ole they support our theory
that the festivals originated in a female cult of spirits or goddesses
of fertility. Strabo speaks of sacrifices offered to Demeter and Kore,
according to the ritual followed at Samothrace, in an island near
Britain, i.e. to native goddesses equated with them. He also describes
the ritual of the Namnite women on an island in the Loire. They are
called Bacchantes because they conciliated Bacchus with mysteries and
sacrifices; in other words, they observed an orgiastic cult of a god
equated with Bacchus. No man must set foot on the island, but the women
left it once a year for intercourse with the other sex. Once a year the
temple of the god was unroofed, and roofed again before sunset. If any
woman dropped her load of materials (and it was said this always
happened), she was torn in pieces and her limbs carried round the
temple.[944] Dionysius Periegetes says the women were crowned with ivy,
and celebrated their mysteries by night in honour of Earth and
Proserpine with great clamour.[945] Pliny also makes a reference to
British rites in which nude women and girls took part, their bodies
stained with woad.[946]

At a later time, S. Gregory of Tours speaks of the image of a goddess
Berecynthia drawn on a litter through the streets, fields, and vineyards
of Augustodunum on the days of her festival, or when the fields were
threatened with scarcity. The people danced and sang before it. The
image was covered with a white veil.[947] Berecynthia has been
conjectured by Professor Anwyl to be the goddess Brigindu, worshipped at
Valnay.[948]

These rites were all directed towards divinities of fertility. But in
harvest customs in Celtic Scotland and elsewhere two sheaves of corn
were called respectively the Old Woman and the Maiden, the corn-spirit
of the past year and that of the year to come, and corresponding to
Demeter and Kore in early Greek agricultural ritual. As in Greece, so
among the Celts, the primitive corn-spirits had probably become more
individualised goddesses with an elaborate cult, observed on an island
or at other sacred spots. The cult probably varied here and there, and
that of a god of fertility may have taken the place of the cult of
goddesses. A god was worshipped by the Namnite women, according to
Strabo, goddesses according to Dionysius. The mangled victim was
probably regarded as representative of a divinity, and perhaps part of
the flesh was mixed with the seed-corn, like t