The Morphology of the Compared Religions.
{40}
As I said in a previous lecture,[40.1] “we must regard the
religious structure to which the cults of Anatolia and Mesopotamia
belonged as morphologically the same as the Hellenic.” The grounds of
this judgment may be now briefly shown. In his _Histoire des anciennes
Religions_, Tiele classifies most of these together under the category
of Nature-Religions, which he distinguishes from the ethical: he is
thinking of the distinction between that religious view in which the
divinity is closely associated, or even identified, with some natural
object, and that in which the divinity is a moral being merely, stript
of all attributes that are derived from the world of nature. Serious
objection may be taken to the terms in which this classification of
religions is expressed. The only religions which would fall under the
ethical class would be the Judaic, the Moslem, and the Christian: and
yet the Hebrews in the most exalted period of their religion prayed to
their god for rain and crops, and the Christian Churches do the same
to this day. A deity whose interest is purely ethical has only existed
in certain philosophic systems: he has never had an established cult.
On the other hand, a nature-religion, at the stage when personal
deities have been somewhat developed, which is not also {41} moral,
has yet to be discovered. Religion, in its origin possibly non-moral,
must, as society advances, acquire the closest relations with the
social moral code. A Sun-god or Thunder-god--Shamash, for instance, of
Babylon, Mithras of Persia, Sol Invictus of the later Roman
Empire--may become a great divinity of an ethical cult and yet retain
his association with the element. And it is fruitless to classify
higher religions at least on such a basis of distinction as “moral”
and “non-moral.”[41.1]
It is more to the purpose of our present comparison to employ as one
of our test-standards the degree of personality in the cult-objects of
the different races. Is the popular imagination still on the level of
animism which engenders mere vaguely conceived daimones, shadowy
agents, working perhaps in amorphous groups, without fixed names or
local habitations or special individuality? Or has it reached that
stage of religious perception at which personal deities emerge,
concrete individualities clothed with special attributes, physical,
moral, spiritual? The most superficial study of the cuneiform texts
and the religious monuments of the Sumerian-Babylonian society does
not leave us in doubt how we should answer these questions in behalf
of the peoples in the Mesopotamian valley. When the Semitic tribes
first pushed their way into these regions, swarming probably, as
usual, from Arabia, at some remotely early date, they found there the
non-Semitic Sumerian people possessed of a highly complex religious
pantheon. Bringing with them their own Shamash the sun-god, Adad the
storm-god, and the {42} great goddess Ishtar, and perhaps other
divinities, they nevertheless took over the whole Sumerian pantheon,
with its elaborate liturgy of hymns and incantations; and for the
record of this great and fascinating hieratic literature the Sumerian
language--with interlinear Babylonian-Assyrian paraphrase--was
preserved down to the beginning of our era. This religious system of
dateless antiquity suffered little change “from the drums and
tramplings” of all the conquerors from the time of Sargon 1st and the
kings before Hammurabi to the day of the Macedonian Seleukos. And in a
sketch of this system as it prevailed in the second millennium B.C. it
is quite useless for our purpose to try to distinguish between
Sumerian and Semitic elements. It is more valuable to formulate this
obvious fact, that a widespread belief in personal concrete
divinities, upon which an advanced polytheism was based, was an
immemorial phenomenon in this region. Tiele’s hypothesis[42.1] that
the earliest Sumerian system was not so much a polytheism as a
polydaimonism, out of which certain definite gods gradually emerged
some time before the Semitic period, is merely _a priori_ theorising.
The earliest texts and monuments reveal as vigorous a faith in real
divine personalities as the latest: witness[42.2] that interesting
relief recently found on a slab in the caravan route near Zohab, on
which the goddess In-Hinni is bringing captives to the King
Annubanini: the evidence of the text accompanying it points to a
period earlier than that of King Hammurabi. We may compare with this
the impressive relief which shows {43} us the stately form of
Hammurabi receiving his code of laws from the sun-god Shamash seated
on his throne[43.1]; and of a later date, the alabaster relief from
Khorsabad showing a sacrifice to Marduk, a speaking witness to the
stern solemnity of the Babylonian worship and to the strength of the
faith in personal divinity.[43.2] That this faith was as real in the
polytheistic Babylonian as in the monotheistic Israelite is evinced
not merely by the monuments, but still more clearly and impressively
by the Sumerian hymns and liturgies.
Nevertheless the phenomena of animism coexist in all this region with
those of developed theism. By the side of these high personal deities
we find vague companies of divine powers such as the Igigi and the
Anunnaki, who are conceived more or less as personal but without
clearly imagined individuality, the former being perhaps definable as
the daimones of heaven, the latter as the daimones of earth.
