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."And bull-voices roar thereto from some-chaic centers of what we tend to regard as our own very specialwhere out of the unseen, fearful semblances, and from a drum anbrand of civilization.65 Just how much the old men know, it isimage as it were of thunder underground is borne on the airdifficult to judge from the published accounts of our Occidentalheavy with dread.1"17 The word "Dithyrambos" itself, as an epi-observers.But it can be seen from a comparison of the figures ofthet of the killed and resurrected Dionysos, was understood byAustralian ritual with those familiar to us from higher cultures,the Greeks to signify "him of the double door," him who hadthat the great themes, the ageless archetypes, and their opera-survived the awesome miracle of the second birth.And we knowtion upon the soul remain the same.that the choral songs (dithyrambs) and dark, blood-reeking ritesin celebration of the god associated with the renewal of vegeta-tion, the renewal of the moon, the renewal of the sun, the renewaland the other men aU raised a death cry.The boys were lifeless.The old wirree-of the soul, and solemnized at the season of the resurrection ofnuns (medicine men).clipping their stone knives in the blood, touched with themthe year god represent the ritual beginnings of the Attic tragedy.the lips of all present.The bodies of the Boorah victims were cooked.EachThroughout the ancient world such myths and rites abounded:man who had been to five Boorahs ate a piece of this flesh; no others were allowedto see this done" (K.Langloh Farker, l~hs Euahlayi Tribe, 1905, pp.72-73; cited the deaths and resurrections of Tammuz, Adonis, Mithra, Vir-by Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, p.232).bius, Attis, and Osiris, and of their various animal representa-^ For an astounding revelation of the survival in contemporary Melanesia oftives (goats and sheep, bulls, pigs, horses, fish, and birds) area symbolic system essentially identical with that of the Egypto-Babylonian,known to every student of comparative, religion; the popularTrojan-CreUm "Irdjvrmtb cim'.plex 'A the MTI'PC! niiilritniLiis] R.r.L' Jr.bnLLayard, Stone Men ofMalekula (London: Chatto and Windus, 1942).W.F.J.carnival games of the Whitsuntide Louts, Green Georges, JohnKnight, in his Cumaean Gates (Oxford, 1936), has discussed the evident rela-Barleycorns, and Kostrubonkos, Carrying-out -Winter, Bringing-tionship of the Malekulan "journey of the soul to the underworld" with thein-Summer, and Killing of the Christmas Wren, have continuedclassical descent of Aeneas, and the Babylonian of Gilgamesh.W.J.Perry.The Children of the Sun (New York: E.P.Dutton and Co., 1923), thought he the tradition, in a mood of frolic, into our contemporary calen-could recognize evidences of this cultuTe-continuity running all the way fromdar;''8 and through the Christian church (in the mythology ofEgypt and Sumer out through the Oceanic area" to North America.Manythe Fall and Redemption, Crucifixion and Resurrection, thescholars have pointed out the dose correspondences between the details of theclassical Greek and primitive Australian rites of initiation, notably Jane Harri- "second birth" of baptism, the initiatory blow on the cheek atson, Themis, A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (2nd revised edi-tion; Cambridge University Press, 1927).60It is still uncertain by what means and in what eras the mythological andEuripides.The liacchae, 526 f.cultural patterns of the various archaic civilizations may have been dissemi-"7 Aeschylus, Frg.57 (Nauck); cited by Jane Harrison (Themis, p.oij in ners, p.61) in hernated to the farthest corners of the earth; yet it can be stated categorically thatdiscussion 'of the role of the bull-roarer in classical and Australian rites of initi-f i itew (if :myj f the so-culled "primitive cultures'* studied b\ our anthropologist1-!ation.For an introduction to the subject of the bull-roarer, see Andrew Lang,represent autochthonous growths [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]