Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

150 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [ch.
manifestly the case. The lower end of the ladder is on earth,
planted in the reality of sacrifice. The sanctified, sacrificed animal
becomes a god. He then sheds his animal form, or keeps it as an
attribute or a beast of burden, or, as in the case of Jupiter
Dolichenus 1 in Fig. 27, he stands upon the animal he once was,
stands in all the glory of a deified Roman Emperor with double
axe and thunderbolt. Any animal in close relation to man,
whether as food or foe, may rise to be a god, but he must first
become sacred, sanctified, must first be sacrificed. The fact that
the sacrifice is, for reasons to be discussed later, renewed year by
year, makes the personality of the god durable.
The Bouphonia, it was acknowledged on all hands, was a
ceremonial primitive and tending to be obsolete. It may be
instructive to examine another instance of bull-sacrifice, where
some of the more archaic and uncouth details have dropped away,
yet where the intent remains the same, and where even more
clearly than in the case of the Bouphonia we have gift-sacrifice to
an Olympian appearing as an idea clearly superimposed on a
primitive communal feast, a sacrament or sanctification of intent
purely magical. Such an instance we have in the yearly sacrifice
of a bull to Zeus Sosipolis 2 , of Magnesia on the Maeander. The
full details of this sacrifice are happily known to us from an
inscription found on one of the antae of the temple of Zeus in the
agora at Magnesia, and dating about the middle of the third
century B.C. 3
At the annual fair {iravrj^vpa) held in the month Heraion,
a bull, the finest that could be got, was to be bought each year
by the city stewards, and at the new moon of the month
Kronion, at the beginning of seed-time, they were to 'dedicate' it
to Zeus 4 . Uncertain
as the dating of months in local calendars
1 Seidl, DoUchenu&}cu.U, Taf. m. 1.
2 For the (Zeus) Sosipolis of Olyrnpia in his snake form and his analogies with
the Cretan infant Zeus see C. Robert, Mitt. Arch. Inst. Athen xvm. 1893, p. 37, and
Frazer ad Pausanias vi. 20. 2—5, and infra, p. 241.
3 O. Kern, Inschriften v. Magnesia, No. 98, discussed by O. Kern, Arch. Anz.
1894, p. 78, and Nilsson, Griechische Feste, 1906, p. 23.
4 ...ravpov tlis k&Whttov tov /XTjvbs'Hpaiwvos iv rrji iravrj-yvpn inaiiTov Irons nai
dvadetKVVwa-i tGil Ad dpxoftivov awbpov p.7]vbs Kpoviwvos iv ttji vovp.i)vlai.