Transcript Hyacinth

The Greek Notion of the Afterlife,
Demeter,
The Eleusinian Mysteries and
Persephone
Most of this presentation was taken from Classical Mythology Lecture Series by
Professor Elizabeth Vandiver, PhD, published by The Teaching Company. Course #241
The Earth Goddess and the
Disappearance of her Only Daughter.
Alternate Title for Future Lifetime Movie:
Married to Her Uncle in Hades,
Persephone’s Story
How Do We Know?
♀ The story is recounted in the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter.
♀ The Homeric Hymns is a series of poems,
ranging from only a few lines to several
hundred, in honor of various gods.
♀ They were composed at different times
between 650 and 550 BCE.
♀ They are called “Homeric” because
they are written in the same dialect of
Greek and using the same meter
(dactylic hexameter) as the Iliad and
Odyssey.
Background….
♀ One of the most
transparently
aetiological myths
it explains the
seasons, or teaches
people why the
crops die off in
winter and return in
the spring.
♀ Highly multivalent
as it deals with
questions of gender
roles, sexuality,
marriage customs,
relative power of
deities, and human
mortalities.
Background
♀ It also reflects the reality of the dangers of
being a beautiful young woman—if you go
out alone, you may be kidnapped by some
man (maybe even your creepy old uncle)
who couldn’t help himself
♀ That was their excuse, no self-control you
know…helpless against the innate power of
conniving women.
♀ Have times changed?
♀ From an anthropological and
♀
psychological position, it was
a comfort, or attempted to be,
to common women who
would have been separated
from their daughters without
being consulted and their
daughters who would be
likewise lonely without the
mothers who raised them.
It was common practice for
fathers to arrange to sell their
daughters to the highest
bidder, and then without
informing or consulting the
mother send them to live with
the new husband’s family.
♀ Since women weren’t allowed to
♀
♀
travel outside of the home
without a chaperone, most
women would never see their
mother/daughter again.
This was a source of great grief
for women and evidence of their
status as property, as well as
evidence of the authoritarian
and powerful role of men.
In the end, even goddess aren’t
exempt from the control of their
stronger male counterparts.
Summary
♀ Demeter (daughter of Cronus and
♀
Rhea) was the goddess of the
corn, and was older than Dionysus
since the corn was necessary
since the settled life on earth
began.
It was also important that a
goddess and not a god represent
the corn because the care of the
fields belonged with the women of
Greek society, and so a goddess
would understand the troubles
and pains of “women’s work.”
The Eleusinian Mysteries
♀ Her chief festival came at
harvest—lasted nine days and
happened in September every
five years.
♀ The Mysteries were the chief
part of worship and took place
in secret in the temple Eleusis.
♀ This is one of the few myths that
has a clear connection with a
specific ritual.
Actual Town of Eleusis
Communion Anyone?
♀ Dionysus was worshipped with Demeter, as
would be the case since they represent the
two acts of life affirming daily sustenance—
eating and drinking wine.
♀ They were the only two Olympians who
understood suffering—thus they were very
important in the day-to-day lives of Greeks.
Getting to the Story…
♀ Demeter and Zeus’ daughter,
Persephone (Maiden of Spring)
was picking narcissus and she
was kidnapped by Hades and
taken to (Tartaros) the
underworld.
♀ The kidnapping happened with
Zeus’ permission.
♀ Demeter wandered the world
and worried for 9 days looking for
her.
♀ Helios, the sun god finally told her.
♀ She went to Eleusis and there, disguised as an
old woman, is taken in by Queen Metaneira, her
four daughters, and Demophoöne a prized, lateborn baby boy.
♀ She sets out to make him immortal by feeding
him ambrosia and laying him in the fire each
night.
♀ Metaneira catches her and freaks out, so
Demeter throws down Demophoöne (According
to some myth he is guaranteed a heroic life
because of his exposure to her, and according
to others, he dies.)
♀ Demeter demands that they build her a temple.
♀ They do it and she’s happy.
♀ She hangs out there and refuses to bless the
earth, causing world-wide famine while
Persephone is gone.
♀ Zeus freaks out and sends every
Olympian to talk her into blessing the
earth again, but she refuses.
♀ Finally, after mediating between Hades
and Demeter, Zeus sends Hermes to tell
Hades that he has got to let her go
back to her mom for two-thirds of the
year. (Think of Greek seasons.) Also, her
mother, Rheia appears to her to
convince her to accept a compromise.
♀ Hades releases Persephone to return,
but tricks her by getting her to eat a
pomegranate seed (if you eat anything
in the underworld you must return).
♀ Persephone returns to her mother who is
thrilled to have her back but is
dismayed that she will have to return to
Hades for one-third of the year.
What Does That Crazy Baby-Burning Story Even Mean?
It offers a window into the nature of the gods it describes and the
society that created them. Let me explain…
Demeter seems to be using Demophoön as a Persephonesubstitute. It is noteworthy that she picks a male child,
especially because a male child will not be taken away from
her through marriage. (patrilocal custom)
1. Demeter follows the same pattern as Gaia and Rheia with an
infant male son and an oppressive father. Demeter’s attempt
doesn’t work. This is consistent with the picture given by
Hesiod that the order of the universe under Zeus is fixed.
Where Gaia and Rheia could succeed before Zeus’ reign,
Demeter fails.
2. She is taking away from Hades (receiver of all) one soul that
ought to belong to him by immortalizing Demophoön to
redress the balance.
3. She, like the other immortals, doesn’t value human life in and
of itself, she doesn’t love Demophoön and doesn’t seem to
care that she is doing to Metaneira what Hades and Zeus
have done to her.
Did They Really Do That “Marrying Your
Daughter to Her Uncle” Thing?
♀ In a word, yes. First, in Athens, a marriage was
a contract between the husband and the
bride’s father. Not a bride and groom. (Most
girls were married at around age 14.)
♀ Second, the marriage of an only daughter
with no brothers to her uncle was perfectly
acceptable. Such a girls was called and
epikleros.
♀ Also, marriage was patrilocal. (Remember,
marriage is a custom, not natural, a reflection
of cultural values)
♀ Finally, mothers and daughters would have
greatly restricted contact after marriage. Thus
sorrow was a natural reaction to such an
arrangement. Women were sequestered.
Why Was Zeus So Worried About Famine?
♀ Zeus didn’t intervene
and persuade Demeter
to lift the famine
because he loves
humans, or to protect
the innocent.
♀ Oh no, humans are
useful to gods. Without
them, who would give
the gods sacrifices?
What About the Human Experience?
♀ Olympians couldn’t go to the underworld
with the exception of Hades and Hermes
(the messenger). So Demeter’s anguish is
very close to what every human feels at a
loved one’s death.
♀ This is the only time a god/goddess feels
this type of mourning for another deity.
♀ Additionally, a symbolic connection
between death and marriage is common in
Greek literature, in part a reflection of high
rates of maternal mortality.
So, Who Likes This Myth?
♀ Jungians love the application of the female archetypes:
maiden, mother, crone (Demeter in disguise), Demeter is
persuaded by Rheia (wise mother) to compromise.
♀ Freudians love it as wish fulfillment: Both for mothers
everywhere who wish they could get their daughters back
from marriage and all humans who wish they could bring
back someone from the dead: Demeter can at least
partially succeeds.
♀ Structuralists find many contradictions to be mediated: the
acceptance death as opposed to the desire of life, the
desire to remain a child as opposed to the necessity of
marriage.
♀ Adherence of the ritual theorists point to the Eleusinian
Mysteries and say, “Look how this myth grew directly from
a ritual.”
♀ Even Frazer’s Dying God is not far off as Persephone could
easily be read as being “the grain.”
All of these is appropriate to elucidate part of the myth, but
none are complete in explaining the appeal of the myth.
Eleusinian Mysteries
♀ Took place annually in the town of Eleusis for at
least 1000, but most likely 2000 years falling into
disuse around 400 AD.
♀ Mysteries meant “secrets” and were open only to
initiates. Initiates were forbidden to tell noninitiates about the rites. (Like Fight Club☺)
♀ Initiates could be male or female, free or slave.
The blending of the genders is most unusual.
♀ Qualifications for initiates:
1. You had to come to Eleusis—it was a location specific
religious ceremony. (This actually limited participation
for those who lived far away and for the poor who could
not afford travel.)
