FELIX DIES FUNDAMENTORUM ANTINOI! And, Is “Fact” or “Fable” More Important in the Context of Hero/ine Cultus?

[Just to let everyone know:  this is one of the LAST of the questions I currently have on-file for this series.  I can certainly generate more of my own, based on things I’ve been asked or matters about which people–whether those from other religions, fellow polytheists, or whomever-might-be-concerned have asked ne directly, or have raised in their writings or in their demeanor and reactions to polytheist religious phenomena or articulated positions–but it would be great to respond to more of these that are direct from readers who might like or be interested in what I have to say about these matters.  So, by all means, send in further questions, ask them in comments here, use the Contact page/form to get in touch with me, or feel free to e-mail me at aediculaantinoi (at) hotmail (dot) com and i will see what we can do!]

A few hours ago, I finished my Foundation Day ritual for the 18th time.  Sadly, this is one of an increasing number which I spent alone (like about the last three as well), but it was also a great improvement on last year’s because I was actually in my Shrine, and not laid up in a bed with a broken leg in another town, as was the case on this day in 2018.  Foundation Day, amongst other things, is also the day that I formally consecrated my Shrine in my apartment in 2015, so it is a big occasion, both for the historical cultus of Antinous, the modern organized practice (which began in 2002), and for all sorts of other reasons and in a variety of ways…!

It’s also a great occasion to be answering the following question:

What matters more in hero cultus: the stories and beliefs held about a person’s life or the actual history of a person’s life? An example would be Zoroaster.  If our ancestors considered him to be a magician in a lineage that includes Orpheus and Pythagoras, does that matter more than the fact that we know he probably would not have viewed himself that way? 

This is an interesting matter, and there are two ways to think about it, based on which sort of Hero/ine one is dealing with:  the Hero/ines of Greek myth, or the Hero/ines of Greek history.  In the former case, every time a new poet turns their hand to the retelling of a myth, nearly anything can happen, and can then also be influenced by cultic activities in terms of how the Hero/ine’s life is described, or such descriptions can lead to novel cultic practices as well.  This is the case for Achilleus, for Orpheus, for any number of other Hero/ines who had shrines in the Ancient Greek world.

The Hero/ines of Greek history, on the other hand (aren’t you all glad I’m not one of the Hekatoncheires–my explanations of almost all things would of necessity be even longer, then!), enter into a bit of a grey area.  Firstly, are these individuals actual people who really lived, or have their historical origins become so obscured by stories about them that such factual realities have retreated into the background entirely?  Such a situation, I believe, exists for one particular Hero from another religion that is very well-known, and yet too many people speak of the details of his mythic narratives as if they were historical and demonstrable facts when this is most certainly not the case:  namely Jesus the Nazarean.  It is entirely possible, I think, that he never had any earthly existence at all, and there is increasing interest in such a viewpoint amongst certain scholars (who tend not to be involved in the religion he ostensibly “founded”!), and there is nothing at all wrong with that being the case in my view.  Zoroaster is another of these:  some Zoroastrians put his historic origins back to over 10,000 years ago, which is highly unlikely (despite their attempts to claim this), and it seems possible that whatever group of Magi organized the reinterpreted ancient Iranian polytheistic system into the dualist system with which we are all familiar afterwards may have had him more as a legendary founder than as an actual historical personage.  If he was historical, then he is essentially the innovator of the Avestan language, and that is demonstrably later than Sanskrit, which means that he cannot be older than 5,000 years, and in fact is probably more recent even than that.  But, Zoroastrains can believe whatever they want to about him!

As for us polytheists, how do we sort these matters?  Remember, with Hero/ine cultus, the most important thing to remember is always that it is not the actual life of the Hero/ine that matters, but instead their death.  If they were human, they had to have died somehow, and most often that death is remarkable in its circumstances in some way, whether because of its particular manner (e.g. drowning, struck by lightning), its particular contextual circumstances (e.g. the first to die in some incident, dying in a particular sacred location or while something was being constructed, etc.), and so forth.  They may have had a noteworthy life in various ways, and legends and myths can be attached to that, and will tend to be with the greater profile of the Hero/ine concerned, but the most important thing is their death.

This then begs the question:  is the tale of their death factual or exaggerated and made more “heroic” in order to feed the Hero/ine’s further renown?

Let’s take the example of Sappho.  We know some details of her life, her relatives, some of their deeds and so forth, but one of the things about her that is remarkable (apart from her amazing poetic skills!) is that she was said to have leapt off a cliff into the sea, thus meeting her death in a manner that many Greek Hero/ines and occasionally formerly-mortal Deities (e.g. Palaimon/Melikertes and Ino/Leukothea) also did.  Did she actually speak with Orpheus’ head or have his lyre?  Probably not literally, and yet that is as much a part of Sappho’s story as any of the relatively scant historical details we know of her, and it accounts for some of the aspects of the culture of Lesbos as well as the particular strengths of Lesbos’ most famous daughter.

And, since this is me, and it’s Foundation Day (or, at least, it’s still Foundation Night, the seventh of the nine Sacred Nights of Antinous from the 24th of October to November 1st), let’s talk about Antinous!  Like Herakles and the Dioskouroi, as well as Palaimon/Melikertes, He was both a Hero and a God depending on where one encountered His cultus, and He definitely started out as a historical human, so we’re at least on more firm territory, in certain respects, with Him than with many others.

We know the date of His birth, and the most likely place of it, but not the exact circumstances of it.  (It has been argued that because His birthdate on November 28th is given in cult calendars along with the birthdates of Deities like Diana, that therefore we should discount it…but, the calendar of Lanuvium outside of Rome and a calendar on papyrus from Egypt agree on the date, and there is no definite connection between the two locations, so it is pretty certain we know the correct date!)  We also know the rough date of His death, but again, not the precise reasons for it:  only that He drowned in the Nile, no matter what caused that drowning.  About the only other things we know about Him were that he was Hadrian’s lover, and that the two had a lion hunt in the year before He died.  That particular event was of semi-epic proportions, it seems, and inspired a great deal of mythologizing after His death…but, we may well ask, what if it never happened?  What if Pachrates of Heliopolis just made the whole story of the Lion Hunt up, and because Hadrian liked it the details first given form there were proliferated and continued in other later texts and traditions?  What we know for certain is that there were red Nile lotuses in Egypt before Antinous’ time, it’s just that they weren’t particularly identified with any Deities or Hero/ines before the initial writings in Antinous’ cultus in the years immediately after His death.

Where myth is concerned–whether myths about Hero/ines, Deities, Ancestors, or really anyone (!?!)–proliferation is the norm rather than the exception, and so expansions and “exaggerations” and reworkings, revisions, and creative insertions and innovations will come up all the time.  If they didn’t, one would begin to suspect that some artificial force is maintaining a “canonical” check on anything that doesn’t fit with the “approved narrative,” and that’s monotheist nonsense, not something that has ever really flown well or at all amongst polytheists.  (Many Deities require many stories, including stories that actively conflict with or even utterly contradict one another!)

But what about when historical facts can be known in relation to historical human Hero/ines?  Even if there are facts involved, myth is far more powerful, and far more true.  The difference between a fact and a myth may simply be how one interprets the fact:  a tree falls, but was it because of the wind, because someone chopped it down, because a gigantic bull ran into it, because of an earthquake or a flood, or because any of those other things could have happened but a Deity was behind it, or any number of other possibilities?  Take any random fact about your own life, dear reader:  are you interested in architecture because you had a childhood friend of the family who was an architect that used to give you graph paper and old blueprints to look at, or because Seshat would become your patron Deity one day…or both?  And if you are lucky enough to be heroized after your death, what will those who follow your cultus have to say about things?

So, what I suspect is the case more often than not is that fact and fable always blur when it comes to Hero/ine cultus, and even with the sheerest and most materialistic facts, there is the possibility of myth and a mythicizing tendency lurking just under the surface, waiting to spring forth like a geyser if given the chance to spout.  It’s the Liberty Valance effect:  “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.”  Without a doubt, legend is almost always more interesting than facts, and even when the facts are “stranger than fiction,” even putting it in those terms demands that fictionalization be the background against which things are taken seriously.

There’s no escaping it…and, from my perspective, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that!