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'Oh, feet of a fawn to the greenwood fled,
Alone in the grass and the loveliness!'

'And all the mountain felt,

And worshipped with them; and the wild things knelt
And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness

Was filled with moving voices and dim stress' (Murray's tr.).

Moreover, the opponent of the worship, Pentheus, king of Thebes and son of the Agave who heads the Theban Bacchanals, is shown to be unjustified in his wholesale denunciation of the Mænads as unchaste. But, as the drama advances and each side grows more bitter in the struggle, then the cruel elements come to the fore. The Chorus who have brought Dionysus from Phrygian lands to Thebes cry for vengeance on their enemy the king, the women who are ranging the hills forget their children, and at last-and this even to the horror of the Chorus-Agave comes on the scene in triumph from the mountains holding, unrecognised by herself, the head of her son in her hands, the son who has gone out to spy on her and whom she has taken for a wild beast. Blinded by her mystic intoxication, she thinks she has done good service to her country while the Chorus are looking at the truth. 'The whole city,' she cries,' will praise me,' but they ask:

'And Pentheus, O Mother, thy child?'

Then her mind clears and she sees what she has done. It seems impossible in face of an ending such as this to suppose that Euripides could have intended the play to be a justification of the Bacchanal worship as a whole, though his sympathy for the beautiful side of it is so strong that acute critics have suggested as much. And his exposure of the myth which he takes for the plot of his drama appears equally just and severe. The brilliance and charm of the Wine-god are emphasised and his power, but also the injustice of his pitiless revenge on the whole kindred of Pentheus for the 'crime' committed by Pentheus alone. Pentheus dies, but Agave the Bacchanal has to endure the knowledge that she has killed him.

Many modern authorities explain that Pentheus himself is a double of Dionysus and that the tearing of him limb from limb reflects the belief in the inevitable death

and dismembering of the divine creature for the good of the world. And it is more than probable that such a belief does lie behind the story. Another instance may be found in the tale of the innocent Orpheus torn to pieces by frenzied women. The theory does help us to understand how such legends took hold of a people as humane as the Greeks, much as the worship of fertility explains their acceptance of lust in Zeus; but the fact remains that the legends are cruel and that the mythology did not outgrow the element of savagery. It is just this combination of savagery and mysticism, a combination very near to all early religions based on the worship of Nature, that would attract and provoke the sensitive, meditative genius of a Euripides. The same is true of Orphism, where the mythology is childishly repellent and yet shows a true religious sense of the double nature in man. Nilsson in his able book indicates this in his summary of the Orphics' most original contribution to mystical religious speculation.'

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'By Persephone, the queen of the lower world, Zeus had a son, Dionysos-Zagreus. Zeus intended the child to have dominion over the world, but the Titans lured it to them with toys, fell upon it, tore it to pieces, and devoured its limbs; but Athena saved the heart and brought it to Zeus, who ate it, and out of this was afterwards born a new Dionysos, the son of Semele. The Titans were struck by Zeus' avenging lightning, which burned them to ashes. From the ashes man was formed, and he therefore contains within himself something of the divine, coming from Dionysos, and something of the opposite, coming from his enemies, the Titans' (p. 216).

It is not surprising that a worship with a fundamental legend of this sort should on the one hand attract to itself a rite as coarse as the taurobolium-the baptism in the streaming blood of a slaughtered bull-and on the other hand produce a poem as exquisite as the verses engraved on the golden tablet of Petelia telling the soul what it must look for after death, whom it will meet, and what it must say :

"This thou shalt say:

"I am the child of earth and the starry heaven,
And heaven my home: you know it, you know it!

I am parched with thirst, I perish! Give me your water,
Cool water that flows from the Lake of Remembrance."

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It is easy to understand why Plato has been claimed both for and against Orphism when we remember his dislike of cheap purifications on the one hand and on the other his intense concern with immortality, and his theory that all knowledge was a 'reminiscence' of a full truth once known to the spirt of man.

