Ruxandra Cesereanu
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania
Cultic Conflicts between Gods in the Greek Tragedy
Abstract: The divide between humans and gods is commonplace in the Greek tragedy: at the beginning, as directors of tragic performances, the gods cause the transformation of humans into moving troupes, robotized and manipulated, armies of industrious insects to the benefit of some religious cult. When conscience and revolt surge in humans, the gods are offended and act punitively. However, sometimes the gods get involved in controversies among them precisely because of the mortals, the issue to be debated upon being arguably the pertinence or the lack of pertinence, at a certain moment, of a religious cult and of its worshippers. Although they may take humans as a pretext, the clashes between gods are always of a religious nature. They are violent precisely because they lead to the extinction or the banning of a religious cult in favor of another. Such clashes appear above all in some of the Greek tragedies such as The Eumenides – from Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia – and Euripides’ Hippolytus and The Bacchae.
Keywords: Greek tragedy; Aeschylus; Euripides; Erinyes; Eumenides; Apollo; Athena; Orestes; Hippolytus; Phaedra: Theseus; Artemis; Aphrodite; Bacchae; Dionysus; Pentheus.
The chasm between humans and gods is a commonplace in the Greek tragedy: at the beginning directors of some tragic performances, the gods cause the transformation of humans into moving troupes, robotized and manipulated, armies of industrious insects to the benefit of some religious cult. When conscience and revolt surge in humans, the gods, offended, act punitively. However, sometimes the gods get involved in controversies among them precisely because of the mortals, the issue to be debated upon being the pertinence or the lack of pertinence, at a certain moment, of a religious cult and its worshippers. The clashes between gods, even if they have as a pretext the humans, are always of a religious nature. They are violent just because they lead to the extinction or the banning of a religious cult in favor of another. Such clashes appear above all in some of the Greek tragedies such as The Eumenides – from Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia – and Euripides’ Hippolytus and The Bacchae.
The most ample religious clash discussed by Aeschylus is to be found in The Eumenides. Not in vain does the plot of the tragedy begin in Apollo’s temple from Delphi, where the woman prophet Pythia invokes the patron of the temple and the other Olympian gods. Pythia is also the first to delineate the Erinyes or the Furies (ancient deities in conflict with the Olympians), exaggerating their gloomy appearance:
“they weren’t exactly women, / I’d say more like Gorgons – then again, / not much like Gorgons either. Years ago / I once saw a picture of some monsters / snatching a feast away from Phineas. / But the ones inside here have no wings – / I checked. They’re black and totally repulsive, / with loud rasping snorts that terrify me. / Disgusting pus comes oozing from their eyes.”
This hideous portrait is meant to terrify (one of the effects the Greek tragedy counted on), but also to suggest that, even at a physical level, the chasm between the old and the new deities was visible; the Olympians were “aesthetic” and solar, the Erinyes – hideous and gloomy. The second to delineate the Furies is god Apollo, trying to define them from a cultic, psychic, spiritual viewpoint: “these frenzied creatures overcome with sleep, / just lying there, these loathsome maidens,” sheltered in Tartarus. Then, awoken from the sleep instilled by Hermes and understanding that Orestes (the human prey who is the cause for their aggressive polemics with the Olympians) is still unpunished and free, the Erinyes depict themselves pointing out the decay and the humiliation inflicted on them by the new gods. Addressing to Hermes (Orestes’ guide towards Athens), they bewail in the old people’s way: “- For a god you’re young – / but still you trample on more ancient spirits” or “-Younger gods are doing this – / they push their ruling power / beyond what’s theirs by right.” The main culprit for their cultic decay is considered to be Apollo, who is accused of having tainted even his own cult since the omphalos (the sacred stone and navel of the world) is touched by Orestes, the matricide, with his protector god’s consent:
“The prophet soils the hearth, / pollutes the shrine himself, / acting on his own behalf. / against divine tradition, / he honors human things. / – He sets aside decrees of fate / established long ago.”
