Zagreus

ZEUS secretly begot his son Zagreus on Persephone, before she was taken to the Underworld by her uncle Hades. He set Rhea’s sons, the Cretan Curetes or, some say, the Corybantes, to guard his cradle in the Idaean Cave, where they leaped about him, clashing their weapons, as they had leaped about Zeus himself at Dicte. But the Titans, Zeus’s enemies, whitening themselves with gypsum until they were unrecognizable, waited until the Curetes slept. At midnight they lured Zagreus away, by offering him such childish toys as a cone, a bull-roarer, golden apples, a mirror, a knuckle-bone, and a tuft of wool. Zagreus showed courage when they murderously set upon him, and went through several transformations in an attempt to delude them: he became successively Zeus in a goat-skin coat, Cronus making rain, a lion, a horse, a horned serpent, a tiger, and a bull. At that point the Titans seized him firmly by the horns and feet, tore him apart with their teeth, and devoured his flesh raw.
b. Athene interrupted this grisly banquet shortly before its end and, rescuing Zagreus’s heart, enclosed it in a gypsum figure, into which she breathed life; so that Zagreus became an immortal. His bones were collected and buried at Delphi, and Zeus struck the Titans dead with thunderbolts.
1. This myth concerns the annual sacrifice of a boy which took place in ancient Crete: a surrogate for Minos the Bull-king. He reigned for a single day, went through a dance illustrative of the five seasons-lion, goat, horse, serpent, and bull-calf-and was then eaten raw. All the toys with which the Titans lured him away were objects used by the  philosophical Orphics, who inherited the tradition of this sacrifice but devoured a bull-calf raw, instead of a boy. The bull-roarer was a pierced stone or piece of pottery, which when whirled at the end of a cord made a noise like a rising gale; and the tuft of wool may have been used to daub the Curetes with the wet gypsum-these being youths who had cut and dedicated their first hair to the goddess Car. They were also called Corybantes, or crested dancers. Zagreus’s other gifts served to explain the nature of the ceremony by which the participants became one with the god: the cone was an ancient emblem of the goddess, in whose honour the Titans sacrificed him; the mirror represented each initiate’s other self, or ghost; the golden apples, his passport to Elysium after a mock-death; the knucklebone, his divinatory powers.

2. A Cretan hymn discovered a few years ago at Palaiokastro, near the Dictaean Cave, is addressed to the Cronian One, greatest of youths, who comes dancing at the head of his demons and leaps to increase the fertility of soil and flocks, and for the success of the fishing fleet. Jane Harrison in Themis suggests that the shielded tutors there mentioned, who 'took thee, immortal child, from Rhea’s side’, merely pretended to kill and eat the victim, an initiate into their secret society. But all such mock-deaths at initiation ceremonies, reported from many parts of the world, seem ultimately based on a tradition of actual human sacrifice; and Zagreus’s calendar changes distinguish him from an ordinary member of a totemistic fraternity.
3. The uncanonical tiger in the last of Zagreus’s transformations is explained by his identity with Dionysus, of whose death and resurrection the same story is told, although with cooked flesh instead of raw, and Rhea’s name instead of Athene’s. Dionysus, too, was a horned serpent-he had horns and serpent locks at birth-and his Orphic devotees ate him sacramentally in bull form. Zagreus became ‘Zeus in a goat-skin coat’, because Zeus or his child surrogate had ascended to Heaven wearing a coat made from the hide of the goat Amaltheia. ‘Cronus making rain’ is a reference to the use of the bull-roarer in rain-making ceremonies. In this context the Titans were Titanoi, ‘white-chalk men’, the Curetes themselves disguised so that the ghost of the victim would not recognize them. When human sacrifices went out of fashion, Zeus was represented as hurling his thunderbolt at the cannibals; and the Titans, ‘lords of the seven-day week’, became confused with the Titanoi, ‘the white-chalk men’, because of their hostility to Zeus. No Orphic, who had once eaten the flesh of his god, ever again touched meat of any kind.

4. Zagreus-Dionysus was also known in Southern Palestine. According to the Ras Shamra tablets, Ashtar temporarily occupied the throne of Heaven while the god Baal languished in the Underworld, having eaten the food of the dead. Ashtar was only a child and when he sat on the throne, his feet did not reach the footstool; Baal presently returned and killed him with a club. The Mosaic Law prohibited initiation feasts in Ashtar’s honour: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk’-an injunction three times repeated.