Haloa

At dusk on January 8th, the Haloa (῾Αλῶα) starts. Haloa took place every year, during the month Poseideon (Ποσειδέωνας), after the first harvest was over. The festival took place around the threshing floor (αλώνια) at the same time throughout Attica. At Eleusis there was a festival called Haloea on the 26th of the month Poseideon.

All women were expected to attend this event, but men were almost always excluded. Interestingly enough, men had a legal and moral expectation to pay for their wives’ expenses in these festivities. The strange timing of the harvest festival—mid-winter—is significant as well.

The Haloea, a festival for Demeter and Dionysus, included a procession for Poseidon. The Haloea is thought to have been a time for merriment. There is mention of a women’s rite in connection with this holiday: Women are provided with wine and food, including cakes in the shapes of sexual organs. They withdraw to themselves and “exchange scurrilous banter, and are teased with suggestions of promiscuity whispered in their ears by ‘the priestesses’.” The women are thought to have stayed secluded throughout the night and then to have joined the men the next day. While the women were off eating, drinking, and sounding much like the women of Lysistrata, the men are thought to have created a big pyre or a bunch of little bonfires.

The Greeks regarded the festival as sacred to not only Demeter but also to Dionysus. With the inclusion of Dionysus in the festival worship, the date shifted towards the winter as “he possessed himself of the festivals of Demeter, took over her threshing-floor and compelled the anomaly of a winter threshing festival.” In many ways, the festival was just as connected, if not more so, with Dionysus than with Demeter. Thus, we see the power and influence of the incoming god and of the importance of wine to Greek cult activity. Practically, Greeks were able to coax out a harvest just early enough to revel with Dionysus.

Despite being among the most documented of Greek festivals, very few records of what exactly occurred during Haloa. Because it was a predominantly, if not exclusively, women’s festival, little information has survived, or was recorded at all, about its characteristics and rituals. In fact, one of the most detailed sources of Haloa actually consists of marginal notes from the 13th century AD on the Roman writer Lucian’s works.

According to these notes, the women’s ritual practices involved “pits, snakes, pigs, and models of genitalia, all of which have a more or less marked sexual significance.” We also know that the festival “is said to have comprised Mysteries of Demeter, Kore, and Dionysus.” Another source singled out these women’s festivals as “containing the germ of ‘Mysteries,’” referencing here the Eleusinian Mysteries—annual initiation ceremonies devoted to the cult of Demeter and Persephone.

Celebrating Haloa

In the earliest times the religious part of the festival might have been restricted to married women, but after the fourth century BCE its celebration may have been limited to hetairai (ἑταῖραι, female companions, a term used non-sexually for women, about women, but used by men to indicate a woman hired for entertainment, often leading to sex), or they were simply also allowed to hold their own symposium during the Haloa, either at home or at Eleusis. The Haloa would have been the day on which they were initiated into the Mysteries. The Eleusinian Arkhontes (Ἄρχοντες, male magistrates of the Mysteries) prepared a huge banquet on this day, with a huge variety, including phallus- and vagina-shaped cakes, but not foods forbidden in the Mysteries: pomegranates, apples, eggs, fowls, some types of fish were out. Animal sacrifice was also disallowed on this day: Demeter received offerings of fresh fruit.

After preparing the food, the Arkhontes left, leaving the women to eat, to drink lots and lots of wine, and to celebrate being a woman and fertile (or the wish to be fertile). The Arkhontes went to the men who were waiting outside of Eleusis for their part in the Mysteries, and told them the story of Eleusis, and how the Eleusinians had discovered nourishment for the entire human race. A giant phallus is often assumed to have been set up on the hálōs, and the women would dance around it carrying clay models of phalli and vaginas, but it is more likely the phallus was never there, but depicted on art work about the Haloa to indicate the fertility aspects of the festival and the dances that occurred there. As part of the festivities, the women engaged in sexualized conversation with each other. As part of the sacrifice, the women carried kernoi (κέρνοι, offering dishes) on their heads, containing incense, grains or other offerings, which they tipped onto the giant phallus or, and this is probably far more accurate, onto the altar.

After the feast and sacrifice, the men who had been waiting were admitted to the grounds, and the women were encouraged by each other–including the priestesses–to take secret lovers for the night. A priest and priestess–with torches representing Demeter and Persephone–apparently sat watch on chests as they presided over the fertility celebration.