The charge is grave and offending, the Erinyes trying thus to conceptually maculate one of the essential sacerdotal elements from Delphi, the omphalos; consequently, Apollo reacts punitively chasing them from his temple and scoffing at them: “Get out!”, “Move on!” The Erinyes are purposefully painted by Phoebus in hideous tinges:
“The way you look, your shape, says what you are – / some blood-soaked lion’s den might be your home.”
The Furies perceive the linguistic offence (and religious, in fact) and they protest accordingly, reprimanding the Olympian god: “why insult us”, “Don’t try cu curb our powers with your words”. But this is only a verbal teasing while the most important accusation brought by the Furies is that Apollo himself (the rational eminence) is the guilty one for the matricide committed by Orestes, through a moral participation. Practically, this is the key moment that launches the downright polemics between the old and the new deities.
Apollo considers that the parricide (Agamemnon’s murder by Clytemnestra) is graver than the matricide (Clytemnestra’s murder by Orestes) since the murdering of the man (who is husband and king) is more blamable than the murdering of the queen (and mother); the murdering of Agamemnon invalidated the very sacred marriage (protected by Zeus and Hera) between man and woman. Thus, Clytemnestra’s debasement (guilty of adultery and regicide) is considered to be more serious than Orestes’ debasement through matricide.
The controversy is temporarily ceased in this point, since the Erinyes-bitches scent out Orestes’ track while he is in an imploring posture on the Acropolis: Orestes leaves a “trail”, him being impure and stained by his murdered mother’s blood; therefore he can be scented out; out of punitive excess, the Furies promise to drink Orestes’ blood the moment he is captured. For a second time Orestes is saved from the Erinyes’ attack with Apollo’s help, consequently, the insulted Furies ask for Mother Night’s protection. The old deities feel again the need to define themselves, but this time in an ampler self-portrait. Here it is: they are instances that chase the murderers’ blood, only the gods are immune to their punishing action; they are not ordinary women, but mad, black, vampire-like creatures who live in the dark, as a sort of connection between the dead and the living. Their punitive and cultic mission was established in the past, “allowed by Fate / and ratified by all the gods”.
This is the moment when Apollo is somehow out of his depth in his role and, consequently, goddess Athena intervenes in Orestes’ trial and in the Erinyes’ lament by convoking the Areopagus, the Athenian court, to give the verdict on the matricide. The Erinyes already sense that, following the respective trial, their tradition and cultic function will be invalidated; their premonition becomes even stronger since Apollo is to appear as main witness in Orestes’ favor and Hermes is to follow him. The essential Apollinic argument is that, spiritually and morally, the sons always belong to their fathers, therefore they always have to avenge the murdering of the father seen as a graver sin than the murdering of the mother. Illustrating the link to the paternal spirit, Phoebus gives as an example even a woman, Athena, carried when an embryo in Zeus’ head, her father.
Feeling their position endangered, the Erinyes accuse Apollo of being a “maculated prophet” and, consequently they claim from the Athenian court (which they barely accept) not to be humiliated since they have already been degraded. They promise a similar religious vendetta: the persecution of the Athenian city if the verdict is not in their favor. However, Apollo denies their role and he declares emphatically their failure even before the verdict is given:
“Among all gods, old and new alike, / you have no honor. I will triumph here.”
The provocation is disdainful since Phoebus declares the Furies to be despised not only by the present Olympian gods, but also by the presupposed old deities (he probably makes reference to old deities allied with the Olympians). Yet, the trial ends not due to Apollo’s emphatic magnificence, nor to the Furies’ overt threats, but strictly due to the ballot awarded by goddess Athena, who acts in Orestes’ favor (considering herself to be a virile goddess, a father’s daughter). Athena’s ballot is a decisive one: even if Zeus is not visible all along the trial, he can be sensed as a divine presence dissimulated behind Athena, who represents him. Moreover, he stands in for Orestes’ father – Agamemnon -, in the same way in which Athena is “the good mother”, from a psychoanalytic point of view and according to some scholars, as opposed to “the evil mother” (Clytemnestra). With such divine adoptive parents, Orestes can only be declared not guilty; or, more precisely, not guiltless but forgiven.
