Semele

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For other uses, see Semele (disambiguation).
"Stimula" redirects here. For a synonym of a genus of grass skipper butterflies, see Koruthaialos.
Semele
Princess of
Polydorus
ConsortZeus
ChildrenDionysus

Semele (

Harmonia, and the mother[1] of Dionysus by Zeus in one of his many origin myths
.

Certain elements of the cult of Dionysus and Semele came from the Phrygians.[2] These were modified, expanded, and elaborated by the Ionian Greek invaders and colonists. Doric Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), born in the city of Halicarnassus under the Achaemenid Empire, who gives the account of Cadmus, estimates that Semele lived either 1,000 or 1,600 years prior to his visit to Tyre in 450 BC at the end of the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC) or around 2050 or 1450 BC.[3][4] In Rome, the goddess Stimula was identified as Semele.

Etymology

According to some linguists the name Semele is

Zemes-mãte, a Slavic and Latvian goddess of the earth.[8][9]

Mallory and Adams suggest that, although Semele is "etymologically related" to other mother Earth/Earth goddess cognates, her name might be a borrowing "from another

Slavonic zemlya,Lithuanian zēmē from the Indo-European name *dʰéǵʰōm (earth). Semele seems to be a Thracian name of the earth goddess from gʰem-elā. The pronunciation was probably Zemelā.[12]

Etymological connections of

Thraco-Phrygian
Semele with
Zemyna is Žemelė,[13][14] and in Slavic languages, the word seme (Semele) means 'seed', and zemlja (Zemele) means 'earth'.[15] Thus, according to Borissoff, "she could be an important link bridging the ancient Thracian and Slavonic cults (...)".[16]

Mythology

Jove and Semele (1695) by Sebastiano Ricci. Galleria degli Uffizi. Florence

Seduction by Zeus and birth of Dionysus

In one version of the myth, Semele was a priestess of Zeus, and on one occasion was observed by Zeus as she slaughtered a bull at his altar and afterwards swam in the river Asopus to cleanse herself of the blood. Flying over the scene in the guise of an eagle, Zeus fell in love with Semele and repeatedly visited her secretly.[17]

Zeus's wife,

River Styx to grant her anything she wanted. She then demanded that Zeus reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his divinity. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he was forced by his oath to comply. Zeus tried to spare her by showing her the smallest of his bolts and the sparsest thunderstorm clouds he could find. Mortals, however, cannot look upon the gods without incinerating, and she perished, consumed in a lightning-ignited flame.[19]

Zeus rescued the fetal

Homeric Hymn). A few months later, Dionysus was born. This leads to his being called "the twice-born".[20]

When he grew up, Dionysus rescued his mother from

Mount Olympus, with the new name Thyone, presiding over the frenzy inspired by her son Dionysus.[22] At a later point in the epic Dionysiaca, Semele, now resurrected, boasts to her sister Ino how Cronida ('Kronos's son', that is, Zeus), "the plower of her field", carried on the gestation of Dionysus and now her son gets to join the heavenly deities in Olympus, while Ino languishes with a murderous husband (since Athamas tried to kill Ino and her son), and a son that lives with maritime deities.[23]

Impregnation by Zeus

Zeus, Semele und Hera. 17th century (Erasmus Quellinus II or Jan Erasmus Quellinus)

There is a story in the Fabulae 167 of

Titans. Jupiter gave his torn up heart in a drink to Semele, who became pregnant this way. But in another account, Zeus swallows the heart himself, in order to beget his seed on Semele. Hera then convinces Semele to ask Zeus to come to her as a god, and on doing so she dies, and Zeus seals the unborn baby up in his thigh.[24]
As a result of this Dionysus "was also called Dimetor [of two mothers] ... because the two Dionysoi were born of one father, but of two mothers"[25]

Still another variant of the narrative is found in

Europa, Plouto, Danaë, Aigina, Antiope, Leda, Dia, Alcmene, Laodameia, the mother of Sarpedon, and Olympias.[28]

