THE HYMN OF THE KOURETES. 

ZeY TIANTWN dpyd, 
TIANTWN APHTOOP, 
ZeY, COl TEMTTO TAYTAN YMNWN ApXAN. 

- 

ZEUS, the Father of Gods and Men, was born, men fabled, 
in the island of Crete. So far there was substantial agreement. 
It may be that this uniformity reflects some half-unconscious 
tradition that in Crete were the beginnings of that faith and 
practice which if it cannot be called Hellenic religion was at least 
‘the substratum on which Hellenic religion was based. No one 
now thinks he can have an adequate knowledge of Greek art with- 
out a study of the Mycenaean and Minoan periods, and, since the 
roots of religion strike as deep as or deeper than the roots of art, 
no one now will approach the study of the Olympian Zeus without 
seeking for the origin of the god in his reputed birth-place. 

By the most fortunate of chances, at Palaikastro on the eastern 
coast of Crete, just the very material needed for this study has come 
to light, a ritual Hymn commemorating the birth of the infant 
us. The Hymn itself is, as will be seen, late, but it embodies 
very early materia], material indeed so primitive that we seem at 
last to get back to the very beginnings of Greek religion, to a 
way of thinking that is not in our sense religious at all, but that 
idsmonstrably leads on to religious faith and practice. This 
primitive mode of faith and practice it is, I believe, of the first 
‘importance that we should grasp and as fully as may be realise. 
It lets us see myth as well as ritual in the making, it will even 
disclose certain elements that lie deep embedded in early 
eek philosophy. The new, or at least partially new, outlook 
ened by the Hymn is easy to misconceive, and, in the first flush 

H. ; 1 

ee Se 

. rc. 
(trae tees we 

2 The Hymn of the Kouretes [ CH. 

of discovery, easy perhaps to over-emphasize. It needs patient 
scrutiny and some effort of the historical imagination. To such 
a scrutiny and to conclusions arising from it the following chapters 
will be devoted. 

Before the meaning of the Hymn is discussed the circumstances 
of its finding must be made clear. This Hymn, about which our 
main enquiry into the origins of Greek religion will centre, was 
not found at Knossos nor even at Phaestos, places whose names 
are now in every man’s mouth, but at the remote seaport town of 
Palaikastro, a name familiar only to archaeologists. If Palaikastro 
should ever be a household word to classical scholars in general, it 
will be as the place of the finding of this Hymn. The marshy 
plain out of which Palaikastro rises is almost certainly the ancient 
Heleia, known to us through inscriptions! as a tract of land over 
which the dwellers in Itanos and Hierapytna disputed. Near to 
Heleia these same inscriptions tell us lay the sanctuary of 
Diktaean Zeus. 

Our Hymn bids the god come to Dikte. The two great 
mountain peaks of Crete, Ida and Dikte, both claimed to be the 
birth-place of Zeus. Dikte, though less splendid and dominant, 
has the earlier and better claim. Hesiod?, our earliest authority, 
places the birth-story at Lyktos on the north-western spur of 
Dikte. 

To Lyktos first she came, bearing the child 
As black night swiftly fell. 

There is a shade of suspicious emphasis on the ‘first, as of one 
whose orthodoxy is impeached. When the glory of Cnossos over- 
shadowed and overwhelmed lesser and earlier sanctities, Ida was 
necessarily supreme, and it required some courage to support the 
claims of Dikte. Diodorus? with true theological tact combines 
the two stories: the god was born indeed on Dikte but educated 
by the Kouretes on Mount Ida. 

1 Dittenberger, 11. 929, line 37 “Irdyvoe wédw olkodvres ériPaddootov xwpav exovTes 
Tpoyovrkny yetrovovoay Tax To Acos rod Arxratov iep&x, and see lines 45 and 65. 

2 Hes. Theog. 481 

év0a pev ikro pépovoa Bony did voxTa wédawav 

mpwTnv és AvKTov. 

3 yy, 70 Kara, dé Thy ldyv, ev 7 owéBn tpapfvar Tov Oedv...dvdpwhévta 5” adbréy 
pace mp@rov moduw xtioat wept tiv Alkrav, drov Kal rhv yévecw adroo yevéo Bar 
MuBoNoyovow.... 

i) 

a But Palaikastro, as a glance at the map! in Fig. 1 will show, 
is not Dikte—not even near Dikte. All eastern Crete with its 
wns of Itanos and Praisos, where dwelt the Eteokretans, and 
the modern sites of Zakro and Palaikastro are cut off from the 
mountain mass of Dikte by the low narrow isthmus? that joins 

¥ 

Li 
an 5 
w (“iy > 
re WA, GF. 
% y \WW Wz R77 — 3 a 
a Min eh sin ie ly BBS 2 ae - 
Zaiwaye < Wt eee S p ro 
“1 “NE g 10S guenrn ZDy te Lasithi Ae. = a eae) 
an ei ye Me SS vA a ‘akro 
7 5 
°Gortyna 5 oF 
“ Phaistos gai “ha) v 
Hierahetna) 
Q la) 

| 
Fic. 1. Map of Crete. 

t he trading towns of Minoa (Gournia) and Hierapytna (Hiera- 
petra). How comes it then that in remote Palaikastro Diktaean 
Zeus is worshipped, that in Palaikastro the ruins of his temple 

lave come to light? This brings us to the question of chronology. 

Strabo? in discussing the origin of Cretan institutions makes 
an interesting remark. ‘Among the Cretans, he says, ‘when 
their warlike cities, and especially that of Knossos, were ravaged, 
certain of their customs were kept up among the inhabitants of 
iyttos and Gortyna and other of the lesser towns rather than by 
e Knossians. Here we have much history in a nutshell. 
Conspicuous cities pay the toll of their splendour. Palaikastro is 
but a lesser town (zroA/yviov): there we may hope to find customs 
“surviving that had died down at Knossos. 

In the Hymn before us just such customs are enshrined. The 
actual stele was engraved in the second or third century after 

1 Reproduced with slight modifications from B.S.A. virt. p. 287, Fig. 1. 

2 Strabo, x. 475 mAaturdrn 6é Kara 76 wécov éorl, radu F évreiOey els orevwrepov 
0 mporépov cuumimrovaw icduov ai joves mepl ééjxovra oradlwv, Tov amo Murgas 
rhs Aurrlww els ‘lepdarurvay xal.7d AiBukdy wédaryos. 

3 Strabo, x. 481 Kaxwbedy rev rbdewy Kal udduoTa THs Kywoolwv, rev wodemeKwv * 
elvan 5€ Twa TeV vouluwy mapa Avrrios Kab Topruvios Kal addos Tiol mohixviors 
Aov 7} wap éxelvos. Clement, citing as his authority the Nostoi of Antikleides, 
that human sacrifice was offered by the Lyctii, a Cretan tribe (Book 11. 4). 

1—2 

/ 

CR. Pee ae 

“et x 

4 The Hymn of the Kouretes 

Christ?; that is clear from the very cursive character of the letters. 
But the poem inscribed is much earlier, probably about 300 B.c. 
We have oddly enough two copies on the back and face of the 
same stone. It seems to have presented serious difficulties to the 
stone-mason. The first copy whether from another stone or from 
a MS. was so faulty that it had to be redone. This looks as if 
matter and language were unfamiliar. For some reason which 
now escapes us, an old ritual hymn was revived. How far it was 
rewritten we cannot now say. Its material is, as will presently be 
shown, primaeval; we cannot date it, it is vouspov. 

The cave on Dikte where Zeus was born has been identified 
and thoroughly excavated*. It is a large double cavern about 
500 feet above the modern village of Psychro in the upland of 
Lasithi. Lyttos, of which the ruins still remain, lies on one spur 
of the north-western peak of Dikte (Lasithi); on the opposite spur 
is the Psychro cave. In the lowest stratum of the deposit in the 
cave is found Kamares ware, above that Mycenaean ware, and so 
on in regular sequence to the geometric period, i.e. about the 
eighth century B.c. After that, save in quite sporadic cases the 
votive offerings cease. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion 
that the cult in the cave came to anend. Dikte it is probable was 
superseded by Ida. In a treaty* between Lyttos and Olous, Zeus 
is sworn by, but his title is Buddtas ‘Zeus of Ida? not Acctatos. 
On his own mountain ‘ He of Dikte’ was superseded. 

Central Crete in her public documents swears by Zeus of Ida, 
but a little group of cities in the remote eastern district held to 
the earlier cult. Itanos, the northernmost of the towns on the 
east coast, was said to have been founded by one of the Kouretes. 
In an inscription‘ found on the modern site (Erimopolis) the 
citizens swear first of all by Zeus Diktaios and Hera and the gods 
in Dikte. At Eteokretan Praisos, Strabo', quoting Staphylos, 
says there was the sanctuary of Diktaean Zeus. Athenaeus® 

Asia Prof. Bosanquet, B.S.A. xv. 1908—1909, p. 347, and Prof. Gilbert Murray, 
p. : 

> For full description see Mr D. G. Hogarth, The Dictaean Cave, B.S.A. vi. 
p. 94 and especially p. 115. 

3 C.I.A. 1. 549, and see R. C. Bosanquet, op. cit. p. 349. 

* Blass (in Collitz-Bechtel, m1?.), 5058 [Td]de Buooay ro ” 
Atxratov kat “Hpav kal O[eolvs rods év Alxrau xal.... ; 

° Strabo, x. 475 ...dy (rv ’Hreoxpirav) elvae rodlxviov Il paoov Sxrov 76 rod Acxratov. 
Avs tepdv. For an inscription of Praisos in which ‘Diktaios’ may be with great 
probability restored see Prof. Bosanquet, op. cit. p. 350. 

° Athen. 1x. 375, quoting Agathocles, Mu@evovsw & Kpjirn yevéoOar rhv Ards 

Irdvmio ma[yres] Ala 

Fi] : Zeus of Dikte 5 

notes that the Praisians sacrifice to a sow, and he connects the 
custom with the ‘unspeakable sacrifice’ which took place on 
_ Dikte in commemoration of the fact that Zeus was suckled by 
a sow. Settlers from Hierapytna! take their oath by two Zeuses, 
Zeus Oratrios and Zeus Diktaios. 
>. It is clear then that though in classical days central Crete was 
_ dominated by the Zeus of Ida, Zeus of Dikte*, whose worship went 
_ on during the bronze and iron ages in the great cave at Lyttos, 
was a living power in the eastern and especially the north-eastern 
extremity of Crete. 

Zeus of Ida might and did dominate central Crete, but in the 
eastern and especially the north-eastern extremities Zeus of Dikte, 
Zeus of the Birth-cave, lived on in classical and even post-classical 
days. His was a name to swear by and at Palaikastro he had 
a temple and a precinct. It is this temple that has been recovered 
for us by the excavations of the British School® carried on in 
1902—1905. These excavations have abundantly shown that in 
the third Late-Minoan period (after 1500 B.c.) Palaikastro was the — 
seat of a ruling prince, after Knossos, Phaistos and Gournia had 
been destroyed. Not a stone of the temple was standing, but 
from architectural fragments found scattered on the site some 
‘notion of its size and its decoration can be gleaned. The temenos 
wall‘ can be traced for about thirty-six metres. The temple stood 
not as the Hellenic temples of Troy and Mycenae at the summit of 
the hill, but on a platform artificially levelled, about half-way 
down. The bulk of the votive offerings belong to the archaic 
period and show that the sanctuary was in full prosperity from the 
seventh to the fifth century B.c. Bronze shields of the same style 
and date as those found in the cave on Mt. Ida have also come to 

light. 

réxvwow éml ras Alkrns év 4 kal dmrdppnros ylverat Ovola...Ipatovor 6€ Kal lepa péfovow 
bi Kal atirn mporedihs avrots 7 Ovaola vevousorar. 

1 Blass, 5039 “Ouydw trav ‘Horiay cai Liiva’ Opdrp.ov kal Liiva Accratoy. 
2 Tt is even probable that the name of Dikte was transferred to one of the peaks, 
perhaps the cone of Modhi near Praisos and Palaikastro. Strabo expressly states 
_ that Dikte is only 100 stadia from Salmonion, the north-east promontory of Crete, 
and that it is not ‘as Aratus alleges’ near Ida, but distant from it 1000 stadia 
towards the east. Aratus is probably describing the old Dikte of the cave. Strabo 
must intend some more easterly peak. The conjecture is due to Prof, Bosanquet, 
op. cit. p. 351. 

3 See Excavations at Palaikastro, 1v. B.S.A. x1. p. 299, Pl. 1x.—xv. 

4 This temenos wall is mentioned in an inscription (Dittenberger, 11. 929, 1. 75) 
70 O€ iepdv Kal Tov meplBorov abTod idlors onmelous Kal meprocxodoumuacw Teptexduevor. 

. 
| 

oS, ae 

NY oa ee 

6 | The Hymn of the Kouretes [CH. 

The three main fragments of the inscribed Hymn were found 
a little to the south of the temple in a deep pocket of earth and 
stones which had been dug right down into the Minoan strata, 
probably in some recent search for building stones. The missing 
pieces were carefully searched for over the whole field of excavation, 
but they have either been destroyed or carried away as building 
material. They may still come to light built into churches or 
houses in the neighbourhood. More than half the stele is missing, 
but, thanks to the fact that there are two copies of the text back 
and front, not nearly half of the text. One of the fragments, that 
which contains the opening lines in the fair copy, is reproduced in 
Fig. 2. 

. ; : Ne 
ALC ied Sells Pe 
N €IE TTA N KPAT ECTANOIGBEBAKE C, \ 
AAIM ON WNIATW MENOCNKTANEC| 
ENIAY TONEPTIEKAIFEFAGIMOA NA | 
TANT Olk PEK OME NITA K TIQMEIZ AN 
SCONANIG Ok nce 
ONO os 3 
cae YEPKH = 1WMeric 

“REX A! PE MOIK PONE IEMA NKPA 

NWN 4rWMENOCA] KTANEC(EN I 
ENOATAPCE MAIAZ 

Fie. 2. Fragment of Hymn of the Kouretes. 

For what precise occasion our Hymn was written we shall 
probably never know, but the fact that it was found near a temple 
of Diktaean Zeus in a place remote from Dikte, the significant 
fact too of the double copy, show clearly that the Hymn is 
essentially a revival, and that we may expect to find in it fossilised 
ways of thinking. This will emerge more clearly in the sequel. 

We must first consider the general structure and character of the 
Hymn. The text? is as follows, 

1 As restored by Prof. Gilbert Murray. See B.S.A. xv. 1908—1909, p. 357. 

Restorep Text. 

DE a Ben 
Méyiote Kodpe, yaipé po, 
la 
Kpovte, mayxparés ydvovs, 
BéBaxes 
Satmovev aywpevos* 
Aixray és émavtov ép- 
me Kal yéyabe podra 
vi yéyaOe podra, 
Tay trot xpéxowev’ raxrict 
J | Sette > lal 
petEavtes ap’ avNotou, 
Kal oTavtes aeidopwev TEdov 
a an 
appt Bopov evepnn. 
"I, «7X. 
Yj a 
"Eva yap oé, Taid’ duBporor, 
> an 
aomd[npopot tpodpies] 
map ‘Péas XaBovres dda 
Uy ? Ie 
K[povovtes atréxpuar]. 
"Io, K.T.r. 

TRANSLATION. 

* 
bp 

“To, Kouros most Great, I give thee hail, Kronian, Lord of all 

‘ 

hat is wet and gleaming, thou art come at the head of thy .. . 

ice and song, 

x ‘That we make to thee with harps and pipes mingled together, ‘ 

d sing as we come to a stand at thy well-fenced altar. 

To, ete. 
For here the shielded Nurturers took thee, a child immortal, 

-REsTORED TEXT (continued). 

? : . Ta|s Karas >Ao(d)s a 
To, «7.2. 
[“Qpas 5é Bplvov Kathros --Vy Wiss 
kai Bpoto(d)s Aika xarhye tu-u tu-s 
25 [wavta 7 adypv duderje bs" tueu tue | 
d& PirorBos Eipyva. ei dita, “ato Ia : 
Ilo, K.T.X. . 
“A[pw Oope, Kés oraluvia, SSS eee 
Kai Oop’ evrrok’ é[s rroiuma, POS 
30 Kés Anila xaprav dpe, 2 A, See : : 
Kés Tedeo[pdpous ciwProvs.] 2 —-U 2-— i 
To, K.7.d. 2 fe) 
Oope Kes] wérnas dpar, Joe oe ae 
Kes TovTopopo(v)s vaas, toy te 
35 Oope Kés [veods mon]eéras, Si Gietads eet ee a 

ope Kes Oduuy K[arav]., 

TRANSLATION (continued). 

To, ete. 

And the Horai began to be fruitful year by year (2) an 

Dil to possess mankind, and all wild living things were hel % 
about by wealth-loving Peace. . eed 

To, ete. 

_ To us also leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy MES and leap - 
_ for fields of fruit, and for hives to bring increase. 

: To, ete. 

, Leap for our Cities, and leap for our sea-borne ships, and leay 
for our r young citizens and for goodly Themis.’ 

ai 
> Sa 
v7 

_3- 
oy 

Ritual Structure of the Hymn 9 

_ Our Hymn is obviously a Hymn of Invocation of a ritual type 
fairly well known’, though the instances extant are unfortunately 
rare. It opens with a refrain in ordinary lyric (di-iambic)? metre 
and this refrain is repeated before each of the (di-trochaic) stanzas, 
The structure of the Hymn is of importance and should be clearly 
realised. It falls into three parts. 

First we have in the refrain the actual invocation; the god 
_is addressed by his various titles and instructed how, where and 
when to come—he is invoked as ‘Kouros most Great, as 
_ ‘Kronian*; as ‘Lord of all’ that is wet and gleaming‘’—it is 

? Our earliest instance is the invocation of the Bull-god by the women of Elis; 
the Delphic Paean to Dithyrambos presents a later and closer analogy. See p. 205 
_ and also my Prolegomena, pp. 438 and 417. 

7 I call the metre of the refrain iambic because this seems simplest. But of 
course the difference between iambics and trochees is often only nominal. 
_Wilamowitz considers it more consonant with the rest of the hymn to scan 
 trochaically : 

i-, wéyiore Kodpe, eh ee ame) 
xatpé por, Kpovece, (sic lapis) ee 
mayKpatés ydvos, BéBaxes p61 ee = 
Oaiuovwv aywuevos, Sy See 
Alxray [és] éviavrov épie aie Ve oY ay 
Kal yéyabe podra, Ep Se ee 

‘This involves treating i~ ® as=a cretic, keeping the very questionable form Kpévece 
(Kpovetov=temple of Kronos in Pap. Grenf. 1. 11 is of course different): and 
deleting ¢s before évcavréy. Otherwise it has great advantages. (G.M.) 
3 The order of the words is, I think, conclusive against taking péyore Koipe 
_ Kpée together, ‘greatest Kronian youth,’ ‘greatest son of Kronos.’ (G.M.) 
4 Both reading and translation are doubtful. Wilamowitz and Mr A, B. Cook 
_ independently suggest ydvos. The stone has ydvous three times, which is strong 
evidence of what the stone-cutter meant to write, and is not really weakened by 
_ the fact that in one case the Y is crowded in between the O and 5, as if it had 
_ been omitted and then inserted; mayxparés ydvos, ‘Almighty Gleam’ or ‘ Radiance,’ 
_ would be simple and good: but rayxparés ydvovs seems to be quite good Greek for 
_ ‘Lord of all ydvos.’ Any compound of -xparjs would take the genitive, like 
 éykparys, axparys. Of. the gen. with raymjrwp, mavalrios, mdvdokos. 
But what is the meaning of ydvos? The Etymologicum Magnum has a gloss: 
ydvos: tOwp xdpua Pas Nlros avyy NevKdrys aumndwv. ‘ydvos: water joy light 
grease gleam candor fulgor.’ (I am reduced to Latin for the last two equivalents.) 
It starts with ‘water’ and it ends with ‘light’ or ‘gleam.’ I translate ‘wet and 
gleaming.’ 
It has been suggested by Mr Cook that perhaps the Kouros is only Lord of the 

Now it is quite true that ydvos never means simply water, without any ‘gleam,’ 
while instances can easily be found in which it means only ‘gleam’ or ‘glory’ 
with no sense of wetness, e.g. Aesch. Ag. 579 Ndg@upa—sdduols Eraccddevoeay apxatov 
ydvos. If the context required it we could certainly leave out the wetness. But 
_ (1) the wetness is normally present: it is kpyvaiov ydvos, ’Acwmrod ydvos, Borpvos 
or dpmédov ydvos, Eovb%s weMoons ydvos, ydvos ’Hpidavoto and the like; and (2) the 
context here seems to me not to reject but rather to welcome the connotation 
of moisture. It is not mere sunlight that the Kouros brings; it is fruitful Spring 
as a whole, with dew and showers and young sap as well as sunshine. T'dvos in its 
ordinary sense exactly hits off the required meaning; see pp. 173—175. (G.M.) 

. eret 

RO Oe e7 

Bright Sky, like a Sun God, and that ydvos is hoc sublime candens, The Aether. . 

10 The Hymn of the Kouretes se (0 

in these capacities he is wanted and expected. He is further 
bidden to come at the head of his Daimones, he is to come to 
Dikte and for the year, he is to come marching and rejoicing. So 
far for the god. 

Next by an easy transition we have a statement of the ritual 
performed. The god is adjured to rejoice in the dance and song 
which the worshippers make to him ‘ with harps and pipes mingled 
together, and which they sing as they come to a stand at his 
well-fenced altar.’ We have clearly a ritual dance accompanying 
a song. The reason, or rather the occasion, of this dance and song 
is next stated. We have in fact what would usually be called an 
‘aetiological’ myth. The worshippers dance round the altar of 
the Kouros because ‘here the shielded Nurturers took the Kouros, 
an immortal child from Rhea, and with noise of beating feet hid 
him away.’ 

Next follows a lamentable gap. When the text re-emerges 
we are midway in the third factor, the statement of the benefits 
which resulted from the events recounted in the myth, benefits 
which clearly it is expected will be renewed in the annual restate- 
ment and ritual re-enactment of this myth. The coming Seasons 
are to be fruitful, Diké is to possess mankind, the Kouros by 
. leaping in conjunction with his worshippers is to bring fertility 
for flocks and fields, prosperity to cities and sea-borne ships, and 
young citizens. 

The full gist of the Hymn will not appear till all three factors 
have been examined in detail, but already, at the first superficial 
glance, we note certain characteristics of a Hymn of Invocation - 
that may help to its understanding. The god invoked is not 
present, not there in a temple ready waiting to be worshipped ; 
he is bidden to come, and apparently his coming, and as we shall 
later see his very existence, depends on the ritual that invokes 
him. Moreover the words addressed to him are not, as we should 
expect and find in the ordinary worship addressed to an Olympian, 
a prayer, but an injunction, a command, ‘come,’ ‘leap. Strangest 
of all, the god it would seem performs the same ritual as his 
worshippers, and it is by performing that ritual that he is able to 
confer his blessings. He leaps when his attendant worshippers 
leap and the land is fertile. All this as will later appear lands 
us in a region rather of magic than religion. 

The Invocation 11 

It will now be necessary to examine in detail the three! factors 
_of the Hymn—the introductory refrain, the aetiological? myth, and < 
what for convenience we may call ‘the resultant blessings.’ The % 
gist of the ritual will be found in the second factor, the aetiological 5 
myth, but we begin with the first. 

1. THE INVvocaTION. 

Méyiote Kovpe, xaipé pou, 
Kpovee. ° 

__ The opening words are enough to startle the seven mytho- 
_ logical sleepers. From the circumstances of the finding of the 
Hymn in the temple of Diktaean Zeus and from the title Kronian,. 
it is clear that Zeus? the Father of gods and men, is addressed 
-as ‘Kouros most Great,’ greatest of grown-up youths. To our 
unaccustomed ears the title sounds strange and barely reverent. 
‘Father, still more ‘Mother, and even ‘Babe’ are to us holy 
words, but a full-grown youth has to us no connotation of 
_ sanctity. Moreover the words Full-grown Youth go ill with 
‘Kronian,’ a title of reverend association. How these two 
dissonant titles come to be unequally yoked together will appear 
_ in the sequel. 
When the Hymn was first discovered, the opening words as was 
natural at once arrested attention, but—so crusted and stiffened 
is the mind with traditional thinking—the full significance of 
the title could not at first be seen. Zeus the Father was firmly 
rooted in our minds, so it was natural at first to think, here we a 
have the young Zeus, Zeus the Divine Son. The Christian ; 
- religion has accustomed us to a god as Son. But it should at ; 
once be noted, Kouros is not vios, not son, nor is it even mais, 

child. Kouros connotes‘ no relationship to a parent, it is simply H 

1 The first two factors only will be examined at this point; the third factor, the 
‘resultant blessings and their relation to Themis,’ is reserved for chapter x. 
y 2 JT use the current term ‘aetiological’ provisionally, for convenience. Its 
inadequacy will be shown later, p. 329. : 
3 Tt should, however, be definitely noted at the outset, for the fact is of cardinal 
_ importance, that nowhere, neither in the refrain nor in the body of the poem, does 
the actual name Zeus appear. ; ; 
4 The word xodpos is of course often used as the rough equivalent of ras or vids, 
ef, Eur. El. 463 +6 Malas dyporfpe xovpy, but I suspect that in this and similar 
passages it covers an earlier and different relation. 

wo The Hymn of the Kouretes [ CH. 

young man just come to maturity. Hence it is that Kouros with 
a capital is in English practically untranslatable save by peri- 
phrasis. ‘Greatest of Youths’ is intolerably clumsy, ‘ Prince of 
Youths, which perhaps might serve, introduces an alien association. — 
Nothing is more stimulating to enquiry than an untranslatable 
word, since underlying it we may hope to find something new, 
unknown. We have no sacred Kouros now, we have got to 
rediscover what caused the sanctity of the Kouros'. We shall find 
it in the aetiological myth, but before we examine this, another 
statement in the Invocation yet remains and one scarcely less 
surprising. 

The Kouros, the young Zeus, is hailed as coming ‘at the head 
of his daimones’ (Saiovev dydpevos). This brings us to a 
curious and, for our investigation, cardinal point. Nowhere save 
in this Hymn do we hear of Zeus with attendant dadmones?. He 
stands always alone, aloof, approached with awe, utterly delimited 
from his worshippers. One god only, Dionysos, and he but a 
half-bred Olympian, is attended by daimones. We can scarcely 
picture Dionysos without his attendant thiasos, be they holy 
women, Maenads, be they the revel rout of Satyrs. We think of 
this thiasos of daimones as attendants, inferior persons, pale 
reflections, emanations as it were from the god himself. It seems 
appropriate that he should be surrounded by attendants (mpomd- 
ov): superior persons, high officials, always are. If this be all, how 
strange, how even unseemly is it that Zeus, the supreme god, 
Father of Gods and Men, should have no thiasos, no escort. The 
Hymn brings us face to face with the fact that Zeus once had a 
thiasos, once when he was a young man, a Kouros. When he 
grew up to be the Father, it seems, he lost his thiasos and has 
gone about unattended ever since. If we can once seize the 
meaning of this thiasos and its relation to the god we shall have 
gone far to understand the making of Greek theology. 

Some survivals of initiation-rites and of the Kouros idea will be considered in 
chapters rx. and x. 

* Mr Cook kindly reminds me that this rule has one singular and beautiful 
exception. In the Phaedrus of Plato (246 &) we read 6 pév dh wéyas tryeucw év ovpayg 
Levs...mp&ros mopeverac...7@ & &rerau oTparis Gedy Te Kal datmdvev... Belov Xopov.... The 

passage reads almost like a reminiscence of a ritual-procession similar to that headed 
by the greatest Kouros (dacudvev aydpevos). 

The Aetiological Myth “h3 

2. THe AgtTIoLoGicaAL Myru. 

The presence of the Kouros is confidently claimed and with it 
all the blessings to flocks and herds that attend his coming. The 
god will come, is come, to Dikte for the year and the produce of 
_ the year; and the reason is clearly stated. The worshippers ‘come 
_ toa stand’ at the altar and there recite and probably enact the 
_ myth. 
For here the shielded Nurturers took thee, a child immortal, 
and with noise of beating feet hid thee away. 
The text at this point is unfortunately defective’, but enough 
remains to make it clear, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the 
story told is the familiar myth of the birth of Zeus and his nurture 
_ by the Kouretes?? The myth is obviously ‘aetiological.’ The 
worshippers of the Kouros say they invoke the Kouros because of 
the myth (év@a yap). We may of course safely invert the order 
_ of things, the myth arose out of or rather together with the ritual, 
not the ritual out of the myth. 
The myth of the birth of Zeus and its ritual enactment is 
recounted by Strabo’ as follows. After mentioning the mysteries 
of Demeter and Dionysos, he says, ‘These things in general and 
the sacred ceremonies of Zeus in particular, are performed with 
_ orgiastic rites and with assistance of attendants (mpo76Xov) similar 
_ to the Satyrs that attend Dionysos. These attendants they call 
_ Kouretes; they are certain young men who perform armed move- 
ments accompanied by dancing. They allege as their reason the 
_ myth about the birth of Zeus, in which Kronos is introduced with 
his habit of swallowing his children immediately after birth, and 
Rhea trying to conceal her birth-pangs and to get the new-born 
child out of the way and doing her utmost to save it. With a 
view to this she enlists the help of the Kouretes. They surround 
the goddess and with drums and with the din of other instruments 

1 Prof. Murray writes, op. cit. p. 359 ‘**L. 14 domd[ngpédpou Kovpyres] Bosanquet.’ 
‘The sense seems certain but the metrical license - ——— for —~ — = is doubtful 
and does not occur elsewhere in the hymn. Hence I prefer Tpopijes : domld[erae | 
Kod ~ pyres] however would correspond neatly with petéavres dy’ | at ~ dotow.” 

af 2 To the similar ritual at Hiphesus as Prof. Murray points out (op. cit. p. 359) 
_ the Kouretes in like fashion ‘come to a stand’ round the altar. See Sirabe, 
_ p. 640, init. dpos, drov ordvras pact Tos Kodpynras Te Wopy Tav Saw exTAHEM.... For 
E particulars of this ritual see p. 246. 

3 x, 468 ...rpoarnodmev ot dor Tov mepl THs Tov Avs yeveoews, év @ Tov pev Kpdvov 
elodyovow elBva wévov Kkaramlvew Ta TéKVG K.T.d. 

d Wa 

\/ 
Wud: 

14 The Hymn of the Kouretes [ OH. 

try to strike terror into Kronos and to escape notice whilst trying 
to filch away the child. The child is then given over to them to 
be reared with the same care by which it was rescued.’ 

A little earlier in his discussion of the functions of the Kouretes 
he says! they are ‘ davmones or attendants (7po7roAoz) on the gods, 
similar to Satyroi, Seilenoi, Bacchoi and Tityroi, and this is 
expressly stated by those who hand down the tradition of Cretan 
and Phrygian ceremonies, these being involved with certain sacred 
rites, some of them mystical, others relating to the child-nurture 
of Zeus and the orgiastic rites of the Mother of the Gods in 
Phrygia and in the region about the Trojan Ida.’ 

Strabo thought that the child reared and protected by the 
Kouretes was Zeus; but our ritual Hymn knows him only as 
Kouros. It need not therefore surprise us that the Kouros 
appears elsewhere with other names. He is sometimes Dionysos, 
sometimes Zagreus. 

The mysteries of Dionysos (Zagreus) are, says Clement of 
Alexandria, ‘utterly inhuman. He then proceeds to recount 
them. Utterly inhuman they are as Clement understood or 
rather utterly misunderstood them: very human indeed, social and 
civilising through and through if my interpretation be correct, so 
human and social that a very considerable portion of humanity 
thinks it well to practise analogous rites to-day. 

Let Clement? tell his story: 

‘The mysteries of Dionysos are wholly inhuman, for while he 
was still a child and the Kouretes were dancing round him their 
armed dance the Titans came stealthily upon him and lured him 
with childish toys and tore him limb from limb while he was yet 
a babe. Thus does the Thracian Orpheus, the poet of the Rite 
recount. 

The cones, the rhombos and the limb-bending toys, 
And the fair gold apples of the Hesperides.’ 

1 x. 466 ...rovodrous yép Twas Saluovas 4 Tpotdrous Gedv rods Kouphras pacly of 
mapadovres TH Kpntixd kat rd, Bptyia, iepoupylats Tisw éwmemheypéva Tals mev wvorexats 
Tats 0 dddaus mepl Te Thy Too Avds madorpodlay rh év Kpyryn kal rovs ris unrpds rey 
ety bpyracuovs év ry Ppvyla Kal rots wept rhy”Lonv ri Tparki Toros. 

2 Abel, Orphica, 196 ra yap Avovricou wvorhpia TéXeov amdvOpwra, dv eloére ratda 
ovra, voy KuwHoer meprxopevivTwy Koupirwy, O0Aw O€ brodivTwv Tirdvwr, amarnoavres 
radapderw abvpuaciw, ovroc 6H of Turdves diéoracav, ere vymiaxov dvTa, ws 6 Tis 
TereTHS months "Oppevs dnow 6 Opdxios. 

kOvos kal pouBos kal malyia kauwmrectyua 
wad Te xpioea Kadd map’ “Eorepliowy Neyuvpeovav. 

ia tied diva ickeat igi Iie Mii aad acest MA rec 
‘ cae ae, erie @) eg ate ar “ - hme 
reer : Ft hie cae (eau ashe rink, 

es The Mysteries of Zagreus 

Other authorities add other details. The wicked Titans who 
le the child away were painted over with white clay, gypsum! 
‘ravos). Moreover, and this is of cardinal importance, there is 
2 sequel to the story. After the child has been made away with 
(apavicpcs), swallowed by his father (rexvodayia) or torn to 
pieces (dtac7rapaypcs), he comes back to life again: there is a 
coming to life again (avaBiwous), a resurrection (mahuyyevecia)’, 
how and when we are not told. Some said? the child’s heart was 
saved and then put back into a figure made of gypsum. In some 

ersions‘ the wicked giants or white-clay-men are struck® with 
lightning by Zeus and burnt to ashes and from these ashes sprang 
the human race. 
_ The cardinal elements of the story whether told of the infant 
Zeus, Dionysos, Zagreus or the Kouros are: 

(1) A child is taken from his mother and carefully tended by 
men called Kouretes. To guard him they dance over him an 
armed dance (aa:dotpodgia). 
(2) The child is hidden, made away with, killed, dismembered 
by men sometimes called Titans, ‘white-clay-men’ (apavopos, 
omapay.os). 

_ (3) The child reappears, is brought to life again. Sometimes 
this is effected by the white-clay-men, sometimes the child 

“reappears as a white-clay-man himself, his heart being put into 

4 

a figure of gypsum (dvaBiwous, Taduyyevecia). 

Of these elements only the first, the Child-Nurture, appears in 
‘the Hymn. This need not surprise us. Literature, even hieratic 
literature, tends to expurgate savage material, the death and 

1 Harpocrat. s.v. dmoudrrwv: ws dpa of Trrdves rov Acdvucoy éhuujnvavto yoym 
 KaTamNacdmevoe. 

2 Plut. De Is. et Os. xxxv. and De Hi ap. Delph. 1x. Acdvucov 6é kat Zarypéa Kal 
Nuxré&coy kal “Iloodalrny abrov dvoudgovcr, Kal pOopds Twas Kal apavicmots, Kal Tas 
dvaBuboeas Kal madvyyeveotas, olxeta Tats elpnucvacs peraBorats alviypara kal uvdedpmara 
Tapatvouct. : ; 

2 Firmicus Mat. De Err. Prof. Relig. 6 ...tmaginem eius ex gypso plastico opere 
perfecit et cor pueri, ex quo facinus fuerat sorore deferente detectum, in ea parte 
‘plastae conlocat, qua pectoris fuerant lineamenta formata. Possibly the imago 
ay have been like the malyvia kawmeotywa and similar in character to the jointed 
racotta dolls with movable arms and legs, found in Greek tombs. 

4 The sources for all these details are collected in Abel’s Orphica, pp. 224 ff. and 
Lobeck’s Aglaophamus, pp. 553 ff. The Zagreus story is told in minute detail in 
the Dionysiaka of Nonnus, vi. 155 ff. , 

«> ‘The thunder-element in the story and the myth of the swallowing of the 
_ thunder-stone by Kronos will be discussed in chapter 111. 

16 The Hymn of the Kouretes [ oH. 

resurrection ritual was well enough as a mystery, but in the third 
century A.D. not for publication even in a ritual Hymn. 

In the study of Greek religion it is all important that the 
clear distinction should be realized between the comparatively 
permanent element of the ritual and the shifting manifold 
character of the myth. In the case before us we have a uniform 
ritual, the elements of which we have disentangled—the armed 
dance over the child, the mimic death and rebirth; but the myth 
shifts; it is told variously of Zagreus, Dionysos, Zeus, and there is 
every variety of detail as to how the child is mimetically killed 
and how the resurrection is effected. To understand the religious 
intent of the whole complex it is all important to seize on the 
permanent ritual factors. 

This does not, however, imply; as is sometimes supposed, 
that ritual is prior to myth; they probably arose together. 
Ritual is the utterance of an emotion, a thing felt, in action, myth 

in words or thoughts. They arise part passu. The myth is not — 

at first aetiological, it does not arise to give a reason; it is repre- 
sentative, another form of utterance, of expression. When the 
emotion that started the ritual has died down and the ritual 
though hallowed by tradition seems unmeaning, a reason is sought 
in the myth and it is regarded as aetiological’. 

We have now to ask what is the meaning of this extraordinary 
ritual. Why is a child or young man subjected to mimic rites of 
death and resurrection ? 

The orthodox explanation is that the child is a sort of vege- 
tation spirit or corn-baby, torn to pieces in winter, revived in 
spring. I do not. deny that in the myth there is an element of 
Corn- or rather Year-baby, but the explanation cannot be regarded 
as satisfactory, as it fails to explain the Kouretes, and the Titans 
disguised with white clay. 

I offer a simpler and I think more complete explanation. 
Every single element, however seemingly preposterous, in both the 
ritual and myth of Zagreus can be explained I believe by the 
analogy of primitive rites of tribal initiation. 

1 This point will become clearer when (in chapter 1.) the psychology of the 

dpwpevov, the ritual act, is examined. The general relation of myth to ritual is 
reserved for chapter vmt. 

4 

ee This had long suspected because of the white-clay-men. 
These I have already fully discussed elsewhere! and I need now 
only briefly resume what is necessary for the immediate argument. 
The word Titanes (white-clay-men) comes of course from tirdvos, 
white earth or clay, gypsum. The Titanes, the white-clay-men, 
Brere later, regardless of quantity, mythologized into Titanes, 
Titans, giants. Harpocration?, explaining the word azropuatton, 
says that the Titans, when they tore Dionysos to pieces, were 
covered with a coat of gypsum in order that they might not be 
recognized. Later, people when they were initiated went on 
_ doing the same thing and for the same reason that most people 
do most things nowadays, because ‘it was the thing to do’ 
Nonnus? also says that the Titans were ‘whitened with mystic 
gypsum.’ 

A coat of white paint was a means of making yourself up as a 
_ bogey or ghost; by disguising your real character as a common 
human man you reinforced your normal personality. A coat of 
_ white or sometimes black paint is the frequent disguise of savages 
to-day when in ceremonies of initiation for the edification of their 
_ juniors they counterfeit their tribal ancestors. 

< 

as bogies to perform initiation rites. It is only later when their 
‘meaning is forgotten that they are explained as Titanes, mytho- 
logical giants. Thus much was clear to me years ago: Le. that 
under the myth of Zagreus lay some form of initiation rite. What 
I then did not see, though my blindness seems to me now almost 
incredible, was the significance of the child and the toys* and 
above all why the child was first killed and then brought back 
to life. 

Again light came to me unexpectedly from a paper kindly sent 

1 Prolegomena, p. 492. 
2 éxupovmevoc Tau vGohoyovmeva map’ éviows, ws dpa ol Turaves tov Ardyucov 
— duuhvavro yOWw KaramAacdpevor ert TH wh ywpimor yeverOar, Toro bev ovv TO 
COvos éxduretv, TH@ 5é torepov KatamAdTTecOar vouluov xapu. 

3 Nonn. Dionys. xxvit. 228 

éNevkalvovto dé yuw 

puoTiTodw. ; 
Le 4 A child’s ‘toys’ in antiquity were apt to be much more than mere playthings. 
‘They were charms inductive of good, prophylactic against evil, influences. Thus 
-erepundia, from crepere ‘to rattle,’ served to amuse the child but also to protect 
him. For this whole subject see R. Wiinsch, Charms and Amulets, in Hastings’ 
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. 

H. 2 

The Titans then, the white-clay-men, are real men dressed up 

ei 

ee re 

jf 

18 The Hymn of the Kouretes (cH. 

to me by Dr Frazer! containing an account of certain initiation 
ceremonies among the Wiradthuri tribe of New South Wales. 
This account must be briefly resumed: 

‘At a certain stage in the initiation ceremonies of these tribes 
the women and children huddled together and were securely 
covered up with blankets and bushes. Then a number of men 
came from the sacred ground where the initiation ceremonies were 
performed. Some of them swung bull-roarers, and some of them 
took up lighted sticks from a fire, and threw them over the women 
and children “to make them believe that Dhuramoolan had tried 
to burn them.” At a later period of the ceremonies the boys were 
similarly covered up with blankets, a large fire was kindled near 
them, and when the roaring of the wood and the crackling of the 
flames became audible, several old men began to swing bull- 
roarers, and the lads were told that Dhuramoolan was about to 
burn them. ‘These performances were explained by a legend that 
Dhuramoolan, a powerful being, whose voice sounded like the 
rumbling of distant thunder, had been charged by a still more 
powerful being called Baiamai, with the duty of taking the boys 
away into the bush and instructing them in all the laws, traditions, 
and customs of the community. So Dhuramoolan pretended that 
he always killed the boys, cut them up, and burnt them to ashes, 
after which he moulded the ashes into human shape, and restored 
them to life as new beings.’ 

With the Cretan ritual in our minds it is clear that the 
Wiradthuri rites present more than an analogy; mutato nomine 
the account might have been written of Zagreus. 

I have chosen the account of the Wiradthuri out of countless 
other instances, because in it we have the definite statement that 
the boys were burnt to ashes and Zagreus-like remodelied again in 
human shape. But everywhere, in Africa, in America, in Australia, 
in the South Pacific Islands, we come upon what is practically the 
same sequence of ceremonies. When a boy is initiated, that is 
when he passes from childhood to adolescence, this pantomime, 
this terrifying (€«7An£vs), this pretended killing of the child, this 

* On some Ceremonies of the Central Australian Tribes, Melbourne, 1901. 

Dr Frazer’s authority is R. H. Matthews, T'he Burbung of the Wiradthuri Tribes, 
Journal of Anthropological Institute, xxv. (1896), pp. 297 f., 308, 311. 

e Pye ee Pars er 
: por ee og San eg aQvy ian 
‘ Hoel ee yy pa “ 
lc a ae alle ii om 

\ ei ‘ Eiancre: Initiations 19 

ing him with clay and bringing him back to life again as 
4 young man, is everywhere enacted. Till the boy has died and 
ns 

come to life again, till he has utterly ‘put away childish things’ 
he cannot be a full member of the tribe, he may not know the 
tribal secrets or dance the tribal dances, he may not handle 
bull-roarers, he cannot perform any of the functions of the full- 
grown man. 

; At and through his initiation the boy is brought into close 
communion with his tribal ancestors: he becomes socialized, part 
of the body politic. Henceforth he belongs to something bigger, 

is part of the stream of the totemic life, one with the generations 
before and yet to come. 

So vital, so crucial is the change that the savage exhausts his 
imagination and his ingenuity in his emphasis of death and new 
birth. It is not enough to be killed, you must be torn to pieces 
burnt to ashes. Above all you must utterly forget your past 
lite The precautions taken to secure this completeness of death 
and resurrection and consequent oblivion are sometimes disgusting 
enough. Murder is carefully counterfeited with the help of 
oe of blood and the like. Sometimes the details are 
amusing: not only does the boy forget his own name that in this 
his social baptism he may receive a new one, but he does not 
know his own mother, he has forgotten how to speak and can only 
ammer, he cannot even swallow, he has to be artificially fed. 
He cannot come in straight at the door but must stumble in 
backwards. If he forgets and stupidly recognizes his mother or 
ts his food like a Christian he is taken back and ‘ huskinawed’ 
again’, All this is of course much more than mere pretence, it is 
a method of powerful suggestion. 

The ritual, then, commemorated and perhaps in part enacted in 
r Hymn is the ritual of tribal Initiation. The Kouretes are 
ung Men who have been initiated themselves and will initiate 
others, will instruct them in tribal duties and tribal dances, will 

1 For details as to Death and Resurrection elements in Initiation Ceremonies see 
A. Schurtz, Altersklassen wnd Miinnerbiinde, 1902; H. Webster, Primitive Secret 

Eeicties, 1908 ; H. Hubert and M. Mauss, Mélanges @ Histoire des Religions, 1909, 
144 ff. ; A. van Gennep, Les Rites de Passage, 1909, pp. 93 ff.; L. Lévy-Bruhl, 
onctions mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures, 1910, pp. 409 ff. ; and, especially, 
G. Frazer, Golden Bough”, ut. pp. 423 ff. and Totemism and EHxogamy, iv. p. 228. 

2—2 

Bical a) n . 

more potent, more lasting, than his own individual existence: he | 

re | alli oe om - 
ETT 8 rane altel ee < 
’ . 

20 The Hymn of the Kouretes (on. 
steal them away from their mothers, conceal them, make away 
with them by some pretended death and finally bring them back 
as new-born, grown youths, full members of their tribe. The word 
Koures is simply a specialized derivative of Kouros, as yupvys of 
yupvos, and perhaps yons of ydos. It is, like Kouros, a word 
impossible to translate, because we have lost the social condition 
expressed. Young Men (Kouroz) we know, but Initiated Young 
Men (Kouretes) are gone for ever. 

The Kouretes are young men full-grown, but it will have been 
already noted that in the Hymn we have a child, and in the 
Zagreus myth a babe’. This brings us to an important point. It 
is not only the passage from childhood to adolescence that among 
savages is marked by rites of initiation, of death and resurrection. 
As Monsieur van Gennep? has well shown in his suggestive book, 
the ceremonies that accompany each successive stage of life, 
ceremonies, 1e. of birth, of marriage, of ordination as a medicine- 
man, and finally of death, are, no less than the ceremonies of 
adolescence, one and all Rites de Passage, ceremonies of transition, 
of going out from the old and going in to the new’. 

Myths, then, which embody the hiding, slaying and bringing to 
life again of a child or young man, may reflect almost any form of 
initiation rite. It is not always possible to distinguish very clearly, 
Later* we shall see that the Kouretes had to do with a rite of the 
initiation of a sort of medicine-man, a rite nearer akin to our 
Ordination than to either Baptism or Confirmation. When the 
Greeks lost touch with the tribal customs which involved the rite 
of adolescence, we may suspect that they invented or at least 
emphasized Infant-Initiation. Latér theologians entirely forgot 
the Kouros, and even the infant Zeus presented somewhat of a 
difficulty if not a scandal. A babe is rather the attribute of the 

1 Thus Nonnus, Dionysiaka, v1. 179 
ddNoTe Torkiuoppov env Bpépos, &AdorE Kovpm 
eikeXos olatpnbévtr, 
whereas Lucretius, 1. 635 
Dictaeos referunt Curetas... 
Cum pueri circum puerum. 
2 Les Rites de Passage, Paris, 1909. 
° For the psychology of initiation rites see Mr Marett’s very interesting analysis 

in The Birth of Humility, Inaugural Lecture before the University of Oxford, 1910. 
4 Chapter 1. 

— Zar Oi 5 oe 

divine Mother than the divine Father, and in patriarchal times, 
once the cult of the Mother was overshadowed, the infant Zeus 
needed apology. He was consigned to ‘local legend’ and was 
held to be due to ‘contaminatio with the child Dionysos.’ 

A clear and striking instance of a Second Birth in early child- 
hood is reported by Mr and Mrs Routledge! as practised among 
the Akikuyu of British East Africa. It is known as ‘To be Born 
Again’ or ‘To be Born of a Goat, and takes place when the boy is 
about ten years old or even younger if the father can afford the 
necessary goat for sacrifice. The goat is killed, a piece of skin 
cut in a circle and passed over one shoulder of the candidate and 
under the other arm. No men are allowed inside the hut, but 
women are present. The mother sits on a hide on the floor with 
he boy between her knees, the goat’s gut is passed round the 
woman and brought in front of the boy. The woman groans as in 
labour, another woman cuts the gut, and the boy imitates the 
ery of a new-born infant, the women present all applaud and 
afterwards the assistant and the mother wash the boy. That 
‘night the boy sleeps in the same hut as the mother. On the 
second day the boy stays with his mother in the homestead. On 
the third day food is brought, and the relatives and friends come 
to a feast in the evening, but no native beer is drunk. After all 
is over the hut is swept out. The boy again sleeps in the mother’s 
hut, and that night the father sleeps in the hut also.’ 

The Akiktyu rite presents one feature of great interest. The 
boy is ‘Born of a Goat.’ It is nowhere stated that he is called 
a Goat, but the child of a goat must surely in some sense have 
been regarded as a Kid. We are irresistibly reminded of the 
-Kid-Dionysos (Eriphios)?, of the Horned Child* and of the Baby 
Minotaur. The notion lingers on in the beautiful thought that 
_ at Baptism a child becomes one of the lambs of Christ the Lamb 
: ‘of God. At present among the Akikfyu the boy who is ‘ Born 

1 With a-Prehistoric Race, 1910, p. 151. Neither Mr nor Mrs Routledge could 
obtain permission actually to witness the rite. The custom is one of the oldest 
‘among the Akikuyu customs and universal among them, There is great reluctance 
to talk of the ceremony, and the knowledge of it was only obtained from natives 
who had broken with their own traditions and come under the influence of 
Christianity. Till a boy has been born again he cannot assist at the burial rites 
of his father, He is not part of theclan. . 

2 Hesych. s.v. 3 See p. 130. 

SR Second Birth Oi 

ce 
a. 
A 
J 

sas | 

Pe ee ee 

= 

Ce ee Se Ee ae 

OED S SNES OO SL ne a ee 

22 The Hymn of the Kouretes [CH. 

of a Goat’ is regarded as fit to tend goats, but behind a ceremony 
so emphatic and so expensive must, it would seem, lie some 
more serious significance}. 

The Akiktyu rite contains no mimic death. Death indeed 
seems scarcely an integral part of initiation, it is only a prepara- 
tion for, an emphasis of, the new Life. But an element like this 
of a striking and dramatic nature tends in myth sometimes to 
swamp the really integral factor. We hear more for example of 
the sufferings (7ra@n) of Dionysos than of his rebirth; the death 
of the child in such myths as those of Atreus and Thyestes, 
Demeter and Demophon? obscures the element of Resurrection. 
But there can be little doubt that originally the New Birth and 
Resurrection lay behind. Lucian‘ in his account of the strange 
solecisms committed by dancers says that he remembers how a 
man who was supposed to be ‘dancing the Birth of Zeus and the 
Child-Eating of Kronos actually danced by mistake the calamities 
of Thyestes, deceived by their similarity. The mistake is at least 
highly suggestive ; the ritual dance of the two myths must have 
been almost identical. 

- 

Anthropologists have been sometimes blamed®, and perhaps 
with justice, for the fiendish glee with which, as though they were 
Christian Fathers, they seize on barbarous survivals in Greek 
religion or literature. Zagreus dismembered by the Titans, the 
cannibal feasts of Thyestes and Lycaon, Demeter burning 
Demophon—these and a host of other stories are ‘survivals of 
human sacrifice.’ It is only a little anthropology that is a 
dangerous thing. Men will kill and eat each other and especially 
their enemies for many and diverse reasons, but actual Human 
Gift-Sacrifice, and especially child-sacrifice, is rare among savages, 
Many a cannibal is a kind and good father; adorned with a 

? For theriomorphs and the inclusion of the animal in the tribe see p. 125 ff. 

? The Orphic Hymn, xxxvu. 14, misunderstanding inverts the sequence. The 
Kouretes are ...rpopées re kal afr ONETHpES. 

® Mr W. R. Halliday has shown clearly that the story of Demeter passing 
ee through the fire is the survival of an infant initiation-rite. See p. 34, 
note 2. 

4 de Salt. 80 ras yap yovds épxotjmuevds ris Kal Thy Tod Kpévov rexvogaylay rapwpxetro 
kal Tas Ovéorou cuupopas 7H buolw mapnyuevos. ; : 

> See Prof. Murray, Olympian Houses in Albany Review, 1907, p. 205. 

° A like explanation is often given of the rites of the Lupercalia, but see 

Warde-Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 316 ‘The youths were never actually killed but 
were the figures in a kind of acted parable.’ 

; ra ‘ Gy eile dae ee ry Med 
“ sg oe wie a _o. ey etna + 

ae 

— :~C~*S Phe Kouretes as Guardians 

necklace of skulls he will sit playing with the child on his knee, 
But, rare though Human Sacrifice is, and rarer still its survivals, 

_ the mock slaying of a boy in initiation rites is so common as to be 
almost universal, and in a large number of instances it is the 
memory of this mock slaying, misunderstood, that survives. By 
way of placation, of palinode, we offer to the humanist the mysteries * 
of Zagreus made harmless, humanized by anthropology. Dhura- 
moolan ‘ pretended that he killed the boys.’ 

Primarily then the Kouretes are, in their capacity of Initiators, 
Child-Nurturers, Guardians (Ilasdorpodou, Pvdraxes). Strabo? is 
on this point emphatic. ‘In the Cretan discourses,’ he says, ‘the 
_ Kouretes are called the nurses and guardians of Zeus, and again? 

Fie. 3. 

in trying to explain the word Kouretes he says, ‘they were so 
ealled either because they were young and boys, or because of 
their rearing of Zeus.’ They earned this title, he adds, through 
being ‘as it were Satyrs attendant on Zeus...’ In the light of this 
initiation nurture the other functions of the Kouretes fall easily — E 
and naturally into place. : 
~The Kouretes are armed and orgiastic dancers (opxnoThpes 
domSnpépor). Strabo* says they are certain youths who execute 

1 x, 472 év dé rots Kpnrixots Adyous of Kouphres Avos poets hé-yovrau Kal plNaKes. 
2 x, 468 io” of Koupfres Aroe did 7d véou ai Kbpou dvres Umoupyeiv 9 dia TO Koupo- 
— rpopetv tov Aia (Aéyerar yap duorépws) ravens HEubsOnoav THs mpoonyopias, oiovel 
: Bdrupol tives évtes mept Tov Ala. 

3 op. cit. 

* oD ‘ Lae 

24 The Hymn of the Kouretes [ou. 

movements in armour; it is especially as inspired dancers that 
they fulfil their function as ministers in sacred rites. ‘They 
inspire terror by armed dances accompanied by noise and hubbub 
of timbrels and clashing arms and also by the sound of the flute 
and shouting. Nursing young children or even drilling young 
boys are functions that seem to us scarcely congruous with the 
dancing of armed dances. On the terracotta relief! in Fig. 3 we 
see the Kouretes armed with shields and short spears dancing over 
the infant Zeus, and if we try to realize the scene at all it seems 
to us absurd, calculated rather to scare the child to death than 
to defend him. But the Kouretes as Initiators continue their 
incongruous functions. Pantomimic dancing is of the essence of 
each and every mystery function. To disclose the mysteries is as 
Lucian’ puts it ‘to dance out the mysteries.’ Instruction among 
savage peoples is always imparted in more or less mimetic dances’. 
At initiation you learn certain dances which confer on you definite 
social status. When a man is too old to dance, he hands over his 
dance to another and a younger, and he then among some tribes 
ceases to exist socially. His funeral when he dies is celebrated 
with scanty and perfunctory rites; having lost his dance he is 
a negligible social unit‘. 

The dances taught to boys at initiation are frequently if not 
always armed dances. These are not necessarily warlike. The 
accoutrement of spear and shield was in part decorative, in part a 
provision for making the necessary hubbub. What a Koures in 
ancient days must have looked like may be gathered from Fig. 4°, 
a photograph taken of the peculiar dance with song (worn) of 
the neophytes among the Akiktyu prior to their initiation as 
men. Conspicuous in their dancing gear are the great ceremonial 
dancing shields and the long staves. They are painted in zigzag 
with white paint, and wear tails and skins of monkey and wild 
cat. To be allowed to dance it is essential that a boy be ‘ painted 

* Annali d. Inst. xu. (1840), Tav. d’ agg. K. I am uncertain where the relief 
now is. EH. Braun, who publishes it, says it passed from the Palazzo Colonna to 
royal castle of Aglié near Turin. 

2 Pisce. 33 qv Tia Kal Tov Meuunuevay dav eEayopevovra Toiv Oeotv r& améppynta Kai 
eLopxovpevoy dyavakTihow.... 

3 Webster, op. cit. pp. 50, 51. : 

aR; Hertz, Contribution &@ une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort. 
Année Sociologique, x. 1905-6. 

5 W.S. and K. Routledge, With a Prehistoric People, 1910, Pl. cvim. R 
duced by kind permission of Mr and Mrs Routledge. "gg 

1] The Kouretes as daimones 25 

with a particular pattern’ of divine institution, ‘he must wear a 
particular dress and carry certain articles,’ 

The ancient Kouretes were not merely young men; they were 
half divine, Daimones. The Kouros in the Hymn is bidden to 
come at the head of his Daimones (Satudvev ayopevos). As 
daimones the Kouretes resembled, Strabo? says, Satyrs, Seilenoi, 
Bacchoi, Tityroi. Divine but not quite gods, they are as we shall 

Fic. 4. 

presently see the stuff of which ancient gods are made. Hesiod’, 
and Hesiod only, calls them actually gods. He tells of 

...the worthless idle race of Satyrs 
And the gods, Kouretes, lovers of sport and dancing. 

1 op, cit. p. 156. ; . eee 

2x. AGG Zouxe 5& waAoV TH Tepl Latvpwv Kal Zerdjvwy kal Baxxwv cat tirvpay 
oyy. 

3 Fyrg. CXXIx. of a 
kal yévos ovriavaw Larvpuv Kal apnxavoepywv 
Kovupfres te Oeol, piromalyuoves OpXNTTHpES- 

a Fee ee ly <a 2 Irens. eee: : 

26 The Hymn of the Kouretes [ CH. 

In the light of initiation ceremonies we understand why the 
Kouretes and Korybantes though they are real live youths are 
yet regarded as Saiuoves, as half divine, as possessed (év@eos), 
enthusiastic, ecstatic, and why their ceremonies are characterized 
by Strabo! as orgiastic. The precise meaning of orgies will 
concern us later; for the present it is enough to note that in most 
savage mysteries it is a main part of the duty of initiators to 
impersonate gods or demons. The initiators dress up as the 
ancestral ghosts of the tribe, sometimes even wearing the actual 
skulls? of their ancestors, and in this disguise dance round the 
catechumens and terrify them half out of their senses. It is only 
when fully initiated that the boys learn that these terrific figures 
are not spirits at all but just their living uncles and cousins®. The 
secret is never imparted to women and children. To do so would 
be death. 

As daipoves whether wholly or half divine the Kouretes have 
all manner of magical capacities. These capacities are by Strabo 
rather implied than expressly stated and are especially noticeable 
in their Phrygian equivalents, Korybantes. The Korybantes bind 
and release men from spells, they induce madness and heal it. 
The chorus asks‘ the love-sick Phaedra 

Is this some Spirit, O child of man? 

Doth Hecat hold thee perchance, or Pan? 

Doth She of the Mountains work her ban, 
Or the dread Corybantes bind thee? 

The Kouretes are also, as all primitive magicians are, seers 
(udvrevs). When Minos in Crete lost his son Glaukos he sent for — 
the Kouretes to discover where the child was hidden®. Closely 
akin to this magical aspect is the fact that they are metal-workers®. 
Among primitive people metallurgy is an uncanny craft, and the 
smith is half medicine man. The metal-working side of these 

1 x. 465 ds 6¢ rdw elmeiy kal card 7d whéov évOovararriKods Tivas Kal BaxxiKous. 
2 H. Schurtz, Altersklassen und Miinnerbiinde, 1902, p. 88. For the functions 
of ancestral ghosts see chapter 273. 
3 H. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, pp. 101 and 187. 
4 Hur. Hip. 141 
7 ob Y évOeos, & Kovpa, 
eir’ éx Ilavés 0’ ‘Exdras 
7 ceyvav KopuBdvrwy go- 
TGs ]) matpos dpelas ; 
> Apollod, 3. 2. 2. Se 
° Soph. ap. Strabo, x. 473 says of the Idaean Daktyls ot cldnpdv re étedpov Kal 
elpyacavto mp@ro Kat dANa mo\Ad Tov mpos Tov Bloy xpyoluwr. 

NR EDR eet). > 

i 
cod 

aa, 

rey 

figures comes out best in the kindred Daktyls and Telchines. 

t,o! hiss 

The Kouretes as Culture-Heroes 27 

A step more and the magicians become Culture-Heroes, inventors 
of all the arts of life, house-building, bee-keeping, shield-making 
and the like. As culture-heroes they attend the Kouros in the 
Hymn. This development of the daimon and the culture-hero will 
be discussed later. 

Just such functions are performed to-day among primitive 
peoples by the Initiated Young Man. If the investigations of 

recent anthropologists? are correct, it is not so much about the 
family and the domestic hearth that the beginnings of the arts | 
cluster, as about the institution known as the Man’s House? | 

Here, unencumbered by woman, man practises and develops his 
diverse crafts, makes his weapons, his boats, his sacred images, 
his dancing masks. Even after marriage when he counts as an 
elderly man he returns to the Man’s House‘ to keep in touch with 

civilization and the outside world. He is a Culture-Hero in the 
_ making. 

To resume the results of our enquiry. 
The worshippers in the Hymn invoke a Kouros who is obviously 

_ but a reflection or impersonation of the body of Kouretes. They 
‘allege as their reason’ an aetiological myth. This myth on 

examination turns out to be but the mythical representation of a 
rite of mimic death and resurrection practised at a ceremony of 
initiation. Now the Kouros and the Kouretes® are figures that 
belong to cultus; they are what would in common parlance be 

1 Diod. Sic. v. 64. Idaean Daktyls are described as yénres who superintend 
émmodas kal TedeTas Kal wvorhpra. They invent fire and the use of iron. The magical 
functions of the Kouretes and their aspect as medicine-men will be discussed in 
chapter 111. 

2 See especially H. Schurtz, Altersklassen und Ménnerbiinde, p. 48. 

3° H. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, ch.1. The ancient Kouretes seem to 
have had a sort of Man’s House at Messene; it was a megaron not a temple. 
See Pausanias, tv. 31. 7 Koupyrwy péyapov 0a fwa Ta ravTa Opotws Kabaylfover. 

4 That institutions analogous to those of the Man’s House among savages lived 
on in Crete we have abundant evidence in Strabo’s account (x. 483) of Cretan 
institutions. The AyéAa with their dpyovres, the cvaciria, the dvdpeia, clearly belong 
to the same social morphology as the Mannerhaus, It is probable that the aprayy 
and the custom dmroxpimrew rov watda (Strabo, 483) is a misunderstanding and in 
part a corruption of primitive initiation ceremonies. For a discussion of some 
part of these Cretan customs and their religious origin see Dr E. Bethe, Die dorische 
Knabenliebe, ihre Hthik und ihre Idee in Rhein. Mus. uxtr. p. 438. f ‘ 

5 For the meagre survivals of the actual worship of the Kouretes in historical 
times as attested by inscription see Prof. Bosanquet, op. cit. p. 353. 

———— 
—— 

Ley! © Spe A er ee 

28 The Hymn of the Kouretes 

called religious. We are face to face with the fact, startling 
enough, that these religious figures arise, not from any ‘religious 
instinct, not from any innate tendency to prayer and praise, but 
straight out of a social custom. Themis and Dike, invoked 
by the Kouretes, lie at the undifferentiated beginnings of things 
when social spelt religious. They are not late abstractions, but 
primitive realities and sanctities', 

This contradicts, it is clear, many preconceived notions. We 
are accustomed to regard religion as a matter intensely spiritual 
and individual. Such undoubtedly it tends to become, but in its 
origin, in the case under investigation, it is not spiritual and 
individual, but social and collective. But for the existence of a 
tribe or group of some kind, a ceremony of initiation would be 
impossible. The surprise is all the greater because the particular 
doctrine in question, that of the New Birth, is usually held to be 
Jate and due to ‘ Orphic,’ ie. quasi Oriental influence. It is held 
to have affinities with Christianity, and is a doctrine passionately 
adhered to by many sects and establishments in the present day. 
It may indeed—in some form or another—as Conversion or as 
Regeneration—be said to be the religious doctrine par excellence. 

Now it has of late been frequently pointed out that the god 
in some sense always ‘reflects’ the worshipper, takes on the 
colour of his habits and his thoughts. The morality of a god is: 
not often much in advance of that of his worshippers, and some- 
times it lags considerably behind. The social structure is also, it 
is allowed, in some sense reflected in the god: a matriarchal 
society will worship a Mother and a Son, a patriarchal society will 
tend to have a cult of the Father. All this is true, but the truth 
les much deeper. Not only does the god reflect the thoughts, 
social conditions, morality and the like, but in its origin his 
substance when analysed turns out to be just nothing but the 
representation, the utterance, the emphasis of these imaginations, 
these emotions, arising out of particular social conditions. 

Long ago Robertson Smith? noted that among the ancient 
Semites or indeed everywhere antique religion ‘was essentially an 
affair of the community rather than of individuals’ ; the benefits 
expected from the gods were of a public character, affecting the 

' For fuller discussion of this point see chapter x. 
> Religion of the Semites, 1889, pp. 211, 240. 

aed sales Bn Salle 

mea Social origin of the Kouretes — 29 
_ whole community, especially fruitful seasons, increase of flocks 
and herds, and success in war. The individual sufferer, who to us 
is the special object of Divine protection, was more or less an out- 
cast. ‘Hannah with her sad face and silent petition was a strange 
_ figure at the sanctuary of Shiloh; the leper and the mourner alike 
_ were unclean and shut out from the exercises of religion as well 
_ as from the privileges of social life’ But necessarily at the time 

when Robertson Smith wrote he conceived of a god as something 

existing independently of the community, though very closely 
related. This brings us to our last point. | 
So long as religion was defined by its object it was, to the 
detriment of science, confused with theology. It was currently 
supposed that religion was a kind of instinct of the soul after 
some sort of god or spirit or—as the doctrine became more rarefied 

—some innate power of apprehending the infinite?» The blunder 

here made was an elementary one, and took small account of facts. 

The most widespread and perhaps potent of all religions, Buddhism, 
_ knows no god. The error arose partly from ignorance or careless- 
ness as to facts, and partly from the mistake in method common 

to all pre-scientific enquiry, the mistake of starting with a general 

term religion of which the enquirers had a preconcéived idea, and 
then trying to fit into it any facts that came to hand. 

In the present enquiry we shall at the outset attempt no 
definition of the term religion, but we shall collect the facts that 
admittedly are religious and see from what human activities they 
appear to have sprung. The Kouros and the Kouretes are such 
facts. They sprang, we have just seen, from certain social interests 
and activities. The worshippers, or rather the social agents, are 
_ prior to the god. The ritual act, what the Greeks called the 
 Spepevor, is prior to the divinity. The psychological genesis of 
the dpépevoy will be examined in the next chapter. 

SL. Se ee ee ge ee ge 

ip as 
a 

Oe ee ee ee Pee oe 

3 1 Tt is when the old tribal sanctions are broken down that Aidos and Nemesis 
-__— of and for the individual come into force. See Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek 
mee pic?, p. 103. 

2 This error, originated I believe by Max Miiller and adopted with various 
modifications and extensions by M, Réville in his, Prolégomenes % Vhistoire des 
religions, and by Morris Jastrow in his Study of Religions, has been well exposed 
by Prof. Durkheim in his article De la définition des phénoménes religieux in Annee 
Sociologique, 11. (1898), pp. 4 ff. 

= et eae 

a UL 

an

THE DITHYRAMB, THE APQMENON AND THE DRAMA. 

OlaceyeTal WYYXAN. 

WE have seen the Kouros grow out of the band of his attend- 
ants the Kouretes, yet the Kouretes and the Kouros remain 
figures somewhat alien and remote, belonging to a bygone 
civilization, only to be realized by comparison with barbarous 

analogies. We have further seen or rather suspected that in the 

thiasos of Dionysos, in his attendant Satyrs, the band of daimones 
who attended the Kouros found its closest analogy. This clue if 
followed leads to a conclusion as unlooked for as it is illuminating 
—Dionysos is the Kouros. The Cretan cult of the Kouretes and 
the Thracian religion of Dionysos are substantially one. 

we - 
VA 

Anyone entering the theatre of Dionysos for the first time will 
probably seat himself at once in the great chair of the high priest 
of Dionysos, midway in the front row of the spectators’ seats. 
Immediately opposite him, as his Baedeker will inform him, is 
the logeion or ‘stage,’ as it is usually though incorrectly called, 
of Phaedrus’. He will be told that this ‘stage’ is late, dating not 
earlier than the time of Septimius Severus (193-211 a.p.), and, in 
his haste to search for the traces of the ancient circular orchestra, 
he may be inclined to pass it by; yet he will do well to give to 
the sculptured frieze that decorates it a passing glance. On the 
first slab to the right of the steps (Fig. 5) is represented as is 
fitting the birth of the god to whom the theatre is consecrate, 
Dionysos. The birth is just accomplished. Zeus is seated in the 

% An archaeological details see my Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, 
p. 282. 

Who are the armed guardians? Who but the Kouwretes? 

The seated Zeus on the relief is full grown, no longer a Kouros ; 
he is Father of the new-born child—he is the familiar Zeus of 
classical theology, Father of Gods and men. Yet he is attended 
am by the Kouretes. Why this shift of functions, this transformation 
> of character? Why this blend of Cretan and Theban mythology ? 
We shall find the answer it may be in the subject of the present 
chapter, the myth and ritual of the Dithyramb. | 

somewhat remote and obscure association. We think of a Dithy- 
-ramb not as a god, but as a form of lyric, full of thrill in its very 

Fie. 5. 

name, but excited, exotic, apt to become licentious. It is with the 
form rather than the content of the Dithyramb that the modern 
commentator is mainly concerned. The very name might by now 
have sunk into obscurity as a mere curiosity for specialists, but 
for one fact which most intimately concerns us. We are told on 
the best authority? that the Dithyramb gave birth to a literary 
offspring greater, more vital than itself—to tragedy. The be- 
ginnings of drama and of primitive magical rites are, we shall 
_ presently see, intertwined at the very roots. It is then of the first 
_ importance that we should grasp as far as may be the nature and 
origin of the Dithyramb. 

G 1 This authority has recently been called in question. See Prof. Ridgeway, 
Origin of Tragedy, 1910, passim. 

‘Dithyramb, like ‘Kouros’ and ‘Kouretes, is a word of 

ae 
ol, ft Ae 
a Bs 

a od 

Bon Oe ES . : 

3h The Dithyramb, dSpopevov and Drama [cu 

Aristotle in a famous sentence has left us his views as to the 
origin of tragedy. ‘Tragedy—as also Comedy, he says in the 
Poetics’, ‘was at first mere improvisation. The one originated 
with the leaders of the dithyramb, the other with those of 
the phallic songs which are still in use in many of our cities.’ 
Dithyramb and drama alike may seem for the moment alien 
to the subject of our last chapter, but it will soon appear that 
an enquiry into their origin and interaction will throw fresh 
light on the relations between the Kouros and the Kouretes, 
and will go far to illuminate the strange conjunction of the 
stage of Phaedrus. 

What then is the Dithyramb? What element in it caused 
this parting of the ways between it and comedy? Something 
there must have been that differentiated it out from the common 
phallic mime, some seed of beauty and solemn significance that 
was to blossom into tragedy, there to find what Aristotle? calls its 
vows, and then to cease. 

Plato® is our single and sufficient direct authority. In discussing 
the various sorts of odes he says, ‘Some are prayers to the gods, 
and these are called by the title hymns; others of an opposite 
sort might best be called dirges, another sort are paeans, and 
another—the birth of Dionysos I suppose—is called Dithyramb,’ 
Plato throws out this all-important statement with a touch of 
indifference (ofa), as of a thing accredited, but too technical to 
be interesting. Scholars‘, guiltless of any knowledge of initiation- 
ceremonies, have usually assumed that Plato has been misled by 
the false etymology of the Double Door. Is it not at least as 
possible that this false etymology arose, in part of course from 
the form of an ancient ritual title misunderstood, but in greater 
part from the fact that Plato’s statement is literally true, that the 
Dithyramb was originally the Song of the Birth ? 

1 Iv. 12 yevouevn (5°) oby dar’ apy fs adrocxediacruch, Kal ath Kad 7 Koumdia, kal 7 mev 
amo TaY eLapxdvTwr Tov SO¥pauBorv, ) dé ard TaV TA parca a err kal vov év aoddais 
ToV Tédewy diamever vomoueva. 

> op. cit. kal modads peraBodds peraBadrotca } Tparywdla émavcaro érel éoxe Thy 
aiTns puou. 

® Legg. 700 B ...xal matwves &repov kal do Acovdicou yéveots, ofuat, dSiOvpapBos 
eyomevos. : 

* See especially Crusius in Pauly Wissowa, Real- Encyclopédie, s.v. Dithyrambos, 
p. 1208. See also my Prolegomena, pp. 412 and 437—445, where the sources for 
the Dithyramb as Birth-Song are collected but the connection with the New Birth 
and Initiation Rites is not understood. 

i las ss ae 

=a ‘ 

ée Wl aN ue 
mh Phe: 
it ; Sy ee 3 
vt S 

_ Timotheos, tradition said, wrote a Dithyramb called the Birth- 
pangs of Semele (Seuérns wSives), and of a Dithyramb by Pindar 
we possess a beautiful fragment (p. 203) which tells of the Birth of 
_ Bromios from Semele in the spring-time. But the best evidence 
of the truth of Plato’s statement comes to us from the Bacchae? 
of Euripides. The Bacchos has been bound and led off to the 
dungeon; all seems lost; and the chorus makes its supreme 
appeal to Thebes not to disallow the worship of the god. They 
chant the story of his miraculous double birth, from which, they 
think, his title of Dithyrambos, He-of-the-T wofold- Door, is derived. 

5 

Dithyramb in the Bacchae — 33 

Acheloiis’ roaming daughter, 
Holy Dirce, virgin water, 
Bathed he not of old in thee, 
The Babe of God, the Mystery ? 
When from out the fire immortal 
To himself his God did take him, 
To his own flesh, and bespake him: 
‘Enter now life’s second portal, 
Motherless Mystery; lo, I break 
Mine own body for thy sake, 
Thou of the Twofold Door, and seal thee 
Mine, O Bromios’—thus he spake— 
‘And to this thy land reveal thee.’ 

I have quoted Prof. Gilbert Murray’s version because it 
renders so convincingly the stately, almost stiff, dogmatic, ritual 
tone of the hymn, its formalism which suddenly at the end of the 
strophe breaks into tender and delicate poetry. This strange and 
beautiful song, we are asked to believe, arose not out of ancient 
‘ritual, but from a grotesque fable based on a false etymology. 
scholars are a race strangely credulous. Once the suggestion 
made, it is surely evident that we have in the song the reflection, 
the presentation, of rites of initiation seen or heard of by Euripides 
among the Bacchants of Macedonia. It is even probable, I think, 
that actual pronouncements from actual ritual formularies are 
_ quoted. ; 
---—~—Ss«-‘The child is snatched by its father Zeus from the immortal 

a 1 y, 518 ff. 

a ére pnp@ mupds €& a- 
Oavdrov Levs 6 rexwv ap- 
macé vw Tad dvaBodcas: 
¥ "16, Avdtpaus’, éuav dp- 
fe ,. ceva Tavde BAO vydvy- 
avapalvw ce 760, & Bak- 
xe, OnBars dvoudcery. 

3 
2 

tyes © Geta Ve 

34 The Dithyramb, Spopevov and Drama  [CcH. 

fire—an allusion of course to the Epiphany of Zeus in the Thunder- 
storm. But the ‘immortal fire’ also reflects an initiation-rite of 
purgation by fire, a rite which, in weakened form, lasted on to 
classical times in the dywdidpomsa}, or ‘Ruuning round the fire,’ 
performed when the child was from five to seven days old. Such 
a rite lies at the back of the story of Demeter and Demophon’. 
The goddess would have made the child ‘deathless and ageless 
for all his days’; by day she anointed him with ambrosia, by night 
she hid him in the strength of fire like a brand. The expression 
‘the strength of fire’ (7rupds pévos) explains the gist of the rite. 
The child is weak and helpless, exposed to every kind of evil 
chance and sorcery. In fire is a great strength, and the child 
must be put in contact with this strength to catch its contagion 
and grow strong. The water rite, baptism, has the same intent. 
Water too is full of sanctity, of force, of mana; through water 
comes the birth into a new life. In the hymn of the Bacchae it 
almost looks as if the water, the bathing in Dirke, might be for 
the quenching of the burning child, but that is not the original 
notion. The baptism of water and the baptism of fire are to the 
same end, the magical acquisition of ghostly strength. In ancient 
Christian ritual before the candidate was immersed a blazing 
torch was thrust down into the font. The emphasis was rather 
on regeneration than purification. 

The child then is purified, or rather perhaps we should say 
strengthened and revitalized, by fire and water; new and stronger 
life is put into him. Yet another rite remains of singular signifi- 
cance, and it is introduced with emphasis‘. The Father-god 
‘eries aloud’ (dvaBodcas)*. This loud, clear, emphatic utterance 
makes us expect some weighty ritual pronouncement, and such a 
pronouncement immediately follows: Come, O Dithyrambos, enter 

1 For sources see Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. 
2 Hom, Hymn 11. 239 vixras 6¢ kpirrecke mupods péver HUTe Saddv. See Mr R. W. 
Halliday, Note on Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 239 ff. in Class. Rev. 1911, p. 8. 
3 Hur. Bacch. 526 
101, AcodpayB’, éuav dp- 
ceva Tdvde BAO. vndvv- 
dvagalyw ce 760’, © Bax- 
* xe, OnBats dvoudgew. 
_ * Boy, originally Bory, the lowing of cattle, seems to be a regular ritual word. 
Pindar (Ol. xu. 25) calls the Dithyramb Bonddras, and in the account in the 
Philosophoumena, ed. Cruice, 1860, p. 170, of the mystic birth in the Eleusinian 

Mysteries it is said of the Hierophant Bog Kal Kéxparye Néywr, iepdy erexe mérvia 
kodpov, Boyuw Bowudr. 

Dithyramb reflects Initiation-Rites 35 

his my male womb. The child is to be born anew, not of his 
mother Semele, but of his father Zeus, and—significant fact—his 
Epiphany at Thebes is to be marked by the new name Dithy- 
E | rambos, common to child and Birth-song alike. What does it all 
34 mean ? 

| y 

24 Taken at its face value it is of course nonsense. The God 

_ Dithyrambos is born of his mother, well and good. He was not, 

could not be, born again of his father. Birth belongs to the 

_ category of facts that cannot be repeated. How then is the second 

birth explained by scholars? Until quite lately it was left at its 

face value: it was nonsense, only it was ‘poetical’ nonsense. 

Moreover it was a mystery, and into a mystery it was perhaps 

as well not to look too closely. By an ancient mystery people 

used to understand something enacted in secret, and probably 
offensive. To the word mystery we now attach a perfectly definite‘ 
meaning. A mystery is a rite, a dpwpevoy enacted with magical 

intent. It is secret, not because it is indecent, but because it is 

intensely social, decent and entirely sacred. 

When the critical spirit awoke, and it was felt that some 
definite meaning must be attached to the second birth of the 
Dithyramb, the next suggestion was that it embodied a social 
shift from matriarchy to patriarchy. This was a step in the right 
direction because it was an attempt to see in a religious dogma 
the utterance, the projection of a social fact; but the explanation, 
though it has elements of truth, is, I now feel’, inadequate. The 
shift from matriarchy to patriarchy never crystallized into a rite, 
never burst into a ritual hymn. 

f The birth from the father cannot be real; it must therefore be 
_ sham, or to speak more elegantly, it must be mimetic. When we 
~ examine later the nature and psychology of a Spapevor it will be 
seen that all rites gud rites are mimetic, but the rite of the 
New Birth is in its essence the mimetic rite par excellence. 
After our discussion of the Kouretes the gist of this mimetic rite 
_ needs no further elucidation. The New Birth of the Dithyramb, 
like the New Birth of the Kouros, reflects a tribal rite of initiation, 
_ and in both cases we have a blend of two sorts of rites, the rites 
_ 1 As such I explained it in my Prolegomena, p. 411. The explanation was 
I believe first offered by. Bachofen in his Mutterrecht. 
3—2 

36 The Dithyramb, Spdpevov and Drama  [cH. 

of infancy, the rites of adolescence. One point however requires 
further emphasis. 

In the case of the Kouros the child is taken from its mother, 
in the case of the Dithyramb it is actually re-born from the thigh 
of its father. In both cases the intent is the same, but in the 
case of the Dithyramb it is far more emphatically expressed. The 
birth from the male womb is to rid the child from the infection of 
his mother—to turn him from a woman-thing into a man-thing. 
Woman to primitive man is a thing at once weak and magical, to 
be oppressed, yet feared. She is charged with powers of child- 
bearing denied to man, powers only half understood, forces of 
attraction, but also of danger and repulsion, forces that all over 
the world seem to fill him with dim terror. The attitude of man 
to woman, and, though perhaps in a less degree, of woman to man, 
is still to-day essentially magical, 

Man cannot escape being born of woman, but he can, and, if 
he is wise, will, as soon as he comes to manhood, perform cere- 
monies of riddance and purgation. Initiation rites teem with 
such ceremonies, and savage life is everywhere hampered by sex 
taboos’, Among the tribes of Western Victoria if a boy is caught 
eating a female opossum he is severely punished; it will make 
him ‘like a girl,’ that is peevish and discontented. Among the 
Narrinyeri during initiation a boy may not eat any food that has 
even belonged to a woman; everything he possesses becomes like 
himself—‘ narumbe, taboo to women, sacred from their touch. — 
If he eats with a woman he will grow ugly and become grey. 
Among the Kugis a woman with child—who naturally at that 
time is doubly a woman—may not even give food to her husband. 
If such a woman among the Indians of Guiana eat of game caught 
by hounds, the hounds will become so emasculate that they will 
never be able to hunt again. 

The Kouretes, it will be remembered?, take the child from the 
mother, Rhea. At Sparta, Plutarch* tells us—and Dorian Sparta 

1 The few examples I give are taken from the large collection made b 
H, Crawley, The Mystic Rose, A study of primitive marriage; pp. 166- a 
Dr Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. 1. 326, 111. 204 ff. ve a ee 

Denlos 

. Vit. Lyc. xv1. The Lesche seems to be the Greek equivalent of the ‘Man’s 

House.’ See p. 27. For a similar Boeotian custom see Sophocles, Oed. Tyr. 1035. 

Dithyramb reflects Initiation-Rites 37 

is, as much as Crete, the home of primitive custom—at Sparta it 
was not left even to the father, much less to the mother, to decide 
_ what children he would rear; he was obliged to bring the child 
_ to a place called the Lesche, ee to be examined by the most 
| ; ancient men of the tribe to see if he was stout and strong and fit 
_ tobeatribesman. If he was weakly he was thrown down a crag 
of Taygetos. It must have been an anxious time for many a 
mother, and that anxiety is, it may be, in part reflected in the 
many stories of mothers who hide their child directly after birth. 
Rhea hides Zeus from Kronos, Auge? has a child by Heracles and 
conceals him. Evadne? hid her child amid the reeds in a dim 
thicket, and ‘his tender body was bedewed with the gleam of 
pansy flowers purple and gold, and no man had seen him or heard 
_ of him though he was now born five days.’ Stories of this type, 
where the child is hid by the mother from fear of the father, have 
hitherto been explained’ by some story of a divine father and the 
mother’s fear of the human father’s anger. 

The child, whether concealed or acknowledged, might remain 
with its mother for a time. She will practise on it her mother- 
rites, She will, perhaps, like the Spartan‘ mother, wash her baby 
with wine to strengthen it. She will certainly bathe or sprinkle 
it with holy water and pass it through the fire. She may wean it 
from her own breast and feed it with honey and alien milk, but, 
sooner or later, the day of separation is at hand. The Kouretes 
of the tribe will come and will take him away, will hide him for 
weeks or months in the bush, will clothe him in strange clothes, 
teach him strange dances and strange lore, and bring him back 
all changed, with a new soul, the soul of his tribe, his mother’s 
child no more, trained it may be henceforth to scorn or spit at 
her. He belongs from henceforth to his father and to the Man’s 
House. 

Nowhere have I been able to find among savage tribes any 
mimic birth from the father’, that is any strict parallel to the 

eh eee 

1 Paus. vu. 4. 8. 
é 2 Pind, Ol. v1. 52 
Tol 6 ovr’ wy aKxodcat 
ovr’. (deity edXOvTO meumratov yeyevauevoy* GAN év 
kéxputTo yap sxolvm Barig é&v ameipaTy. 
3 The new explanation offered here was suggested to me by Mr F, M. Cornford. 
4 Plutarch, op. cit. 
5 The customs of the Couwvade which might seem to belong here can I think be 
otherwise better explained. 

et eae ee Abst Lins des 

, 
5 

a eS i. BY ee 

¢ 

re 

38 The Dithyramb, Spépevov and Drama  {cu. 

mimic birth of Dithyrambos from the thigh of Zeus, though, such 
is the secrecy about initiation rites, that a ceremony of this kind 
may well exist unrecorded and only wait observation. But at the 
initiation rites known as the Bora! in New South Wales the 
‘surrender of the boys by their mother is dramatically represented. 
A circle is marked out, the mothers of those to be initiated stand 
just outside it, the boys are bidden to enter the circle, and thus 
magically pass from the women to the men of the tribe. 

The dpe@pevoy then that underlies the ritual of the Dithyramb 
and of the Kouros is one and the same, the rite of the New Birth. 
This is the cardinal doctrine of the Bacchae. That is why in their 
hour of supreme peril they invoke the Dithyramb. It is against 
this rite of the New Birth that Pentheus blasphemes. It is to 
that Rite personified as Purity, Sanctity, Holiness, that the 

-Bacchants raise their Hymn?: 

Thou Immaculate on high, 
Thou Recording Purity. 

The Hymn of the New Birth becomes a god Dithyrambos, 
the Rite of Purification becomes a goddess Purity—Hosia, and 
Purity outraged is near akin to the Dike later (v. 1015) invoked. - 
Both are guardians of ra véuupa. 

It has been seen that the Kouros is but the projection of the 
Kouretes; it is equally manifest that Dionysos is but his thiasos 
incarnate. But here instantly a difficulty presents itself. Dionysos, 
the Bacchos, has a thiasos of Bacchae. But how can a thiasos of 

women project a young male god? They cannot and do not. Who w 

then do they worship, what divine figure is their utterance 2 They 
tell us themselves; they shout it at us in a splendid ritual song. 

In the first chorus they chant the praise of Thebes, birthplace 
of the Dithyramb son of Semele: 

All hail, O Thebes, thou nurse of Semelé ! 
With Semelé’s wild ivy crown thy towers?. 

! Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, p. 21, quoting Matthews. 

2 v. 170 ‘Ocla rérva Gedy. For écla with the meaning ‘rite of initiation,’ see 
Hom. Hymn to Demeter, 211 degapévn 5° doins éwéBn modurérvia Ane. In offering this 
interpretation, and in what follows as to the Bacchants, I do. not mean to impl 

that Euripides was always fully conscious of the primitive material which lay 
behind his plot. 

3 Hur. Bacch. 105 ® Leuddas rpogol OF- 
Bat, crepavodabe Kioog. 

Then in the antistrophe they turn and sing, of what? Of 
FGrote and the Kouretes, of Mother Rhea and the Child Zeus, 

Hail thou, O Nurse of Zeus, O Caverned Haunt, 

Where fierce arms clanged to guard God’s cradle rare. 
For thee of old some crested Corybant 

First woke in Cretan air, 
The wild orb of our orgies, 

Our Timbrel. 

The phoma has neither sense nor antiphonal structure of 
‘meaning, save that the worship of the Dithyramb was one with 
the worship of the Kouros. The priest of Dionysos as he sat in 
his great seat and looked across at the ‘stage of Phaedrus’ with 
its seated Zeus, its new-born Dionysos, its attendant eae 
would remember and understand. 

And, that there may be no mistake, the chorus insist that the — 
ritual gear of Dionysos is the ritual gear of the Mother: 

The timbrel, the timbrel was another’s, 

And back to mother Rhea must it wend. 
And to our holy singing from the Mother’s, 
The mad Satyrs carried it to blend 
In the dancing and the cheer 

Of our third and perfect Year, 
And it serves Dionysos in the end’. 

_ The Bacchants are not indicating the analogy between two 
Fi ults as though they were a parcel of commentators making 
“marginal notes. Half mad with excitement they shout aloud the 
dogmas of their most holy religion—the religion of the Mother 
» the Child. 

The Maenads are the mothers and therefore the nurses of the 
holy child; only a decadent civilization separates the figures of 
mother and nurse. As nurses they rear the holy child till the 
armed, full-grown men take him away to their new Child-Rearing 

1 Hur. Bacch. 119 
@ Oaddwevua Kovupy- 
Twyv ¢abeot Te Kpyras 
Avoyevéropes évavdot. 
2 y, 130 
mapa 5é€ pwavduevor Darupor 
pardépos égavicavro Oeas, 
és dé xopevuara 

cuvjnwav rprernpliwv, 

als xalper Acrévvoos. 

—. - 
+ 

2 v. 679 

5 vy. 699. 6 v. 705. 

re 

The Dithyramb, dpépevov and Drama | (on. 4 

(ratSorpodia). As nurses they are thrice familiar. In Homer’ 
the god has his nurses (rvOAvav), chased by Lykobrgos: 

Through Nysa’s goodly land 
He Dionysos’ Nursing Nymphs did chase. 

Sophocles in the Oedipus at Colonos® knows of the Nurses : 
Footless sacred shadowy thicket, where a myriad berries grow, F 
Where no heat of the sun may enter, neither wind of the winter blow, 
Where the Reveller Dionysos with his Nursing Nymphs will go. 

At Delphi, Plutarch? tells us, the Thyiades, nurses of Dionysos, 

wake up the child Dionysos in the cradle. 

The Bacchants are the Mothers; that is why at their coming 

they have magical power to make the whole earth blossom: 

Oh burst in bloom of wreathing bryony, 
Berries and leaves and flowers‘. 

It is not only the ‘wild white maids,’ but the young mothers 

with babes at home who are out upon the mountains: 

And one a young fawn held, and one a wild 

Wolf cub, and fed them with white milk, and smiled 
In love, young mothers with a mother’s heart, 

And babes at home forgotten®! 

At the touch of their wands, from the rocks break out streams of 
wine and water, and milk and honey‘. 

It is at the great service of the Mothers on Mount Cithaeron 

that the whole of creation moves and stirs and lives: 

All the mountain felt 
And worshipped with them, and the wild things knelt 
And ramped, and gloried, and the ‘wilderness 
Was filled with moving voices and dim stress’. 

It is against the religion of the Bacchants, as Nurses and 

Mothers of all that is, that Pentheus rages, charging them, the 
Mothers, with license, banning their great service of Aphrodite. 

1 Jl. v1. 129 

és more matvouévoto Awwytco.o riOjvas 
cede Kar’ Hydbeov Nuatiov. 
W 6 Baxxudsras 
del Avdvucos éuBarever 
Oeats audurodGv tiOjvats. 

see Prolegomena, p. 402. 

3 De Isid. et Os. ...drav ai Oviades éyelpwor tov Acxvirynv. For Dionysos Liknites 
4 Eur, Bacch. 107 

Bpvere, Bpvere, xNonper 
uidaKe KadNKdpTe@ K.T.A. 

Tp. 726. 

The Child and the Kouros 41 

And, appealing to their most holy Rite of the New Birth, they 
_ turn and answer his foul-mouthed blasphemy in that song of 
_ increase and grace and peace unspeakable!: 
Where is the Home for me? 
O Cyprus set in the sea, 
Aphrodite’s home in the soft sea-foam 
Would I could wend to thee; 
and, in the awful irony of the end, it is by his mother’s hand that 
Pentheus is torn to pieces. 

The attitude of Pentheus seems to us blasphemous, intolerable ; 
yet if we reflect calmly it is not hard to see how it arose. The 
divine figures of Mother and Child reflect the social conditions of 
a matriarchal group with its rite of adolescent initiation; its 
_ factors are the mother, the child and the tribe, the child as babe 
and later as Kouros. But when, chiefly through the accumulation 
of property, matriarchy passes and patriarchy takes its place, the 
relation of mother to child is less prominent; the child is viewed 
as part of the property of the father. Moreover with the decay of 
matriarchy, initiation ceremonies lose their pristine significance. 
It is not hard to see that, given women worshippers and. a young 
male god grown to adolescence, the relation of son to mother 
‘might be misconceived as that of lover to bride. We find the 
same misunderstanding of matriarchal conditions in the parallel 
figures of Adonis and Aphrodite. 

The memory of primitive matriarchal conditions often survives 
rather curiously in mythology. Dionysos is not alone. Again 
and again we have stories of this god or that who is ‘reared by 
the Nymphs. Apollo tells Hermes how the Thriae, the bee- 
maidens, reared him in a glade of Parnassos; they taught him 
_ soothsaying while he tended his kine, and—he adds naively— 

my father took no heed?. 

So far then it has been established that behind the Dithyramb 
lay a rite, a Sp@mevor, and that rite was one of group initiation. 
- Further it has been seen that the group belonged to the social 
1 Eur. Bacch. 402, adopting the Oxford text; for other readings and views see 
Dr Verrall, The Bacchants of Euripides, p. 155. 

2 Hom. Hymn to Hermes, 557 
maryp & éuds ovK adéyiger. 

a 

a. mn 

Sl) i 

ee 

ae 

42 The Dithyramb, Spépevov and Drama  [CH. 

structure known as matriarchal, a structure reflected in the divine 
figures of Mother and Babe or Kouros, rather than in that of 
Father and Son. We shall have later to consider more closely 
how the divine figure developed from the human institution; but 
first it is all-important that we should examine and if possible 
define the precise nature of a dpépuevov. We shall then be ina 
position to see more clearly how from the particular Spdéevov 
under consideration, the Dithyramb, arose, on the one hand, for 
theology, a god, on the other, if Aristotle be right, for art, the 
drama. 

Etymologically Spémeva are of course things done It is, 
however, at once evident that the word in its technical use as 
meaning religious rites, sacra, does not apply to all things done. 
The eating of your dinner, the digesting of your food, are assuredly 
things done, and very important things, but they are not Speeva. 
Nor does a thing done become a Spwpevor simply because it is 
done socially, collectively ; a large number of persons may eat and 
digest their dinner collectively, yet the act remains secular. What 
is it that adds the sanctity, that makes the act in our sense 
religious ? 

_ First the act must be strongly felt about, must cause or be 
caused by a keen emotion. The great events of life, birth, 
adolescence, marriage, death, do not incessantly repeat themselves ; 
it is about these events that religion largely focuses. When the 
getting of certain foods was irregular and precarious, a source of 
anxiety and joy, the eating of such foods was apt to be religious. 
and protected by taboos. The regular rising and setting of sun 
and moon and stars, because regular, cause little or no emotion ; 
but religion early focused on things of tension and terror, the 
thunderstorm and the monsoon. Such manifestations cause vivid 
reactions. Tension finds relief in excited movement; you dance 
and leap for fear, for joy, for sheer psychological relief. It is this 

In the present chapter the first only of these questions will be considered, the 
genesis of the god from the dpéuevov. The relation of drama to the Dithyramb is 
reserved for chapters vir. and vimt., and see Prof. Murray’s Excursus after chapter vii. 

* In the specialized sense of ‘rites’ dpdueva consist of two factors (a) the thing 
done, the Spwuevov proper, and (b) the thing said, 76 Aeyduevov. The thing said 
which is the element of myth, will be considered later, p. 327. ; 

3 The notion of sanctity will be further analysed in chapter m1. 

vibes IR 

Psychology of the Spdpevov ‘ 43 

excited doing, this dancing, that is the very kernel of both drama 
and dpwyevoyv. Our Kouretes were dancers (épynoripes). 

A high emotional tension is best caused and maintained by a 
thing felt socially. The individual in a savage tribe has but 
a thin and meagre personality. If he dances alone he will not 

_ dance long; but if his whole tribe dances together he will dance 

the live-long night and his emotion will mount to passion, to 
ecstasy. Save for the yopos, the band, there would be no drama 
and no dp#épevov. Emotion socialized, felt collectively, is emotion 
intensified and rendered permanent. Intellectually the group is 
weak ; everyone knows this who has ever sat on a committee and 
arrived at a confused compromise. Emotionally the group is 
strong; everyone knows this who has felt the thrill of speaking 
to or acting with a great multitude. 

The next step or rather notion implied is all important. A 
dpéuevov is as we said not simply a thing done, not even a thing 

excitedly and socially done. What is it then? It is a thing 

re-done or pre-done, a thing enacted or represented. It is some- 
times re-done, commemorative, sometimes pre-done, anticipatory, 
and both elements seem to go to its religiousness. When a tribe 
comes back from war or from hunting, or even from a journey, 

from any experience in fact that from novelty or intensity causes 
_ strong emotion, the men will, if successful, recount and dance their 

experiences to the women and children at home. Such a dance 
we should perhaps scarcely call religious, but when the doings of 
dead chiefs in the past or ancestors are commemorated, when the 
dance is made public and social, and causes strong emotion, it 
takes on a religious colour’. The important point to note is that 
the hunting, fighting, or what not, the thing done, is never 

religious; the thing re-done with heightened emotion is on the 

way to become so. The element of action re-done, imitated, the 
element of pinors, is, I think, essential. In all religion, as in all 
art, there is this element of make-believe. Not the attempt to 
deceive, but a desire to re-live, to re-present. 

Why do we ‘represent’ things at all; why do we not just do 

- them and have done with it? This is a curious point. The 

1 This element of commemoration in the dpwpyevov will be more fully examined 
when we reach the question of the relation of hero-worship to the drama 

(chapter v1i1.). 

i =a 

| 

| 

44 The Dithyramb, 8pdpevov and Drama  [cu. 

occasion, though scarcely the cause, of these representations is 
fairly clear. Psychologists tell us that representations, ideas, 
imaginations, all the intellectual, conceptual factors in our life 
are mainly due to deferred reactions. If an impulse finds instantly 
its appropriate satisfaction, there is no representation. It is out 
of the delay, just the space between the impulse and the reaction, 
that all our mental life, our images, ideas, our consciousness, our 
will, most of all our religion, arise. If we were utterly, instantly 
satisfied, if we were a mass of well contrived instincts, we 
should have no representations, no memory, no plunows, no 
Opéeva, no drama. Art and: religion alike spring from un- 
satisfied desire’. 

Another point should be noted. When the men return from 
the war, the hunt, the journey, and re-enact their doings, they 
are at first undoubtedly representing a particular action that 
actually has taken place. Their drama is history or at least 
narrative ; they say in effect, such and such a thing did happen 
in the past. Everything with the savage begins in this particular 
way. But, it is easy to see that, if the dramatic commemoration 
be often repeated, the action tends to cut itself loose from the 
particular in which it arose and become generalized, abstracted as 
it were. The particular hunt, journey, battle, is in the lapse of 
time forgotten or supplanted by a succession of similar hunts, 
journeys, battles, and the dance comes to commemorate and 
embody hunting, journeying, fighting. Like children they play 
not at a funeral, but at ‘funerals,’ births, battles, what not. To 
put it grammatically, the singular comes first, but the singular 
gets you no further. The plural detaches you from the single 
concrete fact; and all the world over, the plural, the neuter plural 
as we call it, begets the abstract. Moreover, the time is no longer 
particular, it is undefined, not what happened but what happens. 
Such a dance generalized, universalized, is material for the next 
stage, the dance pre-done. 

The religious character of pipnows comes out perhaps more 
clearly when the action is pre-done, for here we are closely neigh- 
boured by magic. <A tribe about to go to war will dance a war 

1 For the function of imi 

Beck, Die Nachahmun 
Leipzig, 1904. 

tation in the development of religious rites see Dr 12 
g und thre Bedeutung fiir Psychologie und Volkerkunde, 

ese ee ee ee pal ak ris ba 
 Cf. Aristotle, loc. cit., dad trav ééapydvtwy rod AcOupd and Kuripi 
Bacch. 140 6 & déapxos Bodpeas: s aise ape 

3 Dittenberger, SyJl. 1.2 1861, 1. 

+ See my Prolegomena, pp. 656 and 475. 

does not know it is the force of collective suggestion, he calls it a 

The god a projection from the group 47 

god. As Philo’ puts it,‘ Bacchic and Korybantic worshippers rave 
until they actually see what they desire.’ 

This process of projection, of deification, is much helped by what 
we may perhaps call the story-telling instinct. The god like his 

_ worshipper must have a life-history. We hear much of the suffer- 

ings (740m) of Dionysos. They are of course primarily the projected 
aa0y ot his worshippers; the worshippers have passed through 
the rite of Second Birth, have endured the death that issues in 
resurrection ; therefore the god is Twice-Born. But once the life- 
history projected, it tends to consolidate the figure of the god and 
to define his personality, to crystallize and clear it of all demonic 
vagueness. Even in the time of the Christian fathers? it was 
realized that the great festivals of the gods were commemorations 
of the events of a god’s life—his birth, his marriage, his exploits, 
sufferings, death. They used this undoubted fact as an argument 
to show that the gods were but divinized men, whose deeds 
(a0Xa) were solemnly commemorated. What the Christian fathers 

_ necessarily could not realize was that it was the social life of the 

group rather than the individual that became the object of 
religious representation. 

Nowhere so clearly as in the religion of Dionysos do we see 
the steps of the making of the god, and nowhere is this religion 
so vividly presented to the imagination as in the Bacchae of 
Euripides. The very vividness, the oneness of the perception, 
seen with the single intention of the poet, makes it to us hard of 
apprehension and has rendered necessary the cold psychological 

analysis just attempted. 

_ The question is often raised—is the Bacchos the god Dionysos 
himself or merely a human leader, an adept, an impostor, as 
Pentheus held? He is one and both, human and divine, because, as 
we have seen, divinity at its very source is human. In the Bacchae 

1 de vit. contemplat. 2, p. 473 M. oi Baxxevduevor kal kopuBavravtes évOovordfovar 
wexpis dv Td Trodovpevov ldwow. See Rohde, Psyche, p. 304. 

2 See S. August. de civitat. dei, vir. 18 Unicuique eorum...ex ejus ingenio, 
moribus, actibus, casibus, sacra et solennia constituta. Lactantius, Divin. instit. 
v. 20 Ipsos ritus...vel ex rebus gestis hominum, vel ex casibus, vel etiam ex 
mortibus natos. Ludorum celebrationes deorum festa sunt, siquidem ob natales 
‘eorum vel templorum novorum dedicationes sunt constituti, and see v1. 20. The 
question of the life-history of the god, that is the orderly sequence of his festivals, 
will be discussed when we come to the éemavurds, p. 331. 

— 

48 ‘The Dithyramb, Spdpevov and Drama — [0H. bc 

we catch the god in the three stages of his making, stages that. 
shift with the changing scenes. He is a human leader, an é£apyxos, 
6 8 &€apyos Bpdusos?; he is half divinized, a daimon more than 
mortal, 6 Saipov 6 Avds rais?. In the prologue he has no thiasos, 
he is alone, cut loose from the xopos that projected him, a full- 
blown Olympian Q@eos. 

Full-blown but never full-grown. Unlike Zeus he rarely quite 
grows up; Father-hood is never of his essence. Always through 
the Bacchae he is the young male god with tender face and fair 
curled hair. What seemed to Pentheus in his ignorance a base 
effeminacy is but the young bloom and glory of the Kouros. His 
name, of which philologists seem at last to have reached the 
interpretation, tells the same tale; he is Dionysos’, Zeus- Young- 
Man, Zeus Kouros. As Bacchos he is but the incarnate cry of 
his thiasos, Iacchos‘. So the god Paean is but the paean, the song 
projected. 

} We have been told perhaps too often that the essence of the 
'Bacchic as contrasted with the Olympian religion is the doctrine 
lof union and communion with the god. Now at last we see why: 
‘ Bacchic religion is based on the collective emotion of the thiasos. 
Its god is a projection of group-unity. Dr Verrall in his essay 
on the Bacchants of Euripides® hits the mark in one trenchant, 
illuminating bit of translation, ‘The rapture of the initiated, he 
says, ‘lies essentially in this: “his soul as congregationalized,” 

Oraceverar Woyav.’ 

The Olympians are, as will later® appear, the last product of 
' yationalism, of individualistic thinking; the thiasos has projected 
them utterly. Cut off from the very source of their life and being, 
the emotion of the thiasos, they desiccate and die. Dionysos with 
his thiasos is still—Comus, still trails behind him the glory of 
the old group ecstasy. 

1 Kur. Bacch. 140. 

2 y, 416. 

> See Kretschmer, Aus der Anomia, 1890, p. 25 thess. Acévyvcos *Acd(c)vucos 
sk. snus-@, ahd. snura, lat. nurus, gr. vuds (*svveds). The notion that Dionysos 
was @ young Zeus survived into late days. Thus the scholiast on Apollonius 
Rhodius (1. 917) says oi 68 Sto mpébrepov elvar Tos KaBelpous, Ala te mpesBirepov Kat 
Avévucov vewrepor. 

4 Bacchos  lacchos fifaxyxos, see Prellwitz, Htymologisch or 2 
for Iacchos see my role. p. 541. The ee 

5 p. 39. 6 Chapter x. 

ely the same. Both are the reflection of a group religion 

f social conditions which are matriarchal and emphasize the — 

s of Mother and Child. The cardinal doctrine of both 
ligions is the doctrine of the New Birth, and this doctrine is the 
reflection of the rite of social initiation. One element in the 
making of a god we have seen to be the projection of collective 

emotion, the reaction of man on his fellow man, But man does Be 

not sit in the void reacting on his fellow man; we have now to 
consider his reaction on the world of nature heat surrounds him. 

— 

Se ee Te eee ee, ee ee 

“

THE KOURETES, THE THUNDER-RITES AND MAWA. 

\ \ / ? 4 / 
TA AE TIANTA OIAKIZE! KEPAYNOC. 

SH rAp H BactAefa Kal’ H AYNamic Kal H AOZa eic TOYE AIGNAC. 

Ws have not yet done with the Kouretes. A fragment of the 
Cretans of Euripides preserved for us by Porphyry’ in his treatise 

on Vegetarianism contains a somewhat detailed account of a 

ceremonial conducted by them which is of high importance for 
our argument. It has certain analogies to the rites of New Birth 
already described, but presents also certain notable differences. 
It is of peculiar interest because in it are described rites of the 
Kouretes which culminate in the initiation of a Bacchos, This 
confirms the substantial identity of Bacchic and Kouretic rites 
which has been established in the last two chapters. 

For a moment let us see where the fragment must have stood 
in the lost play. The evidence is in part drawn from another 
recently discovered fragment’. 

We are in the palace of Minos in Crete. A child has been 
born to the royal house, a portent, the monstrous Minotaur. 
Minos is troubled, he will purify the palace, will ask the meaning 
of the portent. The whole scene reminds us of another lost play 
of Euripides, Melanippe the Wise*, where the portentous twins are 
born and Melanippe in her famous, rationalizing, truly Euripidean 

1 de Abst. 1v. 19; Nauck, Frg. 472. For the whole fragment see my Prolegomena 
chapter x. ; 
2 Berliner Klassikertexte, v. 2 Gr. Dichterfragmente (2), 1907, p. 78. See also 
G. Korte, Die Kreter des Euripides, in Hist. u. Phil. Aufsatze; HE. ee Berlin 
1884, p. 195; and A, Kappelmacher, Zu den Kreten des Euripides, ‘Wiener Eranos, 
50 Vers. Graz, 1909. 4 
3 Nauck, Frg. 484, 

a 

| 61 
speech, explains that the order of the cosmos is fixed and that 
‘such things as portents cannot be. Minos then sends for the 
priests and medicine men, the Idaean Daktyls, presumably to 
purify the palace and bring peace and understanding. They leave 
their secret sanctuary on Ida—the strange manner of its building 
__ they describe, they come in white robes to the terror-stricken 
palace and in solemn anapaests tell of the manner of their life 
on Mount Ida and of the initiation ceremonies that have made 
_ them what they are and have given them authority to cleanse and 
interpret. 

Their avowal of ritual acts performed on Mount Ida is as 
follows: 

There in one pure stream 

My days have run, the servant I 
Initiate of Idaean Jove; 
Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove, 
I have endured his thunder-cry, 

Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts ; 
Held the Great Mother’s mountain flame; 
Enhallowed I and named by name 

A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests. 

Robed in pure white I have borne me clean 
From man’s vile birth and coffined clay 
And exiled from my lips alway 

ae Touch of all meat where Life hath been}, 

The analogies between these rites and the initiation rites 
_ discussed in the last chapter are obvious, We have here as there 
to do with mysteries performed by the ‘mailed priests, the 
Kouretes, and these mysteries are mysteries of Zagreus, and of 
the Great Mother, and of Zeus. But, be it noted, it is Idaean, 
not Diktaean Zeus whom the Kouretes now serve. This leads us 
‘to suspect—what is indeed I believe the fact—that we have to do 
with initiation ceremonies of a later and more highly developed 
type, initiation ceremonies not merely tribal and social, whether 

A aryvov 5é Blov retvwy é& ov 

Avds *Idatou miorns yevdunv 

kal vuxtimddov Laypéws Bpovras . 

Tous 7’ wmopdyous Satras Tedéoas.. 

pntpl 7? Opel Oadas dvacxow 

Kal Koupyrwy 

Baxxos éxAnOnv dowels. 
& ‘The text ii is Nauck’s, save for the addition of re in line 4—rovs 7’ duopdyous, The 
_ translation is by Prof. Murray. With his sanction I Seve: sop eid the word 
_ ‘enhallowed’ for ‘I am set free’ in stanza two. 

mn aes 
ae Sue ; 

- eae 
i: 

aes 

52 The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana [cH 

of infancy or adolescence, but ceremonies that have become in the 
later sense mysteries, rites to which only a chosen few were 
admitted. This seems clear from the asceticism of the avowal 
in the last lines. It is obvious that the whole of the initiated 
youth of a tribe would not be vegetarians, nor could they preserve 
life-long ceremonial purity from the contagion of child-birth and 
funerals. Moreover the initiated man in these rites was, when 
fully consecrated, called a Bacchos, and the Bacchoi were always 
a select congregation. Plato? tells us that those concerned with 
rites of initiation used to say 

Few are the Bacchoi, many bear the Wand. 

It may be conjectured that the rite here administered by the 
Kouretes was some sort of rite of ordination of a medicine-man. 
In this connection it is interesting to note that Epimenides of 
Crete, the typical medicine-man of antiquity, was called by his 
contemporaries the ‘new Koures.’ Plutarch? in his account of the 
purification of Athens in the days of Solon says of Epimenides 
that he was a man of Phaistos, son of the nymph Balte, ‘beloved 
of the gods, and ‘an adept in religious matters dealing with the 
lore of orgiastic and initiation rites.’ It was because of this that 
he was reputed to be son of a nymph and gained his title of, 
Koures. Koures, as has already been noted, can only mean Young 
Man in a specialized sense. We may conjecture—though it is only 
a conjecture—that the Kouretes were Young Men selected from 
the general band of initiated youths. One of their functions was, 
it appears, the consecration of the Bacchoi. 

Plutarch naturally regards Epimenides as ‘dear to the gods, 
and an adept in matters religious, but the traditions that gathered 
round his name are those of magic and medicine rather than of 
religion. He is credited* indeed, and perhaps rightly, with the 
authorship of a Theogony as well as an Argonautika, a Kretika, 

1 Phaed. 69 ¢ cict yap 54 paciv oi rept Tas TeheTds vapOnKopédpor wey TodXol, Baxxor 

dé re madpor. Olympiodorus ad loc, attributes a hexameter to this effect to Orpheus. 
See my Prolegomena, p. 474. 

2 Vit. Solon. xit. ...aKev éx Kpjrns ’Eaipevldns 6 Palorios....’Hddxer 5é tus elvae 
Geogidys Kal copds mepl Ta ela Thy évOovaracriKhy Kal TedeoTiKhy codplav, dd Kal matda 
vippns dvoua Badrys kal Kovpyra véov abroy of rére dvOpwror mpoonydpevov. Diogenes 
cites the “Owova of Myronianos as authority for the title of Koures: ¢noly 871 

Kotpyta avrov éxddouw Kpjres. For the name of the nymph Balte or Blaste see 
Pauly Wissowa, s.v. 

3 Diog. Laert. Vit. Epim. 1, 111. 

Epimenides as Kouros 53 

Purvfications, Sacrifices, and Oracles, and, notable fact, a Birth of 
the Kouretes and Korybantes; but when we come to his life and 
acts his true inwardness as a medicine-man emerges. His career 
begins, in orthodox fashion, with a long magical sleep’. He was 
tending sheep, and turning aside to rest in the shade of a cave he 
fell asleep ; after fifty-seven years he woke, looked for his sheep, 
met his younger brother, now a grey-haired man, and learnt the 
truth. : 

The long sleep is usually taken as just one of the marvels 
of the life of Epimenides. The real significance lies deeper. The 
cave in which he went to sleep was no chance cave; it was the 
cave of Diktaean Zeus, The sleep was no chance sleep; it was 
the sleep of initiation. We gather this from the account left us 
by Maximus of Tyre* He tells us that Epimenides was not only 
a marvellous adept in religious matters, but also that he got his 
skill not by learning, and described a long sleep in which he had 
a dream for his teacher. The same authority tells us? that 
Epimenides said when he was lying at mid-day in the cave of 
Diktaean Zeus a deep sleep of many years befell him, and he met 
with the gods and divine intercourse and Truth and Justice. 

Maximus found this a hard saying (Aoyov muictevecOau 
xarerov), but in the light of savage parallels the difficulty 
disappears. Round the figure of Epimenides the new Koures 
are crystallized the ordinary initiation-experiences of a medicine- 
man to-day. Among the tribes of Alice Springs, in Central 
Australia‘, if a man will become a medicine-man he must sleep, 
and must sleep in a special sacred cave. When he feels a call he 
leaves the camp and goes alone till he comes to the mouth of the 
cave. Here with considerable trepidation he lies down to sleep, 
not venturing to go inside lest he should be spirited away for ever. 
Next morning the Jruntarinia or spirit-people are supposed to 
come, make a hole in his tongue, pierce his head from ear to ear, 
carry him into the depths of the cave and there remove his internal 
organs and provide him with a new set. The hole is actually there 

1 Joc. cit. 109. The sources for Epimenides are collected by Diels, Fragmenie 
d. Vorsokratiker, 11. pp. 489 ff. See also Pauly Wissowa, s.v. 
2 ¢, 22, p. 224. Diels, Fragmente, u. p. 494 dewds dé qv radra (Ta Geta) od uadwv, 

aN’ Urvov abréa&x Sinyelro waxpov Kal dvetpov duddoKandov. 
3 ¢. 28, p. 286 ...(uéons yap) quépas év Acxratov Ards r&e dvTpwr Kelwevos Hmrvur 

> 

Babet ern cvxva dvap pn évtvxeiv avros Oeots Kal Be@v byors kal ’AnrnOelae kal Alkne. 
4 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 523. 

54, The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana (cH. 

when the man emerges from the cave. The rest of course happens. 
in the man’s dream or trance. Among some peoples! the necessary 
initiation-sleep is induced by a sleeping draught. 

The rites we are about to examine are then not rites of simple 
tribal initiation, but rather rites of initiation practised by the 
Kouretes in perbaps a later stage of their development as a 
magical fraternity. The Kouretes are now well on their way. 
to become daimones; they will presently become actual gods 
(Gcot), as in Hesiod. Diogenes? says that some reported that the 
Kretans ‘sacrificed to Epimenides as to a god. In historical 
times both -Crete and Thera had a cult: of the Kouretes. The 
colonists of Hierapytna‘ swear not only by a long list of Olympians, 
but by the Kouretes, the Nymphs, and the Korybantes. From 
the mountain village of Hagia Barbaria, on the way to Gortys, has 
come an inscription® in which ‘Ertaios, son of Amnatos, to the 
Kouretes, guardians of kine, fulfils his word and makes a thank- 
offering. Much earlier are the rock inscriptions in Thera*, where 
the Koures, to whom dedication is made, has his name spelt with 
the ancient Koppa. From medicine-man to god was not, as will 
later be seen, a far cry. 

Before we proceed to examine the rites of the medicine-man, 
the Bacchos, a passage in Diodorus’? must be examined, which 
bears on the relation between adolescence and ordination rites. 
After a long discussion of Cretan mythology he says 

The Cretans, in alleging that they handed on from Crete to other peoples 
the dues of the gods, their sacrifices, and the rites appertaining to mysteries, 
bring forward this point as being to their thinking the chief piece of evidence. 
The rite of initiation at Eleusis, which is perhaps the most celebrated of all, 
and the rite of Samothrace, among the Cicones, whence came Orpheus, its 
inventor, are all imparted as mysteries; whereas in Crete, at Knossos, from 

1 Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, p.174: among the tribes of the Lower Congo. 

2 See supra, p. 25. 5 op. cit. 20. 4 Blass in Collitz-Bechtel, 5039. 

5° E]pratos’ Auvdrov Kwpnor rots po kapraumddwy (4)pav kai (xa)pu(o)rnlov, de Sanctis, 
Mon. dei Lincei, xvi11. (1908), p. 178. For the cult of the Kouretes see Prof. Bosan- 
quet, B.S.A. xv. (1908-1909), p. 351 and H. y. Gaertingen, Inschriften von Priene 
1906, p. 136, no. 186, where an inscribed basis commemorates a certain Apollodorus 
as lepytevovra Baciret kai Kotpnow, For the worship of Zeus Kretagenes and the 
Kouretes in Karian towns, see Le Bas, Inschriften, 11, 338, 394, 406. 

6 1.G.1.M.A. ut. 354 ff. 

7 v.77 ...robro Pépovow, ws olovrar, weyorov Texuhpiovs Thy Te yap map’ ’APnvators 
ev’ Edevoie ywouevny TederHy, emipavestarny cxeddv ovcay amacar Kal Thy €v Dapobpaxy 
kal thy év Opdky ev rots Kixoow, b0ev 6 xaradelias Oppeds jv, mroTiKOs mapadidocba., 
Kata 6€ Thy Kpjrnv év Kyaow voupmorv é& dpyalwy elvau pavepas Tas TedeTaS ratras 
mao. mapadidocba, Kal 7a mapa rots dNdots év amopphTw.mapaddoueva map’ avrots undéva 
Kpim@Tew THY Bovdouévwy TA TOLADTA ywwoKeLV. 

* 
¢ 

yor 

Magical Secret Societies ye) 

ancient days it was the custom that these rites should be imparted openly to 
all, and things that among other people were communicated in dead secrecy 
(€v dmoppyt®) among the Cretans, they said, no one concealed from anyone 
who wished to know such matters. 

What seems to be behind this rather obscure statement is 
this. Initiation-rites of adolescence, as contrasted with initiation- 
rites of a magical fraternity, are comparatively public and open? 
Every tribesman has a right to be initiated; nearly every tribes- 
“man is initiated and knows the secrets of initiation. A magical 
fraternity on the other hand is always more or less of a secret 
society. The rites of both sets of initiation are closely analogous?. 
They centre round the new birth, that is the new set of social 
relations, the new soul, and are figured by real sleep or mimic 
death. The rites of adolescence, and probably what we have 
called mother-rites, are primary, the magical fraternity-rites a 
later development. Crete, the mother of initiation-rites in the 
igean, kept the memory of her adolescence-rites and their com- 
parative publicity, but when her initiation-rites passed to Greece 
proper and to Thrace, they had reached the magical fraternity 
stage. They were not only mysteries, but mysterious. 

In the rites described by Euripides we have no mention of a 
new birth, though perhaps this is implied by the new name given, 
‘Bacchos.’ The candidate has to hold aloft the torches of the 
Mountain Mother, and he has to accomplish two things, the Feasts 
of Raw Flesh and the Thunders of night-wandering Zagreus. 
The torch-light dance or procession upon the mountains (opec- 
Bdoua) is sufficiently known from the Bacchae. The Feasts of 
Raw Flesh (@podayia) will be later discussed*. It is the first- 
named rite, the rite of the Thunders (Spovrai), which has long 
been held to be unintelligible, and on which we must now focus 
our attention. It will provide us with material for a sensible 
advance in the understanding of the origins of Greek and any 
other religion. 

1 This has been clearly brought out by M. Lévy-Bruhl in his Fonctions M entales 
dans les Sociétés Infériewres, p. 417, entirely without reference to the passage of 
Diodorus, ‘l’initiation des novices en général est imposée @ tous, elle est relativement 

_ publique...’ i ee Rie 

2 Lévy-Bruhl, op. cit. p. 417 ‘la ressemblance entre les épreuves de | initiation 
des sorciers ou shamans et celles de initiation des novices de la tribu en général 
est frappante.’ 4 ; 

3 Prolegomena, pp. 479—497.. A full discussion of the douopayla will come best 

v hen we reach the question of sacrifice in chapter v. 

ent ak 

Po ie mee bce ue AND, Oe ie bs Pees SS ES are a ee, 

Se The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana _ [on. 

THE RITE OF THE ‘ THUNDERS.’ 

‘ 
kal vukturddov Zaypéos Bpovras 
Tedéaas. 

‘Having accomplished the Thunders of night-wandering 
Zagreus. What are the Thunders, and how can they be 
accomplished? No answer was forthcoming, so not unnaturally 
scholars proceeded to emend Spovrds!. Following Prof. Gilbert 
Murray’s advice I kept the text? and waited for further evidence 
as to its interpretation. 

Light came from an unexpected quarter. In investigating 

thunderbolts I was referred to a passage, again, oddly enough, in 
Porphyry. Pythagoras, Porphyry® tells us, in the course of his 
journey from Asia Minor to Italy came to Crete. There he met 
on landing some of the Mystae of Morgos, one of the Idaean 
Daktyls, by whom he was initiated into their rites. The first rite 
he underwent. at their hands was purification, and this purification 
was effected by—the thunderbolt or thunder-stone. 

A thunder-stone* is not so strange an implement of purification 
as it might at first sight appear. Celts or stone-axes over a large 
portion of the civilized world are, by a strange blunder, taken to 
be thunderbolts—weapons shot down by the sky-god. Such 

* Porphyry (De Abst. tv. 19), who preserves the fragment for us—as a text on 
which to preach vegetarianism—has Bpovrds. The MSS. follow him with the 
exception of the Leipzig MS., which has Bpords. Lobeck (see Nauck, ad loc.) 
suggests omovdds, which may be rejected as of impossible violence. Valens reads 
Siords, which is feeble in sense. The most plausible suggestion is Diels’ Botras= 
ox-herd. Dieterich (De Hymnis Orphicis, p. 11) accepts Bovras, holding Bpovrds 
to be hopeless: ‘perperam traditur Bpovrds praeclare emendavit Dielesius.’ The 
praeclare is juster than the perperam. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Griechische 
Dichterfragmente, p. 77, note 1) follows Diels, interpreting. Botras as BovkéXos 
The temptation to adopt Bo'ras is severe. In the omophagia a wild bull was 
hunted and eaten; the bull-forms of Dionysos are familiar, his followers are known 
to have been called Bovxédx, at Athens we have a BovkoNetov, and indeed an actual 
Bodrns ee) ners ped we Erechtheion. But had the original reading been 

ovras it is hard to see why the unintelligible Bpovrds should h i 
. 2 Prolegomena, p. 480, note 1. 4 ce aye beat Sean 
® Vit. Pyth. 17 Kparns 8 ériBas rots Mépyou ptoras évds r&v ISalwy Aaxrtdwy bg’ 
ev kal éxabdpOn 77 Kepavvia Ow. q 

4 For the superstitions that gather round thunder-stones, an 
thunder-stones, see H. Martin’s La Foudre dans UAntiquité, 1866, and P, Saint Yve’ 
Talismans et reliques tombés du ciel, in Revue des Etudes Ethnographiques &; 
Sociologiques, 1909, p. 1. See also Sir John Evans, Ancient Stone Implements 
p. 59, E. B. Tylor, Karly History of Man, 2nd edit. p. 226, and Cartailhac ; 
nterre dans les souvenirs et superstitions populaires, 

d for celts as supposed 

o) Lage de 

—— ee 

f j 5 
f. . , 
ee eT 

a lle 

The Thunder-Rites 57 

stones are called to-day by the modern Greek peasant ‘lightning- 

axes’ (aotporedéxia, a shortened form of dotparrorenéxia?). 
_ Great is their value as charms against thunder, similia similibus, 
_to keep milk sweet, to cure rheumatism and the like. 

The celt reproduced in Fig. 6 is a curious illustration of the 
use of these supposed thunder-stones in 
mysteries. It was found in the Argolid, 
and is now in the Central Museum at 
Athens. The inscription? cannot be in- 
terpreted, and is probably of the Abraxas 
order, but it is clear that the scene repre- 
sented has to do with Mithraic mysteries. 
We have the slaying of the holy bull, and, 
below, a figure that looks like a Roman 
soldier bearing a rod surmounted by an 
eagle, is received by a priest: the soidier 
is probably qualifying to become an ‘ Eagle.’ 

Porphyry? then goes on to enumerate 
the various ceremonies gone through during Hee. 
initiation. Pythagoras had to wear a wreath 
of black wool, to lie face foremost near the sea for a whole night 

and, finally, like Epimenides, to go down into the cave of Idaean 
Zeus, probably a great underground cavern on Mount Dikte. 

There he had to spend thrice nine days, and then at last he was 
allowed to gaze on the throne which year by year was draped for 
Zeus. There was on Dikte a tomb as well as a throne, since 
Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras engraved an inscription on it 
as follows: ‘Pythagoras to Zeus’—and the beginning of what he 

wrote was: 

Here died Zan and lies buried, whom they call Zeus, 

1 Prof, Bosanquet kindly tells me that in Crete stone-axes are specially abundant 
on the mountains. Near Palaikastro many are picked up on the now denuded 
limestone. 

2 This inscription is inaccurately reproduced by Perrot and Chipiez, Gréce 
Primitive, vol. v1. p. 119, Fig. 5. The first four letters as given by them are Baxx, 
which led me to hope that the word inscribed was Bdéxxos, but Mr R. M. Dawkins 
was good enough to examine the actual stone and to send me the inscription 
corrected. The drawing in Fig. 6, with the correct inscription, I owe to the kind- 
ness of Mrs Hugh Stewart. 

3 Loc. cit. supra wher perv mapa Oardrry mpnvis éxrabels, viKTwp dé mapa Troraum 
dpvevod uédavos waddors éorepavwuévos. els d€ 7d’Idatov kadovpmevov dvTpov KaTaBas épva 
éxwv pérava Tas vousfoudvas rpls évvéa hudpas éxet duerpiper kal Kabyyiocer T@ Aud rov 

Se, eh a ee" oe =a 

58 The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana _ (cH. 

an inscription which reminds us of another divine being whose 
tomb Zeus took over: 

Here died Pikos and lies buried, who is also Zeus! 

After all these solemnities the final apocalypse of an empty 
throne falls rather flat. Why is the throne draped if it is to 
remain empty? Was the throne really empty? Probably not. 
Zeus in human shape was not seated thereon, otherwise we should 
have been told, but his throne may on certain occasions have been 
tenanted by a symbol as awe-inspiring as, or even more than, 
himself,—his thunderbolt. 

The two coins in Fig. 7 suggest this? The first is from 
Seleukeia Pieria’, the date probably early in the first century B.C. 

Silver Tetradrachm of Seleukeia Denarius of Antoninus 
Pieria. Pius. Rev. 

Fre; 7. 

The reverse shows a large thunderbolt with fillet attached, lying 
on a cushion on a throne; the legend is TEAEVKEQN THS 
IEPA2 KAI AVTONOMOV. The turreted head on the obverse is 
supposed to be the Tyche of Seleukeia. The second coin figured 
is a denarius of Antoninus Pius, and also shows a thunderbolt 
resting on a spread throne. Closely analogous in idea, though 

TE oTopvimevoy airs Kar’ eros Opdvoy €Bedoaro, émiypayyd 7 évexdpatev émt TS TAdw 
emiypawas ‘Mudaydpas 73 Aut,’ ob 1 apxy “Q6e Oavav xetrar Zdv, dv Ala KtkKAHoKOVoW. 

1 Suidas, s.v. IIikos: év0dde Kerra Oaveov...Itkos 6 kal Leds. See p. 109. 

® The coins reproduced are in the possession of Mr A. B. Cook, and will be 
discussed in his forthcoming book on Zeus, He very kindly allows me to anticipate 
their publication. 

3 Cf. Brit. Mus. Cat. Gk. Coins, Syria, pp. 270f. Pl. xxxm. 6 and 8. The 
thunder-cult of Seleukeia Pieria is well known. Appian in his History of Syria 
(c. 56) says of the inhabitants of Seleukeia OpyoKover kal tuvoder Kat voy Kepavvér. 
Keraunos had annually appointed priests, kepavvopédpor, with whom may perhaps be 
compared the \.Ooédpos, who had a seat in the Dionysiac theatre at Athens. See 
my Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. 274. 

my Child and Thunderstone’ 59 

_ not in style, is a Graeco-Roman relief (Fig. 8), now in the museum 
at Mantua’. Here again we have the spread throne, the thunder- 
bolt ; the only addition is an eagle. 

_- The thunderbolt was to the primitive Greek not the symbol — 
or attribute of the god, but itself the divine thing, the embodi- | 
ment and vehicle of the god. As such, long after Zeus had taken 
on full human form in literature, it held its place in cultus, not 
as a weapon in the hand of the human god, but actually occupying | 

5 
- 
his throne. This identity of the two is specially manifest in the 
7 F(A 

Fie. 8. 

figure of the infant Zagreus. In the terracotta relief from the 
- Palazzo Colonna, reproduced in Fig. 3, we have seen three dancing 
Kouretes or Korybantes who clash their shields over the infant 
Zeus. Near him, lying on the ground, is a thunderbolt, his vehicle, 
his equivalent rather than his attribute. 
The human child completely replaces the thunderbolt. On 
the ivory relief? from Milan (Fig. 9) the child is seated on the 
throne once held by the thunderbolt. This relief though late 
embodies a primitive form of the myth. It is matriarchal and 
tribal in sentiment.. We have the Mother and Child, the Kouretes 
and their correlatives the Satyrs, but the Father is nowhere 
represented. 
The fact that child and thunder-stone were one and the same 
= deep-rooted in myth as well as ritual. Hesiod? knew it, 

1H. Braun, Kunstmythologie, Taf. 6. 
_ 2 Arch. Zeit. 1846, Taf. 38; with this relief may be compared the child on the 

throne in the coin of Magnesia, p. 241. 
_ 3 Hes. Theog. 485 rw dé omapyavicaca méyav NOov éyyuddueev. 

i a 

60 

The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana _ [cH. 

x 

Ivory relief from Milan. 

Fic. 9. 

at least subconsciously. When 
Kronos was about to swallow 
Zeus, what is it that Rhea gives 
him and that he really swallowed ? 
A stone in swaddling clothes. On 
the well-known relief! on the 
Capitoline altar Rhea is figured 
with the swaddled stone in her 
hands, offering it to Kronos. 
When the appointed time came 
‘that stone which he had swal- 
lowed last he vomited forth first 
and Zeus set it up in goodly 
Pytho as a sign and a marvel? 
In goodly Pytho it was seen by 
Pausanias?; it was anointed with 
oil day by day, and had a yearly 
festival. It was not till the stone 
was vomited up that the thunder 
and lightning were let loose4, 
Long before Zeus was Zeus, 
thunder and lightning were, in a 
sense to be considered presently, 
divine potencies, their vehicle 
was a thunder-stone; by such a 
thunder-stone was Pythagoras 
purified, on such a thunder-stone 

did he gaze in the Diktaean 
cave. 

1 Overbeck, Kunstmythologie, Atlas iii, 
24, 
* Hes. Theog. 496 

mp@rov 6’ éeluecoe Nov, TUMaTor Kara- 
Tivay: 

Tov peév Leds ortpie xara xXPovds evipu- 
odelns 

TlvOot éy dyabén yuddous taro Tlapyncoto 

onw euev éoricw Gaiua Ovnroitcr Bpo- 
Tool. : 

bey ALN ly. 

* See Prof. Gilbert Murray’s illumi- 
nating analysis and interpretation of the 

confused Hesiodic account in Anthropology 
and the Classics, p, 86. 

The Bull-Roarer a 61 

Given then a rite in which the catechumen is purified by a 
thunder-stone and which has for its culmination the probable, if 
not certain, dvaxaduvwus of a thunderbolt on a throne, was it in 
human nature not to heighten the dramatic effect by adding the 
sound of simulated thunder ? 

Here again we are not left to conjecture: we have definite 

—s 

evidence that in certain mystery-rites thunder was actually 

imitated by bull-voiced mimes, by drums and other apparatus. 
Strabo! in his account of the Kouretes mentions that Aeschylus? 
in the lost Hdoni says that the instruments of Kotys were used 
by the Thracians in their orgies of Dionysos. Kotys is but a 
Thraco-Phrygian form of the Mountain Mother to whom the 
Cretan mystic expressly states he held aloft the torches. She was 
variously called Kotys, Bendis, Rhea, Kybele. After describing 
the din made by the ‘mountain gear’ of Kotyto, the maddening 
hum of the bombykes, the clash of the bronze cymbals and the 
twang of strings, Aeschylus goes on ‘ And bull-voices roar thereto 
Jrom somewhere out of the unseen, fearful semblances, and from 
a drum an image as it were of thunder underground is borne on the 
air heavy with dread.’ 

Real thunder cannot be had to order; mimic thunder can, and 
we know was. Nor is it easy to imagine a more efficient instru- 
ment of éxmAnéis. We know the very instrument with which 
in ancient days mimic thunder was manufactured, the famous 
Bull-roarer or pouBos, the sound of whose whirring is mystical, 
awe-inspiring, and truly religious. It is like nothing in the world 
but itself, perhaps the nearest approach is the ominous sound of 
a rising storm-wind or angry imminent thunder. The rhombos is 
carefully described by the scholiast? on Clement of Alexandria in 
commenting on the passage quoted above, in which he describes 
‘the wholly inhuman mysteries of Dionysos Zagreus. The 
rhombos, says the scholiast, is ‘a bit of wood to which a string 

1 x, 470. 
2 Nauck, Frg. 57 
Taupbpboyyor 5 vromuKavrai 
modev €& dpavots poBepot utwor 
tumavou 6° elk wad’ vroyatov 
Bpovris péperar BapuvrapBys. a , 
3 Ad Clemens Alex. Cohort. p. 5 ‘Kavos kat pduBos’ Evddpiov ot é&fmrar 7 
omaptiov kal év rais Tederais édovetro lva forty. See Lobeck, Aglaoph. p. 700. The 
scholiast professes to explain xdvos but as Mr A. B. Cook kindly pointed out to me 
k&vos is obviously some form of spinning top. The object described as a bit of 
wood with a string through it is obviously a rhombos or Bull-Roarer. The 

a _ 

er ee ee PRT eed 

62 The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana  [0H. 4 

is tied, and it is whirled round and round at initiation-rites to 
make a whirring sound.’ 
In the mysteries of Zagreus, then, as practised by the Kouretes 
and Idaean Daktyls, the initiated man (1) was purified by a 
hunderbolt, (2) heard mimic thunder, (8) probably beheld a 
thunderbolt on a throne. After these experiences, he may, I think, 
1 fairly be said to have ‘accomplished the Thunders.’ 
ar 

To elucidate the general principle of man’s reaction on the 
outside world, which is the main object of the present chapter, we 
could examine no better instance than the Thunder-Rites. 

The Thunder-Rites of Zagreus occur, it has been seen, in the 
initiation of a Bacchos or medicine-man. It will be remembered 
that among the Wiradthuri they occur during rites of adolescence. 
After what has been said of the analogy between the two this is 
not surprising. When the gist of the Thunder-Rite has been 
once grasped it will be abundantly clear thatatany and every 
ceremony of initiation a Thunder-Rite is appropriate. pi 

What purpose do they serve? What is their religious function 2 

The Greeks, says a Christian Father, worship (@epamedover) 
the thunderbolt. The statement causes us something of a shock. 
The Greeks of classical days regarded the thunderbolt as the 
weapon of Zeus the Sky-God, as his attribute, but assuredly they 
did not regard the thunder as itself a full-blown personal god}. 
Nor does the Christian Father say they did. All he states is that 
they ‘worshipped’ the thunderbolt, that is, had a cult of it, tended 
it, attended to it, made it the object of ‘ religious’ care. 

Religion has been defined as ‘l’ensemble des pratiques qui 
concernent les choses sacrées’; so far as it goes the definition is 
excellent, but it only pushes the difficulty a step further back. 

bibliography of the Bull-Roarer is. fully given by Dr Frazer, Golden Bough? 
vol. 11. note 1. The first to draw attention to the importance of the savage Bull: 
Roarer in connection with Greek initiation-rites was Mr Andrew Lang, Custom and 
Myth, 1884, pp. 39—41, 51—55. To the authorities here given must now be added 
ae Sa by at He paearett Savage Supreme Beings and the Bull- 
oarer 1 ert Journa an, a A J 
@ Australie, Introduction, pp. lxviii ff. aebhierar ae oS me 
j Tn imperial days a personal Keraunos was made the object i 
in our sense. In remote Arcadia Pausanias notes (vii. 29, ay fa RS oo ee 
they offered sacrifice to Lightnings, Storms and Thunders ( f 
Ové\Aas kal Bpovrais). Appian (Syr. 58) 
Tas Dedevkelas olklfovre ri wey éml TH Badd 
ToUTO Gedy avrots Kepauvov e0ero, kai OpnoKed 

2 Ovovew ’Acrpamats Kal 
writes ¢acl d¢ aire (Seleukos Nikator) 
gon dwonulay iryhocacba Kepavvo Kal dua 
over kal tuvovor Kal vov Kepavvér, 

Sanctity is pre-theological = 63 

The cardinal question remains, what do we mean by the word 
sacred}? . 

In bygone days the answer would have been prompt and 
simple, the thunderbolt is sacred because it belonged. to a god. 
The god is presupposed and from him comes the sanctity. We 
now know, from a study of the customs and representations of 
primitive peoples, that, broadly speaking, the reverse is true, a 
thing is regarded as sacred, and out of that sanctity, given certain 
conditions, emerges a daimon and ultimately a god. Le sacré, 
cest le pere du dieu. This comes out very clearly in the attitude 
of the Wiradthuri towards the Bull-Roarer. 

Before initiation no boy may behold a Bull-Roarer. He and 
the women hear from a distance the awful unearthly whirring 
sound. At the moment of initiation the novices are closely 
covered with blankets and the fearsome din breaks upon them in 
complete darkness. The roaring, boys and women are told, 
represents the muttering of thunder, and the thunder—this is the 
important point—is the voice of Dhuramoolan. ‘Thunder,’ said 
Umbara headman of the Yuin tribe?, ‘is the voice of Him (and 
he pointed upwards to the sky) calling on the rain to fall and 
everything to grow up new.’ 

Now here we have the Bull-Roarer explained, for the edifica- 
tion of the women and children, as a more or less anthropomorphic 
being, a kind of Sky-God; but note this important point. When 
the boy is actually initiated the central mystery takes the form of 
a revelation (amoxadvwis) of the Bull-Roarer, the boy sees and 
handles it, and learns to twirl it; it is not, he finds, the voice of 
Dhuramoolan the Sky-God, it is a Bull-Roarer. Women and 
children must be told the myth of Dhuramoolan, but the grown 
man has done with theology. Now we should expect that with 
the god will go the sanctity. Not at all; the sanctity did not 
arise from the god, and it survives him. Wherein resides the 

1 

: 
4 

7 

Sn Pe 

sanctity ? 
_ The sanctity of the Bull-Roarer and of all sacred things will 
be found I think at the outset to contain two factors, the sense 

1 BH. Durkheim, Définition des phénoménes religieux, p. 17, in Année Sociologique, 
m1. (1898). - , 
; t Hes and throughout my discussion of the Bull-Roarer I am much indebted 
to Mr R. R. Marett’s Savage Supreme Beings and the Bull-Roarer, Hibbert Journal, 
Jan. 1910. 

aa 

64 The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana [CH. 
of fear or perhaps it would be better called awe, and the sense of 
force, power, effectiveness. The awesomeness of the Bull-Roarer 
is known to all who have heard it; it possesses in a high degree 
the quality of uncanniness. Heard in the open sunlight it sends 
a shudder through even modern nerves; on temperaments more 
primitive, more excitable, more suggestible, heard in the darkness 
of the rites of ‘night-haunting Zagreus’ its effect might well be 
one of frenzy’. 

‘The feare of things invisible is the naturall seed of Religion,’ 
said Hobbes, and he spoke truly, but his statement requires some 
modification or rather amplification. It is not the fear of the 
individual savage that begets religion, it is fear felt together, fear 
emphasized, qualified, by a sort of social sanction. Moreover fear 
does not quite express the emotion felt. It is rather awe, and awe 
contains in it the element of wonder as well as fear?; awe is on the 
way to be reverence, and reverence is essentially religious. It is 
remote entirely from mere blind panic, it is of the nature of 
attraction rather than repulsion. The Point Barrow natives® are 
afraid of the Aurora Borealis, they think it may strike them in 
the back of the neck. So they brandish knives and throw filth to 
drive it away. It is a little difficult to call the act religious. The 
famous Primus in orbe deos fecit timor of Lucretius is the truth, 
but not the whole truth. Moreover the fear which has gone to 
the making of religion is at least as much social as physical‘, 

This brings us to the second factor in sanctity, the factor 
which I think differentiates awe from mere fear, the recognition 
of force, power, effectiveness. This comes out very clearly in the 
case of the Bull-Roarer. The Bull-Roarer has of course in itself 
no power, but its roaring is like the roaring of thunder, and to this 
day a Bull-Roarer is called in Scotland a ‘thunner spell.’ Because 
the Bull-Roarer makes the sound of thunder, has the same quality 

- Aisch, Frg. Edoni, Nauck, Frg. 57 Havlas émraywyov duokhay. 
* As to the individual psychology of religion I follow mainly Mr W. McDougall, 

An Introduction to Social Psychology ; see especially the excellent chapter (x11. on 
The Instinctive Bases of Religion. “ ‘ — 

3 Marett, Threshold of Religion, 
p. 432. 

4 For this religion of fear and wonder Mr 
name teratism, which would be excellen 
forces of fertility. 

p. 15, from Murdoch, Point Barrow Expedition, 

Marett (op. cit. p. 18) suggests the 
t but that it leaves no place for the gentler 

Se PR ER Ee Se ee NN ee ee ee a eee ee ee 

“m] The Thunderstorm and the Bull-Roarer 65 

as thunder, that is, psychologically produces the same reactions, it 
as thunder. 

To us a thunderstorm is mainly a thing of terror, a thing to 
be avoided, a thing ‘not to go out in’ We get abundant and 
superabundant rain without thunderstorms. But an occasional 
drought broken up by thunderstorms helps us to realize what 
thunder and the Bull-Roarer which makes thunder mean to the 
Central Australian, where ‘a thunderstorm causes the desert to 
blossom as a rose truly as if by magic’ The thunder, as the 
headman said, ‘caused the -rain to fall and everything to grow up 
new.’ Now we realize its virtue in the adolescence rite; it gives 
the boys ‘more power,’ they not only grow up, but grow up new. 
The Bull-Roarer is as it were the rite incarnate. The Bull-Roarer 
is the vehicle not of a god or even of a spirit, but of unformulated 
uncanny force, what Mr Lang? calls a ‘ Powerful Awful’ 

The awful, the uncanny, the unknown, is within man rather 
than without. In all excited states, whatever be the stimulant, 
whether of sex or intoxication, or vehement motion as in dancing, 
man is conscious of a potency beyond himself, yet within himself, 
he feels himself possessed, not by a personal god—he is not yet 
év0eos—but by an exalted power. The power within him he does 

not, cannot, at first clearly distinguish from the power without, 

and the fusion and confusion is naturally helped when the emotion 
is felt collectively in the group. This fusion of internal will and 
energy with external power? is of the very essence of the notion of 
sanctity and is admirably seen in the Bull-Roarer. The initiated 
boy when taught to twirl the Bull-Roarer feels himself actually 
making the Thunder, his will and energy and action conspire 
with its uncanny potency. There is no clear severance; he is 
conscious of control, he can alter the pace and thereby the 
weird sounds, he is a Thunder-maker and we are landed straight 
into Magic. 

1 Mr R. R. Marett, op. cit. p. 406, and Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-Kast 
Australia, 1904, p. 538. ; 

2 See Preanimistic Religion, The Contemporary Review, 1909, p. 589. Mr Lang 
denies a pre-Animistic stage of religion. The case for pre-Animism is well stated 
by Mr E. Clodd in his Pre-Animistic Stages in Religion, a paper read before the 
Third International Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford, 1908. 

3 It will be seen in chapter v., when we come to discuss totemism and sacrifice, 
that primitive man’s lack of power to draw intellectual distinctions lies at the back 
of many religious phenomena, 

H. 5 

eee wee ory Pry ee ee ee ati oh s ails 
= 9 ¥ x 

It ds 

66 The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana _ [CH. 

But before examining Magic it is interesting to note that this 
notion of the ‘sacred’ which we have resolved into the fearful and 
the effective, and have seen to be the result of man’s emotion 
projected into external nature, is wide-spread among primitive 
peoples and has given rise to an instructive terminology. It is 
indeed in examining this terminology that we best seize and fix 
the Protean shape of the ‘sacred.’ We have so far focused 
attention on the Bull-Roarer because it is a singularly illumi- 
nating instance of sanctity, and of a sanctity actually observable 
in Greece, but we must now extend the field of vision to a more 
comprehensive sanctity as expressed in savage languages. Almost 
all savages have some word by which they express. a force or 
power which seems to them uncanny, something which arrests 
their attention and rouses in them a feeling of awe. One or two 
of these words will repay a closer investigation. 

We begin with the word orenda? in use among the Iroquois of 
North America, which in some ways seems least mysterious, 
nearest to ordinary natural power. A man’s orenda is his power 
to do things, almost his personality, yet remaining impersonal. 
A man who hunts well has much orenda; when a man is in a 
rage great is his orenda. A man’s orenda is very like the Greek 
Oupds and pévos, bodily life, vigour, passion, power, the virtue that 
is in you to feel and do, also to know, for it is by his orenda that 
the medicine-man learns the secrets of the future. Orenda is 
nowise confined to man. It is further the material of magical 
action. When a storm is brewing the rain-maker is preparing its 
orenda. Orenda is in the notes of birds. A shy bird hard to 
catch has fine orenda. The orenda of man is pitted against the 
orenda of his prey; the orenda of one man in battle or in games 
is pitted against that of another. The orenda of the. rabbit 
controls the snow and fixes the depth to which it is to fall. Orenda 
is often, as already seen, like a mere natural force, but here we see 
its non-natural side. Again when the maize is ripening the 
Iroquois knows the real, natural cause, the sun’s heat. But he 
knows more; it is the cigala makes the sun to shine and the 

1H. S. Hartland, Presidential Address to Anthropological Section of British 

= bition. “Vouk : side : ; 
ae ae , 1906, p. 5, quoting J. N. B. Hewitt in American Anthropologist, 

Fe Oe a ee ee PT ary ee Te a 

Orenda and Manas 67 

cigala does it by chirping, by uttering his orenda. Generally 
orenda seems to be good, but if a man has died from witchcraft; 
‘an evil orenda has struck him.’ 