To Do Today:

The Haloa is the perfect time to organize an adult ‘girl’s night’ with your closest female friends. Watch a movie with erotic tones, drink wine together, gorge yourselves on chocolate and gossip about your partners. If you have an agreement about it with your partner, you could find a lover for the night. If not, go home to him or her and spend the night together in your own ‘fertility rite’. If you’re single and have no one to fill your bed… well… a girl can get creative, can’t she?

For the men, the Haloa might have had an extra ritual part as well; honoring Poseidon as an agricultural Theos. There is evidence that the men built a huge bonfire and had their own conversations around it. Afterwards, they joined the women, when possible (and desired). Single men; I’m sure you can be as creative as the single women reading this.

More About The Rituals:

As Dionysus, whose festivals are held in wintertime, necessarily shifted the date of Haloa to late December/early January, so too did he shift festival rituals towards the celebration of grapes and wine. Rituals were often conducted by women during the “pruning of the vines and the tasting of the wine” as it is around this time of year that the soil around the vineyards are cut and hoed, and the first fermentation cycle completed.

Some texts state that this element of the festival was instituted after the death of the shepherd Icarius (or Ikarios), after he introduced the vine into Attica. The myth has it that Dionysus presented Icarius with the gift of wine as thanks for his hospitality. However, when Icarius shared this gift with his shepherd friends, they mistook the signs of drunkenness as signs of poison, and killed Icarius in retaliation.

According to Lucian, Dionysus punished the shepherds by taking the form of a maiden, thus “maddening with sexual desire.” Unfortunately, when the maiden suddenly disappeared, the shepherds’ erections remained until an oracle told them that they must placate the gods by dedicating clay models of genitals. This dedication thus became a custom of the festival.

An alternative story is that Ikários was such a fine winemaker that he could produce wine so strong, those who drank it appeared to be poisoned. His skill turned out to be his undoing; Íkaros was killed by those who drank his wine, thinking the wine maker was out to kill them. This sense of being poisoned might have come from permanent erections brought on by the wine; they only went away when an oracle told the men to put out clay phallus-shaped objects. When they did so, their limpness returned. This event was celebrated at home, by the men, but the women traveled to Eleusis.

However, Haloa was still a festival to Demeter, and the name of the festival itself points to the harvest activity of threshing. The threshing floor therefore still served as the center of harvest celebration and activity. Eustathius states that “there is celebrated, according to Pausanias, a feast of Demeter and Dionysus called the Haloa” and explains that, during this festival, first-fruits were carried from Athens to Eleusis in honor of the deities, sporting events were held upon the threshing floors, and at the feast there was a procession of Poseidon (worshipped here as Phytalmios, god of plants). Although a large part of Haloa was for women, the general procession and sporting events were open to all citizens.

The feast, or banquet, consisted of “gentle” or civilized foods—cereals, fish, possibly fowl, and “cakes shaped like the symbols of sex,” but nothing of flesh. Other forbidden Eleusinian foods included pomegranate, which was considered dead-man’s food and inappropriate for a feast honouring Demeter, as it was the fruit that drew her Persephone back into the shades of Hades. The Archons in Eleusis would prepare the tables for the women, and then wait outside to show visiting foreigners that civilized foods originated in Eleusis and were dispersed to the rest of mankind from Eleusis.

More About The Women’s Activities

Ritualistically, Haloa was similar to Thesmophoria, another festival in honour of Demeter, in the significance of women’s participation. Both festivals involved “lusty words” and activities, an abundance of sexual symbols, and the consumption of lots of wine and pornographic confectionery. The women celebrated alone so that “they might have perfect freedom of speech” and some sources state that “the scared symbols of both sexes were handled, the priestesses secretly whispered into the ears of the women present words that might not be uttered aloud, and the women themselves uttered all manner of… unseemly quips and jests.”

Demosthenes highlights the role of the priestess, pointing out that she, rather than the Hierophant (chief priest at the Eleusinian Mysteries), presented the fruit offerings and conducted the initiation ceremonies under the presidency of women. He also emphasizes that it was unlawful to offer any blood sacrifice, using as example the story of a Heriophant who was cursed because he offered “in the court of Eleusis burnt sacrifice of an animal victim.”

Collected from various sources