On Heterotopias / Exploring Initiatory Space. by Peter Mark Adams
North Wall : Family Group of Itinerant Initiatrix The woman standing just inside the small door that provides access to Room 5, the room of the mysteries, is richly dressed and veiled. She is positioned as though she has just emerged from the adjoining Dionysian themed chamber (Room 4) and is looking along the sequence of images before her.
Her pose combines two distinct elements: an arm akimbo proclaims her business-like, if not commanding, demeanour. The other hand holds her veil in a typical gesture of pudicitia, pudicitia, whose surface meaning, ‘modesty’, obscures its deeper significance, the subject’s ethical bearing,i which accounts for its role as a standard element in the iconography of a priestess. This combination of elements, added to her appearance at the v ery start of the fresco cycle, c ycle,
proclaims her a hereditary priestess of Dionysos, the initiatrix who will direct and control the ritual. We previously discussed at some length the family based nature of initiatic lineages in the ancient world. With this in mind it is highly likely that the group of two women and a boy depicted at the very commencement of the rite are related and were hired, as a family group, to enact the initiations for the private thiasoi based at the Villa of the Mysteries. A young boy stands naked except for the characteristically Dionysian calf length leather buskins that he wears. He is reading from a liturgical text. A woman sits just behind the boy resting one arm on his shoulder in a reassuring manner, she may well be his mother or a close relative and related, even the daughter, of the rather commanding woman at the start of the fresco cycle. She is dressed in a plain white chiton and holds a scroll in her left hand, evidently she is in control of the liturgical reading. The presence of a young child reading the rite’s liturgy is historically attested. In a political debate Demosthenes said of Aeschines that as a child he, 'read the books out for his mother as she performed initiations' ii The child’s nakedness combined with leather buskins is an intriguing feature. We often see deities, particularly the huntress, Artemis/Diana, wearing buskins. In addition a supernatural being, wielding a whip and depicted at the end of the east wall’s ritual sequence, is also dressed in buskins. Independently, we learn that on the island of Tenedos, just off the coast of the Troad, a calf was dressed in buskins before being sacrificed to Dionysus the manslayer.iii In this case the aitionic myth for this sacrifice is found in the tale of Palaemon. In the case of humans, and specifically human children, it is hard to avoid the implication that some ancient act of ritual sacrifice has been symbolically preserved.
North Wall: Woman with Offering Tray
“Father Liber enjoys honey and we rightly offer him honey poured over warm cake” Ovid. Fasti. 3.761-762. Liber Pater was the indigenous Roman equivalent of Dionysus. A woman wearing a wreath of white myrtle bears an offering tray of sacrificial cakes (liba) in her left hand and a sprig of green myrtle in her right. She is dressed in a simple chiton but wears a purple himation, a garment made of heavier material which could serve as a cloak or shawl, tied around her waist. She is the first figure to break the flat surface of the picture plane by looking out directly at the observer. What does this signify? The purple himation recalls the cloth that Dionysus placed on the ground for Ariadne to lay on when he first embraced her, "A purple robe which the divine Kharites (Charites, Graces) had made with their own hands for Dionysos in sea- girt Dia (Naxos). … it still gave out the ambrosial perfume it received when the Lord Dionysos lay on it, tipsy with wine and nectar, embracing Minos' daughter, the fair young Ariadne, whom Theseus carried off from Knossos and abandoned on the Isle of Dia." iv The use of white and green Myrtle alludes to Dionysus’ katabasis or descent to the underworld – a longstanding metaphor for initiation – during which he presented either the Lord or Mistress of the Underworld, Hades or Persephone, with a sprig of myrtle. She looks out at us, detaching herself from the flat surface of the picture plane and occupation with the fresco’s flat, linear narrative; engaging us and gathering the narrative into herself.
We will find the fresco artist leveraging this kind of ‘dialectics at a standstill’, v on a number of further occasions. It is a movement that returns the viewer’s gaze and triggers a sudden recovery of self-awareness, of a ghost-like state of being-outside-of-oneself, suspended, empty of form and content. With this shift from chronological to kairological time, we have been called upon to act as witnesses, but witnesses to what exactly?
“In every instant, each image virtually anticipates its future development and remembers its former gestures.”vi
Who, then, is she and why has the artist interrupted the flow of the narrative in this way? The combination of items and colours – purple himation, white myrtle, honeyed cakes – all connect this figure with the theme of initiation and dedication to the Dionysus Chthonius who is Hades, Lord of the Underworld, vii
Hades is the same as Dionysus
From this we can deduce that this figure is the initiate herself and that her symbolic accoutrements foreshadow her ‘death’ as the prelude to her illumination.
i
Langlands, R. (2006). Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome. pp.37-77.
ii
Demosthenes XIX 199. Cited in Seaford , RAS. ‘The Mysteries of Dionysus at Pompeii’ in Stubbs, HW (ed.), Pegasus: Classical Essays from the University of Exeter (1981). pp. 52-67. iii
Aelian. On the Nature of Animals. Book 12.34.
iv
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4. 425 ff
v
Benjamin, W. (1999). Arcades Project. N3,1 cited in Agamben, G. (2007). p.26.
vi
vii
ibid Agamben, G. (2007). p.4. Heraclitus of Ephesus. fr.15. cited in Clement of Alexandria. Protreptic. 34.5.
