2. The myth of her pursuit by Alpheius seems modelled on that of his hopeless pursuit of Arethusa which turned her into a spring and him into a river (Pausanias: v. 7. 2), and may have been invented to account for the gypsum, or white clay, with which the priestesses of Artemis Alpheia at Letrini and Ortygia daubed their faces in honour of the White Goddess. Alph denotes both whiteness and cereal produce: alphos is leprosy; alphe is gain; alphiton is pearl barley; Alphito was the White Grain-goddess as Sow. Artemis’s most famous statue at Athens was called ‘the White-browed’ (Pausanias: i. 26. 4). The meaning of Artemis is doubtful: it may be ‘strong-limbed’, from artemes; or ‘she who cuts up’, since the Spartans called her Artamis, from artao; or ‘the lofty convener’, from airo and themis; or the ‘themis’ syllable may mean ‘water’, because the moon was regarded as the source of all water.
3. Ortygia, ‘Quail Island’, near Delos, was also sacred to Artemis (see 14. a).
4. The myth of Callisto has been told to account for the two small girls, dressed as she-bears, who appeared in the Attic festival of Brauronian Artemis, and for the traditional connexion between Artemis and the Great Bear. But an earlier version of the myth may be presumed, in which Zeus seduced Artemis, although she first transformed herself into a bear and then daubed her face with gypsum, in an attempt to escape him. Artemis was, originally, the ruler of the stars, but lost them to Zeus.
5. Why Brontes had his hair plucked out is doubtful; Callimachus may be playfully referring to some well-known picture of the event, in which the paint had worn away from the Cyclops’ chest.
6. As ‘Lady of Wild Things’, or patroness of all the totem clans, Artemis had been annually offered a living holocaust of totem beasts, birds, and plants, and this sacrifice survived in Classical time at Patrae, a Calydonian city (Pausanias: iv. 32. 6); she was there called Artemis Laphria. At Messene a similar burnt sacrifice was offered to her by the Curetes, as totem-clan representatives (iv. 32. 9); and another is recorded from Hierapolis, where the victims were hung to the trees of an artificial forest inside the goddess’s temple (Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess 41).
7. The olive-tree was sacred to Athene, the date-palm to Isis and Lat. A Middle Minoan bead-seal in my possession shows the goddess standing beside a palm, dressed in a palm-leaf skirt, and with a small palm-tree held in her hand; she watches a New Year bull-calf being born from a date-cluster. On the other side of the tree is a dying bull, evidently the royal bull of the Old Year.
23
HEPHAESTUS’S NATURE AND DEEDS
HEPHAESTUS, the Smith-god, was so weakly at birth that his disgusted mother, Hera, dropped him from the height of Olympus, to rid herself of the embarrassment that his pitiful appearance caused her. He survived this misadventure, however, without bodily damage, because he fell into the sea, where Thetis and Eurynome were at hand to rescue him. These gentle goddesses kept him with them in an underwater grotto, where he set up his first smithy and rewarded their kindness by making them all sorts of ornamental and useful objects.1
One day, when nine years had passed, Hera met Thetis, who happened to be wearing a brooch of his workmanship, and asked: ‘My dear, where in the world did you find that wonderful jewel?’
Thetis hesitated before replying, but Hera forced the truth from her. At once she fetched Hephaestus back to Olympus, where she set him up in a much finer smithy, with twenty bellows working day and night, made much of him and arranged that he should marry Aphrodite.
b. Hephaestus became so far reconciled with Hera that he dared reproach Zeus himself for hanging her by the wrists from Heaven when she rebelled against him. But silence would have been wiser, because angry Zeus only heaved him down from Olympus a second time. He was a whole day falling. On striking the earth of the island of Lemnos, he broke both legs and, though immortal, had little life left in his body when the islanders found him. Afterwards pardoned and restored to Olympus, he could walk only with golden leg-supports.2
c. Hephaestus is ugly and ill-tempered, but has great power in his arms and shoulders, and all his work is of matchless skill. He once made a set of golden mechanical women to help him in his smithy; they can even talk, and undertake the most difficult tasks he entrusts to them. And he owns a set of three-legged tables with golden wheels, ranged around his workshop, which can run by themselves to a meeting of the gods, and back again.3
