Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/601

 *mitted to see or to hear anything of it; and even Athenian citizens, it seems, might not enter the innermost sanctuary in which the union of Dionysus with the 'queen' ([Greek: basilinna]) was celebrated. There were however present and assisting in some way fourteen priestesses ([Greek: gerarai]), dedicated to the service of the god and bound by special vows of chastity. These priestesses, we are told, corresponded in number to the altars of Dionysus, and they were appointed by the archon whose wife was wed with Dionysus. There our actual knowledge of the facts ends; but there is material enough on which to base a rational surmise. The correspondence between the number of priestesses bound by vows of purity and the number of the altars suggests that in this custom is to be sought a relic of human sacrifice. The selection of the priestesses by the magistrate who held the title of 'king' suggests that in bygone times it had been the duty of the king, as being also chief priest, to select fourteen virgins who should be sacrificed on Dionysus' altars and thereby sent to him as wives. Subsequently maybe, as humanity gradually mitigated the wilder rites of religion, the number of victims was reduced to one; and later still the human sacrifice was altogether abolished, and, instead of sending to Dionysus his wife by the road of death, the still pious but now more humane worshippers of the god contented themselves with a symbolic marriage between him and the wife of their chief magistrate.

The conception of human sacrifice as a means of sending a messenger from this world to some power above, which receives clear expression in that modern story from Santorini which I have narrated in an earlier chapter, was, I have there argued, known also to the ancient Greeks; and the same means of communication may equally well have been employed for the despatch of a human wife to some god. Plutarch appears to have been actually familiar with this idea. In a passage in which he is attempting to vindicate the purity and goodness of the gods and, it must be added withal, their aloofness from human affairs, he claims that all the religious rites and means of communion are concerned, not with the great gods ([Greek: theoi]), but with lesser deities ([Greek: daimones]), pp. 1369-1371 et passim. Cf. Arist. [Greek: Athên. Pol.] 3.].]