Dead Kings and Saviour Gods - Euhemerizing Shamanism in Thracian Religion

8/12/2019 Dead Kings and Saviour Gods - Euhemerizing Shamanism in Thracian Religion

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Dead Kings and Saviour Gods:

Euhemerizing Shamanism in Thracian Religion

Dan Attrell


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Sometime during the late 16th

century BC, an Indo-European speaking people known to

both Homer and Hesiod as the Thraciansswept into the regions west of the Black Sea before

merging with the local Neolithic populations already settled therein. As one branch of an ill-

defined agricultural revolution emerging out of Anatolia between 7,800 and 5,800 BC, which

wrapped itself around the Black Sea, Thracian culture developed within the context of an

agriculturalist lifestyle on the frontiers of the Russian steppes.1 We cannot be sure what these

Thracianscalled themselves and it is unlikely that they would have recognized themselves as

members of a larger ethnic identity. They were a society of richly equipped warriors and expert

horsemen, patriarchally stratified among small local chieftainships. These Thracians, like many

other cultures peripheral to the great Bronze Age civilizations, were eventually caught up in the

great migratory churning of peoples and in the power vacuums of their collapse between 1200

and 1000 BC. While the Dorian migrations put an end to the kingdoms of Achaea in the

Peloponnese, the Thracio-Phrygians migrated out of Macedonia, passing through the Hellespont

in order to settle into the lands of the Hittite (whose empire the Phrygians may have ultimately

played a role in collapsing).2 Thanks to the written records of the Iron Age Greeks, who

succeeded the decline of the Mycenaeans, the Thracians at last emerged into the light of recorded

history.3 This newly arrived population established itself as rulers over the scattered agricultural

communities north of Greece and indulged in a fondness for gold well preserved in Homer.4 As

a result of their common ethno-linguistic ancestry and their relationships around the eastern

Black Sea following the great age of Greek colonization in the 6th

and 7th

century BC, Thracian

culture was in a state of constant exchange with their Hellenic cousins. In this paper, I will

attempt to briefly survey the religion of these Thracian migrants and the reception of their cults

and iconography into Greco-Roman religion, both at home and abroad. As we shall see,

Thracian religion was markedly distinct from the Homeric model of Olympian religion, focusing

rather on the divinity of kings, the ecstasy of shaman, the perennial death and rebirth of

1

Gray, Russell; Atkinson, Quentin. Language-Tree Divergence Times Support the Anatolian Theory of Indo-European Origin.Nature426 (2003): 435.2Ivan Venedikov. Thrace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin,New Series35, No. 1 (1977): 75. Thus, for

instance, the Mysians inhabited the lands along the Danube, but were also to be found in north-western Asia Minor;

the Dardanians inhabited the upper reaches of the Vardar, and also gave their name to the inhabitants of Troy in the

Iliad; the Mygdonians are mentioned in Macedonia and also in north-western Asia. References to the passing of the

Thracians known as the Bithynians from the valley of the Struma to the lands south of the Bosphorus are still more

persistent. Finally, there is mention of a later migration of the Trerians and the Cimmerians through Thrace.3Lionel Casson. The Thracians. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series 35, No. 1 (1977): 2.4Homer,Iliad, 10.435.


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vegetation, and, subsequently, the immortality of the soul. Due to the heavily limited nature of

our sources concerning Thracian religion and the inherently fluid character of pre-literate

paganism, I merely wish to provide an overview and commentary of the extant Greco-Roman

material rather than an exhaustive explanation of such a dimly understood religion.

The earliest extant traces of human activity in the region eventually known as Thrace

goes back to Palaeolithic times; by approximately 6000 BC its first settled agricultural

population was tilling its fields. Within two thousand years, the regions inhabitantshad

discovered the abundance of mineral deposits hiding beneath the soil and turned their attention

toward mining and metallurgy. Archaeologists working in central Bulgaria have excavated deep

shafts cut into the earth for the extraction of copper, in addition to a number of copper tools,

weapons, and miscellaneous objects dating back to this remote period of prehistory. As early as

3000 BC, Thraces metalworkers were applying their skills to gold panned from nearby rivers

and fashioning it into plaques and jewellery which were among the first gold objects in Europe.5

The people known to Homer as the Thracians inhabited a vast territory, which stretched from

certain islands in the Aegean Sea to the Carpathian Mountains north of the Danube River.

Extant records of the Thracian language, which cover a period from the 8th

century BC to the

Middle Ages have produced little more than twenty-five words altogether, and it is no doubt

related to the languages spoken in Romania today before the area was occupied by the Romans.6

In north-western Anatolia, the region of Bithynia was also inhabited by Thracians, though Greek

colonization along the coast of Asia Minor would ultimately sever ties between this group and

the Thracians on the European mainland.7 Thanks to this era of large scale colonization which

expanded the borders ofMagna Graecia, the Greeks came into direct contact with the multitudes

of independent Thracian tribes. Thracians first appear in the literary record as the enemies of the

Greeks in the mid-7th

century when conflict arose over the colony of Thasos; earlier still they

achieved a hostile reputation in HomersIliadby siding with the (Phrygian) Trojans.8 It was

from this time onward that historians are able to reconstruct what we know about their culture,history, and religion. It should be stressed that the Thracians were not closely related to their

5 Casson 1977, 2.6 Colin Renfrew, Archaeology & Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1987.7 Venedikov 1977, 77.8 J.P. Mallory,In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth.(London: Thames and Hudson,

1989), 72.


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steppe nomad neighbours to the north and the east of their territories. The Thracians settled in

their homelands as early as the mid-2nd

millennium BC, whereas the Scythians, so well

accounted for in Herodotus as the youngest of all nations,had migrated from the steppes of

Asia much later.9

While the Thracians had doubtless adopted some elements of mounted nomad culture in

their homeland, they equally preserved numerous traditions characteristic of the European

Bronze Age civilizations.10

In line with a tradition stretching back to the earliest Indo-European

agriculturalists, each tribe (or collective of tribes) was headed by a king who retained around

himself an aristocracy of priests and warrior. The apex of Proto-Indo-European society was

ruled by a chief whose title is generally secured by this series: raj(Sanskrit); rex(Latin); rix

(Gaulish); ri(Old Irish) and possibly the ThracianRhesusas well. Emile Benveniste argued that

the fundamental meaning of these words was one who determined what was right, while

Andrew Sihler suggested that the underlying root was to be efficacious or to have mana,

suggesting a leader concerned with social and moral order over sovereign coercive power.11

As

the Thracians had no cities, life was generally organized around raising livestock and farming in

small rural villages centered around fortifications built by these chieftains.12

In the days that

stretched back into myth, in the time of Zalmoxis, Orpheus, Maro and Rhesus, these chieftains

played a dual-role as both temporal rulers and high priests. The roles played by these religious

specialists, however, more closely resembled those of ecstatic shaman rather than the priests of

organized post-agricultural religion. James G. Frazer wrote at length about these types of men:

Kings were revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as intercessors between man and god, but

as themselves gods, able to bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are

commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and are sought, if at all, only by prayer and

sacrifice offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and

sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange as this expectation appears to us, it is

quite of a piece with early modes of thought.13

As history progressed and the memory of these shaman-like kings faded into legend, later

generations re-envisioned these sorts of men in a euhemeristic light: as demigods, immortal

9Herodotus,Histories, 4.5.10Ann E. Farkas. Style and Subject Matter in Native Thracian Art.Metropolitan Museum Journal16 (1981): 33-

34.11Malory 1989, 125.12Venedikov 1977, 76.13James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough. (Leicestershire: Forgotten Books, 1922), 10.


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heroes, and rulers over the land of the dead. The Thracians elevated the accomplished hero to

godhood while the Greeks watched on and recorded the phenomenon. Over the centuries of

contact with Thracian merchants, slaves, and mercenaries, the Greek city-states were flooded

with the peculiar belief systems of these exotic and ecstatic northerners. Rather than

instinctively rejecting the beliefs of these , manyGreeks began adopting and

reconceptualising these views before implementing them into their own religious consciousness.

