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

208 The Dithyramb, Spring-Festival, etc. [ch,
the offerings are to be made. A priestess is about to slay a very
lively looking goat. About are dancing Maenads with their
timbrels. But though a goat is sacrificed, the old bull-service is
not forgotten. The altar is decorated with a boukranion, the holy
filleted head of a bull.
. To
resume. In Crete we have the worship of the Mother and
the Child, the Kouros ; without the Child the worship of the
Mother is not ; we have also the theriornorph, the holy Bull, the
' horns of consecration ; we '
cease to wonder that the Cretan
Fig. 55.
palace is full of bulls and horns, we cease to wonder at the story
of Pasiphae and the Minotaur. In Asia Minor, in Phrygia, the
same conjunction, the Mother and the Child and the Bull ;
in
Thrace, in Macedon, in Delphi, in Thracianized Thebes again
the same. It was this religion of the Mother and the holy Bull-
Child and the spring Spcofievov that came down afresh, resurging
from Macedon to startle and enthrall civilized, Olympianized,
patriarchalized, intellectualized Athens, that Athens which, cen-
turies before, under the sea-supremacy of Minos, had had her
legend of the Cretan Bull, her Cretan ritual of the Bouphonia.
Matriarchy died out; Athena was 'all for the father'; hence
the scandal caused by the Bacchants. But the Bull and the
spring Spco/xevov went on, to be the seed of the drama.