Alastor
An avenging spirit or the curse of blood-guilt that pursues a family across generations, demanding retribution.
The Meaning of Alastor
The alastor was both a concept and a class of divine agent — the embodiment of hereditary vengeance that would not rest until a family's cycle of crime and punishment was complete. When Atreus served Thyestes his own children at a banquet, the alastor of that act settled over the House of Atreus, driving the chain of murders through Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Orestes. Aeschylus's Oresteia makes the alastor visible as a demonic force passing from generation to generation, almost like an infectious curse dwelling in the bloodline. The alastor expressed the Greek understanding that great crimes — especially within families — created metaphysical debts that mere time could not cancel. Only ritual purification, divine judgment (as in the Areopagus trial of Orestes), or the exhaustion of the bloodline could end the alastor's work. The term also applied to a specific class of lesser daimones: spirits of the slain who attached themselves to their killers.
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Fun Fact
Aeschylus uses the word alastor to mean both the curse itself and the man who carries or enacts it — curse and cursed become one.
Words We Inherited
English words and phrases that trace back to this myth. See our full guide to English words from Greek mythology.
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