Greek Domestic Religion

Greek Domestic Religion

Ian Elliott  August 17th, 2011

Introduction

Those of us interested not only in studying but emulating ancient religion naturally take an interest in the domestic religion of ancient peoples, for unless we live among surviving or revived pagan communities, we are reduced to celebrating ancient piety in solitude, or with our families.  Judging by recent scholarship, there has been a steady increase of interest in sacra privata, the sacred privacies, and though evidence for such is scanty compared to that available for ancient civic religion, more is being revealed by the efforts of archæologists, epigraphists and scholars as time goes on.

The information available on domestic religion in ancient Greece and Rome, though fragmentary, is far too voluminous for a single lesson, and I have limited the topic to those things that apply to the home and its immediate environs, and to those activities most adaptable to modern use.  Thus, while both the Greek guardian of the family storehouse, Zeus Ktesios, and the genii loci or genius and juno of the Roman household were depicted as snakes, and there is ample evidence of household snakes (harmless grass snakes where the species is known) from ancient Crete to medieval Lithuania and even later, most of us are unlikely to take up this age-old custom of keeping one in the house or under the front porch.  So passing mention will be made of the practice only to illustrate certain features of the guardian spirits later conceived, at least in Rome and partly, in human form.

Allowances must also be made for the differences in ancient and modern architecture, especially as regards the hearth, when seeking to import Greek or Roman domestic religion into today’s homes.  Those of us who are fortunate to have a fireplace can set up a shrine there to Hestia or Vesta and the ancestors and guardian spirits, but in most modern homes fireplaces are ornamental even when fully functional, and do not replace the stove or central heating.  Currently I have no fireplace and so maintain a small shrine in the kitchen, getting it as close to the stove (and as far from the smoke alarm) as possible. 

Finally, I have limited this study to Greek and Roman households, even though the material from other cultures (for instance, the Ainu of Sakhalin before WWII) is richer, in some cases assigning sacred meanings to all features or areas of a home.  Those who have ancestral or far memory links to other cultures are invited to extend this study to those peoples.

Greek Domestic Religion

The material presented in this section is derived from a recent Master’s thesis presented to the University of Cincinnati by the scholar Katherine Swinford.  Her primary interest was in the implements employed in Greek household religion, but her introductory material on the religion itself is well presented and documented. [1]

Household Gods

The Greeks differed from the Romans in installing the major deities of Olympus in household worship, giving them domestic epithets indicating their functions there, whereas the Romans tended to identify their domestic deities by function alone.  For this reason, H. J. Rose preferred to characterize Roman (and Italic) religion as a polydaemonism (concerned with little, or demi-gods) rather than a polytheism, at least at the domestic level.

In Greece, the gods whose household cult is mentioned prominently in ancient sources include Hestia, Zeus, Hermes, Hekate, and Apollo Agyieus (Apollo of the Streets). 

Hestia is often invoked both first and last among the gods, in private as well as public rituals.  If an animal was slaughtered and a sacrifice was performed in the house, the first pieces of the sacrificial meal were offered to her, just as at all meals a few pieces were laid on the hearth. This is the reason why it seems to have been customary to offer the first pieces of all sacrifices, even public ones, to Hestia. The position of Hestia is also reflected in semiphilosophical speculations, in which it is said that Hestia is enthroned in the middle of the universe, just as the hearth is the center of the house.

Hestia is the Greek goddess of the hearth and is the metonymic symbol for an entire household.  The typically Greek explanation for this is that she invented living in houses.  For this reason, a house was regarded primarily as a hearth, just as the community of houses was symbolized by the public hearth, in Athens located in the Prytaneion.

In the middle of the great living room of the Greek house, the megaron, was a fixed hearth. The hearth served not only as the locus for domestic activities such as cooking and heating, but also as the sacred center of the household, or oikos.  Sacrifices took place there, and oaths sworn upon the hearth or to Hestia were powerful.  The newborn babe was received into the family by being carried around the hearth, a ceremony which was called amphidromia and took place on the fifth or tenth day after birth.

As the guardian of the hearth, Hestia served as the protector of the household and its occupants.  The hearth, as an altar of the goddess, functioned as a refuge for suppliants, and those who sought refuge at the hearth were protected, just as those who sought haven at altars within temples were inviolable.

The Greeks before a meal offered a few bits of food on the hearth and after it poured out a few drops of unmixed wine on the floor. The libation was said to be made to Agathos Daimon, the Good Daemon, the guardian of the house, who appears in snake form. It is not stated to whom the food offering was made, but if someone is to be mentioned it must be Hestia, the goddess of the hearth.

To overthrow the house, to demolish the altar within it, incurred a punishment which struck at the same time at the living generation and at all the line of dead ancestors and of descendants yet to be born.  Thus, the hearth, as an altar of Hestia, represented and preserved households past, present and future.

Zeus Ktesios, Herkeios, Kataibaites

Zeus Ktesios, or Zeus of the property, guarded and increased the provisions and wealth of the Greek house.  The ancients used to install Zeus Ktesios in their storerooms.  He was kept in a kadiskos, a small, two-handled, unadorned earthenware container.  The handles were wreathed with white wool and a saffron thread, and ambrosia, that is, water and olive oil and a variety of fruit, was poured in.  The depiction of Zeus Ktesios as a snake led Nillson to speculate that the physical guardian of the stores was a snake used to frighten away thieves, and the contents of the kadiskos were a sacred meal provided to it regularly.  We’ll get back to snakes when we discuss the Romans.

Zeus also appeared in two other guises in or around the Greek house.  The Greek word for fence is herkos, and herkeios is an epithet of Zeus. According to Homer, the altar of Zeus Herkeios generally stood in the courtyard before the house, where sacrifices and libations were offered to him.  By the classical era, houses in towns were built wall to wall, and the shrine of Zeus Herkeios was usually found in the megaron, or large living room common to Greek homes.  As Zeus Kataibates (he who descends), Zeus protected houses against strokes of lightning, and his altar was found before the house or within, next to that of Zeus Herkeios.

Doorway Gods

While Hestia and Zeus were venerated within the house, a few gods, such as Hermes, Apollo Agyieus, “Apollo of the streets” and Hekate, received their due directly outside the Greek home. Literature describes the shrines or altars to these gods, who were guardians of the pathways and of traveling, as standing before the doorways of private dwellings. These shrines functioned as protection against illness, enemies and other types of evil.

Doorway gods were significant to the ancient Greeks. Klearchos of Methydrion, a pious man, took care to garland and clean his Hermes and Hekate each month. This indicates that individuals may have had more than one doorway shrine which may have been dedicated to more than one god.

The herm, the embodiment of the god Hermes, was a square shaft topped with a head and was always ithyphallic. Herms were often used as boundary markers and stood outside of public sanctuaries, between the city and the country, as well as before the doors of private dwellings.  An Attic red-figure loutrophoros depicts a procession coming home from the fountainhouse.  Standing before the doorway of the house is an altar and a bearded herm. The altar may have been an altar to Hermes, or perhaps it functioned to represent one of the two other doorway gods. In Wasps, Philokleon mentions the altars of Hekate, set up before the doors of every citizen (Aristophanes, V. 804). The scholia to Aristophanes note that the altars erected to Apollo Agyieus were square in shape.  A shallow recess near the street-side door, a feature common to many Classical houses, may have served as the locus for such shrines.

In later times, Herakles was regarded as a guardian of the house.  Above the entrance to the house was placed the inscription "Here the gloriously triumphant Herakles dwells; here let no evil enter."

Rites of Passage

As mentioned above, a newborn child was carried around the hearth in an rite called the amphidromia on its fifth or tenth day of life (which is uncertain).  Heidrun Rose suggests that this exposed the child to the “beneficent radiation of Hestia,” and emphasized the connection between the baby and the adults who were to be his kin.  On this day, too, those who were involved in any way with the birth performed ritual washing. This was to eradicate the birth pollution.

Robert Parker states that the amphidromia probably served to unite symbolically the newborn with the sacred center of the house, much like the katachysmata, a ritual which served to join brides and newly-bought slaves to their new homes.

The wedding procession, or gamos, began and ended with the hearth and marked the bride’s transition into her new oikos. Vase paintings often show both mothers; the bride’s mother carried torches lit from her home-hearth, which protected her daughter during the procession, while her mother-in-law, who held torches lit from her respective hearth, received the bride into her new husband’s home.  Carrying the wedding torches was a significant role for Greek mothers.

After the bride left her mother, and thus, the protection of her household hearth, she joined her new oikos in the rituals of incorporation. The first ritual, the katachysmata, is mentioned in a fragment of the 5th century B.C.E. comedian Theopompos: “Bring the katachysmata; quickly pour them over the groom and the bride!”  This ritual took place at the hearth. The katachysmata was also poured over the heads of another category of household inductees, newly-bought slaves. This mixture contained dates, coins, dried fruits, figs, and nuts and was meant to represent good seasons, and thus good auspices for the new member of the household. The groom led his new wife to the sacred hearth of her new oikos, where Hestia waited, sceptre in hand, to unite her with the hearth and thus receive her into the household.  This is an artistic representation; Hestia herself had no religious image.

Several rituals associated with death and burial preparations occur in the ancient Greek home. First, when a family member dies, the home is polluted. This pollution requires its own cathartic rituals, which I will discuss below. Second, the washing and laying out of the corpse takes place within the oikos. Third, after the funeral, the oikos must be cleansed of the death pollution, and the sweepings of the home are offered to Hestia in the hearth-fire.

