Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

110 Magic [ch.
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 figure be effaced by some conquering divinity.
Finally Picus enshrines a beautiful lost 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-??itma, he handles reverently bird-
sanctities.
There are many ways in which man could participate in
bird-mcma. He could, and also ruthlessly did, eat the bird.
Porphyry 1 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 2 ,
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. n. 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.