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

414 From Daimon to Olympian [ch.
' Earth of the Mound,' to whom the Danaides, the Well-Nymphs,
ever appeal. Even Zeus is to them '
:
Child of Earth,' hence Olbios
and Ktesios 1 . It is scarcely possible to breathe the religious
atmosphere of the play save as we see it enacted against the
background of the omphalos-sanctuary.
We go back to Delphi and view the omphalos with new eyes.
When the priestess passes into the inmost sanctuary of Gaia, she
'finds Orestes clinging to the life-stone and about him the aveng-
ing ghosts, the fell Erinyes. They have come, it seemed to
iEschylus—his mind all out of focus through his beautiful mono-
theism and his faith in God the father—from afar, hunting the
fugitive. But of course they, the ghosts, were there in the grave-
sanctuary from the first. Like the Semnae they dwell in a chasm
1 of the earth, and over the chasm stood, it may be, the life-stone, for
they, the ghosts, year by year, bring, in the cycle of reincarnation,
new-old life to man and to the earth, from which they spring and to
which they return. They are from the beginning what iEschylus
makes them ultimately become, spirits of life, fertility-ghosts.
By the mouth of Clytemnestra 2 he blackens their ritual
' How oft have ye from out my hands licked up
Winelesa libations, sober offerings,
On the low hearth of fire, banquets grim
By night, an hour unshared of any god.'
Yet these same wineless libations, these sober offerings, were
the due of the Eumenides at Argos, the snake-maidens, and of the
Semnae at Athens
The firstfruits offered for accomplishment
Of marriage and for children 3 .
iEschylus seems to have seen only the evil of the Earth-Spirits,
only the perennial damnation of the blood-feud. It is impossible
to avoid regret that he did not see that these Earth-Spirits were
for blessing as for cursing, and that he stooped to the cheap
1 v. 859 to /3a, Tas ttcu, Zed; v. 509 reXeidrarov Kparos, S\j3ie Zed; for Zeus Olbios
see supra, p. 148, v. 428 yevoir av &\\a ktijctIov Aids xo-P LV \ f° r Zeus Ktesios cee
supra, p. 297.
2 Jisch. Eum. 106.
3 v. 837. For the practical identity of the ritual of the Erinyes, the Eumenides,
and the Semnae, see Prolegomena, pp. 239—256. That the Semnae were ghosts as
well as fertility spirits is quite clearly shown by the customs connected with the
devrepoirdT/xci. Op. cit. p. 244.
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