Above all, it was the religious beliefs of the Thracians which fuelled the curiosity of

Herodotus. It was said of the Trausi from the Rhodopes Mountains that they lamented the birth

of their children and the harsh life ahead whilst welcoming death with laughter and rejoicing

since the deceased individual was now free from sufferings in blissful post-existence.14

When

compared to the rather bleak view of the afterlife inherent in the religion of Iron Age Greece,

Herodotus curiosity should come as no surprise. To explain the vast differences between

Thracian and Greek religion, despite the fact that both parties had been drawn from common

Indo-European stock, one must look back to the Neolithic period. While the Greeks descended

from those Doric agriculturalistswho directly emigrated westward out of the Near East, the

Thracians were descendants of a group which had taken the long route northward, only much

later settling the lands north of the Peloponnese.15

The ancestors of the Greeks living in the

Mediterranean naturally developed within a thoroughly different system than their Thracian

cousins, whose time on the steppe frontiers exposed them to entirely dissimilar religious

archetypes. When the tail end of these two cultures met again during the late 8th

century, the gulf

between their respective religious structures had become vast. Enough similarities remained,

however, to allow for a smooth degree of religious syncretism to occur. With the mass

importation of Thracian slaves and mercenaries into the Greek city-states, the Greeks further

amplified their exposure to the exoticism of Thracian gods and their mystic doctrines.

As the undisputed masters of healing herbs (according to the Greeks), the Thracians were

no strangers to the shamanic techniques of ecstasy well known among other cultures of the

steppe.16

Working from the texts of Posidonius, Strabo reported that the Mysians, a Thracian

group from north-western Anatolia, possessed members of their society called both

14Herodotus,Histories, 5.4.15Mallory 1989, 177.16Mallory 1989, 72.


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(those who fear god) and (those who walk in smoke) who practiced strict

vegetarianism and consumed nothing but honey and dairy products.17

This reference to the

walkers in smokemay allude to the ecstasy achieved by mass cannabis consumption as

reported by Herodotus among the Scythians.18

The 2nd

century Macedonian author Polyaenus

wrote of the Thracian king Kosingas, who was simultaneously ruler over the Cebrenoi and

Sycaiboai and high priest of Hera. When his subjects had become unruly, Kosingas threatened

to climb up a wooden ladder to complain to the goddess about their misconduct.19

As we shall

see, this ritual ascent to the heavens or rupture of planesby means of a wooden axis mundiis

distinctly shamanic and has many well-documented parallels in cultures from Scandinavia to

India. These stairways, posts and ladders played an extensive role in mystery initiations, in

funerary ritual, and in the rites of sacerdotal or royal enthronement.20

The most well-known

symbol for this cosmic ladder among the Thracian religious iconography was the serpent-coiled

Tree of Life, a motif used in connection with shamanic activities: magic, supernatural healing,

and the ascent and descent of the soul via death and intoxication. As the Goddessrepresentative

on Earth, each of these supernatural activities were in the domain of the priest-kingsthe Greek

tales of Thracian heroes only shine light on this fact.

The traditional view of death amongst the Greeks of Homers time was painted in a rather

pessimistic lightas a descent of the soul into Hades in the form of a gibbering shade. The

deceased Achilles laments to Odysseus: O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying.

I would rather follow the plough as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted to him and

not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.21

The Thracians held to a

number of spiritual doctrines that preserved the notion of the souls immortalityand the hope for

a beatific life after death. It was not by coincidence that the so-called Orphic thought which

reformed Dionysian myth and ritual to include a systematized soteriology developed after the

Greeks had established colonies around the Black Sea and began their cultural exchange with the

Thracians. One Orphic bone inscription from Olbia dated to the 5

th

century BC reads forDion(ysos) and Psyche, revealing the importance of a transcendent soul in connection with the

17Strabo, Geography, 7.3.3.18Herodotus,Histories,4.73; Pomponius Mela 2.21 cf. Eliade 1964, 390-391; Eliade 1972, 274.19Polyaenus, Stratagemata,7.22.20 Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1991), 49.21Homer,Odyssey, 11.488-491.


