Göttliche Liebesvermittlung: Die Narrativierung des Hermes als Gott der erotischen Initiation in der archaischen und klassischen Zeit des antiken Griechenland
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
This project, whose results in book form have been accepted as a Habilitationsschrift by the University of Erfurt, Germany, deals with the narrativization of Hermes as a god of sexual initiation and marriage in archaic Greek literature and with its grounding in cult. This thematic complex is innovative both in the study of Classics and in the History of Religion. The first part of the book focuses on poetic texts from the archaic period in which Hermes exhibits his competence as a divinity forging the sexual maturation and socialization of young men on the cusp of adulthood. Even though in most of these narratives the emphasis is laid upon maidens, who are destined to become wives of gods or heroes, their narrative stylization is unequivocally gendered. I demonstrate that Hermes, in his capacity as ‘go-between’ in sexual affairs, constitutes an elaborate narrative vehicle that mediates not only between genders, but also between genres. From this point of view, the narrative texts of the archaic period that mainly stem from the epic-hymnic tradition are deeply concerned with the tension between male heroic and ehoie poetry, two branches of the early Greek epic tradition that provide a rough schematization of gender relations. While being alerted to the interface of male heroic and ehoie poetry with special reference to Hermes’ position within these epic traditions, I delve into the particularities of this divine figure’s narrative imprint in order to specify the contextual circumstances under which Hermes is ‘put into narrative’ as a deity who presides over the sexual initiation and marriage of youths (and, often also, the sexual consummation and marital commitments of adult men such as Odysseus), and to study the stylization of such narratives in terms of sequential cohesion and thematic coherence. Moreover, Hermes’ narrative foray into the realm of male and female sexuality appears to have its counterpart in religious pragmatics as quite a few joint archaic cults of Hermes and Aphrodite attest. Against this backdrop, this study aspires to use Hermes as a case in point in order to illustrate that literature works as a medium for religion in narrative texts of the archaic period, and that literary discourse over gods parallels everyday life. The interpretative frameworks I employ to designate the fairly standardized links of archaic narratives featuring Hermes as an eroticized agent is drawn from narratology on the one hand (Claude Brémond’s elementary schema of triadic narrative sequence “contingency - occurrence - success”) and also from Robert Parker’s recently coined “gods at work” principle. In order to effect the passing over from the purely narrative section to the one that deals with the archaic cults of Hermes and Aphrodite, I come up with an elaboration of the way in which the concept of ‘human ecology’ can work in literary and cultic contexts so as to argue for the extent to which humans interact with their environment, be it social or natural.
