The Golden Bough
A Study in Magic and Religion
By
James George Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Liverpool
Vol. VII. of XII.
Part V: Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild.
Vol. 1 of 2.
New York and London
MacMillan and Co.
1912
CONTENTS
Preface.
Chapter I. Dionysus.
Chapter II. Demeter And Persephone.
Chapter III. Magical Significance of Games in Primitive Agriculture.
Chapter IV. Woman’s Part in Primitive Agriculture.
Chapter V. The Corn-Mother and the Corn-Maiden in Northern Europe.
Chapter VI. The Corn-Mother in Many Lands.
§ 1. The Corn-mother in America.
§ 2. The Mother-cotton in the Punjaub.
§ 3. The Barley Bride among the Berbers.
§ 4. The Rice-mother in the East Indies.
§ 5. The Spirit of the Corn embodied in Human Beings.
§ 6. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and Daughter.
Chapter VII. Lityerses.
§ 1. Songs of the Corn Reapers.
§ 2. Killing the Corn-spirit.
§ 3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops.
§ 4. The Corn-spirit slain in his Human Representatives.
Chapter VIII. The Corn-Spirit as an Animal.
§ 1. Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit.
§ 2. The Corn-spirit as a Wolf or a Dog.
§ 3. The Corn-spirit as a Cock.
§ 4. The Corn-spirit as a Hare.
§ 5. The Corn-spirit as a Cat.
§ 6. The Corn-spirit as a Goat.
§ 7. The Corn-spirit as a Bull, Cow, or Ox.
§ 8. The Corn-spirit as a Horse or Mare.
§ 9. The Corn-spirit as a Bird.
§ 10. The Corn-spirit as a Fox.
§ 11. The Corn-spirit as a Pig (Boar or Sow).
§ 12. On the Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit.
Note. The Pleiades in Primitive Calendars.
Footnotes
[Cover Art]
[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]
PREFACE.
In the last part of this work we examined the figure of the Dying and
Reviving God as it appears in the Oriental religions of classical
antiquity. With the present instalment of _The Golden Bough_ we pursue the
same theme in other religions and among other races. Passing from the East
to Europe we begin with the religion of ancient Greece, which embodies the
now familiar conception in two typical examples, the vine-god Dionysus and
the corn-goddess Persephone, with her mother and duplicate Demeter. Both
of these Greek divinities are personifications of cultivated plants, and a
consideration of them naturally leads us on to investigate similar
personifications elsewhere. Now of all the plants which men have
artificially reared for the sake of food the cereals are on the whole the
most important; therefore it is natural that the religion of primitive
agricultural communities should be deeply coloured by the principal
occupation of their lives, the care of the corn. Hence the frequency with
which the figures of the Corn-mother and Corn-maiden, answering to the
Demeter and Persephone of ancient Greece, meet us in other parts of the
world, and not least of all on the harvest-fields of modern Europe. But
edible roots as well as cereals have been cultivated by many races,
especially in the tropical regions, as a subsidiary or even as a principal
means of subsistence; and accordingly they too enter largely into the
religious ideas of the peoples who live by them. Yet in the case of the
roots, such as yams, taro, and potatoes, the conception of the Dying and
Reviving God appears to figure less prominently than in the case of the
cereals, perhaps for the simple reason that while the growth and decay of
the one sort of fruit go on above ground for all to see, the similar
processes of the other are hidden under ground and therefore strike the
popular imagination less forcibly.
Having surveyed the variations of our main theme among the agricultural
races of mankind, we prosecute the enquiry among savages who remain more
or less completely in the hunting, fishing, and pastoral stages of
society. The same motive which leads the primitive husbandman to adore the
corn or the roots, induces the primitive hunter, fowler, fisher, or
herdsman to adore the beasts, birds, or fishes which furnish him with the
means of subsistence. To him the conception of the death of these
worshipful beings is naturally presented with singular force and
distinctness; since it is no figurative or allegorical death, no poetical
embroidery thrown over the skeleton, but the real death, the naked
skeleton, that constantly thrusts itself importunately on his attention.
And strange as it may seem to us civilised men, the notion of the
immortality and even of the resurrection of the lower animals appears to
be almost as familiar to the savage and to be accepted by him with nearly
as unwavering a faith as the obvious fact of their death and destruction.
For the most part he assumes as a matter of course that the souls of dead
animals survive their decease; hence much of the thought of the savage
hunter is devoted to the problem of how he can best appease the naturally
incensed ghosts of his victims so as to prevent them from doing him a
mischief. This refusal of the savage to recognise in death a final
cessation of the vital process, this unquestioning faith in the unbroken
continuity of all life, is a fact that has not yet received the attention
which it seems to merit from enquirers into the constitution of the human
mind as well as into the history of religion. In the following pages I
have collected examples of this curious faith; I must leave it to others
to appraise them.
Thus on the whole we are concerned in these volumes with the reverence or
worship paid by men to the natural resources from which they draw their
nutriment, both vegetable and animal. That they should invest these
resources with an atmosphere of wonder and awe, often indeed with a halo
of divinity, is no matter for surprise. The circle of human knowledge,
illuminated by the pale cold light of reason, is so infinitesimally small,
the dark regions of human ignorance which lie beyond that luminous ring
are so immeasurably vast, that imagination is fain to step up to the
border line and send the warm, richly coloured beams of her fairy lantern
streaming out into the darkness; and so, peering into the gloom, she is
apt to mistake the shadowy reflections of her own figure for real beings
moving in the abyss. In short, few men are sensible of the sharp line that
divides the known from the unknown; to most men it is a hazy borderland
where perception and conception melt indissolubly into one. Hence to the
savage the ghosts of dead animals and men, with which his imagination
peoples the void, are hardly less real than the solid shapes which the
living animals and men present to his senses; and his thoughts and
activities are nearly as much absorbed by the one as by the other. Of him
it may be said with perhaps even greater truth than of his civilised
brother, “What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!”
But having said so much in this book of the misty glory which the human
imagination sheds round the hard material realities of the food supply, I
am unwilling to leave my readers under the impression, natural but
erroneous, that man has created most of his gods out of his belly. That is
not so, at least that is not my reading of the history of religion. Among
the visible, tangible, perceptible elements by which he is surrounded—and
it is only of these that I presume to speak—there are others than the
merely nutritious which have exerted a powerful influence in touching his
imagination and stimulating his energies, and so have contributed to build
up the complex fabric of religion. To the preservation of the species the
reproductive faculties are no less essential than the nutritive; and with
them we enter on a very different sphere of thought and feeling, to wit,
the relation of the sexes to each other, with all the depths of tenderness
and all the intricate problems which that mysterious relation involves.
The study of the various forms, some gross and palpable, some subtle and
elusive, in which the sexual instinct has moulded the religious
consciousness of our race, is one of the most interesting, as it is one of
the most difficult and delicate tasks, which await the future historian of
religion.
But the influence which the sexes exert on each other, intimate and
profound as it has been and must always be, is far indeed from exhausting
the forces of attraction by which mankind are bound together in society.
The need of mutual protection, the economic advantages of co-operation,
the contagion of example, the communication of knowledge, the great ideas
that radiate from great minds, like shafts of light from high
towers,—these and many other things combine to draw men into communities,
to drill them into regiments, and to set them marching on the road of
progress with a concentrated force to which the loose skirmishers of mere
anarchy and individualism can never hope to oppose a permanent resistance.
