Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/228

 198 King Midas and his Asss Ears.

which was known only imperfectly through hearsay or tradition, or was so ancient that the original meaning of the rite had passed out of current knowledge. The theory which I now advance, and which occurred to me indepen- dently, has, I find, been anticipated by Mr. A. B. Cook, who has illustrated the subject with his usual wide display of learning.*^

The custom found in various totemic rites of draping an idol or sacred stone in the skin of a sacrificial victim has been explained by Professor Robertson Smith as a theurgic practice intended to bring the sacred life into the stone or image. It is, he adds, " equally appropriate that the worshipper should dress himself in the skin of the victim, and so, as it were, envelop himself in its sanctity. To rude nations dress is not merely a physical comfort, but a fixed part of social religion, a thing by which a man constantly bears on his body the token of his religion, and which is itself a charm and a means of divine protection." ^^ A rite of this kind possibly explains the story of Jacob, when seeking his father's blessing, wearing the skins of sacrificial animals.*^ The custom of draping images, which is a later development of the same practice, a survival of the primitive custom of skin -wearing, prevailed widely in Greece, Baby- lonia, among various sects of Indian Vaishnavas, and in other places.**

Again, in the ritual of the sacred marriages of gods, a

^' Animal Worship in the Mycenaean Age, va Journal of the Hellenic Society, vol. xiv., pp. %\ et seq.

^ Religion of the Semites^, pp. 436 et seq. When the Paniyans of Madras worship Kattu Bhasavati, goddess of the woods, the medium dresses in the clothing of the goddess, the divine afflatus descends upon him, and he utters prophecies, E. Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, vol. vi. , pp. 69 et seq. Cf. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. v., p. 233 ; Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 174.

'^'^Encyclopaedia Biblica, vol. i., p. 11 40; vol. ii., p. 1334.

M. Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 670 ; North Indian Notes and Queries, vol. v., pp. 43 et seq. ; Folk-Lore, vol. v., pp. 333 et seq.
 * Frazer, Pausanias, vol. ii., pp. 574 et seq. ; vol. iii., pp. 70, 592 ct seq. ;