Sacred Sounds: The Cult of Pan and the Nymphs in the Vari Cave

Abstract

Religious ritual in ancient Greece regularly incorporated music, so much so that certain instruments or vocal genres frequently became associated with the religious veneration of specific gods. The Attic cult of Pan and the Nymphs should also be included among this group: though little is often known about the specific ritual practices, the literary and visual evidence associated with the cults make repeated reference to music performed on the panpipes—and to auditory and sensory stimuli more generally—as a prominent feature of the worship of these gods. I consider the Vari Cave, sacred to Pan and the Nymphs, together with the surviving marble votive reliefs from that space, to explore the sounds and sensations associated with the veneration of the rural gods. I argue that the sensory experience offered by the cave and the images within it would have enhanced the worshiper's experience of the ritual and the gods for whom they were performed. In this way, visual and auditory perceptions blurred together to create a powerful experience of the divine.

Going to See the Nymphs: Landscape and Religious Experience at the Zar Trypa Cave (Mount Ossa, Thessaly)

“…Phenomenological approaches are common in the analysis of Prehistoric sacred caves (see for example Bjerk 2012; Skeates 2016; Whitehouse 2016), but have so far only rarely been applied to the study of Greek cave-sanctuaries of the Classical or Hellenistic periods. Notable exceptions include the work of Laferrière (2019) and Papalexandrou (2020).…”