* Cf. Preller, i. 256, 257. Bacchylides make Hecate the
daughter of "deep-bosomed Night". (40). The Scholiast on the
second idyll of Theocritus, in which the sorceress appeals
to the magic of the moon, makes her a daughter of Zeus and
Demeter, and identified with Artemis. Here, more clearly
than elsewhere, the Artemis appears sub luce maligna,
under the wan uncertain light of the moon.
It was ever the tendency of Greek thought to turn from the contemplation of dark and inscrutable things in the character of the gods and to endow them with the fairest attributes. The primitive formless Zoana give place to the ideal statues of gold and ivory. The Artemis to whom a fawn in a maiden's dress is sacrificed does not haunt the memory of Euripides; his Artemis is fair and honourable, pure and maidenly, a goddess wandering in lonely places unbeholden of man. It is thus, if one may rhyme the speech of Hippolytus, that her votary addresses her:—
For thee soft crowns in thine untrampled mead
I weave, my lady, and to thee I bear;
Thither no shepherd drives his flocks to feed,
Nor scythe of steel has ever laboured there;
Nay, through the spring among the blossoms fair
The brown bee comes and goes, and with good heed
Thy maiden, Reverence, sweet streams doth lead
About the grassy close that is her care!
Souls only that are gracious and serene
By gift of God, in human lore unread,
May pluck these holy blooms and grasses green
That now I wreathe for thine immortal head,
I who may walk with thee, thyself unseen,
And by thy whispered voice am comforted.
In passages like this we find the truly natural religion, the religion to which man's nature tends, "groaning and travailing" till the goal is won, But it is long in the winning; the paths are rough; humanity is "led by a way that it knew not".
DIONYSUS.
Among deities whose origin has been sought in the personification, if not of the phenomena, at least of the forces of Nature, Dionysus is prominent.* He is regarded by many mythologists** as the "spiritual form" of the new vernal life, the sap and pulse of vegetation and of the new-born year, especially as manifest in the vine and the juice of the grape. Thus Preller*** looks on his mother, Semele, as a personification of the pregnant soil in spring.**** The name of Semele is explained with the familiar diversity of conjecture. Whether the human intellect, at the time of the first development of myth, was capable of such abstract thought as is employed in the recognition of a deity presiding over "the revival of earth-life" or not, and whether, having attained to this abstraction, men would go on to clothe it in all manner of animal and other symbolisms, are questions which mythologists seem to take for granted. The popular story of the birth of Dionysus is well known.
* It is needless to occupy space with the etymological
guesses at the sense of the name "Dionysus". Greek, Sanskrit
and Assyrian have been tortured by the philologists, but
refuse to give up their secret, and Curtis does not even
offer a conjecture (Or. Etym., 609).
** Preller, i. 544.
*** i. 546.
**** The birth of Dionysus is recorded (Iliad, xiv. 323;
Hesiod, Theog., 940) without the story of the death of
Semele, which occurs in Æschylus, Frg., 217-218; Eurip.,
Bacchæ, i. 3.
His mother, Semele, desired to see Zeus in all his glory, as he appeared when he made love to Hera. Having promised to grant all the nymph's requests, Zeus was constrained to approach her in thunder and lightning. She was burned to death, but the god rescued her unborn child and sowed him up in his own thigh. In this wild narrative Preller finds the wedlock of heaven and earth, "the first day that it thunders in March". The thigh of Zeus is to be interpreted as "the cool moist clouds". If, on the other hand, we may take Dionysus himself to be the rain, as Kuhn does, and explain the thigh of Zeus by comparison with certain details in the soma sacrifice and the right thigh of Indra, as described in one of the Brahmanas, why then, of course, Preller's explanation cannot be admitted.*
* Kuhn, Herabkunft, pp. 166, 167, where it appears that the
gods buy soma and place it on the right thigh of Indra.