Several tragic characters have prior knowledge of their deaths and carry out some of the necessary rituals beforehand; they bathe in ritual water, array themselves in the proper funereal attire, say a prayer to the goddess of the hearth, Hestia, and bid farewell to their loved ones.

After a member of the oikos died, the surviving members of the household washed the body. Often, women were charged with this task. The prothesis, or the laying out of the body, also occurred within the house.  The body was laid on a kline, or couch, and lekythoi, or other small jars of oil, were placed around it.

After the funeral took place, it was necessary to cleanse the house where the death had occurred. For example, an inscription from Keos, dating to the second half of the fifth century B.C.E., states that the house was purified the day after the funeral with seawater and the ceremony terminated with offerings to Hestia at the hearth.91 This final rite, the offering to Hestia, must have concluded an ancient Greek’s “circle of life.” From the first rite of life, the amphidromia, which centered around the hearth, to the last, the final cleansing of one’s soul from the house in which it died, returned back to Hestia.

Miasma (Pollution):

Ancient Greek houses were considered polluted when a death or birth occurred within. In order to avoid these types of pollution, the Greeks created cleansing rituals. Water is the most widespread agent of purification in Greek cathartic rituals. It was required that a person was ritually clean before sacrificing or pouring libations, and by extension, this requirement probably applied to other religious activities.  One prescription for purification was to wash one’s hands or bathe. The water for ritual washing often had to be drawn from a specific source, most often a source from outside the house.

Outside of homes where a birth or death had occurred, the household set up a perirranterion, a basin which stood on a pedestal, filled with water.  Not only did this basin serve as water for the purification of those entering and leaving the house, but it also served as a token of warning to those who wished to avoid coming into contact with impure, or polluted, households.

While the birth of a child temporarily polluted the ancient Greek household, pregnant women were sometimes the cause of, and also subject to, miasma. During the first forty days of pregnancy, a pregnant woman was not allowed to enter a shrine. However, in the later stages of pregnancy, women were urged to visit the sanctuaries of those deities who oversee childbirth. When outside of her oikos, a pregnant woman was not a source of pollution to others, but instead must be wary of incurring the pollution of others.  Pregnant women and those who are about to marry are two classes of people who stand on the cusp of an important transition and are thus susceptible to pollution.

Those who came into the house where a pregnant woman lay were polluted for three days. This birth-pollution could not be passed on and after three days the impure person was cleansed of the miasma. Other purificatory measures were taken in order to eradicate the household of birth-pollution. A baby’s naming ceremony and its amphidromia took place on either the fifth or the tenth day after birth.103 Each of these initiation rites for the newborn was accompanied by rituals and sacrifices. These rites, which probably took place in the courtyard of the house, might have served not only to introduce the child to the oikos, but also to purify anyone involved in the birth, as well as the entire oikos.

The ancient household was polluted when a death occurred within. Similar to childbirth, at this time a basin of water, drawn from a specific source, was placed before the door of the house as a token of warning to those who wished to avoid miasma. It also functioned as water with which visitors could purify themselves after having encountered the pollution within the house.

In order to eliminate the pollution incurred after coming into contact with a polluted household, one needed only wash his or her hands with purifying water. This was similarly true for the house which was polluted by death. After their family member was buried, the family cleansed the house with seawater. This rite served to purify the house of residual miasma.

Ritual Washing

Several domestic rites have a component of ceremonial bathing or hand-washing. During her wedding preparations, the bride’s ritual bath required elaborate ceremony. The loutrophoros, which literally means “one who carries bathwater,” was a vessel used specifically for transporting the water for prenuptial baths from the source prescribed for religious ceremonies.  The women of the family joined the bride to parade to the fountainhouse, usually with a young girl carrying the vase.  After the procession, the bride would bathe in preparation for her upcoming nuptials. The loutrophoros, which symbolized the ritual prenuptial bath, became synonymous with ancient Greek marriage. For this reason, the vessel shape, either ceramic or stone, came to be used as a grave marker or funerary offering for someone who died before he or she was married.

The death of a family member also necessitated ritual washing. The corpse was given a ritual bath by the women of the oikos.  Seawater was the primary cathartic element in funerary rites, and so, it was the type of water used for washing the body.  This rite could be compared to the ritual bathing of the bride and groom before their marriage. While the latter bath serves as a ritual in the transition from one stage of life to the next, the bathing of the corpse marked the end of a life, itself a transition.

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[1] See KM Swinford, The Semi-Fixed Nature of Greek Domestic Religion, http://etd.ohiolink.edu/view.cgi?acc_num=ucin1155647034