Again, in one of the darkest and most perplexing of Greek legends, the
story of Klumenos of Argos and his incestuous love of his daughter
Harpalyke, who revenges herself by slaying her own child and offering
it to the father in a sacrificial meal, we may discern the glimmer of
a remembrance of a cannibal sacrament. The associations of the story
dimly indicate a Thracian origin.[239.3] And it is in the range of
the Greek Dionysiac {240} cult, which according to the most probable
view was adopted from Thrace, that we find imprinted on legend and
ritual the tradition of a savage type of sacrament, in which the human
or animal incarnation of the god was devoured. Such is the
significance that we may fairly attach to the Titan-story of the
murder of the infant Dionysos, to the σπαραγμός of the goat or bull or
snake periodically practised by the Bacchoi or Bacchae, and to the
death of Pentheus.[240.1] And in later Greek ritual the consciousness
here and there survived that the victim offered to Dionysos incarnated
the very deity, even before it acquired the temporary mystic afflatus
from contact with the altar. The record of the ritual of Tenedos, in
which a sacred pregnant cow was tended reverently and the calf that
she bore was dressed in the buskins and then sacrificed to Dionysos,
“the render of men,” is the most piquant example.[240.2]
This Dionysiac tradition reaches back undoubtedly to the second
millennium in Greece; the evidence of a similar sacramental ritual in
purely Hellenic worship is shadowy and slight, for the critical
examination of the Eleusinian mysteries does not clearly reveal it;
and the growth and diffusion of the idea in later Paganism does not
concern us now.
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