The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer--Their
mythology, however, is full of repulsive features--The hypothesis that
many of these are savage survivals--Are there other examples of such
survival in Greek life and institutions?--Greek opinion was constant
that the race had been savage--Illustrations of savage survival from
Greek law of homicide, from magic, religion, human sacrifice, religious
art, traces of totemism, and from the mysteries--Conclusion: that savage
survival may also be expected in Greek myths.
The Greeks, when we first make their acquaintance in the Homeric poems,
were a cultivated people, dwelling, under the government of royal
families, in small city states. This social condition they must have
attained by 1000 B.C., and probably much earlier. They had already a
long settled past behind them, and had no recollection of any national
migration from the "cradle of the Aryan race". On the other hand, many
tribes thought themselves earth-born from the soil of the place where
they were settled. The Maori traditions prove that memories of a
national migration may persist for several hundred years among men
ignorant of writing. Greek legend, among a far more civilised race, only
spoke of occasional foreign settlers from Sidon, Lydia, or Egypt. The
Homeric Greeks were well acquainted with almost all the arts of life,
though it is not absolutely certain that they could write, and certainly
they were not addicted to reading. In war they fought from chariots,
like the Egyptians and Assyrians; they were bold seafarers, being
accustomed to harry the shores even of Egypt, and they had large
commercial dealings with the people of Tyre and Sidon. In the matter of
religion they were comparatively free and unrestrained. Their deities,
though, in myth, capricious in character, might be regarded in many
ways as "making for righteousness". They protected the stranger and the
suppliant; they sanctioned the oath, they frowned on the use of poisoned
arrows; marriage and domestic life were guarded by their good-will;
they dispensed good and evil fortune, to be accepted with humility and
resignation among mortals.
The patriarchal head of each family performed the sacrifices for his
household, the king for the state, the ruler of Mycenae, Agamemnon, for
the whole Achaean host encamped before the walls of Troy. At the same
time, prophets, like Calchas, possessed considerable influence,
due partly to an hereditary gift of second-sight, as in the case of
Theoclymenus,(1) partly to acquired professional skill in observing
omens, partly to the direct inspiration of the gods. The oracle at
Delphi, or, as it is called by Homer, Pytho, was already famous, and
religion recognised, in various degrees, all the gods familiar to the
later cult of Hellas. In a people so advanced, so much in contact with
foreign races and foreign ideas, and so wonderfully gifted by nature
with keen intellect and perfect taste, it is natural to expect, if
anywhere, a mythology almost free from repulsive elements, and almost
purged of all that we regard as survivals from the condition of
savagery. But while Greek mythology is richer far than any other in
beautiful legend, and is thronged with lovely and majestic forms of
gods and goddesses, nymphs and oreads ideally fair, none the less a very
large proportion of its legends is practically on a level with the myths
of Maoris, Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and Bushmen.
(1) Odyssey, xx. 354.
This is the part of Greek mythology which has at all times excited
most curiosity, and has been made the subject of many systems of
interpretation. The Greeks themselves, from almost the earliest
historical ages, were deeply concerned either to veil or explain
away the blasphemous horrors of their own "sacred chapters," poetic
traditions and temple legends. We endeavour to account for these
as relics of an age of barbarism lying very far behind the time of
Homer--an age when the ancestors of the Greeks either borrowed, or more
probably developed for themselves, the kind of myths by which savage
peoples endeavour to explain the nature and origin of the world and all
phenomena.
The correctness of this explanation, resting as it does on the belief
that the Greeks were at one time in the savage status, might be
demonstrated from the fact that not only myths, but Greek life in
general, and especially Greek ritual, teemed with surviving examples of
institutions and of manners which are found everywhere among the most
backward and barbarous races. It is not as if only the myths of Greece
retained this rudeness, or as if the Greeks supposed themselves to have
been always civilised. The whole of Greek life yields relics of savagery
when the surface is excavated ever so slightly. Moreover, that the
Greeks, as soon as they came to reflect on these matters at all,
believed themselves to have emerged from a condition of savagery is
undeniable. The poets are entirely at one on this subject with Moschion,
a writer of the school of Euripides. "The time hath been, yea, it HATH
been," he says, "when men lived like the beasts, dwelling in mountain
caves, and clefts unvisited of the sun.... Then they broke not the soil
with ploughs nor by aid of iron, but the weaker man was slain to make
the supper of the stronger," and so on.(1) This view of the savage
origin of mankind was also held by Aristotle:(2) "It is probable that
the first men, whether they were produced by the earth (earth-born)
or survived from some deluge, were on a level of ignorance and
darkness".(3) This opinion, consciously held and stated by philosophers
and poets, reveals itself also in the universal popular Greek traditions
that men were originally ignorant of fire, agriculture, metallurgy and
all the other arts and conveniences of life, till they were instructed
by ideal culture-heroes, like Prometheus, members of a race divine
or half divine. A still more curious Athenian tradition (preserved by
Varro) maintained, not only that marriage was originally unknown,
but that, as among Australians and some Red Indians, the family name,
descended through the mother, and kinship was reckoned on the female
side before the time of Cecrops.(4)
(1) Moschion; cf. Preller, Ausgewahlte Aufsatze, p. 206.
(2) Politics, ii. 8-21; Plato, Laws, 667-680.
(3) Compare Horace, Satires, i. 3, 99; Lucretius, v. 923.
(4) Suidas, s.v. "Prometheus"; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, xviii. 9.
While Greek opinion, both popular and philosophical, admitted, or
rather asserted, that savagery lay in the background of the historical
prospect, Greek institutions retained a thousand birth-marks of
savagery. It is manifest and undeniable that the Greek criminal law,
as far as it effected murder, sprang directly from the old savage
blood-feud.(1) The Athenian law was a civilised modification of the
savage rule that the kindred of a slain man take up his blood-feud.