Hence when we consider how intimately humanity depends on society for many
of the boons which it prizes most highly, we shall probably admit that of
all the forces open to our observation which have shaped human destiny the
influence of man on man is by far the greatest. If that is so, it seems to
follow that among the beings, real or imaginary, which the religious
imagination has clothed with the attributes of divinity, human spirits are
likely to play a more important part than the spirits of plants, animals,
or inanimate objects. I believe that a careful examination of the
evidence, which has still to be undertaken, will confirm this conclusion;
and that if we could strictly interrogate the phantoms which the human
mind has conjured up out of the depths of its bottomless ignorance and
enshrined as deities in the dim light of temples, we should find that the
majority of them have been nothing but the ghosts of dead men. However, to
say this is necessarily to anticipate the result of future research; and
if in saying it I have ventured to make a prediction, which like all
predictions is liable to be falsified by the event, I have done so only
from a fear lest, without some such warning, the numerous facts recorded
in these volumes might lend themselves to an exaggerated estimate of their
own importance and hence to a misinterpretation and distortion of history.
J. G. Frazer.
CAMBRIDGE, _4th May 1912_.
CHAPTER I. DIONYSUS.
(M1) In the preceding part of this work we saw that in antiquity the
civilised nations of western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the
changes of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of
vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death and
happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites of alternate
lamentation and rejoicing. But if the celebration was in form dramatic, it
was in substance magical; that is to say, it was intended, on the
principles of sympathetic magic, to ensure the vernal regeneration of
plants and the multiplication of animals, which had seemed to be menaced
by the inroads of winter. In the ancient world, however, such ideas and
such rites were by no means confined to the Oriental peoples of Babylon
and Syria, of Phrygia and Egypt; they were not a product peculiar to the
religious mysticism of the dreamy East, but were shared by the races of
livelier fancy and more mercurial temperament who inhabited the shores and
islands of the Aegean. We need not, with some enquirers in ancient and
modern times, suppose that these Western peoples borrowed from the older
civilisation of the Orient the conception of the Dying and Reviving God,
together with the solemn ritual, in which that conception was dramatically
set forth before the eyes of the worshippers. More probably the
resemblance which may be traced in this respect between the religions of
the East and the West is no more than what we commonly, though
incorrectly, call a fortuitous coincidence, the effect of similar causes
acting alike on the similar constitution of the human mind in different
countries and under different skies. The Greek had no need to journey into
far countries to learn the vicissitudes of the seasons, to mark the
fleeting beauty of the damask rose, the transient glory of the golden
corn, the passing splendour of the purple grapes. Year by year in his own
beautiful land he beheld, with natural regret, the bright pomp of summer
fading into the gloom and stagnation of winter, and year by year he hailed
with natural delight the outburst of fresh life in spring. Accustomed to
personify the forces of nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the
warm hues of imagination, to clothe her naked realities with the gorgeous
drapery of a mythic fancy, he fashioned for himself a train of gods and
goddesses, of spirits and elves, out of the shifting panorama of the
seasons, and followed the annual fluctuations of their fortunes with
alternate emotions of cheerfulness and dejection, of gladness and sorrow,
which found their natural expression in alternate rites of rejoicing and
lamentation, of revelry and mourning. A consideration of some of the Greek
divinities who thus died and rose again from the dead may furnish us with
a series of companion pictures to set side by side with the sad figures of
Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. We begin with Dionysus.
(M2) The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a personification
of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the juice of the grape.(1)
His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild dances, thrilling music, and
tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude tribes of Thrace,
who were notoriously addicted to drunkenness.(2) Its mystic doctrines and
extravagant rites were essentially foreign to the clear intelligence and
sober temperament of the Greek race. Yet appealing as it did to that love
of mystery and that proneness to revert to savagery which seem to be
innate in most men, the religion spread like wildfire through Greece until
the god whom Homer hardly deigned to notice had become the most popular
figure of the pantheon. The resemblance which his story and his ceremonies
present to those of Osiris have led some enquirers both in ancient and
modern times to hold that Dionysus was merely a disguised Osiris, imported
directly from Egypt into Greece.(3) But the great preponderance of
evidence points to his Thracian origin, and the similarity of the two
worships is sufficiently explained by the similarity of the ideas and
customs on which they were founded.
(M3) While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic
manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general. Thus we
are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to “Dionysus of the
tree.”(4) In Boeotia one of his titles was “Dionysus in the tree.”(5) His
image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but draped in a
mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head, and with leafy boughs
projecting from the head or body to shew the nature of the deity.(6) On a
vase his rude effigy is depicted appearing out of a low tree or bush.(7)
At Magnesia on the Maeander an image of Dionysus is said to have been
found in a plane-tree, which had been broken by the wind.(8) He was the
patron of cultivated trees;(9) prayers were offered to him that he would
make the trees grow;(10) and he was especially honoured by husbandmen,
chiefly fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a
natural tree-stump, in their orchards.(11) He was said to have discovered
all tree-fruits, amongst which apples and figs are particularly
mentioned;(12) and he was referred to as “well-fruited,” “he of the green
fruit,” and “making the fruit to grow.”(13) One of his titles was
“teeming” or “bursting” (as of sap or blossoms);(14) and there was a
Flowery Dionysus in Attica and at Patrae in Achaia.(15) The Athenians
sacrificed to him for the prosperity of the fruits of the land.(16)
Amongst the trees particularly sacred to him, in addition to the vine, was
the pine-tree.(17) The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship
a particular pine-tree “equally with the god,” so they made two images of
Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies.(18) In art a wand,
tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his
worshippers.(19) Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially
associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a
Dionysus Ivy;(20) at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos,
where figs were called _meilicha_, there was a Dionysus Meilichios, the
face of whose image was made of fig-wood.(21)
(M4) Further, there are indications, few but significant, that Dionysus
was conceived as a deity of agriculture and the corn. He is spoken of as
himself doing the work of a husbandman:(22) he is reported to have been
the first to yoke oxen to the plough, which before had been dragged by
hand alone; and some people found in this tradition the clue to the bovine
shape in which, as we shall see, the god was often supposed to present
himself to his worshippers. Thus guiding the ploughshare and scattering
the seed as he went, Dionysus is said to have eased the labour of the
husbandman.(23) Further, we are told that in the land of the Bisaltae, a
Thracian tribe, there was a great and fair sanctuary of Dionysus, where at
his festival a bright light shone forth at night as a token of an abundant
harvest vouchsafed by the deity; but if the crops were to fail that year,
the mystic light was not seen, darkness brooded over the sanctuary as at
other times.(24) Moreover, among the emblems of Dionysus was the
winnowing-fan, that is the large open shovel-shaped basket, which down to
modern times has been used by farmers to separate the grain from the chaff
by tossing the corn in the air. This simple agricultural instrument
figured in the mystic rites of Dionysus; indeed the god is traditionally
said to have been placed at birth in a winnowing-fan as in a cradle: in
art he is represented as an infant so cradled; and from these traditions
and representations he derived the epithet of _Liknites_, that is, “He of
the Winnowing-fan.”(25)
(M5) At first sight this symbolism might be explained very simply and
naturally by supposing that the divine infant cradled in the winnowing-fan
was identified with the corn which it is the function of the instrument to
winnow and sift. Yet against this identification it may be urged with
reason that the use of a winnowing-fan as a cradle was not peculiar to
Dionysus; it was a regular practice with the ancient Greeks to place their
infants in winnowing-fans as an omen of wealth and fertility for the
future life of the children.(26) Customs of the same sort have been
observed, apparently for similar reasons, by other peoples in other lands.
