to which man's nature tends, "groaning and travailing" till the goal
is won, But it is long in the winning; the paths are rough; humanity is
"led by a way that it knew not".
DIONYSUS.
Among deities whose origin has been sought in the personification, if
not of the phenomena, at least of the forces of Nature, Dionysus is
prominent.* He is regarded by many mythologists** as the "spiritual
form" of the new vernal life, the sap and pulse of vegetation and of the
new-born year, especially as manifest in the vine and the juice of the
grape. Thus Preller*** looks on his mother, Semele, as a personification
of the pregnant soil in spring.**** The name of Semele is explained with
the familiar diversity of conjecture. Whether the human intellect, at
the time of the first development of myth, was capable of such abstract
thought as is employed in the recognition of a deity presiding over
"the revival of earth-life" or not, and whether, having attained to this
abstraction, men would go on to clothe it in all manner of animal and
other symbolisms, are questions which mythologists seem to take for
granted. The popular story of the birth of Dionysus is well known.
* It is needless to occupy space with the etymological
guesses at the sense of the name "Dionysus". Greek, Sanskrit
and Assyrian have been tortured by the philologists, but
refuse to give up their secret, and Curtis does not even
offer a conjecture (Or. Etym., 609).
** Preller, i. 544.
*** i. 546.
**** The birth of Dionysus is recorded (Iliad, xiv. 323;
Hesiod, Theog., 940) without the story of the death of
Semele, which occurs in AEschylus, Frg., 217-218; Eurip.,
Bacchae, i. 3.
His mother, Semele, desired to see Zeus in all his glory, as he appeared
when he made love to Hera. Having promised to grant all the nymph's
requests, Zeus was constrained to approach her in thunder and lightning.
She was burned to death, but the god rescued her unborn child and
sowed him up in his own thigh. In this wild narrative Preller finds the
wedlock of heaven and earth, "the first day that it thunders in March".
The thigh of Zeus is to be interpreted as "the cool moist clouds". If,
on the other hand, we may take Dionysus himself to be the rain, as Kuhn
does, and explain the thigh of Zeus by comparison with certain details
in the soma sacrifice and the right thigh of Indra, as described in one
of the Brahmanas, why then, of course, Preller's explanation cannot be
admitted.*
* Kuhn, Herabkunft, pp. 166, 167, where it appears that the
gods buy soma and place it on the right thigh of Indra.
These examples show the difficulty, or rather indicate the error,
of attempting to interpret all the details in any myth as so
many statements about natural phenomena and natural forces. Such
interpretations are necessarily conjectural. Certainly Dionysus, the god
of orgies, of wine, of poetry, became in later Greek thought something
very like the "spiritual form" of the vine, and the patron of Nature's
moods of revelry. But that he was originally conceived of thus, or that
this conception may be minutely traced through each incident of his
legend, cannot be scientifically established. Each mythologist, as has
been said before, is, in fact, asking himself, "What meaning would I
have had if I told this or that story of the god of the vine or the god
of the year's renewal?" The imaginations in which the tale of the double
birth of Dionysus arose were so unlike the imagination of an erudite
modern German that these guesses are absolutely baseless. Nay, when
we are told that the child was sheltered in his father's body, and
was actually brought to birth by the father, we may be reminded, like
Bachofen, of that widespread savage custom, the _couvade_.
From Brazil to the Basque country it has been common for the father to
pretend to lie-in while the mother is in childbed; the husband undergoes
medical treatment, in many cases being put to bed for days.* This
custom, "world-wide," as Mr. Tylor calls it, has been used by Bachofen
as the source of the myth of the double birth of Dionysus. Though other
explanations of the _couvade_ have been given, the most plausible theory
represents it as a recognition of paternity by the father. Bachofen
compares the ceremony by which, when Hera became reconciled to Herakles,
she adopted him as her own through the legal fiction of his second
birth. The custom by which, in old French marriage rites, illegitimate
children were legitimised by being brought to the altar under the veil
of the bride is also in point.** Diodorus says that barbarians still
practise the rite of adoption by a fictitious birth. Men who returned
home safely after they were believed to be dead had to undergo a similar
ceremony.*** Bachofen therefore explains the names and myths of the
"double-mothered Dionysus" as relics of the custom of the _couvade_, and
of the legal recognition of children by the father, after a period of
kinship through women only.
*** Tylor, Prim. Oult., I 94; Early History of Mankind, p.
293.
** Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1861, p. 254.
*** Plutarch, Quaest. Rom., 5.
This theory is put by Lucian in his usual bantering manner. Poseidon
wishes to enter the chamber of Zeus, but is refused admission by Hermes.
"Is Zeus _en bonne fortune?_" he asks.
"No, the reverse. Zeus has just had a baby."
"A baby! why there was nothing in his figure...! Perhaps the child was
born from his head, like Athene?"
"Not at all--his _thigh_; the child is Semele's."
"Wonderful God! what varied accomplishments! But who is Semele?"
"A Theban girl, a daughter of Cadmus, much noticed by Zeus."
"And so he kindly was confined for her?"
"Exactly!"
"So Zeus is both father and mother of the child?"
"Naturally! And now I must go and make him comfortable."*
* Dial. Deor., xi.
We need not necessarily accept Bachofen's view. This learned author
employed indeed a widely comparative method, but he saw everything
through certain mystic speculations of his own. It may be deemed,
however, that the authors of the myth of the double birth of Dionysus
were rather in the condition of men who practise the _couvade_ than
capable of such vast abstract ideas and such complicated symbolism as
are required in the system of Preller. It is probable enough that the
struggle between the two systems of kindred--maternal and paternal--has
left its mark in Greek mythology. Undeniably it is present in the
_Eumenides_ of AEschylus, and perhaps it inspires the tales which
represent Hera and Zeus as emulously producing offspring (Athene and
Hephaestus) without the aid of the opposite sex.*
In any case, Dionysus, Semele's son, the patron of the vine, the
conqueror of India, is an enigmatic figure of dubious origin, but less
repulsive than Dionysus Zagreus.
Even among the adventures of Zeus the amour which resulted in the birth
of Dionysus Zagreus was conspicuous. "Jupiter ipse filiam incestavit,
natum hinc Zagreum."** Persephone, fleeing her hateful lover, took the
shape of a serpent, and Zeus became the male dragon. The story is on a
footing with the Brahmanic myth of Prajapati and his daughter as buck
and doe. The Platonists explained the legend, as usual, by their "absurd
symbolism ".***
The child of two serpents, Zagreus, was born, curious as it may seem,
with horns on his head. Zeus brought him up in secret, but Hera sent
the Titans to kill him. According to Clemens Alexandrinus**** and
other authorities, the Titans won his heart with toys, including the
bull-roarer or turn-dun of the Australians.**** His enemies, also in
Australian fashion, daubed themselves over with pipeclay.****** By these
hideous foes the child was torn to pieces, though, according to Nonnus,
he changed himself into as many beasts as Proteus by the Nile, or
Tamlane by the Ettrick.
* Roscher's Lexikon, p. 1046.
** Lobeck, Aglaoph., p. 547, quoting Callimachus and
Euphoric
*** Ibid., p. 550.
**** Admon., p. 11; Nonnus, xxiv. 43; ap. Aglaoph., p. 555.
***** Custom and Myth, p. 39.
******Cf. Demosthenes, Pro. Or., 313; Lobeck, pp. 556, 646,
700.
In his bull-shape, Zagreus was finally chopped up small, cooked (except
the heart), and eaten by the Titans.* Here we are naturally reminded of
the dismemberment of Osiris, Ymir, Purusha, Chokanipok and so many other
gods and beasts in Egypt, India, Scandinavia and America. This point
must not be lost sight of in the controversy as to the origin and date
of the story of Dionysus Zagreus. Nothing can be much more repulsive
than these hideous incidents to the genius, for example, of Homer.
He rarely tells anything worse about the gods than the tale of Ares'
imprisonment in the large bronze pot, an event undignified, indeed,
but not in the ferocious taste of the Zagreus legend. But it need not,
therefore, be decided that the story of Dionysus and the Titans is
later than Homer because it is inconsistent with the tone of Homeric
mythology, and because it is found in more recent authorities. Details
like the use of the "turn-dun" in the Dionysiac mysteries, and the
bodies of the celebrants daubed with clay, have a primitive, or at least
savage, appearance. It was the opinion of Lobeck that the Orphic poems,
in which the legend first comes into literature, were the work of
Onomacritus.**
On the other hand, Mueller argued that the myth was really archaic,
although it had passed through the hands of Onomacritus. On the strength
of the boast of the Delphian priests that they possessed the grave
in which the fragments of the god were buried, Mueller believed that
Onomacritus received the story from Delphi.***
* Proclus in Crat., p. 115.
** Aglaoph., p. 616. "Onomacritum architectum istius
mythi."
*** Mueller's Proleg., English transl., p. 319.
Mueller writes, "The way in which these Orphics went to work with
ancient myths can be most distinctly seen in the mythus of the _tearing
asunder of Bacchus_, which, at all events, passed _through_ the hands of
Onomacritus, an organiser of Dionysian orgies, according to Pausanias,
an author of Orphean poems also, and therefore, in all probability, an
Orphic".
The words of Pausanias are (viii. 37, 3), "Onomacritus, taking from
Homer the name of the Titans, established Dionysiac orgies, and
represented the Titans as the authors of the sorrows of the god".
Now it is perhaps impossible to decide with certainty whether, as Lobeck
held, Onomacritus "adapted" the myth, and the Delphians received it into
their religion, with rites purposely meant to resemble those of Osiris
in Egypt, or whether Mueller more correctly maintains that Onomacritus,
on the other hand, brought an old temple mystery and "sacred chapter"
into the light of literature. But it may very plausibly be maintained
that a myth so wild, and so analogous in its most brutal details to the
myths of many widely scattered races, is more probably ancient than a
fresh invention of a poet of the sixth century. It is much more likely
that Greece, whether at Delphi or elsewhere, possessed a legend common
to races in distant continents, than that Onomacritus either invented
the tale or borrowed it from Egypt and settled it at Delphi. O. Mueller
could not appeal to the crowd of tales of divine dismemberment in savage
and civilised lands, because with some he was unacquainted, and others
(like the sacrifice of Purusha, the cutting up of Omorca, the rending of
Ymir) do not seem to have occurred to his memory. Though the majority of
these legends of divine dismemberment are connected with the making of
the world, yet in essentials they do resemble the tale of Dionysus and
the Titans. Thus the balance of probability is in favour of the
theory that the myth is really old, and was borrowed, not invented, by
Onoma-critus.* That very shifty person may have made his own alterations
in the narrative, but it cannot be rash to say with O. Mueller, "If it
has been supposed that he was the inventor of the entire fable, which
Pausa-nias by no means asserts, I must confess that I cannot bring
myself to think so. According to the notions of the ancients, it must
have been an unholy, an accursed man who could, from a mere caprice of
his own, represent the ever-young Dionysus, the god of joy, as having
been torn to pieces by the Titans." A reply to this might, no doubt, be
sought in the passages describing the influx of new superstitions which
are cited by Lobeck.** The Greek comic poets especially derided these
religious novelties, which corresponded very closely to our "Esoteric
Buddhism" and similar impostures. But these new mysteries and trumpery
cults of the decayed civilisation were things very different from the
worship of Dionysus Zagreus and his established sacrifices of oxen in
the secret penetralia of Delphi.***
* Lobeck, Aglaoph., p. 671.
