Before the End

On October 29th I did some enkoimesis work with Spider and Hermes to see if I could gain any insight on the whole Bacchic Orphic strangeness. My first dream, which lasted until around 3:00am, was kind of a mash-up of Rent and the legend of Prosymnos. If I had any dreams after that (significant or otherwise) I do not recall them. However, as I was returning to consciousness but not fully there yet, I heard a voice say, “Baptism.”

Just that one word, no context or clarification. And it left me puzzling most of that morning.

Prosymnos made a lot of sense and actually helped me unravel some really important things about the tradition – but baptism? Really?

There was John the Forerunner, of course, and the initiates at Eleusis taking to the sea, and the lamb sunk in the lake for Prosymnos, and Orpheus’ head floating down river to Lesbos, and the baptai of the Thracian goddess, and Midas bathing in the Paktolos at Dionysos’ insistence to wash off the golden touch, and Ino and Melikertes, and baby Achilles being dipped in the waters of Lethe, and Lethe and Mnemosyne themselves, and the whole ‘kid fallen into milk’ line in the lamellae and …

… none of these felt right.

Close.

But I could feel that there was something about it I just wasn’t getting. And I had to. This had to be something real, something clearly from them – or I couldn’t pursue it, because this isn’t just an intellectual game, six degrees of Eubuleus or something.

So I filed the information away, trusting that if it had come from them it would eventually make sense.

And then a couple days ago, in a collection of essays on religion in ancient Magna Graecia, I came across the following.

I know it’s long but I think you’re going to want to read this one all the way through.

Bonnie MacLachlan, Women and Nymphs at the Grotta Caruso
On the pinakes, the frequent occurrence of prenuptial accoutrements among the motifs seems to suggest that these were proteleia, gifts offered to Persephone by young Locrian brides at the time of their marriage. This would be consistent with a common reading of the Persephone narrative that sees the myth as foundational for a young woman’s initiation, her transformation from maiden, korē, to bride, nymphē. But if young Locrian women on the threshold of marriage connected themselves ritually to the theogamy of Persephone, it cannot be overlooked that their expectations were thereby anchored in the underworld, and eschatological significance cannot be detached from the pinakes. Funeral and nuptial imagery and narratives overlap naturally with Persephone, but were broadly operative in the Greek imagination: marriage and funeral rituals possessed many of the same features. In Locri this was true not only at the Mannella Persephoneion, but also at a Cave of the Nymphs. Rituals here, which began at the end of the Classical period, overlapped with those being carried out at the earlier site, but flourished during the Hellenistic period.

Like many other caves, the Grotta Caruso possessed a spring. Supplying fountains and wells, springs were essential for life in the ancient world and were regarded as sacred. Their numinous character was further enhanced by the fact that this was pure water emerging from the underworld, and nymphs were the divinities who could be found in these places where pure cool water emerged from below the earth. Shepherds, passersby, and women honored the nymphs as they filled their water vessels, attested by this epigram of Leonidas from Tarentum, a Spartan colony not far from Locri:

Πέτρης ἐκ δισσῆς ψυχρὸν κατεπάλμενον ὕδωρ,
χαίροις, καὶ Νυμφέων ποιμενικὰ ξόανα,
πίστραι τε κρηνέων, καὶ ἐν ὕδασι κόσμια ταῦτα
ὑμέων, ὦ κοῦραι, μυρία τεγγόμενα,
χαίρετ’ · Ἀριστοκλέης δ’ ὅδ’ ὁδοιπόρος, ᾧπερ ἀπῶσα
δίψαν βαψάμενος τοῦτο δίδωμι γέρας.

Greetings, chilly stream that leaps down from the cleft rock
And you wooden images of the Nymphs carved by a shepherd
And you drinking troughs from the springs,
and in the water these little ornaments of yours,
maidens, thousands of them, drenched.
Hail. I, Aristocles, this sojourner, give you this present
With which I quenched my thirst, dipping it in your waters. (AP 9.326)

Aristocles dedicated his cup, but others had left korai, dolls, in the waters of the spring for the korai-nymphs. In similar fashion, Locrian women came to the Grotta Caruso and deposited korai at the spring for the nymphs. Grotta gives us a unique opportunity to view the centrality of women in Locri, and reveals their participation in areas we routinely associate with men, such as the theater or rituals celebrating a divinized hero.

Extrapolating from a poem of Callimachus, we might suppose that the women went down and sat on the submerged rock and, as part of a ritual activity, poured over them some of the water collected in the basin. Water was used in Greek ritual primarily for purposes of purification, sometimes for appeasing a divinity or shedding some pollution. For nuptial ceremonies in the Greek world, the lustral bath had another purpose: it conferred upon the bride and groom the fecundating powers of water. The idea was developed by Porphyry in his commentary on the Odyssean Cave of the Nymphs, in which the cave is symbolic of the generative potency of the cosmos. No text has survived at the Locrian cave, however, that could clarify for us which of the above functions was assigned to its waters.

Throughout Magna Graecia, these figures have been found in the graves of young women. Often their arms have been deliberately cut off, or their legs, sometimes at the knees, sometimes at the calves. Some have holes in the truncated limbs, suggesting that arms and legs could be added, like dolls with articulated limbs that could move, and separate terracotta limbs have been collected among the finds at the Grotta. The women each wear on their heads a polos, the mark of a goddess, and some can fit comfortably on the terracotta thrones that were found in the vicinity. Were these votives goddess-dolls? If so, who was the goddess? Once again, we are without inscriptions.

In the year 316 CE, a period of high activity for the rituals at the Grotta Caruso, Menander staged his Dyscolos in Athens and won first prize. The action takes place at a Cave of the Nymphs. Pan emerges from the cave to present the prologue to the play (vv. 1–49), explaining that there is a young maiden who regularly honors the Nymphs and himself, garlanding their statues when she comes to the cave’s spring to fetch water. Pan reflects that he ought to reciprocate her gifts by seeing that she is partnered with a noble young man who had fallen in love with her as he watched her making her dedications. As he predicts, the korē becomes a gynē, and the celebration of the wedding takes place at the cave.

Pan is not the only god whose presence was felt by the women at the Grotta Caruso. On the side of the terracotta plaque with the nymphs and Pan are depicted thyrsoi, implements belonging to the maenadic cult of Dionysus. Models of maenads were also found in the Grotta, together with Sileni, masks and figurines of comic actors, and the theatrical as well as the ecstatic dimension of Dionysus clearly figured in the experience at the Cave. For women to leave behind theatrical votives suggests strongly that their activities were connected with performances that took place in the theater built in the center of the city.

The chthonic aspects of Dionysus were intertwined with the ecstatic and theatrical in Magna Graecia, making it not surprising that this Locrian ritual combined theatrical elements with a katabasis. In Sicilian Lipari, a terracotta portrait of Menander was found in a tomb. On Campanian craters of the fourth century, theatrical and nuptial iconography was combined with iconography drawn from the thiasos of Dionysus, and these were used as funeral urns. The otherworldly potency of Dionysus is of course at the center of the god’s occurrence in funerary contexts. The god’s association with mystery Orphic cults in the Locrian region was made dramatically apparent with the discovery in 1969, in a woman’s grave at Hipponion (a colony of Locri), of an Orphic gold leaf tablet. It dates from about 400, and it reminds the deceased that, of the two paths available in the underworld, one is reserved for mystai and bakkhoi. Could the rituals at the Grotta Caruso have belonged to a mystery cult, and the women emerged from the water as mystai?

There were other chthonic elements connected with the ritual at the Grotta Caruso. On some terracotta plaques, three nymphs are shown with a man-faced bull and an altar. Beneath the man-bull is inscribed the name Euthymos. Euthymos was a local hero of Locri (Strabo 6.1.5). An athletic hero before a cult hero, he was three times victorious at Olympia as a boxer, and was celebrated by Callimachus (fr. 84–85 Pfeiffer). Two statues were erected in his honor at Olympia (the inscription on one survives), and, as the story goes, both statues were struck by lightning on the same day, after which Delphi prescribed the installation of a hero cult.

There are more underworld associations with Euthymos. A legend from the nearby city of Temesa maintained that the Temesians had committed an offense by killing Polites, one of the companions returning home with Odysseus. When Polites became a menacing daimōn after death, Delphi ordered them to propitiate the angry hero with an annual sacrifice of the most beautiful of the Temesian parthenoi to Polites. Locrian Euthymos defeated this daimōn, and was rewarded by receiving the parthenos as a bride.

Euthymos was reported to have lived a long life but met a death that was as miraculous as it was appropriate, for someone who would figure prominently in the water rituals at the Grotta Caruso. He leapt into a local river and disappeared (Pausanias 6.6.4–10). If the rituals at the Grotta were conducted by Locrian parthenoi, the chthonic and erotic connotations of the nymphs with Euthymos would reinforce the strongest features of the theogamy of Persephone.

There are many questions yet to be explored about the Locrian rituals at the Grotta. One of the pieces of the puzzle that requires more explanation is the inclusion of theatrical elements among the finds. The consideration that this is an aspect of Dionysus makes it understandable, but does not explain it. Artifacts left in the niches of the Cave with maenadic, nuptial, and chthonic motifs can be understood as symbolic of several rites of passage, of the teletai of Dionysiac mysteries, of marriage, or of an encounter with the underworld powers, permitting the women to emerge as mystai. But what of the theater? Victor Turner, in The Ritual Process, worked on the elements common to rites of passage, where participants experience a transformation from one biological and social circumstance to another. In this place of danger and vulnerability was an opportunity for “disordered play.” The underworld, experienced in the Persephoneion or in the Grotta Caruso, furnished the stage for this disordered play. Persephone and Aphrodite, the Nymphs, Pan, Euthymos, Dionysus, maenads, and Sileni, along with winged daimones, are the principal actors.