For example, in Java it is or used to be customary to place every child at
birth in a bamboo basket like the sieve or winnowing-basket which Javanese
farmers use for separating the rice from the chaff.(27) It is the midwife
who places the child in the basket, and as she does so she suddenly knocks
with the palms of both hands on the basket in order that the child may not
be timid and fearful. Then she addresses the child thus: “Cry not, for
Njaï-among and Kaki-among” (two spirits) “are watching over you.” Next she
addresses these two spirits, saying, “Bring not your grandchild to the
road, lest he be trampled by a horse; bring him not to the bank of the
river, lest he fall into the river.” The object of the ceremony is said to
be that these two spirits should always and everywhere guard the
child.(28) On the first anniversary of a child’s birthday the Chinese of
Foo-Chow set the little one in a large bamboo sieve, such as farmers
employ in winnowing grain, and in the sieve they place along with the
child a variety of articles, such as fruits, gold or silver ornaments, a
set of money-scales, books, a pencil, pen, ink, paper, and so on, and they
draw omens of the child’s future career from the object which it first
handles and plays with. Thus, if the infant first grasps the money-scale,
he will be wealthy; if he seizes on a book, he will be learned, and so
forth.(29) In the Bilaspore district of India it is customary for
well-to-do people to place a newborn infant in a winnowing-fan filled with
rice and afterwards to give the grain to the nurse in attendance.(30) In
Upper Egypt a newly-born babe is immediately laid upon a corn-sieve and
corn is scattered around it; moreover, on the seventh day after birth the
infant is carried on a sieve through the whole house, while the midwife
scatters wheat, barley, pease and salt. The intention of these ceremonies
is said to be to avert evil spirits from the child,(31) and a like motive
is assigned by other peoples for the practice of placing newborn infants
in a winnowing-basket or corn-sieve. For example, in the Punjaub, when
several children of a family have died in succession, a new baby will
sometimes be put at birth into an old winnowing-basket (_chhaj_) along
with the sweepings of the house, and so dragged out into the yard; such a
child may, like Dionysus, in after life be known by the name of
Winnowing-basket (_Chhajju_) or Dragged (_Ghasitâ_).(32) The object of
treating the child in this way seems to be to save its life by deceiving
the spirits, who are supposed to have carried off its elder brothers and
sisters; these malevolent beings are on the look-out for the new baby, but
they will never think of raking for it in the dust-bin, that being the
last place where they would expect to find the hope of the family. The
same may perhaps be the intention of a ceremony observed by the Gaolis of
the Deccan. As soon as a child is born, it is bathed and then placed on a
sieve for a few minutes. On the fifth day the sieve, with a lime and _pan_
leaves on it, is removed outside the house and then, after the worship of
Chetti has been performed, the sieve is thrown away on the road.(33)
Again, the same notion of rescuing the child from dangerous spirits comes
out very clearly in a similar custom observed by the natives of Laos, a
province of Siam. These people “believe that an infant is the child, not
of its parents, but of the spirits, and in this belief they go through the
following formalities. As soon as an infant is born it is bathed and
dressed, laid upon a rice-sieve, and placed—by the grandmother if present,
if not, by the next near female relative—at the head of the stairs or of
the ladder leading to the house. The person performing this duty calls out
in a loud tone to the spirits to come and take the child away to-day, or
for ever after to let it alone; at the same moment she stamps violently on
the floor to frighten the child, or give it a jerk, and make it cry. If it
does not cry this is regarded as an evil omen. If, on the other hand, it
follows the ordinary laws of nature and begins to exercise its vocal
organs, it is supposed to have a happy and prosperous life before it.
Sometimes the spirits do come and take the infant away, _i.e._ it dies
before it is twenty-four hours old, but, to prevent such a calamity,
strings are tied round its wrists on the first night after its birth, and
if it sickens or is feeble the spirit-doctors are called in to prescribe
certain offerings to be made to keep away the very spirits who, only a few
hours previously, were ceremoniously called upon to come and carry the
child off. On the day after its birth the child is regarded as being the
property no longer of the spirits, who could have taken it if they had
wanted it, but of the parents, who forthwith sell it to some relation for
a nominal sum—an eighth or a quarter of a rupee perhaps. This again is a
further guarantee against molestation by the spirits, who apparently are
regarded as honest folk that would not stoop to take what has been bought
and paid for.”(34)
(M6) A like intention of averting evil in some shape from a child is
assigned in other cases of the same custom. Thus in Travancore, “if an
infant is observed to distort its limbs as if in pain, it is supposed to
be under the pressure of some one who has stooped over it, to relieve
which the mother places it with a nut-cracker on a winnowing fan and
shakes it three or four times.”(35) Again, among the Tanala people of
Madagascar almost all children born in the unlucky month of Faosa are
buried alive in the forest. But if the parents resolve to let the child
live, they must call in the aid of a diviner, who performs a ceremony for
averting the threatened ill-luck. The child is placed in a winnowing-fan
along with certain herbs. Further, the diviner takes herbs of the same
sort, a worn-out spade, and an axe, fastens them to the father’s spear,
and sets the spear up in the ground. Then the child is bathed in water
which has been medicated with some of the same herbs. Finally the diviner
says: “The worn-out spade to the grandchild; may it (the child) not
despoil its father, may it not despoil its mother, may it not despoil the
children; let it be good.” This ceremony, we are told, “puts an end to the
child’s evil days, and the father gets the spear to put away all evil. The
child then joins its father and mother; its evil days are averted, and the
water and the other things are buried, for they account them evil.”(36)
Similarly the ancient Greeks used to bury, or throw into the sea, or
deposit at cross-roads, the things that had been used in ceremonies of
purification, no doubt because the things were supposed to be tainted by
the evil which had been transferred to them in the rites.(37) Another
example of the use of a winnowing-fan in what may be called a purificatory
ceremony is furnished by the practice of the Chinese of Foo-Chow. A lad
who is suffering from small-pox is made to squat in a large winnowing
sieve. On his head is placed a piece of red cloth, and on the cloth are
laid some parched beans, which are then allowed to roll off. As the name
for beans, pronounced in the local dialect, is identical with the common
name for small-pox, and as moreover the scars left by the pustules are
thought to resemble beans, it appears to be imagined that just as the
beans roll off the boy’s head, so will the pustules vanish from his body
without leaving a trace behind.(38) Thus the cure depends on the principle
of homoeopathic magic. Perhaps on the same principle a winnowing-fan is
employed in the ceremony from a notion that it will help to waft or fan
away the disease like chaff from the grain. We may compare a purificatory
ceremony observed by the Karens of Burma at the naming of a new-born
child. Amongst these people “children are supposed to come into the world
defiled, and unless that defilement is removed, they will be unfortunate,
and unsuccessful in their undertakings. An Elder takes a thin splint of
bamboo, and, tying a noose at one end, he fans it down the child’s arm,
saying:
‘_Fan away ill luck, fan away ill success:_
_Fan away inability, fan away unskilfulness:_
_Fan away slow growth, fan away difficulty of growth:_
_Fan away stuntedness, fan away puniness:_
_Fan away drowsiness, fan away stupidity:_
_Fan away debasedness, fan away wretchedness:_
_Fan away the whole completely._’
“The Elder now changes his motion and fans up the child’s arm, saying:
‘_Fan on power, fan on influence:_
_Fan on the paddy bin, fan on the paddy barn:_
_Fan on followers, fan on dependants:_
_Fan on good things, fan on appropriate things._’ ”(39)
(M7) Thus in some of the foregoing instances the employment of the
winnowing-fan may have been suggested by the proper use of the implement
as a means of separating the corn from the chaff, the same operation being
extended by analogy to rid men of evils of various sorts which would
otherwise adhere to them like husks to the grain. It was in this way that
the ancients explained the use of the winnowing-fan in the mysteries.(40)
But one motive, and perhaps the original one, for setting a newborn child
in a winnowing-fan and surrounding it with corn was probably the wish to
communicate to the infant, on the principle of sympathetic magic, the
fertility and especially the power of growth possessed by the grain. This
was in substance the explanation which W. Mannhardt gave of the
custom.(41) He rightly insisted on the analogy which many peoples, and in
particular the ancient Greeks, have traced between the sowing of seed and
the begetting of children,(42) and he confirmed his view of the function
of the winnowing-fan in these ceremonies by aptly comparing a German
custom of sowing barley or flax seed over weakly and stunted children in
the belief that this will make them grow with the growth of the barley or
the flax.(43) An Esthonian mode of accomplishing the same object is to set
the child in the middle of a plot of ground where a sower is sowing hemp
and to leave the little one there till the sowing is finished; after that
they imagine that the child will shoot up in stature like the hemp which
has just been sown.(44)
(M8) With the foregoing evidence before us of a widespread custom of
placing newborn children in winnowing-fans we clearly cannot argue that
Dionysus must necessarily have been a god of the corn because Greek
tradition and Greek art represent him as an infant cradled in a
winnowing-fan. The argument would prove too much, for it would apply
equally to all the infants that have been so cradled in all parts of the
world. We cannot even press the argument drawn from the surname “He of the
Winnowing-fan” which was borne by Dionysus, since we have seen that
similar names are borne for similar reasons in India by persons who have
no claim whatever to be regarded as deities of the corn. Yet when all
necessary deductions have been made on this score, the association of
Dionysus with the winnowing-fan appears to be too intimate to be explained
away as a mere reminiscence of a practice to which every Greek baby,
whether human or divine, had to submit. That practice would hardly account
either for the use of the winnowing-fan in the mysteries or for the
appearance of the implement, filled with fruitage of various kinds, on the
monuments which set forth the ritual of Dionysus.(45) This last emblem
points plainly to a conception of the god as a personification of the
fruits of the earth in general; and as if to emphasise the idea of
fecundity conveyed by such a symbol there sometimes appears among the
fruits in the winnowing-fan an effigy of the male organ of generation. The
prominent place which that effigy occupied in the worship of Dionysus(46)
hints broadly, if it does not strictly prove, that to the Greek mind the
god stood for the powers of fertility in general, animal as well as
vegetable. In the thought of the ancients no sharp line of distinction
divided the fertility of animals from the fertility of plants; rather the
two ideas met and blended in a nebulous haze. We need not wonder,
therefore, that the same coarse but expressive emblem figured
conspicuously in the ritual of Father Liber, the Italian counterpart of
Dionysus, who in return for the homage paid to the symbol of his creative
energy was believed to foster the growth of the crops and to guard the
fields against the powers of evil.(47)
(M9) Like the other gods of vegetation whom we considered in the last
volume, Dionysus was believed to have died a violent death, but to have
been brought to life again; and his sufferings, death, and resurrection
were enacted in his sacred rites. His tragic story is thus told by the
poet Nonnus. Zeus in the form of a serpent visited Persephone, and she
bore him Zagreus, that is, Dionysus, a horned infant. Scarcely was he
born, when the babe mounted the throne of his father Zeus and mimicked the
great god by brandishing the lightning in his tiny hand. But he did not
occupy the throne long; for the treacherous Titans, their faces whitened
with chalk, attacked him with knives while he was looking at himself in a
mirror. For a time he evaded their assaults by turning himself into
various shapes, assuming the likeness successively of Zeus and Cronus, of
a young man, of a lion, a horse, and a serpent. Finally, in the form of a
bull, he was cut to pieces by the murderous knives of his enemies.(48) His
Cretan myth, as related by Firmicus Maternus, ran thus. He was said to
have been the bastard son of Jupiter, a Cretan king. Going abroad, Jupiter
transferred the throne and sceptre to the youthful Dionysus, but, knowing
that his wife Juno cherished a jealous dislike of the child, he entrusted
Dionysus to the care of guards upon whose fidelity he believed he could
rely. Juno, however, bribed the guards, and amusing the child with rattles
and a cunningly-wrought looking-glass lured him into an ambush, where her
satellites, the Titans, rushed upon him, cut him limb from limb, boiled
his body with various herbs, and ate it. But his sister Minerva, who had
shared in the deed, kept his heart and gave it to Jupiter on his return,
revealing to him the whole history of the crime. In his rage, Jupiter put
the Titans to death by torture, and, to soothe his grief for the loss of
his son, made an image in which he enclosed the child’s heart, and then
built a temple in his honour.(49) In this version a Euhemeristic turn has
been given to the myth by representing Jupiter and Juno (Zeus and Hera) as
a king and queen of Crete. The guards referred to are the mythical Curetes
who danced a war-dance round the infant Dionysus, as they are said to have
done round the infant Zeus.(50) Very noteworthy is the legend, recorded
both by Nonnus and Firmicus, that in his infancy Dionysus occupied for a
short time the throne of his father Zeus. So Proclus tells us that
“Dionysus was the last king of the gods appointed by Zeus. For his father
set him on the kingly throne, and placed in his hand the sceptre, and made
him king of all the gods of the world.”(51) Such traditions point to a
custom of temporarily investing the king’s son with the royal dignity as a
preliminary to sacrificing him instead of his father. Pomegranates were
supposed to have sprung from the blood of Dionysus, as anemones from the
blood of Adonis and violets from the blood of Attis: hence women refrained
from eating seeds of pomegranates at the festival of the Thesmophoria.(52)
According to some, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at
the command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus.(53) The
grave of Dionysus was shewn in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue
of Apollo.(54) However, according to another account, the grave of
Dionysus was at Thebes, where he is said to have been torn in pieces.(55)
Thus far the resurrection of the slain god is not mentioned, but in other
versions of the myth it is variously related. According to one version,
which represented Dionysus as a son of Zeus and Demeter, his mother pieced
together his mangled limbs and made him young again.(56) In others it is
simply said that shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and
ascended up to heaven;(57) or that Zeus raised him up as he lay mortally
wounded;(58) or that Zeus swallowed the heart of Dionysus and then begat
him afresh by Semele,(59) who in the common legend figures as mother of
Dionysus. Or, again, the heart was pounded up and given in a portion to
Semele, who thereby conceived him.(60)
Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans celebrated a
biennial(61) festival at which the passion of Dionysus was represented in
every detail. All that he had done or suffered in his last moments was
enacted before the eyes of his worshippers, who tore a live bull to pieces
with their teeth and roamed the woods with frantic shouts. In front of
them was carried a casket supposed to contain the sacred heart of
Dionysus, and to the wild music of flutes and cymbals they mimicked the
rattles by which the infant god had been lured to his doom.(62) Where the
resurrection formed part of the myth, it also was acted at the rites,(63)
and it even appears that a general doctrine of resurrection, or at least
of immortality, was inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch, writing
to console his wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her
with the thought of the immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and
revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus.(64) A different form of the myth of
the death and resurrection of Dionysus is that he descended into Hades to
bring up his mother Semele from the dead.(65) The local Argive tradition
was that he went down through the Alcyonian lake; and his return from the
lower world, in other words his resurrection, was annually celebrated on
the spot by the Argives, who summoned him from the water by trumpet
blasts, while they threw a lamb into the lake as an offering to the warder
of the dead.(66) Whether this was a spring festival does not appear, but
the Lydians certainly celebrated the advent of Dionysus in spring; the god
was supposed to bring the season with him.(67) Deities of vegetation, who
are supposed to pass a certain portion of each year under ground,
naturally come to be regarded as gods of the lower world or of the dead.
