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rites of initiation at Eleusis for which it formed the i centre move Pindar to one of his rare mystical stanzas:

'Blessed is he who hath beheld them
Before he passeth beneath the earth;
He knoweth the end of all man's living,
He knoweth the God-given birth.'

To the average Greek, as numerous passages show, this ritual of the Great Goddesses was a unique centre of comfort and sustainment. For these and other reasons, even before the discoveries of pre-Homeric civilisation in Greek lands, it was surmised by anthropologists, and notably by Miss Harrison, that their worship belonged to the most fundamental part of Hellenic religion. Further research in many fields has suggested that both the Mother and the Maiden are avatars of one and the same Being who dies and revives and gives life for ever, and, indeed, that all the leading goddesses of Greece may be aspects of this one Nature-goddess, and she herself originally the feminine consort, sometimes the ruler, of one virile divinity, conceived as her bridegroom, or her child, or her nursling. There is much to warrant the suggestion. Wherever the worship of any one goddess appears intense and important, there we find elements pointing to the cult of the universal Mother who gives life and takes it. Aphrodite is conceived by Sophocles (and Venus by Lucretius), as the Genetrix who drives all animate things to creation. And all students, since the work of Sir James Frazer, recognise the importance of her link with Adonis, the young man beautiful as the flower of the spring, doomed to an early death like that flower, and able, every spring-time, to rise once more in his bloom. Few now would deny the conclusion that Adonis must be in some sense a spirit of the spring.

In the case of virgin goddesses such as Athena and Artemis, this element of productivity is, naturally, less marked; but even here every one will remember the many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians, and throughout Greece Artemis was the patroness of all young animals in the wild. That she demanded, on occasion, their sacrifice, is only what we should expect, now that we realise better the sacramental nature of so many, possibly

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dt of all victims, and how often the most cherished must Z8 be the chosen. With Athena again, as with Artemis,

it may be admitted that the 'maiden' has overshadowed the 'mother.' But, none the less, it is significant that Athena should be the foster-mother of Erechtheus, the earth-born hero who protects her city, and that rites under her auspices should be performed to ensure a th bountiful harvest. Hera is not only the wife of Zeus re the All-father and the helper of women in childbirth, she is also at Argos, her chief city, the 'goddess of tic flowers' (Antheia), and at Sparta, another centre, she is 'Hera-Aphrodite'; while at Nauplia in the Argolid the nge myth was prominent that every year she bathed in a io sacred spring and became once more a maiden.

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Moreover, Zeus himself was conceived, even in Homeric times, as owing his existence to one great Mother. She is known by various names, of which Rhea or 'Ge' may be the chief, and the title Ge' leaves no doubt that, whatever else she may be, she is certainly a spirit of the Earth. It is Rhea who not only bears Zeus, but saves him from the murderous fury of his foolish father, Kronos; and she is the mother also of those gods who in Homer come nearest to him in the empire of the universe. 'We are three brothers,' Poseidon says, whom Rhea bore, Zeus and Hades and myself.' She is All-mother, it would seem, in the larger sense; while Zeus is All-father only for the next generation of divinities. Thus, the birth of this god who became supreme seems to fall into place as one more example of the widespread belief about the Earth from whom all things draw their being. And this is confirmed when we find that in Crete, the country chosen persistently for his birthplace, he was believed also to have died. Fis grave was shown there, and while to ancient philosophers and Christian controversialists the belief that God could die appeared a ludicrous blasphemy, modern thinkers-and some of them as definitely e Christian as Prof. Angus, Prof. F. B. Jevons, and Mr A. B. Cook-have shown that the myth may embody a profound and religious idea. For the god who dies is always reborn. And by sacramental communion the worshippers can draw his nature into theirs, share in his sufferings and have hope in his resurrection. The

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roots of the belief are primitive though the flower of it can be great. Since the work of Robertson Smith and Sir James Frazer it is now generally accepted that it goes back both to totemism and to semi-magical rites believed to promote vegetation. In the one case it is bound up with the belief in a peculiar link between a human tribe and an animal species and with the desire to make that link closer by actually, on rare and solemn occasions, eating the animal so as to share physically in its nature; while in the other it involves the recognition of the cycle in vegetation where the seed can only give birth to fresh life by falling into the ground and itself perishing. The two beliefs may often have been concurrent and they would naturally reinforce one another the seed died as a seed, but when it passed into the earth it became the food of a new plant that rose from the earth again; the animal died, but when its body passed into the worshippers it strengthened their own life.

