New sweet-wine Sailors ?!

 

New sweet-wine Sailors ?!

We have already broadly shown in the last few posts that Deucalion=Noah=Manu=Yama/Yima (Jemshid)=Dionysus as ἀρχανθρωπος=the third (half-)brother killed by his brother or by his two twin brothers that figured in the Cabeiri myth (=Phocus killed by his brothers Peleus and Telamon).

It is little hardship to see Deucalion as one and the same as the Manu of the Hindus and the Noah of the Bible as they all are shown outlasting a Great Flood.  And if we understand the Great Flood as the same as the Great Winter that blighted airyanəm vaēǰō, as the Parsees do, it is no great leap to see Yima (later Jemshid>Yima with the epithet xšaēta "golden") in his var as being one and the same as Deucalion in his larnax (λάρναξ) "chest", Manu in his naus "ship", and Noah in his ark.  As Yima is the Yama of the Hindus, who is spoken of  Ṛgvedaḥ 10.10.3 as the ekasya ... martyasya "sole existing mortal", it is possible to see that the figures of Manu and Yima/Yama were at one time the same.  That Dionysus is the  ἀρχανθρωπος, the archetypal first man, is something that needs to be delved into to be understood, yet it is hinted at in his epithets in the Orphic hymns of πρωτόγονος (<πρωτόγονον) (see hymns 30 and 52) "first born" and διφυής (<διφυῆ)  (hymn 30) "two-shaped".  That the outlaster of a Great Flood should be identified with this ἀρχανθρωπος, and thus with Dionysus, is hinted at by Deucalion's name. Either understood as Δεύ-καλος “fair Zeus” ("Δευκαλίων presupposes a simpler form *Δεύ - καλος (whence Δευκαλίδαι" - A.B. Cook paraphrasing H. Usener)) or from Ancient Greek δεῦκος (deûkos), an Aetolian variation of γλεῦκος (gleûkos, “sweet new wine” ), and ἁλιεύς (halieús, “sailor”), from ἅλς (háls) "sea".  As this only becomes meaningful when you can understand Deucalion as the ἀρχανθρωπος, the first man, that is, and that the ἀρχανθρωπος is Dionysus who was commonly understood as a "god of wine".  And it should be marked that Polydeukes, the name for one of the Dioscuri, has the same element in his name as if it meant "much sweet new wine" (- see scholia on Nicander's Alexipharmaca line 328 and Theriaca 625, and on Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica 1.1037).  With Noah this same idea has left a trace too, as we read in Genesis 9. 20 -21:

 "And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; ...".

And mark that this leads to Ham's thralldom which, as we said in our last post, stems from a misunderstanding of the ideas behind putting the soul of the ἀρχανθρωπος in matter.

It is maybe worthwhile here to mark that the ancients linked the ideas of being drunk and drowning, and thus the Old English verb drenċan can mean "to give a drink to" or "to drown" whilst  for-drenċan is "to be drunk".  And also worthwhile to mark is that the initial condition of the  mind/intellect/soul when first put  in a humid material body was likened to both drowning and being drunk. Thus Plato Phaedo 79c:

οὐκοῦν καὶ τόδε πάλαι ἐλέγομεν, ὅτι ἡ ψυχή, ὅταν μὲν τῷ σώματι προσχρῆται εἰς τὸ σκοπεῖν τι ἢ διὰ τοῦ ὁρᾶν ἢ διὰ τοῦ ἀκούειν ἢ δι᾽ ἄλλης τινὸς αἰσθήσεως—τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν τὸ διὰ τοῦ σώματος, τὸ δι᾽ αἰσθήσεως σκοπεῖν τι— τότε μὲν ἕλκεται ὑπὸ τοῦ σώματος εἰς τὰ οὐδέποτε κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχοντα, καὶ αὐτὴ πλανᾶται καὶ ταράττεται καὶ εἰλιγγιᾷ ὥσπερ μεθύουσα, ἅτε τοιούτων ἐφαπτομένη;

“Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses—for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses,—then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?” (awend. H. N. Fowler)

And thus we can understand the fear of wine found in olden Egypt marked by Plutarch in his Of Isis and Osiris 6 (353b):

 [6] Οἶνον δ´ οἱ μὲν ἐν Ἡλίου πόλει θεραπεύοντες τὸν θεὸν οὐκ εἰσφέρουσι τὸ παράπαν εἰς τὸ ἱερόν, ὡς οὐ προσῆκον ὑπηρέτας πίνειν τοῦ κυρίου καὶ βασιλέως ἐφορῶντος· οἱ δ´ ἄλλοι χρῶνται μὲν ὀλίγῳ δέ. πολλὰς δ´ ἀοίνους ἁγνείας ἔχουσιν, ἐν αἷς φιλοσοφοῦντες καὶ μανθάνοντες καὶ διδάσκοντες τὰ θεῖα διατελοῦσιν. οἱ δὲ βασιλεῖς καὶ μετρητὸν ἔπινον ἐκ τῶν ἱερῶν γραμμάτων, ὡς Ἑκαταῖος ἱστόρηκεν, ἱερεῖς ὄντες· ἤρξαντο δὲ πίνειν ἀπὸ Ψαμμητίχου, πρότερον δ´ οὐκ ἔπινον οἶνον οὐδ´ ἔσπενδον ὡς φίλιον θεοῖς ἀλλ´ ὡς αἷμα τῶν πολεμησάντων ποτὲ τοῖς θεοῖς, ἐξ ὧν οἴονται πεσόντων καὶ τῇ γῇ συμμιγέντων ἀμπέλους γενέσθαι· διὸ καὶ τὸ μεθύειν ἔκφρονας ποιεῖν καὶ παραπλῆγας, ἅτε δὴ τῶν προγόνων τοῦ αἵματος ἐμπιπλαμένους. ταῦτα μὲν οὖν Εὔδοξος ἐν τῇ δευτέρᾳ τῆς περιόδου λέγεσθαί φησιν οὕτως ὑπὸ τῶν ἱερέων.

