INITIATIONS IN ANCIENT GREEK RITUALS AND NARRATIVES: NEW CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES. ED. BY DAVID DODD

scholars Of Classical History And Literature Have For More Than A Century Accepted 'initiation' As A Tool For Understanding A Variety Of Obscure Rituals And Myths, Ranging From The Ancient Greek Wedding And Adolescent Haircutting Rituals To Initiatory Motifs Or Structures In Greek Myth, Comedy And Tragedy. in This Books An International Group Of Experts Including Gloria Ferrari, Fritz Graf And Bruce Lincoln, Critique Many Of These Past Studies, And Challenge Strongly The Tradition Of Privileging The Concept Of Initiation As A Tool For Studying Social Performances And Literary Texts, In Which Changes In Status Or Group Membership Occur In Unusual Ways. These New Modes Of Research Mark An Important Turning Point In The Modern Study Of The Religion And Myths Of Ancient Greece And Rome, Making This A Valuable Collection Across A Number Of Classical Subjects. Cover 1 INITIATION IN ANCIENT GREEK RITUALS AND NARRATIVES 2 Title Page 3 Copyright Page 4 Table of Contents 5 List of figures and tables 8 List of contributors 9 Preface 11 Acknowledgements 15 List of abbreviations and transliterations 16 PART I Introduction 17 1 Initiation: a concept with a troubled history 18 PART II Female initiations 40 2 What kind of rite of passage was the Ancient Greek wedding? 41 3 Playing the bear and the fawn for Artemis: female initiation or substitute sacrifice? 57 PART III Vidal-Naquet's Black Hunter 83 4 Adolescent initiation in myth and tragedy: rethinking the Black Hunter 84 5 Liminality as metaphor: initiation and the frontiers of Ancient Athens 98 PART IV Initiation and the male community 120 6 Adolescent hair-growing and hair-cutting rituals in Ancient Greece: a sociological approach 121 7 Striding across boundaries: Hermes and Aphrodite as gods of initiation 142 PART V Initiation and narrative patterns 164 8 "Initiation'' in myth; "initiation'' in practice: the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and its performative context 165 9 Who in hell is Heracles? Dionysus' disastrous disguise in Aristophanes' Frogs 191 PART VI The initiation of ritual experts 211 10 Evenius becomes a seer (Herodotus 9.93–5): a paradoxical initiation? 212 11 The initiation of the magician: transition and power in Graeco-Roman Ritual 228 PART VII Afterwords 248 12 The initiatory paradigm in anthropology, folklore and history of religions 249 13 Initiations and initiatory experience 263 Bibliography 268 Subject index 288 Index locorum 297 Foreign word index 301 An international group of experts in Greek religion and society challenge the privileged status of initiation as a paradigm in classical studies. The cases used range widely, from the ancient Greek wedding and adolescent haircutting rituals to initiation in Greek myth, tragedy and comedy