Locations

Rubens. Jupiter and Semele (Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 259-309). Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

The most usual setting for the story of Semele is the palace that occupied the acropolis of

Alcyonian Lake near the prehistoric site of Lerna, Dionysus, guided by Prosymnus or Polymnus, descended to Tartarus to free his once-mortal mother. Annual rites took place there in classical times; Pausanias refuses to describe them.[31]

Though the Greek myth of Semele was localized in

Homeric Hymn
to Dionysus makes the place where Zeus gave a second birth to the god a distant one, and mythically vague:

"For some say, at
Alpheus that pregnant Semele bare you to Zeus the thunder-lover. And others yet, lord, say you were born in Thebes; but all these lie. The Father of men and gods gave you birth remote from men and secretly from white-armed Hera. There is a certain Nysa
, a mountain most high and richly grown with woods, far off in Phoenice, near the streams of Aegyptus..."

Semele was worshipped at Athens at the Lenaia, when a yearling bull, emblematic of Dionysus, was sacrificed to her. One-ninth was burnt on the altar in the Hellenic way; the rest was torn and eaten raw by the votaries.[32]

A unique tale, "found nowhere else in Greece" and considered to be a local version of her legend,[33] is narrated by geographer Pausanias in his Description of Greece:[34] after giving birth to her semi-divine son, Dionysus, fathered by Zeus, Semele was banished from the realm by her father Cadmus. Their sentence was to be put into a chest or a box (larnax) and cast in the sea. Luckily, the casket they were in washed up by the waves at Prasiae.[35][36] However, it has been suggested that this tale might have been a borrowing from the story of Danaë and Perseus.[37][38]

Semele was a tragedy by Aeschylus; it has been lost, save a few lines quoted by other writers, and a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus, P. Oxy. 2164.[39]

Drawing from an Etruscan mirror: Semele embracing her son Dionysus, with Apollo looking on and a satyr playing an aulos

In Etruscan culture

Semele is attested with the Etruscan name form Semla, depicted on the back of a bronze mirror from the fourth century BC.[citation needed]

In Roman culture

In

Tiber River,[40] was dedicated to a goddess named Stimula. W.H. Roscher includes the name Stimula among the indigitamenta, the lists of Roman deities maintained by priests to assure that the correct divinity was invoked in public rituals.[41] In his poem on the Roman calendar, Ovid
(d. 17 CE) identifies this goddess with Semele:

"There was a grove: known either as Semele's or Stimula's:
Inhabited, they say, by Italian Maenads.

Arcadians
,
And that
Evander
was the king of the place.
Hiding her divinity, Saturn’s daughter cleverly
Incited the
Bacchae
with deceiving words:"

"lucus erat, dubium Semelae Stimulaene vocetur;
maenadas Ausonias incoluisse ferunt:
quaerit ab his Ino quae gens foret. Arcadas esse
audit et Euandrum sceptra tenere loci;
dissimulata deam Latias Saturnia Bacchas
instimulat fictis insidiosa sonis:"[42]

Roman sarcophagus (ca. AD 190) depicting the triumphal procession of Bacchus as he returns from India, with scenes of his birth in the smaller top panels (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland)

sarcophagi
from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD.

The Greek cult of Dionysus had flourished among the

Libera, along with Ceres. The temple of the triad is located near the Grove of Stimula,[46] and the grove and its shrine (sacrarium) were located outside Rome's sacred boundary (pomerium), perhaps as the "dark side" of the Aventine Triad.[47]

In the classical tradition

In the

Neoplatonic philosophy of Henry More (1614–1687), for instance, Semele was thought to embody "intellectual imagination", and was construed as the opposite of Arachne, "sense perception".[48]

In the 18th century, the story of Semele formed the basis for three operas of the same name, the first by John Eccles (1707, to a libretto by William Congreve), another by Marin Marais (1709), and a third by George Frideric Handel (1742). Handel's work, based on Congreve's libretto but with additions, while an opera to its marrow, was originally given as an oratorio so that it could be performed in a Lenten concert series; it premiered on February 10, 1744.[49] The German dramatist Schiller produced a singspiel entitled Semele in 1782. Victorian poet Constance Naden wrote a sonnet in the voice of Semele, first published in her 1881 collection Songs and Sonnets of Springtime.[50] Paul Dukas composed a cantata, Sémélé.

