CHAPTER II.

THE ANTHESTERIA.

THE RITUAL OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES.

Our examination of the unpromising Diasia has so far led us to the

following significant, if somewhat vague, results. The festival in

all probability did not originally belong to Zeus, but to a being

called Meilichios, a snake god or demon. The worship of this being was

characterized by nightly ceremonies, holocausts which the sun might not

behold, it was gloomy in character, potent for purification. The name of

the festival is probably associated with _dirae_, curses, imprecations.

The Diasia, gloomy though it is, is a spring festival and its

significance will be yet more plainly apparent if we examine another,

_the_ other spring festival of the Greeks, i.e. the Anthesteria, which

gives its name to the first spring month Anthesterion.

If we know little about the Diasia, about the Anthesteria[53] we know

much. Apollodorus, quoted by Harpocration, tells us that the whole

festival collectively was called _Anthesteria_, that it was celebrated in

honour of Dionysos, and that its several parts, i.e. its successive days,

were known as Pithoigia (cask-opening), Choes (cups), Chytroi (pots). The

exact date of the festival is fixed, the three successive days falling

from the 11th to the 13th of Anthesterion[54].

On the first day, the 11th of Anthesterion, i.e. the Pithoigia,

Plutarch[55] tells us ‘they broached the new wine at Athens. It was an

ancient custom,’ he adds, ‘to offer some of it as a libation before they

drank it, praying at the same time that the use of the drug (φαρμάκου)

might be rendered harmless and beneficial to them.’ This is a clear case

of the offering of first-fruits[56]. Among his own people, the Boeotians,

Plutarch adds, ‘the day was called the day of the Good Spirit[57], the

Agathos Daimon, and to him they made offerings. The month itself was

known as Prostaterios.’ The scholiast to Hesiod[58] tells us that the

festival was an ancestral one (ἐν τοῖς πατρίοις), and that it was not

allowable to hinder either household slaves or hired servants from

partaking of the wine.

The casks once opened, the revel set in and lasted through the next day

(the Choes or Cups) and on through the third (the Chytroi or Pots). The

day of the Choes seems to have been the climax, and sometimes gave its

name to the whole festival.

It is needless to dwell on all the details of what was in intent a

three days’ fair. A ‘Pardon’ in the Brittany of to-day affords perhaps

the nearest modern analogy. The children have holidays, fairings are

bought, friends are feasted, the sophists get their fees, the servants

generally are disorganized, and every one down to the small boys, as

many a vase-painting tells us, is more or less drunk. The drinking bore

of course its ritual aspect; there is a drinking contest presided over

by the King Archon, he who first drains his cup gets a cake, each man

crowns his cup with a garland and deposits the wreath in keeping of the

priestess of the sanctuary of Dionysos in the Marshes. On the day of the

_Cups_ takes place the august ceremony of the wedding of the wife of the

King Archon to the god Dionysos. On that day alone in all the year the

temple of Dionysos is opened[59]; the wedding ceremony itself takes place

in the Boukoleion.

On the third day, the _Chytroi_ or Pots, there was a dramatic contest

known as Χύτρινοι, Pot-contests. During this third day the revel went

on; Aristophanes[60] has left us the picture of the drunken mob thronging

the streets at the holy Pot-Feast:

‘O brood of the mere and the spring,

Gather together and sing

From the depths of your throat

By the side of the boat

Coäx, as we move in a ring.

As in Limnae we sang the divine

Nyseïan Giver of Wine,

When the people in lots

With their sanctified Pots

Came reeling around my shrine.’

The scholiast on the _Acharnians_[61], a play which gives us a lively

picture of the festival, says that the Choes and the Chytroi were

celebrated on one day. The different days and acts of the whole

Anthesteria were doubtless not sharply divided, and if each day was

reckoned from sunrise to sunset confusion would easily arise.

* * * * *

So far a cursory inspection clearly shows that the Anthesteria was a

wine-festival in honour of Dionysos. Moreover we have the definite

statement of Thucydides[62] that ‘the more ancient Dionysia were

celebrated on the 12th day of the month Anthesterion in the temple of

Dionysos in the Marshes.’ The reference can only be to the Choes, so that

the festival of the Choes seems actually to have borne the name Dionysia.

Harpocration[63] goes even further; he says, quoting Apollodorus, that

‘the whole month was sacred to Dionysos.’

A more searching examination of the sources reveals beneath the surface

rejoicings, as in the case of the Diasia, another and more primitive

ritual, and a ritual of widely different significance. It has escaped no

student of Greek festivals that through the Anthesteria there ran ‘a note

of sadness.’ Things were not altogether so merry as they seemed. This

has been variously explained, as due to the ‘natural melancholy of the

spring,’ or more recently as evidence of the fact that Dionysos had his

‘chthonic side’ and was the ‘Lord of souls.’ A simpler explanation lies

at the door.

The clue to the real gist of the Anthesteria is afforded by a piece

of ritual performed on the last day, the _Chytroi_. The Greeks had a

proverbial expression spoken, we are told, of those who ‘on all occasions

demand a repetition of favours received.’ It ran as follows: ‘Out of the

doors! ye Keres; it is no longer Anthesteria.’ Suidas[64] has preserved

for us its true signification; it was spoken, he says, ‘implying that

in the Anthesteria the ghosts are going about in the city.’ From this

fragmentary statement the mandate, it is clear, must have been spoken at

the close of the festival, so we cannot be wrong in placing it as the

last act of the Chytroi.

The statement of Suidas in itself makes the significance of the words

abundantly clear, but close parallels are not wanting in the ritual

of other races. The Lemuria at Rome is a case in point. According to

Ovid[65] each father of a family as the festival came round had to

lay the ghosts of his house after a curious and complex fashion. When

midnight was come and all was still, he arose and standing with bare

feet he made a special sign with his fingers and thumb to keep off any

ghost. Thrice he washes his hands in spring water, then he turns round

and takes black beans into his mouth; with face averted he spits them

away, and as he spits them says, ‘These I send forth, with these beans I

redeem myself and mine.’ Nine times he speaks, and looks not back. The

ghost, they believe, picks them up and follows behind if no one looks.

Again he touches the water and strikes the brass of Temesa and begs the

ghost to leave his house. When nine times he has said, ‘Shades of my

fathers, depart’ (Manes exite paterni!), he looks back and holds that

the rite has been duly done. We cannot impute to the Anthesteria all the

crude minutiae of the Lemuria, but the content is clearly the same—the

expulsion of ancestral ghosts. The Lemuria took place not in the spring

but in the early summer, May—a time at which ceremonies of purification

were much needed.

A second striking parallel is recorded by Mr Tylor[66]. He says of a like

Sclavonic custom, ‘when the meal was over the priest rose from the table

and hunted out the souls of the dead like fleas with these words: “Ye

have eaten and drunk, souls, now go, now go”.’ Dr Oldenberg[67] calls

attention to another analogy. In sacrifices in India to the dead the

souls of ancestors are first invoked, then bidden to depart, and even

invited to return again after the prescribed lapse of a month.

The formula used at the close of the Anthesteria is in itself ample proof

that the Anthesteria was a festival of All Souls; here at last we know

for certain what was dimly shadowed in the Diasia, that some portion at

least of the ritual of the month Anthesterion was addressed to the powers

of the underworld, and that these powers were primarily the ghosts of

the dead. The evidence is not however confined to an isolated proverbial

formulary. The remaining ritual of the Chytroi confirms it. Before they

were bidden to depart the ghosts were feasted and after significant

fashion.

The scholiast on Aristophanes[68] commenting on the words τοῖς ἱεροῖσι

Χύτροισι, ‘at the holy Pot-feast,’ explains the ceremonies as follows:

‘The Chytroi is a feast among the Athenians; the cause on account of

which it is celebrated is explained by Theopompos who writes thus: ...

“They have the custom of sacrificing at this feast, not to any of the

Olympian gods at all, but to Hermes Chthonios”; and again in explaining

the word χύτρα, pot: “And of the pot which all the citizens cook none of

the priests tastes, they do this on the (13th) day”; and again: “Those

present appease Hermes on account of the dead”.’ The scholiast on another

passage in Aristophanes[69] says substantially the same, but adds, again

on the authority of Theopompos, that the practice of cooking the dish of

seeds was observed by those who were saved from the deluge on behalf of

those who perished. The deluge is of course introduced from a desire to

get mythological precedent; the all-important points are that the χύτρα,

the dish of grain and seeds, was offered to none of the Olympians, not

even to Dionysos in whose honour the festival was ostensibly celebrated,

but only to Hermes Chthonios, Hermes of the Underworld, and that of this

sacrifice _no man tasted_. It was no sacrifice of communion, but like

the holocaust made over utterly to dread chthonic powers, and behind

this notion of sacrifice to the underworld deities lay the still earlier

notion that it was dead men’s food, a supper for the souls.

Before we leave the χύτρα it is necessary to examine more precisely the

name of the day, Chytroi. August Mommsen[70] has emphasized the fact, too

much neglected, that the name of the festival is masculine, οἱ χύτροι

not αἱ χύτραι. The feminine form χύτραι means pots artificially made;

the masculine form χύτροι, which occurs far less frequently, means in

ordinary parlance natural pots, i.e. holes in the ground. Pausanias[71]

speaks of a certain natural bath at Thermopylae which the country people

called ‘the Chytroi of the women’; and Herodotus[72] describes it in

the same terms. Theophrastos[73] in his _History of Plants_ speaks of a

certain plant as growing in a place between the Kephisos and the Melas,

‘the place being called Pelekania, i.e. certain hollows in the marsh,

the so-called Pot-holes.’ Hesychius[74], interpreting οἱ χύτρινοι, says

they are ‘the hollow places of the earth through which springs come up.’

The word κολυμβήθρα itself, in classical Greek a natural pool, became in

mediaeval Greek a font, and it may be noted that the natural chasms that

occur in western Yorkshire still locally bear the name of ‘Pots.’

It is possible therefore that the festival took its name from natural

holes in the ground in the district of the Limnae where it was

celebrated, a district to this day riddled with Turkish cisterns made of

great earthen jars (πίθοι). Such holes may have been used for graves, and

were in many parts of Greece regarded as the constant haunt of ghosts

going up and down. They were perhaps the prototypes of the ‘chasms in the

earth’ seen in the vision of Er[75]. Near akin were the megara or chasms

of Demeter at Potniae[76], and the clefts on and about the Pnyx where

the women celebrated the Thesmophoria (p. 125). Such chasms would be the

natural sanctuaries of a Ge and ghost cult.

It is obvious that the two forms χύτροι and χύτραι would easily pass over

into each other, and it is hard to say which came first. It is also to be

noted that, though the masculine form more often means natural hole, it

is also used for artificial pot. Pollux[77], in discussing ‘the vessels

used by cooks,’ says that when Delphilos speaks of the big pot (χύτρον

μέγαν) at the cook’s, he clearly means the χύτρα, not the foot-pan

(χυτρόποδα). Though the form χύτροι ultimately established itself, the

associations of χύτρα, artificial pot, seem to have prevailed, and these

associations are important and must be noted.

Hesychius[78] says that by φαρμακή is meant the χύτρα which they prepared

for those who cleansed the cities. From the scholiast on the _Choephoroi_

of Aeschylus[79] we learn that the Athenians purified their houses with a

censer made of a pot; ‘this they threw away at the meeting of three ways

and went away without turning back.’ Here we have of course the origin

of ‘Hecate’s suppers.’ These were primarily not feasts for the goddess

but purification ceremonies, of which, as no mortal might taste them, it

was supposed an infernal goddess partook. The day of the Chytroi was a

day of such purifications. From some such notion arose the Aristophanic

word ἐγχυτρίζειν, ‘to pot,’ i.e. to utterly ruin and destroy, to make

away with. The scholiast[80] explains it as referring to the practice

of exposing children, but Suidas[81] knows of another meaning; he says

the ἐγχυτρίστριαι were those ‘women who purified the unclean, pouring

upon them the blood of the victim,’ and also those who ‘poured libations

to the dead,’ those in a word who performed ceremonies of placation and

purgation.

It is curious that, though most modern writers from Crusius onwards

have recognised that the Chytroi was a _dies nefastus_ and in the main

a festival of ghosts, this day has been separated off from the rest of

the Anthesteria, and the two previous days have been regarded as purely

drinking festivals:—the Pithoigia the opening of the wine-cask, the

Choes the drinking of the wine-cups. And yet for the second day, the

Choes, literary testimony is explicit. Spite of the drinking contest, the

flower-wreathed cups and the wedding of Dionysos, all joyful elements of

the service of the wine-god, the Choes was a _dies nefastus_, an unlucky

day, a day to be observed with apotropaic precautions. Photius[82], in

explaining the words μιαρὰ ἡμέρα, ‘day of pollution,’ says such a day

occurred ‘in the Choes in the month of Anthesterion, in which (i.e.

during the Choes) they believed that the spirits of the dead rose up

again. From early morning they used to chew buckthorn and anointed their

doors with pitch.’ Buckthorn, known to modern botanists as _Rhamnus

catharticus_, is a plant of purgative properties. The ancient Athenian,

like the modern savage, believed that such plants have the power of

keeping off evil spirits, or rather perhaps of ejecting them when

already in possession. Chewing a substance was naturally a thorough

and efficient way of assimilating its virtues. The priestess of Apollo

chewed the laurel leaf. It seems possible that she may have primarily

had to do this rather as a means of ejecting the bad spirits than to

obtain inspiration from the good. Fasting is a substantial safe-guard,

but purgation more drastically effective. The prophylactic properties of

_rhamnus_, buckthorn, were well known to the ancients. Dioscorides[83]

in his _Materia Medica_ writes, ‘it is said that branches of this plant

attached to doors or hung up outside repel the evil arts of magicians.’

Possibly, in addition to the chewing of buckthorn, branches of it were

fastened to doors at the festival of the Choes, and served the same

purpose as the pitch. Pitch, Photius tells us in commenting on _rhamnus_,

was on account of its special purity used also to drive away sprites at

the birth of a child—always a perilous moment[84].

It is not easy to imagine an enlightened citizen of the Athens of the

fifth century B.C., an Aeschylus, a Pericles, chewing buckthorn from

early dawn to keep off the ghosts of his ancestors, but custom in such

matters has an iron hand. If the masters of the house shirked the

chewing of buckthorn, the servants would see to it that the doors were

at least anointed with pitch; it is best to be on the safe side in these

matters, and there is the public opinion of conservative neighbours to

be considered. Be this as it may, it is quite clear that the day of the

_Choes_ was a day of ghosts like the day of the _Chytroi_.

But, if the ceremonies of the Choes clearly indicate the ‘unlucky’ nature

of the day, what is to be made of the name? Nothing, as it stands.

_Choes_, _Cups_, are undeniably cheerful. But, as in the case of Chytroi,

there _may_ have been a confusion between approximate forms; the two

words χοή, funeral libation, and χοῦς, cup, have a common stem χοϝ.

May not χόες have superimposed itself on χοαί, wine-cups upon funeral

libations? A scholiast on Aristophanes[85] seems to indicate some such

a _contaminatio_. In explaining the word χοάς, he says the meaning is

‘pourings forth, offerings to the dead or libations. An oracle was

issued that they must offer libations (χοάς) yearly to those of the

Aetolians who had died, and celebrate the festival so called.’ Here the

name of a festival Χοάς is oxytone, and though we cannot assume that

it was identical with the Athenian Choes, it looks as if there was some

confusion as to the two analogous forms.

If we view the Choes as Χοαί, the Cups as Libations, the anomalous

and, as it stands, artificial connection of Orestes with the festival

becomes at once clear. At the drinking bout of the Choes, we learn from

Athenaeus[86] and other authorities, the singular custom prevailed that

each man should drink by himself. A mythological reason was sought to

account for this, and the story was told[87] that Orestes, polluted by

the blood of his mother, came to Athens at the time of the celebration of

the Choes. The reigning king, variously called Pandion and Phanodemus,

wished to show him hospitality, but religious scruple forbade him to let

a man polluted enter the Sanctuaries or drink with those ceremonially

clean. He therefore ordered the Sanctuaries to be shut and a measure of

wine (χοῦς) to be set before each man severally, and bade them, when

they had finished drinking, not to offer up the garlands with which

they had been crowned in the Sanctuaries, because they had been under

the same roof with Orestes; but he bade each man place his wreath round

his own cup, and so bring them to the priestess at the precinct of the

Limnae. That done, they were to perform the remaining sacrifices in

the Sanctuary. From this, Athenaeus adds, the festival got the name of

_Cups_. The mad Orestes in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_[88] tells the same

tale and naïvely states that, though he was hurt by the procedure, he

dare not ask the reason, knowing it all too well.

The whole account is transparently aetiological. Some mythological

precedent is desired for the drinking bout of the Choes, based as it was

on a ceremony of funeral libations; it is sought and found or rather

invented in the canonical story of Orestes, and he is made to say in a

fashion almost too foolish even for a madman:

‘And this I learn, that my mishaps became

A rite for the Athenians; and Pallas’ folk

Have still this custom that they reverence

The Choan vessel.’

If we suppose that the Cups (χόες) were originally Libations (χοαί), the

somewhat strained punctilio of the host becomes at least intelligible.

Orestes is polluted by the guilt (ἄγος) of his mother’s blood, he finds

the people in the Limnae[89], close to the Areopagos, celebrating the

Χοαί, the libations to the dead; till he is purified from kindred blood

he cannot join: all is simple and clear.

If the Choes were in intent χοαί, the Cups Libations, the ceremony has

an interesting parallel in a rite performed at the Eleusinian mysteries.

Athenaeus[90], in discussing various shapes of cups says: ‘The plemochoë

is an earthen vessel shaped like a top that stands fairly steady; some

call it, Pamphilos tells us, the cotyliscus. And they use it at Eleusis

on the last day of the mysteries, which takes its name Plemochoai from

the cup. On this day they fill two plemochoae and set them up, the one

towards the East, the other towards the West, and pronounce over them a

magic formula. The author of the _Peirithous_ mentions them, whether he

be Ktesias the Tyrant or Euripides, as follows:

“That these plemochoae down the Chthonian chasm

With words well-omened we may pour.”’

It is at least significant that a compound of the word χοή should both

give its name to a festival day and to a vessel used in chthonic ritual.

The Chytroi and Choes then bear unmistakeably a character of gloom,

and in their primary content are festivals of ghosts. But what of the

Pithoigia? Surely this day is all revel and jollity, all for Dionysos?

Had we been dependent on literature alone, such would have been our

inevitable conclusion. In Plutarch’s account of the Pithoigia (p.

33), the earliest and fullest we possess, there is no hint of any

worship other than that of the wine-god, no hint of possible gloom.

Eustathius[91] indeed tells of a Pithoigia or Jar-opening which was

‘not of a festal character, but in every respect unlucky,’ but this is

the Pithoigia, the Jar-opening, of Pandora. Here we have a hint that a

Pithoigia need not be an opening of wine-jars; there are other jars,

other openings, but save for the existence of one small fragile monument

the significance of the hint would have escaped us.

[Illustration: FIG. 7.]

In the vase-painting in fig. 7 from a lekythos in the University Museum

of Jena[92] we see a Pithoigia of quite other and more solemn intent. A

large _pithos_ is sunk deep into the ground. It has served as a grave.

In primitive days many a man, Diogenes-like, lived the ‘life of the

jar’ (ζωὴ πίθου), but not from philosophy, rather from dire necessity.

During the Peloponnesian war, when the city was crowded with refugees,

a jar (πιθάκνη) was a welcome shelter[93]. A man’s home during his life

is apt to be his grave in death. In the Dipylon Cemetery at Athens, at

Aphidna[94], at Corfu, at Thoricus, and in many another burying place,

such grave _pithoi_ have come to light. From the grave-jar in fig. 7 the

lid has been removed; out of it have escaped, fluttering upward, two

winged Keres or souls, a third soul is in the act of emerging, a fourth

is diving headlong back into the jar. Hermes Psychopompos, with his magic

staff in his hand, is evoking, _re_voking the souls. The picture is a

speaking commentary on the Anthesteria; we seem to hear the mandate ‘Out

of the doors! ye souls; it is no longer Anthesteria!’ The Pithoigia of

the Anthesteria is the primitive Pithoigia of the _grave_-jars, later

overlaid by the Pithoigia of the _wine_-jars.

The vase-painting in fig. 7 must not be regarded as an actual conscious

representation of the Athenian rite performed on the first day of the

_Anthesteria_. It is more general in content; it is in fact simply a

representation of ideas familiar to every Greek, that the _pithos_

was a grave-jar, that from such grave-jars souls escaped and to them

necessarily returned, and that Hermes was Psychopompos, Evoker and

Revoker of souls. The vase-painting is in fact only another form of the

scene so often represented on Athenian white lekythoi, in which the souls

flutter round the grave-stele. The grave-jar is but the earlier form of

sepulture; the little winged figures, the Keres, are identical in both

classes of vase-painting.

The nature of these Keres will be further analysed when we come to the

discussion of primitive demonology. For the present it is enough to note

that the Keres in the vase-paintings and the Keres of the Anthesteria

are regarded as simply souls of dead men, whereas the little winged

phantoms that escape from Pandora’s jar are indeed ghosts, but ghosts

regarded rather as noisome sprites than as spirits; they are the source

of disease and death rather than dead men’s souls. The jar of Pandora is

not so much a grave as a store-house of evil; the _pithos_ as store-house

not only of wine but of grain and all manner of provisions was familiar

to the Greeks. The ordinary _pithos_ was pointed at the base and buried

permanently in the earth like a Turkish cistern; a row of such pithoi,

like those recently unearthed at Cnossus, might serve equally as a

wine-cellar or a granary or a cemetery.

The attributes of Hermes in the vase-painting in fig. 7 are noticeable.

In one hand he holds his familiar herald’s staff, the kerykeion. But, and

this is the interesting point, he is not using it; it is held in the left

hand, inert; it is merely attributive, present out of convention. The

real implement of his agency in revoking the souls is held uplifted in

the right hand; it is his rhabdos, his magic wand.

This _rhabdos_ is, I think, clearly to be distinguished from the

kerykeion, though ultimately the two became contaminated. The kerykeion

or herald’s staff is in intent a king’s sceptre held by the herald as

deputy; it is a staff, a walking-stick, a βάκτρον, by which you are

supported; the _rhabdos_ is a simple rod, even a pliable twig, a thing

not by which you are supported but with which you sway others. It is in a

word the enchanter’s wand.

It is with a rhabdos that Circe[95] transforms the comrades of Odysseus

into swine; it is as magical as the magic potion they drink:

‘Straight with her rhabdos smote she them and penned them in the sties.’

With the rhabdos Hermes[96] led the ghosts of the slain suitors to Hades.

He held in his hand

‘His rhabdos fair and golden wherewith he lulls to rest

The eyes of men whoso he will, and others by his hest

He wakes from sleep. He stirred the ghosts; they followed to their doom

And gibbered like the bats that throng and gibber in the gloom.’

This magic wand became the attribute of all who hold sway over the dead.

It is the wand, not the sceptre, that is the token of life or death, as

Pindar[97] shows:

‘Nor did Hades the king

Forget his wand to wave

Whereby he doth bring

Shapes of men dying

Adown the hollow roadway of the grave.’

The rhabdos as magic wand was πεισίβροτος, _enchanter_ of the dead,

before it became as sceptre πεισίβροτος, _ruler_ of mortals.

Eustathius tells us in the passage already discussed[98], that the

kerykeion was also called πομπός, conductor, and that it was carried

in the hands of those who performed ceremonies of purification. He

is trying, it will be remembered, to derive the words διοπομπεῖν and

ἀποδιοπομπεῖν. When an ancient author is trying to derive words, we

are bound to accept his statements only with the utmost caution; still

in this particular instance there seems no reason for suspecting the

statement that the kerykeion was called πομπός; it is dragged in quite

gratuitously, and does not help out the proposed derivation. What

Eustathius says is this: ‘At the end of the month Maimakterion they

perform ceremonies of sending, among which was the carrying of the magic

fleece, and there take place then throwings out of purifications at the

crossways, and they hold in their hands the _pompos_ (i.e. conductor),

the which they say is the kerykeion, the attribute of Hermes.’ The object

of the whole ceremony is ‘to send out polluted things.’ It is, I think,

significant that the kerykeion, or rather to be strictly accurate the

rhabdos[99], was carried in apotropaic ceremonies, presumably with a view

to exorcise bad spirits, which as will appear later were regarded as the

source of all impurities. It is the other face of revocation; the rhabdos

is used either for the raising or the laying of ghosts, for the induction

(ἐπαγωγή) of good spirits, for the exorcism (ἀποτροπή) of bad.

In discussing the Anthesteria on a previous occasion[100], I felt

confident that in the opening of the grave-jars we had the complete

solution of the difficulty of the unlucky character of the day Pithoigia.

It seems to me now in the light of further investigation that another

ritual element may have gone to its determination.

Plutarch[101], in discussing the nature of the sacred objects committed

to the care of the Vestal Virgins, makes the following notable statement:

‘Those who pretend to have most special knowledge about them (i.e. the

Vestal Virgins) assert that there are set there two jars (πίθοι) of no

great size, of which the one is open and empty, the other full and sealed

up, and neither of them may be seen except by these all-holy virgins. But

others think that this is false, and that the idea arose from the fact

that the maidens then placed most of their sacred things in two jars, and

hid them underground below the temple of Quirinus, and that the place

even now is called from that by the title _Pithisci_ (Doliola).’ We have

two other notices of these Doliola. Varro[102] says: ‘The place which is

called Doliola is at the Cloaca Maxuma, where people are not allowed to

spit. It is so called from the jars beneath the earth. Two accounts are

given of these jars: some say they contain the bones of dead bodies,

others that after the death of Numa Pompilius certain sacred objects

(religiosa quaedam) were buried there.’ Festus[103] gives substantially

the same account, but he says that the sacred objects were buried there

when the Gauls invaded the city.

Of jars containing ‘sacra’ we have in Greece no knowledge, but it is

significant to find that Zeus, who was the heir to so much antique

ritual, had on his threshold in Olympus two jars, one containing good the

other evil[104]:

‘Jars twain upon Zeus’ threshold ever stood;

One holds his gifts of evil, one of good.’

With some such notion as that of the Pithoigia must have been connected

the ceremony of the opening of the _mundus_ or round pit on the Palatine.

Festus[105] tells us that on three days in the year, August 24, October

5, November 6, the _lapis manalis_ that covered it was removed. Varro,

quoted by Macrobius[106], adds: ‘when the _mundus_ is open, the gate of

the doleful underworld gods is open.’

* * * * *

It has been shown that the ritual of each of the several days points

determinedly ghost-wards. The names in each case _admit_ at least of

chthonic interpretation. It remains to examine the collective name

_Anthesteria_.

The ancients sought and found what was to them a satisfactory etymology.

Istros, writing in the third century B.C. and quoted by Harpocration,

says that Anthesterion is the blossoming month because then ‘the most

of the things that spring from the earth blossom forth[107].’ The

_Etymologicon Magnum_[108] offers an easy-going alternative: feast and

month bear their names either because the earth then began to blossom, or

because they offered flowers at the festival.

It was not the habit of those days to trouble about ‘verb-stems’ and

‘nouns of the agent in τηρ,’ but it is surprising to find that the

dubious guess hazarded by Istros should have passed so long unchallenged

by modern science, the more so as flowers have but a general and

accidental connection with the ritual of the feast. Are scholars really

content with an etymology that makes of the Anthesteria the festival of

those who ‘did the flowers’?

In a recent paper in the _Hellenic Journal_[109] Dr A. W. Verrall has

faced the difficulty and offered a new solution. The names of festivals,

he points out, are no exception to the rule that nouns in τηριο are

normally formed from verb-stems through the ‘noun of the agent’ in τηρ,

and take their sense from the action described by the verb, as σωτήριος,

λυτήριος, βουλευτήριον. In like fashion the names of festivals ending

in τηρια describe the action in which the ceremony consisted, or with

which it was chiefly connected. Thus ἀνακλητήρια is a feast or ceremony

of ἀνάκλησις, ἀνακαλυπτήρια of ἀνακάλυψις and so on. _Prima facie_ then

a derivation of _Anthesteria_, should start from the assumption that the

stem is verbal.

“But we need not assume that the verbal stem is ἀνθεσ-. Perhaps ἀνθεσ-

itself needs analysis; and for the first syllable there is an obviously

possible origin in the preposition ἀν- (ἀνά), of which so many examples

(e.g. ἄνθεμα = ἀνάθεμα) are preserved in the poets. The verb-stem

will then be θεσ-, which is in fact a verb-stem and has more than one

meaning. The meaning which would perhaps in any case have suggested

itself first, and which now seems especially attractive, is that which

appears in the archaic verb θέσασθαι or θέσσασθαι _to pray_ or _pray

for_[110], and in the adjectives πολύθεστος and ἀπόθεστος. Prayers and

invocations addressed to the dead were a regular part of the proceedings

by which they were brought back to the world of the living. The compound

ἀναθέσσασθαι would, after the analogy of ἀνακαλεῖν and the like, bear the

sense _to raise by prayer_ or _to recall by prayer_, literally ‘to pray

up’ or ‘pray back.’ And ἀνθεστήρια, derived from ἀναθέσσασθαι, would be

the _feast of revocation_, the name, as usual, signifying the action in

which the ceremony consisted and which was the object of it[111].”

In connection with this new and illuminating etymology, it is interesting

to note that even in their misguided derivation from ἄνθος the ancients

themselves lay stress not so much on the flowers as on the rising

up[112], the ἀνθεῖν ἐκ τῆς γῆς. Under the word Ἄνθεια the _Etymologicon

Magnum_ says ‘a title of Hera when she sends up (ἀνίησι) fruits,’ where

there seems a haunting of the true meaning though none of the _form_[113].

Dr Verrall declines to assert positively the derivation of _Anthesteria_

he propounds, but a second philological argument brings certain

conviction. Mr R. A. Neil suggests that the root which appears in Greek

as θες may appear as _fes fer_ in Latin. This gives us the delightful

equation or rather analogy ἀν-θεσ-τήρια, _in-fer-iae_. Of course

_inferiae_ is usually taken as from _inferi_, _infra_ etc., but no Latin

word ought to have medial _f_ except when preceded by a separable prefix.

To make certainty more certain we have the Feralia, the festival of All

Souls, kept from the 13th to the 31st of the month of Fe(b)ruary. The

month of _purification_ is the month of rites to the dead, in a word

_purgation is the placation of souls_. This is true for Latin and Greek

alike and will emerge more clearly when we come to study in detail the

ritual of the month of February.

ANTHESTERION AND FEBRUARY.

The general analogy between the months of Anthesterion and February,

and the fact that both alike were unlucky and given over to the service

of the dead, was clear to the ancients themselves. The scholiast on

Lucian’s _Timon_[114], commenting on the word _Diasia_, says: ‘The day is

unlucky ... there were among the Greeks certain days which brought with

them complete idleness and cessation of business, and which were called

unlucky (ἀποφράδες). On these days no one would accost any one else,

and friends would positively have no dealings with each other, and even

sanctuaries were not used. These times were so accounted on the analogy

of the month of February, when also it was the custom to sacrifice to

those below, and all that month was dedicated to the dead and accompanied

by gloom, everything going on in an unusual fashion just as the Athenians

celebrated the Diasia in gloom.’ Clearly to the scholiast the Diasia is

but one element of a month given over to the dead.

The meaning of Anthesterion, the significance of its ceremonies, have

been effectively overlaid by the wine-god and his flower garlands, but

with the Romans there was no such superposition and consequently no

misunderstanding. They clearly realized two things, that February was the

month of the dead, and that it was the month of purification. Plutarch in

his _Roman Questions_[115] asks ‘Why was Decimus Brutus wont to sacrifice

to the dead in December, whereas all other Romans offered libations and

sacrifices to the dead in the month of February?’ In his twenty-fifth

Question[116], while discussing the reasons why the days following

respectively the Calends, Nones and Ides of each month were unlucky,

he tells us that the Romans ‘used to consecrate the first month of the

year to the Olympian gods, but the second to the gods of the earth,

and in this second month (February) they were wont to practise certain

purifications and to sacrifice to the dead.’ Athenaeus[117] states that

‘Juba the Mauretanian said that the month of February was so called from

the terrors of the lower world, with regard to means taken for riddance

from such alarms at the time when the winter is at its height, and it

is the custom to offer libations to the dead on several days.’ Juba the

Mauretanian must have known quite well that in February the winter was

not at its height. He states correctly the fact that February was a month

devoted to ceremonies for the riddance of terrors from the underworld,

but carelessly adds an impossible reason for the selection of this

particular month.

Ovid is of all witnesses the most weighty because his testimony is

in part unconscious. In the opening words of the second book of the

_Fasti_[118], after an invocation to Janus, he goes straight to the

question of what the Romans meant by the word _februum_; he notes that

the term was applied to many things, wool, a branch from a pine-tree,

grain roasted with salt, and finally concludes that ‘any thing by which

the soul was purged was called by his rude ancestors _februum_.’

‘Denique quodcumque est, quo pectora nostra piantur,

Hoc apud intonsos nomen habebat avos.’

The month he feels sure got its name from these ‘februa’ or

purifications, but he asks ‘was it because the Luperci purified all

the soil with the strips of skin and accounted that a purification or

atonement, or was it because when the _dies ferales_ were accomplished

then _owing to the fact that the dead were appeased_ there was a season

of purity?’

‘Mensis ab his dictus secta quia pelle Luperci

Omne solum lustrant idque piamen habent?

Aut quia placatis sunt tempora pura sepulcris,

Tunc cum ferales praeteriere dies?’

Both the ceremonials, the Lupercalia and the Feralia, were, he

knows, cathartic: that Fe(b)rua and Feralia were etymologically and

significantly the same naturally he does not guess. Still less could he

conjecture that etymologically February and Anthesterion are in substance

one.

The two great February festivals[119] to which Ovid alludes are of course

the Feralia and the Lupercalia, celebrated respectively on the 21st and

15th of February.

The Feralia was but the climax of a series of days beginning on Feb. 13th

and devoted to ceremonies of the worship of ancestors, Parentalia. It is

curious that, though the Lemuria (May 9-13) were marked as Nefasti, none

of the days of the Parentalia were so marked: still from the 13th to the

21st marriages were forbidden, temples closed, and magistrates appeared

without their insignia; clearly there was some lingering dread of ghosts

that might be about. Parentalia and Feralia alike were ceremonies wholly

devoted to the placation of ghosts.

In the Lupercalia, on the other hand, it is purification rather than

placation that is the prominent feature in the rites. Much in the

Lupercalia is obscure, and especially the origin of its name, but one

ritual element is quite certain. Goats and a dog were sacrificed, two

youths girt themselves in the skins of the slain goats, they held in

their hands strips of the hides of the victims. They ran round a certain

prescribed portion of the city, and as they ran smote the women they

met with the strips of skin. These strips of skin were among the things

known as _februa_, _purifiers_, and by their purifying power they became

fertility charms.

‘Forget not in your speed, Antonius,

To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say

The barren touchèd in this holy chase

Shake off their sterile curse[120].’

There has been much needless discussion as to whether in ceremonies

where striking and beating occur the object is to drive out evil spirits

or to stimulate the powers of fertility. Primitive man does not so

narrowly scrutinize and analyse his motives. To strike with a sacred

thing, whether with a strip of skin from a victim or a twig from a holy

tree, was to apply what the savage of to-day would call ‘good medicine.’

Precisely how it worked, whether by expulsion or impulsion, is no

business of his.

When the Catholic makes the sacred sign of the Cross over his food, is

he, need he be quite clear as to whether he does it to induce good or to

exorcise evil? The peasant mother of to-day may beat her boy partly with

a view to stirring his dormant moral impulses, but it is also, as she is

careful to explain, with intent to ‘beat the mischief out of him.’ In the

third Mime of Herondas[121] the mother is explicit as to the expulsive

virtue of beating. Her boy is a gambler and a dunce, so she begs the

schoolmaster to

‘Thrash him upon his shoulders till his spirit,

Bad thing, is left just hovering on his lips.’

She is in the usual primitive dilemma: his spirit is bad but it is his

life; it is kill and cure.

The strips of goat-skin were _februa_[122], purifying, and thereby

fertility charms. As such they cast sudden illumination on the ‘magic

fleece’ already discussed. The animal sacrificed, be it sheep or goat

or dog, is itself a placation to ghosts or underworld powers; hence its

skin becomes of magical effect: the deduction is easy, almost inevitable.

The primary gist of the sacrifice is to appease and hence keep off evil

spirits; it is these evil spirits that impair fertility: in a word

_purification is the placation of ghosts_.

The question ‘What was purity to the ancients?’ is thus seen to be

answered almost before it is asked. Purity was not _spiritual_ purity in

our sense—that is foreign to any primitive habit of thought, nor was it

physical purity or cleanliness—it was possible to be covered from head to

foot with mud and yet be ceremonially pure. But so oddly does the cycle

of thought come round, that the purity of which the ancients knew _was_,

though in a widely different sense, _spiritual_ purity, i.e. freedom from

bad spirits and their maleficent influence. To get rid of these spirits

was to undergo purification. In the month of February and Anthesterion

the Roman or Greek might, _mutatis mutandis_, have chanted our Lenten

hymn:

‘Christian, dost thou see them

On the holy ground

How the hosts of Midian

Prowl and prowl around?

Christian, up and smite them!’

Till the coming of the new religion of Dionysos, the Greek notion

of purity seems not to have advanced beyond this negative combative

attitude, this notion of spiritual forces outside and against them.

* * * * *

The question yet remains ‘Why did this purification need to take place

in the spring?’ The answer is clear. Why did our own near ancestors have

spring cleanings?

‘Winter rains and ruins are over

And all the season of snows and sins,

...

While in green underwood and cover

_Blossom by blossom the Spring begins_.’

Winter is a reckless time with its Christmas and its Saturnalia. There is

little for the primitive agriculturist to do and less to fear. The fruits

of the earth have died down, the gods have done their worst. But when the

dead earth begins to awake and put forth bud and blossom, then the ghosts

too have their spring time, then is the moment to propitiate the dead

below the earth. Ghosts were placated that fertility might be promoted,

fertility of the earth and of man himself.

It is true that the primitive rites of February and Anthesterion, of

Romans and Greeks, were in the main of ‘riddance.’ The ghosts, it would

seem from the ritual of the Choes and Chytroi, the chewing of buckthorn,

anointing with pitch, the mandate to depart, were feared as evil

influences to be averted; but there is curious evidence to show that at

the time of the Anthesteria the coming of the ghosts was regarded as a

direct promotion of fertility. Athenaeus[123], quoting the Commentaries

of Hegesander[124], tells us of a curious tradition among the natives

of Apollonia in Chalkis. ‘Around Apollonia of Chalkidike there flow two

rivers, the Ammites and the Olynthiacus and both fall into the lake

Bolbe. And on the river Olynthiacus stands a monument of Olynthus,

son of Herakles and Bolbe. And the natives say that in the months of

Elaphebolion and Anthesterion the river rises because Bolbe sends the

fish apopyris to Olynthus, and at that season an immense shoal of fish

passes from the lake to the river Olynthus. The river is a shallow one,

scarcely overpassing the ankles, but nevertheless so great a shoal of

the fish arrives that the inhabitants round about can all of them lay up

sufficient store of salt fish for their needs. And it is a wonderful fact

that they never pass by the monument of Olynthus. They say that formerly

the people of Apollonia used to perform the accustomed rites to the dead

in the month of Elaphebolion, but now they do them in Anthesterion, and

that on this account the fish come up in those months only in which they

are wont to do honour to the dead.’ Here clearly the dead hero is the

source of national wealth, the honours done him are the direct impulsion

to fertility. The gloomy rites of _aversion_ tend to pass over into a

cheerful, hopeful ceremonial of ‘tendance.’

To resume, the Anthesteria was primarily a Feast of All Souls: it

later[125] became a revel of Dionysos, and at the revel men wreathed

their cups with flowers, but, save for a vague and unscientific

etymology, we have no particle of evidence that the Anthesteria was ever

a Feast of Flowers. The transition from the revocation of ghosts with

its dire association to a drunken revel may seem harsh, but human nature

is always ready for the shift from Fast to Feast, witness our own Good

Friday holiday.

THE RITUAL OF Ἐναγισμοί.

In the light of the ceremonies of the spring month February and

Anthesterion, it is now possible to advance a step in the understanding

of Greek ritual terminology and through it of Greek religious thought.

In the first chapter the broad distinction was established between

sacrifice to the Olympians of the upper air—sacrifice which involved

communion with the worshipper, and sacrifice to chthonic powers which

forbade this communion—in which the sacrifice was wholly made over to the

object of sacrifice. The first, the Olympian sacrifice, is expressed by

two terms, θύειν and ἱερεύειν; the second, if the sacrifice is burnt, by

ὁλοκαυτεῖν, and as will presently be seen by σφάζειν, also more generally

by the term ἐναγίζειν.

As regards the Olympian terms, it is only necessary to say definitely

what has already been implied, that θύειν strictly is applicable only

to the portion of the sacrifice that was actually burnt with a view

to sublimation, that it might reach the gods in the upper air; whilst

ἱερεύειν applies rather to the portion unburnt, which was sacred indeed,

as its name implies, to the gods, but was actually eaten in communion by

the worshipper. With the growing prevalence of burnt sacrifice and the

increasing popularity of the Olympians and their service, the word θύειν

came to cover the whole field of sacrifice, and in late and careless

writers is used for any form of sacrifice burnt or unburnt without any

consciousness of its primary meaning.

The term ἱερεύειν is strictly used only of the sacrifice of an animal;

ἱερεῖον is the animal victim. Among the Homeric Greeks sacrifice and

the flesh feast that followed were so intimately connected that the

one almost implied the other; the ἱερεῖον, the animal victim, was the

material for the κρεοδαισία, the flesh feast. So prominent in the

Homeric mind was the element of feasting the worshipper that the feast

is sometimes the only stated object. Thus Odysseus[126] gives command to

Telemachus and his thralls:

‘Now get you to my well-built house, the best of all the swine

Take you and quickly _sacrifice_ that straightway we may dine.’

Here the object is the meal, though incidentally sacrifice to the gods

is implied. It is not that on the occasion of sacrifice to the gods man

solemnly communicates, but that when man would eat his fill of flesh food

he piously remembers the gods and burns a little of it that it may reach

them and incline their hearts to beneficence.

In the Homeric sacrifice there is communion, but not of any mystical

kind; there is no question of partaking of the life and body of the god,

only of dining with him. Mystical communion existed in Greece, but, as

will be later seen, it was part of the worship of a god quite other than

these Homeric Olympians, the god Dionysos.

Before we leave the ἱερεῖον, the animal sacrificed and eaten, one word

of caution is necessary. It is sometimes argued that animal sacrifice,

as contrasted with the simpler offerings of grain and fruits, is the

mark of a later and more luxurious civilization. Such was the view of

Porphyry[127] the vegetarian. Flesh-eating and flesh sacrifice is to

him the mark of a cruel and barbarous licence. Such too was the view

of Eustathius[128]. In commenting on the οὐλοχύται, the barley grain

scattered, he says, ‘after the offering of barley grain came sacrifices

and the eating of meat at sacrifices, because after the discovery of

necessary foods the luxury of a meat diet and imported innovations in

food were invented.’ As a generalization this is false to facts; it

depends on the environment of a race whether man will first eat vegetable

or animal food; but as regards the particular case of the Greeks

themselves, the observations of Porphyry and Eustathius are broadly

true. The primitive dwellers in Greece and round the Mediterranean

generally lived mainly on vegetarian diet, diversified by fish, and the

custom of flesh-eating in large quantities was an innovation brought from

without[129] (ἐπείσακτον). Athenaeus[130] in his first book discusses

the various kinds of food, and dwells with constant astonishment on the

flesh-eating habits of the Achaean heroes of Homer. He quotes the comic

poet Eubulos as asking

‘I pray you, when did Homer ever make

An Achaean chief eat fish? ’tis always flesh,

And roasted too, not boiled.’

Achaean chiefs, he notes—and in this they resemble their northern

descendants—‘do not care for made-dishes, kickshaws and the like. Homer

sets before them only roast meat, and for the most part beef, such as

would put life into them, body and soul.’ It is true Athenaeus is arguing

about the simplicity of the Homeric as contrasted with later Greek life,

but the fact he states is beyond dispute, i.e. that the Homeric diet was

mainly of flesh and unlike the vegetarian and fish diet of the ordinary

Greek. Given a flesh diet for man, and the sacrifice of flesh to the gods

he makes in his own image follows.

The terms θύειν and ἱερεύειν belong then to sacrifice regarded as a

feast; it remains to consider the term ἐναγίζειν, in the definition of

which we come, I think, to the fullest understanding of the ideas of the

lower stratum of Greek religion.

First it is necessary to establish the fact that in usage the terms θύειν

and ἐναγίζειν are clearly distinguished. A passage in Pausanias is for

this purpose of capital importance. Pausanias is visiting a sanctuary of

Heracles at Sicyon. He makes the following observations[131]: ‘In the

matter of sacrifice they are accustomed to do as follows. They say that

Phaestos, when he came to Sicyon, found the Sicyonians devoting offerings

to Heracles as to a hero. But Phaestos would do nothing of the kind, but

would sacrifice to him as to a god. And even now the Sicyonians, when

they slay a lamb and burn the thighs upon the altar, eat a portion of the

flesh as though it were a sacrificial victim, and another part of the

flesh they make over as to a hero.’ The passage is not easy to translate,

because we have no English equivalent for ἐναγίζειν. I have translated

the word by ‘devote’ because it connotes entire dedication—part of the

sacrifice is shared, eaten by the worshipper in common with Heracles

regarded as a _god_, the other part is utterly consecrated to Heracles

as a hero; it is dead men’s food. Pausanias, who is often careless in

his use of θύειν, here carefully marks the distinction. The victim is an

animal: part of it is offered to an Olympian—that portion is shared; part

of it is offered, like the offerings at the _Chytroi_, to no Olympian,

but to a ghost, and of that portion no man eats.

A second passage from Pausanias adds a further element of

differentiation. At Megalopolis, Pausanias visited a sanctuary of the

Eumenides. Of their ritual he speaks as follows[132]: ‘They say that when

these goddesses would drive Orestes mad they appeared to him black, but

that after he had bitten off his finger they seemed to him white, and his

senses returned to him, and therefore he made over an offering to the

black goddesses to turn away their wrath, but to the white ones he did

sacrifice.’

Language and ritual could scarcely speak more plainly: θύειν is to the

Olympians, a joyous thanksgiving to gods who are all white and bright,

beneficent, of the upper air; ἐναγίζειν is to those below who are black

and bad and malignant: θύειν is for θεραπεία, tendance; ἐναγίζειν for

ἀποτροπή, riddance.

* * * * *

The distinction between the two forms of ritual having been thus

definitely established, it remains to examine more closely the word

ἐναγίζειν and the ritual it expresses, that of the dead—a ritual which,

it must at this point be remembered, is also concerned with purification.

The word ἐναγίζειν can only mean the making of or dealing with something

that is of the nature of an ἄγος, or, as the word sometimes appears, a

ἅγος. It did not escape that acute observer of man and his language,

Archbishop Eustathius[133], that this word and its cognate ἅγιος, holy,

had in ancient days a double significance, that holy was not only

pure but also polluted; this, he says, ‘is on account of the double

meaning of ἅγος.’ To put the matter into modern phraseology, ἅγος is

the thing that is _taboo_, the thing consecrated to the gods, and hence

forbidden to man, the thing ‘devoted.’ The word lies deep down in the

ritual of ancient sacrifice and of ancient religious thought; it is the

very antithesis of communion; it is tinged with, though not quite the

equivalent of, expiation.

Fortunately we are not left to conjecture as to what was the precise

nature of the ceremonies covered by the word ἐναγίζειν. We know what

was done, though we have no English word fully to express that doing.

This fact may well remind us that we have lost not only the word but the

thought, and must be at some pains to recover it. In the discussion that

follows no translation of ἐναγίζειν will be attempted: I shall frankly

use the Greek word and thereby avoid all danger from misleading modern

connotations[134].

Quite accidentally, in the middle of a discourse on the various sorts of

soap and washing basins, Athenaeus[135] has preserved for us a record of

the exact ritual of ἐναγισμοί. After stating that the word ἀπόνιπτρον,

washing off, is applied alike to the water in which either feet or hands

are washed, he goes on to note that the word ἀπόνιμμα, ‘offscouring,’

slightly different in form but substantially the same in meaning,

has among the Athenians a technical ritual usage. ‘The term ἀπόνιμμα

is specially applied _to the ceremonies in honour of the dead_ and to

_those that take place in the purification of the polluted_.’ The word

translated ‘polluted’ is ἐναγεῖς, i.e. under or in a state of ἄγος. He

then proceeds to quote from a lost treatise on ceremonies of ἐναγισμός,

the exact details of the ritual. ‘Kleidemos, in his treatise called

_Exegeticus_, writes on the subject of ἐναγισμοί as follows: “Dig a

trench to the west of the tomb. Then, look along the trench towards the

west, pour down water, saying these words: A purification for you to whom

it is meet and right. Next pour down a second time myrrh.” Dorotheos adds

these particulars, alleging that the following prescription is written

also in the ancestral rites of the Eupatridae concerning the purification

of suppliants: “Next having washed himself, and the others who had

disembowelled the victim having done the same, let him take water and

make purification and wash off the blood from the suppliant who is being

purified, and afterwards, having stirred up the washing, pour it into the

same place.”’

The conjoint testimony of the two writers is abundantly clear: either

alone would have left us in doubt as to the real gist of the ceremony.

Kleidemos tells us that it was addressed to the dead; the trench near the

tomb, the western aspect of the setting sun, the cautious formulary, ‘To

you to whom it is meet and right,’ all tell the same tale. It is safest

not even to name the dead, lest you stir their swift wrath. But Kleidemos

leaves us in the dark as to why they want an ἀπόνιμμα, ‘an offscouring,’

water defiled: why will not pure water or water and myrrh suffice?

Dorotheos supplies the clue—those who have slain the victim wash the

blood from their hands and _wash it off him who has been purified_, and

then stirring it all up pour it into the trench. The ghost below demands

the _blood of the victim washed off from the polluted suppliant_: when

the ghost has drunk of this, then, and not till then, there is placation

and purification.

That the ghost should demand the blood of the victim is natural enough;

the ghosts in the Nekuia of the _Odyssey_ ‘drink the black blood’ and

thereby renew their life; but in ceremonies of purification they demand

polluted water, the ‘offscourings,’ and why? The reason is clear. The

victim is a surrogate for the polluted suppliant, the blood is put upon

him that he may be identified with the victim, the ghost is deceived

and placated. The ghost demands blood, not to satisfy a physical but so

to speak a spiritual thirst, the thirst for vengeance. This thirst can

only be quenched by the water polluted, the ‘offscourings’[136] of the

suppliant.

The suppliant for purification in the ritual just described was

identified with the victim, or rather perhaps we should say the victim

with the suppliant, by pouring over the suppliant the victim’s blood.

There were other means of identification. It has already been seen (p.

27) that the suppliant sometimes put on the whole skin of the victim,

sometimes merely stood with his foot on the fleece. Another and more

attenuated form of identification was the wearing of fillets, i.e.

strands of wool confined at intervals by knots to make them stronger.

Such fillets were normally worn by suppliants and by seers: the symbolism

for suppliants is obvious, for seers evident on a closer inspection.

The seer himself was powerless, but he could by the offering of a

sacrifice to ghosts or heroes invoke the mantic dead; he wears the

symbols of this sacrifice, the wreath and the fillets. Later their

significance was forgotten, and they became mere symbols of office. The

omphalos at Delphi, itself a mantic tomb, was covered with a net-work of

wool-fillets, renewed no doubt at first with the offering of each new

victim, later copied in stone[137], but always the symbol of recurring

sacrifice.

[Illustration: FIG. 8.]

[Illustration: FIG. 9.]

Fillets of wool became as it were the attributes of the sacrificial

victim. In the curious vase-painting[138] in fig. 8 Salmoneus, himself

the victim, is wreathed, decorated all over with fillets, which of

course, as there was no animal slain, are merely symbolic[139]. Animal

victims in like fashion are adorned for sacrifice with these merely

routine fillets. The animal sacrifice is to the ghost the surrogate of

the human victim, the fillet in its turn the surrogate of the animal.

The dread ceremonial of ἐναγισμός in its crudest, most barbarous

form, is very clearly shown on the vase-painting in fig. 9, from a

‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora now in the British Museum[140]. The scene depicted

is the sacrifice of Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles. In the _Hecuba_ of

Euripides[141], Neoptolemos takes Polyxena by the hand and leads her

to the top of the mound, pours libations to his father, praying him to

accept the ‘soothing draughts,’ and then cries

‘Come thou and drink the maiden’s blood

Black and unmixed.’

In the centre of the design in fig. 9 is the omphalos-shaped grave[142],

which is in fact the altar. Right over it the sacrifice takes place.

Neoptolemos, as next of kin to the slain man, is the sacrificer;

Polyxena, as next of kin to the slayer, is the sacrifice. The ghost of

the slain man drinks her blood and is appeased, and thereby the army is

purged.

The blood only is offered to the ghost—the blood is the life, and it is

vengeance, not food, the ghost cries for. It is so with the Erinyes, who

are but angry ghosts[143]; when they hunt Orestes they cry[144],

‘The smell of human blood smiles wooingly.’

Earth polluted has drunk a mother’s blood, and they in turn

‘Will gulp the living gore red from his limbs[145].’

When the ghost of Achilles has drunk the fresh blood of the maiden her

body will be burnt, not that it may rise as a sweet savour to the gods

above, but as a holocaust; it is a θυσία ἄδαιτος, a sacrifice without

feast. It will be burnt on the low-lying _eschara_ or portable hearth

that stands on the grave. The _eschara_ was by the ancients clearly

distinguished from the altar proper, the βωμός. The _eschara_, says the

scholiast on the _Phoenissae_[146] of Euripides, is ‘accurately speaking

the trench in the earth where they offer ἐναγισμοί to those who are gone

below; the altar is that on which they sacrifice to the heavenly gods.’

Porphyry[147], who is learned in ritual matters, draws the same

distinction. ‘To the Olympian gods they set up temples and images and

altars, but to the Earth-gods and to heroes, escharas, while for those

below the earth there are trenches and megara.’

It is on an _eschara_ that Clytaemnestra does her infernal service to the

Erinyes[148]. She cries to them in bitter reproach:

‘How oft have ye from out my hands licked up

Wineless libations, sober offerings,

And on the hearth of fire banquets grim

By night, an hour unshared of any god!’

Her ritual was the ritual of the underworld abhorred of the Olympians.

The eschara on which the holocaust to the underworld gods is burnt

lies low upon the ground; the βωμός, the altar of the Olympians, rises

higher and higher heavenwards. There is the like symbolism in the actual

manner of the slaying of the victim. Eustathius[149], in commenting

on the sacrifice of Chryses to Phoebus Apollo, when they ‘drew back

the victims’ heads,’ says ‘according to the custom of the Greeks, for

if they are sacrificing to those above they bend back the neck of the

sacrificial animal so that it may look away towards the sky, but if

to heroes or to the dead in general the victim is sacrificed looking

downwards.’ Eustathius[150] again says of the prayer of Achilles, ‘by

looking heavenwards he expresses vividly whither the prayer is directed,

for Achilles is not praying to Zeus of the underworld, but to Zeus of the

sky.’ The Christian of to-day, though he believes his God is everywhere,

yet uplifts his hands to pray. For the like reason the victim for the

dead was black and that for the Olympians frequently white; that for the

dead sacrificed at the setting of the sun, that for the Ouranians at the

dawn[151]. Upon certain holocausts, as has already been seen, the sun

might not look.

The ritual of the ἐναγισμοί is then of _purgation by placation of the

spirits of the underworld_. The extreme need of primitive man for

placation is from the stain of bloodshed; purgation from this stain is at

first only obtained by the offering of the blood of the murderer himself,

then by the blood of a surrogate victim applied to him.

It is, I think, probable that at the back of many a mythological legend

that seems to us to contain what we call ‘human sacrifice’ there lies,

not the slaying of a victim for the pleasure of a Moloch-like god, but

simply the appeasement of an angry ghost. So long as primitive man

preserves the custom of the blood-feud, so long will he credit his dead

kinsman with passions like his own.

* * * * *

In this connection it is interesting to note some further details of the

ritual terminology of ἐναγισμοί as contrasted with that of the service of

the Olympians.

The sacrifice burnt that the Olympians may eat of it is θῦμα, the

thing burned to smoke; the sacrificial victim slain to be eaten by the

worshipper is ἱερεῖον; the victim slain for placation and purification

is by correct authors called by another name, it is a σφάγιον, a thing

slaughtered. The word explains itself: it is not the sacrifice burnt,

not the sacred thing killed and carved for a meal, but simply the victim

hacked and hewn to pieces. Such a victim was not even necessarily

skinned. Of what use to carefully flay a thing doomed to utter

destruction? In the _Electra_ of Euripides[152] the old man describes

such a σφάγιον:

‘I saw upon the pyre with its black fleece

A sheep the victim, and fresh blood outpoured.’

