Images and Etymologi,Es

17. THRACIAN CULT - FROM PRACTICE TO BELIEF Zofia Halina Archibald Images and Etymologi,es But mortals consider that gods are born, and that they have clothes and speech and bodies like their own. (Xenophanes fr. B 14, Diels-Kranz, Kirk/Raven, no. 170 [= Clem. Alex. Strom. V I 09]) The Ethiopians say that (their gods) are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair (Xenophanes fr. B 16, Diels-Kranz, Kirk/Raven no. I 71 [= Clem. Alex. Strom. VII 22]) Xenophanes' perspicacious remarks about the way human beings form their ideas of the divine was a philosophical insight lost on his contemporaries. The Greeks of Colophon, Xenophanes' home town, and elsewhere continued to practise their cults and represent their gods as though the latter did have human expectations. Xenophanes picked his examples seemingly at random, in order to emphasise two common intellectual weaknesses in the human approach: first, the arbitrary nature of human representations of the divine; and second, the tendency to reduce gods to human terms. 1 When he referred to the Thracians, was he merely extrapolating from the behaviour of other known groups or might he have had some genuine knowledge of Thracian cults? The answer has some bearing on how we view the religious behaviour of ancient Thracians. How far did the Thracians personalise their deities? How did their divine personalities express what was beyond the human sphere? Such mythologies as surely existed have not survived. Ancient Greek writers do provide some information about beliefs and practices but such references cannot be readily excerpted from their Greek context and Greek audiences. The explicitly philosophical context of most relevant texts makes it particularly hard to understand cult behaviour 1 Kirk/Raven, Ch. V, esp. 163-8; Hussey, E., 1he Pre-Socratics (London 1972), 14. 428 Z.H. ARCHIBALD as a social phenomenon (because most participants in cult were not philosophers). The relationship between philosophy and religious prac tice in Thrace is confused and confusing. 2 In our earliest prose source, Herodotus' Histories, Thracian religious beliefs are already couched in a self-consciously philosophical framework (2. 81: Orphilwi bracketed with Pythagoreioi; 4. 94-96: Zalmoxis, Pythagoras and the Getai). There is no obvious way of subtracting from such isolated texts, cer tainly from such texts alone, what might have been non-Greek, in this case Thracian, ideas or beliefs, from what look like tentative Greek philosophical speculations. Even more hazardous is the use of heterogeneous texts from different periods (as has been done in the case of 'Thracian Orphism'), particularly when the majority of these post-date by a very considerable margin the formative phases of cult development for the region in question. 3 The criteria by which an indigenous Thracian ritual tradition can be distinguished from the imagination of a Greek poet or philosopher's armchair have yet to be elucidated. Ancient Greek authors generally showed more interest in myth and philosophy than in cult history or practice, not least because the social dimension of cult was taken for granted.4 The most detailed evidence of regular cult activities comes not from poets and prose writers but from other documentary sources, mainly inscriptions. Outside Athens, only small groups have survived of those public deci sions which got as far as being committed to stone, and of these only a tiny fraction are directly connected with cult institutions. There is thus an uncomfortable imbalance in the written sources between the wide-ranging and constantly elaborated body of myth on the one hand, with its fantastic encounters, timeless settings, the breaking of all manner of taboos; and on the other, the nature of ordinary cult behaviour. 2 Hosek, R., 'Der thrakische Mythos und die thrakische Wirklichkeit', Pulpudeva 5, 1982 ( 1986), 66-72 provides some helpful introductory remarks. 3 This applies particularly to the many works on this subject by Alexander Fol, which have been highly influential in Bulgaria; see esp. Fol. A., Venedikov, I., Marazov, I., Popov, V., Thracian Legends (Sofia 1976); Fol, A., Thracian Orphism (Sofia 1986, in Bulgarian); idem, Politics and culture in ancient Thrace (Sofia 1990, in Bulgarian) 21-22, 58-66, 131-2; idem, Der thrakische Dionysos, Ersus Buch: :{,agreus (Sofia 1993, tr. of Bulgarian text, 1992); idem, The Thracian Dionysos, Book Two: Saba;;_ios (Sofia 1994, in Bulgarian). The relationship between myth and history is further explored below. 4 Parker 1996, 1-9. .

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