Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

vn] The Kouretes at Ephesus 247
Above this grove is a mountain, Solmissos, where they say the Kouretes
took their stand and with the clash of their arms frightened the jealous Hera
who was lying in wait, and helped Leto to conceal the birth. (There are
ancient temples with ancient images of wood, as well as later temples with
statues by Scopas and others.)
Here, every year, the people assemble to celebrate a festival, at which it
is the custom for the young men to vie with one another in the magnificence
of their contributions to the entertainment. At the same season a college of
the Kouretes holds banquets and performs certain mystical sacrifices.
There is little doubt that the ancient wooden images in these
mountain shrines had represented a Mother and Infant of an older
type than Leto and her children. The presence of the Kouretes,
the attendant ministers of Rhea, is proof enough. Leto has
superseded Rhea, just as in later times Leto's daughter, 'Great
Artemis of the Ephesians, whom all Asia and the world wor-
shipped,' gave place in her turn to yet another Asiatic mother
with her divine child.
On Mount Solmissos, above the cypress grove of the Birth-place,
the tradition at least, if not the practice, survived, of a dance of
young men in arms to conceal the divine birth. Certainly, the
young men played a prominent part in the banquet on the
mountain top, held by the college of Kouretes and their president,
the Protokoures 1
, with certain sacrifices called 'mystical' (fivarcKal
dvalai), to mark that they were not ordinary Olympian sacrifices,
such as would naturally belong to the cult of Leto and her twins.
Of what nature were the mystical rites of this mountain-banquet ?
To answer that question we must go southward again to a still
more famous seat of the same cult, where we shall find the
remaining features of the Feast of Tantalus, and an explanation of
their significance.
In Crete 2 , as we have already seen (p. 13), the birth of a divine
child, called Zeus, was concealed from his father Kronos, who had
eaten his other children immediately after their birth. Here too
the concealment was aided by a dance of young men in arms,
called Kouretes.
The myth and ritual of Zagreus have already (p. 14) been
examined. It has been shown that the ceremonies, in a compara-
tively late and civilised form, including a banquet, a procession with
1 See Pauly-Wiss. s.v. Ephesia, col. 2756, and supra, p. 46, and E. Heberdey,
Jahreshefte Oestr. Inst. vin. 1905, Beiblatt, p. 77, for recent discoveries of
inscribed drums with names of Kouretic officials.
2 Strabo x. 468.