Chapter X: Orphic Mysteries (2)

He further notes the distinction often drawn by the orators between goods that are _sacred_ (ἱερά) and those that are (in the Latin sense) _profane_ (ὅσια). The contrast is in fact only fully intelligible when we go back to the primitive notions, under a taboo, released from a taboo. The notion ‘released from a taboo’ was sure to be taken up by a spiritual religion, a religion that aimed at expansion, liberation, enthusiasm rather than at check, negation, restraint. If we may trust Suidas, the word ὅσιοι was applied to those who ‘were nurtured in piety, even if they were not priests.’ The early Christians owed some of their noblest instincts to Orphism.

As we find ὅσιος contrasted with ἱερός, so also between the two kindred words καθαίρω and ὁσιόω a distinction may be observed. Both denote purification, but ὁσιόω marks a stage more final and complete. It is the word chosen to describe the state of those who are _fully_ initiated. Plutarch[1266] says that the souls of men pass, by a natural and divine order, from mortal men to heroes, from heroes to daemons, and finally, if they are completely purified and consecrated (καθαρθῶσι καὶ ὁσιωθῶσιν), as if by a rite of initiation they pass from daemons to the gods. Lucian[1267] again in speaking of the final stage of initiation reserved for hierophants uses the word ‘consecrated’ (ὡσιώθησαν).

Plutarch[1268] makes another interesting suggestion. In a wild attempt to glorify Osiris and make him the god of everything, he derives his name from the two adjectives ὅσιος and ἱερός, and incidentally lets fall this suggestive remark, ‘the name of Osiris is so compounded because his significance is compounded of things in heaven and things in Hades. It was customary among the ancients to call the one ὅσια the other ἱερά.’ The things of the underworld are ὅσια; of the upper sky, things Ouranian, ἱερά. Translated into ritual, this means that the old underworld rites already discussed, the rites of the primitive Pelasgian stratum of the population, were known as ὅσια, the new burnt sacrifices of the Ouranians or Olympians were ἱερά. Dionysos was of the old order: his rites were ὅσια, burial rites were ὅσια. It was the work of Orpheus to lift these rites from earth to heaven, but spiritualized, uplifted as they are, they remain in their essence primitive. It is because of this peculiar origin that there is always about ὅσιος something of an antique air; it has that ‘imprint of the ancient,’ that ‘crust and patina’ of archaism, which Iamblichus[1269] says were characteristic of things Pythagorean, and which, enshrining as it does a new life and impulse, lends to Orphism a grace all its own.

Moreover, though ὅσιος is so ‘free’ that it verges on the profane, the secular, yet it is the freedom always of consecration, not desecration; it is the negation of the Law, but only by the Gospel. Hence, though this may seem paradoxical, it is concerned rather with the Duty towards God, than the Duty towards our Neighbour. Rising though it does out of form, it is so wholly aloof from formalism, that it tends to become the ‘unwritten law.’ Hence such constant oppositions as οὐ θέμις οὐδ’ ὅσιον, ‘allowed by neither human prescription nor divine law,’ and again οὐδ’ ὅσιον οὐδὲ δίκαιον, ‘right neither in the eye of God nor of man.’ Plato[1270] says ‘he who does what is proper in relation to man, would be said to do just things (δίκαια), he who does what is proper towards God, holy things (ὅσια).’ Hence finally the spiritual illumination and advance of ὅσια πανουργήσασ’[1271], breaking through human Justice for the Divine Right, the duty, sacred, sacrosanct, of rebellion.

* * * * *

The Greeks had their goddess Dike, she who divides and apportions things mortal, who according to Hesiod[1272] was sister of the lovely human figures, Fair Order and Peace. But, because she was human, she carried the symbol of human justice, the sword. She lapses constantly into Vengeance. The Bacchants of Euripides[1273] are fully initiated, consecrated as well as cleansed, yet in their hour of extreme need it is to this Goddess of Vengeance they cry for visible, physical retribution on the blasphemer Pentheus:

‘Hither for doom and deed,
Hither with lifted sword,
Justice, Wrath of the Lord,
Come in our visible need,
Smite till the throat shall bleed,
Smite till the heart shall bleed
Him the tyrannous, lawless, godless, Echion’s earth-born seed.’

Orpheus did all he could to raise the conception of Dike. We are expressly told that it was he who raised her to be the ‘Assessor of Zeus.’ Demosthenes[1274] pleads with his fellow citizens to honour Fair Order (Εὐνομία), who loves just deeds and is the Saviour of cities and countries, and Justice (Dike), holy and unswerving, _whom Orpheus who instituted our most sacred mysteries declares to be seated by the throne of Zeus_. The dating of Orphic hymns is precarious, but it looks as though Demosthenes had in his mind the Orphic Hymn to Dike[1275] or at least its prototype:

‘I sing the all-seeing eye of Dike of fair form,
Who sits upon the holy throne of Zeus
The king, and on the life of mortals doth look down,
And heavy broods her justice on the unjust.’

The Orphic could not rid himself of the notion of Vengeance. Dike as avenger finds a place, it will be seen later (p. 612), in the Orphic Hades. Hosia, the real Heavenly Justice, she who is Right and Sanctity and Freedom and Purity all in one, never attained a vivid and constant personality; she is a goddess for the few, not the many; only Euripides[1276] called her by her heavenly name and made his Bacchants sing to her a hymn:

‘Thou Immaculate on high;
Thou Recording Purity;
Thou that stoopest, Golden Wing,
Earthward, manward, pitying,
Hearest thou this angry king?’

It was Euripides, and perhaps only Euripides, who made the goddess Hosia in the image of his own high desire, and, though the Orphic word and Orphic rites constantly pointed to a purity that was also freedom, to a sanctity that was by union with rather than submission to the divine, yet Orphism constantly renounced its birth-right, reverted as it were to the old savage notion of abstinence (ἁγνεία). After the ecstasy of

‘I am Set Free and named by name
A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests,’

the end of the mystic’s confession falls dull and sad and formal:

‘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[1277].’

