OLYMPIAN AND CHTHONIAN ORIENTATIONS

Having touched upon the chthonian character of Orphism we have come to one of the major divisions in “Greek religion”, which might even tempt us to speak of at least two religions, the chthonian one, drawing on local traditions, and the Olympian one, expressing the Panhellenic tradition.

The pantheon of the traditions in the name of Homer and Hesiod is clearly Olympian. Having succeeded his father Cronus,¹² Zeus reigns as a sovereign among the twelve gods (for whom Pisistratus erected an official altar in the agora of Athens around 520 BCE). According to the oldest of the various schemes known to us, the list of twelve included Zeus’s brother, Poseidon, his sisters, Demeter and Hestia, his wife Hera, as well as their offspring Ares, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Athene, Artemis, Apollo and Hermes. In classical times, Plato held that Pluto, or Hades, belonged to the twelve (Laws 828d-e), reflecting “ritual honours” (time) bestowed on him and the spirits of the dead due to the calendar of ritual obligations. However, although Hades was Zeus’s brother and enjoyed the concomitant privileges, as we shall see, he was never generally recognized as one of the twelve Olympians, most probably due to his chthonian identity.

The Olympian gods shared the world not only with lesser gods and men, but also with “mythological” beings of various sorts such as satyrs, centaurs, nymphs, cyclops and other monstrous creatures. In the beginning of times, the Titans - children of Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (Sky) - fought with the younger generation of the Olympians in the so-called Titanomachia (“The battle against the Titans”, the subject of a lost epic).

Although, in the cosmogony (for which Hesiod was the prime authority), Zeus thus ended up as the supreme leader of gods and men, various tales deal with the cunning wit of immortals as well as mortals who often put his sovereignty to the test. In the beginning of times, for instance, Prometheus, one of the Titans, returns the use of fire to the humans contrary to Dios boule (“the mighty will of Zeus”), and subsequently insults Zeus by making him choose between portions of burnt offerings with deceptive appearances. Although Prometheus receives his punishment, he has succeeded in changing the relationship between gods and men, having proved that the reign of Zeus can be challenged. Although Zeus remains the sovereign of gods and men, Prometheus has successfully acted as a trickster as well as a culture hero, inaugurating and consecrating the tradition of animal sacrifices to, as well as human communion with, the Olympians (Hesiod Theogony 535-616; Works and Days 42-89).

Although the lives and ways of mortals and immortals have parted since the golden age (Hesiod Theogony 535; Works and Days 90-93), the relationship between them remains characteristically open-ended. Thus, in human affairs, as in the war between the Achaeans and the Trojans, the gods generally take different sides in the conflict. The Olympians do not represent a unified will, but rather a community of individual powers, equally diverse in passions and intentions as the humans, yet exempted from the labours of mortal existence and the fate of death.

The pantheon is Olympian in the sense that the home of the gods is identified with Mount Olympus in Thessaly, located in the northern parts of Hellas. Being “immortals”, athanatoi or ambrotoi, they breathe the clean air of aether whereas men, living a short life on the surface of the earth, are abandoned to the humid atmosphere of aer. Thus the world is divided between the upper air of easy living and the lower air of hard labour, diseases and troubles of every kind. Few are the heroes who are blessed post mortem (or rather exempted from death by being transported to eschatological topoi) with an afterlife similar to the existence of the gods. As a rule, mortal beings depart to the icy house of Hades in the form of “shadows” (skiai) - or memory “images” (eiddla') - of their final appearances in life. The Greek Hades (alias Pluto) is allotted the underworld, known by the same name and being located beneath the earth according to the Iliad, or at the brink of the world, on the far shores of Oceanus, according to the Odyssey.¹⁵ Hades is one the prime rulers of the khthon, the depth of the earth, not to be confused with ge, the surface of the earth, incorporated by the goddess of the same name (alias Gaia). Contrary to the epichthonian world of the living as well as various mythological beings, the hypokhthonion realm, that is, the netherworld, darkly embraced the presence of the dead as well as the powers of fertility, both represented symbolically by the snake and constituting an anti-world to that of Olympus.