** Aglaoph., 625-630.
*** Lycophron, 206, and the Scholiast.
It may be determined, therefore, that the tale and the mystery-play of
Dionysus and the Titans are, in essentials, as old as the savage state
of religion, in which their analogues abound, whether at Delphi
they were or were not of foreign origin, and introduced in times
comparatively recent. The fables, wherever they are found, are
accompanied by savage rites, in which (as in some African tribes when
the chief is about to declare war) living animals were torn asunder and
eaten raw. These horrors were a kind of representation of the sufferings
of the god. O. Mueller may well observe,* "We can scarcely take
these rites to be new usages and the offspring of a post-Homeric
civilisation". These remarks apply to the custom of _nebrismus_, or
tearing fawns to pieces and dancing about draped in the fawn-skins.
Such rites were part of the Bacchic worship, and even broke out during
a pagan revival in the time of Valens, when dogs were torn in shreds by
the worshippers.**
Whether the antiquity of the Zagrean ritual and legend be admitted or
not, the problem as to their original significance remains. Although the
majority of heathen rites of this kind were mystery-plays, setting forth
in action some story of divine adventure or misadventure,*** yet Lobeck
imagines the story of Zagreus and the Titans to have been invented or
adapted from the Osiris legend, as an account of the mystic performances
themselves. What the myth meant, or what the furious actions of the
celebrants intended, it is only possible to conjecture.
* Lycophrony p. 322.
** Theodoretus, ap. Lobeck, p. 653. Observe the number of
examples of daubing with clay in the mysteries here adduced
by Lobeck, and compare the Mandan tribes described by Catlin
in O-Kee-Pa, Londou, 1867, and by Theal in Kaffir Folk-Lore.
*** Lactantius, v. 19,15; Ovid, Fasti, iv. 211.
Commonly it is alleged that the sufferings of Dionysus are the ruin of
the summer year at the hands of storm and winter, while the revival
of the child typifies the vernal resurrection; or, again, the slain
Dionysus is the vintage. The old English song tells how "John Barleycorn
must die," and how potently he came back to life and mastered his
oppressors. This notion, too, may be at the root of "the passion of
Dionysus," for the grapes suffer at least as many processes of torture
as John Barleycorn before they declare themselves in the shape of strong
drink.* While Preller talks about the _tiefste Erd-und Naturschmerz_
typified in the Zagrean ritual, Lobeck remarks that Plato would be
surprised if he could hear these "drunken men's freaks" decoratively
described as _ein erhabene Naturdienst_.
* Decharme, Mythologie de la Grece, p. 437, Compare Preller,
i. 572 on tiefste Naturschmerz, and so forth.
Lobeck looks on the wild acts, the tearing of fawns and dogs, the
half-naked dances, the gnawing of raw bleeding flesh, as the natural
expression of fierce untutored folk, revelling in freedom, leaping and
shouting. But the odd thing is that the most civilised of peoples should
so long have retained the manners of _ingenia inculta et indomita_.
Whatever the original significance of the Dionysiac revels, that
significance was certainly expressed in a ferocious and barbaric
fashion, more worthy of Australians than Athenians.
On this view of the case it might perhaps be maintained that the germ
of the myth is merely the sacrifice itself, the barbaric and cruel
dismembering of an animal victim, which came to be identified with the
god. The sufferings of the victim would thus finally be transmuted into
a legend about the passion of the deity. The old Greek explanation that
the ritual was designed "in imitation of what befel the god" would need
to be reversed. The truth would be that the myth of what befel the god
was borrowed from the actual torture of the victim with which the god
was identified Examples of this mystic habit of mind, in which the slain
beast, the god, and even the officiating celebrant were confused in
thought with each other, are sufficiently common in ritual.*
* As to the torch-dances of the Maenads, compare Roscher,
Lexikon, p. 1041, and Mannhardt Wald und Feki Kultits, i.
534, for parallels in European folk-lore.
The sacrifices in the ritual of Dionysus have a very marked character
and here more, commonly than in other Hellenic cults, the god and the
victim are recognised as essentially the same. The sacrifice, in fact,
is a sacrament, and in partaking of the victim the communicants eat
their god. This detail is so prominent that it has not escaped the
notice even of mythologists who prefer to take an ideal view of myths
and customs, to regard them as symbols in a nature-worship originally
pure. Thus M. Decharme says of the bull-feast in the Dionysiac cult,
"Comme le taureau est un des formes de Dionysos, c'etait le corps
du dieu dont se repaissaient les inities, c'etait son sang dont ils
s'abreuvaient dans ce banquet mystique". Now it was the peculiarity
of the Bac-chici who maintained these rites, that, as a rule, they
abstained from the flesh of animals altogether, or at least their
conduct took this shape when adopted into the Orphic discipline.* This
ritual, therefore, has points in common with the usages which appear
also to have survived into the cult of the ram-god in Egypt.** The
conclusion suggested is that where Dionysus was adored with this
sacrament of bull's flesh, he had either been developed out of, or
had succeeded to, the worship of a bull-totem, and had inherited his
characteristic ritual. Mr. Frazer, however, proposes quite a different
solution.*** Ours is rendered plausible by the famous Elean chant in
which the god was thus addressed: "Come, hero Dionysus, come with the
Graces to thy holy house by the shores of the sea; hasten with thy
bull-foot". Then the chorus repeated, "Goodly bull, goodly bull".****
M. Decharme publishes a cameo***** in which the god is represented as a
bull, with the three Graces standing on his neck, and seven stars in the
field. M. Decharme decides that the stars are the Pleiades, the Graces
the rays of the vernal sun, and Dionysus as a bull the symbol of the
vernal sun itself. But all such symbolical explanations are apt to be
mere private conjectures, and they are of no avail in face of the ritual
which, on the other hypothesis, is to be expected, and is actually
found, in connection with the bull Dionysus. Where Dionysus is not
absolutely called a bull, he is addressed as the "horned deity," the
"bull-horned," the "horned child".******
* Lobeck, Aglaoph., i 244; Plato, Laws, vi. 782; Herodot,
ii. 81. Porphyry says that this also was the rule of
Pythagoras (Vita Pyth., 1630, p. 22).
** Herodot., ii. 42.
*** Golden Bough, vol. ii.
**** Plutarch, Qu. Or., 3d.
***** Op. cit., p. 431.
****** Clemens Alex., Adhort, ii. 15-18; Nonnus, vi. 264;
Diodorus, iv. 4. 3. 64.
A still more curious incident of the Dionysiac worship was the sacrifice
of a booted calf, a calf with cothurns on its feet.* The people of
Tenedos, says AElian, used to tend their goodliest cow with great care,
to treat it, when it calved, like a woman in labour, to put the calf in
boots and sacrifice it, and then to stone the sacrificer and drive him
into the sea to expiate his crime. In this ceremony, as in the Diipolia
at Athens, the slain bull is, as it were, a member of the blood-kindred
of the man who immolates him, and who has to expiate the deed as if it
were a murder.** In this connection it is worth remarking that Dionysus
Zagreus, when, according to the myth, he was attacked by the Titans,
tried to escape his enemies by assuming various forms. It was in the
guise of a bull that he was finally captured and rent asunder. The
custom of rending the living victims of his cult was carried so far
that, when Pentheus disturbed his mysteries, the king was torn piecemeal
by the women of his own family.*** The pious acquiescence of the author
of the so-called Theocritean idyll in this butchery is a curious example
of the conservatism of religious sentiment. The connection of Dionysus
with the bull in particular is attested by various ritual epithets, such
as "the bull," "bull-born,"**** "bull-horned," and "bull-browed".*****
He was also worshipped with sacrifice of he-goats; according to the
popular explanation, because the goat gnaws the vine, and therefore is
odious to the god.
* AElian., H. A.t xii. 34.
** O. Mueller, Proleg., Engl, transl., 322, attributes the
Tenedos Dionysus rites to "the Beotic Achsean emigrants".
Gf, Aglaoph., 674-677.
*** Theocritus, Idyll, xxvi.
**** Pollux, iv. 86.
***** Athenaus, xi. 466, a.
The truth is, that animals, as the old commentator on Virgil remarks,
were sacrificed to the various gods, "_aut per similitudinem aut per
contrarietatem_" either because there was a community of nature between
the deity and the beast, or because the beast had once been sacred in
a hostile clan or tribe.* The god derived some of his ritual names from
the goat as well as from the bull According to one myth, Dionysus was
changed into a kid by Zeus, to enable him to escape the jealousy of
Hera.** "It is a peculiarity," says Voigt, "of the Dionysus ritual that
the god is one of his offering." But though the identity of the god and
the victim is manifest, the phenomenon is too common in religion to be
called peculiar.*** Plutarch**** especially mentions that "many of the
Greeks make statues of Dionysus in the form of a bull".
Dionysus was not only an animal-god, or a god who absorbed in his rights
and titles various elder forms of beast-worship. Trees also stood in the
same relation to him. As _Dendrites_, he is, like Artemis, a tree-god,
and probably succeeded to the cult of certain sacred trees; just as,
for example, St. Bridget, in Ireland, succeeded to the cult of the
fire-goddess and to her ceremonial.*****
* Cf. Roscher, Lexikon, p. 1059; Robertson Smith on
"Sacrifice," Encyc. Brit.
** Appolodorus, iii. 4, 9.
*** "Dionysos selber. Stier Zicklein ist, und als Zagreus-
kind selber, den Opfertod erleidet." Ap. Roscher, p. 1059.
**** De Is. et Os.
***** Elton, Origins of English History, p. 280, and the
authorities there quoted.
Dionysus was even called "the god in the tree,"* reminding us of Artemis
Dendritis, and of the village gods which in India dwell in the peepul
or the bo tree.** Thus Pausanias*** tells us that, when Pentheus went
to spy on the Dionysiac mysteries, the women found him hidden in a tree,
and there and then tore him piecemeal. According to a Corinthian legend,
the Delphic oracle bade them seek this tree and worship it with no
less honour than the god (Dionysus) himself. Hence the wooden images of
Dionysus were made of that tree, the fig tree, _non ex quovis ligno_,
and the god had a ritual name, "The fig-tree Dionysus". In the idols the
community of nature between the god and the fig tree was expressed
and commemorated. An unhewn stump of wood was the Dionysus idol of the
rustic people.****
* Hesychius.
