Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.
{221}
A comparison of the forms observed in these regions, both in regard
to the minute details and to the general underlying ideas, ought to
contribute independent evidence to the solution of our question. The
transmission of precise rules of ritual from one people to another,
implies an intercourse of some duration, and more or less regulated;
for while the name of a god or a single myth is volatile, and can be
wafted down remote routes by an itinerant trader, or nomad, or hunter,
the introduction of any organised ritual implies, as a rule, the
presence of the missionary or the foreign priest. If, then, there is
any evidence suggesting that Greece in its earliest period learnt its
ritual from Babylon, the importance of this for the ethnic history of
religion will be great indeed. Therefore it may seem that a detailed
comparison of the Eastern and Western ritual is forced upon us at this
point: but it would be premature to expect at present any finality in
the result, because the Mesopotamian documents have only been very
incompletely examined and published by the linguistic experts.
However, the material that they have presented to us reveals certain
salient facts of immediate value for our present purpose that cannot
be wholly illusory, however much we may have to modify our
interpretation of them in the light of future discovery.
{222}
As regards the Greek evidence, we are not without fairly ample
testimony concerning the earliest period. The Homeric poems present us
with the contemporary religious practices of at least a portion of the
population whom we may conveniently call the Achaeans; though we have
no right to suppose that they give us a complete account even of
those. Again, as ritual does not spring up in a day, and has a
singular longevity, we may be sure that much of Homeric ritual is a
tradition of the second millennium. Furthermore, we can supplement
Homer by later testimony, of which the lateness of date is no argument
against the primitiveness of the fashions that it may attest.
The first superficial comparison of Mesopotamian and Aegean ceremonies
exhibits a general similarity in the mechanism of religion; an
established priesthood, temples, images, altars, prayers, sacrifice,
religious music, holy days, consultation of the gods by methods of
divination, a certain ceremonious tendance of the dead, these are
common features of East and West. But if we were comparing Hellenic
with Egyptian or Vedic, or even Mexican and Peruvian religion, we
should be able to point to the same general agreement in externals,
and many of these institutions are found broadcast over the modern
world of savage society. It will be more important for the present
question, if when we examine the Babylonian, Anatolian, and Hellenic
ritual more minutely we discern salient differences, especially if
these are found in certain organic centres of the religious life such
as was the sacrifice. And we must first try to determine whether the
Hellas of the pre-Homeric days already possessed all those religious
institutions roughly enumerated above. We can deal to some extent with
both these problems together.
{223}
The erection of temples is an important stage in the higher
development of anthropomorphic religion. By the beginning of the
second millennium B.C. this had become an immemorial tradition of
Mesopotamia. But we are not sure at what period the other polytheistic
Semites first evolved the architectural shrine, or how long they were
content to use the natural cave as the house of a divinity, or a high
place or “temenos” with altar or sacred pillar. The recent excavations
at Gezer have revealed a glimpse into the religion of the prehistoric
Semites of Canaan; and one shrine that seems nothing more than a row
of sacred monoliths, but also another that has more the appearance of
an elaborate building of a sacred character.[223.1] Of still greater
antiquity was the shrine that Professor Petrie has discovered at
Serabit in the Sinaitic peninsula, an original cave-temple complicated
with the addition of porticoes and chambers, which he believes to have
been devoted to a double cult, the Egyptian and Semitic.[223.2] At
all events, we may conclude that before 1000 B.C. most of the more
cultured Semitic communities in Asia Minor had come to house their
divinities in more or less elaborated shrines.
As regards the other race that dominated the early period of Anatolian
history, the Hittite, we have the priceless evidence of the
Boghaz-Keui monuments: these reveal a complex temple hewn out of and
into the rocky ravine with a “Holy of Holies” and what appears to be a
sleeping-chamber for the god.[223.3] In Phrygia, the artificial
shrine may have been late in supplanting the natural cavern or hole in
the rock that was once the sufficient home of the cult of the great
goddess.[223.4] From {224} the coast of Asia Minor we have no
evidence concerning the site of any ancient temple that carries us
back to the early period with which we are dealing.[224.1] But the
Homeric poems alone are sufficient proof that the Greeks, for whom
they were composed, were beginning to be familiar with some
architectural type of the deity’s habitation. Apollo Smintheus already
has his shrine and professional priest.[224.2] We hear of the temple
and priestess of Athena in Troy,[224.3] of her shrine at Athens,
which she shared with Erechtheus,[224.4] and the stone-threshold of
Apollo at Delphi, that guarded already many treasures within
it.[224.5] And we also know from the excavations of the last few
years that the Aryan invaders from the North, the proto-Hellenes,
would find temples on some at least of the sites of the Minoan
culture. Crete has preserved certain shrines of the second millennium;
but except the temple-cave on Dikte all of them so far are found to be
merely domestic chapels in the king’s palace, as though the king were
personally responsible for the religion of the community: and so at
Mycenae, Tiryns, and Athens, the oldest temples have been found on the
foundations of “Mycenaean” palaces.[224.6] But the temples of Hera on
the public hill of Argos and at Olympia are now dated near to 800
B.C.[224.7]
We have, then, proof sufficient of temple-construction in Greece and
the Aegean islands before the period of Homer; and if we must have
recourse to the theory that the peoples of the Minoan-Mycenaean
culture took {225} their cue in this important evolution from some
foreign civilisation, we should look to Egypt rather than to Assyria,
as nearer and more closely in touch with early Crete.
We may mark here a difference between Eastern and Western thought in
the religious conception of the temple. It was naturally regarded
everywhere as sacrosanct, because permeated with the virtue of the
divine presence; but Babylonia developed this idea with greater
intensity of conviction than the Hellene, and actually deified the
temple itself: the King Nabopolassar (_circ._ 625 B.C.) prays to it in
such words as these, “Oh, temple, be gracious to the king thy
restorer, and if Marduk enters thee in triumph, report my piety to
him.”[225.1] Such exaggeration is not found in Greek
religion.[225.2]
As regards the emblem of divinity, the cult-object set up in the
shrine to attract and to mark the presence of the deity, the
Mesopotamian religion had, as we have seen, already evolved the eikon
or image at some period considerably earlier than the second
millennium, and the statue of the god or goddess had become an
important factor of early ritual: only the emblem of Asshur remained
aniconic.[225.3] Of equally early vogue was the image, whether human
or theriomorphic, in Egyptian cult. Again, the early Hittite monuments
reveal it clearly, though aniconic fetiches appear also on the reliefs
of Boghaz-Keui. But it is probable that the Western Semites, and the
tribes of Arabia before 1200 B.C., {226} and many of them for
centuries after, preferred the aniconic emblem, the “Ashera” or post,
or heap of stones or pillar, to the iconic statue; in fact, that
temple idolatry in its developed forms as it presents itself in later
Mediterranean history was alien to the old and genuine tradition of
Semitic public worship. Iconic representations of divinities may
indeed be found in Western Semitic regions, and some of these may be
of great antiquity; such as the silver statue that Thutmose III. (of
the fifteenth century B.C.) carried off from Megiddo and the
Lebanon,[226.1] or the “Astarte”-plaques found on the site of Gezer.
But in Semitic communities of the earlier period such objects belonged
rather to the private religion, and the public service centred round
the sacred pillar or stone, as was the case at Mecca both before and
after Islam arose: the evidence for this has been carefully given and
estimated by Robertson Smith and Sir Arthur Evans.[226.2]
The same statement holds of many of the non-Semitic peoples of Western
Anatolia; in Phrygia, for instance, the earliest emblem of Kybele was
the rude pillar or cone-shaped stone, and this survived down to late
times in the worship of the Anatolian goddess in some of the Greek
cities on the Asiatic coast.
The recent discoveries in the regions of the Minoan and Mycenaean
culture reveal the same phenomenon: the cults in this area of the
Aegean in the second millennium were in the main aniconic, the
favourite emblem being {227} the pillar or tree-trunk, while in
ancient Crete the axe and even the cross has been found.[227.1] Where
the divinity appears in full human shape, as the snake-goddess in the
chapel of the cross, the lion-guarded goddess or the god descending in
the air above the pillar on the Minoan seals, these figures cannot, or
need not, be interpreted as actual temple-idols. And students of the
religion of classical Greece are familiar with the ample evidence of
the aniconic tradition in the λίθοι ἀργοί, and the cone-shaped pillars
and stocks that served as divine emblems in the later temples of
Greece.[227.2]
Now the ethnic question concerning pillar-cult has been critically
discussed by Sir Arthur Evans in his treatise mentioned above; and the
conclusion at which he arrives, that the striking parallelisms in
Semitic Anatolian and Aegean ritual monuments are not to be explained
as the result of direct borrowing from one or the other group of
peoples, but as the abiding influence of a very early Mediterranean
tradition, commends itself as the most reasonable. It is legitimate to
maintain that the earliest Hellenes took over much of this aniconic
cult from the earlier Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation; but we must
not overlook the fact that they also possessed their own, as a
tradition derived from Central Europe.[227.3] The most futile
hypothesis would be to assume that the early Greeks derived it from
Babylon, where it is less in evidence than in any other Semitic
community.[227.4]
{228}
The iconic impulse whereby the tree-trunk and pillar were gradually
supplanted by the fully human statue was beginning to work by the time
that the Homeric poems received their present form; for we have in the
_Iliad_[228.1] an undoubted reference to a seated statue of Athena in
her temple on the Akropolis of Troy. We see here the working of an
instinct that was partly religious, partly, perhaps, aesthetic in its
origin. If we are to connect it with foreign influences, Egypt is at
least a more “proximate cause” than Babylon.
This comparison of the cult-objects set up in shrines or holy places
must take into account the phallic emblem also. This was much in vogue
in the worship of Hermes and Dionysos, and was not unknown even in the
ritual of Artemis.[228.2] Herodotus maintains that it was adopted by
the Hellenes from “the Pelasgians,” but, as I have tried to show
elsewhere,[228.3] we cannot attach real value to his induction. It
may have descended from an old tradition of European cult, and it was
indigenous among other Aryan nations. As regards the Mediterranean
races, we find traces of its use in the Samothracian mysteries and in
the grave-cult of Phrygia; while some of the records of the Sabazian
mysteries suggest that a phallic character attached to them. The
Minoan-Mycenaean culture has been regarded as innocent of this, since
the phallic emblem does not appear among the monuments yet found; and
this opinion is somewhat corroborated by its absence in the ritual of
Aphrodite, who may be regarded as a direct descendant of the great
Cretan goddess; for only a late and somewhat doubtful text attests the
dedication of phalloi to the {229} Cyprian Aphrodite.[229.1] But the
evidence from the Phrygian religion, that has many ethnic affinities
with Crete, and from such ritual-stories as that of Pasiphae, ought to
make us hesitate.
In Semitic ritual the emblem was certainly not commonly in public use,
even if it occurred at all; the evidence for it, at present
forthcoming, is at least very doubtful; two of the pillars found at
Gezer have been supposed to possess phallic attributes;[229.2] but
Robertson Smith has well protested against the foolish tendency to
interpret sacred pillars generally as phalloi,[229.3] and even
regards Lucian’s assertion of the phallic significance of the two
sacred pillars, each three hundred feet in height, that flanked the
propylaea of the temple at Hierapolis,[229.4] as a mistake suggested
to him by the later Hellenic misinterpretation. Other statements of
Lucian in that treatise may cause us to believe that a phallic
character attached to some part of the ritual of the Syrian goddess;
but, if it did, we could not safely regard it as originally Semitic,
since so many ethnic strains are mingled in that complex religion.
It is doubtful whether we can recognise the emblem anywhere in the
religious monuments of the Hittites, though Perrot would give this
interpretation to one of the cult-objects carved on the relief of
Boghaz-Keui.[229.5]
Finally, its vogue in Babylonia seems to have been confined to private
superstition; from the second millennium onwards it was employed as an
amulet, {230} and one of the royal chronicles, about 1110 B.C., is
inscribed on a tablet that represents a phallos; but we cannot argue
from this or any other evidence yet adduced, so far as I am aware,
that the emblem was used in public ritual.
So far as we can discern at present, then, the Babylonian and Hellenic
phenomena are divergent in respect of pillar-cult and phallic
ritual.[230.1]
The most interesting part of our present inquiry is the comparison of
the ceremonies and the concept of sacrifice in East and West. At the
first glance we note, as usual, a certain general similarity. In the
earliest period we find various animals, both wild and domestic,
offered upon the altars, but in Babylonia no special rules concerning
their sex, such as were prescribed by ancient Greek and Judaic ritual.
In all these countries, again, bloodless offerings of cereals and
fruits were in common vogue; and in the earliest Babylonian period,
these were of great variety, an inscription of Gudea mentioning
butter, honey, wine, corn with milk, figs, dates, as the food of the
gods, “untouched by fire.”[230.2] We note here the distinction
familiar in Greek ritual, between ἔμπυρα and ἄπυρα ἱερά; only in
Babylonia it does not seem to have been of religious importance, nor
to have been developed, as it was in Hellas, into a ceremonial law
that might engender an important variation in the moral ideas and
religious concepts of the worshipper; for instance, the altar of {231}
Apollo at Delos was called καθαρός, “the pure altar,” because no blood
could be shed upon it, the sacrifices of Athena Lindia at Rhodes, and
of Zeus in certain mystic rites of Crete, were ἄπυρα, or “fireless,”
which was the technical name for the oblations of fruits and cereals;
and this fact of ritual suggested to later Greek philosophy the
ethical-religious view that the “pure,” that is to say, bloodless,
offering was the more acceptable oblation, and was a tradition of the
age of man’s innocence. This pregnant idea has not yet been discovered
in Mesopotamian or in any other old Semitic religion; the Babylonian
deities received both kinds, and perhaps simultaneously, though in
certain special ceremonies the sacred cake, or the liquid offerings of
milk, honey, wine, and oil, might suffice;[231.1] while, according to
the ancient Hebraic view, as the legend of Cain and Abel indicates,
the deity appears to prefer blood-sacrifice, though each species is
recognised in the pre-exilic sacral literature.[231.2]
There is another distinction observed in Greek ritual, that becomes of
some importance in the later history of ascetic purity, that between
wineless offerings (νηφάλια) and those accompanied with wine: the
former being preferred by the powers of the lower world,[231.3]
though not invariably, and certainly not by the departed hero. However
this distinction arose--and no single hypothesis explains all the
cases--it was not a Semitic tradition, taught in early days to Hellas.
For the {232} Semitic divinities, including Jahwé, have a genial
liking for wine “which cheereth God and man”;[232.1] nor have we any
Semitic example of a taboo on it, except possibly a late Nabataean
inscription from the neighbourhood of Palmyra, mentioning “the god who
drinks no wine.”[232.2] Such a phrase would certainly not apply to
the deities of Babylon; even the sun-god, who in Hellas appears to
have been a total abstainer, is offered wine in the Babylonian
service,[232.3] and, according to one verse in the _Epic of
Creation_, the deities actually get drunk,[232.4] a grossness which,
in the mythic imagination of Hellas, is only imagined as possible for
Dionysos.
We have the right to say, then, that the avoidance of wine in certain
religious services of Hellas helps to confirm the impression of its
early independence of Semitic influences. The Hellenic rule may, in
certain cases, have been derived from an older Aegean tradition; for
two of the deities to whom it was applied, Helios and Aphrodite, may
be believed to have been bequeathed to Greece by the Minoan-Mycenaean
religion; and wine appears to have been prohibited in certain
ceremonies of the Phrygian goddess,[232.5] and of a goddess of
Caria.[232.6]
These are differences of some importance, and doubtless of great
antiquity between the ritual of East and West; more insignificant, yet
of considerable value for {233} our present question, is the fact that
incense was a regular accompaniment of the Babylonian sacrifice, but
did not come into religious use in Greece till some time after the
period of Homer. The fact itself we may consider as proved, both by
Homer’s silence about it, and by the Homeric use of the word θύος,
which means “victim,” and never “incense,” as in later Greek it came
to mean. Had the influence of the Mesopotamian culture been as strong
on Greece in the second millennium as it came to be from 800 B.C.
onwards, we should certainly have expected that the religious use of
incense, which is very attractive and spreads easily from one race to
another, would have been adopted by Greek ritual before the time of
Homer.
A more essential point is the sharp contrast preserved in the Greek
rites between the Olympian and the Chthonian ritual; a contrast that
demanded a difference of terminology and dictated different sacral
laws concerning time, manner, place of sacrifice, and choice of
victim. So far, I have not been able to discover any hint of this
important bifurcation of ritual in any Mesopotamian record. The only
nether-world power who was worshipped at all was Nergal, whether under
this or other names; and it does not appear that his worship differed
in any essential respect from that of any other high god. In fact, the
dualism between powers of the upper and powers of the lower world,
which has been generally remarked, and sometimes exaggerated in
Hellenic polytheism, only appears slightly in the Babylonian, and
seems to have left no impress on the divine service at all.
As regards the animals of sacrifice, the only striking divergence that
Hellenic and Semitic custom presents is in respect of the swine. The
sanctity or horror with {234} which this animal was regarded by most
Semitic societies[234.1] is not reflected in any record of early
Greek feeling. Being the Hellene’s common food, he offered it freely
to the deity, though in local cults there might occasionally be a
taboo on this as elsewhere on other victims, such as sheep or goat.
But it is possible that some of the predecessors of the Hellene in
Crete and Asia Minor, if not in Greece itself, shared the Semitic
sentiment in regard to the pig; and the reverence paid to it in Crete,
and especially at Praisos in later times,[234.2] may have been a
legacy of Minoan religion; also the Carian worship of Hemithea in
which swine were tabooed may have had ancient links with
Crete.[234.3] But the facts of swine-sacrifice or swine-reverence,
though they serve to distinguish the Hellenic from the ordinary
Semitic community, do not bear directly on our present problem, the
proofs of early Mesopotamian influence on the proto-Hellenic race. For
the usual Semitic taboo has not yet been found in Mesopotamia. The pig
is mentioned in a religious text as one of the animals that might be
offered to the gods as a vicarious piacular sacrifice, nor is there
any hint that the animal is being offered as an unclean
animal.[234.4] Certainly, other animals are mentioned much more
frequently as victims; and I am not aware of any other text that
mentions swine-sacrifice. It was associated in some way with the god
Ninib, one of whose appellatives means “swine”;[234.5] but no
evidence is yet forthcoming that it was offered to him.
{235}
A question now arises of greater moment both for our present purpose
and for the wider interests of Comparative Religion. Was the purport
and significance of the sacrificial act the same in the Western
society as that which is revealed in the sacred literature of
Babylonia? No part of the ancient religious system has been the theme
of so much study and speculation in recent years as the ancient
sacrifice. Robertson Smith in his epoch-making book, _The Religion of
the Semites_, was the pioneer of a new theory; which has since been
developed or modified by certain English and a few Continental
scholars following on his track. The result of these labours has been
to formulate and define various forms of sacrifice that prevailed in
the Mediterranean area. Three main types appear to emerge: (_a_) the
gift sacrifice, where an oblation is given over entirely to the deity,
whether generally to win his favour, or in special circumstances--for
instance, after sin has been committed--to appease his wrath, or as a
thank-offering for favour received; (_b_) the communion sacrifice,
where the community or the individual eat with the deity,
strengthening their feeling of fellowship by a common meal; (_c_) the
sacramental type, where the community or the individual may be said to
“eat the god,” that is, to partake of food or drink made sacred by the
infusion of the divine spirit or personality, which is thus
communicated to the partaker. It is best for the present to regard
these three as separate and independent, without trying to determine
which is prior and which posterior.[235.1]
The first type, which is almost ubiquitous in the human societies that
have arrived at the belief in personal {236} deities, is sufficiently
attested by Homer of the early Greeks, who promise and perform the
sacrifice partly as an offering to please or to appease the deity.
What is more important is the evidence, which I have dealt with
elsewhere,[236.1] that Homeric society was familiar also with the
more genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal where the
worshipper and the deity meet around the altar; this emerges clearly
in the accounts that Homer has given us of an Achaean sacrificial
feast.[236.2] Even the germs are already visible of the idea from
which the third or more mystic type of sacrifice, what I have called
the sacramental type, might be evolved; for special significance
attaches to the acts described in the phrases οὐλοχύτας προβάλοντο and
σπλάγχν᾽ ἐπάσαντο, “they threw forward the barley-shreddings” and “they
tasted the entrails”: the first phrase is not wholly clear, but it may
signify that stalks of barley are first placed on the altar, and
thereby consecrated or filled with the divine virtue that is inherent
there, and then the beast is touched with these on the forehead and
thereby becomes himself filled with the spirit of godhead;[236.3] the
second is also a mystic act, for the σπλάγχνα specially contain the
life, which is now infused with divinity, and by tasting them the
worshippers partake of the divine life. All this arises solely from
the extraordinary degree of supernatural force or “Mana” which the
altar itself possesses, a force which may have {237} been an
inheritance from long ages of pillar-worship, if we believe the altar
to have been evolved from the sacred pillar.[237.1] It explains other
details in the old Hellenic sacrificial act; such as the casting the
hairs of the victim into the altar-flame,[237.2] which established a
communion between the animal and the deity, the practice of solemnly
consecrating the lustral water by ceremoniously carrying it round the
altar,[237.3] and charging it with a still more potent infusion of
divinity by plunging into it a lighted brand from the
altar-fire.[237.4]
The communion sacrifice must then have been in vogue in pre-Homeric
times; and the idea that gave it its meaning never wholly faded from
the State-ritual; for the rule, expressed by such formulae as οὐκ
ἀποφορά, δαινύσθων αὐτοῦ, bidding the worshipper conclude the feast
round the altar and take none of the flesh home, seems to arise partly
from the feeling that the ceremony was meaningless unless he feasted
wholly with the deity.[237.5] But it was most vividly realised in the
religious services of the θίασοι, the later religious orders or
fraternities devoted each to the cult of its special divinity; for
these a common religious meal formed the chief binding-tie.[237.6]
Apart from the Homeric evidence, we have the record of the Attic
Bouphonia as attestation of the great antiquity of this type of
sacrifice in Greece. To {238} the actual statement of the details
given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias, much is added by the curious
aetiological legends that grew up around it.[238.1] We see the ox
marking himself for sacrifice by voluntarily going up to the altar and
eating the corn upon it, being thus called, as it were, by the god
into communion with himself. As he is thus full of the spirit of the
god, it is regarded a sacrilegious act to slay him; but all the
citizens partake of his flesh, and even the stranger who eats becomes
himself a citizen, as through this feast he enters into kinship with
Zeus Polieus. All this can be explained by the belief that Zeus
Polieus is in the altar; and we need not resort to such theories as
that the ox is a totem-animal or the spirit of vegetation.
We must, however, beware of concluding that because the victim was
thus temporarily possessed with godhead and in this holy state
devoured, he was therefore literally regarded as the full incarnation
of the god, or that the worshipper consciously believed he was eating
his own deity who died in the sacrifice. For religious consciousness
by no means always draws the full logical corollaries of a religious
act. The more mystic idea, that has played a great part in the
religion of Europe, can only be detected or suspected, apart from
written direct ancient testimony, where the animal is treated with
reverence apart from and before his association with the altar, or is
regarded as the habitual incarnation of the deity. The immolation and
devouring of such a victim would be of the true sacramental type,
which Robertson Smith believed was the aboriginal form of all
sacrifice. But we have no clear example of it from the earliest period
of genuine Hellenic religion, unless we {239} force the evidence or
exaggerate its meaning.[239.1] We have only certain myths that we may
doubtfully venture to interpret by means of this hypothesis. And these
are no myths about animals, but about human victims devoured in
sacrifice: the most significant is the story of the cannibalistic
feast held by King Lykaon, who cooked his own son and offered the
flesh to Zeus, a ritual of which some survival, whether mimetic or
half-real, was witnessed by Pausanias himself on Mount Lykaon.[239.2]
This would point to sacramental cannibalism, if we assume that King
Lykaon was the human incarnation of Zeus Lykaios and that his son was
therefore a divine infant. But it is possible that the story enshrines
the remembrance of the more ordinary clan-sacrifice of the life of a
clansman to procure them communion with the clan-god by the common
partaking of his flesh: the kinsman is offered rather than the animal,
not so much that the sacrificers may eat their god, but that the god
by consuming their most valued life may be more closely incorporate
with them.
Again, in one of the darkest and most perplexing of Greek legends, the
story of Klumenos of Argos and his incestuous love of his daughter
Harpalyke, who revenges herself by slaying her own child and offering
it to the father in a sacrificial meal, we may discern the glimmer of
a remembrance of a cannibal sacrament. The associations of the story
dimly indicate a Thracian origin.[239.3] And it is in the range of
the Greek Dionysiac {240} cult, which according to the most probable
view was adopted from Thrace, that we find imprinted on legend and
ritual the tradition of a savage type of sacrament, in which the human
or animal incarnation of the god was devoured. Such is the
significance that we may fairly attach to the Titan-story of the
murder of the infant Dionysos, to the σπαραγμός of the goat or bull or
snake periodically practised by the Bacchoi or Bacchae, and to the
death of Pentheus.[240.1] And in later Greek ritual the consciousness
here and there survived that the victim offered to Dionysos incarnated
the very deity, even before it acquired the temporary mystic afflatus
from contact with the altar. The record of the ritual of Tenedos, in
which a sacred pregnant cow was tended reverently and the calf that
she bore was dressed in the buskins and then sacrificed to Dionysos,
“the render of men,” is the most piquant example.[240.2]
This Dionysiac tradition reaches back undoubtedly to the second
millennium in Greece; the evidence of a similar sacramental ritual in
purely Hellenic worship is shadowy and slight, for the critical
examination of the Eleusinian mysteries does not clearly reveal it;
and the growth and diffusion of the idea in later Paganism does not
concern us now.
