My New Study on the Sacrament Theme in Mythological History

[Apologeticsislying]

A new study I am beginning. This is more or less the Preface, because I have an enormous amount of materials that have fascinated me for years on this theme I am finally coming around to writing. This is the first phase of the rough draft. Let me know if there is anything major out of whack, other than myself - Lol! More later....

Greek Dionysian Sacrament and Jesus Christ’s Eucharist: A Wyrd All-Encompassing Garment of Riddles Asking Us If We Really Know What the Sacrament Was Historically/Mythologically and its Meaning For Us Today
By Kerry A. Shirts

The story of the ancient Greek hero/god Dionysus is grim in some respects. The story of the Christian hero/god Christ is grim in some respects. The story of our short hero/lives is grim in some respects. Our wyrd, however, can be and is open to be the brightest illumination of our souls through the grimness (from one perspective, grimness not necessarily being the most important) of the gods as this paper will seek to investigate.

The Wyrd-ness:
The sacrament theme historically/mythologically is wyrd. Wyrd is “weird.” It comes from the Old English and is of Germanic origin which meant destiny.(1) However, there is more to it than that, although that theme of our destiny, the fate-ness of our lives does play into this sacramental/Eucharistic investigation.

In the famous story of Beowulf, the old King who knew death was near to him, is going after the dragon which has been attacking the village night after night and guarding the gold hoard at day. In his farewell speech he gives to his 12 companions accompanying him to defeat the dragon, he is described thus:

“His heart was sad,
Uneasy, and death-ready: wyrd immediately nigh.”(2)

In this linguistic context, wyrd gives us the sense of “haunting doom” as Joseph Campbell, the world renowned mythological scholar puts it, which reminds us of the three “weird sisters” of Shakespeare’s opening scenes in his play MacBeth. Weird (wyrd) sisters are the witches. Craig, a Shakespearean critic/analyst said the witches came from Holinshed who calls them “goddesses of destiny.” Craig says they are “emissaries of the devil.”(3) Their sacrament is murder, the shedding of innocent blood, not directly of themselves however. As the Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley described, and I thinking properly so, that they truly influence Macbeth, but do not force him by external power to do his ungodly deed.(4) “His witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are instruments of darkness; the spirits are their masters. Fancy the fates having masters!”(5) The witches are actually subject to Hecate, an old superior devil or goddess, not a fate.(6)

The Fates, the Norns:
Shakespeare’s witches are transformations from the Norns of older Germanic myths which in Old Norse are described as dwellers by Urth’s well, which waters the roots of the World Ash Tree.(7) They were three female deities who actually determined the fate of the universe and all beings within it, which even the gods could not challenge.(8) Barbara Walker mentions the Prose Edda calls them “three mysterious beings.”(9) Holland describes how the three ladies watered the tree’s three roots since various creatures damaged the tree by eating on it and from it, and that the three norns “Fate and Being and Necessity “…shaped the life of each man from his first day to his last.”(10)

Hecate The Triple Goddess:
Hecate was a very powerful, important ancient goddess, actually a part of a triad of goddesses, Hecate as the crone, Demeter, woman and Persephone, the youthful maid.(11) On Jason’s famous voyage to gain the Golden Fleece, he appealed in his struggle to “Hekate the Roarer… the dread goddess heard him, and approached to the sacrifice… her whole person was entwined with terrible serpents…”(12) She was a “goddess of the underworld and of witchcraft, who is not mentioned by Homer.”(13) The interesting triple aspect of Hecate is mentioned by Jeffrey Burton Russell who noted an interesting parallel/contrast with Hecate and Poseidon. “Hecate had three faces symbolizing her power over underworld, earth, and air. This threefold power of Hecate is comparable to the triple lordship over sea, earth, and sky exerted by Poseidon, whose trident, which symbolizes this lordship, passed into the iconography of the Devil as the modern pitchfork.”(14) She was associated with the moon, which “…as Hecate Selene the Far-Shooting Moon, mother of Dionysus.”(15) So, this appears good background to our Dinoysian research here.

