David the Gnome

The God Priapus has his modern incarnation as the trite-but-trusty garden gnome.  His red Phygrian cap and pointed booties betray his ancient ancestry.  This fertility god, often equivocated to the god Pan, is associated with territorial borders, generative energy, and thievery.

"This god [Priapos] is worshipped where goats and sheep pasture or there are swarms of bees; but by the people of Lampsakos he [Priapos] is more revered than any other god, being called by them a son of Dionysos and Aphrodite."Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 2. 622 ff (trans. Mozley) (Roman epic C1st A.D.) : -Source #3

I have discussed widely, in previous posts, the use of phallic posts as millarium or mile-markers of Roman and Greek eras.  It is easy to see the association between the male sex and borders, I am reminded daily of the fact that my two girl-dogs are the staked-out territory of a local boy-dog.  I’d be surprised if he were to ever poop anywhere else.

The thievery association comes from the myth that Priapus tried to steal love from a sleeping nude.  In any event, he didn’t get away with his surreptitious wooing, due to the bray of a donkey alerting his victim.

Here’s the lowdown on Priapus:
“Priapus is said, by some, to have been the son of Bacchus and Nais, or as others will have it, of Chiŏne; but the generality of authors agree, that he was son of Bacchus and Venus. He was born at Lampsăchus, a city of Mysia, at the mouth of the Hellespont, but in so deformed a state, that his mother, through shame, abandoned him. On his growing up to maturity, the inhabitants of the place banished him their territories, on account of his vicious habits; but being soon after visited with an epidemic disease, the Lampsacans consulted the oracle of Dodōna, and Priāpus was in consequence recalled. Temples were erected to him as the tutelar deity of vineyards and gardens, to defend them from thieves and from birds.

He is usually represented naked and obscene, with a stern countenance, matted hair, crowned with garden herbs, and holding a wooden sword, or scythe, whilst his body terminates in a shapeless trunk. His figures are generally erected in gardens and orchards to serve as scarecrows. Priāpus held a pruning-hook in his hands, when he had hands, for he was sometimes nothing more than a mere log of wood, as Martial somewhat humorously calls him. Indeed the Roman poets in general seem to have looked on him as a ridiculous god, and are all ready enough either to despise or abuse him.” -Source 1

So here you see Priapus associated with goats, such as the God Pan or Levi’s Baphomet. Priapus is Pan, who is also Baphomet, and on and on until you’ve named all such fertility gods.  But the bee reference may be more elusive.  It is likely that the bee association is related to the common domed shape of ancient “skep” or “basket” beehives, as the common depiction of Priapus is as a mound of stone or log.  But I think we can get a little deeper on the bee connection, and to do so we will have to explore the theories of Victor Schauberger and Rudolph Steiner.  Historically later, and along these same lines, Wilhelm Reich probably deserves a mention, due to his “orgone energy” theories.

I believe there is a deeper meaning behind the mythological association between bees and goats, or, to be more specific, goat horns. 

The Holy Horn:  The Shofar, an ancient Hebrew sacramental instrument, was made from a naturally spiraled ram or kudu horn.  According to Wikipedia, “the Elef Hamagan (586:5) delineates the order of preference: 1) curved ram; 2) curved other sheep; 3) curved other animal; 4) straight—ram or otherwise; 5) non-kosher animal; 6) cow. The first four categories are used with a bracha (blessing), the fifth without a bracha, and the last, not at all.”

It is the sound of the Shofar, modulated through the spiraling horn, which is said to be holy.  This sound is just one version of a modulation of energy which is the result of traveling in a precise pattern, this energy path, in its various forms is commonly known as the “golden mean.”  

There is a myth, common to the Mediterranean region, of a ritual called Bugonia, which is said to “spontaneously generate” honeybees.  Here is one version of the Bugonia rite, from Wikipedia: 

“Build a house, ten cubits high, with all the sides of equal dimensions, with one door, and four windows, one on each side; put an ox into it, thirty months old, very fat and fleshy; let a number of young men kill him by beating him violently with clubs, so as to mangle both flesh and bones, but taking care not to shed any blood; let all the orifices, mouth, eyes, nose etc. be stopped up with clean and fine linen, impregnated with pitch; let a quantity of thyme be strewed under the reclining animal, and then let windows and doors be closed and covered with a thick coating of clay, to prevent the access of air or wind. Three weeks latter let the house be opened, and let light and fresh air get access to it, except from the side from which the wind blows strongest. After eleven days you will find the house full of bees, hanging together in clusters, and nothing left of the ox but horns, bones and hair.”

I believe that the Bugonia myth is very comparable to Victor Schauberger’s theories.  It is commonly believed that Bugonia is a form of “spontaneous generation,” and as such is an easily disproven wives-tale.  The true nature of this myth is that it relates knowledge of a generative organic energy, that once understood, can be created, manipulated and harnessed for its pan-generative power.  

