The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (25 page)

10
. The pomegranate which sprouted from Dionysus’s blood was also the tree of Tammuz-Adonis-Rimmon; its ripe fruit splits open like a wound and shows the red seeds inside. It symbolizes death and the promise of resurrection when held in the hand of the goddess Hera or Persephone (see
24.
11
).

11
. Dionysus’s rescue of Semele, renamed Thyone (‘raging queen’), has been deduced from pictures of a ceremonial held at Athens on the dancing floor dedicated to the Wild Women. There to the sound of singing, piping, and dancing, and with the scattering of flower petals from baskets, a priest summoned Semele to emerge from an
omphalos
, or artificial mound, and come attended by ‘the spirit of Spring’, the young Dionysus (Pindar:
Fragment
75. 3). At Delphi a similar ascension ceremony conducted wholly by women was called the
Herois
, or ‘feast of the heroine’ (Plutarch:
Greek Questions
12; Aristophanes:
Frogs
373–96, with scholiast). Still another may be presumed in Artemis’s temple at Troezen. The Moon-goddess, it must be remembered, had three different aspects – in the words of John Skelton:

Diana in the leaves green;

Luna who so bright doth sheen;

Persephone in Hell.

Semele was, in fact, another name for Core, or Persephone, and the ascension scene is painted on many Greek vases, some of which show Satyrs assisting the heroine’s emergence with mattocks; their presence
indicates that this was a Pelasgian rite. What they disinterred was probably a corn-doll buried after the harvest and now found to be sprouting green. Core, of course, did not ascend to Heaven; she wandered about on earth with Demeter until the time came for her to return to the Underworld. But soon after the award of Olympic status to Dionysus the Assumption of his virgin-mother became dogmatic and, once a goddess, she was differentiated from Core, who continued heroine-like to ascend and descend.

12
. The vine was the tenth tree of the sacral tree-year and its month corresponded with September, when the vintage feast took place. Ivy, the eleventh tree, corresponded with October, when the Maenads revelled and intoxicated themselves by chewing ivy leaves; and was important also because, like four other sacred trees – El’s prickly oak on which the cochineal insects fed, Phoroneus’s alder, and Dionysus’s own vine and pomegranate – it provided a red dye (see
52.
3
). Theophilus, the Byzantine monk (Rugerus:
On Handicrafts
, ch. 98), says that ‘poets and artists loved ivy because of the secret powers it contained…one of which I will tell you. In March, when the sap rises, if you perforate the stems of ivy with an auger in a few places, a gummy liquid will exude which, when mixed with urine and boiled, turns a blood colour called “lake”, useful for painting and illumination.’ Red dye was used to colour the faces of male fertility images (Pausanias: ii.
2
. 5), and of sacred kings (see 170.
11
); at Rome this custom survived in the reddening of the triumphant general’s face. The general represented the god Mars, who was a Spring-Dionysus before he specialized as the Roman God of War, and who gave his name to the month of March. English kings still have their faces slightly rouged on State occasions to make them look healthy and prosperous. Moreover, Greek ivy, like the vine and plane-tree, has a five-pointed leaf, representing the creative hand of the Earth-goddess Rhea (see
53.
a
). The myrtle was a death tree (see 109.
4
).

28

ORPHEUS

O
RPHEUS
, son of the Thracian King Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope, was the most famous poet and musician who ever lived. Apollo presented him with a lyre, and the Muses taught him its use, so that he not only enchanted wild beasts, but made the trees and rocks move from their places to follow the sound of his music. At Zone in Thrace a number of ancient mountain oaks are still standing in the pattern of one of his dances, just as he left them.
¹

b
. After a visit to Egypt, Orpheus joined the Argonauts, with whom he sailed to Colchis, his music helping them to overcome many difficulties – and, on his return, married Eurydice, whom some called Agriope, and settled among the savage Cicones of Thrace.
²

c
. One day, near Tempe, in the valley of the river Peneius, Eurydice met Aristaeus, who tried to force her. She trod on a serpent as she fled, and died of its bite; but Orpheus boldly descended into Tartarus, hoping to fetch her back. He used the passage which opens at Aornum in Thesprotis and, on his arrival, not only charmed the ferryman Charon, the Dog Cerberus, and the three Judges of the Dead with his plaintive music, but temporarily suspended the tortures of the damned; and so far soothed the savage heart of Hades that he won leave to restore Eurydice to the upper world. Hades made a single condition: that Orpheus might not look behind him until she was safely back under the light of the sun. Eurydice followed Orpheus up through the dark passage, guided by the sounds of his lyre, and it was only when he reached the sunlight again that he turned to see whether she were still behind him, and so lost her for ever.
³

d
. When Dionysus invaded Thrace, Orpheus neglected to honour him, but taught other sacred mysteries and preached the evil of sacrificial murder to the men of Thrace, who listened reverently. Every morning he would rise to greet the dawn on the summit of Mount Pangaeum, preaching that Helius, whom he named Apollo, was the greatest of all gods. In vexation, Dionysus set the Maenads upon him at Deium in Macedonia. First waiting until their husbands had entered Apollo’s temple, where Orpheus served as priest, they seized the weapons stacked outside, burst in, murdered their husbands, and tore Orpheus limb from limb. His head they threw into the river Hebrus, but it floated, still singing, down to the sea, and was carried to the island of Lesbos.
⁴

e
. Tearfully, the Muses collected his limbs and buried them at Leibethra, at the foot of Mount Olympus, where the nightingales now sing sweeter than anywhere else in the world. The Maenads had attempted to cleanse themselves of Orpheus’s blood in the river Helicorn; but the River-god dived under the ground and disappeared for the space of nearly four miles, emerging with a different name, the Baphyra. Thus he avoided becoming an accessory to the murder.
⁵

f
. It is said that Orpheus had condemned the Maenads’ promiscuity and preached homosexual love; Aphrodite was therefore no less
angered than Dionysus. Her fellow-Olympians, however, could not agree that his murder had been justified, and Dionysus saved the Maenad’s lives by turning them into oak-trees, which remained rooted to the ground. The Thracian men who had survived the massacre decided to tattoo their wives as a warning against the murder of priests; and the custom survives to this day.
⁶

g
. As for Orpheus’s head: after being attacked by a jealous Lemnian serpent (which Apollo at once changed into a stone) it was laid to rest in a cave at Antissa, sacred to Dionysus. There it prophesied day and night until Apollo, finding that his oracles at Delphi, Gryneium, and Clarus were deserted, came and stood over the head, crying: ‘Cease from interference in my business; I have borne long enough with you and your singing!’ Thereupon the head fell silent.
⁷
Orpheus’s lyre had likewise drifted to Lesbos and been laid up in a temple of Apollo, at whose intercession, and that of the Muses, the Lyre was placed in heaven as a Constellation.
⁸

h
. Some give a wholly different account of how Orpheus died: they say that Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt for divulging divine secrets. He had, indeed, instituted the Mysteries of Apollo in Thrace; those of Hecate in Aegina; and those of Subterrene Demeter at Sparta.
⁹

1
. Pindar:
Pythian Odes
iv. 176, with scholiast; Aeschylus:
Agamemnon
1629–30; Euripides:
Bacchae
561–4; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 28–31.

2
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 25; Hyginus:
Fabula
164; Athenaeus: xiii. 7.

3
. Hyginus:
loc. cit
.; Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: ix. 30. 3; Euripides:
Alcestis
357, with scholiast.

4
. Aristophanes:
Frogs
1032; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
xi. 1–85; Conon:
Narrations
45.

5
. Aeschylus:
Bassarids
, quoted by Eratosthenes:
Catasterismoi
24; Pausanias: ix. 30. 3–4.

6
. Ovid:
loc. cit
.; Conon:
loc. cit
.; Plutarch:
On the Slowness of Divine Vengeance
12.

7
. Lucian:
Against the Unlearned
ii; Philostratus:
Heroica
v. 704;
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
iv. 14.

8
. Lucian:
loc. cit
.; Eratosthenes:
Catasterismoi
24; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 7.

9
. Pausanias: ix. 30. 3; ii. 30. 2; iii. 14. 5.

1
. Orpheus’s singing head recalls that of the decapitated Alder-god Bran which, according to the
Mabinogion
, sang sweetly on the rock at Harlech in North Wales; a fable, perhaps, of funerary pipes made from
alder-bark. Thus the name Orpheus, if it stands for
ophruoeis
, ‘on the river bank’, may be a title of Bran’s Greek counterpart, Phoroneus (see
57.
1
), or Cronus, and refer to the alders ‘growing on the banks of’ the Peneius and other rivers. The name of Orpheus’s father, Oeagrus (‘of the wild sorb-apple’), points to the same cult, since the sorb-apple (French =
alisier
) and the alder (Spanish =
aliso
) both bear the name of the pre-Hellenic River-goddess Halys, or Alys, or Elis, queen of the Elysian Islands, where Phoroneus, Cronus, and Orpheus went after death. Aornum is Avernus, an Italic variant of the Celtic Avalon (‘apple-tree island’ – see
31.
2
).

2
. Orpheus is said by Diodorus Siculus to have used the old thirteen-consonant alphabet; and the legend that he made the trees move and charmed wild beasts apparently refers to its sequence of seasonal trees and symbolic animals (see
52.
3
; 132.
3
and
5
). As sacred king he was struck by a thunderbolt – that is, killed with a double-axe – in an oak grove at the summer solstice, and then dismembered by the Maenads of the bull cult, like Zagreus (see
30.
a
); or of the stag cult, like Actaeon (see
22.
i
); the Maenads in fact, represented the Muses. In Classical Greece the practice of tattooing was confined to Thracians, and in a vase-painting of Orpheus’s murder a Maenad has a small stag tattooed on her forearm. This Orpheus did not come in conflict with the cult of Dionysus; he
was
Dionysus, and he played the rude alder-pipe, not the civilized lyre. Thus Proclus (Commentary on Plato’s
Politics
: p. 398) writes: