛΕ again.
ΟΣΟΙ seems miswriting for ΚΑΙ.
3. ΥΩ or ΥΜ: uncertain.
Εἶναι _per compendium_: cf. the foregoing. Kaibel says of (_b_) and
(_c_): “Haec duo carmina videntur ex communi archetypo esse descripta non
solum quod inter se magis similia sunt quam utrumque primo, sed etiam
propterea quod eadem ligatura in utroque verba ὄλβιον εἶναι scripta sunt.”
4. Or ΝΑΤΑΠΕΤΕΙΣ ΡΓΩ for ἀνταπέτεισ’.
5. ΕΤ: perhaps _compendium_ for εἴτε.
The Σ of ἀστεροπῆτι is like Ε. Before κεραυνο͂ there seems to be καὶ by
dittography.
The general formulae represented by the three tablets together, may be
translated:
‘Out of the Pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,
And Eukles and Eubouleus, and other Gods and Daemons:
For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race.
And I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous,
Whether it be that Fate laid me low or the Gods Immortal
Or ... with star-flung thunderbolt.
I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel;
I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired;
I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld;
I have passed with eager feet to (or from) the Circle desired;
And now I come a suppliant to Holy Phersephoneia
That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.—
Happy and Blessèd One, thou shalt be God instead of Mortal.’
(The prose formula: ‘A kid I have fallen into milk’: is once inserted in
the midst of the poem.)
To sum up, we find in these three tablets some common characteristics.
They all show traces of the influence of some colloquial Italian dialect.
The form κοθαρὸς is Thurian. The free omission and addition of final Ν
is probably another Italian symptom, having its analogy in the treatment
of final M in Latin. It seems not to have been pronounced. We find ΥΜΩ
(ὑμῶν), ΠΡΟΦΩ (πρόφρων), ΑΓΝΗ (ἁγνὴν), ΕΥΑΓΕΙΩ (εὐαγεῶν) and _vice
versâ_ ΚΡΑΥΝΩΝ (κεραυνῷ). There is the same uncertainty about Ι following
another vowel: we have ΕΡΧΟΜΑ, ΜΕΙ (με), ΙΚΩΙ. The writer of (_b_), and
perhaps of (_c_) also, did not understand what words he was writing.
One could be more sure about (_c_) if it were not that some of his most
glaring apparent mistakes prove on examination to be compendiary forms
and possibly accurate.
But another form of compendiary writing occurs, I think, in all of these
tablets, and is of more interest.
There is a sentence which appears in (_c_) as
ΕΤ ΜΕ ΜΟΙΡ············ΑΣΤΕΡΟΠΗΤΙ (ΚΑΙ) ΚΕΡΑΥΝΟ.
Evidently not a complete sentence, any more than it is a complete verse,
but a beginning and end with the middle omitted.
In (_b_) we have it a little fuller.
ΕΙΤΕ ΜΕ ΜΟΡΑ ΕΔΑΜΑΣΑΤΟ····ΕΙΤΕ ΑΣΤΕΡΟΠΗΤΙ ΚΡΑΥΝΩΝ.
This, with a little necessary emendation, might seem to be a complete
sentence, as indeed Kaibel takes it, were it not for a fuller version
still in (_a_).
ΑΛΑ ΜΕ ΜΟΡΑ ΕΔΑΜΑΣΕ ΚΑΙ ΑΘΑΝΑΤΟΙ ΘΕΟΙ ΑΛΛΟΙ
·······ΚΑΙ ΑΣΣΤΕΡΟΒΛΗΤΑ ΚΕΡΑΥΝΟΝ.
This fuller and correcter version is obviously incomplete, both in sense
and in metre. The conclusion seems to be that we have in all three cases
a confessedly incomplete collection of words, standing for a complete
and well-known formula. The words seem to be from the beginning and end
of the sentences. It is as though, in a community accustomed to the
Anglican Church service, we found, first: “_When the wicked man his soul
alive._” Second, and deceptively complete in appearance: “_When the
wicked man shall save his soul alive._” Third, fuller and betraying its
incompleteness: “_When the wicked man turneth from save his soul alive._”
Instances of this sort of abbreviation can be found in most liturgies,
though of course in modern times we should put dots to mark the gap
in the middle. But it is certainly not common on Greek inscriptions.
Ordinary abbreviations are common enough—Θ Κ = Θεοὶ Καταχθόνιοι, δμονες
= δαίμονες, and the like. And there is the system, if system it can be
called, illustrated by the quotation from Gregory Nazianzene in the note
on Tablet III. The case most closely resembling the present that is
known to me is that of the Cyprian Curses, published by Miss Macdonald
in the _Proceedings of the Soc. Bibl. Archaeology_, 1890, p. 160 sqq.
Cf. Wünsch, _Append. CIA_, Praef. p. xviii sqq. They are prayers to all
Ghosts and Daemons to hamper and paralyse and “take away the θυμὸς from”
some adversary, of whom the writer is in mortal fear. They begin with
metrical formulae.
The first starts:
ΟΙΚΑΤΑΓΗΝΚΔΜΟΝΕΣΟΙ
ΚΠΑΤΕΡΕΣΠΑΤΕΡΩΝΚΜΗΤΕΡΕ
ΟΙΚΟΙΤΙΝΕΣΕΝΘΑΔΕΚΕΙΣΘΕΚΟΙΤΙΝΕΣ
ΘΕΘΥΜΟΝΑΠΟΚΡΑΔΙΗΣΠΟΛΥΚΗΔΕΑ
ΟΝΤΕΣ
Another, No. IV.:
ΑΤΑ—ΓΗΝΚΔΜΟΝΕΣΟΙΤΕΣΤΕΚ
ΩΝΚΜΗΤΕΡΕΣΑΝΤΙΕΝΙΡΟΙΑΝΔΡΙΟΙ
ΝΕΣΤΙΝΕΣΕΣΤΕΚΟΙΤΙΝΕΣΕΝΘΑ
ΕΑ
These seem to represent two very similar formulae. The first will run:
Δαίμονες οἱ κατὰ γῆν καὶ δαίμονες οἵτινες ἔστε,
καὶ Πατέρες πατέρων καὶ Μητέρες ἀντιένειροι (?),
χοἵτινες ἐνθάδε κεῖσθε καὶ οἵτινες ἔνθα καθῆσθε,
.........................................................
θυμὸν ἀπὸ κραδίης πολυκηδέα πρόσθε λαβόντες.
The other:
Δαίμονες οἱ κατὰ γῆν καὶ δαίμονες οἵτινες ἔστε,
καὶ Πατέρες πατέρων καὶ Μητέρες ἀντιένειροι,
..................... ἄνδριοι ἠδὲ γύναιοι,
δαίμονες οἵτινες ἔστε καὶ οἵτινες ἐνθάδε κεῖσθε
.........................................................
<θυμὸν ἀπὸ κραδίης> πολυκηδέα <πρόσθε λαβόντες.>
The reconstruction of the verses is helped out by several other smaller
fragments. I have followed, with slight variations, Dieterich and Wünsch.
Now here we find several points closely reminding us of the Compagno
Tablets. (1) The different documents are all quoting the same magical
poem. (2) Since the prayer is a prayer to take away somebody’s θυμός, and
otherwise weaken and paralyse him, I think we may conclude that the line
θυμὸν ἀπὸ κραδίης πολυκηδέα πρόσθε λαβόντες (λιπόντες is added as a v. l.
in one only of the fragments) is the final line of the prayer. “Do this,
that, and the other, having first taken away the hurtful spirit out of
his heart.”
(3) The second tablet (No. IV.) gives a half line ἄνδριοι ἠδὲ γύναιοι,
for which there is no place, and which therefore shows the incompleteness
of a formula which, as written in No. I., might have seemed complete,
exactly like καὶ ἀθάνατοι θεοὶ ἄλλοι in Compagno (_a_).
There is possibly a case of the same phenomenon in the Eleuthernae
tablets (II.). There is one place at the end where the metre is broken.
It may be the full formula contained a series of questions, beginning
with Τίς δ’ ἔσι; and ending with Πῶ δ’ ἔσι;—Γᾶς υἱὸς ἠμὶ καὶ ὠρανῶ
ἀστερόεντος. If there were only one tablet containing the formula,
one would prefer to suppose that Τίς δ’ ἔσι; πῶ δ’ ἔσι; was mere
dittography, a scribe having first written the phrase slightly wrong and
then re-written it right without deleting the first version. But this
hypothesis becomes more difficult when there are three tablets differing
in several particulars but agreeing in this unmetrical double question.
In any case, it would probably be wisest to regard the tablets as each
consisting of a series of formulae, mostly in verse but some in prose,
some apparently complete, others compendiary.
VIII. _The Tablet of Caecilia Secundina._
A thin gold tablet (75 mm. by 24 mm. in size) found in Rome about the
year 1899, probably in one of the ancient tombs on the Ostia Road; now
in the British Museum. The script, though generally clear, is peculiar.
The form of ε (cf. ευκλεεσευ in line 2) is new to me, but in general
the writing is like that of a cursive papyrus of Roman times. Prof.
Comparetti, who has published and discussed the tablet in _Atene e Roma_,
LIV. and LV. (1903), considers it certainly later than the Herculanean
papyri, and would place it in the second century or possibly the first,
A.D.
[Illustration]
I read it thus:
ἔρχεται ἐκ καθαρῶν, καθαρὰ χθονίων βασίλεια,
Εὔκλεες Εὐβουλεῦ τε. Διὸς τέκος, ὅπλα δ’ ἔχ’ ὧδε
Μνημοσύνης, (τὸ δὲ δῶρον ἀοίδιμον ἀνθρώποισιν)
Καικιλία Σεκουνδεῖνα, νόμῳ αἰεὶ ἀπαγωγά.
‘She comes from the Pure, O Pure Queen of those below
And Eukles and Eubouleus.—Child of Zeus, receive here the armour
Of Memory, (’tis a gift songful among men)
Thou Caecilia Secundina, in due rite to avert evil for ever.’
_v._ 2. Probably Εὔκλεες as Comparetti: not εὔκλεέ τ’. The rest of this
line is certain as far as Διὸς τέκος: after that, I make out οπλαδεχωδε,
the first δ being (cf. that in τόδε below) very like α, and the ο not
well finished. Repeated examination of the tablet has confirmed my belief
that these are the inscribed letters; and I may add that Dr A. S. Murray
and Mr Cecil Smith, as well as Dr Hartwig, who formerly possessed the
tablet, all independently read the same.
Taking these letters as they stand, we may obtain sense, grammar and
metre by dividing ὅπλα δ’ ἔχ’ ὧδε: “_Have here the armour of Memory_,”
and I believe that this interpretation, though curious, is right. The
change to the second person and the imperative addressed to the Soul are
just like phrases in the other tablets: ὄλβιε καὶ μακάριστε, ἀλλὰ πίε
μου, κτλ. The peculiar use of ὅπλα, to which I can find nothing quite
similar in our fragments of Orphic literature, has its exact parallel in
St Paul’s repeated metaphors ὅπλα δικαιοσύνης (Rom. vi. 12; 2 Cor. vi.
7), ὅπλα φωτός (Rom. xiii. 2). The “armour of Mnemosyne” to an Orphic
would probably bear just the same shade of meaning as the “armour of
light” to a Christian. Lethe was the Orphic “Darkness.” The use of ὧδε
might be paralleled by Homer’s πρόμολ’ ὧδε, and the scholiasts have
remarked long since that in the later Epic language ὧδε was used more
freely than in Homer. The Cyprian Curses just quoted give ὑμεῖς οἱ ὧδε
κείμενοι.
A further question here suggests itself. Who is the Διὸς τέκος?
Eubouleus, by a straining of the identifications of mythologers, might
claim the title; and it would save trouble, no doubt, to admit his claim.
But apart from the unfair advantage which this would give him over
Eukles, a comparison of the phrases applied to the pure soul in the other
tablets (θεὸς ἐγένου, ὑμῶν γένος ὄλβιον εὔχομαι εἶναι, etc.) suggests
that “Child of Zeus” is vocative. “Child of Zeus, receive here thine
armour of Memory.” The doctrine is orthodox in Orphism; the completely
pure soul is the pure blood of Zagreus, freed from the dross of charred
Titan corpses, and as such is the child of Zeus. In an earlier stage it
was Γᾶς παῖς καὶ Ὠρανῶ.
(Prof. Comparetti reads απλαα on the tablet, which he takes to be a
mistake for ἁπαλὰ “tender,” agreeing _per sensum_ with τέκος—not a very
fortunate conjecture.)
_v._ 3. Should we divide τὸ δὲ or τόδε in apposition to ὅπλα?
_v._ 4. Scanned, apparently, Σ’κουνδεῖνα: such licenses are of course
common. The last three words, forming l. 6 on the tablet, are difficult.
The line begins with a vertical bar, like Ι, which in a document of an
earlier time one would certainly take for the final Ι of ΝΟΜΩΙ. Then
follows αι ει; the gap in the middle of the word would be less, if the
bottom of the ε were visible. After this I make out the letters απαγωγα,
apparently the n. pl. of a word ἀπαγωγὸς, “_calculated to avert_” opposed
to ἐπαγωγὸς, “_calculated to induce_” magic influences. Mr Cecil Smith
agrees with this reading. Prof. Comparetti, having only the photograph to
work from, read [ἀ]ιεὶ διαγεγῶσα, “having always lived lawfully.”
The “armour of Memory,” the “gift songful among men,” is firstly perhaps
the spiritual gift, and then in a secondary sense the actual tablet
which both symbolises and _preserves from oblivion_ Cecilia’s claims to
immortality; and does so _in song_.
Caecilia Secundina is not otherwise known, but must have belonged in some
way to the clan of Caecilii Secundi. She would thus be connected with
the Younger Pliny, whose name before his adoption was Publius Caecilius
Secundus.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Thuc. II. 38.
[2] Ps.-Xen. _Rep. Athen._ II. 99.
[3] Ps.-Xen. _Rep. Athen._ III. 8.
[4] Plat. _Euthyph._ 15 D.
[5] So far as it is possible to distinguish the two, τὸ εὐσεβές is
religion from man’s side, his attitude towards the gods, τὸ ὅσιον
religion from the gods’ side, the claim they make on man. τὸ ὅσιον is
the field of what is made over, consecrated to the gods. The further
connotations of the word as employed by Orphism will be discussed
later. ‘Holiness’ is perhaps the nearest equivalent to τὸ ὅσιον in the
_Euthyphron_.
[6] Sext. Empir. _adv. Math._ IX. 123.
[7] _The Characters of Theophrastus_, p. 264.
[8] Arist. _Polit._ p. 1315 a 1.
[9] Plut. _de Superstit._ I.
[10] Plut. _de aud. poet._ 4.
[11] Eur. frg. 292.
[12] Plut. _de Superstit._ X.
[13] Plut. _de Superstit._ IX.
[14] Plut. _de Superstit._ III.
[15] Xen. _Cyropaed._ III. 3. 58.
[16] Isocr. _Or._ V. 117.
[17] Plat. _Legg._ 854 B ἴθι ἐπὶ θεῶν τὰς ἀποδιοπομπήσεις, ἴθι ἐπὶ
ἀποτροπαίων ἱερὰ ἱκέτης ... τὰς δὲ τῶν κακῶν ξυνουσίας φεῦγε
ἀμεταστρεπτί.
[18] Harpocrat. s.v. ἀποπομπάς.
[19] P. II. 11. 1.
[20] Babr. _Fab._ 63.
[21] Hippocr. περὶ ἐνυπνίων 639 ἐπὶ δὲ τοῖσιν ἐναντίοισιν καὶ γῇ καὶ
ἥρωσιν ἀποτρόπαια γενέσθαι τὰ χαλεπὰ πάντα.
[22] English has no convenient equivalent for ἀποτροπή, which may mean
either turning ourselves away from the thing or turning the thing away
from us. _Aversion_, which for lack of a better word I have been obliged
to adopt, has too much personal and no ritual connotation. Exorcism
is nearer, but too limited and explicit. Dr Oldenberg in apparent
unconsciousness of θεραπεία and ἀποτροπή uses in conjunction the two
words Cultus and Abwehr. To his book, _Die Religion des Veda_, though he
hardly touches on Greek matters, I owe much.
[23] Hom. _Il._ II. 421.
[24] _Companion to the Iliad_, p. 77. I have advisedly translated
οὐλοχύται by barley grain, not meal, because I believe the οὐλοχύται to
be a primitive survival of the custom of offering actual grain, but this
disputed question is here irrelevant. I follow Dr H. von Fritze, _Hermes_
XXXII. 1897, p. 236.
[25] The sources for the Diasia are all collected in the useful and so
far as I am aware complete work, Oskar Band, _Die Attischen Diasien—ein
Beitrag zur Griechischen Horteologie_, Wissenschaftliche Beilage zum
Programm der Victoriaschule, Ostern 1883 (Berlin). Many of the more
important sources are easily accessible in Mr Farnell’s _Cults of the
Greek States_, vol. I. pp. 171, 172. Mr Farnell regards Zeus Meilichios
as merely a form of the Olympian Zeus, not as a _contaminatio_ of two
primarily distinct religious conceptions.
[26] _On._ I. 37.
[27] Thucyd. I. 126 ἔστι γὰρ καὶ Ἀθηναίοις Διάσια ἃ καλεῖται Διὸς ἑορτὴ
Μειλιχίου μεγίστη, ἔξω τῆς πόλεως ἐν ᾗ πανδημεὶ θύουσι πολλὰ οὐχ ἱερεῖα
ἀλλ’ <ἁγνὰ> θύματα ἐπιχώρια.
Schol. ad loc. θύματα· τινὰ πέμματα εἰς ζῴων μορφὰς τετυπωμένα ἔθυον.
[28] _vv._ 864 and 408.
[29] Luc. _Icaro-Menip._ 24 schol. ad loc. Διάσια ἑορτὴ Ἀθήνησιν, ἣν
ἐπετέλουν μετά τινος στυγνότητος, θύοντες ἐν αὐτῇ Διὶ Μειλιχίῳ.
[30] Xen. _Anab._ VII. 8. 4 τῇ δὲ ὑστεραίᾳ ὁ Ξενοφῶν ... ἐθύετο καὶ
ὡλοκαύτει χοίρους τῷ πατρῴῳ νόμῳ καὶ ἐκαλλιέρει. The incident probably
took place in February, the month of the Diasia. See Mr H. G. Dakyns,
_Xen._ vol. I. p. 315.
[31] P. X. 38. 8.
[32] P. I. 37. 4.
[33] P. II. 20. 1.
[34] Hesych. s.v. Μαιμάκτης· μειλίχιος, καθάρσιος.
[35] P. II. 2. 8.
[36] Permission to republish the two reliefs figured here and that
in fig. 5 has been courteously granted me by Professor Kekulé von
Stradowitz, Director of the Berlin Museum, and I owe to his kindness the
excellent photographs from which the reproductions are made. From the
official catalogue (_Beschreibung der Antiken Skulpturen in Berlin_) I
quote the following particulars as to material, provenance &c.
1. _Cat._ 722, H. 0·58, Br. 0·31. Hymettus marble found with No. 723
at the Zea harbour not far from Ziller’s house. Taken to Berlin 1879.
Inscribed ΔΙΙ ΜΕΙΛΙΧΙΩΙ. Date fourth century B.C., see _CIA._ II. 3,
1581, cf. _CIA._ II. 3. 1578, 1582, 1583.
2. _Cat._ 723, material, provenance, date, same as 722.
[37] _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ VII. p. 507.
[38] _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ 1883, p. 510.
[39] From a photograph (Peiraeus 12) published by kind permission of the
German Archaeological Institute, see _Eph. Arch._ 1886, p. 47.
[40] Lucian, _Tim._ c. 7.
[41] Suidas s.v. Διάσια.
[42] _J.H.S._ XIX. p. 114, note 1.
[43] Mr P. Giles kindly tells me that a rare Sanskrit word _dveshas_
meaning ‘hate’ and the like exists and phonetically would nearly
correspond to the Latin _dirus_. The corresponding form in Greek would
appear as δειος, unless in late Greek. But from the end of the 5th
century B.C. onwards the pronunciation would be the same as δῖος, and if
the word survived only in ritual terms it would naturally be confused
with δῖος. Almost all authorities on Latin however regard the _ru_ in
_dirus_ as a suffix containing an original _r_ as in _mirus_, _durus_,
etc. This view, which would be fatal to the etymology of _dirus_ proposed
in the text, seems supported by a statement of Servius (if the statement
be accurate) on _Aen._ III. 235 ‘Sabini et Umbri quae nos mala _dira_
appellant,’ as, though _s_ between vowels passes in Latin and Umbrian
into _r_, it remains an _s_ sound in Sabine.
[44] Hesych. s.v. ὁ δὲ Πολέμων τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Διὶ τεθυμένου ἱερείου. From
Athenaeus also we learn that Polemon had treated in some detail of the
‘fleece of Zeus’; Athenaeus says (XI. § 478 C), Πολέμων δ’ ἐν τῷ περὶ τοῦ
δίου κωδίου φησί....
[45] Suidas s.v. θύουσί τε τῷ τε Μειλιχίῳ καὶ τῷ Κτησίῳ Διί, τὰ δὲ κώδια
τούτων φυλάσσουσι καὶ Δία (δῖα) προσαγορεύονται, χρῶνται δ’ αὐτοῖς οἵ τε
Σκιροφορίων τὴν πομπὴν στέλλοντες καὶ ὁ δᾳδοῦχος ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι καὶ ἄλλοι
τινὲς πρὸς καθαρμοὺς ὑποστορνύντες αὐτὰ τοῖς ποσὶ τῶν ἐναγῶν. For Δία
Gaisford conjectures Διὸς but from the passage of Eustathius (see infr.)
it is clear that we must read δῖα.
[46] Eustath. ad _Od._ XXII. 481 § 1934-5 ἐδόκουν γὰρ οἱ Ἕλληνες οὕτω τὰ
τοιαῦτα μύση καθαίρεσθαι διοπομπούμενα. καὶ ἕτεροι μὲν δηλοῦσι τρόπους
καθαρσίων ἑτέρους, ἃ καὶ ἐξάγοντες τῶν οἴκων μετὰ τὰς ἐθίμους ἐπαοιδὰς
προσέῤῥιπτον ἀμφόδοις ἔμπαλιν τὰ πρόσωπα στρέφοντες καὶ ἐπανιόντες
ἀμεταστρεπτί. ὁ δέ γε ποιητικὸς Ὀδυσσεὺς οὐχ οὕτω ποιεῖ ἀλλ’ ἑτέρως
ἁπλούστερον. φησὶ γοῦν· οἶσε θέειον γρῆυ κακῶν ἄκος ... πλέον ποιήσας
οὐδέν ... θέειον δὲ θυμιάματος εἶδος καθαίρειν δοκοῦντος τοὺς μιασμούς.
διὸ καὶ διαστείλας κακῶν ἄκος αὑτό φησιν ὁ ποιητής, οὔτε δέ τινες ἐνταῦθα
ἐπῳδαὶ συνήθεις τοῖς παλαιοῖς οὔτε στενωπὸς ἐν ᾧ ἄνθρακες ἀπαγόμενοι αὐτῷ
ἀγγείῳ ἐῤῥίπτοντο ὀπισθοφανῶς. ἰστέον δὲ ὅτι οὐ μόνον διὰ θείου ἐγίνοντο
καθαρμοὶ καθὰ προσεχῶς ἐγράφη ἀλλὰ καὶ φυτά τινα εἰς τοῦτο χρήσιμα ἦν.
ἀριστερεὼν γοῦν, φυτὸν κατὰ Παυσανίαν ἐπιτήδειον εἰς καθαρμόν· καὶ σῦς δὲ
εἰς τοιαῦτα, ἐστὶν οὗ, παρελαμβάνετο, ὡς ἐν Ἰλιάδι φαίνεται. καὶ οἱ τὸ
διοπομπεῖν δὲ ἑρμηνεύοντές φασιν ὅτι δῖον ἐκάλουν κώδιον ἱερείου τυθέντος
Διῒ μειλιχίῳ ἐν τοῖς καθαρμοῖς, φθίνοντος Μαιμακτηριῶνος μηνὸς ὅτε ἤγοντο
τὰ πομπαῖα, καὶ καθαρμῶν ἐκβολαὶ εἰς τὰς τριόδους ἐγίνοντο. εἶχον δὲ μετὰ
χεῖρας πομπόν· ὅπερ ἦν, φασί, κηρύκιον, σέβας Ἑρμοῦ. καὶ ἐκ τοῦ τοιούτου
πομποῦ καὶ τοῦ ῥηθέντος δίου τὸ διοπομπεῖν ... ἄλλως δὲ κοινότερον
διοπομπεῖν καὶ ἀποδιοπομπεῖν ἐφαίνετο τὸ Διὸς ἀλεξικάκου ἐπικλήσει
ἐκπέμπειν τὰ φαῦλα. Eustathius passes on to speak of purification by
blood and the φαρμακοί, see p. 95.
[47] Maimaktes, it will be remembered, is the other face of Meilichios,
see supra.
[48] See Liddell and Scott, s.v.
[49] Dicaearch. _Frg. Hist._ II. 262.
[50] P. I. 34. 2-5. Strabo (VI. § 284) says that the Daunians when they
consulted the oracle of the hero Calchas sacrificed a black ram to him
and slept on the fleece. The worshippers of the ‘Syrian Goddess,’ Lucian
says (_De Syr. Dea_ 35), knelt on the ground and put the feet and the
head of the victim on their heads. He probably means that they got inside
the skin and wore it with the front paws tied round the neck as Herakles
wears the lion-skin.
[51] Dicaearchus I. 6.
[52] As regards the ethnography of these two strata, I accept Prof.
Ridgeway’s view that the earlier stratum, which I have called chthonic,
belongs to the primitive population of the Mediterranean to which he
gives the name Pelasgian; the later stratum, to which belongs the manner
of sacrifice I have called ‘Olympian,’ is characteristic of the Achaean
population coming from the North. But, as I have no personal competency
in the matter of ethnography and as Prof. Ridgeway’s second volume is
as yet unpublished, I have thought it best to state the argument as it
appeared to me independently, i.e. that there are two strata in religion,
one primitive, one later. I sought for many years an ethnographical clue
to this stratification, but sought in vain.
[53] The sources for the Anthesteria are collected and discussed in the
Lexicons of Pauly-Wissowa and of Daremberg and Saglio and more completely
in Dr Martin Nilsson’s _Studia de Dionysiis Atticis_ (Lundae, 1900),
which has been of great service to me.
[54] Harpocrat. s.v.
[55] Plut. _Q. Symp._ III. 7. 1.
[56] The gist of such offerings will be considered under the _Thargelia_.
[57] Plut. _Q. Symp._ VIII. 3.
[58] _Op._ 368.
[59] Discussed in relation to Dionysos, see infra, Chapter VIII.
[60] Ar. _Ran._ 212, trans. Mr Gilbert Murray.
[61] Aristoph. _Ach._ 1076, schol. ad loc.
[62] Thucyd. II. 15.
[63] Harpocrat. s.v. Χόες.
[64] Suidas s.v. θύραζε· ἔξω τῆς θύρας·
θύραζε Κᾶρες, οὐκ ἔτ’ Ἀνθεστήρια,
οἱ μὲν διὰ πλῆθος οἰκετῶν Καρικῶν εἰρῆσθαί φασιν, ὡς ἐν τοῖς Ἀνθεστηρίοις
εὐωχουμένων αὐτῶν καὶ οὐκ ἐργαζομένων. τῆς οὖν ἑορτῆς τελεσθείσης λέγειν
ἐπὶ τὰ ἔργα ἐκπέμποντας αὐτούς·
θύραζε Κᾶρες, οὐκ ἔτ’ Ἀνθεστήρια.
τινὲς δὲ οὕτω τὴν παροιμίαν φασί·
θύραζε κῆρες, οὐκ ἔνι Ἀνθεστήρια,
ὡς κατὰ τὴν πόλιν τοῖς Ἀνθεστηρίοις τῶν ψυχῶν περιερχομένων.
Photius s.v. substantially identical.
To the information here given Zenobius (_Cent. Paroimiogr._) adds:
Εἴρηται δὲ ἡ παροιμία ἐπὶ τῶν τὰ αὐτὰ ἐπιζητούντων πάντοτε λαμβάνειν.
It is fortunate that Suidas records his second conjecture, as his first
is rendered plausible by the fact that we know the household servants
were admitted to the Pithoigia. Probably in classical days κῆρες had
already become an old fashioned word for souls and the formulary may have
been easily misunderstood. Mommsen in his second edition (_Feste der
Stadt Athen_, p. 386) argues that the form κῆρες is impossible because
‘Gespenstern zeigt man nicht die Thür wie einem Bettler,’ a difficulty
that will scarcely be felt by any one acquainted with primitive customs.
[65] Ovid, _Fasti_ V. 443.
[66] _Primitive Culture_ II. p. 40.
[67] _Religion des Vedas_, p. 533.
[68] Schol. ad Ar. _Ran._ 218 τοῖς ἱεροῖσι Χύτροισι· Χύτροι ἑορτὴ παρ’
Ἀθηναίοις· ἄγεται δὲ παρὰ ταύτην τὴν αἰτίαν, ἣν καὶ Θεόπομπος ἐκτίθεται
γράφων οὕτως· < > ... ἔπειτα· θύειν αὐτοῖς ἔθος ἔχουσι τῶν μὲν Ὀλυμπίων
θεῶν οὐδενὶ τὸ παράπαν, Ἑρμῇ δὲ χθονίῳ. καὶ τῆς χύτρας, ἣν ἕψουσι πάντες
οἱ κατὰ τὴν πόλιν, οὐδεὶς γεύεται τῶν ἱερέων· τοῦτο δὲ ποιοῦσι τῇ <ιγʹ>
ἡμέρᾳ. καί· τοὺς τότε παραγινομένους ὑπὲρ τῶν ἀποθανόντων ἱλάσασθαι τὸν
Ἑρμῆν. ἱερῶν Rav., ἱερέων Ven.: whichever be followed, the mandate of not
tasting is clear.
[69] Schol. ad Ar. _Ach._ 1076 Χύτρους· Θεόπομπος τοὺς διασωθέντας ἐκ τοῦ
κατακλυσμοῦ ἑψῆσαί φησι χύτρας πανσπερμίας ὅθεν οὕτω κληθῆναι τὴν ἑορτήν
... τῆς δὲ χύτρας οὐδένα γεύσασθαι.
[70] _Feste der Stadt Athen_, p. 385.
[71] P. IV. 35. 9 κολυμβήθρα ἥντινα ὀνομάζουσιν οἱ ἐπιχώριοι χύτρους
γυναικείους.
[72] Herod. VIII. 176.
[73] Theoph. _Hist. Plant._ IV. 11. 8 οὗτος δὲ ὁ τόπος προσαγορεύεται μὲν
Πελεκανία, τοῦτο δ’ ἐστὶν ἄττα χύτροι καλούμενοι βαθύσματα τῆς λίμνης.
[74] Hesych. s.v. οἱ χύτρινοι.
[75] Plato, _Rep._ 614 C.
[76] P. IX. 8.
[77] _On._ X. 99.
[78] Hesych. s.v. φαρμακή· ἡ χύτρα ἣν ἡτοίμαζον τοῖς καθαίρουσι τὰς
πόλεις.
[79] _v._ 96.
[80] Schol. ad Ar. _Vesp._ 289.
[81] Suidas s.v. ἐγχυτρίστριαι· αἱ τὰς χοὰς τοῖς τετελευτηκόσιν
ἐπιφέρουσαι ... ἐγχυτριστρίας δὲ λέγεσθαι καὶ ὅσαι τοὺς ἐναγεῖς
καθαίρουσιν, αἷμα ἐπιχέουσαι ἱερείου.
[82] Photius s.v. μιαρὰ ἡμέρα· ἐν τοῖς Χουσὶν Ἀνθεστηριῶνος μηνός, ἐν ᾧ
δοκοῦσιν αἱ ψυχαὶ τῶν τελευτησάντων ἀνιέναι, ῥάμνων ἕωθεν ἐμασῶντο καὶ
πίττῃ τὰς θύρας ἔχριον.
[83] Diosc. _De mat. med._ I. 119 λέγεται δὲ καὶ κλῶνας αὐτῆς θύραις ἢ
θύρασι προστεθέντας ἀποκρούειν τὰς τῶν φαρμακῶν κακουργίας. For this
reference I am indebted to the kindness of Dr Frazer, who also notes that
in Ovid _spina alba_, white thorn, is placed in a window to keep off
_tristes noxas_ and _striges_ (Ovid, _Fasti_ VI. 129-163), and compares
the English notion that hawthorn keeps off witches (see _Golden Bough_,
second edit. vol. I. p. 124, note 3). Miss M. C. Harrison tells me that
to this day rue (_ruta_) is eaten on Ascension Day at Pratola Peligna and
other places in the Abruzzi, “that the witches may not come to torment
our children” (noi mangiamo la ruta affinche le streghe non vengano a
tormentare le creature nostre); see A. De Nino, _Usi Abruzzesi_ I. p. 168.
[84] Phot. s.v. ῥάμνος· φυτὸν ὃ ἐν τοῖς Χουσὶν ὡς ἀλεξιφάρμακον ἐμασῶντο
ἕωθεν, καὶ πίττῃ ἐχρίοντο τὰ δώματα, ἀμίαντος γὰρ αὕτη· διὸ καὶ ἐν ταῖς
γενέσεσι τῶν παιδίων χρίουσι τὰς οἰκίας εἰς ἀπέλασιν τῶν δαιμόνων.
[85] Schol. ad Ar. _Ach._ 961 Χοὰς· ἐγχύσεις, ἐναγίσματα ἐπὶ νεκροῖς ἢ
σπονδάς. ἐκπίπτει χρησμὸς δεῖν χοὰς τοῖς τεθνεῶσι τῶν Αἰτωλῶν ἐπάγειν ἀνὰ
πᾶν ἔτος καὶ ἑορτὴν Χοὰς ἄγειν.
[86] Athen. VII. 2 § 276.
[87] Athen. X. 49 § 437 and Suidas s.v. Χόες.
[88] Eur. _Iph. in T._ 953 seq.
[89] The topographical question does not here immediately concern the
argument. I have tried to show elsewhere (_J.H.S._ XX. p. 111) that the
precinct of the Limnae cannot be severed from the Areopagos without grave
loss to mythology.
[90] Athen. XI. 93 § 496.
[91] Eustath. ad _Il._ XXIV. 526, p. 1363. 26 οὐχ ἑορτάσιμος ... ἀλλ’ ἐς
τὸ πᾶν ἀποφράς.
[92] First published by Dr Paul Schadow, _Eine Attische Grablekythos_,
Inaugural-Dissertation (Jena, 1897), reproduced and discussed by the
present writer _J.H.S._ XX. p. 101.
[93] Ar. _Eq._ 792. Mr R. A. Neil ad loc. points out that πίθος answers
to _fidelia_ in etymology, to _dolium_ in meaning.
[94] Dr Sam. Wide, ‘Aphidna in Nord-Attica,’ _A. Mitt._ 1896, p. 398.
[95] _Od._ X. 236.
[96] _Od._ XXIV. 1-9.
[97] Pind. _Ol._ IX. 33
οὐδ’ Ἀΐδας ἀκινήταν ἔχε ῥάβδον
βρότεα σώμαθ’ ᾇ κατάγει κοίλαν πρὸς ἀγυιὰν
θνᾳσκόντων.
ἀκινήταν is usually rendered ‘unraised’ as though the sceptre were
lifted in token of kingly power. I translate by ‘wave’ because I believe
the action denoted is the waving or moving of a wand, not the raising
of a sceptre. The verb κινέω is, I believe, characteristic of this
wand-waving. κινέω is used in Homer (loc. cit.) τῇ δ’ ἄγε κινήσας. By
Pindar’s time the wand and the sceptre were fused, but he is haunted by
the old connotation of magic.
[98] For text, see p. 24, note 2.
[99] Space forbids the discussion of the whole evolution of the
kerykeion. It contains elements drawn from both sceptre and rhabdos. The
rhabdos is sometimes forked like a divining rod: the forks were entwined
in various shapes. Round the rhabdos a snake, symbol of the underworld,
was sometimes curled as the snake is curled round the staff of
Aesculapius. Ultimately the twisted ends of the rhabdos were crystallized
into curled decorative snakes. In like fashion the frayed fringe of the
leather aegis of Athene is misunderstood and rendered as snakes. By the
time of Eustathius, kerykeion and rhabdos are not clearly differentiated.
[100] _J.H.S._ XX. p. 101.
[101] Plut. _Vit. Cam._ XX.
[102] _Ling. Lat._ 5 § 157.
[103] _Pauli excerpta ex Lib. Pomp._ Fest. s.v. doliola.
[104] _Iliad_ XXIV. 527
δοιοὶ γάρ τε πίθοι κατακείαται ἐν Διὸς οὐδῷ
δώρων οἷα δίδωσι κακῶν ἕτερος δὲ ἑάων.
[105] Fest. 154.
[106] Macr. _Sat._ I. 16. 18.
[107] Harpocrat. s.v. Ἀνθεστ. διὰ τὸ πλεῖστα τῶν ἐκ τῆς γῆς ἀνθεῖν τότε.
[108] _Etym. Mag._ s.v. Ἀνθεστήρια.
[109] _J.H.S._ XX. 115.
[110] _Od._ X. 526.
[111] My view of the primitive significance of the root θεσ, which is
perhaps primarily rather _to conjure_ than _to pray_, will appear more
clearly when we come to the discussion of the Thesmophoria.
[112] Dr Wuensch in his instructive pamphlet _Ein Frühlingsfest auf
Malta_ (Leipzig, 1902) discusses a spring festival of the flowering
of beans which he believes to be analogous to the _Anthesteria_, but
the rites practised are wholly different. Dr Hiller von Gaertringen
(_Festschrift für O. Benndorf_) calls attention to the title _Anthister_
which occurs in an inscription found on Thera, but the inscription is of
the second century B.C., the festival of the ‘Anthesteria’ was celebrated
on Thera, as indeed wherever there was a primitive population, and
_Anthister_ must have borrowed rather than lent his name.
[113] Archbishop Eustathius may have had a dim consciousness of the
separable ἀνα when he says ἄνθος ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ ἀναθέειν παρῆκται κατὰ
συγκοπήν.
[114] Schol. ad Luc. _Tim._ 43 ἀποφρὰς ἡ ἡμέρα] ... ἦσαν παρ’ Ἕλλησιν
ἡμέραι ἀπραξίαν εἰσηγούμεναι παντὸς καὶ ἀργίαν, ἃς ἀποφράδας ἐκάλουν. ἐν
ταύταις οὐδὲ προσεῖπεν ἄν τίς τινα, οὐδὲ καθάπαξ φίλος ἐπεμίγνυτο φίλῳ,
ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ ἱερὰ ἀχρημάτιστα ἦν αὐτοῖς. ἐκαλεῖτο δὲ ταῦτα αὐτοῖς κατὰ τὸν
Φευρουάριον μῆνα ὅτε καὶ ἐνήγιζον τοῖς καταχθονίοις· καὶ πᾶς οὗτος ὁ μὴν
ἀνεῖτο κατοιχομένοις μετὰ στυγνότητος πάντων προϊόντων ἕτερον τρόπον ὃν
καὶ τὰ Διάσια στυγνάζοντες ἦγον Ἀθηναῖοι.
[115] Plut. _Q.R._ XXXIV. διὰ τί, τῶν ἄλλων Ῥωμαίων ἐν τῷ Φεβρουαρίῳ
μηνὶ ποιουμένων χοὰς καὶ ἐναγισμοὺς τοῖς τεθνηκόσι, Δέκιμος Βροῦτος (ὡς
Κικέρων ἱστόρηκεν) ἐν τῷ Δεκεμβρίῳ τοῦτ’ ἔπραττεν;
[116] Plut. _Q.R._ XXV. τῶν μηνῶν τὸν μὲν πρῶτον ὀλυμπίοις θεοῖς ἱέρωσαν
τὸν δὲ δεύτερον χθονίοις ἐν ᾧ καὶ καθαρμούς τινας τελοῦσι καὶ τοῖς
κατοιχομένοις ἐναγίζουσιν.
[117] Athen. III. 53 § 98 τὸν δὲ μῆνα τοῦτον κληθῆναί φησιν ὁ Μαυρόσιος
Ἰόβας ἀπὸ τῶν κατουδαίων φόβων κατ’ ἀναίρεσιν τῶν δειμάτων ἐν ᾧ τοῦ
χειμῶνός ἐστι τὸ ἀκμαιότατον καὶ ἔθος τότε τοῖς κατοιχομένοις τὰς χοὰς
ἐπιφέρειν πολλαῖς ἡμέραις.
[118] Ovid, _Fasti_ II. 19.
[119] The ceremonies of the Lupercalia have been fully discussed by
Warde-Fowler, _The Roman Festivals_, p. 310, and very fully by Mannhardt,
_Mythologische Forschungen_, p. 72.
[120] _Julius Caesar_, Act I. Sc. 2, _v._ 6.
[121] Herond. _Mim._ III. 3.
[122] Serv. ad Verg. _Aen._ VIII. 343 nam pellem ipsam capri veteres
_februum_ vocabant. Varro (_Ling. Lat._ VI. 13) says that _februum_ was
Sabine for _purgamentum_.
[123] Athen. VIII. 11 § 334 F.
[124] 3rd cent. B.C.
[125] That the religion of Dionysos came to Greece at a comparatively
late date will be shewn in Chapter VIII.
[126] _Od._ XXIV. 215
δεῖπνον δ’ αἶψα συῶν ἱερεύσατε ὅς τις ἄριστος.
[127] Porph. _de Abst._ II. passim.
[128] Eust. ad _Il._ I. 449 § 132 μετὰ δὲ τὰς οὐλοχύτας αἱ θυσίαι καὶ ἡ
ἐν αὐταῖς κρεωφαγία διότι καὶ μετὰ τὴν τῶν ἀναγκαίων τροφῶν εὕρεσιν ἡ τῆς
κρεωδαισίας πολυτέλεια καὶ τὸ τῆς τροφῆς ἐπείσακτον εὕρηται.
[129] Prof. Ridgeway (_Early Age of Greece_, vol. I. p. 524) has shown
(to me conclusively) that these Homeric Achaeans were of Celtic origin
and brought with them from central Europe the flesh-_roasting_ and
flesh-eating habits of their northern ancestors.
[130] Athen. I. 46 § 25.
[131] P. II. 10. 1 ἐπὶ δὲ τῇ θυσίᾳ τοιάδε δρᾶν νομίζουσι. Φαῖστον ἐν
Σικυωνίᾳ λέγουσιν ἐλθόντα καταλαβεῖν Ἡρακλεῖ σφᾶς ὡς ἥρωϊ ἐναγίζοντας·
οὔκουν ἠξίου δρᾶν οὐδὲν ὁ Φαῖστος τῶν αὐτῶν, ἀλλ’ ὡς θεῷ θύειν. καὶ νῦν
ἔτι ἄρνα οἱ Σικυώνιοι σφάξαντες καὶ τοὺς μηροὺς ἐπὶ τοῦ βωμοῦ καύσαντες
τὰ μὲν ἐσθίουσιν ὡς ἀπὸ ἱερείου τὰ δὲ ὡς ἥρωϊ τῶν κρεῶν ἐναγίζουσι.
That the distinction between θύειν and ἐναγίζειν is no late invention
of Pausanias is shown by the fact that Herodotos (II. 43) uses the same
words and draws the same distinction though with less explicit detail.
Speaking of Herakles as god and hero, he says: τῷ μὲν ἀθανάτῳ Ὀλυμπίῳ δὲ
ἐπωνυμίην θύουσι, τῷ δ’ ἑτέρῳ ὡς ἥρωϊ ἐναγίζουσι.
[132] P. VIII. 34. 3 καὶ οὕτω ταῖς μὲν (ταῖς μελαίναις) ἐνήγισεν,
ἀποτρέπων τὸ μήνιμα αὐτῶν, ταῖς δὲ ἔθυσε ταῖς λευκαῖς.
[133] Eust. ad _Il._ XXIII. 429, 1357. 59 οὕτω καὶ ἅγιος παρὰ τοῖς
παλαιοῖς οὐ μόνον ὁ καθαρὸς ἀλλὰ καὶ ὁ μιαρὸς διὰ τὸ τοῦ ἅγους διπλόσημον.
[134] I do not deny that the word can be translated if we are content
to vary our rendering in each various case. In the passages already
discussed ‘devote’ is perhaps a fair equivalent, because the contrast
emphasized is with a sacrifice shared. Sometimes the word may be rendered
simply ‘sacrifice to the dead,’ sometimes ‘purificatory sacrifice,’
sometimes ‘expiatory sacrifice.’ No one word covers the whole field. It
is this lost union of many diverse elements that has to be recovered and
is nameless.
[135] Athen. IX. 78 § 409 E ff. ἰδίως δὲ καλεῖται παρ’ Ἀθηναίοις ἀπόνιμμα
ἐπὶ τῶν εἰς τιμὴν τοῖς νεκροῖς γινομένων καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν τοὺς ἐναγεῖς
καθαιρόντων ὡς καὶ Κλείδημος ἐν τῷ ἐπιγραφομένῳ Ἐξηγητικῷ. Προθεὶς γὰρ
περὶ ἐναγισμῶν γράφει τάδε· “Ὄρυξαι βόθυνον πρὸς ἑσπέραν τοῦ σήματος.
