Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/419

 Reviews, 395

startling epithet Miss Harrison traces the origin of many of the later divine figures, on whom as " Olympians," the degenerate descendants of older and nobler personalities, she lavishes un- mitigated scorn. Within the limits of a review it is impossible to trace the stages of her argument ; every student of comparative religion, everyone interested in early Greece, must read, learn, and inwardly digest it for himself. To put the scheme of the book briefly, it seeks to celebrate a "sacred marriage" between the conception of mana as developed by Mr. Marett and that of the fertility spirit which forms the subject of Dr. Frazer's latest instal- ment of The Golden Bough. This is effected by adopting ert bloc the sociological position of Professor Durkheim and the specula- tions of M. Bergson, the latest fashionable psychologist. She develops the now generally accepted view, that in analyzing culture we must begin with the social structure, into the formula that among " primitive peoples " religion reflects not individual but collective feeling and collective thinking; the early god is a "projection" or "externaljzation " of the thiasos or group of worshippers.

Another novel departure is the attempt by Professor Gilbert Murray to establish the position that the forms of the Greek drama reflect the course of death and resurrection of the " Eniautos Daimon," a rather unsatisfactory term to represent the fertility spirit, the personified luck of the year. He arrives at the con- clusion that the drama had its origin in the cult of Dionysus, the " daimon, of death and resurrection, of reincarnation, of the refwineau of the spring, and that renouveau, that reincarnation, was of man as well as nature. ... Of any connection with the tomb and obsequies of an actual dead Athenian hero there is not a particle of evidence " (p. 339).

Two criticisms at once suggest themselves in the study of this book. First, though it may be admitted that there are some traces of mother-right in Athens, the paper by Mr. H. J. Rose {Folk-Lore, vol. xxii., pp. 277 et seq.) throws the burden of proof on those who assert that this system was universally prevalent in Greece. Secondly, in face of Dr. Frazer's conclusions that the existence of totemism in the same region has not been proved, and that "pure totemism is not in itself a religion at all," the use of this