st after a course
of anthropology--this desire of primitive man to acquire for himself the
superhuman forces of the bull; but how does he make the transition from
the real animal to the imaginary human god? First let us remember the
innate tendency of primitive man everywhere, and not especially in
Greece, to imagine a personal cause, like himself in all points not
otherwise specified, for every striking phenomenon. If the wind blows it
is because some being more or less human, though of course superhuman,
is blowing with his cheeks. If a tree is struck by lightning it is
because some one has thrown his battle-axe at it. In some Australian
tribes there is no belief in natural death. If a man dies it is because
'bad man kill that fellow'. St. Paul, we may remember, passionately
summoned the heathen to refrain from worshipping +ten ktisin+, the
creation, and go back to +ton ktisanta+, the creator, human and
masculine. It was as a rule a road that they were only too ready to
travel.[23:1]

But this tendency was helped by a second factor. Research has shown us
the existence in early Mediterranean religion of a peculiar transitional
step, a man wearing the head or skin of a holy beast. The Egyptian gods
are depicted as men with beasts' heads: that is, the best authorities
tell us, their shapes are derived from the kings and priests who on
great occasions of sacrifice covered their heads with a
beast-mask.[23:2] Minos, with his projection the Minotaur, was a
bull-god and wore a bull-mask. From early Island gems, from a fresco at
Mycenae, from Assyrian reliefs, Mr. A. B. Cook has collected many
examples of this mixed figure--a man wearing the _protome_, or mask and
mane, of a beast. Sometimes we can actually see him offering libations.
Sometimes the worshipper has become so closely identified with his
divine beast that he is represented not as a mere man wearing the
_protome_ of a lion or bull, but actually as a lion or bull wearing the
_protome_ of another.[24:1] Hera, +boopis+, with a cow's head; Athena,
+glaukopis+, with an owl's head, or bearing on her breast the head of
the Gorgon; Heracles clad in a lion's skin and covering his brow +deino
chasmati theros+, 'with the awful spread jaws of the wild beast', belong
to the same class. So does the Dadouchos at Eleusis and other initiators
who let candidates for purification set one foot--one only and that the
left--on the skin of a sacrificial ram, and called the skin +Dios ko