The Golden Fleece

by Robert Graves

  The land of Phthiotis was at peace for some years and a firm friendship arose between the Minyans and Centaurs, because when Cretheus recalled the Centaurs to their caves on Mount Pelion they doled out grain and edible acorns to the hungry Minyans from their hidden stores and supplied them with venison and other game. Then, when sometimes the Iolcan Fish nymphs stole out of their huts at night to join the Horse men in customary love-orgies on the mountain, their Minyan husbands did not dare to show resentment; and during the sowing festival, and the festival of caprification, these Minyans went out for a holiday to the seashore and did not return until all was over.

  Cretheus died and was succeeded by his son Aeson, whose wife Alcimede was now Priestess in Ino’s place. At the funeral games given in honour of Cretheus a drunken Centaur tried to kill Aeson with a huge earthenware wine jar; Aeson defended himself with a golden one and dashed out the Centaur’s brains. But otherwise the next few years were passed pleasantly without disturbance, until suddenly everything was turned upside-down by the coming of the iron-weaponed Achaeans under the command of Pelias, son of Poseidon. One early morning Cheiron the Centaur from his cave-mouth on Pelion saw a tall cloud of smoke rising from the city of Iolcos, and a palace servant came stumbling up the mountain-path to warn the Centaurs of their danger. He committed to Cheiron’s keeping, in the name of the Goddess, a little fair-haired boy of two years old, dressed in a tunic of purple cloth, who was seated astride his shoulders: Diomedes, the only surviving son of Aeson and Alcimede.

  Cheiron was afraid, yet could not refuse the charge. He gave out to his people that the child Diomedes was one of the Magnesians, sent him for initiation into the rites of the Horse men; for between the Leopard men and Horse men this exchange of courtesies was habitual. He renamed him Jason, which means ‘The Healer’, in the hope though not the confidence that he would one day be the means of restoring peace in Phthiotis.

  Such, at least, is the account of these events that has been handed down to us by a succession of trustworthy poets, who contradict one another only in unimportant particulars. And some say that the trade that Jason plied while he was living on Mount Pelion was that of torch-maker to the Goddess: by her sanction he would wound the pine-tree near the root and after thirteen months cut out, from the part about the wound, the wood impregnated with resin, which he shaped into phallic torches. This he did for three years running, and at last cut out the heart of the tree for the same purpose.

  Chapter Three

  The Rise of the Olympians

  When, moving southward from beyond the river Danube by slow stages, their last headquarters being at Dodona in Epirus, the sturdy Achaean people finally reached the settled parts of Greece, they found many things that displeased their savage hearts as well as many that pleased them. The gracious and well-decorated houses, the strongly walled cities, the swift and commodious ships, inclined them to wonder and even reverence; and they were pleased to vary their diet of roast and boiled meat, milk, cheese, berries, and wild salads, with dried figs, barley-bread, sea-food, and olive oil. But they were astonished and scandalized to find that their cousins, the Ionian and Aeolian Greeks who had entered the country before them, had become softened by long intercourse with the natives. They were not only wearing womanish clothing and jewelry, but seemed to regard women as the holier and more authoritative sex. Almost all the priestly functions were engrossed by women, and even the Greek tribal gods had acknowledged themselves sons and dependents of the Triple Goddess. The Achaeans were disgusted by this discovery, and determined not to fall into the same error as their cousins, over whom their chariots and iron weapons gave them supremacy in battle. In Greece only bronze weapons had been known hitherto, and the horse, a sacred animal, was little used in warfare. The Achaean chariot columns went forward with such speed that each of the walled cities was surprised and occupied in turn before the citizens of the next were fully aware of its danger.

  King Sthenelus, the new Achaean overlord of the Peloponnese, justified his seizure of the throne of Mycenae from the Henetian house of Pelops by denying that his predecessor had a valid title to it: he married Nicippe, a matrilinear descendant of Andromeda, sister of Perseus the Cretan who had founded the city, and ruled in her name.

