The Cabeirion: Thebes's Other Mystery Cult

On a cup from a sanctuary outside Thebes, Odysseus is a small fat man with spindly legs and an enormous head, riding the waves on a makeshift raft, looking ridiculous.

He is not the only one. The heroes of Greek myth turn up on these vessels squat, pot-bellied and grotesque, drawn with the deliberate ugliness of caricature. Pygmies fight cranes. Figures recline at drinking parties with faces like gargoyles.

These were not tavern crockery. They were dedications, left at a mystery sanctuary by people who had been initiated there.

Twenty-five stades out of town

The sanctuary sat a few miles from Thebes, and it was found the way these things usually are, by accident: a chance discovery of bronze statuettes in 1887, followed by German excavation the next year, and then a second campaign in the 1950s and 60s led by Gerda Bruns, the first German woman to direct an excavation in Greece.

What came out of the ground was a proper establishment. A theatre. A stoa. A group of round and apsidal buildings that do not match the standard Greek temple plan at all. The place had been in use, rebuilt and rebuilt again, for centuries.

The gods were the Kabeiroi. That name attaches to several sanctuaries around the Aegean and it is not clear the same gods are meant in each. At Thebes the pairing is Kabeiros and a figure called simply Pais, the Child, and Demeter and Kore are tangled up in it.

Beyond that, the honest position is that we do not know who these gods were, where they came from, or what they were thought to do. The name is probably not Greek. It may be Semitic. That argument has run for well over a century without resolution.

The traveller who stopped writing

Pausanias went there in the second century CE, and his account is the single most useful thing anyone wrote about the place, mostly because of where he stops.

He gives the geography. He gives the origin story the Thebans told him: that Demeter came to Prometheus, one of the Kabeiroi, and to his son, and entrusted something to them. He is happy to record that much, and says as much explicitly, that there is nothing to prevent him telling everyone what the Thebans say the origin was.

Then he reaches the thing itself. What was entrusted to them, and what became of it, he writes, seemed to him a sin to put into writing. And that is the end of it.

It is worth being precise here, because the Kabeiroi get muddled: Herodotus is the writer who goes quiet about the Kabeiroi of Samothrace, which is a different sanctuary with a different history. For Thebes the witness is Pausanias, and his refusal is the more interesting of the two, because he had just proved he was perfectly willing to publish the parts he judged harmless.

He also passes on what happened to people who mistreated the sanctuary, and the stories are uniformly grim. Violation was punished. That is a cult protecting its reputation as much as its secret.

The joke nobody can explain

Which brings us to the pottery, and to the problem.

The Kabeiric vases were produced locally from around 425 BCE and went on being made into the third century. Not all of them are comic. Some show what look like straightforward cult scenes, figures at an altar, processions, the god reclining.

But a substantial group are savage. The style is the opposite of the elegant Athenian work of the same period: heavy bodies, stubby limbs, exaggerated features, and the specific subjects are the load-bearing myths of Greek identity. Odysseus adrift. Odysseus with Circe. The battle of the pygmies and the cranes, which is a joke about heroic combat before you add anything.

Thebes claimed descent from the heroic age. These are objects made by Thebans, dedicated at a Theban sanctuary, mocking the tradition Thebes claimed.

Nobody has settled what that means. The reading with the most traction treats the humour as ritual rather than irreverent: an inversion, of the kind carnival performs, where the normal order is turned upside down inside a bounded sacred space and put back afterwards. On that view the ugliness is doing religious work, not undermining it.

A second reading takes the mockery more literally. If the Kabeiroi were old gods standing outside the Olympian and heroic order, then laughing at that order is a way of saying whose sanctuary you are standing in.

Both are interpretations built on the same silent objects. No ancient writer explains the pictures, because the one man who might have was busy declining to.

What a rude cup is actually evidence of

There is something useful in the frustration.

Most of what survives from Greek religion is elite, official and dignified: temples, inscriptions, state processions, the sort of material that gets carved because somebody wanted it remembered. Even the great painted cycles were commissioned by people with money and a wall to fill.

The Kabeiric vases are none of that. They are cheap local pottery, made in quantity, bought by ordinary initiates and left behind. And what those people chose to dedicate, at a sanctuary they had paid to enter, was a picture of Odysseus looking like an idiot.

Whatever the mysteries of the Kabeiroi did to a person, it evidently did not require solemnity. That is a real fact about the cult, recoverable from objects rather than from literature, and it cuts against the reflex that mystery religion must have been hushed and portentous throughout.

The sanctuary kept working for centuries on that basis. People walked out from Thebes, went through whatever it was, and left behind a joke.

We have hundreds of the jokes. We do not have the rite, and the one visitor who could have told us decided it would be a sin.