Sacred Marriage

Pagans are forever being accused of having orgies instead of rituals. Never mind that Doreen Valiente addressed this point, at least for witches, more than a quarter-century ago: "If all witches wanted was 'sex orgies,' they would have no need to invent a witch cult in order to indulge in them." (An ABC of Witchcraft, p. 134)  The flip side of this accusation, of course, is the accusers' wish: You guys must be having better sex than me; I wish I could get some of that. Whether pagans have better sex, however, falls outside the scope of this article — readers must do their own experiments.

Leaving aside the question of ritual as an excuse for sex, sex as part of ritual has a long and honored history. What better means to raise and send energy? One specific form of sex magick that comes down through history is sacred marriage, hieros gamos. In this rite, either symbolically or through actual coitus, a deity mates with a human ritualist or two deities mate with each other; either rite often employs humans drawn down as Goddess and/or God. Holy sex in the wet dirt served for centuries as magick to make crops grow. Sacred marriage around the world formerly sanctified the king's connection to the land he ruled; here the queen or high priestess usually embodied the land. And sacred marriage likewise has been used as initiation, to change ritualists' spiritual state, as in the Great Rite of the witches or in ancient mystery cults — some of which may have included sacred homosexual sex.

Although the following story addresses separately these three purposes — sympathetic magick, assertion of sovereignty and initiation — in most cases historically sacred marriage likely combined two or all three. Unfortunately, for many rituals we have only flawed documentation, from Christian clerics who found the rites appalling or racist anthropologists who sneered at them as the work of foolish primitives. Often the true intentions behind ceremonies dismissed as blasphemy or "fertility rites" — as if continuing life weren't important — have not come down to us. Even the most sympathetic observers can only guess at the awe and religious ecstasy produced by any ritual. In the absence of good information, consider that any sacred marriage may not have been "only" a fertility rite. As the Greeks said of Eleusis, Demeter there gave two gifts, dittai doreai: grain and the Mysteries.

Sacred marriage to encourage the land's fertility

At the base of sacred marriate lies a group of associative images. Ten thousand years ago, give or take a few, humans first discovered that if you plant a seed in earth, food grows. If a man plants sperm in a woman's womb, an embryo grows. Symbolically, the Sky Father impregnates the Earth Mother with all life. On earth, therefore, to encourage their fertility, celebrants enacted the sacred marriage. The base formula: "Want more grain? Let's fuck!"

But the growing of food in and of itself isn't as compelling to the average human now as it was 10,000 years ago, or even 150 years ago. I recently read Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, set in the nineteenth century in the English countryside. Hardy loved to incorporate remnants of pagan customs in his books, and pagan themes as well; in Far from the Madding Crowd, our hero Gabriel Oak through fate's machinations outlasts his two tanists, Farmer Boldwood and Sergeant Troy, and wins the hand of the local goddess, Bathsheba Everdene.

Our sturdy Oak King's greatest strength is as a shepherd. However, at a harvest dance just after Troy has married Bathsheba, Gabriel in farmer-mode warns Troy for his new wife's sake that a storm is coming. The couple's just-harvested wheat and barley is standing in the field in ricks, and if not covered it will be ruined. Troy dismisses Oak's warning, and sending out the women and children treats the local men to brandy and water in celebration of his marriage. The locals, ordinarily ale and cider drinkers, pass out, as Oak returns home and gathers evidence rain is near:

Oak sat down meditating for nearly an hour. During this time two black spiders, of the kind common in thatched houses, promenaded the ceiling, ultimately dropping to the floor.... He left the room, ran across two or three fields towards the flock, got upon a hedge, and looked over among (the sheep) ....

They were all grouped in such a way that their tails, without a single exception, were towards that half of the horizon from which the storm threatened. There was an inner circle closely huddled, and outside these they radiated wider apart, the pattern formed by the flock as a whole not being unlike a vandyked lace collar....

Apparently there was to be a thunder-storm, and afterward a cold, continuous rain. The creeping things seemed to know all about the later rain, but little of the interpolated thunder-storm; whilst the sheep knew all about the thunder-storm and nothing of the later rain....

This complication of weathers being uncommon, was all the more to be feared. Oak returned to the stack-yard. All was silent here, and the conical tips of the ricks jutted darkly into the sky. There were five wheat-ricks in this yard, and three stacks of barley. The wheat when threshed would average about thirty quarters to each stack; the barley, at least forty. Their value to Bathsheba, and indeed to anybody, Oak mentally estimated by the following simple calculation:

5 x 30 = 150 quarters = £500
3 x 40 = 120 quarters = £250
Total... £750

Seven hundred and fifty pounds in the divinest form that money can wear — that of necessary food for man and beast: should that risk be run of deteriorating this bulk of corn to less than half its value, because of the instability of a woman? 'Never, if I can prevent it!' said Gabriel. (p. 252-254) 

That's not a kind of calculation most of us will ever make. Even for Gabriel, it's one step removed — grain equals money from sale, not grain equals the food I'm going to eat next year. For us latter-day pagans, it's easier still to forget the link between the land and our continued life. We're not Gabriel Oak; we don't know, or need to know, the ways of animals and the look of clouds to predict a weather that rules our lives. The mechanisms of our complex society protect many of us from starving; if there's a drought in the Midwest, the Northwest still gets bologna sandwiches. But a few steps away from the height of the food chain, in rural Africa or India, in the countryside of former Communist states, on small farms even in the First World, people still live in day-to-day dependency on the food they grow. And we all rely in the end on the produce of the land, however much the plastic and Styrofoam containers in the supermarkets make us forget it.

For our forebears, however, even a mere "fertility rite" had more obvious importance than for many of us. If the crops or herds failed, or before that the gleanings of the wilderness, our ancestors starved. In a frightening universe overhung by darkness, by forces incompletely understood — as they still are, of course — early peoples asked for help.

They first turned to the earth. In most known mythologies, of gatherers, hunters, pastoralists and farmers, she is the first mother. Most likely, it was she that the earliest gatherers and hunters carved in stone and bone, in figures such as the Venus of Willendorf. As Joseph Campbell points out:

We have no writing from this pre-literate age and no knowledge, consequently, of its myths or rites. It is therefore not unusual for extremely well-trained archaeologists to pretend that they cannot imagine what services the numerous female figurines might have rendered to the households for which they were designed. However, we know well enough what the services of such images were in the periods immediately following — and what they have remained to the present day. (Primitive Mythology, p. 139) 

The earth bears roots and berries, the game, the grain. Once the mechanism of fertilization is understood, "the plowing of the earth is a begetting and the growth of grain a rebirth." (Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 66)  The next step is to do something to help the process along.

Rites to encourage fertility exist all over the world. The furthest-flung countries held onto the basic rites longest, before succumbing to the frowns of monotheism or more prudish neighbors. Sir George Frazer cites a long list of examples in The Golden Bough, and though later anthropologists debate his theories his ethnological data for the most part still holds good.

In the islands between New Guinea and Australia, in the last century, the natives considered the male Upulera, Mr. Sun, to come down a ladder specially set for the purpose once a year to fertilize the female Earth. Under the tree where the ladder stood, a man and a woman made ritual love to symbolize the Sun's and Earth's connection to bring the people rain, an abundance of cattle, children and riches.

In Java, when the rice flowered, farmers and their wives visited the fields by night and had ritual sex to promote the growth of the crop. Pipile couples of Central America stayed apart for four days before sowing, so their sex just before the grain went into the ground was more intense; some fucked right as the seed went in. Hesiod similarly adjured his readers to sow, plough and reap naked, according to Walter Burkert in Greek Religion.

On the Indonesian island of Amboina, if the coming clove harvest looked scant, men went to the plantations at night and fucked the earth below the trees, calling out "More cloves!" The Kikuyu of East Africa married young girls to their river's snake god; in huts on the shore, shamans consummated the ritual marriage for the god. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves opines that in the original May Day celebrations "the Priestess had public connexion with the annual king dressed in goatskins, and either he was then killed and resurrected in the form of his successor, or else a goat was sacrificed in his stead and his reign prolonged." (p. 404) 

As time passed, rituals became more symbolic. The Algonquin and Huron Indians each year married two young girls, aged six or seven, to the oki (soul)  of the net at the beginning of fishing season, at a feast where the net sat poised between the girls. When the Bengal dug wells, they made an wooden image of the appropriate god and married him to the goddess of water.

In pagan Sweden, the loveliest girl in the countryside married a lifesize image of Frey, god of fertility, and the two drove about the country in a wagon to greet the people and accept sacrifices. In the Ukraine until the beginning of this century, after the priest blessed the fields on St. George's Day (April 23) , they received an older blessing: Young lovers lay down together and rolled on the earth. Elsewhere in Russia, young women rolled the priest. In Germany, men and women reapers rolled together on the harvested fields.

