Title: Outline-history of Greek religion
Author: Lewis Richard Farnell
Release date: August 14, 2023 [eBook #71402]
Language: English
Original publication: LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO, 1921
Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer
BY
LEWIS RICHARD FARNELL, M.A., D.Litt.
RECTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; GIFFORD LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
ST. ANDREWS; FORMERLY WILDE LECTURER IN NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE
RELIGION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD; HIBBERT LECTURER; HON. D.
LITT. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA, TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, AND
UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS; AUTHOR OF “CULTS OF THE GREEK
STATES,” “THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION,” “HIGHER ASPECTS
OF GREEK RELIGION,” “GREECE AND BABYLON”
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
First issued 1920
New Edition 1921
All rights reserved
I. The Sources and the Evidence
III. The Second Period, 900-500 B.C.
IV. The Third Period, 500-338 B.C.
The foundation of a serious and scientific study of Greek religion, as distinct from the mere mythology of Hellas, may almost be said to have been an achievement of the last generation of scholars. And it is only through recent research that the Hellenic spirit, so creative and imperial in the domains of literature, art and science, can be recognised as manifesting itself not unworthily in the sphere of religion.
The history of Greek religion means, partly, the account and the interpretation of the various rites, cults and cult-ideas of the various Greek families, tribes and communities; partly the estimate of the religious temperament, both of the masses and of the individuals who emerged from among them and of whom some record has been preserved.
Now as the Greek world in the long period of its independence was never organised as a single State, the attempt to give a summary and general account of its religion is confronted with the perplexity arising from the often incalculable diversity of religious forms and ideas in the different centres of its social life, which was in the highest degree centrifugal. Nevertheless, as will be shown, we find in the midst of manifold local variation certain uniformity of religious psychology, making for uniformity of practice, which enables us to deliver certain general pronouncements about the whole.
Ancient Sources: Literary.—Our real knowledge of any ancient religion depends obviously on the copiousness and variety of our records. And it is likely to be more luminous, if the society in question expressed its religious life not only in surviving literature, but also in surviving art. Of both these kinds the student of Greek religion has an unusually rich material.
For in spite of its secular freedom, which is its salient achievement, Greek literature in its highest and most popular forms, as well as in its narrower and more special, is deeply infused or preoccupied with religion and religious myth. In fact, it reflects the vivifying penetration of religion into all parts of Greek activity and mental life. This is obviously true of the epic period, which produced the two types of the chivalrous and the theologic epic, and which has left us most valuable material for the religious history of the tenth and ninth centuries in the Homeric poems, and of the eighth and seventh centuries in the poems of Hesiod and in the ‘Homeric’ hymns. It is none the less true of the great lyric movement that followed upon that, when the greatest poets devoted themselves to the composition of songs for festal-religious occasions or of hymns for the service of temple or altar; and besides these whose great names and fragments of whose great works survive, there was another less distinguished group of special ‘hieratic’ poets, such as Pamphos and Mousaios, who composed hymns for the service of certain mystery-cults, and whose compositions were preserved as liturgical documents by the priestly families that administered them.
The sententious ethical-political poetry of the sixth century, the elegiacs of Theognis and Solon, is instinct with religious emotion and reflection. And the greatest product of the poetic genius of Hellas, the tragic drama, is of a religious character, both in respect of its origin and much of its subject-matter. Finally, the later learned poetry of the Ptolemaic period, the Kassandra of Lycophron, the hymns and other works of Kallimachos, the epic poem of Apollonios Rhodios, are full of antiquarian religious lore.
At the same time, our knowledge is much indebted to the great prose-writers of Greece, the philosophers, historians and orators; among the philosophers, especially to Plato, who more copiously than any of the others reveals to us, however much he idealises, the religious psychology and cult-phenomena of his period; among the historians, especially to Herodotus, who is the intellectual ancestor of the modern anthropologist and student of comparative religion and whose presentation of the facts is coloured with religious conviction. The works of the Attic orators are of special value for our purpose, first because the classical orator was far more apt than the modern to dilate on religious themes and appeal to religious sentiments, as religion was far more closely interfused with political and social life; secondly, because we are more sure of the orator than we can be of the poetic or philosophic writer that his words are attuned to the average pitch of popular belief and sentiment.
