Volume II Part 23 (2/2)

* Decharme, Mythologie de la Grece, p. 437, Compare Preller, i. 572 on tiefste Naturschmerz, and so forth.

Lobeck looks on the wild acts, the tearing of fawns and dogs, the half-naked dances, the gnawing of raw bleeding flesh, as the natural expression of fierce untutored folk, revelling in freedom, leaping and shouting. But the odd thing is that the most civilised of peoples should so long have retained the manners of _ingenia inculta et indomita_.

Whatever the original significance of the Dionysiac revels, that significance was certainly expressed in a ferocious and barbaric fas.h.i.+on, more worthy of Australians than Athenians.

On this view of the case it might perhaps be maintained that the germ of the myth is merely the sacrifice itself, the barbaric and cruel dismembering of an animal victim, which came to be identified with the G.o.d. The sufferings of the victim would thus finally be trans.m.u.ted into a legend about the pa.s.sion of the deity. The old Greek explanation that the ritual was designed ”in imitation of what befel the G.o.d” would need to be reversed. The truth would be that the myth of what befel the G.o.d was borrowed from the actual torture of the victim with which the G.o.d was identified Examples of this mystic habit of mind, in which the slain beast, the G.o.d, and even the officiating celebrant were confused in thought with each other, are sufficiently common in ritual.*

* As to the torch-dances of the Maenads, compare Roscher, Lexikon, p. 1041, and Mannhardt Wald und Feki Kult.i.ts, i.

534, for parallels in European folk-lore.

The sacrifices in the ritual of Dionysus have a very marked character and here more, commonly than in other h.e.l.lenic cults, the G.o.d and the victim are recognised as essentially the same. The sacrifice, in fact, is a sacrament, and in partaking of the victim the communicants eat their G.o.d. This detail is so prominent that it has not escaped the notice even of mythologists who prefer to take an ideal view of myths and customs, to regard them as symbols in a nature-wors.h.i.+p originally pure. Thus M. Decharme says of the bull-feast in the Dionysiac cult, ”Comme le taureau est un des formes de Dionysos, c'etait le corps du dieu dont se repaissaient les inities, c'etait son sang dont ils s'abreuvaient dans ce banquet mystique”. Now it was the peculiarity of the Bac-chici who maintained these rites, that, as a rule, they abstained from the flesh of animals altogether, or at least their conduct took this shape when adopted into the Orphic discipline.* This ritual, therefore, has points in common with the usages which appear also to have survived into the cult of the ram-G.o.d in Egypt.** The conclusion suggested is that where Dionysus was adored with this sacrament of bull's flesh, he had either been developed out of, or had succeeded to, the wors.h.i.+p of a bull-totem, and had inherited his characteristic ritual. Mr. Frazer, however, proposes quite a different solution.*** Ours is rendered plausible by the famous Elean chant in which the G.o.d was thus addressed: ”Come, hero Dionysus, come with the Graces to thy holy house by the sh.o.r.es of the sea; hasten with thy bull-foot”. Then the chorus repeated, ”Goodly bull, goodly bull”.****

M. Decharme publishes a cameo***** in which the G.o.d is represented as a bull, with the three Graces standing on his neck, and seven stars in the field. M. Decharme decides that the stars are the Pleiades, the Graces the rays of the vernal sun, and Dionysus as a bull the symbol of the vernal sun itself. But all such symbolical explanations are apt to be mere private conjectures, and they are of no avail in face of the ritual which, on the other hypothesis, is to be expected, and is actually found, in connection with the bull Dionysus. Where Dionysus is not absolutely called a bull, he is addressed as the ”horned deity,” the ”bull-horned,” the ”horned child”.******

* Lobeck, Aglaoph., i 244; Plato, Laws, vi. 782; Herodot, ii. 81. Porphyry says that this also was the rule of Pythagoras (Vita Pyth., 1630, p. 22).

** Herodot., ii. 42.

*** Golden Bough, vol. ii.

**** Plutarch, Qu. Or., 3d.

***** Op. cit., p. 431.

****** Clemens Alex., Adhort, ii. 15-18; Nonnus, vi. 264; Diodorus, iv. 4. 3. 64.

A still more curious incident of the Dionysiac wors.h.i.+p was the sacrifice of a booted calf, a calf with cothurns on its feet.* The people of Tenedos, says aelian, used to tend their goodliest cow with great care, to treat it, when it calved, like a woman in labour, to put the calf in boots and sacrifice it, and then to stone the sacrificer and drive him into the sea to expiate his crime. In this ceremony, as in the Diipolia at Athens, the slain bull is, as it were, a member of the blood-kindred of the man who immolates him, and who has to expiate the deed as if it were a murder.** In this connection it is worth remarking that Dionysus Zagreus, when, according to the myth, he was attacked by the t.i.tans, tried to escape his enemies by a.s.suming various forms. It was in the guise of a bull that he was finally captured and rent asunder. The custom of rending the living victims of his cult was carried so far that, when Pentheus disturbed his mysteries, the king was torn piecemeal by the women of his own family.*** The pious acquiescence of the author of the so-called Theocritean idyll in this butchery is a curious example of the conservatism of religious sentiment. The connection of Dionysus with the bull in particular is attested by various ritual epithets, such as ”the bull,” ”bull-born,”**** ”bull-horned,” and ”bull-browed”.*****

He was also wors.h.i.+pped with sacrifice of he-goats; according to the popular explanation, because the goat gnaws the vine, and therefore is odious to the G.o.d.

* aelian., H. A.t xii. 34.

** O. Muller, Proleg., Engl, transl., 322, attributes the Tenedos Dionysus rites to ”the Beotic Achsean emigrants”.

Gf, Aglaoph., 674-677.

*** Theocritus, Idyll, xxvi.

**** Pollux, iv. 86.

***** Athenaus, xi. 466, a.

The truth is, that animals, as the old commentator on Virgil remarks, were sacrificed to the various G.o.ds, ”_aut per similitudinem aut per contrarietatem_” either because there was a community of nature between the deity and the beast, or because the beast had once been sacred in a hostile clan or tribe.* The G.o.d derived some of his ritual names from the goat as well as from the bull According to one myth, Dionysus was changed into a kid by Zeus, to enable him to escape the jealousy of Hera.** ”It is a peculiarity,” says Voigt, ”of the Dionysus ritual that the G.o.d is one of his offering.” But though the ident.i.ty of the G.o.d and the victim is manifest, the phenomenon is too common in religion to be called peculiar.*** Plutarch**** especially mentions that ”many of the Greeks make statues of Dionysus in the form of a bull”.

Dionysus was not only an animal-G.o.d, or a G.o.d who absorbed in his rights and t.i.tles various elder forms of beast-wors.h.i.+p. Trees also stood in the same relation to him. As _Dendrites_, he is, like Artemis, a tree-G.o.d, and probably succeeded to the cult of certain sacred trees; just as, for example, St. Bridget, in Ireland, succeeded to the cult of the fire-G.o.ddess and to her ceremonial.*****

* Cf. Roscher, Lexikon, p. 1059; Robertson Smith on ”Sacrifice,” Encyc. Brit.

** Appolodorus, iii. 4, 9.

*** ”Dionysos selber. Stier Zicklein ist, und als Zagreus- kind selber, den Opfertod erleidet.” Ap. Roscher, p. 1059.

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