THE ORIGIN OF THE CULT OF DIONYSOS.1 M ODERN research is doing much to resolve the complicated and almost interminable riddles of the Greek and Latin Mythologies. In another sense than the religious interpretation, the gods of Olympus are fading away: as they fade from off the ethereal scene, the earlier forms out of which they were evolved come up again into view; the Thunder-god goes back into the Thunder-man, or into the Thunder-bird or Thunder-tree; Zeus takes the stately form in vegetable life, of the Oak-tree, or if he must be flesh and blood he comes back as a Red-headed Woodpecker. Other and similar evolutions are discovered and discoverable; and the gods acquire a fresh interest when we have learnt their parentage. Sometimes, in the Zeus-worship at all events, we can see two forms of deity standing side by side, one coming on to the screen before the other has moved off; the zoömorph or animal form co-existing and hardly displacing the phytomorph or plant form. One of the prettiest instances of this co-existence that I have discovered came to my notice in connection with a study that I was making of the place of bees in early religion. It was easy to see that the primitive human thinker had assigned a measure of sanctity to the bee, for he had found it in the hollows of his sacred tree: at the same time he had noticed that bees sprang from a little white larva, comparable with the maggot in a putrescent body. So he devised explanations of the origin of these larvæ, and not unnaturally theorised that the bee would arise in the body of an ox, if the ox were buried, or killed and shut up in a building, whose doors and windows were closed for a sufficient length of time. Classical literature is full of these stories, and even Biblical literature is not destitute of the tradition, as witness the story of Samson, eating honey from the carcase 1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library, 5 January, 1915. |