Source #5:  In the agriculture section of Callum Coats' book [Living Energies, which is about Victor Schaubergers theories], meanwhile, Rudolf Steiner's method for drawing subtle energies into the soil is discussed. Steiner's "biodynamic" farming uses the forces which Steiner called "heaven" and "earth." It does get earthy­ cow horns filled with cow dung are buried in autumn to allow a period of cold fermentation. (Viktor Schauberger wrote about this process and said it was important the materials be cold fermented and not hot fermented.) During the few months that the cow horns are buried, their contents are changed into a sweet smelling substance! Afterwards, part of this substance is mixed with water using a certain method of stirring. By stirring first one way and then reversing the motion, [energy] vortexes are created in one direction, broken and then created in another direction.

Coats compares this mixing process with the Japanese art of sword making, in the sense that you create first order and then chaos and then order again. The sword is first put into the fire ­ the chaotic stage  and then is beaten, putting structure back into the metal. Then it is put back into the fire again, folded over, and bent. Every time the process is repeated, the state of disorder gets lower and lower and the state of order gets higher and higher. The end result is a very highly structured product, which compares to biodynamics' end result of a very energetic product.

The energized material is then spread lightly over the farmers' fields. Since the fields receive an energy dose in which the material quantity is very small but the energetic quantity is very high, it is what could be called a homeopathic dose. "It apparently has a reaction out of all proportion to what is placed there," Callum Coats said on a 1996 radio interview with Laura Lee.

During his research, Coats learned that Viktor Schauberger went further than Steiner and developed soil building systems in which cow horns are not needed. "You don't need to have any animal input at all, in order to create what (Schauberger) called a 'virgin hymen' over the surface of the earth...that very fertile, fecund energy matrix through which plants would germinate much more simply and thrive more vigorously and produce much higher quality product."

The Bugonia ritual, of "creating bees" alludes to the creation of qualitatively dense, "orgone" type energy.  This generation myth is based on the slow, natural processes of subtle energy, and suggests that ancient people had an intuitive understanding of Schauberger-type energies.  The modern man looks at these myths and says "well, they clearly didn’t understand how nature works."  In reality it is the other way around!

Schauberger famously spurned institutional education, claiming instead; (and proudly) "nature was my teacher."  Will we ever move past the modern anachronism that an education must be bought and paid for, like another pair of shoes?  What a heavy, pricey, and undeserved crown is modern education.

Schauberger believed centripetal (vortex) energy was qualitatively superior to mechanized, centrifugal (explosive) energy.  He believed that nature uses centripetal, slow-form energy to draw subtle energies out of the ether, and that this influx causes natural processes to be of zero-loss energetically. 

Priapus is just another name for the archetypal Phallus Deity, pan-generator, and master of organic energy, trailing off of a long ancestry of similarly mythologized gods.  Who is this two-faced Janus, this God of change? 

Gods don't change to reflect our changing natures; they change to reflect reality, which is a medium of change in-itself.  To say there is an Eternal Recurrence is an incomplete philosophy, the more truthful statement is this:  We are experiencing an "Eternal recurrence of the same as different" 

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, more simply:   "Things never happen the same way twice." 

But back to Priapus, for the Egyptian counterpart of Priapus is the God Min:

“Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 6. 1. (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :  We shall at this point discuss Priapos and the myths related about him . . . The Aigyptians (Egyptians) in their myths about Priapos say that in ancient times the Titanes formed a conspiracy against Osiris [Dionysos Sabazios] and slew him, and then, taking his body and dividing it into equal parts among themselves, the slipped them secretly out of the house, but this organ alone they threw into the river, since no one of them was willing to take it with him. But Isis tracked down the murder of her husband, and after slaying the Titanes and fashioning the several pieces of his body into the shape of a human figure, she gave them to the priests with orders that they pay Osiris the honours of a god, but since the only member she was unable to recover was the organ of sex she commanded them to pay to it the honours of a god and set it up in their temples in an erect position. Now this is the myth about the birth of Priapos [who the author identifies with the Egyptian god Min] and the honours paid to him, as it is given by the ancient Aigyptians."  -Source #3

Priapus, as associated with organic generative bounty, is sometimes depicted holding a “horn of plenty.”  This horn of plenty depiction is probably just a watered down “politically correct” iteration.  Ancient Romans were less prudish: Priapus is more commonly depicted as an ugly dwarfish man, with an absurdly large, comically sized penis.    

Could there be more to the myth of Priapus’s guardianship of borderlands than meets the eye?  Gnomes, and fairies (while we’re at it), are associated with a very different border than that of the physical. 

I’ve been brooding about the connections between different fertility gods and what this all could mean.  I had a dream, during all this research, which I could barely extract to the waking state.  All I remember is that I found a fairy ring, in my dream, and I was extremely excited.

Priapus, Border Guard of the Fairy Rings

This border, less terrestrial and more arcane, is that which exists between waking and sleep, between reality and fantasy.  This is the borderland between reality and surreality; the hypnogogic meditative state.  This is the domain of Priapus.

