The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (37 page)

1
. The Ionians and Aeolians, the first two waves of patriarchal Hellene
^s
to invade Greece, were persuaded by the Hellads already there to worship the Triple-goddess and change their social customs accordingly, becoming Greeks (
graikoi,
‘worshippers of the Grey Goddess, or Crone’). Later, the Achaeans and Dorians succeeded in establishing patriarchal rule and patrilinear inheritance, and therefore described Achaeus and Dorus as first-generation sons of a common ancestor, Hellen – a masculine form of the Moon-goddess Helle or Helen. The
Parian Chronicle
records that this change from Greeks to Hellenes took place in 1521
B
.
C
., which seems a reasonable enough date. Aeolus and Ion were then relegated to the second generation, and called sons of the thievish Xuthus, this being a way of denouncing the Aeolian and Ionian devotion to the orgiastic Moon-goddess Aphrodite – whose sacred bird was the
xuthos
, or sparrow, and whose priestesses cared nothing for the patriarchal view that women were the property of their fathers and husbands. But Euripides, as a loyal Ionian of Athens, makes Ion elder brother to Dorus and Achaeus, and the son of Apollo as well (see
44.
a
).

2
. Poseidon’s seduction of Melanippe, his seduction of the Mare-headed Demeter (see
16.
f
), and Aeolus’s seduction of Euippe, all refer perhaps to the same event: the seizure of Aeolians of the pre-Hellenic horse-cult centres. The myth of Arne’s being blinded and imprisoned in a tomb, where she bore the twins Aeolus and Boeotus, and of their subsequent exposure on the mountain among wild beasts, is apparently deduced from the familiar icon that yielded the myths of Danaë (see
73.
4
), Antiope (see
76.
a
), and the rest. A priestess of Mother Earth’s is shown crouched in a
tholus
tomb, presenting the New Year twins to the shepherds, for revelation at her Mysteries;
tholus
tombs have their entrances always facing east, as if in promise of rebirth. These shepherds are instructed to report that they found the infants abandoned on the mountainside, being suckled by some sacred animal – cow, sow, she-goat, bitch, or she-wolf. The wild beasts from whom the twins are supposed to have been saved represent the seasonal transformations of the newly-born sacred king (see
30.
1
).

3
. Except for the matter of the imprisoned winds, and the family incest on Lipara, the remainder of the myth concerns tribal migrations. The mythographers are thoroughly confused between Aeolus the son of Hellen; another Aeolus who, in order to make the Aeolians into third-generation
Greeks, is said to have been the son of Xuthus; and the third Aeolus, grandson of the first.

4
. Since the Homeric gods did not regard the incest of Aeolus’s sons and daughters as in the least reprehensible, it looks as if both he and Enarete were not mortals and thus bound by the priestly tables of kindred and affinity, but Titans; and that their sons and daughters were the remaining six couples, in charge of the seven celestial bodies and the seven days of the sacred week (see
1.
d
). This would explain their privileged and god-like existence, without problems of either food, drink, or clothing, in an impregnable palace built on a floating island – like Delos before the birth of Apollo (see
14.
3
). ‘Macareus’ means ‘happy’, as only gods were happy. It was left for Latin mythographers to humanize Aeolus, and awaken him to a serious view of his family’s conduct; their amendment to the myth permitted them to account both for the foundation of Aeolian kingdoms in Italy and Sicily and – because ‘Canache’ means ‘barking’ and her child was thrown to the dogs – for the Italian custom of puppy sacrifice. Ovid apparently took this story from the second book of Sostratus’s Etruscan History (Plutarch:
Parallel Stories
28).

5
. The winds were originally the property of Hera, and the male gods had no power over them; indeed, in Diodorus’s account, Aeolus merely teaches the islanders the use of sails in navigation and foretells, from signs in the fire, what winds will rise. Control of the winds, regarded as the spirits of the dead, is one of the privileges that the Death-goddess’s representatives have been most loth to surrender; witches in England, Scotland, and Brittany still claimed to control and sell winds to sailors as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the Dorians had been thorough: already by Homer’s time they had advanced Aeolus, the eponymous ancestor of the Aeolians, to the rank of godling, and given him charge of his fellow-winds at Hera’s expense – the Aeolian Islands, which bore his name, being situated in a region notorious for the violence and diversity of its winds (see 170.
g
). This compromise was apparently accepted with bad grace by the priests of Zeus and Poseidon, who opposed the creation of any new deities, and doubtless also by Hera’s conservative devotees, who regarded the winds as her inalienable property.

44

ION

A
POLLO
lay secretly with Erechtheus’s daughter Creusa, wife to Xuthus, in a cave below the Athenian Propylaea. When her son was born Apollo spirited him away to Delphi, where he became a temple
servant, and the priests named him Ion. Xuthus had no heir and, after many delays, went at last to ask the Delphic Oracle how he might procure one. To his surprise he was told that the first person to meet him as he left the sanctuary would be his son; this was Ion, and Xuthus concluded that he had begotten him on some Maenad in the promiscuous Dionysiac orgies at Delphi many years before. Ion could not contradict this, and acknowledged him as his father. But Creusa was vexed to find that Xuthus now had a son, while she had none, and tried to murder Ion by offering him a cup of poisoned wine. Ion, however, first poured a libation to the gods, and a dove flew down to taste the spilt wine. The dove died, and Creusa fled for sanctuary to Apollo’s altar. When the vengeful Ion tried to drag her away, the priestess intervened, explaining that he was Creusa’s son by Apollo, though Xuthus must not be undeceived in the belief that he had fathered him on a Maenad. Xuthus was then promised that he would beget Dorus and Achaeus on Creusa.

b
. Afterwards, Ion married Helice, daughter of Selinus, King of Aegialus, whom he succeeded on the throne; and, at the death of Erechtheus, he was chosen King of Athens. The four occupational classes of Athenians – farmers, craftsmen, priests, and soldiers – are named after the sons borne to him by Helice.
¹

1
. Pausanias: vii. 1. 2; Euripides:
Ion
; Strabo: viii. 7. 1; Conon:
Narrations
27.

1
. This theatrical myth is told to substantiate the Ionians’ seniority over Dorians and Achaeans (see
43.
1
), and also to award them divine descent from Apollo. But Creusa in the cave is perhaps the goddess, presenting the New Year infant, or infants (see
43.
2
), to a shepherd – mistaken for Apollo in pastoral dress. Helice, the willow, was the tree of the fifth month, sacred to the Triple Muse, whose priestess used it in every kind of witchcraft and water-magic (see
28.
5
); the Ionians seem to have subordinated themselves willingly to her.

45

ALCYONE AND CEYX

A
LCYONE
was the daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds, and Aegiale. She married Ceyx of Trachis, son of the Morning-star, and
they were so happy in each other’s company that she daringly called herself Hera, and him Zeus. This naturally vexed the Olympian Zeus and Hera, who let a thunderstorm break over the ship in which Ceyx was sailing to consult an oracle, and drowned him. His ghost appeared to Alcyone who, greatly against her will, had stayed behind in Trachis, whereupon distraught with grief, she leapt into the sea. Some pitying god transformed them both into kingfishers.

b
. Now, every winter, the hen-kingfisher carries her dead mate with great wailing to his burial and then, building a closely compacted nest from the thorns of the sea-needle, launches it on the sea, lays her eggs in it, and hatches out her chicks. She does all this in the Halcyon Days – the seven which precede the winter solstice, and the seven which succeed it – while Aeolus forbids his winds to sweep across the waters.

c
. But some say that Ceyx was turned into a seamew.
¹

1
. Apollodorus: 1. 7. 3; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s
Birds
250; Scholiast and Eustathius on Homer’s
Iliad
ix. 562; Pliny:
Natural History
x. 47; Hyginus:
Fabula
65; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
xi. 410-748; Lucian:
Halcyon
i.; Plutarch:
Which Animals Are the Craftier?
35.

1
. The legend of the halcyon’s, or kingfisher’s, nest (which has no foundation in natural history, since the halycon does not build any kind of nest, but lays eggs in holes by the waterside) can refer only to the birth of the new sacred king at the winter solstice – after the queen who represents his mother, the Moon-goddess, has conveyed the old king’s corpse to a sepulchral island. But because the winter solstice does not always coincide with the same phase of the moon, ‘every year’ must be understood, as ‘every Great Year’, of one hundred lunations, in the last of which solar and lunar time were roughly synchronized, and the sacred king’s term ended.

2
. Homer connects the halcyon with Alcyone (see
80.
d
), a title of Meleager’s wife Cleopatra (
Iliad
ix. 562), and with a daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds (see
43.
h
).
Halcyon
cannot therefore mean
hal-cyon
, ‘sea-hound’, as is usually supposed, but must stand for
alcy-one
, ‘the queen who wards off evil’. This derivation is confirmed by the myth of Alcyone and Ceyx, and the manner of their punishment by Zeus and Hera. The seamew part of the legend need not be pressed, although this bird, which has a plaintive cry, was sacred to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite, or Leucothea (see 170.
y
), like the halcyon of Cyprus (see 160.
g
). It seems that late in the second millennium B.C. the sea-faring Aeolians, who had
agreed to worship the pre-Hellenic Moon-goddess as their divine ancestress and protectress, became tributary to the Zeus-worshipping Achaeans, and were forced to accept the Olympian religion. ‘Zeus’, which according to Johannes Tzetzes (
Antehomerica
102 ff. and
Chiliades
i. 474) had hitherto been a title borne by petty kings (see
68.
1
), was henceforth reserved for the Father of Heaven alone. But in Crete, the ancient mystical tradition that Zeus was born and died annually lingered on into Christian times, and tombs of Zeus were shown at Cnossus, on Mount Ida, and on Mount Dicte, each a different cult-centre. Callimachus was scandalized, and in his
Hymn to Zeus
wrote: ‘The Cretans are always liars. They have even built thy tomb, O Lord! But thou art not dead, for thou livest for ever.’ This is quoted in
Titus
i. 12 (
see 7.
6
).