** Cf. Roscher, p. 1062.
*** ii. 2,5.
**** Max. Tyr., 8, 1.
Certain antique elements in the Dionysus cult have now been sketched;
we have seen the god in singularly close relations with animal and plant
worship, and have noted the very archaic character of certain features
in his mysteries. Doubtless these things are older than the bright
anthropomorphic Dionysus of the poets--the beautiful young deity,
vine-crowned, who rises from the sea to comfort Ariadne in Tintoretto's
immortal picture. At his highest, at his best, Dionysus is the spirit
not only of Bacchic revel and of dramatic poetry, but of youth,
health and gaiety. Even in this form he retains something tricksy and
enigmatic, the survival perhaps of earlier ideas; or, again, it may be
the result of a more or less conscious symbolism. The god of the vine
and of the juice of the vine maketh glad the heart of man; but he also
inspires the kind of metamorphosis which the popular speech alludes
to when a person is said to be "disguised in drink". For this reason,
perhaps, he is now represented in art as a grave and bearded man, now as
a manly youth, and again as an effeminate lad of girlish loveliness. The
bearded type of the god is apparently the earlier; the girlish type may
possibly be the result merely of decadent art, and its tendency to a
sexless or bisexual prettiness.*
Turning from the ritual and local cults of the god, which, as has been
shown, probably retain the earlier elements in his composite nature,
and looking at his legend in the national literature of Greece, we find
little that throws any light on the origin and primal conception of his
character In the _Iliad_ Dionysus is not one of the great gods whose
politics sways Olympus, and whose diplomatic or martial interference is
exercised in the leaguer of the Achaeans or in the citadel of Ilios. The
longest passage in which he is mentioned is _Iliad_, vi. 130, a passage
which clearly enough declares that the worship of Dionysus, or at least
that certain of his rites were brought in from without, and that his
worshippers endured persecution. Diomedes, encountering Glaucus in
battle, refuses to fight him if he is a god in disguise. "Nay, moreover,
even Dryas' son, mighty Lykourgos, was not for long when he strove with
heavenly gods; he that erst chased through the goodly land of Nysa the
nursing mothers of frenzied Dionysus; and they all cast their wands upon
the ground, smitten with murderous Lykourgos' ox-goad. Then Dionysus
fled, and plunged beneath the salt sea-wave, and Thetis took him to her
bosom, affrighted, for mighty trembling had seized him at his foe's
rebuke. But with Lykourgos the gods that live at ease were wroth, and
Kronos's son made him blind, and he was not for long, because he was
hated of all the immortal gods."
* See Thraemer, in Roscher, pp. 1090-1143.
Though Dionysus is not directly spoken of as the wine-god here, yet
the gear of his attendants, and his own title, "the frenzied," seem to
identify him with the deity of orgiastic frenzy. As to Nysa, volumes
might be written to little or no purpose on the learning connected with
this obscure place-name, so popular in the legend of Dionysus. It has
been identified as a mountain in Thrace, in Boeotia, in Arabia, India,
Libya and Naxos, as a town in Caria or the Caucasus, and as an island
in the Nile. The flight of Dionysus into the sea may possibly recall the
similar flight of Agni in Indian myth.
The _Odyssey_ only mentions Dionysus in connection with Ariadne, whom
Artemis is said to have slain "by reason of the witness of Dionysus,"**
and where the great golden urn of Thetis is said to have been a present
from the god. The famous and beautiful hymn proves, as indeed may be
learned from Hesiod,*** that the god was already looked on as the patron
of the vine.
* xi.325.
** xxiv. 74.
*** Works and Days, 614.
When the pirates had seized the beautiful young man with the dark-blue
eyes, and had bound him in their ship, he "showed marvels among them,"
changed into the shape of a bear, and turned his captors into dolphins,
while wine welled up from the timbers of the vessel, and vines and ivy
trees wreathed themselves on the mast and about the rigging. Leaving
aside the Orphic poems, which contain most of the facts in the legend
of Dionysus Zagreus, the _Bacchae_ of Euripides is the chief classical
record of ideas about the god. Dionysus was the patron of the drama,
which itself was an artistic development of the old rural songs and
dances of his Athenian festival. In the _Bacchae_, then, Euripides had
to honour the very patron of his art. It must be said that his praise is
but half-hearted. A certain ironical spirit, breaking out here and there
(as when old Cadmus dances, and shakes a grey head and a stiff knee)
into actual burlesque, pervades the play. Tradition and myth doubtless
retained some historical truth when they averred that the orgies of the
god had been accepted with reluctance into state religion. The tales
about Lycurgus and Pentheus, who persecuted the Bacchae in Thebes, and
was dismembered by his own mother in a divine madness, are survivals
of this old distrust of Dionysus. It was impossible for Euripides, a
sceptic, even in a sceptical age, to approve sincerely of the god
whom he was obliged to celebrate. He falls back on queer etymological
explanations of the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus. This myth,
as Cadmus very learnedly sets forth, was the result of forgetfulness
of the meaning of words, was born of a _Volks-etymologie_. Zeus gave
a hostage to Hera, says Cadmus, and in "process of time" (a very short
time) men forgot what they meant when they said this, and supposed that
Dionysus had been sewnup in the thigh of his father.* The explanation is
absurd, but it shows how Euripides could transfer the doubt and distrust
of his own age, and its attempt at a philological interpretation of
myth, to the remote heroic tunes. Throughout the play the character and
conduct of the god, and his hideous revenge on the people who reject his
wild and cruel rites, can only be justified because they are articles of
faith. The chorus may sing--"Ah! blessed he who dwelleth in happiness,
expert in the rites of the gods, and so hallows his life, fulfilling his
soul with the spirit of Dionysus, revelling on the hills with charms of
holy purity ".** This was the interpretation which the religious mind
thrust upon rites which in themselves were so barbarously obscene that
they were feigned to have been brought by Dionysus from the barbaric
East,*** and to be the invention of Rhea, an alien and orgiastic
goddess.**** The bull-horned, snake-wreathed god,***** the god who,
when bound, turns into a bull (618); who manifests himself as a bull
to Pentheus (920), and is implored by the chorus to appear "as bull, or
burning lion, or many-headed snake" (1017-19), this god is the ancient
barbarous deity of myth, in manifest contrast with the artistic Greek
conception of him as "a youth with clusters of golden hair, and in his
dark eyes the grace of Aphrodite" (235, 236).
* Bacchae, 291, 296.
** Ibid., 73, 76.
*** Ibid., 10-20.
**** Ibid., i. 59.
***** Ibid., 100, 101.
The _Bacchae_, then, expresses the sentiments of a moment which must
often have occurred in Greek religion. The Greek reverence accepts,
hallows and adorns an older faith, which it feels to be repugnant and
even alien, but none the less recognises as human and inevitable. From
modern human nature the ancient orgiastic impulse of savage revelry
has almost died away. In Greece it was dying, but before it expired
it sanctified and perpetuated itself by assuming a religious form, by
draping its naked limbs in the fawn-skin or the bull-skin of Dionysus.
In precisely the same spirit Christianity, among the Negroes of the
Southern States, has been constrained to throw its mantle over what
the race cannot discard. The orgies have become camp-meetings; the
Voodoo-dance is consecrated as the "Jerusalem jump". In England the
primitive impulse is but occasionally recognised at "revivals". This
orgiastic impulse, the impulse of Australian corroboree and Cherokee
fetish-dances, and of the "dancing Dervishes" themselves, occasionally
seizes girls in modern Greece. They dance themselves to death on the
hills, and are said by the peasants to be victims of the Nereids. In
the old classic world they would have been saluted as the nurses and
companions of Dionysus, and their disease would have been hallowed by
religion. Of that religion the "bull-horned," "bull-eating," "cannibal"
Dionysus was the deity; and he was refined away into the youth with
yellow-clustered curls, and sleepy eyes, and smiling lips, the girlish
youth of the art of Praxiteles. So we see him in surviving statues, and
seeing him, forget his ghastly rites, and his succession to the rites of
goats, and deer, and bulls.
ATHENE.
Among deities for whom an origin has been sought in the personification
of elemental phenomena, Athene is remarkable. Perhaps no divine figure
has caused more diverse speculations. The study of her legend is rather
valuable for the varieties of opinion which it illustrates than for any
real contribution to actual knowledge which it supplies. We can discover
little, if anything, about the rise and development of the conception
of Athene. Her local myths and local _sacra_ seem, on the whole, less
barbaric than those of many other Olympians. But in comparing the
conjectures of the learned, one lesson comes out with astonishing
clearness. It is most perilous, as this comparison demonstrates, to
guess at an origin of any god in natural phenomena, and then to explain
the details of the god's legend with exclusive reference to that fancied
elemental origin.
As usual, the oldest literary references to Athene are found in the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. It were superfluous to collect and compare texts
so numerous and so familiar. Athene appears in the _Iliad_ as a martial
maiden, daughter of Zeus, and, apparently, of Zeus alone without female
mate.*
* Iliad, v. 875, 880. This is stated explicitly in the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where Athene is said to have been
born from the head of Zeus (Pindar, Olympic Odes, vii.).
She is the patron of valour and the inspirer of counsel; she arrests
the hand of Achilles when his sword is half drawn from the sheath in his
quarrel with Agamemnon; she is the constant companion and protector of
Odysseus; and though she is worshipped in the citadel of Troy, she is
constant to the cause of the Achaeans. Occasionally it is recorded of her
that she assumed the shape of various birds; a sea-bird and a swallow
are among her metamorphoses; and she could put on the form of any man
she pleased; for example, of Deiphobus.* It has often been observed that
among the lower races the gods habitually appear in the form of
animals. "Entre ces facultes qui possedent les immortels, l'une des plus
frappantes est celle de se metamorphoser, de prendre des apparences non
seulement animales, mais encore de se transformer en objets inanimes."**
Of this faculty, inherited from the savage stage of thought, Athene has
her due share even in Homer. But in almost every other respect she is
free from the heritage of barbarism, and might very well be regarded
as the ideal representative of wisdom, valour and manfulness in man, of
purity, courage and nobility in woman, as in the Phaeacian maid Nausicae.
* _Iliad_, xxii. 227, xvii. 351, Od. iii. 372. v. 353;
_Iliad_, vii. 59.
** Maury, _Religion de la Grece_, i. 256.
In Hesiod, as has already been shown, the myth of the birth of Athene
retains the old barbaric stamp. It is the peculiarity of the Hesiodic
poems to preserve the very features of religious narrative which
Homer disregards. According to Hesiod, Zeus, the youngest child of
child-swallowing Cronus, married Metis after he had conquered and
expelled his father. Now Metis, like other gods and goddesses, had the
power of transforming herself into any shape she pleased. Her husband
learned that her child--for she was pregnant--would be greater than
its father, as in the case of the child of Thetis. Zeus, therefore,
persuaded Metis to transform herself into a fly. No sooner was the
metamorphosis complete than he swallowed the fly, and himself produced
the child of Metis out of his head.* The later philosophers explained
this myth** by a variety of metaphysical interpretations, in which the
god is said to contain the all in himself, and again to reproduce it.
Any such ideas must have been alien to the inventors of a tale which,
as we have shown, possesses many counterparts among the lowest and least
Platonic races.*** C. O. Mueller remarks plausibly that "the figure of
the swallowing is employed in imitation of still older legends," such
as those of Africa and Australia. This leaves him free to imagine a
philosophic explanation of the myth based on the word Metis.**** We
may agree with Mueller that the "swallow-myth" is extremely archaic
in character, as it is so common among the backward races. As to the
precise amount, however, of philosophic reflection and allegory which
was present to the cosmogonic poet's mind when he used Metis as the name
of the being who could become a fly, and so be swallowed by her husband,
it is impossible to speak with confidence. Very probably the poet
meant to read a moral and speculative meaning into a barbaric _maerchen_
surviving in religious tradition.
To the birth of Athene from her father's head savage parallels are not
lacking. In the legends of the South Pacific, especially of Mangaia,
Tangaroa is fabled to have been born from the head of Papa.*****
* Hesiod, Theog., 886, and the Scholiast
** Lobeck, i. 613, note 2.
*** See the Cronus myth.
**** Proleg. Engl. transl., p. 308.
***** Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 10.
In the _Vafthrudismal_ (31) a maid and a man-child are born from under
the armpits of a primeval gigantic being. The remarks of Lucian on
miraculous birth have already been quoted.*
With this mythical birth for a starting-point, and relying on their
private interpretations of the _cognomina_ of the goddess, of her
_sacra_, and of her actions in other parts of her legend, the modern
mythologists have built up their various theories. Athene is now the
personification of wisdom, now the dawn, now the air or aether, now the
lightning as it leaps from the thunder-cloud; and if she has not been
recognised as the moon, it is not for lack of opportunity.** These
explanations rest on the habit of twisting each detail of a divine
legend into conformity with aspects of certain natural and elemental
forces, or they rely on etymological conjecture. For example, Welcker***
maintains that Athene is "a feminine personification of the upper
air, daughter of Zeus, the dweller in aether". Her name Tritogenia is
derived**** from an ancient word for water, which, like fire, has
its source in aether.***** Welcker presses the title of the goddess,
"Glaucopis," the "grey-green-eyed," into the service. The heaven in
Attica _oft ebenfalls wunderbar grun ist_.******
* Cf. Dionysus.
** Welcker, i. 305.
*** Griechische Gotterlehre, Gottingen, 1857, i. 303.
**** Op. cit., 311.
***** The ancients themselves were in doubt whether Trito
were the name of a river or mere, or whether the Cretan for
the head was intended. See Odyssey, Butcher and Lang, note
10, p. 415.
****** Op. cit., i. 303.
Moreover, there was a temple at Methone of Athene of the Winds
(Anemotis), which would be a better argument had there not been also
temples of Athene of the Pathway, Athene of the Ivy, Athene of the
Crag, Athene of the Market-place, Athene of the Trumpet, and so forth.
Moreover, the olive tree is one of the sacred plants of Athene. Now why
should this be? Clearly, thinks Welcker, because olive-oil gives
light from a lamp, and light also comes from aether.* Athene also gives
Telemachus a fair wind in the _Odyssey_, and though any Lapland witch
could do as much, this goes down to her account as a goddess of the
air.**
* Op. cit. i. 318.
** Mr. Ruskin's _Queen qf the Air_ is full of similar
ingenuities.
Leaving Welcker, who has many equally plausible proofs to give, and
turning to Mr. Max Mueller, we learn that Athene was the dawn. This
theory is founded on the belief that Athene = Ahana, which Mr. Max
Mueller regards as a Sanskrit word for dawn. "Phonetically there is not
one word to be said against, Ahana = Athene, and that the morning light
offers the best starting-point for the later growth of Athene has been
proved, I believe, beyond the reach of doubt, or even of cavil." Mr.
Mueller adds that "nothing really important could be brought forward
against my equation Ahana = Athene".
It is no part of our province here to decide between the conjectures of
rival etymologists, nor to pronounce on their relative merits. But the
world cannot be expected to be convinced by philological scholars before
they have convinced each other. Mr. Max Mueller had not convinced Benfey,
who offered another etymology of Athene, as the feminine of the Zend
_Thraetana athwyana_, an etymology of which Mr. Mueller remarks that
"whoever will take the trouble to examine its phonetic foundation
will be obliged in common honesty to confess that it is untenable".*
Meanwhile Curtius** is neither for Ahana and Sanskrit and Mr. Max
Mueller, nor for Benfey and Zend. He derives Athene from the root _aio_,
whence perhaps comes Athene, the blooming one" = the maiden. Preller,
again,*** finds the source of the name Athene in _aio_, whence _aion_,
"the air," or a flower". He does not regard these etymologies as
certain, though he agrees with Welcker that Athene is the clear height
of aether.
Manifestly no one can be expected to accept as matter of faith an
etymological solution which is rejected by philologists. The more
fashionable theory for the moment is that maintained some time since by
Lauer and Schwartz, and now by Furtwangler in Roscher's Lexikon, that
Athene is the "cloud-goddess," or the goddess of the lightning as it
springs from the clouds.**** As the lightning in mythology is often
a serpent, and as Athene had her sacred serpent, "which might be
Erichthonios,"*****
* _Nineteenth Century_, October, 1885, pp. 636, 639.
** Gr. Et., Engl, transl., i. 300.
*** Preller, i. 161.
**** Cf. Lauer, _System der Oriesch. Myth_., Berlin, 1853,
p. 220; Schwartz _Ursprung der Mythol_, Berlin, 1863, p.
38.
***** Paus., xxiv. 7.
Schwartz conjectures that the serpent is the lightning and Athene the
cloud. A long list of equally cogent reasons for identifying Athene with
the lightning and the thunder-cloud has been compiled by Furtwangler,
and deserves some attention. The passage excellently illustrates
the error of taking poetic details in authors as late as Pindar for
survivals of the absolute original form of an elemental myth.
Furtwangler finds the proof of his opinion that Athene is originally the
goddess of the thunder-cloud and the lightning that leaps from it in the
Olympic ode.* "By Hephaistos' handicraft beneath the bronze-wrought axe
from the crown of her father's head Athene leapt to light, and cried
aloud an exceeding cry, and heaven trembled at her coming, and earth,
the mother." The "cry" she gave is the thunderpeal; the spear she
carried is the lightning; the aegis or goat-skin she wore is the cloud
again, though the cloud has just been the head of Zeus.** Another proof
of Athene's connection with storm is the miracle she works when she sets
a flame to fly from the head of Diomede or of Achilles,*** or fleets
from the sky like a meteor.**** Her possession, on certain coins, of the
thunderbolts of Zeus is another argument. Again, as the Trumpet-Athene
she is connected with the thunder-peal, though it seems more rational to
account for her supposed invention of a military instrument by the mere
fact that she is a warlike goddess. But Furtwangler explains her martial
attributes as those of a thunder-goddess, while Preller finds it just
as easy to explain her moral character as goddess of wisdom by her
elemental character as goddess, not at all of the cloud, but of the
clear sky.*****
* Ode, vii. 35, Myers.
** Cf. Schwartz. Ursprung, etc., pp. 68, 83.
*** Iliad, v. 7,18,203.
**** Ibid, iv. 74.
***** Preller, i. 183.
"Lastly, as goddess of the heavenly clearness, she is also goddess of
spiritual clearness." Again, "As goddess of the cloudless heaven, she is
also goddess of health",* There could be no more instructive examples of
the levity of conjecture than these, in which two scholars interpret a
myth with equal ease and freedom, though they start from diametrically
opposite conceptions. Let Athene be lightning and cloud, and all is
plain to Furtwangler. Let Athene be cloudless sky, and Preller finds no
difficulties. Athene as the goddess of woman's work as well as of man's,
Athene Ergane, becomes clear to Furtwangler as he thinks of the _fleecy_
clouds. Probably the storm-goddess, when she is not thundering, is
regarded as weaving the fleeces of the upper air. Hence the myth that
Arachne was once a woman, changed by Athene into a spider because she
contended with her in spinning.**
* Preller, i. 179.
** Ovid, Metamorph., vi. 5-146.
The metamorphosis of Arachne is merely one of the half-playful
aetiological myths of which we have seen examples all over the world.
The spider, like the swallow, the nightingale, the dolphin, the frog,
was once a human being, metamorphosed by an angry deity. As Preller
makes Athene goddess of wisdom because she is goddess of clearness in
the sky, so Furtwangler derives her intellectual attributes from her
skill in weaving clouds. It is tedious and unprofitable to examine these
and similar exercises of facile ingenuity. There is no proof that Athene
was ever a nature-goddess at all, and if she was, there is nothing to
show what was her department of nature. When we meet her in Homer, she
is patroness of moral and physical excellence in man and woman. Manly
virtue she typifies in her martial aspect, the armed and warlike maid of
Zeus; womanly excellence she protects in her capacity of _Ergane_, the
toiler. She is the companion and guardian of Perseus no less than of
Odysseus.*
The sacred animals of Athene were the owl, the snake (which accompanies
her effigy in Athens, and is a form of her foster-child Erechtheus), the
cock,** and the crow.*** Probably she had some connection with the goat,
which might not be sacrificed in her fane on the Acropolis, where she
was settled by AEgeus ("goat-man "?). She wears the goat-skin, _aegis_,
in art, but this is usually regarded as another type of the
storm-cloud.****
* Pindar, Olymp., x. ad Jin.
** Paus., vi. 262.
*** Ibid., iv. 34, 6.
**** Roscher, in his Lexikon, s.v. aegis, with his arguments
there. Compare, on this subject of Athene as the goddess of
a goat-stock. Robertson Smith on "Sacrifice" in the
Encycl. Brit. Aphrodite.
Athene's maiden character is stainless in story, despite the brutal love
of Hephaestus. This characteristic perhaps is another proof that she
neither was in her origin nor became in men's minds one of the amorous
deities of natural phenomena. In any case, it is well to maintain a
sceptical attitude towards explanations of her myth, which only agree
in the determination to make Athene a "nature power" at all costs, and
which differ destructively from each other as to whether she was dawn,
storm, or clear heaven. Where opinions are so radically divided and so
slenderly supported, suspension of belief is natural and necessary.
No polytheism is likely to be without a goddess of love, and love is
the chief, if not the original, department of Aphrodite in the Greek
Olympus. In the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ and the Homeric Hymn she is
already the queen of desire, with the beauty and the softness of the
laughter-loving dame. Her cestus or girdle holds all the magic of
passion, and is borrowed even by Hera when she wishes to win her fickle
lord. She disturbs the society of the gods by her famous amours with
Ares, deceiving her husband, Hephaestus, the lord of fire; and she even
stoops to the embraces of mortals, as of Anchises. In the Homeric poems
the charm of "Golden Aphrodite" does not prevent the singer from hinting
a quiet contempt for her softness and luxury. But in this oldest Greek
literature the goddess is already thoroughly Greek, nor did later ages
make any essential changes in her character. Concerning her birth
Homer and Hesiod are not in the same tale; for while Homer makes her
a daughter of Zeus, Hesiod prefers, as usual, the more repulsive, and
probably older story, which tells how she sprang from the sea-foam and
the mutilated portions of Cronus.*
* Iliad, v. 312; Theog., 188-206.
But even in the Hesiodic myth it is remarkable that the foam-born
goddess first landed at Cythera, or again "was born in wave-washed
Cyprus". Her ancient names--the Cyprian and the Cytherean--with her
favoured seats in Paphos, Idalia and the Phoenician settlement of Eryx
in Sicily, combine with historical traditions to show that the Greek
Aphrodite was, to some extent, of Oriental character and origin. It is
probable, or rather certain, that even without foreign influence the
polytheism of Greece must have developed a deity of love, as did the
Mexican and Scandinavian polytheisms. But it is equally certain that
portions of the worship and elements in the myth of Aphrodite are
derived from the ritual and the legends of the Oriental queen of heaven,
adored from old Babylon to Cyprus and on many other coasts and isles of
the Grecian seas. The Greeks themselves recognised Asiatic influence.
Pausanias speaks of the temple of heavenly Aphrodite in Cythera as
the holiest and most ancient of all her shrines among the Hellenes.*
Herodotus, again, calls the fane of the goddess in Askalon of the
Philistines "the oldest of all, and the place whence her worship
travelled to Cyprus," as the Cyprians say, and the Phoenicians planted
it in Cythera, being themselves emigrants from Syria. The Semitic
element in this Greek goddess and her cult first demand attention.
Among the Semitic races with whose goddess of love Aphrodite was thus
connected the deity had many names. She was regarded as at once the
patroness of the moon, and of fertility in plants beasts, and women.
Among the Phoenicians her title is Astarte among the Assyrians she
was Istar; among the Syrians, Aschera; in Babylon, Mylitta.** Common
practices in the ritual of the Eastern and Western goddesses were the
licence of the temple-girls, the sacrifices of animals supposed to be
peculiarly amorous (sparrows, doves, he-goats), and, above all, the
festivals and fasts for Adonis.
* Paus., Hi. 28, 1.
** So Roscher, Ausfuhr. Lexik., pp. 391, 647. See also
Astarte, p. 656.
There can scarcely be a doubt that Adonis--the young hunter beloved by
Aphrodite, slain by the boar, and mourned by his mistress--is a symbol
of the young season, the _renouveau_, and of the spring vegetation,
ruined by the extreme heats, and passing the rest of the year in the
underworld. Adonis was already known to Hesiod, who called him, with
obvious meaning, the son of _Phoenix_ and Alphesiboea, while Pausanias
attributed to him, with equal significance, Assyrian descent.* The
name of Adonis is manifestly a form of the Phoenician Adon, "Lord".
The nature of his worship among the Greeks is most familiar from the
fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, with its lively picture of dead Adonis
lying in state, of the wailing for him by Aphrodite, of the little
"gardens" of quickly-growing flowers which personified him, and with the
beautiful nuptial hymn for his resurrection and reunion to Aphrodite.
Similar rites were customary at Athens.** Mannhardt gives the main
points in the ritual of the Adonis-feast thus: The fresh vegetation is
personified as a fair young man, who in ritual is represented by a kind
of idol, and also by the plants of the "Adonis-gardens". The youth
comes in spring, the bridegroom to the bride, the vernal year is their
honeymoon. In the heat of summer the bridegroom perishes for the nonce,
and passes the winter in the land of the dead. His burial is bewailed,
his resurrection is rejoiced in. The occasions of the rite are spring
and midsummer. The idol and the plants are finally cast into the sea, or
into well-water.
* Apollod., _Bibliothec_, iii. 14, 4.
** Aristoph., _Lysistrata_, 389; Mannhardt, _Feld und Wold
Kultus_, ii. 276.
The union of the divine lovers is represented by pairing of men and
maidens in bonds of a kindly sentimental sort,--the flowery bonds of
valentines.
The Oriental influence in all these rites has now been recognised; it
is perfectly attested both by the Phoenican settlements, whence
Aphrodite-worship spread, and by the very name of her lover, the spring.
But all this may probably be regarded as little more than the Semitic
colouring of a ritual and a belief which exist among Indo-European
peoples, quite apart from Phoenican influence. Mannhardt traces the
various points in the Aphrodite cult already enumerated through the
folk-lore of the German peasants. The young lover, the spring, is
the Maikonig or Laubmann; his effigy is a clothed and crowned idol or
puppet, or the Maibaum. The figure is thrown into the water and bewailed
in Russia, or buried or burned with lamentations.* He is wakened and
kissed by a maiden, who acts as the bride.** Finally, we have the
"May-pairs," a kind of valentines united in a nominal troth.
* i. 418; ii. 287.
** i 436.
The probable conclusion seems to be that the Adonis ritual expresses
certain natural human ways of regarding the vernal year. It is not
unlikely that the ancestors of the Greeks possessed these forms of
folk-lore previous to their contact with the Semitic races, and their
borrowing of the very marked Semitic features in the festivals.
For the rest, the concern of Aphrodite with the passion of love in men
and with general productiveness in nature is a commonplace of Greek
literature.
It would be waste of space to recount the numerous and familiar fables
in which she inspires a happy or an ill-fated affection in gods or
mortals. Like most other mythical figures, Aphrodite has been recognised
by Mr. Max Mueller as the dawn; but the suggestion has not been generally
accepted.* If Aphrodite retains any traces of an elemental origin, they
show chiefly in that part of her legend which is peculiarly Semitic
in colour. For the rest, though she, like Hermes, gives good luck in
general, she is a recognised personification of passion and the queen of
love.
* Roscher, Lexikon, p. 406.
HERMES.
Another child of Zeus whose elemental origin and character have been
much debated is Hermes. The meaning of the name** is confessedly
obscure.
Opinion, then, is divided about the elemental origin of Hermes and the
meaning of his name. His character must be sought, as usual, in ancient
poetic myth and in ritual and religion. Herodotus recognised his rites
as extremely old, for that is the meaning of his remark*** that
the Athenians borrowed them from the Pelasgians, who are generally
recognised as prehistoric Greeks.
** Preller, i. 307. The name of Hermes is connected by
Welcker (Griesch. Got., i. 342) with (-----), and he gives
other examples of the AEolic use of o for e. Compare
Curtius's Greek Etymology, English translation, 1886, vol.
i. p. 420. Mr. Max Mueller, on the other hand (Lectures, ii.
468), takes Hermes to be the son of the Dawn. Curtius
reserves his opinion. Mr. Max Mueller recognises Saramejas
and Hermes as deities of twilight. Preller (i. 309) takes
him for a god of dark and gloaming.
*** Herod., ii. 61.
In the rites spoken of, the images of the god were in one notable point
like well-known Bushmen and Admiralty Island divine representations, and
like those of Priapus.* In Cyllene, where Hermes was a great resident
god, Artemidorus** saw a representation of Hermes which was merely a
large phallus, and Pausanias beheld the same sacred object, which was
adored with peculiar reverence.*** Such was Hermes in the Elean region,
whence he derived his name, Cyllenian.**** He was a god of "the liberal
shepherds," conceived of in the rudest aspect, perhaps as the patron of
fruitfulness in their flocks. Manifestly he was most unlike the graceful
swift messenger of the gods, and guide of the ghosts of men outworn, the
giver of good fortune, the lord of the crowded market-place, the teacher
of eloquence and of poetry, who appears in the literary mythology of
Greece. Nor is there much in his Pelasgian or his Cyllenian form to
suggest the elemental deity either of gloaming, or of twilight, or of
the storm.*****
* Can the obscene story of Cicero (De Nat. Deor., iii. 22,
56) be a repetition of the sacred chapter by which Herodotus
says the Pelasgians explained the attribute of the image?
** Artem., i. 45.
*** Paus., vi. 26, 3.
**** Homeric Hymns, iii. 2.
***** But see Welcker, i. 343, for connection between his
name and his pastoral functions.
But whether the pastoral Hermes of the Pelasgians was refined into the
messenger-god of Homer, or whether the name and honours of that god were
given to the rude Priapean patron of the shepherds by way of bringing
him into the Olympic circle, it seems impossible to ascertain. These
combinations lie far behind the ages of Greece known to us in poetry and
history. The province of the god as a deity of flocks is thought to be
attested by his favourite companion animal the ram, which often stood
beside him in works of art.* In one case, where he is represented with
a ram on his shoulder, the legend explained that by carrying a ram
round the walls he saved the city of Tanagra from a pestilence.** The
Arcadians also represented him carrying a ram under his arm.*** As to
the phallic Hermae, it is only certain that the Athenian taste agreed
with that of the Admiralty Islanders in selecting such unseemly images
to stand beside every door. But the connection of Hermes with music (he
was the inventor of the lyre, as the Homeric Hymn sets forth) may be
explained by the musical and poetical character of old Greek shepherd
life.
If we could set aside the various elemental theories of Hermes as the
storm-wind, the twilight, the child of dawn, and the rest, it would
not be difficult to show that one moral conception is common to his
character in many of its varied aspects. He is the god of luck, of
prosperity, of success, of fortunate adventure. This department of his
activity is already recognised in Homer. He is giver of good luck.****
He is "Hermes, who giveth grace and glory to all the works of men".
Hence comes his Homeric name, the luck-bringer. The last cup at a feast
is drunk to his honour "for luck".
* Pausanias, ii. 8, 4.
** For Hermes, god of herds and flocks, see Preller, i.
322-325.
*** Pausanias, v. 27, 5.
**** Iliad, xiv. 491; Od. 15, 319.
Where we cry "Shares!" in a lucky find, the Greek cried "Hermes in
common!" A godsend was (------). Thus among rough shepherd folk the
luck-bringing god displayed his activity chiefly in making fruitful the
flocks, but among city people he presided over the mart and the public
assembly, where he gave good fortune, and over musical contests.* It is
as the lucky god that Hermes holds his "fair wand of wealth and riches,
three-leafed and golden, which wardeth off all evil"** Hermes has thus,
among his varied departments, none better marked out than the department
of luck, a very wide and important province in early thought. But while
he stands in this relation to men, to the gods he is the herald
and messenger, and, in some undignified myths, even the pander and
accomplice. In the Homeric Hymn this child of Zeus and Maia shows his
versatile character by stealing the oxen of Apollo, and fashioning the
lyre on the day of his birth. The theft is sometimes explained as a
solar myth; the twilight steals the bright days of the sun-god. But he
could only steal them day by day, whereas Hermes lifts the cattle in an
hour.*** The surname of Hermes, is usually connected with the slaying of
Argus, a supernatural being with many eyes, set by Hera to watch Io, the
mistress of Zeus.****
* See also Preller, i. 326, note 3.
