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

v] 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
I 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 wolf
of him.
Very instructive in this inspect is a Hindu custom 1 . 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, e(f)vyoi> kclkov evpov
apeivov.
The second birth then of the infant Dionysos as a ' horned
child ' is best explained by totemistic ways of thinking. If the
view 2 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 3 , 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 totemisme, in L'Annee Sociologique, 1902 (v.),
p. 82.
3 Dr Frazer in his great work, Totemism and Exogamy, vol. iv. p. 13, says that
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
;