Whoever, as a child, read Kingsley's The Heroes with delight, must have been thrilled strangely when he learned that Mr. Arthur Evans had found in Knossos the palace of King Minos, and even representations of his bull-headed, bull-hoofed, and bull-tailed man-monster, the Minotaur. That find was first made some ten years ago, and it was a not unnatural inference from the discovery that the people of ancient Crete, (whose race and language we know not), had a bull-headed god. It was also a natural inference that the lads and lasses in Athenian stories sent to encounter the Minotaur were, in fact, offered as human sacrifices to this being. But a great deal of doubt has been thrown on these theories by the later discovery that Cretan art rejoiced in many things as fantastic as the grotesque non-religious sculptures on the walls of mediaeval cathedrals. The Cretan seal-rings display many purely fanciful figures of goat-headed, ass-headed, lion-headed men, and of an eagle-headed woman. Archaeologists as a rule do not take these figures as representations of theriomorphic merging into anthropomorphic objects of worship. Mr. A. B. Cook and Mons. Reinach (in a recent article in Rev. de l'Hist, des Religions) are, I think, of that opinion, which certainly needs discussion. But the bull-headed figure appears to be the only one of these grotesques which is employed as a link in a certain long and labyrinthine
Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/160
