Leaving aside the question of ritual as an excuse for sex, sex as part of ritual has a long and honored history. What better means to raise and send energy? One specific form of sex magick that comes down through history is sacred marriage, hieros gamos. In this rite, either symbolically or through actual coitus, a deity mates with a human ritualist or two deities mate with each other; either rite often employs humans drawn down as Goddess and/or God. Holy sex in the wet dirt served for centuries as magick to make crops grow. Sacred marriage around the world formerly sanctified the king's connection to the land he ruled; here the queen or high priestess usually embodied the land. And sacred marriage likewise has been used as initiation, to change ritualists' spiritual state, as in the Great Rite of the witches or in ancient mystery cults -- some of which may have included sacred homosexual sex.
Although the following story addresses separately these three purposes -- sympathetic magick, assertion of sovereignty and initiation -- in most cases historically sacred marriage likely combined two or all three. Unfortunately, for many rituals we have only flawed documentation, from Christian clerics who found the rites appalling or racist anthropologists who sneered at them as the work of foolish primitives. Often the true intentions behind ceremonies dismissed as blasphemy or "fertility rites" -- as if continuing life weren't important -- have not come down to us. Even the most sympathetic observers can only guess at the awe and religious ecstasy produced by any ritual. In the absence of good information, consider that any sacred marriage may not have been "only" a fertility rite. As the Greeks said of Eleusis, Demeter there gave two gifts, dittai doreai: grain and the Mysteries.
Sacred marriage to encourage the land's fertility
At the base of sacred marriate lies a group of associative images. Ten thousand years ago, give or take a few, humans first discovered that if you plant a seed in earth, food grows. If a man plants sperm in a woman's womb, an embryo grows. Symbolically, the Sky Father impregnates the Earth Mother with all life. On earth, therefore, to encourage their fertility, celebrants enacted the sacred marriage. The base formula: "Want more grain? Let's fuck!"
But the growing of food in and of itself isn't as compelling to the average human now as it was 10,000 years ago, or even 150 years ago. I recently read Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, set in the nineteenth century in the English countryside. Hardy loved to incorporate remnants of pagan customs in his books, and pagan themes as well; in Far from the Madding Crowd, our hero Gabriel Oak through fate's machinations outlasts his two tanists, Farmer Boldwood and Sergeant Troy, and wins the hand of the local goddess, Bathsheba Everdene.
Our sturdy Oak King's greatest strength is as a shepherd. However, at a harvest dance just after Troy has married Bathsheba, Gabriel in farmer-mode warns Troy for his new wife's sake that a storm is coming. The couple's just-harvested wheat and barley is standing in the field in ricks, and if not covered it will be ruined. Troy dismisses Oak's warning, and sending out the women and children treats the local men to brandy and water in celebration of his marriage. The locals, ordinarily ale and cider drinkers, pass out, as Oak returns home and gathers evidence rain is near:
That's not a kind of calculation most of us will ever make. Even for Gabriel, it's one step removed -- grain equals money from sale, not grain equals the food I'm going to eat next year. For us latter-day pagans, it's easier still to forget the link between the land and our continued life. We're not Gabriel Oak; we don't know, or need to know, the ways of animals and the look of clouds to predict a weather that rules our lives. The mechanisms of our complex society protect many of us from starving; if there's a drought in the Midwest, the Northwest still gets bologna sandwiches. But a few steps away from the height of the food chain, in rural Africa or India, in the countryside of former Communist states, on small farms even in the First World, people still live in day-to-day dependency on the food they grow. And we all rely in the end on the produce of the land, however much the plastic and Styrofoam containers in the supermarkets make us forget it.Oak sat down meditating for nearly an hour. During this time two black spiders, of the kind common in thatched houses, promenaded the ceiling, ultimately dropping to the floor.... He left the room, ran across two or three fields towards the flock, got upon a hedge, and looked over among (the sheep)....
They were all grouped in such a way that their tails, without a single exception, were towards that half of the horizon from which the storm threatened. There was an inner circle closely huddled, and outside these they radiated wider apart, the pattern formed by the flock as a whole not being unlike a vandyked lace collar....
Apparently there was to be a thunder-storm, and afterward a cold, continuous rain. The creeping things seemed to know all about the later rain, but little of the interpolated thunder-storm; whilst the sheep knew all about the thunder-storm and nothing of the later rain....
