Honoring the Vow to Prosymnos Frater Guaiferius

Honoring the Vow to Prosymnos by Frater Guaiferius

In ancient times there was a mystery cult based on an episode from the life of Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy. A few details of the public rituals have been recovered, but the associated private devotions have always been discreetly veiled. The fragmentary texts hint at some kind of “obscenity”, which suggests we could be dealing with a solitary spiritual practice that continues largely unexplained to this day. In fact, some readers will already have tried it at home, without necessarily realising it’s so ancient that no one really knows how it began.

What we do know is that the Greeks had a story about it; and we can speculate that the tale had an esoteric interpretation.

The legend concerns a vow that was made in life but fulfilled across the boundary that separates life from death. The corresponding mysteries are not as extensively researched as their Eleusinian and Orphic counterparts, so they are even more difficult to reconstruct with any certainty. Consequently, the following account of the “Prosymian Mysteries”, as we might call them, can only be a very speculative elaboration of the snippets and scraps that have survived to the present.

Dionysus is one of those few mythical figures (like Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas, and Dante) who found a way to visit Hades and then return to the world of the living. Their various motives for making the trip are mostly well known, but Dionysus is the exception. The few surviving accounts tell us he wanted to rescue his dead mother, Semele, who had conceived Dionysus by Zeus.

The back-story, where the human Semele is burnt to a crisp by the god Zeus, involves a startling twist: Zeus manages to rescue Dionysus from her womb, then gestate the foetus in his own thigh. It’s worth mentioning also the godly need for fidelity to a vow. Zeus had promised to grant Semele any request, and she had rashly asked to see his divine form. But there are older versions of this motif, in which Semele (or someone very much like her) is already immortal, and rules as Queen of the Underworld.

The episode that concerns us here takes place at Lake Lerna, in the narrow strip of land between the Gulf of Argolis and the Lerna Range, in the Peloponnese. The springs that fed the lake, once famed as inexhaustible, no longer exist; but before they silted up, they provided an entrance to the underworld. This portal was reputed to be guarded by the many-headed serpent called the Hydra. The

limestone mountain range is today topped by a tiny church called Prophitis Ilias (“Prophet Elijah”); but in ancient times it was probably associated with Dionysus, who was also known as Oreiórkhas – “dancer of the mountains.”

On the isthmus between the lake and the sea lived a mage called Prosymnos. His name suggests he was the prototype of the Imaginary Friend (or, if you prefer: spirit familiar; daemon; guardian angel); for symnos means “companion”, and pro-, in Greek as in English, can mean “instead of”, or “as a substitute for”. Prosymnos, being a practitioner of the mysteries, knew how to access the entrance to Hades, located in the middle of Lake Lerna. One of

the skills of the mage is the ability to travel to the underworld at will, to search for souls that have gone missing from the world of humans. But Dionysus did not ask Prosymnos to perform this service for him. He wanted to learn how to do it himself.

The story goes like this. After being born from Zeus’s thigh, Dionysus was taken into hiding by his elder brother, Hermes, to save him from the wrath of Hera, Zeus’s wife. Hermes was already an initiate, and able to travel at will through the heavens, the mountain-tops, the land, the great and small waters, and the underworld. But when Dionysus was old enough for the rites of passage, Hermes, as his brother, was not permitted (according to tradition) to carry out the necessary training.

It was clear to Hermes that Dionysus, who avoided hunting and rough games and liked to wear a heel-length chiton, was not destined to be initiated as a warrior. To be sure, with his pretty face, long curly hair and mysterious allure, he would have had no trouble finding an older lover who could put him through the rites: the abduction, the seduction, the training in living off the land and acting as servant to the lover’s male companions, and finally the feasting. But this was not to be. Dionysus was one of those individuals who are marked from birth for the other initiation, that of the mage.

Of the two paths to male adulthood, the way of the mage was known to be by far the more difficult. To begin with, the process of finding an initiator was not at all straightforward. Mages tend, by nature, to be reclusive, and even those who lived in the cities didn’t advertise themselves. So the initiatic encounter couldn’t be “arranged” or even planned.

The usual procedure was that the novice would spend some time alone in the wilderness, fasting and praying to be shown the guide for those who have no guide. The message might come as a vision, or a voice, or a song; or it might just come as the kind of intuition that conveys certainty. Dionysus’s solitary quest took him to the Lerna Range, and there he had a dream of a fig tree. The next morning, he found his way down from the mountain to a hut he had spied, between Lake Lerna and the sea.

As Dionysus got closer, he heard a strange melodic buzzing in the air, and when he reached the entrance to the garden, his eyes were drawn to a billowing iridescence that glittered in the morning light. As he waited discreetly by the fig-tree at the edge of the path, he was able to make out a figure kneeling at the center of the haze, and realised that it was singing in harmony with a cloud of honeybees, and occasionally laughing softly.

The voice finished chanting, and the bees dispersed. Prosymnos was looking Dionysus straight in the eye. He stood up, beckoned Dionysus over, and kissed him on the forehead. Then he plucked some figs and offered them to his guest, as a sign that the fast was at an end.

Shamanic training usually takes years. But in the case of Dionysus, with all the advantages he had as the offspring of a god, it went much faster. Sigils, visualisations, incantations, trances, astral travel, healing, astrology, herbal lore - these and many other shamanic skills he mastered with ease. Finally, the day came for his last preparatory exercise: Prosymnos guided him through the chants required to pacify the Hydra who guarded the portal in the middle of the lake.

When the session was over, there was only final step to take before Dionysus could wear the headband of an initiate. He had to invite Prosymnos to make love to him. But Prosymnos, with the foresight of a mage, proposed that Dionysus put off fulfilling this last initiatic requirement until his mission to rescue Semele was accomplished. Dionysus vowed to return for that purpose.

In due course, Dionysus succeeded in rescuing

his mother, took her up into the sky, and changed her into the constellation Corona Australis (“The Southern Crown”). When that was done, he returned to Lerna to complete his initiation, and to honor his vow to Prosymnos. But the hermit’s hut had collapsed, and there was no sign of life, only the sound of the wind in the ruins. Dionysus scouted around for clues, and came across a grave overlooking the lake. There was a faded grave marker, inscribed with an ouroboros sigil and the words ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάντατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες (“Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the others’ death and dying the others’ life”).

Dionysus leaned against the fig tree and wept. And when he had finished weeping, he cut a branch from the tree and whittled it into a phallic agalma (the representation of an immortal), then proceeded to paint it. He made a small cut in his forearm, squeezed out some blood, mixed it with red ochre, and applied it to the head. When that coat had dried, he used a combination of sap and powdered kaolin to draw a white eye on the tip. Then he stuck the agalma into the soil of the grave, fixed it solid with small rocks around the base, and proceeded to anoint it with goat butter, to which had been added a small quantity of honey, wine and ground herbs.

He chanted as he squatted over it and eased it into his anal canal. It was the same song Prosymnos had been chanting to the bees: odós áno káto mía kaí oytí (“The way up and the way down is one and the same”). For the first time, his training as a mage coalesced into an overflowing revelation, and his body lived the mysteries. At the conclusion of the rite, he ejaculated onto the grave. This is why Dionysus is often shown wearing the headband of an initiate.

In honor of his fidelity to his promise, the event was once celebrated in festivals in many parts of Greece, in particular the Peloponnese and Athens. These incorporated processions where participants would carry fig wood phalloi, and the braver youths would compete in a kind of rodeo of phallus-riding. In today’s world, such public celebrations of the God of Indestructible Life are no longer possible. But private devotions to his Imaginary Friend continue unabated; and one of the compensations of our own day is that we have access to more user-friendly materials than fig wood.