** Hymn, 529. See Custom and Myth, "The Divining Rod ".
*** Preller, i. 316, note 2; Welcker, Gr. Got, i. 338, and
note 11.
**** AEsch., Prom. Vinct, 568.
Hermes lulled the creature to sleep with his music and cut off his head.
This myth yields a very natural explanation if Hermes be the twilight
of dawn, and if Argus be the many-eyed midnight heaven of stars watching
Io, the moon. If Hermes be the storm-wind, it seems just as easy to say
that he kills Argus by driving a cloud over the face of heaven. In his
capacity as the swift-winged messenger, who, in the _Odyssey_, crosses
the great gulf of the sea, and scarce brushes the brine with his
feathers, Hermes might be explained, by any one so minded, either as
lightning or wind. Neither hypothesis suits very well with his duties
as guide of the ghosts, whom he leads down darkling ways with his
wand of gold.* In this capacity he and the ghosts were honoured at the
Athenian All-Souls' day, in February.**
Such are the chief mythic aspects of Hermes. He has many functions;
common to all of them is the power of bringing all to a happy end. This
resemblance to twilight, "which bringeth all things good," as Sappho
sang, may be welcome to interpreters who see in Hermes a personification
of twilight. How ingeniously, and even beautifully, this crepuscular
theory can be worked out, and made to explain all the activities of
Hermes, may be read in an essay of Paul de St. Victor.*** What is the
dawn? The passage from night to day. Hermes therefore is the god of all
such fleet transitions, blendings, changes. The messenger of the gods,
he flits before them, a heavenly ambassador to mortals. Two light wings
quiver on his rounded cap, _the vault of heaven in little_....
* Odyssey, xxiv. 1-14.
** Preller, i. 330, and see the notes on the passage. The
ceremonies were also reminiscent of the Deluge.
*** Les Deux Masques, i. 316-326.
The highways cross and meet and increase the meetings of men; so Hermes,
the ceaseless voyager, is their protecting genius.... Who should guide
the ghosts down the darkling ways but the deity of the dusk; sometimes
he made love to fair ghostly maids whom he attended. So easy is it
to interpret all the functions of a god as reflections of elemental
phenomena. The origin of Hermes remains obscure; but he is, in his
poetical shape, one of the most beautiful and human of the deities. He
has little commerce with the beasts; we do not find him with many animal
companions, like Apollo, nor adored, like Dionysus, with a ritual in
which are remnants of animal-worship. The darker things of his oldest
phallic forms remain obscure in his legends, concealed by beautiful
fancies, as the old wooden phallic figure, the gift of Cecrops, which
Pausanias saw in Athens, was covered with myrtle boughs. Though he is
occasionally in art represented with a beard, he remains in the fancy as
the Odysseus met him, "Hermes of the golden wand, like unto a young man,
with the first down on his cheek, when youth is loveliest".
DEMETER.
The figure of Demeter, the _mater dolorosa_ of paganism, the sorrowing
mother seated on the stone of lamentation, is the most touching in Greek
mythology. The beautiful marble statue found by Mr. Newton at Cnidos,
and now in the British Museum, has the sentiment and the expression of
a Madonna. Nowhere in ancient religion was human love, regret, hope and
_desiderium_ or wistful longing typified so clearly as in the myth and
ritual of Demeter. She is severed from her daughter, Persephone, who
goes down among the dead, but they are restored to each other in the
joy of the spring's renewal. The mysteries of Eleusis, which represented
these events in a miracle-play, were certainly understood by Plato and
Pindar and AEschylus to have a mystic and pathetic significance. They
shadowed forth the consolations that the soul has fancied for herself,
and gave promise of renewed and undisturbed existence in the society
of all who have been dear on earth. Yet Aristophanes, in the _Frogs_,
ventures even here to bring in his raillery, and makes Xanthias hint
that the mystae, the initiate, "smell of roast-pig". No doubt they had
been solemnly sacrificing, and probably tasting the flesh of the
pig, the sacred animal of Demeter, whose bones, with clay or marble
_figurines_ representing him, are found in the holy soil of her temples.
Thus even in the mystery of Demeter the grotesque, the barbaric element
appears, and it often declares itself in her legend and in her ritual.
A scientific study of Demeter must endeavour to disentangle the two main
factors in her myth and cult, and to hold them apart. For this purpose
it is necessary to examine the development of the cult as far as it can
be traced.
As to the name of the goddess, for once there is agreement, and even
certainty. It seems hardly to be disputed that Demeter is Greek, and
means _mother-earth or earth the mother_.*
* Welcker, Oriech. QML, i. 385-387; Preller, i. 618, note 2;
Maury, Rel. des Grdes, L 69. Apparently "A" still means
earth in Albanian; Max Mueller, Selected Essays, ii. 428.
There is his mythological panacea. Mannhardt is all for "Corn-mother,"
Corn being nothing peculiarly Hellenic or Aryan in the adoration of
earth. A comparative study of earth-worship would prove it to be very
widely diffused, even among non-European tribes. The Demeter cult,
however, is distinct enough from the myth of Gaea, the Earth, considered
as, in conjunction with Heaven, the parent of the gods. Demeter is
rather the fruitful soil regarded as a person than the elder Titanic
formless earth personified as Gaea. Thus conceived as the foster-mother
of life, earth is worshipped in America by the Shawnees and Potawatomies
as _Me-mk-kum-mik-o-kwi_, the "mother of earth" It will be shown that
this goddess appears casually in a Potawatomie legend, which is merely
a savage version of the sacred story of Eleusis.* Tacitus found that
Mother Hertha was adored in Germany with rites so mysterious that the
slaves who took part in them were drowned. "Whereof ariseth a secret
terror and an holy ignorance what that should be which they only see who
are a-perishing."** It is curious that in the folk-lore of Europe, up to
this century, food-offerings to the earth were _buried_ in Germany and
by Gipsies; for the same rite is practised by the Potawatomies.***
* Compare Maury, Religions de la Grece, i. 72.
** Germania, 40, translation of 1622.
*** Compare Tylor, Prim. Cult, ii. 273, with Father De Smet,
Oregon Missions, New York, 1847, p. 351.
The Mexican Demeter, Centeotl, is well known, and Acosta's account of
religious ceremonies connected with harvest in Mexico and Peru might
almost be taken for a description of the Greek _Eiresione_. The god of
agriculture among the Tongan Islanders has one very curious point of
resemblance to Demeter. In the Iliad (v. 505) we read that Demeter
presides over the fanning of the grain. "Even as a wind carrieth the
chaff about the sacred threshing-floors when men are winnowing, _what
time golden Demeter, in rush of wind_, maketh division of grain and
chaff.".... Now the name of the "god of wind, and weather, rain, harvest
and vegetation in general" in the Tongan Islands is Alo-Alo, literally
"to fan".* One is reminded of Joachim Du Bellay's poem, "To the
Winnowers of Corn". Thus from all these widely diffused examples it is
manifest that the idea of a divinity of earth, considered as the mother
of fruits, and as powerful for good or harm in harvest-time, is anything
but peculiar to Greece or to Aryan peoples. In her character as potent
over this department of agriculture, the Greek goddess was named "she
of the rich threshing-floors," "of the corn heaps," "of the corn in the
ear," "of the harvest-home," "of the sheaves," "of the fair fruits," "of
the goodly gifts," and so forth.**
* Mariner's _Tonga Islands_, 1827, ii. 107. The Attic
Eiresioni may be studied in Mannhardt, Wald und Feld Qultus,
it 312, and Aztec and Peruvian harvest rites of a similar
character in Custom and Myth, pp. 17-20. See also Prim.
Quit., ii. 306, for other examples.
** Welcker, ii, 468-470, a collection of such titles.
In popular Greek religion, then, Demeter was chiefly regarded as the
divinity of earth at seed-time and harvest. Perhaps none of the gods
was worshipped in so many different cities and villages, or possessed
so large a number of shrines and rustic chapels. There is a pleasant
picture of such a chapel, with its rural disorder, in the _Golden Ass_
of Apuleius. Psyche, in her search for Cupid, "came to the temple and
went in, whereas behold she espied sheaves of corn lying on a heap,
blades with withered garlands, and reeds of barley. Moreover, she saw
hooks, scythes, sickles and other instruments to reape, but everie thing
laide out of order, and as it were cast in by the hands of labourers;
which when Psyche saw she gathered up and put everything in order." The
chapel of Demeter, in short, was a tool-house, dignified perhaps with
some rude statue and a little altar. Every village, perhaps every villa,
would have some such shrine.
Behind these observances, and behind the harvest-homes and the
rites--half ritual, half folk-lore--which were expected to secure the
fertility of the seed sown, there lurked in the minds of priests and
in the recesses of sanctuaries certain mystic and secret practices of
adoration. In these mysteries Demeter was doubtless worshipped in her
_Chthonian_ character as a goddess of earth, powerful over those who are
buried in her bosom, over death and the dead. In these hidden mysteries
of her cult, moreover, survived ancient legends of the usual ugly sort,
tales of the amours of the goddess in bestial guise. Among such rites
Pausanias mentions, at Hermione of Dryopian Argolis, the _fete_ of
Chthonian Demeter, a summer festival. The procession of men, women, boys
and priests dragged a struggling heifer to the doors of the temple, and
thrust her in unbound. Within the fane she was butchered by four old
women armed with sickles. The doors were then opened, and a second and
third heifer were driven in and slain by the old women. "This marvel
attends the sacrifice, that all the heifers fall on the same side as
the first that was slain." There remains somewhat undivulged. "The things
which they specially worship, I know not, nor any man, neither native
or foreigner, but only the ancient women concerned in the rite."*
In Arcadia there was a temple of Demeter, whose priests boasted a
connection with Eleusis, and professed to perform the mysteries in the
Eleusinian manner. Here stood two great stones, with another over them,
probably (if we may guess) a prehistoric dolmen. Within the dolmen,
which was so revered that the neighbours swore their chief oath by it,
were kept certain sacred scriptures. These were read aloud once a
year to the initiated by a priest who covered his face with a mask of
Demeter. At the same time he smote the earth with rods, and called on
the folk below the earth. Precisely the same practice, smiting the earth
with rods, is employed by those who consult diviners among the Zulus.**
The Zulu woman having a spirit of divination says, "Strike the ground
for them" (the spirits). "See, they say you came to inquire about
something." The custom of wearing a mask of the deity worshipped is
common in the religions of animal-worship in Egypt, Mexico, the South
Seas and elsewhere. The Aztec celebrant, we saw, wore a mask made of the
skin of the thigh of the human victim. Whether this Arcadian Demeter was
represented with the head of a beast does not appear; she had a mare's
head in Phigalia. One common point between this Demeter of the Pheneatae
and the Eleusinian is her _taboo_ on beans, which are so strangely
mystical a vegetable in Greek and Roman ritual.***
* Paus., li. 86.
