The Dactyls

SOME say that while Rhea was bearing Zeus, she pressed her fingers into the soil to ease her pangs and up sprang the Dactyls: five females from her left hand, and five males from her right. But it is generally held that they were living on Phrygian Mount Ida long before the  birth of Zeus, and some say that the nymph Anchiale bore them in the Dictaean Cave near Oaxus. The male Dactyls were smiths and first discovered iron in near-by Mount Berecynthus; and their sisters, who settled in Samothrace, excited great wonder there by casting magic spells, and taught Orpheus the Goddess’s mysteries: their names are a well-guarded secret.

b. Others say that the males were the Curetes who protected Zeus’s cradle in Crete, and that they afterwards came to Elis and raised a temple to propitiate Cronus. Their names were Heracles, Paeonius, Epimedes, Iasius, and Acesidas. Heracles, having brought wild-olive from the Hyperboreans to Olympia, set his younger brothers to run a race there, and thus the Olympic Games originated. It is also said that he crowned Paeonius, the victor, with a spray of wild-olive; and that, afterwards, they slept in beds made from its green leaves. But the truth is that wild-olive was not used for the victor’s crown until the seventh Olympiad, when the Delphic Oracle had ordered Iphitus to substitute it for the apple-spray hitherto awarded as the prize of victory.
c. Acmon, Damnameneus, and Celmis are titles of the three eldest Dactyls; some say that Celmis was turned to iron as a punishment for insulting Rhea.

1. The Dactyls personify the fingers, and Heracles’s Olympic Games are a childish fable illustrated by drumming one’s fingers on a table, omitting the thumb-when the forefinger always wins the race. But secret Orphic knowledge was based on a calendar sequence of magical trees, each of them is assigned to a separate finger joint in the sign-language and a separate letter in Orphic calendar-alphabet, which seems to have been Phrygian in origin. Wild-olive belongs to the top-joint of the thumb, supposedly the seat of virility and therefore called Heracles. This Heracles is said to have had leaves growing from his body (Palaephatus). The similar system is recalled in the popular Western finger-names: e.g. ‘fool’s finger’ which corresponds with Epimedes, the middle finger, and the ‘… finger’, which corresponds with Iasius, the fourth; and in the finger names of palmistry: e.g. Saturn for Epimedes-Saturn having shown himself slow-witted in his struggle with Zeus; and Apollo, god of healing for Iasius. The forefinger is given to Jupiter, or Zeus, who won the race. The little  finger, Mercury or Hermes, is the magical one. Through primitive Europe, metallurgy was accompanied by incantations, and smiths therefore claimed the fingers of the right hand as their Dactyls, leaving the left to the sorceresses.
2. The story of Acmon, Damnameneus, and Celmis, whose names refer to smith craft, is another childish fable, illustrated by tapping with index finger on the thumb, as a hammer on an anvil, and then slipping tip of the middle finger between them, as though it were a piece of hot iron. Iron came to Crete through Phrygia from farther along Southern Black Sea coast;  and Celmis, being a personification of smith iron, will have been obnoxious to the Great Goddess Rhea, patroness of smiths, whose religious decline began with the smelting of iron an arrival of the iron-weaponed Dorians. She had recognized only silver, copper, lead, and tin as terrestrial ores; though lumps of meteoritic iron were highly prized because of their miraculous origin, and one have fallen on Mount Berecynthus. An unworked lump was found in Neolithic deposit at Phaestus beside a squatting clay image of the goddess … sea-shells, and offering bowls. All early Egyptian iron is meteoritic, it contains a high proportion of nickel and is nearly rust-proof. Celmis’s insult to Hera gave the middle finger its name: digita impudica.

3. The Olympic Games originated in a foot race, run by girls, for the privilege of becoming the priestess of the Moon-goddess Hera (Pausanias); and since this event took place in the month Parthenios, ‘of the maiden’, it seems to have been annual. When Zeus married Hera-when, that is, a new form of sacred kingship had been introduced into Greece by the Achaeans-a second foot race was run by young men for the dangerous privilege of  becoming the priestess’s consort, Sun to her Moon, and thus King of Elis; just as Antaeus made his daughter’s suitors race for her (Pindar: Pythian Odes), following the example of Icarius and Danaus.
4. The Games were thereafter held every four years, instead of annually, the girls foot race being run at a separate festival, either a fortnight before or a fortnight after the Olympian Games proper; and the sacred kingship conferred on the victor of the foot race at his marriage to the new priestess, is recalled in the divine honours that the victory continued to bestow in Classical times. Having been wreathed with Heracles’s or Zeus’s olive, saluted as ‘King Heracles’, and pelted with leaves like a Jack o’Green, he led the dance in a triumphal procession and ate sacrificial bull’s flesh in the Council Hall.
5. The original prize, an apple, or an apple-spray, had been a promise of immortality when he was duly killed by his successor; for Plutarch mentions that though a foot race was the sole contest in the original Olympic Games, a single combat also took place, which ended only in the death of the vanquished. This combat is mythologically recorded in the story that the Olympic Games began with a wrestling match between Zeus and Cronus for the possession of Elis (Pausanias), namely the midsummer combat between the king and his tanist; and the result was a foregone conclusion-the tanist came armed with a spear.
6. A scholiast on Pindar (Olympian Odes), quoting Comarchus, shows that the Elian New Year was reckoned from the full moon nearest to the winter solstice, and that a second New Year began at midsummer. Presumably therefore the new Zeus-Heracles, that is to say, the winner of the foot race, killed the Old Year tanist, Cronus-Iphicles, at midwinter. Hence Heracles first instituted the Games and named the sepulchral Hill of Cronus ‘at a season when the summit was wet with much snow’ (Pindar: Olympian Odes)

7. In ancient times, Zeus-Heracles was pelted with oak-leaves and given the apple-spray at midsummer, just before being killed by his tanist; he had won the royal wild-olive branch at midwinter. The replacement of the apple by wild-olive, which is the tree that drives away evil spirits, implied the abortion of this death-combat, and the conversion of the single year, divided into two halves, into a Great Year. This began at midwinter, when solar and lunar time coincided favourably for a Sun-and-Moon marriage, and was divided into two Olympiads of four years apiece; the king and his tanist reigning successively or currently. Though by Classical times the solar chariot race-for the mythological authority is Pelops’s contest with Oenomaus for Deidameia-had become the most important event in the contests, it was still thought somehow unlucky to be pelted with leaves victory in the foot race; and Pythagoras advised his friends to compete in this event but not to win it. The victory-ox, eaten at the Council was clearly a surrogate for the king, as at the Athenian Euphonia.
8. Olympia is not a Mycenaean site and the pre-Achaean myths therefore unlikely to have been borrowed from Crete; they seem Pelasgian.