Bee (mythology)

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Gold plaques embossed with winged bee goddesses, perhaps the Thriai, found at Camiros Rhodes, dated to 7th century BCE (British Museum)

The bee, found in Ancient Near East and Aegean cultures, is believed to be the sacred insect that bridged the natural world to the underworld. Appearing in tomb decorations, Mycenaean tholos tombs were even shaped as beehives.

Bee motifs are also seen in Mayan cultures, an example being the Ah Muzen Cab, the Bee God, found in Mayan ruins, likely designating honey producing cities (they prized honey as food of the gods).

[edit] Worship

The bee was an emblem of Potnia, the Minoan-Mycenaean "Mistress", also referred to as "The Pure Mother Bee".^[1] Her priestesses received the name of "Melissa" ("bee").^[1] In addition, priestesses worshipping Artemis and Demeter were called "Bees".^[2] The Delphi Priestess is often referred to as a bee, and Pindar notes that she remained "the Delphic bee" long after Apollo had usurped the ancient oracle and shrine. "The Delphic priestess in historical times chewed a laurel leaf," Harrison noted, "but when she was a Bee surely she must have sought her inspiration in the honeycomb."^[3][4] Ernst Neustadt, in his monograph on Zeus Kretigenes, "Cretan-born Zeus," devoted a chapter to the honey-goddess Melissa.

[edit] Myth

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo acknowledges that Apollo's gift of prophecy first came to him from three bee-maidens, usually identified with the Thriae. The Thriae was a trinity of pre-Hellenic bee-goddesses in the Aegean. The embossed gold plaque (illustration above right) is one of a series of identical plaques recovered at Camiros in Rhodes^[5] dating from the archaic period of Greek art, in the seventh century, but the winged bee goddesses they depict must be far older.

The Kalahari Desert's San people tell of a bee that carries a mantis across a river. The tired exhausted bee eventually leaves the mantis on a floating flower. ­The bee plants a seed in the mantis's body before it dies, and that seed grows and becomes the first human.

In Egyptian mythology, bees grew from the tears of the sun god Ra, when they landed on the desert sand. The bowstring on Hindu love god Kamadeva's bow is made of honeybees.

[edit] Merope

Main article: Merope

Merope is connected with the bee-mask. Cretan bee-masked priestesses appear on Minoan seals. Before the Hellenes came to the Aegean, Bee of the mythographers recalled the tradition "Merope", the "bee-eater", in the old Minoan tongue. Orion, a suitor of Merope, was born in Hyrai in Boeotia, an ancient place mentioned in Homer's catalogue. According to Hesychius, the Cretan word hyron meant "swarm of bees" or "beehive."^[6] Like some other archaic names of Greek cities, such as Athens or Mycenae, Hyrai is plural, a name that once had evoked the place of "the sisters of the beehive."

This name Merope figures in too many isolated tales for "Merope" to be an individual. Instead the "Merope" must denote a position as priestess of the Goddess. But surely Merope the "bee-eater" is unlikely to be always a bee herself. Though there is a small Mediterranean bird called the Bee-Eater, which was known under that name to Roman naturalists Pliny and Aelian, this Bee-Eater is most likely to have been a She-Bear, a representative of Artemis. The goddess was pictured primitively with a she-bear's head herself, and the bear remained sacred to Artemis into classical times. At a festival called the Brauronia, pre-pubescent girls were dressed in honey-colored yellow robes and taught to perform a bear dance. Once they had briefly served Artemis in this way, they would be ready to be married. In later times, a Syriac Book of Medicine recommends that the eye of a bear, placed in a hive, makes the bees prosper. The bear's spirit apparently watches over the hive, and this was precisely the Merope's role among the Hyrai at Chios.

[edit] Language

Beekeeping was a Minoan craft, and the fermented honey-drink was an old Cretan intoxicant, older than wine. The proto-Greek invaders, by contrast, did not bring the art of beekeeping with them. Homer saw bees as wild, never tame, as when the Achaeans issued forth from their ship encampment "like buzzing swarms of bees that come out in relays from a hollow rock" (Iliad, book II). For two thousand years after Knossos fell the classical Greek tongue preserved "honey-intoxicated" as the phrase for "drunken."^{[citation needed]} The Bee is also seen in a number of Aegean and Near Eastern names. The Jewish historian Josephus noted that the name of the poet and prophet Deborah meant "bee." Melissa is also similarly defined. The name "Merope" seems to mean "honey-faced" in Greek, thus "eloquent" in Classical times.

[edit] See also

• Aristaeus and the bees, and their rebirth from an ox hide bougenia.

[edit] External links

• The Bee Goddess

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Cook, A.B. "The bee in Greek mythology" 1895 Journal of the Hellenic Society 15 pp 1ff, noted by Harrison 1922:443 note 1.
• Harrison, Jane Ellen, (1903) 1922. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek religion, third edition, pp 91 and 442f.
• Engels, David/Nicolaye, Carla (eds.), 2008, "Ille operum custos. Kulturgeschichtliche Beiträge zur antiken Bienensymbolik und ihrer Rezeption", Hildesheim (Georg Olms-press, series Spudasmata 118).
• James W. Johnson, "That Neo-Classical Bee" Journal of the History of Ideas 22.2 (April 1961), pp. 262-266.
• Kerenyi, Karl 1976. Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (Princeton: Bollingen Press)
• Neustadt, Ernst 1906. De Jove cretico, (Berlin). Chapter III "de Melissa dea" discusses bee-goddesses and bee-priestesses in Crete.
• Scheinberg, Susan 1979. "The Bee Maidens of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes" Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 83(1979), pp. 1-28.