by Jack Lindsay
Until his name turned up in Linear-B, scholars often took him as a newcomer in Greece, representing a fusion of cults; but his deep and ancient roots should have been recognized precisely in his union of vegetation-cults and orgiastic rites. We see the same sort of mixture in Tree-Artemis and her rapturous dances in which women played the main role; she and Dionysos both absorbed other ancient deities of tree-cults.[302] (Helen in late representations stands as a tree between the Twins, on coins of Gythion, or rises like Korē from the earth.)[303]
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A consideration of the Hanged Goddesses or Heroines, of whom Helen was one, will help us to realize the strength of the tree-cults behind the Olympian system and the way in which legends arose around the tree-daimōn. Several tales of hanged girls are connected with the origin of a cult. Eunostos (Good Yield) of Tanagra was brought up by the nymph Eunostē, and Ochna (Pear-tree girl) fell in love with him. He avoided her, so she accused him to her brothers of assaulting her. They killed him. She confessed, then jumped from a rock or hanged herself. In the sanctuary of Eunostos in a sacred grove at Tanagra, no woman was admitted. The father of Erigonē, Ikarios, in Attika, was taught by Dionysos to cultivate the grape and was given some bags full of wine. He gave some of the wine to the shepherds, who, drunk, thought he had poisoned them, and killed him, then threw his body in a well or buried it under a tree. Erigone (also called Alētēs, Wanderer) was led by a faithful dog Maira to the spot; she hanged herself on the tree. The gods punished the Athenians with a plague or a mania; all maidens hanged themselves. An oracle said that the troubles would end with the finding of the bodies of Erigonē and Ikarios. As the bodies could not be found, the festival of Aiōra or Alētidēs was instituted in the girl’s honour, and first-fruits were offered to her. Erigonē means early-born: we may compare Korē Protogeneia, firstborn. Both Korē and Erigonē represented vegetation in its spring stage; but through the link with Dionysos and the vintage, the Aiora must have fallen near Choes when wine was ready. The Attic maidens came to lkaria and swung in trees to fertilize and purify. Aiora means both swing or hammock, and halter.[304]
Charila, a poor orphan girl, came in time of famine to beg for food from the Delphic king, who hit her with a sandal and drove her off; she hanged herself for shame. The famine grew worse, with a plague. The oracle bade the king atone for Charila. They found her body at last and did purificatory sacrifices, which were still kept up every ninth year in Ploutarch’s day. The king (long since became a purely religious functionary, like the archon basileus at Athens) sat before a crowd, distributing barley and vegetables to citizens and strangers. A puppet of the child Charila was brought. Everyone took hold of it and he flogged it with a sandal. The female leader of the Thyiades lifted it up and took it to a gulley, tied a rope round its neck, and buried it at the spot where Charila was said to have been buried after her hanging. Though Charila is a vegetation-daimōn of spring, the season of her death seems early autumn, and there is again a Dionysiac touch — the role of the Thyiades. Whipping or beating is a common way of stimulating fertility. Boys in Arkadia whipped the image of Pan with squills; and in the Greek rite of Leukothea at Rome, matrons brought into the shrine a slave woman, to slap her face and beat her with rods.[305]
A mythical reflection of ritual hanging appears in the story of Zeus hanging Hera in the clouds from Olympos, her hands chained and weights on her feet. Here the motif has been playfully diverted into a tale of Zeus punishing his refractory wife; and we find it carried to a further point of abstraction when Zeus challenges the other gods to pull him down to earth with a golden chain, boasting that he could hang the gods, earth, and sea on a rope from a peak of Olympos. Hera is shown on Samian coins with long fillets hanging from her wrists.[306] In the tales of Ochna, Erigonē and Charila we meet what we have called the tragic twist. In humanizing a cult myth of death and resurrection, all goes well till the heroine’s death; but she cannot be simply resurrected like Korē with the next spring. That would be to admit too plainly that the tale derives from the ritual and not the ritual from the tale; it would be to divinize the girl too directly. But the rebirth is not lost; it asserts itself in the recurring rite by which the worshippers gain a sense of renewed life, of revivified earth.
Thus, in the Theban tale, Oidipous, exposed as a baby with feet pierced and bound, returns after killing his father to marry his mother; when the recognition moment comes, he blinds himself and she hangs herself. Here the ritual myth of the young year marrying the earth-mother after killing the old year has been transferred to a saga hero and rationalized in human terms. The rebirth element seems quite gone. But we can perhaps link the story with the Dendrophoria, a Theban rite which Sophokles introduced into Oidipous Tyrannos. A bough was carried through the fields by a man dressed as a woman. A human image was tied to the top of a tree-trunk, which was raised from the ground by ropes and stood upright. The image was then stoned; the fragments were scrambled for; and the woman who got the head nailed it to the temple wall. The action was rationalized as deriving from an attack made by Thebans on a person or spirit hostile to Dionysos. There seems a clear link with the story of Pentheus, whom we mentioned above as the opponent of Dionysos who was seen hiding in a pine tree and torn to pieces by the revellers who included his own mother and daughters. Pentheus-in-the-tree was a form of the god: the sacrificial victim in which the mystery god is incarnated. Hence the use of his tree to make two images of the god. He, like Oidipous, represents the god at the death moment, with the resurrection removed; but the sacrificial rite plays its necessary part in bringing about the renewal of life in the earth and the worshippers. (Oidipous has a dual relation to the hanged or strangled goddess; his mother-wife hangs herself, but in gaining her and his kingdom he has defeated the Sphinx, who flings herself from a rock. Sphinx means Strangler.)[307]
Ariadne, who enabled Theseus by means of her thread to pass safely through the labyrinth, kill the minotaur and return, ended by hanging herself (with a thread). Theseus married her sister Phaidra, who tried to seduce her stepson Hippolytos; repulsed, she hanged herself. Theseus made use of the grant of three wishes by Poseidon to curse Hippolytos. The youth, driving off into exile, had his horses scared by a sea-monster so that he was thrown from the chariot and dragged to death in the traces. So the thread or rope plays a key part in all these tales.
Artemis has her bindings or hangings, as we saw, especially withies; her statue at Agra in Attika was decorated with withy garlands. (Hera of Samos was said to have been born under the withy tree in her sanctuary.) The binding-power of ligos, a kind of withy, was thought to be so great that it could halt menstruation. At Ephesus the temple of Artemis once belonged to her mother Leto; Artemis was here represented by a wooden image said to have been found in the swamps of the Kaystros, which was hung on a sacred tree. The earliest shrine was a mere courtyard round a tree beneath which stood a small altar, exactly the type shown on Minoan gems. The sacred tree marked the spot where she was born, her mother in travail having leant against its trunk. We may compare the holy palmtree on Delos where Leto was also said to have leant in bearing Artemis and Apollo. We see the Tree as itself the Mother, as in the tale of the image of Dionysos emerging from a split plane. Artemis was worshipped at Ephesos as child-rearer or nurse; several statues of the kourotrophos type have been found in the temple.[308]
The close kinship of Helen with Artemis and with Hera as a tree-daimōn should now be clear. She was herself hanged at Rhodes; and her cult-representations at Sparta show her with long fillets dangling from her hands — fillets that suggest both drooping boughs and the ropes that could serve to hang an image on a tree.[309]
The pattern of the hanged heroine appears in many tales of tragic love. In some cases the tale may well mask a local rite connected with springs and trees; in others it may have been taken over for its general appeal. Byblis, after a vain love-quest for her brother, hanged herself in her head-fillets from an oak; her tears created the spring Byblis. (Nikainetos adds
that she haunts Miletos Gate as an owl.) Kleitē, whose husband Kyzikos had been killed by the Argonauts, hanged herself and from her tears the nymphs made a spring with her name. Phyllis, deserted by her lover, hanged herself and turned into an almond tree. Oinone in one version hanged herself. Kleoboia, a married woman, loved Anteos; she got him down Pirene spring, then dropped a millstone on him. She swore that the cord broke and a golden vessel fell; but in remorse hanged herself. A confused mixture of such motifs appeared in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, where Hesiod was murdered by the brothers of a girl whom they suspected him of seducing. They threw his body in the sea; on the third day it was brought to land by dolphins while ‘some local festival of Ariadne was being held’. The girl’s sister, seduced by a stranger, hanged herself. The stranger was a man travelling with Hesiod, and the brothers killed him as well.[310]
One important son-lover god, Attis, was also hanged. Kybele, his mother, also called Agdistis, was bisexual; and the gods decided to end this anomaly. Bacchos doped her springwater with wine; and as she lay drunk, tied her male genitals to a tree with ropes. When she sprang up, the genitals were torn off and left hanging on the tree; from the blood was born the pomegranate tree (or the almond). In one version a blossom from the new tree, put in the bosom of Nana, daughter of the River Sangarios, made her conceive Attis, who on birth was exposed and looked after by a goat. (Nana is also a form of the Great Mother.) Kybele desired Attis, but was made jealous by his preparations to marry, or his love affair with, a nymph of the Sangarios. So she drove him mad and he castrated himself under a pine tree. He was imagined as hanging on the tree (which was identified with him), though in art he was shown lying under it. Christ, we recall, was also hanged on a tree; hymn III of Watts’ First Book of Hymns tells us: ’Tis through the purchase of his death, who hung upon the tree.’ The Attis-worshipper could have sung that hymn; and indeed a priest of Kybele asserted to Augustine the identity of Attis with Christ. Under the Roman Empire the festival of Attis was held from 15 to 27 March, opening with the Entry of the Reed — a procession by the College of Reed-bearers — apparently referring to the exposure of Attis in the reeds. (We may compare the statue of Artemis found in marshes and Helen’s connection with reeds in torch and basket; many culture heroes, exposed at birth, were put among reeds; another example is Moses.) 22 March saw the Entry of the Tree; the College of Tree-bearers took the sacred pine, decorated with violets and wool, to the Palatine Temple. After the Day of Blood, the Festival of Joy (Resurrection), and the Day of Rest, came the bathing of the cult-statue in the Almo.[311]
The idea of the Hanged Goddess substantially derived from the custom of hanging images or masks in trees, and ritual fillets helped to create the idea of the rope — though behind the custom lay the belief in the tree as a form or image of the earth-mother. We had better look more closely at the fillets, which are important both for Helen and Ariadne and the labyrinth. They were used in countless ceremonies, being considered as conductors of spirit force. ‘There are various examples of stone-cults in Greece. In the stone a power resided, and it was therefore anointed and wrapped round with sacred teniai and received a cult’ (Nilsson). We see the magical use of fillets far back in the Minoan world. Pillars with animals set heraldically on either side have fillets: ‘the animals are attached to the column by a string like watchdogs’. For example, a gem from a tomb at Zafer Papoura shows a sheep with big curved horns, perhaps a moufflon, with such a string round its neck. Fabulous beasts are similarly tied. A gem from Mykenai depicts two griffins resting their forelegs on an altar-like base and tied to the central column (the aniconic Mother) by a string; a gold ring shows a seated man holding with a cord the she-griffin seated before him; a gem from Vaphio shows a man with sacral stole also thus holding a she-griffin. On the Hagia Triada sarcophagus stands the cult-pillar enwreathed with greenery and filleted. (The double-axe on a cult-pole or pillar we may take to represent the tree-mother or the stone-mother in epiphany, in an act of union mingling sky and earth, thunderbolt and earth-stone.)[312]
Coins of Tenedos show the double-axe attached by fillets to an amphora. Fillets were worn by Greek prophets or seers, with bay or olive shoots, as a sign of their calling. Hermes’ caduceus was once filleted. The cult-bough was regularly hung with olive fillets, for example the Kopo, the bough borne by the Theban Daphnephoros at the nine-yearly festival; there were balls hanging from it. The Greeks had a custom of going regularly to garland and fillet graves in order to establish contact with the dead. In this they were carrying on a worldwide practice, for example, tying rags or fillets on trees at springs. Threads or cords were attached to the tree or pole in the English May-dances or the Provençal olivette.[313]
A survival among the modern Greeks of a thread or rag (here a kerchief) as the means of communicating spirit power occurs with the Anastarides, a sacred Thiasos with a Christian veneer over a Dionysiac type of fertility ritual. The sacred kerchiefs are kept in the sanctuary; they are ancient heirlooms; to own one is to have an assured place of leadership among the initiates. They are considered power-giving and are carried by the Anasterides at certain stages in the ritual: in the dance of ecstasy and in the fire-walking dance, instead of the ikon. During the sacred procession round the village to collect money for the sacrificial animal the donations are carried in an amenati, one of the kerchiefs. During the feast of the Kalogeros the chief Anastenaris uses the sacred amanetia to anoint two of the performers in the ritual play or drōmenon. The participants also carry amanetia when they do rites for the banishing of evil, the chasing away of epidemics and cattle diseases.
Customs of ancient Italy bring out the importance of cult-masks or puppets hung in trees at festivals. The masks or oscilla appear at the Compitalia, after the Saturnalia, when balls and female figures of wool were hung at crossroads and house-doors; the festival was in the name of the Lares and their mother Mania. (The Lares were tutelary deities of a house, of crossroads, of a town; we find Mania later used as a bugbear for children. Oscillum is interpreted as little os or mouth, and so a mask; but the same word was used for a swing: oscillare, to swing.) Macrobius says, ‘A custom was established: when a family was threatened with some danger, to hang the effigy of Mania before the house-door, to avert it.’ At the Feriae Latinae people swung themselves, some wearing masks. The explanatory tale linked the swinging with the quest for the dead bodies of Aeneas and Latinus; as they could not be found, the souls were sought by swinging in the air.[314] Swinging or leaping rites aimed at fertility can be cited from many lands. In Siam a temporary king was chosen at the end of April; he had to stand on one foot for three hours while Brahmins swung on posts decorated like maypoles. The Old Prussians got the tallest girl to stand on one foot on a seat, her lap full of cakes, a cup of brandy in her right hand, a piece of bark (elm or lime) in her left, while she prayed to the god Waisganthos for flax to rise as high as she stood. Lettish peasants tried to make flax grow by using their spare time swinging in spring or early summer. A. terracotta from a domestic shrine at Phaistos has been reconstructed as showing a Minoan woman on a swing; with it were two side-posts, each surmounted by a dove and thus revealing the presence of the mother-goddess.[315]
A Hymn to Zeus, found inscribed on a stone at Palaikastro in east Crete, one of the great Minoan centres, was probably set up about AD 200, though the language suggests the fourth century BC. It brings together elements of initiation, being sung by Kouretes or young men to Zeus as the greatest Kouros; of the divine birth, with ritual elements of seclusion; and of fertility rites — ultimately of the sacred marriage, since that it is which makes the earth fruitful. ‘Io, Greatest Kouros, I hail you, Son of Kronos, all-powerful and bright. You have stepped forth at the head of your daimones. To Diktē for the year, come and rejoice in the notes we strike for you on the strings and blend with our flutes as we stand and sing about your well-fenced altar. For there the shield[-bearing nurturers or nurses] took you, an immortal baby, from Rhea and [with beat of] foot [hid y
ou away]...[three and a half lines lost]...of fair dawn. [And the seasons swelled with increase] year by year, and mortals were swayed by Justice, and Peace, which goes together with Prosperity, [attended by all] creatures. [Leap for us, for our wine-jars], and leap for fleecy [flocks] and leap [for our fields] of crops and for [hives that bring] full increase. [Leap also for] our cities and our sea-faring ships, and leap for [the young citizens] and leap for [fair] law-abidingness.’
‘Leap’ here has the usual sense of jumping high, but also the secondary one of copulating. So the jump is felt as an act of loving union with nature, impregnating and fecundating the earth: a sort of diffused sacred marriage. Strabon tells us that the Kouretes in Crete were youths ‘who executed armed movements and dances, enacting the myth of the birth of Zeus’. He links them with the Satyrs, Silenoi, Bacchoi and Tityroi, and states that they were concerned with the rearing of the Child Zeus in Crete and with the orgiastic worship of the Mother of the Gods in Phrygia and the Troad Ida. We see how the sacred birth can be closely connected with the sacred marriage. The Great Kouros is the spirit leader of the initiates, described as a baby because of the rebirth of the kouroi; but the latter are in fact moving into the life-level or status that offers them marriage. We understand how in folkplays and folktales the hero, beginning as a baby, may mature at once or in a few days into a swashbuckling adventurer, who often gains a bride. The Homer Hymn to Hermes provides an example of this speedy growth. In folkplays of modern Thrace the Babo, an old woman, carries a baby in a basket (like Dionysos in the liknos); to the accompaniment of a mime of forging a ploughshare, she announces that the child is too big for the basket and demands much food and drink, and a wife; the child then apparently becomes identified with the phallos-bearing Kalogeros, between whom and a girl (actually a young boy) a marriage takes place.