The mana? of the Melanesians is very like orenda, but seems 
to be somewhat more specialized?. - All men do not possess 
mana, though it seems mainly to originate in personal human 
beings. Spirits and ghosts are apt to possess mana, but all ghosts 
do not possess it, only ghosts that are specially potent, Tindalos. 
The word mana is adjective as well as substantive, it is indeed 
very adjectival in its nature; qualities seem almost like specialized 
forms of mana. A man’s social position depends mainly on the 
amount of mana he has, either naturally or by virtue‘ of cere- 
monies of initiation. All this sounds rather abstract, yet on the 
other hand mana has a certain fluid substantiveness. It can be 
communicated from stone to stone. Asked to describe mana one 
savage will say it is ‘heavy,’ another that it is ‘hot/ a third that 
it is ‘strange, uncommon,’ A man finds a queer looking stone, 
puts it near his yams or in his pig-sty, pigs and yams prosper, 

clearly the stone had mana for pigs and yams. Sometimes it 

seems to stand for mere vague greatness. In Mangarevan any 
number over forty is mana mana mana, aptly rendered by 
Mr Marett® as an ‘awful’ lot. Here we have the unknown 
bordering on the supernatural, though as has been well remarked 
nothing to the savage is so natural as the ‘supernatural.’ Perhaps 
the term super-usual would be safer as having no connotation of 
‘natural law.’ 

This vague force in man and in almost everything is constantly 
trembling on the verge of personality. The medicine-men of the 
Australian Dieri* are Kutchi; when one of the Dieri sees a circling 
dust-storm near the camp great is his terror, for there is Kutchi. 
He hurls his boomerang and kills Kutch and flies for terror after- 
wards. ‘ Kutcht growl along a me, by and by me tumble down.’ 

' Codrington, The Melanesians, 1891, pp. 118—120 and p. 192. wets 5 
-® Any attempt to distinguish between the mana, orenda and the like is evidently 

precarious, since we are liable to be misled by the emphasis on special usages of 
the word as noted by particular observers. ‘ 

3 W. R. Halliday, The Force of Initiative in Magical Conflict, in Folk-Lore xxt. 
(1910), p. 148. ee 

4 Miss Hope Mirrlees calls my attention to Chaucer’s use of the word vertu, with 
meanings closely analogous to those of mana and almost as various. 

5 Threshold of Religion, p. 122. 

5 Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 446. 

-. Bs 

7, i a eM el ead Cy 2k 2 te SOEs pute eat 

68 The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana [ CH. 

Here is a self-projected terror on the way to become a god. Yet 
we cannot, even though we supply him with a capital letter and a 
personal pronoun, call Kutcha really a god; Kutchi is a general 
term for the ‘superusual.’ So the Kaffir unkulunkulu is translated 
as ‘the old, old one’ or ‘the great, great one’ and the heart 
of the orthodox anthropologist leaps up to meet a primitive, 
personal god, an All-Father, ‘Savage Supreme Being’; yet 
we are assured by those most at home in the language and 
thought of the Kaffirs that wnkulunkulu in its native form implies 
no personality. 

The savage, like the child, passes from the particular to the 
general; the mature and civilized mind well supplied with ready- 
made abstractions is apt to start from generalities. To the savage 
this stone or tree or yam has mana or orenda, that is what 
concerns him; but gradually,—and this is another high road to 
impersonation—from the multitude of things that have mana, 
there arises the notion of a sort of continuum of mana, a world of 
unseen power lying behind the visible universe, a world which is 
the sphere, as will be seen, of magical activity and the medium of 
mysticism. The mystical element, the oneness and continuousness 
comes out very clearly in the notion of Wa-kon’-da among the 
Sioux Indians. This continwum, rather felt than formulated, is 
perhaps primitive man’s first effort at generalization’. 

The conception of Wa-kon’-da has been so carefully observed 
and the rites connected with it recorded in detail by Miss Alice 
Fletcher during thirty years’ residence among the Omaha Indians 
that it will be best briefly to resume her account. The Wa-kon’-da 
rites and beliefs are specially instructive to us because thunder, 
from the sanctity of which our enquiry began, is one of the most 
usual and significant manifestations of Wa-kon’-da. ‘The Omahas 
regard all animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena, as pervaded 
by a common life, which was continuous and similar to the will- 
power they were conscious of in themselves. This mysterious 
power in all things they called Wa-kon’-da, and through it all 
things were related to man, and to each other. In the idea of the 
continuity of life, a relation was maintained between the seen 

1 It does not follow that the conce 

ti neg ey 
stratum of Melanesian culture; ption of mana belonged to the most primitive 

\ a ; see Dr Rivers in his identi 
Anthropological Section of the British Association, 191i, p. 5 a aa 

" 

4 

A i 

reas 

- 
te 

ea 

I a eS Fe Pe Ee Pe a eel! 

Wa-kon’-da . 69 

and the unseen, the dead and the living, and also between the 
fragment of anything and its entirety 

Any man may at any time seek to obtain Wa-kon’-da by the 
‘rite of the vision.’ He will go out alone, will fast, chant incanta- 
tions, seek to fall into a trance, till finally he sees some object, 
a feather, a tuft of hair, a small black stone—the symbol of thunder, 
or a pebble which represents water. This object henceforward he 
will carry about with him. To him it is henceforth, not an object 
of worship, but a sort of credential, a pledge, a fragment as it 
were of Wa-kon’-da, connecting him with the whole power 
represented by whatever form appeared to him in his vision. 
Certain religious societies were based on these visions. The 
men to whom a bear had appeared formed the Bear society, 
those to whom the black stone appeared became the Thunder 
society. ' 
Miss Fletcher constantly insists that Wa-kon’-da is not a person. 
Yet Wakon’-da is very human; it can pity, man can appeal to it, 
adjure its help. Wa-kon’-da is invisible. ‘No man,’ said the 
tribal elder, ‘has ever seen Wa-kon’-da.’ Perhaps the nearest we 
can get to understanding Wa-kon’-da is to think of it as life— 
invisible life—too all-pervading ever to be personal. This comes 

-out very clearly in the initiation-rites of the Omaha. It has 

already been noted that in examining religious facts we have to 
take account not only of man’s reactions to and relations with his 
fellow-men, but also of his reactions to and relations with the 
non-human world, the external universe. It is to induce and safe- 
guard these relations that the Omaha initiations to be now 
considered are largely devised. 

The first initiation takes place on the fourth day after birth. 

_ Before it takes place the child is regarded as part of its mother, it 
has no separate existence, no personal name. The rite is one of 

introduction to the cosmos, To the sun and moon, the thunder 
and the clouds, the hills, the earth, the beasts, the water, the 

1 A, CO, Fletcher, The Significance of the Scalp-Lock, Journal of Anthropological 
Studies, xxvir. (1897-8), p. 436. It is Miss Fletcher’s admirable practice to have 
her accounts of ritual, ete., retranslated into Omaha and to submit them for 
criticism to some elder among the natives; the danger of misconception is thereby 
minimized. 

ee Oat ee er a pa) YAO, Wa, eo Oe 

70 The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana (cH. 

formal announcement is made that a new life is among them; they 
are asked, or rather adjured, to accept and cherish it. The refrain 
after each clause comes : 

Consent ye, consent ye all, I implore. 

The second rite comes when the child is between two and 
three years old. It is specially significant in relation to the 
notion of Wa-kon’-da. When the child first speaks, first walks, it 
is regarded as a manifestation of life, of Wa-kon'-da. The speaking 
and walking are in fact called Wa-kon’-da. It is only these first 
manifestations that are so called. If later a child falls sick 
and gets better the restored life is never called Wa-kon’-da. 
This second ceremony differs from the first in that it is also 
an initiation into the tribe. It takes place ‘after the first 
thunder in the spring-time, when the grass is well up and the 
birds singing,’ 

_ The only ritual necessary for the child, boy or girl, is a pair 
of new moccasins, now to be worn for the first time. Great sanctity 
attaches to these moccasins, they cannot be given away or ex- 
changed. The mother comes with her child to the sacred hut set 
up for the purpose, but the child must enter it alone, bearing his 
moccasins. Then follow six incantations, each ending with a roll 
of ‘mimic thunder. in a minor key.. During the first song powers 
are invoked to come from the four cardinal points. During the 
second song a tuft of hair is shorn from the crown of the child’s 
head and laid by the priest in a sacred case: but as we learn from 
the words of the song addressed to the Thunder as Grandfather, 

the lock and with it the life of the child pass into the keeping 
of the Thunder : 

Grandfather! there far above, on high, 
The hair like a shadow dark flashes before you. 

_In the third song it is proclaimed. that the power of death as 
well as life lies with Wa-kon’-da: 

What time I will, then only then, 

A man lies dead a gruesome thing, 
What time I will, then, suddenly, 

A man lies dead a gruesome thing. 

(The Thunder rolls.) 

ae 

a a a Pe 

- 

: 1] . Omaha Initiation-Rites 71 

The fourth song accompanies the putting on of the moccasins ; 
its gist is: 

In this place has the truth been declared to you, 

Now therefore arise! go forth in its strength. 

So far the main element of the rite is consecration to the 
thunder-god, the supreme Wa-kon’-da. Next comes a ceremony 
the gist of which, like the earlier ceremony, is to naturalize the 
child in the universe. Boys only are consecrated to the thunder- 
spirit, who is also the war-spirit ; but the next ceremony is open to 
girls. It is called Dhi-ku-win-he, ‘Turning the child.’ The priest 
takes the child to the east of the fire in the hut, then lifting it by 
the shoulders carries it to the south, lets its feet rest on a stone or 
buffalo skull, a sort of omphalos placed there for the purpose. 
There the priest turns the child completely round, then carries it 
to the west, the north, the east again, turning it upon the stone at 
each point while the fifth song is sung: 

Turned by the winds goes the one I send yonder, 

Yonder he goes who is whirled by the wind, 

Goes where the four hills of life and the four winds are standing, 

There in the midst of the winds do I send him, 

Into the midst of the winds, standing there. 
(The Thunder rolls.) 

The stone and grass laid on it and the buffalo skull stand for 
earth; the four hills are the four stages of life. Up till now the 
child bore its cradle name. It now takes its ni-ki-e name which 
relates it to its gens. After the turning of the child its ni-ki-e 
name is announced by the priest with a kind of primitive Benedicate 
omnia opera : 

Ye hills, grass, trees—ye creeping things both great and small—I bid you 
hear! This child has thrown away its cradle name. Hi-e. 

The ceremony ends with a fire invocation. The priest picks 
up the bunches of grass, dashes them to the ground, where they 
burst into flames, and as the flames light up the sacred lodge 
the child is dismissed, while the priest sings: 

O hot red fire hasten, 
O haste ye flames to come, 
Come speedily to help me. 

The whole gist of this ‘Turning ceremony’ is the placing of 

the child ‘in the midst of’ those elements that bring life, health, 

ee ee ee *! a TCD Rr fae ee RUM tae ills as bora 

ee ee ee, ee 
a ae le rina _ v: 

— 

72 The Kouretes, Thunder-Rites and Mana  ([CcH. 

fruitfulness, success, in a word Wa-kon’-da. Very early in life the 
child has ‘accomplished the Thunders.’ 

An examination of the words orenda, mana and Wa-kon’-da 
has helped us to realize what is meant by the word ‘sacred’ and 
also in what sense it is possible to ‘ worship’ or rather to ‘attend 
to’ the thunder without any presupposition of a personal thunder- 
god. It remains to ask—Is this notion of ‘sacred’ as something 
charged with force and fear confined to primitive terminology or 
does it survive in the speech of civilized peoples? The Sanscrit 
word Brahman? means to us a holy man of high caste, but if we 
go back to Vedic texts we find that brédhman in the neuter means 
‘charm, rite, formulary, prayer. The caste of the Brahmans is 
nothing but the men who have bréhman, and this is the force, the 
inside power, by which both men and gods act. Certain texts 
further define bréhman as the substance, the heart, the great 
essence of things (pratyantam), that which is most inward. This 
essence of things is the god Brahma. In a word the bréhman of 
ritual, the power or efficacity felt by the worshipper is transformed 
by the Hindu, if he is a theologian, into a god, if he is a philo- 
sopher, into a metaphysical entity. The mystic by the practice of 
yoga, union, becomes bréhman and has thereby attained a magical 
omnipotence. 

Where the Indian loses himself in metaphysics, the Greek, 
being an artist, delights himself with an agalma, the image, the 
imagination of a personal god. But he too starts from Wa-kon’-da 
of the crudest kind, from strength and force. Hesiod? in his 
conscious self is thoroughly orthodox, his theology is emphatically 
and even noisily Olympian. Zeus is to him human-shaped, Father 
of gods and men, Zeus who knoweth imperishable counsels. But 
the theology of Hesiod* is all confused and tangled with the 
flotsam and jetsam of earlier ages, weltering up unawares from 
subconscious depths : 

Styx, Ocean’s daughter did with Pallas wed ; 
Zelos, fair-ankled Nike did she bear 
Within his halls, and next the glorious twain, 

' See Hubert et Mauss, Théorie générale d dat Area Uke ‘ p 
vir. (1902-3), p. 117. 9g é de la Magie, in Année Sociologique, 

* For the kparos re Bla re of Hesiod see Professor Gilb t M si inati 
account'in Anthropology and the Classics, p. 74. patie 
3 Theog. 383. 

eae a ay ee 

aN ee 

fin]. _ Kratos and Bia 73 

Power and Force. Not any house of Zeus 

Is reft of them, nor seat. When he goes forth 
They follow, hard behind, and by the throne 

Of Zeus, Loud-thunderer, stablish they their seat. 

Kratos and Bia, Power and Force, are shadow-figures in a 
mature, flesh and blood theology. They affect us as strange or 
superfluous. Once more they meet us in the Prometheus Bound, 
and, though now completely humanized, they strike the same 
strange chill. Hesiod, we are told, abounds in ‘abstractions,’ 
“personifications’ of qualities. Rather his verse is full of reminis- 
cences, resurgences of early pre-anthropomorphic faith; he is 
haunted by the spirits of ghostly mana and orenda and Wa-kon’-da 
and bréhman. Styx, Cold Shudder, Petrifaction, is married to 
Pallas, who, as we shall later? find, began life as a thunderbolt. 
Cold Shudder, Fear of the Uncanny, almost Tabu, brings forth 
Eager Effort (Zndos) and Achievement; Dominance (Nike), 
and Power and Force are added to the strange phantom crew. 
We seem to have the confused, half forgotten psychology of a 
thunderstorm. 

In this connection it is interesting to note that Kratos, Force, 
is sometimes almost specialized into thunder. It is the strength 
of Zeus. The process of specialization can be watched. When in 
the Oedipus Rex* the chorus adjures Zeus to blast the Plague-God 
they pray, ‘O Thou who wieldest the forces (kparn) of the fire- 
bearing Lightnings, O Father Zeus.’ In the later writer, Cornutus’, 
Kratos is used as the actual equivalent of the thunderbolt: ‘and 

the Kratos which he holds in his right hand.’ 

In the first two chapters we established as a main element in 
religion collective emotion, man’s reaction on his fellow-man. In 
the present chapter we have dwelt chiefly on man’s reaction to 
the universe. We have seen his emotion extend itself, project 
itself into natural phenomena, and noted how this projection 

2 v. 200 @ Tav Tuppopwy 
dorpamay Kparn véuwr, 4 
a@ Led warep, bro o@ POlaov Kepavvy. é i 
3 Cornut. 10. 13 7d dé Kpdros 6 ev Seka xeupl karéxer. I am indebted for this 
reference to Dr Usener’s Keraunos in Rhein. Mus. ux. (1905), p. 12. 

is gets in him such conceptions as mana, oranda 
Kratos and Bia. We now ass to man’s heen at first c 

er eriontly call oe ieoioulcuoeee of mana, or, , to use curren 
phraseology, we pass to the consideration of magic and its negativ : 
social eee tabu. ne 
: 1 T have adopted mana rather than Wa-kon’- As as a general term for imperso: 

force because it is already current and also because its content is perhaps somewha 
less specialized and mystical. :

MAGIC. 

eYAaimwNn TE Kal GABIoc 6c TéAE TIANTA 
eiAdoc EprdzHTai ANaiTIoc ABANATOICIN, 
A € > 
OpNIOAC KPINWN Kal YtTepBacfac dAECEINWN. 

(a) Magic AnD TaBu. 

THE word payeia from which our word magic is derived, 
was, among the Greeks of classical days, never really at home. 
Plato? on the one occasion that he uses it thinks it necessary 
_ to add a definition, and this definition, we shall see, is highly 
significant. . In the first dialogue that bears the name of 
Alcibiades Socrates is urging on Alcibiades to an exceptionally 
high standard of conduct and education. Such a standard is best 
_ (he says) exemplified by the training of the Spartan and Persian 
kings. ‘When the young prince is fourteen years old he is given 
into. the charge of certain persons who are called the “Royal 
_ paedagogues.” These are four Persians in the flower of their age 
_ who are selected as being reputed foremost in certain virtues: one 
is the wisest, one the most just, one the most prudent, one the 
bravest. Of these the one who is wisest teaches the magic 
— (wayeiav) of Zoroaster the son of Horomazos’; and then to our 
- surprise Socrates adds by way of explanation, ‘the art of the 
Magician is the service (@eparreia) of the gods. The same man 
jives instruction in kingly duties’ (ra BaciduKd). 

fee Or the author of the Alcibiades, 1228 av 6 ev (6 copwraros) wayelay Te 
oe Sdoxer rhv Zwpoderpov Tob ‘Qpoudgov gore d¢ robro Oedv Oepamela: SiddoKer d€ Kal rd, 
eed. 

a oe ee ee es ee Pe ee ee 

6 Magic [CH. 

‘Mageia’ is the service of the gods, and the same man who 
teaches ‘mageia’ teaches kingly duties. No statement could well be 
more contrary to current feeling about magic. We associate magic 
rather with demons than with gods, and we picture it as practised 
by ignorant old women, hole and corner charlatans, or lovers 
insane through passion. We know that certain ‘magical practices’ 
survived among the Greeks, but when asked for instances we do 
not call to mind kings and potentates, we think of Phaedra’s old 
nurse in the Hippolytus, of Simaetha desolate and desperate, of 
Thessalian witches dragging down the moon, of things and people 
outside the pale, at war with the powers that be, whether of earth 
or heaven. Yet in primitive days in Greece, as in Persia, magic 
had to do, if not with divinities (@eoé), yet at least with things 
divine, with sanctities (ra Oe7a), and not less certainly a knowledge 
of magic was assuredly part of the necessary equipment of a king 
(ra Baowdund). The king as magician will be considered in the 
next section. For the present we have to deal with the manipu- 
lation of sanctities by the tribe or by its representative, the 
medicine-man. We shall find that the attitude towards mana 

is a two-fold one, the positive attitude which is magic, the nega- 
tive which is tabu}. 

The design in Fig. 10 is from the fragment of a ‘ Dipylon’ 
amphora? found in the excavations on the site of the Kynosarges 
gymnasium on the left bank of the Ilissos below the spring of 
Kallirrhoé. Most of the vases found in the ‘Dipylon’ tombs on 
this site were claimed by the owner of the land and are now 
inaccessible, but by great good fortune this fragment fell to the 
excavators, and is now preserved in the British School at 
Athens. 

Happily the class of vases known from the first place of their 
finding as ‘Dipylon’ can be dated within narrow limits. Their 
ornamentation is characteristically geometric, and they belong to 
a period extending from circ. 900—700 Bc. Our fragment is a 

* Mr Marett, Threshold of 

? J. P. Droop, ‘Dipylon v 
p. 81, Figs. 1 and 2. The 
Itanos et VInventio Scut 

in relation to the shiel 
interpreted. 

Religion, p. 114, prefers to call tabu a negative mana, 
ases from the Kynosarges site,’ B.S.A. x. (1905-6), 
; fragment has been discussed by M. Th. Reinach, 
i, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, ux. (1909), —p. 324, 
d and thunder-ceremonies, but not, I think, quite rightly 

hl 

ie oe oe Se 

Magical Rain-making re 

specimen of somewhat advanced style!, and we may safely place 
it at about 800—700 B.c. 

The centre of the design is occupied by a rectangular table or 
altar; on it is a large indented Mycenaean shield, apparently 
made of some sort of wicker-work. To the right is a seated man 
holding in either hand an implement? for which hitherto archaeo- 
logists have found no name. From the implement in the man’s 
right hand comes a zigzag pattern. A similar pattern also seems 
to issue from his right thigh. It is probable that to the left of 
the table or altar another man was seated, as the remains of a 
latticed seat are clearly visible, and also the remains of a 
zigzag pattern corresponding to that issuing from the topmost 
implement. 

Fie. 10. 

It has been conjectured that the man is ‘worshipping’ the 
shield. The shield is undoubtedly sacred, its prominent position 
on the altar shows that, and it confers sanctity on the place where 
it is set up. Its full significance will be shown later. But the 
man is not ‘worshipping’ it. If he were, common reverence would 
demand that he should stand up, and somehow salute the object 

1 For the chronology of Dipylon vases see F. Poulsen, Die Dipylon-Gréber und 
die Dipylonvasen, Leipzig, 1905, and S. Wide, Geometrische Vasen, Jahrb. d. Arch. 
Inst. x1. (1897), 195. Our fragment is placed by Mr Droop in Dr Wide’s Class II (a). 

2 There is a crack in the vase between the two hands, but Mr Woodward of the 
British School, who has kindly re-examined the original of the fragment for me, 
thinks it improbable that the two objects formed one implement. 

78 Magic [oH. 
of his worship. But here he is complacently seated, manipulating 
the odd implements in his hands. Odd to us. they are, and no 
classical archaeologist offered any explanation; but to an anthropo- 
logist! skilled in the knowledge of savage gear they are thrice 
familiar. They are primitive musical instruments, part of the 
normal equipment of the medicine-man. They are gourd-rattles. | 
A glance at the series of gourd-rattles in Fig. 11 brings 
immediate conviction. To the right (a) is a natural pear-shaped 
gourd from W. Africa, simply dried with the seeds inside acting as 
pellets. The middle design (6) is from a gourd pierced through 

oO 

(c) Pottery-rattle. Moki _ (b) Gourd-rattle with (a) Natural Gourde! 
of Arizona. stick. Zuii of New Mexico. W. Africa, 
Fie. 11. 

with a wooden handle. It is from the Zufii tribe in New Mexico. 
In the third design (c) the rattle has been copied in pottery, the 
protuberance at the top being copied from the stick handle in the 

* I sent a photograph of the Dipylon fragment to Mr Balfour at the Pitt Ri 
aph g iv 
Orford, asking if he could explain the implements, and he at once “oe 
ae le a eu be a pair of hollow rattles, perhaps of gourd, a very common 
ey ale : world, and one surviving in modern Sudan.’ I publish drawings of 
7 : nstances in Fig, 11 by his kind permission. Mr R. W. Halliday kindly 
evs me that in the Anthropological Museum at Berlin are a number of these ritual 

rattles 
ey Some gourds, some made of wood, some double, some and more frequently 

Iv] : Salmoneus the Weather-king 79 

conservative fashion usual in the making of such implements. 
This third example is from the Moki tribe in Arizonal. 

Our babies still play with rattles; our priests no longer use 
them in their ritual, and it surprises us a little to see a grown 
man ceremonially seated before an altar enthusiastically working 
two rattles. Why does he work them? Not, as might be thought, 
to make thunder; they are not Bull-Roarers. The shake of an 
actual gourd-rattle tells us instantly what the man is doing. The 
soft plash is unmistakable. He is making rain; making it in the 
simplest yet most magical fashion. The rain may come accom- 
panied by thunder and lightning. A zigzag of lightning comes 
from the topmost rattle? and from the man’s thigh, but what he is 
actually making is rain—you can hear it falling. 

Our medicine-man’s method of rain-making is simple and 
handy—just a pair of rattles. We know of another rain-maker— 
this time a king—whose apparatus was more complex. ‘Salmoneus,’ 
Apollodorus tells us, ‘said that he himself was Zeus, and he took 
away from Zeus his sacrifices and ordered men to sacrifice to him.’ 
_ Of course he did nothing of the sort: there was no Zeus, there 
were no sacrifices. What he really did, Apollodorus® tells us in 
the next sentence, he made the weather: ‘he fastened bronze 
cauldrons by straps of hide to his chariot and dragged them after 
him and said that he was thundering, and threw up blazing torches 
into the sky and said that he was lightening.’ 

Orthodox theology by the mouth of Vergil* proclaims Salmoneus 
a half mad criminal, a blasphemous king who counterfeits the 

} 

' In Arizona magical rain-making still goes on. By the kindness of Miss H. E. 
Allen, of Bryn Mawr College, I am possessed of a pottery figure of arain-maker. He 
holds in front of him a vase to receive the rain about to fall. Figures of this kind 
are still in use, Miss Allen tells me, as rain-makers, but in the neighbouring towns 
‘they are already sold as chimney-piece ornaments.’ : : ; 

* These zigzags occur on ‘Dipylon’ vases where no rain-making ceremony is 
depicted. It is not therefore absolutely certain that they represent lightning, but 
it is highly probable. A zigzag pattern is used to decorate a votive double-axe on 
‘palace’ pottery, and the connection of the double-axe with lightning is well known. 
See B.S.A. vi. (1900-1), Fig. 15, p. 53, and Mr A. B. Cook, Class. Rev. 1903, 
p. 406. It has been suggested to me by Miss Gertrude Elles that the zigzag pattern 
may represent simply rain. A zigzag line is the Egyptian hieroglyph for water. 
__ If so the rain issuing from the body of the rain-maker is illustrated by Aristophanes, 
Nubes, 372. ; tas 

33.9. 7 reve yap éaurov elvat Ala kal Tas éxelvou Ovolas apenduevos éaurg 
tTpocéracce Ovew, kal Bipoas uev é&npappévas é€& dpuaros mera AeBiyrav Xarkov cvpwv, 
éheye Bpovrav, Baddwv dé els ovpavdy aidouévas Aaumddas ever aorpdmrew. 

4 Ain. v1. 585. 

Pe Se ea een ose ee Spee a eee 

80 | Magic 
thunder of Zeus, and as such condemned to eternal blasting in 
Hades. 

Salmoneus saw I cruel payment making 

For that he mocked the lightning and the thunder 
Of Jove in high Olympus. His four steeds 

Bore him aloft: shaking a fiery torch 

Through the Greek folk, midway in Elis town 

In triumph went he—for himself, mad man, 

He claimed God’s rights. The inimitable bolt 

He mimicked and the storm cloud with the beat 
Of brass and clashing horse hooves. 

Even the kindly Plutarch! feels that on such as imitate 
thunder and lightning God justly looks askance, but he adds, 

z 

WYTTERLULTTT LL eee ey) 
© 0OCOOCHEETOO OO OS OOOO LLLCLLOC0R SL OC 

Hires eo: 

pleasantly, ‘to those who imitate him in virtue, God gives a share 

of his Eunomia and Dike.’ i 
Vergil describes the mad and blasphemous king as though he 
was an Olympian victor, and as such Salmoneus is depicted on the 
vase-painting from the fifth century krater? in Fig. 12. The central 
figure, Salmoneus, both holds and wears a wreath, and is all 
decked about with olive sprigs and fillets. In his right hand is 
1 Ad princip. inerud. 780 ¥ ve 

A i Mergd yap 6 Beds rots drome ; 
Kepauvous kal akTwoBontas. uae OLA HOURCH OL Bpovras Kai 

: i 7 _ aktwoBorla probably means ‘sunshine.’ 
» pe a Pera HM Roe by Prof. Ernest Gardner in the American Journal 
a cao =( ), 331, pl. 4, and wrongly, I think, interpreted as the madness 

Ty | ee Rainmakers in Thessaly 81 

aa, thunderbolt, in his left he uplifts a sword as though threatening. 
the sky, which is about to discharge its thunderbolts. That he is 

a victor! is made certain by the figure of Nike behind him. She 

raises her hand as though in deprecation. Even for an Olympic, 

victor Salmoneus goes rather far. 

Vergil and the vase-painter alike think of Salmoneus as at 
Olympia in Elis; there it was fabled he perished, he and his 
people, blasted by the thunderbolt. But we learn from Apollo- 

primitive and always the home of magic, Pelasgian Thessaly?. 
From Thessaly comes to us an account of a curious rain-making 
ceremony not attributed to Salmoneus but well in line with his 
method of making the thunder. Antigonos of Karystos*, in his 
Account of Marvellous Things, says that at Krannon there was 

they shook it by way of praying the god for rain, and it was said 
rain came.’ 

Antigonos is rather vague as to what was actually done. They 
shook or agitated the waggon (iv ceiovtes). The type of some 
bronze coins‘ of Krannon (Kpavouviwyv) of which two specimens 

1 This point has been very clearly brought out by Mr A. B. Cook in his dis- 
cussion of the vase in the Class. Rev. xvit. (1903), p. 275. 

2 At some time or other the kingdom and cult of Salmoneus must have passed 
to Crete and settled on the N.W. promontory of Salmonium or Sammonium, An 
Athena Salmonia occurs in an inscription dealing with Hierapytna. See Th. Reinach, 
Rev. de 0 Hist. des Religions, ux. (1909), p. 177%. 

3 Hist. Mirab. xv. Ey 6¢ Kpdvywe ris Oerranlas Sto daolv udvor elvar Kbpaxas 51d 
kal él ray mpokemav Tv dvaypapouevwr To mapdonuoyv Ths ToAEws...UmoypdpovTat dbo 
Kopaxkes ép’ duatlou xadkod, dia Td wyndérore melovs TOUTWY WPOaL. 4 Jé Guaka mpooTapa- 
ketrar Oud TovatTyv airlay’ E€vov yap tows dv kai TovTo paveln. eorw adrots dvaxemévn 
XAAKH, Hv drav adypos 7 celovres Hdwp alrodvra roy Oedv Kal Par ylvecOat. 

4 Reproduced Meisterwerken, p. 259, by Dr Furtwingler, to whom I owe the 
reference. In the English edition of the book, the very interesting excursus on Ge 
praying for rain is unfortunately omitted. 

H. 6 

dorus that before he ruled in Elis he dwelt in a country more 

kept a bronze waggon, and ‘ when the land suffered from drought 

t,t ee 

82 ee wT agéc [oH. 

are reproduced in Fig. 13 makes it all clear. In (a) we have a 
primitive waggon, just two wheels with a cross pole—on it an 
amphora, doubtless filled with water. The coin is not earlier than 
400 B.c.1, and the shape of the high-handled amphora is late, but 
the primitive wheels show that an old type is revived. In coin (0) 
the wheels are just rude pierced disks on which. are perched the 
rain-birds, the crows or ravens. 

On these coins of Krannon we have then as the device of the 
city (rapdonuov), as a traditional ceremony, public, honourable, 
a magical ceremony for the making of rain. This is a fact of 
paramount importance. Magic was no hole and corner practice? 
but an affair of public ritual, performed with full social sanction. 
We have in fact a state of things like that which Socrates 
attributed to the Persians, a social phase in which magic was the 
service (Oepa7reia) of the gods; instruction about it might well be 
given as part of the duties of a king (ra Baovduxd); in a word 
magic was of the state, not of the individual. What exactly is this 
public social magic ? 

In the light of the three last chapters the nature and origin 
of magic is not hard to realize. First and foremost magic is a 
Sp@pevov, a thing predone. The rain-maker jingles his rattle and 
shakes his water-cart, he does something. Language? here speaks 
clearly enough. The Latin factura is magical ‘making,’ witchcraft; 
the Sanskrit krtya is doing and magic; the Greek épyateo@ar is 
used of ritual operations of a magical character. The German 
zauber is connected with O.H.G. zouwan, Gothic tanyan, to do. 
The doing is sometimes that form of doing which we call speaking; 
yons the Greek enchanter, is but a specialized howler; the Hebrew 

dabar does not distinguish between word and deed. Of whatever 
kind the action, the essence of magic is 

Pll do, and I'll do, and Tl do. 

1 See Head, Historia Nummorum, p. 250. 

= Ido not for a moment deny that magic came to be a matter of hole and corner 
rites, nor that, broadly speaking, one distinction between religion and magic is that 
magic concerns itself with the weal of the individual, religion with that of the 
community, but I am here dealing with a stage prior to this differentiation. 
°H. Osthoff, Allerhand Zauber etymologisch beleuchtet in Bezzenberger’s 
Beitriige, xxtv. 109, and H. Osthoff in Archiv f. Relig. 1908 p. 60, for épydferPa ; 
see also Tylor, Karly History of Mankind, 1878, p.135.. , 

Ee ne earn te eee 

vi Psychology of Magic 838 

| Bat this deed, this thing done, is not the beginning. Behind 
it lies desire, hope, if we like to call it so, faith. Our word ‘credo’ 
is, sound for sound, the Vedic! ¢raddh@, and craddha@ means to ‘set 
one’s heart on. Le désir c'est le pere du dieu is true in part, but 
the god has other ancestors; le désir c’est le pere de la sorcellerie 
might be taken without qualification. Man, say the wise Upani- 
shads, is altogether desire (ka@ma): as is his desire so is his insight 
(kratu), as is his insight so is his deed (karma). 

This oneness of desire and deed, which the Indian mystic 
emphasizes, comes out very-clearly in the simplest forms of magic 
when the magical act is only an uttered desire. You are becalmed, 
you can do nothing, think of nothing but the wind that will not 
come. The thought of it possesses you, obsesses you, till the tension 
on your nerves is too much, your longing will out; the wind will 
not whistle for you, you whistle for the wind. Your first whistle 
is sheer, incarnate longing, but, as it came after long waiting, 
perhaps the wind really does rise. Next time the nerve paths are 
ready prepared, a habit is set up, a private, it may be public, ritual 
is inaugurated. : 

In the case of whistling for the wind we have an element of 
piunows; you long for, you think intensely of, the wind, and you 

make a wind-sound; but some other cases are simpler, their 
content is nothing but the one element of emotional discharge. \\ 
You get a letter that hurts you, you tear it up instantly. You do | 
this not because you think you are tearing up the writer, but just — 
because you are hurt, and hurt nerves seek muscular discharge. | 
You get a letter that heals you and you keep it, you hold it tight 
> in your hand, you even, if you are a real ‘savage, put it to your? Wapuhen 
lips, simply because you act on the instinct to clutch what is life 
to you. The simplest case of all is Mr Marett’s famous bull? 

A man escapes from an enraged bull leaving his coat, the bull 

goes on goring the coat. Of course, as Mr Marett prudently 

observes, ‘it is very hard to know what is going on in the bull’s 

mind, but one may guess that the bull does not act in obedience 
to a mistaken application of the laws of association; he is 
simply letting loose his rage on something that happens to be 
-goreable. 

ee ey 5 ell = 

sy OC oer 

1 See Maurice Bloomfield, Religion of the Veda, 1908, pp. 186 and 261. 
2 Threshold of Religion, p. 44. - 

5 Xd WW wily a UA dH, 

6—2 

y 

Magie > [CH. | 

84 

The mainspring then of magic is emotion, desire— whether 
constructive or destructive—emotion, however, essentially not 
passive but active. But though any theory of magic which starts 
rather from the intellect than from the will, which thinks to find 
its roots in the ‘mental framework and constitution’ of man is 
doomed to failure, it would be a great mistake to suppose that 
magic contains nothing of intellectual effort, no theory whatever. 
The last chapter was devoted to this theory, or perhaps we might 
almost call it category of thought, to that notion of awfulness and 
force informed by collective emotion, variously called Wakon’-da, 
orenda, mana. Mana, orenda, Wakon’-da are not the origin of magic 
—that lies as we have seen in will and emotion—but they are the 
medium in which as it were magic acts and its vehicle. As we saw 
in the case of Wakon’-da, this medium makes a sort of spiritualized 
unity behind the visible differentiation of thought, it joins not only 
man and man, but man andall living things, all material things pos- 
sessed by it, it is the link between the whole and its severed part. 
Things can affect each other not by analogy, because like affects 
like, but by that deeper thing participation}, in a common life that 
serves for link. <A deer and a feather and the plant kikuli are all 
one, says the Huichol Indian. Absurd, says the civilized rationalist, 
they belong to different classes, concepts utterly differentiated by 
difference in qualities. But the wise savage knows better, they 
have all one quintessence, one life, and that mystical life produces 
in him the same reactions of awe and hope; they are to him one. 

The fundamental presupposition of magic, says Dr Frazer, is 
identical with that of science, and it consists of a ‘faith, implicit, 
but real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature®’ The 
fundamental presupposition of all but the most rudimentary magic, 
that in which the action is almost purely a reaction, as in the 
case of the torn letter, an action rather bordering on magic than 
actually magical—the fundamental presupposition is, not the 
order and uniformity of nature, not a thing mechanical, but a 
belief in something like the omnipresence of life, of power, some- 
thing analogous to the Stoic conception of the world as a living 
animal, a thing not to be coerced and restrained, but reverently 
wooed, a thing not immutable at all, but waxing and waning, 

1 Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales 1910 
* The Golden Bough?, 1, p. 61. fk 

ee De 

eS SS Oe TG ae ee ee IS a Oe Me 

Psychology of Magic 85 

above all not calculable and observable, but wilful and mysterious, 
a thing a man learns to know not by experiment but by initiation, 
a thing not of ‘a natural law’ but mystical entirely, halting always 
between an essence and a personality. Without this belief in mana, 
Wa-kon’-da, there would be acts of psychological discharge, but 
there could scarcely be a system of magic’. 

This notion of the continuous medium in which magic can act, 
and which anything like advanced magic seems to presuppose, is in 
a sense an abstraction or at least a pluralization, and must have 
been a gradual growth. One of the means and methods of its 
growth it is possible to trace. This brings us back to our medicine- 
man on the Dipylon fragment. | . 

In the centre of the design, as already noted, is a great 
‘Mycenaean’ shield, not worshipped, for the medicine-man, as we 
have seen, is making rain on his own account, but manifestly, from 
its place on the altar, ‘sacred.’ Why is the shield sacred? The 
prompt answer will probably be returned, ‘ because it is the shield 

- of a god’—perhaps of the sky-god. We have the usual @ prior 

anthropomorphism. Man conceives of god in his own image. 

Savage man is a warrior, so his god is a warrior. He has a 

battle-axe, a shield. The battle-axe, the shield are sacred, divine, 
because they are the weapons, the attributes, of a war-god. 
Because in our theology we have borrowed from the Semites the 
Lord is a Man of War, because to us, ‘there is none other that 
fighteth for us, we straightway impose a war-god on the savage 

and the primitive'Greek. Let us look at facts—savage facts first. 

The Omaha, arch-spiritualists as they are, believe they can act 
on, they can direct, such Wa-kon’-da as they have by a sort of 
immediate telepathy on their fellows. They have a word for this 
— Wa-zhini-dhe-dhe, wazhifi, directive energy, dhe-dhe, to send’; by 

1 See especially MM. Hubert et Mauss, Theorie Générale de la Magie, Année 
Sociologique, 1902-3, p. 108. 

2 Miss Alice Fletcher, On the import of the totem among the Omahas, Pro- 
ceedings of the American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, 1897, p. 326. 
See also Notes on certain beliefs concerning Will-Power among the Siowan tribes, a 
paper read by Miss Fletcher before the American Association for the Advancement 
of Science, Buffalo Meeting, Aug. 1896. For my knowledge of this interesting paper 
I am indebted to the kindness of Dr A. C. Haddon. i 

= ge 

apy 

Se to a ds Soil. Wi Sab 

86 % Magic [cH. 

singing certain songs you can send will and power to a friend to 
help him in a race or a game, or strength and courage to a warrior 
in battle. But peoples less spiritualized cling to the outward and 
visible sign. An Arunta native ‘sings’ over a stick or a stone or 
a spear, and thereby gives it what he calls Arungquiltha, a magical 
dangerous evil power.. The object itself, a thin flake of flint attached 
to a spear thrower and carefully painted, is called Arungquiltha ; 
the property is not distinguished from the vehicle. It is left in the 
sun for some days, and the men visit it daily and sing over it a 
request to kill the intended victim, ‘Go straight, go straight, kill 
him. By and by, if the Arungquiltha is successful, they hear a 
noise like a crash of thunder, and then they know that, in the 
form of a great spear the Arungquiltha has gone straight to the 
man, mutilating and thus killing him}. 

A tool is but an extension, an amplification, of a man’s person- 
ality. If the savage feels that he can get Wa-kon/-da, surely that 
Wa-kon’-da can pass into that outer personality which is his tool, 
his weapon. We hear it passing as he ‘sings’ the Arungquiltha. 
it is, M. Bergson? has taught us, characteristic of man as intelligent 
rather than instinctive that he is a tool-user, Homo faber. The 
other animals have tools indeed, beaks and paws of which they 
make marvellous use, but these instruments are parts of the 
animal who uses them, they are organic. A very intelligent 
animal like an elephant can use a tool, he cannot make one. It 
is the fabricated tool, inorganic, separate, adaptable, apt to serve 
the remoter rather than the immediate end, that marks the 
intelligence of man. This separation, this adaptability, this 
superiority of function in the tool, primitive man did not analyse, 
but he found that with his tool he had more mana than without ; 
he could send his mana out further, he was bigger and more 
splendid; so the tool, the weapon, became per se sacred, not 
because it was the instrument of a god, but because it was the 
extension and emphasis of a man, 

We must then clear our minds of all notion that the hoplo- 
latry of the Greeks implies anthropomorphism. The shield on 
the altar is sacred because it is a shield, a tool, a defensive weapon 

1 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899, p. 548. 

: 2 T Evolution Créatrice, p. 151, ‘L’intelligence, envisagée dans ce qui en parait 
étre la démarche originelle, est la faculté de fabriquer des objets artificiels, en 
particulier des outils a faire des outils et d’en varier indéfiniment la fabrication.’ 

> 

i NA as eR a mer STD 

Bay]. The Tool as extension of Personality 87 
part of a man’s personality, charged with magical force, spreading 
the contagion of its mana by its very presence. Not less sacred 
are the tools of the medicine-man, the rain-rattles. 

In the light of this notion of the tool, the weapon as part 
of a man’s personality, many a funeral custom becomes clear. A 
warrior’s weapons, a medicine-man’s gear, a woman’s cooking © 
utensils and her baskets, are buried with them. We think it is | 
___ because they will want them in the next world. It is not quite ! 
that ; we are nearer the truth when we say it is from sentiment. | 

_ The tools a man used are part of him, of his life, of his mana. 
: What life, what mana, have joined together, let not man nor death | 
‘put asunder, 

( 2 PES pu PU 

7 yy. -y 4 Ze, Z lL 

q NZ gD UZ Y B La 

; 

: 

MQ VORA her ene pee 

Fie. 14. 

A weapon then does not of necessity owe its sanctity to a god; 
rather in one case, the actual case before us, we can see before 
our very eyes a god grow up out of a weapon. Pallas Athena, 
Guardian, Promachos, of her city, is altogether human; but what 
of the Palladion? The Palladia have always one characteristic, 
they are sky-fallen (Sco7eteis)?. They are madza, things hurled, 

1 See Lévy-Bruhl, ‘Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures,’ 
p. 384, and R. Hertz, La Représentation collective de la Mort in Année Socio- 
logique, x. 1905-6. In the matter of tools, ete. as part of the personality of a 
man I am glad to find my view has been anticipated by Mr A. B. Cook in a paper 
on Greek Votive Offering in Folk-Lore xiv. 1903, p. 278. Mr Cook quotes as his 
psychological authority Lotze in the Microcosmus 1. 136. My view is ee an 
application to the savage of ee James’s view of personality in general; see 
his Principles of Psychology I. p. , : ’ 
*3 See M. hendee Het ashe brilliant articles Itanos et V Inventio Scuti, no 
p-. 331, in Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, ux. 1909. 

88 | SS Mages? [on. 

cast down; the lightning is the hurled fire (7adrov mip). Pallas 
then is but another form of Kerawnos—the thunderbolt hurled. 
According to ancient thinking, that which slays can save; so the 
Palladion which was the slayer became the Saviour, the Shield. 
In the well-known fresco from Mycenae! in Fig. 14 we see the 
Shield, half humanized, as the object of an actual cult; before it is 
a portable altar, to either side a woman worshipper. But it is not 
the goddess Pallas Athena who lends sanctity to the Palladion, it 
is the sanctity of the Palladion that begets the godhead of Pallas 
Athena. 

This question of the sanctity of the weapon itself as a vehicle 
of mana and an extension of man’s personality is important for 
our adequate understanding of the thunder-cult among the Greeks, 
The Greek of classical days normally conceived of thunder not as 
a vague force but as a definite weapon, a bolt wielded by Zeus. 
Hesiod’s great account of a thunderstorm finishes thus?: 

Turmoil and dust the winds belched out and thunder 
And lightning and the smoking thunderbolt, 
Shafts of great Zeus, 

Here and elsewhere we have three factors in a thunderstorm, 
thunder itself, the noise heard (Spovr/), lightning, the flash seen 
(crTepory), and a third thing, xepavvds, which we translate 
‘thunderbolt. All three are shafts, «Xa, of mighty Zeus. Mighty 
Zeus we may dismiss. He is the product of a late anthropo- 
morphism, but the three sorts of ‘shaft’ mentioned are interesting. 
Thunder is a reality, a sound actually heard, lightning no less a 
reality, actually seen, but the third shaft—the thunderbolt ? There 
is no such thing. Yet by a sort of irony it is the non-existent 
thunderbolt that Greek art most frequently depicts’, 

The word translated ‘shafts,’ xjAa, iS an interesting one. It 
is used only in the plural and of the weapons of a god, and twice 
it occurs in descriptions of the weather. In the Hesiod passage 

1 ’Ednpepls "Apx. 1887, Pl.-x, 2. 
2 Hes. T'heog. 708 
ovv a dveuwor évocly re koviny 7 éogapdycfov, 
Bpovrny TE oTEpoTHy Te Kal aldaddera Kepauvov 
: _ Kika Atos meyddouo. ; 
For the various forms, bird, flower, ete., in which Greek art depicts the thunder- 
bolt, see P. J acobsthal, Der Blitz in der Orientalischen und Griechischen Kunst, 1906. 

ie ag ey ee a en Ae ee Te 

ay 

Keraunos as Weapon 89 

_ we have seen it used of thunder and lightning; in the Ziad}, when 

Zeus the Counsellor hath begun to snow he shows forth there his 
shafts, his «Aa to men. The shafts of Apollo? when he rains the 
plague nine days long upon the Greek host are «fia, which makes 
it probable that they were originally the avenging darts of the 
outraged Sun. When Hesiod numbers xepavvos among the «fra, 
he is of course quite unaware that they are practically the same 
word, cjAa and Kepavves both from a root? meaning to ‘smash.’ 
Neither word commits us definitely to any notion of .a particular 
missile; both simply mean ‘destroyers, smashers.’ 

We know now-a-days, though most of us vaguely enough, that 
a thunderstorm is somehow due to a ‘discharge of electricity.’ 
When a man is ‘struck by lightning’ he ‘dies of ‘an electric 
shock.’ But how should primitive man know that? Meteorology 
is the last of the sciences. He sees the black cloud rising, he feels 
a horrible oppression in the sultry air, he hears unearthly rumblings 
and watches flashes of lightning play across the sky. Finally he 
hears a noise over his head like a cart-load of bricks; earth and 
sky, as Hesiod describes it, are jumbled together with an un- 
speakable din and he gives up all for lost. Presently it is all over, 
the sun is shining, the trees glistening, the earth refreshed and 
‘glad. If that were all, he might think there had been ‘plenty 
devil about, or if he was an optimist much mana and Wa-kon’-da. 
But when he goes into the bush he finds a great tree split and 
charred, or the body of his best friend lying on the road dead, 
distorted. Something has struck the tree and the man and 
smashed them; there have been «fra, destroying weapons, about, 
clubs or battle-axes or sharp pointed arrows that slay. 

- This notion of the thunderbolt, the weapon, was fostered but 
not I think started by a popular and widespread error. We have 
seen that in the mysteries of the Idaean Daktyls, Pythagoras was 

1 x11. 280 
wpero uuntlera ZLevs 

vigéuev dvOpwHmoor mipavokduevos TA fa Kha. 
271}; i, 53 
évvuap mev ava orpatov wxeTo Kha Oeoto. 
Sunbeams in the Anthology (Anth. Pal. x1v. 139) are xpvoea Kia. 

3 The root car, which gives Sanskrit ¢rnd‘ti, he breaks, destroys, and galja-s, 
arrow-point, Gk. «for and xepatfew (kepaglfew), to destroy, where the primitive 
meaning comes out. See for «jdov, Meyer, Handbuch d. Gr. Etymologie, 11, p. 440 ; 
for xepavvés, 1. p. 362. Pindar, Mr Cornford points out to me, plays on the diverse 
meanings of «fda and xyded in his cpra dé Kal | Samora Oéryet ppévas (Pyth. 1. 20). 
The weapons of the gods are magical to hurt and heal. 

ae sii 

90 Magic | (en 

purified by a thunder-stone and that this thunder-stone was 
in all probability nothing but a black stone celt, the simplest 
form of stone-age axe. The wide-spread delusion that these celts 
were thunderbolts cannot have taken hold of men’s minds till 
a time when their real use as ordinary axes was forgotten. It 
cannot therefore have been very primitive, though it is almost 
world-wide. The double axe, 7éXexvus, as will later be seen, was 
assuredly in Crete and other parts of the Aigean a sacred object, 
but the normal weapon which is the normal art-form of the 
thunderbolt is not a double axe. It is more of the nature of 
a double pointed dart, a bidens. The special form of weapon taken 
to represent the thunderbolt is however a matter of secondary 
importance. The essential fact is that thunder was regarded not. 
only as a force (kpdros), a sort of incarnate mana or Wa-kon’-da, 
but as that extension of human force which is a destructive 
weapon (Kepavvds). 

So far then we have considered magic as the manipulation of 
mand. Man tries to handle this mysterious force, a force partly 
within him, partly without, for his own ends—he tries to make 
thunder, mainly that it may rain and the earth may bring 
forth her fruits. But the thunder as destructive weapon has 
brought us face to face with another aspect of, or rather perhaps 
attitude towards, mana, that attitude towards things that is 
summed up in the word tabu. Tabu, avoidance, scruple, some 
authorities would have us think, is of the very essence of religion. 
M. Salomon Reinach? proposes to define religion as wn ensemble de 
scrupules qui font obstacle au libre exercice de nos Jacultés. This 
seems to me a somewhat serious misconception. It is to put tubu 
before mana, a negative aspect before a positive conviction. It is 
true that the Latin word religio?, from which our word comes, 
means ‘to consider, to be careful about, to attend to, it is the 
opposite of negligere, but attention is not tabu. We shall get a 
clearer notion of the real gist of tabu and its intimate inextricable 

relation with mana if we study a certain special form of Greek 
thunder-cult. 

1 Orpheus, p. 4. M. Reinach does not of course ignore the 
f u zB e mana element, but 
his oupieis on a ee tabu, side, is, I think, ee ae ae 
_ OF an excellent analysis of religio see W. Otto, Religio und S: tio, i 
Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft xn. (1909), p. 583, and x1v. (i911), p. 6.5 # a 

re ee Sa 

al - The Horkos, the abaton and tabu 91 

In Greece a place that was struck by lightning became an 
a&Barov, a spot not to be trodden on, unapproachable. On the 
Acropolis at Thebes were to be seen, Pausanias? tells us, the bridal 
chambers of Harmonia and Semele—and even to his day, Pausanias 
adds, no one was allowed to set foot in the chamber of Semele. 

_ And why? The other name for these tabu-ed places speaks 

oe! aa | oe 

es 

clearly—they were évndvova, places of coming. This Pollux tells 
us, is the name given to places on which a bolt from heaven has 
descended. The Htymologicum Magnum adds that such places 
were dedicated to Zeus the. Descender (Kata:Barn), and were 
called @Bara and dévra. In the aBarov at Thebes, ‘along with 
the thunderbolt which was hurled on the bridal chamber of 
Semele, there fell a log from heaven, and they say that Polydorus 
adorned this log with bronze and called it Dionysos’ Kadmos.’ 

Here we see unmistakeably the meaning of tabu: it is an 
attitude towards mana; something full of mana, instinct, alive with 
Wa-kon’-da, has fallen from heaven to earth and that spot of earth 
becomes charged as it were with an electric potency, that spot of 
earth must in common prudence for the common good be fenced 
about. It becomes a Horkos, an enclosed sanctity’. When theo- 
logians, busy with their full-blown Olympians, forgot the old 
notion of mana, the double-edged sanctity, they invented the 
vulgar story that Semele was blasted for impiety, for idle curiosity ; 
but the old local legend remembered that the thunderstorm was 
the bridal of Earth and Sky, of Gaia-Semele and Ouranos- 
Keraunos, and that from that wedding sprang the thunder-child 
Bromios. 

On the Acropolis of Athens as on the Acropolis at Thebes, 
and probably in early days on every high place, there was a Place 
of Coming—and it shows us a new characteristic of these éBata. 
They were not only fenced in as tabu, but they were left open to 
the sky, ‘hypaethral, left in communication as it were with the 
source of their mana, their sanctity, which might pour in upon 
them anew any time. In the north porch of the Erechtheion are 
the marks of a trident’, In examining the roof of this north 

1 rx. 12.3 ...xal és quads ere 4Baror Purdooovow avOpwrous. 

2 See Professor Gilbert Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 265 ‘The word 
Horkos which we translate an oath, really means ‘‘a fence,” or ‘‘ something that 
shuts you in.”’ 

3 See my Primitive Athens, 1906, p. 59. 

92 ual bay uChVoge® Soka [on. 

porch it has been found that immediately above the trident-mark 
an opening in the roof had been purposely left: the architectural 
traces are clear. But what does Poseidon want with a hole in the 
roof? It is no good to a sea-god. It is every good to a lightning- 
god, and before Poseidon took to the sea he was Erechtheus the 
Smiter, the Earth-shaker; this trident was the weapon of his 
striking, his fulmen trisulcum. Lightning-struck places are to 
the Latins bidentalia’, consecrated by the bidens, the two-bladed 
thunderbolt, a sanctity more potent than any tender two-toothed 
lamb. 

Rome gives us not only the bidentalia, but a clear case of the 
hypaethral ¢8arop in the shrine of old Terminus. Ovid? tells us 
that, when the new Capitol was being built, a whole multitude of 
divinities were consulted by augury as to whether they would 
withdraw to make place for Jupiter. They tactfully consented, 
all but old Terminus, the sacred boundary-stone. He stood fast, 
remaining in his shrine, and ‘still possesses a temple in common 
with mighty Jupiter, 

And still, that he may see only heaven’s signs, 
In the roof above him is a, little hole. 

Servius? in commenting on a passage in Vergil says, in the 
Capitoline temple the part of the roof immediately above the very 
stone of Terminus was open, for to Terminus it is not allowable to 
sacrifice save in the open air, The reason lies a little deeper. 
Terminus was just an old thunder-stone, a Svomerés dyadpa, a 
Palladion; he had come down from the sky and naturally he 
liked to look up at it, more mana to him! All sky-gods felt the 
same, Fulgur, Caelum, Sol and Luna were, Vitruvius‘ tells us, 
worshipped in hypaethral temples. 

_ Thebes, we have seen, had its aBarov, its place of mana and 
tabu; at Thebes was born the thunder-child Bromios, The 
Bacchae of Euripides is hard enough to understand anyhow, but 
we cannot even begin its understanding till: we realize that the 
roots of its plot lie deep in things primitive, in the terror and 

* See H. Usener, Keraunos, Rhein. Mus. ux. 1905, p. 22. 
2 Fast. 1. 667 

Nune quoque,. se Supra ne quid nisi sidera cernat, 

Exiguum templi tecta foramen habent. 
3 ad Ain, tx. 448. ; = g VAATED ADS 

et oie Mer er rr re er wr mn 

under-elements in the Bacchae 

beauty, the blasting and the blessing of the thunderstorm, the 
magic of mana, the sanctity of tabu. | oH ‘ 
a The keynote is struck in the first words of the prologue. 
_ Dionysos enters, so quietly, yet against a background of thunder 
_ and lightning. 
3 Behold God’s son is come unto this land 
Of Thebes—even I, Dionysos, whom the brand 
Of heaven’s hot splendour lit to life—when she 
Who bore me, Cadmus’ daughter, Semele, 
Died here!. 
_ He sees the &Barov of his mother, from which is rising faint smoke 
_ through the vine leaves. 
There by the castle’s side 
I see the place, the Tomb of the Lightning’s Bride, 
The wreck of smouldering chambers, and the great 
Faint wreaths of fire undying’. 
‘The god knows this @8arov, though unapproachable, is no monu- 
ment of shame, but of grace, of glory unspeakable. 
r Aye, Cadmus hath done well, in purity 
He keeps the place apart, inviolate, 
His daughter’s sanctuary, and I have set 
My green and clustered vines to robe it round®. 
The sacrilege of the later version of the story is horrible to 
- think of. 
All through the play there are hauntings of lightning and 
_ thunder. The sudden fiery apparitions are not merely ‘ poetical,’ . 
‘ ‘in honour of any and every god; they are primitive, and of the a 
actual lightning-cultus of the land. And above all, the great r 
Epiphany of the Lightning is but the leaping forth atresh of the 
fire from Semele’s Tomb. 
Unveil the Lightning’s eye; arouse 
- The Fire that sleeps, against this house, 
and then the measure changes, and to arrest attention come the 
two solemn emphatic syllables 4, d. 

From Semele’s enhallowed sod 
Awakened? Yea, the Death that came 
Ablaze from heaven of old, the same 
Hot splendour of the shaft of God‘. a 

: t 
O saw ye, marked ye there the flame : 
‘ 

1 Kur. Pacch, i, 2 v. 6. 
3 v.10, 4». 596. 

ay ae 

Ao con say 

And again on Cithaeron we have the awful stillness before the 
storm, the mysterious voice and then the Epiphany of the pillar 
of fire, 
So spake he and there came 

*Twixt earth and sky a pillar of high flame 

And silence took the air—and no leaf stirred 

In all the dell!. 

Euripides is a realist, but he is a poet, and the stuff he is 
dealing with is very primitive. His persons are also personae, 
masks*, Behind his very human and vividly conceived realities are 
shadowy shapes of earlier days, powers and portents (reipea) of 
earth and heaven, Pentheus the dragon’s seed and Bromios the 
thunder and lightning. It is in part this strange blend of two 
worlds, two ways of thinking, that lends to the Bacchae its amazing 
beauty. 

The Thunder-Rites have made clear to us the two-fold attitude 
of man towards mana, his active attitude in magic, his negative 
attitude in tabu. We have further seen how in the thunder 
as weapon, we have an extension of man’s personality, a bridge, 
as it were, between the emotion and desire within a man, his own 
internal mana and that mana of the outside world he is trying 
to manipulate. We have now to consider other developments 
of magic which have left clear traces of their influence on Greek 
mythology and cultus, especially the magic of birds and its rela- 
tion to the medicine-king, and the control of both over not only 
thunder but the weather generally. 

(>) Mepictne-Birp anp Mepicine KING. 

From Homer magic has been expurgated*®; that does not 
surprise us. It is to Hesiod that we look for primitive super- 
stitions, for it is Hesiod who deals with those ‘Works, those 
doings of man that are, we have seen, so closely intertwined with 
the beginnings of magic. Of magic in Hesiod there is no express 

1 Eur. Bacch. 1082. 

® See Mr F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, p. 141. 

® For the absence of magic and other ‘Beastly Devices of the Heathen,’ from 
Homer, see Mr Andrew Lang, ‘Homer and Anthropology,’ in Anthropology and 

Reena mee ees ee es eo Ny te 

‘ee ars tos } y * 
s poe 

Magic and tabu in Hesiod 95 

mention’, and of actual magical rites we hear nothing, though 
tabus abound ; but of magical ways of thinking, thinly veiled by 
Olympian orthodoxy, the Works and Days are full, and for the 
understanding of the magical attitude we can have no better 
helper than Hesiod. . 

Hesiod ends his Works and Days? with the words that stand 

at the head of this Chapter: 

Lucky and bless’d is he, who, knowing all these things, 

Toils in the fields, blameless before the Immortals, 

Knowing in birds and not overstepping tabus. 
Here we have the Whole Duty of Man, positive and negative, at 
least of Hesiod’s holy or pious man, his Oeios avjp, which might 
perhaps be translated man of sanctities*. His Oetos dvnp Hesiod 
characterizes as memvupéva efdos, ‘Knowing the things of the 
spirit, the man who is good about mana‘. 

Hesiod is of course a convinced and most conscientious 
theologian of the Olympian school. Tradition says he was born 
at Kyme in Molis, and his father migrated to Askra on the slopes 
of Mt Helikon. Anyhow his ‘epos of plain teaching®, like the 
Homeric epos of romance and war, moves formally and consciously 

in front of a background of Ionian Olympian gods, whom every- 

where he is concerned to glorify and defend. But far more clearly 
than in Homer these gods are seen to be, however much revered, 
an artificial background. Thus in the lines before us the pious 
man is to be ‘blameless before the immortals, but, when it came 

the Classics, edited by E. Marett, 1908, p. 44. For its emergence in Hesiod and 
the Rejected Epics, see Prof. Gilbert Murray, ‘Anthropology in the Greek Epic 
Tradition outside Homer,’ in the same volume, p. 66. 
1 My attention was drawn to this curious fact by Mr D. 8. Robertson, It may 
be that magic by the time of Hesiod was too uncanny for discussion. 
2 v, 825 
evdaluwy re kal dAB.os bs Tdde wdvTa 
elds epydgnrai dvalrios d0avdroow 
Opvibas Kpivwy kal brepBaclas ddeelvwy. 
3 Op. 731 
...Jelos dvnp, memvupéva eldds, 
for the meaning of Oefos as ‘magical’ and deds as primarily ‘medicine-man,’ see 
Prof. Gilbert Murray, Anthropology and the Classics, p. 79, and for the connection 
of these and other words with magic and the root Oe, see my Pralegomena, pp. 49 
and 137. 
4 The definition of the 6\@cos in Hesiod contrasts strangely with that of Pindar 
(frag. 137) with its other-worldliness, 
"OrBios doris lia Kelv’ cio’ bd. xO6r’: olde pév Blov TedeuTay, 
oldev O€ dtdadorov apxav. 
5 See Prof. Gilbert Murray, Literature of Ancient Greece, 1897, p. 53. 

a m 

96 ee Sy Aes See [cH 

to real definition of his duties, these duties are, not to glorify 
Athena or to offer burnt sacrifice to Zeus, they are not prayer or 
praise or sacrifice in any form, but simply the observance of 
sanctities, attentions, positive and negative. He is to be ‘knowing 
in birds and not overstepping tabus.’ 

In the Zheogony Hesiod is learned and theological, in the 
Works and Days he is practical and religious. He is the small 
Boeotian farmer, and the small Boeotian farmer had his living to 
earn and enough to do to earn it, without greatly concerning 
himself with theogonies and the like, which must have seemed to — 
him but ‘genealogies and foolish questions’ or at best matter for 
the learned, leisured subjects for ‘Sunday reading. The small 
Boeotian farmer is not a sceptic but a man hard pressed by 
practical necessities. What really concerns him is the weather 
and the crops and the season; how he must till the earth and 
when, that is the Works and the Days. With all this to know, 
with the weather to watch and tabus to attend to, with all the 
lucky and unlucky things to be done and not done, a man had 
his hands full and had not much time for brooding over Athena, 
goddess of light and reason, or Apollo with his silver bow. 

We think of Helicon as the fountain of inspiration, as the 
mountain of the Muses, where, circling and surging, ‘they bathe 
their shining limbs in Hippocrene and dance ever with soft feet 
around the violet spring. So does Hesiod in the prooemium to 
the Theogony which is at once local and Homeric, Boeotian and 
Ionian. But the real Helicon of Hesiod’s father! ‘He made his 
dwelling near Helicon in a sorry township, even Askra bad in 
winter, insufferable in summer, never good?” In Helicon it was 
all you could do to keep body and soul together by ceaseless 
industry and thrift, by endless ‘watching out, by tireless ob- 
servance of the signs of earth and heaven. Year in, year out, the 
Boeotian farmer must keep his weather eye open. 

You must watch the House-carrier?, the snail, because, when 

he crawls up the plants from the ground, fleeing from the Pleiades, 
1 Hes. Op. 640 

"Ackpn xetua Kaxyn Oéper & p : Ne 
aap pn xetu n Oper dpyadén obdé mor’ écOd7 
GN dmb7’ ay hepéorkos dd xOoves dm pura Batyy 

T1Anuddas gpevywv, tore 5H oKxddos ovdKére olvéwr. 
Mr A. B. Cook has pointed out (Class. Rev. vit. p. 381) that these descriptive 
names, such as ‘House-Carrier,’ ‘Boneless One,’ ‘No-Hair,’ are comparable to the 
tabu on the proper name of some totem-animals. f 

Te ee 

ve 

2 a |, 

ee Vee 

IW] ‘The Weather-birds and the teirea 97 

it is no longer seasonable to dig about the vines. The snail ‘fleeing 
from the Pleiades’—a strange conjunction of earth and heaven. 
We are in a world truly magical where anything can ‘ participate 
with’ and, in a sense, be the cause of anything else. If you are 

_ a woman, you must watch to see ‘ when the soaring spider weaveth 

her web in the full day,’ and when ‘the Wise One, the ant, 
gathereth her heap.’ You will find that it is on the 12th day 
of the waxing moon and then is it well that a woman should set 
up her loom and lay the beginning of her work’. But first and 
foremost you should watch the birds who are so near the heavenly 
signs, the teipea, and who must know more than man. This * 
watching of the birds we are accustomed to call the ‘science of — 
augury’; we shall presently see that in its origin it is pure magic, 
“pure doing; the magical birds make the weather before they 
portend it?’ 

Take heed what time thou hearest the voice of the crane 

Who, year by year, from out the clouds on high 

Clangs shrilly, for her voice bringeth the sign 

For ploughing and the time of winter’s rain, 
And bites the heart of him that hath no ox’. 

If the warning of the crane be neglected there is yet for the 
late plougher another chance of which already we have learnt: 

And if thou ploughest late, this be thy charm: 
When first the cuckoo cuckoos in the oak, 
Gladdening men’s hearts over the boundless earth, 
Then may Zeus rain‘. 

Again the advice to the Vine-grower : 

But when Zeus hath accomplished sixty days 

After the solstice, then Arkturos leaves 

Okeanos’ holy stream, and first doth rise 

In radiance at the twilight. After him 

Comes the shrill swallow, daughter of Pandion, 
Uprising with the rising of the spring. 

Before she comes, prune thou thy vines. Tis best®. 

The short practical mandates cut sharply in through the poetry 
and all the lovely blend of bird and constellation, which are alike 
teipea, heavenly signs. 

On a black-figured vase in the Vatican‘ (Fig. 15) we have the 
scene of the coming of the swallow. We have a group of men and 

tHes, Op. 776. 

2 I owe this suggestion and much help in the matter of bird-magic to the 
kindness of Mr Halliday. 

3 vy, 450. 4 y, 486. 5 vy, 564. 
6 From a photograph. See Baumeister, Denkmédiler, ut. Fig. 2128, p. 1985. 

H. 7 

98 Magic [on 

boys all glad and eager to welcome her. The first boy says ‘ Look, 
there’s a swallow’ (i500 yedcdev); a man answers ‘by Herakles, 
so there is’ (vi tov ‘Hpaxdéa); another boy exclaims ‘There she 
goes’ (avrnl); and then ‘Spring has come’ (€ap 767). 

I have advisedly translated 8pviOas xpivav < knowing in birds, 
rather than ‘reading or discriminating omens.’ A convention in 
Seams and even in literary translation prevails, that the word 
épvis, whenever it has anything to do with presage, is to be 
translated omen. The habit seems to me at once aki and 
slipshod. All the colour and atmosphere of the word gps is 
thereby lost ; lost because with us the word omen is no Bes. a 
wingéd word. It is safer, I think, to translate dpves as bird, and 

realise by a slight mental effort that to the Greek a ‘bird’ is 
ominous. 

t 

The mantic Weather bird 

- to remind him: 

An ox or an ass that may happen to pass, 

A voice in the street or a slave that you meet, 
A name or a word by chance over-heard, 

If you deem it an omen, you call it a bird. 

. 

A 
4 
. 

the use of dépvis, and ofwvds, and the Latin aves bears such over- 
_whelming testimony, namely that among Greeks and Romans 
alike the watching of birds, their flight, their notes, their habits, 
their migrations were in all mantic art a primary factor. 

The mantic weather-bird precedes the prophetic god. The 
claim put forward by the chorus of Birds? is just: 

We are Delphi, Ammon, Dodona, in fine 

We are every oracular temple and shrine... 
If birds are your omens, it clearly will follow 
That birds are the proper prophetic Apollo. 

Nor is this mere comedy. In a primitive religion to introduce 
_ new gods is to introduce new birds. When Pentheus is raging 
against Teiresias, the ancient mantic priest, who will support the 
new Bacchic religion, he says 
’Tis thou hast planned 

This work, Teiresias, ’tis thou must set 
Another altar and another yet 
Amongst us, watch new birds. 

The remembrance of the mantic birds was never lost at Delphi. 
The vase-painting in Fig. 164 shows us the Delphic omphalos 
decked with sprays and fillets, Apollo to the right with his staff 
_ of mantic bay, Artemis to the left with blazing torch. Between 
; them, perched on the oracular stone itself, a holy bird. 

‘ If Hesiod had been pressed as to why birds were ominous, 
_ why they could help man by foretelling to him the coming of 
spring or the falling of rain, he would no doubt have fallen back 
on his Olympian gods. The gods had given the birds this power, 

the eagle was the messenger of Zeus, the raven of Apollo, the owl 
of Athena. He would not quite have called them as we do now 
attributes, but he would have thought of them, if pressed, as 

1 Aves, 719, trans. Rogers. 2%. 716. 
3 Bur. Bacch. 256. 4 Annali dell’ Arch. Inst. 1865, Tav. @’ agg. 

(oat 

z The classical scholar is in no danger of forgetting the wider 
_ and derived meaning of dps. Aristophanes" is always at hand 

ee te eet aa 

The danger is that we should forget the simple fact to which 

i, 2-1. a) ee. ee 

Ses 

, 

100 Magic 

heralds of his immortals. This view is almost inevitable as long 
as the bird is regarded as an omen pure and simple, as merely 
portending the weather, the said weather being made or at least 
arranged by some one else. There are not wanting signs however 
that, beneath this notion of birds as portents, there lies an earlier 
stratum of thought in which birds were regarded not merely as 

Fie. 16: 

portending the weather but as potencies who actually make it, 
not, that is, as messengers but as magicians. This early way of 
thinking cémes out most clearly in the case of a bird who never 
became the ‘attribute’ of any Olympian, the homely woodpecker. 

In the Birds of Aristophanes the Hoopoe asks Euelpides if | 

the birds ought not by rights to have the kingdom, since, as he 
has admitted, they were there before Kronos and the Titans, yes, 
and before Earth herself. Yes! by Apollo, says Euelpides, they 
certainly ought and you had better be trimming up your beaks 
for you can’t expect that 

Zeus the pretender 

‘ll make haste to surrender 

The Woodpecker’s sceptre he stole?. 
1 Ar, Aves, 468 

dpxadrepor mpotepot te Kpdvov xal Tirdvwv éyévecbe 
Kal ys. 3 
2 Ar. Aves, 478 
mavu tolvuy xph piyxos BéoKew* 
ovK amodwoe: Taxéws 6 Leds 7d oKxh 5) 
; ’ : fiwtpov 7@ SpuxodarrTy. 
Peisthetairos and Euelpides go on to explain how divers birds were ng in divers 

roy 4 

4 

The Woodpecker-king 101 

Zeus stole the sceptre from the woodpecker in Greece but too 
effectively. The tradition of Keleos the old king of Eleusis! lived 
on; but who remembers that he was the rain-bird, the green wood- 
pecker living at Woodpecker-town (Keleai), the woodpecker who 
yaffles in our copses to-day? In German mythology? he survives, 
but as miscreant not as king. The woodpecker was ordered by 
God to dig a well. He refused, fearing to soil his fine clothes. 
God cursed him for his idleness. He was never again to drink 
from a pond and must always cry giet, giet (giess) for rain. The 
many thirst-stories found in folk-lore all point to rain-birds. 

It was in Italy not Greece that the royal woodpecker lived on, 
and it is there that we shall find him realize his function not as 
omen-bird but as magician-king, not portending the weather but 
actually making it. 

The design in Fig. 17 is from a gem, a carnelian now in the 
Berlin Museum’. A bird, who for the 
moment shall be nameless, is perched 
on a post round which is coiled a snake’. 
At the foot is a ram slain in sacrifice. 
A young warrior carrying a shield 
stands before the bird with upraised 
hand as though saluting it or asking 
a question. The interpretation of the 
gem, though it has analogies to the 
scene on the Hagia Triada sarcophagos 
to be later discussed®, must have re- 
mained pure conjecture, but for a 

passage in Denys of Halicarnassos as 

follows : 

Three hundred stadia further (in the country of the Apennines) is Tiora, 
called Matiene. Here there is said to have been an oracle of Mars of great 
antiquity. It is reported to have been similar in character to the fabled 
oracle at Dodona, except that, whereas at Dodona it was said that a dove 

a es 

ta eS Pe eee 

boat ot ie 

Fie. 17. 

lands: the cock in Persia, the kite among certain Greeks, the cuckoo among the 
Phenicians; and this is why birds are wont to sit upon their sceptres. 

1 Paus. ut. 14. 2. Another mystery-priest is Trochilus, the wren, P. 1. 14. 2. 
For classical references to birds here and elsewhere see D’Arcy Thompson, A 
Glossary of Greek Birds. 

2 Grimm, Teutonic ey: II. Ps he io 

3 Furtwangler, Ant. Gem, pl. xxiv. 10, p. ; : 

e The ae ori think, ee the ae as, like the tree, belonging to earth, 
springing from the under-ground, ‘chthonic.’ 

5 p. 159. 

= 
. 

102 Magie [cH. 

perched on a sacred oak gave oracles, among the Aborigines the oracles were 
given in like fashion by a god-sent bird called by them Picus (the Greeks 
name it Dryokolaptes) which appears on a wooden pillar}. 

Denys of Halicarnassos, a Greek by birth, and one to whom 
Latin was an acquired language, saw the Roman Antiquities, to 
the study of which he devoted so much of his life, through Greek 
eyes, and again and again in dealing with things primitive he 
divines the substantial identity behind the superficial difference?. 
Dodona, her sacred oak, her sacred doves, her human god-king 
Zeus; Tiora, her tree-pillar, her woodpecker, her human god-king 
Mars. 

So far Picus is just a pie, an oracular bird. The term picus 
or pie, covered, it would seem, in Latin the genus woodpecker, 
called by the Greeks the wood-tapper (Spvoxoddmrns), and also 
from his carpentering habits the axe-bird (areXexds). The modern 
mag-pve has fallen on evil days. Mag is Meg, a common woman’s 
name and one that stands for woman. Women from Hesiod’s 
days downwards have always chattered; the social silences of man 
are, in truth, compared to those of woman, more spacious and 
monumental. The magpie is now a thief, and worse, she is a 
spotted she-chatter-box. But the old folk-rhyme remembers when 
man listened reverently to the magpie’s uncouth chatter and 
marked her ominous coming and knew that for him the more 
magpies the merrier. 

One for sorrow, 
Two for mirth, 
Three for a wedding, 
And four for a birth. 

We have seen the woodpecker Picus perched upon the tree- 
post, and when we meet him next he is not only associated with 
a tree but closely bound up with its life. The Latins, Plutarch? 
tells us, gave special honour and worship to the woodpecker, the 
bird of Mars. And well they might. Twice did the woodpecker 

1 Dion. Hal. Antig. 1. 14 Tiwpa dé dard rpraxoclwy, 4 xahoumevn Marinvyn. ey 
Tabry Aéyerar Xpnorhpov”Apeos yevéOar wavy apxatov* 6 6¢ rpdros abroo TapamtAHoLos 
nv ws dact TH Tapa Awdwvators wvodo-younevw Tore yevérOar* wry cov exe? wev em} 
Spuds lepdis (medela) xabefouevn Oeomupdety éréyero, mapa 5€ Tots ’ABopvyior Oebmeurros 
Opvis dv avrol mwév mikov, "ENAnves dé dpuvoKo\dmrnv Kadovow, émt Klovos EvAlwov dawwé- 
pevos TO ard dpa. 

? As will later (p. 194) be seen, he was the first to see the substantial i i 
of the Roman Salii and the Greek Kouretes. vy art eel 

3 Vit. Rom. iv. rov dé dpvoxohdarny kal Siadepdvtws Aarivor oéBovra kal Timdow. 

ik ale nl 4 . 
Pe ee ee ae. fh ole 

_ 

ivi, The Woodpecker-king 

103. 

_ interfere to save the divine twins Romulus and Remus; once to 
save the holy trees with which their life was bound up, once to 
feed and protect them when they were exposed by the wicked ‘ 
uncle. It is obvious, I think, that the two versions are sub- : 
stantially the same; the life of the two trees and of the two royal 
___ children is really one. 
Before the birth of the royal twins, Silvia their mother dreamt 
_ awell-omened dream. She saw, wondrous to behold, two palm- 
__ trees shoot up together, the one taller than the other. The tall e 
one with its heavy branches overshadowed the whole earth and 
with its topmost tresses touched the uttermost stars. She saw 
too her father’s brother, the wicked uncle, brandish an axe against 
the trees, and her heart trembled within her. But a woodpecker, 

ae 

Fia. 18. 

bird of Mars, and a she-wolf, delightful companions in arms, fought 
for the trees and by their aid both palm-trees were unharmed. 
Martia picus avis gemino pro stipite pugnant 
Et lupa. Tuta per hos utraque palma fuit?. 

In her dream Silvia sees her children in tree-shape ; so Althaea 
dreamed of the blazing log that held Meleager’s life; so Clytem- 
naestra dreamed of the snake that was her fatal son. Then we 
have the humanized form of the story. The wicked uncle is ; 
routed by the comrades in arms, the wolf and woodpecker of Mars. 

The twins are horn, and in canonical fashion the order is given 

1 Ovid, Fasti, ut. 37. 

104 _ Magic — [CH. 

that they should be drowned. The Tiber shrinks back from 
contact. with so much royal mana and leaves the twins on dry 
ground. There they are suckled by—a she-wolf. 

Ovid in his polite way assumes that we shall know a little more 
elementary mythology; that we shall not forget that the wood- 
pecker too was their foster-nurse, who, though he might not suckle 
them, yet raven-like brought them their daily bread. 

Lacte quis infantes nescit crevisse ferino, 
Et picum expositis saepe tulisse cibos!. 

On a denarius? of Sextus Pompeius Faustulus (Fig. 18) the scene 
is depicted in full. The she-wolf and the twins; above them the 
sacred fig-tree (Ficus ruminalis), and perched upon it the sacred 
birds. 

In Rome to-day an old she-wolf still howls in desolation on the 
Capitoline hill; but there is no woodpecker to make lamentation. 

Picus was an oracular bird, a tree-guardian, a guardian of 
kings; he was also himself a king, king over a kingdom ancient 
and august. Vergil* tells how when Aineas sent his messengers 
to interview the aged Latinus they found him in his house ‘stately 
and vast, upreared on an hundred columns, once the palace of 
Laurentian Picus, amid awful groves of ancestral sanctity. It 
was a place at once palace and temple, befitting the old divine 
king. There each successive king received the inaugural sceptre. 
There was the sacred banqueting hall, where after the sacrifice of 
rams the elders were wont to sit at the long tables. ‘There stood 
around in the entry the images of the forefathers of old in ancient 
cedar ’—figures some of them faint and impersonal, Italus and 
Sabinus, mere eponyms, but among them figures of flesh and 
blood, primal god-kings, ‘gray Saturn and the likeness of Janus 
double-facing, and—for us most important of all—holding the 
divining rod of Quirinus, girt in the short augural gown, carrying 
on his left arm the sacred shield, Picus the tamer of horses. 
Picus equum domitor, a splendid climax; but Picus, the poet 

1 Ovid, Fasti, m1. 53. 

a Babelon, 11. 336. The same scene—except that the tree is, oddly, a vine—occurs 
on an antique violet paste at Berlin, published by Imhoof Blumner and Otto 
Keller, Tier- und Pflanzen-bilder, Pl. 21, 15, cf. Furtwangler, Geschnittene Steine 

im Antig. No. 4379. My attention was drawn to these monuments by the kind- 
ness of Mr A. B. Cook. 

3 Ain. vit. 170 ff. 

Picus and Faunus 

_ knows, is also a spotted pie, a woodpecker. Vergil is past-master 
in the art of gliding over these preposterous orthodoxies. He 
sails serenely on through the story’s absurd sequel, the love of 
Circe, her potions, the metamorphosis! of the tamer of horses into 
a spotted pie, 

Picus equum domitor, quem capta cupidine conjunx 
Aurea percussum virga, versumque venenis ; 
Fecit avem Circe, sparsitque coloribus alas, 

and in the solemn splendour of the verbiage one forgets how 
childish is the content. 

Picus holds the lituus, the augur’s curved staff; he is girt with 
the short trabea, the augur’s robe of purple and scarlet, and he 
carries on his left arm the ancile, the sacred shield borne by the 
Salii, He is a bird, an augur and a king. In Vergil, spite of 
the inevitable bird-end and the augur’s dress, Picus is more king 
than bird or even augur; he remains remote and splendid. Ovid 
however tells us more of what manner of king he was, and the 
revelation is a strange one. In the third book of the Fast? he 
tells us an odd story about Picus, and tells it with his usual output 
of detailed trivialities, significant and insignificant, which must 
here be briefly resumed. 

_ Numa, Numa Pompilius be it noted (to the importance of 
the name we shall return later), with the help of Egeria has 
been carrying out his admirable religious reforms. In the grove 
of Aricia, he has been teaching his people the fear of the gods, 
and the rites of sacrifice and libation, and in general he has 
been softening their rude manners. In the midst of all this 
very satisfactory piety down came a fearful thunderstorm, the 
lightning flashed, the rain fell in torrents, fear took possession 
of the hearts of the multitude. Numa consulted Egeria. She | 
was no good on her own account, she could not stop the storm, 
but being a wood nymph, and of the old order of things, she knew 

1 The story of how Picus spurned the love of Circe and was turned into a 
woodpecker is told with his customary detail by Ovid, Met. xtv. 6. ; 
2 yy, 285—348. The story forms part of the whole account of the ceremonies of 
the Salii in March and especially of the origin of the ancilia, the original of which, 
worn by Picus on his left arm, had descended from the sky at sunrise in a thunder- 
storm. The ancilia will be discussed later, p. 196. 

106 , Magic [ CH. 

it could be stopped, and better still who could do it—Picus and 
Faunus, ancient divinities of the soil. 
piabile fulmen 
Est ait et saevi flectitur ira Jovis. 
Sed poterunt ritum Picus Faunusque piandi 
Prodere, Romani numen uterque solil. 

Ovid swings neatly balanced between two orders, the old and 
the new. The old story is of the thunder (fulmen), a sanctity 
in itself, the vehicle of mana. This fulmen is piabile, you can 
manipulate it magically for your own ends. The new order tells of 
a human-shaped Jove whose weapon is the thunder which he hurls 
in his anger. Clearly he is not wanted here. Numa has just 
been teaching his people those rites of fire-sacrifice and libation 
dear to the full-blown anthropomorphic god. The most un- 
reasonable and ungovernable of the Olympians could scarcely have 
chosen such a moment to manifest his ire. Ovid is caught in the 
trap set by his own up-to-date orthodoxy. 

The necessity of dragging in the Olympian Jupiter constantly 
complicates and encumbers the story. Picus and Faunus really 
make the weather, but by Ovid’s time Jupiter has got full 
possession of the thunderbolt as his ‘attribute. Old Faunus was 
embarrassed and shook his horns in perplexity as to the etiquette 
of the matter; he and Picus had their own province, they were 
gods of the fields and the high mountains, but Jupiter must decide 
about his own weapons : 

Di sumus agrestes, et qui dominemur in altis 
Montibus. Arbitrium est in sua tela Jovi2. 

Finally they arrive at a sort of pious, obscurantist compromise : 
they must not meddle with the thunder, but by their spells they 
will induce Jupiter himself to allow himself to be dragged down 
from the sky. He is worshipped as Elicius, he will allow himself 
to be elicited : 

Eliciunt caelo te, Jupiter; unde minores 
Nune quoque te celebrant, Eliciumque vocant’. 

Picus and Faunus are not regular dei like Jove, they are 

numuna, spirits, genii, a bird-spirit and a wood-spirit ; like the 
1 Fasti, 11, 289. 2 Fasti, 11. 315. 
* Fasti, ut. 327. In all probability as Mr A. B. Cook suggests (Class. Rev. xvi. 

1904, p. 270) Jupiter Elicius is really Jupiter of the ilex-tree: but this question 
does not here concern us. 

Iv] _ Picus, Faunus and Idaean Daktyls 107 

_ Tree-King who watched over the Golden Bough, they haunt 
_ the dark groves. At the foot of the Aventine was a grove so dim 
it seemed a spirit must dwell there. 

Lucus Aventino suberat niger ilicis umbra 
Quo posses viso dicere, Numen inest!. 

Here Picus and Faunus were run to earth, but like the genuine 
old bogey-magicians they were, like Proteus himself, they had to 
be caught and manacled before they would speak. In the best 
accredited fashion, they changed themselves, Plutarch tells us, 
into all manner of monstrous shapes. But caught and bound 
at last they were, and they handed over to Numa the whole 
magician’s bag of tricks; they taught him to foretell the future, 
and most important of all, they taught him the charm, a purifica- 
tion (caapuov), against thunderboits. The charm was in use in 
Plutarch’s days; it was pleasantly compounded of onions, hairs, 
and pilchards. 

Picus and Faunus are magicians, medicine-men, and medicine- 
men of a class with which we are already familiar. On this point 
Plutarch? is explicit. ‘The daemons, Picus and Faunus, he says, 
‘were in some respects (i.e. in appearance) like Satyrs and Panes, 
but in their skill in spells and their magical potency in matters 
divine they are said to have gone about Italy practising the same 
arts as those who in Greece bore the name of Idaean Daktyls.’ 

Now at last we are on firm familiar ground. The Daktyls of 
Crete, the initiates of Idaean Zeus we know, they were the men 
who purified Pythagoras with the thunder-stone‘ and initiated him 
into the thunder-rites of the Idaean cave. If Picus the Bird-King 
was of their company, small wonder that he could make and 
unmake the thunder. As we have already seen they were, com- 
pared to the Kouretes, a specialized society of sorcerers. Of 
like nature were the Telchines in Rhodes, of whom Diodorus® 
says in an instructive passage, ‘they are also said to have been 

1 Fasti, 11. 295. : ent 
2 Vit. Num. xv. ...d\dbxora pacuara Kal poBepa Ths dpews mpoBarnopevous...a da 
Te mpocbectloar Toda T&Y wehAdvTwv Kal Tov Emi Tors Kepawvots éxdiddéae Kafapyov ds 
qotetrat mexpl viv dud Kpoumtuy kal TprxXOv Kal wawddwy. wo oe at 
3 Vit. Num. xv. ...potrav dbo daiuovas Itkov kai Paivoy* ods Ta pev (fidda Zardpwv 
dy ris 7) Ilavav yéver mpocekacese, dvvduer 6¢ Papuaxwy Kal dew drnre Ths mwepl 7a beta 
“yonrelas héyovrae radrad Tois bp’ “EAAjvwv mpocaryopevdetow ‘datos Aaxrvhors aopiso- 
“pevoe rrepitévac thy "IraXiav. 
4 See supra, p. 56. 5 vy. 55. 3. 

~ 

ee a ide = ie Fs we 

108 HCE. — Magic [cH. 

magicians (ydnres), and to have had the power of inducing at their 
will clouds and rain-showers and hail, and they could also draw 
down snow, and it is said that they could do these things just like 
the magi. And they could change their shapes and they were 
jealous in the matter of teaching their arts.’ In this ‘jealousy’ 
we see the note of a secret society. 

In the story of Numa’s dealings with Picus and Faunus we 
have the clearest possible reflection and expression of the conflict 
of new and old, and further of the inextricable confusion caused 

_ by obscurantist attempts at reconciling the irreconcilable. In 

| the old order you, or rather your medicine-king, made the weather 

magically by spells; in the new order you prayed or offered gift- 

_ sacrifice to an anthropoid god, a sky-god, Zeus or Jupiter, and left 

the issue confidently in his hands. Plutarch? is loud in his praises 
of the way that Numa hung all his hopes on ‘the divine. When 
news was brought that the enemy was upon him, Numa smiled 
and said, ‘But I am offering burnt sacrifice.’ Plutarch is no 
exception. For some reason not easy to divine, mankind has 

} always been apt to regard this attitude of serene and helpless 
» dependence as peculiarly commendable. 

Numa is Numa Pompilius and his gentile name tells us that 
he was not only an innovator, but an interloper, a conqueror. 
Umbrians, Sabellians and Oscans, tribes who came in upon the 
indigenous people of Italy from the north are labializers?; their 
king is not Numa Quinquilius, but Numa Pompilius. The wor- 
shippers of Picus, the Woodpecker medicine-king, were, as Denys 
tells us, aborigines. These northerners, though originally of the 
same stock, had passed into a different and it may be a higher 
phase of development, they had passed from spell to prayer, from 
sacrament to gift-sacrifice. They came back again into the plains 
of Italy as the Achaeans came into Agean Greece, bringing a full- 
blown anthropoid sky-god, Jupiter. They found a people still in 
the magical stage ruled over by a medicine-king’, Picus, 

1 Vit. Num. xv. adroy dé rov No 
wore kal mpooayyeNlas adr@ more 
*Hyw O€ Otw. 

* I follow Prof. Ridgeway, Who were the Romans? Proceedings of the British 
Academy, vol. 111. 1907. 

‘sg I borrow the term from Professor Gilbert Murray. The expression ‘ divine- 
king’ is as he has clearly shown (Anthropology and the Classics, p. 77) misleading. 

udv o'rw pacly els Td Oetov avnpricba Tats édrlow, 
yevoueyyns ws émépxovrat modeuror werdiacar Kal elretv, 

Weather-daemon and Olympian 109 

_ The indigenous weather-daemon Picus and the incoming 
thunderer Jupiter have similar and therefore somewhat incom- 
patible functions; it is inevitable that their relations will be 
somewhat strained, a modus vivendi has to be found. One of two 
things will happen. If you are a mild, peace-loving Pelasgian with 
a somewhat obscurantist mind, you will say, ‘Ab! here are two 
great powers, Picus and Jupiter or Zeus, doing the same great 
_ work, making the rain to fall, the sun to shine, commanding the 
thunder; Picus has ‘entered the service of Zeus,’ Picus is ‘the son 
of Zeus,’ Picus is ‘a title of Zeus?, or best of all, are they not both 
one and the same?’ Picus himself, according to the Byzantine 
syncretizers, knew that he was really Zeus. ‘When he had handed 
over the western part of his kingdom he died at the age of 120, 
and when he was dying he gave orders that his body should be 
deposited in the island of Crete, and that there should be an 
inscription : 

Here lies dead the Woodpecker who also is Zeus?.’ 

But it may be that you are of sterner mould and of conquering 
race, that you are an incoming intransigent Achaean; you come 
down into Thessaly and find the indigenous Salmoneus or it may be 
Kapaneus at Thebes making thunder and lightning with his rain- 
birds and water-pails and torches. What! An earthly king, a 
mortal man, presume to mock Zeus’ thunder! Impious wretch, 
let him perish, blasted by the divine inimitable bolt: 

Demens ! qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen 
Aere et cornipedum pulsu simularet equorum’, 

The racial clash and conflict is interesting, and in dealing 
with the story of Picus as told by Ovid some mention of it was 
inevitable, but our business for the present lies solely with the 
development of the lower indigenous stratum. In the figure of 
Picus are united, or rather as yet undifferentiated, notions, to us 
_ incompatible, of bird, seer-magician, king and dawmon, if not god. 
The daimon as we have already seen with respect to the Kouros 
Kings were not deified because there were as yet no dei. The medicine-king is 

predeistic, but possessed of those powers which later and more cultured ages have 

relegated to the ‘ gods.’ 
1 Cf. such titles as Zeus Amphiaraos. 
2 Suidas, s.v. IfKxos: 
év0dde Ketrar Oavdy...[fjxos 6 Kal Zevs. 
3 Verg. Ain. v1. 590. 

— 

—= 

—=— 

110 Magie [Cs 

and the Bacchos is but the reflection, the collective emphasis, of 
a social emotion. The Kouretes utter themselves in their Greatest 
Kouros, the Woodpecker-Magicians in the Woodpecker, Picus. 
When the group dissolves and the links that bound leader and 
group together are severed, then Picus will become a god, unless 
his figere be effaced by some conquering divinity. 

Finally Picus enshrines a beautiful Jost faith, the faith that 
birds and beasts had mana other and sometimes stronger than 
the mana of man. The notion that by watching a bird you 
can divine the weather is. preceded by the far more primitive 
notion that the bird by his mana actually makes the weather, 
makes and brings the rain, the thunder, the sunshine and the 
spring. Beasts and birds in their silent, aloof, goings, in the 
perfection of their limited doings are mysterious still and wonder- 
ful. We speak of zoomorphic or theriomorphic or ornithomorphic 
gods, but again we misuse language. Birds are not, never were, 
gods; there is no definite bird-cult, but there are an infinite 
number of bird-sanctities. Man in early days tries to bring 
himself into touch with bird-mana, he handles reverently bird- 
sanctities. 

There are many ways in which man could participate in 
bird-mana. He could, and also ruthlessly did, eat the bird. 
Porphyry’ says those who wish to take unto themselves the spirits 
of prophetic animals swallow the most effective parts of them, 
such as the hearts of crows and moles and hawks. It is not that 

|you eat a god-bird, it is that you participate in a substance full 

of a special quality or mana. 

Scarcely less efficacious, you can wear the skin of the animal 
whose mana you want, and notably the feathers of a bird. The 
Carthaginian priestess’, whose image sculptured on a sarcophagos 
is reproduced in Fig. 19, wore a. bird-robe, the robe of the 
Egyptian goddess Isis-Nephthys. The goddess was but the | 
humanized, deified form of the holy bird. The body of the 
priestess is enfolded by the bird’s two wings. The bird-head 
appears above the headdress, and in her right hand she holds 

1 de Abst. 11. 48. See my Prolegomena, p. 487. 

_ ? First published by Miss M. Moore, Carthage of the Phenicians, 1905, frontispiece 
in colour, and reproduced here by kind permission of Mr W. Heinemann. 

Iv Bird-magic 

a bird. She is all bird. 
a dark vivid blue and the 
colourless reproduction gives 
but a slight idea of the 
beauty of the bluebird- 
priestess. 

The wearing of bird- 
robes and _ bird-headdresses 
with magical intent goes 
on to-day among primitive 
peoples. Among the Tara- 
humares now-a-days a sha- 
man may be seen at feasts 
wearing the plumes of birds, 
and through these plumes 
it is thought the wise birds 
impart all they know. Like 
Teiresias, like Mopsos, like 
Melampos, like Kassandra, 
these shamans understand 
the speech of birds. A little 
bird tells them. 

Further you can secure 
much bird-mana by a bird- 
dance. These same Tarahu- 
mares assert that their 
dances have been taught 
them by animals. Animals 
they hold are not inferior 
creatures; they practise 
magic. The deer and the 
turkey dance in spring, the 
birds sing and the frogs 
croak to induce the gods 
to let it rain. Here it is 
evident we are in a transi- 
tion stage; gods are already 

1 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mezico, vol. 1. p. 313. 

111 

The colouring of the feathers is 

Fig. 19. 

For the general attitude of 

primitive man towards birds, see H. J. Payne, History of America, 1. p. 161, and 
especially McDougall, Journ. Anthrop. Inst. 1901, xxx1. pp. 173—213. 

Ms. fia, th 

112 Magic [cH. 

developed, but it is the turkey and the deer who do the real 
work, the dancing, for, among the Tarahumares, dancing, noldova, 
means literally to ‘work.’ Their two principal dances are the 
Yumari and the Rutuburi. The Yumari, which was older, was 
taught to the people by the deer. The words sung at the 
Rutuburi dance show clearly the magical intent. After a short 
prelude the song begins’: 

The water is near; 

Fog is resting on the mountain and on the mesa, 

The Blue bird sings and whirs in the trees, and 

The Male Woodpecker is calling on the Uano; 

Where the fog is rising. 

The large Swift is making his dashes through the evening air ; 

The rains are close at hand. 

When the Swift is darting through the air he makes his whizzing 
humming noise. 

The Blue Squirrel ascends the tree and whistles. 

The plants will be growing and the fruit will be ripening, 

And: when it is ripe it falls to the ground. 

It falls because it is so ripe. 

The flowers are standing up, waving in the wind. 

The Turkey is playing, and the Eagle is calling; 

Therefore, the time of rains will soon set in. 

The dance goes on for hours. It is danced on one of the patios 
or level dancing-places where the Tarahumare performs all his 
religious exercises. The dance is performed in the open air 
ostensibly that the principal divinities of the people, Father-Sun 
and Mother-Moon, may see it and be induced to send rain; but, as 
there is no mention whatever of either Father-Sun or Mother- 
Moon, it is probable that the service of the magical birds preceded 
that of these Tarahumaran Olympians. 

It is of course not only birds who teach man to dance, there 
are sterner potencies whose gait and gestures it is well to imitate. 
The Grizzly Bear dance of the North American Indians is thus 
described*. The drummers assemble and chant ‘I begin to grow 
restless in the spring,’ and they represent the bear making ready 
to come from his winter den. Then ‘Lone Chief’ drew his robe 

1 Carl Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, vol. 1. p. 330. 
_ ? It is probable that the various bird-dances of the ancients had the like magical 
intent, e.g. the dances called yaté (Athen. xrv. 629) and oxy (Athen. rx. 391) and 
the famous yépavos (Plut. Thes. xx1.). Mr D’Arey Thompson says (s.v.) that the 
peneg of cranes may be seen in the opening of the year in any zoological 
garden, 

3 W. McClintock, The Old North Trail, p. 264. 

Mana of Birds 

about him and arose to dance imitating the bear going from his 
den and chanting : 

I take my robe, 

My robe is sacred, 

I wander in the summer, 
‘Lone Chief’ imitated with his hands a bear holding up its paws 
and placing his feet together he moved backward and forward 
with short jumps, making the lumbering movements of a bear, 
running, breathing heavily and imitating his digging and turning 
over stones for insects. 

Any bird or beast or fish, if he be good for food, or if in any 
way he arrest man’s attention as fearful or wonderful, may become 
sacred, that is, may be held to be charged with special mana; but, 
of all living creatures, birds longest keep their sanctity. They 
come and go where man and beast cannot go, up to the sun, high 
among the rain clouds; their flight is swift, their cries are strange 
and ominous, yet they are near to man; they perch on trees, yet 
they feed on earth-worms; they are creatures half of Gaia, half of 

_ Ouranos. Long after men thought of and worshipped the gods 

in human shape they still remembered the ancient Kingdom of 
the Birds. On the archaic patera! in Fig. 53, p. 207, is depicted the 
sacrifice of a bull—it may be at the Bouphonia. Athena is present 
_ as Promachos with shield and uplifted spear. Behind her is the 
great snake of Mother Earth which she took over, in front on a 
stepped altar where the fire blazes is a holy bird. What bird is 
intended is uncertain; assuredly no owl, but perhaps a crow, 
though Aristotle? says no crow ever entered the Acropolis at 
Athens. At Korone, Crow Town, there was a bronze statue of 
Athena holding a crow in her hand’. 

We do not associate Artemis with any special bird, still less 
do we imagine her in bird-form ; she is altogether to us the human 
maiden. Yet we know of the winged, or, as she used to be called, 
_ the ‘Persian’ Artemis, with her high curved wings. The recent 

_ excavations of the British School at Sparta have taught us that 
1 Brit. Mus. Cat. B 405, C. Smith, J.H.S. 1. p. 202, Pl. ur., and see my Ancient 
Athens, p. 289, Fig. 30. 
2 Frg. 324. y 
3 Paus. iv. 34. 6; for the relation of Athens to the crow and the enmity of crow 

and owl see Dr Frazer’s note on Paus. 1. 11. 7, and for crow superstitions, xopwvic- 
para, etc., see D’Arcy Thompson, op. cit., s.v. Kopéyy. 

H. 8 

114 Magic | [CH. 

these wings are not oriental, and not even mere attributes of 
swiftness, they are just survivals of an old bird-form. On the 
carved ivory fibula in Fig. 201, from the sanctuary of Orthia, we 
see the primitive goddess who went to the making of Artemis. 
She has high curved wings, and she grasps by the neck two water- 
birds who dwelt in her Limnae. On one of the fibulae two birds 
are also perched on her shoulders; she is all bird. 

RO eRes 

Fig. 20. 

The Greeks early shrank from monstrosities, and our hand- 
books tell us it is because of the sureness and delicacy of their 
instinctive taste. But a hybrid form is not necessarily ugly; it 
may be of great imaginative beauty. There are Egyptian statues 
of the ram-headed Knum, more solemn, more religious than any 
human Zeus the Greeks have left us. In Fig. 212 we have the 
Chinese Thunder-God Zin-Shin, half bird half man as the Greeks 

*1 Reproduced by kind permission from R. M, Dawkins” Laconia, Sparta in 
B.S.A. xu. 1906-7, p. 78, Fig. 17 b. : 

-. * Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs Macmillan from W. Simpson, T'he 
Buddhist Praying Wheel, 1896, Fig. 41. - ¢ : a 

of Birds 
themselves imagined but feared to picture Zeus. He is fantastic 
and beautiful with his wings and eagle beak and claws, riding the 

q clouds in his circle of heavenly thunder-drums. The Greeks had 
just the same picture in their minds—a bird-god, a cloud-god, 

Ae 
LP te 
v 

Sanctity 

ee ee tS 

= P ek 
ee A ee ee Ie Ne. Oe 

a thunder-god—but they dare not adventure it all together, so 
they separate off the ‘attributes’; rationalists as they are they 
divide and distinguish, and give us pictures like the lovely coins 
of Elis (Fig. 22). But there is loss as well as gain. " 

ae 

Fic. 22. 

With this primitive sanctity of birds rather than their definite 

3 divinity in our minds, much that is otherwise grotesque becomes 

a simple and beautiful—Bird-bridegrooms, Bird-parentages, Egg- 

 cosmogonies, Bird-metamorphoses. We no longer wonder that 
8—2 

116 Magic (ae 

Trochilos the Wren is father of Triptolemos, that Ion is son of 
Xouthos the twitterer, himself the son of Aiolos the Lightning, nor 
that the Kouretes have for their mother Kombe the Crow. Bird- 
metamorphoses cease to be grotesque because they are seen not 
to be metamorphoses at all—only survivals misunderstood of the 
old Bird-sanctities. 

The heavenly swan woos Leda, and Nemesis in the form of a 
swan flies before the swan-god!, When Aidos and Nemesis leave 
miserable mortals to their sins and sorrows, they do on their 
swan bodies? once again and fly up to Olympus, their fair flesh 
hidden in white and feathery raiment, to the kingdom of the 
deathless ones—the birds. To that same quiet kingdom the 
chorus ‘of the Hippolytus*, strained to breaking-point by the 
passion of Phaedra, will escape. 

Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding 
In the hill-tops where the Sun scarce hath trod, 
Or a cloud make the home of mine abiding 
As a bird among the bird-droves of God! 

In far-off savage Tauri the leader of the chorus of Greek 
maidens, bird-haunted, remembers the bird and tree-sanctuary at 
Delos, where dwells the sacred swan-bird of the sun-god, and, 
halcyon-like, she sings: 

Sister, I too beside the sea complain, 
A bird that hath no wing. 

Oh for a kind Greek market-place again, 

For Artemis that healeth woman’s pain ; 
Here I stand hungering. 

Give me the little hill above the sea, 

The palm of Delos fringéd delicately, 

The young sweet laurel and the olive-tree 
Grey-leaved and glimmering; 

O Isle of Leto, Isle of pain and love, 

The Orbéd Water and the spell thereof, 

Where still the Swan, minstrel of things to be, 
Doth serve the Muse and sing. 

1 See Roscher, s.v. Nemesis. 
2 This, considering the swan-form of Nemesis, must, I think, be the meaning of 
Hesiod, Op. 200 
Nevkotow gapéeco. kadupauevw xpba KaNév. 
For these ‘femmes cygnes’ and the way they doff and do on their ‘chemises de 
cygne’ see §. Reinach, ‘Les Theoxenies et le yol des Dioscures,’ in Cultes, Mythes 

et Religions, 1. p. 55, though M. Reinach is not responsible for my interpretation 
of Hesiod. : 

3 Hur. Hipp. 732. 
4 Bur. Iph. in T. 1095. 

ag 

Sanetity of Birds | 117 

‘In the last two chapters we have seen that magic takes its 

rise, not only or chiefly in any mistaken theory, but in a thing 

_ done, a dpdpevov, predone. We have further passed in review, in 

_ unavoidable fusion and confusion, three stages of magical develop- 

ment; we have seen magic as open and public, an affair of the 

_ tribe, we have seen it as the work of a specialized group, and last, 
_ as the work of an individual medicine-man or medicine-king. 

Further, we have seen the magical efficacy of birds, as first making, 

_ and then foretelling, the weather. Finally we have seen, in the 

figure of Picus, the strange blend of bird-magician and human 
king. The cause of these various stages of magic, and the social 
conditions underlying the fusion of man and bird or beast will be 

_ examined in the next chapter, when we come to the question of 

saa sis 

sacrifice and the social, totemistic conditions that underlay it. 

This brings us to the second rite in the Kouretic initiation of 
a Bacchos, the omophagia. 

Picus Martius. 

yo. toe. 

Re tae SR Oe eee a bee, a ear eee ey 

erm 

Se 3 LP ee.

TOTEMISM, SACRAMENT AND SACRIFICE. 

‘WHAT MEANEST THOU BY THIS WORD SACRAMENT ?’ 

WE have seen how the mystic, at his initiation by the 
Kouretes, ‘accomplished the Thunders. Another rite remains, 
more dread and, to our modern thinking’, utterly repugnant. 
Before he can become a Bacchos, the candidate must have 

Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts”. 

The omophagia or Eating of Raw Flesh was a rite not confined 
to the Kouretic initiation of a Bacchos. We meet it again in the 
Thracian worship of Dionysos. The Bacchae when they recount 
Ta vopobévra, their accustomed rites, sing the glory and 

joy of the quick red fountains, 
The blood of the hill-goat torn?. 

The Bacchoi in Crete eat of a bull, the Bacchae in Thrace and 
Macedon of a hill-goat; the particular animal matters little, the — 
essential is that there should be a communal feast of Raw Flesh, 
a dals mpoparyos. 

Physically repugnant the rite must always be to our modern 
taste, which prefers to cook its goats and bulls before eating them ; 
but our moral repugnance disappears, or at least suffers profound 
modification, when the gist of the rite is understood. What 

specially revolts us is that the tearing and eating of bulls and 
ee in his de defect. oracul. raises a horrified protest. See my Prolegomena, 
p. 484. 

2 ras T wpopayous datras Tedéoas. 
3 Eur. Bacch. 135 

novs év dpeow... 
. Gypevwv 
alua Tpayoxrévoy, wpmopayor Xap. 

4 
4 
| 

= 

The Group and the Totem 

7 

cH. Vv) 

_ goats should be supposed to be a sacrifice pleasing to a god. We 

- naturally feel that from the point of view of edification the less 
said about the worship of such gods the better. Nor is our moral 
sense appeased if we are told that the sacrifice is a sacrament, 
that the bull or goat torn and eaten is the god himself, of whose 
life the worshippers partake in sacramental communion. In thus 
interpreting ancient rites we bring our own revolting horrors with 
us. The omophagia was part of a religion, that is a system of 
sanctities, that knew no gods; it belongs to a social organization 
that preceded theology. The origin of sacrifice and sacrament 
alike can only be understood in relation to the social structure 
and its attendant mode of thinking from whence it sprang— 
totemism. Only in the light of totemistic thinking can it be 
made clear why, to become a Bacchos, the candidate must partake 
of a sacrament of Raw Flesh. 

‘Totemism,’ Dr Frazer! says—and we cannot do better than adopt his 
definition—‘is an intimate relation which is supposed to exist between a 
group of kindred people on the one side and a species of natural or artificial 
objects on the other side, which objects are called the totems of the human 

group.’ 

We observe at the outset that totemism has two notes or 
characteristics: it has to do with a group not an individual, and 
that group is in a peculiar relation to another group of natural 
and occasionally of artificial objects. : 

It is of the utmost importance that we should be clear as to 
the first note or characteristic, i.e. that totemism has to do with a 
growp. In Dr Frazer’s earlier work on totemism, published in 
1887, his definition ignored the human group. It reads as follows’: 

stitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of 
the class an intimate and altogether special relation. 
In this earlier definition, it will be noted, a class of objects is 
regarded as in relation to an individual savage: in the later to 
a group of men. | 
As to the importance of the group, the word totem, it would 
seem, speaks for itself. It means, not plant or animal, but simply | 

1 Totemism and Exogamy, 1910, vol.1v. p. 3. i 
2 J. G. Frazer, Totemism, 1887, p.1. The italies are our own. This: mono- 

graph is reprinted without alteration in vol. 1. of Dr Frazer’s great work T'otemism 
and Exogamy. — 

A totem is a class of material objects which a savage regards with super- — 

120 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [CH. 

tribe, Various forms of the word are given by various authorities. 
The Rev. Peter J ones, himself an Ojibway, gives toodaim. Francis 
Assikinack, an Ottawa Indian, gives ododam. The Abbé Thavenal 
says the word is properly ote in the sense of ‘ family or tribe,’ the 
possessive of which is otem. He adds that the Indians use ote in 
the sense of ‘mark’ (limited, Dr Frazer! says, apparently to family 
mark), but he argues that the word must mean ‘family or tribe,’ in 
_ some sense ‘ group.’ 

This simple, familiar and, we believe, undisputed fact that 
totem means ‘tribe or group’ has not we think been sufficiently 
emphasized. The totem-animal, it has long been admitted, is 
, not an individual animal, it is the whole species. This at once 
delimits the totem, even when it is an artificial object, from the 
fetich. The fetich is never a class. But, though the group- 
character of the totem-animal is admitted, the correlative truth, 
that it is the human group, not the human individual that is 
related to the totem, has been left vague. Hence all the con- 
troversy as to whether the individual totem is prior to the group- 
totem or wice versd, whether or not the guardian animal or spirit 
of the individual precedes the totem-animal. Hence also the 
significance of Dr Frazer’s? modification of his original definition, 
his substitution of the words ‘group of kindred people’ for ‘a 
savage.’ 

First and foremost then in totemism is the idea of the unity of 
a group. Next comes the second note or characteristic; this 
human group is in a special relation to another group—this time 
of non-human objects. In far the greater number of cases these 
non-human objects are animals and plants, occasionally meteoric 
objects, sun, moon, rain, stars, and still more rarely artificial 
objects, nets or spears’. 

This relation between the human and the non-human group is 
so close as to be best figured by kinship, unity of blood, and is 

1 Totemism, 1887, p. 1, note 6. 

? Facts have forced upon Dr Frazer this modification—and to facts he always 
yields ungrudging obedience—but I cannot help thinking that, as he nowhere calls 
attention to this modification, the full significance of these facts escapes him, 
otherwise he would not base his new theory of totemism on the chance error of 
individual women. See Totemism and Exogamy, iv. p. 57. 

3 Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, t. p. 4. 

al | Psychology of Totemism 121 

expressed in terms of actual identity. A Central Australian 
pointing to a photograph of himself will say, ‘That one is just the 
same as me, so is a kangaroo (his totem). We say the Central 
Australian ‘belongs to the kangaroo tribe’; he knows better, he is 
kangaroo. Now it is this persistent affirmation of primitive man 
in the totemistic stage that he is an animal or a plant, that he 7s 
a kangaroo or an opossum or a witchetty grub or a plum tree, 
that instantly arrests our attention, and that has in fact obscured 
the other and main factor in totemism, the unity of the human 
group. The human group we understand and realize to a certain 
extent. Man, we know, is gregarious, he thinks and feels as a 
group. So much our latter-day parochialism or patriotism or 
socialism may help us to imagine. It is the extension of the 
group to include those strange tribesmen, plants, animals and 
stones, that staggers us. ‘ What,’ we ask, ‘does the savage mean by 
being one, identical with them? Why does he persistently affirm 
and reaffirm that he 7s a bear, an opossum, a witchetty grub, when 
he quite well knows that he is not ?’ 

Because to know is one thing, to feel is another. Because to 
_ know is first and foremost to distinguish, to note differences, to 
discern qualities, and thereby to classify. Above all things it is 
to realize the distinction between me and not-me. We all 

remember Tennyson’s ‘Baby new to earth and sky.’ He and 

the savage have never clearly said that ‘this is I.’ Man in the 
totemistic stage rarely sets himself as individual over against his 
tribe ; he rarely sets himself as man over against the world around 
him’. He has not yet fully captured his individual or his 
human soul, not yet drawn a circle round his separate self. 
It is not that he confuses between himself and a kangaroo; 
it is that he has not yet drawn the clear-cut outline that 
defines the conception kangaroo from that of man and eternally 
separates them. His mental life is as yet mainly emotional, one 
of felt relations. 

1 See Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures, 1910, 
. 25. 

oe But not if we become ‘as little children.’ Mr 8S. Reinach in his delightful 
Orpheus says of totemism (p. 22), ‘Ce respect de la vie d’un animal, dun végétal, 
n’est autre chose qu’une exagération, une hypertrophie de l’instinct social. 11 suffit 
de mener un jeune enfant dans un jardin zoologique pour s’assurer que cette 
hypertrophie est trés naturelle 4 ’homme.’ 
_ 8 For an illuminating account of the psychology of this process see the chapter 
on ‘ Wahrnehmung’ (Perception) in Dr P. Beck’s Die Nachahmung, 1904. 

se 

” 

oH | 
Te 
aa!) 

te 

122 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [cH. 

If we can once think ourselves back into totemistic days we 
shall be rid for ever of an ancient and most pernicious orthodoxy, 
e old doctrine that the religion of primitive man was anthropo- 
fnorphic. Facts tell us that it was not; that theriomorphism and 
phytomorphism came first. Yet the ancient dogma flourishes. 
Again and again we find the unqualified statement that man 
projects his own image on the universe, sees in it his own human 
will, peoples all nature with human souls. Totemism teaches us 
just the contrary ; it is as it were the fossil form of quite another 
creed. It stands for fusion, for non-differentiation. Man cannot 
project his individual self, because that individual self is as yet 
in part undivided ; he cannot project his individual human will, 
because that human will is felt chiefly as one with the un- 
differentiated mana of the world; he cannot project his individual 
soul because that complex thing is as yet not completely 
compounded’. 

Totemism, then, is not so much a special social structure as a 
stage in epistemology. It is the reflexion of a very primitive 
fashion in thinking, or rather feeling, the universe, a feeling the 
realization of which is essential to any understanding of primitive 
religion. It is not a particular blunder and confusion made by 
certain ignorant savages, but a phase or stage of collective think- 
ing through which the human mind is bound to pass. Its basis is 
group-unity, aggregation, similarity, sympathy, a sense of common 
group life, and this sense of common life, this participation’, this 
unity, is extended to the non-human world in a way which our 
modern, individualistic reason, based on observed distinctions, finds 
almost unthinkable. 

We find totemism unthinkable because it is non-rational. We 
are inclined to make the quite unauthorized assumption that true 
judgments, Le. judgments which correspond to observed fact, are 
natural to man. False judgments like totemism we feel are 
anomalous and need explanation. Man’s opinions, his judgments, 
we fondly imagine, are based on observation and reason. Just the 
contrary is the case; beliefs of every kind, at least in man’s early 

1 The late character of the individual ‘soul’ will be di 
the question of Hero- Worship in chapter virt. ve yisialaser wad A 

2 For a full analysis of the primitive id icipati i 
Revers UGE 5 EES ive idea of participation see Lévy-Bruhl, op. cit. 

| 

a vk Totemistic Thinking a Stage in Epistemology 123 

stages of development are prior to experience and observation, 

they are due to suggestion. Anything suggested is received 

unless there is strong reason, or rather emotion, to the contrary4. 
It is not the acceptance of an opinion, however absurd, that needs 

explanation ; it is its criticism and rejection®. Suggest to a savage 

that he has eaten tabooed food, he accepts the suggestion and— 

dies. The strongest form of suggestion is of course the collective 

suggestion of his whole universe, his group, his public opinion. 

Such suggestion will certainly be accepted without question, if it 

appeal to a powerful or pleasing emotion. 

That outlook on the universe, that stage in epistemology which 
we call totemism has its source then not in any mere blunder of 
the individual intellect, but in_a strong collective emotion. The 
next question that lies before us is naturally—What is the 
emotion that finds its utterance, its expression, its representation, 
in totemism? To answer this question we must look at the 
relations of primitive man to his totem. These relations are most 
clearly marked and will be best understood in that large majority 
of cases where the totem is an edible plant or animal. 

As a rule a savage abstains from eating his totem, whether 
plant or animal: his totem is tabu to him; to eat it would be 
disrespectful, even dangerous. An Ojibway who had unwittingly 
killed a bear (his totem) described how, on his way home after 
the accident, he was attacked by a large bear who asked him why 
he had killed his totem. The man explained, apologised, and 
was dismissed with a caution*. This tabu on the eating of a totem 
is natural enough. The man is spiritually, mystically, akin to his 
totem, and as a rule you do not eat your relations. But this tabu 
is in some parts of the world qualified by a particular and very 
interesting injunction. A man may not as a rule eat of his totem, 
but at certain times and under certain restrictions a man not only 

1 W. James, Principles of Psychology, 11. p. 319, ‘the primitive impulse is to 
affirm immediately the reality of all that is conceived,’ ‘we acquire disbelief,’ and 
p. 299, ‘we believe as much as we can.’ i : 

2 This important point has been well brought out in an article in the Edinburgh 
Review (vol. cox. p. 106) on Fallacies and Superstitions. The anonymous writer 
reminds us that the writer of the Problems attributed to Aristotle (0, p. 891, Gant). 
raised the question ‘why do men cough and cows do not?’ a difficulty he might have 
spared himself had his judgments been based on observation. 

3 Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, 1. p. 10. 

a : [et - ens 
Nak) 
» 

124 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice (cH. 

may, but must, eat of his totem, though only sparingly’, as of a 
thing sacro-sanct. This eating of the totem is closely connected 
with its ceremonial multiplication. You abstain from your totem 
as a rule because of its sanctity, ie. because it is a great focus of 
mana; you eat a little with infinite precautions because you want 
that mana and seek its multiplication. This double-edged atti- 
tude towards things sacred lies, as we shall later see, at the very 
foundation of the ideas both of sacrament and sacrifice. 

The totem-animal is in general the guardian and protector of 
its human counterpart, but the relation is strictly mutual; the 
animal depends on the man as the man on the animal. This 
comes out very clearly in the Jntechiwma ceremonies performed 
by the Central Australian tribes?» By Intichiwma are meant 
magical ceremonies performed by members of a totem-group to 
induce the multiplication of the totem. As a typical instance we 
may take the ceremonies of the Emu totem. 

When men of the Emu totem desire to multiply emus they set about it 
as follows. Several of the men open veins in their arms and allow the blood 
to stream on the ground till a patch about three yards square is saturated 
with it. When the blood is dry it forms a hard surface on which the men of 
the totem paint in white, red, yellow and black a design intended to represent 
various parts of the emu, such as the fat, of which the natives are very fond, 
the eggs in various stages of development, the intestines, and the feathers. 
Further, several men of the totem, acting the part of ancestors of the Emu 
clan, dress themselves up to resemble emus and imitate the movements and 
aimless gazing about of the bird; on their heads are fastened sacred sticks 
(churinga) about four feet long, and tipped with emu feathers, to represent 
the long neck and small head of the emu?. 

The ceremony has really, like all Intichiwma ceremonies, two 
main elements: (1) the shedding of the blood of the human Emu, 
and (2) his counterfeit presentment of the bird-Emu. The human 
blood helps out the animal life, renews, invigorates it; the man, 
by dressing up as the Emu and making pictures of it, increases 
his mystic sympathy and commnnion. In the ceremony for pro- 
moting the Witchetty Grub a long narrow structure of boughs is 
got ready. It represents the chrysalis from which the full-grown 
insect emerges. Into this structure the men of the Witchetty 
Grub totem, painted over with the device of the totem in red 
ochre and pipe clay, each in turn enter and sing of the grub in its 

1 Frazer, op. cit. 1v. p. 6. 

2 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, chapter v1., Intichiuma 
ceremonies. 

3 Frazer, op. cit. 1. p. 106. 

_ v] Totemistic Thinking based on Group-unity 125 

various stages of development. They then shuffle out one by one 
with a gliding motion to indicate the emergence of the insect}, 
They enact, they represent their own union and communion, their 
identity with their totem, and thereby somehow intensify its life 
and productiveness. At the back of the whole grotesque perform- 

ance lies, not so much a mistaken ratiocination, but an intense 

desire for food, issuing in a vivid representation. 

Totemism and totemistic ceremonies and ways of thinking are 
based, we have seen, on group-emotion, on a sense of solidarity, of 
oneness. No distinction is felt between the human and non- 
human members of the totem-group, or rather, to be more exact, 
the beginning of a distinction is just dawning. The magical 
ceremonies, the shedding of the human blood, the counterfeiting 
of the animal, have for their object to bridge the gulf that is just 
opening, to restore by communion that complete unity which is 
just becoming conscious of possible division. The ceremonies are 
however still intensely sympathetic and cooperative ; they are, as 
the Greeks would say, rather methektic than mimetic, the expres- 
sion, the utterance, of a common nature participated in, rather 
than the imitation of alien characteristics. The Emu man still 
feels he is an Emu; the feathers he puts on, the gait he emulates, 
~ are his own, not another's. 

But, strong though the sense of group-unity is in Totemism, 
the rift has begun. Totemism means not only unity of one group, 
but also disparity from other groups. The Emu men are one 

| _ among themselves, and one with the Emu birds, but they are 

alien to the Witchetty Grub men, and have no power to multiply 
Witchetty Grubs—or Kangaroos. Behind the totemistic system 
may lie a pre-totemistic social state®, when the tribe was all one, not 
yet broken into totemistic groups. The cause of the severance we 

thal 

anal 

can only conjecture. Probably it was due to the merely mechanical | 

cause of pressure of population. The tribe growing over-populous 

loses coherence and falls asunder by simple segmentation. Once 

that segmentation occurs each half gathers round a nucleus. 
1 Frazer, op. cit. 1. p. 106, of how food comes to be. : 

2 J am indebted for this idea to views expressed by Mr A. R. Brown in a course 

of lectures delivered in 1909 at Trinity College, Cambridge. Mr Brown suggested 

that the Andaman Islanders and the Esquimaux were perhaps instances of pre- 
totemistic. peoples. 

5 hy wy q ri ae 4. Lar tum Ga fo ry 
Pee aA. -y he 

126 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice — [OH. 

We then have forces at work not only of attraction, but of repul- 
sion; union is intensified through disunion. This double force 
which makes and remakes society Empedocles! saw reflected in 
his cosmos : 

A two-fold tale I tell thee. At one time 
The One grew from the many. Yet again 
Division was—the many from the one. 

‘And these things never cease, but change for ever. 
At one time all are joined and all is Love, 
And next they fly asunder, all is Strife. 

Now that we realize a little what totemism is, we are able to 
understand much better the various stages and developments of 
magic and also something of the relation of magic to religion. 
The totem-group when it performs its rites of multiplication has 
indeed some dawning sense of differentiation, but its main emotion 
and conviction is of unity, emotional unity with its totem, a unity 
which it emphasizes and enhances and reintegrates by its cere- 
monies of sympathy. The whole human group.acts and reacts on 
the whole plant or animal group, the mana of the human and the 
animal group is felé as continuous. This is the first stage. But 
as intelligence advances and as actual individual observation tends 
to take the place of collective suggestion, the sense of unity is 
obscured. Little by little the attention is focused on distinctions. 
Man, though he is dressed up as an emu, becomes more and more 
conscious that he is not an emu, but that he is imitating an emu, 
a thing in some respects alien to himself, a thing possessed of 
much mana, but whose mana is separate, a thing to be acted on, 
controlled, rather than sympathetically reinforced. Then, as the 
Greek would say, wé0eEss gives place to ulunocs, participation to 
imitation’. 

Any dawning sense of distinction between the human and the 
animal member of the group is like a traitor in the very heart of 
the citadel. But custom is strong, and totemistic rites go on long 

1 Diels, Frg. 17, p. 177 

dia épéws Tore mev yap &v nbihOn pdvov elvat 
éx ada Tote 0° av duépu mdéov’ €& évds elvac 

kal Taor’ Ddtooorad. Staparepes “obdayua Myer, 
&AoTE ev Pirdrqre guvepxduev’ els év amrayTa, 
ddore 3 ad dix’ Exacta ghopediueva Nelxeos tye. 
° The analogy of the Greek uéeés was pointed out to me by Mr F. M. Gornfords 

after that faith in unity, in consubstantiality, which is of its essence, 
_ is dying or even dead. The stages of its death are gradual. The. 
whole group ceases to carry on the magical rite, which becomes 

the province of a class of medicine-men ; the specialized Kouretes, 

as we have seen, supplant the whole body of Kouroi. Finally the 

power is lodged in an individual, a head medicine-man, a king 

whose functions are at first rather magical than political. 

As the wielder of the power becomes specialized and indi- 
vidualized, his power becomes generalized. In primitive totemistic 
conditions the Emu man, by virtue of his common life, his common 
mana, controlled, or rather sympathetically invigorated, Emus; 
but his power was limited to Emus. Once the totemistic system 
begins to break down, this rigid departmentalism cannot be kept 
up. The band of magicians, and later the individual medicine- 
man or medicine-king began to claim control over the food 
supply and over fertility in general, and also over the weather, on 
which, bit by bit, it is seen that the food supply depends. The 
medicine-king tends towards, though he never attains, complete 
omnipotence. 

One other point remains to be observed. 

‘to speak of a totem as a god and say that it is worshipped by the clan. In 
pure totemism, such as we find it among the Australian aborigines, the totem 

‘It is a serious though apparently a common mistake,’ says Dr Frazer}, | 
is never a god, and is never worshipped. A man no more worships his totem | 

and regards it as his god than he worships his father and mother, his brother 

and his sister, and regards them as gods.’ 

The reason why pure totemism cannot be a system of worship 
18 now abundantly clear. Worship involves conscious segregation 
of god and worshipper. The very idea of a god, as we have seen 
in the case of the Kouros and the Bacchos, belongs to a later stage 
of epistemology, a stage in which a man stands off from his own 
imagination, looks at it, takes an attitude towards it, sees it as 
object. Worship connotes an object of worship. Between totemism 
and worship stands the midway stage of magic. Magic in its 
more elementary forms we have already seen in considering the 
Thunder-Rites. Two later developments have now to be examined, 
developments closely analogous, Sacramental Communion and 
Sacrifice. 

1 Totemism and Exogamy, 1910, vol. 1v. p. 5. 

Se 

128 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [ CH. " 

Before entering on this enquiry we must however pause for a 
moment. We have assumed so far that totemism lies behind Greek 
religion, and that Greek religion can only be rightly understood 
on this assumption. The assumption is not so bold as it may 
seem. We do not claim for Greece a fully developed totemistic 
social system, but rather that totemistic habit of thought, which 
is, we believe, common to all peoples in an early phase of their 
epistemology’. Totemism, we have tried to show, is to our mind 
a habit of collective thinking based on collective emotion. The 
main characteristic of such thinking is union, or rather lack of 
differentiation, of subject and object. This lack of differentiation, 
this felt union, shows itself in many ways, and chiefly in one 
salient example, the belief in the identity of groups of human 
beings with groups of animals or plants. In practice, that is in 
ritual, totemism finds its natural development in the manipulation 
of the spiritual continwum, in magic. 

This habit of collective thinking, this lack of differentiation? 
is, we believe, characteristic not of one race, but of all races at a 
given stage of their mental development. It is further, I believe, 
the characteristic of Greek religion that it emerged early from the 
totemistic magical stage. The Greeks were a people who drew 
clear-cut outlines and sharp distinctions. But we cannot under- 
stand this rapid emergence unless we understand from what they 
emerged. Very early the Greeks shed their phytomorphic and 
theriomorphic gods. With strong emphasis by the mouth of 
Pindar® they insist that a god be clearly and impassably delimited 
from man. Have we any evidence of the earlier stage of thought 
against which the protest is raised? Are there in Greek mythology 
or Greek cultus definite traces of totemistic unification ? 

1 Such a system probably only occurs sporadically where man’s progress in 
epistemology has been arrested and the social structure crystallizes. Since writing 
the above Iam delighted to find that my conjecture, which might appear hazardous 
has been anticipated by Mr A. B. Cook. He writes (J.H.S. x1v. 1894, 157) ‘On the 
whole I gather that the Mycenaean worshippers were not totemists pure and simple 
but that the mode of their worship points to its having been developed out of still 
earlier totemism.’ 

2 For an analysis of primitive mentality, see Lévy-Bruhl, Les F i 
dans les Sociétés Infériewres, 1910. i: oe ee 
3 Ol. v. 58 BN pared- 
on Geds yevér Oar, 
and Isth. v. 20 
Ovara Ovarotor mpéret. 
See my Prolegomena, p. 477. 

—V| Survivals of Totemistic Thinking in Greece 129 

The people of the island of Seriphos would not for the most 
part use lobsters for food, accounting them sacred. lian’ was 
told that if they found one dead they would bury it and lament 
for it. If they took one alive in their nets they cast it back into 
the sea. The dead totem is often mourned for as a clansman. 
In Samoa, if an Owl man finds a dead owl, he will sit down by 
it and weep over it and beat his forehead with stones till the 
blood flows. In Phrygia there was a clan called the Snake-born 
(COdguoyeveis), reputed to be descended from a sacred snake of 
great size who had once lived in a grove, At Parium was 
another group of Snake-born men. The males of the group had 
the power, Strabo‘ tells us, of curing the bite of serpents by 
touching the patient. The Psylli, a Snake clan of Africa, exposed 

their new-born children to the bite of snakes. If bitten they |. 

were bastards, if left untouched legitimate’. If stories such as 
these are not survivals of totemistic thinking, it is hard to know 
what is. 

In poetry more even than in prose or than in the practice of 
actual rites, primitive ways of thinking, totemistic unifications 
_ of man and animal are sure to survive. In the Bacchae of 
Euripides, in that very religion of the Kouros which we have 
seen to be so elemental, we have an instance of strange beauty 
and significance. 

One secret of the thrill of the Bacchae is that the god is always 
shifting his shape. Dionysos is a human youth, lovely, with curled 
hair, but in a moment he is a Snake, a Lion, a Wild Bull, a 
Burning Flame. The leader of the chorus cries‘ 

Appear, appear whatso thy shape or name, 

O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, 

Lion of Burning Flame, 
O God, Beast, Mystery, come! 
When Pentheus comes out from the palace, hypnotised, intoxi- 

cated, seeing two suns, two walls with seven gates, the most 

1 Ml. N.A. xu. 26 on the rérmé évddros. Ov otrofivrar dé adrov of moAXol, voulfovrés ° 
lepdv. Zepiplous dé dkovw Kal Odmrev vexpov éartwkbra* SGvra dé eis Sikrvov éumecdvra 
ov Karéxovow, Ga dmodiddact TH Oaddtry adOcs. Opyvodor dé dpa Tos dmoBavdvras. 
2 Dr Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, 1910, rv. p. 15. 
3 Al. N.A. x11. 39, Sexier dnt, 
5 Varro, ad Prisc. x. 32. € vy, 1017. 

H, 9 

_ es 2 

8 one Ps 

130 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice —_ (OH. 

frightening thing of all is that he sees the Bacchos not as man, 
but bull: 

And is it a Wild Bull this, that walks and waits 
Before me? There are horns upon thy brow! 
What art thou, man or beast? For surely now 
The Bull is on thee! 

Now all this is usually? explained as a ‘late’ mysticism, a sort 
of pantheism, the god in all nature. In reality it goes back to 
things simpler and deeper. It is important to note that this shift 
to animal shape is not a power of transformation due to the mature 
omnipotence of the god; it is with the Dithyrambos from his 
birth; it is part of his essence as the Twice-Born. The first 
chorus’, as well as the third already analysed, is in part a Birth- 
song, a Dithyramb. The chorus sing of the coming of Bromios 
from Phrygia, of the Thunder Epiphany, the smiting of Semele 
the Mother, and the second birth from the Father: 

And the Queen knew not beside him 

Till the perfect hour was there. 

Then a hornéd God was found. 
The Dithyramb is a bull-god, reborn into his tribe not only as 
a full-grown male but as a sacred beast’. 

Thus, in the very kernel of our subject, in the Rite of the 
New Birth, we find the totemistic way of thinking. The boy to 
be initiated is reborn as his totem-animal. 

In describing the ceremony of the Second Birth among the 
Kiktyus we have seen® that the rite was called either To be born 
again or To be born of a goat. As the Kikayu have no goat totem 
we cannot certainly connect the ceremony with totemism, but 
among other peoples the connection is clear. Thus, when a South 
Slavonian® woman has given birth to a child, an old woman runs 
out of the house and calls out, ‘A she-wolf has littered a he-wolf? 
To make assurance doubly sure, the child is drawn through a 

1 y, 920, 

2 Again I find that what I believe to be the right explanation is gi b 
Mr A. B. Cook (J.H.S. x1v. 108). Sy given by 

3 Bacch. 99. 

+ It is scarcely necessary to say that Euripides was all unconscious of that sub- 
pany totemism of which he makes such splendid poetical use. 
BIOs Bile 

6 J, G. Frazer, Totemism, 1887, pp. 32 and 33. 

a a Second Birth as an Animal — 131 

wolf-skin so as to simulate actual birth from a wolf. The reason 
now assigned for these customs is that by making a wolf of the 
child you cheat the witches of their prey, for they will not attack 

a wolf. But the origin of the custom must surely be the simpler } 
notion that you mean what you do to the child—you make a wol 

of him. 

Very instructive in this respect is a Hindu custom’. When a 
Hindu child’s horoscope looks bad, he has to be born again of 
a cow. He is dressed in scarlet, tied on a new sieve and passed 
between the hind legs of a cow forward through the forelegs to 
the mouth and again in the reverse direction to simulate birth ; 
the ordinary birth-ceremonies, aspersion and the like are then 
gone through. The child is new born as a holy calf. This is 
certain, for the father sniffs at his son as a cow smells her calf. 
A like ceremony of new birth as a beast may be gone through 
merely with a view to purification. If in India a grown person 
has polluted himself by contact with unbelievers, he can be purified 
by being passed through a golden cow. This brings out very 
clearly the sense in which new birth and purification are sub- 
stantially the same: both are rites de passage, the spirit of both 
is expressed by the initiation formulary, éfvyov xaxov evdpov 
a pewvov. 

The second birth then of the infant Dionysos as a ‘horned 
child’ is best explained by totemistic ways of thinking. If the 
view” here taken be correct, totemism arises, not from any intel- 
lectual blunder of the individual savage, but rather from a certain 
mental state common to all primitive peoples, a state in which 
the group dominates the individual and in which the group seeks 
to utter its unity, to emphasize its emotion about that unity by 
the avowal of a common kinship with animal or plant. If this be 
so, the Greeks will be no exception to the general rule. They 
must have passed through the stage of undifferentiated thinking 
and group-emotion from which totemism, magic and the notion of 
mana sprang®, and we may safely look for survivals of a totemistic 

1 Frazer, op. cit. p. 33. : 

2 The view taken is substantially that of Prof. Durkheim or at least arises out 
of it. See E. Durkheim, Sur le totémisme, in L’Année Sociologique, 1902 (v.), 
ii De Frazer in his great work, Totemism and Exogamy, vol. tv. p. 13, says that 

the evidence adduced in support of the existence of totemism among the Semites 
and among the Aryans, notably among the ancient Greeks and Celts, leaves him 

9—2 

132 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [cH. 

habit of thought. That these survivals abound among primitive 
red-skins and black-skins rather than among Semites and Aryans 
need surprise no one. 

Another totemistic relic remains to be considered ; it is again 
enshrined with singular beauty in the Bacchae. Among totemistic 
peoples it is frequently the custom to tattoo the member of the 
totem-group with the figure of the sacred plant or animal. That 

Fie. 23. 

this custom was in use among the Thracian worshippers of 
Dionysos we have clear evidence in Fig. 23. The design is from 
a beautiful cylix with white ground in the National Museum at 
Athens. The scene is the slaying of Orpheus by a Maenad. 
Only the Maenad is figured here. On her right arm is distinctly 
tattooed a fawn, on her left some object not yet explained. 

qupecstitions about plants and anionie whieh: Miimgh dee Hee a care a me 

blance to totemism, may have originated quite independently of it.’ 

1 See my paper on S | : x é 
aaa m8, ss 13. Fragments of a Vase presumably by Huphronios, 

Totemistic Tattoo-marks 133 

The female worshippers of Dionysos were it would seem 
tattooed with the figure of a fawn; the male worshippers were 
_ stamped with an ivy leaf, The ditt dother than the vine, was in 
early days the sacred_plant of Dionysos. ‘The Bacchie women 
chewed ivy “in their ecstasy, ;, possibly as a sort of sacrament’. 
Pliny* was surprised at the veneration paid to ivy because it is 
hurtful to trees and buildings. The reason of its sanctity is 
simple if mystical. Ivy lives on when other plants die down. It 
is the vehicle of the external, undying, totem-soul, the vehicle of 
Dionysos, god of the perennial new birth. When Ptolemy Philo- 
pator converted the Egyptian Jews to the religion of Dionysos he 
had them branded with the ivy leaf‘. 

The ivy then was the primitive phytomorph, the fawn the 
theriomorph. You want to identify yourself with your totem, 
who by now has developed into your god. To effect this union, 
this consubstantiality, it is well to carry his symbols and to dance 
his dances, on occasion it is well to eat him; but, best and 
_ simplest, be stamped indelibly with his image. The Bacchant 
wore the nebris, the fawn-skin, on her feet were sandals of 
7 fawn-skin; stamped with the figure of a fawn, she is a fawn 
and fleeing from the human hounds to the shelter of the 
_ woodland she sings: 

O feet of a fawn to the greenwood fled, 
Alone in the grass and the loveliness®. 

We have then in Greek and especially in Bacchic religion 
traces slight but sufficient, not of a regular totemistic social 
system, but of totemistic ways of thinking. We pass on now to 
show how these totemistic ways of thinking explain the gist of 
the Feast of Raw Flesh (Sais épopayos) which was part of the 
rite of Bacchic initiation. We shall find that this Feast is as it 
were the prototype of all sacrament and sacrifice. 

l ae Perdrizet, Le Fragment de Satyros, in Revue des Etudes Anciennes, Xx1I. 
1910, p. 235. 
2 ’plat. Q. R. 112 ai oxo. rors BaxxeKors mabeor yuvatkes evOvs emt Tov KuTTOV 
nor Tats Kal omaparrovor Spatréuevan Tals xepol Kal diécBoveat Tots Thao. 
3 H. N. xvi. 144. ; 
4 Perdrizet, op. cit. p. 235. 
5 Hur, Bacch. 866 
ds veBpos xAoepats éurat- 
fovca Aeluakos Hoovais. 

134 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [cH. 

That sacrifice and sacrament are near akin the similarity of 
the two words would lead us to suspect. One obvious distinction 
is, however, worth noting at the outset. Sacrifice, as part of our. 
normal religious ritual, is now-a-days dead and gone. Sacraments 
show no sign of dying, but rather of renewed life and vigour. 
This need not surprise us. It will shortly appear that sacrifice is 
but a specialized form of sacrament, both sacrament and sacrifice 
being themselves only special forms of that manipulation of mana 
which we have agreed to call magic. Of the two, sacrifice and sacra- 
ment, sacrament is the more primitive ; sacrifice contains elements 
that are plainly of late development. The oldest things lie deepest 
and live longest; it is the specializations, the differentiations, that 
dwindle and die. We begin then by asking—What is sacrifice ? 
What is the late element in it as compared with sacrament? 
And, incidentally, why was it doomed to a relatively early death ? 

The current common-sense view of sacrifice is the gift-theory?, 
do ut des, I give, at some personal ‘sacrifice,’ to you, the god, in 
order that you may give me a quid pro quo. I bring a gift to 
a god as I might to an oriental potentate to ‘smooth his face.’ 
_ This theory presupposes a personality, not to say a personage, to 
whom the gift may be offered. It further supposes that the 
personality is fairly benevolent and open toa bribe. An important 
modification of the do ut des theory of sacrifice is the do ut abeas 
variety, ‘I give that you may keep away. It only differs in 
supposing malevolence in the person approached. When we come 
to consider animism it will be seen that do ut abeas probably. 
precedes do ut des. 

_ The gift-theory of sacrifice was unquestionably held by the 
Greeks of classical times, though with an increasing sense of its 
inadequacy. ‘Holiness, says Socrates? to Euthyphron, ‘is a sort 
of science of praying and sacrificing’; further he adds, ‘sacrifice is 
giving to the gods, prayer is asking of them; holiness then is 
a science of asking and giving.’ If we give to the gods they also 
want to ‘do business with us.’ Euthyphron, with his orthodox 
mind, is made very uncomfortable by this plainness of speech, but. 
has nothing he can urge against it. 

1 See my Prolegomena, pp. 3—7, where I accept this theory which I now see to 

be, as regards primitive sacrifice, wholly inadequate. 
2 Plat. Huthyphro, 15 p. 

vy] —:s Saerament and Gift-sacrifice  - 135 

The gift-element in sacrifice is real, though as we shall 
immediately see it is a late accretion, and it is this gift-element 
that has killed sacrifice as distinct from sacrament. The gift- 
element was bound to die with the advance of civilization. We 
have ceased to tremble before those stronger and older than 
ourselves, we therefore no longer try to placate our god, we have 
ceased to say to him, do ut abeas. We have come to see that to 
bribe a ruler does not conduce to good government; so to the giver 
of all good things we no longer say, do ut des. To this cause of 
the decay of sacrifice is added, in the matter of animal sacrifice, 
the increase of physical sensitiveness. Physically the slaying of 
innocent animals is beginning to be repulsive to. us. Some of us 
still do it for sport; many of us allow others to do it for us to 
procure flesh food; but we vo longer associate slaughter with our 
highest moral and religious values*. : 

Sacrifice then in the sense of gift-sacrifice is dead. It is worth 
noting that an element which has been essential and universal in 
religion can drop out and leave religion integral. Instead of quod 
semper quod ubique, we must now adopt as our motto, tout passe, 
tout lasse, tout casse. . 

The lateness of this somewhat ephemeral gift-element in 
sacrifice is apparent. It presupposes the existence of a well-, 
defined personality with whom man can ‘carry on business. Ina 
word the gift-theory of sacrifice is closely bound up with the mis- 
taken psychology that assumes the primitiveness of animism and, 
anthropomorphism. As Dr Tylor? says with his wonted trenchancy: 

Sacrifice has its apparent origin in the same early period of culture and 
its place in the same animistic scheme as prayer, with which through so long 
a range of history it has been carried on in the closest connection. As prayer 
is a request made to a deity as if he were a man, so a sacrifice is a gift made 
to a deity as if he were a man. 
Dr Tylor, the great exponent of the ‘gift-theory, operates, it is 
clear, from the beginning with a full-blown anthropomorphic god. 
But the totemistic stage of thinking, we have seen, knew no god, 
only a consciousness felt collectively of common mana. Was there 
sacrifice in days of totemistic thinking before a god had been 
fashioned in man’s image, and if so, what was its nature? 

1 Tt will later be seen that killing is not an essential part of sacrifice. 
2 Primitive Culture?, 18738, p. 375. 

/1/ 

ry 

| 

oe eS = 

136 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice (oH. 

Robertson Smith! was the first to see that Dr Tylor’s gift- 
theory, apparently so simple and satisfactory, did not cover the 
whole of the facts. He noted that, when you sacrificed, when you 
gave, as it was thought, a gift to your god, you seldom gave him all 
of it. You ate some of it, most of it yourself, and gave the god 
bones and specimen bits. Now with a jealous god—and the god 
of the Hebrews with whom Robertson Smith was chiefly concerned 
was a jealous god—this method of carrying out your sacrifice 
would clearly, if the gift-theory were true, not work. A ‘jealous 
god’ must be either a fool or a saint to stand it. The sacrificer 
would surely share the just fate of Ananias and Sapphira who 
‘kept back part’ In a word Robertson Smith, fired by the 
recent discoveries of totemism, saw what had necessarily escaped 
Dr Tylor, that the basis of primitive sacrifice was, not ‘the givin 
a _gift, but the eating of a tribal communal meal. In a splendid 
blaze of imagination his mind flashed down the ages from the 
Arabian communal camel to the sacrifice of the Roman mass. 

Even Robertson Smith, great genius though he was, could not 
rid himself wholly of animism and anthropomorphism. To him 
primitive sacrifice was a commensal meal, but shared with the god ; 
by the common meal the common life of god and group was alike 
renewed. Still hampered as he was with full-fledged divinity as 
contrasted with sanctity, he could not quite see that in_sacrifice 
the factors were only two, the eater and the eaten, the ‘ worshipper, 
that is the eater, and the ‘sacred animal_consumed. Once the 
sacred animal consumed, his mana passes to the eater, the wor- 
shipper, and the circuit is complete. There is no third factor, no 
god mysteriously present at the banquet and conferring his 
sanctity on the sacred animal. As will later be seen this third 
factor, this god, arose partly out of the sacrifice itself. From 
Robertson Smith’s famous camel?, devoured raw, body and bones, 
before the rising of the sun, no god developed; from the apodayia 
of the more imaginative Greek arose, we shall presently see, the 
bull-Dionysos. 

The word sacrifice, like sacrament, tells the same tale. Etymo- 
logically there is nothing in either word that tells of a gift, nor 

1 Religion of the Semites, 1889. 

? Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites p. 820. Ihave previously, P 
L g i 5 » Prolego- 
mena, pp. 486 ff., discussed in full this important instance of apne ee ae 

Sacrifice originally sacramental 137 

_ yet of a god, no notion of renouncing, giving up to another and 

a greater. Sacrifice is simply either ‘holy doing’ or ‘holy making,’ 
lepa péCew, just sanctification, or, to put it in primitive language, 
it is handling, manipulating mana. When you sacrifice you build 
as it were a bridge’ between your mana, your will, your desire, 
which is weak and impotent, and that unseen outside mana which 
you believe to be strong and efficacious. In the fruits of the 
earth which grow by some unseen power there is much mana; you 
want that mana. In the loud-roaring bull and the thunder is 
much mana; you want that mana. It would be well to get some, 
to eat a piece of that bull:raw, but it is dangerous, not a thing 
to do unawares alone; so you consecrate the first-fruits, you 
sacrifice the bull, and then in safety you—communicate. 

We are accustomed to the very human gift-theory of sacrifice, 
it appeals to us by its rather misleading common-sense. Com- 
pared with it this theory of sacrifice as a medium, a bridge built, 
a lightning-conductor interposed, may seem vague and abstract. 
It is not really abstract; it belongs to a way of thinking that was 
inchoate rather than abstract. When they began to theorize about 
sacrifice, it was familiar to the ancients themselves. Sallust? the 
Neo-Platonist, the intimate friend of Julian, wrote, at Julian’s 

request, a tract About the Gods and the World. He devotes two 

chapters to Sacrifice. Why does man give gifts to the gods who 
do not need them? Sacrifice is for the profit of man not the gods. 
Man needs to be in contact (cvvapOjvac) with the gods. For this 
he needs a medium (peadrs) between his life and the divine life. 
That medium is the life of the sacrificed animal. Sallust is as 
much—and more—obsessed by full-blown gods as Dr Tylor, but 
he comes very near to the notion of mana-communion. 

It should be noted at this point that eating is not the only 
means of communicating, though perhaps it is among the most 
effective. What you want is contact, in order that mana may 
work unimpeded. When you hang a garment on a holy tree or 

1 This idea has been very fully developed by MM. Hubert et Mauss in their 
illuminating Essai sur la Nature et la Fonction du Sacrifice which first appeared 
in the Année Sociologique, 1. 1897-8, and has since been republished by them 
in the Mélanges d’Histoire des Religions, 1909. p 

2 I owe my knowledge of Sallust’s Ilepl Oedv kal xdcuov to Professor Gilbert 
Murray. See his article 4 Pagan Creed—Sallustius’s ‘De Diis et Mundo’ in 
the English Review, December, 1909, p. 7. 

