Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

Marriage of the Sun and Moon in Crete 523

near the river Theren, there was in historical times a sanctuary, at
which once a year the people of the district assembled to offer
a solemn sacrifice and to celebrate with ancient mimetic rites the
marriage of two divinities then described as Zeus and Hera1.
I would suggest that the later union of Zeus with Hera2 had here
taken the place of an earlier ceremony, the ritual pairing of the
solar bull with the lunar cow.

That a queen should submit to being enclosed in a wooden cow
will not surprise those who are familiar with primitive religious
rites. In view of the similarity existing between Cretan and
Egyptian bull-worship it is to be noted that the queens of Egypt
were sometimes buried in cow-shaped sarcophagi, being thus made
one with Hathor the cow-goddess3. Herodotos4, for example,
describes how Mykerinos (Men-kau-Rd), a king of the fourth
dynasty, when his daughter, an only child, died, buried her in
a hollow wooden cow. This cow stood, or rather knelt, in a
decorated chamber of the royal palace at Sais, its head and neck
thickly plated with gold, and the rest of its body covered with
a scarlet cloak. Between its horns was a golden disk to imitate
the sun ; and once a year, when the Egyptians made mourning for
a certain god, presumably Osiris, the cow was brought out into the
light, for the princess on her death-bed had besought her father
that once a year she might look upon the sun. Whether the
'Minoans' ever assimilated their dead rulers to bulls and cows we
do not know, though it has been conjectured by Mr B. Staes that
the splendid silver cow's head with golden horns and a gold-plated
rosette between them, found in the fourth shaft-grave at Mykenai,
was originally affixed to the exterior surface of a wooden coffin5.

In various parts of the world it has been held that the stars are
the children of the sun and moon6. This view perhaps obtained in

improved upon it by pointing out that Pasiphae was not, as 1 had described her, the
representative of 'a sky-goddess or sun-goddess,' but rather, as others had seen, the
epresentative of the moon (Golden Bough'6: The Dying God p. 71 n. 2).
1 Diod. 5. 72. 2 Infra ch. iii § 1.

3 Cp. R. Lepsius Die Chronologie der JEgypter Berlin 1849 lm 3°9 n* 3*

4 Hdt. 2. 129 ff.

5 B. Staes Hepl ttjs xPV(Te0JS MvKrjvaiKUP rivwv koctfx-q/j.6,tuv in the 'E0. 'A/3%. 1907
pp. 31—60 fig. 12.

6 E. B. Tylor Primitive Culture* London 1891 i. 356 (the Mintira of the Malay
Peninsula, the Ho of Chota-Nagpore in north east India), P. Sebillot Le Folk-lore de
France Paris 1904 i. 10 (Treguier). My friend the Rev. J. Roscoe informs me that
a similar belief occurs among the Baganda of central Africa. W. H. Roscher in his
Lex. Myth. ii. 3198 cites further parallels from A. Schleicher in the Sitzttngsber. d.
kais. Akad. d. Wiss. in Wien Phil.-hist. Classe 1853 xi- 99> T. Waitz—G. Gerland
Anthropologie der Naturvolker Leipzig 1872 vi. 266, W. Mannhardt in the Zeitschrift
fur Ethnologie 1875 vii. 303.