Ἔπειτα παρὰ τὸν βόθυνον πρὸς ἑσπέραν βλέπε, ὕδωρ κατάχεε, λέγων τάδε·
‘Ὑμῖν ἀπόνιμμα οἷς χρὴ καὶ οἷς θέμις.’ Ἔπειτα αὖθις μύρον κατάχεε.”
Παρέθετο ταῦτα καὶ Δωρόθεος φάσκων καὶ ἐν τοῖς Εὐπατριδῶν πατρίοις τάδε
γεγράφθαι περὶ τῆς τῶν ἱκετῶν καθάρσεως. Ἔπειτ’ ἀπονιψάμενος αὐτὸς καὶ
οἱ ἄλλοι οἱ σπλαγχνεύοντες, ὕδωρ λαβὼν κάθαιρε ἀπόνιζε τὸ αἷμα τοῦ
καθαιρομένου καὶ μετὰ τὸ ἀπόνιμμα ἀνακινήσας εἰς ταὐτὸ ἔγχεε.
[136] Hesych. λουτρόν· τὸ ῥύπαρον ὕδωρ ἤγουν ἀπόνιμμα.
[137] _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ XXIV. p. 258.
[138] Now in the Museum at Chicago. _American Journal of Archaeology_,
1899, pl. IV. The vase presents some difficulties, the discussion of
which would be irrelevant here. The figure of Salmoneus madly and
sacrilegiously counterfeiting Zeus and holding his thunder-bolt is I
think certain.
[139] Fillets are specially characteristic of sacrificial victims.
Herodotus VII. 197 describes Athamas as στέμμασι πυκασθείς.
[140] Published by Mr H. B. Walters, _J.H.S._ XVIII. 1898, p. 281, pl.
XV. The class of vases known sometimes as ‘Tyrrhenian,’ sometimes as
Corintho-Attic, all belong to the same period, about the middle of the
sixth century B.C., and are apparently from the same workshop.
[141] Eur. _Hec._ 535.
[142] Omphalos and tomb are in intent the same, see _J.H.S._ XIX. p. 225.
[143] The genesis of the Erinys is discussed later, in Chapter V.
[144] Aesch. _Eum._ 253.
[145] Aesch. _Eum._ 264.
[146] Schol. ad Eur. _Phoen._ 284 διαφέρει βωμὸς καὶ ἐσχάρα. ad 274
ἐσχάρα μὲν κυρίως ὁ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς βόθρος ἔνθα ἐναγίζουσι τοῖς κάτω
ἐρχομένοις, βωμὸς δὲ ἐν ᾧ θύουσι τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις θεοῖς.
[147] Porph. _de antr. nymph._ 3 τοῖς μὲν Ὀλυμπίοις θεοῖς ναούς τε καὶ
ἕδη καὶ βωμοὺς ἱδρύσαντο, χθονίοις δὲ καὶ ἥρωσιν ἐσχάρας, ὑποχθονίοις δὲ
βόθρους καὶ μέγαρα. The _megara_ will be discussed later (p. 125).
[148] Aesch. _Eum._ 106.
[149] Eustath. ad _Il._ I. 459 § 134.
[150] Eustath. § 1057, 37.
[151] Schol. ad Apoll. Rhod. I. 587 τοῖς μὲν οὖν κατοιχομένοις ὡς περὶ
ἡλίου δυσμὰς ἐναγίζουσι τοῖς δὲ οὐρανίδαις ὑπὸ τὴν ἕω, ἀνατέλλοντος τοῦ
ἡλίου.
[152] Eur. _El._ 514.
[153] Eur. _Ion_ 277
ΙΩ. πατὴρ Ἐρεχθεὺς σὰς ἔθυσε συγγόνους;
ΚΡ. ἔτλη πρὸ γαίας σφάγια παρθένους κτανεῖν.
[154] Eur. _Hec._ 121 τύμβῳ σφάγιον.
[155] Athen. XIV. 22 § 626 καθαρμὸν τῆς πόλεως ἐποιήσαντο σφάγια
περιάγοντες κύκλῳ τῆς χώρας ἁπάσης.
[156] Eur. _Supp._ 1296 ἐν ᾧ δὲ τέμνειν σφάγια χρή σ’ ἄκουέ μου.
[157] P. III. 20. 9.
[158] P. IV. 15. 8.
[159] P. V. 24. 10 τοῖς γε ἀρχαιοτέροις ἐπὶ ἱερείῳ ἦν καθεστηκὸς ἐφ’ ᾧ
τις ὅρκιον ἐποιήσατο μηδὲ ἐδώδιμον εἶναι τοῦτ’ ἔτι ἀνθρώπῳ. Strictly
speaking Pausanias ought to have written ἐπὶ σφαγίῳ, but his meaning is
sufficiently clear. τόμια are actually σφάγια, not ἱερεῖα. Eustathius, in
discussing the sacrifice of Odysseus to the ghosts in the Nekuia, makes
the following statement: ὅτι Ὁμήρου εἰπόντος ἱερήια τὰ ἐν Ἅιδου σφάγια
ἐπὶ χοῇ νεκρῶν φασὶν οἱ παλαιοὶ οὐκ ὀρθῶς εἰρῆσθαι τοῦτο, ἐπὶ γὰρ νεκρῶν
τόμιά φασι καὶ ἔντομα, ἐπὶ δὲ θεῶν ἱερεῖα. Pausanias in the passage cited
above (III. 20. 9) uses θύειν where σφαγιάζεσθαι would be more correct.
He makes a sort of climax of confusion when, in describing the ritual of
the hero Amphiaraos, he says (I. 34. 5): ἐστὶ δὲ καθάρσιον τῷ θεῷ θύειν,
when he should have said τῷ ἥρωι σφαγιάζεσθαι.
[160] _Il._ XIX. 265.
[161] P. II. 34. 3.
[162] Ar. _Ran._ 847.
[163] Virg. _Aen._ III. 120.
[164] P. II. 12. 1.
[165] Aesch. _Agam._ 214.
[166] The full and somewhat revolting details as to how omens were
taken from σφάγια do not concern us here; they are given in full by the
scholiast on Eur. _Phoenissae_ 1255; see P. Stengel, _Hermes_ 1899,
XXXIV. p. 642.
[167] Porph. _de Abst._ II. 51.
[168] Xen. _Anab._ VI. 5. 21.
[169] Aesch. _Sept._ 230
ἀνδρῶν τάδ’ ἐστὶ σφάγια καὶ χρηστήρια
θεοῖσιν ἔρδειν πολεμίων πειρωμένων.
[170] Ammon. p. 72 Valck. θύουσι μὲν γὰρ οἱ σφάζοντες τὰ ἱερεῖα, θύονται
δὲ οἳ διὰ τῶν σπλάγχνων μαντεύονται.
[171] The question of σφάγια has been very fully discussed by Dr Paul
Stengel in four papers as follows: ‘Σφάγια,’ _Hermes_ XXI. p. 307,
1886; ‘Miscellen,’ XXV. p. 321; ‘Prophezeiung aus der Σφάγια,’ XXXI. p.
479 and XXXIV. p. 642. To this must be added papers by the same author
on ἐντέμνειν ἔντομα in the _Zeitschrift für Gymnasial-Wesen_ 1880, p.
743, and in the _Jahrbuch für Philologie_ 1882, p. 322, and 1883, p.
375, and on the winds, _Hermes_ 1900, p. 626. I owe much in the matter
of references to Dr Stengel’s full collection of sources, but his
conclusions as stated in ‘Die Sakralaltertümer’ (Iwan Müller’s _Handbuch
der kl. Altertumswissenschaft_, Band V. Abt. 3) seem to me to be vitiated
by the assumption that ceremonies of purification are late and foreign
importations.
[172] Apoll. Rhod. IV. 470, trans. by Mr Gilbert Murray.
[173] Since the above was written my attention has been called to Dr J.
G. Frazer’s paper ‘On certain Burial Customs as illustrations of the
primitive theory of the soul’ (_Journal of Anthropological Institute_,
vol. XV. 1885-6). After a detailed examination of the burial rites and
customs of the Greeks and many other peoples Mr Frazer reaches the
following memorable and to me most welcome conclusion: ‘In general
I think we may lay down the rule that wherever we find so-called
purification by fire or water from pollution contracted by contact with
the dead we may assume with much probability that the original intention
was to place a physical barrier of fire or water between the living and
the dead, and that the conceptions of pollution and purification are
merely the fictions of a later age invented to explain the purpose of a
ceremony of which the original intention was forgotten.’
[174] Soph. _El._ 445.
[175] The details described by Suidas s.v. ἐμασχαλίσθη have a somewhat
apocryphal air and are probably due to etymology.
[176] Schol. ad Soph. _El._ 445.
[177] P. III. 17. 7.
[178] Plut. _de ser. num. vind._ XVII. μεταπεμφθέντες οἱ ψυχαγωγοὶ καὶ
θύσαντες ἀπεσπάσαντο τοῦ ἱεροῦ τὸ εἴδωλον.
[179] Eur. _Or._ 395
ΜΕ. τί χρῆμα πάσχεις; τίς σ’ ἀπόλλυσιν νόσος;
ΟΡ. ἡ ξύνεσις, ὅτι σύνοιδα δείν’ εἰργασμένος.
[180] Suidas s.v. Ἔμβαρός εἰμι, _Paroimiograph._ I. 402, App. Cent. and
Eustath. ad _Il._ II. 732 § 331.
[181] Plut. _Vit. Pelop._ XXI.
[182] _Cat._ 422.
[183] _Od._ XI. 23 ff.
[184] For the ceremonials of ghost-raising, see Dr W. G. Headlam,
_Classical Review_, 1902, p. 52.
[185] Luc. _Char._ 22.
[186] A. Mommsen (_Feste der Stadt Athen_, p. 486) discusses the
Thargelia, Kallynteria and Plynteria in immediate succession, but without
a hint of the connection of the two last with the first.
[187] Vaniček (s.v. p. 310) derives Θαργήλια, which appears also in the
form Ταργήλια, from a root ταργ meaning ‘hot’ and ‘dry’ and connects it
with τρυγ in τρύσκω, τρυγάω etc. All these analogous forms have the same
meaning, i.e. ‘ripened by the sun,’ ‘ready for harvesting.’
[188] Athen. III. 52 § 115 θάργηλον καλεῖσθαι τὸν ἐκ τῆς συγκομιδῆς
πρῶτον γενόμενον ἄρτον.
[189] Hesych. s.v. θάργηλος χύτρα ἐστὶν ἀνάπλεως σπερμάτων.
[190] loc. cit. supra.
[191] Theocr. _Id._ VII. 31 ἁ δ’ ὁδὸς ἅδε Θαλυσιάς.
[192] Hom. _Il._ IX. 534
ὅ οἱ οὔ τι θαλύσια γουνῷ ἀλωῆς
Οἰνεὺς ῥέξ’.
Eustath. ad loc. θαλύσια δὲ αἱ ἀπαρχαὶ ... τινὲς δὲ τῶν ῥητόρων καὶ
συγκομιστήρια ταῦτα καλοῦσιν ... ἔτι δὲ καὶ θαλύσιος ἄρτος ὁ ἐκ τῆς τῶν
καρπῶν, φασί, συγκομιδῆς πρῶτος γινόμενος.
[193] The sources for the Eiresione are very fully given and discussed
by Mannhardt, _Wald- und Feldkulte_, pp. 214-248; see Dr Frazer, _Golden
Bough_, 2nd edition, vol. I. p. 190, for modern parallels.
[194] Ar. _Eq._ 729, schol. ad loc.
[195] Eustath. ad _Il._ XXII. 496, p. 1283 ᾖδον δὲ παῖδες
εἰρεσιώνη σῦκα φέρει καὶ πίονας ἄρτους
καὶ μέλιτος κοτύλην καὶ ἔλαιον ἐπικρήσασθαι
καὶ κύλικα εὔζωρον ἵνα μεθύουσα καθεύδῃ.
[196] Ar. _Plut._ 1054, schol. ad loc. ταύτην δὲ τὴν εἰρεσιώνην πρὸ τῶν
οἰκημάτων ἐτίθεντο οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι καὶ κατ’ ἔτος αὐτὴν ἤλλαττον ... ἕκαστος
πρὸ τῶν θυρῶν ἔστησαν εἰρεσιώνας εἰς ἀποτροπὴν τοῦ λοιμοῦ, καὶ διέμενεν
εἰς ἐνιαυτόν. ἣν καὶ ξηρανθεῖσαν πάλιν κατ’ ἔτος ἐποίει ἑτέραν χλοάζουσαν.
[197] Plut. _Vit. Thes._ XVIII. The account of Plutarch is substantially
the same as that of his contemporary Pausanias the rhetorician; both
appear to draw from some common source, which may be Krates’ περὶ θυσιῶν:
see Mannhardt, _Wald- und Feldkulte_, p. 219.
[198] Harpocrat. s.v.
[199] _Etym. Mag._ s.v.
[200] Suidas s.v. Πύθιον.
[201] Schol. ad Ar. _Plut._ 1054.
[202] Porph. _de Abst._ II. 7. The text contains obscure words, e.g.
εἰλυσπόα of which Nauck observes _loci medela nobis negata_, but those
translated above seem certain.
[203] _Iliad_ loc. cit. supra.
[204] Aristot. _Eth. Nic._ 1160 Θ. IX. 5 θυσίας τε ποιοῦντες καὶ περὶ
ταύτας συνόδους, τιμάς <τε> ἀπονέμοντες τοῖς θεοῖς καὶ αὑτοῖς ἀναπαύσεις
πορίζοντες μεθ’ ἡδονῆς. αἱ γὰρ ἀρχαῖαι θυσίαι καὶ σύνοδοι φαίνονται
γίνεσθαι μετὰ τὰς τῶν καρπῶν συγκομιδὰς οἷον ἀπαρχαί. μάλιστα γὰρ ἐν
τούτοις ἐσχόλαζον τοῖς καιροῖς.
[205] Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 167
ff.
[206] A. Lang, _Religion and Magic_, p. 265.
[207] Philoch. ap. Athen. I. 16 § 9 Φιλόχορος δὲ ἱστορεῖ καὶ κεκωλῦσθαι
Ἀθήνῃσι ἀπέκτου ἀρνὸς μηδένα γεύεσθαι ἐπιλιπούσης ποτὲ τῆς τῶν ζῴων
τούτων γενέσεως.
[208] Fest. § 318 _sacrima_ appellabant mustum quod Libero sacrificabant,
pro vineis et vasis et ipso vino conservando, sicut praemetium de spicis
quas primum messuissent sacrificabant Cereri.
[209] Plut. _Q. Symp._ III. 7. 1 καὶ πάλαι γ’ ὡς ἔοικεν εὔχοντο τοῦ οἴνου
πρὶν ἢ πιεῖν ἀποσπένδοντες ἀβλαβῆ καὶ σωτήριον αὐτοῖς τοῦ φαρμάκου τὴν
χρῆσιν γενέσθαι.
[210] Porph. _de Abst._ I. 14.
[211] Porph. _de Abst._ II. 56. The treatise of Porphyry, so far as
it relates to sacrifice, is mainly based on the previous treatise of
Theophrastos.
[212] Eustath. ad _Il._ I. 449 § 132.
[213] Porph. _de Abst._ II. 20.
[214] Porph. loc. cit. μετὰ δὲ τοὺς οὐλοχύτας αἱ θυσίαι καὶ ἡ ἐν αὐταῖς
κρεωφαγία. διότι καὶ μετὰ τὴν τῶν ἀναγκαίων τροφῶν εὕρεσιν ἡ τῆς
κρεωδαισίας πολυτέλεια καὶ τὸ τῆς τροφῆς ἐπείσακτον εὕρηται.
[215] Eustath. ad _Od._ III. 440, 1476. 37 ὡς καὶ οἱ οὐλοχύται τῆς
παλαιᾶς τροφῆς ἀνεμίμνησκον τῆς τε τῶν οὐλῶν, ὅπερ ἐστὶ τῶν κριθῶν, διὸ
καὶ τοὺς οὐλοχύτας τῶν τις παλαιῶν κριθὰς ἡρμήνευσεν.
[216] Strato ap. Athen. IX. 29 § 382.
[217] For a full discussion of οὐλαί and οὐλοχύται see Dr H. von Fritze,
_Hermes_ 1897, p. 236.
[218] Eustath. ad _Il._ I. 449 § 132, 23 εἰσὶ δὲ οὐλοχύται ... τὰ
προθύματα ... οἱ οὐλοχύται οὐλαὶ ἦσαν τουτέστι κριθαὶ μετὰ ἁλῶν ἃς
ἐπέχεον τοῖς βωμοῖς πρὸ τῆς ἱερουργίας.
[219] Eur. _El._ 804
λαβὼν δέ προχύτας μητρὸς εὐνέτης σέθεν
ἔβαλλε βωμούς, τοιάδ’ ἐννέπων ἔπη.
[220] Athen. XIV. 81 § 661.
[221] Hom. _Od._ IV. 761.
[222] Plut. _Q. Gr._ VI.
[223] Ar. _Av._ 622.
[224] Athen. IV. 14 § 137.
[225] Hom. _Il._ XVIII. 560.
[226] The process of primitive bread-making is fully discussed by Prof.
Benndorf (_Eranos Vindobensis_, p. 374), to whom I am indebted for the
view here expressed. In Yorkshire within my own remembrance a rather
repulsive mess of corn stewed in milk with currants was always eaten on
Christmas Eve before the regular feast began. It was served as soup and
called _frummety_.
[227] Eustath. ad _Il._ XVIII. 563 τὸ δὲ παλύνειν ἄλφιτα οὐδὲ νῦν δηλοῖ
ἀρτοποιΐαν ἀλλὰ τὸ ἐπίπασμα σύνηθες ὂν τοῖς παλαιοῖς, and again in
discussing the feast of Eumaeus (§ 1751, 33) ὁ δ’ ἄλφιτα λευκὰ ἐπάλυνεν,
ὅ ἐστιν ἐπέπασε κατὰ ἔθος ἀρχαῖον τὸ ὕστερον ἀργῆσαν.
[228] Varro _L.L._ V. 106 libum quod ut libaretur. The Latin _puls_ and
_polenta_ are probably from the same root as πέλανος. Pliny (_N.H._
XVIII. 19) says it is clear that in ancient days _pulte non pane Romanos
vixisse_. He adds that to his day primitive rites and those on birthdays
are carried on with _pulse_.
[229] Aesch. _Pers._ 204 ἀποτρόποισι δαίμοσι, and 523 γῇ τε καὶ φθιτοῖς
δωρήματα.
[230] Sannyr. frg. 1 Koch.
[231] The sources for νηφάλια are well collected and discussed by Dr von
Fritze, _De Libatione veterum Graecorum_, Berlin 1893, also by Stengel,
_Hermes_ XXII. p. 645, and ‘Chthonische und Totenkult’ in _Festschrift
für Friedländer_, p. 418, and W. Barth, ‘Bestattungsspende bei den
Griechen,’ _Neue Jahrbücher für klass. Altertüm._ 1900, p. 177. W. Barth
draws distinctions between the cultus of the dead and that of chthonic
divinities, which I think cannot be clearly made out.
[232] Aesch. _Pers._ 607.
[233] Plut. _Q.R._ XX. οἶνον δ’ αὐτῇ σπένδουσι γάλα προσαγορεύουσαι.
[234] Macr. I. 12. 25 quod vas in quo vinum inditum est mellarium
nominetur et vinum lac nuncupetur.
[235] Soph. _Oed. Col._ 468.
[236] Aesch. _Eum._ 104.
[237] Aesch. _Eum._ 727.
[238] P. II. 11. 3. The relation between the Semnae and the Eumenides and
the ritual of the Semnae, which is identical with that of the Eumenides,
will be discussed later in Chapter V.
[239] Schol. ad _Oed. Col._ 100.
[240] Porph. _de antr. Nymph._ 7.
[241] Emped. frg. ap. Porph. _de Abst._ II. 21.
[242] Some further points as to the Nephalia will be considered in
relation to the Eleusinian ritual (p. 150), and the Orphic mysteries
(Chapter X.).
[243] Eustath. ad _Il._ I. 52. For a full discussion of the purport of
cremation see Prof. Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_ I. p. 540.
[244] Porph. _de Abst._ II. 5.
[245] Diog. Laert. VIII. 13.
[246] P. VIII. 42. 5.
[247] Pind. _Ol._ VII. 47, schol. ad loc.
[248] Philostrat. _Eik._ II. 27 § 852.
[249] Diod. V. 56.
[250] P. VIII. 2. 2.
[251] Harpocrat. s.v. φαρμακός.
[252] Diog. Laert. II. 4.
[253] Classical sources for the _pharmakos_ are most fully enumerated by
Mannhardt, _Myth. Forschungen_, pp. 123, 133. For primitive analogies see
Frazer, _Golden Bough_, 2nd ed., vol. III. p. 93, from whom I have taken
the instances adduced.
[254] Ar. _Ran._ 734.
[255] Ar. frg. 532.
[256] Ar. _Eq._ 1405.
[257] Lys. _c. Andok._ 108. 4: νῦν οὖν χρὴ νομίζειν τιμωρουμένους καὶ
ἀπαλλαττομένους Ἀνδοκίδου τὴν πόλιν _καθαίρειν_ καὶ _ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι_
καὶ φαρμακὸν ἀποπέμπειν καὶ ἀλιτηρίου ἀπαλλάττεσθαι, ὡς ἓν τούτων οὗτός
ἐστι.
[258] Fragments of Hipponax (6th cent. B.C.) incorporated by Tzetzes
_Hist._ 23. 726-756:
Τί τὸ κάθαρμα;
ὁ φαρμακὸς τὸ κάθαρμα τοιοῦτον ἦν τὸ πάλαι.
ἂν συμφορὰ κατέλαβε πόλιν θεομηνίᾳ,
εἴτ’ οὖν λιμὸς εἴτε λοιμὸς εἴτε καὶ βλάβος ἄλλο,
τῶν πάντων ἀμορφότερον ἦγον ὡς πρὸς θυσίαν
εἰς καθαρμὸν καὶ φάρμακον πόλεως τῆς νοσούσης.
εἰς τόπον δὲ τὸν πρόσφορον στήσαντες τὴν θυσίαν
τυρόν τε δόντες τῇ χειρὶ καὶ μᾶζαν καὶ ἰσχάδας,
ἑπτάκις γὰρ ῥαπίσαντες ἐκεῖνον εἰς τὸ πέος
σκίλλαις, συκαῖς ἀγρίαις τε καὶ ἄλλοις τῶν ἀγρίων,
τέλος πυρὶ κατέκαιον ἐν ξύλοις τοῖς ἀγρίοις,
καὶ τὸν σποδὸν εἰς θάλασσαν ἔρραινον καὶ ἀνέμους
καὶ καθαρμὸν τῆς πόλεως ὡς ἔφην τῆς νοσούσης.
ὁ δέ Ἱππῶναξ ἄριστα σύμπαν τὸ ἔθος λέγει
1 _πόλιν καθαίρειν καὶ κράδῃσι βάλλεσθαι_ (φαρμακόν),
καὶ ἀλλαχοῦ δέ πού φησι πρώτῳ ἰάμβῳ γράφων
2 _βάλλοντες ἐν λειμῶνι καὶ ῥαπίζοντες_
_κράδῃσι καὶ σκίλλῃσιν ὥσπερ φαρμακὸν._
καὶ πάλιν ἄλλοις τόποις δὲ ταῦτά φησι κατ’ ἔπος
3 _δεῖ δ αὐτὸν ἐς φαρμακὸν ἐκποιήσασθαι._
4 _κἄφη παρέξειν ἰσχάδας τε καὶ μᾶζαν_
_καὶ τυρὸν οἷον ἐσθίουσι φαρμακοί._
5 _πάλαι γὰρ αὐτοὺς προσδέχοντα(ι) χάσκοντες_
_κράδας ἔχοντες ὡς ἔχουσι φαρμακοί._
καὶ ἀλλαχοῦ δέ πού φησιν ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ ἰάμβῳ
6 _λιμῷ γένηται ξηρὸς ὡς ἐν τῷ θυμῷ_
_φαρμακὸς ἀχθεὶς ἑπτάκις ῥαπισθείη._
[259] Hippon. frg. 11 (4) ὡς οἱ μὲν ἅγεϊ Βουπάλῳ κατηρῶντο.
[260] Hellad. ap. Phot. _Bibl._ c. 279, p. 534.
[261] Hesych. s.v. κραδίης νόμος.
[262] Plin. _N.H._ XX. 9. 39.
[263] Diosc. _de mat. med._ II. 202.
[264] Luc. _Nek._ 7 ἐκάθηρέ τε με καὶ ἀπέμαξε καὶ περιήγνισε δᾳδίοις καὶ
σκίλλῃ.
[265] Theocr. _Id._ VII. 104, schol. ad loc.
[266] Ar. _Ran._ 620.
[267] Luc. _Indoct._ 1.
[268] Schol. ad Ar. _Eq._ 1136.
[269] Harpocrat. s.v. φαρμακός· ὅτι δὲ ὄνομα κύριόν ἐστιν ὁ φαρμακός,
ἱερὰς δὲ φιάλας τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος κλέψας καὶ ἁλοὺς ὑπὸ τῶν περὶ τὸν Ἀχιλλέα
κατελεύσθη, καὶ τὰ τοῖς Θαργηλίοις ἀγόμενα τούτων ἀπομιμήματά ἐστιν,
Ἴστρος ἐν πρώτῳ τῶν Ἀπόλλωνος ἐπιφανειῶν εἴρηκεν.
[270] For these modern savage analogies and many others see Dr Frazer,
_Golden Bough_, 2nd ed., vol. III. p. 93.
[271] Plut. _de Is. et Os._ LXXIII. ζῶντας ἀνθρώπους κατεπίμπρασαν ὡς
Μανεθὼς ἱστόρηκε Τυφωνίους καλοῦντες καὶ τὴν τέφραν αὐτῶν λικμῶντες
ἠφάνιζον καὶ διέσπειρον.
[272] Clem. Al. _Protr._ XII. 118 φύγωμεν οὖν τὴν συνήθειαν ... ἄγχει τὸν
ἄνθρωπον, τῆς ἀληθείας ἀποτρέπει, ἀπάγει τῆς ζωῆς, πάγις ἐστὶν βάραθρόν
ἐστιν βόθρος ἐστὶ λίκνον ἐστίν, κακὸν ἡ συνήθεια.
[273] Lev. xvi. 21, and for the Egyptian scape-animal see Herod. II. 39.
[274] Plut. _Q. Symp._ VI. 8.
[275] My attention was kindly drawn to this vase by M. Perdrizet who
proposes shortly to publish it. Suidas (s.v. εἴδωλον) seems to refer
to the Charila ceremony, κελεύει ἡ Πυθία εἴδωλόν τι πεπλασμένον εἰς
ὄψιν γυναικὸς μετέωρον ἐξαρτᾶν καὶ ἀνερρώσθη ἡ πόλις. For this and the
_oscilla_ ceremonies and the analogy of Artemis ἀπαγχομένη (P. VIII. 23.
7) see Lobeck, _Aglaoph._ p. 175. The beating of the female slave in the
temple of Leucothea (Plut. _Q.R._ XVI.) seems to have been based on a
racial taboo, but a φαρμακός ceremony may underlie it.
[276] Serv. ad Verg. _Aen._ III. 75.
[277] For a full and very interesting discussion of the etymology
and meaning of φαρμακός, see Osthoff, ‘Allerhand Zauber etymologisch
beleuchtet,’ Bezzenberger, _Beiträge_ XXIV. p. 109. As to the
accentuation of the word φαρμακός Eustathius (1935. 15) notes that it was
proparoxytone ‘among the Ionians.’
[278] As to the god worshipped at the Thargelia it is probable that
when godhead came to be formulated Demeter Chloe long preceded Apollo.
Diogenes Laertius (II. 44) notes that on the sixth day of Thargelia when
the Athenians purified the city, sacrifice was done to Demeter Chloe.
Here as elsewhere Apollo took over the worship of an Earth-goddess.
[279] Herod. VII. 197. My attention was drawn to this passage and its
importance as reflecting the attitude of the Greek mind towards Human
Sacrifices by Dr A. W. Verrall.
[280] Porphyr. _de Abst._ II. 53-56.
[281] My account of the Bouphonia is taken from Dr Frazer’s summary,
which is exactly based on the complex double account given by Porphyry
from Theophrastos (Porphyr. _de Abst._ II. 29 seq.) and Aelian (_V.H._
VIII. 3). With Dr Frazer’s exhaustive commentary (_Golden Bough_, 2nd ed.
vol. II. p. 295) I am in substantial agreement, save that I do not see
in the murdered ox the representative of the Corn Spirit. The Bouphonia
as ox-_murder_ was first correctly explained by Prof. Robertson Smith
(_Religion of the Semites_, p. 286 ff.). I have discussed it previously
in _Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens_, p. 424 ff.: see also
Dr Paul Stengel, _Rhein. Mus._ 1897, p. 187. With Dr von Prott’s view
(_Rhein. Mus._ 1897, p. 187) that the sense of guilt in the sacrifice
arises from the fact that the ox was the surrogate of a human victim I
wholly disagree.
[282] It is possible that Dipolia is etymologically not festival of Zeus
Polieus but festival of the Plough Curse, see p. 23.
[283] Ar. _Nub._ 984.
[284] The scholiast is (so far as I know) the only authority who
gives the female form. It is possible that the sacrifice may have
been primarily to an earth-goddess and hence the animals are female.
The curious ceremonial of the _Chthonia_ (P. II. 35. 3) was a similar
butchery of cows in honour of Chthonia and presided over by old women who
did the actual slaughter, and no man native or foreigner was allowed to
see it.
[285] P. V. 27. 6.
[286] Diod. I. 91 καθαπερεὶ τὸ μύσος εἰς ἐκεῖνον τρεπόντων.
[287] Plut. _De defect. orac._ XIV., the text is in places corrupt.
[288] I have elsewhere (_J.H.S._ XIX. 1899, p. 223) stated that the
word ‘Stepterion’ cannot to my thinking be translated ‘Festival of
Crowning.’ This explanation rests only on Aelian (_Hist. An._ XII. 34),
and purification (κάθαρσις, ἔκθυσις), not crowning, is the main gist of
the ceremonies. The name Stepterion, is, I suspect, connected with the
enigmatic στέφη and στέφειν as occurring in Aesch. _Choeph._ 94, Soph.
_Ant._ 431, _Elec._ 52, 458, and means in some way purification.
[289] Other instances are given Ael. _Hist. An._ XII. 34, Philostr. _Im._
II. 24. 850. For analogous Roman Festivals see Regifugium and Poplifugia,
Warde-Fowler, _Roman Festivals_, pp. 327 and 174. For the Stepterion and
savage analogies see Dr Frazer, _Pausanias_, vol. III. p. 53.
[290] Plut. _Vit. Alc._ XXXIV.
[291] Poll. _On._ VIII. 141.
[292] Phot. s.v. Καλλυντήρια.
[293] Plutarch and Photius cannot both be right, but it is unlikely that
Photius would give the _sequence_ incorrectly.
[294] Hesych. s.v. σάρματα.
[295] Hesych. s.v. ἡγητηρία· παρὰ ἡγήσασθαι οὖν τῆς τροφῆς κέκληται
ἡγητηρία.
[296] Plut. _Q.R._ LXXXVI.
[297] Plut. _Q.R._ XXXII.
[298] Ov. _Fasti_ V. 621.
[299] The whole ceremony of the _Argei_ has been fully discussed by
Mr Warde-Fowler (_The Roman Festivals_, p. 111). Abundant primitive
analogies have been collected by Mannhardt (_Baumkultus_, pp. 155, 411,
416, and _Antike Wald- und Feldkulte_, p. 276). For the etymology of
_Argei_ see Mr A. B. Cook, _Class. Rev._ XVII. 1903, p. 269.
[300] Plut. _Q.R._ LXXXVI.
[301] Ov. _Fasti_ VI. 219-234.
[302] Warde-Fowler, _Roman Festivals_, p. 148.
[303] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, 2nd ed., vol. II. p. 329.
[304] The sources for the Thesmophoria are collected and discussed by Dr
J. G. Frazer, _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, Art. Thesmophoria.
[305] II. 171. See also Frazer, _Pausanias_, vol. V. p. 29; Harrison and
Verrall, _Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, pp. xxxiv. and 102-105 and 482; A.
Lang, _Homeric Hymns_, Introd. Essay and Hymn to Demeter.
[306] Schol. ad Aristoph. _Thesm._ 78. Photius, s.v. and Schol. ad
Aristoph. _Thesm._ 585.
[307] Cornut. _de Theol._ 28.
[308] Lucian, _Dial. Meretr._ II. 1, first published and commented
on by E. Rohde, _Rhein. Mus._ XXV. p. 549. As the text is not very
easily accessible it is given below: θεσμοφόρια ἑορτὴ Ἑλλήνων μυστήρια
περιέχουσα. _τὰ δὲ αὐτὰ καὶ σκιροφόρια καλεῖται._ ἤγετο δὲ κατὰ τὸν
μυθωδέστερον λόγον, ὅτι ἀνθολογοῦσα ἡρπάζετο ἡ Κόρη ὑπὸ τοῦ Πλούτωνος.
τότε κατ’ ἐκεῖνον τὸν τόπον Εὐβουλεύς τις συβώτης ἔνεμεν ὗς καὶ
συγκατεπόθησαν τῷ χάσματι τῆς Κόρης. εἰς οὖν τιμὴν τοῦ Εὐβουλέως
ῥίπτεῖσθαι τοὺς χοίρους εἰς τὰ χάσματα τῆς Δήμητρος καὶ τῆς Κόρης. τὰ
δὲ σαπέντα τῶν ἐμβληθέντων εἰς τὰ μέγαρα κάτω ἀναφέρουσιν ἀντλήτριαι
καλούμεναι γυναῖκες, καθαρεύσασαι τριῶν ἡμερῶν. καὶ καταβαίνουσιν εἰς
τὰ ἄδυτα καὶ ἀνενέγκασαι ἐπιτιθέασιν ἐπὶ τῶν βωμῶν. ὧν νομίζουσι τὸν
λαμβάνοντα καὶ τῷ σπόρῳ συγκαταβάλλοντα εὐφορίαν ἕξειν. λέγουσι δὲ
καὶ δράκοντας κάτω εἶναι περὶ τὰ χάσματα, οὓς τὰ πολλὰ τῶν βληθέντων
κατεσθίειν· διὸ καὶ κρότον γίνεσθαι ὁπόταν ἀντλῶσιν αἱ γυναῖκες καὶ ὅταν
ἀποτιθῶνται πάλιν τὰ πλάσματα ἐκεῖνα, ἵνα ἀναχωρήσωσιν οἱ δράκοντες οὓς
νομίζουσι φρουροὺς τῶν ἀδύτων. τὰ δὲ αὐτὰ καὶ ἀρρητοφόρια καλεῖται, καὶ
ἄγεται τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον ἔχοντα περὶ τῆς τῶν καρπῶν γενέσεως καὶ τῆς τῶν
ἀνθρώπων σπορᾶς. ἀναφέρονται δὲ κἀνταῦθα ἄρρητα ἱερὰ ἐκ στέατος τοῦ
σίτου κατεσκευασμένα, μιμήματα δρακόντων καὶ ἀνδρῶν σχημάτων. λαμβάνουσι
δὲ κώνου θαλλοὺς _διὰ τὸ_ πολύγονον τοῦ φυτοῦ. ἐμβάλλονται δὲ καὶ εἰς τὰ
μέγαρα οὕτως καλούμενα ἄδυτα ἐκεῖνά τε καὶ χοῖροι ὡς ἤδη ἔφαμεν, καὶ
αὐτοὶ διὰ τὸ πολύτοκον, εἰς σύνθημα τῆς γενέσεως τῶν καρπῶν καὶ τῶν
ἀνθρώπων, ὡς χαριστήρια τῇ Δήμητρι ἐπειδὴ τὸν δημήτριον καρπὸν παρέχουσα
ἐποίησεν ἥμερον τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος. _ὁ μὲν οὖν ἄνω τῆς ἑορτῆς_ λόγος ὁ
μυθικός· ὁ δὲ προκείμενος φυσικός· Θεσμοφόρια καλεῖται καθότι θεσμοφόρος
ἡ Δημήτηρ κατονομάζεται, τιθεῖσα νόμον ἤτοι θεσμὸν καθ’ οὓς τὴν τροφὴν
πορίζεσθαί τε καὶ κατεργάζεσθαι ἀνθρώπους δέον.
[309] The rites of purification included strict chastity, for the purport
of which as a conservation of energy see Dr Frazer, _Golden Bough_, 2nd
ed. II. p. 210.
[310] μιμήματα ... ἀνδρῶν σχημάτων, i.e. φαλλοί. Cf. Septuagint, Is.
iii. 17. The Arrephoroi are not as I previously (_Myth. and Mon. Ancient
Athens_, p. xxxiv.) suggested _Hersephoroi_, Carriers of Young Things.
Suidas, it may be noted, has the formally impossible word _ἀρρηνο_φορεῖν.
It may have arisen from a paronomasia and seems to point in the same
direction as the μιμήματα ἀνδρῶν σχημάτων of the scholiast. On the use of
the φαλλός among agriculturalists as a prophylactic against the evil eye
and ἐν ταῖς τελεταῖς ... σχεδόν ἁπάσαις, see Diod. IV. 6.
[311] The influence of mimetic ritual on the development of mythology
will be considered later, p. 279.
[312] P. IX. 8. 1.
[313] _Nineteenth Century_, April, 1887.
[314] Newton, C. T., _Discoveries at Halicarnassus_, vol. II. p. 383, and
_Travels and Discoveries in the Levant_, II. p. 180.
[315] Porphyr. _de antro Nymph._ VI.
[316] VI. 11. 18.
[317] Eustath. § 1387.
[318] Dr Frazer reminds me that Prof. Robertson Smith (_Religion of the
Semites_, p. 183) derived μέγαρον from the Phoenician _maghar_, Hebrew
_meghara_ ‘a cave.’ The form μάγαρον adduced by Aelian, favours this
view; cf. also Photius s.v. μάγαρον· οὐ μέγαρον, εἰς ὃ τὰ μυστικὰ ἱερὰ
κατατίθενται· οὕτως Μένανδρος.
[319] Heydemann, _Griechische Vasenbilder_, Taf. II. 3. For a somewhat
similar design cf. _Brit. Mus. Cat._ E 819.
[320] Marcellinus on Hermog. in _Rhet. Graec._, ed. Walz, IV. 462.
Sopater, _ibid._ VIII. 67. Aristoph. _Thesm._ 80. Dr Frazer kindly
suggests to me that the custom of releasing prisoners at the Thesmophoria
may be explained as a precaution against the magical influence of knots,
fetters, and the like in trammeling spiritual activities whether for good
or evil, cf. _Golden Bough_, 2nd ed. I. p. 392 sqq.
[321] Apollod. I. 5. 1.
[322] _Ath. Mitt._ 1899, Taf. VIII. 1.
[323] Plut. _de Is. et Os._ LXIX.
[324] As to the meaning of the difficult word Ἀχαία I can offer nothing
satisfactory. It is perhaps worth noting that Athenaeus (III. 74 § 109),
on the authority of Semos, mentions a sort of cake called Ἀχαιΐνα, which
was made on the occasion of the Thesmophoria; the people who carried it
are said to have exclaimed ‘Munch an Achaina full of fat,’ ἐπιλέγοντες
τῶν φερόντων ‘Ἀχαΐνην στέατος ἔμπλεων τράγου.’ The scholiast on Ar.
_Ach._ 709 says that Demeter got her name of Achaia ἀπὸ τοῦ κτύπου τῶν
κυμβάλων καὶ τυμπάνων τοῦ γενομένου κατὰ ζήτησιν τῆς Κόρης, and he may be
right.
[325] Plut. loc. cit. πῶς οὖν χρηστέον ἐστὶ ταῖς σκυθρωπαῖς καὶ
ἀγελάστοις καὶ πενθίμοις θυσίαις εἰ μήτε παραλιπεῖν τὰ νενομισμένα καλῶς
ἔχει, μήτε φύρειν τὰς περὶ θεῶν δόξας καὶ συνταράττειν ὑποψίαις ἀτόποις;
[326] Hesych. s.v. δίωγμα.
[327] Suid. s.v.
[328] Hesych. s.v. ζημία· θυσία τις ἀποδιδομένη ὑπὲρ τῶν γενομένων ἐν
Θεσμοφορίοις. It is possible, I think, that ζημία may conceal some form
connected with Damia.
[329] Plut. _Q. Gr._ XXXI.
[330] IX. 26.
[331] Athen. II. 26 § 46.
[332] Is. _Pyrr. Hered._ 80.
[333] Clem. Al. _Protr._ II. 17, p. 14, δι’ ἣν αἰτίαν ἐν τοῖς
Θεσμοφορίοις μεγαρίζοντες* (μεγάροις ζῶντας, Lobeck) χοίρους ἐμβάλλουσιν.
ταύτην τὴν μυθολογίαν αἱ γυναῖκες ποικίλως κατὰ πόλιν ἑορτάζουσιν
Θεσμοφόρια, Σκιροφόρια, Ἀρρητοφόρια ποικίλως τὴν Φερεφάττης ἐκτραγῳδοῦσαι
ἁρπαγήν.
[334] I. 27. 3.
[335] Trans. J. G. Frazer. Dr Frazer in his commentary on the passage,
vol. II. p. 344, enumerates the other sources respecting the Arrephoroi;
see also Harrison and Verrall, _Mythology and Monuments of Ancient
Athens_, pp. xxxii and 512.
[336] Dr Frazer draws my attention to the curiously analogous ritual
practised at Lanuvium, in a grove near the temple of the Argive Hera,
described by Aelian (_Hist. An._ XI. 16) and Propertius (IV. 8. 3 sqq.).
Once a year sacred maidens descended with bandaged eyes into a serpent’s
cave and offered it a barley cake. If the serpent ate of the cake the
people rejoiced, taking it to show that the girls were pure maidens and
that the year’s crops would be good:
Si fuerint castae, redeunt in colla parentum;
Clamantque agricolae Fertilis annus erit.
[337] _C.I.A._ III., No. 19.
[338] _C.I.A._ III., Nos. 318, 319.
[339] _B.M. Cat._ E 418, see _Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, p. xxxii.
[340] ἄρρητα ἱερὰ ... μιμήματα δρακόντων καὶ ἀνδρῶν σχημάτων, see p. 122,
note 2.
[341] For various views of the Skirophoria, see Robert, _Hermes_ XX. 394;
Rohde, _Kleine Schriften_, p. 371; A. Mommsen, _Philolog._ L. p. 123.
[342] Ar. _Thesmoph._ 834.
[343] _C.I.A._ II. p. 422, n. 573 b.
[344] Ar. _Eccles._ 18.
[345] Ar. _Vesp._ 925.
[346] A. Mommsen, ‘Die Attischen Skira-Gebräuche,’ _Philolog._ L. p. 123.
[347] Plin. _N.H._ XVII. 29. 2.
[348] Hesych. s.v.
[349] Ar. _Thesm._ 533.
[350] Plut. _Vit. Rom._ sub fin.
[351] Schol. ad Theocr. _Id._ IV. 25 τὰς νομίμους βίβλους καὶ ἱερὰς ὑπὲρ
τῶν κορυφῶν αὐτῶν ἀνετίθεσαν καὶ ὡσανεὶ λιτανεύσουσαι ἀπήρχοντο εἰς
Ἐλευσῖνα.
[352] See supra, p. 121 sq.
[353] Sixteen similar figures with feet and hands tightly bound, and in
some cases the arms pierced by nails, were recently found on the site of
the ancient Palestrina, see _Egypt Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement_,
p. 332.
[354] R. Wünsch, ‘Eine antike Rachepuppe,’ _Philolog._ LXI. 1902, p. 26.
[355] Migne, _Patrol. Gr._ LXXXVII. 50 περὶ Θεοφίλου τοῦ ἀπὸ μαγείας
συνδεθέντος τὰς χεῖρας καὶ τοὺς πόδας.
[356] Theocr. _Id._ II. 18 ff.
[357] The bird ἴϋγξ, supposed to be the wry-neck _Iynx torquilla_, bound
on a wheel was a frequent love-charm. It is like the Siren (p. 201)
a bird-soul, an enchanted maiden with the power to lure souls. Such
enchanters, half-human, half-bird, were also the Keledones, cf. Athen.
VII. § 290 E αἳ κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον ταῖς Σειρῆσι τοὺς ἀκροωμένους
ἐποίουν ἐπιλανθανομένους τῶν τροφῶν διὰ τὴν ἡδονὴν ἀφαναίνεσθαι. In
metaphorical language Siren and Iynx are equivalents, cf. Xen. _Mem._
III. 11. 18; and cf. Diog. Laert. VI. 2. 76 τοιαύτη τις προσῆν ἴϋγξ
Διογένους τοῖς λόγοις.
[358] Plat. _Legg._ 933.
[359] Schol. ad Theocr. _Id._ II. 10 τὸν γὰρ χαλκὸν ἐπῇδον ἐν ταῖς
ἐκλείψεσι τῆς σελήνης καὶ ἐν τοῖς κατοιχομένοις* ἐπειδὴ ἐνομίζετο
καθαρὸς εἶναι καὶ ἀπελαστικὸς τῶν μιασμάτων. διόπερ πρὸς πᾶσαν ἀφοσίωσιν
καὶ ἀποκάθαρσιν αὐτῷ ἐχρῶντο, ὥς φησι καὶ Ἀπολλόδωρος ἐν τῷ περὶ θεῶν
... φησὶν Ἀπολλόδωρος Ἀθήνῃσι τὸν ἱεροφάντην τῆς Κόρης ἐπικαλουμένης,
ἐπικρούειν τὸ καλούμενον ἠχεῖον. καὶ παρὰ Λάκωσι βασιλέως ἀποθανόντος
εἰώθασι κρούειν λέβητα. The reading κατοιχομένοις is doubtful; see Mr A.
B. Cook, _J.H.S._ 1902, p. 14.
[360] Poll. _On._ V. 131 περὶ δαιμόνων τῶν ἐπὶ τῶν ἀρῶν. οἱ δὲ δαίμονες,
οἱ μὲν λύοντες τὰς ἀρὰς ἀλεξίκακοι λέγονται ἀποπομπαῖοι, ἀποτρόπαιοι,
λύσιοι, φύξιοι, οἱ δὲ κυροῦντες ἀλιτήριοι, ἀλιτηριώδεις, προστρόπαιοι,
παλαμναῖοι.
[361] W. H. D. Rouse, _Greek Votive Offerings_, p. 339. Dr Rouse
says that ‘binding spells’ δέματα ‘are still the terror of the Greek
bridegroom.’
[362] C. T. Newton, _Discoveries at Cnidus and Halicarnassus_.
[363] Cato, _de agr. cult._ 134. 3 bonas preces precor uti sies volens
propitius mihi liberisque, etc.
[364] Suidas in explaining ἐξάρασθαι says τὸ ἐκτελέσαι τὰς ἀράς, τοῦτ’
ἔστι τὰς εὐχὰς ἃς ἐπὶ ταῖς ἱδρύσεσι τῶν ναῶν εἰώθασι ποιεῖσθαι. It is
worth noting that in M.H.D. _segen_ is not only as in modern German
_benedictio_ but also _maledictio_, see Osthoff, ‘Allerhand Zauber
etymologisch beleuchtet,’ Bezzenberger, _Beiträge_ XXIV. p. 180.
[365] Röhl, _I.G.A._ 497. The whole subject of legal curses has been well
discussed by Dr Ziebart, ‘Der Fluch im Griechischen Recht’ (_Hermes_
XXX. p. 57) to whom I owe many references. Also by the same writer in
his ‘Neue Attische Fluchtafeln’ (_Nachrichten der K. Ges. d. Wiss. zu
Göttingen_, Phil.-Hist. Kl. 1889, pp. 105 and 135), and by R. Wünsch,
‘Neue Fluchtafeln’ (_Rhein. Mus._ 1900, I. p. 62, II. p. 232). Curse
Inscriptions are collected in an Appendix to the _Corpus Inscriptionum
Atticarum_, under the title _Defixionum Tabulae_.
[366] Dittenberger, _Syll. Inscr._ 879.
[367] _Mon. and Myth. Anc. Athens_, p. 104.
[368] Ar. _Thesm._ 331.
[369] Plut. _Vit. Dion._ 56.
[370] Paroimiogr. I. 388 ὁ γὰρ βουζύγης Ἀθήνησιν ὁ τὸν ἱερὸν ἄροτον
ἐπιτελῶν ἄλλα τε πολλὰ ἀρᾶται καὶ τοῖς μὴ κοινωνοῦσι κατὰ τὸν βίον ὕδατος
ἢ πυρὸς ἢ μὴ ὑποφαίνουσιν ὁδὸν πλανωμένοις.
[371] Porph. _de Abst._ IV. 22.
[372] Schol. ad Luc. _Dial. Meretr._ VII. 4 Ἑορτὴ Ἀθήνησι μυστήρια
περιέχουσα Δήμητρος καὶ Κόρης καὶ Διονύσου ἐπὶ τῇ τομῇ τῶν ἀμπέλων καὶ τῇ
γεύσει τοῦ ἀποκειμένου ἤδη οἴνου γινόμενα παρὰ Ἀθηναίοις.
[373] Eustath. ad _Il._ IX. 530, 772 Ἰστέον δὲ ὅτι ἐπὶ συγκομιδῇ καρπῶν
ἐφ’ ᾗ καὶ τὰ θαλύσια ἐθύετο ἑορτὴ ἤγετο Δήμητρος καὶ Διονύσου κατὰ
Παυσανίαν, ἁλῷα καλουμένη διὰ τὸ ταῖς ἀπαρχαῖς καὶ μάλιστα ἐν Ἀθήναις ἀπὸ
τῆς ἅλω τότε καταχρᾶσθαι φέροντας εἰς Ἐλευσῖνα ἢ ἐπεὶ καθὰ καὶ Ὅμηρος
ἐμφαίνει ἐν ἅλωσιν ἔπαιζον κατὰ τὴν ἑορτὴν ἐν ᾗ καὶ Ποσειδῶνος ἦν πομπή.
[374] Harp. s.v. Ἁλῷα.
[375] Dem. 59. 116 κατηρήθη αὐτοῦ (τοῦ ἱεροφάντου) καὶ ὅτι Σινώπῃ τῇ
ἑταίρᾳ Ἁλῴοις ἐπὶ τῆς ἐσχάρας τῆς ἐν τῇ αὐλῇ Ἐλευσῖνι προσαγούσῃ ἱερεῖον
θύσειεν, οὐ νομίμου ὄντος ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἱερεῖα θύειν οὐδὲ ἐκείνου
οὔσης τῆς θυσίας ἀλλὰ τῆς ἱερείας.
[376] _C.I.A._ II. 1, n. 471 ἤραντο δὲ καὶ τοὺς βοῦς το[ὺς] ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι
τῇ θυσίᾳ καὶ τοῖς προηροσίοις καὶ τοὺς ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις ἱεροῖς καὶ
γυμνασίοις. Cf. Dittenberger, _De Epheb._ p. 77.
[377] The nature of the contest is not clear. Artemidorus (I. 8) says:
ταύροις ἐν Ἰωνίᾳ παῖδες Ἐφεσίων ἀγωνίζονται καὶ ἐν Ἀττικῇ παρὰ ταῖς θεαῖς
ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι ‘Κοῦροι Ἀθηναῖοι περιτελλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν.’ See Lobeck, _Agl._
p. 206.
[378] Luc. _Dial. Meretr._ VII. 4 ‘τήμερον Ἁλῷά ἐστι, τί δὲ σοὶ δέδωκεν
εἰς τὴν ἑορτήν;’ schol. ad loc. Ἑορτὴ Ἀθήνησι μυστήρια περιέχουσα
Δήμητρος καὶ Κόρης καὶ Διονύσου ἐπὶ τῇ τομῇ τῶν ἀμπέλων καὶ τῇ γεύσει
τοῦ ἀποκειμένου ἤδη οἴνου γινόμενα παρὰ Ἀθηναίοις ἐν οἷς προτίθεται (d.
Subject fehlt im Cod.: zu ergänzen ist πέμματά?) τινα αἰσχύναις ἀνδρείοις
(sic) ἐοικότα, περὶ ὧν διηγοῦνται ὡς πρὸς σύνθημα τῆς τῶν ἀνθρώπων σπορᾶς
γινομένων ὅτι ὁ Διόνυσος δοὺς τὸν οἶνον.... After recounting the death
of Ikarios the scholiast continues, ὑπόμνημα δὲ τοῦ πάθους ἡ τοιαύτη
ἑορτή. ἐν ταύτῃ καὶ τελετή τις εἰσάγεται γυναικῶν ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι, καὶ
παιδιαὶ λέγονται πολλαὶ καὶ σκώμματα, μόναι δὲ γυναῖκες εἰσπορευόμεναι
ἐπ’ ἀδείας ἔχουσιν ἃ βούλονται λέγειν. καὶ δὴ τὰ αἴσχιστα ἀλλήλαις
λέγουσι τότε, αἱ δὲ ἱέρειαι λάθρα προσιοῦσαι ταῖς γυναιξὶ κλεψιγαμίας
πρὸς τὸ οὖς ὡς ἀπόρρητόν τι συμβουλεύουσιν. ἀναφωνοῦσι δὲ πρὸς ἀλλήλας
πᾶσαι αἱ γυναῖκες αἰσχρὰ καὶ ἄσεμνα, βαστάζουσαι εἴδη σωμάτων (so die
Hs.: der Sinn erfordert σχημάτων genitalium) ἀπρεπῆ (ἀπρεπεῖ die Hs.)
ἀνδρεῖά τε καὶ γυναικεῖα. ἐνταῦθα οἶνός τε πολὺς πρόκειται καὶ τράπεζαι
πάντων τῶν τῆς γῆς καὶ θαλάσσης γέμουσαι βρωμάτων, πλὴν τῶν ἀπειρημένων
ἐν τῷ μυστικῷ, ῥοιᾶς φημὶ καὶ μήλου καὶ ὀρνίθων κατοικιδίων, καὶ ᾠῶν,
καὶ θαλασσίας τρίγλης ἐρυθίνου (ἐριθύνου die Hs.), μελανούρου, κωράβου
(?καράβου), γαλαιοῦ (γαλεοῦ?). παρατιθέασι δὲ τὰς τραπέζας οἱ ἄρχοντες
καὶ ἔνδον καταλιπόντες ταῖς γυναιξὶν, αὐτοὶ χωρίζονται ἔξω διαμένοντες,
ἐπιδεικνύμενοι τοῖς ἐπιδημοῦσι πᾶσι τὰς ἡμέρους τροφὰς παρὰ αὐτῶν
εὑρεθῆναι καὶ πᾶσι κοινωνηθῆναι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις παρ’ αὐτῶν. πρόσκειται δὲ
ταῖς τραπέζαις καὶ ἐκ πλακοῦντος κατεσκευασμένα ἀμφοτέρων γενῶν αἰδοῖα.
ἁλῷα δὲ ἐκλήθη διὰ τὸν καρπὸν τοῦ Διονύσου· ἀλωαὶ γὰρ αἱ τῶν ἀμπέλων
φυτεῖαι.
[379] _Hom. Hym. ad Cer._ 370.
[380] _v._ 399.
[381] Porphyr. _de Abst._ IV. 16.
[382] The sources for the Eleusinian Mysteries are collected in Lobeck’s
_Aglaophamus_. Reference to inscriptions discovered since Lobeck’s days
will be found in Daremberg and Saglio’s _Dictionnaire des Antiquités_,
s.v. The best general account in English is that by Prof. Ramsay in the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, in French two articles reprinted from the
_Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres_, vol. XXXV.
2nd part 1895, and vol. XXXVII. 1900, entitled ‘Recherches sur l’origine
et la nature des Mystères d’Éleusis,’ and ‘Les Grands Mystères d’Éleusis,
Personnel, Cérémonies.’
[383] The rites at Eleusis were _probably_ at first confined to women.
Dionysios of Halicarnassos (_Ant. Rom._ I. 331) says in speaking of the
cult of Demeter in Arcadia, ἱδρύσαντο δὲ καὶ Δήμητρος ἱερὸν καὶ τὰς
θυσίας αὐτῇ διὰ γυναικῶν καὶ νηφαλίους ἔθυσαν ὡς Ἕλλησι νόμος ὧν οὐδὲν ὁ
καθ’ ἡμᾶς ἤλλαξε χρόνος.
[384] _C.I.A._ III. 5.
[385] Inscr. _A. Mitth._ 1894 p. 163 ὡς ἂν τὰ ἱερὰ φέρωσιν αἱ ἱέρειαι
ἀσφαλέστατα.
[386] The exact formulary is preserved by Theon of Smyrna, p. 22, τὸ
κήρυγμα τοῦτο κηρύττεται ‘ὅστις τὰς χεῖρας μὴ καθαρός ... ὅστις φωνὴν
ἀσύνετος.’ Some authorities think that φωνὴν ἀσύνετος means speaking an
unknown, barbarous tongue, others that it meant having some impediment
of speech that prevented the due utterance of the sacred formularies. I
think the former more probable.
[387] Ar. _Ran._ 354.
[388] Hesych. s.v.
[389] Polyaen. _Strat._ III. 11.
[390] Plut. _de glor. Ath._ VII.
[391] _C.I.A._ IV. 385 d, l. 20 ἐπεμελήθησαν δὲ καὶ τῆς ἅλαδε ἐλάσεως.
[392] Mr R. A. Neil suggested that the same root and idea may lurk in
the unexplained _pontifex_, i.e. maker of πομπαί. The connection with
_bridges_ is late and fanciful.
[393] Plut. _Vit. Phoc._ XXVIII.
[394] Head, _Hist. Num._ p. 328: on the reverse is Triptolemos in his
winged car.
[395] Plat. _Rep._ II. 378 A.
[396] Clem. Al. _Strom._ V. 689 οὐκ ἀπεικότως καὶ τῶν μυστηρίων τῶν παρ’
Ἕλλησιν ἄρχει μὲν καθάρσια καθάπερ καὶ ἐν τοῖς βαρβάροις τὸ λουτρόν.
[397] Clem. Al. _Protr._ II. μυστήρια ... ἀπὸ τοῦ συμβεβηκότος περὶ τὸν
Διόνυσον μύσους.
[398] Lyd. _de mens._ IV. 38 Μυστήρια ἀπὸ τῆς στερήσεως τοῦ μύσους ἀντὶ
τῆς ἁγιοσύνης. In form μύστης might come from μύω (cf. ἀμυστί), but Mr
Gilbert Murray draws my attention to some uses of μυστήριον which point
rather to μύσος, e.g. Eur. _Suppl._ 470 λύσαντα σεμνά στεμμάτων μυστήρια
and _El._ 87 ἐκ θεοῦ μυστηρίων.
[399] The aetiology of the Hymn and the various ceremonies that gave
rise to it are well explained by Mr F. B. Jevons, _Introd. to History of
Religion_, Appendix to Chapter XXIV.
[400] I omit altogether the ceremonies of the 17th-18th, the _Epidauria_,
as they were manifestly a later accretion; the worship of the Epidaurian
Asklepios was formally inaugurated at Athens (see p. 344) in 421 B.C.
[401] Dittenberger, _Syllog. Inscript._ 13.
[402] Clem. Al. _Protr._ II. 18 ἔστι τὸ σύνθημα Ἐλευσινίων Ἐνήστευσα,
ἔπιον τὸν κυκεῶνα, ἔλαβον ἐκ κίστης, ἐργασάμενος (? ἐγγευσάμενος)
ἀπεθέμην εἰς κάλαθον καὶ ἐκ καλάθου εἰς κίστην. Since the above was
written, Dr Dieterich (_Eine Mithras-Liturgie_ p. 125) has shown good
reason for supposing that ἐργασάμενος is a euphemism for rites analogous
to the ἱερὸς γάμος: see p. 535.
[403] _C.I.A._ vol. IV. p. 203, ll. 68 and 72.
[404] _Annali dell’ Inst._ 1865, Tav. d’ agg. F. Naples, Heydemann,
_Cat._ 3358.
[405] Clem. Al. _Protr._ I. 2. 13 Δηοῦς μυστήρια καὶ (leg. αἱ) Διὸς
πρὸς μητέρα. Δήμητρα ἀφροδίσιαι συμπλοκαὶ καὶ μῆνις τῆς Δηοῦς καὶ Διὸς
ἱκετηρίαι. ταῦτα τελίσκουσιν οἱ Φρύγες Ἄττιδι καὶ Κυβέλῃ καὶ Κορύβασι,—τὰ
σύμβολα τῆς μυήσεως ταύτης. Ἐκ τυμπάνου ἔφαγον, ἐκ κυμβάλου ἔπιον,
ἐκερνοφόρησα, ὑπὸ τὸν παστὸν ὑπέδυον.
[406] Schol. ad Plat. _Gorg._ p. 123 ἐν οἷς (τοῖς σμικροῖς μυστηρίοις)
πολλὰ μὲν ἐπράττετο αἰσχρά, ἐλέγετο δὲ πρὸς τῶν μυουμένων ταῦτα· ἐκ
τυμπάνου ἔφαγον, ἐκ κυμβάλου ἔπιον, ἐκερνοφόρησα (κέρνος δὲ τὸ λίκνον
ἤγουν τὸ πτύον ἐστίν), ὑπὸ τὸν παστὸν ὑπέδυον καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς. The concluding
formulary, which does not occur in the Eleusinian confession, will be
explained later (Chap. X).
[407] Athen. XI. 52 § 476.
[408] Athen. XI. 56 § 478 ὅσοι ἄνω τὸ κέρνος περιενηνοχότες. τοῦτο δ’
ἐστὶν ἀγγεῖον κεραμεοῦν ἔχον ἐν αὐτῷ πολλοὺς κοτυλίσκους κεκολλημένους·
ἔνεισι δ’ αὐτοῖς ὅρμινοι, μήκωνες λευκοί, πυροί, κριθαί, πισοί, λάθυροι,
ὦχροι, φακοί, κύαμοι, ζειαί, βρόμος, παλάθιον, μέλι, ἔλαιον, οἶνος, γάλα,
ὄιον ἔριον ἄπλυτον. ὁ δὲ τοῦτο βαστάσας οἷον λικνοφορήσας τούτων γεύεται.
I have translated the difficult ἄνω by _aloft_ taking it as referring to
the carrying on the head, but see ‘Kerchnos,’ O. Rubensohn, _A. Mitt._
1898, XXIII. p. 270, to whom I am indebted for many references. The
_Kernophoria_ is well shown in the Ninnion pinax in fig. 160.
[409] Ἐφημερὶς Ἀρχ. 1898, p. 61 χρυσοῖ κέρχνοι Γ.
[410] Sèvres Museum, _Annual of British School at Athens_, vol. III. p.
57, Pl. IV.
[411] Athen. XI. 93 § 496.
[412] Procl. ad Plat. _Tim._ p. 293 ἐν τοῖς Ἐλευσινίοις εἰς μὲν τὸν
οὐρανὸν ἀναβλέποντες ἐβόων ‘ὕε,’ καταβλέψαντες δὲ εἰς τὴν γῆν ‘κύε.’
[413] Hesych. s.v. Κὸγξ ὄμπαξ· ἐπιφώνημα τετελεσμένοις. Mr F. M. Cornford
suggests that the original form may have been Κόγξον πάξ, ‘Sound the
conch—enough.’ See also Lobeck, _Aglaoph._ 775.
[414] My position in this matter was stated long ago in an article in the
_Journal of Hellenic Studies_ XX. 1899, p. 211, 244.
[415] _Sagesse et Destinée_, p. 76.
[416] _Legg._ XI. p. 937 D τοῖς πλείστοις αὐτῶν οἷον Κῆρες ἐπιπεφύκασιν,
αἳ καταμιαίνουσί τε καὶ καταρρυπαίνουσιν αὐτά.
[417] I am indebted for this and many important references to the article
on Keres by Dr Otto Crusius in Roscher’s _Lexicon_ (Bd. II. 1148). Dr
Crusius’ admirable exposition of the nature of the Keres suffers only
from one defect, that he feels himself obliged to begin it with the
comparatively late literary conceptions of Homer.
[418] Conon, _Narr._ XLV.
[419] Published and explained as Heracles κηραμύντης by Professor
Furtwängler, _Jahrb. d. Inst._ 1895, p. 37.
[420] Berlin, _Inv._ 3317.
[421] _Orph. Hymn._ XII.
ἔλθε μάκαρ, νούσων θελκτήρια πάντα κομίζων·
ἐξέλασον δὲ κακὰς ἄτας, κλάδον ἐν χερὶ πάλλων,
πτηνοῖς τ’ ἰοβόλοις κῆρας χαλεπὰς ἀπόπεμπε.
[422] Ahrens, No. 99 b, Ἡρακλῆς Ἡπιάλητα πνίγων.
[423] s.v. ῥιγοπύρετον.
[424] Roscher, _Lexicon_ s.v. Nosoi p. 459, following Professor
Furtwängler. For the whole subject of the demonic cause of nightmare,
see Roscher’s Monograph on Ephialtes, _Abhandl. d. K. Sächs. Ges._
Phil.-Hist. Kl. XX. 1900.
[425] Eur. _Phoen._ 950 μέλαιναν κῆρ’ ἐπ’ ὄμμασιν βαλών.
[426] Wolff. Porphyr. _De philos. ex orac. haur._ p. 149 = Eusebius
_Praep. Ev._ 4. 23. 3 καὶ γὰρ μάλιστα ταῖς ποιαῖς τροφαῖς χαίρουσι,
σιτουμένων γὰρ ἡμῶν προσίασι καὶ προσιζάνουσι τῷ σώματι. καὶ διὰ τοῦτο
αἱ ἁγνεῖαι, οὐ διὰ τοὺς θεοὺς προσηγουμένως ἀλλ’ ἵν’ οὗτοι ἀποστῶσι·
μάλιστα δ’ αἵματι χαίρουσι καὶ ταῖς ἀκαθαρσίαις καὶ ἀπολαύουσι τούτων,
εἰσδύνοντες τοῖς χρωμένοις. The word προσηγουμένως does not so far as I
know occur elsewhere, it seems from the context to mean ‘inductively,’
with a view to _induce_ rather than expel.
[427] Stob. V. 22. Λίνου.
κῆρας ἀπωσάμενος πολυπήμονας αἵ τε βεβήλων
ὄχλον ἀνιστῶσαι ἄταις περὶ πάντα πεδῶσι
παντοίαις μορφῶν χαλεπῶν ἀπατήματ’ ἔχουσαι
τὰς μὲν ἀπὸ ψυχῆς εἴργειν φυλακαῖσι νόοιο.
οὗτος γάρ σε καθαρμὸς ὄντως δικαίως †ὁσιεύσει†,
εἴ κεν ἀληθείῃ μισέεις ὀλοὸν γένος αὐτῶν,
νηδὺν μὲν πρώτιστ’ αἰσχρῶν δώτειραν ἁπάντων
ἣν ἐπιθυμία ἡνιοχεῖ μαργοῖσι χαλινοῖς.
[428] Hes. _Erg._ 90
πρὶν μὲν γὰρ ζώεσκον ἐπὶ χθονὶ φῦλ’ ἀνθρώπων
νόσφιν ἄτερ τε κακῶν καὶ ἄτερ χαλεποῖο πόνοιο
νούσων τ’ ἀργαλέων αἵτ’ ἀνδράσι κῆρας ἔδωκαν.
[429] I prefer to read: ἅστ’ ἀνδράσι κῆρες ἔδωκαν, i.e. ‘grievous
diseases which Keres gave to men,’ but I have translated the text as it
stands, since possibly Hesiod, though he clearly knew of a connection
between νόσοι and κῆρες, may have inverted cause and effect. I have
already discussed the passage in the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, XX.
1900, p. 104.
[430] Hes. _Erg._ 94.
[431] Hes. _Erg._ 102. Procl. ad 102 ἐσωματοποίησε δὲ αὐτὰς προσιούσας
ἀφώνους ποιήσας ἐνδεικνύμενος ὅτι καὶ τούτων ἔφοροι δαίμονές εἰσιν·
οἵτινες δρῶσιν ἀφανῶς ἐπιπέμποντες τὰς νόσους τὰς ὑπὸ τὴν Εἱμαρμένην
τεταγμένας καὶ τὰς ἐν τῷ πίθῳ κῆρας διασπείροντες.
[432] Frg. ap. Plut. _Consol. ad Apoll._ XXVI. Τί οὖν; ἆρά γ’ ἡμεῖς
τοῦτο διὰ τοῦ λόγου μαθεῖν οὐ δυνάμεθα, οὐδ’ ἐπιλογίσασθαι; ὅτι πλείη
μὲν γαῖα κακῶν πλείη δὲ θάλασσα καὶ τοιάδε θνητοῖσι κακὰ κακῶν ἀμφί τε
κῆρες εἰλεῦνται, κενεὴ δ’ εἴσδυσις οὐδ’ αἰθέρι. Bergk (_Frg. adesp._ 2
B) points out that Plutarch’s second quotation is an elegiac couplet,
and for the MS. αἰθέρι reads Ἀΐδεω. This gives no satisfactory sense. Mr
Gilbert Murray reads ἀθέρι a conjecture made certain by a passage in the
dialogue ‘Theophrastos’ (p. 399 E) by Aeneas of Gaza, πλήρης δὲ καὶ ἡ γῆ
καὶ ἡ θάλασσα καὶ τὰ ὑπὸ γῆν πάντα· καὶ ὡς ἔφη τις τῶν παρ’ ἡμῖν σοφῶν
κενὸν οὐδὲν οὐδ’ ὅσον ἀθέρα καὶ τρίχα βαλεῖν.
[433] Simon. Amorg. I. 20.
[434] Aesch. _Suppl._ 684.
[435] Soph. _Phil._ 4.
[436] Theog. 837.
[437] Orph. _Lith._ 268
Λύχνι, σὺ δ’ ἐκ πεδίου ῥόθιόν τ’ ἀπόεργε χάλαζαν
ἡμετέρου καὶ κῆρας ὅσαι στιχόωσιν ἐπ’ ἀγρούς.
[438] Theophr. _De caus. pl._ 5. 10. 4 ἕκαστοι τῶν τόπων ἰδίας ἔχει
κῆρας, οἱ μὲν ἐκ τοῦ ἐδάφους οἱ δ’ ἐκ τοῦ ἀέρος οἱ δ’ ἐξ ἀμφοῖν.
[439] ὅπως μὴ προσάψαιτο τοῦ βωμοῦ διὰ τὸ μυρίας ἴσως ἀναμεμῖχθαι κῆρας.
This reference I borrow from the Thesaurus of Stephanos s.v., but I have
been unable to verify the quotation. The reference as given by Stephanos
is Bud. ap. Philon. _V.M._ 3. In connection with fire and fire-places the
belief in Keres is not dead to-day. An Irish servant of mine who failed
to light a fire firmly declined to make a second attempt on the ground
that she knew ‘there was a little fairy in the grate.’ The Ker in this
case was, as often in antiquity, a malign draught.
[440] Frg. ap. Eustath. 772. 3.
[441] XIV. 2. 652.
[442] Professor Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_ I. p. 177.
[443] As evidence of the evil reputation of Keres Mr Gilbert Murray calls
my attention to the pun in Eur. _Tro._ 424 which seems to have escaped
the attention of commentators:
τί ποτ’ ἔχουσι τοὔνομα;
κήρυκες, ἓν ἀπέχθημα πάγκοινον βροτοῖς.
‘What name have they? A _Ker_ish name.’ Hermes as _κῆρ_υξ invokes and
revokes _κῆρ_ες with his _κηρ_υκεῖον, see pp. 26 and 43.
[444] Theog. 707.
[445] Mimnermus 2.
[446] Pottier _Cat._ 343. P. Hartung, _Philologos_ L. (N.F. IV. 2) Taf. I.
[447] _Cat._ E 290. Cecil Smith, _J.H.S._ 1883, Pl. XXX. p. 96.
[448] _Od._ XI. 398 Τίς νύ σε κὴρ ἐδάμασσε τανηλεγέος θανάτοιο.
[449] _Od._ XII. 158 Ἤ κεν ἀλευάμενοι θάνατον καὶ κῆρα φύγωμεν.
[450] _Il._ IX. 410.
[451] _Il._ XVIII. 535.
[452] _Od._ XIV. 207.
[453] _Cat._ 1682, _Arch. Zeit._ 1882, Pl. 9.
[454] _Cat._ 2157, _Jahrbuch d. Arch. Inst._ I. p. 210.
[455] _Od._ XX. 66
ἢ ἔπειτά μ’ ἀναρπάξασα θύελλα
οἴχοιτο προφέρουσα κατ’ ἠερόεντα κέλευθα
ἐν προχοῇς δὲ βάλοι ἀψορρόου Ὠκεανοῖο,
ὡς δ’ ὅτε Πανδαρέου κούρας ἀνέλοντο θύελλαι.
[456] _Od._ XX. 77
τόφρα δὲ τὰς κούρας ἅρπυιαι ἀνηρείψαντο
καὶ ῥ’ ἔδοσαν στυγερῇσιν ἐρινύσιν ἀμφιπολεύειν.
[457] _Iliad_ XVI. 150.
[458] _Georg._ III. 274
saepe sine ullis
conjugiis vento gravidae, mirabile dictu.
[459] _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ XXII. 1898, Pl. V.
[460] Suidas s.v. Tritopatores. Φανόδημος δὲ ἐν ἕκτῳ φησὶν ὅτι μόνοι
Ἀθηναῖοι θύουσί τε καὶ εὔχονται αὐτοῖς ὑπὲρ γενέσεως παίδων ὅταν γαμεῖν
μέλλωσιν. ἐν δὲ τῷ Ὀρφέως Φυσικῷ ... ὀνομάζεσθαι τοὺς Τριτοπάτορας
Ἀμαλκείδην καὶ Πρωτοκλέα καὶ Πρωτοκλέοντα θυρωροὺς καὶ φύλακας εἶναι
τῶν ἀνέμων and supra Δήμων ἐν τῇ Ἀτθίδι φησὶν ἀνέμους εἶναι τοὺς
Τριτοπάτορας· Φιλόχορος δὲ τοὺς Τριτοπάτρεις πάντων γεγονέναι πρώτους.
τὴν μὲν γὰρ γῆν καὶ τὸν ἥλιον, φησίν ... γονεῖς αὐτῶν ἠπίσταντο οἱ τότε
ἄνθρωποι τοὺς δὲ ἐκ τούτων τρίτους πατέρας.
[461] Hipp. Περὶ ἐνυπν. II. p. 14 ἀπὸ γὰρ τῶν ἀποθανόντων αἱ τροφαὶ καὶ
αὐξήσεις καὶ σπέρματα.
[462] _Geop._ IX. 3 οὐ τὰ φυτὰ μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ πάντα ζωογονοῦσι.
[463] _Cat._ B 4.
[464] The full interpretation of the Cyrene vase is due to Mr Cecil
Smith, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_ p. 103, ‘Harpies in Greek Art.’ The
vase is reproduced and discussed, but only with partial success, by Dr
Studniczka in his _Kyrene_ p. 18.
[465] _Cat._ B 104.
[466] P. V. 19. 1 Βορέας ἐστὶν ἡρπακὼς Ὠρείθυιαν, οὐραὶ δὲ ὄφεων ἀντὶ
ποδῶν εἰσὶν αὐτῷ.
[467] Würzburg, no. 354.
[468] Reproduced later, fig. 47.
[469] Cecil Smith, _J.H.S._ XIII. p. 112, fig. 2.
[470] _Il._ XXII. 208.
[471] Plut. _Moral._ p. 17 a.
[472] Poll. _Onomast._ IV. 130.
[473] _Post-Hom._ II. 509
δοιαὶ ἄρ’ ἀμφοτέροισι θεῶν ἑκάτερθε παρέσταν
Κῆρες· ἐρεμναίη μὲν ἔβη ποτὶ Μέμνονος ἦτορ
φαιδρὴ δ’ ἀμφ’ Ἀχιλῆα δαΐφρονα.
Mr T. R. Glover, in the chapter on Quintus Smyrnaeus in his _Life
and Letters in the Fourth Century_, points out that the Keres in the
poem of Quintus have developed a supremacy unknown to Homer, they are
ἄφυκτοι—even the gods cannot check them. They are by-forms of Aisa and
Moira.
[474] _Cat._ B 639; Murray, _Hist. of Greek Sculpture_ vol. II. p. 28. Dr
Murray cites this vase as an instance of primitive perspective. Hermes,
depicted in an impossible position, actually between the two advancing
combatants, is thought of as in the background.
[475] Hes. _Theog._ 211.
[476] _Theog._ 217 ff.
[477] Hes. _Erg._ 416. The only other passage in which this difficult
word occurs is in one of the oracles collected in the συναγωγή of
Mnaseas (3rd cent. B.C.) and preserved for us by the scholiast on the
_Phoenissae_ of Euripides (ad _v._ 638, Müller _F.H.G._ 3, p. 157) where
Kadmos is told to go on ‘till he comes to the herds of the Ker-nourished
Pelagon’ (κηριτρεφέος Πελάγοντος). Here it looks as if the epithet
indicated prosperity, the man nourished and favoured and cherished by
the Keres, see Roscher, _Lexicon_ s.v. Kadmos, p. 834, and s.v. Keres,
p. 1139, but it is possible that, as suggested to me by Mr Cornford,
the word may have been coined by Hesiod in bitter parody of the Homeric
Διοτρεφής. The notion of the evil wasting action of Keres comes out in
the word κηραίνω, as in Eur. Hipp. 223 τί ποτ’, ὦ τέκνον, τάδε κηραίνεις,
and more physically in Aesch. _Supp._ 999 θῆρες δὲ κηραίνουσι.
[478] Hesych. s.v., ὅσοι νόσῳ τεθνήκασιν.
[479] Aesch. _Eum._ 930.
[480] Hes. _Scut._ 249.
[481] P. V. 19. 6 τοῦ Πολυνείκους δὲ ὄπισθεν ἕστηκεν ὀδόντας τε ἔχουσα
οὐδὲν ἡμερωτέρους θηρίου καὶ οἱ καὶ τῶν χειρῶν εἰσὶν ἐπικαμπεῖς οἱ
ὄνυχες· ἐπίγραμμα δὲ ἐπ’ αὐτῇ εἶναί φησι Κῆρα, ὡς τὸν μὲν ὑπὸ τοῦ
Πεπρωμένου τὸν Πολυνείκην ἀπαχθέντα, Ἐτεοκλεῖ δὲ γενομένης καὶ σὺν τῷ
δικαίῳ τῆς τελευτῆς.
[482] Blue-black, κυάνεος, remained the traditional colour of the
underworld, as in the _Alcestis_ of Euripides (_v._ 262):
ὑπ’ ὀφρύσι κυαναυγέσι
βλέπων πτερωτός—†αἵδας†.
[483] P. X. 28. 4.
[484] Admirable specimens of savage dancing-masks with Medusa-like tongue
and tusks are exhibited in the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde.
[485] Hesych. s.v., Photius s.v.
[486] P. VIII. 15. 3, see Dr Frazer ad loc.
[487] P. VIII. 15. 3.
[488] For these ovens see Conze, ‘Griechische Kohlenbecken,’ _Jahrbuch d.
Inst._, 1890, Taf. I. and II., and Furtwängler, _op. cit._ 1891, p. 110.
[489] Callim. _Hym. ad Dian._ 67, and see _Myths of the Odyssey_, p. 26.
[490] Hom. _Epigr._ XIV. Κάμινος ἢ Κεραμεῖς.
[491] Pernice, _Festschrift für Benndorf_, p. 75. The inscriptions are
not yet satisfactorily explained.
[492] A satyr-mask on an oven is figured in my _Greek Vase-paintings_, p.
9, fig. 1.
[493] Poll. _On._ VII. 108.
[494] Schol. ad Ar. _Nub._ 436.
[495] _Od._ XI. 633
ἐμὲ δὲ χλωρὸν δέος ᾕρει
μή μοι γοργείην κεφαλὴν δεινοῖο πελώρου
ἐξ Ἀΐδεος πέμψειεν ἀγαυὴ Περσεφόνεια.
I have translated γοργείην ‘grizzly,’ not ‘Gorgon,’ advisedly. Homer does
not commit himself to a definite Gorgon. Mr Neil on Aristoph. _Eq._ 1181
says “Γοργολόφα means merely ‘fierce-plumed.’” _The_ Gorgon was made out
of the terror, not the terror out of _the_ Gorgon.
[496] _J.H.S._ XX. 1900, p. xliv. On an _askos_ in the British Museum
(_Cat._ G 80) decorated with a stamped relief, a Gorgon’s head is figured
with horns and animal ears. The head stands above, but separated from, a
fantastic body.
[497] Th. Homolle, _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ XII. 1888, p. 464.
[498] Ϝι[φ]ικαρτίδης | μ’α|νέθεκε | hο | Νάhσιος, see M. Homolle, _op.
cit._
[499] _J.H.S._ 1885, Pl. LIX. _Brit. Mus. Cat._
[500] Aesch. _Prom. Vinct._ 793.
[501] Hes. _Theog._ 270.
[502] Cat. 1956; _Ath. Mitt._ 1886, Taf. X. 270.
[503] Aesch. _Prom. Vinct._ 800 ἃς θνητὸς οὐδεὶς εἰσιδὼν ἕξει πνοάς. The
line is usually rendered ‘no mortal may behold them and live,’ but, in
the light of the account of Athenaeus, it is clear that the πνοαί are the
intolerable exhalations, not the breath of life.
[504] Athen. V. 64 § 221 κτείνει τὸν ὑπ’ αὐτῆς θεωρηθέντα, οὐ τῷ πνεύματι
ἀλλὰ τῇ γιγνομένῃ ἀπὸ τῆς τῶν ὀμμάτων φύσεως φορᾷ καὶ νεκρὸν ποιεῖ. The
same account is given by Aelian, _Hist. An._ VII. 5, and Eustathius §
1704 in commenting on _Od._ XI. 633.
[505] Visconti, _Bull. de Comm. Arch._ 1890, Tav. I. and II. p. 24. A
relief with similar design exists on the back of a Corinthian marble in
the British Museum: its apotropaic functions are fully discussed by Prof.
Michaelis, _J.H.S._ VI. 1885, p. 312.
[506] For the evil eye in Greece see O. Jahn, _Berichte d. k. sächs. Ges.
d. Wissenschaften_, Wien 1855, and P. Perdrizet, _Bull. de Corr. Hell._
1900, p. 292, and for modern survivals, Tuchmann, _Mélusine_ 1885.
[507] Aesch. _Eum._ 54 ἐκ δ’ ὀμμάτων λείβουσι δυσφιλῆ δία. Following Dr
Verrall, I keep the MS. reading.
[508] Since this section was written Dr G. Weicker’s treatise _Der
Seelenvogel_ has appeared. As the substance of his argument as to the
soul-origin of the Sirens had been previously published in a dissertation
_De Sirenibus Quaestiones Selectae_ (Leipzig, 1895) he had long
anticipated my view and I welcome this confirmation of a theory at which
I had independently arrived, a theory which indeed must occur to everyone
who examines the art-form of the Sirens. I regret that his work was known
to me too late for me to utilize the vast stores of evidence he has
accumulated.
[509] _Od._ XII. 39.
[510] _Od._ XII. 166.
[511] _Od._ XII. 184.
[512] Mediaeval Sirens are more fully discussed in my _Myths of the
Odyssey_, p. 172.
[513] _Met._ V. 552
vobis Acheloïdes unde
pluma pedesque avium cum virginis ora geratis?
Apollonius Rhodius also believes that the bird form was a metamorphosis.
_Argon._ IV. 898
τότε δ’ ἄλλο μὲν οἰωνοῖσιν
ἄλλο δὲ παρθενικῇς ἐναλίγκιαι ἔσκον ἰδέσθαι.
[514] Aesch. _Sept._ 776. The nature of the Sphinx as a mantic
earth-demon will be discussed in detail later (p. 207).
[515] Published and discussed by H. Bulle, _Strena Helbigiana_, p. 31.
Recently acquired for the Boston Museum, see _Twenty-sixth Annual Report
of Boston Museum of Fine Arts_, Dec. 31, 1901, p. 35.
[516] Eur. _Hel._ 167.
[517] _Cat._ E 477. The vase is a _kelebe_ of late style with columnar
handles. In previously discussing this design (_Myths of the Odyssey_, p.
158, pl. 40 and _Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens_, p. lxix, fig. 14) I felt
uncertain whether the bird-woman were Harpy, Siren, or Soul. I am now
convinced that a soul is intended, and that the bird form was probably
borrowed from Egypt: see _Book of the Dead_, Vignette XCI.
[518] See _Myths of the Odyssey_, p. 180.
[519] Anton. Lib. I. I owe this reference to Prof. Sam. Wide, _A. Mitt._
XXVI. 1901, 2, p. 155. At the miracle plays it was a custom to let a bird
fly when a person died—a crow for the impenitent thief and a white dove
for the penitent one. See Mr Hugh Stewart, _Boethius_, p. 187.
[520] _B.M. Cat._ E 440. _Monimenti dell’ Inst._ vol. I. pl. 8.
[521] Published by Schreiber, _Hellenistische Reliefbilder_, Taf. LXI.:
where the relief now is is not known. Fully discussed by Dr Otto Crusius,
‘Die Epiphanie der Sirene,’ _Philologos_ (N.F. IV.) p. 93. Dr Crusius
rightly observes that the relief has been misunderstood. It represents
rather an ἔφοδος than a σύμπλεγμα, and the recumbent figure is a mortal
man not a Silen.
[522] Pliny cites Dinon as authority for a like superstition in India.
_Nat. Hist._ X. 49 (_F.H.G._ II. p. 90): Nec Sirenes impetraverunt fidem
adfirmet licet Dinon Clitarchi celebrati auctoris pater in India esse
mulcerique earum cantu quos gravatos somno lacerent. And cf. Aelian
_H.A._ XVIII. 22, 23. Siren in the Septuagint is the word used of the
desert bogey that our translation renders ‘dragon,’ Job xxx. 30 ‘I am
brother to the dragon and companion to owls,’ and again Micah i. 8 ‘I
will make a wailing like the dragon and a mourning as the owls.’
[523] _B.M. Cat._ B 651. J. E. Harrison, _Myths of the Odyssey_, Pl. 39.
[524] Erinna, frg. 5 Στᾶλαι καὶ Σειρῆνες ἐμαὶ καὶ πένθιμε κρωσσέ.
[525] Plat. _Rep._ 617 B.
[526] Plut. _Symp._ IX. 14. 6.
[527] Procl. ad Plat. _Rep._ loc. cit. ψυχαί τινες νοερῶς ζῶσαι.
[528] Ar. _Pax_ 832. For this Orphic doctrine see Rohde, _Psyche_ II. p.
423⁴, Dieterich, _Nekuia_, pp. 104 ff.
[529] Eur. _Hipp._ 732.
[530] Eur. frg. 911.
[531] _Myths of the Odyssey_, p. 166.
[532] _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ 1898, p. 238, fig. 6.
[533] _Mus. Greg._ No. 186. Hartwig, _Meisterschalen_, Taf. LXXIII.
[534] Dr Hartwig _op. cit._ has collected and discussed these vases and
gives to the artist the name ‘Meister mit dem Ranke.’
[535] Aesch. _Sept. c. Theb._ 539.
[536] Heydemann, _Cat._ No. 2846. _Museo Borbonico_ XII. 9. Discussed
and explained by Dr Otto Crusius, _Festschrift für Overbeck_, p. 102. Dr
Crusius holds that the snake is merely a ‘Füllfigur.’
[537] Aesop. _Fab._ 55.
[538] Discovered in the excavations at Delphi, see Homolle, _Fouilles de
Delphes_, 1902, T. II. pl. XIV.
[539] Berlin, _Inv._ 3186. _Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1891, Anzeiger, p. 119,
fig. 17.
[540] P. I. 41. 4.
[541] Hes. _Theog._ 326 and _Scut. Her._ 33, and see Plat. _Crat._ 414 D.
[542] Dr Frazer ad P. IX. 26. 2.
[543] Milani, _Museo Topografico_, p. 69. ‘Delphika,’ _J.H.S._ 1899, p.
235.
[544] The purpose of these holes, which occur frequently in
representations of tomb-mounds on Athenian lekythoi, is not, so far as I
know, made out.
[545] Suidas s.v., καὶ κηρυκαίνας ἐκάλουν Ἀλεξανδρεῖς γυναῖκας, αἵτινες
εἰς τὰς αὐλὰς παριοῦσαι καὶ τὰς συνοικίας ἐφ’ ᾧτε συναγείρειν τὰ μιάσματα
καὶ ἀποφέρειν εἰς θάλασσαν ἅπερ ἐκάλουν φυλάκια.
[546] Hesych. s.v., καὶ τοὺς ἐρινάζοντας τοὺς ἐρίνους κήρυκας λέγουσι.
[547] P. I. 43. 7.
[548] _Anthol. Pal._ VII. 154
Εἰμὶ δὲ Κῆρ τυμβοῦχος, ὁ δὲ κτείνας με Κόροιβος
κεῖται δ’ ὧδ’ ὑπ’ ἐμοῖς ποσσὶ διὰ τρίποδα.
[549] P. VIII. 25. 4 ὅτι τῷ θυμῷ χρῆσθαι καλοῦσιν ἐρινύειν οἱ Ἀρκάδες.
[550] The explanation of Erinyes as ‘angry ones’ is confirmed by modern
philology. F. Froehde, Bezzenberger. _Beiträge_, XX. p. 188, derives the
word Erinys from ἐ-ρυσ-νος, Lith. _rustas_, angry.
[551] _Il._ IX. 571
τῆς δ’ ἠεροφοῖτις Ἐρινὺς
ἔκλυεν ἐξ Ἐρέβεσφιν ἀμείλιχον ἦτορ ἔχουσα.
