Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/318

 282 On the Alleged Evidence for

fertility-magic, to the women's department, because the women mostly tend the fire and cook at it. This was the Greek and the Roman view, and expresses itself in the public worship of Hestia and of Vesta, Priestesses serving male deities may possibly be a relic of some sort of te/oo? ya/io? like that at Athens between Dionysos and the wife of the King-archon. Perhaps, e.g.y the priestess of Poseidon was originally his wife ; such practices are common enough outside Greece. The counterpart of this is, what we not infrequently find, men in the service of goddesses. Neither involves, though neither is inconsistent with, mother-right. But Ares VwaiKoQolva^ is more note- worthy. His worship, says Pausanias,'^ is the result of a battle between the Tegeans and an invading Spartan force, in which the Tegean women intervened and won the day. One thinks naturally of the Amazons, also connected with Ares, of warlike heroines like Althaia,^ and, outside of Greek folklore or history, of the importance of the women in Iroquois war-councils. But it is worth noting, first, that there is nothing impossible or even improbable in Pausanias' tale, for, in a hard fight such as he describes, the intervention of a body of desperate and sturdy women, — and Peloponnesian women were no weaklings, — armed with the men's spare weapons, may well have proved too much for the invading Laconians ; secondly, that as to the exclusion of men from the commemorative rite, even if we do not accept the story, a ritual tabu is a very poor foundation for a sociological theory. Such prohibitions mostly spring either from some notion about the deity's personal likes and dislikes or from purely local and accidental causes ; and in the Greek world they include such oddities as the occasional forbidding of the use of wine in Dionysiac rites and the exclusion of women from

7 VIII., xlviii., 4, 5.

^ Apollodoros, I., viii., i ; ainy] TjvLdxei. Kal to, Kara TrdXefiof ijffKei, ("She was her own charioteer, and practised warlike arts ").