should add, because of
its cheapness. Swine are always prominent in Greek agricultural rites.
And the bull? Well, we modern town-dwellers have almost forgotten what a
real bull is like. For so many centuries we have tamed him and penned
him in, and utterly deposed him from his place as lord of the forest.
The bull was the chief of magic or sacred animals in Greece, chief
because of his enormous strength, his size, his rage, in fine, as
anthropologists call it, his _mana_; that primitive word which comprises
force, vitality, prestige, holiness, and power of magic, and which may
belong equally to a lion, a chief, a medicine-man, or a battle-axe.

Now in the art and the handbooks these sacred animals have all been
adopted into the Olympian system. They appear regularly as the
'attributes' of particular gods. Zeus is merely accompanied by a snake,
an eagle, a bull, or at worst assumes for his private purposes the forms
of those animals. The cow and the cuckoo are sacred to Hera; the owl and
the snake to Athena; the dolphin, the crow, the lizard, the bull, to
Apollo. Dionysus, always like a wilder and less middle-aged Zeus,
appears freely as a snake, bull, he-goat, and lion. Allowing for some
isolated exceptions, the safest rule in all these cases is that the
attribute is original and the god is added.[20:1] It comes out very
clearly in the case of the snake and the bull. The tremendous _mana_ of
the wild bull indeed occupies almost half the stage of pre-Olympian
ritual. The religion unearthed by Dr. Evans in Crete is permeated by the
bull of Minos. The heads and horns are in almost every sacred room and
on every altar. The great religious scene depicted on the sarcophagus of
Hagia Triada[20:2] centres in the holy blood that flows from the neck of
a captive and dying bull. Down into classical times bull's blood was a
sacred thing which it was dangerous to touch and death to taste: to
drink a cup of it was the most heroic form of suicide.[20:3] The
sacrificial bull at Delphi was called _Hosioter_: he was not merely
_hosios_, holy; he was _Hosioter_, the Sanctifier, He who maketh Holy.
It was by contact with him that holiness was spread to others. On a coin
and a vase, cited by Miss Harrison,[21:1] we have a bull entering a holy
cave and a bull standing in a shrine. We have holy pillars whose
holiness consists in the fact that they have been touched with the blood
of a bull. We have a long record of a bull-ritual at Magnesia,[