Jacob Rabinowitz

THE ‘HER’ STORY OF THE GREAT WITCH-GODDESS : ANALYZING THE NARRATIVES OF HEKATE.*

IV

The Witch Narratives: Descent of the Goddess.

        In our treatment of Enodia, where we traced Hekate's demonization to conflation with her, we left posed and unresolved the problem of why that goddess was made infernal. This was due to a reluctance to enter upon a large and synthetic analysis of the witch and her relation to the overall historical context of Greco-Roman antiquity, which would really require another book to set forth in full. But in this section it becomes necessary, however tentatively, to give our ideas on the subject, as a precisely parallel problem, chronologically and in content, is raised by the degradation of the witch figure.

We here attempt to show that the witch is at first so close to the Goddess as to have retained her divinity (Circe), and how she proceeds century by century downward through every grade of mortality -- heroic, human, aged, and finally living-dead -- to a complete invasion of her original immortality.

The Fertility goddess, for the witch is no other as the systematic analysis of her attributes shall demonstrate, suffers inversion not only in her deity, but in her other defining characteristic, her property of Fertility. From the ability to inspire love and produce fecundity the figure becomes the victim of these drives. We shall further on, in our treatment of magic herbs, examine how this plays out in reference to plants and animals and the world at large; for the moment we will only examine how the figure is at first so powerful in her erotic charm that she can use it as an offensive weapon, but then degenerates through love-sickness to lust to monstrous and Roman prodigies of sexual gluttony, ending finally in erotic cannibalism. The question must now be raised — why?

The assault on the goddess is not merely a piece of malice on the part of the poets, but the centuries-long development of an entire culture's relationship to what the goddess represents, and this is, I would maintain, sexually generated material existence as a whole.

One need not here tediously prove anew the weary observation that the early Greeks were uniquely responsive to richness and charm of the physical world, which they found quite as entrancing as Odysseus' comrades did Circe in her garden among the tame wild-animals. Nor is it reasonably to be disputed that the Greeks gradually came to view the material world with the same suspicion, then dread, with which they (at the same historical point) regarded the sex-crazed hag picking magic salads in the graveyard. I would ask the reader to accept then, provisionally, as a heuristic, the notion that the Fertility goddess in her descent to witch-status may on one level be read as a symbol of the changing Greco-Roman attitudes to material existence. The late hag-like witch with her lust and her funereal preoccupations is an allegory of the physical appetites that bring us screaming into existence and the physical laws that send us groaning hence.

Bear in mind that the negative witch depiction, like the dark Hekate, appears only in the 5th century, contemporary with Plato. The same dualism which made the great philosopher and his followers see the world and sex as the doomed and rotting prison of the soul is operant on the goddess who represents the world and sex. The witch, a late echo of the Earth Mother, is vilified in exactly the same terms as the material world: infernal Hekate with her torch and her cave meaningfully parallels the setting of Plato's allegoric troglodytes. The analogy with Plato's cave is even more strikingly apt when one recalls that it occurs in the exact center of the Republic, whose setting is the feast of Bendis (Plato Pol. 354: A 10-11,) a Thracian goddess with whom Hekate was conflated, and who was associated, as Hekate always was, with torches, and connected, like Hekate was (via Enodia) by the time the Republic was written, with horses (Plato Pol. 328: A 1-5).

By the end of antiquity, when for the first time philosophic and abstract language had come into very common use, in the first description of Hekate that does state abstractly what she and the witches figure forth in poetic images, she is explicitly described:
as the mother of all growth:

“Necessity hard to escape are you; you’re Noira and Erinys...you who drink blood...”.(2858-64)(1)

The equation of the fertility goddess with the entire life cycle now viewed as cruel and evil is here stated precisely and clearly.

This reading of the degradation of Hekate and the Witch, as indicative of a progressively more ambivalent attitude towards the material world will explain our passing over two aspects of the witch — her sex and her morality.

From our point of view the witch's descent into evil is a secondary development: it is a by-product of the process the witch represents, the cycle of birth to death, being viewed as cruel. The witch's sex, which is of course always female, is also only incidental, a result of her being a symbol of fertility.

