it was killed. Devised for the former purpose, the myth would tell of some service rendered to the deity by the animal; devised for the latter purpose, the myth would tell of some injury inflicted by the animal on the god. The reason given for sacrificing goats to Dionysus is an example of a myth of the latter sort. They were sacrificed to him, it was said, because they injured the vine.[1] Now the goat, as we have seen, was originally an embodiment of the god himself. But when the god had divested himself of his animal character and had become essentially anthropomorphic, the killing of the goat in his worship came to be regarded no longer as a slaying of the god himself, but as a sacrifice to him; and since some reason had to be assigned why the goat in particular should be sacrificed, it was alleged that this was a punishment inflicted on the goat for injuring the vine, the object of the god’s especial care. Thus we have the strange spectacle of a god sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. And as the god is supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the god’s old self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the goat-god Dionysus is represented as eating raw goat’s blood;[2] and the bull-god Dionysus is called “eater of bulls.”[3] On the analogy of these instances we may conjecture that wherever a god is described as the eater of a particular animal, the animal in question was originally nothing but the god himself.[4]
- ↑ Varro, De re rustica i. 2, 19; Virgil, Georg. ii. 380, and Servius, ad l.;;, and on Aen. iii. 118; Ovid, Fasti, i. 353 sqq; id., Metam. xv. 114 sq.; Cornutus, De natura deorum, 30.
- ↑ Euripides, Bacchae, 138 sq. ἀγρεύων αἷμα τραγοκτόνον, ὠμοφάγον χάριν.
- ↑ Schol. on Aristophanes, Frogs, 357.
- ↑ Hera αἰγοφάγος at Sparta, Pausanias, iii. 15, 9 (cp. the representation of Hera clad in a goat’s skin, with the animal’s head and horns over her head, Müller-Wieseler, Denkmäler der alten
