Sacred marriage can also be used as a tool of initiation. Evidence shows it may have been so used in the mystery religions of the classical world, as well as in state cults. In honor of Dionysos's grape harvest and the traditional autumn mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis in Greece -- rites whose deities may have been interlinked in cult -- I'll address in the following sacred marriage as a mystery initiation.
The mysteries of Eleusis
The mysteries at Eleusis celebrated the Two Goddesses, never named in the site's artifacts but widely acknowledged as grain-mother Demeter and her daughter, Kore, the Maiden, later Persephone, the bride of Hades. Ritualists performed these mysteries for perhaps 2000 years, beginning around 1500 B. C. and ending in the fifth century A. D. The central rites of Eleusis were held secret then and ever since, the silence enforced with laws that doomed to death anyone who revealed the sacred knowledge.
Our direct knowledge of the Eleusinian Mysteries thus comes from a mere handful of quotes, mostly from Christian sources bent on defamation; only Mesomedes, who sought to discuss Isis's rituals in terms of those of the Two Goddesses', could be considered friendly to Eleusis. Many of these ancient quotes seem to point to an act of sacred marriage, interleaved with other, more obscure acts. Mesomedes lists as elements of the mysteries the "marriage underground," "the birth of plants," "the desires of Aphrodite, the birth of the little child, the perfect, unspeakable fire" (Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 94). Another Christian commentator, Asterius, wrote "' Is there not there the descent into darkness and the holy congress of the hierophant and the priestess, of him alone and her alone?... Are not the torches extinguished and does not the vast and countless assemblage believe that in what is done by the two in the darkness is their salvation? '" (Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 550, 563) The late-Victorian Harrison also gives us the commentary of Psellus, not quoting him fully as apparently he's too obscene: "As in the rite of initiation love affairs are to take place, Aphrodite of the Sea is represented as uprising. Next there is the wedding rite for Kore. The initiated sing as an accompaniment.... Then also they enact the birth-pains of Deo (Demeter)." (p. 569)
The Christian Hippolytus quotes an unnamed Nassarene Gnostic 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." (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 91.) The mysteries' Hierophant officiated at night "under the great fire," according to the Nassarene: "celebrating the great and ineffable secrets, he proclaims in a loud voice, 'The Mistress has given birth to a holy boy, Brimo has given birth to Brimos! that is, the Strong One to the Strong One. '" (Karl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, p. 92) A synthema, or password, of Eleusis, passed on by Bishop Clement of Alexandria, runs: "I fasted, I drank the kykeon (barley drink), I took out the kiste (covered basket), I worked and laid back into kalanthos (tall basket), and from there into the kiste." (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 94)
Though several of these quotes seem to indicate a hieros gamos, modern commentators agree we cannot know for sure what happened. Even the Christian writers never fully broke the secrecy of the sacred rites; they seem to have thrown out what scraps they could find to shock people, always aware that any initiate could call them on lies. With the Christians, we should consider the source. For example, when the Nassarene offered that the Hierophant "is made a eunuch by means of hemlock and has renounced all carnal generation" (Harrison, p. 549), he may have done so merely to make the mysteries sound disgusting. Commentators divide on whether this information is true; in The Golden Bough Sir George Frazer accepts it, but Kerényi doubts it, though he notes that the Hierophant was said in late antiquity to sing in a characteristically high voice.
Many other points are open to debate. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves reads in the synthema that a buskin was contained in the small basket, into which a phallus was placed, symbolizing coition. Kerényi agrees the kiste may have held one or more phalli, thus making particularly appropriate the fact that on the way to Eleusis the basket-carrier halted at a fig tree, figs symbolizing female genitalia. Burkert argues instead that the working with the kiste was to pound grain in a mortar.
Most modern writers do agree, however, that some kind of sacred marriage was performed at the Greater Mysteries, perhaps in dumb-show by the Hierophant and chief priestess of Demeter, perhaps in symbolic form. It's doubtful it was portrayed as a large drama, as sacred marriage was in Sumer in the second millenium B. C.; as Kerényi points out, "the shrine itself contained nothing resembling a stage, nor was there a second building resembling a theater." (Eleusis, p. 27) If there was dramatization, it was simple and used no extraordinary machines; along with the huge fire, perhaps initiates saw a set of tableaux. All existing information points to the idea that the mysteries' consummation and central act was the marriage of the Mother and the birth of her Son -- Brimo, whom Harrison names the Thessalian Kore, giving birth to Brimos.
From the initiates' point of view, the form of the sacred marriage was unimportant. The mystery, the initiation, the change of state was in their appreciation of the apotheosis of Kore, become Persephone, and of the sacred birth. Vase paintings speak of this in symbolic form, often sexually. On one, "a young god mounts the throne of love, upon which sits a divine maiden who awaits encouragement from Aphrodite on the other side. Here again Aphrodite's presence announces the recurring divine marriage and a new beginning of the holy story which leads each year to the Mystery rite." (Eleusis, p. 165) Kore is often represented half-naked, as Burkert notes; there were sexual overtones to "seeing Kore." Mythology of the complex surrounding the rites speaks not of Brimos but of Plutos, Wealth, Demeter's son by Iasion, wealth in the form of stored grain -- a return of the theme of sacred marriage as prompting the land to bear.
The mysteries didn't work for everyone. A classical initiate wrote: "' The sacred actions, which were performed in the Mystery temple before the eyes of the initiate, were crude and meaningless in the extreme, and all those who had received the new kind of education regarded them as nothing but priestly deception and childish nonsense. '" (ibid, p. 105) But as many initiates' writings attested, for those who allowed the symbols to be meaningful the mysteries gave a joyful life and a hopeful path into death.
Dionysos, Demeter and Kore
Before would-be initiates could approach the September's Greater Mysteries in Eleusis, they had to attend February's Lesser Mysteries in Agrai. These were secret as well, but writers let slip they mirrored the travails of twice-born Dionysos. Other tantalizing hints link Dionysos to the mysteries of Eleusis: Agrai's Hierophant dressed as Dionysos, as did Eleusis's priest. Harrison calls the Lesser Mysteries those of Dionysos and Kore.
Why Dionysos? The main current of myth doesn't link him to the Two Goddesses -- when Demeter seeks Kore, she pointedly refuses wine. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, she says for her to drink wine would be contrary to themis, the order of nature. But, as Kerényi writes, "We readily understand her words once we know the identity of the ravisher who had snatched her daughter off." (ibid, p. 40)
Kore is abducted on the Plain of Nysa -- a plain with associations both to Hades and to Dionysos. Most Greeks considered Dionysos to have been born and reared on the mountain nearby, Kerényi writes; even those who thought him born on the island of Crete agreed the Nysan Nymphs reared him. In addition to Mount Nysa, however, a city in Asia Minor existed called Nysa, near which was celebrated the divine marriage of Plouton and Kore on "the Meadow." The poet of the Homeric Hymn has a meadow "gape" to receive Kore -- the same word that formed an epithet of Dionysos, the "Gaping One."
Hades and Dionysos shared a cult place, shared terminology. As Herakleitos of Ephesus wrote, Hades was Dionysos.
Other factors support this co-identity. Iakchos, whose name marchers to Eleusis called, wore Dionysian huntsman's boots and a Dionysian name. Vase paintings draw the myths together: one shows Demeter, Kore and a hunting-booted youth on one side, on the other Dionysos with Ariadne and Aphrodite hovering above, emphasizing their connection. The Great Mysteries were performed at the wine harvest, and though the first rites forbade wine, the last night comprised the "pourings of plenty." An Orphic hymn says the lost Dionysos spent time with Persephone, according to Walter F. Otto in Dionysus: Myth and Cult. In a grove in Greek Pyraea, Harrison writes, women feasted Dionysos, Demeter and Kore in a place called the Bridal Chamber.
Thus, as Kore married death, she married ecstasy as well.
Dionysos's sacred marriages in Greek state religion
Dionysos was a marrying kind of god. And in many ways a good god to marry, for all his loose-living ways and propensity for getting people to dismember their relatives. Not only did he get his mother an apotheosis -- such a good boy! -- but unlike with the other Greek gods, myth does not call him a rapist; his relations were consensual in the main. His maenads chose their practice (if occasionally under threat). He made an honest woman of Ariadne -- what other deity married a mortal partner?
Dionysos figures in the clearest form of sacred marriage in Greek state cult -- that of the god to the ritual queen of Athens. This marriage occurred during the god's festival in February, the Anthesteria: feast of flowering, feast of the opening of the wine jars.
The Anthesteria, called the Older Dionysia, took place over a period of three days: Jar-opening, Wine Jugs and Pots, Pithogia, Choës and Chytroi, named for the basic implements for a meal of wine and porridge. It began at sunset with the opening of the jars of new wine, pressed the previous autumn, from vineyards around the city; ritualists honored the god with the first libations of the new wine.
The next day, Choës, combined various actions, some with ghostly and erotic overtones. The men held a drinking contest, but in silence, each at a separate table. Athenians considered Choës a day of defilement: citizens painted house doors with pitch and chewed buckthorn leaves while spectral guests, the Keres, filled the city; Burkert in Greek Religion calls these ancestral spirits. During the day, the virgin girls let the boys push them in swings, associating themselves with the tragic figure of Erigone.
In Attic myth, Erigone's father Ikarios was the first man Dionysos showed how to make wine. Ikarios brought the drink to his fellow villagers; convinced he was poisoning them, they killed him. His distraught daughter sought his body everywhere, finally finding it thrown down a well. In grief, she hanged herself.
