Semele

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For other uses, see Semele (disambiguation).
Semele, watercolor by John McKirdy Duncan (British, 1866-1945)
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Semele, watercolor by John McKirdy Duncan (British, 1866-1945)

In Greek mythology, Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, was the mortal mother of Dionysus by Zeus in one of his two parallel origin myths. The name Semele, like other elements of Dionysiac cult (e.g., thyrsus and dithyramb), is manifestly not Greek[1] but apparently Thraco-Phrygian;[2] the myth of Semele's father Cadmus gives him a Phoenician origin.

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[edit] Affair with Zeus and birth of Dionysus

Semele was a priestess of Zeus, and on one occasion was observed by Zeus as she slaughtered a bull at his altar and afterwards swam in the river Asopus to cleanse herself of the blood. Flying over the scene in the guise of an eagle, Zeus fell in love with Semele and afterwards visited her secretly.[3]

Zeus's consort, Hera, a goddess jealous of usurpers, discovered his affair with Semele when the latter became pregnant. Appearing as an old crone, Hera befriended Semele, who confided in her that her husband was actually Zeus. Hera pretended not to believe her, and planted seeds of doubt in Semele's mind. Curious, Semele demanded of Zeus that he reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his godhood. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he agreed. Mortals, however, cannot look upon a god without dying, and she perished, consumed in flame.[4]

Zeus rescued the fetal Dionysus, however, by sewing him into his thigh (the "Insewn" epithet of the Homeric Hymn). A few months later, Dionysus was born. This leads to his being called "the twice-born". [5]

When he grew up, Dionysus rescued his mother from Hades,[6] and she became a goddess on Mount Olympus, with the new name Thyone, presiding over the frenzy inspired by her son Dionysus.[7]

[edit] Locations

The most usual setting for the story of Semele is the palace that occupied the acropolis of Thebes, called the Cadmeia. When Pausanias visited Thebes in the second century AD, he was shown the very bridal chamber where Zeus visited her and begat Dionysus. Since an Oriental inscribed cylindrical seal found at the palace can be dated 14th-13th centuries BC,[8] the myth of Semele must be Mycenaean or earlier in origin. At the Alcyonian Lake near the prehistoric site of Lerna, Dionysus, guided by Prosymnus or Polymnus, descended to Tartarus to free his once-mortal mother. Annual rites took place there in classical times; Pausanias refuses to describe them.[9]

Though the Greek myth of Semele was localized in Thebes, the fragmentary Homeric Hymn to Dionysus makes the place where Zeus gave a second birth to the god a distant one, and mythically vague:

"For some say, at Dracanum; and some, on windy Icarus; and some, in Naxos, O Heaven-born, Insewn; and others by the deep-eddying river Alpheus that pregnant Semele bare you to Zeus the thunder-lover. And others yet, lord, say you were born in Thebes; but all these lie. The Father of men and gods gave you birth remote from men and secretly from white-armed Hera. There is a certain Nysa, a mountain most high and richly grown with woods, far off in Phoenice, near the streams of Aegyptus..."

Semele was worshipped at Athens at the Lenaia, when a yearling bull, emblematic of Dionysus, was sacrificed to her. One-ninth was burnt on the altar in the Hellenic way; the rest was torn and eaten raw by the votaries.[10]

[edit] Semele in Roman culture

When the initiatory cult of Dionysus was imported to Rome, shortly before 186 BCE, to great public scandal,[11] Semele's name was rendered Stimula. The groves in which the initiation rites took place were deemed sacred to Semele/Stimula. Ovid's Fasti shifts the origin of the Bacchanalian rites in Rome to a mythic rather than a historic past:

"There was a grove: known either as Semele’s or Stimula’s:
Inhabited, they say, by Italian Maenads.
Ino, asking them their nation, learned they were Arcadians,
And that Evander was the king of the place.
Hiding her divinity, Saturn’s daughter cleverly
Incited the Latian Bacchae with deceiving words:"[12]

[edit] Semele in later art

In the 18th Century, the story of Semele formed the basis for three operas of the same name: by John Eccles (1707), by Marin Marais (1709), and by George Frideric Handel (1743). The Eccles and Handel versions use a libretto by William Congreve. Handel's work, while an opera to its marrow, was originally given as an oratorio so that it could be performed on a Lenten concert series; it was premiered on February 10, 1744.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Burkert 1985
  2. ^ Kerenyi 1976 p 107; Seltman 1956
  3. ^ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 7.110-8.177 (Dalby 2005, pp. 19-27, 150)
  4. ^ Ovid, Metamorphoses III.308-312; Hyginus, Fabulae 179; Nonnus, Dionysiaca 8.178-406
  5. ^ Apollodorus, Library 3.4.3; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4.1137; Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods 9
  6. ^ Hyginus, Astronomy 2.5; Arnobius, Against the Gentiles 5.28 (Dalby 2005, pp. 108-117)
  7. ^ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 8.407-418
  8. ^ Kerenyi 1976 p 193 and note 13
  9. ^ Pausanias, Guide to Greece 2.37; Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 35 (Dalby 2005, p. 135)
  10. ^ Graves 1960, 14.c.5
  11. ^ The scandal was reported in Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 39.12, where the consul advised the prostitute Hispala Faecenia "that she ought to tell him what was accustomed to be done at the Bacchanalia, in the nocturnal orgies in the grove of Stimula."
  12. ^ Ovid, Fasti , 6.503

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