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

ix] The Satyrs as Fertility-Daimones 423
They have hacked open the ground to help the Earth-Maiden to
rise. It is impossible to say for certain that the dromena of the
• Bringing up of Semele ' included the hacking of the earth with
picks, but some action of the sort may well have been part of the
ritual of an agricultural people. The earth in some few favoured
regions brings forth her fruit in due season without man's help,
but in Greece, with its thin stony soil, man must help her. Long
before he invented the plough, and long after in places where no
plough could go, he used the pick 1
.
But these horse-tailed daimones are no mere mortal agri-
culturists. They are Satyrs; their function is magical rather
than actual. That function is clearly shown by the two figures of
Erotes, one to either side, that balance and complete them. In
bygone days, before the facts of parentage were known, the Earth
was thought of as mother and husbandless, sufficient herself for all
her child-bearing, or vaguely fertilized by the dead spirits of men
buried in her bosom. But, when she first appears in mythology,
she is attended by a throng of male daimones, and they are
Daktyls, Tityroi, Satyroi, Korybantes, all, according to Strabo, we
remember 2
, substantially the same, all the projection of marriage-
able youth, of the band of Kouroi. Their earliest cultus-shape is
the Daktyl fertility-cone. Their last and loveliest form is that of
the winged spirits, the Erotes, who on the vase before us wait
the uprising of the Mother, and who on the great Hieron vase 3
cluster about the goddess of growth and increase, Aphrodite. But
the form of fertility-daimones known to the early dromenon was
probably that of Satyrs ; and down to late days it is Satyrs in the
Satyr play 4 who attend the Theophany of the god.
In the cults of Delphi there is not a word of Satyrs. The
Herois festival is conducted by women. It is Maenads not Satyrs
who on the peaks of Parnassos dance round Dionysos. This may
well be mainly because the religion of the Thracian Dionysos
came to Delphi in a form in which, as already noted 5
, the Maenads,
the Mothers, were most emphasized, and the child was a babe and
only potentially a Kouros. But I would conjecture that at Delphi
expurgation was at work ; the old meaning of the omphalos
1 E. Hahn, Die Entstehung d. Pflugkultur, 1909, p. 9, Der Hackbau.
2 Supra, p. 14. 3 Prolegomena, p. 634, Fig. 170.
4 See Prof. Murray, supra, p. 343. 5 Supra, p. 40.