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FIVE STAGES OF
GREEK RELIGION
BY
GILBERT MURRAY
Boston
THE BEACON PRESS
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
Anyone who has been in Greece at Easter time, especially among the more
remote peasants, must have been struck by the emotion of suspense and
excitement with which they wait for the announcement "_Christos
anestê_," "Christ is risen!" and the response "_Alêthôs anestê_," "He
has really risen!" I have referred elsewhere to Mr. Lawson's old peasant
woman, who explained her anxiety: "If Christ does not rise tomorrow we
shall have no harvest this year" (_Modern Greek Folklore_, p. 573). We
are evidently in the presence of an emotion and a fear which, beneath
its Christian colouring and, so to speak, transfiguration, is in its
essence, like most of man's deepest emotions, a relic from a very remote
pre-Christian past. Every spring was to primitive man a time of terrible
anxiety. His store of food was near its end. Would the dead world
revive, or would it not? The Old Year was dead; would the New Year, the
Young King, born afresh of Sky and Earth, come in the Old King's place
and bring with him the new growth and the hope of life?
I hardly realized, when writing the earlier editions of this book, how
central, how omnipresent, this complex of ideas was in ancient Greek
religion. Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and the rest of the "Year
Gods" were not eccentric divagations in a religion whose proper worship
was given to the immortal Olympians; they are different names given in
different circumstances to this one being who dies and is born again
each year, dies old and polluted with past deaths and sins, and is
reborn young and purified. I have tried to trace this line of tradition
in an article for the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_ for June 1951, and
to show, incidentally, how many of the elements in the Christian
tradition it has provided, especially those elements which are utterly
alien from Hebrew monotheism and must, indeed, have shocked every
orthodox Jew.
The best starting point is the conception of the series of Old Kings,
each, when the due time comes, dethroned and replaced by his son, the
Young King, with the help of the Queen Mother; for Gaia or Earth, the
eternal Wife and Mother of each in turn, is always ready to renew
herself. The new vegetation God each year is born from the union of the
Sky-God and the Earth-Mother; or, as in myth and legend the figures
become personified, he is the Son of a God and a mortal princess.
We all know the sequence of Kings in Hesiod: First Uranus (Sky), King of
the World, and his wife Gaia (Earth); Uranus reigns till he is dethroned
by his son Cronos with the help of Gaia; then Cronos and Rhea (Earth)
reign till Cronos is dethroned by his son Zeus, with the help of Rhea;
then Zeus reigns till . . . but here the series stops, since, according
to the orthodox Olympian system, Zeus is the eternal King. But there was
another system, underlying the Olympian, and it is to that other system
that the Year-Kings belong. The Olympians are definite persons. They are
immortal; they do not die and revive; they are not beings who come
and go, in succession to one another. In the other series are the
Attis-Adonis-Osiris type of gods, and especially Dionysus, whose name
has been shown by Kretschmer to be simply the Thracian _Deos_ or _Dios
nysos_, "Zeus-Young" or "Zeus-the-son." And in the Orphic tradition it
is laid down that Zeus yields up his power to Dionysus and bids all the
gods of the Cosmos obey him. The mother of Dionysus was Semelê, a name
which, like Gaia and Rhea, means "Earth." The series is not only
continuous but infinite; for on one side Uranus (Sky) was himself the
son of Gaia the eternal, and on the other, every year a Zeus was
succeeded by a "Young Zeus."
The Young King, bearer of spring and the new summer, is the Saviour of
the Earth, made cold and lifeless by winter and doomed to barrenness by
all the pollutions of the past; the Saviour also of mankind from all
kinds of evils, and bringer of a new _Aion_, or Age, to the world.
Innumerable different figures in Greek mythology are personifications of
him, from Dionysus and Heracles to the Dioscuri and many heroes of myth.
He bears certain distinguishing marks. He is always the son of a God and
a mortal princess. The mother is always persecuted, a _mater dolorosa_,
and rescued by her son. The Son is always a Saviour; very often a
champion who saves his people from enemies or monsters; but sometimes a
Healer of the Sick, like Asclepius; sometimes, like Dionysus, a priest
or hierophant with a _thiasos_, or band of worshippers; sometimes a
King's Son who is sacrificed to save his people, and mystically
identified with some sacrificial animal, a lamb, a young bull, a horse
or a fawn, whose blood has supernatural power. Sometimes again he is a
divine or miraculous Babe, for whose birth the whole world has been
waiting, who will bring his own Age or Kingdom and "make all things
new." His life is almost always threatened by a cruel king, like Herod,
but he always escapes. The popularity of the Divine Babe is probably due
to the very widespread worship of the Egyptian Child-God, Harpocrates.
Egyptian also is the Virgin-Mother, impregnated by the holy _Pneuma_ or
_Spiritus_ of the god, or sometimes by the laying on of his hand.
