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

274 Daimon and Hero [ch.
time' are but the projection of his own most vital needs, his need
of food, his need of offspring. At his great Eniautos- festival he
enacts his ancestors who are his food-animals and thereby brings
them back to birth.
To the Central Australian then it is his ancestor who gives
him food and offspring and all the wealth he craves. His way of
thinking is not far from the mind of Pindar. Pindar offends our
moral sense, even our taste sometimes, because to him, in the
glory of life, Wealth and Plenitude bulk so large, and still worse,
as it seems to us, it is inherited wealth which with him seems
married to virtue—an alliance unknown to Christianity. But his
view of life, though never quite inspiring, takes on another
complexion when we see how deep-rooted it is in things primitive.
Any Central Australian at his Intichiuma ceremonies would have
felt in his bones the nearness of ttXovtos as well as aperij to the
Sai/xcov yeveOXto^ 1
.
Theban Pindar may have borrowed his thought from Boeotian
Hesiod ; both came of a tenacious stock. Hesiod 2 tells of the men
\ of the Golden Age, the Alcheringa of the Greek, and how after
/ a life of endless feast they fell asleep, and Earth hid them, and
thereupon they became Salfxoves, spirits, watchers over men,
haunting the land mist-clad,
Givers of wealth, this kinglv guerdon theirs.
In life the king is lord of the Eniautos 3 , in death he is the daimon*
hero.
It may still perhaps be felt that, at least with the Greeks,
this totemistic notion of reincarnation, with its corollary that
the cycle of man's reincarnation brings with it the renewal
of animal and plant life, is matter only of poetry and a vague
philosophy. It is time to enquire whether in actual practice, in
^definite ritual acts, we have any evidence of the same notion.
1 Cf. such passages as 01. n. 96,
6 p.dv itXovtos dperals de5at.5aXiJ.evos,
and the whole of the fifth Pythian.
2 Op. 125,
rjepa io~(rdp.tvoi Travrrj (pOLruivres iw' alav
ir\ovTo56Tat. ' kqX tovto yepas ^auCKriCov Zoxov.
3 It is not a little curious that the scholiast on Hesiod, Theog. 112, w$ r d