Frozen Serenity in Stone Wish, Demand, and the Oceanic Feeling in an Ancient Funerary Stele

Abstract

This article examines a banquet/symposion-themed funerary stele registered in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums not merely as an iconographic and typological object, but as a material counterpart to the mental and emotional strategies developed in the face of death. In the scholarship, such scenes have often been interpreted within the context of a “meal for the dead” or a “funerary banquet.” Without excluding these readings, the present study proposes to understand the depiction not as a direct record of a specific ritual, but as a form of mental architecture that fixes a desire for security, stability, and tension-free continuity. In this framework, the stele’s composition—through its spatial construction, allocation of roles, and placement of objects—can be read as a representational surface that visualizes an ideal state of being in which conflict is suspended and serenity is rendered continuous. Within this perspective, the concept of the “oceanic feeling” (das ozeanische Gefühl) as defined by Sigmund Freud in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, (1930) is employed not as a diagnostic instrument in a direct clinical sense, but as an explanatory and interpretive conceptual frame to relate the scene’s timeless serenity to a wish for a carefree, holistic, and uninterrupted mode of existence. The study therefore reopens the discussion of banquet/symposion scenes not only as representations of ritual practice, but also as cultural and affective representational constructions that make visible an ideal order demanded in the face of death.

Keywords

• Ancient Greece
• Afterlife Belief
• Symposion
• Funerary Stele
• Freud

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