"What has all this farrago about savages to do with Dionysus?" I conceive
some scholar, or literary critic asking, if such an one looks into this
book. Certainly it would have been easier for me to abound in aesthetic
criticism of the Hymns, and on the aspect of Greek literary art which
they illustrate. But the Hymns, if read even through the pale medium of
a translation, speak for themselves. Their beauties and defects as
poetry are patent: patent, too, are the charm and geniality of the
national character which they express. The glad Ionian gatherings; the
archaic humour; the delight in life, and love, and nature; the pious
domesticities of the sacred Hearth; the peopling of woods, hills, and
streams with exquisite fairy forms; all these make the poetic delight of
the Hymns. But all these need no pointing out to any reader. The poets
can speak for themselves.
On the other hand the confusions of sacred and profane; the origins of
the Mysteries; the beginnings of the Gods in a mental condition long left
behind by Greece when the Hymns were composed; all these matters need
elucidation. I have tried to elucidate them as results of evolution from
the remote prehistoric past of Greece, which, as it seems, must in many
points have been identical with the historic present of the lowest
contemporary races. In the same way, if dealing with ornament, I would
derive the spirals, volutes, and concentric circles of Mycenaean gold
work, from the identical motives, on the oldest incised rocks and kists
of our Islands, of North and South America, and of the tribes of Central
Australia, recently described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, and Mr.
Carnegie. The material of the Mycenaean artist may be gold, his work may
be elegant and firm, but he traces the selfsame ornament as the naked
Arunta, with feebler hand, paints on sacred rocks or on the bodies of his
tribesmen. What is true of ornament is true of myth, rite, and belief.
Greece only offers a gracious modification of the beliefs, rites, and
myths of the races who now are "nearest the beginning," however remote
from that unknown beginning they may be. To understand this is to come
closer to a true conception of the evolution of Greek faith and art than
we can reach by any other path. Yet to insist on this is not to ignore
the unmeasured advance of the Greeks in development of society and art.
On that head the Hymns, like all Greek poetry, bear their own free
testimony. But, none the less, Greek religion and myth present features
repellent to us, which derive their origin, not from savagery, but from
the more crude horrors of the lower and higher barbarisms.
Greek religion, Greek myth, are vast conglomerates. We find a savage
origin for Apollo, and savage origins for many of the Mysteries. But the
cruelty of savage initiations has been purified away. On the other hand,
we find a barbaric origin for departmental gods, such as Aphrodite, and
for Greek human sacrifices, unknown to the lowest savagery. From
savagery Zeus is probably derived; from savagery come the germs of the
legends of divine amours in animal forms. But from barbarism arises the
sympathetic magic of agriculture, which the lowest races do not practise.
From the barbaric condition, not from savagery, comes Greek hero-worship,
for the lowest races do not worship ancestral spirits. Such is the
medley of prehistoric ideas in Greece, while the charm and poetry of the
Hymns are due mainly to the unique genius of the fully developed Hellenic
race. The combination of good and bad, of ancestral rites and ideas, of
native taste, of philosophical refinement on inherited theology, could
not last; the elements were too discordant. And yet it could not pass
naturally away. The Greece of A.D. 300
"Wandered between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,"
without external assistance. That help was brought by the Christian
creed, and, officially, Gods, rites, and myths vanished, while,
unofficially, they partially endure, even to this day, in Romaic folk-
lore.