We’re accustomed to believe spiritual power is vested in objects: the lucky rabbit’s foot, the Roman cross that transformed ego death into a literal one. But it was the opposite impulse in Sappho’s day; objects had to be neutralized first so they wouldn’t overwhelm the initiate with the energy they carried, so that both object and initiate would be receptive to divine attention. The mystery schools anointed the objects to survive being seen by the Goddess.
The object in question for the fragment 101 set is an elaborately patterned, exquisitely weaved murex-purple hand cloth ("handkerchief" is used here because English has lost the memory of such a sacred vehicle of reception) from Phokaia, a syndicate of independent city states that dominated the 600-700 BCE luxury market in the highly networked Mediterranean trade. Whether the cloths were passed by initiates (my guess) or acquired as material objects (the consensus), they certainly needed to be "saged" (in the modern parlance) before the initiates could be "possessed" by the Goddess frequency. Murex production alone, as indicated yesterday, was a particularly rank and brutal process. This "gentling" was done by breath.
And this breath in turn evokes the cicada, whose invisible tymbal discharge at 400 beats a second only happens when time is thick, in the heat and stillness. The sun calls it from an underground home to tell us when to pay attention — not unlike that high-pitched ringing we may hear inside our ears. Plato’s Phaedrus myth remembered it that cicadas were once humans who sang when the Muses were born. They sang so unreservedly they forgot to eat, and were transformed into beings of pure voice. After death, they “report” to the Muses which humans honor each Muse — who can remain lucid when the high-frequency "music" overwhelms.
This fragment offers a tantalizing glimpse of archaic mystery school practices — it almost reads to modern eyes as a how-to manual — one broken either by time or intention.
Turn me the Aphrodite:
Infuse my breath into the moistened
Purple handkerchief, entrusted
To us from the masters of Phokaia
To touch to our cheeks.
Activate the cicada voice
Carried on keen wings,
Carried on keen wings,
Seeping its high-frequency song,
Powered up when the sun hangs down
Low, to hover up the cry in transmission.
----------------------------------------------------
101
πρὸς τὴν Ἀφροδίτην·
χερρόμακτρα δὲ καγγόνων
πορφύρα καταΰτμενα
τατιμάσεις ἔμπεμψ’ ἀπὺ Φωκάας
δῶρα τίμια καγγόνων
101A
ἐπὶ τοῦ τέττιγος·
πτερύγων δ’ ὔπα
κακχέει λιγύραν ἀοίδαν,
ὄπποτα φλόγιον καθέ-
ταν ἐπιπτάμενον καταυδείη
More at Digital Sappho
