The earliest reference to Priapos that has come down to us is a comedy by the 4th century BCE playwright Xenarchos; all we know is its title which was named for the ithyphallic divinity who, following the conventions of the genre, likely appeared as a character on stage. Considering the prevalence of such myths told about him, and the inherent comic potential they possess, it’s likely that the play featured an unsuccessful attempt by Priapos to rape a Goddess or nymph. The poet Ovid mentions that he was unable to assault Lotis (Fasti1.391), Pomona (Metamorphoses 14.534) and Vesta, whose story I’ll quote as emblematic of the others:

Should I omit or recount your shame, red Priapus? It is a very playful, tiny tale. Coroneted Cybele, with her crown of turrets, invites the eternal Gods to her feast. She invites, too, satyrs and nymphs and the spirits of the wild; Silenus is present, uninvited. It’s not allowed and too long to narrate the Gods’ banquet: night was consumed with much wine. Some blindly stroll shadowy Ida’s dells, or lie down and rest their bodies in the soft grass. Others play or are clasped by sleep; or link their arms and thump the green earth in triple quick step. Vesta lies down and takes a quiet, carefree nap, just as she was, her head pillowed by turf. But the red saviour of gardens prowls for nymphs and Goddesses, and wanders back and forth. He spots Vesta. It’s unclear if he thought she was a nymph or knew it was Vesta. He claims ignorance. He conceives a vile hope and tries to steal upon her, walking on tiptoe, as his heart flutters. By chance old Silenus had left the donkey he came on by a gently burbling stream. The long Hellespont’s God was getting started, when it bellowed an untimely bray. The Goddess starts up, frightened by the noise. The whole crowd fly to her; the God flees through hostile hands. Lampsacus slays this beast [the donkey] for Priapus, chanting : `We rightly give flames the informant’s guts.’ You remember, Goddess, and necklace it with bread. Work ceases; the idle mills are silent. (Fasti 6. 319)

As Ovid notes, Lampaskos was an early center of the God’s cult; according to Pausanias the people of Lampsakos revered Priapos more than any other divinity. (Description of Greece 9.31.2) His cult spread from Mysia in Asia Minor (where it was as equally popular with the Greek colonists as it was with the natives) to central Greece and Italy, eventually being taken up by the Romans. Attempts were made to give this strange foreign God a respectable lineage – Dionysos (Strabo, Geography 13.1.12), Hermes (Hyginus, Fabulae 160), Zeus (Suidas, s.v. Priapos), Pan (Macrobius, Saturnalia 6.5) and even Osiris (Diodoros Sikeliotes, Library of History 4.6.1) were claimed to be his father. Usually Aphrodite was his mother.

Aside from being a personification of the phallos, Priapos presides over the fertility of animal and plant life and is a powerful apotropaic force, defending against thieves, burglars and malefic charms and spells. Images of him, often crudely made and emphasizing his enormous member, were placed in gardens and outside homes to protect those within. Indeed it is primarily in this capacity that he appears in the bawdy collection of anonymous Latin verse called the Priapeia. Although most of the pieces involve prostitutes stealthily sneaking into a garden to “make use of his tumescence in their filthy self-abuse” as one blushing Victorian scholar described it, or the God threatening to forcefully sodomize thieves and witches, in a few instances we catch a glimpse of his role in adolescent rites of passage and his power to heal. Interestingly Petronius describes a mystery-cult devoted to Priapos in his novel the Satyricon with precisely those aims. The priestess Quartilla has contracted malaria and hopes that by overseeing the rites (which involves a mock marriage of children and the rape of a man by an individual representing Priapos) she will be cured of it. As encountered in Petronius, these mysteries of Priapos bear a strong resemblance to contemporary Bacchic, Eleusinian and Isiac mysteries – though whether they represent an actual cult or are a literary mish-mash intended to satirize these sacred institutions remains unsettled in scholarly circles. We do know from Diodoros, Strabo and other authors that Priapos was given a role within a variety of mysteries so perhaps that element is authentic.

Considering how frequently he is associated with aggressive sexuality one may naturally wonder why he is incapable in myth of consummating a union with assorted Goddesses and nymphs. Is it all for the laughs – or is there something more behind it?

Both, I suspect.

