Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/173

Rh of Theseus and the Minotaur is the sending of Attic captives into the Cretan bull-ring (taurokathapsia), where boy and girl acrobats, on foot, played perilous tricks with bulls, as often depicted in Cretan art. The rest of the myth is a common märchen localised.

I have tried to keep the discussion within the limits of Folk-Lore and of historic fact, and am dealing elsewhere with other elements in Mr. Cook's system. For example, the late Cretan explanation that Athens had to provide young people, in revenge for the death of Androgeos, as prizes at periodical games at Knossos, cannot be earlier than the non-Homeric institution of games at fixed periods. No evidence, I think, is produced (as in the case of Dodona) for such games at Knossos. Again, the passage cited from Diodorus, in proof that Kings of Egypt did wear bestial masks, is a mere astrological myth to explain the Odyssean story of Proteus. He, said the Egyptian priests, was a King of Egypt, and such kings wore trees and fire on their heads, as well as bestial masks. This is absurd: they only wore the golden uræus-snake of Royalty.

The Attic Theseus story is but a world-wide märchen, coloured, probably by a memory of the sports in the bull-ring, (at which captives may have been the performers), and perhaps by representations in art of men with bovine heads. From such figures it is a far cry to inferences about the king as an embodiment of an universal god, and as fighting, in person, or in the person of his son, for his life and crown. A far cry, too, it is to the sacred wedding of the Queen with a Bull-god. If such a rite in any place occurred, it was at Athens. The Athenians would understand that the affair was mystic and symbolic, not abominable. But it is the Athenians, not the Achæan poet, Homer, who degrade the whole kith and kin of Minos by the most disgusting inventions, including the birth of the Minotaur. These tales, inter