Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/116

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108
Correspondence.

other word employed. I think — though I do not wish to be too certain — that the "bogles" of persons recently dead were more dreaded, and considered more generally unlucky, than any other kind.

I have only to add that I quite confess my "perversity" as regards the title ; I regretted having used the word afterwards when I realised its " foreign" look. I am afraid that, as I wanted a name of some sort, and wanted it in a hurry, I took the first one that suggested itself, and the result is, certainly, unhappy.

Clothilde Balfour.

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CHAINED IMAGES.

(Τόνεα Festival.)

To the Editor of Folk-Lore.

Sir, — You kindly gave me space in a recent number of Folk-Lore in which to ask for any facts likely to throw light on the meaning of the Greek festival of the Tonea, and of the appearance in ritual and myth of chained gods.

The interest of this festival, and of the curious myths in question, and the hope expressed by Mr. Hartland in the last number of the Journal that the matter might be pursued, will perhaps excuse my troubling you again. I would now ask specially for any custom of binding or "fettering" in burial rites, whether of savage or peasant folk.

The rites celebrated to Hera in the Tonea festival at Samos were, it will be remembered, yearly and included the hiding of the image of the goddess " tightly bound in willow branches" according to the legend (Athenæus, xv, c. 13 ; Bohn trans., p. 1073). The nearer we approach to a knowledge of the religious calendar of primitive times, the more the dual seasons of death and rebirth, or recall, seem to dominate the cycle of ritual worship ; and to the period of the death or absence of the god, or, as it is generally called, the Chthonic phase, belong of course the funeral rites so well known in Greek worship — such,