Helen of Troy

by Jack Lindsay

  In Australia among the tribes, the churingas (other selves, external souls, doubles) were made up in bundles and stowed in a tree during dangerous moments. Compare what Hyginus tells of Zeus: ‘Amaltheia, nurse of the Child Zeus, hung him in a cradle in a tree, so that he might not be found on earth, in sea, or in heaven.’ Victims or sacrifices were hung in trees. (In many parts of the world the custom of hanging a child’s navel-string in a tree to get the child a tree-soul is found; the dead were often put in trees; trophies were hung there; trees over holy wells or springs were particularly chosen for decking with offerings and clothes; teeth or cut hair were secreted in trees for safety from magical attack or appropriation.)[316]

  Kadmos, in founding Thebes, fought a snake or dragon which he pinned to an oak with his spear; from the tree came a voice telling him that he too would take the form of a snake. The snake hanging from the the tree suggests a fillet. Phorbas, till he was killed by Apollo, obstructed the road to Delphoi, made passers fight, then cut off their heads, which he put in a great oak, where they swung in the wind. Hanging is found in initiation ordeals (though not attested in ancient Greece). The Norse Havamal states: ‘I know that I hung full nine nights on the gallows or windy tree wounded by the javelin and given to Othin, myself to myself.’ This passage is best taken as a reference to some such mystery ordeal, in which the initiate became one with the god. Sacrificial hanging in Scandinavia was common. Adam of Bremen says that the great nine-yearly festival at Uppsala the bodies of both human and animal victims were hung in the grove close to the temple; prisoners of war were often thus hanged. Prokopios states that the folk of Thule (Sweden and Norway) most valued the sacrifice of the first prisoner to the war-god ‘by hanging him from a beam, casting him among thorns, or killing him by other horrible methods’. Among the Thracians there was a sort of ordeal game at drinking parties. Men drew lots and the chosen man climbed on an unsteady stone with a noose round his neck and pruning-knife in hand; if he cut himself loose as he fell, he was safe; if he failed, the others laughed at his death as a great joke.[317]

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  The tree-daimōn was essentially female. Dionysos, the child reared by nymphs, was the one great exception, as Attis was the one important male among the hanged deities. In Egypt the tree-goddess suckled the king or the dead man. In the tomb of Thutmosis III we see a breast, extended by an arm, emerge from the sacred tree to feed the king; in the Book of the Dead (Ani’s Papyrus) we see the dead scribe kneel in adoration under the boughs of a large sycamore by the side of a lake; almost hidden in the leafage is the goddess Nut, who holds out a table of food and a vessel of pure water. Aromatic gums, used in temples, held the mother’s power. The virtue of the gum acacia as an amulet among the Semites arose from the belief that the tree was a woman and the gum a clot of her menstrual blood.[318] Coins of Priansos in Crete (c. 430—200 BC) shows a goddess enthroned under a palm tree, caressing the head of a snake; scholars have seen her as Persephone or Hygeia. But what name was given her by the coin-makers? She lies in the line of descent from the Minoan snake-goddess of Knossos, Gournia, Palaikastro: just as Demeter’s attributes of snake, poppy, small beasts, also all lead back to the same point.[319] Coins of Aptera (c. 400-300 BC) show the head of Artemis Aptera with ornamental crown; on the reverse an armed warrior with upraised right hand salutes a sacred tree. At Dreros, where the old Cretan goddess Britomartis kept her identity beside Artemis instead of being absorbed, the citizen-initiates in the oath of their agela swore each to plant an olive tree or meet a fine of fifty staters.[320]

  In the use of various trees or plants for the crowns of winners in ritual games like those of Olympia, which originated and at times carried on as initiation-agones, we see revealed the belief in the great power and virtue of the mother-tree, the presiding nurse-mother daimōn. The leaves enclosed the initiate in the goddess’s vital force which was incarnated in the tree. At Olympia the victor was crowned with olive. The local tradition said that when Rhea bore Zeus she entrusted the child to the Kouretes (the initiates in their daimonic form); they ran a race with a wild-olive crown for the winner; the foliage was so abundant that they slept on the leaves while they were still green. The green leaves, their fragrance and freshness, were the new life that the young men were absorbing and which made them one with the goddess. The victor, escorted to the town-hall, was pelted with leaves. At Sparta the boys, after the day’s racing, slept on rushes from the Eurotas; the ritual significance of the couch being brought home by a taboo on knives for the rush-cutting. Here, also, no offerings were set on a dead man’s tomb; his body was wrapped in a purple military cloak and then laid on olive leaves. Olives stood at the end of the Athenian racecourse, and old men carried olive shoots at the Panathenaia.[321]

