Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/162

134 poetic fiction contradicted by Homer and Hesiod, human victims were offered to the Minotaur, while, according to Mr. Cook's theory, the Minotaur, or (by his amended system) the Crown Prince of Knossos, ended by being a victim himself.

That in a highly-civilized community of white men, where the king had great wealth, drilled troops (Cretan art proves that fact), and a powerful navy, the monarch should submit to such conditions is prima facie not probable. That any king, anywhere, has ever been regarded as the embodiment of the Supreme Being and, as such, slain, is not proved, to my knowledge, in a single verifiable instance. It is therefore my purpose to examine the scientific theory of the Minotaur as held by Mr. Cook (Folk-Lore, vol. xv., and Classical Review, vol. xvii.), and to point out what I humbly conceive to be perilous errors in the method of the extremely erudite school of the New Mythology.

But my task is most complicated. I have re-written this paper several times, to tell the truth, and am not sure that I can make the matter clear. If you want lucidity, go to a Frenchman, and, at last, I have followed the clue of Ariadne as constructed by the Rev. Father M. J. Lagrange.

Our first question is,—what was the nature of religion in civilized, prehistoric Crete? For a reply we first examine the contents of the caves which were held sacred even in the time of Socrates and later, and one of which was in the time of Socrates regarded as the birthplace of the Cretan Zeus, whatever the name of the god may have been in prehistoric times. Remember that, in Greece itself, as Pausanias writes in the second century A.D.,—"It is difficult to count all the peoples who attest that Zeus was born and bred among them," and he gives several