Phrygia

Greek Argonaut mythology and its Indo-European themes

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The eastern extent of ancient Greece’s mythical imagining must surely lie within the Kingdom of Colchis on the western coast of the Black Sea, now modern Georgia. This was depicted in the famous mythic hero-tale of Jason and the Argonauts, whose most famous literary rendering was in the poem Argonautica of Apollonios of Rhodes from the 3rdC BCE, itself borrowing somewhat from Homer’s Odyssey, and older traditions.

The 'Douris Cup' from the Vatican museum. Jason is devoured/regurgitated by the snake in the sanctuary of Ares ...

The ‘Douris Cup’ from the Vatican museum. Jason is devoured/regurgitated by the serpent in the sanctuary of Ares. The fleece hangs upon a mystical tree in the background … It appears more like the Scandinavian myth of Thor or Beowulf’s serpentine battles than the depiction given by Apollonius’ Argonautica.

“… And they two by the pathway came to the sacred grove, seeking the huge oak tree on which was hung the fleece, like to a cloud that blushes red with the fiery beams of the rising sun. But right in front the serpent with his keen sleepless eyes saw them coming, and stretched out his long neck and hissed in awful wise; and all round the long banks of the river echoed and the boundless grove. Those heard it who dwelt in the Colchian land very far from Titanian Aea, near the outfall of Lycus, the river which parts from loud-roaring Araxes and blends his sacred stream with Phasis, and they twain flow on together in one and pour their waters into the Caucasian Sea. And through fear young mothers awoke, and round their new-born babes, who were sleeping in their arms, threw their hands in agony, for the small limbs started at that hiss. And as when above a pile of smouldering wood countless eddies of smoke roll up mingled with soot, and one ever springs up quickly after another, rising aloft from beneath in wavering wreaths; so at that time did that monster roll his countless coils covered with hard dry scales. And as he writhed, the maiden came before his eyes, with sweet voice calling to her aid sleep, highest of gods, to charm the monster; and she cried to the queen of the underworld, the night-wanderer, to be propitious to her enterprise. And Aeson’s son followed in fear, but the serpent, already charmed by her song, was relaxing the long ridge of his giant spine, and lengthening out his myriad coils, like a dark wave, dumb and noiseless, rolling over a sluggish sea; but still he raised aloft his grisly head, eager to enclose them both in his murderous jaws. But she with a newly cut spray of juniper, dipping and drawing untempered charms from her mystic brew, sprinkled his eyes, while she chanted her song; and all around the potent scent of the charm cast sleep; and on the very spot he let his jaw sink down; and far behind through the wood with its many trees were those countless coils stretched out…” Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes (3rdC bC) trans. R.C. Seaton.

Colchis and Magic:

Mythical Colchis was the home of King Aeëtes, in some traditions a Greek mortal sired by a Titan and a nymph. His beguiling and magically-skilled daughter, Medea, agrees to help the hero Jason to win the Golden Fleece of the magical ram Chrysomallus, guarded by a fierce dragon who Jason slays. In some of the traditions, the sorceress Circe (also a character from Homer’s Odyssey) is the sister of Aeëtes.

Colchis represented the extent of the Greeks’ nautical explorations in the East, being reached by traversing the Hellespont/Dardanelles into the Black Sea before turning east across the coast of Pontus. Ionian Milesians had formed a colony there c.7thC BC. In mythology, it provided a convenient and familiar far shore on which Greeks might interact with eastern exoticism and magic. The towering Caucasus mountains north of Colchis were the torture-ground of the mysterious Titan, Prometheus, chained to a mountain by Zeus for the crime of stealing fire for humanity. It was a ‘fantasy land’ of giants, dragons, fair magical maidens, and fabulous treasures – the perfect Indo-European mythological setting.

The Argonautica’s story-tradition illustrates that the Greeks considered the ‘Caucasian’ peoples of this region as relatives of the Iranian tribe of the Medes. ‘Medea’, daughter of Aeëtes is portrayed as an ancestress of the West-Iranian Medes, a fact her ‘magical’ inclinations seem an attempt to reinforce. Aeetes’ parents were portrayed in myths (i.e – Odyssey) as the deified sun, Helios, and the Okeanid nymph, Perseis. His brother was Perses, and they were both portrayed as wizard-kings.

Themes of destruction, warfare and violence:

The Titan Perses (‘Destroyer’) was said in Hesiod’s theogony to have wedded Asteria (‘Starry One’) and fathered Hekate (‘the night-wanderer’), whom the Argonaut myths relate as a goddess served by Medea and/or Circe. The ‘Perseid’ names (including that of the other epic hero Perseus) have a convenient linguistic similarity to that of the nations of Persians, whose lands bordered Colchis and Armenia. For Greeks of the (Hellenistic) era of Apollonius of Rhodes, the connection between Persians and destruction would have still been a painful and fairly recent memory of the Greco-Persian Wars. The Caucasus however, is also the scene of the Persian myths of the world’s destructive creation, as I shall go on to examine!

The Scythians of the Caucasus also enjoyed a reputation for warfare (and ferocity), and were something of a historic byword for the practice of war. One must not forget that the Caucasus and Asia Minor was a historic homeland of metalcraft and weapon-crafting, as well as horsemanship. To the mythographers of the Jason legends, it is perhaps unsurprising that the god Ares (in whose grove the fleece resides) is referenced so overtly – after all it was in his sacred fields and precincts that Jason was to fight the magical bronze bulls and defeat the dragon to obtain the fleece. We shouldn’t be surprised either that the smith-god Hephaistos is also linked to the region: it was he who taught the fatal Prometheus the qualities and secrets of fire, and manufactured the fierce bronze bulls of Aeëtes (the Khalkotauroi) with whom Jason is required to yoke and plough the sacred field of Ares, and sow the teeth of the Hydra, creating and army of ‘earthborn men’ who will attack him.

Bulls and the Argonaut myth:

“…And close by garden vines covered with green foliage were in full bloom, lifted high in air. And beneath them ran four fountains, ever-flowing, which Hephaestus had delved out. One was gushing with milk, one with wine, while the third flowed with fragrant oil; and the fourth ran with water, which grew warm at the setting of the Pleiads, and in turn at their rising bubbled forth from the hollow rock, cold as crystal. Such then were the wondrous works that the craftsman-god Hephaestus had fashioned in the palace of Cytaean Aeetes. And he wrought for him bulls with feet of bronze, and their mouths were of bronze, and from them they breathed out a terrible flame of fire; moreover he forged a plough of unbending adamant, all in one piece, in payment of thanks to Helios, who had taken the god up in his chariot when faint from the Phlegraean fight…”

The Bull is a constant motif of Indo-European religious imagery. The ancient Persian creation legend related in the Zoroastrian Bundahisihn, tells that the modern generations of humankind and all plants and animals were created from the body of the Celestial Ox, Goshorun, who dies in the first assault upon creation by the contrary spirit who opposes the omniscient creator-god Ahuramazda/Ormahzd. The Ox in the myth belongs the prototypical ‘first man’ Gayomard who is portrayed as the primal ‘king of the mountains’ (the Caucasus mountains) in some myths and folklore – something of a Hercules-like figure. Aeëtes and his Khalkotauroi in the Argonaut myths certainly appear to offer a model for or of the prototypic Indo-Iranian king.

The connection in Greek myth of the Colchian legends with bulls does not stop here, however. The god Helios, father of Aeetes, is also father of Pasiphae, whose legend depicts her conceiving the Minotaur of Crete (‘Asterion’) by having sexual intercourse with a cosmic white bull. This makes Aeetes and Pasiphae mythological brother and sister, and links the Cretan-Minoan and wider Asia-Minor mythos with its prominent bull-imagery, with the upland ‘middle earth’ of the Caucasus and Colchis.

The other important sacred cow of Greek myth who connects definitely with Argonautic ideas is Io – a priestess of Hera from the Argolid (homeland of Jason) transformed into a cow by Zeus, so that he could mate with her. Jealous Hera sets the titan Argus Panoptes to look over her, but Zeus encourages his son Hermes to kill Argus enabling pregnant Io to escape. In an Argolid tale echoing the Ionian myth of Leto, Hera then sends a gadfly to harass Io so that she must wonder from place to place without rest. She finally gives birth in Egypt to . The theme of sacred cow + watcher/shepherd + pursuit + generation of races of men is strongly reflected in the Bundahishin myth of the Persians, which has its origin-territories set in the Caucasus. This is made more explicit by Aeschylus (4th BCE) whose play Prometheus Bound, includes Io in the plot and has her visiting and conversing with the chained Titan, who prophecies of her wandering and eventual lodging in Egypt.

Prometheus, Hephaistos and Mount Elbrus:

“…As the evil spirit rushed in, the earth shook, and the substance of mountains was created in the earth. First, Mount Alburz arose; afterwards, the other ranges of mountains of the middle of the earth; for as Alburz grew forth all the mountains remained in motion, for they have all grown forth from the root of Alburz…” Bundahishin, Chapter 8.

Mount Elbrus - the Omphalos of Indo-European myth. Photo: Jialiang Gao

Mount Elbrus – the Omphalos of Indo-European myth. Photo: Jialiang Gao

Mount Elbrus (Alburz) is the massive volcanic peak towering over the western Caucasus range to the north of Colchis. In Greek myth, this was the place where Zeus chained Prometheus to have his liver daily torn out. For the Persians, it was the mythical mountain from which all others grew in the creation of the earth. The forge of Hephaistos (where Prometheus learned the secrets of fire) was believed to be either here or in Etna by the Greeks. Again we can see the convergence of aspects of Greek and Indo-Iranian mythology in the ‘Indo-European’ corridor: The nidus of metalworking, smith-gods, creative fire and mountain kings is a mytheme which extended from India to Iron Age Ireland, and continued in the myths of the Scandinavians until they christianised in the middle ages of the ‘Common Era’. Add to this the importance in Indo-European mythology to the birth of fresh water on mountain peaks and its downhill progress to the ocean, and the importance of Colchis and the Caucasus to the Greeks becomes clearer. ‘Olympus’ and the Omphalos of ‘Delphi’ seem like mere Pelasgian transfers of an older Caucasian creation myth, which the Argonautic mythology maintained a distinct connection to…

These considerations also transfer directly into the Irish mythology of the Tain Bo Culainge, which I will go on to discuss in another article…

 

Mythological Event Horizons Part 2: The Greco-Persian Wars

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The ascendancy of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty in the 6thC BC and the subsequent Greco-Persian wars provides another ‘event horizon’ which impacts deeply upon our abilities to make a clear analysis of Europe’s ancient pagan history. The reason this so is not because Persian armies eventually reached Europe (they invaded the Balkans and Greece) but because of the negative and dismissive reaction it fostered in Greek opinion towards Persian and Mesopotamian ideas and civilisation from the 6th BC onwards. In view of the dark turns of current affairs in the Middle East involving campaigns of savage aggression towards the modern remnants of ancient Persian and Mesopotamian civilisation (focussed on Kurds, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Shia muslims and Iranians as well as actual archaeological sites), I thought it a noble cause worth examining.

Ancient Mesopotamian and Persian civilisations have rightly been placed as the cradle of civilisation, credited with creating the first cities, the first writing, and leading the world in technologies of agriculture, philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. These innovations were supported by and developed alongside a pervasive cosmological and religious philosophy which has made these civilisations a byword for mystery and ancient wisdom, from a  long before the time Europeans could claim any such plaudits for their own religious, cultural and intellectual achievements.

