A unique mid-fifth-century vessel, attributed to Sotades and shaped as a knucklebone, features thirteen attractive women, ten of whom are levitating (BM 1860,1201.2). One side has an irregular opening, representing the mouth of a cave, with an emaciated, bearded man emerging from it and extending his hand toward the young women. This vessel has not yet been conclusively interpreted. I suggest that it evokes the caves of the nymphs that served as seats of lot-oracles, where knucklebones were used for divination. The bony man, his ribs clearly showing on his bare torso, is a nympholept who has spent much of his time in a cave, portrayed within his hallucinatory vision of a visitation by an airborne ensemble of flying nymphs.

In order to prove this suggestion, I will juxtapose the portrait of the emaciated man with epigraphic and other written evidence attesting to the contents of nympholeptic hallucinations in caves. I will survey the sophisticated artistic devices used to convey the imagined actions and characteristics of the Nymphs in a hallucinatory vision, and explore the contribution of Sotades’ astragalos, which depicts the nympholept’s physical and mental condition, to the reconstruction of the cave cults of the Nymphs.

First Author: Yulia Ustinova

Keywords:
cult caves
Nympholepts
Sotades
astragalos
Nymphs
hallucinations