The History of Greek Religion in the Dark Age
It remains to get on with the task of reconstructing the history of the Dark Age, as it is told through Greek mythology.
(1) Pausanias. A source of vast importance, a repository of data, has survived the ravages of time—this is the Guide to Greece by Pausanias. Pausanias may be looked upon as a religious anthropologist. He went personally to those places in Greece that he says he went to and recorded from first-hand what he saw by way of monuments and artefacts; he investigated accounts and customs concerning local traditions and religious practices. He wove into the account of his journeys material that stems from the literary heritage that he judged pertinent to the subject in hand. Pausanias is a pagan who believes in sacrifice, but he subscribes to the equally pagan tradition of the substitution of animal and non-blood sacrifices for human ones. He is explicit that these are substitutions for original human sacrifices. Within the confines of his cognition, which is reformed pagan, he is an extremely intelligent observer. It is for us a gift of inestimable value that such a patient work of religious anthropology was constructed during the classical era. For first-hand observation, recording of local traditions and recording of literary tradition he is reliable. So far as literary tradition goes, he does not evaluate his sources and tends to think that everything “old” is divinely inspired, so the material in that respect becomes a repository of mythologems, which we must analyse and evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
(2) First and second-order mythography. Men like Apollodorus (sometimes called “pseudo-Apollodorus”) and Hyginus may be designated as first level mythographers—that is, researchers whose aim is to record rather than analyse myth. They are repositories of mythologems. Material in Strabo relating to mythology may be classified as the work of religious anthropology. Diodorus Siculus is a second level mythographer, that is, one who builds or imposes a theory upon mythology—a salient feature of his interpretation is that he is a Euhemerist, namely that he believes that all gods originated as human beings, which was a complex position of pagan faith. One notes that J.G. Frazer was also a Euhemerist writing from the perspective of modern scientific rationalism. Some recognition of the existence of man-gods and women-goddesses inevitably arises when studying mythologems; for the incarnate kings, queens, priests and priestesses are instances of gods and goddesses, and vice-versa. It is impossible to conduct second-order mythography without constructing history too, because mythologems must correspond to a material reality as well as a spiritual one, which is a conclusion that can be avoided only by ignoring the data. If you look at it at all, you arrive at the same position.
The distinction between first-order and second-order mythography is not sharp. Whereas Apollodorus and Hyginus are largely repositories of mythologems, they too have selected from the available material, written accounts and provided an organisation, which in their cases is genealogical. Hence, they are interpreting and cannot avoid second-order mythography.
(3) Mythologems present in pre-crisis Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture. By the phrase “survival of Minoan-Mycenaean religion” both continuity and uniformity are implied, but this is only partially justified; there is also discontinuity. That the Mycenaeans had musical and dancing entertainments can be inferred from the remains of musical instruments—mankind has always had music. That they had an epic poetry cannot be inferred. Linear B was a language of accounting unlikely to have been used for literature. On the other hand, supposing they did have an epic tradition, the literature of Egypt and the Near East (Sinuhe, c,1875 Gilgamesh c,1800) is useful in establishing an upper limit on what any Mycenaean literature could have looked like. Concerning the Epic of Gilgamesh especially: (a) it combines a species of “wisdom literature” with underlying mythologems; at the literary level, the “author” omits no occasion to turn the story into a moral tale. The worldly achievements of Gilgamesh are praised, but no opportunity is spared to point out that Gilgamesh was in truth a fool and throughout his whole life, right to the end, an infantile personality. We infer that ideation of this type of wisdom literature was already possible in Mycenaean culture, though not attested. (b) The myth records that Sumerian/Akkadian society was originally a matriarchy in which the king as priest married the Goddess, Ishtar, and was expected to pay the penalty as a ritual sacrifice. (It is known from the excavations at Ur by Wooley that the Sumerians did practice human retinue sacrifice.) The underlying mythologem represents Gilgamesh as an instance of the dying vegetation god. (c) The epic records a historic revolution in religion as the king released himself from his “obligation” to die. (d) It records also a development of the original rite in which the king as sacrificial-bull is replaced by a ritual contest between two heroes: here Gilgamesh and Enkidu. In the first revision the one kills the other, and the victor becomes king; this is shown in the episode with the giant Humbaba, who guards the Cedar forest, whom together Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaughter. In the epic when Ishtar offers to marry Gilgamesh, Gligamesh refuses her, roundly insulting her for killing all her lovers. Then Ishtar calls for the Bull of Heaven to destroy Gilgamesh, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull. Enlil decides that in retribution one of the two heroes must die. From all of this, we may infer that it was possible in Mycenaean society that the original right of the Goddess to demand the life of her “priest-king” as incarnation of Dionysus may have been transmuted into a ritual involving a contest between two rival claimants. The story is the same as the one which J.G. Frazer made the foundation of his The Golden Bough and is strong confirmation of his conclusions. The references in the work to ritual slayings are numerous, and the connection between death and marriage to the Goddess cannot be avoided. (e) We have also the explicit rejection of human sacrifice by the High God. Gilgamesh and Enkidu sacrifice Humbaba and set his head before Enlil. “Enlil raged at them. ‘Why did you do this thing? From henceforth may the fire be on your faces, may it eat the bread that you eat, may it drink where you drink’.” (f) There are many other mythologems in the epic.
Gilgamesh slaying the Bull of Heaven. Illustration based on Mesoptamian terracotta relief, 2250—1900.
In view of this image, and many others like it, and of Near Eastern depictions of the Goddess as “Mistress of the Animals”, it is hard not to see Minoan religion as in direct descent from Near Eastern religion as a whole. The victim, impersonating the outgoing spirit of vegetation, was looked upon as a sacrificial bull, and named as such. While in reality the conflict took place between two men, religious sensibility early on encoded this as a ritual conflict between a man and a bull-man.
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In the Story of Sinuhe, Sinuhe is an exile from his native Egypt. This narrative reads as closely to contemporary literature as may be, though with Egyptian preoccupations, such as a longing to return to one’s homeland and to achieve a fitting monument for a tomb, but there are mythological elements too. One of these is a doublet of the mythologem of the contest for a tribal crown—Sinuhe must “fight with a mighty man of Retenu”—and we may infer that this was a ritual genuinely practised in the Phoenician community which Sinuhe as exile had joined. There is also the mythologem of matrilineal descent, for Sinuhe is promoted to the position of tribal chief by being married to the eldest daughter of the headman of Retenu.
(4) Mythologems of the Minoan and Mycenaean phases. From the iconography in the material record for the Mycenaean-Minoan epochs we infer that their chief deity was the Goddess, to whom there was a subordinate God, Dionysus. All other gods and goddesses are instantiations of these two concepts; there are no other deities, and Olympian religion has not yet appeared, which is the fundamental discontinuity. The iconography is consistent with the element that has appeared in both Gilgamesh and Sinuhe, the substitution of a ritual contest between two men for the right to rule—we have numerous depictions of combat between two warriors from the Mycenaean phase (c.1380—c.1200). Greek myth contains innumerable instances of (a) the Goddess, (b) the ritual murder of the vegetation god-king, which is expressed in the mythologem of abduction, and (c) the ritual trial by combat. In addition, this trial by combat is associated with (d) the right to rule by marriage to the “daughter of the king” or equivalent, which represents matrilineal succession. The mythologem of succession through trial by combat followed by marriage to the heiress is concealed by the later patriarchal gloss that the heiress is the “daughter of the king”; hence, by the fiction of patrilineal descent.
Therefore, we may assign to the Minoan-Mycenaean phases all those mythologems in Greek religion that express these four ideas. Any material that is related to these four mythologems by its internal connection also belongs to these layers. In relation to the mythologem of kingly succession we find (e) the mythologem of descent from a male god, or, equivalently, of adoption by the king, or of dual parentage. In a later period the adoption ritual is attested in Etruscan iconography, where it is associated with the adoption of the king as “Hercule” subject to the Goddess, thus tied to the mythological “site” of Heracles. The mythological site of the Heavenly Twins, the Dioskouroi, is illuminated by this analysis. The motif of heavenly twins is a structure original to the Indo-European heritage, but it was submerged or transformed on contact with the Mediterranean culture. The two twins, one with heavenly father, the other with mortal father, is a complex expression of all the ideas above: (i) as a suppressed instance of two men twined through their trial by combat such that one must die; (ii) divine descent and adoption, one has a divine father, the other has a mortal father; (iii) the abduction mythologem; though often transposed by later patriarchy—as either the heavenly twins are together abducting one or more maidens, or they battle against the abductor or abductors. The myth of the Spartan Dioscouri, Castor and Pollux, fantastically combines all these ideas. Upon these layers, other layers are constructed—such as cattle-rustling; these are assigned to a later epoch.
Mythologems shall be identified by epoch (I—VI) (defined on page 4) and likely order of historical appearance (1,2,3, ...). We have: (I.1) Mythologem of the cosmological primacy of the Goddess, which expresses the theology of Gaism. (I.2) Mythologem of abduction: the ritual murder of the vegetation god-king; myth of Dionysus; mythologem of resurrection. (II.1) Mythologem of succession through trial by combat. (II.2) Mythologem of succession by right of marriage. (II.3) Mythologem of dual parentage, adoption, or divine parentage.
Not only do all these mythologems already appear in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is very early, implicit in these mythologems is a historical evolution. We infer that the first two, the Goddess and abduction mythologems, belong to an earlier stage of religious development than the latter three. Within the first two mythologems, we also see indications of the underpinning ideology—that this is a religion of vegetation—and that the priest king as embodiment of Dionysus died for the sake of fertile crops or the fecundation of nature. Bound with this is (II.4) the mythologem of the culture hero. In this the hero is associated with the Goddess as the bringer of cultivation. This mythologem is a later doublet of the mythologem of the Goddess, for it affirms her cosmological primacy, and is its real meaning: the Goddess comes first because all crops, animals and good things whatsoever are owing to Her. Implicit in these mythologems above are other ideas: (i) the right of the king to rule; hence some form of (ii) patrilineal descent, but only won by victory in (iii) ritual (bull) games. Trial by combat, for instance, established the right of the king to rule through marriage to the heiress conducted through a public spectacle or games dedicated to the vegetation god. Hence, we add (III.1) the mythologem of (bull) games, which we may also call, the mythologem of the Minotaur. This is the distinctive contribution of the Minoan phase.
(5) The concept of “murder”. The mythologem of trial by combat could also be designated the mythologem of “murder”, for it finds expression in the almost universal instance of the killing—“murder”—of one hero by another. We regard murder as an intentional crime committed for some personal motive, an action of an individual. The concept of “intention” does not belong to the ideation of primitive materialism and we never see any hero or person accused of murder in Greek mythology. We know from a C5 Athenian inscription on a stone stele that under the Draconian code of laws punishment for unintentional homicide was exile. This is probably the first appearance in the history of ideas of the distinction between intentional and unintentional killing. The laws are dated to c.624. Greek myth treats all killing as expressions of ritual slaying, not instigated by what we would call personal motives, not punishable as such, but as actions done at the behest of the gods, possibly through madness and/or possession, or simply because some god has decreed it as fate. The one who does the slaying is as much an object of pity and veneration as the victim, if not more so, since the victim, dead, has already achieved heroic status, while the slayer, as hero, must carry on living. Slaying as a motif points to the mythologem of succession through trial by combat, which shows us that any slaying was regarded as performed as a religious duty. One king had to be replaced by another, and the fundamental pattern is that the slayer simply replaces the slain as king. This mythologem is repeated so often as to indicate a normative behaviour of great antiquity. We see it in the myth of Pelops and Hippodamia, where Pelops not only kills Oenomaus, the father of Hippodamia, himself a notorious slayer of her suitors, but breaks his oath given to the charioteer Myrtilus and brutally slays him. It is from this myth that we obtain (IV.1) the mythologem of the curse. These actions would condemn Pelops according to our ideas of justice; all that happens in the mythological account is that Pelops obtains ritual purification from Hephaestus (a god?), returns to Pisa, marries Hippodamia, succeeds as king, and becomes so great a monarch that the whole peninsular is named after him—the Peloponnese—he is venerated as a hero. The rite of ritual purification is so prevalent in sources that we would regard as historical that it must have been an ancient custom: someone who has slain another goes in exile to another country, where he obtains ritual purification from the king of that country. In this we see: (IV.2) the mythologem of ritual purification: when one hero slays another, he either goes into voluntary exile or is driven into exile by the community; he is purified by another king, whom he succeeds as king.
(4) Mythologems of the Minoan and Mycenaean phases. From the iconography in the material record for the Mycenaean-Minoan epochs we infer that their chief deity was the Goddess, to whom there was a subordinate God, Dionysus. All other gods and goddesses are instantiations of these two concepts; there are no other deities, and Olympian religion has not yet appeared, which is the fundamental discontinuity. The iconography is consistent with the element that has appeared in both Gilgamesh and Sinuhe, the substitution of a ritual contest between two men for the right to rule—we have numerous depictions of combat between two warriors from the Mycenaean phase (c.1380—c.1200). Greek myth contains innumerable instances of (a) the Goddess, (b) the ritual murder of the vegetation god-king, which is expressed in the mythologem of abduction, and (c) the ritual trial by combat. In addition, this trial by combat is associated with (d) the right to rule by marriage to the “daughter of the king” or equivalent, which represents matrilineal succession. The mythologem of succession through trial by combat followed by marriage to the heiress is concealed by the later patriarchal gloss that the heiress is the “daughter of the king”; hence, by the fiction of patrilineal descent.
Therefore, we may assign to the Minoan-Mycenaean phases all those mythologems in Greek religion that express these four ideas. Any material that is related to these four mythologems by its internal connection also belongs to these layers. In relation to the mythologem of kingly succession we find (e) the mythologem of descent from a male god, or, equivalently, of adoption by the king, or of dual parentage. In a later period the adoption ritual is attested in Etruscan iconography, where it is associated with the adoption of the king as “Hercule” subject to the Goddess, thus tied to the mythological “site” of Heracles. The mythological site of the Heavenly Twins, the Dioskouroi, is illuminated by this analysis. The motif of heavenly twins is a structure original to the Indo-European heritage, but it was submerged or transformed on contact with the Mediterranean culture. The two twins, one with heavenly father, the other with mortal father, is a complex expression of all the ideas above: (i) as a suppressed instance of two men twined through their trial by combat such that one must die; (ii) divine descent and adoption, one has a divine father, the other has a mortal father; (iii) the abduction mythologem; though often transposed by later patriarchy—as either the heavenly twins are together abducting one or more maidens, or they battle against the abductor or abductors. The myth of the Spartan Dioscouri, Castor and Pollux, fantastically combines all these ideas. Upon these layers, other layers are constructed—such as cattle-rustling; these are assigned to a later epoch.
Mythologems shall be identified by epoch (I—VI) (defined on page 4) and likely order of historical appearance (1,2,3, ...). We have: (I.1) Mythologem of the cosmological primacy of the Goddess, which expresses the theology of Gaism. (I.2) Mythologem of abduction: the ritual murder of the vegetation god-king; myth of Dionysus; mythologem of resurrection. (II.1) Mythologem of succession through trial by combat. (II.2) Mythologem of succession by right of marriage. (II.3) Mythologem of dual parentage, adoption, or divine parentage.
Not only do all these mythologems already appear in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is very early, implicit in these mythologems is a historical evolution. We infer that the first two, the Goddess and abduction mythologems, belong to an earlier stage of religious development than the latter three. Within the first two mythologems, we also see indications of the underpinning ideology—that this is a religion of vegetation—and that the priest king as embodiment of Dionysus died for the sake of fertile crops or the fecundation of nature. Bound with this is (II.4) the mythologem of the culture hero. In this the hero is associated with the Goddess as the bringer of cultivation. This mythologem is a later doublet of the mythologem of the Goddess, for it affirms her cosmological primacy, and is its real meaning: the Goddess comes first because all crops, animals and good things whatsoever are owing to Her. Implicit in these mythologems above are other ideas: (i) the right of the king to rule; hence some form of (ii) patrilineal descent, but only won by victory in (iii) ritual (bull) games. Trial by combat, for instance, established the right of the king to rule through marriage to the heiress conducted through a public spectacle or games dedicated to the vegetation god. Hence, we add (III.1) the mythologem of (bull) games, which we may also call, the mythologem of the Minotaur. This is the distinctive contribution of the Minoan phase.
(5) The concept of “murder”. The mythologem of trial by combat could also be designated the mythologem of “murder”, for it finds expression in the almost universal instance of the killing—“murder”—of one hero by another. We regard murder as an intentional crime committed for some personal motive, an action of an individual. The concept of “intention” does not belong to the ideation of primitive materialism and we never see any hero or person accused of murder in Greek mythology. We know from a C5 Athenian inscription on a stone stele that under the Draconian code of laws punishment for unintentional homicide was exile. This is probably the first appearance in the history of ideas of the distinction between intentional and unintentional killing. The laws are dated to c.624. Greek myth treats all killing as expressions of ritual slaying, not instigated by what we would call personal motives, not punishable as such, but as actions done at the behest of the gods, possibly through madness and/or possession, or simply because some god has decreed it as fate. The one who does the slaying is as much an object of pity and veneration as the victim, if not more so, since the victim, dead, has already achieved heroic status, while the slayer, as hero, must carry on living. Slaying as a motif points to the mythologem of succession through trial by combat, which shows us that any slaying was regarded as performed as a religious duty. One king had to be replaced by another, and the fundamental pattern is that the slayer simply replaces the slain as king. This mythologem is repeated so often as to indicate a normative behaviour of great antiquity. We see it in the myth of Pelops and Hippodamia, where Pelops not only kills Oenomaus, the father of Hippodamia, himself a notorious slayer of her suitors, but breaks his oath given to the charioteer Myrtilus and brutally slays him. It is from this myth that we obtain (IV.1) the mythologem of the curse. These actions would condemn Pelops according to our ideas of justice; all that happens in the mythological account is that Pelops obtains ritual purification from Hephaestus (a god?), returns to Pisa, marries Hippodamia, succeeds as king, and becomes so great a monarch that the whole peninsular is named after him—the Peloponnese—he is venerated as a hero. The rite of ritual purification is so prevalent in sources that we would regard as historical that it must have been an ancient custom: someone who has slain another goes in exile to another country, where he obtains ritual purification from the king of that country. In this we see: (IV.2) the mythologem of ritual purification: when one hero slays another, he either goes into voluntary exile or is driven into exile by the community; he is purified by another king, whom he succeeds as king.
The theme of dismemberment in Minoan-Mycenaean seal stones.
The deflecting of guilt is seen in the motif of accidental slaying—for instance, when Perseus throws a discus at the celebration of a games, it strikes his father, Acrisius, and accidentally kills him. This motif is most likely to be a later patriarchal gloss on the underlying mythologem of trial by combat; Perseus kills his father and succeeds him, according to ancient tradition; but a later age, “horrified” by the thought of patricide, transmutes the rite into an accident.
Another mythologem arising in this context is: (IV.3) the mythologem of the trial of the instrument of murder. In the genuinely archaic trial of the instrument of murder, a king or hero is slain by another hero, who is destined to succeed him, but it is the weapon that is ritually tried for murder and acquitted. Extraordinary as it may be, this is likely to be the origin of murder trials, historically instituted at the court of the Areopagus in Athens. Thus, the very concept of murder arises through the transmutation of an underlying mythologem in which no idea of motive, intentional act or human guilt is overtly presented. This mythologem of the trial is also related to the yet darker (V.1) mythologem of the scapegoat, or Pharmakos. In this a victim, selected to bear the guilt of the community, is driven out and ritually killed. This is likely to be a mythologem belonging to the disturbed times of the Dark Age, for in it we see yet again a substitution of one ritual (the slaying of the king) by another (the slaying of a victim, chosen on arbitrary criteria) and it is not the sort of thing that belongs to the ordered society, such as we picture the Mycenaean to be. (For the details of the Pharmakos ritual, I refer the reader to Burkert, Greek Religion, 4.5)
Another mythologem arising in this context is: (IV.3) the mythologem of the trial of the instrument of murder. In the genuinely archaic trial of the instrument of murder, a king or hero is slain by another hero, who is destined to succeed him, but it is the weapon that is ritually tried for murder and acquitted. Extraordinary as it may be, this is likely to be the origin of murder trials, historically instituted at the court of the Areopagus in Athens. Thus, the very concept of murder arises through the transmutation of an underlying mythologem in which no idea of motive, intentional act or human guilt is overtly presented. This mythologem of the trial is also related to the yet darker (V.1) mythologem of the scapegoat, or Pharmakos. In this a victim, selected to bear the guilt of the community, is driven out and ritually killed. This is likely to be a mythologem belonging to the disturbed times of the Dark Age, for in it we see yet again a substitution of one ritual (the slaying of the king) by another (the slaying of a victim, chosen on arbitrary criteria) and it is not the sort of thing that belongs to the ordered society, such as we picture the Mycenaean to be. (For the details of the Pharmakos ritual, I refer the reader to Burkert, Greek Religion, 4.5)
The treatment of “murder” is also exemplified in the (V.2) mythologem of madness, which is connected to (V.3) the mythologem of child sacrifice. The hero is the son of Zeus by some other goddess, nymph or maiden. As the victim of the jealousy of Hera, he is driven mad and murders his children. This is seen in the myth of the madness of Heracles. The interesting feature of this mythologem is that after the “crime” has been committed, the hero receives the sympathy of all spectators. Heracles, whom we would call a criminal of the most abject kind, a mass murderer of his own children, remains a hero. The mythologem was exploited by later Dorian (Spartan) bias to serve as an aetiological explanation for why Heracles did not become king at Tiryns; in expiation of his guilt (a later concept) he must serve the debased, inferior usurper of the throne, Eurystheus, and perform ten labours. The crime is transmuted into the aetiological basis of his heroic saga; but all of this belongs to a much later period. The fixing of the canon of the expanded Twelve Labours of Heracles is the work specifically of Pisander of Rhodes, c.650. Heracles was even later transmuted into the archetype of the superhero with an ethical mission; this belongs to the period c.400. The superhero archetype exemplified by Heracles continues to this very day to be a prominent feature of culture, or we might say, of contemporary religion.
(6) The Bull Games. Already by the Minoan phase the Bull Games (Minotaur) is predominantly attested. If we assume that Minoan-Mycenaean culture was broadly “in step” with Near Eastern culture, we infer that already the Minotaur Games (phase III) are a transformed ritual stemming out of earlier rites: that is, the bull game is a substitute for trial by combat. The coming of the Greeks (“Hellenes”, Indo-Europeans) into the Greek mainland is associated with that transition between the first and second phases; as a speculation only (not original to this paper) the Greeks established themselves as overlords and at the same time (what may be original to this paper) adopted the custom from the Near East of trial by combat, an early form of compromise between the religion of the Goddess and anything distinctive they might have brought with them. In accordance with the analysis of Dumezil those distinctive features included: (i) a high storm god, Dyeus = Zeus, (ii) twin gods, later fused with the Dioskouroi, (iii) a goddess of the Dawn (Hausos = Eos), (iv) a threefold tribal structure. We may add: (v) an annual tribal assembly, called in Greek apellai, from which the Greek god, Apollo is derived. All of these features were absorbed by the dominant pre-Greek culture, here denoted “Pelasgian” after classical Greek thinkers. Though submerged, the Indo-European structures may have formed the nucleus of later religious developments; in Homer we see the Zeus-Eos pair emerge as the vehicle of divine patriarchal justice and its messenger. Everything we have seen so far affirms that patriarchal religion arose both as a result of the external fusion of Indo-European with Mediterranean culture, and as an internal development of Mediterranean/Near-Eastern culture.
It is a cornerstone of the historical analysis of the ancient world, and that explanation of the Bronze Age Collapse which makes the idea of a “system collapse” central, that the economy of the Mediterranean and Near East was an instance of “globalization”. This is a well-supported theory (for example, Cline, 1177 B,C. The Year that Civilization Collapsed). We expect the Minoan-Mycenaean culture to be in step with that of the Near East, and especially that of Egypt. In Egypt a developed matriarchy had emerged, and the ritual associated with matriarchy, sacrifice of the vegetation god (Osiris), was by magic rites substituted by the burial of clay statues. There is no evidence for such practice in Minoan culture. Concerning the Minoan phase, we see from the iconography that the celebration of the bull games was their central religious rite. I infer that the bull games did for Minoan culture what statues and the Book of the Dead did for Egyptian culture; hence, the bull games are a form of transmuted ritual sacrifice.
We can meet firmly the demand for evidence of human sacrifice in early Greek culture. It is not disputed that the Minoans did practice bull games, in which both young men and young women (wearing male clothing) would leap over a charging bull. It is not possible that every young man or woman, however well-prepared and trained for the demanding physical feat, survived. We have icons depicting the gory results of such “failures”. It is not the successes but the failures that are the whole point of the rite, for it is the sacrifice and the shedding of the blood that meets the demands of the Goddess. Hence, there is incontrovertible evidence in the iconography of Minoan culture and in the mythologems deposited in Greek culture for the early practice, albeit already transmuted, of human sacrifice within the context of the vegetation religion of the Goddess.
Once we realise that human sacrifice as a rite also has a history, and that by the period where we encounter written evidence for it what we are seeing is nothing like the “pure rite” upon which it is predicated, then we realise that in the historical period we are seeing debased forms not far in their practice from utilitarian bargains with the underworld, or expressions of sheer uncomprehending cruelty. Then it follows that every act of cruelty in the ancient world is an expression of human sacrifice, albeit in debased form.
(7) The dark character of Greek myth. Very little of the Homeric cycle derives from Mycenaean oral tradition. We postulate a tradition of epic oral poetry predating Homer and observe that nearly all the names mentioned in that part of the Iliad that we call the Catalogue of Ships (Book 2) belong to real cities and towns of the Mycenaean period, as attested by archaeology. This establishes a bare continuity between the two ages, and is very important evidence for that continuity, which must be postulated as the vector of the oral tradition expressed in the mythologems; but there is only a reminiscence that such-and-such citadels and towns have been long established, that Mycenae was greatest among them, a bare recollection that there was a period of greater glory; but as to details, very bare indeed. There is no evidence in the material record for any such epic legends as belonging to that epoch. There is one survival Mycenaean image depicting a siege, but that does not amount to any firm ground on which to establish a heroic saga. Any appearance of Mycenaean Greece in Hittite written records does not indicate that Mycenae was constantly engaged in international wars; some minor interference in the Hittite sphere of interest is all that is attested. (The references to Mycenaean Greece in Hittite records are contested.) The appearance of Mycenaean Greece in Egyptian records confirms it enjoyed peaceful relations with Egypt and was a part of its extensive “global” trade network, operating out of the entrepot Ugarit. It is generally recognised that Homer’s knowledge of Mycenaean battle is scant, and more the sort of thing that would arise from clever visualisation of past times, such as we also go in for with our Arthurian cycle from the creations of the Troubadours down to Tennyson. That Homer’s language is archaic is not proof that it hails from Mycenaean literature, for it is also poetic, which implies artificial.
The atmosphere and ethos of Greek mythology is excessively disturbed and violent, and not at all what we would expect from the Mycenaean culture. Although Mycenaean citadels are heavily fortified, the obstacles to land invasion and the impression of sophisticated bureaucracy does not suggest widespread breakdown of “law and order” such as we see in the background of Greek myth. Fortifications may also be constructed against internal enemies as well as external ones, and act as symbols of social power. The picture in Greek myth is of many commercial kingdoms administered out of palace centres. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Mycenaean administrations were limited to regions in the vicinity of the huge palaces, and that other parts of Greece were less accessible and more rural. We may hypothesise a village based tribal culture for these places and that these tribal communities were less bureaucratic and more religiously conservative. The violent and dark background to Greek myth might hail from traditions of the less cultivated rural parts of Mycenaean Greece, but because it is universal and not offset by any hint of the Mycenaean palace organisation, it is more likely to hail from the Dark Age itself.
By the Late Bronze Age, and at the inception of the Bronze Age Collapse, Mycenaean Greece had developed elite military and religious hierarchies. There were governors, country lords, military commands and lieutenants. There was also a priestly elite. Female membership of the elite was closely related to religious function. Subordinate to a given priestess there were female “key-holders”, “attendants”, “servants of the god” and other functionaries. All these personages were major land-owners and owners of other persons designated as “slaves”. Recruitment to the elite is obscure. The mythologems of matrilineal and divine descent tell us that most men did not know who their father was, which is consistent with the tablets; most men were brought up by their mothers alone. Procreation among the lower classes would then be consequences of the orgiastic aspects of religious festivals. Egyptian and Mesopotamian nobles do trace their descent both by father and mother; hence, it is reasonable to suppose that among the elite more dynastic type arrangements were beginning to prevail, and this is reflected in the evidence for patronymics found in Linear B; in these cases, matronymics are not given. Thus, the elite are perpetuating their class power by restricting procreation to within their social grouping to the exclusion of the lower orders, which follow the older rules. There is no evidence of any social mobility. Power is divided between political and priestly functions, and between male and female authorities. Females are no less abundant than men in positions of power and land-tenure. The entire system serves the interest of this aristocracy.
(6) The Bull Games. Already by the Minoan phase the Bull Games (Minotaur) is predominantly attested. If we assume that Minoan-Mycenaean culture was broadly “in step” with Near Eastern culture, we infer that already the Minotaur Games (phase III) are a transformed ritual stemming out of earlier rites: that is, the bull game is a substitute for trial by combat. The coming of the Greeks (“Hellenes”, Indo-Europeans) into the Greek mainland is associated with that transition between the first and second phases; as a speculation only (not original to this paper) the Greeks established themselves as overlords and at the same time (what may be original to this paper) adopted the custom from the Near East of trial by combat, an early form of compromise between the religion of the Goddess and anything distinctive they might have brought with them. In accordance with the analysis of Dumezil those distinctive features included: (i) a high storm god, Dyeus = Zeus, (ii) twin gods, later fused with the Dioskouroi, (iii) a goddess of the Dawn (Hausos = Eos), (iv) a threefold tribal structure. We may add: (v) an annual tribal assembly, called in Greek apellai, from which the Greek god, Apollo is derived. All of these features were absorbed by the dominant pre-Greek culture, here denoted “Pelasgian” after classical Greek thinkers. Though submerged, the Indo-European structures may have formed the nucleus of later religious developments; in Homer we see the Zeus-Eos pair emerge as the vehicle of divine patriarchal justice and its messenger. Everything we have seen so far affirms that patriarchal religion arose both as a result of the external fusion of Indo-European with Mediterranean culture, and as an internal development of Mediterranean/Near-Eastern culture.
It is a cornerstone of the historical analysis of the ancient world, and that explanation of the Bronze Age Collapse which makes the idea of a “system collapse” central, that the economy of the Mediterranean and Near East was an instance of “globalization”. This is a well-supported theory (for example, Cline, 1177 B,C. The Year that Civilization Collapsed). We expect the Minoan-Mycenaean culture to be in step with that of the Near East, and especially that of Egypt. In Egypt a developed matriarchy had emerged, and the ritual associated with matriarchy, sacrifice of the vegetation god (Osiris), was by magic rites substituted by the burial of clay statues. There is no evidence for such practice in Minoan culture. Concerning the Minoan phase, we see from the iconography that the celebration of the bull games was their central religious rite. I infer that the bull games did for Minoan culture what statues and the Book of the Dead did for Egyptian culture; hence, the bull games are a form of transmuted ritual sacrifice.
We can meet firmly the demand for evidence of human sacrifice in early Greek culture. It is not disputed that the Minoans did practice bull games, in which both young men and young women (wearing male clothing) would leap over a charging bull. It is not possible that every young man or woman, however well-prepared and trained for the demanding physical feat, survived. We have icons depicting the gory results of such “failures”. It is not the successes but the failures that are the whole point of the rite, for it is the sacrifice and the shedding of the blood that meets the demands of the Goddess. Hence, there is incontrovertible evidence in the iconography of Minoan culture and in the mythologems deposited in Greek culture for the early practice, albeit already transmuted, of human sacrifice within the context of the vegetation religion of the Goddess.
Once we realise that human sacrifice as a rite also has a history, and that by the period where we encounter written evidence for it what we are seeing is nothing like the “pure rite” upon which it is predicated, then we realise that in the historical period we are seeing debased forms not far in their practice from utilitarian bargains with the underworld, or expressions of sheer uncomprehending cruelty. Then it follows that every act of cruelty in the ancient world is an expression of human sacrifice, albeit in debased form.
(7) The dark character of Greek myth. Very little of the Homeric cycle derives from Mycenaean oral tradition. We postulate a tradition of epic oral poetry predating Homer and observe that nearly all the names mentioned in that part of the Iliad that we call the Catalogue of Ships (Book 2) belong to real cities and towns of the Mycenaean period, as attested by archaeology. This establishes a bare continuity between the two ages, and is very important evidence for that continuity, which must be postulated as the vector of the oral tradition expressed in the mythologems; but there is only a reminiscence that such-and-such citadels and towns have been long established, that Mycenae was greatest among them, a bare recollection that there was a period of greater glory; but as to details, very bare indeed. There is no evidence in the material record for any such epic legends as belonging to that epoch. There is one survival Mycenaean image depicting a siege, but that does not amount to any firm ground on which to establish a heroic saga. Any appearance of Mycenaean Greece in Hittite written records does not indicate that Mycenae was constantly engaged in international wars; some minor interference in the Hittite sphere of interest is all that is attested. (The references to Mycenaean Greece in Hittite records are contested.) The appearance of Mycenaean Greece in Egyptian records confirms it enjoyed peaceful relations with Egypt and was a part of its extensive “global” trade network, operating out of the entrepot Ugarit. It is generally recognised that Homer’s knowledge of Mycenaean battle is scant, and more the sort of thing that would arise from clever visualisation of past times, such as we also go in for with our Arthurian cycle from the creations of the Troubadours down to Tennyson. That Homer’s language is archaic is not proof that it hails from Mycenaean literature, for it is also poetic, which implies artificial.
The atmosphere and ethos of Greek mythology is excessively disturbed and violent, and not at all what we would expect from the Mycenaean culture. Although Mycenaean citadels are heavily fortified, the obstacles to land invasion and the impression of sophisticated bureaucracy does not suggest widespread breakdown of “law and order” such as we see in the background of Greek myth. Fortifications may also be constructed against internal enemies as well as external ones, and act as symbols of social power. The picture in Greek myth is of many commercial kingdoms administered out of palace centres. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Mycenaean administrations were limited to regions in the vicinity of the huge palaces, and that other parts of Greece were less accessible and more rural. We may hypothesise a village based tribal culture for these places and that these tribal communities were less bureaucratic and more religiously conservative. The violent and dark background to Greek myth might hail from traditions of the less cultivated rural parts of Mycenaean Greece, but because it is universal and not offset by any hint of the Mycenaean palace organisation, it is more likely to hail from the Dark Age itself.
By the Late Bronze Age, and at the inception of the Bronze Age Collapse, Mycenaean Greece had developed elite military and religious hierarchies. There were governors, country lords, military commands and lieutenants. There was also a priestly elite. Female membership of the elite was closely related to religious function. Subordinate to a given priestess there were female “key-holders”, “attendants”, “servants of the god” and other functionaries. All these personages were major land-owners and owners of other persons designated as “slaves”. Recruitment to the elite is obscure. The mythologems of matrilineal and divine descent tell us that most men did not know who their father was, which is consistent with the tablets; most men were brought up by their mothers alone. Procreation among the lower classes would then be consequences of the orgiastic aspects of religious festivals. Egyptian and Mesopotamian nobles do trace their descent both by father and mother; hence, it is reasonable to suppose that among the elite more dynastic type arrangements were beginning to prevail, and this is reflected in the evidence for patronymics found in Linear B; in these cases, matronymics are not given. Thus, the elite are perpetuating their class power by restricting procreation to within their social grouping to the exclusion of the lower orders, which follow the older rules. There is no evidence of any social mobility. Power is divided between political and priestly functions, and between male and female authorities. Females are no less abundant than men in positions of power and land-tenure. The entire system serves the interest of this aristocracy.
For Pylos, we may speculate that at the very apex of this social structure stand two figures—one male and the other female: a king, wanax, who has sometimes divine honours. Some commentators claim that we know his personal name, Ekhelawon, the “last King of Pylos”. But this is contested—indeed, internal inconsistencies suggest that the “king” may not even have been a person at all. Thus, significantly, it is not the existence of the Priestess that is contested, but the existence of the king.
There is a High-Priestess who serves “The Mistress” and she is called either just “the Priestess” or the “Priestess of pa-ki-ja-ne”. Within the elite there are very many personages, most of whom have personal names, who hold either religious, military or landed positions of power. The efficient bureaucratic mechanism evidenced by the tablets indicates that, despite the multiple positions of social prestige, the elite appears to be working as one to exploit the labour-force and resources of the state.
What is the relation of the king (wanax) to the deity Poseidon, who heads the corresponding academy of male gods? The High Priestess is clearly the priestess of “the Mistress”, but does the king have a priestly function? Is he the High Priest of Poseidon? Alternatively, might he in fact be Poseidon? Tributes are certainly made to Poseidon (among others), but are tributes made to The Mistress as well? Offerings (as opposed to tributes) are made to “Drimios, the priest of Zeus” which some translate as “Drimos, son of Zeus”; are offerings made to the king and the High Priestess as well? The designation of females as “servant of the god” could indicate that the Priestess serves both Poseidon and The Mistress. At the level of detail, there are unanswered questions.
Outside this structure there are other sources of social power. A third powerful figure appears, the lawagetas, translated as “leader of the people”. At Pylos his personal name may have been Wednaeus, who is a large landholder. It seems that there are several legal entities each called “damos”, which would appear to be “communes” since they hold communal land, and these are connected to three landed lords with the title telestas. In two parallel sets of tablets, tributes are made: (a) to Poseidon or to the king, (b) to the “protectors” or to Lawagetas; (c) to the damos and telestai or to Wednaeus and finally (d) to “the unencumbered land of the cult association” or to Diwieus. The duplicate names arise because the parallel documents invite identification.
In conclusion: there seem to be four ultimate centres of power at Mycenaean Pylos: (i) the “king”, (ii) the High Priestess, (iii) the “leader of the people” and (iv) the commune. I suggest the first two head the bureaucratic elite, and the other two are outside it, and that there are signs of social tension between these groups.
(8) Heterogeneity. The racial mix of the Mycenaean community is heterogeneous. Study of their genetic composition (Iosif Lazaridis et al., Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans) indicates that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically like each other and together derived more than 75% of their genes from the Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and the rest from the Caucasus and Iran (that is, of proto-Indo-European origin). The Mycenaeans also derived some small part of their ancestry from hunter-gatherers of Eastern Europe and Siberia and have some relation to inhabitants of the Eurasian steppe and Armenia. These results are notable for being consistent with traditional views on the origins of Greeks: that they are a fusion of a predominantly indigenous population, designated by “Pelasgian” and by other terms (such as “Leleges”) in classical Greek writing, with Greek-speaking immigrants, designated “Hellenes” in a first migration (c.2200—1900) and “Achaeans” in a second (c.1600). The Linear B tablets contain countless names of non-Greek origin, as does Greek mythology, where, for example, the terminal phoneme -eus, as in Odyseus, Androgeus, Capaneus, is not Greek.
There is the question: if the Dorian Greeks did not arrive in the Peloponnese, Crete and Rhodes as the result of an invasion in the post-Trojan War period, from whence and when did they come? The solution is simple: they were in the Peloponnese, Crete and Rhodes because they had always been there—that is, as long as any Greek-speakers were anywhere in mainland Greece. The fact that the language of Linear B, which we designate Mycenaean Greek, is linguistically closer to the Arcado-Cypriot and Attic-Ionian dialects than Dorian Greek, and that the two belong to separate branches of the great divide in prehistoric Greek language between the Western, Central and Easter groups, does not prove that at some stage members of all three dialects did not coexist in any given region. Mycenaean is attested in Linear B to be only the dialect of the scribes, and it seems reasonable to infer, of the ruling elite. An ethnic mix is likely, and for confirmation we have a document, recorded during the historic period, but reflecting conditions of the Dark Age. When Odysseus, in disguise, pretends to his wife Penelope that he hails from Crete he says: ‘Out of the dark blue sea there lies a land called Crete, a rich and lovely land, washed by the waves on every side, densely peopled and boasting ninety cities. Each of the several races has its own language. First there are the Achaeans; then the genuine Cretans, proud of their native stock; next the Cydonians; the Dorians, with their three clans; finally the noble Pelasgians. …’ (Odyssey, XIX, 176—77.) Remarkably, this passage, in addition to identifying the many language groups of ancient Crete, stresses the three-tribal structure of the Dorians. Homer, writing c.667, knows nothing about the Dorian invasion and the so-called “Return of the Heracleids”. (He has little knowledge of Heracles either.) I hypothesise that a similar ethnic heterogeneity existed in Mycenaean Pylos, as for all regions of Greece, and that the three telestai are the leaders of the three Dorian tribes, if not the tribes themselves.
(9) The refusal and divine retribution. The material in question concerns the following complex myth: a “king” refuses to “pay” a god, or omits to make sacrifice to a goddess; then follows a retribution by the god or goddess in the form of the summoning of a monster; this is in turn followed by a famine and/or plague, which is a great calamity and blight upon the land. Then the crisis is met by a hero or by some collective action by heroes and the monster is defeated. However, this victory does not truly resolve the crisis: since the monster is an instance of divine retribution, then for the hero to kill or in some other way defeat the monster is not a solution to the divine wrath that gave rise to it in the first place. Any healing is illusory or imposed by fiat; hence, it is not healing, and on the contrary, the wound caused by the original disturbance of the divine order is not closed. Greek mythology sends us clues as to why the Dark Age lasted so long. This complex myth contains component mythologems: (V.4) Mythologem of the monster of divine retribution invoked by sacrilege; (V.5) Mythologem of the blight (famine, plague); (V.6) Mythologem of the slaying of the monster of divine retribution.
I am mindful here to distinguish this last component of the complex myth from the (VI.1) mythologem of the Gorgon-slayer (mythologem of Perseus) that is like it, but has a distinct meaning and provenance. The reason for this distinction is that in the mythologem of retribution (V.4) the monster arises in response to a disturbance of the divine order, whereas in (VI.1) the monster pre-exists and is independent of any such disturbance. Mythologems (V.4), (V.5) and (V.6) belong to the Dark Age and I believe arise at the very inception of that age, on the cusp of the Bronze Age Collapse (c.1200), whereas dragon-slaying may be as late as the archaic period (after c.750), and may indeed mark the onset of the resolution of the disturbance created by the Bronze Age Collapse.
We have already seen in the myth of Laomedon an instance of all three of the above mythologems. The most famous of all instances of this complex pattern is the myth of the Caledonian wild boar, which has a doublet in the myth of the Telmassian fox. No boar, fox, bull, lion or any other wild animal could cause the devastation that these beasts are said to bring; hence, their underlying historical reality must lie elsewhere—materially, as a civil war or other violence blighting the land through crop failure, flooding, pestilence and so forth; and spiritually, as a conflict of religious ideologies. Here is another instance of this material, taken from the pages of Pausanias.
There is a High-Priestess who serves “The Mistress” and she is called either just “the Priestess” or the “Priestess of pa-ki-ja-ne”. Within the elite there are very many personages, most of whom have personal names, who hold either religious, military or landed positions of power. The efficient bureaucratic mechanism evidenced by the tablets indicates that, despite the multiple positions of social prestige, the elite appears to be working as one to exploit the labour-force and resources of the state.
What is the relation of the king (wanax) to the deity Poseidon, who heads the corresponding academy of male gods? The High Priestess is clearly the priestess of “the Mistress”, but does the king have a priestly function? Is he the High Priest of Poseidon? Alternatively, might he in fact be Poseidon? Tributes are certainly made to Poseidon (among others), but are tributes made to The Mistress as well? Offerings (as opposed to tributes) are made to “Drimios, the priest of Zeus” which some translate as “Drimos, son of Zeus”; are offerings made to the king and the High Priestess as well? The designation of females as “servant of the god” could indicate that the Priestess serves both Poseidon and The Mistress. At the level of detail, there are unanswered questions.
Outside this structure there are other sources of social power. A third powerful figure appears, the lawagetas, translated as “leader of the people”. At Pylos his personal name may have been Wednaeus, who is a large landholder. It seems that there are several legal entities each called “damos”, which would appear to be “communes” since they hold communal land, and these are connected to three landed lords with the title telestas. In two parallel sets of tablets, tributes are made: (a) to Poseidon or to the king, (b) to the “protectors” or to Lawagetas; (c) to the damos and telestai or to Wednaeus and finally (d) to “the unencumbered land of the cult association” or to Diwieus. The duplicate names arise because the parallel documents invite identification.
In conclusion: there seem to be four ultimate centres of power at Mycenaean Pylos: (i) the “king”, (ii) the High Priestess, (iii) the “leader of the people” and (iv) the commune. I suggest the first two head the bureaucratic elite, and the other two are outside it, and that there are signs of social tension between these groups.
(8) Heterogeneity. The racial mix of the Mycenaean community is heterogeneous. Study of their genetic composition (Iosif Lazaridis et al., Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans) indicates that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically like each other and together derived more than 75% of their genes from the Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and the rest from the Caucasus and Iran (that is, of proto-Indo-European origin). The Mycenaeans also derived some small part of their ancestry from hunter-gatherers of Eastern Europe and Siberia and have some relation to inhabitants of the Eurasian steppe and Armenia. These results are notable for being consistent with traditional views on the origins of Greeks: that they are a fusion of a predominantly indigenous population, designated by “Pelasgian” and by other terms (such as “Leleges”) in classical Greek writing, with Greek-speaking immigrants, designated “Hellenes” in a first migration (c.2200—1900) and “Achaeans” in a second (c.1600). The Linear B tablets contain countless names of non-Greek origin, as does Greek mythology, where, for example, the terminal phoneme -eus, as in Odyseus, Androgeus, Capaneus, is not Greek.
There is the question: if the Dorian Greeks did not arrive in the Peloponnese, Crete and Rhodes as the result of an invasion in the post-Trojan War period, from whence and when did they come? The solution is simple: they were in the Peloponnese, Crete and Rhodes because they had always been there—that is, as long as any Greek-speakers were anywhere in mainland Greece. The fact that the language of Linear B, which we designate Mycenaean Greek, is linguistically closer to the Arcado-Cypriot and Attic-Ionian dialects than Dorian Greek, and that the two belong to separate branches of the great divide in prehistoric Greek language between the Western, Central and Easter groups, does not prove that at some stage members of all three dialects did not coexist in any given region. Mycenaean is attested in Linear B to be only the dialect of the scribes, and it seems reasonable to infer, of the ruling elite. An ethnic mix is likely, and for confirmation we have a document, recorded during the historic period, but reflecting conditions of the Dark Age. When Odysseus, in disguise, pretends to his wife Penelope that he hails from Crete he says: ‘Out of the dark blue sea there lies a land called Crete, a rich and lovely land, washed by the waves on every side, densely peopled and boasting ninety cities. Each of the several races has its own language. First there are the Achaeans; then the genuine Cretans, proud of their native stock; next the Cydonians; the Dorians, with their three clans; finally the noble Pelasgians. …’ (Odyssey, XIX, 176—77.) Remarkably, this passage, in addition to identifying the many language groups of ancient Crete, stresses the three-tribal structure of the Dorians. Homer, writing c.667, knows nothing about the Dorian invasion and the so-called “Return of the Heracleids”. (He has little knowledge of Heracles either.) I hypothesise that a similar ethnic heterogeneity existed in Mycenaean Pylos, as for all regions of Greece, and that the three telestai are the leaders of the three Dorian tribes, if not the tribes themselves.
(9) The refusal and divine retribution. The material in question concerns the following complex myth: a “king” refuses to “pay” a god, or omits to make sacrifice to a goddess; then follows a retribution by the god or goddess in the form of the summoning of a monster; this is in turn followed by a famine and/or plague, which is a great calamity and blight upon the land. Then the crisis is met by a hero or by some collective action by heroes and the monster is defeated. However, this victory does not truly resolve the crisis: since the monster is an instance of divine retribution, then for the hero to kill or in some other way defeat the monster is not a solution to the divine wrath that gave rise to it in the first place. Any healing is illusory or imposed by fiat; hence, it is not healing, and on the contrary, the wound caused by the original disturbance of the divine order is not closed. Greek mythology sends us clues as to why the Dark Age lasted so long. This complex myth contains component mythologems: (V.4) Mythologem of the monster of divine retribution invoked by sacrilege; (V.5) Mythologem of the blight (famine, plague); (V.6) Mythologem of the slaying of the monster of divine retribution.
I am mindful here to distinguish this last component of the complex myth from the (VI.1) mythologem of the Gorgon-slayer (mythologem of Perseus) that is like it, but has a distinct meaning and provenance. The reason for this distinction is that in the mythologem of retribution (V.4) the monster arises in response to a disturbance of the divine order, whereas in (VI.1) the monster pre-exists and is independent of any such disturbance. Mythologems (V.4), (V.5) and (V.6) belong to the Dark Age and I believe arise at the very inception of that age, on the cusp of the Bronze Age Collapse (c.1200), whereas dragon-slaying may be as late as the archaic period (after c.750), and may indeed mark the onset of the resolution of the disturbance created by the Bronze Age Collapse.
We have already seen in the myth of Laomedon an instance of all three of the above mythologems. The most famous of all instances of this complex pattern is the myth of the Caledonian wild boar, which has a doublet in the myth of the Telmassian fox. No boar, fox, bull, lion or any other wild animal could cause the devastation that these beasts are said to bring; hence, their underlying historical reality must lie elsewhere—materially, as a civil war or other violence blighting the land through crop failure, flooding, pestilence and so forth; and spiritually, as a conflict of religious ideologies. Here is another instance of this material, taken from the pages of Pausanias.
Myth of the Marathonian Bull
The Cretans claim this bull was sent to their country by Poseidon, because Minos was the lord of the Greek sea and failed to pay Poseidon special respect. They say this bull was carried over from Crete to the Peloponnese and was one of the twelve labours of Herakles. When it was loosed onto the plain of Argos it dashed away through the isthmus and up through Attica to Marathon, killing whomever it met, including Minos’s son Androgeos. Minos was convinced the Athenians must be to blame for Androgeos’s death. He came over with a fleet and attacked them, and did so much damage that they agreed to take seven girls to Crete and seven boys, for the fabulous Minotaur that lived in the Labyrinth of Knossos. Afterwards the story goes that Theseus drove the bull of Marathon into the acropolis and slaughtered it to the goddess. (Attica, 1.27.8) |
Myth can readily combine material from different epochs. The mythologem of the slaying of the monster of divine retribution (V.6) is structurally akin to the (III.1) mythologem of the Minotaur (bull games) which is itself a substituted ritual for (II.1) the mythologem of trial by combat (murder of the twin or rival), and that is also a substitute for (I.2) the mythologem of abduction, the primal murder of the god-king. Therefore, this material needs to be analysed into layers. We see that the bull of Marathon myth contains all these layers and is in part a statement of the vegetation religion. That is to be expected, for the issue is whether to pay Poseidon “special respect”, and the conclusion can only be a “yes” or a “no”; a “yes” represents a conservative restoration of the original “sacred” duty, and a “no” represents a persistent rebellion.
The provenance of this material is Athens and Attica, and it may not be a Cretan myth. The distinctive material records physical and spiritual events belonging to the inception of the Dark Age. Poseidon’s association with the sea, which may also record a historical aspect, is a reminder of the belief, confirmed by archaeology and Egyptian history, that Crete once held a thalassocracy of the Aegean. The crisis begins with a refusal to fulfil a sacred duty by Minos. There is no agreed etymology or meaning of the name “Minos”, but it may be a title for a “king”, may link to the idea of “son of Zeus” and may connect to the idea of “moon” and thereby to the Goddess. It was probably a title adopted by a man who ruled by right of marriage to the priestess or her daughter, as in a variant of the mythologem of matrilineal succession. That succession was matrilineal at some early stage of Greek culture approximates to certainty. Then the sacred duty that Minos the king has refused can only be the duty to die. That this is a phenomenon known to ancient cultures is also “certain”; that the Celts demanded it of their kings is the explanation for the death of Old Coghan Man (a bog body), who was a king. Here I cannot give all the instances of this fundamental concept, but let us iterate it once with anthropological data recorded by Diodorus.
The provenance of this material is Athens and Attica, and it may not be a Cretan myth. The distinctive material records physical and spiritual events belonging to the inception of the Dark Age. Poseidon’s association with the sea, which may also record a historical aspect, is a reminder of the belief, confirmed by archaeology and Egyptian history, that Crete once held a thalassocracy of the Aegean. The crisis begins with a refusal to fulfil a sacred duty by Minos. There is no agreed etymology or meaning of the name “Minos”, but it may be a title for a “king”, may link to the idea of “son of Zeus” and may connect to the idea of “moon” and thereby to the Goddess. It was probably a title adopted by a man who ruled by right of marriage to the priestess or her daughter, as in a variant of the mythologem of matrilineal succession. That succession was matrilineal at some early stage of Greek culture approximates to certainty. Then the sacred duty that Minos the king has refused can only be the duty to die. That this is a phenomenon known to ancient cultures is also “certain”; that the Celts demanded it of their kings is the explanation for the death of Old Coghan Man (a bog body), who was a king. Here I cannot give all the instances of this fundamental concept, but let us iterate it once with anthropological data recorded by Diodorus.
As for the customs of the Ethiopians … The priests, for instance, first choose out of the noblest men from their own number … [and] him the multitude take for their king; and straightway it both worships and honours him like a god, believing that the sovereignty has been entrusted to him by Divine Providence.
… For the priests at Meroë who spend their time in the worship of the gods and the rites which do them honour, being the greatest and most powerful order, whenever the idea comes to them, dispatch a messenger to the king with orders that he die. For the gods, they add, have revealed this to them, and it must be that the command of the immortals should in no wise be disregarded by one of mortal frame. … Now in former times the kings would obey the priests, having been overcome, not by arms nor by force, but because their reasoning powers had been put under a constraint by their very superstition; but during the reign of the second Ptolemy the king of the Ethiopians, Ergamenes, who had had a Greek education and had studied philosophy, was the first to have the courage to disdain the command … he entered with his soldiers into the unapproachable place where stood, as it turned out, the gold shrine of the Ethiopians, put the priests to sword, and after abolishing this custom thereafter ordered affairs after his own will. (Book III, 5.1 – 6.8) |
And here we have, in a nutshell, the history of the Greek Dark Age, projected onto parallel events occurring at a “later date” in “Ethiopia”.
It is important to step back from the material and, using “fuzzy logic”, grasp the picture as a whole—it points to a terrible war brought on by religious conflict over what one side perceived as the refusal to abide by a sacred duty. But the details could be very significant too. According to the Myth of the Marathonian Bull, and reading the above material “almost literally”, the war started in Crete, spread to “the plain of Argos” and then like wildfire or a charging bull spread up the plains of the Argolid and Korinthia into the Isthmus and onto Attica. One could almost chart the fall of the Mycenaean palaces from this progress—Tiryns, Midea, Mycenae, other places of the Isthmus, and then Athens. The myth contains another mythologem: the (V.3) mythologem of (substitute) child sacrifice. There are two instances of this: Androgeos, the son of Minos, is killed in place of Minos by the conservative religious reaction (the “bull”) to his refusal; then seven girls and seven boys are also sacrificed to this “bull”. But there are other possibilities, since Androgeos means “man of the earth”, the same concept as that of the Spartoi or “sown men”, “men sprung from the earth”, then it is possible that whoever was the real person that lies behind the kingly title Minos, that person selected from among the regular non-Achaean population a substitute for himself, one of those men born of mothers who did not know their fathers; and he may even have honoured him with an adoption ritual and title of “son” before having him sacrificially killed on his behalf. The myth combines this mythologem of child sacrifice with the earlier mythologem of the bull games, where we see painted onto the very walls of Knossos, Tiryns and Pylos, young men and women competing in a bull-leaping ceremony for the chance to avoid being a substitute sacrifice.
That the war described in the myth was terrible should not be doubted, not only because this sequence of events is repeated time after time, but because we can see that the “resolution” in the myth is not a resolution. Minos never does pay Poseidon, so Poseidon’s wrath can hardly have been allayed; and all that happens is that his monster is slain, not likely to make Poseidon happy. The reactions to the crisis are further instances of sacrifice, with the final instance as a definite sacrifice by Theseus of the “bull” to the Goddess, slaughtered at the Acropolis of Athens. We see the close association of Poseidon with the Goddess. The crisis continues and there is a vicious circle principle at work, a downward spiral. If everyone is busy killing everyone else, then there is no time to sow crops, and a famine ensues, no doubt assisted by those general meteorological phenomena indicative of drought that researchers have uncovered for the period. It was a hard time for everyone. Hence, a population collapse. Wars of religion are never pretty.
The idea of sacrifice of a son or daughter is substantially recorded in the anthropological data. Ancients regarded children in terms that we would describe as “property”, and this principle was even later enshrined in Roman law, where the pater familias had absolute authority, even as to life or death, over his family and children. The custom of sacrificing a son is recorded firmly in the Old Testament; for example, at 2 Kings 3, 26—27 the king of Moab immolates his own son to obtain a victory over the Israelites. At 2 Samuel 21, 1—7, one may read even of King David offering seven descendants of Saul to the Gibeonites for sacrifice, who were “put to death during the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning”, a statement of the original religious impulse behind the rite if ever there was one. Ritual human sacrifice was normative in the Hebrew society ruled by King David (c.1000) and later—and the data comes straight out of the Dark Age that followed the Bronze Age Collapse.
It is important to step back from the material and, using “fuzzy logic”, grasp the picture as a whole—it points to a terrible war brought on by religious conflict over what one side perceived as the refusal to abide by a sacred duty. But the details could be very significant too. According to the Myth of the Marathonian Bull, and reading the above material “almost literally”, the war started in Crete, spread to “the plain of Argos” and then like wildfire or a charging bull spread up the plains of the Argolid and Korinthia into the Isthmus and onto Attica. One could almost chart the fall of the Mycenaean palaces from this progress—Tiryns, Midea, Mycenae, other places of the Isthmus, and then Athens. The myth contains another mythologem: the (V.3) mythologem of (substitute) child sacrifice. There are two instances of this: Androgeos, the son of Minos, is killed in place of Minos by the conservative religious reaction (the “bull”) to his refusal; then seven girls and seven boys are also sacrificed to this “bull”. But there are other possibilities, since Androgeos means “man of the earth”, the same concept as that of the Spartoi or “sown men”, “men sprung from the earth”, then it is possible that whoever was the real person that lies behind the kingly title Minos, that person selected from among the regular non-Achaean population a substitute for himself, one of those men born of mothers who did not know their fathers; and he may even have honoured him with an adoption ritual and title of “son” before having him sacrificially killed on his behalf. The myth combines this mythologem of child sacrifice with the earlier mythologem of the bull games, where we see painted onto the very walls of Knossos, Tiryns and Pylos, young men and women competing in a bull-leaping ceremony for the chance to avoid being a substitute sacrifice.
That the war described in the myth was terrible should not be doubted, not only because this sequence of events is repeated time after time, but because we can see that the “resolution” in the myth is not a resolution. Minos never does pay Poseidon, so Poseidon’s wrath can hardly have been allayed; and all that happens is that his monster is slain, not likely to make Poseidon happy. The reactions to the crisis are further instances of sacrifice, with the final instance as a definite sacrifice by Theseus of the “bull” to the Goddess, slaughtered at the Acropolis of Athens. We see the close association of Poseidon with the Goddess. The crisis continues and there is a vicious circle principle at work, a downward spiral. If everyone is busy killing everyone else, then there is no time to sow crops, and a famine ensues, no doubt assisted by those general meteorological phenomena indicative of drought that researchers have uncovered for the period. It was a hard time for everyone. Hence, a population collapse. Wars of religion are never pretty.
The idea of sacrifice of a son or daughter is substantially recorded in the anthropological data. Ancients regarded children in terms that we would describe as “property”, and this principle was even later enshrined in Roman law, where the pater familias had absolute authority, even as to life or death, over his family and children. The custom of sacrificing a son is recorded firmly in the Old Testament; for example, at 2 Kings 3, 26—27 the king of Moab immolates his own son to obtain a victory over the Israelites. At 2 Samuel 21, 1—7, one may read even of King David offering seven descendants of Saul to the Gibeonites for sacrifice, who were “put to death during the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning”, a statement of the original religious impulse behind the rite if ever there was one. Ritual human sacrifice was normative in the Hebrew society ruled by King David (c.1000) and later—and the data comes straight out of the Dark Age that followed the Bronze Age Collapse.
The Warrior Vase
Illustration derived from a large krater found at the ‘House of the Warrior Vase’, Mycenae, C12. Five warriors march away from a woman. (Only one warrior shown above.) The significance of this krater cannot be underestimated, for it belongs to the pottery period of Late Helladic IIIC, and thereby to the period of the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the palaces. The men bear round shields, not the figure-of-eight shields characteristic of the Mycenaean period. Interpretation: the theme is that of departure for war, and hence this icon is evidence that the Dark Age was a period of conflict. The men march away from the female figure, who holds her hair or cap in a significant way. They depart at the behest of the woman, who is the authority figure—her gesture is one of command. All Greek mythology points to the period of the Dark Ages as one of intense conflict and disturbance. This image implies that Mycenae was a matriarchy at the inception of the war, for it is not a domestic scene of parting, such as would subsequently be depicted on white figure vases of the classical period of the C5.
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(10) “Dating” of mythologems. We use “fuzzy logic” to assign an epoch, not a precise date, to a mythologem. Generally, absolute chronology does not apply in the history of mythologems. To illustrate the principles at work, consider the Parian chronicle, an inscription carved into marble. The last event mentioned in this apparently bizarre chronology is dated 299, and scholars are agreed that the inscription was made in 264/63. The chronology presents the (VI.1) mythologem of absolute dating, by ascribing for example, the renaming of the region of Attica as “Cecropia”, the earliest event mentioned, to 1582. The purpose of the chronicle can be inferred from the bias of the events listed which is “religious”. It is a record of sacred events to which it applies fictitious absolute dates. There is also a religious-cultural bias: Hesiod, Homer, Sappho, Musaeus and Orpheus are mentioned. Finally, there is a bias towards the cults of the Aegean region and Ionian heritage. It is another source, somewhat akin to the evidence in Herodotus, indicative of what informed people in Paros in 263 thought had happened in the past, not necessarily evidence for what did take place. The document records that as late as 263 it was normative in Greek society to regard human sacrifice as sacred: for example, during the reign of Pandion, it states that “human sacrifices and the Lycaea were celebrated in Arcadia and … of Lycaon were given among the Greeks.” It mentions a “lustration was first performed by flaying …”; in both cases details having been subsequently effaced. The flaying is an instance of the (II.4) mythologem of Apollo and Marsyas; the ritual flaying of a defeated competitor. The dating is subject to bias: the tendency is to exaggerate the antiquity of religious events by ascribing them to ancient dates. The Parian chronicle assigns the institution of the Panathenaean Games to 1521, but we know that these games were instituted in 566 by Hipparchus son of Pisistratus. Likewise, the institution of the Isthmian games is assigned to 1259 and the Nemean Games to 1251 during the “reign of Theseus”; they were both instituted in 582; the Delphic Games are not mentioned at all. We see that any Greek dating of “ancient” events is unreliable, notwithstanding that they made a cultural norm of it. We can disregard all ancient dating as the product of later cultural bias, instances of the mythologem of absolute dating, an ideological process that serves to foster the illusion of the antiquity and historicity of legendary events. On the other hand, since the mythologems contained in the “chronology” must be assigned to some epoch or other, it follows that we must begin afresh and use their symbolic structure as well as other archaeological and historical evidence to determine when they were introduced. (c) There is in the Parian chronology a significant gap with only one event listed between 1202 and 944. This event is significant to the Ionians – the foundation “by Neleus” (legendary King of Pylos) of the Ionian cities, assigned by the chronicle to 1077. This gap illustrates the backward projection of all the events and acts as circumstantial evidence that many of the events assigned traditionally in Greek mythology to the epochs prior to the Trojan and Theban wars belong to the Dark Age that came after it. The Trojan and Theban wars themselves thereby also become utterly legendary material and their historicity must be doubted, though that is a matter for separate evaluation. (d) But it does not follow from the unreliability of the dating that the events and mythologems recorded in the chronology are complete fabrications. On the contrary, each event must be assessed on an individual basis; the inscription itself is evidence for their historicity has having derived from a firm oral and subsequently written tradition. One event is of particular relevance to our enquiry: “… a scarcity of corn happened at Athens, and Apollo being consulted by the Athenians obliged them to undergo the penalties which Minos should require …”, which is dated by the chronicle to 1295, but significantly here attached to the mythologem of the blight and, yet again, to the mythological character of Minos. The “penalties” here are allusions to the sacrifice of the seven boys and seven girls, which is always associated with that mythologem.
(11) The inception of the Dark Age. In the Minos myth there is a sequence of events: 1. A sacrilegious refusal to honour a god or gods committed by the king; 2. Conflict arising as the god or gods invoke retribution. 3. Civil war in which famine, blight and/or plague result in extreme devastation. 4. Institution of substitute child sacrifice.
The mythologem of child sacrifice looks very old, but we must be wary, because under the influence of the mythologem of absolute dating, which is the same as the illusion of antiquity, all these events have been projected backwards into “mythological time”—the illusion of a time before the heroes, sandwiched between that epoch and the mythological epoch of the gods. Greek mythology was constructed during the archaic period under the “theory” that religious history could be divided into three broad periods: the period of the gods, the period of the “older heroes” and the period of “younger heroes” to which the Trojan and Theban sagas belong. The likelihood that these mythologems belong to the Minoan or Mycenaean phases is low, for the simple reason that we see no corresponding iconography in the material record. While it is a bare possibility on account of the apparently “ancient” quality of these mythologems that they belong to a yet remoter time, there is also no icon corresponding to them in that period. The archaic period (c.750—480) is too late; hence, they must arise in the Dark Age, and probably at the cusp of the onset of that Age for they inform us of the causes of that terrible disturbance and describe a vicious circle principle that would perpetuate it. Furthermore, though the Greeks lost the power of writing during this period, and their sub-Mycenaean (c.1060—c.1000) and Geometric pottery (c.1000—c.730) styles are non-figurative, it is not true that they altogether or immediately lost the power of figurative representation. Hence, we can once again “see” into the darkness. The Late Hellenic III C imagery (c.1200—c.1060) we have, mostly from the Argolid region, depicts warriors setting off for battle, armed with round shields (a type not typical of the Mycenaean period) and of ships and sea-battles. Warriors depart at the instance of a female figure, so these images were made by religious “conservatives”. The theme is most definitely war; we may also infer piracy. All later historical references depict it as a very disturbed time. The figurines and animal figures of this epoch are votive offerings suggestive of obsessive ritual. Through these mythologems we see into the Dark Age, and what we see is religious turmoil coupled to famine, pestilence and extreme violence.
The mythologem of child sacrifice looks very old, but we must be wary, because under the influence of the mythologem of absolute dating, which is the same as the illusion of antiquity, all these events have been projected backwards into “mythological time”—the illusion of a time before the heroes, sandwiched between that epoch and the mythological epoch of the gods. Greek mythology was constructed during the archaic period under the “theory” that religious history could be divided into three broad periods: the period of the gods, the period of the “older heroes” and the period of “younger heroes” to which the Trojan and Theban sagas belong. The likelihood that these mythologems belong to the Minoan or Mycenaean phases is low, for the simple reason that we see no corresponding iconography in the material record. While it is a bare possibility on account of the apparently “ancient” quality of these mythologems that they belong to a yet remoter time, there is also no icon corresponding to them in that period. The archaic period (c.750—480) is too late; hence, they must arise in the Dark Age, and probably at the cusp of the onset of that Age for they inform us of the causes of that terrible disturbance and describe a vicious circle principle that would perpetuate it. Furthermore, though the Greeks lost the power of writing during this period, and their sub-Mycenaean (c.1060—c.1000) and Geometric pottery (c.1000—c.730) styles are non-figurative, it is not true that they altogether or immediately lost the power of figurative representation. Hence, we can once again “see” into the darkness. The Late Hellenic III C imagery (c.1200—c.1060) we have, mostly from the Argolid region, depicts warriors setting off for battle, armed with round shields (a type not typical of the Mycenaean period) and of ships and sea-battles. Warriors depart at the instance of a female figure, so these images were made by religious “conservatives”. The theme is most definitely war; we may also infer piracy. All later historical references depict it as a very disturbed time. The figurines and animal figures of this epoch are votive offerings suggestive of obsessive ritual. Through these mythologems we see into the Dark Age, and what we see is religious turmoil coupled to famine, pestilence and extreme violence.
Montage of imagery from the myth of Clytemnestra and the Curse of the House of Atreus.
From left to right: (i) Clytemnestra touches Aegisthus on the shoulder has he murders Agamemnon, who holds a lyre in his left hand, from the a red-figure krater in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, c.460; (ii) Clytemnestra murders Cassandra, from a kylix in the Archaeological Museum of Ferrara; (iii) Orestes murders his mother Clytemnestra, thus avenging the death of Agamemnon, from an amphora in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, c. 340. The mythologem of the curse exemplifies the self-perpetuating nature of the violence of the Dark Age. By the late classical period the myth of the curse of the house of Atreus had undergone innumerable redactions, not least that of Aeschylus. The original mythologem is expressed by Cassandra (as the Moon) “abducts” Agamemnon (as sacrificial-king), and the artists cited above have unconsciously referenced this by giving Clytemnestra a double-axe as her weapon on both occasions. The men wield swords.
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(12) Mythologem of child sacrifice. This appears everywhere in Greek mythology. The following are just some prominent examples: (a) Lycaon serves his son Nyctimus in a banquet to the gods; (b) the sons of Lycaon serve a child as a banquet to the gods; (c) Tantalos serves his son in a banquet to the gods; (d) Ino, later immortalised as Leucothea (the “White Goddess”), boils her son Melicertes; her husband, Athamas, spears their son Learchus; (e) Ino also demands the sacrifice of Prixus and Helle; (f) Medea kills her younger brother Apsyrtos; she also murders her own sons by Jason, Mernerus and Pheres; (g) The daughters of Proitos, Lysippe, Hipponoë and Cyrianassa kill their own children; (h) Artemis and Apollo slaughter the children of Niobe, who insulted their mother Leto; (i) The motif of child sacrifice appears in the myth of Hypsipyle and Opheltes; (h) Heracles, sent mad by Hera, murders his children by Megara.
This mythologem has parallels in the myths of the gods: (j) Cronos eats his children. (l) Zagreus and Dionysus as Zagreus are dismembered; (m) Dictaean Zeus is dismembered. While these cosmological myths are usually taken as arising in very ancient Greek religion, earlier than the Minoan epoch, they on the contrary derive from the Dark Ages. The hypothesis is that child sacrifice commenced during the ravages of the Dark Ages and are a substitute rite for adult sacrifice. The child need not be an infant; substitution of adult children is also implicated. Child sacrifice arose in the second millennium. But we may consider the possibility that child sacrifice and cannibalism was an atavism to an earlier primitive rite, for which the possibly cannibalised children whose remains were found in the temple at Knossos would be archaeological evidence.
Another related mythologem is (V.7) the mythologem of child burning; of immortalisation. The sacrifice of a child can hardly be undertaken without a sense of guilt; the sense of being under divine command may mitigate this emotion to an extent, but there also arose the compensatory belief that the burning of a child conferred “immortality” on the dead child. What is meant by immortality here cannot be the same as the idea of “everlasting life”, which is a concept arising in Ionian consciousness. This mythologem appears in Greek myth for example, and not exclusively in: (a) Demeter intends to confer immortality on the child Meleagros by putting him in the fire, but is interrupted and he dies; (b) motif of the golden hair in the myth of Pterelaos; (c) motif in the immortality of Glaucos; (d) motif in the birth of Dionysus as son of Semele; Semele is incinerated by Zeus at the instigation of Hera’s jealousy; (e) same motif in the birth of Asclepius; (f) motif in the birth of Achilles; (g) in the myth of Meleager.
(VI.2) Mythologem of child exposure. Related to child sacrifice is child exposure; this is a transmuted ritual arising later, because the killing is not done by the parents, but the parents “give the child to the Goddess”, for it is nature that does the killing. It is a transmuted offering of “first fruits”; the myth is also strongly associated with (VI.3) the mythologem of the foundling—the adoption by other parents or by the Goddess of the foundling. Adoption is possibly an indicator of the mythologem of matrilineal descent and may contain material from an earlier epoch. Child exposure and the divine foster child are expressed in the following myths: (a) Tyro, (b) Zephus and Amphion, (c) Oedipus, (d) Teleophus, (e) Arcas, (f) Atalante, (g) Paris.
Arguably the most disturbing mythologem is (V.8) the mythologem of the Bacchic madness; of the rendering of the king. The tearing of the king limb-by-limb by women driven mad in Bacchic frenzy takes the idea of the sacrifice of the king to an exceptionally savage level. Instances of this mythologem cited by Apollodorus in the Library include, “Orpheus also discovered the mysteries of Dionysos, and he was buried near Pieria after he was torn apart by Maenads” (1.15); the women at Argos driven mad by Dionysus, “had their still-nursing children with them in the mountains and ate their flesh” (3.37); the murder of Pelias by his daughters at the instigation of Medea (1.143); “The mares [of Diomedes the Thracian] ripped him [Abderos] apart and killed him”; the myth of Thracian Lycurgus: “Dionysos made Lycourgos go mad. In his raving he struck his son Dryas with an ax and killed him, thinking that he was chopping the branch of a vine. … When the land remained infertile, the god gave a prophecy that it would bear crops if Lycourgos were put to death. When the Edonoi heard this, they led him to Mount Pangaion and tied him up. There, in accordance with the will of Dionysos, Lycourgos was destroyed by horses and died” (3.33); the myth of Pentheus, immortalised also in the play by Euripides: “Dionysus came to Thebes and made the women leave their houses and celebrate the Bacchic rites on Mount Cithairon. … When he [Pentheus] came to Citharion to spy on the Bacchai, he was dismembered by his mother Agaue in a fit of madness, for she thought he was a beast” (3.36); the myth of Labdacos, son of Pentheus, “who was killed after Pentheus for holding similar beliefs” (3.41). If we read these last examples as specific reminiscences from Theban history at the inception or during the wake of the Dark Age, we may infer that the crisis at Thebes took a particularly violent turn.
This mythologem has parallels in the myths of the gods: (j) Cronos eats his children. (l) Zagreus and Dionysus as Zagreus are dismembered; (m) Dictaean Zeus is dismembered. While these cosmological myths are usually taken as arising in very ancient Greek religion, earlier than the Minoan epoch, they on the contrary derive from the Dark Ages. The hypothesis is that child sacrifice commenced during the ravages of the Dark Ages and are a substitute rite for adult sacrifice. The child need not be an infant; substitution of adult children is also implicated. Child sacrifice arose in the second millennium. But we may consider the possibility that child sacrifice and cannibalism was an atavism to an earlier primitive rite, for which the possibly cannibalised children whose remains were found in the temple at Knossos would be archaeological evidence.