Our story involving the Greeks starts with the collapse of the Indo-European Hatusa (Hittite) Empire of Asia Minor at the close of the 2nd millennium BC. This was a period of increasing colonisation and influence by Ionian and Aeolian peoples and culture (possibly those whom the Egyptians called the ‘Sea Peoples’) spreading from the east coast of Greece and from the region around the Gulf of Corinth (Homer’s Achaea) and out through the archipelagos of the Aegean. Their cultural influence spread and established itself in what would become known as the Troas, Lydia and Caria along the west coast of Asia Minor. By the 6th BC these cultures had grown powerful and wealthy through trade and industry and would have developed close mercantile and cultural ties to the Persian (Mede), Semitic (Phoenician) and Mesopotamian (Assyria and Babylonia) cultures of the Near East.

An example of their cultural affinity to easterners is illustrated by the fact that mainland Greeks frequently characterised the Ionians by their ‘long robes’ – a style influenced by a succession of pre-Hellenic Anatolian cultures including the civilisation of the Hatti or ‘Hittites’, the Lydians, the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia and the Indo-Iranian Medes. The Phrygians – like the Celts – wore breeches.

“… Many are your temples and wooded groves, and all peaks and towering bluffs of lofty mountains and rivers flowing to the sea are dear to you, Phoebus, yet in Delos do you most delight your heart; for there the long robed Ionians gather in your honor with their children and shy wives…” Homeric Hymn to Apollo, c.522BC.

The collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire during the 7th and 6thC BC was a catalyst for growth and expansion of those nations it had formerly held in check. The empire of the Indo-Iranian Medes (Media) expanded to occupy eastern Asia Minor, Scythia (as far as the Caucasus) and northern Mesopotamia (Syria). In Eastern Anatolia, the Ionic-Anatolian kingdom of Lydia gradually expanded its power and influence until it controlled most of western Asia minor and began to push eastwards against the Medes. Lydia’s proverbially wealthy king, Croesus, became politically and economically powerful due to his empire’s innovations in trade and industry (particularly cloth making, dyeing and metallurgy) and the development of gold coinage as an exchange medium.

The Lydians were particularly friendly with Ionian Greeks (who claimed to be descendants of the solar God Apollo), and in 560BC, says Herodotus, Croesus came to the oracle of Delphi, bestowing it with great wealth. In simultaneously demonstrating his affinity to the Greeks and to Apollo, Croesus was no doubt looking for support to push his empire eastwards against Median ruler Astyages.

By the time he had crossed into the Median lands in 547BC, Atyages had been deposed by the western Persian leader Cyrus, who defeated Croesus and used his treasury to fund his efforts establishing the new Persian Empire, which by 540BC had conquered or formed treaties with the coastal Ionians. Cyrus was an enlightened man who no doubt valued the Ionic values of statesmanship and philosophy, and preferred to work with the Ionians against the Lydians and their neighbours. For starters, they had ships and naval experience that he and his son would call upon, as they built and consolidated their Empire. Having secured Lydia, Cyrus’ had the finances needed to conquer Babylon in 539BC. He died in 530BC campaigning against the Scythians of central Asia and was replaced by his reputedly mentally unstable son, Cambyses II, who took Egypt in 525BC before his death followed by the succession of Darius in 522BC, during which there was a period of instability and fracture at the Empire’s roots.

Some Ionians, such as the colonies Samos of Miletus, became – for almost 50 years – trusted allies, power-brokers and advisors of the Persians and maintained a degree of independence that colonies such as Ephesus and Colophon could not. Likewise the Dorian colony of Halicarnassus on the Carian coast to the south of Ionia served a similar special purpose to the Persians. Under Cambyses successor, Darius I, the Empire stretched from Thrace to the Indus valley.

So, having consolidated their empire, was the scene really set for the invasion of Greece? Let’s just ‘stop the tape’ for a minute and discuss a few issues and clear up a few misconceptions about the Persians and the Greeks.

Poster for the 2007 movie '300: Birth of an Empire'. Those scary Persians!

Poster for the 2014 movie ‘300: Rise of an Empire’, directed by Noam Murro. Those scary Persians!

Anyone who has seen the movies ‘300’ and ‘300: Birth of an Empire’ (based on the Frank Miller comics) will know that the Achaemenid empire was a brutal, tyrannical, sexually debauched, scary and ill-disciplined alien horde, right? They must also know that when these apes swept into Greece they had their backsides kicked by a bunch of noble, well-oiled, disciplined man-loving hoplites, who then united to make Greece a glorious democracy as well?

This certainly fits with the ‘barbarian’ image of the Persians that the ancient Greeks came to entertain of them. Curious to the movie industry, charged as it is with the ideological politics of its impresarios and wealthy financiers, the story of the ‘300’ films and their imagery also appears to have functioned on an explicit allegorical level related the modern middle eastern conflict, presenting the Persians (whose army in the film are made consciously to look like Arabs) as some kind of dark twisted enemy of ‘Grecian’ light.

The demonisation of Xerxes in '300' fitted a very modern narrative. Were the opinions of the ancient Greeks to blame?

The magical ‘demonisation’ of Xerxes in the ‘300’ movie franchises fitted a very modern narrative. Were the opinions of the ancient Greeks ultimately to blame?

Of course, the ‘300’ franchise was really just a brutal fantasy, based partly on the memoirs of Herodotus and partly on the prejudices of the 21st century. In reality, the Achaemenids were far from how they were depicted in these films. For starters, Cyrus the Great had established his empire promoting a policy of tolerance and respect for the religions and administrative structures of the countries he invaded, ensuring that rebellion was relatively rare, and his territories easier to govern. When George Bush Jr invaded Babylon, he himself might have taken a leaf out of Cyrus’ book, but instead chose (deliberately it would seem) to set the nation of Iraq on a path to factionalism and chaos. Cyrus famously liberated the Jews of Babylon and helped them (re)build the temple at Jerusalem. Xenophon of Athens (a student of Socrates) declared of him in the 4th BC:

“… And those who were subject to him, he treated with esteem and regard, as if they were his own children, while his subjects themselves respected Cyrus as their ‘Father’…” (Xenophon, Cyropaedia, trans. Bohn)

Indeed, it appears that Cyrus was not considered a great threat to Greek interests. His successor and son Cambyses II likewise showed no particular interest and even allied with the Ionian and Dorian Greeks in his conquest of Egypt, even exploiting the Greeks’ good relations with the Egyptians during this period. Cambyses died in 522BC, supposedly by his own hand, although an assassination by his successor Darius (also implicated in the killing of Cyrus’ other son Bardiya) has been proposed as likely. Whatever the truth, Darius’ accession to the imperial throne was certainly marked by a period of dissatisfaction and unrest, and the Emperor was obliged to exercise harshness in putting down revolts across the Empire. This included the assassination of Samian tyrant Polycrates by the satrap of Lydia, Oroetus, at Sardis, which was then followed by the final conquest of the island, and a hurried exit or ejection for Pythagoras and other likely agitators of the Ionic cause.

In 499BC an open rebellion broke out among the Ionian city-states of Asia Minor, led by Miletus and backed by a military force from Athens. This pushed inland and sacked Sardis in 498 in an act which appears in the wider context of revolt within Darius’ Empire to be more an act of challenge and aggression by Athens than one in support of the interests of Ionia or Lydia. The scene was therefore set for Darius and his successor Xerxes to take punitive action against the Athenians as well as to try and take advantage of the Greek tendency to infighting.

Democracy – far from being the noble ideal of the ‘300’ films and modern political polemic – was used as a weapon imposed by Darius on the Ionian states: he saw it as a tool by which to weaken resistance – an enabler of empires. Think about this for a minute, in the light of modern world politics!

Although the combined power of the (nearly) united Greeks eventually and famously defeated Xerxes’ huge invading army, Greek opinion of Persian culture (and Athenian opinion in particular) was never to recover, and would spark a chain of developments which ultimately lie behind a change in the course of religion in Europe and the Near East, with a focus increasingly based upon human power.

Greek opinion of Persians after the War:

One of the earliest accounts of Athenian Greek jingoism (or at least tragedian schadenfreude) following the defeat of Xerxes at the Battle of Salamis in 479BC is  playwright Aeschylus’ The Persians, which was performed at the City Dionysia in spring of 472BC. The play deals with the return and despair of Xerxes to Persia, and is essentially a chance for the Greeks to wallow in the glory of their victory, and to portray the vanity of working against the will of the gods. Aeschylus’ words – the delight of his Athenian audiences – were later to ring hollow with the internicene chaos of Hellenic civil wars which closed the 6thC:

“…Ah, what a boundless sea of woe hath burst on Persia, and the whole barbaric race…”

Of course, not all Greeks opposed Xerxes’ invasion – the Carians under Queen Artemisia and the Ionians and Aeolians provided critical naval support. This may be why Herodotus of Halicarnassus was more or less sympathetic to the Persian cause in his account of the war. The Dorians of the Peloponnese (Sparta and Argos, for instance) were later sponsored by the Persians in the Peloponnesian Wars which occupied the closing third of the 5th BC. Athens was not popular with everyone.

Before the War – Ionian philosophers and the influence of Persia and Mesopotamia:

The period both immediately before and after the Persian conquest of Lydia and Ionia had been one during which the Ionians experienced a flowering of religious philosophy, almost certainly under the influence of their eastern neighbours and eventual conquerors.  The colony at Miletus was a particularly influential case in point, being home to the philosophical school of Thales (born c.624BC) and his successors Anaximander (born c. 611BC), Anaximenes and then Anaxagoras. Further to this, Miletus’ main Ionian sparring partner, the island of Samos, could (under the rule of Persian ally, Polykrates) boast of Pythagoras (born c.570BC) and his school. Out in the Cycladic gulf south of Delos, was the famous Pherekydes (born c.584BC) on the island of Syros, who is known to have corresponded with Thales. Coming slightly later we have Xenophanes of Colophon (born c.570BC) , and Herakleitos of Ephesus (born c.535BC). These are credited as formulating the doctrines underpinning the Classical Era philosophy and cosmology expressed by Plato and his successors, often termed the ‘fathers’ of western philosophy. The Ionian philosopher Anaxagoras (died c.428BC) was credited with bringing philosophy to Athens, but how far could the ideas of the ‘pre-socratics’ be truly be considered ‘western’? I would argue ‘not many’:

Persian and Assyrian religion:

Unlike the Greeks, the Persians (according to Herodotus) did not idolise their gods or god with imagery. Their’s was a religion that seemed to mirror divine principles, founded in the supreme divinity Ahura Mazda, a god of ethereal light and goodness who challenged the forces of evil or chaos. Ahura Mazda, appears to be a Persian development of the ancient Assyrian and Hurrian sky god – Ashura or Assura – in whose name the kingdoms were theophorically titled. They are part of an continuum, tied up with the ancient mythology of ancient Sumer and Akkad, and to Egypt further to the south. The innovation in the time of the Persian Empire appears to have been a vigorous refining of the Assyrian and Persian religion into what would become known as Zoroastrianism, possibly evolving during the reign of Darius.

As such, compared to the often confusing imagery supporting the Greek pantheon of gods it was philosophically attractive, especially to those who wished to promote an empire whose leader was personified as the logos or divine utterance of Ahura Mazda. Ahura/Ashura was no doubt the archetype upon which the Phrygian ‘Attis’ was based. He would have been the god of the Hittites (‘Hatusa’). The love of the Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian colonists of Asia Minor (not to mention king Croesus of Lydia) for the god Apollo was no doubt heavily influenced by this ancient Indo-Iranian divinity who celebrated intellect and the mind.

Here are a selection of comparisons between Persian and East Semitic religion and the philosophies of the Ionian pre-socratics.

Principle of the waters as ‘first cause’:

Attributed by Aristotle to Thales of Miletos in his Metaphysics is the concept of water as the ‘first principle’ of creation, eternal and itself uncreated. The Aeolian rhapsode-theologian, Hesiod (8th/7thC BC), attributed the first cause to ‘chaos’.

Pherekydes of Syros shared this viewpoint – his primal triad: Chronus (‘eternal time’), Zas (Zeus – the creative expression of ethereal light or pure water) and Chthonie (the feminine receiving principle equated with Anahita, Persian divinity of the salty waters) was very congruent with Persian and Babylonian religion. ‘Zas’ is probably a Hellenisation of ‘Ashura’ or ‘Ahura’, accomplished by the addition of the prefixal ‘Z’.

Herakleitos opined: “…For it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and from water, soul…”, and: “…it is pleasure to souls to become moist…”, to which he qualified: “…The dry soul is the wisest and best…”

He saw water as a lower more primal form of development transcended by fire – that holy principle of the Persians. The Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian mythology placed the waters at the root of creation, and fire with the heavens and the divine – long before the Greeks became interested in the idea.

Strife as an life-giving factor for the universe:

Herakleitos said: “…Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away…”. This is an expression of

The Mazdean (Persian, Zurvan, Zoroastrian) concept was that life came about because of a necessity for conflict of opposites.

The Universal Soul and the circle:

Herakleitos said: “…You will not find the boundaries of soul by travelling in any direction, so deep is the measure of it…”

Thales was said by Aristotle to have proclaimed that “…all things are full of gods…”

Again, the Persian and Mesopotamian philosophies attributed a connecting divine fire to the root of all existence in pure water – the mystical transformation through annihilation, and the Greeks were evidently borrowing this idea. The circle was a prominent part of the winged symbol used to represent the divine emanation in Babylonian and Persian symbolism. Likewise the mysterious cycle of the waters from mountain to river to sea, back to mountain. This geometry was at the heart of Persian and Babylonian thought.

The mixed elements of water and earth imply destruction:

Xenophanes is quoted as saying: “…All things are earth and water that are come into being and grow…”. This was an expression of the Persian/Mesopotamian idea of the creative aspect of salty fluids, including the sea which was made of fresh water and the land mingled:

Hippolytus, quoting Theophrastus said: “… Xenophanes said that a mixture of the earth with the sea is taking place, and that it is being gradually dissolved by the moisture. He says that he has the following proofs of this. Shells are found in midland districts and on hills, and he says in the quarries at Syracuse has been found the imprint of a fish and of seaweed … These, he says, were produced when all things were formerly mud, and the outlines were dried in the mud…”

Pherekydes claimed that the generative act of Zeus (Zas) was bestowing a wedding blanket upon Chthonie made of earth and water, thus causing her to be fertile.

The legends of Enki (pure waters) and Tiamat (salt water of the abyss) expressed the same in Babylonian/Assyrian culture.

The Athenian ‘aftermath’ of eastern philosophy:

Considering the immense similarities between Ionian ‘Pre-Socratic’ and much more ancient Persian and Mesopotamian philosophies, we must presume that the Athenian schools of the lineage of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were simply trying to put a Hellenic spin on ideas that were not originally their own, but part of a much older pagan mythology of the ancient Indo-Europeans, which epitomised morality in its emphasis of virtues of goodness over evil: a ‘rationality’ that Greeks might find it hard to identify with ease in their own 1st millennium BC religion. Theirs was an ‘event horizon’ imposed by the victors of warfare and cultural dominance which denied the old and remodelled it in their own image.

Ancient connections between the Greeks and Indo-Persian peoples:

Many Greek myths are set deep within the Indo-European world. The most striking of these is the most ancient tales of Phrixus and of Iason/Jason and the Argonauts and their adventures in the Scythian kingdom of Colchis/Aia in the Caucasus. The recovery of the ‘golden fleece’ from the sanctuary of Ares (god of violent destruction), guarded by a dragon and beguiled by a lovely sorceress is an exploration of the heart of Indo-Aryan myth. Likewise, the oriental arrival of Dionysus follows in the footsteps of a people whose sacraments of intoxication (called Haoma in the Zoroastrian Avesta and Soma in the Rigveda) and may have underpinned the mysteries of ancient cults and oracles at Eleusis and Delphi.

  Placing ancient mystical ideas in the mouths and written words of philosophers, and of prophets and emperors, rather than in the mouths of poets and Magi, created a direct and legalistic expression of the divine, which was to fundamentally change religion.

It combined to form a religious and temporal model of authority which seeks today to destroy and enslave the ancient pagan seeds of tolerance and diversity which gave birth to mankind and her greatest achievements.

Diving at Epiphany

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Bulgarian men 'diving for the cross' at Epiphany. Photo: Stoyan Nenov/Reuters

Bulgarian men ‘diving for the cross’ at Epiphany. Photo: Stoyan Nenov/Reuters

In Orthodox christianity, the ancient tradition of the Sanctification of the Waters at the festival of Epiphany (5th and 6th of January) is marked throughout the world by the popular custom of ‘diving for the cross’. The festival itself celebrates not just the ‘Theophany’ of Jesus to the gentiles but in particular among Orthodox Christians, his adult baptism by John the Baptist/the holy spirit (depending on which gospel tradition you go by).

Cross-diving usually follows the Epiphany mass and involves the priest casting a crucifix into a body of water, this being the cue for a crowd of eager young men to dive in, competing to retrieve it. It obviously echoes the baptismal theme of the Christian myth, but is there more to this tradition that predates Christianity?

As previously mentioned, there are many features which Christianity has borrowed from paganism for the festivities spanning from the winter solstice to Epiphany: the festivals of Saturnalia and the Dionysia being key donor traditions. Dionysia is the closest model for Epiphany, being the annual festival of the epiphany or theophany of Dionysus to the people. In western christianity, it is also remembered in the seemingly Dionysian celebration of the ‘Miracle at Cana’ at which Jesus supposedly turns water into wine. Diving into water, however is not a particular tradition of the Dionysia.

The Nativity of Aion:

We must look into the early 1st millennium Hellenistic world, and to Alexandria in Egypt to get more of a clue as to the origins of baptism at Epiphany. Christianity evolved in the Levant and Egypt among a seething sea of syncretistic pagan ideas, which under the influence of reductionist neoplatonic philosophy began to be intellectualised, combined and refined. At multi-ethnic Alexandria in the 1st-4th centuries CE, one of the chief gods worshipped among the Hellenised Egyptians was ‘Aion’ or ‘Aeon’ – seemingly a syncretistic youthful version of Kronos, compounded with Osiris, Dionysus and Apollo, and whose nativity festival was held on the 6th of January. The Alexandrian mythos claimed he was born to the virgin goddess Kore (also known as Persephone) on the night of 5th/6th of January. In gnosticism, Aion became the name or title of the series of historically repeating godhoods, one of whom was believed to be Jesus by some gnostics. The idea of the chain of prophets leading to the Messiah was of course originally a Judaic idea, and seems to be the root of the gnostic Aions. Aion, however, was originally a pagan idea:

Aion holding the 'wheel of the year' on a Roman mosaic.

Aion holding the ‘wheel of the year’ on a Roman mosaic.

Epiphanius of Salamis (c.315–403CE) wrote in his book Panarion:

“… Christ was born on the sixth day of January after thirteen days of the winter solstice and of the increase of the light and day. This day the Greeks, I mean the Idolaters, celebrate on the twenty-fifth day of December, a feast called Saturnalia among the Romans, Kronia among the Egyptians, and Kikellia among the Alexandrians. For on the twenty-fifth day of December the division takes place which is the solstice, and the day begins to lengthen its light, receiving an increase, and there are thirteen days of it up to the sixth day of January, until the day of the birth of Christ (a thirtieth of an hour being added to each day), as the wise Ephraim among the Syrians bore witness by this inspired passage in his commentaries, where he says: ‘ The advent of our Lord Jesus Christ was thus appointed: His birth according to the flesh, then his perfect incarnation among men, which is called Epiphany, at a distance of thirteen days from the increase of the light; for it needs must have been that this should be a figure of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and of His twelve disciples, who made up the number of the thirteen days of the increase of the light.’

How many other things in the past and present support and bear witness to this proposition, I mean the Resurrection birth of Christ!  Indeed, the leaders of the idol-cults, filled with wiles to deceive the idol-worshippers who believe in them, in many places keep highest festival on this same night of Epiphany, so that they whose hopes are in error may not seek the truth.  For instance, at Alexandria, in the Koreion as it is called – an immense temple – that is to say, the Precinct of the Virgin; after they have kept all-night vigil with songs and music, chanting to their idol, when the vigil is over, at cockcrow, they descend with lights into an underground crypt, and carry up a wooden image lying naked on a litter, with the seal of a cross made in gold on its forehead, and on either hand two other similar seals, and on both knees two others, all five seals being similarly made in gold. And they carry round the image itself, circumambulating seven times the innermost temple, to the accompaniment of pipes, tabors and hymns, and with merry-making they carry it down again underground. And if they are asked the meaning of this mystery, they answer and say: ‘To-day at this hour the Maiden, that is, the Virgin, gave birth to the Aeon.’

In the city of Petra also – the metropolis of Arabia which is called Edom in the Scriptures – the same is done, and they sing the praises of the Virgin in the Arab tongue, calling her in Arabic Chaamou, that is, Maiden, and the Virgin, and him who is born from her Dusares, that is, Alone-begotten of the Lord.  This also takes place in the city of Elousa on the same night just as at Petra and at Alexandria … “

Unfortunately Epiphanius was none the wiser as to what happened in the crypt of the Koreion, and it is for us to speculate that it may have involved some form of immersion in water. This ancient Alexandrian celebration of nativity and epiphany on the 5th/6th January survives still in the most ancient Christian denomination – the Armenian Church. The prime divinity among the pre-Christian Armenians was the Persian goddess Anahit (Anahita) who was analogous to the Hellenistic ‘Kore’ and therefore to Isis. She was also linked to Ishtar, Aphrodite and Artemis. Anahita was a mountain goddess representing waters – a theme of some importance in the pagan world.

The drowned god who came back to life:

Bas relief image from Philae showing Isis resurrecting and embracing Osiris. Note the historic damage caused by Islamic iconoclasts.

Bas relief image from Philae showing Isis resurrecting and embracing Osiris. Note the historic damage caused by Islamic iconoclasts.

The myth of Isis and Osiris is at the core of ancient Egyptian mythology, and became influential throughout the Roman Empire from the 1stC BCE, when Isis became one of the favourite goddesses of what I call the ‘syncretic era’. The myth of the death by drowning and the resurrection of her brother and lover Osiris is intimately tied up with water. The reborn Osiris – like Phrygian Cybele’s consort, Attis – was summoned from death by the goddess and the new era (Horus) conceived by an act of mystical intercourse. The descent of the statue of Kore into the basement of the temple at the Hellenistic ?gnostic nativity festival of Aion was obviously designed to reflect the Egyptian myth, and also its Eleusinian and Dionysian counterparts. Indeed, examination of this myth demonstrates that it was a theme with vast and far-reaching provenance in ancient paganism.

