Argimpasa

← Encyclopedia

A small gold plaque from the Kuban shows a woman whose body ends, below the waist, in coiling serpents that fan out like the spokes of a wheel. She is crowned and frontal, and the snakes are not a torment but an attribute, a sign of the earth and the waters out of which growing things come. The steppe goldsmiths returned to this figure for centuries, on plaques and headdresses and the backs of mirrors, and the scholars who study them have given her, more often than any other Scythian power, the name Argimpasa. The name itself comes down through a single Greek list, with no Scythian voice behind it to confirm or correct, and that distance — between the goddess and the only words that survive for her — is the first thing to say about her.

The name in the list

In the fourth book of his Histories, Herodotus sets out the gods the Scythians honor, and he does it in the manner of a translator. Each Scythian power is given under its Greek mask, with the native word appended. “Hestia is called in Scythian Tabiti,” he writes, “and Zeus, being most rightly named in my opinion, is called Papaios, and Earth Api, and Apollo Oitosyros, and Aphroditë Urania is called Argimpasa, and Poseidon Thagimasidas.” The goddess of this entry is the fifth of these: the one the Scythians set under the sign of Aphrodite Ourania, the heavenly Aphrodite, the Aphrodite of the sky rather than of mere desire — and whom the Scythians, in Herodotus’ rendering, called Argimpasa.

The name is unstable on the page. The manuscripts of Herodotus give both Argimpasa and Artimpasa, and a third form, Aripasa, appears in places; the variation is the ordinary work of copyists’ hands across centuries, and there is no way, from the Greek alone, to recover which the Scythians said. Modern philologists who read the theonym through the Iranian tongue the Scythians spoke have proposed that its first element answers to Arti or Aṣ̌i, the Iranian goddess of recompense and abundance, the power who measured out wealth, marriage, and a plentiful line of descendants; the second element they connect to words for “pasture” and “lord.” The reading is plausible and well argued, but it is a reconstruction built on a corrupted name, and it remains, like much in this field, a scholarly hypothesis rather than a fixed result.

What the Greek list does establish is her standing. Herodotus names the gods the Scythians worship in an order, and Aphrodite Ourania stands among the first rank — after the hearth-queen Tabiti, the sky-father Papaios, the earth-mother Api joined to the sky, and the sun the Greeks read as Goitosyros under the name of Apollo. To call her the Scythian Aphrodite is at once illuminating and misleading. The Greek match tells us the Scythians had a great female power of generation, one a Greek would set beside his own goddess of love and increase. It does not tell us what she was to the Scythians themselves, in their own theology, under whatever name lies wrecked behind the Greek letters. The mask is all that is left, and the face beneath it must be inferred.

The heavenly goddess and her domains

Aphrodite Ourania — Aphrodite of the heavens — was for the Greeks the elder and graver of the two Aphrodites, the celestial power of generation rather than the goddess of mere desire, and Herodotus’ choice of her rather than the common Aphrodite is itself a piece of evidence. He is telling his readers that the Scythian goddess was a power of the sky and of fertility together, a goddess under whom things were brought forth. The iconography the archaeologists read points the same way. On a famous silver-and-gold mirror from the Kelermes kurgan, among the earliest of the great Scythian finds and dated to the seventh century BCE, a winged goddess stands frontal and grips a panther in each spread hand — the potnia therōn, the mistress of beasts, a type the steppe took from the cults of the Near East and made its own. The wings and the held animals mark a power over the living world, over the increase and the death of creatures, that fits a goddess of fertility and the wild.

A second and later type is gentler and, for the question of Argimpasa, more telling. On gold plaques and on the conical headdress from the Karagodeuashkh kurgan, a goddess sits enthroned, often holding a mirror, and before her stands or kneels a young man who lifts a cup, or receives one. Scholars have read this scene in two ways that are not exclusive: as a communion between worshiper and goddess, and as an investiture, the moment a Scythian king receives his right to rule from the divine hand. If that reading holds, Argimpasa was not only a goddess of generation but a goddess of sovereignty — the power who granted the king his rule, much as the Iranian goddess Arti granted fortune and standing. The historian Yulia Ustinova, in her study of the great goddess of the Bosporan kingdom, has argued that the celestial Aphrodite worshiped in the Greek cities of the Crimean strait was itself a fusion: the imported Greek Aphrodite Ourania grown together, over generations of contact, with this native Scythian great goddess, until the two could no longer be told apart. On that account Argimpasa did not merely resemble Aphrodite Ourania; in the mixed world of the Black Sea coast the two became, in cult, a single goddess of two ancestries.

