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

432 From Daimon to Olympian [ch.
water-carrying maidens, and the whole scene, charming though it
is, has lost its daimon-glamour. It is just that daimon-glamour,
Fig. 132.
that haunting remembrance of things ancient, felt rather than
understood, that a poet 1 keeps, when he is gone
To the strand of the Daughters of the Sunset,
The Apple-tree, the singing and the gold ;
Where the mariner must stay him from his onset,
And the red wave is tranquil as of old :
Yea, beyond that Pillar of the End
That Atlas guardeth, would I wend ;
Where a voice of living waters never ceaseth
In God's quiet garden by the sea,
And Earth, the ancient life-giver, increaseth
Joy among the meadows, like a tree.
Now a snake, like the daimon of the tree and well is not a
monster to be slain, he is a genius to be cherished. Only a
total misunderstanding of his nature, or rather his functions, could
make him a curse to be killed. But there are two things to be
remembered. He, the fertility-daimon, if angered had his evil
side, which comes out clearly in the Erinyes 2 . He, or rather at
Delphi she, the angry Earth, could blast as well as bless. More-
over, as we have seen, the snake-daimon king was in all probability
supposed to die each nine years. So that there was both the
notion of an evil, hostile snake, and also probably a dead king-
snake, to start the myth of the slaying of Python.
On a Kyrenaic vase 3—a class in which things primitive are
apt to survive—in Fig. 133 there is, I think, some reminiscence of
the snake-king. The scene is probably Kadmos slaying the snake,
but it might be any hero slaying any snake without local determi-
nation. The building from which the snake issues is usually
1 Eur. Hipp. 742.
2 For the angry snake as Erinys or avenging ghost see Prolegomena, pp. 232 ff.
3 Puchstein, Arch. Zeit. 1881, p. 238.
"