The Bullroarer Atlas

HAD1898-005 - historical text

Ancient Greece / Dionysiac mysteries

Greece - Europe - Mediterranean

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A red-figure bell-krater showing Dionysos among maenads and satyrs, one playing the double flute — a scene of Dionysiac revelry, not a picture...
Representative image. A red-figure bell-krater showing Dionysos among maenads and satyrs, one playing the double flute — a scene of Dionysiac revelry, not a picture of the rhombos itself. The Metropolitan Museum of Art CC0

rhombos English

Source term: rhombos / kounos

rhombos / konos (Greek): in the Dionysiac mysteries, the wood-on-a-cord whirled to make a roaring noise — a bullroarer; distinct from the dictionary sense "spinning-top" or "magic wheel."

Etymology. Greek name for a whirled object — spinning-top, magic wheel, or bull-roarer — here the whirled sounding instrument of the Dionysiac mysteries. (high confidence)

In a lost Orphic poem quoted by Clement of Alexandria, the Titans lure the child Dionysus to his death with a handful of toys: "Cone, and spinning-top, and limb-moving rattles, / And fair golden apples from the clear-toned Hesperides." The ancient scholiast on Clement fixes one of these, the konos, beyond doubt: "a little piece of wood, to which a string is fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round to make a roaring noise" — a bullroarer, named among the Dionysiac mystery toys. The murder left its mark on the rite itself. Initiates into these mysteries were daubed with clay, and the story told to explain it was that the Titans had painted themselves with clay or gypsum so they would not be known when they fell on the child and tore him to pieces; Demosthenes jeers at Aeschines for helping his mother bedaub her initiates with clay and bran, and Nonnus shows the practice still alive in the late Bacchic mysteries. Andrew Lang, reading the scholiast's gloss, called it "a brief but complete description" of the Australian turndun, and set the whirled wood of the torn god beside the sacred bullroarers of the bush.

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, quoted in Lang 1884, "The Bull-Roarer," Custom and Myth
Function
Bullroarer identified in Dionysiac mystery rites; associated with initiation, clay-daubing, the Dionysus myth cycle, and adjacent Greek mystery context around Eleusis/Demeter without claiming an Eleusinian rhombos attestation.
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Haddon
Source location
Clement, Protrepticus II.17-18; scholiast in Lobeck, Aglaophamus (1829) i.700 (= Lang 1884 n.39); Demosthenes, De Corona 259 (= Lang 1884 n.40a)

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