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Ritual Dynamics 159
a maiden, which was then brought to the city; there, it was
mourned for forty days; on the evening of the fortieth day, the
image was burned. This ritual is supposed to reflect the annual
cycle of nature. The joy at the coming of the goddess was
followed by the sadness at her departure in the fall. Again, the
differences from the Daidala are no less striking than the similarities.
Persephone’s periodical death finds no analogy in any
known cult of Hera; the wooden daidala were not brought to the
city, they were not mourned, and they were not supposed to
represent the periodical death of a virgin. Aelian and Athenaeus
have reports of a similar festival at Eryx in Sicily, this time for
Aphrodite—the festival Anagogia. It owed its name to the departure
of Aphrodite, who was thought to leave for Africa,
followed by birds (pigeons). Nine days later a very beautiful
pigeon was seen coming from the south, and its coming was
celebrated as the festival Katagogia. We observe, however, that
in this festival there is no image, no marriage, no pyre. Burkert
suggested associating this group of festivals with mankind’s
primordial fears: threatened by drought, bad harvests, infertility,
and bad weather, people from time to time leave the area of
agricultural activity and return to the forest, where they used to
find food at the stage of hunters and gatherers. The burning of
an image may be a survival of the great pyres on peak sanctuaries
in Minoan Crete.
Modern research has not only isolated these two important
components of the Daidala, the sacred marriage and the fire
ritual; it has also pointed out that the burning of the Daidala can
be conceived of as a sacrifice, and this is a very important
element which is difficult to reconcile with the other two approaches.
K. Meuli has assigned the sacrifice of the Daidala to
the category of the ‘chthonische Vernichtungsopfer’, sacrifices
offered to chthonic deities whose dangerous power should be
appeased; 41 the myth about the quarrel between Hera and Zeus
and the goddess’ withdrawal can be associated with this interpretation,
which, however, fails to explain other components of
the ritual in the Imperial period (especially the allusions to a
wedding). The fact that the daidala cannot be conceived as
41 K. Meuli, ‘Griechische Opferbräuche’, in Phyllobolia für Peter von der
Mühll zum 60. Geburtstag am 1. August 1945 (Basel, 1946), 209–10.