07. MYSTERY RELIGIONS

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Demeter and the Eleusinian Mysteries

• Demeter
  • one aspect of the earth mother
    • controls crops, fertility of earth
• myth--rape of her daughter Persephone by Hades
  • Persephone remains with Hades during summer--hot, dry, dangerous to crops
  • Persephone remains with Demeter the rest of the year--rains, fruitfulness, harvest
• various theoretical explanations for myth
  • aetiology: explains why there are seasons
  • ritual (Durkheim)--myth : words :: ritual : actions
    • which comes first? do rites validate myths, or do myths validate rites?
  • sociological charter (Malinowski)
    • myth expresses and maintains cultural solidarity
    • confronts paradox that death, fertility are linked
• ritual--chief sanctuary at Eleusis
  • Eleusinian mysteries re-enact Demeter's search for daughter
    • procession from Athens, with racy jokes
    • Eleusis in myth is place Demeter heard news of Persephone
    • initiates into mysteries achieve blessed eternity
      • elaborate ritual culminates in 3 parts
      • things seen, things done, things said
      • details never revealed

Orpheus and Orphism

• Orpheus
  • Thracian poet, real or mythical
  • mother a muse (Calliope), father Apollo, or Thracian river god Oeagrus
• great musician, prophet, leader of mysteries; said by some to have invented writing
• goes to Hades to retrieve wife Euridice
  • forfeits her by looking back at her
  • renounces women thereafter
• torn apart by women of Thrace; various accounts given
  • they resented his rejection
  • he enticed their husbands away
  • he refused them initiation into his mysteries (Orphism; see below)
  • Dionysus sent maenads to destroy him because he worshipped Apollo instead
• other variant traditions of his death
  • Zeus sent thunderbolt to punish him for revealing in his mysteries things previously unknown
  • Dionysus sad to lose Orpheus, who had sung his praise
    • therefore turned Thracian women into trees, and abandoned Thrace
• head and lyre of Orpheus claimed by Lesbos
  • head gave prophecies until stopped by Apollo
  • temple to Dionysos built on spot where head buried
• thus Orpheus has links to Apollo and Dionysos both
  • Apollo: his son; lyre and music; prophecy
  • Dionysos: mysteries; torn apart; trip to Hades
• in the myth of Zagreus (= Dionysos), Dionysos dies and is reborn

Orphism

• origin ascribed to Orpheus himself--his mysteriesorigin ascribed to Orpheus himself--his mysteries
• Dionysos (alias Zagreus) of chief importance
• Orphic theogony (different from Hesiod's):

notes: 1) Chronus accompanied by Adrasteia ('Necessity')
2) Phanes comes out of egg fashioned by Chronus
3) Phanes and Night are the parents of Earth and Heaven
4) Zeus swallows Phanes and all creation; recreates all with Night's help

• infant Zagreus killed and devoured by Titans
  • Zeus kills them with thunderbolt; swallows Zagreus' heart (saved by Athene)
    • begets him anew on Semele as Dionysos
  • man created from ashes of Titans
    • thus part evil, mortal (Titans); part divine (D., eaten by Titans)
• Orphic doctrine
  • provides for original sin; transmigration of (immortal) soul; redemption
  • successive lives, each with rewards, punishments for preceding life
  • goal: to attain eternal happiness
    • achieved by living good Orphic life--ceremony, abstinence (vegetarianism)
  • final union with divine spirit in aether
    • thus all comes from One (Zeus or Phanes); all returns to One
  • Dionysos--suffers what he commits--tearing and eating
    • sacramental reenactment in cult
• modern reaction
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
    • actual title: Die Geburt der Tragodie aus dem Geiste der Musik, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
    • Dionysos stands for loss of self; suffering; violence
    • dying god acquires strength, permanence in moment of death
    • parallel to Christ--death, resurrection, wine as symbol
      • both existential surrogates of the 'Over-man' (Ubermensch)
  • Carl Jung
    • Dionysos is "archetypal expression of universal human suffering" (Kerenyi)