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

450 The Olympians [ch.
full of beautiful courtesies. There are few things uglier than
a lack of reverence for animals. The well-born, well-bred little
Athenian girls who danced as Bears to Artemis of Brauronia.. the
Bear-Goddess, could not but think reverently of the great might
of the Bear. Among the Apaches to-day, Bourke 1 states, ' only
ill-bred Americans, or Europeans who have never had any "raising,"
would think of speaking of the Bear or indeed of the snake, the
lightning or the mule, without employing the reverential prefix
"Ostin," meaning "old man," and equivalent to the Roman title
"Senator."'
In art this exclusion of animal and plant life from the cycle
of the divine is sometimes claimed as a gain. Rather it leaves
a sense of chill and loneliness. Anyone who turns from Minoan
pottery with its blossoming flowers, its crocuses and lilies, its
plenitude of sea life, its shells and octopuses and flying fish,
anyone who turns from all this life and colour to the mono-
tonous perfection of the purely human subjects of the best red-
figured pottery, must be strangely constituted if he feels no loss.
He will turn eagerly for refreshment from these finished athletes
and these no less accomplished gods, to the bits of mythology
wherein animals still play a part, to Europa and her bull, to
Phrixos and his ram, to Kadmos and his snake, and he will turn
also to the 'attributes' of the humanized Olympian, he will be
gladdened by Athena's owl and by the woodpecker of Zeus ;
glad
too that Dionysos' Dendrites still deigns to be a tree and Apollo
to carry his living branch. The mystery gods it should be noted
here, though it has been observed before 2 , are never free ot
totemistic hauntings, never quite shed their plant and animal
shapes. That lies in the very nature of their sacramental worshijD.
They are still alive with the life-blood of all living things from
which they sprang.
(2) The Olympian refuses to be an Earth-daimon. In dis-
cussing the sequence of cults from Gaia to Apollo it has been
seen that, even when he has left totemistic ways of thinking
behind him, when he has ceased to base his social structure on
1 On the Border with Crook, p. 132. I borrow this quotation from Mr Cook's
delightful article on Descriptive Animal Names in Greece, Class. Rev. vin. (1904),
p. 384.
- Supra, p. 129.