The Deities as Social-Powers.
{116}
The next important section of our survey is the comparison of the
social and ethical aspects of the religions in the eastern and western
areas. Here again the former warning may be repeated, not to draw rash
conclusions from the observance of mere general points of similarity,
such as occur in the religious systems of all the more advanced
societies of which we have any explicit record.
The idea that religion is merely a concern of the private individual
conscience is one of the latest phenomena in all religious history.
Both for the primitive and the more cultured communities of ancient
history, religion was by a law of its nature a social phenomenon, a
force penetrating all the institutions of the political life, law and
morality. But its precise contribution to the evolution of certain
social products in the various communities is still a question
inviting and repaying much research. It will be interesting to compare
what may be gleaned from Assyriology and the study of Hellenism
bearing on this inquiry, although it may not help us much towards the
solution of our main question.
We may assume of the Mesopotamian as of other peoples, that its
“social origins” were partly religious; only in the valley of the
Euphrates, society had already {117} so far advanced in the fifth
millennium B.C. that the study of its origins will be always
problematic. The deities are already national, having developed far
beyond the narrow tribal limits before we begin to discern them
clearly; we have not to deal with the divinities of clans, phratries,
or septs, but of complex aggregates, such as cities and kingdoms. And
the great cities are already there before our knowledge begins.
In the Sumerian myth of creation, it is the high god himself who,
after settling the order of heaven and earth, immediately constructs
cities such as Borsippa; a passage in Berosus speaks of Oannes, that
is to say, Ea as the founder of cities and temples;[117.1] and the
myths may enshrine the truth that the origin of the Mesopotamian city
was often religious, that the temple was its nucleus. I cannot
discover that this is indicated by the names of any other of the great
cities, Babylon, Borsippa, Sippar, Kutha; but it is shown by the name
of Nineveh and its connection with the Sumerian goddess Nin or Nina,
possibly a form of Ishtar.[117.2] And in the inscription of Sargon
giving the names of the eight doors of his palace, all named after
deities, Ninib is described as the god “who lays the ground-stone of
the city for eternity”;[117.3] also we find designations of
particular cities, as the city of such-and-such a deity.[117.4]
Finally, it may be worth noting in this direction that Nusku the
fire-god, who lights the sacrifices, is called “the City-Founder, the
Restorer of Temples.”[117.5]
The evidence of Anatolia is late, but it tells the same story: Sir
William Ramsay has emphasised the {118} importance for early political
history of such names as Hieroupolis, the City of the Temple,
developing into Hierapolis, the Holy City.[118.1] In Hellas the
evidence is fuller and older of the religious origin of some, at
least, of the πόλεις, for some of the old names reveal the personal
name or the appellative of the divinity. Such are Athenai (the
settlements of Athena); Potniai, “the place of the revered ones”;
Alalkomenai, “the places of Athena Alalkomene”; Nemea, “the sacred
groves of Zeus”; Megara, probably “the shrines of the goddess of the
lower world”; Diades, Olympia and others. The reason of such
development is not hard to seek: the temple would be the meeting-place
of many consanguineous tribes, and its sanctuary would safeguard
intertribal markets, and at the same time demand fortification and
attract a settlement. Mecca, the holy city of Arabia in days long
before and after Islam, had doubtless this origin.[118.2] We have
traces of the same phenomenon in our English names: Preston, for
instance, showing the growth of a city out of a monastery. In the
later history of Hellenism the religious origin of the πόλεις is still
more frequently revealed by its name: the god who leads the colonists
to their new home gives his name to the settlement; hence the very
numerous “Apolloniai.”
But though it is not permissible to dogmatise about the origin of the
great cities in the valley of the Euphrates, we have ample material
supplied by Babylonian-Assyrian monuments and texts of the close
interdependence of Church and State, to illustrate what I remarked
upon in my inaugural lecture, the political character of the pantheon.