[552] On the epithet ἠεροφοῖτις ‘blood-haunting,’ usually translated
‘walking in darkness,’ Roscher (_Myth. Lex._ s.v.) has based a whole
mistaken theory of the nature of the Erinyes as ‘storm-clouds.’ The
Townley scholion (_ad loc._) offers an alternative reading of the
epithet more consonant with the nature of the Erinys: οἱ δὲ εἰαροπῶτις,
ἐγκειμένου τοῦ εἶαρ ὅπερ ἐστὶ κατὰ Σαλαμινίους αἷμα. On this showing the
Erinyes would be not those who ‘walked in darkness’ but those who sucked
the blood, a view certainly consonant with the picture of the Erinyes
presented by Aeschylus: ἀπὸ ζῶντος ῥοφεῖν ἐρυθρὸν ἐκ μελέων πέλανον
(_Eum._ 264). The termination -πωτις instead of -φοιτις gives of course
a simple and satisfactory meaning; but, accepting ἠερο- as representing
the Cyprian form εἶαρ ‘blood,’ it is perhaps possible to retain -φοιτις
and explain the epithet as ‘blood haunting.’ Another alternative
is suggested by Fick, i.e. that the primitive form is ἡαρο-ποῖτις
‘blutrachend,’ ποῖτις being akin to ποινή, cf. Apollo Poitios (see A.
Fick, ‘Götternamen,’ in Bezzenberger. _Beiträge_, XX. p. 179).
[553] _Il._ IX. 454.
[554] _Il._ XXI. 412.
[555] _Il._ XIX. 418 ὡς ἄρα φωνήσαντος ἐρινύες ἔσχεθον αὐδήν.
[556] Plut. _de Ex._ 11 ἥλιος γὰρ οὐχ ὑπερβήσεται μέτρα (φησὶν ὁ
Ἡράκλειτος) εἰ δὲ μὴ Ἐριννύες μιν, Δίκης ἐπίκουροι, ἐξευρήσουσιν.
[557] The conception of Dike was largely due to Orphic influence, see p.
507.
[558] _v._ 988
ἰὼ μοῖρα βαρυδότειρα μογερὰ
πότνιά τ’ Οἰδίπου σκιὰ
μέλαιν’ Ἐρινύς, ἦ μεγασθενής τις εἶ.
[559] Aesch. _Prom. Vinct._ 566.
[560] The gadfly is purely incidental to Io as cow. Oistros is an
incarnation of the distraction caused by the ghost. On a vase-painting
representing the slaying of her children by Medea, Oistros (inscribed) is
represented as a figure in a chariot drawn by snakes, and near at hand is
‘the ghost of Aietes’ (inscribed) who sent it. (_Arch. Zeit._ 1847, T. 3.)
[561] Plat. _Legg._ IX. 865.
[562] Mr F. M. Cornford draws my attention to a similar and even cruder
English superstition. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his _Observations on the
Religio Medici_ (5th ed. p. 128), maintains as against Sir Thomas
Browne who says that apparitions are devils, that those that appear in
cemeteries and charnel-houses are the souls of the dead which have ‘a
byas and a languishing’ towards their bodies, and that the body of a
murdered man bleeds when the murderer approaches (‘which is frequently
seen in England’) because the soul, desiring revenge, and being unable
to speak, ‘must endeavour to cause a motion in the subtilest or most
fluid parts (and consequently the most moveable ones) of it. This can be
nothing but the blood, which then being violently moved, must needs gush
out at those places where it findeth issues.’
[563] Aesch. _Choeph._ 285.
[564] P. II. 18. 2 τὸ μίασμα τὸ Πέλοπος καὶ ὁ Μυρτίλου προστρόπαιος
ἠκολούθησε.
[565] XXIII. 10. 2.
[566] _Choeph._ 282. In the interpretation of this passage I follow Dr
Verrall, _Choephori_, ad _v._ 286.
[567] Hippocr. περὶ ἱερῆς νούσου, p. 123, 20 ὁπόσα δὲ δείματα νυκτὸς
παρίσταται καὶ φόβοι καὶ παράνοιαι καὶ ἀναπηδήσεις ἐκ κλίνης Ἑκάτης φασὶν
εἶναι ἐπιβουλὰς καὶ ἡρῴων ἐφόδους.
[568] Aesch. _Choeph._ 64. The same idea comes out in the _Electra_ of
Euripides (_v._ 318).
[569] P. VIII. 24. 8 and 9 καὶ αὐτὸν ἡ Πυθία διδάσκει τὸν Ἐριφύλης
ἀλάστορα ἐς ταύτην οἱ μόνην χώραν οὐ συνακολουθήσειν ἥτις ἐστὶ νεωτάτη,
καὶ ἡ θάλασσα τοῦ μητρῴου μιάσματος ἀνέφηνεν ὕστερον αὐτήν. καὶ ὁ μὲν
ἐξευρὼν τοῦ Ἀχελῴου τὴν πρόσχωσιν ἐνταῦθα ᾤκησε.
[570] Apollod. III. 7. 5.
[571] _Il._ VI. 200.
[572] Pind. _Isth._ V. 66.
[573] Apollod. II. 2. 3.
[574] For this information as to the character of the Aleïan plain, which
suggested the view in the text, I am indebted to the kindness of Prof.
Ramsay.
[575] Aesch. _Eum._ 417.
[576] _Ib._ 421.
[577] _Il._ XIX. 258.
[578] Hes. _Erg._ 803.
[579] Aesch. _Eum._ 511.
[580] Aesch. _Eum._ 46 ff.
[581] _v._ 57.
[582] A master-touch from the point of view of Aeschylus, who is all for
the new order. It is however impossible to avoid a regret that he stooped
to the cheap expedient of blackening the Erinyes as representatives
of the old. He thereby half alienates our sympathies. See ‘Delphika,’
_J.H.S._ XIX. 1899, p. 251.
[583] _Cat._ B 471. _Vorlegeblätter_ 1889, Taf. II. 1 _a_.
[584] Würzburg, _Inv._ 354.
[585] The Phineus cylix is published in phototype by Carl Sittl, ‘Die
Phineus Schale, und ähnliche Vasen,’ Programm XXV., forming part of the
_Jahresbericht des Wagnerischen Kunst-Instituts der Kgl. Universität
Würzburg_ 1892. The account there given of the difficult inscriptions
is inadequate and must be supplemented by reference to Dr Böhlau’s
corrections in his paper on ‘Die Ionischen Augenschalen,’ _A. Mitt._ 1898
(XXIII.) pp. 54, 77; see also Furtwängler-Reinhold, Pl. 41.
[586] Pottier, _Cat. A._ 478, pl. 17. 1. The vase is further discussed by
Mr Barnett, _Hermes_, ‘Miscellen,’ 1898, p. 639. Mr Barnett sees in the
winged figure Iris, an interpretation with which I cannot agree.
[587] Schol. ad _Od._ τ 518 and P. X. 30. 2. Pind. Schol. _Ol._ I. 90.
[588] Schol. Ambros. B. ad τ 518.
[589] Aesch. _Choeph._ 1048. The noisome exudation from the eyes
noted by Aeschylus (_Eum._ 54) has already been shown (p. 195) to be
characteristically Gorgon.
[590] _Monimenti dell’ Inst._ IV. pl. 48. Baumeister, p. 1314. The vase,
an _oxybaphon_, is now in the Louvre.
[591] Hermitage, _Cat._ I. 349. Stephani, _Compte Rendu_ 1863, pl. VI. 5.
[592] Millin, _Peintures des vases grecs_ II. 68. Baumeister, fig. 1315,
p. 1118.
[593] _Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1890, Anzeiger, p. 90.
[594] Aeschin. _c. Tim._ 80.
[595] Plut. _Vit. Dion._ C. 55.
[596] Plut. _de ser. num. vind._ XXII.
[597] ἄγγελοι βασανισταί in the Apocalypse of Peter; see Dieterich,
_Nekuia_ p. 61.
[598] Aesch. _Eum._ 126.
[599] _v._ 131.
[600] Eur. _Iph. in T._ 286.
[601] Eur. _Or._ 256.
[602] Passerius, _Pict. Etrusc._ III. 297. _J.H.S._ vol. XIX. 1899, p.
219. This representation does not stand alone. Among the fragments of
vase-paintings found in the excavations on the Acropolis, and as yet
unpublished, is one of considerably earlier style than the design in fig.
53, and with a representation exactly similar in all essentials. The
winged feet and part of the drapery of the figure remain, and below is a
large snake with open mouth. Found as it was in the ‘pre-Persian’ débris,
this fragment cannot be later and is probably much earlier than 480 B.C.
[603] This striding flying pose with the bent knee has been used by some
archaeologists to explain the epithet καμψίπους. But bending or turning
the _knee_ is not bending or turning the foot. It is possible that in
this epithet applied (Aesch. _Sept._ 791) to the Erinys we have merely
an expression of the instinct to create an uncouth deformed bogey. M.
Paul Perdrizet (_Mélusine_ vol. IX. 1898, p. 99, ‘Les pieds ou les genoux
à rebours’) makes the interesting suggestion that the καμψίπους Ἐρινύς
may be an Erinys with feet turned the reverse way, a horrid distorted
cripple. This peculiar form of deformity was not unknown among the
ancients, as witness the statuettes cited as examples by M. Perdrizet, a
bronze in the British Museum (_Cat. Walters_ no. 216) and a terracotta
in the National Museum at Athens (_Cat._ 7877: Stackelberg, _Gräber der
Hellenen_, pl. LXXIII. 475). I do not feel confident of the rightness of
this interpretation for two reasons, firstly, καμψίπους seems scarcely
to be the right epithet for a striking distortion which would rather be
στρεβλόπους or some such word, and secondly, constant stress is laid
on the _swiftness_ of the Erinys which would be inconsistent with a
crippling deformity. On the other hand, figures with their feet reversed
_may_ have suggested the inevitable back-coming of the Erinys. Mr F. M.
Cornford suggests to me that καμψίπους is the humanized equivalent of
γαμψῶνυξ, an interpretation proffered by Blomfield but rejected in favour
of _pernix_. The suggestion seems to me to carry fresh conviction now
that the Erinys is seen to be in her original essence and in her art-form
near akin to Harpy, Sphinx and Bird-woman. Sophocles (_Oed. Tyr._ 1199)
calls the Sphinx γαμψῶνυξ. In fig. 44 she is claw-footed; the Harpy to
the right in fig. 19 has crooked claws for hands. Aeschylus may be using
an epithet that originally meant ‘clutch-foot’ in some new sense as
‘plying the foot,’ i.e. swift, or as ‘back-returning.’
[604] _A. Mitt._ XVI. p. 379. _J.H.S._ XIX. 1899, p. 219, fig. 4.
[605] Vienna Museum. Masner, _Cat._ 221. _Annali dell’ Inst._ 1866, Tav.
d’ agg. R. 2.
[606] Aesch. _Choeph._ 527 and 531.
[607] _v._ 549.
[608] _v._ 927
πατρὸς γὰρ αἶσα τόνδε συρίζει μύρον
accepting Dr Verrall’s reading συρίζει.
[609] _Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1893, p. 93, pl. I. The vase is there
interpreted as the slaying of Polyxena, but I agree with Dr Thiersch
(_Tyrrhenische Amphoren_, p. 56) that the scene represented is the
slaying of Eriphyle by Alcmaeon. In connection with the omphalos-tomb of
the vase-painting it is worth noting that at Phlius near the house of
divination of Amphiaraos there was an omphalos. See P. II. 13. 7.
[610] Soph. _Oed. Tyr._ 469. The attitude of Sophocles towards the
Orestes myth, and the fashion in which he ignores the conflict between
Apollo and the Erinyes, cannot be discussed here. It has been ably
treated by Miss Janet Case in the _Classical Review_, May 1902, p. 195.
[611] _v._ 475.
[612] Eur. _El._ 1252.
[613] Herod. IV. 149.
[614] Aesch. _Eum._ 106.
[615] Pausanias (I. 31. 2) mentions one other place in Attica where the
Semnae are worshipped under this name. At Phlya in one and the same
sanctuary there were altars of Demeter Anesidora, of Zeus Ktesios, of
Athene Tithrone, of Kore Protogone and of goddesses called Venerable
(Σεμνῶν ὀνομαζομένων θεῶν).
[616] The best evidence of this is the language, always ceremonial,
of oaths taken in the law courts, where we may be sure the Semnae are
invoked by their official title, e.g. Deinarchus _c. Dem._ 47. Μαρτύρομαι
τὰς σεμνὰς θεάς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι. But so far as I am aware the Semnae
are never alluded to merely as Semnae.
[617] Eur. _Or._ 259.
[618] Aesch. _Eum._ 55.
[619] Diog. Laert. I. X. 6. See Demoulin, _Épiménide de Crète_, p. 110.
[620] P. I. 28. 6.
[621] Schol. ad Aeschin. _c. Timarch._ I. 188 C ‘ταῖς σεμναῖς θεαῖς.’
Τρεῖς ἦσαν αὗται αἱ λεγόμεναι σεμναὶ θεαὶ ἢ Εὐμενίδες ἢ Ἐριννύες, ὧν
τὰς μὲν δύο τὰς ἑκατέρωθεν Σκόπας ὁ Πάριος πεποίηκεν ἐκ τῆς λυχνίτου
λίθου τὴν δὲ μέσην Κάλαμις. οἱ δὲ Ἀρεοπαγῖται τρεῖς που τοῦ μηνὸς ἡμέρας
τὰς φονικὰς δίκας ἐδίκαζον ἑκάστῃ τῶν θεῶν μίαν ἡμέραν ἀπονέμοντες. ἦν
δὲ τὰ πεμπόμενα αὐταῖς ἱερὰ πόπανα καὶ γάλα ἐν ἄγγεσι κεραμείοις. φασὶ
μέντοι αὐτὰς Γῆς εἶναι καὶ Σκότους, οἱ δὲ Σκότους καὶ Εὐωνύμης ἣν καὶ
Γῆν ὀνομάζεσθαι, κληθῆναι δὲ Εὐμενίδας ἐπιηρέστερον [de conj.: ἐπίηρα
Vat. ἐπὶ Ὀρέστου cett.] πρῶτον καλουμένας. The entire scholion is given
here for convenience, the ritual of cakes and milk has been previously
discussed (p. 90).
[622] Dr Wellmann (_de Istro_ 14) has shown that in all probability the
information of the scholiast is borrowed from the treatise of Polemon
quoted by Clement of Alexandria in his _Protrepticus_, p. 41.
[623] Schol. ad _Oed. Col._ 39 ‘ἔμφοβοι θεαί.’ Φύλαρχός φησι δύο αὐτὰς
εἶναι τά τε ἀγάλματα Ἀθήνησι δύο, Πολέμων δὲ τρεῖς αὐτάς φησι.
[624] Thucyd. I. 126.
[625] Plut. _Vit. Sol._ XII.
[626] Ar. _Eq._ 1312
ἢν δ’ ἀρέσκῃ ταῦτ’ Ἀθηναίοις καθῆσθαί μοι δοκεῖ
ἐς τὸ Θησεῖον πλεούσας ἢ ’πὶ τῶν σεμνῶν θεῶν.
[627] Ar. _Thesm._ 224
ΕΥΡ. οὗτος σὺ ποῖ θεῖς;
ΜΝ. ἐς τὸ τῶν σεμνῶν θεῶν.
[628] Eur. _El._ 1270.
[629] Hesych. s.v. δευτερόποτμος.
[630] Aesch. _Eum._ 1006
ἴτε καὶ σφαγίων τῶνδ’ ὑπὸ σεμνῶν
κατὰ γῆς σύμεναι.
[631] Schol. ad Soph. _Oed. Col._ 42 ‘τὰς πάνθ’ ὁρώσας Εὐμενίδας’....
Τότε γὰρ πρῶτον Εὐμενίδας κληθῆναι εὐμενεῖς κριθέντι νικᾶν παρ’ Ἀθηναίοις
καὶ ὁλοκαυτῆσαι αὐταῖς ὄϊν μέλαιναν ἐν Καρνείᾳ [the reading Καρνείᾳ is
doubtful] τῆς Πελοποννήσου. Φιλήμων δὲ ὁ κωμικὸς ἑτέρας φησὶ τὰς σεμνὰς
θεὰς τῶν Εὐμενίδων.
[632] Dem. _c. Aristocr._ p. 642.
[633] Dem. _c. Dein._ 47.
[634] Philo _de praest. liber_ p. 886 B διό μοι δοκοῦσιν οἱ τῶν Ἑλλήνων
ὀξυδερκέστατοι Ἀθηναῖοι τὴν ἐπὶ ταῖς σεμναῖς θεαῖς πομπὴν ὅταν στέλλωσι
δοῦλον μηδένα προσλαμβάνειν.
[635] Schol. ad Soph. _Oed. Col._ 489 ‘ἄπυστα φωνῶν.’ τοῦτο ἀπὸ τῆς
δρωμένης θυσίας ταῖς Εὐμενίσι· μετὰ γὰρ ἡσυχίας τὰ ἱερὰ δρῶσι καὶ διὰ
τοῦτο οἱ μὲν ἀπὸ Ἡσύχου θύουσιν αὐταῖς καθάπερ Πολέμων ἐν τοῖς πρὸς
Ἐρατοσθένην φησὶν οὕτω, τὸ δὲ τῶν Εὐπατριδῶν γένος οὐ μετέχει τῆς θυσίας
ταύτης. εἶτα ἑξῆς· τῆς δὲ πομπῆς ταύτης Ἡσυχίδαι ὃ δὴ γένος ἐστὶ περὶ τὰς
Σεμνὰς θεὰς καὶ τὴν ἡγεμονίαν ἔχει. καὶ προθύονται πρὸ τῆς θυσίας κριὸν
Ἡσύχῳ ἱερόν, ἥρω τοῦτον οὕτω καλοῦντες διὰ τὴν εὐφημίαν· οὗ τὸ ἱερὸν παρὰ
τὸ Κυλώνειον ἐκτὸς τῶν ἐννέα πυλῶν.
[636] Hesych. s.v., γένος Ἀθήνησιν ἰθαγενῶν.
[637] Plut. _Vit. Nik._ XIII.
[638] Callim. frg. (Schneider II. 123)
Νηφάλι’ αἱ καὶ τῇσιν ἀεὶ μελιηδέας ὄμπνας
λῄτειραι καίειν ἔλλαχον Ἡσυχίδες.
[639] Hesych. s.v. Λῄτειραι· ἱέρειαι τῶν σεμνῶν θεῶν.
[640] Aesch. _Eum._ 856.
[641] _v._ 1026.
[642] Aesch. _Eum._ 1028
φοινικοβάπτοις ἐνδυτοῖς ἐσθήμασιν
τιμᾶτε καὶ τὸ φέγγος ὁρμάσθω πυρός,
ὅπως ἂν εὔφρων ἥδ’ ὁμιλία χθονὸς
τὸ λοιπὸν εὐάνδροισι συμφοραῖς πρέπῃ.
The construction of τιμᾶτε is uncertain, there being no expressed
grammatical object; but the two ritual factors, the torches and crimson
garments, are certain.
[643] Luc. _de domo_ 18.
[644] Luc. _Hermot._ 806.
[645] Aesch. _Eum._ 706.
[646] Plut. _Vit. Aristid._ XXI.
[647] Cf. αἵματι φοινόν (_Il._ XVI. 159). φοινός, φοῖνιξ and φόνος are
not far asunder: cf. also the tragic use of αἷμα for corpse. For purple
in the ritual of the dead, see Diels, _Sibyllinische Blätter_, p. 69 note.
[648] Plut. _Vit. Dion._ LVI. περιβάλλεται τὴν πορφυρίδα τῆς θεοῦ καὶ
λαβὼν δᾷδα καιομένην ἀπόμνυσι.
[649] Plin. _N.H._ IX. 60 purpura dis advocatur placandis.
[650] Aesch. _Eum._ 804. The significance of the ἐσχάρα as distinguished
from the βωμός has been already discussed (p. 61).
[651] Aesch. _Eum._ 860.
[652] Aesch. _Eum._ 980.
[653] _v._ 834.
[654] Plut. _Conj. Praec._ Proem. μετὰ τὸν πάτριον θεσμὸν ὃν ὑμῖν ἡ τῆς
Δήμητρος ἱέρεια συνειργνυμένοις ἐφήρμοσεν.
[655] Aesch. _Eum._ 903.
[656] Aesch. _Eum._ 938. The translation offered only attempts to render
the general sense of this difficult passage, a sense sufficiently clear
for the immediate purpose. No satisfactory explanation has yet been
offered of the enigmatic τὸ μὴ περᾶν ὅρον τόπων, see Dr Verrall, ad loc.
[657] P. I. 28. 6.
[658] Arrian, _Anab._ III. 16. 8.
[659] Hesych. s.v. Ἀνεμοκοῖται.
[660] Plat. _Phaedr._ p. 229. The legend no doubt took its rise in
the Areopagos, where the king’s daughter was flower-gathering, or
fetching water from the Enneakrounos just outside the city gate. It was
transplanted later with many another legend and cult to the banks of the
Ilissus, outside the enlarged city.
[661] Aesch. _Eum._ 939.
[662] Aesch. _Eum._ 916 δέξομαι Παλλάδος ξυνοικίαν.
[663] _v._ 1041 δεῦρ’ ἴτε, σεμναί.
[664] Harpocrat. s.v. Εὐμενίδες ... Αἰσχύλος ἐν Εὐμενίσιν εἰπὼν τὰ
περὶ τὴν κρίσιν τὴν Ὀρέστου φησὶν ὡς ἡ Ἀθηνᾶ πραΰνασα τὰς Ἐρινύας ὥστε
μὴ χαλεπῶς ἔχειν πρὸς τὸν Ὀρέστην Εὐμενίδας ὠνόμασεν, εἰσὶ δὲ Ἀληκτὼ,
Μέγαιρα, Τισιφόνη.
[665] Aesch. _Eum._ hypoth.... ἧς βουλῇ νικήσας κατῆλθεν εἰς Ἄργος, τὰς
δὲ Ἐρινύας πραΰνας προσηγόρευσεν Εὐμενίδας. To suit the statement of
Harpocration, πραΰνας has been altered to πραΰνασα.
[666] There is no evidence that can be relied on to show that before
Aeschylus wrote his play the Semnae ever bore the title of Eumenides.
Pausanias indeed (VII. 25. 1) quotes an oracle from Dodona ostensibly
belonging to the mythical days of Apheidas, in which the title Eumenides
is given to the goddesses of the Areopagos,
φράζεο δ’ Ἄρειόν τε πάγον, βωμούς τε θυώδεις
Εὐμενίδων κτλ.
And this oracle, he says, the Greek called to mind when the
Peloponnesians came against Athens in the time of Codrus. The passage
stands alone, and oracle-mongering was rife at all times.
[667] Soph. _Oed. Col._ 41.
[668] Aesch. _Prom. Vinct._ 209
Θέμις
καὶ Γαῖα πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μία.
[669] _Oed. Col._ 486
ὥς σφας καλοῦμεν Εὐμενίδας, ἐξ εὐμενῶν
στέρνων δέχεσθαι τὸν ἱκέτην.
[670] P. I. 11. 4.
[671] P. VII. 25. 7.
[672] P. VIII. 34. 2.
[673] At this point unhappily a lacuna occurs.
[674] _A. Mitt._ IV. 1879, pl. IX. p. 176.
[675] The regular ritual offerings at Titane, see P. I. 11. 4 and Aesch.
_Eum._ 834.
[676] The archaic marble statuette found at Olympia and representing a
woman with polos on her head and a snake in each hand may very possibly
be one of three Eumenides. See _Olympia_, vol. III. p. 27.
[677] Suidas s.v. Εὐμενίδες· Φιλήμων δὲ ὁ κωμικὸς ἑτέρας φησὶ τὰς Σεμνὰς
θεὰς τῶν Εὐμενίδων.
[678] Xenoph. frg. 1, 2, 5 and 6.
[679] P. VIII. 42. 4. The material for the study of the non-human forms
taken by Greek gods has been recently collected by Dr M. W. de Visser,
_Die nicht-menschengestaltigen Götter der Griechen_, 1903.
[680] P. VIII. 41. 6.
[681] Munich. Published and discussed by Dr Böhlan, ‘Schlangenleibige
Nymphen,’ _Philologos_ LVII. N.F. XI. 1, and see ‘Delphika,’ _J.H.S._
XIX. 1899, p. 216, note 1.
[682] Aesch. _Eum._ 1.
[683] Aesch. _Prom. Vinct._ 209.
[684] The clearest and most scientific statement of the facts as to this
difficult subject known to me is to be found in an article by Dr E. B.
Tylor, ‘The Matriarchal family system,’ _Nineteenth Century_, July 1896.
[685] S. Augustine, _De civitat. Dei_ 18. 9 ut nulla ulterius ferrent
suffragia, ut nullus nascentium maternum nomen acciperet, ut ne quis eas
Athenaeas vocaret.
[686] Athen. XIII. 2 § 555 and Tzetzes _Chil._ V. 19. 650. Other
instances of the survival in Greek mythology of traces of matriarchal
conditions are collected by Bachofen in his _Mutterrecht_, a book which,
spite of the wildness of its theories, remains of value as the fullest
existing collection of ancient facts.
[687] P. VIII. 2. 3.
[688] Diog. 8. 1. 10, and Iambl. _Vit. Pyth._ 3. 11.
[689] The fundamental unity of all the Greek goddesses was, I think,
first observed by Gerhard, _Ueber Metroon und Goetter-Mutter_, 1849, p.
103, but his illuminating suggestion has been obscured for half a century
by systems, such as that of Preller and Max Müller, that see in ancient
deities impersonations of natural phenomena.
[690] P. X. 12. 10
Ζεὺς ἦν, Ζεὺς ἐστί, Ζεὺς ἔσσεται· ὦ μεγάλε Ζεῦ.
Γᾶ καρποὺς ἀνίει, διὸ κλῄζετε μητέρα γαῖαν.
[691] P. VIII. 2. 4.
[692] The distinction has been acutely observed by Miss W. M. L.
Hutchinson in discussing the earth-born parentage of Aeacus, see _Aeacus
a Judge of the Underworld_, p. 6.
[693] Ἐφημερὶς Ἀρχ. 1892, Pl. 9; for stamped Boeotian amphorae in
general, see Mr A. de Ridder, _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ XXII. 1898, p. 440.
[694] Dr Wolters (Ἐφ. Ἀρχ. 1892, p. 225) explains the figure of the
Earth-Mother as Artemis Λεχώ. I entirely agree with Prof. S. Wide that
her pose is not that of ‘eine gebärende Frau’: see S. Wide, ‘Mykenische
Götterbilder und Idole,’ _A. Mitt._ XXVI. 1901, p. 253.
[695] Ἐφ. Ἀρχ. 1892, Pl. 10. 1.
[696] On the head of one of the idols in the recently discovered shrine
at Cnossos, Mr Arthur Evans kindly tells me, is perched a dove, a
forecast it may be of Aphrodite.
[697] See Prof. Ramsay, _J.H.S._ 1884, p. 245.
[698] Cic. _De Nat. Deor._ II. 26 et recidunt omnia in terras et oriuntur
e terris.
[699] Aesch. _Choeph._ 127.
[700] Plut. _de fac. in orb. lun._ 28 καὶ τοὺς νεκροὺς Ἀθηναῖοι
Δημητρείους ὠνόμαζον τὸ παλαιόν.
[701] Cic. _Legg._ II. 22, and 25, 63.
[702] 1 Cor. XV. 36.
[703] _B.M. Cat._ B 213. Inghirami, _Vasi Fitt._ III. 300. Mr A. Lang,
_Homeric Hymns_, plate facing p. 104, names the design ‘Leto with her
infants Apollo and Artemis.’ The catalogue of the British Museum with
just caution says ‘Leto (?),’ but adds that the children are ‘probably
Apollo and Artemis.’ The figures to either side of the central ‘Mother,’
Dionysos and a Satyr, give no clue to the interpretation.
[704] Mr G. C. Richards, _J.H.S._ XIII. 1892, p. 284, pl. XI.
[705] P. V. 18. 1. Dr Frazer translates the difficult word διεστραμμένους
‘turned different ways’; the word seems usually to imply distortion, but
in the case of Death and Sleep this seems inappropriate.
[706] _B.M. Cat._ B 168.
[707] Ar. _Thesm._ 295 and schol. ad loc. The words τῇ Γῇ have been
interpolated after Κουροτρόφῳ but without MS. authority.
[708] P. IX. 16. 2.
[709] Mr R. C. Bosanquet, ‘Excavations of the British School at Melos,’
_J.H.S._ XVIII. 1898, p. 60, Fig. 1, and Dr P. Wolters, ‘Melische
Kultstatuen,’ _A. Mitt._ XV. 1890, p. 248.
[710] All the proposed etymologies, possible and impossible, are
collected by Mannhardt, _Mythologische Forschungen_, p. 287. To his
discussion must now be added Dr Kretschmer’s view that Δᾶ like Μᾶ means
mother and that the form Δαμάτηρ arose when Δᾶ had crystallized into a
proper name. See _Festschrift der Wiener-Studien_, 1902, p. 291.
[711] Aesch. _Prom. Vinct._ 568.
[712] _Etym. Mag._ s.v. Δηώ sub fin.: ἢ Δηώ, παρὰ τὰς δηάς· οὕτω γὰρ δηαὶ
προσαγορεύονται ὑπὸ Κρητῶν αἱ κριθαί.
[713] Hom. _Il._ II. 528 ζείδωρος ἄρουρα.
[714] _History of the New World_, vol. II. p. 7.
[715] O. Rubensohn, ‘Eleusinische Beiträge,’ _A. Mitth._ 1899, pl. VII.
[716] _Hom. Hymn. ad Cer._ 1.
[717] _Hom. Hymn. ad Cer._ 470. The elaborate aetiology of the whole
Homeric Hymn to Demeter has been fully examined and explained by Mr F. B.
Jevons in his _Introduction to the History of Religion_, ch. XXIII. and
Appendix.
[718] Athens Nat. Mus. 484. Fig. 67 is reproduced from a photograph
kindly sent me by Prof. Sam. Wide. For further particulars of this class
of vases I must refer to Prof. Wide’s article ‘Eine lokale Gattung
Boiotischer Gefässe,’ _A. Mitt._ XXVI. 1901, p. 143. Prof. Wide makes
the interesting suggestion that the bird in the field is a bird-soul and
points out that merely decorative ‘Füllfiguren’ do not occur on this
class of vases. This interpretation seems to me highly probable, but till
further evidence emerges, I hesitate to adopt it as certain.
[719] Plut. _de fac. in orb. lun._ XXVIII.
[720] Plut. _de Is. et Osir._ LXVI. ποιητὴς δέ τις ἐπὶ τῶν θεριζόντων
‘Τῆμος ὅτ’ αἰζηοὶ Δημήτερα κωλοτομεῦσιν.’
[721] P. VIII. 25. 4-7.
[722] _Jahrbuch d. Inst. Anz._ 1893, p. 166.
[723] Berl. _Cat._ 2646. _Mon. d. Inst._ XII. tav. IV. This vase with
others of the same type is explained by Dr Robert, _Archäologische
Mährchen_, p. 196, as the rising of a Spring-Nymph, but the inscribed
Berlin vase was not known to him, see also ‘Delphika,’ _J.H.S._ XIX.
1899, p. 232.
[724] _Cat._ 298. Milliet et Giraudon, Pl. LII. B, discussed by Prof.
Furtwängler, _Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1891, p. 113, and Prof. Gardner,
_J.H.S._ XXI. 1901, p. 5, and J. E. Harrison, ‘Delphika,’ _J.H.S._ XIX.
1899, p. 232.
[725] Vasi dipinti del Museo Vivenzio designati di C. Angelini nel
MDCCXCVI. Illustrato di G. Patroni 1900, Tav. XXIX. All the plates of
this publication are of course reproduced from very old drawings and
are quite untrustworthy as regards style. The vase under discussion is
now lost, so that the original cannot be compared. Sig. Patroni thinks
the drawing is authentic. I reproduce it partly because the subject is
not wholly explicable, partly in the hope that by making it more widely
known, I may lead to the rediscovery of the vase, which may be in some
private collection.
[726] Prof. Percy Gardner, ‘A new Pandora Vase,’ _J.H.S._ XXI. 1901,
Plate 1.
[727] _Brit. Mus. Cat._ D 4. _White Athenian Vases_, Plate 19. _Myth. and
Mon. of Anc. Athens_, p. 450, fig. 50.
[728] The worship of Ge as Anesidora at Phlya will be later discussed,
Chap. XII.
[729] A lost play of Sophocles was called Πανδώρα ἢ Σφυροκόποι. The
σφῦρα though characteristic of Hephaistos the craftsman was used by
agriculturists. Trygaeus in the _Pax_ (_v._ 566) remembers that his σφῦρα
waits at home glittering and ready, see _J.H.S._ XX. 1900, p. 107.
[730] Prof. Furtwängler, _Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1891, pp. 117 and 124, ‘Ein
uraltes mythisches Symbol für die Blitze sind aber Hammer und Beil. Sie
sind es ... die mit mächtigen Gewittern den Kopf der grossen Mutter Erde
schlagen und hämmern bis sie erwacht und erweicht.’
[731] P. I. 43. 2 ... ἐοικότα δὲ τῷ λόγῳ δρῶσιν ἐς ἡμᾶς ἔτι αἱ Μεγαρέων
γυναῖκες.
[732] The _Etymologicon Magnum_ has the form Ἀνακληθρίς.
[733] Xen. _Symp._ VII. 5. I have elsewhere (_Myth. and Mon. of Anc.
Athens_, p. cxvii) discussed the possible influence of such mimetic
presentations on the fixed mythological types of vase-paintings. Dr
Frazer (_Golden Bough_, 2nd ed. vol. III. p. 165) makes the interesting
suggestion that in sacred dramas may be found a possible meeting-ground
between Euhemerists and their opponents.
[734] Ar. _Av._ 971, schol. ad loc.
[735] Frg. Hippon. ap. Athen. IX. § 370.
[736] Philostr. _Vit. Apoll._ XXXIX. § 275.
[737] _Brit. Mus. Cat._ E 467. _J.H.S._ XI. pl. 11 and 12, p. 278, and
Roscher, _Lex._ s.v. Pandora, fig. 2.
[738] Hes. _Theog._ 570, trans. Mr D. S. MacColl.
[739] Hes. _Op._ 69 ff.
[740] Hes. _Op._ 59.
[741] For the origin of the _pithos_ see _J.H.S._ XX. 1900, p. 99.
[742] Plut. _de Ei ap. Delph._ II. 1.
[743] P. IX. 35. 1.
[744] Eur. _Ion_ 496.
[745] Eur. _Erech._ frg. V. 3.
[746] I have collected and discussed this evidence in ‘Mythological
Studies,’ _J.H.S._, vol. XII. 1891, p. 350.
[747] P. I. 18. 2.
[748] P. I. 26. 6.
[749] Ov. _Met._ II. 759.
[750] Schol. ad Ar. _Thesm._ 533 κατὰ γὰρ τῆς Ἀγραύλου ὤμνυον κατὰ δὲ τῆς
Πανδρόσου σπανιώτερον.
[751] Plut. _Quaest. Symp._ IX. 14. 2.
[752] For three in the cultus of the dead, see Diels, _Sibyllinische
Blätter_, p. 40. For a discussion of trinities other than of maiden
goddesses, see Usener, ‘Dreiheit’ (_Rhein. Mus._ LVIII. pp. 1-47).
[753] In this connection it may be worth noting that where the nature
of the dual goddess prevents her taking a central place as in the case
of Eileithyia she never merges into a trinity. There are often two
Eileithyiai, e.g. one to either side of Zeus at the birth of Athene, but
never three.
[754] Roscher, _Lex._ s.v. Matres, Matronae.
[755] Fröhner, Coll. Tyszkicwisk, Pl. XVI.; _J.H.S._ XIX. p. 218, Fig. 3.
[756] _A. Mitt._ 1896, p. 266, Taf. VIII.
[757] Eur. _Ion_ 490, trans. Mr D. S. MacColl.
[758] For the development of the type of Hecate in conjunction with the
Charites, see _Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, p. 373.
[759] In the Vienna Museum, found at Gallipoli, _Arch. Epigr. Mitt._ vol.
I. Taf. 1. Prof. O. Benndorf, ‘Die Chariten des Sokrates,’ _Arch. Zeit._
1869.
[760] The sources for the story are well collected in Roscher’s
_Lexicon_, s.v. Paris, but the author of the article seems to have no
suspicion of the real substratum of the myth.
[761] Luc. _dial. deor._ 20 ἡ καλὴ λαβέτω. Tzetzes ad Lycophr. 93 τῇ καλῇ
τὸ μῆλον.
[762] _Cat._ 422. Milliet et Giraudon, Pl. 104.
[763] _B.M. Cat._ E 289. _J.H.S._ VII. 1886, p. 9.
[764] _J.H.S._ VII. 1888, p. 198, fig. 1.
[765] _J.H.S._ VII. 1888, p. 203.
[766] _J.H.S._ VII. 1888, p. 282.
[767] Procl. _Excerpt._ αἳ πρὸς Ἀλέξανδρον ἐν Ἴδῃ κατὰ Διὸς προσταγὴν ὑφ’
Ἑρμοῦ πρὸς τὴν κρίσιν ἄγονται. See Schneider, _Der troische Sagenkreis_,
p. 99, and Welcker, _Ep. Kyklos_ II. 88.
[768] _Berl. Cat._ 2154. Endt, _Beiträge zur Ionischen Vasenmalerei_, p.
29, figs. 11, 12 and 13.
[769] The figure of Paris which does not here concern us came in with the
popularity of the Homeric cycle, and the connection between the conflict
of σημεῖα and the Trojan war may probably have been due to the author of
the _Kypria_.
[770] Eur. _Andr._ 281.
[771] Since the above was written I see that Eustathius (§ 1665. 59)
expressly states that Aphrodite strove _with the Charites_: ἔνθα ἐρίσαι
περὶ κάλλους τήν τε Ἀφροδίτην καὶ τὰς Χάριτας αἷς ὀνόματα Πασιθέη, Καλὴ
καὶ Εὐφροσύνη, τὸν δὲ δικάσαντα κρῖναι καλὴν τὴν Καλήν, ἣν καὶ γῆμαι τὸν
Ἥφαιστον. He goes on to say that Kalè married Arachnos in Crete and that
Arachnos μιγέντα αὐχεῖν τῇ Ἀφροδίτῃ μιγῆναι.
[772] Hom. _Od._ XX. 67.
[773] I follow Prof. Ridgeway (_J.H.S._ 1898, p. xxxiv) in holding that
Artemis with her father Zeus and her brother Apollo are immigrants from
the North, divinities of the Achaean stock. Hence their dominance in
Homer.
[774] Published and discussed by M. P. Perdrizet, _Bull. de Corr. Hell._
1898, p. 584.
[775] Tradition variously ascribed the theft to Tantalos and Pandareos.
Here the presence of the two daughters points to Pandareos as the
offender. The sources for the myth of the theft in its various forms,
which do not here immediately concern us, are collected in Roscher’s
_Lexicon_, s.v. Pandareus, see also p. 226.
[776] On only one vase representing the ‘Judgment’ does Artemis so far
as I know appear, viz. the _very_ late amphora in the Naples Museum.
(Heydemann, _Cat._ 2870.)
[777] _Anthol. Palat._ VI. 280; the play on κόρα in the lines
τὰς τε κόρας, Λιμνᾶτι κόρᾳ, κόρα, ὡς ἐπιεικὲς
ἄνθετο καὶ τὰ κορᾶν ἐνδύματ’ Ἀρτέμιδι
cannot be rendered in English.
[778] Dilthey, _Arch. Zeit._ 1873.
[779] Pauly-Wissowa s.v. Athena, p. 1941, 50.
[780] Plat. _Legg._ 796 ἡ δὲ αὖ που παρ’ ἡμῖν Κόρη καὶ δέσποινα ... ἃ δὴ
πάντως μιμεῖσθαι πρέπον ἂν εἴη κόρους τε ἅμα καὶ κόρας.
[781] Soph. frg. ap. Strabo § 392. That Pallas was the eponymous hero of
the Pallantidae was first pointed out by Düncker, _Hist. of Greece_, vol.
I. p. 113.
[782] Strab. XVII. 46 § 816 παρθένος ἱερᾶται ἃς καλοῦσιν οἱ Ἕλληνες
παλλάδας: see A. Fick, _Indogerm. Beiträge_, 1896.
[783] _C.I.A._ II. 470. 10 συνεξήγαγον δὲ (οἱ ἔφηβοι) Παλλάδα μετὰ τῶν
γεννητῶν καὶ πάλιν εἰσήγαγον μετὰ πάσης εὐκοσμίας.
[784] Aesch. _Eum._ 916.
[785] _The Knights of Aristophanes_, p. 83.
[786] See Mr Gilbert Murray, _Ancient Greek Literature_, p. 178.
[787] _Hom. Hymn._ XXVIII., translated by Mr D. S. MacColl.
[788] Aesch. _Eum._ 736.
[789] Rossbach, _Griechische Antiken des arch. Museums in Breslau,
Festgruss 40 d. Philologen_ (Görlitz, 1889), Taf. I.
[790] The meaning of the woman-headed bird and of her name was first seen
by Dr Max Mayer, ‘Mythhistorica,’ _Hermes_ XXXVII.
[791] Ar. _Hist. Anim._ IX. 18, p. 617 _a_ 9.
[792] P. I. 5. 3 and I. 41. 6; see Dr Frazer ad loc.
[793] P. I. 41. 9.
[794] Lyc. _Alc._ 359. In connection with Lycophron’s account it is
curious to find that in the earliest known representation of the rape of
Cassandra in vase-paintings (_J.H.S._ 1884, Pl. XL.) behind the figure
of Athene stands a large human-headed bird, but this may be a mere
coincidence.
[795] O. Benndorf, _Griechische und Sicilische Vasenbilder_, pl. 51. 1.
[796] Soph. _Phil._ 1327.
[797] Herod. VIII. 41.
[798] Collignon et Couve, _Cat._ 1942. _Jahrbuch d. Inst._, Anzeiger,
1896, p. 36.
[799] Since the above was written I learn that Mr Evans has discovered at
Cnossos the figure of a goddess with a snake in either hand and a snake
or snakes coiled about her head. She may prove to be the prototype of
Athene, of the Erinys and of many another form of Earth-goddess.
[800] Coll. Faina. _Röm. Mitt._ 1897, XII. pl. 12. Another instance of a
winged Athene occurs on the fine vase published by Mr A. de Ridder, _Cat.
Bibl. Nat._ No. 269, p. 173, fig. 23. Athene flies over the sea carrying
the dead body of a hero. Here she performs the office of Eos or of a
Death-Siren or Harpy.
[801] Aesch. _Eum._ 407.
[802] _Il._ XVIII. 382.
[803] From a photograph. The slab is now in the Museum at Naples.
[804] E. Petersen, _Röm. Mittheil._ 1899, pl. VII. p. 154.
[805] Some further instances of the rising of an Earth-goddess greeted by
Erotes will be discussed in Chapter XII., and see p. 570.
[806] Hom. _Od._ VIII. 270.
[807] _Hom. Hymn_ VI. 2, trans. by Mr Gilbert Murray.
[808] At Sekyon, though we are not expressly told of a bath of Aphrodite,
she had a maiden-priestess who was called Loutrophoros, see P. II. 10. 4.
The Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite (LV. 19) joins together the notions of bath
and birth: Αἰγύπτου κατέχεις ἱερῆς γονιμώδεα λουτρά.
[809] P. II. 38. 2.
[810] Reproduced from a photograph. The relief is published and fully
discussed by Dr Petersen, _Röm. Mittheilungen_, 1892, Taf. II. p. 32. The
relief with two other slabs manifestly belonging to the same structure
came to light on a Sunday during the summer of 1887, during the absence
of the official inspector, in the piece of ground formerly belonging to
the Villa Ludovisi and now bounded by the Vie Boncompagni, Abruzzi e
Piemonte. It is said to have been found in an upright position, but as no
other monuments came to light, though the ground was examined to a depth
of 50 metres, the reliefs were probably not _in situ_. Dr Petersen thinks
they formed the three sides of a throne of Aphrodite. They may, however,
have formed part of the decoration of the mouth of a well. That they
were in some way connected with Aphrodite is practically certain from
the design on the two other reliefs (not figured here). These represent
respectively a nude woman playing on the double flutes, who, from the
analogy of similar representations on vase-paintings, is certainly a
hetaira, and a woman draped and veiled bringing incense who is probably a
bride. The various interpretations and restorations of the monument are
given by Dr Helbig, _Führer Rom_ II. p. 128, and _Antike Denkmäler d. K.
Arch. Inst._ vol. II. Pl. 6 and 7, p. 3.
[811] P. V. 11. 8.
[812] Since the above was written I see that M. Joubin (_La Sculpture
Grecque entre les guerres médiques et l’époque de Périclès_, p. 204)
has anticipated me in using the Genoa vase as evidence to show that the
uprising woman in the Ludovisi relief is Aphrodite. But unfortunately
M. Joubin fails to see that Aphrodite is also Kore; he says, ‘D’autres
archéologues avaient identifié le personnage figuré à mi-corps avec
Korè ou Ge; mais la découverte du vase de Gènes coupe court toutes
ces interprétations.’ This is to my mind to miss the real religious
significance of the figure; but M. Joubin is, of course, mainly concerned
with artistic criticism.