He cannot view the witches' being women as central to their degradation, and look at the witch myth as an anti-female polemic, for this is contradicted by the far from gynophobic character of many of the writers who created the witches, and the real gains in social liberty by women during the times when many of these poems were written.

Further, it is just bad methodology to assume that we have here to do with a “mythology of Woman” -- that would be a simple projection of late twentieth century Gender-politics onto classical antiquity. The origin of Gender is indeed a topic that occurs in myth, but one that is ordinarily subordinate to a more general description the cosmos and the human place within it, e.g,., the depiction of Eve in scripture is no more a definitive statement on the nature of Woman than the depiction of the Tree of Life is a serious treatise on arboriculture.  The Eve mythos explains why there are two sexes; it does not offer commentary (whatever has been read into it since) on what it means to be a woman. The Genesis story as a whole is primarily an aetiology of the human condition (mortal, laborious, sexed, etc.) and it is on this “cosmic” level that myth operates. This is not to say there are no stories about what it means to be a man or a woman, but aetiologies of this nature tend to be offered on the less serious level of folklore.

Indeed, at the end of her development, when the witch is demoted to merely human status, and becomes a folklore motif of late antiquity, we do find assertions that witchcraft is something that defines woman.(2) 

But in its origin the witch, as Fertility-goddess, is not primarily a description of woman any more than the thunder-god who also possesses a primary fertility function) is a description of man. The Fertility goddess is as the name would suggest, primarily a depiction of Fertility, and it is on this level one must understand her meaning in the context of Greek culture -- the vilification of material existence gradually contributes to the lowered status of woman, not the other way around. And finally, were misogyny a true source of the witch mythos, we would expect the witches to draw on the rather developed Greek tradition of Misogyny (Simonides, etc.)

A final note: it has not been my intention to enter into a literary and psychological analysis of these witches. This omission will be particularly evident as regards Euripides' and Apollonius* Medea's. A treatment of these aspects would have been to venture on a sea of subtleties in itself ample topic for a thesis. I have here been concerned only to establish, so far as possible, the extent and rate by which the figures in question were degraded as regards immortality and sensuality.

The first of the witch figures is not a follower of Hekate but herself a goddess. Homer informs us:

“There lived Circe of the lovely hair, the dread goddess vho is own sister to the malignant-minded Aietes; for they are both Children of Helios who shines on mortals and their mother is Perse who in turn is daughter of Ocean”. (Od.X:135-39)(3) information which is corroborated by Hesiod's

“And Perseis, the daughter of Ocean, bare to unwearying Helios Circe and Aeetes the king. And Aeetes, the son of Helios who shows light to men,  took to wife fair-cheeked Idyia, daughter of Ocean the perfect stream, by the will of the gods: and she was subject to him in love through golden Aphrodite and bare him neat-ankled Medea.” (Theog. 956-62)(4).

It is curious that Circe's brother Aietes, also the child of Perse (daughter of Oceanos and Tethys), is mortal --a king. Medea, the child of Aietes and Idyia (another daughter of Oceanos and Tethys, Theog. 356) is likewise and somewhat more logically (if we accept Aietes1 status) mortal. This forfeiture of godhood, in defiance of genealogy, is the goddess' first reluctant step hellwards.

Sensuality is also central to the Homeric Circe as is evident these characteristically direct lines:

“You are then resourceful Odysseus. Argeiphontes of the golden staff was forever telling me you would come    to me, on your way back from Troy with your fast black ship. Come then, put away your sword in its sheath, and let us two go up into my bed so that, lying together in the bed of love,  we may then have faith and trust in each other.” (Hom. Od. 10: 330-335)(5).

Admittedly this is a trap, but that it is so intended testifies to Homer's faith in the plausibility of the bait. Circe then radiates such powerful pornographic glory that she may rely on it to prevail upon the suspicions of an Odysseus who had just caught her in an attempt to turn him into a beast!

