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

vn] 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 resurrection
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-YoXe. The ritual was of
Birth—of that Second Birth which, sooner or later, comes to be
1 .'
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
1 Rejuvenation by cooking occurs in the legend of Medea, who persuaded
the daughters of Pelias (whom Gruppe, Or. Rel. u. Myth. i. 145, regards as
a double of Pelops) to dismember and boil him. To convince tbem, Medea made
a ram into a lamb by the same process (Apollod. i. 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.
Roscher, Lex., s.v. Mars.
;