Restless Dead

by Sarah Iles Johnston

Our sources refer to the central figure by the term gyne, which sometimes means a female who has married, in contrast to parthenos, but which can also be used more generically to refer to any human female, particularly in contrast to aner, human male, or thea, divine female. Because Eustathius and Photius pass down the tale in a very abbreviated form, we cannot be certain about the marital status of this gyne. It is likely, however, that she was a virgin. Her method of suicide was, as we have discussed already, strongly associated with virgins. Her use of her girdle (zone) as a noose makes that association stronger yet, as this is the item of clothing most frequently employed by virgins who hang them selves.121 We know that, at least by classical times, Ephesus had a important sanctuary of Artemis in which maidens underwent a transitional ritual. It is possible that the story of the hanging woman began as an aition for some aspect of this festival, as did so many other tales of hanging girls. Certainly, the adornment of the corpse sounds like a detail borrowed from cult; specifically, it makes one think of the common practice of annually readorning (and sometimes also washing) cult statues. Given that in some Artemisian myths, such as those of Aspalis and Aphaia, women's bodies disappear and cult statues simultaneously appear in Artemis's temple, it is quite possible that a fuller form of this myth included transformation of the Ephesian woman's corpse into a cult statue as well.122

  Be that as it may, this myth, like the other one we examined, draws Hecate into the paradigm of the dying maiden, with whose death Artemis was in one way or another involved. Indeed, the fact that there were two different versions of essentially the same story, with two different protagonists (Iphigenia; the Ephesian woman) set in two different locales (Aulis; 123 Ephesus), suggests that the primary raison d'etre of the story was not to explain what happened to Iphigenia or the unnamed Ephesian woman but rather to trace Hecate's origin to a dying maidenalmost any dying maiden would have worked, one suspects. It is likely that Iphigenia was chosen for the part in one version because at the time it developed, she was the most famous of all virgins killed by Artemis, thanks to the incorporation of her story into the panhellenically popular Mycenean saga.124

  The Ephesian myth seems later than the Stesichorean story in part because it is more complex; its plot requires a bit of disentangling. The transformation into a bitch strikes us as a detail that is unnecessary. Why didn't the goddess just kill the woman in the first place, or drive her to suicide? It is easy to respond that the dog is an agalma of Hecate and that the woman's transformation into a bitch, therefore, takes her halfway to her final identity. But this cannot be right. Hecate herself does not appear as a bitch until very late times and then only infrequently in sources such as the magical papyri, which have been influenced by theriomorphic Egyptian religion.125 When other animals that are agalmata to goddesses appear in such stories, they replace, temporarily or permanently, the girl undergoing transition. Iphigenia is replaced by a deer, the girls at Brauron "act the bear" for Artemis, Callisto permanently becomes a bear due to Artemis's wrath, and the Proetides imagine that they are cows, animals sacred to Hera, the goddess who is responsible for their plight in some versions of the myth.

  These myths in which transitional girls permanently or temporarily exchange places with sacred animals emblematize their detachment from normal society during their period of transition. Could we interpret the story of the Ephesian woman this way? Just as the Proetides become cows for angering Hera, and Iphigenia "becomes" a deer as a result of Artemis's anger, does the Ephesian woman become a bitch for angering ... Artemis? Here is our first clue that something has gone awry. In an earlier version of the story, the angered goddess who turned the woman into a bitch was surely Hecate herself, to whom the bitch was sacred.126 After the woman's transformation into a bitch, the story as we know it then doubles back upon itself, as if to accommodate a change in plans, and proceeds down a route that is now familiar from other myths associated with Artemis: a (rehumanized) maiden hangs herself and is turned by Artemis into something else again: the very goddess who should have been in charge of the transformation in the first place. The story as we now have it looks like a deliberate effort, in other words, to adapt an existing myth in such a way as to displace Hecate from her original role as goddess in charge of transitions into that of transitional victim. The setting-Ephesus-is important in this regard. Although we have no detailed evidence for Hecate's worship there, we know that her statue stood within Artemis's great sanctuary.127 Ephesus lies quite close to her Carian homeland and was founded on an older settlement of Carians, who had already built there a large temple to their own goddess.121 Scholars are unanimous in assuming that "Artemis" was the name given by Greek colonists to a local goddess of similar personality whom they found already in place.129 Given the Carian connections, this is likely to have been Hecate herself, in which case Callimachus's story reflects Artemis's displacement of Hecate-or, to view the same idea from a slightly different angle, the desire of a local cult to differentiate between an old and a new goddess in a manner that draws them both into alignment with a popular Greek mythic paradigm.

  That Hecate was drawn into the role of dying maiden makes sense. When she arrived in Greece with the same interests in women's transitions as Artemis, the sensibilities of the Greek mythic imagination would have demanded that this situation be tidied up, for however much cult might tolerate a number of divinities sharing the same functions, myth strove to articulate the differences between them, and to impose some clearly defined, recognizable relationship-sister and brother, parent and child, lover and beloved, victimizer and victim. The result was often more than just a matter of tidying up, of course. The less important di vinity frequently acquired both a symbolic value in myth, where he or she served as a prototype for others who would interact with the divinity, and a "heroic" role in cult, where he or she was worshipped alongside the stronger divinity.

  I do not, I hasten to add, mean to imply that all mythic victims began as "faded divinities." The figure of the victim was so important both to myth and to cult that we must assume that it always existed; it is impossible to think that this role arose only as a convenience during the later archaic age, when the panhellenic pantheon was becoming fixed and divinities such as Artemis were beginning to displace local ones. The fact that we sometimes find transitional myths in which the victim's role is filled by a collective, identified only by patronymic-such as the Pandareids-makes it particularly clear that some victims were never anything else; these nebulous girls can never have been goddesses. Rather, I mean to suggest that, when myth came under the influence of panhellenism, which insisted that a limited number of gods play the central roles in myth, the preexisting role of victim was one into which displaced divinities could easily be moved. Names often help us to distinguish which figures began as victims and which, instead, were displaced gods. As noted, collective patronymics point toward the former; use of the victim's name or a variation of the victim's name as an epiclesis of the divinity (e.g., Artemis-Iphigenia, Artemis-Caryatis, Artemis-Hecate) toward the latter.130

  As an important goddess in her own right, Hecate would have been a divinity who was difficult to accommodate at the time that she arrived, both because she duplicated Artemis so closely in many ways and because the familial relationships within the panhellenic pantheon were already firmly set. Mythic genealogy could not deal with the problem by making her, for example, Artemis's daughter or mother, as it had made Eileithyia into Hera's daughter. (Hesiod, or his source, came as close as he dared by making the two goddesses cousins.)131 The role of dying virgin must have seemed to myth-makers like a more promising way to bring Hecate into a close relationship to Artemis, for two distinct yet intertwined reasons. By making Hecate into the leader of prostropaioi who might thwart a girl's progress toward motherhood, the paradigm reflected, in an inverted fashion, the concern for women's transitions that Hecate brought with her from Asia Minor and continued to express in Greek cult. But by the same token, the paradigm automatically reflected the ot
her distinctive feature that Hecate carried with her when she arrived from Asia Minor: her association with the souls of the unhappy dead, who lingered at the doorways, gates, and crossroads that she was asked to protect, and who were, in the Greek imagination, becoming ever more threatening as the archaic age continued.

  It is important to realize that even as she was drawn into this paradigm, Hecate was not subordinated to Artemis in the same way as other female figures had been; even in myth, she retained an independence that Carya, for example, did not. Unlike the other virgins we have discussed, Hecate neither dies nor is transformed. Instead, in both versions of the story, Hecate is what emerges from the virgin's death. She is the vengeful ghost uniquely created for the role, the divine prototype of all vengeful ghosts, as befits the goddess who is expected to control them. We should not overlook the fact that it is by Artemis's will that Hecate comes to exist, according to these myths. Although on one level this does indeed mean that Artemis has displaced her, on another it means that her divinity has been ratified by the other goddess. In explaining Hecate's existence as a fiat of Artemis's, the stories suggest that Hecate-and her role as leader of ghosts-was divinely accepted as a necessary addition to the pantheon. The old story of the dying virgin has been used to a new effect.

  Our path through this chapter has been long and somewhat circuitous. Table i organizes the fundamentals of what we have discovered about dying virgins schematically. To recapitulate three points that I have made, clarifying some connections between them:

  When Hecate arrived in Greece from Caria during the archaic period, she had two distinctive features: she was a goddess concerned with women's transitions and a goddess who guarded entrances and liminal points. The first meant that she could both facilitate and thwart a woman's passage from virgin to mother, which brought her into contact with certain ghosts that threatened women and babies, and the second brought her into contact with restless souls imagined to lurk at entrances and liminal points.

  TABLE ONE DYING MAIDENS IN GREEK MYTH

  In Greece, there existed a mythic paradigm whereby young women either died because of the wrath of certain goddesses, especially Artemis, or were rescued from dire circumstances by a goddess's grace; either way, they failed to complete their transition. Some of these women-potentially all of them-were believed to come back as vengeful ghosts and injure those who were in the process of completing their own transitions: virgins, new mothers, and the babies they bore. Hekataia and amulets were among the methods used to avert them. In addition, someperhaps all-of the cults for which their myths served as aitia included rituals designed to appease their wrath.

  When Hecate entered Greece, she continued to serve as a goddess of women's transitions in cult, sharing the role with Artemis, but in myth Hecate was subordinated to Artemis by being moved into a variation of the role of mythic victim. This role brought her into even closer contact with the vengeful ghosts that she was already believed to avert. This side of her persona moved to the forefront, especially in myth and literature.

  Of course, it was not only the souls of women who had died in transition that were apt to return and cause trouble, although they form the largest group of such souls in myth and probably also, therefore, in folk belief, because women's roles in life were more sharply defined, and women were thus more likely to die in a state considered incomplete. Occasionally, we hear of male aoroi as well, and both men and women could be biaiothanatoi or ataphoi, the two other categories of souls most likely to become problems for the living. In the magical texts of late antiquity, Hecate was expected to avert all such types of ghosts or to lead them on against the unfortunate. In earlier times, surely it was hoped that the hekataia erected outside of houses would avert all sorts of ghosts as well, even if they were erected specifically to protect against the sorts that would particularly attack women and babies, as I surmised earlier. Hecate's association with aorai in the myths we have been discussing was one of her connections with the ghostly world, but it was not the only one, as I emphasized toward the beginning of this chapter. It was all these elements in combination that led to her, rather than Hermes or any other god, becoming their leader, almost to the exclusion of any other role she could play, in literature at least. In the next chapter, we shall see how a very similar evolution took place involving the Erinyes.

  It is apparent that, given these adjectival names, the gods are as many as the moods of the worshipper, i.e., as his thoughts about his gods. If he is kind, they are Kindly Ones; when he feels vengeful, they are Vengeful Ones.

  Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1922)

  In two linear B tablets found in Knossos, the name Erinu-an early form of Erinys-appears along with early forms of the names Zeus, Athena, Enyalios, Paion, and Poseidon.' That Erinu is a divinity of approximately equal stature to these others is hard to deny: not only is her name included alongside theirs without any apparent distinction, but on one tablet she is to receive an offering of oil, just like them. Cretan Erinu is, in a word, a goddess, a thea. The poet of the Odyssey still knew this centuries later, when he actually called Erinys a thea, and so did Aeschylus when he referred to the now pluralized Erinyes as theai.2

  I chose to begin this chapter by emphasizing Erinys's original divinity because it compels us to recognize from the start that Erinys once was something quite different from the fearsome, demonic creature whom we tend to associate with her name in later centuries. Greek religion knows of no divinity who is completely negative, completely punitive, completely injurious.' Nor, until very late times, does it envision any of its gods in forms that resemble the snakey-haired, pustulant, snaggle-toothed monsters into which Aeschylus converted the Erinyes for their stage debut in 458 B.C.E. Instead, the divinities of Greek reli gion, like the humans whose personalities they mimic, have both positive and negative traits and behave now generously, now badly toward the mortals who depend upon them. They can be frightening upon occasion, but never appear in forms that are physically repulsive or grossly deformed. Such an appearance is rather the mark of creatures like those we discussed in chapter 5, or of such mythic monsters as gorgons and harpies.

