The gate of horn and the gate of ivory
Back in time we go, back... back...
Imagine you’re in the Underworld, and you’re alive and need to get out.
How do you do it?
If you’re Percy Jackson, you use the pearls of Poseidon.
But according to Vergil, the great Roman poet of the Aeneid, national epic of the Romans, you have two choices: a gate made of horn and a gate made of ivory.
Thanks to the Horn Gate, a challenging and worthwhile read on Substack, for inspiring this post.
Here is how Vergil puts it:
There are twin gates of Dream, of which one,
it is said, is made of horn. Through this true shades
are given easy release to the upper world.
but from the other, finished in ivory, shining bright,
the Ancestors send visions falsely imagined.
His speech all spoken, Anchises sends his son
and the Sibyll together out of the ivory gate,
and Aeneas cuts his way to his ships and his fellows.
(Aeneid 6.893-899, my translation)
Aeneas is the hero who has come down into the Underworld, guided by the priestess of Apollo, the Sibyll, to speak to his father Anchises who has knowledge of the future of Rome, which is still centuries away from being fulfilled.
Now Aeneas has to get out, and lots of ink has been spilled about what is meant by true shades, visions falsely imagined, and why our hero goes through the ivory gate.
The question for me today, however, is how did Vergil ever think of this idea? It’s a beautiful thought, a beautiful image, of the two gates.
What were Vergil’s influences?
We happen to know, fortunately, of another set of gates in Greek mythology, which Vergil loved. These gates are found in the Odyssey, and are put In the mouth of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, to whom she is speaking:
…But shrewd Penelope said, “Stranger,
dreams are confusing, and not all come true.
There are two gates of dreams: one pair is made
of horn and one of ivory. The dreams
from ivory are all of trickery;
their stories turn out false. The ones that come
through polished horn come true.
(Odyssey 19.560-569, translation E. Wilson)
Penelope is talking about a dream she had where an eagle came and killed her pet geese. The eagle then spoke to her and interpreted the dream: the eagle is Odysseus and the geese are the suitors who are vying for Penelope’s hand, since they believe the hero has died.
So in that story there are two gates, but there’s no sense that they are located in the Underworld. That may have been Vergil’s innovation—taking the original idea and bending it in a different direction.
But if we go back even further—to the inspiration for Penelope’s idea—we find the Underworld again.
In Bronze Age Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), the Babylonians built plenty of gates because there were plenty of cities that needed to be defended by walls.
The kings of Bronze Age Mycenae, an early Greek citadel, created a gate defended by twin lions.
The Babylonians, for their part, worshipped a pair of divine twins, Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea, who were guardians of gates.1 Among other things, they were envisioned as guardians of the gates of the Underworld and servants of the god Nergal, the king of the land of the dead.
So, for the people of Babylonia and later Assyria (modern Syria), who continued the older religion, there was a place where you could enter (and exit) the Underworld.
What about the horn and the ivory?
The gods of these times were all depicted with horns. Some of them were thought of as bulls, but in the iconography of the time a pair of horns on the head of a human-like figure counted as a sign of divinity.
One could imagine Greek poets getting a hold of these ancient stories and pictures and transforming them for Greek audiences. Instead of a gate to the Underworld guarded by horned gods, you have a gate from the Underworld made of horn.
And instead of twin gods, you have twin gates.
As to the ivory and the false dreams, I wouldn’t put it past a Greek poet to make an innovation there. The shining, attractive object that actually hides the less attractive thing inside is seen in Hesiod’s story of Pandora, the beautiful bride who brought woe to men, and in the story, also Hesiod’s, of the division of the first sacrifice, where shining fat hides a useless thigh bone, whereas the humble stomach hides the useful meat.
And the whole idea of dreams that issue from the depths of the earth seems to me to be a particularly apt candidate for archetype status, since our dreams come from our subconscious, from the deepest and least accessible parts of ourselves.
So…
Where does creativity come from? Ultimately, from a plurality of sources, and from a myriad of contributions: the creator him or herself, his or her influences, and even the deep pool of collective memory of all human beings.
I don’t blame Rick Riordan for deciding not to have Percy make a choice of which gate to go through—it’s a tough choice either way. But it shows that even up to the present day, storytellers are finding new solutions to old plot problems.
May it continue, fruitfully as ever.
I studied these gods in my dissertation many aeons ago, when I was investigating the Near Eastern roots of Kastor and Polydeuces (Castor and Pollux), Greek mythology’s divine twins.
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