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CHAPTER 2 ANCIENT FICTION AND RELIGION
FROM FICTION TO THEORIZING MYSTERY RELIGIONS: A SHORT HISTORY OF A DISCOURSE
Reinhold Merkelbach was not the first to draw attention to the relationship of ancient fiction to ancient and late antique religion. In his Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung (Tübingen, 1927) Karl Kerenyi argued for an origin for the ancient novel in religion, based on his reading of the Romanfiguren (the characters populating the novels) – the passivity characterizing their understanding of self and world, as well as the tremendous influence of Egyptian-Anatolian gods together with superstition on the actions of these characters, led Kerenyi to posit a religious origin for the ancient novel.101 To be sure, the utopian travel novels, the Alexander novels and the Trojan novels did not count among the true novels that provided the grounds for Kerenyi’s theory, so the theory worked for the so-called ‘true’ or ‘ideal’ novel romance.102 According to him the various elements of the novel should be analyzed and interpreted religio-historically, which means that the Egyptian myths provided the prototypes and models for the travels and travails of the loving couples of the novels, in particular the myths about Isis and those concerning the death and ‘resurrection’ of Osiris, and in this view, furthermore, the novels represent the accounts of the sufferings of these gods.103
Merkelbach took up the project of a religio-historical interpretation of the ancient novel and in the process went one step further to include not only the Isiac mystery cult, but all the major mystery cults of the early empire. Not only do the novels present the reader in narrative format with Egyptian myths,104 but also with Mithraic,105 Dionysiac,106 Pythagorean,107 and Helios108 myths, but the narrative texts themselves are mystery texts, or are themselves mythologies. Since the origins of epic, lyric and drama should be sought in religion, it follows that the same should hold for the novel.109 ‘The ancient romances are intimately connected to the mysteries of antiquity in decline, namely the cults of Isis, Mithras, Dionysus, and the sun god. The novels constitute the principal sources for these religions, about which we would otherwise have very little evidence,’ so Merkelbach.110 In effect the novel romances are the scripts for the performances of mystery rituals, our only source for the ‘beliefs’ held by these mystery cults, which were traditionally, of course, secret societies for which we would not otherwise have any historical information at all.111
Merkelbach’s controversial thesis placed the issue of religion and fiction as well as religion in fiction firmly on the agenda of studies of the ancient novel, even though his thesis was not generally accepted.112 Even Kerenyi distanced himself from Merkelbach’s ‘much too simplistic statement of the case.’113
NOVEL AND FICTION: A RELATIONSHIP TESTED – LEUCIPPE AND CLITOPHON AS TEST CASE
One can, however, point to numerous instances of contact between the ancient novel and its religious world or the religious values reflected or assumed in the novel. And here, for instance, one can use as an illuminating test case the parallel between the myth of Isis and Osiris and its ‘use’ as plot framework in Leucippe and Clitophon.114 There is an uncanny, but very real similarity between the plot of Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and the portrayal of the myth of Isis and Osiris in Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride.
As an example, one can start by considering, among other possibilities, the sacrifice scene of Leukippe in Book 3 of Leucippe and Clitophon 15ff.115 Kleitophon watches from the distance from the Roman (Egyptian cavalry) camp how the bandits are sacrificing Leukippe. He sees how she is led to an earthen altar with a coffin near it. A libation is poured over her, and she is led around the altar to the accompaniment of a flute while a priest intones what sounds like an Egyptian hymn. Then she is tied to stakes in the ground, and the sacrificer plunges a sword in her and cuts her open from the heart to the abdomen while Kleitophon, horrified, watches her entrails ‘leaping out’. Her entrails are pulled out and carried to the altar and the bandits share a meal of it.
