Ritual & Death

Ancient Greek Worship: Cult, Mystery, Immersion

"[Oedipus is changed by] a rite that lets him do the most simple yet most difficult of acts: tell his story. So too, in a subtle way, Lee Breuer, in his African American Holiness-Pentecostal rendering of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, The Gospel at Colonus, tells a tale of African American life in America. The consequences in the rite done and the story told mark the differences between the settings and ultimate meanings of these plays, one Greek and tragic and the other, finally, Christian and transformed by joy."

"Oedipus at Colonus and The Gospel at Colonus: African American Experience and the Classical Text," LeBlanc, J.R., Medine, C.M.J. (2012). 

THE RITE as a welcome/initation: by revealing to ANTIGONE (and OEDIPUS) its ritual, COLONUS opens itself to them

Symbolism in THE RITE & BEYOND

• WATER: source of life, boundary of the earth/world, unearthly power  

  • Scene 9: "the spring that runs forever," "libation"

  • Scene 16: "Numberless are the world’s wonders...the storm-gray sea yields to his prows..." 

  • Scene 18: "Damnation rises behind each child like a black wave cresting"

  • Scene 21: "...some shore in the north/ Concussive waves make stream"

  • Scene 25: "It was not war, nor the deep sea, that overtook him..."

• LAMB: bounty, gentleness, offering, humbleness (Jason and the Golden Fleece is a cautionary tale against mortal hubris)

  • Scene 9: "Of fleece cropped from a young lamb"

  • Jubilee means the horn of a young ram in Hebrew

• EARTH: goddesses (the Furies as "daughters of the earth" Demeter, Persephone)

  • Scene 9: "when this earth receives it?"

  • Scene 16: "Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven with shining furrows where his plows have gone"

  • Scene 24: "Child of earth and hell, let him sleep well"

  • Scene 27: "From there they could see the hill crest of Demeter, Freshener of all things."

• OLIVE: Athena's gift to Athens, peace, immortality 

Underworld: Hades

Ancient Greeks anticipated that an individual goes to the Underworld after death. The realm is governed by god Hades and often referred to as such. The Greek Underworld shares similarities and differences with Christian Heaven/Hell:

(1) Location: 

According to Homer, the Underworld lies at the far western end of the world, beyond the earth-encircling Ocean (as we call the Underworld "Hades," "Ocean" gets this name from the Titan god Oceanus). Therefore, the journey to the Greek Underworld isn't a strict "descend" as in the Christian sense, and GOSPEL is blending the two concepts.

"But something invisible and strange

Caught him up—or down--

Into a space unseen."

Antigone, OEDIPUS AT COLONUS  

(2) Good/Evil Division:

Every ancient Greek (mortals, heroes, or demi-Gods) would enter the Underworld after death. But an expectation that good would be rewarded (in heaven) and evil punished (in hell) was not central to their beliefs - only a few mythical figures (like Sisyphus) would suffer eternally. 

But the Underworld also has its division: the glorious area known as the Elysian Fields, which is similar to Heaven. The torturous area is known as Tartarus, corresponding with Hell. Note that OEDIPUS condemned POLYNEICES to the "hated underworld," and we now pray that OEDIPUS himself rest somewhere else in Hades' realm. 

(3) Darkness/Sleep:

In ancient Greek mythology, the northwest is a generally ominous coordinate. Homer wrote in ODESSEY that Cimmerii is a land at the edge of the earth covered in mist and cloud, where the sun never shines. Ovid describes it as a land of perpetual darkness and silence, lying "beyond the north wind." Their land is home to the god of sleep Somnus. 

THESEUS

I think some shore in the north

Concussive waves make stream

This way and that in the gales of winter