While talking of firesticks, it occurs to me that it is perhaps in this direction that we are to look for the explanation of the apparent androgynism of Dionysos. The artistic representations of the god are effeminate in the later periods of Greek art, but even in the earlier times we have significant suggestions of feminine dress and appearance. We think, for instance, of Pentheus in the Bacchae, dressed up as a female Dionysos in order that he may spy out the rebels: and the rude images of the aniconic period are often draped and their heads are covered with feminine gear. Farnell brings the point out clearly in the following sentences: when speaking of the Thrasyllos statue in the British Museum, he says, "In the forms of the breasts, which are soft and almost feminine, we note the beginnings of that effeminacy, which becomes the dominant characteristic of the Dionysiac types". Again, “An interesting vase of the earlier fifth-century style, almost certainly by Hieron, had embodied the legend of the confusion of sex of the infant Dionysos: we see Zeus holding the divine babe attired as a girl, behind him is Poseidon and Hermes goes before and this is a direct illustration of the story preserved by Apollodorus". Again: Effeminacy in the forms renders it difficult at times to distinguish a head of Bacchus from one of Ariadne". Again: "In the larger (Pergamene) frieze Dionysos is a dramatic and impressive figure enough, but the breasts are half feminine". These quotations will show how decided was the tradition of a feminine element in the idea of Dionysos. How could such a conception have arisen? What was there in the origin of the cult that was the germ which found such pronounced efflorescence in Greek art? I am going to hazard a speculative solution.

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It is known that the ivy is one of the early forms of the fire-stick, out of which, by rapid rotation of one stick in another, fire was produced; for example, ivy and laurel were conjugate fire-sticks, the ivy being the male and the laurel the female. Now, if we imagine an earlier stage, in which both the fire-sticks were made of ivy-wood, as might easily have been the case, as soon as it was recognised that the fire had gone into the ivy, then we should have not only a male Dionysos but a conjugate female Dionysos, and one way of expressing this is to say that Dionysos is androgyne. We may get some confirmation of this explanation in the following way: one of the alternative forms for a fire-stick is a piece of nut-wood: when the

need-fire was last made in Westmoreland in 1848, I was told by an old man who took part in the ceremony, and put the cattle through the smoke of the new fire, that the said new fire had been produced by the friction of nut-wood. Now Servius tells us that in Laconia, Dionysos loved a maiden named Caroea (a Miss Nutt, that is), and that he turned her into a nut-tree. As usual in such cases, it was really the nut-tree that was turned into the maid. Her relation to Dionysos is that of the female fire-stick to the male.'

That was how

As I have said,

it happened. It was the ivy that loved the nut-tree. this is a speculation and not a demonstration. There may be other explanations possible. The ivy, for instance, may have actually grown over the nut-tree. We should, then, have to look for a feminine Dionysos in some other direction. There is enough evidence extant to make us believe in the existence of such a feminine counterpart, even if we may not at once be able to say who or what she was.

We have now established our main point as to the meaning of the ivy in the cult of Dionysos. The probability is that Dionysos himself is a lesser Zeus, and through the ivy, a kind of Dioscure, or Zeuschild. This simple and elementary belief has been combined with other nature-cults, roughly described as Thracian or Phrygian, and Bacchic or Orphic, and the outcome is the god Dionysos, the last recruit to the Olympian family, and one of the best of the whole crowd.

1 Servius, Ecl., viii. 29.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CULT OF APOLLO.1

Na recent study of the origin of the Cult of Dionysos, I attempted to show that the solution of this perplexing question (one of the most perplexing of all the riddles of the Greek Mythology) was to be found in the identification of Dionysos with the Ivy, and in the recognition that the identification with the Vine is a later development, a supersession of an earlier and less rational cult, if, indeed, we can call that a supersession which does not wholly supersede; for, as is well known, the Ivy and the Vine go on their religious way together, are seen in the same processions, climb over the same traditional buildings, and wreathe the same imperial and sacerdotal brows. some ways the Ivy seems to have a more tenacious hold upon human regard and custom than the Vine: it behaves in religion as it does in nature, clinging more closely to its support in wall and tree than ever Vine can do, and giving a symbolic indication both by rootlet and tendril that wherever it comes, it has come to stay. It appears as the tattooed totem-mark upon the worshipper's bodies, the sign of an ownership which religion has affirmed and which time cannot disallow.

In

Now this view that the Ivy is the fundamental and primitive cultsymbol in the worship of Dionysos was not altogether new as I pointed out, it had been very clearly stated by Perdrizet in his Cultes et Mythes de Pangée: it had also been suggested by S. Reinach (from whom, I suppose, Perdrizet derived it) as the following passage will show: I had not noticed it when writing my paper :

"Le lierre, comme le taureau, le chevreau, le faon, est une forme primitive de Dionysos, dont il est resté l'attribut; les Ménades dechirent et machent le lierre comme un animal sacré, victime de σπαραγμός ou de νεβρισμός ; et Plutarque sait, sans le dire for

1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library, 12 October, 1915.