Where homicide was committed WITHIN the circle of blood relationship,
as by Orestes, Greek religion provided the Erinnyes to punish an offence
which had, as it were, no human avenger. The precautions taken by
murderers to lay the ghost of the slain man were much like those in
favour among the Australians. The Greek cut off the extremities of his
victim, the tips of the hands and feet, and disposed them neatly beneath
the arm-pits of the slain man.(2) In the same spirit, and for the same
purpose, the Australian black cuts off the thumbs of his dead enemy,
that the ghost too may be mutilated and prevented from throwing at him
with a ghostly spear. We learn also from Apollonius Rhodius and his
scholiast that Greek murderers used thrice to suck in and spit out the
gore of their victims, perhaps with some idea of thereby partaking of
their blood, and so, by becoming members of their kin, putting it beyond
the power of the ghosts to avenge themselves. Similar ideas inspire the
worldwide savage custom of making an artificial "blood brotherhood" by
mingling the blood of the contracting parties. As to the ceremonies of
cleansing from blood-guiltiness among the Greeks, we may conjecture
that these too had their primitive side; for Orestes, in the Eumenides,
maintains that he has been purified of his mother's slaughter by
sufficient blood of swine. But this point will be illustrated presently,
when we touch on the mysteries.
(1) Duncker, History of Greece, Engl. transl., vol. ii. p. 129.
(2) See "Arm-pitting in Ancient Greece," in the American Journal of
Philology, October, 1885, where a discussion of the familiar texts in
Aeschylus and Apollonius Rhodius will be found.
Ritual and myth, as might be expected, retained vast masses of savage
rites and superstitious habits and customs. To be "in all things too
superstitious," too full of deisidaimonia, was even in St. Paul's time
the characteristic of the Athenians. Now superstition, or deisidaimonia,
is defined by Theophrastus,(1) as "cowardice in regard to the
supernatural" ((Greek text omitted)). This "cowardice" has in all ages
and countries secured the permanence of ritual and religious traditions.
Men have always argued, like one of the persons in M. Renan's play, Le
Pretre de Nemi, that "l'ordre du monde depend de l'ordre des rites qu'on
observe". The familiar endurable sequence of the seasons of spring, and
seed-sowing, and harvest depend upon the due performance of immemorial
religious acts. "In the mystic deposits," says Dinarchus, "lies the
safety of the city."(2) What the "mystic deposits" were nobody knows
for certain, but they must have been of very archaic sanctity, and occur
among the Arunta and the Pawnees.
(1) Characters.
(2) Ap. Hermann, Lehrbuch, p. 41; Aglaophamus, 965.
Ritual is preserved because it preserves LUCK. Not only among the Romans
and the Brahmans, with their endless minute ritual actions, but among
such lower races as the Kanekas of New Caledonia, the efficacy of
religious functions is destroyed by the slightest accidental infraction
of established rules.(1) The same timid conservatism presides over
myth, and in each locality the mystery-plays, with their accompanying
narratives, preserved inviolate the early forms of legend. Myth and
ritual do not admit of being argued about. "C'etait le rite etabli. Ce
n'etait pas plus absurde qu'autre chose," says the conservative in M.
Renan's piece, defending the mode of appointment of
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
(1) Thus the watchers of the dead in New Caledonia are fed by the
sorcerer with a mess at the end of a very long spoon, and should the
food miss the mouth, all the ceremonies have to be repeated. This detail
is from Mr. J. J. Atkinson.
Now, if the rites and myths preserved by the timorousness of this same
"cowardice towards the supernatural" were originally evolved in the
stage of savagery, savage they would remain, as it is impious and
dangerous to reform them till the religion which they serve perishes
with them. These relics in Greek ritual and faith are very commonly
explained as due to Oriental influences, as things borrowed from the
dark and bloody superstitions of Asia. But this attempt to save the
native Greek character for "blitheness" and humanity must not be pushed
too far.(1) It must be remembered that the cruder and wilder sacrifices
and legends of Greece were strictly LOCAL; that they were attached to
these ancient temples, old altars, barbarous xoana, or wooden idols, and
rough fetish stones, in which Pausanias found the most ancient relics of
Hellenic theology. This is a proof of their antiquity and a presumption
in favour of their freedom from foreign influence. Most of these things
were survivals from that dimly remembered prehistoric age in which the
Greeks, not yet gathered into city states, lived in villages or kraals,
or pueblos, as we should translate (Greek text omitted), if we were
speaking of African or American tribes. In that stage the early
Greeks must have lacked both the civic and the national or Panhellenic
sentiment; their political unit was the clan, which, again, answered
in part to the totem kindred of America, or Africa, or Australia.(2) In
this stagnant condition they could not have made acquaintance with the
many creeds of Semitic and other alien peoples on the shores of the
Levant.(3) It was later, when Greece had developed the city life of the
heroic age, that her adventurous sons came into close contact with Egypt
and Phoenicia.
(1) Claus, De Antiq. Form. Dianae, 6,7,16.
(2) As C. O. Muller judiciously remarks: "The scenes of nine-tenths of
the Greek myths are laid in PARTICULAR DISTRICTS OF GREECE, and they
speak of the primeval inhabitants, of the lineage and adventures of
native heroes. They manifest an accurate acquaintance with individual
localities, which, at a time when Greece was neither explored by
antiquaries, nor did geographical handbooks exist, could be possessed
only by the inhabitants of these localities." Muller gives, as examples,
myths of bears more or less divine. Scientific Mythology, pp. 14, 15.
(3) Compare Claus, De Dianae Antiquissima Natura, p. 3.
In the colonising time, still later--perhaps from 900 B.C.
downwards--the Greeks, settled on sites whence they had expelled
Sidonians or Sicanians, very naturally continued, with modifications,
the worship of such gods as they found already in possession. Like the
Romans, the Greeks easily recognised their own deities in the analogous
members of foreign polytheistic systems. Thus we can allow for alien
elements in such gods and goddesses as Zeus Asterios, as Aphrodite of
Cyprus or Eryx, or the many-breasted Ephesian Artemis, whose monstrous
form had its exact analogue among the Aztecs in that many-breasted
goddess of the maguey plant whence beer was made. To discern and
disengage the borrowed factors in the Hellenic Olympus by analysis
of divine names is a task to which comparative philology may lawfully
devote herself; but we cannot so readily explain by presumed borrowing
from without the rude xoana of the ancient local temples, the wild myths
of the local legends, the sacra which were the exclusive property of
old-world families, Butadae or Eumolpidae. These are clearly survivals
from a stage of Greek culture earlier than the city state, earlier than
the heroic age of the roving Greek Vikings, and far earlier than the
Greek colonies. They belong to that conservative and immobile period
when the tribe or clan, settled in its scattered kraals, lived a life of
agriculture, hunting and cattle-breeding, engaged in no larger or more
adventurous wars than border feuds about women or cattle. Such wars were
on a humbler scale than even Nestor's old fights with the Epeians; such
adventures did not bring the tribe into contact with alien religions. If
Sidonian merchantmen chanced to establish a factory near a tribe in this
condition, their religion was not likely to make many proselytes.
These reasons for believing that most of the wilder element in Greek
ritual and myth was native may be briefly recapitulated, as they are
often overlooked. The more strange and savage features meet us in LOCAL
tales and practices, often in remote upland temples and chapels.
There they had survived from the society of the VILLAGE status, before
villages were gathered into CITIES, before Greeks had taken to a roving
life, or made much acquaintance with distant and maritime peoples.
For these historical reasons, it may be assumed that the LOCAL religious
antiquities of Greece, especially in upland districts like Arcadia
and Elis, are as old, and as purely national, as free from foreign
influences as any Greek institutions can be. In these rites and myths
of true folk-lore and Volksleben, developed before Hellas won its way
to the pure Hellenic stage, before Egypt and Phoenicia were familiar,
should be found that common rude element which Greeks share with the
other races of the world, and which was, to some extent, purged away by
the genius of Homer and Pindar, pii vates et Phaebo digna locuti.
In proof of this local conservatism, some passages collected by K. F.
Hermann in his Lehrbuch der Griechischen Antiquitaten(1) may be cited.
Thus Isocrates writes,(2) "This was all their care, neither to destroy
any of the ancestral rites, nor to add aught beyond what was ordained".
Clemens Alexandrinus reports that certain Thessalians worshipped storks,
"IN ACCORDANCE WITH USE AND WONT".(3) Plato lays down the very "law
of least change" which has been described. "Whether the legislator is
establishing a new state or restoring an old and decayed one, in respect
of gods and temples,... if he be a man of sense, he will MAKE NO
CHANGE IN ANYTHING which the oracle of Delphi, or Dodona, or Ammon has
sanctioned, in whatever manner." In this very passage Plato(4) speaks
of rites "derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus" as falling within the later
period of the Greek Wanderjahre. On the high religious value of things
antique, Porphyry wrote in a late age, and when the new religion of
Christ was victorious, "Comparing the new sacred images with the old, we
see that the old are more simply fashioned, yet are held divine, but
the new, admired for their elaborate execution, have less persuasion
of divinity,"--a remark anticipated by Pausanias, "The statues Daedalus
wrought are quainter to the outward view, yet there shows forth in them
somewhat supernatural".(5) So Athenaeus(6) reports of a visitor to the
shrine of Leto in Delos, that he expected the ancient statue of the
mother of Apollo to be something remarkable, but, unlike the pious
Porphyry, burst out laughing when he found it a shapeless wooden idol.
These idols were dressed out, fed and adorned as if they had life.(7)
It is natural that myths dating from an age when Greek gods resembled
Polynesian idols should be as rude as Polynesian myths. The tenacity of
LOCAL myth is demonstrated by Pausanias, who declares that even in the
highly civilised Attica the Demes retained legends different from those
of the central city--the legends, probably, which were current before
the villages were "Synoecised" into Athens.(8)
(1) Zweiter Theil, 1858.
(2) Areop., 30.
(3) Clem. Alex., Oxford, 1715, i. 34.
(4) Laws, v. 738.
(5) De. Abst., ii. 18; Paus., ii. 4, 5.
(6) xiv. 2.
(7) Hermann, op. cit., p. 94, note 10.
(8) Pausanias, i. 14, 6.
It appears, then, that Greek ritual necessarily preserves matter of the
highest antiquity, and that the oldest rites and myths will probably be
found, not in the Panhellenic temples, like that in Olympia, not in
the NATIONAL poets, like Homer and Sophocles, but in the LOCAL fanes of
early tribal gods, and in the LOCAL mysteries, and the myths which came
late, if they came at all, into literary circulation. This opinion
is strengthened and illustrated by that invaluable guide-book of the
artistic and religious pilgrim written in the second century after
our era by Pausanias. If we follow him, we shall find that many of the
ceremonies, stories and idols which he regarded as oldest are analogous
to the idols and myths of the contemporary backward races. Let us then,
for the sake of illustrating the local and savage survivals in Greek
religion, accompany Pausanias in his tour through Hellas.
In Christian countries, especially in modern times, the contents of one
church are very like the furniture of another church; the functions in
one resemble those in all, though on the Continent some shrines still
retain relics and customs of the period when local saints had their
peculiar rites. But it was a very different thing in Greece. The pilgrim
who arrived at a temple never could guess what oddity or horror in
the way of statues, sacrifices, or stories might be prepared for his
edification. In the first place, there were HUMAN SACRIFICES. These are
not familiar to low savages, if known to them at all. Probably they were
first offered to barbaric royal ghosts, and thence transferred to gods.
In the town of Salamis, in Cyprus, about the date of Hadrian, the
devout might have found the priest slaying a human victim to Zeus,--an
interesting custom, instituted, according to Lactantius, by Teucer, and
continued till the age of the Roman Empire.(1)
(1) Euseb., Praep. Ev., iv. 17, mentions, among peoples practising human
sacrifices, Rhodes, Salamis, Heliopolis, Chios, Tenedos, Lacedaemon,
Arcadia and Athens; and, among gods thus honoured, Hera, Athene, Cronus,
Ares, Dionysus, Zeus and Apollo. For Dionysus the Cannibal, Plutarch,
Themist., 13; Porphyr., Abst., ii. 55. For the sacrifice to Zeus
Laphystius, see Grote, i. c. vi., and his array of authorities,
especially Herodotus, vii. 197. Clemens Alexandrinus (i. 36) mentions
the Messenians, to Zeus; the Taurians, to Artemis, the folk of Pella,
to Peleus and Chiron; the Cretans, to Zeus; the Lesbians, to Dionysus.
Geusius de Victimis Humanis (1699) may be consulted.
At Alos in Achaia Phthiotis, the stranger MIGHT have seen an
extraordinary spectacle, though we admit that the odds would have been
highly against his chance of witnessing the following events. As the
stranger approaches the town-hall, he observes an elderly and most
respectable citizen strolling in the same direction. The citizen is so
lost in thought that apparently he does not notice where he is going.
