Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia
Minor and the Mediterranean.
{51}
A comparison made according to the test we have just applied is not
so important as that which arises in the second stage of the inquiry.
Assuming that the peoples on the east and west of the Aegean were
already on the same religious plane when the first glimmer of what may
be called history begins, can we discern certain striking resemblances
or differences in their conception and imagination of divinity,
sufficient to prove or disprove the theory of borrowing or of a
movement across large areas of certain waves of religious influence
emanating from a fixed centre?
The comparison now becomes more complex, and can only be summarily
attempted. The first leading question concerns the way in which the
personal divine being is imagined. In Mesopotamia was the religious
perception dominatingly anthropomorphic, not merely in the sense that
the higher divine attributes were suggested by the higher moral and
spiritual life of humanity, but in the more material sense that the
deity was imagined and represented habitually in human form? This
question has been summarily treated in the first chapter. The
Mesopotamian cults are mainly anthropomorphic; in the earliest hymns
and liturgies, as well as in the art-monuments, the divinities appear
to have been {52} imagined as glorified human forms. The figure of
Shamash on the relief, where he sits enthroned inspiring
Hammurabi,[52.1] the form of Ninni bringing the captives to
Annabanini,[52.2] prove a very early dominance of anthropomorphic art
in Mesopotamia. And the rule holds true on the whole of nearly all the
great divinities of the Pantheon; the statue of Nebo the scribe-god in
the British Museum,[52.3] and the representation of him on the
cylinders, are wholly anthropomorphic. The seven planetary deities on
the relief from Maltaija are human-shaped entirely;[52.4] we may say
the same of the procession of deities on the relief from a palace of
Nineveh published by Layard,[52.5] except that Marduk has horns
branching from the top of his head; just as on the alabaster relief
containing the scene of worship noted above,[52.6] and on the
wall-relief in the British Museum he is represented with wings; but
even the rigorous anthropomorphism of Greece tolerated both these
adjuncts to the pure human type. The types of Ramman the
weather-god,[52.7] and the representations of a Babylonian goddess,
who is occasionally found with a child on her knee, and whom sometimes
we may recognise as Ishtar, show nothing that is theriomorphic. On the
other hand, we must note exceptions to this general rule. In one of
the cuneiform inscriptions that describe certain types of deities, we
read the following: “Horn of a bull, clusters of hair falling on his
back; human countenance, and strength of a…; wings… and lion’s body.”
And this description {53} agrees exactly, as Jeremias has pointed out,
with the winged colossal figures, half-lion, half-man, that guarded
the gate of the palace of Nineveh. And we must therefore interpret
them as gods, not as mere _genii_; and he gives some reason for
regarding them as a type of Nergal, the god of the underworld.[53.1]
Further, we find in an inscription of Asarhaddon the following prayer:
“May the gracious bull-god and lion-god ever dwell in that palace,
protecting the path of my royalty.”[53.2]
There is some doubt in regard to the winged figures with eagles’ heads
on the reliefs from Khorsabad, in the British Museum (pl. 38-40): they
are represented holding pine-cones and a “cista mystica” on each side
of the sacred tree, and might be _genii_ engaged in worship; but on
one of the reliefs Assur-nasir-Pal is standing before one of them in
attitude of adoration.
But the most clear and definite evidence on this point is afforded by
the legend and monuments of the god whom Berosos calls Oannes,[53.3]
but whom modern Assyriology interprets as the ocean-born god Ea or Ae
of Eridu, the god of all wisdom and science. According to Berosos, he
had entirely a fish body, but a human head had grown under the head of
the fish, human feet out of the fish’s tail, and he spoke with human
voice: a statue of this type was still existing at Babylon according
to this writer in the time of Alexander. Now the exact type is
presented in the form that appears on various Babylonian cylinders;
there is one that presents the fish-man-god standing before the tree
of Life--receiving a ray perhaps from the sun above:[53.4] and half
{54} his form from the girdle downwards is preserved on a bas-relief
published by Layard,[54.1] showing him holding the bread of life in
one hand and in the other a vase containing the water of life. Here,
then, is theriomorphism struggling with anthropomorphism as we see it
strikingly in the religious monuments of Egypt.
But we have no need of the theory, dear to some anthropologists--that
the earliest period of Mesopotamian religion was purely theriomorphic,
when the deities were imagined and represented merely as animals, and
that the human-shaped deities whom we find standing on lions in the
Babylonian art had once been divine lions and nothing more, and had at
a later period emerged from the animal into divine manhood.
Theriomorphism and anthropomorphism can and generally do confusedly
co-exist: neither in the lowest savagery or at the highest culture is
there found a purely theriomorphic art or theriomorphic religion; on
the other hand, severe anthropomorphism among the ancient religions is
to be found only in the Hellenic, and we may add in the Judaic, though
here with a quite different mode of expression and far more sternly
controlled. In Mesopotamia we have nothing that points to a direct
worship of animals,[54.2] but we discern that the anthropomorphism is
unstable; {55} the religious artist mainly clung to it, except when he
was embodying forms of terror, the destructive demons, and especially
the powers of the lower world: for this purpose he selected the most
portentous types of bestiality, such as we find on that bronze tablet,
which used to be regarded as revealing an interesting glimpse into
Babylonian eschatology: at least we may be sure that the lion-headed
female above the horse in the canoe, at whose breasts two small lions
are sucking, is the goddess of Hell.[55.1] It was probably through
his association with the world of death that Nergal acquired something
of the lion’s nature, and even the very human goddess Ishtar might
assume a lion’s head when she was unusually wroth, though this rests
on a doubtful text. We may say, then, with fair degree of accuracy,
that the theriomorphic forms of Babylonian religious art belong to
demonology; and in this domain the Babylonian artist has shown the
same powerful imagination as the Mycenaean: it is the former to whom
we are indebted for the attractively alarming type of the
scorpion-man.
The phrase “unstable anthropomorphism” applies also to the religious
literature, to the Sumerian-Babylonian hymns. The imagination of the
poets in their highest exaltation was certainly anthropomorphic on the
whole; the high divinities are conceived and presented with the
corporeal, moral, and spiritual traits of glorified humanity. But
often in the ecstasy of invocation the religious poets felt the human
image too narrow and straightened for their struggling sense of the
Infinite. Then the expression becomes mystic, and by virtue of a
curious law that I indicated above, it avails itself of theriomorphic
imagery.[55.2] I quoted the hymn {56} to the warrior Marduk that
invokes him as “Black Bull of the deep, Lion of the Dark House.” Of
still more interest is the invocation of Enlil, the earth-god of
Sumer: “Overpowering ox, exalted overpowering ox, at thy word which
created the world, O lord of lands, lord of the word of life, O Enlil,
Father of Sumer, shepherd of the dark-haired people, thou who hast
vision of thyself.”[56.1] Seven times the words “overpowering ox” are
added in this mystic incantation. In another hymn Enlil is “the Bull
that overwhelms”; Ea, “the Ram of Eridu.”
But this is mystic symbolism, rather than a clear perception of divine
personality; and we may say the same of such vaguely picturesque
phrases as “Bel, the great mountain,” “Asur, the great rock,” an
expression parallel to our “Rock of Ages.”[56.2]
It naturally happens in a religion of unstable anthropomorphism that
the different personalities are unfixed and may melt away one into the
other, or may become conceived as metaphysical emanations, thus losing
concrete individuality. As Dr. Langdon remarks of Babylonian religious
phraseology, “the god himself becomes mystified, he retires into the
hazy conception of an all-pervading spirit, and his _word_ becomes the
active agent.”[56.3] Thus even the strongly personal goddess “Nana”
is identified with the word of Enlil; she herself exclaims, “Of the
Lord his word am I.” His statement accords with the general impression
that the liturgies and monuments of this vast and complex religion
make upon the student. One discerns that the religious art, and to
some extent the religious poetry, developed {57} and strengthened the
anthropomorphic faith and perception of the people, but not so
powerfully as to preclude a mysticising tendency towards metaphysical
speculation that transcended the limits of a polytheism of concrete
personalities. Even Allatu, the goddess of Hell, she who was presented
with the dog’s head and the lions at the breast, was half
spiritualised by the epithet which is rendered “spirit-wind of the
consecrate.”[57.1]
In the other ancient Semitic communities we find the same phenomenon,
a prevailing anthropomorphism with some slight admixture of
theriomorphic idea. At Bambyke, the later Hierapolis, we have the
record and tradition of Atargatis-Derketo, of human and fish-form
combined. In the cult of Esmun in Phoenicia, Baudissin[57.2] suspects
the incarnation of the god in a snake, which brought about his later
identification with Asklepios, and he suggests that the bronze serpent
that healed the Israelites in the desert was borrowed from a Canaanite
idol of a healing snake. The Astarte-images found in prehistoric
Palestine are mainly of human type, but one gives her the curving
horns of a ram, and a rude bronze was found at Tel Zakariya of an
amphibious goddess with human head and the tail of a fish.[57.3]
Something real underlies the statement of Sanchuniathon, quoted by
Eusebios, {58} that Astarte placed on her own head the head of a
bull.[58.1]
But these are exceptional phenomena; and as the Hellenes in the later
period were usually able to identify the leading Semitic deities with
their own, we may see in this another proof that the Western and
Eastern religions were nearly on the same plane as regards their
perception of divine personality.
