THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD
{16}
A summary sketch of so manifold a theme as that with which this
short handbook deals will be of more value if it can present the facts
in some kind of chronologic sequence.
We may conveniently distinguish four periods: the first, the
prehistoric, falling mainly in the second millennium B.C. and closing
with the epoch marked by the Homeric poems; the second, extending from
900 to 500 B.C., beginning with the colonial expansion of Hellas and
ending before the Persian invasion; the third, from 500 to 338 B.C.,
including the greatest century of Greek history and closing with the
battle of Chæronea and the establishment of Macedonian supremacy; the
fourth and last, the Hellenistic and Græco-Roman period.
The chronologic statement is embarrassed by the absence of any record
of date for the institution and diffusion of most of the cults and for
the growth of certain religious ideas; nor can we safely date a
religious fact by the date of the author who first mentions it; a
detail of ritual, a myth, a religious concept, only attested by
Pausanias or a late scholiast, may descend from an age centuries
before the Homeric. And our earliest inscriptions do not {17} as yet
reach back to a period earlier than the beginning of the seventh
century.
For determining our view of Greek religion in the second millennium
B.C., when Hellenism was in the making, the poems of Homer and Hesiod
are of priceless value if they are used with cautious and trained
criticism. We depend greatly also on the general inductions of
comparative religion and anthropology, which may sometimes guide us
rightly in this matter, especially if the anthropological comparison
is drawn from more or less adjacent communities rather than from the
Antipodes. We depend also on the evidence of the monuments of the
Minoan-Mycenæan religion, revealing glimpses of the practices and
faith of a people of high culture, whom no one would dare now to call,
at least in the earlier stage of their life, Hellenic, but from whom
the earliest Hellenes doubtless adopted much into their own religion.
_Sketch of Homeric religion_.--The poems of Homer present us with an
advanced polytheism, a system in which the divinities are already
correlated in some sort of hierarchy and organised as a divine family
under a supreme God. These divine beings are not mere ‘daimones’ or
‘numina,’ such as were in the main the old deities of Rome, vague and
dimly outlined forces animate yet scarcely personal; but rather
concrete and individual Θεοί of robust and sharply defined
personality, not spirits but immortal beings of superhuman substance
and soul, conceived in the glorified image of man. The anthropomorphic
bias is dominant in the poems, plastically shaping the figures of all
the divinities, except occasionally some of the lower grade, such as
{18} the river-god Skamandros. Even the vague group of nymphs, female
‘daimones’ of the rill and the mountain, while lacking individual
characterisation, bear the anthropomorphic name, ‘Brides,’ or ‘young
women,’ which is the root-meaning of Νύμφη. Though the gods and
goddesses are shape-shifters and may manifest or disguise themselves
in the form of any animal--birds by choice--yet their abiding type is
human; nor has Homer any clear remembrance of a ‘cow-faced’ Hera,
still less of an ‘owl-faced’ Athena, since for him at least ‘Hera
βοῶπις’ was Hera ‘of the large ox-eyes’--the term is a complimentary
epithet of women--and Athena γλαυκῶπις, the goddess ‘of the flashing
eyes.’ Also his divinities are moralised beings with human passions
and ethical as well as artistic emotions. The highest among them are
not imagined as Nature-powers, bound up with or immanent in the forces
and departments of the natural world, for such a description applies
only to his wind-Gods and nymphs and gods of river and sea; also,
though more loosely, to his Helios, the God of the Sun; to beings in
fact that count little in his religious world. It scarcely applies to
Poseidon, for though his province is the sea, and some of his
functions and appellatives ‘the girdler of the earth,’ ‘the
earth-shaker,’ ‘he of the dark blue locks’ are derived from it, he is
also the builder of the walls of Troy, the family deity of the house
of Nestor, and the God of horses. It does not describe at all his mode
of imagining and presenting Apollo, Hera, Athena, Hermes and others.
There is no hint that these divinities were conceived by him as
nature-powers or as evolved from any part of the natural world. {19}
The High God, Zeus, though specially responsible for the atmospheric
and celestial phenomena, is not identified with the thunder or even
with the sky, though a few phrases may reveal the influence of an
earlier animistic conception of the divine sky. His religious world,
in short, is morphologically neither a system of polydaimonism nor one
of pantheism in which a divine force is regarded as universally
immanent in the world of things; but is constructed on the lines of
personal theism.
We may observe also that the polytheism of the age of Perikles in
regard to some of its leading divinities has not markedly advanced
beyond the Homeric. Athena, in the Homeric poems, is already the
Goddess of war, arts, and counsel; and there are already hints in the
Homeric presentation of her of the tender Madonna-like character that
is beautifully developed in the later Attic monuments. The Homeric
Apollo is already the oracular God who delights in the music of the
Pæan, though his artistic and intellectual character is not yet fully
developed. Of Hermes and Hephaistos the later Attic conception is not
notably different from the Homeric.
Again, in spite of one or two frivolous and licentious passages, the
religious tone in the Homeric poems is serious and in many important
respects accords with an advanced morality. The deity, though jealous
and revengeful of wrongs or slights to himself, is on the whole on the
side of righteousness and mercy; his displeasure is aroused by those
who spurn the voice of prayer, who injure the suppliant, the guest, or
even the beggar; and besides Zeus and the other ‘Olympians,’ who are
{20} general guardians of the right, there loom the dark powers of the
lower world, who are specially concerned with the sanctity of the
oath. Much also of the religious reflection in the poems strikes us as
mature and advanced: notably that passage at the beginning of the
Odyssey where Zeus declares that it is not the Gods who bring evil to
men, but that it is the wickedness of their own hearts that is the
cause of all their evils.
Finally, the Homeric ritual appears as on the higher level of theism.
We can detect it in no trace of savagery and but little contamination
of the religion with magic. The sacrifice is more than a mere bribe;
it is a friendly communion with the divinity; and the service is
solemn and beautiful with hymn and dance. The cult is furnished with
altar and sometimes with temple and a priesthood, but not yet, as a
rule, with the idol, though this is beginning to appear.
This slight sketch of Homeric theology is presented here in the belief
that the Homeric poems enable us to catch some glimmer of the religion
of the centuries preceding the first millennium. This belief is based
on the conviction that the poems represent a Greek society existing
near the date of 1000 B.C. It is of course opposed to the view still
maintained by some scholars that they are, in their finished form, a
product of a much later period, and that the religion which they
enshrine may be such as was in vogue in Attica about the epoch of
Peisistratos. But certain arguments drawn from ethnology and sociology
are fatal to this theory, and still more so are the arguments that may
be drawn from the history of Greek religion; for at the period of
Peisistratos certain {21} religious forces were rife, and certain
religious phenomena prominent, of which Homer is entirely silent.
