Editing Winnowing (section)

==In Greek culture==
{{further|Winnowing oar}}
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The winnowing-fan (λίκνον [''líknon''], also meaning a "cradle") featured in the rites accorded [[Dionysus]] and in the [[Eleusinian Mysteries]]: "it was a simple agricultural implement taken over and mysticized by the religion of Dionysus," [[Jane Ellen Harrison]] remarked.<ref>Harrison, ''Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion'', 3rd ed. (1922:159).</ref> ''Dionysus Liknites'' ("Dionysus of the winnowing fan") was wakened by the Dionysian women, in this instance called ''[[Thyia (naiad)|Thyia]]des'', in a cave on [[Mount Parnassus|Parnassus]] high above [[Delphi]]; the winnowing-fan links the god connected with the [[Greco-Roman mysteries|mystery religion]]s to the agricultural cycle, but mortal Greek babies too were laid in a winnowing-fan.<ref>[[Karl Kerenyi]], ''Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life'' (1976:44).</ref> In [[Callimachus]]'s ''Hymn to Zeus'', [[Adrasteia]] lays the infant Zeus in a golden ''líknon'', her goat suckles him and he is given honey. In the ''[[Odyssey]]'', the dead oracle [[Teiresias]] tells [[Odysseus]] to walk away from Ithaca with an oar until a wayfarer tells him it is a winnowing fan (i.e., until Odysseus has come so far from the sea that people don't recognize oars), and there to build a shrine to Poseidon.