by Jack Lindsay
This point has to be made here, though we have no space to analyse it in detail. Why it is relevant to us is that without a proper grasp of the tenacious tribal elements in Greek society we cannot understand why the concept of the share, the lot, the due portion, played such an important part in all spheres of thought, social, psychological, political, moral, aesthetic. In other ancient societies, with their kings and their organized temple priesthoods, a man’s place in life was determined from the outset by the prevailing system. Because of the new mobility of Greek society, its particular set of conflicts and harmonies of union, there could be no question of such a fixed array of hierarchical functions. Each man was jostling the other; possibilities of profit, deceit, exploitation in a mercantile world ruled increasingly by money, made relationships complex in a way quite unknown to previous societies. Hence the need for a rule of law to control the situation, the intensely felt need for concepts and systems which allotted each man his place and penalized the overstepping of limits, of bounds. Everyone knew the limits were going to be overstepped continually, by individuals and by states; large numbers of men could not resist the chances of self-aggrandizement which the ‘freedoms’ of the city-state brought about. The individualist side was in ceaseless conflict with the communal; and out of the tensions came all that was best and all that was worst in the Greek world. The elements stimulating inequality were fused with the elements preserving the dream of equal shares in land, food and all the good things of life. A completely new set of tensions arose between society as a whole and the restless individuals who composed it. There was a vigorous drive forward and a continual entanglement of anxieties.
Once we grasp the nature of this tension we understand why the notion of share or portion so thoroughly permeates all the Greek ideas or images of fate. Similar ideas or images can be found in other cultures, but nowhere else is the clustering so powerful, complex and sustained. Where previous societies could get along with a system imposed from above and with various mythological justifications of that system, the Greeks had to beget law proper, definite constitutions and philosophic concepts of order and settled relationships. Scholars have mostly seen the development as a strange spontaneous matter because they have failed to see it as a whole, with its origins understood and the persisting interrelation of its parts, social, psychological, economic, moral. ‘A deep-seated need to discover an order in, or superimpose an order on, the flux of physical and psychological experience is a continuing feature of all Greek artistic and philosophical expression. While it is true that every conscious creature feels this need to some extent, the intensity with which the quest for order was carried on by the Greeks was exceptional. Whether as a result of some mysterious tendency in the national psyche or as spontaneous reaction to their turbulent historical experience after the break-up of the Mycenaean world, the Greeks felt to life with changing, undefined, unmeasured, seemingly random impressions — to live, in short, with what was expressed by the Greek word chaos — was to live in a state of constant anxiety’ (Pollitt). But the development was neither mysterious nor spontaneous, except in so far as all human activity has an element of spontaneity and a living totality evades complete analysis; it derived from the persistence of tribal elements in a scene full of riches inherited from earlier Near-East societies, tribal elements which found the logical conclusion of their struggle in Athenian democracy, where the limit of their possibilities was reached, the point beyond which their contradictions ceased to be fecund and stimulating; and which brought about an impasse broken by the Macedonian domination, the imposition of the kingship which the historical Greeks had rejected.[416]
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Looking back over our inquiry, we may summarize as follows. The Judgement shows the Birth-Fates or Nymphs with their gifts turned into maturely differentiated and competing goddesses in a society where division of labour and status has been fast growing. The goddess of the Sacred Marriage — whether she is a Tree shaped into a wooden cult-statue or a Bird appearing in some moment or situation of epiphany — becomes the Heroine carried off by a ravisher and precipitating disasters for her group. The attendants or guides who go with her on her journey into the unknown, into the darkness of earth where the seed germi-nates, become the ravishers; and finally the tale of the rape provides the basis for explaining why a culture has become divided against itself in fratricidal conflicts of greed, lust, power madness. The maze-dance of movement between life and death, earth and spirit-world, which also expresses the coition spirals of sex and birth, becomes the scene of deepened conflict. The goddess who embodies the principle of the individual share or fate becomes more and more the penalizing force in a world where the correct (tribal) limits are being transgressed. Through-out, the tragic twist turns the myths of fertility ritual into tales felt to explain what has gone wrong in the group.
Helen as the image of supreme happiness and enjoyment, which has somehow brought division and misery on men in their over-eager impulse to grasp and own it, lies at the heart of the whole development. The result is the same whether she was an historical character who drew into herself multiple aspects of ritual myth or whether she was a nature-goddess drawn into the historical drama of conflicting human wills and social cleavages. She owns the substance of Artemis and Aphrodite; she is the earth-bride rescued or captured in the depths, in the spirit-world, to be a pledge of reviving and reintegrated life; she is the tree into which the goddess dies and from which she is reborn; she is the dance-leader of a group leaping from one level of life into another; she is the nymph-nurse of every child and she embodies the sacred marriage which is a vital element in every marriage of man and woman; she is both natural process and human essence; she is the Ariadne who leads through the maze of a difficult moment of transition and crucial change. And she gathers together all the enigmas and conflicts emerging in society and reflected in ritual myth. Yet she is also a mere woman and nothing more, for all that she embodies the moira, the daimonic spell of Aphrodite, by the intensity with which she lives out the drama of her overwhelming beauty.
The contradictions in this system are held in abeyance by Homer. The woman walks simply in her daimonic spell. But all the while inner conflicts chafe through and compel, step by step, a new consciousness of what is implied by measure, order (kosmos, which also means the adornment of beauty), limit, self-knowledge. Helen becomes the Moira, Aisa, Erinys, Themis, Nemesis, of a new dispensation; and what is implied by the due share, the equal share in a world of inequalities, has to be analytically grasped and yet still dynamically lived out.
Myth has become human drama. The ritual patterns have been lifted to a level where they absorb and express the total historical experience of a people, of a period of violent change and growth. Acceptance of the pattern of suffering and daimonic impulsion, of disaster and successful homecoming, alternates with a critical examination and reappraisal of the underlying concepts. The pattern is reformulated to meet the changed circumstances, but from one angle or another it remains deeply significant of the nature of Greek society, of its motivations, problems, and solutions. Hence the way in which that culture keeps on revealing its deepest self in its attitudes to Helen and the experience she embodies. The climax comes with the Peloponnesian War, when after the great moments of union against the outer enemy (the Persians, who represent the rejected kingly principle), the Greek world wrecks itself as the Achaian world had done. Helen is now seen as an illusion; the basis on which the expansion from the ninth century on had depended is breaking down under the weight of its unrealized inner contradictions. The consciousness of permissible limits is at the end of its tether. Euripides expresses the desperate disillusionment, plus the deep hope that men will be shocked, on the brink of failure, through the spectacle of their inhumanities into taking another course. Isokrates seeks to revive the illusion, glossing over the terrible results of the unrealized inner conflicts of the Helen image (and the world it reflects); he wants merely to refurbish the image in the service of w
hat works out as the Macedonian overlordship, the final destruction of the free city-state, the triumph of the landlords under the aegis of the kingship, the imperial adventure turned eastwards. But this means the ending of the old tension between the demand for an equal share and the fact of an extending inequality. Helen is now aestheticized as an image of irresponsible beauty to console and decorate a world in which the old creative tension is lost.
That is what happens historically. But the complexity and richness of the Helen image in its development from Homer to Euripides is not thereby destroyed. The image remains alive for us as concentrating the vital impulses of one of the greatest creative epochs. Whatever are the distant facts of her genesis, Helen cannot but be felt by us as a real person whose drama is at the same time inseparable from a deep series of ritual myths. The fusion of historical reality with myths which powerfully embody man’s vital relation to earth-processes is what gives the imaginative depth and appeal to her image.
Appendix
More on the Thread
In view of the crucial importance for this book of the analysis of Helen’s Fillets and Ariadne’s Thread, further material is here added, to avoid overloading the main narrative.
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1. The thread as line of force
The idea of the body as emitting lines of force or energy goes far back. In an ancient rock-engraving at Tyout in North Africa we see a line issuing from the genitals of each of the three figures, who are thus connected by magical lines of force. The forms are rough; but it seems clear that a man, his wife and child are depicted; he is hunting and a flow of sympathetic aid is coming from his family. The line from his genitals leaps up to the arrow he is shooting at some game, and the arrow is magnified, given special force and virtue. The woman seems to be making a dance gesture with uplifted hands; perhaps she performs a dance rite while her husband hunts, as is common among primitive folk. The thread line flowing from her is ensuring the man’s success in killing the beast, as the thread spiralling from Ariadne ensures the success of Theseus in killing the monster.