Diodoros remarked:

And in the sacred rites, not only of Dionysos but of practically all other Gods as well, Priapos received honour to some extent, being introduced in the sacrifices to the accompaniment of laughter and sport. (Library of History 4.6.1)

Ovid’s account of the attempted rape of Lotis likewise takes place during a Dionysian ritual, culminating in this scene:

And now he was poised on the grass right next to her, and still she was filled with a mighty sleep. His joy soars; he draws the cover from her feet and starts the happy road to his desires. Then look, the donkey, Silenus’ mount, brays loudly, and emits untimely blasts from its throat. The terrified Nympha leaps up, fends Priapus off, and awakens the whole grove with her flight. And the God, whose obscene part was far too ready, was ridiculed by all in the moon’s light. (Fasti 1.391)

Laughter, likewise, plays a role in the Priapic mysteries of Petronius’ Satyricon, during Quartilla’s interrogation of Encolpius. Dennis P. Quinn, in Quartilla’s Cure, observes:

Then, Quartilla’s mood suddenly changes from weeping to laughter. She begins to kiss Encolpius and rejoices in the prospect of following what course she pleased (18.3). She then clapped her hands and began to laugh so loud that it frightened our three main characters. The ancilla and virguncula joined in with the farcical laughter (mimico rusu), leaving Encolpius at a loss at how they could have changed their mood so quickly (19.1). There is a commonality to other mystery religions here. For example, the participants in the Isis cult would begin one part of the sacred drama in exaggerated sorrow for the fate of Osiris’ dismembered body, and then, when Isis’ re-assembly of the God was proclaimed, the worshippers would all break out in hysterical laughter. So it is possible that, although the Priapic rite has not yet begun, Petronius is poking fun at the use of emotion in ritual, of which the Priestess Quartilla seems to be experts. But perhaps extreme emotional shifts were actually a part of Priapic ritual. When we examine some of the sources describing the Dionysiac cult, for example, like  Augustine who describes in disgust the anticipatory giggles of an audience about to see the huge prick of a Priapic mime, it becomes clear that laughter was an important element of Priapus’ appeal. He looked so disgusting that he was funny. This is also true for the initiation scene as Petronius constructs, or reconstructs: the actions are so disgusting that they are funny, or at least intended to be so for some. Indeed laughter is often portrayed throughout the initiation scenes.

We get an even stronger sense of laughter’s meaning from Iamblichos’ description of aischrorrêmosunai which he associated with phallic imagery:

To answer your question, the erection of phallic images is a symbol of generative power and we consider that this is directed towards the fecundating of the world; this is the reason, indeed, why most of these images are consecrated in the spring, since this is just when the world as a whole receives from the Gods the power of generating all creation. And as for the aischrorrêmosunai, my view is that they have the role of expressing the absence of beauty in matter and the previous ugliness of those things that are going to be brought to order, which, since they lack ordering, yearn for it in the same degree as they spurn the unseemliness that was previously their lot. So then, once again, one is prompted to seek after the causes of form and beauty when one learns the nature of obscenity from the utterance of obscenities; one rejects the practice of obscenities, while by means of uttering them one makes clear one’s knowledge of them, and thus directs one’s striving towards the opposite. And there is another explanation too. When the power of human emotions in us is everywhere confined, it becomes stronger. But when it is brought to exercise briefly and to a moderate extent, it rejoices moderately and is satisfied. By that means it is purged and ceases by persuasion, and not in response to force. It is by this means that, when we see the emotions of others in comedy and in tragedy, we still our own emotions, and make them more moderate and purge them. And in sacred rites, through the sight and sound of the obscenities, we are freed from harm that comes from actual indulgence in them. So things of this sort are embraced for the therapy of our souls and to moderate the evils which come to us through the generative process, to free us from our chains and give us riddance. (On the Mysteries 37.3-6; 38.13-40)

Aischrorrêmosunai can mean obscene speech, jokes and laughter and served an important function within the mysteries, as Arnobius of Sicca (Adversus Gentes 5.25-26) relates:

