On Virgin Sacrifice, Cannibalism, Sacred Trees and Sacrificial Dogs in Yellowjackets: A Mythreading

 

Prelude

We should live out our lives playing, performing sacrifices, singing hymns and dancing, so as to be able to win the favor of the gods and to repel our foes and vanquish them in fight.

- Plato

Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings (σφάγια καὶ θυσίας) during the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?

- Amos 5:25

A god must have his sacrifices. When I was a child in Stygia the people lived under the shadow of the priests. None ever knew when he or she would be seized and dragged to the altar. What difference whether the priests give a victim to the gods, or the god comes for his own victim?

- Thalis the Stygian

In this post, we're going to explore the themes of virgin sacrifice, cannibalism and sacred trees & tree cults, as well as dog sacrifice in the context of Greco-Roman mythologies and their relationship to the Yellowjackets show. Of course, the main mythological figure that all the themes are going to revolve around throughout the essay, is the diva triformis, who is behind the meaning of the symbol of the cultus. We talked about her in the first post, as well as the second one.

Based on what I've noticed in the show, it was evident to me that there's a clear emphasis on the virginity motif. But it seems that most fans haven't noticed it, or probably didn't care. I can think of two reasons for this negligence. First, it's because of the fact that it seems virginity is no longer of any importance in the postmodern Western culture, or at least in the media. But if your eyes are accustomed to the myths, or even to the not-so-distant history, you'd probably notice it unconsciously in whatever work of art you're engaged with at the time, because you know its significance in the past. As Sylvia Plath wrote in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar:

My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.

As for the second reason, I'd say people still tend to look at virginity in the physiosexual context. So I'll start the first part with the latter case first and clear up some confusions by showing you that 'virginity' in mythology has a broader meaning than the mere lack of penile-vaginal penetration. Then I'll explore the role of virgin sacrifice in the Greek mythology, then talk about cannibalism and the role of sacred trees in the same context and finally, I'll touch upon the dog sacrifice motif and its relation to diva triformis. In the second part, I'll give you some hints from the show regarding all these themes that I mentioned. Please keep in mind that this is not a historical account of human culture, neither a judgement on the Greek Pantheon, nor an ethical critique of human behavior. It's just a mythological exploration into the world of a tv show. Enjoy the ride!

Part A

The virginity of the original Kore, who unfolded into Artemis as well as into Persephone, and hence the virginity of all the Kores in the world of the Greek gods, is not anthropomorphic but a quality of the unadulterated primal element which had given her birth—its own feminine aspect, as it were.

- Károly Kerényi

A.1    Semantics of Virgin

What most of us (or at least I) know about the Greek mythology probably comes from the various translations which themselves were often translations. So a lot could have been lost in translation, and that's why it's necessary sometimes to consult the original Greek sources to clarify some of the encountered ambiguities. You don't have to be fluent in Greek though, since there are enough sources on the internet that could help you with. 

Now what we know today as the counterpart of the word virgin in the Greek mythology is the word Parthenos (παρθένος), but surprisingly, parthenos is not identical to the virgin that people use today. Not surprisingly though, this identification comes from the later religious cherry-picked translations. The exact origin of the word parthenos is not clear enough, but what is clear is the fact that parthenos was used both for a young girl who didn't have any sexual experience, as well as for an unmarried woman (who had sex before), regardless of the age. Now I'm not a Greek scholar, nor a linguist, so I'll give you a definition of parthenos by the Classical scholar, Giulia Sissa [1]:

A parthenos is a woman whose marital status (non-married) is patent, but whose required sexual condition (unless she becomes pregnant, and until pregnancy becomes evident) remains uncertain.

Among its derived words, we have also Parthenios (or Parthenias) which means the 'child of parthenos,' so a woman can have sex, give birth and still be a parthenos. For example, Eudoros (son of god Hermes and the mortal Polymele) is called parthenios (παρθένιος), or 'the son of a girl unwed,' in Iliad [book 16, line 180]. Interestingly, Hermes fell in love with Polymele when he saw her among the singing maidens in the dance-floor of Artemis.

And maybe the most familiar derived example is the Parthenon, the great temple of goddess Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, where she was its patroness. Parthenon either means the 'house/room of parthenos,' or 'of parthenos' in ancient Greek.

Uh-Oh, seems like someone in Parthenon has angered Zeus
©Petros Giannakouris

There's also the famous Partheneia (singular form is Parthenion) which were the songs and dances that a chorus of parthenos females (parthenoi) used to perform, probably in group of ten and all dressed in white. In English translations of Statius' Silvae, we read that Artemis calls her companions "my chaste band of followers," but if we look at the original text in Latin, we see that she addresses them as 'chori,' which is the plural of chorus, i.e. group of singers and dancers [16]. Hence the parthenoi connection with respect to her companions naturally follows. 

Defining parthenos as a marital status is in fact described beautifully in Euripides' Hecuba, when the weeping Hecuba describes her sacrificed daughter, Polyxena, as [Eur. Hec. 612]:

νύμφην τ᾽ ἄνυμφον παρθένον τ᾽ ἀπάρθενον

bride that is no bride, virgin that is virgin no more (virgin wife and widowed virgin)

So we may safely assume that the one sensical reason behind the common white color of the bridal dress is that it represents the parthenos status of the bride in the context of being unmarried (never before), quite contrary to the common misconception of representing the physiosexual virginity, i.e. not having sex.

Procession from the 1920 Partheneia [3]

All in all, let's not jump to conclusions based on the common translations of the original ancient words. From now on, I'll use parthenos, maiden, virgin and kore interchangeably, unless I state otherwise or it's self-evident what meaning I'm referring to.

A.2    Divine Virgin Mother Cultus

You've probably heard the biblical stories regarding the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus, but you'd be surprised to know that the virgin birth is in fact an ever occurring theme in the cross cultural mythologies since the ancient times. Greeks called it Parthenogenesis, which means 'to be born/to be created of a parthenos.' In the biological context, parthenogenesis roughly means 'reproduction without fertilization by sperm,' and there are several cases of such process that occur in some plants and animals.

In the mythological context, parthenogenesis (sometimes called the miraculous/divine birth) is either equivalent to the biological definition, i.e. involving a goddess as the source and the priestesses as her embodiments/vessels without any male/phallic interference, or to the involvement of a male deity as the fertilizer of the eggs. The female partner could be either a goddess, e.g. the case of Isis with Horus (as you may recall, Isis was one of the personifications of the diva triformis), or a mortal, e.g. the case of Semele with Dionysos. Even a suited mortal male could be the vessel for the male deity.

The god-priestess case is more interesting, since numerous cults revolved around this idea that certain (parthenos) priestesses can become the consorts of gods via a sacred marriage (hieros gamos in Greek) and/or give birth to their divine childs (hence parthenogenesis). As an interesting example, the wife of the Archon Basileus (meaning 'king magistrate' in Greek) of Athens was Basilinna (meaning 'queen' in Greek), who was in charge of the sacred and the secret rites as the high priestess of the city. One of her most important duties was to undertake a sacred marriage with Dionysos each year during the Great Dionysia, a festival held in his honor at Boukoleon, and she was required to be a parthenos before the marriage. Also, there were 14 older (parthenos) women called Gerarai who served as the priestesses of Dionysos in Athens and were sworn in by Basilinna to assist with the rituals and sacrifices.

But wait a minute! Basilinna is wed to the Archon Basileus, has sex with Dionysos every year and she's definitely not a maiden (or at least doesn't remain one age-wise), and she's also required to be a parthenos at the time of her marriage to Dionysos each year?! How is that possible? Well, we need to extend the definition of parthenos and the answer comes from the motif of the divine virgin birth that we mentioned earlier. According to Marguerite Rigoglioso, parthenos is then needs to be equated with its most ancient meaning: holy priestess of divine birth; a woman who gives birth to the children of gods. This way, the parthenoi (plural of parthenos) oracles of Apollon at Delphi were also his wives and virgin mothers of his divine children, and the parthenoi oracles of Zeus at Dodona gave birth to his offsprings either via sacred marriage or as the embodiments of the Mother Goddess (identified as Rhea or Gaia) who was called Dione (Διώνη) [2].