Of course it is one of the many artful devices which abound in this romance to effect a ‘resurrection.’ Some time later Kleitophon learns that his beloved Leukippe escaped her would-be gruesome fate. His slave-companion Satyros and their travel-companion, Menelaos, an Egyptian native to that region, had been captured by the Boukoloi (the brigands or ‘Desperadoes’) and initiated into the banditry, a process which required them to perform the human sacrifice. So they obtained by happy coincidence the stage props of a Homer actor-reciter (a sword with retracting blade) and they set out to prepare the elaborate scam. An animal bladder was stuffed with the entrails, sewed shut and hid beneath Leukippe’s robes. After the mock-sacrifice ‘Leukippe’s’ liver was roasted and shared among the bandits and what was deemed left of her, interred in the coffin.116
Then the cavalry arrives and destroys the band of bandits and Kleitophon is united with Satyros and Menelaos, and eventually also with Leukippe. Menelaos performs some hocus-pocus, recites magic words and removes the contraption from Leukippe’s stomach. The book ends with a parable of the phoenix as (unintended?) commentary on what transpired before.
I would like to contend that this is a ‘refictionalised’ version of the myth of Isis and Osiris. According to the myth Osiris reigned over Egypt and ‘delivered them from their destitute and brutish manner of living’. He later travelled through world spreading civilization. Then he is killed by Typhon ‘by a treacherous plot’. Osiris is tricked and locked into a chest specially made to measure. The chest is dropped in the river and so sent off to sea. The chest washes up, is ‘shipwrecked’, at Byblos where Isis eventually finds it and brings it back to Pelusium in the delta area of Egypt. Here Typhon stumbled across the chest, recognizes who is inside and dismembers Osiris’ body and scatters the parts in different places. Isis dutifully searches the swampy delta area, finds the parts (save the phallus) and buries them. Isis’ son, Horus, eventually avenges Osiris’ death and dismemberment by defeating Typhon in battle.
What is important in the context of this argument, is the interpretation given to this myth by Plutarch:
Stories akin to these and to other like them they say are related about Typhon; how that, prompted by jealousy and hostility, he wrought terrible deeds and, by bringing utter confusion upon all things filled the whole Earth, and the ocean as well, with ills, and later paid penalty therefor. But the avenger, the sister and wife of Osiris, after she had quenched and suppressed the madness and fury of Typhon, was not indifferent to the contests and struggles which she had endured, nor to her own wanderings nor to her manifold deeds of wisdom and many feats of bravery, nor would she accept oblivion and silence for them, but she intermingled in the most holy rites portrayals and suggestions and representations of her experiences at that time, and sanctified them, both as a lesson in godliness and an encouragement for men and women who find themselves in the clutch of like calamities. She herself and Osiris, translated for the virtues from good demigods (daemones) into gods, as were Heracles and Dionysos later, not incongruously enjoy double honours, both those of gods and those of demigods, and their powers extend everywhere … (De Iside et Osiride 27) (my emphasis, GvdH)
Mystery Religions of the Early Imperial Era
1. Present, yet Absent: Peering Through the Mists at Ancient Mystery Religions
2. Concept Formation: Studying Religion as Discursive Practice
Chapter 2: Ancient Fiction and Religion 39
1. From Fiction to Theorising Mystery Religions: A Short History of a Discourse 39
2. Novel and Fiction: A Relationship Tested – Leucippe and Clitophon as Test Case 42
3. Novel and Fiction: A Relationship Tested – Iamblichus’s A Babylonian Story as Test Case 52
Chapter 3: Religion, Fiction, and Genre: Setting the Stage for Theorising Ancient Mystery Religions
1. From the Genre of the Novel to Theorising Ancient Mystery Religions
2. The Referentiality of Fiction
3. Reconceiving the Genre of the Novel
Chapter 4: Fiction and Context, Rhetoric and Social Discourse
1. Art, Cultural Artifacts, Social Discourse, and Social Ideology
2. Social Discourse and the Ancient Novel
3. Novels as Texts-in-Communication
4. The Metaphoricity of the Novelistic Text
5. The Social Communication and Ideology of Cultural Artifacts
6. Colonialism and Novelistic Fiction
7. The Ancient Novel and the Early Roman Empire
8. Imperial Ideology: The Exuberant Invention of the Renewed Golden Age
9. Invented History
10. Foundation Histories and Greek Reaction to Roman Imperial Rule
Chapter 5: And So We Come to Religion
1. Framing the Question and Questioning the Frame
2. Reconceptualising Religion: A Social Theory of Religion
3. Ancient Mysteries and Social Formation in the Early Imperial Era
4. Mysteries, Fiction, and Cult Groups: Light from Prosopographic Evidence
Concluding Postscript
Bibliography
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