Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/380

344 the altar by a continuous cord, which unfortunately broke, and they were all massacred. The Samian despot, Polykrates, when he consecrated to the Delian Apollo the neighbouring island of Rheneia, connected it with the island of Deles by means of a chain.

When we come to the cases of gods who are actually imprisoned or confined, the ritual seems generally based on the idea that the image is tabu, dangerous if exhibited to its votaries, though in some instances the principle of physically detaining the god may be at the root of the matter. The risk of touching or even seeing a sacred object of this kind hardly needs illustration. We have the case of the Hebrew Ark, which it was death for an uninitiated person to touch. Aglauros and Herse, when they saw the chest in which Erectheus was confined, and found the child in the form of a serpent, were seized with madness and threw themselves from the Akropolis. "Gods," says Homer, "are not seen by mortals with impunity," as in the case of Teiresias, who was deprived of sight because he saw Athene in her bath; and when an image of Iphigeneia was found in a bush at Sparta, the sight of it threw the beholders into a state of madness. It is needless to