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Greek god of intoxication in Thracian territory.22

Another of these bone inscriptions containing

the words and marked with little 'Z pictograms (which might represent

little orphic serpents) reveals the widespread and consistent nature of Dionysian symbolism

reaching as far north as modern Ukraine.23

In the shamanic mystery initiations as practiced by

the Orphic cults, near-death experiences and the use of dangerous doses of hallucinogenic plants

went hand in hand. Whereas the Divine Bridegroom Sabazios (Dionysus) was primarily the god

who presided over ecstasy and entheogenic intoxication, the Thracians held him in equally high

regard as a dying-and-rising saviour god and a master over the souls of the deceased. Long

before the introduction of alcohol, shaman exploited the ecstatic and oracular properties of

hallucinogenic mushrooms (Amanita muscariaand various types of coprophilic Psilocybin-

containing mushrooms); opium (Papaver somniferum); jimsonweed, horsemad, or thorn

apple (Datura stramonium); mandrake root(Mandragora officinarum); cannabis; deadly

nightshade(Atropa belladonna); and henbane (Hyoscyamus niger). The experience of death and

the ecstatic evacuation of the soul from the body appears commonly in the Thracian funeral

iconography on which is depicted the Tree of Life. To be in a state of that is, to stand

outside the bodywas to experience death itself. It is both a physical and symbolic self-

sacrifice. These states were achieved through extended periods of fasting, dance and drumming,

sleep deprivation, trials and ordeals, isolation and incubation, and the ritual consumption of

consciousness altering substancesall of which were methods that could be, and often were,

used in conjunction to elicit the ecstatic experience. One must keep in mind the endless

recurrence of these shamanic techniques while reading the myths of the Thracian heroes.

It would appear that these heroes were drawn from noble Thracian stock, akin to the

priest-kings and chieftains from myth and legend, each of whom appear to exhibit a curious

number of peculiarly shamanic characteristics. Although the iconography of the Thracian rider

has been ubiquitously labelled as an all-purpose image for a handful of unrelated gods, it appears

more plausible to interpret these works of votive artwork as depictions of euhemerized semi-

divine human intermediaries - the drawn up from varying Thracian tribes. Amongst

the many branches of Indo-European culture, particularly those influenced by the frontier

lifestyle on the edge of the Russian steppe, these priest-kings were ritually given over to a type of

shamanic initiation, a, to ensure the annual fertility of the crops.24

Festivals in

22Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 42.23M. L. West. The Orphics of OlbiaZeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik45 (1982): 18.24James G. Frazer.Adonis Attis Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion. (New York: MacMillan and Co.,

1906), 182-191.


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honour of the Phrygian Goddess were centered on the ritual hanging of her beloved upon a pine

tree. Over time, this ritual was abrogated by hanging the deitys effigy on the tree, as can be

seen in descriptions of the GreekAnthesteriato Dionysus or theDies Sanguinisof Cybele in

Rome. The famous Tree of Life, a widespread Indo-European symbol of shamanic ecstasy and a

map for the cosmos, was derivative of the axis mundionto which priest-kings were hanged and

overcome by ritualized ecstasy. Frazer first noted the parallel between this ritual and the verses

of the ScandinavianHvamlin which Odin describes how he was sacrificed to himself to

acquire his divine powers: I hung on the windy tree for nine whole nights; wounded with the

spear, dedicated to Odin; myself to myself.25

On the steppes, the birch continues to be the tree

of the Uralic shaman, around which she builds her yurt and journeys up and down to the land of

spirits in a state of ritual inebriation.26

In Vedic ritual, sacrificial posts (ypa) were central to the

drohana, the difficult ascent, through which Brahmin raised themselves to the heavens

climbing a tree became a frequent image of spiritual ascent in Indian literature.27

When

combining the shamans axis, the images of the Great Mother, and dedications to such oracular

gods as Apollo, Sabazios or Asclepius, we can conjecture that the icon of the Thracian Horsemanrepresented an archetypal priest-king whose shamanic initiations lead to his immortalization.

The implication for those depicting the rider on their funerary iconography was then to imbue the

memory of the deceased with heroic qualities and the hope for a better life beyond death. Frazer

wrote of these individuals:

As the gods are commonly believed to exhibit themselves in the likeness of men to their worshippers, it is

easy for the magician, with his supposed miraculous powers, to acquire the reputation of being an incarnate

deity. Thus beginning as little more than a simple conjurer, the medicine-man or magician tends to blossom

out into a full-blown god and king in one.28

Among the most famous of these medicine-men in Thrace was the mystic bard Orpheus, thesubterranean initiator Zalmoxis, the warden of divine wine Maro, and the chthonic god-king

Rhesus. I will now give a brief discussion on each in order to highlight the central archetype at

the core of each of these Thracian heroes. We shall see how each of their respective myths

account for their divine lineage; a mortal upbringing; a rise to military or religio-political

prominence; an initiation into ecstatic mysteries or a death; and consequently a positive afterlife

due to the souls immortality.

Most writers of antiquity believed in the historical veracity of Orpheus existence,although his lifetime stretched far back in the dimness of legend. E.R. Dodds held Orpheus to be

a Thracian figure of much the same kind as Zalmoxis a mythical shaman or prototype of

25Frazer 1906: 182-191.26Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), xx.27Eliade 1964, 403-405.28Frazer 1922, 92.


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shamans.29

Orpheus was both noble and semi-divine: he was a prince, the son of the muse

Calliope and the euhemerised king Oeagrus (a Thracian wine-god); in another account, he was

the son of Apolloa god of healing, music and prophecy.30

Pseudo-Apollodorus accredits

Orpheus with the invention of the Dionysian mysteries, a cult of women established around

sacred marriage and entheogenic intoxication.31

Strabo tells us the rites of Orpheus first

originated among the Cotytian and the Bendideian rites practiced among the Thracians. He

adds that these rites resemble the Phrygian rites, and it is at least not unlikely that, just as the

Phrygians themselves were colonists from Thrace, so also their sacred rites were borrowed from

there.32

Orpheus was reputed to have travelled widely, proselytizing the sacred doctrines of the

Goddess and her Divine Bridegroom throughout the lands he wandered. In Aegina, Orpheus is

said to have established the rites of Hekate, whilst in Laconia he introduced the quasi-Eleusinian

rites of Demeter Chthonia, both of which were centered on the erection of a wooden image.33

The shamanic character of Orpheus is well attested among both ancient and modern sources: He

was simultaneously prince, prophet, healer, musician, and guardian of ecstatic mysteries. He

possessed the ability to charm wild beasts and control natural phenomena. He performed a

, descending into the underworld on a spiritual quest to return the soul of his beloved

Eurydice from Hades and Proserpina. Even his head was a source of oracular power, having

been severed by Dionysus Maenads for having embraced solar monotheism at the end of his

life.34

Orpheus decapitated headthen served as an oracle like the skulls of Yukagir shaman, or

the head of Mimir which Odin used to divulge information about other realms in the

Heimskringla andVlusp.35

The importance of Orpheus lay predominantly in rites which he

established which were said to affirm the immortality of the soul. The mysteries of Dionysus, as

embodied in the ostensibly savage rites of the maenads in EuripidesBacchaewere born out of a

long mythico-religious tradition stretching back into Palaeolithic shamanism and orgiastic

goddess worship. It was the Orphic movement based out of Thrace, however, which took this

primarily female fringe cult andbrought it into the fold of the civilized and the masculine, into

29Dodds, 147 cf. Mircea Eliade and Willard R. Trask. Zalmoxis.History of Religions11, Vol. 3 (1972): 268.30Kathleen Freeman. The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 1-2; Pindar, Fragment 126.9.31Pseudo-Apollodorus,Library and Epitome, 1.3.2.32Strabo, Geography, 10.3.15.33Pausanias,Description of Greece, 2.30.1; 3.14.1; 3.20.1.34William Keith Chambers Guthrie. Orpheus and Greek Religion: a Study of the Orphic Movement. (Princeton:

Princeton University Press: 1993.)35Eliade 1964: 307-8; Eliade, 1972, 268.


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Greek philosophy. In Orpheus we have the embodiment of the Thracian heroic ideala noble

priest-king skilled in magical arts and a founder of an ecstatic gods sacred rites the model

candidate for immortality.

Next to Orpheus, Zalmoxis is the most well attested shamanic hero figure within our

picture of Thracian religion. William Guthrie believed that in Zalmoxis could be found the Getic

cognate of Dionysus, a god indicative of a uniquely Thracian ecstatic religion. In accordance

with the story left by Herodotus, however, it appears that if Zalmoxis did ever achieve godhood,

he was probably a man before being euhemerized as a god by his countrymen. Had his origins

been divine, Diogenes Laertius would not likely have placed him alongside the Persian Magi, the

Gymnosophists of India, or the Druids among the Celts and Gauls.36

These historically attested

groups were each the respective mystics and ecstatics of their culture, they possessed special

knowledge concerning the immortality of the soul and often served among the ranks of

prominent men. In Platos Charmides, written about thirty years after Herodotus, Socrates

mentions one of the physicians of the Thracian king Zalmoxis who are said to be able even to

confer immortality.37

To get a better understanding of Zalmoxis the man or king, we must turn

to Herodotus. Herodotus reports that the Greeks who lived beside the Hellespont and Pontus told

him that the man Zalmoxis was once slave of Pythagoras. After being freed and achieving great

fortune, he returned to Thrace. Herodotus writes:

Now the Thracians were a meanly-living and simple-witted folk, but this Zalmoxis knew Ionian usages and

a fuller way of life than the Thracians; for he had consorted with Greeks, and moreover with one of the

greatest Greek teachers, Pythagoras; wherefore he made himself a hall, where he entertained and feasted

the chief among his countrymen, and taught them that neither he nor his guests nor any of their descendants

should ever die, but that they should go to a place where they would live for ever and have all good things.

While he was doing as I have said and teaching this doctrine, he was all the while making him an

underground chamber. When this was finished, he vanished from the sight of the Thracians, and descended

into the underground chamber, where he lived for three years, the Thracians wishing him back and

mourning him for dead; then in the fourth year he appeared to the Thracians, and thus they came to believe

what Zalmoxis had told them. Such is the Greek story about him. For myself, I neither disbelieve nor fully

believe the tale about Zalmoxis and his underground chamber; but I think that he lived many years before

Pythagoras; and whether there was a man called Salmoxis, or this be the name among the Getae for a god

of their country, I have done with him.38

36Diogenes Laertius,Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 1.1.37Plato, Charmides, 156d.38Herodotus,Histories, 4.95-96.


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Having possession of supernatural wisdom, Zalmoxis gained wealth, political prestige, and a cult

following from among the most powerful of his countrymen. Through what we are told about

Zalmoxis underground chamber and his Pythagorean views on immortality, it may be

conjectured that his Thracian cult followed some sort of mystery initiation model. Mircea Eliade

believed that it was for this reason that Herodotus, whose discretion in divulging mysteries is

well attested, hesitated to give more details concerning the god of the Getae.39 If Zalmoxis was

indeed the founder of an initiatory circle, it does not imply that he must have been a chthonic god

as some have proposed. The occultation and epiphany of semi-divine beings, priest-kings and

messianic prophets is a ritual and mythical archetype frequently found in Europe and Asia Minor

and the descent into the underworld is a widely used shamanic metaphor for initiatory death

before transitioning into a new mode of being.40

The Greek necromanteia, such as the one built

beneath a funerary temple at the 7th

century colony of Orgame, was comprised of a similar

underground chamber into which ecstatics or oracles descended for necromantic occultation.

The idea of sending off a mediator in sacrifice to speak to the gods seems to have been prevalent

in Thracian religion. There is one custom recorded of the Getai from the Lower Danube thataffirms the eventual apotheosis of Zalmoxis out among the northern Thracians. Herodotus gives

us this description:

Every five years they choose by lot one among them, whom they send as an emissary to Zalmoxis to tell

him of their needs at the moment. They send him thus: several of them, selected to this end, hold three

spears; others seize the messenger by the arms and legs, rock him in the air and cast him onto the spears. If

he dies, they believe that the god is favourable to them; if he does not die, they say that he is an evil man,

casting the blame on the messenger. After which they send another man!41

When Herodotus two accounts areseen side by side, they confirm a continuity with the

archetype earlier mentioned by Frazer, wherein the shaman comes to kingship and then ascendsto immortality or godhood. To the Greek mind, Zalmoxis was but another figure modelled after

the mythical trope of the Thracian.

Though Zalmoxis and Orpheus were the most famous quasi-historical figures in Greek

tradition fitting the shamanicarchetype, they were by no means the only two.

Maro, the eponymous founder of Thracian Maroneia, was the semi-divine grandson of Ariadne

and Dionysus who lived around the time of the Trojan War. Homer, through the words of

Odysseus, tells us he was also a priest of Apollo at Ismarus on the Aegean coast of Thrace:

With me I had a goat-skin of the dark, sweet wine, which Maro, son of Euanthes, had given me, the priest

of Apollo, the god who used to watch over Ismarus. And he had given it me because we had protected him

39Eliade 1972, 259.40Eliade 1972, 262.41

Herodotus, Histories, 4.94.


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with his child and wife out of reverence; for he dwelt in a wooded grove of Phoebus Apollo. And he gave

me splendid gifts: of well-wrought gold he gave me seven talents, and he gave me a mixing-bowl all of

silver; and besides these, wine, wherewith he filled twelve jars in all, wine sweet and unmixed, a drink

divine.42

These lines are presented with a number of recurring Greek themes concerning Thracian nobility.

Maro is both high priest and very wealthy; he traces his immediate ancestry back to a god (the

god of intoxication, no less); he dwells in a forest grove sacred to an oracular god; and he

displayed a fondness for divine wines. The Greeks as early as Homer defined Thracians

according to their equestrian prowess, their savagery, their love of gold, and their curious beliefs

concerning the immortality of soul brought on by shamanic initiation. Rhesus, a Thracian king

who appears in the Iliad and a tragedy attributed to Euripides, exhibits many of the archetypes

that defined the ideal Thracian king as well. In Euripides tragedy, a messenger proclaims to

Hector: I see Rhesus mounted like a god upon his Thracian chariot. Of gold was the yoke that

linked the necks of his steeds whiter than the snow; and on his shoulders flashed his targe with

figures welded in gold43

He was the son of a river-god and a muse and during his life he

exhibited godlike skills in war. He possessed a passion for gold, horses and the mystery rites

imparted by Orpheus, the prophet of Bacchus. Upon his death, Rhesus did not descend into

Hades to a life of bleak wandering and forgetfulness but rather to achieve some sort of chthonic

godhood. The Thracian kings mother, an unnamed muse, declares that:

He shall not descend into earth's darksome soil; so earnest a prayer will I address to the bride of the nether

world, the daughter of the goddess Demeter, giver of increase, to release his soul, and debtor, as she is to

me, show that she honours the friends of Orpheus. Yet from henceforth will he be to me as one dead that

seeth not the light; for never again will he meet me or see his mother's face, but will lurk hidden in a cavern

of the land with veins of silver, restored to life, no longer man but god, even as the prophet of Bacchus did

dwell in a grotto beneath Pangaeus, a god whom his votaries honoured.44

It is now apparent that the Thracians, or at least the Greek conceptualization of the Thracians,

were convinced in the immortality of their fallen heroes, particularly those who imparted some

sort of shamanic, Orphic or Pythagorean initiation. Contact with these Thracian hero cults may

then have played an undervalued role in priming the Greek world for the development of

Hellenistic and Roman ruler cults; mystical philosophies; soteriological mystery cults; and the

belief in a better life after death for the praiseworthy initiate. This view allows for a much better

42Homer, Odyssey, 9.193-230.43Euripides,Rhesus, 307 ff.44Euripides,Rhesus, 962 ff.


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interpretation of the funerary and votive monuments featuring the Thracian Horseman from

Roman and Hellenistic periods.

The Thracian Horseman is a term that came to denote the figure depicted on a large

number of Thracian funerary and votive reliefs (stone slabs 30-40 cm wide and 20-30 cm high).

The figure depicted on these reliefs was dubbed Thracian because over 2,000 reliefs have been

published from at least 350 sites characterized by a Thracian presence. Our earliest extant

depictions are Hellenistic, but most reliefs date to the Roman period. The most popular scene

(though not the only one) depicts the Horseman turned to the right, facing the Mother Goddess

and a burning altar, which sits beneath a tree coiled by a serpent. Although the identity of the

Horseman is unknown, many of the reliefs are accompanied by inscriptions. Among the votive

inscriptions, an overwhelming variety of names and epithets were used: , ,

, , Apollo, Hades, Asklepios, Hephaistos, Sabazius, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus,

Silvanus, and the Dioskouroi...45

(lord) and (hero) are most often applied. As

more and more of these reliefs were being recovered and analyzed, a hypothesis developed

among scholars which established the Horseman as an amalgaman all-purpose divinitythe

end result of mass religious syncretism which combined the aspects of nearly every Greco-

Roman, Thracio-Phrygian and Near Eastern divinity. Though the process of identification

between two or more gods from various cultures was a hallmark of ancient religion, there is no

reason to believe so many gods with hardly comparable cults and characteristics could have so

easily fused together as a result of common syncretism.46

The iconographys strong consistency

in symbolism featuring images of the hunt or confrontations with the Goddess suggest a mortal

source for this Horseman. He was the splintered reinterpretation of a single entity, or perhaps a

single class of people, whose origins are now obscured. His religious importance is denoted by

his connection to the Goddess and the Tree of Life or a wooden ladder as in the story of the

priest-king Kosingas. His worldly nobility is indicated by the image of the horse, a symbol of

general superior status among the Thracians and Indo-Europeans in general. I propose,therefore, that the Horseman represents the archetypal Thracian priest-king of the type which

was deified among men for their shamanic role in the rites of the Mother Goddess, the fertility

45 Nora Dimitrova Inscriptions and Iconography in the Monuments of the Thracian Rider. Hesperia 71, No. 2(2002): 210.46Dimitrova 2002, 211.


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rite of sacred marriage. To carve this motif into the funeral monument of an individual was to

associate him with the soul of the departed hero-kings and their ties to the supernatural.

We have seen, then, some glimpse of what occurred when two branches of Indo-

European migrants came into contact after thousands of years of separation. One branch had

settled down early, adopting the life of fishing, viticulture, oil production and trade while

developing vast differences from their northern cousins who endured the frontiers of the nomad-

populated steppes. Where the Greeks concerned themselves with the glory or of this life,

the Thracians looked toward the blessedness of the afterlife, a world which the Thracians

believed some individuals such as Rhesus, Zalmoxis and Orpheus could actually rupture into

whilst still alive. Much of what we know concerning Greek religion is concerned with a

relatively civic context designed to strengthen social cohesion, while Thracian religion remained

more concerned with the spiritual revelations of the ecstatic and the experiential. Their

relationships with shamanism and intoxication differed greatly: to the Greeks Dionysus was

always the exotic foreigner, but among the Thracians the Divine Bridegroom and his goddess

were among the highest gods. Their representatives on earththe priest-kings, shaman, bards,

and mysticswere believed by the Greeks to be the most highly revered in Thracian society, as

they possessed some mystic gnosis uncovered by ecstatic revelation. This cast of mythic hero

lords() eventually solidified themselves into Hellenic consciousness and their

foreign rites endured well into the cultic landscape of the Roman Empire in clandestine cells of

mystery initiates or funerary societies.


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Documents

Dead Kings and Saviour Gods - Euhemerizing Shamanism in Thracian Religion