** Callaway, Izinyanga Zokvbula, p. 362
*** For a collection of passages see Aglaophamus, 251-254.
The Black Demeter of the Phigalians in Arcadia was another most
archaic form of the goddess. In Phigalia the myth of the wrath and
reconciliation of the goddess assumed a brutal and unfamiliar aspect.
The common legend, universally known, declares that Demeter sorrowed for
the _enlevement_ of her daughter, Persephone, by Hades. The Phigalians
added another cause; the wandering Demeter had assumed the form of a
mare, and was violently wooed by Poseidon in the guise of a stallion.*
* The same story was told of Cronus and Philyra, of Agni and
a cow in the _Satapatha Brahmana_ (English translation, i.
326), of Saranyu, daughter of Tvashtri, who "fled in the
form of a mare". Visvasvat, in like manner, assumed the
shape of a horse, and followed her. From their intercourse
sprang the two Asvins. See Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v. 227, or
_Rig- Veda_, x. 17, 1. Here we touch a very curious point.
Erinnys was au Arcadian cognomen of the Demeter who was
wedded as a mare (Paus., viii. 25). Now, Mr. Max Mueller says
that "Erinnys is the Vedic Saranyu, the Dawn," and we have
seen that both Demeter Erinnys and Saranyu were wooed and
won in the form of mares (Select Essays, i. 401, 492-622).
The curious thing is that, having so valuable a proof in his
hand as the common bestial amours of both Saranyu and
Erinnys Demeter, Mr. Max Mueller does not produce it. The
Scandinavian horse-loves of Loki also recur to the memory.
Prajapati's loves in the shape of a deer are familiar in the
Brahmanas. If Saranyu=Erinnys, and both=Dawn, then a dawn-
myth has been imported into the legend of Demeter, whom
nobody, perhaps, will call a dawn-goddess. Schwartz, as
usual, makes the myth a storm-myth, and Demeter a goddess of
storms (Ursprwig der Myth., p. 164).
The goddess, in wrath at this outrage, attired herself in black mourning
raiment, and withdrew into a cave, according to the Phigalians, and
the fruits of the earth perished. Zeus learned from Pan the place of
Demeter's retreat, and sent to her the Moerae or Fates, who persuaded her
to abate her anger. The cave became her holy place, and there was set an
early wooden _xoanon_, or idol, representing the goddess in the shape of
a woman with the head and mane of a mare, in memory of her involuntary
intrigue in that shape. Serpents and other creatures were twined about
her head, and in one hand, for a mystic reason undivulged, she held a
dolphin, in the other a dove. The wooden image was destroyed by fire,
and disasters fell on the Phigalians. Onatas was then employed to make a
bronze statue like the old idol, wherof the fashion was revealed to him
in a dream. This restoration was made about the time of the Persian war.
The sacrifices offered to this Demeter were fruits, grapes, honey and
uncarded wool; whence it is clear that the black goddess was a true
earth-mother, and received the fruits of the earth and the flock. The
image by Onatas had somewhat mysteriously disappeared before the days of
Pausanias.*
* Paus., viii. 42. Compare viii. 25, 4, for the horse Arion,
whom Demeter bore to Poseidon.
Even in her rude Arcadian shape Demeter is a goddess of the fruits
of earth. It is probable that her most archaic form survived from the
"Pelasgian" clays in remote mountainous regions. Indeed Herodotus,
observing the resemblance between the Osirian mysteries in Egypt and the
Thesmophoria of Demeter in Greece, boldly asserts that the Thesmophoria
were Egyptian, and were brought to the Pelasgians from Egypt (ii. 171).
The Pelasgians were driven out of Peloponnesus by the Dorians, and the
Arcadians, who were not expelled, retained the rites. As Pelasgians also
lingered long in Attica, Herodotus recognised the Thesmophoria as
in origin Egyptian. In modern language this theory means that the
Thesmophoria were thought to be a rite of prehistoric antiquity older
than the Dorian invasion. Herodotus naturally explained resemblances
in the myth and ritual of distant peoples as the result of borrowing,
usually from Egypt, an idea revived by M. Foucart. These analogies,
however, are more frequently produced by the working out of similar
thoughts, presenting themselves to minds similarly situated in a
similar way. The mysteries of Demeter offer an excellent specimen of
the process. While the Greeks, not yet collected into cities, lived
in village settlements, each village would possess its own feasts,
mysteries and "medicine-dances," as the Red Indians say, appropriate to
seedtime and harvest. For various reasons, certain of these local rites
attained high importance in the development of Greek civilisation The
Eleusinian performances, for instance, were adopted into the state
ritual of a famous city, Athens, and finally acquired a national status,
being open to all not disqualified Hellenes. In this development the old
local ritual for the propitiation of Demeter, for the fertility of the
seed sown, and for the gratification of the dead ancestors, was caught
up into the religion of the state, and was modified by advancing
ideas of religion and morality. But the local Athenian mystery of the
Thesmophoria probably retained more of its primitive shape and purpose.
The Thesmophoria was the feast of seed-time, and Demeter was adored by
the women as the patroness of human as well as of universal fertility.
Thus a certain jocund and licentious element was imparted to the rites,
which were not to be witnessed by men.
The Demeter of the Thesmophoria was she who introduced and patronised
the (------) of marriage, as Homer says of Odysseus and Penelope.* What
was done at the Thesmophoria Herodotus did not think fit to tell. A
scholiast on Lucian's _Dialogues of Courtesans_ let out the secret in
a much later age. He repeats the story of the swineherd Eubuleus, whose
pigs were swallowed up by the earth when it opened to receive Hades and
Persephone. In honour and in memory of Eubuleus, pigs were thrown into
the cavernof Demeter. Then certain women brought up the decaying flesh
of the dead pigs, and placed it on the altar. It was believed that to
mix this flesh with the seed-corn secured abundance of harvest. Though
the rite is magical in character, perhaps the decaying flesh might act
as manure, and be of real service to the farmer. Afterwards images of
pigs, such as Mr. Newton found in a hole in the holy plot of Demeter at
Cnidos, were restored to the place whence the flesh had been taken. The
practice was believed to make marriage fruitful; its virtues were for
the husband as well as for the husbandman.** However the Athenians got
the rite, whether they evolved it or adapted it from some "Pelasgian"
or other prehistoric people, similar practices occur among the Khonds in
India and the Pawnees in America. The Khonds sacrifice a pig and a human
victim, the Pawnees a girl of a foreign tribe.
* Odyssey, xxiii. 295.
** Newton, Hulicarn., plate iv. pp. 331, 371-391.
The fragments of flesh are not mixed with the seed-corn, but buried on
the borders of the fields.* The ancient, perhaps "Pelasgian," ritual
of Demeter had thus its savage features and its savage analogues.
More remarkable still is the Pawnee version, as we may call it, of
the Eleusinia. Curiously, the Red Indian myth which resembles that of
Demeter and Persephone is _not_ told about Me-suk-kum-mik-o-kwi, the Red
Indian Mother Earth, to whom offerings are made, valuable objects being
buried for her in brass kettles.** The American tale is attached to the
legend of Manabozho and his brother Chibiabos, not to that of the Earth
Mother and her daughter, if in America she had a daughter.
The account of the Pawnee mysteries and their origin is worth quoting in
full, as it is among the most remarkable of mythical coincidences. If
we decline to believe that Pere De Smet invented the tale for the mere
purpose of mystifying mythologists, we must, apparently, suppose that
the coincidences are due to the similar workings of the human mind in
the Prairies as at Eleusis. We shall first give the Red Indian version.
It was confided to De Smet, as part of the general tradition of the
Pawnees, by an old chief, and was first published by De Smet in his
_Oregon Mission_*** Tanner speaks of the legend as one that the Indians
chant in their "medicine-songs," which record the sacred beliefs of the
race.****
* De Smet, Oregon Missions, p. 359; Mr. Russell's, "Report"
in Major Campbell's Personal Narrative, 1864, pp. 55, 113.
** Tanner's Narrative, 1830, p. 115.
*** New York, 1847.
**** Ibid., New York, 1830, pp. 192, 193.
He adds that many of these songs are noted down, by a method probably
peculiar to the Indians, on birch-bark or small flat pieces of wood, the
ideas being conveyed by emblematical figures. When it is remembered that
the _luck_ of the tribe depends on these songs and rites, it will be
admitted that they are probably of considerable antiquity, and that
the Indians probably did not borrow the story about the origin of their
ritual from some European conversant with the Homeric hymn to Demeter.
Here follows the myth, as borrowed (without acknowledgment) by
Schoolcraft from De Smet:--*
"The Manitos (powers or spirits) were jealous of Manabozho and
Chibiabos. Manabozho warned his brother never to be alone, but one day
he ventured on the frozen lake and was drowned by the Manitos. Manabozho
wailed along the shores. He waged a war against all the Manitos....
He called on the dead body of his brother. He put the whole country in
dread by his lamentations. He then besmeared his face with black,
and sat down six years to lament, uttering the name of Chibiabos. The
Manitos consulted what to do to assuage his melancholy and his wrath.
The oldest and wisest of them, who had had no hand in the death of
Chibiabos, offered to undertake the task of reconciliation. They built a
sacred lodge close to that of Manabozho, and prepared a sumptuous feast.
They then assembled in order, one behind the other, each carrying under
his arm a sack of the skin of some favourite animal, as a beaver, an
otter, or a lynx, and filled with precious and curious medicines culled
from all plants. These they exhibited, and invited him to the feast with
pleasing words and ceremonies. He immediately raised his head, uncovered
it, and washed off his besmearments and mourning colours, and then
followed them. They offered him a cup of liquor prepared from the
choicest medicines, at once as a propitiation and an initiatory rite.
He drank it at a single draught, and found his melancholy departed. They
then commenced their dances and songs, united with various ceremonies.
All danced, all sang, all acted with the utmost gravity, with exactness
of time, motion and voice. Manabozho was cured; he ate, danced, sang and
smoked the sacred pipe.
* Schoolcraft, L 318.
"In this manner the mysteries of the great medicine-dance were
introduced.
"The Manitos now united their powers to bring Chibiabos to life. They
did so, and brought him to life, but it was forbidden to enter the
lodge. They gave him, through a chink, a burning coal, and told him to
go and preside over the country of souls and reign over the land of the
dead.
"Manabozho, now retired from men, commits the care of medicinal
plants to Misukumigakwa, or the Mother of the Earth, to whom he makes
offerings."
In all this the resemblance to the legend of the Homeric hymn to Demeter
is undeniable. The hymn is too familiar to require a long analysis. We
read how Demeter had a fair daughter, Persephone; how the Lord of the
Dead carried her off as she was gathering flowers; how Demeter sought
her with burning torches; and how the goddess came to Eleusis and
the house of Celeus in the guise of an old wife. There she dwelt in
sorrow, neither eating nor drinking, till she tasted of a mixture of
barley and water (_cyceon_), and was moved to smile by the mirth of
Iambe. Yet she still held apart in wrath from the society of the gods,
and still the earth bore not her fruits, till the gods bade Hermes
restore Persephone. But Persephone had tasted one pomegranate-seed in
Hades, and therefore, according to a world-wide belief, she was under
bonds to Hades. For only half the year does she return to earth; yet
by this Demeter was comforted; the soil bore fruits again, and Demeter
showed forth to the chiefs of Eleusis her sacred mysteries and the
ritual of their performance.*
The Persephone myth is not in Homer, though in Homer Persephone is Lady
of the Dead. Hesiod alludes to it in the _Theogony_ (912-914); but the
chief authority is the Homeric hymn, which Matthaeus found (1777) in
a farmyard at Moscow. "Inter pullos et porcos latuerat"--the pigs of
Demeter had guarded the poem of her mysteries.** As to the date and
authorship of the hymn, the learned differ in opinion. Probably most
readers will regard it as a piece of poetry, like the hymn to Aphrodite,
rather than as a "mystic chain of verse" meant solely for hieratic
purposes. It is impossible to argue with safety that the Eleusinian
mysteries and legend were later than Homer, because Homer does not
allude to them.
* The superstition about the food of the dead is found in
New Zealand, Melanesia, Scotland, Finland and among the
Ojibbeways. Compare "Wandering Willie's" tale in
_Redgaunttet_.
** Ruhnken, ap. Hignard, _Les Hymnes Homeriques_, p. 292,
Paris, 1864.
He has no occasion to speak of them. Possibly the mysteries were, in his
time, but the rites of a village or little town; they attained celebrity
owing to their adoption by Athens, and they ended by becoming the most
famous national festival. The meaning of the legend, in its origin,
was probably no more than a propitiation of earth, and a ceremony that
imitated, and so secured, the return of spring and vegetation. This
early conception, which we have found in America, was easily combined
with doctrines of the death and revival, not of the year, not of the
seed sown, but of the human soul. These ideas were capable of endless
illustration and amplification by priests; and the mysteries, by
Plato's time, and even by Pindar's, were certainly understood to have a
purifying influence on conduct and a favourable effect on the fortunes
of the soul in the next world.
"Happy whosoever of mortal men has looked on these things; but whoso
hath had no part nor lot in this sacrament hath no equal fate when once
he hath perished and passed within the pall of darkness."* Of such
rites we may believe that Plato was thinking when he spoke of
"beholding apparitions innocent and simple, and calm and happy, _as in a
mystery_"** Nor is it strange that, when Greeks were seeking for a
sign, and especially for some creed that might resist the new worship of
Christ, Plutarch and the Neo-Platonic philosophers tried to cling to the
promise of the mysteries of Demeter.
* Homeric Hymn, 480-482.
** Phaedrus, 260.
They regarded her secret things as "a dreamy shadow of that spectacle
and that rite," the spectacle and rite of the harmonious order of the
universe, some time to be revealed to the souls of the blessed.* It may
not have been a drawback to the consolations of the hidden services
that they made no appeal to the weary and wandering reason of the later
heathens. Tired out with endless discourse on fate and free will,
gods and demons, allegory and explanation, they could repose on mere
spectacles and ceremonies and pious ejaculations, "without any evidence
or proof offered for the statements ". Indeed, writers like Plutarch
show almost the temper of Pascal, trying to secure rest for their souls
by a wise passiveness and pious contemplation, and participation in
sacraments not understood.
As to the origin of these sacraments, we may believe, with Lobeck, that
it was no priestly system of mystic and esoteric teaching, moral or
physical. It was but the "medicine-dance" of a very old Greek tribal
settlement, perhaps from the first with an ethical element. But from
this, thanks to the genius of Hellas, sprang all the beauty of the
Eleusinian ritual, and all the consolation it offered the bereaved, all
the comfort it yielded to the weary and heavy laden.** That the popular
religious excitement caused by the mysteries and favoured by the
darkness often produced scenes of lustful revelry, may be probable
enough. "Revivals" everywhere have this among other consequences. But
we may share Lobeck's scepticism as to the wholesale charges of iniquity
brought by the Fathers.
* Plutarch, De Def. Orac. xxii
** Lobeck, Aglaoph., 133.
In spite of survivals and slanders, the religion of Demeter was among
the most natural, beautiful and touching of Greek beliefs. The wild
element was not lacking; but a pious contemporary of Plato, when he
bathed in the sea with his pig before beholding the mystery-play,
probably made up his mind to blink the barbaric and licentious part of
the performances.
CONCLUSION.
This brief review of Greek divine myths does not of course aim at
exhausting the subject. We do not pretend to examine the legends of
all the Olympians. But enough has been said to illustrate the method of
interpretation, and to give specimens of the method at work. It has been
seen that there is only agreement among philologists as to the origin
and meaning of two out of nearly a dozen divine names. Zeus is admitted
to be connected with _Dyaus_, and to have originally meant "sky".
Demeter is accepted as Greek, with the significance of "Mother Earth".
But the meaning and the roots of Athene, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes,
Cronus, Aphrodite, Dionysus--we might add Poseidon and Hephaestus--are
very far from being known. Nor is there much more general agreement as
to the original elemental phenomena or elemental province held by all of
these gods and goddesses. The moon, the wind, the twilight, the sun,
the growth and force of vegetation, the dark, the night, the atmosphere,
have been shuffled and dealt most variously to the various deities by
learned students of myth. This complete diversity of opinion must be
accepted as a part in the study.
The learned, as a rule, only agree in believing (1) that the names hold
the secret of the original meaning of the gods; and (2) that the gods
are generally personifications of elements or of phenomena, or have
been evolved out of such personifications. Beyond this almost all is
confusion, doubt, "the twilight of the gods".
In this darkness there is nothing to surprise. We are not wandering in
a magical mist poured around us by the gods, but in a fog which has
natural causes. First, there is the untrustworthiness of attempts to
analyse proper names. "With every proper name the etymological operation
is by one degree more difficult than with an appellative.... We have
to deal with two unknown quantities," origin and meaning; whereas in
appellatives we know the meaning and have only to hunt for the origin.
And of all proper names mythological names are the most difficult to
interpret. Curtius has shown how many paths may be taken in the analysis
of the name Achilles. The second part may be of the stem: people, or the
stem: stone. Does the first part of the word mean "water" (cf. aqua), or
is it equivalent to: ("bulwark" or "the people")? Or is it akin to:
"one who causes pain"? Or is the: "prothetic"? and is (it) the root,
and does it mean "clear-shining"? Or is the word related to (------),
and does it mean "dark"?
All these and other explanations are offered by the learned, and
are chosen by Curtius to show the uncertainty and difficulty of the
etymological process as applied to names in myth. Cornutus remarked
long ago that the great antiquity of the name of Athene made its
etymology difficult. Difficult it remains.* Whatever the science of
language may accomplish in the future, it is baffled for the present
by the divine names of Greece, or by most of them, and these the most
important.**
* Cf. Curtius, Greek Etym., Engl, transl., i. 137-139.
** Gruppe, Griech. Culte und Mythtis, p. 169, selects
Iapetos, Kadmos, Kabeiros, Adonis, Baitylos, Typhon, Nysos
(in Dionysos), Acheron, Kimmerians and Gryps, aa certainly
Phoenician. But these are not the names of the high gods.
There is another reason for the obscurity of the topic besides the
darkness in which the origin of the names has been wrapped by time. The
myths had been very long in circulation before we first meet them in
Homer and Hesiod. We know not whence the gods came. Perhaps some of them
were the chief divine conceptions of various Hellenic clans before the
union of clans into states. However this may be, when we first encounter
the gods in Homer and Hesiod, they have been organised into a family,
with regular genealogies and relationships. Functions have been assigned
to them, and departments. Was Hermes always the herald? Was Hephaestus
always the artisan? Was Athene from the first the well-beloved daughter
of Zeus? Was Apollo from the beginning the mediator with men by oracles?
Who can reply? We only know that the divine ministry has been thoroughly
organised, and departments assigned, as in a cabinet, before we meet the
gods on Olympus. What they were in the ages before this organisation, we
can only conjecture. Some may have been adopted from clans whose chief
deity they were. If any one took all the Samoan gods, he could combine
them into a family with due functions and gradations. No one man did
this, we may believe, for Greece: though Herodotus thought it was done
by Homer and Hesiod. The process went on through centuries we know not
of; still less do we know what or where the gods were before the process
began.
Thus the obscurity in which the divine origins are hidden is natural and
inevitable. Our attempt has been to examine certain birth-marks which
the gods bear from that hidden antiquity, relics of fur and fin
and feather, inherited from ancestral beasts like those which ruled
Egyptian, American and Australian religions. We have also remarked the
brilliant divinity of beautiful form which the gods at last attained, in
marble, in gold, in ivory and in the fancy of poets and sculptors. Here
is the truly Hellenic element, here is the ideal--Athene arming, Hera
with the girdle of Aphrodite, Hermes with his wand, Apollo with the
silver bow--to this the Hellenic intellect attained; this ideal it
made more imperishable than bronze. Finally, the lovely shapes of gods
"defecate to a pure transparency" in the religion of Aristotle and
Plutarch. But the gods remain beautiful in their statues, beautiful
in the hymns of Pindar and the plays of Sophocles; hideous, often, in
temple myth, and ancient _xoanon_, and secret rite, till they are all,
good and evil, cast out by Christianity. The most brilliant civilisation
of the world never expelled the old savage from its myth and its ritual.
The lowest savagery scarcely ever, if ever, wholly loses sight of a
heavenly Father.
In conclusion, we may deprecate the charge of _exclusivism_. The savage
element is something, nay, is much, in Greek myth and ritual, but it is
not everything. The truth, grace and beauty of the myths are given
by "the clear spirit" of Hellas. Nor is all that may be deplored
necessarily native. We may well believe in borrowing from Phoenicians,
who in turn may have borrowed from Babylon. Examples of this process
have occasionally been noted. It will be urged by some students that the
wild element was adopted from the religion of prehistoric races, whom
the Greeks found in possession when first they seized the shores of the
country. This may be true in certain cases, but historical evidence
is not to be obtained. We lose ourselves in theories of Pelasgians
and Pre-Pelasgians, and "la Grece avant les Grecs". In any case, the
argument that the more puzzling part of Greek myth is a "survival" would
not be affected. Borrowed, or inherited, or imitated, certain of the
stories and rites are savage in origin, and the argument insists on no
more as to that portion of Greek mythology.