Defeated in this religious trial, the Erinyes threaten the Greek land with diseases, sterility, death, “dark manna”: “Now our anger turns against this land / We’ll spread our poison – how it’s going to pay, / when we release this venom in our heart / to ease our grief. We’ll saturate this ground. / It won’t survive.” This is the moment when Athena has a first cultic intervention, she promises the Furies both full honors and rich offerings on their altar, but also her spatial protection, since Athena grants them a cultic place on the Acropolis, near the Erechteion, promising them offerings and wealth. However, the offer is not very clear yet. Thrice Athena ritually tempts and tames the Erinyes, promising them that they will be honored, admitting that the Furies are old (chased away) deities whom, nevertheless, an Olympian goddess (and not one similar to the others, but precisely the one born from her father’s head, the divine leader of the Olympians) values. Therefore, she wants to convert their mission and their role, adapting them to the new Greek pantheon. From Furies she makes them become exactly the opposite, namely goddesses who are benign to people, solacing, benefic presences; white manna, goddesses of fecundity and wealth. It is a form of captatio benevolentiae that is partially successful, since, in the end, the old Erinyes accept Athena’s pact and religious feast, praising even Zeus and starting thus their first gestures as benefic Eumenides. But, in the economy of the play, the acceptance of the change of their cultic role is sudden and forced, even tendentious. Reconverted, the Eumenides praise Athena who leads them to their new underworld altar, as priestesses with burning torches and animal victims ready to be sacrificed but in the name of good and wealth. This last sequence represents in fact the religious adaptation and the pact between the old and the new gods. But, do the Furies really change their nature? Their underworld altars, the darkness, the secret place, and the sacrifices – all these pertain more to the world of the dead rather than to that of the living. Maybe the old Erinyes are apparently some Eumenides, but it is obvious that their genetic structure (at religious level) has not been modified. This is also underlined by the fact that although Orestes had been acquitted by the Areopagus, he was still harassed for a certain period of time (or at least this is what comes out from Euripides’ texts) by some of the Erinyes who had not changed yet (and probably they never would) into Eumenides.
In Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus, the religious conflict is even more ramified than in The Eumenides, as one can see from the following section. First of all, this text is about a cultic clash between Aphrodite and Artemis, but through two human beings: Phaedra and Hippolytus. The religious polemic is thus clearly outlined from the very beginning: eros versus chastity, lewdness versus ascetism etc. Aphrodite’s representation is ghostlike and dark (Cypris, whose lewd cult included the explicit idea of libidinal madness). The goddess feels defied by Hippolytus, him being Artemis’ fervent worshipper; Aphrodite accuses the young worshipper of a certain anti-Aphrodite sacerdotal hybris. And, indeed, everything indicates that Hippolytus was an Artemisian priest, centered on the cult of hunting, of sport competitions (he is the son of Theseus and of the Amazons’ queen – Hippolyta) and of warlike chastity. Moreover, Hippolytus is not a simple believer, but a frenzied, fanatic, fundamentalist worshipper of Artemis, and this is the nuance that provokes Aphrodite, the goddess considering that her cultic rival is a “comradeship of one too high” for mortal Hippolytus. The sacerdotal information on Hippolytus also indicates the fact he is initiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries and in Orphism – and this will be held against him by a representative of the canonic religion, namely by Theseus, Hippolytus’ father. Consequently, the young Artemisian priest is attacked for a cultic issue both by the divine figure of Aphrodite and by the classic, paternal one of Theseus, who is averse to Orphism and rejects the “obscure” cults based on abstinence.
Without being Aphrodite’s representative, and without casting off Artemis, Theseus is merely a representative of the official religion that perceives heresy in Orphism. In fact, this is the major reproach brought to Hippolytus: the young priest is a “heretic”. Neither the presupposed adultery, nor the symbolic parricide will be the main accusation brought by Theseus against Hippolytus, but the son’s affiliation to a cult that repels the father. That is why the son will be punished by the father’s religion in an exemplary manner: Theseus will invoke Poseidon (his divine father and Hippolytus’ divine grandfather) to punitively and exemplarily kill the heretic son and nephew (in brackets one may say that Theseus acts in this manner since he himself cannot punish Hippolytus because he runs the risk of becoming impure, but also because Poseidon belonged to the pantheon of the classic, official gods who had the right to punish the religious “deviants”). Thus, Poseidon appears epiphanically as a bull, frightens the horses harnessed to Hippolytus chariot and acts so that Hippolytus is torn apart by his own chariot. Poseidon emerges as a sea bull, in the punitive position of the official deities; but he represents something else as well – he is the castrating “father” – substitute (grandfather) for the deviant and heretic son (grandson). The latter, in his turn, is presumed of having wanted to symbolically castrate the father (see the presupposed – but false – adultery of Hippolytus and Phaedra); however, the castration is realized through death and not through an actual libidinal gesture.
Only at the end of the play does goddess Artemis come into sight trying tardily to help her fervent priest and disclosing to Theseus the feminine conspiracy (Phaedra’s setup). Artemis’ criticism is directed towards Aphrodite who, striking Hippolytus, intended to eliminate, through a religious “putsch”, her rival who is immune to eros. Dying, but understanding the sense of Artemis’ mystic revelation, Hippolytus declares to be up to the last moment her fervent priest: the hunter, the guardian of the statues and the breeder of her horses, assuming even in the moment of his death the genetic structure of an Artemisian priest. Since she feels wronged by the murdering of her priest, Artemis promises a similar cultic revenge prophesizing the murdering of Adonis, Aphrodite’s lover, by a punitive boar, manipulated by the goddess of hunting.
It is essential that, after Hippolytus’ death, sanctuaries will be built and dedicated to him in Troezen: here the maids will come before the wedding to place braids of hair as offerings. In other words, Hippolytus will be recognized, at least posthumously, as a sacrificed and sanctified priest of Artemis, since his worshippers are exclusively maids. The sense of the hair offerings was linked to the sexual magic power preserved in hair: and, by cutting it and by their transformation into women, after the wedding, the worshipping maids satisfied both Hippolytus’ ardor of yore in cultivating his chastity, but also his fundamental misogyny that accused the women of being impure on account of their sexual statute. According to other sources, more obscure ones, Hippolytus would have been redeemed from death by Asklepios and appointed priest in one of goddess Artemis’ temples.
As for Phaedra and her possible cultic function, the situation is rather complicated here as well. Although Phaedra did not do anything to defy Aphrodite (on the contrary, it comes out that she was a fervent worshipper of the latter, even if she was not a priestess), Cypris decides to punish Hippolytus through his step mother, inculcating in her a blind passion while she was watching Hippolytus getting initiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Phaedra is one of Aphrodite’s professional worshippers: she had temples built for the goddess and is loyal to the goddess. Nevertheless, Aphrodite is ready to sacrifice her (Phaedra is just an instrument in the goddess’s hands) in order to undermine her cultic rival, Artemis. Infected by passionate love for Hippolytus (that is why the Chorus perceives her as “frantic”, possessed by Hecate, Pan and Cybele), Phaedra runs the risk, however, to implicitly