What astonished Pausanias[161] more than anything else he saw at Methana in Troezen was a ceremony for averting the winds. ‘A wind called Lips, which rushes down from the Saronic gulf, dries up the tender shoots of the vine. When the squall is upon them two men take a cock, which must have all its feathers white, tear it in two, and run round the vines in opposite directions, each of them carrying one half of the cock. When they come back to the place they start from they bury the cock there. This is the device they have invented for counteracting Lips. I myself,’ he adds, ‘have seen the people keeping off hail by sacrifices and incantations.’ The Methanian cock is a typical σφάγιον: it is carried round for purification, the evil influences of the wind are somehow caught by it, in rather proleptic fashion, and then buried away. It is really of the order of pharmakos ceremonies, to be considered later, rather than a sacrifice proper. For a σφάγιον we should expect the cock to be black, but on the principle of sympathetic magic it is in this case white. The normal sacrifice to a wind was a black animal. When in the _Frogs_[162] a storm is brewing between Aeschylus and Euripides, and threatens to burst, Dionysos calls out: ‘Bring out a ewe, boys, bring a black-fleeced ewe, Here’s a typhoon that’s just about to burst.’ Winds were underworld gods, but when propitious they had a strong and natural tendency to become Ouranian, and the white sacrifices with intent to compel their beneficence would help this out. They are an exact parallel to the black and white Eumenides already noted. Virgil[163] says: ‘To Storm a black sheep, white to the favouring West.’ Equally instructive is the account given by Pausanias[164] of the ceremonies performed at Titane to soothe the winds, though with his customary vagueness Pausanias describes them by the word θύειν when they are really ἐναγισμοί. They are performed on one _night_ in each year, and Pausanias adds, the priest also ‘does secret ceremonies into four pits,’ soothing the fury of the winds, and he chants over them as they say Medea’s charms. Each of the four winds dwelt, it is clear, as a chthonic power in a pit; his sacrifice was after the fashion of heroes and ghosts. It is possible, indeed probable, that the pits were in connection with the tomb of some hero or heroine. The sacrifice of Iphigeneia was παυσάνεμος[165], with power to stay the winds; that of Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles had the like virtue. Be that as it may, it will be seen when we come to demonology that the winds were regarded as ghosts, as breaths: as such their cult was necessarily chthonic.