This emerges most clearly when we consider {119} the relations of the
monarch to the deity. Of all Oriental autocracies, it may be said with
truth that the instinctive bias of the people to an autocratic system
is a religious instinct: the kingship is of the divine type of which
Dr. Frazer has collected the amplest evidence. And this was certainly
the type of the most ancient kingship that we can discover in the
Mesopotamian region. The ancient kings of the Isin dynasty dared to
speak of themselves as “the beloved consort of Nana.”[119.1] But more
usually the king was regarded as the son or fosterling of the
divinity, though this dogma need not have been given a literal
interpretation, nor did it clash with the well-established proof of a
secular paternity. An interesting example is the inscription of
Samsuilina, the son of Hammurabi, who was reigning perhaps as early as
the latter part of the third millennium:[119.2] the king proclaims,
“I built the wall in Nippur in honour of the goddess Nin, the walls of
Padda to Adad my helper, the wall of Lagab to Sin the god, my
begetter.” The tie of the foster-child was as close as that of actual
sonship; and Assurbanipal is regarded as the foster-child of the
goddess of Nineveh. Nebo himself says to him in that remarkable
conversation between the god and the king that an inscription has
preserved,[119.3] “weak wast thou, O Assurbanipal, when thou sattest
on the lap of the divine Queen of Nineveh, and didst drink from her
four breasts.” Similarly, the early King Lugalzaggisi declares that he
was nourished by the milk of the goddess Ninharsag, and King Gudea
mentions Nina as his mother.[119.4] In an oracle of encouragement
{120} given by the goddess Belit to Assurbanipal, she speaks to him
thus, “Thou whom Belit has borne, do not fear.”[120.1]
Now a few isolated texts might be quoted to suggest that this idea of
divine parentage was not confined to the kings, but that even the
private Babylonian might at times rise to the conception that he was
in a sense the child of God. At least in one incantation, in which
Marduk is commissioned by Ea to heal a sick man, the man is called
“the child of his god”;[120.2] and Ishtar is often designated “the
Mother of Gods and men” and the source of all life on the earth,
human, animal, and vegetative.[120.3] But the incantation points only
to a vague spiritual belief that might be associated with a general
idea that all life is originally divine. We may be sure that the
feeling of the divine life of the king was a much more real and living
belief than was any sense that the individual might occasionally
cherish of his own celestial origin. The king and the god were
together the joint source of law and order. The greatest of the early
Babylonian dynasts, Lugalzaggisi, whose reign is dated near to 4000
B.C., styles himself the vicegerent (Patesi) of Enlil, the earth-god
of Nippur;[120.4] and in early Babylonian contracts, oath was taken
in the names both of the god and the king.[120.5] Hammurabi converses
with Shamash and receives the great code from his hands, even as Moses
received the law from Jahwé or Minos from Zeus. Did any monument ever
express so profoundly the divine origin of the royal authority and the
State institutions as the famous {121} Shamash relief?[121.1] It is
the gods who endow Hammurabi with his various mental qualities: he
himself tells us so in his code, “Marduk sent me to rule men and to
proclaim Righteousness to the world”;[121.2] and he speaks similarly
of the sun-god Shamash: “At the command of Shamash, the great Judge of
Heaven and Earth, shall Righteousness arise up in the land.”[121.3]
He proclaims himself, therefore, the political prophet of the Lord;
and curses with a portentous curse any one who shall venture to
abolish his enactments. The later Assyrian kings have the same
religious confidence: Sargon (B.C. 722-705) proclaims that he owes his
penetrating genius to Ea, “the Lord of Wisdom,” and his understanding
to the “Queen of the crown of heaven.”[121.4] We find them also, the
Assyrian kings, consulting the sun-god by presenting to him tablets
inscribed with questions as to their chances of success in a war, or
the fitness and loyalty of a minister whom they proposed to
appoint.[121.5]
And this religion affords a unique illustration of the intimacy of the
bond between the king as head of the State and the divine powers. The
gods are the rulers of destiny: and in the Hall of Assembly at Esagila
each year the Council of the Gods under the presidency of Nebo fixed
the destiny of the king and the Empire for the ensuing year.[121.6]
This award must have signified the writing down of oracles concerning
the immediate future, and no doubt the questions were prepared by the
king and the priests. The good king {122} who was devoted to the
service of the gods was glorified by the priesthood in much the same
terms as are applied in the Old Testament to the king who was devoted
to the service of Jahwé: in the cult-inscription of Sippar in the
British Museum,[122.1] Nabupaladdin, who reigned 884-860 B.C., and
who re-established the cult of Shamash, is praised by the priest as
“the called of Marduk, the darling of Anu and Ea, the man wholly after
the heart of Zarpanit.”
The king, then, is the head of the church, himself a high-priest, as
Gudea was high-priest of Ningirsu, and as the Assyrian kings described
themselves as the priests of Asshur, the professional priesthood
serving as their expert advisers and ministers. Was he actually
worshipped in his life? This is maintained by some Assyriologists, and
certain evidence points to the practice. In the conversation between
Nebo and Assurbanipal, to which reference has been made, the god
promises to the king, “I will raise up thy head and erect thy form in
the temple of Bit-Mashmash”;[122.2] the names of old Babylonian kings
are marked with the ideogram of divinity, and Professor
Jastrow[122.3] mentions an inscription of the fourth millennium B.C.
in which Gudea ordains sacrifices to his own statues. A document is
quoted by Mr. Johns,[122.4] recording the dedication of a piece of
land by a private citizen “for his life,” that is to say, to bring a
blessing on himself, to the King Lugalla who is called a god, and to
his consort. But Zimmern[122.5] considers that the direct deification
of kings was a practice of the earliest period only, and was never
pushed so far as it was in Egypt. {123} There is reason to suppose
that the king or patesi who controlled Nippur had alone the right to
be deified, Nippur being the original centre of the Sumerian
religion.[123.1]
The sacred character of the king implied that he could exercise
miraculous functions or put forth divine “mana” on behalf of his
people. We find him in the earlier period reciting incantations in the
dark of the moon to avert evil from the land.[123.2] One of the kings
of the dynasty of Ur assumed the title “the exorciser of the holy tree
of Eridu,” which may point to certain magic functions performed by the
king on the sacred tree.[123.3]
This political aspect of religion appears pronounced also in other
early communities of the Semitic race; the high god or goddess is the
head of the State; the people of Moab are the sons and daughters of
Chemosh; the goddess of Askalon and Sidon wears the mural crown. And
doubtless the early Semitic kingship was of the same sacred character
elsewhere as in Mesopotamia. The King of Moab on the Mesha Stone calls
himself the son of Chemosh; and Ben-Hadad, King of Damascus, is the
son of Hadad.[123.4] In the Aramaic inscription found at
Sinjerli,[123.5] the gods Hadad, El-Reschef, and Shamash are regarded
as special protectors of the kings. One of the last kings of Sidon,
Tabnit, in the inscription on his sarcophagus, places his priestly
office before his royal title, “I, Tabnit, priest of Astarte, King of
the Sidonians.”[123.6] King of Byblos or Gobal, in {124} the fifth
century B.C., regards himself as called to his high office by the
Baalat, the goddess of the State, and prays that she may bless him and
give him length of days “because he is a just king”:[124.1] and
mention has already been made of Phoenician monuments showing the King
of Sidon seated with Astarte and embraced by her. The claim to actual
godship may have really been made by the King of Tyre, as the prophet
Ezekiel twice reproaches him with the blasphemy: “Thou hast said, I am
a God, I sit in the Seat of God, in the midst of the Seas.”[124.2]
The Hittite monuments and the text of the Hittite treaty with Rameses
II. reveal a religion of the same political type. The gods are not
only witnesses to the political contract, but the great Hittite god of
heaven puts his own seal to it; and the last few lines of the text
contain a careful description of that seal, which reveals the
sacrosanct character of the Hittite kingship; for the design chosen
was a group of the god and the Hittite king whom he is embracing. The
same significance belongs to certain scenes in the great relief of
Boghaz-Keui: on one of the slabs we discern an armed god with his arm
round the neck and his hand grasping the hand of a smaller figure,
whose emblem and dress suggest a sacerdotal rather than a royal
personality. But the happy coincidence of the description in the
Hittite-Egyptian treaty proves that this is no mere priest, but a
Hittite King[124.3] of sacred function and semi-divine {125}
character in affectionate union with his god; it suggests also a date
not far from the thirteenth century for the Boghaz-Keui relief; and it
makes unnecessary and improbable the mystic explanation of this scene
that Dr. Frazer has ventured.[125.1] At this early period of the
Hittite empire, the kingship may not yet have been detached from the
priesthood; even later at Comana, in the same country of Cappadocia,
the priests and the kings were drawn from the same stock.[125.2] One
more detail bearing perhaps on the present subject may be noted in
this monument at Boghaz-Keui: the goddess wears a crenelated cap, that
reminds us somewhat of the later mural or turreted crown borne by
Cybele and Astarte. May we suppose that this was the origin of those,
and had the same political significance?
Again, it may be noted that in Phrygia itself, the land of the
goddess, we have vague evidence in the legend of Midas that the early
kings called by that name were regarded as the sons of Kybele.[125.3]
As regards the Minoan-Mycenaean religion and its relation to the
State, the excavations on the site of Knossos suggest that there at
least the whole of the state-cult was in the hands of the kings; for
no public temples have been found, but only shrines in the palaces.
This is the strongest proof of the sacral power of the Minoan ruler,
and we can well believe that he was deified after his death; nor need
we wholly discredit that vague statement of Tzetzes that the old kings
of Crete were given the divine name of Zeus [Δίες].[125.4] {126}
There is value, then, in Homer’s picture of Minos as the friend of God
who holds converse with him.
The political significance of Greek religion impresses itself upon us
at a thousand points and under endless aspects. The deity belongs not
to the individual but to the tribe; and as in the earliest Hellenic
period the tribes were conscious of a certain community of blood,
their earliest religion appears at many points to have transcended the
tribal limits, and certain deities have developed a national
character. Now evidence--vague and legendary, it is true, but valuable
when compared with the facts of other communities--compels us to
conceive of the early Hellenic kings having the same character as
those that we have observed in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Crete; Homer
regards them as the god-born, who can exercise religious functions,
whose decrees have the force of θέμις. The fire that burnt on their
hearth was sacred and embodied the life of the community; and in the
later period the perpetual fire that was maintained in the Prytaneum
of the πόλις represented the ancient sacred hearth-fire of the
king.[126.1] Also, when the monarchy was generally abolished, many of
the cities felt compelled to retain the title of βασιλεύς for the
priest who carried on the religious functions as the shadow of the
ancient priest-king. But these similar phenomena are of little
ethnographic value. Primitive Hellenism was in these respects only
maintaining its own inherited traditions, and following the same lines
of early social evolution as those of other communities. On the other
hand, the distinctness of developed Hellenism is the secular
independence of its intellect; and even in its earliest {127} mythic
period we can believe that the divine character of the Basileus was
less impressively felt, his association with the divinity less
intimate, than was the case in Mesopotamia. Neither Agamemnon nor his
predecessors would speak, we may be sure, with the same astonishing
self-consciousness of their divine inspiration as the earliest and
later kings of Babylon and Assyria.
Returning to the Mesopotamian societies, we find much other evidence
of the dependence of State-institutions upon cult and religious ideas.
Justice and the integrity of the Law were virtues consecrated by old
Babylonian religion. One of the most striking of the Shamash hymns
exhibits the sun-god as the guardian of right judgment--“the wicked
judge thou makest to behold bondage--him who receives not a bribe, who
has regard to the weak, shall be well-pleasing to Shamash, he shall
prolong his life”: “Shamash hates those who falsify boundaries and
weights.”[127.1] The respect for the rights of property to which the
latter phrase alludes, was maintained by the force of religious
sanctions. The King Asurbanipal declares that he has restored to the
Babylonians their fields that had been wrongfully taken away, “for
fear of Bel and Nebo.”[127.2] A number of inscribed Babylonian
boundary-stones have been found with symbols of the various high gods
carved upon them, with invocations in their name to deter trespassers,
or those who would remove their neighbour’s landmark.[127.3] One of
these is marked with a curse as follows:[127.4] “May Ninib, the Lord
of Boundaries, deprive him of {128} his son the water-pourer”--meaning
that the man who violates the boundaries shall leave no son behind him
to perform the funeral rites. Probably other examples of this practice
are to be found in non-Hellenic Asia Minor; at present I can only
quote one, a late Phrygian inscription, which, however, may testify to
an early Phrygian religious function, on a slab with the divine name
Ὁροφύλαξ, “Boundary-guardian,” inscribed beneath a carved
relief-figure of the god Men bearing a club.[128.1] In Greece, as is
well known, religion contributed the same aid to the evolution of the
law of private property in land; the boundary is put under the
protection of Zeus Ὅριος, a power similar to the Latin Jupiter
Terminus, or of Hermes Ἑπιτέρμαιος.[128.2] In this function they are
regarded as nether-deities, whose divinity is latent in the soil. But
though Hellas may have borrowed from Babylon its system of
land-measurement, it did not need to borrow this religious idea and
practice. For these are widespread over the world: in the Teutonic
north the rights of the owner were sanctified by carrying holy fire
from the hearth round the boundary; and in savage modern societies by
the use of the terrible weapon of the tabu and by the erection of
fetiches on the boundary mark which serve as ἀποτρόπαια.[128.3] We
have here a salient example of religion as a constructive force in
framing a great social institution, while the motive desire is secular
and purely human.
But we must not, I think, hope to be able to trace with any exactness
the part played by religion in constructing the various departments of
the social fabric {129} of Babylonia; for when we get our first
glimpse of that society it is already so far advanced, so complex in
its civilisation, in a sense so modern, that its embryology is likely
to escape us. Nevertheless, it is interesting for our purpose to study
the earliest material, the code of Hammurabi, to watch what light it
throws on the correlation of religious and secular life.
Some parts of it are missing, but we may be allowed to pass a
temporary judgment on that which is preserved, and which appears to be
the greater part of the whole corpus.[129.1] The code, as I have
mentioned, is inspired by the god, safeguarded by the god, and the
legislation is in that sense theocratic; but as compared, for
instance, with the Jewish books of the Law, it impresses us as the
work of a cool-headed lawyer, of secular utilitarian principles,
bringing legal acumen to bear on the problems of a complex society. At
certain points it is still on the barbaric plane: the principle of “an
eye for an eye” is enacted; the sense of individual responsibility for
wrong-doing is not yet so far developed but that vicarious punishment
is still allowed; a man’s son or daughter might be put to death for
his own offence. But in many respects it reveals an advanced moral and
intellectual view, and the religious atmosphere is absent where we
should most expect to find an infusion of it. In the enactments
dealing with the fees due to a physician, we seem to discern that
medicine has become a free and secular science. Still more important
for our purpose are the clauses concerning homicide, for it is
particularly in regard to homicide that religious feeling has been
most operative in the {130} early legislation of society, and the
evolution of our modern morality concerning this offence has been at
times retarded by religion. Only one clause in the code happens to
deal with deliberate murder, and only murder in special circumstances,
those in which Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon: Hammurabi would have
impaled Clytemnestra: a few other clauses are concerned with culpable
homicide and unintentional. Hammurabi being himself a master-builder,
is severe with bad architects who build houses so weakly that they
fall in and kill the owners: in such a case he kills the architect.
But he is singularly equitable and mild with a man who is drawn into a
quarrel in which blows are passed, and who unthinkingly wounds or
kills his opponent; if he can take an oath that he acted “without
knowledge or without will,” he has only to pay the physician if the
man is wounded, and half a mina of silver if the man is killed and was
of free birth. Here there is no mention of the blood-feud, and
Babylonian society seems wholly to have escaped from that dangerous
principle of tribal barbarism.[130.1] Neither is there any hint of
the inherent impurity of all bloodshed, whatever is the manner of the
shedding; and it seems that this society was no longer in bondage to
that religious feeling, to which our modern moral sense concerning
murder is in many ways indebted, but which is often obstructive of
legal and ethical progress, and which coloured so deeply the early
Judaic and Hellenic law of homicide. Further, we note that Hammurabi’s
code has come to allow the consideration of motives {131} and
extenuating circumstances; and in this vital respect it ranks with
modern civilised legislation. Between such a society and the
proto-Hellenic community, at least in regard to the view of homicide,
there was a great gulf fixed.
But for the present let us pursue the code further. Another crime that
early society regards with religious horror, and of which religion
always takes cognisance, is incest. The enactments of the code deal
only with three cases: incest with daughter, mother, and stepmother;
in the first, the sinner is driven from the land, probably into
perpetual exile; in the second, both parties are burned alive; in the
third, he is merely driven from the paternal house. The first two
punishments reveal, I think, religious feeling, stronger in the second
case than in the first: the sinner pollutes the land, therefore the
pollution must be purged by his flight, or when most deadly must be
purged away by fire; for execution by burning had often the religious
significance of a holocaust. Still it is only by surmise that we
detect religious colour in the code at this point: in fact, it emerges
clearly only in a few clauses. We note that the code allows of
expurgation by oath-taking; so did the early Greeks and our own
forefathers, and the practice is not distinctive of any particular
people or group. The code allows the ordeal in certain cases, as did
the Greek, and as probably every community has done at a certain stage
of religious feeling; also civilised Babylon countenanced trials for
witchcraft, and enacted a similar water-ordeal to that which prevailed
in England till fairly recent times.
One clause is of interest as showing that Hammurabi was not afraid of
any opposition from the priesthood if he wished to tax Church
property; for he enacts that {132} the ransom of his captured feudal
followers (about whom he is particularly thoughtful) “shall be paid
out of the property of the temple nearest to the place where they were
taken prisoners.”[132.1] But the most interesting part of the code
from the religious point of view, are the enactments concerning a
class of women who are devoted to the service of religion, sisters or
wives, as they are here called, of Marduk: but it will be more
convenient to consider these later on when the question of ritual is
dealt with.
Apart from this great document, I do not know if further evidence is
forthcoming of the precise influence of religion on the social system
of Babylonia. The two spheres may once have been closely
interdependent; but we can see from the earliest legal contracts that
law had already freed itself from religion in the main; the judge is a
secular authority;[132.2] the scribe who draws up the contracts is a
professional notary, and it is not clear that he had any necessary
connection with the temples;[132.3] we only hear of certain elders
who assisted the judge, many of whom were temple officials or members
of the guild of Shamash votaries;[132.4] also, we find trials taking
place in the temples, especially the temple of Shamash at Sippara,
where the legal judgment was called “the judgment of Shamash in the
house of Shamash.”[132.5] Much light has yet to come, no doubt, from
Babylon, and new light perhaps from Anatolia, to illuminate the part
played by religion in the evolution of society. We would wish to know
more concerning the religious side of family institutions, whether,
for instance, there was any direct cult of the family hearth to which
the Hellenes owed so much. Robertson Smith definitely denies that
{133} any of the Semitic races knew of such an institution; and he is
very probably right, for it belongs more naturally to the colder
climates, where the fixed and carefully placed hearth is a necessary
centre of the dwelling-room, than to the hotter, where the inhabitants
could be content in winter with a movable brazier. Yet one text at
least may be cited to prove, if rightly interpreted, that the hearth
could be occasionally deified in a Babylonian liturgy; for in a hymn
to Nusku the fire-god, which contains a litany of absolution from
sins, we find the phrase, “May the hearth of the house deliver you and
absolve you,”[133.1] but the same litany speaks also of the canals as
deified. And we may value these two examples of that polydaimonism to
which we could find parallels in early Hellas. But this evidence does
not point to any established and regulated hearth-worship which might
serve as the religious bond of family morality. More than one
inscription, however, attests the worship of a family house-god
(ilu-biti), to whom it seems a small domestic chapel was
consecrated.[133.2] Similarly, we have in Hellas Zeus Ἑρκεῖος and
Ζεὺς Κτήσιος. And the Babylonian ilu-biti is mentioned, in association
with a divinity of the street, ila-sûki,--a name which reminds us of
Apollo Ἀγυιεύς. Only, these household and street-divinities in Babylon
may have been mere “daimones” rather than θεοί; nor is it clear
whether these family cults were ancestral, the heritage of a
particular clan, or whether they were merely consecrated to the
personal protective deity of the householder, or what part they played
in the family organisation, for instance, in the {134}
marriage-ceremonies, births, and adoptions. So far as I have been able
to study them, the Babylonian litanies and hymns seem rarely to
reflect the religious side of the family life[134.1]; they are
prompted by the needs of the city and the empire, or by the emotional
crises of the individual soul. The legal contracts preserved on the
brick tablets throw some light on the forms of the marriage ceremony,
which appears to have been performed usually in a registration-office
rather than a church. There must surely have been also some religious
side to it; but the only evidence, so far as I am aware, is a very
curious and doubtful document that has been published by Dr. Pinches,
containing details of a religious ceremony which appears to be part of
a bridal.[134.2] I will not quote the quaint and bizarre formulae, as
the renderings are said to be highly conjectural: if they prove
correct, one may judge that the service belongs to a highly advanced
religion; but I cannot adduce any parallel to it from other peoples.
As for the ritual or religious feeling connected with adoption or
birth, I am not aware that the documents have so far disclosed
anything: it is stated vaguely by Peiser, in his sketch of Babylonian
society, that adoption at Babylon might be prompted by a religious
motive, namely, by the desire of the childless parents to have an heir
who might continue the ancestor-worship of the family. But no document
is quoted in proof of this; and it is very doubtful if we ought to
speak of Babylonian ancestor-worship.[134.3] We may suspect that the
writer has been misled by the {135} well-known facts of Vedic,
Hellenic, and Roman family cult.
In this, as in other respects, we may feel how advanced, modern and
secular, was Babylonian society. No trace has appeared as yet of the
tribal or phratric system; the family is the unit of the State, but
individualism is much developed.
On the other hand, the function of religion as a constructive force in
early Greek society, in the evolution of tribal and intertribal law,
is more obvious and transparent, for in this land we are fortunate
enough to catch glimpses of civilised society in its making, which are
denied to us in Mesopotamia. Hellenic religion penetrated every domain
and department of Hellenic life to an even greater degree than did
Babylonian religion the society of Babylon. And yet the Greek mind as
it develops becomes pronouncedly secular, at least in comparison with
the Oriental. The contradiction is only apparent. The Hellene used
religion as an instrument for constructing his social order, for
utilitarian ends, as a serviceable minister that could rarely, and
never for long, establish a tyranny. He even used it to assist and
glorify his sports, yet he varied and arranged these according to his
pleasure. The detrimental tendency of religion to petrify custom was
less marked in his midst than elsewhere; as usual, it often lagged
behind in the progress of the race, yet it followed the progress on
the whole, and often assisted it.
I cannot here give a detailed account of the social functions of Greek
religion; and some of its more interesting phenomena I have tried to
analyse in detail in my _Hibbert Lectures_ and in various chapters of
my _Cults_: one of the most important of the special questions, the
social or political influence of the cults of ancestors, {136} entered
into the course that I delivered last year. I will only attempt here a
brief indication of the salient facts that will repay special study,
confining myself as far as possible to those that belong to the
proto-Hellenic period. Our knowledge, of course, of the relation of
religion to the social order of life, law, and morality in the second
millennium in Greece, is only dim and hypothetical: here and there
Homer affords us glimpses; for the rest, we have legends and cult
evidence which must be carefully and tactfully used. I have already
touched on the religious character of the ancient kingship, and the
evidence of the religious origin of some of the Hellenic πόλεις. It is
probable that some of the deities had already in the proto-Hellenic
period a political character, as deities of the assembly or the
“agora.” Thus Apollo Ἀγυιεύς, at first a divine leader of the
invasion, becomes, when the conquerors settle on the land, at once a
divinity of the city; and some scholars would derive his very name
from the ἀπέλλα, the political assembly. In order to ensure the
settlement and development of law, the debates and judgments in the
market-place must be secured from armed disturbance such as frequently
threatened the peace of the Icelandic Thing: therefore, in pre-Homeric
days the market-place was consecrated as a holy place, and the elders
who give judgment “hold in their hands the sceptres of clear-voiced
heralds.”[136.1] These words probably refer to the κηρύκειον, the
badge of Hermes, the god of the market-place, which as a religious
amulet confers inviolability on the bearer. The same fetich-badge,
giving security to the herald and ambassador, assisted the development
of international law; and the only spiritual sanction of treaties
{137} and covenants with other communities was a religious one, the
force of the oath sworn and the ordeal-ritual which accompanied the
conclusion of a treaty or contract. The temple on the borderland of
different tribes served as a secure place for intertribal intercourse,
commercial and festive, and might become the centre of an Amphictyony,
or federal union of tribes. The constitution of the Delphic
Amphictyony points back to the proto-Hellenic period. The oracles were
beginning in the second millennium to play a political part, as they
did with greater effect in the first. For Zeus was already at Dodona,
and Apollo, the political god _par excellence_, at Pytho.
Our indications are slight and dim; but the poet of the _Odyssey_
seems to be aware that an ὀμφή or oracular deliverance might be used
to dethrone a royal dynasty.[137.1] The dedication of a tithe of the
captives taken in war to Apollo was a custom connected with the
earliest settlements and migration, for Apollo disposed of his
captives by colonising them on some vacant land. The practice appears
to have been a very early one, for this is the legend of the
pre-Dorian settlement of the Dryopes in the Peloponnese;[137.2] also
there is evidence for the institution in pre-historic Greece of that
religious system of colonisation which the Latins called the Ver
Sacrum.[137.3] In fact, the religion of Apollo, especially the common
worship of Apollo Πυθαεύς, served more than any other cult as a bond
of connection between the independent communities already--I
believe--in pre-Homeric days; and to this earliest epoch may belong
that interesting ritual of the Hyperborean offerings brought by
sacrosanct Hellenic pilgrims down from the north along the primeval
routes of the Aryan immigration.[137.4]
{138}
The narrower systems of family and phratry tell the same story of the
constructive power of religion. The primitive grouping into septs and
phratries and tribal subdivisions, of which the traces are not yet
discovered in the civilisation of Babylon, has left its deep imprint
on historic Greek society; and religion is intimately interwoven with
the domestic and phratric cults, not only in that these are much
concerned with worship of heroes and ancestors, but that the high
divinities also, Zeus Φράτριος, Athena Φρατρία and Ἀπατουρία, take
these institutions under their charge. Hence all adoptions and
admissions of new members into the phratry had to be performed at the
altar. The marriage ceremony was a religious ritual--in Attica, at
least, a religious communion like the Roman Confarreatio,[138.1] and
the mutual duties of parents and children, kinsmen and tribesmen, were
consecrated by the early ideas concerning the divine nature.[138.2]
A festival such as the Ἀπατούρια, instituted to cement a social
organisation, and to all appearances of great antiquity, has nothing
like it in the Babylonian festival calendar, so far as I am aware; and
again, to the many political and social titles of the Hellenic
divinities such as Πολιεύς, Ἀγοραῖος, Πάνδημος, Βουλαῖος, it would be
hard to find parallels in the cult-terminology of Babylon.
In considering a religion under its social or legal aspects, the laws
concerning homicide will often yield telling evidence. There is a
whole aeon of development dividing the code of Hammurabi and the
Homeric and pre-Homeric theory in this matter. The Babylonian had
arrived, as we have seen,[138.3] in some indefinitely {139} early
period at the conception of murder as a crime against the whole State,
at what we may call the advanced secular point of view. In Greece that
conception is post-Homeric: the Homeric and pre-Homeric societies were
still in the stage of law in which homicide is treated as a private
affair of the kinsmen, a matter to be settled by the blood-feud or
weregild. Only in certain cases it was a sin, namely, when the slain
person was a suppliant or a kinsman. The religious feeling in respect
of the first partly arises from the old Aryan Hearth-worship;[139.1]
in respect of the second, it is associated with a primitive tribal
horror of shedding kindred blood: and, though the feeling of the
religious sanctity of the guest, the suppliant, and the kinsman was
strong in Semitic communities, I cannot find any special Babylonian
cult that is analogous to that of Zeus Μειλίχιος, or Ἱκέσιος, or
Ξένιος. I have traced elsewhere the development in the ninth and
eighth centuries of the more civilised legislation concerning homicide
in Greece, and I have tried to indicate the precise part played by
religion in aiding the evolution:[139.2] to get to the facts one must
specially study the worship of Athena and Apollo. I have connected it
with a growing sense of the impurity of bloodshed, which might express
itself in a definite religious way, as fear of the ghost or of the
offended deity. It is open to us to explain this increased
sensitiveness concerning purity as a mark of Oriental influence, which
was reaching Greece in the first millennium B.C. But at least we ought
not to derive it from Mesopotamia until we find evidence of
purifications from bloodshed as a common ritual in Babylonian
religion, and the impurity of bloodshed an underlying {140} principle
of the Babylonian law of murder. But, as we have seen, we discern here
only the secular result: the religious force that may have worked
towards it is too far removed in the background of the past.
Summarily, we must conclude that the political application of Hellenic
religion seems wholly a native and independent product of the Hellenic
spirit, and reflected the characteristically Hellenic forms of civic
life.