Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

398 The Ram and the Sun in Phrygia

to be equalised or even reversed. Certain wiseacres in antiquity,
venturing to expound the true inwards of the Sabdzios-my stents,
asserted that Zeus was the rain and Demeter the earth1. Arnobius
takes them to task; but perhaps they were not after all so utterly
misguided. Whether the bull-shaped offspring of the sky-father
and the earth-mother was from the first a sharer in their cult is a
question that may for the moment be postponed. There is no
a priori reason to doubt it.

The Sabazian myth has much in common with Orphic tradition.
For Orpheus too represented Zeus as united successively with his
mother Rhea or Demeter and his daughter Phersephone or Kore.
Rhea, to avoid him, turned into a snake. Thereupon he became
another snake, and twined about her with the so-called Heraclean
knot, which is symbolised by the caduceus of Hermes. Rhea bore
to him Phersephone, a horned child with four eyes, two in their
normal position, two on the forehead, and an extra face on the
back of her neck. Zeus, again taking the form of a snake, con-
sorted with his own monstrous progeny. The child born of this
second union was Dionysos2, i.e. the chthonian Dionysos or Zagreus3.
Nonnos in Orphic vein describes him as a horned infant, who
mounted the throne of Zeus himself and sat there grasping the
thunderbolt in his tiny hand. But Hera soon roused the Titans to
smear their faces with gypsum and to attack him as he was looking
in a mirror. In his efforts to escape he took the forms of a
youthful Zeus brandishing the aigis, an aged Kronos dropping
rain, a babe of shifting shape, a wildly excited youth (kouros),
a lion, a horse, a horned snake, a tiger, and a bull; in which final
disguise he was cut to pieces by the knives of the Titans4. Else-
where the same poet makes Dionysos himself recall his former
exaltation :

' Grant to my love one grace, o Phrygian Zeus.
Rhea my nurse told me while yet a child
How Zagreus—Dionysos long ago—
Once lisped thy name, and lo, thou gavest him

1 Supra p. 392 n. 5 sub fin.

2 Orph. frag. 41 Abel ap. Athenag. supplicatio pro Christianis 20 p. 22 f. Schwartz,
cp. Orph. frag. 47 Abel ap. Athenag. op. cit. 32 p. 42 Schwartz and Tatian. or. adv.
Graec. 6.

3 Hesych. s.v. Zctypetfs, et. mag. p. 406, 46 f. For a full collection of authorities see
Lobeck Aglaophamus i. 547 ff.

4 Nonn. Dion. 6. 155 ff. Orphic influence again underlies Nonnos's statement
{Dion. 7. 309 ff.) that Zeus, when he wooed and won Semele at Thebes, became
successively a human form with bull's horns, a lion, a leopard, and a snake. The
menagerie was simultaneous, not successive, in the case of the Orphic Phanes, who com-
bined in his own person the heads of rams, bulls, a snake and a lion {supra p. 92).