Anthesteria - Tumblr Posts
Kantharos showing Dionysos on the throne. (Apulian, about 335–325 B.C; now in the Boston Museum…)
Today 21 February, ΔΙΟΣ (Thursday), Ἑνδεκάτη/ Πρώτη Μεσοῦντος, XI day From today’s sunset: eleventh day of Anthesterion. Beginning of the Anthesteria- I day: Pithoigia, opening of the pithoi, libations to Dionysos and tasting of the new wine. “Near the sanctuary of Dionysos en Limnais, the Athenians used to mix, taking it from the barrels, the new wine, which they have carried there, for the God and to taste it themselves. From this, Dionysos was called Limnaios, because the sweet wine, having been mixed with water, was drunk for the first time as a mixture. Because of this, the sources were called Nymphs and nurses of Dionysos…satisfied with the mixture, they sang hymns to Dionysos, danced and invoked Him, calling Him Flowery, Dithyrambos, Reveller, Bromios…” (Phanodemus, FGrHist 325 fr. 12) “Among the festivals of the Homeland, there are the Pithoigia, during which it is not lawful for a servant or salaried to refrain from enjoying wine, but, making sacrificial rites, it is customary that all participate in the gift of Dionysos.” Schol. Erga, 368 “Also the eleventh and twelfth are both excellent, alike for shearing sheep and for reaping the kindly fruits..” “Of the numbers after the decade, the eleventh refers to the first element of the monad. Thus, (Hesiod) has praised this one too, as it has analogies with that (the monad), inviting to the shearing of the sheeps and to the reaping of the fruits of the earth…Both aim to take care of the body, the one to the food, the other to protection. They are typical of the eleventh day since this is the beginning of the third pentad, the one that most enhances the light of the moon…” Schol. Erga, 774-776
(via Happy Anthesteria by *A-gnosis on deviantART)
First day of Anthesteria - Pithoigia, the Opening of the Jars and Bottles
Anthesteria -- the Festival of Flowers, the Feast of the Dead. Welcome, Keres...
Today 22 February, ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗΣ (Friday), Δωδεκάτη/ Δευτέρα Μεσοῦντος/ Δυοκαιδεκάτη, XII day From today’s sunset: twelfth day of Anthesterion. Anthesteria, II day: Choes, ‘Pitchers’. “It was a particular festival amongst Athenians, celebrated on the twelfth of month Anthesterion. But Apollodorus says that Anthesteria is the name for the festival as a whole, celebrated in honour of Dionysos, with its component parts Pithoigia, Choes, Chytroi.” Suda s.v. Χόες “At first, no host would willingly take me (Orestes) in, as one hated by the Gods; then some who felt shame offered me a table apart, as a guest, themselves being under the same roof, and in silence they kept me from speaking, so that I might be apart from them in food and drink, and into each private cup they poured an equal measure of wine and had their delight. And I did not think it right to blame my hosts, but I grieved in silence…I hear that my misfortunes have become a festival at Athens, and they still hold this custom and the people of Pallas honor the cup that belongs to the Feast of Pitchers.” Eur. Iph. Taur. 948 Drinking contest, private and public: “According to our customs, at the trumpet signal drink your pitchers; whoever drains his first will win Ktesiphon’s wineskin.” For in the Pitchers there was a contest concerning who could drain his pitcher first, and the winner was crowned with a wreath of leaves and got a skin of wine. At a trumpet signal they would drink. Ktesiphon was ridiculed for being fat and paunchy. An inflated wineskin was set forth in the festival of the Pitchers, on which those drinking in the competition would stand. The first one to finish his drink won, and got a wineskin.” Aristophanes, Acharnians 1000-2 & scholia Miarà hemera- all the Temples are closed. Apotropaic rituals: “‘in the Choes in the month of Anthesterion, in which (i.e. during the Choes) they believed that the spirits of the dead rose up again. From early morning they used to chew rhamnos and anointed their doors with pitch.’ (Phanod. FGrH 325 F 11; Poll. 8.141) Procession: “to go on board the sacred trireme. For in the month Anthesterion a trireme in full sail is brought in procession to the agora, and the priest of Dionysos, like a pilot, steers it as it comes from the sea, loosing its cables.” Phil. Lives of the Sophists, 25 Sacred Marriage of Dionysos and the Queen: “And this woman offered on the City’s behalf the sacrifices which none may name, and saw what it was not fitting for her to see, being an alien; and despite her character she entered where no other of the whole host of the Athenians enters save the wife of the King Archon only; and she administered the oath to the venerable priestesses who preside over the sacrifices, and was given as bride to Dionysus; and she conducted on the city’s behalf the rites which our fathers handed down for the service of the Gods, rites many and solemn and not to be named…This law they wrote on a pillar of stone, and set it up in the sanctuary of Dionysos by the altar in Limnae. Thus the people testified to their own piety toward the God, and left it as a deposit for future generations, showing what type of woman we demand that she shall be who is to be given in marriage to the God, and is to perform the sacrifices. For this reason they set it up in the most ancient and most sacred sanctuary of Dionysos in Limnae, in order that few only might have knowledge of the inscription; for once only in each year is the sanctuary opened, on the twelfth day of the month Anthesterion. These sacred and holy rites for the celebration of which your Ancestors provided so well and so magnificently, it is your duty, men of Athens, to maintain with devotion, and likewise to punish those who insolently defy your laws and have been guilty of shameless impiety toward the Gods…I wish now to call before you the sacred herald who waits upon the wife of the King Archon, when she administers the oath to the venerable priestesses as they carry their baskets in front of the altar before they touch the victims, in order that you may hear the oath and the words that are pronounced, at least as far as it is permitted you to hear them; and that you may understand how august and holy and ancient the rites are. “Oath of the Venerable Priestesses” I live a holy life and am pure and unstained by all else that pollutes and by commerce with man, and I will celebrate the feast of the Theoinia and the Iobacchic feast in honor of Dionysus in accordance with custom and at the appointed times.” (Dem. 59 Neaera 73-78) (Pompe holds a wreath and looks toward Dionysos, seated and wearing a diadem. The winged Eros adjusts His sandals as though preparing to depart. The gilt openwork basket on the ground is the type used in religious processions to carry sacrificial implements to the place of sacrifice. This procession must be part of an Athenian festival in honor of Dionysos, probably the Anthesteria, which culminated in the Sacred Marriage of the God to the wife of the Archon Basileus. From Attica, mid-4th century B.C; now in the Metropolitan Museum…)
Greek Sarcophagus with Dionysus and Ariadne.
Walters Art Museum
Baltimore, MD
Ariadne, mistress of the labyrinth, long linked to the serpent mother goddess. Pregnant, abandoned by Theseus after helping him slay her brother the Minotaur (Theseus ran off with her sister Phaedra, by the way, what a cock), she married the god Dionysus.
Because after you’ve helped murder your brother for love of a man who then nicks off leaving you pregnant on some island so he can bone your sister what better to do than marry the god of booze.
Seriously though Ariadne you are one of the most interesting mythological women.
Anthesteria's second day: Khoes, the Day of Pitchers, Feast of Swinging
First she offered him her cup, and he filled it with his divine wine. Then He returned to Her the crown of His love, and the two ascended together into the heavens where Her crown is still seen among the stars...
Anthesteria started yesterday with a festival of flowers, a procession from the waters to the city, a Masked Man adored by wild women and satyrs and other, stranger folk. But today... today it starts to get weird.
It could be the drinking, yes. The pithoi jars have been opened, the wine has been mixed and blessed, there is no shortage. Rampant and massive public drunkenness rules the streets, wine flows like water. Drinking contests are set up, men and women celebrate the swinging rites of Aiôra and set up swings to play upon like children, hanging dolls and masks also to swing from the trees like Erigone of old.
But what really makes the day of Khoes weird... are the ghosts.