Strubbe demonstrated that Hecate is the second most popular goddess invoked in many of the Greek funerary imprecations and prayers for vengeance, help, and punishment against enemies.(16) She was invoked and worshiped in Samothrace, Thessaly, Lemnos, Athens, and Aegina, being given a share in heaven, earth, and the ocean from Zeus.(17) In point of fact, “the Oracula Chaldaica in the second century A.D. appeared as revelations of Hecate.”(18) Hecate’s son, the wine god Dionysus spread throughout the Roman Empire in the days of Early Christianity, according to Stuart G. Hall.(19) Tacitus in his History mentioned how Dionysus Bacchus was confused in 70 A.D. as being worshiped in the Jerusalem Temple. This was during the reign of Trajan.(20) But I am getting ahead of myself here. Lets step further back into time. I am just here noting that it was not a mere excitement for a decade or so, but lasted for almost a millennium in time, being crucially important in so many respects, sacramental echoes arriving even to us in our day.

Herodotus’s Reckoning:
The Egyptian-Greek correspondence Herodotus mentions is interesting. The falcon god Horus was equated by the Hellenes with Apollo. And Most interesting, Osiris is equated with Dionysos.(21) Osiris was a dismembered and resurrected god as was Dionysos, which we shall see in more detail later. Herodotus also notes that Herakles, Pan, and Dionysos are the youngest of the gods, while the Egyptians say Harakles and Pan are very, very old [to the tune of dating back to at least 11,300 B.C.]. And in the modern note we are told that “here (at 2.146.1a) he [Herodotus] says the names Dionysos and Pan each refer to one being, a god…”(22) The Egyptians did not equate these two as Herodotus noted the Greek did. Herodotus mentions (2.46) that “the Mendesians count Pan to be one of the eight gods…” and they picture him as a man with goat hoofs and legs, and directly notes “Both the goat and Pan are called in the Egyptian tongue Mendes.”(23)

Dionysos and Pan:

Dionysos himself is fascinating, along with the associated rites, rituals, and wild crazy goings on in the wild country which we shall see. His numerous associations are also astonishing. This tie-in with Pan is one of the more fascinating situations. I can only do a minimum checking and cross checking, but there are fascinating insights even in a minimum view.

The Reverend Alexander Hislop (1807-1865), Minister of the Free Church of Scotland, claimed that Adam “can be proved to be the original of Pan.” And from here his linguistic case just doesn’t convince. And, more or less expected, Pan was also Capricornus, the goat. He then ties this into the goat fish tailed figure Oannes, and that this proves this must be Adam! All joking aside, that is his actual thread of thinking. So much for detective mythology.(24) There are more realistic issues to deal with, it is more bemusing than instructive to see some early attempts at figuring this out from a very Christian minister perspective with serious Anti-Roman Catholic tendencies. Such bias rarely ever helps solve much in history, let alone myth or religion.