Besides the ordinary death and rebirth of the vegetation year god, the
general conclusion to which these considerations point has many
parallels elsewhere. Our own religious ideas are subject to the same
tendencies as those of other civilizations. Men and women, when
converted to a new religion or instructed in some new and unaccustomed
knowledge, are extremely unwilling, and sometimes absolutely unable, to
give up their old magical or religious practices and habits of thought.
When African negroes are converted to Christianity and forbidden to
practise their tribal magic, they are apt to steal away into the depths
of the forest and do secretly what they have always considered necessary
to ensure a good harvest. Not to do so would be too great a risk. When
Goths were "converted by battalions" the change must have been more in
names than in substance. When Greeks of the Mediterranean were forbidden
to say prayers to a figure of Helios, the Sun, it was not difficult to
call him the prophet Elias and go on with the same prayers and hopes.
Not difficult to continue your prayers to the age-old Mother Goddess of
all Mediterranean peoples, while calling her Mary, the Mother of Christ.
Eusebius studied the subject, somewhat superficially, in his
_Praeparatio Evangelica_, in which he argued that much old pagan belief
was to be explained as an imperfect preparation for the full light of
the Gospel. And it is certainly striking how the Anatolian peoples,
among whom the seed of the early Church was chiefly sown, could never,
in spite of Jewish monotheism, give up the beloved Mother Goddess for
whom mankind craves, or the divine "Faithful Son" who will by his own
sacrifice save his people. Where scientific knowledge fails man cannot
but be guided by his felt needs and longings and aspirations.
The elements in Christianity which derive from what Jews called "_the
Gôyim_" or "nations" beyond the pale, seem to be far deeper and more
numerous than those which come unchanged from Judaism. Even the Sabbath
had to be changed, and the birthday of Jesus conformed to that of the
Sun. Judaism contributed a strong, though not quite successful,
resistance to polytheism, and a purification of sexual morality. It
provided perhaps a general antiseptic, which was often needed by the
passionate gropings of Hellenistic religion, in the stage which I call
the Failure of Nerve.
G. M.
_September 1951._
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
In revising the _Four Stages of Greek Religion_ I have found myself
obliged to change its name. I felt there was a gap in the story. The
high-water mark of Greek religious thought seems to me to have come just
between the Olympian Religion and the Failure of Nerve; and the
decline--if that is the right word--which is observable in the later
ages of antiquity is a decline not from Olympianism but from the great
spiritual and intellectual effort of the fourth century B.C., which
culminated in the _Metaphysics_ and the _De Anima_ and the foundation of
the Stoa and the Garden. Consequently I have added a new chapter at this
point and raised the number of Stages to five.
My friend Mr. E. E. Genner has kindly enabled me to correct two or three
errors in the first edition, and I owe special thanks to my old pupil,
Professor E. R. Dodds, for several interesting observations and
criticisms on points connected with Plotinus and Sallustius. Otherwise I
have altered little. I am only sorry to have left the book so long out
of print.
G. M.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
This small book has taken a long time in growing. Though the first two
essays were only put in writing this year for a course of lectures which
I had the honour of delivering at Columbia University in 1912, the
third, which was also used at Columbia, had in its main features
appeared in the _Hibbert Journal_ in 1910, the fourth in part in the
_English Review_ in 1908; the translation of Sallustius was made in 1907
for use with a small class at Oxford. Much of the material is much older
in conception, and all has been reconsidered. I must thank the editors
of both the above-named periodicals for their kind permission to
reprint.
I think it was the writings of my friend Mr. Andrew Lang that first
awoke me, in my undergraduate days, to the importance of anthropology
and primitive religion to a Greek scholar. Certainly I began then to
feel that the great works of the ancient Greek imagination are
penetrated habitually by religious conceptions and postulates which
literary scholars like myself had not observed or understood. In the
meantime the situation has changed. Greek religion is being studied
right and left, and has revealed itself as a surprisingly rich and
attractive, though somewhat controversial, subject. It used to be a
deserted territory; now it is at least a battle-ground. If ever the
present differences resolved themselves into a simple fight with
shillelaghs between the scholars and the anthropologists, I should
without doubt wield my reluctant weapon on the side of the scholars.
Scholarship is the rarer, harder, less popular and perhaps the more
permanently valuable work, and it certainly stands more in need of
defence at the moment. But in the meantime I can hardly understand how
the purest of 'pure scholars' can fail to feel his knowledge enriched by
the savants who have compelled us to dig below the surface of our
classical tradition and to realize the imaginative and historical
problems which so often lie concealed beneath the smooth security of a
verbal 'construe'. My own essays do not for a moment claim to speak with
authority on a subject which is still changing and showing new facets
year by year. They only claim to represent the way of regarding certain
large issues of Greek Religion which has gradually taken shape, and has
proved practically helpful and consistent with facts, in the mind of a
very constant, though unsystematic, reader of many various periods of
Greek literature.