Both Dionysus and Osiris were so conceived.(68)
(M10) A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus, which at first
sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of vegetation, is
that he was often conceived and represented in animal shape, especially in
the form, or at least with the horns, of a bull. Thus he is spoken of as
“cow-born,” “bull,” “bull-shaped,” “bull-faced,” “bull-browed,”
“bull-horned,” “horn-bearing,” “two-horned,” “horned.”(69) He was believed
to appear, at least occasionally, as a bull.(70) His images were often, as
at Cyzicus, made in bull shape,(71) or with bull horns;(72) and he was
painted with horns.(73) Types of the horned Dionysus are found amongst the
surviving monuments of antiquity.(74) On one statuette he appears clad in
a bull’s hide, the head, horns, and hoofs hanging down behind.(75) Again,
he is represented as a child with clusters of grapes round his brow, and a
calf’s head, with sprouting horns, attached to the back of his head.(76)
On a red-figured vase the god is portrayed as a calf-headed child seated
on a woman’s lap.(77) The people of Cynaetha in north-western Arcadia held
a festival of Dionysus in winter, when men, who had greased their bodies
with oil for the occasion, used to pick out a bull from the herd and carry
it to the sanctuary of the god. Dionysus was supposed to inspire their
choice of the particular bull,(78) which probably represented the deity
himself; for at his festivals he was believed to appear in bull form. The
women of Elis hailed him as a bull, and prayed him to come with his bull’s
foot. They sang, “Come hither, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea;
come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with thy bull’s foot, O goodly
bull, O goodly bull!”(79) The Bacchanals of Thrace wore horns in imitation
of their god.(80) According to the myth, it was in the shape of a bull
that he was torn to pieces by the Titans;(81) and the Cretans, when they
acted the sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live bull to pieces
with their teeth.(82) Indeed, the rending and devouring of live bulls and
calves appear to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites.(83)
When we consider the practice of portraying the god as a bull or with some
of the features of the animal, the belief that he appeared in bull form to
his worshippers at the sacred rites, and the legend that in bull form he
had been torn in pieces, we cannot doubt that in rending and devouring a
live bull at his festival the worshippers of Dionysus believed themselves
to be killing the god, eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.
(M11) Another animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of his
names was “Kid.”(84) At Athens and at Hermion he was worshipped under the
title of “the one of the Black Goatskin,” and a legend ran that on a
certain occasion he had appeared clad in the skin from which he took the
title.(85) In the wine-growing district of Phlius, where in autumn the
plain is still thickly mantled with the red and golden foliage of the
fading vines, there stood of old a bronze image of a goat, which the
husbandmen plastered with gold-leaf as a means of protecting their vines
against blight.(86) The image probably represented the vine-god himself.
To save him from the wrath of Hera, his father Zeus changed the youthful
Dionysus into a kid;(87) and when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the
fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat.(88) Hence when his
worshippers rent in pieces a live goat and devoured it raw,(89) they must
have believed that they were eating the body and blood of the god.
(M12) The custom of tearing in pieces the bodies of animals and of men and
then devouring them raw has been practised as a religious rite by savages
in modern times. We need not therefore dismiss as a fable the testimony of
antiquity to the observance of similar rites among the frenzied
worshippers of Bacchus. An English missionary to the Coast Indians of
British Columbia has thus described a scene like the cannibal orgies of
the Bacchanals. After mentioning that an old chief had ordered a female
slave to be dragged to the beach, murdered, and thrown into the water, he
proceeds as follows: “I did not see the murder, but, immediately after, I
saw crowds of people running out of those houses near to where the corpse
was thrown, and forming themselves into groups at a good distance away.
This I learnt was from fear of what was to follow. Presently two bands of
furious wretches appeared, each headed by a man in a state of nudity. They
gave vent to the most unearthly sounds, and the two naked men made
themselves look as unearthly as possible, proceeding in a creeping kind of
stoop, and stepping like two proud horses, at the same time shooting
forward each arm alternately, which they held out at full length for a
little time in the most defiant manner. Besides this, the continual
jerking their heads back, causing their long black hair to twist about,
added much to their savage appearance. For some time they pretended to be
seeking the body, and the instant they came where it lay they commenced
screaming and rushing round it like so many angry wolves. Finally they
seized it, dragged it out of the water, and laid it on the beach, where I
was told the naked men would commence tearing it to pieces with their
teeth. The two bands of men immediately surrounded them, and so hid their
horrid work. In a few minutes the crowd broke into two, when each of the
naked cannibals appeared with half of the body in his hands. Separating a
few yards, they commenced, amid horrid yells, their still more horrid
feast. The sight was too terrible to behold. I left the gallery with a
depressed heart. I may mention that the two bands of savages just alluded
to belong to that class which the whites term ‘medicine-men.’ ” The same
writer informs us that at the winter ceremonials of these Indians “the
cannibal, on such occasions, is generally supplied with two, three, or
four human bodies, which he tears to pieces before his audience. Several
persons, either from bravado or as a charm, present their arms for him to
bite. I have seen several whom he has bitten, and I hear two have died
from the effects.” And when corpses were not forthcoming, these cannibals
apparently seized and devoured living people. Mr. Duncan has seen hundreds
of the Tsimshian Indians sitting in their canoes which they had just
pushed off from the shore in order to escape being torn to pieces by a
party of prowling cannibals. Others of these Indians contented themselves
with tearing dogs to pieces, while their attendants kept up a growling
noise, or a whoop, “which was seconded by a screeching noise made from an
instrument which they believe to be the abode of a spirit.”(90)
(M13) Mr. Duncan’s account of these savage rites has been fully borne out
by later observation. Among the Kwakiutl Indians the Cannibals
(_Hamatsas_) are the highest in rank of the Secret Societies. They devour
corpses, bite pieces out of living people, and formerly ate slaves who had
been killed for the purpose. But when their fury has subsided, they are
obliged to pay compensation to the persons whom they have bitten and to
the owners of slaves whom they have killed. The indemnity consists
sometimes of blankets, sometimes of canoes. In the latter case the tariff
is fixed: one bite, one canoe. For some time after eating human flesh the
cannibal has to observe a great many rules, which regulate his eating and
drinking, his going out and his coming in, his clothing and his
intercourse with his wife.(91) Similar customs prevail among other tribes
of the same coast, such as the Bella Coola, the Tsimshian, the Niska, and
the Nootka. In the Nootka tribe members of the Panther Society tear dogs
to pieces and devour them. They wear masks armed with canine teeth.(92) So
among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands there is one
religion of cannibalism and another of dog-eating. The cannibals in a
state of frenzy, real or pretended, bite flesh out of the extended arms of
their fellow villagers. When they issue forth with cries of _Hop-pop_ to
observe this solemn rite, all who are of a different religious persuasion
make haste to get out of their way; but men of the cannibal creed and of
stout hearts will resolutely hold out their arms to be bitten. The sect of
dog-eaters cut or tear dogs to pieces and devour some of the flesh; but
they have to pay for the dogs which they consume in their religious
enthusiasm.(93) In the performance of these savage rites the frenzied
actors are believed to be inspired by a Cannibal Spirit and a Dog-eating
Spirit respectively.(94) Again, in Morocco there is an order of saints
known as Isowa or Aïsawa, followers of Mohammed ben Isa or Aïsa of
Mequinez, whose tomb is at Fez. Every year on their founder’s birthday
they assemble at his shrine or elsewhere and holding each other’s hands
dance a frantic dance round a fire. “While the mad dance is still
proceeding, a sudden rush is made from the sanctuary, and the dancers,
like men delirious, speed away to a place where live goats are tethered in
readiness. At sight of these animals the fury of the savage and excited
crowd reaches its height. In a few minutes the wretched animals are cut,
or rather torn to pieces, and an orgy takes place over the raw and
quivering flesh. When they seem satiated, the Emkaddim, who is generally
on horseback, and carries a long stick, forms a sort of procession,
preceded by wild music, if such discordant sounds will bear the name.
Words can do no justice to the frightful scene which now ensues. The naked
savages—for on these occasions a scanty piece of cotton is all their
clothing—with their long black hair, ordinarily worn in plaits, tossed
about by the rapid to-and-fro movements of the head, with faces and hands
reeking with blood, and uttering loud cries resembling the bleating of
goats, again enter the town. The place is now at their mercy, and the
people avoid them as much as possible by shutting themselves up in their
houses. A Christian or a Jew would run great risk of losing his life if
either were found in the street. Goats are pushed out from the doors, and
these the fanatics tear immediately to pieces with their hands, and then
dispute over the morsels of bleeding flesh, as though they were ravenous
wolves instead of men. Snakes also are thrown to them as tests of their
divine frenzy, and these share the fate of the goats. Sometimes a luckless
dog, straying as dogs will stray in a tumult, is seized on. Then the
laymen, should any be at hand, will try to prevent the desecration of
pious mouths. But the fanatics sometimes prevail, and the unclean animal,
abhorred by the mussulman, is torn in pieces and devoured, or pretended to
be devoured, with indiscriminating rage.”(95)
(M14) The custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall examine
more in detail further on, belongs to a very early stage of human culture,
and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The advance of thought
tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of their bestial and
vegetable husk, and to leave their human attributes (which are always the
kernel of the conception) as the final and sole residuum. In other words,
animal and plant gods tend to become purely anthropomorphic. When they
have become wholly or nearly so, the animals and plants which were at
first the deities themselves, still retain a vague and ill-understood
connexion with the anthropomorphic gods who have been developed out of
them. The origin of the relationship between the deity and the animal or
plant having been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it.
These explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based
on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal or
plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only exceptionally
slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to explain either why it
was spared or why it was killed. Devised for the former purpose, the myth
would tell of some service rendered to the deity by the animal; devised
for the latter purpose, the myth would tell of some injury inflicted by
the animal on the god. The reason given for sacrificing goats to Dionysus
exemplifies a myth of the latter sort. They were sacrificed to him, it was
said, because they injured the vine.(96) Now the goat, as we have seen,
was originally an embodiment of the god himself. But when the god had
divested himself of his animal character and had become essentially
anthropomorphic, the killing of the goat in his worship came to be
regarded no longer as a slaying of the deity himself, but as a sacrifice
offered to him; and since some reason had to be assigned why the goat in
particular should be sacrificed, it was alleged that this was a punishment
inflicted on the goat for injuring the vine, the object of the god’s
especial care. Thus we have the strange spectacle of a god sacrificed to
himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. And as the deity is
supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that, when
the victim is the god’s old self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the
goat-god Dionysus is represented as eating raw goat’s blood;(97) and the
bull-god Dionysus is called “eater of bulls.”(98) On the analogy of these
instances we may conjecture that wherever a deity is described as the
eater of a particular animal, the animal in question was originally
nothing but the deity himself.(99) Later on we shall find that some
savages propitiate dead bears and whales by offering them portions of
their own bodies.(100)
(M15) All this, however, does not explain why a deity of vegetation should
appear in animal form. But the consideration of that point had better be
deferred till we have discussed the character and attributes of Demeter.
Meantime it remains to mention that in some places, instead of an animal,
a human being was torn in pieces at the rites of Dionysus. This was the
practice in Chios and Tenedos;(101) and at Potniae in Boeotia the
tradition ran that it had been formerly the custom to sacrifice to the
goat-smiting Dionysus a child, for whom a goat was afterwards
substituted.(102) At Orchomenus, as we have seen, the human victim was
taken from the women of an old royal family.(103) As the slain bull or
goat represented the slain god, so, we may suppose, the human victim also
represented him.
(M16) The legends of the deaths of Pentheus and Lycurgus, two kings who
are said to have been torn to pieces, the one by Bacchanals, the other by
horses, for their opposition to the rites of Dionysus, may be, as I have
already suggested,(104) distorted reminiscences of a custom of sacrificing
divine kings in the character of Dionysus and of dispersing the fragments
of their broken bodies over the fields for the purpose of fertilising
them. In regard to Lycurgus, king of the Thracian tribe of the Edonians,
it is expressly said that his subjects at the bidding of an oracle caused
him to be rent in pieces by horses for the purpose of restoring the
fertility of the ground after a period of barrenness and dearth.(105)
There is no improbability in the tradition. We have seen that in Africa
and other parts of the world kings or chiefs have often been put to death
by their people for similar reasons.(106) Further, it is significant that
King Lycurgus is said to have slain his own son Dryas with an axe in a fit
of madness, mistaking him for a vine-branch.(107) Have we not in this
tradition a reminiscence of a custom of sacrificing the king’s son in
place of the father? Similarly Athamas, a King of Thessaly or Boeotia, is
said to have been doomed by an oracle to be sacrificed at the altar in
order to remove the curse of barrenness which afflicted his country;
however, he contrived to evade the sentence and in a fit of madness killed
his own son Learchus, mistaking him for a wild beast. That this legend was
not a mere myth is made probable by a custom observed at Alus down to
historical times: the eldest male scion of the royal house was regularly
sacrificed in due form to Laphystian Zeus if he ever set foot within the
town-hall.(108) The close resemblance between the legends of King Athamas
and King Lycurgus furnishes a ground for believing both legends to be
based on a real custom of sacrificing either the king himself or one of
his sons for the good of the country; and the story that the king’s son
Dryas perished because his frenzied father mistook him for a vine-branch
fits in well with the theory that the victim in these sacrifices
represented the vine-god Dionysus. It is probably no mere coincidence that
Dionysus himself is said to have been torn in pieces at Thebes,(109) the
very place where according to legend the same fate befell king Pentheus at
the hands of the frenzied votaries of the vine-god.(110)
(M17) The theory that in prehistoric times Greek and Thracian kings or
their sons may have been dismembered in the character of the vine-god or
the corn-god for the purpose of fertilising the earth or quickening the
vines has received of late years some confirmation from the discovery that
down to the present time in Thrace, the original home of Dionysus, a drama
is still annually performed which reproduces with remarkable fidelity some
of the most striking traits in the Dionysiac myth and ritual.(111) In a
former part of this work I have already called attention to this
interesting survival of paganism among a Christian peasantry;(112) but it
seems desirable and appropriate in this place to draw out somewhat more
fully the parallelism between the modern drama and the ancient worship.
(M18) The drama, which may reasonably be regarded as a direct descendant
of the Dionysiac rites, is annually performed at the Carnival in all the
Christian villages which cluster round Viza, the ancient Bizya, a town of
Thrace situated about midway between Adrianople and Constantinople. In
antiquity the city was the capital of the Thracian tribe of the Asti; the
kings had their palace there,(113) probably in the acropolis, of which
some fine walls are still standing. Inscriptions preserved in the modern
town record the names of some of these old kings.(114) The date of the
celebration is Cheese Monday, as it is locally called, which is the Monday
of the last week of Carnival. At Viza itself the mummery has been shorn of
some of its ancient features, but these have been kept up at the villages
and have been particularly observed and recorded at the village of St.
George (Haghios Gheorgios). It is to the drama as acted at that village
that the following description specially applies. The principal parts in
the drama are taken by two men disguised in goatskins. Each of them wears
a headdress made of a complete goatskin, which is stuffed so as to rise a
foot or more like a shako over his head, while the skin falls over the
face, forming a mask with holes cut for the eyes and mouth. Their
shoulders are thickly padded with hay to protect them from the blows which
used to be rained very liberally on their backs. Fawnskins on their
shoulders and goatskins on their legs are or used to be part of their
equipment, and another indispensable part of it is a number of sheep-bells
tied round their waists. One of the two skin-clad actors carries a bow and
the other a wooden effigy of the male organ of generation. Both these
actors must be married men. According to Mr. Vizyenos, they are chosen for
periods of four years. Two unmarried boys dressed as girls and sometimes
called brides also take part in the play; and a man disguised as an old
woman in rags carries a mock baby in a basket; the brat is supposed to be
a seven-months’ child born out of wedlock and begotten by an unknown
father. The basket in which the hopeful infant is paraded bears the
ancient name of the winnowing-fan (_likni_, contracted from _liknon_) and
the babe itself receives the very title “He of the Winnowing-fan”
(_Liknites_) which in antiquity was applied to Dionysus. Two other actors,
clad in rags with blackened faces and armed with stout saplings, play the
parts of a gypsy-man and his wife; others personate policemen armed with
swords and whips; and the troupe is completed by a man who discourses
music on a bagpipe.
(M19) Such are the masqueraders. The morning of the day on which they
perform their little drama is spent by them going from door to door
collecting bread, eggs, or money. At every door the two skin-clad maskers
knock, the boys disguised as girls dance, and the gypsy man and wife enact
an obscene pantomime on the straw-heap before the house. When every house
in the village has been thus visited, the troop takes up position on the
open space before the village church, where the whole population has
already mustered to witness the performance. After a dance hand in hand,
in which all the actors take part, the two skin-clad maskers withdraw and
leave the field to the gypsies, who now pretend to forge a ploughshare,
the man making believe to hammer the share and his wife to work the
bellows. At this point the old woman’s baby is supposed to grow up at a
great pace, to develop a huge appetite for meat and drink, and to clamour
for a wife. One of the skin-clad men now pursues one of the two pretended
brides, and a mock marriage is celebrated between the couple. After these
nuptials have been performed with a parody of a real wedding, the mock
bridegroom is shot by his comrade with the bow and falls down on his face
like dead. His slayer thereupon feigns to skin him with a knife; but the
dead man’s wife laments over her deceased husband with loud cries,
throwing herself across his prostrate body. In this lamentation the slayer
himself and all the other actors join in: a Christian funeral service is
burlesqued; and the pretended corpse is lifted up as if to be carried to
the grave. At this point, however, the dead man disconcerts the
preparations for his burial by suddenly coming to life again and getting
up. So ends the drama of death and resurrection.
(M20) The next act opens with a repetition of the pretence of forging a
ploughshare, but this time the gypsy man hammers on a real share. When the
implement is supposed to have been fashioned, a real plough is brought
forward, the mockery appears to cease, the two boys dressed as girls are
yoked to the plough and drag it twice round the village square contrary to
the way of the sun. One of the two skin-clad men walks at the tail of the
plough, the other guides it in front, and a third man follows in the rear
scattering seed from a basket. After the two rounds have been completed,
the gypsy and his wife are yoked to the plough, and drag it a third time
round the square, the two skin-clad men still playing the part of
ploughmen. At Viza the plough is drawn by the skin-clad men themselves.
While the plough is going its rounds, followed by the sower sowing the
seed, the people pray aloud, saying, “May wheat be ten piastres the
bushel! Rye five piastres the bushel! Amen, O God, that the poor may eat!
Yea, O God, that poor folk be filled!” This ends the performance. The
evening is spent in feasting on the proceeds of the house-to-house
visitation which took place in the morning.(115)
(M21) A kindred festival is observed on the same day of the Carnival at
Kosti, a place in the extreme north of Thrace, near the Black Sea. There a
man dressed in sheepskins or goatskins, with a mask on his face, bells
round his neck, and a broom in his hand, goes round the village collecting
food and presents. He is addressed as a king and escorted with music. With
him go boys dressed as girls, and another boy, not so disguised, who
carries wine in a wooden bottle and gives of it to every householder to
drink in a cup, receiving a gift in return. The king then mounts a
two-wheeled cart and is drawn to the church. He carries seed in his hand,
and at the church two bands of men, one of married men and the other of
unmarried men, try each in turn to induce the king to throw the seed on
them. Finally he casts it on the ground in front of the church. The
ceremony ends with stripping the king of his clothes and flinging him into
the river, after which he resumes his usual dress.(116)
(M22) In these ceremonies, still annually held at and near an old capital
of Thracian kings, the points of similarity to the ritual of the ancient
Thracian deity Dionysus are sufficiently obvious.(117) The goatskins in
which the principal actors are disguised remind us of the identification
of Dionysus with a goat: the infant, cradled in a winnowing-fan and taking
its name from the implement, answers exactly to the traditions and the
monuments which represent the infant Dionysus as similarly cradled and
similarly named: the pretence that the baby is a seven-months’ child born
out of wedlock and begotten by an unknown father tallies precisely with
the legend that Dionysus was born prematurely in the seventh month as the
offspring of an intrigue between a mortal woman and a mysterious divine
father:(118) the same coarse symbol of reproductive energy which
characterised the ancient ritual of Dionysus figures conspicuously in the
modern drama: the annual mock marriage of the goatskin-clad mummer with
the pretended bride may be compared with the annual pretence of marrying
Dionysus to the Queen of Athens: and the simulated slaughter and
resurrection of the same goatskin-clad actor may be compared with the
traditional slaughter and resurrection of the god himself. Further, the
ceremony of ploughing, in which after his resurrection the goatskin-clad
mummer takes a prominent part, fits in well not only with the legend that
Dionysus was the first to yoke oxen to the plough, but also with the
symbolism of the winnowing-fan in his worship; while the prayers for
plentiful crops which accompany the ploughing accord with the omens of an
abundant harvest which were drawn of old from the mystic light seen to
illumine by night one of his ancient sanctuaries in Thrace. Lastly, in the
ceremony as observed at Kosti the giving of wine by the king’s attendant
is an act worthy of the wine-god: the throwing of seed by the king can
only be interpreted, like the ploughing, as a charm to promote the
fertility of the ground; and the royal title borne by the principal masker
harmonises well with the theory that the part of the god of the corn and
the wine was of old sustained by the Thracian kings who reigned at Bisya.