So … the mysteries of Epiphany are tied up in the many older pagan legends of a dying and reborn god. There is much more that I could say about this topic which involves the Celts of Atlantic Europe, but I will save this for another post for now, except to quote from Florus’ Epitome of Roman History which suggest that the cross-diving tradition may have an older provenance in Bulgaria…

”  … After the Macedonians (heaven save the mark) the Thracians, former tributaries of the Macedonians, rebelled and, not content with making incursions merely into the neighbouring provinces of Thessaly and Dalmatia, penetrated as far as the Adriatic; checked by the boundary which it formed, since nature apparently stayed their advance, they hurled their weapons against the very waters. Throughout the period of their advance they left no cruelty untried, as they vented their fury on their prisoners; they sacrificed to the gods with human blood; they drank out of human skulls; by every kind of insult inflicted by burning and fumigation they made death more foul; they even forced infants from their mothers’ wombs by torture. The cruellest of all the Thracians were the Scordisci, and to their strength was added cunning as well; their haunts among the woods and mountains harmonized well with their fierce temper… ” Lucius Annaeus Florus – The Epitome of Roman History (Trans. E.S. Forster)

Aubrey Beardsley's beautiful depiction of Bedevere casting Excalibur into the hands of 'Dame Du Lac'. The Arthurian legends were a late survival of an important pagan mythic tradition among the Celts. Many of their legends extend into the heady days of the Belgic warbands, of whom the Thracian Scordisci were direct ancestors.

Aubrey Beardsley’s evocative bookplate depiction of Bedevere casting Excalibur into the hands of the ‘Dame Du Lac’. The Arthurian legends were a late survival of an important pagan mythic tradition among the Celts. Many of their legends extend into the heady days of the Belgic warbands, of whom the Thracian Scordisci were direct ancestors.

 

 

 

 

Solar origins of the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ and Christianity.

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Roman era iconographic depiction of Apollo in mosaic, Tunisia. The similarity to later depictions of Jesus in both the Eastern and Western traditions is striking.

Roman era iconographic depiction of Apollo in mosaic, Tunisia. The similarity to later depictions of Jesus in both the Eastern and Western traditions is striking.

The number twelve has a strange significance in the reckoning of time:

There are twelve solar months, corresponding roughly to twelve zodiacal houses along the sun’s ecliptic path. In the Christian myth, Christ is followed by 12 apostles.

There are traditionally twelve ‘hours’ of daylight, as reckoned by sun-dials, and hence we derive our twenty four hours of daylight and night which comprise our unit of one solar ‘day’. This is known as ‘apparent solar time’, as compared to the clock-time we tend to keep in modern times, known as ‘mean solar time’.

There is a difference of roughly twelve days between the old ‘Julian’ and newer ‘Gregorian’ calendric systems in use in Europe and Asia Minor. These changes were instituted to prevent the celebration of Easter (calculated based on the Jewish Lunar calendar) from creeping further away from the Spring Equinox into summer.

There are twelve days marking the traditional European and Eastern ‘Christmas’ or ‘Yule’ festive midwinter period… These were sometimes each looked upon as representing a separate month of the solar year in many pre-modern European cultures. Yuletide began at the winter solstice (approx. 22nd December) and finished on the 3rd January, whereas Christmastide was from 25th December to 6th January (Epiphany).

Origins of Christmas Day:

The establishment of the date of the Nativity festival on the 25th December in Christianity was not in fact formally agreed upon for hundreds of years after the era of Jesus’ supposed life and death. In the late pagan Roman Empire, the 25th day of December was celebrated as Natalis Invicti – the rebirth of the deified ‘Unconquerable Sun’ – Sol Invictus. Although introduced as a late Imperial Cult under Aurelian in 274CE (250 years or so after the death of Jesus) the cult of Sol Invictus was probably in response to the profusion of mystery cults throughout the Roman Empire which employed the iconography of a youthful solar male god, seemingly derived from the older depictions of older gods such as Apollo, Adonis and Attis. Adonis, etymologically at least, appears to have a Semitic origin (compare Adonai – ‘Lord’). These had their origins in the principles of Solar godhood attached to the great ‘static’ or ‘official’ mystery cults of the 1st millennium BCE: Those of Delian Apollo, Apollo at Delphi, Eleusis, Samothrace and the mysteries of Cybele and Attis in Phrygia, among others. Such cults generally relied upon visitation of geographical loci – fixed cult sites – and the participation in initiatory ritual for the purposes of either receiving oracles, healing or higher knowledge. They themselves may have developed from popular extensions of the originally more closely-guarded inner mystery ritual traditions surrounding the elite classes of kings and religious hierophants of the earlier ‘palatial’ cultures (Minoan and Mycenaean), themselves copying the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, which are the oldest for which we have evidence, and were in continuity until at least the start of the 1st millennium CE.

Wars with Carthage and the great movements of the ‘barbarian’ Celts during Rome’s Late Republican Era (c.3rdC BCE) led to the importation of ‘foreign’ mystery religions such as that of Cybele and her ecstatic priests into Rome during the late Punic wars. Another popular ecstatic religious mystery cult was that of the Bacchanalia (Dionysia) from Greece. The Celtic fanaticism towards the solar god Apollo (whom they knew as Belenos) caused them to actually invade Greece and sack Delphi in 179BCE! These events, along with Rome’s increasing expansion and cultural interaction led to the surge in popularity of mystery religions in general during the late Republican era, such that by the 1stC CE  Roman Emperors were themselves visiting Eleusis and Samothrace to become initiates. These cults purported to explain the secrets of the sun, the moon, the planets and stars and the deepest mysteries of nature, death and regeneration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the life-giving Sun was a key part of this, and became part of a new ‘elementalism’ and drive towards simplification and ‘portability’ of mythology.

As the Roman and Greek cultural polities expanded and prospered, initiatory mystery religions became less an indulgence of the elites, and also less attached to fixed geographical locations, developing into a plethora of mobile ideological ‘franchises’ enjoyed by more ordinary persons. These almost certainly plagiarised the secrets and mythological frameworks of the older ‘official’ mysteries whose (often wealthy) initiates and suppliants were supposed to keep their secrets on pain of death or spiritual torment, and such mysteries were gradually bought out into the open and discussed and theorised over. This process was aided by the diffusion of literacy and the spread of and development of the ideas of the ‘Philosophers ‘of classical and Hellenistic era ‘Magna Graecia’ who sought to analyse the constancies and truths behind ancient orally-transmitted mythology.

A good example of such reductionist processes at their apotheosis are the ‘Hermetic’ and ‘Gnostic’ cults in Hellenized Asia Minor, Middle East and North Africa, of which Christianity was to emerge as an early branch within the fractious and millenarianist Hasmonean-era Jewish world with its significant diaspora. These employed Pythagorean, Platonic and Epicurean reductionist theories and a discourse involving the principles of the soul as a form of undying light in their prophetic religious narratives, barely hiding such ideas behind the character narratives of older mythologies.

Such explicit intellectualism was not to everyone’s taste, of course, and other more semiotic forms of mystery cults based upon ritual, myth and symbolism served the needs of those with more traditional (less orientalised) tastes. Orphism was perhaps the oldest and best-established of these traditions – possibly the ‘granddaddy’ of them all, with its origins in the first half of the 1st millennium BCE at least. Its initiates sought to ‘purify’ themselves in order to achieve a better afterlife. Mithraism was certainly the most popular of the newer cults, spreading from Asia Minor into the most northern and western extents of the Roman Empire between the 1st and 3rd centuries of the Common Era. Similar popular mystery religions centred around the Thracian god Sabazios (a regional relative of Dionysus) and European syncretic cults involving the Celtic gods, such as that of the ‘Danubian Horsemen’ involving Epona in Eastern and northern Europe, and a profusion of others more poorly understood due to paucity of material evidence. These all had the common trait of emphasising the position of the characters of ‘Sol’ and ‘Luna’ in their iconography – almost as a ‘badge’ of their ‘mystery’ status.

A Roman relief depicting the banquet of Sol, Luna and Mithras.

A Roman relief depicting the banquet of Sol, Luna and Mithras.

An exquisite example of a plaque depicting the 'Danubian Horsemen' and their central goddess... seemingly a version of Epona.

A plaque depicting the ‘Danubian Horsemen’ and their central goddess (Epona): Sol Invictus rides his quadriga at the top of the image, which deals with the imagery of the cult’s mysteries.

Sol and Luna stand above Sabazios in this cultic Roman plaque

Sol and Luna stand above Sabazios in this cultic Roman plaque

A coin of Emperor Constantine I who converted to Christianity and took the Empire with him. The depiction on the obverse is of Sol Invictus.

A coin of Emperor Constantine I who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. The depiction on the obverse is of Sol Invictus – a vision of where things were heading?

The deified sun was conflated in this era with the older Greek  god Apollo, whose identity was favoured by the Romanised Celtic peoples from the Danube basin to the Atlantic northwest of Europe, in their own syncretic cults. Such cults throughout the Empire had displaced those of the older Capitoline and Olympian Roman and Greek deities among the general populations, although these still had a civic role to play.

Perhaps the most important, popular and long-running cult of the elder Greek gods was that of Dionysus, whose oldest festival – the Rural Dionysia – coincided with the period of the winter solstice whose Greek month was named in honour of the ancient sea god: Poseidonia. This was a festival of dressing up in the guise of the retinue of the god: men as satyrs or silenoi and women as maenads. It was also, significantly, a festival of the epiphany of Dionysus to mankind, which celebrated the god’s transubstantiation of water into wine and the mysteries of budding nature: themes obviously borrowed into later christianity. At Delphi, there was a tradition that Apollo left to live among the Hyperboreans during the month when Dionysus manifested among the people at this festival, at which there was much singing of popular songs by all classes in Greek society – a tradition surviving in the modern European Christmas singing festivities.

After the third century CE the rise of iconoclastic, literate, literalised and intellectualised religious tendencies in the Hellenized Eastern Empire and North Africa was increasingly to eclipse the western traditions of mysterious figurative mythology, which had been at the cornerstone of European religion for millennia. Apollo, Sol, Belenos, Attis, Dionysus and Adonis became ‘Logos’ – replaced by an intellectual man-god who claimed to be ‘the light of the world’, promising – in return for an oath of allegiance – ‘regeneration’ after death into a divine afterlife, safe from the confusion of life. The perfect model of benevolent Imperial power in fact…

Early Christian writers attest to the disagreement between the supposed Nativity day – one for which there is obviously no precedent in the ‘gospel’ traditions, yet which – as the temporal power of the Christian religion grew – became more important to establish, in order that the ‘church’ might exert leadership over the people and displace the pagan festivities.

The earliest Christian authors from whom we have records and quotations make no reference to a celebration of Christ’s nativity. Origen of Alexandria (245CE) and Arnobius (303CE) both scorn the idea that holy men should have their birthdays celebrated, and imply that this is a practice of sinners.

The earliest reference  from Rome itself to a Nativity festival for Christ held on the 25th of December (the festival of the Rebirth of the Unconquered Sun) is in a document produced for a wealthy Christian named Valentinus in 354CE (‘The Calendar of Philocalus’), of which only copies survive. However, there is evidence that the main focus of the Empire in the East at Constantinople was celebrating the nativity on 6th of January at this time, and it would not be until the advent of the 5th century that the 25th of December would hold sway across all of the main Christian patriarchies (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria), in the drive for Orthodoxy which followed the establishment of the religion as a state Imperial cult, as well as the religion followed by Christianised kings who established themselves in the ruins of Rome’s collapsed western Empire in Atlantic Europe.
It is interesting why the arguments often veered between dating the nativity on the 6th of January (still favoured by the Armenian Church) or the 25th of December: Other recorded early traditions even put the nativity closer to the summer solstice, although these were roundly dismissed in favour of the midwinter dating, corresponding to the solar rebirth festivals of paganism. One must remember that early Christianity was spread across the vast Roman Empire, and was well established at centres such as Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and Antioch before the pagan system was rejected by the Emperors. There was no formal agreement as to the structure of festivities, except where there was literal evidence from scriptures.

Pagan Rome’s Empire and the Hellenized cultures it was enveloping generally exercised a policy of syncretism and acceptance of diversity, whereas the new literature-based Abrahamic monotheism was based upon inclusion/exclusion determined by active profession of faith and the purificatory symbolic act of baptism. Before its imposition as state religion within the Empire, Christianity was a religion of the faithful that need pay no heed to incorporating pagan ideas. As a state religion though, compromises were necessary and the religion ‘swallowed the blue pill’ in order to incorporate more peacefully with humanity and establish itself at the centre of power. Hence the use of the day of the Nativity of Sol Invictus as the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus.

Solar aspects of Epiphany/Theophany:

The indecision between the significance of nativity and epiphany perhaps recognised the importance to Christians of ‘spiritual’ birth or ‘revelation of the godhead’ to the people over the material act of parturition, which after all involved vaginas, body fluids and loco-feminis – ideas considered ‘spiritually unclean’ and somewhat repulsive to patristic religions, and Abrahamic ones in particular. The ‘Epiphany’ represented the cultic dedication of the Christ child to humanity, in the form of his supposed unveiling to the ‘Magi’ in the nativity story. It was a retelling of the Greek myths of the hiding of the infant Zeus from his father Kronos who sought to destroy him, and the visiting of various divine beings to the cave which sheltered him.

Jesus’ circumcision – the Attis/Ouranos myth retold?

Another festival prior to Epiphany celebrated Christ’s initial dedication to the jealous tribal god of Judaea – Yahweh – whose introduction by the post-exilic elites of Judah to the polytheistic semitic world marked a watershed in the eventual decline in the religious diversity of the ancient world of the Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Yahweh demanded absolute obedience from birth, including the marking by genital mutilation of male children, and the circumcision of Jesus was celebrated on the 1st of January, the first day of the first month of a new solar year. This – in Jewish custom – is supposed to occur within 8 days of birth, and is usually accompanied by the child’s naming, so prefigures the development of ‘Logos’ (in the words of John: ‘…The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth…’ ) and the inevitable Epiphany. There are older precedents for it: in particular, the sacrifice of genitalia by a youthful solar deity was a religious theme not uncommon to more ancient mythologies: The Greeks told the story of the Titan proto-god Kronos (associated with the Roman Saturnalia festival) castrating his child-slaying father Ouranos (the personified sky) with a sickle to spare the children Ouranos had created, and the Phrygians told the myth of their male solar-God Attis castrating himself in a similarly fertile mystic self-sacrifice to the Earth goddess, Cybele. Perhaps the Greek myth of Apollon (Apollo) killing the great Python of Delphi has similar mystic origins, as do the ithyphallic Dionysian, Hermetic and Orphic traditions also popular at the time of the inception of Christianity.

Perihelion and lengthening days:

The period between 1st and 6th of January marks a time when the sun begins to show a definite change in elevation in the sky and days are perceptibly longer. This is also currently the time when the Earth is closest to the Sun in its orbit – the ‘Perihelion’ – when the planet’s southern hemisphere scorches and the northern is tilted into the depths of its winter.

The Solar-Oceanic gods:

This midwinter solstice period also corresponded roughly to the sixth month of the ancient Greek calendar: Poseidonia. Poseidon was one of the oldest Greek gods, being mentioned before the inception of the Olympians in the Linear B texts surviving from the Mycenaean era of the 2nd millennium BCE. He corresponds in this sense to the ‘elder’ god Kronos, who was father of Zeus in Hesiod’s archaic-era ‘Theogony’, and who was ruler of the Golden Age typically celebrated in Rome’s winter solstice celebration: Saturnalia.  The Kronides – monstrous children of Kronos who pepper Greek myths – are the typical adversaries of ancient Greek heroes venturing to the far reaches of the encircling world-river, Okeanos, and Kronos-Poseidon corresponds incredibly closely to the ancient Gaelic Solar-Oceanic god-character Manannán in this regard. As god of the afterlife he was a perfect hypostasis of the Solar Jesus, introduced so successfully and so early among the non-Romanised pagan Gael of the Atlantic West….

 

 

 

 

Epona and the cult of the Danubian Horsemen

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The Getae (Dacians) and other peoples of the Danube basin developed a fascinating religious cult some time between the 1st and 3rdC CE whose imagery seems to have been a syncresis of the worship of Epona and that of the ‘Thracian Hero’ or Sabazios. The reason we know about it is from a collection of small lead plaques and occasional stone stelae  depicting cult images. After Trajan conquered the Dacians at the start of the 2ndC CE, his admiration for them as a military fighting force and organised society led to a rapid assimilation of them into the Empire and offered Dacian warriors and nobility an opportunity to serve with honour in the Roman army – particularly the cavalry. Dacians, Dalmatians, Moesians, Sarmatians and their Thracian cousins and neighbours had a great equestrian tradition and became key recruits to Rome’s elite mounted fighting forces. As such their native religious cults often appear to have involved the horse – in particular the mounted ‘Thracian Hero’ and the more northerly ‘Danubian Horsemen’ imagery come to mind. There was also the ‘celtic’ goddess Epona, whose idea and imagery was popular not only in the Balkans and down the Danube, but among the ‘Germanic’ peoples who existed along and around the river Rhine in Germania, and even in Gaul and Rome itself.

The phenomenon referred to as the ‘Danubian Horsemen’ cult is perhaps of greatest interest, as appears to show elements of syncretism uniting the more western or Celtic ‘Epona’ cult and the more eastern Thracian ‘Horseman’ cult. The lead plaques which are the most common source of the Danubian imagery are typically quite small – they’d fit in the palm of your hand – and were obviously devotional objects of some kind.

An exquisite example of a plaque depicting the 'Danubian Horsemen' and their central goddess... seemingly a version of Epona.

An exquisite example of a plaque depicting the ‘Danubian Horsemen’ and their central goddess… seemingly a version of Epona.

Apart from the central goddess and her two (or four) horses – an image familiar from the Epona cult – they typically show aspects of the chthonic imagery associated with the Thracian/Phrygian deity Sabazios, and Delphic Apollo: namely the serpent or dragon. The dragon was an important and iconic aspect of Dacian symbolism, as evidenced by their legendary ‘Draco’ banners as depicted on Trajan’s column in Rome. The other essential piece of imagery associated with the cult is the sacrificial fish which appears in the image above in three forms: under the hooves of one of the horses, on the ‘altar’ surrounded by three women, and upon a sacral tripod.

Epona with two horses - note the similarity with the Danubian cult iconography

Epona with four horses – note the similarity with the Danubian cult iconography

The usual appellation of  ‘Danubian Horsemen’ cult actually removes the real central figure from the religion, which is actually the seated goddess. Whereas the ‘Thracian Horseman’ images usually represent the solitary hero on his horse vanquishing a boar or similar beast, here there are two riders – somewhat akin to the Greek Dioskoroi, the famed equestrian brothers of ancient Greek religion, one of whom was mortal and one of whom was divine. Such imagery is an important aspect of the ‘divine hero’ cults which drove societies in this age: it was important that humans could aspire to the divine through identity (tribal or spiritual) with such ideas. Although Hercules was a popular image in this age, his non-equestrian nature would not have appealed so much to warriors of the Danubian region…

By the ‘Dioskorian’ interpretation of this imagery, the goddess seated between the two horsemen would have been seen as an intercessor between the divine and the mortal and therefore a goddess of death and war. The Dioskouroi – Kastor/Castor and Polydeukes/Pollux themselves represented the combination of immortal with mortal – a fact as important to their cult as their association with horses. By common European norms of the day, the owners and riders of horses held a superior cultural and social status – a feature which has endured down to the modern day. The goddess who controls horses was therefore the goddess with power over human society’s elites – perhaps explaining the importance of ‘Epona’. The ‘fertility’ aspect of Epona has often been commented on – perhaps on account of this cultural power-relationship of humans with horses. The imagery of serpents associated with the Sabazios and Danubian cults reflects the power of decay to promote fertility – an aspect reflecting the ideas of kingship and ambition which lead to wars, which in turn led to death and regeneration in Europe’s ancient societies.

Writing in the 1stC BCE, Diodorus of Sicily had this to say about the Celts of Atlantic Europe (which if he is borrowing from Herodotus :

 “…The Keltoi  who dwell along the ocean venerate the Dioskoroi above any of the gods, since they have a tradition handed down from ancient times that these gods appeared among them coming from the ocean…” Library of History 4. 56. 4 (trans. Oldfather)

This may explain the fish in the ‘Danubian Horsemen’ cult imagery – the Dioskouroi were also favourites among Greek and Roman fishermen and mariners, and the Danube basin was famously associated with fisheries and river trade as well as its cavalry traditions, and the river was well-stocked with fish in ancient times, including the freshwater Danube Salmon (Hucho hucho) which can grow to a huge size – as big as a man! The giant fish being trampled by the hooves of the leftmost rider on the ‘Danubian’ plaque may well be one of these. It seems a good fisherman’s alternative to the ‘Thracian Horseman’, typically portrayed trampling his porcine or leonine prey.

So why Epona and what does she signify?

The Danubian ‘Epona’ is depicted making contact with the horses of the two mounted heros, and occupies the central upper part of the plaques’ imagery associated by the usual interpretation with the spiritual or otherworld realms.  In the plaque depicted above, under the arch (which depicts the vault of the heavens) is another figure who appears to be driving a quadriga chariot yoked to four horses and with the rays of the sun coming from his head – evidently this is Helios-Apollo. Other similar plaques depict Sol and Luna (or Helios-Apollo and Artemis-Hecate-Selene, interchangeably Sabazios and Bendis) in the same position. This syncretic imagery seems to have been shared with the late classical Sabazios and Mithras cults of Thracia and Phrygia which subsequently spread throughout the Roman empire. For the solar and lunar gods to be depicted above ‘Epona’ suggests to me that the events in the drama of her mysteries in this cult happened at the gateway to the otherworld, and places this ‘Epona’ as a receiver of the dead. Not a ‘goddess of horses’… She may have been viewed as this by Romans who absorbed Epona’s cult (see: Juvenal, Satires VIII), but they also popularised the Dioscuri as gods of horses! This was evidently a mystery cult whose outward façade hid higher truths.

Some of the Danubian plaques depict Epona interacting with the horses while simultaneously cutting/sacrificing the fish on a tripod altar, sometimes a pedestal altar. Others, like the one above in particular, leave this to a trio of apparently female figures. The image in fact looks like a depiction of Shakespeare’s ‘weird sisters’ around their cauldron, although it may be a pedestal altar. This may be a depiction of a cult practice, but it might equally portray the typically Celtic ‘triple’ aspect of the divinity above, which imagery seems often to have been borrowed by the Greeks and Romans. The left-most figure is dumpy and matronly, the right-most seems lithe and young, the one in the middle is difficult to age unfortunately, but I shouldn’t be surprised if she was supposed to be a crone…

The ‘Great Mother’ – Cybele, Rhea and the Cailleach

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The folklore and fairy-tales of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man maintain a memory of an important female character whose prominence and mystery outstrips all others of these regions. Known as the ‘Cailleach’ (pron. kal-yack), her mythology portrayed her as an ancient forebear of humanity – perhaps so old that her body, her existence, her very essence appears as one with the landscape, which she is credited with creating. On account of her age she is ascribed great knowledge of things past, but also in many traditions claims knowledge of what will come to pass in the future. She is a mistress of herds, an industrious worker, but somewhat reclusive and prone to be found in wild, out-of-the-way places – particularly mountain-tops. She clearly relies on no male partner, although in some tales she is associated with one – albeit in a somehow estranged manner. Students of ancient European paganism might well recognise in her the image of whom the Romans referred to as Magna Mater – the Great Goddess from Anatolia’s Phrygian highlands, known as Cybele who was identical with the Greek ‘Mother of the Gods’, Rhea, wife of old Kronos himself.

501px-Cybele_Getty_Villa_57_AA_19

The Phrygian ‘Great Goddess’ was said to have originated among the Thracians who, according to Herodotus,  were once known as Bryges and crossed over into Asia Minor to occupy its central uplands. She was said in some sources to be the mother of the god Sabazios, the ‘wild horseman’ who became identified with the Greek Dionysos. It is of interest that the sacred rites of both Phrygian Cybele (who remained identified in Thracia as both Cottys (‘the sitter’?) and Bendis) and the Greek Dionysos consisted of wild orgia involving ecstatic dances, processions, the use of intoxicants and sacred rhythmic music involving drums, cymbals, flutes and horns. Participants emphasised the mysteries of nature’s chthonic fertility and recurring constancy. Whereas the Dionysia were typically led by female celebrants, the rites of Cybele were led by a priesthood of castrated eunuchs who took on the roles of women. In spite of this, the similarities were striking and point towards a common older religion, whose origins lay as much within Europe as they did in Indo-European Asia.

Cybele was particularly associated with cult centres in the Anatolian highlands – her shrines (like those of the Persians, Medes and many Celtic peoples) occurring on mountains. The same was true of Rhea, whose main shrine on Crete was situated high on Mount Ida: it was here she was supposed to have hidden the infant Zeus from his cannibalistic father Kronos. The other Mount Ida – in the Phrygian Troad – was sacred to Cybele. Other oracle sites from Greece to Asia Minor were located at high altitude – Delphi being a notable and famous example, which was apparently an oracle to Gaia/Ge before it became sacred to the ‘divine son of light’, Apollo. Mount Fengari on the island of Samothrace (‘Samos of Thrace’) was another site for the oracular cult of the Great Mother of the Gods, whereas on the island of Samos off the Lydian-Ionian coast of Asia Minor, the cult of Hera (a linguistic metathesis of ‘Rhea’) held sway.

When Rome officially adopted the cult of Cybele towards the end of the Punic Wars (3rdC BCE) it was at the behest of the oracular cult of the Sibylline priestesses who appear to have functioned as part of a network of Apollonian oracles across the ancient Mediterranean world, extending from Ionia in western Asia Minor. These appear to have had more ancient links with the worship of the Great Goddess than history generally leads us to believe – perhaps on account of the identity between the ever-youthful Apollo, and Cybele’s divine consort, Attis. The phonetic similarities of the words ‘Sybil’ (originally Greek) and ‘Cybele’ point towards a more ancient link, that the Roman Republic’s dominant and Hellenophile Patrician statesmen perhaps believed they needed to remind their peoples of during the crisis. Presumably, there was a connection between the ecstatic celebratory rites of Cybele and the ecstatic visionary states of the ancient Sybils, although the secret and initiatory aspects of the cults of these gods must leave much open to speculation.

Returning to the northwest shores of Atlantic Europe, is seems quite apparent that there must be some connection between Cybele/Rhea and the craggy old crone of Gaelic myth who seems to share these important mountain-loving and oracular attributes. We have no definite archaeological evidence pointing to the worship of Cybele or Rhea in Roman Britain, and the fact that the ‘Cailleach’ mythology comes from lands which largely fell outside of Rome’s direct cultural influence suggests that the Cailleach legends possibly evolved in-situ and before the coming of Christianity.

That there was certainly Bacchic/Dionysian and Mithraic cult practised among the Roman-Britons: we can be certain of this from archaeology, but there was no evidence of Cybele, which was apparently a city-cult at Rome. Instead, the closest ‘maternal’ divinities we come across are those known as the Matres or Nutrices – typically represented as a trio of seated women variously nursing or holding bowls or cornucopias. A number of stelae or carved stone panels depicting them survive, and they were also a feature seen in other Romanised Celtic provinces of Europe – perhaps bought to Britain by auxiliary troops serving in the legions.

A Romano-Gallic 'matres' statue from Germany.

A Romano-Gallic ‘matres’ statue from Germany.

The same as depicted on a stela from the Roman fort at Housesteads, GB.

The same as depicted on a stela from the Roman fort at Housesteads, GB.

Apart from their seated pose, they have little else in common with the iconography of Cybele. However, the ‘Celtic Triplicity’ of their form must be considered to be a significant North European religious element. This idea (seemingly copied into Christianity) held that gods had three aspects, and were often depicted ‘3-in-1’. However these triune females still don’t on the surface exhibit any relation to the Cailleach myths from un-Romanised areas of Britain and Ireland.

It is possible, one might suppose, that mythology may have diffused out into these ‘peripheral’ areas and taken root, but it is much more likely that the Cailleach legends evolved in-situ rather than being introduced by continental legionaries. What seems more likely is that the Cailleach mythology formed under the same empirical pre-Roman, pre-Hellenic religious worldview that underpinned the origins of Cybele in Thracia and Phrygia – a worldview that significantly preceded the European Iron Age. This may have had its roots way back in the pre-metal ages when evidence of a widespread religious ideology begins to be demonstrated in the remains of stone and wood temple structures and burial sites with structural commonalities that occur in the archaeological record across Europe. Alternatively, the origins of metalworking in Asia Minor in the Chalcolithic period (c.4000 BC onwards) may have brought the goddess with this technological culture… The connection of Irish and Manx Cailleach legends to those of Cuillean the Smith (Weland to the northeastern Europeans) may indicate this to be true.

Sabazios and the Phrygian moon-god ‘Men’

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Note the 'lunar' crest - you can it is Sabazios because he has his foot on a bull... Just like in Mithraism

Note the ‘lunar’ crest – you can it is Sabazios because he has his foot on a bull… Just like in Mithraism

 

 

Sabazios was obviously a god of some prominence in ancient Thracian religion. To the syncretising Greeks and Romans of the Hellenistic age and late antiquity he came to be seen as equivalent to Dionysus – even considered to be an aspect of Dionysus which played an important role in the ‘Orphic’ mysteries, which were among the more important and influential of the classical age.

An intriguing feature of the devotional ‘Sabazios hands’ (invariably in Europe)from the later Roman Empire is that the god is sometimes depicted wearing ‘lunar horns’ of the type often seen with Roman and Greek statuary of Diana and Artemis. It occurred to me that Sabazios might somehow be related to another masculine lunar god of late antique Asia Minor, who was known as ‘Men‘. Men’s cult was venerated not just in ancient Phrygia (Roman Anatolia) but his influence  extended (through the Greek connection) into the city states of northern Hellas.

   Men was (like many Lunar deities) depicted with what appear to be lunar ‘horns’ emerging from his shoulders, and often with his foot upon a ram’s or bull’s head, echoing the imagery of both Sabazios, the ‘Thracian Hero’ and Mithraism:

The god 'Men' - a Lunar Sabazios? Note the Bacchic 'Thyrsus' wand topped with a pine-cone: also a symbol of Phrygian god Attis.

The god ‘Men’ – a Lunar Sabazios? Note the Bacchic ‘Thyrsus’ wand and the pine-cone held in the god’s hand: this was also a symbol of the Phrygian god Attis, consort of the Great Goddess, Cybele.

Men was apparently a god of the months – the lunar cycles, associated in folklore with human fertility and the menstrual cycle. He was depicted as in the traditions of Apollo, the ‘Thracian Heros‘ and Attis as youthful and androgynous, but his appearance in the Roman-era stelae are certainly less military than the Thracian horseman image. Given the depiction of him with very similar iconography as Sabazios, it would appear that he was possibly one and the same god – perhaps a ‘young Sabazios’, or a ‘son of Sabazios’? Indeed, as Sabazios and Zeus/Jupiter became conflated in the Roman sphere, it is very likely that Men represented a dependent ‘aspect’ of the god. Suggestions that he was somehow Persian or Mesopotamian in origin need to be reconciled with these similarities with the Thracian Sabazios-Dionysus hypostasis…

Other mythological characters who share similarities are Endymion (the lover of the Moon – Selene, also known by the similar name ‘Mene’), and Phrygian Attis, consort of the Great Goddess, Cybele. Endymion’s name certainly appears to incorporate a version of the name of Men with this suffix portion: -mion. His mythology may have been borrowed into Greek stories from that of Men in Asia Minor. Like Attis, Endymion’s active role as the lover of an important goddess (Selene) is placed in a suspended state: Whereas Attis castrates himself in a (Dionysiac) frenzy, Endymion is famous for being in an eternal sleep so that the moon might preserve and admire his beauty, and make love to him. Attis was likewise depicted as fresh-faced. Although Endymion was never (that I know) associated with the pine tree and pine cones, Attis – like Sabazios and Men – certainly was. The evergreen and erect pine which cloaks mediterranean mountain sides had an important phallic meaning to these seemingly related religious mystery cults.

 A Moon God for a Moon Goddess?

Having mentioned the Hellenic goddess-titaness Selene – personification of the moon – it is worth examining other aspects of her from the pre-Christian era regional mythology of the eastern Mediterranean. Selene (also called Mene by e.g. Nonnos in his ‘Dionysiaca’) was also identified with Hecate, as well as the virgin huntress-goddess Artemis/Diana (Sabazios is usually portrayed as a hunter rather than a warrior!). Due to the proliferation of mythological traditions and the tussles for cultural hegemony that population movements tend to engender it is likely that all of these were variants of the same ‘star-myths’, used as explanatory vehicles for the mysteries of nature’s great (and largely occult) mechanisms. The ambivalent male sexuality of the god Attis and the priesthood of the Galli who celebrated Cybele seem to find a kinship with the Phrygian god Men, whose depiction above typifies the Eunuchoid appearance more usually seen in depictions of Attis. However, the moon-shouldered god is shown with the military attributes of Sabazios, at least in terms of the ‘vanquished beast’ and the thyrsus-spear. Another thing worth considering is if the depiction really shows ‘lunar horns’ at all – it could possibly represent the god carrying a Thracian pelta shield or a pair of curved Thracian sica swords on his back. The horns might even be phalli – a well-known attribute of Dionysian cult.

Depiction of Thracian warrior with crescentic 'Pelta' shield.

Depiction of Thracian warrior with crescentic ‘Pelta’ shield.

It is likely that ‘Men’ was a more androgynous aspect the Great Goddess, who was herself often seen as cognate with Rhea, Artemis, Selene and Diana – even Hekate. Sabazios was also in some myths portrayed as both the son and lover of the Great Goddess, otherwise known as Cybele.

Mithraic stela from the Louvre - note the imagery of the moon and the wands wielded by the celebrants, as well as the 'Phrygian' clothing.

Mithraic stela from the Louvre – note the imagery of the moon and the wands wielded by the celebrants, as well as the ‘Phrygian’ clothing.

Medean and Persian Mythology: Vohu Manah

The Zoroastrian mythology (‘Avesta’) states that Vohu Manah (‘Good Mind’) was the spirit who introduced the prophet to the supreme being or Logos, known as Ahura Mazda (‘Light of Wisdom’). The Indo-European word for ‘mind’ is echoed in the name of ‘Men’: consider the Latin word mens. Vohu Manah was associated with the care of flocks of cattle – a similar attribute seen in the mythology of Greek Apollo (and Hermes) – Men’s cult image illustrated above shares aspects of this interpretation.

A form of Zoroastrianism was the religion of the non-Greek peoples of Asia Minor during the Assyrian and Persian Empires during the first half of the 1st millennium BCE. Like the Dionysian/Sabazian and Eleusinian cults of the ancient Hellenes (not to mention the practices of the Delphic Oracle), this religion also involved the imbibing of an intoxicating sacrament, known in this case as ‘Haoma‘: A curious link to the moon, the mind and ecstatic mystery religions…

Baal-hamon:

Baal-hamon was the principle god of the Phoenician peoples of Carthage. Apart from the connection between the words ‘Men’ and ‘Hamon’ (and, of course, Manah) another feature linking him with Men was his epithet: Ba’al Qarnaim – ‘Lord of Two Horns’. This seems very close (in turn) to the similarly-named horned Egyptian god, Amun/Ammon. Baal-hamon was related to the Ram, the symbol of this Egyptian deity. The Romans and Greeks equated Ba’al Hamon with Saturn/Kronos.

 

Sabazios – the ‘other’ Thracian god.

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The Thracian/Phrygian god Sabazios is well-attested in ancient Europe, but little – if any – mythology is known about him, not in the least because Thrace (modern Bulgaria) was not a literate culture before its Hellenisation, Romanisation and later Christianisation. Another fact might be because his worship (where it is attested outside of Thrace) appears to have been part of a ‘mystery cult’ where mythology was imparted as secrets to initiates and was not – in common with the greater part of the more ancient Greek, Italic, Celtic and Pontic/Phrygian traditions – part of a common orally-transmitted mythical corpus of knowledge.

We know that the cult of Sabazios was popular in late archaic and Classical Greece, and that it was later to spread throughout the Roman empire. We also know that it showed a good deal of syncretism with the cult of Dionysus/Bacchus, and that two were sometimes considered to be the same god, albeit that the connection of Dionysus/Bacchus to wine was more explicit among the Greeks and Romans while the cult of Sabazios appears to have emphasized the fertility aspects common to the two.

Dionysus/Bacchus and Sabazios were both gods whose cultic worship and festivals typically surrounded the event of the ‘arrival’ (epiphany) of the god and his band of animalistic male and wild human female attendants among the people, associated with ritual cries announcing the god’s coming. In fact, in the Attic cult of Dionysus (practiced at Athens and Delphi) the ‘Bacchic cries’ to the god and his retinue, according to the great 4thC BCE Athenian statesman-author Demosthenes (in his book ‘The Crown’), appear to refer to a ‘foreign’ Sabazios as well as the Phrygian consort-god Attis, suggesting that the cult was considered as something ‘other’ or ‘alien’, at least to men like Demosthenes, who was seeking to denigrate an opponent when he said:

“… On attaining manhood you abetted your mother in her initiations and the other rituals, and read aloud from the cultic writings …You rubbed the fat-cheeked snakes and swung them above your head, crying Euoi saboi and hues attes, attes hues… ”

The cry was called ‘Sabasmos‘ according to the 10thC CE Byzantine encylopedia known as the Suda, which stated (perhaps echoing earlier observations by Clement of Alexandria) that the cults of Sabazios, Bacchus and Dionysus were effectively the same.

Demosthenes’ ancient account refers to a cult of women that involved the carrying of snakes as part of its rituals. Another important part of the ritual or cult was intoxication: the placing of a krater of wine was a part of the ritual of arrival demonstrated on ancient Greek illustrations. The ritual ecstasy of the female band of celebrant-priestesses known as the Maenads who accompanied the god may have been due to factors other than alcohol-intoxication, however. Foremost among these were the group hysteria of the event, heightened by dance and chanting, but perhaps another important factor in the excitement was blood – from the ritual slaughter of an animal or animals, said in some accounts to have been ritually (and primally) rended physically apart by the Maenads in sacrifice to the god. All of these events typically preceded the showpiece ‘arrival’ of the god’s image and his accompanying band of Maenads and disguised male performers dressed as animals, satyrs etc. This would have been followed by feasting and jollity, after which the Dionysia were typified (in the Greek world, at least) by the production of great plays and dramas – a hallmark of Attic culture, from which we have the plays of Aristophanes and other greats of classical drama.

The 'Vix Krater' - an equisite Greek bronze krater buried in the grave of a Gaulish noblewoman c.500BCE. Elaborate kraters were a central symbol of Dionysiac and Sabazian cult worship.

The ‘Vix Krater’ – an exquisite Greek bronze krater buried in the grave of a Gaulish noblewoman c.500BCE. Elaborate kraters were a central symbol of Dionysiac and Sabazian cult worship.

The Thracian and Phrygian (ie – Anatolian) Sabazios emerged from a slightly different religious tradition, but appears to a have merged successfully with the Greek and Roman traditions of Dionysus-Bacchus. In fact, the Dionysiac religion in the Greek cultural world has (rightly or wrongly) generally been considered somewhat ‘different’ to the Olympian traditions, being considered much more of a ‘barbaric’ form of ‘mystery cult’ and generally felt to be somewhat alien and exotic – under the influence of more eastern traditions. This may be a typically ‘Hellenic’ view, however: Greeks of this era (5thC BCE > early Common Era) had a tendency to deride their own ‘primitive’ past and consign such aspects of their indigenous cultural history to the ‘barbaric’ world of Thrace, Phrygia and (of course) the ‘Celts’. The explosion of Hellenic influence and the rise of the Roman Republic on its coat-tails exposed the Greco-Roman world to a plethora of exotic influences, the most favourable of which they found in the Near East. For this reason, these cultures began to ‘orientalise’ and absorb the religious cultures of Thrace and Phrygia, which after the 3rdC BCE were a melting pot also incorporating Celtic and Eastern beliefs. The official acceptance of the Phrygian cults of Attis and the Magna Mater, Cybele, were a prime example of this process, but the older mystery-cults of Orphism and Sabazios-Dionysus had a longer history of influence, which along with the chthonic mystery cult at Eleusis and on the island of Samothrace were testament to the diverse interactions occurring in European paganism. The exoticism and potential for disorder of the Bacchic rites in Rome were accompanied during the late Roman Republic by no small degree of official anxiety, perhaps due to the fact that the state exercised little control over such matters. The adoption of Phrygian Cybele into the official cult of Rome marked the end of the second Punic War, and was perhaps a useful buffer against the more chaotic but no less exotic Bacchanalia. It was following this that the Romans increasingly appear to have shown an interest in the cult of Sabazios (Rome had a temple of ‘Jupiter Sabazios’), which perhaps offered a more conservative aspect of the Dionysiac-Bacchic cult. Rome’s ambitions by the 3rdC BCE lay in the East and her strategy of expansion was achieved as much through cultural incorporation and franchise as by military might.

Thracian/Phrygian Sabazios:

Having mentioned the apparent syncretism of Sabazios with Dionysus during the Hellenic era, it is worth noting the indigenous Thracian and Phrygian aspects of the cult to draw a distinction. As this was (on the whole) a mystery cult and was not written about by indigenous authors, we only have limited epigraphic and artistic (sculptural) evidence to call upon, and most of this during the period of Roman influence following the 2nC BCE. The most common Phrygian and Thracian imagery associated with Sabazios are stone stelae depicting him as a horseman – not a feature seen in Dionysian imagery, except where we see the god’s accomplice Silenus mounted on an Ass. The ‘Thracian Horseman’ is depicted as active and young, and usually shown wearing a billowing cloak and armed with a lance. His image is usually accompanied by some adversarial animals: most often a snake twined around a tree, and sometimes by lions and other wild beasts. Apart from his mount and his weapon, the imagery correlates strongly with that often seen with the archetypal Greek mythical Hero, Hercules. The serpent-slaying hero-role is also seen with Greek Apollo, and it appears that the syncretism between these characters as well as the Centaur Chiron and the god Hermes was a strong feature stamped upon Thracian and Phrygian religion, as well as that of the Celts whose ideas had mingled with theirs during the ‘La Téne’ cultural period. Indeed, when the Romans invaded the Balkans and pushed for Anatolia they were met by combined Thracian, Dacian and ‘Celtic’ forces, whose cavalry was a remarkable and obviously elite part of their fighting style and source of much success until Rome finally defeated and incorporated them into their own armies. The regional prowess of cavalry warfare was at its greatest with the Macedonian Hero-King Alexander, whose father bore the name ‘Phillip’ (‘lover of horses’) and whose cavalry swept aside all opposition in his great surge of conquest during the 4th and 3rdC’s BCE. This was perhaps the spiritual origin of Europe’s medieval mounted warrior elites, and the image of the mounted Thracian Sabazios was used for that of Christianity’s interloper ‘St. George’:

A typical 'Thracian Horseman' image of Sabazios

A typical ‘Thracian Horseman’ image of Sabazios, here hunting a boar – yet another ‘fanged’ chthonic creature representing plenty and growth. The board was a particularly ‘celtic’ image, whereas the serpent was more ‘Greek’ or ‘Eastern’…

The Thracian Horseman image obviously relates to a hero-god, and the name ‘Thracian Heros’ is also applied to the icon-image, one of which is inscribed to ‘Heros Karabazmos’, which name incorporates the ‘-baz-‘ of ‘Sabazios’. To the Thracians, Phrygians and Celts (who used the horse imagery extensively in their otherworldly coins after the 4thC BCE) the ‘Heros’ character represented fertility through the closeness of death: similar to the ancient Etruscan/Roman Mars as well as the all-popular Hercules. In fact, it is worth comparing the iconography of Hercules with that of the Thracian Heros:

Armed Hercules confronts the Serpent Ladon in the garden of the Hesperides (Roman Hispania)

Armed Hercules confronts the Serpent Ladon in the garden of the Hesperides (Roman Hispania)

And now, here’s the Thracian ‘Heros’ to compare. Note the ‘phallic Herma’ to the right of the tree – these were a feature of Dionysiac and Sabazian worship:

Thracian_Horseman_Histria_Museum

The mythology regarding the ‘horseman’ must have incorporated much of that common to the Herculaean and Apollonian myths as well as the Dionysian aspects of Sabazios. not to mention the martial aspects of gods such as Mars. The icon of the galloping helpful horseman ‘coming from’ the underworld where it has been victorious over the serpents and demons incorporates all of these in a more simplified and much more fundamental and portable manner.

Chiron the hunter - teacher of Greek heros. Are him and Sabazios one and the same? Perhaps the Minotaur too?

Chiron the hunter – teacher of Greek heros. Are him and Sabazios one and the same? Perhaps the Minotaur too?

The coins of Celtic tribes in the Balkans such as the Scordisci and Bastarnae demonstrate a syncretic incorporation of such imagery in their appropriations and modification of Greek designs, and this propagated throughout the Celtic world as far as Britain by the 1stC CE. Often the warlike rider is female in the Celtic numismatic images – particularly so during times of conflict with Rome. It finally seems to have been mollified into the form of the benign ‘Epona’ by the early common era when Rome had broken the fanatical and wizardly backbone of wild Celtic culture:

Cuddly mother Epona - the original Celtic form would have bought your head on a plate, not food!

Cuddly mother Epona – the original Celtic form would have bought your head on a plate, not food!

Sabazios in Rome:

As previously mentioned, the cult of the Thracian-Phrygian god Sabazios met with some degree of popularity in the Roman Empire. Apart from a few religious stelae, the most prominent artefacts from the cult are the bronze-alloy votive ‘hands’ discovered in places such as Herculaneum and even as far north as modern Belgium. These hands are know as the ‘Hand of Sabazios’, and generally display a gesture which appears to have been adopted by the early Christian church, and is still used by priests in blessings to this day. Here are some examples:

Hand of Sabazios (British Museum)

Hand of Sabazios (British Museum)

The hands take a variety of forms, with some common elements:

1. Most depict the fingers in the gesture shown in the image.

2. All have a pine-cone (or possibly even a hop-flower) either balanced upon the thumb or grasped between thumb and forefinger. In a few cases, these appears to be more explicitly depicted as the Orphic Egg, in one case holding the image of the Thracian Heros with his horse, lance and serpent adversary within. Although Thrace was a beer-drinking culture, hops were not known to have been used as a beer additive until after the medieval period.

3. All have a serpent or basilisk (serpent with a cock’s comb: lit. ‘king of serpents’) representing the chthonic ideal. Other ‘serpentae’ or ‘herpetae’ such as frogs, turtles and lizards frequently accompany this.

4. Most depict a mother lying with her child on the wrist part of the design. This may be an allusion to Ariadne, wife of Dionysus in the Cretan-Greek version of the myth. The birth and rebirth of ‘Dionysus’ were central parts of the Orphic mystery-legend, and Orphism was ascribec by the Greeks to Thrace.

5. Most depict the Dionysian Krater and bowls or cups.

6. Most depict a ram’s head, sometimes that of a bull, upon which the god places his foot in depictions. This is redolent of the sacrifice of animals at the Dionysia.

7. Many depict a miniature figure of Sabazios himself as a bearded man sat against the extended index and middle finger of the hand. He is sometimes crowned with lunar ‘horns’.

Other iconcography commonly associated with these hands include: The Caduceus or wand of the god Hermes/Mercury (think of the serpent on the tree in the Thracian Heros images), a set of scales, a perched eagle, vines and sometimes ritual objects such as a sacrificial knife and a lituus (ceremonial wand). One example of the hand has a bracelet to which human and animal penises are attached by chains! These hands were believed to have been mounted upon poles at ceremonies

Apart from the hands, the cult of Jupiter-Sabazios is also represented on a few ancient stelae recovered from the Roman world. Here is one particularly fine example from Roman Illyria (modern Albania) depicting what appears to be the Phrygian gods Cybele and Attis – maybe even Selene and Endymion or Artemis and Apollo – (who actually hold a pole with a hand on it!), as well as ploutic father Sabazios himself, as well as the usual icons found on the hands and ‘Thracian Heros’ stelae:

sabazios

The overwhelming fertility aspects of the cult are well-demonstrated, and the warlike aspects of the Thracian god have been removed. Even Mercury appears at the base of the serpent-tree to grant his blessing! Observant readers might begin to see how Julius Caesar’s comments about ‘Dis Pater’ being worshipped by the Gauls point to a more ancient and once-widespread cult which emerged from Bronze Age Europe and had influence from far Britain and Ireland right through to the Near East. Just a peak over the common ‘barbarian’ yet mythologically sophisticated event-horizon of our ancient ancestors….

Chiron, the Centaurs and the Solar hunter-gods.

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Chiron (Kheiron – ‘hand’) was the wise Centaur who plays the role of mentor-instructor to a number of youthful heroes of ancient Greek mythology. Unlike most Centaurs (whose nature was generally as excitable, wild and untameable as young stallions) he was often depicted in earlier Greek art with the full body of a man, having the torso and rear quarters of a horse coming from his back. This depiction is at odds with that usually associated with centaurs, who tend to be shown with all of their limbs being those of the horse:

Chiron the hunter-instructor: In his right hand he holds a youthful Achilles, and over his shoulder he carries a captured hare.

Chiron the hunter-instructor: In his right hand he holds a youthful Achilles, and over his shoulder he carries a captured hare.

Our earliest sources (eg – Hesiod c.8th-7thC BCE) suggest that Chiron was a son of Cronos (Chironos?) who was sired upon the Okeanid nymph Philyra of Mount Pelion in Thessaly. To quote the summaries on the fabulous Theoi.com:

Hesiod, Theogony 1001 (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or 7th B.C.) :
“Kheiron (Chiron) the son of Philyra.”

Eumelus of Corinth or Arctinus of Miletus, Titanomachia Frag 6 (from Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius 1. 554) (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th or C6th B.C.) :
“The author of the War of the Giants (Gigantomakhia) says that Kronos (Cronus) took the shape of a horse and lay with Philyra, the daughter of Okeanos. Through this cause Kheiron (Chiron) was born a kentauros (centaur): his wife was Khariklo (Chariclo).”

The Okeanids were the nymphae daughters of primal Titan, Okeanos, who represented the waters just as Gaia represented the land/earth. For this reason, they represented aspects of Okeanos including rivers, clouds, lakes, streams and (as Naiades) springs of water. The Centaurs in general were supposed to have been the children of the cloud-nymph Nephele and were born on Mount Pelion. The horse-men of Greek mythology were associated with water, just as the legendary Pegasus had his name and origin derived from natural springs (Pegaoi). This origin of the divine-monstrous reflects medieval pagan tales from Scandinavia such as the legend of Sigurd and Fafnir: the dragon and his brothers also have chthonic-aquatic origins. The Greek myths show evidence of parallel colliding traditions: Tethys (wife of Okeanos) was supposed to be the mother of clouds, although not explicitly Nephele in the Olympian mythology. Readers might realise an etymological similarity between Philyra, Pelion, Nephele – even the semitic Nephilim might have similar origins, as might the 9thC CE Meresberg Incantation divinity called Phol, and even maybe the Macedonian kings who called themselves after the equine designation Phillip…

The name itself, ‘Chiron’ or ‘Kheiron’ means ‘hand’ – that useful attribute which sets the average centaur aside from his equine relatives. The ‘Thracian Horseman’ god from the northern Aegaean, Sabazios, was also worshiped in Anatolian Phrygia and was associated with the slaying of dragons or serpents (a motif for the conquest of death and disease) and a hand was used as a votive effigy in his rites.

A 'Sabazios' votive hand - image from the British Museum.

A ‘Sabazios’ votive hand – image from the British Museum.

The Healing Hand:

Chiron was, by his name, the ‘hand’ that guided mythic heroes in their development. In Greek mythology, this included both Achilles (a warrior-hero-ancestor of both the Greeks and Romans) and Hercules/Herakles who was perhaps the most famous hero-forebear, who conquered the forces of chaos and monsters on behalf of mankind. As a ‘teacher-protector of the people’ a (demi) god such as Chiron was therefore (like his pupil) associated with healing and medicine, linking him in Greek mythology to the serpent-slaying solar god Apollo and his medical son Asklepios (a name which incorporates an old Indo-European word for ‘serpent’ or ‘fish’: ask/esk). Chiron taught Achilles about the eponymous wound-herb famous throughout Europe: the Achillea or Yarrow (Homer: Iliad), and was famed in myths for his skill with wild herbs. He therefore functioned as the primal empirical teacher for ancient Europeans of the Aegean.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7. 197 (trans. Rackham) (Roman encyclopedia 1stC CE) :
“[On inventions:] The science of herbs and drugs was discovered by Chiron the son of Saturnus [Kronos] and Philyra.”

As a son of Cronus (Saturn), Chiron was therefore a (half) brother of Zeus. The name of the Thracian/Phrygian god named ‘Sabazios’ might even be considered to be a derivation of ‘Salva Zeus’, meaning ‘Rescuer God’ or ‘Healer God’. Sabazios was more often affiliated with Dionysus in Greek thinking, albeit because the Greeks seem to have originally inherited the traditions of Dionysus AND Sabazios-Chiron from their northern barbarian neighbours – probably during the 2nd millennium BCE or maybe the early 1st millennium BCE. The ‘wild’ Kentauroi and the satyrs would certainly both certainly be considered fit partners for the ‘Bacchanal’ party of Dionysus, although developing perhaps from a separate tradition to that of the fauns and satyrs.

The ‘Horseman’ god known in Thrace and Phrygia Sabazios (later envisioned as St George killing the dragon) seems, as mentioned, to be in many ways equivalent to the solar dragon/snake-slayer god, Apollo of Delphi. In Greek myths, Apollo slew the ancient snake Python: symbol of putrefaction and death, the afterworld and regeneration, and hence he became associated with the sorcerous practice of divination, intended to call on the knowledge of the reincarnating dead once believed in across Europe. As the snake symbolises regeneration and rebirth, Apollo’s ‘dragon-slaying’ was a metaphor for conquering death, hence his primary role as both a god of prophecy and a god of healing.

Apollo was typically represented as an archer (his statue at Delphi probably depicted him holding a bow and arrows). He used his arrows to slay the death-serpent, Python, and its decaying body was probably supposed to give off the vapours which inspired the Delphic Pytheia with their visions and oracles from the Otherworld. Chiron was also depicted with the prey of a hunter – a branch from which dead hares were suspended, like ‘fruit’. His disciple, Hercules, inadvertently caused his death with his own poisoned arrows. The arrows of Apollo were probably considered as a means by which disease was conveyed – an ancient prefiguration of the north European belief in disease caused by the darts of fairies and elves, although it should be clear by now that Apollo was linked to another serpent-slaying healing god tradition originating among the barbarians, and linked to horses. The archer constellation of Sagittarius is most usually depicted as a centaur and mythologically it is linked to both Chiron and a character called Krotos, who was a horse-legged satyr who lived with the mysterious Muses on Mount Helicon. He, like Apollo, was said to have invented the bow, to be a hunter, and (in this case, rhythmical) music – Apollo was said to have invented the lyre. Mount Helicon in Boeotia in Greece had strong associations with horses, it being the site of the birth of Pegasus, who emerged from a well on its slopes. This suggests another proto-religious link between Apollo and an equine man-beast god, but there are certain other aspects to the Krotos myth which links with that of Zeus:

The Idaean Dactyloi:

The myth of Zeus being hidden on Mount Ida from his cannibalistic father Cronus is a key element to the story of the rise of the Olympian gods over the primeval Titans, and from its location to Crete, suggests Minoan origins. This act was done by Gaia (the Earth), also often cognate with Rhea (mother of the gods), who was known in Anatolia among the Phrygians as Cybele – the prophetic ‘mountain mother’, and officially venerated by the Romans after the second Punic wars as ‘Magna Mater‘ – the ‘great mother’. The guardians of infant Zeus were a band of curious characters called the Kouretes who would stamp their feet and clash their weapons in order to cover the thunderous cries of the young god-on-high, Zeus. This was also said to be the invention of rhythmic music, and the connection with the thunderous sound of horses’ hooves becomes suggested for the Mount Helicon mythology associated with horses. The Kouretes were also known as the ‘Daktyloi’ (‘fingers’) which links back to the name ‘Chiron’ (‘hand’) and the hand-symbol associated with the worship of Sabazios. Their rustic and ‘dextrous’ nature were emphasised in their traditions, and they had a fairly widespread cultic expression in religious ritual, being called by additional names such as ‘Korybantes‘ and ‘Kabeiroi‘ in various other traditions outside of Crete.  Hercules was sometimes considered one of them, and they were also linked to the invention of skills such as smithcraft (the clashing of metal on metal being an essential part of this). This links them to some notable north European mythology, which I have already discussed.

The Celtic horse coins:

The vast majority of the coinage produced among European Celtic tribes of the late Iron Age depicts the horse, often in conjunction with a solar wheel symbol. Although often explained away as crude copies of Greek coins, their symbolism goes much deeper than these and hints at many ancient religious secrets which the coming of Romanisation and Christianisation would increasingly obscure. The horse depicted seems highly likely to be a supra-regional god, and the existence of many coins depicting a centaur-like man-horse, a horse-like rider or a human rider seem to confirm this theory, which is worth considering in the light of the information I discussed above about the older Greek and Phrygian myths…

A centaur depicted on a coin of the semi-Romanised king Cunobelinos (1stC CE Britain)

A centaur depicted on a coin of the semi-Romanised king Cunobelinos (1stC CE Britain)

1stC BCE coin of the Venetii (Brittany) showing the horse-man. Definitely a wholly Celtic design!

1stC BCE coin of the Venetii (Brittany) showing the horse-man. Definitely a wholly Celtic design!

The Osisimi of Gaul (atC BCE) also produced many indigenous 'centaur' coins. Like those of the Venetii, they also depict many human heads attached to ?cords in the designs.

The Osisimi of Gaul (1stC BCE) also produced many indigenous ‘centaur’ coins. Like those of the Venetii, they also sometimes depicted human heads attached to ?cords in the designs.