In the first essay my debt to Miss Harrison is great and obvious. My
statement of one or two points is probably different from hers, but in
the main I follow her lead. And in either case I cannot adequately
describe the advantage I have derived from many years of frequent
discussion and comparison of results with a Hellenist whose learning and
originality of mind are only equalled by her vivid generosity towards
her fellow-workers.
The second may also be said to have grown out of Miss Harrison's
writings. She has by now made the title of 'Olympian' almost a term of
reproach, and thrown down so many a scornful challenge to the canonical
gods of Greece, that I have ventured on this attempt to explain their
historical origin and plead for their religious value. When the essay
was already written I read Mr. Chadwick's impressive book on _The Heroic
Age_ (Cambridge, 1912), and was delighted to find in an author whose
standpoint and equipment are so different from mine so much that
confirmed or clarified my own view.
The title of the third essay I owe to a conversation with Professor J.
B. Bury. We were discussing the change that took place in Greek thought
between, say, Plato and the Neo-Platonists, or even between Aristotle
and Posidonius, and which is seen at its highest power in the Gnostics.
I had been calling it a rise of asceticism, or mysticism, or religious
passion, or the like, when my friend corrected me. 'It is not a rise; it
is a fall or failure of something, a sort of failure of nerve.'--We are
treading here upon somewhat firmer ground than in the first two essays.
The field for mere conjecture is less: we are supported more
continuously by explicit documents. Yet the subject is a very difficult
one owing to the scattered and chaotic nature of the sources, and even
where we get away from fragments and reconstructions and reach definite
treatises with or without authors' names, I cannot pretend to feel
anything like the same clearness about the true meaning of a passage in
Philo or the Corpus Hermeticum that one normally feels in a writer of
the classical period. Consequently in this essay I think I have hugged
my modern authorities rather close, and seldom expressed an opinion for
which I could not find some fairly authoritative backing, my debt being
particularly great to Reitzenstein, Bousset, and the brilliant
_Hellenistisch-römische Kultur_ of P. Wendland. I must also thank my
old pupil, Mr. Edwyn Bevan, who was kind enough to read this book in
proof, for some valuable criticisms. The subject is one of such
extraordinary interest that I offer no apology for calling further
attention to it.
A word or two about the last brief revival of the ancient religion under
'Julian the Apostate' forms the natural close to this series of studies.
But here our material, both historical and literary, is so abundant that
I have followed a different method. After a short historical
introduction I have translated in full a very curious and little-known
ancient text, which may be said to constitute something like an
authoritative Pagan creed. Some readers may regret that I do not give
the Greek as well as the English. I am reluctant, however, to publish a
text which I have not examined in the MSS., and I feel also that, while
an edition of Sallustius is rather urgently needed, it ought to be an
edition with a full commentary.[xvi:1]
I was first led to these studies by the wish to fill up certain puzzling
blanks of ignorance in my own mind, and doubtless the little book bears
marks of this origin. It aims largely at the filling of interstices. It
avoids the great illuminated places, and gives its mind to the stretches
of intervening twilight. It deals little with the harvest of flowers or
fruit, but watches the inconspicuous seasons when the soil is beginning
to stir, the seeds are falling or ripening.
G. M.
FOOTNOTES:
[xvi:1] Professor Nock's edition (Cambridge 1926) has admirably filled
this gap.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. SATURNIA REGNA 1
II. THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 39
III. THE GREAT SCHOOLS 79
IV. THE FAILURE OF NERVE 123
V. THE LAST PROTEST 173
APPENDIX: TRANSLATION OF THE TREATISE OF 200
SALLUSTIUS, περὶ Θεῶν καὶ Κόσμου
INDEX 227
Ο πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ὲκ γῆς, χοῖκός· ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος ὁ
Κύριος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ.
"The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the
Lord from heaven."
I
SATURNIA REGNA
Many persons who are quite prepared to admit the importance to the world
of Greek poetry, Greek art, and Greek philosophy, may still feel it
rather a paradox to be told that Greek religion specially repays our
study at the present day. Greek religion, associated with a romantic,
trivial, and not very edifying mythology, has generally seemed one of
the weakest spots in the armour of those giants of the old world. Yet I
will venture to make for Greek religion almost as great a claim as for
the thought and the literature, not only because the whole mass of it is
shot through by those strange lights of feeling and imagination, and the
details of it constantly wrought into beauty by that instinctive sense
of artistic form, which we specially associate with Classical Greece,
but also for two definite historical reasons. In the first place, the
student of that dark and fascinating department of the human mind which
we may call Religious Origins, will find in Greece an extraordinary mass
of material belonging to a very early date. For detail and variety the
primitive Greek evidence has no equal. And, secondly, in this department
as in others, ancient Greece has the triumphant if tragic distinction of
beginning at the very bottom and struggling, however precariously, to
the very summits. There is hardly any horror of primitive superstition
of which we cannot find some distant traces in our Greek record. There
is hardly any height of spiritual thought attained in the world that has
not its archetype or its echo in the stretch of Greek literature that
lies between Thales and Plotinus, embracing much of the
'Wisdom-Teachers' and of St. Paul.
