Читать книгу Five Stages of Greek Religion онлайн

29 страница из 50

But this tendency was helped by a second factor. Research has shown us the existence in early Mediterranean religion of a peculiar transitional step, a man wearing the head or skin of a holy beast. The Egyptian gods are depicted as men with beasts' heads: that is, the best authorities tell us, their shapes are derived from the kings and priests who on great occasions of sacrifice covered their heads with a beast-mask.ssss1 Minos, with his projection the Minotaur, was a bull-god and wore a bull-mask. From early Island gems, from a fresco at Mycenae, from Assyrian reliefs, Mr. A. B. Cook has collected many examples of this mixed figure—a man wearing the protomê, or mask and mane, of a beast. Sometimes we can actually see him offering libations. Sometimes the worshipper has become so closely identified with his divine beast that he is represented not as a mere man wearing the protomê of a lion or bull, but actually as a lion or bull wearing the protomê of another.ssss1 Hera, βοῶπις, with a cow's head; Athena, γλαυκῶπις, with an owl's head, or bearing on her breast the head of the Gorgon; Heracles clad in a lion's skin and covering his brow δεινῷ χάσματι θηρός, 'with the awful spread jaws of the wild beast', belong to the same class. So does the Dadouchos at Eleusis and other initiators who let candidates for purification set one foot—one only and that the left—on the skin of a sacrificial ram, and called the skin Διὸς κῶας, the fleece not of a ram, but of Zeus.ssss1