(M23) If we ask, To what ancient festival of Dionysus does the modern
celebration of the Carnival in Thrace most nearly correspond? the answer
can be hardly doubtful. The Thracian drama of the mock marriage of the
goatskin-clad mummer, his mimic death and resurrection, and his subsequent
ploughing, corresponds both in date and in character most nearly to the
Athenian festival of the Anthesteria, which was celebrated at Athens
during three days in early spring, towards the end of February or the
beginning of March. Thus the date of the Anthesteria could not fall far
from, and it might sometimes actually coincide with, the last week of the
Carnival, the date of the Thracian celebration. While the details of the
festival of the Anthesteria are obscure, its general character is well
known. It was a festival both of wine-drinking and of the dead, whose
souls were supposed to revisit the city and to go about the streets, just
as in modern Europe and in many other parts of the world the ghosts of the
departed are still believed to return to their old homes on one day of the
year and to be entertained by their relatives at a solemn Feast of All
Souls.(119) But the Dionysiac nature of the festival was revealed not
merely by the opening of the wine-vats and the wassailing which went on
throughout the city among freemen and slaves alike; on the second day of
the festival the marriage of Dionysus with the Queen of Athens was
celebrated with great solemnity at the Bucolium or Ox-stall.(120) It has
been suggested with much probability(121) that at this sacred marriage in
the Ox-stall the god was represented wholly or partly in bovine shape,
whether by an image or by an actor dressed in the hide and wearing the
horns of a bull; for, as we have seen, Dionysus was often supposed to
assume the form of a bull and to present himself in that guise to his
worshippers. If this conjecture should prove to be correct—though a
demonstration of it can hardly be expected—the sacred marriage of the
Queen to the Bull-god at Athens would be parallel to the sacred marriage
of the Queen to the Bull-god at Cnossus, according to the interpretation
which I have suggested of the myth of Pasiphae and the Minotaur;(122) only
whereas the bull-god at Cnossus, if I am right, stood for the Sun, the
bull-god at Athens stood for the powers of vegetation, especially the corn
and the vines. It would not be surprising that among a cattle-breeding
people in early days the bull, regarded as a type of strength and
reproductive energy, should be employed to symbolise and represent more
than one of the great powers of nature. If Dionysus did indeed figure as a
bull at his marriage, it is not improbable that on that occasion his
representative, whether a real bull or a man dressed in a bull’s hide,
took part in a ceremony of ploughing; for we have seen that the invention
of yoking oxen to the plough was ascribed to Dionysus, and we know that
the Athenians performed a sacred ceremony of ploughing, which went by the
name of the Ox-yoked Ploughing and took place in a field or other open
piece of ground at the foot of the Acropolis.(123) It is a reasonable
conjecture that the field of the Ox-yoked Ploughing may have adjoined the
building called the Ox-stall in which the marriage of Dionysus with the
Queen was solemnised;(124) for that building is known to have been near
the Prytaneum or Town-Hall on the northern slope of the Acropolis.(125)
(M24) Thus on the whole the ancient festival of the Anthesteria, so far as
its features are preserved by tradition or can be restored by the use of
reasonable conjecture, presents several important analogies to the modern
Thracian Carnival in respect of wine-drinking, a mock marriage of
disguised actors, and a ceremony of ploughing. The resemblance between the
ancient and the modern ritual would be still closer if some eminent modern
scholars, who wrote before the discovery of the Thracian Carnival, and
whose judgment was therefore not biassed by its analogy to the Athenian
festival, are right in holding that another important feature of the
Anthesteria was the dramatic death and resurrection of Dionysus.(126) They
point out that at the marriage of Dionysus fourteen Sacred Women
officiated at fourteen altars;(127) that the number of the Titans, who
tore Dionysus in pieces, was fourteen, namely seven male and seven
female;(128) and that Osiris, a god who in some respects corresponded
closely to Dionysus, is said to have been rent by Typhon into fourteen
fragments.(129) Hence they conjecture that at Athens the body of Dionysus
was dramatically broken into fourteen fragments, one for each of the
fourteen altars, and that it was afterwards dramatically pieced together
and restored to life by the fourteen Sacred Women, just as the broken body
of Osiris was pieced together by a company of gods and goddesses and
restored to life by his sister Isis.(130) The conjecture is ingenious and
plausible, but with our existing sources of information it must remain a
conjecture and nothing more. Could it be established, it would forge
another strong link in the chain of evidence which binds the modern
Thracian Carnival to the ancient Athenian Anthesteria; for in that case
the drama of the divine death and resurrection would have to be added to
the other features which these two festivals of spring possess in common,
and we should have to confess that Greece had what we may call its Good
Friday and its Easter Sunday long before the events took place in Judaea
which diffused these two annual commemorations of the Dying and Reviving
God over a great part of the civilised world. From so simple a beginning
may flow consequences so far-reaching and impressive; for in the light of
the rude Thracian ceremony we may surmise that the high tragedy of the
death and resurrection of Dionysus originated in a rustic mummers’ play
acted by ploughmen for the purpose of fertilising the brown earth which
they turned up with the gleaming share in sunshiny days of spring, as they
followed the slow-paced oxen down the long furrows in the fallow field.
Later on we shall see that a play of the same sort is still acted, or was
acted down to recent years, by English yokels on Plough Monday.
(M25) But before we pass from the tragic myth and ritual of Dionysus to
the sweeter story and milder worship of Demeter and Persephone, the true
Greek deities of the corn, it is fair to admit that the legends of human
sacrifice, which have left so dark a stain on the memory of the old
Thracian god, may have been nothing more than mere misinterpretations of a
sacrificial ritual in which an animal victim was treated as a human being.
For example, at Tenedos the new-born calf sacrificed to Dionysus was shod
in buskins, and the mother cow was tended like a woman in child-bed.(131)
At Rome a she-goat was sacrificed to Vedijovis as if it were a human
victim.(132) Yet on the other hand it is equally possible, and perhaps
more probable, that these curious rites were themselves mitigations of an
older and ruder custom of sacrificing human beings, and that the later
pretence of treating the sacrificial victims as if they were human beings
was merely part of a pious and merciful fraud, which palmed off on the
deity less precious victims than living men and women. This interpretation
is supported by the undoubted cases in which animals have been substituted
for human victims.(133) On the whole we may conclude that neither the
polished manners of a later age, nor the glamour which Greek poetry and
art threw over the figure of Dionysus, sufficed to conceal or erase the
deep lines of savagery and cruelty imprinted on the features of this
barbarous deity.