Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/170

 142 variant Asterinos and Pulja is in Von Hahn ; the Samoyed, with beaver for ram, in Castrén.

The Greeks merely adapted the märchen to certain names,—(Hellê is simply, as Seeliger says, in Roscher's Lexikon, the eponymous heroine of the Hellespont),—and to certain places, which were localised variously as geographical knowledge widened. For cannibalism the Greeks substituted human sacrifice in some great need of the State. It is in Attic myth that the story is constantly repeated, like a formula of märchen. I cannot deny that the idea was much present to the ancient story-tellers who converted märchen into saga or pseudo-history; but I agree with Miss Harrison, as already quoted, that "it may be doubted whether we have any certain evidence of 'human sacrifice' among the Greeks even of mythological days."

Again, it was customary for classical antiquaries to explain various rites as offerings of "surrogates," or sacrifices for human victims.

One case of such an ætiological myth is notorious. We know the oscilla, masks of human faces, which in parts of Italy were suspended on fruit trees and vines. The old antiquaries of Rome explained these masks as substitutes for heads of human victims, which the Dodona oracle bade the Pelasgians offer to Saturn (Kronos). For the story of an oracle older than Heracles' time they quoted L. Manilius, who saw the oracle inscribed on a tripod. It contains Latin words, "the Saturnian laws," "the aborigines," and is a clumsy forgery.

Meanwhile, Mr. Stephen Ponder points out to me that Maori chiefs of old hung their own portrait masks (rahui), with their own well-known tattooing, in each case, about