Persephone's Rooster: Greek Women's Magic Part 3/5
The secret magic symbols in Greek folk embroidery and wedding art
Welcome to Part 3 of the Greek Women’s Magic series, where I explore the hidden magical symbolism in Greek folk embroidery. Part 1 provided sociocultural context; Part 2 explored the botanical symbolism. In this instalment I focus on two powerful birds recurring in the embroidery and carvings: the two-headed eagle and the rooster. Part 4 deals with the remaining mythical beasts found as recurring symbols; Part 5 ties the threads of this symbolic narrative together, and traces continuities in these traditions through the centuries.
The Double-headed Eagle
See the images in Part 2 for the women’s wedding jackets embroidered with the two-headed eagle; it also figures on various samples of embroidery.
A popular myth has it that the double-headed eagle was a symbol of Zeus. He had sent two eagles out to find the centre of the world; one flew east, the other west, and their paths crossed in Delphi, where the Omphalos was thereafter set.
Although this myth is widely repeated, even by the Greek Ministry of Culture, I can find no classical source for it, and I suspect it may be either Graeco-Egyptian, Roman, or even later. (If any readers have a definite source, I will be very grateful for the insight!)
Nevertheless, the lone eagle is indeed a symbol of Zeus, along with his thunderbolt, and two-headed eagles were occasionally in evidence in Ancient Greece, as in Middle Eastern cultures, especially in Persian and Armenian art until the 10th century CE. In the Helladic peninsula, it is as a symbol of Rome and Byzantium that the two-headed eagle comes into its own.
The single eagle with closed wings remained an imperial Byzantine symbol in variations on the naval flag in combination with Christian symbols, which became the basis for the modern Greek flag. In the Byzantine context, the double-headed eagle was found on the heraldic crests of powerful families or specific provinces.
It was not adopted as an imperial emblem until the reign of emperor Isaac Komnenos (r. 1057-1059), who was apparently inspired by a Paphlagonian myth of a giant two-headed eagle large enough to carry away a full grown bull. The personification of strength, it was often called upon in prayer (N. Zafeiriou, The Greek Flag from antiquity to today, 1947, 21-2).
The double-headed eagle motif was established as the emblem of the Palaiologos dynasty; the longest-lived and the last to rule the Byzantine Empire (1259-1453).
Following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, variations on the symbol were taken up by many other empires. However, the crowned Palaiologos version as well as the ecclesiastic version survived, becoming a repository of memory and identity throughout the Turkish occupation. While the flag flies, the City may have fallen, but Byzantium lives on.
Visitors to Modern Greece are sometimes surprised to see bunting lining various neighbourhoods bearing the Byzantine emblem: this is the custom on religious feast days, the golden flag with the double headed eagle signifying the living spirit of Byzantium within the Orthodox Church.
Though this background may seem tangential, the weight of collective narratives Constantinople, its fall, and its significance to modern Greeks must not be underestimated. After the Ottoman conquest, many noble families fled Constantinople for safer shores, many to the Greek islands, others further West, bringing with them the scholarship that would fuel the Renaissance.
Still others settled in their new island homes. The two-headed eagle is found on nuptial embroidery from many Greek regions, suggesting just how widespread the symbolism and memory had been imprinted.
Corfu welcomed a large number of such families, and with them, their symbols, scholarship, and memories of Byzantine glory. My mother’s paternal ancestors were one such family, originally from Constantinople, who settled in Corfu and became landowners under the protection of La Serenissima. A further wave followed from Crete in 1669.
Over time only the symbols remained, a reminder, a proud statement of identity in a safe haven, and perhaps, echoing its first adopter, Isaac Comnenos, a prayer for strength and the lost City.
A powerful apotropaic symbol with the weight of Church and Empire, it is ideal for ‘watching the back’ of a young bride. Its use on a garment to be worn for life, proudly displayed, and faithfully reproduced from one generation to the next, would ensure its ongoing imprint in the collective memory even when its other associations had waned. This is the path of many such survivals; their deep meanings for inclusion in the composition buried in the past, yet their use assiduously passed down the generations.
Roosters
Roosters possess symbolic significance across many cultures. In the Greek context they bear specific culture- and context-specific meanings.
Known as ἀλεκτρύων - ἀλέκτωρ from the verb ἀλέγω, meaning ‘to send away, to repulse,’ thus named as the harbinger of dawn and expeller of night (and night terrors), whence its folk name, ὀρθροβόας (he who calls in the dawn).
Pindar (Olympian Odes, 7.24) and Diodoros Sikeliotes (5.55-56) speak of the daughter of Helios, Ηλεκτρυώνην (Attic Greek, whence Ηλέκτρα and ήλεκτρον) or Αλεκτρώνα (Doric Greek) which gives us the name of the rooster. According to the myth, she was a pre-Olympian goddess of the sunrise, worshipped in Samothrace and Rhodes. We will explore more solar symbolism in the embroidery in Part 4.
Lucian of Samosata gives us the story of Αλεκτρύων, the young friend of the war-god Ares, charged with standing watch as Ares and Aphrodite met for illicit trysts. One night he fell asleep. Helios rose over the couple and promptly notified the cuckolded Hephaestus. Furious at Alektryon, Ares transformed him into a rooster, and ever since, he sleeplessly crows in the dawn.
Lastly, Pausanias (2.25.9) gives us Ηλεκτρύων, king of Tiryns and Mycenae, son of Perseus and Andromeda, father of Alkmini and grandfather of Hercules, whence Alkmini (from αλκή+μένος= powerful rage) acquired the patronymic Electryone/Alectryone.
The rooster’s earliest use as an apotropaic symbol and mythical hybrid creature comes in the form of an archaic winged horse-rooster known as ἱππαλεκτρυών [hippalektryon], first found on a wine-skin dating from the 9th century BCE (W.G. Arnott: Birds in the ancient world from A to Z Routledge, 2007, 102-3).
Its depiction on ceramics became commonplace in the 6th-5th centuries BCE, and it makes appearances in Aeschylian and Aristophanean dramas. In Aristophanes (Ornithes), the creature is painted on shields as a clear apotropaic symbol. Though Pegasus and later Bellerophon became the steeds of choice in classical art, the forgotten hippalectryon highlights the symbolic significance attached to the rooster hybrid.
Myths aside, roosters were already significant sacrificial offerings in antiquity (most famously in Socrate’s deathbed instruction (Plato, Phaedo 117a–118a), asking his disciple Kriton to remember to sacrifice a rooster to Asclepius in thanks for curing him of life). A number of similar accounts are extant.
In the case of sacrifices to Asclepius in supplication or in thanks, some scholars suggest an interpretation whereby the preliminary sacrifice prior to incubation is intended to bring a moment of clarity or revelation upon awakening; the purifying dawn called in by the rooster is gifted to the supplicant.
Laying foundations
In folk contexts the rooster retains this role throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Upon the laying of foundations for a home, bridge, or other large construction, first a priest would be called to bless the location and sprinkle it with holy water, then a rooster would be sacrificed on the cornerstone (sometimes all four of them). This practice was ubiquitous across Greece, and is well attested in Byzantine and later sources.
Believed to be a substitute for the human pharmakos (the sacrificial scapegoat of antiquity), the rooster was sacrificed to purge the location of impurity, and its soul would be bound to the place as a household/bridge protector in the form of a ghost. In common parlance, stonemasons spoke of “fixing” or “establishing” the haunting of a bridge. The spirit of the sacrificed being ensured it would hold up against the river.
Sometimes, the rooster- substitute was not enough, and then the builders would turn to human sacrifice. (See the original folk tales elsewhere on this site for documentation of many such examples as told by locals across Greece in the 19th century; dozens more exist. These have their roots in actual events; they are not just tall tales, as excavation and historical documentation has demonstrated).
Archaeological and textual evidence reveals that the sacrifice of a known innocent; either a ‘noble animal’ or a cherished human (often the master mason’s wife), known as the θεμελίωση (laying the foundation) or στοιχείωση “haunting,” or στοιχειοθεμελίωση (haunting the foundation), was believed to confer supernatural powers on the sacrificial victim who thereafter would guard the structure. (N. Politis, Demotic folk songs, p. 155). In Ancient Greece the sacrificial victim was honoured and worshipped as “the fortune of the city;” in some regions they were replaced with a statue, in others animals were used.
Human sacrifice is attested in excavations and texts in pre-Homeric times, classical antiquity and throughout the Byzantine period (Suda 488; Δ. Β. Οικονομίδου, Η Θυσία εις Οικοδομήματα, «Επετηρίς Εταιρείας Βυζαντινών Σπουδών», τόμος ΜΕ, Αθήναι 1981-82, 56), as late as 1871 according to Politis and Oikonomidis op.cit. 52). As for roosters, one eyewitness recently told me of a rooster being sacrificed when laying foundations for a house destroyed in the 1981 earthquake: the owner - an urban, educated Athenian in his 50s at the time - stated that it was needed to “make the evil go away.” Another confirmed accounts that it still occurs into the present day. Similar accounts are still commonplace.
An alternative explanation offered by some scholars regarding the ancient practice suggests that the sacrifice was meant to placate the spirits of the waters for the intrusion on their domain. In Byzantine times the “fixing of the haunt” with an animal or human sacrifice was commonplace (attested in many sources) in many parts of the Helladic region. The need to expiate “the waters” specifically remains a strong impulse in Modern Greece, attested by the public ritual at every body of water performed at Epiphany (see photo caption in the last photo in this article for more on this - a relevant article will be published at the appropriate time of year).
Echoes
There are widely known folk songs and even children’s songs (one of which I grew up singing with my classmates) telling of the need for a sacrificial victim to “save the many” (this time in a naval context: a victim is selected by lot to save the crew). Again this reflects the collectivist nature of Greek society discussed in Part 1, even if it was (fortunately) little more than a throwback by the time schoolchildren were singing it as we skipped along in the 1980s.
Beyond the ancient belief in the expiatory sacrificial victim as a “magical dose” of protective medicine; there are two further threads to consider. Firstly, the sacrifice of an innocent was believed to confer heroic status and by extension bestow the attributes of a daemon or a demigod. Tied to the structure by the ritual, their powers are limited, but their forced loyalty assured (Oikonomidis 56).
As we cross into the Christian era, this conferral of powers is consolidated through the precedent of martyrdom and sainthood: they are sacrificed in the context of a purification ritual for the common good. Harsh perhaps, difficult for the modern mind to conceive; yet in a harsh world where the social fabric and cultural identity was under threat by hostile occupiers, the sacrifice of the one might ensure the survival of the collective (see Part 1 on the sociocultural context).
It has also been suggested that this practice reflects or parallels the ancient worship of the serpentiform household genius loci, the οἰκουρός όφις (house-guarding snake), the form assumed by Ζευς Κτήσιος (he of material creation) and Ζευς Έρκειος (of fences), among the most common household deities in ancient homes. Offerings to Zeus Ktisios were in the form of shared goods and nourishment; according to Homer, Zeus Erkeios required a portion of ox-meat. The tradition of serpentine protectors persisted into the 20th century and is still the topic of well known folk songs and stories. More on this in future offerings. (Ρωμαίος Κ., «Το φίδι του σπιτιού. Νεοελληνικές επιβιώσεις της λατρείας του οικουρού όφεως», Λαβύρινθος 1 (1973–1974), σ. 50–64. [Romaios K., “The house-snake: Neohellenic survivals of the worship of the house-guardian snake.”) Also Oikonomidis 59.
Rooster as pharmakos?
We have not travelled as far from our humble embroidered or carved rooster on wedding linen and dowry chests as it might seem. Roosters were also sacrificed on the threshold of matrimonial homes on the wedding night before the bride entered, and when she did, its blood was splashed on her shoe to ensure her protection. (Poppy Zora, “Symbolic and semiotic approaches to Greek folk art,” Folklore 1990-1992). Today this has been replaced by a glass to be shattered on the threshold, which the bride triumphantly steps over - signifying that she will overcome the hardships of married life.
