Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/390

 354 The Binding of a God.

myth of Osiris, inv^eigled by his brother Set into a beauti- fully decorated coffer, the coffer nailed down upon him and soldered with lead, and set afloat on the Nile. Whether Osiris was or was not a tree- or corn-spirit does not affect the matter. But in this version we have what is wanting in the Homeric myth, the sealing up of the receptacle of the spirit, which we find in other forms of the story, as for instance that of the Jinni, who was placed under the seal of the Lord Solomon. This is not to be wondered at, because Homer does not go into details, and merely refers incidentally to the myth, one with which his hearers were doubtless quite familiar.

But why was he shut up for thirteen months ? If the thirteen months were, as the old Greek months certainly were, lunar, then the period would represent a solar year, and this to my mind is one of the strongest facts which tend to indicate the chthonic origin of the myth. We know that about the time of the compilation of the Homeric poems a change was going on by which the use of the old and rather vague term ivcavTo^ w^as being replaced by the more definite ero<i. The former prevails in the Achilleid or more primitive stratum of the epic. In Hesiod (Theog. 59) iviavro'i means little more than a ten months' cycle, and the same change in the length of the year prevailed among the early Italians. We may possibly find an indication of the same develop- ment in the calendar in the present case. We know that there were many gods whose images were exposed only once a year. This was the case, for instance, with the statue of the Diadumene Mother and that of the secret statues of the Sikyonians, which they used to carry once a year to the temple of Dionysus.^ Herodotus tells us of the daughter of Mycerinus, who prayed to her father that he would let her see the sun once a year; and the wooden heifer supposed to contain her body was therefore actually

' Paitsanias, i. 7, 3 ; ix. 25, 2.