Another related mythologem is (V.7) the mythologem of child burning; of immortalisation. The sacrifice of a child can hardly be undertaken without a sense of guilt; the sense of being under divine command may mitigate this emotion to an extent, but there also arose the compensatory belief that the burning of a child conferred “immortality” on the dead child. What is meant by immortality here cannot be the same as the idea of “everlasting life”, which is a concept arising in Ionian consciousness. This mythologem appears in Greek myth for example, and not exclusively in: (a) Demeter intends to confer immortality on the child Meleagros by putting him in the fire, but is interrupted and he dies; (b) motif of the golden hair in the myth of Pterelaos; (c) motif in the immortality of Glaucos; (d) motif in the birth of Dionysus as son of Semele; Semele is incinerated by Zeus at the instigation of Hera’s jealousy; (e) same motif in the birth of Asclepius; (f) motif in the birth of Achilles; (g) in the myth of Meleager.
(VI.2) Mythologem of child exposure. Related to child sacrifice is child exposure; this is a transmuted ritual arising later, because the killing is not done by the parents, but the parents “give the child to the Goddess”, for it is nature that does the killing. It is a transmuted offering of “first fruits”; the myth is also strongly associated with (VI.3) the mythologem of the foundling—the adoption by other parents or by the Goddess of the foundling. Adoption is possibly an indicator of the mythologem of matrilineal descent and may contain material from an earlier epoch. Child exposure and the divine foster child are expressed in the following myths: (a) Tyro, (b) Zephus and Amphion, (c) Oedipus, (d) Teleophus, (e) Arcas, (f) Atalante, (g) Paris.
Arguably the most disturbing mythologem is (V.8) the mythologem of the Bacchic madness; of the rendering of the king. The tearing of the king limb-by-limb by women driven mad in Bacchic frenzy takes the idea of the sacrifice of the king to an exceptionally savage level. Instances of this mythologem cited by Apollodorus in the Library include, “Orpheus also discovered the mysteries of Dionysos, and he was buried near Pieria after he was torn apart by Maenads” (1.15); the women at Argos driven mad by Dionysus, “had their still-nursing children with them in the mountains and ate their flesh” (3.37); the murder of Pelias by his daughters at the instigation of Medea (1.143); “The mares [of Diomedes the Thracian] ripped him [Abderos] apart and killed him”; the myth of Thracian Lycurgus: “Dionysos made Lycourgos go mad. In his raving he struck his son Dryas with an ax and killed him, thinking that he was chopping the branch of a vine. … When the land remained infertile, the god gave a prophecy that it would bear crops if Lycourgos were put to death. When the Edonoi heard this, they led him to Mount Pangaion and tied him up. There, in accordance with the will of Dionysos, Lycourgos was destroyed by horses and died” (3.33); the myth of Pentheus, immortalised also in the play by Euripides: “Dionysus came to Thebes and made the women leave their houses and celebrate the Bacchic rites on Mount Cithairon. … When he [Pentheus] came to Citharion to spy on the Bacchai, he was dismembered by his mother Agaue in a fit of madness, for she thought he was a beast” (3.36); the myth of Labdacos, son of Pentheus, “who was killed after Pentheus for holding similar beliefs” (3.41). If we read these last examples as specific reminiscences from Theban history at the inception or during the wake of the Dark Age, we may infer that the crisis at Thebes took a particularly violent turn.
(13) The mythologem of the curse. Greek oral tradition preserves the memory of the self-perpetuating, vicious-circle character of the troubles of the Dark Age. Famous instances of the curse are (a) the curse of the House of Atreus; (b) the curse of the necklace of Europhile; (c) the curse upon the house of Pelias, which is the foundation of the myth of the Golden Fleece. I illustrate this with a summary of the first of these curses.
The curse of the House of Atreus
Tantalos serves his son Pelops at a banquet for the gods. The children of Niobe, daughter of Tantalos are slaughtered by Apollo and Artemis in divine retribution for insult to their mother Leto. Pelops, resurrected, murders Oenomaus and Myrtilus, both of whom curse him as they are dying. Pelops marries Hippodamia and succeeds to the throne of Pisa. Chrysippus, a son of Pelops by the Danaid Astyoche, is murdered by Hippodamia. In an episode involving a golden fleece, the sons of Pelops, Thyestes and Atreus, contend for the throne of Mycenae. Kingship is given first to Thyestes, and then to Atreus. Thyestes commits adultery with Aerope, the wife of Atreus. Atreus murders his own son, Pleisthenes, by a former wife; he also slaughters three sons of Thyestes on the altar of Zeus, serving them to Thyestes as a dish. Thyestes commits incest with his daughter, Pelopia, raping her and fathering a child upon her. She exposes the child, Aegisthus, but this child is adopted by Atreus, who brings it up. Atreus orders Aegisthus to kill Thyestes, but Thyestes evades the plot, and reveals himself as his father; Aegisthus kills Atreus. Agamemnon, son of Atreus, drives Thyestes from Mycenae and is accepted as king there. He marries Clytaemnestra, widow of (another) Tantalos, King of Pisa, and daughter of Tyndareus and Leda. Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia, his daughter by Clytaemnestra, at Aulis to appease an angry ghost and obtain a wind for his fleet setting sail for Troy. At Troy he takes as concubine Cassandra, daughter of Priam, and has by her two sons. On return he, Cassandra and his sons are murdered by Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. Agamemnon’s son and daughter by Clytaemnestra, Orestes and Electra, murder their mother and Aegisthus, her lover. Orestes is pursued by the Erinyes, instruments of the divine retribution of the Goddess, for crimes against mother-blood, but he obtains final absolution from Apollo and Athena at the court of the Areopagus at Athens. |
This myth does not belong directly to the Mycenaean period, and we are not obliged to regard any of the characters in it as historical personages; it belongs to the boundary between the Mycenaean and Dark Age and records the turmoil of the latter. Allowing the mythologems to stand apart from the legendary material, we see exemplars of pre-Minoan layers—vegetation religion in a resurrection motif and succession through marriage to the priestess—incest with a daughter is a sign of that. The material plunges us into the chaos of the Dark Age, with bloody intrigues committed among the aristocracy, and bids to put the divine order right by sacrifices of everyone, children included, which only serve to perpetuate the problem. The resolution comes through the victory of patriarchy, explicitly rendered plain to us in the tragic triology, the Oresteia, of Aeschylus, where we also see a statement of (VI.9) the mythologem of parthenogenesis—the birth of the virgin Athena from the head of Zeus, without the labour of a mother, Zeus having swallowed her mother, the Titaness, Metis. This statement records the victory of patriarchy.
(14) The bloody rites of Artemis. Thus, Greek mythology points to terrible things taking place in the darkness, when the Greeks lost all powers of expression. After the brief respite in the vicinity of Mycenae, from c.1050 onwards virtually no figurative representation, either in image or word, was formed. The mind was only capable of expressing itself in the endless patterns of proto-geometric pottery—beautiful, but indicative of a deeply disturbed spirit obsessively seeking renewal. But memories of the terror were preserved also in oral traditions that are “semantic” in form, as opposed to “iconic”. In his anthropological studies of Greece, Pausanias had the opportunity to record many of these.
Pausanias records multiple instances of the continuing primacy of the Goddess in the Greece, particularly in the smaller towns and rural areas. Within the Peloponnese, the dominant deity is Artemis, who is everywhere associated with rites of the cruellest and most bloody kind. I suggest that Iphigenia was originally a doublet of Artemis, or a title given to her priestess. The cult of Taurian Iphigenia was everywhere associated with human sacrifice. Another example concerns the institution of child sacrifice at the Shrine of Triklarian Artemis, which is said to be in vengeance for the intercourse of Melanippos and Komaitho within the temple. This explanation is an aetiological wrapper from the patriarchal epoch, for in the days of the fertility religion, sacred copulation was a duty, recorded for example in the transformed ritual at Athens during the festival of Anthesteria when the Queen (Basilinna) performed symbolic, if not actual, ritual copulation with priest of Dionysus.
(14) The bloody rites of Artemis. Thus, Greek mythology points to terrible things taking place in the darkness, when the Greeks lost all powers of expression. After the brief respite in the vicinity of Mycenae, from c.1050 onwards virtually no figurative representation, either in image or word, was formed. The mind was only capable of expressing itself in the endless patterns of proto-geometric pottery—beautiful, but indicative of a deeply disturbed spirit obsessively seeking renewal. But memories of the terror were preserved also in oral traditions that are “semantic” in form, as opposed to “iconic”. In his anthropological studies of Greece, Pausanias had the opportunity to record many of these.
Pausanias records multiple instances of the continuing primacy of the Goddess in the Greece, particularly in the smaller towns and rural areas. Within the Peloponnese, the dominant deity is Artemis, who is everywhere associated with rites of the cruellest and most bloody kind. I suggest that Iphigenia was originally a doublet of Artemis, or a title given to her priestess. The cult of Taurian Iphigenia was everywhere associated with human sacrifice. Another example concerns the institution of child sacrifice at the Shrine of Triklarian Artemis, which is said to be in vengeance for the intercourse of Melanippos and Komaitho within the temple. This explanation is an aetiological wrapper from the patriarchal epoch, for in the days of the fertility religion, sacred copulation was a duty, recorded for example in the transformed ritual at Athens during the festival of Anthesteria when the Queen (Basilinna) performed symbolic, if not actual, ritual copulation with priest of Dionysus.
But the vengeance of Artemis brought down destruction on the people, the earth gave no crops, and there were strange diseases deadlier than ever before. The people had recourse to the oracle at Delphi, and the Pythian priestess accused Melanippos and Komaitho. An oracular command came that they should be sacrificed to Artemis, and once every year the boy and virgin with the most beautiful bodies were to be sacrificed to the goddess. Because of this sacrifice the river beside the sanctuary of Triklarian Artemis was called the Implacable river: until then it had no name. The boys and virgins who were innocent before the goddess and died because of Melanippose and Komaitho suffered the most pitiful of fates and so did their families. (Achaia, 7.19.2)
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No question here in the mind of Pausanias that this semantically encoded material records historical events; he goes on to explain how the bloody rite came to an end; a story that belongs to the reformation of Greek religion. Other related instances in which an oral tradition of sacrifice is indicated as a historical reality include: (a) sacrifice by stoning of children at the temple of Kondylean Artemis (Arkadia, 8.23.6); (b) “Murder” of a priest of Dionysus at the Shrine of Dionysus at Potniai resulting in a plague to be commuted by the (implied annual or regular) sacrifice of an adolescent boy (Boiotia, 9.8.1); (c) The sacrifice of Koresos and Kalliroe at the sanctuary of Kalydonian Dionysus at the behest of the oracle of Dodona (Achaia, 7.21.1). The most significant of these oral evidences concerns Sparta.
The place called the LAKE SANCTUARY is sacred to Standing Artemis. They claim this as the idol that Orestes and Iphigenia stole from the Taurians. … There is another piece of evidence that the Standing goddess of the Lakonians is the old barbarian idol: Astrabakos and Alopekos, the sons of Irbos and the descendants of Argis through Amphikles and Amphisthenes, suddenly went mad and when they found this statue, and when the Spartans of Limnai, Kynosouria, Mesoa and Pitane sacrificed to Artemis she cursed them through this statue with quarrels and then with murders; many of them died at her altar and disease devoured the rest. This is the reason why they bloody the altar with human blood. They used to slaughter a human sacrifice chosen by drawing lots; Lykourgos substituted the whipping of fully grown boys, and the altar still gets is fill of human blood. The priestess with the Idol stands beside them; the idol is small and light, except that if ever the scourgers pull back their strokes because of a boy’s beauty or his rank, then the woman finds the idol heavy and hard to carry; she blames the scourgers and says they are hurting her: such a taste for human blood has survived in that statue from the time of the Taurian sacrifices. (Lakonia¸3.16.7-10.)
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This demonstrates the religious transformations taking place within the Dark Age. The practice of human sacrifice in the cult of Taurian Artemis and Iphigenia, had provoked a civil war. Eventually, the sacrificial rite was reformed by the substitution of the famous Spartan custom of scouring, bloody enough, but a symbolic substitute for the original; and a real sacrifice too, if a boy died as a result of the whipping.
With this material in hand, a reinterpretation of all the early wars of Sparta along the lines of religious conflict between conservative matriarchy and incipient patriarchy is invited. An incident known as the expulsion of the partheniai in the context of the First Messenian War is illuminated. This event is extensively referenced in multiple sources, though Pausanias is not one of them. The partheniai were illegitimate men, children of unmarried mothers from Amyclae. A civil war in Lakonia was fought by the Dorian villages against the Achaean village of Amyclae, captured c.750, and eventually these illegitimate men were forced out to found a colony at Taras (Tarentum) in Magna Graeca in 708.
There is more semantically coded material in Pausanias, and some of it points to firm oral traditions stretching into the darkness. The story of the political evolution of Argos (Corinth, 2.19.1) preserves an oral tradition repeated by Plato in the Laws (683) in which we see the original Mycenaean structure with King Temenos, and a subordinate “Leader of the People”, here as battle-commander, Deiphontes. Matrilineal succession through marriage of Deiphontes to Hyrnetho, the daughter of the king, is illustrated. Her position as priestess is suppressed. A civil disturbance arises, the succession being opposed by the sons. The violence of the confrontation is not presented in the account, and a peaceful transition to the rule of law is suggested. We cannot determine who the individuals were, but this is another broad summary of events of the Dark Age, saving the violence is merely alluded to. The developed matriarchy of the Mycenaean structure is replaced through conflict by a patriarchal one. The story is taken up in the account of the war at Epidauros, whose people sided with Deiphontes and Hyrnetho in the quarrel and split from the other Argives. Argos only rose to power during the Dark Age, so this material records a tradition of events belonging to the darkness.
With this material in hand, a reinterpretation of all the early wars of Sparta along the lines of religious conflict between conservative matriarchy and incipient patriarchy is invited. An incident known as the expulsion of the partheniai in the context of the First Messenian War is illuminated. This event is extensively referenced in multiple sources, though Pausanias is not one of them. The partheniai were illegitimate men, children of unmarried mothers from Amyclae. A civil war in Lakonia was fought by the Dorian villages against the Achaean village of Amyclae, captured c.750, and eventually these illegitimate men were forced out to found a colony at Taras (Tarentum) in Magna Graeca in 708.
There is more semantically coded material in Pausanias, and some of it points to firm oral traditions stretching into the darkness. The story of the political evolution of Argos (Corinth, 2.19.1) preserves an oral tradition repeated by Plato in the Laws (683) in which we see the original Mycenaean structure with King Temenos, and a subordinate “Leader of the People”, here as battle-commander, Deiphontes. Matrilineal succession through marriage of Deiphontes to Hyrnetho, the daughter of the king, is illustrated. Her position as priestess is suppressed. A civil disturbance arises, the succession being opposed by the sons. The violence of the confrontation is not presented in the account, and a peaceful transition to the rule of law is suggested. We cannot determine who the individuals were, but this is another broad summary of events of the Dark Age, saving the violence is merely alluded to. The developed matriarchy of the Mycenaean structure is replaced through conflict by a patriarchal one. The story is taken up in the account of the war at Epidauros, whose people sided with Deiphontes and Hyrnetho in the quarrel and split from the other Argives. Argos only rose to power during the Dark Age, so this material records a tradition of events belonging to the darkness.
Pictorial representations of Amazons in Late Helladic IIIIC pottery fragments.
The whirlwind storm of the inception of the Dark Age corresponds to pottery of the LH IIIC period , 1190—1130. Some of the pottery fragments contain images suggestive of female warriors.
Motif
From a pottery fragment found at the proto-Geometric cemetery of Voudeni near Patras, LH IIIC. Under the backward projection of patriarchy the assumption is that any depiction of a warrior must be of a man. However, the breasts in this image are too large to be unambiguously representative of a man. It is a hypothesis that this image represents a female warrior. The image involves no other indication of masculine gender—other related images of men indicate beard growth. Greek myth talks of wars in which female warriors are said to have come from the Aegean islands to support the beleaguered matriarchy of the mainland. We see also in this image the symbol of a bird, suggestive of a cult identification. Bird imagery continues in the archaic period to be strongly associated with female power. The spikes have been interpreted as indicating a hedgehog helmet, but, if that is what it is, there is no reason why a female warrior should not similarly arm herself. The figure is naked, and appears to be rowing. The famous burial of “the hero of Lefkandi” is accompanied by a Queen, who is buried with a pair of gold breastplates very like the image of the fragment (Popham, Antiquity vol. 56, 1982). In another backward projection of patriarchy, Popham speculates that the Queen may have been sacrificed to accompany the male warrior, but provides no evidence to support his claim in his article, or why, if sacrifice is indicated, it might not be the other way around.
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(15) The mythologem of the war with Amazons (V.9) records actual bloodshed in battle between men and women. Depictions of combats between male and female warriors became highly fashionable by archaic times, expressive of the misogyny that developed among politically dominant men; they adorned their temples with paintings and friezes depicting the theme. Women-hating patriarchy also revelled in depictions of the ritual sacrifice to appease the angry ghost of Achilles of Polyxena, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, after the capture of Troy, giving rise to images that can cause the unsuspecting observer’s hair to stand on end. Mythology iconographically records many such wars between men and women, but there is also semantically coded material of an oral tradition that they are no mere fantasy. That there really were Amazons cannot be doubted. Certain geographical regions were associated with them, such as Lycia and Lydia, both renown in the descriptions of Herodotus for their matriarchal customs; the region around Ephesus was especially notable for them; Amazon tribes were known in Libya and Scythia, and most famously in the valley of the river Thermadon in Asia Minor. But Amazons could be found in ancient Greece too, for we see them depicted on the walls of the Mycenaean palaces—riding in chariots, presiding at parades and participating in the chase. Pausanias records the following tradition from Tegea in Arkardia.
There is a figure of Ares in the market-place of Tegea, in relief on a stone tablet; they call him the Woman-feaster. At the time of the Lakonian War and the first expedition of King Charillos of Lakonia, the women laid an armed ambush below the hill now called Wardress Hill; the main forces had engaged with acts of daring and memorable male courage on both sides when the women appeared and broke the Lakonian line; the most daring of them all was Marpessa whom they called the Sow, and Charillos himself was one of the Spartan captives. They let him go without a ransom, under oath to the Tegeans that the Lakonians would never campaign against Tegea again: an oath that he broke. The women on their own with no man present slaughtered a victory sacrifice to Ares and gave the men no share of the sacrificial meat. This was how Ares got his title. (Arcadia, 8.48.4)
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Thus tradition records that Tegea was a matriarchy and capable of fielding female warriors that could overpower a Spartan force of men.
Motif
From a pottery fragment found at the proto-Geometric cemetery of Voudeni near Patras, LH IIIC. A second image depicting a figure with suspiciously large breasts, or breast plates, otherwise naked. The figure has been assumed to be carrying a long sword inside a fringed case. However, this object is not definitely being held by the figure, and it might represent a sceptre.
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The myth of Theseus records an invasion of Athens by Amazons, which superficially appears absurd, but may be a trace from Hittite history. Greek tradition associates a fierce tribe of Amazons with the river Thermodon in Asia Minor (for example, Diodorus 2.44.1). In Hittite tradition the kings of Hatti were in constant warfare with the Khatti people who are said to occupy precisely the same geographical region. (Observe the similarity of names between Hatti and Khatti—could this be a civil war?) The identification of the Khatti people with the Amazons is invited, and I wonder if there is just a faint trace in Greek legend of the wars between the Hittites and the Khatti. The Hittite empire disappeared suddenly in the Bronze Age Collapse, and the Khatti are implicated among the causes of that collapse.
Male figurines, C8 and C7
Figurines of men and horses were used as votive offerings on cauldrons and temples; some were cast into the fire at religious festivals. The idea expressed is that of the substitution of a living victim by the offering. The idea expresses the same obsessive character as that of the patterns of geometric pottery, indicative of disturbed times.
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For the main part Greek men were fighting with Amazon women, because there were always Amazons throughout Greece. The war with the Amazons at Athens is just a faint trace of real conflict there, and there were tombs to prove it. The Athenians showed graves of the Amazons Antiope, who deserted to Theseus, and Molpadia, who killed Antiope. The Megarans had a grave of Antiope’s sister, Hippolyte, who was said to have escaped the battle at Athens and died of grief at Megara.
“Primitive Zeus”
Pottery shield from a burial at Knossos c.900. This fascinating image hails out of the Dark Age. Jaquetta Hawkes (Dawn of the Gods) describes it thus: “Primitive Zeus confronts the Earth Goddess,” but she supplies no explanation for how she arrived at this interpretation. To begin with a description: the standing male figure holds what appears to be an incense burner in his right hand; in his left, he holds a swan. The swan image is repeated two more times. He is within an enclosure, signified by the “roof” above his head. A cauldron is situated to his left, under which another figure emerges from the ground. Interpretation: this would seem to be an invocation of the dead, something akin to the visit to the underworld described in the Odyssey. The sex of the spirit that is evoked from the earth is not indicated, but I suggest is male, an ancestor. The swans, an image that occurs repeatedly in Dark Age and Archaic Age material, denotes a cult or totem association. We recall that Zeus coupled as a swan with Leda; the result of their union being Helen (of Troy) and Castor, one of the Dioscuroi. Leda means “Lady” and the swan image designates a matriarchal connection. An invocatory séance is being performed in the service of the Goddess at her shrine; it represents a consultation with an oracle.
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We find in Greek tradition traces of another much larger conflict whose locus is Argos, in which Perseus appears as the male protagonist and the women, identified as Maenads rather than Amazons, are motivated and lead by Dionysus and Ariadne. The mythologem is several times embroidered. These are details provided by Pausanias.
The near-by memorial is called the memorial of Choreia the maenad; they say she and other women came to Argos in Dionysos’s troops, and when Perseus won the battle he murdered most of the women: the rest were buried together, but since this one had a special position, they made her a private memorial. (Corinth, 2.20.2)
On the right of the sanctuary of Leto is the shrine of Flowering Hera; in front of that is the grave of the island women of the Aegean who went on campaign with Dionysos and died in battle against Perseus and the Argives. They call them the sea-women. Opposite the memorial of these women is a sanctuary of Pelasgian Demeter, named from its founder Pelasgos, whose grave is not far off. (Corinth, 2.22.1-2) |
In some versions Perseus is said to have killed Dionysus and/or Ariadne. The details cannot be deduced in any degree of certainty, but the mythologem points to real violence between men and women. It also suggests that the conservative matriarchy could draw on the support of forces from the Aegean islands. This tradition is recorded elsewhere in what may be a doublet of this mythologem—the myth of Thracian Lycurgus (Iliad, 6, 129—41). We infer that among all the conflicts of the Dark Age, there were attempts to suppress the cult of Dionysus, which resulted in bloody wars. Dionysus (that is, the matriarchy) was able to call on forces drawn from the Aegean islands, and men and women fought each other.
Pausanias records another startling variant of the generally accepted legend of Perseus according to which Perseus swapped the kingdom of Tiryns for Mycenae with his cousin Megapenthes. In Pausanias’s version, Perseus “persuaded Megapenthe, daughter of Proitos to exchange crowns, and taking hers he founded Mycenae.” (Corinth, 2.16.3) This makes Megapenthe into a woman, and is consistent with the interpretation here emerging that Perseus represents forces of patriarchy in conflict with matriarchy, and the picture of a dual monarchy at the Mycenaean palaces. If so, it records an initial compromise between the two sides of the conflict, with the priestess-Queen taking Tiryns as her base, and Perseus taking Mycenae. In Greek legend Perseus dies at the hands of “Megapenthes”, so it is possible that matriarchy gained the upper hand in his case, or for a period. It is hardly to be doubted that two such evenly matched forces over the centuries did not fight each other to exhaustion. But, if Perseus was a real person, and he might have been, then whatever happened to him personally, the forces of patriarchy that he represented won in the end. For that is the content of the (VI.4) mythologem of the dragon slayer. The very image of the Gorgon that Perseus is said to have decapitated stands for female power—it is the symbol of matriarchy. And whether Perseus the man decapitated any female priestesses in battle or otherwise, the mythologem of Gorgon slaying stands for the eventual victory of patriarchy, in which terminus we have the end of the Dark Ages. We must glancingly mention other mythologems associated with the war of the Dark Ages: the (VI.5) mythologem of the war of the Gods—the war between the Gods and the Titans; and as an expression of the ever cyclical and resurgent nature of this war—the subsequent (VI.6) mythologem of the battle of the Gods with the Giants.
The end of the Greek Dark Age
Bronze group
In the Metropolitan Museum c.750—735 A centaur “confronts” a man. This may be an early representation of the myth of the battle between Heracles and the centaurs. This sublime bronze work is yet primitive and crude, and out of step with the sophistication of Homer. Hence, an early date for Homer is not likely. We expect to see the plastic arts keep time with the non-plastic.
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Image to the left: Prometheus
Illustration derived from a Laconian black figure amphoriskos in the Vatican Museum, c.530
Illustration derived from a Laconian black figure amphoriskos in the Vatican Museum, c.530
The myth of Prometheus exemplifies the darkness of Greek mythology, a darkness that can only hail from a Dark Age. The liver of Prometheus is devoured daily at the command of Zeus, the High God of justice. The figure to the left in the image is Atlas, the brother of Prometheus. The oppressive nature of the mythological event is unconsciously expressed by the artist of this icon by the manner in which Atlas appears to lean forward towards Prometheus. It would take the genius of Aeschylus to reconcile this cruel punishment with divine providence. With that reconciliation Greek religion witnesses the development of the idea of man as fallen being, for it will be revealed that Prometheus interfered with the divine plan of Zeus, who hoped, by wiping out entirely the first race of mankind, to begin afresh with a new.