Now Circe's niece Medea is  (Theog. 956-62)  the daughter of  Aeetes  (the son of Helios and Perseis,

Ocean's daughter) and Idyia (daughter of Ocean); It is as we have noted surprising to find her mortal in later depiction. Ona might on the score of heredity expect better. Cicero remarks the contradiction:

“Circe autem et Pasiphae et Aeeta e Persaide, Oceani filia, nati, patre Sole, in deorum numero non habebuntur? quamquam Circen quoque coloni nostri Circeienses relgiose colunt. Ergo hanc deam duces? quid Medeae respondebis, quae duobus dis avis, Sole et Oceano, Aeeta patre, matre Idyia procreata est?” (Cic. De Nat. Deor. 3: 48)

“...are Circe and Pasiphae and Aeetes, the children of Perseis the dughter of Oceanus by the Sun, not to be counted in the list of gods? in spite of the fact that Circe too (i.e., as well as Matuta) is devoutly worshipped at the Roman colony of Circei. If you therefore deem her divine, what answer will you give to Medea, who, as her father was Aeetes and her mother Idyia, had as her two divine grandfathers the Sun and Oceanus?”(6)

If one could show that Medea was formerly a goddess now demoted -to heroic status, it would certainly ait"1 my case for the witch being a fallen goddess. In his doctoral thesis Petroff (7) suggests, in what is admittedly a bold reconstruction, just this: that Medea was a pre-Olympian goddess whose murders reflect actual human sacrifices, and whose place-associations were cult-centers. By his reading Medea's demotion to mortal status is due to her being for the Greeks a symbol of chthonic religious power in the process of being absorbed by an inimical invading patriarchal culture.

Petroff would have it (8) that Dorian-dominated Greek religion stood in relation to the Minoan-Mycenean religion it inundated very much as Christianity did to classical paganism. (This is the same argument advanced by Picard and Nilsson.) He suggests that Medea was an inconvenient deity, who could not be easily co-opted by the male-dominated new order.

The “Medea-cult” was suppressed by silence (no mention of Medea in Homer — and it's interesting –to note the similar absence of Hekate,(9) and by demoting her from goddess to mortal* and reinterpreting her sacrifices as murders.(10)

Though I am in agreement with his overall model, as should be clear from my position on “pollution” developed in part one, I must confess that Petroff's idea is largely based on circumstantial evidence and inference, while the weightiest witness he offers is a single line from Pindar (cited immediately below.) Accordingly I ask of the reader to take nothing on faith, but only to bear Petroff's idea in mind as we watch the direction of the witch-figure's development, which does begin with the goddess Circe. If the downward course mortality-wards is continuous and without exception, Petroff's notion advances in plausibility with the momentum of 900 years of witch-morphology. Nonetheless my case does not depend on the reader accepting that Medea was at one time a goddess. It will suffice to show that between Homer's time and the dramatists the standard mode of representing an enchantress had changed from goddess to hero.

Medea's first considerable appearance is in Pindar's fourth Pythian (lines 9(13) -12(20),) where she prophecies the founding of Cyrene by the ancestor of Battus IV, whose son won the chariot race at the Pythian games of 462, where she apparently preserves at least traces of deity. Her prophecy is uttered with “immortal mouth”, athanatou stomatos (line 12(20).)

The divinity of this Medea is however confined to a single epithet: I am inclined to view this brief testimony as witness to the fading of the trait, since she has also here retreated from the Ciroean tradition of aggressive eroticism. Pindar's Medea is so violently love-struck that magic alone can explain it — though it is Olympian not infernal sorcery (Aphrodite Oulumpothen.. pheren “brought (it) down from Olympus”, lines 214(383)-214(384) the iunx-charm).

Medea is here the object of iunx-love magic, which Jason practices against her. Needless to say Medea is not the first goddess to fall in love with a mortal or be practiced upon by Aphrodite, but the progressive change from inspirer to victim of passion is reversed  bv any of the succeeding Medea' s or witches.(11)

As for Sophocles Rhizotomoi literally “the herb-cutters” but fairly to be translated “the witches” there survive less than twenty lines preserved by Macrobius and the scholiast to Theokritus’ 2nd Idvll; Here we have a Medea by moonlight, howling as she harvests deadly magic herbs, a Hekate of the crossroads crowned with infernal serpents, and Jason melting wax love dolls to madden her with passion. If Medea was ever a goddess, she has now descended to heroic status --or so I would read the sort of magic used against her, a wax doll, certainly a step down from the magic iunx, which Aphrodite herself brings from heaven. It is a lower love magic to prevail upon a lesser Medea. We note again that Medea is the victim rather than the inspirer of passion.

This may seem like a lot to infer from so few lines, but the inference will gain credibility from the succeeding Medeas.

There is little honor to be gained from any brief discussion of a Euripides play, so much does each suggest in so few lines. Let the reader pardon us here our sins of omission, in consideration of the extremely narrow question we here ask: what is the divinity and sensuality of the Medea the poet here creates? It is no less just to Euripides than helpful to my case to state that this is the most fully and complexly human of all the Medea's of literature. The heroic situation is merely the frame for the character's psychological conflict, and in place of the larger than life, Euripides gives us the richer than life: but from the point of view of the witch's morphology, we are clearly a step down-wards from the heroic ambiance of Pindar, or even the melodrama of Sophocles' creation. Euripides' productions are renowned for their incorporation of unheroic realism in the character development, a trait which is echoed by the virtual absence of the supernatural in the play.(12)

Likewise the sensuality has gone from Pindar's heroic/divinely contrived passion and the potion-motivation of Sophocles' Grecian gris-gris to something perhaps more animal or elemental than human. Though Medea is of course not shown as a “romantic lead” — the honeymoon's long been over by the time the curtain rises — if we infer the quality of her former passion from that of her present rage, we must envision a tigress. 

Certainly she is more controlled by than controlling of her passion.

In the Hellenistic witches we begin to have oddly inconsistent accounts of the witches. Such is the complex Medea we find in the Argonautica; part innocent girl, part fierce and brutish woman; she is demurely described as the «areteira» or priestess of Hekate (A.R. Arg. 3: 251-52) — yet of a Hekate who later appears in ghastly nocturnal theophany hell-hounds and all. Emblematic is the description of Medea on her way to the temple of her goddess ( A.R. Arg. 3: 828-86,) which presents an odd mixture of the maidenly and the frightful. Environed by her girlish attendants, she keeps tucked into her belt infernal concoctions, while her flashing glance, sign of descent from Helios, is shunned by the townspeople as if it were the evil eye.

The ambivalence becomes  personified when distinction is made between Medea and the witches:    

...for well she knew the way, having often aforetime wandered there among the graves and among the tough roots, just like medicine women do” (A.R. Arg. 4. 50-53)(13).

This distinction that will be maintained through the further witch depictions: the witch is variously old and hideous or young and attractive. I would read this as the concretization of the general ambivalence to what the witch represents — fertility in all its sensual splendor (the young witch) and a Gnostic horror at the price of generated existence -- age and death (the crone.) I will not belabor this point, since it is incidental to our immediate topic, the inversion of sensuality and divinity.

Retreat from divine status is also evident from Apollonius' Circe, who helps Medea and Jason with no supernatural action, but simply by performing a purification ritual. The great instance of her magic (power, the people turned to animals (considered below) is presented so diffidently that without a (previous knowledge of Homer one would never guess that these are transformed humans.  So marginal have the |godlike powers of the figure become.

Nowhere in the Circe-depiction of Argonautica book four (659-752), is she referred to as a goddess. Too much can be made of this omission, but it is in keeping with Apollonius’ depiction of her as one tormented by nightmares reflecting Medea's crime and blood-guilt -- her sympathetic relation to Medea is stressed as she interrogates:

“For in truth the hideous remembrance of her dreams entered her mind as she pondered; and she longed to hear the voice of the maiden, as soon as she had raised her eyes from the ground. For all those of the race of Helios were plain to discern, since by the far flashing of their eyes they shot in front of them a gleam as of gold. So Medea told her all she asked...” (A.R. Arg. 4: 723-30)(14).