Similarly, in the Hellenic system we note such nameless companies of
divine agencies as the Ἐρινύες and Πραξιδίκαι, conceived independently
of the concrete figures of the polytheism. But, further, in the
Mesopotamian religion we must reckon seriously with lower products of
polydaemonism than these, the demons of evil and disease who so
dominated the imagination and much of the religious life of the
private person that the chief object of the elaborate ritual was, as
we shall see, to combat these. Only, as the curtain gradually rolls
away from the remote past of this earliest home of human culture, it
is not given us to see the gradual emergence of the divine
personalities, or trace--as perhaps we may elsewhere--the {44} process
from polydaimonism to theism. The gods, as far as we can discern, were
always there, and at least it is not in the second millennium B.C.
that me may hope to find the origins of theistic religion.
As regards the other Semitic stocks, the cumulative evidence of early
inscriptions, literary records, and legends is sufficient proof that
the belief in high personal divinities was predominant in this
millennium. It is not necessary to labour here at the details of the
proof; the other lines of inquiry that I am soon going to follow will
give sufficient illustration of this; and it is enough to allude to
the wide prevalence of the designation of the high god as Baal or Bel,
which can be traced from Assyria through Syria, in the Aramaean
communities, in Canaan and Phoenicia, and in the Phoenician colonies:
the Moabite Stone tells us of Chemosh; the earliest Carthaginian
inscriptions of Baal-Hammon and Tanit; from our earliest witness for
Arabian religion, Herodotus,[44.1] we learn that the Arabs named
their two chief divinities, Orotal and Alilat, a god and a goddess,
whom he identifies with Dionysos and Aphrodite Ourania.
It is still more important for us to know the stage reached by the
Hittite religion in this early period; for in the latter half of the
second millennium the influence of the Hittite culture had more chance
of touching the earliest Greek societies than had that of the remote
Mesopotamia or of the inaccessible Canaanites. In the last thirty
years the explorers of Asia Minor, notably Sir William Ramsay and Dr.
Hogarth, have done inestimable service to the comparative study of the
Mediterranean area by the discovery and interpretation of the
monuments of Hittite art: and the greatest of them all, the rock-cut
reliefs of Boghaz-Keui in Cappadocia, {45} has given material to Dr.
Frazer for constructing an elaborate theory of Hittite sacrifice in
his ‘_Attis, Adonis, Osiris_.’ But, before dealing with the Hittite
monuments, the student should note the literary evidence which is
offered by the treaty inscribed on a silver tablet (_circ._ 1290 B.C.)
found in Egypt, which was ratified between Ramses II. and the Hittite
King Chattusar;[45.1] the witnesses to the treaty are the thousand
gods and goddesses of the Hittite land and the thousand gods and
goddesses of Egypt. We are certainly here not dealing with mere vague
pluralities of spirits, such as may be found in an animistic system of
Shamanism; the thousand is only a vague numeral for the plurality of
divinities in the Hittite and Egyptian polytheism; the difference of
sex would alone suffice to prove that the Hittite had developed the
cult of personal deities, and the document expressly quotes the great
heaven-god of the Hittites, called by the Egyptian name Sutekh, and
regarded as compeer of the Egyptian Ra. Other personal Hittite deities
are alluded to in the document, and among them appears to be mentioned
a certain “Antheret of the land of Kheta.”[45.2] Possibly a witness
of still earlier date speaks in the Tel-Amarna letters, the earliest
diplomatic correspondence in the world; one of these, written in
cuneiform to Amenhotep III., in the fifteenth century B.C., is from
Tushratta, the King of the Mitani people.[45.3] Tushratta sends his
daughter in marriage to Pharaoh, and prays that “Shamash and Ishtar
may go before her,” and that Amon may “make her correspond to my
brother’s wish.” He even dispatches a statue of Ishtar of Nineveh,
that “she may {46} exercise her beneficent power in the land of
Egypt”; for she had revealed her desire by an oracle--“to Egypt to the
land that I love will I go.”
The Mitani chieftains bear names that show a convincingly Aryan
formation, and we know from the momentous inscriptions found in 1907
at Boghaz-Keui recording treaties between the king of the Hittites and
the king of the Mitani (B.C. 1400), that the dynasts of the latter
people had Aryan gods in their pantheon.[46.1] But the Mitani
themselves were not Aryans, and are assumed by Winckler and
Messerschmidt to be Hittites.[46.2] If this were proved, the theory
which it is the general aim of these lectures to consider, that the
Babylonian religious system may have reached the Mediterranean in the
second millennium, would receive a certain _vraisemblance_ from the
fact revealed by the letter of King Tushratta, namely, that the Mitani
of this period had adopted some of the Mesopotamian personal
divinities, and might therefore have transmitted them to the coast of
Asia Minor. Yet the Hittites had their own local divine names; from
the cuneiform inscriptions written in the Hittite language found at
Van in Armenia, we gather the names of various Hittite gods, Teshup,
for instance, who appears on a column found at Babylon holding the
lightning, and in his right hand a hammer, which, from the analogy of
other religions, we may interpret as the fetich-emblem of the
thunder.[46.3]
In fact, apart from the literary evidence, the Hittite {47} monuments
would be proof sufficient of the high development of personal religion
in these regions. A relief with Hittite inscriptions, found near
Ibriz, the old Kybistra, near the Cilician gates north of Tauros,
shows us a deity with corn and grapes, and a priest adoring;[47.1] he
is evidently conceived, like Baal by the Semites of Canaan, as a local
god of the earth and of vegetation. But the most striking of all the
Hittite monuments, and one that is all-sufficient in itself for our
present purpose, is the great series of reliefs on the rock at
Boghaz-Keui in Cappadocia, not far from the site of the ancient
Pteria.[47.2] Here is revealed a great and probably mystic pageant of
an advanced polytheism with an elaborate ritual and a clear faith in
high gods and goddesses: the whole procession seems to be passing
along the narrowing gorge towards a Holy of Holies, the inner
cave-shrine of the Mystery.
