Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/145



—Will you allow me to bring before your readers an enigma which is, I think, interesting, and as yet unsolved?

Why does early man make ritual use of chained or fettered images? and whence come his myths and legends of chained and captive deities (other than the volcanic "earth-shakers")?

As typical Greek examples, perhaps I may quote the bound Actæon statue which Pausanias saw at Orchemenos (Paus., ix, 38, 6); the yearly rites celebrated to Hera at Samos in the "festival called Tonens", where the statue of the goddess ("tightly bound" in willow branches in the legend) was carried down to the sea-shore and hidden (Athenæus, xv, c 13; Bohn, p. 1073); and in myth the fettering of Ares by the Aloidæ in the "strong prison house; yea in a vessel of bronze lay he bound thirteen months" (Iliad, v, 386).

The chaining with an iron chain of a cultus image, in ritual, occurs in China; the binding in an iron "Dreschhaus" in Finnish myth; and there is, of course, the straw rope prominent in Japanese Shinto temples and custom; but all such analogies fail as yet to solve the riddle.

Is it too much to hope that the kindness or interest of some readers of may prompt them to impart any suggestive facts, undeterred by Athenæus' scorn of those interpreters of willow-rites who "said many irrelevant things on the subject"? Not living in the period of