Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/169

 Rh example in practice. Nor can we infer, with Mr. Cook, that in highly-civilized Knossos, with its wealth, its palaces, its bijou villa residences, and its pretty Parisiennes in every variety of mediæval and modern costume, the King or the Crown Prince, wearing a bull's mask, had at stated intervals to fight or run for his life and his royal rights, and was, in fact, the Minotaur defeated by Theseus! This is the theory of the Minotaur advanced by Mr. Cook in his "Zeus, Jupiter, and The Oak," in vol. xvii. of The Classical Review, and, with variations, in his "The European Sky God " in Folk-Lore, vol. xv.

Now for the story of conflicts with the Minotaur we have no evidence, I repeat, beyond the Athenian adaptation of the märchen of the Lad, the Giant (or Elephant), and the Giant's Daughter to the names of Theseus, Minos, and Ariadne. To this I shall return; but, meanwhile, the Greek (chiefly Attic and Ionian) legends of sacrificed princesses appear in Attic märchen so primitive that a large percentage of the characters become birds, as in Australian, or American-Indian, or South American folk-tales. One form of such sacrifice is exposure of the royal maiden to a monster, (Andromeda and Hesione). That is pure märchen, and is no proof of such a custom in pre-historic Greece or at Troy. The märchen is carried on into pseudo-historic legend.

The other human sacrifices are done in obedience to the command of an oracle, so that some curse on the country may be removed. But in the famous Minyan case of Phrixus, Hellê, and the Ram, (whether his fleece was golden or purple, or merely white), in my earliest excursion into these fields I showed that the Phrixus story is the saga form of the world-wide folk-tale of children with a ram, lamb, or other friendly animal, fleeing, not from sacrifice, but from cannibalism. The modern Epirote