Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/228

214 The connection between the Arcadian Artemis, the Artemis of Brauron, and the common rituals and creeds of totemistic worship, are now, perhaps, undeniably apparent. Perhaps in all the legend and all the cult of the gooddess there is no more archaic element than this. The speech of the women in the Lysistrata, recalling the days of their childhood when they "were bears," takes us back to a remote past, when the tribes settled at Brauron were bear-worshippers, and, in all probability, claimed to be of the bear stock or kindred. Their distant descendants still imitated the creature's movements in a sacred dance; and the girls of Periclean Athens acted at that moment like the young men of the Mandans or Nootkas in their wolf-dance or buffalo-dance. Another very remarkable example of the goddess's connection with animal-worship may be derived from a rite in her services at Munychium in Attica. It has been seen that in totemistic religion the sacred animal is often sacramentally sacrificed, "himself to himself," as it were, and that his hide is worn by the priest as evidence of the kinship between the creature and the men who claim to be of his stock. The converse of this rite, namely, the investing of the sacrificed beast with human garments, occurs among the Nootkas of North-West America, will be found latter in the worship of Dionysus. It is also present in the ritual of Munychium at Artemis, where a fawn dressed in a girl's raiment was sacrificed to the goodess. The existence of these rude primeval