The scholiast gives himself away by the mention of Eleusis. He confuses the two festivals in instructive fashion, and clearly is reconstructing a ritual out of a cultus epithet. Happily we know from the other and better informed scholiast[352] that the women carried at the Thesmophoria not books but pigs. How then came the pigs and other _sacra_ to be Thesmoi? Dr Frazer proposes a solution. He suggests that the _sacra_, including the pigs, were called θεσμοί, because they were ‘the things laid down.’ The women were called Thesmophoroi because they carried ‘the things laid down’; the goddess took her name from her ministrants. This interpretation is a great advance on the derivation from Thesmophoros, Law-giver. Thesmophoros is scarcely the natural form for law-_giver_, which in ordinary Greek appears as Thesmothetes. Moreover the form Thesmophoros _must_ be connected with actual _carrying_ and must also be connected with what we know _was_ carried at the Thesmophoria. But Thesmoi in Greek did certainly mean _laws_, and Demeter _Thesmophoros_ was in common parlance supposed to be Law-giver. What we want is a derivation that will combine both factors, the notion of law as well as the carrying of pigs. In the light of Dr Verrall’s new explanation of Anthesteria (p. 48) such a derivation may be found. If the Anthesteria be the festival of the charming up, the magical revocation of souls, may not the Thesmophoria be the festival of the carrying of the _magical sacra_? To regard the θεσμοί, whether they are pigs or laws, as simply ‘things laid down,’ deriving them from the root θε, has always seemed to me somewhat frigid. The root θεσ is more vivid and has the blood of religion, or rather magic, in its veins. Although it came, when man entered into orderly and civilized relations with his god, to mean ‘pray,’ in earlier days it carried a wider connotation, and meant, I think, to perform any kind of magical ceremonies. Is not θέσκελος alive with magic? THE CURSE AND THE LAW. But what has law, sober law, to do with magic? To primitive man, it seems, everything. Magic is for cursing or for blessing, and in primitive codes it would seem there was no commandment without cursing. The curse, the ἀρά, is of the essence of the law. The breaker of the law is laid under a ban. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ was the first commandment ‘with promise.’ Law in fact began at a time long before the schism of Church and State, or even of Religion and Morality. There was then no such thing as ‘civil’ law. Nay more, it began in the dim days when religion itself had not yet emerged from magic, in the days when, without invoking the wrath of a righteous divinity, you could yet ‘put a curse’ upon a man, bind him to do his duty by magic and spells.