Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/258

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in Phrygia, recourse has to be had to Atys of Lydia. To find a slain priest, appeal is made to a conjecture of Professor Ramsay's that the priest of Cybele named Attis was probably slain each year. From the story of Marsyas is deduced that the form of death was hanging, and from the " Hava-mal " verses, where Odin claims to have won his divine power by hanging for nine nights on the gallows dedicated to himself, that the hanged man was also a god. It is obvious that the " Hava-mal " proves nothing for actual ritual, and is merely a piece of speculation of the kind so frequent in the Brahmanas, which, however, are not yet seriously quoted as evidence in such cases. The Marsyas legend is probably a record of a very old vegetation-ritual, but it has nothing to do with the slaying of a king. Marsyas is no prince or priest, and the story proves no more than the occasional slaying of the human embodiment of the corn-spirit. For Osiris we have nothing save the interpretation of the Sed festival given by Prof. Flinders Petrie, as to which it is perhaps enough to say that it rests on the acceptance of the theory here discussed, and cannot be extracted from the record without the use of very considerable imagination.

While we cannot accept Dr. Frazer's pet theory of the annual hanging of a man-god on the sacred tree, we readily accept the proofs he brings forward for showing that the gods whose character he discusses were vegetation-spirits. That is not to say that they were merely such spirits, or originally deities of vegetation. Attis seems, from the evidence cited by Dr. Frazer himself (p. 179), to have been a Phrygian Zeus, who may, like Zeus himself (see Cook, Class. Rev.., 1903), have acquired vegetative functions, or have been syncretised with a vegetation deity. Melcarth and Sandan have characteristics of sun-gods, and in the case of Osiris we incline to accept the view that the god was originally the sun, the importance of whose worship in the Mediterranean has been recently established by Dr. Evans {y.H.S., 1 901). This view explains, quite as well as Dr. Frazer's theory, the mourning for the god at the summer solstice (p. 228); and the nocturnal festival of Sais, instead of being a feast of all souls (p. 241), shows signs of being a sun-spell in the use of illumination and in the symbolism of the golden sun