Laudator Temporis Acti

Jack Kerouac, "Private Philologies," The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (New York: The Library of America, 2016), page number unknown:

The Latin "familia" (family) is understood to derive from "thymele"— the sacred center of fire. We learn from this everything we want to know about the origin of the family—not only the word, the sacred center of the fire, the hearth, and the family there assembled:—in raw darknesses.

Kerouac got this bogus etymology from Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1916), p. 65:

[T]he hearth, the centre of the family, becomes the family itself, just our word family, the Latin familia, is from thymelé, the sacred centre of fire.

Where Arnold got it, I don't know. See Alfred Ernout and Alfred Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, 4th ed. rev. Jacques André (Paris: Klincksieck, 2001), p. 215, s.v. famulus (whence familia):

Mots uniquement attestés dans les dialectes italiques et sans étymologie...

See also Roger Henrion, "Des origines du mot familia," L'Antiquité Classique 19 (1941) 37-69 and 11.2 (1942) 253-287, and Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 200-201 (famulus): Greek θυμέλη (place of burning, hearth, altar) is related to θύω (sacrifice by burning).

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Dear Mike,

Sorry I can't write more; I’ve got a class shortly, but this may be Arnold's source, since he mentions Bergmann's monograph in his footnotes. The passage is from p. 46. Best wishes,

Eric [Thomson]