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We hear also of cases in which it had been entirely lost for instance, the Black Demete of Phigalia, an uncouth image with a horse's head; here, when a plague had warned the people to replace it, the AEginetan sculptor Onatas undertook the task; and he is said to have been vouchsafed a vision in sleep which enabled him to reproduce exactly this unsightly idol.
In the cave of Phigalia Demeter was, according to popular tradition, represented with the head and mane of a horse, possibly a relic of the time when a non-specialized corn-spirit bore this form. In Gaul we find a horse-goddess, Epona; there are also traces of a horse-god, Rudiobus.
It was said that in her search for her daughter, Demeter assumed the form of a mare to escape the addresses of Poseidon, and that, offended at his importunity, she withdrew in dudgeon to a cave not far from Phigalia in the highlands of Western Arcadia.
But the monstrous forms which we find in Egypt and Mesopotamia as embodiments of divine power were alien to the Greek imagination; if we find here and there a survival of some strange type, such as the horse-headed Demeter at Phigalia, it remains isolated and has little influence upon prevalent beliefs.
Next came wild bulks of beast-headed gods, like the horse-headed Demeter of Phigalia, and it seems possible enough that there was an Artemis with the head of a she-bear. Gradually the bestial characteristics dropped, and there appeared such rude anthropomorphic images of Apollo more like South Sea idols than the archer prince as are now preserved in Athens.
If persons of fastidious taste should object that the Greeks never could have conceived Demeter and Persephone to be embodied in the form of pigs, it may be answered that in the cave of Phigalia in Arcadia the Black Demeter was portrayed with the head and mane of a horse on the body of a woman.
No sculptor represented Dionysus in this way, even though he was called "bull-shaped" by poets; nor is the horse-god Posidon even represented as a Centaur. The horse-headed Demeter of Phigalia remains the strange and solitary exception, however we may explain her existence.
We were now in the heart of the wild mountain region of Messenia, in whose fastnesses Aristomenes, the epic hero of the state, maintained himself so long against the Spartans. The tremendous gorge below us was the bed of the Neda, which we crossed in order to enter the lateral valley of Phigalia, where lay Tragoge.
In the mysterious cavern of Phigalia, for instance, on the Eleatic shore of Peloponnese, there may have been in remote times so the legend ran an old black wooden image, a woman with a horse's head and mane, and serpents growing round her head, who held a dolphin in one hand and a dove in the other.
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