CHAPTER X.

ORPHIC MYSTERIES.

‘ἁγνὸν χρὴ νηοῖο θυώδεος ἐντὸς ἰόντα

ἔμμεναι· ἁγνείη δ’ ἐστὶ φρονεῖν ὅσια.’

_a._ THE OMOPHAGIA.

The most important literary document extant on Orphic ceremonial is a

fragment of the _Cretans_ of Euripides, preserved for us by Porphyry in

his treatise on ‘Abstinence from Animal Food’—a passage Porphyry says he

had ‘almost forgotten to mention.’

From an allusion in Aristophanes[1210] to ‘Cretan monodies and unhallowed

marriages’ it seems probable that the _Cretans_ dealt with the hapless

wedlock of Pasiphaë. The fragment, Porphyry tells us, was spoken by the

chorus of Cretan mystics who have come to the palace of Minos. It is

possible they may have come to purify it from the recent pollution[1211].

The mystics by the mouth of their leader make full and definite

confession of the faith, or rather acknowledgement of the ritual acts,

by which a man became a ‘Bacchos,’ and they add a statement of the

nature of the life he was thereafter bound to lead. Though our source

is a poetical one, we learn from it, perhaps to our surprise, that to

become a ‘Bacchos’ it was necessary to do a good deal more than dance

enthusiastically upon the mountains. The confession runs as follows[1212]:

‘Lord of Europa’s Tyrian line,

Zeus-born, who holdest at thy feet

The hundred citadels of Crete,

I seek to thee from that dim shrine,

Roofed by the Quick and Carven Beam,

By Chalyb steel and wild bull’s blood

In flawless joints of cypress wood

Made steadfast. There in one pure stream

My days have run, the servant I,

Initiate, of Idaean Jove;

Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove;

I have endured his thunder-cry[1213];

Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts;

Held the Great Mother’s mountain flame;

I am Set Free and named by name

A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests.

Robed in pure white I have borne me clean

From man’s vile birth and coffined clay,

And exiled from my lips alway

Touch of all meat where Life hath been.’

This confession must be examined in detail.

* * * * *

The first avowal is:

‘the servant I,

Initiate, of Idaean Jove[1214].’

It is remarkable that the mystic, though he becomes a ‘Bacchos,’ avows

himself as initiated to Idaean Zeus. But this Idaean Zeus is clearly the

same as Zagreus, the mystery form of Dionysos. Zeus, the late-comer (p.

319, n. 2), has taken over an earlier worship, the nature of which will

become more evident after the ritual has been examined.

Zeus has in a sense supplanted Zagreus, but only by taking on his nature.

An analogous case has already been discussed in dealing with Zeus

Meilichios (p. 19). At a time when the whole tendency of theology, of

philosophy and of poetry was towards monotheism these fusions were easy

and frequent. Of such a monotheistic divinity, half Zeus, half Hades,

wholly Ploutos, we are told in another fragment of Euripides preserved

by Clement of Alexandria[1215]. His ritual is that of the earth-gods.

‘Ruler of all, to thee I bring libation

And honey cake, by whatso appellation

Thou wouldst be called, or Hades, thou, or Zeus,

Fireless the sacrifice, all earth’s produce

I offer. Take thou of its plenitude,

For thou amongst the Heavenly Ones art God,

Dost share Zeus’ sceptre, and art ruling found

With Hades o’er the kingdoms underground.’

It has been conjectured that this fragment also is from the _Cretans_,

but we have no certain evidence. Clement says in quoting the passage that

‘Euripides, the philosopher of the stage, has divined as in a riddle that

the Father and the Son are one God.’ Another philosopher before Euripides

had divined the same truth, and he was Orpheus, only he gave to his

Father and Son the name of Bacchos, and, all important for our purpose,

gave to the Son in particular the title of Zagreus.

In discussing the titles of Dionysos (p. 414), it has been seen that the

names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, were given to the god to mark him as a

spirit of intoxication, of enthusiasm. The title Zagreus has been so far

left unconsidered because it is especially an Orphic name. Zagreus is

the god of the mysteries, and his full content can only be understood in

relation to Orphic rites.

Zagreus is the mystery child guarded by the Kouretes, torn in pieces by

the Titans. Our first mention of him is a line preserved to us from the

lost epic the _Alcmaeonis_[1216], which ran as follows:

‘Holy Earth and Zagreus greatest of all gods.’

The name of Zagreus never occurs in Homer, and we are apt to think that

epic writers were wholly untouched by mysticism. Had the _Alcmaeonis_ not

been lost, we might have had occasion to modify this view. It was an epic

story the subject-matter of which was necessarily a great sin and its

purification, and though primarily the legend of Alcmaeon was based, as

has been seen, on a curiously physical conception of pollution (p. 220),

it may easily have taken on Orphic developments. Zagreus appears little

in literature; he is essentially a ritual figure, the centre of a cult

so primitive, so savage that a civilized literature instinctively passed

him by, or at most figured him as a shadowy Hades.

But religion knew better. She knew that though Dionysos as Bromios,

Braites, Sabazios, as god of intoxication, was much, Dionysos as

Zagreus, as Nyktelios, as Isodaites[1217], he of the night, he who is

‘a meal shared by all’ was more. The Orphics faced the most barbarous

elements of their own faith and turned them not only quâ theology into

a vague monotheism, but quâ ritual into a high sacrament of spiritual

purification. This ritual, the main feature of which was ‘the red and

bleeding feast,’ must now be examined.

* * * * *

The avowal of the first certain ritual act performed comes in the line

where the mystic says

‘I have ...

Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts[1218].’

The victim in Crete was a bull.

The shrine of Idaean Zeus, from which the mystics came, was cemented

with bulls’ blood[1219]. Possibly this may mean that at its foundation

a sacred bull was slain and his blood mixed with the mortar; anyhow it

indicates connection with bull-worship. The characteristic mythical

monster of Crete was the bull-headed Minotaur. Behind the legend of

Pasiphaë, made monstrous by the misunderstanding of immigrant conquerors,

it can scarcely be doubted that there lurks some sacred mystical ceremony

of ritual wedlock (ἱερὸς γάμος) with a primitive bull-headed divinity. He

need not have been imported from Thrace; zoomorphic nature-gods spring

up everywhere. The bull-Dionysos of Thrace when he came to Crete found a

monstrous god, own cousin to himself.

Such a monstrous god is depicted on the curious seal-impression found by

Mr Arthur Evans[1220] at Cnossos and reproduced in fig. 146. He is seated

on a throne of camp-stool shape, and before him stands a human figure,

probably a worshipper. That the monster is a god seems clear from the

fact that he is seated; that he is a _bull_-god is not so certain. The

head is not drawn with sufficient exactness for us to be sure what beast

is intended. He has certainly no horns, but the hoof and tail might be

those of a bull. The seal-impressions found by Mr Hogarth[1221] in such

large numbers at Zakro show how widespread in Crete were these fantastic

forms. The line between man and beast is a faint one. Mr Hogarth holds

that the majority of these sealings have nothing to do with cults—they

are the product, he thinks, of an art which has ‘passed from monsters

with a meaning to monsters of pure fancy.’ He excepts however certain

sealings where a Minotaur is represented[1222], a monster with horned

bull-head, pronounced bovine ears and tail, but apparently human trunk,

arms and legs. Like the monster in fig. 146, this Minotaur is seated,

but with his left leg crossed human-fashion over his right knee and with

human hands extended.

[Illustration: FIG. 146.]

The traditional Minotaur took year by year his tale of human victims. Of

the ritual of the bull-god in Crete, we know that it consisted in part of

the tearing and eating of a bull, and behind is the dreadful suspicion of

human sacrifice.

* * * * *

Part of the avowal of the Cretan mystic is that he has accomplished the

ὠμοφαγία, the rite of ‘the feast of raw flesh.’ That a feast of raw flesh

of some sort was traditionally held to be a part of Bacchic ceremonial,

is clear from the words Euripides[1223] put into the mouth of his Maenads:

‘The joy of the red quick fountains,

The blood of the hill-goat torn,’

where the expression in the original, ὠμοφάγον χάριν ‘joy in eating raw

flesh,’ admits of no doubt.

An integral part of this terrible ritual was the tearing asunder of the

slain beast, in order, no doubt, to get the flesh as raw as might be,

for the blood is the life. Plutarch[1224], in his horrified protest

against certain orgiastic rites, joins the two ritual acts together, the

‘eatings of raw flesh’ and the ‘rendings asunder.’ ‘There are certain

festivals,’ he says, ‘and sacrificial ceremonies as well as unlucky

and gloomy days, in which take place eatings of raw flesh and rendings

asunder, and fastings and beatings of the breast, and again disgraceful

utterances in relation to holy things, and mad ravings and yells upraised

with a loud din and tossing of the neck to and fro.’ These ceremonies,

he goes on to explain, are, to his thinking, not performed in honour of

any _god_, but ‘they are propitiations and appeasements performed with a

view to the riddance of mischievous _demons_; such also, he says, were

the human sacrifices performed of old.’ Plutarch’s words read like a

commentary on the Orphic ritual under discussion: we have the fasting, we

have the horrid feast; he sees the savage element of ‘riddance,’ but he

misses the saving grace of enthusiasm and mystic significance.

If the sympathetic religious-minded Plutarch was horrified at a ritual

so barbarous, it filled the Christian Fathers with unholy joy. Here was

an indefeasible argument against paganism, and for once they compel our

reluctant sympathy. ‘I will not,’ cries Clement[1225], ‘dance out your

mysteries, as they say Alcibiades did, but I will strip them naked, and

bring them out on to the open stage of life, in view of those who are

the spectators at the drama of truth. The Bacchoi hold orgies in honour

of a mad Dionysos, they celebrate a divine madness by the Eating of Raw

Flesh, the final accomplishment of their rite is the distribution of the

flesh of butchered victims, they are crowned with snakes, and shriek

out the name of Eva, that Eve through whom sin came into the world,

and the symbol of their Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent.’ And

again[1226]: ‘the mysteries of Dionysos are wholly inhuman; for while he

was still a child and the Kouretes were dancing their armed dance about

him, the Titans stole upon him, deceived him with childish toys and tore

him to pieces.’

Arnobius[1227] pretends that the Bacchanalia are so horrible he must

pass them by, and then goes on to revel in revolting detail over the

rites ‘which the Greeks call Feasts of Raw Flesh (ὠμοφαγίαι) in which

with feigned frenzy and loss of a sane mind you twine snakes about you,

and, to show yourselves full of the divinity and majesty of the god, you

demolish with gory mouths the entrails of goats bleating for mercy.’

The gentle vegetarian Porphyry[1228] knows that in Chios, according to

tradition, there had been a Dionysos called Omadius, the Raw One, and

that the sacrifice he used to exact was the tearing of a man to pieces.

Istros[1229] stated that of old the Kouretes sacrificed children to

Kronos. On Kronos all human sacrifice was apt to be fathered, but the

mention of the Kouretes, coupled with the confession of the Cretan

mystic, shows that the real divinity is Zagreus.

* * * * *

To these vague though consistent traditions of the eating and tearing

of raw flesh, whether of man or goat or calf, in honour of some form

of Dionysos, evidence more precise and definitely descriptive of

Cretan ritual has been left us, again by a Christian Father, Firmicus

Maternus[1230]. The festival he describes was, like many others in honour

of Dionysos, trieteric, i.e. celebrated each alternate year.

Firmicus in the fashion of his day gives first a long and purely

aetiological narrative of the death of the son of a king of Crete, to

appease whose wrath the ceremony, it was believed, was instituted. ‘The

Cretans commemorated the death of the boy by certain ceremonies, doing

all things in regular order which the boy did or suffered.’ These

ceremonies included an enactment of the scene of the child playing with

the toys and surprised by the Titans, and perhaps originally the slaying

and tearing to pieces of a real child, but in the festival as described

by Firmicus a bull was surrogate. ‘They tear in pieces a live bull with

their teeth and by howling with discordant shouts through the secret

places of the woods they simulate the madness of an enraged mind.’

Firmicus, by his obviously somewhat inaccurate statement, has gone far

to discredit his own testimony. After the performance of a religious

ceremony that involved the tearing of a _live_ bull’s flesh by human

teeth[1231] the surviving worshippers would be few. But, because of this

exaggeration, we need not discredit the whole ritual of the bull-slaying,

nor the tearing and eating of _raw_, though not actually living, flesh.

The bull indeed comes in so awkwardly in the midst of the aetiological

story of the child, that we may be practically sure this account of a

bygone ritual is authentic.

* * * * *

Some light is thrown on the method, and much on the meaning, of the

horrible feast by an account left us by S. Nilus[1232], a hermit of Mt.

Sinai in the 4th century, of the sacrifice of a camel among the Arabs

of his time. S. Nilus seems to have spent some of his abundant leisure

in the careful examination of the rites and customs of the heathen

around, and it is much to be regretted that in his ‘Narrations’ he has

not recorded more of his observations. The nomadic condition of the

Arabs about Sinai impressed him much; he notes that they are without

trade, arts or agriculture, and if other food failed them, fed on their

camels and only cooked the flesh just enough to enable them to tear it

with their teeth. They worshipped no god, either in spirit or through an

image made by hands, but sacrificed to the morning star at its rising.

They by preference sacrificed boys in the flower of their age and of

special beauty, and slew them at dawn on a rude heap of piled-up stones.

He pathetically observes that this practice of theirs caused him much

anxiety; he was nervous lest they should take a fancy to a beautiful

young boy convert he had with him and sacrifice ‘his pure and lovely

body to unclean demons.’ But, he goes on, ‘when the supply of boys was

lacking, they took a camel of white colour and otherwise faultless,

bent it down upon its knees, and went circling round it three times in

a circuitous fashion. The leader of the song and of the procession to

the star was either one of their chiefs or a priest of special honour.

He, after the third circuit had been made, and before the worshippers

had finished the song, while the last words were still on their lips,

draws his sword and smites the neck of the camel and eagerly tastes of

the blood. The rest of them in like fashion run up and with their knives

some cut off a small bit of the hide with its hairs upon it, others hack

at any chance bit of flesh they can get. Others go on to the entrails

and inwards and leave no scrap of the victim uneaten that might be seen

by the sun at its rising. They do not refrain even from the bones and

marrow, but overcome by patience and perseverance the toughness of the

resistance.’

The account of Nilus leaves no doubt as to the gist of the ceremony: the

worshippers aim at devouring the victim before the life has left the

still warm blood. Raw flesh, Prof. Robertson Smith points out, is called

in Hebrew and Syriac ‘living’ flesh. Thus, in the most literal way, all

those who shared in the ceremony absorbed into themselves part of the

victim’s life.

For _live_ bull then we substitute _raw_ bull, and the statement of

Firmicus presents no difficulties. Savage economy demands that your

_juju_, whatever it may be, should be as fresh as possible. Probably, at

first, the bull may have been eaten just for the sake of absorbing its

strength, without any notion of a divine sacrament.

The idea that by eating an animal you absorb its qualities is too

obvious a piece of savage logic to need detailed illustration. That the

uneducated and even the priestly Greek had not advanced beyond this

stage of sympathetic magic is shown by a remark of Porphyry’s[1233].

He wants to prove that the soul is held to be affected or attracted

even by corporeal substances of kindred nature, and of this belief he

says we have abundant experience. ‘At least,’ he says, ‘those who wish

to take unto themselves the spirits of prophetic animals, swallow the

most effective parts of them, such as the hearts of crows and moles and

hawks, for so they possess themselves of a spirit present with them and

prophesying like a god, one that enters into them themselves at the time

of its entrance into the body.’ If a mole’s heart can make you see into

dark things, great virtue may be expected from a piece of raw bull. It

is not hard to see how this savage theory of communion would pass into a

higher sacramentalism, into the faith that by partaking of an animal who

was a divine vehicle[1234] you could enter spiritually into the divine

life that had physically entered you, and so be made one with the god. It

was the mission of Orphism to effect these mystical transitions.

* * * * *

Because a goat was torn to pieces by Bacchants in Thrace, because a bull

was, at some unknown date, eaten raw in Crete, we need not conclude

that either of these practices regularly obtained in civilized Athens.

The initiated bull-eater was certainly known of there, and the notion

must have been fairly familiar, or it would not have pointed a joke

for Aristophanes. In the audacious prorrhesis of the _Frogs_[1235] the

uninitiated are bidden to withdraw, and among them those

‘Who never were trained by bull-eating Kratinos

In mystical orgies poetic and vinous.’

The worship of Dionysos of the Raw Flesh must have fallen into abeyance

in Periclean Athens; but though civilized man, as a rule, shrinks from

raw meat, yet, given imminent peril to rouse the savage in man, even

in civilized man the faith in Dionysos Omestes burns up afresh. Hence

stories of human sacrifice on occasions of great danger rise up and are

accepted as credible. Plutarch[1236], narrating what happened before the

battle of Salamis, writes as follows: ‘As Themistocles was performing

the sacrifice for omens (σφαγιαζομένῳ) alongside of the admiral’s

trireme, there were brought to him three captives of remarkable beauty,

attired in splendid raiment and gold ornaments; they were reputed to be

the sons of Artaÿktes and Sandauke sister to Xerxes. When Euphrantides

the soothsayer caught sight of them, and observed that at the same

moment a bright flame blazed out from the burning victims, and at the

same time a sneeze from the right gave a sign, he took Themistocles by

the hand and bade consecrate and sacrifice all the youths to Dionysos

Omestes, and so make his prayer, for thus both safety and victory would

ensue to the Greeks. Themistocles was thunderstruck at the greatness

and strangeness of the omen, it being such a thing as was wont to occur

at great crises and difficult issues, but the people, who look for

salvation rather by irrational than rational means, invoked the god

with a loud shout together, and bringing up the prisoners to the altar

imperatively demanded that the sacrifice should be accomplished as the

seer had prescribed. These things are related by Phanias the Lesbian, a

philosopher not unversed in historical matters.’ Phanias lived in the 4th

century B.C. Plutarch evidently thought him a respectable authority, but

the fragments of his writings that we possess are all of the anecdotal

type, and those which relate to Themistocles are evidently from a hostile

source. His statement, therefore, cannot be taken to prove more than that

a very recent human sacrifice was among the horrors conceivably possible

to a Greek of the 4th century B.C., especially if the victim were a

‘barbarian.’

The suspicion is inevitable that behind the primitive Cretan rites of

bull-tearing and bull-eating there lay an orgy still more hideous, the

sacrifice of a human child. A vase-painting in the British Museum[1237],

too revolting for needless reproduction here, represents a Thracian

tearing with his teeth a slain child, while the god Dionysos, or rather

perhaps we should say Zagreus, stands by approving. The vase is not

adequate evidence that human children were slain and eaten, but it shows

that the vase-painter of the 5th century B.C. believed such a practice

was appropriate to the worship of a Thracian god.

A very curious account of a sacrifice to Dionysos in Tenedos helps us to

realize how the shift from human to animal sacrifice, from child to bull

or calf, may have come about. Aelian[1238] in his book on the Nature of

Animals makes the following statement: ‘The people of Tenedos in ancient

days used to keep a cow with calf, the best they had, for Dionysos, and

when she calved, why, they tended her like a woman in child-birth. But

they sacrificed the new born calf, having put cothurni on its feet. Yes,

and the man who struck it with the axe is pelted with stones in the holy

rite and escapes to the sea.’ The conclusion can scarcely be avoided that

here we have a ritual remembrance of the time when a child was really

sacrificed. A calf is substituted but it is humanized as far as possible,

and the sacrificer, though he is bound to sacrifice, is guilty of an

outrage[1239]. Anyhow, that the calf was regarded as a child is clear;

the line between human and merely animal is to primitive man a shifting

shadow.

The mystic in his ritual confession clearly connects his feast of raw

flesh with his service of Zagreus:

‘Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove;

I have endured his thunder-cry;

Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts.’

It remains to consider more closely the import of the sacred legend of

Zagreus.

* * * * *

That the legend as well as the rite was Cretan and was connected with

Orpheus is expressly stated by Diodorus[1240]. In his account of the

various forms taken by the god Dionysos, he says ‘they allege that the

god (i.e. Zagreus) was born of Zeus and Persephone in Crete, and Orpheus

in the mysteries represents him as torn in pieces by the Titans.’

When a people has outgrown in culture the stage of its own primitive

rites, when they are ashamed or at least a little anxious and

self-conscious about doing what yet they dare not leave undone, they

instinctively resort to mythology, to what is their theology, and say

the men of old time did it, or the gods suffered it. There is nothing

like divine or very remote human precedent. Hence the complex myth of

Zagreus. When precisely this myth was first formulated it is impossible

to say; it comes to us in complete form only through late authors[1241].

It was probably shaped and re-shaped to suit the spiritual needs of

successive generations. The story as told by Clement and others is

briefly this: the infant god variously called Dionysos and Zagreus was

protected by the Kouretes or Korybantes who danced around him their

armed dance. The Titans desiring to destroy him lured away the child

by offering him toys, a cone, a rhombos, and the golden apples of the

Hesperides, a mirror, a knuckle bone, a tuft of wool. The toys are

variously enumerated[1242]. Having lured him away they set on him, slew

him and tore him limb from limb. Some authorities add that they cooked

his limbs and ate them. Zeus hurled his thunderbolts upon them and sent

them down to Tartaros. According to some authorities, Athene saved the

child’s heart, hiding it in a cista. A mock figure of gypsum was set up,

the rescued heart placed in it and the child brought thereby to life

again. The story was completed under the influence of Delphi by the

further statement that the limbs of the dismembered god were collected

and buried at Delphi in the sanctuary of Apollo.

The monstrous complex myth is obviously aetiological through and through,

the kernel of the whole being the ritual fact that a sacrificial bull, or

possibly a child, was torn to pieces and his flesh eaten. Who tore him to

pieces? In actual fact his worshippers, but the myth-making mind always

clamours for divine precedent. If there was any consistency in the mind

of the primitive mythologist we should expect the answer to be ‘holy men

or gods,’ as an example. Not at all. In a sense the worshipper believes

the sacrificial bull to be divine, but, brought face to face with the

notion of the dismemberment of a god, he recoils. It was primitive

bad men who did this horrible deed. Why does he imitate them? This is

the sort of question he never asks. It might interfere with the pious

practice of ancestral custom, and custom is ever stronger than reason.

So he goes on weaving his aetiological web. He eats the bull; so the bad

Titans must have eaten the god. But, as they were bad, they must have

been punished; on this point primitive theology is always inexorable. So

they were slain by Zeus with his thunderbolts.

Other ritual details had of course to be worked in. The Kouretes,

the armed Cretan priests, had a local war or mystery dance: they

were explained as the protectors of the sacred child. Sacred objects

were carried about in cistae; they were of a magical sanctity,

fertility-charms and the like. Some ingenious person saw in them a new

significance, and added thereby not a little to their prestige; they

became the toys by which the Titans ensnared the sacred baby. It may

naturally be asked why were the Titans fixed on as the aggressors? They

were of course known to have fought against the Olympians in general, but

in the story of the child Dionysos they appear somewhat as bolts from the

blue. Their _name_ even, it would seem, is aetiological, and behind it

lies a curious ritual practice.

* * * * *

The _Dionysiaca_ of Nonnus[1243] is valuable as a source of ritual

and constantly betrays Orphic influence. From it we learn in many

passages[1244] that it was the custom for the mystae to bedaub themselves

with a sort of white clay or gypsum. This gypsum was so characteristic

of mysteries that it is constantly qualified in Nonnus by the epithet

‘mystic.’ The technical terms for this ritual act of bedaubing with clay

were ‘to besmear’ and ‘to smear off’ (περιμάττειν and ἀπομάττειν), and

they are used as roughly equivalent for ‘to purify.’ Harpocration[1245]

has an interesting note on the word ‘smear off’ (ἀπομάττων). ‘Others use

it in a more special sense, as for example when they speak of putting a

coat of clay or pitch on those who are being initiated, as we say to take

a cast of a statue in clay; for they used to besmear those who were being

purified for initiation with clay and pitch. In this ceremony they were

mimetically enacting the myth told by some persons, in which the Titans,

when they mutilated Dionysos, wore a coating of gypsum in order not to

be identified. The custom fell into disuse, but in later days they were

plastered with gypsum out of convention (νομίμου χάριν).’ Here we have

the definite statement that in rites of initiation the worshippers were

coated with gypsum. The ‘some persons’ who tell the story of Dionysos and

the Titans are clearly Orphics. Originally, Harpocration says, the Titans

were coated with gypsum that they might be disguised. Then the custom, by

which he means the original object of the custom, became obsolete, but

though the reason was lost the practice was kept up out of convention.

They went on doing what they no longer understood.

Harpocration is probably right. Savages in all parts of the world, when

about to perform their sacred mysteries, disguise themselves with all

manner of religious war-paint. The motive is probably, like most human

motives, mixed; they partly want to disguise themselves, perhaps from

the influence of evil spirits, perhaps because they want to counterfeit

some sort of bogey; mixed with this is the natural and universal instinct

to ‘dress up’ on any specially sacred occasion, in order to impress

outsiders. An element in what was at once a disguise and a decoration

was coloured clay. Then having become sacred from its use on sacred

occasions it became itself a sort of _medicine_, a means of purification

and sanctification, as well as a ceremonial sign and token of initiation.

Such performances went on not only in Crete but in civilized Athens. One

of the counts brought by Demosthenes against Aeschines[1246] was, it will

be remembered (p. 418), ‘that he purified the initiated and wiped them

clean with mud and pitch’—_with_, be it noted, not _from_. Cleansing

with mud does not seem to us a practical procedure, but we are back in

the state of mind fully discussed in an earlier chapter (p. 39), when

purification was not physical cleansing in our sense of the word, but a

thing at once lower and higher, a magical riddance from _spiritual_ evil,

from evil spirits and influences. For this purpose clay and pitch were

highly efficacious.

But what has all this to do with the Titans? Eustathius[1247], commenting

on the word Titan, lets us into the secret. ‘We apply the word _titanos_

in general to dust, in particular to what is called _asbestos_, which

is the white fluffy substance in burnt stones. It is so called from the

Titans in mythology, whom Zeus in the story smote with his thunderbolts

and consumed to dust. For from them, the fine dust of stones which has

got crumbled from excessive heat, so to speak Titanic heat, is called

_titanic_, as though a Titanic penalty had been accomplished upon it. And

the ancients call dust and gypsum _titanos_.’

This explanation is characteristically Eustathian. In his odd confused

way the Archbishop, as so often, divines a real connection, but inverts

and involves it. The simple truth is that the Titan myth is a ‘sacred

story’ (ἱερολογία) invented to account for the ritual fact that Orphic

worshippers, about to tear the sacred bull, daubed themselves with white

clay, for which the Greek word was _titanos_: they are Titans, but not as

giants, only as white-clay-men. It is not exactly a false etymology, as

the mythological Titan giant probably owed his name to the fact that he

was clay-born, earth-born, like Adam, only of white instead of red earth;

but it was of course a false connection of meaning[1248].

That this connection of meaning, this association of white-clay-men

of the mysteries with primaeval giants, was late and fictitious is

incidentally shown by the fact that it was fathered on Onomacritus. In

the passage from Pausanias[1249] already quoted (p. 473), we are told

that Onomacritus _got the name of the Titans from Homer_, and composed

‘orgies’ for Dionysos, _and made the Titans the actual agents in the

sufferings of Dionysos_. He did not invent the white-clay worshippers,

but he gave them a respectable orthodox Homeric ancestry. What confusion

and obscurity he thereby introduced is seen in the fact that a bad

mythological precedent is invented for a good ritual act; all consistency

was sacrificed for the sake of Homeric association.

* * * * *

But nothing, nothing, no savage rite, no learned mythological confusion,

daunts the man bent on edification, the pious Orphic. The task of

spiritualizing the white-clay-men, the dismembered bull, was a hard one,

but the Orphic thinker was equal to it. He has not only taken part in

an absurd and savage rite, he has brooded over the real problems of man

and nature. There is evil in the universe, human evil to which as yet

he does not give the name of sin, for he is not engaged with problems

of free-will, but something evil, something that mixes with and mars

the good of life, and he has long called it impurity. His old religion

has taught him about ceremonial cleansings and has brought him, through

conceptions like the Keres, very near to some crude notion of spiritual

evil. The religion of Dionysos has forced him to take a momentous step.

It has taught him not only what he knew before—that he can rid himself

of impurity, but also that he can become a Bacchos, become divine. He

seems darkly to see how it all came about, and how the old and the new

work together. His forefathers, the Titans, though they were but ‘dust

and ashes,’ dismembered and ate the god; they did evil, and good came of

it; they had to be punished, slain with thunderbolts; but even in their

ashes lived some spark of the divine; that is why he their descendant can

himself become Bacchos. From these ashes he himself has sprung. It is

only a little hope; there is all the element of dust and ashes from which

he must cleanse himself; it will be very hard, but he goes back with

fresh zeal to the ancient rite, to eat the bull-god afresh, renewing the

divine within him.

Theology confirms his hope by yet another thought. Even the wicked

Titans, before they ate Dionysos, had a heavenly ancestry; they were

children of old Ouranos, the sky-god, as well as of Ge, the earth-mother.

His master Orpheus worshipped the sun (p. 462). Can he not too,

believing this, purify himself from his earthly nature and rise to be the

‘child of starry heaven’? Perhaps it is not a very satisfactory theory of

the origin of evil; but is the sacred legend of the serpent and the apple

more illuminating? Anyhow it was the faith and hope the Orphic, as we

shall later see (p. 571), carried with him to his grave.

There were other difficulties to perplex the devout enquirer. The god in

the mysteries of Zagreus was a bull, but in the mysteries of Sabazios (p.

419) his vehicle was a snake, and these mysteries must also enshrine the

truth. Was the father of the child a snake or a bull; was the ‘horned

child’ a horned snake? It was all very difficult. He could not solve the

difficulty; so he embodied it in a little dogmatic verse, and kept it by

him as a test of reverent submission to divine mysteries:

‘The Snake’s Bull-Father—the Bull’s Father-Snake[1250].’

The snake, the bull, the snake-bull-child[1251]—not three

Incomprehensibles, but one Incomprehensible. On the altar of his Unknown

God through all the ages man pathetically offers the holocaust of his

reason.

The weak point of the Orphic was, of course, that he could not, would

not, break with either ancient ritual or ancient mythology, could not

trust the great new revelation which bade him become ‘divine,’ but must

needs mysticize and reconcile archaic obsolete traditions. His strength

was that in conduct he was steadfastly bent on purity of life. He could

not turn upon the past and say, ‘this daubing with white clay, this

eating of raw bulls, is savage nonsense; give it up.’ He could and

did say, ‘this daubing with white clay and eating of raw bulls is not

in itself enough, it must be followed up by arduous endeavour after

holiness.’

This is clear from the further confession of the Cretan chorus, to which

we return. From the time that the neophyte is accepted as such, i.e.

performs the initiatory rites of purification and thereby becomes a

_Mystes_, he leads a life of ceremonial purity (ἁγνόν). He accomplishes

the rite of eating raw sacrificial flesh and also holds on high the

torches to the Mountain Mother. These characteristic acts of the

_Mystes_, are, I think, all preliminary stages to the final climax, the

full fruition, when, cleansed and consecrated by the Kouretes, he is

named by them a Bacchos, he is made one with the god.

* * * * *

Before we pass to the final act consummated by the Kouretes, the place of

the Mountain Mother has to be considered. The mystic’s second avowal is

that he has

‘Held the Great Mother’s mountain flame[1252].’

In the myth of Zagreus, coming to us as it does through late authors,

the child is all-important, the mother only present by implication. Zeus

the late-comer has by that time ousted Dionysos in Crete. The mythology

of Zeus, patriarchal as it is through and through, lays no stress on

motherhood. Practically the Zeus of the later Hellenism has no mother.

But the bull-divinity worshipped in Crete was wholly the son of his

mother, and in Crete most happily the ancient figure of the mother has

returned after long burial to the upper air. On a Cretan seal Mr Arthur

Evans found the beast-headed monster whom men called Minotaur; on a

Cretan seal also he found the figure of the Mountain Mother, found her at

Cnossos, the place of the birth of the bull-child, Cnossos overshadowed

by Ida where within the ancient cave the holy child was born and the

‘mailed priests’ danced at his birth.

The design in fig. 147 is from the clay impression of a signet ring

found at the palace at Cnossos[1253]. It is a veritable little manual

of primitive Cretan faith and ritual. On the very apex of her own great

mountain stands the Mountain Mother. The Mycenaean women of Cnossos

have made their goddess in their own image, clad her, wild thing though

she was, in their own grotesque flounced skirt, and they give her for

guardians her own fierce mountain-ranging lions, tamed into solemn

heraldic guardians. We know the lions well enough; they came to Mycenae

to guard the great entrance-gate. Between them at Mycenae is a column,

a thing so isolated and protected, that we long suspected it was no

dead architectural thing but a true shrine of a divinity, and here on

the Cretan seal the divinity has come to life. She stands with sceptre

or lance extended, imperious, dominant. Behind her is her shrine of

‘Mycenaean’ type, with its odd columns and horns, these last surely

appropriate enough to a cult whose central rite was the sacrifice of a

bull; before her in rapt ecstasy of adoration stands her Mystes.

[Illustration: FIG. 147.]

Pre-historic Crete has yielded, I venture to think will yield, no

figure of a _dominant_ male divinity, no Zeus; so far we have only a

beast-headed monster and the Mountain Mother. The little seal impression

is a standing monument of matriarchalism. In Greece the figure of the

Son was developed in later days, the relation of Mother and Son almost

forgotten; child and parent were represented by the figures of the Mother

and the Daughter. It matters very little what names we give the shifting

pairs. In Thrace, in Asia Minor, in Crete, the primitive form is the

Mother with the Son as the attribute of Motherhood; the later form the

Son with the Mother as the attribute of Sonship. A further development is

the Son with only a faded Mother in the background, Bacchos and Semele;

next the Son is made the Son of his Father, Bacchos is Dionysos; finally

he eclipses his Father and reigns omnipotent as Zeus-Hades. The Mother

with the Son as attribute came back from Asia Minor to Greece when in

Greece the Mother was but the appendage of the Son, and coming made sore

confusion for mythology. But for prehistoric Crete, for the Cretan mystic

of Euripides in the days of Minos, the ritual is of the Mother and the

Son.

* * * * *

The ‘mystic’ holds aloft the torches of the mother. Fire as well as water

is for cleansing. He is finally consecrated (ὁσιωθείς) by the Kouretes:

‘I am Set Free and named by name

A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests[1254].’

The Kouretes need not long detain us. They are the Cretan brothers of the

Satyrs, the local Satyrs of Crete. Hesiod[1255] knows of their kinship:

from the same parent

‘The goddesses, nymphs of the mountain, had their being,

And the race of the worthless do-nothing Satyrs,

And the divine Kouretes, lovers of sport and dancing.’

Hesiod’s words are noteworthy and characteristic of his theological

attitude. The Satyrs, we have seen (p. 380), are _Satrai_, primitive

Dionysos-worshippers of Thrace and Thessaly. Seen through the hostile

eyes of their conquerors they have suffered distortion and degradation

in form as in content, they are horse-men, worthless, idle. The Kouretes

have just the same beginning in actuality, but their mythological

ending is different. They are seen, not through the distorting medium

of conquest, but with the halo of religion about their heads; they are

divine (θεοί) and their dancing is sacred. It all depends on the point of

view.

Strabo, in his important discussion of the Kouretes and kindred figures,

knows that they are all ministers (πρόσπολοι) of orgiastic deities, of

Rhea and of Dionysos; he knows also that Kouretes, Korybantes, Daktyloi,

Telchines and the like represent primitive populations. What bewilders

him is the question which particular form originated the rest and where

they all belong. Did Mother Rhea send her Korybants to Crete? how do

the Kouretes come to be in Aetolia? Why are they sometimes servants of

Rhea, sometimes of Dionysos? why are some of them magicians, some of them

handicraftsmen, some of them mystical priests? In the light of Prof.

Ridgeway’s investigations, discussed in relation to the Satyrs (p. 385),

all that puzzled Strabo is made easy to us.

The Kouretes then are, as their name betokens, the young male population

considered as worshipping the young male god, the _Kouros_; they are

‘mailed priests’ because the young male population were naturally

warriors. They danced their local war-dance over the new-born child, and,

because in those early days the worship of the Mother and the Son was not

yet sundered, they were attendants (πρόσπολοι) on the Mother also. They

are in fact the male correlatives of the Maenads as Nurses (τιθῆναι). The

women-nurses were developed most fully, it seems, in Greece proper; the

male attendants, in Asia Minor and the islands.

In the fusion and confusion of these various local titles given to

primitive worshippers, this blend of Satyrs, Korybants, Daktyls,

Telchines, so confusing in literature till its simple historical basis

is grasped, one equation is for our purpose important—Kouretes = Titans.

The Titans of ritual, it has been shown, are men bedaubed with white

earth. The Titans of mythology are children of Earth, primitive giants

rebellious against the new Olympian order. Diodorus[1256] knows of a

close connection between Titans and Kouretes and attempts the usual

genealogical explanation. The Titans, he says, are, according to some,

sons of one of the Kouretes and of a mother called Titaia; according to

others of Ouranos and Ge. Titaia is mother Earth. The Cretans, he says,

allege that the Titans were born in the age of the Kouretes and that the

Titans settled themselves in the district of Cnossos ‘where even now

there are shown the site and foundations of a house of Rhea and a cypress

grove dedicated from ancient days.’ The Titans as Kouretes worshipped the

Mother, and were the guardians of the Son, the infant Zagreus, to whom

later monotheism gave the name of Zeus.

* * * * *

From the time that the neophyte enters the first stage of initiation,

i.e. becomes a ‘mystic’ (μύστης), he leads a life of abstinence (ἁγνόν).

But abstinence is not the end. Abstinence, the sacramental feast of raw

flesh, the holding aloft of the Mother’s torches, all these are but

preliminary stages to the final climax, the full fruition when, cleansed

and consecrated, he is made one with the god and the Kouretes name him

‘Bacchos.’

The word ἁγνόν, i.e. ‘pure,’ in the negative sense, ‘free from evil,’

marks, I think, the initial stage—a stage akin to the old service of

‘aversion’ (ἀποτροπή). The word ὁσιωθείς, ‘set free,’ ‘consecrated,’

marks the final accomplishment and is a term of positive content. It is

characteristic of orgiastic, ‘enthusiastic’ rites, those of the Mother

and the Son, and requires some further elucidation.

THE HOSIOI AND HOSIA.

At Delphi there was an order of priests known as Hosioi. Plutarch is our

only authority for their existence, but, for Delphic matters, we could

have no better source. In his 9th _Greek Question_ he asks[1257] ‘who

is the Hosioter among the Delphians, and why do they call one of their

months Bysios?’ The second part of the question only so far concerns

us as it marks a connection between the Hosioter and the month Bysios,

which, Plutarch tells us, was at the ‘beginning of spring,’ the ‘time of

the blossoming of many plants.’ On the 8th day of this month fell the

birthday of the god and in olden times ‘on this day only did the oracle

give answers.’

Plutarch’s answer to his question is as follows: ‘They call Hosioter the

animal sacrificed when a Hosios is designated.’ He does not say _how_

the animal’s fitness was shown, but from another passage[1258] we learn

that various tests were applied to the animals to be sacrificed, to see

if they were ‘pure, unblemished and uncorrupt both in body and soul.’

As to the body Plutarch says it was not very difficult to find out. As

to the soul the test for a bull was to offer him barley-meal, for a

he-goat vetches; if the animal did not eat, it was pronounced unhealthy.

A she-goat, being more sensitive, was tested by being sprinkled with cold

water. These tests were carried on by the Hosioi and by the ‘prophets’

(προφῆται), these last being concerned with omens as to whether the god

would give oracular answers. The animal, we note, became _Hosios_ when

he was pronounced unblemished and hence fit for sacrifice: the word

ὅσιος, it appears, carried with it the double connotation of purity and

consecration; it was used of a thing found blameless and then made over

to, accepted by, the gods.

The animal thus consecrated was called Hosioter, which means ‘He

who consecrates.’ We should expect such a name to be applied to the

consecrating priest rather than the victim. If Plutarch’s statement

be correct, we can only explain Hosioter on the supposition that the

sacrificial victim was regarded as an incarnation of the god. If the

victim was a bull, as in Crete, and was regarded as divine, the title

would present no difficulties.

That the Hosioter was not merely a priest is practically certain from

the fact that there were, as already noted, priests who bore the cognate

title of Hosioi. Of them we know, again from Plutarch, some further

important particulars. They performed rites—as in the case of the testing

of the victims—in conjunction with the ‘prophets’ or utterers of the

oracle, but they were not identical with them. On one occasion, the

priestess while prophesying had some sort of fit, and Plutarch[1259]

mentions that not only did all the seers run away but also the prophet

and ‘those of the Hosioi that were present.’

In the answer to his ‘Question’ about the Hosioter, Plutarch states

definitely that the Hosioi were five in number, were elected for life,

and that they did many things and performed sacred sacrifices with the

‘prophets.’ Yet they were clearly not the same[1260]. A suspicion of

the real distinction dawns upon us when he adds that they were reputed

to be descended from Deucalion. Deucalion marks Thessalian ancestry and

Thessaly looks North. We begin to surmise that the Hosioi were priests of

the immigrant cult of Dionysos. This surmise approaches certainty when we

examine the actual ritual which the Hosioi performed.

It will be remembered[1261] that when Plutarch is describing the ritual

of the Bull Dionysos, he compares it, in the matter of ‘tearings to

pieces’ and burials and new births, to that of Osiris. Osiris has his

tombs in Egypt and ‘the Delphians believe that the fragments of Dionysos

are buried near their oracular shrine, and the Hosioi offer a secret

sacrifice θυσίαν ἀπόρρητον in the sanctuary of Apollo at the time when

the Thyiades wake up Liknites.’ To clinch the argument Lycophron[1262]

tells us that Agamemnon before he sailed

‘Secret lustrations to the Bull did make

Beside the caves of him the God of Gain

Delphinios,’

and that in return for this Bacchus Enorches overthrew Telephos, tangling

his feet in a vine. The scholiast commenting on the ‘secret lustrations’

says, ‘because the mysteries were celebrated to Dionysos in a corner.’ It

is, I think, clear that the mysteries of Liknites at Delphi, like those

of Crete, included the sacrifice of a sacred bull, and that the bull at

Delphi was called Hosioter, that, in a word, Hosioi and Hosioter are

ritual terms specially linked with the primitive mysteries of Dionysos.

The word Hosios was then, it would seem, deep-rooted in the savage ritual

of the Bull; but with its positive content, its notion of consecration,

it lay ready to hand as a vehicle to express the new Orphic doctrine of

identification with the divine. Its use was not confined to Dionysiac

rites, though it seems very early to have been specialized in relation

to them, probably because the Orphics always laid stress on _fas_ rather

than _nefas_. In ancient curse-formularies, belonging to the cult of

Demeter[1263] and underworld divinities, the words ὅσια καὶ ἐλεύθερα,

‘consecrated and free,’ are used in constant close conjunction and are

practically all but equivalents. The offender, the person cursed, was

either ‘sold’ or ‘bound down’ to the infernal powers; but the cursing

worshipper prays that the things that are accursed, i.e. tabooed to the

offender, may to him be ὅσια καὶ ἐλεύθερα, ‘consecrated and free,’ i.e.

to him they are freed from the taboo. It is the dawning of the grace in

use to-day ‘Sanctify these creatures to our use and us to thy service’;

it is the ritual forecast of a higher guerdon, ‘Ye shall know the truth

and the truth shall make you free.’

This primitive notion of release from _taboo_, which lay at the root of

the Orphic and Christian notion of spiritual freedom, comes out very

clearly in the use of the word ἀφοσιοῦσθαι. For this word we have no

exact English equivalent, but it may be rendered as ‘to purify by means

of an expiatory offering.’ Plato in the _Laws_ describes the ceremonial

to be performed in the case of a man who has intentionally murdered one

near of kin. The regular officials are to put him to death, and this

done ‘let them strip him, and cast him outside the city into a place

where three ways meet, appointed for the purpose, and on behalf of the

city collectively let the authorities, each one severally, take a stone

and cast it on the head of the dead man, and thereby purify (ἀφοσιούτω)

the city.’ The significance of this ritual is drastically explicit.

The taint of the murder, the taboo of the blood-guilt, is on the whole

city; the casting of the stones, on behalf of the city, _purifies it

off_ on to the criminal; it is literally conveyed from one to other by

the stone. The guilty man is the _pharmakos_, and his fate is that of a

_pharmakos_; ‘this done let them carry him to the confines of the city,

and cast him out unburied, as is ordained.’ Dedication, _devotion_ of

the thing polluted, ἀφοσίωσις, is the means whereby man attains ὁσίωσις,

consecration. The scholiast[1264] on the passage has an interesting

gloss on the word ἀφοσιούτω. ‘It is used,’ he says, ‘as in this passage,

to mean “to purify,” or “to bring first-fruits,” or “to give honour,”

or “to give a meed of honour on the occasion of death,” or “to give

fulfilment.”’ He feels dimly the shifts and developments of meaning.

You can devote, ‘make over’ a _pharmakos_; you can devote, consecrate

first-fruits, thereby releasing the rest from taboo; you can consecrate a

meed of honour on the occasion of death.

In this connection it is interesting to note the well-known fact that in

common Greek parlance ὅσιος is the actual opposite of ἱερός. Suidas[1265]

tells us that a ὅσιον χωρίον is ‘a place on which you may tread, which is

_not_ sacred, into which you may go.’ He quotes from the _Lysistrata_ of

Aristophanes, where a woman with child prays:

‘O holy Eileithyia, keep back the birth

Until I come unto a _place allowed_.’

He further notes the distinction often drawn by the orators between

goods that are _sacred_ (ἱερά) and those that are (in the Latin sense)

_profane_ (ὅσια). The contrast is in fact only fully intelligible when we

go back to the primitive notions, under a taboo, released from a taboo.

The notion ‘released from a taboo’ was sure to be taken up by a spiritual

religion, a religion that aimed at expansion, liberation, enthusiasm

rather than at check, negation, restraint. If we may trust Suidas, the

word ὅσιοι was applied to those who ‘were nurtured in piety, even if

they were not priests.’ The early Christians owed some of their noblest

instincts to Orphism.

As we find ὅσιος contrasted with ἱερός, so also between the two kindred

words καθαίρω and ὁσιόω a distinction may be observed. Both denote

purification, but ὁσιόω marks a stage more final and complete. It is the

word chosen to describe the state of those who are _fully_ initiated.

Plutarch[1266] says that the souls of men pass, by a natural and divine

order, from mortal men to heroes, from heroes to daemons, and finally, if

they are completely purified and consecrated (καθαρθῶσι καὶ ὁσιωθῶσιν),

as if by a rite of initiation they pass from daemons to the gods.

Lucian[1267] again in speaking of the final stage of initiation reserved

for hierophants uses the word ‘consecrated’ (ὡσιώθησαν).

Plutarch[1268] makes another interesting suggestion. In a wild attempt

to glorify Osiris and make him the god of everything, he derives his

name from the two adjectives ὅσιος and ἱερός, and incidentally lets fall

this suggestive remark, ‘the name of Osiris is so compounded because his

significance is compounded of things in heaven and things in Hades. It

was customary among the ancients to call the one ὅσια the other ἱερά.’

The things of the underworld are ὅσια; of the upper sky, things Ouranian,

ἱερά. Translated into ritual, this means that the old underworld rites

already discussed, the rites of the primitive Pelasgian stratum of the

population, were known as ὅσια, the new burnt sacrifices of the Ouranians

or Olympians were ἱερά. Dionysos was of the old order: his rites were

ὅσια, burial rites were ὅσια. It was the work of Orpheus to lift these

rites from earth to heaven, but spiritualized, uplifted as they are,

they remain in their essence primitive. It is because of this peculiar

origin that there is always about ὅσιος something of an antique air; it

has that ‘imprint of the ancient,’ that ‘crust and patina’ of archaism,

which Iamblichus[1269] says were characteristic of things Pythagorean,

and which, enshrining as it does a new life and impulse, lends to Orphism

a grace all its own.

Moreover, though ὅσιος is so ‘free’ that it verges on the profane, the

secular, yet it is the freedom always of consecration, not desecration;

it is the negation of the Law, but only by the Gospel. Hence, though

this may seem paradoxical, it is concerned rather with the Duty towards

God, than the Duty towards our Neighbour. Rising though it does out of

form, it is so wholly aloof from formalism, that it tends to become

the ‘unwritten law.’ Hence such constant oppositions as οὐ θέμις οὐδ’

ὅσιον, ‘allowed by neither human prescription nor divine law,’ and again

οὐδ’ ὅσιον οὐδὲ δίκαιον, ‘right neither in the eye of God nor of man.’

Plato[1270] says ‘he who does what is proper in relation to man, would

be said to do just things (δίκαια), he who does what is proper towards

God, holy things (ὅσια).’ Hence finally the spiritual illumination and

advance of ὅσια πανουργήσασ’[1271], breaking through human Justice for

the Divine Right, the duty, sacred, sacrosanct, of rebellion.

* * * * *

The Greeks had their goddess Dike, she who divides and apportions

things mortal, who according to Hesiod[1272] was sister of the lovely

human figures, Fair Order and Peace. But, because she was human, she

carried the symbol of human justice, the sword. She lapses constantly

into Vengeance. The Bacchants of Euripides[1273] are fully initiated,

consecrated as well as cleansed, yet in their hour of extreme need it is

to this Goddess of Vengeance they cry for visible, physical retribution

on the blasphemer Pentheus:

‘Hither for doom and deed,

Hither with lifted sword,

Justice, Wrath of the Lord,

Come in our visible need,

Smite till the throat shall bleed,

Smite till the heart shall bleed

Him the tyrannous, lawless, godless, Echion’s earth-born seed.’

Orpheus did all he could to raise the conception of Dike. We are

expressly told that it was he who raised her to be the ‘Assessor of

Zeus.’ Demosthenes[1274] pleads with his fellow citizens to honour Fair

Order (Εὐνομία), who loves just deeds and is the Saviour of cities and

countries, and Justice (Dike), holy and unswerving, _whom Orpheus who

instituted our most sacred mysteries declares to be seated by the throne

of Zeus_. The dating of Orphic hymns is precarious, but it looks as

though Demosthenes had in his mind the Orphic Hymn to Dike[1275] or at

least its prototype:

‘I sing the all-seeing eye of Dike of fair form,

Who sits upon the holy throne of Zeus

The king, and on the life of mortals doth look down,

And heavy broods her justice on the unjust.’

The Orphic could not rid himself of the notion of Vengeance. Dike

as avenger finds a place, it will be seen later (p. 612), in the

Orphic Hades. Hosia, the real Heavenly Justice, she who is Right and

Sanctity and Freedom and Purity all in one, never attained a vivid and

constant personality; she is a goddess for the few, not the many; only

Euripides[1276] called her by her heavenly name and made his Bacchants

sing to her a hymn:

‘Thou Immaculate on high;

Thou Recording Purity;

Thou that stoopest, Golden Wing,

Earthward, manward, pitying,

Hearest thou this angry king?’

It was Euripides, and perhaps only Euripides, who made the goddess Hosia

in the image of his own high desire, and, though the Orphic word and

Orphic rites constantly pointed to a purity that was also freedom, to a

sanctity that was by union with rather than submission to the divine, yet

Orphism constantly renounced its birth-right, reverted as it were to the

old savage notion of abstinence (ἁγνεία). After the ecstasy of

‘I am Set Free and named by name

A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests,’

the end of the mystic’s confession falls dull and sad and formal:

‘Robed in pure white I have borne me clean

From man’s vile birth and coffined clay,

And exiled from my lips alway

Touch of all meat where Life hath been[1277].’

He that is free and holy (ὁσιωθείς) and divine, marks his divinity by a

dreary formalism. He wears white garments, he flies from death and birth,

from all physical contagion, his lips are pure from flesh-food, he fasts

after as before the Divine Sacrament. He follows in fact all the rules of

asceticism familiar to us as ‘Pythagorean.’

Diogenes Laertius[1278] in his life of Pythagoras gives a summary of

these prescriptions, which show but too sadly and clearly the reversion

to the negative purity of abstinence (ἁγνεία). ‘Purification, they say,

is by means of cleansings and baths and aspersions, and because of this

a man must keep himself from funerals and marriages and every kind of

physical pollution, and abstain from all food that is dead or has been

killed, and from mullet and from the fish melanurus, and from eggs, and

from animals that lay eggs, and from beans, and from the other things

that are forbidden by those who accomplish holy rites of initiation.’

The savage origin of these fastings and taboos on certain foods has been

discussed; they are deep-rooted in the ritual of ἀποτροπή, of aversion,

which fears and seeks to evade the physical contamination of the Keres

inherent in all things. Plato[1279], in his inverted fashion, realizes

that the Orphic life was a revival of things primitive. In speaking of

the golden days before the altars of the gods were stained with blood,

when men offered honey cakes and fruits of the earth, he says then it

was not holy (ὅσιον) to eat or offer flesh-food, but men lived a sort of

‘Orphic’ life, as it is called.

Poets and philosophers, then as now, sated and hampered by the

complexities and ugliness of luxury, looked back with longing eyes to the

old beautiful gentle simplicity, the picture of which was still before

their eyes in antique ritual, in the ὅσια, the rites of the underworld

gods—those gods who in their beautiful conservatism kept their service

cleaner and simpler than the lives of their worshippers. Sophocles[1280]

in the lost _Polyidos_ tells of the sacrifice ‘dear to these gods’:

‘Wool of the sheep was there, fruit of the vine,

Libations and the treasured store of grapes.

And manifold fruits were there, mingled with grain

And oil of olive, and fair curious combs

Of wax compacted by the yellow bee.’

Some of these gods, it has been seen, would not taste of the fruit

of the vine: such were at Athens the Sun, the Moon, the Dawn, the

Muses, the Nymphs, Mnemosyne and Ourania. To them the Athenians[1281],

who were careful in matters of religion (ὅσιοι), brought only sober

offerings, _nephalia_; and such an offering we have seen was brought to

Dionysos-Hades. Philochoros[1282], to our great surprise, extends the

list of wineless divinities to Dionysos. Plutarch[1283] knows the custom

of the wineless libation to Dionysos, and after the fashion of his day

explains it as an ascetic protest. In his treatise on ‘the Preservation

of Health’ he says, ‘We often sacrifice _nephalia_ to Dionysos,

accustoming ourselves rightly not to desire unmixed wine.’ The practice

is manifestly a survival in ritual of the old days before Dionysos took

possession of the vine, or rather the vine took possession of him.

Empedokles had taught men that ‘to fast from evil’ was a great and

divine thing; it is not surprising that the ‘wineless’ rites became to

those who lived the Orphic life the symbol, perhaps the sacrament, of

their spiritual abstinence. Plutarch we know (p. 628) was suspected by

his robuster friends of Orphism, and probably with good reason. In his

dialogue on ‘Freedom from Anger’ he[1284] makes one of the speakers, who

is transparently himself, tell how he conquered his natural irritability.

He set himself to observe certain days as sacred, on which he would not

get angry, just as he might have abstained from getting drunk or taking

any wine, and these ‘angerless days’ he offered to God as ‘Nephalia’ or

‘Melisponda,’ and then he tried a whole month, and then two, till he

was cured. To a greater than Plutarch, a priest who was poet also, the

wineless sacrifice of the Eumenides[1285] is charged with sacramental

meaning; the rage of the king is over, in his heart is meekness, in his

hands olive, shorn wool, water and honey; so only may he enter their

sanctuary, ‘he sober and they wineless.’

In the confession of the Orphic there is no mention of wine, no avowal of

having sacramentally drunk it, no resolve to abstain. The Bacchos, with

whom the mystic is made one, is the ancient Bull-god, lord of the life

of Nature, rather than Bromios, god of intoxication. Also it must not be

forgotten that the mystic is a votary of the Mother as well as the Son,

and though the Mother is caught and carried away in the later revels of

the Son, she is never goddess of the vine. It is noteworthy that the

later Orphics turned rather to the Mother than the Son; they revived

the ancient rite of earth to earth burial, supplanted for a time by

cremation, and the house of Pythagoras[1286] was called by the people of

Metapontum the ‘temple of Demeter.’ Pythagoras never insisted on ‘total

abstinence,’ but he told his disciples that if they would drink plain

water they would be clearer in head as well as healthier in body. In the

ancient rites of the Mother, rites instituted before the coming of the

grape, they found the needful divine precedent[1287]:

‘Then Metaneira brought her a cup of honey-sweet wine,

But the goddess would not drink it, she shook her head for a sign,

For red wine she might not taste, and she bade them bring her meal

And water and mix it together, and mint that is soft to feel.

Metaneira did her bidding and straight the posset she dight,

And holy Deo took it and drank thereof for a rite.’

It is strange that Orpheus if he came from the North, the land of Homeric

banquets, should have preached abstinence from flesh: if he was of

Cretan origin the difficulty disappears. Perhaps also such abstinence is

a necessary concomitant of a mysticism that asks for nothing short of

divinity. The mystic Porphyry[1288] says clearly that his treatise on

‘Abstinence from Animal Food’ is not meant for soldiers or for athletes;

for these flesh food may be needful. He writes for those who would

lay aside every weight and ‘entering the stadium naked and unclothed

would strive in the Olympic contest of the soul.’ And a great modern

mystic[1289], looking more deeply and more humbly into the mystery of

things natural, writes as follows:

‘_Toute notre justice, toute notre morale, tous nos sentiments et toutes

nos pensées dérivent en somme de trois ou quatre besoins primordiaux,

dont le principal est celui de la nourriture. La moindre modification de

l’un de ces besoins aménerait des changements considérables dans notre

vie morale._’ Maeterlinck believes, as Pythagoras did, that those who

abstain from flesh food ‘_ont senti leurs forces s’accroître, leur santé

se rétablir ou s’affermir, leur esprit s’alléger et se purifier, comme au

sortir d’une prison séculaire nauséabonde et misérable_.’

But the plain carnal man in ancient Athens would have none of this. What

to him are ὅσια, things hallowed to the god, as compared with νόμιμα,

things consecrated by his own usage? So Demosthenes taunts Aeschines,

because he cries aloud ‘Bad have I fled, better have I found’; so

Theseus[1290], the bluff warrior, hates Hippolytos, not only, or perhaps

not chiefly, because he believes him to be a sinner, but because he is an

Orphic, righteous overmuch. All his rage of flesh and blood breaks out

against the prig and the ascetic.

‘Now is thy day! Now vaunt thee; thou so pure,

No flesh of life may pass thy lips! Now lure

Fools after thee; call Orpheus King and Lord,

Make ecstasies and wonders! Thumb thine hoard

Of ancient scrolls and ghostly mysteries.

Now thou art caught and known. Shun men like these,

I charge ye all! With solemn words they chase

Their prey, and in their hearts plot foul disgrace.’

Happily there were in Athens also those who did not hate but simply

laughed, laughed aloud genially and healthily at the outward absurdities

of the thing, at all the mummery and hocus-pocus to which the lower

sort of Orphic gave such solemn intent. Among these genial scoffers was

Aristophanes.

* * * * *

There is no more kindly and delightful piece of fooling than the scene

in the _Clouds_[1291] in which he deliberately and in detail parodies

the Orphic mysteries. The tension of Orphism is great; it is, like all

mysticisms, a state of mind intrinsically and necessarily transient, and

we can well imagine that, in his lighter moods, the most pious of Orphics

might have been glad to join the general fun. In any case it helps us to

realize vividly both the _mise-en-scène_ of the mysteries themselves and

the attitude of the popular mind towards them. Exactly what particular

rite is selected for parody we do not know; probably some lesser mystery

of purification, for there is no allusion to the supreme sacramental

feast of bull’s flesh nor to the idea that the neophyte is made one with

the god.

The old unhappy father Strepsiades comes to the ‘Thinking-Shop’ of

Sokrates that he may learn to evade his creditors by dexterity of speech

and new-fangled sophistries in general. A disciple opens the door with

reluctance and warns Strepsiades that he cannot reveal these ‘mysteries’

to the chance comer. Strepsiades enters and sees a number of other

disciples lost in the contemplation of earth and heaven. He calls for

Sokrates and is answered by a voice up in the air.

‘_Sok._ Why dost thou call me, Creature of a Day?

_Str._ First tell me please, what are you doing up there?

_Sok._ I walk in air and contemplate the Sun.’

Here is the first Orphic touch. Sokrates instead of climbing a mountain

has taken an easier way: he is suspended in a basket, and, Orpheus-like,

reveres the Sun. The mysteries are not Eleusinian, not of the underworld.

The comedian might and did dare to bring the Mystics of Kore and Iacchos

in Hades on the stage, but a direct parody of the _actual_ ceremony of

initiation at Eleusis would scarcely have been tolerated by orthodox

Athens. The Eleusinian rites had become by that time a state religion,

politically and socially sacred (νόμιμα). The Orphics were Dissenters,

and a parody of Orphic mysteries was an appeal at once to popular

prejudice and popular humour. Sokrates explains that he is sitting aloft

to avoid the intermixture of earthly elements in his contemplation;

again we have a skit on the Orphic doctrine of the double nature of man,

earthly and heavenly, and the need for purification from earthly Titanic

admixture.

After some preliminary nonsense Strepsiades tells his need, and Sokrates

descends and asks:

‘Now, would you fain

Know clearly of divine affairs, their nature

When rightly apprehended?

_Str._ Yes, if I may.

_Sok._ And would you share the converse of the Clouds,

The spiritual beings we worship?

_Str._ Why, yes, rather.

_Sok._ Then take your seat upon this sacred—campstool.

_Str._ All right, I’m here.

_Sok._ And now, take you this wreath.

_Str._ A wreath—what for? Oh mercy, Sokrates,

Don’t sacrifice me, I’m not Athamas!

_Sok._ No, no. I’m only doing just the things

We do at initiations.’

Strepsiades is of the old order; he knows nothing of these new ‘spiritual

beings’ worshipped by Orphics and sophists. Something religious and

uncomfortable is going to be done to him, and his thoughts instinctively

revert to the old order. A wreath suggests a sacrificial victim, and

the typical victim is Athamas (p. 61). Sokrates at once corrects him,

and puts the audience on the right scent. It is not a common old-world

sacrifice; it is an ‘initiation’ into a new-fangled rite, in which it

would appear the mystic was crowned, probably by way of consecration to

the gods. Strepsiades is not clear about the use of such things:

‘_Str._ Well, what good

Shall I get out of it?

_Sok._ Why, just this, you’ll be

A floury knave, uttering fine flowers of speech.

Now just keep still.

_Str._ By Jove, be sure you do it,

Come flour me well, I’ll be a flowery knave[1292].’

If any doubt were possible as to the nature of the ceremonies parodied,

the words translated ‘flour’ (τρῖμμα, παιπάλη) to preserve the pun,

settle the matter. The word τρῖμμα means something rubbed, pounded,

κρόταλον the noise made in rubbing and pounding; it might be rendered

‘rattle.’ παιπάλη is the fine flour or powder resulting from the process.

Strepsiades is to become subtle in his arguments, a rattle in his speech.

The words would have no sort of point but for the fact that Sokrates

at the moment takes up two pieces of gypsum, pounds them together and

bespatters Strepsiades till he is white all over like a Cretan mystic.

The scholiast[1293] is quite clear as to what was done on the stage.

‘Sokrates while speaking rubs together two friable stones, and beating

them against each other collects the splinters and pelts the old man

with them, as they pelt the victims with grain.’ He is quite right as to

the thing done, quite wrong as to the ritual imitated. Strepsiades, as

Sokrates said, is not being sacrificed; it is not the ritual of sacrifice

that is mimicked, but of initiation.

The certainty that the scene is one of initiation, not sacrifice, is

made more certain by the fact that Strepsiades is sitting all the while,

not on an altar, but on a sort of truckle-bed or campstool (σκίμπους).

We have no evidence of the use of a σκίμπους in mystic ritual, but it

is clearly the comic equivalent of the seat or throne (θρόνος) used

in Orphic rites. The candidate for initiation, whether Eleusinian or

Orphic, was always seated, and the ceremony was known as the ‘seating’

or enthronement. Dion Chrysostom[1294] says those who perform initiation

ceremonies are wont in the ceremony called ‘the seating’ to make the

candidates sit down and to dance round them. It is to this ceremonial

that Plato[1295] alludes in the _Euthydemus_. ‘You don’t see, Kleinias,

that the two strangers are doing what the officials in the rites of the

Korybantes are wont to do, when they perform the ceremony of “seating”

for the man who is about to be initiated.’ Kleinias is undergoing

instruction like the neophyte in the mysteries; he has to sit in silence

while his instructors dance argumentatively round him, uttering what seem

to him unmeaning words.

So far Strepsiades is a _mystic_ in the first stage of initiation, i.e.

he is being prepared and purified. All this ceremonial is preliminary

to the next stage, that of full vision (ἐποπτεία). He is seated on the

stool, he is covered with chalk, to one end only, and that is that he may

behold clearly, may hold communion with, the heavenly gods. Sokrates, in

regular ritual fashion, first proclaims the sacred silence, then makes

preliminary prayer to the sophistic quasi-Orphic divinities of Atmosphere

and Ether[1296], and finally invokes the Holy Clouds in pseudo-solemn

ritual fashion:

‘_Sok._ Silence the aged man must keep, until our prayer be ended.

O Atmosphere unlimited, who keepst our earth suspended,

Bright Ether and ye Holy Clouds, who send the storm and thunder,

Arise, appear above his head, a Thinker waits in wonder.

_Str._ Wait, please, I must put on some things before the rain has

drowned me,

I left at home my leather cap and macintosh, confound me.

_Sok._ Come, O come! Bring to this man full revelation.

Come, O come! Whether aloft ye hold your station

On Olympus’ holy summits, smitten of storm and snow,

Or in the Father’s gardens, Okeanos, down below,

Ye weave your sacred dance, or ye draw with your pitchers gold

Draughts from the fount of Nile, or if perchance ye hold

Maiotis mere in ward, or the steep Mimantian height,

Snow-capped, hearken, we pray, vouchsafe to accept our rite

And in our holy meed of sacrifice take delight.’

The address is after the regular ritual pattern, which mentions, for

safety’s sake, any and every place where the divine beings are likely to

wander. That such an invocation formed part of Orphic Dionysiac rites

is not only a priori probable but certain from the Iacchos song in the

_Frogs_ (p. 541). In a word the ‘full revelation,’ the ἐποπτεία, of these

and all mysteries, was only an intensification, a mysticizing, of the old

Epiphany rites—the ‘Appear, appear’ of the Bacchants, the ‘summoning’ of

the Bull-god by the women of Elis (p. 438). It was this Epiphany, outward

and inward, that was the goal of all purification, of all consecration,

not the enunciation or elucidation of arcane dogma, but the revelation,

the fruition, of the god himself. To what extent these Epiphanies were

actualized by pantomimic performances we do not know; that some form of

mimetic representation was enacted seems probable from the scene that

follows the Epiphany of the Clouds, when Strepsiades confused and amazed

gropes in bewilderment, and bit by bit attains clear vision of the

goddesses.

That the new divinities are _goddesses_ is as near as Aristophanes dare

go to a skit on Eleusinian rites; that they are goddesses of the powers

of the air, not dread underworld divinities, saves him from all scandal

as regards his Established Church. He guards himself still further by

making his Clouds, in one of their lovely little songs, chant the piety

of Athens, home of the mysteries.

The Clouds themselves were as safe as they were poetical. Even the

Orphics did not actually _worship_ clouds; but their theogony, their

cosmogony, is, as will later (Chap. XII.) be seen, full of vague

nature-impersonations, of air and ether and Erebos and Chaos, and the

whirlpool of things unborn. No happier incarnation of all this, this and

the vague confused cosmical philosophy it embodied, than the shifting

wonder of mists and clouds.

The scene, though it goes on far too long, must have been exquisitely

comic. With no stage directions probably half the trivial and absurd

details have been lost, but we can imagine that the whole hocus-pocus

of an Orphic mystery was carefully mimicked. We can even imagine that

Sokrates was dressed up as an initiating Silen, such a one as is depicted

in the relief in fig. 149.

* * * * *

We can also imagine that in Athens it was hard to be an Orphic, a

dissenter, a prig, a man overmuch concerned about his own soul. We have

seen how against such eccentrics the advocate Demosthenes could appeal

to the prejudices of a jury. We know that to Theophrastos[1297] it was

the characteristic of a ‘superstitious man’ that he went every month to

the priest of the Orphic mysteries to participate in these rites, and we

gather dimly that he did not always find sympathy at home; his wife was

sometimes ‘too busy’ to go with him, and he had to take the nurse and

children.

Plutarch[1298], sympathetic as he is to some aspects of Orphism, yet, in

his protest against superstition, says, ‘these are the sort of things

that make men atheists, the incantations, wavings and enchantments and

magic, runnings round and tabourings, _unclean purifications_, filthy

cleansings, barbarous and outrageous penances in sanctuaries, and

bemirings.’ And again[1299], when he is describing the hapless plight of

the man who thinks that affliction comes to him as a punishment for sin,

‘It is useless to speak to him, to try and help him. He sits girt about

with foul rags, and many a time he strips himself and rolls about naked

in the mud; he accuses himself of sins of omission and commission, he has

eaten something or drunk something or walked in some road the divinity

forbade him.’ This morbid habit of self-examination is a thoroughly

Orphic trait. Pythagoras[1300] advised his disciples to repeat these

lines to themselves when they went home at night:

‘What have I done amiss? what of right accomplished?

What that I ought to have done have I omitted to do?’

‘When he is at his best,’ Plutarch goes on, ‘and has only a slight attack

of superstition on him he will sit at home, becensed and bespattered,

with a parcel of old women round him, hanging all sorts of odds and ends

on him as though, as Bion says, he were a peg.’ Such rites as those

described by Plutarch were not late decadent inventions, though we hear

of them mainly from late authors; they were primitive savageries revived

with new spiritual meaning by the Orphics. Herakleitos[1301] refers to

them: ‘polluted they are purified with blood, as though if a man stepped

into mud he should be purified by mud.’

This is the shady side of Orphism, the way it had of attaching to itself

ancient, obscure and even degraded rites, the more obscure the easier

to mysticize. It was this shady side that Plato hated, against which he

protested. In the _Republic_[1302] he says ‘seers and mendicant quacks

besiege rich men’s doors, exhibiting books by Musaeus and Orpheus ...

and in accordance with these they perform sacrifices, inducing not only

individual persons but whole cities to believe that you can obtain

freedom and purification from sins, while you are still alive, by

sacrifices and performances that might please a child, and that there

are things they call “rites,” which will release us from suffering after

we are dead, and that if we do not perform them, then there are fearful

things in store for us.’ The Orphics, alas, fell before the temptation,

always assailing the theologist, to enforce his moral and religious

precepts by the terrors of another world; there can be little doubt

that the lower class of Orphic priest in some fashion sold indulgences.

The fearful things with which the uninitiated were threatened, will be

discussed when we come to the question of Orphic eschatology.

THE LIKNOPHORIA.

The tearing of the bull is, however mysticized, a savage orgy; the

purification by mud and clay can never have been pleasing. It is a

relief to turn to another Orphic ceremonial of more genial content—the

Liknophoria, the carrying of the _liknon_.

In discussing the worship of Dionysos Liknites at Delphi, a worship

attended, it will be remembered, by a secret sacrifice performed by

priests who bore the specially Orphic name of Hosioi, Holy Ones, we have

seen the _liknon_ in use as a cradle for the infant god (p. 402). It

will further be noted that Dionysos Liknites is, like the infant Ploutos

in the cornucopia, only an anthropomorphic presentation of the new-born

fruits of the earth, of the fruits whether of spring or autumn; he is a

male form of Kore the earth-daughter. The ceremony of ‘waking’ him was

primarily but a mimetic summons to the earth to bring forth her fruits in

due season.

[Illustration: FIG. 148.]

On the relief in fig. 148 in the Glyptothek at Munich[1303] we see a

shovel-shaped _liknon_, of a shape that might well serve for a cradle;

but it contains not a child, only grapes and leaves, and the phallic

symbol of animal life. The relief, of Hellenistic date, represents a

peasant going to market; he carries fruits and some animal slung on a

stick over his shoulder, and he drives in front of him a cow with her

calf tied on to her. He is passing a sanctuary of Dionysos; a wine cup

and torches and a thyrsos are seen to the left. Up above is a second

little shrine with a Herm, whether of Hermes or Dionysos it is impossible

to say. High in the middle of the main building is an elaborate erection,

on the top of which is set up the sacred _liknon_.

We are at once reminded of a fragment of Sophocles[1304]:

‘Go on your road,

All ye the folk of handicraft who pray

To Ergane, your bright-eyed child of Zeus,

With service of your posted winnow-corbs.’

[Illustration: FIG. 149.]

The passage is of interest because it shows that the _liknon_, the

harvest basket, though undoubtedly used in the cult of Dionysos, was

nowise confined to him. Athene Ergane, goddess at first no doubt of

‘works’ in the Hesiodic sense, of tilth[1305] rather than of weaving and

handicraft, was, as has been previously shown (p. 301), only another

Kore, the local Earth-daughter of Athens. To her rather than to the

work-fellow of Hephaistos, the _liknon_ full of fruits was a fit

offering, and in solemn consecration it was set up, erected (στατόν), as

on the relief. The word ‘_erected_’ is used no doubt to mark the contrast

with other ceremonies of the _carrying_ of the _liknon_ (Liknophoria).

This setting up of the _liknon_ was too open and public a matter to be

a mystery. It was a mere offering of first-fruits whether to Athene or

Kore or Liknites. But in the service of Liknites there was an element of

mystery, the birth of the divine child, and it is largely in connection

with the cult of Dionysos that the _liknon_ takes on mystic developments.

It is an excellent instance of determined Orphic mysticizing.

In the relief[1306] reproduced in fig. 149 we have what is manifestly a

Dionysiac mystery. The neophyte is in the act of being veiled; he may

not look at the _liknon_, with its fruit and sacred symbol, which will

presently be placed upon his head. A satyr holds it in readiness, and

behind the neophyte is a Maenad with her cymbal.

* * * * *

The veiling of the head marks the mysterious character of the ceremony.

We see it again in the delicate piece of stucco-work from the Farnesina

palace reproduced in fig. 150, and now in the Museo delle Therme

at Rome[1307]. The scene is clearly one of initiation; the thyrsos

carried by the boy with head closely veiled marks it as a mystery of

Dionysos. A priest is unveiling an object on what seems to be an altar.

Unfortunately the stucco is much damaged and what the object is cannot

be certainly made out; it looks like a _liknon_ in shape[1308]. In any

case the ceremony of veiling at a Dionysiac mystery is clear. Behind the

officiating priestess is a cista, containing no doubt the further _sacra_

of the rite. The scene takes place in a sanctuary, indicated by a column

and a sacred tree.

[Illustration: FIG. 150.]

The custom of veiling survives for us in the ritual veil of the bride and

the widow, but we have almost emptied it of its solemn ancient content.

The bride veils herself, it is usually supposed, out of modesty. It

is therefore with some surprise we learn that in the primitive church

bridegroom as well as bride were veiled. This custom, according to the

Abbé Duchesne[1309], obtained till quite recently in France and still

obtains in the Armenian Church. At the actual moment of the ceremony,

apparently as an integral part of it, the priest spreads over bride and

groom together a long red veil, the _flammeum_ of the Romans. In the

Coptic ritual the veil is white, but is spread alike over man and woman.

The real symbolism of the veil, which indicates neither modesty nor

chastity, comes out when we examine classical usage. The question was

raised long ago by Plutarch[1310] ‘Why do men veil their heads when they

worship the gods and uncover them when they wish to do honour to men?’

Plutarch is better at asking questions than at answering them, but,

among the various odd solutions he propounds, he gives one suggestive

clue, viz. that the custom was analogous to those of the Pythagoreans.

Pythagorean, as we have seen, spells Orphic revival of primitive usage.

The real reason of the custom comes out in the ceremonial known as the

Sacred Spring (ver sacrum), which Festus[1311] describes as follows: ‘The

Sacred Spring was a rite of dedication among the Italians. Under the

pressure of extreme disasters they used to make a vow that they would

sacrifice all animal things born to them in the spring next ensuing. But

as it seemed to them a barbarous thing to slay innocent boys and girls,

when they came to adult years they _veiled them_ and drove them out

beyond the boundaries of their state.’ Whether the horrid practice of the

‘Sacred Spring’ is real or imaginary, does not for our purpose greatly

matter. One thing is clear: the practice of veiling symbolized, was the

equivalent of, _dedication_. The bride and bridegroom alike are veiled

because they are dedicated in the mystery of marriage, consecrated, made

over to the powers of life. The penitent is veiled because he dedicates

himself as atonement for sin; the widow is made over to the powers

of death, primarily no doubt as a substitute for her sacrifice, her

‘devotio’ of herself to the ghost of her dead husband. Alcestis[1312]

when she returns to the upper air is veiled and silent, and must so

remain for the space of three days; she is consecrate to Hades:

‘Thou mayst not hear sound of her spoken words

Till she be disenhallowed from the gods

Of the nether earth and see the third day’s light.’

The old meaning of _devotion_ to the gods survives now-a-days only in the

beautiful ceremonial of the Roman Church, known in popular parlance as

‘taking the veil,’ and even here its dread significance has been softened

down by the symbolism of a mystic marriage; the ‘devotio’ for life is

blended with the ‘devotio’ for death[1313].

In fig. 148 the _liknon_ has been set up (στατόν), on high, in open

evidence; it contains simply an offering of first-fruits with the added

symbol of the phallos; it is sacred, but nowise mysterious. It forms in

this particular monument a part of the worship of Dionysos, but it might

belong, as already noted, equally well to any and every god or goddess of

harvest to whom first-fruits were due. In figs. 149 and 150 the _liknon_

has become part of a mystery cult; it is about to be put on the head

of the worshipper: he is veiled and may not look upon it. What are the

elements of mystery and how were they imported?

In discussing the religion of Dionysos it has been seen that, at Delphi,

he was worshipped as Liknites. Hesychius[1314] thus explains the title:

‘Liknites, a name of Dionysos, from the cradle in which they put children

to sleep.’ The _liknon_, the shovel-shaped basket used for the carrying

of fruits, served in primitive days another purpose, that of cradle for a

child.

[Illustration: FIG. 151.]

On the vase-painting[1315] in fig. 151, from a red-figured cylix in the

Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, we see the wicker-work _liknon_ in use

as a cradle. The baby Hermes, wearing his broad petasos, sits up in

his _liknon_ looking at the oxen he has just stolen. One of them turns

round surprised at the strange little object he sees, and gently snuffs

the cradle. Maia, the mother of Hermes, comes up in consternation and

holds out a protesting hand. It is the scene described in the Homeric

hymn[1316], though, as usual, the vase-painter is independent in matters

of detail: