The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (27 page)

Authors: Robert Graves

b
. Athene interrupted this grisly banquet shortly before its end and, rescuing Zagreus’s heart, enclosed it in a gypsum figure, into which she breathed life; so that Zagreus became an immortal. His bones were
collected and buried at Delphi, and Zeus struck the Titans dead with thunderbolts.
¹

1
. Diodorus Siculus: v. 75. 4; Nonnus:
Dionysiaca
vi. 296 and xxvii. 228; Harpocration
sub
apomatton; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
355; Eustathius on Homer’s
Iliad
ii. 735; Firmicus Maternus:
Concerning the Errors of Profane Religions
vi; Euripides:
The Cretans, Fragment
475. Orphic Fragments (
Kern
, 34).

1
. This myth concerns the annual sacrifice of a boy which took place in ancient Crete: a surrogate for Minos the Bull-king. He reigned for a single day, went through a dance illustrative of the five seasons – lion, goat, horse, serpent, and bull-calf – and was then eaten raw. All the toys with which the Titans lured him away were objects used by the philosophical Orphics, who inherited the tradition of this sacrifice but devoured a bull-calf raw, instead of a boy. The bull-roarer was a pierced stone or piece of pottery, which when whirled at the end of a cord made a noise like a rising gale; and the tuft of wool may have been used to daub the
Curetes
with the wet gypsum – these being youths who had cut and dedicated their first hair to the goddess Car (see
95.
5
). They were also called
Corybantes
, or crested dancers. Zagreus’s other gifts served to explain the nature of the ceremony by which the participants became one with the god: the cone was an ancient emblem of the goddess, in whose honour the Titans sacrificed him (see
20.
2
); the mirror represented each initiate’s other self, or ghost; the golden apples, his passport to Elysium after a mock-death; the knuckle-bone, his divinatory powers (see
17.
3
).

2
. A Cretan hymn discovered a few years ago at Palaiokastro, near the Dictaean Cave, is addressed to the Cronian One, greatest of youths, who comes dancing at the head of his demons and leaps to increase the fertility of soil and flocks, and for the success of the fishing fleet. Jane Harrison in
Themis
suggests that the shielded tutors there mentioned, who ‘took thee, immortal child, from Rhea’s side,’ merely pretended to kill and eat the victim, an initiate into their secret society. But all such mock-deaths at initiation ceremonies, reported from many parts of the world, seem ultimately based on a tradition of actual human sacrifice; and Zagreus’s calendar changes distinguish him from an ordinary member of a totemistic fraternit.

3
. The uncanonical tiger in the last of Zagreus’s transformations is explained by his identity with Dionysus (see
27.
c
), of whose death and resurrection the same story is told, although with cooked flesh instead of raw, and Rhea’s name instead of Athene’s. Dionysus, too, was a horned serpent – he had horns and serpent locks at birth (see
27.
a
) – and his
Orphic devotees ate him sacramentally in bull form. Zagreus became ‘Zeus in a goat-skin coat’, because Zeus or his child surrogate had ascended to Heaven wearing a coat made from the hide of the goat Amaltheia (see
7.
b
). ‘Cronus making rain’ is a reference to the use of the bull-roarer in rain-making ceremonies. In this context the Titans were
Titanoi
, ‘white-chalk men’, the Curetes themselves disguised so that the ghost of the victim would not recognize them. When human sacrifices went out of fashion, Zeus was represented as hurling his thunderbolt at the cannibals; and the
Titanes
, ‘lords of the seven-day week’, became confused with the
Titanoi
, ‘the white-chalk men’, because of their hostility to Zeus. No Orphic, who had once eaten the flesh of his god, ever again touched meat of any kind.

4
. Zagreus-Dionysus was also known in Southern Palestine. According to the Ras Shamra tablets, Ashtar temporarily occupied the throne of Heaven while the god Baal languished in the Underworld, having eaten the food of the dead. Ashtar was only a child and when he sat on the throne, his feet did not reach the footstool; Baal presently returned and killed him with a club. The Mosaic Law prohibited initiation feasts in Ashtar’s honour: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk’ – an injunction three times repeated (
Exodus
xxiii. 19; xxxiv. 26;
Deuteronomy
xiv. 21).

