The offerings from the hyperboreans

Abstract

The ancient Greeks believed that the fruits of agriculture could be harvested only if one first appeased the spirit of the primitive avatars from which the edible crop had been evolved over the centuries through hybridization and cultivation. On occasion, this appeasement was secured through the sacrifice of a human victim, a person who for various reasons could be considered to represent a similar primitivism. By the classical age, this extreme form of sacrificial appeasement appears to have been reserved for times of unusual crisis, such as pestilence or natural disaster, for at such times, the resurgent forces of primitivism seemed to threaten the entire civilization with regression back to its wilder origins. Other forms of appeasement were ordinarily substituted for the actual offering of a human victim. Amongst these was the enactment of puberty rites, for the natural growth and maturation of an individual could be thought to symbolize this same evolutionary process. Each infant is born as a wild creature who must develop into a socialized adult through the metaphoric death of its former self as it assumes the responsibilities of civilized life in crossing the threshold to sexual maturity. A similar symbolic victim was customarily represented by the offering of first fruits. A portion of the cultivated crop was prematurely cut and consecrated to redeem and release the ripening harvest from the dangerous contamination with the spirits of its pre-agricultural precedents. On the island of Delos, a special version of this consecration was performed. Each year, the various Greek cities would send a sheaf of unripened grain to the sanctuary of the god Apollo and his twin sister Artemis. Amongst these annual offerings, there was one that was supposed to have originated from the Hyperboreans, a mythical people who were thought to live in the original homeland of the two gods. This special Hyperborean offering differed from the others, for it was said to contain a secret item hidden within the sheaf. The mythical traditions about these Hyperboreans recalled the Hellenic peoples' Indo-European origins, back in the time before the tribal migrations that brought them eventually into the Mediterranean lands, and the secret offering pertained to Apollo's more ancient religion in that pre-Geek Hyperborean context. The god who was honored by the Delian rite in the classical period was actually an assimilated manifestation of that original IndoEuropean deity and another from Anatolia, the so-called Lycian Apollo, whose functions and symbolism coincided, more or less, with those of the Hyperborean god. The annual presentation of the secret offering was intended as a ritual appeasement and reconciliation of the god's own former identities in more primitive times. It assured that he too, like the whole fabric of classical civilization, would remain stable in his evolved state. This offering was Soma, the magical plant that figured in the shamanism of the Indo-Europeans and other peoples. In the Hellenic context, as amongst the Indo-Iranians, many substitutes were found for the original Soma when it was no longer easily available in the lands to which these peoples migrated. Although it is never mentioned in Greek literature by name, the tradition of this magical plant was incorporated into the ceremony of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the viticultural rites of the god Dionysus. The substitutions, moreover, as the Delian rite reveals, included the sacred olive and the laurel. As in the former two religions, however, the original of the plant sacred to Apollo appears to have been a fungus, thus adding further confirmation to R. Gordon Wasson's identification of Soma as Amanita muscaria.