"Madri" in ansia : Ghellò a Gela

The paper aims to draw attention on the Greek inscription GELOI (that means “to Ghellò”) engraved on the foot of an Attic kylix dated to the first half of the 5th Century BC. The sherd was brought to light during the archaeological excavations carried out by Piero Orlandini in 1964 within the sanctuary of Bilatemi, a well-known suburban thesmophorion to the East of Gela. Particularly noteworthy is the association between the thesmophorion, generally devoted to protect and empower women’s reproductive capacities, and Ghellò, a female demon. This latter was thought to appear to pregnant women and cause miscarriages, even kill newborns because she was envious for not being able to have any children of her own. By stressing their religious attention to Ghellò, as if they were trying discouraging her tremendous power of inflicting harm to newborns and babies, the Geloan mothers appear to be mothers in angst, shifting their capacity of rearing a child successfully from family to religion. The sherd from Gela is probably one of the earliest mention of the female demon Ghellò within an archaeological context (the first literary mention being the one in Sappho’s 178 Lobel-Page). It conveys a crucial meaning for being uncovered in Greek Sicily where cult practices for local kourotrophic deities are widespread.