The Bullroarer Atlas

ANATOLIA-001 - secondary catalog

Athenian Sabazios mysteries (Glaukothea / Aeschines)

Greece - Classical Athens, mid-4th c. BCE - Europe - Mediterranean

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"Le rhombus et l'iynx" — the whirled rhombos and the spun iynx-wheel appear together in this 19th-century engraving after an ancient Greek...
"Le rhombus et l'iynx" — the whirled rhombos and the spun iynx-wheel appear together in this 19th-century engraving after an ancient Greek vase, alongside a fawn and worshippers of the mystery cult; the instrument pair described in the Sabazios-mystery sources documented here does not survive as an object, only in text. Daremberg & Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines, vol. 4.2, fig. 5941 Public domain Image source

konos / rhombos

konos ("cone, pine-cone") and rhombos ("whirled thing, spinning-top"): Greek names for small whirled objects among the toys of the child Dionysus.

Etymology. konos means "cone, pine-cone"; rhombos, "whirled thing, spinning-top." (high confidence)

An ancient scholiast on Clement of Alexandria pauses to explain one of the toys handled in the Dionysiac mysteries: the konos is a little piece of wood, to which a string is fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round to make a roaring noise. The mystery world in which such objects moved is preserved in Demosthenes' attack on the orator Aeschines, whose mother Glaukothea ran initiations in Athens. By night, Demosthenes says, Aeschines mixed the libations, wrapped the novices in fawn-skins, and scoured them with clay and bran — the daub that myth traced to the Titans, who had painted themselves with clay so as not to be known when they tore the child Dionysus to pieces. By day he led the revelers crowned with fennel and white poplar, squeezing fat-cheeked snakes above his head and crying euoi saboi, hyes attes. Demosthenes names the fawn-skins and the snakes but not the konos; the whirled wood belongs to the scholiast's catalogue of Bacchic toys, and it is on that ground that Glaukothea's rite is read as a Greek instance of the roaring cord.

The κωνος is a little piece of wood, to which a string is fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round to make a roaring noise.

Ancient scholiast on Clement of Alexandria, quoted in Lang, Custom and Myth (1884), ch. "The Bull-Roarer"
Object
Small wooden konos/rhombos whirled on a cord to make a roaring noise in nocturnal Sabazios-mystery initiations conducted in private houses.
Function
Sound-element of telete (initiation) alongside fawn-skin wrapping, clay-daubing, and ritual cries 'euoi saboi'.
Map confidence
medium - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
Source location
Dem. 18.259-60

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