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Iakkhos and Mise the Genderfluid · Lambda: the LGBT in Antiquity Podcast

• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity Podcast, your home for all queer things in the ancient world.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Dominica Raven, episode 19, Iakos and Misa, the gender fluid.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Come, great Iakos, who embraces all, the author of our festival songs, come and dance in the mystic revel, play with the procession of initiates as we travel the sacred way.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: May all joyful things be mine.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: O Lord of the Dance, Iakos, come with us.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I call upon the sacred and holy Misa, whose two-formed nature is masculine and feminine, who is called Redeeming Iakos.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Wherever you are in this world, kindly guide the rituals of initiation.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Iakos was the offspring either of Dionysus and Aphrodite, Dionysus and Aura, Zeus and Demeter, or Zeus and Persephone.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: They were a key figure in both the Eleusinian and the Orphic, or Bacchic, mysteries.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: These mystery religions were not necessarily obscure cults and minor festivals, they were actually major and important events.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Most Athenians would have been inducted into the Eleusinian mysteries.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: For many members of the community, it was actually something of a rite of passage.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Bacchic mysteries were never necessarily garnered by an official citywide participation.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: However, they were practiced from southern Italy all the way to Asia Minor and down to Egypt.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Far from being obscure religions, they were actually instrumental in shaping Western thought.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: The early Greek world did not have a particularly pleasant image of what happened after somebody died.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: When we consider the afterlife as presented in Book 11 of the Odyssey, or all throughout the Iliad of Homer, it reflects a system of duty and remembrance.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: A hero's fame and glory, which they had achieved in life, meant they would be remembered well and continued to be thought about after their deaths.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: But being so well thought of did not in any way mean you were going to have a pleasant or easy afterlife.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: We actually meet Achilles, the most famous, most powerful, and most remarkable soldier in the ancient world, in his death in the underworld.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Achilles is clearly not enjoying his lot.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Though Achilles is a judge, a man of distinction and authority in the underworld, he really does not like his lot in the afterlife.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: He famously tells Odysseus, I would rather be a hired hand to a peasant back on earth than king of all the dead.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, Agamemnon, who was in life the most blessed king in all of Greece, the lord of the wealthiest and most powerful city-state at Mycenae, and the warlord of all the Greek armies at Troy, did not enjoy his afterlife either.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Agamemnon and Achilles actually bicker over who had the worst lot in the afterworld.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: No matter how powerful a man might have been in life, in death he was left to wander the fields of Asphodel.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was a world where you'd literally forget your own identity, unless you were reminded of it.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: In these early days, when Homer wrote during the early Archaic period of Greece, most people felt a very significant connection to these great heroes, many of whom had founded their cities.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Greeks of these early years actually maintained shrines to these ancestral heroes, worshipping them as the demi-gods who had helped build their towns.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: We know, for example, that Odysseus actually had a religion on Ithaca long after his death.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, there's a later tradition that Homer himself had gone to Odysseus's shrine and heard the whole story of the Odyssey from the mouth of Odysseus directly.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: But what's important for our purposes today is that the traditional Homeric afterlife is not a great place to spend eternity.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where the mysteries come in.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: During the classical period, the mysteries offered people a chance to separate their immortal soul and gain a better afterlife.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: The people of Greece worshipped these semi-divine heroes precisely because they were the direct descendants of the gods.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: All Homeric heroes are the sons or grandsons or further afield of a god directly, and therefore have something divine about them.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, residents of a community all understood their own ancestry as one way or another derived from that same demigod hero.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So each member of the community would have had some aspect of the divine in them because they were each descended from these heroes.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or, in another story, Prometheus actually scooped up clay that manufactured human beings, and that clay contained dust from disintegrated titans.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thus, all humanity has something divine in them.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: In either case, the mystery religions taught a means of gaining access to the blessed afterlife by engaging in ritual activity.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: In this way it might be said that the mystery religions of Greece and Rome were the precursors to modern afterlife-centered religions, such as the monotheism.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: While there were numerous gods who played critical roles during this transition, like Demeter, Dionysus, Hermes, and Persephone, it was Iakos who played the most ritually intimate role.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: When initiates died, they were heralded to the afterworld by Hermes, the guide of the dead.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then the tutelary demon, Iakos, guided them to the place they were allotted to go in the afterworld.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Here they received their due for relative excellence or for cruelty while they were alive.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Then, when the time came for the initiate to be reincarnated, it was Dionysus who would bring them back to the world of the living.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Different authors conceptualize their afterlifes a little differently.