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

xi] Themis as the Collective Conscience 485
she is the very spirit of the assembly incarnate. Themis and the
actual concrete agora are barely distinguishable. Patroklos comes
running to the ships of godlike Odysseus,
Where were their agora and themis ' ?
Here the social fact is trembling on the very verge of godhead.
She is the force that brings and binds men together, she is
' herd instinct.' the collective conscience, the social sanction. She
is fas, the social imperative. This social imperative is among a
primitive group diffuse, vague, inchoate, yet absolutely binding.
Later it crystallizes into fixed conventions, regular tribal customs ;
finally in the polls it takes shape as Law and Justice. Themis
was before the particular shapes of gods ; she is not religion, but
she is the stuff of which religion is made. It is the emphasis and
representation of herd instinct, of the collective conscience, that
constitutes religion.
But it will immediately and most justly be asked, What is
this ? Jf Themis be the source and well-spring of religion, are
we not turning religion into mere morality ? Themis is herd-
instinct, custom, convention slowly crystallized into Law and /
abstract Right ; well and good. We all acknowledge that custom,
manners, mores, are the basis of morals, that rjdea, haunts and
habits, are the material of ethics. If we doubted it language is
at hand with proof irrefragable. But surely religion and ethics
are not, cannot be, the same. There is about the very word
religion an atmosphere, a warmth, an emotional lift quite other
and even alien to the chill levels of ethics. An Ethical Society
is not a Salvation Army.
The protest is entirely just. But mark our definition. It is
not herd instinct, not the collective conscience, not the social
imperative that constitutes religion ; it is the emphasis and
representation of this collective conscience, this social imperative.
In a word Themis is not religion, she is the stuff of which
religious representations are made. That is why in the ordered
sequence of the gods at Delphi we gave Themis no place. She is
the substratum of each and every god, she is in a sense above
as well as below each and every god, but herself never quite a
1 Horn. II. xi. 807 'iva (r