a. INVOLUCRUM. B. UNUM E FOLIOLIS INVOLUCRI, MAGNITUDINE AUCTUM.

b. UNUM E FOLIOLIS INVOLUCRI.
C. FLOSCULUS, VALDE AUCTUS.
c. FLOSCULUS.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CULT OF ARTEMIS.1

BY J. RENDEL HARRIS, M.A., LITT.D., LL.D., D.THEOL., ETC., HON. FELLOW OF CLARE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

HE attempt which we have made to disentangle the strands which make up the complexity of the Cult of Apollo, and to determine the starting-point for the evolution of that cult, leads on naturally and necessarily to the inquiry as to the meaning of the cult of the twin-sister of Apollo, the Maiden-Huntress of Greek woods and mountains. It might have been imagined that the resolution of one cult into its elements would lead quite inevitably to the interpretation of the companion cult, but this is far from being the case. The twins in question are quite unlike the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces, whose likeness is so pronounced and whose actions are generally so similar that Lucian in his "Dialogues of the Gods sets Apollo inquiring of Hermes which of the two is Castor and which is Polydeuces, "for," says he, "I never can make out." And Hermes has to explain that it was Castor yesterday and Polydeuces to-day, and that one ought to recognise Polydeuces by the marks of his fight with the king of the Bebryces.

Artemis, on the other hand, rarely behaves in a twin-like manner to Apollo: he does not go hunting with her, and she does not, apparently, practise divination with him; indeed, as we begin to make inquiry as to Apollo and Artemis in the Pre-Homeric days, we find that allusions to the twin-birth disappear, and a suspicion arises that the twin relation is a mythological afterthought, rendered necessary by the fact that the brother and sister had succeeded, for some reason or other, to a joint inheritance of a sanctuary belonging to some other pair of twin-heroes, heroines, or demi-deities; and if this should turn out to be the case, we must not take the twinrelationship and parentage from Zeus and Leto as the starting-point in the inquiry it may be that other circumstances have produced the supposed family relation, and that Leto, who is in philological

1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library, 14 March, 1916.

value only a duplicate of Leda, may turn out to be a very palpable fiction. In that case we shall have to explore the underlying parallelism in the cults of the two deities, outside of the twin relation and anterior to it. The relation of the cults to one another must be sought in another direction. Now let us refresh our memory as to the method which we pursued, and the results which we obtained in the case of the Cults of Dionysos and Apollo. It will be remembered that we started from the sanctity of the oak as the animistic repository of the thunder, and in that sense the dwelling-place of Zeus; it was assumed that the oak was taboo and all that belonged to it; that the woodpecker who nested in it or hammered at its bark was none other than Zeus himself, and it may turn out that Athena, who sprang from the head of the thunder-oak, was the owl that lived in one of its hollows: even the bees who lived underneath its bark were almost divine animals, and had duties to perform to Zeus himself. The question having been raised as to the sanctity of the creepers upon the oak, it was easy to show that the ivy (with the smilax and the vine) was a sacred plant, and that it was the original cult-symbol of Dionysos, who thus appeared as a lesser Zeus projected from the ivy, just as Zeus himself, in one point of view, was a projection from the oak. Dionysos, whose thunder-birth could be established by the well-known Greek tradition concerning Semele and Zeus, was the ivy on the oak, and after that became an ivy fire-stick in the ritual for the making of fire. From Dionysos to Apollo was the next step it was suggested, in the first instance, by the remarkable confraternity of the two gods in question. They were shown to exchange titles, to share sanctuaries, and to have remarkable cult-parallelisms, such as the chewing of the sacred laurel by the Pythian priestess, and the chewing of the sacred ivy by the Mænads and since it was discovered that the Delphic laurel was a surrogate for a previously existing oak, it was natural to inquire whether in any way Apollo, as well as Dionysos, was linked to the life of Zeus through the life of the oak. The inquiry was very fruitful in results: the undoubted solar elements in the Apolline cult were shown to be capable of explanation by an identification of Apollo with the mistletoe, and it was found that Apollo was actually worshipped at one centre in Rhodes as the Mistletoe Apollo, just as Dionysos was worshipped as the Ivy Dionysos at Acharnai. Further

inquiry led to the conclusion that the sanctity of the oak had been transferred by the mistletoe from the oak to the apple-tree, and that the cult betrayed a close connection between the god and the apple-tree, as, for instance, in the bestowal of sacred apples from the god's own garden upon the winners at the Pythian games. In this way it came to be seen that Apollo was really the mistletoe upon the apple-tree, for the greater part of the development of the cult, just as Dionysos was the Ivy, not detached as some had imagined, but actually upon the oak-tree. It was next discovered that the garden at Delphi was a reproduction of another Apolline garden in the far North, among the Hyperboreans, the garden to which Boreas had carried off Orithyia, and to which (or to another adjacent garden) at a later date the sons of Asklepios were transferred for the purpose of medical training. Some said it was a garden at the back of the North Wind, and some said it was in the far-away Islands of the Blessed; it was, however, clear that the garden in question was not an orchard, but that it had plants as well as trees, and that the plants were medicinal, and so the garden had no relation to the flower gardens of later times. If a flower grew there, say the peony,

it grew there as a part of the primitive herbal. Apollo came from the North as a medicine man, a herbalist, and brought his simples with him. His character of a god of healing was due in the first instance to the fact that the mistletoe, which he represented, was the All-heal1 of antiquity, as it was to the Druids whom Pliny describes, and as it is among the Ainu of Japan at the present day. His apothecary's shop contained mistletoe, peony, laurel, and perhaps few more universal or almost universal remedies, and upon these he made his reputation. He must have been a Panakes in his first period of medical practice, but the title passed over to a young lady in the family, who was known as Panakeia, who has furnished the dictionary with the medical word Panacea. Apollo continued to be known as the Paian or Pæonian; and connection was made in Homer's day with the Pæonians on the Danube, in the Serbian

1 The belief in All-healing medicines appears to be innate and persistent in human nature. John Bunyan represents Mr. Skill in the "Pilgrim's Progress as operating with "an universal Pill, good against all the Diseases that Pilgrims are incident to ".