Dead Kings and Saviour Gods: Euhemerizing Shamanism in Thracian Religion

Dan Attrell

Sometime during the late 16th century BC, an Indo-European speaking people known to both Homer and Hesiod as the Thracians swept into the regions west of the Black Sea before merging with the local Neolithic populations already settled therein. As one branch of an illdefined agricultural revolution emerging out of Anatolia between 7,800 and 5,800 BC, which wrapped itself around the Black Sea, Thracian culture developed within the context of an agriculturalist lifestyle on the frontiers of the Russian steppes.1 We cannot be sure what these Thracians called themselves and it is unlikely that they would have recognized themselves as members of a larger ethnic identity. They were a society of richly equipped warriors and expert

horsemen, patriarchally stratified among small local chieftainships. These Thracians, like many other cultures peripheral to the great Bronze Age civilizations, were eventually caught up in the great migratory churning of peoples and in the power vacuums of their collapse between 1200 and 1000 BC. While the Dorian migrations put an end to the kingdoms of Achaea in the Peloponnese, the Thracio-Phrygians migrated out of Macedonia, passing through the Hellespont in order to settle into the lands of the Hittite (whose empire the Phrygians may have ultimately played a role in collapsing).2 Thanks to the written records of the Iron Age Greeks, who succeeded the decline of the Mycenaeans, the Thracians at last emerged into the light of recorded history.3 This newly arrived population established itself as rulers over the scattered agricultural communities north of Greece and indulged in a fondness for gold well preserved in Homer.4 As a result of their common ethno-linguistic ancestry and their relationships around the eastern Black Sea following the great age of Greek colonization in the 6th and 7th century BC, Thracian culture was in a state of constant exchange with their Hellenic cousins. In this paper, I will attempt to briefly survey the religion of these Thracian migrants and the reception of their cults and iconography into Greco-Roman religion, both at home and abroad. As we shall see, Thracian religion was markedly distinct from the Homeric model of Olympian religion, focusing rather on the divinity of kings, the ecstasy of shaman, the perennial death and rebirth of
1

Gray, Russell; Atkinson, Quentin. Language-Tree Divergence Times Support the Anatolian Theory of IndoEuropean Origin. Nature 426 (2003): 435. 2 Ivan Venedikov. Thrace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series 35, No. 1 (1977): 75. Thus, for instance, the Mysians inhabited the lands along the Danube, but were also to be found in north-western Asia Minor; the Dardanians inhabited the upper reaches of the Vardar, and also gave their name to the inhabitants of Troy in the Iliad; the Mygdonians are mentioned in Macedonia and also in north-western Asia. References to the passing of the Thracians known as the Bithynians from the valley of the Struma to the lands south of the Bosphorus are still more persistent. Finally, there is mention of a later mi gration of the Trerians and the Cimmerians through Thrace. 3 Lionel Casson. The Thracians. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series 35, No. 1 (1977): 2. 4 Homer, Iliad, 10.435.

vegetation, and, subsequently, the immortality of the soul. Due to the heavily limited nature of our sources concerning Thracian religion and the inherently fluid character of pre-literate paganism, I merely wish to provide an overview and commentary of the extant Greco-Roman material rather than an exhaustive explanation of such a dimly understood religion. The earliest extant traces of human activity in the region eventually known as Thrace goes back to Palaeolithic times; by approximately 6000 BC its first settled agricultural population was tilling its fields. Within two thousand years, the regions inhabitants had discovered the abundance of mineral deposits hiding beneath the soil and turned their attention toward mining and metallurgy. Archaeologists working in central Bulgaria have excavated deep shafts cut into the earth for the extraction of copper, in addition to a number of copper tools, weapons, and miscellaneous objects dating back to this remote period of prehistory. As early as 3000 BC, Thraces metalworkers were applying their skills to gold panned from nearby rivers and fashioning it into plaques and jewellery which were among the first gold objects in Europe.5 The people known to Homer as the Thracians inhabited a vast territory, which stretched from certain islands in the Aegean Sea to the Carpathian Mountains north of the Danube River. Extant records of the Thracian language, which cover a period from the 8th century BC to the Middle Ages have produced little more than twenty-five words altogether, and it is no doubt related to the languages spoken in Romania today before the area was occupied by the Romans. 6 In north-western Anatolia, the region of Bithynia was also inhabited by Thracians, though Greek colonization along the coast of Asia Minor would ultimately sever ties between this group and the Thracians on the European mainland.7 Thanks to this era of large scale colonization which expanded the borders of Magna Graecia, the Greeks came into direct contact with the multitudes of independent Thracian tribes. Thracians first appear in the literary record as the enemies of the Greeks in the mid-7th century when conflict arose over the colony of Thasos; earlier still they achieved a hostile reputation in Homers Iliad by siding with the (Phrygian) Trojans.8 It was from this time onward that historians are able to reconstruct what we know about their culture, history, and religion. It should be stressed that the Thracians were not closely related to their
5 6

Casson 1977, 2. Colin Renfrew, Archaeology & Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 7 Venedikov 1977, 77. 8 J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 72.

steppe nomad neighbours to the north and the east of their territories. The Thracians settled in their homelands as early as the mid-2nd millennium BC, whereas the Scythians, so well accounted for in Herodotus as the youngest of all nations, had migrated from the steppes of Asia much later.9 While the Thracians had doubtless adopted some elements of mounted nomad culture in their homeland, they equally preserved numerous traditions characteristic of the European Bronze Age civilizations.10 In line with a tradition stretching back to the earliest Indo-European agriculturalists, each tribe (or collective of tribes) was headed by a king who retained around himself an aristocracy of priests and warrior. The apex of Proto-Indo-European society was ruled by a chief whose title is generally secured by this series: raj (Sanskrit); rex (Latin); rix (Gaulish); ri (Old Irish) and possibly the Thracian Rhesus as well. Emile Benveniste argued that the fundamental meaning of these words was one who determined what was right, while Andrew Sihler suggested that the underlying root was to be efficacious or to have mana, suggesting a leader concerned with social and moral order over sovereign coercive power.11 As the Thracians had no cities, life was generally organized around raising livestock and farming in small rural villages centered around fortifications built by these chieftains.12 In the days that stretched back into myth, in the time of Zalmoxis, Orpheus, Maro and Rhesus, these chieftains played a dual-role as both temporal rulers and high priests. The roles played by these religious

specialists, however, more closely resembled those of ecstatic shaman rather than the priests of organized post-agricultural religion. James G. Frazer wrote at length about these types of men:
Kings were revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and are sought, if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece with early modes of thought. 13

As history progressed and the memory of these shaman-like kings faded into legend, later generations re-envisioned these sorts of men in a euhemeristic light: as demigods, immortal

Herodotus, Histories, 4.5. Ann E. Farkas. Style and Subject Matter in Native Thracian Art. Metropolitan Museum Journal 16 (1981): 3334. 11 Malory 1989, 125. 12 Venedikov 1977, 76. 13 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough. (Leicestershire: Forgotten Books, 1922), 10.
10

heroes, and rulers over the land of the dead. The Thracians elevated the accomplished hero to godhood while the Greeks watched on and recorded the phenomenon. Over the centuries of contact with Thracian merchants, slaves, and mercenaries, the Greek city-states were flooded with the peculiar belief systems of these exotic and ecstatic northerners. Rather than instinctively rejecting the beliefs of these , many Greeks began adopting and reconceptualising these views before implementing them into their own religious consciousness. Above all, it was the religious beliefs of the Thracians which fuelled the curiosity of Herodotus. It was said of the Trausi from the Rhodopes Mountains that they lamented the birth of their children and the harsh life ahead whilst welcoming death with laughter and rejoicing since the deceased individual was now free from sufferings in blissful post-existence.14 When compared to the rather bleak view of the afterlife inherent in the religion of Iron Age Greece, Herodotus curiosity should come as no surprise. To explain the vast differences between Thracian and Greek religion, despite the fact that both parties had been drawn from common Indo-European stock, one must look back to the Neolithic period. While the Greeks descended from those Doric agriculturalists who directly emigrated westward out of the Near East, the Thracians were descendants of a group which had taken the long route northward, only much later settling the lands north of the Peloponnese.15 The ancestors of the Greeks living in the Mediterranean naturally developed within a thoroughly different system than their Thracian cousins, whose time on the steppe frontiers exposed them to entirely dissimilar religious archetypes. When the tail end of these two cultures met again during the late 8th century, the gulf between their respective religious structures had become vast. Enough similarities remained, however, to allow for a smooth degree of religious syncretism to occur. With the mass importation of Thracian slaves and mercenaries into the Greek city-states, the Greeks further amplified their exposure to the exoticism of Thracian gods and their mystic doctrines. As the undisputed masters of healing herbs (according to the Greeks), the Thracians were no strangers to the shamanic techniques of ecstasy well known among other cultures of the steppe.16 Working from the texts of Posidonius, Strabo reported that the Mysians, a Thracian group from north-western Anatolia, possessed members of their society called both
14 15

Herodotus, Histories, 5.4. Mallory 1989, 177. 16 Mallory 1989, 72.

(those who fear god) and (those who walk in smoke) who practiced strict vegetarianism and consumed nothing but honey and dairy products.17 This reference to the walkers in smoke may allude to the ecstasy achieved by mass cannabis consumption as reported by Herodotus among the Scythians.18 The 2nd century Macedonian author Polyaenus wrote of the Thracian king Kosingas, who was simultaneously ruler over the Cebrenoi and Sycaiboai and high priest of Hera. When his subjects had become unruly, Kosingas threatened to climb up a wooden ladder to complain to the goddess about their misconduct.19 As we shall see, this ritual ascent to the heavens or rupture of planes by means of a wooden axis mundi is distinctly shamanic and has many well-documented parallels in cultures from Scandinavia to India. These stairways, posts and ladders played an extensive role in mystery initiations, in funerary ritual, and in the rites of sacerdotal or royal enthronement.20 The most well-known symbol for this cosmic ladder among the Thracian religious iconography was the serpent-coiled Tree of Life, a motif used in connection with shamanic activities: magic, supernatural healing, and the ascent and descent of the soul via death and intoxication. As the Goddess representative on Earth, each of these supernatural activities were in the domain of the priest-kings the Greek tales of Thracian heroes only shine light on this fact. The traditional view of death amongst the Greeks of Homers time was painted in a rather pessimistic light as a descent of the soul into Hades in the form of a gibbering shade. The deceased Achilles laments to Odysseus: O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying. I would rather follow the plough as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted to him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.21 The Thracians held to a number of spiritual doctrines that preserved the notion of the souls immortality and the hope for a beatific life after death. It was not by coincidence that the so-called Orphic thought which reformed Dionysian myth and ritual to include a systematized soteriology developed after the Greeks had established colonies around the Black Sea and began their cultural exchange with the Thracians. One Orphic bone inscription from Olbia dated to the 5th century BC reads for Dion(ysos) and Psyche, revealing the importance of a transcendent soul in connection with the
17 18

Strabo, Geography, 7.3.3. Herodotus, Histories, 4.73; Pomponius Mela 2.21 cf. Eliade 1964, 390-391; Eliade 1972, 274. 19 Polyaenus, Stratagemata, 7.22. 20 Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 49. 21 Homer, Odyssey, 11.488-491.

Greek god of intoxication in Thracian territory.22 Another of these bone inscriptions containing the words and marked with little 'Z pictograms (which might represent little orphic serpents) reveals the widespread and consistent nature of Dionysian symbolism reaching as far north as modern Ukraine.23 In the shamanic mystery initiations as practiced by the Orphic cults, near-death experiences and the use of dangerous doses of hallucinogenic plants went hand in hand. Whereas the Divine Bridegroom Sabazios (Dionysus) was primarily the god who presided over ecstasy and entheogenic intoxication, the Thracians held him in equally high regard as a dying-and-rising saviour god and a master over the souls of the deceased. Long before the introduction of alcohol, shaman exploited the ecstatic and oracular properties of hallucinogenic mushrooms (Amanita muscaria and various types of coprophilic Psilocybincontaining mushrooms); opium (Papaver somniferum); jimsonweed, horsemad, or thorn apple (Datura stramonium); mandrake root (Mandragora officinarum); cannabis; deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna); and henbane (Hyoscyamus niger). The experience of death and the ecstatic evacuation of the soul from the body appears commonly in the Thracian funeral iconography on which is depicted the Tree of Life. To be in a state of that is, to stand outside the body was to experience death itself. It is both a physical and symbolic selfsacrifice. These states were achieved through extended periods of fasting, dance and drumming, sleep deprivation, trials and ordeals, isolation and incubation, and the ritual consumption of consciousness altering substances all of which were methods that could be, and often were, used in conjunction to elicit the ecstatic experience. One must keep in mind the endless recurrence of these shamanic techniques while reading the myths of the Thracian heroes. It would appear that these heroes were drawn from noble Thracian stock, akin to the priest-kings and chieftains from myth and legend, each of whom appear to exhibit a curious number of peculiarly shamanic characteristics. Although the iconography of the Thracian rider has been ubiquitously labelled as an all-purpose image for a handful of unrelated gods, it appears more plausible to interpret these works of votive artwork as depictions of euhemerized semidivine human intermediaries - the drawn up from varying Thracian tribes. Amongst the many branches of Indo-European culture, particularly those influenced by the frontier lifestyle on the edge of the Russian steppe, these priest-kings were ritually given over to a type of shamanic initiation, a , to ensure the annual fertility of the crops.24 Festivals in
22 23

Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 42. M. L. West. The Orphics of Olbia Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 45 (1982): 18. 24 James G. Frazer. Adonis Attis Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion . (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1906), 182-191.

honour of the Phrygian Goddess were centered on the ritual hanging of her beloved upon a pine tree. Over time, this ritual was abrogated by hanging the deitys effigy on the tree, as can be seen in descriptions of the Greek Anthesteria to Dionysus or the Dies Sanguinis of Cybele in Rome. The famous Tree of Life, a widespread Indo-European symbol of shamanic ecstasy and a map for the cosmos, was derivative of the axis mundi onto which priest-kings were hanged and overcome by ritualized ecstasy. Frazer first noted the parallel between this ritual and the verses of the Scandinavian Hvaml in which Odin describes how he was sacrificed to himself to acquire his divine powers: I hung on the windy tree for nine whole nights; wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin; myself to myself.25 On the steppes, the birch continues to be the tree of the Uralic shaman, around which she builds her yurt and journeys up and down to the land of spirits in a state of ritual inebriation.26 In Vedic ritual, sacrificial posts (ypa) were central to the drohana, the difficult ascent, through which Brahmin raised themselves to the heavens climbing a tree became a frequent image of spiritual ascent in Indian literature.27 When combining the shamans axis, the images of the Great Mother, and dedications to such oracular gods as Apollo, Sabazios or Asclepius, we can conjecture that the icon of the Thracian Horseman represented an archetypal priest-king whose shamanic initiations lead to his immortalization. The implication for those depicting the rider on their funerary iconography was then to imbue the memory of the deceased with heroic qualities and the hope for a better life beyond death. Frazer wrote of these individuals:
As the gods are commonly believed to exhibit themselves in the likeness of men to their worshippers, it is easy for the magician, with his supposed miraculous powers, to acquire the reputation of being an incarnate deity. Thus beginning as little more than a simple conjurer, the medicine-man or magician tends to blossom out into a full-blown god and king in one. 28

Among the most famous of these medicine-men in Thrace was the mystic bard Orpheus, the subterranean initiator Zalmoxis, the warden of divine wine Maro, and the chthonic god-king Rhesus. I will now give a brief discussion on each in order to highlight the central archetype at the core of each of these Thracian heroes. We shall see how each of their respective myths account for their divine lineage; a mortal upbringing; a rise to military or religio-political prominence; an initiation into ecstatic mysteries or a death; and consequently a positive afterlife due to the souls immortality. Most writers of antiquity believed in the historical veracity of Orpheus existence, although his lifetime stretched far back in the dimness of legend. E.R. Dodds held Orpheus to be a Thracian figure of much the same kind as Zalmoxis a mythical shaman or prototype of
25 26

Frazer 1906: 182-191. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), xx. 27 Eliade 1964, 403-405. 28 Frazer 1922, 92.

