Judaism
The Myths of Greece and Rome
Abstract
Dr Jane Harrison
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 21 May 2002
When We Think In Greek
We all have more Greek than we know, wrote John o’London. Thousands of our most subtle and beautiful words are Greek and have come to us from that world of myth which gave literacy to “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”. One reads in a newspaper that some difficult or messy job—perhaps clearing up corruption—is a the cleansing of the Augean stables. Its original significance is an allusion to the fifth labour of Hercules (Greek, Herakles), who, at the instigation of Juno, was compelled to undertake twelve colossal tasks, of which the fifth was to clean out the stables of Augeas, King of Elis, where three thousand oxen had been untended for thirty years. Hercules was a sun god, and each labour corresponded with a constellation through which the sun had to pass, with its attendant trial, in its annual journey across the heavens.
Pan, the son of Mercury and a wood nymph, has a great place in modern poetry. His name signifies “all” hence a temple dedicated to all the gods was called a Pantheon, and a church in which honour is rendered to the famous dead has acquired the same name. Pan himself was a wild and wandering creature of the woods and mountains. He was goat footed and goat horned, flat nosed and tailed, yet he played wild sweet music on his pipes (the panpipes), and, while he figures as a satyr pursuing the nymphs and dryads, he is also the spirit of living with Nature.
The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is a tribute not only to Sir James Barrie’s ever popular creation, but to the god of the woods and fields who inspired it. Don’t let any Christians know it, though, or they will start a panic about the pagan god taking over the thoughts of Christian children, then Christian demands that Peter Pan and Wendy be removed from the public libraries and shops as Satanic! Our word “panic” means a sudden terror. A sudden and unreasonable fear can strike people alone in the countryside, in woods or on heaths. The ancients attributed it to the presence nearby of Pan. He was the dread of all who wandered through a trackless forest or near a gloomy spot. It is a singular thought that a panic on the stock market, or a panic causing a run on the banks, recalls the eerie terrors felt by Arcadian peasants in remote ages.
The night sky, and woods and fields are alike strewn with names which are Greek myths crystallised. Such stories are those of Perseus and Andromeda, Orion the hunter, Bacchus and Ariadne, the Pleiades—daughters of Atlas, Diana and Endymion, and a hundred others, are written in the heavens. A flower, the narcissus, recalls the myth of Narcissus and the jealousy of Diana, whom Narcissus repelled. Refusing to love either the goddess or any earthly maiden, he fell in love with his own image in a pool. Unable to embrace it, he pined and died of grief. The nymphs would have given him burial, but when they looked for his young body they found only the flower which bears his name. The story has been touched on by many poets—by Milton in Comus, by Chaucer, Spenser, and Goldsmith. There are many other myths associated with plants.
So, the old Greek myths are no esoteric study. They are elemental to our language and literature. A word or a phrase is enhanced by length of history and storage of suggestion. One might refer to hundreds in which began in Greek myth—“Scylla and Charybdis”, “rich as Croesus”, “Cerberus”, “vulcanite”, “Amazons”, “Achilles’ heel”, “Daily Argus”, “lethal chamber”, “sibyl”, “nemesis”, “Europe”, “Titanic”, “mentor”, “Nestor”, “Pandora’s box”, “Champs Elysees”, “&AEelig;olian Hall”, “Gordian knot”, etc.
Seen through the mists of ages, these myths belong to the childhood of man and the whole of human memory. Ruskin says, “To the mean person the myth means little; to the noble person much”. The poet, the artist, and the dreamer will return to these stories so long as men feel the burden and the mystery of life, and are fain to lose them in “the light that never was on sea or land”. But Dr Harrison wanted us to make sure we saw them in their proper light, and not misrepresented.
Misrepresenting the Gods
The Yorkshire classicist, Dr Jane Harrison, explains in her pocketbook, Myths of Greece and Rome, that the Greek gods have been misrepresented by being seen through a Roman microscope, and though nowadays people are less inclined to give them Roman names than they were a hundred years ago, they are still thought of in the same way. It is not only a Roman microsocope, it is a Christian one too, and the overall effect is to see Greek gods still as a type of fairy, ogre or monster—as Harrison says, “toy gods”. Eros, for example is misidentified with cupid who was misidentified as a chubby little prankster armed with his bow and passionate arrows. At Thespiæ, the image of Eros was an “unwrought stone”, a phallic stone, in short.
So long as religions were divided into one true and the rest false, the proper study of them was impossible. Science introduced the historical, and the comparative methods revealing resemblances and differences, and classification was possible.
The discovery of Greek vase paintings forced us to see the Greek gods as the early Greeks saw them. Dionysus is not only a wine god, but also a tree god, worshipped as a post. The Sirens were not pretty mermaids, but strange birds with women’s heads. We uncover masses of terracotta and bronzes, we read inscriptions relating to local rites disregarded by Homer and the tragedians.
What though is mythology, and what is its relation to religion? As Leuba found, religion constitutes ritual, what religious people do, and mythology, what religious people think and imagine. Both are influenced by by what people feel, desire, wish. According to Leuba, “conscious life is always orientated towards something to be secured or avoided immediately or ultimately”. The religion is directed to promotion and preservation of life.
While people are doing a religious act, performing some ritual, they are thinking, imagining, and whatever they are doing or feeling rises up in their minds.
But as to the origin of each particular god, whether they all existed from the beginning, what were their individual forms, the knowledge of these things is, so to speak, but of today and yesterday. For Hesiod and Homer are my seniors, I think, by some four hundred years, and not more. And it is they who have composed for the Greeks the generations of the gods, and have given to the gods their titles and distinguished their several provinces and special powers, and marked their forms.Herodotus, Histories 2
Herodotus recognized that Homer and Hesiod wrote the bible of the Greek religion, and categorically says they lived not more than 400 years earlier, that is about 850 BC. The siege of Troy cannot have been long before that. These were poets, so unless the Greeks had a system similar to the Druids whereby their priests were also poets, Greek religion began in poetry. What, then, were the gods before Homer?
Formerly, the Pelasgians on all occasions of sacrifice, called upon theoi (gods), as I know from what I heard at Dodona; but they gave no title nor yet any name to any of them.Herodotus
Herodotus says people lived in Greece called Pelasgians, who worshipped gods who were not individualized, not called by proper names, such as Zeus and Athene, nor even by titles so were not persons but perhaps powers like the Roman numinae. Herodotus seems to be right because philology, comparative religion, and prehistoric archæology back him up. Among the Olympians are gods who are partly Pelasgian in type.
The Olympians dwell on Olympus, a mountain of Thessaly, from which they take their name. They are Northerners. The Hellenes, who worshipped them, were an immigrant people, who came down from the valley of the Danube and conquered the indigenous Pelasgians. Homer’s Achaians are but one offshoot of those tribes of northern warriors who later, as Dorians and as Gauls, again and again invaded the south, conquered and blended with the smaller, darker, indigenous peoples, and, by blending with them, saved them from being submerged in the great ocean of the East. Homer’s Achaians closely resemble the large statured, fair haired, blue eyed population of the north.
Herodotus thought the Pelasgians were indigenous to the peninsula, whereas Hellenes had been wanderers. There is no need to believe him on that. The Pelasgians were simply the tribe that had settled there and intermarried with the locals before the Hellenes. In fact the word Pelasgian has affinities with the word Persian, and the Persians themselves were an Aryan tribe related to the Greeks. Perhaps a tribe of Persians had got to Greece before the Hellenes. If “l” and “r” are different attempts at saying the same consonant, the Hellenes might have been a tribe of Hurrians. Their first settlement in Greece was in Thessaly. These Northerners, these Hellenes, these Achaians, led the expedition against Troy. The Trojan War was the first collective enterprise, according to Thucydides, that gave unity to Greece.
Once awake to a northern element in Homer, myths of Olympus begin to sound like the Eddas. The gods of Homer sound like Vikings. Zeus can go Berserk. He is uncouth and brutal. The gods are a blend of indigenous and immigrant elements. Homer is singing of divinities, who are in part other men’s gods. So, in Homer are two elements, the primitive Pelasgian element, the immigrant Northern element. A third element seems Minoan. In the figures of Zeus and Hera, his wife, we shall see clearly mirrored the fusion of North and South, of Hellene and Pelasgian. We begin, as is fitting, with Zeus.
Zeus
Zeus is the Indo European sky god in its two aspects. He is the god of the Bright Sky and the shining ether, and also of the Dark Sky, the god of thunder and rain. When the gods drew lots for shares in the universe Poseidon, Homer tells us, drew the sea, Hades the murky darkness, and Zeus “the wide heaven”. The most primitive figures in Greek theology, long before Homer, were Ouranos and Gaia, Heaven and Earth. Zeus has preserved many characteristics of Ouranos. Above all, Zeus is the Loud Thunderer, the Cloud Gatherer, in Homer’s pantheon—“he lighteneth, fashioning either a rain unspeakable or hail or snow, when the flakes sprinkle the ploughed lands”. Iris the Rainbow is his messenger.
Zeus of Homer often behaves like a thunderstorm—exploding in rage at the least opposition. Yet he has a kindly aspect as god of strangers, beggars, and suppliants. Æschylus, the playwright made Zeus both the power that moves and regulates the universe and the moral resolution of world problems. It was a time when, for all the antagonism between Greece and Persia, the immense empire across the water in Asia had influence in mainland Greece, and so too must its religion. At any rate, Æschylus quite suddenly makes a loutish God into a noble one.
Our Zeus is peaceful and altogether mild, as the guardian of Hellas when she is of one mind and not distraught with faction, an image gentle and august in perfect form, one who is the giver of life and breath and every good gift, the common father and saviour and guardian of mankind. The image brought to the troubled heart of the beholder something of its own large repose. “If there be any of mortals whatsoever that is heavy laden in spirit, having suffered sorely many sorrows and calamities in his life, nor yet winning for himself sweet sleep, even such an one, methinks, standing before the image of the god, would forget all things whatsoever in his mortal life hard to be endured, so wondrously hast thou Pheidias, conceived and wrought it, and such grace and light shine upon it from thy art.”Dio Chrysostom
Hera
Hera seems to be the typical wife, and the sacred marriage of her with Zeus is the prototype of human wedlock. So it is that the marriage is turbulent, and brute though Zeus was, Hera is a tyrannous woman, literally a termagant. At Olympia, where Zeus ruled supreme, Hera had a separate sanctuary, the Heraion, much older than that of Zeus. At Argos, too, there was an ancient Heraion sacred to the ox eyed goddess. In Thessaly, in the ancient Argonautic legend, Hera is queen and patron of the hero Jason. Of Zeus we hear nothing. What does it mean? Hera has been forcibly married to vulgar Zeus. She is an ancient Pelasgian divinity, and when Zeus, the god of the immigrant Achaians, conquered her land, the marriage was arranged, but she always defied him. The original wife of Zeus became a cipher, Dione. Dione is Diana, the female form of Zeus, and therefore his original wife.
Hera, then, was Queen in Greece long before the coming of the Achaian Zeus. In those early Pelasgian days, who and what was she? Her name tells us. Hera is “Yara”, the year. Hera is the spirit of the year, the daimon who brings the fruits of the year in their season. As such she has a threefold seasonal aspect. As Stymphalos, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias tells us, Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames. While yet a girl she was called Child or Maiden, when married she was called Fullgrown, and, separated from her husband, she was called Chera, the desolate one, the Widow. She reflects, then, the three stages of a woman’s life, but she reflects also the three seasons, for in antiquity the seasons were three, not four—spring, summer, winter—summer and autumn being regarded together as one season of fruit bearing. In the spring she is Child or Maiden, in summer and autumn she is Fullgrown, and in winter she is a Widow. Her winter desolation reminds us of the mourning of Demeter. This three seasoned year is dependent on the earlier moon calendar, with its waxing, full, and waning moon.
Homer has little of this. Hera is a queen. The nature goddess emerges once in Homer. Zeus the cloud gatherer is seated on the topmost peak of Mount Ida, and Hera, clad in all her splendour and girt with the cestus of Aphrodite, approaches him. “And as he saw her, love come over his deep heart.” He cast about her a great golden cloud and clasped her as his bride within his arms.
And beneath them the divine earth sent forth fresh, new grass, and dewy lotus and crocus and hyacinth, thick and soft that raised them aloft from the ground. Therein they lay, and were clad on with a fair golden cloud, whence fell drops of glittering dew.Homer
Here is the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage which impregnates the earth to give birth in spring. Hebe, it may here be noted, the cup bearer of Olympus, and the daughter of Hera, is but her younger aspect as maiden.
Athena (Minerva)
After Zeus in Olympian precedence next comes Athena, the Grey Eyed, the Ægis bearer, the special daughter of Zeus, a motherless child, she sprang full grown, full armed, from the brain of her Father, though it is never said in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Zeus and Athena are always especially close, so the miraculous birth was made the subject of one of the Homeric Hymns.
The longer form of Athena’s name, Athenaia, is simply a feminine adjective, “she of Athens”, the maiden of Athens. The other name, Pallas, simply means virgin. If the claim of Hera to maidenhood is shadowy, it is not so with Athena. She is maiden through and through, and her temple is rightly called the maiden sanctuary, the Parthenon. But this maiden is essentially of Athens and no other city.
Plato, in the Laws, says Athenaia is but the local Korê, or maiden, the incarnation of Athens. Only after Homer’s epic had come to Athens from Ionia, could the change of Korê to Athena have been made. The rising democracy took Korê and set her as rival and counterpoise to Poseidon, the god of the aristocracy. Of course, a warrior woman is a negation of Korê. She remains unreal. Really, she is the Tychè, the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the worship of the citizens was not a goddess, but the city:
Based on a crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.
Athena is an ideal and a mystery: the ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but transcending, the love of man for woman.Professor Gilbert Murray
She has her ancient snake crouching beneath her shield. This snake was the primeval earth born guardian of the city, and probably the goddess herself was at first imaged as a snake. Herodotus tells us that, when the Persians besieged the citadel, the guardian snake left the honey cake, its monthly sacrificial food, untouched, and, when the priestess told this, the Athenians the more readily forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had really abandoned the citadel.
Then, too, the primitive Athenian Korê or maiden had her olive tree. And, last, Athena had her owl, the owl that still hoots by night in the ruined Parthenon. The goddess herself bore the title Glaukopis, Owl Eyed, and on her coins, current through the whole of civilized Greece, was stamped the image of her owl. When Athena rose to be the goddess of Light and Reason, the little old owl mounted with Athena to be her Bird of Wisdom.
Aphrodite (Venus)
Aphrodite, in marked contrast to Athena, is manifestly an outsider in Olympus. She belongs, as her titles tell, to the southern and eastern islands of the Greek archipelago. She is Cythereia, she of Cythêra, and Cypria, she of Cyprus, where at Paphos she had her great sanctuary. Living in islands her way was ever on the sea.
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.Theognis
Aphrodite is constantly attended by the Horæ, the seasons, and she, like Hera, is herself a seasonal goddess. She is not, in our sense, virginal, but a korê, a maiden, she assuredly is in her eternal youth and radiance. Perhaps the best title for her is Nymphê, Bride. The ancients saw that virginity was not a virtue to be lost once for all, but a grace to be perennially renewed. Aphrodite is a bride of the old order, she is never wife, she can never tolerate permanent patriarchal wedlock. Her will is always turned toward love rather than marriage.
When she is admitted to the patriarchal Olympus, an attempt, foolish and futile, is made to fit her out with a husband, the craftsman, Hephaistos. The figure of Hephaistos in Homer is always contemptible, but it serves to show that the Achaians had reached in their conquest the volcanic island of Lemnos, whose craftsman god they affiliated. As bride of Hephaistos, Aphrodite is also called Charis, Grace. She is the Charis of physical charm and beauty incarnate. But in the cold, austere North, where Artemis loved to dwell, she is never really at home. 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 affiliation as an Olympian barely tolerated, always glad to escape, is that in the Iliad she is a departmental goddess, her sphere is that of one human passion. In the Homeric Hymn she is of far wider import. The poet tells how, when she was seeking the shepherd Anchises:
To many fountained Ida she came, mother of wild beasts, and made straight for the steading through the mountain, while behind her came fawning the beasts, grey wolves and lions fiery eyed and bears and swift pards, insatiate pursuers of the roe deer. Glad was she at the sight of them and sent desire into their breasts, and they went coupling two by two in the shadowy dells.
She is here the impulse of life to all things on the wide earth, a veritable “Lady of the Wild Things”. Yes, and she is Lady, too, of the upper air as well as of sea and land. On a vase painting in the British Museum, a design of marvellous beauty, we see her seated sedately on a great swan sailing through the upper air. It is the Venus Genetrix of the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius.
Three of the local Pelasgian Korai, or Maidens, who became goddesses in Olympus, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite appear together in a myth, the Judgment of Paris. At the wedding of Peleus the gods and goddesses assembled, and Eris, goddess of Strife, threw among them a golden apple inscribed, “Let the fair one take it”. The three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, snatched at the apple in hot rivalry, and straightway went to Paris, Priam’s son, the young shepherd prince for judgment.
Harrison noticed that three out of four illustrations of the Judgement of Paris on Greek vases had no judge, no Paris. Moreover, not one had a golden apple. In the fifth and sixth centuries BC, to which these vases belong, the apple was unknown, and the figure of Paris incidental. Commonly, the vases showed the three goddesses walking in procession behind Hermes, in one case coverd by one cloak shared among all three. Other vases barely differentiate them. It seems the three goddesses are the three Graces or Charities, bearing gifts, dominion, wisdom, love, the sêmeia or tokens of the goddesses who bring them. Any young man has to make this choice.
Artemis (Diana)
Homer, in the Odyssey, adds Artemis as a fourth of the Graces, the Gift Givers, and the daughters of Pandareus have gifts from all four. The activities of Artemis lie, as a rule, among plants, animals and wild things than among people but in her aspect of the moon she watches over women in childbirth.
Artemis, like her brother Apollo, is a Northerner. She was worshipped with the title of Queen in Thrace and in Pæonia, and it is there that her aspect as moon goddess is most clearly evident. There, too, she has the title of Hekate, the Far Darter, the feminine of Apollo Hekatos. As Hekate, as moon goddess, she has her dark and spectral side, and is compact of magic and spells. The moon has her frightening side, she stares down on man with her cold, pitiless eye, a spectral terror charged with magic. But the moon has her gentler and fairer aspect. And this Artemis, when she comes to take people in death, she kills them gently, mercifully, and “with shafts that hurt not strikes and lays them low”.
Artemis, of all the divine maidens, is austerely virginal. While Athena refuses marriage, she is still, in foster mother, guardian, and friend to many a hero. The relation of these early and husbandless matriarchal goddesses to the male figures who attend them is one altogether noble and womanly. It is a relation between mother and lover, but like a patron saint. The goddesses ask of the men whom they inspire and protect, not that he should love and adore, but that he should do great deeds. Such a relation is that of Hera to Jason, of Athena to Perseus, to Herakles, to Theseus. They are to be heroes! With the coming of patriarchal conditions the goddesses are sequestered to a servile domesticity, they become abject and amorous. By Artemis alone among the maidens this high companionship with heroes is all but renounced. She dwells apart in lonely mountains and wild, untouched forests. She is most of all the Lady of the Wild Things.
Accordingly the local cults of Artemis are not untainted by primitive savagery. At Messene Pausanias was witness of a horrid ritual in honour of Artemis Laphria. He tells us of…
…a hall of the Kuretes, where they sacrifice without distinction all animals, beginning with oxen and goats and ending with birds; they throw them all into the fire.
The Kuretes were ministrants of the Great Mother, to whom Artemis was near kin. Pausanias again tells us, in detail, of the ritual of this Great Mother at Hierapolis:
In the court of the sanctuary were kept all manner of beasts and birds, consecrated oxen, horses, eagles, bears, and lions who never hurt anybody, but are holy and tame to handle.
But these tame, holy beasts were kept for a horrid holocaust, which Lucian thus describes:
Of all the festivals the greatest that I know of they hold at the beginning of the spring. At this festival they do as follows. They cut down great trees and set them up in the courtyard. Then they bring sheep and goats and other live beasts and hang them upon the trees. They also bring birds and clothes and vessels of gold and silver. When they have made all ready, they carry the victims round the trees and set fire to them, and straightway they are all burned.
Just such a holocaust was held in honour of Artemis at Patræ. After describing the altar, surrounded by a circle of green logs of wood and approached by an inclined plane made of earth, he tells of the procession of the virgin priestess in a car drawn by deer. Of the sacrifice itself, he says it was not merely a State affair, but popular among private persons:
For they bring and cast upon the altar living things of all sorts, both edible birds and all manner of victims, also wild boars and deer and fawns, and some even bring the cubs of wolves and bears, and others full grown beasts. I saw, indeed, a bear and other beasts struggling to get out of the first force of the flames and escaping by sheer strength. But those who threw them in dragged them up again on to the fire. I never heard of anyone being wounded by the wild beasts.
Most horrible of all, among the Tauri, the local Artemis demanded human blood. In later days the conscience of Greece revolted, and Euripides makes Iphigeneia, doomed to sacrifice her brother, cry out against Artemis who “herself doth drink the blood of slaughtered men”. About this same time, the Persians stopped the Western Semites in Syria and the Levant from sacrificing children to the flames of Melekh, an incident symbolized in the bible by the substitution of a lamb for Abraham.
It is a relief to turn from these savage ceremonials to a gentler aspect of Artemis. On the Acropolis at Athens there was a precinct sacred to Artemis of Brauron. This precinct must have seen strange sights. In it was enacted the arkteia or bear service. In one of the comedies of Aristophanes the chorus of women tell how they were reared at the expense of the State. The State wisely took them in hand early.
As soon as I was seven years old I became an Errephoros, when I was ten I was grinder to our Sovereign Lady, then, wearing the saffron robe, I was a bear in the Brauronian festival.
