Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/194

 1 62 Bill I- baiting, Btill-racing, Btill-fights.

roasted sirloins fattened the priests, while the grand spectacle and death delighted their dinnerless congrega- tions ... So at the taurohoUa of antiquity, those who were sprinkled with bull blood were absolved from sin." It would be interesting to connect the taurobolia with the modern bull-fight, but I am not aware that the connexion has been established by historical evidence.

This is not the time to attempt a full discussion of the interesting suggestion of Mr. Cook. We must first be certain that the scene on the Vaphio cup and the Tiryns and Knossos frescoes do represent a religious or magical performance, and not merely an incident of sport or an acrobatic exhibition. All we can say with any degree of certainty is that in India and in Nigeria bull-baiting and bull-driving are possibly connected with rites of fertility. In, I think, the last paper which he read before our Society,^^ Mr. Andrew Lang successfully disposed of the popular behef that boys and girls were sent from Athens to Crete to be devoured by a Bull-god, and he pointed out that the legend was probably a reminiscence of the sports in the arena at Knossos, such as that represented on the frescoes. It would be satisfactory to believe, with Mr. Cook, that they were used for the pleasant object of drawing ynana from the sacred bulls. But is this not too good to be true }

The discussion supplies a good illustration of the diffi- culties and dangers which a science like folklore is obliged to encounter. We are charged- — and the accusation is often only too true — with being immersed in the quest of survivals. As Professor Gilbert Murray writes, we " search antiquity eagerly for traces of primitive man, for totems, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and the like. The traces which they discover are of the greatest value. But I think that they have often mistaken the reverberation of an extinct barbarity for the actual barbarity itself." ^^

•'■'- Folk- Lot e, xxi. {1910) 132 et seqq. ^^ The Rise of the Greek Epic, 10 et seq.