detail the main intent is the same, and it is
identical with that of the rite of the holy Bull in Greece and the
maypole of our forefathers. Great is the sanctity of the Bear or the
Bull or the Tree; the Bear for a hunting people; the Bull for nomads,
later for agriculturists; the Tree for a forest folk. On the Bear and
the Bull and the Tree are focussed the desire of the whole people. Bear
and Bull and Tree are sacred, that is, set apart, because full of a
special life and strength intensely desired. They are led and carried
about from house to house that their sanctity may touch all, and avail
for all; the animal dies that he may be eaten; the Tree is torn to
pieces that all may have a fragment; and, above all, Bear and Bull and
Tree die only that they may live again.

* * * * *

We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually
_per_ceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image,
an imagined Tree Spirit, or "Summer," or Death, a thing never actually
seen but _con_ceived. Just so with the Bull. Year by year in the various
villages of Greece was seen an actual holy Bull, and bit by bit from the
remembrance of these various holy Bulls, who only died to live again
each year, there arose the image of a Bull-Spirit, or Bull-Daimon, and
finally, if we like to call him so, a Bull-God. The growth of this idea,
this _con_ception, must have been much helped by the fact that in some
places the dancers attendant on the holy Bull dressed up as bulls and
cows. The women worshippers of Dionysos, we are told, wore bulls' horns
in imitation of the god, for they represented him in pictures as having
a bull's head. _We_ know that a man does not turn into a bull, or a
bull into a man, the line of demarcation is clearly drawn; but the
rustic has no such conviction even to-day. That crone, his aged aunt,
may any day come in at the window in the shape of a black cat; why
should she not? It is not, then, that a god 'takes upon him the form of
a bull,' or is 'incarnate in a bull,' but that the real Bull and the
worshipper dressed as a bull are seen and remembered and give rise to an
imagined Bull-God; but, it should be observed, only among gifted,
imaginative, that is, image-making, peoples. The Ainos have their actual
holy Bear, as the Greeks had their holy Bull; but with them out of the
succession of holy Bears there arises, alas! no Bear-God.

* *