Still less reasonable is it to imagine that Homer constructs a
religious world out of his own brain. We must suppose that he reflects
something real and contemporary. Only we must guard ourselves from the
serious error of supposing that he reflects the whole. Much is
doubtless missing in his account which we may be able to supply from
Hesiod and other sources by means of reasonable hypotheses.
The assumption is, then, that the Homeric poems present us with a
part-picture of the religion that prevailed among some of the leading
Greek communities before the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese and
the Ionic colonisation of Asia Minor.
_Pre-Homeric period of religion_.--Now when we consider how slow of
growth and enduring are the forms and the moral and metaphysical
concepts of religion we have the right to believe that part of what
Homer records on these matters is the inherited tradition of an age
some centuries earlier than his own. It is probable that those
earliest Aryan immigrants from the north, Achæans, Dryopes, Minyai
and others--who by mingling with peoples of aboriginal Mediterranean
stock and of the Minoan-Mycenæan culture constituted the happy blend
that we call the Hellenic race--had already arrived at the stage of
personal theism; and that Hellenic religion proper does not start with
a ‘godless period’[21.1] when the unseen powers were only dimly
outlined in the vaguer and more fleeting characters of what is {22}
called animism. We now know from the valuable discovery of a cuneiform
inscription that the Iranian people had evolved such personal deities
as Mitra and Varuna before 1400 B.C.[22.1] And we have the right to
suppose that their western kinsfolk, who were forcing their way
through the Balkans, probably only a century earlier, were at least at
the same level of religious imagination. We can best understand the
picture of the religious world of Homer and also the later
cult-records, if we believe that the kindred tribes coming from the
north brought in certain personal deities, some of whom were common to
more than one stock, and one at least may have been common to them
all. This would best explain the supremacy of Zeus, the Sky-God, the
diffusion of his name Olympios, derived from the mountain that
dominates the northern frontier, near to which the people that were to
lead the history of Greece had at one time temporary settlements and
which they regarded as the throne of their high God. The wide
geographical area of his cult cannot be naturally explained on the
assumption that at any period in Hellenic history he had been merely
the special deity of one particular tribe. Also as regards two other
high Gods at least, Apollo and Poseidon, we may be reasonably sure
that already in the pre-Homeric period certain tribes other than the
Achæans had these cult-figures. In the Hyperborean ritual, which
reflects at points the earliest days of Hellenism, we can follow the
track of Apollo’s invasion from the north; and the evidence is fairly
clear that {23} Poseidon was equally a northern immigrant, being the
special tribal deity of the Minyai.
We must not then apply to the pre-Homeric period of Greek religion the
formula, ‘one tribe one God,’ but must imagine that religion had
already surmounted in some degree the tribal barriers; for though the
spirit of tribal exclusiveness was strong throughout the earlier
periods of this polytheism, certain families and certain tribes having
the special prerogative of certain ἱερά and jealously excluding
strangers, yet the fact of the common possession of certain worships
by various tribes contained the germ of religious expansiveness.
Moreover, at some age indefinitely earlier than the Homeric, the
conception of the high God had expanded both cosmically and ethically.
Zeus had become more than a ‘departmental God’; the deity of the sky
was also in the first period--so far as we can reconstruct it--Zeus
‘Chthonios,’ the Lord of the life of earth and of the world under the
earth, and it is likely that Hades was only an emanation from him.
Also, we may regard the Homeric appellation of Zeus, πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε
Θεῶν τε, as a conventional and crystallised phrase descending from an
older poetic tradition. And we are justified in interpreting it as a
phrase belonging to the higher plane of theism.[23.1]
We must also suppose that the anthropomorphic view of the personal
deity, of which Homer is so attractive a spokesman, had asserted
itself in the period before his. Unlike the early Roman, the early
Hellenic divinities could be regarded as married, and ideas derived
from the life of the {24} family could be applied to them; although we
can often discern that many of the myths concerning divine
relationships--the sisterhood of Artemis to Apollo, for instance--do
not belong to the earliest Hellenic epoch.
_Minoan-Mycenæan religion_.--But any account of the Hellenic
polytheism of the second millennium demands a critical study of the
Minoan-Mycenæan religion as well, and before we can decide what part
of the Homeric and later systems belongs to the aboriginal
Aryan-Hellenic tradition, we must know what the northerners found
indigenous in the lands that they conquered or occupied. We know now
that they found in many centres a culture superior to their own and a
religion of an advanced theistic type with elaborate, though mainly
aniconic, ritual, devoted pre-eminently to a Great Goddess, by whose
side a God was only the subordinate partner. It has been pointed
out[24.1] that where we find in historic Greece the Goddess-cult
predominant, and especially the prevalence of a virgin-goddess, we
should recognise the Minoan-Mycenæan tradition in antagonism to the
‘Aryan,’ the latter invariably maintaining the predominance of the
God. We may therefore believe the cults of Artemis in Arcadia and
Attica, of Athena in Attica, the cult--though not the name--of Hera in
Argos[24.2] and Samos, to have been inherited from the former rather
than to have been brought in by the latter. And sometimes linguistic
science will be able to assign the different personalities of the
polytheism to its different {25} ethnic strains, by determining the
group of languages to which the divine name in question belongs. Those
that can be explained with certainty or probability as of ‘Aryan’ or
Indo-Germanic and may therefore be presumed to have penetrated Greece
from the north, are Zeus, Hera, Ares, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysos,
probably Poseidon and Apollo. On the other hand, ‘Athena,’ ‘Artemis,’
‘Aphrodite,’ ‘Hephaistos’ defy explanation on these lines, and
probably belong to a primitive Ægean language. We may be doubtful
about ‘Hermes,’ though elsewhere I have argued for his ‘non-Hellenic’
origin. That philology has not yet brought us nearer to the solution
of many of these problems is due to the lacunæ in our knowledge of
the pre-Hellenic Mediterranean languages, and especially to our
ignorance of the Minoan script for which we have masses of material
but as yet no interpreter. Finally, the evidence of the early
geographical area of a certain cult may sometimes be decisive in
itself; this is the case in regard to the cults of the ‘Mother of the
Gods’ and of Aphrodite, who are aboriginally connected with Crete and
Cyprus respectively, that is, with the centres of the Minoan culture.
