The mystery cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace offers productive material for theory building with respect to the archaeology of secrecy in ritual contexts. The social practice of secrecy builds political power and relies on communicative strategies that simultaneously conceal and reveal, employing culturally specific codes involving abstraction, ambiguity, metaphor, and allusion. Samothrace increased its secrecy as it grew in prestige: archaeological materialization of this secrecy includes euphemistic inscriptions and magnetized iron rings used as tokens of initiation. The rings use myth, philosophy, and ritual practice to communicate the initiate's status while emphasizing the rites' resistance to disclosure. [secrecy, Greece, initiation, iron, magnetism]
The daimones associated with the mystery cult of Samothrace have been interpreted as the distant memory of prehistoric smiths or dismissed from investigation altogether because of their absence from the epigraphic record. Anthropological models of metaphor formation offer a more nuanced approach to understanding their functions in the cult. The daimones’ ethnicity suggests a response to cultural interactions and economic production in the region; their metallurgical skills provided a key metaphor articulating a range of concepts which defined the rites, including secrecy, regional identity, and cosmological speculation.
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