Sabbats Almanac: Samhain to Mabon - Kristoffer Hughes 2018

The Old Ways: The Feast of Pots by Linda Raedisch
Imbolc

IF YOU WERE TO show up in Classical Athens on the morning of the fourteenth day of Anthesterion, a lunar month corresponding to our late February/early March, you would find a mess: clay pots lying everywhere on the ground, crusted with dried porridge and buzzing with flies. The three-day spring flower festival of Anthesteria finished up last night and no one is awake yet. Anthesteria is a drinking festival as much as a celebration of flowers, so it will probably take the revelers some time to summon the energy to go outside and clean up.

The first day of the festival, on 11 Anthesterion, was Pithogia, when the pithoi, or “jars” of new wine were opened. The second day was Choes, or “cups.” This was when the serious drinking started. The third day of the festival, on the unlucky thirteenth day of Anthesterion, was Chytroi, “pots.” This was the ancient Greek All Souls’ Day. Like our Halloween, Chytroi began at sundown the night before. Chytroi may have been one of the reasons why the Christian All Souls was originally celebrated in springtime, around the time of Beltane.

If you have heard of Chytroi, you are probably either a fan of Classical Greece or you have read Ray Bradbury’s classically trippy novel, The Halloween Tree, in which some small town American boys look in on many of the ancient world’s forgotten festivals of the dead:

’Yes.’ Moundshroud beamed. ’Their Festival of the Dead: The Feast of Pots. Trick-or-Treat old style. But tricks from the dead if you don’t feed them. So treats are laid out in fine banquets on the sill!’¹

The pots in question were little earthenware pots in which panspermia was cooked and served to the dead—no polished red or blackware for these spirits whose meals were left for them in the garden. The appetizingly named main dish was a porridge made with many if not “all” varieties of seeds and grains and sweetened with honey. Hardly what I would call a “fine banquet,” but that’s just me. The offerings were left out for all the dead in general and in Athens also for the ghost of a teenage girl named Erigone. Erigone was the daughter of Icarius (not to be confused with the high-flying Icarus or the Icarius who was Odysseus’ father-in-law). It was to the mortal Icarius that the god Dionysus bequeathed the gift of wine.

Icarius might have done better to refuse it. When he asked his neighbors round to share a pithoi, they thought he was trying to poison them. So they killed him. When his daughter found his body with the help of the family dog, she was driven mad with grief and hanged herself. But that was not exactly the end of this unfortunate little family, for the gods were kind enough to place them among the stars. Icarius is Arcturus, Erigone is Virgom, and the faithful dog is Canis Major.

A maiden suicide was exactly the kind of restless ghost the Greeks felt they needed to appease. The story of Erigone served to explain why a wine and flower festival should finish up with an offering to the dead. The name Erigone means “born in spring,” so one cannot help but wonder if she was once a springtime fertility goddess in her own right. She might just as easily have been a goddess of the harvest, since the ancient Greeks sowed in the fall and reaped in the spring before the dry heat of summer could sear the crops in the fields.

Actually, the ghosts were believed to start wandering among the living as soon as the first pithoi were breached on the first day of the festival, but they became most active at dusk on the second day. Throughout that night and the day of Chytroi itself, the living took special precautions against these roaming spirits. Front doors were smeared with pine pitch. Pitch was regarded as an especially pure substance, perhaps because its distillation from the wood was such a complicated and time-consuming process. Then again, it may have been that its stickiness could stop a ghost in its tracks.

Another practice was to chew pieces of a shrub called rhamnos, which has been translated as “buckthorn,” “blackthorn” and “hawthorn.” Buckthorn now answers to the genus name Rhamnus, but it should also be noted that the ancient Greeks and Romans liked to bring hawthorn branches indoors to protect the household from demons.

The dead who chose not to roam but kept to their quarters in the underworld were also rewarded on Chytroi with offerings of fruit and lentils. These were not left on the ground but brought to a temple and given into the keeping of Hermes Chthonios. This Hermes was not exactly the same guy as the one in the winged sandals, but his underworld counterpart. Several of the Olympians had such alter-egos who were considered more approachable than full-on chthonics like the Erinyes.

Chytroi was not the only time the Greeks’ thoughts turned to the underworld and its denizens. There was the Genesia, the birthday of a deceased person that was celebrated privately by his or her family. In Athens, Genesia observances eventually got sucked into the Nemeseia, a nighttime festival held in honor of the goddess Nemesis on the fifth of the month of Boeodromion, which fell in the midst of our September/October. Nemesis had custody of all those whose lives had been cut short by violence and who required extra placating. (Another of Nemesis’ names was Rhamnusia, which I suppose counts as another vote for buckthorn.)

The Athenians and other Classical Greeks seemed to view the spirits of the dead through a haze of fear and superstition, but the earlier Myceneans spent more time trying to commune with the dead than banishing them. In the Odyssey, the hero goes knock-knock-knocking on Hades’ door when he wishes to consult the shade of the seer Tiresias. In another episode, he is forced to leave the corpses of his fallen shipmates behind on the plain where they were cut down by the Cicones. Back aboard ship, he utters the “triple cry,” calling out the name of each man three times in order to bid him farewell and to encourage his spirit to settle in the cenotaph he will eventually build for him.

But at the close of Chyrtoi, the Athenians were anxious to speed the dead on their way. They informed the ghosts in no uncertain terms that Anthesteria was over and if any of them had slipped from the garden into the house they had better get out. Any spirits still hanging around were made to feel like guests who had stayed too long at a party.

There is one more thing that sets Chytroi apart from some of the more familiar festivals of the dead. On Halloween, trick-or-treaters come home and eat the candy they’ve collected; on the Mexican Day of the Dead, living family members eat the food whose essence has first been offered to the dead. But none of the offerings left out on Chytroi were consumed by the living. Hence the mess the next morning.

Resources

Garland, Robert. Ancient Greece: Everyday Life in the Birthplace of Western Civilization. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

Lloyd, James. “The Anthesteria.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. https://www.ancient.eu/The_Anthesteria/. October 1, 2015.

1. Bradbury, 2015.