Avis de soutenance - doctorat - Emmanuelle PALERMITI

This doctorate dissertation in religious anthropology investigates into three Arcadian figures of Demeter, starting from a selection of three excerpts from Pausanias Periegetes' description of Arcadia: the Demeter Kidaria of Pheneos, whose priest wears her “mask” during the rite and whose sanctuary has ambiguous ties with a nearby Demeter Eleusinia; the Thelpousan Demeter Erinys (“Fury”), worshipped alongside her pacified aspect Demeter Lousia (“Bathed”), connected with myths of a rape by Poseidon and with the birth of the divine horse Arion and of a goddess with a secret name, perhaps Despoina (“Mistress”); and the Phigalian Demeter Melaina (“Black”), whose name stems from a black garment that she puts on in her anger against Poseidon following the same union, where she gives birth to the goddess Despoina. In the memory of the Phigalians, Demeter Melaina is also connected with two successive statues depicting her with the head of a horse and a mane mixed with snakes and wild beasts. Compared to other instances where Demeter – a goddess and mother so often worshipped alongside her daughter Kore that both are sometimes referred to using the dual grammatical number – these three cults share the common characteristic of featuring Demeter alone, though she appears there herself as being ambiguous, plural, or even duplicated/double. Among those dual features, these selected configurations aim at contributing to the studies initiated by and around Marcel Detienne on the functioning of Greek polytheism, by tracking the pantheons that are related to one another and that form specific configurations in our three cults. Through a meticulous re-examination of the Periegesis as well as by comparing the periegetic dossier with the data from every other available source, we look at the interaction between our three cultic configurations and we reintegrate them within the fabric of Greek polytheism while simultaneously re-evaluating their historiography.