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Author
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Comment
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(2/21/06 11:40 pm)
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origin of 'familiars'
Did any of the figures such as Circe or Medea have anything like a 'familiar spirit', an associated animal?
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(2/21/06 11:45 pm)
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Re: misc
Heh. Do Circe's men-into-pigs count?
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(2/22/06 11:12 am)
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Celtic Druids
I think the concept of the animal familiar comes from the Celtic Druids who had a close connection with nature. They could connect with animals the same way people do today with pets, but they would often try to imitate the animal to learn from them.
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Crceres
Registered User
(2/22/06 11:15 am)
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Re: misc
Circe was associated with cats, through some obscure connection that probably carried over from dim and distant days when she was someone's deity. Medea's strongest 'familiar' link would be when she left Jason, in a cart pulled by dragons.
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aka Greensleeves
Registered User
(2/22/06 3:35 pm)
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Re: misc
The Greek gods were often associated with signature animals (Hecate with dogs, Athena with owls, etc). The word Circe means "hawk..." but I don't know if that's anything more significant than the Greek superstition about using appelations in place of actual names. The Greeks practiced animal sacrifice and augury, but I haven't found any sense of adopting the animal's powers or attributes, as seen in other cultures.
As Crceres notes, there are several dragons in Medea's story (one of my translations reads "serpents;" dragons being rare in Greek mythology), as well as a "brazen bull" and, well, the golden ram. Medea is usually counted as a priestess of Hecate; my understanding is that this is from the later period in which Hecate had acquired her more sinister edge (in Hesiod's day she was fairly benevolent, and he waxes practically evangelical on her behalf in the Theogony).
It's interesting that Patrick should mention Druids; Robert Graves believed that the Golden Fleece had its origins at least partly in the annual sacrifice-and-rebirth rituals of northern European kings... more commonly attributed to Celtic peoples.
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kristiw
Unregistered User
(2/22/06 4:28 pm)
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familiars and animal worship
An interesting thing about the greek gods' association with animals... epic poetry preserves a lot of words for the sake of the rhythm and rhyme even after they have fallen out of use. Then people go back and try to figure out meanings from context, so we end up with stories about Dionysus being sewn up in Zeus' leg, to account for a name that sounds like "twice-born," and Aphrodite is born out of foam because "aphros" is the word for foam. To bring this tangent back where it was supposed to go, some of the gods' epithets preserve suggestions of theriolatry, animal worship: Athena glaukopis, for instance, can be translated either as grey-eyed, grey-faced, owl-eyed, or owl-faced...
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