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

676

Goat instead of Bull

the gold tablets from Corigliano constitute a hymn of eleven
hexameters, in which the Orphic votary claims a happy entrance
into the future life and receives the assurance :

' Happy and blessed one, thou shalt be a god instead of a mortal'

Dieterich further remarked that immediately after this hymn comes
a twelfth line containing the prose formula :

'I have fallen as a kid into milk1.'

This enigmatic phrase he referred to the cult of Dionysos Eriphos
or ErzpJiios and explained as a solemn pass-word, in which the
mystic asserted that he too as an eriphos had now returned to his
mother's breast and, thus raised to the rank of a god, had entered
upon the land flowing with milk and honey. Dieterich's elucida-
tion of the final formula is, however, incomplete ; for it does not
really justify the expression 'I have fallen' or adequately account
for the ritual bath of milk. We must, I think, start from the fact,
first noted by Dr Frazer2, that semi-civilised folk relish meat boiled
in milk, but often abstain from the luxury because they fancy that
the boiling would injure the cow from which the milk has been
drawn. Among the Baganda, for example, ' it is recognized that
flesh boiled in milk is a great dainty, and naughty boys and other
unprincipled persons, who think more of their own pleasure than
of the welfare of the herds, will gratify their sinful lusts by eating
meat boiled in milk, whenever they can do so on the sly3.' More-
over, tribes that commonly refuse to boil milk will not hesitate to
do so on certain solemn and specified occasions : the Bahima cow-
men are a case in point4. It is therefore possible that the original
Thraco-Phrygian ceremony involved a ritual boiling of milk. At
the Athenian festival of the Galaxia a mess of barley was actually
boiled in milk for the Phrygian mother-goddess5. And Sallustius,

1 Inscr. Gr. Sic. It. no. 641, r, 14 ff. o\(3ie /ecu /xaKapiare, 6ebs 5' ^\ar]L avrl (Bporolo.
epupos es yaX' ^it€to\v, no. 642, 4 ff. debs e{y)\ivov e£ avdpibirov, gpicpos es ydXa | 'iireres.

2 J. G. Frazer in Anthropological Essays presented to Edward Burnett Tylor Oxford
1907 p. 151 ff., discussing the ancient ritual law 'Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its
mother's milk' (Ex. 23. 19, 34. 26, Deut. 14. 21), argues (a) that among pastoral
tribes in Africa there is a widely spread and deeply rooted aversion to boil the milk
of their cattle, the aversion being based on an idea that a cow whose milk has been
boiled will yield no more milk ; (b) that, notwithstanding this belief, the Baganda boys
etc. do boil their meat in-milk whenever they can; and (c) that the scriptural precept
may have been directed against miscreants of this sort, whose surreptitious joys were
condemned by public opinion as striking a fatal blow at the staple food of the community.

3 J. G. Frazer loc. cit. p. 156.

4 See the interesting account given by my friend the Rev. J. Roscoe The Baganda
London 1911 p. 418.

5 Bekker anecd. i. 229, 25 ff. TaXa^La (FaXd^ia A. Mommsen) • eoprr) 'Ad'quyffi firjTpl