Semele

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Stimula redirects here. For the genus of grass skipper butterflies, see Stimula (butterfly).

In Greek mythology, Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, was the mortal mother of Dionysus by Zeus in one of his many origin myths. (In another version of his mythic origin, he had two mothers, Persephone and Semele.) The name "Semele", like other elements of Dionysiac cult (e.g., thyrsus and dithyramb), is manifestly not Greek but apparently Thraco-Phrygian; the myth of Semele's father Cadmus gives him a Phoenician origin. Herodotus who gives the account of Cadmus estimates that Semele lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around 2000 B.C.

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 afterwards repeatedly visited her secretly.

Zeus' wife, Hera, a goddess jealous of usurpers, discovered his affair with Semele when the latter became pregnant. Appearing as an old crone, Hera befriended Semele, who confided in her that her lover was actually Zeus. Hera pretended not to believe her, and planted seeds of doubt in Semele's mind. Curious, Semele demanded of Zeus that he reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his godhood. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he agreed. Mortals, however, cannot look upon Zeus without dying, and she perished, consumed in lightning-ignited flame.

Zeus rescued the fetal Dionysus, however, by sewing him into his thigh (whence the epithet Eiraphiotes, "insewn", of the Homeric Hymn). A few months later, Dionysus was born. This leads to his being called "the twice-born".

When he grew up, Dionysus rescued his mother from Hades, and she became a goddess on Mount Olympus, with the new name Thyone, presiding over the frenzy inspired by her son Dionysus.

"Virgin" impregnation by Zeus

In another version of the same story, Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Persephone, the queen of the underworld, is called Zagreus, and was dismembered by the Titans, at the instigation of Hera. Gaius Julius Hyginus, or a later author whose work has been attributed to Hyginus, said Zeus created mead out of Zagreus's heart, which he gave to Semele to drink, and that this was how she became pregnant.

Dionysus, who was called "the twice-born" because of being sewn, when still a foetus, into his father's thigh (see above), "was also called Dimetor [of two mothers] ... because the two Dionysoi were born of one father, but of two mothers" According to Ellie Crystal, the rebirth in both versions of the story is the primary reason he was worshipped in mystery religions, as his death and rebirth were events of mystical reverence, and this narrative was apparently used in certain Greek and Roman mystery religions. Variants of the narrative are found in Callimachus and the Fifth Century CE Greek writer Nonnus. In the passage in question Nonnus does not present the conception as virginal; rather, the editor's notes imply Zeus swallowed Zagreus' heart, and visited the mortal woman Semele, whom he seduced and made pregnant. In Dionysiaca 7.110 he classifies Zeus's affair with Semele as one in a set of twelve, the other eleven women on whom he begot children being Io, Europa, the nymph Pluto, Danaë, Aigina, Antiope, Leda, Dia, Alcmene, Laodameia, mother of Sarpedon, and Olympias.

Supposed influence on Christianity

It is thought that Dionysian mythology was incorporated into Christianity. There are correspondences among the legends of Semele, Dionysus, Mary and Jesus; both Dionysus and Jesus were supposed to have been born from a mortal woman but fathered by a god or other supernatural means, to have returned from death, and to have made water into wine. Many modern scholars argue that Christian Eucharist was influenced by the cult of Dionysus and other Hellenistic influences. "It is also possible these similarities between Christianity and Dionysiac religion are all only representations of the same common religious archetypes.

Locations

The most usual setting for the story of Semele is the palace that occupied the acropolis of Thebes, called the Cadmeia. When Pausanias visited Thebes in the second century AD, he was shown the very bridal chamber where Zeus visited her and begat Dionysus. Since an Oriental inscribed cylindrical seal found at the palace can be dated 14th-13th centuries BC, the myth of Semele must be Mycenaean or earlier in origin. At the 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.

Though the Greek myth of Semele was localized in Thebes, the fragmentary 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 Dracanum; and some, on windy Icarus; and some, in Naxos, O Heaven-born, Insewn; and others by the deep-eddying river 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.

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.

Semele in Roman culture

When the initiatory cult of Dionysus was imported to Rome, shortly before 186 BCE, to great public scandal, Semele's name was rendered Stimula. The groves in which the initiation rites took place were deemed sacred to Semele/Stimula. Ovid's Fasti shifts the origin of the Bacchanalian rites in Rome to a mythic rather than a historic past:

"There was a grove: known either as Semele’s or Stimula’s:

Inhabited, they say, by Italian Maenads.

Ino, asking them their nation, learned they were Arcadians,

And that Evander was the king of the place.

Hiding her divinity, Saturn’s daughter cleverly

Incited the Latian Bacchae with deceiving words:

Semele in later art

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 premièred on February 10, 1744.

Notes

External links

References

(US 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.

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