This complication of weathers being uncommon, was all the more to be feared. Oak returned to the stack-yard. All was silent here, and the conical tips of the ricks jutted darkly into the sky. There were five wheat-ricks in this yard, and three stacks of barley. The wheat when threshed would average about thirty quarters to each stack; the barley, at least forty. Their value to Bathsheba, and indeed to anybody, Oak mentally estimated by the following simple calculation:
5 x 30 = 150 quarters = £500
3 x 40 = 120 quarters = £250
Total... £750Seven hundred and fifty pounds in the divinest form that money can wear -- that of necessary food for man and beast: should that risk be run of deteriorating this bulk of corn to less than half its value, because of the instability of a woman? 'Never, if I can prevent it!' said Gabriel. (p. 252 - 254)
For our forebears, however, even a mere "fertility rite" had more obvious importance than for many of us. If the crops or herds failed, or before that the gleanings of the wilderness, our ancestors starved. In a frightening universe overhung by darkness, by forces incompletely understood -- as they still are, of course -- early peoples asked for help.
They first turned to the earth. In most known mythologies, of gatherers, hunters, pastoralists and farmers, she is the first mother. Most likely, it was she that the earliest gatherers and hunters carved in stone and bone, in figures such as the Venus of Willendorf. As Joseph Campbell points out:
We have no writing from this pre-literate age and no knowledge, consequently, of its myths or rites. It is therefore not unusual for extremely well-trained archaeologists to pretend that they cannot imagine what services the numerous female figurines might have rendered to the households for which they were designed. However, we know well enough what the services of such images were in the periods immediately following -- and what they have remained to the present day. (Primitive Mythology, p. 139)
The earth bears roots and berries, the game, the grain. Once the mechanism of fertilization is understood, "the plowing of the earth is a begetting and the growth of grain a rebirth." (Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 66) The next step is to do something to help the process along.
Rites to encourage fertility exist all over the world. The furthest-flung countries held onto the basic rites longest, before succumbing to the frowns of monotheism or more prudish neighbors. Sir George Frazer cites a long list of examples in The Golden Bough, and though later anthropologists debate his theories his ethnological data for the most part still holds good.
In the islands between New Guinea and Australia, in the last century, the natives considered the male Upulera, Mr. Sun, to come down a ladder specially set for the purpose once a year to fertilize the female Earth. Under the tree where the ladder stood, a man and a woman made ritual love to symbolize the Sun's and Earth's connection to bring the people rain, an abundance of cattle, children and riches.
In Java, when the rice flowered, farmers and their wives visited the fields by night and had ritual sex to promote the growth of the crop. Pipile couples of Central America stayed apart for four days before sowing, so their sex just before the grain went into the ground was more intense; some fucked right as the seed went in. Hesiod similarly adjured his readers to sow, plough and reap naked, according to Walter Burkert in Greek Religion.
On the Indonesian island of Amboina, if the coming clove harvest looked scant, men went to the plantations at night and fucked the earth below the trees, calling out "More cloves!" The Kikuyu of East Africa married young girls to their river's snake god; in huts on the shore, shamans consummated the ritual marriage for the god. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves opines that in the original May Day celebrations "the Priestess had public connexion with the annual king dressed in goatskins, and either he was then killed and resurrected in the form of his successor, or else a goat was sacrificed in his stead and his reign prolonged." (p. 404)
As time passed, rituals became more symbolic. The Algonquin and Huron Indians each year married two young girls, aged six or seven, to the oki (soul) of the net at the beginning of fishing season, at a feast where the net sat poised between the girls. When the Bengal dug wells, they made an wooden image of the appropriate god and married him to the goddess of water.
In pagan Sweden, the loveliest girl in the countryside married a lifesize image of Frey, god of fertility, and the two drove about the country in a wagon to greet the people and accept sacrifices. In the Ukraine until the beginning of this century, after the priest blessed the fields on St. George's Day (April 23), they received an older blessing: Young lovers lay down together and rolled on the earth. Elsewhere in Russia, young women rolled the priest. In Germany, men and women reapers rolled together on the harvested fields.
Sometimes, in a complex that has fascinated generations of mythographers and ethnographers, death followed the sacred marriage. Campbell writes that the puberty rites of boys of the Marind-anim of New Guinea ended with a beautifully dressed, oiled and painted virgin being made to lie beneath a log platform, whereupon all the new initiates had sex with her before the assembled crowd. While the boy chosen as last lay with her, the ritualists jerked out the platform's supports. The logs fell on the pair, crushing them. The people retrieved the bodies, butchered and roasted them, and the crowd ate the young couple's flesh.
Hints of similar sacrifices ring through the myths of many cultures. Traditional Indian suttee can be read as an echo. Up till 1810 A. D, the queens of Zimbabwe ceremonially strangled their kings to death every four years; Nigerian kings were strangled after the queen became pregnant and a new royal offspring was guaranteed. In a group of other African states, the king was allowed a substitute, but a new king's ascension still required sacrifice: "The (holy fire) was ritually rekindled by a designated pubescent boy and virgin, who were required to appear completely naked before the new king, the court, and the people, with their fire-sticks; the two sticks being known, respectively as the male (the twirling stick) and the female (the base). The two young people had to make the fire and then perform that other, symbolically analogous act, their first copulation; after which they were tossed into a prepared trench, while a shout went up to drown their cries, and quickly buried alive." (Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 168 - 169)
In Patrae in Greece, the goddess Artemis demanded a sacrifice of the best-looking couple each year in a myth that hints at sacred marriage. The sacrifice only ended when an oracle was fulfilled that "an outside (xenos) king came bearing an outsider (xenikos) deity" -- their king returned from a trip with an image of the new god Dionysos. (Richard Seaford, "Dionysos as Destroyer of the Household," in Masks of Dionysos, edited by Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone, p. 136).
This many-spangled complex of fecundity intertwined with death provided deep and meaningful symbols for the societies that conceived it. The Egyptian ankh, the Indian symbols of yoni and lingam united, the divine sex act was understood as the foundation of all life, a symbol that works as well now as it did for its first artificers. And, if life can be sown when it falls, like the grain it can rise again. Even among Christian writers, the imagery of eternal life was the imagery of plants. Early Christians may have mocked the idea that "the Athenians, celebrating the Eleusinian Mysteries, show to the epoptai (second-time initiates) the great, admirable, most perfect epoptic secret, in silence, a reaped ear of grain." (Burkert thus quotes Hippolytus in Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 91.) But the Gospel of St John (12: 24) echoes: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
Sacred marriage to affirm the sovreignity of the king
My vulva, the horn,
The Boat of Heaven,
Is full of eagerness like the
young moon.
My untilled land lies fallow.As for me, Inanna,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will plow my high field?
Who will plow my wet
ground?(Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, from a reconstruction of "The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi," in Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, p. 37)
The great love-goddess Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, here calls for her sacred marriage, the all-important, central rite of the Sumerian and Akkadian year. This ritual, held at the New Year, the late-summer beginning of planting season, both renewed the land's fertility and married the king to the goddess and the land.
In the late High Neolithic, as pottery, stone carving, jewelry and weaving appeared, the Sumerians built the world's first temples. Three of these earliest temples had an oval-within-oval shape to suggest female genitalia, like the inmost shrine in the Indian temples of the mother-goddess. Later temples were the penile ziggurats, raised high above the mud flats. At the tops of these, the pivot of the universe, the king and a priestess of the rank nu gig -- pure or spotless -- performed the sacred marriage.
He was Dumuzi, the shepherd god. She was Inanna, the love goddess, identified with the morning and evening star, the planet Venus. Priestess and king, Inanna and Dumuzi, mounted to the top of the ziggurat to the sound of singing, cymbals, harps, the frenzied dancing and cheering of the populace, to the sound of poetry "enriched by a wealth of poetic euphemism and innuendo... all but completely lost in translation," writes Iris Furlong in "The Mythology of the Ancient Near East," in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, edited by Carolyne Larrington, p. 20. The sacred bed is strewn with Inanna's holy plants, designed with her symbol of the lion, made from the wood of the huluppu tree secured for her by the hero Gilgamesh. About it the king and priestess perform a love-chase, acting the rite as an allegorical masque, a script for which has been found: "spectacular cultic theater," Furlong writes.
