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Chapter One
ORIGINS OF A MYTHOLOGY: A VIEW FROM THE GRAVE
1 TOMBS WORTH WRITING ABOUT
When over 1,800 years ago Pausanias wrote his guide-book to ancient Greece, he had in mind an audience interested not so much in nature as in the buildings and monuments of man. Oropos, between Athens and Tanagra, was in Pausaniasâ eyes a failure: âThe city is on the coast and has nothing important to write about.â Successful cities bristle with council chambers and civic monuments, and especially with temples, ancient statues, shrines of great heroes, and other notable graves. One such city is Megara. âThe Megarians have tombs inside the cityâ, Pausanias approvingly relates. There is a tomb for those who fell during the Persian invasion; we are told the story of the Aisymnion, the council chamber where heroic dead are buried. Presently, as we walk through the city, we have almost reached the heroön of the founding father Alkathoös, and pause to appreciate the tombs of his first wife Pyrgo, and of his daughter IphinoĂ«.1
The reader can quickly tire of tombs of parochial figures, but their very frequency shows the significance they had for ancient Greek societies. Tombs of the legendary dead are not called into existence by the need to dispose of corpses; rather, the inhabitants of an ancient town need a specific place or position in which to recall and commemorate what that figure of legend means to them.
And what does Iphinoë, daughter of Alkathoös, mean to the Megarians? This is what Pausanias tells us:
⊠the other tomb is said to be that of IphinoĂ«, daughter of Alkathoös; she died, they say, whilst still a maiden [parthenos]. There is a custom that girls [korai] bring libations to the tomb of IphinoĂ« before marriage and make an offering of hair â just as the daughters [thygateres] of the Delians used once to shear their hair for HekaĂ«rge and Opis.
(Pausanias 1.43.4)
As this book is mainly about the rites of parthenoi or korai, I will pause briefly to describe what is meant by these terms. A parthenos, such as Iphinoë, is a girl who is not yet married. Although she is expected not yet to have had sexual experience, parthenia does not directly refer to virginity or end, as Sissa has shown, with the rupture of the hymen. Indeed, Greek medical writers were ignorant of the hymen or denied its existence or found no place for it in their comprehensive accounts of the female anatomy.2 Virginity in any case could not be tested (we hear occasionally of magico-religious ordeals) and could only be preserved by the unremitting vigilance of the parents. Although parthenia was perceived as adversely affected by premature sexual experience (to deflower is to diapartheneuin), the real issue was marriageability and the real contrast was between parthenos and gyne, the married woman. A parthenos is a maiden, not a virgin.
Kore, or koure, which I have translated âgirlâ, is for our purposes scarcely different from parthenos and there is even a corresponding verb for âdeflowerâ, diakoreuein. However, kore also denotes a relationship: to be somebodyâs kore is also to be their daughter (thygater); its contrast with gyne is therefore rather more specific than that of parthenos and the contrast reveals the transfer of authority over the woman: once her fatherâs kore, she now becomes her husbandâs gyne. This is the transition which IphinoĂ« fails to make.
The korai of Megara cut their hair for the dead parthenos IphinoĂ«. Pausanias, in the second century AD, must regard cutting the hair before marriage as somewhat unusual and even old-fashioned, citing an obsolete custom from Delos to illuminate the practice. Yet we know from Euripides that not so far away, at Troizen, it was in his time the custom for girls before they married to cut their hair for Hippolytos â this time a youth who fails to reach adulthood â and we know from a lexicographer that Athenian youths beginning their ephebeia (the last remnant of warrior initiation in the civilized polis) cut their hair too. This is a rite of passage, a rite by which an individual or a group performs the transition from one status in society to another, and a common one in initiations into the adult community: âA girlâs head is shaved at the moment of marriage to indicate a change from one age group to anotherâ (Van Gennep 167). To cut the hair is to change the person, to lay aside an identity. This is what Megarian korai must do before they can become gynaikes.
One might expect the shorn hair to be offered to a goddess â to Hera perhaps or Athene or, like hair shorn at Koureotis (the third day of the Apatouria in Attica), to Artemis.3 But in our case it is not. Our Megarian maidens must seek out the tomb of IphinoĂ«, about whom we know only two facts: (a) she died whilst still a maiden; (b) she is the daughter of founding father Alkathoös. These details suffice. The Megarian girls lay down their parthenia, their maidenhood, at the tomb of the dead maiden; and the dead maiden, being daughter of the original, primeval king, is the communityâs prototype. The tomb of the maiden is not only an ideal place at which to mark the ending of maidenhood; it is, in fact, its central, organic purpose, its raison dâĂȘtre.
2 THE CREATION OF MYTH: A HYPOTHESIS FOR TESTING
But the tomb of IphinoĂ« is still more significant: it is a mythological matrix. It shows the origins of a prevalent type of mythology and exhibits that mythology in its simplest form. The tomb is the place at which to perform a passage ritual, but once called a tomb it is a motif in a new language, a language in which ending maidenhood is figured as the death of a maiden. That language is myth. Because the rite is performed at a tomb, there can now be a myth which tells how a certain maiden once died. Is this why maidens fare so badly in Greek mythology â murdered, sacrificed, taking their own lives, transformed into bears, cows, or trees? All these motifs serve to terminate maidenhood.
We can now watch our myth develop. If we let the IphinoĂ« model evolve (logically, not historically) so that a divinity is actively involved, we might well envisage a ceremony performed under the auspices of the goddess Artemis. The tomb of the maiden might now be situated inside the sanctuary of Artemis. (As a matter of historical fact, there is a tomb of Iphigeneia next to the Artemis sanctuary at Megara and inside the Artemis sanctuary at Brauron.) And the myth acquires a new feature too: the maiden must die, somehow in connection with Artemis or in her sanctuary. How? She will of course (a priori) be sacrificed to Artemis. From this point of view, the story of how Agamemnon was instructed to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to Artemis makes very good sense â if only it were unconnected with the Trojan War. And our hypothesis will be that it was indeed originally independent.
This is a view of mythology which operates with a number of hypotheses. The test of those hypotheses is by experiment and the interpretations of this book are that experiment. I am therefore not at this stage concerned for instance that there is a common view that cult of heroes at their tombs is a late development, which itself is only a hypothesis (though the style of cult may have changed). This book operates with a very different hypothesis, that the commemoration of heroes and legendary figures and association with them through ritual go back at least to Bronze Age times when some of the myths under discussion were formed, and maybe reach back in some form to much remoter times [ch.9.2].
The myths I am concerned with are a surprisingly substantial portion of Greek mythology. They are those narratives which on interpretation correspond to the passage rites from maidenhood to the status of married women. Assignment of a given myth to this category is by experimental interpretation. But behind the interpretation lies the hypothesis that these myths are specific historical phenomena. They can be traced back to specific locations, belong to specific peoples, and serve specific purposes. It is only shortage of data that reduces the precision with which one can explain this type of myth.
At birth, the hypothesis continues, this myth is fixed to a people and is specially connected with a sacred place â a shrine or a tomb â where these passage rites take place. This location figures in the myth itself and can often be preserved even when the myth has quite lost its original purpose: therefore locations which figure in the descendants of the original myth (which are our sole sources) are greatly to be treasured as preserving the original context of the myth. So the location at Aulis is a crucial fact in the Agamemnon and Iphigeneia myth.
The myth can develop in various ways. When a people migrates, the location of their rituals changes and so may the location of the myth. When a people splits, doublets may result. In its ritual context, the myth is largely protected against alteration by the constraints of significance. But when the significance of the ritual declines and the attractions of the narrative increase, then alteration becomes more likely, particularly in the hands of entertainer poets â even if the traditional tastes of audiences restrict the flexibility of the poet.4 Good stories become part of the repertoire of travelling poets addressing a more cosmopolitan, or âpanhellenicâ, market â Iphigeneia becomes part of the Trojan War saga. And those poets who systematize traditions (âgenealogistsâ) must make compromises to do so.
3 METHOD AND REVELATIONS
On this view, there is an original myth to be recovered, however old-fashioned it may be to think so and to return to techniques practised at the beginning of this century. Our first task in each case is to recover the original (cult) myth so far as possible, as it is that to which the interpretation relates; there are all sorts of dangers in this pursuit, notably of unfathomable contamination of variants resolved only by petitio principii, but it is too necessary to allow oneself the luxury of despair.5 Where possible I discuss cult practice in relation to the interpretation, but it will soon become apparent that it is the myth itself which in many cases (if correctly interpreted) contains the last surviving evidence for practices long forgotten â even by the Greeks themselves.
I have tried to explore enough myths to include important, representative or particularly interesting examples and to establish a method, but have not been able to be exhaustive. At the same time, though my focus is on a particular type of myth, I have not wished to exclude or curtail related subjects which might cast some light on Greek history, language, or culture. There is a remarkable amount of material, not just on Greek religion, which is available for recovery through this sort of study â provided only that the following pages justify the working hypotheses.
4 INITIATION â EXAGGERATION?
Initiation and mythology are not small subjects. Any mythology, even that which is no more than story-telling or the fiction of its age, taps concerns, transcends them, or escapes them. A mythology such as the Greek, which is the common property of whole societies (even if those societies stretch no further than individual towns) and not just of those who will read the authorâs work, should in principle reveal a peopleâs perception of its life. And mythology which survives the migration of peoples has some certificate of its continuing validity.
Initiation may seem at first sight to be just one amongst many aspects of early societies or of those societies not yet seriously affected by the social destruction wrought by industrial and economic revolutions. It may seem indeed colourful, but perhaps be distrusted as a current vogue in scholarship comparable with the esoteric symbolisms, solar mythologies, savageries, manas, totemisms, and fertilities of earlier generations, not to mention the structuralisms and feminisms of our own. It will be evident to every reader that the problem is usually one of perspective and proportion, rather than simply of error (though Creuzerian symbolism and the solar pursuits of Max MĂŒller may be rightly viewed less kindly). I have tried throughout this book to avoid initiatory panacea and am acutely conscious of the availability of quite different interpretative frameworks that are simultaneously valid. At the same time, initiation seems to me a particularly important aspect of earlier Greek society and seems more important to me now than it did when I first started writing.
Fertility and increase are vital to the viability of agricultural society. They correspond to the rhythm of the year, whose regular but changing character and sensual contrasts are a fundamental part of human perception. So far, though, fertility is only about things, animals at most. Within the framework of fertility the human animal may be interpreted: seed-corn may be associated with the propagation of fine children, and marriage may be assigned to the growing season, to spring. But when all is said, fertility consigns religion to the control of things, and tipples on the brink of magic in consequence. Initiation, on the other hand, is about people, values, identities (cf. ch. 9.1); and its myths are about young persons who suffered. Indeed, much of what we value about Greek mythology derives, on the view presented in this book, from the personal character with which initiation has imbued it. Initiation is after all the most personal form of religion available before society changes and calls into existence religions of salvation for urban and deracinated souls, though frequently on a pattern learnt from our earlier initiations.
The interface between fertility and initiation is one of explosive power. Here, we shall see, in the blackness of night, in special, cyclical springs a greater power than that of the individual year of fertility is summoned: a new creation takes place, and initiates perform a transition into a new adulthood; group marriage can occur and offspring can be ensured. It is a dangerous process, often attended by an angry goddess, deprived of her adoring maidens and requiring a placation equivalent to human sacrifice. But we anticipate.
Map 2 Iphigeneia and Arkteia
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Chapter Two
THE NORTHâEAST: IPHIGENEIA, DEER, AND BEARS
1 IPHIGENEIA AT AULIS: THE STORY
Diese Sage wurzelt ganz im Kult der Artemis.
(ROBERT 1095)
1.1 Starting Point
We have seen in chapter 1 how a story of Iphigeneia could emerge as the myth accompanying passage rites performed in the cult of Artemis. But when we meet the story, it has long escaped its cultic confines and become a powerful narrative within a repertoire of traditional stories shared by the writers of antiquity. Aeschylus, for instance, employs the tale sensationally in his Agamemnon of 457 BC to call down pollution upon the head of Agamemnon and the whole House of Atreus. Or there is Lucretius, who 400 years later ...