[813] Brit. Mus. _Cat._ D 2. The best reproduction of this beautiful vase
is plate XV. of _White Athenian Vases in Brit. Mus._
[814] Lucret. I. 1.
[815] As long ago as 1857, H. D. Müller in his remarkable book
_Mythologie der Griechischen Stämme_, pp. 249-255, saw that Zeus and
Hera belonged to stocks racially distinct, and that in the compulsory
marriage of Hera to Zeus is reflected the subjugation of a primitive race
to Achaean invaders. In discussing the American excavations at Argos I
followed his leading, see ‘Primitive Hera-Worship,’ _Cl. Review_, Dec.
1892, p. 474, and 1893, p. 44.
[816] Athen. § 672.
[817] Strab. § 637.
[818] P. VIII. 22. 2. The sources for the cult of Hera are well collected
by Mr Farnell in his _Cults of the Greek States_, p. 211, but with Mr
Farnell’s main thesis ‘that her association with Zeus is a primitive
factor in the Greek worship of Hera’ I am still as he then notes (p. 199)
completely at issue.
[819] Again acutely observed by H. D. Müller, _Mythologie d. Gr. Stämme_,
pp. 254, 255, where the identity of Dione and Juno is noted.
[820] These reliefs are now in the Museum at Sofia: there were discovered
in all ninety-two of the same type. _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ XXI. 1897, p.
130, fig. 12; p. 138, fig. 17.
[821] The survival of the type of the ‘Three Sisters’ in mediaeval days
has been well traced by Miss Eckenstein, _Woman under Monasticism_, p. 40
ff.
[822] Since the above was written Mr A. B. Cook has with great kindness
and generosity allowed me to read in proof his article on ‘Zeus, Jupiter
and the Oak,’ shortly to be published in the _Classical Review_. Mr Cook
believes that the worship of Zeus was indigenous in Greece and that Zeus,
Poseidon and Hades are three forms of one primaeval god. His contention
is supported by an immense mass of evidence. I am at present unconvinced,
but space forbids my entering on the controversy here.
[823] Diog. Laert. _Vit. Epim._ XI.
[824] Ἐφ. Ἀρχ. 1866, pl. 3. The ‘patriarchal couple’ are, I incline to
think, rightly explained by Dr Svoronos (_Journal d’Archéol. et Num._
1901, p. 503) as Asklepios and Hygieia, but as for my purpose it is not
necessary to name them, and as the evidence is too detailed to be resumed
here, I prefer not to go beyond the inscription.
[825] I follow Prof. Ridgeway in holding that Apollo and his sister
Artemis belong to the immigrant Achaean stock, see p. 31, note 1.
[826] Heydemann, _Cat._ 108. Raoul Rochette, _Mon. Inéd._ pl. 37.
[827] Eur. _Ion_ 5.
[828] The evidence for this I have collected elsewhere, see ‘Delphika,’
B. The Omphalos, _J.H.S._ 1899, XIX. 225.
[829] _A. Mitt._ 1887, Taf. XII.
[830] Plut. _de defect. orac._ 1.
[831] P. VI. 20. 7.
[832] P. VIII. 4. 9.
[833] P. III. 26. 5
[834] P. III. 15. 3.
[835] Theocr. _Id._ XVIII. 38.
[836] _Inv. C.A._ 617. Published by M. L. Couve, _Revue Archéologique_,
1898, p. 213, figs. 1 and 2, and discussed by Dr Blinkenberg, 1898, p.
398.
[837] P. III. 18. 15.
[838] Dr S. Wide, ‘Mykenische Götterbilder und Idole,’ _A. Mitt._ 1901,
p. 247, Pl. XII.
[839] P. II. 13. 3.
[840] P. VIII. 35. 8.
[841] For the bear-service of Artemis and the bear dedicated to her, see
_Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, p. 403.
[842] The materials for the study of hero-worship are well collected
in Roscher’s _Lexicon_, s.v. Heroes, and for English readers there is
an excellent survey in Mr W. H. D. Rouse’s _Greek Votive Offerings_,
c. I. In the pages that follow I confine myself for the most part
to such aspects of hero-worship as affect my main argument, and to
certain evidence from art which seems to me to have been neglected,
or misunderstood. I must also note that, advisedly, I only deal with
the ‘Making of a God’ in so far as the god developes out of the hero.
The most important and far more difficult question of the relation
between totemism and god-making, a problem for the solution of which
Greek tradition provides but scanty material, I leave for the present
untouched. It can only be decided by much wider anthropological
investigation than is within my scope.
[843] _A. Mitt._ 1877, pl. XXII.
[844] For the ‘Timocles’ relief and for the whole class in general,
see _Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, p. 590, where I have discussed the
influence of the typography of these hero-reliefs on Attic gravestones.
[845] H. Jumod, _Les Barongas_, p. 396, and see ‘Delphika,’ _J.H.S._ XIX.
1899, p. 216.
[846] Mr F. M. Cornford kindly points out to me that the _bearded_ snake
is not unknown to Greek literature. He is one of the many θαύματα that
meet us in the life of Apollonius of Tyana, see Philostr. _Vit. Apoll._
III. 7 and 8. These snakes belong to the wonder land of India.
[847] Published and discussed, ‘Delphika,’ _J.H.S._ XIX. 1899, p. 229,
figs. 9 and 10.
[848] _Cat._ 2458. _J.H.S._ 1899, p. 227, figs. 7 and 8. I have here
discussed and rejected a possible mythological interpretation.
[849] Herod. IV. 172.
[850] Aesch. _Choeph._ 105.
[851] P. VI. 20. 3.
[852] Verg. _Aen._ V. 95.
[853] A. Conze, _Reise in der Insel Lesbos_, Pl. IV. fig. 5, p. 11.
[854] Ael. _Hist. An._ I. 51.
[855] Plut. _Vit. Cleom._ 39.
[856] Phot. s.v. ἥρως ποικίλος. After Christian days the notion started
by the Olympian religion that the snake was bad was strengthened by
association with the ‘old serpent’ of Semitic mythology. Mr R. C.
Bosanquet kindly drew my attention to a curious survival of the belief
that a bad soul takes the form of a snake in the account of the life and
miracles of the fifth century saint, St Marcellus (_Boll. Acta Sanctorum_
1-3, vol. LXIII. of the whole series, pp. 259 and 267). It was related
that a certain matron of noble family, but bad character, died and
was buried with great pomp. ‘Ergo ad consumendum ejus cadaver coepit
serpens immanissimus frequentare, et, ut dicam clarius, mulieri, cujus
membra bestia devorabat, ipse draco factus est sepultura.’ St Marcellus
subdued the snake by striking it thrice with his staff and putting
his prayer-book on its head. To the present day among the Greeks an
unbaptized child, who is not yet quite human (Χριστιανός), is sometimes
spoken of as a snake-monster (δράκος) and is apt to disappear in snake
form. For the δράκος see Abbott, _Macedonian Folklore_, p. 261.
[857] Herod. II. 51 θεοὺς ὅτι κόσμῳ θέντες. Herodotus according to the
fashion of his day derives θεοί from the root θε, to put in order.
[858] Prof. Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. I. p. 339. Aristotle
distinctly states that the region round Dodona was ‘ancient Greece,’
see Ar. _Meteor._ I. 12. 9 αὕτη δὲ (ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἡ ἀρχαία) ἐστὶν ἡ περὶ τὴν
Δωδώνην καὶ τὸν Ἀχελῷον ... ᾤκουν γὰρ οἱ Σελλοὶ ἐνταῦθα καὶ οἱ καλούμενοι
τότε μὲν Γραικοὶ νῦν δέ Ἕλληνες, see Prof. Bury, _J.H.S._ XV. p. 217.
[859] Hesych. s.v. ἥρως· δυνατός, ἰσχυρός, γενναῖος, σεμνός.
[860] Hom. _Od._ I. 29.
[861] I owe this explanation of ἀμύμων entirely to Mr Gilbert Murray.
[862] Hom. _Od._ XXIV. 80.
[863] _Il._ I. 423.
[864] _Od._ XII. 261.
[865] _Od._ XIX. 109.
[866] _Il._ VI. 171.
[867] Aesch. _Choeph._ 1586. Prof. Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol.
I. p. 97, has pointed out that Agamemnon and Menelaos were new-comers,
and that Helen was of the indigenous stock. I venture to suggest that
Aigisthos and Clytaemnestra belong also to the ‘Pelasgian’ stratum.
[868] Hom. _Od._ III. 267.
[869] P. II. 16. 7.
[870] Hom. _Od._ XI. 235.
[871] Hes. frg. ap. Schol. Pind. _Pyth._ IV. 253.
[872] Verg. _Aen._ VI. 585. Hygin. _Fab._ 61. Salmoneus, not Athamas,
is I think represented on the Chicago vase (fig. 8) as holding the
thunderbolt of Zeus; the vase has been rightly explained by Mr A. B.
Cook, _Cl. Rev._ July 1903, p. 276. It will later (Chap. XI.) be shown
that the canonical Hades was peopled by these heroes of an early racial
stratum.
[873] _Od._ XI. 576.
[874] Strab. IX. 3 § 423.
[875] _Od._ VII. 323.
[876] P. X. 4. 10.
[877] P. V. 13. 3.
[878] Pind. _Ol._ I. 90 schol. ad loc.
[879] Schol. ad hyp. _Nem._ Ὁ ἀγὼν (τῶν Νεμέων) ἐπιτάφιος ἐπὶ Ἀρχεμόρῳ
... ὕστερον δὲ νικήσας Ἡρακλῆς ... ἐπεμελήθη τοῦ ἀγῶνος τὰ πολλὰ
ἀνορθωσάμενος καὶ Διὸς εἶναι ἱερὸν ἐνομοθέτησε.
[880] P. III. 19. 3.
[881] Ar. _Av._ 1482, schol. ad loc. Athenaeus (XI. 4 § 461) gives the
same account of the character of heroes: χαλεποὺς γὰρ καὶ πλήκτας τοὺς
ἥρωας νομίζουσι.
[882] Hesych. s.v. κρείττονας.
[883] _West African Studies_, p. 132.
[884] Ar. _Tagenist._ frg. 1.
[885] _Cat._ 1407, from a photograph. For permission to publish this
relief and those in figs. 102, 105, 106, my grateful thanks are due to Mr
Kabbadios, Ephor of Antiquities at Athens.
[886] _Cat._ 1377, from a photograph.
[887] For the whole subject of ἐγκοίμησις see L. Deubner, _De Incubatione
capitula duo_.
[888] Eur. _Iph. in T._ 1261.
[889] P. I. 34. 5.
[890] _A. Mitt._ 1893, p. 250. The introduction of the healer of
Epidauros may have been connected with the great plague at Athens.
[891] A. Koerte, ‘Bezirk eines Heilgottes,’ _A. Mitt._ 1893, p. 237, and
1896, p. 311.
[892] Koerte, _op. cit._ Μνησιπτολέμη ὑπὲρ Δικαιοφάνους Ἀσκληπιῷ Ἀμύνῳ
ἀνέθηκε.
[893] Koerte, _op. cit._ ἄνδρες δίκαιοι γε[γόν]ασι περὶ τὰ κοινὰ τῶν
ὀργεώνων τοῦ Ἀμύνου καὶ τοῦ Ἀσκληπιοῦ καὶ τοῦ Δεξίονος ἐπαινέσαι κτλ.
[894] _Etym. Mag._ s.v. Δεξίων. It seems possible that by the οἰκία in
which Sophocles received Asklepios is meant the Amyneion.
[895] Istr. frg. 51.
[896] Koerte, _op. cit._ ἐπὶ ἱερέως Σοφοκλέους τοῦ Φιλώτου.
[897] Cf. P. VIII. 8. 4, II. 10. 3, III. 23. 7.
[898] Prof. Ridgeway, _The Early Age of Greece_, vol. I. p. 640.
[899] Usener, _Die Sinflutsagen_, p. 58, draws attention to the
hypocoristic form Ἡρύκαλος, see Hesych. s.v. τὸν Ἡρακλέα Σώφρων
ὑποκοριστικῶς, and supposes an old Greek diminutive καλος = Lat. _culus_,
homunculus, Herculus.
[900] See p. 12.
[901] Diod. Sic. IV. 40 τὴν Ἥραν ἀναβᾶσαν ἐπὶ κλίνην καὶ τὸν Ἡρακλέα
προσλαβομένην πρὸς τὸ σῶμα διὰ τῶν ἐνδυμάτων ἀφεῖναι πρὸς τὴν γῆν
μιμουμένην τὴν ἀληθινὴν γένεσιν· ὅπερ μέχρι τοῦ νῦν ποιεῖν τοὺς βαρβάρους
ὅταν θετὸν υἱὸν ποιεῖσθαι βούλωνται.
[902] Rosch. _Lex._ s.v. Herakles, ‘Apotheose,’ p. 2239.
[903] Ἐφημερὶς Ἀρχ. 1890, Pl. VII.
[904] Schol. ad Ar. _Nub._ 508 ἐν Λεβαδείᾳ ἱερὸν ἐστὶ Τροφωνίου ὅπου
ὄφις ἦν ὁ μαντευόμενος ᾧ οἱ κατοικοῦντες πλακοῦντας ἔβαλλον μέλιτι
δεδευομένους. The women in the fourth Mime of Herondas (_v._ 90) offer a
pelanos to the snake of Asklepios.
[905] Berl. _Cat._ 3155. _Jahrb. d. Inst._, Anzeiger, 1890, p. 89.
[906] Plat. _Legg._ 717 A. The Olympian gods do not here concern us,
but it may be worth noting that the gods who keep the state τοὺς τὴν
πόλιν ἔχοντας θεούς, who are classed with the Olympians as of the first
rank, seem to correspond with the ἀστυνόμοι and ἀγοραῖοι of Aeschylus
(_Ag._ 90) who take rank with the οὐράνιοι. Some gods wherever found
were Olympian, e.g. Zeus and Apollo; others though not Pan-Hellenically
recognised took rank as such locally, e.g. Demeter.
[907] Hes. _Erg._ 109.
[908] There are several instances in the National Museum at Athens and
‘Hero-Feasts’ have been carved on sarcophagi which are still in the
courtyard of the local museum at Paros.
[909] _Inv._ 55, see Dr Wiegand, ‘Antike Sculpturen in Samos,’ _A. Mitt._
1900, p. 176.
[910] _Inv._ 60.
[911] See Dr Wiegand, _op. cit._ p. 180.
[912] See Dr Verrall, ‘Death and the Horse,’ _J.H.S._, XVIII. 1898, p. 1.
[913] Roscher, s.v. Heros, p. 2559, No. 5. A better reproduction
in phototype has been published by Dr Chr. Blinkenberg, ‘Et Attisk
Votivrelief,’ _Festskrift til J. L. Ussing_, Kopenhagen, 1900. I follow
Dr Ussing’s view (kindly translated for me by Dr Martin Nilsson).
[914] P. I. 22. 1-3, see Dr Frazer ad loc., and _Myth. and Mon. Anc.
Athens_, p. 328.
[915] Eur. _Hipp._ 26 ff., trans. Mr Gilbert Murray. For Aphrodite
Endemos, _Love-at-Home_, see Dr Verrall, _Cl. Rev._, Dec. 1901, p. 449.
Dr Svoronos makes the interesting suggestion that the sanctuary founded
by Phaedra may have been on the site later occupied by the temple of Nike
Apteros, and that the Wingless Victory may have been a title rather of
Aphrodite than the Athene. See _Journal International d’Archéologie_,
1901, p. 459.
[916] _Cat._ 95, published and fully discussed by Prof. Furtwängler, ‘Ein
sogenanntes Todtenmahlrelief mit Inschrift,’ _Sitzungsberichte d. k. Bay.
Ak. d. Wissenschaften_, Philos.-Philolog. Klasse 1897, p. 401.
[917] Hesych. s.v.
[918] Plat. _Legg._ VI. 784 D.
[919] Both reliefs are reproduced from photographs kindly given me by the
German Archaeological Institute. The relief to Zeus Philios was found
near the Hill of the Nymphs at Athens (_C.I.A._ II. 1330), that to the
Agathos Daimon at Thespiae (_C.I.A._ I. 1815).
[920] νὴ τὸν Φίλιον was a popular oath, cf. Ar. _Acharn._ 730. The
omission of the proper name is significant.
[921] Diod. Sinop. frg. ap. Athen. VI. 2396. Meineke, _F.C.G._ III. p.
543.
[922] Cat. 1500. Both designs in figs. 110 and 111 are reproduced from
photographs.
[923] The most recent account of this much discussed relief is by Dr
Studniczka, ‘Ueber das Schauspielerrelief aus dem Peiraeus,’ in _Mélanges
Perrot_, p. 307. The relief was first published _A. Mittheilungen_ 1882,
Taf. 14, p. 389; see also _Hermes_ 1887, p. 336. _A. Mitt._ 1888, p. 221.
Reisch, _Weihgeschenke_, p. 23. _Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1896, p. 104. _A.
Mitt._ 1896, p. 362.
[924] Dr Studniczka (op. cit. supra) has made a very close examination
of the objects held, and attempts, I do not think successfully, to
deduce therefrom the dramatic characters impersonated. The object held
by the last figure to the left as well as his face is obliterated. It is
sufficient for our purpose that it is clear from the middle figure they
are _actors_.
[925] From a photograph. There are similar reliefs not quite so well
preserved in the Louvre and in the British Museum (_Cat._ 176). A
complete list of those extant is given by Hauser, _Die Neu-attischen
Reliefs_, Anhang, p. 189. The earliest specimen, more nearly approaching
the ‘Hero-Relief,’ and so marked by the presence of a snake, is published
_Arch. Zeit._ 1882, Taf. XIV., and I have already discussed it, _Myth.
and Mon. Anc. Athens_, p. xlv, fig. 7.
[926] Herod. V. 67. I owe this important reference to the article _Heros_
in Roscher’s _Lexicon_, p. 2492, but Dr Deneken calls no attention to its
significance in relation to Dionysos.
[927] _J.H.S._ V. p. 116. Prof. Percy Gardner explains the coin as
belonging to Asklepios: my suggestion is made with the utmost diffidence
as differing from so great an authority on numismatics.
[928] Mr A. G. Bather in an interesting article on ‘The Problem of the
Bacchae’ (_J.H.S._ XIV. 1894, p. 263) concludes that the myths of the
introduction of Dionysos ‘do not find their origin in any introduction of
the god from without, but in the yearly inbringing of the new statue.’
[929] Berlin, _Cat._ 1704. _Mon. d. Inst._ 1873 vol. IX. Pl. LV. W.
Helbig, _Annali_ 1873, p. 106. The curious inscriptions do not here
concern us.
[930] _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_, Serie D, Taf. 1 and 2. The vase is now in
the Municipal Museum at Corneto.
[931] _Il._ VI. 129.
[932] Soph. _Ant._ 955.
[933] Ar. _Thesm._ 135, schol. ad loc.
[934] Naples. Heydemann, Cat. 3237. _Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, pp.
260, 261, figs. 11 and 12.
[935] Herod. VII. 110.
[936] Strabo VII. § 318.
[937] Strabo frg. VII.
[938] Paulinus Nol. _carm. xxx. de reditu Niket. Episc. in Daciam_.
Nam simul terris animisque duri
et sua Bessi nive duriores
nunc oves facti duce te gregantur
pacis in aulam.
quasque cervices dare servituti
semper a bello indomiti negarant
nunc iugo veri domini subactas
sternere gaudent.
nunc magis dives pretio laboris
Bessus exultat, quod humi manuque
ante quaerebat, modo mente caeli
colligit aurum.
...
mos ubi quondam fuerat ferarum,
nunc ibi ritus viget angelorum
et latet justus quibus ipse latro
vixit in antris.
For this and many other valuable references about the Bessi, I am
indebted to Dr Tomaschek’s article ‘Ueber Brumalia und Rosalia,’
_Sitzungsber. d. K. Akad. d. Wissenschaften_, Phil.-Hist. Kl., Wien 1868,
p. 351.
[939] Thucyd. II. 96.
[940] Plin. _N.H._ IV. 18. 11. 40.
[941] Eur. _Bacch._ 13.
[942] Eur. _Bacch._ 65.
[943] _Ib._ 152.
[944] Plut. _Vit. Alex._ 2.
[945] Eur. _Bacch._ 565.
[946] To Euripides in the _Bacchae_ Dionysos is the god of the grape. The
vine probably came from Asia, though about this experts do not seem to
be agreed, see Schrader, _Real-lexicon_; but Dionysos, as will later be
shown, is earlier than the coming of the vine.
[947] Eur. _Bacch._ 519.
[948] _Ib._ 530.
[949] B.M. Cat. E 695. _Mon. d. Inst._ 1833 tav. L.
[950] Strabo X. 3 § 470.
[951] Strabo frg. 25.
[952] For the orientalism of the Theban character and legends, see Mr D.
G. Hogarth, _Philip and Alexander_, p. 34.
[953] Herod. V. 7.
[954] Sappho, frg. 66.
[955] _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_, Serie II. Taf. iii., iv. An even earlier
source is the Corinthian vase published by Dr Löschke, _A. Mitt._ 1894,
p. 524, Taf. viii.
[956] _Od._ VII. 265.
[957] Soph. _Oed. Tyr._ 209.
[958] Eur. _Bacch._ 1356.
[959] _Ib._ 302.
[960] Polyaen. _Strat._ I. 1.
[961] This remarkable frieze is in the local museum at Delphi and is not
as yet completely published.
[962] Herod. V. 3.
[963] Soph. frg. 782 ap. Strab. XV. 687.
[964] Eur. _Bacch._ 556.
[965] Diod. III. 4.
[966] _Ib._ 65.
[967] Diod. IV. 3.
[968] This was first, I believe, observed by Dr Head (_Hist. Num._ p.
176). In discussing the coinage of Lete in Macedonia he says: ‘The coin
types all refer to the orgiastic rites practised in the worship of the
mountain Bacchus, which originated in the country of the Satrae or
Satyrs’ (Herod. VII. 111).
[969] Prof. Ridgeway (_Early Age of Greece_, vol. I. p. 343) identifies
the Orreskii of the coins with the Orestae of Strabo (§ 434). He thinks
the slight difference in form is due to a copyist’s mistake of τ for κ.
[970] Head, _Hist. Num._ p. 176.
[971] Nonnus, _Dionys._ XIII. 43
καὶ λασίων Σατύρων Κενταυρίδος αἷμα γενέθλης.
[972] _Il._ I. 262
κάρτιστοι μὲν ἔσαν καὶ καρτίστοις ἐμάχοντο
φηρσὶν ὀρεσκῴοισι.
[973] _Il._ II. 711
ὅτε φῆρας ἐτίσατο λαχνήεντας
τοὺς δ’ ἐκ Πηλίου ὦσε καὶ Αἰθίκεσσι πέλασσεν.
[974] _Od._ XXI. 303 ἐξ οὗ Κενταύροισι καὶ ἀνδράσι νεῖκος ἐτύχθη.
[975] Boston, _Inv._ No. 6508. _American Journal of Archaeology_
1900, pl. VI. p. 441. The vase belongs to the class usually called
‘proto-Corinthian.’ Mr J. C. Hopkins prefers to call it ‘Argive.’
[976] _J.H.S._ vol. I. p. 130, fig. 1, published and discussed with other
art representations by Mr Sidney Colvin.
[977] It is, it would seem, a mere chance that we have not what might
be called a ‘fish Centaur.’ On an early black-figured vase (_R.
Mitt._ II. 1887, Taf. viii.) we have a series of men represented as
completely human, not with the body ending in fish tails, but with an
extra fish tail added to the complete human body. These are the natural
monster-forms of a people dwelling on the sea-coast.
[978] P. V. 19. 9.
[979] Pind. _Pyth._ III. 5.
[980] B.M. _Cat._ B 620. _J.H.S._ vol. I. pl. ii. p. 132.
[981] _Early Age of Greece_, vol. I. p. 177.
[982] An analogous case to the Satyrs and Centaurs has already been noted
(p. 172), i.e. the Keres, regarded as Telchines, and of monstrous forms;
and still more clear is the case of the Kyklopes (p. 190), barbarous
monsters yet builders and craftsmen.
[983] Pind. frg. 44.
[984] _J.H.S._ I. Pl. ii. Engelmann, _Bilder-Atlas_, 110.
[985] The animal form assumed by Dionysos was (as will later be shown,
p. 432) that of a bull. Had his own worshippers invented the monstrous
Satyrs, they would probably have chosen the bull shape. With the horse
Dionysos, unlike his attendants, has no affinities.
[986] Würzburg, No. 354. _Mon. d. Inst._ X. 8 a. _Myth. and Mon. Ancient
Athens_, p. lxxix.
[987] The literature of this controversy is fully given and discussed by
Dr K. Wernicke, ‘Bockschöre und Satyrdrama,’ _Hermes_ XXXII. 1897, p. 29.
[988] Since the above was written I see with great pleasure that Dr
Emil Reisch in his article ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der attischen Tragödie’
(_Festschrift Theodor Gomperz_ 1902, p. 459) reasserts the old view that
the horse-demons of the vases are Satyrs.
[989] Hes. frg. CXXIX.
[990] Plut. _Vit. Alex._ 2. For many references as to the Maenads I am
indebted to the articles by Dr A. Rapp, ‘Die Maenade in gr. Cultus in der
Kunst und Poesie,’ _Rhein. Mus._ 1872, pp. 1 and 562, and for references
to the Thyiades to Dr Weniger’s _Das Collegium der Thyiaden_.
[991] Plut. _de Superstit._ X.
Μαινάδα Θυιάδα Φοιβάδα Λυσσάδα.
[992] Eur. _Bacch._ 977.
[993] Aesch. _Eum._ 22.
[994] Aesch. _Eum._ 19.
[995] P. X. 19. 3.
[996] Hermitage, _Cat._ 1807.
[997] Aesch. _Eum._ 1.
[998] See Dr Verrall, _Euripides the Rationalist_, p. 223. The same
theological euphemism is observable in the Hymn to Dionysos recently
discovered at Delphi and which will be discussed later (p. 417). Here
there is a manifest attempt to fuse the worship of Apollo and Dionysos.
Dionysos even adopts the characteristic Apolline title of Paean.
[999] P. X. 4. 2.
[1000] P. X. 6. 2.
[1001] P. X. 32. 7.
[1002] _De Is. et Os._ 35. Herodotus (VII. 178) mentions an altar of the
winds at Delphi in a place called Thyia, which was the temenos of the
heroine, who may herself have been a raging wind. The same precinct,
we know from an inscription found at Delphi, was called Thyiai. See E.
Bourguet, _Mélanges Perrot_, p. 25.
[1003] Plut. _de prin. frig._ XVIII.
[1004] Plut. _de mul. virt._ XIII.
[1005] Eur. _Bacch._ 683.
[1006] Plut. _de Ei apud Delph._ XX. 1 Φοῖβον δὲ δή που τὸ καθαρὸν
καὶ ἁγνὸν οἱ παλαιοὶ πᾶν ὠνόμαζον ὡς ἔτι Θεσσαλοὶ τοὺς ἱερέας ἐν
ταῖς ἀποφράσιν ἡμέραις αὐτοὺς ἐφ’ ἑαυτῶν ἔξω διατρίβοντας οἶμαι
φοιβονομεῖσθαι, see _J.H.S._ XIX. p. 241.
[1007] Aesch. _Eum._ 6.
[1008] On a curious ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora (Gerhard, _Auserlesene
Vasenbilder_ 220), the scene of the slaying of Troilos is represented.
This took place according to tradition in the Thymbraean sanctuary. The
sanctuary is indicated by a regular omphalos covered by a fillet and
against it is inscribed βωμός.
[1009] Aesch. _Ag._ 1275.
[1010] Eur. _Hec._ 827
ἡ Φοιβὰς ἣν καλοῦσι Κασσάνδραν Φρύγες.
[1011] Eur. _Bacch._ 664
βάκχας ποτνιάδας εἰσιδών, αἳ τῆσδε γῆς
οἴστροισι λευκὸν κῶλον ἐξηκόντισαν.
Mr Murray’s translation preserves the twofold connotation of the word,
purity and inspired madness.
[1012] Phot. _Bibl._ V. 533ᵇ ὅτι τὸ ποτνιᾶσθαι κυριώτερον ἐπὶ γυναῖκας
τάττεταί φησιν ὅταν κακόν τι πάσχῃ καὶ θήλειαν ἱκετεύῃ θεόν. ποτνιώμενον
δὲ ἄνδρα ἄν τις εἴπῃ ἁμαρτάνει.
[1013] Diod. IV. 3.
[1014] _Oed. Col._ 670, trans. by Mr D. S. MacColl.
[1015] First published by Kondolleon, _Ath. Mitt._ XV. (1890) p. 330,
discussed by E. Maass, _Hermes_ XXVI. (1891) p. 178, and S. Reinach,
_Rev. des Études grecques_ III. (1890) p. 349, and O. Kern, _Beiträge zur
Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie und Religion_, Berlin 1895.
[1016] ἀφίδρυμα Διονύσου.
[1017]
ὄφρα λάβητε
Μαινάδας αἱ γενεῆς Εἰνοῦς ἀπὸ Καδμηείης.
αἳ δ’ ὑμῖν δώσουσι καὶ ὄργια καὶ νόμιμ’ ἐσθλά.
[1018] Plut. _Vit. Alex._ 2.
[1019] Munich. Jahn, _Cat._ 382. _Greek Vase Paintings_, J. E. Harrison
and D. S. MacColl, pl. XV. Baumeister, _Ab._ 928.
[1020] _J.H.S._ XIX. p. 220, fig. 6.
[1021] Head, _Hist. Num._ p. 461, fig. 287.
[1022] Plut. _Vit. Sol._ XII. Epimenides is as it were a historical
Orpheus. Coming from Crete, he, like Orpheus (p. 460), modified Dionysiac
ritual.
[1023] Plut. _Vit. Sol._ XXI.
[1024] Eur. _Bacch._ 485.
[1025] _Oed. Col._ 674, see p. 369.
[1026] _De Isid. et Os._ XXXV. καὶ θύουσιν οἱ Ὅσιοι θυσίαν ἀπόρρητον ἐν
τῷ ἱερῷ τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος ὅταν αἱ Θυιάδες ἐγείρωσι τὸν Λικνίτην.
[1027] The verb θυίω is used of the excited beating of the heart under
strong emotion, e.g. Ap. Rhod. III. 754
πυκνὰ δέ οἱ κραδίη στηθέων ἔντοσθεν ἔθυιεν.
[1028] Plut. _Q. Gr._ XII. τῆς δὲ Ἡρωΐδος τὰ πλεῖστα μυστικὸν ἔχει λόγον
ὃν ἴσασιν αἱ Θυιάδες, ἐκ δὲ τῶν δρωμένων φανερῶς Σεμέλης ἄν τις ἀναγωγὴν
εἰκάσειε.
[1029] Eur. _Bacch._ 375
τὸν Βρόμιον
τὸν Σεμέλας.
_v._ 580
ὁ Σεμέλας,
ὁ Διὸς παῖς.
_v._ 278
ὁ Σεμέλης γόνος.
[1030] Ramsay, _Journal of Asiatic Soc._ XV. 1883, pp. 120 ff., and
Latischew, _Für vergleichende Sprachforschung_, vol. XXVIII. pp. 381 ff.
The inscriptions are explained and discussed in relation to Semele by
Dr Paul Kretschmer, ‘Semele und Dionysos,’ in _Aus der Anomia_ (Berlin
1890), and to him I owe entirely the view adopted in the text.
[1031] P. VI. 20. 9.
[1032] I regret to be obliged to reproduce the publication of Tischbein
(_Greek Vases_ I. 39). As regards style it is obviously inadequate. The
vase has been examined by Mr Cecil Smith (_Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1891, p.
120, note 17) and the reproduction of Tischbein is pronounced by him to
be as regards subject-matter substantially correct.
[1033] B.M. _Cat._ vol. III. E 182, cf. C. Robert, _Archäologische
Mährchen_ 161. Dr Robert explains the vase as the birth of Dionysos
from the well-nymph Dirce, but vase-paintings offer no analogy to the
representation of a well-nymph as a figure rising from the ground.
[1034] Cf. _Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, p. xxxix.
[1035] Heydemann, _Cat. St Angelo Coll._ 172. Gerhard, _Ges. Abh._
Taf. LXVIII. The authenticity of the inscriptions has been questioned.
I examined them last year in the Naples Museum and see no ground for
suspicion.
[1036] An inscription of the 5th century B.C. recently discovered shows
that at Thebes there was an actual sanctuary of Earth. It runs as
follows: ἱαρὸν Γᾶς Μακαίρας Τελεσσφόρο. The titles μάκαιρα and τελεσφόρος
are applied to Ge in the Orphic Hymn (xxvi. 1 and 10). See _Bull. de
Corr. Hell._ 1901, p. 363.
[1037] Soph. _Ant._ 1139.
[1038] Eur. _Hipp._ 555.
[1039] Eur. _Bacch._ 1.
[1040] Such places were, if we may trust the _Etymologicon Magnum_,
called ἐνηλύσια, which at least in popular etymology was believed to
mean ‘Places of Advent.’ They are thus defined: ἐνηλύσια λέγεται εἰς ἃ
κεραυνὸς εἰσβέβηκεν ἃ καὶ ἀνατίθεται Διῒ καταιβάτῃ καὶ λέγεται ἄδυτα καὶ
ἄβατα.
[1041] P. IX. 16. 7.
[1042] Plut. _Q. Gr._ XXXVIII.
[1043] Lydus, _de mens._ IV. 96.
[1044] Eur. _Bacch._ 594.
[1045] Eur. _Bacch._ 1082.
[1046] Aristot. περὶ θαυμ. 122.
[1047] Pind. _Pyth._ III. 77 and schol. ad loc.
[1048] I have collected and discussed some instances of these in my
article ‘Delphika,’ _J.H.S._ XIX. 1899, p. 238.
[1049] P. VIII. 31. 4, and at Gythium, P. III. 22. 1.
[1050] Porph. _Vit. Pyth._ XVII.
[1051] Dr Kretschmer (_Aus der Anomia_ p. 23) has shown that in all
probability the second half of the name Dionysos (-νυσος) means ‘son’ or
‘young man’: it is the cognate of Lat. _nurus_ and of Gr. νύμφη, which
in the compound κακόνυμφος (Eur. _Alc._ 206, 990) appears in masculine
form. On the fragment of an early black-figured vase signed by Sophilos,
three nymphs appear with the inscription Νῦσαι which seems equivalent
to κόραι or νύμφαι or παρθένοι (_A. Mitt._ XIV. Taf. i.). Aristophanes
seems to have vaguely felt or imagined some connection between the last
half of the word and Nysa, the birthplace of the god, in his Νυσήιον Διὸς
Διόνυσον (_Ran._ 215) echoed by Apollonius Rhodius in Διὸς Νυσήιον υἷα
(_Arg._ IV. 1132). Dionysos then is practically either Διόσκουρος, a term
of wide application, or possibly child of the tribe of Dioi (see p. 372).
Dr Kretschmer further points out that the fluctuation in inscriptions
between ι and ε (Δεόνυσος and Διόνυσος) is best accounted for by Thracian
origin, as the Thracians appear to have had a vowel which was not exactly
either, and was indifferently rendered in Greek by both. Probably then,
though not certainly, Dionysos brought his name with him from the North.
[1052] _Jahrbuch des Inst._ 1891, Taf. I. Sufficient fragments of the
vase remain to show that the scene represented was the presentation of
Dionysos to the Olympians.
[1053] Eur. _Bacch._ 535.
[1054] Eur. _Bacch._ 416.
[1055] Ar. _Ran._ 331.
[1056] Preller (3rd ed. p. 665) goes so far as to say ‘Βρόμιος scheint
nur poetisches Beiwort zu sein.’
[1057] Pind. frg. 45
τὸν Βρόμιον τὸν Ἐριβόαν τε καλέομεν.
[1058] Pind. _Ol._ II. 27
ζώει μὲν ἐν Ὀλυμπίοις ἀποθανοῦσα βρόμῳ
κεραυνοῦ τανυέθειρα Σεμέλα.
[1059] Strabo X. p. 470.
[1060] _Anthol. Pal._ IX. 368
Εἰς οἶνον ἀπὸ κριθῆς.
Τίς; πόθεν εἶς Διόνυσε; μὰ γὰρ τὸν ἀληθέα Βάκχον
οὔ σ’ ἐπιγιγνώσκω· τὸν Διὸς οἶδα μόνον.
κεῖνος νέκταρ ὄδωδε, σὺ δὲ τράγον· ἦ ῥά σε Κελτοὶ
τῇ πενίῃ βοτρύων τεῦξαν ἀπ’ ἀσταχύων.
τῷ σε χρὴ καλέειν Δημήτριον, οὐ Διόνυσον,
πυρογενῆ μᾶλλον καὶ βρόμον οὐ Βρόμιον.
The epigram is discussed and the play on πυριγενῆ, πυρογενῆ, βρόμος and
Βρόμιος rightly observed by Hehn (_Kulturpflanzen_, 6th ed. p. 147),
and to his book and Schrader’s _Reallexicon_ I am indebted for many
references. Hehn misses the point of τράγος but it was noted long ago by
Couring in the _Thesaurus_ of Stephanos (2342 B) s.v. τράγος. He remarks
apropos of the epigram: ‘non hircum sed ex olyra et tritico confectum
panem.’ See also Dr W. Headlam, _Cl. Rev._ 1901, p. 23.
[1061] Mr Francis Darwin kindly tells me that τράγος is said to be a
kind of wheat known now as _triticum amylaeum_. It is akin to spelt,
_triticum spelta_, the ancient ζεία. βρόμος is some form of oats, in
modern Greek βρώμη. It is of interest to note that in the 4th century
B.C. βρόμος was an important cereal accounted as more wholesome than
barley. This is clear from the words of the physician Dieuches: γίνεται
δὲ ἄλφιτον καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ βρόμου. φρύγεται δὲ σὺν τῷ ἀχύρῳ πᾶν. ἀποπήσσεταί
τε καὶ τρίβεται καὶ ἐρύκεται καθάπερ καὶ τὸ κρίθινον ἄλφιτον. τοῦτο τὸ
ἄλφιτον κρεῖττον καὶ ἀφυσώτερόν ἐστι τοῦ κριθίνου (_xxi. veter. et clar.
medic. Graec. var. opusc._ ed. F. de Matthaei, Mosquae 1808, p. 39; see
Hehn, _Kulturpfl._ 7th edit. p. 553). By the time of Galen it seems to
have fallen into comparative disuse, displaced probably by the richer
cereals. He says (_de aliment. facult._ I. 14): τροφὴ δ’ ἐστὶν ὑποζυγίων
οὐκ ἀνθρώπων, εἰ μή ποτε ἄρα λιμώττοντες ἐσχάτως ἀναγκασθεῖεν, ἐκ τούτου
τοῦ σπέρματος. The modern history of oats presents a close analogy.
Displaced in the south by the richer wheat it remains the staple food of
the northern Scot, and is the food of cattle only in the south.
[1062] H. Weil, _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ XIX. p. 401
[Δεῦρ’ ἄνα Δ]ιθύραμβε, Βάκχ’,
ε[ὔϊε θυρσῆ]ρες, Βραϊ-
τά, Βρόμι(ε), ἠρινα[ῖς ἱκοῦ
ταῖσδ(ε)] ἱεραῖς ἐν ὥραις.
Dr Weil suggests “faut-il le rattacher à Ϝραίω = ῥαίω et l’expliquer
‘celui qui frappe et qui brise’?”
[1063] Ducange s.v. braisum: grana ad conficiendam braisum cerevisiam
praeparata.
[1064] Dem. _de Cor._ 313.
[1065] Theophr. _Char._ LXXVII.
[1066] Clem. Al. _Protr._ II. Arnob. _c. gent._ V. p. 170.
[1067] Diod. IV. 4.
[1068] Strab. X. 3 § 471.
[1069] Ar. _Av._ 875
καὶ φρυγίλῳ Σαβαζίῳ καὶ στρουθῷ μεγάλῃ
μητρὶ θεῶν καὶ ἀνθρώπων.
[1070] Ar. _Lys._ 388.
[1071] Ar. _Vesp._ 5-12. The word βουκολεῖς (_v._ 6) points to the
βουκόλοι, priests or attendants of the bull-Dionysos.
[1072] Ammian. Marcell. 26. 8. 2: est autem sabaia ex ordeo vel frumento
in liquorem conversis paupertinus in Illyrico potus. O. Schrader,
_Reallexikon_ p. 89, points out that the derivation of Sabazios from
_sabaia_ is possible, if the view of Kretschmer (_Einleitung_ p. 195)
be accepted that Sabazios represents an earlier _Savadios_; he compares
the old Gallic divinity Braciaca ‘God of Malt.’ Mr A. B. Cook kindly
drew my attention to the remark of De Vit in his edition of Forcellini’s
_Lexicon_, s.v. sabaia: ‘unde etiam _zabaion_ vulgo apud nostrates’
(Venetos?).
[1073] Hieron. _Com._ 7 _in Is._ cap. 19: quod genus est potionis ex
frugibus aquaque confectum et vulgo in Dalmatiae Pannoniaeque provinciis
gentili barbaroque sermone appellatur _sabaium_.
[1074] This was first observed by Grimm (_Geschichte d. d. Sprache_ p.
66), see Hehn, _Kulturpflanzen_, 7th edit. p. 550, but Hehn’s explanation
of the custom does not seem satisfactory. Our custom of calling inferior
varieties of plants by _dog_-names, e.g. Dog-Rose, Dog-Violet, seems
analogous.
[1075] For the group of words denoting ‘dregs’ e.g. O.P. _dragios_, with
which τρυγῳδία is connected, see Schrader, _Prehistoric Antiquities_ p.
322, and Hehn, _Kulturpflanzen_ p. 159.
[1076] For the literature of this protracted controversy see U. v.
Wilamowitz, Eur. _Her._ I. p. 32; A. Körte, _Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1893,
VIII. p. 61; Löschke, _A. Mitt._ XV. 1894, p. 518; K. Wernicke, _Hermes_
1897, p. 290; Bethe, _Proleg._ p. 48. My own view was first suggested in
the _Classical Rev._ July 1902, p. 331.
[1077] Aesch. frg. 190 ap. Plut. _Mor._ p. 86 τοῦ δὲ σατύρου τὸ πῦρ ὡς
πρῶτον ὤφθη βουλομένου φιλῆσαι καὶ περιλαβεῖν ὁ Προμηθεύς
τράγος γένειον ἆρα πενθήσεις σύγε.
[1078] Porph. _de antr. nymph._ 7.
[1079] Plat. _Symp._ § 203.
[1080] Plut. _Symp._ IV. 6.
[1081] Brugsch, _Religion und Mythologie d. alten Egypter_, p. 647.
[1082] Xen. _Anab._ IV. 5. 26 ἐνῆσαν δὲ καὶ αὐταὶ αἱ κριθαὶ ἰσοχειλεῖς.
[1083] Lasicius, _De Diis Sarmagitarum_, p. 44.
[1084] Archil. frg. ap. Athen. X. 67 § 447. Bergk 32
ὥσπερ παρ’ αὐλῷ βρῦτον ἢ Θρῆιξ ἀνὴρ
ἢ Φρὺξ ἔβρυζε.
[1085] Aesch. frg. 123 ap. Athen. loc. cit.
[1086] Diod. V. 26.
[1087] In the north as to-day the Beer-god retained his supremacy. It
is interesting to note that the British saint, St Brigida, re-performed
the miracle of Cana with the characteristically northern modification
that she turned the water into excellent beer: _Christi autem ancilla
videns quia tunc illico non poterat invenire cerevisiam, aquam ad balneum
portatam benedixerit et in optimam cerevisiam conversa est a Deo et
abundanter sitientibus propinata est_. _Acta SS. Febr._ I. Vita IV. S.
Brigidae cap. IV. quoted by Hehn, _op. cit._ p. 149. In the Egyptian
_Book of the Dead_ (Chap. CX.) the desire of the soul is for cakes and
_ale_.
[1088] Hehn, _Kulturpflanzen_, 7th edit. p. 154.
[1089] Eur. _Hipp._ 141.
[1090] Plut. _de Is. et Osir._ LXIX. Φρύγες δὲ τὸν θεὸν οἰόμενοι
χειμῶνος καθεύδειν, θέρους δ’ ἐγρηγορέναι, τότε μὲν κατευνασμούς, τότε
δ’ ἀνεγέρσεις βακχεύοντες αὐτῷ τελοῦσι. Παφλαγόνες δὲ καταδεῖσθαι καὶ
καθείργνυσθαι χειμῶνος, ἦρος δὲ κινεῖσθαι καὶ ἀναλύεσθαι φάσκουσι. The
earlier portion of this passage deals with the analogous cult of Demeter
(p. 128) already discussed.
[1091] Berlin, _Cat._ 2290. _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_, Serie A, Taf. VI.
[1092] Plut. _Quaest. R._ CXII.
[1093] Pliny _N.H._ XVI. 62.
[1094] Eur. _Bacch._ 55.
[1095] _Annali d. Inst._ 1862, Tav. d’agg. C.
[1096] Perdrizet, _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ 1900, p. 322.
