Chapter 7
In: Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology
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Abstract
The mystery cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace has repeatedly provided a testing ground for the intersection of classics and anthropology. The models generated through social science frameworks, however, show no immediate connection to the material remains of the cult and deep responsiveness to the contexts of their authors. Two case studies from the nineteenth century offer a fresh hypothesis for the heuristic value of these models. Schelling (1815) and Rossignol (1863) write from different continental traditions and chronological eras. Schelling serves as a guide to the forces shaping German anthropology in the early nineteenth century, when Romantic perspectives cast down an epistemological gauntlet to balance scientific methodology with the drive for transcendence, and to find in the rites the earliest vestiges of human religiosity. Researchers used Indo-European linguistics to bridge Greek myth with German folk tradition, resulting in an identification between the Kabeiroi and Germanic dwarves which has been among the most long-lasting models for the gods of the rites. Rossignol wrote in late nineteenth-century Paris: his models for the rites reflect both the intellectual frameworks and the social activism of contemporary French anthropology. Recent models of cultural evolution had established pyrotechnology as the dividing line between savagery and civilization, and Parisian iron workers were reshaping the political and visual network of the city. Rossignol saw the metallurgy of the island’s daimones as evidence that the rituals celebrated the upward evolution of mankind: what grain was to Eleusis, or wine to Dionysus, metallurgy was to Samothrace. Both the German and the French hypotheses are built on the mythological record of the rites and provide an histoire de mentalité which simultaneously highlights and helps to diminish the distance between ancient initiates and modern investigators. This is a value entirely different from the histoire événementielle which is the natural concomitant of archaeological and epigraphical study.