solemnity, and all those present partook of the flesh, and then--the
hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal
was set on its feet and yoked to a plough as though it were ploughing.
The Death is followed by a Resurrection. Now this is all-important. We
are so accustomed to think of sacrifice as the death, the giving up, the
renouncing of something. But _sacrifice_ does not mean "death" at all.
It means making holy, sanctifying; and holiness was to primitive man
just special strength and life. What they wanted from the Bull was just
that special life and strength which all the year long they had put into
him, and nourished and fostered. That life was in his blood. They could
not eat that flesh nor drink that blood unless they killed him. So he
must die. But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed
him, not to "sacrifice" him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat
him, live _by_ him and through him, by his grace.

And so this killing of the sacred beast was always a terrible thing, a
thing they fain would have shirked. They fled away after the deed, not
looking backwards; they publicly tried and condemned the axe that struck
the blow. But their best hope, their strongest desire, was that he had
not, could not, really have died. So this intense desire uttered itself
in the _dromenon_ of his resurrection. If he did not rise again, how
could they plough and sow again next year? He must live again, he
should, he _did_.

The Athenians were a little ashamed of their "Ox-murder," with its
grotesque pantomime of the stuffed, resurrected beast. Just so some of
us now-a-days are getting a little shy of deliberately cursing our
neighbours on Ash Wednesday. They probably did not feel very keenly
about their food-supply, they thought their daily dinner was secure.
Anyhow the emotion that had issued in the pantomime was dead, though