Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/164

136 bearded. This is the most plausible example of a divine indeterminate bestial-headed monster. He is dubious. It is certain that the bull was a favourite victim in Minoan religion, and that, as in the Egypt of the period, the boukranion or bull skull, with a rosette or double axe between the horns, is a common decorative motive in Cretan art, as also in the tombs of the Acropolis at Mycenæ. The Elamites also, 3,000 years before our era, represented Minotaurs in their art, apparently in an attitude of adoration. These are probably the prototypes of the Cretan Minotaurs or bull-headed demons. The ox does not appear in any form in the more primitive archæological strata of Crete.

As regards the divine bull, or the bull-headed god, the Minotaur, (whose existence as a being divine and worshipped is quite problematic), we have little to add. As late as Euripides a tradition of strange and wild feasts on raw bull's flesh in Crete existed. These, in the fragmentary chorus from his fragmentary play, The Cretans, are contrasted with the pure and vegetarian life of the devotees of the Idæan Zeus. But Miss Harrison, in contradiction of several learned Germans, thinks that Idaean Zeus, the pure, is merely another aspect of Dionysus Zagreus, the impure, whose orgies involved "red and bleeding feasts" of raw bull's meat. Miss Harrison shows that Plutarch and the early Christian fathers speak with horror of wild savage rites, "eatings of raw flesh and rendings asunder," as being still extant; while there are traditions in very late sources of tearing a living man or child in