Author: Robert Graves
Category: Literature
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3. The novel worship of the Sun as All-father seems to have been brought to the Northern Aegean by the fugitive priesthood of the monotheistic Akhenaton, in the fourteenth century B.C., and grafted upon the local cults; hence Orpheus’s alleged visit to Egypt. Records of this faith are found in Sophocles (Fragments 523 and 1017), where the sun is referred to as ‘the eldest flame, dear to the Thracian horsemen’, and as ‘the sire of the gods, and father of all things.’ It seems to have been forcefully resisted by the more conservative Thracians, and bloodily suppressed in some parts of the country. But later Orphic priests, who wore Egyptian costume, called the demi-god whose raw bull’s flesh they ate ‘Dionysus’, and reserved the name Apollo for the immortal Sun: distinguishing Dionysus, the god of the senses, from Apollo, the god of the intellect. This explains why the head of Orpheus was laid up in Dionysus’s sanctuary, but the lyre in Apollo’s. Head and lyre are both said to have drifted to Lesbos, which was the chief seat of lyric music; Terpander, the earliest historical musician, came from Antissa. The serpent’s attack on Orpheus’s head represents either the protest of an earlier oracular hero against Orpheus’s intrusion at Antissa, or that of Pythian Apollo which Philostratus recorded in more direct language.
4. Eurydice’s death by snake-bite and Orpheus’s subsequent failure to bring her back into the sunlight, figure only in late myth. They seem to be mistakenly deduced from pictures which show Orpheus’s welcome in Tartarus, where his music has charmed the Snake goddess Hecate, or Agriope (‘savage face’), into giving special privileges to all ghosts initiated into the Orphic Mysteries, and from other pictures showing Dionysus, whose priest Orpheus was, descending to Tartarus in search of his mother Semele (see 27. k). Eurydice’s victims died of snake-bite, not herself (see 33. 1).
5. The alder-month is the fourth of the sacral tree-sequence, and it precedes the willow-month, associated with the water magic of the goddess Helice (‘willow’ – see 44. 1); willows also gave their name to the river Helicon, which curves around Parnassus and is sacred to the Muses – the Triple Mountain-goddess of inspiration. Hence Orpheus was shown in a temple-painting at Delphi (Pausanias: x. 30. 3) leaning against a willow-tree and touching its branches. The Greek alder cult was suppressed in very early times, yet vestiges of it remain in Classical literature: alders enclose the death-island of the witch-goddess Circe (Homer: Odyssey v. 64 and 239) – she also had a willow-grove cemetery at Colchis (Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 220 – see 152. b) and, according to Virgil the sisters of Phaëthon were metamorphosed into an alder thicket (see 42. 3).
6. This is not to suggest that Orpheus’s decapitation was never more than a metaphor applied to the lopped alder-bough. A sacred king necessarily suffered dismemberment, and the Thracians may well have had the same custom as the Iban Dayaks of modern Sarawak. When the men come home from a successful head-hunting expedition the Iban women use the trophy as a means of fertilizing the rice crop by invocation. The head is made to sing, mourn, and answer questions and nursed tenderly in every lap until it finally consents to enter an oracular shrine, where it gives advice on all important occasions and, like the heads of Eurystheus, Bran, and Adam, repels invasions (see 146. 2).
29
GANYMEDES
GANYMEDES, the son of King Tros who gave his name to Troy, was the most beautiful youth alive and therefore chosen by the gods to be Zeus’s cup-bearer. It is said that Zeus, desiring Ganymedes also as his bedfellow, disguised himself in eagle’s feathers and abducted him from the Trojan plain.1
b. Afterwards, on Zeus’s behalf, Hermes presented Tros with a golden vine, the work of Hephaestus, and two fine horses, in compensation for his loss, assuring him at the same time that Ganymedes had become immortal, exempt from the miseries of old age, and was now smiling, golden bowl in hand, as he dispensed bright nectar to the Father of Heaven.2
c. Some say that Eos had first abducted Ganymedes to be her paramour, and that Zeus took him from her. Be that as it may, Hera certainly deplored the insult to herself, and to her daughter Hebe, until then the cup-bearer of the gods; but she succeeded only in vexing Zeus, who set Ganymedes’s image among the stars as Aquarius, the water-carrier.3
1. Homer: Iliad xx. 231–5; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 2; Virgil: Aeneid v. 252 ff.; Ovid: Metamorphoses x. 155 ff.
2. Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 1391; Homer: Iliad v. 266; Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 202–17; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 9; Pausanias: v. 24. 1.
3. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 115; Virgil: Aeneid i. 32, with scholiast; Hyginus: Fabula 224; Virgil: Georgics iii. 304.
1. Ganymedes’s task as wine-pourer to all the gods – not merely Zeus in early accounts – and the two horses, given to King Tros as compensation for his death, suggest the misreading of an icon which showed the new king preparing for his sacred marriage. Ganymedes’s bowl will have contained a libation, poured to the ghost of his royal predecessor; and the officiating priest in the picture, to whom he is making a token resistance, has apparently been misread as amorous Zeus. Similarly, the waiting bride has been misread as Eos by a mythographer who recalled Eos’s abduction of Tithonus, son of Laomedon – because Laomedon is also said, by Euripides (Trojan Women 822), to have been Ganymedes’s father. This icon would equally illustrate Peleus’s marriage to Thetis, which the gods viewed from their twelve thrones; the two horses were ritual instruments of his rebirth as king, after a mock-death (see 81. 4). The eagle’s alleged abduction of Ganymedes is explained by a Caeretan black-figured vase: an eagle darting at the thighs of a newly enthroned king named Zeus typifies the divine power conferred upon him – his ka, or other self-just as a solar hawk descended on the Pharoahs at their coronation. Yet the tradition of Ganymedes’s youth suggests that the king shown in the icon was the royal surrogate, or interrex, ruling only for a single day: like the Phaëthon (see 42. 2), Zagreus (see 30.1), Chrysippus (see 105. 2), and the rest. Zeus’s eagle may therefore be said not only to have enroyalled him, but to have snatched him up to Olympus.
2. A royal ascent to Heaven on eagle-back, or in the form of an eagle, is a widespread religious fancy. Aristophanes caricatures it in Peace (1 ff.) by sending his hero up on the back of a dung-beetle. The soul of the Celtic hero Lugh – Llew Llaw in the Mabinogion – flew up to Heaven as an eagle when the tanist killed him at midsummer. Etana, the Babylonian hero, after his sacred marriage at Kish, rode on eagle-back towards Ishtar’s heavenly courts, but fell into the sea and was drowned. Etana’s death, by the way, was not the usual end-of-the-year sacrifice, as in the case of Icarus (see 92. 3), but a punishment for the bad crops which had characterized his reign – he was flying to discover a magical herb of fertility. His story is woven into an account of the continuous struggle between Eagle and Serpent – waxing and waning year, King and Tanist – and as in the myth of Llew Llaw, the Eagle, reduced to his last gasp at the winter solstice, has its life and strength magically renewed. Thus we find in Psalm ciii. 5 : ‘Thy youth is renewed, as the eagle’s.’
3. The Zeus-Ganymedes myth gained immense popularity in Greece and Rome because it afforded religious justification for grown man’s passionate love of a boy. Hitherto, sodomy had been tolerated only as an extreme form of goddess-worship: Cybele’s male devotees tried to achieve ecstatic unity with her by emasculating themselves and dressing like women. Thus a sodomistic priesthood was a recognized institution in the Great Goddess’s temples at Tyre, Joppa, Hierapolis, and at Jerusalem (1 Kings xv. 12 and 2 Kings xxiii. 7) until just before the Exile. But this new passion, for the introduction of which Thamyris (see 21. m) has been given the credit by Apollodorus, emphasized the victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. It turned Greek philosophy into an intellectual game that men could play without the assistance of women, now that they had found a new field of homosexual romance. Plato exploited this to the full, and used the myth of Ganymedes to justify his own sentimental feelings towards his pupils (Phaedrus 79); though elsewhere (Laws i. 8) he denounced sodomy as against nature, and called the myth of Ze
us’s indulgence in it ‘a wicked Cretan invention’. (Here he has the support of Stephanus of Byzantium [sub Harpagia], who says that King Minos of Crete carried off Ganymedes to be his bedfellow, ‘having received the laws from Zeus’.) With the spread of Platonic philosophy the hitherto intellectually dominant Greek woman degenerated into an unpaid worker and breeder of children wherever Zeus and Apollo were the ruling gods.
4. Ganymedes’s name refers, properly, to the joyful stirring of his own desire at the prospect of marriage, not to that of Zeus when refreshed by nectar from his bedfellow’s hand; but, becoming catamitus in Latin, it has given English the word ‘catamite’, meaning the passive object of male homosexual lust.
5. The constellation Aquarius, identified with Ganymedes, was originally the Egyptian god, presiding over the source of the Nile, who poured water, not wine, from a flagon (Pindar: Fragment 110); but the Greeks took little interest in the Nile.
6. Zeus’s nectar, which the later mythographers described as a supernatural red wine, was, in fact, a primitive brown mead (see 27. 2); and ambrosia, the delectable food of the gods, seems to have been a porridge of barley, oil, and chopped fruit (see 98. 7), with which kings were pampered when their poorer subjects still subsisted on asphodel (see 31. 2), mallow, and acorns.
30
ZAGREUS
ZEUS secretly begot his son Zagreus on Persephone, before she was taken to the Underworld by her uncle Hades. He set Rhea’s sons, the Cretan Curetes or, some say, the Corybantes, to guard his cradle in the Idaean Cave, where they leaped about him, clashing their weapons, as they had leaped about Zeus himself at Dicte. But the Titans, Zeus’s enemies, whitening themselves with gypsum until they were unrecognizable, waited until the Curetes slept. At midnight they lured Zagreus away, by offering him such childish toys as a cone, a bull-roarer, golden apples, a mirror, a knuckle-bone, and a tuft of wool. Zagreus showed courage when they murderously set upon him, and went through several transformations in an attempt to delude them: he became successively Zeus in a goat-skin coat, Cronus making rain, a lion, a horse, a horned serpent, a tiger, and a bull. At that point the Titans seized him firmly by the horns and feet, tore him apart with their teeth, and devoured his flesh raw.
b. Athene interrupted this grisly banquet shortly before its end and, rescuing Zagreus’s heart, enclosed it in a gypsum figure, into which she breathed life; so that Zagreus became an immortal. His bones were collected and buried at Delphi, and Zeus struck the Titans dead with thunderbolts.1
1. Diodorus Siculus: v. 75. 4; Nonnus: Dionysiaca vi. 296 and xxvii. 228; Harpocration sub apomatton; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 355; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad ii. 735; Firmicus Maternus: Concerning the Errors of Profane Religions vi; Euripides: The Cretans, Fragment 475. Orphic Fragments (Kern, 34).
1. This myth concerns the annual sacrifice of a boy which took place in ancient Crete: a surrogate for Minos the Bull-king. He reigned for a single day, went through a dance illustrative of the five seasons – lion, goat, horse, serpent, and bull-calf – and was then eaten raw. All the toys with which the Titans lured him away were objects used by the philosophical Orphics, who inherited the tradition of this sacrifice but devoured a bull-calf raw, instead of a boy. The bull-roarer was a pierced stone or piece of pottery, which when whirled at the end of a cord made a noise like a rising gale; and the tuft of wool may have been used to daub the Curetes with the wet gypsum – these being youths who had cut and dedicated their first hair to the goddess Car (see 95. 5). They were also called Corybantes, or crested dancers. Zagreus’s other gifts served to explain the nature of the ceremony by which the participants became one with the god: the cone was an ancient emblem of the goddess, in whose honour the Titans sacrificed him (see 20. 2); the mirror represented each initiate’s other self, or ghost; the golden apples, his passport to Elysium after a mock-death; the knuckle-bone, his divinatory powers (see 17. 3).
2. A Cretan hymn discovered a few years ago at Palaiokastro, near the Dictaean Cave, is addressed to the Cronian One, greatest of youths, who comes dancing at the head of his demons and leaps to increase the fertility of soil and flocks, and for the success of the fishing fleet. Jane Harrison in Themis suggests that the shielded tutors there mentioned, who ‘took thee, immortal child, from Rhea’s side,’ merely pretended to kill and eat the victim, an initiate into their secret society. But all such mock-deaths at initiation ceremonies, reported from many parts of the world, seem ultimately based on a tradition of actual human sacrifice; and Zagreus’s calendar changes distinguish him from an ordinary member of a totemistic fraternit.
3. The uncanonical tiger in the last of Zagreus’s transformations is explained by his identity with Dionysus (see 27. c), of whose death and resurrection the same story is told, although with cooked flesh instead of raw, and Rhea’s name instead of Athene’s. Dionysus, too, was a horned serpent – he had horns and serpent locks at birth (see 27. a) – and his Orphic devotees ate him sacramentally in bull form. Zagreus became ‘Zeus in a goat-skin coat’, because Zeus or his child surrogate had ascended to Heaven wearing a coat made from the hide of the goat Amaltheia (see 7. b). ‘Cronus making rain’ is a reference to the use of the bull-roarer in rain-making ceremonies. In this context the Titans were Titanoi, ‘white-chalk men’, the Curetes themselves disguised so that the ghost of the victim would not recognize them. When human sacrifices went out of fashion, Zeus was represented as hurling his thunderbolt at the cannibals; and the Titanes, ‘lords of the seven-day week’, became confused with the Titanoi, ‘the white-chalk men’, because of their hostility to Zeus. No Orphic, who had once eaten the flesh of his god, ever again touched meat of any kind.
4. Zagreus-Dionysus was also known in Southern Palestine. According to the Ras Shamra tablets, Ashtar temporarily occupied the throne of Heaven while the god Baal languished in the Underworld, having eaten the food of the dead. Ashtar was only a child and when he sat on the throne, his feet did not reach the footstool; Baal presently returned and killed him with a club. The Mosaic Law prohibited initiation feasts in Ashtar’s honour: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk’ – an injunction three times repeated (Exodus xxiii. 19; xxxiv. 26; Deuteronomy xiv. 21).
31
THE GODS OF THE UNDERWORLD
WHEN ghosts descend to Tartarus, the main entrance to which lies in a grove of black poplars beside the Ocean stream, each is supplied by pious relatives with a coin laid under the tongue of its corpse. They are thus able to pay Charon, the miser who ferries them in a crazy boat across the Styx. This hateful river bounds Tartarus on the western side,1 and has for its tributaries Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Aornis, and Lethe. Penniless ghosts must wait for ever on the near bank; unless they have evaded Hermes, their conductor, and crept down by a back entrance, such as at Laconian Taenarus,2 or Thesprotian Aornum. A three-headed or, some say, fifty-headed dog named Cerberus, guards the opposite shore of Styx, ready to devour living intruders or ghostly fugitives.3
b. The first region of Tartarus contains the cheerless Asphodel Fields, where souls of heroes stay without purpose among the throngs of less distinguished dead that twitter like bats, and where only Orion still has the heart to hunt the ghostly deer.4 None of them but would rather live in bondage to a landless peasant than rule over all Tartarus. Their one delight is in libations of blood poured to them by the living: when they drink they feel themselves almost men again. Beyond these meadows lie Erebus and the palace of Hades and Persephone. To the left of the palace, as one approaches it, a white cypress shades the pool of Lethe, where the common ghosts flock down to drink. Initiated souls avoid this water, choosing to drink instead from the pool of Memory, shaded by a white poplar [?], which gives them a certain advantage over their fellows.5 Close by, newly arrived ghosts are daily judged by Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus at a place where three roads meet. Rhadamanthys tries Asiatics and Aeacus tries Europeans; but both refer the difficult cases to Minos. As each verdict is given the ghosts are directed along one of the t
hree roads; that leading back to the Asphodel Meadows, if they are neither virtuous nor evil; that leading to the punishment-field of Tartarus, if they are evil; that leading to the orchards of Elysium, if they are virtuous.
c. Elysium, ruled over by Cronus, lies near Hades’s dominions, its entrance close to the pool of Memory, but forms no part of them; it is a happy land of perpetual day, without cold or snow, where games, music, and revels never cease, and where the inhabitants may elect to be reborn on earth whenever they please. Near by are the Fortunate Islands, reserved for those who have been three times born, and three times attained Elysium.6 But some say that there is another Fortunate Isle called Leuce in the Black Sea, opposite the mouths of the Danube, wooded and full of beasts, wild and tame, where the ghosts of Helen and Achilles hold high revelry and declaim Homer’s verses to heroes who have taken part in the events celebrated by him.7
d. Hades, who is fierce and jealous of his rights, seldom visits the upper air, except on business or when he is overcome by sudden lust. Once he dazzled the Nymph Minthe with the splendour of his golden chariot and its four black horses, and would have seduced her without difficulty had not Queen Persephone made a timely appearance and metamorphosed Minthe into sweet-smelling mint. On another occasion Hades tried to violate the Nymph Leuce, who was similarly metamorphosed into the white poplar standing by the pool of Memory.8 He willingly allows none of his subjects to escape, and few who visit Tartarus return alive to describe it, which makes him the most hated of the gods.
e. Hades never knows what is happening in the world above, or in Olympus,9 except for fragmentary information which comes to him when mortals strike their hands upon the earth and invoke him with oaths and curses. His most prized possession is the helmet of invisibility, given him as a mark of gratitude by the Cyclopes when he consented to release them at Zeus’s order. All the riches of gems and precious metals hidden beneath the earth are his, but he owns no property above ground, except for certain gloomy temples in Greece and, possibly, a herd of cattle in the island of Erytheia which, some say, really belong to Helius.10