Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/619

 *tion of it to Hera in Aristophanes' ode brings the legend of Hera's marriage into rank with those other wedding-stories whose actual plot hinged upon the identity of death and marriage. Thus though one legend might be more appropriate in its externals to one occasion, and another legend to another occasion, the ultimate and fundamental idea of them all was single and the same.

This view is boldly championed by the second authority whom I proposed to quote upon the subject of mystic marriage-scenes depicted on funeral-monuments. 'The idea,' says Lenormant, 'of mystic union in death is frequently indicated in the scenes represented upon sarcophagi and painted vases. But for the most part the idea is expressed there only in an allusive manner, which depends upon the identification which this marriage-scene established between the dead person and the deity, by means of such subjects as the carrying off of Cephalus by Aurora, or Orithyia by Boreas, or the love-story of Aphrodite and Adonis .' 'Thus,' he explains, 'a girl carried off (by death) from her parents was simply a bride betrothed to the infernal god, and was identified with Demeter's maiden daughter, the victim of the passion and violence of Hades; a young man cut off by an early fate figured as the beautiful Adonis, snatched away by Persephone from the love of Aphrodite, and brought, in spite of himself, to the bed of the queen of the lower world .' The identification which Lenormant sees in these several instances is an identification, I suppose, not of personalities but of destinies. The popular religion of ancient Greece shows little trace of any pantheistic view which would have contemplated the absorption of the personality of the dead man or woman into that of any god or goddess. Indeed the very number of the personally distinct deities with whom, on such an hypothesis, the dead would have been identified, as well as that continuance of sexual difference in the future life which is postulated by the very doctrine before us, precludes all thought of personal identification. Rather it is the future destiny of the dead person which was identified with the destiny of the deity or hero whose marriage was represented on sarcophagus or cippus or commemorative vase. The lot of Kore or Ariadne or Orithyia prefigured the lot of mortal