which has here been hastily sketched, among the higher races of the
old world; but a brief and partial indication of its history among
some of them must here suffice. We are all acquainted with the final
evolution of the idea of purity in {124} Judaic history: but the
phenomena of its embryonic stages, as revealed in the ritual books of
the Old Testament, may not be so familiar. They present the Hebrew
mind in regard to this particular as on the same level with the
Zarathustrian Persian, the Vedic Indian, and the Hellene of the
seventh century. Purity is the strictest law of Jahvé, the pure god,
who intimates that he would punish Aaron with death if he heedlessly
entered the holy place without purification.[124.1] But the processes
by which it is secured are mechanical, quasi-magical, and the concept
itself appears more materialistic than spiritual, ritualistic rather
than ethical in our sense: the processes of cleansing are such as the
use of incense, lustrations with blood, water, and even fire,
cathartic methods which are almost universal: we hear nothing of
prayer or repentance. Blood is the chief impurity, whether shed
deliberately, accidentally, or righteously. The warriors after battle
must be purified {125} before they enter the camp.[125.1] Murder has
indeed become a tribal offence, and this marks a great advance in the
social development of human society: no satisfaction such as the
were-gilt was allowed for murder; but it is regarded as a sin rather
than a crime, and its sinfulness is the uncleanness of the land on
which the blood is shed. “Blood defileth the land,” and “I the Lord
dwell among the children of Israel.”[125.2] Even the accidental
homicide must fly to the city of refuge, not merely to escape the
avenger of blood, who represents the old family right of the
blood-feud, but to rid the land of the impurity of his presence. Nor
must he return till the death of the high priest.[125.3] This latter
restriction has not yet been explained, so far as I am aware. I
venture the explanation that the high priest is regarded here as the
temporary representative of Jahvé, and as infected with the impurity
that cleaves to the outraged god; but when {126} he dies, the stain
that has been put upon the god fades away and his wrath ceases.
Finally, we may note the rule that when the murderer could not be
discovered, the nearest city must offer cathartic sacrifices, “and thy
sin”--that is, the ritualistic sin of having an impure spot of ground
in one’s territory--“shall then be forgiven thee.”[126.1] In fact the
Judaic law concerning homicide as shown in these books, though it has
advanced far beyond savagery, and has even attained to the modern view
that manslaying concerns the whole community, is yet barbaric on the
whole. The concept of purity aided development up to a certain point
and then probably retarded it. On the other hand, in the department of
sexual morality its operation was most powerful for good; it
consecrated and safeguarded the fundamental laws if it did not
actually construct or evoke them; but, as we should expect, the sexual
purity of the Hebrew code remains a religious law and does not pass
into the domain of secular ethic.
{127}
Another religion that is of equal value for our present purpose is the
Zarathustrian. Trusting as far as we may the translation and
interpretation of its sacred books, we may gather the impression from
the study of them that no religion on the earth has ever been under
such bondage to the cathartic ideal as this one; nor does it appear
very profitable at first sight to put the question here of the
influence of the idea of purity on religion, law, and morals, for the
idea seems all-absorbing and these three to have no independent
existence apart from it. It creates for the Mazdean believer a
morality of its own, with which the secular systems have little or
nothing to do. “Oh, maker of the world,” asks Zarathustra of Ahura
Mazda, “can he be clean again who has eaten of the carcase of a dog or
the corpse of a man?” The deity answers--“He cannot, oh holy
Zarathustra.”[127.1] Nor is there any purification possible for the
unforgivable sin of walking about after fifteen years of age were
{128} reached without a girdle or a proper shirt: “such a one goes
henceforth with power to destroy the world of righteousness.”[128.1]
On the other hand, the highest act of righteousness which brings
forgiveness of all sins to him who performs it is the pulling down of
a dakhma, the scaffold on which the corpses were hung according to the
Persian system of burial, after it had served its purpose; for
naturally it was a focus of impurity, and demons congregated there in
swarms.[128.2] And the Persian concept of purity makes its own law.
As the ritual of cleansing is the prime article of the Zarathustrian
code, so the sacrilegious cleanser, that is, the amateur who tried to
purify another without knowledge of the Mazdean ceremonies, brought
sterility upon the land and was punished with death.[128.3] And death
was the penalty for him who dared to carry a corpse alone, for the
dead body spread around the contagion of a myriad “drugs” or demons,
{129} and two men at least must set hand to it to prevent an
intolerable epidemic of impurity.[129.1] Legislation in the
Zend-Avesta is merciless beyond any recorded code; we must suppose
that it was mainly idle thunder, or Persia would have been
depopulated. The whole universe of Mazdeism is permeated with these
cathartic ideas, and a secular or physical view of things scarcely
glimmers through: the ritual order dominated what we call the material
as well as the spiritual world; the sun, moon, and stars are purified
by the Word. On this basis arose a religion of great exaltation and a
religious fervour of rare intensity: and the sacred books of Persia
are of great value for the present inquiry, for they show us more
clearly than any other record the spiritual concept of the pure heart
emerging from the ritualistic idea; while it is often hard in any
particular text to distinguish between the lower and the higher
significance. When God speaks to the prophet thus--“Purity {130} is
for man, next to life, the highest good: that purity, O Zarathustra,
that is in the religion of Mazda for him who cleanses himself with
good thoughts, words, and deeds,”[130.1] we believe we have reached a
high ethical conception; but the phrase is supposed by Darmesteter to
refer to him who cleanses himself according to the prescriptions of
the law. Yet in their cathartic code were the germs of an advanced
morality, and truthfulness and chastity were fostered by it.[130.2]
The lustrations were partly of the primitive type, taken over, as
usual, from a lower stratum of religion; their most interesting
features are the cleansing words that accompanied them, which were not
usually prayers but spells, formulæ of magic potency, but drawn from
a high {131} religion, such as these, for instance:--“The will of the
Lord is the Law of Righteousness”; “Holiness is the best of all Good:
it is also Happiness.”[131.1] Even the virtue of philanthropy is
given cathartic value in a spell-formula, “he who relieves the poor
makes Ahura King,” recited before the person was washed with the holy
water of Mazda and the “gômêz” of an ox.[131.2]
In a certain sense the Mazdean religion has been the “purest” the
world has known; but the high spiritual concept of purity that it
evolved never escaped nor struggled to escape, as did the Judaic and
Hellenic, from the bondage to ritual. Therefore the religion was
doomed to ceremoniousness and sacerdotalism; and the modern student
who is fascinated with its frequent outbursts of genius and its deep,
whole-hearted conviction must be prepared for the inevitable bathos
that awaits him. Its remoteness from the modern and civilised view of
things may be estimated from {132} the Zarathustrian text, in which
the prophet exalts the priestly medicine-man who heals the diseased
limb with a cleansing spell and by the ejection of the demon, above
the surgeon who heals it with a knife.[132.1]
It is with a feeling of relief that we now turn to the survey of the
Hellenic phenomena, passing by as we must the Vedic and the Islamic,
which appear to be of lesser importance so far as I have been able to
study them. The Hellenic religion more than all others of the ancient
world is the mirror of the manifold civilisation of a people; for its
lesser intensity allowed it more varied application, and it was
obliged to reconcile itself speedily with the utilitarian and secular
forces of rational progress, which there was no sacerdotal caste
strong enough to oppose. And it is in the light of this religion
therefore that the concept of purity can best be studied in its
relations to law and morality. The history of the cathartic ritual in
Greece {133} does not begin till the eighth century; for the Homeric
age was strikingly sane, cheerful, and secular in its views about such
things. Though Hektor feels, as any modern gentleman would feel, that
it was wrong to go to a religious service “bedabbled in gore and
filth,” though Odysseus purifies his house with sulphur-fumigation
after the carnage of the fight, the world for whom Homer sang does not
appear to have been burdened with the ceremoniousness of purification
or with dread of the impurity of blood and death, or with any sort of
care for the vengeance or miasma of the ghost. An age that could rise
to the height of such a sentiment as “best of omens is it to fight for
one’s country,” was likely to be healthy-minded in all such matters.