Not the beloved personal dead whose faces we know and love or fear, but the public dead are these ghosts, our Keres. The spirits of those nameless crowds of people whose lives moved here before ours, whose stories played out and ended, whose pasts fill our community with untold tales and unwhispered names. They move through us every day, but on this day, maybe with the help of the wine, we FEEL them. We hear the soundless echoes of their footfalls, their shouting, their laughter, their quiet murmuring talk. We feel full to bursting with all those who lived in our home, our neighborhood, those who walked our streets, those who gathered in the parks we go to.
And to make it just that little bit weirder, along with the ghosts and the dry dusty whispers of death and time, we feel the stirrings of a powerful sexual tide moving through us, individually and communally. It binds us generally if not specifically -- each of us has lusted, hungered, longed for touch and heat and passion and release. Even the ghosts, now cold and untouchable. The serpent stirs in us, the hot fluids rise, the erotic awareness of bud and flower and stem and root fill every glance at the sacred flowerbeds. We have drunk the wine, we have felt the wildness rise in us. We want to dance, and laugh, and kiss, and caress, and fuck, and explode.
Like a fever, it spreads, then reaches a peak as the evening slides languorously into night. In the most sacred places, the most innermost of temples, the greatest rite is performed, the sacred marriage between the God and the Basalinna, the Sacred Queen. A man and a woman writhe together and become one -- a priest and priestess -- a maenad and a satyr -- Dionysus and Ariadne. And the city shudders in the night with prismatic visions of wine-saturated paradise and release.
Liberation.
Eleleu! Eleleu! Iou! Iou! Hail and welcome the Reveller.
The people sought help from Delphi, and Apollon informed them that they needed to pay respects to Erigone and her father. So they gave them a proper burial and instituted the festival of Aiora in their honor. In return, Dionysos stopped the girls from killing themselves and made the land fruitful once more. At the Aiora young girls would hang ribbons, little cups, and dolls from the branches of trees and let themselves be pushed on a swing.
source: Anthesteria for the lonely soul by Sannion
Anthesteria's third and final day: Khutroi, Day of Pots, Festival of Keres
Thuraze, Keres! Oukeni Anthesteria!
There is still some remaining celebration of the Aiora rites of swinging on Khutroi. Girls hanging ribbons and masks from trees, adults drunkenly or at least merrily playing on swings, small rites of purification by air and light-hearted play. Mostly, these rites have already been done on Khoes, the second day, which is set aside largely for them and is called the Day of Swinging. But if there are any celebrating Anthesteria who have not yet celebrated the Aiora, then Khutroi is the last day for it. Likewise, if the Heiros Gamos was not celebrated on Khoes, then it must be done on Khutroi.
But aside from those remnants of swinging and sacred union, the final day of Anthesteria is mostly devoted to the cult of the public dead, those faceless civic ghosts known as Keres -- who rose from the Underworld with Dionysus and the pithoi jars as Anthesteria began, and who were honored yesterday on Khoes, the second day. Until now, the Keres were given the run of the city for Anthesteria; they were stepped aside for, given space, respected, welcomed. But now is the time to regain our homes, our streets, the places of the living. While still respecting the ghosts of the public dead, now is the time to resurrect our world from death into life.
And so the final act of honoring the Keres is to set out pots with offerings prepared just for them -- vegetables, beans, grains, and seeds, foods that can on this day tempt the city's dead and draw them out of the homes they wander through. Homes they once occupied or visited during their lives, places that were once theirs but now belong to the living. Then with the dead thus drawn and appeased on the doorstep, the homes are warded against the Keres with talismans and small rites. Celebrants shout, "Out the doors, you Keres! It is no longer Anthesteria!" And with the banishment of the ghosts, Hermes and Hekate come to guide the Keres back to the Underworld, and the rooms and homes and parks are renewed to the living, refreshed from the dust of dead memories and times past.
Many celebrants feast after this, eating sweet foods made with honey and wine, foods that are not allowed for the dead, foods made separately from the offerings in the Khutroi pots. The dithyrambs of Dionysus are sung, and songs to Hermes and Hekate as well. The newly-opened wine is drunk again, still, though perhaps not with as much abandon as the nights before. The buds are still on the trees, ready to flower. The ribbons flow in the night breezes. The vines are being pruned a second time by the Maenads and Bacchantes, continuing the cycle of life and death and change. The winter is passing, the shadow passing from our hearts, the cold leaving our bones. We are ready for what comes next.
DARK DRUNKENNESS: THE TALE OF ERIGONE
The reason Khoes is sometimes referred to as the Day of Swings is a story that goes as follows:
When Dionysos first came to Athens to give wine to the people, He was taken in by a kind farmed called Ikarios. In some versions of the tale, Dionysos also fell in love with Ikarios’s daughter Erigone, and many parallels have been drawn between Erigone and Ariadne. In return for their hospitality, Dionysos taught Ikarios to make wine.
Ikarios held a big party, inviting all his friends and neighbors. He bought out the wine which Dionysos had taught him to make, and at first everyone loved the new drink. But when they began to get drunk and started to fall down, they became fearful and suspicious, and thought that Ikarios had poisoned them -- so they killed him and stuffed his body in a well. When Erigone found her father’s body, she was so grief-stricken that she hanged herself on a nearby tree.
As punishment, Dionysos cursed Athens and the surrounding land of Attica with barrenness, and struck down the daughters of the people with a madness that caused the young women to hang themselves -- just like Erigone, whose death their fathers had caused.
The Athenians sent word to the Temple of Delphi, asking the Oracle for help, to know which God they had wronged. The Pythia told the people of Attica that they needed to make amends for the death of Erigone and her father. Ikarios and Erigone were finally given a proper burial, and a festival, the Aiora, was instituted. The madness was lifted, and the land became fruitful again.
During the Aiora, the young girls of the city would hang ribbons, cups and dolls from trees and let the boys push them on a swing. It can be celebrated on either Khoes or Khutroi, either day works.
----- --- -- - The external tragedy of drunkenness. This is a deep and subtle and complex tale, with many layers and moving parts. It is the story of paranoia, fear and suspicion. Of drunken rage and confused impulsive violence. It tells of those who unfairly fear alcohol and inebriation, as well as those who fall under the darker influences of the same. It is a story of a death, and of a suicide, and of the ripple effects that suicides can have in a community, like a curse. And finally, it is the story of how proper reverence, the right attitudes of respect and release, can lift even the heaviest burdens, how merriment and light-heartedness and reverent inebriation can restore the balance and keep dark cycles at bay.
I think of this tale every time someone rails primly against drinking, calls it an evil, blames it for horrible evil things. For it is not the drinking that creates or causes violence and brutality and dark behavior, any more than an unlocked door causes burglary, or a short skirt causes rape. All drinking does is to open the doors to rooms in the self that have long been locked -- it brings to the surface and the light that which has lain sunken in the dark watery depths for so long. In one who has no hidden unresolved monsters, drinking brigs out laughter, and love, and daring, and silliness, and relaxation. The only ones who need fear the liberation of Dionysus are those who have chained their monsters without mastering them.
I think of Erigone's tragedy when a death or a suicide rends the peace of a community, its savage echoes tearing and ripping the fabric of so many lives outward in extending circles. When people seem unable to escape the despair and confusion and pain caused by the tragedy and its echoes, and go on dully repeating them ritually, as if condemned. Holding on. Locked in to the dull pain of their loss, their fracture, their downward spiral. No hope of redemption.
But Dionysos is the Liberator. The savior. The redeeming one. He saved the helmsman from the pirates' fate, raised the shade of his manipulated mother out of Hades and made her a goddess in Olympia, rescued Ariadne from her isolation and misery on Naxos after Theseus had abandoned her. Dionysos and all He represents, all He brings, can help and heal. Passion, finding something to care about again. Ecstasy, getting outside of the self, shedding the layers of self-perception that imprison you. Devotion, believing in something, valuing something that is greater than your self. Intoxication, relaxation, sensation, pleasure, opening up, taking chances, feeling alive, again. Light-hearted playing like a child with others who are doing the same. Sitting on a swing and swinging, hanging ribbons in the trees, as the scents of spring thaw in the fading shadow of winter.
