sign in sign up
<<
Home , Aristaeus, Asterion (god), Catasterismi, Curetes (tribe), Dactyls (mythology), Delphyne

2019-2851-BUZ

1 The Beast Initiate: 2 The Lycanthropy of 3 4 The obscurantist Hellenistic poet Lycophron referenced the initiation of Heracles 5 as a beast suckling the breast of the . This was the event that was the 6 mythological origin of the Galaxy and of the lily flower that incarnated the same 7 deifying essence as the celestial milk of the goddess and it was the etiology for the 8 domestication of felines. As the Lion of Nemea, Heracles was the greatest of the 9 wild cats. The event of the lactation of Heracles is depicted on four Etruscan 10 mirrors and a Faliscan-Hellenic red-figure krater. The deifying milk-flower of the 11 goddess was a of adoption into the family of the celestial , that Hera 12 performed also with two other bastard sons of , and . As the 13 beast being initiated, Heracles became a wolf. Like the motif of the domestication 14 of the cat, the lycanthropy of Heracles involves the whole family of canines, from 15 the domesticated dog to its wilder antecedents in the wolf and its analogue as the 16 fox. The lycanthropy initiation is a motif of warrior brotherhood widespread 17 among the Indo-European peoples. Both the suckling of Heracles and his 18 lycanthropy implicate bacchanalian rites and the symbolism of the fox pelt 19 headgear of the Thracian Bassarides . The wolf represents the transitional 20 figure in the redefining of from lykos to lux, and his relationship with his 21 half-brother Dionysus as presiding over antithetical states of mentality or ecstatic 22 communion with . 23 24 Keywords: lily, Galaxy, cat, lycanthropy, Heracles 25 26 27 28 Milk-flower. The etiological for the domestication of the cat is the tale of 29 the metamorphosis of the handmaiden Galanthis, named as ‘Milk -flower,’ extant 30 in various degrees of completeness in three ancient literary sources and depicted 31 on four Etruscan mirrors and a Faliscan-Hellenic red-figure krater, with significant 32 variations that testify to an underlying theological complex implicating her in the 33 celestial Galaxy, the deifying milk of the Goddess, a special psychoactive or 34 divinatory plant, the netherworld, bacchanalian , and ancient Mystery 35 . 36 narrated the event in the .1 Ovid’s context for the tale is 37 typically playful and ironic, the womanly chat of with Iole, the pregnant 38 wife of her grandson . In the narration, Alcmene recalls her own pregnancy 39 with the infant Heracles and that Iole has an easier delivery. In the , 40 Ovid presented Iole as an analogue of the enthralling .2 Heracles had 41 mandated that the unwilling Hyllus assume the burden of Iole as his bride as he

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9. 273 et seq. 2 Ovid, Heroides, 9.

1 2019-2851-BUZ 1 departed for his ordeal of fiery transfiguration on the mountaintop of Oeta. As the 2 pyre was lit, he similarly transferred the burden of his bow to the hero Philoctetes.1 3 It was with the poison of its toxic arrows that Heracles’ wife Dejanira had smeared 4 the shirt of that she sent to Heracles as a , inadvertently 5 repeating the motif of the hero’s enthrallment to Omphale and initiating the toxic 6 burning affliction that is completed in the transfiguring flames of the hero’s 7 to Olympus and . The ultimate source of the burning agony2 8 of the poisoned robe was the toxin of the Lernean , with which he anointed 9 his arrows. This is the common motif of the arrow toxin, in Greek the 10 homonymous word (ios) for ‘arrow’ and ‘toxin,’ the latter being the of 11 ‘toxicology’ as the science of poisons from the toxon or archer’s ‘bow.3 The Hydra 12 of Lerna was a toxic water that lurked in what was once the supposedly 13 bottomless Lake Halcyon, to Dionysus and the site of one of the most 14 ancient Mystery religions, dating back to the transitional times between Minoan 15 and Mycenaean traditions.4 It was from the depths of Lake Halcyon that Dionysus 16 resurrected his dead mother to the celestial realm. The context of the tale of the cat 17 milk-flower Galanthis is thus a ritual of divinizing transcendence in which the hero 18 is divested of his corporeal burden through an ordeal of fire. 19 When Alcmene was in labor, Hera (), the wife of Zeus () had sent 20 the goddess of childbirth to sit upon the altar beside the birthing chamber with her 21 legs crossed and fingers interlocked to compress and seal the avenue of delivery. 22 Galanthis, her slave girl of the common people (media de plebe), concerned for 23 her mistress now suffering the seventh day of her agony played a trick. She rushed 24 in and falsely proclaimed a successful delivery.5 25 26 Congratulate the mistress. Alcmene of Argos is delivered of 27 her burden. She’s the mother of a boy, the answer to her 28 . 29 30 The startled goddess deceived unclasped her legs, and the infant passed 31 through. 32 Galanthis laughed at her clever trick and ridiculed the cheated goddess, 33 angering her so that she grasped the poor maidservant by her blond-red hair and 34 dragged her upon the ground, transforming her arms into forelegs. Ovid challenges 35 his reader to know the manner of the metamorphosis, not naming the cat, but only

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9. 229 et seq. 2 , Trachiniae, 1082 et seq. 3 Ruck, C. A. P. 1976. On the sacred names of Iamos and Ion: ethnobotanical referents in the hero’s parentage. Classical Journal, 71, 3 (1976), 235-252. 4 Ruck, C. A. P., 2014. The myth of the Lernaean Hydra. In Goffredo, S. and Dubinsky, Z., Eds. The Cnidaria. Past, Present, and Future: The World of the and her Sisters. Springer Publishing. New York. 795-806. Ruck, C. A. P. 2018. The Son Conceived in Drunkenness: Magical Plants in the World of the Greek Hero. Regent Press, Berkeley, CA. 5 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.311-312: dominae gratare. levata est Argolis Alcmene, potiturque puerpera voto.

2 2019-2851-BUZ 1 saying that since she had aided the woman in parturition with her lying mouth, 2 that’s how she would give birth, through the mouth, and just as before she had 3 come and gone from the house, that’s how she would continue,1 indicating that she 4 was henceforth a domesticated animal, a lowly commoner admitted into the house 5 of her mistress. 6 Several centuries later, the Greek grammarian Antoninus Liberalis offered a 7 prose summary of the tale of the maidservant’s metamorphosis. His version 8 derived the tale from a lost verse epic, the Heteroeumena (‘Metamorphoses, 9 Changes’) of the second-century BCE Hellenistic Greek Nicander, a hereditary 10 priest of Apollo in the court of the kingdom of Pergamum, one of the inheritors of 11 the conquest of . Nicander’s extant poems, the Alexipharmaca 12 and the Theriaca indicate his vast knowledge of toxins derived from plant and 13 animal sources, probably an expertise acquired from his training in priestly lore. 14 The version summarized by Antoninus Liberalis (Metamorphoses, 29) is probably 15 closer to Nicander than Ovid. The name of the maiden is Galinthias, a variant of 16 the same Milk-flower, and she is not a commoner or slave girl, but Alcmene’s 17 childhood playmate and the daughter of the Theban , the legendary eponym 18 of one of the city’s famed seven gates. The Fates or Moerae who attended the 19 forestalled birthing changed the girl into the cat, an animal that was thought to 20 conceive via the ear (a detail not mentioned by Ovid) and deliver via the mouth. 21 The goddess took pity of her and made her one of her sacred animals. 22 Heracles when he grew to manhood dedicated a sanctuary to her at Thebes. 23 The obscurantist Hellenistic poet Lycophron referenced the initiation of 24 Heracles as a beast suckling the breast of the goddess Hera (thér mystes):2 25 26 [Phemios’ son, i.e. ] went with the beast initiate 27 who sucked the ample breast of the hostile goddess Tropaia 28 [terrible, who grants victory], [Theseus] who stole the 29 menstrual belt…. 30 31 Phemios as the father of Theseus is unattested elsewhere, but the twelfth- 32 century Byzantine grammarian who wrote the Suda records that Phemios was the 33 father of Aegeus and hence the grandfather of Theseus. Such is the erudite riddling 34 obscurity of Lycophron’s poem, which nevertheless was very popular to his 35 readership, which included the Roman epic poet . 36 The first-second-century CE Greek Christian anti-Semitic epistle attributed to 37 Barnabas, in listing animals taboo for eating, condemns the cat as hateful to the 38 Lord for its manner of procreation, making the mouth, however, the organ of 39 unlawful sexual congress, apparently a condemnation of oral sex.3 This confusion 40 entered the medieval bestiary tradition, which makes either the ear or the mouth

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.322-323: quae quia mendaci parientem iuverat ore, ore parit nostrasque domos, ut et ante, frequentat. 2 Lycophron, Alexandra, 1327-1328. 3 Epistle of Barnabas, 10.8.

3 2019-2851-BUZ 1 the equivalent of the vulva.1 This perverts the obvious symbolism of the tale, that 2 the spoken word heard (ear) opens the way for delivery (mouth), the riddling 3 formula for a mystical or Mystery initiation. 4 Pausanias mentioned the sanctuary that Heracles dedicated in his description 5 of the city in the second century CE.2 In view of the name of Milk-flower, it is 6 significant that the females who were impeding the opening of the birth channel 7 are not named as the goddess of birthing or her analogues, but, according to the 8 local Theban tradition reported by Pausanias, they were a sisterhood of 9 pharmaceutical sorceresses (Pharmacides) sent by Hera, and Galanthis/ Galinthias 10 may be one of them, since she is cited as a daughter of the legendary seer , 11 perhaps the spiritual daughter as an initiate, since her name is not cited as the 12 Milk-flower Galanthis or Galinthias, but Historis, the ‘person who knows,’ 13 cognate with ‘’ and hence ‘.’ In the , wisdom 14 etymologically results from the visionary of sight. Historis is the 15 equivalent of a Spanish sabia and curandera, a shaman. The Theban sanctuary had 16 a statue of her as Galanthis.3 17 Thus, the cat was personified as the sorceress Gale, a dealer in spells, whom 18 Hecate metamorphosed into a cat.4 The ‘cat’ (galée, galé) was named for its 19 fondness for ‘milk’ (gála, gálaktos, cognate with Latin lac, lactis). The cat, even 20 in antiquity, was noted for the acuity of its vision, especially sight in the darkness 21 of night, and for its lustful estrus. ‘Cat’ was slang in Greek for a girl.5 As with the 22 canines (dog, fox, and wolf), the felines (panther, leopard, and lion), are all 23 versions of the various species of cat in mythical tradition, segregated merely into 24 stages in the evolution from wild to potentially domesticated home pets or 25 helpmates. Both the dog and the cat were less tamed in Classical antiquity and not 26 sentimentalized, but tolerated for their assistance, the dog as guardian and in 27 , herding, and warfare, and the cat as a predator on rodents and snakes. 28 Isidore of Seville (seventh century CE) called it a ‘mouser’ (musio) and derived 29 ‘cat’ from captus (‘caught’) or catus (‘acute’ sight).6 The cat was also called 30 aílouros in Greek, of uncertain etymology, but plausibly, at least as folk 31 etymology, derived from aiolos (’fast-moving, nimble’) and oura (‘tail’). 32 The Greek cat was a Mustelidae (ferret, marten, or polecat, which includes 33 also skunk, mink, etc.). The modern domesticated cat (Felidae) evolved from a 34 Numidian breed, first appearing in the first century CE as catta and in Byzantine 35 Greek in the fourth century as katta, replacing Latin feles (of uncertain etymology) 36 in by the eighth century, Modern Greek gata, derived from Berber 37 kaddiska. The domestication of the cat can be traced back to the eighth millennium 38 in Mesopotamia; and in , as animal incarnations of the goddess Bastet and

1 Thirteenth-century Aberdeen Bestiary, folio 23v. 2 Pausanias, 9.11.3. 3 Bettini, M. 2013. Women and : Mythologies of Birth in Ancient and Rome. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL / London, translated from the Italian of 1998, 44. 4 Aelian (third century CE), On the of Animals, 15.11. 5 Aristophanes, Wasps, 1185. 6 Isidore of Seville, , 12.2.38.

4 2019-2851-BUZ 1 her predecessor Mafdet, the cat was a beloved household pet and often afforded 2 mummification or cremation, especially in the Temple complex of Bastet at 3 Bubastis in the eastern Nile Delta. The cat was associated with fertility and 4 motherhood. The Egyptian cat was the jungle cat (Felis chaus) and the African 5 wild cat (Felis silvestris libyca), both of which bear resemblance to the modern 6 domesticated felines. The Neolithic burial on Cyprus of a roughly eight-month-old 7 cat (Felis silvestirs libyca) with a human suggests a bonding, perhaps the 8 of the cat to accompany its human master in burial.1 The Egyptian cat was a prized 9 item for smugglers, and whole armies were dispatched to repatriate them to Egypt. 10 11 Herbalism. After Alcmene’s delivery, the Milk-flower cat maiden as one of 12 the sorceress sisters took the infant Heracles to Mount Cithaeron outside of Thebes 13 and tricked Hera into nursing him. The sisterhoods of pharmaceutical herbalist 14 Pharmacides were not unique to Thebes. At Athens, the North Wind Boreas 15 abducted the maiden Orithyia, the legendary daughter of the autochthonous 16 serpent-king Cecrops from a sisterhood of the same name.2 Sometimes they were 17 named after the flower involved in their herbalist sorcery, like the Hyacinthides, 18 the daughters of Erechtheus,3 the legendary Athenian serpent king, who was 19 largely interchangeable with Erechthonius, the serpent-child of that 20 entrusted to the three daughters of the king to nurse. The Erechthonius 21 serpent as her foster child was an element in the iconography of Athena as an 22 Olympian goddess, depicted as a giant snake lurking behind her shield in her 23 colossal chryselephantine cult statue erected within the fifth-century Parthenon 24 Temple. The abduction of the maiden daughter of the supposed serpent king was a 25 ritual of human sacrifice, the theme presented in the Temple’s bas-relief frieze 26 encircling the cella.4 The prototypic exemplar of the motif was the abduction of 27 by from a sisterhood of flower-gathering sea when she 28 plucked the nárkissos bloom,5 the etiological myth for the Eleusinian 29 Mystery .6 The phármakos designates the pharmaceutical herb and the 30 pharmakós the offered victim. These sorceress women were performing a 31 Dionysian ritual. They were versions of the maenads or bacchants. Among the 32 metaphors that describe their ritual, the bacchants impersonated wet nurses

1 Vigne, J. D., Guilaine, J., Debue, K., Haye, L., and Gérard, P. 2004. Early taming of the cat in Cyprus. In Science. 304, 9, 259. 2 , Phaedrus, 229c. Orithyia’s companion is named Pharamacea, obviously one of the Pharamacides sisterhood. 3 Phanodemus, Atthis, 5, cited in Suidas. 4 Connelly, J. B. 2014. The Parthenon Enigma: A New Understanding of the West’s Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It. Vintage Books/ Random House, New York. 5 Homeric to (2). 6 Ruck, C. A. P. 1978. Documentation. In Wasson, R. G., Hofmann, A., and Ruck, C.A. P. 1978. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 85-136.

5 2019-2851-BUZ 1 (tithénai) of the infant deity.1 The milk from their breasts, however, was not 2 ordinary milk, but a divinizing potion.2 3 These metaphors represent the fantasies or ritual impersonations of root- 4 cutters (rhizótomoi) or herb-gatherers. Thus, the emblem of their bacchanalian 5 ritual was the , the stalk of the giant fennel (Ferula communis), which was 6 the symbolic container for the herbs gathered.3 It was also called the narthex, 7 which has the obvious etymology (narco-thex) of a ‘narcotic repository.’ Nárthex 8 was used as the title of various compendia of herbal medicines in antiquity.4 The 9 thyrsus-narthex is depicted as the magical tree on a Minoan golden signet ring 10 from Mycenae,5 and identifiable, from similar depictions on the coinage of 11 , as the magical African plant known as silphium.6 As the container for the 12 gathered herbs, silphium was variously identifiable export and eventually became 13 a culinary spice, and the plant itself was thought to have become extinct from 14 overuse. 15 The thyrsus was a staff of altered mystical vision and emblematic of the 16 psychoactive and magical herbs it contained. Prime among these were , 17 specifically, the psychoactive muscaria or fly agaric and 18 related species so frequently involved in the folkloric traditions of later Europe. In 19 common Latin culinary nomenclature, the stipe of the mushroom was called its 20 thyrsus.7 Thus, the mushroom itself was the prototype of the herb gatherer’s 21 narthex, since the psychoactive toxins of the Amanita species are confined mainly 22 to the rind of its cap, which represents the magical plants gathered into its 23 receptive stalk, botanically termed its stipe or trunk, hence metaphorically a tree. 24 In depictions and literary descriptions of the narthex, these plucked herbs are 25 represented as ivy, bryony (wild squirting cucumber), and smilax (bindweed, wild 26 morning glory), all involved in traditions of mind-altering potential and as berried 27 vines resembling the grapevine, but toxic in their natural state, whereas the leaves 28 and berries of grapevine are edible, but through the controlled fungal growth of 29 fermentation capable of yielding a cultivated intoxicant, opposed to the natural 30 toxicity of the wild vines.8 A Roman period Greek mythographer attributed the 31 madness to their ‘grazing like animals’ (nemonto, the equivalent of Latin 32 pascuntur) on ivy, smilax, and laurel.9

1 Homer, Iliad, 6.132. 2 , Dionysiaca, 45.298-303: the milk is described as an ‘unfamiliar dew’ (anéthes eérse), something a three-year-old had never tasted from his mother. 3 , Historia plantarum, 9.16.2. 4 Galen, 12.398, 959; Aëtius 8.45. 5 Late-Minoan gold signet ring from Mycenae, Archaeological Museum, Athens, 992. 6 Head, B. V. 1889. A Guide to the Principal Gold and Silver Coins of the Ancients: From Circ. B.C. 700 to A.D. 1. , department of Coins and Medals, London, plate 36. 7 Apicius, De re culinaria, third-fourth-century CE Latin cookbook, 7.15.6. 8 Ruck, C. A. P. Ed. 2017. Dionysus in : Ancient Entheogenic Themes in the Mythology and Archaeology of Northern Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Regent Press, Berkeley, CA. 9 Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses, 10, on the daughters of Minyas: enémonto kíssous kaí mílaka kaí dáphnen (‘they grazed on ivy, smilax, and laurel’), whereupon they metamorphosed into an owl and a bat.

6 2019-2851-BUZ 1 The plants atop the thyrsus can be replaced by a pinecone, an emblem of the 2 , but also suggestive of altered vision, since the pineal gland was so named for 3 its resemblance to the pinecone and commonly considered the visionary organ of 4 mystical transcendence.1 5 6 Origin of the . As Hera suckled Heracles, he drank so voraciously 7 that some of the milk scattered to the heavens, becoming the Milky Way or 8 Galaxy.2 What fell to the earth sprouted as the lily (leírion).3 ‘Lily’ (Latin lilium) 9 is derived from Egyptian hereret for ‘flower, blossom,’ perhaps Sanskrit halini. It 10 can designate any of several species of herbaceous flowers which may or may not 11 resemble the genus Lilium and which are not closely related to it or each other. In 12 heraldry, it became the fleur-de-lis. The plant was ritually interchangeable as 13 sacred to Hera with a flower in the carnation family (Caryophyllaceae), called 14 astérion (Silene linifolia, ‘lily moonflower’)4 in Greek for its ‘star-shaped’ 15 blossom, commonly called catchfly for its attraction to flies caught in its sticky 16 stems. Dioscorides equated astérion with (descriptive of its seven-leaved 17 frond).5 This may indicate a tradition of psychoactive associations, since Pausanias 18 Pausanias identifies the plant sacred to Hera as a ‘grassy herb’ (póa) from whose 19 ‘leaves’ (phylloi, not flowers) are woven the chaplets or wreathes for the goddess. 20 Presumably, he has seen the plant. It grew on the banks of the River near 21 Mycenae. The three daughters of the River Asterion served as wet nurses for the 22 infant Hera.6 As daughters of the river, their grandmother was presumably the 23 Titaness , who is also cited as the wet nurse of Hera.7 Tethys is named, like 24 the bacchant tithénai for her role as universal wet nurse and ‘grandmother’ (téthe) 25 of men and beasts,8 and was depicted in vase paintings accompanied by the 26 goddess of birthing. She was imagined as the primordial source of all moisture 27 falling from the clouds and nourishing the rivers of the earth. Eventually she 28 became the personification of the sea. Her mate was Ocean, the river of fresh 29 water encircling the land mass of earth, and the source of all the waters of the 30 aquifer that surfaced as rivers. 31 A gold signet ring from Cretan Isopata depicts a sisterhood of bare-breasted 32 priestesses with the heads of bees, with the milk of their breasts flowing to the 33 Galaxy, in a ritual of plant gathering that accesses a visionary experience, as 34 indicated by the single disembodied eye and the epiphany of a deity floating in the

1 Galen, De usu partium, 8.14. 2 Manilius (first century CE), Astronomica, 1.750-754; Pseudo-, Catasterismi, 43-44. 3 Geoponica (seventh-century Byzantine manual on ), 11.19. 4 Singer, C. 1927. The herbal in antiquity and Its transmission to later ages. In J. of Hellenic Studies. 47, 1 (1927), 1-52, illus. p. 16, fig. 12, naturalistic drawing of the first or second century CE, redrawn for the Vienna Dioscorides made for Julia Anicia. 5 Dioscorides (3.165) identifies the plant as cannabis and schoenostrophon (for its use as a fiber in making rope). 6 Pausanias, 2.17.2. 7 Homer, Iliad, 14.200-203, 300-303; Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae, 177; Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica, 2.1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2.527. 8 Orphic Hymn, 22 (to ).

7 2019-2851-BUZ 1 sky.1 The was thought to derive both the inspiring drink of honey and the 2 toxins of its sting from the nectar of the flowers it visited.2 The toxins of serpents 3 and plants were similarly analogous, the serpent acquiring its poison by ingesting 4 toxic plants, and plants becoming poisonous by growing in proximity to serpents.3 5 Bees themselves were thought to hatch by parthenogenesis directly from flowers; 6 or alternatively from the carcass of bovines, the cow and bull.4 They were called 7 bougéneis, ‘bovine-born.’5 Bees fed the eponymous founder of the brotherhood of 8 of prophetic at Olympia, according to the myth, with the psychoactive 9 honey of their stings amid a profusion of ion flowers, a plant (viola, violet) 10 involved in the motif of the homonymous íos for ‘arrow’ and ‘toxin.’6 Three aged 11 prophetic women known as the ‘three bees’ administered the Corycian Cave at 12 , which was filled with the glow of honey and the buzzing of the swarming 13 maenads. It was the three bees who taught Apollo the art of . The 14 Apollonian Delphic prophetess, named the after the / Delphyne of 15 the Cave, was called the ‘Delphic bee.’ The first oracular Temple at the site, back 16 in the legendary past, was itself no more than a beehive.7 In ’ Bacchae 17 (405 BCE, performed posthumously), the maenads scratch the earth with their 18 fingertips and milk flowed like a swarm of bees, while from the ivy leaves of the 19 thyrsus dripped down streams of honey.8 20 Four flowers in the depiction on the signet ring sprout from the ground, 21 perhaps single lily blossoms, with extended stamens and pistil, or the catchfly or 22 the nárkissos (sea daffodil, Pancratium maritimum) of Persephone’s abduction. A 23 wavy line separating the priestesses from the goddess terminates in a celestial 24 ‘heart-shaped’ ampule or vessel, as container for the elixir of the gathered plants or 25 the lactation from their breasts. This may the earliest proto-Greek depiction, 26 dateable to the mid second millennium, of the conjunction of the lilies with the 27 milk of the Galaxy. A second, shorter wavy line flows from the breast of the 28 central female on the ring, who is dancing directly above the largest of the four 29 lilies depicted, four being also the number of the females in the dancing group, 30 apart from the epiphany of the much smaller female in the heavens, spatially 31 balancing the disembodied eye. 32 Minoan pitchers in the shape of a female whose breasts form the pouring 33 spouts clearly were not intended as ordinary tableware, but represent an 34 anthropomorphized chalice for a sacred potion, either consisting of milk or

1 Gold ring from Isopata, ca. 1550-1450 BCE, Herakleion Museum, , inv. no. 424. C.D. Cain, C. D. 2001. Dancing in the dark: deconstructing a narrative of epiphany on the Isopata ring. in Amer. Journ. of Archaeol, 105, 1 (Jan. 2001), 24-49, 2 Vergil, , 4.197-203; Pliny, Natural History, 11.22. 3 Vergil, , 2.471: coluber mala gramina pastus: ‘a viper that has grazed on evil grass.’ Nicander, Alexipharmaca, 521 et seq.; Pliny, Natural History, 9.5. 4 Ovid, , 1.374-380. 5 Varro, De re rustica, 2.5.5. 6 Ruck. On the sacred names of Iamos and Ion. 7 Homeric Hymn to Hermes (4), 552-559. 8 Euripides, Bacchae, 704-711.

8 2019-2851-BUZ 1 containing it as an ingredient, or identifying whatever its contents as the milk from 2 the breast of the goddess or her priestesses. Milk was often included as an 3 ingredient in magical consisting of herbs and toxins for the same 4 symbolism. 5 As the nursing female, Hera is enacting her bovine manifestation, preserved in 6 her ancient Minoan-era as ‘Cow-face,’ boópis. As such, her Egyptian 7 analogue was Hathor as the wet nurse of Osiris. Hathor was usually depicted with 8 the head of a cow, ears of a cow, or as the celestial cow, astride the heavens, from 9 her mouth in the west to her hind quarters in the east, at dawn the solar 10 disk that she devoured at its setting upon the western horizon, her body strewn 11 with the stars of the Galaxy. She could also carry a tray of celestial food upon her 12 head, as her udders flow with milk. She was frequently depicted nursing the 13 pharaoh with her divinizing milk. 14 Hathor the cow was interchangeable with Sekhmet and Bastet, depicted as 15 females with a lioness head. The called Bastet Ailouros or ‘Cat.’ Hathor in 16 drunken could become Sekhmet, as the destructive opposite of her 17 nurturing persona. The well-known mid-second-millennium figurine of the snake- 18 goddess or priestess from Knossos has a cat perched atop her head,1 and Minoan 19 frescos depict cats stalking birds. 20 Another account of the origin of the Galaxy claimed that the milk was ’s, 21 the mother of Zeus. It flowed when she pressed to her breast the ‘stone’ that she 22 gave to eat, disguised in swaddling as her infant son.2 The flowing milk 23 that nursed the stone was Rhea’s ruse to prove the authenticity of the stone 24 wrapped in swaddling as indeed the divine infant in disguise. The mythical 25 tradition of the Cretan birth of Zeus and his deifying nurture by the goat maiden 26 is obviously dateable to the mid-second millennium BCE, the period of 27 the assimilation of immigrant Indo-European motifs into Minoan and 28 Mediterranean area religion, the same period as the Isopata ring. Almalthea is 29 derived etymologically from amaltheú-ein (‘to nourish’); or from amálthaktos 30 (‘indomitable virgin’); or from amálg-ein (‘to milk’) with theía (‘divine’).3 By 31 some accounts Amalthea used her goat horn as a rhyton drinking vessel to nurse 32 the infant Zeus, filling it with herbs, like a thyrsus. 33 The ’s observation of the effect of the plants grazed upon by the 34 notoriously indiscriminate goats was an indication of psychoactive potency; and 35 goats as represent the intoxicating revel in the primordial landscape of the 36 wilderness, before the evolution of the civilizing art of agriculture. The milk from 37 animals that graze upon psychoactive plants is psychoactive, as commemorated in 38 the Nordic tradition of the goat Hei∂run, that feeds on the foliage of the tree 39 Yggdrasill and from whose udders flows the for the deities.4 A poem of the

1 Snake-goddess, Knossos, ca. 1600 BCE, Iraklion Museum, Crete. 2 Pseudo-Hyginus, Atronomica, 2.43. 3 Hesychius. 4 Piper, A. 2013. The milk of the goat Hei∂run: an investigation into the sacramental use of psychoactive milk and meat. In Rush. J. A. Ed. and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience. Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, 211-277.