It is interesting to note in this connection that the word σφάγιον is

always used of human victims, and of such animals as were in use as

surrogates. The term is applied to all the famous maiden sacrifices of

mythology. Ion[153] asks Creousa:

‘And did thy father sacrifice thy sisters?’

And Creousa with greater ritual precision makes answer:

‘He dared to slay them as _sphagia_ for the land.’

As a σφάγιον Polyxena[154] is slain on the tomb of Achilles; she dies as

an atonement, a propitiation, as ‘medicine of salvation.’

The normal and most frequent use of σφάγια was, as in the case of

ἐναγισμοί in general, for purification by placation. In stress of great

emergency, of pestilence, of famine, and throughout historical times at

the moment before a battle, σφάγια were regularly offered. They seem to

have been carried round or through the person or object to be purified.

Athenaeus[155] records an instructive instance. The inhabitants of

Kynaetho, a village in Arcadia, neglected the civilizing influences of

dancing and feasting, and became so savage and impious that they never

met except for the purpose of quarrelling. They perpetrated at one time

a great massacre, and after this, whenever their emissaries came to any

other of the Arcadian cities, the citizens by public proclamation bade

them depart, and the Mantineans after their departure made a purification

of the city, leading the slaughtered victims round the whole circuit of

the district.

As purifications the use of σφάγια needs no further comment. It is less

obvious at first why σφάγια were always employed in the taking of oaths.

The expression τέμνειν σφάγια is the equivalent of the familiar τέμνειν

ὅρκια. In the _Suppliants_ of Euripides[156] Athene says to Theseus:

‘Hearken whereinto thou must cut the _sphagia_.’

She then bids him write the oaths in the hollow of a tripod-cauldron

and then cut the throats of the victims into the cauldron, thus clearly

identifying the oaths and the blood.

In the ordinary ritual of the taking of oaths, the oath-taker actually

stood upon the pieces of the slaughtered animal. Pausanias[157], on the

road between Sparta and Arcadia, came to a place called ‘Horse’s Tomb.’

There Tyndareus sacrificed a horse and made Helen’s suitors take an oath,

causing them to stand on the cut-up pieces of the horse,—having made them

take the oath, he buried the horse. At Stenyclerum[158] in Messenia was

another monument, called ‘Boar’s Monument,’ where it was said Herakles

had given an oath to the sons of Neleus on the cut pieces of a boar. Nor

is the custom of swearing on the cut pieces recorded only by mythology.

In the Bouleuterion at Elis was an image of Zeus, ‘of all others,’ says

Pausanias[159], ‘best fitted to strike terror into evildoers.’ Its

surname was Horkios, He of the Oath. Near this image the athletes, their

fathers, brothers, and trainers had to swear on the cut pieces of a boar

that they would be guilty of no foul play as regarded the Olympian games.

Pausanias regrets that he ‘forgot to ask what they did with the boar

after the oath had been taken by the athletes.’ He adds, ‘With the men of

old days the rule was as regards a sacrificial animal on which an oath

had been taken that it should be no more accounted as eatable for men.

Homer,’ he says, ‘shows this clearly, for the boar on the cut pieces of

which Agamemnon swore that Briseis had not been partner of his bed is

represented as being cast by the herald into the sea:

“He spake and with the pitiless bronze he cut

The boar’s throat, and the boar Talthybios whirled

And in the great wash of the hoary sea

He cast it to the fish for food[160].”

This in ancient days was their custom about such matters.’

The custom of standing on the fragments of the victim points clearly to

the identification of oath-taker and sacrifice. The victim was hewn in

bits; so if the oath-taker perjure himself will he be hewn in bits: the

victim is not eaten but made away with, utterly destroyed, _devoted_; a

like fate awaits the oath-breaker: the oath becomes in deadly earnest a

form of self-imprecation.

Still less obvious is it why sacrifices to the winds should uniformly

have taken the form of σφάγια rather than ἱερεῖα. At first sight the

winds if anything would appear to be Ouranian powers of the upper air,

yet it would appear that sacrifices to the winds were buried, not burnt.

What astonished Pausanias[161] more than anything else he saw at Methana

in Troezen was a ceremony for averting the winds. ‘A wind called Lips,

which rushes down from the Saronic gulf, dries up the tender shoots of

the vine. When the squall is upon them two men take a cock, which must

have all its feathers white, tear it in two, and run round the vines in

opposite directions, each of them carrying one half of the cock. When

they come back to the place they start from they bury the cock there.

This is the device they have invented for counteracting Lips. I myself,’

he adds, ‘have seen the people keeping off hail by sacrifices and

incantations.’ The Methanian cock is a typical σφάγιον: it is carried

round for purification, the evil influences of the wind are somehow

caught by it, in rather proleptic fashion, and then buried away. It is

really of the order of pharmakos ceremonies, to be considered later,

rather than a sacrifice proper. For a σφάγιον we should expect the cock

to be black, but on the principle of sympathetic magic it is in this

case white. The normal sacrifice to a wind was a black animal. When in

the _Frogs_[162] a storm is brewing between Aeschylus and Euripides, and

threatens to burst, Dionysos calls out:

‘Bring out a ewe, boys, bring a black-fleeced ewe,

Here’s a typhoon that’s just about to burst.’

Winds were underworld gods, but when propitious they had a strong and

natural tendency to become Ouranian, and the white sacrifices with intent

to compel their beneficence would help this out. They are an exact

parallel to the black and white Eumenides already noted. Virgil[163] says:

‘To Storm a black sheep, white to the favouring West.’

Equally instructive is the account given by Pausanias[164] of the

ceremonies performed at Titane to soothe the winds, though with his

customary vagueness Pausanias describes them by the word θύειν when they

are really ἐναγισμοί. They are performed on one _night_ in each year, and

Pausanias adds, the priest also ‘does secret ceremonies into four pits,’

soothing the fury of the winds, and he chants over them as they say

Medea’s charms. Each of the four winds dwelt, it is clear, as a chthonic

power in a pit; his sacrifice was after the fashion of heroes and ghosts.

It is possible, indeed probable, that the pits were in connection with

the tomb of some hero or heroine. The sacrifice of Iphigeneia was

παυσάνεμος[165], with power to stay the winds; that of Polyxena at the

tomb of Achilles had the like virtue. Be that as it may, it will be seen

when we come to demonology that the winds were regarded as ghosts, as

breaths: as such their cult was necessarily chthonic.

Another of their functions σφάγια share with the ordinary

animal-sacrifices, the ἱερεῖα. Like the ἱερεῖα they could be used for

purposes of divination. Used as they were for purification in any great

emergency, mere economy may have suggested that they should be further

utilized for oracular purposes. The greater solemnity of σφάγια would

lend to the omens taken from them a specially portentous virtue[166]. It

is amusing to find that even Porphyry[167], averse though he is to human

sacrifice, still seems to feel a dim possibility that for mantic purposes

human entrails may have special virtue. ‘But it will be urged,’ he says,

as though stating a possible and reasonable argument, ‘that the future

may be more clearly divined from the vitals of a man.’

Precise authors who know about ritual always distinguish between the

omens taken from ordinary animal sacrifice and those from σφάγια. Thus

Xenophon[168] in the _Anabasis_ says, ‘The sacrifices (ἱερεῖα) are

propitious to us, the omens favourable, the σφάγια most propitious.’ The

practice of using σφάγια for omens before a battle would seem to have

been uniform. When women, says Eteocles[169], are wailing and making a

commotion, it is the part of men

‘To slay the victims, take therefrom the omens

Before the gods, at the onset of the foe.’

It is probably to this oracular function of σφάγια that we owe the very

frequent use of the middle σφαγιάζεσθαι, as in the parallel case of

θύειν, the sacrifice by fire. For θύειν and θύεσθαι the distinction is

familiar, and expressly stated by Ammonius[170]: ‘of those who simply

sacrifice (active) the victims the word θύουσι is used, of those who

take omens from the entrails θύονται.’ The active is of the nature of

thanksgiving, the middle partakes of prayer and impulsion. In the case of

σφάγια the active is very rarely in use, and naturally, for the sacrifice

of σφάγια has in it no element of thanksgiving[171].

The ritual then of σφάγια and of ἐναγισμοί, of slaughter and of

purification, is based on the fear of ghosts, of ghosts and their action

on men alive, whether as evil winds, or for dread portents, or for

vengeance on the broken oath, or, first and foremost, for the guilt of

shed blood. Its essence is of ἀποτροπή, _aversion_.

Nowhere perhaps is this instinct of aversion so clearly seen, seen in

a form where the instinct has not yet chilled and crystallized into

definite ritual, as in the account of the murder of Absyrtos by Jason

and Medea as given by Apollonius Rhodius[172]. The murder was by a

treacherous ambuscade set for Absyrtos at the threshold of the temple of

Artemis; Jason smites him like a bull for sacrifice, while Medea stands

by.

‘So by that portal old kneeling he fell,

And while the last of life yet sobbed and passed,

Craving, clasped both hands to the wound, to hold

The dark blood back. But the blood reached, and sprang,

And, where the veilèd woman shuddered from him,

Lay red on the white robe and the white veil.

Then swift a sidelong eye, a pitiless eye,

The Erinys all subduing, that knoweth Sin,

Awoke, and saw what manner of deed was there.

And Aeson’s son smote from that sacrifice

Red ravine, and three times ravined with his mouth

Amid the blood, and three times from him spewed

That horror of sin; as men that slay by guile

Use, to make still the raging of the dead.’

