The Golden Bough (Third Edition, Vol. 7 of 12) - Mirrors

44 The Golden Bough (Third Edition, Vol. 7 of 12)[033]Hence they conjecture that at Athens the body of Dionysus wasdramatically broken into fourteen fragments, one for each of thefourteen altars, and that it was afterwards dramatically piecedtogether and restored to life by the fourteen Sacred Women, justas the broken body of Osiris was pieced together by a companyof gods and goddesses and restored to life by his sister Isis. 130The conjecture is ingenious and plausible, but with our existingsources of information it must remain a conjecture and nothingmore. Could it be established, it would forge another stronglink in the chain of evidence which binds the modern ThracianCarnival to the ancient Athenian Anthesteria; for in that casethe drama of the divine death and resurrection would have to beadded to the other features which these two festivals of springpossess in common, and we should have to confess that Greecehad what we may call its Good Friday and its Easter Sunday longbefore the events took place in Judaea which diffused these twoannual commemorations of the Dying and Reviving God overa great part of the civilised world. From so simple a beginningmay flow consequences so far-reaching and impressive; for inthe light of the rude Thracian ceremony we may surmise that thehigh tragedy of the death and resurrection of Dionysus originatedin a rustic mummers' play acted by ploughmen for the purposeof fertilising the brown earth which they turned up with thegleaming share in sunshiny days of spring, as they followed theslow-paced oxen down the long furrows in the fallow field. Lateron we shall see that a play of the same sort is still acted, orwas acted down to recent years, by English yokels on PloughMonday.130 The resurrection of Osiris is not described by Plutarch in his treatise Isiset Osiris, which is still our principal source for the myth of the god; but itis fortunately recorded in native Egyptian writings. See Adonis, Attis, Osiris,Second Edition, p. 274. P. Foucart supposes that the resurrection of Dionysuswas enacted at the Anthesteria; August Mommsen prefers to suppose that itwas enacted in the following month at the Lesser Mysteries.