GREECE and BABYLON
A COMPARATIVE SKETCH OF
MESOPOTAMIAN, ANATOLIAN
AND HELLENIC RELIGIONS
BY
LEWIS R. FARNELL, D.Litt., M.A.
FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD
AUTHOR OF
“CULTS OF THE GREEK STATES,” “EVOLUTION OF RELIGION,”
“HIGHER ASPECTS OF GREEK RELIGION” (HIBBERT LECTURES)
Edinburgh: T. & T. CLARK, 38 George Street
1911
[IMPRINT.]
_Printed by_
Morrison & Gibb Limited,
FOR
T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH.
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
[DEDICATION.]
TO
Dr. HENRY WILDE
THE FOUNDER OF THE WILDE LECTURESHIP
IN NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
THESE FIRST-FRUITS OF HIS ENDOWMENT
ARE DEDICATED
BY
THE FIRST WILDE LECTURER
Exeter College, Oxford,
_November_ 1911.
CONTENTS.
{vii}
CHAPTER I.
Inaugural Lecture
CHAPTER II.
Statement of the Problem and the Evidence.
Indebtedness of primitive Greek religion to Mesopotamian
influences--Various kinds of evidence to be considered: Texts and
Monuments of Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan, Hittite Kingdom, Asia-Minor
coast, Minoan-Mycenaean area--Necessity of determining when the
North-Aryan tribes entered Greece, and what they brought with
them--Influences from Mesopotamia on Greece of the second millennium
at least not direct--Precariousness of theory of religious
borrowing--Special lines that the inquiry will pursue
CHAPTER III.
Morphology of the Compared Religions.
Distinction between nature religions and ethical religions
unsound--The degree of personality in the cult-objects a better
criterion--The earliest system known in Mesopotamia a polytheism with
personal deities, but containing certain products of animism and
polydaimonism--Other Semitic and non-Semitic peoples of Asia Minor,
the Minoan-Mycenaean races, the earliest Greek tribes, already on the
plane of personal theism in the second millennium B.C.
CHAPTER IV.
Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Anatolia and the Mediterranean.
Mesopotamian religious conception generally anthropomorphic, but the
anthropomorphism “unstable”--Theriomorphic {viii} features, especially
of daimoniac powers--Mystic imagination often
theriomorphic--Individuality of deities sometimes indistinct--Female
and male sometimes fused--The person becomes the Word--Similar
phenomena in other Semitic peoples--Theriolatry more prominent in
Hittite religion, though anthropomorphism the prevalent idea--The
Minoan-Mycenaean religion also mainly anthropomorphic--The evidence of
theriolatry often misinterpreted--The proto-Hellenic religion partly
theriomorphic--Some traces of theriolatry even in later period, in
spite of strong bias towards anthropomorphism
CHAPTER V.
Predominance of the Goddess.
Importance of the phenomenon in the history of religions--In
Mesopotamia and other Semitic regions the chief deity male, except
Astarte at Sidon--Evidence from Hittite kingdoms doubtful, but at
points on the Asia-Minor coast, such as Ephesos, and notably in
Phrygia, the supremacy of the goddess well attested--The same true on
the whole of Cretan religion--The earliest Hellenes, like other Aryan
communities, probably inclined to exalt the male deity, and did not
develop the cult of Virgin goddesses--Therefore Athena and Artemis
probably pre-Hellenic
CHAPTER VI.
The Deities as Nature-Powers.
Shamash the sun-god derives his personal character from the
nature-phenomenon; but the Babylonian deities develop their
personality independently of their nature-origin, which is often
doubtful--Importance of Sin, the moon-god--Star-worship in Babylonian
cult--No clear recognition of an earth-goddess--Tammuz a
vegetation-power--Western Canaanites worship nature-deities in the
second millennium, probably with moral attributes--The Hittites a
thunder-god and corn-god--The Phrygians a mother-goddess of the earth
and lower world--On the whole, pre-Homeric Hellas worships ethical
personalities rather than nature-powers--Distinguished from
Mesopotamia by comparative insignificance of solar, lunar, astral
cults--Also by the great prominence of the earth-goddess and the
association of certain eschatological ideas with her
{ix}
CHAPTER VII.
The Deities as Social-Powers.
The religious origin of the city--Slight evidence from Mesopotamia,
more from early Greece--Early Mesopotamian kingship of divine
type--The king inspired and occasionally worshipped--The Hittite
monuments show the divine associations of the king--Proto-Hellenic
kingship probably of similar character--Social usages protected by
religion in the whole of this area--No family cult of the hearth at
Babylon--The code of Hammurabi--Comparatively secular in its
enactments concerning homicide--Religious feeling perceptible in the
laws concerning incest--The legal system attached to religion at
certain points, but on the whole, independent of it--In early Hellas
the religion an equally strong social force, but many of its social
manifestations different--Religion tribal and “phratric” in Greece;
not so in Babylon--Purification from bloodshed could not have been
borrowed from Mesopotamia
CHAPTER VIII.
Religion and Morality.
The deity conceived on the whole as beneficent and righteous, but the
divine destructive power more emphasised in Babylonia--Every
Babylonian deity moralised, not every Hellenic--In both societies
perjury a sin, untruthfulness only in Babylonian religious
theory--International morality--The ethics of the family very vital in
both societies, but more complex in Babylonia--Ritualistic tabus a
heavier burden on the Babylonian conscience--Morality more daimonistic
than in Greece--In the Babylonian confessional stress laid on unknown
involuntary sin, hence tendency to pessimism--In Greece less timidity
of conscience, less prominence of magic--Mercifulness a prominent
divine attribute in both religions--More pantheistic thought and a
clearer sense of the divinity of all life in Babylonian theology, as
in the Tammuz-myth
CHAPTER IX.
Purity a Divine Attribute.
Ritual purity generally demanded--Babylonian mythology far purer than
the Greek--Character of Ishtar--Virginity a divine attribute--Mystic
conception of a virgin-mother, the evidence examined in East and West
{x}
CHAPTER X.
Concept of Divine Power and Ancient Cosmogonies.
Neither in Babylon nor Greece any clear and consistently maintained
dogma of divine omnipotence--Yet the divinities collectively the
strongest power in the universe--No developed theory of dualism--The
divine power combined with magic in Babylonia, but not in Greece--No
early Hellenic consciousness of the Word as a creative force--The
magic power of the divine name felt by the Hellenes, but not realised
as a creative force--Babylonian cosmogonies not traceable in the
earliest Greek mythology, nor in Hesiod, but the myth of Typhoeus
probably from Babylonian sources--Babylonian myths concerning creation
of man not known in early Greece--Organisation of the polytheism into
divine groups--Evidence of Trinitarian idea and of monotheistic
tendency--No proof here of Greek indebtedness to Mesopotamia
CHAPTER XI.
The Religious Temperament of the Eastern and Western Peoples.
The relation of the individual to the deity more intimate in
Mesopotamia than in Greece--The religious temper more ecstatic, more
prone to self-abasement, sentimentality, rapture--Humility and the
fear of God ethical virtues in Babylonia--The child named after the
god in both societies--In some Semitic communities the deity takes a
title from the worshipper--Fanaticism in Mesopotamian religion, entire
absence of it in the Hellenic
CHAPTER XII.
Eschatologic Ideas of East and West.
General resemblances between Mesopotamian and early Hellenic rites of
tendance of dead--Mesopotamian theory of the lower world gloomier--The
terror of the spectre stronger in the East than in the West; yet both
fear the miasma of the dead--In both, the literary evidence clashes
somewhat with the evidence from the graves--Certain important
differences in tendance of dead--Water essential in later Babylonian,
wine and the triple libation in early Hellenic--Hero-cult strong in
early Hellas, at least very rare in Mesopotamia--Hellenic idea of
re-incarnation not {xi} yet found in Babylonian records--The evocation
of ghosts, and the periodic meals with or in memory of the dead,
common to both peoples--General All Souls’ festival--But in Babylonia
no popular belief in posthumous punishments and rewards--The powers of
the lower world more gloomy and repellent than in Hellas--No mysteries
to develop the germs of a brighter eschatologic faith
CHAPTER XIII.
Comparison of the Ritual.
In the second millennium all Semitic communities had evolved the
temple, and Babylonia the idol--In Greece, temple-building was coming
into vogue, but the cults still aniconic--The pillar and the phallic
emblem common in early Greece, very rare in Mesopotamia--Sacrifice
both in East and West of two types, the blood-sacrifice and the
bloodless, but in Hellas νηφάλια ἱερά in early vogue, not yet found in
the East--Incense unknown to the pre-Homeric Greeks--The distinction
between Chthonian and Olympian ritual not found at
Babylon--Communion-sacrifice and sacrament in early Greece, not found
as yet in Mesopotamia--Vicarious piacular sacrifice common to both
regions, but human sacrifice rife in early Greece, not found in
Mesopotamia--Mystic use of blood in Greek ritual, immolation or
expulsion of the scape-goat not yet discovered in Mesopotamia--The
death of the divinity in Babylonian ritual--Mourning for Tammuz--In
other Semitic communities--In Hittite worship, Sandon of Tarsos--Attis
of Phrygia--Emasculation in Phrygian ritual, alien to Babylonian as to
Hellenic religious sentiment--Death of divinity in Cretan ritual, and
in Cyprus--In genuine Hellenic religion, found only in agrarian
hero-cults, such as Linos, Eunostos; these having no connection with
Tammuz--Babylonian liturgy mainly a service of sorrow, Greek mainly
cheerful--A holy marriage at Babylon, on Hittite relief at
Boghaz-Keui, in Minoan and Hellenic ritual--A mortal the consort of
divinity, an idea found in many races widely removed--Greek
evidence--Consecrated women in Mesopotamia, two types--Their functions
to be distinguished from the consecration of virginity before marriage
mentioned by Herodotus--Other examples of one or the other of these
customs in Asia Minor--Various explanations of these customs offered
by anthropology--Criticism of different views--Their religious
significance--Ritual of purification--Cathartic use of water and
fire--Preservation of peace during public purification--Points of
agreement between Hellas and {xii} Babylonia--Points of difference,
Babylonian confessional--Value of Homer’s evidence concerning early
Hellenic purification--Babylonian magic in general contrast with
Greek--Astrologic magic--Magic value of numbers, of the
word--Babylonian exorcism--Magic use of images--No severance in
Mesopotamia between magic and religion--Babylonian and Hellenic
divination
CHAPTER XIV.
Summary of Results.
INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS.
ENDNOTES.
GREECE AND BABYLON.
{1}
CHAPTER I.
Inaugural Lecture.
The newly-elected holder of a University professorship or
lectureship, before embarking on the course of special discussion that
he has selected, may be allowed or expected to present some outlined
account of the whole subject that he represents, and to state
beforehand, if possible, the line that he proposes to pursue in regard
to it. This is all the more incumbent on me, as I have the honour to
be the first Wilde Lecturer in Natural and Comparative Religion--the
first, that is, who has been officially charged by the University to
give public teaching in the most modern and one of the most difficult
fields of study, one that has already borne copious fruit, and will
bear more in the future. I appreciate highly the honour of such a
charge, and I take this opportunity of expressing my deep sense of the
indebtedness of our University and of all students of this subject to
Dr. Wilde for his generous endowment of this branch of research, which
as yet has only found encouragement in a few Universities of Europe,
America, and Japan. I feel also the responsibility of my charge. Years
of study have shown me the magnitude of the subject, the pitfalls that
here--more, perhaps, {2} than in other fields--beset the unwary, and
the multiplicity of aspects from which it may be studied. Having no
predecessor, I cannot follow, but may be called upon rather to set, a
precedent.
One guidance, at least, I have--namely, the expressed wishes of the
founder of this post. He has formulated them in regard to Comparative
Religion in such a way that I feel precluded, in handling this part of
the whole field, from what may be called the primitive anthropology of
religion. I shall not, therefore, deal directly with the embryology of
the subject, with merely savage religious psychology, ritual, or
institutions. It is not that I do not feel myself the fascination of
these subjects of inquiry, and their inevitableness for one who wishes
wholly to understand the whole of any one of the higher
world-religions.
