On a funerary urn, the Columbarium Lovatelli, we find another mystery scene with a Mystica Vannus Iacchii. We are sure of the mystery iconographic theme because of the presence of Persephone holding a big torch. On the other side, there is a piglet-sacrifice scene ( a sacrifice quite often present in Demeter’s special celebrations) and the Liknophoria (carrying of the Mystic Vannus). Just an abundance ritual? Judging from how the whole scene unfolds, it is theurgic instead. In fact, the following piglet sacrifice, with the spraying of a libation, is involved.
On the left, a farmer is walking a bull beside a Dionysus Temple. We certainly know the divinity’s name not only because of the pine on the portal top, but also of the liknon-vannus on the roof, plenty of fruits, a cornucopia, and with a phallus. The entire structure holding the sacred liknon is an elaborate erection with a torch. This representation doesn’t seem mysterious at first sight, but a hymn to abundance and fertility.
So we celebrate the child carried in the liknon in a different way than a new child entering our material world, because the Dionysian child cannot but be an “old” child, or a child not new at all, but recycled, in a way. We can be happy for the little Dionysus in the first picture below in a vannus-cradle, but what about the second little Dionysus carved on a sarcophagus? Yet, they are representing the same Liknophoria ( carrying of the liknon), only the “funeral” child is much more clear in his intention. In light of that, it sounds a little credulous the ancient custom of carrying the newborn child in a winnowing fan used as a cradle. But those were only the recollections that arrived from esoteric secret rites to exoteric, non-initiated common people. Above we can see how a mystery moment could be openly represented on a vascular painting, represents a secret rite during the Eleusinian Mysteries with the birth of the divine child. Such a birth was proclaimed by the hierophant with the declaration: ” Brimo has borne a child named Brimos.”
The example on the left, belonging to a greek vascular oinochoe painting, is one of the clearest examples, not only of a ritual mask inside a vannus-liknon but of the last mentioned object as a liturgical item. To an extent that we can affirm the metallographic in the Pompeian villa, we are examining is given an explicit status of representation of a mystery rite for the very presence of the sacred vannus. I have just hinted at the topic in Chymica Vannus-Investigating a Title, but now we have to keep on that.
If a cradle is involved, it is a paradigm of the mystery of ” dying and reviving”. As a Septimius Severus age coin on the left. The baby is, of course, the result of a union. A sacred marriage in this case.
I have already mentioned in my article on Chymica Vannus, that Virgilius in his Georgics describes many agricultural tools used in mythological symbolism. I quote from the article: “A vannus is not a cribrum. A vannus – winnowing fan is not a filtering device, but a separating one through the action of air currents. A van is a broad basket, o oar, into which the corn, or rice, after being trashed, is thrown in the direction of the wind, to let deposit corn and chaff in different places. In archaic times it was also called bird’s wing”. Vannus-Liknon device was the forerunner of modern fans. In fact, Chinese people developed, already back in that era, a rotating winnowing fan. Things are getting more complicated by the Homeric age shape of the device. Like an oar. Not a basket.
I have already mentioned in my article on Chymica Vannus, that Virgilius in his Georgics describes many agricultural tools used in mythological symbolism. I quote from the article: “A vannus is not a cribrum. A vannus – winnowing fan is not a filtering device, but a separating one through the action of air currents. A van is a broad basket, o oar, into which the corn, or rice, after being trashed, is thrown in the direction of the wind, to let deposit corn and chaff in different places. In archaic times it was also called bird’s wing”. Vannus-Liknon device was the forerunner of modern fans. In fact, Chinese people developed, already back in that era, a rotating winnowing fan. Things are getting more complicated by the Homeric age shape of the device. Like an oar. Not a basket.
The Servius comment is so confusing that it seems that he has increasingly gone to make the liknon, or vannus, even more mysterious. Virgil first enumerates all the heavy agricultural implements: the plowshare’s heavy strength, the slow rolling wagons, the irksome weight of the mattock, and next he notes: Virgil: “Slight wares entwined of wickerwork that Celeus made for man, Frames of arbutus wood compact, lacchus’ mystery fan.”
If we were left with Virgil only we should conclude that the fan was a fan, i.e. a thing with which to cause wind, to ventilate, and, as it was an instrument of Demeter, we should further suppose that this fan was used for ventilating, for winnowing her corn. We should still be left with two unanswered questions:
(a) why was a winnowing fan, a thing in constant use in everyday life, “mystic”? and
(b) how had the winnowing fan of the corn goddess become the characteristic implement of the wine god?’
These two difficulties presented themselves to Servius’ mind, and he attempted to answer them after his kind. He does not fairly face the problem, but he tells us everything he can remember that anybody has said about or around the matter. His confusing statement is so instructive it must be quoted in full: ‘The mystic fan of lacchus, which is the sieve (cribrum) of the threshing floor, He calls it the mystic fan of lacchus, because the rites of Father Liber made reference to the purification of the soul, and men were purified through his mysteries as grain is purified by fans. It is because of this that Isis is said to have placed the limbs of Osiris, when they had been torn to pieces by Typhon, on a sieve, for Father Liber is the same person, he in whose mysteries the fan plays a part, because as we said, he purifies souls. Some add that Father Liber was called Liknites by the Greeks. Moreover, the fan is called by them “liknon,” in which he is said to have been placed directly after he was born from his mother’s womb. Others explain the fact that it is called mystic by saying that the fan is a large wicker vessel in which peasants, because of its large size, are wont to heap their first fruits and consecrate it to Liber and Libera. Hence it is called “mystic.’
If by mystic is meant hopelessly and utterly unintelligible, the fan of lacchus certainly justifies its name. Servius leaves us with a ‘vannus’ that is at once a sieve, a winnowing fan, and a fruit basket, with mysterious contents that are at once a purified soul, an infant, and a dismembered Dionysos, leaves us also with no clue to any possible common factor that might explain all three uses and their symbolism.
To solve the problems presented by Servius it is necessary briefly to examine the evidence of classical authors as to the process of winnowing and the shape of winnowing fans. So far we have assumed that a winnowing fan is a basket, but when we turn to Homer we are confronted by an obvious difficulty.
It happens by an odd chance that we know something of the shape of the instrument for winnowing used in Homeric days. It was a thing so shaped that by a casual observer it could be mistaken for an oar. Teiresias in Hades foretells to Odysseus what shall befall him after the slaying of the suitors: he is to go his way carrying with him a shapen oar until he comes to a land where men have no knowledge of sea things, and a sign shall be given to him where he is to abide. Teiresias thus instructs him:
Homer: ‘This token manifest I give, another wayfarer Shall meet thee and shall say, on thy stout shoulder thou dost bear A winnowing fan, that day in earth plant thou thy shapen oar And to Poseidon sacrifice a bull, a ram, a boar.’
The word used is not liknon; it is chaff-destroyer, but nonetheless, it is clear that the ancient instrument of winnowing was, roughly speaking, shaped like an oar; confusion between the two was possible. Such an instrument might well be called a fan, and of some such shape must have been the primitive winnower. It is obviously quite a different thing from the liknon of the reliefs, the fruit basket. A thing shaped like an oar would not be easily carried on the head, nor would it suggest itself as a convenient cradle for a baby.
The way in which this primitive winnowing fan was used is clear from another Homeric passage. In the fray of battle the Achaeans are white with falling dust, just like Homer says Homer: ‘When in the holy threshing floors away the wind doth bear The chaff when men are winnowing. She of the golden hair Demeter with the rushing winds the husk from out the grain Divideth, and the chaff-heaps whiten and grow amain.’
The wind is the natural winnower, but man can help the wind by exposing the mixed chaff and grain. This he throws up on the winnowing fan against the wind, the wind blows away the chaff and the heavier grain falls to the ground. The best instrument with which to do this is naturally an oar-like pole, broadened at the end to serve as a shovel. Such an instrument was the winnowing fan:
Homer: As when from a broad winnowing fan, in a great threshing floor, The pulse and black-skinned beans leap out the whistling wind before Sped by the winnower’s swinging, so the bitter arrow flew From Menelaos glancing far nor pierced his corslet through.’ Here the joint work of the wind and the human winnower is clearly shown.”
I also quote a sentence from Vunex-Blogspot: “Homer’s winnowing-fan, the athereloigon, which is really what you’re interested in, was identified with the ptuon or shovel, whereas all this time we have been going on about the liknon or basket. ” The blog’s author goes on to provide a picture of a very ancient mystic winnowing fan in a form other than a basket:
” A. D. Ure (‘Boeotian Haloa’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1949) provides a visual example of Dionysius with a ptuon instead of a liknon, from the fifth century BC: The image is a little difficult to make out, but the god’s implement can be seen extending diagonally downward from his right hand, terminating just below the piglet’s head to the right of the scene. Ure notes proudly that his fan is ‘more oarlike’ than any of the classical images in Harrison’s article.”
In fact, tied to the idea of a later vannus-liknon basket form, we miss all the implications as a simple air mover. Yet, this would seem absurd and nonsense. But when we will read another Virgilius verse from his Georgics, and furthermore when we will see a series of Pompeian frescoes in another house, even more, enigmatic than those we are examining, also related to air movements, probably we will begin to feel uncertainty of conviction. Above the Mystica Vannus, in the Villa of Mysteries, a winged character is fluttering her blowers.
Let’s not forget that Isis makes Osiris raise from the dead by flapping her wings around him.
A virtual tour of the villa of mysteries is available at Villa Mysteries reconstruction.
See also Chymica Vannus, or a Mortal’s Ambition: Investigating a Title .