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

ix] The Slaying of the Python 393
the sun will lend him a wheel or a chariot or a golden cup.
Such a view is not sun-mythology or moon-mythology, it is
common human psychology. What a man attends to, feels about,
provided it be socially enforced and perpetuated, that is his
religion, thence are his gods.
But what iEschylus envisaged as a divine sequence, and what
modern psychology and anthropology know to be a necessary
development, looked quite otherwise to the popular mind. A
gradual evolution seen from beginning and end only is apt to be
conceived as a fight between the two poles. So it was at Delphi.
The natural sequence of cults from Gaia to Apollo was seen by
the man in the street as a fight between Earth and the Sun,
between Darkness and Light, between the dream-oracle and the
truth of heaven. All this for ritual reasons that will appear later
crystallized in the form of a myth, the slaying of the Python by
Apollo.
iEschylus has given us the peaceful evolution. The fight,
though probably a fiction, is of great importance to us because it
helps us to realize one cardinal factor in the making of an
Olympian. Euripides 1 gives us the fight in two traditional forms :
first the slaying of the snake, and second the dream -oracle of
Earth and Night as against Phoibos the Sun. The chorus of
captive maidens, handmaidens to Iphigeneia, think with longing
of Delos and tell of Apollo's birth there and his passing to
Delphi. Euripides as was natural in an Athenian, accepts the
version that Apollo came from Delos, not from Crete.
Oh fair the fruits of Leto blow ; Strophe.
A Virgin, one, with joyous bow,
And one a Lord of flashing locks,
/ Wise in the harp, Apollo
She bore them amid Delian rocks,
Hid in a fruited hollow.
But forth she fared from that low reef,
Sea-cradle of her joy and grief,
A crag she knew more near the skies
And lit with wilder water,
That leaps with joy of Dionyse
There brought she son and daughter.
1 I. in T. 1235.
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