Reality, Evocation and Boundary in the Mysteries of Mithras
The most obvious point about the grade Nymphus is its very name. For it seems that until the Mysteries invented it, the word νύμφος/Nymphus did not exist. Now what could have been the purpose of such a coinage? Precisely, I suggest, to differentiate the Mithraic initiate from two opposite sorts of people, from brides on the one hand, and grooms on the other. When Firmicus Maternus glossed (De errore 19, 1 Ziegler) νύμφος/Nymphus as sponsus, 'bride-groom', he simply revealed how little he knew about the Mysteries — as Cumont observed before passing on to propose something equally implausible (64). I would argue that the Mithraic word νύμφος/nymphus occupies a deliberately impossible semantic space, that it mediates between the two mutually exclusive terms of the binary opposition bride vs groom. Now no one in their right mind would want a mediator here: on the very good principle that two is company but three's none (65). But my point seems actually forced upon our attention by the form of the word νύμφος itself (I take this to be prior to the Latin Nymphus, which is simply a transliteration). The pitch-stress of the two words which compose the original pair of opposites clearly marks them as related yet different: νυμφίος against νύμφη (numphíos/númphē). The contrast at the phonetic level is exactly parallel to the opposition-in-identity of their semantic meaning. In that connection, the accentuation of Mithraic νύμφος is instructive (granted that we do not actually knowwhat its accentuation was and simply apply the 'rules'): νύμφος. That accentuation produces a sound/stress in the first syllable which is exactly that of one of the original words, νύμφη, 'bride', but no less obviously, the ending is masculine. 'Female first' syllable is countered by male second syllable: phonetic expectation is belied by grammatical form. The word νύμφος is a deliberate paradox, and deliberately constructed to be like two other words which form a binary set. And semantically I would argue, the νύμφος must be a sort of marital androgyne, a fusion of male and female at the point of marriage. No wonder it is untranslatable: it is only conceivable within the world of the Mysteries (66).
If we refer now to the objects associated with the grade Nymphus in the Mitreo di Felicissimo at Ostia we find the following:
diadem
(lost) lamp
The top right-hand object is generally agreed to be a sign for the planet Venus, in keeping with the general pattern of the mosaic (all the right-hand objects seem to refer in the first instance to the tutelary planets of the grades). We have already seen that the objects in the central column (assuming the lamp to have been 'displaced' by some large symbol now lost) in at least the two cases we have discussed, Corax and Leo, seem to refer to relevant knowledge from the 'encyclopaedia' of shared ideas in the Graeco-Roman world. What, then, might be the significance of the lamp in relation to the grade Nymphus? I believe that we must begin (granted that the left-hand object is lost) with Graeco-Roman ideas about the planet Venus.
Although all the planets were understood to have regularly irregular courses, the planet Aphrodite/Venus had a special peculiarity: although it was known to be 'one', it had two names. As Cicero puts it: '...stella Veneris, quae Φωσφόρος Graece, Lucifer Latine dicitur, cum anteceditur solem, cum subsequitur autem "Ἕσπερος"' ('Venus's star, which is called in Greek Phōsphoros, and in Latin Lucifer [i.e. "Bringer of light"] when it precedes the sun, but when it comes after it, Hesperos [i.e. "Evening"]': ND 2, 53 = Pease II, pp. 676–77) (67). Although the denominated interval was sometimes thought of as the period morning–evening, those who "knew" claimed that Venus really linked evening to morning (68). This made it appropriate to invoke Venus to restore light, in an evident play upon the double sense of Phosphoros (69). Perhaps the most relevant example for my purpose is a brief epigram by Meleager (Anth. Pal. 12.114 = Gow-Page, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams, I no. 75, p. 237):
Ἠοῦς ἄγγελε, χαῖρε φαεσφόρε, καὶ ταχὺς ἔλθοις Ἕσπερος, ἣν ἀπάγεις λάθριος αὖθις ἄγων.
"Hail Lightbringer (Phosphoros), messenger of dawn; come quickly, Hesperos, and bring back my girl whom you now take from me once again under the cover of darkness."
The epigram depends utterly for such point as it has upon the fact that it is the same star, Venus, which both forces the girl to leave in the morning (Phōsphoros) and brings her back at night (Hesperos).
This first point about the planet Venus seems to have direct relevance to the Mysteries. For we cannot but be reminded of a familiar Mithraic logion which Cumont correctly identified on the basis of the finds at Dura (70). It is quoted by Firmicus Maternus, De errore 19.1:
]δε Νύμφε, χαῖρε Νύμφε, χαῖρε νέον φῶς.
But if Cumont was correct about the Mithraic provenance of these words, his translation was curious, rather involving the claim that χαῖρε means here not what we would expect, "Hail", but "Rejoice". The logion became a command, not an acclamation:
"(Sing,) Nymph, rejoice! Nymph, rejoice at the new light."
But as Professor Vermaseren rightly saw (1963: 142), this is to impose an unnatural translation because of Cumont's preconceived notion about the meaning of "new light" in Mithras (71). Without that assumption, the logion makes perfect sense, taking χαῖρε in its usual meaning (and adopting Friedrich's conjecture ἴδε, as against ἰὲ or χαῖρε):
"Behold Nymphos! Hail Nymphos! Hail New Light!"
Just as the planet Venus in one of its manifestations was Bringer of Light, so was the grade in the Mysteries which came under its tutelage: the Nymphus was "new light". The lamp at Felicissimus refers both to Venus as Phōsphoros and to the correlative, and appropriate, value of the grade (72).
But the Mysteries of Mithras seem to have taken the idea of 'new light' quite literally: before there can be new light there must be a period of darkness, just as in the relationship between the two aspects of Venus as morning star and evening star. On the top layer of paintings on wall I₂ at Santa Prisca occurs a representation of the Nymphus with his face covered by a veil; on the lower layer of paintings on the same wall, the Nymphus holds a flammeum (a red veil) in his hands (73). One could hardly wish for a clearer reference to the motif of 'hiding' and 'revealing': the act of removing the veil is the act of revelation of the Nymphus as 'new light'. Just like the tutelary planet Venus, the grade Nymphus is characterised by a play between light and darkness.
Let us go back to the planet Venus. The planet's association with both light and darkness gave rise inevitably to a belief that it was itself ambiguous. Its colour might be said to be poikilē, a blend of colours, not a pure colour (74). It was the brightest of all the planets (apart of course from the sun and the moon) — so bright that it alone could be seen by day (Martianus Capella, 8, 883); so bright that it threw shadows (Pliny HN 2, 37; Martianus Capella, ibid.). At the same time it was believed to be 'dark', 'gloomy' (75). This ambiguity is expressed formally in the astrological tradition, where we find the epithet 'two-faced' (διπρόσωπος) for Venus (76). We seem already to be close to my claim about Mithraic νύμφος/Nymphos, the 'marital androgyne'. Yet not quite close enough. But there is one passage, admittedly late, of extreme interest in connection with the planet Venus. Johannes Lydus has a discussion of the chronocrators of each day of the week, a theory which he explicitly refers to the speculations of the Chaldaeans and the Egyptian astrologers (De mensibus 2, 4 = p. 21.1 Wünsch), and he deals in sixth place ('Friday') with the planet Venus (pp. 31.20–1 Wünsch):
τὴν δὲ ἕκτην (ἡμέραν) ἀναφέρουσι φωσφόρῳ, θερμαίνοντι ἅμα καὶ γονίμως ὑγραίνοντι·
'The sixth day they assign to Phōsphoros, a planet which is both warm and wet, suitable for generation...'.
And in developing the significance of this choice, he observes: 'and, in a word, (the planet) is both male and female, just like Aphrodite herself, who is by nature both male and female and is for that reason called "masculo-feminine" by the theologians' (καὶ ἁπλῶς εἰπεῖν ἄρρην τε καὶ θῆλυς εἶναι πέφυκεν, ὡς καὶ αὐτὴ Ἀφροδίτη, τὴν τοῦ ἄρρενος τὴν τε τοῦ θήλεος ἔχουσα φύσιν καὶ διὰ τοῦτο παρὰ τοῖς θεολόγοις ἀρρενόθηλυς καλουμένη).
Now it is evident that even in the Archaic period Aphrodite was conceived as more than merely 'female'. She was born asexually from the infertile sea and Ouranos' fallen testicles (Hesiod, Theogony 188–206 with West's commentary); she crosses boundaries with gay abandon (mating of gods and humans in Homeric Hymn 5); exercises a proverbial mētis(Detienne and Vernant, 1974: 267–8; 278). In the tradition of Homeric exegesis, from Alcman's cosmogonic poem onwards, she (often with Ares) was seen as the fundamental cosmogonic principle (cf. Buffière, 1956: 168–72). It is equally evident that bisexual supreme cosmogonic principles were the stock-in-trade of any number of speculative cults in the ancient world (77). But Johannes Lydus's specific point here is not, so far as I know, to be found anywhere else in the Graeco-Roman 'encyclopaedia' — learned or popular — concerning Aphrodite/Venus, even though it might conceivably have been fairly easy to deduce from familiar astrological doctrines such as the 'masculinization' of the female planet when it rises in the morning (for example Ptolemy, Tetrab. 1, 6 cf. 3, 14 [171]) (78). It would therefore be reasonable to accept that this idea about both divinity and planet was believed to be a secret Chaldaean and Egyptian astrological doctrine; if so, it may have been known as such in the Mysteries, since we have every reason to believe that Johannes Lydus did not invent it (79). And it is tempting to suppose that it was precisely some such 'Chaldaean' or 'Egyptian' doctrine about Aphrodite/Venus which prompted the Mysteries to create the androgynous Nymphus, once again exactly patterned upon the nature of the grade's tutelary planet.
But why? I think we must go back to the question of boundaries, back to the primary issue of separation. I mentioned a little earlier that the Mithraic iconography of the grade Nymphus included a veil, a flammeum. But the flammeum (and there can be little doubt that that is what the splodges of red colour are in the paintings) was of course the Roman marriage-veil, taken off during the marriage-ceremony as a symbolic ritual of passage from one status to another. That aspect of the initiation ceremony of the Nymphus is related not only to the planet Venus but also to real rituals in the ordinary world (80). One interpretation of the flammeum-ritual in the mysteries takes it as the enactment of some sort of hieros gamos, a sacred marriage, between initiate and Mithras: the Nymphus is supposed to be the 'bride of Mithras' (81). Cumont, in criticizing Ferrua's version of the theory (1940: 76), objected: 'aucune femme ne participe aux mystères mithriaques, la cérémonie du dévoilement aurait dû être transportée de l'épouse à l'époux' (1945: 403 n. 3). It does not seem to have occurred to him that just such an absurdity may have been the point; but let that pass, since the theory of a hieros gamos seems to me, at least in the form in which it is normally held, as unsatisfactory as it seemed to Cumont.
It will be recalled that Johannes Lydus, when introducing the subject of Venus as chronocrator, refers to its 'warmth' and its 'fecund dampness'. This reminds us of the common astrological association between the planet Venus and marriage (82). Venus 'governed' marriage and procreation. The problem for the Mysteries was to relate the grade governed by Venus to the commonly accepted meanings of the planet in the 'encyclopaedia'. That could be done easily enough, as we have seen, in relation to light and darkness, which constitute a central theme in the part that the Nymphus played in the economy of the grade structure. But what about marriage and procreation in a cult which excluded women, and which, as I argue, did so deliberately in pursuit of a particular and hostile classification of the female? The problem was to be faithful to ordinary meanings and yet to exclude the acceptance of marriage and procreation evident in ordinary ideas about the planet Venus. The answer, I would urge, lay in the bisexuality of Venus — a 'secret' truth. Bisexuality meant that the female principle was in a sense expendable because it could be integrated at least partly into the male instead of being seen as its opposite. The female is not an independent principle, it is part of the male. And the symbolism of ordinary marriage is of course utterly appropriate: for in marriage the woman accepted her new κύριος or dominus, she passed from one sort of ownership into another; at the same time, the allusion to marriage, made necessary by the ordinary significance of the planet Venus, is surreptitiously interpreted in terms of a more 'interesting' Mithraic meaning — the motif of hiding versus revelation, with its wide reverberations in the theology of the Mysteries. And if we find this sort of denial of the female strange or 'unlikely', we have only to refer to the equally 'strange' and 'unlikely' theories the Graeco-Roman world produced to classify out the female at the level of her most obviously crucial function, procreation — the predictable science of a patrilineal society (83). The 'marital androgyne', the Nymphus, is, at least in part, a reproduction within the Mysteries of precisely the same attitude towards the female.
Since the military life so obviously excluded the female in the Graeco-Roman world that the motif provided not only the major transposition of values in the most perfectly topsy-turvy society the Greek imagination produced, that of the Amazons, but also what one might call the Locris-Tarentum syndrome (legends whose primary function is mythic, inasmuch as they are fantasies about what women get up to when their husbands are away at war) (84), it is scarcely necessary to argue the compatibility of the grade Miles with my case. In relation to the Roman Empire, it is worth simply remarking on the fiction that serving soldiers were not allowed to contract matrimonia, full civil marriages (85); and that the Christian theme of militia Christi was felt appropriate precisely because the military life involved the cancellation of the complex of social obligations, rights and reciprocities which make up ordinary life (86). The marginality of the soldier in relation to civil society is matched by the marginality of the hunter, who operates in the 'wild', τὸ ἄγριον, pitting wits and strength against wild animals: 'thieving' Mithras, who is also a hunter, is surely the structural counterpart of the Mithraic grade Miles (87). If getting to heaven is a matter of looking for the cracks in the given world, not belonging to the given world socially — being socially marginal — is a prerequisite for success; Ravens, marital androgynes, Soldiers and Lions are just such social marginals — men who are birds and beasts, mediators of binary oppositions, excluded from civic rights because of their profession. And starting from that proposition, I think we can properly argue another: that the structure of the three higher grades Leo — Perses — Heliodromus is exactly the same as that of the three junior grades Corax — Nymphus — Miles. Another way of making the same point is to say that what Corax is to Leo, Nymphus is to Perses, and Miles to Heliodromus:
Corax : Leo :: Nymphus : Perses :: Miles : Heliodromus.
The key is surely provided by the relation I have already suggested between the two animal grades — Leo reproduces at a higher level the ambiguity of the Corax between two worlds. The tutelary planets of Nymphus and Perses are the only female planets, and both grades have associations with generation, the one at the level of human society, the other at the level of plants and fruits in general (99). Miles is a specifically male social marginal; Heliodromus is the specifically male ('runner') cosmic marginal. A simple triadic structure is thus reduplicated around the point of full incorporation into the Mysteries (Leo), and serves to highlight the superiority of the seventh grade, the Father; but, as we shall see, there is an important thematic link between that highest grade and the initial terms of the other two triads. And I shall argue that this thematic link, which has hitherto been thought incomprehensible, is intelligible only if we accept the propriety of my present argument that the grade-structure of the Mysteries consists of a reduplicated triadic scheme in which the themes of the lower three grades are reproduced at a higher level, are, if one likes, 'resolved' by the next three grades, Leo → Heliodromus.
If the argument is taken to imply that at the higher levels of initiation the issue of the female became less explicitly important, I think that quite reasonable. But it seems to me absolutely inescapable that the ideological rejection of women was enforced elsewhere than in the grade-system — in the myth about Mithras himself. It is a tedious commonplace in the study of the Mysteries that Mithras is represented as 'born from a rock'; but the commonplace receives scarcely any attention. Although Cumont rightly rejected the naturalistic explanations current in the last century ('sun appearing over the mountains in the morning') he did so, as so often, in favour of a pseudo-historical explanation — that it was the hellenised Magi who borrowed the idea of rock-birth from Anatolian cults (1899: 159–63). The reason for the borrowing was simply not an issue for him. And the only recent discussion which is more than cursory, by Professor Vermaseren, attempts to read the monumental evidence 'symbolically' by arguing that 'we know' that the rock is a symbol of heaven (1951: 93–109) — a solution indistinguishable in its principles from that of the pre-Cumontian naturalists. But Professor Vermaseren did note that Mithras's birth from the rock serves to contrast this god from others born in a more usual way (p. 94); and it seems to me that we must start from there.
Everyone knows that one profani sacramenti signum, one cryptic utterance betokening a deep truth in the Mysteries, was the phrase θεὸς ἐκ πέτρας, 'God out of rock' (Firmicus Maternus, de errore 20.1; cf. 20.5). And it is the paradigmatic significance of the signum rather than its discursive content (about which we can know virtually nothing) which should be of interest to us. For its implicit claim is that Mithras was not born of a divine or human female, but from a rock, which in itself is inanimate and sexless. The notion of a petra genetrix, of a generative rock, is interesting precisely because it is absurd; and the absurd should always interest us, first because no one believes absurdities without good cause, and secondly because absurd propositions are evidently excellent material for dense evocation.
The theme of sexless generation received a good deal of comment in Greek myth (Detienne, 1976: 75–81), and we can see it at work in a highly ideological context in Athena's justification for voting to acquit Orestes in Aeschylus's Eumenides (734–53 Page); cf. Winnington-Ingram, 1948: 130–47; Zeitlin, 1978: 149–84). But it also appears elsewhere in the inventory of familiar Mithraic passages: pseudo-Plutarch, de fluviis 23.4 (= Müller, Geogr. Gr. II p. 663). Roundly condemned by Cumont as pure fantasy (1889: 36), that is just what this story is. But the interest of fantasies lies in their structure. This one explains how the mountain called Diorphon (or Diorphos) in Armenia received its name, and it starts with a person called Diorphos, who was presumably a local herōs believed to have been generated from the earth (γηγενής). The account of his birth is this:
Mithras wished to have a son, but detested the race of women; and so he masturbated on to a rock. The stone became pregnant and when the proper time had come it produced a child named Diorphos.
Μίθρας, υἱὸν ἔχειν βουλόμενος καὶ τὸ τῶν γυναικῶν γένος μισῶν, πέτραν τυνὶ προσερρέθη· ἐγκύος δὲ λίθος γενόμενος μετὰ τοὺς ὡρισμένους χρόνους ἀνέδωκε νέον τοὔνομα Διόρφον.
When the child grew up, he challenged 'Ares' to a duel, lost, and was transformed into a mountain (89). This latter part of the myth must surely remind us of a much better-known Greek myth, that of the Spartoi at Thebes. The two major themes of that myth, the correlation between autochthony (the Spartoi grew out of the ground from the 'seeds' of the dragon killed by Cadmus) and extreme insistence upon the male (they grew armed to the teeth) on the one hand, and the impossibility of sustaining a human society under these conditions on the other (the Spartoi kill each other, and there are no women), are present in the Diorphos myth also, but in an interesting transformation (90). Like the Spartoi, Diorphos is literally autochthonous, he is born from a piece of local soil, and he is an outstanding warrior — so much so that he challenges the god of war to a duel. But the theme of the rejection of the female which is merely implicit in the myth of the Spartoi, and in parallel Athenian myths (Loraux, 1979: 3–26), is quite explicit in the myth of Diorphos: his father Mithras detested the 'race of women'. Now the term 'race of women' is quite standard in Greek accounts of the relations between the sexes — it is, one might say, the standard contemptuous classification of that patrilineal society, as Nicole Loraux has recently shown (1978: 43–87). And if male homosexuality was one obvious correlate of the rejection of women, masturbation is another: both are sexual modes of the denial of the female. And whereas in the 'real' world both are forms of sterility, in the world of myth masturbation can be fecund — except that here (quite predictably for a Lévi-Straussian analysis) that theoretical option is denied in working out its logical consequences: excessive stress on the male → excessive stress upon war → destruction.
If such a (truncated) analysis of the Diorphos myth is at all appropriate, it suggests that in Armenia Mithras was understood to be a fit divinity to employ in such a context; that is, the Iranian practice of excluding women from the worship of Mithra was transformed into an Armenian myth about the problem of autochthony. I would argue that there is no direct relation between Mithraic 'God out of rock' and this Armenian myth (91), that the latter is in no sense a 'borrowing' from or a 'corruption' of the former, as is usually believed. They are rather structural transformations of the same theme, different ways of making sense of a common issue, the opposition between male and female, in relation to a pre-existing fact, Mithras' hatred of women. In the one case Diorphos is autochthonous, warlike, and comes to grief (the Armenians had to account for the reality of the presence of, and the necessity for, women); in the other, Mithras is autochthonous, warlike — and so not human. The birth from the rock both guarantees his divinity, his non-subjection to human rules, and affirms his independence of the 'race of women'.