As we draw nearer to the Mediterranean, the facts are too well known
to need reiteration here. Everywhere we find proofs of a personal
theism reaching far back into prehistoric times: whether it be the
cult of a high god such as the Cilician divinity, called Zeus or
Herakles by the later Greeks, or the Lycian “Apollo,” or a great
goddess such as Ma of Comana, Cybele of Phrygia and Lydia. And now to
all this testimony we can add the recently discovered monuments of a
developed Minoan-Mycenaean religion with the elaborate ritual and
worship of personal divinities, anthropomorphically imagined on the
whole.
Such was the religious world lying before the feet of the Aryan
Hellenes descending from the north; {48} and when their expansion
across the islands to the Asiatic shores began, they would find
everywhere a religion more or less on the same plane of development.
Therefore if, as some students appear to imagine, the aboriginal
Hellene had not developed personal gods before he arrived,[48.1] it
would be irrational to conclude that Babylon had taught him to worship
such beings in place of the vague and flitting daimon. His immediate
teachers would be the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples; and that their
theistic system was derived from Babylon is a theory lacking both
positive evidence and _a priori_ probability, as I may afterwards
indicate. But that the proto-Hellenic peoples were in that backward
condition of religious thought, is in the highest degree improbable.
We must suppose that early in the second millennium they were slowly
pushing their way down through the Balkans and through the country
that is afterwards Thrace. So far as the earliest myths and records of
this region throw some light on its prehistoric darkness, it appears
to have been dominated by a great god. When the Thraco-Phrygian race,
and possibly their kinsmen the Bithynoi, penetrated into the same
region, they brought with them a father-god, who accompanied members
of these stocks into Asia Minor, and settled in Phrygia, Pontus, and
Bithynia by the side of an earlier goddess. Their cousins of the
Indo-Iranian stock had certainly reached the stage of personal
polytheism before 1400 B.C., as the epoch-making discovery of the
Hittite-Mitani inscriptions at Boghaz-Keui, referred to above,
sufficiently indicates.[48.2] We cannot believe that the Hellenes of
the earliest {49} migration were inferior in culture to those
Thracians, Bithynians, or even Indo-Iranians; for various reasons we
must believe the reverse. And we now know from modern anthropology
that peoples at a very low grade of culture, far lower than that which
the Aryan stocks had reached at the time of the great migrations, have
yet attained to the idea of personal and relatively high gods. In
fact, that scepticism of certain philological theorists who, a few
years ago, were maintaining that the Aryans before their separation
may have had no real gods at all, is beginning to appear audacious and
uncritical. At any rate, in regard to the Hellenes, the trend of the
evidence is to my mind weighty and clear, making for the conviction
that the different stocks not only possessed the cult of personal
gods, but had already the common worship of certain deities when first
they entered Greece. Otherwise, when we consider the mutual hostility
of the various tribes and the geographical difficulties in the way of
intercourse in early Greece, it would be difficult to explain the
religious facts of the Homeric poems. We might, indeed, if Homer was
our only witness, suspect him of representing what was merely local
Achaean religion as common to all Greece. But we can check him by many
other witnesses, by ancient myths and cults of diverse localities.
Zeus was worshipped by some, at least, of the main tribes, when they
were in the neighbourhood of Olympus: he is no more Thessalian than he
is Dryopian. One of the earliest Hellenic immigrants were perhaps the
Minyai, and their aboriginal god was Poseidon. The ritual of Apollo
preserves the clearest reminiscence of his entry from the north, and
he is the high god of one of the oldest Hellenic tribes, the Dryopes,
and the wide diffusion of his cult suggests that aboriginally it was a
{50} common inheritance of several stocks. The force of the evidence
that may be urged for this view is ignored by Wilamowitz in his
brilliant but fallacious theory of the Lycian origin of the god. We
must reject the hypothesis of a proto-Hellenic godless period; but, on
the other hand, the mere fact that the early Greek religion appears on
the same plane as the Mesopotamian, in respect of the worship of
personal beings, gives no support at all to the theory of Oriental
influence. If it is to be accepted, it must be sustained by more
special evidence.