For us this depiction has an especial poignancy; the vestigial feature of the uric glance is the last sun setting gleam of Circe's, and the witch-figure's, vanishing deity.

Apollonius’ masterful representation of the interior and emotional being of his character is too eminent and too often discussed to need evidence here. We may merely note that, in the cases of Circe and Medea, this further undermines and humanizes what would otherwise be heroic descriptions. This emphasis on their subjective experience is also of a piece — particularly as regards Medea — with a fuller exposition of the witch's romantic character. We need not demonstrate here the high-passionate character of a Medea who provided a model for Virgil’s Dido. The heroic Medea of Euripides and (one presumes) Sophocles, the nigh-godlike Medea of Pindar subjected to Aphrodite's love-magic, is becoming a love-sick girl, we are moving from the ambiance of tragedy to that of opera.

With Theokritus’s Simaitha, an account of contemporary witchcraft, we have finally jettisoned the heroic context of the witch-figure, who has for some time ceased to be a heroic personage. Simaitha is a silly love-struck maiden, and one who is even more painfully subject to her desires than her witch predecessors. If her appetites are not satisfied, she will not stick at murder (Theok. ldylls,  II: 159-62 quoted below).

Euripides'  Medea avenges her honor, Simaitha her frustration.

We also note that Simaitha is distanced from ‘medicine-women’, describing her lovesick plight and search for a remedy she says: “Who didn't I approach? the house of what old woman who knows how to sing charms did I leave unvisited?” (Theok. Idylls. II: 90-91.)(15) and again at the conclusion of the poem:

“Now I shall bind him with my medicines, but if he still causes me to suffer(16) then, so help me

Fate, he shall be found knocking at the gate of Death. For I tell thee, good Mistress, I have in my press medicines evil enough that one out of Assyria told me of.” (Theok. Idylls. II: 159-62)(17)

Just as with Apollonius we have two sorts of witches, the young and the old, symbolic of the above-mentioned existential ambivalence. In Roman literature these two types will be exhaustively and revealingly realized.

Witches, and indeed magic, are all but absent from Republican literature ((18) the first surviving Latin treatment of a scene of magic is Virgil's eighth Bucolic, dated Autumn 39 BC, and this is in evident imitation of several Theocritean Idylls, especially the Simaitha one mentioned above. Magic and particularly witches emerge in Latin as a function of ‘Alexandrianising’, and are at the outset derivative productions.

Thus I do not believe the heroic Dido of the Aeneid, or the Ovidian Medea, which we shall consider immediately below, undermine my argument that the witch-figure is degenerating steadily. Both Virgil (19) and Ovid are consciously imitating elements of the Epic style of Apollonius of Rhodes, and so they produce witches who are essentially the same sentimental-heroic type.

Nor can we here examine Seneca's Medea, which, though it introduced themes and styles of Silver Latin, is still deliberate imitation of the figure as she appears in Greek tragedy, as regards the features that we are here analyzing, divinity and sensuality.

We cannot fairly be expected to take as documents in the witches’ ongoing morphology the figures produced by writers who are explicitly imitating its stages as they appeared up to six hundred years previously 1 We shall however make up the omission of the important treatments by Virgil, Ovid and Seneca here when we cite them in our consideration of the constant elements in witch depiction, below.

With the exception of these deliberate imitations of previous figures, all the witches of Latin literature take up the ‘new style’ witch developed by Theokritus, and push forward the tendencies she spear­heads. The first of these is Horace’s Canidia.(20) Here the Witch's growing subjection to passion produces a monster of sexual appetite, the witch as anus obscaena. lewd old hag (Hor. Ep. V :98), appears. (21)

Thus Horace Canidia is amata nautis multum et institoribus (Hor Ep.. XVII: 20), “thou much beloved of sailors and of peddlers”. Even Medea, whose impeccable Greek-literary credentials prevented truly scurrilous treatment, is called impudica Colchis, the shameless Colchian (Hor. Ep. XVI: 58).

That libertine behavior now represents a standard feature of witch activity is revealed when Canidia asks this revelatory if rhetorical question: “inultus ut tu riseris Cotytia vulgata, sacrum liberi Cupidinis...” (Hor. Ep. XVII 56-57). Shall I let you laugh safely at having divulged the Cotytian rites and the orgies of Cupid unrestrained (22). The appetites of these abandoned harridans leap the boundaries of nature itself: Canidia's comrade in harms,  Folia (Ep. V: 14), is  described as masculae libidinis,  literally “with a man's sexual desires” i.e., a Lesbian.

Canidia and her friends are hags, anus, (Hor. Ep. V: 98,) they no longer possess their own teeth or hair: (Hor. pat. 1: 48-49). The witch is becoming an ultra of un-divine status, an overdue bill of mortality, the diametric opposite of the immortal Neolithic goddess.

In Lucan witch-sensuality, already developed into a dominant and sadistic type in Horace, disappears into cannibalism. Though he avoids all mention of sex, as befits a prim stoic poet, we may see in Erictho a sublimation of what is elsewhere a principal (if not the principal) witch trait -- particularly when we find that she culls corpse-clippings with her mouth, often explicitly as a violent extension of a kiss:

“illa genae florem priroaevo corpore volsit, illa comam laeva marienti abscidit ephebo.
saepe etiam caris cognato in funere dira Thessalis incubuit membris atque oscula f ingens truncavi^que caput conpressaque dentibus ora laxavit siccoque haerentem gutture linguam praemordens gelidis infudit imxrmura labris arcanumque nefas Stygias mandavit ad umbras”. (Luc. B.C. 6: 561-68)

“Often too, when a kinsman is buried, the dreadful witch hangs over the loved body: while kissing it, she mutilates the head and opens the closed mouth with her teeth; then biting the tip of the tongue that lies motionless in the dry throat, she pours inarticulate sound into the cold lips and sends a message of mysterious horror down to the shades of Hell”.(23)

And as for mortality, she is beyond that: she lives in a sepulcher which is nothing less than Hell's embassy — an officially recognized outpost of the land of the dead. Meroe from the first book of The Golden Ass is creature whose lust is so great that it cannot be described in physiological terms alone — its range is geographical, as her runaway sex-slave Socrates recounts: ‘vis’ inquit unum vel alterum, imno plurima eius audire facta? Nam ut se ament efflictim non modo incolae, verum etiam Indi vel Aethiopes utrique vel ipsi Anticthones, folia sunt artis et nugae merae”. (L.A. Mat. 1: 8) “Then answered he: Will you hear one or two or more of the deeds which she hath done? For whereas she enforceth not only the inhabitants of this country here, but also the Indians and Ethiopians and even the Antipodeans to love her in most raging sort, such are but trifles and chips of her occupation...” (24)

And Meroe's proclivities are characteristic of the other Thessalian witches. Lucius' friend Byrrhaena warns him against his hostess, whose inordinate passions may be measured by the fury with which she repays rejection: “…cave tibi, sed cave fortiter a malis artibus et facinorosis illecebris Panphiles illius, quae cum Milone isto, quern dicis hospitem, nupta est. maga primi nominis et omnis carminis sepulchralis magistra creditur, quae surculis et lapillis et id genus frivolis inhalatis omnem istam lucem mundi siderialis imis Tartari et in vetustum chaos submergere novit. Nam simul quemque conspexerit speciosae formae iuvenem, venustate eius sumitur et ilico in eum et oculum et animum detorquet, serit blanditias, invadit spiritum, amoris profundi pedicis aeternis alligat. tune minus morigeros et vilis fastidio in saxa et in pecua et quodvis animal puncto reformat, alios vero prorsus extinguit.” (L.A. Met. 2: 5; see also 3: 15-16)

“...beware I say, beware of the evil arts and wicked allurements of the Pamphile that is the wife of Milo, whom you call your host, for she is accounted the most chief and principal magician and enchantress of every necromantic spell: who, by breathing out certain words and charms over boughs and stones and other frivolous things, can throw down all the light of the starry heavens into the deep bottom’s hell, and reduce them again to the old chaos. For as soon as she espieth any comely young man, she is forthwith stricken with his love, and presently setteth her eye and whole affection on him: she soweth her seed of flattery, she invadeth his spirit, and entangleth him with continual snares of immeasurable love. And then if any accord not unto her filthy desire, so that they seem loathesome in her eye, by and by in a moment, she either turneth them into stones, sheep, or some other beast as herself pleaseth, and some she presently slays and murders”.(25)

There is nothing to suggest any of Apuleius’ witches are hags — which presents us with a problem — how do we explain that the last great witches of antiquity, in the wake of Erictho, revert to an earlier condition of youthful attractiveness? Certainly as regards inversion of sensuality, the development we have observed obtains — the witch has in this regard gone from planet Venus to a black hole.

We must understand the survival of the beautiful Apuleian witch alongside the Lucanic Hag as the ultimate development of the witch concept as an expression of ambivalence. The tensions that produce on the one hand Erictho and on the other Meroe are to be observed within each as well -- we have already discussed the sensuality submerged in Erictho’s cannibalism, it only remains to demonstrate the flesh-dread in Apuleius is seemingly pleasant production. This should become apparent when we recall that the witches here imprison men for sexual use (Socrates above), threaten them with castration and piss in their faces (L.A. Met. 1: 9-13.) while the hero of this book is transformed into a donkey — an animal which is synonymous with the male organ (26) -- and thereafter be beaten through every adventure as a prologue to renouncing sex forever at the behest of a powerful goddess.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