Only, we discern signs in Canaan as in Mesopotamia, that the
anthropomorphism is, as I have called it, unstable; for not only can
the divinity be imagined as embodied in other forms than the human,
but the demarcations of individuality tend at certain points to fall
away: the most curious instance of this is that the female divinity
seems at times to have been almost absorbed in the god. We must,
however, distinguish here between what is real belief and what is mere
theologic phrasing. In a hymn of praise to Ishtar, composed for the
King Ashurbanapal, the equality of the goddess with the great Assyrian
god Asshur is quaintly expressed by the phrase, “like Ashur, she wears
a beard”; but Jastrow[58.2] protests against the inference that the
goddess was therefore really regarded as male in the Mesopotamian
religion. And indeed this is probably only a fantastic expression of
the idea that Ishtar is the compeer in power of the god, and has much
of the masculine temperament. Even in the full vogue of an
anthropomorphic religion which insists on the distinctions of sex, a
mystical religious thinker could rise to the idea that the divinity
might assume the powers {59} of both natures, an idea of which we find
a glimpse in the later Greek and Greek-Egyptian theosophy. Thus a
Sumerian hymn to Enlil characterises him as “Lord of winds, father and
mother who creates himself”;[59.1] and a well-known hymn to Sin
speaks of him as “Maternal Body that brings everything to birth,” and
in the next line as “Compassionate, gracious father.”[59.2]
The close approximation of the goddess to the god is more clearly
discernible in the Canaanite religion. On the Moabite Mesha stone,
Ashtar-Chemosh appears as a double divinity; and one of the earlier
Carthaginian inscriptions refers to a temple of Moloch-Astarte.[59.3]
Again Astarte, in the inscription on the sarcophagus of Eshmounazar of
Sidon, is called Astart-Shem-Baal, which signifies Astarte the Face of
Baal; and in the Carthaginian inscriptions the same designation occurs
for Tanit. Renan has interpreted the phrase as expressing the dogma
that the goddess is an emanation of the god, but Dr. Langdon would
explain it as arising from the close opposition of the two statues
face to face, Astart-Shem-Baal merely meaning, then, “She who fronts
Baal.” Whichever interpretation be correct, such close assimilation of
the pair might evolve here and there the concept of a bisexual
divinity. Unless the evidence of the classical writers is false, it
did so at a later period under Phoenician influences in Cyprus.
Macrobius tells us that there was in that island a statue of a bearded
deity in female dress, regarded as bisexual, and he quotes Philochoros
as witness to the fact, and to the curious phenomenon in the ritual in
which the {60} men wore female dress and the women male. This explains
Catullus’ phrase “duplex Amathusia” of the bisexual goddess. Servius
and the Christian fathers repeat the statement, and Joannes Lydus
asserts that the Pamphylians at one time worshipped a bearded
Aphrodite;[60.1] if we trust his authority, we might explain the fact
as due to late Semitic influence, which is somewhat attested by
inscriptions on the coinage of Pamphylia under the Persian
domination.[60.2] But, at the most, we can only regard this cult as a
late phenomenon, a local eccentricity, and a morbid development of a
certain vague idea that was working sporadically in the old Semitic
religion. We have no right to assert, as some have occasionally
ventured, that the Semitic peoples generally accepted the dogma of a
bisexual divinity.
Turning now to the other great area of culture that lay between
Mesopotamia and the coast, that of the Hittite kingdoms, we find that
the Hittite deity is usually presented in human form. On the great
relief of Boghaz-Keui, the distinctions of the human family appear in
the divine forms, in whom we may recognise the father god, the mother
goddess with her young son, or it may be, as Dr. Frazer suggests, with
her young lover. And the other Hittite representations of divinity to
which I have referred above are of purely human form, and so also are
the small Hittite bronze idols in the Ashmolean Museum. Nevertheless
here, as in Mesopotamia, the theriomorphic fancy was active at the
same time. On the relief at Boghaz-Keui, nearest to the innermost
shrine, the Holy of Holies, is an idol {61} of human visage with a
body composed of a bizarre arrangement of lion-forms; and in the
procession near to the main deities we note a strange representation
of two bulls in mitred caps of Hittite fashion, and to these mystic
beasts we may apply the name theanthropic, which Robertson Smith
suggested for the sacrificial animal that was half-divine, half-human.
And clearer evidence still is afforded by another relief found not far
from this site at the palace of Euiuk, where a bull is represented on
a pedestal with worshippers approaching.[61.1] He is not here the
sacrificial animal, for he and the altar before him are on a higher
plane, while the priest and priestess below are raising their hands to
him as if in adoration, and are leading rams evidently as victims to
the bull-god. We may be sure, then, that there was some close
association of the Hittite divinity with the bull, as there was with
the lions upon which both god and goddess are standing; and this is
further illustrated by the horns that adorn the conical cap of the god
at Ibriz,[61.2] to whom the grapes and corn were consecrated.