This is an interesting view, since it gives us a sensical framework to understand the (paradoxical) relationship between parthenos as the epithet of Artemis and her aspects of being the goddess of fertility and Mother Goddess (for example at Orthia and Ephesus), and the goddess of childbirth.

A.3    Virgin Sacrifice

In my first post, I discussed the dark side of Artemis, which we see whenever she gets offended, and I mentioned some examples of the human sacrifices that were made on her demand. I also mentioned about the human sacrifices in the honor of Kronos-Saturn. However, surprisingly or not, most of the human sacrifice instances (or at least notable ones) that were mentioned in the literature are related to Artemis and Dionysos, the two patrons of wilderness. For Dionysos, for example we have human sacrifices to Omadius Dionysos at Chios and Tenedos, and to Dionysos Omestes at Lesbos [21].

Within the category of the human sacrifice, there was a special type of sacrifice that was only performed in the special occasions, mostly in the war times and in the great perils, and it was the infamous virgin sacrifice. Unlike the other human sacrifices which (apparently) happened more frequently, specially in annual festivals, virgin sacrifices were very limited in number. They were, however, the highest and most valued type of sacrifices that could be offered to the deities, and they were confined to the nobilities and high ranking officials. Most, if not all, sacrificial victims of Artemis were virgins.

Now let me mention the notable examples of sacrificial virgins in the literature:

• Iphigenia

As I talked about her in my first post, she was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, the king and queen of Mycenae. When Agamemnon's army tries to sail to Troy, Artemis doesn't let the winds blow in their favor, since he had angered the goddess by killing a stag and boasting that even Artemis couldn't have shot that well like him. So Artemis demands that Agamemnon's parthenos Iphigenia should be sacrificed in exchange. Hence she was sacrificed by her own father, so that the Trojan war begins.

Sacrifice of Iphigenia
François Perrier
©Wikipedia

• Polyxena

She was the daughter of Priam and Hecuba, the king and queen of Troy. At the end of the Trojan war, Achilles' ghost appears to the Achaean army and doesn't let them sail back home unless they offer him a Trojan maiden as a sacrifice. The counsel chooses Polyxena by vote and thus, by the sacrifice of a parthenos, the Trojan war chapter officially ends.

Sacrifice of Polyxena
©British Museum

In Euripides' Hecuba, Polyxena after hearing the news of her sentence to sacrifice from her mother, says [4]:

Alas, for your cruel sufferings, my persecuted mother! woe for your life of grief! What grievous outrage has some fiend sent on you, hateful, horrible? No more shall I your daughter share your bondage, hapless youth on hapless age attending. For you, alas! will see me, your hapless child, torn from your arms like a calf of the hills, and sent beneath the darkness of the earth with severed throat for Hades, where with the dead shall I be laid, ah me! For your unhappiness I weep with plaintive wail, mother; but for my own life, its ruin and its outrage, never a tear I shed; no, death has become to me a happier lot than life. 

• Macaria

She was the daughter of Heracles. After her father's death, she runs to Athens and takes refuge there from the hands of Eurystheus who is hunting her down. Finally, after Eurystheus reaches the gates of Athens with his army, oracles tell Demophon, king of Athens, that the only way to save the city is to sacrifice a maiden daughter (parthenon kore, παρθένον κόρη) of a noble father to the daughter of Demeter, i.e. Persephone [Eur. Heraclid. 381]. King refuses to do so, but finally Macaria volunteers to be the sacrificial virgin, and by doing so, ensures the victory of Athenians.

• Daughters of Erechtheus

They were also sacrificed in order to save Athens from the hands of the Thracian army [Apollod. 3.15]. In Euripides' Ion, we have the following dialogue between Ion and Creusa, youngest daughter of Erechtheus [5]:

Ion: Did your father Erechtheus sacrifice your sisters?

Creusa: He dared to kill the maidens (παρθένους), as a sacrifice for their country.

Ion: And you were the only one of your sisters saved?

Creusa: I was a new-born infant in my mother's arms. 

 

Although, it appears in other texts that only one virgin sacrifice was demanded of king Erechtheus, but it seems that his three parthenos daughters had promised each other that if one of them dies, the rest would die too. In defence of this sacrifice however, their mother Praxithea gives her assent to her husband in a strong speech. Part of it reads [6]:

If there were in our household male offspring instead of female, and the fire of war occupied the city, would I not be sending my son into battle with the spear, because I feared that he might die? May I have children who fight and are preeminent among men, and not be mere figureheads in the city! Mothers who send their children off to battle with their tears make men behave like women as they set out for war. I detest women who instead of glory prefer that their children remain alive and approve of cowardice.

Indeed when children die in war they share a common tomb with many others and an equal fame. But my child shall have a crown that is unique as her reward for dying alone on behalf of this city. And she shall save her mother and you and her two sisters. Which of these things is not glorious? So I shall give my daughter, who is not mine except by nature, to be sacrificed for the land. For if the city is going to be destroyed, what share have I in my children? 

 

So mythologically speaking, we can see that ancient Greeks believed that at the time of great nationwide peril, virgin's blood must be spilt for gods and goddesses to ensure the safety of their society.

• Minyades

Minyades were Leucippe, Arsippe and Alcathoe, all of them daughters of king Minyas of Orchomenus who turned their back to Dionysos and in return, they all met their gruesome fates. According to Antoninus Liberalis' Metamorphoses [7]:

They turned out to be startlingly diligent. They strongly criticized other women because they abandoned the city to go as Bacchantes [female followers of Dionysus] in the hills, until Dionysus took on the likeness of a girl and urged the Minyades not to miss out on the rites or mysteries of the god. But they paid no heed to him. At this — not surprisingly — Dionysus was angered and instead of a girl became a bull, then a lion, then a leopard. From the beams of their looms there flowed for him milk and nectar. At these portents terror gripped the maidens. Without delay the three threw lots into a pot and shook it. The lot fell to Leucippe and she vowed to offer as a sacrifice to the god her own son Hippasus whom she tore to pieces with the help of her sisters. Abandoning their paternal home, they went as Bacchantes in the mountains, browsing on ivy, honeysuckle and laurel, until Hermes touched them with his wand and changed them into flying creatures. One of them became a bat, another an owl and the third an eagle owl. And all three continuously avoided the light of the sun.

He uses the word Kore (κόρη) for the daughter which also means maiden and sometimes kore and parthenos were used interchangeably (Kore was also the famous epithet of Persephone), although they're not identical in meaning. This will be important just in a moment. Dionysos doesn't stop there and unleashes his wrath on the entire descendants of Minyades. Plutarch notes that the female descendants were called destroyers/destructive, and writes [8]:

And to this day the Orchomenians call their posterity so. And it is so ordered that, in the yearly feast called Agrionia, there is a flight and pursuit of them by the priest of Bacchus, with a drawn sword in his hand. It is lawful for him to slay any of them that he takes, and Zoilus a priest of our time slew one.

And since Minyades themselves were Kore, it's possible that these poor females who were sacrificed each year in such a horrific manner, were themselves Kore as well, to keep the tradition and represent an eternal punishment for the mortals who dared to oppose Dionysos. So one can assume that this was in fact a virgin sacrifice, as some other sources indicate this as well [9, 10, 11], although it was the exact opposite in the status-wise compared to the ones we saw, i.e. honor. It's worth mentioning that this blood ritual ended after Zoilus died of a sickness inflicted by a wound and the following public condemnations.

• Locrian Virgins

After the Trojan war, Ajax (Aias) the Lesser, son of Oileus, the king of Locris, goes to the temple of Athene at Troy and commits a "lawless act" against parthenos Kasandra, the famous (or infamous) priestess of Apollon, who had already taken shelter there. In a fragment of Alcaeus, we read:

In the temple, the daughter of Priam was embracing the statue of Athena, generous giver of many spoils, clasping its chin...and Aias came in deadly madness to the temple of holy Pallas, who of all the blessed gods is most terrible to sacrilegious mortals, and seizing the virgin with both hands as she stood by the holy statue.

And in The Trojan Women by Euripides, Athene asks Poseidon a favor to punish Achaeans for what Aias did [Eur. Tro. 65ff]:

Athena: I wish to give my former foes, the Trojans, joy, and on the Achaean army impose a bitter return [a return that is no return].

Poseidon: Why do you leap thus from mood to mood? Your love and hate both go too far, on whomever centred.

Athena: Do you not know the insult done to me and to the shrine I love?

Poseidon: I do; when Aias dragged away Kasandra by force.

Athena: Yes, and the Achaeans did nothing, said nothing to him.

This crime angered Athene in such a way that she unleashed a plague on Locrians. To appease the goddess, the oracle of Delphi declares that Athene demanded Locrians to send two of the virgin (parthenos) daughters of their noblest families to her temple each year, for the span of 1000 years. But there's a twist [12]: 

When the maidens arrived, the Trojans met them and tried to catch them. If they caught the maidens, they killed them and burned their bones with the wood of wild trees which bore no fruit. Having done so, they threw the ashes from Mount Traron into the sea. But if the maidens escaped from their pursuers, they ascended secretly to the sanctuary of Athena and became her priestesses, sweeping and sprinkling the sacred precinct; but they might not approach the goddess, nor quit the sanctuary except by night. when maidens escaped death on landing, they served the goddess in the sanctuary for the term of their lives, or, at all events, till their successors arrived.

The whole time, maidens had to be always barefoot, their hair needed to be cropped and they had to wear just a single tunic. Sounds familiar?

Ajax and Cassandra
Solomon J. Solomon (1886)
©Art Gallery of Ballarat

Now I'd like to address a possible issue that may arise in the case of Locrian maidens: it seems that the goddess Athene didn't actually demand a sacrifice and it was only the Trojans that did the killings out of anger or whatnot. So this case is not a virgin sacrifice!

Well, if you read carefully, you'll see that in most descriptions of the myth, everything kinda hints a ritual killing, at least regarding the early maidens who were killed. One interesting example is the description of Tzetzes in Historiarum variarum Chiliades: Graece, Ch. 5, [726-45], where he talks about the act of purification of the city in time of a plague, famine or any other major punishments, by performing a sacrificial rite on those who were called pharmakoi (φαρμακοί), or pharmakos (φαρμακός) if it's one individual, and burn them in the end on a pyre and scatter their ashes into the sea. Borrowing its translation from Dennis D. Hughes' book, he first describes the procedure as follows [21]:

if misfortune laid hold of a city through divine wrath,

whether famine or plague or any other ill,

the most ugly man of all they would lead as to a sacrifice,

for the cleansing and cure of the ailing city.

And, having set up the sacrifice at the suitable place

and having given in his hand cheese, cake, and dried figs,

and having whipped him seven times on the penis

with squills, wild figs, and other wild plants,

in the end on a pyre they would burn him on wild wood,

and into the sea they would scatter the ash to the winds,

for the cleansing, as I said, of the ailing city,

Then he gives the following example for the account:

as also Lycophron mentions somewhere, of the Locrian maids,

saying something like this—I don't know the verses exactly:

'When burning the limbs with barren branches

Hephaestus throws out to the sea the ashes

of her who perished from Traron's peaks.'

But Hipponax explains the whole custom best. 

It's worth mentioning that the main example of the pharmakos rite can be found in Thargelia (Θαργήλια), which was a major Athenian festival held in the honor of Apollon and Artemis. For more information, you can check this page.

Finally, if for some reason you're thinking that Athene is not a goddess who would ever be associated with human sacrifice, then I'd like to quote Porphyry who noted in his work, On abstinence from animal food, that "in Laodicea, which is in Syria, they anciently sacrificed a virgin to Athena." It was also Athene who instructed Orestes and Iphigenia to build a temple for Artemis Tauropolos in which Orestes should establish the law of performing a human sacrifice to honor the goddess in their celebrations.

• The Bear and the Lovers

There are two other virgin sacrifices in the name of Artemis that I'd like to mention briefly, since I touched upon them in my first post. First one is the bear incident at Mounykhia and its relation to the Arkteia festival at Brauron for parthenoi who had to play the dance of bear for Artemis. In short, a bear gets killed after a parthenos provokes the animal while playing with it. Artemis gets angry and unleashes a plague. The oracle tells them that the goddess demands a parthenos to be sacrificed each year. However, they manage to find a way to evade the actual sacrifice, but in return, parthenoi have to go through the Arkteia and play the bear as a form of expiation.

Second case is the love affair at Triclaria temple. Comaetho was the parthenos priestess of Artemis at Triclaria, and Melanippus was her lover. Now I let Pausanias describe the rest [13]:

When Melanippus had won the love of the maiden, he asked the father for his daughter's hand. It is somehow a characteristic of old age to oppose the young in most things, and especially is it insensible to the desires of lovers. So Melanippus found it; although both he and Comaetho were eager to wed, he met with nothing but harshness from both his own parents and from those of his lover.

The history of Melanippus, like that of many others, proved that love is apt both to break the laws of men and to desecrate the worship of the gods, seeing that this pair had their fill of the passion of love in the sanctuary of Artemis. And hereafter also were they to use the sanctuary as a bridal-chamber. Forthwith the wrath of Artemis began to destroy the inhabitants; the earth yielded no harvest, and strange diseases occurred of an unusually fatal character.

When they appealed to the oracle at Delphi the Pythian priestess accused Melanippus and Comaetho. The oracle ordered that they themselves should be sacrificed to Artemis, and that every year a sacrifice should be made to the goddess of the fairest youth and the fairest maiden. Because of this sacrifice the river flowing by the sanctuary of Triclaria was called Ameilichus (relentless). Previously the river had no name.

The innocent youths and maidens who perished because of Melanippus and Comaetho suffered a piteous fate, as did also their relatives; but the pair, I hold, were exempt from suffering, for the one thing1 that is worth a man's life is to be successful in love.

 

So it seems that when it comes to Artemis, virgin sacrifice is not always a matter of saving a nation or victory in a war, at least not directly. Rather, it's about breaking the vows, making the sacred profane and disrespecting the identity and dignity of the goddess. 

In this context, let me give you some examples regarding the extent of Artemis' wrath even on her close companions and loyal followers, or on strangers who threaten her chori:

• Kallisto (Callisto)

Hesiod writes:

She chose to occupy herself with wild-beasts in the mountains together with Artemis, and, when she was seduced by Zeus, continued some time undetected by the goddess, but afterwards, when she was already with child, was seen by her bathing and so discovered. Upon this, the goddess was enraged and changed her into a beast. Thus she became a bear and gave birth to a son called Arkas.

In another reference we read that "Artemis slew Kallisto with a shot of her silver bow."

• Polyphonte

After she has an intercourse with a bear, Artemis banishes her and turns all the wild beasts against her.

• Coronis

She was Apollon's lover and after she cheats on him, Artemis kills Coronis (while she was pregnant) with her arrows.

• Aktaion (Actaeon)

As I mentioned in the first post, Aktaion "boasted that he was superior in the hunt to Artemis" [Eur. Ba. 340], while Pausanias writes that, "Stesichorus of Himera says that the goddess cast a deer-skin round Actaeon to make sure that his hounds would kill him, so as to prevent his taking Semele to wife." [Paus. 9.2.3], so Artemis turns him into a "stag," and (some say after inflicting Aktaion's own hounds with wolf's frenzy) she let them tear their master apart.

• Procris

When Diana confronts the married Procris (who had married in secret), she simply tells her that, "virgins hunt with me, but you are not a virgin, leave my company." [17]

So it seems Artemis-Diana has a strict code of honor, which makes sense, since being a parthenos goes hand in hand with being a puella aeterna, the eternal girl.

A.4    Intermezzo: Parthenos and Oracle

As William Blake wrote aptly once, 

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to endless night.

and this couldn't be more true in the case of virgins in the ancient times. We saw how some of them were born to 'endless night,' but also there were some who were born to 'sweet delight,' and among them were the 'basket bearers' (in the festivals, always a parthenos carrying a basket led the procession to sacrifice), priestesses, prophetesses and oracles of the deities. No one doubts the importance of the social and political aspects of a parthenos for families, since marriage was indeed a big deal for people back then. But being a parthenos, specially among nobilities, had an important spiritual/religious aspect as well. They were the instruments of divine.

