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

i] The Kouretes as Culture-Heroes 27
figures comes out best in the kindred Daktyls and Telchines.
A step more and the magicians become Culture-Heroes, inventors QX&
of all th e arts of life, house-building, bee-keeping, shield-making >
g,nd the like 1 . As culture-heroes they attend the Kouros in the
Hymn. This development of the daimon and the culture-hero will
be discussed later.
Just such functions are performed to-day among primitive
peoples by the Initiated Young Man. If the investigations of
recent anthropologists 2 are correct, it is not so much about the
family and the domestic hearth that the beginnings of the arts
cluster, as about the institution known as the Man's House 3 .
Here, unencumbered by woman, man practises and develops his
diverse crafts, makes his weapons, his boats, his sacred images,
his dancing masks. Even after marriage when he counts as an
elderly man he returns to the Man's House 4 to keep in touch with
civilization and the outside world. He is a Culture-Hero in the /
making.
To resume the results of our enquiry.
The worshippers in the Hymn invoke a Kouros who is obviously
but a reflection or impersonation of the body of Kouretes. They
' allege as their reason ' an aetiological myth. This myth on
examination turns out to be but the mythical representation of a
rite of mimic death and resurrection practised at a ceremony of
initiation. Now the Kouros and the Kouretes 5 are figures that \
belong to cultus ; they are what would in common parlance be
1 Diod. Sic. v. 64. Idaean Daktyls are described as yb-qres who superintend
eTrySas kcu reXeras ko.1 p.varr\pio.. They invent fire and the use of iron. The magical
functions of the Kouretes and their aspect as medicine-men will be discussed in
chapter in.
2 See especially H. Schurtz, Altersklassen und Mannerbiinde, p. 48.
3 H. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, ch. i. The ancient Kouretes seem to
have had a sort of Man's House at Messene; it was a megaron not a temple.
See Pausanias, iv. 31. 7 Kovpr/rcov fxtyapov tvda jya to. navra o/xoius Kadayifovoiv.
4 That institutions analogous to those of the Man's House among savages lived
on in Crete we have abundant evidence in Strabo's account (x. 483) of Cretan
institutions. The 'A7e\cu with their apxovres, the (rwratrta, the dvdpela, clearly belong
to the same social morphology as the Manuerhaus. It is probable that the dpirayr)
and the custom dwoKpinrreiv rbv iraiSa (Strabo, 483) is a misunderstanding and in
part a corruption of primitive initiation ceremonies. For a discussion of some
part of these Cretan customs and their religious origin see Dr E. Bethe, Die dorische
Knabenliebe, ihre Ethik und Hire Idee in Rhein. Mus. lxii. p. 438.
5 For the meagre survivals of the actual worship of the Kouretes in historical
times as attested by inscription see Prof. Bosanquet, q/j. cit. p. 353.
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