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Imaginary Phrygians: Cognitive Consonance and the Assumed Phrygian Origin of Greek Ecstatic Cults and Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2021

Yulia Ustinova
Yulia Ustinova*
Affiliation:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev*
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Abstract

While Greeks called the ecstatic musical mode ‘Phrygian’, there is no evidence of high-arousal musical performances in Phrygia, and the musical characteristics of this mode were distinctively Greek. The image of wide-ranging excited celebrations practised in Phrygia seems to have existed only in the imagination of the Greeks and Romans. This paper suggests that the uneasiness felt by some Greeks facing high-arousal cults was assuaged by attributing them foreign origin, which was often fictitious. By culturally dissociating themselves from the ecstatic practices, the Greeks resolved the cognitive inconsistency between their self-perception as citizens of the decorous civilized world and their surrender to the irresistible allure of high-arousal cults and music. These false attitudes allowed cognitive consonance and attained the status of indubitable truth. Upheld throughout antiquity, they persuaded many modern scholars, who still mistakenly consider the Phrygian musical mode as an Oriental borrowing.

Keywords

Phrygian modeecstatic cultsCybeleMagna Matercognitive consonance
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 141 , November 2021 , pp. 54 - 73
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies

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Footnotes

*

[email protected]. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their insightful comments, and to Carolyn Gross-Baruch for polishing my English.

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