The sources converge on its core characteristics as a solar animal with the power to take on chthonic forces and summon the light, functioning as a protective daemon whether through its own power or through sacrificial binding, blooding, and cleansing. Its association with Persephone as depicted in the Locris pinakes (see Part 2) now seems obvious, given her own sacrifice and dual relationship with the chthonic world of Hades and the fertile lands ruled by her mother.
It certainly cannot be claimed that the medieval and early modern practices directly reflect survivals of ancient ones. This is not for want of trying though; efforts to deliberately promote continuity within Greek culture especially when threatened with cataclysmic change has been closely studied among the Greeks uprooted from Asia Minor during the forced population exchange; and the historical evidence demonstrates similar practices within the Helladic geographical space long before the 19th and 20th centuries. Though some scholars have written derogatively about the continuity arguments as products of Romanticism and nationalism, they appear to be overlooking the numerous times that continuities and archaising impulses have been deliberately used and promoted within periods of upheaval throughout the two millennia between the Hellenistic age and our time. These are recorded in repeated linguistic turns (and well researched in Byzantine studies), as well as in studies of the centuries following the fall of Constantinople.
Yet rather than speaking of continuities, it is preferable to speak of these symbols and ritual praxes as “living monuments,” a term coined within Greek folklore studies. It reflects their nature as living repositories of memory, whereby their form and mythoi adapt to the needs of the day. They are elements of ‘a continual narrative process’ responding to a sense of nostalgia as defined here (Hirschon 222; Boym 2001), aiming to recreate different places and times through the imagination and the use of ‘material embodiments of memory.’ (Hirschon 223). They acquire new accretions when circumstances call for them, but the core remains intelligible.
The assiduous practice of these rituals and use of the symbols suggests they maintained their significance regardless of modifications. The sacrificial practices at the laying of foundations are well-documented, as is the underlying magical, animist thinking underpinning Orthodox Christianity whereby the sacred ‘interpenetrates daily social life’, also well-documented in a variety of studies (Hirschon 2018 after Ware 1993; Hirschon 1998; 2009; Prodromou 1998).
In Part 2 we also saw the protective purpose of the cypress tree, the metaphor of building a new structure in the form of the new household and couple to be protected: innovation is necessary for regeneration, but it is encircled and protected by the narrative elements that make it familiar. We have the pairing of life-affirming and chthonic associations in all the symbols examined thus far, all of which survived the transition to Christianity through scriptural references and practices (the rooster features in Scripture as a harbinger of day, bane of darkness, and revealer of truth, as well as a sacrifice and a symbol of Christ himself). Therefore, it is no great leap to perceive the rooster as a protective daemon, a symbol of a new dawn (literally, through the transition of marriage, from girl to woman), a sacrificial expiation, and a bringer of light.
Young Greek girls embroidering their wedding trousseaus may have known little of the preceding history of these symbols; though they would certainly have recognised the two headed eagle as the Byzantine imperial emblem, and the rooster as a protective symbol. Likewise the men carving their dowry chests and matrimonial beds.
What they would also have known beyond a doubt, just like the stonemasons and villagers singing their stories, was that they had to use these symbols and maintain the ritual practices, or the foundations would not hold. More aptly, there was no reason to change them, but every reason to ensure the transmission of “their reality” through them, and the unwritten codes that ensured this rarely changed (Merakles, Greek Folklore, remarking on folk art).
Does this constitute a survival? Let us reconsider what it means to say that the foundations would not hold, for it is no mere superstition. Use of this symbolism reflected a cultural awareness, a communal identity, and silent language whose use constituted a synthema; a sacred password that reflected belonging, membership in the community, shared beliefs and values, and this transition to married life constituted a social acknowledgement of that membership. Partaking in it was part of the initiation into the community carrying these sacred memories.