We talked a bit about the parthenogenesis, or the divine childbirth, and the role of parthenos priestesses in the cults of Artemis. Even in the case of ordinary childbirth, virginity was regarded as a key element of fertility. We should note that ancient Greeks' (or ancient people in general) point of view towards nature was fundamentally different than ours. In fact, I always argued (borrowing from Kuhn) that one of the fundamental facts about historical periods and cross cultural phenomena that we need to always consider, is the concept of incommensurability. The farther we go back in time, the wider our relative cognitive and perceptual gap gets.

So for the ancients, nature was a divinity, a mother goddess: Ge/Gaia, Rhea, Demeter or Artemis. She was worshipped in her cults, festivals were held in her honor and sacrifices were offered to her to maintain the primordial balance. So it's not surprising at all that fertility, a fundamental aspect of nature, was regarded highly by our ancestors. And on the importance of maidenhood in this context, Spyridon Rangos wrote [14]: 

Artemis vacillates between virginity conceived as maidenly exquisiteness and celibacy symbolizing natural wilderness. My hypothesis is that in the eyes of the Greeks, virginity, far from being 'absence' or lack of sexuality (as has often been supposed), was indeed the precondition of fertility. The dynamism of procreation was considered to reside in virginity; hence the strengthening of virginity was regarded as the intensification of procreative power.

Now in the case of listing the parthenos oracles in the literature, Rebecka Lindau has done a great job and I just quote some of the related parts of her doctoral thesis here [15]:

The Sibyl of Cumae, Cassandra, and Daphne were all virgins ... A tradition, reported in Diodorus Siculus, depicts the virgin Daphne, the daughter of Teiresias whose hair became the laurel which the Pythia used when pronouncing prophecies ... Pausanias credits Gaia with the original prophetic powers and adds that she passed it on to the virgin nymph Daphnis ... In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Hermes’ first gift of prophecy came from three virgin prophetesses, the Triae, and not from Zeus ... Theonoe in Euripides' Helen is a virginal oracle who is credited with "knowing everything."

Then she mentions a very interesting example regarding the diva triformis, Artemis:

Artemis herself is referred to as a Sibylla Delphis and an Artemis Eukleia at Boeotia and Lokris, and an Artemis Pythia at Didyma. According to Pausanias, the first Sibyl was a daughter of Zeus by Lamia, daughter of Poseidon. The name Sibyl was given to her by the Libyans. Helen and the Trojan War were foretold by another Sibyl, Herophile, who wrote hymns, according to Pausanias, and in one of them, she called herself Artemis and the wife, sister, and daughter of Apollo. The nymphs, the companions of Artemis, are also often associated with oracles.

This is indeed an ultimate good noows to me, like one of those 'Aha!' moments when you finally see the big picture behind those unrelated equations. Anyway, let's continue:

Epiphanius in reference to the Montanist sect described how seven virgins dressed in white and carrying torches came frequently to prophesize to the people ... According to Diodorus Siculus, virgins in ancient times delivered the oracles because they have their natural innocence intact and are "in the same case as Artemis." He further recounts that the office of the Oracle of Delphi was originally held by a young virgin until a man from Thessaly raped her, after which incidence the young virgin in office was replaced by an elderly chaste woman.

Finally, let me quote her on the famous Vestal Virgins of Rome:

Plutarch speculated about the virginity of the Vestals, proposing that the man accredited with introducing this institution, king Numa, believed that the fire the Vestals guarded was pure and uncorrupted and had to be guarded by those equally pure and undefiled or that he attributed its fruitlessness and sterility to virginity.

 

A.5    Cannibalism

Mm-hmm! Fish on friday and human flesh the rest of the week.

– Sparky

Do you remember the following headline from 2019?

Swedish scientist advocates eating humans to combat climate change 

Magnus Söderlund,
Director of the Center for Consumer Marketing at Stockholm School of Economics,
presenting his cannibalistic idea on tv

How about Dr. Hannibal Lecter? Do you know him?

©Hannibal

These two examples show you how the "modern man" of 21st century is transforming the taboo of human cannibalism, from a mere savagery of his tribal past into a rational necessity of his civilized society. Now I don't intend to analyze the concept of cannibalism per se, and cast an ethical judgment here. What I'd like to do instead, is to see whether we can find some instances of human cannibalism in the Greco-Roman mythologies related to our hypothesis. But before going into that time period, let me just go back a little bit to the fascinating ancient Egypt era and quote a passage of a Pyramid Text known as the 'Cannibal Hymn':

Unas is the bull of heaven

Who rages in his heart,

Who lives on the being of every god,

Who eats their entrails 

When they come, their bodies full of magic

From the Isle of Flame.

Unas is the Lord of Offerings,

Who knots the cord

Who himself prepares his meal

It is Unas who eats men and lives on gods.

 

A.5.1    Types of Cannibalism

Human cannibalism comes in different flavors. The two main types are endocannibalism (i.e. eating the flesh of a member of one's own community, like a family member), and exocannibalism (i.e. eating humans outside of one's own community, like a captured enemy). Jeffrey P. Blick divides cannibalism into 5 subtypes [18]:

1. Survival: e.g. The Siege of Leningrad in WWII.
2. Ritual: e.g. Eating of the flesh of their deceased by the Fore people of Papua New Guinea as a gesture of respecting the dead.
3. Warfare: e.g. Some Japanese soldiers eating the flesh of their POWs in WWII .
4. Dietary: e.g. The serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, aka Milwaukee Cannibal.
5. Symbolic: e.g. Eucharist (aka Holy Communion) in Catholic Church.

Dismembering and cooking an enemy
Theodore de Bry (1562)
©Meisterdrucke.com

Now that we established a basic ground, we can get back to our main track.

A.5.2    Cannibalism in Greek Mythology

As I mentioned earlier, our point is to see whether we can find some examples of human flesh consumption in the Greek mythological literature related to our purpose. So the first step is to check whether there's any cannibalistic connection to the cults of Artemis or not. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any. That's not surprising though, because even among the ancient Greeks, cannibalism was considered barbaric and 'unGreek.' But on the other hand, sacrificing animals and consuming their flesh as a sacrificial meal are not mutually excluded acts. For example, when Mithra sacrifices a bull so that his followers could eat its meat and this becomes a tradition in Mithraic mysteries. Even in our time and age, when Muslims sacrifice a sheep in the Eid al-Adha, they either donate its meat to the charity, or keep it for the domestic consumption. 

So if there were instances of human sacrifice in ancient times, what could have possibly prohibited them from the consumption of the sacrifice? I'd say nothing, unless it had to do with the sacrificial animal's heart in Dionysian cults, as I mentioned in the first post, or some other rule of exception. In ancient times, they either burned the sacrificed animal on the pyre or they consumed it. So with most human sacrifices belonging to Artemis and Dionysos, it's very likely that the ritual cannibalism was performed in their cults. Though there's no mention of such an act in the literature, which is not surprising, since either it was a routine and normal thing, or it was highly secretive (and were done in remote places because both were the deities of wilderness), or because of the obvious taboo.

Maybe the more well known case of cannibalism, though not ritualistic, is the case of Kronos eating his own children. We touched upon it in the previous post. Next, there's Dionysos' first death by the hands of Titans who tore him into pieces and ate his flesh, except his heart. Regarding the mortals, there was in fact two ritual cannibalism acts. One was mentioned in Lollianos' Phoinikika which I covered it in the first post, as well as talking about Hekate's interesting epithet, Sarkophagos (σαρκοφάγος), meaning 'flesh-eater,' or more precisely, 'cannibal.' The other one was related to none other than Zeus, the survivor of an endocannibalism himself.

• Zeus Lykaios Cultus

They say that in the region of Arcadia and on the Mount Lykaion, there was an altar of Zeus and people called him by the epithet of Lykaios, which means Wolf. They had the custom of human sacrifice and cannibalism as part of their worship. In Plato's Republic, we read the following dialogue [19]:

"What, then, is the starting-point of the transformation of a protector into a tyrant? Is it not obviously when the protector's acts begin to reproduce the legend that is told of the shrine of Lycaean Zeus in Arcadia?" "What is that?" he said. "The story goes that he who tastes of the one bit of human entrails minced up with those of other victims is inevitably transformed into a wolf. Have you not heard the tale?" "I have."

