Transcriber's Notes:
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Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in theoriginal. A few typographical errors have been corrected. A completelist follows the text.
[iv]
BY
[v]
Anyone who has been in Greece at Easter time, especially among the moreremote peasants, must have been struck by the emotion of suspense andexcitement with which they wait for the announcement "Christosanestê," "Christ is risen!" and the response "Alêthôs anestê," "Hehas really risen!" I have referred elsewhere to Mr. Lawson's old peasantwoman, who explained her anxiety: "If Christ does not rise tomorrow weshall have no harvest this year" (Modern Greek Folklore, p. 573). Weare evidently in the presence of an emotion and a fear which, beneathits Christian colouring and, so to speak, transfiguration, is in itsessence, like most of man's deepest emotions, a relic from a very remotepre-Christian past. Every spring was to primitive man a time of terribleanxiety. His store of food was near its end. Would the dead worldrevive, or would it not? The Old Year was dead; would the New Year, theYoung King, born afresh of Sky and Earth, come in the Old King's placeand bring with him the new growth and the hope of life?
I hardly realized, when writing the earlier editions of this book, howcentral, how omnipresent, this complex of ideas was in ancient Greekreligion. Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and the rest of the "YearGods" were not eccentric divagations in a religion whose proper worshipwas given to the immortal Olympians; they are different names given [vi]indifferent circumstances to this one being who dies and is born againeach year, dies old and polluted with past deaths and sins, and isreborn young and purified. I have tried to trace this line of traditionin an article for the Journal of Hellenic Studies for June 1951, andto show, incidentally, how many of the elements in the Christiantradition it has provided, especially those elements which are utterlyalien from Hebrew monotheism and must, indeed, have shocked everyorthodox Jew.
The best starting point is the conception of the series of Old Kings,each, when the due time comes, dethroned and replaced by his son, theYoung King, with the help of the Queen Mother; for Gaia or Earth, theeternal Wife and Mother of each in turn, is always ready to renewherself. The new vegetation God each year is born from the union of theSky-God and the Earth-Mother; or, as in myth and legend the figuresbecome personified, he is the Son of a God and a mortal princess.
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