1. Homer: Iliad xviii. 394–409.
2. Ibid.: i. 586–94.
3. Ibid.: xviii. 368 ff.
1. Hephaestus and Athene shared temples at Athens, and his name may be a worn-down form of hemero-phaistos, ‘he who shines by day’ (i.e. the sun), whereas Athene was the moon-goddess, ‘she who shines by night’, patroness of smithcraft and of all mechanical arts. It is not generally recognized that every Bronze Age tool, weapon, or utensil had magical properties, and that the smith was something of a sorcerer. Thus, of the three persons of the Brigit Moon-triad (see 21. 4), one presided over poets, another over smiths, the third over physicians. When the goddess has been dethroned the smith is elevated to godhead. That the Smith-god hobbles is a tradition found in regions as far apart as West Africa and Scandinavia; in primitive times smiths may have been purposely lamed to prevent them from running off and joining enemy tribes. But a hobbling partridge-dance was also performed in erotic orgies connected with the mysteries of smithcraft (see 92. 2) and, since Hephaestus had married Aphrodite, he may have been hobbled only once a year: at the Spring Festival.
Metallurgy first reached Greece from the Aegean Islands. The importation of finely worked Helladic bronze and gold perhaps accounts for the myth that Hephaestus was guarded in a Lemnian grotto by Thetis and Eurynome, titles of the Sea-goddess who created the universe. The nine years which he spent in the grotto show his subservience to the moon. His fall, like that of Cephalus (see 89. j), Talos (see 92. b) Sciron (see 96. f), Iphitus (see 135. b), and others, was the common fate of the sacred king in many parts of Greece when their reigns ended. The golden leg-supports were perhaps designed to raise his sacred heel from the ground.
2. Hephaestus’s twenty three-legged tables have, it seems, much the same origin as the Gasterocheires who built Tiryns (see 73. 3), being golden sun-disks with three legs, like the heraldic device of the Isle of Man doubtless bordering some early icon which showed Hephaestus being married to Aphrodite. They represent three-season years, and denote the length of his reign; he dies at the beginning of the twentieth year, when a close approximation of solar and lunar time occurs; this cycle was officially recognized at Athens only towards the close of the fifth century B.C., but had been discovered several hundred years before (White Goddess, pp. 284 and 291). Hephaestus was connected with Vulcan’s forges in the volcanic Lipari islands because Lemnos, a seat of his worship, is volcanic and a jet of natural asphaltic gas which issued from the summit of Mount Moschylus had burned steadily for centuries (Tzetzes: On Lycophron 227; Heyschius sub Moschylus). A similar jet, described by Bishop Methodius in the fourth century A.D., burned on Mount Lemnos in Lycia and was still alight in 1801. Hephaestus had a shrine on both these mountains. Lemnos (probably from leibein, ‘she who pours out’) was the name of the Great Goddess of this matriarchal island (Hecataeus, quoted by Stephanus of Byzantium sub Lemnos – see 149. 1).
24
DEMETER’S NATURE AND DEEDS
THOUGH the priestesses of Demeter, goddess of the cornfield, initiate brides and bridegrooms into the secrets of the couch, she has no husband of her own. While still young and gay, she bore Core and the lusty Iacchus to Zeus, her brother, out of wedlock.1 She also bore Plutus to the Titan Iasius, or Iasion, with whom she fell in love at the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia. Inflamed by the nectar which flowed like water at the feast, the lovers slipped out of the house and lay together openly in a thrice-ploughed field. On their return, Zeus guessing from their demeanour and the mud on their arms and legs what they had been at, and enraged that Iasius should have dared to touch Demeter, struck him dead with a thunderbolt. B
ut some say that Iasius was killed by his brother Dardanus, or torn to pieces by his own horses.2
b. Demeter herself has a gentle soul, and Erysichthon, son of Tropias, was one of the few men with whom she ever dealt harshly. At the head of twenty companions, Erysichthon dared invade a grove which the Pelasgians had planted for her at Dotium, and began cutting down the sacred trees, to provide timber for his new banqueting hall. Demeter assumed the form of Nicippe, priestess of the grove, and mildly ordered Erysichthon to desist. It was only when he threatened her with his axe that she revealed herself in splendour and condemned him to suffer perpetual hunger, however much he might eat. Back he went to dinner, and gorged all day at his parents’ expense, growing hungrier and thinner the more he ate, until they could no longer afford to keep him supplied with food, and he became a beggar in the streets, eating filth. Contrariwise, on Pandareus the Cretan, who stole Zeus’s golden dog and thus avenged her for the killing of Iasius, Demeter bestowed the royal gift of never suffering from the belly-ache.3