Apparently, our dear Pausanias had also heard of that [20]: 

It is said, for instance, that ever since the time of Lycaon a man has changed into a wolf at the sacrifice to Lycaean Zeus, but that the change is not for life; if, when he is a wolf, he abstains from human flesh, after nine years he becomes a man again, but if he tastes human flesh he remains a beast for ever.

And so did St. Augustine [21]:

Varro…relates other things no less incredible, about that notorious witch Circe…and about the Arcadians, who, having been chosen by lot, would swim across a certain pool and there would be transformed into wolves and live with like beasts in the wilds of that region. But if they did not feed on human flesh, after nine years, having swum back across the same pool, they were again transformed into men. In fact he even mentioned by name a certain Demaenetus, who when he had tasted of the sacrifice which the Arcadians were accustomed to make to their Lycaean god from a slaughtered boy, was changed into a wolf, and that in the tenth year, restored to his own form, he trained himself in boxing and won a victory in an Olympic contest.

Although there's an another account of Zeus, Arcadia (with Lycaon, son of Pelasgus) and cannibalism, but this time Zeus punishes the cannibalists by striking them with a thunderbolt. There have been some scholarly discussions in order to explain this paradoxical account, including a secret 'wolf brotherhood,' which we won't go through.

• King Minos

Pasiphae was the daughter of the Titan Helios, sister of Circe, wife of king Minos of Crete, and the mother of Minotaur, the bull-headed half-human. Legend has it that one day Poseidon sends Minos a beautiful white bull to sacrifice, but Minos decides to keep it alive instead. Poseidon gets angry and curses Pasiphae to fall in lustful love with the white bull. And so she does. She goes to the great craftsman Daedalus and asks him to help her to have sex with the bull. He builds a 'realistic' wooden cow for her to get inside it. The bull falls into trap and fucks Pasiphae, and later she gives birth to the Minotaur.

Pasiphae
©Jonathan Hirschfeld
2011

After giving birth to Minotaur, she feels great shame and deep guilt, and finally she turns to her husband and tells him [22]:

It is your fault, and my sickness,

my destruction, the result of your sin.

If you intend me to be killed at sea,

kill me now: you are an expert

in human sacrifice and acts of blood.

Do you crave the taste of my flesh?

Then prepare the feast, you cannibal!

Though I am free from all wrongdoing,

let my death pay your penances.

Unfortunately, there's no other mention of the cannibalistic traits of king Minos that Pasiphae talks about, and on top of that, only a few fragments of this play (Euripides' Kretes) have survived.

A.6    Sacred Trees

Trees are sanctuaries. They preach the ancient law of life. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

- Hermann Hesse

Trees and specially sacred trees were among the constant and important motifs of the spiritual development of human beings right from the beginning. For example, did you know that Chimpanzees have tree shrines and perform some kind of ritual there? I'm not kidding. Laura Kehoe, a postdoc at the University of Oxford, first observed this phenomenon back in 2016, in her field study in the Republic of Guinea. She saw that Chimps piled up stones in the cavities of trees and threw stone at them. As her third explanation of this odd ritualistic behavior, she wrote:

maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at “sacred” trees and such man-made stone collections are commonly observed across the world and look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.

Chimps' Tree Cult
[23]

From Shinboku (the Sacred Tree) in Shinto, to the 'The tree of the knowledge of good and evil' in Christianity, and the ancient concept of the 'Tree of Life,' 'Cosmic Tree' and the 'World Tree' in cross cultural mythologies and esoteric movements, we can trace the motif of sacred trees. For the ancients, tree was the divine bridge between sky and earth, a pillar which holds the heaven.

The Tree of Life
©The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In fact [24]:

Trees are a form of nature that represent life and the sacred continuity of the spiritual, cosmic, and physical worlds. A tree is often used to symbolize a deity or other sacred being, or it may stand for what is sacred in general ... Trees that represent certain deities or ancestors, serve as mediators or links to the religious realm, and are associated with cultural beliefs in heaven or the afterlife. Trees may be valued as spiritual and physical contributors of life because they furnish liquids valued as sacred beverages used in ritual or as medicines for curing a variety of illnesses ... A society's religious beliefs about what kinds of trees are sacred generally depends on the nature and number of trees found in its territory. If trees are plentiful, the forest as a whole will also be an important part of the religion's spiritual beliefs and rituals.

Therefore, one expects to find the presence of sacred trees in mythologies as well. And surprisingly or not, we find out that one of the deities who was mostly associated with trees, sacred or not, was our goddess Artemis. In hindsight, this seems to be a trivial fact, since not only she's the Mother Goddess as diva triformis, but she's also the patroness of wilderness and the nymphs, and not to mention that she's Diana of the Woods. One interesting thing about the word nymphe (νύμφη) is that it also refers to 'young women in their first encounter with love.'

You've probably seen, at least in the movies or documentaries, that people hang ribbons or ornaments from trees, specially from the sacred ones. The well-known example is the Christmas tree. This is in fact an ancient tradition. Back then, people used to hang such special objects as well as their offerings, totems of their cultus and images of their deities from the sacred trees as a form of honoring the associated tree god or goddess. Furthermore, there are two special cases where the deities were said to be hung from their trees. 

• Odin, The Hanged God

First one is Odin, the mighty god of Norse people, who hanged himself from Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, for 9 days in order to learn the secret knowledge of the runes.

Odin hanging on the World-Tree
Carl Emil Doepler
©germanicmythology.com

• Artemis, The Strangled Goddess

In Description of Greece, Pausanias writes [8.23.6-7]:

About a stade distant from Caphyae is a place called Condylea, where there are a grove and a temple of Artemis called of old Condyleatis. They say that the name of the goddess was changed for the following reason. Some children, the number of whom is not recorded, while playing about the sanctuary found a rope, and tying it round the neck of the image said that Artemis was being strangled. 

The Caphyans, detecting what the children had done, stoned them to death. When they had done this, a malady befell their women, whose babies were stillborn, until the Pythian priestess bade them bury the children, and sacrifice to them every year as sacrifice is made to heroes, because they had been wrongly put to death. The Caphyans still obey this oracle, and call the goddess at Condyleae, as they say the oracle also bade them, the Strangled Lady from that day to this.

 

A.6.1    Artemis as the Tree Goddess

Let's see what else we can find about Artemis and trees. But first, we should note that obviously, there were other gods and goddesses who had their own sacred trees, specially the Mother Goddesses. The key difference is the relative number of associations compared to the other deities. So for Artemis, as I mentioned in my first post, not only she's addressed as the "great goddess of the woods and groves," but also she has the most cited number of associations with trees in general. She was also the goddess of the maiden dance and her companions, parthenos or not, used dancing as a form of worshipping this aspect of the goddess at her shrines in the woods and around her sacred trees [31]. In the Homeric Hymn 27 to Artemis, we read:

this huntress who delights in arrows slackens her supple bow and goes to the great house of her dear brother Phoebus Apollon, to the rich land of Delphi, there to order the lovely dance of the Muses and Graces. There she hangs up her curved bow and her arrows, and heads and leads the dances, gracefully arrayed, while all they utter their heavenly voice, singing how neat-ankled Leto bare children supreme among the immortals both in thought and in deed.

Sacred tree of Artemis, with her hanged weapons
[26]

One interesting side note is that both Artemis and Dionysos were famous for their peculiar dancing followers whose dances were often of the lewd and lascivious nature. For example, one of the epithets of Artemis was 'Cordax' (of Cordax dance) and Cordax was a "provocative, licentious, and often obscene mask dance," performed by followers of Artemis. Juvenal describes it as [25]:

A Gaditanian singer will begin to tickle you with her musical choir, and the girls encouraged by applause sink to the ground with tremulous buttocks. This amatory dancing with undulations of the loins and buttocks was called cordax.

It seems like cordax was equivalent to the belly dancing or twerking of today, according to the filmmaker Diana Manfredi. 

A veiled and masked dancer
(3rd–2nd century B.C, Greece)
©The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Pleiades, daughters of the Titan Atlas and companions of Artemis were credited for the invention of ritual dance. They finally ascended to the sky by dancing and became The Pleiades, The Seven Sisters star cluster.

The Pleiades
Elihu Vedder (1885)
©Wikipedia

Now getting back to trees, Artemis was associated mainly with the following trees which were her respected epithets as well: Walnut (epi.* Karyatis), Laurel (epi. Daphnia), Cypress (epi. Kyparissia), Palm-tree (Leto gave birth to Artemis and Apollon under a palm-tree), Pine and Willows (epi. Lygodesma).

[* Epithet]

Note that Laurel was the sacred tree of Apollon as well, and it (more likely that its leaves) had a very special role in the divination process of the Pythia, the parthenos High Priestess and Oracle of Delphi. It's also worth mentioning that the three Bee Maidens, who had female human heads and torsos and lower body and wings of a bee, taught the divination to young Apollon. They sometimes are identified/conflated with the three virgin nymph sisters, Thriae, who also had the divination powers and helped Apollon in this regard, and some say they might have been predecessors of the Pythia at Delphi.

The Pythia in a trance state,
 holding a laurel branch in her hand
John Collier (1891)
©Wikipedia

One of the parthenos sisters, Thriae, or the Bee Maidens.
She was also associated with Artemis.
7th century BC gold plaque
©Wikipedia

The sacred palm-tree in Delos, under which Artemis was born
©Mykonos C. Tsakos/delostours.gr

Daphne metamorphosing into laurel while running from Apollon,

 since both were the victims of Cupid's wrath, according to Ovid.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1625)
©Wikipedia

Artemis is also associated with Oak tree via Dryads who were tree nymphs in general, and the nymphs of Oak trees in particular (alongside with Pine, Ash and Apple trees), and they were the loyal companions of the goddess.

Finally, there's another sacred tree of Artemis that I want to mention because it has an interesting and rather surprising cross cultural connection to the show: Cedar (epithet: Kedreatis). In Description of Greece [8. 13. 2], Pausanias informs us that:

Near the city [of Orkhomenos] is a wooden image of Artemis. It is set in a large Cedar tree, and after the tree they call the goddess Kedreatis (the Lady of the Cedar).

So why is this interesting? Well, you do remember that our Oracle's name was Lottie (Lotte), right? Ok. Now if we drop the ("correct") pronunciation here, or consider the short form pronunciation of its original form, i.e. Liselotte and/or Charlotte, we see that Lotte becomes Lote, and we have a tree named Lote tree. So? Alright, here we go. 

Quran, the holy book of Islam, mentions the name of a sacred tree that lives at the boundary of the seventh heaven. It's so sacred that it marks the line between the ineffable realm of Allah and the rest of his creation. No one can pass beyond it, even his archangels, except one man: his prophet Mohammad, who went to the other side at the height of his famous nocturnal ascension to the seventh heaven and met with Allah. The whole journey is called Mi'raj in Arabic. The name of that tree in Arabic is Sidrat al-Muntaha, the Sidr (Sidra) tree of the boundary, and oddly enough, there are only two trees that have been proposed to correspond to this mysterious Sidr tree: the Lote tree (Ziziphus spina-christi, i.e. Christ's Thorn Jujube) and the Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani). You heard me, Lote and Cedar!

Sidr (Sidra) tree as the Lote tree
©Qatar Foundation

The description of Mohammad's ascension in 53:11-18 is grandeur, and worth mentioning:

[Mohammad's] Heart did not doubt what he saw.

How can you then dispute with him regarding what he saw?

And he certainly saw that angel descend a second time.

At the Sidr Tree of the boundary [in the seventh heaven]—

near which is the Garden of [Eternal] Residence—

while the Sidr Tree was covered with [heavenly] splendours.

[Mohammad's] Sight never wandered, nor did it overreach.

He certainly saw some of his Lord’s greatest signs.

Just imagine if a stranger, or someone you know, talks to you about her visions, her divine journeys and tells you about a prophecy. What would be your reaction? Would you believe her?

Sidr (Sidra) tree as the Cedar of Lebanon
©thetimes.co.uk

Trees were the symbol of fertility, Mother Goddess, the neutral meeting point of the chthonic and sky deities. Trees were the vessels of prophecy. Trees were the deities themselves.

A.7    Hekate and Dog Sacrifice

Of the nine dogs Patroclus fed beneath his table, Achilles cut the throats of two and threw their bodies on the pyre,

writes Homer in Iliad, when describing Achilles' sorrow after the death of his dear friend and comrade, Patroclus [27]. If you recall, we talked about our beloved lady Hekate Trimorphis' interesting epithets Kardiodaitos (καρδιόδαιτος) [heart-eater], Sarkophagos (σαρκοφάγος) [flesh-eater/cannibal], and Aorovoros (ἀωροβόρος) [devourer of those who die prematurely, or untimely] in the first post.  

We also mentioned instances of using dogs' organs for invoking her, though for the dark purposes. Now to explore more on this issue, we first note that although dogs were sacrificed in honor of a few deities in the Greek mythologies, the main deity to whom they were offered was in fact Hekate. In the first post, we talked about how she was equivalent to Artemis-Selene(-Persephone) as the khthonic (earth-underworld) representation of our diva triformis (trimorphis). She is indeed the parthenos night-wanderer liminal goddess, and according to Hesiod, Zeus reveres her above all the deities and her domain is the sky, sea and earth. It's no wonder that the Orphic Hymns opens with the hymn to Hekate, addressing her as the maiden queen of the whole world, wearing a saffron-colored robe and the protectress of dogs.

The Triple Hekate (The Night of Enitharmon's Joy)
William Blake (1795)
©Tate Britain/Wikipedia

So as you've guessed already, dog is her sacred animal (as for Artemis-Diana) and she's always accompanied by a (pack of) dog(s). That's why dogs are sacrificed in her honor, and one of her epithets is 'to whom dogs are slain' (κυνοσφαγής/κυνοσφαγοῦς) [28, 29]. They say no one can feel the presence of Hekate, except dogs. 

To give you an example in this regard, Romans used to sacrifice a dog in the Lupercalia festival, so in Roman Questions, Plutarch tries to answer why they sacrificed a dog [30]:

Is it because this performance constitutes a rite of purification of the city? In fact they call this month February, and indeed this very day, februata; and to strike with a kind of leather thong they call februare, the word meaning 'to purify.' Nearly all the Greeks used a dog as the sacrificial victim for ceremonies of purification; and some, at least, make use of it even to this day. They bring forth for Hekate puppies along with the other materials for purification, and rub round about with puppies such persons as are in need of cleansing, and this kind of purification they call 'periskylakismos' [περισκυλακισμός: a purifying rite in which a puppy was sacrificed and carried].

Or is it that lupus means 'wolf' and the Lupercalia is the Wolf Festival, and that the dog is hostile to the wolf, and for this reason is sacrificed at the Wolf Festival?

Or is it that the sacrifice is made to Pan, and a dog is something dear to Pan because of his herds of goats?

Hekate-Artemis
©theoi.com

The triform Hekate-Diana
©The Trustees of the British Museum

Part B: Yellowjackets Connexion    

The Kore's helplessness exposes her to all sorts of dangers, for instance of being devoured by reptiles or ritually slaughtered like a beast of sacrifice. Often there are bloody, cruel, and even obscene orgies to which the innocent child falls victim. Sometimes it is a case of a true 'nekyia,' a descent into Hades [to consult the soul of a dead about the future], occasionally connected with orgiastic sexual rites or offerings of menstrual blood to the moon. Oddly enough, the various tortures and obscenities are carried out by an "Earth Mother." There are drinkings of blood and bathings in blood, also crucifixions. The "Earth Mother" is always chthonic and is occasionally related to the moon, either through the blood-sacrifice, or through a child-sacrifice, or else because she is adorned with a sickle moon.

- Carl Jung

Now let's see what evidences we can find in the show with regards to the themes that we discussed so far.

B.1    Parthenos

So why should all of this matter in the first place? Well, if you recall the episode 9, aka Doomcoming, after the girls rush towards the cabin, howling, they find out about the affair between Jackie and Travis. Then Lottie, displeased and disgusted, tells Jackie that "You took something that doesn't belong to you." Then Jackie responds sarcastically, telling her whether the "spirits" care about that Nat "called dibs on Travis," and to my surprise (in hindsight), Lottie responds, "This has nothing to do with her," and just before locking up Jackie, she continues, "Don't you understand? You don't matter anymore!" 

