In pursuing these discussions of, first, the connection between goeteia and mystery religions and, second, the connection between goeteia and song, many readers will have glimpsed yet a third connection, which needs some attention before we leave these topics: the connection between mystery religions and song. The legendary founders of ancient mysteries are sometimes musicians themselves, Orpheus being the most famous example, and the Dactyls and Musaeus two others. Another founder of mysteries, Eumolpus, is not known in our sources as a musician per se, but was reputed to have composed poems about the mysteries, and the difference between composition and performance scarcely existed in antiquity. His name ("Beautiful Tune"), moreover, confirms his role as singer.82
There are two ways of understanding this connection. The first is to recognize that many types of information-including the sacred teachings that underlay mystery religions-were conveyed through poetry composed and sung by men such as Orpheus, Musaeus, and Eumolpus. We still have, indeed, remains of some of the sacred poems ascribed to Orpheus. In this respect, the singer is essential to mystery religions because of his role as a teacher. But the second way of understanding the connection is to remember the role that music played in communicating with souls and with the powers of the Underworld: since mystery religions depended upon an intimate knowledge of how the Underworld worked, the highly talented singer could also become an excellent initiator. This point can be inferred from the fact that an Orphic poem entitled journey to the Underworld (Katabasis) included doctrines important to mysteries, but it is also made very nicely by Orpheus himself, in the opening lines of his Argonautica, when he claims that everything he sings to mortals about the Underworld was learned when he descended to Hades, "trusting in my cithara, driven by love for my wife."" The Argonautica is late in the tradition, but articulates what the journey to the Underworld and other works from Orphic literature imply: Orpheus knew what he did because he had special connections to the powers of the Underworld, and he was able to make those connections because he was a good singer; now, as a good singer, he would pass his knowledge on. There is a fluid triangularity between music, mysteries, and goeteia that operates in all directions. Some mythic figures or religious milieux emphasize two of the sides in preference to, or even exclusion of, the third (we never hear of Musaeus or Eumolpus interacting with the dead in extant sources), but the structure as a whole hangs together, and at least once was crystallized into a single figure, Orpheus himself.84
Let us return now from these mythic figures to the real goetes of Greece. The development of a term for a practitioner who is male from words linked to a stereotypically female pursuit not only argues for the perceived identity between what the goetes and the lamenting women did, but also suggests that the art we call goeteia was unpracticed by Greeks before the later archaic period. Otherwise, the language would have developed a more gender-appropriate term for such a practitioner. At the same time, the exclusive association in our archaic and classical sources between the term goes and men shows that, however similar in some ways traditional funerary goof and the art of goeteia were, the connection between men and that art was so important that the feminine overtones of the go- root could not stand in the way of the cognate's adoption.
Let me sum up what I have suggested in the last few pages. The Greeks encountered among foreign cultures with which they had contact during the later archaic age the idea that the living might be able to manipulate the dead through special techniques. The archaic age was a time when they were particularly primed to accept such an idea because of various changes within their own culture. Because manipulating the dead required communicating with the Underworld, the Greek term to describe the expert in this new field was built on the root of an older word that traditionally had described a lament directly addressed to the dead-gods. So important was this element of communication to the act of invoking the dead that even the long-time association between gooi and women did not impede the development of the masculine noun goes. This new expert, the goes, was also understood to have the ability to initiate souls into mystery religions, or, in other words, to ensure through his superior knowledge of the Underworld and its workings that the souls under his care would receive preferential treatment after death. The real goes of the classical period, in sum, might best be described as a man who could negotiate a variety of relationships between the living and the dead through virtue of his ability as a singer, a communicator.
Incidentally, my hypothesis, although broadly in agreement with Burkert's observation that goeteia grew out of the singing of laments, differs from his more specific suggestion that the goes was originally a "shamanistic" soother of souls, whose duty was to facilitate the passage of the dead into the Underworld. Such a figure would have been more likely to adopt a name cognate with threnos, the song that praised and pleased the departing soul; Burkert himself notes in passing that most Greek words formed from the go- root imply a plaintive sound, scarcely the sort that one would use to comfort a soul but exactly the sort that might be used to compel one .15 The goes, as I have described him, certainly became involved with the safe passage of souls into the Underworld in his role as an initiator, but this was not his only function.
This hypothesis that techniques for invoking the dead were foreign in origin is supported by the Greeks' own statements. Already in the earliest uses, goes and its cognates have a strongly foreign flavor that gobs and goat never had. Its association with the Dactyls, who are said to have lived in Crete and Phrygia, situates the goes outside of central Greece. Orpheus was said to be from Thrace.86 Pentheus's description of Dionysus as a goes occurs in the middle of a passage in which he is called a Lydian stranger and derogated for his foreign habits of dress and behavior. Herodotus uses goetes of Libyan tribes, as well as of the lycanthropic Neuri.87
In part, this association between goetes and foreign races reflects the universal tendency to attribute the origin of anything outside of what are considered "normal" capabilities or habits to foreign lands. The exotic flavor is usually false, added in order to marginalize the person or idea: "cultural distance is correlated with spatial distance."" This is not always the case, however. Sometimes claims of foreign origin reflect real ity: myth said that Phoenician Cadmus brought the alphabet to Greece and the Greek alphabet really is a development of the Phoenician. Each claim to foreign origin must be judged separately in light of whatever other information is available. In the case of goeteia, as we have just seen, there are good linguistic and historical reasons to suppose that it entered Greece from elsewhere only during the archaic age. We should accept the Greeks' association of goeteia with peoples who lived at the margins not only as an expression of its conceptual foreignness at the time that it was introduced but also as a valid reflection of its origins.19
As the invocation of Darius's soul in Aeschylus' Persians, performed in 472, is our earliest description of ritualized psychagogia, and also the very embodiment of many of the ideas discussed in the preceding few pages, it is fitting to close this section of the chapter with a more detailed consideration of it. The scene opens as the queen herself carries milk, honey, water, wine, and oil-typical offerings for the dead-to Darius's tomb. Here, however, we find the first slip in a different direction: usually such offerings are made in order to ensure that the dead will rest peacefully in their graves, causing no trouble for the living; instead, having described her libations, the queen asks the Chorus of Persian men to sing songs (hymnous), in order to call up (anakaleisthe) the soul of Darius. The Chorus agree, saying that while she pours the libations, they will use their songs to implore Ge, Hermes, and Hades to send up the king's soul.90 Thus the two phenomena-the libations of traditional funeral cult and the technical invocations of psychagogia-are presented as occurring simultaneously. The psychagogic songs the Chorus of men goes on to sing are described as having the shrieking, discordant tones that are appropriate for old-fashioned, female gooi and twice are explicitly called gooi.91 But these are certainly mor
e than gooi in the old fashioned sense, for they literally compel Darius to appear; the ghost, as if to reinforce this, himself describes the singing that brought him forth as a psychagogia (line 687). It is significant that the ghost also says that he has been persuaded by gooi to come up from below. "Persuasion" at this time, and especially in Aeschylus's plays, represents a force that is overwhelmingly irresistible, influential to the point of being magically compulsive. Indeed, in Pindar, Aeschylus, and many of their contemporaries, persuasion is sometimes presented as a magical force itself.92 "Persuasion by laments," then, suggests not that Darius's soul has been persuaded to rise completely of its own free will but that gods has caused him to rise. How different it is in the Choephoroi, where the grieving Electra similarly carries libations to Agamemnon's tomb. She is accompanied not by men who know how to call up her father's soul but by women who can do no more than weep along with her.