——_ 

| 

= 

138 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [oH. 

drop a pin into a holy well, you are not making an offering. Such 
an offering would be senseless; a well has no use for pins, nor a 
tree for raiment. What you do is to establish connection, build 
a sacramental bridge, a lightning-conductor. So Kylon!, by way 
of safeguard, tied himself by a thread to the holy xoanon of 
Athens, thereby establishing sacramental communion. Some- 
times you need no bridge, you have only to lie open to spiritual 
influences. Thus among the Algonkins in North America, a Fox 

man in telling a missionary of his experiences in the sweat 
lodge said: 

Often one will cut oneself over the arms and legs, slitting oneself through 
the skin. This is done to open up many passages that the manitow (the 
Algonkin equivalent of mana) may get through. The manitou comes out 
of its place of abode in the stone. It becomes raised by the heat of the fire 
and proceeds out of the stone when the water is sprinkled on it. It comes 
out in the steam, and in the steam it enters the body wherever it can find 
entrance. It moves up and down and all over inside the body, driving out 
everything that inflicts pain. Before the manitou returns to the stone, it 
imparts some of its nature to the body. That is why one feels so well after 
having been in the sweat lodge’. 

Magic, sacrament and sacrifice are fundamentally all one ; they 
are all the handling of the sacred, the manipulation of mana, but 
usage has differentiated the three terms. Magic is the more 
general term. Sacrament is usually confined to cases where the 
ceremonial contact. is by eating ; sacrifice has come to be associated 
with the killing of an animal or the making over of any object by 
a gift. Sacrament is concerned rather with the absorbing of 
mana into oneself, magic deals rather with the using of that 
mana for an outside end. Moreover sacrifice and sacrament 
tend to go over to the public, ceremonial, recurrent contacts 
effected collectively ; whereas individual, private, isolated efforts 
after contact tend to be classed as magic. 

It is sometimes felt that whereas the gift-theory of sacrifice 
is simple, straight-forward, common-sensical, the medium, or 
contact or communion theory is ‘mystical, and therefore to be 
regarded with suspicion by the plain man. ‘Mystical’ assuredly 
it is in the sense that it deals with the unseen, unknown mana ; 

1 Plut. Vit. Sol. xu. é 
K.T.A. 

* William Jones, The Algonkin Manitou from the Journal of American Folkiore,, 
xvi. p. 190, quoted by I. King, The Development of Religion, 1910, Polor 

EdWavras 5€ rod Lous Kpdknv KrAwoThy Kal TavTns Exouévous 

-. Good and Good to eat 139 

but, once the primitive mind is realized, it is more and not less 
-common-sensical. Religion focuses round the needs and cir- 
cumstances of life. Religion is indeed but a representation, 
an emphasis of these needs and circumstances collectively and 
repeatedly felt. The primary need, more primary, more pressing | 
than any other, is Food!. Man focuses attention on it, feels acutely 
about it, organizes his social life in relation to it; it is his primary, 
value, it and its pursuit necessarily become the subject-matter of 
his simplest religion, his dpa#eva, his rites. 

When Elohim beheld the world he had created he ‘saw that 
it was very good.’ The Hebrew word for ‘good’ (3)%) seems 
primarily to have been applied to ripe fruits; it means ‘luscious, 
succulent, good to eat?’ The same odd bit of human history 
comes out in the Mexican word gualli, which though it means 
‘good’ in general is undoubtedly formed from gua ‘ to eat’ —the 
form gualoni, ‘eatable, keeps its original limited sense. ‘Evil’ in 
Mexican is am ogualli or a gualli, i.e. ‘not good to eat’; gua gualla, 
‘good, good, ‘extremely good,’ is really ‘superlatively eatable.’ 
The word wzochill means ‘flower’; the word for ‘ fruit’ is ‘ good, Le. 
eatable flower,’ xochigualli. Most instructive of all, the act of 
making a meal is ‘I do myself good, Nigualtia’. | 
Food then, what is good to eat, may well have been the initial, l 

and was for long the supreme, good. For primitive man it was 
a constant focus of attention, and hence it was what psychologists 
call a ‘value centre.’ The individual who ate a meal, especially a 
flesh meal, felt the better for it, he was conscious of increased 
mana, of general elation and well being. Meat to those who eat. 
it rarely has the effect of a mild intoxicant. This stimulus felt 
by the individual would constitute in itself a vague sanctity. It 
needed however reinforcement from collective emotion. This 
brings us to the communal meal, the Sais, a meal normally of 

flesh-food. 

1 See Professor E. 8. Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience, 1910, 
chapter m1., On Impulses in Primitive Religion. ‘The social values that centre 
round sex and that find representation in the system of exogamy do not im- 
mediately concern us, Dr Frazer’s view that totemism and exogamy are not 
necessarily related will be found in his Totemism and Exogamy, 1910, Iv. p. 120. 
Professor. Durkheim’s view that the two are necessarily related is stated in 
his Prohibition de VInceste et ses .Origines in L’Année Sociologique, 1898, 
i . 1—70. 

. a 2 Schultens ad Prov. Sal. x11. 2 tob: succosum, uber, uberi succo vigens. 
3B, J. Payne, History of the New World called America, 1892, 1. p. 546 note. 

140 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice —— [cH. 

THE COMMUNAL MEAL (6ais). 

In the light of totemistic ways of thinking we see plainly 
enough the relation of man to food-animals, a relation strangely 
compounded of mana and tabu. You need or at least desire flesh 
food, yet you shrink from slaughtering ‘your brother the ox!’; you 
desire his mana, yet you respect his tabu, for in you and him alike 
runs the common life-blood. On your own individual responsibility 
you would never kill him; but for the common weal, on great 
occasions, and in a fashion conducted with scrupulous care, it is 
expedient that he die for his people, and that they feast upon his 
flesh. 

Among many primitive peoples the eating of meat is always 
communal. Among the Zulus, when a man kills a cow, which is 
done rarely, with reluctance, the whole hamlet assembles, uninvited 
but expected as a matter of course, to eat it. The Damaras of 
South Africa look upon meat as common property. They have great 
reverence for the ox, only slaughter it on great occasions, and every 
slaughter is regarded as a common festival. When the Patagonians 
sacrifice a mare, the feast on her flesh is open to all the tribe? 

This sanctity of the food-animal and the ordinance that the 
meal should be communal is not confined to domestic animals, in 
whose case it might be thought that such sanctity arose from daily © 
contact and usage. Among the Ottawas the Bear clan ascribe 
their origin to a bear’s paw and call themselves Big Feet. When- 
ever they killed a bear they used to offer the animal a part of his 
own flesh and spoke to him thus: 

Do not bear us a grudge because we have killed you. You are sensible, 
you see that our children are hungry. They love you, they wish to put you 
into their body. Is it not glorious to be eaten by the sons of a chief #? 

This strange and thoroughly mystical attitude towards the 
sacrificed food-animal comes out very beautifully in the Finnish 
Kalevala*, where a whole canto is devoted to recounting the 

* See Professor Murray’s beautiful account of the relation between man and 
beast in the normal condition of Greece and the contrast of this with the Homeric 
scenes of animal slaughter, Rise of the Epic, pp. 59 ff. 

2 These instances are taken from the collection in Dr Jevons’s Introduction to 
the History of Religion, p. 158. 

3 Frazer, Zotemism and Exogamy, m1. p. 67, and see also the pathetic account 
of the bear-festival among the Ainos, too long for quotation here, in Dr Frazer’s 
Golden Bough?, 11. pp. 375 ff. 

* Kalevala, translated by W. F. Kirby, Rune xxv1., Vainonaiméinen and the Bear, 

»p EmaVATN Otso the Bear — 141 
sacrificial feast to and of Otso the mountain bear. They chant 
_ the praises of the Holy Bear, they tell of his great strength and 
majesty, the splendour, of his rich fur, the glory and the beauty of 
his ‘honey-soft’ paws. They lead him in festal procession, slay 
and cook and eat him and then, as though he were not-dead, they 
dismiss him with valedictions to go back and live for ever, the 
glory of the forest. In the litany addressed to him the sacra- 
mental use of his flesh comes out very clearly. Limb by limb he 
is addressed : 
Now I take the nose from Otso 
That my own nose may be lengthened, 
But I take it not completely, 
And I do not take it only. 
Now I take the ears of Otso 
That my own ears I may lengthen. 
The notion that the slaying of a food-animal involves a 
communal Sais, a distribution, comes out very clearly among 
the Kurnai, a tribe of South-East Australia’. The ‘native bear’ 
when slain is thus divided. The slayer has the left ribs: the 
father the right hind Jeg, the mother the left hind leg, the elder 
brother the right fore-arm, the younger brother the left fore-arm, 
the elder sister the backbone, the younger the liver, the father’s 
brother the right ribs, the mother’s brother of the hunter a piece 
‘of the flank. Most honourable of all, the head goes to the camp 

of the young men, the Kodpox. 

A somewhat detailed account of savage ceremonial has been 
necessary in order that the gist of sacramental sacrifice should be 
made clear. We have now to ask—Had Greece herself, besides her 
burnt-offerings to Olympian gods, any survival of the communal 
feast ? 
| On the 14th day of Skirophorion (June—July), the day of the 
full moon of the last mouth of the Athenian year, when the 
threshing was ended and the new corn gathered in, on the 
Acropolis at Athens, a strange ritual was accomplished. Cakes 
of barley mixed with wheat were laid on the bronze altar of Zeus 
Polieus. Oxen were driven round it, and the ox which went up 
to the altar and ate of the cakes, was by that token chosen as 

1 In the bear-sacrifice of the Ainos the bear is thus addressed : ‘We kill you 

O bear! come back soon into an Aino’; Frazer, Golden Bough?, 11. p. 379. 
2 A, W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 759. 

ee 

ad 

” a 

142 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice 

victim for the sacrifice. Two men performed the sacrifice ; the 
one, the Boutypos, felled the ox with an axe, another, presumably 
the Bouphonos, cut its throat with a knife, Both the murderers 
threw down their weapons and fled. The weapons were _sub- 
sequently brought to trial. The celebrants feasted on the flesh, 
and the ox itself was restored to life in mimic pantomime’. 

The uncouth ritual of the Bouphonia went on as late as the 
days of Theophrastos, but, by the time of Aristophanes’, it stood 
for all that was archaic and well-nigh obsolete. The Unjust Logos 
when told about the old educational system at Athens says: 

Bless me, that’s quite the ancient lot, so Diipolia-like, 
Of crickets and Bouphonia full. 

What struck Pausanias* when he was told about the ritual, was 

that when the ox-striker had flung away the axe and himself had 

fled, ‘as though in ignorance of the man who did the deed’ they _ 

bring the axe to judgment. It is just this one detail and all the 
elaborate "House-that-Jack-built shifting of the blame from one 
celebrant to another till it rested on the lifeless axe which has 
diverted the attention of modern commentators from what is, I 
now feel, the all-important factor or rather factors. The Bouphonia 
was (1) a communal feast, (2) the death of the ox was only 
incidental to the feast, and it was followed by a mimic Re- 
oo its 
surrection. 

~(1) The Bouphonia was a communal feast. Our fullest 
account is given by Porphyry® who borrows it from Theophrastos, 
Porphyry is explicit. The Bouphonia is a communal sacrifice 
(cow? Ovaia). In the aetiological myth it is related that the 
ox was first smitten by a stranger, either Sopatros* or Dromos, 

1 J thave elsewhere, Ancient Athens, pp. 424-6, and Prolegomena, p. 111, 
discussed the Bouphonia in detail. I can here only examine such elements as 
are important for my immediate argument. Attention was, I believe, first drawn 
to the great significance of the Bouphonia by Professor Robertson Smith, Religion 
of the Semites, pp. 286 ff. The literary sources are collected and discussed by 
Dr Frazer, Golden Bough?, 1. pp. 294 ff. See also H. v. Gaertringen, Zeus 
Thaulios in Hermes, 1911, Miscellen, p. 154. 

2 Nub. 984 

apxatd ye kat Avrodiddn kal rertlywv avdueora 
kat Kyxeldov kal Bovdoviwy. 

3 1, 24.4. As Professor Robertson Smith observes, ad loc., in Pausanias’ time 
the rite had undergone some simplification, otherwise his account is inadequate. 

* In my previous discussions of the Bouphonia, through ignorance of the magical 
character of sacrifice, I fell into the usual error of emphasis. 

5 de Abst. 11. 28 ff. 

§ So-patros may be the Saviour of the rarpa as Sosi-polis is Saviour of the state. 

, 

The Bouphonia. at Athens 

_aCretan. He happened to be present at the ‘communal sacrifice’ 
_at Athens, and seeing the ox touch the sacred cakes, was seized 
with indignation and slew it. He then fled to Crete. The usual 
pestilence followed. Sopatros was discovered and then thought 
he could escape the pollution he had incurred ‘if they would 
all do the deed in common’ and if the ox was smitten ‘by the 
city. In order to effect this the Athenians were to make him 
a citizen, and thus make themselves sharers in the murder!. That 
the Bouphonia was not merely a ‘common sacrifice’ but also a 
- communal feast is certain from the name given to a family who 
- shared it. Theophrastos mentions in this connection, not only 
x families of Ox-smiters (Boutvzrov) and Goaders (Kevtpradaz), but 
also a family of Dividers (Aacrpoi), so called, he says, from the 
‘divided feast’ (Aais) which followed the partition of the flesh?. 
Moreover we have the actual ritual prescription. After the axe 
and the knife had been sharpened, one celebrant struck the OX, 
another slew him, and of those who afterwards flayed the ox, all 
tasted his flesh’. 

_ When the ox had been flayed and all the flayers had tasted his 
flesh, Porphyry‘ tells us ‘they sewed up the hide and stuffed it out 
with hay and set it up just as it was when it was alive, and they 

_ yoked a plough to it as though it were ploughing. Such a ritual 

_ in the heart of civilized Athens was more surprising than any 

trial of a double axe. The scholiast on the Peace® tells us that 

_ the Diipolia was a ‘mimetic representation’ (drouiwnua). He 

‘ exactly hits the mark, though he certainly does not know it. The 

ox is brought to_ life again, not because they want to pretend that 
he has never died and so to escape the guilt of his murder (though 
later that element may have entered), but because his resurrection 
is the mimetic representation of the new life of the new year® and 

1 op. cit. 11. 29 Zwmrarpos vouloas THs mepl abrov SvoxoNas dmaddayjoecOar ws 
évaryots dvros, ef Kowy Tolro mpdievay mdvres epy...dely Karakomfvat Boov wrdo ris 
Toews, amopovyTwy dé rls 6 mardi eorat, mapacyxely avrois ToUTO el moXitny avrov 
Tomnodmevor Kowwvyjoovo. TOU évov. 

2 op. cit. 11. 30 rods & dd rod émiopdéavros Sairpovs dvoudfovow Sia THY ex THs 
Kpeovoulas yiyvouevny daira. 

3 op. cit. 11. 30 ray 6é werd Tadra Sepdvtwy, éyevcavTo To Bods mdvTes. 

4 op. cit. 11. 30 ray 6é wera Tada depdvTwy éyedoavTo Tod Bods mdvres, ToUTWY SE 
TpaxdevTay tiv mwev dopay rod Bods pdwayres Kal xoprw émroyKdoavTes éEavéoTnoar, 
éxovra Tavrov Smep kal fav toxev oxfwa, Kal mpocefevEay dporpoy ws épyacopéevy. 

5 ad v. 50 éore 6¢ droulunua Tov Twepl Tov meddywy Kal Tas Bods cuuBdvTwr. 

6 The New Birth in the spring will be discussed in the next chapter. 

d 

Aa tiwe, 
3 [wal 
nay 

be 

144 + Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice ‘oH: 

this resurrection is meant to act magically, The worshippers 
taste the flesh to get the mana of the ox, and to do that they 
must slay him. To taste the flesh is good, but best of all is it 
that the ox himself should on his resurrection renew his life and 

strength. 

It is not a little remarkable that in the detailed accounts we 
have of the Bouphonia, all mention of Zeus, to whom it is supposed 
the sacrifice is made, is conspicuously absent. The ox is indeed 
said to have been driven up to the table of Zeus Polieus, but on 
that table the offering of cakes and the like is already complete. 
It is clear that the Bouphonia is just what its name says, an 
ox-murder that might be connected with any and every god. It is 
the sacrifice itself, not the service of the god, that is significant ; 
the ox_bulks larger than Zeus, 

Fic. 24. 

In this connection it is worth noting that in the calendar- 
frieze, now built into the small Metropolitan Church at Athens, 
the month Skirophorion is marked, not by any image of Zeus 
Polieus, but by the figure of the Boutypos, the Ox-smiter and his 
ox (Fig. 24). Above the diminutive ox is the sign of the Crab. 
To the right of the Boutypos is seen the Panathenaic ship, 
effaced and sanctified by the Christian symbol of the wheel and 
cross. The next great festival after the Bouphonia, which closed 
the old year, was the Panathenaia in Hecatombaion, which opened 
the new. The Panathenaia itself was superimposed upon the 
ancient Kronia?. 

J. Ni. Symonds <Don,odhenieshe Folkekaiendeggetona ie MEeens ei a 

logie numismatique, 1899, 1. 1. 
2 A, Mommsen, Heortologie, p. 108. 

‘ 
k 
4 
| 
i 

The Bouphonia at Athens ° 145 

This point—the supremacy of the ox and the nullity of the 
god—is well illustrated by the design in Fig. 25 from a black- 
figured hydria'in Berlin. In a small Doric shrine stands an ox; 
in front of him a blazing altar. To the left is Athena seated, her 
sacred snake by her side. She extends her right hand holding 
a phiale; she is waiting for libation. She may wait, it would seem, 
for the priestess raises her hand in adoration or consecration of — 
the ox. The ox is within the sanctuary, the goddess outside. Now 
it is of course impossible to be certain that we have here the ox of 
the Bouphonia. What ‘s certain is that we have a holy ox, holy 
on his own account, with a sanctuary of his own, and that this holy 

Fig. 25, 

ox is associated with not Zeus, but Athena. Whatever Olympian 
was dominant at the moment would take over the intrinsically 
holy beast. 

The simple fact is that the holy ox is before the anthropo- || 
morphic god, the communal feast (dais) before the gift-burnt ti 
sacrifice (@voia). The Bouphonia belongs to the stage of the 
communal feast followed by the resurrection. Of this its name 
bears witness. The word to ‘ox-slay,’ Soudovéw, occurs in Homer? 

1 See my Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. 428, Fig. 37. 
2 Tl. vit. 465 dvcero 5 jéduos, TeTéNeoTO Oé epyov ’Axay 
Bovdéveov dé xara xdolas Kal ddprov &dovTo, 
Schol. ad loc. Bovdoveiv éorly od To Ovew Oeots (dtorov yap émt Ovalas pébvov eyelv) 
GANG TO hovedvew Bods els delmrvov KaTacKkeuny. 

H. 10 

146 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice (oH. 

with the simple meaning to kill an ox for eating purposes. ‘The 
sun went down and the work of the Achaeans was finished ’—they 
had been burning their dead— and they slaughtered oxen amid 
the huts and took their supper.” The scholiast on the passage, 
with probably the Bouphonia in his mind, says explicitly, ‘Govdovety, 
to slay or murder oxen, is not sacrificing to. the gods (for it would 
be absurd to apply the term of murder to a sacrifice) but it is 
slaying oxen asa preparation for a_meal.’ 
~The scholiast rightly notes that the ‘ox-slaying’ concerned the 
ox as food, not the god as eater. What he could not know was 
that a Bouphonia, a slaying for a Banquet, though it need have 
nothing to do with gods, could yet be of supreme sanctity—a 
sanctity preceding the gods and even begetting them. The 
speaker in a fragment of the T'riptolemos of Sophocles says more 
truly than he knows, 

‘Then came fair Dads, the eldest of the Gods}. 
You eat your sacred animal to get his mana; you then personify 
that mana, informing it with the life-blood of your own desire, 
provide him with your own life-history, and then, if you are an ortho- 
dox ritualist, you land yourself in the uncouth predicament that 
you must eat your personal god. From such relentless logic all 
but the most convicted of conservatives are apt to shrink. There 
are side ways, down which you may go, softenings and obscurantist 
confusions by which you may blunt the horns of your dilemma. 
Ritual says you must eat the holy ox; imagination has conceived 
for you a personal Zeus, Father of Gods and men. You slay your 
ox, partake of his flesh, sew up his skin and yoke it to a plough. 
Yet all is well, for the whole holy and incompatible hocus-pocus 
is a ‘sacrifice to Zeus Polieus.’ 

Such strange blendings of new and old, such snowball-lke 
accumulations, are sometimes caused, or rather precipitated, by 
definite political action. Peisistratos, feeling no doubt that 
Olympia might be a dangerous religious and social rival to Athens, 
conscious too that, at a time when the Homeric pantheon was 
rapidly being domesticated in Greece, the fact that Athens should 
have no important local worship of Zeus stamped Athens as 

1 Hesych, s.v. dals* Zopokdys 
mrOev O€ Aals Oddeva mpecBlorn Gear, 
h Ov’ épdvwv ebwxla. 

& 

ee ee eee 

ree 

The Bouphonia at Athens 

provincial, introduced in the lower town near the Ilissos the 
worship of Zeus Olympios, and with it he wisely transplanted a 
whole complex of primitive Olympian cults, making a sanctuary 
for Kronos and Rhea, and a precinct containing a chasm and 
dedicated to Gaia, with the title Olympian. It may be suspected, 
though it cannot be proved, that at the same time, though Zeus 
hever got any substantial footing on the Acropolis, it was arranged 
that he should take under his patronage the ancient festival of 
the Ox-slaying’. 

Some such arrangement is reflected in the story told by 
Hesychius? in his explanation of the proverbial saying ‘ Zeus’ seats 
and voting pebbles’ (Avs Oa«os «al reo(c)oé). ‘They say that, 
in the ballot of the Athenians, when Athena and Poseidon were 
contending, Athena entreated Zeus to give his vote for her and 
she promised in return that she would have the sacrificial victim 
of Polieus sacrificed for the first time on an altar.’ The victim, 

_ that is the bull, was called, according to Hesychius, the victim of 

Polieus (76 tod Hondséws fepezov). I suspect that an « has been 
interpolated and that the earlier term was 7d Tod TOAEWS lepetor, 

_ the communal victim (ef. owt Ovela) which preceded the personal 

god. Anyhow, though Hesychius probably means by his state- 
ment mpdrov Ovecbar émi Bwpod, that Athena promised she 

would first sacrifice on the altar of Zeus, what he really says is 

that she promised first to sacrifice on an altar, that in a word the 
slaying of the ox for a feast should become the offering of an ox 
on an altar, the dais should be a Oucia, a burnt sacrifice offered 
on the altar of an Olympian. 

A sacrifice brings to our modern minds an altar as inevitably 
as it brings a god; both, in the sense we understand them, are late 
and superfluous. To sacrifice is, as the word implies, and as has 
been previously shown, to sanctify, to make sacred; and to make 
sacred is to bring into contact with any source of force and fear, 
with any vehicle of mana. In one version of the story the slain 

1 See my Ancient Athens, p. 192. That the Bouphonia was primarily associated 
with the cult of Hrechtheus in the Erechtheion rather than with that of Zeus, will 
appear in the next chapter. eer eh ; 

2 s.u. Atds OGkor...pact 5¢ ryv "AOnvav Avds denOAvac brép abrhs Thy Whpov éveyKetv 

Kal brocxécbar dvtl rovrov 7d Tod Ilodcéws iepetov mpdrov OvecOar émi Bwuod. Cf. 

Pausanias 1, 28. 10. 

10—2 

148 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [ CH. 

bull of the Bouphonia is buried?. If this statement be correct, the 
mana of the bull is put into direct contact with the earth it is to fer- 
tilize?, a practice known in sacrifice among many primitive peoples. 

We have seen in a previous chapter how the god, the Kouros, 
arose out of the collective emotion of his worshippers; we now 
realize another source of divinity, none other than the sacrifice 
itself. The victim is first sanctified, sacrificed, then divinized. 
Le dieu, cest le sacré personnifié. 

Fie. 26. 

On the votive relief* in Fig. 26 we see the process of diviniza- 
tion go on as it were under our very eyes. The relief falls into 

1 Theophrastus in Porph. de Abst. 11, 29 ...rdv pév Body Adare (XHmrarpos). The 
motive given by Theophrastus is fear, but burial of the remainder of the ox after 
all had tasted may well have been part of the ritual, either for the purpose of 
fertilizing the earth by contact with the bull’s mana, or to secure the unwary from 
chance contact with a sanctity so terrific. 

2 Compare the well known custom of the Khonds who scatter the flesh of human 
victims over their fields to ensure fertility. In civilized Europe to-day the bones of 
animals killed at Easter and other festivals are sometimes scattered on the fields 
‘for luck.’ See Hubert et Mauss, Essai sur le Sacrifice, Année Sociologique 
1898, p. 112. 

’ Imperial Museum, Constantinople, Inv. 1909. See Edhem Bey, Relief votif 
dw Musée Impérial Ottoman in Bull. de Corr. Hell. xxx. (1908). Pl. v. reproduced 
by kind permission of the Director of the Ecole Frang¢aise 4 Athénes. 

= bk f 
Uk Tetas | 

wY A 
. - . f] 
,. ‘3 

The bull-headed Zeus Olbios 149 

Bo ie ma a/c a Pr 
TY Wy i ir Lue ne 

three portions. In the gable at the top isa bull’s head. In the 
centre is the figure of the god to whom the relief is dedicated, 
Zeus Olbios*, Zeus of Wealth or Prosperity: he pours libation on 
an altar, near him is his eagle. Below, the scene represented is a 
Bouphonia. An ox is tethered by a ring to the ground near the 
blazing altar. Behind him is an Ox-Smiter (Boutypos) with 
axe uplifted ready to strike. To the left behind the ox a girl 
approaches, holding in her left hand a plate of fruit and flowers. 
The woman behind holds infulae in her left hand. To the right 
_ are a man and boy holding objects that cannot certainly be made 
out. 

So far all seems well in order. The bull is sacrificed to the 

Olympian Zeus, who stands there dominant with his attribute, the 

————.- 

; he i 
Jovi pvLeweno 
veilivg 2. con ! 

Fic. 27. 

eagle, by his side. But if we look at the god’s figure more closely 
we see that, if Zeus he be, it is in strange form®. On his head are 
horns: he is ravpoxépos, bull-horned, like Iacchos ; he is bull-faced, 
Bovmrpepos, like the infant Dithyrambos. Now, when these animal 
gods come to light, it is usual to say the god assumes the shape 
of a bull, or is incarnate in the form of a bull. The reverse is 

1 The dedication is as follows: 
Hvodiwy iepels Ards ’OABlov 
bmép Tay ldlwy mdvrwy Kabws éxédev- 
cev aveOnka EevxXapLoTHpLov. od. 

2 Miss M. Hardie, of Newnham College, kindly examined the original of the 
relief and writes to me that, so far as it can be made out, there is all the appearance 
of a bull-mask worn by a human head. If this were certain we should have the 
figure of a priest impersonating a bull-god, which would be of singular interest. 

150 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [cH. 

manifestly the case. The lower end of the ladder is on earth, 
planted in the reality of sacrifice. The sanctified, sacrificed animal 
becomes a god. He then sheds his animal form, or keeps it as an 
attribute or a beast of burden, or, as in the case of Jupiter 
Dolichenus' in Fig. 27, he stands upon the animal he once was, 
stands in all the glory of a deified Roman Emperor with double 
axe and thunderbolt. Any animal in close relation to man, 
whether as food or foe, may rise to be a god, but he must first 
become sacred, sanctified, must first be sacrificed. The fact that 
the sacrifice is, for reasons to be discussed later, renewed year by 
year, makes the personality of the god durable. 

The Bouphonia, it was acknowledged on all hands, was a 
ceremonial primitive and tending to be obsolete. It may be 
instructive to examine another instance of bull-sacrifice, where 
some of the more archaic and uncouth details have dropped away, 
yet where the intent remains the same, and where even more 
clearly than in the case of the Bouphonia we have gift-sacrifice to 
an Olympian appearing as an idea clearly superimposed on a 
primitive communal feast, a sacrament or sanctification of intent 
purely magical. Such an instance we have in the yearly sacrifice 
of a bull to Zeus Sosipolis?, of Magnesia on the Maeander. The 
full details of this sacrifice are happily known to us from an 
inscription found on one of the antae of the temple of Zeus in the 

agora at Magnesia, and dating about the middle of the third 
century B.c.? 

At the annual fair (sravyjyupis) held in the month Heraion, 
a bull, the finest that could be got, was to be bought each year 
by the city stewards, and at the new moon of the month 
Kronion, at the beginning of seed-time, they were to ‘dedicate’ it 
to Zeus‘. Uncertain as the dating of months in local calendars 

1 Seidl, Dolichenuskult, Taf. ur. 1. 

* For the (Zeus) Sosipolis of Olympia in his snake form and his analogies with 
the Cretan infant Zeus see C. Robert, Mitt. Arch. Inst. Athen xv. 1893, p. 37, and 
Frazer ad Pausanias vi. 20. 2—5, and infra, p. 241. 

> O. Kern, Inschriften v. Magnesia, No. 98, discussed by O. Kern, Arch. Anz. 
1894, p. 78, and Nilsson, Griechische Feste, 1906, p. 23. 

4 ...radpov ws Kd\dorov rod Mnvos Hpadvos ev rij mavynyvpe éxdotouv érous Kat 
dvadecxviwar TH Aw apxouevov ombpou unvds Kpoviavos év tHe vouunvia. 

oh. ee 

ae hehe Sey 

* 

~ 

; v] The Year-Bull at Magnesia 151 

sometimes is, it is a relief to find ourselves here on safe ground, 
the dedication (avadevéis) of the bull takes place at the beginning 
of the agricultural year; the bull’s sanctified, though not his actual, 
life and that of the new year begin together. 

The dedication, or rather indication, of the bull was an affair to 
be conducted with the utmost official solemnity. The bull was 
led in procession, at the head of which were the priest and 
priestess of the chief and eponymous goddess of the place, Artemis 
Leucophryne, and the Stephanephoros. With them also went the 
Hierokeryx, the Sacrificer and two bands of youths and of maidens 
whose parents were still ‘alive (dudiOanrelis). The Hierokeryx, 
together with the rest of the officials named, pronounces a prayer 
on behalf of the ‘safety of the city, and the land, and the citizens, 
and the women and children, for peace and wealth, and for the 
bringing forth of grain, and of all the other fruits, and of cattle!’ 

We are back with the Kouretes at Palaikastro, before the altar 
of Diktaean Zeus. The sober citizens of Magnesia in the second 
century B.c. do not bid their Sosipolis ‘leap, but their prayer is of 
the same intent—for peace and wealth, for flocks and fruits, for 
women, for children, and first and foremost it is, like the invoca- 
tion of the Kouros, eis évwavrov—for the Year-Feast. The 
Kouretes, the young men, leap alone to their Kouros; in the 
Magnesian procession nine maidens also walked and sang. Both 
youths and maidens alike must have both parents alive®, because 
where fertility is magically invoked there must be no contagion of 
death. 

On the reverse of the coins of Magnesia a frequent device is 
the figure of a ‘butting bull.” A good instance is given in 
Fig. 28 a4 The bull stands, or rather kneels, on a Maeander 
pattern, behind him is a constant symbol, an ear of grain, which 
characterises significantly enough the bull's function as a fertility 
daemon. The bull is, I think, kneeling, not butting. This is 

1 cat ev r&t dvadeixvycbar Tov Tadpoy KarevxécOw 6 iepoxfpvué...mép Te swrnplas 
ris Te Toews Kal THs xwpas Kal Tov mohir@v kal yuvaixGy kal réxvev Kal bmep eipqvns kab 
mdovrou Kab olrov popas kal Tov dd\Nwv Kaprov kal Tov KTNVOV. 

2p. 9. The full force of the words eis év.avrév will be considered in the next 
chapter. 

> For the du@dadijs wats who carried the Eiresione see Eustath. ad Il. xx. 496, 
p- 1283, and my Prolegomena, p. 79. The ritual prescription that a young celebrant 
should be dudcAadijs occurs frequently. 

4 Brit. Mus. Cat. Ionia xvu1. 4 enlarged. 

q 

152 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [ones 

certainly clear in the second coin figured b*. Here the bull is 
being driven by a youth to the mouth of what seems to be a cave. 
In front of it he kneels down as though in willing acceptance of 
his fate. 

The sacred animal, already half divinized, had to be free, had 
to choose, designate itself. We are not told that the bull of 
Magnesia designated itself either by kneeling or bowing its head, 
though the coins figured make it probable. But, in the sacrifice 
of a bull to Zeus Polieus at Kos’—a sacrifice which has many 
analogies to the Bouphonia—the ritual prescription is clear. Each 
ninth part of the three Dorian tribes drove up a bull to the 
sacrificial table of Zeus Polieus, at which the officials were seated, 

fi ‘ ey / 
sas son) acinal Size, 
Cay 
Wee’ 
Uy 

‘ ° sth Vi 

Fic. 28a. 

and that bull was chosen ‘who bent himself*’ Possibly he bent 
down to taste corn on the sacred table like the ox at the Bouphonia, 
possibly he was induced to kneel. Anyhow he gave some sign 
that he was a freewill offering. 

The bull has been solemnly designated, set apart. He is 
sacred now, charged with the mana of the coming year, and his 
nurture is matter of scrupulous religion. The feeding of the holy 

1 Brit. Mus. Cat. x1x. 9. For the Bull-God and the cave and the periodical 
sacrifice in relation to Minos and the period of nine horat (evvéwpos Bacl\eve, r 179) 
see Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic?, p. 1561. 

? Paton and Hicks, Inscriptions of Kos, No. 37, S.I.G.2 616. See Nilsson, 
Griechische Feste,p.17. Similarly at Halicarnassos, the goat chosen for sacrifice 
issued from the herd of his own free will and went up to the altar. See Apollonios, 
Paradoxogr. c. 13, p. 107, and at Pedasa in Karia a goat led the procession for 
seventy stadia. Hence the notion of Bods jyeudy and Kadnyeucy. 

3 There is unfortunately a lacuna at the exact word describing the action 
ai wéy xa TIIO...HI, but the wszo is certain and the restoration broxtWer almost 
certain. V. Prott, Leges Graecorum Sacrae, p. 19, note 3 ad vy. 20, says of Hicks, 
postea ipse in ectypo TIIOKYWEI legere sibi visus est. sroxtrrew is said of an 
animal drinking. 

See eee ee 

The Year-Bull at Magnesia 153 

vy] 

bull is in the inscription given over to a contractor (6 épyo\aBioas). 
_ This is probably a late arrangement; anyhow, though this official 
buys food, he has to drive the bull to the market, and ‘it is good’ 
for those corn-merchants who give the bull grain as a gift. This 
probably looks back to the time when the bull was maintained 
by free contributions from each member of 
the tribe. The communal character of 
these bull-sacrifices comes out very vividly 
in the coin of Kolophon in Fig. 29% In 
the background is the temple of Apollo 
Klarios with its seated god. But in the 
foreground is the real focus of attention, a 
bull and an altar. Around it stand the 
thirteen representatives of the thirteen 
cities of the Ionian league. 

On the 12th of Artemision, the month of Artemis—who is, at 
least in Asia Minor, but a form of the Great Mother—the bull 
was sacrificed. The month Artemision is in Sparta equated by 
- Thucydides* (quoting a decree) with the Attic Hlaphebolion— 
ie. circ. March 24 to April 23—-so that we may fix the festival as 
about the 6th of April, ie. for Greece the time of the late spring 
or early summer. 

On the day of the sacrifice there was again a great procession, 
again led by the priest and priestess of Artemis Leucophryne. 
Behind them came the senate, priests and various officials, and also 
certain chosen epheboi, youths (véov) and children (7aiées), also 
the victors in the games of the goddess, and other victorious 
competitors‘, The Stephanephorus, who with the priest and 
priestess led the procession, had to bring with him the images of 
the twelve gods in their best clothes. A circular hut was to be 
set up, evidently to shelter the images, and three couches were to 
be strewn. This hut or tholos was to be near the altar of the 

twelve gods in the agora. 

Fic. 29. 

1 ], 60 ff. This enactment comes at the end of the inscription as a sort of codicil 

after the account of the sacrifice. z eh 
2 Brit. Mus. Gat. Ionia vu. 15. The coin, of imperial date, bears the inscription 

under the god’s temple TO KOINON IQNON. 
3 y. 19. 1 quoting a decree of 42 B.c. "Apreuialov pnvos rerdpry pOlvovros, év Oé 

*AOhvas...”EAadnBoriavos pnvos Extn pOlvovros. See Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Artemisia. 

is : ; ‘ 
4 cuuropmevery...kal Tos épyBous Kal rovs véous Kal Tovs matdas Kal ToUsS TH 

Z a ay 
Aevkopptnva vixGvras Kal rods dAdous Tos wKaYTAS Tovs aTepavitas aywvas. 

154 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [One 4 

A 
: 
. 

Here we find ourselves in full Olympianism. The twelve gods, 
primitive wooden images though they be, and decked in fine 
raiment, are to be present at the festival. Themistocles, we 
remember, was the founder of Magnesia, and these twelve ancient 
xoana are the counterpart of the twelve Olympians of the east 
Parthenon frieze. But again it is clear that, honoured though 
they are as guests, they are not integral to the ceremony. It is 
expressly ordered indeed that Zeus Sosipolis should have a ram 
sacrificed to him, Artemis a she-goat, and Apollo a young he-goat 
(atrnyos), but for the rest of the twelve no manner of provision is 
made. 

The added sacrifice of a ram to Zeus is, I think, highly signifi- 
cant. The bull, one would have thought, might have sufficed. 
But the reason is clear. The bull-sacrifice was at first no gift- 
sacrifice to Zeus or to any Olympian: it was, as immediately 
appears, a davs—a communal meal. When they shall have sacrificed 
the bull let them dwnide it up among those who took part in the 
procession’. The mandate is clear. The bull is not a gift to Zeus, 
but a vehicle of mana for distribution among the people. In him is 
concentrated as it were the life of the year: he is the incarnate 
ideal of the year; his life begins with the sowing, is cherished 
through the winter, and when it comes to full maturity in the 
early summer dies to live again in the people through the medium 
of the sacrificial banquet. He is sacred rather than divine; but 
divinity is, we have seen, born of sanctification, and sacrifice is but 
a sanctification to the uttermost. The bull is Sosipolis, Saviour of 
the city, in the making®. 

The bull-ceremony then had two acts, the dvadev£s or indica- 
tion, and the dats or communal, magical feast. As regards the 
first, one point remains to be noted. Commentators in explaining 
the festival have usually translated avadevEis as dedication, and 
held that the ceremony meant a solemn consecration of the bull 

1 roy dé Body bray Wowow [S}aveuérwoar Tols cummouretoacw. 

® Sosipolis at Olympia was a chthonic daiuwv rather than a 6eés; he was a 
snake-child like Krichthonios. At Magnesia he is a bull and, as Mr Cook suggests 
to me, when Themistocles (Plut. Vit. Them. xxxt. sub fin.) drank bull’s blood, he 
identified himself with Sosipolis in his bull-form. A coin of Magnesia shows him 
with phiale in hand, standing beside a lighted altar with a slain bull at his feet 
(Ath. Mitt. xx1. 1896, p. 22; P. Gardner, Corolla Numismatica, 1906, p.109). This 
coin represents the u»nueioy in the market-place at Magnesia (Thuc. 1. 138). At 
the Peiraeos Themistocles had a Bwpyoedhs tdpos (Plut. Vit. Them. XXXII.), 

—— eS ae 

aa The Hosioter 155 

to the service of Zeus. As such undoubtedly it would have been, 
at least in part, understood in the time, say, of Themistocles. The 
bull would have been supposed to get his sanctity from Zeus rather 
than Zeus his divinity from the bull. This was, I am sure, not the 
original sense of dvadevéts. Another holy bull makes this certain. 

Plutarch in his rxth Greek Question! asks ‘ Who is the Hosioter 
among the Delphians?’ The answer is, ‘They call Hostoter the 
animal sacrificed when a Hosios is designated.’ It is at first sight 
astonishing to find the name Hosioter—He who consecrates, the 
Consecrator—applied to the victim rather than the priest. But in 
the light of the primitive notion of sacrifice explained above 
(p. 137 ff.) all is clear—the Holy Bull is the source of mana. In 
him mana is as it were incarnate. He it is who consecrates. At 
Delphi he became and was a god—the Bull-Dionysos. Lycophron? 
tells us that at Delphi Agamemnon before he sailed 

Secret lustrations to the Bull did make, 
Beside the caves of him, the God of Gain 
Delphinian. 

Plutarch adds to his enquiry, ‘ Who is the Hosioter?’ a second 
question, ‘and why do they call one of their months Bysios?’ 
Evidently the two are connected. The month Bysios was, Plutarch 

tells us, at the beginning of spring, the time of the blossoming of 

many plants. The 8th of Bysios was the birthday of the god, and 
in olden times on this day only did the oracle give answers. At 
Magnesia the new daimon comes in at the time of sowing; at 
Delphi the Thyiades ‘wake up’ the infant god Liknites at the 
time when the Hosioi offer their secret sacrifice, presumably first 
of and then to the Hosioter, the Bull. The death of the old-year 
daimon may be followed immediately by his resurrection as the 
spirit of the new year. The death of the Old Year and the New 
Birth or Resurrection of the New, will form the subject of the 
next chapter. 

The dvaSekis of the Magnesian bull is not then its consecra- 
tion to Zeus, but simply its indication, its exhibition, its designation 
en pas 

1 For full discussion of this passage see my Prolegomena, p. 501. Plutarch says 
‘Oowripa wev Kadovor Td Ovduevoy iepetov, where 7d Ovbjevov must be passive. 
2 Al. 207 Actoulwv rap dvrpa Kepdgov Ae0d 

Tavpw xpupalas xépuiBas Kkardpéera, 

. BY Ul 
and the scholiast ad loc. says raipos 5¢ 6 Avdyvoos...87. ev mapaBioTw Ta mYoTTpLa 
éreneiro TH Arovicy. 

¥y 

oh ; 

156 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [ cH. 4 

as best and fairest-of the year, fittest vehicle of the life and mana 
of the people and the crops, like to a corn spirit, but of wider 
content. This holy vehicle of the year’s mana, this évavtés- 
daimon who died for the people, became at Delphi and in many 
other places a bull-god, a divinity born of his own sacrifice, 
ie. of his,own sanctification. At Magnesia he remains supremely 
sanctified indeed, but mainly the material of a davs, a sacramental 
Feast. To us the sacrifice of a god seems a miracle or a blasphemy, 
but when the god is seen to be begotten of the sacrifice the 
anomaly is softened. 

It remains to resume our argument as to the sacrifice of the 

bull. 

The bull is slain, not because his death has value to bribe or to 
appease, but in order that he may be eaten, He is eaten because 
he is holy; he is holy because of the magical mana within him, 
what Homer would call his ‘epdv wévos. You would eat the bull 
alive if you could, but eating a bull alive is beset with difficulties, 
So you kill him first and have a feast of raw flesh, an epopayos 
dais. If you become a Bacchos you will partake of that feast but 
once in your life, and henceforth will observe the tabu on flesh 
food—the flesh of ‘your brother the ox.’ 

And because you belong to a group, a thiasos, you do not sit 
alone eating raw bull; you have a communal feast, a Sais. 

You have at first no 1 thought of worshipping or even holding 
communion with any god. All you desire is to absorb the mana 
of the holy bull’s raw flesh. But bit by bit out_of your sacrifice 
of that_bull grew up a divine figure of the Feast, imagined, 
incarnate. You may call the figure by many names, Zeus Olbios, 
or the ‘horned Iacchos,’ or Zagreus, or Dionysos Tauromorphos. 

One name the Initiated gave him, which reveals his origin and 
shows how the ancient mind naturally focused on sacramental 
communion. In his account of the contrast between Apollo and 
Dionysos, Plutarch? tells of the ‘manifold changes’ that Dionysos 

1 de Hi ap. Delph. 1x. Avévvoov 82 kal Laypéa kal Nuxréuov Kal Ioodairny abrov 
dvondfover kal POopds Twas Kal dpavcmods Kal Tas avaBioces Kal mahvyyevectas olketa 
Tais elpnuevars peraBodats alviypara kat pvdedpmara mepatvouct. I have elsewhere 

(Prolegomena, p. 482, note 1) conjectured that the curious and hitherto unexplained 

title Icodairns was connected with the amopayor datres, but I did not then understand 
the importance of the communal meal. 

- = 

Isodaites and the Communal Feast 157 
suffers into winds and water, and earth and stars, and how the 
_ births of plants and animals are enigmatically termed ‘rending 
asunder’ and ‘tearing limb from limb’; and he adds, ‘when they tell 
_ of certain Destructions and Disappearances, and Resurrections and 
_ New Births, which are fables and riddles appertaining to the 
aforesaid changes—then they call the god Dionysos and ?Zagreus, 
and Nuktelios and Isodaites’—Him of the equal Feast. 

So far our attention has been focused on sacrifice considered 
as a sacramental communion, as a means by which the com- 

municant might secure for himself and manipulate for his own 

ends the mana of the sacrificed animal. We have now to consider 

more in detail these ends to which the mana is applied. They 
_ will be found to be very simple and rather what we should call 
material than spiritual. In the Magnesian sacrifice, it will be 
remembered (p. 151), the Hierokeryx prayed year by year for the 
land and the citizens and the women, for peace and wealth, and 

_ for the bringing forth of the other ‘fruits and of cattle’ -We 

shall see this annual prayer embodied, represented as it were, on 

a monument of great importance to be considered in the next 

chapter, the famous Hagia Triada sarcophagos. 

Se ee

THE DITHYRAMB, THE SPRING-FESTIVAL AND THE 
HAGIA TRIADA SARCOPHAGOS. 

HA® HAGE YEAIAOCON, 
KaAAC Gpac Afoyca, 
KAAOYC ENIAYTOYC. 

Vere concordant amores, vere nubunt alites, 
Et nemus comam resolvit de maritis imbribus. 

THE painted stone sarcophagos! which forms in a sense the 
text of the present chapter is now in the museum of Candia, 
but it was found, in 1903, not at Knossos but close to the palace 
of Hagia Triada at Phaistos, on the southern coast of Crete. 
Immediately on its discovery its great importance was recognized, 
and, as there was fear of the frescoes fading, it was promptly 
carried, on the shoulders of men, a three days’ journey across the 
island to the museum at Candia, where it could be safely housed. 

The tomb in which the sarcophagos was found is of a type 
familiar in Lycia but not in Crete. It consisted of a walled, 
square chamber with a door at the north-west corner, somewhat 
after the fashion of the Harpy-Tomb now in the British Museum. 
This analogy is not without its importance, as the scenes repre- 
sented, if we rightly interpret them, embody conceptions familiar 

* First published with full commentary and illustration by R. Paribeni, Il 
Sarcofago dipinto di Hagia Triada in Monumenti Antichi della R. Accademia dei 
Lincei, x1x. 1908, p. 6, T. 1—m. and reproduced here by kind permission of the 
Accademia. See also F, von Duhn, Der Sarkophag aus Hagia Triada in Archiv 
f. Religionswissenschaft, x1. 1909, 161, and E. Petersen, Der Kretische Bildersarg 
in Jahrbuch Arch. Inst. xxtv. 1909, p. 162, and René Dussaud, Les Civilisations 
Pré-Helléniques dans le bassin de la mer Egée, 1910, p. 261. I follow in the 
main Dr Petersen’s interpretation, though, in the matter of the bull-sacrifice my 
view is independent. 3 ; 

2 Pore op. cit. p.9; for the Lycian tombs see Perrot-Chipiez, Hist. de VArt, 
v.p.3 : 

159 

in Asia Minor. Inside the tomb-enclosure were found two 
_ Sarcophagoi, the large painted stone sarcophagos now before us, 
and a smaller one in terra-cotta. The discoverer, Dr Halbherr, 
dates the tomb and its contents at from 1500—1300 B.c. 

We begin with the principal scenes depicted on the two long 
sides of the sarcophagos, and first with the scene in Fig. 30. 
In the centre we have the sacrifice of a bull, of the kind, with 
large, curved horns, once common in the Aegean, now extinct. 

He is dying, not dead; his tail is still alive and his pathetic eyes 
wide open, but the flute-player is playing and the blood flows from 
the bull’s neck into the situla below. Two Cretan goats with 
twisted horns lie beneath the sacrificial table on which the bull 
is bound. They will come next. A procession of five women 
comes up to the table; the foremost places her hands on or 
towards the bull, as though she would be in touch with him and 

_— a 
Be Fae 

al 

a 

im). so 

160 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc.  [CH. — 

his mana. She will consecrate, I think, not him but herself, put 
herself in touch with his great life which ebbs with the flowing 
blood. 

Why does he die? In the light of the last chapter we might 
safely assume that he died because his sacrificers desired his 
mana. But on the sarcophagos we have no communal feast ; nor 
is there present the figure of any Olympian to receive the bull’s 
blood as a gift-offering. How then is it to be made effective? 
A clue will be found in the scene immediately to the right of 
the bull, a scene not a little surprising. But before we pass to 
this scene some details of the bull-sacrifice must be noted. 

After what has been said about sacrifice we understand the 
pathetic figure of the slain bull, huddled up with sad despairing ~ 
face. Very literally he dies for the people, that they may have 
new life, new mana, new pévos, his life and his life-blood. We 
are reminded of the scene in the Odyssey’ where the heifer is 
sacrificed to Athene, 

Then, straightway, Nestor’s son 
Stood near and struck. The tendons of the neck 
The axe cut through, and loosed the heifer’s might. 

And, as the life is let loose, the women raise their cry of 
apotropaic lamentation, their 6XoAvy7. It is a moment of high 
tension, for the life with all its might and sanctity is abroad. 
Then, to make assurance doubly sure and to get the actual vehicle 
of the life, the blood, they cut the victim’s throat: 

The black blood gushed, the life had left the bones?. 

We come now to the object of the sacrifice. On the extreme 
right of the design is a ‘Mycenaean’ shrine with ‘horns of con- - 
secration.’ Growing out from the middle of it, probably actually 

1 Od, 111. 448 
avrixka Néoropos vids, trépAvuos Opacuujdns, 
jrace dyxe ords* wédexus 5 daéxoWe révoyras 
avxevlous, Nicev 5é Bods pévos* ai 5 ddddvEav 
Ouyarépes te vuol re Kal aldoln mapdxoures 
Néoropos. 
Here undoubtedly Nicer 5é Boos uévos means that the strength of the heifer collapsed 
she fell in a heap on the ground. But the idea was originally that something holy 
and perilous escaped ; this is clear from the instant raising of the ddodvypués. That 
the Beet, re pr ea eat vouos is plain from Aesch. Ag, 572. I believe its 
primary use to have been apotropaic. For the é\oAvyyd 
pp. 43—44, and idtuealleriMmer p. 101. wee ie SIP Fett a 
* v, 455 rijs 5° émet éx wéhav alua pin, dare 5° doréa Oupds. 

The Bird and the Axe and the Tree 161 

surrounded by it, is an unmistakable olive-tree. On a step in 
_ front of the shrine is a slender obelisk, and on, or rather hafted 
into, the obelisk, to our delight and amazement, a sacred object 
now thrice familiar, a double axe, and, perched on the double 
axe, a great black mottled bird. The conjunction rather takes 
our breath away. Sacred obelisks we know, of double axes as 
thunder-symbols we have lately heard perhaps enough?; birds are 
the familiar ‘attributes’ of many an Olympian ; but an obelisk 
and a battle-axe and a bird with a sacrificial bull and a 

Fic. 31. 

‘Mycenaean’ tree-shrine—who would have dared to forecast it, 
and what does it all mean ? 

Before this question can be answered we must turn to the 
other side of the sarcophagos in Fig. 31 and learn what is the 

? The most illuminating study on the double-axe, its cult and significance, is 
a paper by Mr A, B. Cook, The Cretan Axe-Cult outside Crete, published in the 
Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions. 
Oxford, 1908, m. p. 184. A further discussion by Mr Cook may be looked for 
in his forthcoming book Zeus, chapter 11., section 3, paragraph (c), division i, ‘The 
double axe in Minoan cult.’ For the bird and the axe see also A Bird Cult of the 
Old Kingdom by P. E. Newbery in the Liverpool Annals of Archaeology and 
Anthropology, m. p. 49, and Two Cults of the Old Kingdom, op. cit. 1. p. 24, and 
O. Montelius, The Sun-God’s Axe and Thor’s Hammer, in Folk-Lore, 1910, p. 60. 

H. Val 

162 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festwal, ete. [ OH. 

sequel of the sacrifice. There is, as before said, no hint of a 
sacramental banquet; but there are other means of contact, of 
sacramental communion, besides eating and drinking. The blood 
of the bull is not drunk by the worshippers; it is brought and 
poured—the liquid is red—by a woman dressed in sacramental 
raiment, from a situla into a great two-handled krater which 
stands between two obelisks again surmounted by double axe and 
bird. The woman celebrant is followed by another woman bearing 
two situlae on a pole over her shoulders, and by a man playing 
ona lyre. At this point the scene clearly ends. The next figure, 
carrying a calf, turns his back and walks in the contrary direction. 
The distinction between the two scenes is, in the original, made 
clearer by the differing colours of the background’. 

As to the double cultus-objects, two points must be carefully 
noted. The two sets of double axes, or rather double-double axes, 
are not quite the same. The one to the right is decorated with 
cross stripes, that to the left is plain. The double axe on the 
red obelisk on the other side of the sarcophagos has similar cross 
markings. Further the obelisk to the right is considerably taller 
than the obelisk to the left. This is I think intentional, not due 
to either accident or perspective, but to the fact that they stand for 
male and female potencies. The most surprising and significant 
difference in the cultus-objects of the two sides yet remains. 
The obelisk in Fig. 30 is merely an obelisk painted red; the 
two obelisks in Fig. 31 are burgeoning out into leaves, and 
they are painted green; they are trees alive and blossoming. 
They are not indeed actual trees®, but mimic trees, obelisks decked 
for ritual purposes with cypress leaves. 

The blood, the wévos of the bull, is brought to the two obelisks. 
It is abundantly clear that we have no gift-offering to a divinity. 
Birds and thunder-axes and trees have no normal, natural use 
for warm blood. The blood, the mana, must be brought with 
magical intent. Contact is to be effected between the unseen 
mystical mana of the bull and the mana of the tree. But, on 
the sarcophagos, we do not see the actual contact, the actual 
communion effected. The priestess does not apply the blood, 
does not asperge the obelisks. The evidence of the sarcophagos 

1 The significance of the scene to the right will be considered later, p. 209. 
2 This was, I think, first pointed out by Professor von Duhn, op. cit. p. 173. 

. 

es, 

PF tg dd 

ee ee eee ee ee ie ial 

aid The Bull-Sacrament of Atlantis 163 

can here be supplemented by other sacrifices in which bulls and 
trees and tree-posts are involved. 

In the island of Atlantis Plato describes a strange bull- 
sacrifice, evidently founded on some actual primitive ritual. 
The essential feature of this sacrifice was the actual contact of 
the victim’s blood with a pillar or post on which laws were 
engraved. Here we have direct contact with the object to be 
sanctified; no altar or even table intervenes. It is sacrifice, Le. 
magical contact, in its most primitive form. Kritias in his 
description of the sunk island says that in the centre of it was 
a sanctuary to Poseidon within which certain sacred bulls ranged 
freely. Poseidon it may be noted in passing is one of the gods 
who grew out of a bull; his wine-bearers at Ephesus? were Bulls, 
and, in answer to the imprecation of Theseus, as a Bull he appears 
out of his own flood to wreck the chariot of Hippolytus*. It is 
to the Cretan Poseidon not to Zeus that Minos‘ promised the 
sacrifice of his finest bull. 

In this sanctuary of Poseidon was a column of orichalcum on 
which were inscribed the injunctions of Poseidon, which seem to 
have constituted the laws of the country. On the column, beside 
the law, was a Curse (“Opxos) invoking great maledictions on the 

disobedient. Now there were bulls who ranged free (€perov) in 

the sanctuary of Poseidon, and the ten kings who were alone in 
the sanctuary prayed to the god that they might take for victim 
the bull that was pleasing to him, and they hunted the bull 
without iron, with staves or snares. The bull, be it noted, is 
free because divine; he is not smitten with a weapon lest his 
#évos should prematurely escape. They then led the bull to the 
column and slew him against the top of the column over the 
writing’. The whole strength and mana of the bull is thus 
actually applied to, tied up with, the épxos. To make assurance 

1 Krit. 119 p and x. 

2 Hesych. s.v. Tadpor: of mapa "Edectous olvoxsoc and s.v. Tavpla: éoprh TLS 
dyouervn ILlocedévos. Athen. x. 25 mapd ’Edectous of olvoxootvres qOen TH Tod Ioce- 
dévos éopry Tadpou éxadodvTo. 

8 Bee on. 1214 Kop’ é&€Onxe Tabpov, dypiov Tépas. Cf. Hesiod, Scut. 104 ravpeos 
évvoclyatos. 

4 Apollod. 2. 5. 7. ; 

° Plat. Krit. 1198 .,.dy dé Edovey Tav Tabpwr, mpds Thy orhdnv mpocayayédyTes Kara. 

 kopupny abris éoparroy kara TeV ypaypdtwr. 

2 
wu ety 

11—2 

7 =. eer 

164 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. [ CH. 

doubly sure they afterwards filled a bowl with wine, dropped into 
it a clot of blood for each of the kings, and then drank, swearing 
that they would judge according to the laws on the column. Such 
a sacrifice is pure magic; it has primarily nothing to do with a 
god, everything to do with the magical conjunction of the mana 
of victim and sacrificer. 

It has been happily suggested that the lost island of Atlantis 
reflects the manners and customs, the civili- 
zation generally, of Crete?, which after its 
great Minoan supremacy sank, for the rest of 
Greece, into a long oblivion. It is also very 
unlikely that Plato would invent ritual details 
which in his day would have but little 
significance. But we have definite evidence 
that the ritual described is actual, not 
imaginary, though this evidence comes not 
from Crete but from another region of the ‘Mycenaean’ world. 
The coin of Ilium? reproduced in Fig. 32 shows, I think, very 
clearly, how the bull was sacrificed. The human-shaped goddess 
Athena Ilias is there with her fillet-twined spear and her owl; 
but to the right is an older sanctity, a pillar on to which is hung 
a bull. He will be sacrificed, not on the pillar’s top, which would 
be extremely awkward, but with his head and his throat to be 
cut against the top, alongside of it, down over it (cata xopudy). 

That the divine or rather the chief sanctity of Ilium was a 
pillar is clear, I think, from the representation in Fig. 33a. 
The ox, or rather cow’, is still free and stands before the goddess. 
She has human shape, but she is standing on the pillar she once 
was. On the obverse of another coin (b) she has left her pillar. 
Most remarkable and to us instructive of all, is the design on a 
third coin of Ilium in Fig. 33c¢. The goddess is present, as 

? See an interesting article The Lost Continent in the Times for Feb. 19, 1911. 

2 The four coins reproduced in Figs. 32 and 33 are published and discussed 
by Dr H. y. Fritze in the section Die Miinzen von Ilion of Prof. Dorpfeld’s Troja 
und Ilion, u. p. 514, Beilage, Pl. 61, No. 19, Pl. 63, Nos. 67, 68 and 69 
and are here represented by Prof. Dérpfeld’s kind permission, Dr Fritze in his 
interesting commentary does not note the Atlantis parallel, but he draws attention 
to the fact that the suspended bull explains the formulary that often occurs in 
ephebic inscriptions alpec@ar rods Bods. Thus CIA mm, 467 Hpavto dé kal rots 
Mvornplors rovs Bods év "ENevoive 77 Ovclg and CIA m!. 471, 78f. érro[ijo jaro dé kal Tas 
dpoes T&v Body érdvdpws év 7H’ Edev[ cin 7H Ovota Kal rots mpLonpoctots]. 

% That the animal sacrificed before the Palladion is female is certain from the 
Bots of the inscription of Ilium, 

>, 

— re 

NS ee 

_— 

Bull and Tree at Ilium 165 

before, mounted on her pillar. Before her is the cow suspended 
head uppermost on a tree. Behind the cow and apparently 
seated on the tree is the sacrificer, known by his short sleeveless 
chiton. He has seized the horn of the cow in his left hand and 
with his right he is about to cut her throat. The goddess may 
be present as much as she likes, but she was not the original 
object of the cow-slaying. The intent is clear, the blood of the 
cow is to fall on the sacred tree and will bring it new mana.. No 
other explanation can account for a method of sacrifice at once 
so difficult and so dangerous. 

The gist of bringing the bull’s blood to the obelisks on the 
sarcophagos is then, in the light of the coins of Ilium, clear. It 
is to bring the mana of the bull in contact with the mimic trees. 
Tree and pillar and obelisk are all substantially one; the living 

tree once cut down becomes a pillar or an obelisk at will, 
and, dead though it may be, does not lose its sanctity. All trees 
tend to be sacred or possessed by an unseen life, but above all 
fruit-trees are sacred}, they are foci of eager collective attention. 
Long before agricultural days and the sanctity of grain came the 
sanctity of natural fruit-trees. On the sarcophagos it is clear 
that we have, not as in the Bouphonia an agricultural, but what 
we might call a vegetation, a tree and fruit ceremony. 

The importance of the fruit-tree and the religious reverence 
paid it come out very clearly in Mycenaean gems”. Not only are 
the shrine and the sacred Tree constantly and closely associated, 
but we have scenes of fruit-gathering accompanied by ritual 

1 Prof. Myres (Proceedings of Class. Assoc. 1910) remarks that Greeks have no 

word for tree in general. dévdpov=fruit tree. é 
2 A. J. Evans, Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult, J.H.S. xxt. (1901), Fig. 53. 

<5 

=~ 

166 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc. [ CH. 

dances and gestures. Such a scene is depicted on the gold signet- 
ring from Mycenae in Fig. 34. To the right we have a shrine 
with a pillar and a sacred Tree. A male worshipper pulls the 
fruit-laden tree downwards, as though to shake off its fruit or 
possibly to uproot it for ritual purposes. A woman figure, perhaps 
a goddess, more likely a priestess, makes ritual gestures with her 
hands, it may be to indicate hunger!; a second woman leans over 
an altar table beneath which is a betyl. A similar scene is 
represented on a gold signet-ring from Vapheio?. Here the tree is 
planted in a pithos, and the so-called priestess is evidently dancing. 

Primitive man then in general, and assuredly the ancient 
Cretan, is intensely concerned with the fruits of the Earth—not 
at first with the worship of Earth in the abstract, but with the 
food® that comes to him out of the Earth. It is mainly because 
she feeds him that he learns to think of Earth as the Mother. 
Rightly did the ancient Dove-Priestesses of Dodona sing‘: 

Earth sends up fruits—call ye on Earth the Mother. 

1 Dr Evans in commenting on the ring, op. cit. p. 177, says, ‘a gesture for 
hunger common among the American Indians may supply a useful parallel. It is 
made by passing the hands towards and backward from the sides of the body, 
denoting a gnawing sensation.’ See Garrick Mallery, Pictographs of the North 
American Indians, in Fourth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1886, p. 236, 
and Fig. 155, p. 235. 

2 Evans, op. cit., Fig. 52. 

3 The importance of food as a factor in civilization and the successive quest of 
roots, fruits, cereals, etc., has been well discussed by Mr E. J. Payne in his History 
of the New World called America, vol. 1. pp. 276 ff. 

4 Paus. x. 12. 10 

TG kaprovs dvler, 5:6 k\ygere wnrépa yaiav. 

vI| Sanctity of Fruit-Trees 167 

And of these fruits, before cereals came in with settled agri- 
culture, most conspicuous and arresting would be the fruits of 
wild trees. The fruit-growing tree would be sacred, and its . 
sanctity would quickly pass to other trees. There was the like 
sanctity, the like mana in all edible plants and roots, but the tree 
would stand foremost. 

Earth as the Mother because the fruit-bearer is very clearly 
shown in Fig. 35, a design from a hydria in the Museum at 
Constantinople’. The scene is at Eleusis, marked by the presence 
of Triptolemos in his winged car. From the earth rises Ge. In 

> = 

VMI 

Fic. 35. 

her hand she bears a cornucopia, full of the fruits of the earth tl fa 
From the cornucopia rises a child. Art could not speak more 
plainly. Ge is mother because fruit-bearer. Earth then is fitly 
embodied by the primaeval fruit-bearer, the tree. 

Earth sent up fruits, but not without help from heaven. In 
the scenes of fruit-gathering this is not forgotten. On the signet- 
ring in Fig. 34 above the tree and the priestess is a rather rudi- Jarl 
mentary indication of the sky, a dotted line and what is probably ¢q,, to 

tS Reinach, Rev. Arch. 1900, p. 87; and see also Dr Svoronos, Journal 
@Archéologie et Numismatique, 1901, p. 387. 

sue 

168 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete.  [ou. 

a crescent moon. If there is any doubt what is meant we have 
only to turn to the gold signet-ring from the Acropolis treasure of 
Mycenae in Fig. 361. Here we have the Harth-goddess or her 
priestess under her great fruit-bearing tree; she holds poppies in 
her hand; worshippers approach her bearing flowers and leaf- 
sprays; behind her a woman gathers fruit, while above her is all 
the glory of Ouranos, Sun and Moon and Milky Way, and down 
from the sky come the powers of the sky, the thunder in its 

double manifestation of shield-demon and battle-axe. The Earth 
is barren till the Thunder and the Rainstorm smite her in the 
springtime—till in his Epiphany of Thunder and Lightning 
Keraunos comes to Keraunia, the Sky-god weds Semele the Earth, 

the 
Bride of the bladed Thunder?. 

In the light of the scene on the signet-ring we do not need to 
ask the significance of the axe hafted into the obelisk®. It is the 

1 J.H.S. 1901. 
> Kur, Hipp. 559 Bpovry dudurd ad 
‘ 0 py Toxdda. Cf. Kur. Bacch. 3 Seuddry to’ 
dorpamnpopy mupt. Other instances of thunder-Brides are Mites! wite of es 
phitryon, the double-borer, the bidens, Dido wedded to Aeneas in a thunderstorm 
First rightly explained by Mr A. B. Cook, Cretan Axe-Cult outside Crete, 

Transactions of the Third International i igi 
Gio iee ene rnational Congress for the History of Religions, 

vi) _ Hrechtheus and the Bull-Sacrijice 169 

- symbol, or rather I should prefer to say the representation, the 

emphasis of the union of the mana of Earth and Sky, of what a 
more formal, anthropoid theology would call the Sacred Marriage 
(iepds yapmos) of Ouranos and Gaia. This union, this marriage is 
further symbolized by the bird. But before we pass to the bird, 
it remains to note a curious and instructive parallel to this cult of 
axe and tree and bull, a parallel which takes us back for a moment 
to the ritual of the Bouphonia. We shall find this parallel in a 
place where we little expect it, in the Erechtheion on the Athenian 
Acropolis. 

Pausanias?, when he is discussing the Court of the Prytaneum 
where iron and all lifeless things were brought to trial, naturally 
thinks of the classical instance of the axe at the Bouphonia. He 
makes incidentally a statement that has not, I think, received the 
attention it deserves. ‘When Hrechtheus was king of the Athenians, 
the Ox-Slayer slew an ox for the first time on the altar of Zeus 
Polieus.’ The Bouphonia was then traditionally connected, not 
only, nor I think primarily, with Zeus, but with Erechtheus. 

This connection of Erechtheus with the bull-sacrifice is con- 
firmed by a famous passage in the Iliad. In the Catalogue of the 

Ships? the contingent of the Athenians is thus described : 

Athens they held, her goodly citadel, 

Realm of Erechtheus, high of heart, whom erst 
Athene reared, daughter of Zeus, what time 

The grain-giver did bear him, and she set 

Erechtheus there in Athens, in her own 

Rich temple. There, as each Year’s Feast goes round, 
The young men worship him with bulls and lambs. 

Earth is his mother, or rather the ploughed field, the tilth, the 
grain-land (dpovpa). Athena, the humanized form of this earth- 
daimon, is but his foster-mother. The young men (xodpor), like 

the kouroi on the sarcophagos, worship him with bulls and lambs 

Ii COLO. 
2 Tl. 11.546 of 0 dp "AOhvas etxov, évxrlwevov mrodleOpor, 

Sjuov "HpexOjos meyadhropos, dv mor ’APHyn 

OpéWe Ards Ovydrnyp, Téxe dé Feldwpos dpoupa: 

Kad 0 év AOtwys eloev, E@ evi mlove vn@. 

év0a dé pv ravporor Kal dpvesots tAdovrac 

Kodpoe "AOnvalwy meptred\dopévav éviauTav. os 
For the present purpose it is of no consequence whether the passage is inter- 

polated or not, nor does the archaeological question of the various yyol concern us. 

170 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc. [ OH. 

‘as each Year's Feast goes round.’ It is a yearly sacrifice, a year- 
sacrifice. For Athenian xotpov, he, Erechtheus, is their péysotos 
KoUpoOS. 

The whole atmosphere of the passage is agricultural; but, 
when we ask what natural and social facts lie behind the figure 
of Erechtheus, we find ourselves surrounded by sanctities more 
primitive. The cult and character of Erechtheus must be sought, 
if anywhere, in the Erechtheion, the sanctuary which stands on the 
site of the old kings’ palace of the Acropolis and which still bears 
his name, The present temple is of course a building of the end 
of the fifth century B.c. All we know certainly of its date is that 

ZAWALL OF ACROPOLIS: 

'2345 10 Sm 

A. Olvetree. 

woe) 

ee oe ; POLIAS 

A) t—) 
SS 

Ta) 
Mn VW Shi 

VI ULLULIILUN JHLLAPULLLL IIL ILLLELUY YUL) 
TILA fA NL ea Pb 

Fie. 37. 

KARYATID PORCH it 

it was unfinished in P.c. 408. What concerns us are the ancient 
sanctities that the comparatively modern structure was built to 
enshrine and safeguard’. Of these for our purpose we need only 
consider three, the famous oneta or tokens: 

A sacred olive tree, 

A ‘sea’ or well called after Erechtheus (’Epey@nis), 

A ‘trident’ mark. 
The disposition of trident-mark and olive tree is seen in Fig. 37. 
The well must have been close to the holy tree. 

1 A discussion of the topography of the Erechtheion will be found in my Anci 
nevent 
Athens, 1890, p. 481, and my more recent views as to the disposition of A onueia 

Tre ©] 

a eT a ee ee s.r Pie 

vr] Cults of the Pandroseion cy 

When we hear of the trident-mark, the salt sea-well and the 
olive tree, we think instinctively of the west pediment of the 
Parthenon, of the great strife between Athena and Poseidon for 
the land of Attica. The salt sea-well and the trident-mark are 
‘tokens,’ we are told, of the defeat of Poseidon; the olive is the 
‘token’ of the triumph of Athena. An awkward story for theology 
and one that required much adjustment and subsequent peace- 
making, as the rivals Athena and Poseidon had to share a sanctuary. 
The story is as untrue as it is awkward. If we would understand 
the ‘tokens,’ we must get back behind these intrusive, grasping 
Olympians and see what the sanctities themselves signify before 
they were anyone’s ‘ tokens.’ 

The olive grew in the Pandroseion’; it also grew in the older 
Erechtheion, in its precinct at least, if not in the actual building. 
Herodotus? says, ‘ There is on this Acropolis a temple of Erechtheus 
who is called Earth-born, and in it are an olive tree and a sea 
which according to current tradition among the Athenians Poseidon 
and Athena planted as tokens when they contended for the 
country. What has the olive to do with Erechtheus? Again the 
Hagia Triada sarcophagos explains. In the obelisks, the artificial 
tree-posts, are planted the thunder-axes that bring the rain-storm 
to fertilize the earth. From that marriage springs the tree. 

The trident-mark, we have already seen (p. 92), was no symbol of 

the sea-god, but, as was shown by the hole in the roof, it was the 
token of Kataibates, the Descender from the sky. According to 
Hyginus* Erechtheus was smitten not by the trident of Poseidon, 
but by the lightning of Zeus, at the request of Poseidon. The 
well too we may conjecture only became brackish when Erechtheus 
the Earth-shaker, Phytalmios, Nurturer of plants, took on a sea- 
god’s attributes. 

in Primitive Athens, 1906, p. 39, from which Fig. 37 is taken. The view here taken 
of Erechtheus as Thunder-god was first proposed by O. Gilbert, Gr. Gdtterlehre, 
1898, p. 170, and is adopted by Dr H. Petersen in Die Burgtempel der Athenaia, 
1907, p. 73. ; 

1 A close analogy to the Pandroseion at Athens is offered by the Pantheion at 
Olympia, in which grew the sacred olive-tree (Aristotle, Oavpdaois dxovouara, 51, 
and Schol. ad Ar. Plut. 586). This Pantheion had obviously nothing to do with 
‘all the gods.’ It was simply the ‘altogether holy place.’ Cf. the rdvOevos reher4 of the 
Orphic Hymns. For the Pantheion see L. Weniger, Der heilige Oelbaum in Olympia, 
Weimar Programm No. 701, 1895, but unhappily Dr Weniger, spite of the evidence 
he brings together, clings to the old view that the Pantheion was in our modern 

sense a Pantheon. 3 : 
2 vit. 55. 3 Fab. 46 ab Iove, Neptuni rogatu, fulmine est ictus. 

oe eee ee, ee) eee 

172 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festwal, ete. [ou. 

In the light of the Hagia Triada sarcophagos it is all quite 

simple and clear. As there, so here, we have an olive tree: 
The holy bloom of the olive, whose hoar leaf 
High on the shadowy shrine of Pandrosos 
Hath honour of us all, 

Apollodorus! says that Athena came after Poseidon and having 
made Kekrops witness of her seizure (katadj ews), planted the 
olive which now is shown in the Pandroseion. Athena is mani- 
festly a superfluous interloper. There is a holy tree whose name 
we may conjecture was the ‘All Dewy One.’ It was tended by 
-maidens who did the service of the Hersephoria; the Dew-carrying 
Maidens to this day go out before the dawn to catch the dew of 
May Day which is magical for bloom and health. The Hersephoria, 
the Dew Service, took place on the 13th of Skirophorion, the night 
before the Bouphonia®. It is natural to ask, Was there any 
possible connection between the two? 

Not far from the statue and altar of Zeus Polieus on the Acro- 
polis, where the Bouphonia was enacted, there was, Pausanias tells 
us, an image of Ge praying to Zeus for rain*, Cut in the living rock 
about a dozen yards north of the Parthenon is an inscription near 
to a basis that once held a votive statue ‘Of Ge the Fruit-bearer 
according to the oracle*’ Possibly the lost statue was the very 
image seen by Pausanias. Ge prayed to Zeus in his capacity of 
Hyetios, the Rainy. A contemporary of Lucian, Alciphron by 
name, has left us in his imaginary letters’ some details of the 
cult of Zeus Hyetios. A certain Thalliskos writes as follows to 
Petraios : 

A drought is upon us. Not a cloud is to be seen in the sky, and we 

want a regular downpour. You have only to look at the ploughed land to 
see how dreadfully parched the soil is. I am afraid all our sacrifices to 

jst ee 

_ ° For the evidence see Mommsen, Heortologie, p.44. The month Skirophorion 
is certain, for the Etymologicum Magnum says of the appnpopia: éoprh émiredouuevn 
TH AOnva vy Te Tkipopoprdyve unvi. The exact day, the 13th, is not certain, but 
highly probable. Suidas says of the Bouphonia, éopry rahaid qv pacw dyecOut 
Hera TA pvoTjpia. The uvorjpia cannot be the Eleusinian mysteries which were 
celebrated in Boedromion (September), they may well be the Arrephoria, which 
were certainly mysterious. The Etym. Mag. explains the word as applied apa 7d 
appyta kal wvorhpia pépev. 

SsPe Teds 

* For facsimile of inscription see my Mythology and Monuments of Ancient 
Athens, p. 415. 

5 Alk, Epist. m1. 35. For the Bonyla of Zeus Hyetios at Didymoi see 
B. Haussoullier, Le Culte de Zeus & Didymes in Mélanges Weil, 1898, p. 147. 

Poa! Hy dee 

a a ee ea ee 

. 
. 
a: 

J 

“Hl 

VI] The Bouphonia as Rain-Charm 173 

Jupiter Pluvius have gone for nothing, and yet all we villagers outdid each 
other to make a good sacrificial show. Each man brought what he could 
according to his means and ability. One brought a ram, another a goat, 
another some fruit, the poor man brought a cake, and the positive pauper 
some lumps of decidedly mouldy incense. No one could run to a bull, for 
our Attic soil is thin and cattle are scarce. But we might have saved our 
expense. Zeus it would seem is ‘on a journey’ and cannot attend to us. 

We begin to suspect that the sacrifice of the bull in the 
Bouphonia was a rain ‘charm,’ later a ‘sacrifice to Zeus Hyetios, 
and this, it may be, explains a strange detail in the ritual. Among 
the attendants at the sacrifice were certain maidens called Water- 
Carriers (Udpopdpor). They. brought the water, Porphyry? says, to 
sharpen the knife and the axe. But for such a function was it 
necessary that maidens should be carefully selected? Is it not at 
least possible that the water poured on the holy axe was to act as 
a rain ‘charm’? The axe was the symbol, the presentation of the 
Sky-Zeus ; what acted prayer could be more potent, more magical, 
than to sprinkle the axe with water? ? 

Be this as it may, we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that 
the Bouphonia and the Hersephoria, widely different in character 
though they were, had the same intent, to induce the sky to let 
fall upon the parched earth its rain or dew, that so the sacred 
olive, and with it all other plants and crops, might blossom and 

bear fruit. The Hersephoria was to induce the fall of fertilizing 

dew*, According to a wide-spread belief, the dew gathered on 
Midsummer Night had special potency to beautify and bless‘. 
Dew, according to common credence, falls thickest on the night of 
the full moon, and the Hersephoria took place on the night of the 

1 de Abst. 1. 30 ddpopdpous mapbévous xarédetav’ al 5’ bdwp Koulfovow, drws Tov 

médekuy Kal Thy paXatpay AKoviTwou,. : 
2 This delightful suggestion is entirely due to Mr A. B. Cook, by whose 

permission I mention it. ’ 

3 See my Prolegomena, p. 122, note 2. The dew was unquestionably regarded 
as the fertilizing seed of the Sky-God. Mr A. B. Cook draws my attention to 
a passage in the Dionysiaka of Nonnus (v1. 144 ff.), where Semele in a dream sees 
the fate to come upon her (her bridal with Zeus), in the vision of a tree, watered by 
the eternal dew of the son of Kronos: 

mero Kaddurérnrov leiv purov évdobe Kymov 
éyxdoov, oldarép BeBapnuevov dupake Kkapr@ 
ical Seno gpurov jev. 
A bird carries the fruit of the tree to the lap of Zeus, and from him a full-grown 

bull-man is born. : 
4 Brand H. Ellis, Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 1849, 1. 218; P. Sebillot, 

Folk-Lore de France, 1904, 1. 94. 

ra 5 

174 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc. [ CH. 

last full moon of the Attic year’. The maidens gathered their 
dew in the precinct of Ourania in the Gardens. The Bouphonia 
was an appeal to the sterner powers of the sky, to thunder, and 
lightning, and the rain-storm. 

It is worth noting that an invocation of dew for the fertilization 
of man and plants and cattle forms part of an Epiphany dp@pevov 
that goes on in the island of Imbros? to-day. A sort of ‘aetio- 
logical myth’ is chanted, telling of the ‘Baptism of Christ.’ Our 
Lady goes down to Jordan, takes water, washes and then entreats 
S. John Baptist to baptize the Holy Child. 8S. John makes 

answer: 
Let him wait till the morn 
That I may ascend into heaven, 
To send down dew upon earth, 
That the master and his lady may be bedewed, 
That the mothers and their children be bedewed, 
That the plains with the trees be bedewed, 
That the springs and the waters be bedewed, 
That the cattle may be tame, 
And the idols may fall down. 

We find ourselves in full magic, 8. John the Baptist and the 
Baptism of life-giving dew—the New Birth. S. John must 
ascend, must become a ‘sky-god,’ before he can descend. 

If, spite of the conjunction of thunder-axe and tree on the 
sarcophagos, the thunder-god Erechtheus and the olive tree strike 
us still as dissonant, we may find conviction when it appears that 
the same strange marriage is found in the lower city. In the 
Academy Pausanias* saw an olive plant, said to have been the 
second to appear. It was doubtless fabled to have been a graft 
from the sacred olive of the Acropolis. All olive trees throughout 
Attica which could claim this high descent were called Moriae 
(propagated, wewopyuévar) and were protected by special sanctions 
under the immediate care of the Areopagos‘. They were also 

' Gruppe, Gr. Mythologie wnd Religion, p. 34. The whole question of the dew 
and rain aspects of the Sky-god will be fully discussed by Mr A. B. Cook in his 
forthcoming work ‘Zeus,’ chapter mu. § 8, ‘Zeus and the Dew,’ § g ‘Zeus and the 
Rain,’ § h Zeus Hyetios 1. Diipoleia. Since the above was written it. has been 
shown by Dr E. Maass (A. Mitt. xxxv. 3, p. 337, Aglaurion) that Aglauros is a well- 
nymph, goddess of the clear shining water, of dy\adv téwp. She and her sisters 
are therefore a trinity of water and dew. 

? I owe my knowledge of this interesting song to the kindness of Mr A. Wace 
who allowed me to see a proof of his forthcoming article on North Greek Festivals. 

* 1. 30. 2 kal purdv éorw édalas, dedrepoy TodTO Neyouevov pavinvat. 

4 See Lysias, Orat. 7. 

Zeus Kataibates and the Olive 175 

under the special charge of Zeus Morios. His altar was in the 
Academy and he was worshipped, we learn to our delight, not 
only as Morios but as Kataibates. Later moralists would explain 
that this was because he avenged sacrilege by lightning; the real 
truth lies deeper and is benignant; he, the rain and thunder-god, 
fertilized the earth and brought forth the sacred olives. 

The scholiast who gives us this welcome information about 
Zeus, who is both Morios and Kataibates, is commenting on the 
famous chorus in praise of Athens in the Oedipus Coloneus?: 

And this country for her own has what no Asian land has known, 

Nor ever yet in the great Dorian Pelops’ island has it grown, 

The untended, the self-planted, self-defended from the foe, 

Sea-gray children-nurturing olive tree that here delights to grow. 

None may take nor touch nor harm it, headstrong youth nor age grown 
bold 

For the round of heaven of Morian Zeus has been its watcher from of 
old. 

He beholds it and, Athene, thy own sea-gray eyes behold. 

Athena with her sea-gray eyes we expect: watching her olive 
tree she is canonical; but, to most readers, the round eye of 
Morian Zeus comes as something of a surprise. If we remember 
the a@Baroy on the Acropolis, with the lightning trident-mark and 
the hole in the roof, we wonder no longer that the old sky-god, 
with his round eye, should be looking down on his own olive tree. 
What was a mere poetical image becomes a ritual reality and 
_ gathers the fresh bloom of a new if somewhat homely beauty. 

Nor is it only a poet praising his own city who remembers such 
local sanctities. Aeschylus in the Danazdes* told of the sacred 

1 Apollodorus, ap. Schol. ad Soph. Oed. Col. 705 rept ’Axadnulav éorly 6 re Tod 
KaraiBdrov Aids Bwuos dy kal Méprov kadovor [ard] Trav éxet pwoprov. 
2 Soph. Oed. Col. 704 
6 yap alév dpdv KUKXos 
Aevooer viv Moplov Acds 
XG yAavk@ms ’APdva. 
The translation in the text is by Mr D. 8. MacColl. 
3 Nauck, frg. 44, ap. Athen. x11. 600 kal 6 ceuvdraros & Aloxvdos év rats 
Aavatow attri rapdye. tiv’ Agdpodirny héyoucay 
épd pev ayvos ovpavos Tpaoa xOdva, 
epws b€ yatay NauBdver yamou Tuxelv 
buBpos 6 dm’ evvarhpos ovpavod mecwy 
Zdvoe yatav: 7 dé rhxrerac Bporois 
Hiwy te Bookdas Kai Blov Anuhrpiov 
dévdpwy tis wpa 8° éx vorlfovros ydvous 
Tédevbs éoTe’ TOYS éyw mapairvos. . 
Trans. Murray. The ydvos of the fragment recalls the rayxparhs ydvous of the 
Hymn of the Kouretes, see p. 7. 

176 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. (cH. | 

marriage of Earth and Sky. He puts the words into the mouth 
of Aphrodite, goddess in later days of human passion, but we seem 
to stand in the ancient Cretan shrine, with about us the symbols 
of Ouranos, the lightning-axe and the bird, and Gaia, the up- 
springing tree dew-watered, and we hear words august and 
venerable which tell of things that were before man and may 
outlast him: 

Lo, there is hunger in the holy Sky 

To pierce the body of Earth, and in Earth too 

Hunger to meet his arms. So falls the rain 

From Heaven that is her lover, making moist 

The bosom of Earth; and she brings forth to man 

The flocks he feeds, the corn that is his life. 

To trees no less there cometh their own hour a 

Of marriage which the gleam of watery things 
Makes fruitful—Of all these the cause am I. 

By the time of Aeschylus most men had probably forgotten 
that the Danaides, the heroines of the play, were the water- 
bearers, the well-nymphs who watered thirsty Argos!; but, 
when Aphrodite made her great speech, there was not an 
initiated man in the theatre but would remember the final 
ceremonial of the Eleusinian mysteries—how, looking up to 
heaven, they cried aloud, de, ‘rain, and looking down to earth, 
«ve, ‘be fruitful. 

We return now to the other side of the sarcophagos, on which 
the sacrifice of the bull is depicted. The remainder of the scene 
towards the right is given somewhat enlarged in Fig. 38. Here 
we have what, with the Acropolis of Athens in our minds?, 
we might call a Pandroseion: an olive tree in a sanctuary, 
surmounted by bulls’ horns, and the thunder-axe on the bare 
obelisk standing for Erechtheus. Upon the thunder-axe is 
perched a bird®. 

1 Prolegomena, p. 620. 

2 Prolegomena, p. 161. 

3 I conjecture that the Bouphonia on the Acropolis and its relati 
Erechtheion and the olive tree date back to the ee when ‘oe nae 
a tributary of the great Minoan thalassocracy. Sopatros, we remember (p. 142 
was a native of Crete. The religious dependence of Athens on Crete outlasted the 
political strife, as Solon witnessed when he sent for Epimenides to purify Athens 
see p. 52. For the Cretan origin of the Bouphonia see Mr Cook, J.H.8. xtv. 131. 

v1] The Cuckoo as Spring-Bird VT 

Upon the thunder-axe we expect to see the thunder-bird of 
Zeus, the eagle, but this is assuredly no eagle, however ‘con- 
ventionally treated.’ It is the bird of spring, with heavy flight 
and mottled plumage, the cuckoo}. 

When first the cuckoo cuckoos in the oak, 

Gladdening men’s hearts over the boundless earth, 
Then may Zeus rain?. 

Fig. 38. 

' Many birds have been suggested. The raven has the high authority of 
Mr Warde Fowler; Dr Hans Gadow suggested to me the magpie. The woodpecker 
was tempting, because of the analogy between médexuvs and medexdy, but as 
Dr Petersen (op. cit. p. 163) points out, the pose of the bird, with wings open, not 
closed, when perching, is characteristic of the cuckoo, though here it may be 
depicted to show the bird has just alighted. The particular bird intended is not 
of great moment. The idea, the coming of a life-spirit from the sky, is the same 
whatever bird be the vehicle. I have elsewhere (Bird and Pillar-Worship in 
connexion with Ouranian divinities, in Transactions of the Third International 
Congress for the History of Religions, Oxford, 1908, um. p. 154) hazarded the 
conjecture, suggested by Mr Cook, that the ritual robe of the celebrant and other 
worshippers on the sarcophagos is a feather dress ending in a bird-tail—but Sig. 
Paribeni has brought evidence, op. cit. p. 17, to show that the feather-like drawing 
on the robe is used to indicate a bull’s skin. 

2 Hesiod, Op. 486; see p. 97. 

H. 12 

178 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc. 

That is the prayer in the heart of the priestess, and she utters 
it, emphasizes it, by her offering of water which she has poured 
out of the high jug into the basin before her, over which she lays 
her hands, perhaps in token that the water is the rain-bath (Aovtpa) 
of the earth’s bridal. Above are the fruit-shaped cakes (wafav), 
for it is food that the cuckoo of spring is to bring her. 

The picture speaks for itself; it is the passing of winter and 
the coming of spring, the passing of the Old Year, the incoming 
of the New, it is the Death and Resurrection of Nature, her New 

Birth. Clearly though this is represented, it confuses us a little 

at first by its fulness and by its blend of animal and vegetable 
and atmospheric life, of tree and bull and bird and thunder-axel. 
All this, so natural, so inevitable to the primitive mind, to us, who 
have lost the sense of common kinship and common mana, seems 
artificial, metaphorical. We need first to meditate over it, to 
disentangle its various strands, before, by an effort of imagination, 
we can do what, if we would understand aright, is supremely 
necessary, think ourselves back into the primaeval fusion of things, 
a fusion always unconsciously present in the mind of poet and 
primitive. 
It is the springtime of man and bird and flower: 

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. 

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; 
The flowers appear on the earth ; 

The time of the singing of birds is come, 

And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. 

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, 

And the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. 
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away’. 

Again in the thirteenth-century roundel’: 

Sumer is icumen in, 
Lhude sing cuccu ! 
Groweth sed and bloweth med, 
And springth the wdé nu, 
Sing cuccu! 
Awé bleteth after lomb, 
Lhouth after calvé cu, 
Bulloc sterteth, bucké verteth, 
Murie sing cuccu! 

1 Just such a blend of tree, bird, bull, thunder, dew and humanity, is found 

in Semele’s tree, see p. 173, note 3. 
2 Song of Solomon, ii. 10. 
3 See HE. K. Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, 1903, 1. 168. 

_ Bridal of Earth and Sky — 179 

a OO) Oe ~ 
RS aA 

It is the bridal of the Earth and Sky, the New Birth of the 

World: 

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet, 
Ver novum, ver jam canorum ver renatus orbis est, 

Vere concordant amores, vere nubunt alites, 

Et nemus comam resolvit de maritis imbribus!. 

So the poet, but the common man who has no words with 
which to speak is yet a poet in his own way, and the drama of 
winter and spring, death and life, he feels, and makes of it 
a Spwpevov, a ritual. Theopompos, according to Plutarch?, relates 
that 

Those who dwell in the west account and call the Winter Kronos and 
the Summer Aphrodite, the Spring Persephone, and from Kronos and 
Aphrodite all things take their birth. And the Phrygians think that in the 
Winter the god is asleep, and that in the Summer he is awake, and they 
celebrate to him Bacchic revels, which in winter are Goings to Sleep, and in 
summer Wakings-up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in winter the god is 
bound down and imprisoned, and in spring aroused and set free again. 

Such rites are not only for the outlet of man’s emotion, not 
only for the emphasis of that emotion by representation, they are, 
as we have seen all rites tend to be, the utterance of his desire 
and will, they are pre-presentations of practical magical intent 
And this in very definite fashion; for, though man does not live 

by bread alone, without his daily bread he cannot live. 

The cuckoo is summoned to bring new life to the tree, dead in 
the winter, to bring the rain that will bring the food-fruits. The 
water and cakes are as it were a visualized prayer, they are evyal. 
But when the gods are formulated and become men and women, 
when Zeus and Hera have supplanted Ouranos and Gaia, then the 

coming of the cuckoo takes on the shape of human wedlock. 

‘Women,’ says Praxinoé to Gorgo, in the famous Syracusan Idyll 
of Theocritus’, ‘Women know everything, 
Yes, and how Zeus married Hera,’ 

1 Pervigilium Veneris. 

2 de Isid. et Osir, Lx1x. Bpdyes 5¢ Tov Oedv olduevor Xeluadvos Kabevdew Oépous 
8 eypnyopévar, rére pev Kkarevvacpovs, rére 8 dveyéprets Baxxevovres atte redodat. 
Tladharyéves 6é karadetoOa Kal Kabelpyrucbar yeudvos, Hpos dé KwetoOa Kal dvadvecOar 
gdcKkovor. See my Prolegomena, p. 128. 

8 xv. 64 

mdvra ywatkes icavrt, Kal ws Leds aydyed’ “Hpar. 

The expression is clearly proverbial, and no doubt arose not from the secrecy of the 
marriage, but—when the meaning of the cuckoo myth was forgotten—from its 
strangeness. It is one of the stories which Pausanias (11. 17. 5) says he (fortunately 
for us) ‘records but does not accept.’ 

12—2 

en ae 

Sor ie 

180 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festwwal, ete. [ CH. 
and the scholiast on the passage, quoting, he says, from Aristotle’s 
treatise on the sanctuary of Hermione, thus tells the tale: 

Zeus planned to marry Hera and wishing to be invisible and not to be 
seen by her he changed his shape into that of a cuckoo and perched on 
a mountain, which, to begin with, was called Thronax, but now is called 
Cuckoo. And on that day Zeus made a mighty storm. Now Hera was 
walking alone and she came to the mountain and sat down on it, where now 
there is the sanctuary of Hera Teleia. And the cuckoo was frozen and 
shivering from the storm, so it flew down and settled on her knees. And 
Hera, seeing it, had pity and covered it with her cloak. And Zeus straightway 
changed his shape and caught hold of Hera....The image of Hera in the 
temple (at Argos) is seated on a throne, and she holds in her hand a sceptre, 
and on the sceptre isa cuckoo. 

Pausanias confirms or perhaps quotes Aristotle. In one detail 
he corrects him. Aristotle mentions a statue of Full-grown or 
Married? (redXela) Hera on the Cuckoo-Mountain, but Pausanias in 
describing the site says, ‘there are two mountains, and on the top 
of each is a sanctuary, on Cuckoo-mountain is a sanctuary of Zeus 
and on the other mountain called Pron there is a sanctuary of 
Hera.” Be that as it may, behind the figure of Father Zeus 
we have the Bridegroom-Bird and the wedding that is a rain- 
storm’, 

Fic. 39a. Fie. 39d, 

The Bird-Lover lives on in a beautiful series of coin-types from 
Gortyna in Crete*, In the first of these (Fig. 39 a), we have a 

1 That the surname Teleia ‘complete,’ i i 1 i 
1 i » practically means ‘ married’ is cert 
from another passage in Pausanias (vit. 22. 2). Merishont the son of Biaaeee er 
says, who dwelt in old Stymphalos, founded three sanctuaries in honour of "the 
yt one ene her ilies eeeamce : while she was yet a girl he called her Child 
mats), when she married Zeus he called her Telei i 
in caed Eon ek er Teleia, when she quarrelled with Zeus 
Cf. the wedding of Dido and Aeneas in the thunderstorm (V ] 
erg. din. tv. 1 
moe the background of the elemental wedding of earth and a ie aa cege e 
. Svoronos, Numismatique de la Créte, vol. 1. x11. 2219, x1v. 16 and 18. xv. 7. 
coe to whom I owe my knowledge of these coins, favours M. Svoronos’s 
explanation, that the nymph is Britomartis. The evidence scarcely seems to me 
sufficient ; see Zeus, Jupiter and the Oak, Class. Rey. 1903, p. 405. 

= vi] ig Bird, Bull and Tree in Orete 181 

maiden seated disconsolate in a barren, leafless tree. In the second 
(Fig. 39 b), the same maiden is seated, but the pose is less desolate ; 
she lifts her head and the tree is breaking out into leaf. In the 
third (Fig. 40 a) a bird comes, perching timidly, the tree blossoms . 
and fruits. In the fourth (Fig. 406) the maiden is a bride, a 
z peer 

Fic. 40a. Fie. 400. 

nymph ; she raises her head with the gesture characteristic of Hera. 
In the fifth (Fig. 41 a) the maiden cherishes the bird, as Hera, in 
the myth, cherished the Bridegroom-Cuckoo in the rainstorm. 
She is a royal bride with a sceptre, and on the sceptre is a bird. 

Fie. 41a. Fia. 410. 
In the sixth (Fig. 416) the bird is a royal bird, an eagle, and 
with his great sanctity he overshadows both tree and maid. And, 
delightful thing, amid all this beauty of bird and spring and maid 
and tree, the old bull is not forgotten, His irrelevant head is 
seen peering through the branches. 

Fic. 42a. Fic. 42 b. 

The seventh coin (Fig. 42 a) offers us a riddle as yet unread. 
We have the nymph seated on the tree as usual, but between the 

182 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. [ CH. 

upper branches of the tree, and continuing down actually on the 
leftmost branch, is an inscription! in early Corinthian letters, 
TSMVPO$, Teovpot. The word is in the nominative plural, not 
the ordinary genitive of place. Does ‘Tieupox’ stand for ‘Tityroi’? 
And does Tityroi stand for ‘play of the Tityroi, as Satyroi stands 
for ‘play of the Satyrs’? Can the inscription refer to a Sp- 
Hevoy, a Satyr-play of the return of spring, the blossoming of the 
tree, and the marriage of the maiden? On the reverse of all 
these coins the type is a bull (Fig. 42). Was the Sp@mevov 
accompanied, as on the sarcophagos, by a bull-sacrifice ? 

In Athens, then, we have the uncouth Spwpevov of the Bou- 
phonia with its mimic resurrection of the ox; in Crete, on the 
sarcophagos, we have the new life of spring represented and 
induced by a Spe@pevov of obelisks leaf-covered, with thunder-axes 
and spring birds. Now the Bouphonia was celebrated, as has 
been seen, at the last full moon of the Attic year, in midsummer, 
when the land was parched. Its object was to induce dew; the 
Cretan Speépuevov was manifestly, like the sacrifice of the bull at 
Magnesia, celebrated in spring. This brings us straight to the 
question of seasonal festivals, and takes us back to the Hymn of 
the Kouretes. 

In the refrain, it will be remembered (p. 8), the Kouros is 
bidden to come to Dikte ‘for the Year’ (és éviavTov), and, when 
the aetiological myth has been recounted, it is said ‘the Horae 
began to be fruitful year by year; [“OQpar S& Bplvov Kxarhros. 
Not only was the Kouros bidden to come for the Year, but if 
we may credit Aratus?, the Kouretes of Dikte, when they deceived 

Kronos, hid Zeus in the cave and reared him for the Year (eis 
€vLavTov). 

1 The inscription was read as Ticvpoc by Dr von Sallet, who first published the 
coin in the Zeitschrift f, Numismatik, vr. p. 263. See also W. W. Wroth, Cretan 
Coins in Numigmatic Chronicle, rv. 1884, p. 35. The suggestion that Ticvpor may 
indicate a dpduevor of Tityroi is due to Mr A. B. Cook. For Tityros as goat-daemon 
see Paul Baur, Tityros in American Journal of Archaeology, 1x. 1905, Pl. v. p. 157. 
The goat-daemon here published holds a cornucopia. 

2 Phaen. 163, 164 

& mv tére Kouplfovra, 
Aixrwt év ebdder, speos oxeddv "Idaiouo, 
dyrpat éyxarédevto Kat étpepov eis éviaurdy, - 
: Aixrato. Kodpyres dre Kpdvov éevdovro. 
For Alxrax should probably be read Avxrun. Diels, Frg. d. Vors. 11. p. 497, attributes 
this legend to the Kretika of Epimenides. 

. 

The Y. car-Festival 

The expression ‘for the Year’ is somewhat enigmatic. It 
should be carefully noted that the ‘Year’ for which the Kouros 
is ‘summoned’ and ‘reared’ is not an éros but an éviavrds'. The 
two words are in Homer frequently juxtaposed?, and the mere 
fact of the juxtaposition shows that they are distinguished. 
What then exactly is an évvavtds*, how does it differ from an éros, 
and why is the Kouros summoned for an éwavrtds rather than 
an étos ? 

The gist of the évzavtds as distinguished from the éros comes 
out in the epithet tekeadpos ‘end bringing, which is frequently 
applied to évvavtos*. The éros or year proper is conceived of as 
a circle or period that turns round’. This éros varies, as will 
presently be seen, from a month to nine years or even longer. 
The éviavtos is not a whole circle or period but just the point 
at which the revolution is completed, the end of the old éros%, 
the beginning of the new. It is easy to see that this significant 
point might later be confused with the whole revolution’. 

1 The distinction is marked in the translation (p. 9) by a capital letter, and 
throughout, whenever Year is a rendering of év.aurés. 

2 Hig. Od. xiv. 292 

év0a map’ aire petva TeNecpdpor els éviaurov. 
GAN bre 5) pnvés Te Kal Nudpar éEeTededyTO, 
; aw meperedANopevov ereos Kal empdvOov wpar. 

3 The view of the évaurés given here is entirely due to Dr Prellwitz, Fine 
griechische Etymologie, in Festschrift fiir Friedlander (1895), p. 382. Dr Prellwitz 
is concerned only with the etymology and literary interpretation of éviavrés and is 
of course in no way responsible for the conclusions I draw as to ritual. 

4 See Od. x1v. 240. ’ 

5 The participle naturally associated with éros as well as with évavrés is 
mepiredduevos, of which the aorist, in form as well as in use, has been shown by 
Dr Prellwitz (op. cit.) to be mepimdduevos. The word médos means axis, point 
round which you turn, and its root wrod, reduplicated and in guttural form, appears 
in xvkdos. The original q-sound appears in Greek before e as a dental, before 
a liquid followed by weak o as 7. 

6 éros is of course a cognate of the Latin vetus and means the completed 
revolution of the old year, cf. also ai vatsa ‘year,’ ksl vétiuchi ‘old,’ and Albanian 
viet ‘year.’ Though éros has many cognates, évavrés has none. All attempts to 
connect it with éros fail because the a remains unexplained. This inclines us 
to accept Dr Prellwitz’s derivation, which at first sight—perhaps because Plato 
makes an analogous guess—seems grotesque. Dr Prellwitz makes évavrés a 
nominative formed from a prepositional clause év-airg, originally évi-at Tw 
‘at-again-the point.’ This admirably suits the new meaning. “Eviavrés on this 
showing is ‘Here we are again’ incarnate. 

7 The scholiast on Ar. Ran. 347 

dmocelovrar dé hvras 
xpovious [érGv] mahalous T éviavTovds 
says: (nretrae mas elev éviavTovs érGv, Emel eros Kal éviauTos TAUTOV ; but the Etymo- 
logicum Magnum carefully defines évavrés thus: dd ro) év aura lévac* dao yap 
Tod Kévrpov Kal Tod dplfovros of qv 6 Atos KaTa Tov Mapriov pha, dv’ Bou Kwwotpevos Tod 
xpovou év éxelvw maduy Epxerar ws Kal 6 Xpiords dard rob Tarpos. 

184 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. 

The évcavrds then was the cardinal turning-point of the year, 

it was vn «al véa in one. Such a day to ancient thinking must — 

be marked out by rites de passage, for the issues were perilous. 
Such rites de passage are those of Closing and Opening, of Going 
to sleep and Waking up again, of Death and Resurrection, of 
killmg or carrying out the Old Year and bringing in the New. 
To such rites it was natural, nay, it was necessary, to summon the 
Kouros. 

We have now briefly to consider the éros or period of 
revolution with its varying lengths and various seasons. 

We think of the ‘year’ as a period of twelve months, beginning 
in January and ending in December, and we think of the Horae 
or Seasons as four in number—Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. 
Clearly the year for which the Kouros is bidden to come begins, 
not in Hecatombaion, at Midsummer, as at Athens, nor in mid- 
winter as with us, but in the springtime. Our year with its 
four seasons is a sun-year, beginning about the winter solstice. 
It has four seasons because the four cardinal sun-periods are 
the two solstices, winter and summer, the two equinoxes, spring 
and autumn. 

The important point about a year proper or éros is that it is 
a recurrent period of a length that varies with man’s particular 
methods of counting time. It is, in fact, a recurrence or cycle of 
times of special tension and interest, a calendar of festivals} 
connected mainly with man’s food-supply. Broadly speaking, the 
distinction between a cult and a rite is that a rite is occasional, 
a cult is recurrent. Seasonal recurrence has been one great, if 
not the principal, factor in religious stability. 

It is obvious that primitive man would not base his calendar ~ 

on solstices and equinoxes which are only observed late; his year 
would be based not on astronomy, but on the seasons of his food- 
supply. Among the early inhabitants of Europe? there were two 
seasons only—winter and summer, The people being mainly 
pastoral, winter began in November with the driving home of 

| Hubert et Mauss, La Représentation dw Temps dans la Religion et la Magie in 
Mélanges d’Histoire des Religions, 1909, p. 189; see also the interesting chapter on 

‘Periodicity in Nature’ in Dr Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics in the 
Home University Library. 

2 H. K. Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, 1. pp. 110 ff. 

_ cattle from the pastures, and summer when they were driven up 
_ again to the hills somewhere about March. When and where 
agriculture is important, the year opens with the season of 

ploughing and sowing. The Greeks themselves hadat_first. two, 

7 

not three, Horae. In early days it is not realized that the Seasons, 
and with them the food-supply, depend on the Sun. The Seasons, 
the Horae, are potencies, divinities in themselves, and there are 
but two Seasons, the fruitful and the fruitless, 

e year and the seasons derive then their value, as was 
natural, from the food they bring. They are not abstractions, 
divisions of time; they are the substance, the content of time. 
To make of éyavrds a god, or even a daimon, seems to us, even 
when he is seen to be not a year but a Year-Feast, a chilly 
abstraction, and even the Horae as goddesses seem a little remote. 
But to the Greeks, as we see abundantly on vase-paintings, their 
virtue, their very being, was in the flowers and fruits they always 
carry in their hands; they are indistinguishable from the Charites, 
the Gift- and Grace-Givers. The word Hora, it is interesting to 
note’, seems at first to have been almost equivalent to Weather. 
In a drought the Athenians, Philochoros? tells us, sacrificed to the 
Horae, and on this occasion they boiled their meat and did not 
roast it, thereby inducing the goddesses to give increase to their 
‘crops by means of moderate warmth and seasonable rains. As 
warders of Olympos it is theirs to ‘throw open the thick cloud or 

set it to%’ 

Athenaeus‘ has preserved for us a fragment of the fourth book 
of the History of Alexandria by Kallixenos the Rhodian. In it 
is described a great spectacle and procession exhibited by Ptolemy 
Philadelphos in honour of Dionysos’. One group in the procession 
is of interest to us. The procession was headed by Silenoi clad, 

1 O. Gruppe, Gr. Myth. 1. 1063, note 3. Dr Gruppe compares the Latin tempus, 
tempestas, which again shows clearly the focus of the primitive mind on the 
practical side of times and seasons. 

2 Ap. Athen. xv. 73’A@nvaio 5°, ws Pyotr Pirdxopos, Tats *Qpars Worres ovK dmrGow, 
aN Epovor Ta Kpéa. 

3 Hom. Il. v. 751 

juev dvaknrivae muxivov vépos 70° émibetvat. 
o Vardi 198; : 
5 As Macedonians all the Ptolemies were addicted to the worship of Dionysos. 

_ The ceremonies to which they were addicted probably enshrined and revived 

many primitive traits. See the interesting monograph by M. Paul Perdrizet, Le 
Fragment de Satyros in Rey. des Etudes Anciennes, 1910. 

Cc 

186 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festiwal, ete. 

some in purple, some in scarlet, to keep off the multitude; next 
followed twenty Satyrs bearing lamps; next figures of Nike with 
golden wings; then Satyrs again, forty of them, ivy-crowned, their 
bodies painted, some purple, some vermilion. So far it is clear 
we have only the ministrants, the heralds of the god to come. 
After these heralds comes the first real personage of the procession, 
escorted by two attendants. His figure will not now surprise us. 

After the Satyrs came two Sileni, the one with petasos and caduceus as 
herald, the other with trumpet to make proclamation. And between them 
walked a man great of stature, four cubits tall, in the dress and mask of a 
tragic actor and carrying the gold horn of Amaltheia. His name was Eniantos. 
A woman followed him, of great beauty and stature, decked out with much 
and goodly gold ; in one of her hands she held a wreath of peach-blossom, in 

the other a palm-staff, and she was called Penteteris. She was followed by 
four Horai dressed in character and each carrying her own fruits. 

The human Dionysos came later, but surely the procession is 
for the Year-Feast, eis "Eviavrtév. 

Eniautos held in his hands the horn of Amaltheia, the cornu- 
copia of the Year’s fruits. He is his own content. Athenaeus? 
in his discussion of the various shapes and uses of cups, makes 
a statement that, but for this processional figure, would be some- 
what startling. ‘There is a cup, he says, ‘called The Horn of 
Amalthea and Eniautos. The Horae too carry each her own 
fruits. This notion that the year is its own content, or rather 
perhaps we should say that the figure of the divine Year arises 
out of the food-content, haunted the Greek imagination. Plato2, 
following the Herakleiteans, derives éviauvtds from év éauT@, he 
who has all things in himself, and the doctrine was popular 
among Orphics. Kronos was identified with Chronos, Time, 
and hence with Eniautos; for Time, with the recurrent circling 
Seasons, has all things in Himself. 

The Seasons, the Horae, in late Roman art are four in number. 
As such they are shown in the two medallions of Commodus? in 
Fig. 43. In the first (2) Earth herself reclines beneath her tree. 

1 x1. 25, p. 783. 

® Kratyl. 410 p 76 yap ra pudueva Kal rd -yeyyopeva. mpodyor els P&s kat adrd év éaurg 

éerdfov...oi ev eviavrdv, dre &v éauTg x.7-A. See Mr F. M, Cornford, Hermes, Pan, 
Logos in Classical Quarterly, m1. 1909, p. 282. For the connection of Kronos and 
"Eviaurés see W. Schulz, ’Avrés in Memnon tv.1910. The identity of Kronos with 
Chronos is as old as Pherekydes. ; 

3 Cat. of Roman Medallions in British Museum, Pl. xxx. 1 (a), 2 (b). 

[ CH. | 

ant og 

Ae 45 
oe 

a 

i 
r 

‘‘ 
‘ 

4 

~The Year and the Seasons 187 

Under her hand is the globe of heaven studded with stars. Over 
it in procession pass the four seasons. On the second medallion (b) 
the four seasons are issuing from an arch. The figure of a boy 
bearing a cornucopia comes to meet them. He is the Young Year 
bearing the year’s fruits. In late art four seasons are the rule, 
but the notion of fourness had crept in as early as Alkman’. He, 

it would seem, had not quite made up his mind whether they were 
three or four. 

Three Seasons set he; summer is the first, 

And  winter next, and then comes autumnthird, 
And fourth is spring, when the trees blossom, but 

Man may not eat his fill. 

Possibly in Alkman we have a mixture of two systems (1) two 
parts of the year: yeruov and Oépos; (2) two or three Horae (Spring 

io = —— ae 
EYES tin aad 

Fic. 43a. Fic. 43 dD. 

and Summer (and Autumn)). The two-part system may have 
belonged to the North, where winter is emphatic and important, 
the two or three Horae may have been the fruitful seasons of the 
indigenous southerners, where winter is but negative. <Auxo, 
Thallo and Karpo obviously do not cover the whole year. Winter 
is no true Hora. Theognis? knew that 

‘Love comes at his Hour, comes with the flowers in spring.’ 

1 Fg. Bergk 76 
Qpas & eonxe pets, Oépos 
Kal xetua Kwrwpay Tplray, 
kal térpatov To fyp, dKa 
odd\rer pév, eoblev 5 dda 
ovK éoTw. 
2 1275 ‘Qpatos cal ”"Epws émirédderar. See my Prolegomena, p. 634. The blend 
of the two systems in Alkman was suggested to me by Mr Cornford. 

s 

188 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. [ CH. 

_ But when we come to early works of art where tradition rules, 
io find the Horae are steadfastly three. On the archaic relief in 
Fig. 441, found on the Acropolis at Athens, they dance hand in 
hand to the sound of the pipe played by Hermes, and with them 
comes joyfully a smaller, human dancer. This human figure has 
been usually explained as a worshipper, perhaps the dedicator of 

Fig. 44, 

the relief; but surely in the light of the medallion of Commodus a 
simpler and more significant explanation lies to hand. He is the 
young Emautos, the happy New Year. 

The four Horae are sufficiently explained by the two solstices 

and the two equinoxes. We have now to consider why in earlier 
days the Horae were three. 

1 From a photograph. For other interpretations see Lechat, Bulletin de Corr. 
Hell. 1889, xu. pl. x1v. pp. 467—476; see also Lechat, Au Musée de lV Acropole 
@ Atheénes, p. 443, and G. C. Richards, J. H. S. xt. 1890, p. 285. 

Inunar and Solar Years 189 

In Athens, in the days of Porphyry, and it may be long before, 
_ the Horae and Helios had a procession together in which was 
carried the Hiresione, the branch decked with wool and hung with 
cakes and fruits. By that time men knew that the Sun had 
power over the Seasons; but at first the Horae were linked with 
an earlier potency, and it is to this earlier potency that they owe 
their three-ness. The three Horae are the three phases of the 
Moon, the Moon waxing, full and waning. After the simple 
seasonal year with _its two divisions came the Moon-Year with 
three, and ast the Sun-Year with four Horaes 
In the third Aneid, when Aneas and his men are weather- 
bound at Actium, they have as usual athletic contests to pass the 
time. Vergil? says 
Interea magnum sol circumvolvitur annum. 
Scholars translate the passage ‘meantime the sun rounds the 
great circle of the year’; but if we take the words literally it is 
the year that is qualified as great, and we are justified in supposing 
that if there is a great year there is also a small one, a parvus 
annus. Such in fact there is, and so Servius in commenting 
understands the passage. ‘ He (i.e. Vergil) says magnus in addition 
lest we should think he means a lunar year. For the ancients 
computed their times by the heavenly bodies, and at_first they 
called a period of 30_ days a lunar year.” ‘Year, annus, is of 
course only a ring, a revolution. ‘Later, Servius goes on, ‘the 
year of the solstices was discovered, which contains twelve 
months.’ 
The great calendar crux of antiquity was the fitting together 
of this old Moon-Year with the new Sun-Year. Into this problem 
_and the various solutions of trieteric and pentaeteric ‘years’ we 
need not enter*, It is enough for our purpose to realize that the 
Moon is the true mother of the triple Horae, who are themselves 
Moirae, and the Moirae, as Orpheus* tells us, are but the three 

1 See Abst. 1. 7 ofs waprupety eouey cal 4 AOhvyow ere xa viv Spwuévn roumh 
“HXlov re Kal ‘Qpay. 
2 y. 284 Servius, ad loc. Magnum, ne putemus lunarem esse, propterea dixit : 
antiqui enim tempora sideribus computabant, et dixerunt primo lunarem annum 
triginta dierum...Postea solstitialis annus repertus est qui x1r. continet menses. 

3 For further discussion of this interesting point see Mr F. M. Cornford in 
chapter vit. 
4 Clement of Alexandria in the Stromata quotes a book in which Epigenes 
noted a number of peculiarities (ra ididfovra) of Orpheus, pyal...Molpas re at uépn 
THs TeAHYS TpLaKkdda Kal mevrekaroekdryy Kal vouunviay (Abel, frg. 253). 

190 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc. 

motrae or divisions («épn) of the Moon herself, the three divisions — 
of the old Year. And these three Moirae or Horae are also 
Charites?. 

The cult of the Moon in Crete, in Minoan days, is a fact clearly 
established. On the lentoid gem? in Fig. 45 a worshipper ap- 
proaches a sanctuary of the usual Mycenaean type, a walled 
enclosure within which grows an olive tree. Actually within the 
sanctuary is a large crescent moon. The conjunction of moon and 
olive tree takes us back to the Pandroseion (p. 170), itself in all 

probability a moon-shrine, with its Dew-Service, its Hersephoria, . 
Minoan mythology knows of the Moon-Queen, Pasiphaé, She who 
shines for all, mother of the holy, horned Bull-Child. 

With respect to the Pandroseion it may be felt that, though 
we have the Dew-Service at the full moon in the shrine of the 

1 Hymn. Magic. v. Ipds Zedjvnv, 6 
7 Xapirwv rpicody rpicoats woppaicr xopevers, 

and cf. the triple Charites who dance round Hekate the Moon, See my Myth 
and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. 378, Figs. 15 and 16. ai 

° A. Evans, Tree and Pillar Cult, 1901, p. 185, Fig. 59. This lentoid gem does 
not stand alone. The same scene, a Mycenean shrine with tree and crescent moon 
before it a female worshipper, appears on a steatite gem found at Ligortyno in 
Crete. See René Dussaud, Les Civilisations préhelléniques, p. 273, Fig. 196. 

The Moon and the Olive 

All-dewy-One, we have no direct evidence of a moon-cult? in the 
_ Erechtheion, no Athenian gem with a crescent moon, shining in 
a sanctuary. This is true, but the coinage of Athens reminds us 
that the olive is clearly associated with the moon. On the reverse 
of an Athenian tetradrachm in Fig. 46 is the owl of Athena, the 
owl she once was, and in the field is not only an olive spray, but a 
crescent moon. Athena and the moon shared a name in common— 
Glaukopis*, The ancient statues of Athena’s ‘maidens’ carry 
moon-haloes (unvicxor)®. She herself on her shield carries for 
blazon the full moon‘, 

Fic. 46. 

Yet another shrine not far from Crete, of early sanctity, with 
holy olive tree and moon-goddess, cannot in this connection be 
_ forgotten. 

Give me the little hill above the sea, 
The palm of Delos fringéd delicately, 

The young sweet laurel and the olive tree, 
Grey-leaved and glimmering®. 

Here we have a succession of holy trees brought one by one 
_ by successive advances in civilization, but over them watched 
_ always one goddess, though she had many names, Artemis, Oupis, 
Hekaerge, Loxo. Behind her humanized figure shines the old 
moon-goddess, 
Oupis the Queen, fair-faced, the Light-Bearer®, 

1 In the Clouds of Aristophanes (610) the Moon complains bitterly of the 
neglect into which she has fallen, deiva yap memrovbévar. 
2 Kur. frg. (Nauck 997) 
yAauk@rls re orpéperac mjyn. 
In the old days the Acropolis of Athens was called the Glaukopion. EH. Maass, 
Der alte Name der Akropolis in Jahrb. d. Inst. 1907, p. 143. 
3 Ar, Av. 1114, and schol. ad loc., but see H. Lechat, Aw Musée de l’Acropole 
ad’ Athénes, 1903, p. 215, Le ‘ Meniscos.’ 
4 On a vase, see Mon. d. Inst., xxi. 6%. 
> Kur. Iph. in T. 1098, trans. Prof, Murray. 
6 Callim. Hymn. ad Dianam, 204 
Otm dvaco’ edam, pacrpope. 

——- Ye 

ee ee ee 

ie eee 

192 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc. — [¢ 

When the Delians, fearing the Persian onset, fled to Tenos,. 

Datis, the Persian general, would not so much as anchor off the 

holy island, but sent a herald to bid the Delians return and fear — 

nothing, for ‘in the island where were born the two gods no harm 
should be done’ The Persians saw in Artemis and Apollo, though 
the Greeks had in part forgotten it, the ancient divinities they 
themselves worshipped, the Moon and the Sun? 

That the moon was worshipped in Crete in her triple phases 
is at least probable. Minos, Apollodorus?® tells us, sacrificed in 
Paros to the Charites, and the Charites are in function indis- 
tinguishable from the Horae. Like the Horae they are at first 

Fig. 47, 

two, then three‘ In Athens two Charites were worshipped 
under the names Auxo (Increaser) and Hegemone (Leader), and 
these were invoked, Pausanias says, together with the Horae of 
Athens, Thallo (Sprouting) and Karpo (Fruit), and the Dew- 
Goddess, Pandrosos. Among many primitive peoples the waxing 
and waning of the moon is supposed to bring increase and decrease 

to all living things. Only the lawless onion sprouts in the wane 
and withers in the waxing of the moon®. 

1 Herod. vr. 97. 2 Herod. 1. 131 2 
4 ie : 3.15.) 7, 
* For the whole question of the double and tri i 
: 1 ple Charites at Athen d else- 
where, and for their connection with the Horae, see my Myth. and Mon: ofan 

Athens, 1890, p. 382, and my Prolegomena, p. 286, The Mai initi i 
then see that the triple form had any econ to the Neat oe pierre 

> Aulus Gellius, xx. 8. See Frazer, Adonis Attis Osiris”, 1907, p. 362. 

‘193 

er} és The Charites in Crete 

- The Charites at Orchomenos! were unhewn stones which had 
my fallen from heaven. Small wonder, if they were phases of the 
moon. On the Phoenician stelae in Fig. 48? we see the moon 
_ figured as three pillars, a taller between two shorter ones, 
indicating no doubt the waxing, full and waning moon. The cult 
of the triple-pillars is familiar in Crete. In Fig. 48? we have the 
well-known triple columns surmounted by the life-spirit, the dove. 
[t is probable, though by no means certain, that we have in them 
primitive pillar-forms of the Charites. | 

Fie. 48. 

The Kouretes, we have noted (p. 182), according to Cretan 
tradition nourished the infant Zeus ‘for the year. The Kouretes 
bid the Kouros leap ‘for the year. Did they ever leap and dance 
for the old Moon-Year? When we remember the Moon-cult of 
Crete, it seems probable; we have, however, no definite evidence. 
But, when we come to the Roman brothers of the Kouretes, the 
Leapers or Salii, we can speak with certainty. It often happens 
that Roman ritual and Roman mythology, from its more con- 
servative and less imaginative character, makes clear what the 
poetry of the Greeks obscures. The Salii will help us to under- 
stand more intimately the nature of the Kouretes, and may even 
throw light on the nature and name of the Dithyramb. They must 
therefore be considered at this point in some detail. 

1-Paus. rx. 35. 1. 

2 Monimenti Ant. dei Lincei, xiv. 1905; Taf. xxr. 2* and xxv. 2. 

3 A. Evans, B.S.A. vit. 1901- 2, p. 29, Fig. 14. I owe the suggestion that in 
these triple pillars we may have ‘the Cretan Charites sche te by Minos to 
Mr Cook’s kindness. 

H. 13 

194 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. [cH 

THE SALII. 

Denys of Halicarnassos’ in his full and interesting account of 
the Salii saw that Kouretes and Salii were substantially the 
same: ‘In my opinion, he says, ‘the Salii are what in the Greek 
language are called Kouretes. We (i.e. the Greeks) give them their 
name from their age, from the word xodpor, the Romans from their 
strenuous movements, for jumping and leaping is called by the 
Romans salire.” Denys exactly hits the mark: the term Kouretes 
expresses the essential fact common to Salii, Korybantes, etc., that 
all are youths; the various special names, the meanings of some 
of which are lost, emphasize particular functions. 

Fie. 49, 

Denys? describes in detail the accoutrement of the Salii, which 
reminds us rather of priest than warrior. He notes the purple 
chitons and bronze girdles, the short cloaks and the conical caps? 
(apices) called, he says, by the Greeks kupBaciat, a name with — 
which very possibly the word Kurbas, a by-form of Korybas, was 
connected. One point in his description is of special interest : 

= h Ant. Rom. 1. 70, 71 «al elcw ot Zao Kata yoov rhv éwhy ywopny “EXAquixke 

MeDepunvevOevres dvéuare Koupiires, tf judy wey éml THS HrLklas otTws dvowacueva Tapa 
Tous Kovpous, vd 6é ‘Pwualwy émi Tis cwrdvov Kwhcews. Td yap é&dd\\ecOal re Kal 
mndav cadipe bm’ atrav déyerar. 

2 Loc. cit. kal ras kadouuévas dalxas emikeluevor Tats kepadats, mldous bWmdous els 
oXIwa ouvaryouévous Kevoedés, ds "EAnves mpooaryopevover kupBaclas. 

‘8 Among savages a conical cap of striking appearance is a frequent element in 
the disguise of the initiator or medicine-man. See Schurtz, Altersklassen und 
Mannerbiinde, 1902, pp. 336, 370, 384, and L. vy. Schroeder; Mimus und Mysterium, 
p. 476, and Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 78. 

yw ae Poe it ees 

j| The Salii and the Kouretes 195 

each man, he says, is girt with a sword, and in his right hand 
wields ‘a spear or a staff or something of that sort? in his left is 
a Thracian shield. We think of the Salii as clashing their swords 
on their shields, but the Salii seen by Denys seem to have had 
some implement as to the exact nature of which Denys is uncer- 
tain. 

The design in Fig, 49 from a relief found at Anagni? may throw 
some light on this uncertainty. The Salii are shown in long 
priestly robes with shields in their left hands. In their right is 
not, as we should expect, a spear or a sword, but an unmistakable ; 
drumstick. Some such implements Denys must have seen. It 
looks back to the old days when the shield was not of metal but 
of skin. Euripides’, speaking of Crete, says that there the triple- 
crested Korybantes found for Dionysos and his Bacchants their 
‘skin-stretched orb.’ In a word timbrel and shield were one and 
the same, a skin stretched on a circular or oval frame and played 
on with a drumstick ; the gear of Salii and Korybantes alike was, 
to begin with, musical as well as military, 

The helmets worn by the Salii on the relief may also be noted. 
They are not of the form we should expect as representing the 
canonical apex. They have three projections, and in this respect 
recall the ‘triple-crested’ Korybants of Euripides. Possibly the 
central knob may have been originally of greater length and 
prominence and may have given its name to the apex. The shields 
carried on the Anagni relief are slightly oblong but not indented. 

1 Loe. cit. rapé(worat 5 éxacros abrév élpos kal TH uev deka Xeupl Noyxnv 7 paBdov 
7 Te T0000’ erepov Kparel, TH SD eduviuy KaTéxer TEATHY OpaKlay. — : 

2 Annali d. Inst, 1869, Tay. d@’ agg. E. Benndorf, who publishes the relief, does 
not say where it now is. That the relief should have been found at Anagni (the 
ancient Anagnia) is a fact of singular interest. Marcus Aurelius, in going through 
Anagnia on his way to his Signian villa writes thus to Fronto (Frontonis et Aureli 
Epistulae, Naber 1867, pp. 66, 67): f : ; 

Priusquam ad villam venimus Anagniam devertimus mille fere passus a via. 
Deinde id oppidum anticum vidimus, minutulum quidem sed multas res in se 
antiquas habet, aedes sanctasque caerimonias supra modum. Nullus angulus fuit, 
ubi delubrum aut fanum aut templum non sit. Praeterea multi libri linitei, quod 
ad sacra adtinet. Deinde in porta cum eximus ibi scriptum erat bifariam sic: 
flamen sume samentum. Rogavi aliquem ex popularibus quid illum verbum esset? 

Ait lingua hernica pelliculam de hostia quam in apicem suum flamen cum in 
urbem introeat inponit. 

I owe this interesting reference to the kindness of Mr Spenser Farquharson. 

3 Bacch, 123 

évOa Tpikdpubes dvrpots 

Bupoérovoy KikNwua Tdd¢€ 

poor KoptBavres nipov. 

13—2 

196 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. [ CH. 

The regular indented ‘Mycenaean’ shape is well seen on an 
Etruscan gem in the Museum at Florence’. 

The first month of the old Roman year, March, the month of 
Mars, was given up to the activities of the Salii. We have no 
evidence that they took any part in initiation ceremonies, but it is 
worth noting that it was in the month of March (17th) at the 

\Liberalia, that, according to Ovid?, the Roman boy assumed the 
toga. This assumption qualified him for military service and may 
have been the last survival, of a tribal initiation-ceremony. On 
the first day of the year, the birthday of Mars, it was fabled, the 
original ancile fell from heaven*, and through the greater part of 
the month the holy shields were kept ‘moving.’ Of the various 
and complex ceremonials conducted by the Salii we need only 
examine two* which throw light, I think, on the Palaikastro 
hymn :— 

(a) the Mamuralia (March 14). 
(b) the festival of Anna Perenna (March 15). 

Both have substantially the same content. 
(a) Ovid? asks 

Quis mihi nune dicat, quare caelestia Martis 
Arma ferant Salii, Mamuriumque canant ? 

The question has been long ago answered by Mannhardt, 
Usener, and Dr Frazer’. Ovid will have it that Mamurius is 

1 See Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, p. 455, Fig. 83. Denys states that the 
shield carried on the left arm was a Thracian pelta. Prof, Ridgeway concludes 
(op. cit. p. 465) that it was the shield of the true Thracians, the kindred of the 
Mycenaean people, and that it survived in the rites of the Kouretes. According to 
Clement (Strom. 1. 16 sub init.) the pelta was invented by the Illyrians, who, if 
Prof. Ridgeway is right, belong to the primitive Aegean stock. A curious double 
ancile appears on a denarius of P. Licinius Stolo, figured by Mr W. Warde Fowler, 
Roman Festivals, p. 350. On the same coin the apex is very clearly shown. 

2 Ovid, Fasti, ur, 771 

Restat ut inveniam quare toga libera detur 
Lucifero pueris, candide Bacche, tuo. 
We should like of course to have definite evidence that rites of tribal initiation 
were practised among the Greeks and Romans in the spring, but such evidence 
is not forthcoming. As regards the Mithraic mysteries we are better informed. 
F, Cumont, Monuments figurés relatifs aux mystéres de Mithras, 1. p. 336, writes : 

‘Les initiations avaient lieu de préférence vers le début du printemps en mars 
et en avril.’ 

3 Ovid, Fasti, 11. 259—273. 

4 The sources for both festivals are fully given in Roscher’s Lewic 
and in Mr Warde Fowler’s Roman Festivals, pp. 44—54. 

5 Fasti, m1. 259. 

§ Mannhardt, Baumkultus, 266, 297 ; Usener, Italisc 
1875, p. 183; Frazer, Golden Bough?, vol. m1. pp. 122 ff. 

on, s.v. Mars, 

he Mythen in Rhein. Mus. 

- 

5s 

commemorated because he was the skilful smith who made the 
eleven counterfeit ancilia, but Lydus! lets out the truth. On 
March 14, the day before the first full moon of the new year, a man 
dressed in goat-skins was led in procession through the streets of 
Rome, beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. 
His name was, Lydus says, Mamurius, and Mamurius we know 
was also called Veturius*. He is the old Year, the Old Mars; the 
Death, Winter, driven out before the incoming of the New Mars, 
the spring®. 

(b) Not less transparent as a year-god is Anna Perenna, ‘ year-in 
year-out. The details of her festival have no special significance. 
Ovid‘ describes it as a rude drinking bout of the plebs; men and 
women revelled together, some in the open Campus Martius, others 
in rough huts made of stakes and branches; they sang and danced 
and prayed for as many years of life as they could drink cups of 
wine. It was just an ordinary New Year's festival. Lydus® gives 
us the gist of it, though he does not mention Anna Perenna. On 
the Ides of March he says there were public prayers that the 
coming year might be healthy. The name Anna Perenna speaks 

for itself. Obviously Anna is the year, presumably the New Year. 

Perenna®, Peranna is the year just passed through, the Old Year— 

_ perannare is ‘to live the year through.’ Anna Perenna was not two 

divinities, but as it were a Janus with two faces, one looking back, 
one forward, Prorsa, Postverta. This comes out very clearly in a 
story told by Ovid’, a story that may reflect a bit of rustic ritual. 
Mars is about to marry; the wedding-day is come, he seeks his 
bride. Instead he finds old Anna (Anna Perenna) who has veiled 
her face and counterfeits the bride’. The young Year-god will wed 

1 De Mens. rv. 49 jyero 5¢ Kal dvOpwmos mepiBeBnpuévos dopais, kal Todroy ématov 
pdBdors Aerrats ériuncect Mamovprov adrdy Kadobrres. ; 

2 The reduplicated form Marmar occurs in the Carmen Arvale and from it 
Mamurius is probably formed, see Wald, Lat. Etym. Worterbuch, s.v. For Veturius 
as the old year cf. Gk. féros. 

3 Roscher, Lewicon, s.v. Mars, pp. 23—99. 

4 Fasti, 111. 523 ff. 

5 De Mens. iv. 49 cat ebyal dnudoras brep Tod byewdv yevéoOau Tdv éviauTov. 

6 Varro, Sat. Menipp. p. 506 te Anna ac Peranna, and Macrob. 1. 12. 6 
publice et privatim ad Annam Perennam sacrificatum itur ut annare et perannare 
commode liceat. 

7 Fasti, 11. 695. Ovid recounts the story as aetiological, 

Inde ioci veteres obscenaque dicta canuntur. , 

8 For the whole subject of May Brides and the False Bride see Miss G. M. 

Godden, Folk-Lore, 1v. 1893, pp. 142 ff. 

198 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc.  [ou. 

the young Year-goddess, Anna; the old Year-goddess he cannot 
and will not wed. Anna Perenna is the feminine equivalent of 
Mamurius Veturius. 

Ovid? piles up conjectures as to who and what Anna was. Out 
of his rubbish heap we may pick up one priceless jewel. 

Sunt quibus haec Luna est, quia mensibus impleat annum : 
Pars Themin, Inachiam pars putat esse bovem. 

Luna, Themis (order), and the Inachian cow are of course all 
one and the same, the Moon as the Measurer and as the Hornéd 
Wanderer through the sky. Man measures time, we have seen, 

Fie. 50. 

first by recurrent days and nights, then by recurrent Moons, then 
by the circle of the Sun’s year and its seasons ; finally he tries to 
adjust his Sun Year to twelve Moon-months2. The original ancile 
or moon-shield fell from heaven into the palace of Numa; that 
was the one sacred month in the spring in which so many ancient 
festivals were concentrated. When the solar year came in, eleven 
Moon-shields are made by the smith Mamurius to counterfeit the 

1 Ovid, Fasti, ut. 657. 
® The development among primitive peoples from weather gods (e.g. thunder) to 
moon and sun gods, a sequence which appears to be regular, is well explained by 

K. J. Payne, History of the New World called Ameri 
infra, chapter IX. : merica, vol. 1. pp. 491 ff., and see 

_ ‘Mars as Year-God \ 199 

one actual Moon-month. Broadly speaking, Anna, though she 
cannot be said to be the Moon, stands for the Moon-Year, Mamurius 
for the Sun-Year, and Anna is the earlier figure of the two. 

This idea of Anna and Mamurius as Moon-Year and Sun-Year 
throws light on a curious Etruscan monument that has hitherto 
baffled explanation. In Fig. 50 we have a portion of the design 
from a Praenestine cista1 now in the Berlin Museum. Menerva 
holds a young boy over a vessel full of flaming fire; she seems to 
be anointing his lips. The boy is armed with spear and shield, 
and his name is inscribed Mars: the scene is one of triumph, for 
over Menerva floats a small winged Victory holding a taenia. The 
scene is one of great solemnity and significance, for on the 
rest of the design, not figured here, we have an influential assembly 
of gods, Juno, Jovos, Mercuris, Hercle, Apolo, Leiber. 

Mars is, of course, the new fighting-season which opens in 
spring, as well as the new agricultural season. But if Mars were 
only the War-God, what sense is there in this baptism of fire ? 

For the young Sun what could be more significant? At the 

Sun-festivals of ‘the solstice? to-day, to feed the sun and kindle 
him anew and speed his going, the Johannisfeuer is lighted year 
by year and the blazing wheel rolled down the hill. 

The band of honeysuckle ornament that runs round the cista 
is oddly broken : just at the point above the young Sun-god’s head 
is the figure of the triple Cerberus. A strange apparition; but he 
ceases to be irrelevant when we remember that Hecate the Moon, 
to whom dogs were offered’ at the crossways, was once a three- 

headed. dog herself. 

From the Salii we have learnt that the function of the armed 
dancers of Rome was to drive out the Old Year, the Old Mars, 
and bring in the New. Mars as a Year-God, like the Greek Ares, 
and indeed like almost every other male God, took on aspects 
of the Sun, Anna Perenna of the Moon. Can we trace in the 
Kouretes any like function ? 

1 Mon. dell? Inst. 1x. Tav. 58. See Marx, Hin neuer Ares Mythus, A.Z. XDI, 
1885, p. 169. 

2H, Gaidoz, Le Dieu Gaulois du Soleil et le Symbolisme de la Roue, Rev. Arch. 
1884, 32 ff. 

3 Maurice Blomfield, Cerberus the Dog of Hades, 1905. Cerberus, gabalas, the 
heavenly dog of the Veda, was later translated to Hades. Cf. the fate of Ixion. For 
Hekate as dog ef. Porph. de Abstin. ut. 17 4 5 ‘Exdry raipos, Kia, Néawa. 

ae 

200 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. — [on. 

The design in Fig. 511 is from a red-figured krater in the 
Louvre: Helios is rising from the sea. By an odd conjunction he 
has, to bear him on his way, both boat and quadriga. His horses 
are guided by Pan holding a quadruple torch. To the right hand 
stands-a dancing Korybant or Koures, with shield and uplifted 
sword. In the chariot with Helios, stands the horned Selene: 
clearly the vase-painter recognised that one function of the 
Koures was to clash his shield at the rising of the Sun, and, it 
would seem, at the marriage of the Sun and Moon. 

_ The Moon was married to the Sun? and in patriarchal fashion 
sank into wifely subjection. As soon as it was understood that 

the Sun was the source of the Seasons, the F ood-bringers, and 
that increase came from his light and heat, not from the waxing 
and waning of the Moon, he rose to complete and permanent 
Supremacy. In the vase-painting? in Fig. 52 we see the Sun 
figured as greatest Kouros; the laurel spray reminds us that 
Helios is Apollo in the making. His uprising is greeted by a 
dance of Satyrs, those daimones of fertility who were, as Strabo‘ 
reminds us, own brothers to the Kouretes 

1 Annali d. Inst. 1852, Pl. F.3. Nonnus also makes 
Knossos at dawn, Dionysiaka, 361 
Hon & exdayev dps éduos népa Téuvov, 
kal orlyes edridnKes Epnuoviuwy KopuBdvrwy 
Kvaocwov éxpovcarto gakéoradov dua xopeins 
ixveot werpnrotow. 
> The marriage of Sun and Moon and its religious content 
Eniautos will be discussed in the next chapter, p. 227. 
3 EH. Gerhard Ueber die Lichtgottheiten auf Kunstdenkmiilern 1840. The vase 
a krater, is now in the Louvre Museum. ‘ 
+ Supra, p. 25. 

the Korybantes dance at 

in relation to the 

——~ ne 

4 

. 

VI} _ Helios, Kowretes and Satyrs 201 

The custom of greeting the rising sun with dances and the 
clash of instruménts is world-wide. Lucian’ says that the Indians; 
when they rise at dawn, worship Helios, and he adds that they do 
not, like the Greeks, account their devotion complete when they 
have kissed their hands, but they stand facing the east and 
greet Helios by dancing, assuming certain attitudes in silence 
and imitating the dance of the god. The intent is obviously 
magical; man dances to reinforce his own emotion and activity ; 
so does the sun; and man’s dance has power to reinforce the 
strength of the rising sun. In Germany, Scandinavia, and England 
the belief is still current that on Easter Morning the sun dances 
and leaps three times for joy. The Dawn with the Greeks had 
her dancing places*. In the light of such representations it is not 

Fia, 52, 

surprising that the Korybantes should be called the children of 
Helios‘, and we understand why Julian® says ‘Great Helios who is 
enthroned with the Mother is Korybas,’ and again, ‘the Mother of 
the gods allowed this minion of hers to leap about, that he might 
resemble the sunbeams. Rites often die down into children’s 

1 De Salt. 17 ...aXX’ éxelvoe mpos Thy dvarodyy ardvres dpxnoet rov “H)cov 
domdgovra. sxnuarifovres Eavrods ciwmy Kal pLovpevor Thy xXopelav Tod God. 

2 See L. v, Schroeder, Mimus und Mysterium, p. 45, and Usener, Pasparios in 
Bhein. Mus. 1894, p. 464. 

3 Od. x11. 4 

86. 7’ Hobs jpiyevelns 
oixta Kal xopol eloc kal dvrodal ’HeXiovo. 
4 Strabo, 202 ...ds elev KoptiBavres daiuovés rwes AOnvas kat ‘HAlov mratdes. 
5 Or. v. 167 KoptBas 6 uéyas cos 6 atvOpovos ry Myrpl, and 168. 

VA ala eA ila Mite hws gi Sa Aa ed Go fe Pe an ae ee 

202 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc. {cH. 

games, and Pollux? tells us that there was a game called ‘Shine 
out, Sun, in which children made a din when a cloud covered the 
sun. 

With the Salii in our minds leaping in March, the first month 
of the New Year, with the Kouretes clashing their shields and 
dancing over the child they had reared to be a Kouros for the 
Year-Feast (e/s évvavrdv), we come back to a clearer understanding 
of the Dithyramb; we may even hazard a conjecture as to the 
etymology of the word. But first, one point remains to be 
established. The Dithyramb, like the Hymn of the Kouretes, 
is not only a song of human rebirth, it is the song of the 
rebirth of all nature, all living things?; it is a Spring Song 
‘for the Year-Feast?,’ 

This is definitely stated in the dithyrambic Paean! to Dionysos 

‘1x. 123 ‘H 6é dex’ & iN’ Ace mardid, Kporov exe Tay madlov adv 7H ériBor- 
Mart ToUTw, Ombray vépos éemidpdun Tov Oedv’ GOev Kal Zrparris év Powlocats, 
e10’ Atos wev melOerac Tots macdtots, 
brav Néywouw, eéex’, w Pld’ Fre. ; 
> It is curious how this notion, that on the resurrection or Epiphany of a god 
depends the fertility of the year, lasts on in the mind of the peasant to-day, 
Mr Lawson in his interesting book on Modern Greck Folklore (p. 578) tells us that 
a stranger, happening to be in a village in Euboea during Holy Week, noticed the 
general depression of the villagers. On Easter Eve he asked an old woman why she 
was so gloomy, and she at once answered, ‘Of course I am anxious, for if Christ 
does not rise to-morrow, we shall have no corn this year.’ Her words come to us 
with a shock as of profanity, but a worshipper of the péyioros Kodpos would have 
felt them to be deeply, integrally religious. ‘ 
* It is worth noting that even now to the farmer a good year means a good 
harvest; Time’s content is set for a period of time, with which may be compared 
the popular use of the German Jahr. Either spring or autumn as season of fruits 
often stands for the whole year ; thus in the Lex Bajuvariorum dates are reckoned by 
autumni. Our word ‘year’ is etymologically the same as the Greek wpa the spring. 
Much interesting material on this question is collected by Schrader Reallexicon s.y. 
‘Jahr und Jahreszeiten.’ 
4H. Weil, Bull. de Corr. Hell. xrx. p. 401. Dr Weil reads 
[Acép’ dva AcO]ipayBe, Baxx’, 
c[vle Oupof]pes, Bpat- 
Td, Boduc(e), *Apivalis txod 
Talod(e) lepais év wpacs. 
Evot & 16 [Bdxy’ & lé Maa]y 
[d]» OnBars mor’ ev evlats 
Znlvi yelvaro] xaddlrais Ovdva. 
mdvres 5 [dorépes ayx |opev- 
gay mdvres 5€ Bporol x[apr- 
gav cats] Baxxue yévvass. : 
In my Prolegomena pp. 417 and 439 I followed Dr Weil, but Dr Vollgraft 
(Mnemosyne, 905, p. 379) has shown that in the second line -BPAITA has been 
misread for XAITA; he proposes to restore e[tie, rape kcco]yat-, but as the reading 

is problematical—though I should welcome ‘raSpe’—I leave the 3rd line un. 
translated. 

ey: 

Dithyramb and Spring-Song 

recently discovered at Delphi. Like the Hymn of the Kouretes it 
is an Invocation Hymn. It opens thus: 

Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come 

* * x  * * * 

Bromios come, and coming with thee bring 
Holy hours of thine own holy spring. 

Evoé, Bacchus hail, Paean hail, 

Whom, in sacred Thebes, the Mother fair 
She, Thyone, once to Zeus did bear. 

All the stars danced for joy. Mirth 

Of mortals hailed thee, Bacchos, at thy birth. 

The new-born god is Dithyrambos, born at the resurrection of 
earth in the springtime. ~ i 

The Delphic Paean is later in sentiment than the Hymn of 
the Kouretes. We have the old matriarchal divine pair, the 
Mother and the Child, but Thyone the mother is married to Zeus. 
Next and most beautiful of the Spring Dithyrambs left us is 
Pindar’s fragment, written to be sung at Athens, in the agora in 
or near to the most ancient sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes 
and like the Delphic Paean it celebrates, as though they were 
one and the same, the coming of spring, the birth of the child 

Bromios. 

Look upon the dance, Olympians, send us the grace of Victory, ye gods, 
who come to the heart of our city where many feet are treading and incense 
steams: in sacred Athens come to the Market-place, by every art enriched 
and of blesstd name. Take your portion of garlands pansy-twined, libations 
poured from the culling of spring, and look upon me as, starting from Zeus, 

I set forth upon my song with rejoicing. a A ; 
Come hither to the god with ivy bound ; Bromios we mortals name Him 

and Him of the mighty Voice. I come to dance and sing, the child of a father 
most high and a woman of Cadmus’ race. The clear signs of his Fulfilment 
are not hidden, whensoever the chamber of the purple-robed Hours is opened 
and nectarous flowers lead in the fragrant Spring. Then, then, are flung over 
the immortal Earth lovely petals of pansies, and roses are amid our hair; and 
voices of song are loud among the pipes, the dancing-floors are loud with the 

calling of crownéd Semele’. 

To resume: the Dithyramb, we have seen, is a Birth-Song, a 
Spopevor giving rise to the divine figures of Mother, Full-grown 
Son and Child; it is a spring-song of magical fertility for the 
new year; it is a group-song, a KvKdvos xopos, later sung by a 
thiasos, a song of those who leap and dance rhythmically 
_ together. 

1 Pindar, Dithyramb 75. The ‘calling of crownéd Semele’ will be further dis- 
cussed in chapter 1x. 

204 The Dithyramb, Spring- Festival, ete. (ou. 

The word Dithyramb now speaks for itself. The first syllable 
Ai for Aji is from the root that gives us Zevs and Ards. The 
termination auBos is probably the same as that in YapBos, 
onpauBos. We are left with the syllable Ovp, which has always 
been the crux. But the difficulty disappears if we remember 
that, as Hoffmann has pointed out, the northern peoples of Greece 
tend, under certain conditions, to substitute o for 6, which gives 
us for At-0ip-ayuBos Ac-Gop-ap8o0s—Zeus-leap-song, the song 
that_makes Zeus leap or beget’. Our Hymn of the Kouretes 
is the Di-thor-amb®. 

We seem to have left the Bull far behind, for the Delphic 
Paean and Pindar’s Dithyramb and even our Hymn of the 
Kouretes know nothing of the bull-sacrifice ; they tell only of the 
human child, not the theriomorph. Only on the sarcophagos do 
we get the bull-sacrifice and the Spring Spéuevov together. But 
Pindar knew that the Dithyramb was the song of the Bull as well 
as of the Child and the Spring. In the x1th Olympian? he is 
chanting the praises of Corinth, home of the Dithyramb, Corinth, 
the home of splendid youths (ayX.acKoupov), Corinth, where dwelt 
as in ancient Crete, the Horae, Eunomia and Dike and Eirene, 
givers of Wealth, golden daughters of Themis, These golden 
Horae had brought to Corinth from of old subtleties of invention ; 

for ‘whence,’ asks Pindar, in words that are all but untranslat- 
able, 

‘Whence did appear the Charites of Dionysos 
With the Bull-driving Dithyramb?’ 

* I owe this brilliant suggestion to Mr A. B. Cook and publish it by his kind 
permission. Previous attempted derivations will be found in Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. 
Dithyramb. To these may be added the recent Studies in Greek Noun-Formation 
by E. H. Sturtevant in Classical Philology, Chicago, 1910, v. p. 329. For the 
interchange of } and 5 see Hoffmann, Die Makedonen, p. 242, 

* Mr Cook also kindly draws my attention to a gloss of Hesychius which presents a 
very instructive parallel : Aerdrupos* Ocds rapa [Z]ruugdatos. This important note 
preserves the name of ‘ Zeus the Father’ as used in the district of Mt Stymphe, not 
far from Dodona on the frontier of Epirus, Macedonia and Thessaly. It furnishes 
a precise parallel both for the compound AZ and for the weakening of ¢ into ¥, in 
short for both the disputable elements in AvOdpauBos. Moreover—a still more 
interesting point—the meaning as well as the form is parallel: Zeus the Father, 
Zeus the begetter, cf. Asch. Lum. 663 rixrec 8 6 §p~oxwv. As initiated Kouros the 
young god has come to maturity of his functions. 

