extract from the Phoenician Kosmogony of Sanchouniathon, may perhaps to some extent illustrate this very obscure myth 1:— 'When the air began to send forth rays of splendour, through the fiery influence both on sea and land, there were winds and clouds and mighty flowings and torrents of heavenly waters. And when they were separated and carried out of their proper place by the fiery influence of the sun and all met again in the air and were dashed together, thunders and lightnings ensued.'2 The sound arouses certain mysterious intelligent existencies named Zophasemim or the sentinels of heaven,' 'as the great constellations or Decans of the Chaldees were called,' and the orderly procession of material phenomena commences. The external creative force (Zeus) shoots fiery splendour on sea and land, themselves emerging into form from the pristine Mot, Mokh, or Mud, the foundation of things (Semele), which has been personified as a Phoenician sage Mochos. Strange chaotic convulsions follow, and amidst the roar of their thunder and the lightning flashes of the enkindling power the earth, temporarily eclipsed in a transition period of Tohuand-Bohu, passes through it into a state of augmented splendour, a resurrection vitality also typified by the changes of the seasons; and Semele in restored beauty stands forth, the All-mother, the All-queen, combination of Demeter and Persephone, Thyone the Inspired;5 breathing of the Invisible God, and an early impersonation and concept of that Kingdom-of-the-Heavens spoken of by Apostles and Evangelists, and which appeared to the Seer of Patmos in its developed splendour as a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet,' the 1 As to the authenticity of Philon, cf. Bunsen, Egypt's Place, iv. 162 et seq: 2 Sanchou. i. 2. Bunsen, Egypt's Place, iv. 182. 4 Cf. ibid. 176. 5 Hom. Hymn, xxvi. 21; Pind. Pyth. iii. 176. time of night, darkness, chaos, and confusion passed, and on her head a starry crown; a feature which leads to the mention of another Pindarik epithet of Semele, namely, Helikampyx,' Curling-hair-circlet-girt. Both this name and Tanuetheira have special reference to her flowing locks. And why? Because the hair, the glory of the woman-earth, is, like the Samsonian locks, the sign and symbol of the force and vigour of vitality; and as such is dedicated to the River-gods as representatives of the strength and daily flow of human life,'2 and Semele is thus fitly the mother of Dionysos Eurychaites, the Flowing-tressed; not the unshorn tresses of Apollon Akersekomes, but the earth-vigour of the telluric spirit of the world Kallietheiros, Adorned-with-lovely-locks. Such appears to be the root idea of the myth of Semele, but since Hesiodos and Pindaros pictured her as a mortal maiden, daughter of the Phoenician Kadmos, it mag easily be perceived how the elements of the myth came to appear in their present form. Zeus has already an Aryan consort, Here, who naturally resents his preference for another and plots her destruction. The kosmical chaos becomes in the anthropomorphic concept the death of Semele, its restoration to order and ever-renewing beauty her resurrection and investiture with immortal life; and, being immortal, she naturally joins her fellowdeities in the etherial abodes of Olympos through the instrumentality of her son, the favourite of Zeus and youthful member of the Aryan Pantheon. These circumstances are easily embellished by the arbitrary and meaningless imaginations of later writers; Ovidius can give us a detailed history of the intrigue, while Nonnos records how the deified Thyone sits at the same heavenly 1 Dithyrambs, Frag. iii. 2 Queen of the Air, i. 12; cf. Il. xxiii. 142; Hes. Theog. 347; Ais. Choe. 6. 3 Pind. Isth. vi. 4. 4 Orphik Hymn, i. 7. table with Zeus and Hermes, Ares and Aphrodite.1 But while we cast aside the comparatively modern and worthless fiction which entwines itself round the original idea, we may well admire the fullness of meaning of these strange stories of the Earlier Time, which seem as deathless as the truths they represent. Nor are we bound to see in them only the thoughts and ideas which they may have reflected upon the gifted minds of antiquity. But in the story of Semele we may find an adumbration of the truth that the creature cannot bear to behold the unveiled glories of the Creator; that if He look upon the earth it trembles, if He touch the hills they smoke; that we must be covered with the hand and set in the cleft of the rock while the brightness of the Infinite passes by; and, lastly, that all changes in created things shall ever be from the lower to the higher, from glory to glory, until at length in place of Semele, the present mortal and melancholy earth that shall wax old as a garment, will arise the deathless splendour of a happier creation, Thyone, inspired to show forth the glory of the true Zeus Hypsistos, when He shall make all things new. As regards the historical cult of Semele, Hesychios2 mentions a festival in her honour, which is apparently identical with the Herois, a singular celebration performed by the Delphians once in nine years, and in which, according to Ploutarchos, 'was a representation of something like Semele's resurrection,' with many mysterious rites illustrating the restoration to life of a great heroine who was doubtless a personification of the Earth-mother. The inhabitants of Brasiai on the Argolik Gulf had a local tradition that Kadmos enclosed Semele and her infant in a chest, which was cast into the sea, and at length thrown up on that coast; from which circumstance the place was said to have received its more modern name, i.e. from 1 Dionys. viii. 418. 2 In voc. Heroai. brasso, to thrown up. Semele, they reported, died and was splendidly buried upon the sea shore, and the youthful Dionysos was nurtured by his aunt Ino, who had opportunely arrived there in the course of her wanderings. The legend is a link between Dionysos and the Semitic Adonis, who was placed in a chest and put into the hands of Persephone,'' herself another phase of Semele. This mystic chest is a kind of ark or kosmic egg, from which the powers of growth, heat, and lifebeauty come forth in the procession of existence.3 Subsection II.-Dionysos and the Dithyramb. In Olymp. xiii. 22, the Poet, recounting the glories of Korinthos, exclaims, 'Where else appeared the delights of Dionysos and the ox-capturing Dithyramb?' The North Dorik cities of the Peloponnesos, Korinthos and Sikyon, were more addicted to the Bakchik ritual than Argos and Sparta. The Sikyonians worshipped the god with many peculiar ceremonies as Bakcheios, the Exciterto-phrensy; his cult having been originally introduced from Thebai about the time of the Dorik invasion. The Dithyramb, or ancient Bakchik choral hymn, is said by the almost unanimous voice of antiquity to have been invented, or rather, remodelled and greatly improved, by the lyric poet Arion of Lesbos, who passed the greater part of his life at the court of Periandros, despot of Korinthos, who ruled B.c. 625-585.5 This circumstance explains the allusion of Pindaros, and, as the Scholiast informs us, a bull was the prize and sacrifice at the Bakchik festival. The fact is interesting as an early instance of the cult of Dionysos Taurokeros. According to the natural Phenomena Theory Arion is an unhistoric personage, whose harp represents the wind.1 This view, like that of the Eumeristik interpreters of his history,2 is much more easily advanced than satisfactorily supported; nor is it indeed at all material to the present enquiry, the important fact remaining undoubted that a Bakchik cult was introduced at Korinthos from Thebai, and was subsequently enlarged and improved by strangers from the neighbourhood of the eastern shores of the Aigaion. The circumstance mentioned by Mr. Cox that Arion is represented as a son of Poseidon,' is in perfect accordance with the Semitic character of the worship and the foreign nature of the god. Pausanias, alluding to the account in Herodotos of Arion and his dolphin, states that he knew a dolphin which would carry a certain boy who had cured it of a hurt wherever he liked.3 Subsection III.-Dionysos Associate of Demeter. The sixth Isthmian Ode opens, With which of the former glories of thy country, O fortunate Thebai, does thy mind chiefly delight itself? Was it when thou broughtest forth to light the associate of bronze-rattling Dameter, Dionysos Eurychaites?' From this important passage we learn (1) that Dionysos was born in Thebai,+ that is, that his cult was introduced there from the Outerworld; Thebai, as above noticed, was one of the chief centres from which it spread through continental Hellas ; (2) that Dionysos became the associate of Demeter; (3) in his character of Eurychaites, Lord-of-the-flowingtresses. The first point is already familiar in the enquiry, and, as regards the second, the connection between Diony 1 Cf. Mythology of the Aryan Nations, ii. 26, 245. 2 Vide Rawlinson, Herod. i. 136. 3 Paus. iii. 25. 4 Cf. Hymns, Frag. i. 6 Sup. II. i. 2. G |