Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/165

 Rh pieces in honour of the Cannibal Dionysus. Moreover, Clemens Alexandrinus says that the abomination, according to Antikleides, author of an epic on the Return of the Heroes from Troy, was practised by the Cretan Lyctii, apparently of Mount Lyttos, where is the cave of Dictaean Zeus.

We have certainly a most unholy mixture of bulls and human sacrifices and Zeus reported from Crete, Is the Athenian legend of the victims of the Minotaur a refraction from actual facts of human sacrifice to a bovine god? That is our problem. I may first remark that Mr. Evans, as he tells me, has found no hint of human sacrifice in prehistoric Cretan art, or in any other relics of that age and country. Secondly, in the transition from Euripides to Clemens Alexandrinus we do not get,—at least I do not get,—the impression that these savage survivals or recrudescences were national, or were affairs of civic worship. Rather they seem to be the delight of secret societies of décadents like de Sade and Gilles de Rais. If so, worse things than they did may have been attributed to them. Compare pagan charges against the early Christians, mediæval charges against the Jews, and the allegations against witches even later. The public worship of highly-civilized Minoan Crete, as far as Cretan art shows, consisted of prayer and offerings of fruit, flowers, and libations. The only sacrifice of animals is represented on a painted larnax or coffin from Hagia Triada, and the recipient seems to be the ghost of a dead hero. Father Lagrange himself thinks that the god had the main part of the sacrifice, but the hero seems to be accepting a calabash of ox's blood. There is no hint of fire and sacrifice.

Here it may be well to say that there is very little evidence for human sacrifice in prehistoric Hellas, while, as for the pharmakos of historic Hellas, the wretch may