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

I towards
290 Daimon and Hero [ch.
souls'; 'ghosts' is perhaps as close a translation as we can get, for
the word carries with it a sense of dread. The word Keres is
obscure in origin and its career is a downward one, tending always
evil, disease and death 1 . Among the Greeks, as, it would
seem, among many primitive peoples, the fear of the dead seems to
precede their worship 2 . The
have already seen 3 ,
'feare of things invisible' is, as we
in part 'the naturall seed of Religion.'
This fear of ghosts is natural enough and needs no emphasis.
It is not indeed at first a disembodied soul that is dreaded, but
rather the whole condition of death, which involves the immediate
family and often the whole tribe in a state of contagious infection.
But, to totemistic thinkers, the fear is always mixed with a sure
and certain hope, the hope of re incarnation. Once the body
fairly decayed and the death ceremonies complete, the dead man
is free to go back to his totem ancestors and begin again the
cycle of life as a new tribesman or a totem animal. This is
} often clearly indicated by funeral rites 4 . Thus
among the Bororo,
the dead man is trimmed up with feathers of the parroquet, in
order that he may take the form of the parroquet totem. Till
the second funeral is over, the dead man among the Hindoos is a
preta, that is a fearful revenant : after that he can enter the world
of Pitaras or fathers, the equivalents of the Alcheringa totem-
ancestors. For this entry, rites of initiation, rites de passage, are
necessary.
'
This double nature of the Greek attitude towards the dead is
very simply and clearly expressed in the vase-painting in Fig. 77.
The design comes from an archaic vase 5 of the 'prothesis' type, a
vase used in funeral ceremonies and decorated with funeral subjects.
Two mourners stand in attitudes of grief on either side of a
1 I have discussed the development and degradation of the idea of the Keres
fully in Prolegomena, chapter v.
- This was very fully exemplified by Dr Frazer in a series of lectures delivered
at Trinity College during the Lent and May terms of 1911 on the 'Fear and Worship
of the Dead.
3 Supra, p. 61.
4 The social attitude of savages towards death as expressed in funeral rites has
been very ably and fully analysed by R. Hertz, Representation collective de. la
Mori, in Annee Sociologique, x. 1905-6, p. 48.
5 In the Museum at Athens, see J. H. S. xix. 1899, p. 219, tig. i. In discussing
this vase before (Prolegomena, p. 235) I made the mistake of saying 'Snake and,
eidolon are but two ways of saying the same thing.' I now realize that the two
forms express ideas of widely different, almost contradictory import. The ghosts
of dead men constantly pass over into the good daimon, the collective ancestor, but
the ideas are disparate.