Apollonius tries to make a ritual of the awful instinct of physical

fear. The body is mangled that the angry ghost may be maimed, the blood

actually licked up that the murderer may spit it forth and rid himself of

the fell pollution. Only then can the corpse be safely buried[173]. But

it is too late, for Absyrtos has put the blood upon Medea.

Clytaemnestra, when she murdered Agamemnon, followed the same horrid

practice of ‘aversion.’ Sophocles[174] makes Electra say:

‘She lopped his limbs as though he were a foe

And for libations wiped upon his head

The blood stains.’

By the time of Apollonius the Erinys is no longer the actual ghost but a

separate spirit of vengeance, and even the primitive ritual of _aversion_

is explained as a sort of tendance; the lopped limbs are ἐξάργματα,

first beginnings, a sort of hideous sacrifice to the murdered man rather

than mainly the means of maiming him[175]. But the scholiast[176] on the

_Electra_ clearly explains the gist of the ceremonial. He says these

things were done ‘as taking away the force of the dead so that later they

may suffer nothing fearful from them.’

It may perhaps be felt that such instances are purely mythological, and

that fear of the ghost had wholly waned in historical times. The horrid

practice of mutilation no doubt fell into abeyance, but the fear of the

ghost and the sense that purification from guilt could only be obtained

by direct appeal to the ghost itself lived on.

The case of Pausanias gives curious evidence as to the procedure of

an educated murderer of the fifth century B.C. Pausanias[177] the

traveller tells how his namesake sought protection from the Goddess

of the Brazen House, but failed because he was defiled by blood. This

pollution he tried by every possible means to expiate: he had recourse

to purifications of all kinds, he made supplication to Zeus Phyxios, a

being obviously akin to Meilichios—and he resorted to the Psychagogi, the

Ghost-Compellers of Phigalia. They seem to have failed, for Plutarch[178]

tells us he sent to Italy for experts, and they, after they had done

sacrifice, _wrenched the ghost out of the sanctuary_.

The historical case of Pausanias is exactly parallel to that of the

mythological Orestes. Man expects that the dead man will behave as he

would behave were he yet living—pursue him for vengeance; the ghost is an

actual, almost physical reality. It needed a Euripides to see that this

ghost was a purely subjective horror, a disordered conscience. He makes

Menelaos ask the mad Orestes[179]:

‘What dost thou suffer? What disease undoes thee?’

and Orestes makes answer:

‘Conscience, for I am conscious of fell deeds.’

Anthropomorphism is usually regarded as a humane trait in Greek religion;

it is noted as a thing distinguishing their cultus from the animal

worship of less civilized nations. But anthropomorphism, as is clearly

seen in ghost-worship, looks both ways. To be human is not necessarily

to be humane. Man is cruel and implacable, and he makes the ghost after

his own image. Man is also foolish and easily tricked, so he plays tricks

upon the vengeful ghost, cheating him of his real meed of the murderer’s

or kinsman’s blood. Hence the surrogate victims, hence the frequent

substitution stories. Another element enters in. The gods, and specially

the ghost-gods, are conservative; man gets in advance of the gods he

has made, and is ashamed of the rites he once performed with complete

confidence in their rightness. Then he tries by a cheat to reconcile his

new view and his old custom. Religion, which once inspired the best in

him, lags behind, expressing the worst.

Suidas[180] tells a story which curiously expresses this state of

transition, this cheating of the god to save the conscience of the

worshipper. The Greeks had a proverb, Ἔμβαρός εἰμι, ‘I am Embaros,’ which

they used, according to Suidas, of a ‘sharp man with his wits about him,’

and, according to one of the collectors of proverbs, of those who ‘gave

a false impression, i.e. were out of their minds.’ The origin of the

proverb was as follows: There was a sanctuary of Artemis at Munychia. A

bear came into it and was killed by the Athenians. A famine followed,

and the god gave an oracle that the famine should cease if some one

would sacrifice his daughter to the goddess. Embaros was the only man

who promised to do it, on condition that he and his family should have

the priesthood for life. He disguised his daughter and hid her in the

sanctuary, and ‘dressed a goat in a garment and sacrificed it as his

daughter.’ The story is manifestly aetiological, based on a ritual with a

hereditary priesthood, and the sacrifice of a surrogate goat dressed as a

woman.

It is probable, though not certain, that behind the figure of the

Olympian Artemis, of the goddess who was kindly to lions’ cubs and

‘suckling whelps,’ there lay the cult of some vindictive ghost or heroine

who cried for human blood. In moments of great peril this belief in

the vindictiveness of ghosts, a belief kept in check by reason in the

day-time, might surge up in a man’s mind and haunt his dreams by night.

Plutarch[181] tells an instructive story about a dream that came to

Pelopidas before the battle of Leuctra. Near the field of battle was a

field where were the tombs of the daughters of Scedasos, a local hero.

The maidens, who were obviously local nymphs, were called from the place

Leuctrides. The night before the battle, as Pelopidas was sleeping in his

tent, he had a vision which ‘caused him no small disturbance.’ He thought

he saw the maidens crying at their tombs and cursing the Spartans, and

he saw Scedasos their father bidding him sacrifice to his daughters a

maiden with auburn hair if he wished to overcome his enemies on the

morrow. Being a humane as well as a pious man, the order seemed to him

a strange and lawless one, but none the less he told the soothsayers

and the generals about it. Some of them thought that it ought not to

be neglected, and brought forward as precedents the ancient instances

of Menoiceus, son of Creon, and Macaria, daughter of Heracles, and,

in more recent times, the case of Pherecydes the philosopher, who was

put to death by the Spartans and whose skin was preserved (no doubt as

‘medicine’) by their kings in accordance with an oracle; also the case

of Leonidas, who sacrificed himself for Greece; and, lastly, the human

victims sacrificed to Dionysos Omestes before the battle of Salamis, all

which cases had the sanction of success. Moreover, they pointed out,

Agesilaus, when he was about to set sail from Aulis itself, had the same

vision as Agamemnon, and disregarding it through misplaced tenderness,

came to grief in consequence. The more advanced section of the army used

the argument of the fatherhood of God and the superior nature of the

supreme deities; such sacrifices were only fit for Typhons and Giants

and inferior and impotent demons. Pelopidas, while they were discussing

the question in the abstract, only got more and more uncomfortable,

when on a sudden a she-colt got loose from the herd and ran through the

camp; the laymen present only admired her shining red coat, her proud

paces and shrill neighing, but Theocritus the soothsayer saw the thing

in his heart, and cried aloud to Pelopidas, ‘Happy man, here is the

sacred victim, wait for no other maiden, use the one the god has given

thee.’ And they took the colt and led her to the tombs of the maidens,

and prayed and wreathed her head and cut her throat and rejoiced and

published the vision of Pelopidas and the sacrifice to the army. Whether

Plutarch’s story is matter of fact or not is of little moment; it was

felt to be _probable_, or else it would never have been narrated.

* * * * *

I have purposely dwelt on the dark side of ἐναγισμοί, of the service of

the placation of ghosts, because in the vengeance of the ghost exacted

for bloodshed lies the kernel of the doctrine of purification. But since

man’s whole activity is not bounded by revenge, ghosts have other and

simpler needs than that of vengeance. The service of the underworld is

not all _aversion_, there is also some element of _tendance_.

[Illustration: FIG. 10.]

In the vase-painting in fig. 10, a design from a rather late red-figured

krater in the Bibliothèque Nationale[182] in Paris, we have a

representation of a familiar scene, the raising of the ghost of Teiresias

by Odysseus, as described in the _Nekuia_. Vase-paintings of this date

tend to be rather illustrations than independent conceptions, but they

sometimes serve the purpose of vivid presentation. Odysseus[183] has

dug the trench, he has poured the drink-offering of mead and sweet wine

and water, and sprinkled the white meal, and he has slain the sheep;

the head and feet of one of them, seemingly a black ram, are visible

above the trench. He has sat him down sword in hand to keep off the

throng of lesser ghosts, and he and his comrades wait the up-rising of

Teiresias. Out of the very trench is seen emerging the bald ghost-like

head of the seer. This is a clear case, not of deprecation but of

invocation. Teiresias by the strength of the black blood returns to

life. There is a clear reminiscence of the ghost-raising[184] that went

on at many a hero’s tomb, for, as will later be seen in the discussion

of hero-worship, every hero was apt to be credited with mantic powers.

The victims slain are in a sense, as Homer calls them, ἱερήια; they

are sacrificed and eaten, but eaten by a ghost. As such they have been

accompanied by offerings that could only be intended for drink-offerings,

not the ἀπόνιμμα, the offscourings, but libations of mead and wine and

pure water. Here again the ghost is made in the image of man: the Homeric

hero drinks wine in his life and demands it after his death. The service

of the dead is here very near akin to that of the Olympians; it is no

grim atonement, but at worst a bloody banquet, at best a human feast, too

human, too universal to need detailed elucidation. It is a ritual founded

on a belief deep-rooted and long-lived; with the Greeks it was alive in

Lucian’s[185] days. Charon asks Hermes why men dig a trench, and burn

expensive feasts, and pour wine and honey into a trench. Hermes answers

that he cannot think what good it can do to those in Hades, but ‘anyhow

people believe that the dead are summoned up from below to the feast, and

that they flutter round the smoke and fat and drink the honey draught

from the trench.’ Here the ghosts invade the late and popular burnt

sacrifice of the Olympians, but the principle is the same.

* * * * *

The Anthesteria was a festival of ghosts, and so far the _riddance_

of ghosts by means of placation has been shown to be an important

element in ancient sacrifice and in the ancient notion of purification.

But placation of ghosts does not exhaust the content even of ancient

sacrifice: another element will appear in the festival of early summer

that has next to be considered, the _Thargelia_.