Set against the rest of the pantheon, her place comes clearer. Where Api is the earth and the river-water, the dark mother joined below to the sky, Argimpasa is the heavenly term of the same generative order — the celestial power of love and increase, and, if the enthronement scenes mean what they seem to, the giver of kingship. That two such goddesses should stand in one pantheon is no contradiction; the great religions of the Near East from which the steppe drew so much knew both an earth-mother and a heavenly queen, and the scholars have long suspected that Argimpasa’s affinities run south, toward the Astarte and Ishtar of the Semitic and Mesopotamian worlds, the heavenly love-and-war goddesses whose worship the Scythians met on their seventh-century campaigns into western Asia. That southern descent is a hypothesis, argued from resemblance and from the trade-roads, and it should be held as one — but it is the frame within which most students of the goddess now place her.

The diviners of the goddess

To Argimpasa the sources bind a class of diviners, and it is here that the record turns hostile and the historian must walk most carefully. Herodotus describes two kinds of seer among the Scythians. The first and ordinary kind divine with willow rods: “they bring great bundles of wands, which they lay on the ground and unfasten, and utter their divinations laying one rod on another.” This art, he says, is hereditary among them. The second kind he sets apart. “The Enarees,” he writes, “who are men-women, say that Aphrodite gave them the art of divination, which they practice by means of the bark of the lime tree” — the linden — “they cut this bark into three portions, and prophesy while they twist and untwist it in their fingers.” Here is the goddess again, under her Greek name: the Enarei are her diviners, and the gift of prophecy is hers to give.

The word Enarei — the Greek also gives Anarieis — is itself a Greek hearing of an Iranian term, and the scholars read it as a-narya, “un-manly,” “not a man.” The Greek and the Hippocratic writers describe the Enarei as a body of diviners drawn from the noblest Scythian families who had lost their manhood and taken up the dress and the work of women; and Herodotus supplies, in his first book, the tale that explains it. When the Scythians swept down into western Asia, he says, a band of them sacked the temple of Heavenly Aphrodite at Ascalon on the Philistine coast — “the most ancient of all the temples of this goddess,” he calls it — and for the sacrilege the goddess struck the plunderers, “and their descendants forever,” with what he names the “female sickness.” The Scythians, he adds, call those who suffer from it the Enarei.

This is the frame, and it must be named as a frame. The picture of the Enarei as men afflicted by a goddess’s curse, unmanned and made to live as women, is a Greek picture, an outsider’s diagnosis laid over a priesthood whose own understanding of itself has not survived. The Greeks had a deep cultural anxiety about the soft, the unmanned, the effeminate, and a tale that made a foreign people’s diviners into the victims of a sexual curse fit that anxiety exactly. We cannot reach behind it. What the Scythians thought the Enarei were — whether a third gender honored in the goddess’s service, whether a priesthood that took on the goddess’s own feminine aspect in their work, whether something else again — is lost, because no Scythian wrote it down. The clinical and the lurid frame is the only door, and it opens only one way.

That the frame is a construction, and not a simple report, is shown by the fact that the ancients themselves disagreed about it. The Hippocratic treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places, written within a generation or two of Herodotus, takes up the same Scythian “disease” and refuses the divine explanation altogether. The men so afflicted, the Hippocratic author says, are the richest and most noble of the Scythians, and the cause is not a goddess but the saddle: a life spent on horseback, the constant chafing and the cold, the breeches and the swellings of the joints, work upon the body until desire and potency fail. And the author adds a sharp methodological remark — that the Scythians themselves attribute the condition to a god and hold the sufferers in awe, “but to me it seems that these affections are just as much divine as all others are, and that no one disease is either more divine or more human than another.” It is one of the earliest surviving arguments that what looks like the special work of a god has, in truth, a natural cause. For the religion of Argimpasa the disagreement matters less for its medicine than for what it reveals: two Greek writers, looking at the same Scythian diviners, producing two incompatible stories — one a curse, one a saddle — neither of which is the Scythians’ own. The Enarei are visible to us only in this crossfire, and the goddess they served is glimpsed past their shoulders.

What can be said with more confidence is the shape of their office. They were diviners, prophets in the goddess’s service, drawn from the high families, working their oracle — in Herodotus’ account — with strips of linden bast plaited and unplaited between the fingers. Stripped of the Greek pathology, that is a priesthood: a hereditary or elect body who read the future for the people and the king under the patronage of the heavenly goddess. The “sickness” is the Greek explanation for why these particular servants of the goddess appeared as they did; it is not, and cannot be taken as, a neutral description of who they were.

Gold plaque of a snake-legged goddess from Ivanovskaya stanitsa in the Kuban, 4th century BCE — the serpent-bodied great goddess often identified with Argimpasa. Photo: Shakko (Sofia Bagdasarova), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

What survives, and how

Almost everything that can be said of Argimpasa rests on three kinds of evidence, each at its own remove, and the honest account keeps them apart. The first is the Greek written record — Herodotus above all, with the Hippocratic treatise beside him. It gives the name, the equation with Aphrodite Ourania, the Enarei, the Ascalon tale, and the method of the lime-bark divination. It is also external, interested, and at points hostile, a Greek looking at the steppe through Greek categories and Greek anxieties; every claim drawn from it carries that bias as a tax. The Scythians left no scripture, no hymn, no temple inscription in their own tongue. There is no second voice.

The second is the mute, abundant evidence of the steppe gold — the Kelermes mirror with its winged mistress of beasts, the enthroned goddesses of the plaques and the Karagodeuashkh headdress, the serpent-legged goddess of the Kuban brooches. These objects are eloquent and silent at once. That a great female power was central to Scythian art and cult is beyond doubt; that the seated figure receiving a cup is Argimpasa specifically, rather than some related or distinct goddess, is an identification made by scholars reading image against text, and it remains an argument rather than a caption. The snake-legged goddess, in particular, is sometimes called Argimpasa and sometimes treated as a separate ancestress-figure of the Scythian royal line; the gold does not tell us which, because the gold does not speak.

The third is the comparative science of the Iranian languages and religions, which reads the broken theonym, sets Arti behind it, and places the goddess in the wider family of Indo-Iranian and Near Eastern powers of fortune and fertility. This is the most technical and the most reconstructive of the three, and its results are the least anchored to any single artifact or text. It is also indispensable, for it is the only instrument that reaches, however uncertainly, toward the Scythian word and the Scythian thought rather than the Greek mask.

Held together, the three yield a goddess seen always in profile. The interpretatio that gave her Aphrodite’s name carried her into the long Greek and Roman afterlife of Black Sea religion, where, as Ustinova has shown, the heavenly Aphrodite of the Bosporan cities is partly her — the native great goddess living on under an imported name, in the cult of a kingdom that straddled two worlds. The Enarei carried her, less happily, into the Greek imagination of the effeminate East and from there into a long history of misreading. And the steppe gold carried her, wordless, into the museum cases of the modern world, where a crowned woman with serpents for legs, or a goddess enthroned with a mirror, holds out a cup to a young king whose name, like her own, is mostly gone. To recover a Scythian goddess of the heavens from a hostile and clinical Greek record is the work this entry can only begin; what the goddess was to those who served her, in the silence on the far side of Herodotus’ list, is the part the sources do not give back.

→ Related: Tabiti · Papaios · Api Goddess · Goitosyros · Scythians · Kul Oba · Solokha · Tolstaya Mogila · Pazyryk · The Sarmatians · The Saka · The Cimmerians · Herodotus · Apollo · Zeus · Hestia · Bendis · Kotys Goddess · The Thracian Horseman