The Greek Myths, Page 23

  f. Among those whom Asclepius raised from the dead were Lycurgus, Capaneus, and Tyndareus. It is not known on which occasion Hades complained to Zeus that his subjects were being stolen from him – whether it was after the resurrection of Tyndareus, or of Glaucus, or of Hippolytus, or of Orion; it is certain only that Asclepius was accused of having been bribed with gold, and that both he and his patient were killed by Zeus’s thunderbolt.7

  g. However, Zeus later restored Asclepius to life; and so fulfilled an indiscreet prophecy made by Cheiron’s daughter Euippe, who had declared that Asclepius would become a god, die, and resume godhead – thus twice renewing his destiny. Asclepius’s image, holding a curative serpent, was set among the stars by Zeus.8

  h. The Messenians claim that Asclepius was a native of Tricca in Messene; the Arcadians, that he was born at Thelpusa; and the Thessalians, that he was a native of Tricca in Thessaly. The Spartans call him. Agnitas, because they have carved his image from a willow-trunk; and the people of Sicyon honour him in the form of a serpent mounted on a mule-cart. At Sicyon the left hand of his image holds the cone of a pistachio-pine; but at Epidaurus it rests on a serpent’s head; in both cases the right hand holds a sceptre.9

  i. Asclepius was the father of Podaleirius and Machaon, the physicians who attended the Greeks during the siege of Troy; and of the radiant Hygieia. The Latins call him Aesculapius, and the Cretans say that he, not Polyeidus, restored Glaucus, son of Minos, to life; using a certain herb, shown him by a serpent in a tomb.10

  1. Strabo: ix. 5. 21 and xiv. 1. 40.

  2. Pausanias: ii. 26. 5; Pindar: Pythian Odes iii. 25 ff.; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3.

  3. Pindar: Pythian Odes iii. 8 ff.; Pausanias: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 202; Ovid: Metamorphoses ii. 612 ff.

  4. Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3; Hyginus: loc. cit. and Poetic Astronomy ii. 40.

  5. Pausanias: ix. 36. 1 and ii. 26. 4; Inscriptiones Graecae iv. 1. 28.

  6. Diodorus Siculus: v. 74. 6; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3; Tatian: Address to the Greeks; Euripides: Ion 999 ff.

  7. Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3–4; Lucian: On the Dance 45; Hyginus: Fabula 49; Eratosthenes, quoted by Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 14; Pindar: Pythian Odes iii. 55 ff., with scholiast.

  8. Germanicus Caesar: On Aratus’s Phenomena 77 ff.; Ovid: Metamorphoses 642 ff.; Hyginus: loc. cit.

  9. Pausanias: ii. 26. 6; viii. 25. 6; iii. 14. 7 and ii. 10. 3; Strabo: xiv. 1.39.

  10. Homer: Iliad ii. 732; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 14.

  1. This myth concerns ecclesiastical politics in Northern Greece, Attica, and the Peloponnese: the suppression, in Apollo’s name, of a pre-Hellenic medical cult, presided over by Moon-priestesses at the oracular shrines of local heroes reincarnate as serpents, or crows, or ravens. Among their names were Phoroneus, identifiable with the Celtic Raven-god Bran, or Vron (see 57. 1); Erichthonius the serpent-tailed (see 25. 2); and Cronus (see 7. 1), which is a form of Coronus (‘crow’ or ‘raven’), the name of two other Lapith kings (see 78. a). ‘Asclepius’ (‘unceasingly gentle’) will have been a complimentary title given to all physician heroes, in the hope of winning their benevolence.

  2. The goddess Athene, patroness of this cult, was not originally regarded as a maiden; the dead hero having been both her son and her lover. She received the title ‘Coronis’ because of the oracular crow, or raven, and ‘Hygieia’ because of the cures she brought about. Her all-heal was the mistletoe, ixias, a word with which the name Ischys (‘strength’) and Ixion (‘strong native’) are closely connected (see 63. 1). The Eastern-European mistletoe, or loranthus, is a parasite of the oak and not, like the Western variety, of the poplar or the apple-tree; and ‘Aesculapius’, the Latin form of Asclepius – apparently meaning ‘that which hangs from the esculent oak’, i.e. the mistletoe – may well be the earlier title of the two. Mistletoe was regarded as the oak-tree’s genitals, and when the Druids ritually lopped it with a golden sickle, they were performing a symbolic emasculation (see 7. 1). The viscous juice of its berries passed for oak-sperm, a liquid of great regenerative virtue. Sir James Frazer has pointed out in his Golden Bough that Aeneas visited the Underworld with mistletoe in his hand, and thus held the power of returning at will to the upper air. The ‘certain herb’, which raised Glaucus from the tomb, is likely to have been the mistletoe also. Ischys, Asclepius, Ixion and Polyeidus are, in fact, the same mythic character: personifications of the curative power resident in the dismembered genitals of the sacrificed oak-hero. ‘Chylus’, Ischys’s other name, means ‘the juice of a plant, or berry’.

  3. Athene’s dispensation of Gorgon-blood to Asclepius and Erichthonius suggests that the curative rites used in this cult were a secret guarded by priestesses, which it was death to investigate – the Gorgon-head is a formal warning to pryers (see 73. 5). But the blood of the sacrificed oak-king, or of his child surrogate, is likely to have been dispensed on these occasions, as well as mistletoe-juice.

  4. Apollo’s mythographers have made his sister Artemis responsible for Ischys’s murder; and, indeed, she was originally the same goddess as Athene, in whose honour the oak-king met his death. They have also made Zeus destroy both Ischys and Asclepius with thunderbolts; and, indeed, all oak-kings fell beneath the double-axe, later formalized as a thunderbolt, and their bodies were usually roasted in a bonfire.

  5. Apollo cursed the crow, burned Coronis to death for her illegitimate love affair with Ischys, and claimed Asclepius as his own son; then Cheiron and he taught him the art of healing. In other words: Apollo’s Hellenic priests were helped by their Magnesian allies the Centaurs, who were hereditary enemies of the Lapiths, to take over a Thessalian crow-oracle, hero and all, expelling the college of Moon-priestesses and suppressing the worship of the goddess. Apollo retained the stolen crow, or raven, as an emblem of divination, but his priests found dream-interpretation a simpler and more effective means of diagnosing their patients’ ailments than the birds’ enigmatic croaking. At the same time, the sacral use of mistletoe was discontinued in Arcadia, Messenia, Thessaly, and Athens; and Ischys became a son of the pine-tree (Elatus), not of the oak – hence the pistachio-cone in the hands of Asclepius’s image at Sicyon. There was another Lapith princess named Coronis whom Butes, the ancestor of the Athenian Butadae, violated (see 47. 4).

  6. Asclepius’s serpent form, like that of Erichthonius – whom Athene also empowered to raise the dead with Gorgon-blood – shows that he was an oracular hero; but several tame serpents were kept in his temple at Epidaurus (Pausanias: ii. 28. 1) as a symbol of renovation: because serpents cast their slough every year (see 160. 11). The bitch who suckled Asclepius, when the goatherd hailed him as the new-born king, must be Hecate, or Hecabe (see 31. 3; 38. 7; 134. 1; 168. n and 1); and it is perhaps to account for this bitch, with whom he is always pictured, that Cheiron has been made to tutor him in hunting. His other foster-mother, the she-goat, must be the Goat-Athene, in whose aegis Erichthonius took refuge (see 25. 2); indeed, if Asclepius originally had a twin – as Pelias was suckled by a mare, and Neleus by a bitch (see 68. d) – this will have been Erichthonius.

  7. Athene, when reborn as a loyal virgin-daughter of Olympian Zeus, had to follow Apollo’s example and curse the crow, her former familiar (see 25. e).

  8. The willow was a tree of powerful moon-magic (see 28. 5; 44. 1 and 116. 4); and the bitter drug prepared from its bark is still a specific against rheumatism – to which the Spartans in their damp valleys will have been much subject. But branches of the particular variety of willow with which the Spartan Asclepius was associated, namely the agnus castus, were strewn on the beds of matrons at the Athenian Thesmophoria, a fertility festival (see 48. 1), supposedly to keep off serpents (Arrian: History of Animals ix. 26), though really to encourage serpent-shaped ghosts; and Asclepius’s priests may therefore have specialized in the cure of barrenness.

  51

  THE ORACLES

  THE Oracles of Greece and Greater Greece are many; but the eldest is that of Dodonian Zeus. In
ages past, two black doves flew from Egyptian Thebes: one to Libyan Ammon, the other to Dodona, and each alighted on an oak-tree, which they proclaimed to be an oracle of Zeus. At Dodona, Zeus’s priestesses listen to the cooing of doves, or to the rustling of oak-leaves, or to the clanking of brazen vessels suspended from the branches. Zeus has another famous oracle at Olympia, where his priests reply to questions after inspecting the entrails of sacrificial victims.1

  b. The Delphic Oracle first belonged to Mother Earth, who appointed Daphnis as her prophetess; and Daphnis, seated on a tripod, drank in the fumes of prophecy, as the Pythian priestess still does. Some say that Mother Earth later resigned her rights to the Titaness Phoebe, or Themis; and that she ceded them to Apollo, who built himself a shrine of laurel-boughs brought from Tempe. But others say that Apollo robbed the oracle from Mother Earth, after killing Python, and that his Hyperborean priests Pagasus and Agyieus established his worship there.

  c. At Delphi it is said that the first shrine was made of bees’ wax and feathers; the second, of fern-stalks twisted together; the third, of laurel-boughs; that Hephaestus built the fourth of bronze, with golden song-birds perched on the roof, but one day the earth engulfed it; and that the fifth, built of dressed stone, burned down in the year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad [489 B.C.], and was replaced by the present shrine.2

  d. Apollo owns numerous other oracular shines: such as those in the Lycaeum and on the Acropolis at Argos, both presided over by a priestess. But at Boeotian Ismenium, his oracles are given by priests, after the inspection of entrails; at Clarus, near Colophon, his seer drinks the water of a secret well and pronounces an oracle in verse; while at Telmessus and elsewhere, dreams are interpreted.3

  e. Demeter’s priestesses give oracles to the sick at Patrae, from a mirror lowered into her well by a rope. At Pharae, in return for a copper coin, the sick who consult Hermes are granted their oracular responses in the first chance words that they hear on leaving the market place.4

  f. Hera has a venerable oracle near Pagae; and Mother Earth is still consulted at Aegeira in Achaea, which means ‘The Place of Black Poplars’, where her priestess drinks bull’s blood, deadly poison to all other mortals.5

  g. Besides these, there are many other oracles of heroes, the oracle of Heracles, at Achaean Bura, where the answer is given by a throw of four dice;6 and numerous oracles of Asclepius, where the sick flock for consultation and for cure, and are told the remedy in their dreams after a fast.7 The oracles of Theban Amphiaraus and Mallian Amphilochus – with Mopsus, the most infallible extant – follow the Asclepian procedure.8

  h. Moreover, Pasiphaë has an oracle at Laconian Thalamae, patronized by the Kings of Sparta, where answers are also given in dreams.9

  i. Some oracles are not so easily consulted as others. For instance, at Lebadeia there is an oracle of Trophonius, son of Erginus the Argonaut, where the suppliant must purify himself several days beforehand, and lodge in a building dedicated to Good Fortune and a certain Good Genius, bathing only in the river Hercyna and sacrificing to Trophonius, to his nurse Demeter Europe, and to other deities. There he feeds on sacred flesh, especially that of a ram which has been sacrificed to the shade of Agamedes, the brother of Trophonius, who helped him to build Apollo’s temple at Delphi.

  j. When fit to consult the oracle, the suppliant is led down to the river by two boys, thirteen years of age, and there bathed and anointed. Next, he drinks from a spring called the Water of Lethe, which will help him to forget his past; and also from another, close by, called the Water of Memory, which will help him to remember what he has seen and heard. Dressed in country boots and a linen tunic, and wearing fillets like a sacrificial victim, he then approaches the oracular chasm. This resembles a huge bread-baking pot eight yards deep, and after descending by a ladder, he finds a narrow opening at the bottom through which he thrusts his legs, holding in either hand a barley-cake mixed with honey. A sudden tug at his ankles, and he is pulled through as if by the swirl of a swift river, and in the darkness a blow falls on his skull, so that he seems to die, and an invisible speaker then reveals the future to him, besides many mysterious secrets. As soon as the voice has finished, he loses all sense and understanding, and is presently returned, feet foremost, to the bottom of the chasm, but without the honey-cakes; after which he is enthroned on the so-called Chair of Memory and asked to repeat what he has heard. Finally, still in a dazed condition, he returns to the house of the Good Genius, where he regains his senses and the power to laugh.

  k. The invisible speaker is one of the Good Genii, belonging to the Golden Age of Cronus, who have descended from the moon to take charge of oracles and initiatory rites, and act as chasteners, watchers, and saviours everywhere; he consults the ghost of Trophonius who is in serpent form and gives the required oracle as payment for the suppliant’s honey-cake.10

  1. Herodotus: ii. 55 and viii. 134; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 15; Homer: Odyssey xiv. 328; Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound 832; Suidas sub Dodona; Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus 900.

  2. Aeschylus: Eumenides 1–19; Pausanias: x. 5. 3–5.

  3. Pausanias: ii. 24. 1; Plutarch: Pyrrhus 31; Herodotus, viii. 134 and i. 78; Tacitus: Annals ii. 54.

  4. Pausanias: vii. 21. 5 and 22. 2.

  5. Strabo : viii. 6. 22; Pliny: Natural History xxviii. 41; Apollodorus: i. 9. 27.

  6. Pausanias: vii. 25. 6.

  7. Ibid.: ii. 27. 2.

  8. Ibid.: i. 34. 2; Herodotus: viii. 134.

  9. Plutarch: Cleomenes 7; Pausanias: iii. 26. 1.

  10. Pausanias: ix. 39. 1–5; Plutarch: On Socrates’s Demon xxii. and The Face on the Orb of the Moon xxx.

  1. All oracles were originally delivered by the Earth-goddess, whose authority was so great that patriarchal invaders made a practice of seizing her shrines and either appointing priests or retaining the priestesses in their own service. Thus Zeus at Dodona, and Ammon in the Oasis of Siwwa, took over the cult of the oracular oak, sacred to Dia or Dione (see 7. 1) – as the Hebrew Jehovah did that of Ishtar’s oracular acacia (1 Chronicles xiv. 15) – and Apollo captured the shrines of Delphi and Argos. At Argos, the prophetess was allowed full freedom; at Delphi, a priest intervened between prophetess and votary, translating her incoherent utterances into hexameters; at Dodona, both the Dove-priestesses and Zeus’s male prophets deliver oracles.

  2. Mother Earth’s shrine at Delphi was founded by the Cretans, who left their sacred music, ritual, dances, and calendar as a legacy to the Hellenes. Her Cretan sceptre, the labrys, or double-axe, named the priestly corporation at Delphi, the Labryadae, which was still extant in Classical times. The temple made from bees’ wax and feathers refers to the goddess as Bee (see 7.3; 18.3 and 47.1) and as Dove (see 1. b and 62.a); the temple of fern recalls the magical properties attributed to fern-seed at the summer and winter solstices (Sir James Frazer devotes several pages to the subject in his Golden Bough); the shrine of laurel recalls the laurel-leaf chewed by the prophetess and her companions in their orgies – Daphnis is a shortened form of Daphoenissa (‘the bloody one’), as Daphne is of Daphoene (see 21. 6 and 46. 2). The shrine of bronze engulfed by the earth may merely mark the fourth stage of a Delphic song that, like ‘London Bridge is Broken Down’, told of the various unsuitable materials with which the shrine was successively built; but it may also refer to an underground tholos, the tomb of a hero who was incarnate in the python. The tholos, a beehive-shaped ghost-house, appears to be of African origin, and introduced into Greece by way of Palestine. The Witch of Endor presided at a similar shrine, and the ghost of Adam gave oracles at Hebron. Philostratus refers to the golden birds in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana vi. 11 and describes them as siren-like wrynecks; but Pindar calls them nightingales (Fragment quoted by Athenaeus 290e). Whether the birds represented oracular nightingales, or wrynecks used as love-charms (see 152. a) and rain-inducers (Marinus on Proclus 28), is disputable.

  3. Inspection of entrails seems to have been an Indo-European mantic device. Divination by the
throw of four knucklebone dice was perhaps alphabetical in origin: since ‘signs’, not numbers, were said to be marked on the only four sides of each bone which could turn up. Twelve consonants and four vowels (as in the divinatory Irish Ogham called ‘O’Sullivan’s’) are the simplest form to which the Greek alphabet can be reduced. But, in Classical times, numbers only were marked – 1, 3, 4, and 6 on each knucklebone – and the meanings of all their possible combinations had been codified. Prophecy from dreams is a universal practice.

  4. Apollo’s priests exacted virginity from the Pythian priestesses at Delphi, who were regarded as Apollo’s brides; but when one of them was scandalously seduced by a votary, they had thereafter to be at least fifty years old on installation, though still dressing as brides. Bull’s blood was thought to be highly poisonous, because of its magical potency (see 155. a): the blood of sacred bulls, sometimes used to consecrate a whole tribe, as in Exodus xxiv. 8, was mixed with great quantities of water before being sprinkled on the fields as a fertilizer. The priestess of Earth, however, could drink whatever Mother Earth herself drank.

  5. Hera, Pasiphaë, and Ino were all titles of the Triple-goddess, the interdependence of whose persons was symbolized by the tripod on which her priestess sat.

  6. The procedure at the oracle of Trophonius – which Pausanias himself visited – recalls Aeneas’s descent, mistletoe in hand, to Avernus, where he consulted his father Anchises, and Odysseus’s earlier consultation of Teiresias; it also shows the relevance of these myths to a common form of initiation rite in which the novice suffers a mock-death, receives mystical instruction from a pretending ghost, and is then reborn into a new clan, or secret society. Plutarch remarks that the Trophoniads – the mystagogues in the dark den – belong to the pre-Olympian age of Cronus, and correctly couples them with the Idaean Dactyls who performed the Samothracian Mysteries.