The myth of Diorphos is then only a 'fantasy' in the pejorative sense on the assumption that there was only one 'true' Mithraic tradition, that preserved by the hellenised Magi. And although we may be sure that communities of Zoroastrians continued to exist in eastern Anatolia, and were recognised as such by the Sasanians (92), the myth makes it clear that Iranian ideas were assimilated into prior indigenous traditions, certainly in Armenia, and by analogy elsewhere in Anatolia. In fact, Cumont might have made use of the myth as excellent evidence for the Anatolian antecedents of the Mysteries; but could not, because for him there was only one way in which they could have been transmitted to the Roman Empire. But if we abandon the hypothesis of a complete religious tradition handed down intact by the hellenised Magi, the myth of Diorphos becomes precious evidence of the sort of evocations and transformations which Iranian themes underwent in Anatolia; and from such transformations were developed the Mysteries. We may note another interesting detail in this connection: the stone upon which Mithras masturbated acted just like a pregnant woman. It took nine months for it to produce its impossible offspring. If Mithras did not like women, he did like order. Not only does the Armenian myth have a direct relation to 'properly' Iranian — and indeed Vedic — beliefs about Mithras as 'looser' (Kuiper, 1961–62: 36–60; Lentz, 1970: 245–55; Boyce, 1975: 29–30); it also suggests that the Mysteries' insistence upon Mithras's cosmic ordering function reproduces, and transforms, an earlier Anatolian — and ultimately Iranian — theme.
So far, though, I have shown only that among the meanings constructed by the Mysteries for their adherents is a systematic denial of the female. The demonstration can only be convincing if one can show that the Mysteries formulated this principle in explicit terms; and that, I would claim, is precisely what is done by a text which everyone knows but which has been quite generally 'refused'. I refer to the quotation of Pallas by Porphyry, De abstinentia 4, 16, which I have already used (p. 32):
τὴν γὰρ κοινωνότητα ἡμῶν τὴν πρὸς τὰ ζῷα ἀνυποτυπόμενοι διὰ τῶν ζῴων ἡμᾶς μηνύειν ἐνόμιζον, ὡς τοὺς μὲν μετέχοντας τῶν αὐτῶν ὀργίων λέοντας καλεῖν, τὰς δὲ γυναῖκας ὑαίνας, τοὺς δὲ ὑπηρετοῦντας κόρακας.
(Those responsible for initiations in the Mysteries) typically allegorised our common nature with the animals by imaging us in the form of animals; thus they called the initiates who had been fully admitted into their Mysteries 'lions', women 'hyenas', and the underlings 'ravens'.
It was Franz Cumont who set the tone of fastidious incomprehension of this passage in his note on the text (1896: 42 n.2):
'Voilà un détail bien étrange. Nulle part ailleurs il n'est question d'un grade de l'hyène dans les mystères mithriaques... Cette partie du texte de Porphyre est si corrompue qu'il vaut mieux renoncer à l'expliquer.'
And seventy-nine years later Robert Turcan writes:
'la participation de femmes aux mystères n'est directement confirmée par aucun document. Dans la citation de Porphyre, s'agit-il d'"hyènes" (si l'on conserve le texte des manuscrits) ou de "lionnes" (si l'on retient avec A. Nauck la conjecture de Felicianus)?'
(1975: 36) (93). But perhaps we ought to read the text without quite so many preconceptions. Nowhere does Pallas say that women were initiates into the Mysteries: indeed, he explicitly states that they were not, by opposing his first category τοὺς μὲν μετέχοντας ... μύστας ('the initiates who are full members') from his second τὰς δὲ γυναῖκας, and from his third, τοὺς δὲ ὑπηρετοῦντας ('the underlings'). If he had wanted to talk about what we might want him to talk about ('were women initiated into the Mysteries?'), he would have put his point differently. But of course he knew that they were not, and could not imagine anyone asking the question; and anyway this is a contextless quotation from a book in several volumes. Moreover, Pallas is talking about the use of animal terms for human beings in the Mysteries, so that the order in which he makes his points does not matter (94). His argument is directed against the 'common opinion' that this feature of the Mysteries had to do with the zodiacal signs and the ecliptic, for he 'knew' that the practice was really connected with the Mysteries' belief in metempsychosis — which is why Porphyry quotes him in the first place.
Now it is my belief that this passage provides the only explicit evidence we possess about the role of women in the Mysteries. But in order to understand it we have first not to misunderstand it by reading into it what is not there, let alone by a desperate recourse to emendation (that sovereign means of foisting our own ideas on to texts we do not understand) (95). And we have then to consult the Graeco-Roman 'encyclopaedia' to find out what Pallas, and the Mysteries, may have meant by calling women 'hyenas'.
The hyena is included by Ovid, Metamorphoses 15, 408–10, in a list of creatures which experience transformations of one sort or another: the phoenix, the chameleon, lynxes' eyes, coral. But the hyena's transformation was altogether unusual: it repeatedly changed its sex. The female hyena one saw one day would have turned into a male the next time one saw it, and likewise with a male one:
Si tamen est aliquid mirae novitatis in istis,
alternare vices et, quae modo femina tergo
passa marem est, nunc esse marem mirere hyaenam,
'But if these things are odd, it is really extraordinary that the hyena changes (its sex): the animal which at one moment is female and is mounted by the male, is next moment male.'
