Lucian’s Verae Historiae describes a voyage into the fantastic. Yet within his account of these unbelievable peoples and places, scholars have identified a complex network of allusions to classical literature and philosophy. In their extensive commentary, for example, Georgiadou and Larmour (1998) explore many of Lucian’s influences, especially that of Plato. Scholars, however, have not given adequate attention to the influence of mystery cults. I will argue that the imagery derived from the Dionysiac mysteries is essential to understanding the text’s narrative structure. Lucian concentrates these ideas into select episodes: the island of the vine-women, the island of cheese, and the encounter of the sea forest, sea chasm and water bridge. With these episodes, Lucian creates points of transition in the journey.
In order to demonstrate the presence and importance of the imagery of the Dionysiac mysteries and initiation in Lucian’s Verae Historiae, I will make use of the small gold lamellae inscribed with directions for the afterlife. These inscriptions, once referred to as the “Orphic Gold Tablets,” are now considered to represent a fusion of practices and beliefs from several mystery cults, with significant influences from the Dionysiac tradition (Edmonds 2004). Although there is no need to assume that Lucian read any specific gold tablets or was himself initiated into the mysteries, we know that the larger belief system that underlay the gold tablets permeated the Greco-Roman world. Lucian would have been exposed to these ideas, even if he did not personally espouse them.
The Dionysiac themes mark important points of transition in the adventures of Lucian’s sailors and thus function to initiate them into the more elaborately described travels. The island of the vine-women serves as the first venture for the sailors and is the most detailed of these episodes. The Dionysiac nature of the island is marked overtly by a stele that the sailors find with an inscription declaring that it marks the farthest point traveled by Dionysus (VH 1.7). After this explicit reference to Dionysus, the rest of their experiences on the island are marked by allusions to the gold tablets and the associated eschatology, although Lucian often subverts the imagery. For instance, the sailors discover a river of wine and ultimately search for its source. The use of bodies of water as landmarks is a common feature in many of the gold tablets. In the Hipponion tablet, for example, both a spring and the lake of Memory are used as signposts for the deceased to navigate his way through the underworld (Graf/Johnston 2007 #1). However, in Lucian’s text the body of water is not water but wine, a characteristic feature of Dionysiac worship. In the Pelinna tablets, wine is identified as the honor that the deceased will receive (Graf/Johnston 2007 #26a, b). As a result of the events on the island of the vine-women, the men experience a Dionysiac initiation, after which they are able to proceed to the alternative worlds of the moon, whale belly, and underworld.
The island of cheese and the encounters with the water obstacles are not described as fully as the island of the vine-women. However, they each develop aspects of the Dionysiac mysteries, which are not explored in the vine-women episode, most notably milk and the cypress tree. The sea forest is comprised of cypress trees, a key feature of the underworld landscape in many of the gold tablets (VH 2.42). The island of the cheese and the surrounding sea of milk evoke the enigmatic lines of the gold tablets in which an animal falls into milk (VH 2.3; Graf/Johnston 2007 #3, #26a, b). Despite the debated meaning of milk in Dionysiac eschatology, the continued and concentrated use of all the imagery of the Dionysiac mysteries in the Verae Historiae demonstrates this purposeful nature of Lucian’s allusions.
Bibliography
Burkert, Walter. 1987. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Edmonds, Radcliffe G. 2004. Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the 'Orphic'
Gold Tablets. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Georgiadou, Aristoula and David H. J. Larmour. 1998. Lucian's science fiction novel, True histories:
interpretation and commentary. Boston: Brill.
Graf, Fritz. 1980. “Milch, Honig, und Wein. Zum Verständnis der Libation im griechischen Ritual.” in
Perennitas: Studi in Onore di Angelo Brelich. Promossi dalla Cattedra di Religioni del mondo classico dell'Università degli Studi di Roma. Roma: Edizioni dell'Ateneo.
Graf, Fritz and Sarah Iles Johnston. 2007. Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold
Tablets. New York: Taylor and Francis.
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