shamans.29 Orpheus was both noble and semi-divine: he was a prince, the son of the muse Calliope and the euhemerised king Oeagrus (a Thracian wine-god); in another account, he was the son of Apollo a god of healing, music and prophecy.30 Pseudo-Apollodorus accredits Orpheus with the invention of the Dionysian mysteries, a cult of women established around sacred marriage and entheogenic intoxication.31 Strabo tells us the rites of Orpheus first originated among the Cotytian and the Bendideian rites practiced among the Thracians. He adds that these rites resemble the Phrygian rites, and it is at least not unlikely that, just as the Phrygians themselves were colonists from Thrace, so also their sacred rites were borrowed from there.32 Orpheus was reputed to have travelled widely, proselytizing the sacred doctrines of the Goddess and her Divine Bridegroom throughout the lands he wandered. In Aegina, Orpheus is said to have established the rites of Hekate, whilst in Laconia he introduced the quasi-Eleusinian rites of Demeter Chthonia, both of which were centered on the erection of a wooden image.33 The shamanic character of Orpheus is well attested among both ancient and modern sources: He was simultaneously prince, prophet, healer, musician, and guardian of ecstatic mysteries. He possessed the ability to charm wild beasts and control natural phenomena. He performed a , descending into the underworld on a spiritual quest to return the soul of his beloved Eurydice from Hades and Proserpina. Even his head was a source of oracular power, having been severed by Dionysus Maenads for having embraced solar monotheism at the end of his life.34 Orpheus decapitated head then served as an oracle like the skulls of Yukagir shaman, or the head of Mimir which Odin used to divulge information about other realms in the Heimskringla and Vlusp.35 The importance of Orpheus lay predominantly in rites which he established which were said to affirm the immortality of the soul. The mysteries of Dionysus, as embodied in the ostensibly savage rites of the maenads in Euripides Bacchae were born out of a long mythico-religious tradition stretching back into Palaeolithic shamanism and orgiastic goddess worship. It was the Orphic movement based out of Thrace, however, which took this primarily female fringe cult and brought it into the fold of the civilized and the masculine, into
29 30

Dodds, 147 cf. Mircea Eliade and Willard R. Trask. Zalmoxis. History of Religions 11, Vol. 3 (1972): 268. Kathleen Freeman. The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 1-2; Pindar, Fragment 126.9. 31 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Library and Epitome, 1.3.2. 32 Strabo, Geography, 10.3.15. 33 Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.30.1; 3.14.1; 3.20.1. 34 William Keith Chambers Guthrie. Orpheus and Greek Religion: a Study of the Orphic Movement. (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1993.) 35 Eliade 1964: 307-8; Eliade, 1972, 268.

Greek philosophy. In Orpheus we have the embodiment of the Thracian heroic ideal a noble priest-king skilled in magical arts and a founder of an ecstatic gods sacred rites the model candidate for immortality. Next to Orpheus, Zalmoxis is the most well attested shamanic hero figure within our picture of Thracian religion. William Guthrie believed that in Zalmoxis could be found the Getic cognate of Dionysus, a god indicative of a uniquely Thracian ecstatic religion. In accordance with the story left by Herodotus, however, it appears that if Zalmoxis did ever achieve godhood, he was probably a man before being euhemerized as a god by his countrymen. Had his origins been divine, Diogenes Laertius would not likely have placed him alongside the Persian Magi, the Gymnosophists of India, or the Druids among the Celts and Gauls.36 These historically attested groups were each the respective mystics and ecstatics of their culture, they possessed special knowledge concerning the immortality of the soul and often served among the ranks of prominent men. In Platos Charmides, written about thirty years after Herodotus, Socrates mentions one of the physicians of the Thracian king Zalmoxis who are said to be able even to confer immortality.37 To get a better understanding of Zalmoxis the man or king, we must turn to Herodotus. Herodotus reports that the Greeks who lived beside the Hellespont and Pontus told him that the man Zalmoxis was once slave of Pythagoras. After being freed and achieving great fortune, he returned to Thrace. Herodotus writes:
Now the Thracians were a meanly-living and simple-witted folk, but this Zalmoxis knew Ionian usages and a fuller way of life than the Thracians; for he had consorted with Greeks, and moreover with one of the greatest Greek teachers, Pythagoras; wherefore he made himself a hall, where he entertained and feasted the chief among his countrymen, and taught them that neither he nor his guests nor any of their descendants should ever die, but that they should go to a place where they would live for ever and have all good things. While he was doing as I have said and teaching this doctrine, he was all the while making him an underground chamber. When this was finished, he vanished from the sight of the Thracians, and descended into the underground chamber, where he lived for three years, the Thracians wishing him back and mourning him for dead; then in the fourth year he appeared to the Thracians, and thus they came to believe what Zalmoxis had told them. Such is the Greek story about him. For myself, I neither disbelieve nor fully believe the tale about Zalmoxis and his underground chamber; but I think that he lived many years before Pythagoras; and whether there was a man called Salmoxis, or this be the name among the Getae for a god of their country, I have done with him. 38

36 37

Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 1.1. Plato, Charmides, 156d. 38 Herodotus, Histories, 4.95-96.

Having possession of supernatural wisdom, Zalmoxis gained wealth, political prestige, and a cult following from among the most powerful of his countrymen. Through what we are told about Zalmoxis underground chamber and his Pythagorean views on immortality, it may be conjectured that his Thracian cult followed some sort of mystery initiation model. Mircea Eliade believed that it was for this reason that Herodotus, whose discretion in divulging mysteries is well attested, hesitated to give more details concerning the god of the Getae.39 If Zalmoxis was indeed the founder of an initiatory circle, it does not imply that he must have been a chthonic god as some have proposed. The occultation and epiphany of semi-divine beings, priest-kings and messianic prophets is a ritual and mythical archetype frequently found in Europe and Asia Minor and the descent into the underworld is a widely used shamanic metaphor for initiatory death before transitioning into a new mode of being.40 The Greek necromanteia, such as the one built beneath a funerary temple at the 7th century colony of Orgame, was comprised of a similar underground chamber into which ecstatics or oracles descended for necromantic occultation. The idea of sending off a mediator in sacrifice to speak to the gods seems to have been prevalent in Thracian religion. There is one custom recorded of the Getai from the Lower Danube that affirms the eventual apotheosis of Zalmoxis out among the northern Thracians. Herodotus gives us this description:
Every five years they choose by lot one among them, whom they send as an emissary to Zalmoxis to tell him of their needs at the moment. They send him thus: several of them, selected to this end, hold three spears; others seize the messenger by the arms and legs, rock him in the air and cast him onto the spears. If he dies, they believe that the god is favourable to them; if he does not die, they say that he is an evil man, casting the blame on the messenger. After which they send another man!41

When Herodotus two accounts are seen side by side, they confirm a continuity with the archetype earlier mentioned by Frazer, wherein the shaman comes to kingship and then ascends to immortality or godhood. To the Greek mind, Zalmoxis was but another figure modelled after the mythical trope of the Thracian . Though Zalmoxis and Orpheus were the most famous quasi-historical figures in Greek tradition fitting the shamanic archetype, they were by no means the only two. Maro, the eponymous founder of Thracian Maroneia, was the semi-divine grandson of Ariadne and Dionysus who lived around the time of the Trojan War. Homer, through the words of Odysseus, tells us he was also a priest of Apollo at Ismarus on the Aegean coast of Thrace:
With me I had a goat-skin of the dark, sweet wine, which Maro, son of Euanthes, had given me, the priest of Apollo, the god who used to watch over Ismarus. And he had given it me because we had protected him

39 40

Eliade 1972, 259. Eliade 1972, 262. 41 Herodotus, Histories, 4.94.

with his child and wife out of reverence; for he dwelt in a wooded grove of Phoebus Apollo. And he gave me splendid gifts: of well-wrought gold he gave me seven talents, and he gave me a mixing-bowl all of silver; and besides these, wine, wherewith he filled twelve jars in all, wine sweet and unmixed, a drink divine.42

These lines are presented with a number of recurring Greek themes concerning Thracian nobility. Maro is both high priest and very wealthy; he traces his immediate ancestry back to a god (the god of intoxication, no less); he dwells in a forest grove sacred to an oracular god; and he displayed a fondness for divine wines. The Greeks as early as Homer defined Thracians according to their equestrian prowess, their savagery, their love of gold, and their curious beliefs concerning the immortality of soul brought on by shamanic initiation. Rhesus, a Thracian king who appears in the Iliad and a tragedy attributed to Euripides, exhibits many of the archetypes that defined the ideal Thracian king as well. In Euripides tragedy, a messenger proclaims to Hector: I see Rhesus mounted like a god upon his Thracian chariot. Of gold was the yoke that linked the necks of his steeds whiter than the snow; and on his shoulders flashed his targe with figures welded in gold43 He was the son of a river-god and a muse and during his life he exhibited godlike skills in war. He possessed a passion for gold, horses and the mystery rites imparted by Orpheus, the prophet of Bacchus. Upon his death, Rhesus did not descend into Hades to a life of bleak wandering and forgetfulness but rather to achieve some sort of chthonic godhood. The Thracian kings mother, an unnamed muse, declares that:
He shall not descend into earth's darksome soil; so earnest a prayer will I address to the bride of the nether world, the daughter of the goddess Demeter, giver of increase, to release his soul, and debtor, as she is to me, show that she honours the friends of Orpheus. Yet from henceforth will he be to me as one dead that seeth not the light; for never again will he meet me or see his mother's face, but will lurk hidden in a cavern of the land with veins of silver, restored to life, no longer man but god, even as the prophet of Bacchus did dwell in a grotto beneath Pangaeus, a god whom his votaries honoured. 44

It is now apparent that the Thracians, or at least the Greek conceptualization of the Thracians, were convinced in the immortality of their fallen heroes, particularly those who imparted some sort of shamanic, Orphic or Pythagorean initiation. Contact with these Thracian hero cults may then have played an undervalued role in priming the Greek world for the development of Hellenistic and Roman ruler cults; mystical philosophies; soteriological mystery cults; and the belief in a better life after death for the praiseworthy initiate. This view allows for a much better
42 43

Homer, Odyssey, 9.193-230. Euripides, Rhesus, 307 ff. 44 Euripides, Rhesus, 962 ff.

interpretation of the funerary and votive monuments featuring the Thracian Horseman from Roman and Hellenistic periods. The Thracian Horseman is a term that came to denote the figure depicted on a large number of Thracian funerary and votive reliefs (stone slabs 30-40 cm wide and 20-30 cm high). The figure depicted on these reliefs was dubbed Thracian because over 2,000 reliefs have been published from at least 350 sites characterized by a Thracian presence. Our earliest extant depictions are Hellenistic, but most reliefs date to the Roman period. The most popular scene (though not the only one) depicts the Horseman turned to the right, facing the Mother Goddess and a burning altar, which sits beneath a tree coiled by a serpent. Although the identity of the Horseman is unknown, many of the reliefs are accompanied by inscriptions. Among the votive inscriptions, an overwhelming variety of names and epithets were used: , , , , Apollo, Hades, Asklepios, Hephaistos, Sabazius, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, Silvanus, and the Dioskouroi...45 (lord) and (hero) are most often applied. As more and more of these reliefs were being recovered and analyzed, a hypothesis developed among scholars which established the Horseman as an amalgam an all-purpose divinity the end result of mass religious syncretism which combined the aspects of nearly every GrecoRoman, Thracio-Phrygian and Near Eastern divinity. Though the process of identification between two or more gods from various cultures was a hallmark of ancient religion, there is no reason to believe so many gods with hardly comparable cults and characteristics could have so easily fused together as a result of common syncretism.46 The iconographys strong consistency in symbolism featuring images of the hunt or confrontations with the Goddess suggest a mortal source for this Horseman. He was the splintered reinterpretation of a single entity, or perhaps a single class of people, whose origins are now obscured. His religious importance is denoted by his connection to the Goddess and the Tree of Life or a wooden ladder as in the story of the priest-king Kosingas. His worldly nobility is indicated by the image of the horse, a symbol of general superior status among the Thracians and Indo-Europeans in general. I propose, therefore, that the Horseman represents the archetypal Thracian priest-king of the type which was deified among men for their shamanic role in the rites of the Mother Goddess, the fertility

45

Nora Dimitrova Inscriptions and Iconography in the Monuments of the Thracian Rider. Hesperia 71, No. 2 (2002): 210. 46 Dimitrova 2002, 211.

rite of sacred marriage. To carve this motif into the funeral monument of an individual was to associate him with the soul of the departed hero-kings and their ties to the supernatural. We have seen, then, some glimpse of what occurred when two branches of IndoEuropean migrants came into contact after thousands of years of separation. One branch had settled down early, adopting the life of fishing, viticulture, oil production and trade while developing vast differences from their northern cousins who endured the frontiers of the nomadpopulated steppes. Where the Greeks concerned themselves with the glory or of this life, the Thracians looked toward the blessedness of the afterlife, a world which the Thracians believed some individuals such as Rhesus, Zalmoxis and Orpheus could actually rupture into whilst still alive. Much of what we know concerning Greek religion is concerned with a relatively civic context designed to strengthen social cohesion, while Thracian religion remained more concerned with the spiritual revelations of the ecstatic and the experiential. Their relationships with shamanism and intoxication differed greatly: to the Greeks Dionysus was always the exotic foreigner, but among the Thracians the Divine Bridegroom and his goddess were among the highest gods. Their representatives on earth the priest-kings, shaman, bards, and mystics were believed by the Greeks to be the most highly revered in Thracian society, as they possessed some mystic gnosis uncovered by ecstatic revelation. This cast of mythic hero lords ( ) eventually solidified themselves into Hellenic consciousness and their foreign rites endured well into the cultic landscape of the Roman Empire in clandestine cells of mystery initiates or funerary societies.

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