In her wanderings on that quest, she reaches the confines of Eleusis as well as other countries — that is the name of a canton in Attica. At that time these parts were inhabited by aborigines named Baubo, Triptolemus, Eubuleus, Eumolpus, Dysaules: Triptolemus, who yoked oxen; Dysaules, a keeper of goats; Eubuleus, of swine; Eumolpus, of sheep, from whom also flows the race of Eumolpidæ, and from whom is derived that name famous among the Athenians, and those who afterwards flourished as caduceatores, hierophants, and criers. So, then, that Baubo who, we have said, dwelt in the canton of Eleusis, receives hospitably Ceres, worn out with ills of many kinds, hangs about her with pleasing attentions, beseeches her not to neglect to refresh her body, brings to quench her thirst wine thickened with spelt, which the Greeks term cyceon. The Goddess in her sorrow turns away from the kindly offered services, and rejects them; nor does her misfortune suffer her to remember what the body always requires. Baubo, on the other hand, begs and exhorts her—as is usual in such calamities—not to despise her humanity; Ceres remains utterly immoveable, and tenaciously maintains an invincible austerity. But when this was done several times, and her fixed purpose could not be worn out by any attentions, Baubo changes her plans, and determines to make merry by strange jests her whom she could not win by earnestness. That part of the body by which women both bear children and obtain the name of mothers, this she frees from longer neglect: she makes it assume a purer appearance, and become smooth like a child, not yet hard and rough with hair. In this wise she returns to the sorrowing Goddess; and while trying the common expedients by which it is usual to break the force of grief, and moderate it, she uncovers herself, and baring her groins, displays all the parts which decency hides; and then the Goddess fixes her eyes upon these, and is pleased with the strange form of consolation. Then becoming more cheerful after laughing, she takes and drinks off the drought spurned before, and the indecency of a shameless action forced that which Baubo’s modest conduct was long unable to win. If any one perchance thinks that we are speaking wicked calumnies, let him take the hooks of the Thracian soothsayer, which you speak of as of divine antiquity; and he will find that we are neither cunningly inventing anything, nor seeking means to bring the holiness of the Gods into ridicule, and doing so: for we shall bring forward the very verses which the son of Calliope uttered in Greek, and published abroad in his songs to the human race throughout all ages:—

With these words she at the same time drew up
her garments from the lowest hem,
and exposed to view formatas inguinibus res,
which Baubo grasping with hollow hand, for
their appearance was infantile, strikes, touches gently.
Then the Goddess, fixing her orbs of august light,
being softened, lays aside for a little the sadness of her mind;
thereafter she takes the cup in her hand, and laughing,
drinks off the whole draught of cyceon with gladness.

A slightly different version of this fragment from an Orphic poem is provided by Clement of Alexandria in the second book of his Exhortation to the Greeks:

This said, she drew aside her robes, and showed a sight of shame; child Iakchos was there and with his hand he, laughing, tossed and jerked it under Baubo’s womb. Then smiled the Goddess, in her heart she smiled, and drank the draught from out the glancing cup.

Laughter has the power to banish sorrow and other ills, connecting it to Priapos’ many apotropaic functions. In his myths he is both the one who drives away through laughter and the one whom laughter drives off – especially in the myth of his attempted rape of Vesta who is synonymous with the hearth and the home itself, according to Cicero:

The name Vesta comes from the Greeks, for she is the Goddess whom they call Hestia. Her power extends over altars and hearths, and therefore all prayers and all sacrifices end with this Goddess, because she is the guardian of the innermost things. (De Natura Deorum 2. 27)

And the author of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite:

Zeus the Father gave her high honour instead of marriage, and she has her place in the midst of the house and has the richest portion.

Which sets up a polar opposition with Priapos, God of outdoors:

This God is worshipped where goats and sheep pasture or there are swarms of bees. (Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 31. 2)

Other polarities abound. Hestia is immobile; Priapos leaps up and is constantly on the move. Priapos is the protector; Hestia is what must be preserved from defilement. Priapos is licentious; Hestia chaste.

However, there may be an even more esoteric significance behind Priapos’ attempted rape – his phallic exuberance stirs up the life-force promoting generation in the plants and animals that are under his care. Without him matter would be barren and stagnant.

Hestia, according to that skillful etymologist Plato, is that matter:

Take that which we call ousia (reality, essence); some people call it essia, and still others ôsia. First, then, in connection with the second of these forms, it is reasonable that the essence of things be called Hestia; and moreover, because we ourselves say of that which partakes of reality ‘it is’ (estin), the name Hestia would be correct in this connection also; for apparently we also called ousia (reality) essia in ancient times. And besides, if you consider it in connection with sacrifices, you would come to the conclusion that those who established them understood the name in that way; for those who called the essence of things essia would naturally sacrifice to Hestia first of all the Gods. Those on the other hand, who say ôsia would agree, well enough with Herakleitos that all things move and nothing remains still. So they would say the cause and ruler of things was the pushing power (ôthoun), wherefore it had been rightly named ôsia. (Kratylos 400d – 401b)

If obscenity contributes to the purification of matter, as Iamblichos asserted, then Priapos’ actions towards Hestia take on an entirely different connotation – as do the whole system of mysteries overseen by Quartilla.

But wait, there’s more!

One of the reasons why I offer mead in libation to Dionysos from time to time is because of the extensive discussion of honey in Carl Kerényi’s Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, which is where I first read the myth of Zeus using mead to drug Kronos during his attempt to seize the cosmic throne.

Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs credits this myth to Orpheus:

In Orpheus, likewise, Kronos is ensnared by Zeus through honey. For Kronos, being filled with honey, is intoxicated, his senses are darkened, as if from the effects of wine, and he sleeps; just as Porus, in the banquet of Plato, is filled with nectar; for wine, he says, was not yet known. The goddess Night, too, in Orpheus, advises Zeus to make use of honey as an artifice. For she says to him:—

When stretch’d beneath the lofty oaks you view
Kronos, with honey by the bees produc’d
Sunk in ebriety, fast bind the God.

This therefore, takes place, and Kronos being bound is emasculated in the same manner as Ouranos. Kronos receives the powers of Ouranos and Zeus Kronos. Since, therefore, honey is assumed in purgations, and as an antidote to putrefaction, and is indicative of the pleasure which draws souls downward to generation; it is a symbol well adapted to aquatic Nymphs, on account of the unputrescent nature of the waters over which they preside, their purifying power, and their co-operation with generation. For water co-operates in the work of generation. On this account the bees are said, by the poet, to deposit their honey in bowls and amphorae; the bowls being a symbol of fountains, and therefore a bowl is placed near to Mithra, instead of a fountain; but the amphorae are symbols of the vessels with which we draw water from fountains. And fountains and streams are adapted to aquatic Nymphs, and still more so to the Nymphs that are souls, which the ancient peculiarly called bees, as the efficient causes of sweetness. Hence Sophokles does not speak inappropriately when he says of souls:—

In swarms while wandering, from the dead a humming sound is heard.

The priestesses who served the Chthonic Goddesses were called by the ancients bees; and Persephone herself was called the honied. The moon, likewise, who presides over generation, was called by them a bee, and also a bull, for bees are ox-begotten. And this application is also given to souls proceeding into generation. The God, likewise, who is occultly connected with generation, is a stealer of oxen. To which may be added, that honey is considered as a symbol of death, and on this account it is usual to offer libations of honey to the terrestrial Gods; but gall is considered as a symbol of life; signifying obscurely by this that death liberates from molestation, but the present life is laborious and bitter.

Which sounds an awful lot like the Orphic verse discussed by the anonymous commentator of the Derveni papyrus where in order to attain mastery of the cosmos Zeus has to swallow the severed:

phallos of the first-born king, onto which all
the immortals grew (or: clung fast), blessed gods and goddesses
and rivers and lovely springs and everything else
that had been born then; and he himself became solitary.

It also makes an interesting parallel with the story related by Arnobius of Sicca which begins with Zeus trying to rape his mother and prematurely jizzing on a rock:

This the rock received, and with many groanings Acdestis is born in the tenth month, being named from his mother rock. In him there had been resistless might, and a fierceness of disposition beyond control, a lust made furious, and derived from both sexes. He violently plundered and laid waste; he scattered destruction wherever the ferocity of his disposition had led him; he regarded not gods nor men, nor did he think anything more powerful than himself; he contemned earth, heaven, and the stars. Now, when it had been often considered in the councils of the gods, by what means it might be possible either to weaken or to curb his audacity, Liber, the rest hanging back, takes upon himself this task. With the strongest wine he drugs a spring much resorted to by Acdestis where he had been wont to assuage the heat and burning thirst roused in him by sport and hunting. Hither runs Acdestis to drink when he felt the need; he gulps down the draught too greedily into his gaping veins. Overcome by what he is quite unaccustomed to, he is in consequence sent fast asleep. Liber is near the snare which he had set; over his foot he throws one end of a halter formed of hairs, woven together very skilfully; with the other end he lays hold of his privy members. When the fumes of the wine passed off, Acdestis starts up furiously, and his foot dragging the noose, by his own strength he robs himself of his sex; with the tearing asunder of these parts there is an immense flow of blood; both are carried off and swallowed up by the earth; from them there suddenly springs up, covered with fruit, a pomegranate tree. (Against the Heathen 5.5-6)

But even more interesting is the linking of Kronos’ castration with meilia considering that the Meliai were generated from the castration of Ouronos and that Melinoë was produced during the rending of Persephone. Likewise Nymphs and water play an important role in the cult of Persephone at Lokroi. And Vergil’s account of Orpheus is part of a story involving bees sprung from the carcass of an ox.

Speaking of Persephone, Porphyry elaborates on the Orphic myth of her weaving in De Antro – note what plant shoots up from Acdestis’ blood? The same one that sprang up when the Corybantes castrated Dionysos and brought his phallos to Italy, which became famed for its honey. (This adds interesting light on the honey and phalloi themes of the Roman Liberalia.)

Also, did you note that Dionysos uses a noose-shaped web to overcome the monster? I did.

As they said on Crete:

πασι θεοίς μελι
λαβυρινθοιο ποτνιαι μελι