7/25/2023 0 Comments Hades greek symbols![]() In Greek mythology, Hades is the son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Isis-Persephone and Serapis-Hades Statue at Gortyn.While it is difficult to arrive at a definitive classification for these artifacts at the moment, this thesis offers a starting point to place the archaic mouth-plates in their proper social, cultural, and ritual context. Taking a selection of the uninscribed gold foil mouth-plates found in archaic burials of Macedonia and Thrace, this thesis examines the potential links between these two practices and asks whether the uninscribed gold foil mouth-plates can be assigned to the category of 'things Orphic', or if they are part of an unrelated burial tradition. The inscribed Orphic tablets have clear links to mystery cults and are related to both the initiation and the afterlife expectations of the deceased. Furthermore, these artifacts are stylistically, materially, and contextually similar to the later Classical and Hellenistic periods use of gold foil for the inscribed Orphic gold tablets. This change may be linked to the rise of local private cults, including mystery cults, that took place in the archaic period. An apparent increase in artifact occurrence in Macedonia during the archaic period was the impetus for this thesis, as a change in grave goods suggests a change in funerary rituals. One of the more distinctive uses of gold foil was as a mouth-plate (or epistomion), which is an ellipsoidal or rhomboidal piece of gold foil placed on the mouth of the deceased in a burial. Gold foil is found in numerous burials in the Mediterranean dating to the early Mycenaean period and the material was used as clothing attachments, jewelry, headbands, wreaths, and other decorative adornments. In an almost Aeschylean venture, Matesis offers our disillusioned age a metaphysical myth on life and death - one reposing on age-old convictions of the Greek spirit. The play begins with an inversion of Eleusinian myth (as Mother and Daughter symmetrically exchange their places), to put forward a Heraclitean conception of the cosmos, based on the paradoxical meeting of opposites and the crossing of all boundaries. ![]() Multiple Dionysian and Orphic echoes are traced in many scenes. The Elder Son symbolically undergoes training for the mysteries of Dionysus, becoming a bacchos for life, in a course parallel to his sister’s initiation into the Eleusinian worldview. Matesis’ vision of Eleusis is inextricably connected with Dionysian myth and theatrical rites. Matesis’ choice of material represents an innovation within the Neo-Hellenic movement of tragedy adaptations, an experiment comparable to the Dionysian revival in Euripides’ Bacchae: a reunion with the roots of the tragic event, a rediscovery of the source and mother of all tragedy. his play The Roar, in which the Eleusinian myth is used as a matrix to refashion the family history of the Atreids). In the author’s eyes, this becomes the capital tragic myth, the genuine structure underlying all the other legends habitually dramatized by ancient tragedians (cf. Pavlos Matesis’ play "Towards Eleusis" (1993) reworks the story of Demeter and Persephone, as well as many rituals of the Eleusinian mysteries, in a modern setting.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |