Melinoe

Name

Melinoë may derive from Greek mēlinos (μήλινος), "having the color of quince," from mēlon (μῆλον), "tree fruit". The fruit's yellowish-green color evoked the pallor of illness or death for the Greeks. A name derived from melas, "black," would be melan-, not melin-.

Hymn

Following is the translation by Apostolos Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow, of the hymn to Melinoe:

I call upon Melinoe, saffron-cloaked nymph of the earth,
whom revered Persephone bore by the mouth of the Kokytos river
upon the sacred bed of Kronian Zeus.
In the guise of Plouton Zeus and tricked Persephone and through wiley plots bedded her;
a two-bodied specter sprang forth from Persephone's fury.
This specter drives mortals to madness with her airy apparitions
as she appears in weird shapes and strange forms,
now plain to the eye, now shadowy, now shining in the darkness—
all this in unnerving attacks in the gloom of night.
O goddess, O queen of those below, I beseech you
to banish the soul's frenzy to the ends of the earth,
show to the initiates a kindly and holy face.

Birth

Melinoë is the daughter of Persephone, who was visited by Zeus disguised as her husband Hades. Although the wording of the hymn is unclear at this point, Pluto (or perhaps Zeus) becomes angry upon learning of the pregnancy and rends her flesh. The figure called Zeus Chthonios in the Orphic Hymns is either another name for Pluto or Zeus in a chthonic aspect.

Melinoë is born at the mouth of the Cocytus, one of the rivers of the underworld, where Hermes in his underworld aspect as psychopomp was stationed. In the Orphic tradition, the Cocytus is one of four underworld rivers.

Although some Greek myths deal with themes of incest, in Orphic genealogies lines of kinship, express theological and cosmogonical concepts, not the realities of human family relations. The ancient Greek nymphē in the first line can mean "nymph", but also "bride" or "young woman". As an underworld "queen" (Basileia), Melinoë is at least partially syncretized with Persephone herself.

Attributes and functions

Melinoë is described in the invocation of the Orphic Hymn as krokopeplos, "clad in saffron" (see peplos), an epithet in ancient Greek poetry for moon goddesses. In the hymns, only two goddesses are described as krokopeplos, Melinoë and Hecate.

Melinoë's connections to Hecate and Hermes suggest that she exercised her power in the realm of the soul's passage, and in that function may be compared to the torchbearer Eubouleos in the mysteries.

According to the hymn, she brings night terrors to mortals by manifesting in strange forms, "now plain to the eye, now shadowy, now shining in the darkness," and can drive mortals insane. The purpose of the hymn is to placate her by showing that the Orphic initiate understands and respects her nature, thereby averting the harm she has the capacity for causing.

The translation of Thomas Taylor (1887) has given rise to a conception of Melinoe as half-black, half-white, representing the duality of the heavenly Zeus and the infernal Pluto. This had been the interpretation of Gottfried Hermann in his annotated text of the hymns in 1805. This duality may be implicit, like the explanation offered by Servius for why the poplar leaf has a light and dark side to represent Leuke ("White"), a nymph loved by Pluto. The Orphic text poses interpretational challenges for translators in this passage.

Inscriptions

Melinoë appears on a bronze tablet for use in the kind of private ritual usually known as "magic". The style of Greek letters on the tablet, which was discovered at Pergamon, dates it to the first half of the 3rd century AD. The use of bronze was probably intended to drive away malevolent spirits and to protect the practitioner. The construction of the tablet suggests that it was used for divination. It is triangular in shape, with a hole in the center, presumably for suspending it over a surface.

The content of the triangular tablet reiterates triplicity. It depicts three crowned goddesses, each with her head pointing at an angle and her feet pointing toward the center. The name of the goddess appears above her head: Dione (ΔΙΟΝΗ), Phoebe (ΦΟΙΒΙΗ), and the obscure Nyche (ΝΥΧΙΗ). Amibousa, a word referring to the phases of the moon, is written under each goddess's feet. Densely inscribed spells frame each goddess: the inscriptions around Dione and Nyche are voces magicae, incantatory syllables ("magic words") that are mostly untranslatable. Melinoë appears in a triple invocation that is part of the inscription around Phoebe: O Persephone, O Melinoë, O Leucophryne. Esoteric symbols are inscribed on the edges of the triangle.