  The sacred marriage at Gortyna in Crete was carried out in a tree. A series of fifth-century coins depict stages in the mating, with Zeus as an eagle. The maiden sits lonely in the leafless tree; then she lifts her head and the tree breaks into leaf; a bird comes to perch cautiously as the tree blossoms and fruits; then the maiden is a bride, nympha, raising her head in a gesture characteristic of Hera; she cherishes the bird; she is a royal bride with a sceptre on which is a bird; next the bird is an eagle, overshadowing tree and girl with his wings, while a bull peers through the branches; finally the nymph still sits, alone, in the tree, but an inscription in old Corinthian letters among the boughs reads Tisyroi — nominative plural, not genitive, of place. Tisyroi perhaps means Play of the Tioroi (goat-daimons of fertility) as Satyroi can mean Play of the Satyrs. In any event there is some link intended between the sacred marriage (bird, tree, girl) and the dancing or leaping goat-daimones of natural growth. On the reverse of all the coins is a bull, perhaps indicating a bull sacrifice as part of the dramatic rite, the drōmenon. A bull’s head is at times affixed to the tree-trunk.

  Coins of New Troy support the idea of a bull sacrifice. Here we see Athena Ilias with her fillet-twined spear and her owl; to her right is a pillar from which is hung a bull so that his throat can be easily slit. On another coin the ox (or rather cow) stands free before the goddess who stands on the pillar; on a third coin the latter stands free; on a fourth she stands on a pillar facing a tree from which the cow is hung with its head among the boughs. Behind the cow, apparently seated in the tree, is the sacrificer in short sleeveless chiton; he has seized a horn and is about to cut the cow’s throat; the blood will drench the tree. In this series, goddess, bull or cow, pillar, and tree are all vitally linked or identified. (An inscription from Ilion speaks of ‘the cow’, so we are safe in seeing the victim as female.) A connection with youth initiation is provided by a formula in many ephebic inscriptions about the lads ‘raising up the bulls’.

  The tree at Gortyna is described as an evergreen plane (Helen’s tree), but the coins show a pollarded willow. Both planes and willows grow in damp marshy soil, so that there were no doubt many of them at Gortyna. Theophrastos speaks of the fruitful poplar growing in the mouth of the Idaian Cave, but Plinius seems to have thought it a willow. On Mt Ida Zeus was nursed by Helikē, Willow. Who was the goddess in the tree of Gortyna? As she is possessed by eagle-Zeus, she has been taken as Hera; she has also been identified with Britomartis. But the strongest case can be made for Europa; and it has been asked if Europa or Europeia was a cult-title rightly or wrongly taken to mean the Goddess of the Flourishing Willow-Withies. But whatever the meaning of the name Europa, it seems clear that its holder was at home in Gortyna and that she had taken over the role of a yet older goddess, Hellotis. We need not argue that here Zeus appears as a willow-nursling, the lover of a willow-bride; all we need to say is that Zeus was connected with the willow because he mated with a goddess who had grown up out of herbal magics.

  Who was Hellotis? We are told her earliest home was Gortyna and that the name was given to a myrtle-twined wreath, thirty feet round, carried at the Hellotia. In it with all due care were the bones of Hellotis. The festival was celebrated at Argos and attached to Athena’s cult
at Marathon and Corinth. It must have come from Crete; Europa appears to have entered the mainland by the same routes as Demeter, converging on Attika. The Hellotia seems a woman’s festival like the Thesmophoria, aimed at fertilizing the crops; in both rites the origin may have lain in the old custom of a secret disposal of the katharmata, ritual remains. A scholiast tells us that at the Corinthian festival ‘a certain Hellotis flung herself and her little sister, Chrysē [Golden] on the fire’, and he adds: ‘So katharsia, cleansings, are brought to the goddess’, and are called Hellotia. Yet another burned sister, Eurytione, is mentioned; and it has been suggested that a large puppet, or two large ones and a smaller, were burned, and that a puppet was hidden in the big wreath and later regarded as a relic of the dead heroine. The scholiast derives Hellotis from helos, a fertile marsh, near Marathon (Marsh-meadow), where Athena had a sanctuary. The tale is that when the Dorians burned Corinth down, Hellotis fled into Athena’s temple, where she died with Eurytione. A plague broke out; an oracle said that the spirits of the maidens must be propitiated; so a shrine was built to Athena Hellotis. The connections with fire came out in the torch-race at Corinth in honour of Athena as a goddess of fire.

  The wreath seems a huge example of the sort of garland burned in Greece at midsummer bonfires. At the Thesmophoria pigs were sacrificed to Demeter and Korē, and thrown into chasms; the remains were later fetched up, set on the altar, and mixed with seed to ensure good crops. The bones of the Hellotia may once have been some such remains of sacrificed beasts with special fertilizing powers; the bones of pigs or such creatures may have been carried in the wreath together with katharmata.

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  If we knew what leaves the wreath was made of, we could guess better at Hellotis, who seems the personification of the wreath (the leaves, the tree) in the sacrificial moment of fire. The burnt sacrifice was the ritual common to all Olympians; the parts of a sacrifice that were burned were turned into a savour or force that could rise and reach gods on high. But burnt sacrifices existed before the Olympians, sending their steam and smoke to closer gods. If we can indeed identify Europa-Hellotis with the eagle-mated girl in the willow tree, then we may suspect the wreath was made of willow-withies and thus had affinities with the withy-bonds of Artemis. Recall the attempted derivation from marsh, helos. Only, here, instead of the cult-image of the goddess, there were the bones of her sacrifice, unless we take the ‘bones’ to be a ritual term for a puppet or puppets.[322]

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  The trails we have followed bring out how important were the tree aspects of the Minoan-Mykenean mother-goddess and how they permeated later Greek religion for all the Olympian dominations. Without some fairly detailed examination, any statement about the centrality of tree-cults in the older strata of ritual and myth cannot carry conviction. Helen, with her plane tree and her comfrey or elecampane, is clearly from one point deeply embedded in those cults. ‘We thus come up against the question: did Helen evolve from a heroine into a tree-spirit, or was the process the other way round? Probably in that plain form the question is unanswerable. Helen the tree-goddess has every sign of going back to Minoan-Mykenean times, and Homer sets his heroine in the same period. But that does not necessarily mean that in the thirteenth century BC there was either an historical princess or a nature-goddess, a nurse-nymph linked with initiation rituals, called Helen. Even if the name goes back directly to that period, the situation may even then not have been simple. The union and differentiation of goddess and heroine may have been a highly complex matter. There is no sign of anything like the Erigonē legend, which reveals the impact of the resurgent Dionysian cult on a single locality. But Helen has strong affinities with the Hanged Artemis and with the Ariadne of the thread. However, before we turn to Ariadne, we had better look further at the evidence for a magical relation between nature-goddess and flowers or herbs in early Greek religion and in Mykenean-Minoan art.

  In the Iliad Paian or Paiōn is the medicine-man of the gods. The Odyssey makes him the father of doctors; according to Solon he was their patron. We may assume that doctors constituted a fraternity with its own initiations and hidden lore, like those of all important craftsmen, and that they looked on Paian as their founding ancestor. We find him especially connected with the peony, paionia, a flower-herb with many virtues. Apollo, who finally absorbed him, became a herbalist too, and taught the art to Asklepios and Oinone. In the Iliad Dionē, the old earth-goddess who was made the mother of Aphrodite, tells her wounded daughter how other gods have been hurt, including Hades who was hit in the shoulder by the arrow of Herakles. ‘But Paiēon spread pain-killing pharmaka on him and healed him; for indeed he was in no way of mortal make.’ Later, described in the same terms, he heals Ares. In the Odyssey we are told of Helen’s pharmakon that it came from Egypt where every man is a doctor, ‘for they are of the race of Paiēon’.

  There is no suggestion of Apollo there; and Paiēon has turned up in Linear B, together with Athena, Poseidon and Enyalios. We cannot doubt his role in Homer has been carried on from the Bronze Age. Indeed it has been suggested that the Homeric formula ‘dark-clouded blood’ represents a conflation of blood with the epithet for Zeus: Zeus dark-clouded, blood becoming Zeus, dark-clouded blood. Such a tangle would most likely happen in a situation where a god was wounded by a mortal, eg Hera by Herakles; and it may derive from a Mykenean poem on the wanderings of Herakles brought about by Hera. The argument is somewhat tenuous, but no doubt there is often a long-drawn and complex development behind many terms in Homer. Herbal pharmaka are implied by the terms in which Paieon is described as healing Ares. ‘Just as the juice of the fig quickly thickens the white milk that was liquid, but is soon curdled when a man stirs it, so he quickly healed Ares; and Hebe bathed him...’[323]

  Though Hermes was another patron of herbal magic, most of the practitioners in myth are female. Hekate was inspirer (in one version, mother) of Medeia, the outstanding witch of such lore. Others were Circe, Polydamna, Agamēdē, Perimēdē, Krokodikē, Thrakē, as well as the Telchines (daimonic reflection of certain craft fraternities connected with the great mother). The Hymn to Demeter tells of the goddess, disguised during her quest for the ravished Persephone, offering herself at Eleusis as nurse to Metanirē for the child Demophoon, whom she promises to protect against harmful drugs or spells. ‘Gladly I’ll take the boy to my breast and nurse him. Never indeed through any heedlessness of his nurse will witchcraft harm him, nor yet the Undercutter [herb-cutter]; for I know a counter-charm far stronger than the Woodcutter [herbalist], and I know a potent protection against magic and the pains it inflicts.’ The technical terms are obscure, but the meaning seems as here translated; Demeter is probably referring to convulsions which were popularly thought to be demoniac. She claims that she knows both incantations and herbal recipes more powerful than any that might be used against the child. The link with Minoan Crete appears in the traditions of the Telchines and the Daktyls, in the rich lore inherited by an historical shamanist character such as Epimenides. Demeter in the Hymn came from Crete to Eleusis; and the prominence of the episode of Demophoon in the poem suggests a relation to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Demeter as nurse suggests further a link of herbal magicks with the nymph-nurses.[324]

  Herbal lore and its applications have normally been the provenance of women. In Greece they were especially connected with childbirth and menstruation; the roots of peony, dittany, withy, galingale, pomegranate, lily, myrtle were prominent.[325] Minoan rings show clearly how strong the relation of foliage, fruits, flowers, herbs was to the mother-goddess of those days, and we cannot doubt that the cults gave their initiates a large fund of herbal recipes. A gold ring from Vaphio depicts in the centre a woman bare to the waist, with loose hair; with her left arm outstretched and her right raised, she seems to dance. She looks at a man clad only in a short loincloth who, mounted on a rocky relief on the left, pulls violently at the boughs of a tree planted in a sort of jar; he turns his head away and bends his knee. On the right there seems to be
a woman leaning on a rock and an idol in the field. On a gold ring from Mykenai again a woman in the centre dances, this time with her hands on her hips; her breasts are naked. On the right a man in loincloth or a small animal-skin over his haunches drags towards himself a plant or shrub planted in a sacred enclosure or a large chest. (He seems to uproot it, but this may be the effect of the artist needing to incline the shapes in an oval space.) He kneels as he turns his head round as far as possible. On the left a woman, naked to the waist, leans or seems to lean on a small monument similar to that with the tree. Both women have loosened hair. In the sky there seems to be shown the Milky Way. In another gold ring from Mykenai a woman is seated on a rock under a tree, bare to the waist; she holds a bunch of poppy-heads. Two women, similarly bare, with a small girl mounted on a rock, bring her flowers. In the field are hung bull-heads; in the sky is a shield-figure (a palladion or magical protection?), with double axe, moon, Milky Way (or rainbow) and solar disk (or star of eve). In a gold ring from Isopata, four women, one on a higher level, seem engaged in an orgiastic dance in a field of flowers, bare-breasted, loose-haired. In the field are a small idol, a serpent, a bough (or corn-ear) and perhaps an eye and ear (of the all-hearing, all-seeing deity?).[326]