Chapter X: Orphic Mysteries (1)

‘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.

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.

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_.’