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the Eleusinian afterlife is in the underworld at the towers of the blessed or the Elysian fields, but other authors had a more celestial afterworld in mind.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Many believed they would go to the moon, and the dwellers on the moon were the previous initiates.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Still others looked to the Milky Way, that great highway across the stars leading up to Olympus and to the throne of Zeus.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: The souls of the initiates were the thousands of stars that danced along the Milky Way.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: In any case, it was Iakos who heralded people up to their destined rewards.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Iakos is an extremely mysterious deity in the ancient world.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: There are relatively few references to be found in literature or mythology to Iakos directly.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, there is a key distinction between the Iakos who is associated with the Eleusinian mysteries, as opposed to the Iakos associated with the Orphic or Bacchic mysteries, though as we'll see, there's plenty of commonality to be found.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the Eleusinian Iakos first.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Eleusinian mystery religion centered around Demeter, the goddess of corn and agriculture more generally, and her daughter, whose name is Persephone or Kore, the maiden.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Iakos is either the child of Demeter or Persephone, so in this context, Iakos is the direct descendant of the line, mother to daughter to grandchild.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: During the festivals, Iakos was the one who led the sacred processions.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: The initiates would literally cry, Iakos, Iakos, as they paraded through town during the Eleusinian processions from Athens to Eleusis.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to being the guiding spirit who inspired initiates along the route, statues of Iakos were carried along the procession as well.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Both metaphorically and literally, Iakos led the processions.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Eleusinian mysteries were extremely egalitarian by comparison with most civic rituals.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: While the procession advanced, people tore their clothing so that they could all become ritual equals where class was no longer distinguishable.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The mysteries were even accessible to resident foreigners who desired to be initiated.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the Eleusinian mysteries also homogenized gender.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: During these processions, gender was far less straightforward than in day-to-day life.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: The cleanest way to visualize this is the simple fact that it's not just the men of Athens, but the men and the women who are eligible to join the mysteries and become ritual equals.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: This may not seem like much, but most festivals in Athens, and really everywhere in the Greek and Roman world, were sexually and gendered exclusive.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: While some festivals were totally segregated, most festivals had specific ritual spaces and specific ritual acts for females, and specific ritual spaces, and specific ritual acts for males during the same festival.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the mysteries were a radical sphere where men and women were ritually equal, even if only for a brief period during the ceremony.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also important to note that the salvation after death offered by the mysteries was also open to anyone who had been initiated into the mysteries.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Taken in this light, it actually makes some sense that the Iakos of the Eleusinian Mysteries was a somewhat homogenized figure.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Though Iakos is presented as a male figure, it is a light, soft, feminine masculinity that Iakos tends to be portrayed as.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: In order to lead a procession where men and women are equal, the chorus leader had to be someone who could lead both men and women in the same ritual activities.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Iakos was that figure, manifesting masculinity and femininity as a ritual role model.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now when we discuss the Iakos of the Orphic or Bakic Mysteries, we find something particularly interesting.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Fundamentally, Iakos played the same role in the Bachic mysteries by leading initiatory rituals and guiding the dead souls.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: The key distinction is that Iakos is actually the offspring of Dionysus, either Dionysus and Aphrodite or Dionysus and the nymph Aura.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Iakos leads the processions and rituals for the Orphic mysteries, but the Orphic mysteries took gender and sexual nonconformity to a whole new level.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: The Orphic mysteries were centered around creating or ritually recreating the space from the beginning of the universe.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: They lived in a world governed by Dionysus, but the Orphic Dionysus was born from Zeus, combining with Phanes, the primordial agendered god from the beginning of the universe.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thus rituals were designed around homogenizing gender in truly radical ways.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: There were no discrete border between bodily forms at the dawn of the universe, but there were no discrete borders between genders either.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Phanes, as well as all the early creatures in the universe, did not reflect discrete gendered natures, but homogenized forms.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Orphic teachings as well as Orphic ritual did not reflect gender as a discrete nature, but a continuous spectrum.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: While the effeminate youth represented by the Eleusinian mysteries is definitely not an image of heteronormativity, there is no real doubt that Iakos is a male figure in the Eleusinian world.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: But in the Bacchic Mysteries, this is taken further.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Orphic hymn number 42 is a hymn to a scarcely attested figure named Misa.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Mesa carries the ritual rod and leads processions from Athens to Eleusis and leads the chorus in Phrygia.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute, that's Iakos.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: The Orphic hymns often start with a list of names for the deity.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they are ritual titles a figure carries in a certain region, and sometimes they're amalgamating multiple deities into the same figure.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: In hymn number 42, Misa is also called Iakos.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: The language of the hymn clarifies at line 6 through 7, Misa, whose twofold nature is male and female.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Iakos and Misa are the same being, manifesting the soft masculine form in Iakos and a discrete feminine form in Misa.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we can see very clearly that Iakos and Misa are the same being.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they present male and sometimes they present female, but they are identical.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: When we understand the figure of Iakos Misa in this way, we get a very clear representation of gender fluidity, where their gender identity shifts and changes over time.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: They seem to shift principally between the masculine and the feminine, not necessarily shifting to alternative genders or androgyny like Dionysus.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when we try to interpret Iakos and Misa properly, they represent a gender fluid deity.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: In the Bacchic mysteries, the homogenizing of gender went far beyond the Eleusinian mysteries.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: In order for male initiates and female initiates to have their ritual role model, they needed a deity who could manifest male or female.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: For this reason, Iakos and Misa were the selfsame individual.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: They had to be a singular deity who could show all the initiates what they had to do to carry out the ritual and lead them to the afterworld.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thus the leader of the chorus had to be both male and female so the initiates could see themselves in the deity who inspired them.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: But what's more, the human soul was innately neither male nor female.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Initiates were looking forward to an afterlife where gender was homogenized as well, so the ritual environment reminded them and prepared them of their eventual eternity.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Taken in this light, the gender fluidity of Iakos and Misa appears to be providing that exact role model.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: There is a clue in the hymn to Iakos found in the Frogs of Aristophanes.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: The play follows Dionysus to the underworld to retrieve Euripides, who had died a few years earlier.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: As Dionysus travels through the underworld, they see an Eleusinian procession where people are praising Iakos.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Initiates were male and female, but this chorus of initiates is all male.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: This becomes somewhat curious when Dionysus spies a pretty young girl among their numbers.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: If we are to interpret the scene correctly, it would seem that the people are acting out some kind of ritual, and that just as in the comedic theater, the role of the young girl is actually being played by an AMAB figure.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: So when Dionysus leaps into the chorus and dances along with this girl, they are knowingly dancing with somebody everybody knows is queer as well.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is unclear what ritual procession Aristophanes is representing here, but whatever it is, gender nonconformity was baked into the ritual itself.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is important because beyond democratizing salvation, Iakos is able to democratize gender as well.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: As we've seen throughout the stories, both the Eleusinian and the Orphic Iakos are gender fluid, but they also encourage the initiates to do the same.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Next week we're going to explore an agender figure known as Phanes.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: We've discussed Phanes a few times on this show, as the firstborn deity, the figure who was hatched from the primordial cosmic egg.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: That early universe was a place without clear gender or sexual boundaries, so Phanes did not manifest gender in a way that we could even understand.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Put another way, Fanis represents all the possibilities of gender without actually manifesting any of them.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Fanes did not identify with either gender because gender was not a meaningful concept during this early period of the universe.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see in two weeks.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Odyssey Book 11 tells the story of Odysseus' journey to the underworld.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: After talking to Tiresias and to Odysseus' own mother, Odysseus hears from his comrades at Troy.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: First he hears from Agamemnon at verse 380 through 464, and then to Achilles at verse 466 through 540.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: In the Odyssey, Hermes conducts the ghosts of the suitors Odysseus has just killed to the underworld, where Agamemnon and Achilles are having a debate about whose lot in the afterlife is worse.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: They agree, living a good life and dying a heroic death did absolutely nothing to improve their situation in Hades.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: The passage is from Theodice, Book 24, verse 15 through 95.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Homer speaks to Odysseus in Philistratus Heroicus, passage 728.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Philostratus was a philosopher who lived during the 2nd century A.D.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: during the Roman Empire in the Severin dynasty.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Heroicus is a dialogue between a vine dresser and a Phoenician merchant near the shrine of Protesileus, the first hero who died at Troy.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that Homer and Odysseus were actually boyfriends comes from this dialogue as well.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: In section 695, Homer is called Odysseus' Plaything.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to have to double back on that another time.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: The passage of Iakos guiding souls to their deserved afterlife comes from Plato's Phaedo, section 107, section C.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Herodotus refers to Eleusinian initiates crying Iacos as they parade in his Histories, Book VII, number 65, section four.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Plutarch references processions on the road from Athens to Eleusis in his parallel lives, The Life of Alcidia Bes, section 34, number 3.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: The observation that the Chorus of Initiates was all male, with a female coded figure included, comes from Kenneth James Dover, The Chorus of Initiates in Frogs, page 179.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Dover was a towering figure in the study of Greek homosexuality during the 20th century.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: His work has already impacted this podcast numerous times.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's all for this week, folks.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you in two weeks for our discussion of Fanes, the Agender God.