Melinoe
Melinoe is a distinctly Orphic chthonic goddess known chiefly from the seventy-first Orphic Hymn, which invokes her as saffron-robed daughter of Persephone conceived at the mouth of the river Kokytos when Zeus, in the guise of Plouton, deceived her mother. Her body is described as two-coloured, one side bright and airy, the other dark and shadowy, and she roams the night sending phantoms and fits of madness upon mortals, who must appease her to be freed. A defixio from Pergamon that names her alongside Persephone and other underworld powers confirms her cultic reality beyond the hymn-book. Sources differ on her exact parentage and even her name, some manuscripts and scholars reading a form that would make Zeus and Persephone jointly her parents, in keeping with the wider Orphic pattern of the god's serpentine union with his daughter.
Parentage
- paternal: Zeus
- maternal: Persephone
Domains
- nocturnal terror
- madness
Powers
- sends nocturnal apparitions and maddening phantoms upon mortals
Epithets
- κροκόπεπλος — saffron-robedOrphic Hymn 71.1 (primary)
Relations
- sibling: ZagreusF. Graf & S. I. Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife (2007), 195-197 (secondary)
- sibling: DionysosF. Graf & S. I. Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife (2007), 195-197 (secondary)
Sources
- Melinoe is a chthonic goddess of the Orphic Hymns, born of Persephone at the mouth of the Kokytos when Zeus (as Plouton) united with her, and a sender of night-terrors and madness.: Orphic Hymn 71 (To Melinoe); a Pergamon defixio invoking Melinoe (R. Wunsch, Antike Fluchtafeln) (primary); A. N. Athanassakis & B. P. Wolkow, The Orphic Hymns (Johns Hopkins, 2013), commentary on Hymn 71 (secondary)