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

xi] The Korythalia 503
and the Daphnephoria the figure of the Mother is effaced, though
it may be that in the two pharmakoi, female as well as male,
as in the two Oschophoroi 1 and the Daphnephoroi, her figure really
survives. But in another service of the Eiresione the Mother
holds her own, even to the exclusion of the Son, the ceremony of
the Korythalia.
Hesychius 2 defining Korythalia says,
A laurel wreathed : some
call it Eiresione.
The Etymologicum Magnum* gives further and most instructive
particulars. It thus defines the word Korythale
The laurel-bough placed before the doors. Because branches which the
call koroi blossom.
So too Chrysippos
:
Let some one from within give me lighted torches and woven koroi
unmixed with myrtle. For poets call branches, diversely, shoots and saplings
and koroi. And others when their sons and daughters come to maturity, place
laurel-boughs before the doors in ceremonies of puberty and marriage.
The Korythalia, ' Youth
Bloom,' expresses just that oneness of
man and nature that is so beautiful and so characteristic of
primitive totemistic thinking. For them it was expressed in
ceremonial, in the carrying of branches, for us it survives in
' poetry.'
Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine, upon the walls of thine house.
Thy children like the olive-branches, round about thy table 4 .
And at Athens in prose, for Demades 5 , the orator, is reported to
have said
The epheboi are the spring of the demos.
But the Korythalia tells us more, it is the matriarchal form of
the Eiresione. We know the divinity projected, represented by
the Korythalia. She was no Kouros, she was Artemis Korythalia.
1 Supra, p. 324.
- s.v. KopvddXia' 8d