Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/247

not seem admissible to do as M. Girard does, and accept Voigt's conclusion while disagreeing with his premises. In other words, if the orgiastic rites existed in Homeric Greece, the second piece of evidence given above loses its value: the inference, that the Greeks borrowed the rites from the Thracians, has some cogency only so long as we believe that the latter were earlier in possession of the rites than the former. There remain the myths alluded to. These agree amongst themselves in representing the god as punishing those who resisted the introduction of his orgies, and they are regarded as "evidently reminiscences of opposition offered to the introduction of a new and foreign worship". But to find reminiscences of historical fact in myths is to extract gold from the sunbeams. If myths are folk-lore, and folk-lore is primitive hypothesis, the one thing certain is that the assumed historical occurrence which the "popular explanation" uses to account for its "observed facts" is not historical at all. Whatever the etymology of "Shotover" Hill, it was never shot over by Little John; nor does this primitive hypothesis contain a reminiscence of any historical fact. The one thing we can infer with certainty is that the original name of the hill was near enough for the folk to confound it with the words "shot over". So, too, the one thing we can be certain of in these myths is that they were designed to explain the orgies. Why did the women of Eleutheræ, a village at the foot of Cithæron, dance in this mad way at the Dionysia? Because Dionysos sends the madness on them. What! on his worshippers? Ah! but they were not always worshippers of his: once Dionysos appeared in a black goat-skin to the daughters of Eleuther, and they derided him; so he sent his madness on them, and did not withdraw it until their father, after consulting Apollo, adopted the cult of Dionysos of the Black Goat-skin (Suidas s. v. μελαναίγιδα Διόνυσον). So, too, the daughters of Prœtus of Tiryns were driven mad by the god because they refused to enter into his orgiastic rites