Sometimes, in a complex that has fascinated generations of mythographers and ethnographers, death followed the sacred marriage. Campbell writes that the puberty rites of boys of the Marind-anim of New Guinea ended with a beautifully dressed, oiled and painted virgin being made to lie beneath a log platform, whereupon all the new initiates had sex with her before the assembled crowd. While the boy chosen as last lay with her, the ritualists jerked out the platform's supports. The logs fell on the pair, crushing them. The people retrieved the bodies, butchered and roasted them, and the crowd ate the young couple's flesh.

Hints of similar sacrifices ring through the myths of many cultures. Traditional Indian suttee can be read as an echo. Up till 1810 A. D, the queens of Zimbabwe ceremonially strangled their kings to death every four years; Nigerian kings were strangled after the queen became pregnant and a new royal offspring was guaranteed. In a group of other African states, the king was allowed a substitute, but a new king's ascension still required sacrifice: "The (holy fire)  was ritually rekindled by a designated pubescent boy and virgin, who were required to appear completely naked before the new king, the court, and the people, with their fire-sticks; the two sticks being known, respectively as the male (the twirling stick)  and the female (the base) . The two young people had to make the fire and then perform that other, symbolically analogous act, their first copulation; after which they were tossed into a prepared trench, while a shout went up to drown their cries, and quickly buried alive." (Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 168-169) 

In Patrae in Greece, the goddess Artemis demanded a sacrifice of the best-looking couple each year in a myth that hints at sacred marriage. The sacrifice only ended when an oracle was fulfilled that "an outside (xenos)  king came bearing an outsider (xenikos)  deity" — their king returned from a trip with an image of the new god Dionysos. (Richard Seaford, "Dionysos as Destroyer of the Household," in Masks of Dionysos, edited by Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone, p. 136) .

This many-spangled complex of fecundity intertwined with death provided deep and meaningful symbols for the societies that conceived it. The Egyptian ankh, the Indian symbols of yoni and lingam united, the divine sex act was understood as the foundation of all life, a symbol that works as well now as it did for its first artificers. And, if life can be sown when it falls, like the grain it can rise again. Even among Christian writers, the imagery of eternal life was the imagery of plants. Early Christians may have mocked the idea that "the Athenians, celebrating the Eleusinian Mysteries, show to the epoptai (second-time initiates)  the great, admirable, most perfect epoptic secret, in silence, a reaped ear of grain." (Burkert thus quotes Hippolytus in Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 91.)  But the Gospel of St John (12: 24)  echoes: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

Sacred marriage to affirm the sovreignity of the king

My vulva, the horn,

The Boat of Heaven,

Is full of eagerness like the young moon.

My untilled land lies fallow.
 

As for me, Inanna,

Who will plow my vulva?

Who will plow my high field?

Who will plow my wet ground?
 

(Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, from a reconstruction of "The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi," in Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, p. 37)
 

The great love-goddess Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, here calls for her sacred marriage, the all-important, central rite of the Sumerian and Akkadian year. This ritual, held at the New Year, the late-summer beginning of planting season, both renewed the land's fertility and married the king to the goddess and the land.

In the late High Neolithic, as pottery, stone carving, jewelry and weaving appeared, the Sumerians built the world's first temples. Three of these earliest temples had an oval-within-oval shape to suggest female genitalia, like the inmost shrine in the Indian temples of the mother-goddess. Later temples were the penile ziggurats, raised high above the mud flats. At the tops of these, the pivot of the universe, the king and a priestess of the rank nu gig — pure or spotless — performed the sacred marriage.

He was Dumuzi, the shepherd god. She was Inanna, the love goddess, identified with the morning and evening star, the planet Venus. Priestess and king, Inanna and Dumuzi, mounted to the top of the ziggurat to the sound of singing, cymbals, harps, the frenzied dancing and cheering of the populace, to the sound of poetry "enriched by a wealth of poetic euphemism and innuendo... all but completely lost in translation," writes Iris Furlong in "The Mythology of the Ancient Near East," in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, edited by Carolyne Larrington, p. 20. The sacred bed is strewn with Inanna's holy plants, designed with her symbol of the lion, made from the wood of the huluppu tree secured for her by the hero Gilgamesh. About it the king and priestess perform a love-chase, acting the rite as an allegorical masque, a script for which has been found: "spectacular cultic theater," Furlong writes.

After making love:

Inanna, seated on the royal throne, shines like daylight.

The king, like the sun, shines radiantly by her side.

He arranges abundance, lushness and plenty before her.

He assembles the people of Sumer.
 

("The Joy of Sumer: The Sacred Marriage Rite,"Inanna, p. 109)
 

Inanna's inner splendor rains down onto earth, and the king invites the people to join his happiness. At the end of the sacred marriage masque, "the principles implicit in the Sacred Marriage are reiterated in a concluding speech by the goddess Ninlil, Inanna's mother. She pledges Inanna's continuing love for the king whereby he will be ensured a long, successful and prosperous reign." (Furlong, p. 20)  These principles are that the ruler is responsible for agricultural prosperity, that all sexual reproduction on earth — vegetal, animal, human — depends on the sacred sex act and that the human-performed sacred marriage works as an enactment of the divine coupling.

This covenant between goddess and king was enacted for more than 1500 years. Baked clay seals show the sacred marriage before the middle of the third millenium B. C.; the first documentary evidence describes the ritual at the end of the second millenium B. C. The rite continued in the cities of Ur and Isin till the twentieth century B. C.

As time moved on and the goddess-focused early Sumerians were overcome by the more patriarchal Akkadians, and later the Babylonians, the focus of the ritual changed from fertility and goddess-worship to the affirmation of the king's control over the country. Inanna herself was renamed Ishtar. Dumuzi, too, went through changes, becoming the vegetation god Tammuz. In both incarnations, he was a dying god, taken by Inanna's sister Ereshkigal, the Lady of the Great Below, to spend six months underground each year.

Though he returned to make love to Inanna and encourage the fields to bloom, forever uneasy lay his marriage bed. On a seal from 2800 B. C., under the sacred marriage bed hides a scorpion "sacred to Inanna, which symbolized her power to destroy life as well as to give it." (The Myth of the Goddess, by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, p. 211)  The compelling symbol of the love-death continued; when the king died, much of the court went along. When Sir Leonard Woolley uncovered the tomb of the king and queen of Ur, from 2500 B. C., "' the king had at least three people with him in his chamber and 62 in the death-pit; the queen was content with some 25 in all.'" (Woolley quoted by Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 409) 

The myth of sacred marriage, the connection of the king to the goddess of the land through the ritual sexual act, with or without ritual death, held sway over the Mediterranean and farther for the next two to three millennia. The Old Testament Book of Esther — Esther being a cognate for Ishtar — reflects a hieros gamos between the king and a virgin priestess representative of the goddess, the Farrars note in The Witches' Goddess. In Egypt, Frazer reports, each July at the rising of the goddess-star Sirius, the god Amun-Ra went from the temple of Karnak to the goddess Mut (" Mother")  in Luxor a few miles up-stream, there to enact the ritual mating of Amun-Ra's priest with the selected Mut priestess, regarded as the concubine of the god. Ra was the god of the Pharaohs, each of whom was considered the son of Ra, and the Egyptians held that Amun-Ra in the king's guise impregnated the queen, the representative of the land. Artists carved and painted this divine sex in two of the oldest temples in Egypt, Deir el Bahari and Luxor.

The ancient Celts subscribed to a similar idea. In one Ulster ritual, the Farrars write, the king confirmed his sovereignty by having sex with a mare, representative of the horse-goddess. Immediately afterward, the mare was killed, carved to pieces and boiled. While attendants brought and shared with him scraps of horsemeat, the king bathed in and drank from the broth, gulping the liquid around him directly from the bath.

Mythographers Frazer and Graves see another ritual marriage of king or god to land in the Irish feast of Lughnasadh, or Lammas (which Graves derives from Lugh mass) , followed traditionally by the god Lugh's death, a pattern even better seen in the legends of his Welsh incarnation Llew Llaw Gyffes. A late medieval manuscript has Lug Schimaig inaugurate a great feast for Lug mac Ethlenn to celebrate his marriage of sovereignty, according to Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. In an eleventh century text, Lug dwells in a fairy palace with a crowned woman identified as the sovereignty of Ireland, Eriu. Lugh's bride, thus, is the land's sovereignty. Funk and Wagnall's notes that "nasad" seems related to words meaning "to give in marriage." Fittingly, Lughnasadh was a time of marriage rites, in honor of Lugh and his bride, especially the goddess's trial marriages, lasting a year and a day.

Funk and Wagnall's sees a connection between Lugh and the Irish goddess-queen Medhbh, inciter of the Cattle-Raid of Cuailgne. The Farrars call her perhaps the clearest example of the goddess of sovereignty, with whom the new king must mate before his recognition; Medhbh allowed no king to reign in Tara unless wedded to herself. To enact his sovereignty, the king inherited the role of Lugh, the sun god, while the shape-shifting hag Medhbh was the land of Ireland, transformed by the sun's caresses from winter to lush harvest.

This connection between king and land, this fructifying sacred marriage, continues in the later history of the British Isles. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus said of Hermuntrude, queen of Scotland, that "whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself." Conversely, King James I of England announced that "I am the husband and the whole island is my lawful wife."

Even today, the Farrars note, a sovereign must go through a ceremony in which he "ascends the throne." Early forms of the ritual make clear that the throne is the lap of the Goddess. The goddess Isis's name, in Egyptian Aset, means seat or throne. The formal seat of the ruler is still identified with power, in republics as well as monarchies; the White House stands for the president. If Bill Clinton had known that by definition he was having sex with a goddess, would he have needed Monica?

Sacred marriage as initiation in the mystery cults

Like any symbol, the holy sex act can be read on many levels. Mystery religions, such as those of the ancient Greeks, use symbolism to point to things that could not be named, secrets that even if spilled could not be understood until their receiver went through the mystery experience. For the mystery cults of the Greek and Roman world, the sacred marriage provided such a symbol.

How literal a sacred marriage mystery cults and parallel state rites portrayed is often far from clear. Earlier writers seemed fairly certain of actual sex: "The mimetic marriage of Crete, a bit of sympathetic magic common to many primitive peoples, because a cardinal mystic rite," writes Jane Harrison on p. 566 of Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903. Later on, writers became less sure. "Even long before (Sir Arthur Evans, archaeologist of Knossos) , historians of religion were fascinated by a number of apparently ancient configurations of myth connected with Crete: ... agrarian mysteries with a sacred marriage.... The iconography of the Cretan Palace Period, however, has provided virtually no confirmation of all these expectations," Walter Burkert says on p. 23 of Greek Religion, published in 1985.

And, again, about the mysteries of Eleusis: "We do know that the holy rite was enacted between the hierophant and the chief priestess of Demeter. Asterius (a Christian commentator) , speaking of the various procedures of initiation at Eleusis, asks — 'is there not there the descent into darkness and the holy congress of the hierophant and the priestess, of him alone and her alone?'" (Harrison, p. 550)  Burkert is less sure: "That sexual elements play a role in mystery initiations is virtually certain, but there is hardly any clear evidence; how in Eleusis, for example, conception and birth-giving was indicated remains obscure." (Greek Religion, pp. 108-109 )  Karl Kerényi argues that Asterius was not in fact describing the mysteries of Eleusis but mysteries based on those of Eleusis that had been exported to Alexandria, nearer Asterius's home.

I must admit that, scanning the books, I ended up wanting to scream, "Did they fuck?!" But that's not the point. The point of a mystery cult is that the mystery should work, the symbol be enacted or described in such a way that it transports the viewers. As Burkert writes in Ancient Mystery Cults, "Mystery festivals should be unforgettable events, casting their shadows over the whole of one's future life, creating experiences that transform existence." (p. 89) 

Many mystery cults did thus move their initiates. Of the Eleusinian Mysteries Athenian playwright Sophocles said, "Thrice-blessed are those mortals who have seen these rites and thus enter into Hades: for them alone there is life, for the others all is misery." (Greek Religion, p. 289)  The Roman Cicero said, "We have been given a reason not only to live in joy but also to die with better hope." (Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, p. 15)  The Athenian orator Isokrates said, "Those who take part of them possess better hopes in regard to the end of life and in regard to the whole aion." (ibid)  Plutarch describes the mystery experience, in an analogy for dying: "' And then some wonderful light comes to meet you, pure regions and meadows are there to greet you, with sounds and dances and solemn, sacred words and holy views; and there the initiate, perfect by now, set free and loose from all bondage, walks about, crowned with a wreath, celebrating the festival together with the other sacred and pure people, and he looks down on the uninitiated, unpurified crowd in this world in mud and fog beneath his feet. '" (Ancient Mystery Cults, pp. 91-92) 

That is initiation: the movement through light and darkness to a higher plane of spirit. To different ends, each mystery cult of the ancient world strove to effect that change. The chief mystery cults of the Greeks and Romans were those of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, the rites of Dionysos and the related Orphic sect, the cult of the Magna Mater, the mysteries of Samothrace and the mysteries of Mithra. Of these, the first four employed the symbol of sacred marriage. Certain other rituals of the Greek and Roman states made use of hieros gamos as well.

Crete: the mother of mysteries

The host of cultural themes introduced from Anatolia and Egypt notwithstanding, the most direct forebear of Greece was Crete.

Frazer and other early mythographers saw a pattern of sacred marriage in the Cretan monarchy, an eight-yearly cycle after which the king died, at the beginning and end of which a solstice or equinox fell upon a full or new moon. At the end of eight years, the king died, and the new king mounted the queen and throne. Baring and Cashford imagine them mating in costumes of a bull and cow. In later years, at end of the octennial the king probably renewed his powers by sacred sex with the queen, and a victim died — most likely a bull. The Greek myths of Crete are full of cattle, possibly inherited from the Egyptians; Cretan art reflects this bull-focus with bull-head rhytons, toy and carven bulls and the frescoes of a bull-dance, in which fair-skinned girls and ruddy boys vault over a running animal.

Poseidon, Greek god-ruler of the bull, shows up in Cretan Linear B writing. In the Mycenean Pylos of the same timeframe, he seems to have held a sacred marriage. Burkert notes a ceremony for Poseidon called the "' spreading of the bed' (reketororterijo, Lechestroterion) , at which oil for libations is used." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 44)  Even for the conservative Burkert "a sacred marriage festival springs to mind."

The Cretans made Zeus, too, a bull. Notorious in classical times for displaying a mountain as "the dead Zeus," the Cretans likewise celebrated near Knossos a sacred marriage between the god and his consort Hera. Sources say the rite imitated the nuptials of the gods. Burkert notes "this might, of course, be no more than an evening bridal procession followed by a nocturnal festival, pannychis." Or it could have been the full monty.

However, unlike the Greeks, the Cretans had no processions toting giant phalli; the Greeks inherited their phallophoriai from Egypt. Lewd pictures and statues were rare in Crete. Kerényi wonders whether this wasn't an artistic policy of restraint; he notes in Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life that occasionally artists sidestepped this policy, as in statuettes of mating couples from the cave-sanctuary of Inatos in south Crete. He further notes that in the main cave-temple of Eileithyia, the birth goddess, the central sanctuary held one tall, phallic stalagmite, polished to a gleam by centuries of worshipping hands: an implicit sacred marriage.

The Greeks placed on Crete the mythic sacred marriage of Demeter and her lover Iasion or Iasios, with whom she lay in a thrice-plowed field. In Hesiod's version, the pair rose smiling; it is only later that Zeus was said to strike down Demeter's lover with a lightning-bolt. Iasion was a hunter, whom Kerényi associates with another Cretan hunter, Zagreus, a double of Dionysos. By now we recognize that thrice-plowed field: here again we have the mother of grain lying with her king to ensure the earth's fertility. Demeter's lover Iasion is connected with Samothrace, thus pointing to the mysteries there and to pre-Greek customs connected with that wilder land.

In classical times, Crete claimed to be the cradle of the Greek mysteries. Diodoros of Sicily in the first century A. D. wrote that the islanders laid claim to originating the Eleusinian, the Orphic and the Samothracian mysteries. Furthermore, in Harrison's translation: "' In Crete, at Knossos, the custom from ancient times was that these rites should be communicated openly and to all, and things that among other peoples were communicated in secrecy, among the Cretans no one concealed from anyone who wished to know.'" (p. 566) 

What rites exactly Diodoros's Cretan informant had in mind, we do not know. Perhaps the mother-mystery was that of Zeus and Hera, perhaps that of Demeter and Zagreus-Dionysos. Looking at the later mysteries of the Greeks, either might work. And either might have included full-on sacred sex.

Sacred marriages in Greek cult

Zeus and Hera also held wedding rites in later years, according to the Greeks. Homer in the Iliad has Zeus and Hera unite atop Crete's Mount Ida, wrapped in a golden cloud from which rains shining drops. Other Greek myths place the union elsewhere, on Euboea or the Island of the Hesperides. Athenians celebrated Zeus and Hera's marriage toward the end of the winter in the Theogamia festival, from which rite we get the term hieros gamos, but all we learn of this ritual is that participants feasted sumptuously.

The two married also in the festivals of Plataea, the Little and Great Daedalas. Every few years at the former, ritualists dressed the images of Hera and Zeus as bride and groom and drew them down to the river bank, then returned them to place. Every 60 years, at the Great Daedala, the Plataeans hauled all 14 accumulated images, again in bridal dress, first to the river and then to the top of Mount Cithareon, where they were burned along with their wooden altar: a fiery love-death for wooden deity-dolls.

Other images of sacred marriage are scattered through Greek rites and tales. The Delphian sibyl — a freelance prophetess not to be confused with the Pythia at Delphi — called herself the bride of Apollo. Records hint at vestiges of such a relationship between the Pythia and Apollo as well. In Patara in Lycia, the priestess was said to make love to Apollo; shut up in the temple at night, she was filled by the god with prophecy. Aeschylus made his Cassandra a prophetess who lost the ability to convince men of her predictions when she refused to have sex with the god.

In Dorian Crete, Burkert records a type of homosexual sacred marriage in boys' initiation. A group of men's clubs, which met for meals in the men's hall (andreion) , summoned each year the current crop of pubescent boys to sweep, clean and perform menial services, between times sitting on the floor clad in simple robes. From this chorus of boys, each year a man would carry off a beautiful lad, as Zeus carried off Ganymede. For the chosen boy, this was considered an honor. The man warned the boy's family in advance, and relatives arranged a mock pursuit that ended in the andreion. These proceedings scandalized — and titillated — other Greeks.

The cult of Demeter

By far the most obvious allusions to, and perhaps full enactments of, sacred marriage in Greece occur in the cults and mysteries of Demeter and Dionysos, which prove remarkably interlinked. Indeed, the two could be called one great ritual corpus, peaking at Eleusis and in the traveling Bacchic mysteries of wine and ecstasy. Demeter and, more often, Persephone appear frequently in Dionysian ritual, and likewise Dionysos shows up in the rites of the blonde grain-goddess and her maiden daughter.

Demeter shared with Dionysos the festival of Haloa, held in secret in Eleusis on a midwinter night. Only women could attend. The name makes it the festival of the threshing floor, an odd feast for mid-winter; Harrison thinks the rite was transferred to a more Dionysian time when the wine-god became its co-sponsor. To the Haloa, the women brought imitation phalli and vulvae, at it traded indecent talk and ate cakes in the shape of genitals. Certain foods were banned: pomegranates, apples, domestic fowl, eggs, red sea-mullet, black-tail, crayfish, shark. Harrison says that the pomegranate was taboo as dead men's food, and the Orphics gave eggs to the dead. The other foods smell of love: apples a traditional love-fruit, fish from Aphrodite's ocean. All the ritual's symbols point to sex and fertility, if only in mimicry. Michael Jameson in "The Asexuality of Dionysos," in Masks of Dionysos, sees again the linkage of human sexual vigor and fertility to that of agriculture.

In another all-female festival, the three-day Thesmophoria in October, the women of Athens buried pigs in the earth for the lost Kore's sake, a ritual said to have been instituted by the mourning Demeter. Other Thesmophoriae were held elsewhere. The pigs represented the swine herded by Eubouleus, swallowed by the chasm at the same time as the Maiden; "the death marriage is recapitulated in the sacrifice." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 243)  The women in the rite also imitated Kore, who took the path to Hades for first time: entering the earth-cleft Kore did, with pigs as Kore did, eating pomegranate seeds as she did. The seeds that fell to the ground were left for the dead. To the Athenians the dead were the people of Demeter; burial in itself may have had implications of a mystic marriage, symbolism that appears elsewhere for Dionysos.

Accompanying the pigs of the current Thesmophoria, the women gave the earth models of phalli and snakes and real pine boughs with cones; the lot together form symbolic copulation, a type of sacred marriage, as Eva Keuls notes in The Reign of the Phallus. "Pigs" was Greek slang for female genitals. In addition to the group's sacrificing this year's pigs, three specially anointed women, who refrained from sex three days beforehand, baled up remains of the pigs of years past. This compost Athenian landholders mixed with next year's grain seeds. "The manipulation of the decomposed remains of piglets to achieve a good harvest is the clearest example in Greek religion of agrarian magic," Burkert writes.

So much for the dark, all-female rites of Demeter, marked by secrecy, special attention to pomegranates and the manipulation of fake genitals. Though equally secret, the mysteries of Eleusis admitted both sexes, and the genitals involved may have been real.

The mysteries of Eleusis

The mysteries at Eleusis celebrated the Two Goddesses, never named in the site's artifacts but widely acknowledged as grain-mother Demeter and her daughter, Kore, the Maiden, later Persephone, the bride of Hades. Ritualists performed these mysteries for perhaps 2000 years, beginning around 1500 B. C. and ending in the fifth century A. D. The central rites of Eleusis were held secret then and ever since, the silence enforced with laws that doomed to death anyone who revealed the sacred knowledge.

Our direct knowledge of the Eleusinian Mysteries thus comes from a mere handful of quotes, mostly from Christian sources bent on defamation; only Mesomedes, who sought to discuss Isis's rituals in terms of those of the Two Goddesses', could be considered friendly to Eleusis. Many of these ancient quotes seem to point to an act of sacred marriage, interleaved with other, more obscure acts. Mesomedes lists as elements of the mysteries the "marriage underground," "the birth of plants," "the desires of Aphrodite, the birth of the little child, the perfect, unspeakable fire" (Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 94). Another Christian commentator, Asterius, wrote "' Is there not there the descent into darkness and the holy congress of the hierophant and the priestess, of him alone and her alone?... Are not the torches extinguished and does not the vast and countless assemblage believe that in what is done by the two in the darkness is their salvation?'" (Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 550, 563) The late-Victorian Harrison also gives us the commentary of Psellus, not quoting him fully as apparently he's too obscene: "As in the rite of initiation love affairs are to take place, Aphrodite of the Sea is represented as uprising. Next there is the wedding rite for Kore. The initiated sing as an accompaniment.... Then also they enact the birth-pains of Deo (Demeter)." (p. 569)

The Christian Hippolytus quotes an unnamed Nassarene Gnostic that "the Athenians, celebrating the Eleusinian Mysteries, show to the epoptai (second-time initiates) the great, admirable, most perfect epoptic secret, in silence, a reaped ear of grain." (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 91.) The mysteries' Hierophant officiated at night "under the great fire," according to the Nassarene: "celebrating the great and ineffable secrets, he proclaims in a loud voice, 'The Mistress has given birth to a holy boy, Brimo has given birth to Brimos! that is, the Strong One to the Strong One.'" (Karl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, p. 92) A synthema, or password, of Eleusis, passed on by Bishop Clement of Alexandria, runs: "I fasted, I drank the kykeon (barley drink), I took out the kiste (covered basket), I worked and laid back into kalanthos (tall basket), and from there into the kiste." (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 94)

Though several of these quotes seem to indicate a hieros gamos, modern commentators agree we cannot know for sure what happened. Even the Christian writers never fully broke the secrecy of the sacred rites; they seem to have thrown out what scraps they could find to shock people, always aware that any initiate could call them on lies. With the Christians, we should consider the source. For example, when the Nassarene offered that the Hierophant "is made a eunuch by means of hemlock and has renounced all carnal generation" (Harrison, p. 549), he may have done so merely to make the mysteries sound disgusting. Commentators divide on whether this information is true; in The Golden Bough Sir George Frazer accepts it, but Kerényi doubts it, though he notes that the Hierophant was said in late antiquity to sing in a characteristically high voice.

Many other points are open to debate. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves reads in the synthema that a buskin was contained in the small basket, into which a phallus was placed, symbolizing coition. Kerényi agrees the kiste may have held one or more phalli, thus making particularly appropriate the fact that on the way to Eleusis the basket-carrier halted at a fig tree, figs symbolizing female genitalia. Burkert argues instead that the working with the kiste was to pound grain in a mortar.

Most modern writers do agree, however, that some kind of sacred marriage was performed at the Greater Mysteries, perhaps in dumb-show by the Hierophant and chief priestess of Demeter, perhaps in symbolic form. It's doubtful it was portrayed as a large drama, as sacred marriage was in Sumer in the second millenium B. C.; as Kerényi points out, "the shrine itself contained nothing resembling a stage, nor was there a second building resembling a theater." (Eleusis, p. 27) If there was dramatization, it was simple and used no extraordinary machines; along with the huge fire, perhaps initiates saw a set of tableaux. All existing information points to the idea that the mysteries' consummation and central act was the marriage of the Mother and the birth of her Son — Brimo,  whom Harrison names the Thessalian Kore, giving birth to Brimos.

From the initiates' point of view, the form of the sacred marriage was unimportant. The mystery, the initiation, the change of state was in their appreciation of the apotheosis of Kore, become Persephone, and of the sacred birth. Vase paintings speak of this in symbolic form, often sexually. On one, "a young god mounts the throne of love, upon which sits a divine maiden who awaits encouragement from Aphrodite on the other side. Here again Aphrodite's presence announces the recurring divine marriage and a new beginning of the holy story which leads each year to the Mystery rite." (Eleusis, p. 165) Kore is often represented half-naked, as Burkert notes; there were sexual overtones to "seeing Kore." Mythology of the complex surrounding the rites speaks not of Brimos but of Plutos, Wealth, Demeter's son by Iasion, wealth in the form of stored grain — a return of the theme of sacred marriage as prompting the land to bear.

The mysteries didn't work for everyone. A classical initiate wrote: "' The sacred actions, which were performed in the Mystery temple before the eyes of the initiate, were crude and meaningless in the extreme, and all those who had received the new kind of education regarded them as nothing but priestly deception and childish nonsense.'" (ibid, p. 105) But as many initiates' writings attested, for those who allowed the symbols to be meaningful the mysteries gave a joyful life and a hopeful path into death.

Dionysos, Demeter and Kore

Before would-be initiates could approach the September's Greater Mysteries in Eleusis, they had to attend February's Lesser Mysteries in Agrai. These were secret as well, but writers let slip they mirrored the travails of twice-born Dionysos. Other tantalizing hints link Dionysos to the mysteries of Eleusis: Agrai's Hierophant dressed as Dionysos, as did Eleusis's priest. Harrison calls the Lesser Mysteries those of Dionysos and Kore.

Why Dionysos? The main current of myth doesn't link him to the Two Goddesses — when Demeter seeks Kore, she pointedly refuses wine. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, she says for her to drink wine would be contrary to themis, the order of nature. But, as Kerényi writes, "We readily understand her words once we know the identity of the ravisher who had snatched her daughter off." (ibid, p. 40)

Kore is abducted on the Plain of Nysa — a plain with associations both to Hades and to Dionysos. Most Greeks considered Dionysos to have been born and reared on the mountain nearby, Kerényi writes; even those who thought him born on the island of Crete agreed the Nysan Nymphs reared him. In addition to Mount Nysa, however, a city in Asia Minor existed called Nysa, near which was celebrated the divine marriage of Plouton and Kore on "the Meadow." The poet of the Homeric Hymn has a meadow "gape" to receive Kore — the same word that formed an epithet of Dionysos, the "Gaping One."

Hades and Dionysos shared a cult place, shared terminology. As Herakleitos of Ephesus wrote, Hades was Dionysos.

Other factors support this co-identity. Iakchos, whose name marchers to Eleusis called, wore Dionysian huntsman's boots and a Dionysian name. Vase paintings draw the myths together: one shows Demeter, Kore and a hunting-booted youth on one side, on the other Dionysos with Ariadne and Aphrodite hovering above, emphasizing their connection. The Great Mysteries were performed at the wine harvest, and though the first rites forbade wine, the last night comprised the "pourings of plenty." An Orphic hymn says the lost Dionysos spent time with Persephone, according to Walter F. Otto in Dionysus: Myth and Cult. In a grove in Greek Pyraea, Harrison writes, women feasted Dionysos, Demeter and Kore in a place called the Bridal Chamber.

Thus, as Kore married death, she married ecstasy as well.

Dionysos's sacred marriages in Greek state religion

Dionysos was a marrying kind of god. And in many ways a good god to marry, for all his loose-living ways and propensity for getting people to dismember their relatives. Not only did he get his mother an apotheosis — such a good boy! — but unlike with the other Greek gods, myth does not call him a rapist; his relations were consensual in the main. His maenads chose their practice (if occasionally under threat). He made an honest woman of Ariadne — what other deity married a mortal partner?

Dionysos figures in the clearest form of sacred marriage in Greek state cult — that of the god to the ritual queen of Athens. This marriage occurred during the god's festival in February, the Anthesteria: feast of flowering, feast of the opening of the wine jars.

The Anthesteria, called the Older Dionysia, took place over a period of three days: Jar-opening, Wine Jugs and Pots, Pithogia, Choës and Chytroi, named for the basic implements for a meal of wine and porridge. It began at sunset with the opening of the jars of new wine, pressed the previous autumn, from vineyards around the city; ritualists honored the god with the first libations of the new wine.

The next day, Choës, combined various actions, some with ghostly and erotic overtones. The men held a drinking contest, but in silence, each at a separate table. Athenians considered Choës a day of defilement: citizens painted house doors with pitch and chewed buckthorn leaves while spectral guests, the Keres, filled the city; Burkert in Greek Religion calls these ancestral spirits. During the day, the virgin girls let the boys push them in swings, associating themselves with the tragic figure of Erigone.

In Attic myth, Erigone's father Ikarios was the first man Dionysos showed how to make wine. Ikarios brought the drink to his fellow villagers; convinced he was poisoning them, they killed him. His distraught daughter sought his body everywhere, finally finding it thrown down a well. In grief, she hanged herself.

But not before marrying Dionysos. The Roman poet Ovid has her become the god's wife by eating a grape, but in Aristotle's time a song of Erigone was penned by a famous erotic poet, as Kerényi notes in Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Just such a song the girls sang as they swung, in imitation of Erigone, who swung herself up to the grapes, in a rite that has roots as far back as ancient Crete and Sumer, judging by unearthed statuettes of swinging girls. Erigone's swinging combined death and love. The act of swinging in itself includes an erotic element, feelings pointing to sexual climax.

The Athenian girls' swinging to memorialize the sacred love-death formed a prelude for another sacred marriage, that of the Athenian queen.

Most of what we know of this rite comes from an orator's speech protesting the current queen, the basilinna. He argues that the role of the queen, traditionally a citizen and virgin at marriage, should not have been filled by an outlander of dubious reputation:

"This woman offered the unspeakable sacrifices for the city; she saw what as a non-Athenian she ought not to have seen. A woman such as this entered the room that no other of all the many Athenians enters save only the wife of the king. She administered the oath to the Venerable Ones who attend at the sacred acts, she was given to Dionysos as wife, she conducted for the city the ancestral practices towards the gods, many sacred, secret practices." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p 239.)

The union of queen and god took place just after sunset at the end of Choës in the Boukolion, a small house in the Agora, "the bull's stable," which was the ancient official residence of the king. In this cattle-house, Harrison saw a reflection of a bygone sacred marriage to a bull, reminiscent of Minoan Crete. In vase paintings of the rite, one shows the queen in procession escorted by satyrs, another Choës revelers standing with torches around Dionysos and Ariadne's couch. Other vases likewise portray these two, emphasizing a particular symbolism: As when Theseus gave his wife Ariadne to the god, as when in Aitolia in western Greece the first winemaker gave his wife to the god, so did the king in Athens.

What happened in the Athenian sacred marriage? Again, commentators differ. Some theorize the king appeared in the mask of the god; others imagine the queen mating with an cult statue from archaic times. Kerényi underlines the physical aspect of the connection: "Aristotle... spoke of the marriage in the Boukoleion in well-balanced words that were understood in his time... symmeixis and gamos. The second word stands for bodily union, a consummatio matrimonii, between the god and the queen." (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 309-310)

Kerényi draws parallels between this sacred marriage and two other enactments in religion: a ritual held every two years near Delphi called the Awakening of the Liknites and the myth of Isis reassembling and reanimating Osiris. The former was held by the Thyiades, female followers of Dionysus, on Mount Parnassos on the very day that the basilinna consummated her sacred marriage. The term "Liknites" indicates the god's being carried in a liknon, a winnow-shaped basket, used to carry babies both mortal and divine. In the three months leading up to the ritual, the Thyiades roamed icy Parnassos calling the god in terms in which an aroused lover might call her beloved. No source revealed what happened in the culminating Awakening, probably held in the Korykian Cave by torch-light, but Kerényi writes:

He who lay in the liknon... was treated by the women as an awakening child.... Here again, however, as in all the original mysteries of antiquity the "what" was a "holy open secret." Long before there were representations of the winnow with the phallus, the phallus was placed in the winnow. As the indestructible god's severed member it had lain in the winnow ever since the unrevealed symbolic actions by which the god was revived... became liknon ceremonies. (ibid, p. 225)

The Thyiades called for three months for their god to come, and finally the phallus awakened. As a classical quote says, "' the phallus was uprighted for Dionysos in accordance with a mystery.'" (ibid, p. 274.) The Phrygians too held an Awakening feast for Dionysos in the spring, marked by orgiastic rites.

Kerényi identifies this erotic Awakening with the end of Isis's search for Osiris. In the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, the goddess seeks the parts of her brother/husband god's dismembered body around the world; in just the same way, Diodoros has Demeter collect the parts of her son Dionysos. In a similar Orphic version, Athena preserves her brother Dionysos's heart in a basket — an organ Orphic texts indicate stands for the god's phallus. Kerényi sees this phallus as made of fig-wood, just like an object that Dionysos makes for ritual in Orphic myth, just like the object Kerényi says was found in the liknon. It's likely that at the end of their journeys, the Thyiades replaced the god's phallus, as Isis did for her husband. Having done so, the goddess mounted Osiris and revived him with divine intercourse. Just so may have the Thyiades and the basilinna mounted and revived their god.

The phallus has been a symbol for Dionysos from time immemorial. In Attica's rural Dionysia, bearers carried giant phalli, just as they did in during Athens's Great Dionysia. The huge phalli in procession echoed Dionysos's epithet Orthos, Erect; Dionysos was often identified with the erection-god Priapos. From other evidence, Kerényi deduces that the Athenians kept a cult-statue of Dionysos's erect phallus in the precinct of the Horai, the goddesses of the hours. Similarly, Kerényi considers that the Thebans kept an idol of Dionysos Kadmos (Dionysos Hermes) — that is, a phallic idol — in a building from the Mycenean Age. Later Roman reliefs of Dionysian rites showed the uncovering of a phallus. In a symbol redoubling phallus on phallus, the Orphics depicted a snake entwining the phallus-holding liknon. The mysteries of Sabazius (a double for Dionysos) em ployed related sexual symbolism: ceremonialists slid a metallic snake beneath the initiates' clothes — the so-called "God through the lap," a form of sexual union with the god.

When the queen of Athens uprighted the god's phallus and made love to him, the women of the city were with her in spirit. Before the consummation, the queen helped the 14 Venerable Ones, the Gerairai, representing the city's women, invoke the god at 14 altars with the help of the contents of 14 sacred, secret baskets. Paintings on ceremonial oil-pitchers found in tombs likewise show a woman mounting a chariot drawn by four horses, sometimes with a woman charioteer, the god Dionysos standing beside the chariot; Kerényi sees this "otherwise incomprehensible," "absurd and actually impossible situation" as representing Erigone's ascension to goddesshood, supported by the women of Athens, repeated in the queen's mating with the god. (ibid, pp. 160-161)

But while the queen made it with Dionysos, and the king led the men in their drinking contest, what did the wives of Athens do? Vase paintings indicate this might have been their night of fun: a night of ritual love-making, perhaps with strangers, perhaps with their own men.

Three weeks before the Anthesteria, Athens held the hieros gamos of Zeus and Hera at the Theogamia, in the same month as the Lenaia, in which wine-blessing rites occurred while the year's coldest weather cleared the vintage. Gamelion was the marriage-month; after the gods married, so could the people.

A cold month for marriages, as Kerényi points out. But it makes sense if you consider why you might require a human marriage before a sacred one. In some way unclear in surviving literature, young wives could take part in the Anthesteria in a different way than virgins. At the Feast of Flowers, Dionysos may have appeared as the women's higher husband, for whom earthly husbands prepared them.

Kerényi notes that the men did not necessarily return to their wives at the drinking contest's end; "Aristophanes... speaks of hetairai and dancing girls who joined the men in their drinking." (ibid, p. 312.) He sees the wives as getting a Dionysian visit from a stranger, calling as evidence a vase painted with a young woman following a silenus, answering the call of the god. Richard Seaford in "Dionysos as Destroyer of the Household" (in Masks of Dionysos, edited by Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone) points out that in the sacred marriage a publicly escorted stranger invaded the royal household to have sex with the queen. A parallel enactment in the streets would likewise involve strangers. Perhaps the sacred wine-contest invoked the men with the god, to go forth and spread the Dionysian flame.

In contrast, Eva Keuls in The Reign of the Phallus makes an interesting case that the sacred marriage of Dionysos served, in Attica at least, to promote domestic, conjugal sexuality. She notes a vase painting in which the basilinna awaits the god's arrival at a semi-opened door, a recurrent symbol for conjugal sex. Likewise, she describes a jug that shows a man and woman at home gently embracing, with ivy and grapevines surrounding them. On another vase, Ariadne pours wine for Dionysos in a domestic scene; on the obverse a peaceable maenad and a nonphallic satyr converse, whom Keuls sees as man and wife. Perhaps ritual play-acting on the Anthesteria spiced up Attic couples' relationships. In this version, the men came home to their own wives, but as satyrs to maenads. Vase paintings usually show maenads one-upping satyrs. Perhaps, this night, the women were in control.

Whether with husbands or strangers, Athenian wives might have done as others did worldwide to celebrate sacred marriages: paired up as the Goddess and God do. Specifically, they may have done as did the peoples of the Near East, spreading the sacred marriage into the populace in a rite in which the average housewife could become the goddess, as Athalya Brenner discusses in her article "The Hebrew God and His Female Complements" in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, edited by Carolyne Larrington. Such occasions seem to have been pretty fun, involving sexy dress-up and a party atmosphere. Perhaps the Athenians, who had taken on the Near Eastern rites of Adonis, took on this sacred marriage as well.

After the European Maypole dance, sacred orgies in the fields. After divine marriage in Sumer, sacred orgies in the streets. After the wine god's marriage in Athens — a knock at the door, a whisper, a man in Dionysian dress: someone known? someone new?

Dionysos's sacred marriages in his wandering cult

"The cult of Dionysos had a pronounced dual aspect," Keuls writes; "it provided rituals of mad hysteria in which sexual hostilities and pent-up frustration were released, and, at the same time, it promoted a resolution of antagonism in harmonious family life." (p. 373) The marriage of the basilinna to the god, the Athenian women participating in the spirit or the flesh, perhaps represented the latter. For the former, we have maenadism and the free-form religion of the god.

Most examples of Greek religion we've seen so far were state cults, with rituals in set places run by predetermined people. Often the priests and priestesses came of specific ancient families of the city, as at Eleusis and Delphi. However, another strain of Greek religion existed, in which wandering priests and priestesses formed private religious groups and performed individual initiations. Many of the Dionysos cults in which women went a-maenading were of this latter type.

Usually, in each locality, maenad celebrations happened at a set time — at the local Lenaia or Agrionia. Women formed a religious group, a thiasos, to celebrate the rites of the god. Some of these were semi-official, as with the Thyiades in Delphi. But, as Burkert writes in Greek Religion:

Alongside public Dionysiac festivals there emerge private Dionysos mysteries. These are esoteric, they take place at night; access is through an individual initiation, telete. As a symbolic Beyond, closed and mysterious, the Bacchic grotto or cave appears. The role of the sexes becomes less important; there are male as well as female mystai. In contrast to the mysteries of Demeter and the Great Gods, these mysteries are no longer bound to a fixed sanctuary with priesthoods linked in resident families; they make there appearance wherever adherents can be found. (p. 291)

For the wives of Greece, trapped in a form of purdah, these Dionysian mysteries offered a chance to step out and live a little. Though men became involved, sometimes to lead the throngs of Dionysos or perhaps to stand in for the god, even in later times women were the dominant sex.

Dionysos was known as a god of women, to the extent of being sneered at as womanish. His whole existence, Otto writes, was illuminated and crowned with the love of women. The poet Anacreon addresses him: "O Lord, whose playfellows are the mighty Eros, and the dark-eyed nymphs and violet Aphrodite!" (Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, p. 176) Myth calls the goddess of love his consort, by him the mother of the Charites. Many of his nymphs become his mistresses. Michael Jameson in "The Asexuality of Dionysos," in Masks of Dionysos, sees in the center of the violent myths involving tearing up animals and eating raw flesh a figure soft, gentle and quiet, a mediating figure important for women. The women of Elis in traditional songs called him with his daughters the Charites to make sure he came gently; on the flip side, an Argive myth has women turn into cows in heat for Dionysos.

For the mystically inclined, maenadism gave women a chance to touch the divine. "The bacchante pays no attention to the silenus who grabs at her in his lust," Otto quotes Plutarch; "the image of Dionysos, whom she loves, stands alive before her soul, and she sees him even though he is far away from her; for the glances of the bacchante sweep up high into the aether and yet are filled with the spirit of love." (ibid, p. 177) Her state of frenzy is blessed. She goes beyond the intoxication of wine, the characteristic maenad dance with thrown-back head of vase paintings, to the pure madness and ecstasy of a spirit wedding the god.

However, as Plato writes, "Many are the narthex-bearers, but few are the bakchoi" (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 34) — a narthex being a symbolic cane of Dionysos, bakchoi mystics of the cult. For non-mystic women, a Dionysiac rite might just be a rare night of dancing, drinking and ritual sex.

"It is possible that old forms of puberty initiation were still preserved in sexual initiation" as part of Dionysiac rituals, Burkert writes in Greek Religion, p. 292. As with women at the Anthesteria, "not virgins, but only women could be bakchoi, and married couples could be initiated together." Kerényi sees a whole range of gradations between a visionary higher connection and a nice evening fuck. Doubtlessly rites varied from group to group, but almost certainly they provided the god's traditional stimulants, wine and sexual excitement. "Private Dionysos celebrations may be orgies in the disreputable sense of the word," Burkert sniffs in Greek Religion, p. 167.

Thornton writes it was common for girls to get pregnant at festivals; the Macedonian king Alexander's mother was said to have conceived him during a mystery ritual. In one comedy, a householder, referring to his daughter's stealing out for Dionysian rites, addresses her: "' Happy he who shall be your possessor and embrace you so firmly at dawn that you fart like a weasel'" (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 338). Vase paintings show men being abducted by women with Dionysian wands, sileni mounting willing maenads, even a woman sporting a strap-on to dance for the god. At least one commentator believes sexual orgasm, "lesbian or heterosexual," to have been characteristic of most bacchantes. "Only the most accomplished women achieved a trance state without it." (Jameson, "The Asexuality of Dionysos," Masks of Dionysos, p. 61)

Without going that far, it seems clear that, in the Dionysian milieu, women frequently had sex with the god. Was this sacred marriage? In myth and literature, the leader of the Bacchic rout is Dionysos himself. Quite possibly the leading man or men were invoked with the god; through them, bacchantes made love to Dionysos.

Small wonder, then, that in myth the daughters of Minyas could not reconcile worship of Dionysos with their marriages. Maenadism seems to have subverted the convention of marriage, liberated women if only for a night. Hera, the goddess of marriage, was well-known to oppose Dionysos; she would not have ivy in her temples, and allegedly her priestesses could not talk to his. It was she who sent the Titans to murder Dionysos and who sent him mad. Keuls notes that the period of greatest maenad activity in Athens came at the same time as the greatest sexual polarity, the fifth century B. C.

But on Samos Hera accepted vine and ivy leaves as votive gifts, and on Lesbos the goddess shared a sanctuary with Dionysos. The maenadic rites provided a necessary outlet for the pent-up anger of Greek, particularly Athenian, wives. The maenads' brief flirtation with freedom ended by upholding the form of marriage and of society as a whole.

Sacred marriages to Dionysos as death

The mysteries of Dionysos, just as did the mysteries at Eleusis, had another rationale: to prepare their initiates for death. Especially in later centuries and for women, Dionysian vase paintings and sarcophagus reliefs portray death (that ultimate initiation) as a sacred marriage to the god.

Many paintings and reliefs depict the divine marriage of Dionysos and Ariadne, coupled with imagery linked to death. It's worth recalling that in some myths of Ariadne her marriage resulted in death, as Iasion's marriage to Demeter did in his death by thunderbolt. The sacred marriage of the basilinna, so often connected to Ariadne's, stands between two days of dismal rites, Burkert notes: one of defilement and one of sacrifices for the Chthonic Hermes. On Naxos there are two Ariadne festivals, one with joyous, orgiastic revelry, one full of mourning and lamentation. Tying Dionysos back to Eleusis, Ariadne can be read as a double of Persephone, whom Theseus attempted to abduct just as he did Ariadne. One myth said that Dionysos disappeared on the mountain in Naxos that he had earlier ascended with Ariadne. After that, Ariadne disappeared too.

Kerényi writes that vases from Roman times found in Southern Italy often show a similar departure of the youthful dead, especially women, from the city to Dionysian nuptials. On one such vase, Eros throws a woman a ball that rolls past the boundary-line of her city. On the vase's other side, another woman with a grave face holds out a mirror and a festive ribbon to the bride-to-be; the profferer's sorrow shows this is no ordinary marriage. The bride likewise hesitates; she would prefer not to go. Another woman washes her hair in the presence of two nude youths; symbolism makes it clear that she is not a hetaera but that these are Dionysian youths come to escort her, probably to an afterlife. On an amphora rare because it contains a continuous wrap-around picture, an image of a sad, draped woman is followed by a picture of Dionysos, nude and wreathed, awaiting her on a couch. Beside him, the bacchante unveils herself for her marriage to the god.

In many funerary images, the mystery of death appears as a step toward ecstatic life in a divine marriage. As Kerényi writes, a man's personal identification as Dionysos and a woman's as a bride of the god enabled the dying and their families to overcome the terrors of death.

Roman cults of Dionysos

As the vases from southern Italy show, the Romans continued the cult of Dionysos, embroidering it and changing it to suit their particular needs. Another relic from this cult is an inscription on the base of a statue erected for a Dionysian priestess, Agripinilla, by her thiasos of 500 people. This monument lists the initiates' titles, including a woman designated the phallophoros, the phallus-bearer, and a man called the heros — possibly the one into whom the god was invoked.

Perhaps the most important information left to us about the Roman rites is the frescoes of the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii. In these frescoes, which decorate a large room adjoining a smaller one, a stately woman called by scholars a matrona or domina guides the actions shown. Her role probably resembled that of the Athenian basilinna in that she ran the ritual, but it is not she but a younger woman, perhaps a woman being initiated, who decks herself as a bride. The domina watches, and the bride in turn watches a pregnant woman, possibly a symbol of the bride's later psychic or actual pregnancy with or from the god. Ritualists also prepare a boy, possibly another initiate. In a later panel, a female devotee receives a flogging from the goddess Aidos (Shame). Over the initiate, cymbals are struck; a companion holds out a thyrsus, a pine-cone-tipped Dionysian wand, for the woman to take up when her purification is done. The well-chastened initiate next steps out in a dance, unveiling herself. The central figure of the frescoes appears next, a woman enthroned, perhaps the domina herself — the painting is badly marred and cannot be read. Kerényi calls this figure the god's mother and the god's bride.

Kerényi interprets all these ritual actions as preparations for the scene that took place in the smaller adjoining room — ritual marriage to the god. Within this room, the frescoes are all of Dionysian revelry, the last showing the domina herself, looking slightly surprised. What has surprised her? Did she become a bride again? Did she merely witness the marriage that fulfilled the mysteries? The frescoes are too discreet to tell.

Other images support the concept that a sacred marriage was performed, perhaps in tandem with the initiation of a young boy. Two Roman terra cotta reliefs show the phallus in the liknon being shown to female initiates, but in contrast being placed on male initiates' heads while they keep their eyes closed. A Roman sarcophagus displays a satyr beating a boy as if to punish him, and elsewhere an initiate in hunting boots, with a half-naked maenad lovingly awaiting him. On another sarcophagus, one scene shows attendants dressing a young boy as the god, another two girls serving two nude youths cakes; a separating curtain iconographically indicates sex will occur. Stucco reliefs at a house excavated near the Villa Farnesina show a young boy, head completely covered, facing a silenus, a male initiator who is fussing with a liknon he could be either opening or closing. An ointment jar shows a similar young boy carrying a covered liknon on his veiled head to a matronly female initiator.

If I follow these images properly, the Roman rituals seem to have two purposes: a sacred marriage as initiation for women, and phallus-bearing as initiation for young boys and men. All three rites probably involved beatings for purification. The females are shown the phallus; the males cover their eyes and carry the phallus. Young boys probably did not participate in sacred marriage but, after a ritual in which initiators took on the role of Titans or Kouretes, were identified with the child Dionysos. Young men perhaps took on the role of the adult god in sacred sex.

Dionysos and homosexual sacred sex

The licentious sacred sex of Dionysiac rites could lead to disastrous consequences. Burkert writes in Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 105, of Livy's testimony about the Bacchanalia of 186 B. C: "With as much explicitness as Augustan prudery would allow, he says that the initiands suffered homosexual rape." In the court case surrounding this scandal, Roman officials apparently uncovered a ring of Dionysian ritual abuse, in which women sought men of no more than 20, perhaps mainly for their own satisfaction but also for that of male friends. In the specific case, a mother proffered her young son willingly; only his beloved protested.

The bacchanalia were then ruthlessly repressed. But they reflowered, given state legitimacy again by Julius Caesar, which seems an unlikely end if the cult were only about strange sex or abuse. (There was plenty of that going on in Rome without the guise of ritual.) However, it does seem possible that another facet of Dionysian sex was a sacred marriage between the god and his male devotees.

A myth from the ancient Dionysian site of Lerna supports this idea. In this myth, Dionysos asked Prosymnos or Polymnos — both names symbolize a sacred phallus, according to Kerényi — to show him the way to the underworld so he could retrieve his mother. In return, Prosymnos insisted he be allowed to have anal sex with Dionysos, to which Dionysos agreed. Prosymnos, however, died before the god's return; his mourners set up for Prosymnos a phallic monument. Dionysos, still grateful on his return from death, "performed his act of subservience by sitting down on the phallus." (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 311)

So too, perhaps, did his devotees, either with real phalli or their symbolic equivalents. "One might be tempted to make some associations with the curious fact that markedly androgynous representations of Eros become quite prominent in late Apulian vase painting, toward 300 B. C," Burkert writes in Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 105. Quite possibly, too, for every young man who protested his use during the bacchanalia, others were willing to become the "bride" of the god, or to play the god sexually for male as well as female devotees. Perhaps, too, there is some connection here to the young Athenian men who ritually greeted the god dressed as women.

But this theme of feminization might instead connect to Dionysos's eunuch aspect. If a main symbol of Dionysos is the detached phallus, what happens to the god once the phallus is gone? In the mysteries of Samothrace, marked by huge bronze statues of Hermes with upraised phalli, said to be in that condition from beholding Persephone — an allusion perhaps to yet another sacred marriage — the god's murderers carried off his male organ from northern Greece to Italy. "For this reason," Clement says, "certain persons, not inappropriately, equate Dionysos with Attis, because he too was separated from his reproductive organ." (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 277)

Who's this Attis dude?  Other Roman cults involving sacred marriage

No rites filled the Victorians with such horror as the mysteries of Cybele, the Magna Mater, exported in fulfillment of an oracle from Phrygia to Rome. Horror writer H. P. Lovecraft uses the Magna Mater to make readers shudder in several stories.

In her rites, ecstatic ritualists identified with the goddess's lover Attis, killed and emasculated by a hermaphroditic monster, an emanation of the goddess herself. Filled with frenzy, devotees took knives to themselves while on parade, throwing their severed balls into the houses of people they passed, who were then expected to nurse the ritualists back to health. Not everyone who snipped and tossed was happy the next morning — the Roman poet Catullus wrote an ode about a friend who was quite beside himself.

These, then, are the most notorious rites of the Magna Mater. Less well-known are records of sacred marriage in her cult. From late antiquity, a synthema comes down: "' I ate from the tympanon, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the composite vessel (kernos), I slipped under the bed curtain (pastos).'" (Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 98) The term pastos indicates the curtain of a bridal bed. A hint of sacred marriage, but that mystery was never revealed.

The mysteries of Samothrace, which lasted into Roman times, deserve a mention; we already saluted Hermes, who stood at the doorway of the mystery building and greeted Persephone with upraised phallus. These mysteries were performed in a non-Greek language — which, exactly, has never been determined — and had special gods who could not be named, whom one commentator makes parallel to Demeter, Persephone and Hades. The mysteries' avowed reason was to protect seafarers from drowning; initiates wore a purple sash and may have taken a ritual bath to imitate Odysseus, to whom the goddess Leukothea gave a magickal veil to prevent harm from the sea. A myth associated with Samothrace was that of the lost Harmonia, who may have been sought as was the abducted Kore. Harmonia's brother "Eetioin is identified with Iasion, who mated with Demeter and was killed by the lightning of Zeus; the sacred marriage with fatal consequences recalls Ishtar and (Magna Mater) mythology and may be indicative of unspeakable sacrifice." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 284) But again, nothing is known for certain.

Throughout Roman myth and practice, as elsewhere in the ancient world, sacred marriage lies scattered and spangled. As Apuleius celebrates in The Golden Ass, Isis became one of the main mystery goddesses of ancient Rome. Burkert writes of the cult of Isis:

The very prominence of sexual abstinence in the preparation for the Isis ceremonies draws attention to a center that is veiled. A priest of Isis from Prusa, in a recently published epigram, is praised for having arranged "the bed, covered with linen, which is unspeakable for the profane": the word used for bed, demnion, does not suggest a dining couch. An "unspeakable" ritual of sacred marriage seems to emerge; its correspondences in the Isis-Osiris myth are well-known. (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 107)

In Roman state cult, each Vestal Virgin, one of six virginal attendants to the goddess Vesta's sacred flame, dressed as a bride to ascend her throne. After she took her vow, the Pontifex Maximus, or chief priest, embraced her and called her his beloved, and the two symbolically became man and wife. Graves sees this as a relic of early Vestals' coupling in a sacred marriage with the Roman king's attendants; the resulting children became heirs to the throne. Frazer says the ancient King and Queen of Rome may have masqueraded as a god and goddess at their marriage. Every Roman bride customarily gave up her virginity to the fertility god Mutunus Tutunus in a form of sacred marriage; the Roman writer Lactantius said, "' Brides seat themselves on this god's genital member in order to make the first offering of their virginity to the god.'" (Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, p. 109)

Frazer, of course, based his whole monumental Golden Bough on his researches about the Roman King of the Wood, who patrolled the grove of Diana at Nemi. The king had to range constantly; his fate was to be killed by the next king, a succession by sword that lasted till imperial times. He guarded in particular one tree, which Frazer said represented the goddess and which he embraced as his wife. In the legend of the birth-goddess of Nemi, Egeria, and her husband Numa, the sacred grove that the king patrolled provided the site for their union. Frazer wistfully notes that this union may have been celebrated annually in the grove where the King of Wood wedded Diana. "But no ancient writer mentions that this was done," Frazer says (p. 164), and our knowledge of the rite of tree-marriage to Diana is scanty.

The ancients preserved their mysteries well. Even if we had more comprehensive accounts, we could never really know what it was to experience the mysteries. For that, we would have had to have been there, married the goddess or the god, restored fertility to the land, asserted our rule over the world.

Glittering hints tease us. What we know of the mysteries of Demeter and Kore and of Dionysos seem to draw the two cults together into an ancient pattern: the Mother Goddess and her Lover-Son. Earlier we saw Dionysos is he who takes Kore into death. He also returns his mother Semele to life, renaming her Thyone, a name meaning maenad; myth and vase paintings connect Semele to Ariadne and Persephone. Indeed, Dionysos has Zeus make Semele a goddess. In other myths, Dionysos is Zeus; Kerényi notes that myths associated with Crete make the two identical, and Dionysos's double Hades is called a subterranean Zeus. Rhea is Zeus's mother, Dionysos's foster-mother; the Titans or Kouretes dance with sword-play about both gods. Orphic and other myths make Rhea identical with Demeter, whom Eleusinian images make identical with Persephone.

The mother is the daughter; the son is the father. Rhea mates with Zeus, both in the form of snakes. A snake coils about the secret basket of the mysteries. I think too of the tiny ivory figurine, likely of Cretan make, found in Mycenae and now in the National Museum of Athens, of two goddesses embracing, with a young god climbing onto their laps. "According to prevalent opinion, it represents Demeter, Persephone and Iacchus, i.e. the god who led the procession of initiates at the Eleusinian Mysteries" — that is, Dionysos. (Basil Petrakos, National Museum: Sculpture, Bronzes, Vases, p. 36.) The Two Goddesses and the God, mother, daughter and son-lover, make their way from ancient Crete to the Greek mysteries. In the first century A. D., Diodoros of Sicily's Cretan informant told him the Eleusinian, the Orphic and the Samothracian mysteries all originated in Crete, where they were communicated openly to all. In the open air in Crete, or hidden in night mysteries in Greece, the Goddesses and the God strive to give initiation to all.

One theme seems clear. Dionysos himself rose from the dead, and he led his wife and mother to heaven. The awful queen of the mysteries, Persephone, his wife, also rose again. In mysteries, the ancients learned to identify with these dying and rising deities, to face death and hope to return. Myths, vase paintings and the hints left us indicate the ritual that produced that identification may well have been a sacred marriage.

Clearly the rites of sacred marriage were central to ancient paganism. From an image of sacred fertility, to an image of sacred kingship, to an image of initiation, they worked on many levels, perhaps as far back as the Neolithic on all three at once.

But we've lost the rites that took the ancients thousands of years to hone. We trip haltingly behind our forebears, attempting to reconstruct the ineffable. Perhaps, with care and time, we latter-day pagans can create as effective rites of light and darkness, of sparkling meadows beneath an unearthly sun, of caverns lit by sepulchral flame, and through these be reborn as once were people of every land. We have one of the essential pieces: divine sex.

(originally published in 1999 in Widdershins volume 5, issues 3 and 4).