We assume then that the polytheism of the Greece of history was a
blend of Northern and Mediterranean elements; and the poems of Homer
may reveal a reflection of the early Achæan period when the fusion
was not yet fully accomplished. Thus we find there that Athena,
Hephaistos, Hermes and the Goddess of Argos had been already
‘Achæanised or Hellenised,’ and are warm champions of the Hellenic
cause; while Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, though genealogically linked to
the Olympian family, are {26} equally warm on the side of Troy and are
treated by the poet with irreverence and even contumely. The position
of Apollo is different. There are overpowering reasons for regarding
him as of northern origin, a genuinely Achæan deity, and the Achæan
poet treats him with deep respect. And we can only explain his
pro-Trojan sympathies by the assumption that when the poems were
composed his cult had become dominant on the Trojan shore, which he
was therefore supposed to guard.
But the ethnic decision is at present impossible on a vast number of
details in this composite polytheism, in respect both of ritual and of
the divine personalities; and the student of Hellenic religion must
often abandon temporarily the quest of origins in his investigation of
the composite whole.
_Proto-Hellenic period_.--The very high development of this
Mediterranean civilisation from which Hellenism drew so much of its
own life is in itself sufficient reason for the belief that the
advanced picture that Homer presents of his contemporary polytheism
affords us a true estimate of the progress that had been achieved in
the centuries before him. And this is corroborated by a careful
analysis of the later cult-records.
_Family religion_.--Society in the latter half of the second
millennium had already reached the higher agricultural stage and had
evolved the monogamic family. Demeter--whose Aryan descent is proved
by her name--was generally recognised by the various Hellenic tribes
as the Earth-Goddess of corn, and the very ancient festival of the
Thesmophoria was commonly associated with her. Certain forms of the
religion of the family, which was the life-source {27} of much of the
private ethics of later Greece, can be traced back to the earliest
period; the worship, for instance, of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, the God of the
garth, around whose altar in the courtyard of the old Aryan house the
kinsmen gathered for worship. Another sacred centre of the family life
in the pre-Homeric Society was doubtless the hearth and the
hearth-stone in the middle of the hall; there are allusions to its
sanctity in the Homeric poems, and the cult-records attest the great
antiquity of this religious fact; although the development of the
personal goddess Hestia is a later phenomenon.
Again, the wider kinship-groups of the φρατρίαι and γένη are obviously
pre-Homeric, and doubtless these had been consecrated by aboriginal
religion, though we cannot date precisely the emergence of such
cult-forms as Zeus Φράτριος and Athena Φρατρία, the deities who were
specially concerned with the constitution and rights of the
kindred-group.
_Political religion_.--Further, it is fairly clear that already in
this first stage the religion had become closely interfused with the
higher political and social life. Although the greater part of the
population lived still under the tribal system in scattered
villages--κωμηδόν--yet the ‘polis’ had already arisen; and in certain
cases we may surmise for it a religious origin, where its name is
derived from the personal name or the shrine of some divinity.
Examples are ‘Athenai,’ Alalkomenai, Potniai, perhaps Megara. In these
cases the temple must have been the nucleus around which grew up the
secular habitations; and the deity of the temple would become supreme
in the political religion. {28} Athena had won this position at Athens
and probably elsewhere in the immemorial pre-Homeric past; and this
explains her character in the Homeric poem as the divinity who more
than all others inspires political wisdom and counsel. Various
indications point in fact to the belief that the earliest development
of the city life was closely bound up with the cults of Zeus and
Athena; for no other divinity was ever styled Polieus or Polias by any
Greek State; and this agrees mainly with the presentation of them in
the Homeric poems. The unanimity of the tradition points back to the
second millennium, as the period when this political characterisation
of the two deities was determined. And this view is strikingly
confirmed by the records concerning the ritual and the establishment
of the cult of Zeus ‘Polieus’ on the Athenian Akropolis, an
institution attributed to Kekrops and marking probably the
Hellenisation of Attica; the singular features of the ritual and the
association preserved in its legend of Attica with Crete indicate a
high antiquity, when agriculture was the economic basis of the
political as well as the religious life.
We may believe that other cults besides the two just mentioned played
their part in the political growth of the pre-Homeric world. The
marketplace, the cradle of political oratory, had become sacred
ground, as Homer himself attests; and this consecration was probably
marked by the presence of some ‘agalma,’ a sacred stone of Hermes, for
instance. Apollo, also, had early divested himself of the aboriginal
character of the god of the wood and of the homeless migratory host,
had become a builder of cities, and had established himself in the
{29} city’s streets with a change in the meaning of his title,
Αγυιεύς, once an appellative of the Way-God who guided the host
through the wild, now of the deity who guarded the ways of the city.
And already, before Homer, his shrine at Pytho was beginning to
acquire wealth and political importance as an oracular centre of
consultation.
_Ethical religion_.--The theistic system had been turned to good
account in other directions than the political before it appeared on
the canvas of Homer. The whole morality of early social life had been
nurtured and protected by it; for we may maintain that the ethical
religious spirit of Homer--unless we regard him as a man or as a group
of men to whom a special revelation had been made--must reflect in
some degree a tradition that had grown up in the centuries before him.
We see then that current conceptions about the Gods had ceased to be
inspired merely by fear; a milder sentiment had come to tinge
religious thought; the Deity was regarded not only as a righteous God
of vengeance, but as loving mercy and compassion and as a defender of
the weak and destitute. Only once, and only in regard to the wild
sea-god Poseidon, does a Homeric phrase suggest that the deity might
have been regarded as in his own nature malevolent.[29.1] The cult of
Zeus Ξείνιος, the guardian of the stranger and the wanderer, had
already arisen. And the sanctity of the oath taken in the name of the
deities of the upper and the lower world was the basis of much private
and communal morality.
_Art an aspect of religion_.--And other parts of the higher activity
of man had been consecrated by the {30} polytheism of which Homer
inherits and develops the tradition. The earliest imagination of the
Hellenes appears to have perceived a daimoniac potency--a ‘numen’ as
we may say--in the arts of song and music; and this had sometimes
crystallised into the personal forms of divinities, into such
interesting embodiments as the Muses or the Charites, who must have
belonged to the pre-Homeric popular theism. The latter group had grown
up at the Bœotian Orchomenos, an old centre of the Minoan-Mycenæan
culture. It may be that at one time they had no other than the purely
physical significance of vegetation-powers; but we only understand
their value for Homer if we suppose that before his time they had come
to be associated with the arts and the delight of human life. We
discern also that the higher deities, Apollo and Athena, though by no
means merely ‘functional’ or departmental powers, had acquired the
special patronage of song and art. It seems, then, that in the
earliest as in the later periods of their history the religion of the
Hellenes idealised that sphere of human activity in which the Hellenic
spirit was to achieve its highest, the sphere of art, and among higher
and lower religions it was unique in this.
_Proto-Hellenic ritual_.--It seems, then, that even in the earliest
period the polytheism was no longer on the most primitive plane. And
we gather the same impression from what is revealed to us of the
earliest forms of Greek ritual. The Homeric and Hesiodic poems are
full of information concerning the liturgy or cult-service with which
the poets were familiar; what they tell us avails first of all for the
period of the eleventh to the eighth century. But {31} ritual takes
long to develop, and once fixed is the most abiding element in
religion. It is not too bold, then, to take the Homeric account as
vouching for a tradition that goes back at least to the later
centuries of the second millennium.
The sacred place of worship might be a natural cave, or a ‘temenos,’ a
fenced clearing in a grove, containing as the ἄγαλμα of the deity a
tree-trunk or holy pillar or heap of stones, whence gradually an
artificial altar might be evolved; the latter had become, some time
before Homer, the usual receptacle of sacrifice and was a prominent
figure in the Minoan-Mycenæan religion, which usually associated it
with a sacred tree or pillar, the token of the deity’s presence or a
magnet for attracting it, but not with any iconic statue or idol.
Personal religion could content itself with such equipment, but, if
the anthropomorphic instinct is strong in it, it prompts the
construction of the temple or the house of God. And temples must have
been found in the land in the pre-Homeric period; the few that have as
yet been revealed in the area of Minoan-Mycenæan culture were built,
with one exception,[31.1] within the royal palaces, and must be
regarded as domestic chapels of the king, marking his sacred character
as head of the religion of the State, the character with which the
legends invest King Minos and King Aiakos. The earliest that have been
excavated on free sites are the temples of Hera at Argos and Olympia,
and these are now dated not earlier than the ninth century B.C. But
the traditions of the earliest temple at Delphi, and of that of Athena
on the {32} Athenian Acropolis, suggest a greater antiquity than this.
With the multiplication of temples special priesthoods must also have
multiplied. But the professional priest had already arisen in
pre-Homeric times; Homer knows of the brotherhood called the
Selloi,[32.1] who tended the oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona, “who
slept on the ground and never washed their feet,” and he mentions
others who were attached to special deities, and two of these at least
administered cults without a temple, the priest of Zeus of Mount
Ida,[32.2] and the priest of the river Skamandros,[32.3] of each of
whom he says, “he was honoured like a god among the people.” These
words suggest a high and sacrosanct position; yet these two priests
are also warriors fighting in the ranks, which is the mark of a
secular priesthood; and there is no legend nor any hint of evidence
suggesting that a professional priesthood enjoyed a political and
social power in the prehistoric that we know was never achieved by
them in the historic period of Greece. For the evolution of many of
the earliest Hellenic institutions evidence is almost wholly lacking.
But on general comparative grounds we can surmise that the religious
character of the monarchy was most prominent in the earliest times and
that as its secular power and functions developed, the priest-expert
was attached to him to assist in the national cults, over which the
Basileus retained a general supervision. We have scarcely a hint,
either in the earliest or later days of Greece, of any conflict
between Church and State; we know that, at least, historic Greece
escaped sacerdotalism; {33} and its earliest societies, whatever their
danger or their struggles may have been, had escaped it by the days of
Homer.[33.1] Bearing on this point is the other negative fact, that
for this earliest age we have little or no evidence of the prevalence
of what is called ‘Shamanism,’ divine seizures, ecstatic outbursts of
wild prophesying, by which a society can be terrified and captured.
The professional ‘Mantis,’ the prophet or soothsayer, existed as
distinct from the priest; but his methods generally--so far as our
earliest witness informs us--were cool and quasi-scientific.[33.2]
The ritual at the altar in the early period with which we are at
present dealing consisted of an oblation to the deity of an animal
victim or an offering of fruits and cereals; the sacrifice might be
accompanied with wine or might be wineless, a ‘sober’ sacrifice which
was called νηφάλια, the latter being perhaps the more ancient
tradition. We may interpret the earliest form of Hellenic
animal-sacrifice as in some sense a simple tribal or family
communion-meal with the deity, whereby the sense of comradeship and
clan-feeling between man and God was strengthened and nourished. This
is the view that Homer has inherited, and it endures throughout the
later history of the ritual; and it expresses the general genial
temper of Hellenic religion, a trait which Robertson Smith marked as
characteristic of other religions of the same social type.[33.3]
Similarly the description given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias of
the ancient ritual of Zeus {34} Polieus on the Athenian Akropolis
reveals to us a typical example of the civic communion feast.[34.1]
Such a sacrifice is merely a transference into the divine circle of
the practice of the common feast of the tribesmen. But we can also
discern a mystic element in the Homeric ritual text, which is
evidently based on a tradition indefinitely older than the poems; the
sacrificial victim, usually the ox, is first consecrated by being
touched with the barley-stalks, which had been placed on the altar and
which fill him by their contact with the altar’s divine spirit: then
when he has been immolated and cut up, the sacrificers are specially
said “to taste the entrails”[34.2] invariably before the real sacred
meal begins; as the entrails are the inner seat of the life which has
been consecrated by the hallowing contact of the altar, we are
justified in supposing that the object of this solemn act was to
establish the real and corporeal communion of the worshipper with the
divinity.[34.2]
_Chthonian worship_.--The important distinction which is well attested
of the later ages between the ‘chthonian’ and the ‘Olympian’
ritual--to use these two conventional terms for convenience--may
already have been in vogue in the earliest period of the polytheism.
In the first type of sacrifice, where the offering was made to the
nether divinities, the victim’s head was held down above a hole in the
ground--a βόθρος--and the blood from the severed throat was shed into
it. In the second, where the upper powers, whose region was the air or
{35} the sky, were the recipients, the victim was held up erect off
the ground, his face lifted towards the sky, and in this attitude his
throat was cut. Homer shows himself aware of this form of sacrifice;
and that the other, the chthonian, was also in vogue in his time is to
be inferred from his account of the ritual performed by Odysseus in
honour of the shades, where he mentions the βόθρος, the sacrifice of
black sheep, with their heads turned downwards towards the lower
world, and the triple libation of honey, wine and water.[35.1] For
the ritual of the dead in the Greek religious tradition was closely
modelled on the service of the nether divinities. The triple libation
is known to have been part of Minoan-Cretan cult, as the altar table
found in the cave of Mount Dikte attests.[35.2] And a shrine with a
βόθρος in the middle of the cella has been found at Priniá in Crete,
consecrated to a chthonian goddess, of which the foundation is
ascribed to the ninth century.[35.3]
From these indications and from the prevalence of chthonian cults
attested by later records, in which we can discern features of great
antiquity, we can gather that the earliest period of Greek religion
was not wholly characterised by the brightness of ritual and the
geniality of religious feeling that appear on the surface of Homeric
poetry. The Homeric sacrifice was often accompanied by a sense of
sin,[35.4] though the poet shows no cognisance of any peculiar ritual
of a specially piacular type. Also he was aware of the dark world of
powers who avenged {36} the broken oath and punished sinners even
after death. Long before his time, we may suppose, gloomy worship,
such as that of the Θεοὶ Μειλίχιοι described by Pausanias at Myonia in
Lokris,[36.1] of which the rites were performed by night, was in
vogue in parts of Greece. Mother-Earth, prophesying through
phantom-dreams, had held rule at Delphi before Apollo came, and that
was long before Homer’s work began.[36.2]
There are strong reasons also for believing that the cult of
hero-ancestors was already a part of the pre-Homeric religion, as it
was a prominent part of the post-Homeric. The elaborate tendance of
the dead attested of the Mycenæan period by the graves discovered at
Tiryns and Mycenæ, could easily develop into actual worship if it was
maintained through many generations, as it was at Menidi in Attica.
Doubtless, the common and promiscuous worship of the dead was a morbid
development of the later polytheism. But Homer, who is generally
silent about such cults, and in a well-known passage about the
Twin-Brethren[36.3] seems to ignore deliberately their divine or
semi-divine character, almost reveals his knowledge of the worship of
Herakles,[36.4] and certainly was aware of the Attic cult of
Erechtheus, unless the passage that refers to it was the work of the
interpolator.[36.5]
It is a difficult question how we are to estimate and how far we can
trust the Homeric evidence on this important point of religion. Even
if we trust it so far as to say that the Achæans at least practised
{37} no real worship of the dead, it yet remains probable that they
found it existing here and there in the lands in which they settled.
It is important to emphasise this gloomier side of Greek religion; but
it is detrimental to exaggerate it, as has been the tendency of some
modern writers in a pardonable revolt from the old shallow theories of
orthodox classicism. We ought to recognise that at no period of his
history was the ordinary Hellene ghost-ridden, worried and dismayed by
demoniac terrors, or by morbid anxiety about the other world or his
destiny after death; at least he will not appear so, when we compare
his religious and mythologic records with those of Babylon, Egypt, and
Christendom.[37.1] Nor dare we affirm that the prehistoric Hellene
was weaker-minded and more timorous in respect of such matters than
the later. He may even have been stronger-minded, and at least as
willing to eat a sacramental meal in company with the ‘Theoi
Meilichioi’ (shadowy powers of the lower world), or with the
Nether-Zeus, or the Nether Earth-Mother, and with his departed
family-spirits, as were his later descendants at Lokris, Mykonos and
other places.[37.2] The earliest myths have little of the goblin
element. Homer indeed himself was cognisant of such forms of terror as
a black ‘Ker’--Penelope likens Antinoos to one;[37.3] the ancient
folklore of Argolis was aware of a bad spirit that once ravaged its
homes.[37.4] The early popular imagination was sure to have inherited
or to have evolved such creations of fear; and a black Earth-Goddess
with a horse’s {38} head and snake-locks, who lived in a dark cave at
Phigaleia, almost certainly in the pre-Homeric period, was a
sufficiently terrifying personality.[38.1]
But happily for the Greek imagination, the divinities of the world of
death, abiding below the earth, tended to take on the benign functions
of the powers of vegetation. The God of the lower world is scarcely
called by the ill-omened name of Hades in cult, but Plouton or
Trophonios or Zeus Chthonios, names importing beneficence; for the
Homeric and Hesiodic world Demeter is a goddess of blessing, not of
terror. And although in the earliest period certain demoniac
personages such as Medousa--identical in form and perhaps in character
with the snake-locked horse-headed Demeter--may have loomed large and
terrible in popular cult, and afterwards faded wholly from actual
worship or survived in the lower strata of ineffectual folklore, yet
the more civilising imagination had also been operative in the
religion of the second millennium. The monuments of the
Minoan-Mycenæan religion reveal scarcely an element of terror. And at
some period before Homer the kindly deity, Hermes, had assumed the
function of the leader of souls. As regards the eschatological views
of the prehistoric Greek we can say little, unless we believe that
Homer was his spokesman; and such belief would be very hazardous. The
earliest communities may have had no special hopes concerning the
departed soul; we have no reason for thinking that the mysteries which
came to offer some promise of happiness in the world to come had as
yet proclaimed such a doctrine; the earliest form of the Eleusinia may
have been that of a secret {39} society organised for agrarian
purposes. But, on the other hand, there is no proof that the primitive
mind of the Hellene brooded much on the problem of death, or was at
all possessed with morbid feeling about it; and in pre-Homeric times
he must have been freer from care in this matter than he was in the
later centuries, if we accept the view of certain scholars that the
elaborate ritual of ‘Katharsis’ or purification, which was mainly
dependent on the idea of the impurity of death, ghosts and bloodshed,
was wholly the creation of post-Homeric days.
_Earliest ritual of purification_.--It has been even said that the
very idea of the need of purification on special occasions was unknown
to Homer. This is demonstrably false; it is enough to mention one
passage alone: at the close of the first book of the _Iliad_, the
Achæans at Agamemnon’s bidding, purify themselves from the plague,
and throw the infected media of purification into the sea; this is a
religious lustration. And when Hesiod mentions the rule that a man
returning from an ‘ill-omened’ funeral could not without peril attempt
to beget a child on that day,[39.1] he happens to be the first
literary witness to the Greek tabu of death; but we may be sure that
he is giving us a tradition of indefinite age, and that the ‘Achæan’
society, of which Homer is supposed to be the spokesman, had some of
the Kathartic rules and superstitions that are found broadcast in
later Greece. It may not have elaborated or laid marked stress on
them; it may have had no strong sense of the impurity of homicide nor
devised any special code for its expiation. But if it was entirely
without any instinctive feeling for the {40} impurity of birth and
death, and for the danger of the ‘miasma’ arising from certain acts
and states, it was almost unique among the races of man. Only, a
progressive people does not overstrain such feelings.
Such a religion as has been sketched might accord with a high social
and political morality. On the other hand, it would not be likely to
foster and consecrate certain mental moods, ennobled by Christian
ethic, such as ‘fear of God,’ humility, faith. Never in the free
periods of Greek history was ‘deisidaimonia’ (‘fear of divine powers’)
regarded as a virtue, but rather as a vice or weakness. The Hellene
was humble in his attitude to God only in the sense that he disliked
overweening acts and speech of self-glorification; the phrase, δοῦλος
τοῦ θεοῦ, ‘slave of God,’ common in early Christian documents, would
be as repugnant to the Hellene as would be the ecstasy of
self-abasement congenial to the Babylonian and the Christian
religions. As for the Pauline use of the word πίστις, ‘faith,’ its
value for religious morality would have been unintelligible for the
earlier Greek.[40.1]
_Cruder religious conceptions in the earliest period_.--So far, the
religious phenomena discoverable with some certainty or some
probability in the earliest period of Greek history indicate a
theistic system of a somewhat advanced type. But doubtless we must
reckon with the presence of much else that was cruder and more savage.
When we find in the later records ample evidence of the lower products
of the religious imagination, the products of ‘animism’ or ‘fetichism’
or ‘theriomorphism’ or ‘polydaimonism,’ {41} more inarticulate and
uncouth embodiments of the concept of divinity, or darker and more
cruel ritual than that which Homer describes, such as human sacrifice,
the driving out of the scapegoat, blood-magic for controlling winds or
finding water, no reasonable critic will call all these things
post-Homeric because they may not be mentioned in Homer, or suppose
that the pure-minded Hellenes were seduced into borrowing them from
the Orientals, or that they were spontaneous products of a later
degenerate age. The view taken of them by those who have in recent
times applied comparative Anthropology to the study of Hellenism is
the only one that is possible on the whole; these things are a
surviving tradition of a mode of religious thought and feeling proper
to the aboriginal ancestors of the Hellenic race, or immemorial
indigenous products of the soil upon which that race grew up. There is
no cataclysm in the religious history of Greece, no violent breach
with its past, no destruction of primitive forms at the advent of a
higher enlightenment; no fanatic prophet arose, and the protests of
philosophy were comparatively gentle and ineffective. Only a few
religious forms of an undeveloped society that might shock a more
civilised conscience were gradually abandoned; most of them were
tolerated, some in a moribund condition, under a more advanced
religion, with which they might be seen to clash if any one cared to
reason about them. Therefore a chapter or a statement in Pausanias may
really be a record of the pre-Homeric age; and in this way we can
supplement the partial picture that has been given above.
_Animal-Gods and Animal-worship_.--The anthropomorphic {42} principle,
which is not necessarily the highest upon which a personal theism
could be constructed, is the main force of the higher life of Hellenic
polytheism. We may believe that it had begun to work before Homer, but
not predominantly or with sufficient effect to produce a stable
anthropomorphism in religion. Some worship of animals which is called
‘theriolatry,’ some beliefs in the animal-incarnations of the
divinity, were certainly in vogue. A few of the more ancient
cult-titles would be evidence sufficient, apart from the later
records. One of the most significant and oldest is Λύκειος, an epithet
of Apollo marking his association with wolves; we find also that in
many legends and even occasionally in ritual the wolf appears as his
sacred animal. These facts point back to a period when Apollo was
still the hunter-god of the wild wood, and was regarded as
occasionally incarnate in the beast of the wild. We have also a few
indications of direct reverence being paid to the wolf, apart from its
connection with any god.[42.1] Another salient example either of
theriolatry or theriomorphic god-cult is snake-worship, proved to have
existed in the earliest epoch of the Delphic religion, and in vogue
according to later records in Epirus and Macedonia. It may have been
reverenced in its own right, or as the incarnation of some personal
divinity or hero, as we find it later attached to the chthonian
deities, to the Earth-Mother, Zeus Κτήσιος and Μειλίχιος,[42.2]
Asklepios, and to the buried hero or heroine, such as Erechtheus,
Kychreus. We have also reasons for assuming a very early cult of a
Bear-Artemis in {43} Attica[43.1] and Arcadia; and many other
examples of similar phenomena will be found in a treatise on the
subject by De Visser.[43.2] Later Arcadia was full of the products
and of the tradition of this early mode of religious imagination;
besides the horse-headed Demeter at Thigaleia, we hear of the worship
at the same place of a goddess called Eurynome, represented as
half-woman, half-fish; and bronze figures, belonging to the Roman
period, have been found at Lykosoura in Arcadia, apparently
representations of divinities partly theriomorphic.[43.3]
The first anthropologists who dealt with the primitive forms of
Hellenic religion read this special set of phenomena in the light of
totemism; but progressive students have now abandoned the totemistic
hypothesis, on the ground that there is little or no trace of Totemism
in any Greek or any Aryan Society, and that theriolatry, or the direct
worship of animals, needs no such explanation. Also, as I have
recently pointed out elsewhere,[43.4] the theriomorphic concept of
divinity can and frequently does co-exist at certain periods and in
certain peoples with the anthropomorphic; nor can we say with
assurance that in the mental history of our race the former is prior
to the latter, or that generally the anthropomorphic was evolved from
the animal-god.
_Functional Deities: polydæmonism_.--In attempting to penetrate the
pre-Homeric past, we have to reckon with another phenomenon which,
though {44} revealed in later records only, has certainly a primitive
character and has been regarded as belonging to an age when the
concept of definite complex personalities, such as θεοί, had not yet
arisen. It was Usener[44.1] who first called attention to a large
number of local cults of personages unknown to myth or general
literature and designated, not by what are called proper names, such
as Hermes, Apollo, Zeus, but by transparent adjectival names,
expressing a particular quality or function or activity, to which the
essence of the divine power in each case was limited: such, for
instance, are Ἔχετλος Ἐχετλαῖος ἤρως, Κυαμίτης, Εὔνοστος, being
nothing more, respectively, than the hero of the ploughshare at
Marathon, the ‘hero who makes the beans grow’ on the sacred way to
Eleusis, ‘the hero who gives the good return of corn’ at Tanagra; for
these he invented the term, ‘Sonder-Götter,’ meaning deities of a
single function only; and to those of them to whom only a momentary
function and therefore only a momentary existence seemed to appertain,
he applied the term ‘Augenblick-Götter,’ ‘Momentary Gods’; an
Hellenic example of this type might be ‘Μυίαγρος,’ ‘Fly-chaser,’ in
Arcadia, and Elis, who at the sacrifice to Athena or Zeus was called
upon to chase away the flies that would worry the sacrificers, and who
only existed for the purpose and at the time of that call.
We may compare also, for vagueness and inchoateness of personality,
certain aggregates of deities having no definite single existence, but
grouped by some adjectival functional name, such as θεοὶ Ἀποτροπαῖοι,
‘the deities that avert evil,’ at Sikyon,[44.2] {45} θεαὶ
Γενετυλλίδες, the goddesses of birth, in Attica,[45.1] the θεαὶ
Πραξιδίκαι, the goddesses of just requital, at Haliartos.[45.2] Such
forms seem to hover on the confines of ‘polydaimonism,’ and to be the
products of an embryonic perception of divinity, cruder and dimmer
than the robust and bright creations of the Hellenic polytheism, to
which so rich a mythology and so manifold a personality attached. And
another fact seems to fall into line with these; in some cult-centres
the deity, though personally and anthropomorphically conceived, might
only be designated by some vague descriptive title, like ὁ θεός and ἡ
θεά, as occasionally at Eleusis, or ‘Despoina,’ ‘the Mistress,’ the
Goddess of Arcadia, or ‘Παρθένος’, the ‘Virgin,’ on the coast of
Caria, and in the Chersonnese; even as late as the time of Pausanias
the men of Boulis in Phokis never called their highest God[45.3] by
any other name than ὁ Μέγιστος, ‘the Greatest.’ And it has been
thought that the well-known statement of Herodotus that the Pelasgians
had no names for their divinities was based on some such facts as
these.
The importance of these phenomena would be all the greater if Usener’s
theory were true that they represent the crude material out of which
much of Greek polytheism has grown.[45.4] But in any case they claim
mention here, because they are the products of a mental operation or
instinct that must have {46} been operative in the earliest period of
Hellenic religion.
_Animism or animatism_.--In another set of facts, also attested by
later records, we may discern the surviving addition of an animistic
period. A large part of the Hellenic, as of other religions, reflects
man’s relation and feeling towards the world of nature, his dependence
on the fruits of the earth, the winds, the waters, and the phenomena
of the sky. The trend of the higher polytheism in the Hellenic mind
was to set the personal divinity above and outside these things, which
he or she directs as an intellectual will-power. But we have
sufficient evidence of another point of view which is that of more
primitive religion, from which the deity is imagined as essentially
immanent in the thing, not as a distinct personality emerging and
separable from it. The Arcadians who worshipped ‘Zeus
Keraunos,’[46.1] or ‘Zeus-Thunder,’ at Mantineia, or the people at
Gythion in Laconia, who called a sacred meteoric stone, ‘Zeus
Καππώτας,’[46.2] ‘the fallen Zeus,’ or the Athenians who worshipped
‘Demeter χλόη,’ ‘Demeter Green Verdure,’[46.3] reveal in these
strange titles an attitude of mind that is midway between ‘animatism,’
that religious perception of each striking thing or phenomenon in
nature as in itself mysteriously alive and divine, and ‘theism’ which
imagines it controlled by a personal deity. At the stage when Demeter
could be named and perceived as ‘Chloe,’ ‘Verdure,’ the
anthropomorphic conception of divinity, though certainly existing, was
not yet stable or crystallised.
{47}
But there are other cult-facts reported to us of a still cruder type
that seem to reveal animatism pure and simple and the infancy of the
Hellenic mind. The Arcadians,[47.1] always the most conservative and
backward among the Hellenes, in their colony of Trapezus, ‘offered
sacrifice to the lightning and thunder and storms’; it seems that for
them these things were animate and divine directly, just as the
Air--Bedu--was for the Macedonians. Again, through all the periods of
Hellenic religion, the worship of rivers and springs only at certain
points approached the borders of theism; sometimes offerings were
flung directly into the water, and prayer might be made ‘into the
water’--we must not say ‘to the river-god,’ but to the divine
water.[47.2]
We discern these two different ways of imagining divinity in the
worship and ideas attaching to Helios, ‘Sun,’ and Hestia, ‘Hearth’; as
regards the former, we have reason to surmise that his religious
prestige was higher in the pre-Homeric than in the later age, and that
the exalted position as a great political and cultured God which he
enjoyed in the later history of Rhodes was a heritage from the Minoan
religious tradition.[47.3] In Homer’s poems we find him personal and
anthropomorphised; but we may well doubt if he was so for the average
Greek, who merely kissed his hand to him every morning or bowed to him
on coming forth from his house, and who, regarding him merely as
animate, or ‘Living Sun,’ found it difficult to develop him {48} into
a free and complex individual person. As regards Hestia the facts are
still clearer.[48.1] In her worship, which belonged to the aboriginal
period of Greek religion, she was at first, and in the main she
continued to be, nothing more than ‘Holy Hearth,’ the Hearth felt as
animate, nor was the attempt to anthropomorphise into a free personal
Goddess ever wholly successful.
_Magic_.--Now that which is here called ‘animatism’ is a religious
feeling which may inspire real worship, but is more liable than pure
theism to be associated with magic; and it is reasonable to believe
that magic was in vogue in prehistoric Hellas, not necessarily in
antagonism to religion, but practised for purposes of the community as
well as for private ends.
It is true that the records which tell us about these things are all
of a period much later than Homer’s, and that he is almost silent
about such matters.[48.2] But we know now how to appreciate Homer’s
silences. And general anthropology compels us to believe that some of
those records reveal facts of immemorial antiquity in Greece. The
Thesmophoria, one of the most ancient of the Hellenic services, was
partly magical; that is, it included rites that had a direct efficacy,
apart from the appeal to any divinity, such as the strewing the fields
with the decaying remains of the pigs that had been consecrated to the
earth-Goddesses and thrown down into their vault.[48.3] So also in
the Thargelia of {49} Attica and other Greek communities, the
ceremonies connected with the scapegoat, the ritualistic whipping and
transference of sin, belong to the domain of magic rather than to
religion.[49.1]
We have also direct testimony of a magical dealing with the elements
in the titles of officials at Athens called the ‘Heudanemoi’[49.2]
and of those at Corinth called Ἁνεμοκοῖται,[49.3] both words denoting
‘wind-lullers,’ those ‘who charmed the winds to sleep’; and again in
the description of the rite performed by the magicians at Kleonai who
according to Clemens[49.4] “averted the sky’s wrath by incantations
and sacrifices”; or in Pausanias’ account of the operations of the
priest of the winds at Titane in Sikyon[49.5] who endeavoured to
assuage their fierceness by “singing over them the spells that Medea
used.” Doubtless these officials are only maintaining the practices of
an indefinitely remote past. And these are also reflected in the
legend of the ancient Salmoneus of Thessalian and possibly Minyan
origin, who drove about in a chariot imitating thunder and, while
merely practising a well-known type of weather-magic, was
misunderstood by the higher powers and later moralists.
The few records that may avail for an opinion concerning the early
period with which we are at present concerned entirely fail to suggest
any such prevalence of magic as might obstruct intellectual progress
or the growth of a higher religion. They reveal generally a type that
is harmless or even philanthropic.[49.6] Doubtless some black magic
{50} existed in the earliest as in the later Hellas, directed against
the life or the property of individuals, and worked by evil means; the
more ancient literature is entirely silent about this; but a late
record of Pausanias testifies to a barbarous magic practised by the
community of Haliartos to discover a water-supply[50.1]: a son of one
of the chief men was stabbed by his own father, and as he ran bleeding
about the land springs of water were found where his blood dripped.
But at no time, we may judge, was the religion or the intellect of
Greece so clouded with magic as was the case elsewhere in the ancient
civilisations, notably in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
_Human sacrifices_.--This attempted presentation of the first era of
Greek religion must raise the question as to the practice within it of
the ritual of human sacrifice. For we are apt to associate this with a
primitive society and with a crude or savage religion. But this
association is not borne out by the religious history of mankind. The
practice has been found in societies highly developed both in morality
and civilisation; and the a priori argument is dangerous, whether we
apply it in one way or the other.
It has been said that the Homeric poems show no consciousness of the
existence of the cruel rite in the Greek world of the period; and it
has been argued on this ground that the Achæan society of which they
are the voice was innocent of it.[50.2] A doubt may arise concerning
the slaughter of the Trojan captives at the pyre of Patroklos,[50.3]
an act of ferocity for which Homer outspokenly blames Achilles. The
passage {51} certainly suggests that the poet was aware that such
things were occasionally done at contemporary funerals; in Mycenæan
tombs at Argos and Mycenæ human remains have been found before the
entrance-door that point to an offering of slaves or captives.[51.1]
But this need not have been an act of worship or strictly of religion.
The dead might be imagined as needing slaves; and to kill slaves to
accompany the departed, just as to kill horses over the pyre, may only
imply ‘tendance’ and no worship of the spirit. But Homer’s silence
concerning human sacrifice as a rite of religion is of no value as
evidence for our present question, as I have argued elsewhere.[51.2]
How are we to account for the fairly numerous records of actual human
sacrifice, or of the semblance or reminiscence of it, in later Greek
worship, records that are found sporadically among most of the leading
Greek stocks? The old shift of attributing to Oriental influences
everything in Hellenic religion that clashed with our ideal of
Hellenism was naïvely unscientific. That the practice should have
sprung up spontaneously and suddenly in the later society, when civic
life and morality were advancing, is hard to believe. It is more
natural to suppose that it was an immemorial and enduring tradition of
the race, which was only with difficulty abolished and which lingered
here and there till the end of paganism. It has been found among many
other Aryan races, and it was especially in vogue among the
Thraco-Phrygian stock, of near kin to the Hellenic. These general
grounds for believing that {52} it was a feature of the earliest Greek
religion are confirmed by some special evidence derivable from the
legends and cult-records. It is generally impossible to date the birth
of legends; but some can be discerned to belong to an earlier stratum
than others; such are the legends concerning the human sacrifice to
Zeus Αύκαιος on Mount Lykaion in Arcadia, to which is attached the
story of King Lykaon and the banquet that he offers to Zeus on the
flesh of his own son;[52.1] the Achæan or Minyan story of the
sacrifice to Zeus Laphystios--Zeus the Ravening--of the king’s son of
the house of Athamas;[52.2] Kyknos’ sacrifice of pilgrims and the
dedication of their skulls to Apollo on the Hyperborean pilgrims’-way
at the Achæan Pagasos;[52.3] the sacrifice of a boy and a maiden to
Artemis Τρικλαρία by the Ionians on the southern shore of the Gulf of
Corinth.[52.4] A careful study of the legends of these various rites
will convince one that they belong to the earliest period of Greek
religion. The last example is specially illuminating: the human
sacrifice is here practised by the Ionians in their ancient
settlements in the land, afterwards called Achaia; and its cessation
is connected with the arrival of the cult of Dionysos and the return
of the heroes from Troy.
The purpose and significance of the rite differed probably in the
different cult-centres. In most cases we may interpret it as piacular,
the dedication to an offended deity of a valued life, the life of the
king’s son or daughter, as a substitute for the life of the people,
such vicarious sacrifice being a common human institution; in some few
cases we may {53} discern an agricultural motive, the blood being shed
as a magic charm to secure fertility.[53.1] At certain cult-centres
and at certain times the human victim may have been regarded as the
incarnation of the deity or the ‘daimon’; and this idea might explain
the legends concerning the slaying of Iphigeneia the priestess of
Artemis, or of the priests of Dionysos. Finally, in the ritual of Zeus
Lykaios, we may detect a cannibal-sacrament, in which the holy flesh
of the victim, whose life was mystically one with the God’s and the
people’s, was sacramentally devoured. This ghastly practice is only
doubtfully disclosed by legends and by interpretation of later
records; a faint reminiscence of it may also have survived in the
Argive story of Harpalyke and Klymenos.[53.2] But a close parallel to
it will be noted in the Thracian Dionysiac ritual.
_Summary account of the first period_.--A detailed account of the
pre-Homeric religious age must at many points remain doubtful and
hypothetical; but certain definite and important facts may be
established. Anthropomorphism, in a degree not found in the earliest
Roman religion, was already prevalent, even dominant; and nearly all
the leading personal divinities of the later polytheism had already
emerged; only Dionysos had not yet crossed the border from Thrace;
Asklepios, dimly known to Homer, was merely the local deity of a small
Thessalian community, Pan merely the daimon of flocks in remote
Arcadia. Cretan religion, also personal in its imagination and mainly
anthropomorphic, had left its deep imprint on the mainland; and its
divine personalities, such as Rhea, the {54} Mother of the Gods, and
Aphrodite were soon adopted by the northern immigrants, but not at
first into high positions. The deity was generally imagined not as a
spirit or a vague cosmic force, but as glorified man, and therefore
the religion became adaptable to human progress in arts, civilisation
and morality. But much in the animal world still appeared sacred and
weird; and the deity might be at times incarnate in animal form. At
the same time the religious imagination was still partly free from the
bias of personal theism, and produced vaguer divine forms, of some
force and power, but belonging rather to ‘animatism’ or polydaimonism
than to polytheism.
Finally a study of all the facts and probabilities may convince a
careful student that the origin of Greek polytheism as a whole from
simpler forms cannot be found in this earliest period. In the second
millennium, which is the starting-point for Hellenic history proper,
we cannot discern the ‘making of a God’ (unless we mean the
building-up of his more complex character), nor do we start with a
godless period. We may well believe that in the history of mankind
theism was evolved from animism or polydaimonism; we may believe the
much more doubtful theory that anthropomorphism arises from a previous
theriomorphism, and there may still be some who are convinced that
theriomorphism implies a totemistic society. But, at any rate, these
various evolutions had already happened indefinitely before the two
strains--the Northern and the Mediterranean--had blended into the
Hellenic race. The higher and the lower, the more complex and the
simpler, forms of religious imagination {55} operate together
throughout Hellenic history; and the higher, though dominant, never
wholly absorbs the lower, both being an intellectual tradition of an
indefinite past. Much work on the origins of Greek religion has been
wasted because its chronology is anachronistic. And the attempt to
unlock many of its mysteries by the key of totemism has been abandoned
by those who recognise that many of the views concerning this social
phenomenon and its religious importance, prevalent in a former
generation, were erroneous.