But not before marrying Dionysos. The Roman poet Ovid has her become the god's wife by eating a grape, but in Aristotle's time a song of Erigone was penned by a famous erotic poet, as Kerényi notes in Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Just such a song the girls sang as they swung, in imitation of Erigone, who swung herself up to the grapes, in a rite that has roots as far back as ancient Crete and Sumer, judging by unearthed statuettes of swinging girls. Erigone's swinging combined death and love. The act of swinging in itself includes an erotic element, feelings pointing to sexual climax.
The Athenian girls' swinging to memorialize the sacred love-death formed a prelude for another sacred marriage, that of the Athenian queen.
Most of what we know of this rite comes from an orator's speech protesting the current queen, the basilinna. He argues that the role of the queen, traditionally a citizen and virgin at marriage, should not have been filled by an outlander of dubious reputation:
"This woman offered the unspeakable sacrifices for the city; she saw what as a non-Athenian she ought not to have seen. A woman such as this entered the room that no other of all the many Athenians enters save only the wife of the king. She administered the oath to the Venerable Ones who attend at the sacred acts, she was given to Dionysos as wife, she conducted for the city the ancestral practices towards the gods, many sacred, secret practices." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p 239.)
The union of queen and god took place just after sunset at the end of Choës in the Boukolion, a small house in the Agora, "the bull's stable," which was the ancient official residence of the king. In this cattle-house, Harrison saw a reflection of a bygone sacred marriage to a bull, reminiscent of Minoan Crete. In vase paintings of the rite, one shows the queen in procession escorted by satyrs, another Choës revelers standing with torches around Dionysos and Ariadne's couch. Other vases likewise portray these two, emphasizing a particular symbolism: As when Theseus gave his wife Ariadne to the god, as when in Aitolia in western Greece the first winemaker gave his wife to the god, so did the king in Athens.
What happened in the Athenian sacred marriage? Again, commentators differ. Some theorize the king appeared in the mask of the god; others imagine the queen mating with an cult statue from archaic times. Kerényi underlines the physical aspect of the connection: "Aristotle... spoke of the marriage in the Boukoleion in well-balanced words that were understood in his time... symmeixis and gamos. The second word stands for bodily union, a consummatio matrimonii, between the god and the queen." (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 309 - 310)
Kerényi draws parallels between this sacred marriage and two other enactments in religion: a ritual held every two years near Delphi called the Awakening of the Liknites and the myth of Isis reassembling and reanimating Osiris. The former was held by the Thyiades, female followers of Dionysus, on Mount Parnassos on the very day that the basilinna consummated her sacred marriage. The term "Liknites" indicates the god's being carried in a liknon, a winnow-shaped basket, used to carry babies both mortal and divine. In the three months leading up to the ritual, the Thyiades roamed icy Parnassos calling the god in terms in which an aroused lover might call her beloved. No source revealed what happened in the culminating Awakening, probably held in the Korykian Cave by torch-light, but Kerényi writes:
He who lay in the liknon... was treated by the women as an awakening child.... Here again, however, as in all the original mysteries of antiquity the "what" was a "holy open secret." Long before there were representations of the winnow with the phallus, the phallus was placed in the winnow. As the indestructible god's severed member it had lain in the winnow ever since the unrevealed symbolic actions by which the god was revived... became liknon ceremonies. (ibid, p. 225)
The Thyiades called for three months for their god to come, and finally the phallus awakened. As a classical quote says, "' the phallus was uprighted for Dionysos in accordance with a mystery. '" (ibid, p. 274.) The Phrygians too held an Awakening feast for Dionysos in the spring, marked by orgiastic rites.
Kerényi identifies this erotic Awakening with the end of Isis's search for Osiris. In the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, the goddess seeks the parts of her brother/husband god's dismembered body around the world; in just the same way, Diodoros has Demeter collect the parts of her son Dionysos. In a similar Orphic version, Athena preserves her brother Dionysos's heart in a basket -- an organ Orphic texts indicate stands for the god's phallus. Kerényi sees this phallus as made of fig-wood, just like an object that Dionysos makes for ritual in Orphic myth, just like the object Kerényi says was found in the liknon. It's likely that at the end of their journeys, the Thyiades replaced the god's phallus, as Isis did for her husband. Having done so, the goddess mounted Osiris and revived him with divine intercourse. Just so may have the Thyiades and the basilinna mounted and revived their god.
The phallus has been a symbol for Dionysos from time immemorial. In Attica's rural Dionysia, bearers carried giant phalli, just as they did in during Athens's Great Dionysia. The huge phalli in procession echoed Dionysos's epithet Orthos, Erect; Dionysos was often identified with the erection-god Priapos. From other evidence, Kerényi deduces that the Athenians kept a cult-statue of Dionysos's erect phallus in the precinct of the Horai, the goddesses of the hours. Similarly, Kerényi considers that the Thebans kept an idol of Dionysos Kadmos (Dionysos Hermes) -- that is, a phallic idol -- in a building from the Mycenean Age. Later Roman reliefs of Dionysian rites showed the uncovering of a phallus. In a symbol redoubling phallus on phallus, the Orphics depicted a snake entwining the phallus-holding liknon. The mysteries of Sabazius (a double for Dionysos) em ployed related sexual symbolism: ceremonialists slid a metallic snake beneath the initiates' clothes -- the so-called "God through the lap," a form of sexual union with the god.
When the queen of Athens uprighted the god's phallus and made love to him, the women of the city were with her in spirit. Before the consummation, the queen helped the 14 Venerable Ones, the Gerairai, representing the city's women, invoke the god at 14 altars with the help of the contents of 14 sacred, secret baskets. Paintings on ceremonial oil-pitchers found in tombs likewise show a woman mounting a chariot drawn by four horses, sometimes with a woman charioteer, the god Dionysos standing beside the chariot; Kerényi sees this "otherwise incomprehensible," "absurd and actually impossible situation" as representing Erigone's ascension to goddesshood, supported by the women of Athens, repeated in the queen's mating with the god. (ibid, pp. 160 - 161)
But while the queen made it with Dionysos, and the king led the men in their drinking contest, what did the wives of Athens do? Vase paintings indicate this might have been their night of fun: a night of ritual love-making, perhaps with strangers, perhaps with their own men.
Three weeks before the Anthesteria, Athens held the hieros gamos of Zeus and Hera at the Theogamia, in the same month as the Lenaia, in which wine-blessing rites occurred while the year's coldest weather cleared the vintage. Gamelion was the marriage-month; after the gods married, so could the people.
A cold month for marriages, as Kerényi points out. But it makes sense if you consider why you might require a human marriage before a sacred one. In some way unclear in surviving literature, young wives could take part in the Anthesteria in a different way than virgins. At the Feast of Flowers, Dionysos may have appeared as the women's higher husband, for whom earthly husbands prepared them.
Kerényi notes that the men did not necessarily return to their wives at the drinking contest's end; "Aristophanes... speaks of hetairai and dancing girls who joined the men in their drinking." (ibid, p. 312.) He sees the wives as getting a Dionysian visit from a stranger, calling as evidence a vase painted with a young woman following a silenus, answering the call of the god. Richard Seaford in "Dionysos as Destroyer of the Household" (in Masks of Dionysos, edited by Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone) points out that in the sacred marriage a publicly escorted stranger invaded the royal household to have sex with the queen. A parallel enactment in the streets would likewise involve strangers. Perhaps the sacred wine-contest invoked the men with the god, to go forth and spread the Dionysian flame.
In contrast, Eva Keuls in The Reign of the Phallus makes an interesting case that the sacred marriage of Dionysos served, in Attica at least, to promote domestic, conjugal sexuality. She notes a vase painting in which the basilinna awaits the god's arrival at a semi-opened door, a recurrent symbol for conjugal sex. Likewise, she describes a jug that shows a man and woman at home gently embracing, with ivy and grapevines surrounding them. On another vase, Ariadne pours wine for Dionysos in a domestic scene; on the obverse a peaceable maenad and a nonphallic satyr converse, whom Keuls sees as man and wife. Perhaps ritual play-acting on the Anthesteria spiced up Attic couples' relationships. In this version, the men came home to their own wives, but as satyrs to maenads. Vase paintings usually show maenads one-upping satyrs. Perhaps, this night, the women were in control.
Whether with husbands or strangers, Athenian wives might have done as others did worldwide to celebrate sacred marriages: paired up as the Goddess and God do. Specifically, they may have done as did the peoples of the Near East, spreading the sacred marriage into the populace in a rite in which the average housewife could become the goddess, as Athalya Brenner discusses in her article "The Hebrew God and His Female Complements" in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, edited by Carolyne Larrington. Such occasions seem to have been pretty fun, involving sexy dress-up and a party atmosphere. Perhaps the Athenians, who had taken on the Near Eastern rites of Adonis, took on this sacred marriage as well.
After the European Maypole dance, sacred orgies in the fields. After divine marriage in Sumer, sacred orgies in the streets. After the wine god's marriage in Athens -- a knock at the door, a whisper, a man in Dionysian dress: someone known? someone new? Dionysos's sacred marriages
in his wandering cult "The cult of Dionysos had a pronounced dual aspect," Keuls writes; "it provided rituals of mad hysteria in which sexual hostilities and pent-up frustration were released, and, at the same time, it promoted a resolution of antagonism in harmonious family life." (p. 373) The marriage of the basilinna to the god, the Athenian women participating in the spirit or the flesh, perhaps represented the latter. For the former, we have maenadism and the free-form religion of the god.
Most examples of Greek religion we've seen so far were state cults, with rituals in set places run by predetermined people. Often the priests and priestesses came of specific ancient families of the city, as at Eleusis and Delphi. However, another strain of Greek religion existed, in which wandering priests and priestesses formed private religious groups and performed individual initiations. Many of the Dionysos cults in which women went a-maenading were of this latter type.
