him into a kid;[1] and when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat.[2] Hence when his worshippers rent in pieces a Hve goat and devoured it raw,[3] they must have beheved that they were eating the body and blood of the god.
This custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall examine more fully presently, belongs to a very early stage in human culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The advance of thought tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of their bestial and vegetable husk, and to leave their human attributes (which are always the kernel of the conception) as the final and sole residuum. In other words, animal and plant gods tend to become purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or nearly so, the animals and plants which were at first the deities themselves, still retain a vague and ill-understood connection with the anthropomorphic gods which have been developed out of them. The origin of the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant having been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it. These explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to explain either why it was spared or why
- ↑ Apollodorus, iii. 4, 3.
- ↑ Ovid, Metam. v. 329; Antoninus Liberalis, 28; Mythogr. Vatic. ed. Bode, i. 86, p. 29.
- ↑ Arnobius, Adv. nationes, v. 19. Cp. Suidas, s.v. αἰγίζειν. As fawns appear to have been also torn in pieces at the rites of Dionysus (Photius, s.v. νεβρίζειν; Harpocration, s.v. νεβρἰζων), it is probable that the fawn was another of the god’s embodiments. But of this there seems no direct evidence. Fawn-skins were worn both by the god and his worshippers (Cornutus, De natura deorum, c. 30). Similarly the female Bacchanals wore goat-skins (Hesychius, s.v. τραγηφόροι).