9 2019-2851-BUZ 1 describes the transfer of a serpent’s venom into the breast milk.1 2 Others claimed that the infant Zeus was fed by bees.2 , the ‘bee’ (a 3 feminine personification of ‘honey’ or méli) was a sister of Amalthea, and she or 4 bees directly suckled the infant. 5 6 Ritual of Adoption. A similar tale of Hera’s nursing of Heracles was told about 7 Dionysus3 and Hermes,4 both like Heracles, deified bastard sons of Zeus. The 8 suckling of these sons of Zeus represents an acknowledged ritual of adoption in 9 Greek and Roman culture. described it, as prescribed by the Delphic 10 oracle, as the procedure required to reintegrate among the living a man presumed 11 dead: he must put himself in the women’s hands, be washed and wrapped in 12 swaddling, and then suck the breast, in the same manner as when he was newly 13 born.5 Thus, his identity among the living was reestablished by being born anew. 14 similarly described Hera’s nursing as a mimesis of birthing her 15 adopted son as an adult:6 16 17 Hera lay upon a bed, and drawing Heracles close to her body 18 then let him fall through her garments to the ground, 19 imitating in this way the actual birth; and this ceremony is 20 observed to this day by the barbarians whenever they wish to 21 adopt a son. 22 23 It is still practiced today as validation of artificial kinship, with the adult 24 nursed by the tribal matron as a baby.7 25 In Nonnus’ account of Hera suckling the full-grown Dionysus, she first 26 anointed his unconscious body with divine drops from her ‘pain-healing teat’ 27 (akessíponos thelé)), curing him of his sacred frenzy, admiring the radiant beauty 28 of his manhood, comparing him to the handsomeness of her own son . Only 29 now in very late antiquity, does a poet mischievously play with the eroticism of a 30 grown man suckling. She obviously is sexually attracted to him, jealous that she 31 cannot consummate a union with him herself, although she hid her face in 32 modesty. Then she bared her full body. Her breasts are full of (ambrósies 33 pl´thousa thelé), the divine drink of the , and she ‘massaged’ them, ‘spouting 34 a stream poured from her jealous breasts’ (thlibómenen blúzousa chúsin zelémoni 35 mázoi). Her breast does not contain milk in this narration, but ambrosia as a

1 Greek Anthology, 9.1, Polyaenus of Sardis (probably Julius Polyaenus, the sophist contemporary with Julius Caesar, who wrote three books of Parthian to Bacchus. 2 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 5.70.1. 3 Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 35.319-335. 4 Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica, 2.43. Martianus Capella (fifth century CE), De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, 1.34. 5 Plutarch, Quaestiones Romanae, 5. 6 Diodorus Siculus, 4.39.2. 7 Kobakhidze, E. 2010-2011. The tradition of foster adoption in ancient Mediterranean area and Georgia. Phasis, 13-14, 55-59.

10 2019-2851-BUZ 1 ‘medicinal ’ or akésima. Thus, ambrosia is also the liquid of the Milky Way 2 and its earthly botanical analogue as the lily. 3 In suckling someone else’s nursling, Hera is enacting her ornithological 4 analogue as the cuckoo bird, which she bore traditionally upon her scepter,1 or 5 ornamenting her throne.2 The scepter could also have the lily flower as its finial, 6 sometimes ornamented with a floral motif to indicate its botanical reference.3 The 7 two emblems recall the episodes of Hera’s adoptive divinizing role as wet nurse 8 with the milk of the Galaxy. Cuckoos were recognized in antiquity as brood 9 parasites, laying their eggs in the nest of another species, leaving the foster parents 10 to hatch their young, which is the etymology of ‘cuckoldry.’ The cuckoo on Hera’s 11 scepter is emblematic of her marital subservience to her wedded husband. 12 Similarly, she was patroness of matrimony, the rite that subjugated her sexuality 13 under the control of her wedded husband. When Zeus first courted Hera, he 14 disguised himself as her pet cuckoo on Mount Thornax4 in the Argolid, which 15 subsequently changed its name to Coccygion or Cuckoo.5 There was a temple of 16 Zeus Coccygius on its summit.6 On the adjacent Mount Pron was an ancient 17 temple of Hera. Aristophanes in the Birds (414 BCE) made ‘Cloud-cuckoo-land’ 18 (Nephelokokkugía) the fantasy primordial city of phallic bird-men that the comic 19 heroes founded in antithesis to the realm of the Olympians. 20 21 The Lily-stone. The so-called Suckling Painter depicted Hera with an ample 22 exposed breast nursing Heracles as an episode of herbalism with the lily equated to 23 a ‘stone.’ The artist is named for the fourth-century lekythos vase from southern 24 Italy, now in the collection of the British Museum.7 Depictions of upper class 25 women nursing are rare in Greek art and were apparently avoided out of decorum.8 26 decorum.8 Ordinarily, wealthy wives employed wet nurses and attempted to avoid 27 the development of ample breasts, which were considered aesthetically unsightly,

1 Pausanias, 2.17.4: chryselephantine statue of Hera, seated on a throne, by Polycleitus, Temple of Hera, outside Mycenae. Hera enthroned, with cuckoo bird and lily scepter, Attic red-figure lekythos, attributed to the Brygos Painter, ca. 500-475 BCE, Rhode School of Design Museum, Providence, RI, inv. no. RISD 25.078, Beazley Archive no. 204109. 2 Return of Hephaestus to Olympus: Hephaestus, Dionysus, Satyriscus, , approaching Hera, unveiling herself, seated upon her cuckoo throne, Attic red-figure skyphos, ca. 430-420 BCE, attributed to the Kelophon Painter, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, inv. no. 1982-88, Beazley Archive no. 11777. 3 Hera enthroned and , Attic red-figure kylix from Vulci, Etruria, ca. 490-480, Museum, , inv. no. 542, Beazley Archive no. 438, 133. 4 A pre-Greek word, documented as the name of the mother of Prometheus. 5 Pausanias, 8.27.17. 6 Pausanias, 2.36.1. 7 Squat bellied (28 cm / 11 ins height; 12.6 cm / 5 ins width) red-figure lekythos, with accessories of white and yellow, lekythos (oil-bottle), from Apulia (Southern Italy), 365-350 BCE, attributed to the Suckling Painter, British Museum, London, inv. no. 1846.0925.13. The lekythos is usually narrow bodied. 8 Bonfante, L. 1997. Nursing mothers in Classical art. In Koloski-Ostrow, A. O., and Lyons. C. L. Eds. Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art. Routledge, London and New York, 174- 196.

11 2019-2851-BUZ 1 and comically obscene like gross erections on a male. The vase probably survived 2 intact because it was sequestered in a tomb, and it can be expected to represent a 3 scene of cultic significance for the deceased. 4 Heracles is unmistakably not an infant, but an adolescent. This is true of all 5 other surviving depictions of this episode.1 He is never an infant, but a pubescent 6 youth. On the lekythos, Heracles is nude, except for bracelets, shoulder strap, and 7 anklets. He is making direct eye contact with the goddess. In front of the nursing 8 Hera stands Athena, identified by her aegis goatskin, which she is not wearing as 9 usual as a shawl, but draped over her extended arm, holding in her hand a large 10 flower that she has plucked. The aegis was the goatskin of the suckling goat- 11 maiden Amalthea. Athena holds the flower next to the suckling Heracles, equating 12 the flower with the milk of the goddess, from which it presumably has sprouted 13 and which she now has picked. It resembles the single trumpet-shaped blossom of 14 a lily (lírion, krínon), as depicted on Minoan vases and frescos2 and the Isopatra 15 ring, or the catchfly astérion. 16 Behind the seated Hera is the winged , standing, the messenger goddess of 17 the Olympians, probably signifying that this event fulfills the intention of Zeus. As 18 messenger, Iris fulfills the same office as Hermes, but in her materialization as the 19 rainbow, she visually signifies the linkage of the celestial and terrestrial realms. 20 She holds a knobby staff, not a customary item of her iconography, but probably a 21 depiction of the pruned club that will serve as the badge of Heracles’ 22 heroism, wielded in the labors that will win him admittance as a deity among the 23 Olympian family. It is the traditional motif of the transmuted into the 24 olive as the paramount triumph of cultivation.3 She is looking down at Heracles’ 25 mother Alcmene, who is seated and holding a victor’s wreath. Above her is a 26 window, recalling the deceptive visit to her bedchamber, in which Zeus had

1 He is an adolescent or pubescent full-grown youth on a Faliscan red-figure krater, Villa Giulia Museum, Rome, inv. no. 25191. He is similarly a full-grown beardless youth on four Etruscan mirrors: 1) ca. 400-375 BCE, Bologna, Museo Civico, inv. no. 107J24: a beardless and nude , identified only by lion headgear and slender club, where he is the same age as his Etruscan twin Vile behind , watching intently, his hand on her shoulder, Uni’s legs are spread, but draped by her dress; 2) from Vulci, ca. 400-350 BCE, Berlin, Staaliche Museen, inv. no. 7769: a beardless and nude Hercle, identified by club, sits crosswise in the lap of Uni, his genitals shielded by the cape thrown behind his back and over his groin, with Mean seated opposite (without throne) offering an olive chaplet, , standing in central position, with , identified by aegis shawl and head, behind Uni; Uni holds a drinking rhyton, indicating the intoxicating nature of her milk, and a wavy stream behind the head of Tinia depicts the Galaxy; the lily is indicated by a four-petal floret behind Menrva, duplicated twice flanking the head in the lower exergue and as buds along the stylized vine motif encircling the whole scene; the vine motif occurs also right and left within the central scene; 3) from , late fourth century BCE, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence, discussed infra; 4) from Traquinia, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence, discussed infra. 2 Kandeler, R., and Ullrich, W. R. 2009. Symbolism of plants: examples from European- Mediterranean culture presented with biology and history of art: June: Lilies. In Journ. of Experimental Botany. 60, 7 (May), 1893-1895. 3 Ruck, The Son Conceived in Drunkenness, 169 et seq.

12 2019-2851-BUZ 1 impersonated her husband .1 On the other side, behind Athena, is 2 , seated high upon a rock and identified by jewelry and the mirror she 3 holds. Below her is a myrtle tree, which was emblematic of the vulva.2 On a higher 4 level appears , wings spread and looking down at his mother, a wreath over 5 his right shoulder, holding another wreath in his right hand and an embroidered 6 tainía fillet or headband in his left. Like wreathes, the headband was an award of 7 victory. A tainía was meant to be tied, and especially when wielded in the hand of 8 Eros, it had erotic connotation of union, not only sexual, but metaphysical with a 9 spiritual lover in another trans-dimensional realm.3 The eternal love of Eros and 10 Psyche transmuted sexual bonding into transcendent spiritual redemption. 11 In a scene depicted with such detail, with different types of footwear, jewelry 12 and items of clothing distinguished by style and ornamented with fabric design, it 13 would be remiss not to notice four round objects on the ground, which is where a 14 plant, like the lily that Athena has picked, could be expected to appear. They are 15 not lilies. They are spherical like stones. 16 17 Celestial Circlet. A late fourth-century BCE Etruscan mirror from Volterra 18 depicts Uni (Hera / Juno, i.e. [Y]uni) suckling Hercle (Heracles).4 Like the 19 lekythos vases, mirrors were tomb dedications. The Etruscan mirrors were 20 expensive objects indicative of a woman’s status in life, and beyond their use 21 while living, they were placed in the tomb to transfer that status to the afterworld 22 and often had depictions relevant to the preparation for immortality.5 They were 23 also scrying devices. An Etruscan mirror depicts the embrace of a male and 24 female, attended by a maid servant looking into a mirror, whose prophetic 25 message, according to the Etruscan inscription, is interpreted by another female 26 (perhaps a deceased relative) as cathreptomancy (katoptromanteía, ‘reflection 27 divination’) as the future of the couple.6 upon images mirrored in a 28 reflecting surface (psychomanteum) was a mode of divination and spiritual séance 29 in antiquity, practiced at sites like the Necromanteion at Ephyra in northwestern 30 Greece, situated at the confluence of the Rivers and , which 31 flowed from an entrance to the netherworld.7

1 Zeus with ladder as Amphitryon visiting Alcmene at window of her bedchamber, with burlesque Hermes carrying a lamp, bell-shaped krater from Paestum, Campania, ca. 360-330 BCE, attributed to Asteas, Vatican Museum, Gregorian Etruscan Museum, room 22, upper hemicycle. 2 Henderson, J. 1975. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. Yale University Press, New Haven, 20, 122, 134-135. 3 Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 83-84. 4 Etruscan mirror, from Volterra, late fourth century BCE, Uni (Hera) nursing the grown Heracle, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence. 5 de Grummond, N. 1985. The Etruscan mirror. In Notes in the History of Art. 4, 2/3 (winter/spring), 26-35. 6 Praenestine mirror, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, inv. no. Ant. 1991/103.36. Bonfante, L. 2015. Etruscan mirrors and the grave. In Haack, M.-L. Ed. L’Écriture et l’espace de la mort: Épigraphie et nécropoles à l’époque préromaine. OpenEdition Books, Rome, chap. 11. 7 Dakaris, S. 1973. The Antiquity of Epirus: The Acheron Necromanteion, Ephyra-Pandosia- Coassope. Athens. Wiseman, J. 1998. Rethinking the halls of Hades. In Archaeology, 51, 3, 12-18.

