Clavis Mythologiarum

BOOK III. OF THE DEIFIED PATRIARCHS. HEAD VI. OF THE CABEIRI: SAMOTHRACE, MEMPHIS AND THE ISLANDS.

○It were premature, in the present stage of the inquiry, to expect from the places in which the Cabeiri were honoured what has been sought in vain from their name, their parentage and their number; and yet it has been the practice of those who have written upon the subject to assume that the place of the rites will determine the persons in whose honour they were kept, and so to carry the question from the one head to another without having resolved it in either.1 I propose in the present head to set down, with such exactness as the testimonies allow, what is affirmed respecting Samothrace, respecting the temple at Memphis, and respecting the islands and the coast of the Troad; to distinguish the fact of the worship from the account of its origin; to examine the opinion that the rites were carried from Egypt; and to indicate, as at present sketched, the conclusion to which I am led, reserving the proof of it to a place which the state of the collections does not yet permit me to name. NB-25-004 NB-29-003 NB-54-001

○Herodotus, in the course of his account of the ithyphallic images of Mercury, relates that the Athenians were the first of the Greeks to take them from the Pelasgians, and that they handed them on to others; and he adds that whoever has been initiated into the rites of the Cabeiri, which the Samothracians learned from the Pelasgians and now practise, understands what his meaning is (Herod. ii. 51).2 He says further that Samothrace was formerly inhabited by those Pelasgians who came to live among the Athenians, and that it is from them that the Samothracians take their rites. It is to be observed that he refers his meaning to those who have been initiated, and does not himself say who the Cabeiri were, how many they were, or from whom they sprang; that he derives the rites of Samothrace from the Pelasgians, and does not say whence the Pelasgians had them; and that he speaks as one initiated, or as expecting the initiated to understand him, and says no more. What the initiated understood is therefore not to be had from this place, and must be collected from the later writers; and it is no small part of the difficulty that the earliest of the witnesses should in this manner decline to say what the others are required to explain. NB-25-004 NB-54-001

○Of the founder of the rites the accounts are not two but three. Herodotus names a people; Mr. Faber relates, from ancient writers, that Chryse, the daughter of Palas, having espoused Dardanus, brought him as a marriage portion the Mysteries of the Great Gods, and that "These Mysteries, when the Arcadians left Peloponnesus on account of a deluge, Dardanus established in Samothrace, enjoining at the same time the strictest secrecy respecting the names of the deities, to whose honour they were devoted" (Faber, Cabiri, vol. i. ch. vi.);3 and Clement, in a place which is directed against the whole of the practice, names Eetion as the man who instituted the orgies and mysteries of the Samothracians, and counts them an imposture (Clem. Alex. Cohort. ad Gent. (Protrept.) c. 2).4 Of these the first is the account of a people; the second, of a person and of a flood, and is given by Mr. Faber as the report of others and not as his own finding; the third, of a person who is not Dardanus. They may be reconciled, if Dardanus and Eetion be taken to have been of that people, or to have acted for it; but this is a supposition, and neither place says it. The persons in whose honour the rites were kept remain, in each of the three, unnamed in the passages as I have them; and Clement, who does not name the Cabeiri in the place, is not entered as a witness upon them, but upon the rites of the island only, which Herodotus ascribes to the Pelasgians. NB-29-003 NB-56-001

○Strabo reports in his tenth book that the Scepsian, who compiled the fables concerning these matters, denied that any mystic story of the Cabeiri was told in Samothrace, but that he cited, notwithstanding, the opinion of Stesimbrotus the Thasian, that the sacred rites in Samothrace were performed in honour of the Cabeiri; and that the Scepsian said that they were called Cabeiri after the mountain Cabeirus in Berecyntia (Strab. lib. x.).5 The derivation is not of the order of those which have been considered under the first head of the Cabeiri; it makes the name neither a sound, with Strabo, nor a title, with Selden, but a place. A name taken from a place may be older than the persons or younger; and the passage does not say which. Whether the Cabeiri were named from the mountain, or the mountain from them, I leave open; nor is it evident, upon the single authority of one who denies in the same sentence that the mystic story is told, how far the Scepsian's own account is to be received. NB-51-001