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Some of these elements in Orphism, as we meet it, may be late and themselves intensified by Platonic influence, but our best scholars agree with Prof. Nilsson that 'in its essential features' the Orphic myth 'goes back to the sixth century.' Moreover, the ecstastic worship with which it is connected can be traced further back still. Homer knows of the Mænads and their Dionysiac frenzy. Euripides, our chief witness in the fifth century to the myth of Zagreus, connects the god with the Kouretes, the attendants of the young Zeus in Crete. One other god, and one only, in the Greek Pantheon is closely connected with this cycle of beliefs, and that god is Phoebus Apollo. Phoebus is always associated with Hyacinthus, and Hyacinthus is the being, half flower, half beloved youth, who must be mourned for every year, another type of the year-god, the Eviavròs Saiμwv of Miss Harrison, the spirit of fertility, the new life of spring' (p. 31). That Apollo 'was sometimes called Hyacinthus and the sacred tomb of Tarentum sometimes shown as his,* can only be understood if we realise that he was once identified with his favourite. The close connexion of Apollo both with Delphi and with Crete is well known, and Nilsson emphasises his connexion with Dionysus, as shown, for example, by the fifth-century vase-painting with the two gods extending hands to each other before the omphalos at Delphi' (p. 208). Thus it may well form part of one fundamental order of ideas that 'Dionysos died and was buried at Delphi, and Zeus in Crete, and the tomb of Hyakinthos was shown at Sparta and at Tarentum' (p. 33).

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It is noticeable that all these traditions point back, directly or indirectly, to Crete, and it is natural to look with Nilsson for some light from the discoveries of the Minoan age. For we have clear indications that in

Polyb., 8. 30,

Minoan Crete some form of Nature-worship was dominant. The religious scenes engraved on gems or painted in fresco show us trees and boughs set within an enclosure like the sacred fence, the Herkos, of later times, bullheaded men and goat-headed, and above all the figure, presented again and again, of a great goddess, recognised as a Mother-Goddess by all scholars. She is associated sometimes with a similar goddess, sometimes with worshippers, men and women; they bring her flowers or she holds flowers herself, and often her attribute is the double-axe, a weapon connected not only with Zeus but also with the Mountain-Mother Cybele. In one case at least an armed male figure appears descending from the sky: another scene appears to be one of ritual mourning, so much so that Sir Arthur Evans writes, There can be little doubt that the mourning scene refers to a Minoan equivalent for Attis or Kinyras, Adonis or Thammuz, but imaged here as a youthful warrior God, in other words the Cretan Zeus.'*

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When we remember that the Dictaan Cave at Psychro, the reputed nursing-place of Zeus, was found by the excavators to be stored with offerings from the Minoan age, it is hard to resist the conclusion that in Crete, as Mr. A. B. Cook has been urging in both his monumental volumes, traces are to be found pointing plainly to the worship of a sky-god 'who fertilises his consort, the Earth-goddess, and becomes the Father of a divine Son.'t

Dionysus himself, however, in his distinctive form, is, so all classical tradition implies, a comparative newcomer to the front ranks of Greek divinities, and it is of importance to note that the vine is never represented in the painting or engravings of Crete. This neglect of such a decorative motive certainly points to Sir Arthur Evans being right in his opinion that wine was not known in Minoan days, some fermented liquor from a cereal being used instead. And the stress laid in the 'Odyssey' on the Cyclops' first introduction to wine makes in the same direction. Now, if the worship of the winegod as such was a fresh importation from Northern Thrace and Phrygia, as the legends run, while the ideas

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of fertility, death, decay, rebirth, and sacramental union with the dying and reviving god were already rooted in the primitive creeds, then, certainly, we seem in a better position, as Nilsson points out, for the understanding of 'the deep religious movement that the spreading of the Dionysiac religion caused in the older historic age of Greece' (p. 33).

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Nilsson follows up this point by emphasising the connexion of Crete with the holy marriage, which in the Greek myth is that of Zeus and Hera,' a marriage which was celebrated at Knossos and also was said to have taken place at Gortyn,' where the bride was 'commonly called Europa.' Further, Nilsson recognises that the youthful beardless Cretan type of Zeus, in Phaistos surnamed Feλxavós '—(Velchanos)—must be 'the bridegroom of the holy marriage.' There can be little doubt that the majority of students would agree with this, provided that to bridegroom' we might add' or offspring,' for a link of genuine identity between the Father and the Son is an essential feature in these myths.

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When, however, Prof. Nilsson goes on to say, 'It is surely astonishing that the name of Zeus, the god of the heavens, should have been applied to the divine child of Crete,' then it may be well to pause and bring forward other points, some of them new. That the classical Greeks called the Cretan God Zeus would only be astonishing if it were certain that the Cretans were, in fact, radically different from themselves. Tribal differences, no doubt, there must have been, but it may be questioned if the opinion now prevalent in favour of a non-Hellenic origin for the Minoans has not been too hastily accepted. The undoubted differences between the earlier stages of the Minoan culture and the culture of the Western mainland on the one hand, the affinities of the Minoan with Asia Minor on the other, could all be explained by the simple supposition that the Minoans, though of Hellenic stock, came into Crete down the Asia Minor coast long before the culture of the West had developed. The real test between the two views must lie in the decipherment of the Minoan scripts, if that could be accomplished. And already it is possible, as a recent article in the American Journal of Archæology'

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