Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/47

 Presidential Address. 35

formed at the tombs of heroes to induce or compel them to protect their votaries and promote fertility in the earth,^^ we are now invited to suppose these rites to be unconnected with the cult of any single dead man. On the contrary, in its association with the worship of Dionysus, the drama suggests an embodiment of the Eniautos Daimon, " who represents the cyclic death and rebirth of the world, including the rebirth of the tribe by the return of the heroes or dead ancestors." •^■' Thus the drama of the Greeks by its successive stages, — the Contest of the Year against its enemy, Light and Darkness, Summer and Winter ; the Ritualistic death of the Year Daimon ; the Announcement of the fact by the Messenger ; the Lamenta- tion of the death of the old with the triumph of the new ; the Recognition ot" the Daimon, followed by the Resurrec- tion,- — is resolved into a form of magic performed as a periodical fertility cult. But, to quote the warning of a recent critic : — " The present tendency is to find primitive religion in everything, and to explain everything by what ]:)rimitive religion was or is supposed to have been. There is no objection to that, so long as it is recognised that (like the old interpretation of religion itself in terms of Juris- prudence) it is only an interpretation ad hoc, a transitory framework in which something vital and fluid for the time takes shape. The drawback is that the framework is apt to dominate over the content, and that to be regarded as the essence or originating cause which is only the con- venient — or, it may be, the inconvenient — symbolism. "^^

We may readily admit that these speculations throw welcome light on many dark places of early Greek belief. But, if these conclusions are to be admitted, they obviously carry us far beyond the bounds of Hellas, and other cults,

'3\V. Kidgeway, The Oright of Tragedy, p. 108.

^*Prof. G. M. Murray, in Miss J. E. Harrison, Themis, p. 341 ; and see II. !• K-ose, J. Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion atid Ethics, vol. v., p. 860. 35 The Ttmes, LiUraiy Sttpplenient, Feb. 6lh, 1913, p. 46.