The mystery cults are understood to go back to early Classical Greece, prominence of various local phenomena are recorded in 700-600 B.C.(25) Fritz Graf (Griechische Mythologie) says the Attic tragedies, (fifth century B.C.) even the archaic epic poetry were all grounded in mythological themes. “The tragic poet deliberately situated himself in the epic traditions of mythical narrative.”(26) The main mythical narrative concerning both Dionysos and Pan is their father being a god, while the mother is either human or unknown, in Dionysos’ case, she was Demeter, or Io, some say Dione, some Persephone, and some Lethe.(27) In the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos his mother is Semele “conceived and bore you to Zeus who delights in thunder.”(28) It was poor Semele who when pregnant with Dionysos asked Zeus to show her his real form, which he warned was not a good request, (in some accounts Hera, Zeus’s wife, tricked her into doing this because she was jealous of the child and knew it would kill the mother) but she was adamant. He did so, and his tremendous power of thunder and lightning killed her, whereupon Hermes took the unborn child, gave it to Zeus (in some accounts) and he put it in his thigh until it was time for the birth to occur.(29)
Various miracle stories arose, of course, of Dionysos and Pan, with Dionysos driving some mad (his main power) who in a frenzy tore people apart who had insulted or slighted the god, from other stories of his turning sailors on ships into dolphins after terrifying them when their ship was overgrown quickly with vines threatening their safety out at sea, since they had threatened him.(30) Pan, being a shepherd god of forests and mountains, the wild places, loved music, but could startle travelers (“panic” them) who dreaded him as noisy and rioting, and was also loved and dreaded, though he could calm all things with his sweet music.(31) His famous pan pipes wherein he charmed all with his music, according to one story, originated when the woman he was pursuing and in love with, but who didn’t want anything to do with him, the Nymph Syrinx, asked Gaia (the earth) to change her into a bed of reeds. From those reeds Pan made his pipes – pan pipes.(32) His cult was at the same time as Dionysos in Greece, around 5th century B.C., where is spread from Arcadia, Pan’s original home.(33) To give us historical perspective, this was the time of the Babylonian exile of ancient Israel after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 600 B.C.

Hans Liesegang, an eminent German philosopher, demonstrated that the very famous stone carving of the Orphic deity Phanes in the oval of the cosmic egg with the 12 signs of the zodiac surrounding him, and a serpent entwining all the way up his body is Phanes/Pan/Dionysos, since the cloven hoofs, the goats feet, (Pan was goat from the legs down, man from the waist up) give the syncretism, while Pan was understood as the Orphic cosmological deity, the logos, the all-Father, who commanded all the heavens.(34) The important point to get the sense of is that this mystery, according to mystical thinking, is “the gods and cosmic forces represented here are not conceived merely as existing successively or side by side; they act upon one another and within one another. All are manifestations of a single god and of one and the same cosmos, which is this god himself with all the powers which he discharges, but still encompasses; and these forces are the whole world with all its creatures and forms.”(35) The coiled serpent in the unique alabaster Serpent Bowl, as it is called, was identified as “the celestial force” which force moves the outermost sphere which encompasses all the other spheres of heaven, and is identified as Macrobius said, “by the names of Zeus, Dionysus, and Helios.”(36) A most important, if not the most crucial aspect is the inscription which is invoking Helios within which sphere Zeus-Dionysus “created and engendered all things out of himself.”(37)

The relation of the sun (Helios) with Phanes, Dionysus, and Orphism is not a modern guess, but a fundamental of not only the Orphic mystery religion, but of the Greeks ancient worship of which Socrates is a good later example. In his classic study of Socrates and the sun, James A. Notopoulos demonstrated the sun “as the source of life, light, sight, the cause of growth in nature Helios was worshiped in more than casual cult worship.”(38)
Herodotus shows that the Persians thought Zeus was the entire circuit of the heavens and sacrifice to him on the tops of mountains. “They also worship the sun, moon, and earth, fire, water, and winds.”(39) In the Pseudo-Eratosthenes “katasterismoi,” we read about the plot of Aeschylus “Bassarides” “The plot centered on the death of Orpheus at the hands of Bassarids because ‘he did not honor Dionysos but accounted Helios the greatest of the gods, whom he also called Apollo.” But at the time Helios was not identified with Apollo, this being a later Orphic interpolation. Helios, in other words, was still being identified with Apollo in later Orphic thinking, and being worshiped. The interesting thing is the gold plates of Thurii have an inscription “that Helios was part of the cult worship of Athens about the time Socrates died.” The festivals of Athens were connected to the fertility of the earth, fertility being a Dionysian aspect without question.(40) Further, there is evidence that the cult of Helios existed early on is the fact that after the summer solstice, the whole State would assemble at the common precincts of Helios and Apollo, and “among the honors they shall be priests of Helios and Apollo and have front seats at every festival, a fact which gives strong support to the traditional honorary seat for the priests of Helios at the theatre of Dionysus.”(41) The next few points for this emphasis is critical for this sacramental theme, as a support for what I will conclude. Not only were the rays of Helios identified with Apollo’s arrows in the middle of the 5th century, “the poets develop the sun not only as a god but as a symbol as well. The sun and its light become the symbol of purity, immortality, truth.” Not only Pindar, but Parmeneides, and Empedocles “develop further its symbolic significance and Sophocles elevates Helios into the greatest of the gods…the Athenian stranger in Plato’s Laws calls the sun and the moon megaloi theoi [great gods] and the sun reflects in its orderly movement the divine soul.”(42) The sun, as we shall continue to see, is a key sacramental theme in the Dionysian mysteries, the sacrament, which carries through to the Christian ages, and beyond into the Middle Ages, and on into our very own day! It is never lost sight of, yet its metamorphosis is remarkably astonishing as it has been particularized from an overall universal aspect, of which today we are only beginning to envision.