Alternate Interpretations

Melinoe is depicted in numerous different ways in modern society. The most common interpretation of Melinoe is that she was either the daughter of Zeus and Persephone or the daughter of Hades and Persephone. However many believe that she, along with Hades, Zagreus and numerous other gods, was a victim of syncretism.

There were many gods and goddesses that were similar to others and these were combined to make singular gods. For instance, nearly all the chief sky gods of the Greek city states become Zeus before the rise of the polis.

Zeus, Zeus Pater (Jupiter) and Deus all mean the same thing, then it can be inferred that Zeus is a title, much like Caesar or king. Most of Zeus’ epithets are related to the city in which he was worshiped. In the Hymn to Melinoe, Kronian means ‘son of Kronos’, which was a title also widely applied to Hades. In several places like Locri, Eleusis, Corinth and Ephyra, Plouton (Hades) and Persephone were the chief deities, the ones responsible for the fertility of the earth, for the cycle of life and death. As a Father-Mother god pairing much like Zeus and Hera, they had children to rule over other aspects of their dominion. But during the rise of the polis and the writing down of oral myth, Zeus became the chief dominant god in a fractious region united by a single pantheon ruled over by a single sky god. Chief deities of the sea became Poseidon in much the same way, and Hades was relegated from rulership over the earth with his wife to rulership over only the dead. To make the pantheon make sense and include all gods, there couldn’t be two chief deities of the living world. Those writing down the myths also surmised that Hades, as the ruler of the dead, was infertile and could not have produced children like Melinoe and Zagreus. Hades, in his aspect of Zeus Katachthonios, the king beneath the earth, lost his role as father to his children because of syncretism. Zagreus and especially Melinoe remained, and their paternity was quickly attributed to the most common source of paternity in Greek myth: Zeus Olympios.

However it is possible to read between the lines in the Orphic hymns. For example, in Zagreus’ conception, the father appears as a snake, a creature who is deeply chthonic in its mythic origins. In this way, the father is written into this myth in code, not outright, as Hades. A few lines are added to reference back to Zeus, but the deeper symbolism points to Hades. In the conception of Melinoe above, Persephone bears her by the shores of the Cocytus, but strangely at the same time in the bed of Zeus Kronion, which here translates to the king son of Kronos, which could also be Hades. The line describing how Zeus took Hades’ form to conceive Melinoe on Persephone is about as clear an indication as we can have that the original source of the myth was ret-conned to have Zeus be the father.

Melinoe was important enough to enough people as the daughter of Hades and Persephone that the myth had to be written this way in order to say to the people that “we know you worshipped her this way, as the daughter of Hades and Persephone, but here is what actually happened. This is what everyone should believe now, but if you want to keep believing that Hades was her father, here is how you can go right on ahead and do that”.

If it is not meant to be interpreted this way, then why bother going to all the trouble of saying that Zeus had to take Hades’ form to conceive the child? Wouldn’t Melinoe’s birth have been just as equally valid if Zeus had simply done what he did with almost every other one of his bedmates and ravished Persephone unwillingly?

The answer is clearly no, and the fact that the text exists to so elaborately explain Melinoe’s conception is the signifier that her original myth was different.

In modern literature

Melinoe appears as a speaking character in The Judgment of Midas, a masque by Christopher Smart (1722–1771). She is one of two wood nymphs in the masque, perhaps due to the similarity of her name to Meliai, the nymphs of the ash tree.

Melinoe appears in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians young adult fiction series, where she is described as "the goddess of ghosts … . She oversees the restless dead that walk the earth. Every night she rises from the Underworld to terrify mortals." Melinoe shows Ethan Nakamura the way out of the Underworld, partly as a way of spiting the gods in their war against the Titans. When the heroes (Thalia, Nico, and Percy) give chase, she shows them illusions of the restless souls of their loved ones that died; Percy, having "made his peace" with his dead, is unaffected and forces her to retreat.

Melinoe also appears in The Equilibria Collection, a young adult fiction series by author Echo Fox. Melinoe breaks free from the underworld destabilising the harmony in the world by preying on the negative emotions of the people. Triggering death and chaos to its inhabitants by their own hand.