Behind him comes a crowd of excited but silent people, who watch him
with intense interest. The citizen reaches the steps of the town-hall,
while the excitement of his friends behind increases visibly. Without
thinking, the elderly person enters the building. With a wild and
un-Aryan howl, the other people of Alos are down on him, pinion him,
wreathe him with flowery garlands, and, lead him to the temple of Zeus
Laphystius, or "The Glutton," where he is solemnly sacrificed on
the altar. This was the custom of the good Greeks of Alos whenever a
descendant of the house of Athamas entered the Prytaneion. Of course the
family were very careful, as a rule, to keep at a safe distance from
the forbidden place. "What a sacrifice for Greeks!" as the author of the
Minos(1) says in that dialogue which is incorrectly attributed to Plato.
"He cannot get out except to be sacrificed," says Herodotus, speaking of
the unlucky descendant of Athamas. The custom appears to have existed as
late as the time of the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius.(2)
(1) 315, c.; Plato, Laws, vi. 782, c.
(2) Argonautica, vii. 197.
Even in the second century, when Pausanias visited Arcadia, he found
what seem to have been human sacrifices to Zeus. The passage is so very
strange and romantic that we quote a part of it.(1) "The Lycaean hill
hath other marvels to show, and chiefly this: thereon there is a
grove of Zeus Lycaeus, wherein may men in nowise enter; but if any
transgresses the law and goes within, he must die within the space of
one year. This tale, moreover, they tell, namely, that whatsoever man
or beast cometh within the grove casts no shadow, and the hunter pursues
not the deer into that wood, but, waiting till the beast comes forth
again, sees that it has left its shadow behind. And on the highest crest
of the whole mountain there is a mound of heaped-up earth, the altar of
Zeus Lycaeus, and the more part of Peloponnesus can be seen from that
place. And before the altar stand two pillars facing the rising sun, and
thereon golden eagles of yet more ancient workmanship. And on this altar
they sacrifice to Zeus in a manner that may not be spoken, and little
liking had I to make much search into this matter. BUT LET IT BE AS IT
IS, AND AS IT HATH BEEN FROM THE BEGINNING." The words "as it hath been
from the beginning" are ominous and significant, for the traditional
myths of Arcadia tell of the human sacrifices of Lycaon, and of men who,
tasting the meat of a mixed sacrifice, put human flesh between their
lips unawares.(2) This aspect of Greek religion, then, is almost on a
level with the mysterious cannibal horrors of "Voodoo," as practised by
the secret societies of negroes in Hayti. But concerning these things,
as Pausanias might say, it is little pleasure to inquire.
(1) Pausanias, viii. 2.
(2) Plato, Rep., viii. 565, d. This rite occurs in some African
coronation ceremonies.
Even where men were not sacrificed to the gods, the tourist among the
temples would learn that these bloody rites had once been customary, and
ceremonies existed by way of commutation. This is precisely what we find
in Vedic religion, in which the empty form of sacrificing a man was gone
through, and the origin of the world was traced to the fragments of a
god sacrificed by gods.(1) In Sparta was an altar of Artemis Orthia,
and a wooden image of great rudeness and antiquity--so rude indeed, that
Pausanias, though accustomed to Greek fetish-stones, thought it must
be of barbaric origin. The story was that certain people of different
towns, when sacrificing at the altar, were seized with frenzy and slew
each other. The oracle commanded that the altar should be sprinkled
with human blood. Men were therefore chosen by lot to be sacrificed till
Lycurgus commuted the offering, and sprinkled the altar with the blood
of boys who were flogged before the goddess. The priestess holds the
statue of the goddess during the flogging, and if any of the boys are
but lightly scourged, the image becomes too heavy for her to bear.
(1) The Purusha Sukhta, in Rig-Veda, x. 90.
The Ionians near Anthea had a temple of Artemis Triclaria, and to her
it had been customary to sacrifice yearly a youth and maiden of
transcendent beauty. In Pausanias's time the human sacrifice was
commuted. He himself beheld the strange spectacle of living beasts
and birds being driven into the fire to Artemis Laphria, a Calydonian
goddess, and he had seen bears rush back among the ministrants; but
there was no record that any one had ever been hurt by these wild
beasts.(1) The bear was a beast closely connected with Artemis, and
there is some reason to suppose that the goddess had herself been
a she-bear or succeeded to the cult of a she-bear in the morning of
time.(2)
(1) Paus., vii. 18, 19.
(2) See "Artemis", postea.
It may be believed that where symbolic human sacrifices are offered,
that is, where some other victim is slain or a dummy of a man is
destroyed, and where legend maintains that the sacrifice was once human,
there men and women were originally the victims. Greek ritual and Greek
myth were full of such tales and such commutations.(1) In Rome, as is
well known, effigies of men called Argives were sacrificed.(2) As an
example of a beast-victim given in commutation, Pausanias mentions(3)
the case of the folk of Potniae, who were compelled once a year to offer
to Dionysus a boy, in the bloom of youth. But the sacrifice was commuted
for a goat.
(1) See Hermann, Alterthumer., ii. 159-161, for abundant examples.
(2) Plutarch, Quest. Rom. 32.
(3) ix. 8, 1.
These commutations are familiar all over the world. Even in Mexico,
where human sacrifices and ritual cannibalism were daily events,
Quetzalcoatl was credited with commuting human sacrifices for blood
drawn from the bodies of the religious. In this one matter even the most
conservative creeds and the faiths most opposed to change sometimes say
with Tartuffe:--
Le ciel defend, de vrai, certains contentements,
Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements.
Though the fact has been denied (doubtless without reflection), the fact
remains that the Greeks offered human sacrifices. Now what does this
imply? Must it be taken as a survival from barbarism, as one of the
proofs that the Greeks had passed through the barbaric status?
The answer is less obvious than might be supposed. Sacrifice has two
origins. First, there are HONORIFIC sacrifices, in which the ghost or
god (or divine beast, if a divine beast be worshipped) is offered the
food he is believed to prefer. This does not occur among the lowest
savages. To carnivorous totems, Garcilasso says, the Indians of Peru
offered themselves. The feeding of sacred mice in the temples of Apollo
Smintheus is well known. Secondly, there are expiatory or PIACULAR
sacrifices, in which the worshipper, as it were, fines himself in a
child, an ox, or something else that he treasures. The latter kind of
sacrifice (most common in cases of crime done or suspected within the
circle of kindred) is not necessarily barbaric, except in its cruelty.