But we have in the University one accomplished exponent of these
themes in Mr. Marett, and until recently we have been privileged to
possess Professor Tylor; and Dr. Wilde has made his wishes clear that
the exposition of Comparative Religion should be mainly an elucidation
and comparison of the higher forms and ideas in the more advanced
religions. And I can cheerfully accept this limitation, as for years I
have been occupied with the minute study of the religion of Greece, in
which one finds much, indeed, that is primitive, even savage, but much
also of religious thought and religious ethic, unsuspected by former
generations of scholars, that has become a rich inheritance of our
higher culture. He who wishes to succeed in this new field of arduous
inquiry should have studied at least one of the higher religions of
the old civilisation _au fond_, and he must have studied it by the
comparative method. He may then make this religion the point of
departure for wide {3} excursions into outlying tracts of the more or
less adjacent religious systems, and he will be the less likely to
lose himself in the maze and tangle of facts if he can focus the
varying light or doubtful glimmer they afford upon the complex set of
phenomena with which he is already familiar.
And the Greek religion serves better than any other that I know for
such a point of departure, the influences being so numerous that
radiated upon it. It had its own special inheritance, which it
fruitfully developed, from the North, from its proto-Aryan past, and
which we shall be able to define with greater clearness when
comparative religion has done its work upon the religious records of
the early Aryan peoples. Also, the Hellene had many intimate points of
contact with earlier and alien peoples of the ancient Mediterranean
culture whom he conquered and partly absorbed, or with whom he entered
into intellectual or commercial relations. Therefore the religions of
the Minoan Age, of the Anatolian peoples, of Egypt, and finally of
Babylon and Persia, come inevitably to attract the student of the
Hellenic.
As far, then, as I can see at present, I may have to limit my
attention in the lecture-courses of these three years during which I
fill this post, to the phenomena of the Mediterranean area, and these
are more than one man can thoroughly elucidate in a lifetime, as the
manifold activity in various departments of this field, attested by
the Transactions of our recent Congress of the History of Religions,
will prove to those who read them. And I shall endeavour in the future
to follow out one main inquiry through a short series of lectures, as
this is the best method for a reasoned statement of consecutive
thought. But I propose in this lecture to sketch merely in outlines
the salient features of some {4} of the religions of the Mediterranean
area, and hope thereby to indicate the main problems which the student
of comparative religion must try to solve, or the leading questions he
must ask, and thus, perhaps, to be able to suggest to others as well
as to myself special lines of future research and discussion.
What, then, are the questions which naturally arise when we approach
the study of any religion that has advanced beyond the primitive
stage? We wish to discover with definiteness what is the idea of
divinity that it has evolved, in what forms and with what concepts
this idea is expressed--whether, for instance, the godhead is
conceived as a vague “numen,” or as a definite personality with
complex character and functions, and whether it is imagined or
presented to sense in anthropomorphic forms.
The question whether the religion is monotheistic or polytheistic is
usually answered at a glance, unless the record is unusually
defective; but in the case of polytheism careful inquiry is often
needed to answer the other morphological questions that press
themselves upon us, whether the polytheism is an organised system of
co-ordinated and subordinated powers or a mere medley of uncorrelated
deities. If the former, whether the unifying tendency has developed in
the direction of monotheism or pantheism.
Again, the study of the attributes and functions ascribed and the
titles attached to the deity will enable us to answer the questions
concerning his relation to the world of Nature, to the social sphere
of law, politics, and morality; and in this quest we may hope to gain
fruitful suggestions concerning the interaction of religion, social
organisation, and ethics. We shall also wish to know whether the
religion is dogmatic or not--that is {5} to say, whether it lays
stress on precise theological definitions; whether it claims to
possess sacred books or a revelation; whether it contains the idea of
faith as a cardinal virtue. Further, it is always interesting to
consider whether it has engendered a cosmogony, a theory of the
cosmos, its origin, maintenance, and possible dissolution; and whether
it is instinctively favourable or antagonistic to the growth of the
scientific spirit, to the free activity of the intellect; and,
finally, whether it gives prominence to the belief in the immortality
of the soul and to the doctrine of posthumous rewards and punishments.
There are also certain special questions concerning the nature and
powers of the divinity that are found to be of importance. The
distinction of sex in the anthropomorphic religions, the paramountcy
of the god or the goddess, is observed to produce a singular effect in
religious psychology, and may be associated with fundamental
differences in social institutions, with the distinction, for
instance, between a patrilinear and a matrilinear society. As regards
the powers attributed to the divinity, we may endeavour to discern
certain laws of progress or evolution in progressive societies--an
evolution, perhaps, from a more material to a more spiritual
conception, or, again, from a belief in divinities finite and mortal
to a dogma that infinity, omniscience, and immortality are their
necessary attributes. On this line of inquiry we are often confronted
with the phenomenon of the death of the god or goddess, and no single
fact in the history of religions is of more interest and of more
weight. Also, we frequently find an antagonism between malevolent and
benevolent powers, whence may arise a philosophic conception of
dualism in Nature and the moral world.
{6}
There are, further, the questions concerning ritual, often very
minute, but of none the less significance. What are the forms of
worship, sacrifice, prayer, adoration? As regards sacrifice, is it
deprecatory merely, a bribe to avert wrath, or is it a gift to secure
favour, or is it a token of friendly trust and affection, or a mystic
act of communion which effects between the deity and the worshipper a
temporary union of body and soul? In the study of ritual we may
consider the position of the priesthood, its power over the religion,
and through the religion over the State, and the sources of that
power.
This enumeration of the problems is long, but I fear by no means
exhaustive. I have not yet mentioned the question that may
legitimately arise, and is the most perplexing of all--that which is
asked concerning the vital power and influence of a certain religion,
its strength of appeal, its real control of the people’s thoughts and
acts. The question, as we know, is difficult enough when we apply it
to modern societies; it may be quite hopeless when applied to an
ancient State. It is only worth raising when the record is unusually
ample and varied, and of long continuity; when we can believe that it
enshrines the thoughts of the people, not merely of the priest or of
the philosopher. We are more likely to believe this when the record is
rich not only in literature, but in monuments.
It may also be demanded that the history of religions should include a
history of their decay, and, in his brilliant address at the recent
Congress, Professor Petrie has formulated this demand as one that
Egyptology might fulfil. Certainly it belongs to the scientific
treatment of our subject to note the circumstances and operative
causes that induced a certain people to abandon their ancestral
beliefs and cults; but whether from the {7} careful study of each
special case certain general laws will emerge by process of induction
may be doubted. It will depend partly on the completeness of our
records and our skill in their interpretation.
I will conclude this sketch of an ideal programme, which I, as least,
can never hope to make actual, with one last query--Is it the main
object of this comparative study to answer the inquiry as to the
reciprocal influences of adjacent religions, to distinguish between
the alien and the native elements in any particular system--to
estimate, for instance, what Greece owed to Babylon, to Egypt, to
India? Certainly the problem is proper to our province, is attractive,
and even hopeful, and I have ventured to approach it myself. But I
should hesitate to allow that it is the main one, and that the value
of our study is to be measured by our success in solving it; for,
whatever answer we finally give to such questions, or if we abandon in
despair the attempt to answer them precisely, it is none the less
fruitful to compare the Babylonian, Indo-Iranian, Egyptian, and
Hellenic systems of belief--for instance, to consider the Orphic
eschatology in relation to the Buddhistic, even if we reject the
theory that Buddhistic influences could have penetrated into early
Orphism.
I will now sketch what I have perceived to be the higher elements or
more developed features in Hellenic religion, and will consider in
regard to each of these how it contrasts with or resembles the cults
of the other leading peoples of this area. The Hellenic high divinity
is, in the first place, no mere shadowy “numen,” no vague spirit-power
or semi-personal divine force, such as the old Roman belief often
seems to present us with, nor is he usually conceived as a divine
element immanent in certain things; but he appears as a concrete
personal {8} individual of definite physical traits and complex moral
nature. Vaguer and cruder ideas no doubt survived right through the
historic period, and the primitive ancestor of the Hellene may once
have lived in the religious phase of thought in which the personal god
has not yet emerged or not yet been detached from the phenomenon or
the world of living matter. But I believe that the Greek of the
historic, and even of the Homeric, period had left this phase far more
remotely behind him than certain modern theorists have lightly
supposed, and I am convinced that the proto-Hellenic tribes had
already before the conquest of Greece developed the cult of certain
personal deities, and that some, at least, of these were the common
heritage of several tribes. It is quite possible that before they
crossed the northern frontier of Greece they found such divinities
among their Aryan kinsfolk of Thrace, and it is certain that this was
the type of religion that they would mainly find among the peoples of
the Minoan-Mycenaean culture.
We discern it also, where the record allows us to discern anything,
among the nearer and remoter stocks of the Asiatic side of the
Mediterranean area. In the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of the
Persian religion, Ahura-Mazda is presented as a noble ethical figure,
a concrete personal god, like Jahwé of Israel, whatever his original
physical significance may have been. Marduk of Babylon, whom
Hammurabi, the consolidator of the Babylonian power, raised to the
rank of the high god, may once have been a sun-god, but he transcended
his elemental nature, and appears in the records of the third
millennium as a political deity, the war-god, and leader of the
people, as real a personality as Hammurabi himself. The same is true
of Asshur, once the local {9} deity of the aboriginal land of the
Assyrians, but later raised by the imperial expansion of this people
almost to the position of a universal god, the guardian of the land,
the teacher and the father of the kings; nor can we discern that he
was ever an elemental god.
Speaking generally, in spite of many important differences, we may
regard the religious structure to which the cults of Anatolia and
Egypt belonged as morphologically the same as that which I am defining
as Hellenic. Also, among all these peoples, by the side of the few
higher deities who have developed moral personalities, we find special
elemental divinities, as, in Hellas, we find Helios and the deities of
the wind, Hephaistos the fire-god.
The distinction between the religions of the Hellenes and “the
barbarians,” which Aristophanes defines as the difference between the
worship of ideal divine personages, such as Zeus, Apollo, and Demeter,
and the direct worship of elementary powers, such as sun and moon, is
not borne out by modern research. Where we find sun-worship or
moon-worship in the East, it does not appear to have been directed
immediately to the thing itself regarded as a living or animate body,
but to a personal god of the sun or the moon--Bel, Shamash, or Sin. We
can only distinguish the Greek from the Oriental in respect of
Nature-religion by the lesser degree of devotion that the Hellene
showed to it. Only those of his divinities whose names connoted
nothing in the material or natural world, could develop into free
moral personalities, and dominate the religious imagination of the
people. Nowhere, for instance, had Helios any high position in the
Greek world except at Rhodes, where we must reckon with pre-Hellenic,
Minoan, and later with Semitic influences. Therefore, when, shortly
{10} before and after the beginning of the Graeco-Roman period, a wave
of sun-worship welled from the East over the West, it may have brought
with it religious ideas of high spirituality and ethical purity, yet
by the race-consciousness of the Hellenes it must have been judged to
be a regress towards a barbaric past.
The instinct of the Greek in his creation of divine forms shows always
a bias towards the personal and the individual, an aversion to the
amorphous and vague, and herein we may contrast him with the Persian
and Egyptian. A certain minor phenomenon in these religions will
illustrate and attest this. All of them admitted by the side of the
high personal deities certain subordinate personages less sharply
conceived, divine emanations, as we may sometimes call them, or
personifications of moral or abstract ideas. Plutarch specially
mentions the Persian worship of Truth, Goodwill, Law-abidingness,
Wisdom, emanations of Ahura-Mazda, which in the light of the sacred
books we may, perhaps, interpret as the Fravashis or Soul-powers of
the High God; and in certain Egyptian myths and religious records we
hear of a personification of Truth, whose statue is described by the
same writer. But at least in the Persian system we may suspect that
such divine beings had little concrete personality, but, rather, were
conceived vaguely as daimoniac forces, special activities of divine
force in the invisible world. Now the Greek of the period when we
really know him seems to have been mentally unable to allow his
consciousness of these things or these forces to remain just at that
point. Once, no doubt, it was after this fashion that his ancestors
dimly imagined Eros, or the half-personal Curse-power Ἀρά; but he
himself could only cherish Eros under the finished and concrete form
of a {11} beautiful personal god, and the curse was only vitalised for
him when it took on the form of the personal Erinys. This topic is a
fruitful one, and I hope to develop it on a later occasion.
It suggests what is now the next matter I wish to touch on--the
comparison of the Mediterranean religions in respect of their
anthropomorphism. Philosophically, the term might be censured as
failing to distinguish any special type of religion; for we should all
admit that man can only envisage the unseen world in forms
intelligible to his own mind and reflecting his own mental structure.
But, apart from this truism, we find that religions differ essentially
and vitally according as this anthropomorphism is vague and indefinite
or sharply defined and dominating; according as they picture the
divinity as the exact though idealised counterpart of man, and
construct the divine society purely on the lines of the human, or
refrain from doing this either through weakness and obscurity of
imagination or in deference to a different and perhaps more elevated
law of the religious intellect. Now, of the Hellenic religion no
feature is salient as its anthropomorphism, and throughout its whole
development and career the anthropomorphic principle has been more
dominating and imperious than it has ever been found to be in other
religions.[11.1] At what remote period in the evolution of the
Hellenic mind this principle began in force, what were the influences
that fostered and strengthened it, in what various ways it shaped the
religious history of the Hellenic people, are questions that I may be
able to treat more in detail in the future. {12} But there are two
important phenomena that I will indicate now, which we must associate
with it, and which afford us an illuminating point of view from which
we may contrast the Greek world and the Oriental. In the first place,
the anthropomorphic principle, combining with an artistic faculty the
highest that the world has known, produced in Greece a unique form of
idolatry; and, in the second place, in consequence chiefly of this
idolatry, the purely Hellenic religion remained almost incapable of
that which we call mysticism.
Now, much remains still to be thought out, especially for those
interested in Mediterranean culture, concerning the influence of
idolatry on religion; and not only the history, but the psychology of
religion, must note and estimate the influence of religious art. It
may well be that the primitive Greeks, like the primitive Roman, the
early Teuton, and Indo-Iranian stocks, were non-idolatrous, and this
appears to have been true to some extent of the Minoan culture.
Nevertheless, the Mediterranean area has from time immemorial been the
centre of the fabric and the worship of the eikon and the idol. The
impulse may have come from the East or from Egypt to the Hellene; he
in his turn imparted it to the Indian Aryans, as we now know, and in
great measure at least to the Roman, just as the Assyrian-Babylonian
temple-worship imparted it to the Persian. Nowhere, we may well
believe, has the influence of idolatry been so strong upon the
religious temperament as it was upon that of the Hellenes; for to it
they owed works of the type that may be called the human-divine, which
surpass any other art-achievement of man.
I can here only indicate briefly its main effects. It {13} intensified
the perception of the real personal god as a material fact. It
increased polytheism by multiplying the separate figures of worship,
often, perhaps, without intention. It assisted the imagination to
discard what was uncouth and terrifying in the Hellenic religion, and
was at once the effect and the cause of the attachment of the Hellenic
mind towards mild and gracious types of godhead. The aniconic emblem
and uncouth fetich-formed figures were here and there retained,
because of vague ideas about luck or for superstitious fetichistic
reasons; but the beautiful idol was cherished because it could arouse
the enthusiastic affection of a sensitive people, and could bring them
to the very presence of a friendly divine person. The saying that the
Olympian deities died of their own loveliness means a wrong
interpretation of the facts and the people. But for a beautiful
idolatry, Hellenic polytheism would have passed away some centuries
before it did, the deities fading into alien types or becoming fused
one with the other. Nor was its force and influence exhausted by the
introduction of Christianity, for it shaped the destinies of the Greek
Church, and threw down a victorious challenge to the iconoclastic
Emperors.
If now we were to look across the Mediterranean, and could survey the
religious monuments of Persia, Assyria and Babylonia, Phoenicia, and
the Hittite people, we should find a general acceptance of the
anthropomorphic idea. The high personal deities are represented mainly
in human form, but the art is not able to interpret the polytheistic
beliefs with skilfully differentiated types. In Chaldaic and Assyrian
art one type of countenance is used for various divinities, and this
such as might inspire awe rather than affection. And the
anthropomorphism is unstable. Often animal traits {14} appear in parts
of the divine figure. Nergal has a lion’s head; even the warrior
Marduk is invoked in the mystic incantations as “Black Bull of the
Deep, Lion of the dark house.”[14.1] In fact, over a large part of
anterior Asia, anthropomorphism and theriomorphism exist side by side
in religious concept and religious art. We may say the same of Egypt,
but here theriomorphism is the dominating factor.
As regards the explanation of this phenomenon, many questions are
involved which are outside my present province. I would only express
my growing conviction that these two distinct modes of representing
the divine personage to the worshipper are not necessarily prior and
posterior, the one to the other, in the evolution of religion. They
can easily, and frequently do, coexist. The vaguely conceived deity
shifts his shape, and the same people may imagine him mainly as a
glorified man of human volition and action, and yet think of him as
temporarily incarnate in an animal, and embody his type for purposes
of worship or religious art in animal forms.
I would further indicate here what I cannot prove in detail--that
theriomorphism lends itself to mysticism, while the anthropomorphic
idolatry of Greece was strongly in opposition to it. The mystic
theosophy that pervaded later paganism, and from which early
Christianity could not escape, originated, as Reitzenstein has well
shown, mainly in Egypt, and it arose partly, I think, in connection
with the hieratic and allegorical interpretation of the theriomorphic
idol. There was nothing mystic about the Zeus of Pheidias, so far as
the form of the god was concerned. The forms were {15} entirely
adequate to the expression of the physical, moral, and spiritual
nature of the god. The god was just that, and there was nothing
behind, and, as the ancient enthusiast avers, “having once seen him
thus, you could not imagine him otherwise.” But when a divinity to
whom high religious conceptions have already come to attach is
presented, as it might be in Egyptian religious art, with the head of
a jackal or an ape, the feeling is certain to arise sooner or later in
the mind of the worshipper that the sense-form is inadequate to the
idea. Then his troubled questioning will receive a mystic answer, and
the animal type of godhead will be given an esoteric interpretation.
Plutarch, in the _De Iside et Osiride_,[15.1] is one of our
witnesses. He finds a profounder significance for theosophy in the
beetle, the asp, and the weasel than in the most beautiful
anthropomorphic work of bronze or marble. He here turns his back on
his ancestors, and goes over to the sect of the Egyptian mystic.
But the most curious testimony to my thesis is borne by an inscription
on an Egyptian lamp--an invocation of the God Thoth: “O Father of
Light, O Word (λόγος) that orderest day and night, come show thyself
to me. O God of Gods, in thy ape-form enter.”[15.2] Here the
association of so mystic a concept as the “Logos,” the divine Reason,
an emanation of God with the form of an ape, is striking enough, and
suggests to us many reflections on the contrast between the Egyptian
theriomorphism and the human idolatry of the Greek. The Hermes of
Praxiteles was too stubborn a fact before the people’s eyes to fade or
to soar into {16} the high vagueness of the “Logos,” too stable in his
beautiful humanity to sink into the ape.
But before leaving this subject I would point out a phenomenon in the
Hellenic world that shows the working of the same principle. The
Orphic god Dionysos-Sabazios-Zagreus was πολύμορφος, a shape-shifter,
conceived now as bull, now as serpent, now as man, and the Orphic
sects were penetrated with a mystic theosophy; and, again, they were a
foreign element embedded in Greek society and religion.
While we were dealing with the subject of anthropomorphism, we should
consider also the question of sex, for a religion that gives
predominance to the god is certain to differ in some essential
respects from one in which a goddess is supreme. Now, although the
conception of an All-Father was a recognised belief in every Greek
community, and theoretically Zeus was admitted to be the highest god,
yet we may believe Athena counted more than he for the Athenians, and
Hera more for the Argives. And we have evidence of the passionate
devotion of many urban and village communities to the mother Demeter
and her daughter Kore, to whom the greatest mysteries of Greece, full
of the promise of posthumous salvation, were consecrated. Also, in the
adjacent lands of earlier culture we mark the same phenomenon. In
Egyptian religion we have the commanding figure of Isis, who, though
by no means supreme in the earlier period, seems to dominate the
latter age of this polytheism. In the Assyrian-Babylonian Pantheon,
though the male deity is at the head, Ishtar appears as his compeer,
or as inferior only to Asshur. Coming westward towards Asia Minor, we
seem to see the goddess overshadowing the god. On the great Hittite
monument at Boghaz-Keui, {17} in Cappadocia, skilfully interpreted by
Dr. Frazer, we observe a great goddess with her son coequal with the
Father-God. In the lands adjacent to the coast a Mother-Goddess,
sometimes also imagined as virgin, Kybele of Phrygia, Ma of
Cappadocia, Hipta of Lydia, Astarte of Askalon, Artemis of Ephesos who
was probably a blend of Hellenic and Oriental cult-ideas, appears to
have been dominant from an immemorial antiquity; and Sir Arthur Evans
has discovered the same mysterious feminine power pre-eminent in the
Minoan religion. We may even affirm that she has ruled a great part of
the Mediterranean down to the present day.
The various questions suggested by this predominance of
goddess-worship are fascinating and subtle. The sociological one--how
far it is to be connected with a system of counting descent through
the female, with a matrilinear society--I have partly discussed
elsewhere.[17.1] I may later be able to enter on the question that is
of more interest for the psychology of religion--the effect of such
worships on the religious sentiment. Here I can merely point to the
phenomenon as a natural and logical product of the principle of
anthropomorphism, but would call attention to the fact that in the
East it sometimes developed into a form that, from the anthropomorphic
point of view, must be called morbid and subversive of this principle;
for the rivalry of divine sex was here and there solved by the fusion
of the two natures in the divinity, and we find a bisexual type--a
male Astarte, a bearded Ishtar.[17.2] The healthy-minded
anthropomorphism of the Hellene rejects this Oriental extravagance.
{18}
If we now could consider in detail the various moral conceptions
attached to the high State divinities of Greece and the East, we
should be struck with a general similarity in the point of view of the
various culture-stocks. The higher deities, on the whole, are ethical
beings who favour the righteous and punish transgressors; and the
worship of Greece falls here into line with the Hebraic conceptions of
a god of righteousness. But in one important particular Hellenic
thought markedly differs from Oriental, especially the Persian. In the
people’s religion throughout Hellas the deities are, on the whole,
worshipped as beneficent, as doing good to their worshippers, so long
as these do not offend or sin against them. The apparent exceptions
are no real exceptions. Ares may have been regarded as an evil god by
the poet or the philosopher, but we cannot discover that this was ever
the view of the people who cared to establish his cult. The Erinyes
are vindictive; nevertheless, they are moral, and the struggle between
them and Apollo in the Aeschylean drama is only the contest between a
more barbaric and a more civilised morality. In the list of Greek
divine titles and appellatives, only one or two at most can be given a
significance of evil.
Doubtless, beneath the bright anthropomorphic religion lurked a fear
of ghosts and evil spirits, and the later days of Hellenic paganism
were somewhat clouded with demonology. But the average Greek protected
himself sufficiently by purification and easy conventional magic. He
did not brood on the principle of evil or personify it as a great
cosmic power, and therefore he would not naturally evolve a system of
religious dualism, though the germs from which this might grow may be
found in Orphic tradition and doctrine. Contrast this with the
evidence from Egypt, Assyria, and {19} Persia. The Egyptian and
Assyrian records bear strong impress of the prominence and power of
the belief in evil spirits. The high gods of Assyria were continually
being invoked and implored by the worshipper to save him from the
demons, and one of these, Ira, a demon of pestilence, seems to have
received actual worship; and much of Egyptian private ritual was
protective magic against them.
But nowhere did the power of evil assume such grand proportions as in
the old Mazdean creed of Persia, and the dualism between the good and
evil principle became here the foundation of a great religion that
spread its influence wide through the West. The religion had its
prophet, Zarathustra, in whose historic reality we ought not to doubt.
In his system the faithful Mazdean is called upon to play his part in
the struggle between Ahura-Mazda and Angra-Mainyu, and this struggle
continues through the ages till in the final cataclysm the Daevas, or
evil demons, will be overthrown. We note here that this faith includes
the idea of a final Judgment, so familiar to Judaic and Christian
thought, but scarcely to be found in the native Hellenic religion.
Further, it should be observed that the Mazdean dualism between good
and evil has nothing in common with the Platonic antithesis between
mind and sense, or St. Paul’s between spirit and flesh, or with the
hatred of the body that is expressed in Buddhism. The good Mazdean
might regard his body as good and pure, and therefore he escaped, as
by a different way did the Greek, from the tyranny of a morbid
asceticism. Only he developed the doctrine of purity into a code more
burdensome than can be found, I think, elsewhere. The ideas of
ritual-purity on which he framed this code are found broadcast through
the East and in Egypt, and appear {20} in the Hellenic religion also.
The Greek, however, did not allow himself to be oppressed by his own
cathartic system, but turned it to excellent service in the domain of
law, as I have tried to show elsewhere.[20.1]
Generally, as regards the association of religion and morality, we
find this to be always intimate in the more developed races, but our
statistics are insufficient for us to determine with certainty the
comparative strength of the religious sanction of morals in the
ancient societies of the Mediterranean. The ethical-religious force of
the Zarathustrian faith seems to approach that of the Hebraic. We
should judge it to be stronger, at least, than any that was exercised
in Hellas, for Hellas, outside the Orphic sects, had neither sacred
books of universal recognition nor a prophet. Yet all Hellenic
morality was protected by religion, and the Delphic oracle, which
occasionally was able to play the part of the father-confessor,
encouraged a high standard of conduct--as high as the average found
elsewhere in the ancient world. We may note, however, one lacuna in
the Hellenic code: neither Greek ethics, on the whole, nor Greek
religion, emphasised or exalted or deified the virtue of truth; but we
hear of a goddess of Truth in Egypt, and it becomes a cardinal tenet
and a divine force in the Zarathustrian ideal.
