(urth) vanished people=Hieros

[Jeff Wilson]

On 11/12/2011 10:24 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
> FWIW, the other stuff is really stretching. Apollo didn't track Hermes and his stolen cattle by putting
>
> his nose to the ground and sniffing. He just consulted an oracle and went where it told him.

Apollo attempted to track the cattle and Hermes conventionally, but 
could not because Hermes was clever enough to reverse the tracks. 
Hermes also was clever enough to hide the cattle in a cave so that 
Apollo could not see them from above. If Apollo could just sacrifice a 
lamb, sprinkle grain around a cock, and have it point to the missing 
cattle or the culprit, it would confound the entire point of the origin 
myth establishing Hermes are a clever, quick-thinking thief.

Of course, Apollo eventually figured it our because he _had_ acquired 
dominion over prophecy if not immediate divination when he had himself 
been a clever infant and slain THE Python (a rival of Typhon, so it was 
no pushover) in the very temple of its mistress Gaia at Delphi, so 
*that's* a secondary attribute, while his hunting prowess seems inborn.

And there is the small fact that before all these duelling references 
were writ down by individuals, his actual worshipers were making 
high-dollar bronzes of him hunting.

Not that an attribute has to be prominent for a poet to employ it.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >