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  • Autopsia:Olson, Themis, Pausanias
  • Anthony Mellors (bio)

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How different might the film narratives of Clash of the Titans have been had they followed Jane Harrison's reading in Themis. The Titans, she says, were originally men who daubed themselves with white clay (from τιτανοs, white clay or gypsum) in order to perform initiation rites associated with the passage from child- to man-hood; only later, 'when their meaning is forgotten', do they come to be regarded as mythological giants.1 The original Titans had the role of symbolically murdering the Kouretes, young men figured as daimones or attendants of the gods (Kouros is another name for Zeus) who invoke Themis and Dike, the spirits of a time before society and religion became differentiated. According to Harrison, this symbolic death is the basis of the boys' rebirth into the tribe: until each boy has put away his childhood, he cannot become 'socialized, part of the body politic.'2

Later in Themis, Harrison attends to the mythological presentation of the Titans familiar from Hesiod's Theogony. Here, the Titans are understood as 'fertility-daimones', distinguished from the mythological Giants by being potencies of the sky rather than the earth: 'In Homer and Hesiod they, unlike the Giants, are always Gods, Tιτενεs θεοι. They are constantly being driven down below the earth to nethermost Tartarus and always re-emerging. The very violence and persistence with which they are sent down below shows that they belong up above.'3 The Gigantes are children of Gaia (earth) and the Titans children of Gaia and Ouranos (sky), though they are more sky than earth; unlike the Giants, they represent the region of τα μετεωρα, the aither, becoming gods of the sun and moon. Harrison's point is that this separation into a Gigantomachia and a Titanomachia [End Page 95] has important implications for ritual interpretation: while the Olympians' triumph over the Giants represents the expurgation of an unhealthy, phallic worship of fertility, their partial triumph over the Titans symbolizes a renunciation of what she terms Naturism, the Persian-derived religion associated with the four elements and which led to the origins of scientific method. Harrison regards the fight against the Giants as naturally and ethically defensible: '[i]nstinctively a healthy stock will purge its religion from elements exclusively phallic. This expurgation ranks as first and foremost among the services Olympianism rendered to Greece.'4 Censure of the Titans, however, she considers to be something of an error, only explainable by the hostility (as Herodotus tells us) of the hoi polloi to a natural philosophy associated with barbarians (i.e. Persians). The worship of the powers of the upper air, she says, led to 'exact observation', therefore to mathematics, astronomy, and the doctrines of Sokrates and Herakleitos, as well as to mysticism and pantheism; so while the Olympians were right to reject or reform Earth-worship, they were wrong not to have embraced the new natural philosophy.

A philosophy, that is, that was the development of an archaic sensibility. For Harrison, the Olympian spirit is the tendency to personalize and intellectualize the gods, so that they cease to represent the mystery and complexity of life and become objets d'art. Olympianism becomes reactionary, she argues, in its resistance to the influence of Persian religion in the sixth century B.C., when Orphism, with its 'imported elements of Oriental and mainly Iranian nature-worship and formal mysticism' reformed the archaic Earth-religion by broadening it into a cosmogony: 'it fought the Giants but joined forces with the Titans.'5

The distinction between Giants and Titans, therefore, means far more than a scholarly footnote. For Harrison, it attests to a crucial turning point in the history of human consciousness: individualism, the sense of subjective separateness, appears with the breakup of totemistic societies; but when a more sophisticated cosmogony develops, one that seeks to integrate the new subject with the old Animism, individualism, spurred by its 'barren' drive for immortality, attempts to suppress it. In rejecting the primitive, Olympian individualism cannot go beyond itself to return to group consciousness. The retreat is into 'mind' as against 'life', self-consciousness instead of action. What Harrison calls 'primitive consciousness'

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