He is life's liberating force. He is release of limbs and communion through dance. He is laughter, and music in flutes. He is repose from all cares -- he is sleep! When his blood bursts from the grape and flows across tables laid in his honor to fuse with our blood, he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows of ivy-cool sleep.
— Euripedes, "The Bacchae"
This may be the time of flowering and blossoming in Greece, but here it's cold and bare still...
Anthesteria’s first day: Pithoigia, the Day of Opening Jars
We shall sing Dionysus On the holy days Him who was twelve months absent Now the time has come, now the flowers are here.
It begins with a procession. They come to the waters, the motley fellows of the propompoi — maenads, satyrs, nymphs, and bacchantes, restless from the restrictions of winter. There at the edge of the waters they find Him — the Masked Man, awaiting them in the marshes where earth and water meet. Raising him up, they escort him back into the city once again, with song and dance, the maenads and bacchantes waving their ivy-wreathed thyrsoi, the satyrs hurling merry insults at bystanders. They take Him to the sanctuary.
Once in the sacred place of Dionysos, the jars are brought out — the pithoi, great clay jars, casks, bottles, all full of wine that was buried over the winter to ferment, sent into the Underworld with Dionysus. The first libation is poured out to Dionysos Limnaios, he of the marshes, Fair-Flowering, the Reveller, the Stormer. Then the priestesses of the mystery, wine-stained maenads, mix the wine according to the secret rites, and all may drink.
There is dance, and song, and music, and merriment; even the restless spirits of the city’s faceless dead come to join in the revelry amid the flower petals and the lovely scent of wine. The Eleusinian Mysteries are performed in secret, sacred places. The Anthesteria has begun.
This is a Festival of Flowers, though it will also be a Feast of the Dead as it winds its way through three days’ celebration…
Also today we celebrate the divine conception of Dionysus, for this is when Zeus lay with Semele and together they conceived their divine son.
Anthesteria’s second day: Khoes, the Day of Pitchers, Feast of Swinging
First she offered him her cup, and he filled it with his divine wine. Then He returned to Her the crown of His love, and the two ascended together into the heavens where Her crown is still seen among the stars…
Anthesteria started yesterday with a festival of flowers, a procession from the waters to the city, a Masked Man adored by wild women and satyrs and other, stranger folk. But today… today it starts to get weird.
It could be the drinking, yes. The pithoi jars have been opened, the wine has been mixed and blessed, there is no shortage. Rampant and massive public drunkenness rules the streets, wine flows like water. Drinking contests are set up, men and women celebrate the swinging rites of Aiôra and set up swings to play upon like children, hanging dolls and masks also to swing from the trees like Erigone of old.
But what really makes the day of Khoes weird… are the ghosts.
Not the beloved personal dead whose faces we know and love or fear, but the public dead are these ghosts, our Keres. The spirits of those nameless crowds of people whose lives moved here before ours, whose stories played out and ended, whose pasts fill our community with untold tales and unwhispered names. They move through us every day, but on this day, maybe with the help of the wine, we FEEL them. We hear the soundless echoes of their footfalls, their shouting, their laughter, their quiet murmuring talk. We feel full to bursting with all those who lived in our home, our neighborhood, those who walked our streets, those who gathered in the parks we go to.
And to make it just that little bit weirder, along with the ghosts and the dry dusty whispers of death and time, we feel the stirrings of a powerful sexual tide moving through us, individually and communally. It binds us generally if not specifically — each of us has lusted, hungered, longed for touch and heat and passion and release. Even the ghosts, now cold and untouchable. The serpent stirs in us, the hot fluids rise, the erotic awareness of bud and flower and stem and root fill every glance at the sacred flowerbeds. We have drunk the wine, we have felt the wildness rise in us. We want to dance, and laugh, and kiss, and caress, and fuck, and explode.
Like a fever, it spreads, then reaches a peak as the evening slides languorously into night. In the most sacred places, the most innermost of temples, the greatest rite is performed, the sacred marriage between the God and the Basalinna, the Sacred Queen. A man and a woman writhe together and become one — a priest and priestess — a maenad and a satyr — Dionysus and Ariadne. And the city shudders in the night with prismatic visions of wine-saturated paradise and release.
