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

• Zeus
• Persephone

Domains

• nocturnal terror
• madness

Powers

• sends nocturnal apparitions and maddening phantoms upon mortals

Epithets

• κροκόπεπλος

Relations

• sibling: Zagreus
• sibling: Dionysos

Sources

• Orphic Hymn 71 (To Melinoe); a Pergamon defixio invoking Melinoe (R. Wunsch, Antike Fluchtafeln)
• A. N. Athanassakis & B. P. Wolkow, The Orphic Hymns (Johns Hopkins, 2013), commentary on Hymn 71