2 OE AUG ToAAG 8” év Kapdlars dvdpav &aov 

“Qpar morvdvOenor dp- 
xala copiouara’ may 8’ evpovros epyov. 

Tal Awwwicov rédev éépavev 

atv Bondtdra Xdpures OvOupduBy ; 

~ 

The Bull- cia pirating 205 

Why is the Dithyramb Bull-driving? Why does the Bull- 
driving Dithyramb come with the Charites ? 

Pindar no doubt was thinking of the new Graces of tragedy ; 
but behind them come the figures of the older Charites, the 
Givers of all Increase, the Horae who bring back the god in the 
Spring, be he Bull or human Kouros. In our oldest Dithyramb 
they bring him as a Bull. ; 
In his Xxxvith Greek Question Plutarch asks, ‘Why do the 
women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be present 
with them with his bull-foot 2? Happily Plutarch preserves for us 
the very words of the little early ritual hymn— 

In Springtime, O Dionysos, 

To thy holy temple come, 

To Elis with thy Graces, 

Rushing with thy bull- foot, come, 
Noble Bull, Noble Bull!. 

Fira. 53. 

Plutarch? tries as usual to answer his own question and at 
last half succeeds. ‘Is it, he suggests, ‘that some entitle the god 
as born of a bull and as a bull himself,...... or is it that many hold 
that the god is the beginner of sowing and ploughing?’ We have 
seen how at Magnesia the holy Bull was the beginner (apynyos) 
of ploughing and sowing. 

: *"Enbety np w& Ardvuce 

*Arelwy és vad 

ayvov abv xaplrecow, 

és vaov 7 Boéw modt Aduv. 

"Age tatpe, de Taipe. 
I adopt in the first line Mr A. B. Cook’s simple and convincing emendation 
np for ypw. The vocative jp does not exist. Schneidewin emends ‘pws. 
Bergk (ed. 4) keeps jjpw, observing ‘non ausus sum jpws substituere.’ For elision of 
the dative see Monro, Homeric Grammar, ed. 2, §§ 376. 

= OP. cit. note 1 mérepoy 6re Kal Bowyer Tpooary opevouoe kal rabpov vio Tov Oedv; 

...4) Oru Kal aporpov Kal omrdpov TroNXol Tov Oedv dpxnyov yeyovévas voulfovar. 

[o 

On a cameo in the Hermitage at St Petersburg in Fig. 537 
we see the ‘noble Bull’ rushing ‘with his bull-foot’ and he is 
coming ‘with the Charites’: they are perched, a group of three, 
oddly enough between his horns. Above the holy Bull are the 
Pleiades?; their rising twenty-seven days after the vernal equinox 
was the signal in Greece for the early harvest. The women 
of Elis ‘summon’ the Bull, sing to him, praise him; but after all 
if you want a Bull to come to his holy temple, it is no use 
standing and ‘summoning’ him, you must drive him, drive him 
with a ‘Bull-driving Dithyramb.’ 

206 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. noe 

From the leaders of the Dithyramb Aristotle has told us arose 
tragedy, the Goat-Song. Yet the Dithyramb is a song of Bull- 
driving. The difficulty is not so great as it seems. Any young 
full-grown creature can be the animal form of the Kouros, can be 
sacrificed, sanctified, divinized, and become the Agathos Daimon, 
the ‘vegetation spirit,’ the luck of the year, All over Europe we 
find, as Dr Frazer’ has abundantly shown, goats, pigs, horses, — 
even cats can play the part, Best of all perhaps is a bear, because 
he is strongest; this the Athenian maidens remembered in their 
Bear-Service (apxteta). But bears, alas! retreat. before advancing 
civilization. Almost equally good is a bull, if you can afford him. 
But in Attica, as Alciphron has told us (p. 173), a bull was too 
expensive. A goat is not a bad life-spirit, as anyone will quickly 
discover who tries to turn him back against his will. Crete, the 
coast-land of Asia Minor, and Thrace, as we know from their coins, 
were bull-lands with abundant pastures. Attica, stony Attica, 
is a goat-land. If you go to Athens to-day, your morning coffee — 
is ruined because, even in the capital, it is hard to get a drop of 
cow’s milk. Instead you have, as an abundant and delicious food, 
sour goat’s milk, ysaodprue. 

On the archaic patera in Fig. 544 in the British Museum® we 

1 Baumeister, Denkméiler, Fig. 413, p. 377. 
* For the Pleiades and their importance in the farmer’s year ef. Hesiod 615 
619. See A. W. Mair’s Hesiod, Poems and Fragments, 1908, Addenda, p. 136. Pn 
Mair quotes the scholiast on the Phaenomena of Aratos, 264 ff., who says the Pleiades 
rise with the sun at dawn when he is in Taurus, which with the Romans is in April 
oho es oe s oes may have some reference to the constellation Taurus 
3 The Golden Bough?, u. 261—269. For the Bear-Servic f 
Mon. of Ancient Athens, ’p. 410. oh A ee 
3 ye and Mon. of Ancient Athens, p. 289, Fig. 30. 
at. B, 80, published by C. H. Smith, J.H.S. 1. Pl. 7, p. 202 
Rev. 1. (186%), 96: ,p . See also Class. 

; | 

_ Dithyramb and Tragoedia 207 

see depicted two scenes: one to the left the sacrifice of an Ox, a 
Bouphonia, the other to the right a festival that centres round 
a goat, which perhaps we may venture to associate with a tragoedia. 
Some of the figures round the goat hold wreaths, and it may be 
that the splendid animal in the midst of them is the tragic prize. 
Behind the goat-scene, and evidently part of it, is a primitive 
mule-car. This recalls Thespis and his cart, and the canonical 
jests ‘from the cart.’ The scene to the left is in honour of 
Athena. She and her great snake and her holy bird await the 

Fie, 54. 

sacrificial procession. A flute-player leads the Bull-driving Dithy- 
ramb. The Bull is led or rather driven by a cord attached to one of 
his hind legs; the other men hold wreaths, a staff, and an oinochoé. 

On another and much later red-figured vase, in the Naples 
Museum!, reproduced in Fig. 557, we have another scene of 
goat-sacrifice. This time the god Dionysos himself is present. 
His stiff xoanon stands close to the altar and table at which 

1 Heydemann, Cat. 2411. 
2 Mow. dell’ Inst. v1. 37. See also Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, v. p. 256. 

208 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. (cH. 

the offerings are to be made. A priestess is about to slay a very 
lively looking goat. About are dancing Maenads with their 
timbrels, But though a goat is sacrificed, the old bull-service is 
not forgotten. The altar is decorated with a boukranion, the holy 
filleted head of a bull. 

To resume. In Crete we have the worship of the Mother and 
the Child, the Kouros; without the Child the worship of the 
Mother is not; we have also the theriomorph, the holy Bull, the 
‘horns of consecration’; we cease to wonder that the Cretan 

f ‘Se 
Oe Fo 
“Oy 2: 
Kz 

Fie. 55. 

palace is full of bulls and horns, we cease to wonder at the story | 
of Pasiphae and the Minotaur. In Asia Minor, in Phrygia, the 
same conjunction, the Mother and the Child and the Bull; in 
Thrace, in Macedon, in Delphi, in Thracianized Thebes again 
the same. It was this religion of the Mother and the holy Bull- 
Child and the spring dSpepevov that came down afresh, resurging 
from Macedon to startle and enthrall civilized, Olympianized, 
patriarchalized, intellectualized Athens, that Athens which, cen- 
turies before, under the sea-supremacy of Minos, had had her 
legend of the Cretan Bull, her Cretan ritual of the Bouphonia. 

Matriarchy died out; Athena was ‘all for the father’; hence 
the scandal caused by the Bacchants. But the Bull and the 
spring Sp@mevov went on, to be the seed of the drama. 

_ The Kouros and the Dionysia 209 

The most ancient Dionysia at Athens were, Thucydides? tells 
us, in the month Anthesterion, the month of the rising of the 
dead and the blossoming of flowers. At the Anthesteria were 
dramatic contests known as Pot Contests?, but we know of no 
Dithyramb, and no Bull-sacrifice. On the eve of the great Dionysiac 
festival, the Epheboi of Athens, the Kouroi, brought the image of 
Dionysos by torch-light into the theatre. They brought him by 
night—for was he not vu«rédwos, vuetimodos ? They brought their 
Greatest Kouros in human shape, an image such as we have seen 
on the vase, but, in the same procession, they brought their 
god, their Kouros, in animal shape—a splendid bull. Surely 

_as they went they sang their Bull-driving Dithyramb. 

It was expressly ordained, an inscription® testifies to it, that 

this bull should be ‘worthy of the god.’ Worthy of the god 

forsooth! Why, he was the god. 

d&te taipe, Gée raipe. 

It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that one, and 
perhaps the most important, portion of the scene on the sarcophagos 
has been left undescribed. To the extreme right (Fig. 31, p. 161) is 
a small building variously interpreted as tomb or sanctuary; it is 

richly decorated. In front of it stands the closely draped figure 
_ of a youth, by his side a tree, and in front of him a stepped altar. 

To him approach three youths bearing offerings. The foremost 
brings a moon-shaped boat, the two last bring, not the blood of the 

dead bull, but young bull-calves, leaping and prancing; the some- 

what irrelevant pose of the calves reminds us of the bull on the 
fresco of Tiryns. All three youths wear strange beast-skin robes‘ 

Var. 15 Kal rd &v Aluvats Acovicou (6 Ta apxatdrepa Avovdcia TH SwOexdry Tovetras 
év unvi ’AvOcornpidv.). For the whole question of the various Dionysia see my 
Primitive Athens, p. 85. The significance of the Anthesteria in relation to the 
Dithyramb and the drama will be further discussed in chapter vu. 

2 Schol. ad Ar. Ran. 218 #yovro dyaves airs of XuTpwol Kadobmevor. See 
Primitive Athens, p. 87, note 6. 

3 "Edn. 4098, 1. 11 elotyyayor dé kal rov Acdvucov do ris éoxdpas els 70 béarpov 

pera puwros kal €reupav rots Avovvalois rabpov déov Tod Oeod, dy Kai €Ovcay ev TQ lepd TH 

TOUT]. 

4 Signor Paribeni has shown (op. cit.) that these celebrants, male and female, 
wearing beast robes, are ‘girded with sackcloth.’ Our word ‘sackcloth’ is the 
Hebrew py, Assyrian sakku, Coptic sok, which gave the Greeks their odxxos. It 
means simply rough, hairy beast-skin. In the familiar Bible passages, it will be 
noted that when sackcloth is worn it is not a complete dress, it is an extended 

H. 14 

210 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, ete. 

like that of the woman celebrant, but their procession seems to 
have nothing to do with hers, for they are turned back to back. . - 
Two interpretations of thescene have been offered. Dr Petersen’, 

whose theory as to the meaning I have, in the main, followed, © 

holds that the building to the right is a sanctuary, the figure in 
front of it a god, Dionysos, closely draped because phallic. 
Dionysos is here as god of fertility, worshipped in spring; the 
tree beside him marks one of his aspects, as Dendrites. A more 
widely current interpretation, offered by the first publisher 
of the sarcophagos, Sig. Paribeni®, is that the building is a 
tomb, the figure in front a dead man, a hero. The boat and 
calves are offerings to the dead man, the boat in Egyptian fashion 
provided for his journey, the young bulls to revive his life and 
strength. 

We are now brought face to face with an all-important 
question, Is the spring Sp@pevov on the sarcophagos conceived as 
celebrated in honour of, in relation to, a god or a mortal, Dionysos 
or a dead hero? Further, since, as we have seen, drama and 
Spoevov are closely connected, this question leads straight on to 
another problem, ‘Does Greek drama arise from the worship of 
Dionysos, or, as has been recently maintained, from the worship of 
the dead?’ This question is not a mere curiosity of literary 
history, still less is its importance to be measured by the 
heat of a passing controversy. The answer lies, I believe, 
deep down in the very nature of religion, and in that peculiar 

quality of the Greek mind on which the differentiation of | 

their religion from that of other peoples depended. The 
solution can only be attempted after a very careful analysis 

of the meaning of the terms employed and especially the 
term hero. 

loin-cloth, girt on as in the case of the celebrants on the sarcophagos, e.g. Isaiah iii. 
24, describing the mourning of Zion, says, ‘Instead of well set hair there shall be 
or tet ts and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth,’ and again in Psalm 
bee, Isr 

‘Thou hast turned my heaviness into joy: 

Thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.’ 

The wearing of sackcloth was in all likelihood originally not merely a sign of 

mourning, but a means of magical identification with the holy, sacrificed beast 
1 Jahrb. d. Arch. Inst. 1909, p. 162. ; 
2 Supra, p. 158, note 1. 

for. Fe 

vs 

- 

before hint analysis is attempted, we have to consider 
another series of dpépeva, which present interesting analogies to 
: the Speueva of the Dithyramb. Like these they are magical and | | 
“recurrent, having for their object to influence and One: a good 
year. Like them, they became closely intertwined with the 
worship of heroes. We mean the contests (dydves) celebrated 
widely and periodically in Greece, and first and foremost those. 
contests which set the clock for Hellas—the great Olympic 
7 ‘Games. 

> 
q 

|

L THE ORIGIN OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES. 
Vu 

By F. M. CornForpb. 

More than one theory has recently been put forward by 
English scholars, to account for the origin of the Olympic Games. - 
It has been felt that the naive view which sees in these athletic 
contests no more than the survival of an expedient, comparable 
to the whisky-drinking at an Irish wake, for cheering up the 
mourners after the funeral of a chieftain, clearly leaves something 
to be desired; for it entails the rejection of the whole ancient 
tradition recorded by Pindar, Pausanias, and others. Some part 
of this tradition is, indeed, undoubtedly fictitious—the deliberate 
invention of incoming peoples who wished to derive their claims 
from a spurious antiquity. Nothing is easier than to detect these 
genealogical forgeries; but when we have put them aside, there 
remains much that is of a totally different character—the myths, 
for instance, used by .Pindar in his first Olympian. This residuum 
calls for some explanation; and no theory which dismisses it 
bodily as so much motiveless ‘poetic fiction’ can be accepted as 
satisfactory. 

The first hypothesis that claims serious consideration is the 
current view, lately defended by Professor Ridgeway. Games 
were held, he says, in honour of heroes, beside the tomb, ‘in order 
doubtless to please the spirit of the dead man within.’ ‘Athletic 
feats, contests of horsemanship, and tragic dances are all part of — 
the same principle—the honouring and appeasing of the dead.’ 

1 Stated, e.g., by Christ (Pindari Carmina, 1896, p. lxii ff.): ludos instituebant 
ad animos recreandos atque post luctum exhilarandos...Aliam opportunitatem ludos 
faciendi faustus eventus belli obtulit. Namque et hominum animi libenter post 
atroces belli casus laboresque reficiebantur, etc. 

2 Origin of Tragedy, pp. 36, 38. 

The Funeral Theory 

It will be noted that this hypothesis marks an advance upon 
what we call the naive view, in that it recognises the religious 
character of the games. Athletic feats were performed, not solely 
to cheer the spirits of the performers, but as an act_of worship, to 
“honour and appease’ the spirit of a hero. The theory holds that 
the performance originates in funeral games at the barrow of 
a dead chief—in the case of Olympia, at the Pelopium—and is 
perpetuated because dead warriors like to be remembered by their 
survivors and can visit neglect with unpleasant consequences. 
Hence it is prudent to honour and appease them. 

Dr Frazer’ brings forward evidence in support of this theory 
of the funeral origin. It consists chiefly? of instances of games 
celebrated at funerals or founded in historic times, either in 
fGreece or elsewhere, to do honour to famous men, such as 
Miltiades, Brasidas, Timoleon, who were worshipped as heroes 
with annual sacrifices and games. Dr Frazer concludes that ‘we 
cannot dismiss as improbable the tradition that the Olympic 
Games and perhaps other great Greek games were instituted to 
commemorate real men who once lived, died, and were buried on 
the spot where the festivals were afterwards held.’ 

The objection to this apparently simple theory is stated by 
Dr Frazer himself, and he feels its force so strongly that he 
propounds another hypothesis of his own, which, as we shall later 
see (p. 259), is actually inconsistent with the funeral origin. He 
remarks that the funeral theory does not explain all the legends 
connected with the origin of the Olympic Games. We might 
almost go so far as to say that it does not explain any of the more 
‘ancient legends. The earliest, indeed the only, authority cited by 
Dr Frazer for the statement that the games were founded ‘in 
honour of Pelops’ is Clement of Alexandria*. Our older author- 
ities, Pindar, for instance, and the sources used by Pausanias, tell 
a quite different story. About the death and obsequies of Pelops, 

1 Part ur. of the Golden Bough, ed. 3, p. 92 ff. ; 

2 The lashing of all the youths in the Peloponnese on the grave of Pelops till 
the blood streamed down as a libation to the departed hero, to which Dr Frazer 
adduces parallels from savage mourning customs, may perhaps be dismissed as an 
unfortunate attempt of the Scholiast on Pindar Ol. 1. 146 to derive aiuaxouplar from 
aiua Kovpwv. : 

3 Protrept. 11. 34, p. 29, ed. Potter. It should be noted that Clement is 
advocating a theory of his own, that Games held for the dead, like oracles, were 
‘mysteries.’ 

ees See 

214 = The Origin of the Olympic Games [cu. 

which ought to be the centre and core of the Olympian tradition, 
that tradition is absolutely silent. Pindar! dates the Games from 
the victory of Pelops over Oinomaos in the chariot-race, which 
ended in the death of Oinomaos, not of Pelops. The Elean in- 
formants of Pausanias? had no tradition of any funeral games in 
honour of that hero; they traced the origin of the festival to a 
higher antiquity, and said that ‘Pelops celebrated the Games in 
honour of Olympian Zeus in a grander way than all who had gone 
before him.’ 

It is true. that Pausanias says, ‘the Eleans honour Pelops as 
‘much above all the heroes of Olympia as they honour Zeus above 
the rest of the gods’; and that a black ram was annually sacrificed 
at his precinct*. Pausanias calls the enclosure a ‘precinct’ (réye- 
vos), not a grave‘. The German excavators have dug down to the 
neolithic stratum, and no trace of any real interment, except a 
neolithic baby, has been found*. Thus, although the mound in this 
precinct was, as early as Pindar’s time, regarded as the barrow of 

| aa there is no material evidence that any real chieftain was 
ever buried there at all. The case of Pelops at Olympia is, more- 
over, exceptionally favourable to the funeral theory. The ‘dead’ 
who were connected with the festivals at the other three centres of 
panhellenic games* were not chieftains whose warlike deeds could 
be commemorated. At Nemea the ‘dead’ who was honoured was 
Archemoros, an infant; at the Isthmus, Glaukos, a sea-daemon ; 
[ at Pytho, a snake. 

Further, whereas the games were held once in every four 
years, the hero-sacrifices at the supposed tomb of Pelops were 
annual, and we have no reason to believe that they were even held 
at the same time of year. 

It thus appears that the funeral theory, which would have the 
whole Olympic festival originate in the obsequies of an actual 
man called Pelops, is contradicted by the more ancient traditions 
of Elis and unsupported by any monumental evidence. The field 
is clear for an alternative theory which will take account of the 
fact that the Games were believed to be older than the time of 

LO Ua. 2 Paus. v. 8. 2. 

3 Paus. v. 13. 1. 

4 Cf. Schol. ad Pind. OJ, 1. 149, rwés pact uh pv Fua Grn’ iepdy rod IléXomos. 

* Dorpfeld, Olympia in préhistorischer Zeit, Mitth. Ath. xxxiii. (1908) p. 185 ff. 

6 The four Great Games—Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian, seem to 
be distinguished from others more than once in Pindar by the epithet tepol. 

oe a 

Relation to Hero-worship 215 

Pelops, who was associated with a reconstitution of them on a 
grander scale, and will also interpret, instead of rejecting, the 
legends about their origin. 

The point of general and fundamental interest involved in this 

‘controversy is the significance of hero-worship and its place in the 

development of Greek religion—a question which, as has been 
remarked already (p. 210), is vital also for the history of the 
drama. For the drama and for the games alike the modern 
Euhemerist like Professor Ridgeway supposes a funeral origin. 
In other words, wherever we find hero-worship or ceremonies more 
or less connected with the commemoration of ‘heroes, we are to 
suppose that they originated in memorial rites dating from the 
actual obsequies of some man or men who died and were buried 
(or at least had a cenotaph) on the spot. This view has led 
Professor Ridgeway to take up an extreme position with regard to 
the whole order of religious development. 

“A great principle,’ he says!, ‘is involved in this discussion, since the 
evidence shows that whereas it is commonly held that the phenomena of 
vegetation spirits and totemism are primary, they are rather to be regarded 
as secondary phenomena arising from the great primary principle of the 
belief in the existence of the soul after death, and the desirability of 
honouring it. 

‘Scholars had begun at the wrong end, taking as primary the phenomena 
of vegetation spirits, totemism etc., which really were but secondary, arising 

‘almost wholly from the primary element, the belief in the existence of the 

soul after the death of the body. As prayer, religion proper, was made to the 
dead, religion must be considered antecedent to magic, which is especially 
connected with the secondary elements?’ 

Of the extreme view stated in the last sentence the whole of 
this book may be taken as a refutation. Prof. Ridgeway’s view 
was instantly challenged by Dr Frazer’, who ‘contended that 
totemism, the worship of the dead, and the phenomena of vegeta- 
tion spirits should be considered as independent factors, and that 
none of the three should be held to be the origin of the others.’ 
With this denial that ‘religion proper, identified with prayers 
to the dead, is prior to magic—the immediate manipulation of 
mana—our whole argument is, of course, in agreement. Where 

1 Summary of a paper on The Origin of the Great Games of Greece, delivered 
before the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, May 9, 1911. 
2 Report of the same paper in the Athenaeum, May 20, 1911. 
3 Athenaeum, loe. cit. 

| 

216 The Origin of the Olympic Games (oH. . " 
we go beyond Dr Frazer’s pronouncement is in attempting to 
show how the three factors he calls ‘independent’ are related to 
one another. j 

What is now clear is that behind the theory of the funeral 
origin of the Games and of the drama, as advocated by Professor 
Ridgeway, lies the view that the primary religious phenomenon is 
prayer, or other rites, addressed to one or more individuals, whether 
dead men or gods, with the purpose of ‘honouring and appeasing’ 
them, and thereby.securing the benefits, especially the food-supply, 
which they can give or withold. The do ut des principle is taken 
as primary and ultimate. Further, since dead men are most 
suitably appeased by commemoration of their exploits, the 
primitive rite is essentially commemorative, only secondarily 
designed to secure tangible benefits. 

Against this general view of religious development it has 
already been argued (p. 134) that the do ut des principle is not 
early, but late; and that magic—the magic which immediately 
controls the food-supply and the natural phenomena on which it 
depends—was carried on before there were any gods at all, and 
can be carried on by direct mimetic methods, without any prayerful 
appeals to dead ancestors. The special topic of hero-worship and 
the detailed analysis of the term ‘hero’ are reserved for the next 
chapter. Our object here is to state a theory of the origin of the 
Great Games which will not rest on the foundations, in our 
opinion false, which support Professor Ridgeway’s funeral hypo- 
thesis. 

According to the view which we shall put forward, the Games 
are to be regarded as originally and essentially a New Year’s 
festival—the inauguration of a ‘Year, If it can be shown that 
the legends can be interpreted as reflecting rites appropriate 
to such a festival, the hypothesis will have some claim to 
acceptance, 

Our simplest course will be to examine the myths about the 
origin of the Games, contained in Pindar’s first Olympian, and to 
disentangle the separable factors in this complex legend. We 
shall begin with the story of the so-called chariot-race, in which 
Pelops defeated the wicked king Oinomaos, and won the hand 
of his daughter Hippodameia and with it the succession to the 

oes ra 

Ons Ritual Myths in Pelops legend ay 

_ kingdom. We shall then examine the dark and disreputable story 
(as it seemed to Pindar) of the Feast of Tantalus and offer an 
explanation which will connect it with the institution of the 
Games in their earliest form. 

Our enquiry will proceed on the assumption that these myths 
are not saga-episodes, but belong to the class of ritual myths. In 
other words, they are not poeticised versions of unique historical 
events in the life of any individual ‘hero’; but reflect recurrent 
ritual practices, or dp@peva!. The failure to distinguish these two 
classes of myths leads the Euhemerist into his worst errors; and in 
this particular case it puts the advocate of the funeral theory 
into a serious difficulty. For on that theory these stories must 
represent those exploits of the dead chieftain, of which his 
ghost will most like to be reminded; and it is difficult to under- 
stand what satisfaction the departed Pelops could find in having 
his attention periodically drawn to the fact that his father had 
been damned in Hell for cooking him and trying to make the gods 
eat him at dinner. If, on the other hand, we recognise that all 
these myths are of the ritual type, it must be observed that 
“Pelops’ is stripped of every vestige of historic personality. He 
becomes an empty name, an eponym. The only semblance of 
historic fact that remains about him is the statement that he came 
from Lydia to his own island, the Peloponnese; and, as Gruppe’ 
shows, it is probable that this is the reverse of the truth, and that 
his legend was first carried to Asia Minor at a comparatively late 
date by settlers from central Greece. The funeral theory is thus 
reduced to deriving the most important of Hellenic festivals from 
the unrecorded obsequies of a person of whom nothing whatever 
is known, and who, in all probability, never existed. 

But it is time to put controversy aside and reconstruct the 
meaning of Pindar’s myths. 

1 For the relation of myth to ritual see infra, p. 327. 

2 Griech. Myth. und Rel. 1. 653. Gruppe holds that the ancestors of the 
 Atreidae, Tantalus and Pelops, were transplanted to Lydia with the rest of the 
Ionian Saga early in the sixth century, especially in the reigns of Alyattes and 
_ Croesus. 

oe 

aT at TS, 

a oe, oe " 

THE CONTEST WITH OINOMAOS, 

Pindar? thus describes the contest: 

When, towards the fair flowering of his growing age, the down began 
to shade his darkening cheek, Pelops turned his thoughts to a marriage that 
lay ready for him—to win from her father of Pisa famed Hippodameia. 

He came near to the hoary sea, alone in the darkness, and cried aloud to 
the Lord of the Trident in the low-thundering waves. And he appeared to 

him, close at his foot. And Pelops spoke to him ;: Come now, O Poseidon, if — 

the kindly gifts of the Cyprian in any wise find favour with thee, do thou 
trammel the bronze spear of Oinomaos, speed me on swiftest chariot to Elis, 
and bring victory tomy embrace. For thirteen men that sued for her he hath 
overthrown, in putting off the marriage of his daughter... 

So he said, and he attained his prayer, which went not unfulfilled. The 
God glorified him with the gift of a golden car and horses with wings 
unwearied. And he overcame mighty Oinomaos, and won the maiden to 
share his bed ; and she bore him six sons, chieftains eager in prowess. 

Thus indirectly and allusively Pindar tells the story which 

forms the subject of the Eastern pediment of the temple of Zeus’ 

at Olympia. Probably most readers of the First Olympian think 
of the contest between Pelops and Oinomaos as a chariot-race— 
the mythical prototype of the chariot-races of the historic Games. 

WS 

ANY? 

o> 
y ) 

ites” 
q a“ ISS T| ALD 
Y ee Ne) oN ASS q 
7 Pray WN ELAR \ 
| Mian Hee: " 

ili ita Snide eet 

Fia, 56. 

So too it may have been regarded by Pindar. But if we examine 
the story as known to us from other sources, it becomes plain that 
this was not its original meaning. 

The scene is represented in the design (Fig. 56) on a polychrome 

bell-shaped krater in the Naples Museum? In the right fore- 
ground Pelops and the bride Hippodameia are driving off in the 
same chariot ; for it was Oinomaos’ custom to make the suitors 

LIOUsE RG Ont 
2 Arch. Zeit. 1858, Taf. ty. 

219 

_ drive with her from Elis to the altar of Poseidon at the Comubhing 

Isthmus’. Meanwhile the king himself, who is armed with spear 
and helmet, stays behind to sacrifice, before a column surmounted 
by a female divinity’, the ram which an attendant is bringing up 
on the left. Then Oinomaos will mount the chariot held in 
readiness by his charioteer Myrtilus, and drive in pursuit of the 
flying pair. On overtaking them, he intends to stab Pelops in 
the back with his bronze spear. He has already disposed of 
thirteen suitors in this questionable way. But Pelops will escape ; 
for Hippodameia has persuaded Myrtilus to remove the linchpins 
of the king’s chariot. Oinomaos will be tumbled out and killed 
by Pelops with his own spear. His grave—a mound of earth 
enclosed by a retaining wall of stones—was shown on the far side 
of the Kladeos. Above it stood the remains of buildings where 
he was said to have stabled his mares’. 

It is obvious that this story does not describe a primitive form | 

of mere sport. It is made up of at least two distinct factors. 
(a) There is, first, the contest between the young and the old 
king, ending in the death of the elder and the succession of the 
younger to the kingdom. (b) Second, there is the carrying off 
(aprayn) of the bride; for Pelops and Hippodameia drive off 

in the same chariot, with the chance of altogether escaping the 
pursuing father. This is not a chariot-race, but a flight, such as 

often occurs in marriage by capture‘. 

These two factors must be briefly examined. We shall see 
that both can be interpreted on the hypothesis that the rites 
reflected in these myths are appropriate to a New Year's festival. 

(a) The Contest between the Young and. the Old King. This 
feature of the story is taken by Mr A. B. Cook® as the basis of his 
theory of the origin of the Great Games. The parallel story of 

1 Weizsacker in Roscher’s Lea., s.v. Oinomaos, col. 768, holds that this trait 
must belong to a Phliasian legend of Oinomaos, and that Oinomaos was transferred 
from Phlius to Olympia. r 

2 The sacrifice is said to have been made to Zeus Areios (Paus. v. 14. 6) or 
to Ares (Philostr. Imag. 10). Earlier vases show Oinomaos and Pelops taking 
the oath before a pillar, in one case inscribed AIOZ, in another surmounted by 
a male divinity. See A. B. Cook, Class. Rev. xvu. p. 271. 

3 Apollod. m.4; Paus. v.17. 7; Diod. 1v. 73; Paus. vi. 21. 3. 

4 See Weizsicker in Roscher’s Lex., s.v. Oinomaos. . 

5 Zeus, Jupiter, and the Oak, Class. Rev. xvi. 268 ff., and The European Sky- 
God, Folk-Lore 1904, To the learning and ingenuity displayed in these articles, 
as well as to other help from Mr Cook, I am deeply indebted. 

=—— 

220 The Origin of the Olympic Games — [cn. 

Phorbas, king of the Phlegyae, shows that we are justified in 
regarding the contest. for the kingship as a separable factor; for 
in that story we have the contest alone, without either the 
chariot-driving or the flight with the bride. Phorbas dwelt 
under an oak, called his ‘palace,’ on the road to Delphi, and 
challenged the pilgrims to various athletic feats. When he had 
defeated them, he cut off their heads and hung them on his oak. 
Apollo came as a boxer and overthrew Phorbas, while his oak was 
blasted by a thunderbolt from the sky. 

The sacred tree and the thunderbolt reappear in the case of 
Oinomaos. Between the Great Altar and the sanctuary of Zeus 
in the Altis stood a wooden pillar or post, decayed by time and 
held together by metal bands. It was further protected by a roof 
supported on four columns. This pillar, it was said, alone escaped 
when the house of Oinomaos was blasted by lightning’. Near it 
stood an altar of Zeus Keraunios, said to have been erected when 
Zeus smote the house. The place was, in fact, sanctified by being 
struck by lightning. Oinomaos, whom legend made both husband 
and son of Sterope, the lightning-flash, was one of those weather- 
kings with whom we are already familiar (p. 105), who claimed to 
control the thunder and the rain, and like Salmoneus who, as we 
have seen (p. 81), migrated from Thessaly to Elis, were liable to 
be blasted by the later thunder-god of Olympus. Oinomaos with 
his bronze spear was éyyetxépavvos*. He too, like Phorbas, hung 
up the heads of the defeated suitors on his house. Again we 
encounter the same complex as we found in the Erechtheion (pp. 
92 and 171)—a sacred tree or pillar, and the token of the thunderer. 

The Pandroseion of the Athenian Acropolis has its analogue in . 

the Rantheion—the all-holy or all-magical place—which contained 
the sacred olive tree at Olympia® 

On the basis of this conjunction of weather king and sacred 
tree, Mr Cook suggests that ‘in mythical times the Olympic 
contest was a means of determining who should be king of the 
district and champion of the local tree-Zeus.” The holder of the 

office for the time being was analogous to the Rex Nemorensis 

of the Golden Bough—an incarnation of the Tree and Sky God, 

1 Paus. v. 20. 6. 2 Paus. v. 14. 6. 

% An epithet applied by Pindar to Zeus (Pyth. 1v. 194; Ol. xu. 77). Athena is 
éyxerBpbuos, Ol. vit. 43, 

4 Supra, p. 171, note 1. 

7 4 
= re 

_ The Victor as King | 221 

_and, like his Italian parallel, defended his office against all comers, 
until he was finally defeated and superseded by the successful 
combatant. 

The Olympic victor, he points out, was treated with honours 
_ both regal and divine; feasted in the prytaneum; crowned with 
a spray of olive like the wreath of Zeus himself; pelted, like 
a tree-spirit or Jack-in-the-Green, with leaves. As such he is 
represented in the vase-painting in Fig. 57. 

Finally, on his return to his native city, the victor was dressed 
in royal purple and drawn by white horses through a breach in 
the walls. Im many cases he was worshipped after death, as a 
hero; not because he was a successful athlete, but because he had 
once been an incarnate god. 

Fie. 57. 

This hypothesis of Mr Cook’s we believe to be fundamentally 
correct. Plutarch in his Symposiac Questions’, after remarking 
that the foot-race was the sole original contest _ at Olympia, all the 

other competitions having been added later, proceeds: 
ee 

1 Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. 15, says that Pythagoras advised men to compete, but 
not to win, at Olympia, cvpBaiver yap Kal GAdws und evayels elvar Tovs iKwvTas Kat 
gudroBoroupévous. Why had the ¢uddoBoria this effect ? : 

2 A kylix from Vulci now in the Bibl. Nat. Paris; Arch. Zeit. 1853, Taf. u11., 
i.; figured and discussed by Mr Cook, C.R. xv. p. 274. 

‘ 3 y, 2, p. 675 rots 8 Odvprlos mdvra mpocOhKn TAY TOU Spbuov yeyove.. 065.0 
8 elwety bri Téa Kal povopaxlas dyiov mepl Illcay Hyero méxpe Povou Kal opayns Tw 
arropevev Kal UmomiumTovTwr. 

u 

: 
: 

eee 

sy 

ee ae. 

222. The Origin of the Olympic Games [ou 

I hesitate to mention that in ancient times there was also held at Pisa a 

contest consisting of a single combat, which ended only with the slaughter and 
death of the vanquished. — 
Plutarch rightly feels that this was not a form of athletic sport. 
This single combat is again reflected in myth as a wrestling match 
between Zeus and Kronos for the kingdom, from which some dated 
the institution of the games’. 

But although we accept the essence of Mr Cook’s theory of 
this single combat, we prefer to avoid some of the terms in which 
he describes its significance. The words ‘king, ‘ god,’ ‘incarnation 
of the tree-Zeus’ may all be somewhat misleading’. In the light 
of the preceding chapters, we see that a weather-magician like 
Oinomaos, though a late theology may see in him the temporary 
incarnation of a god, goes back to a time when there was no god 
to be incarnated: on the contrary the sky god is only a projected 
reflex of this human figure of the magician, who claims to com- 
mand the powers of the sky and to call down its rain and thunder 
by virtue of his own mana. We shall be on safer ground if we 
restrict ourselves to the simple primitive group, consisting of the 
weather-magician who wields the fertilising influences of Heaven, 
and the tree which embodies the powers of the Earth—the 
vegetation which springs up when the thunder shower has burst, 
and Heaven and Earth are married in the life-giving rain’. 

To this we must add the conception, with which Dr Frazer 
has made us familiar‘, of the limited period of office enjoyed by 
such a personage. The individual on whose vigour and excep- 
tional powers the fertility of earth depends, cannot be allowed to 
continue in office when his natural forces fall into decay. Hence 
the single combat, in which he has to make good his right to 
a renewed period or else to die at the hands of his more vigorous 
antagonist. 

Now, in some cases at least, this period of office was not 
limited merely by the duration of its holders’ natural strength : 

1 Paus. v. 7 Ala 5% of wer evradOa radatca Kal aire 7G Kpdvy rept rijs apxijs, ob 
d€ ém Kareipyacpevors drywvoberhoal pacw avrov. 

* See supra, p. 149. Mr Cook kindly tells me that in his forthcoming Zeus he 
has restated his view in terms not open to the above objections. 

% See supra, p. 176. ae 
4 Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 264. See also for the 

periodicity of the rule of Minos (r 179 évvéwpos Bact\eve) Prof. Murra Ri 
the Greek Epic?, 127 note. ae : eae a 

7 . 

The King as Year-God 
it bore some fixed relation to the year, and to the seasonal cycle 
of vegetable life in nature. In other words the term of office was 
a ‘year’—a term which, as we have seen (p. 189), may denote 
a lunar or solar year or a longer period of two, four, or eight solar 
years—a trieteris, penteteris, or ennaeteris. During this period, 
long or short as it might be, the tenant of the office represented, 
or rather was, the power which governed the rains of heaven and 
the fruits of earth; at the end of it he was either continued for 
a new eniautos, or violently dispossessed by a successor. Further, 
since the eniautos itself could be concretely conceived as a daamon 
carrying the horn of plenty!—the contents and fruits of the ‘year’ 
in the more abstract sense—we may think of the temporary ‘king’ 
as actually being the eniautos-daimon or fertility spirit of his 
‘year. When the year is fixed by the solar period, we get 
festivals of the type of the Roman Saturnalia or the Greek 
Kpova (with which the Saturnalia were regularly equated in 
ancient times), and the single combat appears as the driving 
out of winter or of the dying year by the vigorous young spirit 
of the New Year that is to come. It is as eniautos-daimon, not 
at first as ‘incarnate god’ or as king in the later political sense, 
that the representative of the fertility powers of nature dies at 
the hands of the New Year. In this combat we may see, in a 
word, the essential feature of a Saturnalian or Kronian festival. 

This view is supported by a curious feature, to which Mr Cook 
calls attention, in the vase-painting of Salmoneus figured above on 
p. 80. Salmoneus, the weather-king, arrayed, as we have seen, 
with the attributes of the Olympic victor, wears on his left ankle 
an unmistakable fetter. We may suspect, as Mr Cook remarks, 
that this is part of his disguise as a would-be god, and it shows 
that the god imitated is not Zeus, but the fettered Kronos, Kpovos 
medntns. Once a year, at the Saturnalia, the statue of Saturn 
slipped the woollen fetter with which it was bound throughout 
the rest of the year. : 

Hesiod tells us that, after Kronos had vomited forth the 
stone which he swallowed instead of his son, Zeus entering on his 

1 See supra, p. 186, and infra, p. 285. an 

2 Macrob. Sat. 1. vur. 5, Saturnum Apollodorus alligari ait per annum laneo 
vinculo et solvi ad diem sibi festum, id est mense hoc Decembri. For the fettered 
Kronos see Roscher, Lew., s.v. Kronos, col. 1467. Th 
3 Theog. 501. The lines are regarded by some editors as interpolated. For the 
release of Kronos see Hesiod, Erga, 169" (ed. Rz. 1902). 5 Wad, Okt 

224 The Origin of the Olympic Games 

reign, released from their bonds the brothers of Kronos, the Titans, 
who then gave Zeus the thunder and lightning. The unfettering 
of Kronos or Saturn appears to be a reflection of the custom 
at Saturnalian festivals of releasing prisoners and slaves—the 
mock subjects of the mock king of the feast, himself a prisoner 
or a slave. It may have symbolised a brief return of the older 
reign of Kronos, or the Golden Age, lasting over the intercalary 
days between two years of the reign of Zeus. At any rate in this 
design are united the attributes of the old Thunderer and 
Vegetation Spirit, of the Olympic victor, and of the unfettered 
Kronos—a combination which strongly confirms our suggestion 
that the Games were connected with a Saturnalian feast. 

Against the view here suggested an objection might be urged 
on the score of the date of the Olympic Festival. Saturnalian 
feasts fall usually in the neighbourhood of Christmas (the winter 
solstice) or of Easter (the vernal equinox) or at some season of 
carnival between these two dates. The Olympic Games, on the 
other hand, were held in the late summer. The earliest date 
on which they could fall was August 6; the latest, September 29.. 
Moreover they were not annual, but penteteric; that is to say 
they were celebrated once in every four years. How then can 
they be connected with Saturnalian rites ? 

The answer to this objection will throw light on the second 
factor in the myth of Pelops and Oinomaos—the capture of the 
bride, Hippodameia. 

(b) The Marriage of Pelops and Hippodameia. The date at 
which a celebration of the Games fell due was reckoned by 
a singularly complicated process, comparable with the mysterious 
method laid down by the Christian churches for the calculation 
of Easter; for, like Easter, the Games were a moveable feast, 
determined by astronomical considerations. The Scholiast on 
Pindar’ quotes from Comarchos what appears to be the official 
prescription for fixing the dates, copied possibly from some inscrip- 
tion in the Prytaneum at Olympia. 

1 Ad Ol. m1. 33 restored as follows by, Weniger, Das Hochfest des Zeus in 

Olympia, Klio, 1905, p. 1 ff.: Kwuapxos 6 ra mepl "Hdelwy ovyrdtas gyno otrws~ 
Mpwrov Mev obv mavTos meplodov cuveOnke mevrernplia’ dpxew (note the official jussive 

= a 
a ae 

i 
a 
Ff 
' 
: 

ae eS ee 8 ee ee ee | | : - y 
eo a : ils ee ee ¥ 

x 

; vit] Date of Olympic Festival 225 

The Games were held’ alternately in the Elean months 
Apollonios and Parthenios—probably the second and third months 
of the Elean year, if we may suppose that ‘this, like the Delphic 
and Attic years, began about midsummer. The interval between 
two celebrations was alternately 49 and 50 months. This fact 
shows that the festival cycle is really an octennial period (ennae- 
teris) divided into two halves—a period which reconciles the 
Hellenic moon year of 354 days with the solar year of 36541. Ac- 
cording to the document preserved by Comarchos, the reckoning 
is made in a peculiar way, which seems to call for explanation. It 
starts from the winter solstice. Take the first full moon after the 
solstice—this will fall on January (Thosuthias) 13?—and count 
8 months. This will give the full moon (Aug. 22, 776 = OL. 1) of 
Apollonios (Aug. 8—Sept. 5) as the central day for the first 
celebration. The next will fall four years later, after fifty months, 
at the full moon (Sept. 6, 772=OL. IL) of the month Parthenios 
(Aug. 23—Sept. 21). Forty-nine months later we shall be again at 
the full moon of Apollonios (Aug. 23, 768=Ot. 11), and so the 
cycle recurs. 

The singular plan of starting the whole reckoning from the 
winter solstice seems to indicate that the year at Elis, as at Delos 
and in Boeotia and probably also at Delphi and Athens, formerly 

_ began in winter; and this circumstance at once suggests that the 

single combat of the young and old eniautos-daimons may have 
originally belonged to the season of midwinter—the season at 
which the Roman Saturnalia were ultimately fixed’. 

infinitive) vouuqviay unvds ds Owovdids (2) év “HAcde dvoudgerar, wept dv rporal ov 
ylvovrat xeipepwal* Kal mpra ‘Ohbumia dyerar n! pvt: évds déovTos Siapepdvruy TH 
apg, Ta wev dpxouerys Tis dmdpas, Ta 2 Um’ adtov Tov dpxTodpov. re 5€ Kard wevrern- 
ploa dryerar 6 dywv, Kal abrds 6 ILlydapos waprupe?. Schol. ad Ol. v. 35 ylvera dé 6 
dy more pev i uO’ pnvadv, wore 6é dua v', BOev Kal more pev TH ’Amod\AwHlw unvl, 
more dé TO IlapOeviw émuredetrar.. The account in the text is based on Weniger’s 
admirable analysis in the above-mentioned article. 

1 The 114 days by which the lunar falls short of the solar year amount in 
8 years to 90 days, which were distributed over the period in 3 months intercalated 
in winter. The 8-year period thus96+3 months99=49 +50. 

2 The dates given exempli gratia are those for the first Olympiad, starting from 
Decr. 25, 777. See Weniger, loc. cit. 

3 This may also throw light on an unexplained obscurity in Pindar, who, 
describing the institution of the Games by Herakles, says (Ol. x. 49) that Herakles 
first gave its name to the Hill of Kronos, ‘which before was nameless, while 
Oinomaos ruled, and was wetted with much snow’—mpbobe yap vidvupvos, ds Oivduaos 
apxe, BpéxeTo TodNG vidddt. What can this possibly mean, if not that a tradition 
survived connecting the hill with some mid-winter festival? It suggests that 
the defeat of ‘Oinomaos’ and the termination of his ‘rule’ coincided with the 
introduction of the new octennial eniautos and the shift to August, 

H. 15 

ag i te 

226 ‘The Origin of the Olympic Games [ CH. 

A cycle such as this is obviously a late and very artificial 
invention, implying fairly exact astronomical knowledge. It is 
independent of the seasons and concerned solely with the motions of 
the sun and moon. There is no reason why it should begin at the 
same season as the pastoral or the agricultural year.. The most 
propitious moment would be the summer, as near as can con- 
veniently be managed? to the summer solstice, when the sun is at 
the height of his power. The moon too is taken at the full. The 
union of the full moon and the full-grown Sun is one form—the 
astronomical—of that sacred marriage.which in many parts of the 
ancient world was celebrated at midsummer. This union, we 
suggest, is symbolised by the marriage of Pelops and Hippodameia. 
The suggestion has the support of Dr Frazer’s high authority. 
He gives reason for holding that ‘under the names of Zeus and 
Hera the pair of Olympic victors’ (that is, the victor in the chariot- 
race and the girl who won the virgin’s race at the Heraea, which 
we shall discuss later) ‘would seem to have really personated the 
sun and moon, who were the true heavenly bridegroom and bride 
of the ancient octennial festival®.’ 

Thus the second factor under consideration—the marriage of 
Pelops and Hippodameia—is explained. It was symbolised, as we 
saw, by the flight of bride and bridegroom in the same chariot. 
As such it appears in the design (Fig. 58) of a red-figured 
amphora* with twisted handles. Hippodameia stands erect, 

1 Some mention will be made later (p. 230) of the difficulties which seem to 
have forced the founders of the cycle to choose just this part of the summer. The 
month Apollonios corresponded with the Delphic Bukatios (Pythian Games) and 
the Laconian Karneios (festival of the Karneia). It was clearly convenient to fix 
these greater festivals at a time when the labours of harvest were well over and 

agricultural work was at a standstill. Earlier writers, for instance Bo 
eeler, believed that the Games were held at the first full moon after 7 me 
solstice. 

? See Part 111. of the Golden Bough, ed. 3, p. 91. Dr Frazer arrived at this 
conclusion some years ago, and, after hearing that I had reached it also kindly 
allowed me to see the proofs from which the above sentence is quoted. T believe 
the explanation was first suggested to me by one of Mr A. B. Cook’s articles on 
CR ea pee in Folk-Lore xv. p. 377 ff. 

3 Now in the Museo Pubblico at Arezzo. First published i i i 
(vi. 3) of the German Archaeological Institute. Thai glad = mas 
Furtwingler in commenting on this vase has pointed out that the scene here and 
on the other Oinomaos vases is a rape rather than a race. He writes (Griechische 
Vasenmaleret, Serie 11. Taf. 67, Text p. 34) ‘Dass die Fahrten der Freier der Hippo- 
dameia und damit die des Pelops urspriinglich nicht als Wettrennen sondern als 
Entfiihrung, als Brautraub gemeint und Oinomaos der Verfolger war, dies ist in 
den verschiedenen Sagenvarianten, und in den Kunstdenkmilern immer deutlich 
geblieben.’ Prof. Furtwingler makes the interesting suggestion that this vase is 
from the hand of the same master as the famous Talos vase in Ruvo, 

vir] Marriage of Sun and Moon 227 

looking much more like a goddess than a ravished bride. The 
olive trees and the two doves flying close together to perch on one 
of them seem to take us back to the trees and birds of the 
marriage of Sky and Earth on the Hagia Triada sarcophagos?. 
The chariot of Pelops is the four-horsed chariot of the sun 
which Erichthonios the mythical founder of the Panathenaea aid 
imitated’. That the Sun and Moon should drive in the same 
chariot may seem strange, since of course they never rise together 
in the same quarter of the sky. But we have already seen them 

Ppeez 
i 
— 

eel else ee 

Fig. 58. 

so represented on the Louvre krater (Fig. 51)*; and the same 
conjunction appears in literature. At the marriage of Kapaneus, 
Helios and Selene drove their chariot together over the sky* At 
the two ends of the pedestal of the great statue of Zeus at 

1 Supra, p. 176. 
2 Verg. Georg. 1. 113 Primus Erichthonius currus et quatuor ausus | iungere 

equos. Eratosth. catast. 13 rj Tod ‘HMou dvriupmov éroujoaro duppelay. Hyg. Astr. 
u. 13 Heniochus, Erichthonium...quem Jupiter, cum vidisset primum inter 
homines equos quadrigis iunxisse, admiratus est ingenium hominis ad Solis inventa 
accessisse, quod is princeps quadrigis inter deos est usus. Others identified the 
celestial Charioteer with Myrtilus, Hyg. <bid. 

3 Compare also the coin of Gellia, figured in Roscher, Lez., s.v. Mars, col. 2410, 
which shows Mars as a warrior and Nerine—the Roman Sun or Year God with his 
bride—standing in a quadriga. 

4 Hur. Suppl. 990 tl péyyos, Thy’ aiyhav 

édcppeverov “AXtos 

Dedrdva te kar aldépa 

+raurdd? wv’ dkvdda viupat... 
My attention was drawn to this passage by Prof. Murray. 

15—2 

228 The Origin of the Olympic Games [ OH. 

Olympia, the sun drove in his chariot and the moon rode her 
horse: she is Hippodameia, the horse-rider1. 

The chariot-drive of Pelops and Hippodameia, itself a flight 
rather than a race, was however connected by tradition with the 
historic chariot-races at Olympia. We have evidence too that the 
chariot-races of the Roman circus were associated with the courses 
of the heavenly bodies. 

Cassiodorus?’, a sixth century writer, tells us that the Roman 
Circus represented the change of seasons, and the courses of the 
Sun and Moon. The two-horse chariot-race represented the 
course of the moon, the four-horse chariot-race that of the sun. 

Lydus* mentions that the Circus Maximus at Rome contained 
altars of the planet gods. Below the pyramid of the Sun stood 
altars of the Moon, Mercury and Venus; above it, altars of Saturn, 
Jupiter, and Mars. Tertullian‘ says that the whole circus was 
dedicated to the Sun. 

So, at Olympia itself, the twelve rounds of the chariot-race 
—dwdexayvaymros as Pindar® calls it—may well have represented 
the course of the Sun through the twelve signs. In the hippo- 
drome the pillar which marked the starting-point had beside it an 
altar of the Heavenly Twins’. At the starting-point of the foot-_ 
races in the Stadium stood the tomb of Endymion, the sinking 
Sun who married Selene the Moon’. The most cautious scholars 
accept Boeckh’s view that the fifty daughters of this marriage are 
the fifty moon months of the Olympiad. 

We have thus disentangled two elements in the complex story 
of Pelops and Oinomaos, as told by Pindar. The marriage of the 
sun and moon must clearly be coeval with the reconstitution of the 
Games ‘on a grander scale’ associated with ‘Pelops’; and pre- 
sumably this reconstitution meant the reform of the calendar by 

2 Paus, v.11. 8. Stone images of the Sun with rays and the Moon with horns 
stood in the market-place of Elis, Paus. vr. 24. 6. 

? Var. Ep. iii. 51 Biga quasi lunae, quadriga solis imitatione reperta est... 
Obeliscorum quoque prolixitates ad caeli altitudinem sublevantur; sed potior soli 
inferior lunae dicatus est. < 

3 De mensibus 1, pp. 4 and 12. 

, Ps hae 8 Circus oe principaliter consecratur, cuius aedes in medio spatio 
et elligies de fastigio aedis emicat...quadrigas Soli, bigas Lu 
Roscher, Lew., s.v. Mondgéttin, col. 3189, z rere ee 
Ohm. 50s - 
6 Pind. Ol. m1. 36. Paus. v. 15. 7 Paus. vi. 20, 9. 

Sear a 

vo] The Heraea 229 

the introduction of the octennial period which is symbolised by 
this particular form of the sacred marriage. The case of the 
Panathenaea, deliberately modelled on the Olympic Festival, is 
precisely similar. The Great Panathenaea of Peisistratos were 
penteteric; but they were only an enlargement of the ancient 
Lesser Panathenaea, founded by Erichthonios, which were annual. 
In the same way at Olympia itself, as we shall see (p. 231), the 
Heraea were probably at first annual, and later came to be 
celebrated with especial grandeur and additional rites in every 
fourth year. We may be fairly sure that the Olympic Games 
themselves had similarly been at first an annual feast; and there 
1s no reason to suppose that this annual feast was held in the late 
summer, since that date is due solely to the conjunction of sun 
and moon. 

Before we pass on to the Elean tradition of the origin of the 
Games, we must discuss the, probably older, Women’s Games, 
which seem to date from the earlier system of time-reckoning by 
the moon. 

THe HERAEA. 

We have seen that the Olympic festival was a moveable feast, 
and occurred alternately in Apollonios and Parthenios, which were 
probably the second and third months of the Elean year. This 
variation of the month is a strange and inconvenient arrangement. 
Moreover it is unique. The Pythia also were held at intervals of 
50 and 49 months, but the incidence of the intercalated months of 
the octennial period was so arranged that the festival itself always 
fell in the same month (Bukatios) of the Delphic year. In the 
same way the Panathenaea, though penteteric, always fell in 
Hekatombaion. There must have been some very strong reason 
for the troublesome variation of months in the sole case of the 
most important of panhellenic gatherings. 

Weniger finds the reason in the existence of an older im- 
movable festival at the very season at which the reconstituted 
Games were to be fixed. Every fourth year a college called the 
Sixteen Women wove a robe for Hera and held games called the 

1 The following argument as to the month of the festival and its relation to the 
Heraea is taken from the penetrating analysis of Weniger, loc. cit., supra, p. 224, 

q 

ee 

230 The Origin of the Olympic Games (OH. 

Heraea*. The games consisted of a race between virgins®, who 
ran in order of age, the youngest first, and the eldest last. The 
course was the Olympic stadium, less about one-sixth of its length 
(i.e. 500 instead of 600 Olympic feet). The winners received 
crowns of olive and a share of the cow sacrificed to Hera. ‘They 
trace the origin of the games of the virgins, like those of the men, 
to antiquity, saying that Hippodameia, out of gratitude to Hera 
for her marriage with Pelops, assembled the Sixteen Women, 
and along with them arranged the Heraean games for the 
first time.’ 

It is highly probable that these games of virgins (Parthenia) 
gave its name to the month Parthenios, and were in honour of 
Hera Parthenos—Hera, whose virginity was perpetually renewed 
after her sacred marriage with Zeus. It is also probable that 
they were held at the new moon, that is, on the first day of 
Parthenios*. Further, if these games gave the month its name, 
in that month they must always have fallen. Thus the octennial 
period of the Heraea is of the usual straightforward type, which 
keeps always to the same month. The natural inference is that 
the Heraea were first in the field, and that, when the men’s games 
were fixed at the same season, it was necessary to avoid this older 
fixed festival. At the same time, if the games of Zeus were 
allowed to be established regularly in the middle of the previous 
month Apollonios, it was obvious that the Heraea would sink into 
a mere appendage. Zeus, on the other hand, was not inclined to 
yield permanent precedence to Hera. The deadlock was solved by 
a characteristic compromise. The octennial period for the Games 
of Zeus was so arranged that in alternate Olympiads they should 
fall fourteen days before, and fourteen days after, the Heraea 
(on Apollonios 14/15 and Parthenios 14/15). By this device of 
priestly ingenuity the honour of both divinities was satisfied, and 

so the inconvenient variation of months for the Olympic festival is 
explained. 

1 Paus. v. 16. 2. 

® The winners were allowed to dedicate statues of themselves (Paus. v. 16. 3). 
The girl-runner in the Vatican is probably one of these votive statues. Beside the 
girl, in this marble copy of the bronze original, is a palm branch on a stump as 
symbol of victory. 2 

* Cf. Lydus, de mens. ur. 10 af Kadévdar “Hpas éopriy érivyyavov, rouréort Dedjvys. 
The Heraea cannot in any case have fallen between the 10th and 16th of Parthenios 
when the men’s games were held in alternate Olympiads. 3 

ere eee ee ee ee ETN ie Fee 
| : ; i | 

vit] The Foot-race for the Bride 231 

The Heraea, then, were probably older than the reconstituted 
Olympia; and if they gave its name to the month Parthenios, 
they must have been annual before they were octennial or 
penteteric. They carry us back to the old lunar year, which 
preceded the combined sun-and-moon penteteris. Here again, as 
at Athens (p. 191), we find the moon associated with the olive 
tree; she has also her horned cow, a portion of whose flesh fell to 
the victor in the virgin’s race. The eating of this portion and the 
wearing of the olive crown symbolised that the victorious virgin 
was, in an especial sense, identified with the moon. She became 
the Hippodameia of her year’, and the chosen bride of the sacred 
marriage. It was not, at first, that she impersonated Hera 
3 Parthenos?: on the contrary, Hera Parthenos is the divinised 
projection and reflex of the Moon-maiden, the queen of the 
4 2 virgins that bore her company and, in all probability, went down 
é to the river Parthenias, a tributary of the Alpheus, to draw the 
> water for her nuptial bath* 

THE FOOT-RACE FOR THE BRIDE. 

4 If the moon-bride was chosen by a foot-race, so also, it would 
, seem, was the sun-bridegroom. We have already seen that the 
fifty daughters whom the moon bore to Endymion were the fifty 
: 1 The accusation against Oinomaos of incest with his daughter Hippodameia 
fa simply means that Hippodameia was the title of his ‘wife’ and also of her 

successor, the wife of his successor, represented in myth as his ‘daughter.’ 
a: The Sixteen Women ‘ get up two choruses’ (xédpous dvo loraor), one for Physcoa, 
- and one for Hippodameia. Weniger, loc. cit., holds that this marks the union 
: of two colleges—the Thyiads of Elis who honoured Physcoa and Dionysus, and 
a college in Pisatis who worshipped Hera and Hippodameia. It looks as if Oinomaos 
. and Hippodameia were the Olympian doubles of Dionysus and Physcoa. For the 
equation Oinomaos = Dionysus cf. Athenaeus x. 426 ¥ who cites Nicochares, 
Amymone (Kock 1. 770) Oivduaos obros xatpe mévre kal dvo (the mixture of two parts 
wine with five water) and Eupolis, Aix (Kock 1. 260), Ardvuce xatpe: ua) Te mévre 
cat 600. Gruppe, Gr. Myth. u. Rel. 1. 150, notes that Physcoa and Dionysus were 
worshipped at Oinoe (north of Olympia) and connects the name Oinomaos with 
Oinoe. 

2 Dr Frazer, G. B.3, Part mz. p. 91, writes: ‘If the olive-crowned victor in the 
men’s race at Olympia represented Zeus, it becomes probable that the olive-crowned 
victor in the girls’ race, which was held every fourth year in honour of Hera 
represented in like manner the god’s wife....But under the names of Zeus and Hera 
the pair of Olympic victors would seem to have really personated the Sun and 
Moon, who were the true heavenly bridegroom and bride of the ancient octennial 
festival.’ 

3 Parthenias (Strabo vit. 357) or Parthenia, beside which was the graye of the 
mares (Parthenia and Eripha) of Marmax, first of Hippodameia’s suitors (Paus. vi. 
21. 7). Hesych. Hpecides- xépar ai Novrpa Koulfovoat 7h "“Hpg. Etym. Mag. p. 436 
"Hpeoides* ai i€pecac ris év “Apyet "Hpas: dad ris” Hpas: 7} mapa Tov aptow pédovTa, 
dpvalrides, al dpvdmevar Td, Nourpd. Cf. Paus. 1, 17.1; Weniger, loc. cit. 

Me 
q 

232 The Origin of the Olympic Games ___[cu. 

moon months of the penteteris, and we are also told of Endymion, 

\ that he set his sons to race at Olympia for the kingdom’. This is 

a variant of the race of suitors for the hand of the princess, which 
in other similar stories carries the kingdom with it. 

Now we know of another family of fifty daughters whose hands 
were disposed of by competition in a foot-race—the Danaids. In 
the Ninth Pythian Pindar tells how the Libyan king Antaeus, 
desiring to compass a famous marriage for his daughter, followed 
the example of Danaus in Argos, who 
contrived for the forty and eight maidens a wedding most swift, before 
midday should be upon them. He presently made the whole company stand 
at the goal of the race-course and bade determine by a foot-race which 
maiden each hero should have, of all that came to be his sons-in-law. 
But, whereas Antaeus offered only one daughter as the prize for 
one out of many suitors, Danaus offered a bunch of forty-eight ; 
and another authority lets out the truth that some, if not all, 
of these eight and forty got no husbands. : 

Pausanias* telling how Icarius set the wooers of Penelope to 
run the race in which of course Odysseus was successful, adds that 
Icarius (like Antaeus) imitated Danaus, who set the suitors to run 
for his daughters. The first man home had first choice of a 
Danaid, the second, the second choice, and so on. ‘The daughters . 
that were left had to wait till other wooers came and had run 
another race. Now in Pindar’s version forty-eight Danaids are 
offered. Why this number? Because, we are told, two were 
already married—Hypermnestra and Amymone. Who are the 
forty-eight who cannot get husbands ? 

If the fifty daughters of Danaus are doubles of the fifty 
daughters of Endymion and the Moon, the answer is clear. The 
two who are married must be the first and last months of the 
penteteric cycle—the moons who are paired in sacred marriage 
with the midsummer sun, 

The Danaids are also well-maidens, with functions, perhaps, 
like those of the Athenian Dew-Carriers (p. 173). To the moon- 
bride may have fallen the duty of bringing water for rain-charms, 

PPP ase vowles: acre Os de 

° Note that Pindar says (v. 113) the race was to be run ‘ before midday shou 
overtake them’ (mply Késov duap édeiv); before, that is to say, the sun at his heceht 
of noon or of midsummer carries off the one who is married. It may be observed 
that 48=16+16+16; does this account for the number of the Sixteen Women— 
sixteen for each of the remaining three years of the penteteris ? 

“ 

RO ee eee ae sn 

ee ie ae 

ee ee 

2 vit] 

The Foot-race for the Bride 233 

while the sun-bridegroom was charged with the maintenance of 
the solar fire}, 

Now, the Elean antiquaries said that for the first thirteen 
Olympiads from the beginning of the unbroken tradition, the only 
competition was the foot-race%. This is the race which we have 
seen reflected in myth as the race for the kingdom and the hand 
of the princess. In literal fact it seems to have been a contest to 
determine who should represent the male partner in the sacred 
marriage with the victor of the virgin’s race. It has already been ! 
suggested that this personage could be regarded as, in a certain 
sense, the daimon of his ‘year, the ‘king’ for a limited period, 
on whom the rains of heaven and the fruits of earth would 
depend. 

Modern analogies support this view of the significance of the 
foot-race. ‘Games, says Mr Chambers’, ‘were a feature of 
seasonal, no less than of funeral feasts....A bit of wrestling or 
a bout of quarter-staff is still de rigueur at many a wake or rush- 
bearing, while in parts of Germany the winner of a race or of a 
shooting-match at the popinjay is entitled to light the festival 
fire, or to hold the desired office of May-King.’ 

The suggestion is further confirmed by an interesting ancient 

-analogy. The Laconian Karneia were celebrated in the month 

Karneios, which corresponds to the Elean Apollonios. Their date, 
moreover, like that of the Olympian festival, with which they 
sometimes coincided‘, seems to have been fixed with reference 

1 Cf. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 1.122. In modern agricultural festivals 
‘water is thrown on the fields and on the plough, while the worshippers them- 
selves, or a representative chosen from among them, are sprinkled or immersed. 
To this practice many survivals bear evidence; the virtues persistently ascribed to 
dew gathered on May morning, the ceremonial bathing of women annually or in 
times of drought with the expressed purpose of bringing fruitfulness on man or 
beast or crop, the ‘‘ ducking” customs...,’ etc. The interpretation of the Danaids 
as rain-makers is due to Mr A. B. Cook and will be discussed by him in his forth- 
coming book Zeus. 

2 Paus. v. 8. 6. Cf. Plut. Symp. Qu. v. 2. 675 c (above, p. 221). : 

3 The Mediaeval Stage, 1.148. Mr Chambers refers to Frazer, G. B.? 1. 217; 
mm. 258. Cf. Mannhardt, Ant. Wald- und Feldkulte, p. 254, ‘Jene deutschen 
Maitags- und Ernteumginge nehmen mehrfach auch die Form eines Wettlaufs an, 
bei welchem entweder die letzte, den Korndémon darstellende Garbe oder der 
Maibaum das Ziel ist, oder durch welchen die Rollen bei dem Umgangye mit dem 
Laubmann, Pfingstbutz u.s.w. entschieden werden. Der Wettlauf bildet den ersten 
Akt, die Prozession mit dem durch den Sieger in demselben dargestellten Vege- 
tationsdamon den zweiten Akt der Festbegehungen.’ 

4 For instance in the year 480 B.c., Herod. vu. 206; vit. 72. 

234 The Origin of the Olympic Games [ CH. 

to the full moon. The festival was conducted by a college of 
Karneatai, young, unmarried men, who were chosen, five from 
each tribe (?), and held office for four years’—a period which 
seems to indicate that this annual festival was held with especial 
splendour once in each penteteris. 

The rite which specially concerns us is the race of the 
Staphylodromoi*. These were young men, chosen from among 
the Karneatai; their title was derived from the clustered vine- 
branches which they carried in their hands. One of their number 
decked himself with garlands and ran, ‘ praying for a blessing on 
the city’; the rest pursued him. If he was overtaken, it was 
supposed to bring good luck; if not, the reverse. 

The race here takes a different form from those we have been 
concerned with—probably an older form+, which did not degenerate 
into a mere athletic competition. The young man, decked with 
garlands and perhaps also disguised with the skin of a beast so as 
to be the ‘mumming representative of a daimon*, embodies the 
luck of the year, which will be captured or lost, according as 
the youth is overtaken or escapes. His connection with the fruits 
of the year is marked by the vine-clusters; and it does not 
surprise us to find that at Cyrene the festival of Apollo Karneios 
was celebrated with the slaughter of many bulls, and that his 
altars were decorated ‘in spring with all the flowers the Horae 
bring when the west wind blows laden with dew, and in winter 

1 Kur. Alk, 448, 

Zmdpra KiKdos avixa Kapvelou mepuitocerar wpas 

bnvos, detpouévas mavwdxou ceddvas. 
catia Karneia see 8. Wide, Lakonische Kulte, p. 73 ff., Nilsson, Gr. Feste, 
p. 118 ff, 

» Hesych. xapvedras* oi dyapou KekAnpwuevor 5€ emt Tv 700 Kapvetov Nevroupytav * 
mévTe 0€ ap’ Exdorns < pudjs Castellanus> éml TeTpaetlay éhecrobpyouv. 

3 Bekk. Anecd. 1. p. 305 oTapvhodpbuoe* Kara thy Tov Kapvetov €opriy oréupard, 
Tis mepiOeuevos tpéxer émevxduevds Te TH mddeu XpnoTov, émduKxovor bé adbtdv véor, 
orapv\odpbuo Kadovmevor. Kal édv jev kaTardBwor abrov, dyabdv te rpocdoxOow Kara 
Ta emix wpa TH TorEL, ef Oé uh, TowvavTlov. The Oschophoria at Athens was a similar 
festival, see Athenaeus x1. 62, p. 496. It began with a race of epheboi carrying 
doxo. and they duyuiAd\Gvro mpds adAHdovs dpdum. The victor (6 xpérepos) went in 
pregsiion with his band, cwudger werd xopod. For the Oschophoria see infra, 
p- ‘ 

* Compare the Regifugium on Feb. 24, four days from the end of the old Roman 
year, discussed by Dr Frazer (G.B.? Part 1. vol. ii. pp. 308—312), who compares 
this ‘flight’ to races for the kingdom. 

> Hesych. oreupariatoy* dixnddv re ev €0pTH Tousedov 
Alkndov is glossed as ddcpua, 
See S. Wide, loc. cit. 

: (coda. Touméwv) daluovos. 
Minua, eldwrov, Sdiov, etc.; dexnrLKral are mummers. 

7 

4 vit | 

The Foot-race of the Kouretes , 235 

with the sweet crocus’ The slain bulls were eaten at a dais or 
eranos’. The Karneia are an instructive instance, because they 
show us the complete series: first the animal—xdpvos means 
a ram; next the human youth with animal disguise; then 
the daimon Karneios, or Kranios Stemmatios*; finally the 
Olympian Apollo, surnamed Karneios and Dromaios to remind 
him that he had taken the place of a ram-racer. 

THE FOOT-RACE OF THE KOURETES. 

We are now in a position to interpret the Elean legend of 
the origin of the Games—a legend which has been persistently 
rejected, merely because the facts which have been thrown into 
relief in the preceding chapters of this book were unknown or not 
understood 4. 

With regard to the Olympic games, the Elean antiquaries say that 
Kronos first reigned in Heaven, and that a temple was made for him by the 
men of that age, who were named the Golden Race; that when Zeus was 
born, Rhea committed the safe-keeping of the child to the Idaean Daktyls or 
Kouretes, as they are also called ; that the Daktyls came from Ida in Crete, 
and their names were Herakles, Paeonaeus, Epimedes, Jasios, and Idas ; and 
that in sport Herakles, the eldest, set his brethren to run a race, and crowned 
the victor with a branch of wild olive, of which they had such an abundance 
that they slept on heaps of its fresh green leaves?. 

After what has gone before, no lengthy comment is needed. 
The Games are traced back to an original foot-race, held by young 
men, Kouretes, from Crete’, presumably analogous to the young, 
unmarried Karneatai of Sparta. The race, we may suppose, deter- 
mined who should be the Kouros—the Greatest Kouros—of his 
year. The winner received, not a prize of commercial value such 

1 Kallim. in Apoll. 77 ff. ; 

2 Pind. Pyth. v. 77 modvOurov Epavov eve dvadetEapévay,” AmodXov, Ted, Kapvyu’, ev 
daitl ceBigouev Kupdvas dyaxtimévay modu. d 

3 Paus. m1. 20. 9, Kranios Stemmatios had a temenos on the road from Arcadia, 
to Sparta. ; ; 

4 The Elean tradition reported by Pausanias is not to be despised; for it must 
be remembered that its natural custodians, the two priestly houses of the Iamidae 
and Klytiadae, held office at Olympia with unbroken continuity down to the third 
century a.p. (cf. Weniger, Der heilige Olbaum in Olympia, Weimar, 1895, p. 2). 

5 Paus. v. 7. 6. ; i 

6 Plato, Laws, 625: Crete is uneven and specially suited to foot-racing. The 
social importance of foot-races is marked at Gortyn, where the ephebi not yet 
admitted to full rights were called dmddpoyor, dua 7d wndérw TaY Koww Spduwr 
peréxew (Ar. Byz.); whereas dpouets possessed rights of mature years, see Busolt, 
Gr. Gesch. 1.344. At the Panathenaea there was a ‘long foot-race’ (uaxpos dpdjmos) 
of the ephebi from the altar of Eros, where they lighted torches ; the mupd of the 
Goddess’ victims was lighted with the victor’s torch, Schol. ad Plat. Phaedr, 2315. 
Philostratus, +. yuuv. 5, describes the stadion race at Olympia as a race for the 
honour of lighting the fire on the altar. 

236 The Origin of the Olympic Games [CH. 

as were usual in funeral games, but a symbol of his office as 
vegetation-daimon—the branch of the sacred tree. ‘This branch 
reminds us of the golden bough, and perhaps, links the foot-race 
of the young men to the contest between the young and the old 
king. For in the famous wood at Nemi, it was he who succeeded 
in tearing a bough from the sacred tree, who had a right to con- 
_ tend in single combat with the King of the Wood for succession 
| to his office?. 

It is possible that the sacred tree from which the victor’s 
wreath or branch was plucked was not at first the olive-tree, which 
may have belonged rather to the moon and the virgin victor of 
the Heraea. One curious tradition points to another fruit-tree— 
the apple. Phlegon of Tralles?, a contemporary of Pausanias, tells 
how in the sixth Olympiad, Iphitus consulted the Delphic oracle 
as to how the victors should be crowned. The God told him not 
to make the fruit of the apple the prize of victory, but to take the 
wild olive, ‘now wreathed in the light web of the spider.’ Iphitus 
found among the many wild olives of the temenos one which was 
covered with spider’s webs, and he built a wall round it. The first 
victor to be crowned with olive was Daikles of Messene, who won 
the footrace in the seventh Olympiad. If this tradition has any 
truth in it, we may suppose that the original apple-bough was 
superseded by the olive borrowed from the moon-goddess’, possibly 
when the race of the young men was combined with that of the 
virgins, at the introduction of the sun-and-moon calendar, and 
the men’s games were assimilated as closely as possible to the 
women’s, 

Even before it became the moon-tree, the holy olive probably 
belonged to Earth. We have seen how the Kouretes ‘slept on 
heaps of its fresh green leaves.’ They were like the Selloi of 
Dodona who slept upon the ground (yapuaedvar), in order that 

1 Servius ad Zin. vi. 136 Dabatur autem fugitivis potestas ut si quis exinde 
ramum potuisset auferre, monomachia cum fugitivo templi sacerdote dimicaret. 
? F.H.G. ut. p. 604 
“Igire, updevov Kaprov wh Ons éml vik, 
ada Tov aypiov duqirlOe Kapm@wdn €davov, 
ds viv dupéverac Nerrotow tddopuac apdxvns. 
® According to the legend told in Pind. Ol. 11. Herakles went to the land of the 
Hyperboreans to fetch the wild olive. On his former visit, in quest of the golden- 
horned hind, he was welcomed there, not by Apollo, but by Artemis, the horse- 

rider (im7oaéa, cf. Hippodameia), and then it was that he ‘stood and marvelled at 
the trees.’ 

Sr ee 

vir] The Olive-branch 237 

in their dreams they might draw oracular wisdom from the Earth}. 

Olympia also had its Earth oracle and its cult of Demeter 
Chamyne?, whose priestess sat enthroned in a place of honour and 
witnessed the Games of Zeus. 

The theory, of course, presupposes that the Olympic Games, 
hike the Karneia, the Panathenaea, the Heraea, and others, were 
annual before they were penteteric; for the penteteris, as we have 
remarked, is an astronomical cycle independent of the yearly 
upspringing and decay of vegetation’. The supposition is very 
probable, when we consider the late and artificial character of 
periods which combine the sun calendar with the older reckoning 
by the moon. In discussing that combination we agreed with 
Dr Frazer that from its introduction the Olympic victor repre- 
sented the Sun united in marriage with the Moon. Even if there 
were no further evidence, it would still be a reasonable conjecture 
that in earlier days, the sacred marriage, here as elsewhere, had 
been an annual feast, and its protagonists instead of being related 
to the celestial bridegroom and bride, had embodied the powers 
of fertility in a more primitive form directly associated with the 
seasonal life of nature. If that is so, the new penteteric festival in 
the late summer may have attracted to itself features, such as the 
single combat and the foot-race for the olive branch, from feasts 

_ which under the older systems of time-reckoning would naturally 

belong to winter or to spring. We are therefore untouched by 
objections based on the time of year of the historic Games—a 
time fixed solely with reference to the Sun and Moon. We are at 
liberty to suppose that the winner of the foot-race represented the 
fertility-daimon, before he represented the Sun. As one mode of 
time-reckoning supersedes another, so in the sphere of religion 
emphasis is successively laid on Earth, with her changing seasons 
and meteoric phenomena, on the Moon, and on the Sun. This 
line of enquiry may set at rest many old-standing controversies. 

1 Hom, Il. xvi. 234. This analogy is pointed out by Weniger, Der heilige 
Olbaum, p. 19. ; Nahe 

* Gruppe, Gr. Myth. u. Rel. 1. 142, calls attention to the probable identity 
of Iasios, one of the Idaean Daktyls called the brothers of Herakles in the Elean 
legend, with Iasion who lay with Demeter on the ground (Hes. Theog. 969, 
Od. y. 125). 

* We here welcome the support of Professor Ridgeway, who, as reported in the 
Athenaeum, May 20, 1911, ‘ pointed out that the astronomical cycles, such as the 
Metonic, were late, and may have come in with the remaking of the games, which 
must have existed long before z.c. 776 at Olympia.’ 

—_———— 

238 The Origin of the Olympic Games 

Take such a divinity as Osiris, who began life as a vegetation- 
spirit, manifest in trees or in the corn. Ancient theologians and 
modern students have again and again upheld or refuted the 
propositions that ‘Osiris is the Moon, ‘ Osiris is the Sun, or that 
he is neither. The truth will, we believe, prove to be more 
complex. These vegetation-spirits or Year Gods successively take 
on moon and sun attributes, when the lunar calendar supersedes 
the agricultural, and again when the lunar calendar is first com- 
bined with, then superseded by, the solar. There is no simple 
answer to the question: ‘Is Osiris the Moon, or is he the Sun ?’ 
He began as neither, and has passed through both phases. 

As each new stage succeeds, the older festivals are not abolished. 
Some are adapted, with necessary shifts to a different season of 
the year. Others survive in a degenerate form, as holidays. So, 
and so only, can we account for the extraordinary duplication of 
festivals in ancient calendars, and for the occurrence, at different 
times of the year and attached to different divinities, of rites which 
are obviously identical in content. 

If we may assume the same succession of calendars at Olympia, 
the several stages would correspond to the succession we have 
made out for the sacred Tree. In the earliest, seasonal or agri- 
cultural, stage the olive belonged to Earth, to Demeter Chamyne. 
Then it passed to Hera the moon-goddess and became the prize 
of the moon-virgin’s race. Finally, when sun and moon were 
united in the ennaeteris, the olive-branch supplanted the original 
apple-bough, and became the prize also for the foot-race of the 
Sun-bridegroom. 

THE MoTHER AND CHILD AND KoURETES AT OLYMPIA. 

Further evidence is not wanting in support of the tradition 
at Olympia of the Idaean Daktyls or Kouretes, to whose foot-race 
for the olive-branch the Games were traced back. This tradition 
is firmly rooted in the monuments and cults of Olympia. The 
legend, as we have seen, says that ‘when Zeus was born, Rhea 
committed the safe-keeping of the child to the Idaean Daktyls 
or Kouretes, who came from Ida in Crete” Pindar’ himself is 

TS Olawealed Zwrnp dpuvepes Let, Kpévidv re valwy Ndgov 
TULay T Andgedy evp) péovra "ldatsy re ceuvdv dvrpov. 
se ies ad v. 42 oe év "Hdcdt Anurrpros 6 ZKnyros...iepdv Ards. eveoe 
voulfovres un Tov év”"HNde ywplwy adrdoy pweuvAocOar bred hey” i] 
eh addi p Meu h TEAABov uvynmovedte "ldns THs 

[CH. 

} vo] | Sosipolis 239 

our witness that on the hill of Kronos Olympia had a Cave which 
was called Idaean, manifestly because it was a counterpart of the 
Cave of the Birthplace on Cretan Ida. To this Cave the legend 
of the xovpotpodiéa belongs. We must look for it among a small 
group of sanctuaries, whose high antiquity is marked, among other 
things, by their close neighbourhood to the foot of the sacred hill 
of Kronos. The later shrines and precincts of Pelops and the 
Olympian Father Zeus had to find room further out towards 
the river. 

\ 

LE HILL OF KRONOS 
SES 
(Ge A SEstyy, % 2. 
= iS ZY, 2 a suige de e 
SAW MG 2 > Se ee 2 ¢ 
2 SS AwwyyZZG 2 x UW 4g ae inp ay 
RNY 2= SN"! te% es Zan us \ tn’ aie 
SS MWS Qe SF Paco Sling Gali AN yee ne 
SiN S a i “a BE Qe 2 

SR M7 8 

- AS 
i te ote x 4 EGNOS ws Gy Fw e 2 

N\ 
SR 

North Terrace Wall 

Temple of Zeus 

Fie. 59. 

In this group (Figs. 59 and 60) we find, first, the Metroon, 
marking the site of a very ancient cult of the Mother Goddess; 
and close by it an altar of the Kouretes.. Right on the skirts of 
the hill, behind the line of the later treasuries, stood a small 
shrine of the Mother and Infant—Eileithyia and Sosipolis. This 
little temple moreover did not stand clear of the hillside ; the 
back wall appears to have been actually engaged in it. This 
circumstance, observed by Dorpfeld, has led to the identification 

1 Paus, v. 8. 1. 2 Paus. vi. 20. 2. 

ae nn a eee ere 

240 The Origin of the Olympic Games [CH. 

of the shrine with the Idaean Cave, and of ‘Zeus the Saviour, 
who as Pindar says honoured it, with the Saviour of the City, 
Sosipolis*. 

So we find among the most ancient monuments of the Altis 
a complex of shrines dedicated to the Mother and Child, and 
the attendant Kouretes—a group whose significance has already 
been made clear. It represents the three essential factors of a 
matrilinear society®. 

The ritual of this shrine of Eileithyia and Sosipolis was simple‘. 
The priestess, an old woman annually chosen, brought water to 
wash the infant god, and set out barley cakes kneaded with honey. 
These honey-cakes were food for the serpent—the animal form 

Hieron 
Eileithyia. 

Fic. 60. 

of the god. For legend said that once, when the Arcadians in- 
vaded Elis, the baby Sosipolis was set naked before the Elean 
army; and he changed into a snake and the Arcadians ran away. 
Then the snake vanished into the earth, no doubt at the very 
spot where this cave-shrine was afterwards built. 

Only the aged priestess might enter the inner shrine. Outside, 
the maids and matrons waited, singing a hymn, and offering 
incense of all sorts, but with no libations of wine. These offerings— 
incense and wineless libations—are, as we know, characteristic of 

* See Carl Robert, Sosipolis in Olympia, Mitth. d. Arch. Inst. Athen Abth 
xvi, 1893, p. 37 ff. : ; 

* It may be observed that the next stage of the Elean tradition is the arrival 
from Crete of Klymenos, a descendant of the Idaean Herakles, who erects an altar 
of ashes to Olympian Hera, and an altar to Herakles surnamed Parastates and 
the other Kouretes (Paus. v. 8. 1 and 14. 8). 

3 See supra, p. 39, and infra, chapter xt. 

4 Paus. vi. 20. 2 

a ae ee ee Te ee a a 

vo] Sosipolis in Magnesia 241 

pre-Olympian divinities—the elder gods of the Earth or of the 
Sky". Sosipolis, the snake-child, like Erichthonios, was of the 
Karth. The Earth was his mother; for ‘Kileithyia’ is only one 
name of the Mother Goddess, Rhea, Demeter, Gaia. 

In Magnesia, as we have seen 
(p. 154:), Sosipolis has become Zeus Sosi- 
polis. Nevertheless, right down into 
Imperial times the tradition survived 
of his infant form and of his therio- 
morph, the snake. Fig. 61 shows one 
of a series of bronze coins of Magnesia 
of the time of Caracalla’. On it 
appears the infant Saviour seated on 
a table or throne with legs of thunder- 
bolt pattern. Round him are his 
Kouretes, clashing their shields; and, underneath, the snake 
emerges from a cista. 

Who was the child Sosipolis? Not far from Olympia, at Elis 
itself, Sosipolis had a sanctuary in common with Tyche. There he 
was represented not as an infant, but as a boy, clad in a star- 
‘spangled robe and holding the horn of Amaltheia, the goat who 
suckled the infant Zeus in Crete‘—the cornucopia with the fruits 

Fie. 61. 

of the year’. Tyche and Sosipolis are the same as Eirene and 

the child Ploutos—the Hora® carrying the Wealth of the year. 
The festival of Magnesian Sosipolis has already been discussed 
(p. 150); and it has been argued that the bull, who was designated 
at the full moon of the month Kronion—the month of seed-time— 
fed up all through the winter, and eaten at a communal meal in 
spring or early summer, embodied the life of the year, was the 
1 See J. HE. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 89. ' 

* Compare the snake-child Opheltes-Archemoros associated with the founding 
of the Nemean Games (Apollod. m1. 6. 4; Bacchyl. vir. 10) and the child Aix which 

- tended its father the Python slain by Apollo, connected with the origin of the 

Pythia (Plut. Qu. Gr. p. 293c; see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 151). Another 
Olympian hero, Iamos, is nursed by snakes, Pind. Ol. v1. 45. 

3 From Rayet, Milet et le golfe Latinique, Fig. 36, p. 139. The obverse has the 
laurel-crowned head of Caracalla. See also Imhoof-Blumer, Gr. Miinzen, 1890, 

8h oo. 

; 4 The Cretan Zeus also has his snake form, Schol. Arat. 46; Eratosth. catast. 
25. 62; cf. C. Robert, loc. cit. supra. , 

® Compare also the Eniautos with Amaltheia’s horn in Ptolemy’s procession, 
p. 186, supra. 

6 Hesiod, Theog. 903; Pind. Ol. x11. 6 Evvoula...Aixa...Bipyva, raulae dvdpdoe 
TOUT OV. 

H. 1 

os) 

oa 

242 The Origin of the Olympic Games [ OH. 

daimon of the eniautos. He is identical with the Kouros of the 
Cretan hymn, who comes ‘for the Year, and brings with him the 
blossoming of the Seasons’. 

Before we leave the Kouretes and their foot-race, we must 
mention a curious parallel from Hebrew tradition”, which gives us 
a combination of moon and sun races, and also seems to confirm 
the identification, already mentioned (p. 193), of the Kouretes 
with the Roman Sali. 

The Jewish Agada contains a dialogue between certain Rabbis 
and their disciples concerning the hippodrome of Solomon. 
Solomon held twelve horse-races in each year, one in every month. 
‘Why not thirteen?’ says a disciple, for there were thirteen 
months. One race, replies the Rabbi, was not a horse-race, but 
a foot-race of young men of the tribe of Gad, as it is written®: 
‘And of the Gadites there separated themselves unto David into the 
hold to the wilderness, mighty men of valour, men trained for war, 
that could handle shield and spear; whose faces were like the faces 
of lions, and they were swift as the roes upon the mountains.’ This 
race of youths was run in the intercalary month Tebeth which 
contains the winter solstice. They also carried golden shields. 
It is written of them‘: ‘As oft as the king went into the House 
of the Lord, the Runners bare them (the golden shields), and 
brought them back to their chamber,’ 

These young men called ‘Runners’ (n°'$39) seem strangely 
analogous to the Roman ‘ Leapers’ (the Salii), who also kept shields 
(ancilia) in a chamber and brought them out in solemn procession 
in the month of Mars—the first month of the old Roman year, 
The interesting point about Solomon’s Kouretes-Salii is that their 
race, falling in the intercalary month, seems to be a moon-race on 
foot, as contrasted with the horse-races of the sun in the other 
twelve months. Such may originally have been the foot-race of 
the Idaean Kouretes at Olympia, becoming a sun-race when 
the Kouros was identified with the sun. 

1 Does this conception throw light on the obscure figure of the ‘ Saviour Year’ 
(AvkdBas Zadfwv) in Asia Minor? Cf. Roscher, Lex., s.v. Orthopolis. Av«dBas 
according to Stengel (Hermes, xvut., p. 304) is the moon. : 

» See Wiinsche, Salomos Hippodrom als Abbild des babylonischen Himmelsbildes 
Leipzig, 1906. Cf. Hisler, Arch. f. Religionswiss. x1. (1907) 150. : 

3 1 Chron. xii. 8. 

41 Kings xiv. 28. The Authorised Version not understanding the Runners 

translates pyIn by ‘the guard.’ 

“ 
" 
» 
is 

ene 1 ee 8 

vit] The Feast of Tantalus 243 

The Saviour of the City may, then, be represented either as an 
animal—a bull among a pastoral people, or a snake when he is 
a ‘local daimon?’ or hero—or as a human infant, boy, or youth. 
We need not be disturbed by the differences of age’. The change 
from the old year to the new may be symbolised in various ways. 
We are familiar with the venerable Father Christmas on the verge 
of the grave, and with the New Year as an infant. 

At Olympia Sosipolis became fixed in his infant shape beside 
his mother Eileithyia. Every year he must be born anew and 
washed with the holy water by his venerable nursing-mother. 
But another type is well-known—the youth (Adonis, Attis, Osiris), 
who dies and rises again in spring. 

This Easter death and resurrection of the same individual 
is evidently at first distinct from the death of the Old Year at the 
hands of the New, where the two individuals are necessarily 
different and the death might be a real death. The death, on the 
other hand, which is followed by a resurrection, cannot be real; it 
must always have been a mimetic rite. Does the Olympian 
legend of Pelops preserve traces of a Sp@evov of this type? We 
shall attempt to show that it does. 

THE FEAST oF TANTALUS. 

One element in the legend of Pelops, as told by Pindar in the 
first Olympian, still waits to be explained—the banquet of Tantalus. 
We have remarked that it constitutes a crux for the theory of the 
funeral origin of the Games. If the Games merely commemorated 
the achievements of Pelops, why had this dark and monstrous 
story lasted down to Pindar’s time as part of the Olympian 
legend of the hero? ‘To ignore or to suppress it would have been 
simpler than to keep it and explain it away. 

1 Paus. v. 20. 2 Zwolmonus ’Hrelous émixwpros Saluwv. ts 

2 Cf. the various ages of Dionysos, p. 41, and Macrob. Sat. 1. xvill. 9 on the 
various ages of the Sun: item Liberi Patris (=Solis in inferno hemisphaerio) 
simulacra partim puerili aetate, partim iuvenis fingunt. Praeterea barbata specie, 
senili quoque...hae autem aetatum diversitates ad solem referuntur, ut parvulus 
videatur hiemali solstitio, qualem Aegyptii proferunt ex adyto die certa, quod 
tunc brevissimo die veluti parvus et infans videatur. Exinde autem procedentibus 
augmentis aequinoctio vernali similiter atque adulescentis adipiscttur vires figuraque 
iuvenis ornatur. Postea statuitur eius aetas plenissima effigie barbae solstitio 
aestivo, quo tempore summum sui consequitur augmentum. Exinde per dimi- 
nutiones veluti senescenti quarta forma deus figuratur. 

16—2 

q 

244 The Origin of the Olympic Games [ oH. 

We shall proceed, as before, on the supposition that this 
incident, like the other factors in the myth already explained, 
is not an event in the real history of an individual called Pelops, 
but reflects a rite or dp@pevov. It may have escaped suppression 
because the ritual was more important than the reputation of the 
hero and his father. We hope to show further that this rite was 
of a nature which enables us to relate it to the New Year rites we 
have already found embedded in other parts of the legend. 

The story of the Feast of Tantalus, with the primitive and 
horrible features which so shocked the conventional piety of 
Pindar, is as follows. Invited by the gods to eat nectar and 
ambrosia at their table, Tantalus asked them in return to a banquet 

4h on the summit of Mount Sipylos. The feast was an eranos; that 

Bas is to say, each guest brought a contribution. Tantalus, at the last 

fi" _course, served the flesh of his son Pelops, whom he had cut in 
pieces and boiled in a cauldron. The deities were taken at 

nal: unawares, and one of them, Demeter, ate of the horrible dish. 
Then Zeus, seeing what had been done, ordered that the flesh 
should be put back into the cauldron and the child restored whole 
and sound, According to Bacchylides!, it was Rhea, the mother 
goddess, who revived Pelops by passing him through the cauldron. 
In Pindar’s revised and expurgated version, the infant is taken out 
of a ‘pure cauldron’ by Klotho, the Birth Fate—xadapod ré8nto0s 
éehe KXwGa. Finally, Zeus blasted Mount Sipylos with thunder 
and earthquake, to punish Tantalus for his impiety, or else (as 
some haye held) for carrying piety to an indiscreet excess. One 
reason why it is so hard to please the gods is that it is so hard to 
know beforehand at what moment they will have outgrown the 
sort of things which used to please them. 

Now, what was the essential purport of the ritual described in 
this myth? What was actually done to the infant, and with what 
intent? In the right answer to this question lies our hope of con- 
necting the Feast of Tantalus with the institution of the Games. 

Is it a human sacrifice, counteracted by a miracle? Such is 
the common view?, which sees a parallel to the more famous 

' Bacch. frag. 54 (Jebb) ap. Schol. Pind. Ol. 1. 40 6 88 Baxxvrldns rov Médora 

Thy ‘Péav éyer tryidoat Kabeloay dia NBnros. I suspect that Bacchylides is meant by 
the mpérepo. whom Pindar controverts, Ol. 1. 37. 
2 See Roscher, Lew., s.v. Pelops. 

er eee a Ope Or yee rE Pe Ay og A Patt SEP AE Pee 
; ies alle ; nae 

vit] The Boiling of Pelops 245 
sacrifice of Isaac on the mountain top. But in such stories do we 
not always find a vicarious victim? Something at least is really 
made over to the gods—if not Isaac, then a ram caught in a thicket; 
and the original human victim escapes. Here, on the contrary, 
there is no substitute; the gods get no equivalent for the victim. 
A sacrifice in which nothing is really made over to the gods is not 
a sacrifice in the usual sense. . 

If we put aside this explanation, what remains? Nothing is 
more certain than that if you cut a child to pieces and boil it, you 
cannot afterwards restore it to life by boiling it a second time, If 
the child was really killed,:the restoration to life was miraculous ; 
in other words, it did not happen. But suppose that the restoration 
to life was, not a miraculous interruption of the rite, but the 
central core of the rite itself. Suppose, in fact, that it was 
a ritual, not of sacrifice, but of regeneration, of New Birth? 
Then, as in countless other such ceremonies, the symbolic re- 
surrection is preceded by a symbolic and counterfeit death. A 
pretence is made of killing the child in order that it may be born 
again to a new life. Pindar writes more wisely than he knows 
when he says the child Pelops was taken out of a ‘pure’ or 
‘purifying’ cauldron by Klotho, a Birth-Fate. The ritual was of 
Birth—of that Second Birth which, sooner or later, comes to be 

conceived as ‘purification,’ 

| 
| 

_= >. 

To prove that it is so, the other features of the narrative must 
be explained. Why does this rite of new birth take place at the 
conclusion of a feast on a mountain-top? Why does the mimic 
death of the child take the form of his being dismembered, 
cooked, and eaten? Why is the mountain riven with thunder 
at the close ? 

First, what mountain was the scene of this banquet of the gods ? 

Pindar accepts the tradition that Pelops came from Lydia, 
and that the mountain was Sipylos in Magnesia. There, on the 
very summit of an isolated crag is still to be seen the rock-cut seat 

— 2 one bad ST ee EN eo 

es 

1 Rejuvenation by cooking occurs in the legend of Medea, who persuad ed 
the daughters of Pelias (whom Gruppe, Gr. Rel. uw. Myth. 1. 140, regards as 
a double of Pelops) to dismember and boil him. To convince them, Medea ma de 
a ram into a lamb by the same process (Apollod. 1. 9. 27). This, I suspect, was the 
Golden Ram or Lamb, that is the Sun, whose daughter Medea was. Compare 
Menerva cooking the young Mars on the Praenestine cista in Fig. 50, p. 198. Cf. 
p Roscher, Lex., s.v. Mars. 

a 

2 aera 

246 The Origin of the Olympic Games [oH. 

called the Throne of Pelops; and, lower down on the face of the 
cliff, the sanctuary of the Mountain Mother, here worshipped 
under the name of Mother Plastene.. But this was not the only 
home of the legend of Tantalus. There is also a Mount Tantalus 
in Lesbos, where some traits of the story reappear. And not only 
so; but no less an authority than Aeschylus makes King Tantalus 
reign on Mount Ida in Phrygia. The poet even transfers Sipylos 
to the neighbourhood of Ida’. 

Strabo complains of Aeschylus for making (as he says) this 
‘confusion’; but in another passage‘ Strabo himself tells us how 
the confusion came about. It was due to identity of cults in the 
two places. The Great Mother of Mount Sipylos was also the 
Lady of Ida. ‘The Berekyntes, he says, ‘and the Phrygians in 
general, and the Trojans living at da worship Rhea with mystical 
rites...and after the various places of her cult, they call her Idaea, 
Dindymene, Sipylene, Pessinuntis, Kybele.’ ‘The Greeks,’ he adds, 
‘call her attendants Kouretes.’ » 

This gives us a clue. It suggests a form of cult to which we 
can refer the ritual of Tantalus’ Feast—the cult, namely, which 
prevailed all down the coast of Asia Minor, of the Great Mother 
and her Child, with her attendant Kouretes or Korybantes—the 
very cult which we have found established at the foot of the hill of 
Kronos at Olympia. 

Following this clue let us move southward again from Mount 
Ida to Ephesus. Here we shall find an Olympianised form of this 
same cult of the Mother and Child, flourishing throughout 
historical antiquity®. This instance is specially important for us, 
because here, at Ephesus, we have as a constituent part of the 
cult, a banquet, a eranos feast, on the top of a mountain. Strabo’s 
account® is as follows: 

On the coast near Ephesus, a little above the sea, lies Ortygia, a splendid 
grove (dAgos) of trees of all sorts, mostly cypress. Through it flows the river 
Kenchrios where they say Leto washed after her travail For here legend 

tells of the Birth, of the nurse Ortygia, of the Birth-place, where no one may 

enter, and of the olive-tree close by where the goddess is said to have rested 
after her travail. 

1 Paus. v. 13. 7, and Frazer, ad loc. 

* In Lesbos we hear also of Thyestes (whose homonym in Argive legend was, 
like Tantalus, concerned in a Texvopayla) and Daito, who must be connected with 
some ritual dais. See schol. and Tzetzes ad yk Al 219 5 

3 Strabo xm. 580, Aesch. frag. 156. 4 Strabo x. 469. 

5 See Tac. Ann. ut. 61. 8 xiv. 639. 

vol] 

4 

The Kouretes at Ephesus 247 

Above this grove is a mountain, Solmissos, where they say the Kouretes 

took their stand and with the clash of their arms frightened the jealous Hera 
who was lying in wait, and helped Leto to conceal the birth. (There are 
ancient temples with ancient images of wood, as well as later temples with 
statues by Scopas and others.) 
_ Here, every year, the people assemble to celebrate a festival, at which it 
is the custom for the young men to vie with one another in the magnificence 
of their contributions to the entertainment. At the same season a college of 
the Kouretes holds banquets and performs certain mystical sacrifices. 

There is little doubt that the ancient wooden images in these 
mountain shrines had represented a Mother and Infant of an older 
type than Leto and her children. The presence of the Kouretes, 
the attendant ministers of Rhea, is proof enough. Leto has 
superseded Rhea, just as in later times Leto’s daughter, ‘Great 
Artemis of the Ephesians, whom all Asia and the world wor- 
shippeth, gave place in her turn to yet another Asiatic mother 
with her divine child. 

On Mount Solmissos, above the cypress grove of the Birth-place, 
the tradition at least, if not the practice, survived, of a dance of 
young men in arms to conceal the divine birth. Certainly, the 
young men played a prominent part in the banquet on the 
mountain top, held by the college of Kouretes and their president, 
the Protokoures!, with certain sacrifices called ‘mystical’ (uvotixat 
@vctas), to mark that they were not ordinary Olympian sacrifices, 
such as would naturally belong to the cult of Leto and her twins. 
Of what nature were the mystical rites of this mountain-banquet ? 
To answer that question we must go southward again to a still 
more famous seat of the same cult, where we shall find the 
remaining features of the Feast of Tantalus, and an explanation of 
their significance. 

In Crete2, as we have already seen (p. 13), the birth of a divine 
child, called Zeus, was concealed from his father Kronos, who had 
eaten his other children immediately after their birth. Here too 
the concealment was aided by a dance of young men in arms, 
called Kouretes. 

The myth and ritual of Zagreus have already (p. 14) been 
examined. It has been shown that the ceremonies, in a compara- 
tively late and civilised form, including a banquet, a procession with 

1 See Pauly-Wiss. s.v. Ephesia, col. 2756, ‘and supra, p. 46, and R. Heberdey, 
Jahreshefte Oestr. Inst. vu1. 1905, Beiblatt, p. 77, for recent discoveries of 
inscribed drums with names of Kouretic officials. 

2 Strabo x. 468. 

eS ee ern Trae ae ana 

248 The Origin of the Olympic Games (cH. 

torches of the mountain mother, and certain thunder-rites, formed 
a rite of ordination held by a sacred college of Kouretes, analogous 
to the Kouretes at Ephesus. We may presume that the banquet 
was held, in Crete as at Ephesus, on the sacred mountain. We 
have seen too that the myth of Zagreus retains certain primitive, 
and even disgusting, traits which carry us back to very early rites 
of tribal initiation. This myth supplies the remaining details of 
the Feast of Tantalus. We are told that the wicked Titans tore 
the child in pieces, put a cauldron on a tripod, and boiled his 
limbs, piercing them with spits. The horrid repast ends with an 
epiphany of the Thunderer.. Zeus was invited to the feast, but 
discovering what had been done, blasted the Titans with his bolt?. 
The child was restored to life; his torn limbs were collected, and 
he ‘emerged whole and entire+’ 

The analogy, or rather identity, of this rite with the death and 
resurrection of Pelops can hardly leave a doubt that the Feast of 
Tantalus was in essence a ceremony of New Birth, of mock death 
and resurrection, and also, in some sense, of Initiation. It gives 
us the ritual which is needed to complete the religion of the 
Mother and Child and the Kouretes at the Idacan Cave beneath 
the hill of Kronos. 

The next point to be considered is, what connection can there 
be between an initiation ceremony, such as we have found in the 
legend of Pelops, and the inauguration of a New Year? We 
may note, in the first place, that the Eating of Children (rexvo- 
gayia) which persistently recurs in the lineage of the house of 
Tantalus, is connected with the succession to the kingdom. 
Thyestes, son of Pelops, in the course of a strife for the kingdom 
with his brother Atreus, is given the flesh of his own children to 
eat. Zeus, the father of Tantalus, does not indeed eat his son 
Dionysus, but he caused the Dithyrambos to ‘enter his male womb’ 
and be born again from it. Kronos swallowed Zeus in the form of 

1 Clem. Alex, Cohort, p- 5=Abel, Orph. frag. 200. 

* Was the Thunderer present as a visible thunderbolt on a draped throne such 
as those figured above on p. 58? We are reminded of the famous Throne of 
Pelops on the Magnesian mountain-top and the equally famous Sceptre of Pelops 
worshipped at Chaeronea, Paus. rx. 40. 11. 

3 Arnob. adv. nat. v. 19=Abel, Orph. frag. 196. 

* Macrob. Somn. Scip. 1. 12=Abel, Orph. frag. 206. 

vit] Texvogayiar and the Kingdom. 249 

a stone and vomited him forth again!, Ouranos, father of Kronos, ' 
hid his children in the earth. The motive in the case of these 
oldest rexvopayias is the fear of being superseded by the heir to 
the kingdom*, This same lineage is also the line of transmission 
of the famous sceptre of Pelops, worshipped at Chaeronea, which 
is probably nothing but the thunderbolt, marking that the holder 
of it for the time being is king over the elements*. There was no 
public temple for this sceptre, ‘but the man who acts as priest 
keeps the sceptre in his house for the year; and sacrifices are. 
offered to it daily, and a table is set beside it covered with all 
sorts of flesh and cakes.’ . The priest was evidently an annual 
“king, whose mana was derived from the sceptre. As Pausanias 
says, ‘that there is something divine about it is proved by the 
distinction it confers on its owners.’ 
---—s*The parallelism of these two series of facts—the recurrent 
texvoparyiat and the transmission of the sceptre—warrants us in 
connecting the ritual of the Feast of Tantalus with the succession | 
to an annual or periodic ‘kingdom*’ . 
These facts suggest that this ritual of New Birth or inaugura- 
tion at the Mountain Feast can be related to our conception of 
‘Pelops’ as the young Year-God, whose marriage was celebrated in 
the summer. The ritual would be appropriate to a seasonal feast 
of a Kronian (Saturnalian) character, at which the youthful year- 
god, standing for all young and growing things in nature, was 
initiated or inaugurated, as ‘King’ for his Year, under the 
form of death and resurrection. 

2. —— ae es 

In the first place, for the Kronian character of the Feast we 
have a curious piece of evidence in the text of Pindar itself. 

1 See above p. 22 for practical identity of the Kpévovu rexvopayla to the cvmpopat 
Ovécrou as represented in mimetic dance. 
2 See Prof. Gilbert Murray, Anthropology and the Classics, p. 84. ; 
3 Paus. rx. 40. 11. The transmission of the sceptre remains an important 
motive in the Orphic Theogony. Abel, Orph. frag. 85. + try es 
4 Another trait in Pelops’ story which may survive from an initiation ceremony 
is the going down into the sea at night under the open sky to invoke Poseidon 
4 (Ol. 1. 73). The reason for supposing that this was a piece of ritual is its 
recurrence in the story of another Olympic hero, Iamos, who goes down into the 
2 Alpheus at night to call on Poseidon and Apollo, and is subsequently inaugurated 
as seer in charge of the oracle (Ol. vr. 58). Pythagoras, when initiated by the 
Idaean Daktyls, before being purified by the thunderstone, ‘lay stretched out on his 
face by the sea at dawn, and at night by a river’; see above, p. 57. This ritual 
contact with water must have been as essential as contact with fire (thunder): the 
mana of both elements was needed by the king of thunder and of rain. 

7 Aes ee 

es wee aa Se oe. ee oe eS es 2 = ee a ed 
his ? 

= 

Me 

om 

250 The Origin of the Olympic Games [' 

At line 48 of the First Olympian, Pindar describes the cutting _ 
up, boiling, and eating of Pelops. He says this shocking incident 
was invented by the envious neighbours, who secretly spread the 
report, 
that into bubbling water boiling with fire they had cut him limb by limb 
with a knife, 

tparéCaci r dui Sevrara Kpeov 

oéGev dueddcavro Kal payov. 

Such is the reading of our Mss. But what sense can be made 
of it? Why should Pindar say they distributed and ate the last 
morsels of the flesh (if we take Sevtata xpeOy together), when 
legend said that only one morsel—the shoulder—was eaten? Or 
(taking audi Sevtara together’), that they ate of the flesh at the 
end of the feast, whereas flesh was usually served first ? Why, 
again, are the tables mentioned at all? We shall not discuss the 
various editorial emendations, because we believe that the true 
reading and interpretation are preserved by Athenaeus?. 

The text of Pindar used by Athenaeus read not audi devtata 
but audi Se’tepa. This is certain from the interpretation put 
upon the passage by Athenaeus, which turns on this very word ; 
for he quotes the lines as proof that ‘among the ancients much 
care and expense were lavished on the “second course” (SevTepat 
tpamrefat). It appears, then, that for some reason Pindar wished 
to mention the ‘second tables ’—dessert, in fact—and to avoid the 
banality of the actual phrase Sevtepar tpdmefar, he introduced 
both words in a different construction—tparéfaci 7, daudl 
devTepa, ‘and at the tables, at the second (course), they divided 
and ate of thy flesh?’ 

But what is the point of mentioning that Pelops was served 
up at dessert? Athenaeus again supplies the answer. He ig 
reporting a dinner-party conversation, occasioned by the appearance 
at table of the devrepax Tpamelau. 

1 Schréder (1908) prints audi devrara between commas. 

2 Athen. xiv. 641 ¢ 8re yap joav Kal mapa Tors dpxalos ai Sevrepar rpdmrecac 
TONUTEAGS pEemepyuvnuévar, mwaptornow Iivdapos év ’Odvumcovixas mepl ris Ilé\omos 

Kpeoupylas dunyotmevos* tparéfacl 7° aul devrepa (dudidevpa A. corr, Schweigh.) 
Kpe@v K.T.X. 
3 The wrong correction of devTepa to devrara was inevitable; the converse 
error, except as a sheer blunder, is inconceivable. 
} 4 Athen. xtv. 6398 TepinvexOnoay huiv Kad at devTEpat KaNovmevan Tpdmecat, ToN- 
£ ” > L ~ ca £ £ 4 \ 
Ades Nuly dObwevac od Movoy Tats Tv Kpoview juépais, év ais Pwuatiwy +racly (?° Pwuators 
marpiov éorw) éoriay rods olkéras, adrods Tas Top olkerGv dvadexoudvous 

; Aetroupylas. 
EdAnvixdoy 5é rodro 7d 60s... . a 

The Sevrepar tpamelar 251 
When Masurius had finished speaking, the ‘second tables,’ as they are 
called, were handed round. These are often served, not only on the days of 
the festival of Kronos, on which it is the Roman custom! to feast the slaves, 
the masters themselves undertaking for the nonce the office of servants. The 
custom is also Greek. Thus a similar practice prevails in Crete at the 
Hermaia: the slaves are feasted and make merry, while their masters 
perform the menial offices. 

He goes on to mention similar festivals at which this 
Saturnalian custom was observed—the Babylonian Sakaea, at 
which a slave was dressed as king; the Thessalian Peloria 
where the sacrifice to Zeus Pelorios was attended by the dressing 
of tables with a splendid feast to which slaves were admitted and 

served by their masters, including the king himself?. 
The vegetables, fruits, and cakes served at the ‘second tables’ 
were especially associated with the supposed simplicity of the 
Golden Age of Kronos, and so were characteristic of Kronian or 
Saturnalian feasts’. So this phrase tpazréfauci 7 audi Sevtepa 
confirms our suggestion that the Feast of Tantalus was Kronian 
in character‘. 

1 Lydus de mens. m1. 22 (March 1) dre 6é rarpiov apxnv évavTod tov Mdprioy ot 
“Pwpator rapédaBov, Sidov Kal awd Tod ras...Matpwvas, rovréore Tas evyevldas, Tods 
hale ‘By KaOdmep év Tots Kpovios rourl mpdrrev 00s mv rots Sovdous KexTyMEvors 
(cf. rv. 42). 

2 Another of Athenaeus’ instances is the following from Euripides, Cretan 
Women, frag. 467 N.: 

rt yap mode Tpdmefa; Te SD ob BplOera; 
mdjpns pev dpwv movriwy, mapeor dé 
pboxwv répewa. odpkes apvela Te dais 

Kal memTa Kal KporynTa THs EovVomrépov 
merdvy pedtoons apbdvws dedevpéva. 

This must describe some important banquet; if it was that of Thyestes, who 
was a character in the play (Schol. ad Ar. Ach. 433), we should again have the 
devrepa tpdmefac connected with a rexvogayia. Athenaeus also quotes the 
Tpopwriov KardBacts of Dikaiarchos, 7 ye riv moAdny damdyny ev Tots delrvo.s 
mapéxovoa Sevtépa tpdrefa mpoceyévero— an instance which may be significant for 
us, since the Trophoniads are equated with the Idaean Daktyls and Korybants. 
Plut. fac. in orb. lun. xxx., J. HE. Harrison, Prolegomena, yp. 579, and infra, 
chapter x1. 

$ They were also called the Horn of Amaltheia, Athen. xiv. 6434. See above, . 
p. 186. Compare Plato’s description of the vegetarian diet of the City of Pigs (Rep. 
372). His citizens lie on leaves, reeds, bryony and myrtle boughs as the Idaean 
Kouretes at Olympia lie on leaves of the wild olive (Paus. v. 7. 7). 

4 Mr Cook draws my attention to the importance in this connection of the 
agonistic table. On Athenian coins of Imperial date occurs the type of a sacred 
table on which are an owl, a wreath, and a bust of Athena, and beneath the table 
the amphora containing presumably the prize oil (Head, Hist. Num. p. 326). 
Some Imperial bronze coins of Delphi (Svoronos, Bull. Corr. Hell. (1896), Pl. xxx. 
nos. 1—8) which clearly refer to the Pythian, as the Athenian to the Panathenaic, 
- Games, show on the reverse a table with wreath, fruits, amphora, and perched 
near them a crow or raven. The bird, like the bust of Athena, indicates the 
presence of the god at the vegetarian dais. Mr Cook holds that this was’ originally 

The Origin of the Olympic Games 

THE KRONIAN FESTIVAL OF THE BASILAI. 

We are now, perhaps, in a position to identify this mountain 

Feast with an actual New Year's Festival observed throughout 
historic antiquity at Olympia—the only Olympic festival we know 
which was held on the top of a mountain. 
_ Immediately before his description of the shrine of the Mother 
and child Sosipolis, Pausanias tells us that on the top of the 
mountain of Kronos, ‘the Basilai, as they are called, sacrifice to 
Kronos at the spring equinox, in the Elean month Elaphios¥’ 

With this festival Dr Frazer? compares a feast ‘not only 
observed by the Parsis in India and elsewhere, but common to 
Persians, Arabs, and Turks, it being the day fixed for the 
computation of the incoming solar year. It corresponds with 
the vernal equinox and falls about the third week in March. It 
is called Jamshedi Naoroz, and strictly speaking is “New Year's 
Day,” but in India it is simply a day of rejoicing, and is observed 
in honour of a Persian king named Jamshed, who first introduced 
the principles of cultivation, and the proper method of reckoning 
time on the solar system.’ We are reminded of Diodorus’ state- 
ment that the festivals and sacrifices of Kronos among the Romans 
commemorated how Kronos became king and introduced among 
mankind the civilised manner of life. 

Everything we know of the sacrifice of the Basilai thus fits the 
requirements of the Feast of Tantalus. It is a festival of Kronos ; 
it is held on the top of a mountain; its date—the vernal equinox— 
is the appropriate time for the inauguration of the Year or Sun 
God under the form of death and resurrection. If we are right in 
seeing a ritual myth in the story of the mountain banquet, and in 

a communion table, at which the victor sat and ate the fruit of the God, later 
degraded into a mere table for prizes. 

1 Paus. vi. 20. 1 én 5& rod dpous (rod Kpovlov) 7H Kopydq Ovovew oi Bacthac 
kadotpevor TO Kpdvy xara lonueplay rhy év T@ jpt’Edadle pyri mapa "Helos. (Cf. 
Dion. H. 1. 34.) 

* Pausanias, Vol. 1v. p. 75, quoting A. F. Baillie, Kurrachee (Karachi), past, 
present, and future, Calcutta, 1890, p. 190. 
3 v. 66. 

* Lydus tells us that Oinomaos, king of Pisa, held the contest of horse-driving 
on the twenty-fourth of March—close to the vernal equinox; but, in the absence of 
older authority, this statement does not carry much weight. De mens. t, 12 ovUTos 
6€ (Olvduaos) jv Baoreds Micatwr, Hye 6é Tov tarmexoy ayava pnt Maprly eixorrG 
terdprn bWouuévov Tod “HNlov. Cf. J. Malalas, Chronogr. 173—6, ; 

rae 5 

tees 

Festival of the Basilai 

supposing that this myth, as part of the Olympian legend of 
Tantalus, reflected some local rite, the Kronian festival of the 
Basilai is the only one which meets the needs of the case. 

It is not improbable that this Kronian feast represents a very 
ancient seasonal festival of spring, which became attached to the 
vernal equinox when the sun and the critical dates of his annual 
course became important. In discussing Salmoneus, we connected 
his attribute of the slipped fetter (p. 223) with the Kronian custom 
of releasing slaves and prisoners at new year festivals. We saw 
too that this custom at Rome, which originally belonged to the 
Kalends of March, was borrowed by the later Saturnalia of mid- 
winter, and yet retained also at its old date in March. The Attic 
Kronia show an instructive parallel At Athens the same 
Saturnalian custom of feasting slaves and releasing prisoners 
appears both at the Panathenaea in Hekatombaion—a festival 
apparently superimposed on the older Kronia1—and at the spring 
festival of Dionysus, the Anthesteria’. 

Proclus*, more definitely, records the admission of slaves to the 
festival at the Pithoigia—the first day (Anthesterion 11) of the 
Anthesteria. This observance is of peculiar interest to us because 
among the Boeotians, as we know from Plutarch’, this day was 
called the day of the Good Spirit, the Agathos Daimon. It was 
also a day when the souls of the dead were evoked from the 
grave-jars (pithot); the Opening of the Jars was at once a spring- 
festival of first-fruits—on that day they broached the new wine— ° 
and a temporary release of the spirits of the dead from the prison 
of the grave’. 

1 Dem. xxiv. 26 ed6vs 7H borepala, Kal Tair’ dvtwv Kpovluw cal dd rair’ dpermevns 
Ths BovAns, Samrpatdmuevos...xkabifer Oat vouobéras Sud, Wndlouaros éml TH TY Tavanvatoy 
mpopdce. Plut. vit. Thes. 12 Kpoviov unvds, dv vdv “ExaropuBardra cadobor. Schol, 
ad Dem. 111. p. 29 fv ‘ExarouBaidw 6 kal Kpdvios map’ "E\Aqou. ; 

Macrobius, Sat. 1. 10. 22, following Philochorus, records the practice of the 

Attic Kronia; Philochorus Saturno et Opi primum in Attica statuisse aram 
- Cecropem dicit, eosque deos pro Jove Terraque coluisse, instituisseque ut patres 
familiarum et frugibus et fructibus iam coactis passim cum servis vescerentur. 

2 Dem. xxt1. 68 épwray ef wdryv To Secmwrnprov @Kodounon. Katapalyy ay eywye, 
el y’ 6 marhp 6 obs Sxero abrdbev avrais médars eEopxnodmevos Avovuctwy TH Tommy. 
Schol. ad loc., 200s Fv mapa Tots ’APnvatos év rots Avoyvolors Kal év Tots Tlavadnvatoss 
rovs decuwras adlecbar Tot Secpod év éxelvais Tals Nuépats. ; 

3 Ad Hes. Op. 366 év rois rarplos éorly éopry ILiovyla Kab’ av ovre olkéryv ob're 

tcOwrov elpyew Tis dmodavoews OemiTov nV. 
7 4Q. ie abe 3. For the Pithoigia see J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 32 ff. 

5 For the conjunction of the worship of the Good Daimon and the souls of the 
dead see next chapter. 

254 The Origin of the Olympic Games [ CH. | 

When we put these scattered indications together, we con- 

jecture that the Kronian sacrifice of the Basilai at Olympia was 
one of those old spring festivals of the New Year, at which the 
resurrection of life in nature was symbolised in various ways}. 

To resume this part of our argument. We find that the story 
of the eating and resurrection of Pelops at the mountain banquet 
hangs together with the presence at Olympia, both in legend and 
in cult, of the Kouretes, attendant on the Mother and Child. 
Pindar’s description preserves a trait which, with the evidence of 
Athenaeus, points to the Kronian character of the rite. On the 
hill of Kronos we know of a festival connected with Kronos, which 
was celebrated at the spring equinox, when the youthful sun comes 
of age. The sacrifice is conducted by priests called Basilai, or 
Kings: and the recvogayias characteristic of the house of Pelops 
are associated with the succession to the kingdom. From these 
indications we conclude that, while the birth of the new Year God 
was celebrated in the cult of the infant Sosipolis, his Easter death 
and resurrection—his initiation or inauguration when he passes 
from childhood to youth—was marked in ritual by the Kronian 
festival of the Basilai in March, and in myth by the death and 
rebirth of the youth Pelops at the mountain banquet of Tantalus. 

In the Third Olympian Pelops is actually called ‘ Kronios’— 
the very epithet by which the Kouros is invoked in the Cretan 
hymn :— 

I, 
Méyiore Kovtpe, xaipe por, 
Kpovee. 

It is to be wished that Pausanias had recorded more details of 
the vernal sacrifice of the Basilai on the hill of Kronos. The title 
Basileus is constantly given to Kronos; at Olympia he seems to 
have been the arch-basileus of a college of Basilai. Possibly some 
light may be thrown upon his obscure figure by the Basileus at 
Priene?. 

An inscription has come to light upon the basis of a statue 
inueription 1 G.'3, 17. 33. Wivsowa ah Bovchoy ice aa ee 
poet von Prott’s view (Leges graec. sacrae, 1. 12) that this was borrowed from 

2 Hoy. Gartringen, Inschr. v. Priene, 1906, p. 136, No. 186, gives an inscription 

from the base of a bronze statue of the second century 8.c. found in situ at the N.W 
corner of the Agora at the entrance to a temple: Baowneldns kal Kaddwlen | roy 

j vi] The Basileus | 255 
erected to a priest of ‘the Basileus and the Kouretes.’ Once more 
we encounter the Kouretes, this time with a Basileus at their head. 
Further, we learn from Strabo, that Basileus was the title of 
a ‘young man’ of Priene chosen to take charge of the rites. This 
young man is manifestly the human Kouros,—related to his 
Kouretes as the Protokoures is related to the college of Kouretes 
at Ephesus, and (may we not add?) as the Kronos Basileus at 
Olympia is related to his Basilai. 

The Olympic Games began with a foot-race ‘for the kingdom’ ; 
the youth who won the race was the Basileus. What does this 
title mean ? 

The priest at the Laconian Karneia was called Agetes, the 
Leader, and the festival itself, Agetoriat. At Argos, Karnos the 
Ram was called Zeus and Hegetor. We are reminded how in 
ancient days the leader of the annual procession might be a holy 
Bull or a Goat, and how at Athens the Kouros in Bull form and 
human form came in procession to the theatre. The young 
man pursued by the Staphylodromoi, with his wreaths and 
beast-disguise, was a ‘mumming representative of the dazmon, 
who went in procession at the festival*’ We have already seen 
the Kouros of the Cretan hymn as Leader of his daimones 
(Saipovev ayopevos). Was the Basileus simply the Baou-revs— 
‘leader of the march’ or ‘leader of the step, that is of the 
dance of the young men‘? And is not this dance or march 
nothing but the komos, the procession in which the Olympian victor, 
attended by his friends and hymned with songs of triumph, visited 
the altars of the gods? We now understand—what otherwise 
seems surprising—the fact, implied by Pindar and explicitly 

abrav rérepa | AmroANdwpov ILocerdwriov | lepnrevovra Bacrel | kal Kovpnow. Strabo, 
vit. 384 cal 5% mpds Thy Ovolav radryy Kabloraor Baorhéa dvdpa véov Ipinvéa roy ray 
iep@v émimednoduevov. We owe this reference to Mr A. B. Cook. The important 
word Bacihéa, though found in the mss. and in editions before Kramer, is now 
omitted by editors ! 

1 Hesych. dynris:...év dé rots Kapvetors 6 lepwpevos Tod (ris, MSS. corr. Meursius) 
Geo Kal 4 éopry Aynropea. See Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 121. 

2 See supra, p. 209. 3 See supra, p. 234, note 5. 

4 For the derivation of Baci\eds see H. W. Fays, Greek BAZI-AEYZ2, in Classical 
Quarterly, v. 1911, p. 117. Prellwitz (Etym. Wérterb.) suggests: Bao: altbak- 
trisch jaiti, Haus, Geschlecht, lit. gimtis, natiirl. Geschlecht; ¢8d0n° éyevv7n, 
Hes. Dann Bacide’s, Geschlechtsherr, wie ahd. chuning. 

Paus. vi. 22. Near the grave of the suitors of Hippodameia was a sanctuary of 
Artemis Kordax, so named because the attendants (dxéAov90r) of Pelops, after his 
victory, Ta ériviia Hyayov mapa TH Oe@ Tarn Kal wpxnoavTo émixdplov Tots mepl Tov 
Dimvdov Kkopdaxa Spxnow. 

256 The Origin of the Olympic Games [cH. 

stated by the Scholiast’, that the victor himself Jed the procession 
and acted as é€apyxos or precentor of the ancient hymn of Archi- 
lochos, which was addressed, not to the victor himself, but to the 
hero who was his mythical prototype, Herakles. 

The Komos or triumphal procession of the victor resembles the 
Ovation described by Lydus? as a most venerable festival among. 
the Romans. It was held on new year’s day (January 1). The 
consul, dressed in white and riding a white horse, led the procession 
up the Capitoline hill. Both the dress and the horse assimilated 
him to Jupiter, whose victory over the Giants symbolised, in 
Lydus’ opinion, the victory of the sun over the colds of winter’. 

THE VICTOR AND THE HERo. 

Had we begun this chapter with the statement that the 
triumphal procession, or komos, was the original kernel of the 
Olympic Games, it would have seemed, in the strict sense of the 
word, preposterous. But in view of the facts we have analysed 
and of the previous discussion of the Dithyramb (p. 205), it will 
not perhaps now seem paradoxical to suggest that this procession, 
with its sacrifice and eating of a bull‘, its hymn to the hero, and 
the concluding feast in the banqueting chamber’, was the central 
rite, to which the foot-race of the Kouretes was a mere preliminary. 
The race, whose original } purpose was simply to determine who 
should be the greatest Kouros or King of his year, developed by 
successive accretions into the elaborate athletic sports, which in 
later times came to be the central feature of the whole festival. 

1 Pind. Ol. rx. 1 76 pey "Apxihdxou péhos hwvaev Oduptla, Kaddlvuxos 6 TpiT6os 
Kexhadds, dpxece Kpdviov trap’ &xOov dyemovedoat kwudfovTe pliros “Hpapudstw ody 
eratpos. Christ, ad loc. Victor vero ipse vice praecentoris (cdpxou) fungebatur 
sodalibus praeeuntis, id quod Pindarus verbo avyeuovedoa significavit et scholiasta, 
hac adnotatione confirmat : kwudger dé mpds Tov Tod Ards Buoy 6 viKhoas mera Tey 
pilwv, atros ris Bohs éfnyovpevos. 

2 De mens. 111. 3, 

® The ancient custom was to exchange gifts (orp/va) of dried figs and laurel 
leaves which were useful for driving away spirits. Ibid. 4 &ev dy eln ddpvn, 
éxrodwy Saluwoves—a phrase which recalls the Gvpage Kijpes of the Anthesteria, 
J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 35. 

4 Schol. ad Pind. Ol. v. 7 of yap vixGvres vor év rois & Bwuois. Cf. Nem. vr. 40 
Tavpopdvy Tprernpld. (the Isthmia) ; frag. ap. vit. Pind. ex schol. Ambros. (Christ, 
P. C) mevraernpls copra Bovrromméds (the Pythia), That the bull at Olympia was not. 
only sacrificed but ‘distributed’ to be eaten (dais) appears from Athenaeus tr. 55: 
Empedocles, victorious in the chariot race, disapproving as a Pythagorean of flesh- 
eating, made a confectionary bull and duéverme Tots els Thy Tavnyupw amravrncacwy. 

_ > Paus. v. 15, 12 gore dé Kat éoriardprov ’Hdelos...rods 6¢ Th "ONMumia ukdvras 
EoTLWOW Ev TOUTW TH olKiMarL, ; 

The Komos 257 

The Komos, which thus sank to be a mere appendage, retained 
even in historic times features which show that the personality of 
the victor was not of primary importance. The elaborate Epinikian 
ode of the Pindaric type was a late institution. The earlier 
_ victors, like Epharmostos, were content with the threefold ringing 
cry which began, ‘Hail, King Herakles’? Even when Pindar 
brought the Ode of Victory to its perfection, the victor had still to 
be satisfied with a personal reference at the beginning and the 
end. The central portion of the typical Epinikion is occupied, not 
with the victor’s personality and achievements, but with the deeds 
of his ancestors, those earlier manifestations of the Genius of his 
house (Saiuwv yevéOd105) who is reimbodied in each successive 
generation. It is the daimon, incarnate for the moment in the 
victor, who in a great number of Pindar’s odes, is really the object 
of praise and commemoration. In other odes the myth is devoted 
to the institution or ordinance (teOués) of the rite itself, This, as 
we shall see (p. 327), is the proper and original topic of the myth 
in a hymn associated with ritual. In the development of the 
Epinikian ode we may perhaps see an analogy to the development 
of the drama, which starts from a ritual dithyramb containing 
an ‘aetiological’ myth, and later is infused with a new element of 
saga-history borrowed from epic tradition?. In both cases the 
hymn and the ritual myth come first; the commemoration of 
ancestors is a secondary importation. 

We have spoken of the Olympic victor as the daimon of his 
Year; we have seen him wreathed, and pelted with leaves’, 
_ leading the song and dance of his attendants in the Komos— 
a Kouros at the head of his Kouretes. We have also found him 
conceived as the reincarnation of the daimon of his house—the 
Spirit of his dead ancestors, who, as Pindar‘ says, ‘listening with 
such consciousness as the dead may have, hear of his great 
prowess, on which the delicate dew of song is shed, as of a glory 
which is their own and which they share with their son.’ Finally, 
we may regard him also as representing the ‘local hero, be he 

_ 1 Pind. Ol. rx. 1. Hesych. rerpdxwuos: pédos te civ dépxhoer mwemonudvov els 
“Hpaxréa émuwvikior, 

2 See infra, p. 334. 4 

3 Victors were also pelted with flowers and fruits, Plut. Symp. Qu. vu. 4, 723 (0 
Kal podas cat Auxviow, évior dé Kal undows Kal povats EBadrov ws Kaois yepalpovres del 
Tovs viknpopous. 
4 Pyth. v. 98; ef. Ol. vit. 14, Nem. tv. 85. 

H. 17 

258 The Origin of the Olympic Games [ OH. 

Sosipolis, or Herakles!, or Pelops. Sosipolis with his cornucopia 
bears traces of his function as Agathos Daimon, giver of the fruits 
of earth. The Idaean Herakles has his olive-branch, or apple- 
bough. Pelops is a figure of saga; yet his legend shows that’ he 
slipped into the place of a Year-God, the Sun King of the octennial 
period. 

4%, v, 

Z- = “Ss 4 , i 

JOLY) YY 
WEI, — Wy 
WEE By LS Ree Wi ip 
SLL yell aa 
tpg jh ee Wii, 1. 
Ue fl Y Wi 

I. 

Arama HRe.or! 

Fie. 62. 

Older than any of these, perhaps, was that nameless Hero, or 
Heroes, whose altar, painted with a leafy branch, of olive or of 
bay, was discovered in a round chamber, identified by Curtius with 
the Gaeum, or sanctuary of Earth, mentioned by Pausanias, The 

Milo, the athlete six times victorious at Olympia, led the Krotoniates into 
battle, wearing his Olympic wreaths and the lion-skin and club of Herakles, Diod. 
RUT 10s 

2 vy. 14.8. See Frazer on v. 15. 8. No less than twelve coats of plaster were 
stripped off this altar. Almost every one showed the branch; and on each, as 1s 
seen in Fig. 62, was inscribed HPQOP or HPQOD or, in one case, HPQQN. It may 
be a significant fact that the floor of this round chamber is of earth of a clayey 
texture, quite different from the sandy soil of the Altis, which has clearly been 

vit} : The Victor and the Hero 

worshippers who painted and repainted this altar did not know 
whether it belonged to one ‘hero’ or to many: they inscribed 
it now ‘Of the Hero, now ‘Of the Heroes,” Their doubt is 
instructive. The ‘Hero’ is not a dead man with a known name 
and history commemorated by funeral games. His title stands 
not for a personality, but for an office, defined by its functions and 
capable of being filled by a series of representatives. At one 
time Sosipolis might be ‘the hero’; at another Pelops, the 
mythical ancestor of an incoming people; at another the Idaean 
Herakles or his Dorian homonym. Even as late as Macedonian 
times, a Philip could build a round shrine—the Philippeum—in 
deliberate imitation of the old round chamber with the Hero altar, 
and thus pose as ‘the Hero’ of Olympia for the time being”. In 
view of these considerations, the establishment of Games and 
“hero-worship’ in honour of historic personages, like Miltiades or 
Brasidas, lends no support to the funeral theory of the origin 
of the Olympic Games. Before any one of these individuals could 
be worshipped as the Hero of a city, the conception of what the 
Hero or Saviour of the City is, must first have been clearly 
defined. The title and functions of a Hero are a blank frame, 
which may be filled by a succession of representatives, chosen each 
for his ‘ year,’ or by this or that historic personality, as the changes 
and chances of time and of politics may determine. 

To the analysis of the idea of a Hero the next chapter will be 
devoted. 

brought from Mount Kronios where a similar soil is found. It has been inferred 
that the sanctuary was transferred from the hill, with some of the sacred soil, 
to its present site. Dr Frazer regards this inference as uncertain. 

1 The same holds of the octennial kingship—the office to which the winner 
of the race, according to Dr Frazer’s final theory (G. B.3, Part mr. p. 104), became 
entitled. Dr Frazer speaks of combining this view with the funeral theory by 
supposing that ‘the spirits of these divine kings...were worshipped with sacrifices 
at their graves, and were thought to delight in the spectacle of the games which 
reminded them of the laurels which they had themselves won long ago....’ But it 
must be clearly pointed out that this is not the funeral theory as advocated by 
Prof. Ridgeway, who will have the whole festival start from the obsequies of one 
' individual chief—a historic or quasi-historic personality—whereas Dr Frazer’s view 
(rightly, as we think) makes the office and its functions, not any individual holder 
of it and his personal exploits, the central factor. This is an essential point of 
difference between the two theories. 

2 I owe this to Mr Cook, who points out that the Philippeum is built of stone, 
painted to look like brick, because the old chamber in the Gaeum was of brick. 

17—2

DAIMON AND HERO. 

‘INCERTUS GENIUMNE LOCI, FAMULUMNE PARENTIS 
EssE PUTET.’ 

In the last two chapters we have examined in some detail 
two great festivals of the Greeks, the spring Dithyramb, which 
according to Aristotle gave birth to the drama, and the Olympic 
Games celebrated every fifth year at or after the summer solstice. 
We have seen that the primary gist of both these festivals was the 
promotion of fertility and that each of them alike gave birth to a 
daimon of fertility who took on various names and shapes. The 

Dithyramb gave birth to the Greatest Kouros whose matured — 

form in Crete was that of Father Zeus, but elsewhere he crystal- 
lized as Kouros into the figure of Dionysos. At Olympia, 
starting again from the Kouretes the daimon of fertility took 
various heroic shapes as Oinomaos, as Pelops, and finally again 
bequeathed something of his nature and functions to the Olympic 
Zeus himself. 

We have by this time a fairly clear notion of one element in | 

the nature of a damon. We have seen him to be the product, 
the projection, the representation of collective emotion. Normally 
and naturally he is attended by the group or thiasos that begets 
him, but gradually he attains independent personality. We have 
also seen that in primitive communities this collective emotion 

ee around and includes food interests and especially food- 

animals and fruit-trees. In consequence of this the daimon is 

conceived in animal and plant-form, as theriomorph or phyto- 
_ morph. Dionysos is a bull or a goat, or a tree, or rather the 
| human Dionysos grows out of the sacrifice of the bull or the 
' goat, or out of the sanctification of the tree. 

q 

—— 

a 

SS = 

Sa oe 

—_ 

CH. vit] Daimon and Hero 261. 

But in the case of the Dithyramb and still more vividly in 
the case of the Olympic games we have been all along conscious 
of another element as yet not completely analysed, the_hero. 
The Dithyramb has to do with the fertility-daimon but the 
drama which sprang out of it sets before us not the adOn, the 
sufferings, thelife-history « of. Dionysos, but the maQn, thelife- 
histories of a a host of heroes, of Agamemnon, of Orestes, of 
- Prometheus, of Herakles, of Hippolytos. Pindar the poet of the 

Games salutes no daimon by name. He asks? 
‘What god, what hero, or what man shall we sing?’ 

If then at one stage of their development in both the drama and 
the Olympic games the hero-element was dominant, it is all 
important that we should ask and answer the question,—‘ what 
exactly is a hero?’ 

The question may seem at the first glance superfluous. A 
hero is surely simple enough. He is just a dead man revered 
in life, honoured with a mild and modified form of divine honours 
after death. We have surely done with difficult and dubious con- 
ceptions like ‘collective representations.’ We have got to facts at 
last, simple, historical facts. All now is plain, concrete, a posteriori. 
“You must not say that “Minos” represents a dynasty; Minos was a 
particular man and Dr Ridgeway can discuss his dates and doings. 
You must not say that Menelaos is a tribal hero; Menelaos was 
a well-known infantry officer with auburn whiskers?’ Let us 
look at facts. It happens that at Athens the record of a 
succession of hero-kings is unusually full and complete; so to 
Athens let us turn. 

The oldest hero reverenced by Athens was Cecrops. Who 
was Cecrops? The old Euhemerism knows many things about 
Cecrops. He was the first king of Athens’, a native of Egypt, 
who led a colony to Athens about 1556 B.c. He was a typical 
culture hero, he softened and polished the rude manners of the 
inhabitants and, as an earlier Theseus, drew them from their 

1 Ol. 11. 2 rlva Oedy, rly jpwa, Tiva 5° dvdpa KeadAooper ; 

2 See the review of Professor Ridgeway’s Origin of Tragedy in the Times 
Literary Supplement, Jan. 26, 1911. 

3 For the classical sources on which the account current in handbooks is based 
and for monumental evidence see my Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. Xxv. 

Daimon and Hero 

scattered habitations to dwell in twelve small villages. He gave 

them laws and customs and taught them to cultivate the olive. 
He introduced the worship of Zeus Hypatos and forbade the 
sacrifice of living things. ‘After a reign of fifty years spent in 
regulating his newly formed kingdom and in polishing the minds 
of his subjects, Cecrops died, leaving three daughters Aglauros, 
Herse and Pandrosos!.’ But in this unblemished career there is 
one blot, one skeleton in the well-furnished cupboard that even 
the most skilled Euhemerism cannot conceal. Cecrops the hero- 
king, the author of all these social reforms, Cecrops the humane, 
the benevolent, has a serpents tail. 

A serpent’s tail is an awkward stumbling-block, but Euhe- 
merism early and late is equal to the occasion. The fact of the 
snake tail may be damaging, but it is symbolic. Cecrops was 
twy-formed (du¢v7s) because, some said, he knew two languages, 
Greek and Egyptian. Deeper thinkers divined that Cecrops was 
twy-formed, because he instituted marriage, the union of two 
sexes. He was arbitrator at the ‘strife’ of Athena and Poseidon. 
The women, who exceeded the men by one, voted for Athena, 
and to appease the wrath of Poseidon they were henceforth dis- 
enfranchized? and their children were no longer to be called by 
their mother’s name. The women’s decision came as a shock to 

old Cecrops and he forthwith instituted patriarchal marriage. 
‘At Athens, says Athenaeus*, quoting Clearchus the disciple of 
Aristotle : 

‘Cecrops was the first to join one woman to one man. Before, connections 
naa taken place at random and marriages were in common. Hence as some 
think Cecrops was called “Twy-formed” (Siupuns) since before his time people 
did not know who their fathers were, on account of the number of possible 
parents.’ 

Scandal and stumbling-block though it was, the serpent’s tail 
was integral and never forgotten. In the Wasps‘ old Philocleon, 

1 Lempriére, Classical Dictionary, 1827. I quote Lempriére as a typical instance 
of Euhemerism unabashed, but between him and the less picturesque statements in 
later Dictionaries, e.g. Seyffert (1908), revised by Prof. Nettleship and Dr Sandys, 
there is as regards any real understanding of Cecrops little to choose. j 

* 8. Aug. de civit. Dei 18.9 ...ut nulla ulterius ferrent suffragia, ut nullus nas- 
centium maternum nomen acciperet. 

3 xi. 2, §§ 555, and Tzetzes, Chil. v. 19. 650. Clearchus like so many of his 

successors misinterpreted the rigid matriarchal system as licence. See my Prole- 
gomena, p. 262. ; 

4 Ar. Vesp. 438 
& Kéxpoy pws dvat, r& mpos TodGy Spaxoyrldin. 

Meg : 

Cecrops as Daimon-Hero 
_ longing to join his dear dikasts and violently held back by the 
chorus, cries aloud: 
Cecrops, hero, King, O thou who at thy feet art serpent-shaped. 

_ The scholiast apologizes and explains, but every Athenian knew 
_ that in his serpent’s tail was the true nature and glory of the 

hero. ¥ 
As serpent-tailed the artist of the delightful archaic terra- 
cotta’ in Fig. 63 shows him to us. Half of him is a decorous 

Fic. 63. 

and civilized statesman. He is bearded, and wears a neat chiton ; 
he holds an olive spray in one human hand, he is thallophoros?; 
with the forefinger of the other he touches his lips to enjoin a 
sacred silence at the birth of a holy child. He stands erect and 
solemn but he has no feet, only a coiling snake’s-tail. So he 
appears on many a vase-painting and relief; so Euripides’ figured 
him at the door of Ion’s tent at Delphi: there 

Cecrops with his daughters 
Rolled up his spiral coils, the votive gift 
Of some Athenian. 

L Berlin Cat, 2537. 
2 See infra, p. 366. 
3 Ton 1163 
kar eloddovs 6¢ Kéxpora Ovyarépwv médas 
omelpas suveiacovr, AOnvalwy Twds 
avadnua. ’ au 
The daughters of Cecrops, unlike their father, are never figured with snakes’ tails. 
¥or female snake-tailed daimones see infra, p. 280, Fig. 71. 

“ 

he ne 

Daimon and Hero 

_ It is at the birth of Erichthonios, the second great Athenian 

hero, that Cecrops is mostly represented in art, as on the terra-_ 

cotta in Fig. 63. Gaia herself rises in human shape from the 
earth; she is a massive figure with long heavy hair. She holds 
the child in her arms, handing him to Athena his foster-mother, 

_to whom he stretches out his eager hands. This birth of the 

child from the earth symbolizes, we are told, that the race of 
Erechtheus, the Erechtheidae, ancestors of the Athenians, are 
autochthonous, home-grown; so it does, but it ‘symbolizes,’ or 
rather we prefer to say represents, something much more. This 
we shall see in the sequel shown in Figs. 64a and 6. 

When the child is born from Earth, Athena his foster-mother 
gives him into the care of the three daughters of Cecrops. 
Strange daughters these for a human king, the Dew-Sisters and 
the bright Spring Water, three reflections as we have seen of 
the maidens of the Hersephoria. They hide the child in a sacred 
cista. Two of the sisters in disobedience open the cista. The 
scene 1s given in Fig. 64a from a red-figured pelike*?, The cista 

Fig. 64. 

stands on piled rocks indicating no doubt the Acropolis. The 
deed is done, the sacred cista is open. Its lid, it should be noted, 
is olive-wreathed. From the cista springs up a human child, 

Athena approaches and the two disobedient sisters? hurry away. 7? 

. at 
Vion Supra, p. 174, note 1. 

? British Museum Cat. E. 418, and see my Prolegomena, p. 133. 
3 The figures on the reverse are actually those of two epheboi, but the vase is 

almost certainly a copy from some drawing in which H 
represented. 

erse and Aglauros are y 

' 

~ 

W a) ; Erichthonios as Daimon-Hero 265, 

They have cause for haste, cause more imminent than a guilty 
conscience. The design in Fig. 64a shows two guardian snakes, 
but rooted to the rocks. The child Erichthonios himself is a 
human child. But the design in Fig. 65 from a cylix by Brygos! 

¢ 

Fic. 65. 

tells us another and a more instructive tale. The scene, of 
which only a part is given here, takes place just after the opening 
of the chest. The two terrified sisters are pursued by a huge 
snake, a snake so huge that his tail coils round to the other side 
of the cylix not figured here. He is not one of the guardian 
snakes, he is the actual dweller in the chest. Cecrops is a snake, 
Erichthonios is a snake, the old snake-king is succeeded by a new 
snake-king. 

There are no such things as snake-kings. What the myths of 
Cecrops and Erichthonios tell us is that, for some reason or 
another, each and every traditional Athenian king was regarded 
as being also in some sense_a snake. How this came to be 
we might never have guessed but for the story of the cista. In 
Dionysiac rites the snake in the cista was a constant factor. A 
whole class of coins of Ephesus known as cistophoroi? show us 

1 Frankfort. In the Stidel-Institut; see W. Klein, Meistersignaturen, p. 179, 
and Wiener-Vorlegeblitter, Serie vim. Taf. 2. On the reverse is the sending forth 
of the Eleusinian ‘hero,’ Triptolemos, the correlative of Erichthonios. 

' 2 See Head, Hist. Num. p. 461. For cistae and snakes on coins see L. Anson, 

Numismata Graeca, Part 1. Cista x11. 936, where all the known instances are 
collected. 

266 Daimon and Hero — ‘(cue 

the sacred cista, its lid half-opened, a snake emerging. A 
specimen is given in Fig. 646. The cista of the coin and the 
cista of Erichthonios are one and the same; the myth arose 
from a rite. : 

The carrying of sacred snakes or the figures of snakes was 
not confined to the worship of Dionysos. It was part of the 
ceremonial both of the Arrephoria and the Thesmophoria. The 
scholiast on Lucian! tells us that the Arretophoria were the same 
as the Thesmophoria and 

are performed with the same intent concerning the growth of crops and of 
human offspring. In the case of the Arretophoria, too, sacred things that 
may not be named and that are made of cereal paste are carried about, ie. 
umages of snakes and of the forms of men?. They employ also fircones on 
account of the fertility of the tree, and into the sanctuaries called megara 
these are cast and also as we have already said, swine,—the swine, too, on 

account of their prolific character—in token of the growth of fruit and of 
human beings. 

The carrying of snakes is, like the carrying of phallot and the 
carrying of the life-giving dew, a fertility charm. 

In the ‘temple of Polias’ on the Acropolis there was according 
to Pausanias* besides the image of Athena and the lamp that 
was always burning another sacred thing, a Hermes of wood said 
to be the votive-offering of Cecrops; it was-covered from sight by 
branches of myrtle. It has long been conjectured that this 
‘Hermes’ was ithyphallic and so reverently veiled. But a simpler 
explanation is probably right. The ‘Hermes’ of the old temple 
was, like the Hermes of Kyllene‘, an aéSoiov, possibly snake- 
shaped. The covering with myrtle boughs recalls the leafage and 
sprays that so oddly surround the great snake on the Brygos vase, 
they also recall the olive crown on the cista in Fig. 64a. The 
notion of these leaf and branch crowned cistae and Hermae is 
not, I think, concealment, it is rather that the image of the 

Dial. Meretr. nu. 1. The scholion is given in full and discussed in my 
Prolegomena, p. 121. 

2 wihwara Spaxdvrwy-Kcat avipav oxnudrov. The wihwara dvdpav oXNMUATwWY are 
undoubtedly ¢éXa., cf. Septuagint, Is. iii. 17. Probably at first the snake was the 
totemistic vehicle of reincarnation and only later, when the true nature of parent- 
age was known, identified with the padXos. 

3 1, 27.1 Kerra dé €v 7G vaw ris Iloduddos ‘Epufs Evo, Kéxporos elvar Neyébuevor 
avdOnua bd K\ddwy wupolyys ob civorrov. : 

* Due to Dr Frickenhaus,.Erechtheus in A. Mitt. xxx. 1908, p.171. See also 
for the whole. subject-and the analogy to Daktyl cults, Kaibel, Géttinger Gelehrte 

Nachrichten, 1901, 499. It will later (p. 294) appear that Hermes is but a humanized 
form of the snake life -daimon. 

Eee 

vi) Ion as Daimon-Hero 

life-daimon should be brought into magical contact with the 
vegetation he is to revivify. 

Once we realise that the traditional kings of Athens were 
conceived of as snake-daimons, the ‘household-snake’ (otKoupos 
dgis) of the Acropolis became instantly clear. Herodotus! writes 
somewhat sceptically : 

the Athenians say that they have a great snake which lives in the sanctuary 
as the guardian of the Acropolis. They both say this and as if it were really 
existing they place monthly offerings before it and the monthly offering is a 
honey-cake. And always before, the honey-cake was consumed, but then 
(at the Persian invasion) untouched. And when the priestess announced 
this the Athenians deserted the city the more readily because the goddess 
herself had forsaken the Acropolis. 