○Of the islands the same author says that the Cabeiri are most honoured in Imbros and Lemnos, but that they are also honoured in separate cities of the Troad; and he adds that their names are kept secret (Strab. lib. x.).6 It follows that Strabo gives none, and that the number cannot be had from him; for a company whose names are withheld is a company whose number can be learned only from those who have broken the secrecy, and these, as has been seen under the head which precedes, do not agree. The same author reports, upon the authority of Herodotus, that there were temples of the Cabeiri at Memphis, as also of Vulcan, and that Cambyses destroyed them. That the Cabeiri are honoured in the islands and in the Troad, and at Memphis, proves the extent of the worship and nothing yet of its origin; and under which head they stand is not determined by it. NB-53-001

×Herodotus himself, in his third book, relates that Cambyses, having entered at Memphis the temple of Vulcan and derided the image, entered also the temple of the Cabeiri, into which none might enter save the priest, and burned the images with bitter mockery; and he adds that these images were like those of Vulcan, and were said to be his sons (Herod. iii. 37).7 A temple of the Cabeiri stood therefore at Memphis, closed to all but the priest, and its images were destroyed by Cambyses. Mr. Bryant makes the Cabiritic worship to have passed from Egypt to Canaan and Syria, and thence to Greece (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Of the Cabiri, Corybantes, Idaei Dactyli, Curetes).8 Herodotus attests the temple, but he does not attest the passage; and in his second book (Herod. ii. 51) the Samothracians have the rites from the Pelasgians, who are not said to have had them from Egypt. That the Cabeiri were worshipped in Egypt is one fact; that they were carried from it is another, which Mr. Bryant has not here proved from this witness. I do not say that it cannot be proved by another; I say only that the opinion, in resting upon a testimony which attests the one fact, has taken the other to be established, which is to suppose beforehand what the argument is designed to prove. NB-27-009 NB-25-004

○I am at present of opinion, with the qualifications which the state of the testimonies imposes, that the places in which the Cabeiri were honoured are to be taken together, and not separately, if any conclusion is to be drawn from them: Samothrace, where the rites were derived from the Pelasgians, or from Dardanus, or from Eetion; Imbros and Lemnos, where the names were secret; the Troad, where they were honoured in separate cities; and Memphis, where they were honoured in a temple which none but the priest might enter. Each of these has been made, by one writer or another, the cradle of the worship; and I do not find that any one of them has been shown to precede the rest. It is not without some appearance of reason that a worship which is found, closed and secret, in an Egyptian temple, and open, with a founder and a flood, in a Greek island, has been supposed to have passed from the one to the other; but that it has been supposed is not that it has been shown, and it is not less consistent with the testimonies that the same deluge, remembered under several names, gave rise to a rite at each. This I state as a conjecture, and as such I do not rest upon it; its proof, which depends upon the persons who were honoured in each place, is not to be attempted until their number is known.9 NB-27-009 NB-53-001 NB-29-003 NB-51-001

○It may be objected, in the first place, that a worship attested at Memphis in the time of Cambyses, and in Samothrace in the time of Herodotus, must be older in Egypt than in Greece, since Egypt is the older country; to which I answer that the antiquity of a country is no evidence of the antiquity of a rite within it, and that Herodotus, who is the witness of both, does not himself say so. It may be objected, in the second place, that the secrecy of the names in the islands is itself a presumption that they were the same as at Memphis, where none but the priest might enter; to which I answer that a secrecy common to several places is as consistent with several secrets as with one. It may be objected, in the third place, that the account of Dardanus, since it names a deluge, belongs to the heads which concern the Deluge, and that the Cabeiri are therefore the persons of the Ark; to which I answer that it is given by Mr. Faber as the report of others, that the deluge in it is the flood of the Arcadians, and that it is not apparent upon what principle one deluge is to be taken for another. And it may be objected, lastly, that I have collected in three heads a great number of testimonies and have concluded from none; to which I can only reply that a conclusion which the testimonies will not bear is not the less a conclusion for being drawn, and that the collection is of use, if for nothing else, in showing what remains to be ascertained. The Cabeiri stand, therefore, at the close of the present head, as they stood at the close of those which precede it: their number is not ascertained, being two, three, four, seven, eight or nine, according to the witness; their identity with the Curetes and the Corybantes is affirmed by some and qualified by others, and is not proved by any; and the head under which they are to be placed, whether among the deified patriarchs or elsewhere, is undetermined. These objections, and others which may be urged with less force, will be considered at greater length when the question of the number shall have been resumed.10 NB-25-004 NB-29-003 NB-54-001 NB-56-001 NB-51-001 NB-53-001 NB-27-009