The theme recurs repeatedly; Tertullian, de pallio 3.2 Gerlo, reports that the transformation took place annually, a point elaborated by Aelian, NA 1, 25:
κοινωνοῦσί τε ἀρρεπότητι ἐνατέρας, καὶ γαμοῦσί τε καὶ γαμοῦνται, ἄνα ἔτος πάλιν ἀμείβουσαι τὸ γένος:
'they have bisexual mating habits, inasmuch as they both mount and are mounted, changing their sex every year'. And he continues: 'So this animal proves Kaineus and Teiresias old-hat not by fine-sounding words but in deed' — a comment whose underlying assimilation of animal sexuality into human sexuality will not be lost on us after my earlier discussion of the raven and the lion. A related popular belief is also worth remarking: the female hyena was supposed to be able to produce offspring without the male, parere sine mare vulgus credit (Pliny NH 8, 105). The antiquity of the belief, and its pervasiveness in Greece in the fourth century BC, is suggested by Aristotle, who actually took the trouble to get hold of specimens of hyenas from a professional hunter in order to decide whether the popular view was correct or not (HA 579b 16–28). And although he showed that it was quite false, no one cared what science thought, as no one now cares what natural historians think about hyenas — because our social use of hyenas is much more important to us than 'true' facts about them. Whether or not we have in contemporary western Europe seen a hyena, all of us 'know' that they are carrion-eaters, that they laugh 'like human beings', and that they take the leavings of that noble beast, the lion. Some of us know that all of those ideas are more or less completely false, but we still make use of the prior social lie in finding images of the loathsome. Hyenas, like lions, have a cultural significance even in societies in which they are not directly known.
If what I have argued about the significance of the signum θεὸς ἐκ πέτρας in the Mysteries is correct, we can see already one Mithraic reason for calling the human female a 'hyena': if the Mysteries believed a myth which made Mithras the ideal pattern of generation (without the female), the hyena represents the opposite, an order in which the female reproduces without the male, just as it provides an instance of an order in which the distinctions between the sexes are confused and ambiguous. But there is more. The hyena was supposed in the Graeco-Roman 'encyclopaedia' to be able to imitate the human voice not, as in the case of the raven, harmlessly or as a means of permitting communication between the divine and the human worlds, but for the sake of evil. Hyenas could learn the name of a shepherd, call him out of his hut and devour him (Pliny HN 8, 106). A cross between the hyena and the Ethiopian lioness (of course!) produced a creature called the corocotta, which could imitate the sounds of men and of cattle (HN 8, 107) (96). But the hyena had even more mysterious powers: according to Aelian (NA 6, 14), quoting Aristotle, any creature which it touched with its left paw fell into a torpor. It would prowl around animal-pens or stables, touch its victim in this manner, dig out the earth from under its head as it lay on the ground, and expose the throat. It then suffocated the animal, by biting the throat, and dragged it away. The hyena was also believed to have a particular enmity against the dog (which had in the Graeco-Roman world a special status in relation to human beings, marked above all in its casual admittance into the house) (97). It would imitate the sound of human vomiting (itself a detail of unusual interest, since vomiting involves (1) a human sound which is not speech (2) the reverse of normal digestion — it is a perfect reversal of norms), and attract dogs to the scene — and then pounce on them and kill them. According to Pliny, HN 8, 106 (cf. Proclus In Plat. Rempubl. 1, 290, 17 Diehl), its shadow prevented dogs from barking — that is, hindered them from one of their domestic functions — while Aelian (NA 6, 14) adds that this happened when the moon was full: the baleful shadow cast on dogs was a moon-shadow (cf. Cassianus Bassus, Geoponica 15, 1, 10–11 = Bidez-Cumont, 1938: II, frg. 052, pp. 193–97). And he instructively draws an explicit parallel between this activity of the hyena and human witches or sorceresses:
καταγοητεύουσα ὡς αἱ φαρμακίδες —
and it is important that he compares the hyena to female witches (98). When we add that the hyena was believed to be the only animal which digs up graves (sepulchra) to get at human corpses (Pliny HN 8, 106), it becomes appropriate to think of the hyena as the equivalent in the animal world of the lamia, the 'night witch' figure of Greek folklore, a creature fascinating for the structuralist, in that it was conceived both as an arch-'sort-crosser' and as the epitome of the anti-human: hermaphroditic, capable of metamorphosis, wont to remove its eyes, in some sense human (indeed female) yet looking like a wild animal, inhabiting marginal spaces (ravines, woods, ruined towers, caves), cannibalistic, feeding especially on the flesh of babies (90). And it must be obvious that the 'uncertainty' about the sex both of the lamia (f.) and of the hyena (f.) conceals a fundamental determination, characteristic of the Graeco-Roman world, to make the female the ultimate repository of the anti-human — that is, of the anti-male.
