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

vni] Analysis of Term 'Mythos' 327
first received or purified him on his entry into Athens. The real
functional tribal eponym, Phytalos, fades before the saga-personality
Theseus.
Theseus indeed marks, as already noted, the period of transi-
tion between the group and the individual, the functionary, the
basileus and the individual historic or saga-chief. Theseus is a
king's son, but he lets go the kingship (ftcurikeiav a^et?). He is
the hero of the new democracy whose basis is individuality. It
is this swift transit from the group to the individual, from the
function to the person, that is, as will later become clear, at once
the weakness and the strength of the religion of the Greek. The
individual is a frail light bark to launch upon a perilous sea.
But the Sibyl bade the Athenian, who let the kingship slip, take
courage
:
The wine-skin wins its way upon the waves 1 .
Theseus, then, the saga-hero, the quasi-historical personality,
took on the life-history, the year-history of a fertility-daimon, that
daimon himself, figured by the youth with the Eiresione, having as-
similated another daimon, him of the grape—Dionysos. It remains
to ask—What are the factors, the actual elements, the events in
the life-history of an Eniautos-daimon* ? What is his mythosl
And first, what precisely do we mean by a mythos ?
The Mythos.
A myth is to us now-a-days a ' purely fictitious narrative 15 .'
When we say a thing is ' we mythical '
mean it is non-existent.
We have travelled in this matter far from ancient thinking and
1 Pint. VU. Thrs. XXIV.
&(tk6s yap iv ot'5/xan irovToiropevaai.
ToOro 8e /ecu 2i/3uX\ae varepov airoffTOixaTiaai wp'os ttjv ttoKiv IdTopovaiv ava^dty^a/xiv^v
'A'Tkos /3a7rrij"77 ' Bvvai 54 tol ov $ep.is eariv.
- To avoid misunderstanding I ought perhaps to state clearly at this point that
the phrase eviavrbs daL/xwv is so far as I know never used by the Greeks. They
called their year-daimones by different names in different places. In Boeotia he
wus Agathos Daimon, in Crete Mer/intos Kouros, at Eleusis Plouton. Our earliest
literary evidence for Eniautos as a definite personality is probably Pindar, Paean,
I. 5 TravreXris 'EiViaiiTds, 'ilpai re Qepuyovot. See infra, chapter xi.
:i See the excellent definition in Murrav's English Dictionary. 'A purely
fictitious narrative usually involving supernaturnl persons, actions or events,
and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.'
A myth is essentially 'popular,' i.e collective, not the product of an individual
brain, it has to do with daimones, i.e. involves the 'supernatural,' it blends the
historical and the natural in a waj* to be observed later.