orderly and ritual fashion, but it could induce the more dangerous and destructive
form of madness when done without order. The increasing importance of Dionysus
in the archaic and classical periods reflected the increasing importance of wine and the
circumstances of its communal consumption, in symposiums and elsewhere, to the
developing Greek state. Dionysus was above all a god of transitions. Dionysiac scenes
on Attic vases, particularly those offering distinctive, challenging frontal faces, address
the theme of transition to an altered state, be this by means of wine, frenetic dance,
sleep, or death. In Dionysiac ritual his worshipers took on the roles of characters from
his myths, and the (transitional) donning of costume was integral to and constitutive
of his rites; hence his association with masks and the theater. The so-called ‘‘Orphic’’
gold leaves, buried with the dead to guide them through the underworld, are now
recognized to be in fact Dionysiac. Death was a final transition over which the god
presided, and across the Greek world people had themselves initiated into his rites in
preparation for it.
Kevin Clinton(Chapter 22) discusses the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and
Kore. Despite Mylonas’ despair at ever discovering the secret of the Mysteries, it is
indeed possible to reconstruct a great deal of them from diverse evidence. The
myste ̄riawere named for the ‘‘blindfolded’’mystai, the initiates who were about to
seeand to undergo an extraordinary experience, the attractiveness of which was
enhanced by the secrecy that enveloped it. Literary sources indicate that those who
had seen the mysteries hoped for a better afterlife than those who had not. Amongst
iconographic sources the Ninnion Tablet and the Regina Vasorum in particular help
us to understand the roles of two of the obscurer gods in the Eleusinian myth, the
pair of torch-carrying youths Eubouleus and Iakchos. They constituted equal and
opposite underworld escorts and framed the sacred drama seen by the initiates.
Iakchos (in the form of a statue carried by a priest) escorted the blindfolded initiates
to Demeter (in the form of a hierophantid?) as she sat mourning for her daughter on
the Mirthless Rock. This can be identified with a rock seat inside the cave in the cliff
within the sanctuary itself. Eubouleus in turn (in the form of a priest?) escorted Kore
(in the form of another hierophantid?) out of an ‘‘underworld’’ pit adjacent to the
rock, to reunite them. Subsequently, images of the two goddesses were displayed to
the new initiates in the Telesterion, in a brilliant light that may have emanated from
the torches held by the former initiates, theepoptai. Theepoptaithemselves were then
permitted to witness a further scene, perhaps, if the Christian Hippolytus is to
believed, a grain of corn and Demeter’s cornucopia-bearing child Ploutos, the
embodiment of agricultural ‘‘prosperity.’’
M.W. Dickie(Chapter 23) looks at magic. He observes that, for all the conceptual
issues some have raised about the definition of magic in an ancient Greek context, the
ancient concept of magic (mageia,goe ̄teia) was roughly equivalent to our own, which
after all derives from it. The ancient concept probably had its roots in the arrival of
itinerant Persian fire-priests,magoi, into the Greek world in the later sixth century
BC, whose rituals began to mimic those of mystery cults. From the fifth or early
fourth centuries BC we findmagoiassociated with various spell types: curse tablets
(too much has been made of the notion that these are products of ancient Greece’s
culture of competition), meteorological spells, healing spells, root-cutting spells,
divination (with the scrying varieties coming to prominence in the hellenistic period)
and necromancy. But wonders and illusions without specific practical end, ‘‘conjuring
14 Daniel Ogden