Liberation.
Eleleu! Eleleu! Iou! Iou! Hail and welcome the Reveller.
Anthesteria’s third and final day: Khutroi, Day of Pots, Festival of Keres
Thuraze, Keres! Oukeni Anthesteria!
There is still some remaining celebration of the Aiora rites of swinging on Khutroi. Girls hanging ribbons and masks from trees, adults drunkenly or at least merrily playing on swings, small rites of purification by air and light-hearted play. Mostly, these rites have already been done on Khoes, the second day, which is set aside largely for them and is called the Day of Swinging. But if there are any celebrating Anthesteria who have not yet celebrated the Aiora, then Khutroi is the last day for it. Likewise, if the Heiros Gamos was not celebrated on Khoes, then it must be done on Khutroi.
But aside from those remnants of swinging and sacred union, the final day of Anthesteria is mostly devoted to the cult of the public dead, those faceless civic ghosts known as Keres — who rose from the Underworld with Dionysus and the pithoi jars as Anthesteria began, and who were honored yesterday on Khoes, the second day. Until now, the Keres were given the run of the city for Anthesteria; they were stepped aside for, given space, respected, welcomed. But now is the time to regain our homes, our streets, the places of the living. While still respecting the ghosts of the public dead, now is the time to resurrect our world from death into life.
And so the final act of honoring the Keres is to set out pots with offerings prepared just for them — vegetables, beans, grains, and seeds, foods that can on this day tempt the city’s dead and draw them out of the homes they wander through. Homes they once occupied or visited during their lives, places that were once theirs but now belong to the living. Then with the dead thus drawn and appeased on the doorstep, the homes are warded against the Keres with talismans and small rites. Celebrants shout, "Out the doors, you Keres! It is no longer Anthesteria!" And with the banishment of the ghosts, Hermes and Hekate come to guide the Keres back to the Underworld, and the rooms and homes and parks are renewed to the living, refreshed from the dust of dead memories and times past.
Many celebrants feast after this, eating sweet foods made with honey and wine, foods that are not allowed for the dead, foods made separately from the offerings in the Khutroi pots. The dithyrambs of Dionysus are sung, and songs to Hermes and Hekate as well. The newly-opened wine is drunk again, still, though perhaps not with as much abandon as the nights before. The buds are still on the trees, ready to flower. The ribbons flow in the night breezes. The vines are being pruned a second time by the Maenads and Bacchantes, continuing the cycle of life and death and change. The winter is passing, the shadow passing from our hearts, the cold leaving our bones. We are ready for what comes next.
Anthesteria’s first day: Pithoigia, the Day of Opening Jars
We shall sing Dionysus On the holy days Him who was twelve months absent Now the time has come, now the flowers are here.
It begins with a procession. They come to the waters, the motley fellows of the propompoi — maenads, satyrs, nymphs, and bacchantes, restless from the restrictions of winter. There at the edge of the waters they find Him — the Masked Man, awaiting them in the marshes where earth and water meet. Raising him up, they escort him back into the city once again, with song and dance, the maenads and bacchantes waving their ivy-wreathed thyrsoi, the satyrs hurling merry insults at bystanders. They take Him to the sanctuary.
Once in the sacred place of Dionysos, the jars are brought out — the pithoi, great clay jars, casks, bottles, all full of wine that was buried over the winter to ferment, sent into the Underworld with Dionysus. The first libation is poured out to Dionysos Limnaios, he of the marshes, Fair-Flowering, the Reveller, the Stormer. Then the priestesses of the mystery, wine-stained maenads, mix the wine according to the secret rites, and all may drink.
There is dance, and song, and music, and merriment; even the restless spirits of the city’s faceless dead come to join in the revelry amid the flower petals and the lovely scent of wine. The Eleusinian Mysteries are performed in secret, sacred places. The Anthesteria has begun.
This is a Festival of Flowers, though it will also be a Feast of the Dead as it winds its way through three days’ celebration…
Also today we celebrate the divine conception of Dionysus, for this is when Zeus lay with Semele and together they conceived their divine son.