with, how did he originate? We can understand--at least after a course
of anthropology--this desire of primitive man to acquire for himself the
superhuman forces of the bull; but how does he make the transition from
the real animal to the imaginary human god? First let us remember the
innate tendency of primitive man everywhere, and not especially in
Greece, to imagine a personal cause, like himself in all points not
otherwise specified, for every striking phenomenon. If the wind blows it
is because some being more or less human, though of course superhuman,
is blowing with his cheeks. If a tree is struck by lightning it is
because some one has thrown his battle-axe at it. In some Australian
tribes there is no belief in natural death. If a man dies it is because
'bad man kill that fellow'. St. Paul, we may remember, passionately
summoned the heathen to refrain from worshipping τὴν κτίσιν, the
creation, and go back to τὸν κτίσαντα, the creator, human and
masculine. It was as a rule a road that they were only too ready to
travel.[23:1]
But this tendency was helped by a second factor. Research has shown us
the existence in early Mediterranean religion of a peculiar transitional
step, a man wearing the head or skin of a holy beast. The Egyptian gods
are depicted as men with beasts' heads: that is, the best authorities
tell us, their shapes are derived from the kings and priests who on
great occasions of sacrifice covered their heads with a
beast-mask.[23:2] Minos, with his projection the Minotaur, was a
bull-god and wore a bull-mask. From early Island gems, from a fresco at
Mycenae, from Assyrian reliefs, Mr. A. B. Cook has collected many
examples of this mixed figure--a man wearing the _protomê_, or mask and
mane, of a beast. Sometimes we can actually see him offering libations.
Sometimes the worshipper has become so closely identified with his
divine beast that he is represented not as a mere man wearing the
_protomê_ of a lion or bull, but actually as a lion or bull wearing the
_protomê_ of another.[24:1] Hera, βοῶπις, with a cow's head; Athena,
γλαυκῶπις, with an owl's head, or bearing on her breast the head of the
Gorgon; Heracles clad in a lion's skin and covering his brow δεινῷ
χάσματι θηρός, 'with the awful spread jaws of the wild beast', belong to
the same class. So does the Dadouchos at Eleusis and other initiators
who let candidates for purification set one foot--one only and that the
left--on the skin of a sacrificial ram, and called the skin Διὸς κῶας,
the fleece not of a ram, but of Zeus.[24:2]
The _mana_ of the slain beast is in the hide and head and blood and fur,
and the man who wants to be in thorough contact with the divinity gets
inside the skin and wraps himself deep in it. He begins by being a man
wearing a lion's skin: he ends, as we have seen, by feeling himself to
be a lion wearing a lion's skin. And who is this man? He may on
particular occasions be only a candidate for purification or initiation.
But _par excellence_ he who has the right is the priest, the
medicine-man, the divine king. If an old suggestion of my own is right,
he is the original θεός or θεσός, the incarnate medicine or spell or
magic power.[24:3] He at first, I suspect, is the only θεός or 'God'
that his society knows. We commonly speak of ancient kings being
'deified'; we regard the process as due to an outburst of superstition
or insane flattery. And so no doubt it sometimes was, especially in
later times--when man and god were felt as two utterly distinct things.
But 'deification' is an unintelligent and misleading word. What we call
'deification' is only the survival of this undifferentiated human θεός,
with his _mana_, his κράτος and βία, his control of the weather, the
rain and the thunder, the spring crops and the autumn floods; his
knowledge of what was lawful and what was not, and his innate power to
curse or to 'make dead'. Recent researches have shown us in abundance
the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning and
rain.[25:1] We have long known the king as possessor of Dike and Themis,
of justice and tribal custom; we have known his effect on the fertility
of the fields and the tribes, and the terrible results of a king's sin
or a king's sickness.[25:2]
What is the subsequent history of this medicine-chief or θεός? He is
differentiated, as it were: the visible part of him becomes merely
human; the supposed supernatural part grows into what we should call a
God. The process is simple. Any particular medicine-man is bound to
have his failures. As Dr. Frazer gently reminds us, every single
pretension which he puts forth on every day of his life is a lie, and
liable sooner or later to be found out. Doubtless men are tender to
their own delusions. They do not at once condemn the medicine-chief as a
fraudulent institution, but they tend gradually to say that he is not
the real all-powerful θεός. He is only his representative. The real
θεός, tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in clouds
perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain. If the mountain is
once climbed the god will move to the upper sky. The medicine-chief
meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He has some connexion
with the great god more intimate than that of other men; at worst he
possesses the god's sacred instruments, his ἱερά or ὄργια; he knows the
rules for approaching him and making prayers to him.
There is therefore a path open from the divine beast to the
anthropomorphic god. From beings like Thesmophoros and Meilichios the
road is of course much easier. They are already more than half
anthropomorphic; they only lack the concreteness, the lucid shape and
the detailed personal history of the Olympians. In this connexion we
must not forget the power of hallucination, still fairly strong, as the
history of religious revivals in America will bear witness,[26:1] but
far stronger, of course, among the impressionable hordes of early men.
'The god', says M. Doutté in his profound study of Algerian magic,
'c'est le désir collectif personnifié', the collective desire projected,
as it were, or personified.[27:1] Think of the gods who have appeared
in great crises of battle, created sometimes by the desperate desire of
men who have for years prayed to them, and who are now at the last
extremity for lack of their aid, sometimes by the confused and excited
remembrances of the survivors after the victory. The gods who led the
Roman charge at Lake Regillus,[27:2] the gigantic figures that were seen
fighting before the Greeks at Marathon,[27:3] even the celestial signs
that promised Constantine victory for the cross:[27:4]--these are the
effects of great emotion: we can all understand them. But even in daily
life primitive men seem to have dealt more freely than we generally do
with apparitions and voices and daemons of every kind. One of the most
remarkable and noteworthy sources for this kind of hallucinatory god in
early societies is a social custom that we have almost forgotten, the
religious Dance. When the initiated young men of Crete or elsewhere
danced at night over the mountains in the Oreibasia or Mountain Walk
they not only did things that seemed beyond their ordinary workaday
strength; they also felt themselves led on and on by some power which
guided and sustained them. This daemon has no necessary name: a man may
be named after him 'Oreibasius', 'Belonging to the Mountain Dancer',
just as others may be named 'Apollonius' or 'Dionysius'. The god is only
the spirit of the Mountain Dance, Oreibates, though of course he is
absorbed at different times in various Olympians. There is one god
called Aphiktor, the Suppliant, He who prays for mercy. He is just the
projection, as M. Doutté would say, of the intense emotion of one of
those strange processions well known in the ancient world, bands of
despairing men or women who have thrown away all means of self-defence
and join together at some holy place in one passionate prayer for pity.
The highest of all gods, Zeus, was the special patron of the suppliant;
and it is strange and instructive to find that Zeus the all-powerful
is actually identified with this Aphiktor: Ζεὺς μὲν Ἀφίκτωρ ἐπίδοι
προφρόνως.[28:1] The assembled prayer, the united cry that rises from
the oppressed of the world, is itself grown to be a god, and the
greatest god. A similar projection arose from the dance of the _Kouroi_,
or initiate youths, in the dithyramb--the magic dance which was to
celebrate, or more properly, to hasten and strengthen, the coming on of
spring. That dance projected the Megistos Kouros, the greatest of
youths, who is the incarnation of spring or the return of life, and lies
at the back of so many of the most gracious shapes of the classical
pantheon. The Kouros appears as Dionysus, as Apollo, as Hermes, as Ares:
in our clearest and most detailed piece of evidence he actually appears
with the characteristic history and attributes of Zeus.[28:2]
This spirit of the dance, who leads it or personifies its emotion,
stands more clearly perhaps than any other daemon half-way between
earth and heaven. A number of difficult passages in Euripides' _Bacchae_
and other Dionysiac literature find their explanations when we realize
how the god is in part merely identified with the inspired chief dancer,
in part he is the intangible projected incarnation of the emotion of the
dance.
* * * * *
'The collective desire personified': on what does the collective desire,
or collective dread, of the primitive community chiefly concentrate? On
two things, the food-supply and the tribe-supply, the desire not to die
of famine and not to be harried or conquered by the neighbouring tribe.