[1097] Plut. _de Is. et Os._ XXXV. ὅτι δ’ οὐ μόνον τοῦ οἴνου Διόνυσον
ἀλλὰ καὶ πάσης ὑγρᾶς φύσεως Ἕλληνες ἡγοῦνται κύριον καὶ ἀρχηγὸν ἀρκεῖ
Πίνδαρος μάρτυς εἶναι λέγων·
Δενδρέων δὲ νόμον Διόνυσος πολυγηθής αὐξάνοι
ἁγνὸν φέγγος ὀπώρας.
[1098] Plut. _Symp._ IX. 14. 4.
[1099] Eur. _Bacch._ 274.
[1100] The doctrine of Teiresias was wide-spread in Greece by the time
of Diodorus. He says (IV. 3): καθόλου δὲ μυθολογοῦσι τῶν θεῶν μεγίστης
ἀποδοχῆς τυγχάνειν παρ’ ἀνθρώποις τοὺς ταῖς εὐεργεσίαις ὑπερβαλομένους
κατὰ τὴν εὕρεσιν τῶν ἀγαθῶν Διόνυσόν τε καὶ Δήμητρα, τὸν μὲν τοῦ
προσηνεστάτου ποτοῦ γενόμενον εὑρέτην, τὴν δὲ τῆς ξηρᾶς τροφῆς τὴν
κρατίστην παραδοῦσαν τῷ γένει τῶν ἀνθρώπων.
[1101] _Myth. and Mon. Anc._ Athens, pp. 44-50.
[1102] B.M. _Cat._ B 264. Gerhard, _Auserlesene Vasenbilder_, Taf. 38.
[1103] Eur. _Bacch._ 99.
[1104] Eur. _Bacch._ 918.
[1105] Eur. _Bacch._ 1017
φάνηθι ταῦρος ἢ πολύκρανος ἰδεῖν
δράκων ἢ πυριφλέγων ὁρᾶσθαι λέων.
[1106] Schol. ad Lyc. _Al._ 1237 κερατοφοροῦσι γὰρ καὶ αὗται κατὰ μίμησιν
Διονύσου, ταυρόκρανος γὰρ φαντάζεται καὶ ζωγραφεῖται.
[1107] Plut. _de Is. et Os._ XXXV.
[1108] Athen. § 425 C.
[1109] Soph. _Trach._ 9.
[1110] Soph. frg. 548.
[1111] _Archäologische Zeitung_ XVI. (1883), Taf. 11. This vase is now in
the Louvre.
[1112] Gerhard, _Auserlesene Vasenbilder_, Taf. 47.
[1113] Eur. _Bacch._ 519.
[1114] Plato _Legg._ III. 700 B ἄλλο εἶδος ᾠδῆς Διονύσου γένεσις, οἶμαι,
διθύραμβος λεγόμενος.
[1115] Pind. _Ol._ XIII. 18
ταὶ Διωνύσου πόθεν ἐξέφανεν
σὺν βοηλάτᾳ χάριτες διθυράμβῳ;
[1116] Plut. _Q. Gr._ XXXVI.
Ἐλθεῖν ἥρω Διόνυσε
Ἀλείων ἐς ναόν,
ἁγνὸν σὺν χαρίτεσσιν
ἐς ναὸν τῷ βοέῳ ποδὶ θύων.
Ἄξιε ταῦρε, ἄξιε ταῦρε.
[1117]
[Δεῦρ’ ἄνα Δ]ιθύραμβε, Βάκχ’,
ε[ὔιε θυρσῆ]ρες, Βραϊ-
τά, Βρόμι(ε), ἠρινα[ῖς ἱκοῦ
ταῖσδ(ε)] ἱεραῖς ἐν ὥραις.
Εὐοῖ ὦ ἰὸ [Βάκχ’ ὦ ἰὲ Παιὰ]ν
[ὃ]ν Θήβαις ποτ’ ἐν εὐίαις
Ζη[νὶ γείνατο] καλλίπαις Θυώνα.
πάντες δ’ [ἀστέρες ἀγχ]όρευ-
σαν, πάντες δὲ βροτοὶ χ[άρη-
σαν σαῖς], Βάκχιε, γένναις.
I have followed throughout Dr H. Weil’s version.
[1118] Plut. _de Is. et Os._ XXXV.
[1119] Plut. _de Ei ap. Delph._ IX.
[1120] The suggestion that follows as to the connection of the word
Dithyramb with Thriae is only given tentatively. It is also possible that
the word Dithyramb may be of foreign origin. Epiphanius (_Adv. Haeres._
vol. I. bk iii. p. 1093 D) tells of a goddess in Egypt, worshipped with
orgiastic rites under the name Τίθραμβος. She was akin to Hecate (ἄλλοι
δὲ τῇ Τιθράμβῳ Ἑκάτην ἑρμηνευομένην). Τίθραμβος may have come with other
orgiastic elements from Crete to Thrace (see p. 460).
[1121] Suidas s.v. λέγουσι γὰρ θρίασιν τὴν τῶν ποιητῶν μανίαν.
[1122] Philoch. frg. 125 ap. Zenob. _prov. cent._ V. 75 Φιλόχορός φησιν
ὅτι νύμφαι κατεῖχον τὸν Παρνασσὸν τροφοὶ Ἀπόλλωνος τρεῖς καλούμεναι
Θριαί, ἀφ’ ὧν αἱ μαντικαὶ ψῆφοι θριαὶ καλοῦνται.
[1123] _Hom. Hymn. ad Merc._ 551-563. I accept Hermann’s reading Θριαί
for Μοῖραι, cf. Gemoll ad loc.
[1124] For a full account of ‘the Bee in Greek Mythology’ see Mr A. B.
Cook, _J.H.S._ XV. 1895, p. 1.
[1125] Eur. _Hipp._ 555.
[1126] θρίαμβος translated by the Romans into the plain prose of
‘triumph’ seems to have remained to the Greeks a poetical word
consecrated to poetical usage. Conon says indeed of Tereus in telling the
story of Philomela: τέμνει τὴν αὐτῆς γλῶσσαν δεδιὼς τὸν ἐκ λόγων θρίαμβον
(_Narrat._ XXXI.), but the story and the usage of the word seem borrowed
from some poetical source. Sir Richard Jebb kindly draws my attention
to the fact that in our earliest literary mention of the _thriambos_
(Kratinos, Koch frg. 36) it is apparently sung by a female singer:
ὅτε σὺ τοὺς καλοὺς θριάμβους ἀναρύτουσ’ ἀπηχθάνου.
[1127] See Mr Gilbert Murray, _Euripides_ p. lxvii.
[1128] Eur. _Bacch._ 699.
[1129] _Ib._ 862.
[1130] _Ib._ 723.
[1131] Nietzsche has drawn in this respect a contrast, beautiful and
profoundly true, between the religion and art of Apollo and Dionysos.
Apollo, careful to remain his splendid self, projects an image, a
dream, and calls it _god_. It is illusion (_Schein_), its watchword is
limitation (_Maass_), Know thyself, Nothing too much. Dionysos breaks
all bonds; his motto is the limitless (_Uebermaass_), Excess, Ecstasy.
_Das Individuum mit allen seinen Grenzen und Maassen ging hier in der
Selbstvergessenheit der dionysischen Zustände unter, und vergass die
apollinischen Satzungen_ (Nietzsche, _Die Geburt der Tragödie_, p. 37).
[1132] Ath. XI. 31 § 427.
[1133] Plat. _Legg._ p. 775.
[1134] _Ib._ p. 637.
[1135] Ath. XI. 4 § 461.
[1136] Ath. XI. 51 § 476.
[1137] Plut. _De adul. et amic._ VII.
[1138] Diod. IV. 3.
[1139] _Boston Museum Annual Report_, 1901, p. 60, No. 20. P. Hartung,
_Strena Helbigiana_, p. 111.
[1140] Bacchyl. _Paean_, Bergk 13, trans. by Mr D. S. MacColl.
[1141] Brit. Mus. _Cat._ E 439, pl. XV. On the reverse a Satyr plays the
flute to his master’s dancing.
[1142] Bibliothèque Nationale, _Cat._ 576. P. Hartwig, _Meisterschalen_
XXXIII. 1.
[1143] Athens, Nat. Mus. _Inv._ 3442. _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ XIX. 1895,
p. 94.
[1144] Eur. _Bacch._ 135.
[1145] Eur. _Bacch._ 409.
[1146] Herod. II. 81 ὁμολογέουσι δὲ ταῦτα τοῖσι Ὀρφικοῖσι καλεομένοισι
καὶ Βακχικοῖσι, ἐοῦσι δὲ Αἰγυπτίοισι καὶ Πυθαγορείοισι.
[1147] Eur. _Hipp._ 954
Ὀρφέα τ’ ἄνακτ’ ἔχων
βάκχευε.
[1148] Apollod. I. 3. 2, 3.
[1149] Diod. III. 65 πολλὰ μεταθεῖναι τῶν ἐν τοῖς ὀργίοις.
[1150] E. Maass, _Orpheus_. To Dr Maass’s learned book I owe much, but I
am reluctantly compelled to differ from his main contention.
[1151] Conon, _Narr._ XLV. φιλόμουσον τὸ Θρᾴκων καὶ Μακεδόνων γένος.
[1152] Strabo X. 3 § 722.
[1153] Strabo VII. 7 § 315.
[1154] Eur. _Bacch._ 560.
[1155] Eur. _Alc._ 579.
[1156] In the Church of S. Apollinare in Classe. See Kurth, _Mosaiken von
der christlich. Era_, Taf. XXVII.
[1157] Berlin Mus. _Cat._ 3172; _Progr. Winckelmannsfeste_, Berlin, No.
50, Taf. II.; Roscher, _Lexicon_, vol. III. p. 1179.
[1158] Herod. VII. 75.
[1159] Diod. IV. 25.
[1160] These wanderings by sea may perhaps be reflected in the voyage of
the Argonauts.
[1161] Roscher, _Lexicon_, vol. III. p. 1181, fig. 5. The vase was
formerly in the Dutuit collection.
[1162] Plat. _Symp._ 179 C. Phanocles (ap. Stob. _serm._ LXIV.) makes
Orpheus suffer for his introduction of paiderastia, the introduction of
which is attributed by Aristotle (_Pol._ II. 10) to the _Cretan_ Minos.
[1163] Prokl. ad Plat. _Polit._ p. 398 Ὀρφεὺς ἅτε τῶν Διονύσου τελετῶν
ἡγεμὼν γενόμενος τὰ ὅμοια παθεῖν λέγεται τῷ σφετέρῳ θεῷ.
[1164] Eratosth. _Catast._ XXIV. Since the above was written M. Salomon
Reinach’s interesting paper ‘La Mort d’Orphée’ (_Rev. Arch._ 1902, p.
242) has appeared. He sees in Orpheus a fox-totem of the Bassarids.
But the traits of Orpheus recorded by tradition seem to me exclusively
human. I am more inclined to see in his dismemberment the echo of some
tradition of ‘secondary burial,’ such as is known to have been practised
in primitive Egypt and, significantly, in Crete, at Palaiokastro. See
_J.H.S._ 1902, p. 386.
[1165] Hypoth. ad _Orph. Lith._
[1166] Soph. frg. 523.
[1167] Soph. frg. 1017. The attribution to Sophocles is doubtful.
[1168] Evidence of the use of οἱ σοφοί to indicate the Orphics has been
collected by Dr J. Adam in his edition of the _Republic_, Vol. II. p. 378.
[1169] Museo Gregoriano II. 60. 1; Roscher, _Lexicon_ III. p. 1187, fig.
12.
[1170] _J.H.S._ 1888, pl. I. On another vase in the British Museum (Cat.
E 301) a Maenad pursuing Orpheus is tattooed on the right arm and both
insteps with a ladder-like pattern.
[1171] Plut. _de ser. num. vind._ XII. οὐδὲ γὰρ Θρᾷκας ἐπαινοῦμεν ὅτι
στίζουσιν ἄχρι νῦν τιμωροῦντες Ὀρφεῖ τὰς αὑτῶν γυναῖκας, and Phanocles
ap. Stob. _Florileg._ p. 399 _v._ 13 says:
ποινὰς δ’ Ὀρφῆϊ κταμένῳ στίζουσι γυναῖκας
εἰς ἔτι νῦν κείνης εἵνεκεν ἀμπλακίης.
[1172] _Early Age of Greece_, vol. I. p. 398.
[1173] Soph. _Ant._ 962.
[1174] Plut. _Symp._ VIII. Proem.
[1175] Philostr. _Her._ V. § 704 ἡ κεφαλὴ γὰρ μετὰ τὸ τῶν γυναικῶν ἔργον
ἐς Λέσβον κατασχοῦσα ῥῆγμα τῆς Λέσβου ᾤκισε καὶ ἐν κοίλῃ τῇ γῇ ἐχρησμῴδει.
[1176] Philostr. _Her._ V. § 704.
[1177] Lucian _adv. indoct._ 11.
[1178] _Antiq. Hist. Mir._ V.
[1179] Minervini, _Bull. Arch. Nap._ vol. VI. 1857, Tav. IV.; Roscher,
_Lexicon_ III. p. 1178, fig. 3. The vase was last seen by Prof.
Furtwängler in the Barone collection; where it now is I am unable to say.
On the reverse of the vase (not figured here) a Muse is handing a lyre to
a woman.
[1180] Plut. _de defect. orac._ XLV.
[1181] The scholiast on the _Plutus_ of Aristophanes _v._ 39, commenting
on the words ἔλακεν ἐκ στεμμάτων, says that persons who consulted an
oracle made their inquiries of the god in writing. They wrote on a tablet
(ἐν πυκτίῳ) placed in the shrine for that purpose and wreathing it with
garlands gave it to the divining priest. But this information has an
apocryphal air.
[1182] Eur. _Alc._ 962.
[1183] Schol. ad Eur. _Alc._ 968 ὁ δὲ φυσικὸς Ἡράκλειτος ... γράφων οὕτως
‘τὸ δὲ τοῦ Διονύσου κατεσκεύασται ἐπὶ τῆς Θρᾴκης ἐπὶ τοῦ καλουμένου
Αἵμου, ὅπου δή τινας ἐν σανίσιν ἀναγραφὰς εἶναί φασιν.’
[1184] According to Diodorus, Linos and Orpheus both used ‘Pelasgic’
letters, and in them Linos wrote the deeds of Dionysos. τόνδ’ οὖν Λίνον
φασὶ τοῖς Πελασγικοῖς γράμμασι συνταξάμενον τὰς τοῦ πρώτου Διονύσου
πράξεις καὶ τὰς ἄλλας μυθολογίας ἀπολιπεῖν ἐν τοῖς ὑπομνήμασιν. ὁμοίως δὲ
τούτοις χρήσασθαι τοῖς Πελασγικοῖς γράμμασι τὸν Ὀρφέα.
[1185] Philostr. _Vit. Apoll._ XIV. 151. Dr Deubner (_de Incubat._ p.
11) notes that ἐφίστασθαι is the regular word used for sudden divine
apparitions.
[1186] Conon, _Narr._ XLV. The narrative concludes thus: λαβόντες οὖν
(τὴν κεφαλὴν) ὑπὸ σήματι μεγάλῳ θάπτουσι, τέμενος αὐτῷ περιείρξαντες, ὃ
τέως μὲν ἡρῷον ἦν, ὕστερον δ’ ἐξενίκησεν ἱερὸν εἶναι· θυσίαις τε γὰρ καὶ
ὅσοις ἄλλοις θεοὶ τιμῶνται γεραίρεται· ἔστι δὲ γυναιξὶ παντελῶς ἄβατον.
[1187] Ael. _V.H._ XII. 8.
[1188] Phleg. _Mirab._ III. It is possible that the trait of the severed
head was borrowed from the ritual of Adonis at Byblos. See C. Fries. _N.
Jahrb. Kl. Alt._ VI. 1903, Heft 1.
[1189] Strab. VII. frgs. 17, 18 and 19.
[1190] P. IX. 30. 12.
[1191] The worship of Eros by the Lycomids will be discussed later (p.
644).
[1192] Ar. _Ran._ 1032.
[1193] S. August. _de civit. dei_ XVIII. 14: Verum isti theologi non pro
diis culti sunt quamvis Orpheum nescio quomodo inferiis sacris praeficere
soleat civitas impiorum.
[1194] Athen. XIV. 32 § 632.
[1195] P. X. 7. 2.
[1196] [Eur.] _Rhes._ 941.
[1197] Herod. VII. 6.
[1198] Tat. _adv. Graec._ XLI. 271 τὰ ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ ἐπιφερόμενά φασιν ὑπὸ
Ὀνομακρίτου τοῦ Ἀθηναίου συντετάχθαι.
[1199] Clem. Al. _Str._ I. 332 Ὀνομάκριτος οὗ τὰ εἰς Ὀρφέα φερόμενα
λέγεται εἶναι κατὰ τὴν τῶν Πεισιστρατιδῶν ἀρχὴν περὶ τὴν πεντηκοστὴν
Ὀλυμπιάδα.
[1200] P. VIII. 37. 5.
[1201] Plato _Phaed._ p. 69 C εἰσὶ γὰρ δὴ φασὶν οἱ περὶ τὰς τελετὰς
ναρθηκοφόροι μὲν πολλοί, Βάκχοι δέ τε παῦροι. Olympiod. ad loc. παρῳδεῖ
πανταχοῦ τὰ τοῦ Ὀρφέως, διὸ καὶ στίχον αὐτοῦ φησί·
Πολλοὶ μὲν ναρθηκοφόροι, παῦροι δέ τε Βάκχοι.
ναρθηκοφόρους οὐ μὴν Βάκχους τοὺς πολιτικοὺς καλῶν Βάκχους δὲ τοὺς
καθαρτικούς.
[1202] Published by Dr Sam. Wide, _A. Mitt._ XIX. (1894), p. 248;
discussed by Dr Ernst Maass, _Orpheus_ (1895); see Dr Erwin Rohde,
_Kleine Schriften_, p. 293.
Line 63 οὐδενὶ δὲ ἐξέσται ἐν τῆι στιβάδι οὔτε ἆισαι | οὔτε θορυβῆσαι οὔτε
κροτῆσαι μετὰ δὲ | πάσης εὐκοσμίας καὶ ἡσυχίας τοὺς μερισ|μοὺς λέγειν καὶ
ποιεῖν προστάσσοντος | τοῦ ἱερέως ἢ τοῦ ἀρχιβάκχου.
Line 135 εὔκοσμος δὲ κληρούσθω ἢ καθισ|τάσθω ὑπὸ τοῦ ἱερέως ἐπιφέρων τῶι
ἀκοσ|μοῦντι ἢ θορυβοῦντι τὸν θύρσον τοῦ θε|οῦ ὧι δὲ ἂν παρατεθῆι ὁ θύρσος
ἐπικρεί|ναντος τοῦ ἱερέως ἢ τοῦ ἀρχιβάκχου | ἐξερχέσθω τοῦ ἑστιατορείου.
ἐὰν δὲ ἀ|πειθῆι αἱρέτωσαν αὐτὸν ἔξω τοῦ πυλῶ|νος οἱ κατασταθησόμενοι
ὑπὸ τῶν | ἱερέων ἵπποι, καὶ ἔστω ὑπεύθυνος | τοῖς περὶ τῶν μαχομένων
προστεί|μοις.
[1203] Pind. _Ol._ V. 24.
[1204] _Isth._ IV. 14.
[1205] _Pyth._ II. 34.
[1206] Pind. _Pyth._ III. 59.
[1207] _Isth._ VI. 36.
[1208] _Ol._ XIII. 92.
[1209] Soph. _Oed. Col._ 607, trans. Mr Gilbert Murray.
[1210] Ar. _Ran._ 849; see Nauck ad loc.
[1211] The restoration attempted by Dr Körte (_Die Kreter des Euripides_,
Aufsätze Ernst Curtius gewidmet, p. 197), on evidence drawn from Etruscan
urns, seems to me quite uncertain.
[1212] Eur. frg. 475 ap. Porph. _De Abst._ IV. 19, trans. Mr Gilbert
Murray.
[1213] Mr Murray translates the MS. reading:
μύστης γενόμην
καὶ νυκτιπόλου Ζαγρέως βροντὰς
τάς τ’ ὠμοφάγους δαῖτας τελέσας.
For βροντὰς Dr Diels would read βούτας, i.e. βουκόλος. (See Dieterich,
_De Hymnis Orphicis_, p. 11, and cf. Eur. frg. 203.) This emendation
seems to me probable, but as both MS. readings and all suggested
emendations are uncertain I have based no argument on the word βροντάς.
[1214] _v._ 10 Διὸς Ἰδαίου μύστης γενόμην.
[1215] Eur. frg. 904 ap. Clem. Al. _Strom._ V. p. 688.
[1216] Ap. _Etym. Gud._ p. 227. The lexicographers explain the title as
meaning mighty hunter, but in the ritual Zagreus is more hunted than
hunter.
[1217] Plut. _de Ei_ IX. Διόνυσον δὲ καὶ Ζαγρέα καὶ Νυκτέλιον καὶ
Ἰσοδαίτην αὐτὸν ὀνομάζουσι. Taking the three ritual titles in conjunction
it seems almost certain that Ἰσοδαίτης refers to the ὠμόφαγοι δαῖτες of
the Zagreus ritual shared alike by all mystics.
[1218] _v._ 11 τάς τ’ ὠμοφάγους δαῖτας τελέσας.
[1219] Eur. frg. 476 καὶ ταυροδέτῳ κόλλῃ κραθεῖσ’.
[1220] A. Evans, _Annual of British School at Athens_, vol. VII. p. 18,
fig. 7 _a_.
[1221] D. Hogarth, _J.H.S._ vol. XXII. 1902, p. 76 and plates VI.-IX.
[1222] _Op. cit._ nos. 17-18, and _Ann. B.S.A._ VII. fig. 45.
[1223] See supr. p. 452.
[1224] Plut. _de defect. orac._ XIV.
[1225] Clem. Al. _Protr._ II. 12 Διόνυσον μαινόλην ὀργιάζουσι Βάκχοι
ὠμοφαγίᾳ τὴν ἱερομηνίαν (? ἱερομανίαν) ἄγοντες καὶ τελέσκουσι τὰς
κρεανομίας τῶν φόνων ἀνεστεμμένοι τοῖς ὄφεσιν, ἐπολολύζοντες Εὔαν κτλ.;
and again speaking of the analogous ceremonies of the Korybants Clement
(_Protr._ II. 6) says: καὶ ταῦτ’ ἔστι τὰ μυστήρια, συνελόντι φάναι, φόνοι
καὶ τάφοι.
[1226] Clem. Al. _Protr._ II. 17 τὰ γὰρ Διονύσου μυστήρια τέλεον
ἀπάνθρωπα, ὃν εἰσέτι παῖδα ὄντα ἐνόπλῳ κινήσει περιχορευόντων Κουρήτων
δόλῳ δὲ ὑποδύντων Τιτάνων ἀπατήσαντες παιδαριώδεσιν ἀθύρμασιν οὗτοι δὴ οἱ
Τιτᾶνες διέσπασαν ἔτι νηπίαχον ὄντα ὡς ὁ τῆς τελετῆς ποιητὴς Ὀρφεύς φησιν
ὁ Θρᾴκιος: and _Protr._ XII. 119 referring to the _Bacchae_ he speaks of
the Maenads as αἱ δύσαγνον κρεανομίαν μυούμεναι.
[1227] Arnob. V. 19 atque _vos plenos Dei numine ac majestate docentes_
caprorum reclamantium viscera cruentatis oribus dissipatis: the words in
italics shew that Arnobius understood the real gist of the rite.
[1228] Porphyr. _De Abst._ II. 55 ἔθυον δὲ καὶ ἐν Χίῳ τῷ Ὠμαδίῳ Διονύσῳ
ἄνθρωπον διασπῶντες καὶ ἐν Τενέδῳ ὥς φησιν Εὔελπις ὁ Καρύστιος.
[1229] Ap. Porphyr. _De Abst._ II. 56. Clement (_Protr._ III. 4) says,
citing as his authority the _Nostoi_ of Antikleides, that this human
sacrifice was offered by the Lyctii, a Cretan tribe.
[1230] Firmicus Maternus _de err. profan._ relig. c. 6 Cretenses, ut
furentis tyranni saevitiam mitigarent, festos funeris dies statuunt et
annuum sacrum trieterica consecratione componunt, omnia per ordinem
facientes, quae puer moriens aut fecit aut passus est. Vivum laniant
dentibus taurum, crudeles epulas annuis commemorationibus excitantes et
per secreta silvarum clamoribus dissonis ejulantes fingunt animi furentis
insaniam ut illud facinus non per fraudem factum sed per insaniam
crederetur.
[1231] If any one finds the tearing of the bull with the teeth a hard
saying, he may be reassured by the statement of Nonnus (_Dionys._ VI.
205) that the bull-shaped Dionysos was cut in little bits _by a knife_,
which would greatly facilitate matters:
ἀμοιβαίῃ δὲ φονῆες
ταυροφυῆ Διόνυσον ἐμιστύλλοντο μαχαίρῃ.
[1232] _Nili opera_, Narrat. III. 28, Migne, Patrol. LXXIX. I owe this
reference to Nilus to Prof. Robertson Smith’s _Religion of the Semites_
p. 320, but as the passage is of cardinal importance in relation to the
account of Firmicus I have substituted a translation for his summary.
[1233] Porphyr. _De Abst._ II. 48.
[1234] One of the titles of Dionysos, i.e. Eiraphiotes, is as Mr R.
A. Neil has pointed out the etymological equivalent of the Sanscrit
_varsabha_, _bull_: see _Golden Bough_, 2nd edit. vol. II. p. 164.
[1235] Ar. _Ran._ 355 μηδὲ Κρατίνου τοῦ ταυροφάγου γλώττης Βακχεῖ’
ἐτελέσθη, trans. Rogers.
[1236] Plut. _Vit. Them._ XIII. In this same way a legend grew up and was
accredited by Neanthes, the Cyzicene historian, that when Epimenides was
‘purifying Attica by human blood’ a youth, Kratinos, offered himself as
a willing sacrifice. But how apocryphal such stories may be is owned by
Athenaeus himself (XIII. 78 § 602), who adds after his narrative that he
is aware that the whole story was said by Polemon to have been a fiction.
[1237] Published and discussed in relation to the myth of Zagreus by Mr
Cecil Smith, _J.H.S._, 1890, p. 343.
[1238] Ael. _N.A._ XII. 34 λίθοις βάλλεται τῇ ὁσίᾳ. ὁσία is the regular
word for a _mystic_ rite, cf. _Hom. Hymn. ad Cer._ 211 ὁσίης ἐπέβη.
[1239] See supra, p. 113.
[1240] Diod. Sic. V. 75. 4.
[1241] The scattered sources for the Zagreus myth are given in full in
Abel’s _Orphica_ (p. 230 ff.). They appear to be all based on a lost poem
or poems attributed to Orpheus of which Clement in the passage already
discussed (p. 484) quotes two lines: ὡς ὁ τῆς τελετῆς ποιητὴς Ὀρφεύς
φησιν ὁ Θρᾴκιος·
κῶνος καὶ ῥόμβος καὶ παίγνια καμπεσίγυια
μῆλά τε χρύσεα καλὰ παρ’ Ἑσπερίδων λιγυφώνων,
and the scholiast on the passage observes (Dind. I. p. 433) ὠμὰ γὰρ
ἤσθιον κρέα οἱ μυούμενοι Διονύσῳ, δεῖγμα τοῦτο τελούμενοι τοῦ σπαραγμοῦ
ὃν ὑπέστη Διόνυσος ὑπὸ Τιτάνων.
[1242] Among these sacred objects which cannot be discussed in detail
here perhaps the most interesting was the rhombos or bull-roarer still
in use among savage tribes, on the significance of which fresh light has
recently been thrown by Dr Frazer in his paper ‘On some ceremonies of the
Central Australian Tribes.’ Melbourne 1900.
[1243] Nonnus may have based his poem on the Βασσαρικά of Dionysius, to
which it seems possible that the fragments recently discovered of an
epic poem dealing with Bacchic subjects belong. These fragments contain
a curious account of the slaying and eating of a human victim disguised
as a stag. See Mr Kenyon in Herwerden’s _Album Gratulatorium_ and Dr
Ludwich, ‘Das Papyros-Fragment eines Dionysos-Epos’ (_Berl. Philolog.
Wochenschrift_, Jan. 3, 1903, p. 27).
[1244] Nonn. _Dionys._ XXVII. 228
ἐλευκαίνοντο δὲ γύψῳ
μυστιπόλῳ
and see XXVII. 204, XXIX. 274, XXXIV. 144, XLVII. 732. Cf. also the
disguise of the Phocians described by Herodotus (VIII. 27).
[1245] Harpocrat. s.v. ἀπομάττων.
[1246] Dem. _de Coron._ § 259.
[1247] Eustath. ad _Il._ II. 735 § 332 τίτανον δὲ κυρίως τὴν κονίαν
φαμέν, τὸ ἰδιωτικῶς λεγόμενον ἄσβεστον τὸ ἐν λίθοις κεκαυμένοις χνοῶδες
λευκόν. ἐκλήθη δὲ οὕτως ἀπὸ τῶν μυθικῶν Τιτάνων οὓς ὁ τοῦ μύθου Ζεὺς
κεραυνοῖς βαλὼν κατέφρυγε. δι’ αὐτοὺς γὰρ καὶ τὸ ἐξ ἄγαν πολλῆς καύσεως
καὶ ὡς οἷον εἰπεῖν τιτανώδους διατρυφθὲν ἐν λίθοις λεπτὸν τίτανος
ὠνομάσθη, οἷα ποίνης τινὸς Τιτανικῆς γενομένης καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ. οἱ δὲ παλαιοί
φασι τίτανος κόνις γύψος, and see Eustath. 1676 where a child who sees
snow for the first time is said to have mistaken it for τίτανος.
[1248] Since writing the above I find that my explanation of the Titans
has been anticipated by Dr Dieterich, _Rh. Mus._ 1893, p. 280. His high
authority is a welcome confirmation of my view.
[1249] P. VIII. 37. 5.
[1250] Ταῦρος δράκοντος καὶ δράκων ταύρου πατήρ, frg. ap. Clem. Al.
_Protr._ I. 2. 12. What was made of such a reverent mystic dogma by the
unsavoury minds of Christian fathers can be read by the curious.
[1251] M. Salomon Reinach, who has done so much for the elucidation of
Orphism, has shown that the Celts held in honour and depicted on their
monuments a _horned snake_. Such a conception would keep up the confusion
of bull and snake. He believes the original form of Zagreus to have been
that of a horned snake. The point is an interesting one and is evidence
of Northern elements in Orphic as well as Dionysiac conceptions, see
_Rev. Arch._ 1899, vol. XXXV. p. 210, S. Reinach, ‘Zagreus le serpent
cornu.’
[1252] _v._ 12 μητρί τ’ ὀρείᾳ δᾷδας ἀνασχών. In the recently discovered
fragment of Timotheos (_v._ 135) it is to the ‘Mountain Mother’ that the
drowning sailor would pray:
εἰ δυνατὰ πρὸς μελαμπεταλο-
χίτωνα Ματρὸς οὐρεί-
ας δεσπόσυνα γόνατα πεσεῖν....
See Timotheos, _Die Perser_, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 1903.
[1253] Published and discussed by the discoverer Mr Evans in the _Annual
of the British School at Athens_, vol. VII. 1900-1901, p. 29, fig. 9.
The enlargement (3/1) here reproduced from the _Annual_ is based on a
restoration, but a perfectly certain one. A series of clay fragments
impressed by the same seal, but not from the same impression, were found
in a deposit of burnt wood. The various fragments overlapped sufficiently
for certain reconstruction. When I first saw a drawing of the seal I
was inclined to think it was ‘too good to be true,’ but by Mr Evans’
kindness I was allowed while at Crete to examine the original fragments
and am satisfied that the reconstruction is correct. We owe the most
important monument of Mycenaean religion to the highly trained eye and
extraordinarily acute perception of the excavator.
[1254]
καὶ Κουρήτων
βάκχος ἐκλήθην ὁσιωθείς.
The word ὁσιωθείς is rendered ‘Set Free’ by Mr Murray in his translation
for reasons explained later, p. 504.
[1255] Hes. frg. CXXIX. ap. Strab. X. p. 323.
[1256] Diod. V. 66.
[1257] Plut. _Q. Gr._ IX. Τίς ὁ παρὰ Δελφοῖς Ὁσιωτὴρ καὶ διὰ τί Βύσιον
ἕνα τῶν μηνῶν καλοῦσιν; Ὁσιωτῆρα μὲν καλοῦσι τὸ θυόμενον ἱερεῖον, ὅταν
Ὅσιος ἀποδειχθῇ, πέντε δέ εἰσιν ὅσιοι διὰ βίον καὶ τὰ πολλὰ μετὰ τῶν
προφητῶν δρῶσιν οὗτοι καὶ συνιερουργοῦσιν, ἅτε γεγονέναι δοκοῦντες ἀπὸ
Δευκαλίωνος. Stephanos comments ‘mendose ut videtur pro τὸν θυόμενον,
accipiendo sc. θυόμενον active pro θύοντα.... Recte autem habet τὸ si
quidem Ὁσιωτὴρ (ταῦρος) est Hostia quae immolatur.’
[1258] Plut. _de Defect. Orac._ XLIX. οἱ γὰρ ἱερεῖς καὶ θύειν φασὶ τὸ
ἱερεῖον κτλ.
[1259] Plut. _de Defect. Orac._ LI.
[1260] Nikitsky, _Delphisch-Epigraphische Studien_ p. 145, points out
that in inscriptions two hereditary families of priests are traceable;
these he thinks may correspond with the προφῆται or utterers whom he
holds to be Apolline and the ὅσιοι who are manifestly Dionysiac. His book
is in Russian, and I only know it at second hand.
[1261] Plut. _de Is. et Os._ XXXV. and see p. 441. Had the treatise by
Socrates περὶ Ὁσίων which Plutarch refers to been preserved, we should
have been informed.
[1262] Lyc. _Al._ 207 and schol. ad loc. ταῦρος δὲ ὁ Διόνυσος ... ὅτι ἐν
παραβύστῳ τὰ μυστήρια ἐτελεῖτο τῷ Διονύσῳ.
[1263] C. T. Newton, _Discoveries at Cnidos_ p. 735 and Insc. 88, 83 etc.
[1264] Plat. _Legg._ 873 B, schol. ad loc. ἀφοσιούτω* καθαιρέτω, ὡς
νῦν, ἢ ἀπαρχὰς προσαγέτω, ἢ τιμάτω, ἢ τὴν ἐπὶ θανάτῳ ἀποδιδότω τιμήν, ἢ
πληροφορείτω. I owe the reference to this interesting passage to Mr F. M.
Cornford. I am not sure what the scholiast means by the post-classical
word πληροφορέω; the passive means in the New Testament ‘to have full
assurance’ of faith and the like. It may point to the final stage of
initiation.
[1265] Suidas s.v. ὅσιος, ὅσιον χωρίον.
[1266] Plut. _Vit. Rom._ 28.
[1267] Lucian, _Lexiphan._ 10.
[1268] Plut. _de Is. et Os._ LXI. ὁ Ὄσιρις ἐκ τοῦ ὁσίου καὶ ἱεροῦ τοὔνομα
μεμιγμένον ἔσχηκε· κοινὸς γάρ ἐστι τῶν ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ τῶν ἐν ᾅδου λόγος.
ὧν τὰ μὲν ἱερὰ τὰ δὲ ὅσια τοῖς παλαιοῖς <ἔθος?> ἦν προσαγορεύειν. It is
practically certain that τὰ μέν refers to the first mentioned class, i.e.
τὰ ἐν οὐρανῷ.
[1269] Iambl. _Vit. Pythag._ 58 χαρακτὴρ παλαιότροπος ... ἀρχαιοτρόπου δὲ
καὶ παλαιοῦ πίνου.
[1270] Plat. _Gorg._ p. 507 B.
[1271] Soph. _Ant._ 74.
[1272] Hes. _Theog._ 901.
[1273] Eur. _Bacch._ 991 ἴτω Δίκα φανερὸς ἴτω ξιφηφόρος.
[1274] Dem. _c. Aristogeit._ XXV. 11.
[1275] _Orph. Hymn._ LXII.
[1276] Eur. _Bacch._ 370 Ὁσία πότνα θεῶν. It is worth noting in
connection with the Ὁσία of Euripides, that on tomb-inscriptions in
Phrygia, and so far as at present known only there, dedications occur to
a divinity bearing the titles ὅσιος καὶ δίκαιος. These inscriptions are
of Roman date, and it is usual to refer them to Mithras worship, but,
found as they are in Phrygia, the home of the Bacchants, it is possible,
I think, that they may indicate an old tradition of Cybele worship. See
Roscher s.v. Hosios.
[1277]
πάλλευκα δ’ ἔχων εἵματα φεύγω
γένεσίν τε βροτῶν καὶ νεκροθήκης
οὐ χριμπτόμενος, τήν τ’ ἐμψύχων
βρῶσιν ἐδεστῶν πεφύλαγμαι.
[1278] Diog. Laert. _Vit. Pyth._ 19 § 33.
[1279] Plat. _Legg._ VI. p. 782.
[1280] Soph. frg. 464, ap. Porphyr. _de Abst._ II. p. 134.
[1281] Schol. ad Soph. _Oed. Col._ 100.
[1282] Philoch. frg. 30, ap. Schol. ad Soph. _Oed. Col._ 99.
[1283] Plut. _de tuend. sanit._ XVII.
[1284] Plut. _de cohibend. ir._ XVI. sub fin.
[1285] Soph. _Oed. Col._ 100, νήφων ἀοίνοις, and schol. ad loc.
[1286] Diog. Laert. _Vit. Pythag._ XV., and see p. 91.
[1287] _Hom. Hymn. ad Cer._ 205-210
δεξαμένη δ’ ὁσίης ἐπέβη πολυπότνια Δηώ.
[1288] Porphyr. _de Abst._ II. 4 and I. 31.
[1289] Maeterlinck, _Le Temple enseveli_, p. 188.
[1290] Eur. _Hipp._ 952.
[1291] Ar. _Nub._ 223 ff. That this scene is in intent a parody of Orphic
ceremonial was first observed by Dr Dieterich, _Rh. Mus._ 1893, p. 275.
[1292] Ar. _Nub._ 259
ΣΤ. εἶτα δὴ τί κερδανῶ;
ΣΩ. λέγειν γενήσει τρῖμμα, κρόταλον, παιπάλη.
ἀλλ’ ἔχ’ ἀτρεμί.
ΣΤ. μὰ τὸν Δί’ οὐ ψεύσει γέ με·
καταπαττόμενος γὰρ παιπάλη γενήσομαι.
[1293] Schol. ad Ar. _Nub._ 260 ταῦτα μὲν λέγων ὁ Σωκράτης λίθους
περιτρίβων πωρίνους καὶ κρούων πρὸς ἀλλήλους συναγαγὼν τὰ ἀπὸ τούτων
θραύσματα βάλλει τὸν πρεσβύτην αὐτοῖς καθάπερ τὰ ἱερεῖα ταῖς οὐλαῖς οἱ
θύοντες.
[1294] Dio Chrysost. _Or._ XII. 387 εἰώθασιν ἐν τῷ καλουμένῳ θρονισμῷ
καθίσαντες τοὺς μυουμένους οἱ τελοῦντες κύκλῳ περιχορεύειν.
[1295] Plat. _Euthyd._ 277 D.
[1296] Aether, air and whirlwind frequently appear in the Orphic
fragments preserved to us, e.g. Damasc. _Quaest. de primis princ._ p. 147
καὶ γὰρ Ὀρφεύς·
ἔπειτα δ’ ἔτευξε μέγας Χρόνος αἰθέρι δίῳ
ὠεὸν ἀργύρεον,
and in the fragment of a hymn to the Sun preserved by Macrobius _Sat._ I.
23. 22. Solem esse omnia et Orpheus testatur his versibus:
κέκλυθι τηλεπόρου δίνης ἑλικαυγέα κύκλον
οὐρανίαις στροφάλιγξι περίδρομον αἰὲν ἑλίσσων
ἀγλαὲ Ζεῦ Διόνυσε, πάτερ πόντου, πάτερ αἴης,
Ἥλιε παγγενέτωρ παναίολε χρυσεοφεγγές,
words which might have been sung by Sokrates in his basket.
[1297] Theoph. _Char._ XXVIII.
[1298] Plut. _de Superstit._ XII. τῆς δεισιδαιμονίας ἔργα καὶ πάθη
καταγέλαστα καὶ ῥήματα καὶ κινήματα καὶ γοητεῖαι καὶ μαγεῖαι καὶ
περιδρομαὶ καὶ τυμπανισμοὶ καὶ ἀκάθαρτοι μὲν καθαρμοί, ῥυπαραὶ δὲ
ἁγνεῖαι, βάρβαροι δὲ καὶ παράνομοι πρὸς ἱεροῖς κολασμοὶ καὶ προπηλακισμοί.
[1299] Plut. _de Superstit._ VII.
[1300] Diog. Laert. _Vit. Pyth._ XIX.
[1301] Heracleit. frg. 130, Bywater, καθαίρονται δὲ αἵματι μιαινόμενοι
ὥσπερ ἂν εἴ τις ἐς πηλὸν ἐμβὰς πηλῷ ἀπονίζοιτο.
[1302] Plato, _Rep._ 364 B.
[1303] Munich Glyptothek, No. 601. Schreiber, _Hell. Reliefbilder_, Taf.
80 A.
[1304] Soph. frg. 724
στατοῖς
λίκνοισι προστρέπεσθε.
[1305] I have already discussed the _liknon_ in connection with the
fragment of Sophocles in the _Classical Review_, vol. VIII. p. 270.
In the Thorwaldsen collection at Copenhagen there is a relief closely
analogous to that in fig. 148. A _liknon_ is erected on a column: above
it appears a large goat’s head, see Schreiber, _Reliefbilder_, Taf. CXI.
1.
[1306] Baumeister, _Denkmäler_ p. 449, fig. 496. Campana _op. plast._ 45.
An almost identical relief on a ‘Campana’ terracotta is in the Kestner
Museum at Hanover.
[1307] Helbig, _Museo delle Therme_, no. 1122. Fig. 150 is drawn from a
photograph.
[1308] Since the above was written and the drawing in fig. 150 made,
I have examined the original, and find that the obscure object _is_ a
_liknon_; the main outline and even the handle can be clearly made out.
[1309] Duchesne, _Origines du culte chrétien_ p. 416.
[1310] Plut. _Q.R._ X.
[1311] Festus, p. 379.
[1312] Eur. _Alc._ 1144. The ritual word ἀφαγνίσηται, disenhallowed,
marks the primitive meaning, getting rid of the pollution of the dead; it
is a form of ἀποτροπή.
[1313] For the whole subject see ‘Le voile d’oblation,’ S. Reinach, Acad.
des Inscriptions, _C.R._ 1897, p. 644.
[1314] Hesych. s.v.
[1315] Baumeister, _Denkmäler_ vol. I. p. 680, fig. 741.
[1316] _Hom. Hymn. Merc._ 150.
[1317] _Cat._ 31. Pashley, _Travels in Crete_, 1837, vol. I. p. 37. A
very similar representation of Liknites carried by two Satyrs occurs
on a sarcophagus in the Naples Museum. Dr Hans Graeven kindly pointed
out to me a majolica plate in the Kestner Museum at Hanover on which
oddly enough exactly the same scene occurs. Clearly it is a copy from an
ancient sarcophagus. The only addition is that the group stands against
the background of a mediaeval landscape.
[1318] S. Reinach, _Revue Arch._ 1900, vol. XXXVI. p. 87. The vase has
been more fully interpreted by Dr Svoronos, _Journal d’Archéologie et
Numismatique_, 1901, p. 387.
[1319] The birth of Brimos is discussed later (p. 549).
[1320] _B.M. Cat._ E 183. _Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens_, p. liii, fig.
9.
[1321] Verg. _Georg._ I. 165
Virgea praeterea Celei vilisque supellex,
Arbuteae crates, et mystica vannus Iacchi.
Serv. ad loc. Id est cribrum areale. _Mystica_ autem _Iacchi_ ideo ait
quod Liberi Patris sacra ad purgationem animae pertinebant: et sic
homines ejus Mysteriis purgabantur, sicut vannis frumenta purgantur.
Hinc est quod dicitur Osiridis membra a Typhone dilaniata Isis cribro
superposuisse: nam idem est Liber Pater in cujus Mysteriis _vannus_ est:
quia ut diximus animas purgat. Unde et Liber ab eo quod liberet dictus,
quem Orpheus a gigantibus dicit esse discerptum. Nonnulli Liberum Patrem
apud Graecos Λικνίτην dici adferunt; _vannus_ autem apud eos λίκνον
nuncupatur; ubi deinde positus esse dicitur postquam est utero matris
editus. Alii mysticam sic accipiunt ut vannum vas vimineum latum dicant,
in quod ipsi propter capacitatem congerere rustici primitias frugum
soleant et Libero et Liberae sacrum facere. Inde _mystica_.
[1322] Mr Andrew Lang (_Custom and Myth_ p. 36) conjectures that the
‘use of the _mystica vannus Iacchi_ was a mode of raising a sacred wind
analogous to that employed by whirlers of the tundun or bull-roarer’; but
with his accustomed frankness Mr Lang owns that like Servius he is ‘only
guessing.’