The progress of Greek religion falls naturally into three stages, all of
them historically important. First there is the primitive _Euetheia_ or
Age of Ignorance, before Zeus came to trouble men's minds, a stage to
which our anthropologists and explorers have found parallels in every
part of the world. Dr. Preuss applies to it the charming word
'Urdummheit', or 'Primal Stupidity'. In some ways characteristically
Greek, in others it is so typical of similar stages of thought elsewhere
that one is tempted to regard it as the normal beginning of all
religion, or almost as the normal raw material out of which religion is
made. There is certainly some repulsiveness, but I confess that to me
there is also an element of fascination in the study of these 'Beastly
Devices of the Heathen', at any rate as they appear in early Greece,
where each single 'beastly device' as it passes is somehow touched with
beauty and transformed by some spirit of upward striving.
Secondly there is the Olympian or classical stage, a stage in which, for
good or ill, blunderingly or successfully, this primitive vagueness was
reduced to a kind of order. This is the stage of the great Olympian
gods, who dominated art and poetry, ruled the imagination of Rome, and
extended a kind of romantic dominion even over the Middle Ages. It is
the stage that we learn, or mis-learn, from the statues and the
handbooks of mythology. Critics have said that this Olympian stage has
value only as art and not as religion. That is just one of the points
into which we shall inquire.
Thirdly, there is the Hellenistic period, reaching roughly from Plato to
St. Paul and the earlier Gnostics. The first edition of this book
treated the whole period as one, but I have now divided it by writing a
new chapter on the Movements of the Fourth Century B. C., and making
that my third stage. This was the time when the Greek mind, still in its
full creative vigour, made its first response to the twofold failure of
the world in which it had put its faith, the open bankruptcy of the
Olympian religion and the collapse of the city-state. Both had failed,
and each tried vainly to supply the place of the other. Greece responded
by the creation of two great permanent types of philosophy which have
influenced human ethics ever since, the Cynic and Stoic schools on the
one hand, and the Epicurean on the other. These schools belong properly,
I think, to the history of religion. The successors of Aristotle
produced rather a school of progressive science, those of Plato a school
of refined scepticism. The religious side of Plato's thought was not
revealed in its full power till the time of Plotinus in the third
century A. D.; that of Aristotle, one might say without undue paradox,
not till its exposition by Aquinas in the thirteenth.
The old Third Stage, therefore, becomes now a Fourth, comprising the
later and more popular movements of the Hellenistic Age, a period based
on the consciousness of manifold failure, and consequently touched both
with morbidity and with that spiritual exaltation which is so often the
companion of morbidity. It not only had behind it the failure of the
Olympian theology and of the free city-state, now crushed by
semi-barbarous military monarchies; it lived through the gradual
realization of two other failures--the failure of human government, even
when backed by the power of Rome or the wealth of Egypt, to achieve a
good life for man; and lastly the failure of the great propaganda of
Hellenism, in which the long-drawn effort of Greece to educate a corrupt
and barbaric world seemed only to lead to the corruption or
barbarization of the very ideals which it sought to spread. This sense
of failure, this progressive loss of hope in the world, in sober
calculation, and in organized human effort, threw the later Greek back
upon his own soul, upon the pursuit of personal holiness, upon emotions,
mysteries and revelations, upon the comparative neglect of this
transitory and imperfect world for the sake of some dream-world far off,
which shall subsist without sin or corruption, the same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever. These four are the really significant and
formative periods of Greek religious thought; but we may well cast our
eyes also on a fifth stage, not historically influential perhaps, but at
least romantic and interesting and worthy of considerable respect, when
the old religion in the time of Julian roused itself for a last
spiritual protest against the all-conquering 'atheism' of the
Christians. I omit Plotinus, as in earlier chapters I have omitted Plato
and Aristotle, and for the same reason. As a rule in the writings of
Julian's circle and still more in the remains of popular belief, the
tendencies of our fourth stage are accentuated by an increased demand
for definite dogma and a still deeper consciousness of worldly defeat.
I shall not start with any definition of religion. Religion, like
poetry and most other living things, cannot be defined. But one may
perhaps give some description of it, or at least some characteristic
marks. In the first place, religion essentially deals with the uncharted
region of human experience. A large part of human life has been
thoroughly surveyed and explored; we understand the causes at work; and
we are not bewildered by the problems. That is the domain of positive
knowledge. But all round us on every side there is an uncharted region,
just fragments of the fringe of it explored, and those imperfectly; it
is with this that religion deals. And secondly we may note that religion
deals with its own province not tentatively, by the normal methods of
patient intellectual research, but directly, and by methods of emotion
or sub-conscious apprehension. Agriculture, for instance, used to be
entirely a question of religion; now it is almost entirely a question of
science. In antiquity, if a field was barren, the owner of it would
probably assume that the barrenness was due to 'pollution', or offence
somewhere. He would run through all his own possible offences, or at any
rate those of his neighbours and ancestors, and when he eventually
decided the cause of the trouble, the steps that he would take would all
be of a kind calculated not to affect the chemical constitution of the
soil, but to satisfy his own emotions of guilt and terror, or the
imaginary emotions of the imaginary being he had offended. A modern man
in the same predicament would probably not think of religion at all, at
any rate in the earlier stages; he would say it was a case for deeper
ploughing or for basic slag. Later on, if disaster followed disaster
till he began to feel himself a marked man, even the average modern
would, I think, begin instinctively to reflect upon his sins. A third
characteristic flows from the first. The uncharted region surrounds us
on every side and is apparently infinite; consequently, when once the
things of the uncharted region are admitted as factors in our ordinary
conduct of life they are apt to be infinite factors, overruling and
swamping all others. The thing that religion forbids is a thing never to
be done; not all the inducements that this life can offer weigh at all
in the balance. Indeed there is no balance. The man who makes terms with
his conscience is essentially non-religious; the religious man knows
that it will profit him nothing if he gain all this finite world and
lose his stake in the infinite and eternal.[6:1]
Am I going to draw no distinction then between religion and mere
superstition? Not at present. Later on we may perhaps see some way to
it. Superstition is the name given to a low or bad form of religion, to
the kind of religion we disapprove. The line of division, if we made
one, would be only an arbitrary bar thrust across a highly complex and
continuous process.
Does this amount to an implication that all the religions that have
existed in the world are false? Not so. It is obvious indeed that most,
if analysed into intellectual beliefs, are false; and I suppose that a
thoroughly orthodox member of any one of the million religious bodies
that exist in the world must be clear in his mind that the other million
minus one are wrong, if not wickedly wrong. That, I think, we must be
clear about. Yet the fact remains that man must have some relation
towards the uncharted, the mysterious, tracts of life which surround him
on every side. And for my own part I am content to say that his method
must be to a large extent very much what St. Paul calls πίστις or
faith: that is, some attitude not of the conscious intellect but of the
whole being, using all its powers of sensitiveness, all its feeblest and
most inarticulate feelers and tentacles, in the effort somehow to touch
by these that which cannot be grasped by the definite senses or analysed
by the conscious reason. What we gain thus is an insecure but a precious
possession. We gain no dogma, at least no safe dogma, but we gain much
more. We gain something hard to define, which lies at the heart not only
of religion, but of art and poetry and all the higher strivings of human
emotion. I believe that at times we actually gain practical guidance in
some questions where experience and argument fail.[8:1] That is a great
work left for religion, but we must always remember two things about it:
first, that the liability to error is enormous, indeed almost infinite;
and second, that the results of confident error are very terrible.
Probably throughout history the worst things ever done in the world on a
large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion, and
I do not think that has entirely ceased to be true at the present day.
All the Middle Ages held the strange and, to our judgement, the
obviously insane belief that the normal result of religious error was
eternal punishment. And yet by the crimes to which that false belief led
them they almost proved the truth of something very like it. The record
of early Christian and medieval persecutions which were the direct
result of that one confident religious error comes curiously near to
one's conception of the wickedness of the damned.
* * * * *
To turn to our immediate subject, I wish to put forward here what is
still a rather new and unauthorized view of the development of Greek
religion; readers will forgive me if, in treating so vast a subject, I
draw my outline very broadly, leaving out many qualifications, and
quoting only a fragment of the evidence.
The things that have misled us moderns in our efforts towards
understanding the primitive stage in Greek religion have been first the
widespread and almost ineradicable error of treating Homer as primitive,
and more generally our unconscious insistence on starting with the
notion of 'Gods'. Mr. Hartland, in his address as president of one of
the sections of the International Congress of Religions at Oxford,[9:1]
dwelt on the significant fact about savage religions that wherever the
word 'God' is used our trustiest witnesses tend to contradict one
another. Among the best observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance,
some hold that they have no conception of God, others that they are
constantly thinking about God. The truth is that this idea of a god far
away in the sky--I do not say merely a First Cause who is 'without body
parts or passions', but almost any being that we should naturally call a
'god'--is an idea not easy for primitive man to grasp. It is a subtle
and rarefied idea, saturated with ages of philosophy and speculation.
