Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/373

 The Binding of a God. 337

ferring gifts on suppliants, and so on.-^ The same tales, it is needless to say, were told in connection with many images of later times, holy roods, the relics of saints, and the like. Hence in some cases images were temporarily lent, and conveyed their virtues to their possessors for the time. Thus, in time of trouble the yEginetans lent to the Thebans the images of the ^akidae, and they were sent to help the Greeks at the battle of Salamis." The Spartans did th.e same with the Tyndarides, and the Thebans lent their hero Melanippus to Kleisthenes of Sikyon.^ It is a belief of this kind which accounts for the common habit of carrying images in procession. Thus the Agurtai, priests of Isis, used to carry about images of their god. At the Apollonia rite in Sikyon the statues of Apollo and Artemis were carried from the tem- ple of Peitho to that of Apollo.* The Egyptian priests at Papremis carried about an idol, which Herodotus identified with Ares, in a small wooden temple gilded all over, which was drawn on a wheeled carriage which must have been much the same as the tabernacle of Moloch.'^ So with the Indian Jaggannath and Krishna, and the procession of the spear of Kandaswami in Ceylon, or Ghazi Miyan in Northern India.^ Similarly in Germany Nerthus,Berecynthia,and Fro travelled all over the country and conveyed their blessed influence to every place they visited.'^

Moore read the story in Fromman Upon Fascination, a German work, where it is quoted from Vincent of Beauvais. It is a commonplace of medieval chronicles. Baring Gould (Curioics Myths, ed. 1869, p. 224, sqq.) and Graf (^Roina nella Meiitoria e nelle Iminaginazioiii del Medio Evo, vol. ii. p. 388, sqq.^ give the best accounts of the cycle. — Ed.]

' Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. i. p. 114, note; vol. iv. p. 1320.

^ Herodotus, v. 80 ; viii. 64.

' Grote, History of Greece, vol. i. p. 443, note.


 * Pausanias, ii. 7.


 * Herodotus, ii. 63 ; Acts of the Apostles, vii. 43.

^ Folk-Lore, YoX.vi. p. iSt, -jdookQ, Popular Ixeligioji and Folklore of N'orthern India, vol. i. p. 208.

' Grimm, loc. cit., vol i. pp. 64, 107, 213, 255, note ; vol. ii. p. 595 ; vol iv, p. 1307 ; and for an image conveying itself on board ship, Tacitus, Hist., iv. 84.

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