Note 124 — Chapter V · THE CULT OF SOULS

The Tritopatores are most distinctly referred to as ἄνεμοι: Demon ap. Phot. Suid. τριτοπ. cf. δεσπόται ἀνέμων Phot. τριτοπάτωρ; Tz. Lyc. 738. Orphic poetry made them θυρωροὺς καὶ φύλακας τῶν ἀνέμων. This is already a free interpretation; the Attic belief, expressed by Demon, knows nothing about this. It can only have been learned invention that limited their number to three (as in the case of the originally unlimited number of Horai, Erinyes, etc.), and gave them definite names (Amalkeides, etc., Orph. fr. 240, Ab.) or identified them with the three Hekatoncheires (Kleidemos in the Ἐξηγ.). The genuine and ancient belief about them can still be discerned through all the confusion of misinterpretation and misunderstanding, and according to this the τριτοπάτορες were the souls of ancestors who were also wind-spirits. People prayed for children to these spirits: and Lobeck, Agl. 755 ff., is right in connecting with this custom the Orphic doctrine that the soul of man comes into him from without with the wind. Even this, however, is only a speculative embellishment of the popular belief about the Tritopatores (which the Orphics cannot, as Welcker thinks, Götterl. iii, 71, have “invented”: they only explained it after their fashion and consequently must have found it already existing). When we have stripped off all speculative accretions we find the Tritopatores to have been the souls of ancestors who have become wind-spirits and travel in the wind like other ψυχαί (whose name even is derived from the breath of the wind). From these as from real πνοιαὶ ζῳογόνοι their descendants hope for aid where the entry into life of a new ψυχή is concerned. It is not hard to understand the connexion between souls and wind-spirits; it is merely that such conceptions were rare among the Greeks and for that reason these isolated wind-spirits surviving in popular belief were turned into individual daimones—the Tritopatores no less than the Harpies (see Rh. Mus. 50, 3 ff.).