But the consideration of the early Hellenic sacrifice, of which the
salient features have been slightly sketched above, is of signal value
for our present purpose. For it reveals at once a marked contrast to
Babylonian ideas so far as these at present are revealed to us. The
Babylonian-Assyrian liturgies, epics, and chronicles have failed to
disclose any other theory of the sacrifice than that which is called
the gift-theory. A general {241} term for the Babylonian sacrifice is
“kishtu” or “present.”[241.1] The deities are supposed to eat what is
given them; in the Epic of the Deluge the naïve phrase occurs, “The
gods smell the savour, the delightful savour, the gods swarm like
flies around the sacrificer.” No evidence is as yet forthcoming that
the sacrificer was supposed or was allowed to eat with the deity, as
in the Hellenic communion-sacrifice. On the contrary, certain texts
can be quoted which seem expressly to forbid such a thing.[241.2] The
document already cited that was found in Assurbanipal’s library,
containing the Job-like lament of the good man who had found no profit
in goodness, contains a verse in which he compares himself with the
sinner who neglects all religious ordinances, and who has even “eaten
the food of God.” And so we find that among the various evil or impure
or unlucky deeds that could bring a man under the ban of the gods, the
“devouring of sacrificial flesh” is expressly mentioned.[241.3]
Unless, then, documents yet to be revealed contradict this positive
and negative evidence, we have here a fact of great weight to set
against the theory that we are discussing. Whencesoever the Hellenes
derived their genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal,
they did not derive it from Babylon. And all Robertson Smith’s
speculations concerning the inner significance of the Semitic
sacrifice cannot yet be applied to Mesopotamia, whence he was not able
to glean any evidence. In Babylonia the sacrificer got no share of the
victim. He might eat with the spirits of the dead in certain ritual,
but he was not, it appears, privileged {242} to eat with the god or
goddess. The deity took the victim, or the sacrifice of cereals and
fruits, as a present, and the priest got his share. But we are not
told that the priest ate with the god, or where he ate; nor can we say
that the priest represented the worshipper.
If a true sacrament is yet to be discovered in Babylonian religion, it
will probably be found in some document of the Tammuz ritual. For it
is probable that Tammuz was identified with the corn as with other
parts of vegetation, and that the mourning for him was accompanied
with abstinence from bread. His resurrection ended the fast, and if in
their joy the worshippers ceremoniously broke bread, they may have
supposed they were eating the body of their risen lord. But such a
reconstruction of the old Tammuz ritual rests at present only on the
indirect evidence of the later records of Attis-Adonis cult and of the
Tammuz-worship among the heathen Syrians of Harran in the tenth
century of our era.[242.1]
It belongs to the Babylonian conception of the sacrifice as a gift,
that the animal was often regarded as a ransom for the man’s own life;
that is to say, when sin had been committed, the deity might be
placated by the gift of an agreeable victim, and be persuaded to
accept it in place of the sinner whose life was properly forfeit. For
instance, a sick man is always supposed to have sinned; and the priest
who is performing an animal sacrifice in his behalf uses the prayer,
“Take his present, take his ransom”;[242.2] and the formula of a
sacrifice offered by way of exorcism is very explicit: “A male sheep,
a female sheep, a living sheep, a dead {243} sheep shall die, but I
shall live.”[243.1] Another inscription[243.2] throws further light
on the ritual of the vicarious sacrifice: “To the high-priest may one
cry out: the kid of substitution for the man, the kid for his soul he
hath brought: place the head of the kid to the head of the man, place
the neck of the kid to the neck of the man, place the breast of the
kid to the breast of the man.” Whether this solemn manipulation was
performed after or before the sacrifice, its object must have been to
establish by contact a communion between the man and the victim, so
that the kid might be his most efficacious representative. It thus
became part of the higher ethical teaching of Babylon that “sacrifice
brings life,” just as “prayer takes away sin,” a doctrine expressed in
a fragmentary tablet that contains a text of striking spiritual
import.[243.3]
The type of sacrifice that may be called vicarious must have been an
ancient as well as a later tradition in Greece; for the legends
associated with many sacrifices clearly attest it, explaining certain
animal victims as substitutes for a human life that was formerly
demanded by the offended deity, the vicarious sacrifice usually
carrying with it the ideas of sin and atonement.[243.4] The
substitution might occasionally {244} be apologised for by a legal
fiction, as, for instance, when in the ritual of the Brauronian
Artemis the angry goddess demanded the life of a maiden, and the
Athenian parent sacrificed a goat, “calling it his daughter.”[244.1]
But though this idea is common to the Mesopotamian and Hellenic
communities, they differ widely in respect of the evidence they
afford, of the prevalence of human sacrifice. As regards ancient
Greece, the evidence is indubitable, though much that has been brought
by modern scholars is due to false interpretation of ritual, such as
the scourging of the Spartan boys; later, the human sacrifice became
repugnant to the advancing ethical thought of the nation, but
according to one authority did not wholly die out till the age of
Hadrian. On the other hand, no literary text nor any monument has yet
been found that proves the existence of such a ritual in Babylonia. In
one of his biographical inscriptions Assurbanipal proclaims that he
“sacrificed” prisoners of war to avenge his murdered father on the
spot where his father was slain.[244.2] He boasts of worse things
than this; and we can well believe that he murdered them in cold
blood. But the {245} words by no means suggest a ceremonious
tomb-ritual with human sacrifice.
Slightly more important is a passage in a legal document, to which Mr.
Johns[245.1] calls attention; whence it appears that a forfeit for
reopening an already adjudicated cause was the consecration of one’s
eldest child by fire to a god or goddess; and, as incense and
cedar-wood are mentioned in the same context as concomitants of the
threatened ceremony, the conclusion seems natural that this was once
at least a real threat of human sacrifice inflicted as a legal
punishment. This legal clause gives us the right to conclude that in
the earliest period the Semites and Sumerians of Mesopotamia
occasionally resorted to this rite. They would be indeed a peculiar
people and a favoured nation if they had always been innocent of it.
It is sufficiently attested by direct evidence, either of record or
excavation, or by the suggestion of legend, of the Arabs, Syrians, the
early Canaanites,[245.2] the Israelites, the Phoenicians; also of the
Phrygians and other non-Semitic peoples of Anatolia. Yet it must be
put to the credit of the Babylonian culture of the second millennium,
that the Mesopotamians had either completely or almost abandoned it.
At this time it was doubtless in full vogue in Greece; and certainly
Babylon could not have been their evil teacher in this matter. But
they needed no teachers in what was an ancient tradition of their
northern ancestors, and of the people with whom they mingled. Yet only
twenty years ago a distinguished writer on Greek ritual could say, “It
is certain that the {246} Hellenes borrowed the practice of human
sacrifice from the Orientals.”[246.1]
As we discover no trace of the idea of communion in the ordinary
Babylonian sacrifice, we are the less surprised that scarcely any hint
is given by the sacred literature or monuments of any mystic
application of the blood of the victim, which was used for so many
purposes of communion-ritual by the early Hellenes and Hebrews. I can
find no other evidence for this in Mesopotamia except one passage
quoted by Zimmern,[246.2] in which the sacrificer is ordered to
sprinkle some part of the door with the blood of the lamb. It is not
probable that the Babylonians were incapable of the notion that by
physical contact with certain sacred objects a temporary communion
could be established between the mortal and the divinity: it appears,
for instance, in one of the formulae of the purification-ritual--“May
the torch of the Fire-god cleanse me”[246.3]--in the yearly practice
of the king grasping the hands of the idol of the god, perhaps in the
custom of attaching the worshipper to the deity with a cord,[246.4]
and in the diviner’s habit of grasping the cedar-staff, which is
called “the beloved of the gods.”[246.5] But it may be that they
never applied this notion to the sacrifice, so as to evolve the
institution of the communion-meal; or they may have evolved it in
early times, and through long ages {247} of power the priests may have
become strong enough to suppress it and to substitute for it the
gift-ritual, which would be more profitable for themselves. It accords
with this absence of any mystic significance in the sacrifice that we
do not find in the Babylonian service any mystic use of the
sacrificial skins, of which some evidence can be gathered from various
details of Greek ritual.[247.1]
Again, the Babylonian records have so far failed to reveal any
evidence for any such public ceremony as the sending forth of the
scapegoat, whether human or animal, charged with the sins of the
community. This ritual was common to the Hellenes, Egyptians, and
Hebrews, and probably to other Semitic communities.[247.2] The idea
of sin-transference on which it rests was familiar enough to the
ancient Babylonian; but he seems only to have built upon this a
private system of exorcism and purgation of sin and disease for the
individual. As far as we know, it did not occur to him to effect by
this method a solemn annual expulsion of all the sins of the nation.
On the other hand, there is another type of sacrifice common to
Babylonia and Greece, by which an oath or an engagement might be
cemented: the animal is slaughtered with an imprecation that the same
fate may befall him who breaks his oath or violates the compact.
Zimmern quotes a good example of this, relating to the compact made
between the Assyrian king Assurnirari {248} and Mati’ilu, prince of
Arpad:[248.1] a sheep is sacrificed and the formula pronounced: “This
head is not the head of a sheep, it is the head of Mati’ilu, of his
sons, of his great ones, of the people of his land. If Mati’ilu breaks
this oath, the head of Mati’ilu will be cut off, like the head of this
sheep.” The same idea underlies the oath-sacrifice in the
_Iliad_,[248.2] though it is not expressed with such naïve
make-believe or such logic in the detail; but as the beast is
slaughtered or wine poured, a curse is uttered invoking on the
perjured a similar fate, or with a prayer that “his brains may be
poured out like this wine.” The original idea is magical: the symbolic
explanation is later. Another parallel is the Latin oath over the
stone.[248.3]
Such resemblance in special forms by no means weakens the impression
that we receive from the striking differences discernible in the
Babylonian and Hellenic significance of sacrifice. To those already
noted we may add yet another, which concerns the association of
sacrifice with divination. It is Professor Jastrow’s opinion[248.4]
that the chief motive of the Babylonian sacrifice was the inspection
of the liver of the victim, from the markings of which the skilled
expert could interpret the future by a conventional system revealed to
us in certain ancient Babylonian documents. This superstition is so
elaborate and artificial that if we find it in adjacent countries, it
is more reasonable to suppose that one borrowed it from the other,
than that it was developed independently in each. We find it in later
Greece, Etruria, and Rome; but the evidence of the Homeric poems
suggests that it was unknown to the {249} Hellenes of the earlier
period. They are very likely to have borrowed it from Babylonian
sources in post-Homeric times; and we note here, as in other cases
where the influence of Babylon upon Greece can be reasonably posited,
it reaches the western shores of the Aegean at a post-Homeric rather
than a pre-Homeric epoch.
The comparative study of Mesopotamian and Hellenic sacrifice confronts
us finally with another problem belonging to the history of religions,
and one of the greatest, the dogma of the death of the divinity and
the origin and significance of that belief. For where the mystic type
of communion-sacrifice is found, where the animal that is slain for
the sacrament is regarded as the incarnation of the deity, the
divinity may be supposed himself to die temporarily, doubtless to rise
again to life, either immediately or at some subsequent festival. This
momentous conclusion need not always have been drawn, for religious
logic is not often persistently thorough, nor does the evolution of
the idea belong necessarily to the sphere of totemism, as Robertson
Smith supposed, and M. Reinach is still inclined to maintain. It is
not my concern here to discuss the totemistic hypothesis, but I may
point out that in the rare examples where the totem-animal is slain,
it is not clear that it is slain as a divinity.
Again, the belief in the periodic death of a deity might arise
independently of the sacrifice, namely, from the essential idea of the
godhead itself, when the divine life is identified with the annual
life of vegetation: the phenomena of nature in autumn and spring may
suggest to the worshipper the annual death and resurrection of the god
or goddess. It is important to note that in this, as in the other
source of the belief, the conclusion need not always have been drawn,
for the vegetation-deity {250} might be supposed not to die in autumn
or winter, but merely to disappear, and the story of his or her
disappearance need not carry the same religious consequences as the
story of the divine death.
The immolation of the divine victim in a communion-service, wherein
the worshippers partake symbolically or realistically of the divine
flesh and blood, though suggested by a thought that we must call
savage, may be pregnant with consequences momentous for higher
religion, as the history of Christian dogma attests. And even the
annual death of the nature-god may be raised to a higher significance
than its mere nature-meaning, and may be linked with the promise of
human immortality.
We may note, finally, that a religion which expresses in its ritual
the idea of the deity’s death and resurrection is likely to be charged
with a stronger emotional force than one that lacks it; for the two
events will excite an ecstasy of sorrow and of joy in the believer.
As the phenomenon, then, is of such importance, it is necessary to be
critical and unbiased in the collection of statistics. Our present
field of inquiry is the Eastern and Western Mediterranean area; and
here our conspicuous example is the ancient Sumerian-Babylonian ritual
of Tammuz,[250.1] a folk-service of lamentation and rapture,
psychologically akin in many respects to Christianity, and of most
powerful appeal.
The Tammuz hymns preserved to us are of the highest Babylonian poetry,
and though they are chiefly litanies of lamentation, sorrowing over
the death of the young god, yet one or two echoes are heard at their
close of the rapturous rejoicing over his resurrection.[251.1] {251}
With them is associated the story of the descent of his consort
Ishtar, or of his goddess-sister; another great motive of the
religious imagination which neighbouring peoples and faiths were quick
to capture and adapt to their own religious use. We have seen[251.2]
that the evidence is clear that the life of Tammuz is the life of the
crops and fruits; and we discern a pure nature-religion unmoralised
and without dogma, but evoking a mood and a sentiment that might
supply the motive force to more complex and more spiritual creeds. It
was not suited to the religious atmosphere of the Assyrian and
Babylonian courts; but its influence spread far through Asia Minor. It
captivated the other polytheistic Semites, and at times, as Ezekiel
shows us, the women of Israel, revealing to these latter, no doubt, a
vein of religious sentiment unknown in the austere Mosaic monotheism.
