悲嘆の女神

Abstract

In my previous paper it was proposed that the goddess named Potnia had been worshipped in the Mycenaean Period and that information from the Linear B Tablets strongly indicates that she had been a kind of Mother Goddess. After the Dark Age, then, what sort of goddess can we find as her successor in classical Greece? All of the Olympian goddesses seem more or less to have inherited characteristics of the Mother Goddess, even Athena and Artemis. However, it is Demeter who, of all prominent goddesses, is the most likely to be the Mother Goddess. It is my purpose in this paper, therefore, to look at Demeter concentrating on her aspect as the Mother Goddess through a study of the Odyssey, the Hymn to Demeter, the Theogony and the Works and Days of Hesiod. In Book V of the Odyssey the marriage of Demeter and Iasion is related by Calypso. Although this story is introduced as only one example of the love affair between a goddess and a mortal man, it interests us very much because it shows traces of the old agricultural cult. One of such echoes is the phrase, "eni tripoloi", in the thriceploughed field. The other is Iasion himself. He seems to be a very strange figure because his character or individuality has never been established even though he is mentioned by some Greek and Latin writers such as Diodorus (5, 48), Theocritus (3, 50), and Ovid (9, 422). Who is Iasion, and why is he treated as such an insignificant figure? In my opinion, Iasion had been the young son or husband of the Great Mother Goddess. Whenever the marriage of Demeter and Iasion is mentioned, the word tripolos is also mentioned (e. g. the Theogony 971), and Iasion is the husband of Demeter when she is strongly recognized as the Mother Goddess. In order to examine this idea the study of the Anatolian and Egyptian religion is very helpful, in both of which the Mother Goddess being always accompanied by her young husband or a son who dies and rearises annually as a spirit of plants : for example, Dumuzi, Tammuz, Baal, Hadad and Horus. It seems, therefore, it was Demeter and Iasion who realized in Greece the idea of the Mother Goddess and her young husband. But Iasion is a surprisingly inconspicuous figure, compared with the Anatolian and Egyptian young god, this intimating that this kind of Oriental religion was unacceptable to the Greeks. One of the reasons of their rejection is the concept of a god who has to 'die', and the other is that of a male-god who is under the control of a great goddess. In all Indo-European religions, the supreme divinity should be the male-god of Heaven, and the Greeks could not accept the Great Mother as the highest divinity. Therefore it was quite natural that Iasion was defeated by the thunderbolt of Zeus. Actually it was the young god of death and resurrection, not the mortal lover of Demeter, who was thus overthrown. In the Hymn to Demeter we can find the same reminder of old myth as Iasion, that is, Demophon, a son of Keleos, who was brought up by Demeter. In Demophon we can see the reflection of the young god of the Mother Goddess because at first Demeter must have been the mother of Demophon, instead of his nurse. According to the similar myth of Thetis and Achilleus (the Argonautica, 4, 869-879), Thetis condemned her baby, Achilleus, to the flames in order to make him immortal, because she was the mother of the baby, and so was Demeter. Secondly the actions of Demeter itself shows the power of the Mother Goddess, who can exert incomparable influence upon the region of death and life. Thus, according to the story, Demeter tried to give new life to her son, but failed, revealing the fact that Demeter was deprived of her power, and her son Demophon could never be revived but was completely destroyed, as was Iasion. In the Theogony it is mentioned that Zeus married Demeter as his forth wife (912-3), meaning that Demeter was incorporated in to the order of Zeus. Furthermore, in the Works and Days Hesiod says that a farmer should pray to 'Zeus Chthonios' and Demeter before he sets about his autumn work, implying that Zeus takes over the role of the young god as an agricultural spirit. Besides Zeus became even the lord of death and new life, because in Creta he was looked upon as "dead Zeus" and "Zeus resurrected", Callimachus informing us of a tomb there (the Hymn to Zeus, 8-9). In this way Zeus defeated the Anatolian young god, took over his main functions, and deprived Demeter of her husband, son, and all her power and vitality as the Great Mother. Now she becomes just a wife of Zeus, suppressed under the power of his world order. In other words, she could only survive as a goddess without any great and supreme power of the Mother Goddess, and in the depth of her consequent sadness she may well be called the prototype of Mater Dolorosa.