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

vni] The Anthesteria 275
Are the actual dead, as well as the daimones of Hesiod, appealed >
to as irXovToSorac, as, like the Olympians, SwTrjpes idwv ? Cecrops
and Erich thonios, we have seen, are connected with ritual snakes, J
but is the ritual snake connected with the dead ? Neither
Arrephoria nor Thesmophoria, both ceremonies extremely primi-
tive and both concerned with fertility, have any word to say of
ancestors, any hint of a cycle of human reincarnation. We shall
find what we seek and more even than we expect in the great
Athenian festival of the blossoming of flowers and the revocation
of souls, the Anthesteria.
The Anthesteria.
The Anthesteria was a three days' festival celebrated from the
11th to the 13th of Anthesterion, falling therefore at the end of our
February, when the Greek spring is well begun. The three days
were called respectively Pithoigia 'Jar-opening,' Choes ' Drinking
Cups,' Chytroi ' Pots.' Each day had its different form of pot
or jar and its varying ceremonial, but the whole festival was,
if we may judge from the names of the several days, essentially
a Pot-Feast. On the first day, the Pithoigia, the wine-jars were
opened, on the second the wine was solemnly drunk, on the third
a pot full of grain and seeds, a, panspermia, was solemnly offered.
I have elsewhere 1 shown, and my view has, I believe, been
universally accepted, that beneath the festivities of a Wine-
Festival to Dionysos there lay a festival of All-Souls, that in
the spring month of February the Athenians, like "the Romans
at their Feralia, performed ceremonies for the placation of the
dead. I was right, I believe, in detecting the All-Souls feast;
wrong, however, in supposing that it belonged to a different
and lower religious stratum. This mistake I shall now attempt
to rectify. I shall try, in the light of the doctrine of reincarnation
and the Intichiuma ceremonies, to show that the ghost element
and the fertility element belong to one and the same stratum
of thought, and are, in fact, mutually interdependent.
We begin with the Pithoigia. The pithos or great stone jar,
frequently half buried in the earth, was the main storehouse of
1 Prolegomena, pp. 32—55, to which I must refer for a full statement of sources
and for the literature of the Anthesteria.
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