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

viii] Palingenesia and Totemism 271
sacrifice. The snake among the Greeks was full of /nana, was (
intensely sacred, not because as food he supported life, but
because he is .himself a \ife-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 hai^wv yevvr)*, the spirit, the genius of the
race, he stands not for personal immortality in our modern
sense, not '
for the negation of death, aOavaaia, but for the
perennial renewal of life through death, for Reincarnation, for
TraXi'yyevecricL.
The word 7ra\i