That Artemis herself in Arcadia was a bear does not, perhaps, much surprise us, and Pausanias tells us that one of her worshippers was turned into a bear. No doubt in rude Arcadia the bear was a much dreaded creature, whom it was wise to propitiate. But to find, in the Christian era, at civilized Athens, a bear cult is not a little astounding, and shows strikingly how tenacious is ancient tradition. We do not know the precise nature of the ritual, though we do know that no well born Athenian man dare marry a maiden unless she had been consecrated as a bear to Artemis. Probably these little Athenian girls, wrapped in yellow bearskins, would dance and crouch bear fashion before the goddess Artemis, and the little girls were safe from marriage for the ensuing year.
It seems the Athenians got a little ashamed of the rude ritual. A saffron robe was substituted for the bearskin, and from the time of Aristophanes we hear more of the dedication of raiment than of the dancing of bears. One maiden, we learn from an inscription in the British Museum, offers a cloak of carded wool, another her saffron robe, a third her mirror with an ivory handle. The list is a long one, and the goddess, if she wore all the dedicated raiment, must have had enough to put on. She was very gracious, and disdained nothing. Here and there some cloak or shawl is noted down as a “rag”.
The virginity of Artemis in her tenderest aspect makes her specially gentle to the young maiden. An epigram of the Anthology shows this in charming fashion. A young girl, Timaretê, dedicates to her local Artemis, as Lady of the Lake, her clothes and her childish toys and doll before her marriage. Korê is Greek for both maiden and doll.
The derivation of the name Artemis is not so clear as that of Hera or Athena. It seems probable, however, though not quite certain, that the goddess took her name from a healing herb much in use in antiquity, the artemisia or mugwort, known also as the Mother of Herbs and as Tutsan (tout saint) or All Heal. The mugwort has fallen out of the modern pharmacopoeia.
In Parkinson’s Herbal we are told that the mugwort or wormwood possessed the power of dispelling demons. It was used in the Midsummer ceremonials of S John’s Eve for making girdles, and was called S John’s herb. The herb doctor, Culpepper, says that a hot decoction of the herb was used to promote delivery and to remove tumours. In a word, it was essentially a woman’s medicine, and was sometimes called parthenium.
Another herbalist, Gerarde, notes from Pliny that the mugwort “doth properly cure women’s diseases”. It is specially noted that the mugwort grew in great profusion on Mount Taygetos in Arcadia, the favourite hunting ground of Artemis. A manuscript of the eleventh century shows Artemis in the act of giving the mugwort to the centaur Cheiron, the ancient physician who dwelt on Mount Pelion in Thessaly. The reputation of the mugwort lasted on till modern days.
Whether, as Dr Rendel Harris has supposed, Artemis actually got her name from the artemisia, one thing is clear, the healing herb was closely associated with her cult. It brings us to a neglected aspect of her nature. Artemis, like her twin brother Apollo, was a healer.
Apollo, Sophocles tells us, had in the North an “ancient garden”, and this garden, no doubt, was not of flowers, but of healing herbs. Hekate, who was, as we have seen, but the magical moon aspect of Artemis, had a similar garden, which Medea the sorceress visited, and of which we have an account in the Orphic Argonautica. It was shady with leaf bearing trees, and in it grew many a magic herb, black poppy, smilax, mandragora, aconite, and other “baneful plants”.
In the Hippolytus of Euripides, Artemis, all huntress, is worshipped by the huntsman Hippolytus. In an ancient treatise on hunting we are told that hunters must pay homage to Artemis Agrotera, She of the Wild. They must pour libation, sing hymns, and offer firstfruits of the game taken, and they must crown the goddess. It is pleasant to learn also that the hunters must crown their dogs, and that dogs and huntsmen must feast together. But when Hippolytus comes to pay this service to Artemis, to our surprise he finds her not as Agrotera on the mountain or in the wilds of the forest, but in a garden enclosed, a holy magical place. This holy place, this garden enclosed, was the herb garden of Artemis the Healer.
Apollo (Phœbus)
Apollo is the dread bowman, second only in power to Zeus on Olympus, but the god of the silver bow has many other functions and attributes. He has much the same simple beginning as his sister, the herbalist Artemis. If he can hurt, he can also heal. His healing aspects appears clearly in one of his names—Pæan. Apollo Pæan is Apollo the Healer. The word, detached, came to mean a song of delivery from battle or pestilence or famine, a pæan, in our sense. Probably these pæans were at first magical charms chanted over wounds, but the meaning spread to include chants of delivery from all manner of evil.
The primary meaning, however, of the term “pæan” was simpler. Pæan was He of Pæonia, and Pæonia took its name from the peony flower. Nicholas Culpepper says, “Peony is an herb of the sun”, and is a healing herb of Apollo. On the mountain tops of Greece, especially in the Balkans, it still grows lavishly. The plant came to Greece from China and Japan by way of Persia, and in Japan it is still credited with portentous powers. The Greek form is the single red peony, not the double variety familiar in our gardens. Though Culpepper says it is a "herb of the sun," it was largely prescribed for diseases supposed to be caused by the moon—nightmares and melancholy—and was used as a prophylactic against insanity and convulsions. The peony was under the special guardianship of the woodpecker, and he piously pecked out the eyes of those who dug it up by daylight.
Apollo, then, as Pæan, was, we may take it, a herbalist doctor like Artemis, and, like Artemis, he came from Northern Pæonia. Like Artemis also, he had an astral aspect. If Artemis was the moon, Apollo assuredly was the sun.
The Pæonian image of Helios is a small disc carried on a long pole. It was carried in procession. The ancients were themselves well aware that Apollo was the sun and Artemis the moon. When the barbarians were invading Greece they refrained from ravaging both Delos and Ephesos, “for the sun is held to be Apollo, and Artemis to be the moon”.
It happens that we know in some detail the ritual in which Apollo figures as the sun. At Thebes, at the festival of the Daphnephoria, or festival of the Laurel Carrying, the order of the ritual was as follows. It was a ceremonial strangely like the Maypole ceremonies that still survive today. The ritual object carried is half maypole, half orrery. They wreathe a pole of olive wood with laurel and various flowers. On the top is fitted a bronze globe, from which they suspend smaller ones. Midway round the pole they place a lesser globe, binding it with purple fillets, but the end of the pole is decked with saffron. By the topmost globe they mean the sun, to which they actually compare Apollo. The globe beneath this is the moon, the smaller globes hung on are the stars and constellations, and the fillets are the course of the year—for they make them 365 in number.
The Daphnephoria is headed by a boy, both whose parents are alive, and his nearest male relation carries the filleted pole, to which they give the name Kopo. The Daphnephoros himself, who follows next, holds on to the laurel. He has his hair hanging loose, he wears a golden wreath, and he is dressed out in a splendid robe to his feet, and he wears light shoes. There follows him a choros of maidens, holding out boughs before them to enforce the supplication of the hymns. The procession of the Daphnephoria is to the sanctuary of Apollo Ismenios and Him of the Hail.
The association of Apollo with the laurel gave rise to the wearing of “Apollo’s bays”. Ælian tells us that Apollo made himself a wreath of the laurel of Tempe, and, taking in his right hand a branch of this same laurel, he came to Delphi and “took over the oracle”. We think of Apollo in connection with the bay as the oracular god. But Ælian is right; the bay was not at first prophetic, and Apollo was, to begin with, no oracular god. When, in coming south, he reached Delphi, he took over the oracle from the ancient earth goddess already in possession.
Apollo is a northerner, from the Valley of Tempe, which lies at the base of Olympus. We have seen him worshipped in Pæonia. Can we go farther north? By the help of another title of Apollo we can. Apollo is Hyperboreios. Boreas, we know, is the North Wind, and the Hyperboreans, over whom Apollo reigned, used to be explained as the people beyond the North Wind. But the term “Boreas” still needs elucidation. Boreas means the mountain wind, and the word “Bora” still survives as the name of a mountain in old Serbia, and its correlative in Slavonic is “Gora”.
As regards the Hyperboreans, we have a curious legend told us both by Pausanias and Herodotus a legend that intimately concerns us. Herodotus made diligent inquiry about the Hyperboreans in Scythia, but could learn nothing. But at Delos he learned that:
Delian girls and boys cut their hair in honour of certain Hyperborean maidens who died at Delos. The girls, before their marriage, cut off a tress and lay it on the tomb, which is at the foot of an olive tree, on the left hand of the entrance to the Temple of Artemis. And the Delian boys twine some of their hair round a green stalk and likewise lay it on the tomb.
From immemorial times, the legend went, the Hyperboreans had sent year by year, to Delos certain secret sacred offerings wrapped in wheat straw from their northern home. The first time they sent two maidens, but, as the messengers never returned, the Hyperboreans were “very ill content”, and from then on they sent the offerings only to their own borders, and charged their neighbours to send them from their country to the next, and so the offerings came at last to Delos. Herodotus and Pausanias give two different routes difficult to reconcile. The story seems to enshrine memories of ancient trade routes from the northern land behind the mountain to the southern isle of Delos.
And what about the secret sacred offerings? Pausanias says that no one knew what lay under the straw that enwrapped them. If anyone could have found out, the prying Pausanias was the man. The trade route, however, yields up the secret. One of the treasures hidden beneath the wheatsheaves was amber.
The Celts regarded amber as the tears of Apollo, and it seems they thought it exuded from the apple tree. Euripides makes amber to be the tears shed by Phaëthon’s sisters over his grave. And who is Phaëthon but Apollo? In the Hippolytus, the chorus sings, “Phaëthon’s sad sisters by his grave weep into the river, and each tear gleams, a drop of amber, in the wave”.
The Baltic, with its pine trees, is a great amber producing country, and this fossil resin was early prized as an ornament. It is found in Mycenæan tombs and in the lake dwellings of Switzerland. The amber districts of the Baltic were known far and wide in prehistoric times, and led to trade with Southern Europe. Amber was carried in caravans to Marseilles, to Olbia in the Black Sea, and to the Eridanus at the head of the Adriatic. From these three centres it spread over the whole of the Hellenic world.
But besides amber, a thing in itself beautiful and magical, the holy sheaves contained another, unlooked for treasure—the apple, the sacred fruit of Apollo himself.
The discovery of the connection of Apollo with the apple tree, and the derivation of the name Apollo from “apple”, is one of the triumphs of modern research. Dr Rendel Harris has traced Apollo from the apple island Abalus, on the coast of Frisia, over the Carpathians, through the Bora district in old Servia, down through Greece to Delos, finding all along the route apple names as halting stations for the god. Apollo himself in Thessaly is called Aploun.
As Apollo came south, he dropped his northern apple tree and assumed instead the poplar and the bay. But there is evidence enough. There is, first, his title Mâleates (He of the Apple). In the Temple of Asclepios at Athens sacrifice was made, first to Mâleates, and then to Apollo. More striking still is the evidence from Delphi. Lucian makes Solon tell of the prizes in the athletic contests:
At Olympia a wreath of wild olive, at the Isthmus one of pine, at Nemea of parsley, at Pytho some of the god’s sacred apples.
On a coin of Delphi we have the sacred table of the god represented. On it is a sprig of bay, a wine vessel, and a pile of apples. Over the apples watches Apollo’s raven, and piously abstains from pecking at them.
It may well be that Apollo’s apple tree had another claim to sanctity. The white variety of mistletoe grows chiefly, not on oaks, but on apple trees, and this notably in England, while in Brittany it attaches itself chiefly to another Apollo tree—the poplar. It may be that Apollo gained some of his healing power from the mistletoe that hangs on his apple boughs. The Ainu of Japan even today hold the mistletoe as specially sacred. Sometimes they eat it as a food, and sometimes drink it as a medical decoction. They regard it as “good in almost every disease”. Pliny says that the Druids called it, in their language, Omnia Sanantem—that is, All Heal. Culpepper writes in detail on the mistletoe, “its government and virtues”, and adds “that the mistletoe is under the dominion of the sun, I do not question”.
Again, we do not naturally, nowadays, connect Apollo with the mistletoe. But mistletoe in Greek is ixos, and, in one of the towns of Rhodes, Apollo was worshipped under the title of Ixios Apollo—Mistletoe Apollo. Is it not possible that, in Apollo, fairest and goodliest of the Olympians, Apollo the northerner, Apollo of the mistletoe, we have but the counterpart of the young Baltic divinity, Balder the Beautiful?
Ares (Mars)
Ares, the war god brother of Apollo, need not long detain us. He, too, is a northerner, but of Thrace, and, unlike Apollo, he is never really affiliated to Olympus. He is splendid and forceful, but never really respected. Ares is a god, but he is unhonoured by the orthodox gods, the Olympians. Like Apollo, one of his aspects was originally that of a sun god. As such he appears on the coins of Thrace, and the Homeric Hymn writer addresses him as “thou that whirlest thy flaming sphere among the courses of the sky”, but he is Helios Hades, god of the setting, not the rising, sun. As such he is the bringer of death, not only in battle, but by pestilence and famine. In the Œdipus Tyrannos, when the city lies smitten by the plague, the chorus call on Dionysos, god of gladness and life, to banish Ares, him of slaughter and death. They sing:
Draw nigh, thou and thy Mænad throng. Drive from us with bright torch of blazing pine the god unhonoured by the gods divine.Sophocles
Hermes (Mercury)
Hermes is least of the Olympians, but works hardest. He is the herald, the messenger, the servant in general. As messenger, he appears in the Iliad. To him Zeus entrusted the difficult and delicate mission of escorting Priam to the tent of Achilles, and he acquits himself of the task with a tact really divine. Again, in the Odyssey it is Hermes who is commissioned to go to the nymph Calypso, and bid her despatch Odysseus to his home.
Hermes is messenger from Olympus to Earth. He is also messenger from Earth to Hades under the Earth. When Odysseus has slain the suitors, it is Hermes who comes to conduct their souls to Hades. He is Psychopompos. Such is Hermes as we know him today, as Homer composed him. Pausanias says:
Touching Hermes,the poems of Homer have given currency to the report that he is the servant of Zeus, and leads down to hell the souls of the departed.
This goodly young messenger, with the winged sandals and the golden wand, in what form was he actually worshipped? The answer comes as a distinct shock. He was worshipped as a herm“”that is, as a rude block or post, later surmounted by a head. Pausanias, when he came to Pharæ in Achaia, saw an image of Hermes Agoraios (He of the Market).
It was of square shape, surmounted by a head with a beard. It was of no great size. In front of it was a hearth made of stone with bronze lamps clamped to it with lead. Beside it an oracle is established. He who would consult the oracle comes at evening, burns incense on the hearth, lights the lamps, lays a coin of the country on the altar to the right of the image and whispers his question into the ear of the god. Then he stops his ears and quits the market place, and when he is gone outside a little way, he uncovers his ears and whatever word he hears that he takes for an oracle.
Not only Hermes, but, it would seem, many of the other gods, began their ritual life as hermæ. At Pharæ, close to the image of Hermes, Pausanias tells us…
…stood about thirty square stones. These the people of Pharæ revered, giving to each stone the name of a god… And in the olden time all the Greeks worshipped unwrought stones instead of images.