Again, the relief on the gate at Sinjerli[61.3] affords us another
clear example of a divinity only partly anthropomorphic: a god with
the body of a man and the head of a lion; as he bears a hunting weapon
in one hand and a hare in the other, and on each shoulder a bird is
sitting, we may regard him as a deity of the chase. Finally, from
certain cuneiform texts found at Boghaz-Keui, and recently published
and interpreted by Professor Sayce,[61.4] we gather that the eagle,
probably the double-headed {62} eagle which appears as an ensign on
Hittite monuments, was deified; for we appear to have a reference to
“the house” or temple “of the eagle” (Bit Id Khu), and this fact may
help to explain the figure of a man’s body with a bird’s head on a
relief of Sinjerli.[62.1]
As regards the test, then, that we are at present applying, it seems
that the Hittite and the Mesopotamian religions were more or less on
the same plane, though we may suspect that theriolatry was stronger in
the former. It is also important for our purpose to register in
passing the clear proof of certain religious approximations, probably
in the second millennium B.C., between the Hittites and the
Assyrian-Babylonian kingdom. The Hittite god Teshup, with the
double-headed hammer or axe and the forked lightning in his hand, is
of close kin and similar in type to the Canaanite, Syrian, and
Babylonian Ramman-Adad, the god of storms.[62.2] But the evidence
does not yet seem to me to make it clear which people or group of
peoples was in this case the borrower, which the lender. And the same
doubt arises in respect of the striking art-type of the divinity
standing on the lion; we find it in the early Hittite monuments, such
as the Boghaz-Keui sculptured slabs; and again on the relief of
Gargamich, on which is a winged male deity standing on a lion and a
priest behind him, also on a lion;[62.3] and later among the Tarsos
representations of the Hittite Sandon: it was in vogue at the Syrian
Bambyke and at Babylon. The assumption of Perrot[62.4] is that it was
{63} of Babylonian origin, but the art-chronology does not seem to
speak decisively in this matter. It is not necessary here to prejudge
this difficult problem: it does not directly affect our present
question, as the type of the goddess with lions comes into Hellas only
at a later period. As regards the other Anatolian peoples who came
into close contact with the Hellenes, we may find abiding influences
of certain Hittite religious ideas and motives of religious art. We
may admit that the lion-borne goddess of Boghaz-Keui is the prototype
of Kybele, even the crenelated headdress that she wears suggesting the
turreted diadem of the later goddess: it is likely that the ancient
type of Teshup, the weather-god with hammer or axe and the lightning,
survived in Commagene in the cult-figure that was afterwards
interpreted as Jupiter Dolichenus: and it may have influenced the
ideas about the thunder-god in Pontus, as a primitive relief of a god
brandishing a thunderbolt and holding a shield has been found near
Amasia.[63.1] Speaking generally, we must pronounce the native
pre-Hellenic religious art of the Asia Minor littoral, of Phrygia,
Lydia, Caria, anthropomorphic, so far as it tried at all to embody the
imagined form of the divinity. The record is generally blurred by the
later Hellenic influences. But we have at least in Phrygia rude images
of the pre-Hellenic Cybele; the intention of these is anthropomorphic,
and in the rough outline of the goddess’s form as hewn out of the rock
of Sipylos above Smyrna, the Hellenes could discern their sorrowing
Niobe. Where the anthropomorphism fails, as in the Phrygian monument,
which shows Cybele seated with a phiale and human-shaped in other
respects, but with a head fashioned like “the round capital of a {64}
pillar,”[64.1] the influence of the aniconic fetich may be the cause.
At any rate, we have no clear trace of theriomorphism either in the
legend nor in the monuments of the great mother, the Kybele of
Phrygia, or the Mā of Cappadocia. The power of the mountain-goddess
was incarnate in the lions, but we have no ground for saying that she
herself was ever worshipped as a lion.
We turn at last to the Minoan-Mycenaean and proto-Hellenic periods;
for our present purpose the two cannot well be kept apart, as much of
the evidence concerning the former is derived from records of myths
and religious customs that were in vogue in the later period. Our
first glimpse of the Minoan religion, which Sir Arthur Evans more than
any one else has revealed to us,[64.2] gave us the impression of an
aniconic worship that had for its sacred “agalmata” such fetich
objects as the sacred pillar or double-headed axe, but which did not
express its actual imagination of its divinities in any art-type. If
this were so, we should not be able to answer the question how far the
Minoan religion was purely anthropomorphic until we have found the
interpretation of Minoan writing. But our store of monuments has been
much enriched by later discoveries in the Palace of Knossos, and in
one of its private chapels in which the Cross was the central sacred
emblem, Sir Arthur Evans found the interesting figure of the
snake-goddess--purely human, but holding snakes in her hands and
girdled with snakes, while before her stands a votary {65} brandishing
a snake:[65.1] again, a Minoan signet-ring published by him[65.2]
revealed the great mountain-goddess herself on the summit of a peak
flanked by lions and holding a spear. These may be actual
reproductions of cult-images; and many other gems and other works have
now been published by him and others proving that the people who
belonged to this great Aegean culture of the second millennium
habitually conceived of their gods in human form, even if they did not
as a rule erect their idols in their temples. Thus on a gem which
shows us an act of worship performed by a female votary before a
sacred pillar, a human-shaped god with rays round his head and holding
a spear is hovering in the air above it;[65.3] and on the great
sarcophagus of Praisos we have on the one side a complex scene of
ritual, conspicuous for the absence of any idol or eikon of the
divinity, and at the other end a human form of god, or it may be hero,
standing as if he had just come forth from his shrine or
heroön.[65.4] In fact, the Minoan-Mycenaean religious monuments have
revealed to us at least three personages, anthropomorphically
conceived, of the popular religion of the period that we may call
pre-Hellenic: a great goddess, often represented as throned, with
fruits and emblems of vegetation around her, or as standing on a
mountain and associated with lions; a god who is sometimes conversing
with her or is descending from the sky armed with spear and
shield,[65.5] and sometimes rayed; thirdly, the goddess with the
snake as her familiar. {66} To this extent, then, the Minoan-Mycenaean
peoples were on the same plane of religion as those of Mesopotamia:
and the record of the anthropomorphic divinity can be traced in the
Aegean area back to the fourth millennium B.C. by the nude figures in
stone of a goddess of fecundity with arms pressed across her breasts,
a type belonging to the Neolithic period.
In passing, let us observe that neither the earliest prehistoric art
of the Mediterranean nor the great religious types of the Minoan
divinities recall the art style of Mesopotamia.
But this developed anthropomorphism of the early Aegean civilisation
is not the whole story. Modern research has accumulated evidence that
seems to point to a theriomorphic religion in Crete and in Mycenaean
Greece which has been supposed by some to have preceded the former in
order of time and in the logical process of evolution, and which at
any rate survived by the side of it. Traces of the same phenomenon
have been noted in the Hittite area, and more faintly in the valley of
the Euphrates. The first modern writer who proclaimed with emphasis
the theriomorphic elements in the prehistoric religions of Greece was
Mr. A. Lang in his _Custom and Myth_, connecting it with a theory of
totemism that does not concern us here. Afterwards, a systematic
treatment of the problem in the light of the monuments of the Cretan
and Mycenaean periods was presented by Mr. Cook in a paper published
in the _Hellenic Journal_ of 1894 on “Animal Worship in the Mycenaean
Age”; and again in 1895 by an essay on “The Bee in Greek Mythology”: a
very full collection of the materials, with some exposition of
important religious theory, will be found in De Visser’s treatise, _De
Graecorum Diis non referentibus speciem humanam_ {67} (1900). Miss J.
Harrison has worked further along the same lines, and has published
some special results in her paper read before the Congress of the
History of Religions, 1908, and published in its _Transactions_, on
“Bird and Pillar Worship in relation to Ouranian Divinities.”
Now the material that forms the fabric of these researches is so
intricate, the relevant facts so manifold and minute, that it is
impossible to consider them in detail within the limits of this
present inquiry, of which the leading object is an important question
of history concerning the religious influence of the East on the West;
and, again, the writers above mentioned are deeply concerned with
theories about the origins, or at least the earlier stages in the
evolution of religion. And as I am only comparing East and West in a
limited and somewhat advanced period of their history, I am not
necessarily bound to deal with problems of origin. Nevertheless, a
summary survey of this group of facts may provide us with important
clues towards the solution of our main question. But a few general
criticisms of the assumptions which, whether latent or explicit, are
commonly made in the writings just quoted, may be useful at the
outset. First, one finds that the word “worship” is used very loosely
by the ancients as well as by contemporary writers: and by its vague
and indiscriminate employment an effort is made to convince us that
the pre-Hellenic and proto-Hellenic world worshipped the lion, the ox,
the horse, the ass, the stag, the wolf, the pig, the bird, especially
the dove, the eagle, and lastly even the cock. We should have to deal
with a savage religion rioting in theriolatry, and we should not need
to trouble any longer about the theory of its Mesopotamian origin, for
as we have seen theriomorphism played a very small part in the
Sumerian-Babylonian cult. But one {68} must ask more precisely, What
is worship, and what does lion-worship, for instance, imply? Are we to
believe that every one of these animals was worshipped, the whole
species being divine? And does their “worship” mean that the
superstitious people prayed to them, built altars or sacred columns,
or even shrines to them, and offered them sacrifice? It has become
urgent to reserve some such strict sense for the word as this, in
order to preserve a sense of the distinction between our
ritual-service of a real personal divinity and the various, often
trifling, acts that may be prompted by the uneasy feeling or
reverential awe evoked by the presence of a curious or dangerous
animal. Thus, to abstain from eating or injuring mice or weasels is
not to worship mice or weasels: to lament over a dead sea-urchin is
not to worship sea-urchins: to give a wolf a decorous funeral is not
to worship wolves: to throw a piece of sacrificial meat to flies
before a great sacrifice to some high divinity is not to worship
flies. All these things the civilised Greeks could do, but they ought
not for that to be charged with worshipping whole species of animals
directly as gods. Next let us bear well in mind that secular animals,
like secular things, can become temporarily sacred through contact
with the altar: thus the ox who voluntarily approached the altar and
ate of the grain or cakes upon it, might be believed by the Hellenes
to become instantly divine, full of the life of the divinity, and most
ceremonious respect resembling worship might be meted out to him; but
we should not hastily believe that the Greeks who might feel like this
towards that particular ox worshipped all oxen; or that the society of
King Minos worshipped all axes wherever found, because in peculiar
circumstances and ritual an axe might become charged with {69}
divinity. Finally, I may again protest against the fallacy of
supposing that theriomorphism always precedes anthropomorphism: for an
ever-increasing mass of evidence forces one to the conviction that
they are often co-existent and always compatible one with the other;
if this is so, it is rash and unscientific to say, as is so easy to
say and is so often said, when one meets in the Mediterranean or
elsewhere a human god or goddess accompanied by a lion or a cock, that
the anthropomorphic divinity has been evolved from the animal.
Looking now directly to the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments, before we
consider the early Hellenic records, we must distinguish between those
that are obviously cult-scenes and those that are not obviously but
only hypothetically so, and this second class are those with which Mr.
Cook’s papers mainly deal. The former have been treated masterfully by
Sir Arthur Evans in his paper on “Tree and Pillar Cult”; from these we
gather that the worshipper did not usually pray before an idol, but
before a pillar or a sacred tree combined often with horns of
consecration or an axe; also that he imagined his deity generally in
human form, the pillar serving as a spiritual conductor to draw down
the divinity from heaven. Therefore I may remark that the phrase
“pillar-cult” here, and in Miss Harrison’s paper quoted above, does
not express the inwardness of the facts. But the latter writer
endeavours to prove the prevalence of a direct cult of birds in this
period; and further maintains the dogma that “in the days of pillar
and bird anthropomorphism was not yet.” The Minoan monuments on which
she relies are the great Phaistos sarcophagus, the trinity of
terra-cotta pillars surmounted by doves found in an early shrine of
the Palace of Knossos,[69.1] with {70} which are to be compared the
dove-shrine of Mycenae and the gold-leafed goddesses of Mycenae with a
dove perched on their heads; and finally, the semi-aniconic idol of a
dove goddess, with the dove on her head and her arms outspread like
wings, found in another shrine of the palace of Knossos, and
descending from a pre-Mycenaean traditional type.[70.1] Whatever we
may think of these monuments, they cannot be quoted as the memorials
of a time “when anthropomorphism was not yet”; for the earliest of
them, probably that mentioned last, is of later date than the type of
the naked human-formed goddess of the Neolithic Aegean period.
The question depends wholly on the true interpretation of the
monuments; as regards the Phaistos sarcophagus, the exact significance
of the ritual is still a matter of controversy, to which I may return
later, when I compare the ritual of east and west; this much is clear,
that a holy service of blood-oblation is being performed before two
sacred trees, into the top of which two axes are inserted and on the
axes are two birds painted black. Is it immediately clear that “the
birds are objects of a definite cult,” as Miss Harrison
maintains?[70.2] This may be strongly disputed; otherwise we must say
that the axe and the tree are equally direct objects of cult. But the
illuminative scene on the signet-ring described above[70.3] suggests
that the function of the pillar was to serve as a powerful magnet to
attract a personal divinity. And Sir Arthur Evans has well shown that
the tree and the pillar were of equal value as sacred objects in
Minoan-Mycenaean religion. A sacrifice doubtless of mystic and magical
power is {71} being performed before them here: the worshippers may
well believe that the combined influence of blood-offering, sacred
tree, and sacred axe will draw down the divinity of the skies. In what
form visible to the eye would he descend? The carver of that
signet-ring dared to show him above the pillar in human form, as the
mind’s eye though not the sense-organ of the worshipper discerned him.
But the artist of the Phaistos sarcophagus is more reserved. As the
Holy Ghost descended in the form of a dove, so the unseen celestial
divinity of Crete might use any bird of the air as his messenger,
perhaps by preference the woodpecker or dove. And this natural idea
would be supported by the fact that occasionally birds did alight on
the top of sacred columns, and they would then instantly be charged
with the sanctity of that object and would be regarded as a sign of
the deity’s presence and as an auspicious answer to prayer and
sacrifice. Thus many birds in Greece became sacred by haunting
temples; and Dr. Frazer has suggested that the swallows and sparrows
that nested on the temple or on the altar at Jerusalem acquired
sanctity by the same simple religious logic.[71.1] But it is futile
to argue that therefore the Hellenes and Hebrews once worshipped
either the whole species of swallows and sparrows or any single one.
And Sir Arthur Evans’ own interpretation of the doves on the triple
group of columns, as being merely “the image of the divine descent,
and of the consequent possession of the bactylic column by a spiritual
being,” is sane and convincing.[71.2] This does not prove or
necessarily lead to “bird-worship.” Further, he suggests[71.3] that
as the dove was originally posed on the top of the column {72} as a
gracious sign of the divine presence, so when the human form was
beginning to take the place of the column the dove would then be seen
on the human head, as in the case of the statuettes of goddesses
mentioned above, and as it appeared on the head of the golden image at
Bambyke, which some called Semiramis.[72.1] The close association of
the Mediterranean goddess and of the goddess of Askalon, Phoenicia,
and Bambyke with doves may have been caused by several independent
reasons; one may well have been the habitual frequenting of her temple
by the birds. This would easily grow into a belief that the goddess
when she wished to reveal something of her presence and power to the
external eye would manifest herself in the bird. This we may call
theriomorphic imagination that goes _pari passu_ easily with the
anthropomorphic. But none of these monuments come near to proving that
this Mediterranean race directly worshipped birds, nor do they suggest
any such theory as that the human divinity emerged from the bird. We
shall, in fact, find that evidence of this kind that I have been
examining, used recklessly in similar cases, leads to absurd
results.[72.2]
Here it is well to remark in passing that the cult of {73} the
Dove-goddess is a test case for trying the question of Oriental
influence on the west. It cannot be traced back to Babylon, and no one
would now maintain the old theory that the dove-shrines of Mycenae
were an import from the Phoenician Astarte cult. Sir Arthur Evans’
discoveries enable us to carry back this particular worship in the
Aegean to pre-Mycenaean times. We could with better right maintain
that the Syrians borrowed it from the Aegean or possibly from Askalon,
where, as Dr. Evans has pointed out, Minoan influences were strong.
But the most reasonable view is that which he expresses that “the
divine associations of the dove were a primitive heritage of primitive
Greece and Anatolia.”[73.1]
As regards Mr. Cook’s theory of Mycenaean animal-worship, it is not
now necessary to examine it at any length. It was based mainly on a
comparison of a fairly large number of “Mycenaean” seals and gems from
Crete and elsewhere showing monsters bearing animals on their
shoulders or standing by them. He interpreted the “monsters” as men
engaged in a religious mummery, wearing the skins of lions, asses,
horses, bulls, stags, swine, that is, as ministers of a divine lion,
ass, etc., bringing sacrificial animals to these animal-deities, and
he raised the large questions of totemism and totemistic
cult-practices. His theory presents a picture of zoolatric ritual that
cannot be paralleled elsewhere in the world either among primitive or
advanced societies. And we begin to distrust it when it asks us to
interpret the figures in a gem-representation as an ass-man bearing
two lions to sacrifice; for neither in Greece, Egypt, or {74} Asia is
there any record of a lion-sacrifice, a ceremony which would be
difficult to carry out with due solemnity. The more recent discovery
of a set of clay-sealings at Zakro in Crete by Dr. Hogarth, who
published them in the _Hellenic Journal_ of 1902, has rendered Mr.
Cook’s view of the cult-value of these “monsters” now untenable. They
are found in combinations too widely fantastic to be of any value for
totemistic or a zoolatric theory, and the opinion of archaeologists
like Sir Arthur Evans and Winter[74.1] that these bizarre forms arose
from modifications of foreign types, such as the Egyptian hippopotamus
goddess, crossed at times with the hippokamp and the lion, has
received interesting confirmation from the discovery of a shell relief
at Phaistos showing a series of monsters with hippopotamus heads, and
in a pose derived undoubtedly from a Nilotic type.[74.2] We may
venture to say that the exuberant fancy of the Minoan-Mycenaean artist
ran riot and amused itself with wild combinations of monsters, men and
animals, to which no serious meaning was attached.
Only rarely, when the monsters are ritualistically engaged in watering
a sacred palm tree or column,[74.3] does the religious question
arise. And here we may find a parallelism in Assyrian religious art,
in the representation of “winged genii fertilising the adult palms
with the male cones”; but according to Sir Arthur Evans this motive is
later in the Eastern art than in the Mycenaean. Perhaps only one type
of monster found on these gems and seals is derived from a real
theriomorphic figure of the contemporary religion, namely, the
Minotaur {75} type. A few of the Zakro sealings show the sealed figure
of a human body with bovine head, ears, and tail[75.1]; and a clay
seal-impression found at Knossos presents a bovine human figure with
possibly a bovine head sealed in a hieratic attitude before a warrior
in armour.[75.2] Such archaeological evidence is precarious, but when
we compare it with the indigenous Cretan legends of the bull-Zeus and
the union of Pasiphae with the bull, we are tempted to believe that a
bull-headed god or a wholly bovine deity had once a place in Minoan
cult.
To conclude, this brief survey of the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments
points to a contemporary religion that preferred the aniconic agalma
to the human idol, but imagined the divinity mainly as
anthropomorphic, though this imagination was probably not so fixed as
to discard the theriomorphic type entirely. Therefore this religion is
on the same plane with that of Mesopotamia rather than with that of
Egypt.
Turning now to the proto-Hellenic period, which, without prejudging
any ethnic question, I have kept distinct from the Mycenaean, we have
here the advantage of literary records to assist the archaeological
evidence. I have stated my conviction that the earliest Hellenes had
already reached the stage of personal polytheism before conquering the
southern Peninsula; and the combined evidence of the facts of myths
and cults justifies the belief that their imagination of the deity was
mainly anthropomorphic. By the period of the Homeric poems, composed
perhaps some five centuries after the earliest entrance of the
Hellenes, we must conclude that the anthropomorphism as a religious
{76} principle was predominant in the more progressive minds that
shaped the culture of the race: a minute but speaking example of this
is the change that ensued in accordance with Homeric taste in the
meaning of the old hieratic epithet βοῶπις; in all probability it
originally designated a cow-faced goddess, but it is clear that he
intends it for ox-eyed, an epithet signifying the beauty of the large
and lustrous human eye. The bias that is felt in the religious poetry
of Homer comes to determine the course of the later religious art, so
that the religion, art, and literature of historic Greece may be
called the most anthropomorphic or anthropocentric in the world. Yet
we have sufficient proof that in the pre-Homeric age the popular mind
was by no means bound by any such law, and that the religious
imagination was unfixed and wavering in its perception of divinity:
and the belief must have been general that the god, usually imagined
as a man, might manifest himself at times in the form of some animal.
Apollo Lykeios, the wild god of the woods, was evidently in the habit
of incarnating himself in the wolf, so that wolves might be
sacramentally offered to him or sacrifice offered to certain
wolves.[76.1] In the Artemis legend of Brauron and Aulis we detect
the same close communion of the goddess with the bear. Now, upon the
fairly numerous indications in cult-legend and ritual that the deity
was occasionally incarnate in the animal, much fallacious
anthropological theory has been built. It is not now my cue to pursue
this matter _au fond_. But it is necessary for my purpose to emphasise
the fact that there is fair evidence for some direct zoolatry in the
proto-Hellenic period, though there is less than is often supposed,
and it needs always careful criticism. {77} As I have already said,
the ancients of the later learned period were often vague and
unprecise when they spoke of “the worship” of animals. Thus Clemens
informs us[77.1] that the Thessalians “worshipped” ants, and on the
authority of Euphorion that the Samians “worshipped” a sheep: the word
used in each case being σέβειν. But accurate statements concerning
religious psychology demand the nicest discrimination: “a little more,
and how much it is.” We may suspect that the word σέβειν was as
vaguely used in antiquity as the term “worship” in loose modern
writing: and it is to be remarked that when one authority uses this
word, another may employ the verb τιμᾶν, which does not imply so much.
For instance, Clemens states that the Thebans “honoured” the weasel;
Aelian, that they “worshipped” it.[77.2] We are nearly always left in
doubt how much is meant: whether the animal was merely treated
reverentially and its life spared, or whether sacrifice and prayers
were offered to it: the former practice may be found in almost any
society modern or ancient, the latter is savage zoolatry, and is a
fact of importance for the religious estimate of a people.
I cannot consider all the cases which are given with sufficient
fullness in the work that I have cited by De Visser.[77.3] But the
instance cited above--the Samian worship of the sheep
[πρόβατον]--shows us how little we have to build our theories on. It
is quite possible that such a story arose from some ritual in which
the sheep was offered reverentially, treated as a theanthropic {78}
animal, half-human, half-divine, like the bull-calf of Tenedos in the
cult of Dionysos,[78.1] an interesting form of sacrifice to which I
shall have occasion to refer again. Clear records of actual sacrifice
to animals in Greece are exceedingly rare. We have the quaint example
of the so-called “Sacrifice” to the flies before the feast of Apollo
on the promontory of Leukas; this I have discussed elsewhere,[78.2]
pointing out that it seems only a ritual trick to persuade the flies
to leave the worshippers alone, and certainly does not suggest the
“worship” of flies.[78.2] There is also a dim ritual-legend attaching
to the temple of Apollo the wolf-god in Sikyon, which appears to point
to some sacrifice to wolves in or near the temple at some early
period.[78.3] The third case is more important: the “sacrifice to the
pig,” which Athenaeus, quoting from Agathokles of Kyzikos, attests was
an important service at Praisos in Crete, performed as a προτελὴς
θυσία, that is, as a preliminary act in the liturgies of the higher
religion.[78.4] The ritual-legend explained the act as prompted by
the service that a sow had rendered to the infant Zeus; but it remains
mysterious, and we would like to have had more clear information as to
the actual rite. Finally, we have the most important type of zoolatric
ritual in Greece, the worship of certain sacred snakes: various
records attest this in the cult of Trophonios at Lebadeia and in the
temple of Athena Polias at Athens; in the cult of Zeus-Meilichios in
the Piraeus, in the sacred grove of Apollo in Epeiros, probably in the
shrines of Asklepios at Epidauros and Kos, and elsewhere.
{79}
Now it is important to note that these ritual records nowhere suggest
that whole species of animals were worshipped, but that only certain
individuals of that species, haunting certain places to which a sense
of religious mystery attached, such as a cave or a lonely grove, or
else found in or near some holy shrine, were thus marked out as
divine. Also, we observe that in all the examples just quoted, the
cult of the animal is linked to the cult of some personal god or
goddess or hero: the snake, for instance, is the natural incarnation
of the underworld divinity or hero. The only exception to this latter
rule that may be reasonably urged is the prehistoric worship of Python
at Delphi, which, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out, is curiously like the
ritual and cult of a fetich-snake in Dahomey.[79.1] Yet, for all we
know, Python, who in the earliest version of the story is of female
sex, may at a very early time have been regarded not as a mere snake,
but as an incarnation of the earth-goddess Gaia, who ruled at Delphi
before Apollo came. The question whether the ancestors of the Hellenes
or the pre-Hellenic peoples with whom they mixed were ever on the
lowest plane of theriolatry does not concern us here. What is
important is, that the records, both Mycenaean and Hellenic, justify
us in believing that the dominant religion in Greece of the second
millennium B.C. was the worship of personal divinities humanly
conceived who could occasionally incarnate themselves in animal form,
and that where animal worship survived it was always linked in this
way to the cults of personal polytheism. From the Homeric period
onward, the higher Hellenic spirit shows itself averse to the
theriomorphic fashion of religion; yet this never disappeared wholly
from {80} the lower circles. Arcadia, the most backward and
conservative of the Greek communities, never accepted the rigid
anthropomorphic canon. This is shown by the record of the Phigaleian
Demeter with the horse’s head; the mysterious goddess Eurynome of
Phigaleia, half-woman, half-fish; the Arcadian Pan, the daimon of the
herds, imagined as with goat legs and sometimes with goat’s head; and,
finally, by the Arcadian idols of the Roman period found at Lykosoura
in 1898, representing the female form with the head of a cow.[80.1]
This résumé of the facts, so far as it has gone, appears to justify
the theorem with which it started, that the “Mycenaean” peoples and
proto-Hellenes in the second millennium were on the whole, in respect
of the morphology of their religion, on the same plane as those of the
Euphrates valley; only it appears that theriomorphism played slightly
more part in the cults and legends of the West than in those of the
Sumerian-Babylonian culture. It is obvious to any student of
comparative religion that such general similarity which we have here
observed, and which we might observe if we compared early Greece with
Vedic India, neither proves nor disproves a theory of borrowing. And
so far there seems no occasion for resorting to such a theory, unless
the type of the fish-goddess at Phigaleia be considered a reason for
supposing Semitic influences here at work and for tracing her ancestry
to Derketo of Bambyke. For such transference of cult we might have to
invoke the help of Phoenicians, who arrive on the scene too late to
help us in the present quest, and who are not likely to have been
attracted into the interior of Arcadia.