Goêteia in History #2
PArt II
Before the word goêteia was first written down, it was already long in use in the ancient Mediterranean world. It is therefore fitting to first cast a glance at the archaic terrain the term goêteia emerged from — especially its border regions — before turning to its earliest literary sources.
Many ancient maps follow a circular scheme. Accordingly, the familiar, or even sacred center - as in the case of the omphalos - was placed at the heart of the map. The further we move toward the outer periphery — i.e., the boundary of the iconographic cosmos — the more we find ourselves surrounded by monsters and wonders.[1]
The ancient Greeks spoke of the oikumene (οἰκουμένη) as the region that marked land already inhabited or prone to become settled. Over time, this concept expanded to encompass the entire known geographical world, or even the full Greco-Roman cultural sphere; it began to mark the boundary between the civilized world and that of the barbarians.
However vast the oikumene might be imagined, it remained encircled by otherness — regions deemed hostile, inhospitable, or simply inaccessible.[2] A prominent example of this was the Black Sea, which the Greeks originally called Áxeinos Póntos (Ἄξεινος Πόντος).[3] The term áxeinos combines the Greek word for “guest-friend” (ξένος) with the prefix ἀ-, expressing negation. Thus, for the Greeks, the Áxeinos Póntos was not the Black Sea, but the Hostile Sea, likely due to its stormy waters, inaccessible coasts, and the perceived hostility of the tribes inhabiting its shores.
The frozen shores of the Euxine, the ‘hospitable’, Sea hold me: called Axenus, ‘inhospitable’, by men of old, since its waters are troubled by immoderate winds, and there are no quiet harbours for foreign ships. There are tribes round it, seeking plunder and mayhem, and the land’s no less fearful than the hostile sea. Those you hear of, men delighting in human blood, live almost beneath the same starry sky as myself, and not far away from here is the dread Tauric altar of Diana, goddess of the bow, stained with murder. They say this was once the kingdom of Thoas, not envied by the evil, nor desired by the good.[4]
Note: Had we the space here for a more extensive discussion, I would wish to insert a note on the important aspect described by Jake Stratton-Kent: that the ancient epics so often weave together geographical and mythical realities. In this sense, the Black Sea was already, by the fifth century BCE, a mercantile and flourishing trading region for the Greek, and not merely a place of projected otherness. The seafaring Greeks were by no means inclined toward geographical isolationism; on the contrary, we read already in Herodotus that laughter at foreign customs merely reveals one’s own incomprehension, just as we hear of the Scythian sage Anacharsis.[5] And at the same time — without contradicting this economic and historiographical perspective — the region also marked, from a mythological standpoint, a horizon beyond which Otherness was at home.
After all, it is no coincidence that the Argonauts set sail from the shores of the Black Sea on their epic voyage into a world inhabited by shamanic beings. Beyond the Áxeinos Póntos lay what was no longer oikouménē. To view an ancient map of this region through a mythological lens is not to trace a coastline but to glimpse a wound: the point where the Other began to bleed into the familiar, into the ordered world of the self. The Áxeinos Póntosmarked an open boundary — not merely because of the unknown beyond it, but because through this narrow edge the Other could enter the body of the known world.[6]
In later sources, the term was transformed into Euxine, literally “good stranger.” In an attempt at apotropaic warding, the Hostile Sea was thus verbally tamed into the Friendly Sea. The dangers and threats emanating from this place were no longer invoked even in name.
As several scholars since Karl Meuli’s seminal essay from 1935 have show, it was precisely this Black Sea region that is often considered as the principal route along which Scythian–shamanic influence reached the Greeks in archaic times.[7] The Euxine, then, was both perilous sea and trading corridor, mythic allegory as well as source of early goêtic influences upon Greek culture. Before the body of goêteia appears in ancient Greek literature, travelers and traders from the Black Sea had already carried its bones beneath the Greek sun. For just as no cultural artifact is ever wholly new, wholly original, or purely of a single people, so too early goêteia is a golem — born of clay and bone, shaped alike by foreign and authentically Greek forces.
To understand the cosmos in which goêteia takes place, we do well in reflecting on the tension between oikumene and the wound of euxine. However, we need to transpose them from the realm of cultural geography or even cosmology, to the realm of our own carnal experience. Here we encounter the small campfire of our cognitive mind (i.e., the oicumene), surrounded by and exposed to the infinite wilderness of those sensual impressions in which we involuntarily, constantly, and ceaselessly partake in the flesh. Here we speak of the realms of sound, smell, sight, taste, and touch, and of all the uncanny, alien, and plainly weird stimuli that echo the presence of Radical Otherness. The euxine is no longer a confined tangential spot on the map, but rather we find ourselves surrounded by the wound of Otherness, bleeding into it, with each sight, sound, taste, and bite.
The oicumene of our cognition, reasoning, and problem-solving is a filigree effect based upon multiple distributed networks of signal processing in the body, with the main nodes located in our brain, gut, and spine. This fragile network, which allows us to apprehend the world in the seeming clarity of cause and effect, faces a Hostile Sea of wild, unbridled, raw sensory impressions, which we have sought to restrain with relentless obsession for millennia. This battle is called civilization. It is the fierce attack of the human species to subjugate the world, to prune, confine, and soften it so that it becomes intelligible to the small, flickering campfire of our mind. Civilization is the micro-dosing of reality, according to the rules of the incredibly limited capacity of the human intellect. Civilization is the act of seating the forest, of fastening the spirits of the Wild Hunt onto plastic chairs, in order to count them, wash them, comb them, and pour the thundering tremor of their fleshy knowledge into the tiny cups of our minds.
Goêteia, as we will see, is its own kind of Áxeinos Póntos, a metaphorical as well as actual Black Sea. Her craft marks a wound in the body of many civilizations. She is a gash running from the Ancient Greek world onward. Through her unruly art the telluric forces of the wild and uncivilized bleed anarchically into the well-organized flesh of the polis. Wherever we encounter her traces — for her body rarely reveals itself in the bright daylight of scripture — she escapes civilized restraint and remains entangled in obstinate coarseness and willful autonomy.
Although the term goês does not yet appear in his epics, it is best to begin with Homer. Here we find the precursor concepts into which the word goês will later slip, absorbing many of their meanings. These are the realms of φάρμακα / pharmaka (potions, drugs, poisons), θελκτήριον / thelkterion (spells, charms), ἀοιδή / aoidē (chants, incantations), and τεχνάσματα / technasmata (cunning devices, trickery).[8]
Straight from the outset, it becomes clear what unites these terms and what marks the complete circumference of their adjacent territories: the human body itself. All of these terms describe effects on, through, and with the human flesh, blood, skin, as well as their carnal appearances in the world. They mark in no way a sacred sphere of divine transcendence; rather, they trace the dirty streets of everyday daemonic struggles. These precursors of goêteia form a worn utility belt of potions, drugs, and poisons; incantations, songs, and charms; rings, stones, and amulets; ointments, oils, and fumigations; weapons and shields, all saturated with demonic power. The carnal realm is not overcome here; instead, it is employed as vessels of daemonic embodiment.
But when the queen had bathed him in the halls and anointed him with oil, the sorcerer’s charm vanished from his flesh.[9]
This “sorcerer’s charm” refers to the magical disguise and alteration of Odysseus’ appearance. Thus, from the beginning we encounter the low magic among the Ancient Greek as an art that affects both the flesh as well as our perception of the world. Moreover, the person who had put this glamour on Odysseus in an act of alliance, to help him as he plots against the suitors, was no other than the deity Athena herself. The Homeric line, therefore, makes Athena’s spell sound like a bodily charm that adheres to the skin and can be washed away with oil. This locates her divine intervention in the very register of the carnal, immanent, trickster-magic that later Greek culture would know as goêteia.
Whether a deliberate literary device or not, this passage foreshadows the ambivalence that will haunt the term goêteia throughout history: It marks marginal, suspect, and even fraudulent practices; and yet it also indicates the unapologetically effective, and indisputable tangible impact of chthonic sorcery. Even Athena, the goddess of wisdom, strategy, civic order, and heroic clarity, would turn to a goêtic charm, if the situation afforded it.