He that is free and holy (ὁσιωθείς) and divine, marks his divinity by a dreary formalism. He wears white garments, he flies from death and birth, from all physical contagion, his lips are pure from flesh-food, he fasts after as before the Divine Sacrament. He follows in fact all the rules of asceticism familiar to us as ‘Pythagorean.’

Diogenes Laertius[1278] in his life of Pythagoras gives a summary of these prescriptions, which show but too sadly and clearly the reversion to the negative purity of abstinence (ἁγνεία). ‘Purification, they say, is by means of cleansings and baths and aspersions, and because of this a man must keep himself from funerals and marriages and every kind of physical pollution, and abstain from all food that is dead or has been killed, and from mullet and from the fish melanurus, and from eggs, and from animals that lay eggs, and from beans, and from the other things that are forbidden by those who accomplish holy rites of initiation.’ The savage origin of these fastings and taboos on certain foods has been discussed; they are deep-rooted in the ritual of ἀποτροπή, of aversion, which fears and seeks to evade the physical contamination of the Keres inherent in all things. Plato[1279], in his inverted fashion, realizes that the Orphic life was a revival of things primitive. In speaking of the golden days before the altars of the gods were stained with blood, when men offered honey cakes and fruits of the earth, he says then it was not holy (ὅσιον) to eat or offer flesh-food, but men lived a sort of ‘Orphic’ life, as it is called.

Poets and philosophers, then as now, sated and hampered by the complexities and ugliness of luxury, looked back with longing eyes to the old beautiful gentle simplicity, the picture of which was still before their eyes in antique ritual, in the ὅσια, the rites of the underworld gods—those gods who in their beautiful conservatism kept their service cleaner and simpler than the lives of their worshippers. Sophocles[1280] in the lost _Polyidos_ tells of the sacrifice ‘dear to these gods’:

‘Wool of the sheep was there, fruit of the vine,
Libations and the treasured store of grapes.
And manifold fruits were there, mingled with grain
And oil of olive, and fair curious combs
Of wax compacted by the yellow bee.’

Some of these gods, it has been seen, would not taste of the fruit of the vine: such were at Athens the Sun, the Moon, the Dawn, the Muses, the Nymphs, Mnemosyne and Ourania. To them the Athenians[1281], who were careful in matters of religion (ὅσιοι), brought only sober offerings, _nephalia_; and such an offering we have seen was brought to Dionysos-Hades. Philochoros[1282], to our great surprise, extends the list of wineless divinities to Dionysos. Plutarch[1283] knows the custom of the wineless libation to Dionysos, and after the fashion of his day explains it as an ascetic protest. In his treatise on ‘the Preservation of Health’ he says, ‘We often sacrifice _nephalia_ to Dionysos, accustoming ourselves rightly not to desire unmixed wine.’ The practice is manifestly a survival in ritual of the old days before Dionysos took possession of the vine, or rather the vine took possession of him.

Empedokles had taught men that ‘to fast from evil’ was a great and divine thing; it is not surprising that the ‘wineless’ rites became to those who lived the Orphic life the symbol, perhaps the sacrament, of their spiritual abstinence. Plutarch we know (p. 628) was suspected by his robuster friends of Orphism, and probably with good reason. In his dialogue on ‘Freedom from Anger’ he[1284] makes one of the speakers, who is transparently himself, tell how he conquered his natural irritability. He set himself to observe certain days as sacred, on which he would not get angry, just as he might have abstained from getting drunk or taking any wine, and these ‘angerless days’ he offered to God as ‘Nephalia’ or ‘Melisponda,’ and then he tried a whole month, and then two, till he was cured. To a greater than Plutarch, a priest who was poet also, the wineless sacrifice of the Eumenides[1285] is charged with sacramental meaning; the rage of the king is over, in his heart is meekness, in his hands olive, shorn wool, water and honey; so only may he enter their sanctuary, ‘he sober and they wineless.’

In the confession of the Orphic there is no mention of wine, no avowal of having sacramentally drunk it, no resolve to abstain. The Bacchos, with whom the mystic is made one, is the ancient Bull-god, lord of the life of Nature, rather than Bromios, god of intoxication. Also it must not be forgotten that the mystic is a votary of the Mother as well as the Son, and though the Mother is caught and carried away in the later revels of the Son, she is never goddess of the vine. It is noteworthy that the later Orphics turned rather to the Mother than the Son; they revived the ancient rite of earth to earth burial, supplanted for a time by cremation, and the house of Pythagoras[1286] was called by the people of Metapontum the ‘temple of Demeter.’ Pythagoras never insisted on ‘total abstinence,’ but he told his disciples that if they would drink plain water they would be clearer in head as well as healthier in body. In the ancient rites of the Mother, rites instituted before the coming of the grape, they found the needful divine precedent[1287]:

‘Then Metaneira brought her a cup of honey-sweet wine,
But the goddess would not drink it, she shook her head for a sign,
For red wine she might not taste, and she bade them bring her meal
And water and mix it together, and mint that is soft to feel.
Metaneira did her bidding and straight the posset she dight,
And holy Deo took it and drank thereof for a rite.’

