36

Appendix 36

For related conceptions in Rome, see Festus (128M, BT [1965], p. 115): “*Manalem *fontem dici pro eo, quod aqua ex eo semper manet . . . Manalem lapidem putabant esse ostium Ord, per quod animae inferorum ad superos manarent, qui dicuntur manes.” (Cf. F. Bömer, “Der sogenannte Lapis Manalis,” ARW 33 [1936], p. 281; Kroll, RE 16 s.v. mundus, cols. 56 If. To prevent one-sided conceptions from stealing into the picture, see also Festus 156M, p. 147: “Manes di ab auguribus vocabantur, quod eos per omnia manere credebant, eosque deos superos atque inferos dicebant.)

To this one should compare the rich material offered by F. M. Corn ford (“The Eleusinian Mysteries,” in Festschrift Ridgeway [1913], pp. 160ff.) about Greek underground structures, “phrear, the equivalent of the Latin puteus.” And about the “Curtius-Lake,” Lacus Curtius — representing a mundus — which was to be found, according to Dion. Hal. 2.42, en mesō tēs Romaiōn agoras, i.e., right in the middle of the Forum (see also Festus 49M, p. 42). Cornford explains (p. 162, note):

The legend of Curtius, whose self-devotion stopped a flood, and who was honoured
with dona ac fruges thrown into his lakkos, may throw light on the custom at Athens
of throwing wheatmeal kneaded with honey into the cleft in the ground at the
precinct of Ge Olympia where the water ran away after Deukalion’s flood, Paus. 1.18.7.

The well, closed by a stone — here even by a veritable Roman general and his horse — is not unfamiliar to us, meanwhile, after all that we heard about Eben Shetiyyah, the wen of the Ka’aba, etc. There are more curious connections between wells and stones that ask for consideration in future investigations, such as the following three items:

(1) The stone that was given by the Child to the Wise Men of the East, according to a legend picked up by Marco Polo. “The Magi did not understand the significance of the stone and cast it into a well. Then straightaway there descended from Heaven a fire which ’they carried into their own country and placed it in a rich and beautiful church’.” L. Olschki [1] mentions also the Uigur version of this story, where “the stone is detached by the Child from His crib and thrown into a well because of its overwhelming weight which frustrated all human and animal efforts to carry it away. A column of fire reaching the blue sky is said to have risen from the well into which the stone had fallen and to have kindled the fire worshiped by the Magi ‘up to our days’.”

(2) The star of the Magi which fell into the well of Bethlehem, according to Gervase of Tilbury, [2] after it had served its purpose to guide the Wise Men to the “new way.”

(3) The falling star that opened the abyss, according to Revelation — a future event, for a change. Out of this well ascends smoke which darkens the sun and air, and Franz Boll pointed aptly to the “smoke-barrel,” south of Sagittarius and Scorpius: Ara, the Altar in the Galaxy, [3] and under this very Altar are the souls of the witnesses of God waiting for the last day (Rev. VI.9). According to Eratosthenes’ catasterisms, at this Altar Zeus and his followers took their oath before attacking Kronos. [4]

The reader is likely to react unkindly claiming that there is no reason for whichever connection between legends about the Three Wise Men, Revelation, and the “Well of Gilgamesh.” Yet, Franz Boll (Offenbarung, pp. 69ff.) has recognized in those strange locust demons of Revelation — they come out of the well of the abyss — who resemble horses with human heads, and have wings, and tails of scorpions, the Sagittarius-Centaur of Mesopotamian boundary stones, also to be found on the rectangular zodiac of Dendera. Revelation also states that they had wreaths as if of gold on their heads: the Egyptian Sagittarius wears a double crown, the Teukros tradition ascribes to the constellation “the royal face” (to prosōpon basilikon, Boll, Sphaera, pp. 181f.). In the Gilgamesh Epic Scorpion men watch the way to the other world; Virgil (*Aeneid *6.286) makes it centaurs.

We must leave it at that: the chapter “Sagittarius and Saturn” would take us too far. We merely wanted to show that Gilgamesh’s well and the opening of new ways are not “prehistoric drivel” that has nothing to do with our post-Greek, Christian civilization. It was with veritable awe that Boll stated (Offenbarung, p. 73, 11. 4): “Von der Konstanz aller wesentlichen Charakteristiken in dies en Sternbildtypen macht sich der Fernerstehende schwer einen Begriff.”

Although all this must remain posterior cura, we would like to mention the suggestion offered by Cornford, namely, “that one of these phreata (= wells) in Eleusis was closed at its mouth by the agelastos petra,” i.e., the laughterless rock; Demeter was agelastos because of the loss of Persephone, and she was sitting upon this laughterless rock, which Cornford (“The Eleusinian Mysteries,” p. 161) proposes to take for “the double of the anaklēthra at Megara, which, as its name implies, was the place where Kore was ‘called up’.” This might be, but it does not throw much light on the whole plot, whereas it seems important to recall how the “laughterless” state of the goddess was altered, namely, by the rather improper jokes of Baubo/Iambe. This very trait, now, occurs frequently within the scheme of world-ages. The Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu, who, enraged by Susanowo’s misdemeanor, had withdrawn into a rocky cave leaving the world in utter darkness, was caused to come out again only by the lascivious dances of “the ugly sky-female,” Uzumue, dancing with the celestial jewel-tree upon her head, amidst the 800,000 gods assembled in the Milky Way, and producing fire afterward. Egyptian Ra, who had retired from a world which he did not like anymore, was “persuaded” by the same kind of jokes by Isis to take up again his duties (“And then the great god laughed at her”). The motif emerges again in the Edda, where Loke and a he-goat make the angry Skadi laugh, preventing her, thus, from avenging the murder of her father, Thiassi. [5] The story has also survived, although in dull disguise, in the Polynesian Marquesas Islands and, in excellent shape, with the Cherokee Indians; there the sex appeal is missing, admittedly, but the agelastos character is Mother Sun, desolate about the death of her only daughter: a true Demeter (her daughter resembling Eurydice: she had been brought back half of the way already, when the psycho-pompoi made a mistake that permitted her to return to Hades); the indecent dance is replaced by the concert of a juvenile orchestra.

We have heard (appendix #29) of an allegedly terrestrial agelastos petra with a river flowing at its foot, called Lethe. We also mentioned that Eleusis means “Advent,” pointing to the circumstance that Demeter arrived there and that, before having borne Zeus, Demeter had the name of Rhea (Orph. frg. 145, Kern p. 188).

The moving of Rhea-Demeter to Eleusis is a huge and perplexing story, indeed, involving honeybees, a woodpecker — whose daughters were promoted to priestesses of Eleusinian Demeter — goats, and what else, and we are not likely to cover this event here and now. That we are up to a major change of residence can be taken from the parallel case of Amaterasu who, after having been caused by Uzumue’s dance to leave her cave, was respectfully guided into a “New Hall,” as we hear in the Kogo-shui, [6] and “then Ama no Koyane no Mikoto and Futo-tama no Mikoto suspended an exalted Sun-rope around this Hall.” [7]

Not being specialists in Eleusinian matters, topography, etc. (they remained secrets to the end), we do not feel entitled to deal earnestly with these items beyond raising some questions, such as which well was closed — if Cornford’s suggestion is right — by the laughterless rock? Was it a former lapis manalis? What happened to the *agelastos *petra after Demeter had been moved to laugh? And how could this rock, closing a well connected with the underworld, be combined with the legends that hold Demeter responsible for the coming into being of the Stygian spring (Aelianus, *De *natura animalium 10.40), or for her having caused the waters of Styx to become black (O. Waser, Roscher 4.1572)? Demeter is supposed to have changed the color of the Stygian waters when she, on her search for Persephone, fleeing from Poseidon and changing into a mare, arrived at the Arcadian spring of Styx and per ceived in the water her own mis-shape. And how, on the other hand, could the bringing into being of Styx and her sitting on the laughterless rock be combined with the Orphic claim, according to which Demeter “separated the double nourishment of the gods,” splitting it up into Nectar and Ambrosia, [8] both of which come out of the “horn of Amaltheia,” i.e., alpha Aurigae?

Considering the amount of testimonies for stones, shards, trees, plugs which close the one or the other well, abyss, whirlpool, or, by being pulled out or just removed announce major changes and great catastrophes, we might be expected to wrap up this whole parcel, from the “Holiest of Holies” replacing the Ark — its function, respectively, to cover the tehom — to Tahaki tearing up the tree of Tane-of-holy-waters, and to Alexander pulling out the pole-pin, or to mischievous Monkey who removed the basket. But apart from the fact that there are many more instances, unmentioned in this essay, which should also find their place in the said parcel, behind every tree, stone, and well lurks, as it were, the danger of simplification and of ruthless identifying; to simplify, however, is the very danger that we most wish to avoid. In other words, we do not mean to make comparative mythology “easier,” by procuring simple denominators upon which all these items could be brought; we think, on the contrary, that we are faced with an almost uncountable number of x’s for which the fitting equations have to be worked out in long and cumbersome future investigations.

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  1. “The Wise Men of the East in Oriental Traditions,” in Festschrift Popper (1951), p. 386.

  2. Sunt qui dicunt, stellam Magorum suo cornpleto ministerio in puteum cecidisse Bethlehemicum et illic eam intro videri autumant. See F. Liebrecht, *Des *Gervasius Von Tilbury Otia Imperialia (1856), pp. 1, 53.

  3. Thymiatherion, or thyterion. Michael Scotus still made it “puteus sive sacrarius.” See F. Boll, Sphaera (1903), p. 446; Boll, *Aus der Offenbarung Johannis * (1914), P.75.

  4. It remains to be seen whether Ara has something to do with that enigmatical well of Gen. XXI.31, 33, called Beer-sheba, which is either “Well of Seven” or “Well of the Oath.” The Septuaginta votes for the Oath,” XXI.31: phrear horkismou; XXI.33: kai ephyteusen Abraam arouran epi tō phreati tou borkou kai epekalesato ekei to onoma Kyriou Theos aiōnios. (Compare also T. Nöldeke, “Sieben Brunnen,” ARW 7 [1904], pp. 340-44.)

  5. See F. R. Schröder, *Skadi und die *Götter Skandinaviens (1941), pp. 19-25.

  6. K. Florenz, Die historischen Quellen der Shinto-Religion (1919), p. 423; see also pp. 37ff., 153-62; and Nihongi, trans. by W. Aston (1956), pp. 40-49.

  7. The question remains whether the “exalted Sun-rope” is the same as the “left rope” — being called thus because plaited from left to right — and the “rope whose root-ends are plaited together” by means of which Amaterasu was cut off from ever reentering that laughterless cave, according to Nihongi and Kojiki (see Florenz, Quellen der Shinto-Religion, p. 40, n. 22).

  8. Orph. frg. 189, Kern p. 216: Dēmētēr prōtē kai tas dittas trophas dieilen.