“The king presided and made a distribution in public of grain and pulse to all, both citizens and strangers.  And the child-image of Charila is brought in.  When they had all received their share, the king struck the image with his sandal, the leader of the Thyiades lifted the image and took it away to a precipitous place, and there tied a rope round the neck of the image and buried it.”

Mr. Calderon has shown that very similar rites go on to-day in Bulgaria in honour of Yarilo, the Spring God.

The image is beaten, insulted, let down into some cleft or cave.  It is clearly a “Carrying out the Death,” though we do not know the exact date at which it was celebrated.  It had its sequel in another festival at Delphi called Herois, or the “Heroine.”  Plutarch[23] says it was too mystical and secret to describe, but he lets us know the main gist.

     “Most of the ceremonies of the Herois have a mystical reason
     which is known to the Thyiades, but from the rites that are done in
     public, one may conjecture it to be a ‘Bringing up of Semele.’”

Some one or something, a real woman, or more likely the buried puppet Charila, the Spring-Maiden, was brought up from the ground to enact and magically induce the coming of Spring.

* * * * *

These ceremonies of beating, driving out, burying, have all, with the Greeks, as with the savage and the modern peasant, but one real object:  to get rid of the season that is bad for food, to bring in and revive the new supply.  This comes out very clearly in a ceremony that went on down to Plutarch’s time, and he tells us[24] it was “ancestral.”  It was called “the Driving out of Ox-hunger.”  By Ox-hunger was meant any great ravenous hunger, and the very intensity and monstrosity of the word takes us back to days when famine was a grim reality.  When Plutarch was archon he had, as chief official, to perform the ceremony at the Prytaneion, or Common Hearth.  A slave was taken, beaten with rods of a magical plant, and driven out of doors to the words:  “Out with Ox-hunger!  In with Wealth and Health!” Here we see the actual sensation, or emotion, of ravenous hunger gets a name, and thereby a personality, though a less completely abstracted one than Death or Summer.  We do not know that the ceremony of Driving out Ox-hunger was performed in the spring, it is only instanced here because, more plainly even than the Charila, when the king distributes pulse and peas, it shows the relation of ancient mimic ritual to food-supply.