An example is the Attic Thargelia, in which two human scape-goats
annually bore "the sins of the congregation," and were flogged, driven
to the sea with figs tied round their necks, and burned.(1)
(1) Compare the Marseilles human sacrifice, Petron., 141; and for the
Thargelia, Tsetzes, Chiliads, v. 736; Hellad. in Photius, p. 1590 f. and
Harpoc. s. v.
The institution of human sacrifice, then, whether the offering be
regarded as food, or as a gift to the god of what is dearest to man (as
in the case of Jephtha's daughter), or whether the victim be supposed to
carry on his head the sins of the people, does not necessarily date from
the period of savagery. Indeed, sacrifice flourishes most, not among
savages, but among advancing barbarians. It would probably be impossible
to find any examples of human sacrifices of an expiatory or piacular
character, any sacrifices at all, among Australians, or Andamanese,
or Fuegians. The notion of presenting food to the supernatural powers,
whether ghosts or gods, is relatively rare among savages.(1) The
terrible Aztec banquets of which the gods were partakers are the most
noted examples of human sacrifices with a purely cannibal origin. Now
there is good reason to guess that human sacrifices with no other
origin than cannibalism survived even in ancient Greece. "It may be
conjectured," writes Professor Robertson Smith,(2) "that the human
sacrifices offered to the Wolf Zeus (Lycaeus) in Arcadia were originally
cannibal feasts of a Wolf tribe. The first participants in the rite
were, according to later legend, changed into wolves; and in later
times(3) at least one fragment of the human flesh was placed among the
sacrificial portions derived from other victims, and the man who ate it
was believed to become a were-wolf."(4) It is the almost universal rule
with cannibals not to eat members of their own stock, just as they do
not eat their own totem. Thus, as Professor Robertson Smith says, when
the human victim is a captive or other foreigner, the human sacrifice
may be regarded as a survival of cannibalism. Where, on the other
hand, the victim is a fellow tribesman, the sacrifice is expiatory or
piacular.
(1) Jevons, Introduction to the Science of Religion, pp. 161, 199.
(2) Encyc. Brit., s. v. "Sacrifice".
(3) Plato, Rep., viii. 565, D.
(4) Paus., viii. 2.
Among Greek cannibal gods we cannot fail to reckon the so-called
"Cannibal Dionysus," and probably the Zeus of Orchomenos, Zeus
Laphystius, who is explained by Suidas as "the Glutton Zeus". The
cognate verb ((Greek text omitted)) means "to eat with mangling and
rending," "to devour gluttonously". By Zeus Laphystius, then, men's
flesh was gorged in this distressing fashion.
The evidence of human sacrifice (especially when it seems not piacular,
but a relic of cannibalism) raises a presumption that Greeks had once
been barbarians. The presumption is confirmed by the evidence of early
Greek religious art.
When his curiosity about human sacrifices was satisfied, the pilgrim in
Greece might turn his attention to the statues and other representations
of the gods. He would find that the modern statues by famous artists
were beautiful anthropomorphic works in marble or in gold and ivory.
It is true that the faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth
were smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or
Africa.(1) As a rule, however, the statues of historic times were
beautiful representations of kindly and gracious beings. The older works
were stiff and rigid images, with the lips screwed into an unmeaning
smile. Older yet were the bronze gods, made before the art of soldering
was invented, and formed of beaten plates joined by small nails. Still
more ancient were the wooden images, which probably bore but a slight
resemblance to the human frame, and which were often mere "stocks".(2)
Perhaps once a year were shown the very early gods, the Demeter with the
horse's head, the Artemis with the fish's tails, the cuckoo Hera, whose
image was of pear-wood, the Zeus with three eyes, the Hermes, made
after the fashion of the pictures on the walls of sacred caves among
the Bushmen. But the oldest gods of all, says Pausanias repeatedly, were
rude stones in the temple or the temple precinct. In Achaean Pharae he
found some thirty squared stones, named each after a god. "Among all
the Greeks in the oldest times rude stones were worshipped in place of
statues." The superstitious man in Theophrastus's Characters used to
anoint the sacred stones with oil. The stone which Cronus swallowed
in mistake for Zeus was honoured at Delphi, and kept warm with wool
wrappings. There was another sacred stone among the Troezenians, and
the Megarians worshipped as Apollo a stone cut roughly into a pyramidal
form. The Argives had a big stone called Zeus Kappotas. The Thespians
worshipped a stone which they called Eros; "their oldest idol is a rude
stone".(3) It is well known that the original fetish-stone has been
found in situ below the feet of the statue of Apollo in Delos. On this
showing, then, the religion of very early Greeks in Greece was not
unlike that of modern Negroes. The artistic evolution of the gods, a
remarkably rapid one after a certain point, could be traced in every
temple. It began with the rude stone, and rose to the wooden idol, in
which, as we have seen, Pausanias and Porphyry found such sanctity.
Next it reached the hammered bronze image, passed through the archaic
marbles, and culminated in the finer marbles and the chryselephantine
statues of Zeus and Athena. But none of the ancient sacred objects lost
their sacredness. The oldest were always the holiest idols; the oldest
of all were stumps and stones, like savage fetish-stones.
(1) Pausanias, ii. 2.
(2) Clemens Alex., Protrept. (Oxford, 1715). p. 41.
(3) Gill, Myths of South Pacific, p. 60. Compare a god, which proved to
be merely pumice-stone, and was regarded as the god of winds and waves,
having been drifted to Puka-Puka. Offerings of food were made to it
during hurricanes.
Another argument in favour of the general thesis that savagery left
deep marks on Greek life in general, and on myth in particular, may be
derived from survivals of totemism in ritual and legend. The following
instances need not necessarily be accepted, but it may be admitted that
they are precisely the traces which totemism would leave had it once
existed, and then waned away on the advance of civilisation.(1)
(1) The argument to be derived from the character of the Greek (Greek
text omitted) as a modified form of the totem-kindred is too long and
complex to be put forward here. It is stated in Custom and Myth, "The
history of the Family," in M'Lennan's Studies in Early history, and is
assumed, if not proved, in Ancient Society by the late Mr. Lewis Morgan.
That Greeks in certain districts regarded with religious reverence
certain plants and animals is beyond dispute. That some stocks even
traced their lineage to beasts will be shown in the chapter on Greek
Divine Myths, and the presumption is that these creatures, though
explained as incarnations and disguises of various gods, were once
totems sans phrase, as will be inferred from various examples. Clemens
Alexandrinus, again, after describing the animal-worship of the
Egyptians, mentions cases of zoolatry in Greece.(1) The Thessalians
revered storks, the Thebans weasels, and the myth ran that the weasel
had in some way aided Alcmena when in labour with Heracles. In another
form of the myth the weasel was the foster-mother of the hero.(2) Other
Thessalians, the Myrmidons, claimed descent from the ant and revered
ants. The religious respect paid to mice in the temple of Apollo
Smintheus, in the Troad, Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos and Crete is well known,
and a local tribe were alluded to as Mice by an oracle. The god himself,
like the Japanese harvest-god, was represented in art with a mouse at
his foot, and mice, as has been said, were fed at his shrine.(3) The
Syrians, says Clemens Alexandrinus, worship doves and fishes, as the
Elians worship Zeus.(4) The people of Delphi adored the wolf,(5) and the
Samians the sheep. The Athenians had a hero whom they worshipped in the
shape of a wolf.(6) A remarkable testimony is that of the scholiast on
Apollonius Rhodius, ii. 124. "The wolf," he says, "was a beast held in
honour by the Athenians, and whosoever slays a wolf collects what
is needful for its burial." The burial of sacred animals in Egypt
is familiar. An Arab tribe mourns over and solemnly buries all dead
gazelles.(7) Nay, flies were adored with the sacrifice of an ox near
the temple of Apollo in Leucas.(8) Pausanias (iii. 22) mentions certain
colonists who were guided by a hare to a site where the animal hid in a
myrtle-bush. They therefore adore the myrtle, (Greek text omitted). In
the same way a Carian stock, the Ioxidae, revered the asparagus.(9) A
remarkable example of descent mythically claimed from one of the lower
animals is noted by Otfried Muller.(10) Speaking of the swan of Apollo,
he says, "That deity was worshipped, according to the testimony of the
Iliad, in the Trojan island of Tenedos. There, too, was Tennes honoured
as the (Greek text omitted) of the island. Now his father was called
Cycnus (the swan) in an oft-told and romantic legend.(11)... The swan,
therefore, as father to the chief hero on the Apolline island, stands
in distinct relation to the god, who is made to come forward still more
prominently from the fact that Apollo himself is also called father of
Tennes. I think we can scarcely fail to recognise a mythus which was
local at Tenedos.... The fact, too, of calling the swan, instead of
Apollo, the father of a hero, demands altogether a simplicity and
boldness of fancy which are far more ancient than the poems of Homer."
(1) Op. cit., i. 34.
(2) Scholiast on Iliad, xix. 119.
(3) Aelian, H. A., xii. 5; Strabo, xiii. 604. Compare "Apollo and the
Mouse, Custom and Myth, pp. 103-120.
(4) Lucian, De Dea Syria.
(5) Aelian, H. A., xii. 40.
(6) Harpocration, (Greek text omitted). Compare an address to
the wolf-hero, "who delights in the flight and tears of men," in
Aristophanes, Vespae, 389.
(7) Robertson Smith, Kinship in Early Arabia, pp. 195-204.
(8) Aelian, xi. 8.
(9) Plutarch, Theseus, 14.
(10) Proleg., Engl. trans., p. 204.
(11) (Canne on Conon, 28.)
Had Muller known that this "simplicity and boldness of fancy" exist
to-day, for example, among the Swan tribe of Australia, he would
probably have recognised in Cycnus a survival from totemism. The fancy
survives again in Virgil's Cupavo, "with swan's plumes rising from his
crest, the mark of his father's form".(1) Descent was claimed, not only
from a swan Apollo, but from a dog Apollo.
(1) Aeneid, x. 187.
In connection with the same set of ideas, it is pointed out that several
(Greek text omitted), or stocks, had eponymous heroes, in whose names
the names of the ancestral beast apparently survived. In Attica
the Crioeis have their hero (Crio, "Ram"), the Butadae have Butas
("Bullman"), the Aegidae have Aegeus ("Goat"), and the Cynadae, Cynus
("Dog"). Lycus, according to Harpocration (s. v.) has his statue in the
shape of a wolf in the Lyceum. "The general facts that certain animals
might not be sacrificed to certain gods" (at Athens the Aegidae
introduced Athena, to whom no goat might be offered on the Acropolis,
while she herself wore the goat skin, aegis), "while, on the other
hand, each deity demanded particular victims, explained by the ancients
themselves in certain cases to be hostile animals, find their natural
explanation" in totemism.(1) Mr. Evelyn Abbott points out, however, that
the names Aegeus, Aegae, Aegina, and others, may be connected with the
goat only by an old volks-etymologie, as on coins of Aegina in Achaea.
The real meaning of the words may be different. Compare (Greek text
omitted), the sea-shore. Mr. J. G. Frazer does not, at present, regard
totemism as proved in the case of Greece.(2)
(1) Some apparent survivals of totemism in ritual will be found in the
chapter on Greek gods, especially Zeus, Dionysus, and Apollo.
(2) See his Golden Bough, an alternative explanation of these animals in
connection with "The Corn Spirit".
As final examples of survivals from the age of barbarism in the religion
of Greece, certain features in the Mysteries may be noted. Plutarch
speaks of "the eating of raw flesh, and tearing to pieces of victims,
as also fastings and beatings of the breast, and again in many places
abusive language at the sacrifices, and other mad doings". The mysteries
of Demeter, as will appear when her legend is criticised, contained one
element all unlike these "mad doings"; and the evidence of Sophocles,
Pindar, Plutarch and others demonstrate that religious consolations
were somehow conveyed in the Eleusinia. But Greece had many other local
mysteries, and in several of these it is undeniable the Greeks acted
much as contemporary Australians, Zunis and Negroes act in their secret
initiations which, however, also inculcate moral ideas of considerable
excellence. Important as these analogies are, they appear to have
escaped the notice of most mythologists. M. Alfred Maury, however, in
Les Religions de la Grece, published in 1857, offers several instances
of hidden rites, common to Hellas and to barbarism.
There seem in the mysteries of savage races to be two chief purposes.
There is the intention of giving to the initiated a certain sacred
character, which puts them in close relation with gods or demons, and
there is the introduction of the young to complete or advancing manhood,
and to full participation in the savage Church with its ethical ideas.
The latter ceremonies correspond, in short, to confirmation, and they
are usually of a severe character, being meant to test by fasting (as
Plutarch says) and by torture (as in the familiar Spartan rite) the
courage and constancy of the young braves. The Greek mysteries best
known to us are the Thesmophoria and the Eleusinia. In the former the
rites (as will appear later) partook of the nature of savage "medicine"
or magic, and were mainly intended to secure fertility in husbandry and
in the family. In the Eleusinia the purpose was the purification of the
initiated, secured by ablutions and by standing on the "ram's-skin of
Zeus," and after purifications the mystae engaged in sacred dances,
and were permitted to view a miracle play representing the sorrows and
consolations of Demeter. There was a higher element, necessarily obscure
in nature. The chief features in the whole were purifications, dancing,
sacrifice and the representation of the miracle play. It would be
tedious to offer an exhaustive account of savage rites analogous to
these mysteries of Hellas. Let it suffice to display the points where
Greek found itself in harmony with Australian, and American, and African
practice. These points are: (1) mystic dances; (2) the use of a little
instrument, called turndun in Australia, whereby a roaring noise is
made, and the profane are warned off; (3) the habit of daubing persons
about to be initiated with clay or anything else that is sordid, and of
washing this off; apparently by way of showing that old guilt is removed
and a new life entered upon; (4) the performances with serpents may be
noticed, while the "mad doings" and "howlings" mentioned by Plutarch
are familiar to every reader of travels in uncivilised countries; (5)
ethical instruction is communicated.
First, as to the mystic dances, Lucian observes:(1) "You cannot find a
single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing.... This much all
men know, that most people say of the revealers of the mysteries that
they 'dance them out'" ((Greek text omitted)). Clemens of Alexandria
uses the same term when speaking of his own "appalling revelations".(2)
So closely connected are mysteries with dancing among savages, that when
Mr. Orpen asked Qing, the Bushman hunter, about some doctrines in which
Qing was not initiated, he said: "Only the initiated men of that dance
know these things". To "dance" this or that means to be acquainted with
this or that myth, which is represented in a dance or ballet d'action(3)
((Greek text omitted)). So widely distributed is the practice, that
Acosta, in an interesting passage, mentions it as familiar to the people
of Peru before and after the Spanish conquest. The text is a valuable
instance of survival in religion. When they were converted to
Christianity the Peruvians detected the analogy between our sacrament
and their mysteries, and they kept up as much as possible of the
old rite in the new ritual. Just as the mystae of Eleusis practised
chastity, abstaining from certain food, and above all from beans, before
the great Pagan sacrament, so did the Indians. "To prepare themselves
all the people fasted two days, during which they did neyther company
with their wives, nor eate any meate with salt or garlicke, nor drink
any chic.... And although the Indians now forbeare to sacrifice beasts
or other things publikely, which cannot be hidden from the Spaniardes,
yet doe they still use many ceremonies that have their beginnings
from these feasts and auntient superstitions, for at this day do they
covertly make their feast of Ytu at the daunces of the feast of the
Sacrament. Another feast falleth almost at the same time, whereas the
Christians observe the solempnitie of the holy Sacrament, which
DOTH RESEMBLE IT IN SOME SORT, AS IN DAUNCING, SINGING AND
REPRESENTATIONS."(4) The holy "daunces" at Seville are under Papal
disapproval, but are to be kept up, it is said, till the peculiar
dresses used in them are worn out. Acosta's Indians also had "garments
which served only for this feast". It is superfluous to multiply
examples of the dancing, which is an invariable feature of savage as of
Greek mysteries.
(1) (Greek text omitted), chap. xv. 277.
(2) Ap. Euseb., Praep. Ev., ii, 3, 6.
(3) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.
(4) Acosta, Historie of the Indies, book v. chap. xxviii. London, 1604.
2. The Greek and savage use of the turndun, or bribbun of Australia in
the mysteries is familiar to students. This fish-shaped flat board of
wood is tied to a string, and whirled round, so as to cause a
peculiar muffled roar. Lobeck quotes from the old scholia on Clemens
Alexandrinus, published by Bastius in annotations on St. Gregory, the
following Greek description of the turndun, the "bull-roarer" of English
country lads, the Gaelic srannam:(1) (Greek text omitted)". "The conus
was a little slab of wood, tied to a string, and whirled round in the
mysteries to make a whirring noise. As the mystic uses of the turndun
in Australia, New Zealand, New Mexico and Zululand have elsewhere been
described at some length (Custom and Myth, pp. 28-44), it may be enough
to refer the reader to the passage. Mr. Taylor has since found the
instrument used in religious mysteries in West Africa, so it has now
been tracked almost round the world. That an instrument so rude should
be employed by Greek and Australians on mystic occasions is in itself a
remarkable coincidence. Unfortunately, Lobeck, who published the Greek
description of the turndun (Aglaophamus, 700), was unacquainted with the
modern ethnological evidence.
(1) Pronounced strantham. For this information I am indebted to my
friend Mr. M'Allister, schoolmaster at St. Mary's Loch.
3. The custom of plastering the initiated over with clay or filth was
common in Greek as in barbaric mysteries. Greek examples may be given
first. Demosthenes accuses Aeschines of helping his mother in certain
mystic rites, aiding her, especially, by bedaubing the initiate with
clay and bran.(1) Harpocration explains the term used ((Greek text
omitted)) thus: "Daubing the clay and bran on the initiate, to explain
which they say that the Titans when they attacked Dionysus daubed
themselves over with chalk, but afterwards, for ritual purposes, clay
was used". It may be urged with some force that the mother of Aeschines
introduced foreign, novel and possibly savage rites. But Sophocles, in
a fragment of his lost play, the Captives, uses the term in the same
ritual sense--
(Greek text omitted).
(1) De Corona, 313.
The idea clearly was that by cleansing away the filth plastered over
the body was symbolised the pure and free condition of the initiate. He
might now cry in the mystic chant--
(Greek text omitted).
Worse have I fled, better have I found.