It's clear now what Lottie meant by saying "you took something that doesn't belong to you." She wasn't talking about Travis and Nat, she was talking about Jackie's virginity, which belonged to Artemis. And now that it was taken, Jackie was out and didn't matter anymore. And we saw what happened to her in the end, and what they were going to do to Travis, the stag, just like Actaeon. The girls were struck with Lyssa, i.e. wolf's frenzy, just like the Aktaion's hounds.

In fact, In ancient times, any offense towards Khthonic deities (χθόνιοι θεοί)—deities of the earth, dirt and underworld—be it with regards to the sacrifices, or their shrines, their rights, ..., had a very grave consequence—causing their eternal divine wrath, or menis (μῆνις) in Greek—and they needed to be appeased only by performing a special type of blood sacrifice called enagizein (ἐναγίζειν) at the whereabouts of the spot where the offense was given [34]. 

It's worth mentioning that enagizein was totally different in nature than the normal sacrifice, aka thyein (θύειν). For example, Pausanias tells us that Orestes (Ὀρέστης) first performed an enagizein to avert the wrath of the vengeance goddesses—Erinyes (Ἐρινύες) or Eumenides (Εὐμενίδες)—then did a normal sacrifice afterwards as a thank-offering [Paus. 8.34.3]:

The story is that, when these goddesses were about to put Orestes out of his mind, they appeared to him black; but when he had bitten off his finger they seemed to him again to be white and he recovered his senses at the sight. So he offered a sin-offering (ἐνήγισεν) to the black goddesses to avert their wrath, while to the white deities he sacrificed a thank-offering (ἔθυσε).

Even in the later monotheistic traditions, we hear about such offenses as well. For example, in Isaiah 43:23-24, the god of Jacob and Israel says to his people:

You have not brought me sheep for burnt offerings, nor honored me with your sacrifices. I have not burdened you with grain offerings nor wearied you with demands for incense. You have not bought me sweet cane with your silver, nor pleased me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins and wearied me with your offenses.

Needless to say that human sacrifices were also performed as an enagizein. Now returning to Jackie, she first angered the parthenos goddess of the wilderness in Doomcoming, and then in the the thank-prayer scene* in the finale, she caused the menis of the dirt deities by eating their gift yet insulting them at the same time. Therefore, her death near the cabin was inevitable.

Also, as far as I know, being a virgin was not something meaningful or significant for boys, unless it was used to indicate the fact that they were unmarried, i.e. being a parthenos. If I'm not mistaken, Hippolytus was the only male figure in the literature whose state of chastity was being emphasized. He was among the followers of Artemis, up to his tragic death by the curse of Aphrodite. It seems that he just hated sex, love and being in a relationship. It's worth noting that the words that were used for his state of "chastity" are either a peculiar translation of (the derived forms of) sophroneo (σωφρονέω)—which actually means 'being moderate,' 'to curb one's passions,' 'showing self-control'—or agnos (ἁγνός)—which means 'pure,' 'holy,' 'chaste'—or akeratos (ἀκήρατος), which means 'untouched,' or 'undefiled.' Interestingly, the word parthenos was used for him only once, when he says "my body is pure of the bed of love." But if you look at the original Greek sentence [Eur. Hipp. 1003], you'd see that the word "bed of love" is in fact a personal translation of the word lekhos (λέχους), which itself actually means 'the bed of marriage,' or 'marriage' in general. Therefore, we can see yet again that virginity in the Greek mythology was nothing but an indicative of the marital status, and furthermore, its significance was reserved for girls, rather than boys, due to being related to the important concept of the female fertility.

* The choice of the words in the prayer is also very interesting. Let us recall the prayer first: 

For this gift from the wilderness, we give our thanks. To the spirit of the bear, who sacrificed so that we could survive, we give our thanks. And to the ancient gods of the sky and the dirt, we give our thanks.

As you can see, not only it's apt in the invocation of the appropriate deities (i.e. sky and the dirt, while excluding the sea domain), but also in using 'wilderness' for the forest and nature in general. The latter is interesting, because it's related to the famous 'huntress' epithets of Artemis, i.e. Agra (Ἄγρα), Agraia (Ἀγραία) or Agrotera (Ἀγροτέρα), and all of which are the linguistic neighbors of Agria (ἀγρία), which means 'uncultivated' and 'wild,' when applied to plants, animals and humans, and 'uncivilized' when used for humans only.

B.2    Cannibalism

On the other hand, we knew right from the beginning that cannibalism is the elephant in the room. On the surface, it's pretty obvious that this is just a survival type cannibalism. But then if you look carefully at the opening of the pilot, you see that the so called 'pit girl' is dressed only in a white tunic, barefoot and running from some people (chased by THE HUNTER, as it's named in the script) through the woods with all the totems hanging from the trees and the presence of the single eyes on their trunk. If it's not part of a ritual cannibalism, then what's with all the symbolic setting? In fact, this is how this symbolic setting is described in the script, written by Ashley Lyle & Bart Nickerson:

Dozens of eyes CARVED into the surrounding trees. Around them, TALISMANS hang from the branches, fashioned from bough and BONE.

The 'pit girl' is named as the 'RUNNER' in the script, and we've mentioned some examples of the sacrificial victims running from their fates. In ancient times, contrary to the most sacrifice customs where the sacrificial animals were chosen to be domesticated, the ones which were offered to Artemis had to be wild animals hunted for the sacrificial purpose only. It's interesting to note that any wild animal hunted for food, for recreation or for prizes and trophies is called 'game,' and in the first version of the pilot script we read:

Butcher SLITS the Runner's throat with a HUNTING KNIFE. Bleeding her out like a prize buck, ready for butchering. Which is exactly what she is...

We also note that the huntress Artemis is the lover of the (group) shouts, screams and the noises that are made in hunting, hence she bears the epithet Keladeine [Κελαδεινή], which means 'of clamours,' and 'of the echoing chase' when used for Artemis. Now compare this with what's written in the script, describing the echoing chase scene:

The Runner lets out a single, strangled SCREAM. A beat, before -- an answering SHRIEK sounds somewhere beyond the glade. Then ANOTHER. And another, and another, until the air is filled with eerie, inhuman wails.

Now let's pause a bit on the ritual cult names that were given to the girls in the pilot script. We talked about THE HUNTER and the RUNNER, but what about THE BUTCHER, THE OVERSEER and THE SHAMAN? Well, after hearing what I mentioned about the sacrificial rituals in the ancient Greek cults, you might've thought that all of the procedures at those rituals were done by one person: a priest or a priestess. But what if I told you that you were wrong?

First of all, in any cult devoted to a deity, we had a (high) priest [hiereus] or a priestess [hiereia] as the main official figures, most of whom might have been diviners themselves as well, with the notable exception of the temple of Apollon at Delphi, where the diviner was the Pythia and the role of the priests was to interpret her oracular statements. As noted by Angelos Chaniotis, in several types of rituals, priests and priestesses had assistances as well. For example, in the sacrificial rituals, we had a hierothutes as the sacrificial supervising priest, a mageiros as the butcher officiating in sacrifices, a kreonomos as the distributor of sacrificial meat, a xuleus in charge of cutting the wood for the fire, etc. Now it's easy to see who is who with regards to the show, right? THE SHAMAN is the hiereia, THE OVERSEER is the hierothutes and THE BUTCHER is the mageiros. 

In more primitive cultures, the shaman—the predecessor of the priest and the priestess—was actually the hunter's leader, and usually wore animal mask, deer skin and an antlered headdress or crown.

The pit incident itself might have been an accident though—as it's called a Tiger Pit in the script—e.g. the maiden had escaped the actual ritual somehow, but met her written fate in the pit. Or maybe the pit-death was part of the ritual in the first place.

Now one might ask whether it's possible that the girls kill the Runner but not cannibalize her? Well, the answer in our mythological context is a yes. In fact, one of the interesting things in the ancient Greek sacrificial rites is that they had different types of offerings depending on the domains of the involving deities, as well as the intent of their sacrifice. That's why we have different words for sacrifice in ancient Greek, each word indicating the type that's required, and each type required its own specific set of rules. I talked a bit about enagizein in the previous section. In the case of the domain of the deities (or heros) in question, if you are offering to the khthonic deities, you should not consume any part of the sacrificial victim at all. For example, Odysseus in his descent to the dark house of Hades (i.e. underworld), was instructed by the goddess Circe (Kirke) to dig a pit and make a sacrifice to the dead, e.g. to the soul of the blind seer Teiresias for consultation, by cutting the throat of the animals and letting their blood flow into the pit, ultimately in order to get a safe passage back home.

