Volume II Part 21 (2/2)

** O. Muller, Engl. transl., p. 15; Catast., i.; Apollodor., iii. 82; Hyginus, 176, 177. A number of less important references are given in Bachofen's Der Bar in den Religionen des Alterthums.

Such is the ancient myth, which Otfried Muller endeavours to explain by the light of his lucid common sense, without the a.s.sistance which we can now derive from anthropological research. The nymph Callisto, in his opinion, is a mere refraction from Artemis herself, under her Arcadian and poetic name of Calliste, ”the most beautiful”. Hard by the tumulus known as the grave of Callisto was a shrine, Pausanias tells us, of Artemis _Calliste_.* Pamphos, he adds, was the first poet known to him who praised Artemis by this t.i.tle, and he learned it from the Arcadians.

Muller next remarks on the attributes of Artemis in Athens, the Artemis known as Brauronia. ”Now,” says he, ”we set out from this, that the circ.u.mstance of the G.o.ddess who is served at Brauron by she-bears having a friend and companion changed into a bear, cannot possibly be a freak of chance, but that this metamorphosis has its foundation in the fact that the animal was sacred to the G.o.ddess.”

It will become probable that the animal actually was mythically identified with the G.o.ddess at an extremely remote period, or, at all events, that the G.o.ddess succeeded to, and threw her protection over, an ancient wors.h.i.+p of the animal.

Pa.s.sing then from Arcadia, where the friend of the G.o.ddess becomes a she-bear, to Brauron and Munychia in Attica, we find that the local Artemis there, an Artemis connected by legend with the fierce Taurian G.o.ddess, is served by young girls, who imitate, in dances, the gait of bears, who are called little bears, apktoi, and whose ministry is named aptcreia, that is, ”a playing the bear”. Some have held that the girls once wore bear-skins.**

* Paus., viii. 3.

** Claus, op. cit., p. 76. [Suchier, De Dian Brauron, p.

33.] The bearskin seems later to have been exchanged for a saffron raiment. Compare Harpokration, Aristophanes, _Lysistrata_, 646. The Scholiast on that pa.s.sage collects legendary explanations, setting forth that the rites were meant to appease the G.o.ddess for the slaying of a tame bear [cf. Apostolius, vii. 10]. Mr. Parnell has collected all the lore in his work on the Cults of the Greek States.

Familiar examples in ancient and cla.s.sical times of this religious service by men in b.e.s.t.i.a.l guise are the wolf-dances of the Hirpi or ”wolves,” and the use of the ram-skin in Egypt and Greece.* These Brauronian rites point to a period when the G.o.ddess was herself a bear, or when a bear-myth accrued to her legend, and this inference is confirmed by the singular tradition that she was not only a bear, but a bear who craved for human blood.**

* Servius. Jen. i. xi. 785. For a singular parallel in modern French folk-lore to the dance of the Hirpi, see Mannhardt, Wald und Feld Qultus, ii 824, 825. For the ram, see Herodotus, ii. 42. In Thebes the ram's skin was in the yearly festival flayed, and placed on the statue of the G.o.d.

Compare, in the case of the buzzard, Bancroft, iii. 168.

Great care is taken in preserving the skin of the sacrificed totem, the buzzard, as it makes part of a sacred dress.

** Apostolius, viii. 19, vii. 10, quoted by O. Muller (cf.

Welcker, i. 573).

The connection between the Arcadian Artemis, the Artemis of Brauron, and the common rituals and creeds of totemistic wors.h.i.+p is now, perhaps, undeniably apparent. Perhaps in all the legend and all the cult of the G.o.ddess there is no more archaic element than this. The speech of the women in the _Lysistrata_, recalling the days of their childhood when they ”were bears,” takes us back to a remote past when the tribes settled at Brauron were bear-wors.h.i.+ppers, and, in all probability, claimed to be of the bear stock or kindred. Their distant descendants still imitated the creature's movements in a sacred dance; and the girls of Periclean Athens acted at that moment like the young men of the Mandans or Nootkas in their wolf-dance or buffalo-dance. Two questions remain unanswered: how did a G.o.ddess of the name of Artemis, and with her wide and beneficent functions, succeed to a cult so barbarous? or how, on the other hand, did the cult of a ravening she-bear develop into the humane and pure religion of Artemis?

Here is a moment in mythical and religious evolution which almost escapes our inquiry. We find, in actual historical processes, nothing more akin to it than the relation borne by the Samoan G.o.ds to the various animals in which they are supposed to be manifest. How did the complex theory of the nature of Artemis arise? what was its growth? at what precise hour did it emanc.i.p.ate itself on the whole from the lower savage creeds? or how was it developed out of their unpromising materials? The science of mythology may perhaps never find a key to these obscure problems.*

* The symbolic explanation of Bachofen, Claus and others is to the effect that the she-bear (to take that case) is a beast in which the maternal instinct is very strong, and apparently that the she-bear, deprived of her whelps, is a fit symbol of a G.o.ddess notoriously virginal, and without offspring.

The G.o.ddess of Brauron, succeeding probably to the cult of a she-bear, called for human blood. With human blood the Artemis Orthia of Sparta was propitiated. Of this G.o.ddess and her rights Pausanias tells a very remarkable story. The image of the G.o.ddess, he declares, is barbarous; which probably means that even among the archaic wooden idols of Greece it seemed peculiarly savage in style. Astrabacus and Alopecus (the a.s.s and the fox), sons of Agis, are said to have found the idol in a bush, and to have been struck mad at the sight of it. Those who sacrificed to the G.o.ddess fell to blows and slew each other; a pestilence followed, and it became clear that the G.o.ddess demanded human victims. ”Her altar must be drenched in the blood of men,” the victim being chosen by lot.

Lycurgus got the credit of subst.i.tuting the rite in which boys were flogged before the G.o.ddess to the effusion of blood for the older human sacrifices.* The Taurian Artemis, adored with human sacrifice, and her priestess, Iphigenia, perhaps a form of the G.o.ddess, are familiar examples of this sanguinary ritual.** Suchier is probably correct in denying that these sacrifices are of foreign origin. They are closely interwoven with the oldest idols and oldest myths of the districts least open to foreign influence. An Achaean example is given by Pausanias.***

Artemis was adored with the offering of a beautiful girl and boy.

Not far from Brauron, at Halae, was a very ancient temple of Artemis Tauropolos, in which blood was drawn from a man's throat by the edge of the sword, clearly a modified survival of human sacrifice. The whole connection of Artemis with Taurian rites has been examined by Muller,**** in his _Orchomenos_***** Horns grow from the shoulders of Artemis Tauropolos, on the coins of Amphipolis, and on Macedonian coins she rides on a bull. According to Decharme,****** the Taurian Artemis, with her hideous rites, was confused, by an accidental resemblance of names, with this Artemis Tauropolos, whose ”symbol” was a bull, and who (whatever we may think of the symbolic hypothesis) used bulls as her ”vehicle” and wore bull's horns.

* Paus., iii. 8,16. Cf. Muller, Dorians, book ii. chap. 9, 6. Pausanias, viii. 23, 1, mentions a similar custom, ordained by the Delphian oracle, the flogging of women at the feast of Dionysus in Alea of Arcadia.

** Cf. Muller, Dorians, it 9, 6, and Claus, op. cit., cap.

v.

*** Paus., vii. 19.

****Op. cit., ii. 9, 6.

***** Ibid., p. 311. Qf. Euripides, Iph. Taur., 1424, and Roscher, Lexikon, p. 568.

<script>