Mythology and rituals around the stone

In archaic and classical Greece, stones play an important role, both as a material object around which we can observe a lot of ritual practices and as an 'image' in Greek mythology. Such ritual practices and such mythical images involving a stone are for the most part - but not only - connected with the death and with the tomb like place of cult and imagination.

The relationship between the stone, the tomb and the death among the Greeks is well illustrated, for example, by the idea of sema and that of mnema: the first (sema) stands for the tomb both as a material and as a symbolic place; the second (mnema) puts emphasis on the symbolic side of this relationship, considering the tomb, first of all, as a memory place. However, the symbolic and material link between stone, death, tomb and funeral practices is transmitted not only by notions like sema and mnema, but also by different means.

I would like to analyse one of these various means using the idea of Polyvalence des images, shaped by the founder of the Historical Anthropology of the Ancient World, Louis Gernet (1882-1962), whose intellectual biography and work have been reconstructed by R. Di Donato [1]. The Gernet's wording Polyvalence des images means an original method to read Greek Myths based on the plastic and polysemic nature of mythical 'images'. 'Image' - we have to be more specific about that - is a kind of 'mental image', that can take a concrete form as an iconographical image, but also as a textual one.

In Louis Gernet's works the polysemic function of an 'image' can be described as a 'phenomenon of social memory'. The expression 'social memory' reveals an influence from the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. I'm obviously thinking to M. Halbwachs' studies on memory (Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, 1925 and La mémoire collective, posthumously published in 1950). As Di Donato has reconstructed, Halbwachs and Gernet shared the same experience - together with some important sociologists (M. Mauss, H. Lévy-Bruhl, F. Simiand, E. Lévy, A. Bianconi) - at the club of Cahiers du socialiste, a group that continued to exist until the war [2].

"Ce que nous appelons polyvalence des images - in the words of L. Gernet - est donc un phénomène de mémoire sociale: elle consiste en ce que des représentations plus ou moins dominatrices et capables de servir de pôles d'attraction ont correspondu à des objets divers de préoccupation ou d'intérêt dans des milieux successifs" . [3]

Therefore, an image conserves the multiplicity of senses that it has been assuming during its history as an embedded part of mythological language: each time the same image recurs, in a mythical story, it takes and gives back this complexity of sense. This complexity, or more precisely, this 'polyvalence', can be observed on a synchronic level (that is, many senses for the same 'image' in a similar context) or on a diachronic one (that is, many senses for the same 'image' in different and also successive contexts).

According to this method, the Greek myth bears a close resemblance to a real language. Consequently, reading the Greek mythology is similar to reading a language, in which the basic part (the 'image') is the issue of the fusion between a signifier and a signified - that is between signifiant and signifié in the words of Ferdinand de Saussure [4] - connected one another on a basis which is arbitrary and that changes according to different contexts or different ages.

Occurring in different contexts, mythical images acquire their own polysemy: each mythical image is thus polyvalente on a synchronic level and on a diachronic one, according to its own way and to its own history. Moreover, the polyvalence of a certain image crosses the paths and histories of other images.

The analysis of the Greek myth is in fact based also on the multiplicity of mutual relationships among mythical images. We can see an association between an image and others recalled according to an analogical link (that is, the same image occurring in different histories); and we can see, at the same time, a connection between an image and other images connected according to a link of contiguity (that is, different images occurring in the same history). It is impossible to read a single and isolated image: synchronic and diachronic polysemy with associations and connections makes it possible to move on the only ground that can be travelled over: a real chain, a would be never-ending series of images.

Using such a method of analysis one can go back to the contexts in which these 'images' were born, reconstructing mental attitudes and social forms which are reflected by them. In this sense, the Greek myth, or rather "the Greek legend", can be read - once more in the words of L. Gernet - "as a document of archaic Greece's social proto-history" [5].

Since we haven't any certainty about the contexts, we just can't start from the contexts to read an image. Conversely, we have to make the opposite effort: we must start from reading an image in order to reconstruct some aspects of its context, that is of the context that has produced such an image. So, just in order to try to reconstruct some contexts, it is useful to analyze and interpret their 'polyvalence' and the mechanism of associations and connections starting from them.

Accordingly, the method based on polyvalence des images can assist in the attempt to point out some aspects of the stone as a mythical image, and of its function and symbolic values with regard to the death.

• * I would like to thank R. Di Donato for having read and enriched this paper with many useful suggestions. All errors are my own.
  [1] See R. Di Donato, Per una antropologia storica del mondo antico, Firenze 1990, pp. 13-130.
  [2] See R. Di Donato, Une oeuvre, un itinéraire, in L. Gernet, Les Grecs sans miracle, testes réunis et présentés par R. Di Donato, préface de J.-P. Vernant, postface de Riccardo Di Donato, Paris 1983, pp. 403-420.
  [3] See L. Gernet, Polyvalence des images. Testi e frammenti sulla leggenda greca, edited by A. Soldani, foreword by R. Di Donato.
  [4] On the relationship with the chapter of the Cours de linguistique générale about syntagmatic and associative links, see R. Di Donato, Per una antropologia, pp. 126-127.
  [5] On Gernet's work on Greek legend as a document of archaic Greece's social proto-history, see R. Di Donato, Per una antropologia, pp. 119-130.