in honour of _Yarilo_, the Spring God.

The image is beaten, insulted, let down into some cleft or cave. It is
clearly a "Carrying out the Death," though we do not know the exact date
at which it was celebrated. It had its sequel in another festival at
Delphi called _Herois_, or the "Heroine." Plutarch[23] says it was too
mystical and secret to describe, but he lets us know the main gist.

"Most of the ceremonies of the _Herois_ 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,