It is strange that Orpheus if he came from the North, the land of Homeric banquets, should have preached abstinence from flesh: if he was of Cretan origin the difficulty disappears. Perhaps also such abstinence is a necessary concomitant of a mysticism that asks for nothing short of divinity. The mystic Porphyry[1288] says clearly that his treatise on ‘Abstinence from Animal Food’ is not meant for soldiers or for athletes; for these flesh food may be needful. He writes for those who would lay aside every weight and ‘entering the stadium naked and unclothed would strive in the Olympic contest of the soul.’ And a great modern mystic[1289], looking more deeply and more humbly into the mystery of things natural, writes as follows:

‘_Toute notre justice, toute notre morale, tous nos sentiments et toutes nos pensées dérivent en somme de trois ou quatre besoins primordiaux, dont le principal est celui de la nourriture. La moindre modification de l’un de ces besoins aménerait des changements considérables dans notre vie morale._’ Maeterlinck believes, as Pythagoras did, that those who abstain from flesh food ‘_ont senti leurs forces s’accroître, leur santé se rétablir ou s’affermir, leur esprit s’alléger et se purifier, comme au sortir d’une prison séculaire nauséabonde et misérable_.’

But the plain carnal man in ancient Athens would have none of this. What to him are ὅσια, things hallowed to the god, as compared with νόμιμα, things consecrated by his own usage? So Demosthenes taunts Aeschines, because he cries aloud ‘Bad have I fled, better have I found’; so Theseus[1290], the bluff warrior, hates Hippolytos, not only, or perhaps not chiefly, because he believes him to be a sinner, but because he is an Orphic, righteous overmuch. All his rage of flesh and blood breaks out against the prig and the ascetic.

‘Now is thy day! Now vaunt thee; thou so pure,
No flesh of life may pass thy lips! Now lure
Fools after thee; call Orpheus King and Lord,
Make ecstasies and wonders! Thumb thine hoard
Of ancient scrolls and ghostly mysteries.
Now thou art caught and known. Shun men like these,
I charge ye all! With solemn words they chase
Their prey, and in their hearts plot foul disgrace.’

Happily there were in Athens also those who did not hate but simply laughed, laughed aloud genially and healthily at the outward absurdities of the thing, at all the mummery and hocus-pocus to which the lower sort of Orphic gave such solemn intent. Among these genial scoffers was Aristophanes.

* * * * *

There is no more kindly and delightful piece of fooling than the scene in the _Clouds_[1291] in which he deliberately and in detail parodies the Orphic mysteries. The tension of Orphism is great; it is, like all mysticisms, a state of mind intrinsically and necessarily transient, and we can well imagine that, in his lighter moods, the most pious of Orphics might have been glad to join the general fun. In any case it helps us to realize vividly both the _mise-en-scène_ of the mysteries themselves and the attitude of the popular mind towards them. Exactly what particular rite is selected for parody we do not know; probably some lesser mystery of purification, for there is no allusion to the supreme sacramental feast of bull’s flesh nor to the idea that the neophyte is made one with the god.

The old unhappy father Strepsiades comes to the ‘Thinking-Shop’ of Sokrates that he may learn to evade his creditors by dexterity of speech and new-fangled sophistries in general. A disciple opens the door with reluctance and warns Strepsiades that he cannot reveal these ‘mysteries’ to the chance comer. Strepsiades enters and sees a number of other disciples lost in the contemplation of earth and heaven. He calls for Sokrates and is answered by a voice up in the air.

‘_Sok._ Why dost thou call me, Creature of a Day?

_Str._ First tell me please, what are you doing up there?

_Sok._ I walk in air and contemplate the Sun.’

Here is the first Orphic touch. Sokrates instead of climbing a mountain has taken an easier way: he is suspended in a basket, and, Orpheus-like, reveres the Sun. The mysteries are not Eleusinian, not of the underworld. The comedian might and did dare to bring the Mystics of Kore and Iacchos in Hades on the stage, but a direct parody of the _actual_ ceremony of initiation at Eleusis would scarcely have been tolerated by orthodox Athens. The Eleusinian rites had become by that time a state religion, politically and socially sacred (νόμιμα). The Orphics were Dissenters, and a parody of Orphic mysteries was an appeal at once to popular prejudice and popular humour. Sokrates explains that he is sitting aloft to avoid the intermixture of earthly elements in his contemplation; again we have a skit on the Orphic doctrine of the double nature of man, earthly and heavenly, and the need for purification from earthly Titanic admixture.

After some preliminary nonsense Strepsiades tells his need, and Sokrates descends and asks:

‘Now, would you fain
Know clearly of divine affairs, their nature
When rightly apprehended?

_Str._ Yes, if I may.

_Sok._ And would you share the converse of the Clouds,
The spiritual beings we worship?

_Str._ Why, yes, rather.

_Sok._ Then take your seat upon this sacred—campstool.

_Str._ All right, I’m here.

_Sok._ And now, take you this wreath.

_Str._ A wreath—what for? Oh mercy, Sokrates,
Don’t sacrifice me, I’m not Athamas!

_Sok._ No, no. I’m only doing just the things
We do at initiations.’

Strepsiades is of the old order; he knows nothing of these new ‘spiritual beings’ worshipped by Orphics and sophists. Something religious and uncomfortable is going to be done to him, and his thoughts instinctively revert to the old order. A wreath suggests a sacrificial victim, and the typical victim is Athamas (p. 61). Sokrates at once corrects him, and puts the audience on the right scent. It is not a common old-world sacrifice; it is an ‘initiation’ into a new-fangled rite, in which it would appear the mystic was crowned, probably by way of consecration to the gods. Strepsiades is not clear about the use of such things:

‘_Str._ Well, what good
Shall I get out of it?

_Sok._ Why, just this, you’ll be
A floury knave, uttering fine flowers of speech.
Now just keep still.

_Str._ By Jove, be sure you do it,
Come flour me well, I’ll be a flowery knave[1292].’

If any doubt were possible as to the nature of the ceremonies parodied, the words translated ‘flour’ (τρῖμμα, παιπάλη) to preserve the pun, settle the matter. The word τρῖμμα means something rubbed, pounded, κρόταλον the noise made in rubbing and pounding; it might be rendered ‘rattle.’ παιπάλη is the fine flour or powder resulting from the process. Strepsiades is to become subtle in his arguments, a rattle in his speech. The words would have no sort of point but for the fact that Sokrates at the moment takes up two pieces of gypsum, pounds them together and bespatters Strepsiades till he is white all over like a Cretan mystic. The scholiast[1293] is quite clear as to what was done on the stage. ‘Sokrates while speaking rubs together two friable stones, and beating them against each other collects the splinters and pelts the old man with them, as they pelt the victims with grain.’ He is quite right as to the thing done, quite wrong as to the ritual imitated. Strepsiades, as Sokrates said, is not being sacrificed; it is not the ritual of sacrifice that is mimicked, but of initiation.

The certainty that the scene is one of initiation, not sacrifice, is made more certain by the fact that Strepsiades is sitting all the while, not on an altar, but on a sort of truckle-bed or campstool (σκίμπους). We have no evidence of the use of a σκίμπους in mystic ritual, but it is clearly the comic equivalent of the seat or throne (θρόνος) used in Orphic rites. The candidate for initiation, whether Eleusinian or Orphic, was always seated, and the ceremony was known as the ‘seating’ or enthronement. Dion Chrysostom[1294] says those who perform initiation ceremonies are wont in the ceremony called ‘the seating’ to make the candidates sit down and to dance round them. It is to this ceremonial that Plato[1295] alludes in the _Euthydemus_. ‘You don’t see, Kleinias, that the two strangers are doing what the officials in the rites of the Korybantes are wont to do, when they perform the ceremony of “seating” for the man who is about to be initiated.’ Kleinias is undergoing instruction like the neophyte in the mysteries; he has to sit in silence while his instructors dance argumentatively round him, uttering what seem to him unmeaning words.

So far Strepsiades is a _mystic_ in the first stage of initiation, i.e. he is being prepared and purified. All this ceremonial is preliminary to the next stage, that of full vision (ἐποπτεία). He is seated on the stool, he is covered with chalk, to one end only, and that is that he may behold clearly, may hold communion with, the heavenly gods. Sokrates, in regular ritual fashion, first proclaims the sacred silence, then makes preliminary prayer to the sophistic quasi-Orphic divinities of Atmosphere and Ether[1296], and finally invokes the Holy Clouds in pseudo-solemn ritual fashion:

‘_Sok._ Silence the aged man must keep, until our prayer be ended.
O Atmosphere unlimited, who keepst our earth suspended,
Bright Ether and ye Holy Clouds, who send the storm and thunder,
Arise, appear above his head, a Thinker waits in wonder.

_Str._ Wait, please, I must put on some things before the rain has
drowned me,
I left at home my leather cap and macintosh, confound me.

_Sok._ Come, O come! Bring to this man full revelation.
Come, O come! Whether aloft ye hold your station
On Olympus’ holy summits, smitten of storm and snow,
Or in the Father’s gardens, Okeanos, down below,
Ye weave your sacred dance, or ye draw with your pitchers gold
Draughts from the fount of Nile, or if perchance ye hold
Maiotis mere in ward, or the steep Mimantian height,
Snow-capped, hearken, we pray, vouchsafe to accept our rite
And in our holy meed of sacrifice take delight.’

The address is after the regular ritual pattern, which mentions, for safety’s sake, any and every place where the divine beings are likely to wander. That such an invocation formed part of Orphic Dionysiac rites is not only a priori probable but certain from the Iacchos song in the _Frogs_ (p. 541). In a word the ‘full revelation,’ the ἐποπτεία, of these and all mysteries, was only an intensification, a mysticizing, of the old Epiphany rites—the ‘Appear, appear’ of the Bacchants, the ‘summoning’ of the Bull-god by the women of Elis (p. 438). It was this Epiphany, outward and inward, that was the goal of all purification, of all consecration, not the enunciation or elucidation of arcane dogma, but the revelation, the fruition, of the god himself. To what extent these Epiphanies were actualized by pantomimic performances we do not know; that some form of mimetic representation was enacted seems probable from the scene that follows the Epiphany of the Clouds, when Strepsiades confused and amazed gropes in bewilderment, and bit by bit attains clear vision of the goddesses.

That the new divinities are _goddesses_ is as near as Aristophanes dare go to a skit on Eleusinian rites; that they are goddesses of the powers of the air, not dread underworld divinities, saves him from all scandal as regards his Established Church. He guards himself still further by making his Clouds, in one of their lovely little songs, chant the piety of Athens, home of the mysteries.

The Clouds themselves were as safe as they were poetical. Even the Orphics did not actually _worship_ clouds; but their theogony, their cosmogony, is, as will later (Chap. XII.) be seen, full of vague nature-impersonations, of air and ether and Erebos and Chaos, and the whirlpool of things unborn. No happier incarnation of all this, this and the vague confused cosmical philosophy it embodied, than the shifting wonder of mists and clouds.

The scene, though it goes on far too long, must have been exquisitely comic. With no stage directions probably half the trivial and absurd details have been lost, but we can imagine that the whole hocus-pocus of an Orphic mystery was carefully mimicked. We can even imagine that Sokrates was dressed up as an initiating Silen, such a one as is depicted in the relief in fig. 149.

* * * * *

We can also imagine that in Athens it was hard to be an Orphic, a dissenter, a prig, a man overmuch concerned about his own soul. We have seen how against such eccentrics the advocate Demosthenes could appeal to the prejudices of a jury. We know that to Theophrastos[1297] it was the characteristic of a ‘superstitious man’ that he went every month to the priest of the Orphic mysteries to participate in these rites, and we gather dimly that he did not always find sympathy at home; his wife was sometimes ‘too busy’ to go with him, and he had to take the nurse and children.

Plutarch[1298], sympathetic as he is to some aspects of Orphism, yet, in his protest against superstition, says, ‘these are the sort of things that make men atheists, the incantations, wavings and enchantments and magic, runnings round and tabourings, _unclean purifications_, filthy cleansings, barbarous and outrageous penances in sanctuaries, and bemirings.’ And again[1299], when he is describing the hapless plight of the man who thinks that affliction comes to him as a punishment for sin, ‘It is useless to speak to him, to try and help him. He sits girt about with foul rags, and many a time he strips himself and rolls about naked in the mud; he accuses himself of sins of omission and commission, he has eaten something or drunk something or walked in some road the divinity forbade him.’ This morbid habit of self-examination is a thoroughly Orphic trait. Pythagoras[1300] advised his disciples to repeat these lines to themselves when they went home at night:

‘What have I done amiss? what of right accomplished?
What that I ought to have done have I omitted to do?’

‘When he is at his best,’ Plutarch goes on, ‘and has only a slight attack of superstition on him he will sit at home, becensed and bespattered, with a parcel of old women round him, hanging all sorts of odds and ends on him as though, as Bion says, he were a peg.’ Such rites as those described by Plutarch were not late decadent inventions, though we hear of them mainly from late authors; they were primitive savageries revived with new spiritual meaning by the Orphics. Herakleitos[1301] refers to them: ‘polluted they are purified with blood, as though if a man stepped into mud he should be purified by mud.’

This is the shady side of Orphism, the way it had of attaching to itself ancient, obscure and even degraded rites, the more obscure the easier to mysticize. It was this shady side that Plato hated, against which he protested. In the _Republic_[1302] he says ‘seers and mendicant quacks besiege rich men’s doors, exhibiting books by Musaeus and Orpheus ... and in accordance with these they perform sacrifices, inducing not only individual persons but whole cities to believe that you can obtain freedom and purification from sins, while you are still alive, by sacrifices and performances that might please a child, and that there are things they call “rites,” which will release us from suffering after we are dead, and that if we do not perform them, then there are fearful things in store for us.’ The Orphics, alas, fell before the temptation, always assailing the theologist, to enforce his moral and religious precepts by the terrors of another world; there can be little doubt that the lower class of Orphic priest in some fashion sold indulgences. The fearful things with which the uninitiated were threatened, will be discussed when we come to the question of Orphic eschatology.

THE LIKNOPHORIA.

The tearing of the bull is, however mysticized, a savage orgy; the purification by mud and clay can never have been pleasing. It is a relief to turn to another Orphic ceremonial of more genial content—the Liknophoria, the carrying of the _liknon_.

In discussing the worship of Dionysos Liknites at Delphi, a worship attended, it will be remembered, by a secret sacrifice performed by priests who bore the specially Orphic name of Hosioi, Holy Ones, we have seen the _liknon_ in use as a cradle for the infant god (p. 402). It will further be noted that Dionysos Liknites is, like the infant Ploutos in the cornucopia, only an anthropomorphic presentation of the new-born fruits of the earth, of the fruits whether of spring or autumn; he is a male form of Kore the earth-daughter. The ceremony of ‘waking’ him was primarily but a mimetic summons to the earth to bring forth her fruits in due season.

On the relief in fig. 148 in the Glyptothek at Munich[1303] we see a shovel-shaped _liknon_, of a shape that might well serve for a cradle; but it contains not a child, only grapes and leaves, and the phallic symbol of animal life. The relief, of Hellenistic date, represents a peasant going to market; he carries fruits and some animal slung on a stick over his shoulder, and he drives in front of him a cow with her calf tied on to her. He is passing a sanctuary of Dionysos; a wine cup and torches and a thyrsos are seen to the left. Up above is a second little shrine with a Herm, whether of Hermes or Dionysos it is impossible to say. High in the middle of the main building is an elaborate erection, on the top of which is set up the sacred _liknon_.

We are at once reminded of a fragment of Sophocles[1304]:

‘Go on your road,
All ye the folk of handicraft who pray
To Ergane, your bright-eyed child of Zeus,
With service of your posted winnow-corbs.’

The passage is of interest because it shows that the _liknon_, the harvest basket, though undoubtedly used in the cult of Dionysos, was nowise confined to him. Athene Ergane, goddess at first no doubt of ‘works’ in the Hesiodic sense, of tilth[1305] rather than of weaving and handicraft, was, as has been previously shown (p. 301), only another Kore, the local Earth-daughter of Athens. To her rather than to the work-fellow of Hephaistos, the _liknon_ full of fruits was a fit offering, and in solemn consecration it was set up, erected (στατόν), as on the relief. The word ‘_erected_’ is used no doubt to mark the contrast with other ceremonies of the _carrying_ of the _liknon_ (Liknophoria).

This setting up of the _liknon_ was too open and public a matter to be a mystery. It was a mere offering of first-fruits whether to Athene or Kore or Liknites. But in the service of Liknites there was an element of mystery, the birth of the divine child, and it is largely in connection with the cult of Dionysos that the _liknon_ takes on mystic developments. It is an excellent instance of determined Orphic mysticizing.

In the relief[1306] reproduced in fig. 149 we have what is manifestly a Dionysiac mystery. The neophyte is in the act of being veiled; he may not look at the _liknon_, with its fruit and sacred symbol, which will presently be placed upon his head. A satyr holds it in readiness, and behind the neophyte is a Maenad with her cymbal.

* * * * *

The veiling of the head marks the mysterious character of the ceremony. We see it again in the delicate piece of stucco-work from the Farnesina palace reproduced in fig. 150, and now in the Museo delle Therme at Rome[1307]. The scene is clearly one of initiation; the thyrsos carried by the boy with head closely veiled marks it as a mystery of Dionysos. A priest is unveiling an object on what seems to be an altar. Unfortunately the stucco is much damaged and what the object is cannot be certainly made out; it looks like a _liknon_ in shape[1308]. In any case the ceremony of veiling at a Dionysiac mystery is clear. Behind the officiating priestess is a cista, containing no doubt the further _sacra_ of the rite. The scene takes place in a sanctuary, indicated by a column and a sacred tree.

The custom of veiling survives for us in the ritual veil of the bride and the widow, but we have almost emptied it of its solemn ancient content. The bride veils herself, it is usually supposed, out of modesty. It is therefore with some surprise we learn that in the primitive church bridegroom as well as bride were veiled. This custom, according to the Abbé Duchesne[1309], obtained till quite recently in France and still obtains in the Armenian Church. At the actual moment of the ceremony, apparently as an integral part of it, the priest spreads over bride and groom together a long red veil, the _flammeum_ of the Romans. In the Coptic ritual the veil is white, but is spread alike over man and woman.

The real symbolism of the veil, which indicates neither modesty nor chastity, comes out when we examine classical usage. The question was raised long ago by Plutarch[1310] ‘Why do men veil their heads when they worship the gods and uncover them when they wish to do honour to men?’ Plutarch is better at asking questions than at answering them, but, among the various odd solutions he propounds, he gives one suggestive clue, viz. that the custom was analogous to those of the Pythagoreans. Pythagorean, as we have seen, spells Orphic revival of primitive usage.

The real reason of the custom comes out in the ceremonial known as the Sacred Spring (ver sacrum), which Festus[1311] describes as follows: ‘The Sacred Spring was a rite of dedication among the Italians. Under the pressure of extreme disasters they used to make a vow that they would sacrifice all animal things born to them in the spring next ensuing. But as it seemed to them a barbarous thing to slay innocent boys and girls, when they came to adult years they _veiled them_ and drove them out beyond the boundaries of their state.’ Whether the horrid practice of the ‘Sacred Spring’ is real or imaginary, does not for our purpose greatly matter. One thing is clear: the practice of veiling symbolized, was the equivalent of, _dedication_. The bride and bridegroom alike are veiled because they are dedicated in the mystery of marriage, consecrated, made over to the powers of life. The penitent is veiled because he dedicates himself as atonement for sin; the widow is made over to the powers of death, primarily no doubt as a substitute for her sacrifice, her ‘devotio’ of herself to the ghost of her dead husband. Alcestis[1312] when she returns to the upper air is veiled and silent, and must so remain for the space of three days; she is consecrate to Hades:

‘Thou mayst not hear sound of her spoken words
Till she be disenhallowed from the gods
Of the nether earth and see the third day’s light.’

The old meaning of _devotion_ to the gods survives now-a-days only in the beautiful ceremonial of the Roman Church, known in popular parlance as ‘taking the veil,’ and even here its dread significance has been softened down by the symbolism of a mystic marriage; the ‘devotio’ for life is blended with the ‘devotio’ for death[1313].

In fig. 148 the _liknon_ has been set up (στατόν), on high, in open evidence; it contains simply an offering of first-fruits with the added symbol of the phallos; it is sacred, but nowise mysterious. It forms in this particular monument a part of the worship of Dionysos, but it might belong, as already noted, equally well to any and every god or goddess of harvest to whom first-fruits were due. In figs. 149 and 150 the _liknon_ has become part of a mystery cult; it is about to be put on the head of the worshipper: he is veiled and may not look upon it. What are the elements of mystery and how were they imported?

In discussing the religion of Dionysos it has been seen that, at Delphi, he was worshipped as Liknites. Hesychius[1314] thus explains the title: ‘Liknites, a name of Dionysos, from the cradle in which they put children to sleep.’ The _liknon_, the shovel-shaped basket used for the carrying of fruits, served in primitive days another purpose, that of cradle for a child.

On the vase-painting[1315] in fig. 151, from a red-figured cylix in the Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, we see the wicker-work _liknon_ in use as a cradle. The baby Hermes, wearing his broad petasos, sits up in his _liknon_ looking at the oxen he has just stolen. One of them turns round surprised at the strange little object he sees, and gently snuffs the cradle. Maia, the mother of Hermes, comes up in consternation and holds out a protesting hand. It is the scene described in the Homeric hymn[1316], though, as usual, the vase-painter is independent in matters of detail:

‘Straightway did goodly Hermes back to his cradle hie,
And round his shoulders pulled the clothes, as when a babe doth lie
All snug and warm in swaddling bands. And—for he loved it well—
Tight in his left hand held he his lyre of tortoise-shell.’

The Thyiades, as has been noted (p. 402), awakened the child Liknites. Of the actual ceremony of ‘awakening’ ancient art has left us no record; but on a sarcophagus in the Fitzwilliam Museum[1317] at Cambridge (fig. 152) we have a scene depicted that looks like a reminiscence of some such ceremonial. On the front face of the sarcophagus is represented the triumphant procession of Bacchos; at one of the ends is the scene of the carrying of the infant god. The two men, one bearded, the other youthful, grasp the _liknon_ by its convenient handles, and emerge hurriedly from behind a curtain slung between two trees. The curtain and the flaming torches point to a mystery scene enacted by night. Nothing certain is known of the details of the ceremony, but it may be conjectured that at a given signal the birth of the sacred child was announced, and the attendants issued from behind a screen of some kind, bearing the child in a _liknon_.

The vase-painting in fig. 153 from a hydria in the Museum at Constantinople[1318] offers a close analogy to Liknites, the child in the cradle, and throws instant light on his primitive significance. The vase is of somewhat late style, about the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., the drawing only indifferent, but the subject-matter all important. The scene is at Eleusis. Of that we are sure, because Triptolemos is present with his winged car and the corn-ears he is about to carry through the world. The side figures in the top row of vases of this class are always subordinate, usually difficult of interpretation. The figure in the left-hand corner is Aphrodite, by this time tediously omnipresent. The group to the right cannot certainly be named, but the seated woman is known to be a priestess from the great temple-key she holds over her right shoulder. On the lower row the interpretation of the central group is certain. Ge rises from the ground, watched by two goddesses; one to the right bears a gold lance; she is obviously Athene. The group to the left, of two women, one holding a torch, represents Kore and Demeter.

The scene represented is clearly the birth of a divine child at Eleusis. The birth of such a child[1319] was, as will later be seen (p. 552), proclaimed by the hierophant at some moment during the celebration of the Mysteries: ‘Brimo has borne a child Brimos,’ but such a mystery would scarcely be represented openly on a vase-painting. A simpler name lies to hand. _The child rises out of a cornucopia, symbol of fertility._ He _is_ the fruits of the earth. He is solemnly presented to Athene because Eleusis gave to Athens her corn and her mysteries. Art could speak no plainer. On vases representing Eleusinian scenes, e.g. the sending forth of Triptolemos, Plouton, who is none other than Ploutos, Wealth, is represented as an aged man, white-haired, carrying a cornucopia full of fruits[1320]; but here we have the young Ploutos, the babe who _is_ wealth itself. In like fashion the _liknon_ is either a basket for fruits or a cradle for a child. It is all the same beautiful symbolism that refuses coldly to discriminate between the human and the natural, that sees in marriage the plough, in man the sower, in earth the mother, and in the fruits of the earth the new-born child.

When we realize that the _liknon_ is, as it were, a cornucopia that for human fruit becomes a cradle, we naturally expect that, in its mystical sense, it will be a symbol of new birth, that Liknites will be connected with a doctrine of _palingenesia_, a sort of spiritual resurrection. The Orphics had their doctrine of _palingenesia_, but the symbolism of the _liknon_ was to them mainly of purification, to which they added that of rebirth. The history of how this came to be is a curious and instructive chapter in the development of primitive mysticism.

* * * * *

The _locus classicus_ on the _liknon_ is the commentary of Servius on Vergil’s[1321] words in the first _Georgic_, where among the stock implements of Demeter he notes the _mystica vannus Iacchi_. So confused and confusing is the commentary that it has gone far to make the _liknon_ or _vannus_ mysterious.

Virgil first enumerates all the heavy agricultural implements: the ploughshare’s heavy strength, the slow rolling waggons, the irksome weight of the mattock, and next he notes

‘Slight wares entwined of wicker work that Celeus made for man,
Frames of arbutus wood compact, Iacchus’ mystic fan.’

If we were left with Virgil only we should conclude that the fan _was a fan_, i.e. a thing with which to cause wind, to _ventilate_[1322], and, as it was an instrument of Demeter, we should further suppose that this fan was used for _ventilating_, for winnowing her corn. We should still be left with two unanswered questions: (1) ‘why was a winnowing fan, a thing in constant use in everyday life, “mystic”?’ and (2) ‘how had the winnowing fan of the corn-goddess become the characteristic implement of the wine-god?’ These two difficulties presented themselves to the mind of Servius, and he attempts to answer them after his kind. He does not fairly face the problem, but he tells us everything he can remember that anybody has said about or around the matter. His confused statement is so instructive it must be quoted in full:

‘The mystic fan of Iacchus, that is the sieve (_cribrum_) of the threshing-floor. He calls it the mystic fan of Iacchus, because the rites of Father Liber had reference to the purification of the soul, and men were purified through his mysteries as grain is purified by fans. It is because of this that Isis is said to have placed the limbs of Osiris, when they had been torn to pieces by Typhon, on a sieve, for Father Liber is the same person, he in whose mysteries the fan plays a part, because as we said he purifies souls. Whence also he is called Liber, because he _liberates_, and it is he who, Orpheus said, was torn asunder by the Giants. Some add that Father Liber was called by the Greeks _Liknites_. Moreover the fan is called by them _liknon_, in which he is said to have been placed directly after he was born from his mother’s womb. Others explain its being called ‘mystic’ by saying that the fan is a large wicker vessel in which peasants, because it is of large size, are wont to heap their first-fruits and consecrate it to Liber and Libera. Hence it is called “mystic”.’

If by ‘mystic’ is meant hopelessly and utterly unintelligible, the fan of Iacchos certainly justifies its name. Servius leaves us with a ‘vannus’ that is at once a sieve, a winnowing fan and a fruit basket, with mysterious contents that are at once a purified soul, an infant and a dismembered Dionysos, leaves us also with no clue to any possible common factor that might explain all three uses and their symbolism.

To solve the problems presented by Servius it is necessary briefly to examine the evidence of classical authors as to the process of winnowing and the shape of winnowing fans[1323]. So far we have assumed that a winnowing fan is a basket, but when we turn to Homer we are confronted by an obvious difficulty.

It happens by an odd chance that we know something of the shape of the instrument for winnowing used in Homeric days. It was a thing so shaped that by a casual observer it could be mistaken for an oar. Teiresias[1324] in Hades foretells to Odysseus what shall befall him after the slaying of the suitors: he is to go his way carrying with him a shapen oar, until he comes to a land where men have no knowledge of sea-things, and a sign shall be given to him where he is to abide. Teiresias thus instructs him:

‘This token manifest I give, another wayfarer
Shall meet thee and shall say, on thy stout shoulder thou dost bear
A winnowing fan, that day in earth plant thou thy shapen oar
And to Poseidon sacrifice a bull, a ram, a boar.’

The word used is not _liknon_; it is ἀθηρηλοιγός, chaff-destroyer, but none the less it is clear that the ancient instrument of winnowing was, roughly speaking, shaped like an oar[1325]; confusion between the two was possible. Such an instrument might well be called a fan, and of some such shape must have been the primitive winnower. It is obviously quite a different thing from the _liknon_ of the reliefs, the fruit basket. A thing shaped like an oar would not be easily carried on the head, nor would it suggest itself as a convenient cradle for a baby.

The way in which this primitive winnowing fan was used is clear from another Homeric passage[1326]. In the fray of battle the Achaeans are white with falling dust, just as

‘When in the holy threshing floors away the wind doth bear
The chaff, when men are winnowing. She of the golden hair
Demeter with the rushing winds the husk from out the grain
Divideth, and the chaff-heaps whiten and grow amain.’

The wind is the natural winnower, but man can help the wind by exposing the mixed chaff and grain. This he throws up on the winnowing fan against the wind, the wind blows away the chaff and the heavier grain falls to the ground. The best instrument with which to do this is naturally an oar-like pole, broadened at the end to serve as a shovel. Such an instrument was the πτύον or winnowing fan:

‘As when from a broad winnowing fan, in a great threshing floor,
The pulse and black-skinned beans leap out the whistling wind before
Sped by the winnower’s swinging, so the bitter arrow flew
From Menelaos glancing far nor pierced his corslet through[1327].’

Here the joint work of the wind and the human winnower is clearly shown.

A basket of the shape of an old-fashioned coal-scuttle could be used to scoop up the grain and toss it against the wind. It would not be so convenient as the oar-shaped winnowing fan, because the labourer would have to stoop to shovel up the grain, but it would hold more grain and would serve the second purpose of an ordinary basket and of a child’s cradle. Primitive man is not averse to these economies.

The _liknon_ and the _vannus_ alike begin as winnowing fans and end as baskets for corn or fruit. The _liknon_ of the Hellenistic reliefs and the _vannus_ of Virgil are made of wicker-work; the fan of Homer shaped like an oar was made of sterner stuff, probably of wood. This may be gathered from a pathetic fragment of the _Proteus_ of Aeschylus[1328] where some one tells of

‘The piteous dove who feeding beats and breaks
Her hapless breast amid the winnowing fans.’

The winnowing fan is essentially and necessarily an instrument of Demeter. This Virgil knew, though he knew also that it had passed into the service of Iacchos. Theocritus[1329] at the end of his harvest Idyll prays

‘O once again may it be mine to plant
The great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands
Smiling, with sheaves and poppies in her hands.’

The ‘great fan’ here, as the word πάξαιμι ‘fix’ or ‘plant’ shows, must have been the oar-shaped fan, not the basket. The basket, the light thing of osier carried on the head, is mainly characteristic of Dionysos. An epigram in the _Anthology_[1330] enumerates the various instruments of the worship of Bacchus, the rhombos, the fawn-skin, the cymbals, the thyrsos, and

‘The timbrel lightly carried with its deep and muttering sound,
The liknon often borne aloft on hair with fillet bound.’

We have then, it is clear, two implements in use in ancient days for winnowing; distinct in shape and made of different materials. The ‘chaff-consumer’ of Homer, called also a _ptuon_, made of wood and later of iron, is an oar-shaped implement with a long handle; the _liknon_ proper, the _vannus_ of Vergil, is a shovel-shaped basket made of wicker work. The only factor common to the two is that they are both winnowers. There the resemblance ends. The _ptuon_ remained a simple agricultural tool, the _liknon_, the winnow-_corb_, became ‘mystic’ because of its function as a purifier and because of its second use as a cradle for the mystery-babe. In it was carried the phallos, the symbol of life; hence it was reverently veiled. The confusion between the two is entirely caused by our modern terminology, which uses the word ‘fan’ to translate both λίκνον, ‘winnow-corb,’ and πτύον, ‘winnow-fork’ or ‘shovel.’ The religion of Dionysos, and with it the Orphic mysteries, adopted the _liknon_, the winnow-corb, and left the _ptuon_, the winnow-shovel, to Demeter.

* * * * *

The diverse shapes of the _liknon_ have been discussed at length because they are of vital importance for the understanding of Orphic mysteries and Orphic mysticism. The shift from winnowing fan to fruit basket marks the transition from agriculture to vine culture, from Demeter to Bacchus, and the connecting link is Bromios. The vine-growers have no use for the winnowing fork but they were once grain-growers, and they keep the _liknon_-basket in their worship.

Moreover, and this is the most curious and conclusive evidence, though they have turned their winnowing fans into fruit-baskets, they by an instructive and half unconscious confusion take over from the winnowing fan its proper symbolism and apply it to the fruit-basket.

The winnowing fan symbolized purification; as the husk is separated from the grain so is evil winnowed away from good; it mattered little whether the separation was effected by an actual fan (πτύον) or by a sieve (κόσκινον)[1331]. Plato[1332], whose mind was charged with Orphism, knew that all purification is _discernment_, separation, from the outward cleansing of the body to that innermost purification which is ‘the purging away by refutation of all prejudice and vain conceit within the soul.’ We have kept among our sacraments the outward washing with water, but we have lost the lovely and more intimate symbolism of the _liknon_. Yet we still remember that ‘His fan is in his hand and he will throughly purge his floor.’

The symbolism of the basket of first-fruits was quite other; it was the sign of plenty, of new life, of the birth of fruits and children. But the Orphic cannot forget purification; his fusion of new and old is at the back of all his confused mysticism that baffled Servius. The fan he knows symbolizes purification, but the basket is the cradle of the new-born Liknites. He sees in a flash how he can connect the two. Was not the child torn asunder? is it not that divine dismembered life by which all men are purged and consecrated and born anew? It even seems to him full of a wondrous significance that this divine dismembered life should be carried on the head, the seat of the divine reason, and he invents a story of a nymph, with an old Satyr name, Hippa[1333], who carried the _liknon_ on her head and symbolized the soul. Charged with all this symbolism we cannot wonder that the _liknon_ as fan for winnowing, as sieve for sifting, as basket for first-fruits, as cradle for a child, was, as Harpocration[1334] tells, ‘serviceable for every rite of initiation, for every sacrifice.’