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

CHAPTER VIII.
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 daimon. 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
focuses 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.