CHTHONIC DIVINITIES, WORSHIP OF

This category of divinities in ancient Greek religion comprises the Earth (in Greek Χθών), or Gaia (Ge); the fertility goddesses who emanated from her, especially the Mother Goddesses of Asia Minor; and the dead, who often figure as spirits of fertility. S. Eitrem [Opferritus und Voropfer der Griechen und Römer (Christiania 1914)] attempted to show—and M. Nilsson concurred (1:135)—that the introductory ceremonies of the normal

Greek sacrifice offered to the celestial gods indicated an important phenomenon. Inasmuch as the celestial divinities allowed themselves to be associated in the cult of the dead, they were very probably regarded as the dead with whom the spirits of the place were identified. This would mean that a remnant of the animistic-agrarian form of religion going back to pre-Greek culture was preserved as an essential element in the cult of the Olympian gods. At the stage of archaic Greek religion represented by Homer, the dead were mere wraiths who did not even have a cult. However, the employment of a cleft or fissure for channeling an offering in liquid form from the top of the grave or altar into the earth is confirmed by archeology of shaft graves of Mycenae and by the discovery of such altars in ancient Crete. Unquestionably, in ancient Crete and in the Minoan culture in general, the motherly earth was no longer viewed only as a vague personification or an abstractly conceived fertility power, the receiver of chthonic cult, but, on the contrary, as the Mistress of Life, active in the fruitful earth itself.

The close union also of the Olympian gods with an element that falls within the earthly sphere was especially striking not only in the case of the sea god, Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, the husband of Dao (i.e., Demeter, the Earth-Goddess), but especially in the case of Hermes, the god of stone piles, who, perhaps even in his office as guide of the dead, was called Chthonios. Zeus himself was associated as Chthonios at Athens in certain sacrifices to Gaia, and was therefore the object of a chthonic cult in practice, although not perhaps by formal rite. The earliest children of Gaia, the Titans and Giants, had a continued life only in myth. The Titans conquered by Zeus were chthonic gods through their confinement, at first in Tartarus as a place of punishment and then, after their pardon by Zeus, through their abode in Elysium, the land of the dead on the rim of the earth. The worship of fertility demons frequently had an important place in the complex of cults of rural areas.

Bibliography: h. j. rose, Handbook of Greek Mythology (6th ed. New York 1958) 17–101. m. p. nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion v.1. u. von wilamowitz-moellendorff, Der Glaube der Hellenen, 2 v. (Berlin 1931–32) v.1. h. schwabl, "Weltschöpfung, " Paulys Realencyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Suppl 9 (1962) 1433–1582, esp. 1440ff.

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