REFERENCES

(1) P.G.M. quotes Betz.
(2) As in Pliny N.H. 28: 23: 77 ff, who explains that a woman's menstrual blood is enough to dispel storms, kill, make aborts etc. This sanguinary paen follows a description of the medicinal qualities of woman's milk and saliva, and begins with the somber flourish of Post haec nullus est modus. “Proceeding from these we shall see the power of female secretions to be limitless”. On the popularity of the belief in women’s occult bent we have: “durat tamen tradita persuasio in magna parte vulgi, veneficiis et herbis id (solis lunaeque defectus) cogi eamque unam feminarum scientiam praevalere”. (Plin. H.N. 25: 10.)
     Yet there still exists among a great number of the common people an established conviction that these phenomena (eclipses of the sun and moon) are due to the compelling power of charms and magic herbs and that the science of them is the one outstanding province of women. (Jones)
(3) Murray.
(4) Evelyn-White.
(5) Murray.
(6) Rackham, mod.
(7) Petroff, Medea, ch.4. “Medea the Goddess”.
(8) Petroff, Medea, p. 169.
(9) To this one might add his careless treatment of witch-related themes (herbal magic, &c.) which will be discussed in detail below.
(10) Petroff, ch. V.,“From Goddess to Witch”.
(11) See the Medea passages from Pindar.
(12) This important point is made at length in Appendix Two, where every reference to witchcraft in that play is scrutinized.
(13) Seaton.
(14) Seaton.
(15) It is to be noted that we here fined for the first time the image of witch as crone as graia.
(16) Reading with Dover katadesomai for katathusomai  and ei for ai in line 159.
(17) Edmonds.
(18) Tupet, Magie. pp. 209-10.
(19) An oblique but interesting proof of the survival of the fertility goddess in the witch is provided by Duclos in her brilliant, Dido as Diana Triformis. The intuition is the more impressive as she seems innocent of Dumezil's demonstration of the general tendency of archaic Indo-European mythological triple figures to survive in Roman literature as pseudo-history, and the particular relevance of the "three functions11 to triple Juno, which we have discussed above. Duclos lack of background on these points brings about a slightly erroneous reading of Pea Triplex as Diana-Hekate-Luna rather than Diana-Juno-Proserpine. Here we shall give Duclos’ findings with the necessary correction.
       There is a very explicit comparison with virgin Diana in 1: 496-504; the Juno figure is prominent where Dido “weds” Aeneas, in book four during a the thunderstorm, a scene which Eliade, (Eternal Return, pp. 21-22,) has noted as a signal example of the hieros gamos, giving numerous Greek and Sanskrit parallels. He says “Dido celebrates her marriage with Aeneas in the midst of a violent storm; their union coincides with that of the elements; heaven embraces its bride, dispensing fertilizing rain”.
The assimilation of Dido to Persephone/Hekate is of course in the "magical rites" that mask her suicide in book six. There Dido is “unum exuta pedem vinclis, in veste recincta, (Vir. Aen. 4: 518) “one foot unsandalled and girdle loosened” which parallels the single-sandalled Hekate of the magical papyri, an image we discuss later.
(20) As regards the identity of the modern witches, there is some debate (Tupet pp. 294-5) as to whether Canidia is a real name or a reference to an actual person, though this would go against the ''general tendency in the Roman satirists to go for the type rather than the individual. Etymology offers no revelations. As regards Sagina, and indeed the term i, we have Cicero's explanation
“Sagire sentire acute est; ex quo sagae anus quia multa scire volunt et sagacae dicti canes. Is igitur qui ante sagit quaxn oblata res est dicitur praesagire, id est futurum ante sentire”. (Cic. Diu.. I, 30)
“Sagire means to have sharp perception; this is why they call old women fiagas. — on account of their inquisitiveness, and by a like reasoning dogs are called sagacae. Therefore someone who knows a matter before it occurs is said to praesagire. That is, “to perceive in advance the future”.
To which we may append “Sagae mulieres dicuntur feminae ad lubidinem virorum indagatrices. Unde et sagaces canes dicuntur ferarum vel animalium quaesitores”. Nonius, p. 23, 2.
“Women who concern themselves with finding out men's sexual desires are called sagas; similarly keen-scented hounds who are good at Judging the location of animals and wild beasts are called sagaces."
which explications only serve to show that the term had come to symbolize a constellation of witchy notions — future-reading, erotic magic, and secret wisdom. Folia, whose name is related to ohullis and petale. and means literally "leaves," -- perhaps an allusion to witches' herbal concerns.
(21) This is not to say that there are now lewd hags in literature before Canidia -- the end of Aristophanes' Plutus depicts just such a creature, lamenting her no longer interested gigolo. There are however no witches. That is to say, no fallen fertility goddesses, of this description until Rome.
(22) Bonnet, mod. Cotyto is a Thracian goddess and used as a generic witch-religion term, here suggesting the bacchic frenzy of the witches' activities; as regards “Cupid unrestrained” i.e., orgies, — such things are told of every unpopular religion — the "love feast" where they blow out the candles and do what darkness invites. This is not to say exactly this does not in fact often happen in fringe religions, but we need better testimony than that of a poet who makes sex a reproach and whose gynophobic puritanism produced poems like the infamous twelfth Epode which begins “Quid tibi vis, mulier nigris dignissima barris? munera cur mihi...”
“What good do you think it'll do you if you send me presents, you're a woman who'd need to be serviced by great hairy elephants...” As well as many other compositions varying the theme in more and less savory ways.
(23) Duff.
(24) Adlington.
(25) Adlington.
(26) Particularly in Egyptian, where it is spelled 'a-a. (probably pronounced something like ‘hee-haw’ — similarly the word for cat is mw, onomatopoetically pronounced ‘miaou’. The phonetic element 'a-a is represented by a wooden pillar, followed by a phallus and the ideogram for donkey. The phallus, phonetically mt (cf. Heb. Mat, ‘male’) is used as a nonphonetic determinative as in tschav  “male” or ka “bull”. It is probable that a priest of Isis would be sufficiently versed in the “hieroglyphically written notions of things” to perceive the symbolism of the donkey, which is universal among those cultures which have contact with the highly endowed animal. Cf. proverb 25: 10 in the late Ptolemaic (323-30 BC) Instruction of Anksheshong. “Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey; only a want of funds restrains him”. (Lichtheim, mod.)