By telling the story of Pluto’s abduction of Demeter’s daughter, the Homeric hymn to Demeter (2-3), belonging by authorial reference to the Homeric tradition, thus seems to incorporate the chthonian aspect into the overall scheme of Olympian dominance. In the epics we hear very little of the chthonian powers attributed to Dionysus/Bacchus and Hades/Pluto; it is only as late as the sixth century BCE that the story of the chthonian fate of Demeter’s “daughter” (kore) saw the light of day. As the Homeric version has it, Kore became queen of the underworld under the name of Persephone, but as a consequence of Demeter’s chaos-inducing wrath, Zeus accepted her to stay one third of the year with her mother on Mount Olympus. In this late version of the myth, elements of initiation through chthonian symbolism are present, albeit clearly downplayed. As a divine “nurse”, kourotrophos, in the guise of an old woman, Demeter attempts to immortalize a human child, Demophoon, as a substitute for the loss of her own child. In order to purify him from the contamination of mortality she places him in the hearth of the royal palace. Yet, the apotheosis is interrupted by Demophoon’s mother, queen Metaneira, who, beholding the incomprehensible sight, cries out in anguish (Homeric hymn to Demeter 248-9). Although Demophoon was not denied heroic honours post mortem (as indicated by time, Homeric hymn to Demeter 263), and although a better fate is bestowed on men in the future by Demeter’s institution of the Eleusinian mysteries (Homeric hymn to Demeter 270-74; 480-82), we hear nothing of immortality in Homer’s hymn. However, a very different picture appears from the few remaining fragments of the Orphic version. Here, the child of Dionysus seems to play a major role, exemplifying, as in other contexts, the way to salvation by traversing the triple stages of “life-death-life”, and thus serving as a model for the accomplished immortalization of the initiate.

We shall return to the mysteries of Eleusis further below and for now only point to this Panhellenic tradition of ritual initiation as a battle ground for Homeric and Orphic perspectives on human destiny and afterlife.

Chthonian powers belong to the earth and therefore, predominantly, to a specific locality. Accordingly, by representing a Panhellenic frame of storytelling, the Homeric epics (and to a lesser extent also the poems of Hesiod) had to avoid or exclude local themes of identification in order to satisfy diverse audiences.

If we turn to the local traditions as they are rendered by various sources (such as those stemming from lyrical poets and epitaphs, as well as later logographers), we get a different picture of Greek religion. Heroes, forefathers and legendary kings are anything but pale shadows in the house of Hades. They are chthonian powers to be reckoned with. Thus various rites take place at graves and temples in honour of chthonian beings, whether of human or divine origin.

One aspect of the hero cult, or the cult of the dead, is incubation. Applicants are supposed to sleep in caves or in the temple area, temenos, in order to receive dreams from the underworld, typically as a remedy for some health-related issue (disease or infertility). The oracular institutions were numerous and also had their Panhellenic counterparts as, for instance, Pythia’s well-known tripod in Delphi. As the story goes, Apollo replaced Gaia (hitherto prevailing over the “earth-Oracle”) by slaying the chthonian snake, Python, which guarded it. It until the following spring, and thus Dionysus, the god of moist fertility, was summoned by rites of mixing and drinking the wine along with making offerings of the first fruits. As mentioned above, the powers of growth and fertility, that is the powers of the earth, were intimately associated with the threat of death and destruction (e.g. famine, infertility and other disasters caused by ritual neglect). Various aspects of Dionysus seemed to be implicated in this symbolism. Being a male god of fertility, he was part of Anthesteria’s secret rites undertaken in the temple “in the Marshes” (en limnais) by the hieratic “queen” (basilinna, the wife of the archon basileus), perhaps in a kind of “holy wedding” (hieros gamos) (Demosthenes Private Orations 59.76; Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians 3.5).

Being originally a god of death and turning into a god of the wine stock as well, Dionysus significantly combines joy and destruction, and by way of being a “fertility potion”, Fruchtbarkeitszauber (Deubner [1909] 1962: 117), it is not surprising that the Anthesteria festival also created a spatial-temporal enthralment in which the doors to the underworld were opened. As a kind of Halloween, the liminal sphere of the three festival days was permeated with the spirits of the dead. The doors of houses were smeared with pitch, and leaves of buckthorn were chewed in order to prevent any evil influence from “the ghosts” (phantasma). On the last day (the khytroi), the keres (spirits associated with death and the underworld, and probably representatives of the souls of the dead) were ordered to leave (Zenobius Athenaion [Athenians] 1.30; Burkert 1983: 226f.).¹⁹ The festival was closed and normal order, that is, the separation between the living and the dead, restored.

Another festival, the Thesmophoria, took place at the opposite end of the annual calendar, namely in the month of Pyanepsion (October/November). It was a festival entirely carried out by women, who were thus allowed to leave the confines of their homes (oikoi) for a couple of days. Contrary to the Anthesteria, the Thesmophoria were not restricted to Athens but became popular throughout most of the Greek world. The festival honoured Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, who, by incorporating the dry aspect of fertility, was the counterpart to Dionysus together with whom she symbolized the double aspect of fertility (cf. Euripides Bacchae 275-81). It is generally held that the Thesmophoria took place in commemoration of Pluto’s abduction of Demeter’s daughter (kore). Together with Kore, a swineherd by the name of Eubuleus was swallowed by the gap opened up by Pluto’s arrival. Hence, swine or piglets were sacrificed and constituted a part of “what is laid down” (thesmos) in the clefts of Demeter and Kore. The decomposed leftovers were brought back by female participants who

descended among snakes and various fertility symbols. The ambivalent powers of the underworld were invoked and were hence to be mastered only by these select women who were allowed to enter the holy “pits” (megara) by having kept pure for three days preceding the festival (Scholia in Lucianum 275.23-276.28 Rabe). It is reasonable to suggest that they were somehow supposed to transmit their sexual powers to the success of the following harvest.

Cutting across the wide spectrum of the various rites of the calendar, prescribing the adoration of a wide range of divinities including Cronus, Athena, Artemis, Asclepius, Hera and Zeus, we will here restrict ourselves to looking at a very famous festival of Panhellenic appeal, namely the mysteries of Eleusis.²⁰ In this festival, that is, ta makra (the Greater Mysteries), which took place every four years, the symbolic contents of fertility festivals such as Anthesteria and Thesmophoria seem to provide a background for the undertaking of “initiation” (telete) and the all-encompassing “final vision” (epopteia) of a nightly spectacle. The latter seems to have offered a gratifying illumination of the destiny of mortal beings in the cycle of life and death, if only for the price of binding everyone’s tongue.

An overall sequential correspondence between the mythical tradition (concerning Demeter and her daughter) and the initiation process in Eleusis seems obvious. Problems begin to arise when we try to relate in more detail the content of the myth to the secret, or rather unspeakable, features of the cult; we simply do not know the degree to which the initiates actually engaged in an imitation of the mythical drama.

On the nineteenth of the month of Boedromion (September/October), the fifth day in the Greater Mysteries, ritual participants walked on the sacred road from Athens to Eleusis in a “procession” (pompe) that included the Archon Basileus (the priest of Athens), priestesses carrying the sacred “objects” (hiera), the epheboi (youngsters about to become male citizens) escorting the icon of lacchus (another classical name for Dionysus) and, last but not least, the would-be “initiates” (mustai). Arriving in the “yard” (aule) before “the initiation hall” (Telesteriori) in Eleusis, a “nightlong ritual” (pannukhis) was enacted in honour of Demeter. Supposedly, the participants were not introduced to the unspeakable part of the initiation before the twentieth. More precisely, it has been suggested that on the night between the twentieth and twenty-first of Boedromion some ritual performance reflected the mythical drama.²¹ It is, however, doubtful that the building of the Telesterion would have been suitable for a successful reception of any dramatic staging. Whatever happened that night, the mustai probably prepared themselves in the daytime by fasting and purification,²² by covering their faces and by the drinking of kukeon (Clement of Alexandria Protrepticus 2.18), the consecrated draught which is mentioned in both the Homeric and the Orphic version of the Demeter/Kore story (Homeric Hymn to Demeter 207-9; Orphicorum Fragmenta 53).²³ During the night of the twentieth, the neophytes only went through the first part of the initiation (the one called telete), while for the final rites, the epopteia, by which they would become epoptai, that is, “those who have seen”, they would have to wait for the next festival. This concluding initiation took place on the night of the twenty-first day of Boedromion and probably represented in some form the reappearance of Kore/Persephone.²⁴ Without putting too much faith in the testimony of Hippolytus, this “epiphany” might very well have included an ear of corn held forth by the priest appearing in the glow of fire from the opening of the aduton, the most sacred chamber of the Telesterion (Refutation of all Heresies 5.8).

Although the main source which enables us to reconstruct the mythical background behind the mysteries is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, it is worth noting that Clement of Alexandria interpreted the ritual undertakings (whether he knew about them from Eleusis or, more probably, from similar rites in Alexandria) not in the light of the Homeric version, but by referring to the Orphic poem, of which he gave a short paraphrase and one minor quotation (Clement of Alexandria Protrepticus 2.16-17 = Orphicorum Fragmenta 53).²⁵

In the Orphic context, the “nightly daemon” (daimon nukterine), as she was called (Orphicorum Fragmenta 53), assumed, and combined in one person, the roles that were in the Homeric context divided between Queen Metaneira and the housemaid, lambe. Being the queen of Eleusis, Baubo receives Demeter as a guest in the royal palace and offers her a “draught” (kukeon) of wine and meal. When Demeter declines, Baubo teases her by uncovering her genitals and revealing thereby the lacchus child “in her bosom” (hypo kolpois, Protrepticus 2.21).²⁶ Pleased at the sight, Demeter now accepts the drink, and this, Clement says, is “the hidden mysteries of the Athenians” (kruphia ton Athenaion musteria, 2.17). Whereas in the Homeric hymn, the sight of mother and child makes Demeter react with sorrow, only to be distracted by lambe’s gentle and poetic teasing, intrinsically suggested by her name, the Orphic revelation of Baubo’s female and motherly nudity causes Demeter to react with delight. This could be taken to mean that the sexual motif of “the male child in the lap” is suppressed in the Homeric version in favour of various other representations of woman and child as, for instance, Metaneira’s and Demeter’s incommensurable nursing of Demophoon. In Homer, the apotheosis fails and human mortality is confirmed contrary to the divine and immortalizing kourotrophos-aspect emphasized repeatedly in Orphism.²⁷ The Orphic influence on the Eleusinian mysteries might even suggest that some kind of soteriological apotheosis was thought to be ritually secured by identifying human beings, that is “mortals” (hoi thnetoi), with the procreative and recreational continuity of the divine pair of male and female gods, Zeus/Dionysus and Demeter/Persephone (cf. Albinus 2000: 182-91). Still, such an interpretation may only have been optional, tied to the Orphic frame of self-identification, if even that.

The esoteric nature of the mysteries as aporrheton, “that of which it is forbidden to speak”, makes it difficult to draw any clear-cut conclusions as to their symbolic content. Yet it is fair to say that the “mass production” of initiates made the Eleusinian initiation (telete as well as epopteid) anything but secret. Not speaking of and not enacting (in public) is not the same as not knowing. Probably there was no substantial secret to reveal, but merely ritual experiences²⁸ which were taboo outside the institutionalized frame of the ritual acts (dromena). The nature of this “public secret” invited various schemes of interpretation, as, for instance, pertaining to an Orphic or Homeric discourse, rather than assigning the mystery to an inner core of unchangeable “truth”.

The dominance of Athenian cult administration, together with the Panhellenic use and significance of the Delphic oracle, may have dissolved some inner differences and discrepancies in the variety of local traditions, but probably at the cost of the strength of particular traditional identifications. When King Philip of Macedonia conquered the mainland in 353 BCE, and when Alexander the Great subsequently introduced a new area of Hellenic expansion, the impact of Greek culture on the neighbouring peoples waxed, but then again waned in a general Hellenistic attenuation.²⁹

When the Romans, who adopted and translated considerable portions of Greek culture, created the Roman Empire, Greek religion was no longer merely Greek. Finally, when Christianity became the official religion of the empire during the fourth century CE, the end of classical antiquity was imminent.

Still, we should not overlook the fact that examples of ironical comments on polytheistic “beliefs” (cf. Xenophanes in the sixth century, Fragment 11 Lescher) and ridicule regarding the adoration of statues (cf. Heraclitus in the fifth century, B 128 DK) go far back indeed. In classical times, Plato condemned Homeric poetry and suggested that it be eradicated from the ideal city on the grounds that it dangerously promoted make-believe and raised unsound feelings (Republic 598e-600b). A little later, Theophrastus dismissed popular belief in the gods as “superstition” (deisidaimonia, literally “fear of demons”, Theophrastus Characters 16).

In other words, diatribes against “religion” - or the worship of the gods - were not unknown to the Greeks even in the apogee of classical culture. Inasmuch as the Greeks did not have a canonical tradition, but merely paternal laws (typically carved in stone) and to some extent a Panhellenic authority of epic traditions (backed up by what has sometimes been termed a city-state ideology), at least until the fourth century BCE, they also had a porous relationship to foreign influences, most notably various cultures to the east of the Greek-speaking territory. Due to the Ionic settlements and the great colonization from the middle of the eighth century BCE, intercultural encounters were plentiful. Thus, Bacchic cults borrowed a great deal from eastern countries (as thematized, for instance, in Euripides’ Bacchae, 1-169). Prominent scholars such as E. R. Dodds (1951: 140, 160) and Karl Meuli (1935: 137ff.) have argued that the Greeks also borrowed a shamanistic practice from the Scythians.

Without going into this complex question here, I find it problematic to speak typologically of shamanism as “rooted in man’s psychological make-up”, as Dodds does, without taking into account the institutional framework of “shamans” actually found among the Siberian Tungus (cf. Eliade 1951; Vajda 1964: 268), but not among the Greeks. Although Meuli, and his pupil Walter Burkert (1972: 120-65), pointed to a lot of similarities (on different levels as it seems), these parallels can roughly be reduced to themes of ecstasy and the ability of bi-location.³⁰ On this “semantic” level, a diffusion of “ideas” seems likely, but this does not permit us to use the notion of “shamanism” abstracted from the ritual and tribal structure of the phenomenon among the Tungus.

The complex question of cultural diffusion and reception cannot be treated here, but we can mention the widespread phenomenon of interpretatio graeca. Herodotus, the first “historian”, took a great interest in comparing Greek myths and cult practices with foreign customs, especially Egyptian counterparts inasmuch as the Egyptian civilization was highly admired, if not envied, for their impressive cultural achievements.³¹ Among other things, Herodotus points to similarities between the Orphic mystery cults and the adoration of Isis and Osiris (Herodotus 2.2-3, 2.18, 49, 81), and he often claimed that the Egyptian counterparts were the oldest. Although ancient historians and mythographers who compared various customs from all over the Mediterranean area are still our prime source for coming to grips with different kinds of intercultural similarities (borrowings, diffusion, reception, imitation, etc.), it goes without saying that we will have to keep a vigilant eye on the preconditions and presuppositions behind these comparisons. A historian such as Herodotus, for instance, would want to show that the Greeks stood on the shoulders of other cultures and that the Panhellenic tradition was not as self-sufficient and autochthonous as many Greeks may have liked to believe. Although Herodotus was probably right on a general level, it may be fair to suggest that he was also able to find similarities where he wanted to find them (just as later Europeans did when they embellished themselves in the light of Acropolis).

On the other hand, when the Greeks spoke of Barbarians, that is, non-Greeks, they regarded the neighbouring cultures, especially the Persians, as potential enemies presenting a threat to their own customs. As a general rule, however, military conflicts were not bound up with questions of cultural identification. The war between Hellas and Persia may have been a “clash of civilizations”, but it was certainly not a war of religions.