#cotys

Cotys de Amolad, mucha en inspiración en Pinterest.

So I think I've reached a point where we've pretty much exhausted what's accessible to me. This dictionary excerpt from 1890 claims that there's a Plutarch excerpt out there that I'd love to get my hands on that talks about a 'tamer' Cotytian holiday, but as of right now I can't even find what reference it's supposed to be in.

I think between these different sources we have a decent view of her. Strong themes of sex-positivity and earth attachments, decent themes of regalness, 'madness', and maybe the dead, possible but admittedly loose ties to the sea or monsters, magic, femininity, and war or victory.

I think I have a series of excerpts from Euripolis' supposed play about Cotys' cult coming to Athens and this somehow being a bad thing, but I'm not sure I have the spoons or knowledge on the subject to properly dissect them.

I'll keep an eye out for any archaeological progress too, but rn my selection on that is pretty abyssal.

Read from the beginning

I ended up stumbling across another poem that I think includes a mention of Cotys: Theocritus' Idyllis 6. (And here's the Greek.) The poem seems to be about two lovers who get to singing about Galatea and Polyphemus, and shortly after their song have a nice, ahem, jaunt in the pastures. It's all very sweet in a way. I think just from the context, drawing a continuous line of sexual themes for Cotys here wouldn't be wrong, especially given the line where she's mentioned:

As Goody Cotyttaris taught me, thrice in my breast I spit.

Now, the word that gets translated to breast can apparently mean either bosom or lap. And immediately after this line, the two characters stop singing and are fully engaged with each other.

But I want to take a minute to focus on the word that gets translated as "goodly". The word used means "old woman", which is a note I find very interesting considering I'm pretty sure most ancient Greeks don't assume their gods can even die, let alone age. It seems to be significant when a god is noted as old. Looking at the tone of the rest of the poem, I don't think it's meant with any negative connotation, just as a plain statement. Thinking back to the previous conversation on Juvenal's poem, it doesn't seem unreasonable to consider a potential "mother of the gods" figure to be "old", possibly very old. Another potential candidate could be the status of a primordial god, either creating or embodying entire physical concepts of the world (ex. Time, the Sea, the Sky, the Earth). Again, looking back at previous comparisons to multiple earth goddesses, the idea of Cotys either being or creating the earth isn't much of a stretch. Another option is that "old" refers to the length of her cult - perhaps not in Athens particularly, but perhaps among the Thracians or those deeper inland. Unfortunately, this is something I can't really confirm at this time.

Something else of note is that the character who says the quoted line seems to be roleplaying as Polyphemus essentially, which would suggest a relationship between him and Cotys, or Cotyttaris, and given the nature of the poem and the actual quote, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to consider a sexual relationship here as well. This gives me a few ideas that I don't think I'll get into here, but may be useful at a later date.

Read from the beginning

So next I'll be looking at Virgil's Catalepton. This is annoyingly the only free English version I could find. Anyway, we're looking at section 13 in this one. The entire segment seems to be about what some might call infidelity and is rather overt sexually.

The section that specifically mentions Cotytia is this...

Throughout the beautiful Cotyttia

Thou'lt not invite me to the festal p. . . . s,

(I couldn't find the Latin but I'm convinced that hidden word is penis)

And then goes on to describe other places where the narrator is not going to, ahem, enjoy themselves with the subject of the poem.

Anyway, there's not much more to work with this one, but it does reinforce a theme of sexuality playing a role in her worship, as discussed here.

Taking a moment to backtrack on the Strabo discussion,

The description he gives of the parade also mentioned participants creating fearful noises on top of the war-cry-like music. Unfortunately, I don't think we can properly reconstruct whether the music was supposed to "defeat" the scary noises so to speak (though it's not something to rule out either), but I think we can connect these themes of sexuality and warband and terror into a theme of extreme emotions (or perhaps as the gentlemen scholars might say "excitement of the senses"). Fully embracing and reveling in these states of excitement seems crucial to the Cotytian experience.

Thinking back on Horace's poem,

With all of this in mind, the allusion to "Cupid's worship" may have been a sexual reference, given that he is a god of passionate desire, erotic love, attraction, etc. If that's the case, then we have three poets giving Cotytian worship very sexual traits, which I think is enough to make this a pretty solid association.

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