Dodd David B - Initiation in ancient Greek rituals and narratives : new critical perspectives

David B. Dodd and Christopher A. Faraone

First published 2003
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routlege is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

2003 David B. Dodd and Christopher A. Faraone, selection and editorial matter; individual contributions, the contributors

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MHL Typesetting Limited, Coventry, Warwickshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Initiation in ancient Greek rituals and narratives: new critical perspectives/[edited by] David B. Dodd and Christopher A. Faraone.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Initiation rites Religious aspects History. 2. Initiation rites Greece History. 3. Greece Religious life and customs. 4. Initiation rites in literature. 5. Greek literature History and criticism. I. Dodd, David B., 1963 II. Faraone, Christopher A.

BL795.I55 I55 2003

292.3 8dc21 2002031777

ISBN 0415289203

PART I
Introduction

FRITZ GRAF

PART II
Female initiations

GLORIA FERRARI

CHRISTOPHER A. FARAONE

PART III
Vidal-Naquets Black Hunter

DAVID B. DODD

IRENE POLINSKAYA

PART IV
Initiation and the male community

DAVID D. LEITAO

NANNO MARINATOS

PART V
Initiation and narrative patterns

SARAHILES JOHNSTON

RADCLIFFE G. EDMONDS III

PART VI
The initiation of ritual experts

CRISTIANO GROTTANELLI

IAN MOYER

PART VII
Afterwords

BRUCE LINCOLN

JAMES M. REDFIELD

David B. Dodd obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1999 with a dissertation on adolescents in Greek myth. He has delivered papers on Greek tragedy and choral poetry, and has published articles on ancient homosexuality and American superhero comics. He teaches Latin at Newark Academy in Livingston, New Jersey.

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III is an Assistant Professor of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia. He has written articles on Orphism, magic, and Plato, and he is at work on a book on myths of the journey to the underworld.

Christopher A. Faraone is Professor in the Department of Classics and the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. He is co-editor (with T. Carpenter) of Masks of Dionysus (1993) and author of Ancient Greek Love Magic (1999) and a number of articles on early Greek poetry, religion, and magic.

Gloria Ferrari is Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Harvard University. She further explores the role of metaphor in visual representations in Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece (2002).

Fritz Graf teaches Classics at Ohio State University. He is working on ancient religions, especially on questions of ritual and festivals. His most recent books are Magic in the Ancient World (1997) and a slim volume on calendar and festivals in Rome: Der Lauf des rollenden Jahres (1997).

Cristiano Grottanelli is Professor of History of Religions in the Universities of Modena and Florence. He has recently written Il sacrificio (1999) and co-edited (with F. Cordano) Sorteggio pubblico e cleromanzia dallantichit all et moderna (2001). He is currently preparing a book on biblical prophecy.

Sarah Iles Johnston is Professor of Greek and Latin at Ohio State University. She is the author of Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (1999) and other books and articles on ancient Greek religions.

David D. Leitao is an Associate Professor of Classics at San Francisco State University. He is the author of several articles on Greek myth and ritual and on the history of gender and sexuality in antiquity.

Bruce Lincoln is the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago and an associate member of the Departments of Anthropology and Classics. His writings include Theorizing Myth (1999) and Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Womens Initiation (2nd edn, 1991).

Nanno Marinatos is Professor of Classics and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her area of research is pre-Greek and Greek religious ritual in imagery and texts. Her books include The Goddess and the Warrior: the Naked Goddess and Mistress of Animals in Early Greek Religion (2000) and several co-edited volumes (with R. Hgg), the most recent of which is Greek Sanctuaries (1993).

Ian Moyer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. His dissertation research examines the role of Egyptian priests in interactions between the Greek world and Egypt, and he has written articles on Herodotus and Graeco-Egyptian religion.

Irene Polinskaya is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Bowdoin College. Her research focuses on local religious practices in ancient Greece, models and approaches to the study of Greek religion, and the social history and archaeology of ancient Greece.

James M. Redfield is the Edward Olson Professor in the Department of Classics, the Committee on Social Thought, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College, University of Chicago. He is author of Nature and Culture in the Iliad (1975) and of numerous essays on diverse topics; his next book, The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy, is forthcoming from Princeton.

David B. Dodd

Initiation as a category with psychoanalytic, phenomenological and structuralist values was a popular topic from the 1950s through the 1970s. I am thinking here both of the use of initiation by scholars influenced by C.G. Jung such as Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell and of the recuperation of Arnold Van Genneps notion of rites of passage by anthropologists of a structuralist bent, most famously Victor Turner. The social sciences of this period were to a large degree characterized by an express desire to produce a positive science of the human, which was perhaps most strikingly articulated in Claude Lvi-Strauss ideas (1958: 257) for laboratories and research teams that could analyze and derive accurately the quasi-mathematical formula of each of the worlds myths.

From the 1960s on, a more critical strain of thought emerged in the fields of psychology and continental philosophy, which challenged the very nature of such positivism. This strain, associated most closely with the names Foucault and Derrida, but also including anarchist and Marxist cultural criticism, feminism and anti-psychiatry, has shown little interest in initiation. While this may be partly the result of intellectual fads changing, Bruce Lincoln has argued that this critical theory ultimately renders the study of the category of initiation irrelevant, since it reveals it to be merely a tool for the production of false consciousness. Lincoln (1991) presents this argument powerfully and strikingly, as an afterword to the second edition of his book,