The folk-versions of the saga, though resembling the literary versions, are less elaborate and generally wilder, and perhaps represent its primitive form.[496] The greatest differences are found in versions of the Tain and of Cuchulainn’s death, which, separate in the saga, are parts of one folk-tale, the death occurring during the fighting over the bull.  The bull is his property, and Medb sends Garbh mac Stairn to take it from him.  He pretends to be a child, goes to bed, and tricks Garbh, who goes off to get the bull.  Cuchulainn arrives before him and personates the herdsman.  Each seizes a horn, and the bull is torn in two.[497] Does this represent the primitive form of the Tain, and, further, were the bull and Cuchulainn once one and the same—­a bull, the incarnation of a god or vegetation spirit, being later made anthropomorphic—­a hero-god whose property or symbol was a bull?  Instances of this process are not unknown among the Celts.[498] In India, Indra was a bull and a divine youth, in Greece there was the bull-Dionysos, and among the Celts the name of the divine bull was borne by kings.[499] In the saga Morrigan is friendly to the bull, but fights for Medb; but she is now friendly, now hostile to Cuchulainn, finally, however, trying to avert his doom.  If he had once been the bull, her friendliness would not be quite forgotten, once he became human and separate from the bull.  When she first met Cuchulainn she had a cow on whom the Brown Bull was to beget a calf, and she told the hero that “So long as the calf which is in this cow’s body is a yearling, it is up to that time that thou art in life; and it is this that will lead to the Tain."[500] This suggests that the hero was to die in the battle, but it shows that the Brown Bull’s calf is bound up his life.  The Bull was a reincarnation of a divine swineherd, and if, as in the case of Cuchulainn, “his rebirth could only be of himself,"[501] the calf was simply a duplicate of the bull, and, as it was bound up with the hero’s life, bull and hero may well have been one.  The life or soul was in the calf, and, as in all such cases, the owner of the soul and that in which it is hidden are practically identical.  Cuchulainn’s “distortion” might then be explained as representing the bull’s fury in fight, and the folk-tales would be popular forms of an old myth explaining ritual in which a bull, the incarnation of a tree or vegetation spirit, was slain, and the sacred tree cut down and consumed, as in Celtic agricultural ritual.  This would be the myth represented on the bas-reliefs, and in the ritual the bull would be slain, rent, and eaten by his worshippers.  Why, then, should Cuchulainn rend the bull?  In the later stages of such rites the animal was slain, not so much as a divine incarnation as a sacrifice to the god once incarnated in him.  And when a god was thus separated from his animal form, myths often arose telling how he himself had slain the animal.[502] In the case of Cuchulainn and