lt at midnight, and I'll make Such a tremendous and a terrible sound That thou, Diana fair, however far Away thou may'st be, still shalt hear the call, And casting open door or window wide, Shalt headlong come upon the rushing wind, And find and save me - that is, save my vines, Which will be saving me from dire distress; For should I lose them I'd be lost myself, But with thy aid, Diana, I'll be saved. This is a very interesting invocation and tradition, and probably ofgreat antiquity from very striking intrinsic evidence. For it is firstlydevoted to a subject which has received little attention - the connection of Diana as the moon with Bacchus, although in the great DizionarioStorico Mitologico, by Pozzoli and others, it is expressly asserted that in Greece her worship was associated with that of Bacchus, Esculapius and Apollo. The connecting link is the horn. In a medal of Alexander Severus, Diana of Ephesus bears the horn of plenty.This is the horn or horn of the new moon, sacred to Diana. According to Callimachus, Apollo himself built an altar consisting entirely of horns to Diana. The connection of the horn with wine is obvious. It was usual amongthe old Slavonians for the priest of Svantevit, the Sun god, to see if thehorn which the idol held in his hand was full of wine, in order to prophesya good harvest for the coming year. If it was filled, all was right; ifnot, he filled the horn, drank from it, and replaced the horn in the hand,and predicted that all would eventually go well. It cannot fail to strikethe reader that this ceremony is strangely like that of the Italian invocation, the only difference being that in one the Sun, and in the other the Moon is invoked to secure a good harvest. In the Legends of Florence there is one of the Via del Corno, in which the hero, falling into a vast tun or tina of wine, is saved from drown...
