Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/415

 Reviews. 389

kinsfolk are avenging him very thoroughly, while they are merely amusing themselves with his supposed murderers. His suggestion of motive may be right in these cases ; but it could not be naturally applied to two Hellenic parallels, of which he may be aware, though he has not mentioned them. In the Homeric hymn to Demeter the goddess promises in honour of her foster- ling Demiphon, that " over him at fixed seasons as the years roll round the sons of the Eleusinians shall always join in battle and the fell war-shout."- I have pointed out what appears to be the only possible explanation of this mysterious blessing, that the Eleusinians are to institute a yearly ritual in honour of Demiphon, which is to include a sham-fight over his grave; and that another parallel is the Argive \i6o/3okia, where the people joined in two parties and threw stones at each other in honour of the dead maidens Damia and Auxesia. Now Demiphon is no warlike figure of Epic Saga, but probably a peaceful vegetation-hero, and the mysterious m.aidens, Damia and Auxesia, are revealed by their names as vegetation-goddesses.^ It is against all the evidence to explain these two ceremonies as dictated by the desire to avenge the vindictive ghost ; they belong rather to the sphere of vegeta- tion-magic : blood shed over the grave of vegetation-heroes or heroines quickens their powers of fertility. ■*

The savage illusion about death, from which we ourselves have not yet wholly escaped, engenders the belief that mankind were originally not intended to die, but that their doom of mortality was due to some accident, some mistake, or some malevolent trick of an animal or a human being. In fact a few savage myths, among the many that Dr. Frazer quotes (pp. 58-S6), resemble the Biblical story of Genesis still more closely, and attribute the mis- fortune to some human disobedience of a divine behest (p. 79, the Baganda of Central Africa), or to some sin of mankind (p. 70, the Arawaks of British Guiana), and in many of the aborigmal stories it is a woman who causes the trouble. Tlie death-myth of the

-Horn. i/. Dem., 265-267.

•* Vide my Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii., pp. 93-94.

■• Another type of mimic contests at funerals has been explained as a dramatic presentation of the conflict between good and evil spirits. \'ide J. Hastings, Encyclopaedia 0/ Ethics and Religion, vol. iv., p. 481.