The fertility of the earth and the fertility of the tribe, these two are
felt in early religion as one.[29:1] The earth is a mother: the human
mother is an ἄρουρα, or ploughed field. This earth-mother is the
characteristic and central feature of the early Aegean religions. The
introduction of agriculture made her a mother of fruits and corn, and it
is in that form that we best know her. But in earlier days she had been
a mother of the spontaneous growth of the soil, of wild beasts and trees
and all the life of the mountain.[29:2] In early Crete she stands with
lions erect on either side of her or with snakes held in her hands and
coiled about her body. And as the earth is mother when the harvest
comes, so in spring she is maiden or Korê, but a maiden fated each year
to be wedded and made fruitful; and earlier still there has been the
terrible time when fields are bare and lifeless. The Korê has been
snatched away underground, among the dead peoples, and men must wait
expectant till the first buds begin to show and they call her to rise
again with the flowers. Meantime earth as she brings forth vegetation in
spring is Kourotrophos, rearer of Kouroi, or the young men of the tribe.
The nymphs and rivers are all Kourotrophoi. The Moon is Kourotrophos.
She quickens the young of the tribe in their mother's womb; at one
terrible hour especially she is 'a lion to women' who have offended
against her holiness. She also marks the seasons of sowing and
ploughing, and the due time for the ripening of crops. When men learn to
calculate in longer units, the Sun appears: they turn to the Sun for
their calendar, and at all times of course the Sun has been a power in
agriculture. He is not called Kourotrophos, but the Young Sun returning
after winter is himself a Kouros,[30:1] and all the Kouroi have some
touch of the Sun in them. The Cretan Spring-song of the Kouretes prays
for νέοι πολῖται, young citizens, quite simply among the other gifts of
the spring.[30:2]
This is best shown by the rites of tribal initiation, which seem
normally to have formed part of the spring Drômena or sacred
performances. The Kouroi, as we have said, are the initiated young men.
They pass through their initiation; they become no longer παῖδες, boys,
but ἄνδρες, men. The actual name Kouros is possibly connected with
κείρειν, to shave,[31:1] and may mean that after this ceremony they
first cut their long hair. Till then the κοῦρος is ἀκερσεκόμης--with
hair unshorn. They have now open to them the two roads that belong to
ἄνδρες alone: they have the work of begetting children for the tribe,
and the work of killing the tribe's enemies in battle.
The classification of people according to their age is apt to be sharp
and vivid in primitive communities. We, for example, think of an old man
as a kind of man, and an old woman as a kind of woman; but in primitive
peoples as soon as a man and woman cease to be able to perform his and
her due tribal functions they cease to be men and women, ἄνδρες and
γυναῖκες: the ex-man becomes a γέρων; the ex-woman a γραῦς.[31:2] We
distinguish between 'boy' and 'man', between 'girl' and 'woman'; but
apart from the various words for baby, Attic Greek would have four sharp
divisions, παῖς, ἔφηβος, ἀνήρ, γέρων.[31:3] In Sparta the divisions are
still sharper and more numerous, centring in the great initiation
ceremonies of the Iranes, or full-grown youths, to the goddess called
Orthia or Bortheia.[32:1] These initiation ceremonies are called
Teletai, 'completions': they mark the great 'rite of transition' from
the immature, charming, but half useless thing which we call boy or
girl, to the τέλειος ἀνήρ, the full member of the tribe as fighter or
counsellor, or to the τελεία γυνή, the full wife and mother. This whole
subject of Greek initiation ceremonies calls pressingly for more
investigation. It is only in the last few years that we have obtained
the material for understanding them, and the whole mass of the evidence
needs re-treatment. For one instance, it is clear that a great number of
rites which were formerly explained as remnants of human sacrifice are
simply ceremonies of initiation.[32:2]
At the great spring Drômenon the tribe and the growing earth were
renovated together: the earth arises afresh from her dead seeds, the
tribe from its dead ancestors; and the whole process, charged as it is
with the emotion of pressing human desire, projects its anthropomorphic
god or daemon. A vegetation-spirit we call him, very inadequately; he is
a divine Kouros, a Year-Daemon, a spirit that in the first stage is
living, then dies with each year, then thirdly rises again from the
dead, raising the whole dead world with him--the Greeks called him in
this phase 'the Third One', or the 'Saviour'. The renovation ceremonies
were accompanied by a casting off of the old year, the old garments, and
everything that is polluted by the infection of death. And not only of
death; but clearly I think, in spite of the protests of some Hellenists,
of guilt or sin also. For the life of the Year-Daemon, as it seems to be
reflected in Tragedy, is generally a story of Pride and Punishment. Each
Year arrives, waxes great, commits the sin of Hubris, and then is slain.