And we must always remember that one of the chief religions of the
world, Buddhism, has risen to great moral and intellectual heights
without using the conception of God at all; in his stead it has Dharma,
the Eternal Law.[10:1]
Apart from some few philosophers, both Christian and Moslem, the gods of
the ordinary man have as a rule been as a matter of course
anthropomorphic. Men did not take the trouble to try to conceive them
otherwise. In many cases they have had the actual bodily shape of man;
in almost all they have possessed--of course in their highest
development--his mind and reason and his mental attributes. It causes
most of us even now something of a shock to be told by a medieval Arab
philosopher that to call God benevolent or righteous or to predicate of
him any other human quality is just as Pagan and degraded as to say that
he has a beard.[10:2] Now the Greek gods seem at first sight quite
particularly solid and anthropomorphic. The statues and vases speak
clearly, and they are mostly borne out by the literature. Of course we
must discount the kind of evidence that misled Winckelmann, the mere
Roman and Alexandrian art and mythology; but even if we go back to the
fifth century B. C. we shall find the ruling conceptions far nobler
indeed, but still anthropomorphic. We find firmly established the
Olympian patriarchal family, Zeus the Father of gods and men, his wife
Hera, his son Apollo, his daughter Athena, his brothers Poseidon and
Hades, and the rest. We probably think of each figure more or less as
like a statue, a habit of mind obviously wrong and indeed absurd, as if
one thought of 'Labour' and 'Grief' as statues because Rodin or St.
Gaudens has so represented them. And yet it was a habit into which the
late Greeks themselves sometimes fell;[11:1] their arts of sculpture and
painting as applied to religion had been so dangerously successful: they
sharpened and made vivid an anthropomorphism which in its origin had
been mostly the result of normal human laziness. The process of making
winds and rivers into anthropomorphic gods is, for the most part, not
the result of using the imagination with special vigour. It is the
result of not doing so. The wind is obviously alive; any fool can see
that. Being alive, it blows; how? why, naturally; just as you and I
blow. It knocks things down, it shouts and dances, it whispers and
talks. And, unless we are going to make a great effort of the
imagination and try to realize, like a scientific man, just what really
happens, we naturally assume that it does these things in the normal
way, in the only way we know. Even when you worship a beast or a stone,
you practically anthropomorphize it. It happens indeed to have a
perfectly clear shape, so you accept that. But it talks, acts, and
fights just like a man--as you can see from the _Australian Folk Tales_
published by Mrs. Langloh Parker--because you do not take the trouble to
think out any other way of behaving. This kind of anthropomorphism--or
as Mr. Gladstone used to call it, 'anthropophuism'--'humanity of
_nature_'--is primitive and inevitable: the sharp-cut statue type of god
is different, and is due in Greece directly to the work of the artists.
We must get back behind these gods of the artist's workshop and the
romance-maker's imagination, and see if the religious thinkers of the
great period use, or imply, the same highly human conceptions. We shall
find Parmenides telling us that God coincides with the universe, which
is a sphere and immovable;[12:1] Heraclitus, that God is 'day night,
summer winter, war peace, satiety hunger'. Xenophanes, that God is
all-seeing, all-hearing, and all mind;[12:2] and as for his supposed
human shape, why, if bulls and lions were to speak about God they would
doubtless tell us that he was a bull or a lion.[12:3] We must notice the
instinctive language of the poets, using the word θεός in many subtle
senses for which our word 'God' is too stiff, too personal, and too
anthropomorphic. Τό εὐτυχεῖν, 'the fact of success', is 'a god and more
than a god'; τὸ γιγνώσκειν φίλους, 'the thrill of recognizing a friend'
after long absence, is a 'god'; wine is a 'god' whose body is poured out
in libation to gods; and in the unwritten law of the human conscience 'a
great god liveth and groweth not old'.[12:4] You will say that is mere
poetry or philosophy: it represents a particular theory or a particular
metaphor. I think not. Language of this sort is used widely and without
any explanation or apology. It was evidently understood and felt to be
natural by the audience. If it is metaphorical, all metaphors have grown
from the soil of current thought and normal experience. And without
going into the point at length I think we may safely conclude that the
soil from which such language as this grew was not any system of
clear-cut personal anthropomorphic theology. No doubt any of these
poets, if he had to make a picture of one of these utterly formless
Gods, would have given him a human form. That was the recognized symbol,
as a veiled woman is St. Gaudens's symbol for 'Grief'.
* * * * *
But we have other evidence too which shows abundantly that these
Olympian gods are not primary, but are imposed upon a background
strangely unlike themselves. For a long time their luminous figures
dazzled our eyes; we were not able to see the half-lit regions behind
them, the dark primeval tangle of desires and fears and dreams from
which they drew their vitality. The surest test to apply in this
question is the evidence of actual cult. Miss Harrison has here shown
us the right method, and following her we will begin with the three
great festivals of Athens, the Diasia, the Thesmophoria, and the
Anthesteria.[14:1]
The Diasia was said to be the chief festival of Zeus, the central figure
of the Olympians, though our authorities generally add an epithet to
him, and call him Zeus Meilichios, Zeus of Placation. A god with an
'epithet' is always suspicious, like a human being with an 'alias'. Miss
Harrison's examination (_Prolegomena_, pp. 28 ff.) shows that in the
rites Zeus has no place at all. Meilichios from the beginning has a
fairly secure one. On some of the reliefs Meilichios appears not as a
god, but as an enormous bearded snake, a well-known representation of
underworld powers or dead ancestors. Sometimes the great snake is alone;
sometimes he rises gigantic above the small human worshippers
approaching him. And then, in certain reliefs, his old barbaric presence
vanishes, and we have instead a benevolent and human father of gods and
men, trying, as Miss Harrison somewhere expresses it, to look as if he
had been there all the time.