At Orchomenos in Bœotia, where was a very ancient sanctuary of the Charities or Graces, their images were “stones that had fallen from heaven.” Pausanias elsewhere tells us that the square shaped images of Hermes were first used by the Athenians, who were a people “zealous in all religious matters”, and from Athens their usage passed to the remainder of Greece. The sanctity of these square shaped hermæ was seen in the panic that ran through Athens when, just at the time of the fatal Sicilian expedition, the sacred hermæ were sacrilegiously mutilated.
Nothing could apparently be more unlike the winged messenger Hermes than the rude, immovable, square herm. The anomaly struck the Greeks themselves. Babrius, writing in the second or third century AD, makes the god himself wonder what on earth he was. Was he a tombstone, a wayside post, or was he an immortal?
The answer to the god’s own question might hardly have been found in Greece, but from the old Slavonic rites of Russia comes a simple solution. After they had held a sort of “wake” over the dead man, the body was burned, and the ashes were placed in a small urn and set up on a pillar or herm on the boundary line of two properties. The dead grandfather was the object of special reverence, under the title of “tchur”, which means in Russian either “grandfather” or “boundary”. The grandfather looked after the patriarchal family during his life, he safeguarded its boundaries in death. His monument was at once tombstone and term.
Hermes, then, to begin with, is just a herm, a pillar or square stone to keep the dead in memory and mark his grave. In form it is identical with a boundary stone. The mourner hopes and believes that his kinsman, loving and faithful in life, will be faithful in death. So when the autumn comes and he sows his seed, burying it in the ground, he believes that his father or his grandfather, if duly mourned and honoured, will look after the seed in the underworld. The herm becomes a giver of increase (charidotes).
Nor is this the end. During their lifetime a man will go to the elders of his tribe, to his father and his grandfather, and ask for counsel in time of need. Surely, now they are dead, they have not quite forgotten him. So, as night falls and ghosts are about, he steals to the grave and whispers to the herm his question. Even if the herm be dumb, the first chance word spoken by a passerby seems miraculous. There is always magic in the dead, because they have passed into the unknown, and, when the living fail, they may have power to help. So on the herm is painted the rhabdos, which, to begin with, is not a messenger’s staff at all, but a magician’s wand. And about the wand is coiled a snake, for a snake is the symbol—the incarnation—of the dead man, and creeps and coils about his tomb.
Little by little the herm takes over the guardianship of all that man prizes. If the worshipper is a shepherd, the herm tends his sheep and rams, and becomes Criophoros (the Ram Bearer), the prototype of Christ, the Good Shepherd. Always the herm is guardian of children and young men. He is Kourotrophos (Child Rearer). As such Praxiteles made his great statue of Hermes carrying the child Dionysos.
Exactly how the long leap was taken to Olympus we do not know. When the high gods settled in Olympus, it was not unnatural that their humble Pelasgian brother should be received as messenger and servant. He had always been the means of communication between the upper and the lower world. But when he became the messenger of the Olympian gods, he had to shift his shape. His feet, once so firmly rooted in the ground, must be loosed and fitted with golden sandals, his magician’s wand with snakes becomes a herald’s staff, and he himself is no longer a bearded man, but a youth with the down on his cheek, “the time when youth is most goodly”.
One interesting link between Hermes and his more magnificent brother, Apollo, remains to be noted. Both are musicians. The lyre is as much his attribute as the bow or the bay.
In the charming Homeric Hymn to Hermes we are told how Maia, the fair tressed nymph, bare to Zeus the babe Hermes, Lord of Cyllene and Arcadia, rich in sheep. Bouncing from his mother into the cradle, then off into the world, he finds a tortoise and shows how its “gay garment” (shell) can make an instrument different from the lyre. The lyre is purely a stringed instrument like the harp; the instrument made by Hermes out of the chelys, or tortoise shell, has a sounding board. It is the rudimentary form of the modern violin. The chelys of Hermes was characteristic of the south, the lyre of Apollo of the north.
Poseidon (Neptune)
In the Iliad, Poseidon—who is called Shaker of the Earth, sounding more like Hephaestos—claims equality with Zeus. Poseidon and Zeus are constantly in all but open warfare. Zeus by the mouth of Iris threatens Poseidon with wrath and retribution, and Poseidon, greatly enraged, claims to be, like Zeus and Hades, a son of Kronos and Rhea, and equal in potency. The children of Poseidon are an impious and outrageous race, giants and Cyclopes. Mutual antagonism and bad kids are signs that gods are not of the same family at all but are strangers. Poseidon is a foreigner, some thought a Phœnician.
Poseidon is god of the sea and to the Greek the sea was a barren salty waste where he might not sow or plough or reap. It was the “unharvested sea”. It yielded, however, one form of nutriment—fish; and, unlike the Homeric heroes, the classical Greeks were largely fish eaters. Poseidon was the expression of the hopes and desires of a fisher people. His trident was the fisherman’s three pronged spear.
What is surprising is that Poseidon was Tamer of Horses and Saviour of Ships or “giver of horses and of ships with spreading sails”, in each case first he was concerned with horses. Elsewhere:
First on Attic roads thy bridle tamed the steed for evermore, and well swings at sea, a wonder in the rower’s hand, the oar bounding after all the hundred Nereid feet that fly before.
On a fragment of Corinthian pottery not later than the seventh century BC, Poseidon is riding on a horse. In his right hand he holds his trident, not usually considered a horseman’s weapon! Horses were sacrificed to him in his rituals. Every ninth year, in Illyria, a yoke of four horses was sunk in the waters. Pausanias tells us that the Argives threw horses bitted and bridled into Dione in honour of Poseidon. An obvious inference is that the horses are the metaphorical white horses of the spumy wave, but Dione here was a fresh water spring.
Poseidon, then, is sea god and horse god. But he is also a bull god. One of Poseidon’s standing epithets was Taureus (The One of the Bull), the Bull God the Earth Shaker. On a black figured vase, Poseidon, lord of the sea, is seated on a bull. His left hand grasps a fish, and behind him stands his trident. In his right hand, he holds a blossoming bough. What has the bull god to do with the sea and the trident? What congruity is there between the salt sea fish and the blossoming bough?
The animal on which a god stands or rides, or whose head he wears, is usually the primitive animal form of the god himself. Poseidon, who had once the form of a horse, was also once a bull.
In the story of the death of Hippolytos, Poseidon has granted to Theseus, father of Hippolytos and son of Poseidon, three wishes. Hippolytos is driving his chariot by the seashore, and Theseus curses his innocent son:
And by Poseidon’s breath He shall fall swiftly to the house of Death.
Hippolytos gets to the Gulf of Saronis when three great waves rose, their echoes roaring from the land, sweeping towards him, and “a wild Sea Bull flung to the shore, a fell and marvellous Thing”. The wild sea bull seems to have been a tsunami. In like wise, the horses of Poseidon quite possibly were the foaming waves, as suspected, and occasionally, Poseidon becomes a bull!
An honest god’s the noblest work of man
It is not the god who comes first and creates the worshipper, it is the worshippers who, in their own image, create, imagine, as we should say nowadays, project the god.Jane Harrison
The answer comes from the question, “Who and what were the worshippers of Poseidon, and what their environment?”. Can we in antiquity find a people who fulfilled the conditions of Poseidon worshippers? A people who were agriculturalists, reared horses and cattle, dwelt by the sea and fished in a place where tsunamis were known and terrifying, and wordhipped a bull. Crete is the answer! Poseidon is the Minotaur, the bull of Minos, or rather Poseidon is how Greeks visualized the Cretan civilization. The Cretans did not so much breed horses themselves, but they were such a wealthy people they imported horses, and so became associated with them by their suppliers.