Genealogy

Argive genealogy in Greek mythology
InachusMelia
ZeusIoPhoroneus
EpaphusMemphis
LibyaPoseidon
BelusAchiroëAgenorTelephassa
DanausElephantisAegyptusCadmusCilixEuropaPhoenix
MantineusHypermnestraLynceusHarmoniaZeus
Polydorus
Agave
SarpedonRhadamanthus
Autonoë
EurydiceAcrisiusInoMinos
ZeusDanaëSemeleZeus
PerseusDionysus
Colour key:

  Male
  Female
  Deity

Music

Notes

  1. ^ Although Dionysus is called the son of Zeus (see The cult of Dionysus : legends and practice Archived 2007-10-11 at the Wayback Machine, Dionysus, Greek god of wine & festivity, The Olympian Gods Archived 2007-10-02 at the Wayback Machine, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology Archived 2013-10-17 at the Wayback Machine, The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007, etc.), Barbara Walker, in The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, (Harper/Collins, 1983) calls Semele the "Virgin Mother of Dionysus", a term that contradicts the picture given in the ancient sources: Hesiod Archived 2008-01-06 at the Wayback Machine calls him "Dionysus whom Cadmus' daughter Semele bare of union with Zeus", Euripides Archived 2008-07-24 at the Wayback Machine calls him son of Zeus, Ovid tells how his mother Semele, rather than Hera, was "to Jove's embrace preferred", Apollodorus says that "Zeus loved Semele and bedded with her".
  2. ^ Martin Nillson (1967).Die Geschichte der Griechischen Religion, Vol I. C. H. Beck Verlag. München p. 378
  3. ISBN 978-0140449082. But from the birth of Dionysus, the son of Semele, daughter of Cadmus
    , to the present day is a period of about 1000 years only; ...
  4. ^ Herodotus, Histories, II, 2.145
  5. ^ Kerenyi 1976 p. 107; Seltman 1956
  6. Slavonic zemlya:earth, Lithuanian
    žemýna: the earth goddess: Martin Nillson (1967).Die Geschichte der Griechischen Religion, Vol I. C. H. Beck Verlag. München p. 568;
  7. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch
    : root *dgem. Compare Damia and "Demeter" (mother earth).
  8. ^ Ann, Martha and Myers Imel, Dorothy. (1993). Goddesses in World Mythology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
  9. ^ Gimbutas, Marija. "The Living Goddesses".
  10. ISBN 978-1-884964-98-5
  11. ^ Walter Burkert (1985), Greek Religion, p. 163
  12. ^ M.L.West, Indoeuropean poetry and myth, p.174-175 Oxford University Press. p.174
  13. ^ Laurinkiene, Nijole. "Gyvatė, Žemė, Žemyna: vaizdinių koreliacija nominavimo ir semantikos lygmenyje". In: Lituanistika šiuolaikiniame pasaulyje. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2004. pp. 285–286.
  14. ISBN 978-1-136-14172-0
    .
  15. ISSN 0236-0551
    .
  16. Studia Mythologica Slavica 17 (October). Ljubljana, Slovenija. p. 22. https://doi.org/10.3986/sms.v17i0.1491
    .
  17. ^ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 7.110-8.177 (Dalby 2005, pp. 19–27, 150)
  18. Fabulae
    167.
  19. Metamorphoses III.308–312; Hyginus
    , Fabulae 179; Nonnus, Dionysiaca 8.178-406
  20. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4.1137; Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods 9; compare the birth of Asclepius, taken from Coronis
    on her funeral pyre (noted by L. Preller, Theogonie und Goetter, vol I of Griechische Mythologie 1894:661).
  21. Hyginus, Astronomy 2.5; Arnobius, Against the Gentiles 5.28 (Dalby 2005
    , pp. 108–117)
  22. ^ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 8.407-418
  23. ISBN 978-90-04-33465-6
  24. ^ Fabulae 167.1
  25. ^ (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 4. 5, quoted in the Theoi.com collection of Zagreus sources])