13 2019-2851-BUZ 1 On the mirror, Heracles is seen not as an infant nor an adolescent, but as a 2 muscular and bearded adult man, leaning on his club as he suckles upon the teat 3 that a very beautiful Uni has exposed and holds for him.1 Hercle was the first man 4 to be elevated to divine status in Etruscan tradition and aristocratic males often 5 identified with him. Uni sits on an elaborate throne, with footstool, suggesting that 6 the locale is Olympus. The opulence of the accoutrements also indicates the 7 wealthy status of Uni, and of the deceased lady in whose tomb the mirror was 8 deposited. Marriage to a female of nobility and wealth in Etruscan society elevated 9 her husband to her family’s aristocratic status. Etruscan women exercised 10 considerable power and freedom, in contrast to the patriarchal customs of their 11 Roman neighbors.2 The scene on the mirror is witnessed by Olympians (a nude 12 Apollo / Apulu, identified by laurel chaplet and staff of branching laurel; two nude 13 females, wearing elaborate necklaces; one, distinguished by the uncovered bridal 14 veil, is probably Hebe (’Eternal Youth’), who will become Heracles’ Olympian 15 wife; and a very handsome and regally robed Zeus / Tinia (cognate with Zeus as 16 Dios), identified by his scepter. It is a ritual of formal adoption into the celestial 17 family, and labeled in Etruscan with a placard held by Tinia, that reads, perhaps: 18 ‘This image shows how Hercle, Hera’s son, drank milk,’ or something similar, 19 since Etruscan is only partially decipherable.3 Hebe, as the only legitimate 20 daughter of Zeus, begotten from his lawful wife Hera, represents the Etruscan 21 matriarchal tradition of inheritance through Uni as the female lineage. 22 A bald and bearded with a bizarrely disjointed neck reclines above them. 23 The satyr appears to be drinking from a libation saucer as an analogue of the 24 divine milk:4 or more probably he is using the saucer as a mirror for divination by 25 lecanomancy (divination by inspection of a reflecting liquid in a ‘basin’ lekané), 26 hence the presence of Apulu as prophetic deity, with the top of his psychoactive 27 oracular laurel directly below the phiale libation saucer. A winged nude child on 28 the handle of the mirror, wearing only a ring-circlet on a ribbon as necklace, is 29 Epiur, holding an oval egg-like object in either hand as symbolic of rebirth or 30 perhaps as sortes (lots) for divination. Epiur / Tages (Greek epiouros) was the 31 guardian of infants. As Tages, he was the little old baby-man who popped 32 out of the ground in front of the plowman and taught the Etruscans the art of 33 divination.5 Thus Epiur can be depicted with an adult face or indications of adult 34 balding. He may be the son of Menrva () and Hercle, hence an analogue of

1 Rasmussen, T. 2005. ’ apotheosis in Etruria and Greece. In Antike Kuns,. 48, 30-39. 2 Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 22.14 (517d-518b). Bonfante, L. 2986. Daily life and . In Bonfante, L. Ed. Etruscan Life and Afterlife: A Handbook of Etruscan Studies Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 233 et seq. 3 Eca sren tva ichnac hercle unial clan thra sce. The first word is cognate with Latin ecce (‘behold’) and words five, six, and seven say ‘Hercle Uni’s son.’ Bonfante translates: ‘This image shows how Hercle, son of Uni, suckled milk.’ 4 Compare the rhyton in Uni’s hand on the Etruscan mirror from Vulci, described supra. 5 Ruck, C. A. P. 2017. The Great Gods of Samothrace and the Cult of the Little People. Regent Press, Berkeley, 351 et seq.

14 2019-2851-BUZ 1 Erichthonios, Athena’s foster serpent child from the coitus interruptus with 2 Hephaestus. 3 The figure of Tinia / Zeus on this mirror has sometimes been identified as 4 / Neptune based on his scepter, which could be interpreted as a , 5 but the three tines of the fork are too small and the outer two are curled outward, 6 making it not serviceable as a fishing prong. The central tine is flanked by two 7 additional tines curled inward. The scepter’s finial is clearly a stylized lily, with 8 central pistil and surrounding stamens. Thus, perhaps we should interpret the 9 winged child as holding ‘stones’ instead of sortes and the circlet, worn as an 10 ornament on his necklace, as emblematic of the circle formed by the Galaxy in the 11 heavens. 12 13 Lycanthropy. A mirror from Tarquinia (ca. 300 BCE) depicts the scene of the 14 suckling with the seated Uni attended by a woman standing behind and grasping 15 her, who is perhaps supporting her as midwife, although Hercle is fully adult, but 16 breadless, with a bizarrely drawn face, with what appears to be more like a snout 17 than a nose, and supporting himself with his club.1 This is a scene of adoption 18 through mimetic birthing. The lower drapery of Uni’s gown has been pulled up 19 into her lap to suggest that Hercle has emerged from between her legs. Behind the 20 midwife is a very tall flower, identifiable perhaps as the lily, complete with leaves, 21 long stems, and two buds, very carefully drawn, although the figures of the 22 personae are rather ineptly portrayed, especially the weird face of Hercle, who 23 appears somewhat canine, making the presence of the carefully delineated lily 24 more remarkable. 25 The winged female behind Hercle is perhaps Mean, Athena as the Victory 26 goddess , with proffered crown. Behind Hercle, directly beneath the proffered 27 crown, is another circlet, much larger, like an oval shield, but it obvious belongs 28 neither to Mean nor to Hercle, who traditionally doesn’t wield a shield in his feats 29 of heroism. The circlet apparently is being carried in the talons of a small bird, 30 perhaps a dove, above it. The dove may identify the winged goddess not as Mean, 31 but Turan, the Etruscan equivalent of Venus. Her name is pre-Hellenic, cognate 32 with tyrannos, as ‘mistress,’ and may be the Etruscan word for ‘dove’ or ‘swan.’ 33 She was both mother and lover, and signified health and vitality, hence the 34 equivalent of Hebe as Hercle’s bride on the mirror from Volterra. Turan, like 35 Hebe, is the Etruscan empowering female for the male’s sovereignty. 36 The circlet, however, isn’t an empty ring; it is filled with three lateral wavy 37 lines that identify it as the Milky Way. The circlet of the Milky Way carried in the 38 talons of the dove on the left balances the lily on the right and is intended to equate 39 the two items, in accordance with the description of the Galaxy as a somewhat

1 Tarquinia, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence.

15 2019-2851-BUZ 1 circular figure or ‘ring’ among the ,1 a ‘ring, although not perfect’ 2 (deformatum, ‘deformed’),’2 or as depicted on the Etruscan mirror, oval shaped. 3 The weirdly lycanthropic snout of Hercle may have been the intention of the 4 artist. In the same manner, the uncharacteristic unmuscular body and arm of the 5 hero and the canine leg and foot were probably intentional. Etruscan artists 6 excelled in the depiction of humans, and mirrors were objects of considerable cost. 7 Hercle, as the artist intended, is metamorphosing into a wolf, accessed via the 8 deifying milk from Uni’s breast and its equivalent, the oval circlet of the Galaxy 9 borne in the talons of the empowering dove. This is the significance of 10 Lycophron’s riddling bizarre reference to in this episode as a 11 theriomorphic ‘initiate beast’ (ther mystes):3 12 The lycanthropy of Heracles is the major motif in Euripides’ Heracles tragedy 13 (ca. 416 BCE).4 He has just fetched the infernal hound from Hades. In 14 his absence, the ‘Wolf’ Lykos intends to kill Heracles’ family. Hercules intervenes 15 to rescue them, but at the critical moment, , the goddess of madness, 16 commanded by Hera, drives her pack of hounds against him, infecting him with 17 the toxin of his own arrows, and he becomes mad. Thinking that he is performing 18 one more of his heroic labors, in a delusion of altered , he murders 19 his wife and children. He becomes the ‘Wolf.’ Lyssa, the agency for the delusion, 20 is named as the ‘She-wolf,’ the personification of rabidity, the madness that 21 regresses the domestication of the canines back to its lupine predecessor. She was 22 costumed with a wolf headgear, the fox pelt headdress of the Thracian maenads. 23 The toxin associated with Cerberus was Aconitum lycoctonum, commonly called 24 wolfs-bane, a plant of the Delphinium family, of which all species are toxic. 25 Heracles was costumed for the play with his traditional feline headgear, the 26 Nemean lion-skin, and a verse in the text suggests that Lykos, like Lyssa, had a 27 canine headdress. At the end of the tragedy, Heracles exits, not for his fiery 28 transcendence to Olympus, but for burial at Athens. Ovid associates wolf’s-bane 29 with a wife’s murder of her stepchildren.5 30 The Alexandra was ascribed to the third-century BCE tragedian Lycophron,6 31 although perhaps falsely. Lycophron was his adopted name. It means ‘with the 32 mind of a wolf,’ and it suggests that he had himself been a theriomorphic initiate 33 into the lycanthropic Mysteries in Southern Italy, the home of his so-called 34 adoptive father.

1 Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica, 2.43: ostenditur circulus quidem in sideribus, candido colore, quem lacteum esse nonnulli dixerunt: ‘there is shown a certain ring amid the stars, white in color, which everybody calls milky.’ 2 Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica, 2.43: circulum deformatum, quem supra demonstravimus: ‘a deformed ring, as we mentioned above.’ Nos autem omnium corporum deformationem dicere instituimus: ‘all of the stellar configurations, however, are deformations or approximations.’ 3 Lycophron, Alexandra, 1327-1328. 4 Ruck, C. A. P. 1976. Duality and the madness of Herakles. In , 9, 53-76. 5 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.147: lurida terribiles miscent aconita novercae. 6 The tenth-century Byzantine Suda encyclopedic lexicon (pseudonymously attributed to Suidas) records the titles of twenty tragedies.

16 2019-2851-BUZ 1 The lycanthropic metamorphosis would have special significance for the 2 Etruscan / Romans The mythical founders of Rome were sons of Mars, nursed as 3 infants by a wolf,1 which suggests the cult of warrior lycanthropy,2 although some 4 accounts rationalized her as a woman, ‘wolf’ (lupa) being slang for a prostitute.3 5 Her name was Acca Larentia or Larentina and by one account she was awarded as 6 prize to the deified Heracles in a game of dice as a temple prostitute and locked in 7 his temple. By this tradition, Heracles was the father of the twins. After he had 8 slept with her, he advised her to marry the first man she met upon leaving the 9 temple. This was a wealthy Etruscan, whose property she inherited and bequeathed 10 to the Roman people. 11 Acca Larentia was the etiology for the Larentalia festival of the winter 12 solstice, a celebration of the household lares, which is probably the etymology of 13 Larentia’s name. It derives from Etruscan lar for ‘lord,’ cognate with Greek laos 14 for ‘people, soldiery, folk.’ The lares were clad in a rustic dog-skin tunic, a 15 garment that elicited antiquarian scholarly inquiry, and they were attended by 16 dogs.4 The dog-skin implies the motif of werewolves and lycanthropy. The lares, 17 probably influenced by Greek tradition, by the early Empire became paired as 18 twins, like Romulus and Remus, and assimilated with the Dioskouroi twin sons of 19 Zeus. The Dioskouroi could be represented by two posts, joined by one or two 20 crossbeams, the ‘receptive’ dokana, which was carried into battle as the standard 21 in front of the army, an iconic glyph of the household and equally receptive grave. 22 It symbolized a brotherly love that spans this world and the other.5 The lares were 23 always represented as small images, figurines, dancing like the Corybants, who 24 attended Rhea’s birth of Zeus, on tiptoe, balanced on a single leg, with one arm 25 raised holding a rhyton drinking horn, which suggests their involvement in the 26 motif of psychoactive toxicity. Like the Dioskouroi, they were protectors of the 27 household, and paired with the penates, who were similarly represented by 28 figurines. The penates protected the innermost hidden parts of the household, the 29 penetralia or pantry, where the figurines were stored in a cupboard, and this was 30 given an significance as guardians of secret lore.6 Although later 31 anthropomorphized as idealized young men, their earliest representations were 32 ithyphallic, associating penetralia with ‘penetration.’ 33 At the winter solstice celebration of the Larentia, the interdimensional barrier 34 traditionally gapes open, allowing the little creatures from the other realm to roam

1 The earliest account is Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first BCE), Roman Antiquities, 1.77-79, derived from the third-century BCE Quintus Fabius Pictor. 2 Kershaw, K. 2000. The One-eyed God: Odin and the (Indo-)Germanic Männerbünde. Journal of Indo-European Studies, Monograph No. 36. Washington, DC.; Ruck, C. A. P. 2016. The wolves of war: evidence of an ancient cult of warrior lycanthropy. In Neuroquantology, 14, 3 (September), 544-566. 3 Livy, 1.4.7. 4 Plutarch, Questiones Romanae, 51; Ovid, Fasti, 5.129 et seq. 5 Ruck. The Great Gods of Samothrace, 30 et seq. 6 Ruck, C. A. P., and Larner, L. 2013. Virgil's edible tables. In Rush, J. A. Ed. Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience. Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 387-449.

17 2019-2851-BUZ 1 abroad. The Larentalia is comparable to the Balkan Greek kallikanzaroi, with the 2 incursion of elfin figures, gremlins, fairies, and werewolves.1 The kallikantzaroi 3 are cognate with the Turkish karakondjolos. For the Romans, the solstice gateway 4 remained open until the February Lupercalia, the ‘Wolf’ Festival which was 5 intended as the ritual purging of the incursion. February took its name as the 6 month from the februa, thongs of goatskin wielded as whips in a revelry of mock 7 flagellation around the Wolf Cave at the base of the Palatine Hill, commemorating 8 the lupine breastfeeding of the founding brotherly twins and the goddess Rumina 9 (a personification of the rumis or ‘breast’), who was patroness of nursing. 10 Galaxy-stone. The word for ‘stone’ (lás, láos) offers a traditional pun with the 11 word for ‘people’ (laós), documented as early as the Homeric tradition,2 and 12 demonstrated in the myth of Deucalion, who created people from the stones that 13 were the bones of mother Earth.3 These are the primordial creatures, the ‘stones’ 14 that sprouted as mushrooms after a fall of rain at Corinth:4 15 Here, tradition says, that in earliest times, human bodies 16 sprang from fungi swollen with rain. 17 Theophrastus records that certain mushrooms sprouting near the sea petrify to 18 stones with the heat of the sun.5 ‘Stone’ is a metaphor for mushroom as a folkloric 19 motif, documented by a Byzantine commentator on the second-century BCE 20 Nicander.6 21 As something sacred, mushrooms have no name, only metaphors. The paucity 22 of metaphors reflects a taboo against profane use, shrouding them with phobias of 23 lethal toxicity. Thus, in English there are only four words for the mushroom. It can 24 be called a , which is safe because it is a foreign and quasi-scientific 25 assimilation from Latin, but fungus itself is a metaphor, cognate with the Greek 26 spongos for ‘sponge,’ descriptive of the mushroom’s rapid fruiting, expanding as it 27 absorbs the moisture of a rainfall. Transculturally, the genesis of mushrooms is 28 attributed to the thunderbolt, encapsulating its celestial fire in the expanding 29 wetness of matter.7 The sponge itself is interchangeable with an aquatic rock. The

1 Ruck, C. A. P., Staples, B. D., and Heinrich, C. 2001. The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, 36-40. 2 , , frag, 82 (Strabo, 7.322): ‘So out of stones moral men were made, and they were called people.’ Homer, Iliad, 24.611. 3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.393-394: magna parens terra est: lapides in corpore terrae ossa reor dici (‘Earth is the great parent; stones in Earth’s body I think are called bones’). 4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.392-393: hic aevo veteres mortalia primo corpora vulgarunt pluvialibus fungis. 5 Theophrastus, Historia plantarum, 4.7,2: ‘mushrooms grow in a certain place close to the sea [emphasis added], which are turned to stone by the sun.’ Allegro, J. M. 1970. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East. Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., London, 1970, chap. 6, footnote 13. 6 Scholia to Nicander, Alexipharmaca, 526. The note comments on Nicander: ‘For to different kinds of mushrooms different names have been assigned.’ 7 Wasson, R. G. 1986. Lightningbolt and mushrooms. In Wasson et al., Persephone’s Quest, 83-94; Ruck, C. A. P. 2016. Mushroom in the cults of Early Europe. In NeuroQuantology. 14, 1 (January), 68-93.

18 2019-2851-BUZ 1 blood from the decapitated head of the Gorgon Medusa fell to the ground as coral,1 2 which was so named in Greek as the ‘little pubescent girl’ (korállion), equating the 3 blood with menses. It was pliant, but changed to the hardness of rock when 4 submerged in water. Ovid’s extended narration of the event indicates that his 5 audience understood his mythological reference. Pliny called it the Gorgon-stone.2 6 The Gorgon Medusa herself was a zoomorphism of the mushroom, as depicted on 7 a fourth-century BCE Greek vase,3 and substantiated by the local mythological 8 tradition that Pausanias records about Mycenae, whose name (Mykenai) was given 9 the etymology of the ‘Mushroom-sisterhood’ of the .4 This is probably a 10 verbal punning corruption of its pre-Indo-European name as the Minoan sisterhood 11 of the Mekonai, the sisterhood of the poppy flower.5 The earliest record of the 12 city’s name as m-w-k-i-n-u (Mukina) occurs in an inscription from the mortuary 13 tomb of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, the father of Akhenaten, at Kom el-Hettân (1349 14 BCE). The opium capsule is often depicted in Minoan iconography as a knob on a 15 stem, resembling a mushroom. The capsule also resembles the pomegranate, 16 which often has a prominent elongated calyx, and when inverted presents the 17 likeness of a mushroom. The bloody matrix of the pomegranate (which was called 18 rhoie or ‘flux’) would suggest the menses of the coral, as well as any knob-shaped 19 item,6 like the mykos. 20 The mushroom in English can also be called champignon, which is similarly 21 distanced as foreign, assimilated from the French and naming it simply as 22 something native to the ‘fields’ (champs), technically specific for the button 23 mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) native to the grasslands, the commonly cultivated 24 mushroom.

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.735-752. 2 Pliny, Natural History, 37.56: gorgonia nihil aliud est quam curalium. nominis causa, quod in duritiam lapidis mutatur emollitum in mari (‘Gorgonia-stone is nothing other than coral. The reason for the name is because when softened [emphasis added] in the sea [like a sponge] it turns into the hardness of stone.’). 3 Fourth-century BCE amphora, Berlin, inv. no. F. 3022; Ruck. Documentation. In Wasson et al., The Road to Eleusis, 85-136, image 7. 4 Pausanias, 2.16.3. ‘() founded Mycenae. For on its site the hilt (mykos) fell from his sword, and he regarded this as a sign to found a city. [It is implausible that the hilt could detach itself from the sword.] I have also heard the following account. He was thirsty, and the thought occurred to him to pick up a mushroom (mykos) from the ground. Drinking with joy the water that flowed from it, he gave the place the name of Mycenae.’ The hilt of a sword was called its mykos because of its design. The mykos that fell off the hilt to the ground involves the common metaphor of the erect penis as a mykos (Archilochus, frag. 34 Diehl; cf. Hesychius, Herodian). When on the ground, it was a phallic mushroom. The two accounts are analogous versions of the same event. The spring that flowed from the plucked mykos is the horse that emerged from the severed neck of the Gordon Medusa, hence the episode is an analogue of the decapitation-harvest scenario. 5 Ruck. The Son Conceived in Drunkenness, 140-141. Ripinsky-Naxon, M. 1993. The Nature of : Substance and Function of a Religious Metaphor. State University of New York Press, Albany, 159. 6 Herodotus, 7.41.

19 2019-2851-BUZ 1 The term ‘toadstool’ is a folkloric metaphor identifying it as a stool for a 2 toad,1 which is frequently associated with the mushroom because of its secretion 3 of psychoactive bufotoxins like the of mushrooms. The toxin in 4 the psychoactive is primarily (a GABAA receptor), not the 5 same as (which is like LSD, , and DMT). The toadstool is 6 specifically a toxic mushroom, but commonly applied to all fungi as loathsome 7 and dangerous. In Elizabethan folklore, the toad absorbed its venom by lurking 8 under so-called stones.2 This is analogous to the ancient tradition that the toxin of 9 serpents and plants is reciprocal, each deriving the toxin from the other.3 In 10 French, the is called crapaudin, from the ‘toad’ (crapaud). The 11 mushroom as a stool is transcultural, occurring in the effigy of the Aztec analogue 12 of Dionysus as Xochipilli, seated upon a stool ornamented with glyphs for the 13 psychoactive mushroom.4 14 The scientific myco-prefix as in ‘’ is a Greek metaphor designating 15 the mushroom as something mucous, repulsively slimy with bodily effluents like 16 semen and menses.5 The Greek amanites6 (Modern Greek manitari, botanical 17 Latin amanita) probably derives from the Amanus Mountains of modern Lebanon 18 as a source of the ancient mushrooms. 19 The only common term as a mushroom is similarly a folkloric metaphor 20 designating it as an onomatopoeic bovine zoomorphism, assimilated from the 21 French mousseron, derived from Late Latin mussare, ‘to bellow or moo,’ cognate 22 with Greek muá-ein. The same root is responsible for the Greek muía (diminutive 23 muíska) and Latin musca for the fly as onomatopoetically ‘buzzing.’ Mushrooms 24 bellowed as they fruited from the earth.7 In the myth of Zeus and his courtship of 25 the cow-maiden Io, the bellowing was the mooing of the cow in estrus, stung with 26 the toxin of the cow-fly (Tabanus bovinus), which was called oistros, assimilated 27 into English as estrus, the entomological ghostly metamorphosis of her former 28 tender Argos, who wielded the cow-prod and whip of sexual arousal.8 The Latin 29 version of the cow-prod is the stimulus, which Virgil employs in his description of 30 Amata, the ‘beloved,’ whipped into estrus by the Fury with the toxins of 31 Mycenae.9 The multiple eyes of the Argos Panoptes were placed in the tail of the

1 Wasson. V. P., and Wasson, R. G. 1957. Mushrooms, Russia, and History. Books, New York, 65-91. 2 Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 4, scene 1, verse 6-8: ‘Toad that under cold stone days and nights has thirty-one sweltered venom sleeping got.’ 3 Supra, footnote 6. 4 Wasson, R. G. 1980. The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 57-78. 5 Ruck, C. A. P. 2012. The great god Sabazios and the crab dance in Athens. In The Stone Mushrooms of Thrace (bilingual edition, English and Greek). EKATAIOS, Alexandroupoli, Thrace-Greece, 193-220. 6 Nicander, frag. 79. 7 Aristias, (fifth-century BCE tragedian) frag. 6 (Nauck), probably from his Perseus tragedy, quoted in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 3.60B. Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 49-51. 8 Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 51-52. 9 Vergil, Aeneid, 7.346 et seq.

20 2019-2851-BUZ 1 peacock, whose feathered sexual display is triggered by the pheromone of its 2 peahen, the iconic bird of Hera as wife of Zeus.1 The multiple ‘eyes’ of the 3 herdsman and the stinging fly suggest the scabby white remnants of the shattered 4 universal veil that adhere to the cap of the Amanita muscaria and related 5 psychoactive species, an ‘eye’ being an appropriate metaphor for a mushroom that 6 affords access to visionary experience. The cow-maiden in estrus pursued by her 7 herdsman fly is an expression of this mushroom’s common association with the 8 fly; hence its specific nomenclature as muscaria. Flies are attracted to this 9 mushroom to lay their eggs in its cap, and within a few days, the mushroom is 10 loathsome, crawling with larvae, but also emblematic of rebirth, since were 11 commonly depicted as entomological manifestations, like bees and butterflies. 12 This is probably the reference in the tradition of bees bred from the carcass of 13 bovines. Folkloric tradition equates all flying insects with the same symbolism.2 14 The fly-agaric mushroom is naturally programmed with a scenario for initiatory 15 rituals. It was commonly mixed with milk and employed as an insecticide 16 attracting flies, who drowned in the galactic potion.3 Hence its name in French as 17 tue-mouche. 18 Perhaps no plant masquerades more easily as a stone than the fungi (which 19 have no leaves, branches, roots, or flower), for which the name is ‘stone’ in 20 Hebrew (PTR). The evangelist Matthew’s account of the of Simon with 21 the new name of Peter (Greek pétros, ‘stone,’ pétra, ‘topographical rock’) as the 22 rock entrusted with the keys of heaven4 puns upon the mushroom. The ancient key 23 key was a knobbed bolt, presenting a likeness of a mushroom, opening the door to 24 mystical experience.5 The Jewish name Simon designates ‘someone who listens,’ a 25 a suspiciously too apt name for the first apostle. His role as ‘head,’ Cephas (Greek 26 képhas, kephalé), further puns upon kepha for ‘stone,’ and the 27 anthropomorphism of the mushroom as a harvested head, like the Gorgon 28 Medusa.6 It should be remembered that the Gorgon head had the efficacy of 29 petrification. The German Pilz for mushroom is derived from Btilz, an assimilation 30 of the Latin boletus (Latin for ‘mushroom,’ cognate with Greek bolítos, a 31 metaphor as ‘clod of earth, stone’), one of which Pilze is called Steinpilz, ‘stone- 32 mushroom.’ The tradition of the ‘stone’ as the substance from which the deifying 33 elixir is prepared is the fundamental motif of alchemy, termed the philosophers’ 34 stone (lapis philosophorum), first mentioned by Zozimos of Egyptian Panopolis

1 Ruck. The Great Gods of Samothrace, 136 et seq. 2 Wasson, V. P., and Wasson, R. G. 1957. Mushrooms, Russia, and History, 206. 3 Albertus Magnus (thirteenth century), De vegetalibus, 2.6.87: Tuber enim quod vocatur muscarum, venenosum est; et si lacti immisceatur, et si lacti immisceatur et muscae cadant super lac illud, gustantes ipsum, inflantur et moriuntur (‘The mushroom that is called fly is poisonous and if it is mixed with milk and flies fall on that milk, they swell up and die’). This is the first mention of the fly-agaric in Europe. 4 Matthew, 16.18. 5 Allegro, J. M. 1970. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 47 et seq. 6 Allegro, J. M. 1970. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 46-47.

21 2019-2851-BUZ 1 (ca. 300 CE).1 The ‘stone’ was edible. Drinking the elixir accessed enlightenment, 2 , and the transcendent metamorphosis of the leaden to golden 3 perfection. 4 Stones were thought to have magical powers. Gemology in antiquity was a 5 compendium of traditional accounts, passed on without verification by each new 6 author, and it often includes garbled information which derived from 7 mythologized stones, which were not actual stones. The anonymous Orphic 8 Lithica is a work of the fourth century CE. The narrative scenario that serves as 9 introduction indicates that the compendium is Orphic. It records a tradition about a 10 galaxy-stone, whose antiquity goes back to before the time of Pliny. It dissolves in 11 the mouth, tastes like milk, and affects the mind, depriving it of memory, and 12 comes from Egypt.2 The Orphic Lithica lists the galaxy-stone as second in the 13 hierarchy of magical gems, after only the crystal, which had pride of place for its 14 ability to focus the rays of the sun and ignite fire. The galaxy-stone was filled with 15 ‘divine milk’ (thespésios gála) and had the property to alter even the mind of deity 16 and bend it to one’s will.3 Some people called it lethaíon, because it induced 17 amnesia in both men and gods. Lethaíon suggests the Fountain of or 18 ‘Forgetfulness,’ a river in the netherworld, of which Orphic initiates were 19 instructed not to drink, however burning the thirst of their soul for the wetness of 20 incarnation. ‘Truth’ was a-letheía or the negation of forgetfulness, remembrance, 21 recognition, recollection of previous incarnations, gnosis, knowledge. In Virgil’s 22 description of the river Lethe, which the author of the Lithica would well have 23 known, innumerable souls fly about like bees, filling the grove with buzzing, as 24 they settle into white lilies, harvesting their nectar, waiting for , 25 drinking of the stream’s milky juice of oblivion.4 The juice-nectar of the lily is 26 confounded with the waters of the river and the simile of the bees presents the 27 souls as the prototypic root cutters. 28 The galaxy-stone was filled with , the fluid that flowed instead of blood 29 in the veins of the immortal deities, which you could milk from it, as if it had 30 udders, yielding a fluid just like milk in every respect. The white scabs of the 31 Amanita muscaria are fantasied as udders of a cow.5 The galaxy-stone is a version 32 of the Zoroastrian Persian , which the Greeks knew as [h]ómomi, 33 and it was associated with lycanthropy.6 Zoroaster was cited as the author of a

1 Ede, A., and Cormack, L. B. 2012. A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 86. 2 Pliny, Natural History, 37.56. 3 Orphic Lithica, 191-203. 4 Vergil, Aeneid, 6.705-715: floribus insidunt variis, et candida circum lilia funduntur (‘they settle into various flowers and swarm around white lilies’). Lethaei ad fluminis undam secures latices et longa oblivia potant (‘at the water of the Lethe River, they drink its care-expelling fluid/ juice/ milk and long-lasting oblivion’). In the Georgics (4.387 et seq.), Lethe’s water is identified as the opium poppy. 5 Wilson, P. W. 1999. Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish . City Lights, San Francisco, 31: “Púca as a mushroom name also means “heifer’s pouch,” i.e., the udder of a young cow, perhaps a metaphor for the ruddy Amanita cap with its white ‘teats.’” 6 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 46 (369d-f).

22 2019-2851-BUZ 1 compendium of gemology; several of the stones may masquerade as haoma. Pliny 2 records one of these as much prized by the Magi, the astriótes [like the astérion 3 catch-fly lily of Hera], so named as a ‘star’ apparently fallen from the Galaxy.1 4 The Avestan haoma is cognate with the Vedic Soma potion which was considered 5 milk from the udders of the Celestial Cow of the Galaxy,2 and it is always 6 concocted with cow milk, to implant this metaphor of lactation. It was churned 7 into from a cosmic ocean of milk.3 In the hagiographic biography of 8 Zoroaster, his father mixed the haoma with milk and shared the drink with his wife 9 to conceive the legendary eponymous founder of the lineage of astrological 10 priestly prophets who perpetuated the title of Zoroaster or ‘star-gazer’ and Magi. 11 The probable date of Zoroaster is the mid second millennium BCE, but since it 12 was a priestly title, he often is placed in the eighth century. Among the ethnically 13 marginalized Yezidi, the Amanita muscaria is still employed today as haoma in 14 the cult of Mithras.4 The Hindu dietary prohibition against mushrooms was 15 probably extended to include all bovines as taboo. The Buddha broke the taboo by 16 consuming mushrooms in his last meal, prepared for him by a , as he 17 journeyed to the pre-appointed site of his Great Demise with his entourage of 18 monks, who were forbidden to partake of the tabooed meal.5 Surely, a blacksmith 19 as implausible chef implies an alchemical diet. 20 Toxins in the fodder upon which bovine animals graze could be expected to 21 pass into the milk.6 The rhyme of Hey Diddle Diddle may have an antiquity of 22 thousands of years going back to the cow maiden Io and before, telling the tale of 23 the cow that jumped over the moon, while the feline cat fiddled and the little 24 canine dog laughed.7 Cows don’t ordinarily dance. Cows avoid grazing around 25 their cow-pies, hence precluding an inadvertent involvement with the common 26 psilocybin mushrooms, but they seek out locoweed, which is so named for its toxic 27 result upon them. Similarly, other toxic plants like nightshade are fodder for 28 bovines and horses. Although Amanita muscaria is not common in fields, it does

1 Pliny, Natural History, 37.45: mirasque laudes eius in magicis artibus Zoroastren cecinisse produnt (‘they cite that Zoroaster has sung miraculous praise of this stone for the arts of the Magi’). In this context, the ‘magicians’ can only refer to the Zoroastrian priesthood. 2 Rig Veda, Hymn 10. Elizarenkon, T. J. 1995. Language and Style of the Vedic Rsis. SUNY, Albany, 35. 3 Heinrich, C. 1995. Strange : Alchemy and Religion, the Hidden Truth. Bloomsbury, London, 30-36. 4 Ruck, C. A. P., Hoffman, M. A., and González Celdrán, J. A. 2011. Mushrooms. Myth, and Mithras: The Drug Cult that Civilized Europe. City Lights Books, San Francisco, 235-238. On the Yezidi, see Wilson, P. L. 2018. Cauda Pavonis: Esoteric Antinominism in the Yezidi Tradition. Automedia, New York. 5 Wasson, R. G. 1986. The last meal of the Buddha. In Wasson et al., Persephone’s Quest, 117- 139. 6 Piper, A. 2013. The milk of the goat Hei∂run. 7 Bois, G. J. C. 2010. Jersey Folklore and Superstitions, Volume One: A Comparative Study with the Traditions of the Gulf of St. Malo (the Channel Islands, Normandy, and Brittany) with reference to World Mythologies. AuthorHouse, Central Milton Keyes, 369 et seq.

23 2019-2851-BUZ 1 grow on the fringes, bordered by suitable host trees. and horses, of course, 2 once grazed in the forests.1 3 The human breast itself could be likened to a spoked wheel, with the nipple as 4 the felloe or central hub.2 The episode is a hallucinatory account of Zeus’s 5 insemination of as a serpent. The spoked wheel (Greek [w]ítus) is a glyph 6 for the mushroom, depicting the radiating underside of its gilled cap. It is the 7 etymology for the ‘vine’ (Latin vitis, as in ‘viticulture’) and of ‘wine’ (Greek 8 [w]oínos).3 As an Indo-European word imported into vine-growing regions from 9 their original northern homeland, where the climate is not suitable for the growing 10 of grapes for fermentation, it must have been a word for their original ‘intoxicant,’ 11 which was later applied for the intoxicant of wine as found in their new 12 Mediterranean environment. This is an apt assimilation since the mushroom was 13 termed a fermentation of earth,4 and the fungal yeasts manipulated in the process 14 of fermentation were a civilizing taming of the wild, uncultivatable mushroom. A 15 circle with a central dot is a glyph for the mushroom in indigenous Mesoamerican 16 cultures, as is the ‘wheel,’ as a means of shamanic, whirling, dizzying 17 transcendence or transport. The seer Ezekiel received his call to amid a 18 thunderstorm with the mushrooms fruiting as the wheels of the mekabah chariot 19 throne of Yahweh.5 20 Soma/haoma is related etymologically to the Greek hú-ein, ‘rain,’ with the 21 connotations of ‘squeezing’ out the water or juice, cognate in English with ‘suck’, 22 as in suckling or the manipulation of the elongated teats of the udder of the 23 celestial cow, analogous to the masturbation of the bull, with the male’s seminal 24 ejaculate analogous to milk.6 The nymphs of nursed the infant Dionysus with 25 with ‘the milky juice’ (glagóessan…ikmáda) of their breasts,7 and they were 26 transformed into the constellation of the ,8 not pressing their nipples to his 27 mouth, but as droplets of rain falling from the Galaxy as the baby lay supine upon 28 his back gazing up upon the stars. The Hyades were supposedly named for the 29 ‘rain’ (hú-ein), by the traditional etymology. By some accounts, the nursing 30 occurred underground, with the infant hidden in a cave, a murky chamber, or a

1 Vermeulen, R. 2015. Natural Grazing: Practices in the Rewilding of Cattle and Horses. Rewilding Europe. 2 Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 7.331: ‘Then going under her bosom, it [Zeus courting Semele as a serpent] cinctured the spoked wheel’s felloe of her breasts.’ 3 Ruck, C. A. P. 1986. The wild and the cultivated: wine in Euripides’ Bacchae. In Wasson et al., Persephone’s Quest, 178-223. Chantraine, P. 1968, 2009. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque. Klincksieck, Paris, s.v. oinos and botrys. Frisk, H. 1954-1970. Griechisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Carl Winters, Heidelberg, s.v. oinos and botrys. 4 Nicander, Alexipharmaca, 521; cf. 525 with scholia. 5 Ezekiel, 1.1-28. Ruck et al. The Apples of Apollo, 210-211. 6 Aristophanes, Birds, 1646: ‘I will make you king and feed you on phallic bird’s milk.’ Markov, V. 2017. The seminal milk of heaven. In Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 185-186. 7 Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 9.31. 8 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibiotheke, 3.4.3; Pherecydes, scholia to Homer, Iliad, 18.486; Pseudo- Hyginus, Astronomica, 2.21; Scholia to Germanicus, Aratea.

24 2019-2851-BUZ 1 cellar.1 This suggests the metaphor of a spongey fungus awaiting the rainfall for 2 the incarnation of the celestial fiery spirit from the lightning’s bolt that 3 traditionally is the generative cause for the fruiting of the mushroom. It was this 4 incarnation that allowed the bacchants to draw milk from clods of earth or from 5 rock as from living breasts.2 There was, however, another meaning to the name of 6 the Hyades. The Hyades were also called Suculae or ‘suckling piglets’ in Latin, 7 which is the more plausible etymology for their Greek name, from hys for ‘pig.’3 8 The significance of the pig is its association with the Goddess, being an obscene 9 metaphor for the female genitals,4 suggested by the boar’s arousal by the 10 pheromone of a woman in estrus. Thus, the Gorgon Medusa had porcine 11 attributes—the nose, ears, and tusks of a sow, and the sorceress turned men 12 into boars, for which the was , or [h]ómomi.5 As the délphax, the pig 13 pig is named like the dolphin for the ‘womb,’ cognate with French Dauphin. 14 Another account of the origin of the Galaxy claimed that the milk was Rhea’s 15 (Latin Ops). the mother of Zeus.6 She is named, like the rhoíe pomegranate, for the 16 the menstrual flux. The milk flowed to the Galaxy as she pressed to her breast the 17 ‘stone’ that she gave Cronus to eat, disguised in swaddling as her infant in a 18 mimesis of nursing. The flowing milk that nursed the stone was Rhea’s ruse to 19 prove the authenticity of the stone as indeed the divine infant in disguise. Some 20 claimed that the deception took place on the Arcadian Wolf Mountain Lykaios.7 21 Apart from the ruse of the stone, she didn’t nurse the infant herself, but entrusted 22 him to the ‘Nurturing Goddess’8 Amalthea, who was either a goat-herder or herself 23 herself a goat. Amalthea’s goatskin became the aegis, hence connecting her to the 24 goat-goddess and the former displaced persona of Athena. By one account, 25 Zeus was fed on ambrosia that doves brought him in the Cave on Crete and on 26 nectar delivered by an eagle.9 27 Doves were primarily associated with Aphrodite, who was born, in the 28 Hesiodic tradition, the generation before Zeus. The bird designated as a dove, 29 however, was more like the carrier pigeon (Columba livia domestica), an

1 Homeric Hymn to Dionysus (26), 6: in a fragrant cave. Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 9.65: in a gloomy house. Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 14.151: in a dark cellar as the baby called daddy to the skies. Greek houses did not ordinarily have cellars. 2 Euripides, Bacchae, 708-710; Philostratus, Elder, Imagines, 1.14; Nonnus, Dionysuaca, 45.309- 310. 3 This etymology accounts for the quantity of the upsilon as long, as in ‘pig.’ Ruck, The Great Gods of Samothrace, 394-395. 4 Aristophanes, Acharnians, 729-817; Henderson, The Maculate Muse, 132. 5 Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 140-141. 6 Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica, 2.43. 7 Pausanias, 8.36.3. 8 From amaltheúein, ‘to nourish’ (Hesychius); or amálthaktos, ‘hard, indomitable’; alternative name as Adamantheia, ‘indomitable virgin’; or amélg-ein, ‘to milk, suck,’ with theía, ‘divine.’ 9 Moero (or Myro, Muró), Hellenistic female epic poet from Byzantium, (telling the story of the childhood of Zeus), frag 1.3-6, Powel, Collectanea Alexandrina, Oxford, 1925, preserved in Athenaeus.

25 2019-2851-BUZ 1 entrusted with delivering messages across the inter-dimensional barrier.1 The 2 doves were anthropomorphized as the sisterhood of the , cited as wet 3 nurses of the god Dionysus. They are named for their ‘filled breasts’ (plé-ein, 4 ‘fill’) but given a new etymology for their celestial function as guides for ‘sailing’ 5 (plé-ein, ‘sail’). It is such a dove bearing the circlet filled with the Milky Way, the 6 ambrosial milk that flowed to the Galaxy from the breast of Rhea-Ops in her ruse 7 with the ‘stone,’ that is depicted on the Etruscan mirror, and its earthy equivalent 8 as the lily. Doves delivered ambrosia daily to the Olympians through the 9 dangerous narrow passageway of the Symplegades; in this version of the motif, the 10 ambrosia was identified as the Golden of the tree in the Garden of the 11 .2 When Perseus, harvested the head of the Gorgon Medusa there, the 12 apple that he picked from the tree was identified as a mushroom.3 The kíbisis that 13 Perseus traditionally employs slung across his arm to receive the harvested 14 Medusa head is still used today as the receptacle for plucked like the apple.4 15 As such, it has the same significance as the thyrsus-narthex. The 16 that led to the Judgment of Paris came from this same tree in the Hesperides 17 garden.5 This is not a trivial coincidence, but identifies the casus belli as the motif 18 of the transmutation of the primordial entheogen. The War at Troy was the final 19 attempt to subjugate the female into the male dominance of matrimony and to 20 incorporate Apollo into the evolving realm of Zeus.6 Since the mushroom is 21 named as a mooing-bellowing bovine zoomorphism, its association with the divine 22 milk of celestial cows was inevitable. 23 The stone of Rhea-Ops’ deception was preserved at Delphi as the sacred 24 omphalos,7 and its fungal implication is suggested by the tradition that 25 conspired with Rhea in concocting the ‘drug’ (phármakon) that was the emetic 26 potion that the adult Zeus gave to Cronus to cause the regurgitation first of the 27 stone and then of his ingested children.8 When they emerged in the vomit of the 28 emetic potion, they had been alchemically digested along with the ingested stone 29 and had been transcended to their new personae as the nuclear brothers and sisters 30 of the Olympian family (Hera, Demeter, , Poseidon), and their netherworld 31 brother Hades. Zeus swallowed Metis when she metamorphosed into the cow-fly

1 Blechman, A. 2007. Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Species. University of Queensland Press, Lucia, Queensland; Levi, W. 1977. The Pigeon. Levi Publishing Co., Inc., Sumter, SC. Carrier pigeons occur in the third-millennium BCE Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. In the sixth century BCE, the Persian Cyrus employed them as war pigeons. The Greeks used the pigeons to convey the results of the Olympic Games between cities; and Julius Caesar employed them in his conquest of Gaul. 2 Homer, , 12.63-64. 3 Fourth-century BCE amphora, Berlin, inv. no. F. 3022, discussed supra. 4 Alcaeus (ca. 600 BCE), frag. 255 Campbell; Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 151-152. 5 Coluthus of Egyptian Lycopolis (fifth century CE), Rape of Helen, 59. 6 Ruck, C. A. P., and Staples, D. 1994. The World of Classical Myth; Gods and , Heroines and Heroes. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, 263 et seq. 7 Hesiod, , 498-500. 8 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke, 1.2.1. Hesiod, Theogony, 493 et seq., attributes the stratagem only to .

26 2019-2851-BUZ 1 as they were engaged in sexual concourse to beget his motherless daughter 2 Athena.1 3 Metis was equated with the primordial deity or ‘Revelation’ in Orphic 4 .2 Phanes was depicted emerging from the cosmic egg or stone, pushing 5 apart the two halves of the broken shell. He was equated with the Zoroastrian 6 Mithras, who was born from a rock.3 The configuration of the split eggshell-stone 7 with the intervening stipe is dumbbell-shaped. It encodes the fungal identity of the 8 twin Dioskouroi, the antithetical sons of Zeus. In the riddling language of the 9 Mystery tradition, it was the plant that harvested to prepare (Iason) 10 for the anointment that rarified the significance of his name as the man of the íos 11 arrow-toxin motif. The plant sprouted from the ichor of the of the tormented 12 Prometheus, upon which the eagle daily fed. It was a cubit tall, like the crocus of 13 the Corycian wolf-cave on Mount Parnassos, the same crocus that was the 14 botanical manifestation of Apollo when he begot the Athenian hero Ion, the 15 eponymous founder of the Ionian tribal group of the Greeks. Ion’s name is another 16 exemplar of the arrow-toxin motif. The plant grew from the earth with a twin stem, 17 descriptive of no plant other than the Amanitas and similar mushrooms, with the 18 lengthening stipe-stem pushing apart, in both directions, splitting the stone ovum 19 into the opposing globular base and cap.4 The Dioskouroi wore the split red half 20 eggshells as their iconographic caps. They were similarly depicted as such a 21 dumbbell configuration in their aniconic representation as the dókana posts.5 The 22 liver was considered the microcosmic analogue of the cosmos in hepatoscopy 23 (divination of a haruspex by inspection of the liver). It is also the organ of the 24 human physiology that filters toxins and contained the highest concentration of 25 ingested poisons. The eagle of Prometheus that feasted daily upon its ichor 26 identifies it as eagle fare, food of the thunderbird, a metaphor like raven’s bread,6 27 identifying the psychoactive Amanitas. Thus, the tradition of the eagle that fed 28 nectar to the infant Zeus, comparable to the doves that delivered ambrosia. 29 Rhea’s allies in protecting the infant Zeus were the Curetes, who were 30 ‘sowed’ like mushrooms from a heavy fall of rain.7 They were analogues of the 31 Dioskouroi, the Corybants, and the . The Idaean dactyl (tiny ithyphallic 32 creature) named Celmis was a little devoted playmate of the infant Zeus and was

1 Hesiod, Theogony, 886, with scholiast; Ruck, The Great Gods of Samothrace, 149; Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 156 et seq. 2 Orphic Hymns, 6; Athanassakis. A. N., and Wolkow, B. M. 2013. The Orphic Hymns. Press, Baltimore, note 61. 3 Ruck et al. Mushrooms, Myth, and Mithras, 52 et seq. 4 Ruck; The Great Gods of Samothrace, 367 et seq. 5 Ruck et al. The Apples of Apollo, 122 et seq. 6 Klapp, E. 2013. Raven’s bread and other manifestations of fly agaric in Classical and biblical literature. In Rush, J. A. Ed. Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience. Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 333-342. 7 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.282: largoque satos Curetes ab imbri (‘or the Curetes sown by a great rainfall’).

27 2019-2851-BUZ 1 turned into adamant,1 often taken to be a diamond as the hardest rock, but here a 2 lump of iron. Kelmis is named as the ‘driver’ (kéle-sthai) of the castling, liquid 3 metal poured into a mold, the job of a technician in metallurgy, indicating his 4 identity as one of the tiny creatures like the Kabeiroi who assisted Hephaestus in 5 the alchemical forge. His brothers were Damnameneus (the ‘hammer’) and 6 (the ‘anvil’).2 Kelmis allegedly offended the great Mother in some never specified 7 way, and his brothers confined him deep within , where he 8 metamorphosed into iron. Kelmis figured in the proverb: ‘Kelmis in iron’ for an 9 obdurate person. 10 Ovid mentions Celmis (Kelmis) very briefly in a rhetorical praeteritio 11 (occultatio) or catalogue of topics to be omitted from discussion, along with the 12 rainfall-sown Curetes (and the ‘small’ (parvo) botanical metamorphoses of Crocus 13 and Smilax), challenging his reader to know the forbidden Mystery tradition of the 14 little people. These creatures are fungal anthropomorphisms.3 They materialized 15 as Rhea or her analogues dug her fingers into the ground in travail for the 16 parturition of Zeus. Thus, they occur in multiples of five for her dactyls, or three 17 for the trinity of her divine sisterhoods. The pose digging into the earth as root 18 cutter suggests their botanical personae. As a gemstone, the adamant protected 19 against all toxins. It was the castling metal of which the pruning hook of Perseus 20 was constructed for the decapitation of the Gorgon head,4 and the sickle that 21 castrated Ouranos.5 Only something of the same efficacy as the Gorgon head or 22 the celestial genitals would have the power to counter the nature of the pruned 23 head or the harvested celestial mycological phallus, as antitoxin counters toxin. It 24 was also the metal of the chains that bound Prometheus.6 25 It became associated with the lodestone, the mineral magnetite. Iron rings 26 were souvenirs of initiation into the Mystery of Samothrace, as commemoration of 27 the links broken from the chains of the prisoners released from the Cave of Plato’s 28 delusional , like iron rings bound to the adamantine force of the magnet.7 29 The magnet was analogous to the electrostatic attraction of amber,8 a stone which 30 is the petrified exudation of trees. All mushrooms were such petrified arboreal 31 exudations.9 32 According to the Orphic Lithica, the galaxy-stone could rouse the herd to 33 estrus and assured a copious lactation for the animal’s nurslings. It could also be

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.281-282: te quoque, nunc adamas, quondam fidissime parvo, Celmi, Iovi (‘and you [I won’t mention], now adamant, O Celmis, formerly most devoted to little Jove’). 2 Homer, The Idaean Dactyls, frag 1. (from Clement, Stromateis, 1.16.75); anonymous Phoronis (early Greek epic), frag. 2 (cited in Zenobius, 4.80); Sophocles, frag. 335 Nauck2, from the satyr play Knops. 3 Ruck, The Great Gods of Samothrace. 4 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke, 2.4.2. 5 Hesiod, Theogony, 161. 6 , Prometheus, 6. 7 Ruck. The Great Gods of Samothrace, 61-69, 255 et seq. 8 Ruck. The Great Gods of Samothrace, 60 et seq. 9 Pliny, Natural History, 22.96.1: origo non nisi ex pituita arborum (‘no source except from the pitch of trees’).

28 2019-2851-BUZ 1 mixed with honey and administered as a potion to a human mother, affording a 2 milk that would ‘intoxicate’ (methúonta) the suckling child.1 Women customarily 3 hung talismanic engraved stones between their breasts to assure a plentiful supply 4 of milk. 5 6 The lily-mushroom of ’s torment. An Etruscan mirror explicitly depicts 7 the lily as an analogue of the mushroom. It portrays Ixion bound to the spoked 8 solar wheel, flying in shamanic torment, with a bizarrely-drawn ‘flower’ at his 9 feet.2 Again, in view of the beautifully exact engraving of the mirror’s subject, the 10 ineptness of the flower’s depiction would have displeased the artist’s , were 11 it not intentional, like the lupine snout on the suckling Hercle. Cook, in his 12 discussion of the mirror, dismissed the ‘flower’ as a meaningless design.3 The left 13 bottom of the mirror is lost, but presumably it would have had another version of 14 the ‘flower,’ either identical or perhaps as a clue or comment on the extant 15 ‘meaningless design.’ 16 Ixion at a banquet with the Olympians upon their magical foods of ambrosia 17 and nectar4 tried to rape Hera, but was misled by a hallucinatory look-alike in the 18 persona of the lady Cloud (Nephéle).5 Hallucinatory erotic-ecstatic experience at a 19 a divine dinner upon ambrosia and nectar surely implicates the role of an 20 entheogen. In a comparable tradition, Hera created a Cloud version of Helen,6 who 21 who was the delusory image for whom the Greeks fought at Troy, while the real 22 Helen spent the interim of the war in Egypt learning the lore of .7 The union 23 of Ixion with Cloud resulted in the tribe of , who sprouted from a rainfall 24 upon the slopes of Mount ,8 the mountain ridge that borders the northern 25 edge of the plain of , claimed in antiquity along with the Peloponnesus, as 26 one of the original homelands of the Etruscan people.9 Aristophanes staged a 27 chorus of Clouds in his parody of Socratic teaching (423 BCE), identifying the 28 phallus that was their obligatory costuming for the comic stage as their noses, as 29 they inhaled the nebulous smoke of cannabis that allowed them to get high.10 30 Aeschylus may have staged the Cloud ladies in his Prometheus tragedy (ca. 480s

1 Orphic Lithica, 197-203. 2 Ixion, bound to the spoked wheel, ca. 460-450 BCE, British Museum, inv. no. GR 1900 6-11.3. 3 Cook, A. 1914-1940. Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion. Cambridge University Press, New York, republished Biblio and Tannen, 1964, 201, fig. 146. 4 (second century CE), Dialogues of the Gods, 9. 5 , Pythian Odes, 2.32 et seq.; Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke, Epitome, 1.20. 6 Euripides, Helen, 34: ‘synthesizing a breathing image copy of me out of the sky.’ 7 Homer, Odyssey, 4.226-232. 8 Diodorus Siculus, 4.12.5. 9 Hellanicus of Lesbos (fifth century BCE), Phoronis (genealogical notices of events from the times of Phoroneus, primordial king of the Peloponnesus), frag. 76. 10 Ruck, C. A. P. 2014. Aristophanes’ parody of Socrates as a pothead and the Spartan warrior cult of the wolf. In Ellens J. H. Ed. Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Sacraments: Chemical Paths to S “pirituality and God, vol. 1, History and Practices. ABC-, Santa Barbara, 75-91; Ruck, C. A. P. 2017. Cannabis, caves, and plays. In Estren. M. J. Ed. One Toke to God: The Entheogenic of Cannabis. Cannabis Spiritual Center, Malibu, 27-32.

29 2019-2851-BUZ 1 to 430 BCE, perhaps pseudo-Aeschylus) as a chorus of air-borne 2 weeping for the tormented Titan. 3 As punishment for his misled delusional rape of Hera, Ixion was bound 4 spread-eagled (or in running-man position1) to a whirling wheel of fire. Ixion was 5 named as the ‘mistletoe’ (Viscum album2), which in English is derived as the 6 ‘urine-twig,’3 cognate with ‘micturition.’ He is depicted on an Apulian amphora, 7 bound to his fiery wheel, while Hephaestus with hammer on one side leans upon a 8 tree sprouting the twigs of mistletoe and an Erinys on the other sets the wheel 9 whirling.4 traditionally afflicted their victims with maddening toxins.5 The 10 The scene is witnessed by an enthroned Zeus and the rainbow Iris, who is a 11 thematic doublet for the rainy lady Cloud. The botanical persona of Ixion as the 12 urine-twig mistletoe refers to the sanctity of the Amanita muscaria and its 13 potentiated metabolite in urine among the Druids. The motif extends even to the 14 supposedly poisonous urine of toads.6 The toad’s lascivious eroticism made it a 15 common metaphor for the vulva.7 It was often represented with its hind legs spread 16 spread wide apart to expose its genitals. Exemplars of the goddess from early 17 Europe depict her as a toad, painted red, with scabby toxin-secreting warts on her 18 skin,8 the total configuration identifiable as the distinctive cap of the Amanita 19 muscaria. As the toad Phryne, it was an epithet of Aphrodite.9 20 The mistletoe and the mushroom are similar parasitic dependents upon the oak 21 as its fruit, both engendered supposedly by the fall of the thunderbolt. They thus 22 both represent the incarnation of celestial fire, fittingly so in the persona of Ixion 23 since he was a son of the ‘flaming’ , a primordial pre-Olympian 24 manifestation of the solar Apollo.10 The whirling wheel of fire represents the 25 Druidic rite of human immolation in a large cage of wickerwork.11 It was a rite 26 that Ixion had first inaugurated himself, pushing his father-in-law, a dinner guest, 27 into a bed of burning wooden coals. 28 The spoked wheel of Ixion’s torment is a demonstrable image of the gilled 29 underside of the mushroom’s cap as a spoked wheel. From Ixion was descended

1 Kylix, ca. 500 BCE: Ixion, bound to his wheel in running position, Museum of the History of Art, Geneva, inv. no. 5728. 2 Greek [w]ixía, [w]ixós. 3 Sanskrit mehati, cognate with Greek omeích-ein. Ruck et al. The Apples of Apollo, 15-40. 4 Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, printed as fig. 146 in Cook, Zeus. 5 Vergil, Aeneid, 7.346 et seq. 6 Morgan, A. 1995. Toads and Toadstools. Celestial Arts, Berkeley, 10. 7 Hieronymus Bosch, Seven Deadly Sins, Prado, Madrid: superbia with toad over vulva. Wasson. The Wondrous Mushroom, 184 et seq. 8 Gimbutas, M. 1981. The ‘monstrous Venus’ of prehistory or goddess creatrix. In Comparative Civilizations Review, 7, 7 (fall), 1-26. 9 Rising, H. M. 2013. Invoking Animal : A Guide for the Pagan Priestess. Moon Books, Winchester, UK / Washington, 133; Werness, H. B. 2006. The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art. Continuum, New York / London, 190. 10 Ruck et al. The Apples of Apollo, 15-16. Phlegyas was a primordial king of Thessaly and father of Apollo’s lover , the mother of . 11 Caesar, Gallic Wars, 6.16.

30 2019-2851-BUZ 1 the race of centaurs, whose leader Cheiron possessed vast herbal knowledge, 2 which he taught traditionally to the heroes entrusted to his tutelage as the poison- 3 arrow motif of toxic archery.1 The list of known students of the great centaur2 4 suggests that the basic toxin of his herbal lore was fungal, like the tradition of the 5 origin of the whole race of centaurs. The Gorgon Medusa, among her other 6 zoomorphic materializations, was a .3 By his wife , Ixion was the father 7 father of Peirithoös (), sometimes depicted as a centaur.4 Dia has a name 8 that designates her as a homonymous bride of Zeus-Dios, and hence she is a 9 mythical doublet of the married Hera as the deceptive lady Cloud. Peirithoös was 10 the bridegroom at the marriage feast of Hippodameia, the ‘horse-dominant’ female 11 who is a doublet of the Gorgon Medusa. It was for a projected marriage to a 12 Hippodameia that Perseus was sent to harvest the Gorgon head. A third 13 Hippodameia was the abducted bride of in the foundation myth of the 14 sanctuary of Olympia.5 15 The centaurs, as a race of creatures that sprouted from a mountain rainfall and 16 as a tribe of primordial men known as the are an equine zoomorphism of 17 the same mushroom motif that yielded the Gorgon Medusa and the bovine 18 anthropomorphism of the cow maiden Io. Io was cited as the sister of the 19 mushroom maiden Mykene, after which the citadel was renamed Mycenae. The 20 Lapiths are named as a primordial race of stones, ‘sons of the rock.’6 It is perhaps 21 significant that if Hephaestus is not the deity who provides the wheel for Ixion’s 22 torment, the spoked wheel is presented by Athena in her role of Metis-Medusa 23 analogue.7 24 The curiously ineptly depicted ‘flower’ on the Etruscan Ixion mirror was 25 identified by Robert Graves as a mushroom. He suggested that it was the food of

1 Ruck et al. The Apples of Apollo, 89-92. 2 The following are cited as students of Cheiron: and his cousin Patroclus, , Ajax, , Asclepius, Caeneus, Heracles, Jason, Medus (Medea’s son), Oileus (an Argonaut), Phoenix, , Perseus, Telamon, and Theseus. A didactic compendium titled The Precepts of Cheiron was attributed to Hesiod. 3 The earliest depiction of the Medusa: large relief pithos from Thebes, ca. 670 BCE, Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. CA 795. 4 Peirithoös as a centaur kissing the hand of his bride Hippodameia, Roman wall fresco, , Naples Museum, inv. no. 9044. 5 Ruck. The Son Conceived in Drunkenness, 28 et seq. 6 Latin lapis, ‘stone,’ cognate with Greek lepas, ‘topographical rock,’ like petra. The patronymic – id suffix in Greek designates ‘child of.’ In Michelangelo’s Battle of the Centaurs (ca. 1492), the centaurs fight with stones, reflecting the artist’s etymology of the Lapiths. Scigliano, E. 2005. Michelangelo’s Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara. Simon and Schuster, New York, 43. The opponents of Theseus traditionally fight with stones against him as the antithetical motif of his name, as either under or bound to a stone or placing a stone as burial marker. 7 Ares and Hermes apprehend Ixion, before an enthroned Hera, with Athena providing the wheel, Attic red-figure kantharos (Dionysian drinking cup), attributed to the painter, British Museum, London, inv. no. London E155, Beazley archive no. 212127.

31 2019-2851-BUZ 1 centaurs, that they embodied the of the psychoactive mushroom.1 Wasson 2 had earlier accepted (“he is surely right”) and presented Graves’ identification in 3 Mushrooms, Russia, and History.2 The bizarreness of the depiction, as Wasson 4 reasoned, was its likeness to the fire-drill, the stipe representing the penis, called 5 ‘mushroom’ in Greek, as a stick, drilling into the cap as vulva, with the 6 crosshatching lines on the underside of the cap designating the radiating gills as 7 the teeth of the ‘comb’ of the loom, the vulva as a sacred image, comparable to the 8 male member as phallus. Mushrooms were employed as tinder for the generation 9 of fire as a sexual union. The ‘female agaricke’ was the white shelf-fungus Fomes 10 officinalis (sweet to the taste at first, but then bitter, a cynical condemnation of 11 womanhood), supposedly veined like a comb, representing the white underside of 12 the Amanita; and the ‘male agaricke’ was the Fomes fomentarius or Fomes 13 ignarius, long, brown-reddish, sticky (with semen), hard, and heavy. The fire-drill 14 makes Ixion an analogous tradition to Prometheus’ theft of fire. Prometheus stole 15 it as a ‘flower’ (ánthos) from Hephaestus, and that deity is also the one who 16 chained the Titan to the rock of his torment.3 The fire-drill was invented by 17 Hermes.4 18 The Fomes fomentarius has a long history back into Paleolithic times as the 19 tinder for the spark engendered by the fire-drill. It is a shelf fungus growing like 20 steps upward on the trunk of the cosmic tree, resembling the hooves of the magical 21 steed that would afford the mystical transport of transcendence, like Pegasus, the 22 horse of Perseus. Significantly, Prometheus hid his stolen fire in the narthex or 23 bacchant , that served as receptacle for the plants gathered in the Dionysian 24 ritual. Other fungi like the puffballs were used to shelter the smoldering embers for 25 transport from hearth to hearth. The explosive fruiting of the puffballs, releasing 26 their storehouse of spores, was suggestive of spiritual release. A tenth-century 27 Byzantine codex of Dioscorides illustrates the agaric with an image that bears no 28 resemblance to the Fomes officinalis, apparently by an illustrator with no 29 knowledge of the mushroom, but learned in the tradition of the supposed male and 30 female kinds of agaric, or perhaps merely copying a more ancient manuscript. In 31 1491, the earliest printed book with a delineation of the agaric depicts it with roots, 32 branches, and a foliaged cap. 33 The depiction of the ‘flower’ on the Etruscan mirror has not only deformed 34 the mushroom to illustrate its sexual imagery as a fire-drill, but it has endowed it 35 with an anomalous stem supporting a calyx widening into a trumpet-shaped 36 blossom. The mushroom is morphing into a lily. One such lily is notoriously 37 psychoactive, the , and like the mushroom that was food for centaurs, it 38 bore the folkloric name in Greek as ‘horse-mad’ (hippománes). Ajax ‘harvested’ it 39 as the cause of the delusionary madness that led him to slaughter herds, thinking

1 Graves, R. 1960. Food for Centaurs. Doubleday, Garden City. He incorporated the identification as the Amanita muscaria in his revised 1963 edition of The Greek . Penguin, New York, 1955, forward. 2 Wasson and Wasson. Mushrooms, Russia, and History, 116 et seq. 3 Aeschylus, Prometheus, 7. 4 Homeric Hymn to Hermes (4), 108-114; Ruck. The Great Gods of Samothrace, 119 et seq.

32 2019-2851-BUZ 1 that they were men.1 This lily with the name as dirkaion / kirkaion was also 2 involved in the motif of lycanthropy2 and with the sorceress Circe as perhaps an 3 analogue of moly, the [h]ómomi or haoma of the Zoroastrian magi priests. 4 The Ixion mirror surrounds the central episode with a border of trailing wild 5 ivy vine, suggesting that the morphing lily is an analogue to the Dionysian ivy, the 6 prototypic toxic antecedent to the grapevine as the product of human intervention 7 in hybridizing the intoxicating cultivated transmutations of primitive and toxic 8 natural growths. Frequently the vase depictions of the lily from Southern Italy 9 show the blossom as the apparently toxic3 bindweed wild morning glory (smilax), 10 with an anomalous head raising from within its funnel and wearing the red 11 Phrygian cap.4 The cap derives from the pointed fox snout and the pelt worn by the 12 Bassarides Thracian bacchants, and implies the motif of lycanthropy.5 This 13 identifies the lily’s flower as the little red-cap, the anthropomorphism of the 14 European folkloric tale of Rotkäppchen and her adventure of initiatory 15 lycanthropy.6 A very broad red-figure fourth-century BCE terracotta patera platter 16 from a grave in Apulia depicts the return of Persephone with four mushroom- 17 shaped knobs around its rim.7 These are clearly not intended as handles since the 18 platter has explicit handles on either side. The central scene is surrounded by a 19 bindweed morning glory vine blossoming with lilies. Two on opposite sides, rising 20 amid the tendrils, are the capped heads of a female. Pliny noted the extraordinary 21 similarity of the morning glory’s flower to the lily.8 22 A second-century CE mosaic from a villa north of Rome depicts the winged 23 Gorgon head at its center.9 Such Gorgon heads (gorgóneia) were often used as an 24 apotropaic emblem to decorate the entrance hall of houses. The delicate tracery of 25 stems with occasional stylized leaves and flowers filling the area surrounding the

1 Sophocles, Ajax, 143; Ruck et al. The Apples of Apollo, 24 et seq.; Ruck. The Son Conceived in Drunkenness, 111, 197. 2 Dirke was the wife of the ‘wolf’ Lykos of Thebes. She was a bacchant: Ruck. The Son Conceived in Drunkenness, 129 et seq. 3 Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 83: the Grimm fairytale of our lady’s little drinking glass identifies the bindweed morning glory as the flower of the Virgin and suggests folkloric knowledge of its intoxicating potential. 4 Red-figure krater, fourth century BCE, Etruscan. 5 Ruck. Dionysus in Thrace, 111 et seq. 6 Ruck, C.A. P., Staples, B. D., González Celdán, J. A., and Hoffman, M. A. 2007. The Hidden World: Survival of Pagan Shamanic Themes in European Fairytales. Carolina Academic Press, Durham. 55-62. 7 Attributed to the Baltimore painter, Art Institute of Chicago. Ruck (ed.), Dionysus in Thrace, 97- 99, fig. 6.2 and 6.2a. 8 Pliny, Natural History, 21.11 9 Now installed in the central garden courtyard of the Gardner Museum, Boston. The mosaic was discovered in 1892 in the remains of an ancient villa north of Rome, near the villa of Augustus’ wife Livia. It probably was the floor of a bath. The delicate tracery of the interlocking design of stems, flowers, and leaves resembles those of Pompeii around 25 CE, but brick stamps indicate that it was laid a century later during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. I am indebted to Joe Ledoux, a professional magician with an interest in depictions of psychoactive plants in European art, for calling this mosaic to my attention.

33 2019-2851-BUZ 1 Gordon head sprout from bases midpoint in each quadrant of the central square. 2 Here at the base as if sprouting directly from the ground as well as from the 3 branching and encircling stems are more elaborate and much larger flowers, four 4 of them, arrayed cruciform with the Medusa at its center. They are lilies, complete 5 with three leaves of their calyx. However, the top of each blossom is a red rim, 6 spotted with white, and each has a bird anomalously alighting or apparently 7 dancing upon it, as if it were a solid cap, rather than the opened space of the funnel 8 of the lily’s trumpet. The birds perhaps identify the flower as their fare, each bird a 9 different species. The lilies appear to be morphing into red mushrooms. A chain- 10 link design frames the square, with another tracery of interlocking stems as a 11 border beyond it. 12 13 14 15 16

34