Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/246

 236 by the thing that is not. The bearing of these remarks may be seen in their application to some of the myths quoted in the article Dionysia, in Daremberg and Saglio. The writer of the article, M. Jules Girard, rightly follows Roscher's Lexikon in various points, but unfortunately does not follow the Lexikon in adopting Mannhardt's explanation of the orgiastic elements in the worship of Dionysos. Again, he is unfortunate in following the Lexikon in deriving the orgiastic elements from Thrace, and dating their spread in the time after Homer. I say unfortunate for two reasons; first, because while accepting the Lexikon's view, he apparently unconsciously rejects the evidence on which alone it is based; and, second, because the view is, as I will proceed to suggest, itself unsatisfactory. If Mannhardt's explanation (Wald- und Feldkulte, i, 534 f.) is correct, then the mad dances and shouts, which are the orgiastic elements, date from at least Aryan times, and must have been known to the Greeks not only before the time of Homer, but before the Greeks appeared in Greece. They are primitive man's way of wakening the spirit of vegetation from its winter slumber. There can have been no borrowing by one Greek tribe from another; each Greek tribe brought this piece of primitive magic along with it. What, then, is the evidence for the assertion that these orgiastic rites were borrowed from Thrace? It is, first, that they were not known to Homer (or as Lobeck, Aglaoph., 288, more cautiously says, were at the most known to the Greeks only by rumour); next, that the worship of Dionysos has every mark of having existed from the hoariest antiquity amongst the Thracians; and, third, certain legends or myths about the introduction of the mad rites into certain places in Greece. With regard to the first item, there is a passage in Homer (Il., vi, 132 ff.) which all admit to refer to the orgiastic worship of Dionysos, but not all admit to be genuine. Now, we may either reject this passage, with F. A. Voigt, the writer in the Lexikon; or retain it, with M. Girard. But it does