Christopher Knowles, on The Secret Sun Blog, has been discussing marshes and their connection with the theme of borderlands, in a series of posts titled “Wizards and Walk-ins.”

Interestingly, I once asked a good friend if he had ever seen a “UFO.”  This retired Army Major proceeded to recall a story from his youth: He was out hunting deer in rural New Jersey, when he came upon a “UFO” hovering over a swamp.  What happened next?  He claims he shot at the UFO with his 8mm Mauser rifle and it flew away!

Whether or not he was pulling my leg with this story, I find it interesting that the marsh/swamp component was present in the telling.

Marshes, or rivers which travel below ground (or just caves, themselves) are symbolic of entering a “wood between the worlds,” as CS Lewis called this arena.  In the prequel novel to the Narnia series of books, The Magicians Nephew, CS Lewis describes an in-between realm where different worlds or realities can be entered through little puddles.  In Lewis’ rough draft of The Magicians Nephew, called the Lefay Fragment, the protagonists leave their world by means of a raft, upon an underground flowing stream.

"Lampsacus whose dwellers no triennial festival of Bacchus nor Phrygian madness bids gather in secret caverns, but their own god [Priapos] hales them to Venus [Aphrodite]. High over the city they see his altars and the carvings of his towering shrine."  -Source #3

Significantly, in CS Lewis’ final draft, he chose a ring as the mode of transportation to another world. 

A fairy ring, as depicted above, is a naturally occurring circle of mushrooms.  Is Priapus the guardian spirit of the fairy ring?

So we see this ring motif occurring in the works of JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Ring novels. 
Richard Wagner, nevertheless, is still the original ring lord, with his first opera, Die Fein (The Fairies) and his Der Ring des Nibelungen, his epic Ring Cycle.  Remember, it was Wagner’s music which appears in Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece: 2001, A Space Odyssey.

(And how easily I get sidetracked, the curse of the generalist, reel it in, reel it in!) 

There are diverse opinions of the folkloric meaning of fairy rings, often they are seen as very lucky or very unlucky, sometimes dangerous, or even beneficial.  While the word is out on the portent of finding such a ring, the result of entering one is fairly well agreed upon.  Entering a ring might make you sleepy, and when you try to get out, the fairies won’t let you! 

If you do escape, that may be the least of your problems.  Often, upon returning from fairy land, the traveler realizes that either no time has passed or hundreds of years.  Time dilation or compression is a common facet of a voyage into “fairyland.”  C. S. Lewis’s fairyland was Narnia, and in his “The Lion Witch and Wardrobe” novel, the children live in Narnia 27 years, and yet still make it home for dinner, because hardly any time has passed!

One last quote will do me in on this post.  There are still connections here which I haven’t entirely fleshed out.  Perhaps folklore can still shine some light on the Priapus Myth:

 Ovid, Fasti 6. 319 ff (trans.Boyle) (Roman poetry C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"Should I omit or recount your shame, red Priapus? It is a very playful, tiny tale. Coroneted Cybele [Rhea], with her crow of turrets, invites the eternal gods to her feast. She invites, too, Satyri and Nymphae, Rural-Spirits; Silenus is present, uninvited. It's not allowed and too long to narrate the gods' banquet: night was consumed with much wine. Some blindly stroll shadowy Ida's dells, or lie down and rest their bodies in the soft grass. Others play or are clasped by sleep; or link their arms and thump the green earth in triple quick step. Vesta [Hestia] lies down and takes a quiet, carefree nap, just as she was, her head pillowed by turf. But the red saviour of gardens [Priapos] prowls for Nymphai and goddesses, and wanders back and forth.  He spots Vesta [Hestia]. It's unclear if he thought she was a Nympha or knew it was Vesta. He claims ignorance. He conceives a vile hope and tires to steal upon her, walking on tiptoe, as his heart flutters. By chance old Silenus had left the donkey he came on by a gently burbling stream. The long Hellespont's god was getting started, when it bellowed an untimely bray. The goddess starts up, frightened by the noise. The whole crowd fly to her; the god flees through hostile hands. Lampsacus slays this beast [the donkey] for Priapus, chanting : `We rightly give flames the informant's guts.' You remember, goddess, and necklace it with bread. Work ceases; the idle mills are silent."  -Source #3

 

Sources:

1.  Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology; For Classical Schools, By Charles K Dillaway:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20734/20734-h/20734-h.htm

2.  Hermae, Termini, Pillars and Groves
 http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/ipi/ipi06.htm

3.  The Theoi Project, encyclopedia entry for Priapus: http://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/Priapos.html

4.  Fairy Rings Invade Ohio:  http://cowgarage.com/2011/10/05/fairy-rings-invade-ohio/

5.  Living Energies, by Callum Coates, a review (which I quoted)  can be found at:  http://www.earthpulse.com/src/subcategory.asp?catid=2&subcatid=5

6.  The Shofar  http://www.music.iastate.edu/antiqua/shofar.htm

7.  Wikipedia Bugonia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugonia