1 / 20

Looking for a Greek Halloween….

Looking for a Greek Halloween…. Finding Demeter, Dionysos, and Greek women. Lecture Layout. --Archaeology and Greek festivals Dionysos and Demeter misteries The Thesmophoria at Athens: vase paintings literary sources.

papina
Download Presentation

Looking for a Greek Halloween….

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Looking for a Greek Halloween…. Finding Demeter, Dionysos, and Greek women

  2. Lecture Layout --Archaeology and Greek festivals Dionysos and Demeter misteries The Thesmophoria at Athens: vase paintings literary sources

  3. There is not a specific equivalent of Halloween in ancient Greece, but some religious festivals present some features of Halloween

  4. Underworld • Death • Wearing special dresses (doing crazy things…) • Calendar: Autumn festivals

  5. Greek calendar • Autumn was the darkest part of the year finishing at the end of December with the winter solstice. Autumn was connected with gods of the underworld as Demeter, and her daughter Kore (Persephone), or Dionysos, conceived as the ‘dark’ side of Apollo. We’ve seen that in Delphi Apollo was reigning

  6. but from the end of October/beginning of November for three months Dionysus took his place. Apollo was supposed to go to the Hyperboreans. In the winter women cults took place on the Mount Parnassos

  7. Maenad who holds a thyrsus in her right hand and with her left hand shakes a panther in the air. A snake is rolled up over her head like a diadem. Tondo of an Attic white-ground kylix, 490–480 BCE. From Vulci (Italy), now at the Antikensammlung of Munich (Germany). Attributed to the Brygos painter

  8. tondo Kylix = drinking cup, from wich engl. chalice

  9. Demeter and Dionysos • The cults of Demeter and Dionysos were usually mysteric cults. Even if some events took place in public, the two divinities were often at the center of secret rites. To be admitted people had to be initiated.

  10. The Thesmophoria • Thesmoi = laws and phoria = carrying, Demeter as a law-bearer Celebrated by women only all over Greece in October/November. The focus was fasting and purification, ritualized descent into the underworld, rituals to bring renewed life back.

  11. Since Thesmophoria were mysteries we know little about the religious performances which took place. Most informations relate to Athens, which was close to Eleusis (one of the main center for the cult of Demeter). Athens is very well attested in ancient sources.

  12. At Athens there was a Thesmophorion, a sacred precinct with a temple devoted to Demeter. It was probably located on the Pnyx (the hill close to the acropolis where the agorà was founded), since we know that the festival lasted three days during which Athenian women (only the wives of Athenian citizens) lived in tents on the agorà. The place was interdicted to males for all that period.

  13. Homeric Hymn to Demeter, a hymn attributed to Homer but probably written after the Homeric age, around 700 BCE. It was used as a sacred texts by the adepts to the mysteries even later, up to late antiquity

  14. From Athens, about 470 BCE attributed to the Syleus painter, terracotta red figure dinos (= vase for mixing wine). Getty Villa Museum Malibu

  15. Herodotus 2.171.2 Concerning Demeter's initiation rite, which the Greeks call thesmophoria, let a holy silence be placed on it, except to the extent it is religiously lawful to speak. Danaus' daughters were the ones who brought this rite out of Egypt and taught it to Pelasgian women. After all the peoples of the Peloponnesus had been driven out by the Dorians, the rite was lost. Only those of the Peloponnesians who were left behind and the Arcadians, who were not driven out, preserved it.

  16. Aristophanes wrote “The Thesmophoriazousai (The women who celebrate the Thesmophoriae)”, a comedy in which the Athenian women decide to take a revenge on Euripides bad attitudes towards them. It was represented for the first time in 411, when Euripides was about 70 years old

  17. Anodos, Nesteia, Kalligeneia The three days of the festival. Anodos: ‘the way up’. A procession of the women carrying offerings for the Goddess on the way up to the pnyx.

  18. Nesteia: fasting. Women did not eat and seat mourning as Demeter when without Kore.

  19. Kalligeneia: the day of rebirth. Sacrifices of piglets took place, and then banquets and feast.

  20. Votive relief to Demeter and Kore, provenance unknown Getty Villa Museum Malibu 425 - 400 B.C. Marble

More Related