Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/192

 i6o Ihill-baitiuo, Bull-racing, Bid I- fights.

possibly see in them two phases of a custom which may be regarded as magical or religious, or a compound of both. The scene on the cup may represent the capture of the sacred bulls by unarmed hunters for the purpose of sacrifice. As we have seen in the case of the Todas and among certain peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean, the use of some amount of violence to such holy beasts seems to be not an uncommon prelude to their being selected as victims, the rough usage to which they are subjected being possibly intended to stimulate their energies and render them an acceptable offering to the gods or fitted to accompany the spirits of the dead to the underworld.

The next stage is the appearance of the bulls in the arena. The suggestion of Mr. Cook, to which the evidence now adduced from Nigeria and India may seem to lend some additional support is that the essential feature of the Minoan performance is the grasping of the horn or horns of the sacred animals, by which the performer, w^ho may be the delegate of the community, obtains by contact a share of the divine power or mana of the holy beast.^^ We may conjecture that the bull, from his strength and virility, came to be regarded the great dispenser of mana, and hence he is worshipped by pastoral and agricultural tribes. Mr. Cook points out that the goat, another horned animal, was used in cults like those of the bull. We also know that contact with a sacred bull was believed to cause fertility. In the well-known case of the bull kept before the Reforma- tion at the shrine of St. Edmund at Bury St. Edmunds, married women who desired offspring used to touch his milk-white sides and pendant dewlaps as he was led in procession through the streets of the towm, and then paid their vow^s at the shrine of the saint.^°

■*■' Zetis, i. 499 et seqq.

'•''^ County Folk- Lore, Suffolk, 124. ^Ir. Sidney Hartland quotes other cases of the same kind in Primitive Patiinity, i. \})\ ct seqq. ; also see Notes nud Queries, 1st sei. viii. i.