As an example from later tribal society we may take a drawing made by North American Indians in a petition to Congress about fishing rights in some small lakes near Lake Superior. The totems of the seven tribes concerned are shown: crane, three martens, bear, manfish, catfish. ‘From the eye and heart of each of the animals runs a line connecting them with the eye and heart of the crane, to show that they are all of one mind, and the crane’s eye has a line connecting it with the lakes on which the tribes want to fish, while another line runs towards Congress.’ Other North American drawings, expressing a lovesong, show two figures, one with an elongated arm that touches the other; then the two figures, one standing, and the other lying down, connected with a double line that joins the lower part of the faces (? throats or mouths) while from the head of the standing lover runs a wriggling winding line towards the girl. The designs illustrate the statements: ‘I can make her blush, because I hear all she says...though she were far off, even on the other hemisphere.’[417]
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2. The spirit-string in Australia
The spirit-rope or string is highly important in shamanist experience, especially as link between this and the other world. In Australia, ‘sometimes by means of invisible ropes they [the medicine-men] climb up and down between earth and sky’. These spirit-ropes they bring up out of themselves. (So the ropes in a sense are the entrails or insides of the shamans.) Myth reflects these beliefs. In S.W. Australia the natives told how fire was brought from aloft down to earth by a man who threw a spear at the clouds, with string attached. He climbed the string and reached heaven. An invaluable account of initiation experience, just as it was felt and understood by one of the initiates, has been given by a Wiradjuri doctor of the kangaroo totem. His father took him as a small boy into the bush to be trained. He put two large quartz crystals against his breast. ‘They vanished into me. I do not know how they went, but I felt them going through me like warmth. That was to make me clever and also to bring things up. He also gave me some things like quartz crystals in water. They looked like ice, and the water tasted sweet. After that I used to see things that my mother could not see.’ At the puberty initiation he watched the doctors (shamans) bringing up their crystals and shooting the virtue into him to make him ‘good’. So, in a holy state like all the initiates during the rite, he went into seclusion in the bush to fast and meditate. His father came to him there and showed him a piece of crystal in his hand. ‘When I looked at it, he went down into the ground; and I saw him come up all covered with red dust. It made me very frightened.’ At his father’s bidding he managed to bring up a crystal and was told, ‘Come with me to this place.’ He goes on: ‘I saw him standing by a hole in the ground, leading to a grave. I went inside and saw a dead man, who rubbed me all over to make me clever, and gave me some crystals. When we came out, my father pointed to a tiger-snake, saying “That is your familiar. It is mine also.” There was a string extending from the tail of the snake to us — one of those strings which the medicine-men bring up out of themselves. My father took hold of the string and said, “Let us follow the snake.” The snake went through several tree-trunks and led us through them. At last we reached a tree with a great swelling round its roots. It is in such places that Duramulun lives. The snake went down into the ground and came up inside the tree, which was hollow. We followed him. Then I saw a lot of little Duramuluns, the sons of Baiame [the highgod]. Afterwards the snake took us into a great hole, in which were a number of snakes. These rubbed themselves against me and did not hurt me, being my familiars. They did this to make me a clever man and a doctor. Then my father said, “We will go up to Baiame’s camp.” He got astride a thread and put me on another and we held by each other’s arm. At the end of the thread was Wombu, the bird of Baiame. We went up through the clouds and on the other side was the sky. We went through the place where the clouds go through, and it kept opening and shutting very quickly. My father said that if it touched a doctor when he was going through, it would hurt his spirit, and when returned home he would sicken and die. On the other side we saw Baiame sitting in his camp. He was a very great old man with a long beard. He sat with his legs under him and from his shoulders extended two great quartz crystals to the very sky above him. There were also numbers of the boys of Baiame, and of his people who are birds and beasts [totems]. After this time, and while I was in the bush, I began to bring crystals up; but I became very ill and cannot do anything since.’
Here the thread plays the guiding part through the difficult sections of the spirit journey, into the underworld and up into the sky; it is attached to the two great messenger figures, the chthonic snake and the bird of the highgods. There is even the Symplegades of the Clashing Cloud-Jaws. The riding of the thread in the sky-ascent suggests both witch’s broom and Siberian shaman’s horse or goose.
The power of the string appears also in the main tools of magic used by the Australians: the pointing-stick and the tchintu. The stick has a length of string passing in and through a little hollow receptacle of bone or wood, and out again at the opposite end, which is then closed. The stick is pointed at the victim, who may be miles away; his life or blood is drawn down the string into the receptacle, where it is caught. The tchintu is a lump of resin and two teeth with a long string attached. The heat of the sun is ‘sung’ into it. Then it is put on the victim’s track, so that the heat passes out and into him, with mortal results. The string conducts the sun-force, transmits it into the doomed man. A dead man’s hair also provides much power.
The studies of Howitt showed that the natives of South-east Australia had their medicine-men who told of a cord magically attached to their bodies. Elkin thus describes the proceedings: ‘During the initiation of medicine-men in South-east Australia they produce a rope from the medicine man by means of incantations. This cord enables him to accomplish marvellous exploits, for instance to emit fire from his stomach like an electric wire. And, more inte
resting still is the use made of the rope to rise towards the sky, or to the treetops, or into space. At the initiation-parade, at the height of the ceremonial enthusiasm, the magician lies on his back under a tree, raises his rope, and climbs up to a nest placed at the treetop; he then passes to other trees, and at sunset climbs down the trunk again. Only the men see this exploit, which is preceded and followed by the whirling of the bull-roarer and other expressions of emotional excitement. In the description of these exploits noted by M. Berndt and myself will be found the names of the medicine-men and details like the following: Joe Dagan, a Wongaibon magician, lying on his back at the foot of a tree made his rope rise and climbed up it, his head thrown backwards and his body loose, his legs apart and his arms at his sides. When he reached his goal, forty foot up, he waved his hands to those who were below. He came down in the same manner and, as he was lying quietly on his back, the rope re-entered his body.’