The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (19 page)

6
.
Ibid
.: 110 ff.

7
.
Ibid
.: 162 ff.

8
. Pausanias: vi. 22. 5; Scholiast on Pindar’s
Pythian Odes
ii. 12.

9
. Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 1; Apollodorus: iii. 8. 2.

10
. Hyginus:
Fabula
181; Pausanias: ix. 2. 3.

1
. The Maiden of the Silver Bow, whom the Greeks enrolled in the Olympian family, was the youngest member of the Artemis Triad, ‘Artemis’ being one more title of the Triple Moon-goddess; and had a right therefore to feed her hinds on trefoil, a symbol of trinity. Her silver bow stood for the new moon. Yet the Olympian Artemis was more than a Maiden. Elsewhere, at Ephesus, for instance, she was worshipped in her second person, as Nymph, an orgiastic Aphrodite with a male consort, and the date-palm (see
14.
a
), stag, and bee (see
18.
3
) for her principal emblems. Her midwifery belongs, rather, to the Crone, as do her arrows of death; and the nine-year-old priestesses are a reminder that the moon’s death number is three times three. She recalls the Cretan ‘Lady of the Wild Things’, apparently the supreme Nymph-goddess of archaic totem societies; and the ritual bath in which Actaeon surprised her, like the horned hinds of her chariot (see 125.
a
) and the quails of Ortygia (see
14.
3
), seems more appropriate to the Nymph than the Maiden. Actaeon was, it seems, a sacred king of the pre-Hellenic stag cult, torn to pieces at the end of his reign of fifty months, namely half a Great Year; his co-king, or tanist, reigning for the remainder. The Nymph properly took her bath after, not before, the murder. There are numerous parallels to this ritual custom in Irish and Welsh myth, and as late as the first century
A
.
D
. a man dressed in a stag’s skin was periodically chased and killed on the Arcadian Mount Lycaeum (Plutarch:
Greek Questions
39). The hounds will have been white with red ears, like the ‘hounds of Hell’ in Celtic mythology. There was a fifth horned hind which escaped Artemis (see 125.
a
).

2
. The myth of her pursuit by Alpheius seems modelled on that of his hopeless pursuit of Arethusa which turned her into a spring and him into a river (Pausanias: v. 7. 2), and may have been invented to account for the gypsum, or white clay, with which the priestesses of
Artemis Alpheia at Letrini and Ortygia daubed their faces in honour of the White Goddess.
Alph
denotes both whiteness and cereal produce:
alphos
is leprosy;
alphe
is gain;
alphiton
is pearl barley;
Alphito
was the White Grain-goddess as Sow. Artemis’s most famous statue at Athens was called ‘the White-browed’ (Pausanias: i. 26. 4). The meaning of
Artemis
is doubtful: it may be ‘strong-limbed’, from
artemes
; or ‘she who cuts up’, since the Spartans called her
Artamis
, from
artao
; or ‘the lofty convener’, from
airo
and
themis
; or the ‘themis’ syllable may mean ‘water’, because the moon was regarded as the source of all water.

3
. Ortygia, ‘Quail Island’, near Delos, was also sacred to Artemis (see
14.
a
).

4
. The myth of Callisto has been told to account for the two small girls, dressed as she-bears, who appeared in the Attic festival of Brauronian Artemis, and for the traditional connexion between Artemis and the Great Bear. But an earlier version of the myth may be presumed, in which Zeus seduced Artemis, although she first transformed herself into a bear and then daubed her face with gypsum, in an attempt to escape him. Artemis was, originally, the ruler of the stars, but lost them to Zeus.

5
. Why Brontes had his hair plucked out is doubtful; Callimachus may be playfully referring to some well-known picture of the event, in which the paint had worn away from the Cyclops’ chest.

6
. As ‘Lady of Wild Things’, or patroness of all the totem clans, Artemis had been annually offered a living holocaust of totem beasts, birds, and plants, and this sacrifice survived in Classical time at Patrae, a Calydonian city (Pausanias: iv. 32. 6); she was there called Artemis Laphria. At Messene a similar burnt sacrifice was offered to her by the Curetes, as totem-clan representatives (iv. 32. 9); and another is recorded from Hierapolis, where the victims were hung to the trees of an artificial forest inside the goddess’s temple (Lucian:
On the Syrian Goddess
41).

7
. The olive-tree was sacred to Athene, the date-palm to Isis and Lat. A Middle Minoan bead-seal in my possession shows the goddess standing beside a palm, dressed in a palm-leaf skirt, and with a small palm-tree held in her hand; she watches a New Year bull-calf being born from a date-cluster. On the other side of the tree is a dying bull, evidently the royal bull of the Old Year.

23

HEPHAESTUS’S NATURE AND DEEDS

H
EPHAESTUS
, the Smith-god, was so weakly at birth that his disgusted mother, Hera, dropped him from the height of Olympus, to rid herself
of the embarrassment that his pitiful appearance caused her. He survived this misadventure, however, without bodily damage, because he fell into the sea, where Thetis and Eurynome were at hand to rescue him. These gentle goddesses kept him with them in an underwater grotto, where he set up his first smithy and rewarded their kindness by making them all sorts of ornamental and useful objects.
¹

One day, when nine years had passed, Hera met Thetis, who happened to be wearing a brooch of his workmanship, and asked: ‘My dear, where in the world did you find that wonderful jewel?’

Thetis hesitated before replying, but Hera forced the truth from her. At once she fetched Hephaestus back to Olympus, where she set him up in a much finer smithy, with twenty bellows working day and night, made much of him and arranged that he should marry Aphrodite.

b
. Hephaestus became so far reconciled with Hera that he dared reproach Zeus himself for hanging her by the wrists from Heaven when she rebelled against him. But silence would have been wiser, because angry Zeus only heaved him down from Olympus a second time. He was a whole day falling. On striking the earth of the island of Lemnos, he broke both legs and, though immortal, had little life left in his body when the islanders found him. Afterwards pardoned and restored to Olympus, he could walk only with golden leg-supports.
²

c
. Hephaestus is ugly and ill-tempered, but has great power in his arms and shoulders, and all his work is of matchless skill. He once made a set of golden mechanical women to help him in his smithy; they can even talk, and undertake the most difficult tasks he entrusts to them. And he owns a set of three-legged tables with golden wheels, ranged around his workshop, which can run by themselves to a meeting of the gods, and back again.
³

1
. Homer:
Iliad
xviii. 394–409.

2
.
Ibid
.: i. 586–94.

3
.
Ibid
.: xviii. 368 ff.

1
. Hephaestus and Athene shared temples at Athens, and his name may be a worn-down form of
hemero-phaistos
, ‘he who shines by day’ (i.e. the sun), whereas Athene was the moon-goddess, ‘she who shines by night’, patroness of smithcraft and of all mechanical arts. It is not generally recognized that every Bronze Age tool, weapon, or utensil had magical properties, and that the smith was something of a sorcerer. Thus, of the
three persons of the Brigit Moon-triad (see
21.
4
), one presided over poets, another over smiths, the third over physicians. When the goddess has been dethroned the smith is elevated to godhead. That the Smith-god hobbles is a tradition found in regions as far apart as West Africa and Scandinavia; in primitive times smiths may have been purposely lamed to prevent them from running off and joining enemy tribes. But a hobbling partridge-dance was also performed in erotic orgies connected with the mysteries of smithcraft (see
92.
2
) and, since Hephaestus had married Aphrodite, he may have been hobbled only once a year: at the Spring Festival.

Metallurgy first reached Greece from the Aegean Islands. The importation of finely worked Helladic bronze and gold perhaps accounts for the myth that Hephaestus was guarded in a Lemnian grotto by Thetis and Eurynome, titles of the Sea-goddess who created the universe. The nine years which he spent in the grotto show his subservience to the moon. His fall, like that of Cephalus (see
89.
j
), Talos (see
92.
b
) Sciron (see
96.
f
), Iphitus (see 135.
b
), and others, was the common fate of the sacred king in many parts of Greece when their reigns ended. The golden leg-supports were perhaps designed to raise his sacred heel from the ground.

2
. Hephaestus’s twenty three-legged tables have, it seems, much the same origin as the Gasterocheires who built Tiryns (see
73.
3
), being golden sun-disks with three legs, like the heraldic device of the Isle of Man doubtless bordering some early icon which showed Hephaestus being married to Aphrodite. They represent three-season years, and denote the length of his reign; he dies at the beginning of the twentieth year, when a close approximation of solar and lunar time occurs; this cycle was officially recognized at Athens only towards the close of the fifth century
B
.
C
., but had been discovered several hundred years before (
White Goddess
, pp. 284 and 291). Hephaestus was connected with Vulcan’s forges in the volcanic Lipari islands because Lemnos, a seat of his worship, is volcanic and a jet of natural asphaltic gas which issued from the summit of Mount Moschylus had burned steadily for centuries (Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
227; Heyschius
sub
Moschylus). A similar jet, described by Bishop Methodius in the fourth century
A
.
D
., burned on Mount Lemnos in Lycia and was still alight in 1801. Hephaestus had a shrine on both these mountains. Lemnos (probably from
leibein
, ‘she who pours out’) was the name of the Great Goddess of this matriarchal island (Hecataeus, quoted by Stephanus of Byzantium
sub
Lemnos – see 149. 1).