Global InformationAlphito information
Alphito (Ancient Greek: Ἀλφιτώ) is a supernatural being first recorded in the Moralia of Plutarch,[1] where "apotropaic nursery tales" about her[2] are told by nursemaids to frighten little children into behaving.[3] Her name is related to alphita, "white flour" (compare Latin albus), and alphitomanteia, a form of divination (-manteia)[4] from flour or barley meal.[5] She was presumably old, with white hair the color of flour.[6]
Although Alphito has been called a mere boogeyman,[7] the 19th-century folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt, forerunner of J.G. Frazer, classified her as originally a "corn mother" because of her name, and others have considered her a vegetation spirit.[8] According to Robert Graves, Frazer thought Alphito was actually Demeter or Persephone.[9]
Although evidence for Alphito rests in the minimal reference in Plutarch and an indirectly relevant entry in the lexicographer Hesychius,[citation needed] Graves developed an elaborate thesis that Alphito was "'the White Goddess', who in Classical times had degenerated into a nursery bugbear but who seems originally to have been the Danaan Barley-goddess of Argos."[10] In The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Graves describes the whiteness of the goddess as a dichotomy:
In one sense it is the pleasant whiteness of pearl-barley, or a woman's body, or milk, or unsmutched snow; in another it is the horrifying whiteness of a corpse, or a spectre, or leprosy. … Alphito, it has been shown, combined these senses: for alphos is white leprosy, the vitiliginous sort which attacks the face, and alphiton is barley, and Alphito lived on the cliff tops of Nonacris in perpetual snow."[11]
No ancient source connects Alphito to leprosy nor the Arcadian site of Nonacris.
In recent scholarship, Alphito is classed with spirits or demons that threaten reproduction and child-nurturing such as Acco, Gello, and Mormo.[12]
- ^ Plutarch, Moralia 1040B, "Contradictions of the Stoics" (De stoicorum repugnantiis 15): τῆς Ἀκκοῦς καὶ τῆς Ἀλφιτοῦς δ᾽ ὦν τὰ παιδάρια τοῦ κακοσχολεῖν αἱ γυναῖκες ἀνείργουσιν.
- ^ Mary Rosaria Gorman, The Nurse in Greek Life (Boston, 1917), p. 37.
- ^ Frederick E. Brink, "Demonology in the Early Imperial Period," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.16.3 (1986), p. 2071.
- ^ Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, reissued 2006), p. 495.
- ^ O. Crusius, RE (1894), vol. 1, p. 1637.
- ^ James Redfield, "From Sex to Politics: The Rites of Artemis Triklaria and Dionysos Aisymnetes at Patras," in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 102.
- ^ Graham Anderson, Greek and Roman Folklore: A Handbook (Greenwood Publishing Company, 2006), p. 195.
- ^ Crusius, RE 1637.
- ^ Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York, 1948, 1975, 1999 printing), p. 66.
- ^ Graves, The White Goddess, p. 66.
- ^ Graves, The White Goddess, p. 434.
- ^ Jan N. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 101–102 online; John Kevin Newman, Roman Catullus and the Modification of the Alexandrian Sensibililty (Georg Olms, 1990), p. 223, note 46.