Again, in all ancient societies religion is closely interwoven with
political, legal, and social institutions, and its influence on these
concerns the history of the evolution of society and law. It is only
in modern society, or in a few most ideal creeds at periods of great
exaltation, that a severance is made between Cæsar and God. Save
Buddhism, the religions of the ancient societies of the East and of
Egypt were all in a sense political. Darius {21} regards himself as
specially protected by Ahura-Mazda, and we are told by
Herodotus[21.1] that in the private Persian’s prayers no separate
personal benefits were besought, but only the welfare of the King and
the Persian community. The gods of Assyria inspire counsel and order
the campaign; Shamash, the sun-god, is “Just Ruler” and the “Lord of
Law”; and Ninib is styled the god “who lays for ever the
foundation-stone of the State,” and who, like Zeus ὅριος, and the
Latin Terminus, “protects the boundaries of the cornfield.” The Syrian
goddess of Bambyke, Kybele of Phrygia, Astarte of Askalon, all wear
the mural crown, the badge of the city goddess. But I doubt if our
materials are as yet rich enough to inform us in what precise way
religion played a constructive part in the oldest
civilisations,--namely, those of Assyria and Egypt. We may observe
that the code of Hammurabi, our oldest legal document, is curiously
secular and in many respects modern.
The question can be most fruitfully pursued in the study of the Greek
societies; for no other religion of which we have any record was so
political as the Hellenic, not even, as I should judge, the Roman, to
which it bears the closest resemblance in this respect. The very
origin of the πόλις, the city-state, was often religious; for the name
or title of the deity often gave a name to the city, and the temple
was in this case probably the centre of the earliest residence. In the
organised and complex Greek societies, every institution of the
State--the assembly, the council, the law-courts, the agrarian
economy, all the regulations of the family and clan--were consecrated
and safeguarded by the supervision of some deity. Often he or she was
worshipped as in a literal sense the {22} State ancestor, and in one
of the temples might be found burning the perpetual fire which
symbolised the permanence of the city’s life. And in Greece we find a
unique phenomenon, which, though small, is of great significance--the
deity might here and there be made to take the office and title of a
civic magistrate. For instance, Apollo was στεφανηφόρος in Asia Minor
cities, and in the later days of Sparta, as the recent excavations
have shown, the ghost of Lykourgos was elected as the chief inspector
of the education of the young.
To the superficial observer, then, the Greek civic society might
appear a theocracy. But such a view would imply ignorance of the
average character of the ancient Greek world. There can be no
theocracy where there is no theocrat. In Asia Minor the priest might
be a great political power, but in Greece this was never so. Here the
political, secular, utilitarian interest dominates the religion. The
high divinities become politicians, and immersed in secular affairs,
and even take sides in the party strife, as some of the religious
titles attest. Thus Greek religion escaped morbidity and insanity,
becoming genial and human, and compensating by its adaptability to the
common needs of social life for what it lacked of mystery and
aloofness. Therefore, also, in Greek invocations and hymns we do not
often hear the echo of that sublimity that resounds in the Iranian,
Assyrian, and still more in the Hebrew liturgies.
Another interesting point of comparison is the relation of religion to
the arts and sciences. Their association may be said to have been more
intimate in Hellenism than it has been found to be in any other creed.
We can estimate what music and the drama owed to Apollo and Dionysos,
and how the life of the {23} philosopher, artist, and poet was
considered consecrated to certain divinities. We hear of the Delphic
oracle encouraging philosophic pursuits. The name “Museum” is a
landmark in the religious history of education, and we know that the
temple of Asklepios in Kos was the cradle of the school of modern
medicine. The records of the other religions of this area show
glimpses of the same association, and more extended research may throw
further light on it. The Babylonian gods Nebo and Ea were divinities
of wisdom and the arts, and to the former, who was the inventor of
writing, the library of Ashurbanapal was consecrated. Chaldean
astronomy was evolved from their astrology, which was itself a
religious system. But demonology was stronger in Assyria, Persia, and
Egypt than in Hellas, and demonology is the foe of science. In the
Zend-Avesta the priestly medicine-man, who heals by spell and
exorcism, is ranked higher than the scientific practitioner. A chapter
might be written on the negative advantages of Greek religion, and
none was of greater moment than this--that it had no sacred books or
authoritative religious cosmogony to oppose to the dawn and the
development of scientific inquiry. Asklepios had been a practitioner
in the method of thaumaturgic cures, but he accepted Hippokrates
genially when the time came.
As regards the relation between Greek philosophy and Greek religion,
something may remain to be discovered by any scholar who is equally
familiar with both. It would be absurd to attempt to summarise the
facts in a few phrases here. I wish merely to indicate the absence in
pure Hellenic speculation of any elaborated system of theosophy, such
as the late Egyptian “gnosis,” till we come to Neo-Platonism, when the
Greek intellect is no longer pure. We discover {24} also a vacuum in
the religious mind and nomenclature of the earlier Greek: he had
neither the concept nor any name to express the concept of what we
call “faith,” the intellectual acceptance and confessional affirmation
of certain dogmas concerning the divinity; and in this respect he
differed essentially not only from the Christian, but also from the
Iranian and Buddhistic votary.
A great part of the study of ancient religion is a study of ritual,
and it is interesting to survey the Mediterranean area, so as to
discern similarities or divergencies in the forms of religious
service. Everywhere we observe the blood-sacrifice of animals, and
very frequently the harmless offering of fruits and cereals, and now
one, now the other, in Greece as elsewhere, was regarded as the more
pious. The former is of the higher interest, for certain ideas which
have been constructive of higher religions--our own, for example--have
grown out of it. At first sight the animal oblation seems everywhere
much the same in character and significance. The sacrificial ritual of
Leviticus does not differ in any essential trait from that which
commended itself to the Greeks and the other peoples of these lands.
Certain animals are everywhere offered, at times as a free and
cheerful gift, at other times as an atonement to expiate sin and to
deprecate wrath. Certain other animals are tabooed, for reasons that
may repay searching out.
In most regions we have evidence of the practice of human sacrifice,
either as an established system or as an occasional expedient. The
motives that prompted it present an important and intricate question
to the modern inquirer. The two nations that grew to abhor it and to
protest against it were the Hebrew and the Greek, though the latter
did not wholly escape the taint {25} of it; for he had inherited the
practice from his ancestral past, and he found it indigenous in the
lands he conquered. Repellent as the rite may be, it much concerns the
study of the religions of the cultured races.
Now, an interesting theory concerning sacrifice was expounded and
brought into prominent discussion by Professor Robertson Smith in his
_Religion of the Semites_, and in an earlier article in the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_--namely, that a certain type of ancient
sacrifice was a mystic sacramental communion, the worshipper partaking
of some sacred food or drink in which the spirit of the deity was
temporarily lodged. This mystic act, of which there is no clear trace
in the Old Testament, is reported from Egypt,[25.1] and it appears to
have been part of the Attis ritual of Phrygia. We find doubtful traces
of it in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries; also a glimpse of
it here and there in the public religion of Hellas. But it is best
attested as a potent force in the Dionysiac worship, especially in a
certain savage ritual that we may call Thracian, but also in the
refined and Hellenised service as well.
I cannot dwell here on the various aspects of this problem. The
Hellenic statistics and their significance I have partly collected and
estimated in a paper published some years ago.[25.2] The application
of the sacramental idea to the explanation of the Eleusinian
mysteries, ingeniously attempted by Dr. Jevons, I have discussed in
the third volume of my _Cults of the Greek States_; and the Dionysiac
communion-service is considered at length in the fifth.
The attractiveness of the mystic appeal of the {26} Sacrament appears
to have increased in the later days of paganism, especially in its
period of struggle with Christianity. That strangest rite of the
expiring polytheism, the ταυροβόλιον, or the baptism in bull’s blood,
in the worship of Kybele, has been successfully traced back by M.
Cumont to the worship of the Babylonian Anaitis. The sacramental
concept was the stronghold of Mithraism, but can hardly be regarded as
part of its heritage from Persia, for it does not seem to have been
familiar to the Iranian religion nor to the Vedic Indian. In fact, the
religious history of no other Aryan race discloses it with clearness,
save that of the Thraco-Phrygian and Hellenic. Was it, then, a special
product of ancient “Mediterranean” religious thought? It would be
important to know, and Crete may one day be able to tell us, whether
King Minos took the sacrament. Meantime, I would urge upon those who
are studying this phenomenon in the various religions the necessity of
precise definition, so as to distinguish the different grades of the
sacramental concept, for loose statements are somewhat rife about it.
Apart from the ritual of the altar, there is another mode of attaining
mystic union with the divinity--namely, by means of a sacred marriage
or simulated corporeal union. This is suggested by the initiation
formulæ of the mysteries of Attis-Kybele. The cult of Kybele was
connected with that of the Minoan goddess, and the strange legend of
Pasiphae and the bull-god lends itself naturally to this
interpretation. The Hellenic religion also presents us with a few
examples of the holy marriage of the human bride with the god, the
most notable being the annual ceremony of the union of the “Queen,”
the wife of the King Archon, at Athens, with Dionysos. And in the
mysteries of {27} later paganism, as well as in certain forms and
symbolism of early Christianity, Professor Dieterich has traced the
surviving influence of this rite.
Among all the phenomena of ritual, none are more interesting or in
their effects more momentous than the rites that are associated with
the dogma of the death of the divinity. That the high gods are
naturally mortal and liable to death is an idea that is certainly
rare, though it may be found in Egyptian and old Teutonic mythology;
but the dogma of the annual or periodic death and resurrection of the
divinity has been, and is, enacted in much peasant ritual, and worked
for the purposes of agrarian magic in Europe and elsewhere. More
rarely we find the belief attached to the mystic forms and faith of
some advanced religion, and it is specially in the Mediterranean area
where it appears in a high stage of development. It is a salient
feature of the Egyptian worship of Isis; of the Sumerian-Babylonian
ritual, in which the dead Thammuz was bewailed, and which penetrated
Syria and other parts of Asia Minor; of the worship of Attis and
Adonis in Phrygia and the Lebanon; and of certain shrines of the
Oriental Aphrodite. It is associated often with orgiastic sorrow and
ecstatic joy, and with the belief in human immortality of which the
resurrection of the deity is the symbol and the efficacious means.
This idea and this ritual appears to have been alien to the native
Hellenic religion. The Hellenic gods and goddesses do not die and rise
again.
Only in one Aryan nation of antiquity, so far as I am aware, was the
idea clear and operative--the Thraco-Phrygian, in the religion of
Dionysos-Sabazios. This alien cult, when transplanted into Greece,
retained still some savagery in the rite that enacted the death of the
{28} god; but in the Orphic sects the ritual idea was developed into a
doctrine of posthumous salvation, from which the later pre-Christian
world drew spiritual comfort and some fertile moral conceptions. This
Thracian-Dionysiac influence in Hellas, though chastened and sobered
by the sanity of the national temperament, initiated the Hellene into
a certain spiritual mood that was not naturally evoked by the native
religion; for it brought into his polytheism a higher measure of
enthusiasm, a more ecstatic spirit of self-abandonment, than it
possessed by its own traditional bent. Many civilised religions appear
to have passed beyond the phase of orgiastic fervour. It emerges in
the old Egyptian ritual, and most powerfully in the religion of
Phrygia and of certain districts of Syria; but it seems to have been
alien to the higher Semitic and the Iranian religions, as it was to
the native Hellenic.
I have only been able here, without argument or detailed exposition,
to present a short summary of the more striking phenomena in the
religious systems of our spiritual ancestors. Many of the problems I
have stated still invite further research, which may considerably
modify our theories. I claim that the subject possesses a masterful
interest both in its own right and for the light it sheds on ancient
philosophy, ancient art, and ancient institutions. And it ought in the
future to attract more and more the devotion of some of our
post-graduate students. Much remains to be done even for the Hellenic
and Roman religions, still more for those of Egypt and Assyria. Here,
in our University of Oxford, under whose auspices the Sacred Books of
the East were translated, and where the equipment for the study is at
least equal to that of any other centre of learning, this appeal ought
not to be made in vain.