That this was the significance of the daubing with clay in Greek
mysteries and the subsequent cleansing seems quite certain. We are led
straight to this conclusion by similar rites, in which the purpose of
mystically cleansing was openly put forward. Thus Plutarch, in his
essay on superstition, represents the guilty man who would be purified
actually rolling in clay, confessing his misdeeds, and then sitting at
home purified by the cleansing process ((Greek text omitted)).(1) In
another rite, the cleansing of blood-guiltiness, a similar process
was practised. Orestes, after killing his mother, complains that the
Eumenides do not cease to persecute him, though he has been "purified
by blood of swine".(2) Apollonius says that the red hand of the murderer
was dipped in the blood of swine and then washed.(3) Athenaeus describes
a similar unpleasant ceremony.(4) The blood of whelps was apparently
used also, men being first daubed with it and then washed clean.(5) The
word (Greek text omitted) is again the appropriate ritual term. Such
rites Plutarch calls (Greek text omitted), "filthy purifications".(6) If
daubing with dirt is known to have been a feature of Greek mysteries,
it meets us everywhere among savages. In O-Kee-Pa, that curiously minute
account of the Mandan mysteries, Catlin writes that a portion of the
frame of the initiate was "covered with clay, which the operator took
from a wooden bowl, and with his hand plastered unsparingly over". The
fifty young men waiting for initiation "were naked and entirely covered
with clay of various colours".(7) The custom is mentioned by Captain
John Smith in Virginia. Mr. Winwood Reade found it in Africa, where, as
among the Mandans and Spartans, cruel torture and flogging accompanied
the initiation of young men.(8) In Australia the evidence for daubing
the initiate is very abundant.(9) In New Mexico, the Zunis stole Mr.
Cushing's black paint, as considering it even better than clay for
religious daubing.(10)
(1) So Hermann, op. cit., 133.
(2) Eumenides, 273.
(3) Argonautica, iv. 693.
(4) ix. 78. Hermann, from whom the latter passages are borrowed, also
quotes the evidence of a vase published by Feuerbach, Lehrbuch, p. 131,
with other authorities.
(5) Plutarch, Quaest. Rom., 68.
(6) De Superstitione, chap. xii.
(7) O-Kee-Pa, London, 1867, p. 21.
(8) Savage Africa, case of Mongilomba; Pausanias, iii. 15.
(9) Brough Smyth, i. 60.
(10) Custma and Myth, p. 40.
4. Another savage rite, the use of serpents in Greek mysteries, is
attested by Clemens Alexandrinus and by Demosthenes (loc. cit.). Clemens
says the snakes were caressed in representations of the loves of Zeus in
serpentine form. The great savage example is that of "the snake-dance
of the Moquis," who handle rattle-snakes in the mysteries without
being harmed.(1) The dance is partly totemistic, partly meant, like
the Thesmophoria, to secure the fertility of the lands of the Moquis
of Arizonas. The turndum or (Greek text omitted) is employed. Masks are
worn, as in the rites of Demeter Cidiria in Arcadia.(2)
(1) The Snake-Dance of the Moquis. By Captain John G. Bourke, London,
1884.
(2) Pausanias, viii. 16.
5. This last point of contact between certain Greek and certain savage
mysteries is highly important. The argument of Lobeck, in his celebrated
work Aglaophamus, is that the Mysteries were of no great moment in
religion. Had he known the evidence as to savage initiations, he would
have been confirmed in his opinion, for many of the singular Greek
rites are clearly survivals from savagery. But was there no more truly
religious survival? Pindar is a very ancient witness that things of
divine import were revealed. "Happy is he who having seen these things
goes under the hollow earth. He knows the end of life, and the god-given
beginning."(1) Sophocles "chimes in," as Lobeck says, declaring that
the initiate alone LIVE in Hades, while other souls endure all evils.
Crinagoras avers that even in life the initiate live secure, and in
death are the happier. Isagoras declares that about the end of life and
all eternity they have sweet hopes.
(1) Fragm., cxvi., 128 H. p. 265.
Splendida testimonia, cries Lobeck. He tries to minimise the evidence,
remarking that Isocrates promises the very same rewards to all who live
justly and righteously. But why not, if to live justly and righteously
was part of the teaching of the mysteries of Eleusis? Cicero's evidence,
almost a translation of the Greek passages already cited, Lobeck
dismisses as purely rhetorical.(1) Lobeck's method is rather cavalier.
Pindar and Sophocles meant something of great significance.
(1) De Legibus ii. 14; Aglaophamus, pp. 69-74.
Now we have acknowledged savage survivals of ugly rites in the Greek
mysteries. But it is only fair to remember that, in certain of the few
savage mysteries of which we know the secret, righteousness of life and
a knowledge of good are inculcated. This is the case in Australia, and
in Central Africa, where to be "uninitiated" is equivalent to being
selfish.(1) Thus it seems not improbable that consolatory doctrines were
expounded in the Eleusinia, and that this kind of sermon or exhortation
was no less a survival from savagery than the daubing with clay, and the
(Greek text omitted), and other wild rites.
(1) Making of Religion, pp. 193-197, 235.
We have now attempted to establish that in Greek law and ritual many
savage customs and usages did undeniably survive. We have seen that both
philosophical and popular opinion in Greece believed in a past age of
savagery. In law, in religion, in religious art, in custom, in human
sacrifice, in relics of totemism, and in the mysteries, we have seen
that the Greeks retained plenty of the usages now found among the
remotest and most backward races. We have urged against the suggestion
of borrowing from Egypt or Asia that these survivals are constantly
found in local and tribal religion and rituals, and that consequently
they probably date from that remote prehistoric past when the Greeks
lived in village settlements. It may still doubtless be urged that all
these things are Pelasgic, and were the customs of a race settled in
Hellas before the arrival of the Homeric Achaeans, and Dorians, and
Argives, who, on this hypothesis, adopted and kept up the old savage
Pelasgian ways and superstitions. It is impossible to prove or disprove
this belief, nor does it affect our argument. We allege that all Greek
life below the surface was rich in institutions now found among the most
barbaric peoples. These institutions, whether borrowed or inherited,
would still be part of the legacy left by savages to cultivated peoples.
As this legacy is so large in custom and ritual, it is not unfair to
argue that portions of it will also be found in myths. It is now time to
discuss Greek myths of the origin of things, and decide whether they are
or are not analogous in ideas to the myths which spring from the wild
and ignorant fancy of Australians, Cahrocs, Nootkas and Bushmen.