signe de la feuille de lierre: et que les femmes, quand elles célébraient, comme dit Plutarque (Quaest Rom. 112) la 'Passion de Bacchus,' mettaient en pièces des branches de lierre et en mangeaient les feuilles; le lierre, comme la faon, le chevreau ou le taureau, était un forme de Dieu; et comme ces animaux, il servait aux repas de communion qui formaient le mystère par excellence de la Bacchanale. 1 Perdrizet was referring to the attempts made to introduce the Greek religion into Jerusalem, and to force it upon Egyptian Jews, and in particular to the decree of Ptolemy Philopator that the Jews should be "branded with the ivy-leaf, the emblem of Bacchus" (3 Macc. ii. 29: cf. 2 Macc. vi. 7). Philopator goes farther in this compulsory Hellenisation than Antiochus Epiphanes, who had required the Jews to take part in Bacchic processions, carrying thyrsi twined with ivy: he will have them take the totem-mark of the god. It was not meant to be a degradation, for he was tattooed himself with the same sacred symbol. 2 The description of the tearing and eating of the ivy in a sacramental manner is also very instructive; it is the god that is eaten here, just as in the more terrible sacraments of raw flesh with which we are familiar in early religion in general, and in the Bacchic revels in particular. What Perdrizet then missed was the identification of the underlying god. He saw the ivy off the oak: if he had seen it on the oak, the whole matter would have been much clearer to him. And we are inclined to think it might have been clearer for consider how closely Dionysos is connected with the thunder, not only by his miraculous birth from the thunder-smitten Semele, but also by the titles and descriptions given to him by the Greek poets. Miss 1 τοὺς δὲ ἀπογραφομένους χαράσσεσθαι, καὶ διὰ πυρὸς -3 Macc. ii. 29. γενόμενης δὲ Διονυσίων ἑορτῆς ἠναγκάζοντο -2 Macc. vi. 7. See further on the totem-marks of Dionysos in Miss Harrison's review of Perdrizet, Classical Review, December, 1910. 2 Miss Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 429, misses the meaning of the chewing of the ivy and suggests that "the Maenads chewed ivy leaves for inspiration, as the Delphic prophetess chewed the bay". They ate the god for inspiration, would be a more correct statement. Harrison tried to get Bromios away from the thunder, but she admitted that throughout the Baccha "Dionysos is in some degree a god of thunder as well as thunder-born, a god of mysterious voices, of strange confused orgiastic music, which we know he brought with him from the North". "In some degree a god of thunder" ! the expression will bear re-writing. When we see the ivy climbing over the oak, and attaching itself to it, the birth from Zeus and Semele, the tree and the earth (for it is well-established now that Semele means earth), becomes intelligible. The tree is the thunder and makes all its parasites and all its denizens thunder." The new hypothesis connects a number of scattered phenomena and traditions together. To begin with: the vine displaces the ivy : why? Simply because the first vines were trained on trees, as indeed they long continued to be so that the transference from ivyDionysos to vine-Dionysos was easy and natural. The ivy, however, never loses its place in the cult, in spite of the predominance given to the new-comer. It will stay on the thyrsus: it will continue to be the totem-mark of the god. Thus the vine and the ivy grow side by side. They are on the same oak. In the language of mythology they both grow over the ruins of the thunder-struck palace of Semele. In Euripides, Bacchae 41 f., it is the vine that so spreads itself: in Euripides, Phoenissae 651, it is the ivy that clings to the pillars of 1 Miss Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 415. 3 "This is, I suppose, the explanation of the legend of Dionysos-statues with faces painted red. According to Pausanias the Corinthians made two images of Dionysos out of a tree, and the images had red faces and gilt bodies (Paus. II. ii. 6; Frazer, G. B., ii. 161). So also at Phigaleia, there were images of Dionysos, covered with leaves of ivy and laurel, through which it was possible to see that the fetish had been smeared with vermilion (Paus. VIII. xxxix. 6). Farnell thinks (Cults of the Greek States, v. 243) that, "in these cases the idol's face was smeared with red, no doubt in order to endow it with a warm vitality, for 'red' is a surrogate for blood, and anointing idols with blood for the purpose of animating them is a part of old Mediterranean magic". We have shown that there is another explanation of "red" as the colour of the thunder, and that this is a widespread and fundamental conception in the growth of cults. See Boanerges, c. 4. 3 We may compare the story which Philostratus (Imagg. ii. 19) tells of a certain savage Phorbas, who dwelt under an oak tree, which was regarded as his palace, whither the Phlegyæ resorted to him for judgment. the ruined house, and the scholiast has a note to the effect that when the Kadmean palace was struck by the lightning of Zeus, the ivy grew over the pillars so as to hide and protect the infant god. On this ground it is said that the god is called Perikionios (pillar clinging) by the Thebans. The royal palace to which the vine and ivy cling is originally the sacred oak. Even the description of Dionysos in terms of the ivy clinging to the pillar is probably a misunderstanding of an original Perkunios, Perkun being the oak-and-thunder-god of the northern nations, whose name still survives in the Slavonic Perun, and in the Latin Quercus and the Hercynian forest. As the Greeks had lost the word for oak, which answers to the Latin Quercus, they naturally made Perkunios into Perikionios. For once mythology in a minor point was a disease of language. The transfer of names was invited by the fact that, in mythology, a pillar commonly represents a tree.1 For an artistic representation of Dionysos Perikionios, we may now turn to our frontispiece, where we have a pair of Pompeian statues of Bacchus and Ariadne, standing on ivy-clad pillars. The matter may be taken a little farther for there are other creeping plants which are found in the cult of Dionysos, and have a similar origin to the ivy. For instance there is a plant called smilax (milax of the Attic speech), which (whatever be its exact botanical equivalent) turns up with the ivy and the vine in the ritual of Dionysos. Just as the ivy and the vine are found growing side by side over the pillars of the ruined palace of Semele, so the smilax, the ivy, and the vine are found in the garlands of the Bacchae. Thus Athenaeus tells us that in the great Bacchic procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the maidens were crowned with ivy, vine leaves, and smilax. And this conjunction explains the language of the Bacchae (703-5) where the Maenads are garlanded with ivy, oak, and smilax; 2 Then did they wreathe their heads -A. S. WAY. where "briony" is wrongly substituted for “smilax”. 1 Attractive as this identification is, there are serious objections to it, which are considered on p. 92. 2 p. 198 E. |