In this chapter, I have sketched the way in which Greek beliefs in the power of the dead to return evolved from a state in which very few dead were able to do so, and then only under very special circumstances and at their own volition, to a state in which potentially any soul could return, either of its own volition or because it was being compelled to do so by those who were still living. I have emphasized in particular the development of a specialist in techniques of dealing with the disembodied soul, which suggests that this new belief was quickly understood to have practical implications, both positive and negative. In the next two chapters, we shall examine some particularly dangerous types of dead and how they caused problems for the living.
"There was no change in the door or window this morning, nor any reason to think that any stranger had been to the house. Yet there they sat, driven clean mad with terror, and Brenda lying dead with fright, with her head hanging over the arm of the chair. I'll never get the sight of that room out of my mind so long as I live."
"The facts, as you state them, are certainly most remarkable," said Holmes. "I take it that you have no theory yourself which can in any way account for them?"
"It's devilish, Mr. Holmes; devilish!" cried Mortimer Tregennis. "It is not of this world. Something has come into that room which has dashed the light of reason from their minds. What human contrivance could do that?"
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" (r91o)
Mr. Tregennis's conclusion reflects a belief that was exceedingly common in many cultures until recently-indeed, a belief that still underlies many contemporary ghost stories. Disasters for which no other cause can be found, and especially madness, are presumed to have been inflicted by creatures "not of this world." Most often, it is specifically the restless dead who are blamed.
In many cultures, both ancient and modern, three types of dead are almost always presumed to be dangerously restless: those who have not received funeral rites (ataphoi), the untimely or prematurely dead (aoroi ), and those who have died violently (biaiothanatoi ). The reason that ataphoi are restless seems fairly obvious: no longer among the living, they are not yet in their proper place within the realm of the dead either; they linger at the border in between or move back and forth with out peace.' The remedy for problems caused by this sort of dead seems obvious as well: performance of proper funeral rites usually does the trick. Both the problems and the remedies connected with the violently dead and the untimely dead are more complex, however, and therefore provide us with richer interpretative materials. Which dead souls qualify as having died violently or prematurely, how they express their disgruntlement, and how the living can defuse the problems that they cause are questions that will repay our attention; indeed, the answers will also shed further light on the plight of the unburied. We shall start here with a brief visit to the biaiotbanatoi and then, in chapter 5, discuss the most important type of aoros, the ghost who killed babies and reproductively viable women, in more depth.
In the biaiothanatoi, we confront one of the problems sketched at the beginning of chapter i. Until very late times, when they are invoked in the spells of the magical papyri to serve the practitioner in various ways, most of our evidence for what the biaiothanatoi were and did comes from dramatic sources such as Athenian tragedies and the Tetralogies of Antiphon, which some scholars have argued do not accurately represent real beliefs of the time. Robert Parker has already shown that we cannot accept this argument in its most extreme form, concluding that although the atmosphere of Aeschylus and the Tetralogies is too "thick with spirits" for everyday habitation, their "imaginative exaggeration sets before us the fundamental structure of popular belief." 2 I would add to his observations a reminder that there is also nonliterary evidence for a belief in the biaiothanatoi, some of which we have examined in previous chapters. Plato, for example, refers to a common belief that the souls of the murdered linger on earth, frightening their murderers, and Xenophon's Cyrus refers to the same belief in order to support the premise that the soul survives after death.' Moreover, in chapter z, we examined some descriptions of actual rituals for appeasing or exorcising angry ghosts. With these guarantees that there was a core of reality to ancient Greek belief in biaiothanatoi, literary sources can be used, cautiously, to fill out the picture.
