G wiz

The amazing Varanasi photographer Laurent G has a beautiful post on the Eleusinian Mysteries, which he illustrates with this typically haunting image.For anyone with an interest in the religion and mythology of India, I urge you to visit his gorgeous site, designldg. Here are just a few of his astounding photographs.

Hofman gets Stoned

Veteran novelist Robert Stone has written an interesting piece ("Day Tripper") about Dr. Albert Hofman, the legendary research chemist who accidentally discovered LSD in the spring of 1943.

Hoffman, right, at Sandoz.

Working at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Basel, Switzerland, "Hofman specialized in the investigation of naturally occuring compounds that might make useful medicines. Among these was a rye fungus called ergot..." It was from ergot that he derived D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, LSD.

Eventually his discovery led him into an exploration of the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries:

As a scientist he was fascinated by the ritual practiced by the ancient Greeks at Eleusis each fall. These rites, honoring the grain goddess Demeter, celebrated antiquity’s most profound mystery cult. Initiates described an intense life-changing experience in the course of the nighttime ceremonies. Hofmann believed that one of the components of the sacred kykeon, the potion distributed to adepts, was a barley extract containing ergot.

The fictional characters in my novel NIGHT OF THE FURIES use Hofman's ergot theories (recently re-published in The Road to Eleusis) to uncover a modern Dionysian cult descended from ancient Eleusis. In fact, Jack's brother Dan, the brainy, psychonaut grad student depicted in my book, has a mystical view of nature remarkably similar to Stone's description of Hofman:

He developed a personal mysticism involving nature, for which he had a lifelong passion. One thing this very tolerant man decried in the Western drive for facile satisfaction was an alienation from the outdoors. The use of LSD made him more and more conscious of it. In nature he saw “a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality.”

Read the whole article HERE.

American Mysteries

Guess what? The Eleusinian Mysteries are alive and well and celebrated annually in Washington state.

The Aquarian Tabernacle Church is running its 24th Spring Mysteries Festival, a reconstruction of the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, somewhere west of Seattle April 9-12. Registration is US $165+ for adults if received by February 1, higher thereafter. Info: http://www.aquatabch.org/spring-mysteries-festival

Myth of the Sole

It was an "instantly mythic moment" according to the NY Times. Indeed the thrown shoe flies far back into the past. Posting for National Geographic's Pop Omnivore, Marc Silver writes on the history of Thrown Shoes and Other Hurled Insults. "Your feet walk on dirt. [...To] show the sole of your foot in Middle Eastern countries, in Thailand, and in a few other places—it’s a terrible insult. People get into huge fights when they think someone has purposely shown the bottom of their foot, barefoot or in shoes. If you cross [your] legs and let the sole of your shoe face someone, that can be a terrible, terrible insult. People have been killed for that." He traces the gesture back as far as ancient Egypt, where people "sometimes drew a pictograph of their enemy on the bottom of their sandals and walked on them symbolically."

This reminded me that the ancient Greeks also used shoes to express contempt. In my novel, Night of the Furies, the young trio of archeological sleuths contemplate a 1st Century BC statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty:

Eros, the winged cherub, fluttered just over her shoulder, while standing beside her was the goat-god Pan, doing his best to seduce her.

It's difficult to tell whether Eros is trying to defend Aphrodite or encourage Pan. But there's little doubt of the goddess' intent, flashing the sole of her sandal.

Later in the novel the trio investigate the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries. Initiates to the annual religious rite--which included both women and slaves--joined together in a boisterous 14-mile procession from Athens to the seaside city of Eleusis.

At one point, crossing a bridge over the river Kephisos, "Men with heads covered to conceal their identity sat on the bridge and hurled ribald insults at distinguished persons in the procession" (H.W. Parke). Whether it was done to "forestall any ill luck" or was simply an opportunity for merriment, we have to ask ourselves: What ancient culture other than the Greeks would have allowed such freedoms to its citizens? How many cultures even allow them today?

We have much to thank the ancient Greeks for, just as the Iraqi people--despite legitimate complaints and terrible costs--have much to thank our soldiers for. According to the brother of the Iraqi reporter who "spontaneously" threw his shoes at President Bush, he had been planning his "protest" for nearly a year. There was a time, not too long ago in Iraq, when he wouldn't have been free to even imagine such a thing.

Divine Inspiration

Phryne before the Areopagus

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1861, Hamburg Kunsthalle

I've always loved this painting (click to enlarge). It's shocking and beautiful and mysterious all at once. For years a dog-eared postcard of it served as my bookmark. But for some reason, I never sought out the story behind it. I suppose I feared it would somehow diminish the thrill of the picture itself.

It wasn't until I was doing research for Night of the Furies that I discovered what the scene was about. It turns out it's connected with the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient Greek religious ceremony (and a key element of my novel). The woman, Phryne, was a famous hetaera, or courtesan, in 4th Century B.C. Greece. She was accused of profaning the Mysteries' seaside purification rites by striding naked into the water for all the world to see.

Her trial took place at the Aereopagus, a rock hill near the Acropolis that served as the setting for the high court of Athens. I took this picture of it from the vantage of the Acropolis. A temple dedicated to the Furies once stood at the foot of the rock.

Here's Wik on Phryne's trial: "...she was defended by the orator Hypereides, one of her lovers. When it seemed as if the verdict would be unfavourable, he tore open her robe and displayed her breasts, which so moved her judges that they acquitted her. ...The judges' change of heart was not simply because they were overcome by the beauty of her nude body, but because physical beauty was often seen as a facet of divinity or a mark of divine favor during those times."

Phryne's divine beauty inspired more than the court of Athens. The scene of her with her hair loose, wading nude through the shimmering sea, inspired the greatest painter of classical Greece, Apelles. His renowned painting Venus Anadyomene ("Aphrodite Rising from the Sea"), though lost to time, launched a recurring, iconic motif into the long history of art.

Here's a version in marble from a 4th century A.D. Roman villa.

The motif was revived in the Renaissance, two thousand years after Apelles. It inspired Botticelli's famous "Birth of Venus."

In the 20th Century, the image found its way into the movies, with Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in the first and greatest Bond picture, Dr. No.

The scene quickly became a cinema classic, and was knocked off again in 2002 with Halle Berry as the Bond girl, Jinx, the latest Aphrodite incarnation.

I'm all for sexy girls with knives in their belts, but my favorite Birth of Venus is by the 19th-Century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

It's probably this dreamier Aphrodite, tucked in the back of my mind somewhere, that inspired this scene in Night of the Furies:

The girl who held my eyes now was stepping lazily through the surf, gazing down at the frothy water, seemingly lost in herself. She was wearing a bikini with sailor stripes and the emblem of an anchor embroidered on the cups. Her hair was a rich black, cut to her shoulders, and tangled from drying in the wind. Her mouth was slightly open, and her downcast eyes were dark. She looked like a sated panther, moving with a kind of languid grace, dragging her toes through the water. Something about her—maybe the strength of her profile, or the whiteness of her skin, or the way she peered with quiet intentness at the strangers parading around her—told me she was different than the rest, that this was not the sort of place she came to very often. There was an air of youthful innocence about her, but an air intriguingly tinged with darkness, a sort of sensual contentment. I found the very sight of her arousing.

Arousing indeed. Phryne's brazen beauty was undoubtedly divine.