at all.  It means making holy, sanctifying; and holiness was to primitive man just special strength and life.  What they wanted from the Bull was just that special life and strength which all the year long they had put into him, and nourished and fostered.  That life was in his blood.  They could not eat that flesh nor drink that blood unless they killed him.  So he must die.  But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him, not to “sacrifice” him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him, live by him and through him, by his grace.

And so this killing of the sacred beast was always a terrible thing, a thing they fain would have shirked.  They fled away after the deed, not looking backwards; they publicly tried and condemned the axe that struck the blow.  But their best hope, their strongest desire, was that he had not, could not, really have died.  So this intense desire uttered itself in the dromenon of his resurrection.  If he did not rise again, how could they plough and sow again next year?  He must live again, he should, he did.

The Athenians were a little ashamed of their “Ox-murder,” with its grotesque pantomime of the stuffed, resurrected beast.  Just so some of us now-a-days are getting a little shy of deliberately cursing our neighbours on Ash Wednesday.  They probably did not feel very keenly about their food-supply, they thought their daily dinner was secure.  Anyhow the emotion that had issued in the pantomime was dead, though from sheer habit the pantomime went on.  Probably some of the less educated among them thought there “might be something in it,” and anyhow it was “as well to be on the safe side.”  The queer ceremony had got associated with the worship of Olympian Zeus, and with him you must reckon.  Then perhaps your brother-in-law was the Ox-striker, and anyhow it was desirable that the women should go; some of the well-born girls had to act as water-carriers.

The Ox-murder was obsolete at Athens, but the spirit of the rite is alive to-day among the Ainos in the remote island of Saghalien.  Among the Ainos the Bear is what psychologists rather oddly call the main “food focus,” the chief “value centre.”  And well he may be.  Bear’s flesh is the Ainos’ staple food; they eat it both fresh and salted; bearskins are their principal clothing; part of their taxes are paid in bear’s fat.  The Aino men spend the autumn, winter and spring in hunting the Bear.  Yet we are told the Ainos “worship the Bear”; they apply to it the name Kamui, which has been translated god; but it is a word applied to all strangers, and so only means what catches attention, and hence is formidable.  In the religion of the Ainos “the Bear plays a chief part,” says one writer.  The Bear “receives idolatrous veneration,” says another.  They “worship it after their fashion,” says a third.  Have we another case of “the heathen in his blindness”?  Only here he “bows down” not to “gods of wood and stone,” but to a live thing, uncouth, shambling but gracious—­a Bear.