2. You could not be a murderer.
3. You had to speak Greek.
4. You had to sacrifice a pig—this also had a limiting
effect socio-economically.
What Do We Know?
Because it was secret, our knowledge is
limited and probably biased.
Some initiates must have told the secret,
the surviving written references observe
the prohibition. They allude to details of
the Mysteries but do not describe them.
The only writers who do describe the
Mysteries are early Christian authors.
Because they wrote with the desire to
prove the Mysteries false, their testimonies
may be biased and inaccurate.
What Do We Know?
We know that the ceremonies had
three components:
1.Things that were done
2. Things that were said
3. Things that were shown
The doing and saying may have been
the acting out of some sort of
religious dramas.
The things that were shown were of
the greatest interest.
The Things That Were Shown
Considered the high points of the
ceremony.
As the initiates proceeded through the
initiation ceremony over several days
they would go deeper into the great
temple complex in Eleusis and the final
ceremony, we think, was held in an under
ground chamber.
(The temples are still there today in Eleusis
which is now a suburb of Athens. The
temple complex is surrounded by
chemical and power plants .)
The Things That Were Shown
According to the Christian authors the
sacred object shown was something
obscene: statue, figurine, or symbol.
Other authors have suggested that
this great revelation, the meaning of
life and death was an ear of wheat
being sliced in silence—rather
tame?
Cutting an Ear of Wheat? Really?
The power of a religious symbol seen from
within a religion doesn’t depend on what
that symbol is or how it would look from the
outside.
Another example would be the act of
Christian Communion. The objects involved
have little meaning in and of themselves. It
is what they symbolize that makes them
powerful.
In this religion that was concerned with life
and death, issues of mortality and
immortality, Persephone’s decent and
return from the underworld, cutting an ear
of living grain to symbolize the death and
rebirth of all life may have been highly
powerful. So it is possible that this was the
high point.
Details that Connect
We know enough to recognize many details in
the Homeric Hymn as aetiologies for parts of
the ritual of the Mysteries.
1. When Demeter arrives she drinks barley
meal, mint, and pennyroyal. The initiates
drank a similar drink in the ceremony.
2. Demeter’s visit to Eleusis explains why the
Mysteries are celebrated there.
3. On a conceptual level, the connection with
death and the afterlife is aetiological,
because initiation promised a happy afterlife.
4. If we had more information we might
recognize other details as aetiological as
well.
Happily Ever After
Initiates were promised a happier
afterlife than they would otherwise
have.
“Whoever on this earth who has seen
these is blessed, but he who has no
part in the holy rites hath another lot
as he wastes away in dank
darkness.”
--Homeric Hymn to Demeter
Happily Ever After
The reason people became initiates
was to guarantee a happier
afterlife.
With more details about the rituals, we
might understand more about the
promise. Some believe that the
Demophoön in the fire episode has
some aetiological value.
Afterlife
The standard view in other Greek literature
is substantially less pleasant.
The Underworld, Tartaros, as described by
Homer in The Odyssey is a place of dim
shadowy existence much less desirable
than life in this world.
The ghost is called and eidolon—”image”—
what survives in the afterworld is much
less real or important than the living
person on earth. This differs from
Christianity or Islam.
Afterlife
The word for soul, “psyche” originally meant
“the breath”—the thing that leaves the
body at death—the thing that makes the
difference between and live body and
dead body.
Spirits in Tartaros are described as being
witless, not even knowing themselves. In
The Odyssey, Odysseus must give them a
drink of blood to regain their wits and
remember who they were when they
lived.
Afterlife
Some noteworthy souls are picked out for
reward or punishment, but overall there
is little sense that one’s state in the
afterlife was determined by one’s
actions in this life. Most souls are dim
shadowy remnants of themselves in
Tartaros where nothing much happens
and they eventually fade into nothing.
The conception of the Elysian Fields,
reserved for a very few especially good
souls is alluded to in The Odyssey and
elsewhere in literature, but the concept
wasn’t fully developed, it seems, during
the time of Homer or the writing of the
Homeric Hymns.
Afterlife
The idea of punishment for the wicked is more
clearly developed, but even it does not
apply to the majority of humanity;
punishment is restricted to a few famous
wrongdoers, such as the “cardinal sinners.”
Tantalos (tried to trick gods into eating human
flesh)
Tityos (At Hera’s behest, tries to rape Leto, the
mother of Apollo and Artemis)—liver eaten
for eternity by two vultures), and
Sisyphus (must push a boulder up hill every day
only to have it roll back down).
Reincarnation?
Pythagoras (in the sixth century BC)
apparently taught a doctrine that
included reincarnation (and
vegetarianism). Souls could be
reincarnated as humans or animals.
The records of his teachings were
not written until at least 100 years
after his death.
Reincarnation in Plato
Plato discusses reincarnation in the so-called,
“Myth of Er” in The Republic.
Story: A warrior is killed (or thought to have
been killed) in battle remains dead for a
period of some days, when he comes out
of his “coma” he recounts what he saw
while he was dead. Among other things, he
sees people being reincarnated according
to the kinds of lives they have lived
previously. For instance, wily Odysseus
came back as a monkey.
This detail may indicate that the story was
created to suggest caution about proper
human behavior.
Reincarnation in Plato
1. One difficulty in using this as
evidence for fourth-century belief is
that Plato may have invented this
“myth” for use in The Republic.
2. Elsewhere for instance in the
Apology of Socrates, Plato describes
a view of the afterlife that is much
closer to the traditional one.
Reincarnation in Virgil
Virgil, writing in Rome in the first century BC, combined
the ideas of reward and punishment and the idea
of reincarnation in Book VI of The Aeneid.
Story: Anchises, Aeneas’ dead father, tells him that
some souls go to the land of the blessed as he has
done, and some really bad ones goes to Tartaros,
most souls go to a period much like Catholic
Purgatory where they spend 1,000 years and then
drink from the river Lethe. They are reincarnated
without knowing anything of their previous lives.
Anchises is showing Aeneas a long line of souls
about to be reincarnated who are to be great
Romans of the future and Aeneas’ descendants.
Again, as with Plato, it is difficult to determine to what
extent Virgil used the idea of reincarnation purely as
a literary device and to what extent it mirrors
actual belief.
Orpheus and Eurydice
One of the most important myths concerning the
afterlife.
Orpheus, son of Apollo and one of the Muses, was
the greatest poet who ever lived. He had the
power to charm animals, stones, and trees with
his music/singing.
When his wife Eurydice was bitten in the heal by a
snake on their wedding day, and dies. He goes
into the underworld with his Lyre and his poetry
to try to get his wife back from the underworld. It
works, Hades and Persephone agreed with the
one condition: he cannot look back at her until
they have reached the land of the living again.
Of course, he looked back, and she falls back
into the underworld, never to be seen again.
Orpheus and Eurydice
This purely mythical Roman Orpheus was associated with a
body of writings and a set of religious beliefs called
“Orphism.”
1. Began to be taught in the sixth century BC. (Same time
as Pythagoras)
2. The Orphic writings supposedly contain the knowledge
that Orpheus gained while in the Underworld.
3. Reincarnation is central to the doctrine; only by
following the teachings of Orpheus to lead an ascetic
life can the soul eventually be freed from rebirth. As in
Buddhism, incarnation is a bad thing from which one
seeks release.
4. Some Orphic writings contained precise instructions
about what one should say and do in the Underworld
to avoid reincarnation.
Thus Orphism, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, held out the
promise of a happy, or at least happier, afterlife.
As in so many other areas of Greek religion,
no orthodoxy about the afterlife exists. It
seems safe to say that it was generally
considered both less important and less
pleasant than this life.
Greek mythology contains no aetiology for
death through, for example, human sin or
mistake. This is very unusual. Most cultures
have mythology to suggest that we should
live forever, but because of some mistake,
death was brought upon us.
Questions to Consider:
1. Modern students often find it strange
that Greek religion and mythology had
no set doctrine about the afterlife and
that the different descriptions diverged
from one another so greatly. To what
extent do you think this lack of unified
doctrine can be attributed to the lack
of a “sacred book”?
2. The Greeks’ relative lack of agreement
about the afterlife is often cited as proof
that their interest was mainly focused on
this world and this life. Do you think this
conclusion is valid?