The aesthetic expression and prioritisation of certain symbols adapted and evolved along with society - not, however, the symbols themselves. Their nature as living monuments represents enduring values important to the living (not historical) community: a well-knit community, a happy life, fertile land, etc (Vrella 21): all necessities for survival. It also demonstrates the endurance of the animistic worldview.
In a collective society, then, where kinship and family units were greater than the individual, the foundation could not hold without these declarations of belonging and conformity to the mores of the community.
This has changed within the 20th century, and this gradual change is reflected in the paradigm shift experienced by Greeks of today; this is not true however, for their recent ancestors for whom it remains within living memory and lived experience.
Love and death
Roosters were regularly sacrificed for construction: this symbolism remained current through the late antique, medieval, and early modern period. As we saw in Part 2, cypresses were ubiquitous as cemetery borders; their connotation of linking heaven and earth widespread among Christian communities, their sombre nature reflected in Orthodox iconography. Flowers are almost universal as bridal accessories and decorative motifs, but what of their association with chthonic Persephone as explored in Part 2?
Let us not forget that Greek marriages, ancient, early modern, and sometimes contemporary too, consciously or unconsciously, are not necessarily love matches - if anything, these were discouraged. They are social contracts first (Hirschon 1985), even if that contract is limited to the immediate families. Persephone’s abduction and subsequent balancing act between life with her husband and her mother is a very real reflection of the life of a new bride.
One might say this is universal: in the Greek cultural awareness it is formally ritualised. Love is desired and perhaps prayed for (pace Aphrodite), but not crucial; acceptance of the inevitable transition is, reflected in the vessel (womb, the bride herself) and tree of life springing forth from it. The bride is a link in a chain; like generations of women before her, she must play her part in preserving and transmitting collective memory and regeneration. For their community, she is the pharmakos (and so is the man).
There is one final dimension to consider. The bride experiences the sacrifice of her maidenhood - both in the sense of childhood (reflected in the ball offered to Persephone) and literally, as reflected in the ritual. But she also undergoes a deification of her own.
Like Persephone, she becomes a queen in her own right, for marriage and motherhood confer on her a sacred dimension in the form of a new, supremely powerful role in her community. Mothers are sacred in the Greek worldview; the greatest possible taboo is to disrespect them.
In the Christian era, Panagia (the Madonna), “Mother of God; Mother of all” is the most beloved and respected of divinities in Greek households, having replaced Hestia as the protector of the hearth (the Bottomless Chalice; Queen of Heaven); Hera as protectress of women and childbirth (Panagia Eleoussa, the Merciful; Agia Lechousa, Holy protector of childbirth [local to Serres]); Athena as divine warrioress (The Leader in Battle; She of the Seven Swords; The Terrible Protector); Demeter as patron of the harvest (Poly- / Meso- / Apo-sporitissa; The Bottomless Chalice); and, Persephone (Panagia of pain; Queen of Heaven), as the woman who is impregnated against her will and called on to offer the ultimate sacrifice.
A separate study will explore the evidence for these syncretic parallels: they are not based on similarity alone. When Justinian (r. 527-565) ordered all pagan temples to be consecrated as Christian churches, to avoid civil unrest the reconsecration and rituals closely reflected the previous deity and their attributes. The Orthodox liturgy features powerful theurgic rituals directed at both icons (replacing statues), and the faithful themselves. This will be tackled in detail in future articles, but the key point is that many of the older practices survive in full, under new names.
Clockwise from top: Panagia Dolorosa (of pain, or of Charon); Panagia Queen of Heaven; The Leader in Battle; Panagia of the Seven Swords; The Merciful; The Terrible Protectress; The never-emptying cup. Panagia has over 500 epithets in local and Pan-Orthodox tradition.
It may be tempting at this point to begin to read Zagreus into the figure of the crucified Christ in the icon of Panagia Dolorosa. Scholars have argued the point for decades - it is a possibility, but requires cautious handling as despite the many parallels, the evidence is insufficient.