THE BIAIOTHANATOI AND POLLUTION
Having invoked the name of Robert Parker, I should pause on another important issue that he takes up: the relationship between biaiotbanatoi and miasma, pollution.4 In Antiphon's Tetralogies, for example, miasma seems to be equated with the anger of the dead or with a supernatural agent whom the dead person deploys, such as an alastor.5 Thus, miasma could be understood as an impersonalized way of representing the danger lurking around the murderer, a danger that, in personalized form, was represented instead by the dead or his agents. Under this premise, creatures such as the Aeschylean Erinyes can then be understood, in Parker's words, as the "animate agents of pollution, [embodying] the anger of one slain by a kinsman." 6 This seems to be confirmed by the fact that both the anger of biaiotbanatoi and miasma are mentioned as primary causes of madness, for example, and by the fact that, as Rohde long ago pointed out, rites described as "purificatory" sometimes include elements that look far more like efforts to appease the dead or chthonic powers who championed them.7 But this is not always the case; in some sources, miasma is clearly a free-standing concept, which neither represents nor is directly connected with the anger of a dead person, a force that seems to operate automatically, set in motion as soon as a crime of blood occurs. Even after being purified of the miasma from Clytemnestra's death by Apollo, Orestes continues to be pursued by the Erinyes. Conversely, Oedipus is surrounded by miasma and yet is not pursued by Erinyes in the most famous versions of the story that we possess from the classical period; the earliest reference to the story, in con trast, mentions Erinyes but no miasma.8 Although the concepts of miasma and biaiothanatoi overlap or even coincide at times, one is not inextricably bound up with the other; they can be mutually reinforcing yet distinct means of imagining the danger that surrounds a murderer and the retribution that awaits him. How one specifically envisions that danger probably has as much to do with one's personal outlook (or the genre in which one has chosen to work) as anything else.9
And yet to return to Rohde's thesis, miasma and biaiothanatoi do coincide in ways that suggest "being polluted" should be understood, more often than is generally recognized, as the state of having the dead angry at one; to be "purified" of the pollution of a blood crime and to be freed from the ghost must often have been part of the same process, or even wholly the same process. We have already seen some instances of this in previous chapters. For example, the ceremony by which Circe purifies Jason and Medea after Apsyrtus's murder is referred to by Apollonius Rhodius as a "cleansing" of pollution but includes elements that we would normally associate with the appeasement of an angry spirit, such as propitiatory drink offerings and cakes.10 Plutarch describes the alastores and palamnaioi of the dead as pursuing and punishing "old miasmata." 71 There are cases, moreover, in which rituals called purifications follow upon the perception that angry ghosts are causing trouble. According to tradition, for example, the psychagogoi's expulsion of Pausanias's ghost from the temple in Sparta was called a purification (katharmoi ), and Epimenides' rescue of the Athenians when they were being persecuted by phasmata-the ghosts of those murdered in the Cylonian Affair-included both propitiations (hilasmoi) and purifications (katharmoi ).12
The purifications associated with many mystery cults are particularly interesting in this respect. Let us start with Eleusis. It is highly likely that ghosts or their agents (e.g., Erinyes) were represented as threatening the initiate during some part of the process of initiation at Eleusis. This was probably intended to be understood both as a real threat at the time of the initiation (that is, the ghosts might try to prevent completion of the initiation, as a passage from Proclus that we shall examine shortly suggests) and as a re
minder of what awaited the uninitiated after death. When these "ghosts" appeared is hard to say; the constrained space of the telesterion (initiation hall) makes it unlikely that any katabasis or similar drama that depended heavily on visual details was enacted during the initiation ceremony itself, as not all of the initiates would have been able to see it clearly.13 And yet, several of our sources speak of the initiates meeting something "frightening" or "shocking" in the darkness, which most likely means in the darkness of the night of their initiation. Perhaps we must imagine that whatever frightened the initiates lurked just inside the building, "greeting" the initiates as they entered. After this stage of the process, according to our sources, the initiates would experience great pleasure, joy, and light, representing their safe passage through the danger. They would also, perhaps, "meet the gods" at this point.14 The sudden appearance of a great light could easily be staged in the telesterion in such a way that even the initiates farthest away would see it.
But at any rate, however we imagine the business to have been staged, ancient sources are too insistent on the initiates being frightened for us to assume that nothing happened. That what "frightened" and "shocked" them included one or more ghosts or their agents is suggested not only by the frequent use of the word ekpleksis, which implies a personal agent of some sort rather than just a generally frightening experience such as might be induced by darkness alone, but also by a number of ancient sources that specifically mention ghosts and their agents as well. In his spoof of the mysteries, Aristophanes includes an empousa, who appears just before Dionysus and Xanthias pass into the blissful portion of the Underworld where the initiates are celebrating a feast. As we shall see shortly, empousa was one term for a restless and vindictive soul.15 Lucian's humorous katabasis includes the appearance of the Erinys Tisiphone out of the dark, which one of the characters says reminds him of what happens during the Eleusinian initiations.16 All of the Erinyes were understood to punish the living on behalf of the angry dead, but Tisiphone, whose name means "avenger of murder," would be especially associated with avenging the violently dead. Proclus tells us that "in the holiest of mysteries, before the gods arrive, the emanations of chthonic demons become manifest and visions frighten the initiates, distracting them from the good things that the gods have to offer." 17
The threat of being attacked by the angry dead would be greater for those who dared to approach initiation with blood on their hands or, by association, for those being initiated at the same time as the bloodguilty. It makes sense in this respect that the Eleusinian mysteries specifically excluded anyone in this state.18 It is likely, however, that the bloodguilty who desired initiation could solve their problem by being cleansed at the "lesser mysteries" held in the Athenian suburb of Agrai some seven months before the initiation proper at Eleusis itself. We are told by a number of ancient sources that the lesser mysteries focused on purifications, and the mythic aition for them suggests that purification from blood-guilt was their specific concern. They were said to have been established by Demeter as a favor to Heracles, who wished to be initiated at Eleusis but was turned away because he was tainted by his murder of the centaurs. Whatever the ritual was that Demeter performed for Heracles, it overcame this problem.19 I would agree with those scholars who suggest that it was the ritual represented on the Lovatelli urn and the Torre Nova sarcophagus, which involved, among other things, application of the "fleece of Zeus" (Dios koidion), associated elsewhere with purification from blood-guilt; in a moment, we shall see why this is important.20
But to return now to the importance of Heracles' story as an aition both for the lesser mysteries as a site of purification before the greater mysteries and for the ability of the greater mysteries to protect initiates against the inhabitants of Hades, we should remember why Heracles sought initiation at Eleusis in the first place: he was about to embark on a trip to the Underworld in order to fetch Cerberus and believed that initiation would provide special protection during this most difficult journey, a journey that other people would make only after their deaths. Protection against what? Against Cerberus himself? Against creatures such as Aristophanes' loathsome, shape-shifting empousa? Against the gorgon Medusa, whom very old mythic tradition said Heracles had confronted and overcome on his journey into the Underworld? 21 Perhaps creatures such as these were the comic and mythic elaborations of what the real Eleusinian initiate feared and sought insurance against: the angry souls of the dead or their infernal agents.
Empousa is particularly interesting in this respect, and her appearance in Aristophanes' Frogs probably should be taken more seriously than it usually is. Although Aristophanes may have given her a ridiculously exaggerated appearance for comic effect, it seems that empousa was a real term for the sort of angry soul that was imagined to cause problems for both the initiate at some stage of the initiatory process and the uninitiated after death. Empousai are associated with Hecate in classical sources and are described by late sources specifically as phasmata that Hecate can send forth, which virtually identifies them as one type of the angry ghosts whom Hecate controlled. Empousa is precisely the term applied to Aeschines' mother in connection with her practice of leaping out of the dark and frightening people in some mystery cult. It sounds as if she took part in a dramatic enactment of some kind during initiations, pretending to be a ghostly threat that the initiates had to face.22 The name empousa looks like a feminine appellative formed from the same root as empodon, meaning "underfoot," and empodeia, meaning "impediment." Like the terms for so many other demonic or ghostly creatures, then, it probably began as a descriptive adjective: just as "harpies" snatched (harpazein) their victims, so empousai hindered (em- podizein) theirs, impeding secure passage of the soul either through the process of initiation or on the way to safe haven in Hades after death.23 Empousa, in short, looks very much like a common descriptive term for the sort of restless soul who tried to frighten, distract, and impede initiates during some stage of the initiation process at Eleusis and elsewhere. By purifying oneself of any trace of blood-guilt at the lesser mysteries, one protected oneself against such threats during initiation at the greater mysteries, which, in turn, would protect one against them in the afterlife. A very close parallel is offered by column VI of the Derveni Papyrus, which mentions daimones empodon, "daimones who impede," and equates them with souls of the dead, psychai. These daimones empodon are described as being "hateful" to other souls, that is, as causing problems for the initiates trying to protect their souls, who are instructed to propitiate the daimones by sacrifices, prayers, and incantations, or problems for the souls of the dead who are trying to pass into the Underworld safely.24 Iamblichus, describing theurgic initiations designed to save the soul, mentions that evil spirits (kaka pneumata) might serve as an impediment (empodion) to those who have not been adequately purified. Theurgic initiations were modeled on those of traditional mysteries, and thus Iamblichus's reference further confirms our interpretation of both Aristophanes' Empousa and the daimones empodon.21
Unlike Heracles, the average Greek who participated in the lesser mysteries would usually not have been guilty of murder, and for him the lesser mysteries may have been just a formality, or have served as a general preparation. Alternatively, however, the "infectious" nature of blood-guilt may have suggested that even an "innocent" man or woman might have acquired enough guilt to require cleansing before embarking upon the greater mysteries-it was always better to be safe.26 Athena sought purification after witnessing Tydeus's savage act of cannibalism by running to the "mystic torch" and the "pure waters" of the Ilissos at Agrai, which we know were used for purification in the lesser mysteries. This suggests that the lesser mysteries were known as a venue in which one could rid oneself of secondhand as well as primary blood-guilt.27 The timing of the lesser mysteries is also significant in this respect: they took place late in the month of Anthesterion'21 a week or two after the Anthesteria, the annual festival during which all the Athenian dead were propitiated and particularly dang
erous ones were averted'29 and just a few days before or after the Diasia, a major festival of Zeus Meilichios that was also held at the Ilissos.30 Given the connection of Zeus Meilichios with both the Underworld and purifications from blood-guilt, and the use of some holocaust sacrifices at the Diasia, we can be fairly sure that this festival was concerned inter alia with establishing and main taining good relationships with the world of the dead.31 A specific link between the Diasia and the lesser mysteries lies in the fact that the "fleeces of Zeus," which were used in purifications by the officials of the Scirophoria, the Eleusinian Dadouchos, and certain other officials concerned with purification, came from sheep sacrificed to either Zeus Meilichios or Zeus Ctesios at the Diasia or other times; 32 this is in my opinion and that of many other scholars the sort of fleece shown in connection with Heracles' purification from the murder of the centaurs on the Torre Nova sarcophagus and Lovatelli vase. Michael Jameson has gone even further along these lines, arguing that Zeus Meilichios played an important role not only in the Diasia but also in the lesser mysteries themselves.33
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