From “Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion” 1903, Chapter X. On Orphic Mysteries: “The locus classicus on the liknon is the commentary of Servius on Vergil’s words in the first Georgic, where among the stock implements of Demeter he notes the mystica vannus lacchi. So confused and confusing is the commentary that it has gone far to make the liknon or vannus mysterious.
Virgil first enumerates all the heavy agricultural implements: the ploughshare’s heavy strength, the slow rolling wagons, the irksome weight of the mattock, and next he notes:
Virgil: ‘Slight wares entwined of wicker work that Celeus made for man, Frames of arbutus wood compact, lacchus’ mystic 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 the mind of Servius, and he attempts 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 confused statement is so instructive it must be quoted in full: ‘The mystic fan of lacchus, that is the sieve (cribrum) of the threshing-floor. He calls it the mystic fan of lacchus, because the rites of Father Liber had 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. Whence also he is called Liber, because he liberates, and it is he who, Orpheus said, was torn asunder by the Giants. Some add that Father Liber was called by the Greeks Liknites. 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 its being called mystic by saying that the fan is a large wicker vessel in which peasants, because it is of 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 lacchos 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 none the less 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 as:
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 providing 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 an uncertainty of conviction. Above the Mystica Vannus, in the Villa of Mysteries, a winged character is fluttering her blowers, while the wind impersonation is next. At the end Isis makes Osiris to raise from the dead by flapping her wings around him.
In addition let’s consider the first picture below, always taken from Villa of Mysteries megalographia. A winged serpent. I could transpose this symbolism in metallic Alchemy. A winged serpent, furthermore with a white lily on its head, is unquestionably a symbol of our volatile Mercurius. The black color cannot be a mere decoration fancy. Secret Fire/Mercurius starts to “fly” during the putrefactive, dark, stage. Furthermore the white stork, along with with white seem to emerge from the black putrefactive soil. White birds and flowers are synonymous of first white appearance as well. The breastfeeding of a lamb, in Alchemy, stands for the following use of this mercurial “milk”: to feed another white lamb/Mercurius who will later be brought forth for the red color/blood. But, in this frescoe, things points at a superior level. It is not an issue to extract a metallic Soul anymore. The masks here probably stand for a different kind of Soul.
The topic is here more dangerous. In fact Eros/human Soul is present and women are officianting. Inconspicuous in the best known part of the Opus Magnum, in the weird part women seem to take a leading role. See again the pictures of dionysian liturgies and get at the gallery on the last page: unquestionably there are feminine presences scattered everywhere. And that’s strange. Women were the priestesses of Dionysus, and I don’t refer here to the orgiastic, and later, degenerations of Bacchanals, but to the early secret rites of immortality of the Soul.
Livius, during Augustan age, describes the embarrassing affair of bacchanals in Rome occurring in 186 b.C (Ab urbe XXXIX, 8-18). He tells of the degeneration caused by the arrival in the capital of the original Dionysian rites from Campania. Livius said about the transformations carried by the priestess Paculla Annia, who had allowed men in rites previously set apart for women only, for the first time admitting her sons. Sexual degenerations took place, to an extend to turn the ancient secret rites in mere orges.Till the consequent bacchanals ban.
While still in Pompei, women were the unique celebrants and companions of the feminine god. Very often we can find images of priestesses, whose practices were an aristocrat privilege handed on from mother to daughter. The final character in Villa of Mysteries is the “Domina”, the lady of the house.