If the hyena acted like the sorceress, it was the object of particular regard on the part of 'magicians' (magi):
Hyaenam magi ex omnibus animalibus in maxima admiratione posuerunt, utpote cui et ipsi magicas artes dederint vimque qua alliciat ad se homines mente alienatos
('Of all animals, the magicians had the highest regard for the hyena, so much so that they have ascribed to it their own magical arts and especially the power by means of which it snares men whom it has driven out of their minds': Pliny HN28, 92). That suggests that the hyena was supposed to be able to deprive men of their rational faculties, to make them non-men. Whereas ravens and lions were animals endowed with quasi-human rationality, the hyena was an animal which turned men into animals, just as the Sirens in the Odyssey deprive men of their desire to return home by destroying their memories (Todorov, 1967: 47–55). And since the Mysteries were nothing if not means to 'wisdom' (Gordon, 1972: 100), an animal hostile to reason was perfectly suited to represent the antithesis of the means to salvation; but of course the crucial point is that this animal was further identified as 'woman' in the Mysteries. This point about human rationality is closely related to another unusual feature of the hyena, its eyes.
In oculis animus habitat, observes Pliny (HN 11, 145), 'the mind dwells in the eyes'; and when we kiss someone's eyes, we seem to reach the mind itself (146). Animo autem videmus, animo cernimus; oculi ceu vasa quaedam visibilem eius partem accipiunt atque transmittunt: 'Moreover, it is with the mind that we see, with the mind that we make things out; the eyes are a sort of vessel — they receive and pass on that part of the mind which can be seen'. Man alone has, as a species, eyes of different colours; in all other species the eyes of every individual are alike (141). All, that is, but the hyena: oculis mille esse varietates colorumque mutationes, '(their eyes are always changing, and altering their colour' (HN8, 106); in mille colores transeunt subinde, '(their eyes) keep changing their colour all of a sudden, in a myriad different hues' (11, 151) (100). The eyes of the hyena were utterly unstable: its shifty character was resumed in its ocular physiology. And with those eyes it could paralyse any creature at which it gazed three times quibusdam magicis artibus, 'by magic, I suppose' (Pliny HN 8, 106). And although we have noted earlier that in Egypt lions were supposed to be able to 'fascinate' (p. 34), the hyena is the only animal in the Graeco-Roman 'encyclopaedia' proper which possessed the evil eye. And it is clear from Pliny HN 7, 16–17, that in the Graeco-Roman world it was women who were normally supposed to possess the evil eye; indeed Cicero apparently held that the ability to 'fascinate' was due to an interesting anatomical peculiarity, the possession by women of a double pupil: feminas quidem omnes uniuque visu nocere quae duplices pupillae habeant Cicero quoque apud nos auctor est ('Our own writer Cicero observes that any woman anywhere is able to cast the evil eye if she has a double pupil'). I would argue that the evil eye is another of the links between the hyena and the 'race of women', and intimately connected with the ability of both to derange men.
A proper structural analysis of these, and other, ideas about hyenas in the Graeco-Roman 'encyclopaedia' would take me too far afield. But I have surely said enough to make it plausible to argue that the hyena was an entirely appropriate name for women in a cult committed to the principle of the supremacy of the male or the masculine. Capable of parthenogenesis, a creature of the night, the producer of parodic human utterances, eater of corpses, destroyer of the mind, a thing that is human and not-human, the hyena is man's worst enemy in the animal kingdom, the destroyer of the possibility of human culture, a nightmare that is almost a 'night witch'. It renders human meanings null; subverts all the rules; incarnates disorder; erases reason. It is the low point of the world of genesis, the point at which nothing makes any sense and all categories are jumbled together. Perhaps Pallas knew what he was talking about after all? (101)
Acceptance of this idea that Woman was termed 'hyena' in the Mysteries of Mithras helps us to understand a little better a crucial puzzle: if the world was created or, at the very least, set in order, by Mithras, why was escape into apogenesis so necessary? The problem is pressing inasmuch as we can no longer easily appeal to Zoroastrian theories about a dual creation by Ahura Mazda and Ahriman and assume that they will provide an explanation for the beliefs of the Mysteries. Although it may seem at first sight surprising, I think we may find some instructive contrasts between the Mysteries of Mithras and Hesiod's view of the place of man in creation — all the more so in that the work of Pierre Vidal-Naquet and of Marcel Detienne suggests that the ideas Hesiod so elegantly related to each other (as a true 'primitive intellectual') were widely accepted throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity in the form of unselfconscious associations and patterns of behaviour (102). The Hesiodic version of the origin of Woman presents her as Zeus's counter gift to men for the theft of fire by Prometheus (Theogony 570; 585); and fire in turn was denied men because of Prometheus's trick at the first sacrifice at Mekone (Theogony 561–67). As Jean-Pierre Vernant has shown, the myth is organised in terms of a series of illusions: Prometheus concealed the good meat in something unpleasant (the ox's stomach), but made the uneatable bones look appetising by covering them with fat; later, he conceals fire in a fennel-stalk; and then Zeus hides evils — 'toil', suffering, sickness, quick old age — beneath the alluring beauty of Woman. And all this concealment reproduces the structure of concealment in relation to human labour in the fields and in human reproduction (1974: 177–94; 1977: 915–19; 927–34).
To all this, the Mysteries offer sharp contrasts. The initial sacrifice, although certainly connected in some way with Mithras's theft, was performed not at some point 'in time' when gods and men could still meet on a footing of apparent equality or at least commensality (as at Mekone), but 'cosmically'; and not by the ambiguous Titan Prometheus but by Mithras himself. That implies that the sacrifice marked not a separation between man and god but the ordering of the cosmos, from the order of the heavenly bodies to the order of plant-life and, presumably, of human society. I have argued elsewhere that one of the familiar by-scenes on complex panelled reliefs represents a Mithraic account of the human institution of sacrifice: and it is performed between Mithras and Sol (1978: 217–18). Sacrifice was not a 'second-best' institution for the Mysteries; it was the reproduction of an act originally performed by Mithras himself (103). Moreover, fire did not have to be stolen from an angry Zeus, and was not placed in direct relation to the origin of sacrifice: if the petragenes monuments are relevant here, fire in the Mysteries was supposed to have come with the birth of Mithras from the rock; which implies that the human use of fire as a means of cooking and of civilization came directly from him. The Hesiodic relations between each of these aspects of human life are systematically denied in the Mysteries, and they are all referred directly to Mithras as 'culture-hero'.
Where does that leave Woman? In Hesiod, woman is both a source of aesthetic delight, for men and for gods, and an evil — there is at least compensation for the drudgery she brings men. She also has an indispensable place as a metonymic mediator between the man's world in the fields and the domestic space: both bread and sperm enter her belly; she is ploughed as the earth is ploughed; she is fecund as the earth is fecund. But the Mysteries' account of the origin of corn, that it came from the cosmic killing of the Bull by Mithras, undercuts that mediating rôle of woman: there is no theme of 'hiding the corn' by means of which woman can be socially located. The only element of the Hesiodic view that survives is the crude binary opposition between 'good' males and 'deceptive' females. I would argue that the Mysteries' reorganisation of this relatively integrated traditional view of women was an extreme attempt to found, mythically and ritually, the age-old dream of patrilineal societies, to do away with women and leave the world pure and unsullied: the Mysteries of Mithras determined, as it were, to take Euripides' Hippolytus utterly seriously (104). But they chose to effect the dream in the context not of this world (where it was evidently impossible) but of the next, and to write off this world insofar as it was polluted by the hyena, woman. So that if we can never know how Mithraic woman arrived to spoil Mithras's creation, we can certainly know what the Mysteries proposed to do about it. A taller and taller story indeed, but one of immediate relevance in a world where the female threat to male honour — the ultimate source of the male fear of women in patrilineal societies — increased precisely in step with men's uncertainties about the true locus of honour.
No one has ever attempted a history of honour in the Graeco-Roman world (105). Still less has anyone tried to relate such a history of honour to the development of novel cults in the Graeco-Roman world. But the theme might repay study. What, for example, is the relation between 'holiness' and honour? What is the relation between, say, Euripides' doubts about the validity of the traditional structure of male honour, with all its ramifications in relation to the cult of the body, and Plato's radical-conservative elaboration of a theory of the tripartite soul? Honour is crucial, of course, not merely because by definition it can be possessed and sought only by men in a patrilineal society, but also because, although the élites in the Graeco-Roman world laid claim to the possession of that specialized form of 'political' honour which involved conspicuous consumption, athletics and war, as a value it was quite general both among peasants and among the non-agricultural inhabitants of towns. To put it crudely, honour was the means whereby men in the Graeco-Roman world articulated the relationship between perceived rights and obligations and negotiated with their peers for status. And if the most radical loss of honour came through enslavement, it seems clear that the economic and social changes of the hellenistic period, but perhaps even more, of the Roman Empire, involved changes also in the meanings constructed by the system of honour — changing conditions of land tenure, relations with tax-collectors, enforced military service, geographical and social mobility, differential access to legal redress and citizen rights, the re-acquisition of social rights and new sorts of obligations by freedmen (cf. Nouailhat, 1975: 212–32). Alterations of the rules in all these areas involved a revaluation, slight or intense, of the honour system, and corresponding uncertainties about social rôles and social status. And under these circumstances in a patrilineal society, two responses seem to me utterly predictable: on the one hand, the sentimentalization of the family, and on the other a growing tendency towards the polarization of the sexes, not so much institutionally (though that is obvious even in the historical development of Greek democracy, and perhaps also in legal changes in the late Republic in Rome) as 'mythically'. And if the Mysteries of Mithras chose to elaborate an extreme version of the latter tendency, they were by no means alone among new religions in the Roman Empire, particularly among sects which pursued some form of mystical revelation. What such sects lost in terms of mass appeal they made up for in coherence at the level of their fantasy version of what the world is 'really' like. For in a situation in which traditional rules for the acquisition and retention of honour by men were becoming uncertainly relevant, it was tempting to 'analyze' the situation in a wholly familiar way: for in traditional terms, whereas a man could be sure of his own ability to fulfil his obligations and maintain his rights within his community, he was always open to massive loss of honour through the sexuality of women (his wife, his daughter or his sister). The Mysteries of Mithras offered an elaborate means of escape from that threat — produced by the application of traditional attitudes to a new situation (real social and economic changes which threatened the meanings encoded in the honour system) — whereby the world of contingency and chance was at least to an extent identified as the world of Woman (illusory, deceitful, changeable, carrier of death) and the world of non-becoming identified as the world of Mithras born from a rock, uncontaminated by the female. Both 'honour' and 'woman' are redefined.