The death is deserved; but the slaying is a sin: hence comes the next
Year as Avenger, or as the Wronged One re-risen. 'All things pay
retribution for their injustice one to another according to the
ordinance of time.'[33:1] It is this range of ideas, half suppressed
during the classical period, but evidently still current among the ruder
and less Hellenized peoples, which supplied St. Paul with some of his
most famous and deep-reaching metaphors. 'Thou fool, that which thou
sowest is not quickened except it die.'[33:2] 'As He was raised from the
dead we may walk with Him in newness of life.' And this renovation must
be preceded by a casting out and killing of the old polluted life--'the
old man in us must first be crucified'.
'The old man must be crucified.' We observed that in all the three
Festivals there was a pervasive element of vague fear. Hitherto we have
been dealing with early Greek religion chiefly from the point of view of
_mana_, the positive power or force that man tries to acquire from his
totem-animal or his god. But there is also a negative side to be
considered: there is not only the _mana_, but the _tabu_, the Forbidden,
the Thing Feared. We must cast away the old year; we must put our sins
on to a φαρμακός or scapegoat and drive it out. When the ghosts have
returned and feasted with us at the Anthesteria we must, with tar and
branches of buckthorn, purge them out of every corner of the rooms till
the air is pure from the infection of death. We must avoid speaking
dangerous words; in great moments we must avoid speaking any words at
all, lest there should be even in the most innocent of them some unknown
danger; for we are surrounded above and below by Kêres, or Spirits,
winged influences, shapeless or of unknown shape, sometimes the spirits
of death, sometimes of disease, madness, calamity; thousands and
thousands of them, as Sarpedon says, from whom man can never escape nor
hide;[34:1] 'all the air so crowded with them', says an unknown ancient
poet, 'that there is not one empty chink into which you could push the
spike of a blade of corn.'[34:2]
The extraordinary security of our modern life in times of peace makes it
hard for us to realize, except by a definite effort of the imagination,
the constant precariousness, the frightful proximity of death, that was
usual in these weak ancient communities. They were in fear of wild
beasts; they were helpless against floods, helpless against
pestilences. Their food depended on the crops of one tiny plot of
ground; and if the Saviour was not reborn with the spring, they slowly
and miserably died. And all the while they knew almost nothing of the
real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was
somehow a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defilement. It is this
state of things that explains the curious cruelty of early agricultural
doings, the human sacrifices, the scapegoats, the tearing in pieces of
living animals, and perhaps of living men, the steeping of the fields in
blood. Like most cruelty it has its roots in terror, terror of the
breach of _Tabu_--the Forbidden Thing. I will not dwell on this side of
the picture: it is well enough known. But we have to remember that, like
so many morbid growths of the human mind, it has its sublime side. We
must not forget that the human victims were often volunteers. The
records of Carthage and Jerusalem, the long list in Greek legend of
princes and princesses who died for their country, tell the same story.
In most human societies, savage as well as civilized, it is not hard to
find men who are ready to endure death for their fellow-citizens. We
need not suppose that the martyrs were always the noblest of the human
race. They were sometimes mad--hysterical or megalomaniac: sometimes
reckless and desperate: sometimes, as in the curious case attested of
the Roman armies on the Danube, they were men of strong desires and weak
imagination ready to die at the end of a short period, if in the
meantime they might glut all their senses with unlimited
indulgence.[35:1]
Still, when all is said, there is nothing that stirs men's imagination
like the contemplation of martyrdom, and it is no wonder that the more
emotional cults of antiquity vibrate with the worship of this dying
Saviour, the Sôsipolis, the Sôtêr, who in so many forms dies with his
world or for his world, and rises again as the world rises, triumphant
through suffering over Death and the broken _Tabu_.
_Tabu_ is at first sight a far more prominent element in the primitive
religions than _Mana_, just as misfortune and crime are more highly
coloured and striking than prosperity and decent behaviour. To an early
Greek tribe the world of possible action was sharply divided between
what was Themis and what was Not Themis, between lawful and _tabu_, holy
and unholy, correct and forbidden. To do a thing that was not Themis was
a sure source of public disaster. Consequently it was of the first
necessity in a life full of such perils to find out the exact rules
about them. How is that to be managed? Themis is ancient law: it is τὰ
πάτρια, the way of our ancestors, the thing that has always been done
and is therefore divinely right. In ordinary life, of course, Themis is
clear. Every one knows it. But from time to time new emergencies arise,
the like of which we have never seen, and they frighten us. We must go
to the Gerontes, the Old Men of the Tribe; they will perhaps remember
what our fathers did. What they tell us will be _Presbiston_, a
word which means indifferently 'oldest' and 'best'--αἰεὶ δὲ νεώτεροι
ἀφραδέουσιν, 'Young men are always being foolish'. Of course, if there
is a Basileus, a holy King, he by his special power may perhaps know
best of all, though he too must take care not to gainsay the Old Men.
For the whole problem is to find out τὰ πάτρια, the ways that our
fathers followed. And suppose the Old Men themselves fail us, what must
we needs do? Here we come to a famous and peculiar Greek custom, for
which I have never seen quoted any exact parallel or any satisfactory
explanation. If the Old Men fail us, we must go to those older still, go
to our great ancestors, the ἥρωες, the Chthonian people, lying in their
sacred tombs, and ask them to help. The word χρᾶν means both 'to lend
money' and 'to give an oracle', two ways of helping people in an
emergency. Sometimes a tribe might happen to have a real ancestor buried
in the neighbourhood; if so, his tomb would be an oracle. More often
perhaps, for the memories of savage tribes are very precarious, there
would be no well-recorded personal tomb. The oracle would be at some
place sacred to the Chthonian people in general, or to some particular
personification of them, a Delphi or a cave of Trophônius, a place of
Snakes and Earth. You go to the Chthonian folk for guidance because they
are themselves the Oldest of the Old Ones, and they know the real
custom: they know what is Presbiston, what is Themis. And by an easy
extension of this knowledge they are also supposed to know what is. He
who knows the law fully to the uttermost also knows what will happen if
the law is broken. It is, I think, important to realize that the normal
reason for consulting an oracle was not to ask questions of fact. It was
that some emergency had arisen in which men simply wanted to know how
they ought to behave. The advice they received in this way varied from
the virtuous to the abominable, as the religion itself varied. A great
mass of oracles can be quoted enjoining the rules of customary morality,
justice, honesty, piety, duty to a man's parents, to the old, and to the
weak. But of necessity the oracles hated change and strangled the
progress of knowledge. Also, like most manifestations of early religion,
they throve upon human terror: the more blind the terror the stronger
became their hold. In such an atmosphere the lowest and most beastlike
elements of humanity tended to come to the front; and religion no doubt
as a rule joined with them in drowning the voice of criticism and of
civilization, that is, of reason and of mercy. When really frightened
the oracle generally fell back on some remedy full of pain and blood.
The medieval plan of burning heretics alive had not yet been invented.
But the history of uncivilized man, if it were written, would provide a
vast list of victims, all of them innocent, who died or suffered to
expiate some portent or _monstrum_--some reported τέρας--with which they
had nothing whatever to do, which was in no way altered by their
suffering, which probably never really happened at all, and if it did
was of no consequence. The sins of the modern world in dealing with
heretics and witches have perhaps been more gigantic than those of
primitive men, but one can hardy rise from the record of these ancient
observances without being haunted by the judgement of the Roman poet:
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,
and feeling with him that the lightening of this cloud, the taming of
this blind dragon, must rank among the very greatest services that
Hellenism wrought for mankind.
FOOTNOTES: