Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives

New Critical Perspectives

David Dodd, Christopher A. Faraone, David Dodd, Christopher A. Faraone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135143732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Scholars of classical history and literature have for more than a century accepted `initiation' as a tool for understanding a variety of obscure rituals and myths, ranging from the ancient Greek wedding and adolescent haircutting rituals to initiatory motifs or structures in Greek myth, comedy and tragedy.
In this books an international group of experts including Gloria Ferrari, Fritz Graf and Bruce Lincoln, critique many of these past studies, and challenge strongly the tradition of privileging the concept of initiation as a tool for studying social performances and literary texts, in which changes in status or group membership occur in unusual ways. These new modes of research mark an important turning point in the modern study of the religion and myths of ancient Greece and Rome, making this a valuable collection across a number of classical subjects.

Part I

INTRODUCTION

1

INITIATION

A concept with a troubled history

Fritz Graf

In contemporary culture even outside the narrow circle of scholarship, initiation has become, over the last century, a household word. Two citations express our culture’s orthodoxy about initiation. When, in Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, the sometimes unruly (and almost immortal) narrator has to introduce some of his sons into sexuality, he makes a short remark: “Sure, there are rites of passage for males as well as females; every culture has them, even those that aren’t aware of it.”¹ A much earlier voice has told us why this should be so: “Initiation may be traced to a period of the most remote antiquity”. Thus the Reverend George Oliver, Doctor of Divinity and Bishop of Shropshire, in the first of twelve lectures he gave on The History of Initiation …, Comprising a Detailed Account of the Rites and Ceremonies, Doctrines and Disciplines of All the Secret and Mysterious Institutions of the Ancient World, published in 1840. Initiation rites, then, are part and parcel of human history, they are an anthropological constant going back to our earliest times, and (not the least) they are “secret and mysterious”. Of course, the learned bishop and freemason had to say no less, since he set out to give the most impressive pedigree possible to his own Masonic ritual predilections. In doing so, he made ample use of the works of earlier scholars — not the least of someone whom the Anglican bishop, I assume, would rather not publicly acknowledge as his spiritual father: initiation both primitive and Greek is already present in the two volumes in which the Jesuit Father Josèphe François Lafitau, in 1724, compared the customs of the American savages with those of the first humans altogether.² The initiation rites — les rites initiatiques — of the Iroquois and the Hurons which he personally witnessed (the rites so impressively captured, some two centuries later, though in another tribe, in A Man Called Horse) immediately evoked in Father Lafitau the memory of the initiations at Eleusis and sent him unto the slippery path of a diffusionist theory that made them into an important part of early man’s religious legacy.³ A glimpse into any of the volumes that record a major congress on the topic, organized at the university of Montpellier in 1990, can show how much these assumptions are still alive in the studies of Greek and Roman culture and literature.⁴

A glorious past

Initiation, thus, was thought of as a human universal of extremely great age. In the prevailing historicizing and evolutionist model of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these two characteristics meant about the same thing: any human universal should go back before the primeval Age of the Scattering (whatever time span that implies for a modern palaeoanthropologist). Second, the term was oscillating between two meanings that we keep apart. The first is the initiation into the secrecy of mysteries, especially those of Eleusis, according to Father Lafitau, whereas the Reverend Oliver dwelt at length on the much more spectacular mysteries of Bacchus, mainly by embellishing the already rather novelistic story of Livy on the scandal which shocked Rome in 186 bc.⁵ The second is initiation as a life crisis ritual, the transformation of children (or adolescents) into full adults — the rites Lafitau had observed among his savages. The first meaning leads back to the very roots of our terminology: Latin intia is Cicero’s and Varro’s rendering of Greek mustêria, applied to Eleusis and Samothrace, while intiare as a translation of Greek mueisthai (“to initiate into a mystery cult”) and initiatus as the Latin equivalent of Greek memueménos (“initiate of a mystery cult”) are at least a century older.⁶ Via the derivative noun initiatio, first used by Suetonius for the ritual introduction into the Eleusinian mysteries,⁷ the term arrived in Father Lafitau’s French and in the Reverend Oliver’s English anthropological terminology, and from there started to make its career in twentieth-century anthropology.

Lafitau’s use, thus, carried the day; he applied it both to the mystery cults of Greece and Rome and to the puberty rites — as we would say — of his Huron and Iroquois: in a literal sense to the former, as a metaphor to the latter — since, strictly speaking, the use of the term outside ancient mystery cults is metaphor, and a rather bold one, based on some phenomenological similarities. The term in its metaphorical meaning became current in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ethnographical reports and, in the later nineteenth century, in the theorizing of the armchair ethnographers — not the least, of course, Frazer: his two volumes on Balder the Beautiful contain a long chapter on “The Ritual of Death and Resurrection” in “certain initiatory rites” that “lads at puberty” had to undergo.⁸

Frazer, though, was interested only in the imagery of death and rebirth found in many initiatory cults; he had no interest in initiation as such. Nor had Arnold Van Gennep, the Belgian folklorist, who taught in Switzerland until he left it somewhat abruptly, and who in 1909 described the conceptual and structural framework to better formalize these rites of transition and put them into a wider context. He included what he called “les rites d’initiation” in the wider framework of his tripartite rites of passage, and he subdivided them (assuming, but not really insisting on an evolutionary development) into puberty rites, rites introducing new members into secret societies, introduction into mystery cults, Christianity (“religions universalistes”, especially baptism), religious fraternities and orders, professional societies and specific functions like priests and sorcerers, kings and sacred prostitutes — a valid classification that is all too often overlooked by less neat followers.⁹ It was ethnographers with an outspoken interest in society and sociology who, at the turn of the century, focused on these rituals, Hans Schurtz in Germany with his Altersklassen und Männerbünde of 1902, Hutton Webster in the United States with Primitive Secret Societies of 1908, the tandem Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert in France in an article from 1909.¹⁰ These works, combined with Durkheim’s theory of the social origin of religion, inspired Jane Ellen Harrison to look for traces of similar rites in ancient Greece.¹¹ The result of this research was Themis: A Study of the Social Origin of Greek Religion, published for the first time in 1911. The book — which would have been revolutionary, had it had an immediate impact — opens with a long interpretation of the Palaikastro hymn, a epigraphical hymn to Zeus of early Hellenistic date, excavated in Western Crete in 1905 and published by Gilbert Murray in 1908.¹²

The hymn praises Zeus as the megistos kouros, “greatest young man”, and it describes his entourage of leaping and dancing Kouretes, “male adolescents”, Zeus’ own dancing and the power this has over human life, both social and agricultural. Strangely enough for a modern reader, it reminded Harrison immediately of the Orphic myth of Dionysus, his entourage of Titans and his dismemberment. She read this myth as the etiological story for the Cretan dances of the young Kouretes, and she used it to elegantly break away both from Frazer and from her earlier work: asking herself what the myth of killing and resurrecting the baby Dionysus could mean, she answered:

The orthodox explanation is that the child is a sort of vegetation spirit or corn-baby, torn to pieces in winter, revived in spring … I offer a simpler and I think more complete explanation. Every single element, however seemingly preposterous, in both the ritual and myth of Zagreus can be explained I believe by the analogy of primitive rites of tribal initiation.¹³

Initiation — or puberty rite — thus enters the Greek world as the challenge to the Usener-Frazer fertility paradigm, termed by Jane Ellen Harrison as “orthodox”: initiation offered a new, unorthodox paradigm for the understanding of Greek religion and myth. To be fair, Harrison was not the first to look at initiation rites in order to understand Greek rites. Lafitau had already done so, and (as far as I know, independently) so did Andrew Lang, that learned scholar whose fame has been eclipsed by the Cambridge group, when he connected “certain features in the mysteries” with “the mysteries of savage races”.¹⁴ But these occasional remarks stayed on the level of learned observations and never turned into a theory, unlike Harrison’s.¹⁵ Her insight, however, did not immediately turn into the new orthodoxy, although Gilbert Murray, the Oxford Regius Professor of Greek and her close friend of many years, took it immediately up in some memorable pages of his Four Stages of Greek Religion of 1912, urging that “this whole subject of Greek initiation ceremonies calls pressingly for more investigation”.¹⁶ But the call went unheard, and the fertility paradigm dominated the study of Greek religion up to the death of Martin Nilsson in 1964. During all this time, initiation was marginal — and not even provocative; its proponents lived at the margins of the European scholarly community. Henri Jeanmaire, whose Couroi et Courètes of 1939 followed the insights of Jane Ellen Harrison and built them into a much wider panorama, taught and published in Lille, not in Paris — nor did Louis Gernet, whose splendid “Dolon le loup” of 1936 is another early example of an initiatory explanation;¹⁷ and Angelo Brelich’s very learned and theoretically sophisticated Paides e Parthenoi of 1969 never made the impact it deserved — otherwise his intriguing and challenging statement that higher societies (“le cosi dette civiltà superiori”) did not have puberty rites would not have been so constantly overlooked.¹⁸ It was only when one of the centers of scholarship finally became involved that the paradigm began to become highly visible: Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the “Black Hunter”, published simultaneously in 1968 in Cambridge and in Paris and reiterated in several variants, reinstated the topic,¹⁹ and in that very same year, Jean-Pierre Vernant’s collection of Gernet’s papers opened our eyes to the elegance of “Dolon le loup”. The new orthodoxy grew during the 1970s and expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, from history of religion to the study of Greek and Roman literature; for literature, it was especially Claude Calame’s Les choeurs des jeunes filles of 1977 that built the bridge, though it was only the English translation of 1997 that really confirmed it as the new orthodoxy.²⁰ It is no coincidence that Arnold van Gennep’s book, although never neglected, gained new luster during this period, not least because of what one could call its “protostructuralist” approach.²¹

Thus, I wo...