  That Erinys was originally as complex as any other divinity is also suggested by the opacity of her name, for which, like most Greek gods' names, scholars can find no good, obvious etymology.4 As we have seen several times in this book, demonic creatures and monsters usually have transparent names that express their simple personalities: Morino is literally the "Fearsome One"; Empousa is "She Who Impedes." Surely, if Erinys had never been anything more than a sort of moral bugbear, a demonic policewoman whose only mission in the divine order was to punish those who overstepped behavioral guidelines, her name would clearly reflect this role. In fact, there are several terms for divine or supernatural creatures that do convey such ideas: alastor ("avenger"), palamnaios ("long-remembering [of a crime]"), Praxidikai ("Workers of Justice"). The Erinyes occasionally are referred to by one of these terms, but they remain independent entities, which suggests that their identity was too complex to be completely subsumed within their role as remorseless avengers. Once we have examined Erinys's nature and functions fully, we shall be able to understand better both why Erinys did what she did in her most famous role as an agent and representative of the angry dead, and, by extension, how avenging the dead fit within the broader social code of the Greeks.

  ERINYES AND THE FAMILY

  In Homer, as we have already seen in chapter 4, Erinys and the Erinyes sometimes are associated with avenging the dead. At Althaea's request, for example, Erinys punishes Meleager for killing his uncle. It was this association that led Rohde and other scholars to conclude that the Erinyes were spirits of the dead themselves, rising from the Underworld to wreak their own vengeance.s The connection between the Erinyes and the dead is not ubiquitous, however. Phoenix's father invokes the Erinyes against his son while he is still alive, and Penelope would invoke them against Telemachus if he threw her out of the house.
The gods, who never die, invoke them against one another. In fact, of twelve instances in the Homeric poems that involve Erinys or the Erinyes, only four are instances of dead individuals punishing the living. In addition to their invocation by Althaea, they are invoked by the dead Epicaste against Oedipus, and in two Homeric passages they are called on to witness oaths in their role as "those who avenge the dead who have been forsworn." 6

  To understand the Erinyes, then, we would be wise to look beyond any association they have with the vengeance of the dead. In six of the twelve Homeric passages in which Erinys or the Erinyes are mentioned, the common denominator is a crime or insult that occurs between blood kin: The Erinyes take action when a son steals his father's concubine, a son kills his father and marries his mother, two brothers argue, a son angers his mother, a man kills his mother's brother, or a son chases his mother out of her home.7 Crime between blood kin is by far their pre dominant interest in late archaic and classical myth as well, where they both avenge crimes committed by kin and instigate such crimes by inciting kin to injure one another. Most famously, Erinys or the Erinyes pursue Orestes and Alcmaeon after they have murdered their mothers. They deepen the fratricidal hatred between Polyneices and Eteocles, in some versions of the story, because their father Oedipus has angrily invoked them to do so after his sons have insulted him. Clytemnestra calls on the Erinyes who saw Iphigenia's death to stand by while she murders Agamemnon.' Erinys is described by the tragedians as "destroying the family" (olesioikos), as bringing on "child-slaughtering discord" (paidoletor eris), and as "withering the family line" ( phthersigenes). She delights in blood spilt by relatives (haimata suggona), in strife nurtured in the home, in destroying mothers and children in a single blow, and in obliterating whole houses at once. The Erinyes thrive on kindred murders (suggenes phonos). Generally, as they themselves declare in a famous scene, they are less interested in crimes committed by one spouse against the other-spouses share no blood-but even here they make exceptions when spousal crime threatens to destroy other members of the family who are related by blood. Thus, Erinyes are said to punish the union between a husband and a concubine that will destroy his marriage and put the welfare of his children at risk, or punish a wife's adultery, when it leads to her mistreatment or even murder of her children.9 Of course, they themselves were born as a result of familial crime: they sprang up from the drops of blood spilt when Cronus castrated his father Uranus.10