~ 

In the days of the old month-year the goddess herself ‘was a 
4% snake. When she took human form the snake became her 
‘attribute’; it was the ‘symbol of wisdom.’ When Pausanias? 
saw the great image of Athena in the Parthenon he noted ‘at 
her feet lies a shield and near the shield is a serpent. Who 
was the serpent? Pausanias hits the mark, if but tentatively, 
‘it may be Erichthonios’; it 7s he—the lord and the, luck of the 
state. Ayy Uh h uyyfaiyy hun, wg (3, V tht pap ba] ; 
. Wake fakuartr Wd) Ww, Ie, [vet Fil Ct ch thm 
Before we leave the Athenian kings one point remains to be 
noted. They are snakes or at least take on the form of snakes, 
but they are also ‘eponymous heroes.’ Cecrops ‘gives his name’ 
to the Cecropidae, Erechtheus to the Erechtheidae. After what 
has been said? about the Kouros and the Kouroi, Bacchos and 
the Bacchoi, it is scarcely necessary to point out that the reverse 
is the case : an ‘eponymous hero’ never ‘gives’ his name, he always 
receives it. Cecrops is the projection of the Cecropidae, Erech- 
theus of the Erechtheidae; neither is a real actual man, only an 
ancestor invented to express the unity of a group. 

This comes out very clearly in the case of Ion the ‘eponymous 
hero’ of the Ionians. When we have said ‘eponymous hero’ we 
have exhausted the content of Ion. Save for his birth and child- 
hood, which Euripides makes alive, Ion is for us a shadow-figure. 
He is not robust and living like old Cecrops. He never appears 
as a snake; the Ionians whom he represented had passed beyond 

oa 

1 vir. 41. 21.24. 7. 3 Supra, p. 48. 

Me 

« 

- 

268 Daimon and Hero [cH 

the stage of snake-daimons. Moreover when we come to examine 
the birth-story it is but a weak version of the Erichthonios 
myth. Ion takes on the chest and the guardian snakes; they 
are canonical. Jon is a hero, he must wear a hero’s swaddling 
clothes; as though appropriating the myth he piously recites it 
though for dramatic purposes in question form?. 

2 

Zon. And did Athena take the child from Earth? 
Cre. Yes, to her maiden arms, she did not bear him. 
Jon. And did she give him as the pictures tell us? 
Cre. To Cecrops’ daughters, to be kept not seen. 
Jon. And they methinks opened the goddess’ chest ? 

|| fon, like Cecrops, like Erechtheus, is the péysoros Kovpos of his 

tribe, but, expressing as he does an artificial rather than natural 
group, he is emptied of all vital content. 

the king is unquestionably that of a snake, and the snake is used 
in phallic ceremonies for the promotion of fertility. But are we 
justified in calling the snake a ‘daimon of fertility’ ? 

It is important to be clear on this point. Such a notion 
contradicts traditional opinion. The snake we are constantly told 
is the vehicle of the dead man, the form in which he is apt to 
appear. The evidence for this death-aspect seems clear and 
abundant. On tombs and funeral ‘hero-reliefs’ the snake is 
constantly present. On the familiar Sparta hero-reliefs? a huge 
bearded snake is erect behind the seated heroized pair; on reliefs 
of the funeral banquet type® a snake appears twined about a tree 
or drinks from a cup in the reclining ‘hero’s’ hand. 

I. It is not hard to see reasons why a snake should be associated 

ith a dead man. The snake is an uncanny beast gliding in and 
out of holes in the earth. He may well have been seen haunting 
old tombs. It-is even possible that, as Plutarché says, the appear- 
ance of the spinal cord of a dead man suggested snakes. Nor is 
the association of snake and dead man’s soul confined to the 

| To resume, the form taken by the traditional hero and also 

1 Kur. Ion 269, ef. vv. 21—27, 
2 See Fig. 88 and Prolegomena, p. 327. 

* A number of these monuments are reproduced op. cit. in Figs, 97—100, 105 
106, 112, and in connection with these the death-aspect of the snake is discussed. 
My present view as to the interpretation of these ‘hero-reliefs’ will be given 
later, p. 307. 

4 Vit. Cleom. 39. 

Zs el a i ee le — 

F : 
< 3 : 
eels   

an) The Daimon-Snake 269 

Greeks. It is, Dr Frazer! says, a common belief among the Zulus 
and other Caffre tribes that the dead come to life and revisit their 
old homes in the shape of serpents. Such semi-human serpents 
are treated with great respect and often fed with milk. Among 
the Ba-Ronga? the snake is regarded as a sort of incarnation of an 
ancestor and is dreaded though never worshipped. <A native 
pursuing a snake that had got into the kitchen of a missionary 
station accidentally set the building on fire. All the neighbours 
exclaimed that the fire was due to the snake, and the snake was 
the chiko-nembo or ghost of a man who was buried close at hand 
and had come out of the earth to avenge himself. If a dead man 
wants to frighten his wife, he is apt in East Central Africa to 
present himself in the form of a snake. Among the Bahima of 
EKukole’, in Uganda, dead chiefs turn into snakes, but dead kings 
into lions. 

If the snake then is the symbol or vehicle of the dead man 
how can he also be a ‘daimon of fertility’? The two aspects are 
incompatible, even contradictory—death and life are not the 
same, though mysticism constantly seeks to blend them. Which 
then does the snake represent, death or life? Is he a good 
daimon of life and fertility or an evil daimon of mortality and 
corruption ? 

Fortunately, a story told us by Plutarch‘ leaves us in no doubt 
as to the significance of the snake and its relation to the dead 
man. After Cleomenes of Sparta had fled to Egypt and there 
died by his own orders, Ptolemy, fearing an insurrection, wished to 
dishonour the king’s body and ordered it to be impaled and 
hung up. 

A few days after, those who were guarding the impaled body saw a huge 
snake (Spdkovra) wound about the head and hiding the face so that no bird of 
prey should light on it. Thereupon a superstitious fear fell on the king and 
such a dread that it started the women on various purification ceremonies, 
inasmuch as a man had been put to death who was dear to the gods and of 
more than mortal nature. The Alexandrians came thronging to the place 
and saluted Cleomenes as a hero and the child of the gods, till the learned 
men put a stop to it by explaining that as oxen when they putrefy breed bees, 

1 Adonis Attis Osiris?, p. 73. 

2 H. Jumod, Les Ba-Ronga, 1898. 

3 J. Roscoe, The Bahima, Journal of Anthrop. Inst. xxxvit. (1907). 

4 Vit. Cleom. xxxix. ...ol madato. wddora Tay fdw Tov SpdKovra Tots jnpwow 
ouvpKelwoar. 

iit Marc! 

270 Daimon and Hero [oH. 2 

and horses wasps, and beetles come to life from decaying asses, so human 
carcasses when some of the juices about the marrow congeal and thicken 
substantially give rise to serpents. And it was because they knew this that 
the men of old time associated the snake more than any other animal with 
heroes. 

The ‘men of old time’ were content with no such pseudo- 
science. They believed, with the pious Alexandrians, not that 
the snake was the sign and result of putrefaction, but that it was 
evidence, clear and indefeasible, that the man was of more than 

mortal nature (Kpeittovos thv dvaw). Cleomenes had been a 
hero in our sense in his life, but no one knew that in the religious 
sense he was a ‘hero’ till the snake appeared. The snake then is 
the symbol and the vehicle not of mortality but immortality— 
of something sacred, something in the vaguer sense divine. 

The word xpeittwyv, better, stronger, used by Plutarch is 
instructive. xpeitToves, Hesychius tells us, is a general term for 
heroes and for gods, but not all dead men were xpeirtoves. This 
reminds us that the meaning of the word ‘hero’ is actually not 
‘dead man,’ but, if we may trust Hesychius!, it means simply 
‘powerful,’ ‘strong,’ ‘noble,’ ‘ venerable.’ 

the snake then stands for life and mana, not for death. In 

the light of the snake as life-daimon, as ‘more than mortal, we 
understand many birth-stories current in antiquity. A snake was 
seen lying outstretched by the side of Olympias, mother of 
| Alexander, and Philip from that time on deserted his bride. 
| It may have been, Plutarch? concludes, from fear of her enchant- 
Sp or because ‘he dared not violate the sanctity of one 
wedded to a greater than he.’ In like fashion, says Pausanias’, 
| was Aristomenes the Messenian born, ‘for his mother, Nicoteleia, 
they say, was visited by a daimon or a god in the likeness of 
a serpent. The same story was told of Aristodama by the 
Sicyonians. 

We have already (p. 148) seen how out of a sacrificed animal, a 
bull or goat, could arise a god. The case however of the snake is 
quite different from that of the food animals. So far as we know, 

[ the snake was never killed that his mana might be eaten. It is 
well to note that sanctity does not always issue in sacramental 

1 Sub voc. jpws: Suvards, loxupes, evvatos, ceuves. 
2 Vit. Alex. 2, pie i ’ 
3 tv. 14.7, and Dr Frazer ad loc. For other instances of the fath 
snakes see Adonis Attis Osiris”, p. 70. : Sea a 

Palingenesia and Totemism 

sacrifice. The snake among the Greeks was full of mana, was 
intensely sacred, not because as food he supported life, but 
because he is himself a life-daimon, a spirit of generation, 
even of immortality. But—and this is all important—it is im- 
mortality of quite a peculiar kind. The individual members of 
the group of the Cecropidae die, man after man, generation after 
generation; Cecrops, who never lived at all, lives for ever, as 
a snake. He is the daiuov yevyns, the spirit, the genius of the 
race, he stands not for personal immortality in our modern 
sense, not for the negation of death, d@avacia, but for the 
perennial renewal of life through death, for Reincarnation, for 
TANLYyEveria. 

The word radvyyevecia, ‘birth back again,’ speaks for itself. 
It is a much simpler, more primitive thing than we are apt to 
imagine. We think of Reincarnation as belonging to an elaborate 
and somewhat stereotyped mysticism, whether Indian or Pytha- 
gorean. It is associated in our minds with a grotesque system of 
purification for the individual soul. Our common sense and the 
common sense of the normal enlightened Greek rebels against 
such a doctrine, just as we mentally rebel against the totemist’s 
claim of kinship with beast and plant. The average Athenian, 
when he was told by Empedokles that he had once been a bird or 
a tree, was probably as much surprised and disgusted as the 
theologian of the last century when it was hinted to him that his 
-remoter ancestors were apes. 

Reincarnation is, I venture to think, no mystical doctrine 
propounded by a particular and eccentric sage, nor yet is it 
a chance even if widespread error into which independently in 
various parts of the world men have fallen. Rather it is, I 
believe, a stage in the development of thinking through which 
men naturally and necessarily pass, it is a form of collective or 
group thought, and, as such, it is a usual and almost necessary 
concomitant of totemism. Whether my view in this matter be 
true or false, thus much stands certain, a belief in Reincarnation 
is characteristic of totemistic peoples. It is these simple, deep 
down things that last so long. Reincarnation long held under by 
Nationalism and Olympianism, reemerged to blossom in Orphism, 
and constantly to. haunt the imagination of a Pindar and a 

®. 

8S: 
= 

\—) 

272 - . Daimon and Hero (on. ee 

Plato; ‘to understand this reincarnation we must go back to our 
savages. 

‘The theory of conception as a reincarnation of the dead, 
writes Dr Frazer’, 

is universally held by all the Central Australian tribes which have been 
||investigated by Messrs Spencer and Gillen ; every man, woman and child 
| is supposed by them to be a reembodiment of an ancestral spirit. 

Messrs Spencer and Gillen, in the preface to their volume, the 
Northern Tribes of Central Australia, themselves write?: 

Perhaps the most interesting result of our work is the demonstration 
of the fact that, in the whole of this wide area, the belief that every living 
| member of the tribe is the reincarnation of a spirit ancestor is universal. 
This belief is just as firmly held by the Urabunna people, who count descent 
in the female line, as it is by the Arunta and Warramunga, who count 
descent in the male line. 

And again’: 

| The natives one and all in these tribes believe that the child is the direct 
| result of the entrance into the mother of an ancestral spirit individual. 

How the Central Australian came to believe in reincarnation 
we cannot certainly say, but it is not hard to imagine how such a 
faith might arise. New young emus, new young kangaroos are 
born; the savage has no notion of creation, no theory of pro- 
creation; he sees the young kangaroo come from the body of its 
mother, the emu from the emu’s egg; the old kangaroos, the old 
emus, are born back again, there has been a TaNuyyever ta. 
His rites of initiation constantly obsess him with the notion of 
re-birth, with a death and resurrection that are of one and the 
same life. These ceremonies may indeed, it has been well 
conjectured‘, have for one of their main objects to secure rein- 
carnation. Such rites as circumcision and the knocking out of 
teeth would thus find a new and simpler meaning. Bones and 
sinews decay, but a tooth lasts on and would serve, if carefully 
guarded, as an imperishable bit of the old body, as a focus for 

1 Totemism and Exogamy, 1. p. 191. 

® Northern Tribes, Introd. p. xi. 
3 Northern Tribes, p. 330. 
4 By Dr Frazer, The Magic Art, 1. 106. 

ecaaid Reincarnation of Ancestors OTs) 
reincarnation, a ‘stock of vital energy for the use of the dis- 
embodied spirit after death}, 

It is easy to see how such a belief goes with group-life and 
group-thinking. The individual dies, but, as a matter of actual 
fact, the group goes on, the totem animal is never extinct, This 
totem animal, conceived of as the common life of the tribe, is 
projected as it were into the past, the ‘ Alcheringa’ time, and 
is there thought of as half man half animal, a figure, if the clan 
be a snake clan, strangely like old Cecrops. When a man dies he 

 - goes back to his totem. He does not cease to be, but he ceases 

functionally for a time, goes out of sight, by and by to reappear 
as a new tribesman. Generation is not, as Plato? reminds us, 
a straight line stretching after death into an interminable remote 
immortality, it is a circle, a xv«Aos, always returning upon itself. 
Just such was the ‘ancient doctrine’ of which Socrates? reminded 
Cebes, which affirmed that ‘they who are here go thither and they 
come back here and are born again from the dead.’ 

We have seen‘ how in the Jntichiwma ceremonies the totem- 
group magically secures the multiplication of the totem. The 
human-emu sheds his blood, dresses and dances as an emu, that 
__he may increase and invigorate the supply of bird-emus. If we 
bear in mind that recurrent cycle of human life which is 
‘Reincarnation, and if we also bear in mind that to the totemist 
the two cycles of life, human and animal or plant, are indissolubly 
linked, then we understand without difficulty what otherwise is 
so strange and disconcerting, the fact that Intichiwma ceremonies 
are commemorative as well as magical. The emu man when he 
dances aS an emu commemorates the deeds of his emu ancestor, 
He needs must, because those heroic deeds done in the ‘ Alcheringa 

1 Dr Frazer, op. cit. p.96. Mr Cornford calls my attention to the curious notice 
in Lydus (de mens. tv. 40), rods uévror dd6vTas odk ExovTas picews 7 Tupl 7 Xpovyw your 
pakp@ KaravaNrloxer Oar KxareAiumravoy (ol madatol) ém’ adris THs mupas ws TO ovo 
axpHotous mpos Tov THs madiyyeverias Abyov droBAémovTes * TPbdpa yap kal avrol TOV wept 
avrfs mapedéxovTo Noyov Oud TO avis ws Eddxer Tadvyyevnobuevoy dvOpwmrov un xpn rev 
éml THs unTpwas yaoTpos dddvTwr. 

® Plat. Phaed. 728 e yap wh del dvramodidoln ra erepa Tots érépo.s yer bueva. 
@omepel KUKAw Tepudvra, GAN EevOeld Tis ein H yéveois ex TOD érépou povov els TO 
Karavrikpd Kal uh avaxdumror madw éml 7d Erepov unde Kaprhy tovotro, oloOa bri, K.T.D. 

3 Plat. Phaed. 70 c madatds wey ody gore Tis Adbyos, oF pmeuvnueda, ws eloly évOévde 
adukduevar éxe?, kal madd ye dSedpo dduxvodvrat kal ylyvovTat Ex THV TEOvEwTU, 

4 Supra, p. 124. 
18 

274 Daimon and Hero [ cH. 

time’ are but the projection of his own most vital needs, his need 
of food, his need of offspring. At his great Eniautos-festival he 
‘enacts his ancestors who are his food-animals and thereby brings 
‘them back to birth. 

To the Central Australian then it is his ancestor who gives 
him food and offspring and all the wealth he craves. His way of 
thinking is not far from the mind of Pindar. Pindar offends our 
moral sense, even our taste sometimes, because to him, in the 
glory of life, Wealth and Plenitude bulk so large. and still worse, 
as it seems to us, it is inherited wealth which with him seems 
married to virtue—an alliance unknown to Christianity. But his 
view of life, though never quite inspiring, takes on another 
complexion when we see how deep-rooted it is in things primitive. 
Any Central Australian at his Intichiwma ceremonies would have 
felt in his bones the nearness of w)ovTos as well as apery to the 
daipov yevéOros}. 

Theban Pindar may have borrowed his thought from Boeotian 
Hesiod ; both came of a tenacious stock. Hesiod? tells of the men 
of the Golden Age, the Alcheringa of the Greek, and how after 
a life of endless feast they fell asleep, and Earth hid them, and 
thereupon they became ° daipuoves, spirits, watchers over men, 
haunting the land mist-clad, 

Givers of wealth, this kingly guerdon theirs. 

) In life the king is lord of the Eniautos*, in death he is the daimon-. 
‘ hero. oa 
It may still perhaps be felt that, at least with the Greeks, 

this totemistic notion of reincarnation, with its corollary that 
the cycle of man’s reincarnation brings with it the renewal 
of animal and plant life, is matter only of poetry and a vague 
philosophy. It is time to enquire whether in actual practice, in 
definite ritual acts, we have any evidence of the same notion. 

1 Cf. such passages as Ol. 11. 96, 
5 wav modros dperais dedardaduévos, 
and the whole of the fifth Pythian. 
2 Op. 125, 
Hepa éoodmevor mdvry porravres éx’ alay 
Az ae mXovrodéra’ Kal rovro yépas Baoidjiov éoxov. 
; It is not a little curious that the scholiast on Hesiod, Theog. 112, &s 7’ &gevos 
ddooavro, says “Agevds éore kuplws udev 6 dd éviavTod wovros. 

- 

oe: and for the literature of the Anthesteria. 

vor] The Anthesteria 

Are the actual dead, as well as the daimones of Hesiod, appealed 
to as movrodorau, as, like the Olympians, Swrfjpes édor ? Cecrops 
and Erichthonios, we have seen, are connected with ritual snakes, 
but is the ritual snake connected with the dead? Neither 
Arrephoria nor Thesmophoria, both ceremonies extremely primi- 
tive and both concerned with fertility, have any word to say of 
ancestors, any hint of a cycle of human reincarnation. We shall 
find what we seek and more even than we expect in the great 
Athenian festival of the blossoming of flowers and the revocation 
of souls, the Anthesteria. 

Tur ANTHESTERLA. 

The Anthesteria was a three days’ festival celebrated from the 
11th to the 13th of Anthesterion, falling therefore at the end of our 
February, when the Greek spring is well begun. The three days 
were called respectively Pithoigea ‘Jar-opening,’ Choes ‘Drinking 
Cups, Chytroi ‘Pots.’ Each day had its different form of pot 
or jar and its varying ceremonial, but the whole festival was, 
if we may judge from the names of the several days, essentially 
a Pot-Feast. On the first day, the Pithoigia, the wine-jars were 
opened, on the second the wine was solemnly drunk, on the third 
a pot full of grain and seeds, a panspermia, was solemnly offered. 

I have elsewhere! shown, and my view has, I believe, been 

universally accepted, that beneath the festivities of a Wine- 

Festival to Dionysos there lay a festival of All-Souls, that in 

4 the spring month of February the Athenians, like the Romans 

at their Feralia, performed ceremonies for the placation of the 
dead. I was right, I believe, in detecting the All-Souls feast; 
wrong, however, in supposing that it belonged to a different 
and lower religious stratum. This mistake I shall now attempt 
to rectify. I shall try, in the light of the doctrine of reincarnation 
and the Intichiwma ceremonies, to show that the ghost element 

g and the fertility element belong to one and the same stratum 
of thought, and are, in fact, mutually interdependent. 

We begin with the Pithoigia. The pithos or great stone jar, 

_ frequently half buried in the earth, was the main storehouse of 

1 Prolegomena, pp. 32—55, to which I must refer for a full statement of sources 

18—2 

276 Daimon and Hero | [cH. 

the ancients both for food and drink, for grain, for oil, for wine. 
The cellars of the palace of Knossos have disclosed rows of these 
pithoi. I have elsewhere! shown that the pithoi are also grave- 
jars, out of which the ghosts of dead men might flutter forth and 
to which they could return as to their homes. But for the 
present it is as storehouses of food and especially wine that the 
pithoi concern us. At the Pithoigia these wine-jars were opened 
for the first time, as the wine made in the autumn would 
then just be drinkable. Proklos on Hesiod? tells us that ‘the 
festival was an ancestral one, and that it was not allowable to 
prevent either household slaves or hired servants from partaking 
of the wine.’ By this time no doubt it was a family rather than 
a gentile festival; anyhow it was collective, of the whole house’, 
and it was ancient. It was, Proklos says, ‘in honour of Dionysos’; 
he prudently adds ‘that is, of his wine.’ 

Food and drink, and the desire magically to increase and safe- 
guard food and drink, are earlier than the gods. Plutarch‘ in his 
account of the Pithoigia lets us watch the transit from one to the 
other. He is speaking of the local Theban Pithoigia over which 
his father had presided and at which he had been present as a — 
boy. 

On the eleventh day of the month (Anthesterion) they broached the new 
wine at Athens, calling the day Pithoigia. And from of old it seems it was 
their custom to offer some of it as a libation before drinking of it, with the 
prayer that the use of the drug might be rendered harmless and beneficial to 
them. But by us (Boeotians) the month is called Prostaterios, and it is our 

custom on the sixth day of the month ¢o sacrifice to the Agathos Daimon and 
then taste the new wine after the West Wind has done blowing. 

And again later® he says those who are the first to drink of the 
new wine drink it in Anthesterion after the winter, and we call 
that day by the name of the Agathos Daimon but the Athenians 
call it Pithoigia. 

The nature of the ‘sacrifice’ is clear. Plutarch uses the 

1 Proleg. p. 43. 
? Op. 368 Apxouévov 5é ridov. "Ey rais rarplous trav “ENAjvwv éoprats éredetro Kal 

Ta dokwra Kal N wLOoryla els Thunv Avovicov, Touréort Tod olvov avrod. 

3 Tzetzes ad Hes. Op. 366 says 7 miBoryla 5é Kowdv qv cuumdcrov: dvoltayres yap 
Tous mlOous maot peTediOovv Tod Arovicov Swpjuaros. 
Quaest. Symp. ur. 7.1 Kat mada ye (ws gorxev) edxovTo Tod olvov mply 7 mlew, 
dmoamévdovres aBAaBH Kal owrijpiov adrots rod PapudKov Thy xphow yevéoOar...€xTn 
& icrapevov voulferar Odoavras dyaby daluorr yeverOar Tod olvov mera Sépupor. 

5 Quaest. Symp. vut. 3. 

The Agathos Daimon, the Pithoigia 

vm) 277 
word proper to burnt sacrifice (@Qvewv)!, but this is no offering 
to an Olympian, it is simply the solemn pouring out of a 
little of the new wine, that so the whole may be released from 
tabu. ‘This ‘sacrifice’ of the new wine is, to begin with, made 
to nothing and nobody, but bit by bit a daimon of the act emerges, 
and he is the Agathos Daimon. In what shape and similitude 
shall we find the Agathos Daimon? Is he a wholly new apparition 
or an old familiar friend ? 

The Agathos Daimon. Classical scholars are apt to remember 
the Good Spirit, the Agathos Daimon or Agathodaimon as he is 
later called, as a vague ‘genius’ of some sort invoked at the 
close of banquets when a little pure wine was drunk,or as a late 
abstraction appearing like Agathe Tyche in the preamble of 
decrees. The view I now hope to make clear is that the Agathos 
Daimon is a very primitive fertility-spirit, a conception that long 
preceded any of the Olympians. He is indeed the inchoate 
material out of which, as we shall presently see, more than one 
Olympian is in part made. But for the present we are interested 
in him chiefly as the mask or functional form which each 
individual hero is compelled to wear. 

We have first to ask what shape he assumes. 

The coin in Fig. 66? gives us the clearest possible answer. 
Here we have a great coiled snake sur- 
rounded by emblems of fertility, ears of 
corn and the poppyhead with its multitude 
of seeds. The snake’s name is clearly in- 
scribed; he is the New Agathos Daimon 
(NEO. AT'A@., AAIM.). On the obverse, 

not figured here, is the head of Nero; it 
is he who claims to be the New Agathos 
Daimon. Cecrops the hero-king was a 
snake, Nero the Emperor is the new snake: it is not as private 
individuals that they claim to be fertility-daimons, it is as 
functionaries. Cecrops the modest old tribal king was content 
to bring fertility to the Cecropidae, Nero as imperialist claims 
to be the ‘Good Daimon of the whole habitable world*.’ 

1 For the use of ew as distinguished from ¢evayifew see Prolegomena, p. 53 ff. 
2 Head, Hist. Num. p. 720. 
3 C. I. G. rt. 4699 daiuwy dyabos ris olkoupérys. 

Fia. 66. 

ne rere ne nee ee ee 

278 Daimon and Hero 3 [ OH. 

It has long been known of course that the Agathodaimon 
of Hellenistic days was, as it is generally 
expressed, ‘worshipped in the form of a 
snake,’ but, because his figure appears on 
late Roman coins of Alexandria and often 
crowned by the Egyptian Shent, it is assumed 
that the snake-form was late or borrowed 
from the East. This is true of course of the 
Shent, false of the snake. We shall find 
abundant evidence of the Agathos Daimon as snake at home in 
Greece. The special value of the Alexandrian coin-types is that 
they so clearly emphasize the fertility-aspect of the snake. In 
Fig. 67 a coin of Nerva', better preserved than the coin of Nero, 
we have the same great fertility-snake, whom but for Nero’s coin 
we should not have certainly known to be the Agathos Daimon ; 
he wears the Shent and has ears of corn and somewhat to our 
surprise he holds in his coils a caduceus. 

The snakes are sometimes two in number, a male and female 
genius who later crystallized into the half-human figures of 
Agathos Daimon and Agathe Tyche. A marriage was needed 
magically to compel fertility. In Fig. 68 we have a great 
modius or corn basket placed on the top of an Ionic column. 

Fic. 69. 

In the basket are ears of corn and poppyheads. To either side 
is a snake; that on the right wears a poppyhead, that on the 
left a Shent. Probably the Shent-wearer is the royal or male 
snake, the bride being poppy-crowned, an earth-daimon. On the 
obverse is the head of Hadrian. 

1 The coins in Figs. 67 to 70 are reproduced by kind permission of Dr George 

Macdonald from his Catalogue of Greek Coins in the Hunterian Collection, Vol. ur. 
Pl. rxxxvi. and uxxxvi. 

thos Daimon in Egypt 279 

The modius marks very clearly the function of the snakes 
as fertility-daimons. The same idea comes out in the manifold 
attributes of the pair in Fig. 69. That they are regarded 
here as male and female is doubtful; rather they are the 
Egyptian and Greek incarnations of the same notion. The 
snake to the right is all Egyptian. He wears the disk and 
plumes and carries in his coils the sistrum as well as a poppy- 
~ head, he is in fact a wraeus. The snake to the left is partly 
Egyptianized; he wears the shent, but in his coils is the 
kerykeion of the Greek Hermes. 

It would almost seem as though the kerykeion had like power 
in itself with the snakes, and indeed what 
was it but a staff with a pair of snakes inter- 
twined? On the coin of Claudius in Fig. 70 
we have no snakes but a great winged 
kerykeion, to either side of it ears of corn, 
the whole tied together in a bunch. Later 
when we come to the ceremonies of the 
Chytroi? we shall understand why the kery- 
keion, the ‘attribute’ of Hermes, had power to compel fertility. 

From these imperial coins with the figure of the Agathos 
Daimon two points emerge, both of paramount importance. 
First, as already noted, the snake-daimon is a collective repre- 
sentation: he stands for a king or emperor, a functionary of some 
kind, not a personality. Second, his function is the promotion of 
fertility. The regular adjective attached to the daimon is 
ayabcs, good, and the kind of ‘ goodness’ one needs in a Daimon 
is in the first instance fertility. = 

So much indeed we might have already guessed from the 
name, but it was better to have clear monumental evidence. 
The word dya6és has like dios no superlative because it is in 
itself a superlative, meaning something dyav, something very 
much’, Later of course it was moralized, but to begin with it 

Fia. 70. 

1 Infra, p. 289. : 
2 Menander (Kock 550 ap. Clem. Al. Strom. v. 727) was wiser than he knew 
when he said 
dmravre daluwv davdpt cvumaplorarat 
ebOds yevoudvy, pvoTdywyos Tod Blov 
dyabbs: kaxov yap Saluov’ ob vousoréov 
elvat Blov B\dwrovra xpnorov. 
3 Stephanos, Lez. s.v: 

vo Vogl The Shent-crowned snakes of Alexandria are late and foreign, 

Daimon and Hero 

just means as with us ‘good’ in the sense of ‘abundant,’ a ‘good’ 
lot, aya@% dais! a good dinner, ayaa rpdypara, not matters morally 
excellent, but ‘good’ circumstances in peaceful days?, res secundae. 
We have already* seen how in early Hebrew or in Mexican ‘good’ 
means ‘good to eat.’ It is over things ‘good to eat’ that the 
Agathos Daimon has his sway. All this, familiar to the student 
of language, is apt to be forgotten when we come to analyse a 
religious conception like that of the Agathos Daimon, yet is — 
essential to its realization. This abundance, this ‘muchness’ of | 
the Agathos Daimon will come out even more clearly when we 
come to his attribute the cornucopia. 

can we point to earlier and home-grown snake-daimons of 
fertility ? 

On the black-figured cylix‘ in Fig. 71 we find them repre- 
sented in lovely and quite unlooked-for fashion. The scene is a 

Fie. 71. 

1 Hom, Zl. xr, 810 cal ogw dat?’ ayabny mapabhooua. 
2 Thucyd. m1. 82 éy wey yap eipivn kal dyabots mpd-yuacw. ~~ 
3 Supra, p. 139. ; 
4 In Munich, Alte Pinakothek. First published and discussed by Dr Bohlau 
Schlangenleibige Nymphen. Philologus, N. F. x1. 1. One half of the vase is re- 
produced and discussed in my Prolegomena, p. 259. See also Delphika in J. H. 8. 

xix. 1899, p. 216. But I did not then see the connection with the Agathos 
Daimon. 

- Charites and Eumenides with Snakes 281 

vineyard. On the one side, heraldically grouped, are a herd of 
mischievous goats, the enemies of the vine, bent on destruction, 
nibbling at the vines. On the other, as though to mark the 
contrast, under a great spreading vine, are four maiden-snakes. 
Two hold a basket of net or wicker in which the grapes will be 
gathered ; a third holds a great cup for the grape juice, a fourth 
plays gladly on the double flute. 

It might perhaps be rash to name these gentle snake-bodied 
vintage nymphs Agathoi Daimones, though Agathoi Daimones 
they are in form and function. Any Athenian child would have ~ 
known by what name they best loved to be called. Old Cecrops 
would not have blushed to own them for his daughters. The 

emt ails’ 

peas 
EYMENI Z1N 
EY KXAN 

“1 
eee 

Fic. 72. 

Charites so early got them wholly human form they might have hs 
looked askance. Anyhow the snake-maidens are own sisters to 
the three staid matronly women figures on the relief in Fig. 72, 
the Eumenides of Argos?, who hold pomegranates in one hand 

1 For the Eumenides and their relation to the Semnae and to the Erinyes see 
Prolegomena, pp. 217—256. I have there fully discussed the snake form of the 
angry ghost, the Erinys, pp. 232—237. See Delphika, J. H. 8. x1x. 1899, p. 230. 

282 Daimon and Hero [ CH. 

and in the other snakes—own sisters too to the ancient fertility 
goddesses of the Areopagos, the Semnae. 

The Agathos Daimon was, like the Roman nwmen, what 
Dr Warde Fowler! has well called a ‘functional spirit with will 
power,’ the function being indicated by the adjectival name. As 
such he was, no doubt, to begin with, sex-less. When sex is 
later attributed to him he is—perhaps under the influence of 
patriarchalism—like the Roman genius, always male, a daimon 
of generation, but on the whole he resists complete personalization. 
He gets, it is true, as will be seen, a sort of shadowy mother 
or wife in Agathe Tyche, yet, save for these grape-gathering nymphs 
and the Eumenides of Argos, we should never have known that 
the snake fertility-daimon took female form. 

The Agathos Daimon appears again with Tyche at Lebadeia in 
Boeotia, associated with the strange and almost grotesquely primi- 
tive ceremonial of the oracle of Trophonios?. When a man would 
consult the oracle he first of all had to lodge a fixed number 
of days in a ‘certain building’ which was sacred to the Agathos 
Daimon and to Agathe Tyche: when he came back senseless from 
the oracle he was carried to this same house where he recovered 
his wits. I suspect that in that house or building dwelt a holy 
snake, an o/xovpos ddis. Pausanias saw in the grotto images with 
snakes curled about their sceptres, he did not know whether to 
call them Asklepios and Hygieia or Trophonios and Eileithyia, for 
he adds, ‘ they think that snakes are as sacred to Trophonios as to 
Asklepios. The suppliant to the oracle when he went down into the 
dreadful chasm took with him in either hand a honey-cake, surely 
for a snake’s appeasement. Behind all these snake-divinities is 
the snake-daimon, the snake himself, male and female?, 

Boeotia was assuredly a land of snake-cults. The relief‘ in 
Fig. 73, which is good Attic work of the fourth century B.c., found 
at Eteonos, attests this. A man carrying a cake, probably a 
honey-cake, in his uplifted hand approaches a grotto cave; he leads 
by the hand his little son who hangs back. No wonder, for from 
the grotto rears out his head a huge snake. A good daimon he 
probably is, but somewhat fearsome. 

1 The Religious Experience of the Roman People, 1911, p. 119. 
2 Paus, 1x. 39. 8,5 and 138. See infra, chapter xr. 
3 Infra, pp. 429—436. * Berlin Museum Cat. 724. 

4 

Vit | Agathos Daimon and Agathe Tyche 283 

Agathe Tyche we meet again at Elis and with her Agathos 
Daimon, only he bears another and a now thrice familiar name, 

Fig. 73. 

Sosipolis. The people of Elis, Pausanias? tells us, had a sanctuary 
of Tyche with a colossal image on its colonnade. 

Here too Sosipolis has honours (r:pai) in a small building to the left of 
Tyche. The god is painted in the shape in which he appeared in a dream, 
as a child, dressed in a chlamys spangled with stars, and in one hand he 
holds the horn of Amaltheia. 

But what has a child in a spangled chlamys holding a cornu- 
copia to do with our snake-daimon? Much, indeed everything; he 
is the ‘good’ snake-daimon. We remember* that when the child 
was placed in the forefront of the Elean army, he changed into a 
serpent, and fear fell on the Arcadians and they fled. The Eleans 
won a great victory and called the god Sosipolis. 

And where the serpent appeared to go down into the ground after the 
battle, there they made the sanctuary*. 

Sosipolis at Olympia, it will be remembered, had like Erech- 
theus and Trophonios the snake’s service of the honey-cake. 

The Agathos Daimon and Sosipolis are one and the same, and 
Sosipolis, it will be remembered, is but another name for Zeus 
Soter, Saviour of the city. Now we understand—though this is 
of but trifling interest save as a confirmation—the confusion in 

1 Supra, p. 240, note 4. 2 vr. 25. 4. 
3 Loe. cit., supra, p. 240. 4 Paus. vi. 20. 3 and 5. 

ORs een a il ae ae a eee 

284 — Daimon and Hero | [cH. 

Greek drinking customs of Zeus Soter with the Agathos Daimon. 
Suidas?, in his valuable gloss, says: 

The ancients had the custom after dinner of drinking to the Good 
Daimon. They gulped down some unmixed wine and said this was to the 

Good Daimon, but when they were about to separate it was to Zeus the 
Saviour? 

The familiar Sosipolis is then in form and function, though 
not in name, an Agathos Dai- 
mon. He is to us especially 
instructive, because he shows the 
transition from snake to animal 
form. Sosipolis changes into a 
snake. It is a safe mythological 
rule that a metamorphosis of this 
kind may always be inverted; 
the snake takes on the form of a 
human child. Another point to 
be noted is, that at Elis and 
Olympia, when the snake-daimon 
takes on human form, he*® and 
his female correlative, Tyche or 
Eileithyia, appear in the matri- 
archal relation, as Mother and 
Son. 

On the relief in Fig. 74 we 
see Agathe Tyche holding a child 
in her arms. The design is 
carved in low relief on a column 
in the Hall of the Mystae of Dionysos recently excavated at 
Melos‘. Agathe Tyche is clearly here the Good Luck of Melos ; 

1's.v. “Ayabod Aatuovos. *EGos etxov of madaol wera TO Setrvov mlvew "Ayabod 
Aatwovos, émippopobvres &xparov, kal rodro Aéyev ’Ayabot Aaluwovos: xwplferbar dé 
MéNovres Atos Zwrfpos. Suidas adds that the second day of the month was called 
the day of the Agathos Daimon. The second is one of the few days that are 
not mentioned as either lucky or unlucky by Hesiod in his calendar. 

* For the whole discussion of the subject of the final libations at a feast to 
Agathos Daimon, Agathe Tyche and Zeus Soter see Athenaeus xy. 47, 48, 692, 693. 
He gives as his authorities Philochoros and Theophrastos, and various poets of the 
Old and Middle Comedy. 

* The nominal correlative of Tyche is Tychon, a daimon who is but a form of 
Priapus, see Kaibel, Daktyloi Idaioi, in Nachrichten d. k. Gesellschaft d. Wissen- 
schaften zu Gottingen, Phil.-Hist.-Kl. 1901, p. 503. . 

4 J.H.S. xvi. 1898, p. 60, Fig. 1, and A. Mitth. xv. 1890, p. 248. For Birene 
carrying the child Ploutos see my Mythology and Monuments, pp. 65—8, 

Agathe Tyche and Cornucopia 285 

she is the personification or projection, the genius loci. The 
style of the relief is of course late, but it goes back to an 
earlier prototype and one that to us is instructive. Pausanias? 
saw at Thebes, near to the observatory of Teiresias, a sanc- 
tuary of Tyche, and she was carrying the child Ploutos. As 
he naively observes: 

It was a clever plan of the artists to put Ploutos in the arms of Tyche 

as his mother or nurse, and Kephisodotos was no less clever; he made for 
the Athenians the image of Eirene holding Ploutos. 

Tyche at Elis has lost, or never had, her prefix Agathe. When 
the child Ploutos is in her arms the adjective 
is superfluous, he is her ‘Wealth,’ her ‘Good- 
ness. When the snake-daimon Sosipolis 
takes human form, he holds the ‘horn of 
Amaltheia, the cornucopia. The child and 
the cornucopia of earth’s fruits are one 
and the same. That is clear on the vase- 
painting? in Fig. 35, where Ge rises from 
the earth, holding in her hands the great 
cornucopia, out of which uprises the child. 
The cornucopia is sometimes explained as 
the ‘horn of Amaltheia, the goat-mother 
who nursed the infant Zeus. Sometimes 
it is the horn of the river-bull Achelods, 
the great source of fertility’. Its symbolism 
is always the same; fertility, whatever the 
source. But most of all it stands for the 
gathered fruits of the year’ There was 
a certain cup, we remember’, ‘ called the Horn of Amaltheia and 

TKR ZENOKM2 
TIvroPOPHZ A> 
TO A KAI PETS 

Fig. 75. 

also Hniautos.’ 
The relief in Fig. 75° may serve to remind us of the snake and 

human forms of the Agathos Daimon. It is the only instance 
known to me where they occur together. The monument was 
found at Epidauros. It is of Roman date’, a votive offering of 

Wape, UG see 2 Supra, p. 167. 3 See Prolegomena, p. 435, Fig. 135. 

4 Diodorus 1v. 35. 4 8 mpocayopedoar Képas "AuanOelas, év @ mwrdrrovet mAHOos 
brdpxew maons omwpw7s Spas, Botpwy Te kai uno Kat Trav d\Nwy TOLOUTWY. 

5 p. 186. 6 Kabbadias, Fouilles d’Epidaure, 1. p. 45. 

7 The date is given in the inscription but not the era used. As three eras are 
in use at Epidauros the exact year cannot be fixed. The lettering is of the 

Qnd cent. A.D. 

286 Daimon and Hero ; [cH 

a certain priest, a Fire-Bearer, by name Tiberius Claudius 
Xenokles. The god is represented holding a sceptre in his right 
hand, a cornucopia in his left. A god we must call him, for the 
dedication is ayaGod Geod, of the Good God. Near Megalopolis 
Pausanias' saw a temple of the Good God; he remarks that ‘if 
the gods are givers of good things to men and Zeus is the 
supreme god, it may logically be inferred that the term is applied 
to Zeus.’ The inference is somewhat rash. As the relief was 
found at Epidaurus the epithet is usually explained as a ‘title 
of Asklepios,’ but surely the Agathos Theos is only an Olympianized 
form of the old Agathos Daimon. Over his body still crawls the 
snake he once was. We follow the snake. 

The association of mother, snake, child, and the wealth of 
harvest fruits comes out strikingly in the Graeco-Roman relief? in 
Fig. 76. We have purposely kept it to the end because it 

Y 
4 ry 
Be 

admirably embodies and summarizes the relation of snake, hero 
and daimon. The seated figure is Demeter, and we are tempted 
to call the young boy who brings the fruits to her Triptolemos. 
It is, I think, safer to think of him as the child Ploutos. In Crete- 
Hesiod? tells us: 

Demeter brought forth Ploutos...and kindly was the birth 

Of him whose way is on the sea and over all the Earth. 

Happy, happy is the mortal who doth meet him as he goes, 
For his hands are full of blessings and his treasure overflows, 

1 vii. 36. 5. 
° Overbeck, Kunst-Mythologie, Atlas Taf. 
® Theog. 969, schol. ad loe. cal yap 1 maporuta § rupay Kad KptOdv, w vime Wdobre.’ 

ee 

Kychreus the Snake-King 
and the scholiast preserves for us the tag: 

Ah for the wheat and barley, O child Ploutos. 

The snake behind Demeter is of special interest. In function 
he was of course an Agathos Daimon, but as to his actual name 
people were not so sure. Tradition associated him with the hero 
Kychreus of Salamis. 

‘At Salamis,’ Pausanias! tells us, ‘there was a sanctuary of Kychreus. 

It is said that, while the Athenians were engaged in the sea-fight with the 
Medes, a snake appeared among the ships and God announced that this snake 

_ was the hero Kychreus.’ 

To this sanctuary, when Athens and Megara were fighting for 
Salamis, Solon went by night and offered to Periphemos and 
Kychreus sphagia, the sacrifice proper to heroes’. 

Kychreus is, perhaps, a somewhat shadowy figure to many of 
us, but he was in ancient days a hero of high repute. Plutarch 
solemnly argues that the robber Skiron cannot have been such 
a very disreputable villain, as he was son-in-law to Kychreus, who 
had divine honours at Athens. His real home was of course the 
coast country of the bay, opposite Salamis, of Kychreia, whose 
other name was Skiros. Of Kychreia and its clansmen Kychreus 
was eponymous hero, as Cecrops of Cecropia and the Cecropidae. 

Strabo* knew this, and he tells us, on the authority of Hesiod, 
that 

From Kychreia the snake Kychreides had its name, which Kychreus bred, 
and Eurylochos drove it out because it ravaged the island, but Demeter 
received it into Eleusis, and it became her attendant. 

Others said that Kychreus himself was surnamed Serpent 
(“Ogus)*. 

All this aetiology is transparent. There was at Kychreia or 
Salamis, as at Athens, a local ‘household’ snake (oicoupos dus). 
With it, as at Athens, was associated the eponymous hero of the 
place. The cult of the snake fell into disrepute, the human form 
of the eponymous hero was preferred. At Eleusis also there was 
behind the figure of Demeter an old local snake ; in the mysteries 

1 7, 36. 1; for the various forms of the Kychreus legend see Dr Frazer, ad loc. 

2 Plut. Vit. Thes. 10: for sphagia see Prolegomena, pp. 63—73. 

3 1x. 8§ 393 ...broddEacOae 5¢ adrov Thy Ajunrpa eis EXevotva Kai yevéoba ravrns 
dugtroov. The gist of the killing of the snake by the hero or god will be 
considered when we come to the Olympians. 

4 Steph. Byz. s. v. Kuxpetos mayos. 

“— 

288 Daimon and Hero [on. 

the marriage? of Demeter with Zeus, who ‘took the form of a 
snake, was still known, but again the human form of the goddess 
obtains. As in Fig. 76, the snake is well behind her; but he is 
there for all that, and his old fertility functions are shown in the 
fruit-bearing child, Ploutos. The little shrine out of which the 
snake peers is a heroon, but the hero is a functionary-daimon, not 
a historic personality. At Thebes, too, Suidas? tells us, ‘there is a 
heroon of the Agathos Daimon.’ 

We have dwelt at length on the Agathos Daimon because 
without a clear notion of him in his twofold aspect as collective 
representative and as fertility-daimon the ceremonies of the 
Anthesteria lose half their meaning. Later we shall be able to 
demonstrate from monumental evidence that it was the form and 
function of the Agathos Daimon that, not only the mythical kings 
Cecrops and Erechtheus and Kychreus, but also each and every 
local hero put on, and that it was only as and because they assumed 
this guise that they became ‘heroes’ and won for themselves 
acultus. For the present we must return to the Anthesteria. 

The Choes. The first day of the Anthesteria, the Pithoigia, 
we have seen, was given to the ‘sacrifice, that is to libations of 
the new wine to the Agathos Daimon at the broaching of the 
casks. The second day, the Choes or drinking cups, need not long 
detain us*. It was the natural sequel of the first. The taboo 
having been removed from the new wine, a revel set in. Each 
man, or at least each householder, was given a Chous, a measure 
of wine: there was a drinking contest (ayov), the exact arrange- 
ments of which are not clear. Each man or boy crowned his cup 
with a garland and brought it to the priestess of the temple of 
Dionysos in the Marshes‘, 

1 See Prolegomena, p. 535, and see the great snake coiled round Demeter on the 
vase in the Museo delle Terme, p. 547, Fig. 156. 

* s.v.Ayabod Aaivovos...Kal év OfBacs d¢ Hv “Hp@ov ’Aya0od Aatuovos. 

3 Most authorities have held that the marriage of the Queen Archon to Dionysos 
took place on the day of the Choes. But Dr Frazer (Lhe Magic Arti. p. 137) says that 
the assumption rests on insufficient evidence ; he conjectures that it may have taken 
place in the month Gamelion. The ceremony was of cardinal importance as a 
fertility charm, but because of the uncertainty of date I omit all discussion of itin 
relation to the Anthesteria. 4 

* For sources see the Lexica and Dr Martin Nilsson’s Studia de Dionysiis 
Atticis, 1900. 

a 

The Choes and the Chytroi 289 

The main fact that concerns us as to the Choes is that, spite 
of the revel and the wine-drinking and the flower-wreathed 
cups, the day of the Choes was nefastus. Photius! tells us it 
was a ‘day of pollution, in which they believed that the spirits 
of the dead rose up: by way of precaution against these spirits 
from early dawn they chewed buckthorn, a plant of purgative 
properties, and they anointed their doors with pitch. A new 
element is here introduced; there are ghosts about and they 
are feared. 

The Chytrot. This coming and going of the ghosts about the 
city at the Anthesteria is clearly evidenced by the concluding 
ritual of the third day, the Chytroi. The Greeks, Zenodotus? tells 
us, had a_ proverbial expression said ‘of those who on all 
occasions demand a repetition of favours received. It was as 
_ follows: 

Out of the doors! ye Keres; it is no longer Anthesteria, 
And it was spoken, Suidas? said, 
inasmuch as there were ghosts going about the city at the Anthesteria. 

Year by year, in ever returning cycle as the Anthesteria came 
_ round, the ghosts were let loose at the Pithoigia. For three days 
they fluttered through the city, filling men’s hearts with nameless 
dread, causing them to chew buckthorn and anoint their doors 
with pitch and close their sanctuaries; then, on the third day, by 
solemn mandate, they were bidden to depart. 

Before we come to the reason of their uprising two points 
must be noted. First, the ghosts are many, a fluttering crowd; 
they are collective, addressed in the plural ; it is not an individual 
ancestor of great fame and name who rises from the dead, but 
ancestors. Second, they are feared as well as reverenced. The 
name Keres, applied to them, is not the equivalent of yuyxat 

1 s.v. papa hudpa* év rols Xovoly ’AvOearnptdvos unvos, év @ Soxotow ai Puxal rwv 
TereuTycdrTav dnévar, pduvwv Ewbev euacwvro kal mitry Tas Ovpas exptov. ‘ 

2 Cent. Paroim. s.v. Hipnrat 5¢ 7 mapouuta él tov Ta aire EmegnrouvTwy WAVTOTE 
 awBdvew. The use of the proverb seems to emphasize the insistent, periodic 
return of the ghosts. 
3 s.v. Ovpase 

Ovpage Kijpes, ov ere AvOeoriHpia. 

ws Kata Thy TodW Tots *AvOeornplos Tav WuxXGv TeprepKopuevwv. 

= 19 

a. PAs 
290 Daimon and Hero [on 

‘souls’; ‘ghosts’ is perhaps as close a translation as we can get, for 
the word carries with it a sense of dread. The word Keres is 
obscure in origin and its career is a downward one, tending always 
towards evil, disease and death?. Among the Greeks, as, it would 
seem, among many primitive peoples, the fear of the dead seems to 
precede their worship’. The ‘feare of things invisible’ is, as we 
have already seen’, in part ‘the naturall seed of Religion.’ 

This fear of ghosts is natural enough and needs no emphasis. 
It is not indeed at first a disembodied soul that is dreaded, but 
rather the whole condition of death, which involves the immediate 
family and often the whole tribe in a state of contagious infection. 
But, to totemistic thinkers, the fear is always mixed with a sure 
and certain hope, the hope of reincarnation. Once the body 
fairly decayed and the death ceremonies complete, the dead man 
is free to go back to his totem ancestors and begin again the 
cycle of life as a new tribesman or a totem animal. This is 
often clearly indicated by funeral rites‘: Thus among the Bororo, 
the dead man is trimmed up with feathers of the parroquet, in 
order that he may take the form of the parroquet totem. Till 
the second funeral is over, the dead man among the Hindoos is a 
preta, that is a fearful revenant: after that he can enter the world 
of Pitaras or fathers, the equivalents of the Alcheringa totem- 
ancestors. For this entry, rites of initiation, rites de passage, are 
necessary. 

This double nature of the Greek attitude towards the dead is 
very simply and clearly expressed in the vase-painting in Fig. 77. 
The design comes from an archaic vase® of the ‘prothesis’ type, a 
vase used in funeral ceremonies and decorated with funeral subjects. 
Two mourners stand in attitudes of grief on either side of a 

1 Thave discussed the development and degradation of the idea of the Keres 
fully in Prolegomena, chapter v. 
* This was very fully exemplified by Dr Frazer in a series of lectures delivered 

at Trinity College during the Lent and May terms of 1911 on the ‘ Fear and Worship 
of the Dead.’ 

3 Supra, p. 64. 

4 The social attitude of savages towards death as expressed in funeral rites has 
been very ably and fully analysed by R. Hertz, Représentation collective de la 
Mort, in Année Sociologique, x. 1905-6, p. 48. 

re In the Museum at Athens, see J. H. S. x1x, 1899, p. 219, fig. 4. In discussing 
this vase before (Prolegomena, p. 235) I made the mistake of saying ‘Snake and 
eidolon are but two ways of saying the same thing.’ I now realize that the two 
forms express ideas of widely different, almost contradictory import. The ghosts 

of dead men constantly pass over into the good daimon, the collective ancestor, but 
the ideas are disparate. 

i iad 

vor] The Chytroi and the Panspermia 291 

grave-mound, itself surmounted by a tall vase. Within the grave- 
mound the vase-painter has drawn 
what he believes to be there, two 
things—in the upper part of the 
mound a crowd of little fluttering 
Keres, and below the single figure 
of a snake. The Keres are figured 
as what the Greeks called e/Swra, 
little images, shrunken men, only 
winged. They represent the shadow 
soul, strengthless and vain ; but the 
Oupcs of the man, his strength, his 
life, his wévos, his mana, has passed 
into the daimon of life and rein- 
carnation, the snake. An eiéwdor, 
an image, informed by @uy0os makes 
up something approximately not 
unlike that complex, psychological conception, our modern ‘ im- 
mortal soul,’ 

The central ceremony of the Chytroi, the ceremony that gave 
its name to the day, still remains, and it will bring indefeasible - 
evidence to show that the focus of attention at the Anthesteria 
was not on death, not on the e/dwrov, but on the Ouyds, not on 
the ‘strengthless heads of the dead’ but on life through death, 
on reincarnation, on the life-daimon. This central ceremony was 
the boiling but—significantly—not the eating of a pot (xyuTpos or 
xutpa) of all kinds of seeds, a panspermia. The scholiast on the 
Frogs in commenting on the words ‘with the holy Pots’ says 
expressly, quoting Theopompos, 

And of the pot which all the citizens cook, no priest tastes. 

And again the scholiast on the Acharmans?, also quoting Theo- 
pompos, says 

they cooked pots of panspermia whence the feast got its name, but of the 
pot no one tasted. 

1 Ad Ar. Ran. 218 kal r#s xUTpas jy eovos mdvtes oi Kara Thy wow ovdels ~yevEeTaL 
Tov iepéwv. The reading iepéwy is uncertain. 
- 2 Ad Ar, Ach. 1076 Xvrpovs: Oedmouros rods diacwhévras ex Tov KaTaKvoMov 
— -éWijoal pyow xvtpas mavorepulas bev otrw KANOhvac Thy Eoprhy...7Hs 5é XUTpas ovdéva 
 -yevoar ba. 

19—2 

es ee 

> 

292 Daimon and Hero (oH. 

The panspermia has not, I think, been rightly understood. In 
commenting on it before’, misled by the gift-theory of sacrifice, 
I took it to be merely a ‘supper for the souls.’ No doubt as 
such it was in later days regarded, when primitive magical rites 
had to be explained on Olympian principles. But it was, to begin 
with, much more. The ghosts had other work to do than to eat 
their supper and go. They took that ‘supper, that panspermia, 
with them down to the world below and brought it back in the 
autumn a pankarpia. The dead are Chthonioi, ‘earth-people,’ 
Demetreiot, ‘Demeter’s people’, and they do Demeter’s work, her 
work and that of Kore the Maiden, with her Kathodos and Anodos’. 
An Athenian at the Anthesteria would never have needed S. Paul’s* 
angry objurgation : 

Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and 
that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare 
grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain. 

It is sown a panspermia, it is reaped a pankarpia. 

The lexica regularly define panspermia and pankarpia by 
each other, and they are right, for fruit 7s seed, but a distinction 
must be observed. The living and the dead seem to have as it 
were a sort of counter-claim on the fruits of the earth. The live 
- man wants the fruits of the earth that he may eat them and so 
live; the dead man wants them as seed that he may take it with 
him down below and tend it and give it a ‘body’ and send it 
back, bring it back as fruit. The autumn is the living man’s 
great time. Then he takes most of the fruit and grain, eats 
it and stores it for himself, but even then he saves a little for the 

dead, offering them dzapyai, because only so can his seed grow — 

and prosper. The spring, the Anthesteria, is the dead man’s 
time, for the seeds belong mainly to him. It is this cycle that 
haunted the mind of Aeschylus’, only he abstracts it somewhat, 

1 Prolegomena, p. 37. If my present theory, suggested to me in part by Mr 
Cornford, be right, the cooking of the panspermia must be a late invention added 
when it came to be regarded as a food. 

‘ mat de facie in orb. lunae 28 kal rods vexpods "AOnvaioe Anunrpelous dvéuatov rd 
TAAQLOY, 

3 For the dpwueva of the Kathodos and Anodos see Prolegomena, p. 123, and for 

the Anodos of the Maiden, p. 276. See also infra, chapter Ix. 
4 1 Cor. xv. 20 ff. 
> Choeph. 127 
= yatay abriy, n 7a wavra rikrerac 
péyard + abfis ravde KOua NapBaver 
and Dr Verrall ad loc. For the whole symbolism and for the Roman custom of 

Kernophoria and Pankarpia = 998 

making it of Earth the Mother rather than of dead men and 

seeds: 

Yea summon Earth, who brings all things to life 
And rears and takes again into her womb. 

It is this cycle of reincarnation that makes of the panspernua 
a thing more solemn and significant than any ‘supper of the 
souls, kindly and venerable though that notion be. 

The panspermia and pankarpia appear in many forms and 
under other names, as Kernophoria, as Liknophoria, as Thargelia. 
The Thargelia are of the first harvest in June. Hesychius’ defines 
thargelos as a ‘pot full of seeds” A Liknophoria, the carrying of a 
winnowing-basket full of fruits, to which often on monuments a 
phallos is added, might take place at any rite when fertility was 
desired. It was part of the Eleusinian and other mysteries, it was 
practised at marriage ceremonies. Of the Kernophoria we have 
unusually full particulars. It is specially interesting as showing 
the care taken that in a panspermia each and every form of seed 
should be represented. Athenaeus says of the Kernos: 

A vessel made of earthenware, with many little cups fastened on to it in 
which are white poppies, barley, pulse, ochroi, lentils, and he who carries 
it after the fashion of the carrier of the liknon tastes of these things, as 
Ammonius relates in his third book ‘On Altars and Sacrifices.’ 

The Kernophoria was in the autumn, living man’s time; he 
tastes of the fruits to get their mana. 

In previously discussing the pankarpia and kindred matters 
‘I was led astray by Porphyry’s charming vegetarianism. He 
quotes again and again such offerings as these as examples of the 
simple life dear to the gods, in the golden days before man tasted 
flesh food. Thus Sophocles* in the lost Polyidos, which must 
have dealt with the primitive rites of Crete, says: 

planting corn on graves, manifestly to secure the magic of the dead, see Prolegomena, 
p. 267 
1 g.y. Odpyndos* xUTpa éorly dvdmhews orepudrwv. : 

2 Both the Kernophoria and the Liknophoria are fully discussed and illustrated 
in my Prolegomena, pp. 160 and 599 and 518—535, 549, and a Kernos of which 
many specimens have come to light is there reproduced in Fig. 16: the scene of the 
Kernophoria appears on the ‘ Ninnion’ pinax in Fig. 160. " 

3 Porphyr. de Abst. 11. 19 kal Lopokhfs daypdgwv riv Oeopirh Ovalav pnoly ev TH 
TloAvidw 
jv pev yap olds waddés, jv dé Kaprédou 
amovdn Te Kal pag ev TEeOnoaupio wey n * 
evn dé maryKdpreca cupmpyns odats 
Naros 7’ édalas Kal TO TocKihwrarov 
EovOjs meNloons KnpbtacTov opyavor. 

294 Daimon and Hero (on. 

Wool of the sheep was there, fruit of the vine, 

Libations and the treasured store of grapes F 

And manifold fruits were there, mingled with grain 

And oil of olive and fair, curious combs 

Of wax, compacted by the murmuring bee. 

Following Porphyry, I explained the pankarpia and the 

panspermia, as simple fare for simple-hearted gods. But its gist 
is really magical, and the rite long preceded any god however 

primitive and gentle, it preceded even the Agathos Daimon. 

The dAnthesteria was then a feast of the revocation of souls 
and the blossoming of plants, a feast of the great reincarnation 
cycle of man and nature. One final point of cardinal importance 
remains to be noted—the god in whose honour the panspermia 
was offered. 

HERMES CHTHONIOS AS AGATHOS DAIMON. 

The scholiast on the Frogs’, already quoted, makes, in com- 
menting on the Chytroz, a second statement of scarcely less interest 
than the first. Not only does ‘no one taste of the Pot’ but 

They have the custom of sacrificing at this feast, not to any of the 
Olympian gods at all, but to Hermes Chthonios. 

We are thankful to find the Olympians refraining for once; as 
a rule they are only too ready to lay greedy hands on a magical 
rite, pervert its meaning and turn it into a ‘gift-sacrifice’ for 
themselves. Had Hermes Chthonios been an Olympian we must 
have postponed the consideration of him to the next chapter, but 
Hermes Chthonios, it is expressly said, is no Olympian, he is—it 
is perhaps by now scarcely necessary to state it—our ancient 
friend, the Agathos Daimon. 

Photius? tells us in so many words: ‘Hermes a kind of drink — 
as of the good Daimon and Zeus Soter’; but evidence abounds 
more deep-seated than this hitherto enigmatic yet curiously 
explicit gloss. 

It was the Agathos Daimon who presided over the Pithoigia 
of the wine-casks; it is Hermes who with magic rhabdos and 

1 Ad Ar. Ran. 218 ...dvew avrots eos EXovgt Tay ev Pedy oder! 7d rapdray, “Epey 
dé xPoviw. : 

2 s.v. ‘Epufis mocews eldos* ws dyabod daiwovos kal Ards gwrhpos. I owe this 
evidence to Professor Murray. 

Hermes as Agathos Daimon 295 

with kerykeion summons the souls from the great grave-pithos 
on the Jena lekythos? in Fig. 78. It is Hermes always who attends 
Pandora-Anesidora, she of the 
pithos, when she rises from the €_ 
earth. Always he carries his Sat = 
kerykeion with the twin twisted Ranier re resereree 
snakes, that kerykeion which |- = 

we saw gathered in the coils /’ 5 

of the Agathodaimon on the i“ 
¢ 
y 

coins of Alexandria’, a conjunc- 
tion now easily understood. We 

understand now why Hermes, Ai , 
as phallic herm, is god of fer- kg : 
tility of flocks and herds, but | ZW 
also, as Psychopompos, god of y 

ghosts and the underworld. Wy 

He, a snake to begin with and SX 

carrying always the snake-staff, a agree 

is the very daimon of reincar- 

nation. Homer, who contrives Fic. 78. 

to forget nearly everything of 

any religious interest, cannot quite forget thut; only, for death and 
life, he, in his beautiful way, puts sleep and waking. When 
Hermes led the ghosts of the slain suitors to Hades, he held 
in his hand 

His rhabdos fair and golden wherewith he lulls to rest 
The eyes of men whoso he will, and others by his hest 
He wakens. 

Under the influence of the epic Hermes is eclipsed; he was 
never allowed into Olympos save as a half outsider, a messenger ; 
probably, but for the Athenian cult of the Hermae, he could never 
have forced an entrance at all and his functions would have gone 
on being filled by the more pliable, upper-air Iris. Even though 
‘expurgated’ by Homer, it is curious to note how as ‘messenger’ 
he is almost omnipresent in popular art and literature in many a 

\\ 

Hah 

a 

1 P, Schadow, Eine attische Grablekythos 1897. See also Prolegomena, p. 43. 
2 Supra, p. 278, Fig. 67. 
3 Od. xx1v. 1—4 
7H T avdpGv dupara Gédyee 
Gy é6éder, rods 8 atire kai brvwovras éyelpe. 

296 Daimon and Hero 

situation, as e.g. the Judgment of Paris, where no ‘ messenger’ is 
really wanted. He was really there from the beginning as daimon 
or ‘luck’ of the place or the situation, there long before the gods 
who made him their ‘messenger’.’ If he was only a ‘ messenger, 
why did men cry xowds épuhs ‘shares in the Luck,’ why does 
he always ‘lead’ the Charites, even when they are going no- 
whither? In later literature which bears his name, in the 
Hermetic writings and in the magic papyri, he comes to his own 
again. 

In the magic papyri? Hermes and the Agathos Daimon are 
sometimes closely associated, sometimes placed in the relation of 
father and son, or teacher and disciple, sometimes actually identi- 
fied. Thus, in one prayer, the Lord Hermes is addressed as ‘he 
who brings together food for gods and men,’ and he is employed to 

bring about all things for me and guide them by Agathe Tyche and Agathos 
Daimon?, 

One of the titles of Hermes is Agathopoios, and it is said of him 
as Agathos Daimon that 

when he shines forth the earth blossoms, and when he laughs the plants 
bear fruit, and at his bidding the herds bring forth young‘. 

Another prayer runs as follows: 

Give me every grace, all accomplishment, for with thee is the bringer 
of good, the angel standing by the side for Tyche. Therefore give thou 
means and accomplishment to this house, thou who rulest over hope, wealth- 
giving Aion, O holy good Daimon. Bring to accomplishment and incline to 
me all the graces and divine utterances>. 

It is a grave mistake to’ think that all this is mere late 
demonology. The magic papyri contain, it is now acknowledged 

1 It is, I think, possible that the ‘messenger’ may really be a survival of the 
‘representative’ or mpoordrns, that is the winner in an agon, the rp&ros Kotpos— 
the individual who stood for the group. When his function was forgotten he might 
easily lapse into the deputy messenger. Mr Cornford draws my attention in this 
connection to the fact noted above (p. 276) that the month Anthesterion was in 
Boeotia called Hpooraripios, possibly it got its name from a festival of IIpoorarhpa. 

2 Wessely, Griech. 4auberpapyrus von London und Paris and Neue gricch. 
Zauberpapyri in Denkschr. d. k. Akad., phil.-hist. xxxvz. Wien, 1888 and xxi, 
1893. 

3 Tpatdv poe rdvra cad owpéras adv’ AyabG Téxn Kal *Aya0@ Aatuove. Reitzenstein, 
Poimandres, p. 21. 

+ dvéOahev ) yA cod emthdupavros Kat exapmopdpnce Ta pura cot yeAdoavros, 
efpoydvnce TH Ga ood émirpéwavros—Reitzenstein, op. cit. p. 29. 

° 86s wor macay Xdpw, waicay mpaéw, MeTa GoD yap éorw 6 dryabopdpos ayyeXos 
Tapectws Téxn. 61d dds topov Kal mpaéw ToUTH TH olkw Kupcevwy édrldos mouToddéra 
alwy, iepé Ayabe Satuov: rérex mdoas xdpiras Kal tas edOelas onmas. op. cit. p- 29. 
For gépos and mpaéis in connection with Hermes cf. Aesch. Choeph. 808 

mais 6 Malas érel popwraros 
Tpakw ovpiav Oé\uv, 

| 

a vin | 

on all hands, very primitive stuff? 
Agathe Tyche and Agathos Daimon come together the woman 
figure in matriarchal fashion precedes the male daimon. 

in the prayer just quoted the 
good Daimon is conceived of as 
ap angel or messenger standing 
as attendant by the side of 
Tyche. This possibly helps to ex- 
plain the subordinate function of 
Hermes as propolos or attendant 
on the greater gods—it is anyhow 
a mark of early thinking. 

Hermes, as Agathos Daimon, 
was once merely a phallos; that 
he was also once merely a snake, 
is, I think, a safe conjecture. 
But it is merely a conjecture: 
I can point to no actual monu- 
ment where Hermes is figured 
as a snake. It is otherwise 
with another and a_ greater 
than Hermes, in whose form the 
Agathos Daimon chose to mas- 
querade— Zeus. 

ZEUS KTESIOS AS AGATHOS 
DAIMON. 

Of singular interest is the 
relief in Fig. 79 found at Thespiae 
in Boeotia and now in the local 
museum at Thebes? It dates 
about the 3rd century B.c. and 
is clearly inscribed Avos Krnatov, 

late it—‘of household property, Zeus, not so much of fertility as 

1 Reitzenstein, op. cit. p 
aus Cypern. 

wirklichen Volksglaubens erwarten.’ 
2 Inv. No. 330. I owe to the kindness 

interesting monument which he has published an 

Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1904, p. 140. 
diirfen wir nicht so wohl Ergebnisse philosoph 

Zeus Ktesios as Agathos Daimon 

It is noticeable that — 

Ss 

a 
SS 

ve 
SS 

“ies 
} 

MM te 

WM YN a 
MA 
Wh 

YAY oF 
ie... Min, Hie ye 

S 
SSS 

y 

Af 
Y 

~S 
Sss 

SS 

WY 
sigs 

es 

"9 ih 
Uuype 
fs Up AG 

Y, 

Y) 

/ Uf), Yip} //) Be? 

Y YM YY Gy ‘y 

Mig 1 Wy d 
ee ANE e LoS 

Fre. 79. 

WG 
Waa 

‘Zeus’—we might perhaps t 

oO 

Mittheilungen, xxxmm. 1908, p. 279, Schlangenstele des Zeus Ktesios. 

297 
when 

Indeed 

SSN 

Y 

7, 

rans- 

. 28, 129, and R.. Foerster, Hermes in einer Doppelherme 
‘In diesen Gebeten und Anrufungen 

ischer Spekulation als Ausserungen 

{ Dr M. P. Nilsson a photograph of this 
d fully discussed in the Ath. 

298 Daimon and Hero 

of its stored produce. Ktesios, Epikarpios and Charitodotes are 
titles applied to Zeus in his capacity as the giver of Increase?. 
To these might be added Ploutos, Olbios, Meilichios, Philios, 
Teleios. All these are daimons of fertility? and like the Agathos 
Daimon might naturally be thought of in snake shape. It was 
long ago conjectured by Gerhard* that Zeus Ktesios was a snake ; 
the Thespiae relief brings to his view welcome confirmation. 
Snake though he was, to him as to Zeus Olbios (p. 148) a bull was 
sacrificed 4, 

Zeus Ktesios is not only a snake; to our great delight we 
find him also well furnished with Pots. He was essentially 
domestic. Harpocration®, quoting Hyperides, says 

They used to set up Zeus Ktesios in storerooms. 

In the temple of Zeus at Panamara a votive inscription® was 
found 

To the household gods, Zeus Ktesios and Tyche and Asklepios. 

It is to such primitive daimones of the penetralia that the Chorus 
in the Choephoroi of Aeschylus’ appeal. It is at the altar of 
Ktesios that Cassandra as chattel of the house is bidden to take 
her place’. Homer® must in his queer subconscious way be 
thinking of Zeus Ktesios, with perhaps some associations of 
Pandora, when he says®, 

Jars twain upon Zeus’ threshold ever stood, 
One holds his gifts of evil, one of good. 

1 Plut. Stoic. Repug. 30 6 Zeds yerotos ef Kriovos xatpe kat “Emixdpmios Kai 
Xapitodérns mpocaryopevduevos.... 
2 Prolegomena, p. 356. 
3 In his brilliant but too little read monograph on Agathos Daimon and Bona 
Dea, Akad. Abhandl. 1847, 11. 45, Anm, 28. 
+ See the decree in Dem. 21. 58 Au KTnolw Body NevKov. 
> s.v. Kryotov Acés. "Tareplins év 7 mpos ’Amreddatov* Kriotov Ala év rots rapelors 
idpvovro. 
6 Bull. de Corr. Heil. x1. 1888, p. 269, No. 54 Kat rots évouxtdéous Beots Adi Kryoig 
kat Téxn Kal’ Aokdyrly. 
7 v. 786 
ot 7 owe Swudrwv 
TrovToyahh puxdv voultere, 
khveTe, atuppoves Beol. 
8 Aesch. Ag. 1020 
érel o €O0nxe Leds dunvitws dduors 
kowwwvoy elvar xepylBwy, mo\Ov pera 
SobAwY orabeicayv Krnaiov Bwpod édas. 
9 Tl. xxtv. 527 ; 
dorol yap re ido. Karaxelarae ev Ards ovdg 
ddpwv ola dldwor kaxdv Erepos dé édwy. 

[on 

Zeus Ktesios and Ambrosia 299 

It was indeed side by side with Demeter Anesidora at ancient 
Phlya! that Zeus was worshipped, a fitting conjunction. At 
Phlya were worshipped also Dionysos Anthios and the Semnae, 
and at Phlya were mysteries of Eros. In the list of divinities 
Demeter Anesidora comes first, as was fitting; the Earth sends up 
her gifts and then man harvests and stores them for his use. It 
is interesting to find that the actual cult of Zeus Ktesios as well 
as his name lands us in the storeroom—though to speak of his 
‘cult’ is really a misnomer, as we shall immediately see. 

Athenaeus’, quoting Philemon, makes the following statement: 

The Kadiskos is the vessel in which they set up Ktesian Zeuses. 

He goes on to quote from the Hwegetikon of Antikleides, a post- 
Alexandrian writer, some ritual prescriptions for the carrying out 
of the ‘cult’ or rather installation. 

Put the lid on a new two-eared Kadiskos, crown the ears with white wool 
and let down the ends of...the thread from the right shoulder and the 
forehead and place in it whatever you can find and pour into it ambrosia. 
Now ambrosia is pure water and olive oil and pankarpia. Pour in these. 
The text is corrupt and therefore it is not quite clear how the 
wool or thread was arranged on the vase. The vase with its 
‘ears, ‘right shoulder’ and ‘forehead’ reminds us of the anthropoid 

vases of the Troad. 

But it is the ambrosia that delights and amazes us. Why in 
the world should ambrosia be defined as pure water, olive oil, and 
pankarpia? Why, but because in the pankarpia and the oil and 
the pure living water are the seeds for immortality, for next year’s 
reincarnation? The Olympians took ambrosia for their food, but 
its ancient immortality was of -earth’s recurrent cycle of growth, 
not of heaven’s? brazen and sterile immutability. 

Athenaeus* has yet another small and pleasant surprise in 

1 For the mysteries at Phlya see Prolegomena, p. 642, and for Eros as Herm and 
his close analogies with Hermes see p. 631. 

2 xr, 46. 473 Kadloxos. Bidruwy év TO mpoewpnuery ovyypdpuare mornplov eldos. 
Ayyeiov 8 éariv év @ rods Krnotous Acas eyxabdpvovow, ws ’Avrixdeldns ono ev TH 
BEnynrixg@, yedpwv otrws* Avds xrnolov onweia Lopver Ga xpn woe. Kadlokov Kauwvov 
Siwrov émiOnuarodvra, oréparTa TH Gra éply eve kal €x To apmou TOU dektob kal 
ex Tod perémov Tod Kpokiov, Kal éoOetvar 6 Te dv etpys Kal eoxéas duBpoctav. H 6 
apBpoola USwp axpadvés, éhasov, maykapmia. “Amep éuBare. Kaibel, supplendum fere 
(kadéo Oar Ta &Kpa) Tod Kpoxtou. } ae ion 

3 For the Olympian notion of immortality which is the very contradiction of the 
old reincarnation, see infra, chapter x. 

4 loc. cit. ‘Eppijs, dv €\xovo’ ol pev €x mpoxordlov, 
of & éx Kadloxou o° loov tow Kexpapévor. 

300 Daimon and Hero [cH. 

store for us. ‘The comic poet Strattis, he says, in his Lemnomeda 
makes mention of the Kadiskos, thus: 

Hermes, whom some draw from a prochoidion, 
Others, mixed half and half from a Kadiskos. 

By the help of the Agathos Daimon we understand the comic 
poet. Strattis. Hermes is the daimon of ambrosia and of im- 
mortaliiy. 

Zeus Ktesios then like Hermes is simply a daimon of fertility, 
taking snake form—he was not yet a theos. His aspect as Ktesios 
embarrassed the orthodox theologian and delighted the mystic and 
the monotheist. It is pleasant to find’ that even when translated 
to the uttermost heavens he did not disdain the primitive service 
of the pankarpia. 

Ruler of all, to thee I bring libation 

And honey-cake, by whatso appellation 

Thou wouldst be called, or Zeus, or Hades thou 
A treless offering I bear thee now 

Of all earth’s fruit, take Thou its plenitude. 
For thou amongst the Heavenly Ones art god, 
Dost share Zeus’ sceptre, and art ruling found 
With Hades in the kingdoms underground. 

Zeus Ktesios was to the Greeks a house-snake, with a service 
of storehouse jars for his chief sanctity. That acute observer 
of analogies between Greek and Roman religion, Denys of 
Halicarnassos?, confirms our view and illuminates it further by 

Latin custom. Speaking of the Penates brought by Aeneas from 
the Troad, he Says : 

Now these gods are called by the Romans Penates. But those who 
translate the word into Greek render it, some as ‘Patréoi,’ some as 
‘Genethlioi,” some again as ‘Ktesioi, others as ‘Mychioi,’ others as 
‘Herkeioi.’ Each and all of these translators seem to adopt a word 
according to what has occurred to themselves, and they all mean pretty 

* Eur. Nauck frg. (incert.), 912: 
gol TH mdvrwy pedéovTe Yon 
Téhaviv Te Pépw, Leds ei? *Al6ns 
ovomasouevos arépyes: od dé bot 
Ovolay dmupov maykapmelas 
défac wAHpN mpoxvbetcar. 

2 Ant. Romi. 1. lxvii. 3 rods 8& Beads TovTous ‘Pwuator uev evdras xadodow * oi & 
efepunvevorres els rHv ‘EX\dda yYAGooay rovvoua ol wer Ilarpgous amopaivovew, oi dé 
Teve@dtous, elat 8’ of Krnotovs, dddou dé Muxlous, of d€ “Epxelous. ore 82 TOUTwY 
€kaoros Kard Twos Tov ounBeBnkdrwr adbrots trovetc bau Thy émlk\ynow, Kwdvvevovel re 
mavres auwoyérws 7d abrd héyeuw. oxhuaTos bé kal popPhs adbrav mépt Tiwacos wey 6 
avyypapeds cde dmodalverac* Knpbkia ovdnpa Kal yadka kal Képapov Towixdv elvar ra ev 
Tots advTOLS Tots év Aaovivip lepd, mudécOar dé adrds TadTa Tapa Tov émixwpluv. 

vir | Roman Genius of the Penus 301 

much the same. Timaios the historian expresses himself thus as to their 
form and appearance. The sacred things deposited in the adyta at Lavinium 
are Kerykeva of iron and bronze and Trojan pottery, and he said that he 
learnt this from the natives of the place. 

The house-snake of the Romans as guardian of the penus is far 
more familiar to us than the Agathos Daimon or Zeus Ktesios 
of the Greek storeroom. He appears on countless Graeco-Roman 
wall-paintings. A good instance is given in Fig. 80!. We have 

Fia. 80. 

the facade of a house in temple-form—the pediment decorated 
with sacrificial gear, a boucranium, a patera, a sacrificial knife. 
Within, supposed no doubt to be within the penetralia, are the 

1 From the photograph of a Pompeian wall-painting. 

302 Daimon and Hero [ CH. 

family sanctities. The great fertility-snake in front, all sur- 
rounded by herbage and ap- 
on Sl proaching a small altar, is the 
= genius of the house in animal 
4 CG form!. Above is the head of the 
house himself, the human genius, 
to either side of him a dancing 
Lar holding a _ cornucopia. 
Similar in feeling is the design 
in Fig. 81, from a relief in the 
Villa Medici?. The snake genius 
this time is twined actually 
3 = : round the household altar and 
the head of the house himself 
holds the cornucopia. The snake 
is omnipresent. It is not till Rome falls under Greek influence 
that we get the family daimon abstracted from the hearth and - 
fully anthropomorphic. The Bonus Eventus of the blue glass 
cameo plaque* in Fig. 82 is a Greek for all his name‘, a goodly 
human youth with no hint of divinity but his patera and corn 
ears, a péyrotos Kodpos. 

It is of the first importance to note that in Denys’s account of 
the Greek equivalents of the Penates the renderings are all in the 
plural, The Greek mind, intensely personal, individual, clear cut 
as it was, tended to the singular, to Zeus Ktesios, who is a 
personality, rather than to Ktesioi, who are vague datmones. 
It is indeed through the Latin genii that we best understand 
the Greek daimones. They are at once more impersonal and, 
which is almost the same thing, more collective, more generalized, 
or rather less specialized. The genius is essentially as its name 
shows the spirit of life, birth, generation’; to live a full life is 

Fig. 81. 

1 Cf. Servius ad Verg. Georg, ur. 417 (serpens) yaudet tectis ut sunt ayabol 
datiwoves quos Latini genios vocant. 

2 Annali dell’ Inst. 1862, Taf. R. 4, 

3 In the British Museum, reproduced from Mr Gyril Daven ort’s Cai 
pl. 3, by kind permission of Messrs Seeley. g ‘ wie 

4 The cameo seems to reflect the art type adopted by Euphranor ; see Pliny N.H. 
34. 77 Euphranoris simulacrum Boni Eventus dextra pateram, sinistré spicam ac 
papaverem tenens, 

5 Cf. the lectus genialis. Paul the Deacon Says (p. 94), Lectus genialis qui 
nuptiis sternitur in honorem genii, unde et appellatus, a statement which 
reversed, just hits the mark, ; 

vu | Genius of the Group 303 

undulgere genio, to live ascetically is defraudare genium. But 
though each man had his individual genius, his life-spirit, the 
genius is essentially of the group; it is as it were incarnate in the 

Fic. 82. 

father of the family! or in the emperor as head of the state. 
Every department of social life, every curta, every vicus, every 
pagus had its genius, its utterance of a common life; not only 
the city of Rome had its Genius Urbis Romae but the whole 
Roman people had its Genius Publicus Populi Romani’. 

1 For the family as representing an economic unit and as contrasted with the 
gens which is a kinship unit, see Mr Warde Fowler’s most interesting account in 
his Religious Experience of the Roman People, 1911, p. 70. 

2 This point is well brought out in the article s.v. Genius in Daremberg and 
Saglio’s Dictionnaire des Antiquités, ‘il (le génius) était une divinité toute trouvée 
pour les collectivités de tout ordre.’ 

eh eo ere eae ee 

304 Daimon and Hero "OnE 

THE DioscurI AS AGATHOI DAIMONES. 

We have not yet done with the singular account by Denys. 
The mention of Kerukeia recalls to us Hermes as Agathos Daimon 
and the fertility-kerukeia of the Alexandrian coins’. The Trojan 
‘pottery’ takes us back to the Kadiskoi2. Snakes and jars seem 
indeed to be the natural and characteristic sacra of these house- 
hold numina whether Greek or Latin. I have long suspected that 
the so-called funeral snakes and funeral jars that appear on 
sepulchral and other monuments have more to do with fertility- 
daimons than with the dead. On coins of Laconia, Fig. 83, 
one frequent symbol of the Dioscuri is a 
snake-twined amphora. Twins all over the 
world, as Dr Rendel Harris* has abundantly 
shown, are apt, not unnaturally, to play the 
part of fertility-daamones: they are not only, 
as the coin shows them, lucida sidera but they 
are gods of all manner of increase; they can 
make rain, they cause the dew to fall. 

In connection with the Penates, the Ktesioi 

1 ii ai ei Di 

and the Kadiskoi, the well-known votive-relief* of Argenidas in: 

Fig. 84 is of singular interest. Argenidas has returned from a 

voyage; his ship is figured in a kind of rocky bay to the right. 

Argenidas the dedicator stands safe and sound on a plinth in 
front of his ship. The inscription reads: 

Argenidas son of Aristogenidas to the Dioscuri, a vow. 

To the left are the twins in human form. In the right hand 
corner are their earliest afudpvuara or images, the doxava, beams 
with crossbeams, railings, which to Plutarch’s® kindly mind repre- 
sented their brotherly love. Beneath them is written ‘(Ana)keion.’ 

1 Supra, p. 299. 

2 It is, I think, very probable that the ‘Duenos vase,’ as suggested by Miss 
Bennett in an article as yet unpublished, was made like the Kernos to contain 
in its several compartments different seeds, etc. See also Daremberg and Saglio, 
s.v. Kernos. 

3° The Cult of the Heavenly Twins, 1906, p. 26. 

4 Verona Museo Lapidario 555, from a photograph kindly lent me by Dr Rendel 
Harris. 

> De Fratern. amor. init. ra madaid tov Acockovpwy adidpiuara of Drapriarac 
ddkava Kadovor. gore dé dto Eda wapddAnda Svol mraryious éwefevypuéva Kal Soxel TH 
pradArgy tav Gedy oiketov civar rod dvabjuatos Td Kowdy Kal dodvalperov—the word 
apidpuua is untranslatable, it seems to mean anything set up apart, a dedication. 

The Dioscuri as Agathoi Daimones 305 

They form as it were a double sanctuary of the ‘Lords,’ the Anakes, 
a title they share with Cecrops and many another hero. Between 

yy 

Vy 
(in 2 

WY A yy Y 

\\ VA, \ UY A Wj C4 

AY YG by, Yyey/, i ‘ Yj, ; 2 nC 

INA Ae A WY 

AWA | Lrg ey) NEY 

iii IAG 4 ZB Zi: Yt | \ G YY Ze 

NG a jj VILLA iy: 

Gn WY rN Ff yz, 
EY (CON Foi 

L YY Uff \Z YY GP ONE 7 4 f hij (pf 
WWM LTO OT, 
Yj YLT TIC TE iA See 

UU l; Ms C7) WEY i Li Tittle TM /| Mi Hf 

Fie. 84. 

Argenidas and the Dioscuri is a table, on it two tall amphorae. 
Are they funeral urns containing the ashes of the Dioscuri? I 
think not. They perform, I believe, the 
function of the Kadiskoi of Zeus Ktesios, 
and I suspect they contain ambrosia, a 
pankarpia or a panspermia, for to the night 
of them is coiled in the air a daiwmon, a 
snake. On another relief, in Fig. 851, the 
dokana have snakes. This shows, I think, 
not that the Dioscuri are dead men, but 
that they are daimonic; they are, in the 
strict sense of the word, ‘heroes.’ 

“The Dioscuri are heroes or daimones full of instruction, as 
another monument? in Fig. 86 will show. The design is from 
a votive-relief found in Thessaly, of late date and somewhat rough 
though vigorous workmanship. It represents the scene familiar 

Fia. 85. 

1 Sparta Cat. 588, from a photograph kindly sent me by Mr Wace. 

“2 In the Louvre Museum. W. Fréhner, Deux Peintures de Vases Grecs, 1871, 
Pl. 11., and see my Mythology and Monuments, 1890, p. 159, for the simple meal 
_ provided in the Prytaneion at Athens for the Dioscuri. 

H, 20 

306 Daimon and Hero | [cH 

to us as the Theowenia, ‘Banquet of the gods.’ A couch is set 
with cushions and coverlet, a table spread with fruit and cakes; 
below it an altar on which the male worshipper is placing some 
object. The guests are arriving. The woman lifts her hand to 
welcome the great Epiphany. The guests are the ‘Great Gods, 
magnificently galloping down from high heaven on their prancing 
horses, preceded by Nike with a garland. Above them in 
the pediment Helios is rising. The inscription reads @®eois — 

Fic. 86. 

weydrows Aavda ’ArOovertea] ‘To the Great Gods Danaa 
daughter of...’; the reading of the second name is uncertain. 
What is the meaning of this absurd, incompatible representa- 
tion? Simply this. In the Theoxenia we have the old magical 
service of the panspermia and the pankarpia Olympianized. In 
the old order the pot of seeds or the liknon full of fruits were in 
themselves sanctities; they were themselves carried and conse- 
crated as dmapyai or first-fruits; they were tabooed from man’s 
use that they might be the seed and source of fertility for the 
coming year. There are as yet no human gods, there is no gift- 
sacrifice. There are only vague shapes of daimones that crystallize 

= 

‘ 
\ es 
La ' r 

vo T] 
gradually into the shape of the Good and Wealthy Daimon who 
year by year renews himself and refills his cornucopia with earth’s 
produce. But, when the daimones take shape as theot, the old 
service must fit itself to the new conceptions. The dsapyat and 
the communal vegetarian das that followed on the release from 
taboo became feasts held in honour of these theot. These non- 
existent Olympian magnificences have couches and tables, and 
oddly combined with the table for the old offering of the 
pankarpia is an altar for burnt sacrifice. To crown the absurdity, 
the Anakes, ‘Lords’ of man’s life on earth, they who were snake- 
daimones of fertility, are changed into human horsemen who gallop 
proudly down from the sky to honour a mortal banquet. Mytho- 

logy makes of them the personal ‘sons of Zeus, but to ritual they 
are still functionaries, Anakes. 

Daviiones and Theot 307 

We have purposely brought together the two representations 
of the Dioscuri (a) the snake-twined amphorae, (b) the Horsemen 
descending to the Theoxenia, because they bring into sharp contrast 
the two poles as it were of religious thinking. On the one hand 
we have daimones, collective representations of purely functional 
import, with their ritual of magic; on the other full-blown anthro- 
poid theot, descending from heaven to their service of do ut des. 
But the Theoxenia! is by anticipation; the Olympians, their 

nature and their ritual, are reserved for the next chapter; we 
have now to establish finally, not the relation of god to daimon but 
of daimon to dead man. This relation, and with it the true nature 
of a ‘hero,’ comes out with almost startling clearness in a class of 
monuments which have puzzled generations of archaeologists, and 
which I venture to think can only be understood in the light of 
the Agathos Daimon—I mean the monuments variously and in- 
structively known as ‘Sepulchral Tablets, ‘Funeral Banquets, and 
‘Hero Feasts.’ 

Tue ‘Hero FEASTS.’ 

Over three hundred of these ‘Hero Feasts’ are preserved, so 
we may be sure they represent a deep-seated and widespread 

_ 1 Analogous to the Theoxenia of the Dioscuri are the stories of Tantalos 
(see supra, p. 244) and Lycaon who ‘entertain the gods.’ Behind such myths lies 
always the old magical dais. 

20—2 

ee ee are 

yo 

‘ 

308 Daimon and Hero [cH. 
popular tradition. A good typical instance’ is given im J 
Fig. 87. ; 
A man reclines at a banquet; his wife, according to Athenian 
custom, is seated by his side. In front is a table loaded with cake 
and fruits. So far we might well suppose that we had, as on 
Athenian grave-reliefs, a scene from daily life, just touched with a 
certain solemnity, because that life is over. But other elements 
in the design forbid this simple interpretation. A boy-attendant 
to the right pours out wine; that is consistent with the human 

Fic. 87. 

feast, but a boy to the left brings, not only a basket of ritual 
shape, but a pig that must be for sacrifice. 
Pindar’s question is again much in place: 

What god, what hero, what man shall we sing ? 

The answer is given, I think, by the snake, who with seeming ir- 
relevance uprears himself beneath the table. The banqueter is a 
man; the horse’s head like a coat of arms marks him as of knightly 
rank. He is in some sense divine; else why should he have 
sacrifice and libation? And yet he is no real god, no Olympian; 
rather he is a man masked to his descendants as a daimon, as the 
Agathos Daimon. The dead individual grasps a perennial function 
and thereby wins immortality, he is herovzed. 

1 Berlin, Sabouroff Coll. 

vill | The ‘ Hero- Feasts’ 309 

On past interpretations, beginning with Winckelmann and 
probably not yet ended with Prof. Gardner!, it is not necessary 
long to dwell. All early interpretations fall under four heads. 
The scenes on the reliefs are explained either as 

(a) Mythological, e.g. Winckelmann interprets the banqueting 
scene as the loves of Demeter-Erinys and Poseidon. These 
mythological interpretations are now completely discredited. 

Fic. 88. 

(b) Retrospective and commemorative. They represent domestic 
scenes in the daily life of the dead man, and thus are in line with 
the scenes on ordinary Athenian grave-reliefs. The snake 1s 
supposed to be a ‘household snake.’ 

(c) Representative of the bliss of Elysium where the dead 

Shall sit at endless feast. 

1 I borrow my summary of these views from Prof. Gardner's admirable paper. 
A Sepulchral Relief from Tarentum, in J. H. §S., 1884, v. p. 105, where a full 
bibliography .of the subject will be found. 

310 Daimon and Hero [ OH. 

(d) Commemorative, but of ritual facts, i.e. of the offerings of 
meat and drink brought by survivors to the grave of the dead 
man. This interpretation brings the ‘Hero Feasts’ almost into 
line with the well-known Sparta reliefs, where the heroized dead 
are ‘worshipped’ by diminutive descendants’. 

Almost but not quite. To bring food and drink to your dead 
relations, whether from fear or love, is to treat them as though 
they were the same as when they were alive, creatures of like 
passions and like potency or impotency with yourself. On the 
Sparta relief? in Fig. 88, they are, like Cleomenes’, cpetrtoves tHv 
gvow, stronger, greater in their nature, quite other than the 
humble descendants who bring them cock and pomegranate. 

Fig. 89. 

How has it come to pass? The relief speaks clearly. They too 
have taken on the form and function of the Agathos Daimon. A 
great snake is coiled behind their chair, and the male figure holds 
in his right hand a huge kantharos, not ‘in honour of Dionysos’ 

* See Mr A. J. B. Wace, Sparta Museum Catalogue, 1906, p. 102, for a full 
analysis of the ‘ Totenmahlrelief,’ and Dr Rouse’s instructive chapter on ‘The Dead 
the Heroes and the Chthonian Deities,’ in his Greek Votive Offerings, 1902. 4 

? A, Mitth. 1877, m. pl. xx. For the snake’s beard which marks him as a half- 
human daimon not a real snake see Prolegomena, p. 327. 

° Supra, p. 269. 

vor) Snake and Cornucopia 
but because to him as Agathos Daimon libation of the new wine 
will be made. In his left he holds a pomegranate, the symbol, 
with its bursting seeds, of perennial fertility. 

The relief in Fig. 891 shows us another instructive element 
We have the accustomed banquet scene made very human by the 
crouching dog under the table. In the background, close to the 
horse’s head, is a tree, and round it is coiled a snake. The tree 
and the snake wound round it are the immemorial ‘symbol’ of 
life. The snake, the Agathos Daimon, is the genius of growing 
things, guardian of the Tree of Life, from the garden of Eden to 
the garden of the Hesperides. 

In Fig. 89 the foremost of the three banqueting men holds 
a great horn from which the snake seems about to drink. Is the 
horn just a drinking-cup, a rhyton, used by the dead man, or has 
it some more solemn significance, some real connection with the 
snake? A chance notice in Athenaeus? gives us the needful clue. 
Chamaileon, a disciple of Aristotle, in his treatise ‘On Drunkenness’ 
noted that large cups were a characteristic of barbarians and not 
in use among the Greeks. But he is aware of one exception. 

In the various parts of Greece nowhere shall we find, either in paintings 
or in historical records, any large-sized cup except those used in hero-cere- 
monies. For example, they assign the cup called rhyton only to heroes. 

Chamaileon feels that there is a difficulty somewhere, but he 
explains that the cups of heroes are large because heroes are of 
‘difficult’ temper and dangerous habits. The reason I would 
suggest is simpler. They ‘assign’ the rhyton, the great horn, 
as appropriate to a hero, because the hero as daimon had it from 
the beginning—the rhyton 1s the cornucopia. 

The snake and the great cornucopia, the ‘Horn of Amaltheia,’ 
the ‘Eniautos’ cup® are, I think, evidence enough that the ban- 
queting man is conceived of as an Agathos Daimon. It is not 
necessary to suppose that everywhere he was locally known by 

1 From a relief in the local museum at Samos. Inv. 55. See Wiegand, Antike 
Skulpturen in Samos, A. Mitth. 1900, p. 176. 

2 xz, 4, 461 év 5€ Tots mepl Thy ‘ENAdda Toros, ovr’ év ypapais, or’ éml rap 
mpoTepov, evphoouer morhpiov evuéyebes elpyacuévov, ™mAnY tov émi Tols hpwikols. To 
yap puTov dvopasbuevov dvots Tos nowow amedldocav. “O Kal dd&eu Ticly exeuw amoplav, 
el un Tis dpa phoee.... In previously discussing this passage (Proleg. p. 448) I 
understood as little as Chamaileon the real significance of the rhyton in the 
‘ Hero-Feasts.’ 

3 Supra, p. 186. 

Tee ee ee eee ae 

312 - Daimon and Hero ed 

that exact title. The name matters little; the functions, as 
expressed in the attributes snake and horn, are all important. 
Yet in one instance’, the design in Fig. 90, we have direct evidence 

AP 4 TOMAX OENP IZ: ANEOE ZANSIIER ITE AEIN $14 tay kK AITHIAAHT PITO YQEOY Atal 
i ipeea ree 5 AIT YX [tA CAOHITEYCEOYTY WAY 

Fig. 90. 

of actual names, which, but for the inscription, we should never 
have dared to supply. 

Aristomache and Theoris dedicated (it) to Zeus Epiteleios, Philios, and to 
Philia, the mother of the god and to Tyche Agathe the wife of the god. 

Aristomache and Theoris we may see in the two women wor- 
shippers. Probably they are mother and wife of the man who 
walks between them. The inscription teems with suggestion. It 
is Olympian in spirit; the two women pray first and foremost to 
Zeus the Accomplisher, no doubt that the wife’s marriage may be 
fruitful and the mother may see her children’s children. It is 
patriarchal, for Zeus has a wife ; it is matrilinear, for his mother 
is invoked. 

But it is the names that most amaze and delight us. Zeus 
* Jacobsen Coll. Ny Carlsberg, Copenhagen Cat. 95, first published and discussed 

by A. Furtwingler, Hin Sogenanntes Todtenmahlrelief mit Inschrift in Sitzungs- 
berichte d. k. Bay. Akad. d. Wissenschaften, philos.-philolog. Kl. 1897, p. 401, 

vur] Dead Man as Hero 313 

is not only Epiteleios, he is also Philios. Philios the friendly, 
sociable one, is the very incarnation of the dais, the communal 
meal, he is always ready for the Theoxenia, based as it was on 
the old service of the Agathos Daimon. His mother Philia is but 
the feminine counterpart of his name. It is his wife who unmasks 
his Olympian pretensions, and shows him for the earth-born divinity 
that he is, his wife and his great cornucopia, for, if his wife be 
Agathe Tyche, who is he but the ancient Agathos Daimon ? 

We have dwelt long on the dawmon character of the banqueter, 
because that is apt to be neglected, but it must not be forgotten 
that he has another aspect, that of actual dead man. On one? of 
the Sparta grave-reliefs, in Fig. 91 this is certain. A seated man 
holds in the right hand a great. ie 5 
kantharos, in the left a pomegranate. J TINAOISN eh Bi 
A large snake in the left-hand corner || — J IN 
marks his daimon character, but he =p) | WM 
is an actual dead man; against him 

= ltt 
We \\ 
his name is clearly written, Tumokles. if = | stk 
1 <* ry 
Prat |) 
KN ! 

PS 

sf 

These Sparta reliefs were actual 

tomb-stones over particular graves: cy hw 

the later ‘Hero-feast’ type with N 3) 

the reclining banqueter were rather : 

adjuncts to tomb-stones, set up in \ 

family precincts. They are how- —~ 
ever frequently inscribed, sometimes Fie. 91. 

simply with the name of the dead 
man or dead woman, sometimes with the additional statement 

_ that he or she is hero or heroine. Thus a hero-feast in Leyden* 

is dedicated ‘to Kudrogenes, Hero’ (Kudpoyéver” Hpws). On another 
in Samos‘ is inscribed ‘ Lais daughter of Phoenix, Heroine, hail !’ 

(Aats Poivixos “Hpotvn yaipe). It is as though we heard the 
Chorus chant to the dead Alkestis® 

a Li 
vow © éott pakapa dSatpov: 
~ 4 = fa \ , 
xaip’, & morve, ed de Soins. 

1 For Zeus Philios see Prolegomena, p. 359. To the comedian Zeus Philios was 
the ‘ diner-out’ par excellence. ‘ ; 

2 4. Mitth. 1879, 1v. Taf. vir. p. 292. Other inscribed instances are figured in 
Mr Wace’s Introduction to Sculpture in the Sparta Museum Catalogue, p. 105. 

3 No. 15; see Prof. Gardner, op. cit. p. 116. 

4 No. 60, Prolegomena, p. 352, Fig. 106. 5 Kur. Alk. 1003. 

yl ee a ge ee er 

Saal ahah 

$id Daimon and Hero | for. 

In the archaic grave-reliefs of Sparta the dead man is figured 
as a hero, that is, as we now understand it, he has put on the garb 
and assumed the functions of an Agathos Daimon. In the ‘ Hero 
Feasts’ of the fourth and succeeding centuries right down through 
Roman times, the dead man is also heroized, is figured as we have 
seen with snake and cornucopia. But Athenian grave-reliefs of 
the fine-period, of the fifth and early fourth centuries B.c., know 
of no snake no cornucopia! no daimon-hero. The dead man is 
simply figured as he was in life; he assumes no daimonic function 
whether to ban or to bless; he is idealized it may be but not 
divinized. The cause of this remarkable fact, this submergence 
of the daimon-aspect of the dead man will concern us later. One 
last form of the Hero-Feast, of special significance for our argument, 
yet remains to be considered. 

The design in Fig. 92 is the earliest known specimen? of the 

Fic. 92. 

so-called ‘Tkarios reliefs. The main part of the composition is 

the familiar ‘Hero Feast, the reclining banqueter, the attendant 

1 This is the more remarkable as the Athenian grave-reliefs take over, as I have 

tried to show elsewhere (Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 590), the art-type of the 

earlier Spartan monuments. It seems as though, while the art-type is preserved, 
Sg a ame bee de the daimonie attributes were advisedly expurgated. 

ound at the Peiraeus, now in the Louvre. F,. Dehneken, Hi i 
Arch. Zeit. 1881, p. 272. ee 

Pin) / The ‘ Tkarios’ Reliefs 

cup-bearer, the seated wife, the table laden with fruits and cakes, — 
the rampant snake. But on the left, instead of approaching wor- 
shippers, the hero’s descendants, we have the Epiphany of a god. 
A daimon-hero receives the daimon, the god Dionysos—o dSaipov 
0 Avds ais}. 

There were many legends of heroes who ‘received’ Dionysos. 
Pegasos received the god at Hleutherae in Boeotia, Ikarios the 
eponymous hero of the deme Ikaria received him in Attica, 
Amphictyon at Athens. We cannot say that the banqueter on 
the relief is Ikarios or Pegasos, nor is it important to give him 
aname. The cardinal point is that, as the relief shows us, a local, 
daimonic, hero-cult could and did blend with the worship of the 
incoming Thracian Dionysos. In the light of the Agathos Daimon 
of the Pithoigia we see how easy was the fusion. Daimon and 
divinity alike had their wine-jars, their fruitful trees and blossom- 
ing flowers, and, best of all, their common animal-form, the holy 
snake. One daimon receives another and a greater than himself— 
that is all; but we understand now why Cleisthenes could so lightly 
take from the hero Adrastos his tragic choroi and ‘give them as 
his due* to Dionysos.’ From one daimon to another they had not 
far to go. 

We have now established the nature of a ‘hero’ and seen that 
the two factors, dead man and daimon, that go to his making, are, 
in the light of the primitive doctrine of reincarnation, inextricably 
intertwined. The daimon proper, we have seen, was a collective 
representation expressing not a personality so much as a function, 
or at least a functionary, the eponym of a gens, the basileus of 
a state. As each individual man dies, though for a while he may 
be dreaded as a ghost, his tomb being tended by way of placation, 
he passes finally to join the throng of vague ‘ancestors’ who year 

1 Bur. Bacch. 416. The god’s traits as Agathos Daimon, as feaster and as near 
akin to irene who nurtured the child Ploutos, come out very clearly in this chorus. 
xalper mev Parlarow, 
pri 5’ ddBoddrerpay Wi- 

phvav, Kovporpopoyv Oedv. 

@adla and Aals are figures near akin, ritual communal banquets, and Aals we 
yvemember (p. 146) was mpeoBlorn Oedr. 

2 Paus. 1. 2. 5, and Dr Frazer, ad loc. < 

3 Herod. v. 67 Krebévns d& xopovs uev 7H Arovdow dmréduxe. I advisedly translate 
dmédwxe ‘gave them as his due.’ The regular meaning of dodldwps 18 to give to 
gome one what is appropriate to him, to which he has some claim, hence its 
frequent use in the sense of to ‘restore,’ ‘repay.’ 

316 Daimon and Hero [cH. 

by year at the Anthesteria reemerge themselves and send or rather 
bring back as flowers and fruit the buried seed. A writer in the 
Hippocratic Corpus’ tells us, if any one saw the dead in a dream 
dressed in white and giving something, it was a good omen, for 

‘from the dead come food and increase and seeds.’ 
And as Aristophanes? has it: 

When a man dies, we all begin to say 

The sainted one has ‘passed away,’ has ‘fallen asleep,’ 
Blessed therein that he is vexed no more; 

Yes, and with holy offerings we sacrifice 

To them as to the gods—and pour libations, 

Bidding them send good things up from below. 

We have next to establish a further step in our argument. 
The ‘hero’ takes on not only the form and general function of 
the dawmon but also his actual life-history as expressed and 
represented in his ritual. This further step is, as will presently be 
seen, for the understanding of the origin of the drama of para- 
mount importance. We shall best understand its significance by 
taking a single concrete case that occurs in the mythology and 
cultus of the quasi-historical hero, Theseus. Theseus is an 
example to us specially instructive because his cult took on 
elements from that of Dionysos. He too not only absorbed the 
functions of an Agathos Daimon but like Pegasos, like Ikarios, 
like the nameless hero in Fig. 92 ‘received’ the god. 

THESEUS AS HERO-DAIMON. 

To pass from Cecrops or even Erichthonios to Theseus is to 
breathe another air. Cecrops is the eponymous hero of the 
Cecropidae, the Basileus, the imagined head of a Gens®, later mis- 
understood as a constitutional monarch. He is also a being on 
whom as medicine-king the fertility of people and crops depended, 
a snake-daimon. Theseus lays no claim to be autochthonous. 

1 De Somn. 1. p. 14 . 
onépuara ylvovra.. 
* Tagenist. frg. 1 kal Obouév Y adrotor rots évaylouacw 
@omep Oeotor. Kai xods YE XebmEevos 
alrovued’ avrods Ta Kana detpo avidvar, - 
3 I follow Prellwitz in understanding Basileus as ‘Geschlechtsherr,’ gee 
Etymologisches Worterbuch, 1905, s.v. ; 

a7 yap T&v drodavovtav al Tpopal Kal avéjoes Kat 

‘S17 

A chance poet’ concerned to glorify the hero may call the Athe- 
nians ‘Theseidae, but Theseus is no real eponym. He comes 
from without; he represents the break with the gentile system, 
with the gens and its Basileus; he stands for democracy. His was 
the synoikia. Before his days the people of Attica had lived 
in scattered burghs (cata 7réXeus), citadel communities with each 
a Basileus or archon—a Pandion on the burgh of Megara, a Cecrops 
on the Athenian Acropolis—with each a city hearth, a Prytaneion. 
Theseus broke down the old divisions, the ancient Moirai, confusing 
doubtless many an archaic sanctity. He made one community 
with one goddess, and in her honour he instituted the festival of 
the Synoikia, the Feast of Dwelling together’. 

From the mythology of Theseus as representative of the 
democracy the supernatural has as far as possible been expurgated, 
The snake, the daimon double of the ‘hero,’ has ceased to haunt 
him. Plutarch in his delightful way says at the beginning of his 
Life of Theseus? : 
_ ‘TJ desire that the fabulous material I deal in may be subservient to my 
endeavours, and, being moulded by reason, may accept the form of history, 
and, when it obstinately declines probability and will not blend appropriately 

with what is credible I shall pray my readers may be indulgent and receive 
with kindness the fables of antiquity.’ 

So forewarned, we may be sure that ancient tradition has been 
freely tampered with by Plutarch as well as by his predecessors. 
It is the more delightful to find that, though the heroic snake- 
form is abolished—doubtless as unworthy of the quasi-historical 
Theseus—his cult preserves intact the life-history of a fertility 
daimon. One festival only of those associated with: him can be 
considered, but this will repay somewhat detailed examination— 
the famous Oschophoria. 

The Oschophoria. Plutarch‘ is our best authority for the 
Oschophoria and his narrative must be given in full. Theseus has 
slain the Minotaur, has deserted Ariadne on Naxos, has put in at 

1 Soph. Oed. Col. 1065 deuvds 6 mpocxwpov “Apns, 
dew b¢ Onoedav axud. ; E 3 
2 Thucyd. 1. 15 él yap Kéxpomos kai ray mpaérov Baciiéwy 7 “ATTuKT és Oncéa del 
Kara modews @Kelro mpuTaveid Te Exovoa Kal dpxovTas.... 
3 Sub init. ; 
4 Vit. Thes. xx. Plutarch’s account is very likely drawn from Krates mepi 
§vordv (circ. 200 B.c.). 

318 Daimon and Hero [ou. 

Delos and there, parenthetically, instituted the Crane-dance; he 
turns his ship at last homewards. 

‘When their course brought them near to Attica both Theseus and the 
pilot were so overjoyed that they forgot to hoist the sail which was to be the 
signal to Aigeus of their safe return and he, despairing of it, threw himself 
from the rock and was killed. But Theseus, on landing, himself performed 
the sacrifices he had vowed to the gods at Phaleron when he set sail, and 
meantime dispatched a messenger to the city with news of his safe return. 
The messenger met with many who were lamenting the death of the king and 
others who rejoiced as was meet and were ready to receive him (Theseus) with 
kindness and to crown him on his safe return. He recetved the crowns and 
wound them about his kerykeion and coming back to the shore, as Theseus had 
not yet finished his libations, he stopped outside, being unwilling to disturb 
the sacrifice. When the libations were accomplished he announced the end of 
Argeus, and they with weepings and lamentations hastened up to the city}? 

‘Hence even now they say, at the Oschophoria, the herald does not crown 
himself but his kerykeion, and those who assist at the libations utter at the 
moment of the libations the words Eleleu, [ou, Jou, of which the one is a cry used 
by people when they pour libation and chant the paean, the other expresses 
terror and confusion?. Theseus having buried his father redeemed the vow 
he had made to Apollo on the seventh day of Pyanepsion; for it was on this 
day that they came back in safety and went up to the city. The boiling of 
all sorts of pulse is said to take place because, when they returned in safety, 
they mixed together what was left of their provisions in one pot in common 
and consumed them feasting in common together. And they carry out the 
Eiresione, a branch of olive wound about with wool like the suppliant branch, 
on that occasion, and laden with all sorts of first-fruits that scarcity may 
cease, and they sing over it 

Hiresione brings 

Figs and fat cakes, 

And a pot of honey and oil to mix, 
And a wine cup strong and deep, 
That she may drink and sleep. 

Some say that these things began to be done on account of the Heracleidae 
who were thus nurtured by the Athenians, but the greater number agree with 
the above®....And they also celebrate the festival of the Oschophoria which 
was instituted by Theseus.’ 

Plutarch’ begins his account of the actual ceremonies of the 
Oschophoria with the statement that two of the seven maidens 
taken by Theseus to Crete were really young men dressed to look 
like women. On his return to Athens these two young men 
walked in the procession dressed, he says, like those who now (in 
the Oschophoria) carry the branches. 

_ | The passages in italics are those which, if my interpretation be right, have 
ritual significance, though supposed to be merely historical. 

2 éripwveiy 6¢ év Tails orovdats ’EXede0, Lod Tov, rovs TapovTas* wy Td pev orev dSovTes 
(orevdovres codd. corr. F. M. C.) dvadwvety cad mawvlfovres elwOac., TO dé éxadAnEews 
kal rapax is éort. 

® At this point is a digression (xx.) in which the ship of Theseus is described. 
It was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of Demetrios of Phalerum and 

was probably an old ritual car. See Nilsson, Archiv f. Religionswiss. xt. 402 
Griechische Feste, 1906, p. 268, note 5. : seca ae 

Ritual of the Oschophoria 319 

vii] 
‘These they carry to do honour to Dionysos and Ariadne on account of 
the legend, or rather because they came back when the fruit-harvest was 
being gathered in. The Deipnophoroi (carriers of the meal) take part and 
have a share in the sacrifice, and play the part of the mothers of those on 
whom the lot fell, for they kept coming to them with provisions, and tales 
(10Gor) are recited because those mothers used to recount tales to cheer up 
their children and comfort them. Demon also gives the same particulars. 
And a temenos was set apart to Theseus, and the Phytalidae superintended 
the sacrifice, Theseus having handed it over to them in return for their 
hospitality.’ 

Before discussing this remarkable hodge-podge of ritual and 
pseudo-history our account of the Oschophoria must be completed 

from other sources. 
Athenaeus? in describing the various shapes of vases mentions 
one called pentaploa (the fivefold). 

‘Philochoros mentions it in the second book of his Attica. And Aristo- 
demos in the third book of his Concerning Pindar says that during the Skira 
a contest took place at Athens consisting of a race of epheboi. And that they 
run holding a fruit-laden vine-branch, which is what is called an éschos. And 
they run from the sanctuary of Dionysos as far as the sanctuary of Athena 
Skiras, and he who wins receives the kylix called pentaploa, and he feasts with 
a choros. And the kylix is called pentaploa inasmuch as it holds wine and 
honey and cheese and meal and a little oil.’ 

Proklos also in his Chrestomathia? has a valuable notice as 
follows: 

‘Songs belonging to the Oschophoria are sung among the Athenians. Two 
youths of the chorus are dressed like women and carry branches of vine laden 
with fine bunches of grapes, they call such a branch an osché, and from this 
the songs get their name, and these two lead the festival.’ 

After repeating some of the details and the pseudo-history already 
known to us from Plutarch, Proklos goes on: 

‘The chorus follows the two youths and sings the songs. Epheboi from 
each tribe contend with each other in the race, and of these the one who is 
first tastes of the phiale called pentaple, the ingredients of which are oil, wine, 
honey, cheese and meal.’ 

1 xr, 62, §§ 495, 496 ... Apeorddnuos & év rplry mepl Iwvddpou rots Zxlpous onow 
"AOhvate (’AOjvnor Mein.) dyava émirercicban Tav epnBwv dpduou* Tpéxew 6 airovs 
éxovras duméhov KNddov KaTdKapmov, Toy KANovULEV OY doxov. Tpéxovor d éx Tob lepod Tov 
Avovicou wéxpt Tod THs Dxipddos "AOnvas iepod, Kal 6 viKnoas AapBaver KOK rip Aeyouev ny 
revratAday Kal Kwpdger meTa Xopo. Tlevrardoa 8’) KUNE Kadelrac, Ka door olvov exer 

Kal wéde Kat Tupdv Kal édeperov Kal édatou Bpaxv. ‘ é 

2 Chrestomath. 28 édcxopopixa 5¢ wéAn Tape, "AOnvaiors j5eTo* Tod dé xopov be duo 
yeayla Kara yuvatkas éoTrodopevoe krhuatra ammréhou KoplfovTes MecT wy (sic) eb Oddo 
Borptwy (exddouy 5é aro doxny, ag ob Kal Tots wéheow 7 érwvupla) Tips Copris KabnyoovTo. 
dptas d¢ Onoda mpdrov rob Epyou' K.TA. .x.€lmeTo Tors veavlats 6 Xopos Kat moe TH edn é& 
éxdarns 5€ pudfs EpnBor SinusAh@vro mpds dAAAAouS Spbuw* Kal TOUTWY 0 mporepos éyevero 

éx TAs TevTamAs Neyouevns pidhns, i) owvexcpvaro aly Kat oly Kat méduTe Kal TUPy Kab 
ad¢iross, 

320 — Daimon and Hero — [oH 

Probably most of the ritual details in Plutarch, Athenaeus and 
Proklos come from Philochoros. Istros!, who was nearly his con- 
temporary, wrote an account of Theseus in the thirteenth book of 
his History, and adds the somewhat important detail that the two 
oschophoroi had to be ‘conspicuous both for race and wealth. 
The scholiast on Nikander’s Alexipharmaka says? that, they had 
to have both parents alive, and Hesychius® adds that they were in 
the flower of their age. 

Amid much uncertainty as to detail the main features of the 
festival stand out clearly. First and foremost the Oschophoria is 
an autumn festival, marking and crowning the end of all the 
harvests. It is one feature in the great Pyanepsia which gave 
its name to the fourth month of the Attic year, Pyanepsion (Oct. 
Nov.). Pyanepsia meant bean-cooking, and one element in the 
feast was the common meal out of the common pot, a bean-feast 
or tavo7épya‘, such as that which was eaten, as we saw, in 
Athens at the Anthesteria on the day of the Chytroi. It required 
some ingenuity to fit the Bean-Feast on to the slaying of the 
Minotaur, but Plutarch, or his authority®, is equal to the occasion. 
Theseus and his companions, on their return from Crete, being 
short of provisions, ‘mixed together what was left of everything 
and ate it from a common pot.’ 

Besides the pyanepsia proper, the Bean-Feast, we have two 
other elements whose gist is clearly analogous, and which are 
therefore best taken together : 

a. The Eiresione. 
6. The Oschophoria. 

The Eiresione® was carried also at the earlier harvest-festival 

Ap. Harpocrat. s.v. dérxopépor...6 6¢ “Iorpos év 7H ty’ rept Onoéws Né-yuw ypdder 
olrws, évexa THs Kowhs owrnplas vouloar Tovs Kadovpévous dcxopspous xarahéyew B’ rev 
eke kat wor KparovyTwv. Harpocration defines dcx as khfua Borpus e&npTnuévous 
xOov. 

? Schol. ad Alewipharm. 109 dcxogpédpa 5é Néyovrae "AOhvnor maldes dudrOanets 
GpiNrwmevor KaTA Pudds of K.T-D. 

3 s.v. woxopopla. aides edyeve’s HBvres KaTanéyovrat ot K.T.d. , 

oS Athen. XIv. 08, §§ 648 ‘Hori dé 7d rudmov, ws Pynor DwotBros TavoTepuia év 

yruxet nWnuévn. Probably this was the exact mess eaten at the Pyanepsia. The 

word méavov was old-fashioned. Heliodorus (ap. Athen. rx. 71, §§ 406) says, rijs 

Tov Tupav eWnoews éemwonbelons, of ev Tadatol miavov, of d€ vor OdbmUpoy mpoc- 

ayopevovow. The most ancient mess was probably of pulse, the more modern of 

various sorts of grain. ; ; 
> Possibly Krates the friend of Polemon. 

§ I have discussed the Hiresione in detail in connection with the Thargelia 
Prolegomena, p. 77, chapter 111., Harvest Festivals. I did not then understand the 

The Eiresione 

of the summer first-fruits, the Thargelia, which also gave their 
name to a month Thargelion, May—June. The Eiresione is of 
course simply a portable May-pole, a branch hung about with 
wool, acorns, figs, cakes, fruits of all sorts and sometimes wine-jars. 
It was appropriate alike to the early and the late harvest-festival, 
but for the late harvest after the vintage was over it had naturally 
to be supplemented by the carrying of other branches, vine-boughs 
laden with bunches of grapes, an Oschophoria. 

This blend of Eiresione and Oschophoria was evidently 
characteristic of the ceremonies of Pyanepsion. The two cere- 
monies are represented on the Calendar-frieze? of the old 
Metropolitan Church of Athens (Fig. 93) to mark the month 

Pyanepsion. A boy carrying the Eiresione is followed by a 
magistrate, and immediately in front of him is a youth treading 
grapes and holding in his hand an éschos, a branch laden with 
bunches of grapes. To the right of him is a kanephoros carrying 
no doubt a pankarpia. 

With the Staphylodromoi of the Karneia? in our minds the 
main gist of the Oschophoria is clear. It is like the race of 
Olympia, a race of youths, ephebor, kourot, with boughs. It has 

similar content of the Oschophoria. See also Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte, 
1877, pp. 214—58, which, spite of its early date, is far the best account both as 
regards the collection of facts and their interpretation. 

1 J. N. Svoronos, Der Athenische Volkskalendar, Sonderabdruck aus Journal 
_ Internationale d’archéologie numismatique, 1899, u. 1. 
2 See supra, p. 234. 

H. 21 

322 Daimon and Hero [ CH. 

two elements, the actual agon the contest, in this case a race, and 
then, second in time but first in importance, the procession and the 
komos. The somewhat complicated details of the race seem to 
have been as follows!. Two epheboi chosen from each of the ten 
tribes raced against one another. The ten victors, after being 
feasted, formed into procession, one of them leading the way as 
keryx, two following, dressed as women and carrying branches, the 
remaining seven forming, as at Delphi, the choros. The prize 18, 
in the Oschophoria, a cup of mingled drinks, manifestly not a 
thing of money value but of magical intent, a sort of liquid 
panspermia, or pankarpia, meet for a vintage feast. The blend 
of cheese and wine and honey may not commend itself to our 
modern palates, but Demeter, save for the wine, drank the same in 
her holy kykeon. 

The branches were carried, Plutarch conjectures, to do honour 
to Dionysos ‘on account of the myth’ (dia tov wb@ov). The myth 
of Naxos may have done honour to Dionysos ; how it could reflect 
credit on Theseus or form a suitable element in his cult it is not 
easy to see The pdOos proper’, the word or tale spoken at a 
vintage ceremony, would no doubt—when a god had once been 
projected—do honour to the vintage god and his bride; but 
Plutarch, or his authorities*, must of necessity connect it with 
his hero, so the disreputable legend of Naxos has to be tolerated* 
But Plutarch suspects the real truth. No Greek as keen about 
ritual and religion as he was could fail to know that the Oschophoria 
was part of a vintage festival, but again the awkward hero has to 
be dragged in, so we have ‘or rather because they came back when 
the fruit harvest was being gathered in.’ 

In his account of the origin of the Olympic games Mr Cornford® 
has made it abundantly clear that the winner issued in the king, 
who, in one aspect, was but the leader of the choros, the head of 

1 See Mommsen, Feste d. Stadt Athen (1898), p. 285; and for the n 
; ° ; umber s 
in the Theseus legend cf. Verg. Ain. v1, 21 septena quotannis Corpora valor all 
For the precise nature of a primitive uidos see infra, p. 327. : 
A oto aie ee ee eee et: and the Dionysos myths were attached 
to Theseus quite late, i.e. after the Persian war. The date of th inatio i 
little importance to my argument. Se ae 
4 The mythology of Ariadne cannot here be examined, but it is interesting to 

note in passing that in the legend of the desertion The i 
poe aah ea okt ion Theseus and Dionysos are 

5 See supra, chapter vit, 

Eniautos-Daimon and King 

the revelling komos. We are never told that the winner in the 
Oschophoria was called basileus, but in Plutarch’s pseudo-history 
the truth comes out. The messenger meets ‘many who were 
lamenting the death of the king and others who rejoiced as was 
meet and were ready to receive him with kindness and to crown him 
on his safe return.’ The words are in our ears: Le Roi est mort; 
Vive le Roi. Aigeus the old king dies; Theseus the new king 
reigns. The old Year is over, the new Year is begun. The 
festival looks back to a time and a place when and where the year 
ended with the final harvest and the new year began in academic 
fashion in the autumn! or early winter. 

In the Oschophoria the winner of the race is, as at Olympia, an 
Eniautos-daimon and a basileus in one. He dies as an individual 
and revives as an eternally recurrent functionary. The contra- 
dictory cries Hleleu Iou Iow are now clear enough? There is 
‘terror and confusion’ when the old Year, the old King, dies; there 
is libation, a paean, and a joyful cry when the new Year, the new 
King, is crowned. One curious detail looks back to still earlier 
days. At the Oschophoria the herald (dyyedos) does not crown 
himself, he crowns his Kerykeion and his herald’s staff with the two 
snakes entwined. This surely looks back to the time when the 
Eniautos-daimon was a snake or a pair of snakes, and the crown 
was for the symbol of the snake-daimon not for his human 
correlative. 

Another ritual element points to early days—the Deipnophoror 
or foodbearers who supplied the chosen epheboi with provisions, 
took part in the ceremony, and then ‘played the part of the 
mothers’ of the youths on whom the lot fell (amrouipovpmevar tas 
untépas éxeivory TOV AaxovT@v). They also recited myths to 
encourage the youths. We have then as an integral part of the 
ritual just the two factors always.present in matriarchal mytho- 
logy, the Mother and the Son. The mother brings food, because 
like Mother-Earth she is essentially the feeder, the Nurturer; the 
_ mother speaks words (ui60.) of exhortation and consolation such 

1 Mr Chambers has shown that this was the case in the bi-seasonal year of 
central Europe. The winter season began in mid-November, the summer in mid- 
March. See The Mediaeval Stage, vol. 1.110. © . , f 

2 It seems impossible to decide that one of these cries definitely expresses joy 
and the other sorrow. Both vary according to their context. 

21—2 

Pie. 

Lyte. 

as many a mother must have spoken in ancient days to a son 
about to undergo initiation. Such words spoken aloud may have 
actually been a feature in initiation ritual. 

Yet another curious element in the ritual remains. Plutarch 
and Proklos both tell us that two of the young men who carried 
the Branches were dressed as women. Plutarch, as we have seen, 
explains the custom by an aetiological myth of more than usual 
foolishness. Modern commentators are not much more successful. 
The common sense or naive school sees in the interchange of 
dress between the sexes a prolepsis of the ‘Arry and Arriet’ 
hilarity of Hampstead Heath. Others think that in the supposed 
women’s dress we may see simply a survival of Ionian priestly 
vestments. Dr Frazer! justly observes that, in an obscure and 
complex problem like that of the religious interchange of dress 
between men and women, it is unlikely that any single solution 
would apply to all the cases®. 

Such a figure of an Oschophoros disguised probably as a 
woman is, I think, preserved for us in the design in Fig. 94 from the 
interior of a red-figured cylix? of the fine period. The scene takes 
place before a temple, indicated by the column to the right. A 
youth or maiden—the doubt is instructive—stands near to a great 
lekane or laver which, as often, stands on a short pillar supported 
by a basis. The horned object on the basis is probably part of a 
basket of a type not uncommon in ritual use. The same shape of 
basket is carried by the boy on the relief in Fig. 87. The youth 
or maiden has hair elaborately long, and on the head is a diadem 

1 Adonis, Attis and Osiris, Appendix tv., on Priests dressed as Women. See also 
Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte, p. 253, and Baumkultus, 203. Prof. Murray 
reminds me that Pentheus in his woman’s robe imitated ‘the gait of Ino or of 
Agave my mother,” Kur. Bacch. 925. 

2 Of the general problem of interchange of dress a solution is offered in chapter 
x1. In the particular case before us it seems to me just possible that the two youths 
disguised as women may represent really a woman and a youth, a mother and a 
young son. The parts of women in rural mimes are still to-day taken in Greece by 
men disguised. Men assumed women’s parts in the classical theatre: the reason 

for this, to our minds, ugly practice is obscure, but the facts remain. If we ~ 

suppose the two first figures of the procession of Branch-Bearers (prec 
by the herald) to have been Mother and Son, their dress might pe oo cee 
distinguishable. Dionysos the son par excellence was effeminate in guise and gait 
The Son before he leaves his Mother is a woman-thing. The racers would race 
either naked or but lightly clad, but the two who became personae might, once the 
contest over, assume ritual garb as Mother and Son. ; 

3 See Hauser, Philologus, tiv. (1895), p. 385. 

7 f 

324 ~ Daimon and Hero | for: - 

ae 

“AN Fe re Oe 

ee ees ee ee = t. 

Vit | The Oschophoroi 325 

with leaf-sprays. The robe is manifestly a ritual vestment: its 
elaborate decoration reminds us of the robe worn by Demeter at 
Eleusis on the Hieron vase!. The lekane is filled with water. The 
youth (or maiden) is, it may be, about to plunge the great bough 
into the water. Is it for a rain-charm, or will he asperge the 
people? We cannot say. One thing, and perhaps only one, is 
certain: the figure, be it maid or man, is a Thallophoros, possibly 
an Oschophoros, though no grape-bunches are depicted. 

The moral of Plutarch’s clumsy aetiological tale is clear ; had 
it been made for our purpose it could scarcely have been clearer. 

It embodies the very act of transition from the periodic festival 
with its Eniautos-daimon to the cult of the individual hero; from, 
in a word, the functionary to the personality. It is along this 
well-trodden road that each and every hero, each and every god, 
must travel before the parting of their ways. 

There is competition among the saga-heroes as to who shall 
seize the function-festival for his own. Plutarch, as usual, is 
instructive through his very naiveté. Some said that the cere- 
monies of Pyanepsion ‘began to be done on account of the 

1 Prolegomena, p- 556, Fig. 198. 

326 Daimon and Hero [ OH. 

Heracleidae! who were thus nurtured by the Athenians, but 
the greater number agree with the above.’ 

Theseus, the individual hero, for reasons political now lost to 
us, won and survived, though when we read the shifts to which 
Plutarch is put to ‘do him honour’ we feel his triumph is a sorry 
one. But honest Plutarch? knew and cannot conceal that the 
rites were really in the hands not of an individual hero, but a 
group, a gens, the Phytalidae, the ‘Plant-Men.’ Very fitly did 
such a group hold presidency over harvest ceremonies: their 
function was to promote the fertility of all growths fit for human 
food. The group of the Phytalidae project of course an eponymous 
hero Phytalos, Plant Man. Phytalos received Demeter into his 
house, as Ikarios ‘received’ Dionysos; she gave him for guerdon 
the gift of the fig-tree*. Translated into the language of fact, 
this means that the group of the Plant-Men at one time or 
another began cultivating the fig, a tree which seems long to 
have preceded in Greece the culture of the vine. 

Pausanias* saw—and the sight is for us instructive—the 
sepulchre of Phytalos, and on it was an inscription: 

Here the lordly hero Phytalos once received the august 
Demeter, when she first revealed the autumnal fruit 

Which the race of mortals names the sacred fig ; 
Since when the race of Phytalos hath received honours that wax not old. 

Phytalos is lord (ava£) and hero (#pws), and he has a tomb 
(rados), but does even the wildest Euhemerist dream that he ever 
existed? The writer of the epitaph knew that he was the merest 
eponym ; it is the race (yévos) of Phytalos, not the individual hero, 
that has deathless honours. 

The climax of a preposterous aetiology is reached by Plutarch® 
in commenting on the Phytalidae. He knows of them and their 
local presidency; knows of their tribal contribution to the cere- 
monial house by house feast which Theseus took to himself; and 
what does he say? ‘The Phytalidae superintended the sacrifice, 
Theseus having handed it over to them in return for their hospitality. 
Very handsome of him, for it was the gens of the Phytalidae who 

? For Herakles as arch-hero see infra, p. 364. 2 Op. cit. xx111. sub fin. 
3 Paus, Ds 37. 2. f + 1, 37. 2, trans. Frazer. 
> "BénpeOy dé al réwevos at7@ al rods dd Tov mapacydvrwv* Tov dacpov olkewy ératey 

els Outlay atT@ Tere aropopds* Kat Tis Ovolas émemehoovTo Puranrlda, Oncéws aroddvros 
avrots duorBhv Tis Pidokevias. 

vat] 

first received or purified him on his entry into Athens. The real 
functional tribal eponym, Phytalos, fades before the saga-personality 
Theseus. 

Theseus indeed marks, as already noted, the period of transi- 
tion between the group and the individual, the functionary, the 
basileus and the individual historic or saga-chief. Theseus is a 
king’s son, but he lets go the kingship (Bacvctav ageis). He is 
the hero of the new democracy whose basis is individuality. It 
is this swift transit from the group to the individual, from the 
function to the person, that is, as will later become clear, at once 
the weakness and the strength of the religion of the Greek. The 
individual is a frail light bark to launch upon a perilous sea. 
But the Sibyl bade the Athenian, who let the kingship slip, take 
courage : 

The wine-skin wins its way upon the waves! 

Theseus, then, the saga-hero, the quasi-historical personality, 
took on the life-history, the year-history of a fertility-daimon, that 
daimon himself, figured by the youth with the Eiresione, having as- 
similated another daimon, him of the grape—Dionysos. It remains 
to ask_-What are the factors. the actual elements, the events in 
the life-history of an Eniautos-daimon?? What is his mythos ? 
And first, what precisely do we mean by a mythos? 

THe MyrTHos. 

A myth is to us now-a-days a ‘purely fictitious narrative,’ 
When we say a thing is ‘mythical’ we mean it 18 non-existent. 
We have travelled in this matter far from ancient thinking and 

1 Plut. Vit. Thes. xxiv. 
dokos yap év olduarte movromopevoat. 
Tobro dé kal ZlBvdAday borepov drocromaticas mpos Thy Tow loropodaw dvapleyEamer ny * 
"Ackds Bamrify’ divas 5é Tor ov Oéuss éoTw. 

2 To ayoid misunderstanding I ought perhaps to state clearly at this point that 
the phrase évavros daluwy is so far as I know never used by the Greeks. They 
called their year-daimones by different names in different places. In Boeotia he 
was Agathos Daimon, in Crete Megistos Kouros, at Eleusis Plouton. Our earliest 
literary evidence for Eniautos as a definite personality is probably Pindar, Paean, 
1. 5'O mavredys Eviavurés, Opal re Oeurydvor. See infra, chapter x1. 

3 See the excellent definition in Murrav’s English Dictionary. ‘A purely 
fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions or events, 
and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.’ 
A myth is essentially ‘popular,’ i.e. collective, not the product of an individual 
brain, it has to do with daimones, ie. involves the ‘supernatural,’ it blends the 
historical and the natural in a way to be observed later. 

328 Daimon and Hero [ OH. 

feeling. A mythos to the Greek was primarily just a thing spoken, 
uttered by the mouth. Its antithesis or rather correlative is the 
thing done, enacted, the ergon or work. Old Phoinix says to 
Achilles ‘Thy father Peleus sent me to thee to teach thee to be 
both 

Of words the speaker and of deeds the doer®.’ 

From sounds made by the mouth, to words spoken and thence 
to tale or story told the transition is easy. Always there is the 
same antithesis of speech and action which are but two different 
ways of expressing emotion, two forms of reaction; the mythos, the 
tale told, the action recounted, is contrasted with the action actually 
done. It is from this antithesis that the sense of unreality, non- 
existence gradually arises. 

This primary sense of mythos as simply the thing uttered, 
expressed by speech rather than action, can never, so long as he 
reads his Homer, be forgotten by the literary student. But when 
we come to myth in relation to religion, myth contrasted with 
ritual, we are apt to forget this primary and persistent meaning, 
and much confused thinking is the result. The primary meaning 
of myth in religion is just the same as in early literature; it is 
the spoken correlative of the acted rite, the thing done; it is 76 
Aeyouevov as contrasted with or rather as related to Td dp@pevov*. 

Let us take the simplest possible instance in a rite already 
described‘, in which—the instances are rare—we have recorded 
both act and myth. In the Grizzly Bear Dance of the North 
American Indians the performers shuffle and shamble about like 
a bear in his cave waking from his winter sleep. That is the 

a Our word mouth and uO00s are connected, ef. also uwfw—all come from the 
Beet mu—to a an audible sound by opening or closing the lips, ef. 
n.h.d. Micke, wvia, a ‘hummer,’ and pwiw, uiorns; see Prellwitz i 
Wéorterbuch, 1905, s.v. Se eh wm 

2 Il. 1x. 443 

_ bbOwy Te pyriip Euevar mpynkripa re Epywv. 

3 Passages dealing with dpwueva and Aeyoueva are collected by Bergk, Griechische 
Literaturgeschichte, 1884, vol. 11. p. 4, but he does not distinguish between the 
myth proper and the aetiological myth. Thus in Paus. nm. 37. 2 7a Aeydueva eri 
Tots dpwuévois means clearly the story current to account for the rites, whereas in 
Galen, de usw part. v1. 14 dos jjoba mpds Tots Spwudvos re Kal Aeyouévors bd Tey 
lepopdvTwy, the Neydueva are clearly the myth proper, spoken at the moment of the 
performance. Bergk well remarks that the word drama is never used of these 
dpwueva but that Aristotle connects the two in the Poetics (3..3) 60ev Kal Sdpduara 
kaXeio Oat Ties alta pacw Sre mmodvrat Opavres. - 

4 Supra, p. 112. 

my 

The 

Mythos in the Dromenon  ~—-829 

action, the dp@mevov. They also at the same time chant the 
words : 
I begin to grow restless in the spring. 

I take my robe, 
My robe is sacred, 
I wander in the summer. 

These are the Aeyoueva, the things uttered by the mouth, the 
myths. As man is a speaking as well as a motor animal, any 
complete human ceremony usually contains both elements, speech 
and action, or as the Greeks would put it, we have in a rite Ta 
dpemeva and also Ta émi Tots Spwpévors Neryomeva. 

It is necessary to emphasize this point because that great 
genius Robertson Smith has here led many of us his weaker 
followers astray. 

‘Strictly speaking,’ he says!, ‘mythology was no essential part of ancient 
religion for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers.’ 
g § 

To Robertson Smith a myth was the ancient equivalent of 
that hated thing, a dogma, only unguarded by sanctions. Had 
it been granted him to tarry awhile among the Iowa Indians or 
among the Zufiis he would have told another tale. An Iowa 
Indian when asked about the myths and traditions of his tribe 
said?: 

These are sacred things and I do not like to speak about them, and it is 

not our custom to do so except when we make a feast and collect the people 
and use the sacred pipe. 

A pious man would no more tell out his myths than he would 
dance out his mysteries. Only when the tribe is assembled after 
solemn fasting, and holy smoking, only sometimes in a strange 
archaic tongue and to initiate men or novices after long and 
arduous preparation, can the myth with safety be uttered from 
the mouth; such is its sanctity, its mana. 

In discussing the ‘Aetiological Myth*’ of the Hymn to the 
Kouretes we noted briefly that a myth is not to begin with and 
necessarily ‘aetiological.’ Its object is not at first to give a reason; 
that notion is part of the old rationalist fallacy that saw in primi- 
tive man the leisured and eager enquirer bent on research, all 
alive rerum cognoscere causas. When the Grizzly Bear dancer 

1 Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 19. 

2 Dorsey, Eleventh Annual Report of the American Bureau of Ethnology, 1889-90, 
p. 430. I owe this reference to the admirable chapter on ‘Mythology’ in Prof. 

Ames’s Psychology of Religious Experience, 1910. 
3 Supra, p. 13. 

330 Daimon and Hero | eee 

utters his myth, says the words, ‘I begin to grow restless in the. 
spring,’ he is not explaining his action—that, if he has any gift 
of observation and mimicry should be clear enough—he only utters 
with his mouth what he enacts with his shambling, shuffling 
feet, the emotions and sensations he feels in relation to the ‘most 
Honourable One, the Bear. It is not until he becomes shy and 
shamefaced instead of proud and confident in his pantomime, 
that, seeking an excuse, he finds it in his myth turned aetiological. 
When the Kouretes lose faith in their power to rear a child eds 
éviavtov they go on uttering their myth, but they put it in the 
past tense and interpolate an explanatory conjunction marking the 
decay of faith : 
For here the shielded Nurturers took thee a child immortal. 

We have previously! analysed in detail the motor or active 
factor in a rite, the dp@puevov?, we have seen that in its religious 
sense it was not simply a thing done but a thing re-done or pre- 
done; it was commemorative or magical or both. We have also 
noted that it was a thing done under strong emotional excitement 
and done collectively. All this applies equally to the other factor 
in a rite, the myth. In the religious sense a myth is not merely 
a word spoken; it is a re-utterance or pre-utterance, it is a focus 
of emotion, and uttered as we have seer collectively or at least 
with collective sanction. It is this collective sanction and solemn 
purpose that differentiate the myth alike from the historical 
narrative and the mere conte or fairy-tale: a myth becomes 
practically a story of magical intent and potency. 

Possibly the first muthos was simply the interjectional 
utterance mu; but it is easy to see how rapid the development 
would be from interjection to narrative. Each step in the ritual 
action is shadowed as it were by a fresh interjection, till the 
whole combines into a consecutive tale. Thus to take again a 
simple instance ; in the Rutuburi dance described above® we have 
a sequence, 

The Blue Squirrel ascends the tree and whistles. 
The plants will be growing and the fruit will be ripening, 
And when it is ripe it falls to the ground, ; 

1 Supra, p. 42. 
> It is worth noting that the actual word dpdmevoy when it becomes the equiva- 

lent of ‘rite’ shows that the tendency must have been to emphasize the motor 
element. 

. 3 Supra, p. 112. 

-. 

4b ¥ 4 
eae 
WW een 

- The Eniautos-Mythos 331 

and this sequence is as it were the life-history of the plant or 
the animal to be magically affected; it is the plot of the dpapevor, 
for, says Aristotle, in a most instructive definition, 

by myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents. 

When we realize that the myth is the plot of the dpepevov we 
no longer wonder that the plot of a drama is called its ‘myth.’ 

It would be convenient if the use of the word myth could 
be confined? to such sequences, such stories as are involved in 
rites. Anyhow the primitive myth, the myth proper, is of this | 
nature, and it is one form of the myth proper that we have now 
to consider, the plot or, life-history of the Hniautos-daimon. 
What are its elements and its characteristics? What if anything 
did it contribute to the plots (wdGor) of the dramas enacted at 
the Great Dionysia? If these dramas arose from the Spring 
Spépueva some analogies between their respective ‘myths’ must 
surely be observable. 

THE ENrAuTOS-MUTHOS. 

The elements of the Eniautos myth are few and simple’; its 
main characteristic is its inevitable, periodic monotony. This 
comes out clearly in the Spaeva of the Oschophoria. The 
principal factors are: 

(a) <A contest (dyév). In this case and also in the Karneia 
and in the Olympic Games the contest is a race to decide who 
shall carry the boughs and wear the crown. 

(b) A pathos, a death or defeat. In the Theseus myth this 
appears in the death of the old king. The pathos is formally 
announced by a messenger (dyyedos) and it is followed or accom- 
panied by a lamentation (Opivos). 

(c) A triumphant Epiphany, an appearance or crowning of 
the victor or the new king, with an abrupt change (mepurréteva) 

1 Poet. v1. 6 Néyw yap “000 Todrov ri ofvbecw TOV Tparywdir wy. 

2 Mr van Gennep proposes this in bis interesting paper Was ist Mythus? (Inter- 
nationale Wochenschrift fiir Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, Sept. 1910, p. 1167). 
His definition of myth is as follows: ‘Der Mythus ist eine Erzahlung, die allge- 
meine und regelmassig wechselnde und sich wiederholende Erscheinungen darstellt 
und deren Bestandteile sich in gleicher Sequenz durch religidsmagische Handlungen 

(Riten) aussern.’ 

3 I omit the presentation or prologue introducing the plays as not ritually 
essential and as not noted in the Oschophoria, but it is interesting to find that in 
Mr Chambers’ analysis of the Mummers’ play (op. cit. I. p. 211) he divides it into 
three parts: the Presentation, the Drama, the Quéte. See also Prof. Murray, infra, 

p. 359. 

= 

332 Daimon and Hero (CH. 

from lamentation to rejoicing. In the Theseus rite, we have the 

actual mathot which marked this shift, Hleleu Tow Iou'. 

The Speéuevov may of course take a somewhat simplified form. 
Thus the Kathodos and Anodos of Kore? omits the agon, but 
probably in all cases where a human representative had to be 
chosen, a leader or king, the contest element was present. 
It is surely a fact of the highest significance that the Greek word 
for actor is agonistes, contester. The shift from sorrow to joy was 
integral because it was the mimetic presentation of the death of 
the Old Year, the birth of the New. To seek for a threnos we 
need not go to a hero’s tomb. 

To have a fixed ritual form imposed is, like the using of a 
beautiful, difficult rhythm—an impediment to the weak, a great 
and golden opportunity to the strong. But a ritual form, how- 
ever solemn and significant, does not, and did not make great 
drama. We see that clearly enough in the folk-plays, that, as 
they were before the drama, so have long out-lasted it. With 
extraordinary tenacity the old form maintains itself as in the 
Carnival plays observed by Mr Dawkins* in Thrace and by 
Mr Wace‘ in Thessaly and Macedonia. They are nothing but 
the life-history of a fertility-daimon; the story is more complete 
than in the Oschophoria; it takes the datmon from the cradle to 
the grave and back again, to life and marriage. Mr Wace from 
many scattered and fragmentary festivals constructs the full 
original somewhat as follows: 

An old woman first appears nursing her baby in her arms, and this child 
is in some way or other peculiar. He grows up quickly and demands a bride. 
A bride is found for him, and the wedding is celebrated, but during the wedding 
festivities he quarrels with one of his companions, who attempts to molest the 
bride, and is killed. He is then lamented by his bride, and miraculously 
restored to life. The interrupted festivities are resumed, and the marriage is 
consummated. 

1 Supra, p. 318. 

_” Such simplified dpéueva are the Thesmophoria, where we hear of no agon, the 
Charila at Delphi (infra, p. 416), the summoning of Dionysos by trumpets from the 
abyss at Lerna. Sometimes the agon is apparently the chief element in the rite as 
a the Lithobolia at Eleusis. Sometimes it is softened to a mere Aovdopta, as in the 

enia. 

° R. M. Dawkins, The Modern Carnival in Thrace and the Cult of Dionysos, 
J. H. S. xxvi. 1906, p. 191. Mr Dawkins’ attention was drawn to this. festival by 
Mr G. M. Vizyenos, a native of Viza (the ancient Bi{vy), which is about two hours 
west of Haghios Gheorghios, where the festival is now celebrated. Mr Vizyenos 
had seen the festival as a boy some forty years before it was observed by 
Mr Dawkins. ; 

4 In a paper to be published in the forthcoming Annual of the British School 
of which Mr Wace has very kindly allowed me to see a proof. j 

~ yur] | Carnival Plays 333 

To attempt a close parallel with the ancient cult of Dionysos 
is, I think, scarcely worth while, though analogies like the baby 
in arms or in the cradle to Liknites are obvious. We are dealing 
with material that long preceded and long outlasts the worship of 
any Olympian, the disjecta membra of the life-history of a year-god 
or fertility-daimon. Heisa babe; he has, probably at his initiation, 
a death and resurrection; he is married. The cycle of his life is 
eternally monotonous, perennially magical. 

The monotony of these folk-plays is almost intolerable, and 
if we were asked to see in them the germ of all the life and 
splendour and variety of Attic drama we might rightly rebel; 
but we are not. What the Spopeva of the Hniautos-davmon gave 
to Attic drama was, not its content, but its ritual form, a form 
which may be informed by beauty or by ugliness, according as it 
is used by an imagination clean or coarse. 

That the form is really the life-history of a fertility-daemon, 
and its intent, like the ritual of the daimon, strictly magical 
is shown beyond doubt by the concluding words of the Thracian _ 
ceremony : 

Barley three piastres the bushel. Amen, O God, that the poor may eat ! 
Yea, O God, that poor folk may be filled. 

That the daimon impersonated is the Hniautos-daimon is no 
less clear. At one point in the concluding ceremonies Mr Dawkins 
tells us: 

All the implements used were thrown high into the air with cries ‘Kal 
Tov xpdvou,’ ‘Next year also.’ 

It would be tedious and unprofitable for our argument to 
multiply instances of these folk-plays which last on in the remoter 
corners of Europe to-day’. They are tenacious of life because 
they are still held to be magical—the playing of them brings 

1 They have been collected and discussed by Mr E. K. Chambers in his in- 
valuable book The Mediaeval Stage, 1903, vol. 1. Book 1. Folk Drama. Everywhere, 
he points out, we have the contest, our agon, which in the eighth century erystallized 
into the Conflictus Veris et Hiemis, and the death and resurrection mime from 
which, in the form of the Easter trope Quem Quaeritis, mediaeval drama sprang. 
The subject has been so fully and admirably treated by Mr Chambers that I will 
only note here that we could have no simpler or more significant instance of a 
death and resurrection dpupevor than the Quem Quaeritis with its mythos in dialogue: 

Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, [0] Christicolae? 
Tesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicolae. 
Non est hic, surrexit sicut praedixerat. 
Ite, nuntiate, quia surrexit de sepulchro. — 
The function of the dyyedos is here specially clear. ‘The agon 1s absent. 

' 

334 Daimon and Hero [ OH. 

luck to the village for the season, and they are popular because 
they invariably end with a quéte. They are intolerant of develop- 
ment because of their periodic nature, and fixed factors—the fight, 
the death, the resurrection, on which this ‘luck’ inherently and 
essentially depends. 

The mythos, the plot which is the life-history of an Eniautos- 
daimon, whether performed in winter, spring, summer or autumn, 
is thus doomed by its monotony to sterility. What is wanted 
is material cast in less rigid mould; in a word Aeyopeva not 
bound by dpoéueva, plots that have cut themselves loose from 
rites. The dithyramb, which was but the periodic festival of the 
spring renowveau, broke and blossomed so swiftly into the Attic 
drama because it found such plots to hand; in a word—the forms 
of Attic drama are the forms of the life-history of an Eniautos- 
daimon; the content is the infinite variety of free and individualized 
heroic saga—n the largest sense of the word ‘ Homer’, 

THE HoMERIC SAGa. 

