Mother's Curse.
ギリシア語で「精神の汚染」を意味する。強い伝染力を持つ邪悪な運命であり、母親に対して、あるいは「太母神」の伝統ある法に反して犯した罪から発生する。母親殺しという許すべからざる罪を犯したオレステースは、ミアズマによって人間世界から遮断されていたため、「復讐の女神」からわが身を守ってくれる者を、ただ１人として見出すことができなかった。Mother's Curse.
Barbara G. Walker : The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (Harper & Row, 1983)
The Greek concept of Societies create order by stigmatizing certaindisorderly conditions and events and persons as 'polluting', that is, by treating them metaphorically as unclean and dangerous. Very roughly, the pollutions generally recognized by the Greeks were birth, death, to a limited degree sexual activity, homicide ecept in war, and sacrilege; certain diseases, madness above all, were also sometimes viewed in this way, while mythology abounds in instances of extreme pollutions such as incest, parricide, and cannibalism.
Different pollutions worked in different ways (local rules also varied). We get some indication of the attendant casuistry from, above all, a long code from Cyrene (SEG 9. 72) and the rules of purity attached to certain Coan priesthoods (F. Sokolowski, Lois sacrees des cites grecques (1969), nos. l54, 156). To give some illustrations: contact with a dead person of one's own family pollutes for longer than with an unrelated person; a person entering a house of birth becomes polluted, but does not transmit the pollution further; sejmal contact only requires purification if it occurs by day...
Pollution has a complicated relation to the sacred. In one sense they are polar opposites: the main practical consequence of (for instance) the pollutions of birth and death was that the persons affected were excluded from temples for a period of days, and priests and priestesses had to observe special rules of purity. But offenders against the gods became 'consecrated' to them in the sense of being made over to them for punishment; and such negative consecration (which could also be imposed by a human curse) was comparable to a pollution. This is why a[goV and ejnaghvV, words that appear to be related to a root aJg- conveying the idea of sacredness, to some extent overlap in usage with mivasma and miarovV , the standard terms for pollution and polluting. In consequence, the boundaries are blurred between the concepts of 'pollution' and of 'divine anger'.
Since some pollutions are natural and inescapable, rules of purity are obviously not simply rules of morality in disguise. But the very dangerous pollutions were those caused by avoidable (if sometimes mintentional) actions such as bloodshed and sacrilege. In theory, one man's crime could through such pollution bring disaster to a whole state. There is a common mythological schema (best seen at the start of Sophocles (I), OT), whereby pollution causes plague, crop-failure, infertility of women and of animals. Such pollution is fertility reversed, which is why such powers as the Eumenides (Erinyes) are double-sided, agents of pollution and also givers of fertility (see above all Aeschylus, Eum.). Orators often attempted to brand political opponents as polluting demons, the source of the city's misfortunes; and a question actually put to the oracle of Zeus at Dodona shows that this conception of the polluting individual was not a mere anachromism in the historical period: 'is it because ofa mortal's pollution that we are suffering the storm?' (SEG 19. 427).
But pollution is also often envisaged as working more selectively. According to Antiphon (1)'s Tetralogies, for instance, murder pollution threatens the victim's kin until they seek vengeance or prosecute, the jurors until they convict. Thus the threat of pollution encourages action to put right the disorder.
Fear of pollution is often said by modern scholars to be absent from the world of Homer; the emergence of such anxieties becomes therefore a defining mark of the succeeding centuries. But it is wrong to interpret pollution beliefs, an ordering device, as primarily a product of fear; and the natural context for, for instance, a doctrine of blood pollution of the type discussed above is a society such as Homer's where legal sanctions are weak. As we hve seen, pollution belief is a complex phenomenon, a vehicle for many different concerns: it has no unified origin or history. See also PURIFICATION, GREEK.
R. C. T. P.( O. C. D.)