Endnotes
1. “The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories,” Glynnis Chantrell, editor, Oxford University Press, 2002: 548.
2. As found in Joseph Campbell, “Creative Mythology,” Penguin Books, 1976: 121.
3. Hardin Craig, “An Interpretation of Shakespeare,” Lucas Brothers Publishing, Columbia, Missouri, 1948: 255. Cf. Alexander Schmidt, “Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary,” 2 vols., Dover ed., 3rd revised and enlarged, 1971: 2: 1349.
4. A. C. Bradley, “Shakespearean Tragedy,” Penguin Books, 1991: 315-316.
5. A. C. Bradley, “Shakespearean Tragedy,” St. Martin’s Press, 1985: 286. He further notes whether Shakespeare understood that “weird” signified fate is not known, though “…it is probable that he did.” (p. 286, note 2).
6. A. C. Bradley, “Ibid.,” p. 287.
7. Joseph Campbell, “Creative Mythology,” p. 121.
8. “The Mythology Book,” Ellen Dupont Editorial Director, DK Publishing, 2018:137.
9. Barbara Walker, “The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets,” Harper & Row Publishers, 1983: 730. Hereafter cited as “Woman’s Encyclopedia.”
10. Kevin Crossley-Holland, “The Norse Myths,” Pantheon Books, 1980: 15. Cf. Martyn Whittock, Hannah Whittock, “Tales of Valhalla, Norse Myths & Legends,” Pegasus Books, 2018: 33. See also Neil Gaiman, “Norse Mythology,” W. W. Norton & Co., 2018: 41 – The three sisters tend the well of Urd, “and make sure the roots of Yggdrasil are covered with mud and cared for. The well belongs to Urd; she is fate, and destiny. She is your past. With her are Verdandi – her name means ‘becoming’ – and hers is the present, and Skuld, whose name means ‘that which is intended,’ and her domain is the future. The norns will decide what happens in your life.”
11. Robert Graves, “The Greek Myths, 2 vols., Penguin Books, reprint, 1990 2: 110. See Jane Harrison, “Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion,” Princeton University Press, 1991: 288 where she notices the importance of the threefold nature of the Greeks sacred number. Cf. Apollonius of Rhodes, “The Voyage of the Argo,” Penguin Books, reprint, 1975: 64, where the Minyae were sorrowful seeing Cyzicus dead in the dust “and for three whole days they and the Doliones wailed for him and tore their hair. Then they marched three times round the dead king…”
12. Peter Green, “The Argonautika, The Story of Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece,” University of California Press, 1997: 144-145.
13. E. V. Rieu, translator, “The Voyage of the Argo” by Apollonius of Rhodes, Penguin Books, 1971: Glossary, p. 204.
14. Jeffrey Burton Russell, “The Devil, Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity,” Cornell University Press, 1st paperback, 1987: 127-129. Walker, “Woman’s Encyclopedia,” p. 1017 notes the trident was the counterpart to the triangle, the goddess’s symbol, where in India, the trident wielding god was Shiva, Bridegroom of threefold Kali.
15. Walker, “Woman’s Encyclopedia,” p. 378.
16. J. H. M. Strubbe, “Cursed be he that Moves My Bones,” in Christopher A. Faraone, Dirk Obbink, “Magika Hiera, Ancient Greek Magic & Religion,” Oxford University Press, 1st paperback, 1997: 46.
17. “Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities,” Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1963: 774.
18. Martin Hengel, “Judaism and Hellenism,” Fortress Press, 1st One Volume edition, 1981: 216.
19. Stuart G. Hall, “Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church,” Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1992:2.
20. Michael Grant, “The Jews in the Roman World,” Barnes & Noble Books, 1995: 232-233.
21. “The Landmark Herodotus, the Histories,” Edited by Robert B. Strassler, A New Translation by Andrea L. Purvis, Anchor Books, 2007: 2.2.144.
22. “Landmark Herodotus,” p. 186, note 2.146.1a.
23. “Herodotus, the Histories,” Translated by G. S. Macauley, Barnes & Noble Books, 2004: p. 95.
24. Reverend Alexander Hislop, “The Two Babylons,” Loizeaux Brothers, 2nd American Edition, 1959.
25. L. Michael White, “From Jesus to Christianity,” HarperSanFrancisco, 2004: 58.
26. Fritz Graf, “Griechische Mythologie,” translated by Thomas Marier, John Hopkins University Press, 1993: 142.
27. Robert Graves, “Greek Myths,” 1:56.
28. “Homeric Hymns,” Apostolos N. Athanassakis, John Hopkins University Press, 1976: 1.
29. “The New Century Classical Handbook,” Catherine B. Avery, General Editor, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 997.
30. Gustav Schwab, “Die Sagen des Klassischen Altertums,” translated by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz, “Gods and Heroes, Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece,” Random House, 1947: 60-66.
31. “Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities,” Edited by Harry Thurston Peck, Cooper Square Publishers, 1963: 1164.
32. Lesley Adkins and Roy Adkins, “Handbook to Life in Ancient Greece,” Facts on File, Inc., 1997: 323.
33. Adkins, “Ibid.,” p. 323.
34. Hans Liesegang, “The Mystery of the Serpent,” in Joseph Campbell, editor, “The Mysteries,” Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 5th printing, 1990: 209.
35. Leisegang, “Ibid.,” p. 211.
36. Leisegang, “Ibid.,” p. 201.
37. Leisegang, “Ibid.,” p. 202.
38. James A. Notopoulos, “Socrates and the Sun,” “Classical Journal,” 37/5. Feb., 1942: 261.
39. Herodotus, “The Histories,” translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, Penguin Books, reprint, 1983: 1.131. (p. 96).
40. Notopoulos, “Ibid.,” p. 267.
41. Notopoulos, “Ibid.,” p. 268.
42. Notopoulos, “Ibid.,” p. 272-273.

[moksha]

(Pan was goat from the legs down, man from the waist up)

Sounds like some of the early Church elders.

Bravo Kerry! This was a fun and informative read.

[Apologeticsislying]

(Pan was goat from the legs down, man from the waist up)

Sounds like some of the early Church elders.

Bravo Kerry! This was a fun and informative read.

Thank you Moksha. It's fun researching and writing it! I ought to have about 7-9 more installments before I finish, a small book even! Woo! I will begin tying it all in once I bring in Orpheus, Jesus, and the Neoplatonists, then the Catholics, then the mystics, then the Mormons, then the Indians. I always bite off more than I can chew.....

I've only dropped hints in this first one, but a couple of powerful ones as to where I think this leads.

[Hagoth]

Interesting stuff, Kerry. I'm curious to see if you will take into account the significance of sacramental substances like kykeon in the Eleusinian Mysteries and other entheogens extending well into the Christian era.

[moksha]

... the significance of sacramental substances like kykeon in the Eleusinian Mysteries and other entheogens extending well into the Christian era.

Or mustard on pastrami with rye bread, or whole cranberries with roast turkey (hey, it's November). As Tevye would say, "Tradition!"