[1323] For the full discussion of this subject I may refer to a paper I
hope shortly to publish in the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, 1903.
[1324] Hom. _Od._ XI. 127
ὁππότε κεν δή τοι ξυμβλήμενος ἄλλος ὁδίτης
φήῃ ἀθηρηλοιγὸν ἔχειν ἀνὰ φαιδίμῳ ὤμῳ
καὶ τότε δὴ γαίῃ πήξας εὐῆρες ἐρετμὸν κτλ.
In the _Odysseus Acanthoplex_ of Sophocles the winnowing fan was called
by another of these descriptive epithets. Eustathius has preserved the
line
ὤμοις ἀθηρόβρωτον ὄργανον φέρων.
That it was understood to be simply the πτύον is clear from Porphyry
(_De antr. nymph._ 35) ... ὡς πτύον ἡγεῖσθαι εἶναι τὴν κώπην. Eustathius
(§ 1675) pertinently observes πλάτη γὰρ θαλασσία τὸ ἐρετμὸν καὶ πλάτη
χερσαία τὸ πτύον.
[1325] Odysseus is figured on gems with a broad-bladed oar, see
Inghirami, _Galleria Omerica_ III., Harrison, _Myths of the Odyssey_, pl.
30.
[1326] Hom. _Il._ V. 499.
[1327] Hom. _Il._ XIII. 588
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀπὸ πλατέος πτυόφιν μεγάλην κατ’ ἀλωὴν
θρῴσκωσιν κύαμοι μελανόχροες ἢ ἐρέβινθοι
πνοιῇ ὑπὸ λιγυρῇ καὶ λικμητῆρος ἐρωῇ.
[1328] Aesch. frg. 194, ap. Athen. IX. § 394.
[1329] Theocr. _Id._ VII. 155
ἇς ἐπὶ σωρῷ
αὖθις ἐγὼ πάξαιμι μέγα πτύον.
Cf. πήξας εὐῆρες ἐρετμόν of the oar of Odysseus. The scholiast
on Theocritus says ὅταν δὲ λικμῶνται καὶ σωρεύωσι τὸν πυρὸν κατὰ
μέσον πηγνύουσι τὸ πτύον καὶ τὴν θρινάκην κατέθεντο. For the modern
representative of the θρῖναξ still used in Crete I may refer to my
article in the _Hellenic Journal_, 1903, part I.
[1330] _Anthol. Palat._ VI. 165.
[1331] πτύον according to Vaniček is from the root _pu_, meaning to
cleanse, which in its various modifications gives us πῦρ πνέω. κόσκινον
like κεσκίον is a reduplicated form of _sak_, _ska_, _ski_ to separate.
The symbolism of the sieve will be discussed later. In meaning it is
identical with _cribrum_; both are ‘separators.’
[1332] Plat. _Soph._ 226 E πᾶσα ἡ τοιαύτη διάκρισις ... λέγεται παρὰ
πάντων καθαρμός τις.
[1333] Procl. in Plat. _Tim._ II. 124 C, D, and III. 208 D. According to
Proclus p. 171 F Orpheus wrote a discourse on Hippa.
[1334] Harpocrat. s.v. τὸ λίκνον πρὸς πᾶσαν τελετὴν καὶ θυσίαν ἐπιτήδειον.
[1335] Müller-Wieseler II. 54. The gem was formerly in the Marlborough
Coll. It is published in phototype and discussed by Dr Furtwängler,
_Ancient Gems_, pl. LVII. ii. p. 339. It is now in the Boston Museum
of Fine Arts. The antiquity of both the artist’s signature and the gem
itself is accepted by Prof. Furtwängler, but has been questioned by many
competent archaeologists. As I have not seen the original I am unable to
express any certain conviction. For a full account of the controversy see
_Boston Museum Annual Report_, XXIV., 1900, p. 88.
[1336] Plutarch or the author of the ‘Proverbial sayings of Alexander’
(_Prov. Alex._ XVI. 1255), νόμος ἦν Ἀθήνῃσι ἐν τοῖς γάμοις ἀμφιθαλῆ παῖδα
λίκνον βαστάζοντα ἄρτων πλέων εἶτα ἐπιλέγειν Ἔφύγον κακὸν εὗρον ἄμεινον.
[1337] Schol. ad Call. _Hymn. ad Jov._ 48 ἐν γὰρ λείκνοις τὸ παλαιὸν
κατεκοίμιζον τὰ βρέφη πλοῦτον καὶ καρποὺς οἰωνιζόμενοι· λίκνον οὖν τὸ
κόσκινον ἢ τὸ κούνιον ἐν ᾧ τὰ παιδία, τιθέασιν. For similar modern
customs see Mannhardt, _Mythologische Forschungen_, ‘Kind und Korn,’ p.
366.
[1338] Suidas s.v. ἔφυγον κακόν, εὗρον ἄμεινον, and Hesych. s.v.
[1339] Dem. _de Cor._ § 313.
[1340] Strictly speaking a ἱερὰ σύμμιξις. These rites are probably of
earlier origin than the patriarchal institution of monogamy.
[1341] Clem. Al. _Protr._ 16 Σαβαζίων γοῦν μυστηρίων σύμβολον τοῖς
μυουμένοις ὁ διὰ κόλπου θεός. δράκων δέ ἐστιν οὗτος διελκόμενος τοῦ
κόλπου τῶν τελουμένων ἔλεγχος ἀκρατίας Διός. The meaning of διὰ κόλπου
and with it ὑπὸ κόλπου is sufficiently evident from this passage.
Any possible doubt is removed by the use of ὑπὸ κόλπου in Lucian’s
_Alexander_ c. 39.
[1342] Arnob. _c. gent._ V. c. 21. Ipsa novissime sacra et ritus
initiationis ipsius quibus Sebadiis nomen est, testimonio esse potuerunt
veritati, in quibus aureus coluber in sinum dimittitur consecratis et
eximitur rursus ab inferioribus partibus.
[1343] Clem. Al. _Protr._ II. 15 τὰ σύμβολα τῆς μυήσεως ταύτης ... ἐκ
τυμπάνου ἔφαγον, ἐκ κυμβάλου ἔπιον· ἐκερνοφόρησα· ὑπὸ τὸν παστὸν ὑπέδυν.
ταῦτα οὐχ ὕβρις τὰ σύμβολα, οὐ χλεύη τὰ μυστήρια;
[1344] The uses of the word παστάς are discussed by Sir Richard Jebb in
commenting on _v._ 1207 of the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, App. p. 263,
where the suggestion is made that the παστάς was some interior portion or
arrangement in the θάλαμος.
[1345] _Philosophoumena_ ed. Cruice v. 3 τετέλεσται δὲ ταῦτα (τὰ βακχικὰ
τοῦ Ὀρφέως) ... πρὸ τῆς ... ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι τελετῆς, ἐν Φλοιοῦντι τῆς
Ἀττικῆς, πρὸ γὰρ τῶν Ἐλευσινίων μυστηρίων ἐστὶ [τὰ] ἐν τῇ Φλοιοῦντι τῆς
λεγομένης Μεγάλης ὄργια. ἔστι δὲ παστὰς ἐν αὐτῇ, ἐπὶ δὲ τῆς παστάδος
ἐγγέγραπται μέχρι σήμερον ἡ πάντων τῶν εἰρημένων λόγων ἰδέα. πολλὰ μὲν
οὖν ἐστὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς παστάδος ἐκείνης ἐγγεγραμμένα· περὶ ὧν καὶ Πλούταρχος
ποιεῖται λόγους ἐν ταῖς πρὸς Ἐμπεδοκλέα δέκα βίβλοις. Whether the παστάς
is here bridal chamber or bridal bed it is impossible to decide; it may
have been a sort of decorative baldacchino. That παστός meant sometimes
bed, not chamber, is clear I think from the title παστοφόρος applied to
Aphrodite.
[1346] Arist. _De Rep. Ath._ III. 5 (p. 118) ἔτι καὶ νῦν γὰρ τῆς τοῦ
βασιλέως γυναικὸς ἡ σύμμειξις ἐνταῦθα γίγνεται τῷ Διονύσῳ καὶ ὁ γάμος.
Rutherford and Hude bracket καὶ ὁ γάμος. I see no reason for this. By
Aristotle’s time the old matriarchal σύμμειξις was regarded as a regular
patriarchal γάμος. The double expression marks a transitional attitude of
mind.
[1347] [Demosthenes] _in Neaer._ § 73. The sources for the ceremony in
the Boukolion are fully given by Dr Martin Nilsson, _Studia de Dionysiis
Atticis_ p. 156.
[1348] ἁγιστεύω καὶ εἰμὶ καθαρὰ καὶ ἁγνὴ ἀπό τε τῶν ἄλλων τῶν οὐ
καθαρευόντων, καὶ ἀπ’ ἀνδρὸς συνουσίας.
[1349] The club rules of the Iobacchoi, noted p. 475, do not deal with
the mysteries of the cult.
[1350] P. II. 11. 3.
[1351] Epiph. _L.I.T._ III. p. 255, and Iren. I. 18, p. 89, οἱ μὲν
νυμφῶνα κατασκευάζουσι καὶ μυσταγωγίαν ἐπιτελοῦσι μετ’ ἐπιρρήσεών τινων
τοῖς τελουμένοις καὶ πνευματικὸν γάμον φάσκουσιν εἶναι.
[1352] Firmicus Mat. _de Ev. Pr. Relig._ p. 38 C neque verba solum
sed etiam ritus nuptialis sacris mysticis intercurrisse indicio est
solemnis gratulatio qua mystae recens initiatos sponsarum nomine
consalutabant—χαῖρε νυμφίε, χαῖρε νέον φῶς.
[1353] Ar. _Ran._ 324.
[1354] Ar. _Ran._ 382.
[1355] The text as emended by Dr Weil runs as follows, see _Bull. de
Corr. Hell._ XIX.
[Οἰνοθα]λὲς δὲ χειρὶ πάλ-
λών δ[έπ]ας ἐνθέοις [σὺν οἴσ-]
τροις ἔμολες μυχοὺς [Ἐλε]υ-
σῖνος ἀν[θεμοεί]δεις
Εὐοὶ ὦ ἰὸ Βάκχ’ ὦ ἰ[ὲ Παι]άν·
[ἔθνος ἔνθ’] ἅπαν Ἑλλάδος
γᾶς ἀ[μφ(ὶ) ἐ]νναέταις [φίλιον] ἐπ[όπ]ταις
ὀργίων ὁσ[ίων Ἴα]κ-
χον [κλείει σ]ὲ βροτοῖς πόνων
ᾦξ[ας] δ’ ὅρ]μον [ἄλυπον].
[1356] Soph. _Ant._ 1115 τὸν ταμίαν Ἴακχον. The title ταμίας points, I
think, to the rites dispensed, ‘steward of the mysteries.’
[1357] Herod. VIII. 65 καί οἱ φαίνεσθαι τὴν φωνὴν εἶναι τὸν μυστικὸν
ἴακχον ... καὶ τὴν φωνὴν τῆς ἀκούεις ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ ὁρτῇ ἰακχάζουσι.
[1358] Plut. _Cam._ XIX. 15. The word used for the ceremony of escorting
is variously ἐξάγειν, προπέμπειν, and once ἐξελαύνειν, see Foucart, _Les
Grands Mystères d’Éleusis_, p. 121 (1900), and Roscher s.v. Iacchos.
[1359] Strab. X. 3. 11 Ἴακχόν τε καὶ Διόνυσον καλοῦσι καὶ τὸν ἀρχηγέτην
τῶν μυστηρίων τῆς Δήμητρος δαίμονα. An inscription of Roman date has
[δαί]μονι πέμψαν ἰάκχωι, see Ἐφ. Ἀρχ. 1899, p. 215. We are reminded of
the Agathos Daimon, the spirit of wealth (p. 33).
[1360] Suidas s.v. Ἴακχος. Lucret. IV. 1160 ‘tumida et mammosa Ceres est
ipsa ab Iaccho.’
[1361] Schol. ad Ar. _Ran._ 479 Σεμελήι’ Ἴακχε πλουτοδότα.
[1362] Soph. frg. 782, ap. Strab. XV. p. 687, see p. 379.
[1363] Nonn. XLVIII. 951 ff.
καὶ τριτάτῳ νέον ὕμνον ἐπεσμαράγησαν Ἰάκχῳ
καὶ χορὸν ὀψιτέλεστον ἀνεκρούσαντο πολῖται
Ζαγρέα κυδαίνοντες ἅμα Βρομίῳ καὶ Ἰάκχῳ.
That the child Iacchos at Eleusis became an element in Orphic teaching is
evident from the degraded form of the Baubo legend expressed in an Orphic
hymn and quoted in full by Clement, _Protr._ 21. 26, see Dindorf, vol.
IV. p. 11.
[1364] P. I. 37. 4.
[1365] P. III. 13. 2.
[1366] P. III. 14. 5.
[1367] The singular and very peculiar ritual of bull-sacrifice described
in the _Kritias_ of Plato, and represented on imperial coins of Ilium,
has recently been elucidated by Dr von Fritze (‘Troja und Ilium,’
_Beiträge_, pp. 514, 563). It probably took place at Eleusis, cf.
_C.I.A._ II. 467, ἤραντο δὲ τοῖς Μυστηρίοις τοὺς βοῦς ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι τῇ
θυσίᾳ. But this ceremony I believe to have been part of the primitive
ritual of Poseidon at Eleusis, which, interesting though it is, does
not here concern us. Of an Omophagia at Eleusis the ‘tokens’ contain
no trace, though the bull-ritual of Poseidon may have facilitated the
affiliation of Dionysos.
[1368] Helbig, _Cat._ 1168, Museo delle Terme, Rome, published and
discussed by E. Caetani Lovatelli, _Ant. Mon. illustr._ p. 25 ff., tav.
II.-IV.
[1369] The mystic initiated holds a club. He is probably Herakles, who,
according to tradition, was initiated in the mysteries at Agrae.
[1370] This passage is of such cardinal importance that the text is given
below. The birth of Brimos and the ‘ear of grain reaped’ are often cited
separately as elements in Eleusinian rites, but so far as I know their
substantial identity has never been noted, nor has attention been called
to the fact that they are both Dionysiac (Thraco-Phrygian) elements. The
text is that of Cruice, _Philosophoumena_, Paris 1860, p. 170. Λέγουσι
δὲ αὐτόν, φησί, Φρύγες καὶ ‘χλοερὸν στάχυν τεθερισμένον’ καὶ μετὰ τοὺς
Φρύγας Ἀθηναῖοι μυοῦντες Ἐλευσίνια, καὶ ἐπιδεικνύντες τοῖς ἐποπτεύουσι
τὸ μέγα καὶ θαυμαστὸν καὶ τελειότατον ἐποπτικὸν ἐκεῖ μυστήριον, ἐν σιωπῇ
τεθερισμένον στάχυν. Ὁ δὲ στάχυς οὗτός ἐστι καὶ παρὰ Ἀθηναίοις ὁ παρὰ
τοῦ ἀχαρακτηρίστου φωστὴρ τέλειος μέγας καθάπερ αὐτὸς ὁ ἱεροφάντης, οὐκ
ἀποκεκομμένος μέν, ὡς ὁ Ἄττις, εὐνουχισμένος δὲ διὰ κωνείου καὶ πᾶσαν
παρῃτημένος τὴν σαρκικὴν γένεσιν νυκτὸς ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι ὑπὸ πολλῷ πυρὶ τελῶν
τὰ μεγάλα καὶ ἄρρητα μυστήρια βοᾷ καὶ κέκραγε λέγων ‘ἱερὸν ἔτεκε πότνια
κοῦρον Βριμὼ Βριμόν,’ τουτέστιν ἰσχυρὰ ἰσχυρόν. Πότνια δέ ἐστι, φησίν,
ἡ γένεσις ἡ πνευματική, ἡ ἐπουράνιος, ἡ ἄνω· ἰσχυρὸς δέ ἐστιν ὁ οὕτω
γεννώμενος. φησίν of course refers to the Naassene not the Hierophant.
[1371] So determined are some commentators to see in pagan rites
evil where no evil is, that Miller has substituted ἀπηρτισμένος for
παρῃτημένος, thus making nonsense of the passage.
[1372] Aster. _Encom. Mart._ p. 113 B οὐκ ἐκεῖ καταβάσιον τὸ σκοτεινὸν
καὶ αἱ σεμναὶ τοῦ ἱεροφάντου πρὸς τὴν ἱερείαν συντυχίαι μόνου πρὸς μόνην;
[1373] Luc. _Alex._ 38 εἰ δὲ μὴ πολλαὶ ἦσαν αἱ δᾷδες τάχ’ ἄν τι καὶ
τῶν ὑπὸ κόλπου ἐπράττετο. μετὰ μικρὸν δὲ πάλιν ἐσῄει ἱεροφαντικῶς
ἐσκευασμένος ἐν πολλῇ τῇ σιωπῇ καὶ αὐτὸς μὲν ἔλεγε μεγάλῃ τῇ φωνῇ ἰὴ
Γλύκων κ.τ.λ.
[1374] The Christian fathers of course regarded the Sacred Marriage as a
shameful rape. Tertullian (_ad nat._ II. 7, p. 57 D) asks ‘Cur rapitur
sacerdos Cereris si non tale Ceres passa est?’ That Tertullian’s view is
wrong is sufficiently evidenced by the author of the _Philosophoumena_,
loc. cit.
[1375] Clem. Al. _Protr._ I. 15 Δηοῦς δὲ μυστήρια καὶ Διὸς πρὸς μητέρα
Δήμητρα ἀφροδίσιοι συμπλοκαὶ καὶ μῆνις ... τῆς Δηοῦς ἧς δὴ χάριν Βριμὼ
προσαγορευθῆναι λέγεται.
[1376] Lyc. _Al._ 1175.
[1377] Luc. _Menippus_ 20 καὶ ἐνεβριμήσατο ἡ Βριμὼ καὶ ὑλάκτησεν ὁ
Κέρβερος. The untranslatable play on the words shows that the name Brimo
was taken to imply a loud angry noise.
[1378] Apoll. Rhod. III. 861, and schol. ad loc.
[1379] Soph. _Oed. Col._ 1048. I have translated κλῄς by _key_ not by
_seal_, although, as Prof. Jebb (ad loc.) points out, ‘there is no
evidence for the Eleusinian Hierophant putting a key to the lips of the
initiated.’ In face of the fact that the key was the recognized symbol of
priestly office, I incline to think some such ceremony was enacted. We
know from Hesychius (s.v.) that there was a festival or ceremony called
‘the festival of the keys,’ Epikleidia, but unhappily we have no details
and cannot use the fact as an argument.
[1380] Schol. ad _Oed. Col._ 1048 ζητεῖται τί δήποτε οἱ Εὐμολπίδαι τῶν
τελετῶν ἐξάρχουσι ξένοι ὄντες· εἴποι δ’ ἄν τις ὅτι ἀξιοῦσι πρῶτον τὸν
Εὔμολπον ποιῆσαι τὸν Δηϊόπης τῆς Τριπτολέμου τὰ ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι μυστήρια
καὶ οὐ τὸν Θρᾷκα καὶ τοῦτο ἱστορεῖν Ἴστρον ἐν τῷ περὶ τῶν Ἀτάκτων.
Ἀκεστόδωρος δὲ πεμπτὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ πρώτου Εὐμόλπου εἶναι τὸν τὰς τελετὰς
καταδείξαντα, γράφων οὕτως ‘Κατοικῆσαι δὲ τὴν Ἐλευσῖνα ἱστοροῦσι πρῶτον
μὲν τοὺς αὐτόχθονας εἶτα Θρᾷκας τοὺς μετὰ Εὐμόλπου παραγενομένους πρὸς
βοήθειαν εἰς τὸν κατ’ Ἐρεχθέως πόλεμον, τινὲς δέ φασι καὶ τὸν Εὔμολπον
εὑρεῖν τὴν μύησιν τὴν συντελουμένην κατ’ ἐνιαυτὸν ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι Δήμητρι καὶ
Κόρῃ.’
[1381] I have elsewhere (_Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, p. lvii ff.)
discussed the relations of Erechtheus and Eumolpos. The view there
expressed as to the Eumolpidae and their relation to Thrace and the
incoming of Dionysos is confirmed by the more detailed and independent
examination of the legend by Dr Toepffer, _Attische Genealogie_, p. 40.
[1382] _Cat._ 61, 140; _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_ A. 7.
[1383] For polychrome fac-simile see _Coll. Tyskiewicky_, Pl. X. The vase
is now in the Museum at Lyons.
[1384] Cedrenus _Comp. T._ I. p. 24. The sources are fully given in
Lobeck’s _Aglaophamus_, p. 572. The word βάθρον is sometimes written
βόθρον, a detail which does not affect the present argument.
[1385] Tatian _c. Gr._ VIII. 251 ἐν τῷ τεμένει τοῦ Λητοΐδου καλεῖταί τις
ὀμφαλός, ὁ δὲ ὀμφαλὸς τάφος τοῦ Διονύσου.
[1386] _Rev. Internat. d’Archéologie et Numismatique_ 1901, pl. I. and Dr
Svoronos’s interpretation, p. 234.
[1387] Poll. _Onom._ IV. 103 τὸ γὰρ κερνοφόρον ὄρχημα, οἶδα ὅτι λίκνα ἢ
ἐσχαρίδας ἔφερον. κέρνα δὲ ταῦτα ἐκαλεῖτο.
[1388] Dr Svoronos identifies ‘Ninnion,’ and I believe correctly, with
the hetaira Nannion, whose notorious career is related by Athenaeus (Bk.
XIII. §§ 582 and 587), but this question is for my purpose irrelevant.
[1389] Schol. Ar. _Plut._ 845.
[1390] Steph. Byz. Ἄγρα καὶ Ἄγραι χωρίον πρὸ τῆς πόλεως, ἐν ᾧ τὰ μικρὰ
μυστήρια ἐπιτελεῖται μίμημα τῶν περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον.
[1391] Dr Svoronos, whose brilliant interpretation of the pinax I follow
in the main, sees in the ‘omphalos’ the πέτρα ἀγέλαστος. Here reluctantly
I am obliged to differ.
[1392] Schol. ad Ar. _Eq._ 409, βάκχον ἐκάλουν ... τοὺς κλάδους οὓς οἱ
μύσται φέρουσι. The name given to these bunches of myrtle is evidence in
itself of the intrusion of the worship of Dionysos.
[1393] Strab. X. iii. 13 § 468.
[1394] Eur. _Bacch._ 126.
[1395] From a photograph of the relief, now in the National Museum at
Athens.
[1396] S. Aster. _Amasen. Hom. x. in SS. Martyr._ οὐ κεφάλαιον τῆς σῆς
θρησκείας τὰ ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι μυστήρια καὶ δῆμος Ἀττικὸς καὶ ἡ Ἑλλὰς πᾶσα
συναίρει ἵνα τελέσῃ ματαιότητα; Οὐκ ἐκεῖ τὸ καταβάσιον τὸ σκοτεινὸν καὶ
αἱ σεμναὶ τοῦ ἱεροφάντου πρὸς τὴν ἱερείαν συντυχίαι μόνου πρὸς μόνην; Οὐχ
αἱ λαμπάδες σβέννυνται καὶ ὁ πολὺς καὶ ἀναρίθμητος δῆμος τὴν σωτηρίαν
αὐτῶν εἶναι νομίζουσι τὰ ἐν τῷ σκότῳ παρὰ τῶν δύο πραττόμενα;
[1397] _Hymn. ad Cer._ 122.
[1398] _v._ 490.
[1399] Od. V. 125 νειῷ ἔνι τριπόλῳ. I venture to render τριπόλῳ by ‘in
the spring,’ because Theophrastos (_H.P._ VII. 1) says there were three
ploughings, one in the winter, one in the summer and a third between the
two (ἄροτος τρίτος ὁ μεταξύ τούτων) which must have been in the spring
before the seed was sown. _Triptolemos_ is the Eleusinian Iasion.
[1400] Hes. _Theog._ 969.
[1401] Theocr. _Id._ III. 50. Translated by Mr Gilbert Murray.
[1402] In Samothrace, Iasion becomes a mystery-figure. He is the father
of Korybas, and his sister Harmonia takes her ἱερὸς γάμος to Thebes.
Again the route is by the islands, see Diod. V. 45.
[1403] Schol. ad Hes. _Theog._ 971 καὶ γὰρ ἡ παροιμία ‘πυρῶν καὶ κριθῶν,
ὦ νήπιε Πλοῦτε.’
[1404] _Hom. Hymn. ad Cer._ 480.
[1405] _v._ 483.
[1406] Diod. V. 77, and see Diod. V. 64.
[1407] Plut. _An sen. est ger. resp._ XVII. ἡ δὲ πατρὶς καὶ μητρὶς (ὡς
Κρῆτες καλοῦσι).
[1408] A. J. Evans, _The Palace of Knossos in its Egyptian relations_,
Egypt Exploration Fund, Arch. Report 1899-90, p. 60.
[1409] An instance of a sacred pantomime in which the parts of gods were
taken by ‘Iobacchoi’ is given in another connection (p. 475), but this
pantomime cannot be used as evidence. Its date is long after the rise of
the drama.
[1410] Psellus, _Quaenam sunt Graecorum opiniones de daemonibus_ 3 (ed.
Migne). ἃ δέ γε μυστήρια τούτων οἷα αὐτίκα τὰ Ἐλευσίνια τὸν μυθικὸν
ὑποκρίνεται Δία μιγνύμενον ἤγουν τῇ Δηοῖ ἢ τῇ Δημήτερι καὶ τῇ θυγατρὶ
ταύτης Φερεφάττῃ, τῇ καὶ Κόρῃ. Ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἔμελλον καὶ ἀφροδίσιοι ἐπὶ τῇ
μυήσει γίνεσθαι συμπλοκαί, ἀναδύεταί πως ἡ Ἀφροδίτη ἀπό τινων πεπλασμένων
μηδέων πελάγιος. Εἶτα δὲ γαμήλιος ἐπὶ τῇ Κόρῃ ὑμεναῖος. Καὶ ὑπᾴδουσιν
οἱ τελούμενοι ‘ἐκ τυμπάνου ἔφαγον, ἐκ κυμβάλων ἔπιον, ἐκιρνοφόρησα, ὑπὸ
τὸν παστὸν εἰσέδυν.’ Ὑποκρίνεται δὲ καὶ τὰς Δηοῦς ὠδῖνας. Ἱκετηρίαι γοῦν
αὐτίκα Δηοῦς. καὶ χολῆς πόσις καὶ καρδιαλγίαι. Ἐφ’ οἷς καὶ τραγόσκελες
μίμημα παθαινόμενον περὶ τοῖς διδύμοις ὅτι περ ὁ Ζεὺς δίκας ἀποτιννὺς
τῆς βίας τῇ Δήμητρι τράγου ὄρχεις ἀποτεμὼν τῷ κόλπῳ ταύτης κατέθετο
ὥσπερ δὴ καὶ ἑαυτοῦ. Ἐπὶ πᾶσιν αἱ τοῦ Διονύσου τιμαὶ καὶ ἡ κίστις καὶ
τὰ πολυόμφαλα πόπανα καὶ οἱ τῷ Σαβαζίῳ τελούμενοι καὶ οἱ μητριάζοντες
Κλώδωνές τε καὶ Μιμαλλόνες, καί τις ἠχῶν λέβης Θεσπρώτειος καὶ Δωδώναιον
χαλκεῖον καὶ Κορύβας ἄλλος καὶ Κούρης ἕτερος δαιμόνων μιμήματα. Ἐφ’ οἷς ἡ
Βαυβὼ τοὺς μηροὺς ἀνασυρομένη καὶ ὁ γυναικεῖος κτείς· οὕτω γὰρ ὀνομάζουσι
τὴν αἰδῶ αἰσχυνόμενοι. Καὶ οὕτως ἐν αἰσχρῷ τὴν τελετὴν καταλύουσιν.
I owe this reference to Taylor’s _Eleusinian Mysteries_. The book is by
modern authorities as a rule contemptuously ignored, probably because
Taylor’s construing is always vague and often inaccurate and he entirely
declines to accentuate his Greek. In spite of these minor drawbacks his
attitude towards the interpretation of the Mysteries is far in advance of
that of many better furnished scholars.
[1411] The account of Psellus is for obvious reasons rather resumed than
translated. Some of the rites recorded by Psellus are not in harmony with
modern conventions, and for my purpose it is not needful to discuss them.
But once for all I wish to record my conviction that such evil as we find
in these mysteries we bring with us. The mind of Herondas is not the
measure of primitive sanctities. The story of Babo or Baubo has always
been a stumbling-block, but we know now that her action was a primitive
and perfectly reverent προβασκάνιον; as such it is depicted on ancient
amulets. Its significance and its apotropaic potency alike appear in
the very early matriarchal legend of the Lycian Bellerophon (Plut. _de
mulier. virt._ IX.). The true mystic said with Heracleitos (ap. Clem.
_Protr._ II. p. 30): Εἰ μὴ γὰρ Διονύσῳ πομπὴν ἐποιεῦντο καὶ ὕμνεον ἆσμα
αἰδοίοισιν, ἀναιδέστατα εἴργαστ’ ἄν· αὐτὸς δέ Ἀΐδης καὶ Διόνυσος ὅτεῳ
μαίνονται καὶ ληναίζουσιν. See Pfleiderer, _Die Philosophie des Heraklit
im Lichte der Mysterienidee_, p. 28.
[1412] Galen, _de Usu Part._ VII. 14 § 469; see Lobeck, _Aglaoph._ p. 63.
[1413] Sopat. _Dist. Quaest._ Walz, _Rhet. Graec._, vol. VIII. p. 1.
[1414] Plut. _Consol. ad uxor._ X. ὅτι κωλύει σε πιστεύειν ὁ πάτριος
λόγος καὶ τὰ μυστικὰ σύμβολα τῶν περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον ὀργιασμῶν ἃ σύνισμεν
ἀλλήλοις οἱ κοινοῦντες.
[1415] See especially A. Dieterich, _Nekuia_, pp. 84 ff., and _De Hymnis
Orphicis_, pp. 31 ff. Other references are given in the notes and
Appendix.
[1416] In the Appendix kindly written for me by Mr Gilbert Murray.
[1417] Brit. Mus. Gold Ornament Room, Table-Case H. Kaibel, _CIGIS_, No.
641. The tablet had been rolled up and placed in a hexagonal cylinder
hanging from a delicate gold chain and doubtless worn by the dead person
as an amulet. The facsimile reproduced here and first published _J.H.S._
III. p. 112 was verified for Prof. Comparetti by Mr Cecil Smith and
supersedes Kaibel’s publication. As the letters in the original are small
and in places not easily legible, Mr Smith’s reading is given below:
Εὑρήσσεις δ’ Ἀίδαο δόμων ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ κρήνην
πὰρ δ’ αὐτῆι λευκὴν ἑστηκυῖαν κυπάρισσον·
ταύτης τῆς κρήνης μηδὲ σχεδὸν ἐμπελάσειας.
Εὑρήσεις δ’ ἑτέραν τῆς Μνημοσύνης ἀπὸ λίμνης
ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ προρέον· φύλακες δ’ ἐπίπροσθεν ἔασιν.
Εἰπεῖν· γῆς παῖς εἰμὶ καὶ οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος,
αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ γένος οὐράνιον· τόδε δ’ ἴστε καὶ αὐτοί·
δίψῃι δ’ εἰμὶ αὔη καὶ ἀπόλλυμαι· ἀλλὰ δότ’ αἶψα
ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ προρέον τῆς Μνημοσύνης ἀπὸ λίμνης·
καὐ[τοί σο]ι δώσουσι πιεῖν θείης ἀπ[ὸ κρήν]ης
καὶ τότ’ ἔπειτ’ ἄ[λλοισι μεθ’] ἡρώεσσιν ἀνάξει[ς]
............ιης τόδε.................................θανεῖ[σ]θαι
.....................τοδ’ ἔγραψ[εν?]...
.......................................σκότος ἀμφικαλύψας.
[1418] Joubin, _Bull. de Corr. Hell._ XVII. 1893, p. 122. This tablet,
with two others which are duplicates of the one here given, are now in
the National Museum at Athens. For fac-similes and discussion of text see
Appendix.
[1419] Hes. _Theog._ 135.
[1420] Basil Thomson, ‘The Kalou-Vu’ (_Journal Anthrop. Inst._ May 1895,
p. 349). I am indebted for this reference to Mr Andrew Lang’s _Homeric
Hymns_ p. 91.
[1421] Mr Lang, op. cit. p. 81, examines ‘the alleged Egyptian origins’
of the Eleusinian mysteries and decides against M. Foucart’s theory
_in toto_. Mr Lang certainly succeeds in showing that for all Greek
mysteries a satisfactory savage analogy can be found; but this surely
does not preclude the possibility of occasional borrowing. Crete has
shown conclusively that ‘Mycenaean’ art borrowed from Egypt: why not
‘Mycenaean’ religion? See _Classical Review_, Feb. 1903, p. 84.
[1422] Kaibel, _CIGIS_ 1842:
ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ δοίη σοι ἄναξ ἐνέρων Ἀιδωνεύς,
ὦ Μέλαν· ἥβης γάρ σοι ἀπώλετο φίλτατον ἄνθος
and 1488 Θ(εοῖς) Κ(αταχθονίοις). εὐψύχει, κυρία, καὶ δοῖ σοι ὁ Ὄσιρις τὸ
ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ. For the analogy of the Christian _refrigerium_ see Mr J.
A. Stewart’s interesting note in the _Classical Review_ for March 1903,
p. 117, published since the above was written. See Dieterich, _Nekuia_
p. 95, and Foucart, _Recherches sur l’Origine et la Nature des Mystères
d’Éleusis_, Paris 1895, p. 68.
[1423] Dieterich, _Abraxas_, p. 97:
χαῖρε δὲ λευκὸν ὕδωρ καὶ δένδρεον ὑψιπέτηλον.
It is perhaps worth noting that in the Egyptian _Book of the Dead_
(Vignette to Chapter LXIII. A.) the dead man receives water from a
goddess in a tree growing out of a pool of water.
[1424] Hes. _Theog._ 227.
[1425] Ar. _Ran._ 186.
[1426] _Ib._ 194 παρά τὸν Αὑαίνου λίθον.
[1427] Plat. _Rep._ X. 621.
[1428] A reminiscence of Styx, see Pausanias VIII. 18. 5 and Dr Frazer’s
commentary.
[1429] Plat. _Phaedr._ 249 ff.
[1430] P. IX. 39. 5-14.
[1431] Plut. _de fac. in orb. lun._ XXX. ἀλλὰ χρηστηρίων δεῦρο κατίασιν
ἐπιμελησόμενοι καὶ ταῖς ἀνωτάτω συμπάρεισι καὶ _συνοργιάζουσι τῶν
τελετῶν_. κολασταί τε γίνονται καὶ _φύλακες_ ἀδικημάτων.
[1432] Plut. _de Gen. Soc._ XXI. ff.
[1433] Plut. _Symp._ Proem. and VII. 5. 3.
[1434] Eur. _Bacch._ 280.
[1435] Apollod. _Epit. Vat._ 6. 3.
[1436] Eur. _Or._ 211.
[1437] _Orph. Hymn._ LXXVII.
[1438] Plat. _Phaedr._ p. 248 C.
[1439] Plut. _de occult. viv._ sub fin. δεχόμενοι καὶ ἀποκρύπτοντες
ἀγνοίᾳ καὶ λήθῃ τοὺς κολαζομένους ... ἓν κολαστήριον ... ἀδοξία καὶ
ἄγνοια καὶ παντελῶς ἀφανισμὸς αἴρων εἰς τὸν ἀμειδῆ ποταμὸν ἀπὸ τῆς λήθης.
[1440] Dante _Purg._ XXVIII. 130, XXXI. 98, XXXIII. 127. I owe this
reference to Dante’s well to the kindness of Mr F. M. Cornford. He tells
me that the source from which Dante took _Eunoë_ is not known.
[1441] Εὐνόη is the name of a Nymph, apparently a Naiad; see Roscher, s.v.
[1442] Naples Museum, Kaibel, _CIGIS_ 642. For fac-similes of this and
the following tablets, the text of which presents many difficulties, see
Appendix, pp. 663, 665.
[1443] See Appendix, p. 665.
[1444] Eur. _Cycl._ 646.
[1445] _Notizie degli Scavi_, 1880, Tavᵃ IIIᵃ, Figs. 1, 2, 3. With these
three tablets was found a red-figured plate of Lucanian fabric on which
was represented a winged genius bearing a crown.
[1446] Kaibel, _CIGIS_ 641: see Appendix, p. 668.
[1447] Kaibel, _CIGIS_ 2: see Appendix, p. 669.
[1448] Kaibel, _CIGIS_ 641. 8: see Appendix, p. 669.
[1449] Nothing certain is known of Caecilia Secundina, though her name
suggests connection with the family of Pliny the Younger, whose original
name before his adoption by his uncle C. Plinius Secundus was Publius
Caecilius Secundus.
[1450] Theophr. _Char._ XXVIII.
[1451] Hesych. s.v. Εὐκλῆς.
[1452] _Orph. Hymn._ XXX. 6, 7, and see Abel, _Orphica_ s.v.
[1453] In magical papyri the utterance of certain σύμβολα or tokens is
urged as a plea for acceptance:
νεῦσον ἐμοί, λίτομαι, ὅτι σύμβολα μυστικὰ φράζω.
See Dieterich, _Abraxas_, p. 97.
[1454] Herod. II. 122.
[1455] _Plat._ Phaedo 70 C. Plato may have had some Orphic rite vaguely
in his mind in the _Phaedrus_. The soul escapes by wings from the inside
of the sphere into heavenly places (248 C).
[1456] Emped. ap. Diog. Laert. VII. 77.
[1457] Diog. Laert. VII. 12.
[1458] The κύκλος of the rites was probably a real wheel, but it is also
possible that it was a circle drawn round the neophyte out of which he
escaped. Psellus (περὶ δαιμόνων) records an old Bacchic rite in which
demons were expelled by the action of leaping out of a circle of fire:
πυρὰ δὲ πολλὰ κύκλῳ τινὶ περιγράφοντες ἐξάλλονται τῆς φλογός. ἤν δὲ καὶ
τοῦτο τῆς παλαιᾶς βακχείας, ἵνα μὴ λέγω μανίας μέρος ... ὁ δέ γε κύκλος
κατοχῆς ἔχει δύναμιν. The wheel and the magic mesmeric circle may have
got ‘contaminated.’
[1459] Clem. Alex. _Strom._ V. p. 242 διὰ δὲ συμβόλων, ὡς ὅ τε τροχὸς ὁ
στρεφόμενος ἐν τοῖς τῶν θεῶν τεμένεσιν εἱλκυσμένος παρὰ Αἰγυπτίων.
I have throughout translated κύκλος by wheel. The same idea is rendered
indifferently by τροχός and κύκλος, though κύκλος occurs more frequently:
cf. Proclus _ad Tim._ p. 330 A κύκλος τῆς γενέσεως, ἐν τῷ τῆς εἱμαρμένης
... τροχῷ. The same thing is in English a ‘cycle,’ in American a ‘wheel.’
In the Orphic Hades of Vergil the κύκλος is a _rota_.
[1460] Hero Alex. _Pneum._ I. 32 and II. 32. Θησαυροῦ κατασκευὴ τροχὸν
ἔχοντος στρεφόμενον χάλκεον ὃς καλεῖται ἁγνιστήριον.
[1461] Theocr. II. 36 schol. διόπερ πρὸς πᾶσαν ἀφοσίωσιν καὶ ἀποκάθαρσιν
αὐτῷ ἐχρῶντο ὥς φησι καὶ Ἀπολλόδωρος ἐν τῷ περὶ θεῶν. For a full
discussion of the apotropaic uses of bronze gongs see Mr A. B. Cook, ‘The
Gong at Dodona,’ _J.H.S._ vol. XXII. 1902, p. 5.
[1462] Procl. in Plat. _Tim._ V. 330 ἧς καὶ οἱ παρ’ Ὀρφεῖ τῷ Διονύσῳ καὶ
τῇ Κόρῃ τελούμενοι τυχεῖν εὔχονται·
Κύκλου τ’ αὖ λῆξαι καὶ ἀναπνεῦσαι κακότητος.
[1463] Eur. _Bacch._ 901.
[1464] Dr Dieterich in his valuable tract _De Hymnis Orphicis capitula
quinque_ says (p. 55): στέφανος est qui cingit loca beatorum, vel prata
illa ipsa desiderata. Simili notione vox στέφανος usurpatur in Orphicorum
Argonauticorum versu 71
αὐτίκα οἱ στέφανος καὶ τεῖχος ἐρυμνὸν
Αἰητέω κατέφαινε καὶ ἄλσεα.
His interpretation suggested that given in the text, though the two are
not identical.
[1465] Theo. Smyrn. _Mathem._ I. p. 18 τετάρτη δὲ ὃ δὴ καὶ τέλος τῆς
ἐποπτείας ἀνάδεσις καὶ στεμμάτων ἐπίθεσις ... δᾳδουχίας τυχόντα ἢ
ἱεροφαντίας ἢ τινος ἄλλης ἱεροσύνης.
[1466] Hesych. s.v. δευτερόποτμος· ἢ ὁ δεύτερον διὰ γυναικείου κόλπου
διαδύς· ὡς ἔθος ἦν παρὰ Ἀθηναίοις ἐκ δευτέρου γεννᾶσθαι.
[1467] Diod. IV. 39.
[1468] Luc. _Lexiph._ 10 καὶ ταῦτα εὖ εἰδὼς ὅτι ἐξ οὗπερ ὡσιώθησαν
ἀνώνυμοί τέ εἰσι καὶ οὐκέτι ὀνομαστοὶ ὡς ἂν ἱερώνυμοι ἤδη γεγενημένοι.
ὡσιώθησαν here clearly marks the final stage of initiation only open to
priests: it is practically ‘ordination.’
[1469] Hesych. s.v. Ἔριφος· Διόνυσος.
[1470] Steph. Byz. s.v. Διόνυσος· Ἐρίφιος παρὰ Μεταποντίοις.
[1471] Clem. Al. _Protr._ XII. 119 βακχεύουσι δὲ ἐν αὐτῷ οὐχ αἱ Σεμέλης
τῆς κεραυνίας ἀδελφαὶ αἱ μαινάδες αἱ δύσαγνον κρεανομίαν μυούμεναι ἀλλὰ
τοῦ θεοῦ θυγατέρες αἱ ἀμνάδες αἱ καλαὶ τὰ σεμνὰ τοῦ λόγου θεσπίζονται
ὄργια χορὸν ἐγείρουσαι σώφρονα.
[1472] Eur. _Bacch._ 142.
[1473] Eur. _Bacch._ 706.
[1474] O. Benndorf, _Grabschrift von Telmessos_ (Sonderabdruck aus der
Festschrift für Th. Gomperz) p. 404:
‘Ἔνθα Βόηθος ἀνὴρ μουσόρρυτος ὕπνον ἰαύει
αἰῶνος γλυκερῷ κείμενος ἐν μέλιτι.’
[1475] M. Salamon Reinach (‘Une formule Orphique,’ _Rev. Arch._ XXXIX.
1901, p. 202) takes πίπτειν ἐς to be metaphorical and compares _incidere
in_ and the French _tomber sur_. But the division of verb and preposition
and the fact that the sentence is a religious formulary are against this
light colloquial sense. If the expression _is_ metaphorical it has a
close analogy in πίπτειν ἐς γένεσιν. Porphyry says (_De Antr. Nymph._ 13)
of the souls ὅταν ἐς γένεσιν πέσωσιν. It may I think be worth noting that
in Egypt, when the soles of the feet (of the mummy) which had trodden
the mire of earth were removed, the gods were prayed to grant milk to
the Osiris that he might bathe his feet in it. See Wiedemann, _Ancient
Egyptian Doctrine of Immortality_, p. 48.
[1476] Usener, ‘Milch und Honig,’ _Rhein. Mus._ 1902, Heft 2, p. 177.
[1477] Tertull. _de corona militis_ 3: dehinc ter mergitamur ... unde
suscepti lactis et mellis concordiam praegustamus.
[1478] For a full account of the complex and beautiful ceremony of
primitive Baptism see _Didaskaliae fragmenta Veronensia latina_,
ed. Ettauler (Lips. 1900), pp. 111-113, and E. Trumpf, _Abh. d.
philos.-philol. Cl. der K. Bayer. Ak. d. Wiss._ XIV. 3, p. 180.
[1479] S. Hieron. _Altercat. Lucif. et orthodox._ c. 8, t. 11, p.
180ᵉ: nam et multa alia quae per traditionem in ecclesiis observantur
auctoritatem sibi scriptae legis usurpaverunt, velut in lavacro ter caput
mergitare deinde egresso lactis et mellis praegustare concordiam.
[1480] ‘Berliner Zauber-papyrus,’ _Abh. d. Berl. Akad._ 1865, p. 120. 20:
καὶ λαβὼν τὸ γάλα σὺν τῷ (μέλι)τι ἀπόπιε πρὶν ἀνατολῆς ἡλίου καὶ ἔσται τι
ἔνθεον ἐν τῇ σῇ καρδίᾳ.
[1481] Steph. Byz. s.v. Ἄγρα· χωρίον ... πρὸ τῆς πόλεως ἐν ᾗ τὰ μικρὰ
μυστήρια ἐπιτελεῖται μίμημα τῶν περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον. These Lesser Mysteries
were celebrated in the month Anthesterion sacred to Dionysos, see p.
560. For Persephone see Schol. Ar. _Plut._ 845 ἦσαν δὲ τὰ μὲν μεγάλα τῆς
Δήμητρος τὰ δὲ μικρὰ Περσεφόνης.
[1482] Porphyr. _Vit. Pythag._ 17.
[1483] Plut. _de Gen. Socr._ XVI. ἔστι γάρ τι γενόμενον ἰδίᾳ περὶ τὰς
ταφὰς τῶν Πυθαγορικῶν ὅσιον οὗ μὴ τυχόντες οὐ δοκοῦμεν ἀπέχειν τὸ
μακαριστὸν καὶ οἰκεῖον τέλος ... ὁσίως γὰρ ὑπὸ τῶν φίλων κεκηδεῦσθαι τὸ
Λύσιδος σῶμα.
[1484] Plat. _Phaedo_ 108 A ἀπὸ τῶν ὁσίων τε καὶ νομίμων τῶν ἐνθάδε.
[1485] Plut. _de fac. in orb. lun._ XXVIII.
[1486] Philostr. _Her._ 714 ὠμὸν γὰρ τὸ ἐπ’ αὐτῷ κήρυγμα· μὴ γὰρ θάπτειν
τὸν Παλαμήδην μηδὲ ὁσιοῦν τῇ γῇ.
[1487] The whole series is published in the _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_,
Serie E, Taf. I-VII.
[1488] Heydemann, _Cat._ 3222. _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_, Serie E, Taf.
II. This vase was carefully examined by Dr Studniczka in 1887. On his
report is based the full discussion by Dr Winkler, ‘Unter-italische
Unterweltsdarstellungen,’ _Breslauer Philolog. Abhandlungen_, Band III.
Heft 5, 1888. I verified Dr Studniczka’s report of the inscriptions in
1902. Nothing further can be done till the vase is properly cleaned, and,
now that the Naples Museum is under new direction, this, it may be hoped,
will be done.
[1489] Verg. _Aen._ VI. 644.
[1490] P. X. 30. 6.
[1491] P. II. 31. 1.
[1492] P. II. 37. 5.
[1493] Jahn, _Cat._ 849. _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_, Serie E, Taf. I.
[1494] P. X. 29. 3.
[1495] Verg. _Aen._ VI. 585.
[1496] Schol. ad Pind. _Ol._ I. 89.
[1497] Athen. VII. 14 § 281. The sources for the punishment of Tantalos
are fully collected by Dr Frazer ad Paus. X. 31.
[1498] P. V. 13. 7.
[1499] P. II. 22. 3.
[1500] Hom. _Il._ VI. 152.
[1501] P. II. 1. 1.
[1502] Eustath. ad _Il._ VI. 153, 631 and ad _Od._ XI. 592, 1702.
[1503] By substitution of the Aeolic υ for ο. See Vaniček, _Etym.
Wörterbuch_, p. 592.
[1504] P. II. 1. 3.
[1505] P. II. 5. 1.
[1506] Diod. XX. 103.
[1507] Strab. VIII. 21 § 379.
[1508] P. II. 5. 1.
[1509] P. II. 2. 2.
[1510] My present object is not to discuss the origin of the particular
forms of punishment inflicted in Hades, but it may be noted in passing
that the stone overhanging Tantalos and the lake in which he is submerged
may have contained a reminiscence of some natural precipice and actual
catastrophe, see Eustath. ad _Od._ XI. 592, 1701. In the _Aeneid_ (VI.
601) the Lapithae, Ixion and Peirithoös all alike suffer the penalty of
the imminent stone.
[1511] W. M. L. Hutchinson, _Aeacus, a Judge of the Underworld_, p. 25.
[1512] P. II. 29. 6.
[1513] Eustath. ad _Il._ XIV. 321, 989.
[1514] Eustath. ad _Od._ IV. 564, 187 τὸ δὲ ξανθὸς Ῥαδάμανθυς πρὸς ἡδονὴν
Μενελάῳ πέφρασται, ξανθὸς γὰρ καὶ αὐτός.
[1515] Hom. _Od._ XI. 601.
[1516] Verg. _Aen._ VI. 617.
[1517] P. I. 17. 2, and Ar. _Eq._ 1311 schol. ad loc.
[1518] P. III. 3. 7.
[1519] _Cat._ 258. Hartung, _Arch. Zeit._ p. 263, Taf. XIX. and _Wiener
Vorlegeblätter_, Serie E, Taf. VI. 3.
[1520] _Cat._ 319. Masner, p. 39, fig. 22.
[1521] In a vase in the Museum at Carlsruhe (_Cat._ 388) one ‘Danaid’
appears in the second tier of figures, see Winkler, _Darstellungen der
Unterwelt_, p. 13.
[1522] Plat. _Rep._ 363 D and E.
[1523] Plat. _Gorg._ 493.
[1524] Ps.-Plat. _Axioch._ 573 E. In Xenophon (_Oec._ VII. 40) the
water-carriers are unnamed and masculine: οἱ εἰς τὸν τετρημένον πίθον
ἀντλεῖν λεγόμενοι.
[1525] Jahn, _Cat._ 153. Baumeister II. 866.
[1526] _Arch. Zeit._ 1871, Taf. 31. The objects in front of the seated
old man are apparently a collection of loose sticks. I had doubts
as to the accuracy of the reproduction, but the original at Palermo
was examined for me by the late Mr R. A. Neil, and he pronounced the
reproduction substantially correct.
[1527] Apul. _Met._ VI. 18. Prof. Furtwängler was, I believe, the
first to call attention to the passage of Apuleius in connection with
this vase. See _Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1890, Anz. p. 24, and for the whole
question of Oknos, which does not here immediately concern us, see O.
Rossbach, ‘Dämonen der Unterwelt,’ _Rhein. Mus._ 1893, p. 593.
[1528] P. X. 31. 9-11.
[1529] Strab. VIII. § 256. Eustathius ad _Il._ IV. 171. 351 attributes
the verse in slightly different form to Hesiod: ἢ καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν Δαναΐδων αἳ
παραγενόμεναι ἐξ Αἰγύπτου φρεωρυχίαν ἐδίδαξαν ὡς Ἡσίοδος
Ἄργος ἄνυδρον ἐὸν Δαναὸς ποίησεν ἔνυδρον.
[1530] Aesch. _Supp._ 158.
[1531] The story that the _heads_ of the murdered husbands were buried in
or near Lerna apart from their bodies may have been merely aetiological
and based on the practice of calling the brim of a well κεφαλή. Cf. our
‘well-head,’ ‘fountain-head.’ Latin _caput aquae_. It is not my purpose
here to examine completely the Danaid myth save in so far as the Danaides
were _contaminated_ with the Uninitiated in Hades. The folklore of the
subject has been well collected by Dr Campbell Bonner, _Trans. American
Philol. Ass._ vol. XXXI. 1900, II. p. 27.
[1532] Strab. loc. cit. supra.
[1533] Herod. II. 171.
[1534] Poll. _On._ III. 38 καὶ τέλος ὁ γάμος ἐκαλεῖτο καὶ τέλειοι οἱ
γεγαμηκότες διὰ τοῦτο καὶ Ἥρα τελεία ἡ ζυγία. The play on the word τέλος
cannot be reproduced in English.
[1535] Eustath. ad _Il._ XXIII. 141, p. 1293.
[1536] For the vases known as Loutrophoroi see Milchhoeffer, _A. Mitt._
V. 1880, p. 174, and P. Wolters, _A. Mitt._ XVI. 1891, p. 371, and _ib._
XVIII. 1893, p. 66. These vases were sometimes pierced at the bottom but
it is not certain that the pierced vases were placed only on the graves
of the unmarried.
[1537] Dr Frazer, ad P. X. 31. 9, collects a number of interesting modern
parallels.
[1538] Plin. _N.H._ XXVIII. 2. 3.
[1539] Hor. _Od._ 3. 11. 35. Apollodorus II. 1. 14 says of Hypermnestra
αὕτη δὲ Λυγκέα διέσωσε παρθένον αὐτὴν φυλάξαντα.
[1540] Schol. ad Arist. _Orat._ II. p. 229 τῶν δὲ Δαναΐδων ὁ τετρημένος
πίθος τὸ μήποτε ταύτας μετὰ τὸν φόνον τῶν φιλτάτων τὴν ἀναψύχουσαν αὐτὰς
ἐκ τῆς ἀνδρείας κηδεμονίας χάριν παρ’ ἄλλων τυγχάνειν, πᾶσι γενομένας
ὑπόπτους διὰ τὸ ἄγος.
[1541] Soph. _El._ 433.
[1542] It is scarcely necessary to say that in my interpretation of
this myth I owe much to my predecessors, though my view is slightly
different from any previously given. Controversy has raged as to whether
the mythical Danaides gave rise to the ‘Uninitiated’ or _vice versâ_.
This seems to me a fruitless question with no possible answer. Each form
arose separately, and the point is their ultimate _contaminatio_. The
literature of the controversy is given by Dr Frazer ad P. X. 31. 9. To
his references may be added, Dämmler, _Delphika_ p. 22, and Mr A. B.
Cook, _J.H.S._ XIII. 1892, p. 97.
[1543] I much regret that M. Salomon Reinach’s brilliant article on the
criminals eternally condemned in Hades, ‘Sisyphe aux enfers et quelques
autres damnés’ (_Rev. Arch._ 1903, p. 1), reached me too late for me to
use the results of his researches.
[1544] Procl. _Ennead._ I. 6. 9 ἐν ἅπασι ταῖς τελεταῖς καὶ τοῖς
μυστηρίοις οἱ θεοὶ πολλὰς μὲν ἑαυτῶν προτείνουσι μορφάς, πολλὰ δὲ σχήματα
ἐξαλλάττοντες φαίνονται καὶ τοῖς μὲν ἀτύπωτον αὐτῶν προβέβληται φῶς
τοῖς δὲ εἰς ἀνθρώπειον μορφὴν ἐσχηματισμένον, τότε δὲ εἰς ἀλλοῖον τύπον
προεληλυθός.
[1545] Mr Gilbert Murray, _Greek Literature_, p. 66.
[1546] Ar. _Av._ 692.
[1547] The world-egg is of course an element common to many cosmogonies.
It may very likely be one of the many elements primarily borrowed by
Orphism from the Egyptians. The Egyptian demiurgus Chnoum gave birth to a
cosmic egg, see Euseb. _de praep. ev._ 3. 11. According to Diodorus (I.
27) Osiris says εἰμὶ δὲ υἱὸς Κρόνου πρεσβύτατος καὶ βλαστὸς ἐκ καλοῦ τε
καὶ εὐγενοῦς ᾠοῦ, σπέρμα συγγενὲς ἐγεννήθην ἡμέρας. Our concern here is
merely with the particular form taken by the doctrine in Orphism.
[1548] Hes. _Theog._ 116.
[1549] Damasc. _Quaest. de prim. princ._ p. 147. The sources are fully
given in Abel’s _Orphica_, p. 173. I am also indebted for references to
Schömann’s _De Cupidine Cosmog._, see Schömann, _Opuscula_, vol. II. p.
60.
[1550] Clem. Rom. _Homil._ VI. 4. 671 καὶ Ὀρφεὺς δὲ τὸ Χάος ᾠῷ
παρεικάζει, ἐν ᾧ τῶν πρώτων στοιχείων ἦν ἡ σύγχυσις, τοῦτο Ἡσίοδος
Χάος ὑποτίθεται, ὅπερ Ὀρφεὺς ᾠὸν λέγει, γεννητὸν ἐξ ἀπείρου τῆς ὕλης
προβεβλημένον, γεγονὸς δὲ οὕτω, κ.τ.λ.
[1551] Procl. in Plat. _Tim._ 2, p. 307 εἴη ἂν ταὐτὸν τό τε Πλάτωνος ὂν
καὶ τὸ Ὀρφικὸν ᾠόν.
[1552] Plut. _Quaest. Symp._ II. 3. 1.
[1553] Macrob. _Sat._ VII. 16. 691.
[1554] Achill. Tat. Isag. ad Arati _Phenom._, p. 77.
[1555] Luc. _Dial. Mort._ I. 1 and _Catapl._ 7.
[1556] Ov. _Ars Am._ II. 330. Cf. Juvenal VI. 518.
[1557] This fact, that eggs were offered to the dead, has been clearly
established by Dr Martin Nilsson in his tract _Das Ei im Totenkultus der
Griechen_. The ‘Sonderabdruck’ he has kindly sent me appeared in the
_Frân Filologiska Föreningen i Lund Språkliga uppsatser_ II. (Lund, 1902).
[1558] Clem. Al. _Str._ VII. 4, p. 713 ὁρᾶν γοῦν ἔστι τὰ ᾠὰ ἀπὸ τῶν
περικαθαρθέντων, εἰ θαλφθείη, ζωογονούμενα, οὐκ ἂν δέ τοῦτο ἐγένετο εἰ
ἀνελάμβανεν τὰ τοῦ περικαθαρθέντος κακά.
[1559] It is possible that the cosmic egg may have been imported from
Egypt and _contaminated_ later with the egg of purification.
[1560] P. IX. 27. 1.
[1561] _Amat._ 1.
[1562] Diod. IV. 6 μυθολογοῦσιν οὖν οἱ παλαιοὶ τὸν Πρίαπον υἱὸν εἶναι τοῦ
Διονύσου καὶ Ἀφροδίτης.
[1563] _Inv._ 2351. P. Hartwig, _J.H.S._ XII. 1891, p. 340.
[1564] Verg. _Aen._ IV. 684. If we may trust Servius (ad loc.), with
strictly practical intent, ‘Muliebriter tanquam possit animam sororis
excipere et in se transferre. Sic Cicero in Verrinis “ut extremum
filiorum spiritum ore excipere liceret.”’ So according to the thinking
of many primitive people are new souls born of old souls, see Tylor,
_Primitive Culture_, II. p. 4.
[1565] _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_, Serie D, Taf. VIII.
[1566] _Theog._ 1275.
[1567] _Cat._ 2291. _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_, Serie A, Taf. V.
[1568] _Museo Ital. di Antichita_, vol. III. 1, pl. 2.
[1569] Soph. _Ant._ 781, trans. by Mr Gilbert Murray.
[1570] _Cat._ 1852. Fig. 172 is reproduced from a hasty sketch kindly
made for me by Mrs Hugh Stewart; it is only intended as a note of subject
and not as a substitute for complete publication.
[1571] Plat. _Symp._ 196 A.
[1572] Now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, De Ridder, _Cat._ 366;
see Lenormant et de Witte, _Élite des Monuments Céramographiques_ IV.,
Pl. LI.
[1573] Eur. _Hipp._ 525.
[1574] _Cat._ E 440. _Mon. d. Inst._ I. Pl. VIII. The design in fig. 38,
Odysseus passing the Sirens, is from the obverse of this vase. The three
Sirens probably suggested the triple Erotes.
[1575] Alcman frg. 38 (34).
[1576] Fröhner, _Choix de vases grecs_, Pl. VI. p. 24.
[1577] _Philosoph._ V. 8, ed. Cruice.
[1578] Harpocrat. s.v. Φλυεῖς.
[1579] P. I. 31. 4. Attention was first drawn to this passage in
connection with the ‘Anodos’ vase-paintings by Prof. Furtwängler,
_Jahrbuch d. Inst._ 1891, pp. 117-124, but with his interpretation of the
vases I find myself unable to agree (see p. 282, n. 2) and the evidence
from the _Philosophoumena_ seems to be unknown to him.
[1580] See Dr Frazer, _Pausanias_, vol. II. p. 412.
[1581] The roots φλε, φλι, φλυ and the guttural form χλι (cf. χλιδή) all
express the same notion of bursting, bubbling, germinating, see Vaniček
ad voc. and cf. Hesych. φλεῖ· γέμει, εὐκαρπεῖ, πολυκαρπεῖ, and the words
φλύκταινα, φλύζει.
[1582] Plut. _Symp._ V. 8. 2 and 3 τοῦ δὲ Ἐμπεδοκλέους εἰρηκότος·
οὕνεκεν ὀψίγονοί τε σίδαι καὶ ὑπέρφλοια μῆλα.
The text has ὑπέρφλοια: the superfluous ι may have crept in owing to
Plutarch’s guess.
[1583] Plut. loc. cit. ὁμοίως τὸν Ἄρατον ἐπὶ τοῦ Σειρίου λέγοντα·
καὶ τὰ μὲν ἔρρωσεν τὸν δέ φλόον ὤλεσε πάντα,
τὴν χλωρότητα καὶ τὸ ἄνθος τῶν καρπῶν φλόον προσαγορεύειν ... εἶναι δὲ
καὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων τινὰς οἳ Φλοίῳ Διονύσῳ θύουσιν.
[1584] Harp. s.v. Κτησίου Διός· ... Κτήσιον Δία ἐν τοῖς ταμείοις ἵδρυντο.
[1585] Athen. XI. 46 § 478: the portions omitted καὶ ἐκ τοῦ ὤμου τοῦ
δεξιοῦ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ μετώπου τοῦ κροκίου are unintelligible as they stand,
but their meaning does not affect the present argument.
[1586] Probably not even in name; if my conjecture be correct the Δίαs
set up are of the same nature as the _dirae_ and the δίον κώδιον, see p.
23, note 2.
[1587] Plut. _Them._ I. Pausanias (IV. 1. 7) in speaking of this same
_telesterion_, which was the sanctuary of the Lycomids, calls it by the
very peculiar name κλίσιον, Dr Frazer translates κλίσιον ‘chapel.’ The
word _may_ mean a ‘lean to,’ a rough annexe, but I would conjecture that
here it means the same as παστάς, i.e. ‘bridal chamber,’ the place of the
ἱερὸς γάμος, see p. 536.
[1588] P. IV. 1. 7 and 8.
[1589] _Philosophoum._ V. 3 ed. Cruice, ἔστι δ’ ἐν τοῖς πυλεῶσι καὶ
πρεσβύτης τις ἐγγεγραμμένος, πολιὸς, πτερωτὸς, γυναῖκα ἀποφεύγουσαν
διώκων κυανοειδῆ (κυνοειδῆ the MS.: but Schneidewin’s correction is
generally admitted), ἐπιγέγραπται δὲ ἐπὶ τοῦ πρεσβύτου· φάος ῥυέντης, ἐπὶ
δὲ τῆς γυναικός· περεηφικόλα. ἔοικε δὲ εἶναι κατὰ τὸν Σηθιανῶν λόγον ὁ
φάος ῥυέντης τὸ φῶς, τὸ δὲ σκοτεινὸν ὕδωρ ἡ φικόλα, τὸ δὲ ἐν μέσῳ τούτων
διάστημα ἁρμονία πνεύματος μεταξὺ τεταγμένου.
[1590] Luc. _de Salt._ 7, and Xen. _Symp._ VIII. 1.
[1591] _Orph. Hymn._ VI. 7 (trans. by Mr Gilbert Murray):
πάντη δινηθεὶς πτερύγων ῥιπαῖς κατὰ κόσμον
λαμπρὸν ἄγων φάος ἁγνόν, ἀφ’ οὗ σε Φάνητα κικλήσκω
ἠδὲ Πρίηπον ἄνακτα καὶ Ἀνταύγην ἑλίκωπον.
[1592] Eur. _Hipp._ 1269.
[1593] Diog. Laert. _Vit. Pyth._ V.
[1594] Sauppe, _Die Mysterieninschrift von Andania_.
[1595] Diog. Laert. _Vit. Pyth._ XXI.
[1596] Clem. Al. _Strom._ IV. 19 § 583.
[1597] Iambl. _de Myst._ § 247 χαρακτὴρ παλαιότροπος ... ἀρχαιοτρόπου δὲ
καὶ παλαιοῦ πίνου διαφερόντως ὥσπερ τινὸς ἀχειραπτήτου νοῦ προσπνέοντα.
[1598] Diog. Laert. _Vit. Pyth._ 8. 1. 10.
[1599] Strab. VII. § 297.
[1600] Valer. Max. 8. 15. 1.
[1601] Plin. _Nat. Hist._ XXXVI. 46.
[1602] Johannes Malala, _Chronogr._ IV. 74 οὗ ὄνομα ὁ αὐτὸς Ὀρφεὺς
ἀκούσας ἐκ τῆς μαντείας ἐξεῖπε Μῆτιν, Φάνητα, Ἠρικεπαῖον ὅπερ ἑρμηνεύεται
τῇ κοινῇ γλώσσῃ βουλὴ, φῶς, ζωοδοτήρ.
[1603] Prokl. in Plat. _Tim._ II. 207 εἴη ἂν ταὐτὸν τό τε Πλάτωνος ὂν καὶ
τὸ Ὀρφικὸν ᾠόν.
[1604] Prokl. in Plat. _Tim._ II. 130 θῆλυς καὶ γενέτωρ κρατερὸς θεὸς
Ἠρικαπαῖος.
[1605] Herm. in Plat. _Phaedr._ p. 135 τετρὰς δὲ ὁ Φάνης, ὡς Ὀρφεύς φησι
τετράσιν ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ὁρώμενος ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα.
[1606] Herm. in Plat. _Phaedr._ p. 125 οὐ πρῶτος δὲ ὁ Πλάτων ἡνίοχον καὶ
ἵππους παρέλαβεν ἀλλὰ καὶ πρὸ αὐτοῦ οἱ ἔνθεοι τῶν ποιητῶν Ὅμηρος, Ὀρφεύς,
Παρμενίδης.
[1607] P. III. 16. 1.
[1608] _Kypria_, frg. ap. Athen. VIII. § 334.
[1609] _Cat._ 2254. Kekulé, _Ueber ein griechisches Vasengemälde im
akademischen Kunstmuseum zu Bonn_, 1879, p. 1.
[1610] Pherekydes ap. Prokl. in Plat. _Tim._ III. 368 ὁ δὲ Φερεκύδης
ἔλεγεν εἰς Ἔρωτα μεταβεβλῆσθαι τὸν Δία μέλλοντα δημιουργεῖν.
[1611] Prokl. in Plat. _Cratyl._ p. 66 ὡς ὁ Ὀρφεὺς ἐνθέῳ στόματι λέγει
καὶ καταπίνει τὸν πρόγονον αὐτοῦ τὸν Φάνητα καὶ ἐγκολπίζεται πάσας αὐτοῦ
τὰς δυνάμεις ὁ Ζεύς.
[1612] Procl. in Plat. _Tim._ II. 130 B τοιαῦτα γὰρ περὶ αὐτοῦ καὶ Ὀρφεὺς
ἐνδείκνυται περὶ τοῦ Φάνητος θεολογῶν. πρῶτος γὰρ ὁ θεὸς παρ’ αὐτῷ ζῴων
κεφαλὰς φέρει
πολλὰς
κρίας, ταυρείας, ὄφιος χαροποῦ τε λέοντος,
καὶ πρόεισιν ἀπὸ τοῦ πρωτογενοῦς ᾠοῦ, ἐν ᾧ σπερματικῶς τὸ ζῷόν ἐστι, and
p. 131 E διὸ καὶ ὁλικώτατον ζῷον ὁ θεόλογος ἀναπλάττει κριοῦ καὶ ταύρου
καὶ λέοντος καὶ δράκοντος αὐτῷ περιθεὶς κεφαλάς.
[1613] Eur. _Bacch._ 1017.
[1614] _Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens_, p. 538.
[1615] _Hom. Hym._ XIX. 42 trans. by Mr D. S. MacColl.
[1616] The Orphic conception of Pan as All-god was no doubt helped out
by the fact that as early as the time of Herodotus (II. 46) the analogy
was noted between the Greek Pan and the Egyptian Mendes, who was both
Goat-god and All-god; see Roscher, ‘Pan als Allgott’ in _Festschrift f.
Overbeck_, 1893, p. 56 ff., and for Mendes, Roscher, s.v.
[1617] Plut. _de defect. orac._ 17.
[1618] Murray, _Ancient Greek Literature_, p. 68.
[1619] _A. Mitth._ XIII. pl. IX.
[1620] P. IX. 25. 5.
[1621] Clem. Al. _Strom._ V. 8 § 231.
[1622] Reproduced by kind permission of Dr E. von Stern from the
_Mémoires de la Société Impériale d’histoire et des antiquités_, vol.
XVIII. pl. I. The vase was found at Kertsch.
[1623] Eur. _Bacch._ 769.
[1624] Diod. Sic. I. 11. 3 Εὔμολπος μὲν ἐν τοῖς Βακχικοῖς ἔπεσί φησιν
Ἀστροφαῆ Διόνυσον ἐν ἀκτίνεσσι πυρωτόν. Ὀρφεὺς δὲ
‘Τοὔνεκά μιν καλέουσι Φάνητά τε καὶ Διόνυσον.’
[1625] Justinus, _Cohort._ c. 15 καὶ αὖθις ἀλλαχοῦ που οὕτως λέγει
εἷς Ζεύς, εἷς Ἀΐδης, εἷς Ἥλιος, εἷς Διόνυσος,
εἷς θεὸς ἐν πάντεσσι· τί σοι δίχα ταῦτ’ ἀγορεύω;
[1626] Dr Sam. Wide, _A. Mitt._ XIX. 1894, p. 248 ff.
[1627] Inscr. line 120 Μερῶν δὲ γεινομένων αἰρέτω ἱερεὺς ἀνθιερεύς,
ἀρχίβακχος ταμίας, βουκολικός, Διόνυσος, Κόρη, Παλαίμων, Ἀφροδείτη,
Πρωτεύρυθμος, τὰ δὲ ὀνόματα αὐτῶν συνκληρούσθω πᾶσι.
[1628] E. Maass, _Orpheus_, p. 64. The theory that Orpheus is a god seems
to me to vitiate much of Dr Maass’s interesting and valuable book.
[1629] Lucian _De Salt._ 7 § 271 ... καὶ _εὔρυθμος_ αὐτῶν κοινωνία καὶ
εὔτακτος ἁρμονία τῆς _πρωτογόνου_ ὀρχήσεως δείγματά ἐστι.
[1630] Eur. _Hipp._ 527.
[1631] Murray, _Ancient Greek Literature_, p. 272.
[1632] Plat. _Symp._ 189.
[1633] Eur. _Hipp._ 535.
[1634] E.g. Maass, _Die Tagesgötter_, p. 288.
INDEX.
Transcriber’s Note: In the original, footnote references were given
in the form 232² (page number, and in superscript, the number of the
footnote on that page). As all footnotes have been moved and renumbered
in creating this e-text, a reference to the relevant footnote has been
added in brackets.
I. GREEK.
ἄγγελοι βασανισταί, 232² (Footnote 597)
ἅγιος, 57
ἁγνεία, 168
ἄγνοια, 582
ἅγος, 57, 58, 113, 114, 116
ἀγυρμός, 151
ἀθηρηλοιγός, 529
ἅλαδε μύσται, 152
ἄλφιτα, 88
ἀμεταστρεπτί, 605
ἀμύμων, 335-337
ἀμφιθαλὴς παῖς, 77
ἀναθέσσασθαι, 46
ἀνάστατοι, 132
ἀνόσιοι, 615
Ἄξιε ταῦρε, 438³ (Footnote 1116)
ἀπαγωγά, 587
ἀποδιοπομπεῖσθαι, 26, 27, 43
ἀπόθεστος, 46
ἀπόνιμμα, 57, 58, 623
ἀποπομπαί, 8, 9
ἀποτροπή, 68, 163, 256, 364, 509
ἀποφράδες, 48
ἀρά, 139-145
ἀφαγνίσηται, 523
ἀφιέρωσαν, 149
βαλλητύς, 155
βασκάνια, 191
Βασσαρικά, 492¹ (Footnote 1243)
βουπλήξ, 369
βρόμος, 416, 417
βρῦτον, 424
βωμός, 61, 62
γῆρας, 173
Δᾶ, 271
δαίμονες, 588, 625, 658
δεισιδαιμονία, 4-7
δέματα, 141² (Footnote 361)
δευτερόποτμοι, 244
Δημητρεῖοι, 267, 600
Δῖα, festival of, 23, 143
διοπομπεῖν, 43
Διὸς κώδιον, 23-28, 643
δράκαινα, 232
δρακοντώδεις, 233
δρᾶμα and δρώμενα, 568-571
δρώμενα, 283, 568-571
ἐγχυτρίζειν, 36
ἔλασις, 152
ἐμασχαλίσθη, 69
Ἔμβαρός εἰμι, 70
ἐναγεῖς, 58
ἐναγίζειν, 53-63
ἐναγίσματα, 470, 629, 630
ἐναγισμοί, 53-63, 161
ἔνθεος, 426
ἐπαγωγαί, 140
ἐπαγωγή, 587
ἐπιβαίνω, 593
ἐποπτεία, 516, 547
ἐξάργματα, 69
ἐξέλασις, 106
ἔριφος, 595
ἐσχάρα, 61, 62, 147¹ (Footnote 375)
ἐσχάραι, 125
Εὑδάνεμοι, 251
εὐεία, 430
εὔιοι γυναῖκες, 414
εὐχή, 142
ἔφοδοι, 219
ζημία, 129
ἡγητηρία, 116
ἠεροφοῖτις, 215
θαλύσια, 77
θάργηλος, 76
θεραπεία, 3, 163, 181, 256
θέσκελος, 137
θεσμοί, 137, 643
θέσσασθαι, 46
θρῖναξ, 530³ (Footnote 1329), 532
θρόνος, 514, 548
θύειν, 53
θύεσθαι, 67
θύματα ἐπιχώρια, 14
θύσα, 430
θυσία, 80
θυσία ἄδαιτος
ἱερά, 555
ἱερεῖον, 54
ἱερεύειν, 53
ἱερὸς γάμος, 482
ἵπποι, 475¹ (Footnote 1202)
Ἱππολύτῳ δ’ ἔπι, 355
ἴϋγξ, 139
καθαρμοί, 116, 161
καθοσιώσας, 401
Κάσσμια, 210
κατοργιάσας, 401
κέρνος, 158² (Footnote 406)
κῆρ τυμβοῦχος, 213
κῆρες θανάτοιο, 176
κηριτρεφής, 184, 185
κήρυκες, 172² (Footnote 443)
κινέω, 45² (Footnote 97)
κλῄς, 554¹ (Footnote 1379)
κὸγξ ὄμπαξ, 161
κολυμβήθρα, 35
κρείττονες, 327, 335, 340
κύκλος, 591¹ (Footnote 1458)
λῄτειραι, 248
λιθοβολία, 155
λίκνον, 158² (Footnote 406)
Μᾶ, 271² (Footnote 710)
Μαῖα, 262
μέγαρα, 61, 123, 125
μέθη, 423
μελίσπονδα, 423
μύσος and μυστήριον, 154
μύω, 153
ναρθηκοφόροι, 474¹ (Footnote 1201)
νόμιμα, 511, 513
Νύμφη, 262
νύμφιος, 539³ (Footnote 1352)
Νυμφών, 539
Νῦσαι, 412¹ (Footnote 1051)
ὅπλα, 587
ὅρκια τέμνειν, 64
ὅσια, 599
ὁσιότης, 478
ὁσιωθείς, 499¹ (Footnote 1254), 600
οὐλοχύται, 54, 86-89
παγκαρπία, 80, 159, 643
πάντα ῥεῖ, 164
παστός, παστάς, 536
πέλανος, 88-90
πολύθεστος, 46
πομπή, 152
πότνια θηρῶν, 194, 264-266
πρόβατα, 15
προκάθαρσις, 560
προσβολαί, 219
στέμματα, 594
στέφανος, 593
στυγνότης, 15
σύνθημα, 155³ (Footnote 402)
σφάγια, 63-73, 245, 250
τέμνειν σφάγια, 64
τίθηναι, 402, 465, 500
τράγος, 416, 421, 422
τραγῳδία, 421
ὕε κύε, 161
ὑποκόλπιος, 594
φάος ῥυέντης, 645
φίκολα, 645
φύλακες, 374, 580
Χαμύνη, 405
χρηστέ, 335
χύτραι, 35
χύτρινοι, οἱ, 35
χύτρος, 79
ὠμοφαγία, 483, 485
II. GENERAL.
Absyrtos, 68
Achaia, 128
Acheloüs, 435
Adikia, 613
Adrastos, 362
Agathos Daimon, 357, 544
Aglauros, 287
Agnoia, 585
Agnus castus, 106, 130
Agrae, 560
— mysteries at, 557-561
Agrionia, 465
Aiakos, 611
Aigisthos, 335
Aioleiai, 409
Alcmaeon, 220, 481
_Alphita_, 156
Amphiaraos, 27, 344
Amynos, 345-347
_Anaklethra_, 604
Ananke, 270, 606
Anodos, 122, 126, 276-285, 604
Anthesteria, 32-74
Anthropomorphism, 70
Aphrodite, 308-316, 641
Apollo and Orpheus, 460
Archemoros, 339
Archibacchos, 476
Ares, 375-377
Argei, 117
Arrephoria, 131-134
Artemis, 299-301
Artemis Munychia, 71
Asklepios, 341-350
Athamas, 110, 513
Athene, 301-308
Athene Aithuia, 305
Athene, birth of, 366
Aversion, gods of, ceremonies of, 8, 9
Bacchoi, 474-478, 561
Bacchos, 433
‘Bacchos’, 479, 480
Banquet of the Blest, 614
Baptism, 597
Bassarids, 461
Bath, ritual, 312
Baubo, 570, 570¹ (Footnote 1411)
Beating ceremonial, 100
Bee, 443, 444
Bellerophon, 220
Bessi, 370, 371
Birth of Aphrodite, 312
Birth, Sacred, 549-552
Book of the Dead, 577, 589
Boreads, 181
Boukolion, 537, 539
Bouphonia, 111-113
Brimo, 552-554
Brimos, 526, 549¹ (Footnote 1370)
Bromios, 414-417, 531
Buckthorn, 37
Bull-God, 432-437, 516
Bull-roarer, 527² (Footnote 1322)
Burning Bush, 410
‘Busk’, 118
Caecilia Secundina, 586, 587
Calendar, Attic, 29
Cereal intoxicants, 416-525
Cervisia, 424
‘Chalcidian pursuit’, 129
Chaos, 516
Charila, 106
Charites, 287-299, 438, 439
Choes, 38-40
Chryse, 306
Chthon, 200
Chytroi, 33-37
Cicones, 457, 470
Circle, 593-595
_Clouds_, parody of Orphism in, 512
Cnossos, 483
Commination Service, 145
Cradle, 524, 528
Credo and Confiteor, 156
Cremation, 510
_Cretans_, the, 479
Crete, 460, 565-568
Curses, 138-145
Cyamites, 545
Danaides, 614-624
Delphi, influence of, 557-561
Demeter and Kore, 271-273
‘Demeter’s people,’ dead as, 267
Dendrites, 426-432
Deo, 272
Despoina, 594-598, 600
_Devotion_, 161, 523
Dexion, 346-347
Diasia, 11-28
Dike, 507, 613
Dionysos, 364
— at Eleusis, 557, 561
— grave of, 558
— Omestes, 71
— on hero-reliefs, 360-363
Dipolia, 111
Dirae, 23, 143
‘Dirae’ of Teos, 143
Dithyramb, 412
Dithyrambos, 437-445
Dodona, gong at, 570
Dolioli, 44
Drama, origin of, 568
Drunkenness, 448
Dryas, 369
Egg in Mysteries, 628-630
Eiraphiotes, 488-495
Eirene, 270
Eiresione, 77-82
Eleusinian Mysteries, 540
Ennoia, 584-585
Epikleidia, 554¹ (Footnote 1379)
Epimenides, 401
Epoptes, 547
Erechtheus, 555
Ergane, 520
Erichthonios, 406
Erikapaios, 649
Erinyes, 61, 68, 213-239
Eris, 250
Eros, 626-659
— and Psyche, 533
— and the Mother, 639-641
Eubouleus, 586, 587, 588
Eukles, 586, 587, 588
Eumenides, 253-256
Eumolpidae, 554-557
Eumolpos, 554-557
Eunoë, 583, 584
Eurydice, 461, 603-605
Eurynomos, 186
_Euthyphron_, discussion of religion in the, 2
_Everruncatio_, 115
Eye, Evil, 196
Fan, winnowing, 528-535
February, 48-51
Februum, 49
Feralia, 49
Figs for purification, 99
Flaminica Dialis, 117
_Flammeum_, 522
Fleece of purification, 548
Flight ceremonies, 113
Fox totem, 462
‘Frummety’, 89² (Footnote 226)
Gephyrismoi, 136
Gong of Dodona, 570
Gorgoneion, 187-191
Graiae, 194-196
Gypsum, 135, 514
Hades, 601
Haloa, 145-150
Harpies, 178-183
Harvest-festivals, 75-119
Head of Orpheus, 469
Hebe-Ganymeda, 325
Hecate, 288
Helen Dendritis, 322
Helios, 462, 463
Hephaistos, 377
Hepialos, 167
Hera, 316-319
Herakles, 166, 347
— at Agrae, 547
— at Sekyon, 55
— in Hades, 612
— initiation of, 547
Herm, Eros as, 631
Hermes, 631
— Chthonios, 34, 35, 249
Heroes, 326-363
‘Hero-Feasts’, 350-363, 615
Hero-healers, 341-350
Heroines, cult of, 323-326
Heroïs, 403
Hersephoria, 287
Hesychidae, 247
Hesychos, 247
Hierophant, 550, 551, 564, 571, 594
Hippolytos, 354, 512
Holocaust, 16
Honey, 597
Horse-demons, 388
Horse-Medusa, 179
‘Horses’, 476
Hosia, 507
Hosioi, 434, 501-508
Hyakinthos, 339
Iacchos, 379, 414, 541-545
Iasion, 565, 566
‘Ikarios’ reliefs, 361
Immortality, 478, 571
Inferiae, 47
Intichiuma, 83
Iobaccheia, 538
Iobaccheion, 475
Iobacchoi, 656
Isodaites, 441, 482
Ivy, 429
Judges in Hades, 610
Kabeiroi, 653, 654
Kalligeneia, 126, 130, 270
Kallynteria, 114-116
Karpophoros, 263
Kathodos, 123
Ker, Eros as, 632, 636
Keraunia, 408-411
Keres, 35¹ (Footnote 45), 41-43, 165-217
Kernophoria, 160-549, 559
Kernophoros, 559
_Kernos_, 158, 159, 160, 549
Kerostasia, 183
Kerykainae, 212
Kerykeion, 42, 277
Kid, 595
Klodones, 373
Kore and Demeter, 271-273
Koreia, 145
Korybantes, 515
Korybas, 570
Koures, 401, 570
Kouretes, 172, 485, 492, 499-501
Kourotrophos, 267-271
_Krithologos_, 87
Kronia, 110
Kykeon, 155, 156
Leibethra, 457, 462, 469
Lemuria, 33, 34
Lesbos, 466-468
Lethe, 575-584
Liber, 528, 538
Libera, 528, 538
_Libum_, 89
Likna, 403
Liknites, 402, 403, 523, 524, 532, 534, 550
_Liknon_, 519-535
Liknophoria, 518-535, 547-549
Liknophoros, 534
Loutrophoria, 622
Lupercalia, 49-51
Lycomids, 471
Lycurgus, 369
Maenads, 389
Maiden, 262
Maimaktes, 17
Maniae, 255
Marriage, the Sacred, 535-538, 549-552
Masks, in ritual, 188
Masks on furnaces, 190
Matriarchy, 261, 273
Meilichioi, 16
Meilichios, 340
Melisponda, 510
Metempsychosis, 590
Metis, 649
Milk, 596-598
Mimallones, 373, 570
Mimes, 475
Minos, 611
Minotaur, 483
Mitos, 653
Mnemosyne, 509
— Well of, 575-584, 623
Moisture, Principle of, 431
Monotheism, 626
Mother, the, 260-271, 510
— and Son, 560, 561-563
Mountain Mother, 497-499
Mud in Mysteries, 615
Mysteries, 150
— Eleusinian, 150-160
— Lesser, 560
_Mystes_, 153
‘Mystic pig’, 548
Naassenes, 550
Name, new, 594
Nekuia, 73, 267
Nephalia, 91-98, 423, 509-511
Nesteia, 126
Nilus, S., 486
Ninnion, pinax of, 558, 561
Nyktelios, 441
Nymphs, 291, 318
Nysa, 379
Oknos, 618
Omadius, 485
Omestes, 489
Omophagia, 546² (Footnote 1367)
Omphalos, 59, 320, 321
— at Eleusis, 557, 558, 569, 561
Onomacritus, 473, 494
Orpheus, 456-478
— on vases, 602
Orphic Burial-Rites, 599
— Cosmogony, 625-659
— Eschatology, 573-624
— tablets, 574-600
— Theogony, 625, 626
— vases, 600-613
Osiris, 402, 440, 576, 577
Ourania, 316, 509
Paean, 439-442
_Palingenesia_, 527
Palladium, 302
Pallas, 301, 302
Pan, 101, 651
Panagia, 344
Pandora, 280-283
Pandrosos, 287
Panes, 278, 282, 290
Pangaion, 462
Pantomime, in ritual, 283
— sacred, 570
Pantomimes, 475
Parentalia, 49
Paris, judgment of, 292-299
_Pastos_, 158
Peirithoös, 612
_Pelanos_, 88-90, 156, 345, 349
Pelasgian characters, 468
Pelasgians, nameless gods of, 333
Pelops, 338
Perikonios, 430
Phanes, 646-648, 656
Pharmakos, 95-114
Pherophatta, 556
Philia, 356
Phix, 211
Phlya, 536, 537, 549
Phlya, mysteries at, 549, 641-646
Phokos, 338
Pholos, 386
Phytalmios, 427
Pig of purification, 152, 153
Pimpleia, 470
_Pithoi_, 617
Pithoigia, 32, 33¹ (Footnote 55), 37, 40-45
Pithos, 41
Plemochoae, 40, 161
Ploutos, 566, 567
Plynteria, 115
Poinae, 606
Polyxena, 61
Praxidikae, 188, 214
Priapos, 631
Proteurhythmos, 656-658
Protogene, 643
Protogonos, 648-651, 657
Protolaos, 653
Psoloeis, 409
Psychagogoi, 69
Psychostasia, 183
_Ptuon_, 531
Purification, ritual of, 24-29, 162
Purple in ritual, 249
Pyanepsia, 81
Pythagorean rites, 455, 646
Queen Archon, 537
Re-birth, 590
Rhabdos, 42-44, 277
Rhadamanthys, 611
Rhea, 562, 563
Rhombos, 491
Sabaiarius, 420
Sabazios, 418-420
_Sacra_, 157
Sacramentalism of food and drink, 454
Sacred Marriage, 551, 552, 564-566
— Spring, 522, 523
Sacrifice, fireless, 94
— human, 96, 109, 114
_Sacrima_, 84
Salmoneus, 59, 336, 607
Satrae, 370
Satyrs, 211, 380-388, 421, 422
Scape-goat, 105
Seilenoi, 388
Semele, 404
Semnai Theai, 239-253
Sieve, 532, 622
Simaetha, 139
Siren, 139, 197-207
Sisyphos, 607-610
Skedasos, daughters of, 71
Skira, 134, 135
Skirophoria, 134-136
‘Smileless Stone’, 127
Snake, Erinys as, 232-237
— form of hero, 327-332
Soul as bird, 200-201
— as star, 205
Sphinx, 207-211
Stenia, 136
Stepterion, 113
Stone of Parching, 577
Sublimation, 93
Tablets, Orphic, 574-600
Taboo, 83-85, 148, 154
Tantalos, 607, 608
— dog of, 227, 459
Tattooing, practice of, 464
Telchines, 171
Telesterion, 644
Thargelia, 74-119
Theoinia, 538
Theseus in Hades, 612
Thesmophoria, 120-160
_Thesmophoriazusae_, 144
Thesmophoros, 137
Thracians, 555
Thriae, 442, 443
Thriambos, 442-444
Thyiades, 402, 524
Titans, 493-495
Titles, cultus, 333-340
Tityos, 337
‘Token’, 155, 536, 551
_Tonea_, festival of, 316
Tragedy, 388, 421
Trinities, maiden, 286-292
Triptolemos, 273, 556, 563, 564, 610
Tritopatores, 179
Trophoniads, 580
Trophonios, 349, 579-581
Tyche, 270, 271
Uninitiated, the, 615
Vannus, 527-535
Veil, symbolism of, 522
Ver Sacrum, 522
Vestal Virgins, 44
Wand-bearers, 474-478
Water-Carriers in Hades, 615, 616
‘Well of Fair Dances,’ 127
Well-Nymphs, 620
Wheel, 589-593
Wine, 447
Women and agriculture, 272
World Egg, 626-630
Zagreus, 441, 480, 489, 491-496, 587, 588
Zan, 598
Zetes and Kalais, 181
Zeus Aktaios, 27
— Epiteleios, 356
— Hades, 17, 21
— Idaean, 480
— Ktesios, 643
— Meilichios, 13-28
— Philios, 356, 357
— Phyxios, 69
— Polieus, 111
— sacrifice to, in Homer, 11
_Zythos_, 424
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