The ritual of Adonis is mainly borrowed from the Tammuz service. For
instance, the rite of planting the short-lived “garden of Adonis,” of
which possibly the earliest record is in Isaiah xvii. 10, appears to
be alluded to in a verse of a Tammuz hymn.[251.3] The figure of
Tammuz is primevally Sumerian; therefore the diffusion of his cult
among the various Semitic communities does not enable us to conclude
that the death and resurrection of a divinity is an aboriginal Semitic
tradition. As regards other evidence on the strength of which this
dogma has been attributed to them by some scholars, it is of late
authority and of doubtful validity. Josephus[251.4] tells us that at
Tyre the {252} resurrection of Herakles was once celebrated by Hiram;
but this might well be a derivative of the non-Semitic Sandon cult of
Tarsos, which will be considered below. And the legend of the death of
Dido at Carthage, even if there is no doubt that the queen was
originally the great goddess of Tyre, is no sufficient proof of a
Phoenician ritual in which the divinity died annually.
But as regards the non-Semitic peoples of anterior Asia, the question
of borrowing is more difficult to answer with certainty.
No Hittite monument nor any Hittite text has as yet revealed to us any
figure that we can identify with Tammuz. But certain indications
incline us to believe that the idea of the death of the god was not
unfamiliar to the Hittite religion or to some of the communities under
Hittite influence. On the Boghaz-Keui relief we have noted the
presence in the religious procession of those mysterious animals,
calves, or bulls, wearing caps of peculiar Hittite fashion.[252.1]
Are not these “theanthropic animals” to be sacrificed as a
communion-link between man and God? We know that the bull was
worshipped as an incarnation of a Hittite deity; and therefore from
the sacrifice of the bull might emerge the dogma that the deity
ceremoniously died at certain periods. From the sanctity of the bull
in ancient Hittite cult-centres may have descended the mystic
communion {253} rite of the Taurobolion or Tauropolion, which Cumont
has shown good reason for supposing to have arisen in the worship of
the Persian Anahita, and to have been adopted into the service of
Kybele.[253.1]
More direct evidence is to be gleaned from the cult of Sandon or
Sandes of Tarsos, a city which was once within the area of Hittite
culture. The god of Tarsos comes later to be identified with the
Tyrian Baal and the Hellenic Herakles; and the legend of the death of
the latter hero may be an echo of a ἱερὸς λόγος of Tarsos, inspired by
an annual rite in which the god of the city was consumed on a funeral
pyre, and was supposed to rise again from the flames in the form of an
eagle.[253.2] The later Tarsian coins display the image of the god,
the pyre, the eagle, the double-headed axe, and the lion;[253.3] and
the last three of these symbols belong to the oldest religious art of
the Hittites. The proof would be complete if it could be shown that
the name Sandon or Sandes belongs to the Hittite language. All we know
at present is that it is not a Babylonian or Sumerian word, or found
in the vocabulary of any Semitic people. Prof. Sayce believes himself
to have found it in a cuneiform inscription of Boghaz-Keui. This would
be the direct proof that we require; but the word that he
transliterates as Sandes is said to be the ideogram of Hadad, the
Syrian Semitic god, and that Hadad is used as the Semitic equivalent
of Sandes is merely a conjuncture.[253.4]
A still clearer and more striking example of the phenomenon with which
we are dealing is the Phrygian {254} and Lydian cult and legend of
Attis. The various and often conflicting details in the story of his
birth, life, and death, the various elements in his cult, are known to
us from late sources; the consideration of the whole question would
not be relevant here; but it is necessary for our purpose to
determine, if possible, what are the aboriginal motives of the myth
and cult. It seems likely that the earliest form of the Phrygian
religion was the worship of the great mother-goddess, coupled with a
son or lover,[254.1] a young and beautiful god who dies prematurely,
and whose death was bewailed in an annual ritual, whose resurrection
was presented in a subsequent or accompanying service. Of the death
and the lamentation we have older evidence than for the resurrection
and the rejoicing, but the one seems to be a necessary complement of
the other. The family likeness of Attis to Tammuz strikes us at first
sight. As Tammuz appears as a young vegetation deity, identified
partly with the life of trees, partly with the corn, so Attis in the
Phrygian legend and ritual is presented as a tree-divinity, and in the
verse of a late hymn, which is inspired by an ancient tradition, is
invoked as “the corn cut by the reaper.”
And these two personalities of the Sumerian and Phrygian religions
evoked the same psychologic sentiment, sorrowful, romantic, and
yearning. The hypothesis naturally suggests itself that the more
Western people borrowed the cult from Mesopotamia, and that this had
happened as early as B.C. 1500.[254.2] All scholars are agreed at all
events that the figure of Attis belongs to the older pre-Aryan stratum
of the population of {255} Phrygia; modern speculation is sometimes
inclined to regard this as Hittite, and we know that the Hittites
adopted some part of the Babylonian religion. But the name Attis
itself is a stumbling-block to the hypothesis of borrowing from
Mesopotamia. Believing Adonis to be a Western-Semitic form of Tammuz,
we can explain the name as meaning merely “the Lord,” a natural
appellative of the Sumerian god. But we cannot so explain “Attis.” It
is non-Semitic, and must be regarded as belonging to an Anatolian
language-group, nor can we yet discover its root-meaning.
Again, there are many features of the Attis-worship and legend that
are not found in the corresponding Sumerian, and one at least that
seems essentially alien to it. The death of the vegetation-god,
originally suggested by the annual phenomenon of nature, may be
explained by various myths, when the personal deity has so far emerged
from his nature-shell that he is capable of personal drama. The death
of Tammuz does not appear to have been mythologically explained at
all. We may suppose that the killing of Adonis by the boar was
borrowed from the Attis legend, for in Phrygia, and also in Lydia--as
the Herodotean Ates story proves--this animal was sometimes regarded
as the enemy that slew the god. It is a reasonable belief that the
boar came to play this part in the story through a misunderstanding of
certain ritual, in which this victim was annually offered as
incarnating the deity, or was reverentially spared through a
sacrificial law of tabu. If this is an original fact of Attis-cult, it
counts somewhat against the hypothesis of derivation from Mesopotamia,
for the pig does not appear to have played any such part, positive or
negative, in Mesopotamian, as in the ritual of the Western Semites and
{256} on the shores of Asia Minor; nor can any connection at present
be discovered between Tammuz and this animal.
But another version of the death of Attis, current at some time among
his worshippers, was that he died from the effects of self-mutilation,
a motive suggested by the emasculation of the Phrygian Galloi. We have
here a phenomenon in the cult and myth that was alien to the religious
habits of the Mesopotamian communities. The eunuch as a secular
functionary is a figure belonging to an immemorial social tradition of
the East; but the eunuch-priest is the morbid product of a very few
religions, and there is no trace of such in Mesopotamia. The
Babylonian church-law demanded an unblemished priesthood of strong
virility, agreeing in this respect with the Judaic and the Hellenic,
and according with an ancient sentiment that the vigour of the priest
was the pledge of that continued flow of divine power which supported
the vigour of the community. Self-emasculation was penalised in the
religious rule of Jahwé, and the Gallos was excluded from
temple-worship by the ritual code of Lesbos. The records of modern
savagery and the history of asceticism, whether in modern and
mediaeval India or in early Christianity, afford us varied
illustration of the wildest excesses of self-inflicted cruelty against
the human body, but not--so far as I am aware--of this particular form
of self-destruction.[256.1]
As a religious practice it is a special characteristic of Phrygia, a
land always fascinating to the student on account of its strange
freaks of religious psychology; and from Phrygia the practice spread
into some adjacent communities, such as Bambyke. One may be allowed
{257} to pause a little to consider the original motive that prompted
it. At first sight one is tempted to explain it as due to a morbid
exaggeration of the craving for purity. But elsewhere, where this
impulse was most powerful, for instance, in the later Orphic and Isis
cults, and in early and mediaeval Christianity, it produced many
mental aberrations but not this particular one. Nor, again, have we
any reason for supposing this craving to have been strong in the
devotees of Phrygia; the Galloi of Bambyke, according to Lucian, were
possessed by strong though impotent sexual desires and were allowed
full license with women. The form of communion most ardently sought
with the Phrygian goddess and with the later Sabazios was a marriage
symbolised by a sexual act; and Greek and Latin writers, both pagan
and Christian, agree in reprobating the obscenities of Kybele-Attis
worship; we may note also that Phrygian sacred mythology is somewhat
grosser than the Hellenic.
We are compelled to seek another explanation, and I can suggest none
other than that which I have hazarded elsewhere; namely, that Phrygian
religious emasculation was an act performed in a frenzy of exaltation
by the priest or _mystes_ desirous of assimilating himself as far as
possible to the female nature of the great divinity.[257.1] {258} The
worship was under male ministration for the highest part; but for the
full exercise of divine power the male priest must become quasi-female
and wear a female dress, the latter part of the rôle being common
enough in primitive “theurgy.” The priest is himself at times the
incarnation of the young god, and is called Attis. Therefore Attis was
himself supposed to have performed the same act, even at the cost of
his life. How early was this institution of a eunuch priesthood in
Phrygia we have no direct evidence to prove. It may be a “Hittite”
tradition; for figures that Perrot reasonably interprets as
eunuch-priests are seen on the reliefs of Boghaz-Keui.
Returning to the topic of the death of the divinity, we may assume
that in Phrygia this was a very ancient tradition, enacted yearly by a
ceremonious laying out of the vegetation puppet on a bier, or the
suspension of it on a pine-tree. We have no direct or otherwise trusty
evidence for the immolation of the priest who incarnates the god;
doubtless the stories about the death of Marsyas and the
harvest-sacrifice of Lityerses point to a ritual of human-sacrifice;
whom Marsyas stands for is doubtful, but in the Lityerses legend it is
merely the passing stranger who is slain, and neither of these
traditions is explicitly linked with Attis-cult.
Finally, we may pronounce the hypothesis of the derivation of the
Phrygian cult from Mesopotamia to be unproved and unnecessary.
Pursuing this phenomenon further afield, we come to the area of
Minoan-Mycenaean culture. If the legend of the death of the Minotaur
could be safely interpreted as arising from the periodic immolation of
a bull-god, the idea that we are in quest of would be proved to belong
to the Minoan Cretans; but the {259} frescoes of Knossos present that
event with such a gay and sporting _entourage_ that one feels shy of
forcing a solemn religious significance into it. More important for
our purpose is the traditional Zeus-legend of Crete. It is generally
felt to be alien to the genuine Hellenic tradition concerning their
high god, as something adopted by the immigrant Hellenes from an
earlier Eteocretan ritual and creed.[259.1] We have a glimpse of a
ritual in which the deity is born, is worshipped as an infant, and
then as a boy--κοῦρος, as he is invoked in the new fragment of the
hymn of the Kouretes--and especially as the son of a great mother, not
as a mature independent personality. Again, there appears an orgiastic
emotion and passion in the ritual that strikes a note in harmony with
the Phrygian Kybele-Attis worship. The very early associations of
Crete and the countries adjacent to the Troad are now being revealed
by accumulating evidence, and may point to an affinity of stock. It
may well have been, then, that the Minoan Cretans had their
counterpart to Attis, a young god who was born and died periodically,
whom they may have named Velchanos, the name of the young deity seen
sitting under a tree on a Cretan coin of the fifth century. Though in
age and character so unlike the Hellenic Zeus, we may suppose that the
incoming Hellenes named him so because they found him the chief god of
the island. We can also understand why the later Bacchic mystery
flourished so fruitfully in Crete, if it found here already the ritual
of a young god who died and rose again, and why in later times the
inhabitants celebrated with such enthusiasm the Hilaria,[259.2] the
Easter festival of the resurrection of the Phrygian divinity.
{260}
This attempt to reconstruct a portion of old Cretan religion on the
lines of the early Phrygian has only a precarious value, until some
more positive evidence is forthcoming from the Minoan art-record,
which hitherto has revealed to us nothing concerning an annual divine
birth and death. The ritual-legend is incomplete: we hear sufficiently
of the birth, and we may argue _a priori_ that a periodic ritual of
the god’s birth implies a periodic death. Unfortunately all that we
glean from ancient literature is that there was a grave of Zeus,
perhaps in the Idaean cave, on which Pythagoras is said to have
written an epitaph.[260.1] But a sceptical doubt arises here from the
fact which was pointed out by Rohde, that the grave of a divine
personage was often a misnomer of the underground sanctuary of a
chthonian deity; and either the Idaean cave or the great cavern on
Mount Dikte, whence the interesting relics of an immemorial cult have
recently been gathered,[260.2] might at a later period have come to
be regarded as a grave. Still, we may ask, could the phrase “the grave
of Zeus” have become prevalent among a people with whom the worship of
this god was still a living creed, unless the faith also prevailed
that the god who died rose again to power? In that case the “grave of
Zeus” could be a name for a sanctuary where the ritual of the death
was enacted preliminary to the ritual of the birth.
This reconstruction then, and the _a priori_ deduction emphasised
above, may claim to be at least legitimate.
Finally, some evidence may be added from Cyprian cult for the view
that the Minoan civilisation was {261} cognisant of the dogma of the
death of the divinity. We hear of the grave of Ariadne-Aphrodite which
was shown in later times in Cyprus,[261.1] and the Cretan and
Cypriote legends of the maidens called Gorgo, Parakuptousa, and
Galatea[261.2] reveal to us an Aphrodite who died periodically and
was laid out on a bier and revived. The Aphrodite of Cyprus is most
probably of “Minoan” origin; and, being a goddess of vegetation, the
idea of periodic death and resurrection might naturally attach to her,
and might be associated with another type of ritual also, the annual
casting of her puppet into the sea, which probably gave rise to such
stories as the leap of Britomartis or Derketo into the waves.[261.3]