THE GODS OF THE UNDERWORLD

W
HEN
ghosts descend to Tartarus, the main entrance to which lies in a grove of black poplars beside the Ocean stream, each is supplied by pious relatives with a coin laid under the tongue of its corpse. They are thus able to pay Charon, the miser who ferries them in a crazy boat across the Styx. This hateful river bounds Tartarus on the western side,
¹and has for its tributaries Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Aornis, and Lethe. Penniless ghosts must wait for ever on the near bank; unless they have evaded Hermes, their conductor, and crept down by a back entrance, such as at Laconian Taenarus,
²or Thesprotian Aornum. A three-headed or, some say, fifty-headed dog named Cerberus, guards the opposite shore of Styx, ready to devour living intruders or ghostly fugitives.
³

b
. The first region of Tartarus contains the cheerless Asphodel
Fields, where souls of heroes stay without purpose among the throngs of less distinguished dead that twitter like bats, and where only Orion still has the heart to hunt the ghostly deer.
⁴None of them but would rather live in bondage to a landless peasant than rule over all Tartarus. Their one delight is in libations of blood poured to them by the living: when they drink they feel themselves almost men again. Beyond these meadows lie Erebus and the palace of Hades and Persephone. To the left of the palace, as one approaches it, a white cypress shades the pool of Lethe, where the common ghosts flock down to drink. Initiated souls avoid this water, choosing to drink instead from the pool of Memory, shaded by a white poplar [?], which gives them a certain advantage over their fellows.
⁵Close by, newly arrived ghosts are daily judged by Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus at a place where three roads meet. Rhadamanthys tries Asiatics and Aeacus tries Europeans; but both refer the difficult cases to Minos. As each verdict is given the ghosts are directed along one of the three roads; that leading back to the Asphodel Meadows, if they are neither virtuous nor evil; that leading to the punishment-field of Tartarus, if they are evil; that leading to the orchards of Elysium, if they are virtuous.

c
. Elysium, ruled over by Cronus, lies near Hades’s dominions, its entrance close to the pool of Memory, but forms no part of them; it is a happy land of perpetual day, without cold or snow, where games, music, and revels never cease, and where the inhabitants may elect to be reborn on earth whenever they please. Near by are the Fortunate Islands, reserved for those who have been three times born, and three times attained Elysium.
⁶But some say that there is another Fortunate Isle called Leuce in the Black Sea, opposite the mouths of the Danube, wooded and full of beasts, wild and tame, where the ghosts of Helen and Achilles hold high revelry and declaim Homer’s verses to heroes who have taken part in the events celebrated by him.
⁷

d
. Hades, who is fierce and jealous of his rights, seldom visits the upper air, except on business or when he is overcome by sudden lust. Once he dazzled the Nymph Minthe with the splendour of his golden chariot and its four black horses, and would have seduced her without difficulty had not Queen Persephone made a timely appearance and metamorphosed Minthe into sweet-smelling mint. On another occasion Hades tried to violate the Nymph Leuce, who was similarly metamorphosed into the white poplar standing by the pool of Memory.
⁸He willingly allows none of his subjects to escape, and few who visit
Tartarus return alive to describe it, which makes him the most hated of the gods.

e
. Hades never knows what is happening in the world above, or in Olympus,
⁹except for fragmentary information which comes to him when mortals strike their hands upon the earth and invoke him with oaths and curses. His most prized possession is the helmet of invisibility, given him as a mark of gratitude by the Cyclopes when he consented to release them at Zeus’s order. All the riches of gems and precious metals hidden beneath the earth are his, but he owns no property above ground, except for certain gloomy temples in Greece and, possibly, a herd of cattle in the island of Erytheia which, some say, really belong to Helius.
¹⁰

f
. Queen Persephone, however, can be both gracious and merciful. She is faithful to Hades, but has had no children by him and prefers the company of Hecate, goddess of witches, to his.
¹¹Zeus himself honours Hecate so greatly that he never denies her the ancient power which she has always enjoyed: of bestowing on mortals, or withholding from them, any desired gift. She has three bodies and three heads-lion, dog, and mare.
¹²

g
. Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera, the Erinnyes or Furies, live in Erebus, and are older than Zeus or any of the other Olympians. Their task is to hear complaints brought by mortals against the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, and of householders or city councils to suppliants – and to punish such crimes by hounding the culprits relentlessly, without rest or pause, from city to city and from country to country. These Erinnyes are crones, with snakes for hair, dogs’ heads, coal-black bodies, bats’ wings, and bloodshot eyes. In their hands they carry brass-studded scourges, and their victims die in torment.
¹³It is unwise to mention them by name in conversation; hence they are usually styled the Eumenides, which means ‘The Kindly Ones’ – as Hades is styled Pluton, or Pluto, ‘The Rich One’.