 6  As for wine, those who serve the god in Heliopolis bring none at all into the shrine,since they feel that it is not seemly to drink in the day-time while their Lord and King is looking upon them. The others use wine, but in great moderation. They have many periods of holy living when wine is prohibited, and in these they spend their time exclusively in studying, learning, and teaching religious matters. Their kings also were wont to drink a limited quantity prescribed by the sacred writings, as Hecataeus has recorded; and the kings are priests. The beginning of their drinking dates from the reign of Psammetichus; before that they did not drink wine nor use it in libation as something dear to the gods, thinking it to be the blood of those who had once battled against the gods, and from whom, when they had fallen and had become commingled with the earth, they believed vines to have sprung. (awending F. C. Babbitt)

We have already marked that Prometheus' binding was taken by the neo-Platonists as a metaphor for the descent of souls into matter and it is markworthy that Prometheus is said to be the father of Deucalion.

We might then look to find some idea that Deucalion, Manu and Noah underwent the same "tearing asunder" (σπαραγμός) as Dionysus the ἀρχανθρωπος  but we do not find it in their myths as we have them.    But what the Parsees say of Yima seems to prove that it should belong here beyond all doubt.   Among the old Avestan texts we meet Spitiiura, the Yima-cutter (spitiiurəmca yimō.kərəṇtəm) in Yašt 19.46, but nothing more is said of him in these old writings.  But luckily the meaning of the name was remembered nevertheless, and is recoverable from the Bundahišn (35.3) where Jam, that is Yima, Tahmōraf, Spitūr, the older Spitiiura,  and Narseh were all brothers, and that the evil king Dahāg and Spitūr worked together to carve (kirrēnīd) Jam in twain (Bdh. 35.5).  But elsewhere in the Bundahišn we also find that Jam is said to have been cut apart by the dēws who answer to the Titans in the Dionysus myth  (Bdh. 33.1) and shows the same variation as we find in the myths of Osiris and Dionysus, though Osiris and Dionysus are said to be the same.  The Šāh-nāma has Żaḥḥāk (=Dahāg) alone do it:

 "As soon as Zohák heard these words he resolved upon a horrible deed of vengeance. He ordered two planks to be brought, and Jemshíd being fastened down between them, his body was divided the whole length with a saw, making two figures of Jemshíd out of one! "

And an interesting further detail is found in the  Fārs-nāma and in a poem on Jamšid in the Persian Rivāyats, namely, that he was killed while hiding inside a tree (see Encyclopedia Iranica [here]).  This is interesting as Dionysus was linked to trees in a hundred different ways but  one of his titles in Bœotia was “Endendros” which means “the one in (en) the tree (dendron)” (see Hesychius' Lexicon "<Ἔνδενδρος>· παρὰ Ῥοδίοις Ζεύς· καὶ Διόνυσος ἐν Βοιωτίᾳ"). In Ancient Greek however, ὕλη (húlē) could mean “wood(s)" or "matter", thus πρώτη ὕλη (prṓtē húlē), “prima materia or first matter”, and so "the one in the tree" could be understood at a push as "the one in matter".  This is the origin of the so-called "Green Man".

 Above: "Green Man" mosaic in Istanbul Museum by Disdero (see [here]).

 And on the Great Dish found at Mildenhall, and now in the British Museum, we will straightaway see the likeness of the above to what is meant to be the god Oceanus as well.

 Above: Detail of Great Dish from Mildenhall.  Photograph by JMiall (see [here]).

 And thus the forefather of mankind sometimes takes on the attributes of a sea-god, sea water being swapped for wood as a symbol of matter.  Porphyry On the Cave of the Nymphs in Homer's Odyssey (Περὶ τοῦ ἐν Ὀδυσσείᾳ τῶν Νυμφῶν Ἄντρου):

"πόντος δὲ καὶ θάλασσα καὶ κλύδων καὶ παρὰ Πλάτωνι ἡ ὑλικὴ σύστασις." 

"Again, according to Plato, the deep, the sea, and a tempest are images of a material nature."

That the Šāh-nāma has Jemshid set up  the classes of men shows us the inner link that must exist between him and the figure of Heimdallr/Rígr of the Rígsþula.

 

Farewell.