A seal impression found at Cnossos shows us a one masted vessel with rowers. On the vessel is a large horse. Sir Arthur Evans thought it signified the importation of horses. From the plaiting of its mane and his upspringing tail, it is a Libyan bred horse. Herodotus wrote:
The god Poseidon the Greeks learned of the Libyans, for no people except the Libyans had the name Poseidon, and they have always worshipped him.
The Minotaur itself was the king acting the bull in some ritual in which he guised as a bull. Guising was a habit that lasted until the late middle ages even in Britain. The custom of carrying a bull’s head aloft on a pole still survived with Berkshire Morris dancers. At Ephesus the young men who poured out wine at the festival of Poseidon were called Tauroi (bulls). A painting of a tsunami has been dug up at Santorini, the ancient Greek island of Thera which eventually exploded violently. Such eruptions and the earthquakes that were likely to have been even more common will have thrown tsunami waves against the neighbouring shores, and given rise to the idea of the sea being a mad bull. The coast of Asia Minor by Ephesus would have been as vulnerable to waves thrown up from the colliding plates across the Aegean.
During the third and early second millennia BC the Cretans wanted to conquer and colonize Greece. Each landing place of the immigrant Cretans is a site of Poseidon worship, and the remains found their are described as Mycenæan—Minoan or Cretan. We cannot here give the full archæological evidence. All round the mainland coast of Greece are Poseidon sanctuaries and Mycenæan antiquities. Telemachus, in the Odyssey, seeking his father, comes to Pylos, on the western coast of the Peloponnese. There, at the castle of Neleus, lives old Nestor, “tamer of horses”. By the sea, the local people sacrificed coal black bulls, and offered oblations to “the blue haired Shaker of the Earth” also called the “Girdler of the Earth”. Beehive tombs, found at this place, are characteristic of late Minoan civilization. Mycenæan antiquities and Poseidon sanctuaries are found all along the coast of Greece, right up to the north of Thessaly, where they quite suddenly end, perhaps where the danger of tsunami waves from near Crete end.
The failure of Poseidon to dominate anywhere shows the Minoan civilization took hold on the mainland for a time, but was ultimately ousted, partly at first by the Pelasgians, then by the Hellenic invaders from the north.
The myth of Theseus suggests the yoke of Crete which held sway over Athens was beaten by the people enslaved, and the monster overthrown. Theseus is the God Zeus, and the myth is the legend of the fall of Crete at some time after it was weakened by the explosion of Thera. In Homer, Poseidon is a powerful but an alien god. He is Crete, and Cretan civilization was great as Hellenic civilization, but which could never wholly be accepted by Greece. The were probably Semites related to the Phœnicians, who were the biblical Canaanites.
The Mother Of The Gods
The god of Crete gave rise to the Greek god Poseidon, but the Cretan goddess gave rise to the Greek Great Mother. A clay seal impression found by Sir Arthur Evans at Cnossos shows a high peaked mountain, at the apex of which a goddess stands. She holds a sceptre in her outstretched hand, and for guardians she has two fierce lions, one to either side in solemn heraldic fashion. These lions on the mainland protect the great gate of the citadel of Mycenæ. Between them, at Mycenæ, is a column which represents the goddess. In the Cretan sealing, she is clad in a skirt with its many flounces. Behind the Mountain Mother on the seal is a Mycenæan shrine with its odd columns and horns, marking a cult whose god was a bull headed man. Before the goddess stands a worshipper rapt in ecstasy.
Another aspect of the goddess has her rising out of the ground, in which she is knee deep. She wears the Cretan flounced skirt and a short sleeved bodice, showing her breasts. She is altogether the mother. To either side of her are two blossoming plants, also rising from the ground. In her left hand she grasps three poppy capsules. The poppy, with its countless seeds, is always the emblem of fertility. Over her right shoulder are seen the heads of three snakes. Her right wrist is grasped by a male attendant, who lifts her from the ground. It is the Mother goddess rising from the earth in the spring. The scene depicted is what the Greeks called the Anodos (up rising). This Anodos was known to us on countless Greek vases, but here is its source in Crete. At Delphi, at Athens, and at Megara, the Greeks had rites of summoning or calling up the Goddess. One of these rites was called the Bringing up of Semele. Semele is the Thracian form of Gê or Gaia, the Earth.
Zeus, the Olympian patriarchal father god, largely effaced the Great Mother, but could not fully erase her. The priestesses at the ancient oracular shine of Dodona chanted her name in their litany:
Earth sends up fruits, so praise we Earth the Mother.
And at Delphi the priestess began her formal ritual address to the gods:
First in my prayer before all other gods, I call on Earth, primeval prophetess.
The Great Mother is called upon first, signifying that she was at Delphi before Poseidon, before Dionysos, before Apollo. In Greece the Mother and the Father gods are characteristic of the two main theological strata, the Mother is Pelasgian and Minoan, the Father Indo European—Hellenic. The Mother is accompanied usually by a male attendant, either son or lover, but his position is always subordinate. It stood for the guardianship of Athena, Hera, Artemis over their heroes. The author of the Homeric Hymn describes her and her gifts:
Concerning Earth, the mother of all, shall I sing, firm Earth, eldest of gods, that nourishes all things in the world; all things that fare on the sacred land, all things in the sea, all flying things, all are fed out of her store. Through thee, revered goddess, are men happy in their children and fortunate in their harvest. Thine it is to give or to take life from mortal men. Happy is he whom thou honourest with favouring heart, to him all good things are present innumerable—his fertile field is laden, his meadows are rich in cattle, his house filled with all good things. Such men rule righteously in cities of fair women, great wealth and riches are theirs, their children grow glorious in fresh delights, their maidens joyfully dance and sport through the soft meadow flowers in floral revelry. Such are those that thou honourest, holy goddess, kindly spirit. Hail, Mother of the Gods, thou wife of starry Ouranos, and freely in return for my ode give me livelihood sufficient.
Note that the Great Mother preceded Zeus. She was remembered as “Wife of Starry Ouranos”. On the Orphic gold tablet buried with him to ensure his safety is inscribed the proud confession:
I am the child of Earth and of Starry Heaven.
The change effected by the Patriarchal invaders is illustrated by a vase in the Oxford Ashmolean Museum, in which the uprising figure is marked Pandora. Pandora, the first woman, in Hesiod was made from clay by Hephaestus then had bequethed a gift from each of the Olympians. She was meant to be beautiful and beguiling to men but meant nothing but trouble. Pandora opened, not a box, but a pithos, a large earthenware jar used in those days for storing almost anything, wine, oil, grain, even bodies—they were used for burial. Diogenes lived in a pithos not a barrel. The picture of Pandora and the pithos was originally the image of the Great Mother with her store of grain, wine, oil and so on, her cornucopia, the real horn of plenty, the annual harvest, her gifts to humanity.
Patriarchy reinterpreted the image of the Great Mother, with her pithos full of the gifts of the earth, to suit themselves. They turned her into an empty headed bimbo letting loose the woes of the world, when, as the wife of Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus, she opened the pithos she was not supposed to touch. It was propaganda, something scholars usually fail to recognize. An intermediate version of the myth of Pandora proves it. The pithos belongs, in this intermediate myth to Prometheus and stands for the gifts he had brought for humanity. Pandora opened it prematurely and let them all escape except Hope, which was at the bottom and could not get out before the lid was replaced. So, here, Prometheus brings the gifts as a direct replacement for the Great Mother, and the images that were everywhere, and the older myth were explained away. These reinterpretations were not mistakes. They were intended. The god of patriarchal tribes like the Hellenes, Father Zeus, would have no Great Earth Mother in Olympus. She who gave all things quite openly is made into the slave of man, his plaything, his sex object, the brainless, bimbo woman.
The Earth Mother can be followed to the mainland and her influence on the Pelasgian goddesses revealed, how she gave to Aphrodite her doves, and to Athene her snakes.
Demeter And Persephone (Ceres And Proserpine)
Demeter means Grain Mother. She is a derivative of the Earth Mother who preceded her because primitive people saw the earth as a mother before they settled into agriculture. She was as significantly a mother when people were still hunter gatherers. When the hunters settled as herdsmen then as agriculturalists, the Great Mother evolved into a Grain Mother, Demeter.
It seems odd to some that heavy farming work like grain production should be attributed to a mother, but mothers produce children and the earth was always a goddess in this sense. Moreover, women started agriculture. In the presettled existence of hunter gathering, the man went away in groups hunting. Woman, responsible for children, gathered roots and fruits close to home. They were the ones who gathered the nutritious grain seeds from wild grasses and too them home to nibble, inventing pots and baskets to carry things in. They were the ones who noticed that these same grasses began to grow around their huts, and realize why. And at leat two out of three parts of the diet were gathered rather than hunted.
The men realized that it was what the women did that fed them most of the time, and that their own efforts gave them a feast occasionally. They dare not interfere in what they thought must be magical, and had something to do with the women bringing forth children. In Payne’s History of the New World, an Indian explained:
When the women plant maize, the stalk produces two or three ears. Why? Because women know how to produce children. Only they know how to plant the corn so as to be sure of it germinating. Then let them plant it, they know more than we do.
It precisely shows the attitude of Stone Age men to women in what many consider a matriarchal society, though patriarchal historians and anthropologists cannot bear to hear of it.
Homer will not say anything about the Rape of Persephone and the Mourning of Demeter, of the Kathodos or going down into Hades, and the Anodos, the rising up in spring. He mentions Demeter as dwelling on earth, not on Olympus. She stands demeaned with her yellow hair at the sacred threshing floor when men are winnowing, and she divides grain from chaff. Persephone is for Homer not Korê, not the lovely maiden form of the Grain Mother, but the dread Queen of the underworld, ruling in Hades. Odysseus, wanting to talk to the dead heroes in Hades was scared that “Persephone the dread From Hades should send up the awful monster’s grisly head”."
In fact, Demeter did have a dark side, like Kali, the Indian goddess. The earth yielded its gifts but it also received the dead:
Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life, And rears and takes again into her womb.Æschylus
Athenians called the dead Demetreioi, Demeter’s People, and the Gorgon’s head is a ritual mask meant to be a ghost or somebody dead. They are commonplace among the rituals of primitive tribes still. The gorgon is a monster invented to account for the ritual mask. The Earth Mother, as guardian of the dead, has a terrifying aspect, that of a gorgon. A Rhodian plate in the British Museum shows the Great Mother grasping in her hands two birds, with human body and feet. She is winged, and has a gorgon’s head with pendent tongue, glaring eyes and great tusks.
Demeter, as guardian of ghosts, is called Demeter Erinys, erinys being an angry ghost. Erinyes, angry ghosts, figures of terror and vengeance, become in the Eumenides of Æschylus, figures of fertility, holy and benign, carrying, in one hand, their underground snakes, in the other, fruit and flowers. Greek religion, as understood by dramatists like Æschylus, was meant to tranform fear and ugliness into beauty and tranquillity.
Dionysos
Homer does not recognize two gods who, by the middle of the fifth century BC, were on Olympus, and shown on the Parthenon frieze (the Elgin Marbles). These two gods, Dionysos and Eros, are Mystery gods. Dionysos comprised elements of two previous non-Hellenic gods:
- a god of wine, orgy, and ecstasy from Thrace
- a Cretan mystery god, Zagreus, who is substantially the Egyptian god of immortality, Osiris.
His name really means “The Young God”, making him a new or infant version of Zeus. He is the son of his mother, Semele, and later is affiliated to Zeus by a rebirth. Semele is the Thracian earth goddess. “Zemlya” is Slavonic for “earth”. The worship of Dionysos is matriarchal. It is a return to goddess worship under the guise of a god. The mother is worshipped as well as of the son, but often she is disguised as the nurse. Bacchantes are mothers—they tend the young of wild things, and they have magical power to make the whole world break into blossom. At the great ritual of the mothers all Creation stirs anew, “And all the mountains felt, and worshipped with them, and the wild things knelt and ramped and gloried”. It is why Dionysos and his mother were not welcome on a patriarchal Olympus!
The worship of Dionysos has an important characteristic that distinguishes him from other Greek gods, but is easily recognizable in Christianity. Dionysos has a congregation, a band of devotees. What the Greeks called a thiasos. His worshipping band are called Satyrs, his mother’s are Mænads. In it is an important psychological discovery for religion, the psychology of the group. Euripides said of the Bacchic initiate, “His soul is congregationalized”. Dionysos is the god of ecstasy, but the ecstatic feeling is conjured by the group, not just individually. Other gods did not have a thiasos, but, perhaps, once they all did. The Olympians had long passed this stage. Their worship was not an ecstasy. It was a routine service of sacrifice, prayer, and praise.
Poseidon and all the Olympians, perhaps all gods, are projections of the wants, desires, imaginings, hopes of the worshipper. Dionysos fulfils the hopes, and so on, of the worshipper when they strive to become him. The god is a projection of the group worshipping him, and the group must become the likeness of the god. By becoming one with the god he had projected, the worshipper of Dionysos attained the immortality of the god. That is the doctrine of each mystery religion.
Strive not thou to become a god. The things of mortals best become mortality.Pindar
No one sought to become Zeus or Athene or Apollo. That would have seemed folly and insolence. If this striving worked, it would be a clever way of getting people to strive to be their perfect selves. But by no means, is everyone up to it. Plato says in a citation from an Orphic text that “Many are the wand bearers, few are the Bacchoi”. “Many are called but few chosen”, as Matthew puts it. While all Christians think they are saved, few of them will think about this.
Another trait marks Dionysos off from the Olympians. They are humanoid gods, but he retains part of his non human natural self. He is tree god, dendrîtes, and is a shape shifter, being able at will to change himself back into plant or animal form. The Bacchantes, in extreme peril, call upon Dionysos for vengeance in ancient incarnations highly reminiscent of later witchcraft:
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!
Eros
Round the head of Aphrodite on Greek vases are little winged figures holding sprays of flowers—Erotes. At death there fluttered forth from a man’s mouth a little winged sprite—the ker (cf Egyptian, ka)—the spirit of life. Eros is not love between man and woman, but the impulse of life in all living things. These Erotes attend the mother when she rises from the earth in spring. Later, owing to the attachments between men at Athens, Eros took on the form of a beautiful ephebos.
The religion of Eros has one element lacking in the religion of all the other gods—a cosmogony. Aristophanes tells of a time when earth and heaven were not yet, being chaos, when Eros sprang from a cosmic egg to lead people to the light and air from Tartaros. It is Orphic mysticism, not at all Homeric. Homer has only a glimmer of eschatology—a shadowy Tartaros—and even fainter Elysian fields, where great heroes and those connected by marriage with the gods go after death, but in which the common man has no place. What Homer was not interested in gradually became a human obsession, and the Mystery religions, then Christianity took over. The Olympians paled, and were bound to pale, before them.