become a deviant from Aphrodite’s cult when, because of her passion, she feels the need to attend the ceremonies of the Artemisian cult, being even ready (if she could thus seduce Hippolytus) to participate at spear hunting like an Amazon or to watch the athletic contests of taming the wild horses. Knowing who and what she is, Phaedra is nevertheless aware that it is not normal for her to be troubled by deviances and heresies. She comes from a stock of women and queens for whom the cult of the bull was significant: Pasiphae, her mother (the queen of Crete in love with the white bull with whom she conceives the Minotaur – Pasiphae being, probably, a Minoan priestess centered on the Dionysian cult of the bull), then Ariadne, Phaedra’s sister, in love with Theseus whom she helps killing the Minotaur (later on abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, Ariadne is to become Dionysos’ wife, who appears to her as a bull). Phaedra herself is nobody else but Theseus’ wife in love with her step son, whose mother was an Amazon. And all of a sudden, for the mortal punishing of Hippolytus, Poseidon’s bull may have Dionysian connotations as well. Will Phaedra be sacrificed also because Aphrodite feels partially betrayed when, troubled by her incestuous passion, Phaedra is willing to become a worshipper of the Artemisian cult only for Hippolytus’ sake? Present at Phaedra’s torments, the Nurse proclaims Cypris to be an instance “above the gods”, an engine of the cosmic, divine and earthly lives altogether. In their turn, the Chorus praise Eros as the “master and lord of the world”, a terrible god of instincts, a ghost that deserves to be honored at least as much as Apollo is, if not even more, since Eros is the male equivalent of Cypris – the dark, devastating passion. In other words, the Chorus suggest a stratification of the divine instances, a certain hierarchy in which Cypris will be higher ranked than Artemis or Apollo. The end of the tragedy will demonstrate however that Aphrodite uselessly sacrificed Phaedra: after his death, Hippolytus is acknowledged as a complete Artemisian priest. Aphrodite’s religious “putsch” failed even if the Artemisian priest was sacrificed.
One of the most interesting plays from the point of view of a religious polemic is Euripides’ Bacchae, since the Dionysian cult is revealed here in its frenetic-orgiastic side, but also in the violent-dark one. Dionysus is travestied in a bacchant and only at the end of the play will he reveal his divine identity to the other characters. The purpose of his disguise is to present, step by step, the initiation of the spectator (and of the reader) in the Dionysian cult: for the characters of Euripides’ play, Dionysus appears as a bacchant, yet, for the readers, he describes the missionary journey of a god and priest at the same time, wandering through Persia, Arabia, Asia Minor (I’ve set those eastern lands / dancing in the mysteries I established, / making known to men my own divinity”). Dionysus chooses the city of Thebes for a vigorous demonstration of his cult, since he was provoked and offended by his aunts, Semele’s sisters, who considered him a mortal, without a divine lineage (son of Zeus). In order to exemplarily punish the heretic aunts and the Theban women in general (who rejected the Dionysian cult), Dionysus changes them by force into bacchae:
“So I’ve driven those women from their homes / in a frenzy – they now live in the mountains, / out of their minds. I’ve made them / put on costumes, / outfits appropriate for my mysteries. / All Theban offspring – or, at least, all women – / I’ve driven in a crazed fit from their homes”,
confesses the god demonstratively. However, Dionysus intends to punish especially his cousin Pentheus since this one is strongly opposed to the Dionysian cult, him being very attached to the official cults. In other words, the religious polemic does not take place between the gods, but between a still unofficial god (Dionysus) and the human representative of the other official gods (Pentheus). After the Dionysian religion will be forcibly established in Thebes, Dionysus intends to wander as a missionary through other regions and geographic spaces for the spreading of his cult.
