by Jack Lindsay
But to return to the geranos. Inscriptions tell us that the dancers carried rhymoi, the exact meaning of which has been much debated. The word seems to mean ropes; and possibly the dancers carried a sort of rope or garland-like object which suggested a snake and was used to emphasize the spiralling in and out. The ritualistic carrying of a snake or a replica of one can be instanced; and snake dances were probably common among the Minoans. Minoan art shows a bird-headed winged woman in a vigorous dance, suggesting that there were bird dances; and some of the so-called animal-daimones in their processional movements may represent masked men. The Minotaur may well have been in origin the king or priest wearing a bull-mask in a ritual of life-death. A Cypriot terracotta dating from before 1200 BC shows a masked dancer pulling a bull-mask off his head. Figures of similar style but later date show another bull-masked dancer, a dancer taking off a stag-mask so that we can see his own hair and right ear beneath it; and a dancer in a shaggy dress, who has just removed a horned animal-mask, which he holds in his left hand. The dancers are normally shown with human feet. Replicas of bull-masks or fox-masks have also been found. All these figures were discovered in shrines or temples. From a very early period Cypriot terracottas show circular dances. One type depicts a triad dancing back to back round what seems the trunk of a sacred tree.[361]
Theseus is said to have danced the geranos in Crete round a Horned Altar: a touch that suggests a Minoan setting. Kalli-machos, after describing the garlanded image of Aphrodite which Theseus brought, mentions the geranos and connects the dance figures with the labyrinth. ‘After escaping the cruel bellowing of Pasiphae’s wild son and the coiled abode [hedos] of the crooked labyrinth, about your altar, Lady, they raised the music of the kithara and danced the circling dance, with Theseus leading the chorus.’ Eustathios says that old-fashioned folk, especially sailors, did a dance with many twists and turns intended to represent the windings of the labyrinth. Loukian cites as Cretan dance themes ‘Europa, Pasiphae, both the Bulls, the Labyrinth, Ariadne, Phaidra, Androgeos, Daidalos, Ikaros, Glaukos, the seer-craft of Polyidos, and Talos the bronze sentinel of Crete’.
The dance expressed an ordeal followed by marriage with the king’s daughter. The tradition that Minos handed over Ariadne to Theseus suggests that she was the prize for overcoming the dangerous test. Homer saw the dance as one of love or courtship; the dancers were unmarried lads and girls. The property value of the girls in marriage was stressed. Probably the passage in the Iliad does not mean that the girls got the oxen for their parents; more likely the oxen were wedding gifts made to her by her own household and thus of value, not to her parents, but to her suitors. Female inheritance normally precedes the custom of a dowry, which represents the economic perquisite originally bestowed on a husband by a matrilocal wife. Certainly in historical Crete female inheritance existed before the dowry; and matri-local customs survived in several forms. Collective marriage, we saw, also survived, and in earlier days must have been yet stronger in range. Possibly Homer’s Knossian dance was a rite of collective marriage on graduation from the agela.[362]
A dance, the same or very similar, was the Spartan ring dance, hormos, performed by ephebes and maidens; from the context we see that the ephebes were not just young fellows in general, but that the term is used in the technical sense of youths undergoing ephebic training in the agela, in which both dancing and fighting were studied. ‘Even now’, says Loukian, ‘you may see their young men dancing quite as much as fighting under arms; when they have finished sparring and exchanging blow for blow with each other, their contest ends in dancing and a flute-player sits in the midst.’ Hormos means cord or chain, especially a necklace made up of bits and pieces strung together; the line of lads and girls was thus a living thread of bodies. Ariadne’s Thread then appears as more than a fillet communicating spiritforce from one point to another; it was the string of dancers tracing the maze pattern. Loukian tells us: ‘The lad goes first, doing the steps and postures of young manhood, and those which later he’ll practise in war. The maiden follows him, showing how to do the woman’s dance with propriety, and so the string is beaded with modesty and manliness.’ In his more general comments, he says that the flute-player marks time with his foot, while the lads, ‘following one another in line, perform figures of all sorts in rhythmic steps, now those of war, and presently those of the choral dance dear to Dionysos and Aphrodite’.
The Game of Troy, performed (as we noted) by boys of high rank in the Circus Maximus at Rome, seems certainly in origin the same sort of thing as the hormos, but with girls excluded and the aspect of military manoeuvres stressed. Virgil compares the movements to the Cretan Labyrinth and to troops of dolphins at play. The ancient roots of the Game have been proved by the picture on an Etruscan vase of about 600 BC, where armed riders are shown emerging from a labyrinth labelled TRVIA — Troy! Here is the surprising link of the maze pattern with Troy, which we earlier suggested.
Loukian goes on to refer to Homer’s account of Ariadne’s dance-floor, but excuses himself from details on the grounds that the reader will know about the subject. For him the choros of Ariadne and hormos are love dances. Hesychios glosses choros as ‘circle, crown’: which both links the labyrinth and its dance with Ariadne’s crown and helps the suggestion that Homer’s choros was in fact the floor on which the ring dance was performed. At Athens a labyrinth of Roman pattern lies on the floor of the later orchestra, and on a vase depicting the fight with the Minotaur the labyrinth is shown in Greek theatral form. The steps from the orchestra to the stage, we may note, were called Charon’s Steps ghosts, supposed to emerge from the underworld, went up and down them. The orchestra-labyrinth could then stand for the passage between the normal world and the underworld.
A finely engraved metal cuirass, recently found at Olympia, helps to link Helen with Ariadne as the girl carried off by Theseus. The design on the upper part belongs to the series on proto-corinthian vases in which the Twins rescue her from Theseus and Peirithoos. She stands with tall polos between the two pairs of young men; Theseus holds her hand, but she turns and lifts her free hand to salute her brothers, who are not this time mounted. Her dress shows a meander pattern which we earlier found to be a stylized version of the labyrinth. So, Helen enclosed in a meander with Theseus holding her hand is close to Ariadne accompanying him through the maze, however different the situation is in other ways.[363]
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The names Dionysos and Lady of the Labyrinth existed in the Bronze Age. It has been suggested that then Ariadne was supreme dancer of the female nature spirits, with Dionysos in a lesser role. The male figure of Minoan cult (son, lover, or both) was always much subordinated to the mother; in neolithic times he did not exist, but he began to come up in Middle and Late Minoan periods. The female vegetation-cults sank in many ways with the rise of Greek historical culture. We can then imagine Ariadne becoming the lesser figure, with Dionysos growing ever more important, till the insurgence of the peasants in the seventh and sixth centuries fully established him. The tale of Theseus in Crete would not have been in existence in the Bronze Age, but was developed in the later Dark Age as the hero gained prestige as someone who carried off heroines. The passage in the Odyssey would then reflect a simple clash between the claims of Theseus and Dionysos; the former intruded on the old settled relations of Ariadne and the god, and the god called on Artemis to deal with him.
In making these conjectures, one is not asserting that either Ariadne or Dionysos in Minoan-Mykenean days had all the attributes they later revealed. Only that there was a nurse-mother goddess presiding over an important initiation dance (connected also with marriage) and that there was a widespread cult involving ecstatic dances and rapt experiences which later gathered round the son rather than round the nurse-mother. The death-rebirth aspects of Ariadne tended to fade out or remain local in later days; the stress was put, apart from her link with the labyrinth, on her triumphal marriage with Dionysos. That marriage became a theme of funerary sculpture. O
n one sarcophagus we see a veiled Ariadne to whom Dionysos turns, almost naked with a female-looking body (which is contrasted with the sturdy Hermes on the other side); in a lost example, drawn in the early nineteenth century, a young androgynous lad is in place of Ariadne.
Thiasos, the word used for the Dionysiac revelling group, is non-Greek and not found in Homer; it may well be an ancient Aegean or Minoan term. Ecstatic dances were certainly an important feature of Minoan religion. We have seen them in connection with magical or sacred herbs and trees. Here are some more examples. On a gold ring from Isopata four women dance in a meadow in sunlight (if we may thus interpret the eye); there are two snakes over their heads, whether they are meant to be on the ground or thrown about between them. A small goddess appears to the dancers or is presiding over them; she may be compared with the faience figures from the central palace sanctuary at Knossos. Here the figures are Middle Minoan, so it seems too early to apply the name Lady of the Labyrinth. The snake-goddess, it is true, has been taken as a house-deity and the bell-shaped idols, who have snakes wrapped round them or are found in sacred vessels decorated with snakes, do not seem connected with the wild dances. But a dual function in ritual for snakes may well have existed in Minoan times. In later times the snake is linked both with Mainads and Dionysos and with the house-cult and Zeus. At Gazi a Minoan goddess with poppy-heads on her crown shares a shrine with a goddess who has birds on her head. It has been suggested that the Mykeneans knew the snake-goddess of the palace as the Lady of the Labyrinth and the revelling goddess as Ariadne. If so, we should have to separate the labyrinth dance, the geranos or hormos, from Ariadne, which sets up many difficulties.[364]
If we look back at the designs on rings from Tiryns and Canea, we see that the woman might be Ariadne as much as Helen; but the male would be the Minoan Dionysos or some similar figure rather than Theseus or an earlier prototype. Dionysos, we may recall, still had a ship in his cult at classical Athens.
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We have seen the labyrinth as a dance expressing conflict, wandering, emergence into a new life; and the figures of this dance may have been reflected in a maze pattern on the floor (like those later cut in turf in England). Spiral patterns have a very long history. We might take as example the Maltese prehistoric temples. The entry, from an open central forecourt, into a middle temple at Tarxien is reduced, as in the other temples, to a narrow longish passage (five feet wide) by two mighty upright slabs; what entry is left is blocked by a two-feet-high slab that has to be stepped over. Two large spirals cover the whole of this slab, facing outward and set back to back; they develop down and out, with a small triangle (point down) at the top between them and a large one, less marked, pointing up from below. (Similar slabs from other temples of Malta are known.) The patterns have been called oculus-spirals, a formalized expression of the eyes and nose of the ancestor goddess who is guarding the internal structure. But the temples do not seem made for a cult of ancestors the spirals are a genital symbol and define the entrance into the womb of the goddess. The spiral as a symbol or image of the female goes back at least to the Late Palaeolithic:
From much later, historical times, may be cited one of the ‘snake-goddesses’ (or ‘priestesses’) from the temple repositories of Knossos or an archaic Carthaginian figurine from Ibiza whose garments are significantly decorated with a profusion of spirals. The aptitude of the circular spiral for this connotation may be found in its symbolising an urge and invitation to find a way to the final centre; perhaps also to return from it and infinitely to repeat the same experience. The latter component becomes indubitable where several of these spirals are joined into a pattern of endlessness, and even in the single S-spiral: with these, at any rate, the symbol becomes expressive of the experience of the conjunctio oppositorum: the up-and-down; the forward-and-back; the in-and-outward — and therewith of birth and death. These implications, so it would seem, constitute the aptitude of the spiral for symbolising the experience of the female principle. (Zuntz)
A few early examples will help to bring the point home. On the lap of a nurse-mother statuette from neolithic Sesklo a circular spiral is drawn as also on her seat and on that of the child. A crude Bronze-Age figurine from Salcutsa in Roumania has the same sort of spiral on her lap. A late neolithic clay figure of a seated goddess from a tumulus near Philippopel (Plovdiv) in Bulgaria has an S-spiral inside a lozenge on the genital zone. We see that the spiral does not simply represent the vulva, but the vulva in terms of movement: the entry into, or exit from, the female body, a dynamic symbol that can express birth, copulation, and (by analogy) death or rebirth. The Bulgarian figure is actually a vessel; we may compare the so-called face-urns of Troy with their suggestion of face, breasts and symbolic vulva. Woman is the vessel of life: here too the fluid goes in and out.[365]
Two examples of a dance or movement through the maze in initiations will help us get inside Ariadne’s system. In the circumcision dance of the Merina of Madagascar the path to the sacred stone was divided into five by means of strings. On the middle string the king walked in a straight line; on the other four strings, which were set out in labyrinthic meanderings, walked the people. The king, as embodied divinity, went straight to the initiation goal; the others had to dance to it through the difficult maze. But in all the cases the path of the goal, the achievement of the new life, was represented by a thread.
Among the Buddhists of Indochina we find the dance through the maze as a conflict with evil forces. In Arakan the faithful read the holy Bana as they danced through an artificial labyrinth. At each turn they challenged the Yaksha there and drove him away. At last they reached the divine region. Here no thread is mentioned; but we find it in the same situation among the Singhalese, where the devotee, reading the Paritta, which is aimed against the Yakshas, unwinds a thread as he reads.
If we turn to such a place as Malekula we see the maze pattern in full action, mythically and ritually. Thus on the island of Atchin a series of dances represent the gradual initiation of the Maki-men into the mysteries:
This dance represents at one and the same time (a) a sacred marriage (b) an initiation rite and (c) the Journey of the Dead....In the pattern of the final movement of the dance the Maki-men form a solid body arranged in rows and members of the introducing ‘line’ thread their way through them. Members of the introducing ‘line’ occupy in the Maki the position of those already fully initiated, and comparison with the version of the Journey of the Dead as recorded from Seniang shows that the progression of the initiates between the ranks formed by the Maki-men corresponds with the path followed by the dead man through a maze-like design drawn in the sand by the Guardian Ghost, a figure that the dead man must know how to complete before entering into the land of the dead through the cave by which she sits. If he does not know how to do this, the Guardian Ghost devours him. I have shown elsewhere how this maze-design represents the labyrinthine entrance to the tomb in the civilisations of the Ancient East, of which the existing Malekulan belief is a faint echo. Sand-tracings and figure-dances of na-leng type are thus both seen to be derived from labyrinths constructed to trap the ignorant and to prevent access to the land of the dead to all except those who, through the performance of due ritual and the resulting acquirement of the necessary knowledge, have earned the right to enter. (Layard)
The problem set the dead man is expressed again by a belief that the female Guardian Ghost draws a design on the sand; as the spirit of the dead man comes near, she rubs out half of the design; the spirit must fill in the missing part and walk over it before entering the land of the dead. Two main designs are found. One is of a single continuous line with a definite start and finish, crossing and recrossing itself on a framework of straight lines set at right angles to one another; the framework represents the labyrinth, the continuous line the path traced by the initiate through it. The second consists of a single never-ending line which encloses a space based on a framework of small circles or dots. The dots represent the eyes, nostrils
, and breasts of the Guardian Ghost, and the line the contour of her body. The two types, clearly distinguished in ritual, have as art forms become merged.
In south India we find a series of designs drawn by Hindu women in Tamil country on the thresholds of their houses during the harvest-month until Margali or Mrigasira (mid-December to mid-January). Tattooers of the vagrant Korava community use similar designs. The threshold designs are aimed both at preventing evil from entering the house and facilitating a cosmic death—rebirth (initiation). The month in question is that in which the sun reaches the winter solstice and is said to die; then the most solemn rite in south India, Pongal, is held and the sun is said to be reborn. The month before Pongal is made up of unlucky days; the following month, of lucky days. Margali is ‘a most unhealthy month. It is the month on which all kinds of epidemics — cholera, fever, and smallpox — are supposed to occur.’ During the bad month mendicants go from door to door, about 4 am, waking all sleepers with gongs, warning them to be on guard against evil influences. The women then prepare a patch about a yard square outside the door, smear it with cowdung, and trace designs on it with rice-flour. In the square are set pellets each with a pumpkin flower in it. The pellets are said to represent Vigneshwara, god of obstacles. We hear also of the path being first swept and sprinkled, and the designs drawn with slaked lime or old ground-up mortar (anything white) in a continuous line; the work is done before sunrise. But no efforts are made to guard the drawings; it is enough that they have been made. The pumpkin flower is in the form of a five-pointed star, symbolic of sacrifice and used to avert the evil eye. Names used for the designs, kolam, are Brahma’s Knot and Pavitram (a finger-ring of sacrificial grass or gold: we may compare the garland or crown of Helen, Harmonia, Ariadne). The Sanskrit root of pavitram seems pu, to cleanse and to pacify. ‘The object of the pavitram is to scare away giants, evil spirits, or devils, whose mission is to bring disasters upon men and mar the ceremonies of the Brahmins. The very sight of the pavitram makes them tremble and take to flight. This powerful amulet consists of three, five, or seven stalks of darbha grass plaited together in the form of a ring.’ The Brahmins can do nothing without it. ‘It is the basis of all those pious and meritorious acts...which lead to everlasting felicity’ (Dubois). There is a virtue also in the knots tying the grass. Brahma’s Knot is the knot with which the three strands of the sacred cord of a Brahman are tied together in such a way that no loose end is visible and the cord becomes virtually a never-ending line. (The continuous-line design of a face, connected in the Near East with the mantic entrails of sacrifice and the face of Humbaba, was known in Greece; examples of the Humbaba type have been found in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia.)