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The crudities in the conception are obvious, and the cruelties it could lead to notorious. In many places, if not everywhere, it meant human sacrifice. The sense of some link between Man and Nature crystallised into a conviction that the force animating the external world could be embodied in a human personality, and that such a personality, like the divine animal or the sacred seed, must perish so that its force may pass into other living beings. A study of the whole subject suggests, however, that the horrors would never have gained the hold they did on the world unless the system had appealed, however confusedly, to beliefs which are the life of great religions and the truth of which it would be rash to deny, the belief, for example, that Man and Nature are allied for good, and the belief that the world progresses through heroic sacrifice.

The worst extravagances of this worship were rare among the Greeks, and they never discovered its finest possibilities; but the essence of it can be found in their history. Of human sacrifice there are certain traces, but they are only isolated traces, and it is plain that Hellenic humanity, poetry, and good sense turned from it with loathing, much as the prophets turned in Palestine. Eschylus makes the sacrifice of Iphigenia a crime that

her mother could never be expected to forgive. Euripides does the same. And it would be unwarrantable to assume that totemism, as a developed system, ever existed in Greece, though here also there are indications of tendencies in that direction: the frequency, for example, of myths where the god masquerades as an animal, the cases where the worshippers masquerade also, like the little girls who danced as 'bears' in honour of Artemis, and the legends of creatures such as the Minotaur. Certainly it is true, as Prof. Nilsson says, that 'there is nothing in Greek religion which necessarily demands a totemistic explanation' (p. 77). Yet it, would be unscholarly to disregard these indications and their kinship with totemism, and still worse to overlook the other type of sacramental ritual, the type that springs rather from a recognition of the power in vegetation. Most scholars would agree, and Nilsson agrees himself, that the worship of Dionysus, the wine-god, was of such a type, and point to the legends of his birth through the death of his mother Semele, a goddess of the earth, and of his second birth from the thigh of Zeus, and to the orgiastic character shown by many phases of his ritual where the devotees identified themselves with the God, conceived him as taking the form of a bull, and delighted in tearing live cattle to pieces and eating the flesh raw.

The dangerous and degrading elements are plain from the mere statement of such facts, and yet it is impossible to deny the stimulating influence of the Dionysiac cult, both for religion and for art. The tradition that Tragedy owed its birth to the revel-rout of Dionysus cannot be set aside; indeed, the trend of modern research, in spite of Ridgeway's brilliant attack, has been to make the most of it. That tradition is understandable in itself if the Dionysiac worship did in fact involve the belief that suffering and death are not only inevitable parts of Nature's processes, but are bound up with strange and joyful resurrections. Nor does the theory preclude the possibility that an essential factor in the growth of tragedy is to be found in the cult of heroes and the memory of their deeds and deaths. On the contrary, the two kinds of ritual would harmonise easily, and scholars such as Prof. Murray have done service in pointing this out. The late Sir William Ridgeway was

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on strong ground when he called attention to the insistence, in play after play, on the importance of the hero's death and the honours to be paid at the tomb. The plot of the Edipus at Colonus,' for example, turns on the necessity for Athens or for Thebes of securing that the body of the dead king should be buried in the land. It is, however, of equal importance to note that he is buried under the protection of the Holy Goddesses, the Semnæ, and through the sense of their protection the tragedy is dominated by a mysterious peace. Now the fact that all great tragedy should bring with it a sense of peace is the characteristic as well as the mysterious thing about it. Every student, from Aristotle downwards, has tried to explain this and none has wholly succeeded; probably because, as Kant insists, the truth on which Art depends cannot be formulated in full by the concepts of the intellect. But those have done best who have seen that tragedy involves both the waste of something noble and the conviction that through that waste a satisfying end is served. And such is precisely the feeling involved in the worship of a spirit that dies to be born again in a younger, stronger form. It is this element in the Dionysiac worship that made it so natural a centre for tragedy. Nor is it far-fetched to compare the stimulus given by the Christian Church to mystery-plays in mediæval times. This character of the Dionysus-cult was not realised till the present generation of scholars, and, in the excitement of discovery, the theory may often have been pushed too far, but there can be no question of its value.

Another element in the cult should not be overlooked, the stimulus to the sense of unity with the elemental powers of Nature. Our chief evidence for this comes from that most subtle and complex play, the ‘Bacchanals' of Euripides. The play is complex, because it takes account not only of the vivifying, liberating, unifying elements in the orgiastic form of the worship but also of the maddening and the discordant; just as it takes account not only of what is decorative in the myths but also of what is barbarous. The delight of the Bacchanals in escaping from the ordinary and the mundane into the remote and the ecstatic is given with an intensity that carries the reader away:

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