Trophonius

Trophonios (Greek Τροφώνιος ) was a Greek hero with an ancient oracle in the Boeotian city Lebadeia.

Etymology and similar cults

The name is from the Greek word " trepho " = " feed " due. Strabo and various inscriptions call a " Zeus Trephonios ". Other chthonic Zeus deities with similar titles were in the Greek world known, eg Zeus Meilichios (the " honeyed " Zeus), or Zeus Chthonios (the " underground " Zeus).

Similar deities also existed in the Roman world, for example, there was an altar in Lavinium in Latium Aeneas under the title Indiges Jupiter (Jupiter under the earth ).

Trophonios in mythology

According to Greek mythology, was the son of Trophonios Erginus. According to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo Trophonios built together with his brother Agamedes the Temple of the Oracle at Delphi. Upon completion, the oracle told them that they should be six days indulge in every imaginable pleasures, and on the seventh day would be their greatest longing to be fulfilled. After seven days, they were found dead in their beds. In this story, the saying is based "Whom the gods love dies young."

Pausanias reported by the brothers, they would have built a treasury for King Hyprieius of Boeotia. Through a secret passage that only they knew, they would have stolen his riches. The king asked the thieves a trap by exposing a snake in the treasury. Agamedes was bitten by the snake and died - then Trophonios cut off his head and took it with him, so that the king could not identify the body. Then Trophonios fled to the cave of Lebadeia and was never seen again.

As a long time later, the inhabitants of Lebadeia had to suffer from a disease, they asked the oracle at Delphi for advice. The answer of the Pythia was that an unnamed hero was upset because he would not worship, therefore, citizens should find his grave and set up a cult for him. Long citizens searched in vain until finally followed a shepherd boy in search of honey bees in a hole in the ground. Instead he found honey Trophonios, which Lebadeia defeated the disease and it won a popular oracle.

In Euripides' tragedy Ion childless Xythos consulted the oracle of Trophonios on his way to Delphi.

Apollonius of Tyana reported after his visit to the shrine, Trophonios was in philosophical matters a representative of the teachings of Pythagoras.

The Trophonios cult

Pausanias describes in his book on Boeotia ( 9.39 ) the Trophonios cult in numerous details. For several days, had the visitors of the oracle to prepare with purification rituals and sacrifices. Then he was led by two thirteen- year-old boy in the river Herkyna, bathed and anointed, and dressed in plain clothes. He was served water from two sources, called Lethe ( oblivion) ​​and Mnemosyne (Remember ). Only then he was allowed to enter the oracle shrine. There he found a ladder, which he had to descend into a narrow hole in the floor through which he had to put his foot. From below, he has now pulled off abruptly to his feet, then he received a blow to the head that made him semi-conscious. In the darkness of the cave him now his future was supported by a voice disclosed. Then you pulled the visitors on the feet up again. At the top he had to sit down and repeat what the oracle had told him on the " chair of remembering ." In the "House of the Good Spirit," visitors could then relax and " find the laughter ."

Vision of Timarchos

Plutarch gives in De Genio Socratis a dream vision of the cosmos and the afterlife, which was in the oracle of Trophonios of Timarchos, one died early disciple of Socrates, received.

This Timarchos wanted, according to Plutarch necessarily know what it did with the daimon of Socrates on, and rose for that purpose in the oracle cave where he stayed for two nights and a day, so that his companion gave him already lost. But then he popped yet again, seemed very happy and gave the final ritual the following report:

Once he was in the cave, he was surrounded by thick darkness, he prayed, lay sprawled on the floor and did not know sure if he awake or dreaming. Then he felt as if his skull would share a hard blow which broke and sent his soul from the broken seams. His soul felt as if released from a suffocating dungeon and stretched out like a sail, which fills up by the wind. Then he heard a very graceful sound like a slight whirling around his head and looking up saw no earth, but bright islands, appearing in changing, fiery colors, loud islands, numerous and large, and all of a round shape. Between the islands was a lake or sea, shimmering in various shades of blue. The islands were moving, were tossed about, rose and fell.

The lake seemed sometimes very deep, sometimes quite shallow, two fiery streams filled the water with white light, but in the middle he saw an abyss, deep, thunderous and full of darkness, from which a howling and barking of animals crying of children and groans of men and women and all sorts of other terrible tones up broke, but how subdued and far away from what he was sore astonished.

Finally, he heard the voice of an invisible being, who asked him what did he want to know what Timarchos replied, " Everything! because what if there were, that would be wonderful and surprising? " What answers him the essence that the sky was not his region, but he could be happy to show him the realm of Persephone, namely the earthly world as underworld or hell. And he launches into a philosophical view of the split from the Styx into four parts world, as there are life, movement, reproduction, and decay. Life is associated with the motion by an invisible bond, movement with propagation through understanding and sun, and reproduction with disintegration through nature and the moon, and each of these compounds is one of the Moirai set, namely Atropos over the first, Clotho of the second and Lachesis on the third.

Now the moon put a border area is in which under-and over the world meet periodically, ie every 177 turns. At each such meeting souls can be drawn down from the world above in the sub-lunar hell, conversely souls who have completed the circle of rebirths, ascend into the Overworld. Then Timarchos noticed that he really only see stars that were moving hither and thither, whereupon he declares his leaders, those were the Daimones. The souls are namely partially woven the flesh and matter, and thus the world of desires, but partly outside of the meat attached to the body as a string, this part of the soul outside the body is the mind or Daimon. The greater the proportion of the Daimons had, the more unerringly is the movement of the soul and those points of light that he sees go a very peaceful transition that are the souls of the prophets and philosophers.

Then Timarchos returned to his body and in this world, after the voice had him yet announced, in three months he will understand everything better. In fact Timarchos had died suddenly after 3 months.

Trophonios in the classical tradition

" Descend into the cave of Trophonios " became a proverb for " suffer great fear " - it The clouds is alluded to in Aristophanes ' comedy.

Various ancient philosophers, such as Heraclides Ponticus, wrote commentaries for Trophonios cult who are lost today.

The sources Lethe and Mnemosyne are very much like the myth of Er, which is told in Plato's Republic, with texts of the Orphic, and with passages about remembering and forgetting in Hesiod's Theogony.

Since the God of the sanctuary had once been a man, denied in Roman times the tax collector in the usual temples tax exemption on the grounds that even an apotheosis does not create any tax exemption.

The Hellfire Club established himself a " den of Trophonios " with obscene murals, where members celebrated their orgies.

Friedrich Nietzsche describes himself in the preface to his book Dawn as " Trophonios " because he was descended into the subterranean depths of morality.