Restless Dead
Page 25
Another reason that we cannot expect to find explicit evidence for threatening ghosts in all transitional myths and rituals is that the paradigm proposed above in connection with Erigone is only that: a paradigm. Any single example of a myth and ritual complex may include all of its elements or only some of its elements; local concerns and historical accident will dictate which. The possibility that the dead girl might return to attack others, which is expressed explicitly in the case of Erigone, may have been eliminated by other traditions that required the girl to be divinized, for example. According to one tradition, Ariadne hanged herself when abandoned by her future husband Theseus, and in another she died in childbirth after being abandoned by him. Either situation could have led to her becoming a vengeful ghost, but her role as Dionysus's bride in what became the dominant version of the myth would have eliminated the possibility of her death and subsequent ghostly career.76
There are indeed some other traces of the idea that girls might be attacked by vengeful ghosts during the time that they were preparing for marriage, however. Let us begin not with another myth but with that most sober of sources, the Hippocratic corpus. A treatise called Concerning Unmarried Girls opens with a broad statement to the effect that when people become ill, they sometimes believe that they see hostile daimones (daimonas dusmeneas), who urge them to kill themselves, typically by hanging. The author then goes on to say that women who have reached the age of menarche without having intercourse are particularly prone to this problem.
This sounds very much like an insider's view of the paradigm we have just examined: threatening ghosts are blamed by unmarried girls for causing suicidal madness. We must assume that the premenstrual girls' fancies, like most such beliefs, were planted in their minds by the tales they heard from other women in their families-tales like that of the Athenian maidens whom Erigone's ghost had once driven to hang themselves, or like the tales of Gello, Lamia, and Mormo, discussed in chapter 5. Perhaps these were among the stories to which Plato alludes when he mentions children who were afraid of mormolukeiai.77 We can find some confirmation of this in Erinna's Distaff, where the poetess, describing her dead friend's childhood, mentions "Fearsome Mormo ... [who] roamed on four feet and changed her visage from [one thing to another]." The remains of the poem are very fragmentary, but references to the girl's mother teaching her wool-work and other things in the lines immediately preceding and following the mention of Morino suggest that, like more practical knowledge, this sort of lore was passed down in the women's quarters. Young girls raised on tales of creatures such as Mormo would naturally be predisposed to imagine that they saw them at times when they were delirious or suffering from some other form of adolescent angst.78 We may wonder whether the lost poem by Sappho in which Gello was mentioned was of a type similar to the Distaff, describing the typical experiences of a young girl as well.
Let us return now to myth and ritual complexes by means of the story of Carya. In the fullest version of the myth,79 Carya is a Laconian girl who is seduced by Dionysus and subsequently turned by him into a nut tree (karua) when her sisters prevent her from accepting his further advances. Richard Seaford has suggested that the myth expresses the divided loyalties of the transitional girl: she is torn between her natal family and the stranger (Dionysus) who comes from outside to marry her. When handled incorrectly, the myth seems to say, the transferal of loyalty from natal to marital family ends in tragedy.80
Seaford is surely correct, but we must wonder whether as in other cases (including that of Erigone), Dionysiac concerns have been grafted onto another myth. Caryatis was Artemis's cult title at a famous Laconian temple in the village of Caryai near Caphyae; the priestesses there were called caryatidai, and each year Laconian girls performed a dance called the caryatis at a festival in honor of Artemis called the Cary- ateia.81 These pieces of information, combined with the basic plot of the myth (an unmarried girl becomes involved in an illicit sexual relationship and subsequently suffers) indicate that the myth of Carya originally was associated with Artemis and with a dance performed by girls at a festival in that goddess' honor.82 Judging from Artemis's epiclesis and the name of her local festival and priestesses, the karua-tree must have been sacred to her in Laconia; thus, Carya's transformation would signify the same thing as transformation into a cult statue: she became the goddess's agalma. As in the case of Erigone's myth, Dionysus seems remarkably dispensable, thrust into the role of seducer that almost any male could have played. It is probable that in the original myth, it was Artemis, not Dionysus, who turned Carya into the nut-tree, either to punish the girl for having been seduced or, perhaps, to rescue her from threatened rape. Either would bring the story into alignment with the paradigm discussed at the beginning of this section.83
Honorable though this transformation may have been, it prevents Carya from completing her transition from virgin to mother, and thus leaves her permanently stranded in the same liminal state as Erigone. There is an indication, in a story related by Lactantius, that, like Erig one, Carya was believed to return and drive other transitional girls to their deaths.84 One day when a group of Laconian girls were amusing themselves (cum luderent virgines), they suddenly decided to kill themselves (meditatus ruinam omnis chorus). Rushing to the karua-tree that stood nearby, they hanged themselves from its branches. At the site where this happened, Lactantius says, the temple of "Diana Carya" was built. Thus, the myth suggests that it was the girls' suicides that precipitated the foundation of the temple and the festival, just as the suicide of Athenian girls precipitated the foundation of the Aiora and Aletis. It also implies that, conversely, the foundation of temple and festival were expected to prevent further suicides.
The fact that the mythic girls are described by Lactantius as a chorus is proleptic; the group serves as the model for the annual choruses that danced the caryatis at the Caryateia festival after the temple of Artemis Caryatis was founded. The description of both the mythic and the real girls as virginal indicates that they were at the age during which transitional rites took place, as does, again, the method by which they committed suicide. That the mythic girls became madly suicidal at this age, and expressed that madness by hanging themselves on the tree that once was a virgin like themselves, suggests a causal connection between their fate and that of Carya. The karua-tree irresistibly pulled them to their deaths; Carya, having failed to complete her own transition, compelled other girls to suffer with her. The similarities between the myth and ritual connected with Erigone and those connected with Carya are striking: can we not conclude that, like Erigone, the dead Carya was believed to return as a prostropaios, bringing suicidal insanity with her if the proper rites were not performed?
THE PANDAREIDS AND HELEN
Let us look briefly at some other girls who die during the time when they should be making the transition from virgin to mother.
The Pandareids (daughters of the Athenian king Pandareus) are presented to us as a collective; they have no individual names.85 As such, they are quintessential "daughters," like the Proetides. Their roles are still defined by their relationship to their father and according to the rules of their society; therefore, they can be nothing other than virgins whom Pandareus will hand over to the right husbands at the proper time .16
As in the case of Erigone, it is in fact the loss of their parents that marks the beginning of the Pandareids' tragic story, as narrated by Penelope at Odyssey zo.63-78. At first, it seems that disaster will nonetheless be averted and the girls will live out normal lives, for they are adopted by four goddesses who are especially adept at preparing girls to become wives and mothers: Aphrodite feeds them, Hera gives them exceptional beauty and wisdom, Artemis gives them stature, and Athena teaches them handiwork. Just as Aphrodite is arranging their marriages, however, another disaster strikes. The harpies snatch the girls and hand them over to the Erinyes, whom they will be compelled to accompany (amphipoleuein) forevermore.
Unfortunately, Penelope does not bother to tell us why th
e girls are handed over to the Erinyes.17 We must presume that the Odyssey's audience knew the myth and would have been able to fill in this blank. She also fails to explain exactly what it means to "accompany the Erinyes," but here we can make some good guesses. The Erinyes were well known as spirits of the Underworld who caused problems for the living. In literature, their attacks often look justified: they punish those who transgress the rules of civilized behavior, particularly the rules that protect the relationship between parent and child and between other blood kin. But sometimes even here, the question of what is really "justified" and what constitutes persecution of the innocent is raised: the locus classicus is their pursuit of Orestes, and the trial at the end of Aeschylus's Eumenides shows that there was definitely more than one opinion. Other evidence, discussed in the next chapter, suggests that the Erinyes also attacked women at risky times, such as marriage and childbirth, and thereby links them with ruining girls' transitions. For example, in the Eumenides, Athena promises that at the time a girl marries or bears a child, the Erinyes (under their new, alternative name of Semnai Theai) 18 will receive first-fruit offerings in return for their cooperation. In response to Athena's offer, the Erinyes then promise to prevent young people from dying prematurely and to facilitate marriages .89 The Erinyes themselves were imagined as eternal virgins, divine paradigms of the girls whose transitions they could thwart if they wished or, worse, of girls like Erigone and Carya who never completed that transition and remained frozen in their virginity by early death. Therein lies the explanation of the Pandareids' fate. "To accompany the Erinyes" means, for those who die unwed as the Pandareids did, to become like the Erinyes. Once again, then, we encounter the idea that those who do not make it through their own transitional periods, successfully passing from virginity to motherhood, are likely to return after death and cause problems.
The verb denoting the Pandareids' relationship to the Erinyes, amphi- poleuein, is interesting for two reasons. First, because it means "accompany" in the more precise sense of "wander around with"; thus again we glimpse the association between girls who die in transition and the detached, exiled state that is typical of those who have no fixed place, including the restless dead.90 Second, because it finds an echo in at least one, and probably two, later texts that precisely express the idea of ghosts wreaking harm on the living. A spell from the fourth-century C.E. Great Paris Magical Papyrus calls upon the "chthonic amphipoloi," along with other chthonic entities typically found in these contexts, such as Hecate, Hermes, Acheron, and various types of dead, to work its curse. A curse tablet from third century C.E. Cyprus, which virtually repeats the spell of the magical papyrus, substitutes the seemingly meaningless word antipolis for amphipoloi, but David Jordan is undoubtedly correct in understanding this as a scribal error. The tablet is important in establishing that the spell of the papyrus was in active use for at least ioo years before it was even recorded on our papyrus; the chthonic amphipoloi it mentions were figures of real belief, expected to carry out practitioners' dire directives.91
To jump eleven or twelve centuries back to Homer now, both the plot of the Pandareids' myth and its association with an early Athenian king suggest that it was used as an aition for rituals similar to the Aiora, Aletis, and Caryatis. The plurality of goddesses by whom the girls are nurtured complicates the picture, however-all of them were goddesses in whose honor transitional rites could appropriately be celebrated, but surely no single rite would have honored them all simultaneously. Perhaps, at least in its current form, the myth alludes not to any single cult but rather to a series of rites through which girls passed at different times, or a variety of rites through any of which a given girl might pass. 12 In Athens, during the classical period at least, selected girls might honor Athena and Aphrodite at the Arrhephoria and Artemis at Brauron; Hera, as a goddess of marriage, might be honored at some festival during Gamelion, the month of marriages. The cooperation of the goddesses in raising the Pandareids, then, may be a composite picture of what was in reality a long process with different rites at several stages, each watched over by a different goddess. In this case, the myth has become detached from any aitiological role it ever played in the strictest sense, because it explains no single cult. There is one hint that the myth originally had a closer connection to some ritual, however. The girls are nourished by Aphrodite on cheese, honey, and wine. These are not the usual elements of a Greek diet, particularly a young woman's diet. Both because of this and because the text specifies these ingredients so carefully, we must suspect that they made up some sort of kukeon, offered at a special ceremony.93
The Erinyes also play a part in another myth that is relevant to our discussion, although here the paradigm that I have been discussing has become so deeply buried under the influence of the epic cycle that it is difficult to retrieve. According to Pausanias, the people of Rhodes told the following story. After the death of Menelaus, Helen was driven out of Laconia and arrived in Rhodes, hoping to find a home with her friend Polyxo, the widow of Tlepolemus. Polyxo, however, blaming Helen for her husband's death at Troy, secretly plotted revenge. One day, she disguised her serving women as Erinyes and sent them to attack Helen, who was bathing. The women seized Helen and hanged her from a nearby tree. It is for this reason, Pausanias concludes, that the Rhodians now have a temple of Helen Dendritis (Helen of the Tree ).94
Helen's connection with trees and what it implies for her original function as a goddess has been discussed by others.95 Here I wish to concentrate instead on the story that tries to explain that connection. First of all, we must recognize that as Pausanias tells it, the myth is an attempt to explain how the cult of Helen Dendritis, which is better known in Laconia, ended up in Rhodes. We might guess that Helen's mythic connection with the Trojan War suggested tying her to a Rhodian hero who fought at Troy; Tlepolemus was brought in, and thus the idea of his widow's revenge arose as an explanation for Helen's death. The general idea that Polyxo had attacked Helen probably was already in circulation, in fact, for Pausanias's contemporary, Polyaenus, relates a different story, in which Polyxo attacks both Helen and Menelaus.96 Notably, however, Polyaenus's story is set in Egypt, where the pair have stopped on their way home, rather than in Rhodes, and it involves the use of rocks and fire, rather than masquerading servants. The motif of Helen being hanged by "the Erinyes" must have originated either in a local Rhodian myth (originally attached, perhaps, to some other figure, with whom Helen came to be identified) or in a myth that the Argives brought with them from Laconia when they colonized Rhodes. Certainly, the Laconian story of Carya that we have just reviewed shows that hanging maidens were at home there.
In the Rhodian story, Polyxo's mode of revenge brings Helen close to the role of hanging virgin. Helen as we know her best, of course, was no virgin at all, but the Helen of cult need not have shared all the traits of her epic sister. Plutarch tells us that Theseus kidnapped her when she was a young girl dancing at the Spartan temple of Artemis Orthia 97 surely this means dancing in a chorus of girls undergoing the transitional rites that this goddess sponsored. Plutarch's story hints, therefore, that Spartan Helen may once have played the central role in a cult aition similar to some of those I mentioned at the beginning of this section, in which a virgin is threatened with rape during her transitional period. As in the case of the Laconian girls who were seized with madness while dancing, the description of Helen dancing in honor of Artemis Orthia would be proleptic; the dance properly should have been instituted after the mythic virgin, Helen, had suffered. That the central figure in the Rhodian aition was also a virgin originally is suggested not only by her mode of death but by the fact that she was taking a bath when it occurred. Of all the baths a Greek woman took, one of the most important and most ritually elaborated was the one immediately before her wedding.98 Thus our Rhodian heroine, like the Pandareids, was given over to the Erinyes on the very eve of her marriage.
What about Helen's killers? "Serving women disguised as Erinyes" is an odd detail
and seems like a distorted remembrance or interpretation of something else. We may guess that in the original myth, it was real Erinyes who hanged Helen or drove her to hang herself. In the cult itself, perhaps, local women wearing frightening costumes or masks enacted the myth through dance or even hanged a "virgin" as represented by a statue or animal (as in the case of the cults of Artemis and Aspalis, shortly to be discussed).99 If this reconstruction is correct, it would be a variation on some of the other examples I have discussed. Here, one virgin is attacked by a group of ghostly or demonic creatures; there, groups of virgins are attacked by individual ghosts. The central idea, however, is the same: at the time of transition, a girl may be threatened by the angry dead, who must be dealt with, in one way or another, through rituals.