In the Persians, we witness the very transformation of female lament into male goeteia; Aeschylus crystallizes in a single dramatic scene a process that spanned, no doubt, far more than a century. That he could do this-that an Athenian audience could understand and respond to the scene he presents-tells us that in 472., the relationship between these phenomena was still meaningful. That he chose to crystallize the transformation within a Persian court is important, too: it signals to us once again that goeteia was viewed by the Greeks as a foreign art, for in 47z the Persians were foreigners par excellence. It is interesting that the word magos and its cognates are completely absent from this scene. If, as I discussed earlier, we are to understand the magoi as having some skill in invoking the dead, then this omission in a play set in the Persian court is so striking as to look deliberate. We can only assume that it was motivated by Aeschylus's desire to emphasize the power of gooi, the magical ability of traditional lament, and the metamorphosis of the one art into the other. Epimenides' career in Athens is interesting in this context as well. According to Plutarch, at the same time that he rid the city from the terrors and ghosts roused by the Cylonian Affair, he taught the Athenians to be milder in their rites of mourning, particularly by restricting the harsh practices in which the women had previously indulged. Here again, the professional craft of the male replaced female traditions; for the good of the city, the goes supplanted the lamenting women.93
THE GOES AT WORK
We now have a theoretical picture of the early goes as a specialist in things of the soul, but we still face the question of who the real goetes of everyday Greek life were. Burkert's thesis that many new ritual techniques and beliefs were introduced during the orientalizing period by migratory practitioners is an excellent explanation for how many such things first reached Greece. Although, as discussed above, some Greek forms of manipulating the dead, notably the curse tablets, have no exact parallel in foreign cultures, it is likely that other techniques, as well as the general idea of doing so, came from abroad. It is also possible that for some time wandering experts from foreign lands-or wandering Greeks who had adopted and adapted their techniques-served as the main dispensers of the new skills. But as the techniques grew more popular, it would have been hard for wandering experts to meet demand, particularly because the dead were often invoked to deal with problems that could not await the arrival of a specialist: if you wanted a ghost to impede an opponent in a court case scheduled for the following day, a curse tablet had to be inscribed immediately, not the next time a goes passed through. Some of the tablets look as though they might have been inscribed by an amateur, and Plato makes provisions, in the Laws, for punishing those who earn their living by invoking the dead more severely than those who write them only for themselves, which suggests that there were at least some do-it-yourself goetes in fourth-century Athens.94 A passage in Plato's Republic mentions experts who travel from door to door offering to inscribe curse tablets (katadesmoi) and send ghosts against victims (epag(5goi) for a fee, which, in concert with the passage from the Laws just mentioned, assures us that there was in fact a thriving business in manipulating the dead.95 The small lead dolls that accompanied some curse tablets deposited in late fifth-century Athens also point to a professional class of practitioners. Those making the dolls may have been "sadly innocent of skill in the plastic arts," as David Jordan puts it, but the very production of anthropomorphic dolls in this medium, however lacking in finesse, is itself significant; it cannot have been easy. Some such dolls, moreover, have been found inside tiny "coffins" made of thin sheets of lead onto which curses were inscribed.96
It seems reasonable to assume that some local inhabitants in each area learned the necessary skills of calling up the dead and went into business for themselves. The wandering expert might still be called in for special cases, and would probably retain a superior aura of glamour, but the local practitioner would be there to serve quotidian needs. In addition, non-experts occasionally might try to perform some of the simpler rites themselves.
Who were these local practitioners? We have already noted that the goes had more than one arrow in his quiver: he knew not only how to invoke dead souls but how to protect them once they were in Hades and how to soothe those that were disgruntled. Thus, the goes might be known under a variety of other names as well, including "initiator." Even the title of "purifier" would suit him, for "purification" is the term used by some ancient authors to refer to the processes used by Epimenides in Athens and the psychagogoi called into the Sparta after Pausanias's death, as well as by Plato in the passage from the Phaedrus describing cures for illnesses brought on by the angry dead.97 The ritual described on Side A of the Selinuntine lex sacra also involves purification, as the miaroi Tritopatores are changed to katharoi; although here we cannot be sure that those performing the ritual were professionals, it is nonetheless yet another instance in which those who solved problems caused by the unhappy dead might be labeled "purifiers." 98 Broadening the field of associations a little further, Plato describes those who offer their skills at invoking the dead and initiating the living as beggars (agurtai) and prophets (manteis). Similarly, in the passage from the Laws, he refers to such a professional as a prophet (mantis) or an "interpreter of wonders" (teratoskopos). The reference to begging probably signifies nothing more than Plato's scornful distaste, combined with the fact that these practitioners worked freelance, but the other terms suggest that at Plato's time, those who invoked souls also practiced some form of divination. This makes sense once we recall the useful role that the dead might play there.
Whatever he might call himself, there is little reason to think that the goes was despised by the general populace: only members of the elite intellectual class like Plato looked down their noses at him. Not only do Plato's own words attest to the easy and open passage of the goes throughout the city, but some of the situations in which we find the only physical remains of his art-the curse tablets-suggest that he was not terribly concerned about concealing his actions. Although we sometimes find the tablets in places that would have been hidden from ancient eyes, such as the bottom of a well or deep within a grave, in other cases they are found near the top of the grave, and textual evidence suggests that they often were not buried at all. Plato mentions that people become upset when they see waxen figures of the sort that accompanied curse tablets lying in doorways, at crossroads, or on the graves of their parents. A spell from the magical papyri (PGM IV.z96-466) instructs the practitioner to place the curse tablet, the figurine, and an offering of seasonal flowers beside (para) the grave of one who has died an untimely or violent death, implying that at least by this time, it was acceptable to leave the tablet above ground and in full view. Some recipes for depositing curse tablets (including the one just cited) further indicate that the written curse was to be recited aloud as it was deposited. We are left with a striking image of the practitioner standing in a cemetery at dusk (this particular spell specifies that the sun should be setting) performing acts that onlookers could scarcely miss. The efficacy of the curse tablet, in fact, may sometimes hav
e depended on its deposition being discovered. Although later stories indicate that the destruction of a tablet was believed to nullify its curse, surely it would not be easy to rid oneself of the psychological effects of knowing that one had been cursed, particularly if one feared that other, undiscovered tablets still existed. And in the situations for which curse tablets were deployed-the law courts, the athletic arena, the bedroom-self-confidence was everything. Ironically, the virtue of the written curse might sometimes lie in its very publicity.99
The goes, then, like many another man in the ancient city, was a businessman, presenting himself as an expert in a certain art with certain wares and skills to sell. There are attractive analogies for this idea in the fact that throughout Greek history, there were individuals who made various other forms of interaction with the nonhuman world their special profession: the readers of bird portents (oionopolos) and of sacrificial portents (thuoskoos), for example, who already appear in the Homeric poems. Undoubtedly, the wares and skills of a goes seemed a little odd to the Greeks-we must remember that their appearance in our sources postdates these others considerably. And undoubtedly, his wares and crafts were a little frightening-after all, they arose from the same roots as did the Greeks' increased fear of the dead, with whom the goes was on intimate terms. But we have virtually no evidence for attempts to control the goetes' activities or to punish those who practiced goeteia during the classical period-indeed, Plato's argument for including laws against such activities in his perfect state implies that, in classical Athens at least, there were none. His failure to refer to such laws in other city-states in this context implies they did not have them either.100 The disinterest probably means that goeteia was not perceived as much of a threat to the existence of the polls or any of its institutions. It would certainly seem threatening to those who believed it was being directed against them, and its use undoubtedly troubled ethically idealistic philosophers, but it was of little consequence to the state per se. Burkert has suggested, along similar lines, that the personal use of purification techniques-which, like the beliefs that we have been discussing, first thrived during the archaic period-had a better chance to get going in Greece than in Near Eastern cultures because of the absence of institutionalized monarchic power, which would otherwise restrict and control their dispensation. 101 Indeed, as we have discussed, when the Greek state had a problem, it might hire one of these specialists for the public good. In chapter 5 we shall explore the very interesting fact that the use of goeteia and similar magical techniques was apparently absent from one facet of Greek life, however: childbearing.
Restless Dead Page 14