c. Demeter lost her gaiety for ever when young Core, afterwards called Persephone, was taken from her. Hades fell in love with Core, and went to ask Zeus’s leave to marry her. Zeus feared to offend his eldest brother by a downright refusal, but knew also that Demeter would not forgive him if Core were committed to Tartarus; he therefore answered politically that he could neither give nor withhold his consent. This emboldened Hades to abduct the girl, as she was picking flowers in a meadow – it may have been at Sicilian Enna; or at Attic Colonus; or at Hermione; or somewhere in Crete, or near Pisa, or near Lerna; or beside Arcadian Pheneus, or at Boeotian Nysa, or anywhere else in the widely separated regions which Demeter visited in her wandering search for Core. But her own priests say that it was at Eleusis. She sought Core without rest for nine days and nights, neither eating nor drinking, and calling fruitlessly all the while. The only news she could get came from old Hecate, who early one morning had heard Core crying ‘A rape! A rape!’ but, on hurrying to the rescue, found no sign of her.4
d. On the tenth day, after a disagreeable encounter with Poseidon among the herds of Oncus, Demeter came in disguise to Eleusis, where King Celeus and his wife Metaneira entertained her hospitably; and she was invited to remain as wet-nurse to Demophoön, the newly-born prince. Their lame daughter Iambe tried to console Demeter with comically lascivious verses, and the dry-nurse, old Baubo, persuaded her to drink barley-water by a jest: she groaned as if in travail and, unexpectedly, produced from beneath her skirt Demeter’s own son Iacchus, who leaped into his mother’s arms and kissed her.
e. ‘Oh, how greedily you drink!’ cried Abas, an elder son of Celeus’s, as Demeter gulped the pitcherful of barley-water, which was flavoured with mint. Demeter threw him a grim look, and he was metamorphosed into a lizard. Somewhat ashamed of herself, Demeter now decided to do Celeus a service, by making Demophoön immortal. That night she held him over the fire, to burn away his mortality. Metaneira, who was the daughter of Amphictyon, happened to enter the hall before the process was complete, and broke the spell; so Demophoön died. ‘Mine is an unlucky house!’ Celeus complained, weeping at the fate of his two sons, and thereafter was called Dysaules. ‘Dry your tears, Dysaules,’ said Demeter. ‘You still have three sons, including Triptolemus on whom I intend to confer such great gifts that you will forget your double loss.’
f. For Triptolemus, who herded his father’s cattle, had recognized Demeter and given her the news she needed: ten days before this his brothers Eumolpus, a shepherd, and Eubuleus, a swineherd, had been out in the fields, feeding their beasts, when the earth suddenly gaped open, engulfing Eubuleus’s swine before his very eyes; then, with a heavy thud of hooves, a chariot drawn by black horses appeared, and dashed down the chasm. The chariot-driver’s face was invisible, but his right arm was tightly clasped around a shrieking girl. Eumolpus had been told of the event by Eubuleus, and made it the subject for a lament.
g. Armed with this evidence, Demeter summoned Hecate. Together they approached Helius, who sees everything, and forced him to admit that Hades had been the villain, doubtless with the connivance of his brother Zeus. Demeter was so angry that, instead of returning to Olympus, she continued to wander about the earth, forbidding the trees to yield fruit and the herbs to grow, until the race of men stood in danger of extinction. Zeus, ashamed to visit Demeter in person at Eleusis, sent her first a message by Iris (of which she took no notice), and then a deputation of the Olympian gods, with conciliatory gifts, begging her to be reconciled to his will. But she would not return to Olympus, and swore that the earth must remain barren until Core had been restored.
h. Only one course of action remained for Zeus. He sent Hermes with a message to Hades: ‘If you do not restore Core, we are all undone!’ and with another to Demeter: ‘You may have your daughter again, on the single condition that she has not yet tasted the food of the dead.’
i. Because Core had refused to eat so much as a crust of bread ever since her abduction, Hades was obliged to cloak his vexation, telling her mildly: ‘My child, you seem to be unhappy here, and your mother weeps for you. I have therefore decided to send you home.’
j. Core’s tears ceased to flow, and Hermes helped her to mount his chariot. But, just as she was setting off for Eleusis, one of Hades’s gardeners, by name Ascalaphus, began to cry and hoot derisively. ‘Having seen the Lady Core,’ he said, ‘pick a pomegranate from a tree in your orchard, and eat seven seeds, I am ready to bear witness that she has tasted the food of the dead!’ Hades grinned, and told Ascalaphus to perch on the back of Hermes’s chariot.
k. At Eleusis, Demeter joyfully embraced Core; but, on hearing about the pomegranate, grew more dejected than ever, and said again: ‘I will neither return to Olympus, nor remove my curse from the land.’ Zeus then persuaded Rhea, the mother of Hades, Demeter, and himself, to plead with her; and a compromise was at last reached. Core should spend three months of the year in Hades’s company, as Queen of Tartarus, with the title of Persephone, and the remaining nine in Demeter’s. Hecate offered to make sure that this arrangement was kept, and to keep constant watch on Core.
l. Demeter finally consented to return home. Before leaving Eleusis, she instructed Triptolemus, Eumolpus, and Celeus (together with Diocles, King of Pherae, who had been assiduously searching for Core all this while) in her worship and mysteries. But she punished Ascalaphus for his tale-bearing by pushing him down a hole and covering it with an enormous rock, from which he was finally released by Heracles; and then she changed him into a short-eared owl.5 She also rewarded the Pheneations of Arcadia, in whose house she rested after Poseidon had outraged her, with all kinds of grain, but forbade them to sow beans. One Cyamites was the first who dared do so; he has a shrine by the river Cephissus.6
m. Triptolemus she supplied with seed-corn, a wooden plough, and a chariot drawn by serpents; and sent him all over the world to teach mankind the art of agriculture. But first she gave him lessons on the Rarian Plain, which is why some call him the son of King Rarus. And to Phytalus, who had treated her kindly on the banks of the Cephissus, she gave a fig-tree, the first ever seen in Attica, and taught him how to cultivate it.7
1. Aristophanes: Frogs 338; Orphic Hymn li.
2. Homer: Odyssey v. 125–8; Diodorus Siculus: v. 49; Hesiod: Theogony 969 ff.
3. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 167; Hyginus: Fabula 250; Callimachus: Hymn to Demeter 34 ff.; Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 11,; Pausanias: x. 30. 1.
4. Hyginus: Fabula 146; Diodorus Siculus: v. 3; Scholiast on Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus 1590; Apollodorus: i. 5. 1; Scholiast on Hesiod’s Theogony 914; Pausanias: vi. 21. 1 and i. 38. 5; Conon: Narrations 15; Homeric Hymn to Demeter 17.
5. Apollodorus: i. 5. 1–3 and 12; Homeric Hymn to Demeter 398 ff. and 445 ff.
6. Pausanias: viii. 15. 1 and i. 37. 3.
7. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 231–74; Apollodorus: i. 5. 2; Orphic Fragment 50; Hyginus: Fabula 146; Ovid: Metamorphoses v. 450-563 and Fasti i
v. 614; Nicander: Theriaca; Pausanias: i. 14. 2 and 37. 2.
1. Core, Persephone, and Hecate were, clearly, the Goddess in Triad as Maiden, Nymph, and Crone, at a time when only women practised the mysteries of agriculture. Core stands for the green corn, Persephone for the ripe ear, and Hecate for the harvested corn – the ‘carline wife’ of the English countryside. But Demeter was the goddess’s general title, and Persephone’s name has been given to Core, which confuses the story. The myth of Demeter’s adventure in the thrice-ploughed fields points to a fertility rite, which survived until recently in the Balkans: the corn-priestess will have openly coupled with the sacred king at the autumn sowing in order to ensure a good harvest. In Attica the field was first ploughed in spring; then, after the summer harvest, cross-ploughed with a lighter share; finally, when sacrifices had been offered to the Tillage-gods, ploughed again in the original direction during the autumn month of Pyanepsion, as a preliminary to sowing (Hesiod: Works and Days 432–3, 460, 462; Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris 69; Against Colotes 22).
The Greek Myths Page 11