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This is a distinguished article by an expert on Greek mythology and the origins of religions. He makes some very interesting applications to modern thinking. His article, in spite of the title, has more to do with Medea than with her half-brother, Apsyrtus (the swept-down one), whom she had had Jason
murder and dismember so they might make good their escape from her father after stealing the golden fleece. Medea possessed the dæmonic powers of dark places and strange animals such as the serpent. She represents the transition from totemism to a worship of deities in the form of human beings, sometimes disguised as animals. The substitution of animal for human sacrifice was not for kindness or ethical reasons, but to allow the victim to escape rebirth and a frightful confrontation with an ancestral god. In the modern world the profane actions are performed with a religious intensity. The modern ideologies (unnamed) are not based on rational ideas but on the old physical Adam. As formal religions are shrinking, the expanding domain of the profane discloses the old totem in its heart. The more radical Oriental philosophies make much of inaction. They know that action leads to pollution, i.e., regression to totemism.