We are perhaps tired of being told that Aischylus’ said his 
tragedies were ‘slices from the great banquets of Homer,’ and we 
feel the ugly metaphor is worthier of the learned and ingenious 
Diners who record it than of the poet on whom it is fathered. 
Yet the metaphor is instructive. The plots of Attic drama are 
things cut off (tewayn). They are mythoi that have worked 
themselves loose from the cults of which they were once the 
spoken utterance’, and are thereby material to be freely moulded 
at the artist’s will. ¢ 

* Following Dieterich rather than Prof. Ridgeway, I had long vaguely held that 
the threnos and peripeteia of Greek tragedy arose from mysteries based on the death 
and resurrection of the year rather than from the tomb-ritual of any mere historical 
hero. But I date my definite enquiry into the daimonic origin of these forms from a 
lecture On the Form and Technique of Greek Tragedy delivered by Prof. Murray at 
Oxford in the Easter term of 1910. For detailed and to me conclusive evidence I am 
now able to refer to the Excursus which Prof: Murray has with great kindness 
appended to this chapter and which embodies the result of his independent 
investigations. By the kindness of Dr M. P. Nilsson I have just received a pre- 
print of his valuable monograph, Der Ursprung der Tragédie, which appears in 
Ilberg’s Neue Jahrbiicher fiir das klassische Altertumsgeschichte und deutsche 
Literatur, xxvu. 9, p. 609. 

> Athen. vit. 39. 347 of’ é vodv Baddéduevos Ta TOD Kad Kal Aaprpod Aicxddov 
ds Tas abTov Tpaywolas Teudxn clvar eve Tay ‘Ounpouv peyddwv delrvwv. : 

* Iam aware of course that these ‘tied’ mythoi, even while they were tied 
attached to themselves a certain amount of floating historical legend. This has 
been very well shown by Mr Chambers (op. cit.) in his account of the various local 
elements of folk story attracted by the Mummers’ play, vol. 1, p. 211. 

; 
J 

<a 

q 
p a 
a 

The Homeric Saga 335 

It may have surprised some readers that in our long discussion 
of ‘heroes’ there has been no mention of Homer, who sings heroic 
deeds. The reason is clear. If my contention be right that the cult | 
of the collective daimon, the king and the fertility-spirit is primary, 
Homer’s conception of the hero as the gallant individual, the soldier. 
of fortune or the gentleman of property, 1s secondary and late. 
It has again and again been observed that in Homer we have no 
magic and no cult of the dead. Our examination of the Anthesteria 
has shown us that, for Greece as for Central Australia, the two were 
indissolubly connected. Homer marks a stage when collective 
thinking? and magical ritual are, if not dead, at least dying, when 
rationalism and the individualistic thinking to which it belongs are 
developed to a point not far behind that of the days of Perikles. 
Homer’s attitude towards religion is sceptical, Ionian’. 

What is meant by the ‘individualism’ of Homer is seen 
very clearly in the case of the androktasvai or ‘man-slayings.’ 
Dr Bethe? has shown beyond the possibility of a doubt that the 
somewhat superabundant androktasiat which appear as single 
combats in the Iliad really reflect not the fights of individual| 
heroes at Troy, but the conflicts of tribes on the mainland o 
Greece. When the tribes who waged this warfare on the mainland 
pass in the long series of Migrations to Asia Minor and the islands, 
the local sanctities from which they are cut loose are forgotten, 
and local daimones, eponymous heroes and the like become indi- 
vidualized Saga-heroes. Achilles and Alexandros are tribal heroes, 
that is collective conceptions, of conflicting tribes in Thessaly. 
Hector before, not after, he went to Troy was a hero-daimon in 
Boeotian Thebes; his comrade Melanippos had a cult in Thebes, 
Patroklos whom he slew was his near neighbour, like him a local 
daimon. It is the life-stories of heroes such as these, cut loose by 
the Migrations from their local cults, freed from their monotonous 
periodicity, that are the material of Attic drama, that form its 
free and plastic plots. 

1 The connection of collective thinking with magic and of individualism with 
the Olympian system will be discussed in the next chapter. ' 

2 For this whole subject and the contrast of Homer’s attitude with that of 
Zischylus see Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, Ionia and Attica. — ; 

3 Homer und die Heldensage. Die Sage vom Troischen Kriege, in Sitzungs- 
berichte d. k. Pr. Ak. d. Wissenschaften, phil.-hist, K1., 1902. English readers will 
find the dvdpoxrdc.ae fully discussed on the basis of Dr Bethe’s researches in 
Prof. Murray’s Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 195. Prof. Murray accepts Dr Bethe’s 
conclusions and adds much to their significance. . 

336 Daimon and Hero i [ CH. 

The enquiry of the date of this influx of heroic saga belongs to 
the Homeric Question and is beyond alike my scope and my com- 
petence. When and how the old forms of the daimon-drama were 
replenished by the newly imported Ionic epos can only be 
conjectured. If conjecture be permissible I should imagine that 
the Pot-Contests (yvtpsvor ayaves) of the Anthesteria were, from 
time immemorial, of the old daimon type. When Peisistratos 
ordained the recitation of “Homer” at the Panathenaea, the influ- 
ence of the epos on the rude dramatic art of the time must have 
been immediately felt, and it only needed the birth of an Aischylus 
to make him seize on the teudyn that lay so close to hand. He 
or his predecessors took of necessity the prescribed form, the life- 
history of the daimon, and filled it with a new content, the story of 
a daimon de-daimonized; an Agamemnon who though he was a 
tribal daimon at home was an individual hero before the walls 
of Troy. 

The local daimons of Thessaly and Boeotia and the Peloponnese 
were de-daimonized by the Migrations; that is easily understood. 
But once the fashion set, once the rationalizing story-telling 
tendency started, once the interest in the local daimon and his 
magical efficacy diminished, and even those stationary daimons 
whose tribes never migrated, became de-daimonized, individualized. 
Hippolytos, son of Theseus, is a clear and very instructive case. 
He has a local cult at Trozen, later by some shift of population 
taken in at Athens, but to the drama he is wholly human, the 
hero of a widespread folk-tale. Yet even drama cannot wholly 
forget the daimon-functionary, and Euripides?, by the mouth of 
Artemis, tells us the manner of his cult. 

Yea and to thee, for this sore travail’s sake, 
Honours most high in Trozen will I make, 
For yokeless maids before their bridal night 
Shalt shear for thee their tresses. 

Pausanias® confirms Euripides; he tells us that at Trozen 

__ A precinct of great renown is consecrated to Hippolytos son of Theseus ; 
it contains a temple and an ancient image....There is a priest of Hippolytos 

1 Hipp. 1424: 
Tyas peyloras év moder Tpofnvia 
ddow* Kopar yap adfuyes yduwy mdpos 
Kouas Kepotvrat cor, dv’ aidvos paKpod 

TévOn méeyioTa Sakpiwy Kapmounéry. 
21. 32. 1, Frazer. : i 

—— 

Hippolytos as Kouros 337 

at Trozen who holds office for life, and there are annual sacrifices. Further, 
they observe the following custom. Every maiden before marriage shears 
a lock of her hair for Hippolytos, and takes the shorn lock and dedicates 
it in the temple. 

Hippolytos is indeed, in a sense that has hitherto escaped us, 
the Megistos Kouros, ‘He of the Shorn-Hair!’—the daimon of 
initiation ceremonies, of the rite de passage from virginity to 
virility. The plot, the mythos of the Hippolytos utters things 
older and deeper than any ugly tale, however ancient, of 
Potiphar’s wife. | 

In the relief? in Fig. 95 we have a monument of Hippolytos. 

Fie. 95. 

He is figured as a young hero with a horse, a knight like the 
daimones of the Hero-Feasts. His dog is with him to mark him 
as a human huntsman. But the hero-daimon is not forgotten. 

1 With his accustomed generosity Mr Cook allows me to cite in advance his view 
that xépos xépy are from the same root as keipw. This had of course been guessed 
by the ancients, see Ht. Mag. xovpd* dm Tob Kelpw xéxapuar kop xal kouvpd, and for 
modern supporters of the view see Collitz-Bechtel, Gr. Dial. Inschr. 1. 148, No, 373 
tat xépfar, and F. Solmsen in the Zeitschrift f. vergleich. Sprachforschung, 1888, xxix. 
128 f. This derivation I had known and from cowardice rejected. It strongly 
supports, as Mr Cook kindly points out, my contention that the Kouretes were the 
young initiates of the tribe. On the third day of the Apatouria, called koupedrts, the 
xodpot had their hair cut and were enrolled in the phratries. Full references will be 
found in Mr Cook’s forthcoming book in section 1 of chapter 1. in connection with 
the ‘hair festival’ of the Komyria. I venture to apply Mr Cook’s argument in the 
case of Hippolytos as Meyistos Kowros of Trozen. For Herakles and his connection 
with hair-cutting see infra, p. 379. f 

2 Found at Aricia but of Attic workmanship, now in the Torlonia Museum. 
See Blenkenberg, Et Attisk Votiv-relief, Festskrift til J. L, Ussing, 1900, 

H. 22 

338 Daimon and Hero [ cH. 

Just in front of the horse is a low altar, an eschara, the kind in 
use for ‘heroes’; a worshipper approaches. Moreover the figures 
in the background show clearly to what company Hippolytos 
belongs. Asklepios who, as we shall see in the next chapter, was 
put a daimon half crystallized into a god, Aphrodite Pandemos 
to the left, and between them the temple of Themis’. 

| In the case of Hippolytos we know precisely where was his 
| local cult, and from his ritual we can partly see how the tragedy 
|of Euripides arose from his annual muthos. More often the con- 

Fic. 96. 

nection escapes us. We have the record of a local cult and we 
have the finished dramatic figure but the links are lost. The 
relief in Fig. 96 presents us with the two factors baldly and 
blankly juxtaposed without attempt at reconciliation. To the 
left we have a warrior like Hippolytos leading a horse, to the 
right the daimon-snake. The artist himself was probably at 
a loss to establish a connection; anyhow he does not attempt it. 
The horseman takes no notice of the snake; the snake, serenely 

oriea these local divinities of the south slope of the Acropolis see Prolegomena 
p- : ; 

” 

ag vir] Daimon-Ritual and Homeric-Saga 339 

coiled, is indifferent to the horseman. They are of two alien 
worlds. 

If with this relief to help us we bear in mind these two factors, 
the old daimonic, magical ritual which lent the forms, the new 
‘Homeric’ saga which lent the heroic content, the relation of the 
drama to the worship of Dionysos and also to the worship of the 
dead becomes, I think, fairly clear. The plays were performed in 
the theatre of Dionysos, in the precinct of the god, his image 
was present in the theatre, the chorus danced round his altar, 
his priest sat in the front and central seat among the spectators. 
In the face of facts so plain it seems to me impossible that the 
drama had its roots elsewhere than in the worship of Dionysos’. 
Aristotle is right, ‘tragedy arose from leaders of the Dithyramb?’ 
Of any connection with the tomb and obsequies of an actual dead 
Athenian hero there is not a particle of evidence. But, Dionysos 
is a daimon, he is the daimon, of death and resurrection, of re- 
incarnation, of the renowveau of the spring, and that renowveau, 
that reincarnation, was of man as well as nature. In the Anthesteria, 
the Blossoming of Plants and the Revocation of Ghosts are one 
and the same, but they are universal, of ancestors, not of one 
particular dead ancestor. 

We left the problem of one scene (Fig. 31) on the Hagia 
Triada sarcophagos unsolved and the solution now comes of itself. 
The figure standing in front of the building is not, I think, 
a god, not Dionysos Dendrites, nor is he a man, a particular dead 
individual who is having a funeral at the moment. Rather he is 
a daimon-hero, and the building before which he stands is a 
heroon, like the heroon of the Agathos Daimon at Thebes. He 
may be a dead king, if so he is worshipped as a functionary, 
a fertility-daimon not as an individual; he is like Cecrops, like 
Erichthonios. He is certainly I think a kouros like in youth and 

1 For a full statement of this, Prof. Ridgeway’s view, see his Origin of Tragedy, 
1910. 

2 Supra, p. 32. The difficult question of when and how the incoming Thracian 
daimon Dionysos came to dominate the local Agathos Daimon I leave here un- 
answered. I have elsewhere (Proleg. pp. 557 and 571) suggested that Dionysos 
may have come to Athens by way of Delphi and Eleusis. For the possible influence 
of the Mysteries on drama see A. Dieterich’s ‘epoch-making’ Die Entstehung der 
Tragédie in Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, 1908, p. 164. 

22—2 

| 

A el) 

¥ 

340 . Daimon and Hero. °. [cH. Vm 
strength to the kourot who approach him with offerings, only stiff — 
and somewhat xoanon-like as becomes one who is a daimon not 
a man. Over his forehead hangs a long single curl which may 
well characterize him as ephebos?. Near him is his holy tree, sign 
and symbol of the life and function of an Agathos Daimon. To 
him, as Eniautos-daimon, are brought offerings of young bulls 
and a new-moon boat, not a service of do ut des, not as gifts to 
persuade, but rather magically to induce® him: and, in his honour 
with like intent, is played out the renowveau of bird and tree, 

the mimic drama of the Dithyramb. 

We have watched the making of a daimon-hero out of vaguer 
sanctities; in the next chapter we shall see the daimon-hero 
crystallize, individualize into a god. 

1 See supra, p. 337, note 1. 

2 Even, perhaps, magically to bring him to life. The figure of the Kouros, as 
noted above, has a stiff, half-lifeless look. We may compare the figure of Pandora 
the Earth-Goddess as she appears on the Bayle cylix in the British Museum (see 
my Myth. and Mons. of Anc. Athens, p. 450, Fig. 50). The ‘Birth’ and ‘Making’ 
of Pandora are but mythological presentations of the renowveaw of earth in the 
spring. For the analogous Anodos vases see infra, p. 418.

GREEK TRAGEDY. 

THE following note presupposes certain general views about 
the origin and essential nature of Greek Tragedy. It assumes 
that Tragedy is in origin a Ritual Dance, a Sacer Ludus, repre- 

senting normally the Aition, or supposed historical Cause, of 

some current ritual practice: e.g. the Hippolytus represents the 
legendary death of that hero, regarded as the Aition of a certain 
ritual lamentation practised by the maidens of Trozén. Further, it 
assumes, in accord with the overwhelming weight of ancient 
tradition, that the Dance in question is S_origin ally or centrally 
that of Dionysus; and it regards Dionysus, sus, in this connection, 
as the spirit of the Dithyramb or Spring Drémenon (see above, 
Chapter vi.), an ‘Eniautos-Daimon, who represents the cyclic 
death and rebirth of the 1 world, including the rebirth—of the 
tribe be by the return of the | heroes or dead ancestors. 

These conceptions, it will be seen, are in general agreement with 
the recent work of Dieterich (Archw fiir Religionswissenschaft, 
XI. pp. 163—196), also with that of Usener (2b. vil. pp. 803—813), 
as developed by Dr Farnell (Cults, vol. v. p. 235, note A), 
and the indications of the Macedonian mummeries described by 
_ Mr Dawkins and others. I must also acknowledge a large debt to 
Prof. Ridgeway’s Tomb-theory, the more so since I ultimately 
differ from him on the main question, and seek to show that 
certain features in tragedy which he regards as markedly foreign 
to Dionysus-worship are in reality natural expressions of it. 

It is of course clear that Tragedy, as we possess it, contains | 

many non-Dionysiac elements. The ancients themselves have 
warned us of that. It has been influenced by the epic, by hero 
cults, and by various ceremonies not connected with Dionysus. 
Indeed the actual Aition treated in tragedy is seldom confessedly 
and obviously Dionysiac. It is so sometimes, as sometimes it 1s 
the founding of a torch-race or the original reception of sup- 
pliants at some altar of sanctuary. But it is much more often 

———=> 

ad eh Midi Si sath lo a aT) a To va ewe PS a 7 0 ee ee 

F 
| 

the death or Puthes of some hera Indeed I think it can be 
shown thai every extant tragedy contaims somewhere towards 
whe end the celebration of a taba tomb This point we must 

elndiy concede to Professor Ridgeway. I wish to suggest, how- 
Fat. ain thes anata: Aevaing eee 
forms of tragedy retain clear traces of the original drama of the 
Death and Rebirth of the Year Spmit. 

Dieterich has already shown that a characteristic of the Sacer 
Lads im the mysteries was a Peripeteia. or Reversal. It wasa 
change from sorrow to joy, from darkness and sights of inexplicable 
femer te light and the discovery of the reborn God Such a 
Peripetels is clearly aseeiated with an Anagnorisis, a a Recognition 
er Discovery. Sach formulse from the mysteries as @apceire, 
Mieras. tee Ged cosmeucrer—Hvpycaper, evyyaiposer— 
“Eguyer caxar, yiger Gucuer, imply a close connection between 
why these two elements are reganied by Aristotle as normally 
beloneimg te Tragedy. Now Peripeieia of some nnd is perhaps 
im itself & necessary or normal part of any dramatic story. But no 
eme could say the same of Amagnorisis It must come into Greek 
tzagedy from the Sacer Ladus, in which the dead God is Recognized 
ex Discovered 

Se fr Dieterich. Bui we may go much further than ths. If 
we examine the kind of myth which seems to underly the various 
“Bnmeates” celebraiens we shall find : 

L Am deen @ Contest. the Year agamsé its enemy, Light 
agaimsit Darkmess. Sammer agaimsi Winter. 

2 A Pathes of the Year-Dsimon, generally a ritual or | 
eee 
Bigpulytes torn to pieces (erapaynis) 

S A Messenger. For this Pathos seems seldom or never to 
be actually perfermed under the eyes af the audience. (The 
reasem of this is net hard to suggest) It is announced by a 
messemger. “The mews comes” thai Pan the Great, Thammuz,—_ 
Adems, Osims is dead_ and the dead body is often brought In ona — 
Wer. +This kads te 

& A TVhrenes a9 Lameniaizon. Specially characteristic, how- 
ever. 8 a clash ef contrary emotions, the death of the old being — 

x 

The Satyrs and the Peripetera 343 
also the triumph of the new: see p. 318 f., on Plutarch’s account 
of the Oschophoria. 

5 and 6. An Anagnorisis—discovery or recognition—of the 
slain and mutilated Daimon, followed by his Resurrection or 
Apotheosis or, in some sense, his Epiphany in glory. This I shall 
eall by the general name Theophany. It naturally goes with a 
Peripeteia or extreme change of feeling from grief to joy. 

Observe the sequence in which these should normally occur: 
Agon, Pathos, Messenger, Threnos, Theophany, or, we might say, 
Anagnorisis and Theophany. 

First, however, there is a difficulty to clear away. The 
Peripeteia which occurs in tragedy, as we have it, is not usually 
from grief to joy but, on the contrary, from joy to grief, which 
seems wrong. Our tragedies normally end with a comforting 
theophany but not with an outburst of joy.—No, but it looks as if 
they once did. We know that they were in early times composed 
in tetralogies consisting of three tragedies and a Satyr-play. 

This is no place to discuss the Satyr-play at length. But 
those who have read Miss Harrison’s article on the Kouretes 
(B.S.A. xv. and Chapter 1. above) will recognize that the Satyrs 
are the mpdmodo. Saiuoves in the rout of Dionysus, especially 
associated with his ‘initiations and hierowrgiai’—that is, exactly 
with our Sacer Ludus of Dionysus. Strabo, pp. 466—8, makes 
this pretty clear. Hence comes their connection with the dead 
and with the anodos of Koré. ‘The subject could easily be 
illustrated at length, but probably the above point, as it stands, 
will hardly be disputed. The Satyr-play, coming at the end of 
the tetralogy, represented the joyous arrival of the Reliving 
Dionysus and his rout of attendant daimones at the end of the 
Sacer Ludus. 

It has however been argued, and by so high an authority as 
Mr Pickard-Cambridge’, that the Satyr-play though very early 
associated with tragedy was not so in its first origin. He points 
out that no Satyr-plays are attributed to Thespis, that it is 
difficult to make out tetralogies for any writer before Aeschylus, 
and that it was Pratinas who mpatos éypaye Latvpous (Suidas). 

1 In a public lecture at Oxford in 1910. It may be worth mentioning that 
the new fragments of Sophocles’ Ichneutae (Oxyrhyneus Papyri, vol. 1x.) are 
markedly tragic in metre and diction. 

344 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

I take this to mean that Pratinas was the first person to write 
words for the rout of revelling masquers to learn by heart. 
Thespis, like many early Elizabethans, had been content with a 
general direction: ‘ Enter Satyrs, in revel, saying anything. I do 
not, however, wish to combat this view. It would suit my general 
purpose equally well to suppose that the Dionysus-ritual had 
developed into two divergent forms, the satyr-play of Pratinas and 
the tragedy of Thespis, which were at a certain date artificially 
combined by a law. In any case there must have been close 
kindred between the two. The few titles of tragedies by Thespis 
which are preserved, ‘Iepeis, Hi@eos, TlevOevs, PopBas 7) *AOXa eal 
Ueréa, all bear the mark of the initiation drémenon or Sacer 
Ludus. The Priests; The Youths, or Kouroi; Pentheus, the torn 
Dionysus; Phorbas, the battling King who slew or was slain— 
to a reader of the present volume these tell their own tale. And 
after all Aristotle has told us that Tragedy é« tod YarupiKod 
petéBarev (Poet. 4). It ‘developed out of the Satyric’—at the 
very least, from something akin to the Satyrs. I therefore con- 
tinue—provisionally—to accept as a starting-point some tragic 
performance ending in a satyr-play. 

Now we know that in the historical development of Tragedy 
a process of differentiation occurred. The Satyr-play became more 
distinct and separate from the tragedies and was eventually 
dropped altogether ; and, secondly, the separate Tragedies became 
independent artistic wholes. 

This process produced, I conceive, two results. First, the 
cutting-off of the Satyr-play left the tragic trilogy without its 
proper close. What was it to do? Should it end with a threnos 
and trust for its theophany to the distinct and irrelevant Satyr- 
play which happened to follow? or should it ignore the Satyr-play 
and make a theophany of its own? Both types of tragedy occur, 
but gradually the second tends to predominate. 

Secondly, what is to happen to the Anagnorisis and Peri- 
peteia? Their proper place is, as it were, transitional from the 
Threnos of tragedy to the Theophany of the Satyr-play; if any- 
thing, they go rather with the Satyrs. Hence these two elements 
are set loose. Quite often, even in the tragedies which have a full 
Theophany, they do not occur in their proper place just before the 
Theophany, yet they always continue to haunt the atmosphere. 

Sequence of Ritual Forms 

The poets find it hard to write without bringing in an Anagnorisis 
somewhere. 

Before tracing the Forms in detail, let us take some clear and 
typical instances of the sequence of all the five elements together, 
Agon, Pathos, Messenger, Threnos, Theophany. I take three plays 
which, though not early, are very strict in structure, and I begin with 
the Bacchae. For, if there is any truth in this theory at all, our one 
confessedly Dionysiac play ought to afford the most crucial test of it. 

The latter half of the Bacchae divides itself thus: 

787—976. A long Agon, divided by a Choric dance, 862—911. 
Dionysus pleads with Pentheus in vain, then at 819 begins to 
exert the Bacchic influence upon him till Pentheus follows him 
into the house, already half-conquered: after the Chorus, the two 
come out, the Contest already decided and Pentheus in his 
conqueror’s power; they go out to the mountain. 

Chorus, then 1024-1152 Pathos, =zrapayuos of Pentheus, nar- 
rated by a Messenger and received with violent clash of emotion. 

1153—1329. Elaborate Threnos, which consists first of a mad 
dance of triumph avti Opyjvov, then of a long Threnos proper, and 
contains in the midst of it—exactly in the proper place—the 
collection of the fragments of Pentheus’ body and the Anagnorisis 
of him by Agave. 

1330, or rather in the gap before 1330. Epiphany of Dionysus. 

Now, when we remember that Pentheus is only another form 
of Dionysus himself—like Zagreus, Orpheus, Osiris and the other 

daimons who are torn in pieces and put together again—we can 
see that the Bacchae is simply the old Sacer Ludus itself, scarcely 
changed at all, except for the doubling of the hero into himself 
and his enemy. We have the whole sequence: Agon, Pathos and 
Messenger, Threnos, Anagnorisis and Peripeteia, and Epiphany. 
The daimon is fought against, torn to pieces, announced as dead, 
wept for, collected and recognized, and revealed in his new divine 
life. The Bacchae is a most instructive instance of the formation 
of drama out of ritual. It shows us how slight a step was necessary 
for Thespis or another to turn the Year-Ritual into real drama. 

Hippolytus. 
902—1101. Clear and fierce Agon between Theseus and 

Hippolytus. 

346 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

Short Chorus, Threnos-like. 

1153—1267. Szapayuos of the Hero by his own horses: 
Pathos, narrated by a Messenger. 

Short Chorus, hymn to Cypris dvtl Opnvov. 

1283—end. Epiphany of Artemis, curiously mixed with the 
Threnos, and bringing with it the Anagnorisis (1296—1341). 

We are just one step further from the original ritual. For 
who was Hippolytus? He was, ritually, just another form of the 
- same Year-daimon, who is torn to pieces and born again. When 
we remember the resurrection of Hippolytus in legend, we shall 
strongly suspect that in an earlier form of the Hippolytus- 
drémenon there was a resurrection or apotheosis of the hero 
himself together with his protectress Artemis. Drama has gained 
ground upon ritual. Hippolytus has been made a mortal man. 
And we now have a Theophany with Artemis immortal in the air 
and Hippolytus dying on the earth. 

Andromache. 

547—765. Agon between Peleus and Menelaus. 

An interrupting scene containing the appearance of Orestes 
and flight of Hermione; Chorus. 

1070—1165. Pathos—stoning—narrated by Messenger. 

1166—1225. Threnos. 

1226. Theophany of Thetis, bringing comfort. 

The Theophanies of Euripides almost always bring comfort, 
and thus conserve an element of the old Peripeteia from grief to 
joy. The sequence in the Andromache is very clear, but has one 

interrupting scene. This interrupting scene will find its explana- 

tion later. For the present we merely notice that it is concerned 
with Orestes and that it falls naturally into the following divisions : 
802—819, Nurse as Exangelos or Messenger from within; 825— 
865, Threnos of Hermione; 879—1008, Appearance of Orestes, 
who saves and comforts Hermione, and expounds the death of 
Neoptolemus, which is the Aition of the play. See below p. 356. 

The above cases are merely illustrations of the way in which 
the Dionysus ritual has adapted itself to the reception of heroic 
myths. The chief modification is that other persons and events 
are put into the forms which originally belonged to the Daimon. 
In the Bacchae it is Pentheus who is torn, but Dionysus who 

Theophany 347 

appears as god. In the Hippolytus, it is not Hippolytus who 

appears as god but Artemis, his patroness. In the Andromache 
the persons are all varied: it is Peleus and Menelaus who have 
the contest; it is Neoptolemus who is slain and mourned; it is 
Thetis who appears as divine. 

We will now consider the various Forms, and see how far they 
are constant or usual, and what modifications they undergo. And 
first for the most crucial of them, the Theophany. This subject 
has been excellently treated by Eric Miiller, De Deorum 
Graecorum Partibus Tragicis, Giessen 1910. 

‘THEOPHANY. 

We all know that most of the extant plays of Euripides end 
with the appearance of a god (Hzpp., Andr., Suppl., Ion, Et, I. T., 
Hel., Or., Bac., I. A., Rhes.). But it has not been observed that 
in this, as in so many of his supposed novelties, Euripides is 
following the tradition of Aeschylus. The reason of this is, first, 
that the technique of Aeschylus is not so clear-cut and formal as 
that of Euripides. His gods do not so definitely proclaim them- 
selves as such, and probably did not appear from quite so effective 

a pnxavn. Second, and more important, Aeschylus was still 
operating with trilogies, not with single plays, so that his 
Theophanies are normally saved up to the end of the trilogy and 
then occur on a grand scale. 

To take the extant plays first : 

The Oresteia has no gods till the Eumenides (unless we count 
a vision of the Furies at the end of the Choephorot), but then we 
have a great Theophany of Apollo, Athena and the Furies in 
procession together. 

The Supplices trilogy, Supplices, Aegyptii, Danades: we 
know that this ended with an epiphany of Aphrodite, whose 
speech, founding the institution of marriage based on consent, is 
preserved (Nauck, fr. 44). This is evidently a full-dress Theo- 
phany in the style afterwards followed by Euripides, in which the 
god solemnly founds an institution and gives the Aition of the 
performance. 

The Persae trilogy consisted of the Phineus, Persae, Glaucus 
(Pontius ?), that is, it seems not to have been a continuous treat- . 
ment of one subject leading up to one final Epiphany, like the 

adie ali Sec ah ena 

348 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

Oresteia and the Danaid-trilogy. It falls apart into separate 

plays, and each play will be found to have in it some divine or — 

supernatural apparition. 

Persae: the Hero or, as he is called, the God (eds 644, &c., 
daiuov 642) Darius is evoked from his sacred tomb. 

Phineus: the end, or at any rate the dénouement, of the play 
consisted in the chasing away of the Harpies by the Sons of the 
North-wind—that is, in a great apparition of winged supernatural 
shapes. 

Glaucus Pontius: it contained, probably at the end, a prophecy 
spoken by Glaucus; and in it Glaucus, half-man, half-beast, 
appeared rising from the sea. (N. 26.) This seems like a regular 
Theophany with a prophecy. (If the third play was the other 
Glaucus, called Potnieus, then we have no evidence.) 

Prometheia Trilogy. This stands somewhat apart for two 
reasons. First, its Aition is not any Year-ritual or Tomb-ritual 
but definitely the institution of the Torch-race at the Prometheia. 
Secondly, all the characters are divine, so that there can hardly 
be question of an epiphany in the ordinary sense. The recon- 
struction of the trilogy is still doubtful, but it seems unlikely that 
the ultimate reconciliation of Prometheus and Zeus can have been 
dramatically carried out without some appearance of Zeus in his 
glory. 

Theban Trilogy. Latus, Oedipus, Septem. Here we possess 
the third play and it ends not in a Theophany but in a Threnos?. 
That is, it belongs to the first type mentioned on p. 344 above. 
The satyr-play belonged to the same cycle of saga. It was called 
Sphinx. It would be interesting to know how Dionysus and his 
train were brought into connexion with the Sphinx and Oedipus 
and whether there was any appearance of the God as deliverer or 
bringer of new life. In any case the same conjunction appears 
on the Vagnonville Crater; a Sphinx is sitting on a yaa ys 
which Satyrs are hammering at with picks, as though for the 
Anodos of Koré. (See J. E. Harrison, Delphika, J.H.S. xxx. 1899, 

p. 235, and Prolegomena, p. 211, fig. 45; cf. also the krater in 
Monwmenti dell’ Inst. 1. pl. Lv.) 

11 do not mean by this to suggest that the final scene is spurious. On the 
contrary. The Aition is the grave-ritual of Eteocles and Polynices, and the last 
scene 1s quite correct and normal in stating that Aition. 

OO eee Cm 

cy tee 

_ Epiphanies in Aeschylus — 349 

‘Thus we find that of the five trilogies of Aeschylus which are 
represented in our extant plays, two end with a final epiphany, 
one has an epiphany in each play, one is uncertain but most 
likely had a grand final appearance of Zeus in state; one ends 
with a Threnos. 

What of the fragmentary plays? I will not attempt to discuss 
them at length, but will merely mention those which prima facie 
seem to have contained an epiphany. I refer throughout to 
Nauck’s Fragmenta. 

Amyméne: the heroine attacked by satyrs THocewWavos dé emupavévtos 6 
Zdrvupos pev épvyev. Epiphany of Poseidon. 

Bassarai: 2nd of the Lycurgus trilogy, Edoni, Bassarai, Neaniskor. The 
Neaniskoi I take to be the converted Hdoni ; they form a band of Kouroi 
initiated into the worship of Dionysus. Thus the whole trilogy had probably 
an epiphany at the end, with Dionysus instituting his own ritual worship. 
But also the separate plays seem to have had epiphanies. 

démi: king Lycurgus acts the part of Pentheus: Dionysus is on the 
stage, as in the Bacchae, fr. 61: he makes an earthquake, as in the Bacchae, 
fr. 58: and, since his enemy Lycurgus was ultimately confounded, it is 
practically certain that in the end, as in the Bacchae, he appeared in 
lory. 
; Ee sahai : Orpheus, a rebel of a different sort, was torn to pieces by the 
Maenads (Bassarids) for worshipping the Sun, ai d€ Movoa ocuvayayovoat 
aay Eratosth. Catast. 24, This suggests a great epiphany of the Muses. 
The play must have been very close to the original Dionysiac ritual, like the 
Bacchae. The Daimon (Dionysus-Orpheus) is torn to pieces, collected and 
recognized, mourned for, and then revealed in glory. ; 

Other Dionysiac plays are Pentheus, of which we are definitely told that 
its plot was the same as that of Euripides’ Bacchae ; Dionusow Trophor, plot 
not known: evidently the nursing of the young Year-daemon in some form 
(see above, p. 13); and lastly, Bacchae. ; 

See also, for other Year-daimon plays, the Kréssai, and the WNemea- 
Hypsipyle trilogy below. k ; 

Ixion: perhaps the third play of the same trilogy as the Perrhaebides. 
The last scene seems to have shown Ixion bound by Zeus to the burning 
wheel in the sky. . See Diod. Sic. 4. 69. 3, ap. N. This would give a great 
epiphany of Zeus and the gods. : 

Eurépé or Kdres: see N. The play seems to have ended by the arrival 
through the air of the gods Sleep and Death, bearing the body of Europa’s 
son, Sarpédén, for burial in his native land. he 

Kabirt : plot uncertain, but we know that the Kabiri themselves made an 
appearance. Plutarch, ap. N. 97. : : 

Vemnon: at the end Memnon is slain by Achilles. His goddess mother, 
Eés, goes to Zeus and obtains the gift of immortality which she brings to 
him. Epiphany of Eds. Proclus, ap. N. ; 

Niobé: no direct evidence, but it is difficult to see how this plot can have 
been completed without the appearance of a god. ' 

Pentheus : same plot as the Bacchae. Epiphany of Dionysus. See above. 

Xantriai, ‘The Rending Women’: possibly another name for the Pentheus : 
in any case it seems to have dealt with the same story. 

Semele or Hydrophorot. The ‘ Water-bearers” are those who try to put 

out the conflagration of the palace owing to the epiphany of Zeus. 

350 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

Toxotides: Actaeon transformed into a stag. Probably epiphany of 
Artemis. 

Phineus : see above, p. 348. 

Psychostasia: the epiphany here was famous and elaborate. Zeus 
appeared on the ‘theologeion,’ Thetis on one side of him and Eos on the 
other, weighing the souls of Achilles and Memnon. Pollux, 4. 130. Eos, we 
are told, came down on a yépavos. 

Oreithuia: she was carried off by Boreas. The passages from Longinus 
and John of Sicily about the extravagance or droria of the poet suggest that 
Boreas appeared in person when he ‘stirred the sea by blowing with his two 
cheeks.’ 

The following are less clear. 

Heliades: their transformation into poplars was foretold or explained. 
This suggests an epiphany. Such things are usually done by a divine being. 

The Achilles trilogy, Myrmidones, Nereides, Phryges or Hector's Ransom. 
In the first Thetis seems to have appeared to provide the arms, in the second 
the Chorus consists of Nereids and it is difficult to imagine the play without 
Thetis. In the third we know that Hermes appeared at the beginning. 
It seems possible that the council of the gods described in J/. xx1v. as insisting 
on the ransoming of Hector made an appearance. 

Hoplén Krisis, the Adjudgement of the Arms of Achilles : it appears from 
N. 174 that Thetis was summoned to come with her attendants to preside 
over the trial. No doubt she came. 

Lastly, there are some plays in which our supposed Year-daimon 
makes his epiphany not as a celestial god but as a ghost or a hero returned 
from the grave. It is obvious that he is quite within his rights in so 
appearing : -he is essentially a being returned from the dead, and his original 
ritual epiphany was a resurrection. 

Persae: after the Pathos narrated by the Messenger comes a Thrénos and 
an evocation of the dead king or god, Darius, see p. 348. 

Kréssai : the subject seems to have been the restoration to life of Glaucus, 
son of Minos, by Polyidus. (This Glaucus, restored to life by snakes, may 
well have been a form of Year-daimon.) 

Psychagégot: the plot is unknown, except that the title is said to have 
denoted ‘persons who by charms of some sort resurrect the souls of the 
dead.” Bekk. Phryn. p. 73, 13. 

Nemea and Hypsipyle probably belong to a trilogy on the death and 
heroization of Archemorus-Opheltes, who is a typical Year-daimon, appearing 
as a Snake or a Baby. (See p. 214.) 

We do not know whether there was an appearance of Heracles at the end 
of Aeschylus’ Philoctetes, as there was in that of Sophocles. But it is perhaps 
worth remembering that Aeschylus was supposed to have revealed ‘certain 
lore of the mysteries’ in the Towotides, Hiereiai, Sisyphus Petrocylistes. 
Iphigenia and Oedipus. The extremely close connection between the mysteries 
oo the Year-daimon will be in the minds of all who have read the present 
volume. 

A numerical tabulation of the above results would be mislead- 
ing, both because most of the conclusions are only probabilities, 
and still more because we cannot generally constitute the trilogies 

to which the various lost tragedies belong. If we could, the final 
Theophanies would probably be still more numerous. There 

remain outside the above plays some 23 of which our knowledge is. 

so scanty that no prima facie conclusions can, as far as I can see, be 

i 
; 
q 
: 

~ 
* 

Epiphanies in Euripides 351 

drawn. But it can hardly be disputed that in a surprising number 
of Aeschylus’ tragedies we have found signs of either a definite 
epiphany of a god or the resurrection of a dead hero, or lastly the 
direct worship of a Year-daimon. We cannot be certain, but we 
may surmise that some such epiphany or resurrection was quite as 
common in Aeschylus as in Euripides. 

I will leave out the question of such Epiphanies in the 
fragments of Sophocles: the evidence would take very long to 
state. His extant plays will be briefly treated below. In general the 
result is that in this, as in so many other particulars, Sophocles is 
influenced more by the Ionian Epic and less by the Attic Sacer 
Ludus than the other two tragedians. It is just the same with the 
other Forms. Sophocles deliberately blurs his outlines and breaks 
up his Agén and Messenger and Prologue into what we may almost 
call continuous dramatic conversation; Euripides returns to an 
extreme clarity and articulateness and stiffness of form in all 
three. The discussion of Euripides’ technique is of course another 
story, but so much will, I think, hardly be denied either by his 
friends or his enemies. 

Passing on, then, to Euripides, what is it that he did about his 
epiphanies? In especial, why is he ridiculed by comedy for his 
use of the Deus ex machina, if Aeschylus really used such 
epiphanies as much or more ? 

The answer, I think, is not that he invented the introduction 
of gods: he clearly did not: but that, more suo, he introduced 
them in a sharply defined manner, always at the end of the play, 
and, it would seem, with some particularly smooth and effective 
machinery. (Perhaps an invention made about the year 428, see 
Bethe, Prolegomena, pp. 130—141.) The general purpose for which 
he used them—(1) to console griefs and reconcile enmities and 
justify tant bien que mal the ways of the gods, and (2) to expound 
the Aition of the play, and the future fates of the characters—was, 
I believe, part of the tradition. In these respects his gods play 

a exactly the parts of Athena in the Eumenides or Aphrodite in the 

Danaides, probably even of Zeus in the Prometheus Unbound. 
The Theophanies in the extant plays of Euripides are as follows : 

Hippolytus: Artemis appears, (1) comforts and reconciles Theseus and 
Hippolytus, and (2) founds the ritual of Hippolytus at Trozén. 

352 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

Andromache: Thetis appears, (1) sheds comfort on the suffering Peleus 
and Andromache, and (2) orders that Neoptolemus be laid in his tabu tomb 
at Delphi. 

Supplices: Athena appears, (1) comforts the Argives by foretelling the 
expedition of the Epigoni to conquer Thebes, and (2) bids Theseus consecrate 
the brazen tripod at Delphi which is witness to the oath of eternal friendship 
to Athens sworn by the Argives. 

Jon: Athena appears, (1) comforts Ion and Creusa, and (2) ordains the 
founding of the four Attic tribes. 

Electra: the Dioscoroi appear, (1) condemn the law of vengeance, comfort 
Electra and Orestes, and (2) expound the origin of the Areopagus, of the 
Oresteion in Arcadia, and of the tabu tombs of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra 
(ef. Paus, 11. 16. 7). 

Iphigenia Taurica: Athena appears, (1) appeases Thoas, promises comfort 
to Orestes, and (2) founds the worship of Artemis-Iphigenia at Halae and 
Brauron. 

Helena: the Dioscoroi appear, (1) appease Theoclymenus, (2) found the 
worship of Helen (in conjunction with their own), explain the name of the 
island Helene, and promise immortality to Menelaus. 

Orestes: Apollo appears, striking (as [ hope to show elsewhere) his hearers 
into a trance; (1) makes peace between Menelaus and Orestes, (2) explains 
the origin of the Oresteion in Arcadia and of the Areopagus and proclaims 
the worship of Helen. 

Bacchae: Dionysus appears, (1) judges his enemies, consoles Cadmus and 
(2) establishes his worship. See above. 

Iph. Aul.: end lost: Artemis seems to have appeared, (1) saved Iphigenia, 
comforted Agamemnon, and (2) doubtless ordained the Brauron rite. 

Rhesus: the Muse, mother of Rhesus, appears, (1) laments her son, and 
(2) establishes his worship as an ‘anthropodaimon.’ 

If this were free and original composition the monotony would 
be intolerable and incomprehensible: we can understand it only 
when we realize that the poet is working under the spell of a set 
traditional form. 

The Euripidean plays which do not end with a god are the 
following: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, Heracleidae, Hecuba, Heracles 
Troades, Phoenissae. 

These require special consideration. It is no part of my case — 
to argue that all plays necessarily conform to the same type. The 
sacer ludus of a Torch-race, like the Prometheia, or the sacer ludus 
of some Altar of Sanctuary like the various Suppliant Plays, has 
no particular reason for conforming to the scheme of the Dionysus- 
play, except the influence of custom and analogy. But we shall 
find even in these plays which have no obvious Theophanies some 
curious traces of the Theophany-form. 

? 

The Cyclops is a Satyr-play, and does not come into question. 

The Alcestis is, I think, also in form a Satyr-play. (See Argument, also 
Dieterich, Pulcinella, p. 69.) Yet we must note that it ends with a Resur- 
rection. 

Lheophanies and Theophany-Forms 353 

Medea: it ends with a scene in which Medea appears on a height 

(Schol. ad 1317), and then rides through the air uttering prophecies and 
_ founding the rite of her children’s worship. When we remember that Medea 
_ Was really a goddess, and that she and her children received worship in 

Greece, we can see that this scene is really a faded or half-humanized 

Theophany. Cf. the treatment of Hippolytus. 

Heracleidae : who is, in the ritual sense, the ‘hero’ of the Heracleidae ? 
Without doubt Eurystheus ; it is the “Ayos of his death and his sacred grave 
or ‘place of burial’ (1040 ff.) that constitute the Aition of the play. The end 
in our MSS. seems to be incomplete, but it clearly contains the foundation by 

; the Hero himself of his own tabu ritual. This is not far removed from the 

___ original daimon-rite or theophany. 

i. Heeuba: it ends with the prophecies of the fey and dying Thracian hero, 

and his announcement of the Aition of the Kunos Séma (1278). 

. Heracles: Theseus is of course not a god, but he is a worshipped hero ; 
and his function in this play. is just that of the ordinary Deus. He 
comforts Heracles, sends him away from Thebes, describes his future life, and 

lastly ordains his worship with its proper honours and ritual. (See esp. 

1322—1340 : just like a speech ex machina.) 

Troades: it ends with a pure Threnos. See above. It is interesting to 
note that the Theophany, omitted here, comes by its rights at the beginning 
of the play. 

Phoenissae: a curious question arises. The play apparently ends with a 
Threnos, which is legitimate enough. But the last scene also contains the 
driving out of Oedipus to Mt Kithairon. Now Oedipus was a daimon who 
haunted Mt Kithairon. (See Roscher; also my Introd. to Sophocles’ Qed. 
Rex.) He goes out to Kithairon in this play, 1751f. Also in Ged. hex, 
1451 ff. he expresses his wish to go out to ‘yonder Kithairon that is called 
mine own.’ When we remember that the connection of Oedipus with the 
Attic Colénus is probably a late Attic invention (Phoen. 1704 ff.) and reflect 
on the curious ‘passing’ of Oedipus in the Coloneus, a suspicion occurs that 
the true ritual end of the Oedipus-dromenon was the supernatural departure 
of the hero-daimon to his unknown haunt on the mountain. In this case the 

sending forth to Kithaeron—otherwise almost unmotived—is again a faded 

remnant of what we have called the Theophany-form. This argument is 
strengthened by the generally admitted fact that the pair Oedipus-Jocasta are 

,3 os 

a vegetation pair, like Adonis-Aphrodite, Hippolytus-Artemis, etc. But it 
cannot be pursued further here. 

To sum up, we find that the tragedies of Euripides usually 
end with a Theophany of a markedly formal and ritual character, 
closely suiting our conception of the Sacer Ludus of Dionysus, as 
daimon of the Year-cycle of death and rebirth; further, that in those 
tragedies which do not end in a confessed Theophany there are at 
any rate curious resemblances to the typical Theophany-form ; 
furthermore, the evidence of the extant and fragmentary plays of 
Aeschylus, though often uncertain, seems to show that a Theophany 
of a similar sort was also usual in them, either at the end of a 
trilogy or in the separate plays. About Sophocles we shall say 
something later: the evidence is not very conclusive, but the 
indications are not at all inconsistent with the above results. 

23 

H. 

354 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

Let us now consider the other forms, especially the group 

Aon, PatHos, MESSENGER, THRENOS. 

Pathos and Messenger almost always go together; the Agon 
is doubtless less characteristically ritual than the other parts, as 
arguments and spirited dialogue scenes naturally tend to occur in 
any drama. With respect to the Agon and Threnos we will 
chiefly notice how they stand in relation to the Messenger, and 
how far the supposed original order of sequence is preserved in 
each play. 

Euripides being the clearest and most definite in his ritual 
forms, we will take him first. 

Alcestis: being a Satyr-play it need not conform to the tragic type. It 
has, however, in the proper place the Agon (Heracles and Death), Threnos 
and Resurrection. 

Medea: typical, with the necessary modifications. Agon, Medea against 
herself 1020-1080. (The scene before has also been an Agon, Medea out- 
witting Jason.) Pathos and Messenger 1121—1230 ; quasi-Threnos in the 
frightful scene (1251—1292) where the children are murdered behind the 
barred door; quasi-Theophany, as explained above. (There cannot be a 
real Threnos because that is definitely forbidden by Medea 1378 ff. We 
may conjecture that there was no @pqvos in the Corinthian rite: cf. Paus. 
11. 3. 6 and Schol. Med. 273. 1f it was intended to mitigate infant mortality, 
this would be natural.) 

Heracleidae: see above on Eurystheus. The Pathos-Messenger (799—866) 
announces the battle and the capture of Eurystheus; there then follows an 
Agon-scene, apparently out of its order; the end is incomplete, but it 
oe the establishment of the funeral rite by Eurystheus himself, as 

ero. 

Hippolytus : typical. Agon, Messenger with Pathos, Threnos, Anagnorisis 
Theophany. See above. 

Andromache: typical: same order. See above. 

Hecuba: the Messenger comes early in the play, hence we cannot have a 
Theophany immediately following it. In compensation a Ghost appears at 
the beginning. We have Agon between Odysseus and Hecuba-Polyxena 
(218—440): Messenger with Pathos 484—582: then Threnos in Hecuba’s 
ees Then the course of the play interrupts. On the end see above, 
p. 353. 

Supplices: clear sequence. Agon between Herald and Theseus-Adrastus 
(399—597) ; Messenger announcing the Battle 634—777 ; then Threnos. This 
Threnos is enormously developed and practically includes the rest of the 
play up to the Theophany, except that it is interrupted by the Euadne scene. 
(That scene is evidently put in, and very skilfully, to fill up the interval 
while the slain men are cremated and their bones made ready. for burial 
But it must, no doubt, have some ritual explanation also.) i 

_ Heracles: the sequence is peculiar. The Messenger bursts out from the 
ruined house at 909. The scene before has been the divine apparition of 
Lyssa, which, however, is quite different in character from the regular 
Theophanies. I am inclined to think that technically the attack of Lyssa 
upon Heracles is an Agon; see below on the Jph. Aul., Persae and Septem 

; 
; 

7 

i 

a 

355 

The scene before has certainly been an Agon between Heracles and Lyc 
(cf. 789, 812). Thus we get the sequence Agon (Agon), Pathos and Messen cell 
Threnos, and, clearly, Anagnorisis 1089—1145: then, instead of a god, 
Theseus appears, ex machina as it were: see above. 

Ion: typical. Great Agon scene, Creusa against Apollo 859—922, or one 
may perhaps count it as lasting till 1047; then Pathos-Messenger 1106—1228 
brief Threnos 1229—1250; then second Agon 1250—1394 and Anagnorisis 
1395—1549 (with Peripeteia); then Theophany. a 

Troades: the form in many ways peculiar, but the latter part has the 
sequence: Agon of Helen against Hecuba-Menelaus 860—1060; Choric ode 
then Messenger 1123—1155, then great Threnos to the end. ‘ 

Electra: Agon of Electra and Clytemnestra 997—1146: then the 
Messenger is omitted, the Pathos is atrayyehov, announced by the shriek of 
Clytemnestra and the return of the murderers with bloody swords, 1147— 
1176: then Threnos (with a kind of spiritual Anagnorisis and Peripeteia), 
then Theophany. The Messenger-form, omitted here, has occurred earlier 
in the play, 761—858. : 

Iphigenia Taurica: the end is clear: Agon, Thoas and Iphigenia 1152— 
1233: Messenger (with a kind of Anagnorisis 1318, 1361): no Threnos, 
unless we may take the Chorus’s two lines of lamentation, 1420, 1421, as an 
atrophied Threnos; Theophany. The real Threnos of the play has come 
earlier, as it tends to come in plays about Orestes. 

Helena: Agon with Theoclymenus (I take the diplomatic contest with 
these dangerous barbarians to be a clear form of Agon) 1186—1300: con- 
tinued in 1369—1450: then Messenger 1512—1618: no Threnos is possible ; 
instead we have a brief Agon, Theoclymenus against the Servant at the door 
1621—1641 : then Theophany. 

Phoenissae: there are two Messengers, each with a double speech. We 
take at present only the second. The great Agon of the play has occurred 
much earlier, 446—637, between Eteocles and Polynices. The sequence at 
the end is merely Messenger 1356—1479, Threnos 1485—1580, and 1710— 
end, interrupted by an Agon between Creon and Antigone. As Aitia we 
have the burial arrangements of Eteocles and Polynices and the expulsion 
of Oedipus to Mt Kithairon—perhaps a faded Theophany, see above. The 
tabu tombs of the two princes form also the end of the Septem. The general 
structure of the Phoenissae is highly formal under its cover of Epic expansion, 
but we will not discuss it here. 

Orestes: in the conclusion of the play I think we must recognize the 
Phrygian as an Exangelos. That is, his dramatic function is to relate what 
has taken place inside the house. The lyrical form is merely chosen for 
variety’s sake. This gives us the sequence: Messenger combined with 
Threnos: Agon between Orestes and Menelaus: Theophany of Apollo. 
There has been an ordinary Messenger earlier 852—956: also a Threnos 
960—1012. Also an Evocation of the dead Agamemnon, much atrophied 
1225—1240. (These atrophied evocations of Agamemnon are of course de- 
rived from the great evocation in the Choephori: one would like to know if 
that scene itself is softened down from some still more complete predecessor, 
in which Agamemnon actually rose from the tomb.) 

Bacchae: absolutely typical: see above. 

Iphigenia Aulidensis: the end is lost, but the present traces suggest a 
pretty typical sequence: Agon, Achilles pelted by the troops, argument 
between Achilles and Clytaemnestra, 1337—1432 : Threnos of Iphigenia, 1475 
—1531: Messenger 1532—? Then perhaps Threnos, certainly Theophany. 

Rhesus: the Héniochos is clearly a Messenger. So we end with the 
sequence Agon 675—727, fight of Diomedes and Odysseus with the Guards: 
Messenger 728—819, continuing into a short Agon between Heniochos and 
Hector, 820—881: then Theophany combined with Threnos. 

23—2 

356 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

But let us consider one particular point more closely. If we 
notice the plays in which Orestes occurs we shall find that that 
hero always produces a peculiar disturbance in the Forms. Now 
Orestes is traditionally a figure of strongly marked type—the 
beloved hero who is reported dead and then returns in triumph. 
I strongly suspect that his reported death, lamentation and 
re-appearance alive were in origin exactly parallel to the reported 
death, lamentation and re-appearance alive of the Daimon, 
Dionysus, Osiris, ete. In Sophocles the false death is described in 
detail: it is a omapaypos, like that of Hippolytus, and at the 
Pythian games! As Orestes became thoroughly humanized, the 
supernatural element dwindled away. But we shall see that his 
appearance, though it mostly comes early in the play and does 
not count—so to speak—as a real final Theophany, is apt to come 
in conjunction with Messenger and Threnos and Invocation of the 
Dead. It bears traces of its original theophanous glory. 

Usener has argued on other grounds (Archiv, l.c. pp. 332 ff.) 
that Orestes at Delphi was a winter daimon and ‘ Doppelganger ’ 
to Dionysus, as Neoptolemus was to Apollo. And it is worth 
noting that the same line of thought possibly supplies a clue to 
a puzzling and tiresome scene in Euripides’ Llectra, 771—858. 
The ritual described in the messenger’s speech seems extra- 
ordinarily like a reflection of a Bouphonia at an Eniautos festival. 
Orestes is made to act as Daitros for the communal Dais (see 
p. 142)—one might say, as some reminiscence of a daimon of the 
New Year who in human form slays the Old Year in bull form. 
As such he is recognized (v. 852, éyv@oOn & wo | yépovTos...) 
and they crown and lead him with acclamation (v. 854, orépovae 
8 evOds cod Kacuyyyntov Kapa | Yalpovtes aXadadlovTes). 

Iph. Taur.: besides the final sequence we have an opening 
Orestes-sequence: Threnos for Orestes 136—235: Messenger 
announcing Pathos (Stoning) of Orestes: then Appearance of 

Orestes, in a great scene 472—900, involving an Agon and an 

Anagnorisis and Peripeteia. 

Eur. Electra: after Prologue, we have Threnos 112—212 (on 
Orestes and Agamemnon): then Appearance of Orestes, with 
Agon leading to Anagnorisis 487—595. Oddly enough this is 
followed by an Evocation of the Dead, and a Messenger. ‘The 
various elements of the death and resurrection of the Daimon are 

7 
; 
. 
q 
: 
; 
j 

Agon, Pathos, Messenger, Threnos 357 a 

all there, but scattered and broken since the conception which 
held them together has been lost. 

We noticed above in the Andromache (p. 6) that the inter- 
rupting Orestes-scene came with a sequence Messenger, Threnos, 
Epiphany of Orestes, and that, much in the manner of a deus ex 
machina he (1) saved and consoled Hermione, and (2) announced 
the Aition of the play. 

In the Orestes the hero does not return from the dead, and the 
sequence is quite confused, but our supposed original Daimon- 
Orestes appears possibly to have left two rather curious traces. 
1. He is shown at the, beginning of the play lying like a dead 
man (83 GOrLw vexp@t: vexpos yap otTos KTA., 385 Tiva déopKa 
veptépwv ;), is roused by the women wailing rownd him and rises. 
2. At the end, just before the full-blooded Theophany of Apollo, 
we see Orestes appearing on the roof of the Palace, a place 
generally appropriated to divine bemgs. See also below on the 
Choephori and Soph. Electra. 

Turning from Euripides to the less formal tragedians, we shall 
not of course expect to find in them the same clear-cut sequences 
of unmistakable Agon, Messenger-Pathos, Threnos, Anagnorisis, 
Theophany. But I think we shall find that these Forms, a little 
less stark and emphatic, a little more artistically modified, are 
usually present in both Aeschylus and Sophocles. 

Aeschylus : 

Supplices: we have seen that the whole trilogy ended in a typical Theo- 
phany, so we need not expect one here. But we have a clear Agon (Maidens 
against Herald) 826—910, followed by arrival of the Basileus with a Peripeteia ; 
then Messenger (Danaus as Messenger 980—1014); then not exactly a 
Threnos, but a song of prayer (1018—end). 

Persae: the Forms come early. Messenger 249—514, Threnos 515—597, 
Evocation of dead ‘god’ 598—680: epiphany 681—842. The rest to the 
end is Threnos. This gives us a perfect typical sequence, except that the 
Agon seems to be absent. If we look for it in its proper place we shall find 
it, not acted indeed but described. In 176—214 we have Atossa’s dream of 
the Agon between Europe and Asia, the Agon which was actually taking 
place but could not be represented on the stage. Cf, Ale. Heracles, Iph. Aul. 

Septem : here also the Agon takes place ‘off, after 718. Then Messenger 
792-822: then Threnos 831—1009, and, instead of a Theophany, an enact-— 
ment of the Aition of the ritual. (Grave-worship of Eteocles and Polynices.) 
_ Prometheus: a passionate little scene between Prometheus and the 
‘Chorus just before 940 might possibly be described as an Agon, though the 
greater Agon comes earlier: then 944-1035 Messenger (Hermes, cf. 943) 
mixed with Agon: then, as substitute for the Theophany, a supernatural 
earthquake involving the cleaving of Earth and the revealing of Hell. 

358 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

Agamemnon: in this trilogy the full Theophany is reserved for the last 
play and consequently the sequence in the individual plays is upset and 
confused. We have, however, Messenger 550—680: Agon of Clytemnestra 
and Agamemnon 810—-975: then the Cassandra scene, foretelling the Pathos ; 
then Pathos airayyedov, another Agon and Threnos. 

Choephori: as in other Orestes-plays we have a Threnos and Anagnorisis 
quite early 165—244: Evocation of dead 315—510: Agon (Orestes and 
Clytemnestra) 674—930, with a Messenger (Exangelos) in the midst of it 
875—886, combined with Pathos airdyyedov: Threnos, consisting of mixed 
joy and woe and culminating in long speeches over the dead bodies 935— 
1047: lastly a Vision of the Furies, which may possibly have involved a real 
epiphany. 

Eumenides: Agon 566—680, or perhaps to 750, with Athena making an 
Aition-speech in the style of a Deus ex machina in the middle 681—710: then 
new Agon with a reconciliation (886 ff.) and Peripeteia ; then great Procession 
of gods. No Messenger. The whole play is really the Theophany of the 
Oresteia trilogy. 

Sophocles: 

It is especially interesting to see how Sophocles has broken 
down the stiff limes of the ritual Theophany into scenes of vague 
supernatural grandeur. 

Oedipus Rew: fairly clear end. Agon (short but involving Anagnorisis 
and Peripeteia) between Oedipus and the Herdsman 1123—1185 : Exangelos 
or Messenger with Pathos 1223—1296: then Threnos with suggestion of 
Oedipus’s flight to Kithairon to become a Daimon (1451 ff.). 

_ Oedipus Coloneus: Agon between Oedipus and Polynices 1254—1396: 
slight Threnos and last speech of Oedipus. This last speech is very super- 
natural ; it consists of prophecies and Aitia, and is spoken amid continuous 
lightning and thunder (1514f.) : then Messenger 1579—1666, and final Threnos 
over Oedipus’s passing. A faded Theophany is pretty visible here. 

Antigone: enormous Agon scene, Creon v. Antigone, then v. Haemon 
then v. Antigone again 384—943: Tiresias bringing a kind of Discovery (3) 
and Peripeteia 988—1114: Messenger with Pathos 1155—1256, small Threnos: 
Second Messenger (Exangelos) 1278 and greater Threnos. The Aition is 
the same as that of the Septem, some Theban hero-ritual commemorating the 
children of Oedipus and their unhallowed ends—the buried living and the 
unburied dead. i 

Ajax: a curious question suggests itself. All the latter part of ole 
1046—1401, is occupied with an Agon (in three stages, onlin: ina seen 
tion) about the burial of Ajax. It is triumphantly decided that he is to be 
buried. Is that the end? Or was he really buried? Was there not some 
great final pomp representing the burial?—In considering the prolonged 
emphasis laid on this burial question in the Ajax, we should remember that 
among the dromena of the Aianteia was a mopman and that the funeral bier of 
Ajax pera mavorm\las KaTEeKOO[MEITO. (Hesych., vid. Pauly s. Aianteia.) The 
Le ups to aoe oa : pai perhaps the hero-cult itself not quite 
unrelated to some “ Year-ritual,” if the de . i i 
flower that was marked with his name. a eee eer ae ge 

In any case the sequence is rather curious: Theo ginni 
1—133. Later on we get a much atrophied ede ee basses 
tells the Pathos which then proceeds to follow, 815—865. Then a scene of 
search and Anagnorisis 866—890: then Threnos 891—1040: then the great 
Agon, Reconciliation and—on some scale or other—Funeral. sie: 

Hlectra: an Orestes-play, with the usual special characteristics. It begins, 

The Prologue we 359 

after the Prologue, with a Threnos 86—250, then an Agon 328-—471 (Chryso- 
themis) and a greater Agon 516 —633 (Clytemnestra): then an Invocation of 
the dead Agamemnon 634—659: this 1s answered by the arrival of the 
Messenger announcing the death of Orestes 660—763, short Agon and Threnos 
822870: then, after Agon which is almost part of the Threnos, 871—1057, 
Appearance of Orestes, with Anagnorisis, Peripeteia and final settlement of 
the play. On the death, lamentation, and discovery alive of Orestes, see p. 356, 

Trachiniae: the same question arises here as in the Ajax. The burning 
of Heracles on Mt Oeta was in ancient tradition and art closely associated 
with his Apotheosis. Was this burning and apotheosis represented on the 
stage? It definitely is so in Seneca’s imitation, Herc. Oet. ad fin. In any 
case, whether represented or not, I think it must have been suggested to the 
minds of all spectators. The sequence is fairly typical: Agon of Hyllus 
and Deianira 734—820, Messenger (Exangelos) 870—946, Threnos, interrupted 
by the Appearance of Heracles, his Self-Lamentation and Burning—ie. 
Apotheosis. 

Philoctetes: this play has a definite Theophany at the end, but otherwise 
its sequence is rather far from any type. One might divide it thus: Agon 
865 —1080, including an Anagnorisis 895—926: Threnos 1081—1217: fiercer 
_Agon (Odysseus v. Neoptolemus and Philoctetes) 1222—1302; Reconciliation 
1308—1408: Theophany 1409—1471. 

PROLOGUES. 

We have hitherto considered the Forms that come towards 
the end and build up the conclusion of a tragedy. In any true 
_ work of art the end is always specially important and significant. 

It is the last act that chiefly determines the character of a play. 
It is the end of the verse that best indicates the metre. But 
there is one important form which belongs necessarily to the 
beginning. 

Dieterich is doubtless right in comparing the Prologue of — 
tragedy with the Prorrhésis of the hierophant before a sacred 
Droémenon. What such a prorrhésis was like we can only guess. 
There are a few small phrases of ritual preserved: there is the 
parody of a prorrhesis given by the Hierophant in the Frogs, 
354 ff.; there are a few lines spoken by Iphigenia as priestess 
before her tabu procession starts (I. 7. 1226 ff). It certainly 
gave orders for Euphemia, or solemn silence: it probably also 
said something about the sacred dance which was to follow. 
‘Make room for a Dance of Mystae! And do you begin the singing 
and the all-night dances that are meet for this festival’ (Ar. Frogs, 
370 £). When the nature of the dance was something obviously 
dictated by the occasion—e.g. when it was the celebration of 
a particular Festival on the proper day—there was no need for 
any further explanation. But as soon as anything like tragedy 

360 kitual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

began, the case was different. The sacred dance of Dionysus 
might be about Agamemnon, or Oedipus, or the Daughters of 
Danaus, or what not. Consequently there was need of a Pro-logos, 
of something spoken before. The word suggests prose rather than 
verse. We know that the sacred Herald proclaimed—in an 
audience which had no knowledge of what play or what poet 
was coming—O Theognis, lead on your Chorus!’ (Ar. Ach. 11). 
We know that—in a certain Proagon, whatever that was— 
Sophocles led on his Chorus in black. What was the poet 
supposed to do when he ‘led on’ his Chorus? Did he just bow 
and retire, leaving the audience to guess as best they could from 
the play itself what it was all about? Or did he use this oppor- 
tunity and tell them? Anyhow the prologos is defined as ‘all 
the part before the dancers come on, and it seems quite likely 
that originally it was not regarded as part of the sacred dance at 
all, but was something informal spoken by the poet. If our 
knowledge were a little fuller we should very likely be told who 
TpOTos éyparre mporoyous, and be able to assume that when 
Aeschylus ‘led on’ his Chorus for the Persae and the Suppliant 
Women he told the audience what the play was to be. Then the 
development would be like that of the Dithyramb, of Comedy, of 
the Satyr-play, perhaps of the Apotheosis-scenes at the end: 
a Form that was first merely improvised or built up by scenic 
effects without written verses, grew gradually to be ‘written’ and 
regarded as an integral part of an artistic whole. Mediaeval 
prologues and clown-scenes would afford good parallels, and we 
should understand why Euripides was so proud that ot&av 
TPOTLOTA wor TO yévos av elmev edOdS TOD dpduatos. He, more 
' than either of his predecessors, made a character in the play do 
all the Prologue for him, and that in a thorough and clear manner, 
For clearness, cadnvela, was to the age of the Sophists the first 
virtue of Xé£Eus. 

But this is conjectural: what development is traceable in our 
extant remains? I think we can see that the Prologue, still 
rather fluid in the hands of Aeschylus, grew first in the direction 
of mere drama, and then turned aside towards a defi 
form. 

For instance, in Aeschylus we have the stages : 

1. No written Prologue: Supplices and Persae. 

nite religious 

The Prologue 361 

2. Simple Prologue of one speaker: Agamemnon, Choephori 
(with Pylades dumb). 

3. Complete exposition-scene with two or more characters: 

Septem : Eteocles and Messenger. 

_ Humenides: Pythia: change of Scene: Apollo, Orestes and 
Ghost. (Unless indeed the Dance in the strict sense begins by 
the Chorus being seen within about v. 35.) 

Prometheus: the elaborate scene with Kratos and Bia has 
apparently been introduced to meet the need of nailing the 
gigantic figure on the rock. 

In Sophocles stage (1) disappears altogether, and so practically 
does (2). All the plays without exception begin with regular 
exposition-scenes involving two or more characters. It is notice- 
able, however, that two of the latest plays, Trachiniae and 
Phaloctetes, start this exposition-scene with a quasi-Euripidean 
Prologue, addressed confessedly or half-confessedly to the audience. 
‘That is, Sophocles regularly works in stage (3), but in his latest 
work begins to be influenced by a further stage. What this is we 
shall find in Euripides. 

Euripides has practically always an exposition-scene—so 
much is a natural concession to the growing complexity of 
_drama—but in front of the exposition-scene he has a formal 
speech addressed to the audience by one quiet and solitary 
figure; a figure, also—and this is what I wish to emphasize— 
which is either confessedly supernatural or at least somehow 
charged with religious emotion. 

Let us take first the plays which happen to omit the ex- 
position-scene altogether. To do so is, of course, a kind of 
archaism: a return to a less complex kind of drama, in which 
the sacred dance followed immediately on the Prologue-speech. 
It occurs, if we disregard the Cyclops as not being a tragedy, in 
only two dramas, and those naturally enough the very two that 
are most formal and nearest to their respective forms of Sacer 
Ludus, the Bacchae and the Supplices. The Bacchae has been 
already dealt with: the Sacer Ludus behind all the Suppliant 
Plays seems to me to have been a ritual only second in its 
‘influence on tragedy to that of the Year-cycle itself. I will not 
‘now discuss the subject at length, but I can understand the origin 
of the Suppliant Plays best as a ritual intended to keep alive 

362 Ritual Forms in Greek Tragedy 

the right of sanctuary attached to some particular altar or tomb 
or the like, very much as we keep alive the control over a right 
of way. On one day in the year some fugitives take refuge at: 
the altar, some pursuer tries to drag them away, and some high 
authority, god or king or people, forbids him. This is notoriously 
a very common motive in Greek tragedy, and was used, as recent. 
finds have shown us, in the romantic comedy of the fourth 
century. (Pap. Ox. VI. 855, a scene which I should now explain 
differently.) I suspect that this ritual is also at the back of 
various rites which have generally been interpreted as survivals of 
human sacrifice, rites in which some one is pursued with weapons 
and is supposed to be killed unless he reaches a certain place 
of refuge. 

However that may be, let us consider the actual Prologue- 
speakers. We may start with <Alcestis, Apollo (and Death): 
Hippolytus, Aphrodite: Hecuba, the Ghost of Polydorus: Jon, 
Hermes: Troades, Poseidon (and Athena): Bacchae, Dionysus: 
all these are supernatural. Next observe Heracleidae, Iolaus 
suppliant at an altar: Andromache, the heroine suppliant at an 
altar: Supplices, Aithra, surrounded by a band of women sup- | 
plant at an altar: Heracles, Amphitryon and Megara, suppliants 
at an altar: Helena, the heroine supplant at an altar: Iph. Taur., 
the half-divine priestess of a strange and bloodstained Temple 
rising from a dream of death. The religious half-supernatural 
atmosphere is unmistakable. 

The only exceptions are Medea, Phoenissae, Electra, Orestes, though in 
the two last the exception is more apparent than real. We must remember 
the curious traces of the daimon that cling about Orestes. In any case, 
both openings produce a decidedly uncanny atmosphere—the lonely woman 
in the night uttering curses against her mother, and the woman sitting alone 
by her brother who is mad and perhaps dead. 

There remain two peculiar cases, the Rhesus and Iphigenia in Aulis. We 
know that the /hesus had in Alexandrian times three different Prologues, 
while the Iphigenia has two in our present MSS. I will not discuss them 
further than to point out that they seem to represent a new form of Prologue 
which starts with a lyric scene. The lyric Prologues of both are very similar 
and exceedingly beautiful, and I may say in passing that I have long been 
inclined to think that we have in them the hand of the original producer of 
the Zphigenia, Euripides the younger. 

What is the explanation of these facts? It seems to me that 
the old Sacer Ludus has reasserted itself: the Prologue, after 
passing into a mere dramatic exposition-scene between ordinary 

363 

people, returns again to be a solemn address spoken to the 
- audience by a sacred or mysterious figure. The differences are, 
first, that it is now integral in the whole play as a work of art, 
and secondly that it has been markedly influenced by the speech 
of the god at the end. It is the same story with other elements 
of the drama. The language and metre gets freer in Sophocles, 
and returns to formality in Euripides. The dialogue becomes 
irregular and almost ‘natural’ in Sophocles, and then returns to 
a kind of formal antiphony of symmetrical speeches or equally 
symmetrical stichomythiae. The Chorus itself first dwindles to 
a thing of little account and then increases again till it begins 
once more to bear the chief weight of the tragedy. Something 
like the old hierophant reappears at the beginning, something 
like the old re-risen god at the end; and, as we have seen, it 
is in plays of Euripides, and most of all in the very latest of 
his plays, that we find in most perfect and clear-cut outline the 
whole sequence of Contest, Tearing-asunder, Messenger, Lamenta- 
tion, Discovery, Recognition, and Resurrection which constituted 
the original Dionysus-mystery. 

An outer shape dominated by tough and undying tradition, 
an inner life fiery with sincerity and spiritual freedom ; the 
_-vegssels of a very ancient religion overfilled and broken by the 
new wine of reasoning and rebellious humanity, and still, in 
their rejection, shedding abroad the old aroma, as of eternal and 
_ mysterious things: these are the fundamental paradoxes presented 
to us by Greek Tragedy. The contrasts have their significance 

for other art also, perhaps for all great art. But aesthetic 
criticism is not the business of the present note. 

G. M.

FROM DAIMON TO OLYMPIAN. 

(HERAKLES. ASKLEPIOS. GAIA TO APOLLO at DELPHI.) 

“ATIOAAON, “ATTOAAON, 
Aryldt, ATTOAAWN EMOC. 

On the very threshold of Olympos, one foot within the portals 
yet never quite inside, stands the hero of all heroes, the ‘ young 
dear hero, Herakles. The reason of his tarrying there is simple 
and instructive. * It is not that in his labours and his banquetings 
he is too human, too ‘heroic’ in the saga sense; it is that he isa | 
daimon, and a daimon-hero has much ado to fit his positive 
functions and yet shadowy shape into the clear-cut inert crystal of 
the Olympian. 

HERAKLES AS FERTILITY AND YEAR-DAIMON. 

Homeric saga did for Herakles all it could. 

‘And as to Hermes and Herakles,’ says Pausanias’, ‘the poems of Homer 
have given currency to the report that the first is a servant of Zeus and leads 
down the spirits of the departed to Hades, and that Herakles performed many 

hard tasks.’ 

Why should Hermes and Herakles be linked together? What 
has the young messenger with golden rod and winged sandals to 
do with the lusty athlete? A second question brings an answer 
to the first. What were Hermes and Herakles before ‘Homer’ 
made of one the ‘servant of Zeus’ and of the other the ‘hero’ 
of the labours? Pausanias himself tells us; they were both 
“Herms.’ 

? Usener, Sintflutsagen, p. 58, supposes an old Greek diminutive «ados=Latin 
culus, and adduces the hypokoristic form ‘Hpuxddos. See Hesych. s.v. rov ‘Hpaxdéa 
LwHppwy broxopiorexds, cf. Hercules. 

oS Sais Ged, 2h, 

 Herakles as Herm — | 365 

The Athenians, he says!, zealous in all matters of religion, 
were ‘the first to use the square-shaped images of Hermes.’ The 
_ Arcadians were ‘specially partial’’ to the square form of Hermes. 
Hermes was a Herm, but not only Hermes, also Apollo Aguieus 
and Poseidon and Athena Ergane and Helios and—which concerns 
us most for the moment—Herakles. Art too bears out the testi- 

Fig. 97. 

mony of Pausanias. In the vase-painting, Fig. 97, we have 
Hermes in Herm form®. The Herm is marked by the kerykeion, 
the staff with double snakes. Behind the Herm is a little 
tree, for Hermes is a fertility-daimon; in front an altar and, 
suspended on the wall, a votive pinax. Side by side with the 
Herm of Hermes we figure a Herm of Herakles4, from a bronze coin 
of Athens. More human than the Hermes, Herakles has arms; in 
one he holds a great cornucopia which marks him as Agathos 
Daimon, in the other his characteristic club. 

We talk and write glibly of the ‘club’ of Herakles as his 
‘characteristic attribute’ and thereby miss the real point. The 
‘club’ of Herakles is not to begin with a thing characteristic of 
Herakles, a fdmadov, the rude massive weapon of a half-barbarian 
hero; it is a magical bough, a chados’ rent from a living tree. 

1 ty. 33. 4. 

2 viii. 48. 6. - hs ; 

3 Conze, Heroen und Géttergestalten, Taf. 69. 2. The Herm on the original is 
ithyphallic. 1%, 

4 See Roscher, s.v. Herakles, 2157, and see Overbeck, Gr. Plastik’, u. 25. 

5 This was long ago pointed out to me in a letter from Dr Walter Headlam, but 
neither he nor I then saw its full significance. It was also observed by Mr A. B. 

Cook in J.H.S. 1894, xiv. p. 115. 

Ree ee an ee ae 

366 From Daimon to Olympian (on. 

The Orphic Hymn’ going back, as so often, to things primitive 
thus addresses Herakles: 

| ‘Come, Blessed One, bring spells for all diseases, 
| Drive out ill fates, wave in thy hand thy branch ; 
| With magic shafts banish the noisome ‘Keres. 

Herakles is, like Theseus, Thallophoros. Hermes as Herm has a 
tree in his sanctuary ; Herakles as Herm carries a bough. 

The people of Trozen knew the truth about the ‘club of 
Herakles’ and their simple faith seemed over credulous to 

Pausanias’. He says: 

And there is here a Hermes called Polygios. They allege that Herakles 
placed his club against this image and this club, which was of wild olive, 
took root in the earth, if anyone likes to believe it, and sprouted up 
afresh, and the wild olive tree is still growing. They say that Herakles found 
the wild olive at the bay of Saron and cut the club trom it. 

Hermes Polygios® seems to be some old xoanon about which grew 
a wild olive stunted and club-like in some part of its shape. One 
thing is clear, the ‘club’ of Herakles was connected, though after 
the inverted fashion of an ‘aetiological’ myth, with the living 

growth of a tree. 
The bough in the right hand tells then the same story of 

fertility as the cornucopia in the left. The cornucopia and its 
significance are now familiar‘ and need not detain us. Only one 
point is important, the Athenian coin is of high evidential value 
because it shows the cornucopia as a cultus attribute. Later when 
‘Homer’ and his saga had completely humanized Herakles, when 
the saga-individuality of the hero became articulate and his 

1 xr. 14 éOe udkap, vovowy Oedkrhpia mavTa Koulfwr, 

éféhacov bé xaxas dras, KAddov év xepl madd\wv, 
mrqvois 7’ loBddous Kipas Xadewas admdmepre. 

211.31.10 ...Kal mv yap Korivov TodTo uév (TO pdradov) btw mioTd, évégu TH YH 
kal dveB\dornoev adds, kal Eotw 6 KdtTios meduKWs ETL,.. 

3 The etymology of Polygios is uncertain. Usener (Rhein. Mus. uvitt. 167) 
suggests Ilodvyuos, and would make of the Hermes a rerpdxecp. Maass (De Aeschyli 
Supplicibus commentatio, 1890, p. xiii, note 1) explains as Ilo\-v-yios ‘sanitate 
pollens,’ and compares “Axaxjovs. S$. Hitrem (Rhein. Mus. uxi. 1909, p. 333) 
quoting Prof. Torp, derives Hodvyios from IohvAvyios, and compares Asklepios 
Agnitas, Artemis Lygodesma, and the Hermes of the Hymn (v. 410) and the 
miracle of the withies. I dare not build upon this most interesting but unproved 
suggestion. e 

4T may add to what was said above pp. 311, 312 about the cornucopia on 
graye-reliefs, an interesting fact that had escaped me. Dr Pfuhl, in his article 
Das Beiwerk auf den ost-griechischen Grabreliefs in Jahrb. d. Inst. xx. 1905 
section vi. das Fullhorn, points out that in no less than five instances on grave- 
reliefs the cornucopia appears erected on a pillar as an adjunct to the ordinary 
parting scenes, The specimen is in the British Museum, Cat. 704, from Smyrna. 

r c 

Herakles with Cornucopia and Klados 367 

functions as a daimon were forgotten, the cornucopia became 
cumbersome. Tradition held to 
it as we see in the design in 
Fig. 98. It could not, like the 
branch, be transformed from a 
fertility-emblem into a weapon ; 
it had to be accounted for; it 
called aloud in fact for an aetio- 
logical myth. The cornucopia, 
men said, did not originally 
belong to Herakles, it was the 
guerdon of one of his great 
labours; he broke it off from 
the bull-headed river Acheloés. 
Dejaneira speaks. 

‘A river was my lover, him I mean 

Great Achelods, and in threefold form 

Wooed me, and wooed again. A visible bull 
Sometimes, and sometimes a coiléd, gleaming snake, 
And sometimes partly man, a monstrous shape 
Bull-fronted, and adown his shaggy beard 
Fountains of clear spring water glistening flowed’ 

The vase-painting? in Fig. 99 reads like a commentary on 
Dejaneira’s words. It just gives us the needful clue. Here is the 
- great daimon of fertility in his familiar form, half man, half bull. 
And, as on countless coins the bull-man is the local river-god, so 
from his mouth flow the fertilizing streams, for is he not wayxparys 
yavovs, ‘Lord of all that is wet and gleaming®’? And, that there 
be no mistake, a great cornucopia lies parallel above the life-giving 
waters’. 

Nowhere perhaps does the fertility-daimon come so vividly 
before us as in the words of Dejaneira. We see him shifting from 

1 Soph. Trach. 9 ff. 2 Arch. Zeit. xvi. (1883), Taf. 11. 

3 Such are the deol yavdevres invoked by the Danaid chorus at the close of the 
Supplices of Aeschylus (v. 993). They leave the praises of the Nile and implore the 
local gods 

moramous ot dua xXwpas 
Oedeuov Taua xXéovow 
TONUTEKVOL. 

4 Life-giving and also land-making. For the story of Alkmaion and the new 

alluvial earth deposited at the mouth of the Acheloos see Prolegomena, pp. 220, 221. 

pl Cast Niel 2 ak i 
- ‘ 

368 From Daimon to Olympian [ CH. 
one familiar shape to another; he is now, like Agathos Daimon, 

like Zeus Ktesios, a ‘gleaming snake,’ now a ‘ visible bull,’ as he 

appeared to the women of Elis who wooed him to come to them 

‘with his bull-foot, and now a monstrous shape bull-fronted 
(Bovmpepos) like Zeus Olbios?. Nowhere else moreover is he, the 

fertility-daimon, so clearly the bridegroom, rejected indeed for 

saga purposes, but rejected only for his fully humanized form, for 

another fertility-daimon, Herakles. Herakles breaks off the horn 

of the fertility-daimon and carries away his bride. So understood 

the monstrosities of the story become real and even beautiful. 

In the wooing of Dejaneira, whether by Achelods the river-god 
or by Herakles the hero-daimon, we have a mythos that embodies 
the marriage, the ‘epds ydpos, of the queen of the land with the 
fertility-daimon, reflecting a ritual like that of the marriage of the 
Queen Archon at Athens with Dionysos. It is the old wedlock of 
the Earth and Sky, of thirsty Argos and the rain of heaven which 
fills the wells and rivers of earth. We wonder no longer that the 
Dithyramb, the spring mystery babe, is laid at his birth in the 
stream of 

Acheloés’ roaming daughter, 
Holy Dirke, virgin water, 

1 In some places naturally the fertility-daimon was not a 
l ‘ goat, but a bull. See 
supra, p. 165. The goat, like the bull, might be associated with the cornucopia 
Amaltheia, whose horn was the original cornucopia, was of course a goat. Below 
es eee figure of aaa ‘Tityros’ in the Museum of Fine Arts at 
oston 1s a cornucopia. See P. r, Tityros, i i i 
eicnn Tied p aur, lityros, in American Journal of Archaeology, 

2 Supra, p. 148, Fig. 26. 3 Hur. Bacch. 519. 

Ay ee 
4 ‘ 

" “Herakles tn the Trachiniae 369 

a But if this wedlock of earth and living water be the first stage, 
_ there is in the Herakles-myth as told in the Trachiniae a second 
stage. Herakles is not only a seasonal fertility-daimon ; he is 
manifestly! a daimon ‘of the Sun-Year. His Twelve Labours 
occupy a Great Year, wéeyas évvavtos. The divisions of this cycle 
were somehow set forth in the ‘ancient tablet’ from Dodona which 
he gave to Dejaneira before he set forth on his last Labour, in the 
twelfth year. This twelfth year was not 12 months but 14, that 
is, it had the two intercalary months necessary to equalize approxi- 
_ mately the moon and sun cycles. The sacrifice that, together with 
the death of Herakles on the pyre, crowned the great calendar 
festival, the Eniautos-festival, had a like symbolism. Twelve 
“perfect bulls’ stood for the twelve years, but in all the victims 
were a hundred, to save the face of the hundred moons in the 
octennial moon-cycle. 
It may be that neither Sophocles nor his predecessors in 
shaping the legend, Peisander and Panyasis, were actually aware 
that Herakles was a daimon of the Sun-Year, but more, much 
more, than conscious knowledge goes to the making of poetry. 
Anyhow, the chorus, the maidens of Trachis at their first entry’, 

strike a note strangely appropriate. They would fain know where 
_ tarries the son of Alkmena. To whom do they appeal ? 
‘Thou whom Night as the stars die bringeth to birth 

And layeth to bed all ablaze, 
Helios, Helios, speak: where over the earth 

Move his wandering ways?’ 
In orthodox fashion the maidens explain that their appeal is to 
Helios because he is all-seeing. 

‘Speak, O thou of the seeing eye*’ 

But the real reason lies deeper; the Sun and only the Sun knows 
where Herakles is, for Herakles is a daimon of the Sun- Year‘. 

1 See Dr Verrall, The Calendar in the Trachiniae of Sophocles, Class. Rev. x. 
1896, p. 85, to which I must refer for details of a somewhat complicated argument. 
No one will tax Dr Verrall with a parti pris for Sun-Myths. He says expressly 
‘Our proposition is simply that, in respect of the chronological framework, the 
story presented in the Trachiniae exhibits, and is founded upon, a certain calendar 
and certain institutions relating to the calendar which existed when the story was 
first thrown into this shape.’ 

2 y. 94. 2y. LOL. 

4 In just the same fashion, as I have tried to show elsewhere (Helios-Hades, 
Class. Rev. xx1z. (1908), p. 15), Demeter appeals to Helios to know who has ravished 
her daughter, and Helios himself is the ravisher as Helios-Hades. 

24 

370 From Daimon to Olympian 

In much of his mythology that cannot be examined here, 
Herakles is but the humanized double of Helios. It is from the 
sun he borrows his tireless energy. As the young sun he fights 
with Hades the setting sun at Pylos. As again the rising sun he 
rescues Alcestis from the shades. If such cases seem to any to be 
dubious, there is one adventure that admits of no alternative 
interpretation. Helios, Apollodorus tells us, so admired the cour- 
age of Herakles in shooting at him, that he gave to the hero a 
golden cup in which he might cross the ocean. Helios had but 
one cup to give, the golden cup in which he himself sailed and 
slept at sunset. 

Surely the Sun has labour all his days, 

And never any respite, steeds nor god, 

Since Eos first, whose hands are rosy rays, 

Ocean forsook, and Heaven’s high pathway trod ; 
All night across the sea that wondrous bed 
Shell-hollow, beaten by Hephaistos’ hand, 

Of wingéd gold and gorgeous, bears his head 
Half-waking on the wave from eve’s red strand 

To the Ethiop shore, where steeds and chariot are, 
Keen hearted, waiting for the morning star?. 

After the magical words the vase-painting in Fig. 100 is more 
like a blasphemy than an illustration. Yet it is instructive. The 
human Herakles was never meant to sail in the sun’s boat, but 
orthodox anthropomorphism demands it; room or no room, in he 
must go, to sail but not to sleep. 

HERAKLES AS IDAEAN DAKTYL. 

The Herakles of the Trachiniae as fertility and Year-daimon 
helps us to understand another aspect of the hero that much 
embarrassed the piety of Pausanias*. At Thespiae he visited the 

1 J would guard against misunderstanding. Herakles takes on the form of an 
Eniautos-daimon, and therefore has solar elements, but these do not exhaust his ~ 
content. The same is true of Apollo, Odysseus, Orpheus and Dionysos, and indeed 
of almost all gods and daimones. “The reaction against certain erroneous develop- 
ments of solar mythology has led, as I have long pointed out, to the neglect of 
these elements. q 

* Mimnermos, frg. of Nanno. I borrow this translation from Prof. Murray’s 
History of Greek Literature, p. 81. 

3 1x. 27.6. The nature of the Thespian cult of Herakles and his character as an 
Idaean Daktyl have been convincingly demonstrated by Dr Kaibel in his brilliant 
monograph, Daktyloi Idaioi in Nachrichten d. k. Ges. d. Wiss. zu Gottingen 
phil.-hist. Kl. 1901, p. 506 ff. For Herakles as Eniautos-daimon the responsibility 
is mine. The phallic daimon is long-lived. Dr Usener has convincingly shown in 
his Der heilige Tychon, 1907, that Priapos may survive in the hagiology of a 
Christian Saint. 

Herakles as Idaean Daktyl 

sanctuary of Herakles and heard the story of the fifty daughters 
of Thestios. Pausanias cannot reconcile a 
legend so discreditable with what he knows 
of Herakles son of Amphitryon, so he 
suggests another and an earlier Herakles. 
‘I judged the sanctuary to belong to the 
Herakles who is called one of the Idaean Daktyls, 
the same of whom I found sanctuaries at Erythrae 
in Ionia and at Tyre. Nor are the Boeotians 
ignorant of this name of Herakles, for they say 

themselves that the sanctuary of Mycalessian 
Demeter is entrusted to the Idaean Herakles.’ 

What manner of daimon this Herakles, 
this Daktyl, was is made abundantly clear 
from this very cult of Mycalessian Demeter 
to which Pausanias refers. At Mycalessos 
close to the Euripos Demeter had a 
sanctuary. Fie. 100. 

They say that it is closed every night and opened again by Herakles, who 
is said to be one of the so-called Idaean Daktyls. Here a miracle is exhibited. 
Before the feet of the image they place whatever fruits the earth bears in 
autumn and these keep the bloom upon them the whole year round!. 

It isa pankarpia. Such magical fruits, with upon them a bloom 
that is perennial rather than immortal, does the Eniautos-daimon 
carry in his Hiresione and hold for ever in his cornucopia. 

Herakles, the Idaean Daktyl, brought fertility to plants but 
also to man. His cornucopia is for fruits, but sometimes it holds 
phalloi?. That is why his cult is at Thespiae: he and every 
fertility-daimon is but another Eros*. Because Eros is human 
there is excess and ugliness waiting to shadow and distort nature’s 
lovely temperance. The saga of the daughters of Thestios was 
ugly and polygamous, but the cult was magical and austere. At 
the sanctuary of Herakles at Thespiae Pausanias‘ tells us 

A virgin acts as his priestess till her death. 

1 Paus. tx. 19. 5 ...d0a év drdpa wépuxev 4h yh pépew & did mavTds péver TeOnrOTa 
érouvs. 

2 See the bronze Gallo-Greek statuette in Dr A. Coulson’s collection at Noyon. 
Gazette published by him, Hermes Phallophore, Gazette Arch. 1877, pl. 26. The 
liknon, whose function is the same as that of the cornucopia, often contains a phallos 
as well as fruits. See Prolegomena, Figs. 148 and 149. 

3 For Eros as Herm and his kinship with Priapos see Prolegomena, p. 631. 
Baie OMe Gs 

24—2 

Se ee ee ee a ee 

See pe ee 

From Daimon to Olympian 

Herakles then, till saga caught and transformed him, was an 
_Idaean Daktyl and as such own brother to the Kouretes, the 
_Korybantes and the Satyrs.. We wonder no longer that it was 

Herakles the eldest of the Idaean Daktyls who founded the 
Olympic games. It is not merely that there may have been 
early immigrants from Crete, it is certainly not because Herakles 
was the strong man of the Twelve Labours, it is because Herakles, 
the Idaean Daktyl, was as Megistos Kouros the fertility-daimon 
of the year. Therefore he was Kladophoros, Thallophoros*. Hero- 
daimon though he be, with branch and cornucopia, with Twelve 
Labours like the Sun and, Sun-like, sailing in a golden cup, yet 
no effort is spared to make of Herakles a regular Olympian. In 
literature he has his apotheosis, on vase-paintings he is formally 
‘received into Olympos, brought by Athena his patron up to the 
very throne of Zeus*. ‘Tradition even said that Hera passed him 
through her robe to make him by adoption her real son’. Yet 

though he is always being ‘received’ and ‘adopted’ he never — 

attais real godhead’. 
Why is this? What is it that eternally bars the gate of 
Cee We shall find the answer in a study of his twofold 

ritual. 

RITUAL OF HERAKLES AS YEAR-DAIMON. 

The failure of Herakles to gain admission to Olympos is the 
more remarkable because we have clear evidence that he was 
worshipped in part with the same ritual as the Olympians them- 

selves. Pausanias® when visiting the sanctuary of Herakles at 
Sekyon observes as follows. 

They say that Phaistos when he came to Sekyon found them devoting 
offerings (evayifovras) to Herakles as to a hero. But Phaistos would do 
nothing of the kind but would offer burnt offering (Ove) to him as to a god. 
And even now the Sekyonians, when they slay a lamb and burn the thighs 
upon the altar, eat a portion of the flesh as though it were a sacrificial victim, 
and another part of the flesh they devote (évayifover) as though to a hero, 

1 For the Satyrs see infra, p. 423. 

> Paus. v. 7.7. See supra, p. 366. Therefore, too, I think he was Epitrapezios, 
for the winner in the agon was regularly feasted. The ugly saga-figure of Herakles 
as glutton and wine-bibber, so popular in comedy and Satyric plays, and not wholly 
absent from tragedy, has probably this beautiful origin. Thus hardly did saga deal 
with cultus. Like Dais (supra, p. 146), Thaleia is no mere goddess of banqueting 
and revels, she is the daimon of the magical fertility-feast. 

3 For instances see Roscher, Herakles, 2239. : 

+ Diod. Sic. rv. 40. > See Prolegomena, p. 347. 

° 1.10.1. For details as to the ritual of evaylfew see Prolegomena, p. 58 ff. 

Yearly Ritual of Herakles Sie 

Phaistos it may be was the eponymous hero of Phaistos in 
Crete, and from Crete he may have brought to Sekyon? the ritual 
of an Ouranian Zeus. That ritual common to all Olympians was 
of course burnt sacrifice; the worshipper ate part, the rest was 
a gift-sacrifice, etherialized by burning, that so in the form of 
a sweet savour it might reach the gods of the upper air. We 
have seen? in the rite of the panspermia practised on the day of 
the Chytroi that of the panspermia no man tasted, it was made 
over, tabued to Hermes Chthonios, it was an évayiopos, a thing 
tabu. The reason in the case of the vegetarian sacrifice is clear, 
the seeds are wanted as seeds, that they may reappear as fruits in 
autumn. The same applies in the case of animal sacrifice, though 
to us the reasoning is less obvious. The flesh is made over, buried, 
or wholly burnt; it is tabu, because it is wanted to fertilize the 
ground, like the pigs buried with the snakes and fir-cones at thé 
Thesmophoria’. 

Herodotus* was evidently puzzled by the two-fold nature of 
Herakles. Finally he comes to the conclusion that 

Those of the Greeks do most wisely who have set up a double worship 
of Herakles and who offer burnt sacrifice to the one as an immortal and with 
the title Olympian, and to the other devote offerings as to a hero. 

The first of these wise Greeks who set up the double worship of 
Herakles were the Athenians. Diodorus Siculus’ draws an 
instructive contrast between the practice at Athens and that of 
Opous and of Thebes: he says 

Menoitios, having sacrificed a boar and a bull and a ram, ordered them 
to make a yearly sacrifice at Opous and to do honour to Herakles as a hero. 
The Thebans did much the same, but the Athenians were the first to honour 
Herakles as a god with burnt sacrifices. 

To give Herakles his fitting honours (vima/) as a hero 
Menoitios ordered a yearly sacrifice. The fact is cardinal; and 

1 In Hesiod’s days Sekyon was called Mekone. A change of name implies 
usually some change in population. Such may lie at the back of Hesiod’s strange 
- story about how Prometheus tricked Zeus. The ethnology of the ritual shift from 
évayifew to dvew I must leave to others of wider competence. 
2 Supra, p. 291. 
3 Supra, p. 266. 
4a. 44 Kal doxéovor 5é mou ovTor 6pOdrara “EAAjvav moew, of diéa “Hpdkdeca 
iSpuodmevar Exrgvra, Kal TH wev ws dbavdry OvAYuMly dé érwvuulyy Bdovet, TH Dé érépw 
ws Howl evarylfovar. 

> rv. 39 kdampov kal radpov Kal xpiov Ovoas ws now karéderée Kar’ évcavTov év ‘Omodyre 
Ovew Kal TYLav ws jpwa Tov ‘Hpaxdéa—rd Tapamdjovoy dé mounodvTwy Kal Tay OnBaiwy, 
” AOnvator rp@ro. Tav d\Nwy ws Hedy Erlunoay Ovolas rov ‘Hpakdéa. 

374 From Daimon to Olympian [ OH. 

yet, because the notion of the Eniautos-daimon lay undetected, 
its true significance is never seen. Here and there a careful 
writer? will note that the hero-sacrifice is yearly, but in per- 
functory fashion for completeness sake. The reason for the yearly 
recurrence is never given, it is not even asked. Once the Eniautos- 
daimon comes to his own, and once it is recognized that it is his 
mask which each and every individual dead man eventually puts 
on, once it is seen that he, not the individual dead man, is the 
real ‘Strong One, ‘ Venerable One,’ the essential ‘ Hero,’ on whom 
the luck and life of the year depend, then the need for honours 
that shall be yearly is instantly evident. 

We need not multiply instances. Not only to Herakles are 
the yearly dues paid but to a host of others whom we think of 
merely or mainly as the heroes of saga, to Tereus?, Melampous’, 
Neoptolemos‘, Achilles, Tleptolemos. Tleptolemos is specially 
interesting. From Pindar® we should never guess that Tleptole- 
mos had yearly dues or indeed that he was anything but a 
magnificent ancestor of Diagoras.to whom sacrifice was done ‘as 
to a god.’ But the scholiast lets out a fact instructive to us if 
somewhat compromising to Pindar. He tells that there was a 

yearly panegyris and agon in honour of Tleptolemos and called by 
his name, but he adds 

It was by way of compliment that Pindar transferred to Tleptolemos the 
agon performed in honour of Helios. 

* Dr Nilsson in his’ Griechische Feste, 1906, p. 454, quotes Stengel as observing 
that ‘wohl alle Heroenopfer jahrlich wiederkehrten,’ but so little does he see the 
importance of the fact or the real gist of a ‘hero’ that in the preceding sentence 

he says ‘eine vollstandige Behandlung (der Heroen-Kulte) gehért nicht in die 

Heortologie.” Rohde in his brilliant Psyche, 1894, deals in detail with the yearly 
agones for the dead, but with no hint of why they are yearly. Deneken in his 
admirable article, Heros, in Roscher’s Lexicon, does not, I think, even mention 
the fact. In this matter I have been myself an equal offender. In discussing 
(Prolegomena, pp. 55—76 and 326—359) the ritual of the dead and of heroes and its 

chthonic character, I never even observed, much less understood, the fact that this 
ritual was annual. 

2 Paus. 1. 41. 9 Avovow dvd rap eros. 
* Paus. 1. 44. 5 cat QUover 7S MeAdurods kal dva wav eros €oprhy &yovat. 
4 Kal ot (Neorrod\éuw) kara eros evarytfovoww oi Aepot. 
OV ONe \auis Tt 
760 NUTpov cuupopas oikrpas yuKd Traore uw 
torarat TipuvOiwv dpxaryéra 
wotep ew 
Lipo Te Kvicdecou wourd Kal Kplows aud déOdors. 
Schol. ad loc. éyxwuacrinOs 62 6 Tlidapos rov dyava “HNlw Tehovpevoyv eis Tov 
TAnmo\e“ov pernyaye; and again more forcibly éWedcaro Sé 6 Iltdapos: ob yap 
TAntroréuw 6 dyow émireetrat, 7G dé ‘HAlw Tibeace Tov dyGva, ws “lorpos pyolv év rH 
mept Tav HNiov dvywvwy: ‘Pddvoe rOéaow ‘HXlov év "Pddw yuurixey crepavirny avava. 

er; 

Siete : Me 2 © & 
= x Ss ; ; bs ’ 
A ey 0 a 
‘ * 

is o 

Ix]. a Yearly Ritual of Heroes 375 

The ritual of a hero was that of a year-daimon and hence often 
of a sun-daimon, and this explains why heroes were worshipped 
at sunset. This was much more than a mere poetical way of 
expressing that the hero’s life was westering. It was magical. 

You emphasize death that you may ensure resurrection. At Elis 

Pausanias! tells us 

Achilles had not an altar but a cenotaph erected in consequence of an 
oracle. At the beginning of the festival on a fixed day about the setting of the 
sun the women of Elis perform other ceremonies in honour of Achilles and it 
is their custom to bewail him. 

The women of Elis we remember? ‘summoned’ the bull-daimon 
in the spring. Here we have them raising a threnos over the 
dead day and the dead year’. 

The notion that to the hero the sacrifice must be yearly went 
on into historical times. It is this yearly character and this only 
that explains the nature of the offerings. Thucydides is evidence 
of both. Hard pressed in the Peloponnesian War, the Plataeans 
thus appeal to the Lacedaemonians: 

‘Cast your eyes upon the tombs of your fathers slain by the Persians and 
buried in’our land. Them do we honour year by year with a public gift of 
raiment and other wonted offerings and of whatsoever the earth brings forth in 
its season, of all these things we bring to them the jirstfruits*? 

The Plataeans themselves—or at least Thucydides—do not 
really understand. He thinks it is because the earth is just 

a ‘friendly land’ to the dead heroes. It really is that they, 

the ancestors, have a pankarpia which they, like the Australian — 
ancestors of the Alcheringa time, may turn into a panspermua. 
This is their perennial function as Year-daimones. 

Much that remains valid has been written as to the distinction 
between a chthonic and Olympian ritual, between the consecrations 
(€vayiopot) of heroes, chthonic divinities and the burnt offerings 
(@vuara) of the Olympians, between the low-lying eschara and the 
high stone bomos. It has been seen and rightly that heroes 
and chthonic divinities have a common ritual, save that to heroes 

1 yi. 23. 3. 2 Supra, p. 205. 

3 For the relation of the setting-sun to Hades see my Helios-Hades, Class. Rev. 
xxi. 1908, p. 12, and for sun-aspects of Achilles see Otto Seeck, Geschichte des 
Untergangs der antiken Welt, 1902, vol, 1. p. 579. : F 

4 Thucyd, 111. 58 ...ods éryuduery Kara ros exacrov Snpocla éoOjuacl re Kal rods 
Erots vouluos, doa TE ] YH NOY dvedloov wpaia mavTw dmapxas emupepovTes ebvor mer 
éx gidlas xwpas. See also Porphyry (de Abst. 1v. 22) who says that Draco laid it 
down as an eternal ordinance that heroes as well as gods should receive offerings of 

‘yearly pelanoi.’ 

376 From Daimon to Olympian 

as being more recent in sanctity wine is offered. All this is true, 
but not the whole, nor even I think the main truth. The real 
distinction is that heroes and chthonic divinities are Year-daimones 
who die to rise again. The Olympians are, and, as will presently" 
be seen, it is nowise to their credit, Immortals (a@@dvarot). It is 
as Year-daimones that Heroes have chthonic ritual with all its 
characteristic apparatus of low-lying altars, of sunset sacrifices, and 
above all of the pankarpia. 

HERAKLES AS ALEXIKAKOS OF EPHEBOI. 

We return to Herakles whose content is not yet exhausted. 
The relief? on Fig. 101 shows 
us the Hero in front of his 
own Heroon, a small shrine on 

a stepped basis and consisting 
only of four pillars and a roof. 
The shrine is not large enough 
to hold the great humanized 
hero, and probably at first it 
held no figure at all, only a 
sacred pot, a kadiskos, with a 
panspermia, or perhaps again 
a slab with a holy snake. 
Around the shrine is a sacred 
grove as befits a daimon of fertility. The worshippers approach 
bringing a bull. The bull will be sacrificed to the hero whose 
animal shape he once was*. The character of a Herakleion is 
shown very clearly in Fig. 102, from a Lower Italy amphora*. The 
design also emphasizes in singular fashion the somewhat strained 
relations between saga and daimon-cult. The scene is from a lost 
tragedy the plot of which is preserved for us by Hyginus®. 
Haemon is bidden to kill Antigone; he saves her and she bears 
1 Infra, chapter x. 

ae Frickenhaus, Das Herakleion von Melite, A. Mitt. xxxvr. 1911, Taf. 11. 2, 
The reliefs in Figs. 101 and 104 are reproduced by kind permission of Dr Frickenhaus. 

(oH: 

3 Cf. C.I.G. 1688, 32 rod Bods rid Tod npwos éxatov orarhpes Atywaio.. I do not — 

feel certain whether this is to be construed ‘the price of the Hero-Ox’ or 
of the ox of the hero,’ but in any case hero and ox are intimately linked. 
* In the Ruvo coll., Mon. d. Inst. x. 1848, Tay. XXVI., and Klugmann Annali 
1848, p. 177. ‘ ; 
° Fab. uxxir. ...hune Creon rex, quod ex draconteo genere omnes in corpore 

insigne habebant, cognovit. cum Hercules pro Haemone deprecatur ut ei ignosceret 
non impetravit. 

‘the price 

C 

« f 
- 7 *, 

ee 
¢ 

 Herakles as Alewikakos 

4 

a child to him. The child grown to manhood comes to the games 
at Thebes and is recognized as of royal race by the mark on his 
- body. Herakles begs Creon to pardon Haemon but his prayer is 
4 refused. Haemon kills himself and Antigone. y 

The story is of great interest because of the recognition by 
some body-mark of the child as belonging to the ‘dragon’s seed,’ 
To this we shall later! return, but for the present it is the figure of 
_ Herakles that concerns us. In the saga he, for some reason not 
_ given, asks Creon a favour. He is no daimon; he is just one mortal 
a of royal race asking a boon of another. But art is more conserva- 
tive. Herakles was the hero of Thebes and on the amphora his 
~ heroon, marked by his name’, bulks proportionately large. He, 
not Creon, for all Creon’s kingly sceptre, is the Hero to be 
intreated. It is a strange instructive fusion and confusion of two 
strata of thinking. 
a On the reverse of the Ruvo amphora in Fig. 103 we have the 
game heroon. In it is seated the figure of a woman with mirror 
and toilet-box after the fashion of an Attic grave-relief. She is 
the correlative of the Herakles on the other side; she by dying 
is heroized. By that time any individual dead man or woman 
might be heroized. The two sides of the vase give us a strange 
 plend of daimon-cult, of saga, and of daily life. 

1 Infra, p. 434. 
2 Haemon, Antigone, Creon, and the local nymph Ismene are also all clearly 

- inseribed. The other figures are uncertain and unimportant. 

378 From Daimon to Olympian [ CH. 

The relief in Fig. 104 enables us to give to the figure of 
Herakles a local habitation and a 
name. The inscription on the basis 
of the little shrine is clear—‘ Of 
Herakles Alexikakos?.’ As ‘ Defender 
from Evil’ Herakles was worshipped 
in the deme of Melite, the Pnyx 
region of Athens. Again the hero 
stands close to and overtopping his 
little shrine. The shrine is sur- 
mounted by a great krater on a 
pedestal. Krater and pedestal to- 
gether are about half the height of 
the shrine itself. Whom is Herakles 
to defend from evil? The worshipper 
only approaches; an ephebos, like in 
age and stature to Herakles himself, 
save that he wears cloak and petasos. 
Is there any link between the great 
krater and the youth and Herakles 
‘Defender from Evil’? It happens 
Fie. 103. that, in very singular and instructive 

fashion there is, and by a happy 

chance we know it. 

Photius* in a priceless gloss thus explains the word oimi[a]lotnpia 
‘wine-doings’: 

i _A libation to Herakles performed by the ephebot before the cutting of their 
air. 

Photius gives as his authority a play of Eupolis, the Demot. 
We should -guess therefore that the custom was Athenian, but 

1 A. Mitt. xxxvi. 1911, Taf. x. ” 

2 For Herakles in Melite, see my Primitive Athens, pp.146—152. Dr Frickenhaus 
holds that the triangular precinct with the Wine-press, excavated by Dr Dorpfeld, 
and by him explained as the old sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes, is the 
Herakleion in Melite. I followed Dr Dorpfeld, and this is not the place to-re-examine 
a question mainly topographical, but if Dr Frieckenhaus’s ‘most interesting theory 
be true, and we have a Herakleion close to the old orchestra, it may, as Prof. Murray 
suggested to me, throw an odd light on the Herakles disguise assumed by the 
Dionysos of the Frogs. Both are Kouroi; both, as will immediately be seen, have 
a wine-service. So the shift from one to another is not as great as it seems. 

® sv. olvaloripas omovdh re “Hpakde? émcrehouuevy brs Tov epnBwv mpiv 
amokelpacbat. Hivmrodis Arjocs. 

Herakles as Greatest Kouros 379 

_ fortunately we know it for certain. Hesychius', explaining the 
same word ovwnisteria, says: 

_At Athens those who are about to become ephebor before the lock of 
hair is cut bring to Herakles a measure of wine and when they have poured 
libation they give to drink to those who come with them. And the libation is 

called otnisteria. 
Athenaeus? adds the authority of Pamphilos and says that 
the great cup of wine offered was called an oinisteria. 

Fic. 104. 

To Herakles as to the Agathos Daimon at the Pithoigia’ is 
offered a libation of wine. To Herakles as to Hippolytos* is 
offered the shorn lock, because he is the Greatest Kouros, 
'Herakulos ‘the young, dear hero.” In the light of the offering 
of the lock, the sign and the vehicle of the bloom of youth, some 
of the athla of Herakles which have seemed insignificant, not to say 
ignoble, are instantly understood. He the Greatest Kouros swings 
his klados, his branch from the tree of life, against a pygmy ker, 
with shrunken body and distorted face. It is youth against 
noisome disease and death. He the Greatest Kouros lifts his 

, l giv. olvicrhpia: “AOvnoe oi wéddovres épnBevew mply dmoxelpacOat Tov jaddov 
ein pépovew (ew MS.) ‘Hpaxdet uérpov olvov kat omeloavres rots auvehOodow émedldow 
’ wlvew* dé crovdh éxaeiro olvicTHpia. : 

2 xr. 494 oivoripia* of wéhdovres droxelpew Tov okod\d\ov €pyBor pyot Idudidros 
elopépovor T@ “Hpaxde? uéya morjpiov oivov 6 Kahodow oiviornplay kal omeloavtes Tots 
——— guven odor Siddace rive. 

3 Supra, p. 288. 4 Supra, p. 337. 

a 

380 From Daimon to Olympian [ OH. 

klados to slay the shrivelled ugly figure leaning on his stick and 
“inscribed yfjpas, Old Age’. 

We blossom like the leaves that come in spring, 
What time the sun begins to flame and glow, 
And in the brief span of youth’s gladdening 
Nor good nor evil from the gods we know, 
But always at the goal black Keres stand 
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death within her hand?2. 

We understand also now why constant emphasis is laid on 
the fact that Herakles was initiated. On a cinerary urn in the 
Museo delle Terme? Herakles leaning on his club stands in the 
presence of Demeter and fondles the sacred snake that is twined 
about her. The scholiast on the Ploutos+ of Aristophanes tells 
us that the mysteries at Agrae were founded in order that 
Herakles might be initiated. He is the prototype, the pro- 
jection, of the initiate youth, he as Alexikakos defends the boy 
in his rite de passage to and through the perils of manhood*. 
Later the initiation into the tribe is viewed as initiation into a 
‘mystery.’ 

And, finally, we see the reality and significance of what has 
hitherto seemed a somewhat frigid conceit, the marriage of 
Herakles and Hebe. In the Nekuia® Odysseus sees Herakles 
in Hades and is perplexed, for orthodoxy demanded that Herakles 
should be in Olympos feasting with his bride Hebe. Odysseus, 
or rather the poet, betrays his embarrassment : 

Next Herakles’ great strength I looked upon— 
His shadow—for the man himself is gone 

To join him with the gods immortal ; there 

_ He feasts and hath for. bride Hebe the fair. 

Herakles the Ephebos, the Kouros, is fitly wedded to Hebe, 

1 See the two vases reproduced in Prolegomena, Figs. 17 and 18. When I 

discussed them (op. cit. pp. 166, 174) I did not at all understand the Significance of 
Herakles as Greatest Kouros. 

2 Mimnermos, 2. 

3 Helbig Cat. 1168. Lovatelli, Ant. Mon. illustr. p. 25 ff. tav. 1.—1y, Repro- 
duced Prolegomena, p. 547, Figs. 155, 156. 

4 Ad v. 845. 

° In previously discussing the initiation of Herakles 
p. 147) I have, I think, over-emphasized the fact that he w 
immigrant; foreign elements entered undoubtedly into hi 
him to be in the main home-grown. 

6 Hom. Od. x1. 601. 

(Primitive Athens, 1906, 
as always regarded as an 
S cult, but I now believe 

“i “4 
‘ 
eo 
+ dh) 

i, 

Asklepios as Year-Daimon 

_ maiden-youth in its first bloom, who is but the young form of 
_ Hera Teleia}, the Kore. | 
Herakles, it is abundantly clear from his cornucopia, is Agathos 
Daimon ; but if so, we naturally ask where is his characteristic 
snake? He has no kerykeion, no snake-twined staff ; his body 
never ends, like that of Cecrops, in a snake’s tail. Olympos did 
_ not gladly suffer snakes, and Herakles, aiming at Olympos, wisely 
sloughed off his snake-nature. While yet in his cradle he slew 
the two snakes that attacked him and his twin brother Iphikles?. 
_ We shall later? see the significance of this snake-slaying which 
is common to many heroes and which culminates as it were in 
the myth of the slaying of the Python of Apollo. 

* 

Be, 

Another hero-daimon Saviour and Defender like Herakles was 
less prudent ; he kept his snake and stayed outside Olympos, the 
great Hero-Healer with the snake-twined staff, Asklepios. 

ASKLEPIOS AND TELESPHOROS. 

Asklepios is a god but no Olympian; his art-type is modelled 

on that of Zeus; he is bearded, benign, venerable; he is, in fact, 

the Zeus of daimon-heroes. He never becomes an Olympian 

_ because he remains functional rather than personal, he is always 
the Saviour-Healer. 

| On the snake-aspect of Asklepios it is needless to dwell, it is 

manifest’, When it was desired to introduce the cult of the god 

_ from Epidauros’, a sacred snake was sent for whether to Rome or 

Athens. In art as a rule the snake is twined about his staff, but 

KY 

1 For Hebe as Ganymeda and her ancient cult at Phlius see Prolegomena 
p. 325. For the relations of Hebe to Hera, and of both to Herakles, I may refer 
forward to Mr Cook’s Zeus. 

2 Herakles slaying the snakes appears on silver coins of Thebes and on red- 
figured vases. See Roscher, Lewicon, s.v. Herakles. The origin of the twin nature 
of so many ‘heroes’ of Daktyl type has been explained by Dr Kaibel, op. cit., and 

does not here concern us. 
d 2 Infra, pp. 429—436. 
7 4 For details as to the snake-origin of Asklepios see my Prolegomena, p. 342. 
Fick, in Bezzenberger’s Beitrdge, 1901, p. 313, suggests that the difficult name 
Asklepios is connected with oxadardjw, to turn round and round. Hesychius 
explains cxadamrdfer as péuBera—he coils or rolls round. 
B2~ 5 Paus. vu. 8. 4, 1. 10. 3, 1m. 23. 7. 

Se 

382 From Daimon to Olympian __[e 

in the relief? in Fig. 105 the simple truth is patent: the ! god in 

so 

Fie. 105. 

human form leans on his staff awaiting his worshippers, the holy 
snake behind him is his equal in stature and in majesty. It was 
in the precinct of Asklepios at Epidauros that the relief in Fig. 75 
was found, dedicated to the Agathos Theos? with his cornucopia 
and sacred snake. 

But if the snake-aspect of Asklepios is evident and, I believe, 
now accepted, there are two other elements in his cult that show 
him to be a fertility-daimon and that have hitherto not I think 

been rightly understood, the figure of Telesphoros and the snake- 
twined omphalos. 

On many coins of Asia Minor of Roman date, and especially 
on those of Pergamos there appears in connection with Asklepios 

1 Athens, Central Museum Cat. 1407. In previousl ishi i ief 
: y publishing this relief 
Prolegomena, p. 342) I did not und i . 
¢ shire na, p ) I did not understand the relation of the-snake to the Agathos 
2 Supra, p. 285. 

= 

_ ‘Telesphoros as Year-Daimon 383 

F types the figure of a child or dwarf wearing a cloak and high 
_ peaked hat. The three coins! in Fig. 106 are typical. In the 
central coin of the three we have a sacred tree and round it is 

coiled a snake. An emperor salutes the holy beast. Between 
the snake and the emperor is the figure of the child Telesphoros. 

To the right, on a coin of Pergamos, the same child occupies the 

whole field; on the left, again a coin of Pergamos, he stands in a 
shrine of the same type as the Herakleion in Fig. 102. 

Fie. 106. 

Numismatists have long ago found for the child daimon the © 
right name: he is Telesphoros’, but just because the needful clue 

_ was missing, the name lacked its true meaning. Telesphoros, we 

are told, was the ‘daimon of convalescence.’ Telesphoros is 
wrapped in a cloak because invalids when convalescent wear 
shawls. For his peaked hat as yet no such satisfactory explanation 

has been found. The blunder is an odd one, for to pronounce the 

adjective telesphoros is to call up the missing noun: 

Zu8 Sl Be Bas o eheopdpor eis é peer) 
evoa Tap auT@ velva T a(op €ls E€vlavTov™. 

Asklepios, with his staff and venerable beard, is Old Father 
Christmas, Telesphoros is the Happy New Year‘ Under the 
influence of patriarchy and Zeus the venerable type of the 
Eniautos-daimon obtains, and, save in remote Asia Minor, the 
Kouros form is forgotten. At Pergamos he lives on clad like the 
infant Dioscuri® in pointed cap and hooded cloak. 

1 Num. Chron. Serie 11. Vol. 1. Pl. 1. o 

2 Warwick Wroth, Telesphoros, J.H.S. 1882. See especially p. 297 for the 
curious bronze statuette of Telesphoros with peaked hood. The upper part when 
lifted off discloses a phallos, symbol of regeneration. 
"3 Hom. Od. xiv. 292. For évaurés and reheopdpos see supra, p. 183. 

4 For similar child-figures see swpra, pp. 187 and 188. 

5 Of. the children wearing peaked hats in votive terra cottas to the Anakes. See 
my Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 154, Fig. 32. ‘ 

f 

384 From Daimon to Olympian fen. | 

The snake-twined omphalos. We connect Asklepios with the 
snake but not with the omphalos, yet on the coin! of Pergamos in ~ 
Fig. 107 the association is clear. On the obverse we have the 

Fic. 107. 

head of the god, of the usual bearded benevolent Zeus-like type, 
on the reverse a netted omphalos round which coils a great snake 
with upreared head. The mention of the omphalos brings Delphi 
instantly to our minds, but it must be clearly noted that the 
omphalos is not at Delphi only. The omphalos is of Ge rather 
than of Apollo, and wherever there is worship of Mother-Earth 

there we may expect the omphalos. We find it at Eleusis, 

clearly figured on the Ninnion pinax?, the centre of the whole 
design. We meet it again at Phlius*. Asklepios himself then 
is a snake-daimon, twined round the omphalos of Ge. He is but 
the daimon of the fertility of the Earth. As such he never 
passes wholly to the upper air of the Olympians. He remains a 
Saviour and a Healer, loved of the dream-oracle, very near to — 
earth and to man. 

- Herakles then and Asklepios, though as Saviours and Healers 
they are greater than any Olympians, never became really — 
Olympianized. Their function is to make us feel how thin and 
chill, for all their painted splendour, are these gods who live at 
ease in the upper air, how much they lose when they shake off 
mortality and their feet leave the earth who was their mother. 

We now pass to the examination of a god who was perhaps 
more Olympian than any Olympian, more serene, more radiantly 
splendid, more aloof, more utterly in the fullest sense of the word 
supertor. By a fortunate chance we shall study him where his 
cult and figure are brought into direct contrast and even conflict 

1 Num. Chron. m1. vol. 1. Pl. 1, p. 23. 
2 See Prolegomena, p. 559, Fig. 160. 3 Paus. m1. 13. 7 

=. ja U v. is 
pd eh - ar é 
Nae j 

Prologue to the Eumenides 385. 

with the old sanctities of Earth and her daimones at Delphi, 
_ where ; 
Phoibos, on Harth’s mid navel o'er the world 

Enthroned, weaveth in eternal song : 
The sooth of all that is or is to be}. 

THE SEQUENCE OF CULTS AT DELPHI FROM Gata TO APOLLO. 

It happens that, as to the cults of Delphi, we have a document 
of quite singular interest, no less a thing than an official state- 
ment from the mouth of the local priestess of the various 
divinities worshipped at Delphi, and—a matter of ‘supreme 
_ importance—the traditional order of their succession. Delphi 

was the acknowledged religious centre of Greece, and nowhere 
else have we anything at all comparable in definiteness to this 
statement. Thrice familiar though the passage is, it has not 
I think been quite fully understood. It must therefore be 
examined somewhat in detail. The prologue of the Humenides 
spoken by the priestess of Apollo opens thus: 

First in my prayer before all other gods 
I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess. 
Next Themis on her mother’s mantic throne 
Sat, so men say. Third by unforced consent 
gt Another Titan, daughter too of earth, 
e Phoibe possessed it. She for birthday gift 
Gave it to Phoibos, and he took her name. 

With divination Zeus inspired his soul, 
And stablished him as seer, the fourth in time, 
But Loxias speaks the mind of Zeus his sire”. 

Such are the opening words of the prologue to the Humenides, 
and they are more truly of prologue® character than perhaps at 
_ first appears. They set forth or rather conceal the real agon of 

+ Eur. Jon, 5. 

_ 2 Asch. Eum. 1—8 and 17—19 

. Ilp&rov perv edyq THs mpecBevw Oedy 
Tiy mpwrbmavTw Talay: éx dé rhs Oéuuy, 
6h TO pntpos Sevrépa 760° efero 
pavretov, ws Novos Tis: ev O€ Tw TplTw 
Adxer Oedovans ovde mpds Blav Tivds, 
Tiravils ddXn mats xOoves Kabéfero 
PoiBn Stdiwow & 7% yevéPdov dbow 
PolBw: 7d PoiByns 5 svou’ exer wapdvupov. ; 

téxuns dé vi Leds evOeov xricas ppéva, 
iver réraproy révde pavrw év xpdvors 
Avds mpopyrns 8 éorl Aokias marpés. 
3 For function of Prologue see Prof. Murray, supra, p. 359. 

25 

H. 

386 From Daimon to Olympian. [ cH. 

the play, the conflict between the new order and the old, the 
daimones of Earth, the Erinyes, and the theot of Olympos, Apollo 
and his father Zeus, and further necessarily and inherently the 
conflict of the two social orders of which these daimones and 
theoi are in part the projections—matriarchy or, as it is better 
called, the matrilinear system and patriarchy. The conflict 
between the daimones of Earth and the Olympian Apollo will 
be discussed in the present chapter; the conflict of the two 
social orders as reflected in mythology must be reserved for 
the next. 

The statement of Aischylus is necessarily somewhat ex parte. 
He is a monotheist and moreover he is ‘all for the Father’ In 
dealing with the religion of Delphi he is confronted with the 
awkward fact that Zeus at Delphi had no official cult, the oracle 
was in the hands of Apollo. Moreover that oracle was actually 
delivered by a woman seated over a cleft in the Earth and 
inspired not only by the laurel she chewed but by mephitic 
vapours that rose from the earth. In all this Zeus was—nowhere. 
Yet the supremacy of Zeus was to Aischylus the keystone of 
his beautiful faith in a right that was beyond might, a thing 
to be preserved even in the face of seeming facts. A lesser soul 
would have turned obscurantist, would have juggled with facts; 
a more conventional mind would have accepted orthodox tradition 
and claimed that Apollo conquered by force. That to Aischylus 
was no conquest at all. ‘The solution he gives us in the prologue 
is utterly Auschylean and in a sense strangely modern. There 
has been not a fight but a development?, not even, as in the agon 
of the play, a reconciliation and sudden conversion, but a gradual 
emergence and epiphany of godhead from strength to strength, 
from Gaia to Zeus. And, an interesting thing, Aischylus, as will 
shortly appear, was right. He gives us by the mouth of his 
priestess a sequence of cults which not only existed at Delphi 

1 The same notion of development comes out in the Prometheus, as has been 
well observed by Miss Janet Case (Class. Rev. 1902, p. 195). It has not, I think 
been recognized in the Supplices, but Prof. Murray points out to me that the key. 
note of the play is the transition from violence to persuasion. Ares, who is BAABn 
—violence and hurt personified—must give way to Aphrodite as Peitho. So only 
can the Danaides, fertility-nymphs like the Semnae, bring peace and prosperity to 

the barren land. See also for the same idea in the story of Io, Rise of the Greek 
Epic?, p. 291. 

Gaia and Themis 387 

but is found as a regular religious development over a great 
part of the civilized world. 

The chronological sequence at Delphi was as follows: 

(1) Gaia, 
(2) Themis, 
(3) Phoibe, 

(4) Phoibos. 

Zeus is not given as fifth, he is the crown and climax of all, 
Phoibos reigns, fourth in time but only as vice-gerent, as ‘Asds 
tpopyTns, not of course prophet in our sense, but utterer, exponent 
of his father’s will?. 

Gaia is transparent. She stands for Earth and the powers of 
the Earth ; her sanctuary, the omphalos, will have to be considered 
in detail later. Themis is a conception so dominant, so integral 
to religion that her full consideration is reserved for our final 
chapter. In the figure of Themis, if we are right, we have 
the utterance, the projection and personification, of the religious 
principle itself. She will not be considered now because she is 
not really a link in the chain. Rather she is a figure who 
shadows and attends each of the others. She is the daughter 
and bye-form of Gaia. She delivers oracles, Oéwscres, ordinances, 
__ rather than prophecies in our sense, for both Phoibe and Phoibos; 
she even ultimately ascends to high heaven and becomes the 
counsellor and wedded wife of Zeus himself. This will I hope be 
made clear in the final chapter; for the present the reader is 
asked to substitute provisionally for the order: 

(1) Gaia, (1) Gaia and Themis, 

(2) Themis, this shortened succession (2) Phoibe and Themis, 
(3) Phoibe, (3) Phoibos and Themis. 
(4) Phoibos, 

Gaia then is the Earth and Phoibos is of course Phoibos- 
Apollo. The reason of his double title will appear later. But 
who is Phoibe? Phoibos and Phoibe are seen, from the practical 
identity of name, to be beings of the same order, beings of 
brightness and purity”. It is odd that their real nature should 
have escaped commentators, Once stated it is simple and so 
. See Dr Verrall’s Humenides, note to vv. 17—19 ; and for the prologue generally, 

his Introduction, p. xii. 
2 Cf. doBovometc Gar to live in ritual purity ; see Prolegomena, p. 394. 

25—2 

ee ee ee 

388 

obvious. It has only lain so long concealed because of a dominant 
anthropomorphism. Phoebus is still to-day the Sun’. 

Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings, 
And Phoebus ’gins arise. | 

And if Phoibos be the Sun, who is Phoibe but the Moon ? 
Zschylus gives no hint of the Moon nature of Phoibe. To 

him and to his commentators she seems simply a Titaness, one 

of the old order used as a bridge between Gaia and Phoibos- 

From Daimon to Olympian 

‘Apollo. But Latin poets, unconfused by anthropomorphism, never 

forget. Vergil? writes 

Tamque dies caelo concesserat: almaque curru 
Noctivago Phoebe medium pulsabat Olympum, 

and again Ovid* with an eye on the mantic Apollo, 

Auguribus Phoebus, Phoebe venantibus adsit. 

But we are not left to Latin poets for evidence. We have 
the direct statement of Plutarch*—no better authority could be 

desired—that, according to Orphic tradition, the oracle at Delphi 

was held by Night and the Moon. This point is important for 

[on 

our sequence and must be clearly established. The statement. 

occurs in the curious account given of one Thespesios*’—an 

oddly magical name—and his spiritual adventures in the under- 
world. 

Thespesios and his guide arrive at a certain place—the topo- 
graphy is necessarily vague, where three daimones are seated at 
the angles of a triangle, and then 

The guide of the soul of Thespesios told him that Orpheus got as far as 

here, when he went to fetch the soul of his wife, and, from not clearly — 

remembering, he published to mortals a false report that the oracle at Delphi 
was shared by Apollo and Night, whereas in no respect was there community 
between Night and Apollo. ‘But this oracle,’ said the guide, ‘is held in 
common by Night and the Moon, not issuing out of the earth at any one 
place, nor having one particular seat, but it wanders everywhere among men 
in dreams and visions. Hence dreams receive and spread abroad a blend, as 
you see, of what is simple and true with what is complex and misleading.’ 
‘But the oracle,’ he continued, ‘of Apollo you cannot see clearly. For the 

1 The sense in which Phoibos may be said to ‘be’ the Sun will be explained 

later (p. 392). To avoid misunderstanding it may be stated in advance that : 

equivalence is not meant. Phoibos stands for the Sun-aspect of Apollo; and 
Apollo has other aspects. Hence Phoibos is not the equivalent of Helios, still less 
is Apollo. The same applies to Phoibe, Artemis and the Moon. 

4) Fine x. 215, 5 Amores, 11. 2. 51. 

4 De ser. num. vindict. xx11. 

> His real name was.Aridaeus. Thespesios was a new name given him. The 
whole account reads strongly like the account of an initiation ceremony, 

., = 

'“Moon-oracle at Delphi — 

_ earthiness of the soul will not relax nor permit it to soar upwards but keeps 
it down tight, held by the body.’ Thereon leading him up to it, the guide 
sought to show Thespesios the light from the tripod which as he said shone 
through the bosom of Themis on to Parnassos, But much desiring to see it 
he could not for its brightness, but as he went by he heard the shrill voice 
of a woman uttering in verse, both other things and, as it seemed, the day of 
Thespesios’ death. And the daimon said that that was the voice of the Sibyl who 
sang of what was to be as she was borne round in the face of the moon. And 
though he desired to hear more he was pushed away in the contrary direction 
by the swirl of the moon as though in a whirlpool, so that he only heard 
distinctly a little. 

The story of Thespesios is instructive. It reflects theological 
embarrassment. Local primitive tradition knew that. the oracle 
at Delphi was of Earth and Night. Like the oracles of Amphia- 
raos, of Asklepios, and of the Panagia of Tenos to-day, it was 
a dream-oracle, that came to you while sleeping on holy ground. 
‘The suppliants were probably like the Selloi at Dodona yayacedvas, 
Couchers-on-the-ground. But an overdone orthodoxy demanded 
that about Apollo there should be nothing ‘earthy’ and no deed 
or dream of darkness. A bridge, as.with Aschylus, was built 
by way of Phoibe, who is always half of earth and half of heaven. 
To save the face of the resplendent Sun-God the Sibyl. is set in 
the Face of the Moon’. 

Such mild obscurantism was dear to the gentle Plutarch but 
it would scarcely have availed but for a clear tradition of the 
Moon’s sometime dominance at Delphi. And it would seem at 
Delos also. A bronze coin of Athens shows us in the field 
a copy of the cultus statue of Apollo made by Tektaios and 
Angelion for the sanctuary at Delos. Apollo holds on his out- 
stretched hand three figures whom we may call Moirae, Horae, 
Charites, as we will’. They are, like all these triple figures, 
moon-phases, for, as we remember, according to Orpheus‘ ‘the 
Moirae are the divisions (ra pépn) of the Moon*’ On Delos 
dwelt Artemis and Apollo, in whom the Persians recognized their 
own Sun and Moon. Apollo as the Sun, on Delos as at Delphi, 
1 Plut. loc. cit. ...€v TO mpoodmw THs cedAhvns Tepipepouevyv. . Plutarch says (de 
defect. orac, x11.) that some called the moon an dorpov yedes, others é\uumiay viv 
so that she was well adapted as a transition from earth to heaven. 
ee P AUS ghk.. OO. > 

3 Pausanias, loc. cit., says the Apollo of Delos held Charites in his left hand. 
See the Athenian coin with Apollo and Charites on p. 444, For the shift between 
Moirae, Horae and Charites, see supra, pp. 189—192. 

4 Supra, p. 189, note 4. : ; 
5 Hence they are children of Night, as in the Orphic Hymn to the Moirae, 

‘which begins Moipax deipéovor Nuxros plra Tréxva wehaivys. 

‘oe ee 
“—<e 

390 From Daimon to Olympian [ cH. 
succeeded to, took over, a service of the Moon. We no longer 
wonder why Thespesios at the place of the oracle found ‘three 
daimones seated in triangular pattern!, nor why the light and 
Fate of the Moon ‘shone through the bosom of Themis on to 
Parnassos?.’ 

We have dwelt on the moon-character of Phoibe because, as. 
in the sequence of cults enumerated by the priestess it has not 
been recognized, some insistence was needed. This sequence is 
now clearly before us, Earth, Moon, Sun. To our delight, though 
it should not be to our surprise, the same sequence that we met 
at Olympia* we now meet at Delphi, and this sequence it would 
appear is, for agricultural peoples, world-wide. 

For long, perhaps too long‘, scholars have reacted against 
sun-mythology and moon-mythology. The reaction was of course 
brought about by the learned absurdities perpetrated in the name 
of these two great lights. The old error of Naturism*® was to 
suppose that sun or moon or dawn or wind exhausted the content, 
of a god. The new truth, born of psychology and sociology, is to 
recognize that, into the content of every man’s experience and 
hence of every man’s divinities, enter elements drawn not only 
from earth but from sun and moon. 

Mr Payne, in his remarkable, and to me most illuminating, 
History of the New World, called America®, was, I believe, the first 
to call attention to this sequence of the gods. His testimony is. 
specially valuable as arising out of a study of the religious facts 
of the New World, not the Old. After a long and interesting 
account of the great Harth Goddess of Mexico, he thus continues: 

Having thus surveyed the principal objects of worship belonging to the 
region of earth we pass on to consider next those belonging to the upper air 

* Plut. loc. cit. €wpa d€ rpels Satuovas du00 KaOnuevous ev cyt ATL TpLywvou. 
reminded of Hekate and ae cohen e Hs at oes Mag 

2 Plut. loc. cit. $ Supra, p. 237. 

4 I have long protested against the excesses of this reaction. See Athenaeum 
(No. 4301), April 2, 1910, p. 404, in which I tried to indicate that each god, ‘each 
and every divine name, is but as it were a focus round which conceptions cluster 

from heaven above as well as earth below.’ The sequence of these theological 

conceptions I owe to Mr Payne, and their special relation to the calendar largely 
to Mr Cornford. 

° The errors of the old Naturism have been admirably exposed by Prof. Durkheim 
in his Examen critique des systémes classiques sur les origines de la pensée religieuse 
2nd article in Revue Philosophique, L909} pr 142: COVolvE pays. : 

gh 

a} 

ae - 

me cS ‘a : me . 
Ix] Sequence of Earth, Metarsia and Meteora 391 
or firmament; and lastly the heavenly bodies. If our conclusions are correct, 
the cultivator has universally followed the same order in his theological 
speculations. Beginning with the gods of the earth, he has adyanced_to. the 
atmospheric powers or gods of the weather, powers which are at first conceived 
as dwelling on particular mountains, but are ultimately disengaged from the 
earth, and formed into a distinct class. He next infers that these important 
powers are subject _to powers higher still, powers which regulate the winds 
and the rains, compelling them to recur at regular intervals, and through 
them exercising an ultimate control over the production of food and whatever 
else affects human life and fortune on earth. These powers are.the sun,.the 
moon and the stars. When this point has been reached the cycle is complete. 

No further progress, none at least on the old lines, is possible. 
Mr Payne carefully guards his statement against all excess : 

When it is said that man has begun by worshipping the terrestrial 
powers and has advanced successively to the worship of the atmospheric and 
the celestial, it is by no means meant that he does not, in the very earliest 
stages of advancement, recognize the wind and the rain, the sun and the 
moon, as objects exercising influence over his fortunes; for such objects 
naturally awaken even in the savage mind the instincts of fear and veneration. 
What is meant is that the atmospheric and stellar powers take a prominent 
place in the incorporated family of men and gods, bound together by the 
covenant of sacrifice at a later period than the gods of the earth. The 
recognition of these powers as benevolent ones belongs to the stage of 
artificial food-production. 

As to the sequence moon and sun rather than sun and moon 
and the cause of this sequence Mr Payne is equally explicit’: 

The worship of the moon naturally precedes that of the sun, because a 
connection is traced between the lunar phenomena and the food-supply in an 
earlier stage than that in which a connection is traced between the food-supply 
and the solar phenomena. The different seasons of the year bring with them 
different supplies of natural force.... The approach and duration of the periods 
in which these different supplies are provided is measured by the successive 
re-appearances and gradual changes of the moon. Hence apparently the savage 
naturally regards the moon as the cause of these successive supphes of food? 
To all the beneficent aspects and relations of the moon as 
insisted on by all authorities we may add perhaps, in the making 

of man’s early religion, some touch of spectral terror of the remote 
dull staring thing: 

Setebos, Setebos, Setebos, 
Thinketh he dwelleth in the cold of the moon. 

In Mr Payne’s sequence one step on the ladder from earth to 
heaven is what may be called the ‘weather. He adopts in fact 
without knowing it a distinction at which the Stoic philosophers 
arrived and which is very convenient for religion, the distinction 

1 Op. cit. 1. p. 493. ts 
2 In some parts of the world the successive moons or months are called by the 

name of the plants that appear in them. 

392 From Daimon to Olympian —— [cn 

between Ta petdépova and ta petéwpa. The Stoic writer Achilles!, 

‘going back probably to Poseidonios, writes thus: 

Ta peréwpa are distinguished from rd perdpova thus: ra peréwpa are the 
things in heayen and the ether, as e.g. the sun and the other heavenly bodies 
‘and ouranos and ether: ra perdpova are the things between the air and the 
‘earth, such aswinds. 

The gist of the distinction lies in the difference between aer 
and aither; ta petéwpa are the holy blaze of aither which is 
uppermost, Ta petapota, thunder, rain, clouds, wind, are of the 
damp cold aer, the lower region of earthy mist. Of all the 
heavenly bodies the moon with her dew and mists is most akin 
to Ta peTdpota. . 

From the sequence of Alschylus 7a petdpova are missing. 
He was probably only half conscious of the moon and sun elements 
in Phoibe and Phoibos, and of the disorderly phenomena of the 
weather as sanctities he took no account. In our previous chapters 
on the Thunder-Rites and on Bird-Magic.we have seen how 
early and large a place ta petapova held in Greek religion, but 
Ta weTdpora were among the elements that Olympian religion 
tried, though somewhat vainly, to discard. Even however at 
Delphi traces remain, for we find the weather birds perching at 
either side of the omphalos of Gaia, and Zeus is obliged to 
acknowledge them as his eagles. 

In the light then of comparative religion “Eschylus is seen 
to be right. At Delphi, as elsewhere, broadly speaking man’s 
reactions and hence his interests or emotions focus first on earth 
as a source of food, then successively on the moon and sun as 
fertilizers and regents of the season. In every rite and every 
mythological figure these elements must be reckoned with. In 
analysing a god we must look for traits from earth, from 
‘weather, from moon, from sun, The earth stage will show him 
as a snake or a bull or a tree or in human form as Megistos 
Kouros or Thallophoros. The moon? will give him horns afresh, 

* epi opaipas. The fragment is printed in the Uranologie of Petavius, Paris, 

1680. My quotation is borrowed from O. Gilbert’s valuable work, Die Meteorologischen 
_Theorien d. Gr, Altertums, 1907, p. 8. 

2 Moon-elements are found in nearly all goddesses and many heroines: in 
Athena, Artemis, Hekate, Persephone, Bendis; in Antiope, Europa, Pasiphaé 
Auge, and a host of others. Sun-elements in Odysseus, Bellerophon, Perseus, 
Talos, Ixion, Phaethon. Sun and moon symbols are the bull, the golden dog, the 
Golden Fleece, the Golden Lamb, etc., etc. In fact, if our-contention be true 
‘there is scarcely any mythological figure that does not contain sun and moon 
elements, and scarcely any of which the content is exhausted by sun and moon. 

ate 

23.25 

: as! eae ae ee, ee he 

is Sai ah ul aes pee iat 

os 
‘ 

The Slaying of the Python 

ae 

393 

Zz the sun will lend him a wheel or a chariot or a golden cup. 

Such a view is not sun-mythology or moon-mythology, it is 
common human psychology. What a man attends to, feels about, 

religion, thence are his gods. 

| provided it be socially enforced and perpetuated, that is his 

But what Aschylus envisaged as a divine sequence, and what 
modern psychology and anthropology know to be a necessary 
development, looked quite otherwise to the popular mind. A 
gradual evolution seen from beginning and end only is apt to be 
conceived as a fight between the two poles. So it was at Delphi. 
The natural sequence of cults from Gaia to Apollo was seen by 
the man in the street as a fight between Earth and the Sun, 
between Darkness and Light, between the dream-oracle and the 
truth of heaven. All this for ritual reasons that will appear later 

Apollo. 

crystallized in the form of a myth, the slaying of the Python by 

Aischylus has given us the peaceful evolution. The fight, 
though probably a fiction, is of great importance to us because it 
i helps us to realize one cardinal factor in the making of an 
Olympian. Euripides’ gives us the fight in two traditional forms: 

first. the slaying of the snake, and second the dream-oracle of 

Earth and Night as against Phoibos the Sun. The chorus of 
captive maidens, handmaidens to Iphigeneia, think with longing 
of Delos and tell of Apollo’s birth there and his passing to 
Delphi. Euripides as was natural in an Athenian, accepts the 

version that Apollo came from Delos, not from Crete. 

Oh fair the fruits of Leto blow; 

A Virgin, one, with joyous bow, 

And one a Lord of flashing locks, 
Wise in the harp, Apollo: 

She bore them amid Delian rocks, 
Hid in a fruited hollow. 

But forth she fared from that low reef, 
Sea-cradle of her joy and grief, 
A crag she knew more near the skies 
And lit with wilder water, 
That leaps with joy of Dionyse: 
There brought she son and daughter. 

‘1 I, in T. 1235. 

Strophe. . 

From Daimon to Olympian 
Then comes the slaying of the snake, as in some way necessary-— 

Euripides does not say why—if Apollo is to come to his own. 
The snake, the guardian of the old Earth oracle, is killed, but the 

general apparatus of the cult, the cleft in the earth, the tripod 

and the omphalos, is kept. 

And there, behold, an ancient Snake, Strophe 1245. 
Wine-eyed, bronze-gleaming, in the brake 
Of deep-leaved laurel, ruled the dell, 
Sent by old Earth from under 
Strange caves to guard her oracle, 
A thing of fear and wonder. 

Thou, Phoebus, still a new-born thing, 
Meet in thy mother’s arms to lie, 

Didst kill the Snake, and crown thee King 
In Pytho’s land of prophecy ; 

Thine was the tripod and the chair 

Of golden truth; and throned there, 

Hard by the streams of Castaly, 
Beneath the untrodden portal 

Of Earth’s mid-stone there flows from thee 
Wisdom for all things mortal. 

Phoibos as a new-born child slays the snake. We are reminded 
inevitably of the young New Year, of Telesphoros; we remember 
also that the hero-kings of Athens were thought of as snakes. 
But these questions must wait. For the death of her snake and 
the banishment of Themis which goes with it, Earth takes revenge, 
she sends up dream-oracles. 

He slew the Snake; he cast, men say, Antistrophe. 
Themis, the child of Earth, away 
From Pytho and her hallowed stream ; 

Then Earth, in dark derision, 

Brought forth the Peoples of the Dream 
And all the tribes of Vision. 

And men besought them; and from deep 
Confuséd underworlds of sleep 
They showed blind things that erst had been 
And are, and yet shall follow. 
So did avenge that old Earth Queen 
Her child’s wrong on Apollo. 

Clearly the oracle abolished by Apollo, the particular Themis 
banished by the god, was just the sort that Orpheus attributed 
to Delphi and the existence of which at Delphi was denied by 
the orthodox guide of Thespesios'; it was of Earth and Night; like 
that of Asklepios it was of dream and snakes. - The chorus puts 

1 Supra, p. 388. 

[cH 

Ts. F, mudite ele. ay | 

‘The Sun-God as Babe | 395 

_ it as though this kind of oracle was started by Earth in revenge 
to ‘spoil the trade of Delphi?’ It was of course there from the 
beginning, and the snake is its representative. 
Then swiftly flew that conquering one 
To Zeus on high and round the throne 
Twining a small indignant hand, 

Praved him to send redeeming 

To Pytho, from that troublous band 
Sprung from the darks of dreaming. 

Zeus laughed to see the babe, I trow, 
So swift to claim his golden rite; 
He laughed and bowed his head, in vow 
To still those voices of the night. 
And so from out the eyes of men 
That dark dream-truth was lost again; 
And Phoebus, thronéd where the throng 

Prays at the golden portal, 
Again doth shed in sunlit song? 

Hope unto all things mortal. 
It is a strange hymn, its gods concerned with hope and 
petty jealousy. It reflects the Delphi of the day which stood for 
greed and lying and time-serving and obscurantism. But because 
Euripides is poet more even than moralist, it is redeemed and 
made beautiful by the background in which move the two ancient 
protagonists Night and Day. Still, Euripides the mystic did not, 
could not, wholly love Apollo, who stood more and more for clear 
light and truth and reason and order and symmetry and the 
harmony of the heavenly bodies and all the supposed Greek 
virtues. He knew of a god whose rites and whose beauty were 
of darkness ; when Pentheus asks Dionysos :. 

How is thy worship held, by night or day ? 

the god makes answer: 

Most often night: ‘tis a majestic thing 
The darkness®. 

Literary tradition then is unanimous as to the sequence of 
cults from Gaia to Apollo. ischylus explains it as a peaceful 
and orderly development, Euripides as a fight. We have now to 

1 See Prof. Murray, Iphigeneia in Tauris, p. 103. 
ay, 1279 amd 5° Gdaboctvay vuxrwrdv ééetdev Bporar, 
kal Tynas édAw OfKe Aoégla, 
monrvdvop. 5° év Eevdevte Opbyy Odpon Bporots 
Oecddtrwy aotdais. por — 
‘There is no ‘sunlit’ in the original, but Prof. Murray divines that it 1s the young 
Sun-God who climbs to his father’s throne. 
3 Hur. Bacch. 485. 

396 From Daimon to Olympian 

see what light is thrown on the situation and on the character 
of the ultimately dominant Olympian by an examination of the 
actual ritual at Delphi and the evidence of monuments. We 
_ begin with the cultus of Gaia. 

Of a ritual of Gaia under that name we have, it must be 
clearly understood at the outset, no evidence. But of her chief 
sanctity, the omphalos, we know much, and it is through our 
understanding of the omphalos that we shall come to realize the 
relation between Earth and Apollo and their ultimate hostility, as 
figured in the slaying of the Python. It is of the first importance 
to be clear about the omphalos, but it is not from AAischylus that 
we shall learn its real nature, though it is only when that nature 
is understood that we can feel the full beauty and reality of the 
agon in his Humenides. 

THE OMPHALOS. 

‘By the time of Aischylus the omphalos was regarded as simply 
a holy Stone which, by pious consent, was held to be the centre 
of the earth; it was a fetich-thing, supremely sacred, to which the 
supplant clings. This holy Stone is naturally in the innermost 
shrine. Thither, when the priestess! has ended her ordering and 
invocation of the Delphian divinities, she goes, and there she finds 
Orestes, clinging to the omphalos, horribly polluting its sanctity 
by his touch. The scene, mutatis mutandis, is figured on many 
vase-paintings, one of which is given in Fig. 108%, It brings the 

conical holy Stone clearly before us; it is covered with fillets, — 

a refuge for the suppliant. Its sanctity is clearly established, 
but what was the cause of this sanctity? In a word what did 
the omphalos really stand for, really mean ? 

The name omphalos is little or no help. Like its correlative 
umbilicus it came to mean navel, but originally it only meant any 
sort of boss or thing that bulged, the boss of a shield or a phiale, 
an island that stands up on the ‘nombril’ of the sea’. Fortunately 

1 Aisch. Hum. 39 
eye wey Eprrw mpds TovvoTeph pvyxov- 
6p 8 em’ dudadrg pev dvdpa Oeouveh, 
fdpav exovra mpoorpbmrasoy. 
. 2 0. Jahn, Vasenbilder, Orestes in Delphi, 1839, Taf.1. ‘The vase was former! 
in the Lamberti collection. “ 

* Later it may have been connected with 6uo%, as the place of sacred utterance. 

[on . 

sss 
d. cial 4 

a es The 

Omphalos at Delphi 397 

_ we are not left to philology. We know what an omphalos actually 
was, and we have traditions as to what it was believed to be. 
These traditions seem at first to contradict the monumental 

evidence, but, as we shall see immediately, both tradition and 
monumental facts, are equally true and equally essential to any 
right understanding. We begin with the monumental facts. 

