s_ have a mystical reason
which is known to the Thyiades, but from the rites that are done in
public, one may conjecture it to be a 'Bringing up of Semele.'"

Some one or something, a real woman, or more likely the buried puppet
_Charila_, the Spring-Maiden, was brought up from the ground to enact
and magically induce the coming of Spring.

* * * * *

These ceremonies of beating, driving out, burying, have all, with the
Greeks, as with the savage and the modern peasant, but one real object:
to get rid of the season that is bad for food, to bring in and revive
the new supply. This comes out very clearly in a ceremony that went on
down to Plutarch's time, and he tells us[24] it was "ancestral." It was
called "the Driving out of Ox-hunger." By Ox-hunger was meant any great
ravenous hunger, and the very intensity and monstrosity of the word
takes us back to days when famine was a grim reality. When Plutarch was
_archon_ he had, as chief official, to perform the ceremony at the
Prytaneion, or Common Hearth. A slave was taken, beaten with rods of a
magical plant, and driven out of doors to the words: "Out with
Ox-hunger! In with Wealth and Health!" Here we see the actual sensation,
or emotion, of ravenous hunger gets a name, and thereby a personality,
though a less completely abstracted one than Death or Summer. We do not
know that the ceremony of Driving out Ox-hunger was performed in the
spring, it is only instanced here because, more plainly even than the
Charila, when the king distributes pulse and peas, it shows the relation
of ancient mimic ritual to food-supply.

If we keep clearly in mind the _object_ rather than the exact _date_ of
the Spring Song we shall avoid many difficulties. A Dithyramb was sung
at Delphi through the winter months, which at first seems odd. But we
must remember that among agricultural peoples the performance of magical
ceremonies to promote fertility and the food supply may begin at any
moment after the earth is ploughed and the seed sown. The sowing of the
seed is its death and burial; "that which thou sowest is not quickened
except it die." When the death and burial are once accomplished the hope
of resurrection and new birth begins, and with the hope the magical
ceremonies that may help to fulfil that hope. The Sun is new-born in
midwinter, at the solstice, and our "New" year follows, yet it is in the
spring that, to this day, we keep our great res