Sabazios

The snake came out of a fold of cloth, cool and dry, and was laid against the initiate’s bare chest. A priest drew it slowly downward, over the ribs and across the belly, until it slipped free below the waist. The god had passed through the body. Whoever endured this went out changed, no longer an ordinary worshipper but one of the saboi, a person who belonged to Sabazios.

Sabazios was older than the rite that made him famous. He came out of Phrygia and Thrace, the uplands and river country between the Aegean and the Danube, where he was a sky-father and a storm god and, above all, a horseman. The Phrygians seem to have carried him into Anatolia when they crossed out of the Balkans early in the first millennium before the common era, and the shape of his name still shows what he had been. The second half of it, -zios, grows from the same ancient root that gives Greek its Zeus and Latin its deus, the bright sky made into a god. He was a Zeus of his own people before the Greeks ever met him.

When the Greeks did meet him, they did what they always did with a foreign god. They looked for the nearest thing they already had and pressed the newcomer into it. Sabazios went partly into Zeus, the sky-lord, and partly into Dionysus, the god of the vine and of the loosened mind, and for centuries afterward he was worshipped as an aspect of both without ever quite dissolving into either. The doubling suited him. His rites had the thunder of the one and the frenzy of the other.

On the reliefs he is a rider, bearded, in the soft peaked cap and patterned trousers of Anatolia, a staff of authority in his hand and a serpent somewhere near the hooves of his horse. But the objects that carry his name across the centuries are not statues of the man at all. They are hands. Cast in bronze, roughly life-sized, a right hand lifted with thumb, forefinger and middle finger raised in what later ages would recognize as a gesture of blessing, the other two fingers folded down.

Every surface of these hands is crowded. A pinecone sits on the thumb. A snake climbs the wrist and lays its head across the bent fingers. Around and between them a small menagerie gathers: a frog, a lizard, a tortoise, a ram’s head, a thunderbolt, a set of scales, sometimes a woman reclining with a child behind a little hinged door set into the palm. The hands stood in shrines fixed to the tops of poles and were carried aloft in processions, and they have been dug out of the ground everywhere the cult reached, from the buried streets of Herculaneum to the far provinces of the north. What most of the symbols meant is no longer certain. They were a language, and the readers of it are gone.

In Athens he was never respectable. By the end of the fifth century Aristophanes had already put him in a comedy, now lost, in which the foreign god is bundled out of the city. A generation later the orator Demosthenes reached for the same contempt as a weapon. Attacking his rival Aeschines, he sneered at the man’s boyhood spent helping his mother run back-alley initiations: dressing the initiates in fawn-skin, mixing the bowl, hauling the fat snakes up over their heads, and leading the shrieking crowd through the streets crowned with fennel and white poplar while they howled the cry of the cult, euoi saboi. It was meant to disgrace him. The picture it leaves, torchlight and hissing and the smell of crushed leaves, is the closest thing we have to seeing the worship from the inside.

Rome liked him no better. In 139 before the common era a praetor named Cornelius Hispalus cleared the followers of Jupiter Sabazius out of the city along with a crowd of astrologers, and here the god walked into one of the strangest confusions in the history of religion. The same expulsion swept up the Jews of Rome, and somewhere in the reporting of it the name Sabazios collided with Sabaoth, the Hebrew title of the Lord of Hosts. Whether the Roman authorities genuinely mistook the Sabbath-keeping foreigners for worshippers of the snake-god, or whether a later copyist simply muddled two similar words, no one can now say. He was, to Athens and Rome alike, an outsider, and outsiders get shown the gate.

For all the noise of his cult, Sabazios left almost nothing in the way of story. There is no birth, no war, no death and return that the sources agree on. The snake rite itself seems to gesture at an old myth of a god who took serpent form to father a divine child on a goddess, the same shadow-story that hangs behind the Orphic Dionysus, but the mysteries kept their meaning close and took most of it with them. He survives as a set of gestures and a box of emblems rather than a life. Almost everything we know of him, we know from people describing his worshippers, usually in order to mock them.

What he offered was real enough to his own people. As a sky-father he held the weather and the high bright authority of heaven; as the god behind the snake he held the other half of the world, the cool earth, the buried seed, the shed skin and the new one under it. His mysteries promised the thing all the mystery cults promised, a passage through fear into belonging, purification and rebirth for anyone willing to let the cold length of a serpent be drawn down the whole front of the body. The bronze hand raised over a household was a blessing and a guard, its fingers set forever in the sign that turned harm aside.

His limits were the limits of a borrowed god. He never won a myth of his own that could stand beside the Greek and Roman stories, and so he was always in danger of being read as merely another face of Zeus or Dionysus and quietly folded away. He was foreign, and foreignness could get his people driven out of a city on a magistrate’s word. In the end the thing that let him travel so far, his readiness to merge with whatever larger god he met, is the thing that cost him his outline. What remains is a hand held up in blessing, heavy and green with age, and no longer entirely sure whose it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sabazios?

Sabazios is a Phrygian and Thracian sky-father and horseman god whose worship spread through the Greek and Roman world. Because he was so readily identified with Zeus and Dionysus, he is known mainly through his ecstatic mystery cult rather than through a body of myths of his own.

What is the Hand of Sabazios?

The Hand of Sabazios is a bronze votive right hand, roughly life-sized, raised with the thumb and first two fingers extended in a blessing gesture. Its surface is covered with symbols such as a pinecone, a snake, a frog, a lizard, and a thunderbolt. These hands were mounted on poles in shrines and carried in processions, and examples have been found from Herculaneum to the northern Roman provinces.

What happened in the initiation into the mysteries of Sabazios?

Ancient writers describe an initiation in which a live snake was placed against the initiate’s chest and slowly drawn down across the body to below the waist. The rite symbolized the god passing through the worshipper, marking a purification and rebirth into the cult. Initiates were afterward known as saboi, those belonging to Sabazios.

Why was Sabazios expelled from Rome?

In 139 BCE the praetor Cornelius Hispalus expelled worshippers of Jupiter Sabazius from Rome, along with astrologers, as part of a crackdown on foreign cults. The same account also swept up the Jews of Rome, and the name Sabazios became tangled with the Hebrew title Sabaoth. Scholars still dispute whether Roman officials genuinely confused the two or whether the muddle was introduced by a later copyist.

Is Sabazios the same as Zeus or Dionysus?

Sabazios is not the same god, but he was worshipped as an aspect of both. The Greeks and Romans linked his sky-father nature to Zeus and Jupiter and his ecstatic, snake-handling rites to Dionysus. He kept a distinct cult and identity even as he was absorbed into their worship.

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