'Antiqui dicunt': classical aspects of the witches in 'Macbeth.

'
Anthony DiMatteo
Notes and Queries. 41.1 (Mar. 1994): p44+. From Literature Resource Center.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Oxford University Press
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/

Abstract:

William Shakespeare raises the stature of the witches in 'Macbeth' by connecting them symbolically
with the classical goddess Hecate. Shakespeare's witches parallel Natale Conti's description of
Hecate and her dark world in the 'Mythologies.' Witches are only capable of seeing what is likely to
happen and have no way of defining the course of events. Macbeth's moral downfall begins when
he forgets this boundary and begins seeing the witches as having the power to define life's course.

Full Text:

THAT Shakespeare commingles different mythological types in portraying the three ~witches' of
Macbeth is perhaps an obvious feature of the ~weird sisters" dramatic make-up in the play.(1) They
clearly are more than commonplace witches as that social type was likely to have been understood
by Shakespeare's contemporaries.(2) While arguably homeless unless their cauldron in IV.i is also
a hearth, they are not beggarly at least in the sense of asking Macbeth for any material favour,
although in I.iii.4-10, one of the witches reports that she enacted revenge upon ~a sailor's wife'
after being denied the ~chestnuts in her lap'.(3) Part of what makes them more than simply witches
are their symbolic connections with ~antique' or classical Hecate as the pagan goddess of the
underworld was symbolically interpreted in Renaissance mythography. This component becomes
clearer if we compare Natale Conti's interpretation of Hecate to the Macbeth witches. An important
if arcane light thereby emerges as a context for Shakespeare's symbolic use of what the ancients
are alleged to have said regarding ~pale Hecate's off ~rings' (II.i.52).

In the third book of Conti's Mythologies on the underworld, the requisite chapter on Hecate is found
after those on night, death, and sleep and before Proserpina, the first three transparently figures for
processes and times associated with ~entrance' into Tartarus, while Hecate and Proserpina are the
reigning female deities or ~powers' encountered below.(4) The ancients say Hecate was called
~Trivia', reports Conti, because of the sacrifice of meals offered to her and the beggarly sort by
nobility at triple crossroads and because Luna, Diana, and Hecate are linked as deities springing
from the same source in fate. As for appearance, Hecate is sometimes depicted as triple-headed,
with a horse's head as her right head, a dog's as her left, and a man's, ~or as some have it, a pig's
head in the center'. In countenance and stature she looks like the Gorgon, and her feet and hair
look like serpents. Some ancients thought that dogs were sacrificed to her and that she even was
an eater of dogs (~canicida Dea') because their barking disturbed the air at night. Among her
powers is the ability to alter the course of rivers and move standing fields of corn. In ancient ritual
and cosmology, she is associated with boundaries and thresholds. Conti writes,

The ancients thought Hecate appeared in the

vestibules of homes, which is why her altars

were built before doorways as Aeschylus

says, ~Hecate, first to be met in the forecourts

of royalty.'

[Hanc vestibula domorum tueri arbitrabantur,

quare ante fores aras erigebant, ut in his

testatur Aeschylus: ~Regalium atriorum previa

Hecate'](5) This liminal symbolism in ritual of course also reflects her border-marking role in the
universe whose triple division into hell, earth, and the heavens is symbolized by what Vergil calls in
the Aeneid ~trifold Hecate, the three faces of virgin Diana'. As he customarily does at a chapter's
end, Conti asks, ~what did the ancients mean to signify by these fables?' (~Quid igitur per has
fabulas significare voluerunt antiqui?').(6) In brief, none other than ~the course and power of fate
divinely communicated into mortal bodies, as the lines quoted from Hesiod indicate' (~fatorum
cuiusque ordo ac vis est Hecate ut patet e superioribus carminibus Hesiodi, quae divinitus in
mortalia corpora infunditur').(7) Hence, she symbolizes that astral force descending from the stars
to operate on all bodies below or even that predictive power associated with the sun or Jove that
sees, hears, and moderates all things.(8)

I have culled from Conti's remarks on Hecate what I see as points of contact with the symbolism of
Macbeth. Especially noteworthy is the very clear portrayal of the Macbeth witches as having
predictive power albeit not determining command over the course of events in the play. They seem
to know all, and like Hecate in Conti's reading, they articulate or manifest the shape that destiny
takes in its sovereign sway over mortal things. This testifying ability is what Banquo attributes to the
three when he implores or commands that they address him:

If you can look into the seeds of time,

And say which grain will grow, and which will not,

Speak then to me.

(I.ii.58-60) While Macbeth at this point in the play also speaks of the witches' ~prophetic greeting'
(I.ii.78), later on, immediately after Hecate's appearance in IV.i, he notably wavers from this
interpretation, suggesting the witches have what Conti says the ancients attributed to the sun or
Jove, a controlling power over the course of mortal things:

I conjure you, by that which you profess,

Howe'er you come to know it, answer me:

Though you untie the winds, and let them fight

Against the Churches; though the yesty waves

Confound and swallow navigation up;

Though bladed corn be lodg'd, and trees blown down;

Though castles topple on their warders' heads;

Though palaces, and pyramids, do slope

Their heads ~to their foundations; though the treasure

Of Nature's germens tumble all together,

Even till destruction sicken, answer me

To what I ask you.

(IV.i.50-61) The fact that in Macbeth's list of what destiny might have in store, the possibility of the
witches' controlling nature (~though you untie the winds') comes first, suggests that he has crossed
a line in the interpretation of ~the power' of witchcraft that Banquo (and Conti) carefully avoided
doing. The goddess of witches, Hecate herself is only an instrument of a force greater than her
own; she is ~the course and power of fate divinely communicated into mortal bodies'. Of course,
this perhaps fine though rather crucial distinction between instrument and cause is muddled by
Macbeth's evidently swelling desire to know what will happen. Ironically, Macbeth himself has
become an instrument of his desire to know, a trespass of the boundaries of reason and the
universal order that the goddess Trivia' was understood to delimit, not determine. If, as is likely,
Hecate's appearances in the play are spurious, we should acknowledge at least how appropriate
the interpolator felt her presence in the play was, perhaps serving to call to mind the lessons of the
ancients and what their ancient symbols signified. Conti's final sentence on Hecate in the chapter
he gives to her reminds us what her ~fable' meant:

Since the ancients therefore wished to signify

that in all things there must be an end, that no

one can escape the will of the Gods, or pass by

their appointed day, for all that is good or bad

arises from the judgement and will of the

Gods, they invented these matters regarding

Hecate, in terms both of her genealogy and

her appearance.

[Cum vellent igitur significare antiqui omnibus

esse moriendum, neque quenquam posse

Deorum voluntatem effugere, aut ab illis

statutum diem praeterire, omniaque et commoda

et incommoda proficisci ex arbittio

voluntateque Deorum, haec et ad ortum et ad

formam Hecates spectantia excogitarunt.](9)

If the play thus involves Macbeth's transgressing of a moral boundary by attempting to know and
even bypass his appointed day, then what better way to dramatize this trespass than by using a
symbolism Shakespeare's contemporaries were likely to have understood as represented by the
~antique' goddess Hecate? That three witches commence the play and are thereby given
considerable prominence in demarcating at least a dramaturgical boundary immediately becomes
understandable as a poetic technique for invoking the meaning if not the name of trifold Hecate.
Their beginning the play gives a symbolic shaping to Holinshed's account that can be read in terms
of Renaissance mythographic symbolism.

Furthermore, it is perhaps more than coincidental, given what Conti reports from Aeschylus
regarding Hecate to be met first in the royal forecourts, that Lady Macbeth in I.vi first greets King
Duncan at the threshold of Macbeth's castle at Inverness. The soon to be queen has already by
this point in the play laid claim to a prophetic power that the three witches have been shown to
have. In response to Macbeth's letter, itself a symbolic verbal instrument of ~prophetic knowledge',
Lady Macbeth describes herself as an actual vehicle of prophetic wisdom when she greets
Macbeth and echoes the witches:

Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!

Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!

Thy letters have transported me beyond

This ignorant present, and I feel now

The future in the instant.

(I.v.54 8) She wrongfully aspires to be a fourth servant of triune Hecate, as it were, symbolically a
breech of cosmological order as well as of moral boundaries. Indeed, all of nature eventually
appears out of order that night at Inverness as Lenox reports to Macbeth in II.iii.61-2 that, ~some
say, the earth / Was feverous, and did shake'. When Shakespeare transfers a detail about horses'
eating each other (II.iv.14) from Holinshed's account of King Duff's murder by Donwald to Duncan's
by Macbeth, we can appreciate the rich classical import of this symbolic detail if we recall Hecate's
horseheadedness and her eating of dogs. Furthermore, Macduff's description of the slain King as
~a new Gorgon' (II.iii.72) interestingly transfers to the victim the attributed appearance of the
classical witch goddess.

Likewise, when in II.i.2, Fleance reports that ~the moon is down', we are perhaps right in
understanding a mythological signal that Luna is giving way to the dark aspect of Hecate,
representing the lowest rung in the cosmic order, the underworld', the furthest point away from deity
where the soul upon birth enters hyle or the body or even more remotely, where the soul of the
damned goes after life. ~Here's a knocking, indeed!' exclaims the porter (Ii.iii.1), whose allegorical
significance as a Charon-like figure who greeted the dead at the threshold of hell clearly connects
with the classical associations of the Macbeth witches as representatives of Hecate encountered at
the margins of the king's realm.

Through this series of symbolic contacts between the play and Hecate allegorically understood, we
can see how the play can be read as a progress through hell. Indeed, that Shakespeare would
engage the mythography of Hecate in his representation of three witches appears far less arcane
once we take into account that in the Renaissance, the antique fables of the gods conveyed
~universal precepts regarding morals', as Conti phrases it in the first chapter of his book. Certainly
this engagement suggests that far from being a curious tale from Scottish history involving witches
and the fate of kings, Macbeth in its symbolism arguably depicts something like an archetypal
pattern from time immemorial involving a contestation for the centre and its control between the
outcasts of society at the crossroads and kings at the hearth, who through sacrifice at Hecate's
altars attempted to assuage the forces of disorder at the threshold or borders of their realm. But, as
Hecate gives warning in the play,

And you all know, security

Is mortals' chiefest enemy.

(III.v.32 3) (1) The difficult, composite quality of the Macbeth witches is reflected by K. M. Briggs's
description in Pale Hecate's Team (London, 1962), 78:'On the whole the witches, who are never so
named, seem to have the ordinary witch characteristics, but something of the weird sisters clings to
them; and they are even more like the supernatural hags of Scandinavian folklore.' (2) According to
Keith Thomas, for example, witches in early modern England tended to be poor women whose
lives were maintained by traditional neighbourly customs often more observed in the breech than in
the keeping in seventeenth-century England (see Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York,
1971), 561-6). (3) The edition of the play cited throughout is Kenneth Muir, The Arden Edition of the
Works of Shakespeare: Macbeth Cambridge, Mass., 1951). (4) The text of Conti used throughout is
Mythologiae (Padua, 1616), 123-7 (repr. New York and London, 1979). All passages cited from this
edition also occur in the Venice, 1567, edition. Translations are mine. (5) Mythologiae (Padua,
1616), 125. (6) Ibid., 127. (7) Ibid. (8) Conti says regarding Hecate's. genealogy that those ancients
who thought her to be Perses and Asteria's daughter, and thereby Coelus' granddaughter,
~considered her that predictive force, as it were' (~vim illam scilicet praedictam putarunt') through
which the sun (or Jove) moderates all. On p. 127 Conti makes the solar reading, on 536, the Jove.
(9) Mythologiae, 127.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

DiMatteo, Anthony. "'Antiqui dicunt': classical aspects of the witches in 'Macbeth.'." Notes and
Queries, vol. 41, no. 1, 1994, p. 44+. Literature Resource Center, https://link-gale-
com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/apps/doc/A15103339/LitRC?u=tall85761&sid=LitRC&xid=c477dc51.
Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A15103339