The first mention of purification for bloodshed is in a poem of
Arctinos of the eighth century; and a certain ritual-code of purity
begins to emerge in Hesiod. Henceforward cathartic legislation comes
to be very rife in Greece, emanating chiefly from two centres as it
{134} seems, Delphi and Crete. The gods to whom the domain of
ritual-purity belongs especially are Apollo, Zeus, and Dionysos; at
the same time the ghostly terrors of the underworld appear to be
gaining a greater hold on the Hellenic imagination, and “catharsis” is
specially needed to deal with these. Probably all this is only a
revival of aboriginal practices and superstitions rooted in the
Hellenic soil, a religion which the intellectualism of Homeric
civilisation had happily suppressed for a time, but which asserted
itself with renewed strength when that civilisation was overthrown.
Yet the revival, though apparently a “set-back,” bore fair fruit for
morality, law, and even religion. The history of Greek ethic must
reckon as it has not yet done with the ritual of purity, and the
history of Greek law with the fear of the ghost and the miasma of
bloodshed.
At first the idea is, as usual, ritualistic and non-moral: and much
that we find in savage communities, and in Judæa, Persia, and India,
we find again in Greece. As the Hebrew {135} warriors were purified
before returning to camp, so the Macedonian army was purified in
spring before the campaign,[135.1] and the misunderstood story of the
Phokians daubing themselves with gypsum before battle points to a
cathartic ritual.[135.2] And the Hellenic ceremonies agreed with
those of most other nations in regard to the causes of uncleanness and
the methods of deliverance: fire, water, blood, onions, the skins of
animals sacrificed, even clay and bran, are the usual purifying media.
In one method of κάθαρσις only the Hellenic ritual is unique so far as
I know: sacrificial communion with God was sometimes considered an
effective means of obliterating the impurity which the kinsmen
contracted by a death in the family: at Argos the mourners put off the
“tapu” by eating of the sacrifice to Apollo, believing that the spirit
of the pure god in the sacred food could destroy {136} the miasma
within and around them.[136.1] The strongholds of Pharisaic
purification were the religious brotherhoods of Orphism and the
earlier Pythagoreanism, a religious-philosophic school closely
associated with the former; in these the law of “the pure life” is a
ceremonious law, specially concerned with abstinence from certain
food. But Greek thought did not remain long on this level: a saying is
attributed to Charondas of Catana, but perhaps of later origin, which
asserts that “foul speech is a defilement of the soul”;[136.2] and in
a fragment of Epicharmos of the fifth century, we have the utterance
of the higher gospel, “If thou art pure of soul, thou art pure of all
thy body”; and the later Pythagorean literature, such as the “Golden
Song” of Hierocles, contains the doctrine that “purity of soul is the
only divine service”; “God has no more familiar abode on the earth
than the pure soul.” And to an unknown writer, probably of the same
{137} school,[137.1] we owe the dogma, “We worship God most meetly if
we render our own soul pure from every stain of evil.” There are two
epigrams in the Anthology, included in the fanciful collection of
Pythian oracles, expressing the same idea that holiness is a spiritual
fact independent of ceremonies or lustrations: “Oh stranger, if holy
of soul, enter the shrine of the holy God, having but touched the
lustral water: lustration is an easy matter for the good, but all
ocean with its streams cannot cleanse the evil man.”[137.2] The other
maintains as clearly as Isaiah or the New Testament the uselessness of
all mere washing of hands: “The temples of the gods are open to all
good men, nor is there any need of purification: no stain can ever
cleave to virtue. But depart, whosoever is baneful at heart, for thy
soul will never be washed by the cleansing of the body.”[137.3] The
better Greek mind attained this freedom the more easily in that it was
not strongly {138} or generally possessed with the belief in the
aboriginal impurity or sinfulness of the flesh and the earthly life.
And Greek ritual itself, conservative as it was and never abandoning
its code of purification, comes at last to be influenced by this freer
atmosphere and to reconcile ceremonious purity with a higher moral
law. Before the temple of Asclepios at Epidauros stood the text,
“Within the incense-filled sanctuary one must be pure; and purity is
to have righteous thoughts.”[138.1] An inscription on a temple in
Rhodes of the time of Hadrian[138.2] shows a strange blend of
primitive and advanced thought. Its preamble mentions “rules
concerning righteous entrance into the shrine.” “The first and
greatest rule is to be pure and unblemished in hand and heart and to
be free from an evil conscience.” Then follows the usual ceremonious
code of rules concerning the impurities of food, {139} funerals, and
natural affections of the body: and the last clause shows the ethical
idea penetrating even these, for the code prescribes that a person may
enter the shrine “on the same day after lawful married intercourse.”
This means that the adulteress was excluded, as she was at Athens by a
law quoted by Demosthenes.[139.1] It appears then that the liberal
ethic judgment attributed to Theano, the female Pythagorean teacher,
that while lawful intercourse was no bar to participating in a
religious service on the same day, the adulteress was to be for ever
excluded,[139.2] was not wholly out of accordance with the advanced
ritualistic code of Greece.
The above is some slight illustration of the development of the Greek
concept of purity and of its ethical influence. It remains to trace
its action in a very important department of law--the law of homicide.
Perhaps the most significant distinction between the code of a
civilised and that of a savage or {140} barbaric community lies in
their respective attitudes towards manslaughter or murder: in the
latter society it is mainly an affair between the families concerned,
to be settled by the were-gilt or the blood-feud: in the former the
whole community feels itself to be deeply concerned. Our Teutonic
ancestors, at the time of Tacitus and for centuries after, remained at
the lower stage, though we discern that the legal genius of the
Icelanders was impelling them towards the higher even before
Christianity reached them. What is strange is that some societies
appear to have attained a high general level of civilisation without
making this momentous advance: the Homeric world, for instance, was
scarcely abreast with the early Icelandic in this respect, although we
may see signs that the higher idea was ready to emerge in the later
Homeric period.[140.1] Then follows a blank in {141} our record which
may be tentatively filled up by the interpretation of mythology, until
in the developed Attic law--which we know better than the law of any
other Greek state--we find the modern idea fully recognised and
applied to a criminal code, probably from the sixth century onward,
though traces of legal barbarism still survive. We would gladly
discover the constructive forces, spiritual or political, that brought
this great reform about. The anthropology of our contemporary savage
societies has not yet supplied us with analogies that we could apply
to Greek history: a few savage states have indeed spontaneously
achieved the great advance from the blood-feud to a public law of
homicide, but there is no record showing how they have achieved it.
Some writers have supposed that the emergence of criminal law in
general is always due to some great increase of power in the central
government, probably to the development of the monarchy. But as a
universal axiom this cannot be accepted; for, as {142} Steinmetz in
his treatise on “The Development of Punishment”[142.1] has shown,
such a suggested cause is not found operative in the backward
communities of modern times that have developed a public criminal law.
Nor would it be reasonable to urge that the central authority was
stronger in Greece of the seventh century than in the earlier
monarchical period. Probably Steinmetz is right in his belief that
among savage societies the earliest criminal law arises from some
intense feeling of hatred or dread excited by acts that violate
religious feeling or secular interests. One of the earliest crimes to
be punished by death at the hands of the society is incest: the horror
that it excites among savages is a feeling that we may call religious.
We may not be able to show indeed that the primitive ideas of purity
would explain the earliest complicated codes of human marriage: but
the circles of kinship that are thus established seem certainly to
have been consecrated {143} at a very early time by the concept of
purity that came to be attached to them.[143.1] Now it is probable
that a similar religious feeling was operative in the case of
homicide.
If in any given society the primitive belief in the impurity of
bloodshed became intensified beyond a certain point, homicide might
easily come to be regarded no longer as a matter to be settled by the
families of the slayer and the slain, but as the deep concern of the
people of the land. We have seen that it was just this religious
concept of impurity that brought the act under the cognisance of the
national religious law of Israel: the people are terrified because the
soil has been made impure and their god has been stained. In the
Zend-Avesta we find that {144} the slaying of a water-dog was an
impure act against God, and was avenged by the whole community; and
sacrifice was offered to appease the holy soul of the dog.[144.1]
These facts then offer some analogy for the theory that I would
suggest, namely, that the civilised law in Greece concerning homicide
arose in the post-Homeric period through an intensification of the
feeling concerning the impurity of bloodshed and owing to the greater
hold that the terrors of the ghostly world had come to gain over the
later Hellenic imagination; for the ghost or the Erinys of the dead is
the embodiment of the miasma that arises from the slaying; and the
ghost knows how to drive it home, and is no respecter of persons, but
can make a whole area uninhabitable. The religious phenomenon and the
legal fact that I would connect as cause and effect are not found in
the Homeric period: both are found coexisting in the later. And much
legendary evidence accords with this hypothesis. {145} Perhaps the
earliest indication of the emergence of the idea in Greek society that
certain kinds of homicide concern the State, is found in the legends
about exile and excommunication for the shedding of kindred blood, the
exile, for instance, of Bellerophon and Ixion. Such exile is not the
ordinary flight of the homicide to avoid the avenger of blood; for in
the cases where a man is of the same kin as the slain, there is no
family avenger, but the whole community in horror cast him out lest
the curse should infect themselves. Kinsmen’s blood was more sacred
than other, therefore the shedding it spread the greater impurity over
the land. And the Greek legends suggest that this offence was one of
the earliest in the legal history of the race which awoke the
religious conscience of the State.[145.1] {146} Now if we assume that
the old ideas associated with kinship came to be extended to the whole
community of the polis--as might easily happen through the
intermarriage of the γένη--then a similar miasma would be caused
by the slaying of a citizen as by kindred murder: the State would feel
the supernatural peril of the act and would take cognisance.
The reasons for supposing that this was the actual order in the
Hellenic evolution of the homicide law may appear to rest on mere
legends, but legends are often direct and firsthand evidence of early
thought, and the stories about the slayers of kindred who were driven
out of the communities and who were the first applicants for the
ritual of purification, such as Ixion, Orestes, Theseus, accord well
with the early belief that the Erinyes were the ghostly avengers of
kindred slaughter. Then we find that in the Aithiopis, the poem of
Arctinos of Miletus, Achilles has to leave the army and retire to
Lesbos for {147} purification, although Thersites, whom he has slain,
is no real kinsman of his: whence we may draw the conclusion that the
State of Miletus, in the eighth century, had come to take cognisance
of the slaying of any citizen. And the Argives, in the fifth or fourth
century, offer atonement to Zeus Meilichios for a civic massacre, the
god who has a legendary association with purification for the shedding
of kindred blood. By the fifth century in Athens the religious feeling
concerning the sacredness of all life within the city had so deepened
that even the slaying of a slave caused a miasma and was a State
offence.[147.1]
Now when we examine certain details of Attic law, together with
certain expressions of sentiment concerning homicide in the classical
writers of Attica, we see the clear imprint of its origin. Accidental
homicide was as gravely regarded by the Athens of the fourth century
as by the old Hebrew code: such homicides must fly over the border,
but if they went by {148} a certain road, the State refused to allow
the avenger of blood to follow them: they must remain in exile until
they have won the forgiveness of one of the kinsmen of the
dead.[148.1] We may suppose that the kinsmen are regarded as taking
up the feud of the ghost, who is likely to be vindictive, even when
the slaying was accidental. Finally, when the pardoned homicide
returns he must go through elaborate purifications. These latter were
to wipe off the miasma, not to ease what we might call the burden of
conscience. And the community were obliged to expel temporarily even a
perfectly innocent man, because of their fear of the wrath of the
dead. This dread of the ghost is appealed to by an Attic orator as a
motive that should influence the judges to condemn the
prisoner.[148.2] The first legal preliminary in a case of murder,
which reveals clearly the religious origin of the State law, was the
solemn proclamation, made by one of the relatives holding {149} a
spear at the funeral, that the murderer should keep aloof from all the
holy and public places of the community.[149.1] And Antiphon strongly
expresses the popular sentiment that the unpunished murderer pollutes
the public altars and vitiates the atmosphere of the city:[149.2] and
the whole of Plato’s legislation[149.3] concerning homicide is based
on the idea of the miasma arising from bloodshed, and is quite in
accord with Attic law. The exile of the murderer purges the city as
well as his execution; therefore the accused was allowed to go out of
the country before the verdict.[149.4] The contagion was worse under
a roof than in the open air; therefore the Athenian judges insisted on
trying homicide in an unroofed court, “lest they should be under one
roof with the slayer.”[149.5] Also it is part of primitive animistic
belief that such miasma could cleave to things which had caused the
death of a man: hence the {150} inanimate object such as an axe or bar
of iron might be solemnly tried and, if found guilty, would be thrown
into the sea to rid the State of infection:[150.1] the same
superstition explains the old English law that a waggon which ran over
a man and caused his death should be given to God--“deodand”: that is,
it was to become a perquisite of the King, who represented God.