It may be that centuries ago, the myth of Persephone’s abduction was generated as an aetiology for the fate and role of women, used in the nuptial context to guide the bride-to-be into her new identity. Sacrificed on the cornerstone, an innocent genius loci bound to the household and family, generator of new life and bringer of a new day, carrier of so much collective memory. Her name may have faded or changed; her attributes did not. Nor did her central role at the foundation of the Greek family.
Perhaps the bride and the rooster are one and the same.
Some modern considerations
Some readers may surely bristle at what may read as a reification of women and womanhood (and manhood too, for that matter). I would ask them to examine their assumptions, and revisit Part 1, where my sharing of personal experience and broader context was intended to address just this.
I invite readers to follow the links to Renée Hirschon’s ethnographic work (found throughout this article, links in text below), to more closely consider the nature of the collective society, its values and dynamics. It calls for a more subtle approach than outright dismissal. We are looking at many different time periods, and a very different worldview that is the product of an environment reflecting the values it upholds. We cannot apply today’s sensibilities, the product of a different set of circumstances, to a time when survival - individual and collective - dictated such values. That is a luxury and privilege of the first world, and comes with its own sacrifices.
The collective mentality that sacrifices the individual for the group while ritualising kinship relationships is beginning to fracture in the present day, but it comes at a heavy price: one of isolation, disorientation, toxic competition, and social disarray. I have witnessed this on both personal and collective levels throughout my life, and sought to dig into the social and psychological drivers of this phenomenon. For many Greeks, the freedom of modern liberal society comes at the price of a rift with family, and a kind of internal alienation that cannot easily be expressed, but one which those who have chosen that path know all too well. I am one of them.
The value system underpinning these practices originate in a culture whose cohesion and identity has been subjected to centuries of external pressures. Specifically on the matter of maintaining the canon of folk symbolism, the Ottoman occupation was a strong motivator: folk culture was an innocuous, but powerful vehicle for maintaining cultural identity and memory in an illiterate society. This requires significantly different scholarly treatment than the study of elite culture. For the rural classes of Greece, clinging to the collective identity was an act of both resistance and survival.
From a modern vantage point, I am neither defending nor condemning it. I have been a victim of its pressures, as were my maternal ancestors before me. But I am also witnessing the destruction and confusion wrought by the efforts to force rapid modernisation and break these bonds.
The scholar in me remains an agnostic inquirer, and my purpose is as much to understand as to share that understanding with those who would too quickly dub us ‘backward’ and in need of faster Europeanisation - a wholly racist and colonialist attitude; or equally, tell us we are Western until we believe it, and ride altogether roughshod over these all too real sociocultural features that comprise Greek society, with its very own, living expression and perception of the legacy that too many Western scholars and practitioners alike use to their own ends and interpret without considering the living society and its traditions .
Interpretations of Persephone’s abduction myth as a signifier of a misogynistic society make the cardinal error of applying presentism to a harsh world in which different values applied for the very reason of survival. The sophistication of the way in which these values were ritualised and embedded in these life transitions deserve more careful - and realistic - handling. Agnosticism may be helpful in this context.
This study as well as this one are good places to start the quest for understanding. The first begins with the explanation that there is no word for “privacy” in Greek (we use the loan-word ιδιωτικότητα, which is still not widely used or understood), because the notion is not fully accepted. The word for private individual (the same since antiquity) is ιδιώτης - the source word for idiot. It holds both meanings and has disparaging connotations: one who wishes to live outside the community as a private individual is considered an idiot, for they cannot hope to survive for long. Even shepherds and monks are attached to communities. The second presents a detailed look at Greek kinship and cultural values as observed in the 1970s; a setup that to me is quite familiar.
I will not dwell further on this aspect as it will take us too far off topic; in the next instalment we explore the guardians of the young family-to-be, discover goddesses gazing through the foliage with new names, but powerful identities and gifts. Our young bride is neither as helpless nor as much of a victim as she might seem.
Stay tuned for Part 4, on mythical beasts, bridal armour, and more, and Part 5, where I draw all the threads together.
Those are beautiful. It may indeed be that symbols rule the world. we had better take care.