Few, Pausanias? tells us, ever entered the adyton ; few therefore 
saw the real omphalos. Pausanias himself does not seem to have 
seen it, for, in enumerating the contents of the adyton, he makes 
no mention of the omphalos. But, outside the temple near the 
altar of the Chians and the famous stand of the krater of Alyattes, 
_ king of Lydia, there was another omphalos which Pausanias? did 
see and thus describes : 

What the people of Delphi call the omphalos is made of white stone and 
is said by them to be at the centre of the whole earth, and Pindar in one of 

his odes agrees with this. 

Pausanias it would seem, before he entered the temple, saw 
an omphalos and 4 propos of it gives the current tradition about 
the omphalos which he did not see. On the vase-painting® in 
Fig. 109 which represents the slaying of Neoptolemos, an egg- 
shaped omphalos is seen in the open air under a palm tree. 

1 x, 24. 5. 
2 x, 16.2 rov 66 brd Acdday Kadotuevoy dudaddy, Gov memoenuevov AevKod TodTo 

oy elvan TO ev péow ys mdons K.T.d. 

3 Annali d. Inst. 1868, Tav. d’ Agg. E. 

From Daimon to Olympian 

This outside omphalos has been found by the French excavators? 

Fie. 109. 

Just on the very spot where Pausanias saw it, and is shown in Fig. 110. 
As he described it, it is not a stone but ‘made of white stone.’ It 
is covered with an agrenon, a net of 
fillets copied here in stone. We have 
then simply a holy Stone, and the 
evidence of Pausanias and the vases 
is confirmed. The discovery of an 
actual omphalos, we are told, is ‘ ex- 
ceedingly interesting, but we are not 
one jot better off than we were as to 
its meaning. The old question faces 
us. What is the reason of its 
sanctity ? 

We turn to literary tradition and 
literary tradition comes as a salutary 
shock. It is to Varro we owe a 
tradition as to the omphalos that is 
of capital importance. Epimenides 

Fie. 110. 

? By kind permission of the Director of the Ecole Frangaise I was allowed to 
publish it in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, 1900, p. 254, Fig. 2. But 
as the title of my article—Aegis-Agrenon—shows, its object was only to discuss the 
decoration. I had previously (Delphika, J. H. 8. xrx. 1899, p- 225) discussed the 
value of the omphalos itself, and to this article I must refer for many details. A 
number of illustrations of omphaloi will be found in Prof. Middleton’s article in 
J. H. S. 1888, p. 296 ff. By far the best account of the omphalos known to me is 
that by Dr G. Karo in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques 
et Romaines, s.v. omphalos. By the kindness of Prof, Svoronos I have just received 
his monograph on oi 6u@adol tov Ilvoiwy, but not in time to utilize hig researches. 

Omphalos as Grave-mound 

i 

of Phaistos—having an omphalos of his own in Crete, though 
he did not assign this as the reason—impiously denied that the 
omphalos at Delphi was the centre of the earth’. Varro? agrees 
with him, and not only, he says, is the omphalos at Delphi not 
the centre of the earth but the human navel is not the centre 
of the human body. He then goes on to say that 

What the Greeks call the omphalos is something at the side of the temple 
at Delphi, of the shape of a thesaurus, and they say it is the tumulus of Python. 

The omphalos then according to literary tradition is not a fetich- 
stone butagrave-mound, and moreover, for this is cardinal, it is 
not a grave-mound commemorating a particular dead man, it is 
the grave-mound of a sacred snake, the sacred snake of Delphi. 
The testimony of Varro does not stand alone. Hesychios? in 
explaining the words To&iov Bovvos, ‘ Archer’s Mound,’ says: 

It is of Apollo in Sikyon, but according to a better tradition it is the 
place in Delphi called Wape (ravine). For there the snake was shot down. 
And the omphalos of Earth is the tomb (rados) of the Python. 

Monumental fact then says that the omphalos is a holy Stone, 
tradition says it is the grave of a daimon-snake. Which is right ? 
Happily both. The question once fairly stated almost answers 
itself. A holy Stone is not a grave, but a holy Stone may stand | 
upon a grave, and such a complex of tomb and tombstone is the 
omphalos. 

Tomb and tombstone, grave-mound and stele are known to us, 
of course, from Homer. When Sarpedon was carried to the rich 
land of wide Lycia his kinsmen and clansmen buried him 

With mound and stele—such are dead men’s dues‘. 

Grave-mounds are found all over the world. They are, when 
the ground is soft, the simplest form of sepulture; you dig a hole, 
heap a mound, plant a stone or memorial pillar to mark the spot. 
You may have the mound without the stone, or the stone without 
the mound, but for a complete conspicuous tomb you want both. 

1 Plut. de defect. orac.1. The myth here related is purely aetiological to account 
for the birds on the omphalos. It does not here concern us. _ i 

2 De ling. Lat. vir. 17 Praeterea si quod medium id est umbilicus, ut pilae, terrae, 
non Delphi medium. Sed terrae medium non hoc sed quod vocant Delphis in 
aede ad latus est quiddam ut thesauri specie, quod Graeci vocant 6ugaddv, quem 
Pythonos aiunt tumulum. 

3 g,v. Toglou Bouvés. 

4 Tl. xvt. 675 THuBw Te oTHAy Te’ TO yap yépas ear GaydvTwr. 

2S 

~ 

Pant ae 

400 From Daimon to Olympian [cH. 

Is this then all? Is the omphalos simply the heaped-up grave 
of a local hero marked by a commemorative pillar? Are we driven 
at last by facts, back to common-sense and Euhemerism? A. 
thousand times ‘No.’ The omphalos is a grave compounded of 
mound and stele; yet the grave contains no dead man but a 
daimon-snake ; the stele is, as we shall immediately see, a thing 
not commemorative but magical. 

Varro tells us the omphalos is like in shape to a thesaurus or 
treasury. It is now recognized that the ‘treasury’ of which Varro 
is speaking is not, as was formerly supposed, a beehive tomb, a 
thing like the ‘Treasury’ of Atreus, but merely a money-box of 
the ‘beehive tomb shape. Two of these are reproduced in Fig. 
111 aand b. Their shape is that of a blunt cone, and their likeness 

Adages bale 

to the omphalos is clear. On the one (a) just below the hole for 
the money, is a shrine with Hermes holding purse and kerykeion ; 
near him his cock. On the other (0) stands a figure of Fortuna 
or Agathe Tyche with cornucopia and rudder. They are there, as 
the god and goddess of money, but it will not be forgotten? that 
in early days they were daimones of the fertility of the earth. 

1 H. Graeven, Die thinerne Sparbiichse in Altertum in Jahrbuch d. Inst. xvi. 
1901, p. 160, Figs. 27, 29. Specimen (a) was formerly in the Castellani collection ; 

(6) is in the Cabinet de médailles of the Bibliothéque Nationale, No. 5230. 
2 pp. 284 and 296. 

a 

F pe (Aa os . ic, 
0 a ee 

: Omphalos and Beehive-Tomb AOL 

But, though Varro is probably only thinking of money-boxes, 
these money-boxes reflect the shape and to some extent the 
function of other and earlier ‘Treasuries,’ the familiar beehive 
tombs. Pausanias? thus describes the ‘Treasury’ of Minyas, to 
him the great wonder of the world: 

= It is made of stone ; its shape is round, rising up to a rather blunt top, 
___and they say that the topmost stone is the keystone of the whole building. 
4 We are reminded of the omphalos-form, and it seems others 
saw the analogy too, for Aristotle? tells us that 

What are called omphaloi are the midmost stones in vaulted buildings, 

A beehive tomb must of necessity have a central keystone, but 
the ‘ Treasuries’ which abound in Greece proper have no keystone 
that is in any way like an omphalos. Fora real and instantly con- 
vincing analogy we must go to Asia Minor. In Fig. 112 we have 

brennan toe, 

VMI 

a Fie. 112. 

a view of the so-called ‘Tomb of Tantalos’ on Mt. Sipylos, before 
it was excavated’. The dotted lines indicate of course a restoration 

1 1x, 88.3 .,.cxfua dé mepipepés éotw aire, Kopupy d€ ok és dyay 6&0 avnyuern... 
TOY 5€ dvwrdtw TY MOwy paclv dpyoviay mavTl eival TH olKodopruare. ; 

2 De mund. vi. 28 of 6udadol dé Neyduevor ol ev rats warlor AlGor, ol wéoo Ketwevot, 

3 Texier, Description de l’Asie Mineure, vol. u. pp. 253, 254, Plate CXXX,, 
Fig. 14. For evidence as to the restoration see the text. Numerous phalloi were 
found round the tombs, of just the right size to serve as keystones. They are 
— omphalos-shaped. 

H. 26 

* ie 
Ses Ly ies Q th 4 

—Fat fu ta - 

402. From Daimon to Olympian [CH 
but a certain one—the keystone of the great vault is a terminal 

cone like the Delphic omphalos, the chamber of death was crowned 

by the primitive symbol of life. It is no stele commemorating an 

individual man, still less’ is it a mere architectural or decorative 

feature; it is there with solemn magical intent to, ensure, to induce, 
the renewal of life, reincarnation. 

~The ‘Tomb of Tantalos’ is of great importance because it fixes 

beyond a doubt the nature of an omphalos stone, But if Asia 

Minor is felt to be too remote we have evidence, though somewhat 

less explicit, nearer home. On the road from Megalopolis to 

Messene, Pausanias! saw a sanctuary of certain goddesses called 

Maniae, which name he believed to be a title of the Eumenides. 

With the sanctuary was associated the story of the madness of 
Orestes. 

Not far from the sanctuary is a mound of earth of no great size and set 
up upon it is a finger made of stone. And indeed the name of the mound is 
Finger’s Tomb. 

SSSBSaS 

a5 PAT S DS 

ee er SIV PL IIIIIQVG OSS SSS5 

o OILS SS > > 
= > ? _ AN 
: (oe > 

ZZ 
C WLLL, 

Fie. 113. 

Pausanias goes on to recount a purely aetiological myth about 
Orestes in his madness biting off one of his fingers. 
What ‘Finger’s Tomb’ must have looked like may be seen in 
Fig. 113 the design from a black-figured lekythos?. We have the 

4 VIII. 34. 2 2.00 mbppw dé Tod lepod yijs xGud éorw ob méya, érlOnua éxov Nov 
Remeyener ddxrudov, kal 67 Kal dvoua TO Xwuarl éort Aaxridov py hua. 

iN the Naples Museum. For full details see my Delphika in J.H.S. xrx. 1889, 
p- : ; 

if 

i 

~ § Daktyl’s Monument’. _ 

mound of earth covered in this case by lewkoma. The mound is 
surmounted by a conical stone painted black and, roughly, finger- 
shaped, It stands on a basis of black stone, Bury the mound 
out of sight in earth, and you have an omphalos on a basis like 
those in the vase-paintings. The figures on either side approach 
as though for some solemn ritual; probably of oath-taking. 

We have translated the words Aaxtv’Xov puna as ‘ Finger’s 
Tomb’ because they were undoubtedly so understood by Pausanias 
and the people who told the aetiological myth about Orestes. But 
the true gist of the monument is better realized if we translate 
_ ‘Daktyl’s monument.’ In discussing Herakles the nature of the 
Daktyls’ became evident. They are fertility-daimones, Daktyl’s 
monument is mutatis mutandis the same as the ‘Tomb of Tantalos,’ 

The funeral mound in Fig. 113 is marked by a great black snake, 
A white mound marked by a snake is indeed on vase-paintings 
the normal form of a-hero’s tomb. A good instance is shown in 

Fie. 114, 

Fig. 114 from a black-figured amphora”, Here we have the funeral 
mound of Patroklos. Above the mound is a pigmy eidolon, the 
hero’s ghost; on the mound is the hero-snake whose meaning is 
now® to us amply clear. To its special significance in relation to 
the omphalos we shall return when we come to the myth of the 
slaying of Python. 

The covering of white stucco served a double purpose. It 
preserved the mound from the weather and also made it con- 
spicuous. A tomb was necessarily tabu, and the more conspicuous 
it was, the safer for the chance passer-by. In Fig. 115 from an Attic 

4 Eee Aca Vasenbilder, 111. Taf. 199, Berlin, Cat. 1867, No, 1902. 

3 Supra, chapter vit. 
26—2 

ae Tad 

— 

404 From Daimon to Olympian [cH : 

leékythos? the mound is covered with lewkoma but the precaution 
has failed. A passer-by has transgressed the tabu. Out from the 

Fig. 115. 

grave-mound darts a huge snake, the offended daimon, the Erinys 
of the tomb. on 

The ordinary grave-mound, as seen in Figs. 113, 114, is 
covered with leukoma on which is painted a snake, but it has as a 
rule no surmounting cone. It is not a complete omphalos-tomb. 
On many Athenian lekythoi we have a representation of the 
mound and the stele. A fine example? is given in Fig. 116. The 

allele) De cee woman feleleie 
ee xy 

Fie. 116, 

1 Remains of actual tombs covered with Nevxwua have come to light. That it 
was in use in Athens we know from Solon’s prescription of it (Cicero, de leg. m. 26). 
For the whole question see Winnefeld, Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1891, p. 197, Taf. 1v., by 
whom the vase in Fig. 115 was first published. ae : 

2 Now in the National Museum, Athens. See Prof. Bosanquet, Some early 
Funeral Lekythoi, J. H. 8. xix. 1899, Pl. 1. p. 169. 

rx] 
commemorative stele stands on a high stepped basis. Apparently 
behind it is a large egg-shaped grave-mound, $225 Ones 
It is tempting to see in the stele a survival or transformation 
of the surmounting cone, but the vase-painting in Fig. 117! forbids 

BEelEewerrefrere. 

Fic. 117, 

this supposition. When a vase-painter wanted to draw a cone he 
was well able to do so. It is not clear from the drawing whether 
the cone stood by the side of the mound or passed through it 
emerging into sight at the top, but in any case we have a well- 
defined cone not a stele. The intent is therefore magical not 
commemorative, though as we saw in considering the Intichiwma 
ceremonies the two are to the primitive mind not wholly sundered’. 

The sceptical reader will probably by this time demand a plain 
answer to a long-suppressed question. By collecting and com- 
bining scattered evidence, literary and monumental, it has been 
made possible and indeed practically certain that the omphalos 
was a cone surmounting a grave. We have further had abundant 
evidence that cones did surmount graves. Well and good. But 
such monuments, we found, were called the ‘Tomb of Tantalos’ 
or ‘Finger’s Tomb.’ Can we point to any grave-mound surmounted 
by a cone which we can fairly associate with an omphalos? Happily 

1 From an Athenian white lekythos in the possession of Mr Cook, by whose 
most kind permission it is figured here. The drawing was made for me by 
‘Mrs Hugh Stewart. 
2 Supra, p. 124. 

406 From Daimon to Olympian [ORG 

we can, and this final evidence clinches our whole argument. It 
also casts new light on the relations between Gaia and Apollo. 

APOLLO AGUIEUS. 

The bronze coin? in Fig. 118 is from Byzantium. On the obverse 
is the head of Apollo; on the reverse an object 
which, in the light of what has been already 
seen, is not hard to explain. It is a mound 
surmounted by a tall narrow cone-shaped 
pillar, round which near the top is a wreath. 
The cone with the wreath looks somewhat like 
a cross, and might be mistaken for this 
Christian symbol. We are however able to trace the type back 
to earlier coins where all likeness to the cross disappears. 

In Fig. 119 we have placed side by side for comparison (a) a 

Fie. 119. 

coin’ of Megara, (b) a coin of Apollonia in Illyria, (c) a coin of 
Ambrakia in Epiros.- All three show the slender obelisk or cone 
of our Byzantium coin, but it stands on a basis not a mound, and 
has slightly variant adjuncts. The Megara coin (a) is of special 
interest, for Byzantium was a colony of Megara and doubtless 
derived its coin-types from the mother-city. The obelisk here is 
decorated with two dependent fillets and what seems to be a wreath 
seen sideways, it is certainly not a cross; to either side in the field 
is a dolphin. On the coin of Apollonia (b) the pillar tapers slightly 
to either end and has a wreath only. The coin of Ambrakia (c) 
has two fillets dependent from the point of the obelisk, and here 
a surprise awaits us. 

The filleted obelisk on the coins of Ambrakia is the symbol 

' In the ‘possession of Mr Cook, and published by his Kina permission from a 

drawing made for me by Mrs H. Stewart. For previous discussion f 
see Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Aguieus, p. 912. : Ese ue ee 

oe im ae A ey 
ag a tate Ua 4 aie 

| The Aguieus-Cone 407 
and vehicle of a god thrice familiar, Apollo Aguieus, ‘He of the 
Ways. Harpocration! thus describes him: 

Aguieus is a pillar tapering to the end, which they set up before the doors. 
And some say they are proper to Apollo, others to Dionysos, others to both, 

It is usually thought that Harpocration is blundering when 
he attributes the Aguieus pillar 
to Dionysos. Now that its real 
nature as a fertility-symbol is 
understood he is seen to be 
right. The pillar was neither 
Apollo nor Dionysos, it preceded 
and entered into the nature of 
both. 

A good specimen of an actual 
Aguieus-pillar? is still extant 
and is given in Fig. 120. It is 
cone-shaped, and on it are a 
number of pegs on some of which 
hang votive wreaths. About 
two-thirds of the way up as on 
the coin of Megara a fillet is 
twined round the pillar. Round 
the vase are sculptured figures 
of Apollo himself in human form 
dancing round his own Aguieus 
pillar. Opposite him is Pan play- 
ing on the syrinx. To their 
piping dance the three Horae. 
It is a strange conjunction of 
old and new, the human-shaped 

Fra. 120. 

1 g.y. Ayuds* dyueds 6€ éore klww eis OE) Aiyor, dv tordor mpd T&v Oupdv* ldtous dé 
elval pacw avrovs ’Amdddwvos, of d€ Arovicou, ol 6é dugow. 

2 Now in the Villa Albani. See Panofka, Dionysos und die Thyiaden, 1852, 
Taf. ut. No. 9. Panofka explains the pillar as Dionysos, and refers to the 
Dionysos Stylos of Thebes (Clem, Alex. Strom. 1. 346). But the cones were before 
the human-shaped god, and it is only by their monumental context that they can 
be assigned to one or another. In the present case the lyre-playing Apollo points 

to Aguieus. Further, we know from Clement (Strom. 1. 348) that according to the 

author of the Europia, in the temple of Apollo at Delphi there was a high pillar on 
which were hung tithes and spoils votive to him. 
:  "Odpa beg dexdrny axpobind TE Kpeudo ajrey 
orabuav éx fabéwy Kal Klovos vynrovo. 
But the description is too vague to be decisive evidence. 

OU a ey eS ee 

408 From Daimon to Olympian [ CH. 

divinities still as it were adhering to the old sanctity from which 
they sprang. : 

The cone with the dancing Horae throws light I think on one 
form of the triple Hekate, as shown in F ig. 1211. . Three maidens 
dance round a central half-humanized column. The type which 
occurs frequently is usually and rightly explained as Hekate, and the 
triple Charites who dance round the column are triple because of 
the three phases of the Moon. As such they are clearly shown 
in another Hekateion relief at Budapest, where on the head 
of the midmost figure is a great crescent. 
Further this relief shows clearly that the 
triple maidens were, to begin with, of 
earth. One of them like the Semnae, like 
the Erinyes, holds a coiled snake. The 
Horae or Seasons of the Moon, her 
Motrae, are preceded by the earlier Horae, 
the Seasons of Earth’s fertility, at first 
two, spring for blossoming, autumn for 
fruit, then under the influence of a moon- 
calendar three. These earliest Horae dance 
as was meet round the old fertility-pillar. 

The scholiast on the Wasps* as well as 
Suidas‘ both state that the cone-shaped 
Aguieus is Dorian, and the statement ac- 
cording to the scholiast has the authority 
of Dieuchidas of the fourth century B.C. 
who wrote chronicles of Megara. The 
point is interesting because the coins cited 
all come from Dorian colonies, and since 
Prof. Ridgeway’s® investigations Dorian 
now spells for us not late Hellenic but primitive ‘ Pelasgian,’ 

Fig, 121. 

* In the Museum at Prague. For these Hekateia see my Mythol. and Mon. 
of Anc. Athens, p. 379. 
? Archiol. epigr. Mitt. aus Oestr. 1. Taf. VI. 
3 v. 875 & déomor’ dvat yetrov "Ayued roduod tpoOdpou mporvNate. 
4 s.v. "Ayual...dyueds dé dor klwv...as in Harpocration. He adds gore 82 dcop 
Awpiewy* elev 8 ay of mapa rols ’Arrikois Aeyouevoe drynels of pd TeV oikrav Bopol as 
ZopordAs werdywv rd,’ AOnvalwy €6y eis Tpolay dyot 
Adumer & duels Bwyds arulev rupt 
outpyns cradaybmots, BapBdpous evooulas. . 
kal dyueds 6 mpd Trav addelov Oupav Kwvoerdis kiwy lepds ’Améd\Xwvos kal adrds beds. 
> Who were the Dorians? in Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor, 
1907, p. 295, but for another view see Mr OC. Hawes, B.S.A. xvr. 1909-10, p. 265. 

The Agwieus-Cone as Altar 

_ Suidas speaks of the Aguieus pillars as ‘altars’ (@wpoi). As 
an altar in our sense, as a place for burnt-offering, the obelisk could 
scarcely serve, but, when it stood on a grave-mound or on a basis, 
mound or basis would serve as altar while wreaths and stemmata 
as on the coins would be hung on the obelisk. In this connection 
it is instructive to note that on a black-figured vase-painting? 
Fig. 122 we have an omphalos-like structure decorated with diaper 
pattern, and against it is clearly written ‘Bwyds. The primitive 
altar was not a stone structure raised high above the earth but 
rather a low mound of earth, a grave-mound. This is shown very 
clearly in the vase-painting on another vase”, where there is no 

Fic, 122. 

doubt that the omphalos-like structure is a grave-mound. The 
scene is the slaying of Polyxena over the very tomb of Achilles 
into which her blood is seen flowing. Near the omphalos-altar is a 
_low hearth, an eschara. 

The pillar of Aguieus stood before the entrance of the Athenian 
house’, This comes out very clearly in the absurd scene of the 
sacralization of the Court in the Wasps‘. The chorus of old 
dikasts solemnly invoke the god of the place: | 

‘O Pythian Phoebus, and Good Fortune, 
O speed this youth’s design 

Wrought here, these gates before ; 

Give us from wanderings rest 

And peace for evermore, 

Teie Paian.’ 

1 Munich Cat. 124; Gerhard, Auserlesene Vasenbilder, 223. 

2 A ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora in the British Museum. H. B. Walters, Je Heese 
xvinl. 1898, Pl. xv. p. 284. , 

_ 8 Three examples of Aguieus-pillars are still in situ beside house-doors at 
Pompeii. Another, inscribed Mds pe toaro, is in the Corfu Museum. See J. Six in 
A, Mitt. x1x. 1894, 340—345. : d wf 

4 y. 869. Ihave ventured to interpolate ‘Good Fortune’ in Mr Rogers’ trans- 
lation, of which I make use. Apollo as Aguieus is essentially Agathos-Daimon. 
_ ‘He probably had the old honey-service instead of wine, and this I-think is referred 
to in the words (v. 878) dvri cupatou wédiros prKxpov TO Ovuidly mapapléas. N 

From Daimon. to Olympian 

And Bdelycleon, while the Paean is sung, looks up to the 
conical pillar of Aguieus who was also Patroos and prays for 
his father: ‘Nes 

‘Aguieus, my neighbour, my hero, my lord! who dwellest in front of my 
vestibule gate, ; 

I pray thee be graciously pleased to accept the rite that we new for my 
father create.’ 

Apollo Aguieus is often interpreted as a sun-pillar and with 
some measure of truth. In front of the ordinary Athenian house 
there stood not only an Aguieus but a Hekateion. Philocleon? is 
filled with the bright hope that the oracles will come true and 
each Athenian will someday build 

Before his own door in the porch a Courtlet, 
A dear little Courtlet like a Hekateion. 

Aguieus the sun will guard and guide him by day, Hekate the 
Moon by night. So the scholiast on Plato? understands Apollo 
and Hekate. They are both évd8s01 Saipoves ‘ Way-Gods, lighting 
the wayfarer, the first business of moon and sun to primitive man. 

By ‘daimon of the ways’ he means Artemis or Selene; Apollo also is called 
Of the Ways (Aguieus), because they both fill the ways with light, the one, 
the Sun, by day, the other by night. Therefore they set them up in the 
roads. 

The triple Hekateia as we have seen show a pillar surrounded 
by three dancing figures*. The pillar of life has become a pillar 
of light. Aguieus is Phoibos. | 

_Aguieus the pillar is often confused with the Herm. The wife 
of Mnesilochos goes out to met her lover and talks to him, near. 
the Aguias, under a bay-tree. The scholiast‘ explains Aguieus 
as aherm. ‘They give this name to a four-square Apollo” In 
intent there is obviously no difference, but the form was unlike 
and they were probably developed by different peoples. Hermes 
remained in cultus phallic to the end; Aguieus, at least at Delphi, 
was by historical times expurgated, possibly because he early took 

‘ 

1 Ar, Vesp. 804: 
£2 Legg. 914 B évodlay Saluova rip “Apreu Frou thy Dedhyny gpnoly, éret Kai 6 
"ATdwy "Ayueds, Kal yap dudw ras ddods Trypodot pwrds, 6 mev uepas 6 Atos 7 Oe 
vuxros. dud Kal ldpvoucr Tovrous év adrais, ' a 
3 Supra, p. 408. 
4 Ar, Thesm. 489 za, 

pa tov ’Ayud, Schol. dyweds otrw Kaovmevos ’Amd\\wv 
TeTpd-ywvos. 

Apollo and the Omphalos 411 

on as ‘birthday gift’ from Phoibe the fertility of the moon rather 
than the earth. be orks 
: On the red-figured vase-painting in Fig. 123! we see the 

Fie. 123. 

Olympian Apollo seated on the omphalos’. The scene is certainly 
at Delphi, for the figure approaching on the left and holding a 
_ sheathed sword is Orestes balanced to the right by Pylades. Apollo 
looks triumphant holding lyre and laurel branch, and if we think 
of him as dethroning Gaia from her ancient. seat we find his 
intrusion hard to bear, but, remembering Aguieus, it may be that 
the seated Olympian is no parvenu but only the fully humanized 
form of the ancient fertility cone, surmounting the grave-mound. 

f/The grave-cone took shape in Aguieus, but naturally the 

omphalos-cult was not confined to Delphi or associated only with 
Apollo. It might arise anywhere where there was a hero-grave 
or a worship of Earth-Spirits’. We have seen that Asklepios had 

1 Raoul Rochette, Mon. Méd. pl. 37. Naples Museum, Heydemann Cat. 108. 
2 For the type in sculpture see Mr Wace’s article in B.S.A. 1902-3 (ix.), p. ‘211. 
3 An instructive parallel to the omphalos-cult I believe to be the ceremonial of 
the Latin mundus, covered by the lapis manalis. But the examination of this 
would take me too far for present limits. I will only note that the two elements of 
the omphalos-cult, ghosts or fertility, are very clearly present, though their connection 
is not expressly stated. Varro (ap. Macrob. 1. 16. 18) says ‘Mundus cum patet, 
-deorum tristium atque inferum ianua patet.’ Plutarch, Vit. Rom. 11, notes that 
the mundus was, as it were, the penus or storehouse of the new city, dmapxal re 
adr boos voum wey ws KaAols ExpGvTo, Poet dE ws dvarykato.s, dreTéOnoay évravea. 
As often with the Latins, we have the social fact presented clearly because inmytho- 
logized. For ‘Mundus patet’ see Mr Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 211, 
and for Tellus and the Manes see his Religious Experience of the Roman People, 
BI opal Oar RE 

412 From Daimon to Olympian (on. 

a snake-twined omphalos'; there was probably an omphalos in 
Cyprus; we shall meet another in Athens. At Phlius’, that home 
of archaic cults, there was an omphalos which, in emulation of 
Delphi, was reputed to be the midmost point of the whole Pelo- 
ponnese, a pretension obviously absurd. It stood near the ancient 
house of divination of Amphiaraos, where was a dream-oracle. 

At Argos an inscription* has come to light which tells how 
the mpopavtves and tpopfptas of Apollo Pythios 

established, in accordance with an oracle, the omphalos of Ga and the 
colonnade and the altar...and they arranged a thesauros in the oracular 
shrine. 

Obviously this complex was a correct copy of the Delphic 
installation and would have no interest for us, but that it probably 
supplanted or somehow rearranged a more ancient sanctuary. 
When the Danaides in the Supplices of Aischylus land at Argos 
they betake themselves as suppliants to a hill (adyos)®> whereon 
‘was an altar and about it somewhere the symbols of the gods, or 
rather, as we should put it, the sanctities that preceded any 
definite divinities. They are called by Danaos the dydveoe Geol, 
gods of the agon or assembly, The chorus, more justly, alludes to 
them as daimones. 

The chorus, holding their suppliant branches, which are, 
Danaos says, ‘images of holy Zeus®, that is of Zeus Aphiktor’, 
Zeus the ‘ Suppliant,’ pray, as they needs must, and as Aaschylus 
would himself desire, first and foremost to Zeus. But, seated as 
they are, on the holy mound, they have to get into touch with 
the local sanctities. Hence a sort of sacramental litany follows, 
expounding and emphasizing, and as it were displaying, their 
forms and functions. 

1 Supra, p. 384. 

2 Hesych. vis 6upadds* 4 Iddos cal Aeddol. 

3 Paus. u. 13. 7. 

4 Vollgraff, Bull. Corr. Hell. 1903, p. 274 “Eocavro [ror] éx HavTnas Tas dudaddv 
kal tla]y meploraow Kal 7d gdpdyya Kal Tov Bousr...cal Oncavpov &v Te wavrhy 
KaTegKEevacoay. : 

5 Fisch, Supp. 179 

duewdv éore ravros elver’, & Kopa, 
mayor mpoalfew Tavs’ dywvlwy beav. 

Gols aN os TdxicTa Bare, Kal AevKooTedets : 

ixernplas dyddpuar’ aldolov Acés... 
- ” Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic2, p. 291, has shown that Zeus Aphiktor 
1s a ‘projection’ of the rite of Supplication. : Z SF 

The. Omphalos at Argos 

_ Zeus duly invoked, Danaos continues, pointing to some symbol : 

Da. Next call ye upon yonder son of Zeus. 

Cho. We call upon the saving rays of the Sun. 

Da. And pure Apollo banished, a god, from heaven}, 

Unless we realize the background the passage is not easy to 
understand, but, if we suppose an omphalos-sanctuary, all is clear. 
Danaos at the word ‘yonder’ (rovde) points to the Aguieus-pillar 
that marks the top of the mound. It is the symbol of the young 
son (iis), the kowros of Zeus. But the chorus do not quite catch 
his point. They answer conventionally, and perhaps with a trace 
of Egyptian reminiscence, ‘ Yes, of course, Apollo the Sun with 
his saving rays. Well and good, says Danaos, but the point just 
now is that you appeal to a god who was, like yourselves, banished, 
and who, though counted as impure, was intensely, savingly pure, - 
and the source of life, health and salvation. The holy stone he 
points to is, like the omphalos, like the stone on which Orestes sat 
at Gythion*, like the black stone of the Mother‘, kathartic and 
apotropaic. It is an earlier sanctity and purity than the purity 
of the Sun. 

Among the local sanctities precedence is given to the Apollo- 

stone which, if we are right, crowns the mound. Other sanctities 

appropriate to the circumstances of the Danaides are, the trident® © 
of the sea-god who has brought them hither, and the kerykeion 
of the herald-god who is the protector and vehicle of all suppliants*. 
We seem to see before us the social sanctities on their way to be 
divinities. Supreme among them is the relation to Ga, Ga Bownis’, 

1 Aisch. Supp. 202- 

Aa. kat Znvos tow révde viv Kikdjoxere. 

Xo. Kkadoduev adyas Hrlov swrnplous. 

Sete; Aa. ayvov 7° ’Ard\A\w puyds’ dm’ obpavot Gedy. 

The MSS. have éprw. Following Kiehl (Bamberger) and Prof. Tucker and 
Dr Headlam I read tw. If the reading épyw be correct, the reference must be to 
an eagle, 

2 For Apollo as Kowros see end of chapter. 

3 Paus. m1. 22. 1. 

4 The scholiast on Pind. m1. 77 tells of the Mother-stone for which Pindar 
founded ashrine. For the prophetic, kathartic and prophylactic properties of these 
holy stones in connection with the omphalos see my Delphika, J.H.S. xrx. p. 237, 
The phallos-stone being specially the vehicle of life was specially able to revivify 
and heal all sickness and misfortune. 

5 y, 208 6p Tplavav rhvde onuetov Geob. i 

Probably (see supra, p. 171) an ancient bidens-mark—as in the Erechtheion. 

6 Aisch. Supp. 210 Aa. “Epuns 86’ dddos rotow ‘EAAjvwr vomors. 

Xo. devddpas viv éoOAd knpuKevéTo. 

7 vy, T42 its ya Bowirt, WéiKov céBas. 

414 From Daimon to Olympian [oH 
‘Earth of the Mound, to whom the Danaides, the Well-Nymphs, — 
ever appeal. Even Zeus is to them ‘Child of Earth,’ hence Olbios 
and Ktesios!- It is scareely possible to breathe the religious 
atmosphere of the play save as we see it enacted against the 

background of the omphalos-sanctuary. 

We go back to Delphi and view the omphalos with new eyes. 
When the priestess passes into the inmost sanctuary of Gaia, she 
finds Orestes clinging to the life-stone and about him the aveng- 
ing ghosts, the fell Erinyes. They have come, it seemed to 
Aischylus—his mind all out of focus through his beautiful mono- 
theism and his faith in God the father—from afar, hunting the 
fugitive. But of course they, the ghosts, were there in the grave- 
sanctuary from the first. Like the Semnae they dwell in a chasm 
of the earth, and over the chasm stood, it may be, the life-stone, for 
they, the ghosts, year by year, bring, in the cycle of reincarnation, 
new-old life to man and to the earth, from which they spring and to 
which they return. They are from the beginning what Aaschylus 
makes them ultimately become, spirits of life, fertility-ghosts. 
By the mouth of Clytemnestra? he blackens their ritual: 

‘How oft have ye from out my hands licked up 
Wineless libations, sober offerings, 
On the low hearth of fire, banquets grim 
By night, an hour unshared of any god.’ 

Yet these same wineless libations, these sober offerings, were 
the due of the Eumenides at Argos, the snake-maidens, and of the 
Semnae at Athens: . 

The firstfruits offered for accomplishment 
Of marriage and for children3, 

_Aiischylus seems to have seen only the evil of the Karth-Spirits, 
only the perennial damnation of the blood-feud.. It-is impossible 
to avoid regret that he did not see that these Earth-Spirits were 
for blessing as for cursing, and that he Stooped to the cheap 

1 v, 859 & BG, Tas rat, Zed; v. 509 reevdtarov Kpdros, d\Bre Zed; for Zeus Olbios 
see supra, p. 148, v. 428 yévorr av &dAa xTnotov Avds xdpw; for Zeus Ktesios see 
supra, p. 297. : 

2 Asch. Hum. 106. fi 

* v. 837. For the practical identity of the ritual of the Erinyes, the E i 

s m 
and the Semnae, see Prolegomena, pp. 239—256. That the cached versie o 

well as fertility spirits is quite clearly shown by the customs connected with the 
devreporétuct. Op. cit: p. 244: a ay ee ot 

The Ennaeteric Festivals at Delphi 416 

expedient of maligning his spiritual foes. What in his inspired 
_ way he did see, both in the Supplices and the Hwmenides, was 
_ that the old forces of the Earth must be purged from forcefulness, 
from violence and vengeance, before Earth could in n plenitude 
bring forth her increase. 

d It remains to ask, ‘What do we know of the ritual of Gaia at 
Delphi?’ Of ritual to Gaia under that name and definitely stated 
to have been carried on at the omphalos-sanctuary, the answer, as 
previously indicated, is, ‘ Nothing.’ But it happens that we have 
from Plutarch a fairly full account of three manifestly primitive 
festivals which took place at Delphi every nine years, and these 
festivals, on examination, turn out to be three acts in one dramatic 
or rather magical ceremony, whose whole gist is to promote the 
fertility of Earth. They are in short three factors in, or forms Be 
a great Eniautos-Festival. 

THE ENNAETERIC FESTIVALS AT DELPHI. 

In his Greek Questions Plutarch! asks, ‘What is Charila enone 

_ the Delphians?’ His answer begins as follows: 

There are three Nine-Year Festivals that the Delphians keep in the — 

- following order. One they call Stepterion, the next Herois, the third 
~ Charila. 

All that Plutarch states is that these three festivals were each 
_ celebrated every nine years and that their sequence was as given, 
_ Whether they were all enacted at the same time—on, e.g. three 
successive days, or at successive periods in the year, cannot be 
decided certainly. The order is not of great importance, as in the 
cyclic monotony of the life of an Eniautos-daimon it matters little 
whether death follows resurrection or resurrection death. We 
shall begin therefore with the festival, the intent of which is 
clearest and to us most instructive, the second in order, the 
Herois or ‘Heroine,’ reserving for the end the festival with which 
Plutarch begins, the Stepterion. 

The Herois. This is a delightful otiy! to investigate, because 

: Z Q. Gr. x11. Tis 7 mapa Aeddors Xapida ; T pets dyovet Aedgol évvaernplias Kara 70 
«ks, ay Tip per Urewrhpiov Kahovar, Thy 0 “Hpwtda, rhv dé Xapidav.. 

416 From Daimon to Olympian [on 

we have only one source for it, Plutarch? himself. And he, though 
it is but little, tells us just enough for its understanding. 

Most of the ceremonies of the Herots have a mystical reason which is 
known to the Thyiades, but, from the rites that are done in public, one may 
conjecture it to be a ‘ Bringing up of Semele.’ 

The Herois was a woman’s festival. Plutarch of course could 
not be present at the secret ceremonies of the Thyiades, but his 
friend Thyia, their president, would tell him all a man might know. 
Part of the ceremonial he says was public. 

. Charila. The third of the ennaeteric festivals, the Charila, is 
the manifest counterpart of the Herois, and again Plutarch is our 
sole but sufficient source. After recounting the aetiological myth 
he gives us the ritual facts”. ; 

The king presided and made a distribution in public of grain and pulse 
to all, both strangers and citizens. And the child-image of Charila is brought 
in. When they had all received their share, the king struck the image with, 
his sandal, and the leader of the Thyiades lifted the image and took it away 
to a precipitous place and there tied a rope round the neck of the image and 
buried it, where they buried Charila when she hanged herself. 

Charila is manifestly, whether enacted in spring or autumn, a 
festival of the type of ‘Carrying out the Death. Charila is beaten 
and hanged and buried in some chasm. The nearest analogies in 
Greece are the pharmakos ceremonies and the ‘Driving out of 
Hunger®.”’ Like the Herois the Charila was managed by the 

Thyiades and was therefore a woman’s festival. 

It is however the Herois that most instructs us. It never 
seems to have occurred to Plutarch, as it would to a modern’ 
mythologist, that, because a festival was called Herots, it must 
have to do with a mortal ‘heroine.’ From the rites known to him 
he promptly conjectured that it was a ‘Bringing up of Semele.’ 
Semele, it is acknowledged, is but a Thraco-Phrygian form of 
Gaia. The ‘Bringing up of Semele’ is but the Anodos of Gaia 
or of Kore the Earth-Maiden. It is the return of the vegetation 
or Year-spirit in the spring. ; 

; u Qu. Gr. x1. THs 6é ‘Hpwidos Ta WretoTa puorikov exer Nbyov dv icacw al Ouddes 
€K . TOV Spwpev ev gpavepas Veuédys dv ris dvarywyhv elkdcere. ; 
R Loe. cit. MpoKabnrar mev yap 6 Bacideds, Tov addlrwv Kal Tov Xedpbrrwv émdidovs 
maot kal Eévots kal moNirats, koulferar d€ THs Xaplas macduxdv elSwhov.. 
3 Prolegomena, p. 106. : 

Heroines as Fertility-Daimones 417 

Why then is the festival called Herois? Because Herois is 
but the feminine of Hero, Strong One, Venerable One, and as it 
was the business of all Heroes to be Good Daimones and to bring 
fertility, so, and much more, was it the business of all Heroines, 
Again we have the ancestral dead, the collective dead women at 
their work of fertilization by way of reincarnation, and again they 
crystallize into one figure, Herois. 

That fertilization was indeed the business of Heroines and 
that they were expected to do it regularly for the Eniautos- 
festival is plainly evidenced by an inscription! of about the third 
century B.c. It was found in the precinct of Artemidoros in 
Thera, cut into a small basis or rock-altar on which statues seem 
to have stood. It runs as follows in two hexameter lines: 

Heroines they are who bring the new fruit to the Year-Feast, 

Come then to Thera’s land and accomplish increase for all things. 

We remember well enough that the spirits of the Earth, the 
ghosts, can be summoned for cursing. The ghost of Clytemnestra? 
hounds up her Erinyes, herself the leader of the pack. Althaea? 
beats upon the Earth with her hands to rouse the Curse; the 
priest of Demeter‘ at Pheneus in Arcadia smites the Earth with 
rods to summon the underground folk when there is swearing to 
be done by the holy Stones. But we are apt to forget, perhaps 
because Homer and sometimes Aschylus forgot, that there was a 
ritual which summoned these underground folk to bless and not 
to curse. 

At Megara, near the Prytaneion, Pausanias® saw 
a rock which they name Anaklethra, ‘Place of Calling up,’ because Demeter, 

if anyone believe it, when she was wandering in search of her daughter called 
her up there. 

1 1.G. vol. x11. (1904) fase. 11. Supp. Thera, Res Sacrae, No. 1340. 
[“Hpaicjoar Kaprdov véov 
[e]is évavrov dyovow, 
Oedre [k]ai ev Onpas xOovl 
Kell C]olva| mdvra redovoa. : 
The text is restored by Wilamowitz. For jpéooa, an emendation that seems 
practically certain, he compares Anth, Pal. v1. 225, and Ap. Rhod. rv. 1309. Both 
are references to Libyan heroines, and the relations of Thera to Cyrene in Libya 
were of course close. In the epigram a tithe of the winnowed harvest is offered to 
the heroines. I have again to thank Mr Cook for referring me to the important 
evidence of this Thera inscription, 
2 Asch. Hum. 115. 3 Tl, rx. 529. 
4 Paus. vit. 15. 2 ...rederH pdBdous Kata Néyor 57 Tiva. Tous UmoxGovious mater. Ay, 
5 1. 43,2 ..”Avax\yOpay ri mérpav dvoudfoucr...€oxdra de TH oyw Spwow Es Tuas 
ére ai Meyapéwr. 

H. Der 

cao ee 

418 From Daimon to Olympian [ CH. 

As to the aetiological myth Pausanias is rightly sceptical. 
Happily he adds: 

The women of Megara to this day perform rites that are analogous to the 
story told. 

Did the ‘Bringing up of Semele’ take place at an omphalos- 
sanctuary? At Delphi we cannot say for certain. It is possible 
that in the fragmentary Paean, ‘For the Delphians, Pindar? may 
allude to some such ceremonial. He goes gladly to Pytho we 
are told: 
to Apollo’s grove, nurse of wreaths and feasts, where oft by the shadowed 
omphalos of Earth the maidens of Delphi beat the ground with swift feet, as 
they sing of the son of Leto. 

But the reference is too vague to be of much use as evidence. 

At Athens we are more fortunate. Pindar we remember?, in 
his spring Dithyramb, bids the very Olympians come to the 
omphalos* of Athens, where, as on an altar, incense smokes and 
where many feet are treading. So insistent is he on the flowers 
and the ‘fragrant spring’ that. we can scarcely doubt that his 
song was written for the Anthesteria, We are sure it was written 
for a ‘ Bringing up of Semele,’ for: 

Then, then are flung over the immortal Earth lovely petals of pansies, 
and roses are amid our hair; and voices of song are loud among the pipes, 
the dancing-floors are loud with the calling of crowned Semele*. 

On Gaia worship as seen in ‘The Bringing up of Semele’ 
much light is thrown by the familiar ‘Anodos’ vases. The 
design in Fig. 124° shows the Anodos. We have a great mound 
of earth artificially covered in with a thick coat of white. On it 

1 Paeans, frg. vi. 15, Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynch. Pap. Part v. p. 41. 
KaTéBav orepavey 
kal Oadiav tpdpov adAcos ’Aré\- 
Awvos, 760c Aarotday 
Gaya Aehpdr Kbpac 
XOoves dupardoyv mapa 
oKidevTa jedr(d)mevar 
modl Kporéo(vre yav Gog). 
2 Supra, p. 208. 

3 Pind. frg. 75. 3 TwoNUBarov ott daoreos 
oupardv OvdevTa... 
4 y, 20 axel 7 dubai pedéwv ov addois, 

axel re Leuddav éxdurvKa xopol. 
> For the ‘Anodos’ type of vases see my Prolegomena, pp. 276—285 and p. 640 
where most of the important specimens are figured. The subject can only here be 
briefly resumed, so far as it affects the immediate argument, 
6 Krater, Berlin, 2646. Mon. d. Inst. xt. tay. 4, 

Ix] Anodos of Farth-Mother 419 

are painted a tree, leaf-sprays and a tortoise. From the top of 
the mound rises a tree. In the midst rises up the figure of a 
woman. It is a grave-mound, an omphalos-sanctuary, and she 
who is the spirit of the earth incarnate rises up to bring and be 
new life. The tree that springs from the mound is, like the cone, 
a symbol and vehicle of life. Probably it marked the earlier stage 

Fig. 124. 

in which the earth as mother was all-sufficing. On another Anodos 
vase! the uprising woman is inscribed (Phe)rophatta, but in most 
instances of the type she is nameless, she is the Earth-Kore reborn 
in spring. On the Pherophatta vase Hermes Psychopompos, he 
who summoned the Keres from the pithos, stands near with 
uplifted rhabdos. On the vase in Fig. 124 the Earth-Mother 
clearly rises from an artificial mound, and this is doubtless a 
grave. On yet another vase, a black-figured lekythos’, she rises, 
not out of a mound but within the precinct of a sanctuary marked 
by two columns, and from her head are branching trees. The 
grave 7s a sanctuary. 

On the Pherophatta vase we have clearly the influence of 

1 Krater, Albertinum Mus. Dresden. Jahrb. d. Inst. 1893, p. 166. 
2 Bibliothéque Nat. Paris, Cat. 298, Milliet et Giraudon, Pl. tir. 

27—2 

pei an | SS ee ee ee 

420 From Daimon to Olympian | [ CH. 

Eleusis; Pherophatta is the Hleusinian Kore, not the Thraco- 
Phrygian Semele, though their nature is one and the same. The 
uprising we note is here eagerly greeted by a choros of goat- 
daimones with hoofs and high pointed horns. Tityroi we might 
call them, though perhaps it is safest they should be nameless’. 
But on the vase in Fig. 124 it is horse-daimones, Satyrs, with 
but one goat-daimon, who attend the uprising. Moreover seated 
near the hill is Dionysos himself with his thyrsos waiting for 
his Mother to rise up. We have before us unquestionably the 
‘Bringing up of Semele.’ 

Tradition said that Dionysos fetched his mother up from the 
underworld. Apollodorus? sketching the history of the worship 
of Dionysos ends it thus: 

Finding that he was a god, men paid him worship, but he went and 
fetched his mother up out of Hades, gave her the title of Thyone and went 
up with her into heaven. 

The hasty Assumption of the mother, viewed as history, 
strikes us as abrupt and unmeaning. It is of course simply an 
Olympianized saga-mythos of the old ritual of the ‘Bringing up 
of Semele. Semele, Earth, never could or did go to heaven, but 
she rose up out of earth. She needed no son to bring her, her — 
son was indeed the fruits of the earth, the child Ploutos*, But, 
when patriarchy came in, and the Mother takes the lower place, 
someone has to ‘fetch her up.’ Moreover she must rise not only 
up from earth but up to high heaven. There is no one but her 
son to do all this. Later, Orpheus as lover ‘fetches up’ Eurydike, 
Earth, the ‘wide-ruler,’ the ‘broad-bosomed. He fails, because 
she must perennially return to Hades that she may rise again 
next spring. 

In actual ritual at Athens the Son as well as the Mother is 
summoned. And the Mother is summoned in her two-fold aspect 
of Mother and Maid rather than Mother and Daughter. In the 
ritual scene in the Frogs‘, at the bidding of the Hierophant, the 
chorus chant the Saviour Maid who—be it noted—comes first 

? Goat-daimones are also figured on the krater published by Dr Hartin 6 
Mitt. x11. 1899, p. 88, ‘Die Wiederkehr d. Kore.’ The figure a Kore rises Se 
vase straight from the ground. There is no omphalos-mound, The throng of 
ithyphallic goat-daimones seem to be dancing a regular dance. The focus of 
interest : Ee on them rather than on the figure of Kore. 

CuTTE OLteyinos 

3 Supra, p. 167. ay, oo —30G8 

+72 
' 

06 Lacchos as Spring-Daimon 421 

and hence is not daughter—and then, with changed measure, the 
Fruit-bearing Mother’. Next the Hierophant says : 
Now call Him hither, the Spirit of Spring’, 

And then follows the hymn to Iacchos, the young Dionysos of the 

mysteries : 
Iacchos, O Iacchos. 

The scholiast® on the passage gives valuable information. 

‘Some,’ he says, ‘account for the words xcdXe dedv thus. In the agones at 
the Lenaia of Dionysos, the Torchbearer, holding the torch, says, “Call ye 
the god,” and those present call aloud in answer, “Son of Semele, Iacchos, 
Wealth-Giver.”’ 

The ceremony of calling the god at Athens went on at the 
Lenaia, probably on the ancient orchestra, the round dancing- 
place close to the agora. Its central altar may well have been the 
omphalos, though of this there is no certain evidence. Manifestly 
the Son of Semele, the Earth-goddess, is but the impersonation, 
the projection of the fruits of the Earth. Like the child in the 
cornucopia he is Wealth, Ploutos. Beginning as a child in the 
religion of Mother and Son, he ends in later patriarchal days as 
a white-haired old man‘, 

The functional identity of and the easy shift between Mother 
and Son, Earth and He of the Earth, Semele and Semeleios, is 
shown in vase-paintings. On far the greater number Semele 
herself rises through the mound or out of the level earth, but 
sometimes the heads of both Mother and Son are seen rising side 
by side*. Two instances are known to me in which the Son rises 
alone through the mound. One of these is reproduced in Fig. 125°, 

1 y, 383 dye viv érépay tuvev lidav, rhv xapropépoy Baciheaar, 
Ajpntpa Oedv. 

2 vy. 395 viv kal tov wpatov Gedy mapaxadetre detpo. e .. : 

The adjective patos is quite untranslateable. It means blooming in spring. As 
the word wpa is primarily the season of spring, my translation may perhaps pass. 
Eros too is wpatos as the life-spirit (see supra, p. 187). The ritual instruction 
kddeu Tov Gedy 1s good comic material later in the play (v. 479). 

3 Adv. 479 76 Te ‘kdder Oedv’ Twes ot rws drobedwkacw* év Tots Anvaikols dyGou Tod 
Atovicov 6 dadoixos karéxwv Ndwrrada Never, Kadetre Oedv' Kal of vrakovovTes Bowot 
Demerrjie “laxxe wAovrodéra. Later when people did not understand the ‘summon. 
ing’ of the Spring-Spirit they thought the Olympian was called ‘pos dpwyjv. 
Zeuedyie probably meant to begin with just ‘Harth-One,’ not Son of Semele. 

4 As on a kalpis in the British Museum, Cat. E. 229, where, absurdly enough, 
the white-haired Hades-Plouton holds a huge cornucopia. 

5 Prolegomena, p. 407, Fig. 130. 

6 In the Hope collection at Deep-dene. See Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1890, p. 120, 
note 17. In the collection of Greek Antiquities at Stockholm I saw a late red- 
figured vase, the design of which seemed, as far as memory served me, almost 
identical with this. There may be others of the same type as yet unnoted. 

“a i f > = 1. © a 

422 From Daimon to Olympian -[ CH. 

The Son uprising is attended by a figure of Nike. Maenads as 
well as Satyrs await his rising. From the artificial mound a 
leafed spray is blossoming. 

Fie. 125. 

The attendants that wait on the rising figure are of high 
importance. They not only await but often actively aid the 
uprising. On the vase! in Fig. 124 they are idle though keenly 
interested spectators, In the Pherophatta vase they dance, 

-b5) — rT Up , 
> TULUM ACT 

Fie. 126. 

probably by way of magical induction. On the vase in Fig, 126 
they are drastic. Each of the two Satyrs holds a great pick. 

* Hydria, now, M. Hébert kindly informs me, in the Musée Cinquanténaire at 
Brussels: Fréhner, Choix de Vases Grecs, Pl. v1. 24. 

The Satyrs as Fertility-Daimones 423 

They have hacked open the ground to help the Earth-Maiden to 
rise. It is impossible to say for certain that the dromena of the 
‘Bringing up of Semele’ included the hacking of the earth with 
picks, but some action of the sort may well have been part of the 
ritual of an agricultural people. The earth in some few favoured 
regions brings forth her fruit in due season without man’s help, 
but in Greece, with its thin stony soil, man must help her. Long 
before he invented the plough, and long after in places where no 
plough could go, he used the pick’. 

But these horse-tailed daimones are no mere mortal agri- 
culturists. They are Satyrs; their function is magical rather 
than actual. That function is clearly shown by the two figures of 
Erotes, one to either side, that balance and complete them. In 
bygone days, before the facts of parentage were known, the Earth 
was thought of as mother and husbandless, sufficient herself for all 
her child-bearing, or vaguely fertilized by the dead spirits of men 
buried in her bosom. But, when she first appears in mythology, 
she is attended by a throng of male daimones, and they are 
Daktyls, Tityroi, Satyroi, Korybantes, all, according to Strabo, we 
remember?, substantially the same, all the projection.of marriage- 
able youth, of the band of Kouroi. Their earliest cultus-shape is 
the Daktyl fertility-cone. Their last and loveliest form is that of 
the winged spirits, the Erotes, who on the vase before us wait 
the uprising of the Mother, and who on the great Hieron vase? 
cluster about the goddess of growth and increase, Aphrodite. But 
the form of fertility-daimones known to the early dromenon was 
probably that of Satyrs, and down to late days it is Satyrs in the 
Satyr play who attend the Theophany of the god. 

In the cults of Delphi there is not a word of Satyrs. The 
Herois festival is conducted by women. It is Maenads not Satyrs 
who on the peaks of Parnassos dance round Dionysos. This may 
well be mainly because the religion of the Thracian Dionysos 
came to Delphi in a form in which, as already noted’, the Maenads, 
the Mothers, were most emphasized, and the child was a babe and 
only potentially a Kouros. But I would conjecture that at Delphi 
expurgation was at work; the old meaning of the omphalos 

1B. Hahn, Die Entstehung d. Pflugkultur, 1909, p. 9, Der Hackbau. 
2 Supra, p. 14. | a 3 Prolegomena, p. 634, Fig. 170. 

4 See Prof. Murray, supra, p. 343. ; 5 Supra, p. 40. 

ws 7 ee 2. © 

424 From Daimon to Olympian [ OH 

was at first advisedly ignored, then forgotten. The religion of 
Apollo with its ‘Nothing too much’ may well have protested 
against the religion of Dionysos with its inherent ecstasy and 
possible licence. 

We have seen Aguieus as the symbol of life standing on 
the earth-mound. It is to the cult of Apollo as emerging from 
that of Gaia and more and more sharply differentiated from 
hers that we must now turn. We shall best understand it by 
examining the myth of the slaying of the Python, and this 
brings us to our third ennaeteric festival, the Stepterion. 

THE SLAYING OF THE PYTHON. 

Aaschylus, as already observed, will have none of the slaying 
of the snake. Our chief literary source is the Homeric Hymn to 
the Pythian Apollo. Art adds very little to our knowledge, 
though coins frequently represent the slaying of the Python near 
the tripod, and vases, though rarely, show the infant Apollo 
shooting from his mother’s arms at the huge monster issuing 
from a rocky cave. One monument, however, the Pompeian fresco 
in Fig. 1271, is of some religious interest because it shows us the 

Fie, 127. 

Python in relation to the omphalos. The beast, wounded and 
bleeding, is still coiled round it. Moreover behind the omphalos 
is a high pillar which gives a grave-like look to the whole complex. 
On the pillar are hung, not wreaths, but the bow and quiver of the 

1 From a photograph. 

1x] The Stepterion 425 

god. To celebrate the Python’s death there is to be a Bouphonia. 
The priestess with the sacred double-axe in her hand brings up 
the bull. Apollo has cast aside his laurel-branch and is preparing 
to chant a Paean to himself. Artemis looks on in the background, 
Of much more importance than any monument of art is the 
account we have from Plutarch of the ritual of the Stepterion. 

The Stepterion. In the Greek Questions: Plutarch does not 
state the actual ritual of the Stepterion. He makes allusive 
mention of it and attempts a rather confused and feeble explana- 
tion. He has evidently not made up his mind as to what the real 
gist of the festival is. 

Now the Stepterion would seem to be an imitation of the fight of the 
god against the Python and of his flight to Tempe after the fight, and of his 
banishment. Some say that he took flight, being in need of purification after 
the murder, others say that he was following hard on the Python who was 
wounded and escaping, and that he failed by a little to be in at the death. For 
he came up with the Python when he was just dead of his wound, and his son, 

whose name they say was Aix, had just performed for him his funeral rites. 
Of such events or of something of this sort is the Stepterion an imitation, 

Plutarch, confused in his mind though he seems to be, is 
about right. The Stepterion was not exactly an ‘imitation’ of an 
actual fight with a particular monster the Python, but it was an 
imitation or rather a perpetual reenactment of ‘something of this 
sort.’ In another passage, though half unconsciously, he himself 
lets out the truth. 

In his discourse on the Cessation of the Oracles? Plutarch 
gives vent to his distress about the unworthy stories that are 
told of the gods, their rapes, their wanderings, their hidings, 
their banishments, their servitudes. 

‘These,’ he says, ‘are not of the gods, but they are the sufferings of 

daimones and their changes and chances which are commemorated on 
account of their virtue and force.’ 

It may be incidentally observed that no one of Plutarch’s day 

_ 1 The sources for the Stepterion are given in Nilsson’s Griechische Feste, 1906, 
p. 150. Dr Nilsson rightly criticizes my previous explanation of the rite as based 
on the slaying of the snake, but his own explanation is not to me satisfactory. By 
far the best account of the Stepterion is given by Dr H. Usener, Heilige Handlung. 
Ilion’s Fall, in Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, 1904, pp. 317—328, to which 
Irefer for all details, e.g. the Doloneia and the figure of Aix, which do not affect 
my present argument. I owe much to Dr Usener’s argument, though I cannot 
accept all his conclusions. eau 

2 xvr. ...00 Oedv elow, GANA Sarudvwn radjuara Kal TUXaL po nwovevomevat Ou apeTny 
kal dUvamuv avTav. 

426 From Daimon to Olympian OH: 

could well have put the matter more clearly and truly. These 
‘wanderings’ and ‘hidings’ and the like are not of the @eo/, not 
of the fixed Olympian personalities, but of the recurrent cycles 
of the daimones, and they are commemorated just because of 
their magical ‘virtue and force. In another moment we feel 
Plutarch will be using the expression ‘functional daimon.’ 

Being himself a priest at Delphi Plutarch takes, as an 
instance of how things are misunderstood, the festival of the 
Stepterion, according to him an extreme case. Auschylus, we are 
told, is utterly wrong when he says 

‘And pure Apollo, banished, a god, from Heaven!’ s 
And furthest of all from the truth are the theologians at Delphi who hold 
that once a fight took place there between the god and a serpent about the 
oracle, and who allowed poets and story-writers to present this at dramatic 
performances in the theatres, as though they were bent on contradicting what 
is actually done in the most sacred rites. 

Here he is interrupted, most fortunately for us, by a question 
from one of his audience, a certain Philip, who wants to know 
exactly what these ‘most sacred rites’ are, which dramatic 
authors, when they represent a fight as taking place between 
Apollo and the snake, contradict. Plutarch answers: 

Those rites I mean which are in connection with the oracular shrine, 
which quite recently the state (Delphi) celebrated, admitting into them all 
the Hellenes beyond Pylae and going in procession as far as Tempe. 

It is these rites that contradict the notion of a fight with a 
serpent. 

For the hut that is set up here, over the threshing-floor, every nine years, 
is not just some hole like the lair of a serpent, but 7s the imatation of the 
_ dwelling of a tyrant or king, and the attack made in silence upon it along 

what is called the Doloneia...they accompany the youth, both of whose 
parents are alive, with lighted torches, and when they have set fire to the hut 
and overturned the table they fly without looking back through the doors of 
the sanctuary. Finally the wanderings and the servitude of the boy and the 
purifications that take place at Tempe make one suspect that there has been 
some great pollution and some daring deed2, 

1 Supra, p. 413. 

2 De def. orac. 15 ...4 Te yap icrapévn adidas évtada mepl Thy dw dC évvea éTOv, 
ov pwhewdns Tis SpdkovTos xeud, GAL Miunua TupavviKns 7) Backs éorw olkhoews, NTE 
MEeTa ovyns ém’ adrhy dud ris dvouagouévns Aodwvelas Epodos ev 7 (Reiske, 7) MSS.) 
Alohddart (aloha MSS.) rdv dupibanrg Képov humeévats Saoly dyover Kal TpooBaddovres TO 
Tip TH Kadidde Kal Thy Tpdmevay dvactpéparres dvemiotpemtl pev-youot diek Oup&v rod 
lepod* kal reNeuratoy ai re hdvar Kal 4 Aarpela Tob madds of Te yeyvduevor mepl Ta Téurn 
Kadapuol weyddou Twvds dyous Kal ToAuhuaros troplav éxovor. After €podos is a lament- 
able lacuna. It has not been successfully filled, so I attempt no translation. 
Fortunately the loss does not affect the main argument, i.e. that the Stepterion 
was no imitation of the slaying of the Python. ' 

a ee ie Sahin = ’ i ieee 
lid a wae ee ee hae fied — 1 er eae 
- $ oe 

The Stepteria an Eniautos-Festival 427 

Clearly Plutarch has here no belief in the aetiological myth 
which in the Quaestiones he doubtfully accepts. It is often 
assumed that the hut which was burned contained a serpent}, 
but of this there is no evidence. Had Plutarch known of any 
such serpent he would never have argued as he did, and no one 
was better acquainted than Plutarch with the details of Delphic 
ritual. We must give up the serpent. The Stepterion consisted 
of a secret attack with lighted torches on a hut?, which though 
apparently it is made of wood or reeds had somehow—a piece of 
purple drapery and a wreath would do it—the semblance of a 
king’s palace. The boy. who lit the fire fled to Tempe, was 
purified and feasted. there, and returned in triumph crowned and 
carrying a laurel branch. 

We know that boy with both his parents alive. He carries 
the Hiresione; he is the young New Year. But the burning of 
the hut? It is the old, old Eniautos-festival, but enacted here 
at the end of a Nine-Years Year, one of the periods arranged to 
fit together the course of Sun and Moon*. Le Rov est mort, so 
his kingly palace is burnt, the table of his first-fruits overturned‘; 
and the celebrants fly as the slayers of the holy ox fled at the 
Bouphonia®. They have incurred an agos. The cry of Ie Paian 
is heard’, Vive le roi; the new, young king appears from Tempe 
or from anywhere’, crowned and bearing his branch. 

It is from Alian’, in his account of the ceremonies at Tempe, 
that we get the fullest details of the carrying of the laurel 
branch, and it is through Atlian that we realize that this bringing 
in of the new laurel, this carrying it and wearing it in wreaths, 
gave to the Festival its name ‘Stepterion, Festival of Wreathers®,’ 

1 I was misled by this myself in treating of the Stepterion before, Prolego- 
mena, p. 113. 

2 The hut at Delphi does not of course stand alone. The burning of the booths 
at the Tithorea festival, followed by departure in haste, is a close parallel. See 
Paus. x. 32.17. At Tithorea the festival was held twice a year—once in the spring, 
once in the autumn. 

3 Supra, p. 223. 4 Supra, p. 426. 5 Supra, p. 142. 

_ 6 Hphoros (F.H.G. 1. 225, p. 70, quoted by Strabo rx. p. 422) the Kuhemerist 
says that Python was a xaherds dvijp ; it is he who speaks of the oxyvi Tob T1dGwvos, 
and he says that when the man called Drako was shot down they cried te macdy. 

7 The appearance from Tempe is probably due to some local shift of cults, and 
does not concern us. ; 

8 Var. Hist. 111. 1. ; : é 

9 I was quite wrong (Prolegomena, p. 113, note 4) in my previous adoption of 
the form Derrhpiov, but I still think there may be connection with the enigmatic 
orépy and orégew of Hisch.. Choeph. 94, Soph. Ant. 431, Elek, 52, 458. 

428 From Daimon to Olympian [oH. 

After a long account of the beauties of Tempe lian thus 
writes : 

And it was here the Thessalians say that Apollo Pythios by command 
of Zeus purified himself after he had shot down the snake of Pytho who 
guarded Delphi while he still held the oracle. So Apollo made himself a 
crown of the laurel of Tempe, and taking in his right hand a branch of this 
same laurel came to Delphi and took over the oracle, he who was son of Zeus 
and Leto, And there is an altar in the very place where he wreathed himself 
and bore away the branch. And to this day the Delphians send high-born 
boys in procession there, and one of them is architheoros. And they, when 
they have reached Tempe and made a splendid sacrifice, return back, after 
weaving themselves wreaths from the very laurel from which the god made 
himself a wreath....And at the Pythian games the wreaths given to the 
actors are made of the same laurel, 

Apollo on vases and coins carries the bough, he is thallophoros, 
A good example is shown in the design in Fig. 128 from an 

Fie. 128. 

Etruscan Cista. Apollo is seated close to his omphalos on which 
is perched a mantic bird. He holds a huge bough, A warrior 
approaches to consult the oracle, 

But if there was no snake, how did the story of the snake 
get in? Very simply I think. At Pytho there were holy snakes 
or a snake used for mantic purposes. The tradition as to this 
that the snake guarded the oracle for Gaia, is very strong. The 

? 

1 Monimenti dell’ Inst. vun. Tay. xxv,—xxx. 

Ix] The Python as Snake-King 429 

_ people of Epiros had a snake-cult which they believed to be 
derived from Delphi, and which we may suppose was, if not 
actually derived, at least analogous. lian! thus describes it: 
The people of Epiros sacrifice in general to Apollo, and to him they 
celebrate their greatest feast on one day of the year, a feast of great 
magnificence and much reputed. There is a grove dedicated to the god, 
and it has a circular enclosure and within are snakes, playthings surely for 
the god. Now only the maiden priestess approaches them, and she is naked 
(yvprn), and she brings the snakes their food. These snakes are said by the 
people of Epiros to be descended from the Python at Delphi. Now if when the 
priestess comes near them the snakes are seen to be gentle, and if they take 
to their food kindly, that is taken to mean that there will be a plentiful year 

and free from disease ; but if they frighten her, and do not take the honey- 
cakes she offers them, then they portend the reverse. 

The snake here is not slain by Apollo, it is taken on peaceably 
as a plaything (a@Ovpya). The snake has a maiden priestess. 
The omen, as at Athens, is by food. When the snake of Pytho, 
feminine of course at first, as guardian of Gaia, had to be killed, 
he became a male serpent, a foeman worthy of Apollo’s steel?. 
But all this goes to show the harmlessness of the local genius 
loci, and does not explain how men came to think he had to die. 
The clue is given by the ‘kingly palace’ at the nine-years Festival, 
the Stepteria. Minos reigned for nine years’. The king as 
daimon incarnate of the Year reigned at Delphi for nine years. 
At the end he is killed or deposed. And—this is the important 
point—the king as hero-daimon is envisaged as a snake. Cecrops 
was a snake, Kychreus was a snake’. The old snake dies, the 
young snake lives. 

KADMOS AND JASON AS SNAKE-SLAYERS. 

The myth of the slaying of the snake is not of course confined 
to Delphi, though only at Delphi is it the deed of a god. Kadmos 
slays the snake of Ares, and his snake-slaying is singularly in- 
structive. 

The chorus in the Phoenissae® tell the story of how Kadmos 

1 De Nat. An. x1. 2. a4f i ; 

2 The Homeric Hymn has, however (v. 300), Spdxaiva. Euripides (I. in T. 1245) 
has dpdxwv. ‘ h 

e ‘Od. xx, 179 évvéwpos Bactheve Ards peyddov dapiorys. See Prof. Murray, Rise 

i k Epic?, p. 156, note 1. 
of Ms ene » 287. ; 5 Hur. Phoen, 638, 

2 ie 

oe eee ae | ee 

ii 

430 From Daimon to Olympian [ OH. 

followed the heifer, and guided by her came to the fertile Aonian 
land, to the fount of Dirke. 

There the snake of Ares, savage guard, 
O’er the flowing fount kept watch and ward, 
There the beast his bloody eyeballs rolled, 
Thither on a time came Kadmos bold 
Seeking lustral water. By the might 
Of maiden Pallas he the snake did smite, 
With a rock upon its head 
Bloody stained, and straight he shed 
All its teeth upon the earth, 
Up there sprang an armed birth. 

Not. for long were they. Bloody strife 

Sent them back to earth that gave them life. 

The snake, though the chorus regard him as a terrible 
monster, is the guardian of the well, is really the genius loci, 
the Agathos Daimon of the place. As such he appears on the 
vase’ by Assteas reproduced in Fig. 129. Kadmos has come up 

Fic. 129. 

to the well, the snake ramps out at him, and in terror he drops 
his water-jar and picks up a great stone. With the help of the 
stone and the goddess Athene who stands near he will presently 

1 Naples Museum, Cat. 3226. From a photograph, 

=— 7 

2 : + 

The Snake as Well and Tree-Daimon 

431 
slay the snake. Above is seated to the right Thebe; above 

_- Kadmos, and rather inappropriately remote behind a hill, is 

Krenaie the well-nymph; above 
Athene the old river-god Ismenos 
stands holding his sceptre. All 
about the snake are blossoming 
trees and plants. This is not I 
think mere landscape painting, it 
marks the snake as a fertility- 
daimon. 

But the fertility character 
of the snake comes out most 
clearly in the snake who guards 
the golden fruit of the Hesperides. 
On the vase-painting? in Fig. 130 
we have the tree and the great 
snake coiled round it, and at the 
foot wells out from a cave in 
the earth a spring with double 
mouths. Here we have the real 
old cultus-complex, tree and well 
and snake-daimon guarding both. 
The tree and all green things come from the earth bedewed 
by living water. So on the Acropolis at 
Athens there was an olive tree, a holy snake, 
a well. Snake and tree are seen on the 
familiar Athenian coin in Fig. 181. The well 
is not yet there, for when Poseidon took it 
over he had to create it with his trident and 
to salt it. 

Another vase-painting in Fig. 132 is in- 
structive, because it shows how easily, once 
the story-telling instinct is at work, the meaning and the 
conjunction of the old sanctities is forgotten. We have the 
garden and the Hesperid nymphs, the great tree with the golden 
fruit, and the snake twined about it. But the holy well is sun- 
dered from the tree and the snake, the Hesperids are just 

Fia. 130. 

- 1T regret that I am unable to trace the sources of the vases in Figs, 130 
and 132, They are reproduced from lantern slides long-in my possession. 

eee We CE ey’ se 

i 

432 From Daimon to Olympian [ CH. 

water-carrying maidens, and the whole scene, charming though it 
is, has lost its daimon-glamour. It is just that daimon-glamour, 

Fie. 132. 

that haunting remembrance of things ancient, felt rather than 
understood, that a poet! keeps, when he is gone 
To the strand of the Daughters of the Sunset, 
The Apple-tree, the singing and the gold ; 
Where the mariner must stay him from his onset, 
And the red wave is tranquil as of old: 
Yea, beyond that Pillar of the End 
That Atlas guardeth, would I wend ; 
Where a voice of living waters never ceaseth 
In God’s quiet garden by the sea, 
And Earth, the ancient life-giver, increaseth 
Joy among the meadows, like a tree. 

Now a snake, like the daimon of the tree and well is not a 
monster to be slain, he is a genius to be cherished. Only a 
total misunderstanding of his nature, or rather his functions, could 
make him a curse to be killed. But there are two things to be 
remembered. He, the fertility-daimon, if angered had his evil 
side, which comes out clearly in the Erinyes*. He, or rather at 
Delphi she, the angry Earth, could blast as well as bless. More- 
over, as we have seen, the snake-daimon king was in all probability 
supposed to die each nine years. So that there was both the 
notion of an evil, hostile snake, and also probably a dead king- 
snake, to start the myth of the slaying of Python. 

On a Kyrenaic vase*—a class in which things primitive are 
apt to survive—in Fig. 133 there is, I think, some reminiscence of 
the snake-king. The scene is probably Kadmos slaying the snake, 
but it might be any hero slaying any snake without local determi- 
nation. The building from which the snake issues is usually 

Kur. Hipp. 742. 

For the angry snake as Erinys or avenging ghost see Prolegomena, pp. 232 ff. 
Puchstein, Arch. Zeit. 1881, p. 238. 

al 
2 
3 

The King as Snake 433 

interpreted as a well-house and may be such, but it is, I think, 
more like ‘the imitation of the dwelling of a tyrant or king! 

Fra. 133; 

It will be remembered that on grave reliefs we have the hero 
in human form standing with or without his 
horse—a saga-figure drawn from reality—and 
by his side his daimon-form, a coiled snake. 
Now it is not a little curious that in a few 
grave reliefs, an instance? of which is given in 
Fig. 134, we have a man killing a snake. This 
does not, I think, refer to any actual incident 
in the man’s life, does not imply that a man 
died of the bite of a snake. It is simply the 
old type misunderstood and made into a 
pseudo-fact. A man and a snake side by 
side on a tombstone. What does it mean? We do not really 
know, we have forgotten. It must mean something. Well then 
the man must be killing the snake. Something like this happened 
in mythology. There was a snake at Delphi probably painted on 
the omphalos, and, it may be, a real snake used for divination. 
There came to be a human god Apollo, side by side with the 
snake. What was Apollo the bright and beautiful doing with 

Fie. 134. 

1 Supra, p. 426. 2 Sparta Cat. 565. 
H. 28 

434 From Daimon to Olympian (CH. 

the old snake? Well, he had better be killing it. So he was. 
He was Pythoktonos as he was Sauroktonos. 

The Kadmos myth tempts to another conjecture. It must 
frankly be admitted that it is only a conjecture—but I hope 
a probable one—that Kadmos who is a snake-slayer is also 
himself a snake. When, at the close of the Bacchae, Dionysos 
bids Kadmos depart from Thebes, he says to him : 

‘For thou must change and be a Serpent Thing 

Strange, and beside thee she whom thou didst bring 

Of old to be thy bride from Heaven afar, 

Harmonia, daughter of the Lord of War, 
and Kadmos knows that the dragon-shape is upon him; he says 
to Agave, ‘I must 

lead my spouse, mine own 
Harmonia, Ares’ child, discorporate 
And haunting forms, dragon and dragon mate,’ 

We know now what lies behind these metamorphoses, A 
man is turned into what he really was. Kadmos is turned into 
a snake because he was a Snake-man, the snake-man, head and 
king of a Snake-group. The snake was the blazon of the Spartoi, 
Pausanias? saw the grave of Epaminondas at Mantinea, and thus 
describes it: . 

Over his tomb stands a pillar and there is a shield on it upon which is 
wrought a dragon. 

The Spartoi of Thebes were the ‘sown men,’ that earth-born 
dragon’s brood from which Pentheus sprang, set always, as we 
shall later see, when moralized, in some sort of antithesis to the 
Olympians. So in the Bacchae® 

Dark and of the dark impassioned 

Is this Pentheus’ blood; yea fashioned 

Of the Dragon, and his birth 

From Echion child of Earth. 

He is no man, but a wonder ; 
Did the Earth-Child not beget him 
As a red Giant to set him 

Against God, against the Thunder ? 

And now we see that the mysterious sequel to the dragon- 
slaying is quite simply explained. Both Kadmos and Jason, when 
they have slain the dragon, sow his teeth, and up from the earth 
springs a crop of armed men. The Spartoi had the snake for 

1 y, 1330 ff. 4 NAnbig Wl, Ish Sr Ue sonite 

weg — The Dragon's Teeth 435 

their blazon; they had also marked, probably tattooed on their 
bodies from childhood, a lance. Whether the two-fold symbols 
of snake and lance were owing to the fusion of two groups or 
not we cannot determine, but the fact is certain; hence the 
alternative of dragon or armed man. Aristotle! in dealing with 
anagnorisis ‘speaks of ‘the lance which the earth-born bear. 
Dio Chrysostom? writes of ‘the lance which is said to be the 
sign of their race among the Spartoi at Thebes’; and Julian? 
even more explicitly says: 
The lance is said to be imprinted on the Spartoi by their mother. 

But why the teeth?’ In a previous chapter we have noted 
the savage custom of knocking out a boy’s tooth at puberty 
ceremonies and its possible significance. We have seen the 
tooth preserved on the Roman pyre. The tooth because it is 
practically indestructible, and perhaps also because it looks like 
a gleaming white seed-corn, is the symbol and supposed vehicle 
of reincarnation. 

Jason, as well as Kadmos and Apollo, slew a dragon and sowed 
the dragon’s teeth. The scene is set before us with a strange and 
_ magical splendour by Apollonios Rhodios*®. On it a curious light is 

cast by the vase-painting * in Fig. 135. In the background is the 
tree with the golden fleece. Near at hand Athena with her owl, 
as guardian of the hero. She should of course be Hera, but the 
vase-painter is a good Athenian patriot. A magnificent dragon 
ramps up to the left—there will be splendid sowing with that 
dragon’s teeth. So far all is on sound conventional saga lines, 
but where is the dragon-slaying hero? Where indeed? The vase- 
‘painter seems to have remembered in some odd haunting way 
that the dragon-slayer is of the dragon’s seed. He is being born 
anew from his jaws. 

The slaying of the snake then, based on the ritual death of the 
old snake king, gradually got moralized. It came to symbolize 

1 Poet. 16 Adyxnv jv Pépovor ynyevets. Aristotle instances the lance as one of 

the ‘congenital’ (sdugura) tokens. It is more probable that it was a tattoo-mark 
= eae aes § p. 8lc. 4 pp, 272, 273. 8 a, 11784, 
6 In the Vatican collection; from a photograph. The swallowing of the hero 
has so far as I know never been explained. There is no literary tradition, and ae 
vase is a dat Neyéuevov among monuments. For the myth of er: and the 
whale which is clearly analogous see W. Simpson, The Jonah Legend, 1899. 

28—2 

436 From Daimon to Olympian LORE 

and re-emphasize as a fight what Aischylus saw to be a develop- 
ment and succession, the passage from the old Earth-cult to the 
later completely humanized Apollo-worship. Whether behind the 
story of the fight there lay also some historical fact such as the 
incursion of a new tribe either from North or South bringing 
a more advanced form of worship I cannot determine’. Tradition 

Fic. 135. 

pointed on the one hand to the coming of Apollo from Crete, on 
the other from Delos. 

The snake-killing is but one aspect of Apollo’s content; we must 

now pass to another, closely connected indeed but which adds 
fresh elements to our conception. 

1 No critic can be more deeply conscious of the ethnographi . i 
! : graphical weakness of t 
book than is the writer. I have attempted to get light from eihiomenee Sel 

have not f; ; i 
ee ee so far succeeded; I oe forward to the achievements of others better 

APOLLO AS PHOIBOS. 

We have seen Apollo as Aguieus, the old fertility-cone. But 
it is not as Aguieus that he conquers the Earth-snake and sub- 
merges the ancient Themis of the dream-oracle. It is not as 
Aguieus that he stands for light and reason, for justice and 
moderation. As Aguieus he is indeed in some sense Phoibos the 
Pure or the Purifier, for the conical stone, as a life-stone, was 
kathartic: what gives life heals from disease’. It is however, as 
will immediately be seen, the second stage in the succession, the 
passage from Earth to Sun by way of Moon, from Gaia to Phoibos 
by way of Phoibe, that lifts Apollo to Olympos, What definite 
ritual evidence have we of this? If the Herois, the Charila, the 
Stepterion all find their utterance, their projection, in Gaia and 
her Snake, what is the festival, the ritual, that finds its utterance, 
its projection, in the name and nature of Phoibos? It is the 
Daphnephoria. 

The Daphnephoria. We have seen that under the name Step- 
terion there was a Daphnephoria at Delphi, but our fullest 
evidence as to the festival comes to us not from Delphi but from 
Thebes. When Pausanias? visited Thebes, he saw the dragon’s 
well and the field where Kadmos sowed the teeth. He saw also 
a hill sacred to Apollo, who bore the title of Ismenian from the 
river Ismenos which, as we have already seen’, was near at hand. 
After describing the temple of Apollo Ismenios he says: 

The following custom is, I know, still observed at Thebes. A boy of 
distinguished family and himself well-looking and strong is made the priest 

of Ismenian Apollo for the space of a year (éviavows). The title given him is 
Laurel-bearer, Daphnephoros, for these boys wear wreaths made of laurel 

leaves. 4 

Now if this were all we should naturally say—Here, as in the 
Stepterion, is the same old fertility-spirit who belongs to the 
seasonal service of Gaia; the boy carries a laurel Eiresione, and 

1 For the connection between life and resurrection gods, i.e. what I should call 
Eniautos-daimones, and gods of healing, I can now refer to Baudissin’s interesting 
book, Adonis wnd Esmun. ine Untersuchung zur Geschichte des Glaubens an 
Auferstehungsgotter und an Heilgétter, 1911. The book deals largely with Semitic 
religion, and specially with Jahwe as the ‘living’ God, and because living, the 
Healer of diseases. Asklepios, who raises from the dead, is a close parallel. 

. 2 3x, 10.4, 3p, 431. 

438 From Daimon to Olympian [CH. 

we are not a step the further. Fortunately we know more 
particulars of the Daphnephoria and they take us straight from 
earth to heaven, from Gaia to Phoibos. 

Proklos quoted by Photius! gives us the ritual of the Daphne- 
phoria in quite exceptional detail, as follows. After telling us that 
it was an enneateric festival and of the same order as the Parthenia, 
and after giving its aetiological myth, he proceeds to enumerate 
the ritual facts. 

They wreathe a pole of olive wood with laurel and various flowers. On 
the top is fitted a bronze globe, from which they suspend smaller ones. Mid- 
way round the pole they place a lesser globe binding it with purple fillets— 
but the end of the pole is decked with saffron. By the topmost globe they 
mean the sun to which they actually compare Apollo. The globe beneath 
this is the moon ; the smaller globes hung on are the stars and constellations, 
and the fillets are the course of the year—for they make them 365 in number. 
The Daphnephoria is headed by a boy, both whose parents are alive, and his 
nearest male relation carries the filleted pole to which they give the name 
Kopo. The Daphnephoros himself, who follows next, holds on to the laurel, he 
has his hair hanging loose, he wears a golden wreath and he is dressed out in 
a splendid robe to his feet and he wears light shoes. There follows him a 
choros of maidens holding out boughs before them to enforce the supplication 
of the hymns, The procession of the Daphnephoria is to the sanctuary of 
Apollo Ismenios and Him-of-the-Hail. 

_ Our sequence of cults is uttered in visible ritual form with a 
clearness, an actuality, beyond anything we might have dared to 
hope. We have an Eiresione of the Earth, the flowers of the Earth, 
and it is carried to the sanctuary of a Weather-God, Him-of- 
the-Hatl, probably in this case with a view to magical aver- 
sion rather than induction. We have the Moon with her purple 
fillets half-way up the pole, and at the top the saffron-decked 
globe of the golden Sun Phoibos himself. The ladder from Earth 

to Heaven is complete. 

1 Bibl. cod. 239, p. 321 (=Schol. ad Clem. Alex. Protrept. p. 9) kat 4 airla...1 O€ 
dapynpopia: EVAov édatas karacrépovar dddvars Kal mockinos &vOeor* Kal ex’ &kpou mev 
XAAKH Epapudserar odpaipa, éx d& rabrys Mixporépas éLapr@or* Kata dé 7d péoov rod 
EdNov wepiOévres EXdocova Ths én’ dxpy opalpas Kabdmrover roppupa, oréupara’ tau Oe 
TeevTaia To) EVAov mepioTéANover KpoKwTG. Boterac 8’ avrois 7) Bev dvwTrdtw opaipa 
Tov joy, @ Kal Tov ’Amd\\wva dvapépovow,  5€ vmoxepévn rip cednvnv, Ta Oe 
TpoonpTynyeva tiv shaipluv dotpa te Kal dorépas, Ta O€ ye oréupata Tov éviaterov 
dpduov: Kal yap Kal réé movodow adr. dpxer dé THs Sapyndoplas mats auplarys, Kat 
6 uddora aire olkeios Bacrdte Td kaTeoTeupevoy Evov, 6 Kwmd Kahodow. aidros be > 
dapynddpos érduevos Ths Sdgyns epdmrerat, Tas Mev Kouas Kabeluevos, xpvcoty dé orépavov 
pépwv Kal aumpav éoOAra modipn écroducuevos, ipixparidas Te Srodedenévos: Xopos 
Tapbéveay émakodovdel mporetywy khavas mpds ixernplay rOv ture mapéreumov be Thy 
dadvnpopiay els’ Amé\Awvos "Icunviov cai Xadafiov. 

eee 

j 1x), Apollo and the Apellaia 439 

It is difficult for us perhaps to realize how pregnant was to the 
ancient world this shift from Gaia to Phoibos, from a focus of 
attention that was on the coming and going of the fruits of the 
earth and the disorderly and fearful phenomena of the weather, to 
a contemplation of the fixed and orderly procession of the 
heavenly bodies. Time was to primitive man always a coloured 
various thing, with festivals of spring and harvest for purple 
patches, but, through the calendars of moon and sun, it became 
also a recurrent rhythmical pattern’. 

Aguieus is the fertility of the Earth; the gist of Phozbos is the 
Sun-calendar with all its attendant moralities of law and order 
and symmetry and rhythm and light and reason, the qualities we 
are apt too readily to lump together as ‘Greek.’ But what of 
Apollo ? 

We have seen that Apollo Aguieus, who by a strange and 
terrible irony became to Cassandra her ‘Destroyer, was in reality 
the Lord of Life. Can we more closely determine what kind of 
life? For once philology may, I think, safely guide us—to a goal 
desired but unlooked for. : aap: 

APOLLO AS KOUROS. 

Apollo’s name has an earlier form Apellon’, From this rather 
than the form in 0 we must start. The Doric month Apellatos 
frequently occurs at Delphi where it begins the year and can 
safely be equated with the Attic Hekatombaion. Now seasonal 
festivals, it would seem, were before months and frequently lent to 
the months their names. The month of Apellaios is the month 
in which the festival of the Apellaia occurred. But what are the 
Apellaia? The word drehrd€ew 1s, Hesychius tells, Laconian for 

éxxdnordtev. It means therefore to ‘hold’ or ‘summon’ or ‘be 

1 See supra, p. 184, for the importance of ‘periodicity’ in the development of 
civilization. Dr Troels-Lund (trans. by Leo Bloch) in his Himmelsbild und Weltan- 
schauung im Wandel der Zeiten, 1908°—a book too little known in England probably 
because of its popular form—has shown in very interesting fashion that a period 
of enlightenment goes pari passu with an increased interest in astronomy. See 
also Otto Seeck, Geschichte d. antiker Welt, 1902, Band u. Anhang, Der Sonmen- 

laube. 
é 2 For the form Apellon see Pauly-Wissowa s.v. Apollo, and Usener, Gétternamen, 
p. 305. The short e for o is, according to Herodian, ap. Eustath. 183. 10, ad Il. 

ir. 103, characteristically ‘Doric.’ 

44.0 From Daimon to Olympian [cH. 

member of’ an assembly. Most significant of all Hesychius has 
the gloss 

dmeA\\dkas* tep@v Kowwvovs, Sharers of sacred rites: 

and again 
dmehAal: onkol, éxxAnolar, apxatpecia, folds, assemblies, elections. 

Is Apollo the god of the fold and those within the fold? Is he 
the Good Shepherd? or the arch-politician ? 

It has long been conjectured, partly from the evidence adduced 
and partly from the supposed nature of Apollo Karneios, that 
Apollo was the god of flocks and herds. But Apollo is surely not 
more, nor indeed half so much, god of flocks and herds as Hermes. 
We have no Apollo Kriophoros nor Moschophoros. Apollo will 
prove, I think, to be the god of the fold (an«os), but it is a fold of 
human sheep. The nature of the fold and the sheep shepherded 
by Apollo will be found, I believe, in an inscription? found in the 
French excavations at Delphi dealing with the organization and 
regulations of the phratria of the Labyadae. 

The inscription gives us a rare glimpse into the inner life of 
an ancient group. It records regulations for the various initiation 
ceremonies, the successive rites de passage through which a member 
of the group must pass, and the offerings that must be made by 
him or on his behalf, ‘from the cradle to the grave,’ 

Among the ceremonies prescribed? occur certain offerings 
called respectively adeAXaia and Sdpata’. We know from 
Athenaeus* that Sdparos is a kind of unleavened bread made in 
Thessaly. The Séparau then are offerings of cakes. The inscrip- 
tion further divides these Sapatau into two kinds, ydpera and 
mavoja, that is obviously what we should call wedding-cakes and 
christening-cakes. So much for the dapatat, but what of the 
amedXaia? On what occasion are they offered ? 

1 Homolle, Inscriptions de Delphes, in Bull. de Corr. Hell. xrx. 1895, p. 5, 
Réglements de la Phratrie des AaBvadac. 
- # The inscription at the end of the fifth century B.c. begins raye[uloéw di{xalws 
Klara robs vouous ras [w]é[A]os kad rods Tov AaBvadLav] mép rv dmredalwy Kal rap 
daparadv, I will perform aright the office of tagos in accordance with laws of the 
state and of the Labyades with respect to the apellaia and the daratai. Both city 
(dds) and group (Labyadae) are concerned in the enactments. We stand as it 
were on a bridge between old and new. 

3 m1. p. 110 Nixavdpos 6é 6 Kohogwvios év rats TAmbooas Tov &tvmov dprov Kanet 
ddparov. 114B Dédevkos ev Opduw bd Maxeddvwv otirws kahovmevov, Sdparov &’ brd 
Gecoadav. Hesych, s.v. dapdrw* CAG LOR 

Apollo as Megistos Kouros 

Among the ancients, as among ourselves, a man’s christening, 
his reception as a child into the congregation, was a family festival. 
So also was his marriage. Neither concerned the state. But 
there was another occasion, more solemn, charged with a civic im- 
portance beyond that of either christening or marriage, and that 
was his reception into the body of grown men as a full-grown 
kouros. Then and not till then the youth became deddAd€, a 
‘sharer in sacred rites’; then and not till then could he enter the 
a7érXrat, the ‘folds, the ‘assemblies’ the ‘elections.’ The 
azrehnaia I believe! to be the offerings made at puberty initiation. 
Apellaios is the month of these rites and these offerings, Apellon 
is the projection of these rites; he, like Dionysos, like Herakles, is 
the arch-ephebos, the Megistos Kouros. 

Apollo was Phoibos of the unshorn hair?, and now remembering 
his double Herakles Alexikakos we understand why. Plutarch? 
tells us that in the days of Theseus 

It was the custom for those who were passing from childhood to manhood 
to go to Delphi and offer there the firstfruits of their hair to the god. 
Theseus went there, and there is, they say, a place at Delphi that is called the 
Theseion after him. He only shaved the forepart of his head, as Homer says 
was the practice of the Abantes, and this sort of tonsure was called Theseis 
after him. 

The tonsure may have varied with each group. All that concerns 

us is that He-of-the-Unshorn-Hair is youth incarnate, youth just 

about to be initiated. : 
When Pentheus will insult the Bacchos what outrage does he 

choose 4? 
First shear that delicate curl that tangles there, 

and the daimon, the Greatest Kouros, makes answer, 

I have vowed it to my God; ’tis holy hair. 

1 J follow here Mr Homolle, op. cit. p. 45. The Apellaia are equated by 
Mr Homolle with the Ionian Apatouria. ‘C’est l’hommage de la majorité, et 
Voffrande recue fait de l’enfant un homme et de l’incapable un citoyen.’ This view 
of the Apellaia is accepted by Dr Nilsson, Griechische Feste, p. 465, note 2. But 
for the view that Apollo-Apellon is the projection of the ceremonial I am alone 
responsible. For the Apatouria and other festivals in which traces of puberty- 
initiation survive, see the concluding chapter. 

2 Tl. xx. 39 BoiBos dxepoex duns. . 

8 Vit, Thes. v. ous d€ dvros ere Tore Tods weraBalvovras ex Taldwy éhOdvras els 
Aehpods amdpxecbar TG OeG THs buns. The word peraBaive marks the rite de 
passage. 

4 Hur. Bacch. 493 Ie. mp&rov wey aBpdv Bborpuxov Tew odbev. 
At. tepds 6 mdKapmos’ Tw Dew O° adrov TpEpw. 

442 From Daimon to. Olympian [CH. 

It is youth incarnate, youth with the unshorn hair’, who leads ure 
Bacchants to the mountains, 

And sets them leaping, as he sings, 
His tresses rippling to the sky. 
And deep beneath the Maenad cry 
His proud voice rings: 
‘Come, O ye Bacchae, come.’ 

Fie. 136. 

1 150 rpudepdy <te> rrOkapmor els aidépa plrtuv. 

“ tr? Apollo and Dionysos as Kouroi 443 

_ On a curious and beautiful early Greek mirror’, in Fig. 136, 
we see the two gods standing, each on a basis, face to face. Apollo 
holds his laurel spray. He is a typical ephebos, wearing but a 
chlamys and with his unshorn hair coiled in a krobylos, Dionysos, 
always more effeminate, less remote from the Mother, wears a long 
chiton. They are both calendar gods; the sun, a disk with the 
head of an ephebos, shines impartially between them. But the 
place seems to belong to Dionysos. A great vine is to either side 
of the bases and above isa panther. Perhaps Apollo as Delphinios 
may claim the dolphins. 
There came then to Delphi, tradition tells us, two Kouroi, the 
greatest Kouroi the world has ever seen, Apollo and Dionysos. 
Were they, who seem so disparate, really the same? So far as 

Fig. 137. 

they are Kouroi and Year-Gods, yes. But they are Kouroi and 
Year-Gods caught and in part crystallized at different stages of 
development. Apollo has more in him of the Sun and the day, 
of order and light and reason, Dionysos more of the Earth and the 
Moon, of the divinity of Night and Dreams. Moreover, Apollo is 
of man’s life, separate from the rest of nature, a purely human 
accomplishment; Dionysos is of man’s life as one with nature, a 
communion not a segregation. 

The vase-painting? in Fig. 187 may serve as the résumé of a 

1 Gerhard, EHtruskische Spiegel, ccxctt. ; 
2 Hermitage Cat. 1807. See Prolegomena, p. 391, Fig. 124. 

Be Re TL ee een ee Re omer 

444 From Daimon to Olympian [ CH. Ix 

long and complex chapter. We are at Delphi, and Dionysos the 
elder Kouros holds the place. About him are his Maenadsand his  — 
Satyrs. He welcomes the younger Kouros with his laurel bough, 
grasping him by the hand. Between them stands the holy tree, 
for they are both branch-bearers, and beneath them is the 
omphalos of Gaia, mother of both. 

We have watched Apollo in his transit from earth to heaven. 
We have seen that he like Dionysos was an Eniautos-daimon and 
a Megistos Kouros. But Apollo, unlike Dionysos, is a genuine, 
unmistakable Olympian. Wherein lies the difference? In a 
word, what is it to be an Olympian? The enquiry will be 
attempted in the next chapter. 

ApoLLo or DeEnos.

THE OLYMPIANS. 

v > » Al 
ATOTION AX AN efH ef TIC hafH iAEIN TON Afa. 

2 \ \ ih rn. > 4 2 \ \ 2 v 2 \ AY 
oy rap Toye Typ@nac Eexefnoyc oyAeé Toye Fifantac &pxein d&AAA TON 
TTATEPA BEN Kal ANOPWTTWN. 

In the Peace’ of Aristophanes, when Trygaeus is trying to win 
Hermes to his side, he tells him that there is a most serious and 
alarming plot being hatched against all the gods. Hermes asks 
what it is all about and Trygaeus answers 

‘Why there’s Selene and that old villain Helios 

Have been plotting away against you for ever such a time, 
To betray Hellas into the hands of the barbarians.’ 

Hermes asks why they should do that and Trygaeus explains 

‘Why, by Zeus, it’s because 
We sacrifice to you, but those barbarians 
To them, and of course that’s why they'd like 
To ruin us altogether, that they may get 
For themselves the feasts that ought to belong to the gods.’ 

- The ‘barbarians’ on whose behalf the Moon and Sun are 

plotting are, of course, the Persians. Herodotus? in an instructive 
passage tells us of the manner of their worship. 

The Persians to my knowledge observe the following customs. 

It is not their habit to set up images, temples and altars; rather they 
charge them who do so with folly, and this, I think, is because they do not 
hold like the Greeks that the gods are of human natures. It is their practice 
to ascend to the tops of mountains, and there they do sacrifice to Zeus, and 
they call the whole circle of heaven Zeus (Aia). They sacrifice to the sun 
and the moon, to the earth and to fire and water and the winds. To these 
and these only have they sacrificed from the beginning. 

Herodotus, like Trygaeus, clearly thought that the nature-gods 
of the Persians were quite distinct from the human-nature gods of 
the Greeks. He could not possibly, at his stage of thinking, 
realize that all gods are, in the sense explained in the last chapter, 

1 y, 403 ff. ; oy 
2 1,181 ...8rc ovK dvOpwropuéas évuucay Tovs Beds Kard mep ol" EANyves elvau... 

» een Fe 

| ee Bel we 

446 The Olympians [ CH. 

nature-gods, and all, because they are born of man’s reaction towards 
the outside world, are by equal necessity human-nature gods; that 
itis in fact a question of degree, of stage of development rather 
than of definite distinction. Apollo the typical Olympian was, as 
we have just seen in the last chapter, of Earth and of the Sun, as 
well as of that human-nature which in him, as Kouros, as Ephebos, 
emerged resplendent. A detailed examination would probably 
show that the same was true in great part of each and every 
Olympian. 

The Greek Gods, in their triumphant humanity, kicked down 
that ladder from earth to heaven by which they rose. They 
reflected, they represented the mood of their worshippers, which 
tended always to focus itself rather on what was proper to 
humanity than on what was common to man and the rest of 
the universe. The Greek of the time of Aristophanes or even of 
Herodotus had probably no very clear idea that the Apollo he 
worshipped was a Sun-god. But the Persians as outside observers 
were more acute. The scholiast on the passage from the Peace! 
just quoted observes, 

The barbarians honour the sun and the moon as Herodotus relates. And 
probably they reverence both sun and moon more than all the other gods. 
On this account they refrained from ravaging both Delos and Ephesos, For 
the sun is held to be Apollo and Artemis to be the moon. 

Whatever may have been the view of the unthinking public, 
the educated man, as Well as the barbarous Persian, knew that in 
past days the Greeks themselves had worshipped Nature-powers. 
Plato in the Kratylos? makes Sokrates say 

‘The earliest inhabitants of Greece accounted those only to be gods whom 
the barbarians now worship, the sun and moon and earth and the constella- 
tions and heaven.’ 

And again in the Laws’, when the Athenian asks the Cretan 
Kleinias how he could show that the gods existed, Kleinias 
answers, 

‘Why first of all there is the earth and the sun and the constellations 
and the whole universe and the fair order of the seasons and the division of 

them into years and months. And then there is the fact that all men 
Hellenes and barbarians alike, account them to be gods.’ ; 

2 397, 3 8864. 

The Olympians are anthropomorphic — 447 

Here we seem to be in a midway position. The Nature- 
powers, earth and sun and stars, are gods, but they are also 
evidence that there are gods. Divinity is in process of extrusion 
from nature. 

The Pythagorean writer of the Epinomis speaks very clearly 
as to the precedence due to the Nature-powers, 

As to the gods, Zeus and Hera and all the rest, let each man lay down 
a law for himself as he will, and let this be binding, but as to the visible 
gods, who are greatest and most to be honoured...these must be reverenced 
with due rites and sacrifices and festivals. 
To doubt the existence of these is the wildest impiety. 

Everywhere then we find among thinking men the conscious- 
ness that behind the recognized Olympians were Nature-powers. 
It was, of course, as already observed, impossible for a Greek of 
that day to recognize the simple psychological fact that a god was 
neither of the two, neither a man nor a nature-power but rather — 
the outcome of both, the expression of man’s focus of attention 
on nature. a pee 

We think and write of the gods of the Greeks as anthropo- 
morphic, ‘of human form’ or ‘shape.’ The clumsy word is too narrow; 
its associations are rather of art than religion. The word used by 
Herodotus avOpwrodins ‘of human growth’ or ‘nature’ is wider 
and better. It has more life-blood about it, more of the real 
nature and function of the god, less of the outer semblance. Yet 
even the wider word must not be glibly used, Still less must we 
assume off-hand that the shift from nature-god to human-nature 
god is necessarily an advance. The process needs careful scrutiny 
and the result some detailed analysis. We shall find that the 
complete human-nature god is, roughly speaking, what we call an 
Olympian. What then are his characteristics? It will be seen in 
the sequel that they are strangely, significantly negative, that 
an Olympian is in fact in the main the negation of an Eniautos- 
daimon. 

(1) The Olympian sheds his plant or animal form, Of this 
we have already had abundant evidence. Zeus Ktesios was once 
a snake%. Zeus Olbios in local worship long preserved his bull's 

1984 p—985 p. The close of the long passage is resumed rather than 

translated. 
2 Supra, p. 297. 

St i ead 

448 The Olympians [cH. 

head}, But imagination boggles at a bull-headed Zeus seated in 
Olympos. Yet for all that the remembrance of the bull-nature 
never dies out. It lives on in mythology. 

Fie. 138. 

On the beautiful archaic metope of Selinus? in Fig. 138 we 
have Europa seated on the bull. 

No whit like other bulls is he, but mild and dear and meek: 
He has a wise heart like a man’s, only he cannot speak. 

1 Supra, p. 148. 2 From a photograph. 

Olympians reject Animal-form 449 

Moschos? of course, in his lovely idyll, thinks that Zeus took 
upon him the form of a bull, but, in the light of Zeus Ktesios 
and the Bull Dionysos, we know this to be a mere late aetiological 
inversion. The Sun-God of Crete in Bull-form wooed the moon- 
goddess, herself a cow; their child is the young bull-god the 
Minos-Bull, the Minotaur. Kadmos sought Europa in Boeotia, in 
Cowland—and what did he find ? 

Kadmos hither came from Tyrian town; 
Lo! untired before him laid her down 
The heifer, that made clear the god’s command 
And bade him dwell there in the fertile land2. 
And, that there may be no mistake, Mnaseas? tells us that on 

either flank of the heifer was 
‘a white sign like the circle of the moon.’ 

Sometimes the animal form of the god lives on as in mytho- 
logy ; more often perhaps it survives in the supposed ‘attribute’ of 
the god. Thus on the familiar coin of 
Kaulonia in Fig. 1389 we have Apollo in 
fall human form. Standing beside him 
is a stag, an animal ‘sacred to’ him as to 
his sister Artemis. Such sanctities are 
not lightly forgotten. On the outstretched 
arm of the god is a little winged figure, 
usually interpreted as a wind. It is, I 
think, more probably the daimon of the Fra. 139. 
god, his Kratos, his power, his mana 
made visible. In his other hand the god as Thallophoros holds 
a sacred bough. In high Olympos the gods cease to carry 
boughs, instead they carry wine-cups. They feast more freely 
than they function. | 

The shedding of plant and animal form marks of course the 
_ complete close of anything like totemistic thinking and feeling. 
It is in many ways pure loss. The totemistic attitude towards 
animals may, as based on ignorance, beget superstition, but it is 

Td We lO. 

2 Kur. Phoen. 638. 

® Schol. Hur, Phoen. 638 

évOa d€ mpoomeddoas suAdduBave Body épiuvxoy 
Ty 7] Kev VoToLOW én’ audotépooty Exnot 
Nevkov ofm’ éxdrepe meplrpoxov Hite mivys. 

a eee Utley ee 

450 The Olympians 

full of beautiful courtesies. There are few things uglier than 
a lack of reverence for animals. The well-born, well-bred little 
Athenian girls who danced as Bears to Artemis of Brauronia, the 
Bear-Goddess, could not but think reverently of the great might 
of the Bear. Among the Apaches to-day, Bourke? states, ‘only 
ill-bred Americans, or Europeans who have never had any “raising,” 
would think of speaking of the Bear or indeed of the snake, the 
lightning or the mule, without employing the reverential prefix 
“Ostin,” meaning “old man,” and equivalent to the Roman title 

929 

“Senator. 

In art this exclusion of animal and plant life from the cycle 
of the divine is sometimes claimed as a gain. Rather it leaves 
a sense of chill and loneliness. Anyone who turns from Minoan 
pottery with its blossoming flowers, its crocuses and lilies, its 
plenitude of sea life, its shells and octopuses and flying fish, 
anyone who turns from all this life and colour to the mono- 
tonous perfection of the purely human subjects of the best red- 
figured pottery, must be strangely constituted if he feels no loss. 
He will turn eagerly for refreshment from these finished athletes 
and these no less accomplished gods, to the bits of mythology 
wherein animals still play a part, to Europa and her bull, to 
Phrixos and his ram, to Kadmos and his snake, and he will turn 
also to the ‘attributes’ of the humanized Olympian, he will be 
gladdened by Athena’s owl and by the woodpecker of Zeus; glad 
too that Dionysos’ Dendrites still deigns to be a tree and Apollo 
to carry his living branch. The mystery gods it should be noted 
here, though it has been observed before?, are never free ot 
totemistic hauntings, never quite shed their plant and animal 
shapes. That lies in the very nature of their sacramental worship. 
They are still alive with the life-blood of all living things from 
which they sprang. 

(2) The Olympian refuses to be an Earth-daimon. In dis- 
cussing the sequence of cults from Gaia to Apollo it has been 
seen that, even when he has left totemistic ways of thinking 
behind him, when he has ceased to base his social strueture on 

1 On the Border with Crook, p. 132. I borrow this quotation fr 
delightful article on Descriptive Animal Names in ey Gian Rees (1904) 

- 2 

p. 384. 
2 Supra, p. 129. 

— 
$ 
a 

ome hci 

x| The Olympians reject Snake-form 451 

supposed kinship with animals and plants, man tends, in his 
search after food, to focus his attention first on earth! and only 
later on heaven. His calendar is at first seasonal, based not 
on observation of the heavenly bodies but on the waxing and 
waning of plants, of the fruits of the earth. The worship of 
Earth in a word comes before the worship of Heaven. 

This worship of Earth and the daimonic powers of the earth 
is, we have also seen, closely and even inextricably mixed with 
the cult of the dead. The daimonic power of the dead is figured 
under the form of a snake. The situla in F ig. 140 from Daphnae? 
recalls this earth-snake to our minds, He is clearly a daimon of 
fertility; to his right hand springs upa tree. He is winged, for 
he is in part a daimon of the powers of the air, but he is 
emphatically a snake. That there may be no mistake not only 

Fie, 140, 

has he, like Cecrops, a snake’s body, but in either hand he holds 
a snake. 

_ When the Olympians mounted from Olympos to the upper 
air they were, it seems, ashamed of their earth-origin and resolved 
to repudiate their snake-tails. This is very clearly seen on the 
vase-painting’ in Fig. 141. To the right is an old Earth-daimon 
just like the daimon on the Daphnae situla. He is winged, and 
his body ends in two snake-coils. He is obviously as benevolent 
and as civilized as Cecrops himself. But he is earth-born, and 
Zeus of the upper air, the completely human Zeus, will have none 

1 For a full examination of the religion of Earth and its relation to phallic 
cults see A. Dieterich, Mutter Erde, 1905; and for the transition from Earth- to 
Heaven-worship, 8. Wide, Chthonische und Himmlische Gétter, in Archiy f. 
Religionswiss. 1907, p. 257. 

' 2 Brit. Mus. Cat. B. 104. 
3 Gerhard, Auserlesene Vasenbilder, 111. 237. 

bS 
Ne) 
‘ 

452 The Olympians | [ CH. 

of him, will blast him with his thunder-bolt. We seem to hear 
the kindly, courteous old earth-daimon ery, and cry in vain, 

2A ‘ r 
t@ Geo VEWTEPOL, 

The animosity of the wholly human Olympians against the 
earth-born daimones takes definite and instructive form in the 
myth of the Gigantomachia. The word giant brings to our minds 
the picture of a man of monstrous size and probably cannibal 
habits, but the ‘giants’ of the Greeks are nowise in this sense 
‘gigantic.’ Pentheus is a ‘bloody giant’, but his stature is like 
that of other mortals. He is the typical ‘giant, earth-born, seed 
of Echion. The Greek giants have one characteristic mark and 
even this scarcely separates them from ordinary mortal men: they 

Fic. 141. 

are Karth-born, yyyeveis, and as such they fight with primitive 
weapons wrested from earth, with huge blocks of stone and trees 
uptorn by their roots. They are the actual and special children 
of Karth herself. Again and again on vases and reliefs when in 
the great fight with the Olympians the earth-born ones are in 
danger, the figure of Gaia rises up from the ground to implore 
mercy for her sons?. 

In this connection it is important to note the form given 
to them in art*. On black-figured vases and early reliefs, such 
as the pediment of the Megara Treasure-house at Olympia, they 

1 Kur. Bacch. 573; see supra, p. 434. 
5 re Roscher, Lexicon, s.v. Gaia. 
or the whole subject of the Giants see Dr Maximili 4 illi 
Die Giganten und Titanen, 1887. Following the Tiymologioune actin 
ybyavres, he holds that 7 and yiyas are from the same root. I follow in the 
main his view of the contrast between Giants and Titans, but he is in n : 
responsible for the views I deduce from this contrast. iy ee 

~ 
‘ 

A ewer a eee Ss ee ee 

; 

x] 

are simply armed men, hoplites, like the crop of men who sprang 
at Thebes from the dragon’s teeth. On later and more learned 
monuments, as for example red-figured vases and the great Altar 
of Pergamos, they are men with bodies ending in serpents’ tails. 
They are, even to the detail of the added wings, creatures just 
like the opponent of Zeus in Fig. 141. They prove to be in fact 
nothing but the gods, or rather the snake-tailed daimones, of the 
early population. They began like the daimon on the Daphnae 
vase and like Cecrops and Kadmos as fertility-daimones, as Agathoi 
Daimones. When the human-shaped Olympians triumph they 
become evil monsters to be overthrown. Their kingdom is of 
this earth. 

The Olympians reject Ouranian Aspect 453 

(3) The Olympian refuses to be a daimon of air and sky. 
Mythology tells us not only of a Gigantomachia but of a Titano- 
machia. The Titans cannot be very precisely delimited from the 
Giants. They too are in some sense Earth-born’, Titaia was a 

_ title of Earth, Titias was own brother to Kyllenos, and the nature 

of Hermes Kyllenios we know, and both were paredroi of the 
Mother and both were Idaean Daktyls*. The Earth-born Tityos 
is a figure that needs no comment. Priapos, Lucian® tells us, was 
either ‘one of the Titans or of the Idaean Daktyls*’ Picus and 
Faunus, says Plutarch, ‘either Satyrs or Titanes.’ 

But; and this is the interesting point, the Titans, unlike the 
Giants, seem early to have left their earth-nature behind them 
and climbed one step up the ladder to heaven. Fertility-daimones 
they remain, but rather as potencies of sky than earth. A little 
south of Sikyon Pausanias® saw the town of Titane, the town, 
according to the natives, where Titan first dwelt. 

They say that he was brother to the Sun, that the place took its name 
Titane from him. I think that Titan was great at marking the seasons of 

the year and the time when the sun gives increase to and ripens the fruit 
of trees. 

1 For the primitive Daktyl and phallic nature of the Titans see Kaibel, Daktylot 
Tdaioi, 1902. 

2 See Kaibel, op. cit., pp. 489—492. } 

3 De Salt, 21, speaking of the invention of the armed dance by Priapos, rav 
Tirdvev otuat va 7} Tov Idaiwy Aaxtidwv. : 

4 Vit. Num. 15 ods ra wev Gra Daripwv dv ris ) Tirdvwy yever mpoceckacece. From 
lack of understanding of the nature of the Titanes Tirdywv has been emended into 
Tlavév. 

Dieriteelal ete) 

aCe Pe ey ie oe ON ee ee 

454 | _.. The Olympians 

The notion that Titan is a Sun-power lives on, like Phoebus, 
in English poetry. 

And Titan, tired in the mid-day heat, 
With burning eye did hotly over-look them}. 

But it would be a mistake to suppose that Titan is always and 
merely the Sun. Empedokles? is nearer the truth because less 
specialized. To him Titan is the aither, the whole region of the 
meteora. 

Gaia and billowy ocean and air with its moisture, 
And Aither, the Titan, embracing the All in a circle. 

Special Titans specialize into Sun-Gods. The Titan Sisyphos 
who climbs the steep of heaven rolling his stone before him, only 
to fall adown the steep and climb it again next morning, is the 
Sun, the Titan Phaethon is the Sun, the Titaness Phoebe is the 
Moon, but Titan himself is rather Ouranos, the whole might of 
the upper air. 

Art has left us no representations of the Titanomachia as 
distinguished from the Gigantomachia—but in literature it is 
abundantly clear that the Titans are Ouraniones. In Homer 
and Hesiod they, unlike the Giants, are always gods, Turfves Geos 3. 
They are constantly being driven down below the earth to nether- 
most Tartarus and always re-emerging. The very violence and 
persistence with which they are sent down below shows that they 
belong up above. They rebound like divine india-rubber balls. 
Their great offence in Olympian eyes is that they will climb up to 
high heaven, which the human-shaped Olympians had arrogated to 
themselves. The fight between Titans and Olympians always 
takes place in mid air. In the Theogony* the Titanomachia is 
but a half-humanized thunderstorm, where Zeus as much and 

perhaps more manifestly than his opponents is but a Nature- 
Power. i 

' Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 177. 
2 Diels, F.V.S. 38 
ytd te Kal mdvros modkUKuLwy Ho vypos arp 
Tiray 78° alOinp optyywv epi KbKrov émrayra. 
A kindred figure to Titan is Akmon (Sk. agman), the personified vault of heaven. 
° Hes. Theog. 630 
Tires te Oeol xa door Kpévou égeyévorro: 
Hom. Il. x1v. 278 Oeods dvéunvev dravras. 

* v, 675 ff., trans. Prof. Murray, rods Urorapraplous, ot Turfves xaddovrar. 

a ey ee ee 

oe 

0) The Titanomachia 455 

The new gods stood on Olympos and the Titans on the older 
religious seat, Thessalian Othrys. 

And the Titans opposite had made strong their lines and both sides put 
forth their might. And there was a terrible cry from the boundless sea, and 
shattering of the earth, and the broad sky groaned and high Olympos was 
shaken from his foundations with the rush of immortal things, and the quak- 
ing and the noise of feet upon the steeps came down unto cloudy Tartaros.... 
And the armies met with a great shout and Zeus held back his fury no more. 
Down from Olympos and heaven he came in one sweep of thunders that ceased 
not; and the bolts went winged from his mighty hand and the life-bearing 
Earth cracked with the burning and around him the fathomless forest roared 
in fire and all Earth seethed and the streams of Okeanos and the unharvested 
sea, and a hot blast beset the earth-born Titans, a flame unspeakable blazed 
in holy aether and the flash of thunderbolt and lightning blinded their eyes 
mighty though their strength -was, and a wondrous heat laid hold of Chaos?. 
And it seemed, to see with the eyes and to hear the great din with the ears, 
that Earth and broad heaven crashed together. For such a mighty din had 
been if earth were in ruin and heaven hurtling above her. Such was the din 
what time the gods met in battle. 

_ The stuff of which Zeus is made is clear enough. He too was 
a Titan, he too was Ouranos and Aither, and his nature retains 
more of Ta petdpova than of ta petéwpa. But he has emerged 
into humanized form, and his old form is made to appear, not like 
the chrysalis from which he evolved himself, but rather as an 
alien foe opposed. It is strange and interesting that Zeus, king 
and father of all the other Olympians, should be the last to shed 
his elemental nature. He who is always boasting that he is Father 
and Councillor remains to the end an automatically explosive 
thunderstorm?. He has none of the achieved serenity of the 

Sun-god Apollo. 

We are accustomed to think of the Titans as criminals, rebels 
against high heaven condemned for their sin of #8pes to languish 
in Tartarus. It is well to look at things from the other side, th 
side set before us in the Prometheus of Aischylus. pa 

1 Chaos is the space between Earth and Heaven. See schol. ad Theog. 116 
...Fryouv Tov Kexupevoy ev TH weraky ys Kal ovpavod. 

2 M, Salomon Reinach in his Orpheus, 1909, p. 5, has well pointed out that the 
same explosiveness attaches to the Hebrew Father-God, Jahveh. It is difficult to 
do justice to Jahveh unless we remember the primitive elements his figure absorbs. 
The account of Uzzah and the ark in 2 Samuel vi. 4—7 shocks our moral sense. 
Uzzah caught hold of the Ark to prevent it falling—‘for the oxen shook it.’ The 
intent was innocent, even praiseworthy, but ‘the anger of the Lord was. kindled 
against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error: and there he died by the 
ark of God.’ Such a God makes worship difficult. But if we remember that 
the ark was itself a centre of tabu, automatically explosive, like a thunderstorm, 

and that the human Jahveh is a later addition, our antipathy in part disappears. 

456 The Olympians [ CH. 

Prometheus is the arch-Titan and he is son of Gaia, The 
chorus who sympathize with him are nature-powers, Okeanids of 
the old order. There is perhaps nothing in all ancient poetry 
more lovely than the coming of the Okeanid chorus. Prometheus, 
hurt and bitter of heart, hears in the air a flutter of bird-wings. 
He is afraid. He is so badly hurt that all the world is pain and 
fear to him— 

mav yo. poBepoy To mpooéprov1. 

The Okeanids sing softly to him their song of sympathy and 

gentleness, in that measure which in itself is a healing— 

pndev poBnOns: piria yap ade rdéis mreptyov Boats 

apithas mpooéBa rovd_e mayor. 
It is the eternal healing of dispassionate nature as against the 
angry clash of irreconcilable human wills and egotisms. 

The chorus laments the new rulers, the new helmsmen of the 
world’s ship, just as the Erinyes bemoan the coming of the vedrepou 
Geoi— 

véou yap olakovdpot Kpatodo’” ’Odvprov, veoxpois dé 57) vopous 

Zeds adérws kpatives, : 

Ta mplv S€ meAwpia viv dicrot?, 
“He has destroyed the old portentous ones.’ The expression ‘ por- 
tentous ones,’ red dpva, is noticeable and repays investigation. 

We think of the Okeanids as Ocean-nymphs, sea-nymphs, but 
we do not think quite rightly, nor does the notion sea-nymph at 
all exhaust their content. Okeanos is much more than Ocean 
and of other birth. 

This comes out clearly in the unforgettable scene at the 
beginning of the 20th Iliad’. Zeus summons all the gods to 
his council on Olympos and Themis ranges round to collect 
them. She fetches the rivers and they all hurry up and do on 
their human shapes and sit them down in the polished colon- 
nades. 

There was no River came not wp, save only Ocean, nor any nymph, of all 
that haunt fair thickets and springs of rivers and grassy water-meadows. 

Why did not Ocean come? The sea-god came‘, . 

Nor was the Earth-shaker heedless of the goddess’ call, but from the salt 
sea came up after the rest and set him in the midst. 

1 Aisch. Prom. Vinct. 128 ff. 2%. 150 ff, 
* Home fax Actin Bs 1a 

ott ars he F pte aay, © oe he eet ae 

Okeanos as Sky-God 457 

Homer! is loud and instant to tell us that no river might rank 

with Zeus. 

a Not even King Acheloios is match, nor yet the great strength of deep- 
flowing Ocean, from whom all rivers flow and every sea, and all springs and 
deep wells: yet even he hath fear of the lightning of great Zeus and his dread 
; thunder, when it pealeth:out of heaven. 

a Homer here, as often, doth protest too much. Okeanos fears 
: no Zeus and will not attend his councils—and why? Because he 
= himself is not Ocean but the stream of Ouranos, high heaven itself, 
. 

an earlier unhumanized Zeus. Okeanos, says the Htymologicum 
Magnum?, is a title of Ouranos. 

As a potency of the old order he is the enemy of Zeus, the 
friend of Prometheus. And he comes, not like a sea-god mounted 
on a dolphin but on a four-legged bird with winnowing wings. 
The bird comes in so clumsily that he must be integral. It beats 
the air with its pinions eager to be back in its heavenly home. 
And again, the Okeanids come, not swimming and _ floating 
through the waves but borne on the breeze, for they too are 
daimones of the upper air— 

kpaimvopdpor dé wu’ erenav adpar®. 
The gods who came to Prometheus in his sorrow are the old 

nature-gods whom he as Titan invoked, azther, the swift-winged 
winds, the springs of heaven-born rivers— 

& Sios aidnp Kai taxdmrepor mvoai ; 
ToTapav Te mHyal TovTioy Te KULAT@OY 
dvipiOpov yéNacpa, Tmappnrop Te ‘yi? 

That is poetry, but it is also theology, sound if obsolete, but 
obsolete only to revive in philosophy, the philosophy of Sokrates 
hung in mid-air; the philosophy of those Ionians who, borrowing 
it may be their doctrine from the BdpBapou, the Persians, saw 10 
the elemental nature-powers the beginning of things. Most of all 
the sun is not forgotten by the old Titan-god: 

ok) eee 

© / rol 

Kal Tov mavdmtnv KUKAOY 7nALoU Rake 
ae \ cal / / 

Wea we ola mpos beav Tacx beds. 

1 Jl, xxt. 195. A Lea 

2 s.v. Qreavds* 6 obpayds vevdmorar. ’Qxeavds is connected with ai, agayanas— 
surrounding; it is the stream of ether engirdling the universe; it is ceaseless, 
recurrent (d4Wéppoos), unwearied (dxdparos), essentially Titanic. See H. H. Berger, 
Mythische Kosmographie der Griechen, 1904, pp. 1 and 2. 

3 Asch, Prom. Vinct. 132. 

4 vu, 88. 5 y, 92. 

Cee eee 

458 The Olympians — [ CH. 

The Gigantes are children of Earth, the Titanes are children 
of Earth and Heaven, with a leaning towards Heaven. The 
Gigantomachia stands for the triumph of the humanized.Olym- 
pian over the powers of Earth, over the snake-tailed monster ; 
the Titanomachia stands for the triumph, partial only, of Olym- 
planism over that higher form of Naturism which is Ouranianism}. 
It would scarcely have been possible to figure Sun and Moon as 
lawless monsters, but Ouranos included in his compass ta werap- 
ova as well as ta weréwpa, and in the conduct of ra werapova and 
the weather-daimones generally there was much that might cause 
a willing enemy to blaspheme. Thunder and lightning, wind 
and rain, storm and tempest might fitly be classed as peloria, 
portents. 

The chorus of Okeanids, we have seen, lament that 
He has destroyed the old portentous ones. 

The word peloria covers, I think, both Earth-powers and Sky- 
powers, both Giants and Titans; but it is not a little interesting 
to find that quite early the word differentiated itself into two 
forms. Dr Osthoff? has shown that wé\wp and répas—monster 
and portent—are one and the same. An examination of the uses 
of the two words shows that they are practically identical, only 
that—and this is for us the important point—7édwp tends to 
specialize towards what is earth-born, and répas in the form 
teipea tends to be used of heavenly signs. 

Thus 7édwp is one regular term for an earth-born monster 
and specially for a snake. Gaia herself in Hesiod? is Tata 
meX@pn, the Python in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo is TéLop, 

? The chorus of Okeanids say emphatically (v. 164) 
6 & énixérws del 
Géwevos dyvaumrrov véov, 
dduvarar ovpavlay 
yévvay, 
> Etymologische Beitriige zur Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, in Archiy f. 
Religionswiss. 1904, p. 51. Both 7é\wp and répas go back to a guttural form *qepas. 
Hesychius has the form ré\wp* redbpiov, pwaxpdv, wéya and TedwWplos, Méyas, TeNwpLos. 
Euripides (Androm. 1033) uses the form xédwp, 
bre viv "Apyddev mopevdels 
"Ayapeuvdrios Kéwp, advTwY émuBas 
Kredvev jarpds, 
where xé\wp is obviously not ‘a poetic word’ for son. Orestes is the daimon 
household snake, the Ktesios turned Erinys. 
3 Theog. 159. 4 vy. 374. 

~ ry ays TAD 2 oe re ee 4, 

x] The Peloria 459 

but to Euripides? he is yas meAdpov répas. The portent sent by 
Persephone from below the earth is Topyein xepads) Seuvoto 
mehw@pov, but it is also Avs répas, as though by afterthought. 
Hades himself is Pelorios. One of the earth-born men sprung 
of the dragon’s seed was, according to Hellanikos?, called Pelor. 
The rest of the five were Oudaios, He of the Soil, Hyperenor, the 
Overweening, Echion, Snakeman, and Chthonios, Earthman, surely. 
a significant company. 

Finally, what is very interesting for us, we know of an ancient 
festival celebrated in honour of these primitive earth-potencies 
and called by their name Peloria. Athenaeus*, in discussing 
the ancient rites to which it was the custom to admit slaves, 
writes thus: 

Baton of Sinope, the orator, in his work on Thessaly and Haemonia, says 
plainly that the Roman Saturnalia was essentially a Greek festival and alleges 
that it was called by the Thessalians Peloria. 

Baton then goes on to give an aetiological myth to the effect 
that the festival, which was a sacrifice held in common by the 
Pelasgians, was instituted in honour of one Peloros who brought 
the news of the sudden emergence, owing to an earthquake, of the 
vale of Tempe. A table spread with all manner of delicacies was 
set for Peloros, hence the name of the feast—to which strangers 

and slaves were made welcome—and 

Even to this day the Thessalians celebrate this as their chief festival and 
call it Peloria‘, : 

The primitive character of the Peloria has been already? dis- 
cussed. What concerns us now is the name. It is abundantly 
clear that by the time of Athenaeus, and probably long before, 

the meaning of the word Peloria had been lost—the feast was 

said to be held in honour of Zeus Peloros. No one knew that the 

festival was in honour of just those old earth-portents whom Zeus 

destroyed. If we want to realize the sanctities reverenced at the 
old Thessalian festival we must go back not to Zeus but to the old 
Earth-daimon, winged and snake-tailed, who on the vase-painting 
in Fig. 141 smiles as he confronts the thunderbolt of Zeus. 

The Olympians then stand first and foremost as a protest 

1. in T. 1248. : 2 Schol. Apoll. Rhod. 11. 1178. 
3 xtv. 45. 639, 4 640. > Supra, p. 251. 

460 The Olympians 

against the worship of Earth and the daimones of the fertility 
of Earth. So far they command our respect and even our 
sympathy. As long as man is engaged in a hand to hand struggle 
for bare existence, his principal focus of attention must be on food. 
The magical inducement of the recurrent fertility of the earth is 
his first and well-nigh his last religious duty. But, as civilization 
advances, and he is freed from the more urgent necessities, his 
circle of needs enlarges and the focus of his attention widens. 
The old intense interest in food and fertility slackens. Moreover 
a worship of the powers of fertility, which includes all plant and 
animal life, is broad enough to be sound and healthy, but, as man’s 
attention centres more and more intently on his own humanity, 
such a worship is an obvious source of danger and disease. In- 
stinctively a healthy stock will purge its religion from elements 
exclusively phallic. This expurgation ranks first and foremost 
among the services Olympianism rendered to Greece!. The fight 
of the Gods against the Giants had right as well as might on 
its side, 

But, if the fight of the Gods against the Earth-born Giants be 
just and right, the same can scarcely be said of the fight against 
the Titans. These powers of the upper air, these gods of storm 
and lightning, these perdpova may be, because not understood, 
lawless, but they are nowise impure and their worship can scarcely 
degrade. Moreover, though the petdpova were, as being wholly 
unintelligible and apparently irresponsible, the appropriate objects 
of magic, the petéwpa with their ordered comings and goings, 
risings and settings, waxings and wanings, tempted man up the 
steep road of exact observation. Measurements led him to mathe- 
‘matics, ina word, to science. The Olympians would have done well 
had they, while renouncing or at least reforming Earth and ra 
vetapova, clung to and developed the worship of ta petéwpa. 
It has already been observed? that, in the course of the advance 
of European civilization, each new period of enlightenment has 

? See Kaibel, Daktyloi Idaioi, 1902, p. 512, for expurgation in Homer, and 
Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic®, 1911, pp. 143 ff. The process of expurgation 
probably long preceded its literary expression. For the general moral gain and the 
softening of manners see Greek Epic?, p. 257, where Prof. Murray quotes Plutarch’s 
significant words which head this chapter as motto, Vit. Pelop. xx1., a human 
sacrifice is opposed on the grounds ds ovdert rOv kpetrovew Kai tmrep nuds dperhy 
ovcay ottrw BdpBapoy Kal mapdvouoy Ovolav: od yap Tovs Tupavas éxeivous obdé Tovs 
Diyavras dpxew adda Tov marépa Gedy kal dvOpurwr. 

2 Supra, p. 439. 

eS a a a. ee Se 

eo eT | See ee oe 

ye -. 

Xx] Persian Religion and Ionian Philosophy 461 

been accompanied or rather expressed by new progress in the 
study of astronomy. 

Why then did the orthodox Olympian religion, spite of the 

protests of philosophers, renounce td petéwpa? I would hazard 

a conjecture, distinctly marking the fact that it is at present little 
more than a conjecture, of which confirmation, however, seems to 
grow apace. By the mouth of Herodotus and Aristophanes we 
have seen that, to the popular mind, the worship of nature-powers, 
the elements and the heavenly bodies, earth, air, water, fire, Sun 
and Moon, was characteristic of ‘the barbarians,’ and in the sixth 
century B.C. barbarian of course spelt Persian. ‘That old villain 
Helios’ is intent on betraying the Olympians; he is caught 
Medizing. Is it not possible that some, indeed much of the 
acrimony felt, the contumely heaped on meteoric philosophy is 
due, not to the rage of the common man against the thinker, but 
to the natural resentment of the patriot? Sokrates in his basket 
contemplating ta peréwpa is not only, or chiefly, the fantastic 
philosopher, he is the pilloried Persian. 

We may take it as an axiom! that philosophy arises out of 
religion. Greek philosophy arose, we are told, in Ionian Naturism. 
Starting from our axiom we are bound to ask, ‘Out of what religion 
was it that Ionian Naturism arose?’ Not from Olympianism. 
The doctrines of Thales, of Herakleitos, of Anaximenes, of Anaxi- 
mander, given that they arose from a religion at all, must have 
arisen from a religion concerned with the elements, Water, Fire, 
Air, Earth. For such a religion we look in vain to Greece. 
That philosophy arose in the sixth century B.c., just the century 
when Asia Minor was riddled through and through with Persian 
infiltrations. 

The history of art tells, I think, the same tale. Up to the 
time of the Persian wars Greek art was all that we call archaic. 
It was traditional and hieratic. Then comes the sudden awaken- 
ing to an almost complete naturism. We write and lecture on the 
outburst of new life that followed on the struggle with a great 
Oriental potency. Is it not at least as likely that in art as in 

1 For a full exposition and analysis of this principle, to me indisputable and 

axiomatic, I may be allowed to refer to Mr F. M. Cornford’s forthcoming work, 
From Religion to Philosophy. 

462 mf The Olympians 

philosophy ‘Naturism’ received a fresh impulse from Persia? and 
both had a common source, Persian religion ? . The Olympians are, 
as will presently be shown’, essentially objets d'art. 

We shall find confirmation of this view if we look at another 
movement of the sixth century B.c., the movement known as 
Orphic®. Orphic religion contains within itself much that is indi- 
genous. Its main fond is primitive Aigean religion, with all those 
factors of naturism and magic already described in detail. But 
what differentiates it out from the rest of the popular religion 
of Greece is, I have long believed, certain imported elements of 
Oriental and mainly Iranian nature-worship and formal mysticism ‘. 
The Greek spirit always tended to humanize and individualize 
its daimones into personal gods, Iranian mysticism kept them 
disintegrated and dispersed in the medium of nature from which 
they sprang. JDivinities so dispersed are the natural medium 
and vehicle of magic, of sacramentalism, of each and every form 
of mysticism. 

Orphism did just what the Olympian religion failed or refused 
to do, It reformed the religion of Earth, but by strengthening 
the powers of Heaven, not by disallowing them; it fought the 
Giants but joined forces with the Titans®. This it was, I think, 
enabled to do through its reinforcement by Iranian naturism and 
mysticism. To confirm this view the main position of Orphic 

1 This is not the place to discuss the character of Persian art. Its characteristic 
naturalism may be well studied in the sculptures from Persepolis, excavated by 
M. and Mme Dieulafoy, and now in the Louvre. The possible influence of Persia 
in producing Pheidian and post-Pheidian naturalism in art was first suggested to 
me @ propos of his discoveries at Memphis by Prof, Flinders Petrie, It was a 
conversation with him that first led me to the idea that Persian nature-worship 
might underlie Ionian philosophy. 

2 Infra, p. 478. 

? Orphism as a whole is advisedly excluded from the present book, which aims 
only at an examination of certain social origins of Greek religion. ‘ 

4 For these foreign elements in Orphism see especially Dr Hisler, Welten- 
mantel und Himmelszelt, 1910. For Persian influence in Egypt in the sixth and 
fifth centuries B.c. see W. Flinders Petrie, Personal Religion in Egypt, p. 40 ff 
For prehistoric relations between Iran and Asia Minor as evidenced by the Boghazkoi 
excavations see Winckler in Mitteilungen d. deut. Orient.-Gesellschaft, 1907 
No. 35, Pp. 1—71, and Garstang, Land of the Hittites, 1910. For a good résumé 
of the Persian elements in Orphism see Dr Wiinsch’s review of Dr Bisler’s book in 
Archiv f. Religionswiss. 1911, p. 536. 

> Persian religion laid, as is well known, special stress on. Fire- i 
along with this went a minute attention to Zainal purity, and a han dee a 
drawn between light and darkness, good and evil—a distinction foreign to the 
primitive Greek mind. We owe our devil to the Persians, 

tal hihi iia a 1 Rt 7 11's 

x) Persian Religion and Orphism 468 

religion must briefly be resumed. Only so can we feel to the 
full the weakness and deadness of Olympian negations, 

d The broad foundation of Orphic religion, as of all mysticism, 
was a pantheistic naturism. All things are sprung from Earth and 
y Heaven. This doctrine is best voiced in the priceless fragment of 

4 the Melanippe the Wise of Euripides’. Melanippe has borne two 
; children to the god Poseidon. They are exposed, by the god’s 
command, but saved by divine interposition and found, in the 
usual fashion, suckled by wild kine. They are brought to the 
king. He calls a seer who pronounces it to be a portent, and 

es 

; 

‘ orders expiation by the burning of the children. Melanippe is 
d called and ordered to carry out the sentence. She recognizes and 
_____ pleads for them, an odd, advanced plea. She urges that there are 

no such things as portents and then, while her children are still 
| under sentence of burning, in strange Euripidean fashion, expounds 
the immutable order of nature—a tradition received by her from 
her half divine mother, Hippo, the daughter. of the wise old 
| Cheiron on Mt Pelion. 
4 This is the statement : 

It is not my word, but my mother’s word? 

How Heaven and Earth were once one form, but stirred 
And strove and dwelt asunder far away : 

And then, rewedding, bore unto the’day 

And light of life all things that are, the trees, 

Flowers, birds and beasts and them that breathe the seas, 
And mortal Man, each in his kind and law. 

ae 

_ 
. 

_ A primitive and beautiful cosmogony, meet material for 
mysticism, but why, it may be asked, claim it as Orphic? Such 
it was held by tradition to be, at least in Alexandrian times, 
Apollonius Rhodius? tells how, just before the Argo sailed, the 
heroes fell to quarrelling, and Jason sought to stay them from their 
strife, and Orpheus lifted up his voice and essayed to sing. 

He sang how Earth and Heaven and Sea were joined 
Of old together in one form, and next 
How that they parted after deadly strife 
Asunder. How, in ether, Sun and Moon 
And stars keep each their ever steadfast course, 
And how uprose the mountains, and the rivers 
: Rippled and rushed, and creeping things were born. 

e 1 Nauck, Fg. 484, trans. Murray. i 

2 A much-quoted line. Cf. Plato, Symp. 1774, and Hur, Hei. 513. It is used 
of something having the force of ancient tradition. As a preface it makes us 
expect some weighty pronouncement. 

3 1, 494 

— a ee a 

MTOR a oe, ee ht ee a eg 

464 The Olympians . [cH. 

Different though the style is, vaguer and more Ouranian the 
outlook, it is clear that here, as in Melanippe, we have the old 
Orphic cosmogony which lent to Empedokles his Neikos and 
Philia, and to philosophy in general rd rovobv and 70 macxov. 
It is a cosmogony that knows no Olympians. To Melanippe 
Earth and Sky are the causes, the beginnings, of all things. The 
Olympians are there; they may be, as Helen said, ‘to blame’ 
(airvoc), but they are only spokes in the great wheel? of nature, not 
the driving force that sets and keeps her going, not aitiav*, 

Varro? tells us expressly that 

Earth and Sky, as the mysteries of Samothrace teach, are the Great Gods, 

and Samothrace was the natural bridge between Orientalized 
Asia Minor and the mainland. Most conclusive of all is the 
avowal of the Orphic mystic, his avowal of race and parentage. 
He claims to be the child of no Olympian, he goes back to 
potencies earlier, more venerable: 

I am the child of Earth and of Starry Heaven‘. 

The avowal of the initiate Orphic does not end here. A second 

clause is added, not wholly untinged, I think, by protest : 
But my race is of Heaven (alone). 

The creed he adopts is definitely opposed to that of Xeno- 

phanes®: 
From earth all things rise, and all things in earth have their ending. 

Again Xenophanes says : 

All things are earth and water that grow and come into being ; 
and again: 

For we all are born of earth and are born of water, 

where the fire element is intentionally disallowed. 

1 Infra, p. 523. 

2 Tl. 111. 164 of rb wor airly éoot, Ocol vb mor atrol elou. 

3 De Ling. Lat. vy. 58 Terra enim et Caelum ut Samothracum initia docent 
sunt Dei Magni. ; f 

4 Petelia Tablet. See Prolegomena, p. 574. 

> atrap éuov yévos ovpaviov. ven if we take the atrdp as having but slight 
adversative force and translate ‘moreover’ the emphasis is the same. 

_§ Diels, Frg. 27, 29 and 33. Prof. Burnet, Early Greek. Philosophy? pels 
thinks that certain expressions used by Xenophanes ‘can only be meant to make 
the heavenly bodies ridiculous.’ But though Xenophanes may have distrusted the 
worship of the heavenly bodies, he revered Ouranos as a whole. 

ee 

i i 3 

‘ey. ea 

— ee ee a ee eee 

mp Orphism and the Ouranians 4.65 

It is almost as though the initiate Orphic would say, By nature, 
by birth, I spring from my mother Earth, but by adoption and 
grace I am made the child of Heaven. Manifestly a distinction is 
drawn between the two great cosmic powers, and preference given 
0 Ouranos. 

But we have other definite evidence that the religion of 
Orpheus emphasized just what the Olympian religion disallowed, 
the worship of the heavenly bodies. Tradition accounted Orpheus 
a Sun-worshipper. Eratosthenes? thus writes: 

He (Orpheus) did not honour Dionysos but accounted Helios the greatest 
of the gods, whom also he called Apollo. And rising up early in the morning 
he climbed the mountain called Pangaion and waited for the rising of the 
sun, that he might first catch sight of it. Therefore Dionysos was enraged 
and sent against him his Bassarids, as 4Hschylus the poet says. 

In worshipping Helios, Orpheus only followed the custom of 
his native Thrace. Sophocles in the Tereus? makes one of his 

characters say : 

O Helios, name 
To Thracian horsemen dear, O eldest Flame! 

Maximus of Tyre* said that the Paconians reverenced Helios, 
and the Paeonian image of Helios is a small disk on a long pole. 

Orpheus, Eratosthenes tells us, called Helios also Apollo, and 
the later Orphics who went by the name of Pythagoreans always 
worshipped Apollo. It was revealed in the mysteries that Apollo 
and Helios were the same. That is clear from a passage in the 
lost Phaethon of Euripides‘. The rash Phaethon has fallen, killed 
by a lightning flash from the Sun, and his bride thus reproaches 
the slayer: 

Thou hast destroyed me, O bright Helios, 
Me and this man. O rightly among mortals 
Apollo, yea, Destroyer, art thou called 

By such as know the Silent Names of spirits. 

Side by side with the Olympian movement which tended 
entirely to humanize the gods, we have then a movement of return 
to Nature-Worship. This movement arose in the sixth century, 
and was, broadly speaking, contemporary with the rise of Ionian 
philosophy, itself, if our contention be just, based in part on 

1 Catast. 24. p. 140. * Soph. Frg. 523. 
3 8.8 ...dicxos Bpaxts vrep waxpod v\ov, something like, no doubt, the pole and 

globe carried in the Daphnephoria. See supra, p. 438. 

* Nauck, Prg. 781 gers ra crydvr’ dvduar’ olde damdvev. 
H. 30 

466 The Olympians 

Persian naturism. Is it rash to suppose that Orphism owed its 
main impulse to the infiltration of Persian religious doctrine ? 
that in religion as in politics there was ‘Medizing’? Tradition 
said, and it is a tradition that has been too long forgotten, that 
when Cyrus consulted the oracle of the head of Orpheus at Lesbos, 
there came to him in answer words as singular as significant. 
‘Mine, said the oracle to the Persian, ‘O Cyrus, are also thine’ 

Moreover, and this I think is an important point, Orphism was 
always discredited at Athens. Spite of its high moral tone, spite 
of the fact that it was recognized as a purer and reformed phase of 
Dionysiac religion’, it was never popular in high places. Is it not 
at least possible that some of its discredit arose from political, 
racial prejudice ? 

To resume. In discrediting certain elements of Earth- Worship 
Olympianism did well. In disallowing the worship of the Heavenly 
bodies Olympianism did ill. Save for the Persian War, or rather 
the Persian infiltration, this backward step need perhaps never 
have been taken. 

(4) The Olympians refuse the functions of the Eniautos-daimon. 
As to the making of Greek theology, Herodotus® has left us a 
notable statement, much discussed but not as yet, I think, fully 
elucidated. 

But as to the origin of each particular god, whether they all existed from 
the beginning, what were their individual forms, the knowledge of these 
things is, so to speak, but of to-day and yesterday. For Hesiod and Homer 
are my seniors, I think, by some four hundred years and not more. And it 
is they who have composed for the Greeks the generations of the gods, and 
have given to the gods their titles and distinguished their several provinces 
and special powers and marked their forms. 

There were gods before the Olympians of Homer and Hesiod, 
but they were without titles, they were undistinguished in their 

1 Philostr. Heroic. v. 3. 704 ra éua w Kipe cat od. See Prolegomena, p. 466. 
A commentator on Statius also notes the analogy between the Persian ‘and the 
Pythagorean nature-gods as contrasted with the anthropomorphic Greek divinities. 
See Lutatius Plac. ad Stat. Theb. 1v. 516 (Abel, Frg. 282). He contrasts ‘hos deos 
cognitos qui coluntur in templis’ with ‘alium principem...de cujus genere sunt sol 
et luna.’ Of this last he says ‘ Persae etiam confirmant...maximis in hoe auctoribus 
Pythagora et Platone.’ 

2 See Prolegomena, p. 456, and especially Diodorus, 111. 65, where it is said of 
Orpheus rod\a merabeivar T&v ev Tots dpyiors. 

3 11. 53 ...08700 6€é efor of morjoavres Oeoyovlny’ EAnot kal rotcr Oeotot Tas érovuulas 

dovres Kal Tiuas Te Kal Téxvas diéovTes Kal Elden avTdv onunvartes. 

x] Olympians contrasted with Eniautos-Daimones 467 

functions, undiscriminated in their forms. We know now what 
manner of beings these pre-Olympian potencies were ; they were 
Year-daimones, all alike in shape and function, all apt to take on 
plant or animal shape, the business of each and all monotonously 
one, to give food and increase to man and make the year go round. 
But the Olympian will have none of this, he shakes himself loose 
of the year and the produce of the year. In place of his old 
Junction, his rip}, his yépas, he demands a new honour, a service 
done to him, himself as a personality. Instead of being himself a 
sacrament he demands a sacrifice. 

This shift of meaning in rvs} from function that must be per- 
formed to honour claimed marks the whole degradation of the 
Olympian. The god like the man who substitutes privilege for 
function, for duty done, is self-doomed and goes to his own place. 
“If any will not work neither let him eat,’ Sentiment, tradition, 
may keep up the custom of gift-sacrifice for a while, but the gods 
to whom the worshipper’s real heart and life goes out are the gods 
who work and live, not those who dwell at ease in Olympos. They 
are Year-daimones, and the type and model of them all is the 
old hard-working Helios, the unwearied one, whether he toils to 
mount the heavens day by day or, in human form as Herakles, to 
cleanse the earth for man from monsters. 

Surely the Sun has labour all his days, 
And never any respite, steeds nor god?. 

The real true god, the Eniautos-daimon, lives and works for 
his people; he does more, he dies for them. The crowning dis- 
ability and curse of the new theological order is that the Olympian 
claims to be immortal (40avaros). In examining sacrament and 
sacrifice we have seen that the Year-daimon in the form of a 
Bull lived his year-long life that he might die, and died that he 
might live again. His whole gist and nature was absorbed and 
expressed by the cycle of periodic reincarnation. Out of this 
eycle came all his manifold, yet monotonous life-history, his Births, 
his Re-births, his Appearances and Disappearances, his Processions 

1 For this observation on the shifting use of riu/ I am indebted to Mr Cornford, 
and may refer to his forthcoming book From Religion to Philosophy. _Mr Cook 
points out to me that Zeus never quite shook off his year-aspect, see Iliad u. 134 
évvéa On BeBdaor Ards weryddou éviavrol. Zeus indeed, alone among the Olympians, is 
a Sky and Weather-god to the end. 

2 See supra, p. 370. 

30—2 

468 - The Olympians. — : [ CH. 

and Recessions, his Epiphanies, his Deaths, his Burials, his Resur- 
rections, his endless Changes and Chances*. 

All this, all life and that which is life and reality —Change 
and Movement?—the Olympian renounces. Instead he chooses 
Deathlessness and Immutability—a seeming Immortality which 
is really the denial of life, for life is change. This brazen lifeless 
immutability impressed the imagination of Pindar’. Tinged with 
Orphism though he was, he did not hear how hollow it rang: 

Of one race, one only are men and gods ; both of one mother’s womb, wé 
draw our breath: but far asunder is all our power divided, and parts us— 
here there is nought and there in strength of bronze, a seat unshaken, eternal, 
abides the heaven above. 

He sees the beauty and the fertility of Earth’s recurrent cycle 
mirrored in man: 

Even so, for a sign thereof, Alcimidas shows clear the mark of his race, 
close kin to the fruitful cornlands: whose alternation now gives from the 
soil life in abundance to man and now again takes rest to lay hold upon 
strength. rit 
But he cannot see that the Olympian who will not die to live 
renounces life, he desiccates and dies. Such is the very nature of 
life that only through the ceaseless movement and rhythm of 
palingenesia is immortality possible. Athanasia, eternity through 
not dying, is almost a contradiction in words. ) 

Together with this conception of a dead and barren im- 
mortality there grew up the disastrous notion that between god 
and man there was a great gulf fixed, that communion was no 
more possible. To attempt to pass this gulf was hybris, it was 
the sin against the gods. Pindar again lends himself to this 
pitiless, fruitless doctrine. The dull, melancholy mandate runs 
through his odes: 

Seek not thou to become a god* 

In this mandate we see the door closed finally on the last remnants 
of totemistic thinking; it is the death warrant of sacramentalism. 
The only possible service now is gift-sacrifice ; and by that service 
alone, history has shown, the soul of man cannot live. 

1 See supra, pp. 425, 426. 

® H. Bergson, La Perception du Changement, Conférences faites 4 Oxford 1911, 
p. 28 ‘si le changement est réel et méme constitutif de toute realité....’ 

3 Nem. vi. sub init. 
+ Supra, p. 128. 

a i eS 

bes 

>i The Olympians as jealous Gods 469 

In a fashion more sad and dreary and degraded still the 
complete separation of man and god utters itself in another and, 
to sacramentalism, a blasphemous thought. The gods are jealous 
gods; there is #@dvos. The gods begrudge a man a glory that 
may pale their own splendour.. To the mystery-god Dionysos 
@0ovos is unknown: 

No grudge hath he of the great, 
No scorn of the mean estate ; 
But to all that liveth, his wine he giveth, 
Griefless, immaculate! 2 

So too Plato®, by a beautiful instinct, when he tells of the grea 
procession of the gods and daimones through high heaven, will 
exclude no one save only @Odvos himself : 

And any one may follow who can and will, for jealousy stands ever 
without the heavenly choir. 

Zeus is but the great leader of an equal band, but the Megistos 
Kouros’, he is no jealous god. 

So far then our conception of the Olympian is mainly negative. 
He refuses the functions of the totemistic daimon, he sheds his 
animal or plant form. He will not be a daimon of Earth, nor yet 
even of the Sky; above all he refuses to be a Year-daimon with 
his function of ceaseless toil. He will not die to rise again, but 
chooses instead a barren immortality. He withdraws himself 
from man and lives remote, a ‘jealous god.’ 

But these negations, instructive though they are, do not 
exhaust the content of the Olympian. We feel instinctively that 
in some ways an Olympian is more vivid, more real than any 
shapeless, shifting nature-daimon. If we met Zeus or Apollo in 

“the street we should know them and greet them. To put it 
simply, the Olympian, for all his negations, has personality, in- 
dividuality. It will repay us to investigate rather closely what 
we mean by personality and individuality. 

It has been from the outset a cardinal principle of this book 
that the god is the reflection, the projection of man’s emotions 
socially reinforced. We saw in the first chapter that the divine 

1 Hur. Bacch. 421. er, ‘ 

2 Phaedr.247B ...p0dvos yap Ew Oelov xopod tcrara: and again, in the T’imaeus (29); 
Plato, aristocrat though he is, knows that in the sphere of the good there are no 
class distinctions, dya0@ 5€ ovdels rept oddevds ovdérore eyylyverat pOovos. ° 

3 Supra, p. 12, note 1. 

ae ae, ee Dole ETE ey we ©. 

470 _ The Olympians 

figures of the Kouros and the Mother were but the projections 
of social conditions essential to a Matrilinear group’. Further, 
in considering totemistic societies?, we have seen that their main 
characteristic was solidarity, lack of differentiation. Man had 
not yet separated himself out from nature, and the individual 
man has but slight consciousness of himself as distinguished from 
his group. Such a social state of things has its religious counter- 
part, its religious projection, in undifferentiated forms like the 
daimon of the group, the functionary, uttering and embodying the 
collective life of the group’. 

But as the group system disintegrates, the individual emerges, 
and further, not only does the individual emerge from the group, 
but the human individual is more and more conscious of his sharp 
distinction from animals and plants, from the whole of nature 
that surrounds him. This twofold emergence of the individual 
from the group, of the human individual from the nature-world 
around him, is inevitably mirrored in the personality, in the 
individuality of the Olympian gods. 

We are still too apt to put the cart before the horse, to think 
of the group as made up of an aggregate of individuals rather 
than of the individuals as a gradual segregation of the group. It 
is only by an effort of imagination that we realize that plurality, 
the group, comes first. A simple illustration from language may 
serve to make clear this point. 

In many North American, Central Asian, and Pacific languages 
two plurals are in use, the Inclusive and Exclusive, or, as they 
are perhaps better called, the Collective and Selective Plurals. 
The Collective ‘we’ includes all persons present, the ‘Selective’ 
a smaller selected group, to which the speaker belongs. The 
proper use of this plural is essential to the successful missionary, 
otherwise doctrinal scandal may ensue: 

When the formula ‘We have sinned’ occurs in prayer, the exclusive form 
must be employed, for the supplicant would otherwise be including the 
Almighty among those to whom sin is imputed. The same expression 
occurring in a sermon, takes the inclusive form; for the audience would 
otherwise be excluded from the category of sinners and would understand 

the preacher’s meaning to be ‘We, the clergy, have sinned but not you, the 
people,’ 

1 pp. 38—42. 2 pp. 118—127. S ppa ile erss 
4 Payne, op. cit. 188. 

x] The Olympians are individualized 471 

Again, and still more instructively, we have among the Apache 
Indians and the British Columbian tribes a collective as well as a 
selective singular. The collective singular denotes the person as 
a member of the group. Thus if the question be asked ‘Who will 
help?’ the answer would be the collective ‘I, that is ‘I for one’ or 
‘I among others.’ But if the question be ‘Who is the mother of 
this child?’ the answer will be the selective ‘I,’ that is I and 
nobody else. . 

Now ‘this sharp distinction occurs, Mr Payne! observes, ‘with a 
frequency which indicates it as answering to a substantial need of daily life. 
The Apache Indians for example, one of the wildest peoples in America, 
would scarcely have invented and rigorously preserved this idiom unless it 
were indispensable to their intercourse: and the same may be said of the 
British Columbian tribes in whose languages it is even more conspicuous. 
The collective, it should be noted, ts the ordinary form, and the selective the 
exception.’ 

No more interesting illustration could be adduced of the sense 
of solidarity naturally pervading the food-group and of the weak 
sense of individuality in separate members. 

It will be apparent whither the argument is tending. Now- 
a-days we think of the plural number in language as made up 
of a number of singular units, as a complexity rather than a 
simplicity. That is because we reason back from a segregation 
already accomplished and that seems to us instinctive. But the 
facts of language show that the plural and all other forms of 
number in grammar arise not by multiplication of an original ‘I’ 
but by selection and gradual exclusion from an original collective 
‘we. This ‘we’ represents the aggregate personality of the food- 
group, and therefore includes the undifferentiated ‘I’ of the speaker 
of the time being. The procedure is from synthesis to analysis, 
from the group to the individual. 

Dr Tylor, the great exponent of Animism, sees in the conception 
of the human soul ‘the very fons et origo® of the conception of 
spirit and deity in general’: 

‘Spiritual beings,’ he says, ‘are modelled by man on his primary conception 
of his own human soul#.’ 

1 History of the New World, 1. p. 188. st } 
2 Mr Payne, from whom (op. cit. vol. 1. p. 186) I borrow this interesting 
observation, adds, ‘to borrow terms from the philosophy of Quantity, if thought 
and language are regarded as two related variables, the ‘I ” does not represent their 
prime ratio but their ultimate one.’ I am no mathematician but I append the 
illustration in case it may be significant. 

3 Primitive Culture®, 1. 247. 4 Op. cit. u. p. 184. 

472 | The Olympians [ CH. 
Broadly speaking this remains true, but, in the light of modern 
psychology and sociology, it needs some restatement. For the 
individual human soul we must substitute that thing at once 
more primitive and perhaps therefore more complex—the group- 
soul. The god is projected, not by the thinking or the feeling of 
one man, but by such part of his thinking and feeling as he has 
in common with other men, such emotions and ideas as are 
represented by his customs and enshrined in his language: 

‘It seems,’ again says Prof. Tylor}, ‘as though the conception of a human 
soul when once attained to by man served as a type or model on which he 
framed not only his ideas of other souls of lower grade, but also his ideas of 
spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports in the long grass 
up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world, the Great Spirit.’ 

Profoundly true if only the words italicized ‘when once 
attained to by man’ be carefully borne in mind. A more intimate 
knowledge of savage thinking has brought to light a stage of 
thinking more primitive, more inchoate, than animism, a stage 
which we may call Animatism, or better I think Zoism?, a stage 
in which man has not yet got his own individuality clear, but 
Ss intensely conscious of life lived, of power felt, though not yet 
of isolated personality. This state of group-thinking or rather 
group-living is reflected in totemism and in the vague daimones 
that emerge from totemistic thinking®. 

Until man learns to think of himself sharply as an individual, 
that is until the hold of the group is weakened, he will not 
sharply individualize his gods. They will be not clear cut 
personalities but functional daimones. Now it would seem at. 
first that a clear cut personality is a higher and better thing 
than a vague impersonal daimon or functionary. So he is from 
the point of view of art and intellect, but all experience goes to 
show that his emotional appeal, save to the very highly educated, 
is feebler. The sight of a great discoverer or great thinker will 
touch the imagination of a few, but, if you want to move the 
great heart of the people to hysteria, to almost frenzy, you must 

1 Op. cit. 1. p.110. The italics are my own. 

2 I borrow this term—and welcome it is a 
‘Animatism ’—from Mr Cook. 

* For the indeterminate stage preceding Animism see especial] A.C. Kruij 
Animisme in den Indischen Archipel, 1906, a book I rishi pete 
through the analysis in the Revue de I’ Histoire des Religions, by R. ‘Hertz 1909. 
p. 352. Mr W. McDougall’s ‘ Defence of Animism’ (Body and Mina, 1911) appeared 

after this section of my book was written, and I have not had lei it wi 
the needful attention. puniersaisss 8 

substitute for the inelegant form 

> Holophrase and Holopsychosis 473 

produce a daimon-functionary, as little individualized as may be, 
you must crown a king. The reason is clear, the king, the 
daimon-functionary, is the utterance of the group and each 
individual in the group claims him as in part himself, 

_The highly personalized, individualized god is fashioned on 
the highly personalized, individualized self, and the essence of the 
sense of self is separateness}, or consciousness of the severance of 
one self from other selves?, and of that self as subject and distinct 
from objects. Now primitive consciousness for the most part lacks 
this sense of segregation, because it is mainly absorbed in activities, 
in ‘doing things. The things of which the savage is mainly 
conscious are not envisaged as external objects, they are parts of 
his doing, of his ‘warm stream of human consciousness. We 
have already*® seen this in the case of weapons and tools which 
are felt as extensions of personality. Your stick is part of your 
act of brandishing, or of your sense of walking. You are not 
conscious of it as a stick till you let it fall. The sense of: action, 
of relation, is vivid and submerges subject and object. This comes 
out very clearly in certain aspects of primitive language. 

It used to be thought that language began with nouns, the 
names of things, to which later were added qualifying adjectives. 
Still later, it was held, these separate nouns were joined by verbs 
expressing relations between subject and object, and these again 
were qualified by adverbs. Modern linguistic tells quite another 
and, for psychology and primitive religion, a very instructive 
tale. Language, after the purely emotional interjection, began 
with whole sentences, holophrases‘, utterances of a relation in 

1 See supra, p. 86. Separateness, individuality, is a characteristic of life, but it 
is eternally combated by the tendency to reproduce other life which prevents com- 
plete individuality. See Prof. Bergson, L’ Evolution Créatrice, p. 14, ‘on peut dire 
que si la tendance 4 s’individuer est partout présente dans le monde organisé, elle 
est partout combattue par la tendance 4 se réproduire.’ Hence the Eniautos-daimon 
resisted complete individualization. ; 

2 The correlative of this, the process of individualizing the soul, is very clearly 
stated by M. Lévy-Bruhl in his Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Infériewres, 
p. 430, ‘Quand l’individu humain prend une conscience claire de lui-méme en tant 
qu’individu, quand il se distingue formellement du groupe auquel il se sent appar- 
tenir, alors les étres et les objets extérieurs commencent aussi a lui apparaitre 
comme pourvus d’ames ou d’esprits individuels, durant cette vie et aprés la mort. 

3 Supra, p. 86. 

4 For this illustration from language I am indebted to Mr E, J. Payne’s sections 
on language in his History of the New World, 1899, vol. u. p. 114 ff. In the dis- 
cussion of personalization that follows from it I owe much to Mr Crawley’s Idea 
of the Soul, 1909, p. 35. 

. is 

474 ) The Olympians — [ CH. 

which subject and object have not yet got their heads above 

water but are submerged in a situation. A holophrase utters a. 

holopsychosis. Out of these holophrases at a later stage emerge 
our familiar ‘Parts of Speech,’ rightly so called, for speech was 
before its partition. A simple instance will make this clear. 

The Fuegians! have a word, or rather holophrase, mamehlapr- 
natapat, which means ‘ looking-at-each-other,-hoping-that-either- 
will-o ffer-to-do-something-which-both- parties-desire - but -are-unwill- 
ing-to-do. This holophrase contains no nouns and no separate 
verbs, it simply expresses a tense relation—not unknown to some 
of us, and applicable to any and every one. Uneducated and 
impulsive people even to-day tend to show a certain holophrastic 
savagery. They not unfrequently plunge into a statement of 
relations before they tell you who they are talking about. As 
civilization advances, the holophrase, overcharged, disintegrates, 
and, bit by bit, object, subject and verb, and the other ‘Parts of 
Speech’ are abstracted from the stream of warm conscious human 
activity in which they were once submerged. 

‘The analogy,’ as Mr Crawley observes, ‘between the holophrase and the 
primitive percept and concept is close. In both we start with masses which 
are gradually divided in the one case by perception becoming analytical, in 
the other by an attempt on the part of the articulating muscles to keep pace 
with this mental analysis.’ 

The holophrase shows us man entangled as it were in his own 
activities, he and his environment utterly involved. He has as 
yet no ‘soul,’ but he has life, and has it more abundantly. 

Is the savage then impersonal? Does he tend to employ only 
generalized abstract terms denoting that indefinable though wholly 
palpable thing ‘relation’? Far from it. He is intensely personal. 
Language again is the best evidence. 

A New Caledonian expressing the fact that some fruit was not high enough 

for the native palate, said not ‘it-not-yet-eatable,’ but ‘we-not-yet-eatable2.’ 

Egotism could scarcely go further. The thing eaten is regarded 
as a mere appendage to, as in fact part of, the personality of the 
eater. It is indeed actually an essential factor in that activity, 
that eating or not-eating of which he is intensely conscious. A 
faint survival of this egotistic plural is observable in the ‘we’ of 
the modern writer, which absorbs the reader's personality ; when 

1 Crawley, op. cit. p. 34. ? Crawley, op. cit. p. 37. 

— 

x] 

the writer becomes doubtful of a sympathetic union he naturally 
lapses into the exclusive ‘I 

Group-Consciousness and Individualism 475 

Language then would seem to throw light on two points. 
First, primitive man, submerged in his own reactions and activities, 
does not clearly distinguish himself as subject from the objects to 
which he reacts, and therefore has but slight consciousness of his 
own separate soul and hence no power to project it into ‘animated 
nature. He is conscious of life, of mana, but not of individual 
spirits ; his faith may be described as Animatism or Zoism?! rather 
than as Animism, his ritual will be that of magic, which is, as we 
have seen, but the manipulation of mana. His sacrifice, if sacrifice 
he performs, will be a sacrament partaken of, not a gift offered to 
a person. Second, man felt himself at first not as a personality 
separate from other persons, but as the warm excited centre of a 
group; language tells us what we have already learnt from ritual, 
that the ‘soul’ of primitive man is ‘congregationalized?, the col- 
lective daimon is before the individual ghost, and still more he is 
before the Olympian god. 

The savage we have seen is never impersonal, never abstract. 
His whole being, his whole personality, is as it were involved, 
submerged in action, but he does not personify. The act of 
personifying involves the realization of subject and object, the 
vivid consciousness of the subject as an individual, a person, and 
then the projection of that personality over into an object realized 
as distinct. It is as far as possible from that holopsychosis, that 
symbiosis of which the holophrase is the expression. The one is 
emotional, the other highly intellectual. As M. Lévy-Bruhl® has 
well said : 

Connaitre en general c’est objectiver; objectiver, c’est projeter hors de soi, 
comme quelque chose d’étranger, ce qui est a connaitre. 

To know, it would seem, is at least in part to purge perception 
from egoistic emotion, from sympathy ; it is to view dispassionately. 

1 Some new termis much needed. I prefer Mr Cook’s Zoism; see supra, p. 472. 
Animatism is suggested by Mr Marett (Threshold of Religion, p. 15), ‘It (the attitude 
of a Kaffir towards a thunderstorm) is Animism in the loose sense of some writers, 
or, as I propose to call it, Animatism, but it is not Animism in the strict scientific 
sense that implies the attribution, not merely of personality and will but of 
‘soul ” or “spirit” to the storm.’ Mr Clodd in his Pre-animistic Stages in Religion, 
Fortnightly Review, 1909, p. 1133, suggests Naturism. 

2 p. 48. 

3 Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures, p. 452. 

476 The Olympians 

Here we seem to trace one cause of the chill remoteness of the 
Olympians. They are objects to a subject, they are concepts thrown 
out of the human mind, looked at from a distance, things known, 
not like the mystery gods felt and lived. The more clearly they 
are envisaged the more reasonable and thinkable they are, the 
less are they the sources, the expression, of emotion. 

We touch here on the very heart and secret of the difference 
between the Olympian and the mystery-god, between Apollo and 
Zeus on the one hand and Dionysos on the other: a difference, the 
real significance of which was long ago, with the instinct of genius, 
divined by Nietzsche. The Olympian has clear form, he is the 
“principium individuationis’ incarnate; he can be thought, hence 
his calm, his sophrosyne. The mystery-god is the life of the whole 
of things, he can only be felt—as soon as he is thought: and in- 
dividualized he passes, as Dionysos had to pass, into the thin, 
rare ether of the Olympian. The Olympians are of conscious 
thinking, divided, distinct, departmental; the mystery-god is the 
impulse of life through all things, perennial, indivisible. 

Above the intellectualized Olympians was set, by Homer and 
by Alschylus alike, the dominant figure of Moira?, division, 
partition, allotment, and rightly, for it is by dividing, by dis- 
tinguishing, by classifying, that we know. This impulse to 
divide is reflected in Moira, and the departmental Olympians 

are, so far as they are thought, but specialized Moirai. As has 
been well said: 

Chaque mythologie est, au fond, une classification, mais qui emprunte ses 
principes 4 des croyances religieuses, et non pas a des notions scientifiques. 

1 Die Geburt der Tragidie, p. 116, ‘erste aus dem Geiste der Musik heraus 
verstehen wir eine Freude an der Vernichtung des Individuums. Denn, an den 
einzelnen Beispielen einer solchen Vernichtung, wird uns nur das ewige Phanomen 
der dionysischen Kunst deutlich gemacht, die den Willen in seiner Allmacht 
gleichsam hinter dem principio individuationis, das ewige Leben jenseit aller 
Erscheinung und trotz aller Vernichtung, zum Ausdruck bringt,’ and again, p. 23, 
“man mdochte selbst Apollo als das herrliche Gétterbild des principit individuationis 
bezeichnen’; for the emotional, unifying tendency of Dionysos see p. 24. 

* The meaning of this figure of Moira and the inherent scepticism of the 
Olympians was also in his inspired way divined by Nietzsche, op. -cit., p. 69, 
‘,..dies alles erinnert auf das starkste an dem Mittelpunkt und Hauptsatz der 
aschyleischen Weltbetrachtung, die iiber Géttern und Menschen die Moira als 
ewige Gerechtigkeit thronen sieht. Bei der erstaunlichen Kiihnheit, mit der 
Aschylus die olympische Welt auf seine Gerechtigkeitswagschalen stellt, miissen 
wir uns vergegenwartigen, dass der tiefsinnige Grieche einen unverriickbar festen 
Untergrund des metaphysischen Denkens in seinen Mysterien hatte, und dass sich an 
den Olympiern alle seine skeptischen Anwandelungen entladen konnten.’ 

—— 

Dike and Durée 477 

Les panthéons bien organisés se partagent la nature, tout comme ailleurs les 
clans se partagent Punivers!. ? 
The Olympians are then but highly diversified Moirai and the 
Moirai are departments, they are the spatial correlatives of the 
temporal Horai. The wheel of Dike moves through time, Moira 
operates in space. The distinction is of cardinal importance. 
Prof. Bergson? has shown us that durée, true time, zs ceaseless 
change, which is the very essence of life—which is in fact ‘l’Evolu- 
tion Créatrice, and this is in its very essence one and indivisible. 

La durée réelle est ce que ’on a toujours appelé le temps, mais le temps ~ 
pergu comme indivisible. 

We cannot understand this perhaps through the eye, trained 
to spatial perception, but we can imagine it through the ear. 

Quand nous écoutons une mélodie, nous avons la plus pure impression de 
succession que nous puissions avoir—une impression aussi éloignée que 
possible de la simultandité—et pourtant c’est la continuité méme de la 
mélodie et limpossibilité de la décomposer qui font sur nous cette impression. 
Si nous la découpons en notes distinctes, en autant ‘d’avant’ et ‘d’aprds’ 
qwil nous plait, c’est que nous y mélons des images spatiales et que nous 
imprégnons la succession de simultanéité ; dans lespace seulement, il y a 
distinction nette de parties extérieures les. unes aux autres. 

It is this ‘durée,’ figured by the Greek as Dike, the Way’, that 
the mystic apprehends; in the main stream and current of that 
life of duration, he lives and has his being. Moira and all the 
spatial splendours of her Olympians are to him but an intellectual 
backwater. 

Finally, the Olympians not only cease to be sources of emotion 
but they positively offend that very intellect that fashioned them. 
They are really so many clear-cut concepts, but they claim to have 
objective reality. This is the rock on which successive genera- 
tions of gods have shattered. Man feels rightly and instinctively 

1 MM. Durkheim et M. Mauss, De quelques Formes Primitives de Classification— 
Contribution a V Etude des Représentations Collectives. L’Année Sociologique, 1901— 
1902, p. 1. In this monograph, which in its relation to the study of religious 
origins is simply ‘epoch-making,’ the authors seek to establish that logical 
classification arises from social. This is analogous to the philosophical position 
of Prof. Durkheim, who holds that the ‘ categories’ are modes of collective rather 
than individual thinking ; see his Sociologie Religieuse et Théorie de la Connaissance 
in Rev. de Métaphysique, xvi. 1909, p. 733. For Moira as the principle of classi- 
fication I am entirely indebted to Mr Cornford, and, for the full analysis and 
significance of the conception, may refer to his forthcoming Prom Religion to 
Philosophy, chapter 1. 

2 La Perception du Changement, 1911, p. 27. 

3 For the significance of Dike see infra, pp. 516—528. 

eee a eee tae woe Pel Ye aoe Y ae a! .” = la Da a | 

478 The Olympians [ CH. 

that a god is a real thing—a real thing because he is the utterance 
of a real collective emotion, but, in progress of time, man desiccates 
his god, intellectualizes him, till he is a mere concept, an etdolon. 
Having got his ecdolon, that erdolon fails to satisfy his need, and 
he tries to supply the place of the vanished thymos, the real life- 
blood of emotion, by claiming objective reality. 

There is another submerged reef waiting to wreck the perilous 
bark of divinity. Man’s first dream of a god began, as we saw, in 
his reaction towards life-forces not understood. Here again we 
begin with the recognition of, or rather the emotion towards, a truth. 
There 7s a mystery in life, life itself which we do not understand, 
and we may, if we choose, call that mystery by the name of god, 
but at the other end of the chain of evolution there is another 
thing, a late human product which we call goodness. By a 
desperate effort of imagination we try to link the two; we deny 
evolution and say that the elementary push of life is from the 
beginning ‘good, that God through all his chequered career 
is immutably moral, and we land ourselves in a quagmire of 
determinism and teleology*. Or, if we are Greeks, we invent a 
Zeus, who is Father and Councillor and yet remains an auto- 
matic, explosive Thunderstorm?. 

Such in general is the progress of a god—from emotion to 
concept, from totem-animal to mystery-god, from mystery-god 
to Olympian. But the Greek, and perhaps only the Greek, went 
one step further, and that step brought a certain provisional 
salvation. It is a step, at all events, so characteristic of the Greek 
mind, that it claims our attention. 

This brings us to our last point. 

(5) Lhe Olympian became an objet dart. We have been told 
to satiety that the Greeks are a people of artists. Something we 
mean by this, but what? It is manifest that their gods, Apollo, 
Artemis and Athene, are works of art in a sense that our own are 

dorsivbich ialitapastie trish. tae tcn ttc 

cation ofthe Go which meant th Hea 9 ih the God whe th 

equated 7d & with Tayaddr. element in the mistake made by Plato when he 
3 See supra, p. 455. 

x] The Olympians as Obdjets d'Art 479 

not. We feel instinctively that, however much we may quarry for 
the origin of Greek religion, and strive to reconstruct it, and see 
its influence on life and on literature, the broad fact remains that 
the strength of the Greek temperament lay rather in art than in 
religion. The full gist of this fact cannot appear till, in the last 
chapter, we have examined the figure of Themis, but one point is 
immediately clear and immediately relevant. 

M. Bergson! has shown us that the function of science is to aid 
and direct action to provide tools for life. It begins with and only 
very slowly emerges from practice. Man acts that he may live, by 
adjusting himself to his environment. Man thinks that he may 
the better act. But here and there arises an individual, and once 
there has arisen a race, in whom nature has linked less clearly the 
faculty of perception with the faculty of action. We all know that 
the artist is ‘unpractical?” and that is what we mean. When an 
artist looks at a thing, it is at that thing whole, that he may see 
it for the love of it. When the man of action looks at a thing he 
analyses it, classifies it, sees it dismembered; he sees the joints 
carved for his eating, not the whole live animal—he sees what he 
can use and eat. 

Therefore to the Greek his god, however remote and detached, 
is never quite a mere cold concept. His Olympian is alive, seen 
whole, and seen with keen emotion, loved for himself not for the 
work he does, not merely as a means of living. But it was only 
to the Greek that the Olympian lived, a great and beautiful 
reality. Seen through Roman eyes, focussed always on action, 
he became the prettiest and emptiest of toys. 

So far we have looked at the Olympians as individuals, as 
luminously distinct personalities. But they are not only indivi- 
duals; they form a group, and as a group they claim to be 
considered. This brings us to our last consideration, to the figure 

of Themis. 

1 p. 47 ‘Originellement, nous ne pensons que pour agir. C’est dans le monde 
de l’action que notre intelligence a été coulée,’ and see supra, Pp. 473, a 

2 H. Bergson, La Perception du Changement, Conférences faites a PUniversité 
@ Oxford, 1911, p. 11, ‘L’artiste est, au sens propre du mot, un “ distrait,”’ and see 
op. cit. p. 13. See also Prof. J. A. Stewart’s beautiful section on ‘The pe of 
Ideas as expressing aesthetic experience’ in Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 1999, p. 135. 
‘ Aesthetic experience is a condition in which concentration, often momentary, 
never long maintained, isolates an object of consciousness: the object stands there 
itself, alone, peerless,’ and for a suggested psychological explanation, the temporary 
inhibition of ‘ synapses,’ see op. cit. p. 142, note.

. THEMIS. 

Odpe K éc OEMIN KadAAN. 

IN discussing the sequence of the gods at Delphi, we left, 
it will be remembered’, the figure of Themis unformulated. Before 
we can consider the Olympians as a group, nies significance ene 
be examined. 

At Delphi Themis comes next in order after Gaia, and in the 
Prometheus Bound Aischylus’ makes her but another form of Gaia. 
Prometheus says that the future was foretold to him by his 

mother, 

cident 
And Gaia, one in nature, many-named. 

By Aschylus, in both plays, Themis is in fact envisaged as the 
oracular power of Earth. As such she is figured in the design in _ 
Fig. 142 from a red-figured cylix’. 

Aigeus, the childless king, comes to the oracle at Delphi to ask 
hhow he may have a son. Within the temple is the tripod and 
seated on it is not any one particular Pythia, but Themis herself, 
the spirit, the projection of the oracle. Gods might come and go, 
Gaia and Phoibe and Phoibos, but Themis who, as we shall presently 
see, is below and above all gods abides there seated. She holds in | 
‘one hand a phiale of it may be holy water, and in the other — 
a spray of laurel. She is thallophoros. “a 

At Athens‘ the priestess of Themis had a seat in the Dionysiac 
theatre and another seat bears the inscription ‘Two Hersephorot 

1 Supra, p. 387. 2 Prom. Vinet. 209. 
? Berlin Gat. Gerhard, Awserlesene Vasenbilder, cooxxvit. 

4 C.L.A. m1, 318, 350, See Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. 274. 

‘GHD x1] Themis as Gaia 481 

of Ge Themis.’ Themis had a sanctuary on the south slope of the 
Acropolis near to that of Ge Kourotrophos and Demeter Chloe 
At Rhamnus? she was worshipped by the side of Nemesis. At 
Trozen, whence her cult may have come to Athens with Aigeus, 
there was an altar to the Themides*. In Thessaly* there was 
a worship of Themis with the title J chnatos, the ‘ Tracker, which 
links her with Nemesis and Erinys. At none of these places 
is there any mention of her prophetic function; but at Olympia 

Pausanias® tells us of a Gaion or sanctuary of Ge, at which there 
was an altar of Themis. 

é le of Ge here. On what 
Iden days they say that there was also an orac 
is called the Reson opening or mouth) there is an altar to Themis. 

But if Themis be but the projection, the impersonation of 
Earth and of the prophetic powers of Earth, why should she be 
above and beyond all other gods? First a minor point must be 
made clear. Themis is in a sense prophecy incarnate, but it is 

2 C,1.A. 11. 1570. 
Be el 3 ( Gr. Mythologie, 1. p. 585 
% 5. It is probable that, as O. Gruppe, Gr. Mythologie, 11. p. 585, 
j en peas dog thonts were connected, and both came eee from 
eos ihemis may have been the goddess of the pe ore) Amphictyons. 
te Strabo, 1x. 435. vy. 14. 10. 
| 31 
H. 

482 Themis [CH. 

only in the old sense of prophecy, utterance, ordinance, not in the 
later sense of a forecast of the future'. A closer examination of 
the word Themis and its cognates will show that in her nature is 
more even of ordinance than of utterance. It will repay us at 
the outset to examine her functions in Homer, though Homer has 
but dim consciousness of their significance. 

In Homer Themis has two functions. She convenes and 
dissolves the assembly ; she presides over the feast. Telemachos? 
adjures the assembly at Ithaka 

By Olympian Zeus, and by Themis, who looseth and gathereth the 
meetings of men. ; 

Zeus himself cannot summon his own assembly.. He must 

bid Themis call the gods to council from many-folded Olympos’ brow. 
And she ranged all about and bade them to the house of Zeus?*. 

Themis presides over the banquet. When Hera enters 
Olympos, the gods rise up to greet her and hold out their cups in 
welcome, and she takes the cup of Themis who is first. And, 
when Themis would ask what troubled her, Hera makes answer, 

‘ Ask me not, concerning this, O goddess Themis ; thyself knowest it, how 

unweening is his-heart and unyielding. But do thou begin the equal banquet 
of the gods in the halls*’ 

It is the meed of Themis to convene and dissolve the agora’ ; 
it is hers too to preside over the equal, sacramental feast. 

We think of Themis as an- abstraction, as Law, Justice, Right, 
and, naturally, we are surprised that she who is above Zeus himself 
should be set to do the service of a herald, an office surely meeter 
for Hermes or Iris. Why, we ask, with Hermes and Iris at hand, 
ready to speed over earth and sea with messages and mandates, 
should Themis have to execute just this one office of convening 
the assembly? To preside over the banquet may be an honourable 

1 Supra, p. 387. 
Hom. Od. 11. 68 
aoa jyev Znvos ’Oduprlov 4d O€ucoros, 
n T dvdpGv ayopas Huev Aver HOE Kaditer. 
3 Hom. Il. xx. 4—6. eS 
+ Hom. Il. xv. 87—95 
GAG ot y apxe Geotar Sdpmors eve Sacrds élons. 
For the Equal Feast see supra, pp. 145 and 157. A. 
¥ * Aristides (I. p- 837) doubtless referring to Homer says, éxxdnolat cal BovXeurnpra 
a Gedy  mpeoBuTarn cuvd-yer O€us. Hesychius gives Themis the title of ’A-yopata. 

wo 

4 
q 

2 pe   od fs 
aoe ee ee ee ee 

Ta (v7 . 

7 ne 4 

—— | 

ee a 

> 

1 af es UL ei 

x1] Themis and Doom : 483 

function, but to ‘range about all over,’ fetching up gods and demi- 
gods, is no more a mark of supremacy. The solution of this 
obvious difficulty will give us a clue not only to the nature of 
Themis herself but to the source and mainspring of Greek, and 
incidentally of every other, primitive religion. 

The Greek word Themis and the English word Doom are, 
philology tells us, one and the same; and it is curious to note that 
their development moves on exactly parallel lines. Doom is the 
thing set, fixed, settled; it begins in convention, the stress of 
public opinion ; it ends in’ statutory judgment. Your private doom 
is your private opinion, but that is weak and ineffective. It is the 
collective doom, public opinion, that, for man’s common convenience, 
crystallizes into Law. Themis like Doom begins on earth and ends 
in heaven. On earth we have our Doomsday, which, projected 
into high heaven, becomes the Crack of Doom, the Last J udgment. 

We have seen that Themis at Trozen was worshipped in the 
plural, that: there was an altar to the Themides. Out of many 
dooms, many public opinions, many judgments, arose the figure 
of the one goddess. Out of many themistes arose Themis, 
These themistes, these fixed conventions, stood to the Greek for all 
he held civilized. They were the bases alike of his kingship and of 
his democracy. These themistes are the ordinances of what must 
be done, what society compels; they are also, because what must 
be will be, the prophecies of what shall be in the future; they are 
also the dues, the rites, the prerogatives of a king, whatever 
custom assigns to him or any official. 

The Greek attitude towards Themis and the themistes comes 
out very vividly in the account of the Cyclopes’. The Cyclopes are 
the typical barbarians, and how do they show it? They are not 
irreligious, far from it, they are notably pious, trusting entirely in 
the divine mercy and not tilling the earth. 

A people proud to whom no law is known, 
ad, feeding to the deathless Gods alone, 
They plant not and they plough not, but the earth 
Bears all they need, unfurrowed and unsown : 
u . Od, 1x. 106 
ee Kurdérov & és yatav breppiddwv, abeuicrov, 
ixomed’.....- 
ae & or dyopal Bovrnpdpor ore Oémores, 
trans. Mackail. 

sO 

44 Themis 

Barley and wheat, and vines whose mighty juice 
Swells the rich clusters when the rain of Zeus 
Gives increase ; and among that race are kept 
No common councils nor are laws in use. 

That is what is wrong with the Cyclopes: they reverence the 
gods, they are earth-worshippers, and earth for them brings forth 
her increase, but they are a@éucores, they have no customs, no 
conventions, binding by common consent, they have no agora. 
That for the Greek was the last desolation. We hear the chorus 

in remote barbarian Tauri cry* 
O for a kind Greek market~place again ! 

Not only were the Cyclopes god-fearing and god-trusting 
exceedingly, but they excelled in family life. To each Cyclops 
his house was his castle, each Cyclops was master in his own 
patriarchal home. : E 

For on the high peaks and the hillsides bare 

In hollow caves they live, and each one there 

To his own wife and children deals the law, 

Neither has one of other any care. 
The only Themis was of the hearth and home, and to the Greek 
that was no Themis at all. Themis was the-use and wont of full- 
grown men, citizens, made effective in the councils of the agora. 

Themis was of course at first of the tribe, and then she was 
all powerful. Later when the tribal system, through wars and 
incursions and migrations, broke up, its place was taken less 

a 

dominantly, more effectively, by the polis. The polis set itself 

to modify and inform all those primitive impulses and instincts 

that are resumed in Earth-worship. It also set itself, if un-— 

consciously, as a counterbalance to the dominance of ties of near 
kinship. Antigone® stands for kinship and the dues of Earth, 
Creon for patriarchalism incarnate in the Tyrant and for the Zeus 
religion that by that time had become its expression. | 

We no longer wonder why in Homer Themis convenes the 
assembly. She is no herald like Hermes, no messenger like Iris, 

1 Supra, p. 116. 

2 For the emergence of the polis from the débris of the shattered group- 
see Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic?, pp. 31, 37. ; cha 

* This has been very ably worked out by Dr Zielinski in his Der Gedanken- 
fortschritt in den Chorliedern der Antigone in Festschrift fiir Theodor Gomperz 
og See also his Eaxkurse zw den Trachinierinnen, Philologus ty. 1896, pp. 491, 

ae 

XY] Themis as the Collective Conscience 485 

she is the very spirit of the assembly incarnate. Themis and the 
actual concrete agora are barely distinguishable. _ Patroklos comes 
running to the ships of godlike Odysseus, 

Where were their agora and themis! ? 

Here the social fact is trembling on the very verge of godhead. 
She is the force that brings and binds men together, she is 
‘herd instinct, the collective conscience, the social sanction. She 
is fas, the social imperative. This social imperative is among a 
primitive group diffuse, vague, inchoate, yet absolutely binding. 
Later it crystallizes into fixed conventions, regular tribal customs ; 
finally in the polis it takes shape as Law and Justice. Themis 
was before the particular shapes of gods; she is not religion, but 
she is the stuff of which religion is made. It is the emphasis and 
representation of herd instinct, of the collective conscience, that 
constitutes religion. 

But it will immediately and most justly be asked, What is 
this? If Themis be the source and well-spring of religion, are 
we not turning religion into mere morality? Themis is herd- 
instinct, custom, convention slowly crystallized into Law and 
abstract Right ; well and good. We all acknowledge that custom, 
manners, mores, are the basis of morals, that 7@ca, haunts and 
habits, are the material of ethics. If we doubted it language is 
at hand with proof irrefragable. But surely religion and ethics 
are not, cannot be, the same. There is about the very word 
religion an atmosphere, a warmth, an emotional lift quite other 
and even alien to the chill levels of ethics.) An Ethical Society 
is not a Salvation Army. 

The protest is entirely just. But mark our definition. It is 
not herd instinct, not the collective conscience, not the social 
imperative that constitutes religion; it is the emphasis and 
representation of this collective conscience, this social imperative. 
In a word Themis is not religion, she is the stuff of which 
religious representations are made. That is why in the ordered 
sequence of the gods at Delphi we gave Themis no place. She is 
the substratum of each and every god, she is in a sense above 
as well as below each and every god, but herself never quite a 

- 2 Hom. Il. x1. 807 wa og dryopy Te Cems TE. 

486 Themis 

full-fledged divinity. In the passage already quoted! when _ 
Patroklos runs to the ships, we have seen her hover on the verge 
of divinity, and it is not a little curious that Homer here, in } 
his odd semi-conscious way, seems to feel that the gods grow out 
of the assembly. Patroklos comes to the place ! 

where was their assembly and their themis, whereby also were the altars of 
their gods established. 

lal > Ve 
These are the Oeol ayopaiot, aywuvtot. 

Religion has in it then two elements, social custom, the | 

collective conscience, and the emphasis and representation of that 
collective conscience. It has in a word within it two factors in- 
dissolubly linked: ritual, that is custom, collective action, and 
myth or theology, the representation of the collective emotion, — 
the collective conscience. And—a point of supreme importance— 
both are incumbent, binding, and interdependent. 
Now it is in this twofold character and incumbency of religion . 
that its essence lies, and here too are found the characteristics that 
delimit it from its near neighbours, morality and art. Morality is 
the social conscience made imperative upon our actions, but 
morality unlike religion, save on questions involving conduct, 
leaves our thoughts free. Art, which is also, like religion, a 
representation of the social conscience?, has no incumbencies. 
She imposes no obligation on either action or thought. Her 
goddess is Peitho not Themis. 

We accept then Prof. Durkheim’s? illuminating definition:— 

Les phénoménes dits religieux consistent en croyances obligatoires 

connexes de pratiques définies qui se rapportent & des objets donnés - 
dans les croyances. , 

It is of interest to note that Prof. Durkheim in his definition 
never overtly says the word collective. The note and characteristic 

1 Hom. 1. loc. cit. 

wa of aryoph Te Oéus re 
anv, TH OH Kal ode Oe&v érerevxaro Bapol. 

? This subject I hope to discuss later in another connection. 

° E. Durkheim, De la Définition des Phénomenes Religieux in L’Année Socio- 
logique, 11. 1898, p. 1, and see also Représentations Individuelles et Représentations 
Collectives in Revue de Métaphysique et Morale, v1. 1898, p. 278, and Sociologie 
Religieuse et Théorie de la Connaissance in the same review, xvi. 1909, p. 733. 
This last paper is the Introduction to M. Durkheim’s forthcoming book on Les 
Formes Elémentaires de la Pensée et de la Vie Religieuse. M. Durkheim’s views as 
to the origin of religion have been sympathetically stated by M. Henri Hubert 
in his preface to the French translation of Chantepie de la Saussaye’s Manuel 
@ Histoire des Religions, 1904. For English readers there is a short account of 
M. Durkheim’s position in the last chapter of Mr Marett’s Threshold of Religion. 

ee ee 

eee a ee 

Definition of Religion 487 

of what is religious is that it is ‘obligatoire.’ But when we come 
to analyse ‘obligatoire’ there is for man qué his humanity only 
one source of what is ‘obligatoire,’ and that is the social con- 
science. His body obeys natural law and his spirit is bound by 
the social imperative. The moral constraint upon him is of 
Themis not of Physis, and, because of this constraint, man is a 
religious animal. 

In the early days of group civilization man is altogether a 
religious animal, altogether under the sway of Themis, of the 
collective conscience. His religion, his representation, is that of 
a totem animal or plant, a mere projection of his sense of unity 
with his group and with the outside world. The obligation is so 
complete, so utterly dominant, that he is scarcely conscious of it. 
As the hold of the group slackens and the individual emerges, the 
field of religion is bit by bit narrowed. Man’s latest religious 
representation is of that all but impossible conception, the god 
as individual. The god as individual passes over, as we have seen 
in the last chapter, into the objet dart. 

A definition however illuminating always desiccates its object. 
To think of religion as consisting in ‘des croyances obliga- 
toires connexes de pratiques définies’ chills its very life-blood. 
Religious faith and practice is intensely obligatory, but it is 
also eagerly, vividly, chosen, it is a great collective havresis. 
Religion sums up and embodies what we feel together, what 
we care for together, what we imagine together, and the price of 
that feeling together, that imagining together, the concessions, 
the mutual compromises, are at first gladly paid. 

It is when religion ceases to be a matter of feeling together, 
when it becomes individualized and intellectualized, that clouds 
gather on the horizon. It is because religion has been regarded 
as a tissue of false hypotheses that it has commanded, will always 
command, the animosity of the rational thinker. When the religious 
man, instead of becoming in ecstasy and sacramental communion 
one with Bacchos, descends to the chill levels of intellectualism 
and asserts that there is an objective reality external to himself 
called Bacchos, then comes a parting of the ways. Still wider is 
the breach if he asserts that this objective reality is one with the 
mystery of life, and also with man’s last projection, his ideal of 
the good. 

<a gee 

Sao | Sone 2 ee ee i Re oe ane, 
¢ hal =< oat 

~ 

488 Ono Rese Os [oH: 

In the light of the new definition it is instructive to examine 
the old. Until recent times ‘definitions. of religion. have usually 
included some notion of a relation of the human soul to a god ; 
they have been in some sense theological. , Thus M. Reville! ea 

La religion est la détermination de la vie humaine par le sentiment dun 
lien unissant l’ésprit humain a l’ésprit mystérieux dont il reconnait la domi- 
nation sur le monde et sur lui-méme, et auquel il aime a se sentir unl. © 

Here, though the word God is cautiously avoided, the idea of 
a god, and even a personal god, the object of love, is present. 

This idea that religion may be defined as a relation to a god 
is sufficiently refuted by the simple fact that one of the most 
important and widespread of religions, Buddhism, knows no god. 
Religion is to the Buddhist not prayer, the worship of an external 
being, but the turning in upon himself, the escape from the 
sorrow that comes of desire, the gradual attainment of Nirvana. 
Yet no one will deny to Buddhism the name of religion, 

But if it be felt that Buddhism is a strange exception, it is 
important to note that theology is in all other religions not 
essential and integral, but rather a phase, a stage marking a 
particular moment in development. At the outset of the present 
book advisedly no definition of religion was attempted. The aim 
was to examine actual religious facts. It was seen in the early 
chapters that such religious facts were, collective emotion, mana, 
magic, sacramentalism. All these existed long before they blos- 
somed into the figure of a god. That vague and inchoate thing 
‘sanctity’ was there long before it did on shape and personality. 
As Prof. Durkheim? well Says : 

La notion de la divinité, loin d’étre ce qu'il y a de fondamental dans la vie 
religieuse, n’en est en realité qu’un épisode secondaire. C’est le produit @un 

processus spécial en vertu duquel un ou deux des caractéres religieux se con- 
centrent et se concrétisent sous la forme dune individualité plus ou moins. 

définie. 

Feeling the futility of defining religion in terms of theology, 
scholars have resorted to things vague,—to a ‘sense of the super- 
natural,’ or to an ‘instinct for mystery, the apprehension of a sort 
of nescio quid, an unknown ‘infinite, behind the visible world. 
Such were the definitions of Max Miiller, which, to the modern 
psychologist and anthropologist, seem unreal to the point of 

: Prolégoménes a UV Histoire des Religions, p. 34. ; ea 
2 Définition des Phénoménes Religieux. L’Année Sociologique, 1898; p. 13. 

“ 

Pe ee 

XI] | Religion and ‘the Infinite’ 489 

grotesqueness. We may take Max. Miiller’s! definition ‘as 
typical : aid hea nea 
Religion is a mental faculty or disposition which, independent of, nay in 
Spite of sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different 
names and under varying disguises. 

. Here we have the old Intellectualist fallacy in full force. The 
protests of a host of scholars who felt the inadequacy and frigidity 
and unreality of this Intellectualism induced Max Miiller? to 
modify his definition as follows: 

Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such manifestations 
as are able to influence the moral character of man. ther 

Here we have a dim inkling of the truth. The notion of 
social obligation as an element in religion begins to creep in. 

Max Miiller’s ‘infinite’ was re-stated and re-emphasized by 
Herbert Spencer’, but with a characteristic rationalist corollary. 
According to him the essence and kernel of all religions was not 
only the sense of mystery, but an instinctive desire and demand 
to penetrate this mystery; man desired to know the unknown, the 
unknowable. 

Here is an element which allcreedshavein common. Religions diametri- 
cally opposed in their overt dogmas are yet perfectly at one in the tacit 
conviction that the existence of the world with all wt contains and all which 

surrounds it is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation. 

In the light of present anthropological knowledge the picture 

called up for us by Herbert Spencer of the lonely individualistic 

savage lost in contemplation of the All, and waking from his trance 
eager to start on his career of elementary science, ‘rerum cog- 
noscere causas, is, if natural and illuminating at the time it was 
written, now, in the light of a more familiar intimacy with the 
savage mind, inadequate and even misleading. Wonder and awe, 
as we have seen in discussing the Thunder-god‘, were elements that 
went to the making of religion, but the main objects of his cult, 
i.e. the main foci of his attention, were his food-plants and his food- 
animals; if he was an Australian his witchetty grubs, his emus, 
his kangaroos. If he was a North American Apache, his. bears. 

1 Introduction to the Science of Religion, 1882, p.13. The definition was put 

forward verbally in 1873. 
: 2 Natural Religion (Gifford Lectures, 1888), pp. 188, 193. 

3 First Principles, 1875, p. 44. 
4 Supra, p. 64.5. ins 4 

490 Themis [ OH. 

He was concerned, not to lie prostrate in wonder before the 
mystery of their life, still less to embark on scientific enquiry 
into the causes of that life, but to make them grow and multiply 
that he might eat them and grow and multiply himself. 

Has man then no sense of mystery, no consciousness of some- 
thing greater than himself to which he owes obedience, to which 
he pays reverence? Yes. The instinct of those who, in framing 
the old definitions of religion, included ‘mystery’ and ‘the in- 
finite, was right—though their explanations wrong. The mystery, 
the thing greater than man, is potent, not only or chiefly because 
it 1s unintelligible and calls for explanation, not because it stimu- 
lates a baffled understanding, but because it is felt as an obligation. 
The thing greater than man, the ‘ power not himself that makes for 
righteousness,’ is, in the main, not the mystery of the universe to 
which as yet he is not awake, but the pressure of that unknown 
ever incumbent force, herd instinct, the social conscience. The 
mysterious dominant figure is not Physis, but Themis’. 

If then we would understand religion, we must get behind 
theology, behind, for the Greeks, the figures of the Olympians, and 
even the shadowy shapes of the daimones, and penetrate to the 
social conscience, and first and foremost to its earliest and perhaps 
most permanent expression”, to social structure—the organized 
system of relationships. 

This brings us back to the Olympians. Of what. social 
structure are they the projection ? . 

Undoubtedly they represent that form of society with which 
we are ourselves most familiar, the patriarchal family. Zeus is 
the father and head: though Hera and he are in constant unseemly 
conflict, there is no doubt about his ultimate supremacy. Hera 

* It will later (p. 516) be seen that Themis casts her shadow over Physis till the 
two are scarcely distinguishable. 

* For the importance of social structure I may refer to the Presidential address 
of Dr W. H. R. Rivers to the Anthropological Section of the British Association, 
1911, p. 9. His words are a landmark in the history of anthropological study, and 
are specially relevant to all enquiries as to the origin of religious forms. ‘If then 
social structure has this fundamental and deeply seated character, if it is the least 
easily changed and only changed as the result either of actual blending of peoples 
or of the most profound political changes, the obvious inference is that it is with 
social structure that we must begin the attempt to analyse culture.’ 

The Olympians and Social Structure 491 

xr] 

is Jealous, Zeus in frequent exasperation, but none the less finally 
dominant. The picture is intensely modern, down to the ill- 
assorted, incongruous aggregate of grown-up sons and daughters 
living idly at ease at home and constantly quarrelling. The 
family comes before us as the last forlorn hope of collectivism. 
Its real original bond is a sex-tie between husband and wife; its 
real function the rearing of helpless children. For this rearing the 
husband is, save for the highest forms of civilization, useless at 
home, his function is to be a food-seeker abroad and to come back 
with his beak full of worms. Once the children grown up, and the 
sex-tie grown weak, the family falls asunder for sheer lack of moral 
molecular cohesion. 

Olympos is in Northern Thessaly. We are so obsessed by the 
literary Homeric Olympos that we are apt to forget that Olympos 
was, to begin with, an actual northern mountain. Zeus, father of 
gods and men, Zeus the sky-god, with all the heavy fatherhood 
of Wuotan, is a Northerner, or at least has been profoundly 

‘modified by Northern racial influence. As the Father, though 

perhaps not wholly as the Sky-God, he is the projection of northern 
fatherhood. He, or rather his fatherhood, came down from the 
north with some tribe, or tribes, whose social system was patri- 
linear. Hera was indigenous and represents a matrilinear system ; 
she reigned alone at Argos, at Samos, her temple at Olympia is 
distinct from and far earlier than that of Zeus. Her first husband 
or rather consort, was Herakles. The conquering Northerners pass 
from Dodona to Thessaly. Zeus drops his real shadow-wife, Dione 
at Dodona, in passing from Thessaly to Olympia, and at Olympia 
Zeus, after the fashion of a conquering chieftain, marries Hera, a 
daughter of the land’. In Olympos Hera seems merely the jealous 
and quarrelsome wife. In reality she reflects the turbulent native 
princess, coerced, but never really subdued, by an alien conqueror. 

1 To discuss the racial question I have not the necessary equipment nor is the 
archaeological material as yet adequate. But, following Dr Rivers, supra, p. 490, note*, 
I believe that a change of social structure indicates either racial change or some 
profound political upheaval. It is, I think, probable that the indigenous population 
whose social structure was matrilinear was not Indo-European at all but belonged to 
the same race as the Hittites of Asia Minor and that the memory of them survives 
in the mythological Amazons. To this question I hope to return on another 
occasion. The subject has been already discussed in Dr Walther Leonhard’s 

Hittites und Amazonen, 1911. : 
"2 For a full discussion of this question we may look to Mr Cook’s forthcoming 

— Leus. 

492 soa, Tate: DRemnsecarragaes Se [cH. 

Now in Homer, once alive to the fact. of an earlier background 
against which is set the Northern patrilinear family, traces of 
primaeyal sanctities are not. hard to find. When Themis summons 
the ‘Olympian agora, we remember! that she not only summons 
the Olympian family, but she has to ‘range round’ to find the 
earlier nature-potencies, the gods of spring and stream. Hastily 
they do on their human shapes; we catch them at the very 
moment of hurried, uneasy metamorphosis. But, though they do 
on human shapes, they are no part of the great human, patrilinear, 
family. 

Again, ritual is always conservative. In the archaic ritual of 
the oath we see the contrast between new and old. When Menelaos 
is about to engage with Paris, he says? to the Trojans 

Bring ye two lambs, one white ram and one black ewe for Earth and Sun, 
and we will bring one for Zeus. 

The Trojans, Southerners of Asia Minor, use the old sym- 
pathetic ritual of the Horkos. The primitive Horkos or barrier 
or division is between Earth and Sky, and Earth the Mother is, 
as we shall presently see, before Sky, the Father. The Achaeans, 
the Northerners, have no Horkos proper, but they bring a ram for 
the anthropomorphic Zeus. 

If then we would understand the contrast between the Olym- 
pians and their predecessors we must get back to the earlier 
Themis, to the social structure that was before the patriarchal 
family, to the matrilinear system, to the Mother and the Tribe, 
the Mother and the Child and the Initiated young men, “hed 
Kouretes. 

MATRILINEAR STRUCTURE. 

We are back where we began. It may be well to recall what 
has been so long out of sight. The relief in Fig. 143 from the 
Capitoline altar? sets the old matrilinear social structure very 
clearly before us. 

To the left the Mother is seated. Her child has been taken 
away from her. Seated on a rock in the middle.of the picture he 

1° Supra, p. 482; -- 2 Hom. Jt... 104... vr; 
3 Green Kunstmythologie, Atlas a, 24, : ee 

XI] The Matrilinear Group 493 

is suckled by the goat Amaltheia. Over him, dominating the 
whole scene, two Kouretes clash their shields. Mother, Child, 
Initiated youths, these are the factors of the old social group. 
The father, Kronos, is...nowhere. We hear the words of the Hymn: 

‘For here the shielded Nurturers took thee, a child immortal, from Rhea, 
and, with noise of beating feet, hid thee away.’ We 

From art-representations Kronos the father is singularly, 
saliently, absent. We remember the detailed representation of 
the birth of the child, on the Milan relief?; the mother giving 
birth to the child, the child set on the throne, the child on the 

Fie. 1438. 

back of the prancing goat; always the mother and child, and the 
animal form of the mother with its totemistic remembrance, but 
never the father. The conclusion is very clear. The myth is a 
presentation, a projection of the days when, at first, the facts of 
fatherhood were unknown, and later, but little emphasized ; when 
the Themis of the group was the mother, as mother of ane initiate 
youth to be. Themis as abstract Right, or as statutory Law, 
sanctioned by force, would surely never have taken shape as a 

2  p. 60. Fig. 9. 
1 Supra, p. 7. Supra, p. 60 8 

Bacal ee ee See eee oa ee Ce ee 

494 Themis (on 

woman; but Themis as the Mother, the supreme social fact and 
focus, she is intelligible. 

It may seem strange that woman, always the weaker, should 
be thus dominant and central. But it must always be observed 
that this primitive form of society is matrilinear not matriarchal. 
Woman is the social centre not the dominant force. So long as 
force is supreme, physical force of the individual, society is im- 
possible, because society is by cooperation, by mutual concession, 
not by antagonism. 

= 
i 

Fie. 144, 

Moreover, there is another point of supreme importance. In 
primitive matrilinear societies woman is the great social force or 
rather central focus, not as woman, or at least not as sex, but as. 
mother, the mother of tribesmen to be. This social fact finds its 
projection in the first of divine figures, in Kourotrophos— Rearer 
of Sons. The male child nursed by the mother is potentially | 
a kouros, hence her great value and his. When Agamemnon bids 
Menelaos slay all his foes root and branch, he says 

: : 
Let not one escape sheer destruction, spare not even that which a mother 
bears in her womb, for it is a kowros}? 

Y Hom. Il. vi. 58 
by Twa yaorépt wr 
<n a arenes édvra dpépor. ee’ 
rof. Murray kindly drew my attention to this passa, e. Hence th ist 
common to many lands, of placing a male child in the bride’s lap that che 
become Kourotrophos. See D. 8. Stuart, The Prenuptial Rite in the New Calli- 
machos, Journal of Classical Philology, v1, 1911. 

~; 
’ 

XI] 

Kronos as Matrilinear King 495 

Kronos the Father emerges into prominence when patriarchy 
becomes dominant. He then is figured as a sort of elder Zeus, 
He appears on another face of the Capitoline altar? reproduced 
in Fig. 144, Like Zeus he is seated on a chair with arms. Unlike 
Zeus he is veiled. Rhea approaches bearing the swaddled stone. 
It is a strange, almost grotesque, blend of old and new. 

Kronos as a father is respectable, even venerable. But patri- 
archy, once fully established, would fain dominate all things, would 
invade even the ancient prerogative of the mother, the right to 
rear the child she bore. Standing before the Hermes of Praxiteles 
I have often wondered why a figure so beautiful should leave the 
imagination unsatisfied, even irritated. It is not merely that the 
execution is late and touched with an over facility ; it is, I think, 
that the whole conception, the motive, is false. Hermes, the young 
male, usurps the function of the mother, he poses as Brephotrophos. 
He is really Kowrotrophos. The man doing woman’s work has all 
the inherent futility and something of the ugly dissonance of the 
man masquerading in woman’s clothes. 

Kronos stands always for the old order, before Zeus and the 
Olympians; he hates his father Ouranos but reverences and takes 
counsel with Earth his mother. Another trait links him with the 
earlier pre-patriarchal order. Unlike Zeus, Kronos is not addressed 
as father. He is not father but ‘king, king upon earth in the 
older Golden Age. 

O king Kronos and Zeus the Father?. 

It is not a heavenly kingdom imagined, it is a definite reign 
upon earth. Kronos is never, never could be, translated to the 
skies. The reason is, I think, clear: Kronos is the king, he is the 
projection of the old medicine king. He 1s like Picus, like Sal- 
moneus. He reigns as tvpavvos in an ancient fortress, a TUpous’, 
not as Father in the open depuar’ ’Odvurov. It is as king that 
he is constantly confused with Moloch who is Melek, the King’. 

Kronos the king represents the old matrilinear days and is 

1 Overbeck, Kunstmythologie, ea Il. et ae 
2 Julian, Conviv. 317d, & Bacthed Kpove al Lev warep. ae 
3 Pind. Ol. 11, 124 érevkay Acos od0v Tapa. clakan Baad Beek bende sae and 
i d their possibly Mongolian origin see Kev. Arch. 1JU2, p. 5 
Eo oaervigs iNnminadeng aston, which immediately commends itself, was ore to 
Dr Frazer by Professor Kennett. See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, Appendix, p. ; 

SE PI SNe oe mene mer Wr te ayh Coro CN AM ace Ue ee 
‘ , Ss " i - 

ro 

’ 

496 % > Phemis ¢ 
therefore closely linked with Gaia. It has been already! shown 
how on the slopes of the hill Kronion at Olympia was the sanctuary 
of the Mother and Child, Sosipolis and Eileithyia. The same 
conjunction obtains at Athens. When the cult of Olympian Zeus 
was brought by Peisistratos to Athens, with him came Kronos and 
Rhea, and with him came Gaia*, for Rhea is but the Mountain 
Mother, the Asia Minor wilder form of Gaia. 

As king, Kronos is also daimon of the year. He stands for 
the cycle of reincarnation. Plato, in the Politicus*, makes a most 
instructive comparison between the Age of Kronos and his own 
age, the Age of Zeus. His account of the Age of Kronos seems 
haunted by reminiscences not only of totemism but of matrilinear 
social structure. Above all things, it is the age of the Earth-Men, 
sown.and re-sown4. 

‘ There were divine daimones who were the shepherds of the various species 
and herds of animals, and each was entirely sufficient for those whom he 
shepherded. So that there was no wildness nor eating of each other, nor 
any war, nor revolt amongst them.,...In those days God himself was their 
shepherd....Under him there were no governments nor separate possessions 
of women and children. For all men rose again from the earth remembering 
nothing of their past. And such things as private property and families did 
not exist, but Earth herself gave them abundance of fruits from trees and 
other green things, spontaneously, and not through husbandry. And they 
dwelt naked in the open air, for the temperature of the seasons was mild. 
And they had no beds, but lay on soft couches of herb which grew abun- 
dantly out of the earth. Such, Socrates, was the life of men in the days of 
Kronos.’ 

Plato seems conscious that, in the days of Kronos, the ruler of 
each department was more herdsman or shepherd than king. The 
ancient Basileus was indeed, as already has been hinted, a person 
half daimon, half man, essentially a functionary, and almost wholly 
alien to our modern, individualistic notion of king. Given that 
Kronos was such a daimon king, it is clear that he rules over the 
early earth-born race, that his kingdom is in quite a special way 
of this earth. He stands for the Earth and her seasonal year 
rather than for any cycle of Sun and Moon. 

The etymology of his name is not quite certain, but the ancient 
guess which connects it with the verb xpaivw is probably right. 

1 Supra, p. 240. 2 Paus. 1. 18. 7. 

3271 B, 272 a. : 

= Plato, op. cit. 272 & Kal ro yiuwov jon wav avprwro yévos, rdoas éxdorns THs 
Puxijs Tas yevéoers dmodedwxvlas, doa jw éxdory TpoctaxOévra, Tocadra eis viv omépuara 
mecovons..., and see also Timaeus 42 p, 83 p: - The whole thought is that expressed 
in ritual by the Anthesteria. Supra, p. 292. 

(ou. 

—— s)he 

hs We t= 

Se oe ae ee 

Kronos as Year-God 497 

Kronos is the Fulfiller, the Accomplisher, In what sense he is 
the Accomplisher is clear from the words of the Chorus in the 
Trachiniae?: . 
avadynta yap ovS 6 mravra Kpaivev Bacireds 
éméBade Ovarois Kpoviédas: 
GAN’ eri mua cai Xapa maou KvKAovowy otov ” ApKrou 
otpopddes KéAevbor. 

Kronos is the Accomplisher of the full circle of the year. His 
nature and his name alike make easy his identification with 
Chronos”. He is not the Sun or the Moon, but the circle of the 
Heavens, of Ouranos, husband of Ge; of Ouranos, in whose great 
dancing-place the planets move, 

And God leads round his starry Bear?. 

Kronos indeed, so far as he is a Year-god, marks and expresses 
that earlier calendar of Hesiod, in which Works and Days are 
governed by the rising and setting of certain stars and constella- 
tions, Sirius, Orion, the Pleiades, and by the comings and goings 
of migratory birds, the swallow, the cuckoo, and the crane‘, But 
though man looks to these heavenly and atmospheric terata to 
guide his sowings and reapings, his real focus of attention is still 
earth. And inasmuch as his social structure is matrilinear, she 
is Mother-Earth; Father-Heaven takes as yet but a subordinate 
place. When, nowadays, we speak of God as ‘Father’ we mean 
of course no irreverence, but we strangely delimit the sources 
of life. The Roman Church, with her wider humanity, though 
she cherishes the monastic ideal, yet feels instinctively that a 
male Trinity is non-natural, and keeps always the figure of the 

divine Mother. 

1 vy. 126. 

2 Thus Proklos on Plato, Kratylos, 61 vots ydp éorw 6 Bagcdevs Kpévos...avrds els 
éavTov érestpaupevos, bs ye Kal Tovs dm’ abrov mpoxvWayras els éavTov avois eméorpewer 
Kal évexo\mloaro Kal év éavT@ crabep&s Wpvcev, and the fragment of Kritias (Diels, 
F.V.8.?, p. 618. 21) ; 
dkduwas Te Xpdvos epi 1” devdw 
pevuare mnpyns potra Tikrwy 
avros éaurév. ; Bibe 
Kronos and Chronos were of course in meaning, as in form, entirely distinet to 
begin with. Chronos is an Orphie figure derived from the Iranian Time-God 
Zryan. His figure cannot be discussed here. See R. Hisler, Weltenmantet und 
Himmelszelt, 1910, index s.v. Kronos, Chronos, and Zrvan, and also for Kronos 

and Eniautos, W. Schultz,”Aiiros in Memnon, 1910, p. 47. 
_ 8 W. Raleigh. i 
4 Supra, p97. Since I wrote the, chapter on bird magic and the relpea there has 
“appeared an interesting paper dealing in part with the association of constellations 
and birds by Dr M. P. Nilsson, Die dlteste Zeitrechnung. Apollo und der Orient in 

Archiy f. Religionswiss., 1911, x1v. p. 423. 

H. 32 

498 os ~. Lhemis 

The particular forms taken by ‘a people’s mythology or 
theology can, as before said, only be understood in the light of 
its social structure. The matrilinear stage had long been buried 
and forgotten, and hence the figures of Dionysos and his mother 
Semele, and his attendant Satyrs, the figures of Rhea with her 
effaced husband Kronos and the band of the Kouretes, had lost 
their real significance. To the mythologist it is sufficient evidence 
of a matrilinear state of society in Greece, with its attendant tribal 
initiations, that such a social structure is seen thus clearly reflected 
in mythology. But, to a mind trained rather in historical than 
mythological method, such evidence may seem less convincing. 
We have therefore now to ask: what evidence is there, apart from 
mythological representations, of the existence of a social structure 
in which the mother, the male-child, and the tribe were the main 
factors ? 

We turn, of course, first and foremost to the Apatouria, the 
festival of enrolment in the phratriai, but we turn only to be at 
the outset disappointed. The name itself is manifestly patriarchal. 
Apatouria is Homopatoria1, the festival of those who have the 
same fathers. It is celebrated kata ta watpva, according to 
paternal usage. On the third day was celebrated the festival 
of the covpedris, of the shearing of the hair, the significance of 
which has been already? noted in connection with Herakles and 
Apellaios. But here again we can detect no special relation to 
the Mother. A chance biographical notice in one of the ‘Lives?’ 

of Homer gives us the needful clue, and makes us suspect and 

indeed feel practically certain that the festival of The Same 
Fathers originally belonged to the Mothers‘, 

When Homer was sailing to Greece, he put in at.Samos. And the peopl 
there chanced at the moment to be celebrating the Apatouria. And oan 

a ee ee 

ie ae De 

the Samians, who had seen him before in Chios, when they beheld Homer — 

: i So definitely the scholiast to Aristoph. Acharn. 146 of 5é dacw bre rv Tar épwv 
opod cuvepxouevww did Tas Tov Tmaldwy éyypadas olov opomarbpa éyerOar Thy Eoprhy ~ 

omoly Tpbmw héyouey Aoxov Thy duohéxtpoy Kal dkorrw Thy dubkorrw otrw Kal “Opo- — 

maropia ’“Amarépva. 
28 ,pp.3 : : cies 
a ee oe 78 and 441; for hair shearing in general see Dr Frazer, Pausanias, 
3 Westermann, ps.-Herod, Biogr. 29, p. 15. 

4 The connection of Athena with the é¢780., her xodpor, and their relation to ini- . 

tiation ceremonies haye been ably examined by Miss Doroth 
College, in an essay as yet unpublished. See ans addada poses Ra 

The Apatouria and the Tritopatores 499 

arriving at Samos, went and told the clansmen, and made a panegyric about 
Homer. And the clansmen ordered him to bring Homer, And the man 
who had met him said to Homer— Stranger, the city is: celebrating the 
Apatouria, and the clansmen bid you come and feast with them?’ And 
Homer said he would, and he went’ along with his host. And, as he went, 
he lighted on the women who were sacrificing at the crossways to Kouro- 
trophos. And the priestess looked at him in anger, and said to him, ‘Man, 
begone from the sanctities!’ 

The festival has become that of the ‘Same F athers,’ but the 
sacrifice is by women and to the Mother, the Rearer of Children. 
It is by the Crossways, for the Mother has taken on her Moon- 
Aspect, as Eileithyia, as Hekate. It is strange indeed, at the 
sacrifice for the ‘Same Fathers, that no man might be present, 
but if the festival were once of the Same Mothers all is clear. 

The Apatouria, the festival of the ‘Same Fathers, is late and 
patriarchal. It is interesting to find that, late though it is, the 
Apatouria finds—as in early days all social structure must—its 
mythological reflection and representation in a myth, that of the 
Tritopatores” ; figures the interpretation of which, because they 
neglect to examine social structure, has caused mythologists 
much trouble and perplexity. 

~ Of the Tritopatores Suidas*’, quoting Phanodemos, says: 

The Athenians only both sacrifice and pray to them for the birth of 
children when they are about to marry. ‘ 

The scholiast*, commenting on the word Tritogeneia, recalls a 
phrase that sounds like an echo of this prayer, and throws new 

light on it: 
‘May my child be zpuroyerns.’ 
The father prays to the Tritopatores that his child may be 

<4 : 3} 2 i @ . . * pe . 
2 oli the explanation of Dr G. Lippold in his Tritopatreis, A. Mitt. xxxv1. 
1911, p. 105. Dr Lippold scarcely seems to see the great UR in relation to 
i ial structure of his own convincing interpretation. 
ae Tee Fd ones For the older explanation of Tritopatores see Prolegomena, 

joy Le 
4 Schol. BT ad Hom. Il. vit. 39 
bias ys ely, bh Tplroyévera 
; mais por TpiToyevns ely, M ; . 
It is very likely, as Dr iepotd points out, that the two conelnding words re ne 
original, but have been added, as often in similar cases, to make up a desire 
hexameter. 

32—2 

~~ 

500 sy Themis 

rpitoyevis. Tritogeneia, we remember, was the Athena who 
sprang from her father’s head: 

Tritogeneia, the daughter of Zeus the Counsellor, _ 
Born from his sacred head, in battle-array ready dight, 
Golden all glistering?. 
Tritogeneia is not ‘she who is born on the third day, nor yet 
‘she who was born from the head of her father, nor yet ‘she who 

was born of the water of the brook Triton’; she is she who was true 

born, and to be true born is in patrilinear days to be born in 
wedlock of your lawful father. Hesychius?, defining the word 
Tpettoxovpn, says: 

She for whom everything has been accomplished as to marriage. Some 
define it as ‘a true virgin.’ 

The outrageous myth of the birth of Athena from the head of 
Zeus is but the religious representation, the emphasis, and over 
emphasis, of a patrilinear social structure. When an Athenian 
prayed to the Tritopatores, it was not for children merely, but for 
true born children, children born with him for their father. 

The Apatouria, then, is the festival of those who have the 
same father, and of these the Tritopatores and Tritogeneia are 
the mythical expression. Now we realize why the god and 
goddess, who presided over the Apatouria, were Zeus and Athena, 
Father and Father-born daughter. As, in the old matrilinear 
days, Kronos the father was ignored, so, by the turn of the wheel, 
the motherhood of the mother is obscured, even denied; but with 
far less justice, for the facts of motherhood have been always 

patent. Athena is the real Kourotrophos, but for patrilinear | 

purposes she is turned into a diagram of motherless birth. 

As patrons of the Apatouria, Zeus and Athena bear the titles 
Phratrios and Phratria. The phratria is the brotherhood of those 
who have the same father. It has nothing to do with the dSeddoé, 
those who have the same mother, the duoyderpios?; it is of the 

1 Hom. Hym. xxvut. 4 
Tpiroyerj, Thy ards éyelvaro uyrlera Leds 

; ; Temas eK Kepahfs Toeuria reve’ éxoucar. 

28 Vs Tprroxovpy: q mwdvTa ovy(re)réNecrac Ta els Tods yapmous* twés d& ywrnola 
amapbévos. The origin of the stem Tpiro is not known; all that is clear is that it 
must mean ‘true,’ ‘genuine,’ 

* Gaius (Inst. 111. 10), in true patrilinear fashion, thus defines agnatus ‘and con- 
sanguineus: ‘legitima cognatio est ea quae per virilis sexus personas coniungitur. 

ee ee ee ey 

7] * 

Po a ae > | 

Zeus, Apollo, and Athena 501. 

patrilinear, not the matrilinear structure. When, in the Hume- 
mdes', the Erinyes ask of Orestes, slayer of his mother, 

What brotherhood will give him holy water ? 
Apollo is ready with his answer: 

This too I tell you, mark how plain my speech, 
The mother is no parent of her ‘child,’ 

Only the nurse of the young seed within her. 
The male is parent, she as outside friend 
Cherishes the plant, if fate allows its bloom. 
Proof will I bring of this mine argument. 

A father needs no: mother’s help. She stands, 
Child of Olympian Zeus, to be my witness, 
Reared never in the darkness of the womb, 
Yet fairer plant than any heaven begot. 

This alliance of the three Olympians of the Humenides, Zeus, 
Apollo, Athena, brings us to a curious point. The bond, we feel, is 
non-natural; the three gods stand together not because there is 
any primitive link, any common cultus, but as projections, repre- 
sentations of patriarchy, pushed to the utmost. They are a trinity 
of Phratrioi, Patréoi. Where else, we ask, are these three dis- 

_ parate divinities thus unequally yoked together? The answer 
is clear and brings immediate light; in Homer and in Homer 
only”. 

Achilles, sending forth Patroklos in his armour, prays* 

Would, O father Zeus and Athene, and Apollo, would that not one of all 
_ the Trojans might escape death, nor one of the Argives. 

Hector names Apollo and Athene as linked together for special 
adoration?: 

Would that I were immortal and ageless all my days, and honoured, like 
as Athene is honoured and Apollo ; ri 

Ttaque eodem patre nati fratres agnati sibi sunt, qui etiam consanguinei vocantur, 
nec requiritur an etiam matrem eandem habuerint.’ So subtle and persistent is the 
suggestion of name that there are persons even to-day who think that in some 
mysterious way they are more descended from their father than their mother. 
For the whole question see P. Kretschmer, Die Griechische Benennung des Bruders, 
Glotta 1. p. 210, 

1 559 mola dé xépviy pparépwr mpoo déEeT at; 

Frg. 1048. . asa 
% As long ago remarked by Mr Gladstone, who brought together all the evidence 

i book too little read now-a-days, his Juventus Mundi, 1869, p. 266 (Section Viii. 
ise and Apollo). We cannot’ of course adopt Mr Gladstone’s solution. He 
held that Apollo and Athene were each in a special way the Logos of Zeus, The 
question is also raised by Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic?, p. 69, note 3. 

and see also Eur. Or. 552,. and 

8 Hom, Il, xvt. 97. | . 

4 Hom. Il. vit. 540. wt) 

502  . Themis 

and again}, even more significantly, he links Zeus, Athene, and. 

Apollo together as the typical happy family: 

Would that indeed I were for ever as surely the son of aegis-bearing Zeus, 
ard that my mother were lady Hera, and that I were held in such honour as 
Apollo and Athene, as verily this day is to bring utter evil on all the Argives! 

Apollo and Athena then are linked together as Phratriot and 
this conjunction is found in the patrilinear Homer and in the 
EHumenides where all. the emphasis is patriarchal. Elsewhere 
Apollo is linked with quite another goddess, with Artemis, and in 
this conjunction we see a survival, though altered and disfigured, 
of matriarchal structure. In Homer a great effort is made to 
affiliate Artemis as one of the patriarchal family, but, in her 
ancient aspect as Ilorwa Onpaev, she is manifestly but a form 
of the Great Mother: at Delphi, where Apollo reigns supreme, his 
‘sister’ Artemis is strangely, significantly absent. What has 

happened is fairly obvious. Artemis, as Mother, had a male-god 

as son or subordinate consort, just as Aphrodite had Adonis. When 
patriarchy ousted matriarchy, the relationship between the pair is 
first spiritualized as we find it in Artemis and Hippolytos; next 
the pair are conceived of in the barren relation of sister and 
brother. Finally the female figure dwindles altogether and the 
male-consort emerges as merely son of his father or utterer of his 
father’s will—Avds rpodyrns. 

This is curiously and instructively shown in the history of the 
Eiresione. Originally of course the Eiresione was, as we have 

seen’, a sanctity per se, a branch carried magically to promote . 

fertility. In historical times, in the Thargelia, Daphnephoria, ete. 
it was associated with the worship of, it was ‘sacred to,’ Apollo’, 
This is natural enough for Apollo, as Aguieus and as Kouros, was 
the young male divinity, the source of fertility. In the Thargelia 

-1 Hom. II. xm, 827. 
2 Supra, p. 220. 
® Also at the Hiresione of Samos, which was associated with the primitive swallow 
song. See (Hadt.), Vit. Hom. p. 17 f. ap. Suidam, 8.V."Ounpos...30eTo 5€ Ta érea Tae 
(@ Kaderrar Elpeoudyn) ev 77 Ddéuw emt roddv Xpovov brd Tév matdwy, br’ dyelpovey ev TH 
€opr7 Tod ’Amd\Nwvos. In the song given by Suidas occur the lines a 
veduat Tou veBuar éviatcos ore XeALOwy 
éornk’ év mpodtpos Widh mbdas* dédAG gép’ atpa 
trépoae 7@.’AmbdXwvos yuraridos 
el wév Te Owdoers* 
but the ceremony was really to Kourotrophos. See Suidas, loc. cit, 

o See ace ms + €(TR & leer 
("Ounpos) eis Dauov kat ebpe yuvatka Koupotpédw Ovovcav x.7.d. . hk 

pa eS 

The Korythalia 

and the Daphnephoria the figure of the Mother is effaced, though 
it may be that in the two pharmakoi, female as well as male, 
as in the two Oschophoroi! and the Daphnephoroi, her figure really 
. Survives. But in another service of the EHiresione the Mother 

' holds her own, even to the exclusion of the Son, the ceremony of 
the Korythalva. 

.  Hesychius? defining Korythalia says, 
A laurel wreathed : some call it Hiresione. 

The Etymologicum Magnum* gives further and most instructive 
particulars. It thus defines the word Korythale: 

The laurel-bough placed before the doors. Because branches which the 
eall korot blossom. 

So too Chrysippos : 

Let some one from within give me lighted torches and woven horoi 
unmixed with myrtle. For poets call branches, diversely, shoots and saplings 
and korot. And others when their sons and daughters come to maturity, place 
laurel-boughs before the doors in ceremonies of puberty and marriage. 

The Korythalia, ‘ Youth Bloom,’ expresses just that oneness of 
man and nature that is so beautiful and so characteristic of 
primitive totemistic thinking. For them it was expressed in 
ceremonial, in the carrying of branches, for us it survives in 

‘ poetry.’ 

Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine, upon the walls of thine house. 
Thy children like the olive-branches, round about thy table*. 

And at Athens in prose, for Demades’, the orator, is reported to 
have said 7 
The epheboi are the spring of the demos. 

But the Korythalia tells us more, it is the matriarchal form of 
the Eiresione. We know the divinity projected, represented by 
the Korythalia. She was no Kouros, she was Artemis Korythaha. 

1 Supra, p. 324. : ‘ 

2 g.y. kopvdanla* ddpvn éoreupevn TWES THY elper vu ny. : a 
3 s.v. kopudddn* 7) mpd TOY Oupav ribeuevn ddgvn’ dre ol KAdOoL (ods kopous KaAo0a) 
bdddovew Gs Kal Xptoumross *AAA SGdas Hupévas poe dbrw rls evdobey, kal xépous 
mrexrods axpapvets wupplyns—ol yap mownral dvdaradw Tovs Khadous Kal ogous Kat 
dprnkas héyouct. rwes d& bre NBncdvTwov TY véwy Kat Ouyarépuv, Sddvas mpoeTtOouv 

égdnBlos Kal ydpo.s els To OiKpov. 
4 Psalm exxviii. 3, 4. ; Ri at 
5 ap, Athen. ut. 55. 99 cal, Anuddns d¢ 6 parwp Ereye. 

..gap dé To Shou rods 
épnBovs; cf. the ver sacrum of the Latins. iki oo aay 

504. _. LPhemis .” : 

And, if as to her nature there was any doubt, she had another 
festival which marks her function, the Tithenidia, the festival 
of nurses and nurslings. Call her Orthia}, or Korythalia, or 
Hyakinthotrophos?, or Philomeirax?, it is all one; she is Kouro- 
trophos, the Rearing Mother, nurse of the Kouroi to be4 

Kourotrophos and the Lady of the Wild Things are but the 
forms of the ancient mother served by the Kouretes and she 
survives in the figure of Artemis, the Huntress sister of Apollo. 

Of this we have curious ritual evidence. 

At Messene, near to a temple of Kileithyia, Pausanias* saw 

a hall of the Kouretes, where they sacrifice without distinction all animals, 

beginning with oxen and goats and ending with birds: they throw them all 
into the fire. 

Why this singular service to the Kouretes ? Why indeed, 
unless we remember that they were the ministrants, the correlatives 
of the Great Mother, the ‘Lady of the Wild Things. ‘To her the 
sacrifice of all living things is manifestly, if hideously, appropriate. 

And to her it was offered, Lucian’, in his account of the 
Syrian goddess at Hieropolis—manifestly but a form of the Great 

Mother—tells how, in the court of the sanctuary, were kept all 
manner of beasts and birds. 

' Consecrated oxen, horses, eagles, bears and lions, who never hurt anyone, 
but are holy and tame to handle. 

But of these tame beasts and birds in 

one day in the year there 
is a holocaust. 

‘Of all the festivals,’ Lucian? says, ‘the greatest that 
in the beginning of the spring. Some call it the Pyre, 
this festival they do as follows. They cut down great trees and set them u 
in the courtyard. Then they bring in goats and sheep and other live beasts, 
and hang them up on the ‘trees, They also bring birds and clothes and 
vessels of gold and silver. When they have made all ready, they carry the 

Or the trees and set fire to them and straightway they are all 
urned” =~ 

I know of they hold 

By a fortunate chance we know that this sacrifice of all ] 

iving 
things, so appropriate to the Mother, was also made to Ar 

temis 

1 The etymology of Orthia is still uncertain, but the scholiast on Pindar, 
Ol. 11. 54, is probably right in his guess ag to the meaning: srt 6pOot els cwrnplay 7 
p80 rods yevrvanevous. 3 

> For vaxwOorpbdos see Collitz-Bechtel, Samm. Gr. Dialekt. 3501, 3502, 3512; 
the title occurs in Knidos. For Hyakinthos 

; as juvencus =adulescentul j 

Dr 8S. Wide, Lakonische Kulte, p. 290. z ‘ Se lua 
® Paus. v1, 23. 8, 4 Supra, p. 494, 5 ry, 188. 91 
5 De Syria Dea, 41, { ? Op. cit. 49, 

some the Torch. At 

ot ee iin ily hare tia ye ee a ee ee ee ee See 

af oe! ee 
re ee ee ee f 

a 

Von a, UP ee oe ee ee ee 
5 = ih 2 a*o r _ 

xr]! Kourotrophos and the Kouretes 505 
with the title of Laphria, who was, Pausanias? tells us, substantially 
the same as the Ephesian Mother. At Patrae, which was in- 
habited by dispossessed Calydonians, a yearly sacrifice to Artemis 
_ was celebrated. After describing the altar surrounded by a circle 
of green logs of wood and approached by an inclined plane of 
earth, and also the procession of the virgin priestess in a car 
drawn by deer, Pausanias comes to the sacrifice itself, which, he 
says, is not merely a state affair, but popular also among private 
persons. It is sad reading. 

_For they bring and cast upon the altar living things of all sorts, both 
edible birds and all manner of victims, also wild boars and deer and fawns. 
and some even bring the cubs of wolves and bears, and others full grown 

beasts. And they lay on the altar also the fruits of cultivated trees. Then 
they set fire to the wood. I saw indeed a bear and other beasts struggling to 
get out of the first force of the flames and escaping by sheer strength. But 
those who threw them in drag them up again on to the fire. I never heard 
of anyone being wounded by the wild beasts?. 

Such was the savage service of the Kouretes and of the 
Mother and of that last survival of the Mother, the maiden ‘ sister” 
of Apollo the Kouros. 

Of matrilinear structure there is evidence stronger still and 
better concealed in an obscure ceremony, the significance of which 
has only lately been made out, the festival of Things Insolent or 
_ Things Unwonted, Things beyond and outside their Moira, the 
- Hybristika. 

: Tue HysrisTIKA. 

Plutarch, in his treatise on the Virtues of Women‘, tells of 
the brave fight made by the women of Argos against Cleomenes, 
under the leadership of the poetess Telesilla. This fight was the 
alleged aition of a curious festival. 

Some said the fight was on the seventh day of the month, others that it 
was on the day of the new moon of the month which is now called the fourth, 
but which was formerly called Hermatos, on which day they still celebrate the: 
Hybristika, and clothe women in men’s chitons and chlamydes and men in 

the peploi and veils of women. 

The learned Plutarch realises that this festival belonged to a 
whole class in which women counterfeited men and vice versa. 
He cites as a further instance the Argive law that women who 

9 

1 iy, 82. 6. : 2 vir. 18. 12. ; 

8 By Mr W. R. Halliday in his illuminating monograph, A Note on Herodotos 
vi. 83 and the Hybristika, in B.S.A. xv1. 1909-10, p. 212. 

4 De Mulier, Virt. 4.. 

506 | TRONS [ CH. 

were brides should wear beards. The ation he gives was that the 
scarcity of males caused the women to admit slaves as husbands. 
The singular customs of the Hybristika marked, he thinks, the 
contempt of the freeborn bride. , 
The name Ta v8piotixd means things outrageous, imsolent in 
the etymological sense, things against use and wont. Now why, 
in a primitive society, should Themis who rules over all things be 
wantonly and yet systematically outraged? What lies behind this 
world-wide outrage of the exchange of clothes between the sexes, 
which survives to-day among the ’Arries and ’Arriets of Hamp- 
stead Heath ? > an 
The answer that till quite lately has been accepted as most 
satisfactory is, that the transfer of clothing marks the shift from 
matriarchy to patriarchy. The priest of Herakles at Cos had to 
wear woman’s clothes when he sacrificed. It is tempting to 
Suppose that once there had been a woman priestess of some 
native goddess Omphale, and that when patriarchy obtained a 
priest usurped the office of the priestess but still wore her ritual 
gear. The theory is ingenious and indeed points the way to the 
more satisfactory solution suggested by Mr Halliday. That 
solution he arrived at by the only safe road, by examining in 
their entirety all the various occasions on which the change of 
clothes takes place. 
The rite of the change of clothes—for a formal rite it is, not a 
wanton eccentricity—is observed on occasions seemingly the most 
dissimilar, at circumcision, at marriage, at mourning after a death. 

At circumcision Egyptian boys are dressed as girls. Among the _ 

Nandi, before boys are circumcised, the young girls pay them a 
visit and give them some of their own garments and ornaments, 

and similarly the girls are given the clothes and ornaments of — 

boys on a like occasion. 

The borrowed plumage is returned when the girls and boys are re- 

spectively admitted into the new social status for which circumcision has 
qualified them? 

Achilles on Skyros was disguised as a girl®, Dionysos was 
brought up by Ino and Athamas as a maiden‘, 

* Plut. Quaest, Gr. ym. Ad ri rapa Kgous 6 rod “Hpaxdéous lepeds €v ’Avrimaxla 
yuvatkelay évdeduuévos. éoOATa Kal rhv Kepadny dvadovmevos julrpa ‘KaTapxerar THs 
Ovalas ; 

> Mr Halliday, op. cit. p. 214. 3 Apollod, m1. 13. 8. 4 Apollod. mm. 4. 3. 

re s Cf 

Ts é EP yo 

q 

The Hybristika as Rite de Passage 507 

_ The rites of puberty, the rites of marriage, are, like all other 
primitive rites, rites de passage: their object is to afford a 
safe passage in the perilous transit from one age or condition to 
another. Man feels, though he does not yet know, that life zs 
change, and change is beset with dangers. The first crisis of life is 
the change of puberty, from boyhood to manhood. Manhood, among 
primitive peoples, seems to be envisaged as ceasing to be a woman: 
the notion is quite natural. Man is born of woman, reared of 
woman. When he passes to manhood, he ceases to be a woman- 
thing’ and begins to exercise functions other and alien, That 
moment is one naturally of extreme peril; he at once emphasizes 
and disguises it. He wears woman’s clothes. The same applies 
at marriage. 

The focus of attention at puberty and in marriage is on sex. 
The rite de passage is from one sex to another. Hence the change 
of clothes. But what is effective and salutary for one crisis may 
be effective and salutary for another. Hence the fact, perplexing 
at first, that at mourning for death—another rite de passage—the. 
Lycians changed clothes with the opposite sex. In fact the 
ceremony of change of clothes might easily come to be observed 
whenever it was desirable to ‘change the luck.’ Among the 
Nandi 

Once every seven-and-a-half years, some say four years after the circum- 
- cision festival, the Saket-ap-eito ceremony takes place. The country 1s 
handed over from one age to another. At the conclusion of the ceremonies, 
the men of the preceding age take off their warriors’ garments and put on 
those of old age. The defence and well-being of the community are thereby 

handed over to their successors. 

Here the rite de passage is not from sex to sex but from age to 
age. The general characteristics of each periodic festival, such as 
the Carnival, the Saturnalia, are always the same, a complete 
upset of the old order, a period of licence and mutual hilarity, 
and then the institution of the new. As Mr Halliday points 
out, the last survival is the servants’ ball of the old-fashioned 

country Christmas. 
Behind the Hybristika and many another primitive Greek rite 

there lies a rite of initiation, the rite of the making of a Kouros. 
When tribal conditions are broken up, the family takes the place 

1 See supra, p. 36. 

508 ~ « Themis > - 

of the group. What were once puberty rites change, as we have 
already seen!, into other forms of initiation, as medicine or seer or 
member of some secret society. A very singular instance of this 
18 preserved to us in the rites of Trophonios at Lebadeia which 
are known to us in exceptional detail, and which cast considerable 
light on the figure of Themis as she shifts from being a projection 
of the social structure to her final form as a divinity of prophecy. 

THE ORACLE OF TROPHONIOS. 

The sources of our knowledge of the ritual of Trophonios are 
three : 

1. The account of Pausanias when he visited Lebadeia. 

2. The treatise of Plutarch on the Daimon of Sokrates, in 
which he recounts the experiences of a young philosopher who 
went down into the chasm of Trophonios to find out what the 
Daimon of Sokrates was. 

3. Plutarch’s treatise on. the Face in the Orb of the Moon, in 
which he relates the rite of Trophonios to other ceremonies, and 
thereby lets out their real nature. 

(1) The account of Pausanias? is familiar, and also too long to 
be quoted in eatenso; it must for the most part be resumed. After 
a description of the city of Lebadeia, which in splendour equalled 
the most flourishing cities of Greece, and after stating that 
Trophonios was-in form and function analogous to Asklepios, 
Pausanias describes the procedure of consulting the oracle. The 
consultation is preceded by various rites of purification and 
sacralization. The applicant lodges ‘for a stated number of 
days in a certain building sacred to the Agathos Daimon and 
to Agathe Tyche. He bathes only in the river Herkyna, he 
sacrifices to various divinities, among them of course Trophonios 
and Demeter with the title Europa, whom they call the nurse of 
Trophonios, obviously a divinity of the Ge-Kourotrophos type. 
He feeds on sacrificial flesh, and omens are taken from the 
victims, especially from the flesh of a ram sacrificed ov 
to Agamedes. 

Next comes the actual descent: 

er a pit 

The way in which he goes down is this, 

First, during the night two citizen 
boys about thirteen years old lead him to t 

he river Herkyna and anoint him 

1 Supra, p. 52, ; 2 S914, 

xi] ‘The Oracle of Trophonios 509 

with oil and bathe him. The boys are called Hermai, and they wash him 
and do all necessary things for him. Then the priests take him not straight 
to the oracle, but to certain springs of water which are close to each other. 
Here he must drink what is called the water of Lethe, that he may forget all 
he has hitherto had in mind. Next he drinks of another water, the water of 
Memory, and by it he remembers again what he sees down below. Then 
having seen it and worshipped and prayed he comes to the oracle itself 
dressed in a tunic of linen, girded with fillets and wearing the boots of the 
country. ms 

Then follows a detailed account of the actual structure of the 
oracular chasm. It is artificial and shaped like a pot for baking 
bread in. It is about eight ells deep. The consultant goes down 
by a ladder. 

When he has gone down he sees a hole between the ground and the stone- 
work. Its breadth seems to be two spans and its height one. He then lays 
himself down on his back, and holding in either hand barley-cakes mixed 
with honey, he pushes his feet through the hole first and then follows himself, 
trying to squeeze his knees through the hole. When he has got his knees 
through the rest of his body is immediately pulled in, and shoots along as a 
man might be caught and dragged along by the swirl of a mighty and swift 
stream. The future is not revealed to all in the same way. To one it is 
given by sight, to another by hearing. They return through the hole feet 
foremost. 

Next comes a story of the sad and instructive fate of a 

sacrilegious consultant, and then Pausanias concludes: 

When a man has come up from Trophonios, the priests again take him 
and set him on what they call the throne of Memory, which stands not far 
from the shrine, and when he is seated there they ask him as to what he has 
seen and heard. When he has told them they give him over to his friends, 
and they carry him, still overwhelmed with fear and unconscious of himself 
and where he is, to the same building where he stayed before, the house of 
Agathos Daimon and Agathe Tyche. Later on his wits return to him and 
the power to laugh will come back again. 1 do not write from hearsay. 1 
have myself consulted Trophonios, and have seen others who have done it. 

It is important that Pausanias states what he knows from 

personal experience. No one who has read Pausanias will incline 
to credit him with hysteria. 

(2) Plutarch’s account of the experiences of Timarchos' adds 

certain details to the picture, and greatly emphasizes the im- 
portance of the revelations imparted. When Timarchos after 

the accustomed preliminaries entered the chasm, . 
thick darkness was about him. He prayed and lay a long while upon the 

i 1 i wit 1 d to him 
d tain whether he was waking or dreaming. But it seeme 
Gable felt. a a blow on his head with a great noise, and that through the 

1 De Genio Socr. xxt. 

510 Themis rd [cH. . 

sutures of his skull his soul was let loose. And, as his soul went forth, it, 
was mixed with pure and pleasant. and lightsome air, and it seemed for the 
first time to take breath, and seemed to expand and be more spacious than 
before, like a sail swollen with the wind. : 

Then follows a long account of the revelation vouchsafed to. 
Timarchos, which included the whole cosmos and the daimones 
pervading the cosmos, all of which was explained by an invisible 
voice. Finally, 

The voice ceased speaking, and Timarchos turned round to see who was 

the speaker. But a sharp pain seized his head, as though his skull were 
being pressed together, so that he lost all sense and understanding. In a 
little while he recovered and found himself in the mouth of the cave of 
Trophonios, where he had first lain down}. 
Sokrates, when he was told all this, was much annoyed that he 
had not heard about it before Timarchos died, so that he might. 
have questioned him on his experiences. We share the annoyance 
of Sokrates. . 

In the Hybristika we saw that the rite de passage was. 
emphasized, expressed, represented by a change of clothes. In 
the rites of Trophonios the transit from one state to another is 
still more drastically enacted. After purification the suppliant. 
goes down into a chasm, slips through a hole feet foremost, is 
swirled away, has a vision, comes back through the hole reversed. 
Without exaggeration, he may surely be said to have accomplished 
a rite de passage. In the rites of Trophonios we seem to see the 
thing presented pictorially, physically, geographically; the rites 
are, as M. van Gennep? would say, preliminal, liminal, postliminal. 

But it may fairly be asked, Are we justified in comparing 
the rites of Trophonios to rites of initiation? Are they not 
expressly and merely certain curious ceremonies in relation to 
the consultation of a primitive oracle ? 

It may be noted in passing that the suppliant was attended 
by boys who were citizens, and that they were about thirteen 
years of age, that is they had just attained puberty. But happily 
we have evidence more definite. 

(3) In his treatise on the Face in the Orb of the Moon, 

? Plut. de Genio Socr. xxi. sub fin. 

2 Les Rites de Passage, 1909, p. 14 ‘le schéma complet des rites de passage 
comporte en théorie des rites préliminaires (séparation), liminaires (marge) et post- 
liminaires (agrégation).’ 

st 

as. 

ne ee a 

ee 
oo eae 

mel Mnemosyne and Anamnesis 511 

Plutarch? tells us that the moon is daimon-haunted, but that 

certain of the better sort of daimones do not always stay in the 
moon. 

They come down hither in order to take charge of or: 

: 1 ge of oracles, and the 
present at, and take part in, the highest of orgiastic initiatory rites, andl ales 
are chasteners and watchers over wrong doings and they shine as saviours in 
battle and at sea.... Of the best of these daimones those of the age of Kronos 
said they themselves were. And the same of old were the Idaean Daktyls in Crete 
and the Korybantes in Phrygia and the Trophoniads in Lebadeia of Boeotia 

and countless others in various places all over the habitable world, of whom 
the sacred rites and honours and titles remain. 

Plutarch could not put the matter more plainly. The same 
daimones preside over oracles and over rites of initiation; Tro- 
phoniads, Idaean Daktyls and those of the age of Kronos are all 
substantially the same. The statement is for us a priceless 
illumination. But we ask what is really meant by this bringing 
together of things apparently so remote and alien, oracles, institu- 
tions for looking into the future, and rites of initiation, purely 
‘social institutions ? 

MNEMOSYNE AND ANAMNESIS. 

At the outset, it must be remembered that oracles were, down 
to late days, places to be consulted for advice as to the present as 
much and more than for knowledge of the future; they were 
essentially places of counsel for practical purposes. But even 
so there remains a certain gulf to be bridged between the social 
and the oracular. The bridge is easily crossed if we examine the 
analogy of primitive initiation rites. 

We saw in the first chapter? that the cardinal rite of tribal 
initiation was a mimetic Death and Resurrection. By every sort 
of pantomime the notion was enforced that the boy had died to 
his old life, had put away childish things, had in a word a new 
social status and soul. We also saw that tribal initiation was the 
prototype of all social rites, that the rites at birth, marriage, the 

1 De fac. in orb. lun. xxx. obk det dé diarplBovawv én’? abr ol daluoves ddA XpnaTnplov 
dedpo Kkarlacw émipednodpuevor, Kal Tals avwraTrw cupmaperor Kad cuvopydgover THY 
reheTov, Kohacrat Te ylvovrar Kal pvdaxes aducnuarwv Kal owrnpes év TE Tone woes kal 
xara Oddarrav emiddumrovow...ek dé TaY BeATLoOvOr éxelvow of Te mepl rov Kpdvoy ovres 
épacay adrods etva, kal mpdbrepov év TH Kpijry tovs "Ldatous Aaxrinous, dy TE Ppvyla TOUS 
KoptBavras yevéoOar, cal rovs mepl Bowwrlay év AcBadeiag Tpopwriddas, kal puplous addous 
mohAaxo0e THs olKoumerns * cy tepd Kal Timal Kal mpoonyoptat diapevouot. 

2 Supra, p. 18. 

512 Themis 

making of a medicine man, death itself, were only rites de passage, 

the transit from one state to another. Change which is life itself _ 

is emphasized, represented. To consult an oracle you need a rite 
de passage just as much as to be made a member of a tribe, To 
know is to be in touch with mana, not to be entheos, for the theos 
is not yet formulated and projected, but to be sanctified, to pass 
inside the region of tabu; hence the preliminary purification. 
Lethe is but an attenuated Death; Mnemosyne, renewed con- 
sciousness, is a new Life, 

We distinguish between the objective and the subjective. So 
did primitive man; indeed a creature who did not for practical 

purposes make some such distinction would not long survive. — 

But we know definitely that the subjective world, though it can 
influence our actions as strongly as the objective, has its only 
reality within us. The savage gives to the world of his imagina- 
tion, of his feelings, emotions, dreams, a certain outside reality. 
He cannot quite distinguish between a conception and a perception. 
He makes another world with a sort of secondary reality, super- 
sensuous but quite real. To this supersensuous world go all his 
remembrances of the past, all his hopes and imaginings for the 
future. 

And so the supersensuous world grows big with the invisible present and 
big also with the past and the future, crowded with the ghosts of the dead 
and shadowed with oracles and portents of the future. It is this super- 
Sensuous, supernatural world which is the eternity, the other world, of 
primitive religion ; not an endlessness of time but a state removed from 
full sensuous reality, a world in which anything and everything may happen, 
a fairyland of heaven and hell, a world too peopled with demonic ancestors 
and liable to a ‘once upon a time-ness’ denied to the present}, 

Thus, to consult an oracle, a veritable, almost physical, rite de | 

passage is indispensable. The suppliant must pass out of the 
actual, sensible, ‘ objective’ world, into that other world of dream, 
of ecstasy, of trance, with its secondary reality, the world in which 
emotions, hope and fear, and imaginations, are blended with what 
we should call subjective hallucinations. He needs a rite @agré- 
gation to assimilate him, and when he would return to the normal 

* See my paper on The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religions, 
pp- 499—501 in the Darwin Memorial Volume, 1909. The view there expressed 
as. to the content of the primitive supersensuous world is entirely based on 
Dr P. Beck’s Erkenntnisstheorie des primitiven Denkens in Zeitschrift f, Philosophie 
und philos. Kritik, 1903, p. 172, and 1904, p. 9. ea ie 

————“= i 

. i ae Se 
; i € 

Wik 4) get ae 
fs 

Mnemosyne and Anamnesis 513 

sensuous world with its other and almost alien reality he needs 
a rite de” ségrégation. 

That Memory, the mere remembering of facts, should be the 
Mother of the Muses is a frigid genealogy. The usual explana- 
tion offered is that memory is the faculty which enables you to 
remember and repeat long epic poems. But the Mnemosyne of 
initiation rites, the remembering again, the dvduvnous, of things 
seen in ecstasy when the soul is rapt to heavenly places, she is 
surely now, as ever, the fitting Mother of all things musical. We 
are told again and again that Plato ‘borrowed much of his imagery’ 
from the mysteries, but it is no external borrowing of a mere 
illustration. Plato’s whole scheme alike of education and philo- 
sophy is but an attempted rationalization of the primitive mysticism 
of initiation, and most of all of that profound and perennial mysticism 
of the central rite de passage, the death and the new birth, social, 
moral, intellectual. His borrowings of terminology, his dvAakes, 
his avépeia, his xa0apars, éxTrAnks, dvaxdduyus, even his pMeNETAV 
amobvncxewy, are but the outer signs of a deep inward and spiritual 
debt. 

Plato, in his accustomed way, just slightly alters the word, giving 
us a more strictly accurate term Anammnesis for the mythological 
Mnemosyne, but with no intention of concealing his borrowing. 
What has so long lain hidden from us must have been patent to 
every initiated Greek, and especially to every Orphic. On the 
tablet? hung round the neck of the dead initiated man, was 
inscribed an instruction that reflects, though in slightly different 
form, the ritual of Trophonios : 

Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring, 

_ And by the side thereof standing a white cypress. : 

To this Well-spring approach not near. 

But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory, 

Cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it. 

_ At, Lebadeia the supplicant must drink of Lethe, he must 
present a clean sheet for the revelation to come. But Lethe was 
only Katharsis?, the negative. side, and gradually this negative 

aL Prolegomena, pp. 574 and 660. oi have there fully discussed the Mnemosyne 
of the Orphic tablets and drawn attention to the analogy of the rites of Trophonios, 
but I did not then understand their relation to rites of social initiation. peas 

2 For another view of. Katharsis as the ‘restoration of equilibrium see Prof. 
Margoliouth’s Poetics of Aristotle, 1911, p. 59. 

H. 33 

Cr oes Themis (on. 

side fell away and came even to be regarded as a forbidden evil, 
a denial of the new life of Mnemosyne?. } 

The evidence then, not only of the rites of the Kouretes but 

=; 

also of such rites as the Hybristika and the oracular rites of : 

Trophonios, shows us clearly that some primitive conceptions of — 
Greek religion, and hence inevitably of Greek philosophy, were 
based on group-institutions, the social structure of which was of the 
matrilinear type. We return to the point from which we set out, 
the rites and representation of the Palaiokastro Hymn. We shall 
find there to our surprise and satisfaction that this dominance of 
social structure is not only evident but even strongly emphasized. 

THEMIS, DIKE AND THE HORAE. 

Our first chapter was devoted to the consideration of the 
Hymn of the Kouretes. We noted then that in subject as in | 
structure the Hymn fell into three parts, (1) The Invocation, ~ 
(2) the Aetiological Myth, (3) the Resultant Blessings. The first 
and second parts we considered in detail. We saw how the 
Kouros invoked was a projection of his worshippers the Kouretes, — 
and we noted that he was invoked for the year, that he was in — 
fact the vehicle and incarnation of the fruits and blessings of the — 
year. His growth to maturity, his entry on the status of ephebos?, — 
caused the growth and maturity of the natural year. 

We then passed to the consideration of the aetiological myth 
and saw that in it was reflected and projected that matrilinear 
structure of society in which the Mother and the Son, the Son 
grown to maturity, were the prominent facts. The third factor, 
the Resultant Blessings, had to be held over till the figure of 
Themis had been discussed, and now awaits consideration. 

After the birth of the Kouros and that yearly coming which 
reflects his yearly re-birth the Hymn tells us* 

_ } This notion of Mnemosyne, of Death and Resurrection, is almost like a dim 
imaginative forecast of modern philosophical speculation. Prof. Bergson has 
shown us that Consciousness ‘signifies above all memory,’ ‘all consciousness is 
memory; all consciousness (what he elsewhere calls durée) is a preservation and 
accumulation of the past in the present,’ and again ‘all consciousness is an 
anticipation of the future,’ ‘consciousness is above all a hyphen, a tie between the — 
past and future.’ See Life and Consciousness in Hibbert Journal, Oct. 1911, 
pp. 27 and 28. ; : 
* Too late for incorporation in chapter 1, I find that, if we may trust the 
Etymologicum Magnum (s.v. Atxrn), there was at Dikté a Avs dyahua ayév evov 
obviously the image of Zeus as Kouros. s 
> Supra, p. 8. 

Ps, 

—_—s 

Se eS 

a aS 

Themis, Dike and the Horai 515 

The Horai began to be fruitful year by year and Dike to possess mankind, 
and all wild living things were held about by wealth-loving Peace. 

Then the Invocation is repeated, the Kouretes bid their Kouros, 
who is but themselves, 

__ ‘Leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks, and leap for fields of fruit, and 
for hives to bring increase.’ 

And 

‘Leap for our Cities, and leap for our sea-borne ships, and leap for our 
young citizens and for goodly Themis.’ 

In the light of ancient magic we understand leaping for flocks, 
fields and beehives. In the light of the Eniautos-daimon we 
understand leaping for the Horai, the Seasons, who bring the 
great Year-Festival. In the light of the Greatest Kouros and 
rites of initiation we even understand leaping for young citizens, 
but when it comes to the last leap of all, high in the air, for 
goodly Themis, we stand amazed. If we examine the figures of 

' Dike and the Horai our surprise may change to understanding 

and even admiration. 

Themis is the mother of the Horai. Speaking of the weddings 
of Zeus, Hesiod! says, 

Next led he goodly Themis, and she bore 
The Hours, Eunomia, Dike, blooming Peace. : 

It is then two of the Horai, the Seasons, who, at the birth o 
the Kouros, bring the new and splendid order to the earth”. 

Pindar® gives the same genealogy when he tells of the glories 
of Corinth : 

Where doth Eunomia reign and her sister, secure foundation of cities, 
Dike and her foster sister Eirene, guardians of wealth for men, golden 
daughters of Themis of the Fair-Counsels. 

And again in the fragment of the first Paean*, written for 
Thebes for the festival of the Daphnephoria : 

‘Te. 
Lo the Year in its accomplishment and the Horai born of Themis have 
come to the horse-loving city of Thebes, bringing Apollo’s garland-loving 

feast. May he long time crown the race of the citizens with the flowers of 
temperate Eunomia.’ 

1 Theog. 901. 

2 For the Horai and the Age of Innocence see Prof. Bosanquet, B.S.A. vim. 
p. 354: but, as Mr Cornford suggests to me, the notion may be that of the in- 
auguration of a new Great Year, like Empedocles’ world-periods, beginning with 
a reign of Philia and Justice; cf. Plato, Politicus, 270. 

3 Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. v. p. 25; and for connection with 
Daphnephoria see p. 16. 

33—2 

Des 

i: 

516 “eer Ue PRenas: 

The sentiment is strangely like the Hymn of the Kouretes. 
Apollo takes the place, as well he might’, of the Greatest Kouros. — 

The Dike then of the Hynin is one of the Horai and is the 

+ 

daughter of Themis. To us she seems like a slightly more ; 
abstracted Themis. In her other form she is Justice, that is, — 

she is Convention, public usage, the social conscience, Themis 
regarded as an abstraction. But to regard Dike thus is to lose 
sight of her aspect as one of the Seasons, and indeed to mis- 

conceive her origin and very essence. 

a ae ee 

Dike in her origin is very like Themis, only always a little — 
more alive, less stationary. In common Greek parlance, preserved _ 

chiefly in the normal use of the accusative, she is the ‘way of life, 
normal habit. 
Bpépe & 
2 

> i4 UJ A > , 
apuaxérov Sikay vdatos dpoxtumov”. 

‘The clatter of horse’s hooves roars in the way of, after the fashion of, an 

unconquerable mountain-beating torrent.’ 
kopns Sé mévOos Aayxavw modov Siknv®, 

My hair dishevelled like a colt’s wild mane. 

Again, Pindar‘ says he will have no share in the loud boast of 

the guileful citizen: 
pirov ein pirciv: 

mort & exOpov dr’ exOpos eov AvKoLo Sixav trobedoopuat, 
» > eT, , c Lal Col 
GAN addoTe watréwv dois oKoAtats. 
‘A friend to a friend, a foe to a foe, like a wolf will I leap upon him 
heading now here, now there.’ 

Like a wolf, like a foal, like water. Here we have the difference - 

> 

ee 

= 

? 

ware 

between @éuus and 8écn. The one, Oéuss, is specialized to man, — 
the social conscience, the other is the way of the whole world of — 
nature, of the universe of all live things. The word 8é«n® has in — 
it more life-blood, more of living and doing; the word @éuus has 
more of permission to do, human sanction shadowed always by — 

tabu ; fas is unthinkable without nefas. i 
1 Supra, p. 439. 2 Asch. Septem, 84. 4 
8 Soph., Nauck, Frg. 598. 4 Pyth. 1. 155. 3 
> Mr Cornford points out to me that in some compounds, e.g. évdixos, dikn keeps _ 

the notion of ‘way’ after she has, as a personality, submerged it in retribution — 
and vengeance. Aristotle (Pol. B. 3. 1262a 24), Mr Cook reminds me, uses — 
dixatos of Pharsalian horses who, apparently, breed true. The commentators, _ 

ad loc., note that in the land of the just, rikrovow...yuvaixes €ouxdra Téxva ToKedot. 

Xenophon (Cyr. vir. 3. 38) uses dixacos of a soil that repays cultivation. 

% 
; 

3 

q 
a 
; 

—— a Sa ee 

Dike and Themis 517 

We speak of the dé«n of a wolf, a foal, a torrent, not of its 
Géuts; but man, as well as nature, has his ways, his habits,'so we 
speak of the din of men; and with this human use a notion not 
merely of habit but of right, due habit, comes in. ‘To lie soft’ is 
the dixn, not merely the habit, but the due of old men’. Odysseus, 
Penelope? says to Medon, was 

‘One that wrought no iniquity toward any man, nor spake aught unright 
eous in the township, as is the way of divine kings.’ tok 

Dike then is the way of the world, the way things happen, 
and Themis is that specialized way for human beings which is 
sanctioned by the collective conscience, by herd instinct. A lonely 
beast in the valley, a fish in the sea, has his Dike, but it is not till 
man congregates together that he has his Themis. 

And now we begin to understand the link between Dike and 
the Horai. Dike we have seen is the way of life of each natural 
thing, each plant, each animal, each man. It is also the way, the 
usage, the regular course of that great animal the Universe, the 
way that is made manifest in the Seasons, in the life and death of 
vegetation; and when it comes to be seen that these depend on 
the heavenly bodies, Dike is manifest in the changes of the rising 
and setting of constellations, in the waxing and waning of the 
Moon and in the daily and yearly courses of the Sun. 

In one passage at least, in the Medea* of Euripides Dike 

stands for the course, even the circular course of the whole 

cosmos. In the general reversal of all things 

Upward go the streams of the living rivers, 
Dike and all things are turned about. 

Only so do we understand how Dike seems sometimes to take 
on the semblance of the Moon, sometimes of the Sun. In the 
Hymn to the Moon in the Magic Papyri‘, where so much that is 

1 Hom. Od. xxiv. 255 
evdguevar padakas’ 7 yap dlkn éorl yepovTwv, 
2 Od. rv. 690 
otre Twa pétas éfalovoy otre Te elma 
; év Shum: Hr éorl dikyn Oelwy Baorhjwv. 
3 y, 410 — dvw Trotapav iepav xwpodor. mayal 
kal dika Kal mdvta madw , oTpepeTas. pe ; 

4 Par, Pap. Abel, 292, verses 7 and 49. For the moon-aspect of Moira, Dike, 

T'yche, Ananke, etc., see Dieterich, Abraxas, p. 102. 

518 Themis 

ancient is enshrined, the Moon is addressed not only as Moira, but 
as Dike. 
adotpact kopatovoa Aixn kat vnpara Moipév, 
KrAobo kai Adyeois 75 “Arporros ef tpikapave, 
and again, 
...00 yap Suvadduktos *AvayKn 
Moipa 7 epus...Aikn ov, 

and in the prooemium of Parmenides' the Ways of Day and 

Night are closed by mighty doors, and of these 
Diké Avenging. keeps the keys that fit them. 

In Homer the Gates of Heaven are turned on their hinges by 
the Horai. The Ways, the Paths, the Goings of Day and Night 
could never have been guarded by Themis. 

' We have yet to note another distinction between Themis and 
Dike. Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras? makes an instructive 
statement as to their relative positions. 

‘Men,’ he says, ‘knowing that all places alike have need of justice, fable that 
Themis occupies the same position in the realm of Zeus as Dike in that of 
Plouton and as Law occupies in cities, so that he who does not act aright with 
respect to what is ordained should seem to be thereby committing injustice 
at one and the same time against the whole universe.’ 

Iamblichus? seems to have discerned, if rather dimly and con- 
fusedly, the real state of the case. Human custom and law, Nomos, 
was a fact of this actual world. Themis in Heaven and Dike in 
Hades were fictions, mythological projections. He gives no hint 
why Themis should be in Heaven, Dike in Hades. An enquiry 
into the cause will repay us. But first we must establish the fact. 

Themis is constantly associated with Zeus; she hangs about 

1 Diels, F.V.S. p. 114, v. 11 
&vOa mihat Nuxrés re kat "Hyuaros eiol xedevOwy 

atrat 0 albépar mrfvrae peyddowwr Oupérpois, . 
_ T&Y O€ Aixn rodvrowos eer KAnidas dLorBovs. 
Dr Otto Gilbert in his Die Daimon des Parmenides, Archiv f. Gesch. d. Philosophie, 
Xx, p. 25, has conclusively shown that the vision of Parmenides is a, Hades-journey. 
The poet goes with the Sun-chariot through the gates of the West (xd4@0d0s) and 
passes through the house of Night to the gate of the dyodos where Dike is. The 
Heliads go to the upper world. Parmenides stays with Dike below. 

2 1x. 46 ...rods yap dvOpdrous.,.uvOomorery Tiy adrhy rdéw exew rapa To Aud rv 
Oduw kal mapa 7 Wrobrwre thy Alknv kal xara Tas woreELs Tov Népov, tva 6 wh dixalws 
ep’ a réraxrar Tovey dua palyyntat mdvra Tov Kéomov ouvadiker. 

3 He may be quoting a dictum of Pythagoras. 

ee a 

Bel Dike in Hades BLS 

him like a sort of moralized Kratos and Bia. The nurse says of 
Medea!, 
‘Did ye hear her cry 

To them that guard man’s faith forsworn, 
Themis and Zeus ?’ 

It was the boast of gina that more than any other city she 
honoured 

Saviour Themis who sitteth by Zeus, God of Strangers”. 

Hesiod as we have seen makes her succeed Thetis as second 
wife of Zeus. 

The real truth comes out in the fragment of a hymn of 
Pindar’s? in which he describes this Olympian wedding. 

And first did the Moirait lead Heavenly Themis of the Good Counsels 
with golden horses along the springs of Okeanos, up the holy ladder of 
Olympos, along the shining way. 

She who was of earth, she who was Earth herself, leaves her 
home and goes the way of all things divine, up to Olympos. But, 
in the very pomp and pageant of her going, we feel she is entering 
on an alien kingdom. Hers are human conventions, and it is only 
by constraint of the Moirai that she goes skyward, there to wed 
Zeus and to summon his councils. 

Not less clearly and with more inherent propriety does Dike 
belong to Hades, the kingdom of Plouton. When Antigone? is 

1 Kur, Med. 169 
émiBoarat 
Ogu edxralay Znva 0’. 
And again, 208 
trav Znvos opxtay Ogu. 
2 Pind. Ol. vi. 21 
év0a Zeoreipa Ards Eeviov 
mdpedpos doxetrar O€ms. 

3 Christ, Frg. 29, 30, v. 7. This hymn, like the Paean quoted above, may very 
probably have been written for the Daphnephoria to accompany the procession of 
the Kopo. See supra, p. 438. 

4 In a lyric fragment (Bergk, adesp. 139) the Fates are made to escort the three 
Horai, Eunomia, Dike and Hirene. 

Kr\w0m Adxeols 7’ edwdevor 
xodpac Nuxrés, 
ebxyoudvwy émaxovcar’, ovpdviar xOdmial TE Saluoves* 
& mavdeluavrot, méumer amp 
_poddkorrrov Evvoulay NumapoOpdvous 7 aderpas, Alkay 
Kal orepaynpopov Hipavay. 

5 Soph. Ant. 450. 

ee ee ee ee ee a 

520 ~ Themis (| 

charged with transgression she thus contrasts the law of Zeus and 
that of the underworld gods. 

‘Yes, for it was not Zeus who heralded 
That edict, no nor she who dwells below, 
Dike, who gave such laws for mortal men,’ 
Of course, at the time of ‘the general migration to Olympos, a 
_ great effort is made to assure the assumption into heaven of Dike 
as well as Themis. The notion obtained to a certain extent in 
Olympianized Orphic circles. Dike becomes as a double of Themis 
assessor of Zeus. So the Orphic Hymn!, 
Sing the all-seeing eye of Dike fair 
Who sits upon the holy throne of Zeus. 

Demosthenes? pleads with his citizens to honour Eunomia and 
Dike holy and unswerving, ‘ 

Whom Orpheus, who instituted our most sacred mysteries, declares to be — 
seated by the throne of Zeus. 

Orphic literature might proclaim Dike as assessor of Zeus in 
the highest heavens, but Orphic popular art, like primitive philo- 
sophy, knew that her real home was in Hades, by the side of 
Plouton. On the well-known underworld vases of Lower Italy of 
which a specimen? is given in Fig. 145 a group of figures occurs in 
the right-hand corner, of which the interpretation is fortunately 
certain. A seated youth bids farewell to another youth about to 
start on his journey to the upper world. The seated youth is 
Theseus. 

...Sedet aeternumque sedebit 
Infelix Theseus‘, 

The youth about to return to the upper world bears a signifi- 
cant name, ‘He who runs round, Peirithods, His periodic cycle 
leads him inevitably upwards. 

By the side of Theseus a woman is seated holding a drawn 
sword, She is Dike in her later Orphic aspect of Vengeance. Of 
this happily there is no doubt, as on the fragment of a vase® with 

u LX, 2 ¢. Aristogeit. xxv. 11, and see Prolegomena, p. 507. 

3 Munich, Jahn Cat. 849. Wiener Vorlegeblitter, Serie E, Taf. 1. For the 
whole series see Prolegomena, p. 601. 

4 Verg. Zin. vi. 617. 

° Carlsruhe, Cat. 258, Hartung, Arch. Zeit. p. 263, Taf. xrx., and Wiener 

Vorlegeblitter E, Taf. v1. 3. See also. my Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens 
p. exlviii., Fig, 39. ; Seg j 

Dike and Eurydike 521 

similar design the figure is inscribed AIKH. What has this Dike 
with the drawn sword, this Vengeance incarnate, this denizen of 
Hades, to do with that Dike we already know, the fixed order of 
the world, the Way of Nature? The fragment of another vase- 
painting’ may help us to understand. It is reproduced in Fig. 146, 
and is obviously a portion of a design similar to that in Fig. 144, 
though of earlier and much finer workmanship. 

To the right is the palace of Hades and in it is acaten 
Persephone. ‘To her left we may safely restore Plouton. To her 

Fie. 145. 

right stands ‘Hekata’ with two blazing torches. Close to the 
palace, as usual, is the figure of Orpheus as Thracian musician or 
priest. Above him to the left a door, just ajar, leading evidently 
to the upper air. Close to the door, with her hand upon it, is a 
winged figure. Above the right wing are letters read variously 
AIKA and AIKA. Dr Dieterich? would read AIKA, and sees in 
the winged figure Dike warding the gates of Hades a reminiscence 

1 Jalta, Coll. Ruvo, Monumenti Antichi d. Accademia dei Lincei, vol. XVI. 
Tav. 11. 
2 Archiv f. Religionawiss: x1. 1908, p. 159. 

ire 
' 

; 

Pi 
¥ 
z 

* 
‘ 
e; 

4 , eee Le ey ie ~ 2 a or oe ae a 

" 

522 Themis [cH. 

et 

of the Dike who appears as gate-warden of Hades in the prooemium 
of Parmenides?. 
But to this interesting suggestion there is one obvious objec- 
tion. If the winged figure be Dike, she is a duplication. Below, 
in the left-hand corner, is a seated figure with hand upraised, 
attentive to what goes on above her. Against her is her name 
AIKA, Dike. Of the winged figure a simple explanation les to” 
hand’. The inscription AIKA is close to a fracture. By supplying 

~ 

—— — 

Fie. 146. 

-—ir. 7 “ee 

the letters evpy we get Eurydike. The figure who turns at the’ 
door is Eurydike herself. Her wings present no difficulty. She — 
is in Hades and hence is conceived of as an eidolon. 

Moreover—and this is for us the important point—in the light — 
of Eury-dike we understand Dike herself. Eurydike, She of the 
Wide-Way, is, like Kurysternos, but the ordered form of Earth 
herself, in her cyclic? movement of life and death, her eternal wheel 

1 Supra, p. 518, note 1. 

* I offered this explanation in the Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, 1909, p. 411, 
in a note entitled Dike oder Eurydike. Before his lamented death, Dr Dieterich 
wrote acknowledging my suggestion with the utmost courtesy and kindness, but he 
pronounced it to his mind ‘unwahrscheinlich.’ : 

° It is perhaps scarcely needful to note that the Greek philosopher never 

‘escaped from the wheel’; revolution was as near as he could get to ? Evolution 
Créatrice. 

whi ln. 

ee | 

a 

ee ee 

— 

Wheel of Dike 523 

of palingenesia. She, the young green Earth, has, as we have 
seen’, her yearly Anodos, as Kore, as Semele, as Eurydike. At 
first she rises of her own motion and alone, as we have seen on 
many a vase-painting®. Later, when the physical significance of 
her rising is no longer understood, when patriarchy has supplanted 
matrilinear earth-worship, a human and patrilinear motive is 
provided. She needs a son or a lover to fetch her up, to carry her 
down. So we get the rape of Persephone by Hades, of Basile 
by Echelos, of Helen by Theseus and Peirithods, the descent 
of Dionysos to fetch his mother Semele, and, latest and loveliest, 
the love-story of Orpheus and Eurydike. Here on the Orphic 
vase-painting we have a reminiscence of the fact that Eurydike 
really and primarily returned to the upper world alone. Orpheus 
is there, but he sings on, untouched by, irrelevant to, her going. 
Dike then, like her prototype Eurydike, represents the eternal 
cycle of the life of the earth, the temporal sequence of the Horai. 

In the light of Dike we understand another element in the 
underworld vases which has long puzzled scholars. In the palace 
of Plouton (Fig. 145), above alike the figure of Plouton and 
Persephone, is suspended a wheel. This wheel has been strangely 
misunderstood. 

We think instinctively of the Wheel of Fortune, and we think 
rightly. Fortune (Tyche) is the goddess who brings—brings 
forth, brings to accomplishment. But we add to this notion the 
notion of retribution. 

Turn Fortune, turn thy Wheel, and lower the proud, 
or again, 
He hath put down the mighty from their seat. 

Just such a degradation awaited Dike. From being the order 
of the world, the way of the world, she became the Avenger of 
those who outstep and overpass the order of the world. But this 
notion of Vengeance is secondary, not primitive ; the wheel to the 
early Greek would carry no such suggestion. 

The powers of the sky were divided in antiquity as we have 
seen® into ra petdpova and ra petéwpa, the ‘weather’ and the 
heavenly bodies. The two are well shown side by side on the 

1 Supra, p. 418. 2 Supra, pp. 419 and 422. 
3 Supra, p. 392. 

524 Themis — (cH. 

Gallic altar! in Fig, 147. The thunder and the thunder-god have. 

everything to do with Kratos and Bia, but 

regular course of .the heavenly bodies 
symbolized by the rotation of the wheel. 

The Paeonians we remember? worshipped 
the sun in the form of a disk.. At the 
Daphnephoria?, sun and moon and_ stars 
were represented by globes. On the archaic 
Greek mirror in Fig. 136 the sun is a rayed 
disk with the head of a Kouros. But these 
represent rather the stationary aspect of 
the sun than his perennial motion, his 
ceaseless way. The going of the sun is 
drastically represented by the little votive 
solar chariot* in Fig. 148. The chariot 
has six wheels and is drawn by one horse. It contains the 
solar disk itself. It.is of course the wheel in motion that has 

Fie, 148. 

power magically to compel the sun to rise. The wheels in 
sanctuaries®. were turned by ropes with the like intent, 

1 In the Maison Carrée at Nismes. See Gaidoz, Le Dieu Gaulois du Soleil, 3 

Rey. Arch. vr. 1885, p. 187, Fig. 26. 

2 Supra,:p. 465. ; 3 Supra, p. 438, ; 

‘i Found at Trundholm. Sophus Miiller, La Représentation solaire de Trundholm 
Antiquités Scandinaves, Copenhague, 1903, pp. 303—321; and J. Dechelette, Le 
Culte du Soleil aux Temps Préhistoriques, in Rev. Arch. 1909, xtv. p. 94. For the 
whole subject see Gaidoz, Le Diew Gaulois du Soleil, in Rev. Arch. 1884 p. 33 

° See Prolegomena, p, 591. : tara 

have no lot or part in Dike; hers is the — 

| 
2 
; 
. 

SS ee ee 

Symbolism of the Swastika 525 

And here in Greek art representations a curious point may he 
noticed. The actual wheel, whether solid or spoked, does not 
appear in Greek symbolism till late. But what we may call the 
spokes of the wheel and the indication of its going are represented 
very early in the ornament known as the Swastika. The Swas- 
tika has been variously interpreted as a ‘croix gammée’ and as a 
reduced simplified kind of wheel. It is really not quite either; it 
is a symbol combining motion and direction. It is the four points 
of the compass in motion. 

To the Greeks it undoubtedly stood at one time for the Sun. 
On coins of Thrace we find Mesembria thus written ME2;L, 
Mid-Sun or Mid-Day-town”. But on other coins we may with 
equal probability conjecture that the swastika, or rather triskeles, 
represents the Moon. In Fig. 149 we have two Syracusan coins. 

Fic. 149. 

The three winged legs indicate swift motion.. In the coin to the 
right the rudimentary body, or belly, from which the legs spread 
has become a human face, a Gorgoneion which symbolizes rather 

Moon than Sun’. 
The origin of the Swastika is still much disputed. It is found 

at Hissarlik in the remains of the Second City; it abounds on 
geometric ware and on the archaic pottery of Cyprus, Rhodes, and 
Athens, The name we give it is of course Sanskrit: swastika is 
from su, well, and asti, it is. When the direction of the croix 

1 The literature of the ritual wheel and the Swastika isimmense. See especially 
W. Simpson, The Buddhist Praying Wheel, 1896, in which the results of most of 
the earlier literature are collected. Also Goblet d’Alviella, La Migration des 
Symboles, 1891; and M. Goblet d’Alviella’s recent work, Croyances, Rites, 
Institutions, 1911, vol. 1. chapter 1, Moulins % priéres, Roues magiques et cir- 
cumambulations. On p. 80 of the same book is given a very full bibliography of 
the literature of the Swastika and the cross. a 

2 See Prof. Percy Gardner’s ‘Ares as a Sun-God,’ and ‘Solar Symbols,’ in 
Num. Chron. N.S. vol. xx. p. 12. 

3 For the triskeles and tetras 
part rv. Religion, Pl. xv.—xix. TI 
coins of Lycia, land of sun-worship. 

keles on coins see Mr Anson’s Numismata Graeca, 
The triskeles occurs with special frequency on the 

A yo or oe 
“19 
7 = 
ae ae 

a 
$ 

526 Themis [ CH. 

gammée is to the right it is swastika, all is well; when, as much 

’ more rarely, the direction is to the left, -U, it is sauvastika, and ~ 

all is evil. The idea is of course not confined to the East. It 
lives on to-day in Scotland, as deisul, ‘sunwise, and widershins. 
In college Combination Rooms port wine is still passed round 
according to the way of the Sun. 

The notion of following the course of the sun is world-wide. 
Starting no doubt in practical ‘magic, it ended in a vague feeling 
of ‘luck’ But it is in India and China that the idea most 
developed on the moral side, and India and China best help us 
to the understanding of Dike as the way of the world and also 
as Right and Justice. 

The Praying Wheels of the Lamas and of Buddhism generally 
have long been the butt of missionaries and of ignorant Anglo- 
Indians. But they enshrine a beautiful and deeply religious 
thought. When the Lama sets his wheel a-going, it is not merely 
that he gets the prayers printed upon it mechanically said. He 
finds himself in sympathetic touch with the Wheel of the Uni- 
verse; he performs the act Dharma-chakra-pravartana, ‘ Justice- 
Wheel-Setting in motion.” He dare not turn the wheel contrari- 
wise; that were to upset the whole order of Nature. The wheel 
moves along and indeed symbolizes the course of rta. This rta 
rules all the periodic events of nature. It is indeed periodicity 
incarnate. The Dawn-Maidens shine in harmony with rta. The 

sun is called the wheel of rta with twelve spokes, for the year’s — 
course has twelve months. The fire of sacrifice is kindled ‘under | 

the yoking of rta, which means under the world order!. 

In man’s activity rta is moral law. In things intellectual it is 
satya, truth. Untruth, it is instructive to find, though it is some- 
times asatya, is more often expressed by anrta. Among the Greeks 
too Dike was closely companioned by Aletheia. We remember? 
that, when Epimenides slept his initiation sleep in the cave of 
Diktaean Zeus, 

w 

he met with the gods, and with divine intercourse, and with Aletheia 
and Dike. 

* Maurice Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda, 1908, pp. 126, 127. 
2 Supra, p. 53. 

ee a ee 
ie 
oo 

: Z eal 

ee a ae ee eae me dy ee eT 

en . ne) -y 2” we 7 Sea cA ie 

Rta, Asha and Tao 527 

Parmenides! makes Dike reveal 
the unshaken heart of fair-rounded Truth. 

Greeks and Indians alike seem to have discerned that the divine 
Way was also the Truth and the Life. 

This notion of the Way, which is also the Right, seems to have 
existed before the separation of Indian from Iranian. The Vedic 
rta is the same word as the Avestan asha (areta) and the Cunei- 
form Persian arta. Varuna of the Veda, and Ahura Mazda of the 
Avesta, are divinities closely akin, and 

One of the most interesting parallels between Veda and Avesta is that 
both gods are described as ‘the spring of the rta, or righteousness.’ Varuna 
is khartasya (Rig-Veda, 2. 28. 5); Ahura Mazda is ashahe khao (Yasna, 
10. 4). The words are sound for sound the same”. ; 

The emphasis of Iranian religion was always strongly on the 
moral conflict between right and wrong, as figured by the struggle 
between light and darkness. Dike, who was the way of the world, 
became in Orphic hands Vengeance on the wrong doer, on him 
who overstepped the way. I would again suggest that it is pos- 
sible that this moral emphasis was due to Persian influence®. 

Closely analogous to Dike and to rta is the Chinese tao, only 
it seems less moralized and more magical. Tao is like Dike the 
way, the way of nature; and man’s whole religion, his whole moral 
effort, is to bring himself into accordance with tao. By so doing 
he becomes a microcosm, and by sympathetic magic can control 
the world. The calendar not only indicates natural facts, but it 
prescribes moral doings. Tao, like rta, is potent in all three spheres, 
in outside nature, in the relation of man to his gods, in the relation 
of man to man or morality proper; but Tao, unlike rta and Dike, 
does not seem to include intellectual truth, a matter which does 
not much concern the magic-ridden Chinaman. 

If Dike is the way, the order of the going of life, it is not hard 
to see how she should develop into Vengeance, how her figure 

1 Diels, F.V.S.?, p. 115. v. 10 
xpéw 5é ce mavra mubéc bar, 
juev ’AdnOelyns evKiKNeos arpeues nT op 
noe Bporev ddgas. 
2 Maurice Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda, 1908, p. 126. 
3 The cuneiform tablets discovered at Pterium (Boghazkoi) show that the 
syllables artartaasha were known as elements in personal names, e.g. Arta- 

shavara, Artatama, as early as 1600 .c. 

ee a 
je ae AL 
+ 

528 MPRENIBE. ee [ CH. 

should be hard to distinguish from that of Nemesis and even 
Adrasteia, she from whom none may run away. On coin types — 
the figures of Dike, Nemesis, Tyche,. Adrasteia, are only distin- 
guishable by the places at which they are minted, and that only in 
cases where it is known from literature or inscriptions that parti- 
cular cults existed. In Fig. 150 a a coin of Alexandria}, struck by 
Antoninus Pius (A.D. 139—140), we have a seated figure holding 
in her right hand the scales, in her left the cornucopia. Because 
she holds the scales she is usually called Dikaiosyne, but the 
cornucopia is more appropriate to Agathe Tyche, or Fortune. 
In Fig. 1506, a coin of Markianopolis? in Moesia, struck by 

Fie. 150. 

Heliogabalus, we have a standing figure again holding the scales _ 
in her right. In her left is a measuring-rod, at her feet a wheel. 
Numismatists call her inelegantly ‘Nemesis Hquitas, but why not 
Dike or Tyche? It is not that there is a late ‘syncretism’ of these 
divine figures; they start from one conception and differentiate. 

With the Way and the Wheel in our minds we return to Dike | 
in Hades. She sheds a new light on certain other denizens. All 
the noted criminals are victims of the wheel, they are all of the 
old order of palingenesia. It is not so much that Olympian, 
patriarchal malice, condemns these elder potencies 6f mother- 
Earth to eternal Hell®, as that they are forced by their own cyclic 
nature to die, to go below the bosom of earth, that they may 

1G. Macdonald, Cat. Hunterian Coll. 1905, vol. ut. pl. uxx 28 
Reproduced by Dr Macdonald’s kind permission. . a 
? H. Posnansky, Nemesis and Adrasteia, 1890, pl. 1. No. 15. For Tych 
with the scales see Bergk, Adespot. 139 Tyxa pepdruv apxd...kal To Teg here a 
Oobév... ay 
3 A view I have previously expressed (see Prolegomen 60 i 
see requires restatement. map aie 

9) pede it Pl a eis lle 

a x1] Peirithods, Sisyphos, the Danaids 529 

rise again. Each and all of them must say with the initiated 
Orphic: 
‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld1’ 
Each and all must be born anew with the New Birth of the 
world. Such is the Way. . 
In Fig. 146, beneath the palace of Plouton, are the Erinyes 
with snakes in their hair. But they are not ministers of Ven- 
geance. The inscription calls them (Eu)menides, and near them, 
the goddesses of new life, is a little upspringing tree. Plouton 
himself is not the sullen terror of the underworld, he is the 
Wealth that rises up from the Earth in spring. Hekate, with 
her torches, is not the spectre of the night, she is the life-giving 

moon that waxes and wanes, the very spirit of palingenesia. 
Theseus is made by the orthodox to sit for ever on the rock, but 
Dike, the Way, lets Peirithods, the Wheel, return to the upper air. 
Txion on his wheel is not tormented; by the might of Dike he, 
the Sun-God, is ceaselessly turning. It is his function, not his 
fate. Herakles goes down to Hades, not once to fetch up 
Cerberus, but day by day at sunset, that he may rise again on 
the morrow”. 

This notion of Dike explains sometimes a grouping of criminals 
that might otherwise be unmeaning. In Fig. 151 we have a design 
from a black-figured amphora®. The Danaides are filling their 

_ cask, and by their side is Sisyphos rolling his pitiless stone up 

1 Adorowas & bd Kddrov édvv xPovias Bacidelas. See Prolegomena, p. 594. 
_ ? So Orpheus must always return that he may reemerge. When the real function 
of Hurydike is forgotten, the story of her looking back is invented to account for 
her return. 
_-® Munich, Jahn Cat. 153. See Prolégomena, p. 617. 

H. | 34 

530 | Themis [on. 

the hill. Sisyphos is the ancient Titan, the Sun himself. His" 
labour is no penalty, it is the course of Dike, it 1s periodic, 
eternally incumbent. So too with the Danaides; they are well- 
nymphs, but also projections of the ancient rain-making ceremonies, 
they carry water to make rain'. Their labour too is ceaseless, ; 
periodic. They are part of the eternal dike of nature. ! 

The design in Fig. 152 is from the Castle Howard? krater — 

Woke veccce”, Yl 
4s) 2% = a ee ; ref <® | 

Ee es 

Fre. 152. 

signed by Python. It shows in striking contrast the Olympian ‘ 
order of things. Zeus is there, Zeus of the sky, but unlike the — 
old Titan Sisyphos who ‘has labour all his days’ Zeus lives at 
ease, remote. He has ceased to be a thunderstorm, instead he 
orders one. The Danaides are now Hyades, Rain-nymphs. They — 
still pour water from their hydriae, but they have mounted to 
high heaven, and they have ceased to be recurrent, periodic; they “ 
no longer ceaselessly pour water into leaky vessels. To Olympian 
theology, in its ignorance and ineptitude, ‘recurrent’ had come to 
spell ‘fruitless’; the way of life was envisaged as an immutable 
sterility and therefore rejected. 
1 T owe this interpretation to Mr A. B. Cook; it is a marked advance on my 
old view (Prolegomena, p. 621) that the Danaides were merely well-nymphs. i 

2 Now in the British Museum, Cat. F. 149. For details of the subject, the 
quenching of the great pyre of Alkmena, see J. H. S. x1. p. 225. : 

we 

—e ee a a ey 

sai} Moral Right and Natural Law 531 

_ Dike then, the Way, rules in the underworld, she and her 
subjects, the year and day daimones. She is there of necessity, as 
the Living Way, the course of Nature, before Orphic theology 
placed her there as the spirit of Vengeance. Regarding Dike as 
the Way, the order of living, of Nature, we see at once that she, 
eldest and chief of the Horai, might well be invoked by the 
Kouretes to welcome the Year. But here we come straight up 
against our final difficulty, a difficulty we have ignored in con- 
sidering rta and asha and tao, but that has all the time been 
dogging our steps. Why does man make this strange confusion 
between moral right and natural law? Why is Themis the mother 
of Dike, and why must the Kouretes, if they want a good 
harvest, ‘leap’ not only for Dike and the Horai but for ‘goodly 
Themis’? 

Deep-rooted in man’s heart is the pathetic conviction that moral 
goodness and material prosperity go together, that, if man keep 
the rta, he can magically affect for good nature’s ordered going. 
When the Olympians became fully humanized, and sacramentalism 
was replaced by gift-sacrifice, the notion slightly altered its form. 

_ The gods it was now felt were bound in honour to bestow on their 

faithful worshippers a quid pro quo. The idea is no-wise confined 
to the Greeks. The Psalmist, whose sheltered outlook on life was 
traditional and religious rather than realistic, says confidently, 

‘I have been young, and now am old, 
And yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, 
Nor his seed begging their bread?.’ 

Hesiod? mutatis mutandis cherishes the same conviction, 

Whoso to stranger and to kinsmen deal 

Straight judyments, ne’er o’erpassing Justice’ bounds, 
Their city flowers, and their folk blossometh, 

And in their land is Peace the Nurse of children, 
Never on them doth Zeus bring grievous war. 
Famine and strife are far from men who deal 
Straight judgments, feast and song are all their toil. 
For them earth bears rich food; the mountain oak 
Rears high her acorns, midway holds her bees. 

The fleecy sheep go heavy with thick wool, 

And wives bear children like unto their sires. 

All good things blossom; never need they tempt 
The barren sea, for them earth bears her grain. 

1 Pg, xxxvii. 25. 2 Op. 225. 
34—2 

532 : — Themis 

The hymn to the Kouretes echoes the sentiments of Hesiod, save j 
that the sea-going Cretans have learnt to ‘leap for their ships.’ } 
Then, when the social life finds its focus in the figure of a king, © 
on his goodness and the justice of his ruling, on his Dike, his Way, — 
the prosperity of his people depends. He himself must be free — 
from blemish, morally and physically (duvpov), and he must — 
uphold right judgments (eddccias). Odysseus’ tells Penelope that — 
she need fear no breath of blame, her fame goes up to wide 
heaven. 

‘As doth the fame of a blameless king, one that fears the gods and reigns 4 
among men, many and mighty, maintaining right, and the black earth bears — 
wheat and barley, and the trees are laden with fruit, and the sheep bring 
forth and fail not, and the sea gives store of fish, and all out of his good 
guidance, and the people prosper under him.’ 

This sympathy, this almost identity of the Way of Man and ~ 
the Way of Nature, comes out very beautifully in the Golden 3 ; 
Lamb chorus of the Electra of Euripides. The chorus goes back i 
in spirit to the First Sin, the bloodfeud of the drama. This was — 
to them, in their tribal way of thinking, the First Sin of the entire 3 
world; and after it, the whole order of the universe was changed. 3 

Atreus, as king, had a mascot, a Golden Lamb, on which the luck : 

7 

of the tribe depended. Thyestes stole the Lamb and thereby - 
claimed and won the kingship. ; 
Then, then the world was changed, [Strophe 2 7 
And the Father, where they ranged, % 

Shook the golden stars and glowing, 
And the great Sun stood deranged 
In the glory of his going. 
Lo from that day forth, the East 
Bears the sunrise on his breast, 
And the flaming Day in heaven 
Down the dim ways of the west 
Driveth, to be lost at even. : 
The wet clouds to Northward beat; 
And Lord Ammon’s desert seat 
Crieth from the South, unslaken 
For the dews that once were sweet, 
For the rain that God hath taken. 

— 

2% 
€ 

rt 
oe 

ee eee 

1 Hom, Od. xix. 111 3 
evduxlas avéxnot, pépnor b€ yata pwédava 
mupous Kal KpiOds K.T.D. (trans. Butcher and Lang.) 

For the whole subject of the king as source of medicine see Dr Frazer, Lectures on 
the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, passim. For Oedipus as medicine kingly 
see Professor Murray’s translation of Oedipus, King of Thebes, p. 88, note to verse 21. 

* vv. 699—746. For the origin of the myth see Professor Murray’s note to his 
translation of the Electra, p. 94. For the Lamb as mascot see Mr A. B. Gook, 
Zeus, ch. i. § 6 (f), rv. ie: 

= 

The Golden Lamb . §38 

The reversal of nature is complete. Not only rd weréwpa in 
their ordered goings, but even ra petapara, the ‘ weather,’ is upset. 
Then in the Antistrophe comes a note, surely Euripidean, of 
scepticism. Can man really affect nature, is Themis really potent 
over Physis ? 
Tis a children’s tale, that old [Antistrophe 2 
Shepherds on far hills have told; 
And we reck not of their telling, 

Deem not that the Sun of gold 
Ever turned his fiery dwelling, 

Or beat backward in the sky, 
For the wrongs of man, the cry 
Of his ailing tribes assembled, 
To do justly, ere they die. 
Once, men told the tale, and trembled ; 

Fearing God, O Queen: whom thou 
Hast forgotten, till thy brow 
With old blood is dark and haunted. 
And thy brethren, even now, 
Walk among the stars, enchanted. 

Because Electra slew her mother, will the moon change her 
course or veil her face? The chorus refuse to believe it. Such 
a doctrine is contrary to all experience, though it accords, it would 
seem, with common sense, that is with accepted tradition. Why 

did men ever accept a doctrine disproved day by day, and from 
the outset preposterous? For a reason put very simply by the 
Greeks. Because Themis was the mother of Dike; the social con- 

“science, the social structure, gave birth, not of course to the order 
of nature, but to man’s conception, his representation, of that 

order’. 

To man in the totemistic stage of thinking, Dike and 
Themis, natural order and social order, are not distinguished, not 
even distinguishable. Plants and animals are part of his group’, 
factors in his social structure. It is not that he takes them under 
his protection ; they are his equals, his fellow-tribesmen ; naturally 
they obey the same law, or rather, for definite law is not yet, they 
are part of the same social structure, they follow the same social 
custom. If one member of that body suffer, or prosper, all the 

Pe ee a a) PS a OT | eae ee eh : ae as 
a E we 

ee 

_-1-This position will be more fully established in Mr F. M. Cornford’s From 
Religion to Philosophy. 
2 Supra, p. 120. 

534 ‘ Themis 

other members suffer or prosper with him. The oneness of group 
life and collective consciousness makes this axiomatic. 

When a man, living in a totemistic social structure, believes _ 

that, by observing his group-customs, he can help the crops to 
grow, this nowise requires explanation. Such a faith, indeed, is of 

the essence of totemistic thinking. What does seem strange is 

that, when group-thinking or emotion. makes way for individual 
reason, a faith disproved by even the most superficial observation 
should still be upheld. The reason is of course simple. Religious 
beliefs, as we have seen, are but presentations, projections, of 
Oéucores, of utterances, ordinances, of the social conscience. Be- 
gotten by one social structure, they long survive its dissolution. 
We believe that a pestilence or a famine is consequent on some 
national wrong-doing, not because we have observed facts and 
noted such a sequence, but because we once thought and lived 
totemistically and the habits of totemistic thinking still cling. 
Moreover they take shape in dogmas and in ritual, faithfully and 
blindly? handed down from generation to generation. 

To any rational thinker it is at once clear that Dike, Natural 
Order, and Themis, Social Order, are not the same, nay even they 
are not mother and daughter; they stand at the two poles remote 
and even alien. Natural Law is from the beginning; from the 
first pulse of life, nay even before the beginning of that specialized 
movement which we know as life, it rules over what we call the 
inorganic. Social Order, morality, ‘goodness’ is not in nature at 
the outset; it only appears with ‘man her last work.’ 

A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolu- 

tions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth - 

at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge 

of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking 
Mother?. 

The mystic will claim that life is one indivisible movement®, 

1 So remote is ritual from reason that Dr Beck (Nachahmung, p. 165) gives the * 

following suggestive, though I think inadequate, definition of ritual: «So entstand 
der Kultus und die Mythologie nach meiner Theorie aus gedeuteten Gewohnheits- 
handlungen. Kultisch nennen wir aber nur Handlungen die ihrem Erfolg nach 
unzweckmissig waren.’ - 

2 Bertrand Russell, ‘The Free Man’s Worship,’ Independent Review, 1903. 
Reprinted in Philosophical Essays, 1910, p. 59. ; 

° H. Bergson, La Perception du Changement, Conférences faites & Oxford 
peels, ‘Nous devons nous représenter tout changement, tout mouvement, comme 
absolument indivisibles.’ Op. cit. p. 2, ‘Mon état d’Ame en avancant sur la route 
du temps s’enfle continuellement de la durée qu’il ramasse ; il fait, pour ainsi dire 
boule de neige avec lui-méme.’ ; 

ze 

e prefers it, ever accumulating snowball. We gladly — 
But to say that Alpha is Omega, the end is as the | 
mning, that life and force are the same as moral good, and | 
abel the mystical marriage of the two ‘God, is to darken 
insel, It is to deny that very change and movement which — 
life, it is to banish from a unified and sterilized universe 
Evolution Créatrice,’ ; 

i! 

The religious man who in the supposed interests of morality 
tains this creed is, it may be, splendide mendaw. He is more; — 
is one in heart and soul with his brother the antique medicine — 

sst, the Koures. With him he leaps on high, crowning his — 

Oope « és Oéuw Karav.