Usually, in each locality, maenad celebrations happened at a set time -- at the local Lenaia or Agrionia. Women formed a religious group, a thiasos, to celebrate the rites of the god. Some of these were semi-official, as with the Thyiades in Delphi. But, as Burkert writes in Greek Religion:
For the wives of Greece, trapped in a form of purdah, these Dionysian mysteries offered a chance to step out and live a little. Though men became involved, sometimes to lead the throngs of Dionysos or perhaps to stand in for the god, even in later times women were the dominant sex.Alongside public Dionysiac festivals there emerge private Dionysos mysteries. These are esoteric, they take place at night; access is through an individual initiation, telete. As a symbolic Beyond, closed and mysterious, the Bacchic grotto or cave appears. The role of the sexes becomes less important; there are male as well as female mystai. In contrast to the mysteries of Demeter and the Great Gods, these mysteries are no longer bound to a fixed sanctuary with priesthoods linked in resident families; they make there appearance wherever adherents can be found. (p. 291)
Dionysos was known as a god of women, to the extent of being sneered at as womanish. His whole existence, Otto writes, was illuminated and crowned with the love of women. The poet Anacreon addresses him: "O Lord, whose playfellows are the mighty Eros, and the dark-eyed nymphs and violet Aphrodite!" (Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, p. 176) Myth calls the goddess of love his consort, by him the mother of the Charites. Many of his nymphs become his mistresses. Michael Jameson in "The Asexuality of Dionysos," in Masks of Dionysos, sees in the center of the violent myths involving tearing up animals and eating raw flesh a figure soft, gentle and quiet, a mediating figure important for women. The women of Elis in traditional songs called him with his daughters the Charites to make sure he came gently; on the flip side, an Argive myth has women turn into cows in heat for Dionysos.
For the mystically inclined, maenadism gave women a chance to touch the divine. "The bacchante pays no attention to the silenus who grabs at her in his lust," Otto quotes Plutarch; "the image of Dionysos, whom she loves, stands alive before her soul, and she sees him even though he is far away from her; for the glances of the bacchante sweep up high into the aether and yet are filled with the spirit of love." (ibid, p. 177) Her state of frenzy is blessed. She goes beyond the intoxication of wine, the characteristic maenad dance with thrown-back head of vase paintings, to the pure madness and ecstasy of a spirit wedding the god.
However, as Plato writes, "Many are the narthex-bearers, but few are the bakchoi" (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 34) -- a narthex being a symbolic cane of Dionysos, bakchoi mystics of the cult. For non-mystic women, a Dionysiac rite might just be a rare night of dancing, drinking and ritual sex.
"It is possible that old forms of puberty initiation were still preserved in sexual initiation" as part of Dionysiac rituals, Burkert writes in Greek Religion, p. 292. As with women at the Anthesteria, "not virgins, but only women could be bakchoi, and married couples could be initiated together." Kerényi sees a whole range of gradations between a vision-ary higher connection and a nice evening fuck. Doubtlessly rites varied from group to group, but almost certainly they provided the god's traditional stimulants, wine and sexual excitement. "Private Dionysos celebrations may be orgies in the disreputable sense of the word," Burkert sniffs in Greek Religion, p. 167.
Thornton writes it was common for girls to get pregnant at festivals; the Macedonian king Alexander's mother was said to have conceived him during a mystery ritual. In one comedy, a householder, referring to his daughter's stealing out for Dionysian rites, addresses her: "' Happy he who shall be your possessor and embrace you so firmly at dawn that you fart like a weasel'" (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 338). Vase paintings show men being abducted by women with Dionysian wands, sileni mounting willing maenads, even a woman sporting a strap-on to dance for the god. At least one commentator believes sexual orgasm, "lesbian or heterosexual," to have been characteristic of most bacchantes. "Only the most accomplished women achieved a trance state without it." (Jameson, "The Asexuality of Dionysos," Masks of Dionysos, p. 61)
Without going that far, it seems clear that, in the Dionysian milieu, women frequently had sex with the god. Was this sacred marriage? In myth and literature, the leader of the Bacchic rout is Dionysos himself. Quite possibly the leading man or men were invoked with the god; through them, bacchantes made love to Dionysos.
Small wonder, then, that in myth the daughters of Minyas could not reconcile worship of Dionysos with their marriages. Maenadism seems to have subverted the convention of marriage, liberated women if only for a night. Hera, the goddess of marriage, was well-known to oppose Dionysos; she would not have ivy in her temples, and allegedly her priestesses could not talk to his. It was she who sent the Titans to murder Dionysos and who sent him mad. Keuls notes that the period of greatest maenad activity in Athens came at the same time as the greatest sexual polarity, the fifth century B. C.
But on Samos Hera accepted vine and ivy leaves as votive gifts, and on Lesbos the goddess shared a sanctuary with Dionysos. The maenadic rites provided a necessary outlet for the pent-up anger of Greek, particularly Athenian, wives. The maenads' brief flirtation with freedom ended by upholding the form of marriage and of society as a whole.
Sacred marriages to Dionysos as death
The mysteries of Dionysos, just as did the mysteries at Eleusis, had another rationale: to prepare their initiates for death. Especially in later centuries and for women, Dionysian vase paintings and sarcophagus reliefs portray death (that ultimate initiation) as a sacred marriage to the god.
Many paintings and reliefs depict the divine marriage of Dionysos and Ariadne, coupled with imagery linked to death. It's worth recalling that in some myths of Ariadne her marriage resulted in death, as Iasion's marriage to Demeter did in his death by thunderbolt. The sacred marriage of the basilinna, so often connected to Ariadne's, stands between two days of dismal rites, Burkert notes: one of defilement and one of sacrifices for the Chthonic Hermes. On Naxos there are two Ariadne festivals, one with joyous, orgiastic revelry, one full of mourning and lamentation. Tying Dionysos back to Eleusis, Ariadne can be read as a double of Persephone, whom Theseus attempted to abduct just as he did Ariadne. One myth said that Dionysos disappeared on the mountain in Naxos that he had earlier ascended with Ariadne. After that, Ariadne disappeared too.
Kerényi writes that vases from Roman times found in Southern Italy often show a similar departure of the youthful dead, especially women, from the city to Dionysian nuptials. On one such vase, Eros throws a woman a ball that rolls past the boundary-line of her city. On the vase's other side, another woman with a grave face holds out a mirror and a festive ribbon to the bride-to-be; the profferer's sorrow shows this is no ordinary marriage. The bride likewise hesitates; she would prefer not to go. Another woman washes her hair in the presence of two nude youths; symbolism makes it clear that she is not a hetaera but that these are Dionysian youths come to escort her, probably to an afterlife. On an amphora rare because it contains a continuous wrap-around picture, an image of a sad, draped woman is followed by a picture of Dionysos, nude and wreathed, awaiting her on a couch. Beside him, the bacchante unveils herself for her marriage to the god.
In many funerary images, the mystery of death appears as a step toward ecstatic life in a divine marriage. As Kerényi writes, a man's personal identification as Dionysos and a woman's as a bride of the god enabled the dying and their families to overcome the terrors of death.
Roman cults of Dionysos
As the vases from southern Italy show, the Romans continued the cult of Dionysos, embroidering it and changing it to suit their particular needs. Another relic from this cult is an inscription on the base of a statue erected for a Dionysian priestess, Agripinilla, by her thiasos of 500 people. This monument lists the initiates' titles, including a woman designated the phallophoros, the phallus-bearer, and a man called the heros -- possibly the one into whom the god was invoked.
Perhaps the most important information left to us about the Roman rites is the frescoes of the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii. In these frescoes, which decorate a large room adjoining a smaller one, a stately woman called by scholars a matrona or domina guides the actions shown. Her role probably resembled that of the Athenian basilinna in that she ran the ritual, but it is not she but a younger woman, perhaps a woman being initiated, who decks herself as a bride. The domina watches, and the bride in turn watches a pregnant woman, possibly a symbol of the bride's later psychic or actual pregnancy with or from the god. Ritualists also prepare a boy, possibly another initiate. In a later panel, a female devotee receives a flogging from the goddess Aidos (Shame). Over the initiate, cymbals are struck; a companion holds out a thyrsus, a pine-cone-tipped Dionysian wand, for the woman to take up when her purification is done. The well-chastened initiate next steps out in a dance, unveiling herself. The central figure of the frescoes appears next, a woman enthroned, perhaps the domina herself -- the painting is badly marred and cannot be read. Kerényi calls this figure the god's mother and the god's bride.
Kerényi interprets all these ritual actions as preparations for the scene that took place in the smaller adjoining room -- ritual marriage to the god. Within this room, the frescoes are all of Dionysian revelry, the last showing the domina herself, looking slightly surprised. What has surprised her? Did she become a bride again? Did she merely witness the marriage that fulfilled the mysteries? The frescoes are too discreet to tell.
Other images support the concept that a sacred marriage was performed, perhaps in tandem with the initiation of a young boy. Two Roman terra cotta reliefs show the phallus in the liknon being shown to female initiates, but in contrast being placed on male initiates' heads while they keep their eyes closed. A Roman sarcophagus displays a satyr beating a boy as if to punish him, and elsewhere an initiate in hunting boots, with a half-naked maenad lovingly awaiting him. On another sarcophagus, one scene shows attendants dressing a young boy as the god, another two girls serving two nude youths cakes; a separating curtain iconographically indicates sex will occur. Stucco reliefs at a house excavated near the Villa Farnesina show a young boy, head completely covered, facing a silenus, a male initiator who is fussing with a liknon he could be either opening or closing. An ointment jar shows a similar young boy carrying a covered liknon on his veiled head to a matronly female initiator.
If I follow these images properly, the Roman rituals seem to have two purposes: a sacred marriage as initiation for women, and phallus-bearing as initiation for young boys and men. All three rites probably involved beatings for purification. The females are shown the phallus; the males cover their eyes and carry the phallus. Young boys probably did not participate in sacred marriage but, after a ritual in which initiators took on the role of Titans or Kouretes, were identified with the child Dionysos. Young men perhaps took on the role of the adult god in sacred sex.
Dionysos and homosexual sacred sex
The licentious sacred sex of Dionysiac rites could lead to disastrous consequences. Burkert writes in Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 105, of Livy's testimony about the Bacchanalia of 186 B. C: "With as much explicitness as Augustan prudery would allow, he says that the initiands suffered homosexual rape." In the court case surrounding this scandal, Roman officials apparently uncovered a ring of Dionysian ritual abuse, in which women sought men of no more than 20, perhaps mainly for their own satisfaction but also for that of male friends. In the specific case, a mother proffered her young son willingly; only his beloved protested.
The bacchanalia were then ruthlessly repressed. But they reflowered, given state legitimacy again by Julius Caesar, which seems an unlikely end if the cult were only about strange sex or abuse. (There was plenty of that going on in Rome without the guise of ritual.) However, it does seem possible that another facet of Dionysian sex was a sacred marriage between the god and his male devotees.
A myth from the ancient Dionysian site of Lerna supports this idea. In this myth, Dionysos asked Prosymnos or Polymnos -- both names symbolize a sacred phallus, according to Kerényi -- to show him the way to the underworld so he could retrieve his mother. In return, Prosymnos insisted he be allowed to have anal sex with Dionysos, to which Dionysos agreed. Prosymnos, however, died before the god's return; his mourners set up for Prosymnos a phallic monument. Dionysos, still grateful on his return from death, "performed his act of subservience by sitting down on the phallus." (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 311)
So too, perhaps, did his devotees, either with real phalli or their symbolic equivalents. "One might be tempted to make some associations with the curious fact that markedly androgynous representations of Eros become quite prominent in late Apulian vase painting, toward 300 B. C," Burkert writes in Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 105. Quite possibly, too, for every young man who protested his use during the bacchanalia, others were willing to become the "bride" of the god, or to play the god sexually for male as well as female devotees. Perhaps, too, there is some connection here to the young Athenian men who ritually greeted the god dressed as women.
But this theme of feminization might instead connect to Dionysos's eunuch aspect. If a main symbol of Dionysos is the detached phallus, what happens to the god once the phallus is gone? In the mysteries of Samothrace, marked by huge bronze statues of Hermes with upraised phalli, said to be in that condition from beholding Persephone -- an allusion perhaps to yet another sacred marriage -- the god's murderers carried off his male organ from northern Greece to Italy. "For this reason," Clement says, "certain persons, not inappropriately, equate Dionysos with Attis, because he too was separated from his reproductive organ." (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 277)
Who's this Attis dude? Other Roman cults involving sacred marriage
No rites filled the Victorians with such horror as the mysteries of Cybele, the Magna Mater, exported in fulfillment of an oracle from Phrygia to Rome. Horror writer H. P. Lovecraft uses the Magna Mater to make readers shudder in several stories.
In her rites, ecstatic ritualists identified with the goddess's lover Attis, killed and emasculated by a hermaphroditic monster, an emanation of the goddess herself. Filled with frenzy, devotees took knives to themselves while on parade, throwing their severed balls into the houses of people they passed, who were then expected to nurse the ritualists back to health. Not everyone who snipped and tossed was happy the next morning -- the Roman poet Catullus wrote an ode about a friend who was quite beside himself.
These, then, are the most notorious rites of the Magna Mater. Less well-known are records of sacred marriage in her cult. From late antiquity, a synthema comes down: "' I ate from the tympanon, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the composite vessel (kernos), I slipped under the bed curtain (pastos). '" (Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 98) The term pastos indicates the curtain of a bridal bed. A hint of sacred marriage, but that mystery was never revealed.
The mysteries of Samothrace, which lasted into Roman times, deserve a mention; we already saluted Hermes, who stood at the doorway of the mystery building and greeted Persephone with upraised phallus. These mysteries were performed in a non-Greek language -- which, exactly, has never been determined -- and had special gods who could not be named, whom one commentator makes parallel to Demeter, Persephone and Hades. The mysteries' avowed reason was to protect seafarers from drowning; initiates wore a purple sash and may have taken a ritual bath to imitate Odysseus, to whom the goddess Leukothea gave a magickal veil to prevent harm from the sea. A myth associated with Samothrace was that of the lost Harmonia, who may have been sought as was the abducted Kore. Harmonia's brother "Eetioin is identified with Iasion, who mated with Demeter and was killed by the lightning of Zeus; the sacred marriage with fatal consequences recalls Ishtar and (Magna Mater) mythology and may be indicative of unspeakable sacrifice." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 284) But again, nothing is known for certain.
Throughout Roman myth and practice, as elsewhere in the ancient world, sacred marriage lies scattered and spangled. As Apuleius celebrates in The Golden Ass, Isis became one of the main mystery goddesses of ancient Rome. Burkert writes of the cult of Isis:
In Roman state cult, each Vestal Virgin, one of six virginal attendants to the goddess Vesta's sacred flame, dressed as a bride to ascend her throne. After she took her vow, the Pontifex Maximus, or chief priest, embraced her and called her his beloved, and the two symbolically became man and wife. Graves sees this as a relic of early Vestals' coupling in a sacred marriage with the Roman king's attendants; the resulting children became heirs to the throne. Frazer says the ancient King and Queen of Rome may have masqueraded as a god and goddess at their marriage. Every Roman bride customarily gave up her virginity to the fertility god Mutunus Tutunus in a form of sacred marriage; the Roman writer Lactantius said, "' Brides seat themselves on this god's genital member in order to make the first offering of their virginity to the god. '" (Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, p. 109)The very prominence of sexual abstinence in the preparation for the Isis ceremonies draws attention to a center that is veiled. A priest of Isis from Prusa, in a recently published epigram, is praised for having arranged "the bed, covered with linen, which is unspeakable for the profane": the word used for bed, demnion, does not suggest a dining couch. An "unspeakable" ritual of sacred marriage seems to emerge; its correspondences in the Isis-Osiris myth are well-known. (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 107)
Frazer, of course, based his whole monumen-tal Golden Bough on his researches about the Roman King of the Wood, who patrolled the grove of Diana at Nemi. The king had to range constantly; his fate was to be killed by the next king, a succession by sword that lasted till imperial times. He guarded in particular one tree, which Frazer said represented the goddess and which he embraced as his wife. In the legend of the birth-goddess of Nemi, Egeria, and her husband Numa, the sacred grove that the king patrolled provided the site for their union. Frazer wistfully notes that this union may have been celebrated annually in the grove where the King of Wood wedded Diana. "But no ancient writer mentions that this was done," Frazer says (p. 164), and our knowledge of the rite of tree-marriage to Diana is scanty.
The ancients preserved their mysteries well. Even if we had more comprehensive accounts, we could never really know what it was to experience the mysteries. For that, we would have had to have been there, married the goddess or the god, restored fertility to the land, asserted our rule over the world.
Glittering hints tease us. What we know of the mysteries of Demeter and Kore and of Dionysos seem to draw the two cults together into an ancient pattern: the Mother Goddess and her Lover-Son. Earlier we saw Dionysos is he who takes Kore into death. He also returns his mother Semele to life, renaming her Thyone, a name meaning maenad; myth and vase paintings connect Semele to Ariadne and Persephone. Indeed, Dionysos has Zeus make Semele a goddess. In other myths, Dionysos is Zeus; Kerényi notes that myths associated with Crete make the two identical, and Dionysos's double Hades is called a subterranean Zeus. Rhea is Zeus's mother, Dionysos's foster-mother; the Titans or Kouretes dance with sword-play about both gods. Orphic and other myths make Rhea identical with Demeter, whom Eleusinian images make identical with Persephone.
The mother is the daughter; the son is the father. Rhea mates with Zeus, both in the form of snakes. A snake coils about the secret basket of the mysteries. I think too of the tiny ivory figurine, likely of Cretan make, found in Mycenae and now in the National Museum of Athens, of two goddesses embracing, with a young god climbing onto their laps. "According to prevalent opinion, it represents Demeter, Persephone and Iacchus, i. e., the god who led the procession of initiates at the Eleusinian Mysteries" -- that is, Dionysos. (Basil Petrakos, National Museum: Sculpture, Bronzes, Vases, p. 36.) The Two Goddesses and the God, mother, daughter and son-lover, make their way from ancient Crete to the Greek mysteries. In the first century A. D., Diodoros of Sicily's Cretan informant told him the Eleusinian, the Orphic and the Samothracian mysteries all originated in Crete, where they were communicated openly to all. In the open air in Crete, or hidden in night mysteries in Greece, the Goddesses and the God strive to give initiation to all.
One theme seems clear. Dionysos himself rose from the dead, and he led his wife and mother to heaven. The awful queen of the mysteries, Persephone, his wife, also rose again. In mysteries, the ancients learned to identify with these dying and rising deities, to face death and hope to return. Myths, vase paintings and the hints left us indicate the ritual that produced that identification may well have been a sacred marriage.
Clearly the rites of sacred marriage were central to ancient paganism. From an image of sacred fertility, to an image of sacred kingship, to an image of initiation, they worked on many levels, perhaps as far back as the Neolithic on all three at once.
But we've lost the rites that took the ancients thousands of years to hone. We trip haltingly behind our forebears, attempting to reconstruct the ineffable. Perhaps, with care and time, we latter-day pagans can create as effective rites of light and darkness, of sparkling meadows beneath an unearthly sun, of caverns lit by sepulchral flame, and through these be reborn as once were people of every land. We have one of the essential pieces: divine sex.
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