  Now, the Triple Goddess, who in her character of Mother Rhea had adopted the Greek Sky God, Dios, as a son and had renamed him Zagreus or Zeus, had kept him under control by making him subject to Cronus, her indolent Cretan lover, and by supplying him with several elder brothers, for the most part ancient Pelasgian heroes, the occupants of oracular shrines. Sthenelus and his Achaeans now disavowed the tutelage of Cronus over Zeus and recognized as elder gods, divine brothers of Zeus, only Poseidon and Hades, who had been, like himself, ancient gods of the Greek people. They also denied that Zeus was Zagreus, son of the Triple Goddess: reverting to the ancient Greek fable that he was Dios and had descended from Heaven upon insensate Earth in the form of a thunderbolt, they declared that Earth was not his mother in the sense that he had ever been dependent upon her, and that he was the Supreme and Original God of All Things. But this view was not well received by the Ionians, Aeolians, and Pelasgians, who insisted that he was indeed Cretan Zagreus, the last of the Goddess’s children to be born in the Dictean Cave.

  The Chief Priestess of the Mother Goddess Rhea, in alliance with the Chief Priestess of the Maiden Goddess Athena, sent secret envoys to the Chief Priests of Poseidon and Apollo, urging that Zeus should be deposed from his sovereignty at once, lest a sour monotheistic cult, on the model of that recently established in Egypt by the Pharaoh Akhenaton, should destroy the rich complexity of religious life in Greece: she undertook that when Zeus had been deposed, by a sudden raid upon Dodona, his holiest seat, the Mother Goddess would institute a divine republic of gods and goddesses, all of equal standing, under her own benign presidency. This suggestion was accepted by Poseidon and Apollo, but Sthenelus was informed of the plot in good time, and arresting the Chief Priests and the Chief Priestesses brought them in chains to Mycenae. He did not, however, dare to put them to death, but sent for advice to the Oracle at Dodona. The Oracle ordered that Poseidon and Apollo should be banished from Greece for a full year and become hired servants to foreigners; meanwhile their worship was to be wholly discontinued. This punishment was carried out in the persons of the two Chief Priests: Sthenelus sent them to his ally, King Laömedon of Troy, who employed them as stone-masons to build his palace, but in Trojan style, it is said, cheated them of their pay. By order of the Oracle, Rhea and Athena were punished in another way: their Chief Priestesses were hung up publicly to an oak-tree by their hair, with anvils tied to their feet, until they swore to be of good behaviour. But their worship was not discontinued, for the sake of the harvest.

  The Achaeans found that the Triple Goddess was too powerful for them either to deny or destroy, as they had at first intended, and were for a while at a loss what to do. Then they decided, on behalf of Zeus, to repudiate his former wife, Dione, and force the Goddess into marriage with him, so that he was now to be the Great Father and she merely the mother of his children, no longer the Great Mother. Their decision was generally accepted by the other Greeks, who were cowed by the vengeance taken on Apollo and Poseidon and Rhea and Athena. It was a decision of the greatest importance, since it authorized all fathers to assume the headship of their households and to have the say in matters which hitherto had been left entirely to the discretion of their wives.

  The Thracian War God Ares and a new Smith God, Hephaestus of Lemnos, were declared reborn of this forced union of Zeus and the Triple Goddess. It was further proposed that the God Apollo should be reborn of the same union, but the priestly archers of Apollo opposed this, intending to make the Oracle of Delphi independent of the Goddess, and claimed that he was son to Zeus by another mother, a Quail woman from Ceos named Leto. A similar refusal was made by the adherents of Hermes, formerly a Pelasgian hero charged with authority over his fellow-ghosts, but now promoted to be the Olympian
Herald God; they claimed that Hermes was the son of Zeus by a daughter of the Titans named Maia the Arcadian. The Achaeans accepted both these claims, but denied the claim of Ares, who hated Zeus, to have been born to Hera parthenogenetically; for every god but Zeus, they insisted, must have a father. The Triple Goddess, however, controlled the shrines of numerous other heroes throughout Greece, and since it was found impracticable to close all of them, because of the devotion of the Pelasgian peasantry, she was now, in her new character of consort to Zeus, known only as Hera, the protectress of heroes. In order to limit her powers, it was alleged by the adherents of Zeus that he was the father, by other mothers, of many of these heroes. The conflicting claims caused a deal of religious difference in Greece, and it was rumoured that Hera had withdrawn her favour from all heroes who boasted Zeus to be their father. The Greeks complained that she was a jealous wife and a cruel stepmother.

  Sthenelus now sent envoys to every part of Greece with notice that he intended to call a grand conference on sacred matters, hoping to compose all outstanding differences between the devotees of the various deities of the land. The place appointed was a township near Pisa in the west of the Peloponnese, named Olympia after a near-by hill, the Lesser Mount Olympus; here was a shrine of Mother Rhea, or Ge, the most venerable in Greece. To the conference came all the Greek and Pelasgian religious leaders; they feasted together more amicably than might have been expected and disputed points of theogony and theology. It was first of all debated which deities were worthy to belong to the Divine Family now installed on the Greater Mount Olympus under the sovereignty of Father Zeus. Among those admitted to senior godhead was the repentant Poseidon. Poseidon had been a god of the forests, but the gradual thinning of the forests in the settled parts of Greece made it proper for him to govern some other department of nature as well. He became God of the Sea (as was natural, since ships are built of forest timber and propelled by wooden oars) and was confirmed in his sovereignty of the Sea by a marriage to Amphitrite, the Triple Goddess in her marine character; she became the mother by him of all the Tritons and Nereids. But the thunderbolt with which he had formerly been armed was taken from him and he was given a trident instead, for the spearing of fish; the thunderbolt was reserved by Zeus for his sole use.

  The God Apollo, though not reckoned as a senior, had improved his standing by taking over the greater part of the reverence hitherto owed to the hero Prometheus: he became patron of the Promethean schools of music, astrology, and art which had been founded in the neighbourhood of Delphi long before his arrival there, and adopted the fire-wheel of Prometheus as one of his own emblems.

  The Triple Goddess in her gracious character of Nymph could not be excluded from the Olympian family; but she lost her ancient name, Marianaë, and was forced into ignoble marriage with Hephaestus, the lame, dwarfish, sooty-faced Smith God who had hitherto been regarded merely as a Lemnian hero. She was renamed Aphrodite, the Foam-born One. It was also urged by many voices that the Triple Goddess must be represented on Olympus in her third principal character, that of Maiden, and after some dispute she was admitted as the Maiden Huntress and known as Artemis of the New Moon, for Artemis was the chief name of the Triple Goddess among the Pelasgians; but the new Artemis was reborn as a sister of Apollo by Leto. This concession, however, did not satisfy the Boeotians and Athenians, on whose affections the Maiden Goddess had so powerful a hold in her character of Athena that a second seat on Olympus had to be found for her. After much more dispute she was admitted as Athena, but only on condition that she too suffered a rebirth, denying that she was daughter to the Mother Goddess and alleging that she sprang full-armed from the head of Zeus: this was to be proof that Father Zeus could beget children, even females, without having recourse to the female womb, by an independent act of will. Athena repented of her attempt to overthrow Zeus and became the most dutiful and industrious of all his daughters and his most zealous champion against lawlessness.

  When the question of the Underworld was raised, an attempt was made on behalf of the Triple Goddess, in her character of Mother Hecate, to claim this as her ancient and inalienable possession; but the claim was rejected by the adherents of Zeus, who feared that she might use it as a base of war against Olympus. They awarded it to gloomy Hades, brother to Zeus. However, since it was impossible to keep the Goddess wholly out of the Underworld, she was admitted as the Maiden Persephone, but forced under the harsh tutelage of her uncle Hades and allowed little say in the government of her former dominions. Mother Hecate was treated even more shamefully. Since sacrifices of dogs had been customarily offered her, she became a three-headed dog kennelled at the gate of Hades, and was renamed Cerberus. This award of the Underworld to Hades caused more dissension in Greece than any other decision of the conference, and his union with Persephone was bewailed by the Pelasgians as a rape rather than a marriage.

  The Ionians, when they first acknowledged the authority of the Triple Goddess, had most of them allowed their male children to be initiated into the Pelasgian secret fraternities which assisted in her worship. The Aeolians had done the same. Each fraternity had its demon, incarnate in some beast or bird the flesh of which was death to eat, except on peculiarly solemn occasions; and its members met regularly for festival dances to the demon, in which they imitated the gait and habits of the sacred beast or bird and were disguised in its hide or fur or feathers. Their leader impersonated the demon and was inspired by him. The choice of a fraternity was in some cases made for a child by its mother before birth if a creature, either in dream or in waking life, obtruded itself on her notice; but, in general, the fraternity comprised all the male members of a half-tribe. Thus the Satyrs of Thessaly and the Silenians of Phocis were Goat men; the Centaurs of Pelion, Horse men; some of the Magnesians, Leopard men; the Crisaeans of Phocis, Seal men; and there were Owl men at Athens. The women had similar societies, called sororities, and no woman was permitted by the Goddess to take a lover from the fraternity which matched her sorority – thus Lion might company with Leopardess, and Lioness with Leopard; but not Lion with Lioness or Leopard with Leopardess – which was a rule doubtless designed to bind up the scattered tribes in affectionate harmony, with the pleasant comings and goings that it entailed. But in proof that the demons of each fraternity were subject to the Triple Goddess, there was a yearly holocaust held in her honour: each fraternity sent its sacred male animal, bound, to the nearest of her many mountain sanctuaries, there to be burned alive, all of them together, on a raging bonfire.

  The Achaeans showed a natural suspicion of these demons because of their allegiance to the Triple Goddess and because of the promiscuous love-making that they enjoined on their worshippers. It was the policy of Sthenelus to suppress as many as possible of the societies and to subject the demon of each of those that remained to some member of the Olympian Family. Thus he claimed that Zeus had not only a Ram character, his worshippers having been shepherds, but could be appropriately worshipped as Bull, Eagle, Swan, Dove, and Great Serpent. Hera was permitted to retain power over the Lion, Cuckoo, and Wryneck. To Apollo, who had formerly been a Mouse demon, were granted the additional characters of Wolf, Bee, Dolphin, and Falcon. To Athena were granted the Crow, Heron, and Owl, and later she took the Cuckoo from Hera; to Artemis were granted the Fish, Deer, Dog, and Bear; to Poseidon, the Horse and Tunny; to Hermes, the Lizard and Lesser Serpent; to Ares, the Boar; and so on. The Pelasgians were greatly incensed when Poseidon styled himself the Horse God, and in one of their towns an image of the Mare-headed Mother, called the Furious Mare, was set up in protest; for the horse plainly confesses the sovereignty of the Triple Goddess by the moon-shaped imprint of his hoof.

  These and other confusing changes in the Greek religion, which included the inauguration of a new calendar, were explained to the assembled visitants at Olympia in the solemn spectacle, arranged by the heralds of the God Hermes, which concluded the conference. There was a pantomimic representation of the castration by Zeus of his supposed father Cron
us – after which Zeus was crowned with wild olive and pelted with apple-leaves in congratulation – of the marriage of Hera and Zeus, Poseidon and Amphitrite, Hephaestus and Aphrodite; of the rebirths of Ares, Hephaestus, and Athena; of the Beast and Bird demons making submission each to a new master or mistress – in short, of all the novel mythological happenings now agreed upon. These performances ended with a lively exhibition of the twelve Olympians seated at dinner together, wearing the garbs appropriate to their new characters and attributes. Each deity was represented by some king, priest or priestess; the part of Zeus being taken by Sthenelus of Mycenae, who held in one hand the dog-headed golden sceptre of Perseus, and in the other the Gorgon-faced shield of aversion.

  The Olympic festival was made an occasion for grand athletic contests between young men from every city and colony of Greece: funeral games in honour of Cronus. The contests, known as the Olympic Games, were organized by young Alcaeus of Tiryns, the principal male champion of the Triple Goddess and a matrilinear descendant of Andromeda. He won the straight and the all-in wrestling contests himself. Alcaeus, a man of phenomenal size and strength, and leader of the Bull fraternity of Tiryns, had arrived at Olympia bawling out threats against the Goddess’s enemies; but, like most strong and hot-tempered men, he was easily hoodwinked. The adherents of Zeus plied him with food and drink and allowed him to believe that he had forced many important concessions from them as to the new status of the Goddess – and indeed he had done for her more than any one else had done. He had threatened to wreck the conference chamber with his brass-bound olive club unless it were agreed that the Goddesses in Olympus should not be outnumbered by the Gods. When the Achaeans therefore introduced Ares, Hephaestus, and Hermes into the Olympian family, Alcaeus introduced the Triple Goddess in two more characters: as Demeter the Corn Mother, mother of Persephone, and as Hestia the Goddess of the Hearth. Thus there were six Gods and six Goddesses1 in the new Pantheon. But it was clear to everyone that Alcaeus had been fooled into accepting on behalf of the Triple Goddess far less than her just due; for alike in the Sky, Sea and Underworld, and on the Earth, she was now under male tutelage; and when the Priestess of the Triple Goddess of Olympia sitting, cuckoo-sceptre in hand at the divine feast in Hera’s place, asked him whether he had acted in treachery or stupidity, he shot an arrow clean through her two breasts – a disgraceful deed which brought him the worst of luck. Alcaeus later became famous under his new name of Hercules, or Heracles, which means ‘Glory of Hera’, which he adopted when he quitted the Bull fraternity and became a Lion man, in the hope of placating the Goddess whom he had injured.