About a hundred years after Homer’s time — at least according to conventional estimates — the term goês appears in writing for the first time. We encounter it in the archaic, anonymous epic Phoronis, from the late 7th or early 6th century BCE, preserved only in fragments. It recounts the story of the Tirynthian culture hero Phoroneus.
[…] there Idaean Phrygians, goêtes, mountain-dwellers, had their homes, Kelmis and tall Damnameneus, and mighty Akmôn, skillful servants of mountain-haunting Adrasteia, who, using the arts of cunning Hephaestus, were the first to discover dark iron in mountain clefts, and bring it to the fire and work it into a splendid thing.[10]
In the same paragraph, we also meet the Idaean Dactyls for the first time — three wondrous, daimonic brothers, masters of the forge who dwell far apart from humankind, remote and by themselves on the holy mountain of the Mother goddess Rhea, Mount Ida. Their names — Kelmis (anvil), Damnameneus (hammer), and Akmon (iron) — suggest their liminal existence on the threshold of man and daemon, natural force and refined art, conscious being and raw substance. These three appear as the earliest goêtes: enchanted, hive-like beings who, in utter solitude, do not merely practice a craft but incarnate it. Thus the Idaean Dactyls — literally the Fingers of Mount Ida — were revered as the servants, guardians, and ritual celebrants of the Great Mother upon her sacred mountain, and as one of the primal springs from which the chthonic sorcery of the goês first flowed into the world.
Three and a half centuries later, in the age of Socrates, we find one of the earliest written occurrences of the term goês in Euripides’ Bacchae. The play is set in mythic Thebes, at the moment when Dionysus first brings his cult to Greece. Pentheus, the king, rejects the god as a dangerous innovation — foreign, effeminate, and socially subversive. From the civic perspective within the drama, Dionysus’s cult appears as something alien and threatening: its rites are unfamiliar, its adherents defy social norms, and its worship undermines the patriarchal order. Yet this portrayal is a conscious literary fiction, for by the 4th century BCE Dionysus was anything but a new deity; his cult had been firmly rooted in Greek religion since the Archaic period.
In the form of Pentheus’ outraged accusation against the new cult, lines 215–265 of Euripides’ play contain a number of specific details concerning the rites, the transgressions, and the otherness of the goês as he was imagined in literature at this early stage. In condensed form, we may summarize the following observations: The women are abandoning their homes for the wilderness of remote forests and shadowed mountains — where they engage in ecstatic rites that follow no known order or orthodoxy. Their ceremonies appear steeped in excess and rumor of sexual transgression, all under the banner of the new god, Dionysus. These gatherings resemble revelry more than worship. Among them moves one figure above all: a goês, a foreigner from the Lydian lands, beautiful and strange to behold, who seduces the young women by day and night. His rituals make use of mixing-bowls, wine and grapes, as well as the sacred wand of the Bacchants, the ivy-crowned thyrsos.
And they say that some stranger has come, a goês, a conjuror from the Lydian land, fragrant in hair with golden curls, having in his eyes the wine-dark graces of Aphrodite. He is with the young girls day and night, alluring them with joyful mysteries. If I catch him within this house, I will stop him from making a noise with the thyrsos and shaking his hair, by cutting his head off.[11]
Even in this early literary appearance, the goês already bears all the markers that would define him for centuries to come: he is imbued with threatening otherness, originating from distant lands that evoke notions of decadence and barbarism, and his combination of exoticism, magic, and taboo-breaking religiosity represents at minimum a shock to the established order, and at worst a profound crisis.
If one manages to strip the goês of his daimonic power and attraction, one has the perfect figure to mock: awkward and alien, deceptive yet vanquished, shamed and reduced to a warning to maintain the social order. If, however, one cannot domesticate him and fetter his wild appearance, then he must be fought, expelled, or destroyed. Under no circumstances, even if he settled in the far periphery of the polis, must he be tolerated on equal terms.
The goês is thus simultaneously the radically Other, both geographically and evolutionarily. He embodies the occult barbarian as well as the archaic atavism. On both axes he must be marked as overcome — both in geographical proximity and in temporal distance. His wildness, his taboo-breaking presence, and his rites challenge the new order, both from the perspective of the alien Other as well as from the standpoint of one’s own distant past. In this context, it’s worthwhile to read the respective section from Richard Gordon’s seminal 1999 essay, Imagining Greek and Roman Magic.
More sophisticated still, or at any rate learned in a different way, was the Greek goes, who is later represented as a magus. The etymology of this term connects it with the ritual lament for the dead (actually a female responsibility). It has been argued that death came in the late Archaic and early Classical periods to seem more terrible, and that this anxiety led to an imaginative elaboration of the process of transition between this life and the world of the dead. A by-product of this shift was the democratization of an older belief about heroes, that they were potentially active and capable of direct intervention in human life as daemones, and in particular a greater awareness of the restless dead, the ahôroi and biaiothan-atoi. The goês seems to have emerged as a specialist ‘singer’ to mediate between the newly-particularized dead and the living, invoking Hekate, the goddess of passages and communications, and likewise Hermes. The importance of Hekate at least in later Greek representations of (malign) magic, as well as the association between Orpheus and magic almost certainly goes back to their practice. The goês seems to have been, along with begging-priests and ‘prophets’, the heir of ‘a small portion of a divided patrimony’, that of the Archaic healer-seers such as Melampus, Thaletas or Abaris.[12]
[to be continued]
Footnotes
[1] For further reading I recommend Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Fines Terrae — Die Enden der Erde und der vierte Kontinent auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1992, as well as, Asa Simon Mittmann, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England, New York: Routledge, 2006.
[2] For the Greeks in their beginnings, as for any unlettered people, all the world was originally Terra Incognita, except the microcosm in which each individual or each group lived. (J. R. Bacon, Terra Incognita, in: Greece & Rome, Feb., 1932, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Feb., 1932), pp. 79/80)
[3] Stephanie West, 'The Most Marvellous of All Seas’: The Greek Encounter with the Euxine, in: Greece & Rome, Oct., 2003, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Oct., 2003), pp. 151-167; also see: Stefan Albrecht, “Pontos Axeinos“ und „Pontos Euxeinos“: Das Schwarze Meer, in: Ost-West: Europäische Perspektiven, 1/2019, Freising: Renovabis, 2019.
[4] Ovid, Tristia, Book IV, el. 4 57f.
[5] Pia Guldager Bilde, Jane Hjarl Petersen (eds.), Meetings of Cultures in the Black Sea Region: Between Conflict and Coexistence, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2008
[6] Albrecht, 2019, https://www.owep.de/artikel/1229-pontos-axeinos-und-pontos-euxeinos-schwarze-meer#, accessed October 2025)
[7] Exemplary studies, listed here in chronological order, include: Meuli, Karl, Scythica, Hermes 70 (1935), Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, pp. 121–176; Jeanmaire, Henri, Couroi et Courètes, Lille: Librairie Universitaire, 1939; Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951; Burkert, Walter, “ΓΟΗΣ”. Zum griechischen ‘Schamanismus, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 105 (1962), pp. 36–55; Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, Paris: François Maspero, 1965; Kingsley, Peter, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999.
[8] These designations for certain domains of magic did not yet imply specific practitioners. They had not yet crystallized into early social or professional types, and we do not know how those who practiced them referred to themselves. See in this regard Richard Gordon’s important observation:“Would […] anyone have referred to herself as a Thett(ss)alê, or pharmakis, or even as a saga? Moreover, it is difficult even to guess how far people in antiquity - particularly before the Hellenistic period - relied upon practitioners for obtaining magical services rather than inventing their own rituals on the basis of rumour, common knowledge and their own imagination. […] All we can be sure of is that any lay-person who did invent his or her own ritual for a specific end after the development of a strong sense of magic in the Hellenistic period would not have laid much store by it. It was acknowledged by then in cities (though surely not, or at least not to the same degree, outside them) that such things required special competence. Magic became, more exclusively than earlier, a service.” (Richard Gordon, Imagining Greek and Roman Magic, in: Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clarks (eds.), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, London: The Athlone Press, 1999, p.181-182)
[9] Odyssey 19.457–458
[10] Phoronis fragment 2 Bernabé = Z Apoll. Rhod. 1, 1126/31b; quoted after Gordon, 1999, p. 179
[11] Euripides, Bacchae, translated by T. A. Buckley, 1858, lines 230-240
[12] Gordon, 1999, p. 185