There was a sacrifice at the Diasia, but it was not a sacrifice given to
Zeus. To Zeus and all the heavenly gods men gave sacrifice in the form
of a feast, in which the god had his portion and the worshippers theirs.
The two parties cemented their friendship and feasted happily together.
But the sacrifice at the Diasia was a holocaust:[14:2] every shred of
the victim was burnt to ashes, that no man might partake of it. We know
quite well the meaning of that form of sacrifice: it is a sacrifice to
placate or appease the powers below, the Chthonioi, the dead and the
lords of death. It was performed, as our authorities tell us, μετὰ
στυγνότητος, with shuddering or repulsion.[15:1]
The Diasia was a ritual of placation, that is, of casting away various
elements of pollution or danger and appeasing the unknown wraths of the
surrounding darkness. The nearest approach to a god contained in this
festival is Meilichios, and Meilichios, as we shall see later, belongs
to a particular class of shadowy beings who are built up out of ritual
services. His name means '_He of appeasement_', and he is nothing else.
He is merely the personified shadow or dream generated by the emotion of
the ritual--very much, to take a familiar instance, as Father Christmas
is a 'projection' of our Christmas customs.
* * * * *
The Thesmophoria formed the great festival of Demeter and her daughter
Korê, though here again Demeter appears with a clinging epithet,
Thesmophoros. We know pretty clearly the whole course of the ritual:
there is the carrying by women of certain magic charms, fir-cones and
snakes and unnameable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there
is a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth,
and their remains afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the
fields. There is more magic ritual, more carrying of sacred objects, a
fast followed by a rejoicing, a disappearance of life below the earth,
and a rising again of life above it; but it is hard to find definite
traces of any personal goddess. The Olympian Demeter and Persephone
dwindle away as we look closer, and we are left with the shadow
Thesmophoros, '_She who carries Thesmoi_',[16:1] not a substantive
personal goddess, but merely a personification of the ritual itself: an
imaginary Charm-bearer generated by so much charm-bearing, just as
Meilichios in the Diasia was generated from the ritual of appeasement.
Now the Diasia were dominated by a sacred snake. Is there any similar
divine animal in the Thesmophoria? Alas, yes. Both here, and still more
markedly in the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, we
regularly find the most lovely of all goddesses, Demeter and Persephone,
habitually--I will not say represented by, but dangerously associated
with, a sacred Sow. A Pig is the one animal in Greek religion that
actually had sacrifice made to it.[16:2]
* * * * *
The third feast, the Anthesteria, belongs in classical times to the
Olympian Dionysus, and is said to be the oldest of his feasts. On the
surface there is a touch of the wine-god, and he is given due official
prominence; but as soon as we penetrate anywhere near the heart of the
festival, Dionysus and his brother gods are quite forgotten, and all
that remains is a great ritual for appeasing the dead. All the days of
the Feast were _nefasti_, of ill omen; the first day especially was ἐς
τὸ πᾶν ἀποφράς. On it the Wine Jars which were also Seed and Funeral
Jars were opened and the spirits of the Dead let loose in the
world.[17:1] Nameless and innumerable, the ghosts are summoned out of
their tombs, and are duly feasted, each man summoning his own ghosts to
his own house, and carefully abstaining from any act that would affect
his neighbours. And then, when they are properly appeased and made
gentle, they are swept back again out of this world to the place where
they properly belong, and the streets and houses cleaned from the
presence of death. There is one central stage indeed in which Dionysus
does seem to appear. And he appears in a very significant way, to
conduct a Sacred Marriage. For, why do you suppose the dead are summoned
at all? What use to the tribe is the presence of all these dead
ancestors? They have come, I suspect, to be born again, to begin a new
life at the great Spring festival. For the new births of the tribe, the
new crops, the new kids, the new human beings, are of course really only
the old ones returned to earth.[17:2] The important thing is to get them
properly placated and purified, free from the contagion of ancient sin
or underworld anger. For nothing is so dangerous as the presence of what
I may call raw ghosts. The Anthesteria contained, like other feasts of
the kind, a ἱερὸς γάμος, or Holy Marriage, between the wife of the
Basileus or Sacred King, and the imaginary god.[18:1] Whatever reality
there ever was in the ceremony has apparently by classical times faded
away. But the place where the god received his bride is curious. It was
called the Boukolion, or Bull's Shed. It was not originally the home of
an anthropomorphic god, but of a divine animal.
* * * * *
Thus in each of these great festivals we find that the Olympian gods
vanish away, and we are left with three things only: first, with an
atmosphere of religious dread; second, with a whole sequence of magical
ceremonies which, in two at least of the three cases,[18:2] produce a
kind of strange personal emanation of themselves, the Appeasements
producing Meilichios, the Charm-bearings Thesmophoros; and thirdly, with
a divine or sacred animal. In the Diasia we find the old superhuman
snake, who reappears so ubiquitously throughout Greece, the regular
symbol of the underworld powers, especially the hero or dead ancestor.
Why the snake was so chosen we can only surmise. He obviously lived
underground: his home was among the Chthonioi, the Earth-People. Also,
says the Scholiast to Aristophanes (_Plut._ 533), he was a type of new
birth because he throws off his old skin and renews himself. And if that
in itself is not enough to show his supernatural power, what normal
earthly being could send his enemies to death by one little pin-prick,
as some snakes can?
In the Thesmophoria we found sacred swine, and the reason given by the
ancients is no doubt the right one. The sow is sacred because of its
fertility, and possibly as practical people we should add, because of
its cheapness. Swine are always prominent in Greek agricultural rites.
And the bull? Well, we modern town-dwellers have almost forgotten what a
real bull is like. For so many centuries we have tamed him and penned
him in, and utterly deposed him from his place as lord of the forest.
The bull was the chief of magic or sacred animals in Greece, chief
because of his enormous strength, his size, his rage, in fine, as
anthropologists call it, his _mana_; that primitive word which comprises
force, vitality, prestige, holiness, and power of magic, and which may
belong equally to a lion, a chief, a medicine-man, or a battle-axe.
Now in the art and the handbooks these sacred animals have all been
adopted into the Olympian system. They appear regularly as the
'attributes' of particular gods. Zeus is merely accompanied by a snake,
an eagle, a bull, or at worst assumes for his private purposes the forms
of those animals. The cow and the cuckoo are sacred to Hera; the owl and
the snake to Athena; the dolphin, the crow, the lizard, the bull, to
Apollo. Dionysus, always like a wilder and less middle-aged Zeus,
appears freely as a snake, bull, he-goat, and lion. Allowing for some
isolated exceptions, the safest rule in all these cases is that the
attribute is original and the god is added.[20:1] It comes out very
clearly in the case of the snake and the bull. The tremendous _mana_ of
the wild bull indeed occupies almost half the stage of pre-Olympian
ritual. The religion unearthed by Dr. Evans in Crete is permeated by the
bull of Minos. The heads and horns are in almost every sacred room and
on every altar. The great religious scene depicted on the sarcophagus of
Hagia Triada[20:2] centres in the holy blood that flows from the neck of
a captive and dying bull. Down into classical times bull's blood was a
sacred thing which it was dangerous to touch and death to taste: to
drink a cup of it was the most heroic form of suicide.[20:3] The
sacrificial bull at Delphi was called _Hosiôtêr_: he was not merely
_hosios_, holy; he was _Hosiôtêr_, the Sanctifier, He who maketh Holy.
It was by contact with him that holiness was spread to others. On a coin
and a vase, cited by Miss Harrison,[21:1] we have a bull entering a holy
cave and a bull standing in a shrine. We have holy pillars whose
holiness consists in the fact that they have been touched with the blood
of a bull. We have a long record of a bull-ritual at Magnesia,[21:2] in
which Zeus, though he makes a kind of external claim to be lord of the
feast, dare not claim that the bull is sacrificed to him. Zeus has a ram
to himself and stands apart, showing but a weak and shadowy figure
beside the original Holy One. We have immense masses of evidence about
the religion of Mithras, at one time the most serious rival of
Christianity, which sought its hope and its salvation in the blood of a
divine bull.
Now what is the origin of this conception of the sacred animal? It was
first discovered and explained with almost prophetic insight by Dr.
Robertson Smith.[21:3] The origin is what he calls a sacramental feast:
you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the divine animal in
order--here I diverge from Robertson Smith's language--to get into you
his _mana_, his vital power. The classical instance is the sacramental
eating of a camel by an Arab tribe, recorded in the works of St.
Nilus.[21:4] The camel was devoured on a particular day at the rising of
the morning star. He was cut to pieces alive, and every fragment of him
had to be consumed before the sun rose. If the life had once gone out
of the flesh and blood the sacrifice would have been spoilt; it was the
spirit, the vitality, of the camel that his tribesmen wanted. The only
serious error that later students have found in Robertson Smith's
statement is that he spoke too definitely of the sacrifice as affording
communion with the tribal god. There was no god there, only the raw
material out of which gods are made. You devoured the holy animal to get
its _mana_, its swiftness, its strength, its great endurance, just as
the savage now will eat his enemy's brain or heart or hands to get some
particular quality residing there. The imagination of the pre-Hellenic
tribes was evidently dominated above all things by the bull, though
there were other sacramental feasts too, combined with sundry horrible
rendings and drinkings of raw blood. It is strange to think that even
small things like kids and fawns and hares should have struck primitive
man as having some uncanny vitality which he longed for, or at least
some uncanny power over the weather or the crops. Yet to him it no doubt
appeared obvious. Frogs, for instance, could always bring rain by
croaking for it, and who can limit the powers and the knowledge of
birds?[22:1]