piece of luck that almost makes one's heart stand still, he
gives us the very words of the little ritual hymn the women sang, our
earliest "Bull-driving" Spring Song:

"In Spring-time,[25] O Dionysos,
To thy holy temple come;
To Elis with thy Graces,
Rushing with thy bull-foot, come,
Noble Bull, Noble Bull."

It is a strange primitive picture--the holy women standing in springtime
in front of the temple, summoning the Bull; and the Bull, garlanded and
filleted, rushing towards them, driven by the Graces, probably three
real women, three Queens of the May, wreathed and flower-bedecked. But
what does it mean?

Plutarch tries to answer his own question, and half, in a dim, confused
fashion, succeeds. "Is it," he suggests, "that some entitle the god as
'Born of a Bull' and as a 'Bull' himself? ... or is it that many hold
the god is the beginner of sowing and ploughing?" We have seen how a
kind of _daimon_, or spirit, of Winter or Summer arose from an actual
tree or maid or man disguised year by year as a tree. Did the god
Dionysos take his rise in like fashion from the driving and summoning
year by year of some holy Bull?

First, we must notice that it was not only at Elis that a holy Bull
appears at the Spring Festival. Plutarch asks another instructive
_Question_:[26] "Who among the Delphians is the Sanctifier?" And we find
to our amazement that the sanctifier is a Bull. A Bull who not only is
holy himself, but is so holy that he has power to make others holy, he
is the Sanctifier; and, most important for us, he sanctifies by his
death in the month Bysios, the month that fell, Plutarch tells us, "at
the beginning of spring, the time of the blossoming of many plants."

We do not hear that the "Sanctifier" at Delphi was "driven," but in all
probability he was led from house to house, that every one might partake
in the sanctity that simply exuded from him. At Magnesia,[27] a city of
Asia Minor, we have more particulars. There, at the annual fair year by
year the stewards of the city bought a Bull, "the finest that could be
got," and at the new moon of the month at the beginning of seedtime they
dedicated it, for the city's welfare. The Bull's sanctified life began
with the opening of the agricultural year, whether with the spring or
the autumn ploughing we do not know. The dedication of the Bull was a
high solemnity. He was led in procession, at the head of which went the
chief priest a