Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/171

Rh their own grounds as a mark of ownership,—and of tabooed soil, I presume. "Trespassers, beware!" that was the meaning.

Miss Harrison also quotes savage masks whose function is permanently "to make an ugly face" at you if you are robbing a neighbour or his orchard. Miss Harrison is not discussing oscilla, but I think that she and Mr. Ponder have hit on a more probable explanation of oscilla than that which Mr. Cook shares with L. Manilius and other Roman antiquaries. Mr. Cook holds, with them, that the masks are evidence of human sacrifice in the past.

The forged oracle in Pelasgian Greek and Latin, more ancient than Heracles, was also used to explain the Argei, or straw puppets, thrown over the Sublician bridge at Rome. They were originally men offered, on the demand of the same forged oracle, to Saturn. In the case of the puppets, the presence of the wife of the Flamen Dialis, mourning, may indicate that the Latins once drowned men, as the Trojans drowned horses, to propitiate their river.

Now I hope that I have made my position, the shadowy nature of mythological evidence for Greek human sacrifices to gods, clear enough to procure suspended judgment, or even a verdict of "not proven."

Returning to Minoan Crete, we have had no proof of human sacrifices in that isle in prehistoric times. But that topic, with the whole theory that the Minotaur was the king, or prince, of Knossos embodying the god of the sun, the sky, the stars, and the oak tree, and that, masked as a bull, he, or his son, fought every nine years for his rights and his life (Mr. Cook's view), or was butchered in a cave, while another man came out in the same mask (Mr. Murray's view), cannot be dealt with in our space. Meanwhile, let the reader ask himself, "Was the arrangement likely to be submitted to by the wealthy and powerful monarch of a highly-civilized state, in touch