With respect to his divine structure, Dionysus is a complicated god from the genetic-religious viewpoint: he is akin to Cybele (the goddess of fertility and vegetation) and to Rhea (a goddess of mountains), the two goddesses coalesced at a certain point and melted into the Dionysian cult. But Dionysus is also akin to Demeter, as Tiresias explains in the Bacchae, and the Eleusinian Mysteries (since at Eleusis Dionysus was also worshipped as a god who passed, as Zagreus, through death and redemption). He is paradoxically connected even with Apollo, although indirectly: not in vain was there at Delphi a grotto-temple of a Dionysian type (even if he was Apollo’s opposite, Dionysus was honored just because he represented the other extreme). According to Tiresias, Dionysus is akin to Ares, through his bloody-punishing terrible side. According to the Chorus, Dionysus is akin to Aphrodite – as Cypris -, both gods being representatives of the sensorial frenzy. The plethora of Dionysus’ names (Evyos, Dithyrambos, Bromios, Iacchos, Bacchus, Bacchaebacchus, Zagreus) pleads for the multiple nuances of the Dionysian cult. Then, the Dionysian cortege is made up of various secondary divinities such as the nymphs, the satyrs, Pan or Xilen, some of them specialized as vegetal entities, of the revival, others as orgiastic entities, certainly circumscribed to the cult of the wine perceived as a form of Eucharist (liquefied Dionysus) of the god with his fervent worshippers, as Tiresias explains. The Chorus from Euripides’ play also mention Dionysus’ animal, totemic incarnations: bull, serpent, lion – some of them are centered on the fertility and revival symbolism, some others on the punitive and great force symbolism.
As any god who respects himself, Dionysus has fundamentalist and frenetic priests and priestesses: in his case, these are especially the Bacchae. They are of two types: the voluntary ones (the Asians) and the involuntary ones (the Thebans), which indicates again the structure of Janus Bifrons of the god – on the one hand he is a protective deity, and on the other he is a punitive god, of violent death. Dionysus is similar to almost all the other Greek gods: the formula Janus Bifrons is not characteristic only for Dionysus, but also for Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite or Hera – each of these has a solar side that they reveal to the faithful believers, and a gloomy side revealed punitively to the heretic. The Asian Bacchae delineate Dionysus as an exorcizing and liberating god, mystically incarnated in a bull or a serpent (“Appear now to our sight, O Bacchus – / come as a bull or many-headed serpent”). And, when he, on purpose, allows himself to be captured by Pentheus and he is a prisoner in the royal palace, he leaves as surety in his place, when evading, a bull. Moreover, the Bacchae themselves, like their protecting god, have two types of manifestations: on the one hand they breast-feed fawns, are crowned with ivy and oak, change the land into milk and honey, and the water springs into wine; and, on the other, they butcher the herds of bulls, plunder the towns surrounding Thebes and fight savagely like Amazons.
However, what is revealing for the Dionysian cult, in the case of the Bacchae, is, above all, the relation between the god concealed in bacchant and Pentheus the faithless, who, from a certain point on, simultaneously becomes the offering and the priest (the apprentice) of the god that he defies and challenges. Because Pentheus will be sacrificed after a model akin to that of the sacrifice Dionysus-Zagreus (by the Titans), through sparagmos. In fact, Dionysus warns his disciple, who is not even aware of being his disciple, that he does not know what he says, what he does and what he is, the entire play being conceived as a demonstration of “sacrificial lynching” (this is René Girard’s demonstration). Dionysus and Pentheus are one another’s double; but Pentheus’ case is especially ardent in demonstration: he is Dionysus’ religious enemy, but his disciple and priest as well, sacrificed according to the very model of Dionysus’ sacrifice. The god prepares Pentheus’ initiation death, in order to prove his bloody, gloomy side too, not only the classic (vegetal etc.): Dionysus is the god “most fearful and yet most kind to men”. Thus, Pentheus will be initiated in the Dionysian mystique, disguised as a bacchant and perceiving Dionysus as a bull. But, even more important is the fact that Pentheus perceives the difference between the two Thebes: the traditional one (whose exponent was he, himself, until a certain point, as a representative of the official religion) and the Dionysian one (whose exponent he becomes unwillingly in the very moment of his sacrificial death, being torn by his mother, Agave, forcibly changed into a Bacchae). After Pentheus’ death, Dionysus appears (unconcealed) in front of Cadmus and Agave, but he is no longer interested in any mystical revelation, since “You learn too late. You were ignorant / when you should have known.” Pentheus had been taught the lesson of religious cult, and through his initiation and death, the official gods and worshippers were forced to finally accept Dionysus.
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