Footnotes

  1. The preceding heads treat of the name and parentage of the Cabeiri, and of their number. The present is the last of the three, and it does not conclude the matter; the question of the head under which the persons are to stand is not decided by the places, any more than by the name, the parentage or the number. ↩

  2. Herod. ii. 51. The meaning to which Herodotus refers is that of his account of the images of Mercury, which he says were taken by the Athenians from the Pelasgians; the allusion to the initiated is thus, in the place, an appeal to a knowledge which he does not communicate. I have given the passage in substance, and have rested nothing upon the form of the version. ↩

  3. Faber, Cabiri, vol. i. ch. vi. Mr. Faber adds, in the same place, that the descendants of Dardanus carried the rites to Ilium, and Aeneas to Italy, and that Dionysius of Halicarnassus found the statues of the Cabiri the same as those at Samothrace. The passage is a relation which Mr. Faber repeats from ancient writers, and I have taken it as such, and do not reckon it among his own opinions. ↩

  4. Clem. Alex. Cohort. ad Gent. (Protrept.) c. 2. Clement names in the same sentence Dardanus, who taught the mysteries of the mother of the gods, and Midas the Phrygian, who is said to have learned the imposture from Odrysus and to have communicated it to his subjects. I report the passage in substance only. It is not to be taken as a testimony concerning the Cabeiri, whom Clement does not here name; I use it for the founder of the island's rites. ↩

  5. Strab. lib. x. The words of the passage which immediately precede are concerned with another statement, which the Scepsian is said not to accept on the ground that no mystic story of the Cabeiri is told in Samothrace; and it is the opinion of Stesimbrotus, cited by him in spite of that ground, which is here in question. The mountain Cabeirus in Berecyntia is named by the Scepsian alone. ↩

  6. Strab. lib. x. It is to be noted that the honour paid to the Cabeiri in Imbros and Lemnos is said to be the greatest; it is a statement concerning the practice of the author's own day, and I do not take it to be a statement concerning the beginnings of the rite. ↩

  7. Herod. iii. 37. I give in substance what Herodotus relates of the images, that they were like those of Vulcan and were said to be his sons. This agrees neither with the account of Philo, who makes the Cabeiri the sons of Suduc, nor with that of Mr. Faber, who makes them the patriarch and his company, as these have been set down under the preceding heads; it agrees in one point only, the paternity of Vulcan, with certain of the genealogies there reported, and the agreement in that point does not extend to the number. The difficulty remains where it was. ↩

  8. Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Of the Cabiri, Corybantes, Idaei Dactyli, Curetes. Mr. Bryant says in the same place that the rites were memorials of the Ark Berith and of the persons preserved in it, who were the original Cabiri or Baalim. The two statements, that of the Ark and that of the passage from Egypt, are separate, and I examine here only the second. ↩

  9. The proof which is deferred here depends upon the number, and the number, as has been shown in the preceding head, is not ascertained; so that the deferral is not one which may be expected to be shortly redeemed. I note it without complaint, since the nature of the inquiry does not permit it to be otherwise. ↩

  10. Of the objections which may be urged with less force, the principal is that which proposes the Cabeiri as the Dioscuri; it depends, as the others do, upon the number, and will be considered with it. I do not at present say under which of the heads of the present Book, or whether under any, they are finally to be placed. ↩

← BOOK III. OF THE DEIFIED PATRIARCHS. HEAD V. OF THE CABEIRI: THEIR NUMBER.BOOK IV. OF THE WATERS. HEAD I. OF THE DELUGE, AS REMEMBERED AMONG THE NATIONS. →