“Look upon the dance, Olympians; send us the grace of Victory, ye gods who come to the heart of our city, where many feet are treading and incense steams:  in sacred Athens come to the holy centre-stone.  Take your portion of garlands pansy-twined, libations poured from the culling of spring....

“Come hither to the god with ivy bound.  Bromios we mortals name Him, and Him of the mighty Voice....  The clear signs of his Fulfilment are not hidden, whensoever the chamber of the purple-robed Hours is opened, and nectarous flowers lead in the fragrant spring.  Then, then, are flung over the immortal Earth, lovely petals of pansies, and roses are amid our hair; and voices of song are loud among the pipes, the dancing-floors are loud with the calling of crowned Semele.”

Bromios, “He of the loud cry,” is a title of Dionysos.  Semele is his mother, the Earth; we keep her name in Nova Zembla, “New Earth.”  The song might have been sung at a “Carrying-in of Summer.”  The Horae, the Seasons, a chorus of maidens, lead in the figure of Spring, the Queen of the May, and they call to Mother Earth to wake, to rise up from the earth, flower-crowned.

You may bring back the life of the Spring in the form of a tree or a maiden, or you may summon her to rise from the sleeping Earth.  In Greek mythology we are most familiar with the Rising-up form.  Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, is carried below the Earth, and rises up again year by year.  On Greek vase-paintings[20] the scene occurs again and again.  A mound of earth is represented, sometimes surmounted by a tree; out of the mound a woman’s figure rises; and all about the mound are figures of dancing daemons waiting to welcome her.

All this is not mere late poetry and art.  It is the primitive art and poetry that come straight out of ritual, out of actual “things done,” dromena.  In the village of Megara, near Athens, the very place where to-day on Easter Tuesday the hills are covered with throngs of dancing men, and specially women, Pausanias[21] saw near the City Hearth a rock called “Anaklethra, ‘Place of Calling-up,’ because, if any one will believe it, when she was wandering in search of her daughter, Demeter called her up there”; and he adds:  “The women to this day perform rites analogous to the story told.”

These rites of “Calling up” must have been spring rites, in which, in some pantomimic dance, the uprising of the Earth Spirit was enacted.

Another festival of Uprising is perhaps more primitive and instructive, because it is near akin to the “Carrying out of Winter,” and also because it shows clearly the close connection of these rites with the food-supply.  Plutarch[22] tells us of a festival held every nine years at Delphi.  It was called from the name of the puppet used Charila, a word which originally meant Spring-Maiden, and is connected with the Russian word yaro, “Spring,” and is also akin to the Greek Charis, “grace,” in the sense of increase, “Give us all grace.”  The rites of Charila, the Gracious One, the Spring-Maiden, were as follows: