The gate of the year

The Thesmophoria

Clay statuettes of the goddesses Athena, Demeter and Persephone, dating to the V century B.C., now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA.
In Autumn, in the month of Pyanepsiòn (October-November), were celebrated the Thesmophoria, a feast for women to which participated all married women of free condition. The ceremony, who was held during the period devoted to the ploughing and sowing of the fields, was dedicated to Demeter and her daughter Persephone. The former was worshiped in her quality of goddess of the fertility of the earth and of women, but also in her role as founder of agriculture and of the social norms; the latter as the wife of the ruler of the World of the Dead, who came back on earth at the moment of the agricultural works, personifying the vegetation cycle. Persephone, in fact, spent one third of the year in the World of the Dead and two thirds in the company of her mother, Demeter. The ritual included a period of removal of the women, who went to the sacred grove of Demeter Thesmophoros, where for three days, through purification practices, fasts, obscene jokes, eating pomegranates and a form of ritual flagellation, propitiated fertility. Furthermore, they sacrificed some piglets, which were thrown in deep pits in the earth (mégara), together with wheat cakes in the shape of serpents or male genitals. In this occasion, the women invoked Demeter under the rather unusual epithet of Kalligéneia (“Bearer of a fair offspring”). The decayed remains of the previous year’s offerings were brought out by some women and put on altars. It was believed that, if the farmer had mixed a portion of these remains with his seed of wheat, he should have harvested a particularly abundant crop. The term itself with which the feast was designated, Thesmophoria, meant “Bringing of the deposits” (West 2005).

[Immagine: http://library.artstor.org/library/]




Seasonal Cycles

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The Thesmophoria Clay statuettes of the goddesses Athena, Demeter and Persephone, dating to the V century B.C., now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA. In Autumn, in the month of Pyanepsiòn (October-November), were celebrated the Thesmophoria, a feast for women to which participated all married women of free condition. The ceremony, who was held during the period devoted to the ploughing and sowing of the fields, was dedicated to Demeter and her daughter Persephone. The former was worshiped in her quality of goddess of the fertility of the earth and of women, but also in her role as founder of agriculture and of the social norms; the latter as the wife of the ruler of the World of the Dead, who came back on earth at the moment of the agricultural works, personifying the vegetation cycle. Persephone, in fact, spent one third of the year in the World of the Dead and two thirds in the company of her mother, Demeter. The ritual included a period of removal of the women, who went to the sacred grove of Demeter Thesmophoros, where for three days, through purification practices, fasts, obscene jokes, eating pomegranates and a form of ritual flagellation, propitiated fertility. Furthermore, they sacrificed some piglets, which were thrown in deep pits in the earth (mégara), together with wheat cakes in the shape of serpents or male genitals. In this occasion, the women invoked Demeter under the rather unusual epithet of Kalligéneia (“Bearer of a fair offspring”). The decayed remains of the previous year’s offerings were brought out by some women and put on altars. It was believed that, if the farmer had mixed a portion of these remains with his seed of wheat, he should have harvested a particularly abundant crop. The term itself with which the feast was designated, Thesmophoria, meant “Bringing of the deposits” (West 2005). [Immagine: http://library.artstor.org/library/]