After making love: Inanna, seated on the royal throne, shines like daylight. The king, like the sun, shines radiantly by her side. He arranges abundance, lushness and plenty before her. He assembles the people of Sumer.(" The Joy of Sumer: The Sacred Marriage Rite,"Inanna, p. 109)
Inanna's inner splendor rains down onto earth, and the king invites the people to join his happiness. At the end of the sacred marriage masque, "the principles implicit in the Sacred Marriage are reiterated in a concluding speech by the goddess Ninlil, Inanna's mother. She pledges Inanna's continuing love for the king whereby he will be ensured a long, successful and prosperous reign." (Furlong, p. 20) These principles are that the ruler is responsible for agricultural prosperity, that all sexual reproduction on earth -- vegetal, animal, human -- depends on the sacred sex act and that the human-performed sacred marriage works as an enactment of the divine coupling.
This covenant between goddess and king was enacted for more than 1500 years. Baked clay seals show the sacred marriage before the middle of the third millenium B. C.; the first documentary evidence describes the ritual at the end of the second millenium B. C. The rite continued in the cities of Ur and Isin till the twentieth century B. C.
As time moved on and the goddess-focused early Sumerians were overcome by the more patriarchal Akkadians, and later the Babylonians, the focus of the ritual changed from fertility and goddess-worship to the affirmation of the king's control over the country. Inanna herself was renamed Ishtar. Dumuzi, too, went through changes, becoming the vegetation god Tammuz. In both incarnations, he was a dying god, taken by Inanna's sister Ereshkigal, the Lady of the Great Below, to spend six months underground each year.
Though he returned to make love to Inanna and encourage the fields to bloom, forever uneasy lay his marriage bed. On a seal from 2800 B. C., under the sacred marriage bed hides a scorpion "sacred to Inanna, which symbolized her power to destroy life as well as to give it." (The Myth of the Goddess, by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, p. 211) The compelling symbol of the love-death continued; when the king died, much of the court went along. When Sir Leonard Woolley uncovered the tomb of the king and queen of Ur, from 2500 B. C., "' the king had at least three people with him in his chamber and 62 in the death-pit; the queen was content with some 25 in all. '" (Woolley quoted by Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 409)
The myth of sacred marriage, the connection of the king to the goddess of the land through the ritual sexual act, with or without ritual death, held sway over the Mediterranean and farther for the next two to three millennia. The Old Testament Book of Esther -- Esther being a cognate for Ishtar -- reflects a hieros gamos between the king and a virgin priestess representative of the goddess, the Farrars note in The Witches' Goddess. In Egypt, Frazer reports, each July at the rising of the goddess-star Sirius, the god Amun-Ra went from the temple of Karnak to the goddess Mut (" Mother") in Luxor a few miles up-stream, there to enact the ritual mating of Amun-Ra's priest with the selected Mut priestess, regarded as the concubine of the god. Ra was the god of the Pharaohs, each of whom was considered the son of Ra, and the Egyptians held that Amun-Ra in the king's guise impregnated the queen, the representative of the land. Artists carved and painted this divine sex in two of the oldest temples in Egypt, Deir el Bahari and Luxor.
The ancient Celts subscribed to a similar idea. In one Ulster ritual, the Farrars write, the king confirmed his sovereignty by having sex with a mare, representative of the horse-goddess. Immediately afterward, the mare was killed, carved to pieces and boiled. While attendants brought and shared with him scraps of horsemeat, the king bathed in and drank from the broth, gulping the liquid around him directly from the bath.
Mythographers Frazer and Graves see another ritual marriage of king or god to land in the Irish feast of Lughnasadh, or Lammas (which Graves derives from Lugh mass), followed traditionally by the god Lugh's death, a pattern even better seen in the legends of his Welsh incarnation Llew Llaw Gyffes. A late medieval manuscript has Lug Schimaig inaugurate a great feast for Lug mac Ethlenn to celebrate his marriage of sovereignty, according to Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. In an eleventh century text, Lug dwells in a fairy palace with a crowned woman identified as the sovereignty of Ireland, Eriu. Lugh's bride, thus, is the land's sovereignty. Funk and Wagnall's notes that "nasad" seems related to words meaning "to give in marriage." Fittingly, Lughnasadh was a time of marriage rites, in honor of Lugh and his bride, especially the goddess's trial marriages, lasting a year and a day.
Funk and Wagnall's sees a connection between Lugh and the Irish goddess-queen Medhbh, inciter of the Cattle-Raid of Cuailgne. The Farrars call her perhaps the clearest example of the goddess of sovereignty, with whom the new king must mate before his recognition; Medhbh allowed no king to reign in Tara unless wedded to herself. To enact his sovereignty, the king inherited the role of Lugh, the sun god, while the shape-shifting hag Medhbh was the land of Ireland, transformed by the sun's caresses from winter to lush harvest.
This connection between king and land, this fructifying sacred marriage, continues in the later history of the British Isles. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus said of Hermuntrude, queen of Scotland, that "whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself." Conversely, King James I of England announced that "I am the husband and the whole island is my lawful wife."
Even today, the Farrars note, a sovereign must go through a ceremony in which he "ascends the throne." Early forms of the ritual make clear that the throne is the lap of the Goddess. The goddess Isis's name, in Egyptian Aset, means seat or throne. The formal seat of the ruler is still identified with power, in republics as well as monarchies; the White House stands for the president. If Bill Clinton had known that by definition he was having sex with a goddess, would he have needed Monica?
Sacred marriage as initiation in the mystery cults
Like any symbol, the holy sex act can be read on many levels. Mystery religions, such as those of the ancient Greeks, use symbolism to point to things that could not be named, secrets that even if spilled could not be understood until their receiver went through the mystery experience. For the mystery cults of the Greek and Roman world, the sacred marriage provided such a symbol.
How literal a sacred marriage mystery cults and parallel state rites portrayed is often far from clear. Earlier writers seemed fairly certain of actual sex: "The mimetic marriage of Crete, a bit of sympathetic magic common to many primitive peoples, because a cardinal mystic rite," writes Jane Harrison on p. 566 of Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903. Later on, writers became less sure. "Even long before (Sir Arthur Evans, archaeologist of Knossos), historians of religion were fascinated by a number of apparently ancient configurations of myth connected with Crete: ... agrarian mysteries with a sacred marriage.... The iconography of the Cretan Palace Period, however, has provided virtually no confirmation of all these expectations," Walter Burkert says on p. 23 of Greek Religion, published in 1985.
And, again, about the mysteries of Eleusis: "We do know that the holy rite was enacted between the hierophant and the chief priestess of Demeter. Asterius (a Christian commentator), speaking of the various procedures of initiation at Eleusis, asks -- 'is there not there the descent into darkness and the holy congress of the hierophant and the priestess, of him alone and her alone? '" (Harrison, p. 550) Burkert is less sure: "That sexual elements play a role in mystery initiations is virtually certain, but there is hardly any clear evidence; how in Eleusis, for example, conception and birth-giving was indicated remains obscure." (Greek Religion, pp. 108 - 109 ) Karl Kerényi argues that Asterius was not in fact describing the mysteries of Eleusis but mysteries based on those of Eleusis that had been exported to Alexandria, nearer Asterius's home.
I must admit that, scanning the books, I ended up wanting to scream, "Did they fuck?!" But that's not the point. The point of a mystery cult is that the mystery should work, the symbol be enacted or described in such a way that it transports the viewers. As Burkert writes in Ancient Mystery Cults, "Mystery festivals should be unforgettable events, casting their shadows over the whole of one's future life, creating experiences that transform existence." (p. 89)
Many mystery cults did thus move their initiates. Of the Eleusinian Mysteries Athenian playwright Sophocles said, "Thrice-blessed are those mortals who have seen these rites and thus enter into Hades: for them alone there is life, for the others all is misery." (Greek Religion, p. 289) The Roman Cicero said, "We have been given a reason not only to live in joy but also to die with better hope." (Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, p. 15) The Athenian orator Isokrates said, "Those who take part of them possess better hopes in regard to the end of life and in regard to the whole aion." (ibid) Plutarch describes the mystery experience, in an analogy for dying: "' And then some wonderful light comes to meet you, pure regions and meadows are there to greet you, with sounds and dances and solemn, sacred words and holy views; and there the initiate, perfect by now, set free and loose from all bondage, walks about, crowned with a wreath, celebrating the festival together with the other sacred and pure people, and he looks down on the uninitiated, unpurified crowd in this world in mud and fog beneath his feet. '" (Ancient Mystery Cults, pp. 91 - 92)
That is initiation: the movement through light and darkness to a higher plane of spirit. To different ends, each mystery cult of the ancient world strove to effect that change. The chief mystery cults of the Greeks and Romans were those of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, the rites of Dionysos and the related Orphic sect, the cult of the Magna Mater, the mysteries of Samothrace and the mysteries of Mithra. Of these, the first four employed the symbol of sacred marriage. Certain other rituals of the Greek and Roman states made use of hieros gamos as well.
Crete: the mother of mysteries
The host of cultural themes introduced from Anatolia and Egypt notwithstanding, the most direct forebear of Greece was Crete.
Frazer and other early mythographers saw a pattern of sacred marriage in the Cretan monarchy, an eight-yearly cycle after which the king died, at the beginning and end of which a solstice or equinox fell upon a full or new moon. At the end of eight years, the king died, and the new king mounted the queen and throne. Baring and Cashford imagine them mating in costumes of a bull and cow. In later years, at end of the octennial the king probably renewed his powers by sacred sex with the queen, and a victim died -- most likely a bull. The Greek myths of Crete are full of cattle, possibly inherited from the Egyptians; Cretan art reflects this bull-focus with bull-head rhytons, toy and carven bulls and the frescoes of a bull-dance, in which fair-skinned girls and ruddy boys vault over a running animal.
Poseidon, Greek god-ruler of the bull, shows up in Cretan Linear B writing. In the Mycenean Pylos of the same timeframe, he seems to have held a sacred marriage. Burkert notes a ceremony for Poseidon called the "' spreading of the bed' (reketororterijo, Lechestroterion), at which oil for libations is used." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 44) Even for the conservative Burkert "a sacred marriage festival springs to mind."
The Cretans made Zeus, too, a bull. Notorious in classical times for displaying a mountain as "the dead Zeus," the Cretans likewise celebrated near Knossos a sacred marriage between the god and his consort Hera. Sources say the rite imitated the nuptials of the gods. Burkert notes "this might, of course, be no more than an evening bridal procession followed by a nocturnal festival, pannychis." Or it could have been the full monty.
However, unlike the Greeks, the Cretans had no processions toting giant phalli; the Greeks inherited their phallophoriai from Egypt. Lewd pictures and statues were rare in Crete. Kerényi wonders whether this wasn't an artistic policy of restraint; he notes in Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life that occasionally artists sidestepped this policy, as in statuettes of mating couples from the cave-sanctuary of Inatos in south Crete. He further notes that in the main cave-temple of Eileithyia, the birth goddess, the central sanctuary held one tall, phallic stalagmite, polished to a gleam by centuries of worshipping hands: an implicit sacred marriage.
The Greeks placed on Crete the mythic sacred marriage of Demeter and her lover Iasion or Iasios, with whom she lay in a thrice-plowed field. In Hesiod's version, the pair rose smiling; it is only later that Zeus was said to strike down Demeter's lover with a lightning-bolt. Iasion was a hunter, whom Kerényi associates with another Cretan hunter, Zagreus, a double of Dionysos. By now we recognize that thrice-plowed field: here again we have the mother of grain lying with her king to ensure the earth's fertility. Demeter's lover Iasion is connected with Samothrace, thus pointing to the mysteries there and to pre-Greek customs connected with that wilder land.
In classical times, Crete claimed to be the cradle of the Greek mysteries. Diodoros of Sicily in the first century A. D. wrote that the islanders laid claim to originating the Eleusinian, the Orphic and the Samothracian mysteries. Furthermore, in Harrison's translation: "' In Crete, at Knossos, the custom from ancient times was that these rites should be communicated openly and to all, and things that among other peoples were communicated in secrecy, among the Cretans no one concealed from anyone who wished to know. '" (p. 566)
What rites exactly Diodoros's Cretan informant had in mind, we do not know. Perhaps the mother-mystery was that of Zeus and Hera, perhaps that of Demeter and Zagreus-Dionysos. Looking at the later mysteries of the Greeks, either might work. And either might have included full-on sacred sex.
Sacred marriages in Greek cult
Zeus and Hera also held wedding rites in later years, according to the Greeks. Homer in the Iliad has Zeus and Hera unite atop Crete's Mount Ida, wrapped in a golden cloud from which rains shining drops. Other Greek myths place the union elsewhere, on Euboea or the Island of the Hesperides. Athenians celebrated Zeus and Hera's marriage toward the end of the winter in the Theogamia festival, from which rite we get the term hieros gamos, but all we learn of this ritual is that participants feasted sumptuously.
The two married also in the festivals of Plataea, the Little and Great Daedalas. Every few years at the former, ritualists dressed the images of Hera and Zeus as bride and groom and drew them down to the river bank, then returned them to place. Every 60 years, at the Great Daedala, the Plataeans hauled all 14 accumulated images, again in bridal dress, first to the river and then to the top of Mount Cithareon, where they were burned along with their wooden altar: a fiery love-death for wooden deity-dolls.
Other images of sacred marriage are scattered through Greek rites and tales. The Delphian sibyl -- a freelance prophetess not to be confused with the Pythia at Delphi -- called herself the bride of Apollo. Records hint at vestiges of such a relationship between the Pythia and Apollo as well. In Patara in Lycia, the priestess was said to make love to Apollo; shut up in the temple at night, she was filled by the god with prophecy. Aeschylus made his Cassandra a prophetess who lost the ability to convince men of her predictions when she refused to have sex with the god.
In Dorian Crete, Burkert records a type of homosexual sacred marriage in boys' initiation. A group of men's clubs, which met for meals in the men's hall (andreion), summoned each year the current crop of pubescent boys to sweep, clean and perform menial services, between times sitting on the floor clad in simple robes. From this chorus of boys, each year a man would carry off a beautiful lad, as Zeus carried off Ganymede. For the chosen boy, this was considered an honor. The man warned the boy's family in advance, and relatives arranged a mock pursuit that ended in the andreion. These proceedings scandalized -- and titil-lated -- other Greeks.
The cult of Demeter
By far the most obvious allusions to, and perhaps full enactments of, sacred marriage in Greece occur in the cults and mysteries of Demeter and Dionysos, which prove remarkably interlinked. Indeed, the two could be called one great ritual corpus, peaking at Eleusis and in the traveling Bacchic mysteries of wine and ecstasy. Demeter and, more often, Persephone appear frequently in Dionysian ritual, and likewise Dionysos shows up in the rites of the blonde grain-goddess and her maiden daughter.
Demeter shared with Dionysos the festival of Haloa, held in secret in Eleusis on a midwinter night. Only women could attend. The name makes it the festival of the threshing floor, an odd feast for mid-winter; Harrison thinks the rite was transferred to a more Dionysian time when the wine-god became its co-sponsor. To the Haloa, the women brought imitation phalli and vulvae, at it traded indecent talk and ate cakes in the shape of genitals. Certain foods were banned: pomegranates, apples, domestic fowl, eggs, red sea-mullet, black-tail, crayfish, shark. Harrison says that the pomegranate was taboo as dead men's food, and the Orphics gave eggs to the dead. The other foods smell of love: apples a traditional love-fruit, fish from Aphrodite's ocean. All the ritual's symbols point to sex and fertility, if only in mimicry. Michael Jameson in "The Asexuality of Dionysos," in Masks of Dionysos, sees again the linkage of human sexual vigor and fertility to that of agriculture.
In another all-female festival, the three-day Thesmophoria in October, the women of Athens buried pigs in the earth for the lost Kore's sake, a ritual said to have been instituted by the mourning Demeter. Other Thesmophoriae were held elsewhere. The pigs represented the swine herded by Eubouleus, swallowed by the chasm at the same time as the Maiden; "the death marriage is recapitulated in the sacrifice." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 243) The women in the rite also imitated Kore, who took the path to Hades for first time: entering the earth-cleft Kore did, with pigs as Kore did, eating pomegranate seeds as she did. The seeds that fell to the ground were left for the dead. To the Athenians the dead were the people of Demeter; burial in itself may have had implications of a mystic marriage, symbolism that appears elsewhere for Dionysos.
Accompanying the pigs of the current Thesmophoria, the women gave the earth models of phalli and snakes and real pine boughs with cones; the lot together form symbolic copulation, a type of sacred marriage, as Eva Keuls notes in The Reign of the Phallus. "Pigs" was Greek slang for female genitals. In addition to the group's sacrificing this year's pigs, three specially anointed women, who refrained from sex three days beforehand, baled up remains of the pigs of years past. This compost Athenian landholders mixed with next year's grain seeds. "The manipulation of the decomposed remains of piglets to achieve a good harvest is the clearest example in Greek religion of agrarian magic," Burkert writes.
So much for the dark, all-female rites of Demeter, marked by secrecy, special attention to pomegranates and the manipulation of fake genitals. Though equally secret, the mysteries of Eleusis admitted both sexes, and the genitals involved may have been real.
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