In the case of the intent of the sacrifice, there was also another type of sacrifice in which the sacrificial meat was not meant to be consumed at all, which was called sphagia (yes, this was one of the two sacrifices that the god of Israel had demanded from them in Amos 5:25, while the other one being thusia). It was performed before battles, to seal an oath, to cross a river or wilderness, to ease the winds or for purification. For example, Euphrantides the seer sacrificed three young prisoners of war to Dionysos Carnivorous (Omestes), for granting the Greeks salvation and victory in war. The key point of sphagia, in contrast to thusia or enagizein, was the emphasis on the blood-letting part, specially if a divination was involved. Many pre-battle sphagia were offered to Artemis Agrotera. So in the hypothetical case of an uneaten pit-girl in the pilot, the girls could have sacrificed the Runner as a sphagia to the ancient gods of the sky and the dirt for granting them a rescue or any other favor, as an enagizein to appease the anger of the gods of the dirt like the case of Jackie, or even as a normal thusia just to thank the deities of the dirt. By the way, if you're wondering about the Runner's hair, I should add that before slitting the throat, some hair of the victim needed to be cut by the sacrificial knife, and it was usually thrown on the fire. This is different than the virgin hair offerings to Artemis that I had mentioned in the first post.

Now if the sacrifice was done for the cannibalistic purpose, one may ask whether it was an endocannibalism or exocannibalism. In other words, was the Runner part of another clan, i.e. 'them,' and got captured, or was she part of an ingroup, i.e. 'us,' chosen by lot to be sacrificed for the greater good? Or maybe she's done something sacrilegious and angered Artemis-Hekate and now she's being punished? Or it might have been just a normal sacrifice in the honor of Hekate Sarkophagos. Maybe it's a virgin sacrifice for the purpose of being rescued and return home, or to ask the Mother Goddess to provide them with future food for the long winter. But one thing is rather certain: since they cooked the meat, it can't be a Dionysian ritual, since Maenads and Bacchants practiced tearing apart their victims (Sparagmos) and eating their flesh raw (Omophagia), just like their god, Dionysos Omophagos (the Raw-Eater), himself.

B.3    Tree

I think this motif is the most obvious one to notice and relate to. They're stuck in the woods; they fell from the sky, the Great Father, and now they're at the mercy of the woods, the Great Mother. In Pilot, we see totems hanging from the trees, and some of the trees have eye-shaped features. Then later we see the symbol is carved on some of them. The 'tyrant' father figure, i.e. Travis' dad, dies of being fallen from the grace of the sky father and getting crucified and pierced by the hand of the mother earth, i.e. a tree branch. 

It's interesting that it was Laura Lee who found him first: while she's sitting under that tree, the first falling drop of his blood lands on her teddy bears' forehead and the second one lands on hers after she looks up. In Saints, right under the trunk of a tree, Shauna tries to get an abortion but she aborts the abortion in the end. Artemis is the goddess of childbirth and patroness of children. In Doomcoming, we see ribbons and ornaments are hung from the trees before for the festival. After the intoxication, or to be precise, after eating the flesh of the earth and letting her into their souls, Van tells Tai that she looks like a tree, and then someone else replies back, in wonder, that trees look like Tai. 

Then we have Coach Ben and Natalie sitting under the trunk of another tree, shining light on their repressed feelings and integrating this part of their personal Shadows. It's there that Coach Ben, now lying down, realizes the universality of love. And again in that episode, Lottie finally finds her shrine, which is nothing but a hollow trunk of a tree that was cut before. It's right there that she receives the revelation about the sacrificial bear, and the prophecy about the virginity of Jackie being taken. Then, after breaking from a trance like state by the tree, the oracle declares "He doesn't belong to her," about Travis and Jackie, and then the mania begins. 

Finally, we have none other than Taissa as the 'Lady in the Tree' that Sammy was talking about. Tai is a personification of a chthonic entity, probably Hekate in the Greco-Roman context. We find her near a tree, eating soil/dirt, and she finds herself resting upon the trees both as a teen and as an adult. I wish I was able to remember if there were any other tree references in the show or not. Oh, how can I forget that in the season finale (Sic transit gloria mundi), we see Lottie offering the heart of the sacrificial bear to the tree goddess and uttering the darkness and the blood sacrifice prayers.

And last but definitely not least, did you know that one of the epithets of Hekate is 'Eater or Consumer of Dirt/Mud/Mire'**? Oh yeah! In our case, Taissa the Dirt Eater.

** Vorvorophorva: βορβοροφόρβα

B.4    Hekate and Dog Sacrifice

As you must have noticed in the season finale, adult Taissa had sacrificed her family dog in order to win the election and we see the dog/puppy's head, and probably its heart, was put on the altar, with the symbol drawn by (its) blood on the wall behind. Well, it's an obvious reference to Hekate, i.e. dark arts and dog sacrifice, which in turn is another evidence for our diva triformis hypothesis.

B.4.1    "Sammy, Sammy, Sammy"

There's also another probable reference to Hekate in Sammy's cryptic drawings. In one of them, we see a dark figure with outstretched arms, with the word resembling CETU written on top of it. If we consider a case where the letter resembling U was in fact meant to be O, interchangeable with O (e.g. phonetically indistinguishable) or it was an unfinished O, then we have an interesting mythological connection. 

CETO?

Of course in the first glance, Ceto (Keto) was the mother of sea monsters. But it is argued that she is the dark oceanic side of Hekate, since both share the epithet of Krataios/Krataiis (κραταιός/κραταιίς) [Mighty/Of the Rocks], which was also the name of Skylla's (Scylla) mother [32]:

The hateful den of Ausonian Skylla (Scylla), the wicked monster borne to Phorkys (Phorcys) by night-wandering Hekate (Hecate), whom men call Krataiis (Crataeis).

There's at least one other interesting thing about Sammy's paintings: the presence of one, two and three eyeless females. It seems like the individual eyeless female and the couple are in fact members of the eyeless trio. So what of it? Well, we have this exact three eyeless females in Greek mythology who are called Graia (or Graiai) [Γραια, Γραιαι], "old women" or "old witches," or "grey ones." They are three (some say two) old grey-haired eyeless sisters who share a detachable eye and tooth amongst each other, and guess what? They are daughters of Phorkys and Keto! Yes, indeed. In Theogony, Hesiod tells us that [Hes. Th. 270]:

And again, Keto (Ceto) bore to Phorkys (Phorcys) the fair-cheeked Graiae, sisters grey from their birth: and both deathless gods and men who walk on earth call them Graiae, Pemphredo well-clad, and saffron-robed Enyo.

You recall the 'saffron-robed' reference from the first essay, right?!

Graiai?

In Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Prometheus (Προμηθεύς) tells Io (Ἰώ) that [Aesch. PB 790 ff]:

When you have crossed the stream that bounds the two continents, toward the flaming east, where the sun walks, ..., crossing the surging sea until you reach the Gorgonean plains of Cisthene, where the daughters of Phorcys dwell, ancient maids, three in number, shaped like swans, possessing one eye amongst them and a single tooth; neither does the sun with his beams look down upon them, nor ever the nightly moon. And near them are their three winged sisters, the snake-haired Gorgons, loathed of mankind, whom no one of mortal kind shall look upon and still draw breath. Such is the peril that I bid you to guard against.

And Hyginus writes in Fabulae:

From Phorcus (Phorkys) and Ceto (Keto): Phorcides Pemphredo, Enyo and Persis (for this last others say Dino).

Anyway, it's very likely that even if Hekate and Keto were not identical, we definitely had a mythological syncretism at some point. This is also reflected in her other epithets, such as Einalian (Of the Sea), Limenitis/Limenitikos (Harbor Goddess/Of the Harbor), Medusa (Protector, Gorgon) & Gorgo (Gorgon) and Drakaina (Serpent, Dragon) [33].

Gorgon at the Artemis temple in Corfu
©Wikipedia

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