  26. ^ Callimachus, Fragments, in the etymol. ζαγρεὺς, Zagreos; see Karl Otfried Müller, John Leitch, Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology (1844), p.319, n.5
  27. ^ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 24. 43 ff — translation in Zagreus
  28. ^ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 7.110–128
  29. ^ Semele was "made into a woman by the Thebans and called the daughter of Kadmos, though her original character as an earth-goddess is transparently evident" according to William Keith Chambers Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, rev. ed. 1953:56. Robert Graves is characteristically speculative: the story "seems to record the summary action taken by Hellenes of Boeotia in ending the tradition of royal sacrifice: Olympian Zeus asserts his power, takes the doomed king under his own protection, and destroys the goddess with her own thunderbolt." (Graves 1960:§14.5). The connection Semele=Selene is often noted, nevertheless.
  30. ^ Kerenyi 1976 p 193 and note 13
  31. ^ Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.37; Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 35 (Dalby 2005, p. 135)
  32. ^ Graves 1960, 14.c.5
  33. ^ Holley, N. M. “The Floating Chest”. In: The Journal of Hellenic Studies 69 (1949): 39–40. doi:10.2307/629461.
  34. ^ Beaulieu, Marie-Claire. "The Floating Chest: Maidens, Marriage, and the Sea". In: The Sea in the Greek Imagination. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. pp. 97-98. Accessed May 15, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17xx5hc.7.
  35. ^ Pausanias (1918). "24.3". Description of Greece. Vol. 3. Translated by W. H. S. Jones; H. A. Ormerod. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann – via Perseus Digital Library.-4.
  36. ^ Larson, Jennifer. Greek Heroine Cults. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. pp. 94-95.
  37. ^ Larson, Jennifer. Greek Heroine Cults. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. p. 95.
  38. ISBN 978-3-7370-0252-3 DOI: https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737002523.61
  39. ^ Timothy Gantz, "Divine Guilt in Aischylos" The Classical Quarterly New Series, 31.1 (1981:18-32) p 25f.
  40. ^ CIL 6.9897; R. Joy Littlewood, A Commentary on Ovid's Fasti, Book 6 (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 159.
  41. ^ W.H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1890–94), vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 226–227.
  42. ^ Ovid, Fasti, 6.503ff.
  43. De Civitate Dei
    4.11.
  44. Ab Urbe Condita
    39.12.
  45. ^ Littlewood, A Commentary on Ovid, p. xliv. See particularly the paintings of the Villa of the Mysteries.
  46. ^ Littlewood, A Commentary on Ovid, p. xliv.
  47. ^ Michael Lipka, Roman Gods: A Conceptual Approach (Brill, 2009), pp. 18–19.
  48. ^ Henry Moore, A Platonick Song of the Soul (1647), as discussed by Alexander Jacob, "The Neoplatonic Conception of Nature," in The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition (Kluwer, 1991), pp. 103–104.
  49. ISBN 0-19-315203-7
    .
  50. ^ Naden, Constance (1894). The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden. London: Bickers & Son. p. 137.

References

  • ISBN 0-674-36280-2
  • ISBN 0-89236-742-3
    )
  • Graves, Robert, 1960. The Greek Myths
  • Kerenyi, Carl
    , 1976. Dionysus: Archetypal Image of the Indestructible Life, (Bollingen, Princeton)
  • Kerenyi, Carl, 1951. The Gods of the Greeks pp. 256ff.
  • Seltman, Charles, 1956. The Twelve Olympians and their Guests. Shenval Press Ltd.

See also

External links

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