THE DEMONOLOGY OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES AND BOGEYS.
‘ὦ μεγάλαυχοι καὶ φθερσιγενεῖς
Κῆρες Ἐρινύες.’
In the preceding chapters the nature of Greek ritual has been discussed.
The main conclusion that has emerged is that this ritual in its earlier
phases was mainly characterized by a tendency to what the Greeks called
ἀποτροπή, i.e. the turning away, the _aversion_ of evil. This tendency
was however rarely quite untouched by an impulse more akin to our modern
notion of worship, the impulse to θεραπεία, i.e. the induction, the
fostering of good influences.
Incidentally we have of course gathered something of the nature of the
objects of worship. When the ritual was not an attempt at the direct
impulsion of nature, we have had brief uncertain glimpses of sprites
and ghosts and underworld divinities. It now remains to trace with more
precision these vague theological or demonological or mythological
outlines, to determine the character of the beings worshipped and
something of the order of their development.
In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to formulate
than in ritual. Ritual, i.e. what men _did_, is either known or not
known; what they meant by what they did—the connecting link between
ritual and theology—can sometimes be certainly known, more often
precariously inferred. Still more hazardous is the attempt to determine
how man thought of the objects or beings to whom his ritual was
addressed, in a word what was his theology, or, if we prefer the term,
his mythology.
At the outset one preliminary caution is imperative. Our minds are
imbued with current classical mythology, our imagination peopled with
the vivid personalities, the clear-cut outlines of the Olympian gods;
it is only by a somewhat severe mental effort that we realize the fact
essential to our study that _there were no gods at all_, that what we
have to investigate is not so many actual facts and existences but only
conceptions of the human mind, shifting and changing colour with every
human mind that conceived them. Art which makes the image, literature
which crystallizes attributes and functions, arrest and fix this shifting
kaleidoscope; but, until the coming of art and literature and to some
extent after, the formulary of theology is ‘all things are in flux’
(πάντα ῥεῖ).
Further, not only are we dealing solely with conceptions of the human
mind, but often with conceptions of a mind that conceived things in a
fashion alien to our own. There is no greater bar to that realizing of
mythology[414] which is the first condition of its being understood, than
our modern habit of clear analytic thought. The very terms we use are
sharpened to an over nice discrimination. The first necessity is that
by an effort of the sympathetic imagination we should think back the
‘many’ we have so sharply and strenuously divided, into the haze of the
primitive ‘one.’
Nor must we regard this haze of the early morning as a deleterious mental
fog, as a sign of disorder, weakness, oscillation. It is not confusion
or even synthesis; rather it is as it were a protoplasmic fulness and
forcefulness not yet articulate into the diverse forms of its ultimate
births. It may even happen, as in the case of the Olympian divinities,
that articulation and discrimination sound the note of approaching
decadence. As Maeterlinck[415] beautifully puts it, _la clarté parfaite
n’est-elle pas d’ordinaire le signe de la lassitude des idées?_
There is a practical reason why it is necessary to bear in mind this
primary fusion, though not confusion, of ideas. Theology, after
articulating the one into the many and diverse, after a course of
exclusive and determined discrimination, after differentiating a number
of departmental gods and spirits, usually monotheizes, i.e. resumes the
many into the one. Hence, as will be constantly seen, _mutatis mutandis_,
a late philosophizing author is often of great use in illustrating a
primitive conception: the multiform divinity of an Orphic Hymn is nearer
to the primitive mind than the clear-cut outlines of Homer’s Olympians.
* * * * *
In our preliminary examination of Athenian festivals we found underlying
the Diasia the worship of a snake, underlying the Anthesteria the
revocation of souls. In the case of the Thesmophoria we found magical
ceremonies for the promotion of fertility addressed as it would seem
directly to the earth itself: in the Thargelia we had ceremonies of
purification not primarily addressed to any one. In the Diasia and
Anthesteria only was there clear evidence of some sort of definite being
or beings as the object of worship. The meaning of snake-worship will
come up for discussion later (p. 326), for the present we must confine
ourselves to the theology or demonology of the beings worshipped in the
Anthesteria, the Keres, sprites, or ghosts, and the theological shapes
into which they are developed and discriminated.
THE KER AS GHOST AND SPRITE.
That the Keres dealt with in the Anthesteria—‘worshipped’ is of course
too modern a word—were primarily ghosts, admits, in the face of the
evidence previously adduced (pp. 43, 44), of no doubt. That in the
fifth century B.C. they were thought of as little winged sprites the
vase-painting in fig. 7 clearly shows, and to it might be added the
evidence of countless other Athenian white lekythi where the _eidolon_ or
ghost is shown fluttering about the grave. But to the ancients _Keres_
was a word of far larger and vaguer connotation than our modern _ghosts_,
and we must grasp this wider connotation if we would understand the later
developments of the term.
Something of their nature has already appeared in the apotropaic
precautions of the Anthesteria. Pitch was smeared on the doors to catch
them, cathartic buckthorn was chewed to eject them; they were dreaded
as sources of evil; they were, if not exactly evil spirits, certainly
spirits that brought evil: else why these precautions? Plato has this in
his mind when he says[416] ‘There are many fair things in the life of
mortals, but in most of them there are as it were adherent Keres which
pollute and disfigure them.’ Here we have not merely a philosophical
notion, that there is a soul of evil in things good, but the reminiscence
surely of an actual popular faith, i.e. the belief that Keres, like a
sort of personified bacilli, engendered corruption and pollution[417].
To such influences all things mortal are exposed. Conon[418] in telling
the story of the miraculous head of Orpheus (p. 468) says that when it
was found by the fisherman ‘it was still singing, nor had it suffered
any change from the sea nor any other of the outrages that human Keres
inflict on the dead, but it was still blooming and bleeding with fresh
blood.’ Conon is of course a late writer, and full of borrowed poetical
phrases, but the expression human Keres (ἀνθρώπιναι κῆρες) is not
equivalent to the Destiny of man, it means rather sources of corruption
inherent in man.
[Illustration: FIG. 17.]
In fig. 7 we have seen a representation of the harmless Keres, the souls
fluttering out of the grave-pithos. Fortunately ancient art has also left
us a representation of a baleful Ker. The picture in fig. 17 is from a
pelike[419] found at Thisbe and now in the Berlin Museum[420]. Heracles,
known by his lion skin and quiver, swings his rudely hewn club (κλάδος)
against a tiny winged figure with shrivelled body and distorted ugly
face. We might have been at a loss to give a name to his feeble though
repulsive antagonist but for an Orphic Hymn to Heracles[421] which ends
with the prayer:
‘Come, blessed hero, come and bring allayments
Of all diseases. Brandishing thy club,
Drive forth the baleful fates; with poisoned shafts
Banish the noisome Keres far away.’
The primitive Greek leapt by his religious imagination to a forecast of
the truth that it has taken science centuries to establish, i.e. the fact
that disease is caused by little live things, germs—bacilli we call them,
he used the word Keres. A fragment of the early comic poet Sophron[422]
speaks of Herakles throttling Hepiales. Hepiales must be the demon of
nightmare, well known to us from other sources and under various confused
names as Ephialtes, Epiales, Hepialos. The _Etymologicon Magnum_[423]
explains ‘Hepialos’ as a shivering fever and ‘a daimon that comes upon
those that are asleep.’ It has been proposed to regard the little winged
figure which Herakles is clearly taking by the throat as Hepiales[424],
demon of nightmare, rather than as a Ker. The question can scarcely be
decided, but the doubt is as instructive as any certainty. Hepiales is a
disease caused by a Ker; i.e. it is a special form of Ker, the nightmare
bacillus. Blindness also was caused by a Ker, as was madness; hence
the expression ‘casting a black Ker on their eyes[425].’ Blindness and
madness, blindness of body and spirit are scarcely distinguished, as in
the blindness of Oedipus; both come of the Keres-Erinyes.
To the primitive mind all diseases are caused by, or rather _are_, bad
spirits. Porphyry[426] tells us that blisters are caused by evil spirits
which come at us when we eat certain food and settle on our bodies.
He goes to the very heart of ancient religious ‘aversion’ when he adds
that it is on account of this that purifications are practised, _not
in order that we may induce the presence of the gods, but that these
wretched things may keep off_. He might have added, it is on account of
these bad spirits that we fast; indeed ἁγνεία, the word he uses, means
abstinence as well as purity. Eating is highly dangerous because you
have your mouth open and a Ker may get in. If a Ker should get in when
you are about to partake of specially holy food there will naturally be
difficulties. So argues the savage. Porphyry being a vegetarian says that
these bad spirits specially delight in blood and impurities generally
and they ‘creep into people who make use of such things.’ If you kept
about you holy plants with strong scents and purging properties, like rue
and buckthorn, you might keep the Keres away, or, if they got in, might
speedily and safely eject them.
The physical character of the Keres, their connection with ‘the lusts of
the flesh,’ comes out very clearly in a quaint moralising poem preserved
by Stobaeus and attributed to Linos. It deals with the dangers of Keres
and the necessity for meeting them by ‘purification.’ Its ascetic tone
and its attribution to Linos probably point to Orphic origin. It runs as
follows[427]:
‘Hearken to these my sayings, zealously lend me your hearing
To the simple truth about all things. Drive far away the disastrous
Keres, they who destroy the herd of the vulgar and fetter
All things around with curses manifold. Many and dreadful
Shapes do they take to deceive. But keep them far from thy spirit,
Ever watchful in mind. This is the purification
That shall rightly and truly purge thee to sanctification
(If but in truth thou hatest the baleful race of the Keres),
And most of all thy belly, the giver of all things shameful,
For desire is her charioteer and she drives with the driving of
madness.’
It is commonly said that diseases are ‘personified’ by the Greeks. This
is to invert the real order of primitive thought. It is not that a
disease is realized as a power and then turned into a person, it is that
primitive man seems unable to conceive of any force except as resulting
from some person or being or sprite, something a little like himself.
Such is the state of mind of the modern Greek peasant who writes Χολέρα
with a capital letter. Hunger, pestilence, madness, nightmare have each a
sprite behind them; _are_ all sprites.
Of course, as Hesiod[428] knew, there were ancient golden days when these
sprites were not let loose, when they were shut up safe in a cask and
‘Of old the tribes of mortal men on earth
Lived without ills, aloof from grievous toil
And catching plagues which Keres gave to men[429].’
But alas!
‘The woman with her hands took the great lid
From off the cask and scattered them, and thus
Devised sad cares for mortals. Hope alone
Remained therein, safe held beneath the rim,
Nor flitted forth, for she thrust to the lid[430].’
Who the woman was and why she opened the jar will be considered later (p.
283); for the moment we have only to note what manner of things came out
of it. The account is strange and significant. She shut the cask too late:
‘For other myriad evils wandered forth
To man, the earth was full, and full the sea.
Diseases, that all round by day and night
Bring ills to mortals, hovered, self-impelled,
Silent, for Zeus the Counsellor their voice
Had taken away[431].’
Proclus understands that these silent ghostly insidious things _are_
Keres, though he partly modernizes them. He says in commenting on the
passage, ‘Hesiod gives them (i.e. the diseases) bodily form making them
approach without sound, showing that even of these things spirits are the
guardians, sending invisibly the diseases decreed by fate and scattering
the Keres in the cask.’ After the manner of his day he thinks the Keres
were presided over by spirits, that they were diseases sent by spirits,
but primitive man believes the Keres _are_ the spirits, _are_ the
diseases. Hesiod himself was probably not quite conscious that the jar or
pithos was the great grave-jar of the Earth-mother Pandora (p. 286), and
that the Keres were ghosts. ‘Earth,’ says Hesiod, ‘was full and full the
sea.’ This crowd of Keres close-packed is oddly emphasized in a fragment
by an anonymous poet[432]:
‘Such is our mortal state, ill upon ill,
And round about us Keres crowding still;
No chink of opening
Is left for entering.’
This notion of the swarm of unknown unseen evils hovering about men
haunts the lyric poets, lending a certain primitive reality to their
vague mournful pessimism. Simonides of Amorgos[433] seems to echo Hesiod
when he says ‘hope feeds all men’—but hope is all in vain because of the
imminent demon host that work for man’s undoing, disease and death and
war and shipwreck and suicide.
‘No ill is lacking, Keres thousand-fold
Mortals attend, woes and calamities
That none may scape.’
Here and elsewhere to translate ‘Keres’ by fates is to make a
premature abstraction. The Keres are still physical actual things not
impersonations. So when Aeschylus[434] puts into the mouth of his Danaid
women the prayer
‘Nor may diseases, noisome swarm,
Settle upon our heads, to harm
Our citizens,’
the ‘noisome swarm’ is no mere ‘poetical’ figure but the reflection of a
real primitive conviction of live pests.
The little fluttering insect-like diseases are naturally spoken of for
the most part in the plural, but in the _Philoctetes_ of Sophocles[435]
the festering sore of the hero is called ‘an ancient Ker’; here again
the usage is primitive rather than poetical. Viewing the Keres ‘as
little inherent physical pests,’ we are not surprised to learn from
Theognis[436] that
‘For hapless man wine doth two Keres hold—
Limb-slacking Thirst, Drunkenness overbold.’
Nor is it man alone who is beset by these evil sprites. In that
storehouse of ancient superstition, the Orphic _Lithica_[437], we hear of
Keres who attack the fields. Against them the best remedy is the Lychnis
stone, which was also good to keep off a hailstorm.
‘Lychnis, from pelting hail be thou our shield,
Keep off the Keres who attack each field.’
And Theophrastus[438] tells us that each locality has its own Keres
dangerous to plants, some coming from the ground, some from the air,
some from both. Fire also, it would seem, might be infested by Keres.
A commentator on Philo says that it is important that no profane fire,
i.e. such as is in ordinary use, should touch an altar because it may be
contaminated by myriads of Keres[439]. Instructive too is the statement
of Stesichorus[440], who according to tradition ‘called the Keres by
the name Telchines.’ Eustathius in quoting the statement of Stesichorus
adds as explanatory of Keres τὰς σκοτώσεις: the word σκοτώσεις is late
and probably a gloss, it means darkening, killing, eclipse physical
and spiritual. Leaving the gloss aside, the association of Keres with
Telchines is of capital interest and takes us straight back into the
world of ancient magic. The Telchines were the typical magicians of
antiquity, and Strabo[441] tells us that one of their magic arts was to
‘besprinkle animals and plants with the water of Styx and sulphur mixed
with it, with a view to destroy them.’
Thus the Keres, from being merely bad influences inherent and almost
automatic, became exalted and personified into actual magicians.
Eustathius in the passage where he quotes Stesichorus allows us to see
how this happened. He is commenting on the ancient tribe of the Kouretes:
these Kouretes, he says, were Cretan and also called Thelgines (_sic_),
and they were sorcerers and magicians. ‘Of these there were two sorts:
one sort craftsmen and skilled in handiwork, the other sort pernicious
to all good things; these last were of fierce nature and were fabled to
be the origins of squalls of wind, and they had a cup in which they used
to brew magic potions from roots. They (i.e. the former sort) invented
statuary and discovered metals, and they were amphibious and of strange
varieties of shape, some were like demons, some like men, some like
fishes, some like serpents; and the story went that some had no hands,
some no feet, and some had webs between their fingers like geese. And
they say that they were blue-eyed and black-tailed.’ Finally comes the
significant statement that _they perished struck down by the thunder of
Zeus or by the arrows of Apollo_. The old order is slain by the new. To
the imagination of the conqueror the conquered are at once barbarians
and magicians, monstrous and magical, hated and feared, craftsmen and
medicine men, demons, beings endowed like the spirits they worship, in a
word Keres-Telchines[442]. When we find the good, fruitful, beneficent
side of the Keres effaced and ignored we must always remember this fact
that we see them through the medium of a conquering civilization[443].
THE KERES OF OLD AGE AND DEATH.
By fair means or foul, by such ritual procedures as have already been
noted, by the chewing of buckthorn, the sounding of brass, the making
of comic figures, most of the Keres could be kept at bay; but there were
two who waited relentless, who might not be averted, and these were Old
Age and Death. It is the thought that these two Keres are waiting that
with the lyric poets most of all overshadows the brightness of life.
Theognis[444] prays to Zeus:
‘Keep far the evil Keres, me defend
From Old Age wasting, and from Death the end.’
These haunting Keres of disease, disaster, old age and death
Mimnermus[445] can never forget:
‘We blossom like the leaves that come in spring,
What time the sun begins to flame and glow,
And in the brief span of youth’s gladdening
Nor good nor evil from the gods we know,
But always at the goal black Keres stand
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death within her hand.
And all the fruit of youth wastes, as the Sun
Wastes and is spent in sunbeams, and to die
Not live is best, for evils many a one
Are born within the soul. And Poverty
Has wasted one man’s house with niggard care,
And one has lost his children. Desolate
Of this his earthly longing, he must fare
To Hades. And another for his fate
Has sickness sore that eats his soul. No man
Is there but Zeus hath cursed with many a ban.
Here is the same dismal primitive faith, or rather fear. All things are
beset by Keres, and Keres are all evil. The verses of Mimnermus are of
interest at this point because they show the emergence of the two most
dreaded Keres, Old Age and Death, from the swarm of minor ills. Poverty,
disease and desolation are no longer definitely figured as Keres. The
vase-painter shows this fact in a cruder form. On a red-figured amphora
(fig. 18) in the Louvre[446] Herakles is represented lifting his club
to slay a shrivelled ugly little figure leaning on a stick—the figure
obviously is an old man. Fortunately it is inscribed γῆρας. It is not
an old man, but Old Age itself, the dreaded Ker. The representation is
a close parallel to Herakles slaying the Ker in fig. 17. The Ker of Old
Age has no wings: these the vase-painter rightly felt were inappropriate.
It is in fact a Ker developed one step further into an impersonation.
The vase may be safely dated as belonging to about the middle of the 5th
century B.C. It is analogous in style, as in subject, to an amphora[447]
in the British Museum bearing the love-name Charmides.
[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
Gradually the meanings of Ker became narrowed down to one, to the
great evil, death and the fate of death, but always with a flitting
remembrance that there were Keres of all mortal things. This is the
usage most familiar to us, because it is Homeric. Homer’s phraseology
is rarely primitive—often fossilized—and the regularly recurring ‘Ker
of death[448]’ (κὴρ θανάτοιο) is heir to a long ancestry. In Homer we
catch the word Ker at a moment of transition; it is half death, half
death-spirit. Odysseus[449] says
‘Death and the Ker avoiding, we escape,’
where the two words death and Ker are all but equivalents: they are both
death and the sprite of death, or as we might say now-a-days death and
the angel of death. Homer’s conception so dominates our minds that the
custom has obtained of uniformly translating ‘Ker’ by fate, a custom that
has led to much confusion of thought.
Two things with respect to Homer’s usage must be borne in mind. First,
his use of the word Ker is, as might be expected, far more abstract
and literary than the usage we have already noted. It is impossible to
say that Homer has in his mind anything of the nature of a tiny winged
bacillus. Second, in Homer Ker is almost always defined and limited by
the genitive θανάτοιο, and this looks as though, behind the expression,
there lay the half-conscious knowledge that there were Keres of other
things than death. Ker itself is _not_ death, but the two have become
well-nigh inseparable.
Some notion of the double nature, good and bad, of Keres seems to survive
in the expression two-fold Keres (διχθάδιαι Κῆρες). Achilles[450] says:
‘My goddess-mother silver-footed Thetis
Hath said that Keres two-fold bear me on
To the term of death.’
It is true that both the Keres are carrying him deathward, but there is
strongly present the idea of the diversity of fates. The English language
has in such cases absolutely no equivalent for Ker, because it has no
word weighted with the like associations.
In one passage only in the Iliad[451], i.e. the description of the shield
of Achilles, does a Ker actually appear in person, on the battlefield:
‘And in the thick of battle there was Strife
And Clamour, and there too the baleful Ker.
She grasped one man alive, with bleeding wound,
Another still unwounded, and one dead
She by his feet dragged through the throng. And red
Her raiment on her shoulders with men’s blood.’
A work of art, it must be remembered, is being described, and the feeling
is more Hesiodic than Homeric. The Ker is in this case not a fate but a
horrible she-demon of slaughter.
THE KER AS HARPY AND WIND-DEMON.
In Homer the Keres are no doubt mainly death-spirits, but they have
another function, they actually _carry off_ the souls to Hades. Odysseus
says[452]:
‘Howbeit him Death-Keres carried off
To Hades’ house.’
It is impossible here to translate Keres by ‘fates,’ the word is too
abstract: the Keres are πρόσπολοι, angels, messengers, death-demons,
souls that carry off souls.
[Illustration: FIG. 19.]
The idea that underlies this constantly recurring formulary, κῆρες
ἔβαν θανάτοιο φέρουσαι, emerges clearly when we come to consider those
analogous apparitions, the Harpies. The Harpies betray their nature
clearly in their name, in its uncontracted form ‘Ἀρεπυια,’ which
appears on the vase-painting in fig. 19; they are the Snatchers, winged
women-demons, hurrying along like the storm wind and carrying all things
to destruction. The vase-painting in fig. 19 from a large black-figured
vessel in the Berlin Museum[453] is specially instructive because, though
the winged demons are inscribed as Harpies, the scene of which they form
part, i.e. the slaying of Medusa, clearly shows that they are Gorgons;
so near akin, so shifting and intermingled are the two conceptions. On
another vase (fig. 20), also in the Berlin Museum[454], we see an actual
Gorgon with the typical Gorgon’s head and protruding tongue performing
the function of a Harpy, i.e. of a Snatcher. We say ‘an actual Gorgon,’
but it is not a Gorgon of the usual form but a bird-woman with a Gorgon’s
head. The bird-woman is currently and rightly associated with the Siren,
a creature to be discussed later (p. 197), a creature malign though
seductive in Homer, but gradually softened by the Athenian imagination
into a sorrowful death angel.
[Illustration: FIG. 20.]
[Illustration: FIG. 21.]
The tender bird-women of the so-called ‘Harpy tomb’ from Lycia (fig. 21),
now in the British Museum, perform the functions of a Harpy, but very
gently. They are at least near akin to the sorrowing Sirens on Athenian
tombs. We can scarcely call them by the harsh name of the ‘Snatchers.’
And yet, standing as it did in Lycia, this ‘Harpy tomb’ may be the
outcome of the same stratum of mythological conceptions as the familiar
story of the daughters of the Lycian Pandareos. Penelope[455] in her
desolation cries aloud:
‘Would that the storm might snatch me adown its dusky way
And cast me forth where Ocean is outpour’d with ebbing spray,
As when Pandareos’ daughters the storm winds bore away,’
and then, harking back, she tells the ancient Lycian story of the fair
nurture of the princesses and how Aphrodite went to high Olympus to plan
for them a goodly marriage. But whom the gods love die young:
‘Meantime the Harpies snatched away the maids, and gave them o’er
To the hateful ones, the Erinyes, to serve them evermore[456].’
Early death was figured by the primitive Greek as a snatching away by
evil death-demons, storm-ghosts. These snatchers he called Harpies, the
modern Greek calls them Nereids. In Homer’s lines we seem to catch the
winds as snatchers, half-way to their full impersonation as Harpies.
To give them a capital letter is to crystallize their personality
prematurely. Even when they become fully persons, their name carried to
the Greek its adjectival sense now partly lost to us.
* * * * *
Another function of the Harpies links them very closely with the Keres,
and shows in odd and instructive fashion the animistic habit of ancient
thought. The Harpies not only snatch away souls to death but they give
life, bringing things to birth. A Harpy was the mother by Zephyros of
the horses of Achilles[457]. Both parents are in a sense winds, only the
Harpy wind halts between horse and woman. By winds as Vergil tells us
mares became pregnant[458].
[Illustration: FIG. 22.]
As such a Harpy, half horse, half Gorgon-woman, Medusa is represented
on a curious Boeotian vase (fig. 22) of very archaic style now in the
Louvre[459]. The representation is instructive, it shows how in art as
in literature the types of Gorgon and Harpy were for a time in flux;
a particular artist could please his own fancy. The horse Medusa was
apparently not a success, for she did not survive.
It is easy enough to see how winds were conceived of as Snatchers,
death-demons, but why should they impregnate, give life? It is not, I
think, by a mere figure of speech that breezes (πνοιαί) are spoken of
as ‘life-begetting’ (ζωογόνοι) and ‘soul-rearing’ (ψυχοτρόφοι). It is
not because they are in our sense life-giving and refreshing as well
as destructive: the truth lies deeper down. Only life can give life,
only a soul gives birth to a soul; the winds _are_ souls as well as
breaths (πνεύματα). Here as so often we get at the real truth through
an ancient Athenian cultus practice. When an Athenian was about to be
married he prayed and sacrificed, Suidas tells us, to the Tritopatores.
The statement is quoted from Phanodemus who wrote a book on _Attic
Matters_[460]. Suidas tells us also who the Tritopatores were. They
were, as we might guess from their name, fathers in the third degree,
forefathers, ancestors, ghosts, and Dêmon in his _Atthis_ said they
were winds. To the winds, it has already been seen (p. 67), are offered
such expiatory sacrifices (σφάγια) as are due to the spirits of the
underworld. The idea that the Tritopatores were winds as well as ghosts
was never lost. To Photius and Suidas they are ‘lords of the winds’ and
the Orphics make them ‘gate-keepers and guardians of the winds.’ From
ghosts of dead men, Hippocrates[461] tells us, came nurture and growth
and seeds, and the author of the _Geoponica_[462] says that winds give
life not only to plants but to all things. It was natural enough that
the winds should be divided into demons beneficent and maleficent, as it
depends where you live whether a wind from a particular quarter will do
you good or ill.
[Illustration: FIG. 23.]
In the black-figured vase-painting in fig. 23, found at Naukratis and
now in the British Museum[463], a local nymph is depicted: only the
lower part of her figure is left us, drapery, the ends of her long hair
and her feet, but she must be the nymph Cyrene beloved of Apollo, for
close to her and probably held in her hand is a great branch of the
silphium plant. To right of her approaching to minister or to worship are
winged genii. It is the very image of θεραπεία, tendance, ministration,
fostering care, worship, all in one. The genii tend the nymph who is the
land itself, her and her products. The figures to the right are bearded:
they can scarcely be other than the spirits of the North wind, the
Boreadae, the cool healthful wind that comes over the sea to sun-burnt
Africa. If these be Boreadae, the opposing figures, beardless and
therefore almost certainly female, are Harpies, demons of the South wind,
to Africa the wind coming across the desert and bringing heat and blight
and pestilence[464].
[Illustration: FIG. 24.]
It might be bold to assert so much, but for the existence of another
vase-painting on a situla from Daphnae (fig. 24), also, happily for
comparison, in the British Museum[465]. On the one side, not figured
here, is a winged bearded figure ending in a snake, probably Boreas:
such a snake-tailed Boreas was seen by Pausanias[466] on the chest of
Cypselus in the act of seizing Oreithyia. There is nothing harsh in the
snake tail for Boreas, for the winds, as has already been noted (p.
68), were regarded as earth-born. Behind Boreas is a plant in blossom
rising from the ground, a symbol of the vegetation nourished by the North
wind. On the reverse (fig. 25) is a winged figure closely like the left
hand genii of the Cyrene cylix, and this figure drives in front of it
destructive creatures, a locust, the pest of the South, two birds of
prey attacking a hare, and a third that is obviously a vulture. The two
representations taken together justify us in regarding the left hand
genii as destructive. Taking these two representations together with a
third vase-painting, the celebrated Phineus cylix[467], we are further
justified in calling these destructive wind-demons Harpies. On this
vase[468] the Boreadae, Zetes and Kalais, show their true antagonism. The
Harpies have fouled the food of Phineus like the pestilential winds they
were, and the clean clear sons of the North wind give chase. It is seldom
that ancient art has preserved for us so clear a picture of the duality
of things.
[Illustration: FIG. 25.]
* * * * *
On black-figured vase-paintings little winged figures occur not
unfrequently to which it is by no means easy to give a name. In fig. 26
we have such a representation[469]—Europa seated on the bull passes in
rapid flight over the sea which is indicated by fishes and dolphins.
In front of her flies a vulture-like bird, behind comes a winged figure
holding two wreaths. Is she Nike, bringing good success to the lover?
is she a favouring wind speeding the flight? I incline to think the
vase-painter did not clearly discriminate. She is a sort of good Ker, a
fostering favouring influence. In all these cases of early genii it is
important to bear in mind that the sharp distinction between moral and
physical influence, so natural to the modern mind, is not yet established.
[Illustration: FIG. 26.]
We return to the Keres from which the wind demons sprang.
THE KER AS FATE.
One Homeric instance of the use of Ker remains to be examined. When
Achilles[470] had the fourth time chased Hector round the walls of Troy,
Zeus was wearied and
‘Hung up his golden scales and in them set
Twain Keres, fates of death that lays men low.’
This weighing of Keres, this ‘Kerostasia,’ is a weighing of death fates,
but it is interesting to find that it reappears under another name, i.e.
the ‘Psychostasia,’ the weighing of souls. We know from Plutarch[471]
that Aeschylus wrote a play with this title. The subject was the weighing
of the souls or lives not of Hector and Achilles, but Achilles and
Memnon. This is certain because, Plutarch says, he placed at either
side of the scales the mothers Thetis and Eos praying for their sons.
Pollux[472] adds that Zeus and his attendants were suspended from a
crane. In the scene of the Kerostasia as given by Quintus Smyrnaeus[473],
a scene which probably goes back to the earlier tradition of ‘Arctinos,’
it is noticeable that Memnon the loser has a swarthy Ker while Achilles
the winner has a bright cheerful one, a fact which seems to anticipate
the white and black Erinyes.
The scene of the Psychostasia or Kerostasia, as it is variously called,
appears on several vase-paintings, one of which from the British
Museum[474] is reproduced in fig. 27. Hermes holds the scales, in either
scale is the Ker or _eidolon_ of one of the combatants; the lekythos is
black-figured, and is our earliest source for the Kerostasia. The Keres
or ψυχαί are represented as miniature men, it is the _lives_ rather than
the fates that are weighed. So the notion shifts.
[Illustration: FIG. 27.]
In Hesiod, as has already been noted (p. 169), the Keres are more
primitive and actual, they are in a sense fates, but they are also
little winged spirits. But Hesiod is Homer-ridden, so we get the ‘black
Ker,’ own sister to Thanatos and hateful Moros (Doom) and Sleep and the
tribes of Dreams[475]. We get also[476] the dawnings of an Erinys, of an
_avenging_ fate, though the lines look like an interpolation:
‘Night bore
The Avengers and the Keres pitiless.’
Hesiod goes on to give the names usually associated with the Fates,
Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and says they
‘To mortals at their birth
Give good and evil both.’
Whether interpolated or not the passage is significant both because it
gives to the Keres the functions Homer allotted to the Erinyes, and also
because with a reminiscence of earlier thought it makes them the source
of good and of evil. It is probably this last idea that is at the back of
the curious Hesiodic epithet Κηριτρεφής, which occurs in the _Works and
Days_[477]:
‘Then, when the dog-star comes and shines by day
For a brief space over the heads of men
Ker-nourished.’
‘Men nourished for death’ assuredly is not the meaning; the idea seems
to be that each man has a Ker within him, a thing that nourishes him,
keeps him alive, a sort of fate as it were on which his life depends.
The epithet might come to signify something like _mortal_, subject to,
depending on fate. If this be the meaning it looks back to an early stage
of things when the Ker had not been specialized down to death and was not
wholly ‘black,’ when it was more a man’s luck than his fate, a sort of
embryo Genius.
Κηριτρεφής, Ker-nourished, would then be the antithesis of Κηρίφατος
‘slain by Keres,’ which Hesychius[478] explains as those who died of
disease; and would look back to a primitive doubleness of functions when
the Keres were demons of all work. In vague and fitful fashion they begin
where the Semnae magnificently end, as Moirae with control over all human
weal and woe.
‘These for their guerdon hold dominion
O’er all things mortal[479].’
In such returning cycles runs the wheel of theology.
* * * * *
But the black side of things is always, it would seem, most impressive
to primitive man. Given that the Ker was a fate of death, almost a
personified death, it was fitting and natural that it should be tricked
out with ever increasing horrors. Hesiod, or the writer of the _Shield_,
with his rude peasant imagination was ready for the task. The Keres of
Pandora’s jar are purely primitive, and quite natural, not thought out at
all: the Keres of the _Shield_ are a literary effort and much too horrid
to be frightening. Behind the crowd of old men praying with uplifted
hands for their fighting children stood
‘The blue-black Keres, grinding their white teeth,
Glaring and grim, bloody, insatiable;
They strive round those that fall, greedy to drink
Black blood, and whomsoever first they found
Low lying with fresh wounds, about his flesh
A Ker would lay long claws, and his soul pass
To Hades and chill gloom of Tartarus[480].’
Pausanias[481] in his description of the chest of Cypselus tells of the
figure of a Ker which is thoroughly Hesiodic in character. The scene
is the combat between Eteokles and Polyneikes; Polyneikes has fallen
on his knees and Eteokles is rushing at him. ‘Behind Polyneikes is a
woman-figure with teeth, as cruel as a wild beast’s, and her finger-nails
are hooked. An inscription near her says that she is a Ker, as though
Polyneikes were carried off by Fate, and as though the end of Eteokles
were in accordance with justice.’ Pausanias regards the word Ker as the
equivalent of Fate, but we must not impose a conception so abstract on
the primitive artist who decorated the chest.
We are very far from the little fluttering ghosts, the winged bacilli,
but there is a touch of kinship with those other ghosts who in the
Nekuia draw nigh to drink the black blood (p. 75), and—a forecast of
the Erinyes—the ‘blue-black[482]’ Keres are near akin to the horrid
Hades demon painted by Polygnotus on the walls of the Lesche at Delphi.
Pausanias[483] says, ‘Above the figures I have mentioned (i.e. the
sacrilegious man, etc.) is Eurynomos; the guides of Delphi say that
Eurynomos is one of the demons in Hades, and that he gnaws the flesh of
the dead bodies, leaving only the bones. Homer’s poem about Odysseus, and
those called the _Minyas_ and the _Nostoi_, though they all make mention
of Hades and its terrors, know no demon Eurynomos. I will therefore say
this much, I will describe what sort of a person Eurynomos is and in what
fashion he appears in the painting. The colour is blue-black (κυανοῦ
τὴν χρόαν μεταξύ ἐστι καὶ μέλανος) like the colour of the flies that
settle on meat; he is showing his teeth and is seated on the skin of a
vulture.’ The Keres of the _Shield_ are human vultures; Eurynomos is the
sarcophagus incarnate, the great carnivorous vulture of the underworld,
the flesh-eater grotesquely translated to a world of shadows. He rightly
sits upon a vulture’s skin. Such figures, Pausanias truly observes,
are foreign to the urbane Epic. But rude primitive man, when he sees
a skeleton, asks who ate the flesh; the answer is ‘a Ker.’ We are in
the region of mere rude bogeydom, the land of Gorgo, Empusa, Lamia and
Sphinx, and, strange though it may seem, of Siren.
To examine severally each of these bogey forms would lead too far afield,
but the development of the types of Gorgon, Siren and Sphinx both in art
and literature is so instructive that at the risk of digression each of
these forms must be examined somewhat in detail.
THE KER AS GORGON.
The Gorgons are to the modern mind three sisters of whom one, most evil
of the three, Medusa, was slain by Perseus, and her lovely terrible face
had power to turn men into stone.
The triple form is not primitive, it is merely an instance of a
general tendency, to be discussed later—a tendency which makes of each
woman-goddess a trinity, which has given us the Horae, the Charites, the
Semnae, and a host of other triple groups. It is immediately obvious that
the triple Gorgons are not really three but one + two. The two unslain
sisters are mere superfluous appendages due to convention; the real
Gorgon is Medusa. It is equally apparent that in her essence Medusa is a
head and nothing more; her potency only begins when her head is severed,
and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body
later appended. The primitive Greek knew that there was in his ritual a
horrid thing called a Gorgoneion, a grinning mask with glaring eyes and
protruding beast-like tusks and pendent tongue. How did this Gorgoneion
come to be? A hero had slain a beast called the Gorgon, and this was its
head. Though many other associations gathered round it, the basis of the
Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood. The ritual
object comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it; then
the hero is supplied to account for the slaying of the monster.
Ritual masks are part of the appliances of most primitive cults. They
are the natural agents of a religion of fear and ‘riddance.’ Most
anthropological museums[484] contain specimens of ‘Gorgoneia’ still in
use among savages, Gorgoneia which are veritable Medusa heads in every
detail, glaring eyes, pendent tongue, protruding tusks. The function of
such masks is permanently to ‘make an ugly face,’ _at_ you if you are
doing wrong, breaking your word, robbing your neighbour, meeting him in
battle; _for_ you if you are doing right.
Scattered notices show us that masks and faces were part of the apparatus
of a religion of terror among the Greeks. There was, we learn from the
lexicographers[485], a goddess Praxidike, Exactress of Vengeance, whose
images were heads only, and her sacrifices the like. By the time of
Pausanias[486] this head or mask goddess had, like the Erinys, taken on a
multiple, probably a triple form. At Haliartos in Boeotia he saw in the
open air ‘a sanctuary of the goddesses whom they call Praxidikae. Here
the Haliartans swear, but the oath is not one that they take lightly.’ In
like manner at ancient Pheneus, there was a thing called the Petroma[487]
which contained a mask of Demeter with the surname of Cidaria: by this
Petroma most of the people of Pheneus swore on the most important
matters. If the mask like its covering were of stone, such a stone-mask
may well have helped out the legend of Medusa. The mask enclosed in the
Petroma was the vehicle of the goddess: the priest put it on when he
performed the ceremony of smiting the Underground Folk with rods.
[Illustration: FIG. 28.]
[Illustration: FIG. 29.]
[Illustration: FIG. 30.]
[Illustration: FIG. 31.]
The use of masks in regular ritual was probably a rare survival, and
would persist only in remote regions, but the common people were slow to
lose their faith in the apotropaic virtue of an ‘ugly face.’ Fire was a
natural terror to primitive man and all operations of baking beset by
possible Keres. Therefore on his ovens he thought it well to set a Gorgon
mask. In fig. 28, a portable oven now in the museum at Athens[488], the
mask is outside guarding the entrance. In fig. 29 the upper part of a
similar oven is shown, and inside, where the fire flames up, are set
three masks. These ovens are not very early, but they are essentially
primitive. The face need not be of the type we call a Gorgon. In fig.
30 we have a Satyr type, bearded, with stark upstanding ears and hair,
the image of fright set to frighten the frightful. It might be the
picture of Phobos himself. In fig. 31 we have neither Gorgon nor Satyr
but that typical bogey of the workshop, the Cyclops. He wears the typical
workman’s cap, and to either side are set the thunderbolts it is his
business to forge. The craftsman is regarded as an uncanny bogey himself,
cunning over-much, often deformed, and so he is good to frighten other
bogeys. The Cyclops was a terror even in high Olympus. Callimachus[489]
in his charming way tells how
‘Even the little goddesses are in a dreadful fright;
If one of them will not be good, up in Olympos’ height,
Her mother calls a Cyclops, and there is sore disgrace,
And Hermes goes and gets a coal, and blacks his dreadful face,
And down the chimney comes. She runs straight to her mother’s lap,
And shuts her eyes tight in her hands for fear of dire mishap.’
This fear of the bogey that beset the potter, and indeed beset every
action, even the simplest, of human life, is very well shown in the
Hymn[490] ‘The Oven, or the Potters,’ which shows clearly the order of
beings against which the ‘ugly face’ was efficacious:
‘If you but pay me my hire, potters, I sing to command.
Hither, come hither, Athene, bless with a fostering hand
Furnace and potters and pots, let the making and baking go well;
Fair shall they stand in the streets and the market, and quick shall
they sell,
Great be the gain. But if at your peril you cheat me my price,
Tricksters by birth, then straight to the furnace I call in a trice
Mischievous imps one and all, Crusher and Crasher by name,
Smasher and Half-bake and Him-who-burns-with-Unquenchable-Flame,
They shall scorch up the house and the furnace, ruin it, bring it to
nought.
Wail shall the potters and snort shall the furnace, as horses do snort.’
How real was the belief in these evil sprites and in the power to avert
them by magic and apotropaic figures is seen on a fragment of early
Corinthian pottery[491] now in the Berlin Museum reproduced in fig. 32.
Here is the great oven and here is the potter hard at work, but he is
afraid in his heart, afraid of the Crusher and the Smasher and the rest.
He has done what he can; a great owl is perched on the oven to protect
it, and in front he has put a little ugly comic man, a charm to keep off
evil spirits: he might have put a Satyr-head[492] or a Gorgoneion; he
often did put both; it is all the same. Pollux[493] tells us it was the
custom to put such comic figures (γελοῖα) before bronze-foundries; they
could be either hung up or modelled on the furnace, and their object was
‘the aversion of ill-will’ (ἐπὶ φθόνου ἀποτροπῇ). These little images
were also called βασκάνια or by the unlearned προβασκάνια, charms against
the evil eye; and if we may trust the scholiast on Aristophanes[494] they
formed part of the furniture of most people’s chimney corners at Athens.
Of such βασκάνια the Gorgon mask was one and perhaps the most common
shape.
[Illustration: FIG. 32.]
* * * * *
In literature the Gorgon first meets us as a Gorgoneion, and this
Gorgoneion is an underworld bogey. Odysseus[495] in Hades would fain have
held further converse with dead heroes, but
‘Ere that might be, the ghosts thronged round in myriads manifold,
Weird was the magic din they made, a pale-green fear gat hold
Of me, lest for my daring Persephone the dread
From Hades should send up an awful monster’s grizzly head.’
Homer is quite non-committal as to who and what the awful monster is; all
that is clear is that the head only is feared as an ἀποτρόπαιον, a bogey
to keep you off. Whether he knew of an actual monster called a Gorgon is
uncertain. The nameless horror may be the head of either man or beast, or
monster compounded of both.
In this connection it is instructive to note that, though the human
Medusa-head on the whole obtained, the head of any beast is good as a
protective charm. Prof. Ridgeway[496] has conclusively shown that the
Gorgoneion on the aegis of Athene is but the head of the slain beast
whose skin was the raiment of the primitive goddess; the head is worn on
the breast, and serves to protect the wearer and to frighten his foe; it
is a primitive half-magical shield. The natural head is later tricked out
into an artificial bogey.
[Illustration: FIG. 33.]
We are familiar with the Gorgoneion on shields, with the Gorgoneion on
tombs, and as an amulet on vases. On the basis[497] in fig. 33 the
Gorgoneion is set to guard a statue of which two delicate feet remain. On
two sides of the triangular statue we have the Gorgon head; on the third,
serving a like protective purpose, a ram’s head. The statue, dedicated
in the precinct of Apollo at Delos, probably represents the god himself,
but we need seek for no artificial connection between Gorgon, rams and
Apollo; Gorgoneion and ram alike are merely prophylactic. The basis has
a further interest in that the inscription[498] dates the Gorgon-type
represented with some precision. The form of the letters shows it to have
been the work and the dedication of a Naxian artist of the early part of
the 6th century.
[Illustration: FIG. 34.]
On a Rhodian plate[499] in the British Museum in fig. 34 the Gorgoneion
has been furnished with a body tricked out with wings, but the mask-head
is still dominant. The figure is conceived in the typical heraldic
fashion of the Mistress of Wild Things (πότνια θηρῶν); she is in fact the
ugly bogey-, Erinys-side of the Great Mother; she is a potent goddess,
not as in later days a monster to be slain by heroes. The highest
divinities of the religion of fear and riddance became the harmful bogeys
of the cult of ‘service.’ The Olympians in their turn became Christian
devils.
Aeschylus[500] in instructive fashion places side by side the two sets of
three sisters, the Gorgons and the Graiae. They are but two by-forms of
each other. Prometheus foretells to Io her long wandering in the bogey
land of Nowhere:
‘Pass onward o’er the sounding sea, till thou
Dost touch Kisthene’s dreadful plains, wherein
The Phorkides do dwell, the ancient maids,
Three, shaped like swans, having one eye for all,
One tooth—whom never doth the rising sun
Glad with his beams, nor yet the moon by night—
Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged,
With snakes for hair—hated of mortal man—
None may behold and bear their breathing blight.’
The daughters of Phorkys, whom Hesiod[501] calls Grey Ones or Old Ones,
Graiae, are fair of face though two-thirds blind and one-toothed; but
the emphasis on the one tooth and the one eye shows that in tooth and
eye resided their potency, and that in this they were own sisters to the
Gorgons.
The Graiae appear, so far as I know, only once in vase-paintings, on
the cover of a pyxis in the Central Museum at Athens[502], reproduced
in fig. 35. They are sea-maidens, as the dolphins show; old Phorkys
their father is seated near them, and Poseidon and Athene are present in
regular Athenian fashion. Hermes has brought Perseus, and Perseus waits
his chance to get the one eye as it is passed from hand to hand. The eye
is clearly seen in the hand outstretched above Perseus; one blind sister
hands it to the other. The third holds in her hand the fanged tooth. The
vase-painter will not have the Graiae old and loathsome, they are lovely
maidens; he remembers that they were white-haired from their youth.
The account given by Aeschylus of the Gorgons helps to explain their
nature:
‘None may behold, and bear their breathing blight[503].’
[Illustration: FIG. 35.]
They slay by a malign effluence, and this effluence, tradition said,
came from their eyes. Athenaeus[504] quotes Alexander the Myndian as his
authority for the statement that there actually existed creatures who
could by their eyes turn men to stone. Some say the beast which the
Libyans called Gorgon was like a wild sheep, others like a calf; it had
a mane hanging over its eyes so heavy that it could only shake it aside
with difficulty; it killed whomever it looked at, not by its breath but
by a destructive exhalation from its eyes.
What the beast was and how the story arose cannot be decided, but it is
clear that the Gorgon was regarded as a sort of incarnate Evil Eye. The
monster was tricked out with cruel tusks and snakes, but it slew by the
eye, it _fascinated_.
* * * * *
The Evil Eye itself is not frequent on monuments; the Gorgoneion as a
more complete and more elaborately decorative horror attained a wider
popularity. But the prophylactic Eye, the eye set to stare back the
Evil Eye, is common on vases, on shields and on the prows of ships (see
fig. 38). The curious design in fig. 36 is from a Roman mosaic dug up
on the Caelian hill[505]. It served as the pavement in an entrance
hall to a Basilica built by a certain Hilarius, a dealer in pearls
(_margaritarius_) and head of a college of Dendrophoroi, sacred to the
Mother of the Gods. The inscription prays that ‘God may be propitious to
those who enter here and to the Basilica of Hilarius,’ and to make divine
favour more secure, a picture is added to show the complete overthrow
of the evil eye. Very complete is its destruction. Four-footed beasts,
birds and reptiles attack it, it is bored through with a lance, and as a
final prophylactic on the eye-brow is perched Athene’s little holy owl.
Hilarius prayed to a kindly god, but deep down in his heart was the old
savage fear[506].
[Illustration: FIG. 36.]
The Gorgon is more monstrous, more savage, than any other of the
Ker-forms. The Gorgoneion figures little in poetry though much in
art. It is an underworld bogey but not human enough to be a ghost, it
lacks wholly the gentle side of the Keres, and would scarcely have
been discussed here, but that the art-type of the Gorgon lent, as will
be seen, some of its traits to the Erinys, and notably the deathly
distillation by which they slay:
‘From out their eyes they ooze a loathly rheum[507].’
THE KER AS SIREN[508].
The Sirens are to the modern mind mermaids, sometimes all human,
sometimes fish-tailed, evil sometimes, but beautiful always. Milton
invokes Sabrina from the waves by
‘... the songs of Sirens sweet,
By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb,
And fair Ligeia’s golden comb
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks
Sleeking her soft alluring locks.’
Homer by the magic of his song lifted them once and for all out of the
region of mere bogeydom, and yet a careful examination, especially of
their art form, clearly reveals traces of rude origin.
Circe’s warning to Odysseus runs thus[509]:
‘First to the Sirens shalt thou sail, who all men do beguile.
Whoso unwitting draws anigh, by magic of their wile,
They lure him with their singing, nor doth he reach his home
Nor see his dear wife and his babes, ajoy that he is come.
For they, the Sirens, lull him with murmur of sweet sound
Crouching within the meadow: about them is a mound
Of men that rot in death, their skin wasting the bones around.’
Odysseus and his comrades, so forewarned, set sail[510]:
‘Then straightway sailed the goodly ship and swift the Sirens’ isle
Did reach, for that a friendly gale was blowing all the while.
Forthwith the gale fell dead, and calm held all the heaving deep
In stillness, for some god had lulled the billows to their sleep.’
The song of the Sirens is heard[511]:
‘Hither, far-famed Odysseus, come hither, thou the boast
Of all Achaean men, beach thou thy bark upon our coast,
And hearken to our singing, for never but did stay
A hero in his black ship and listened to the lay
Of our sweet lips; full many a thing he knew and sailed away.
For we know all things whatsoe’er in Troy’s wide land had birth
And we know all things that shall be upon the fruitful earth.’
It is strange and beautiful that Homer should make the Sirens appeal to
the spirit, not to the flesh. To primitive man, Greek or Semite, the
desire to know—to be as the gods—was the fatal desire.
Homer takes his Sirens as already familiar; he clearly draws from popular
tradition. There is no word as to their form, no hint of parentage: he
does not mean them to be mysterious, but by a fortunate chance he leaves
them shrouded in mystery, the mystery of the hidden spell of the sea,
with the haze of the noon-tide about them and the meshes of sweet music
for their unseen toils,—knowing all things yet for ever unknown. It is
this mystery of the Sirens that has appealed to modern poetry and almost
wholly obscured their simple primitive significance.
‘Their words are no more heard aright
Through lapse of many ages, and no man
Can any more across the waters wan
Behold these singing women of the sea.’
Four points in the story of Homer must be clearly noted. The Sirens,
though they sing to mariners, are _not_ sea-maidens; they dwell on an
island in a flowery meadow. They are mantic creatures like the Sphinx
with whom they have much in common, knowing both the past and the future.
Their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that
song is death. It is only from the warning of Circe that we know of
the heap of bones, corrupt in death—horror is kept in the background,
seduction to the fore.
* * * * *
It is to art we must turn to know the real nature of the Sirens. Ancient
art, like ancient literature, knows nothing of the fish-tailed mermaid.
Uniformly the art-form of the Siren is that of the bird-woman. The
proportion of bird to woman varies, but the bird element is constant. It
is interesting to note that, though the bird-woman is gradually ousted
in modern art by the fish-tailed mermaid, the bird element survives in
mediaeval times[512]. In the _Hortus Deliciarum_ of the Abbess Herrad
(circ. A.D. 1160), the Sirens appear as draped women with the clawed feet
of birds; with their human hands they are playing on lyres.
The bird form of the Sirens was a problem even to the ancients. Ovid[513]
asks:
‘Whence came these feathers and these feet of birds?
Your faces are the faces of fair maids.’
Ovid’s aetiology is of course beside the mark. The answer to his
pertinent question is quite simple. The Sirens belong to the same order
of bogey beings as the Sphinx and the Harpy; the monstrous form expresses
the monstrous nature; they are birds of prey but with power to lure by
their song. In the Harpy-form the ravening snatching nature is emphasized
and developed, in the Sphinx the mantic power of all uncanny beings, in
the Siren the seduction of song. The Sphinx, though mainly a prophetess,
keeps Harpy elements; she snatches away the youths of Thebes: she is
but ‘a man-seizing Ker[514].’ The Siren too, though mainly a seductive
singer, is at heart a Harpy, a bird of prey.
[Illustration: FIG. 37.]
This comes out very clearly in representations on vase-paintings. A
black-figured aryballos[515] of Corinthian style (fig. 37), now in the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is our earliest artistic source for the Siren
myth. Odysseus, bound to the mast, has come close up to the island: on
the island are perched ‘Sirens twain.’ Above the ship hover two great
black birds of prey in act to pounce on the mariners. These birds
cannot be merely decorative: they in a sense duplicate the Sirens. The
vase-painter knows the Sirens are singing demons sitting on an island;
the text of Homer was not in his hands to examine the account word by
word, but the Homeric story haunts his memory. He knows too that in
popular belief the Sirens are demons of prey; hence the great birds. To
the right of the Sirens on the island crouches a third figure; she is
all human, not a third Siren. She probably, indeed all but certainly,
represents the mother of the Sirens, Chthon, the Earth. Euripides[516]
makes his Helen in her anguish call on the
‘Winged maidens, virgins, daughters of the Earth,
The Sirens,’
to join their sorrowful song to hers. The parentage is significant.
The Sirens are not of the sea, not even of the land, but demons of the
underworld; they are in fact a by-form of Keres, souls.
* * * * *
The notion of the soul as a human-faced bird is familiar in Egyptian,
but rare in Greek, art. The only certain instance is, so far as I know,
the vase in the British Museum[517] on which is represented the death of
Procris. Above Procris falling in death hovers a winged bird-woman. She
is clearly, I think, the soul of Procris. To conceive of the soul as a
bird escaping from the mouth is a fancy so natural and beautiful that
it has arisen among many peoples. In Celtic mythology[518] Maildun, the
Irish Odysseus, comes to an island with trees on it in clusters on which
were perched many birds. The aged man of the island tells him, ‘These are
the souls of my children and of all my descendants, both men and women,
who are sent to this little island to abide with me according as they
die in Erin.’ Sailors to this day believe that sea-mews are the souls of
their drowned comrades. Antoninus Liberalis[519] tells how, when Ktesulla
because of her father’s broken oath died in child-bed, ‘they carried her
body out to be buried, and from the bier a dove flew forth and the body
of Ktesulla disappeared.’
The persistent anthropomorphism of the Greeks stripped the bird-soul
of all but its wings. The human winged _eidolon_ prevailed in art: the
bird-woman became a death-demon, a soul sent to fetch a soul, a Ker that
lures a soul, a Siren.
Later in date and somewhat different in conception is the scene on a
red-figured stamnos in the British Museum[520] (fig. 38). The artist’s
desire for a balanced design has made him draw two islands, on each of
which a Siren is perched. Over the head of one is inscribed Ἱμε(ρ)οπα
‘lovely-voiced.’ A third Siren flies or rather falls headlong down on to
the ship. The drawing of the eye of this third Siren should be noted.
The eye is indicated by two strokes only, without the pupil. This is
the regular method of representing the sightless eye, i.e. the eye in
death or sleep or blindness. The third Siren is dying; she has hurled
herself from the rock in despair at the fortitude of Odysseus. This is
clearly what the artist wishes to say, but he may have been haunted by
an artistic tradition of the pouncing bird of prey. He also has adopted
the number three, which by his time was canonical for the Sirens. By
making the third Siren fly headlong between the two others he has neatly
turned a difficulty in composition. On the reverse of this vase are three
Love-gods, who fall to be discussed later (Chap. XII.). Connections
between the subject matter of the obverse and reverse of vases are
somewhat precarious, but it is likely, as the three Love-gods are flying
over the sea, that the vase-painter intended to emphasize the seduction
of love in his Sirens.
[Illustration: FIG. 38.]
* * * * *
The clearest light on the lower nature of the Sirens is thrown by
the design in fig. 39 from a Hellenistic relief[521]. The monument
is of course a late one, later by at least two centuries than the
vase-paintings, but it reflects a primitive stage of thought and one
moreover wholly free from the influence of Homer. The scene is a rural
one. In the right-hand corner is a herm, in front of it an altar, near
at hand a tree on which hangs a votive syrinx. Some peasant or possibly
a wayfarer has fallen asleep. Down upon him has pounced a winged and
bird-footed woman. It is the very image of obsession, of nightmare, of a
haunting midday dream. The woman can be none other than an evil Siren.
Had the scene been represented by an earlier artist, he would have made
her ugly because evil; but by Hellenistic times the Sirens were beautiful
women, all human but for wings and sometimes bird-feet.
[Illustration: FIG. 39.]
The terrors of the midday sleep were well known to the Greeks in their
sun-smitten land; nightmare to them was also daymare. Such a visitation,
coupled possibly with occasional cases of sunstroke, was of course the
obsession of a demon[522]. Even a troubled tormenting illicit dream was
the work of a Siren. In sleep the will and the reason are becalmed and
the passions unchained. That the midday nightmare went to the making of
the Siren is clear from the windless calm and the heat of the sun in
Homer. The horrid end, the wasting death, the sterile enchantment, the
loss of wife and babes, all look the same way. Homer, with perhaps some
blend of the Northern mermaid in his mind, sets his Sirens by the sea,
thereby cleansing their uncleanness; but later tradition kept certain
horrid primitive elements when it made of the Siren a hetaira disallowing
the lawful gifts of Aphrodite.
There remains another aspect of the Sirens. They appear frequently as
monuments, sometimes as actual mourners, on tombs. Here all the erotic
element has disappeared; they are substantially Death-Keres, Harpies,
though to begin with they imaged the soul itself. The bird-woman of the
Harpy tomb, the gentle angel of death, has been already noted (p. 177).
The Siren on a black-figured lekythos in the British Museum[523] (fig.
40) is purely monumental. She stands on the grave stele playing her great
lyre, while two bearded men with their dogs seem to listen intent. She
is grave and beautiful with no touch of seduction. Probably at first the
Siren was placed on tombs as a sort of charm, a προβασκάνιον, a soul to
keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with apotropaic
ritual (p. 196), that the charm itself is used as counter-charm. So the
dreaded Death-Ker is set itself to guard the tomb. Other associations
would gather round. The Siren was a singer, she would chant the funeral
dirge; this dirge might be the praises of the dead. The epitaph that
Erinna[524] wrote for her girl-friend Baukis begins
‘Pillars and Sirens mine and mournful urn.’
[Illustration: FIG. 40.]
On later funeral monuments Sirens appear for the most part as mourners,
tearing their hair and lamenting. Their apotropaic function was wholly
forgotten. Where an apotropaic monster is wanted we find an owl or a
sphinx.
Even on funeral monuments the notion of the Siren as either soul or
Death-Angel is more and more obscured by her potency as sweet singer.
Once, however, when she appears in philosophy, there is at least a
haunting remembrance that she is a soul who sings to souls. In the
cosmography with which he ends the _Republic_, Plato[525] thus writes:
‘The spindle turns on the knees of Ananke, and on the upper surface of
each sphere is perched a Siren, who goes round with them hymning a single
tone. The eight together form one Harmony.’ Commentators explain that the
Sirens are chosen because they are sweet singers, but then, if music be
all, why is it the evil Sirens and not the good Muses who chant the music
of the spheres? Plutarch[526] felt the difficulty. In his _Symposiacs_ he
makes one of the guests say: ‘Plato is absurd in committing the eternal
and divine revolutions not to the Muses but to the Sirens; demons who
are by no means either benevolent or in themselves good.’ Another guest,
Ammonius, attempts to justify the choice of the Sirens by giving to them
in Homer a mystical significance. ‘Even Homer,’ he says, ‘means by their
music not a power dangerous and destructive to man, but rather a power
that inspires in the souls that go from Hence Thither, and wander about
after death, a love for things heavenly and divine and a forgetfulness
of things mortal, and thereby holds them enchanted by singing. Even
here,’ he goes on to say, ‘a dim murmur of that music reaches us, rousing
reminiscence.’
It is not to be for a moment supposed that Homer’s Sirens had really any
such mystical content. But, given that they have the bird-form of souls,
that they ‘know all things,’ are sweet singers and dwellers in Hades, and
they lie ready to the hand of the mystic. Proclus[527] in his commentary
on the _Republic_ says, with perhaps more truth than he is conscious
of, ‘the Sirens are a kind of souls living the life of the spirit.’
His interpretation is not merely fanciful; it is a blend of primitive
tradition with mystical philosophy.
The Sirens are further helped to their high station on the spheres by the
Orphic belief that purified souls went to the stars, nay even _became_
stars. In the _Peace_ of Aristophanes[528] the servant asks Trygaeus,
‘It is true then, what they say, that in the air
A man becomes a star, when he comes to die?’
To the poet the soul is a bird in its longing to be free:
‘Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,
On the hill-tops, where the sun scarce hath trod,
Or a cloud make the place of mine abiding,
As a bird among the bird-droves of God[529].’
And that upward flight to heavenly places is as the flying of a Siren:
‘With golden wings begirt my body flies,
Sirens have lent me their swift winged feet,
Upborne to uttermost ether I shall meet
And mix with heavenly Zeus beyond the skies[530].’
But, though Plato and the poets and the mystics exalt the Siren,
‘half-angel and half-bird,’ to cosmic functions, yet, to the popular
mind, they are mainly things, if not wholly evil, yet fearful and to be
shunned. This is seen in the myth of their contest with the Muses[531].
Here they are the spirits of forbidden intoxication; as such on vases
they join the motley crew of Centaurs and Satyrs who revel with Dionysos.
They stand, it would seem, to the ancient as to the modern, for the
impulses in life as yet unmoralized, imperious longings, ecstasies,
whether of love or art or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man
from his ‘Land of Heart’s Desire’ and to which if he hearken it may be he
will return home no more—voices too, which, whether a man sail by or stay
to hearken, still sing on.
The Siren bird-woman transformed for ever by the genius of Homer into the
sweet-voiced demon of seduction may seem remote from the Ker of which
she is but a specialized form. A curious design[532] on a black-figured
cylix in the Louvre (fig. 41) shows how close was the real connection.
The scene is a banquet: five men are reclining on couches, two of them
separated by a huge _deinos_, a wine-vessel, from which a boy has drawn
wine in an oinochoë. Over two of the men are hovering winged figures,
each holding a crown and a spray; over two others hover bird-women, each
also holding a crown and a spray. What are we to call these ministrant
figures, what would the vase-painter himself have called them? Are the
human winged figures Love-gods, are the bird-women Sirens? For lack of
context it is hard to say with certainty. Thus much is clear, both kinds
of figures are favouring genii of the feast, and for our purpose this
is all-important: the bird-women, be they Sirens or not, and the winged
human figures, be they Love-gods or merely Keres, _perform the same
function_. The development of the Love-god, Eros, from the Ker will be
discussed later (Chap. XII.); for the present it is best to regard these
bird-women and winged sprites as both of the order of Keres, as yet
unspecialized in function.
[Illustration: FIG. 41.]
THE KER AS SPHINX.
Two special features characterize the Sphinx: she was a Harpy carrying
off men to destruction, an incarnate plague; she was the soothsayer
with the evil habit of asking riddles as well as answering them. Both
functions, though seemingly alien, were characteristic of underworld
bogeys; the myth-making mind put them together and wove out of the two
the tale of the unanswered riddle and the consequent deathly pest.
On the vase-painting in fig. 42 from a cylix[533] in the Museo Gregoriano
of the Vatican, we have a charming representation of the riddle-answering
Oedipus, whose name is written _Oidipodes_, sitting meditating in
front of the oracle. The Sphinx on her column is half monument, half
personality; she is a very human monster, she has her lion-body, but she
is a lovely attentive maiden. From her lips come the letters και τρι,
which may mean _and three_ or _and three (-footed)_. In the field is a
delicate decorative spray, which, occurring as it does on vases with a
certain individuality of drawing, seems to be, as it were, the signature
of a particular master[534].
[Illustration: FIG. 42.]
The Sphinx in fig. 42 is all oracular, but occasionally, on vases of the
same date, she appears in her other function as the ‘man-snatching Ker.’
She leaves her pedestal and carries off a Theban youth. The 5th century
vase-painter with his determined euphemism, even when he depicts her
carrying off her prey, makes her do it with a certain Attic gentleness,
more like a death-Siren than a Harpy. Aeschylus[535] in the _Seven
against Thebes_ describes her as the monster she is; the Sphinx on the
shield of Parthenopaeus is a horrid bogey, the ‘reproach of the state,’
‘eater of raw-flesh,’ with hungry jaws, bringing ill-luck to him who
bears her on his ensign.
[Illustration: FIG. 43.]
In the curious vase-painting in fig. 43, a design from a late Lower Italy
krater[536] in the museum at Naples, the Sphinx is wholly oracular, and
this time she must answer the riddle, not ask it. The Sphinx is seated
on a rocky mound, near which stands erect a snake. The snake is not, I
think, without meaning; it is the oracular beast of the earth-oracle.
The Silenus who has come to consult the oracle holds in his hand a bird.
The scene would be hopelessly enigmatic but for one of the fables that
are current under the name of Aesop[537], which precisely describes the
situation. ‘A certain bad man made an agreement with some one to prove
that the Delphic oracle was false, and when the appointed day came, he
took a sparrow in his hand and covered it with his garment and came to
the sanctuary, and standing in front of the oracle, asked whether the
thing in his hand was alive or dead, and he meant if the oracle said it
was dead, to show the sparrow alive, but if the oracle said it was alive,
to strangle it first and then show it. But the god knew his wicked plan,
and said to him, “Have done, for it depends on you whether what you hold
is dead or living.” The story shows plainly that the divinity is not
lightly to be tempted.’
The story, taken in conjunction with the vase-painting it explains,
shows clearly another thing. The Sphinx was mainly a local Theban bogey,
but she became the symbol of oracular divinity. At Delphi there was an
earth-oracle guarded by a snake, and in honour of that earth-oracle the
Naxians upreared their colossal Sphinx[538] and set it in the precinct of
Gaia. As time went on, the savage ‘man-snatching’ aspect of the Sphinx
faded, remembered only in the local legend, while her oracular aspect
grew; but the local legend is here as always the more instructive.
[Illustration: FIG. 44.]
The next representation of the Sphinx (fig. 44), from the fragment of
an oinochoë in the Berlin Museum[539], is specially suggestive. The
monster is inscribed, not with the name we know her by, ‘Sphinx,’ but
as ‘Kassmia,’ the Kadmean One, the bogey of Kadmos. The bearded monster
with wings and claws and dog-like head has lost her orthodox lion-body,
and lent it perhaps to Oedipus who stands in front of her. The scene is
of course pure comedy, and shows how near to the Greek mind were the
horrible and the grotesque, the thing feared and the thing scoffed at.
The Kassmia, the bogey of Kadmos, may have brought her lion-body with
Kadmos from the East, but the supposition, though very possible, is not
necessary. Cithaeron was traditionally lion-haunted[540]. The Sphinx may
have borrowed some of her traits and part of her body from a real lion
haunting a real local tomb.
It is worth noting in this connection that Hesiod[541] calls the monster
not Sphinx but Phix:
‘By stress of Orthios, she, Echidna, bare
Disastrous Phix, a bane to Kadmos’ folk.’
The scholiast remarks that ‘Mount Phikion where she dwelt was called
after her,’ but the reverse is probably true. Phix was the local bogey
of Phikion. The rocky mountain which rises to the S.-E. corner of Lake
Copais is still locally known as Phaga[542]. By a slight and easy
modification Phix became Sphix or Sphinx, the ‘throttler,’ an excellent
name for a destructive bogey.
[Illustration: FIG. 45.]
The last representation of the Sphinx, in fig. 45, brings us to her
characteristic as tomb-haunter. The design is from a krater[543] in
the Vagnonville Collection of the Museo Greco Etrusco at Florence. The
Sphinx is seated on a tomb-mound (χῶμα γῆς) of the regular sepulchral
type. That the mound is sepulchral is certain from the artificial stone
basis pierced with holes[544] on which it stands. Two lawless Satyrs
attack the mound with picks. The Sphinx is a tomb-haunting bogey, a Ker,
but ultimately she fades into a decorative tomb monument, with always
perhaps some prophylactic intent. In this, as in her mantic aspect, she
is own cousin to the Ker-Siren, but with the Sphinx the mantic side
predominates. The Sphinx, unlike the Siren, never developed into a
trinity, though when she became decorative she is doubled for heraldic
purposes.
* * * * *