It is true then that all the great fields of Greek literature make their several contributions to the material of our subject. And besides the works of the great masters, the student has to reckon with the secondary and parasitic work of the later scholiasts, compilers and commentators, which is even more replete with the special information upon which the history of Greek religion can be built. The study of it is, in fact, almost coextensive with the whole study of Greek literature.
But amidst this profusion of material we must specially mark the works of those ancients who wrote direct treatises on the various religious phenomena, on the Gods, the cult-practices, the theologic and mythologic systems of the Hellenic societies. The earliest of such works that have come down to us are the poems of Hesiod and the Hesiodic school, the Works and Days and the Theogony, while of parts of the ‘Homeric’ hymns the special theme is the attributes and functions of the various divinities. But it was not till the period of scientific activity after Aristotle that definite treatises in prose on different departments of the national religion began to be rife. A chapter on sacrifice by Theophrastos is mainly preserved for us by Porphyry. The writers of ‘Atthides’ or Attic history and antiquities, who belonged mainly to the third century, were special workers in this field; Philochoros, the chief of them, wrote ‘on festivals,’ ‘on sacred days,’ ‘on divination,’ ‘on the Attic mysteries’; Istros, the slave and friend of Kallimachos, on the ‘manifestations of Apollo’ and on ‘the Cretan sacrifices’; while the ‘exegetic work’ of Kleidemos was, if we may judge from the fragments that remain, occupied with the problems of religion and mythology. Outside this circle we hear of other contributions to the history of Greek religion, such as the treatises of Herakleides, probably the pupil of Aristotle, usually called ‘Pontikos,’ on ‘the foundations of temples,’ and ‘on oracles’; and a work by an unknown Sokrates of Kos on the important subject of ‘Invocation-titles of the Gods.’ Lastly may be mentioned here a treatise of Apollodoros, ‘περι Θεῶν,’ which, if he is to be identified with the author of the ‘Bibliotheca,’ was probably a learned account of the popular religion rather than a metaphysical enquiry.
Of nearly all this scientific post-Aristotelian literature only isolated fragments survive in quotations by later writers, lexicographers, and scholiasts, who were no doubt more deeply indebted to it than they always acknowledged; but it is some compensation for our loss that the work last mentioned, the Bibliotheca of Apollodoros, has been preserved, a rich storehouse of myth and folklore with some infusion of actual cult-record. Among the later literature our subject is indebted to the geographer, Strabo, for many incidental observations of local cults and ritual; still more to the philosophic moralist and littérateur, Plutarch, a man of earnest religious interest and some power of original thought, who knew the religion of his country at first hand and at a time when it was yet alive, and who devoted to it much attention and literary industry; hence we must rank high among our ancient authorities his Quæstiones Græcæ and his treatises ‘on the Pythian Oracle’ and on ‘the cessation of oracles.’ Again, much desultory but varied information is afforded by the compilers Athenæus, in his Deipnosophistæ, and Stobæus, in his Florilegium. But of higher value than all these, or in fact than any work that has been bequeathed to us from antiquity, is the Descriptio Græciæ, by Pausanias, composed about 180 A.D.; for he travelled somewhat as a modern anthropologist, relying partly on earlier literature, yet using his own eyes and ears and his own notes; and his ruling passion was the study of the folk-religion and the religious monuments; so that it is due mainly to him that we know something of the village-religion of Hellas as distinct from that of the great cities, and can frame working theories of the evolution through immemorial ages of various growths of the polytheism.
The lexicographers Harpokration, Hesychios and Suidas contribute facts of value, especially in their citation of cult-appellatives, which owing to the magic value of the special name or title whereby the deity was invoked throw a revealing light on the significance and power of many a worship, and help to frame our conception of the complex character of many a divinity. Again, the various collections of ‘Scholia’ on the classical texts are a rich quarry for our reconstruction of the fabric of Hellenic religion; and of chief value among these are the Scholia on Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes and Theocritus, while Servius’ Commentary on Vergil tells us even more about Greek cult and mythology than about Roman; and high in this class of our authorities we must rank a work of late Byzantine learning, the Commentary of Tzetzes on Lykophron’s poem, ‘Kassandra,’ for his scholia are charged with remote antiquarian lore derived from good sources.
Finally, we gather much of our knowledge from the controversial treatises of the early Christian Fathers, written with propagandist zeal in the heat of their struggle against Paganism. They reveal to us much of the religion that they strove to overthrow by the exposure of its viciousness and its absurdities. But their statements must be used with cautious criticism. Their knowledge was by no means always at first hand, unless—which we rarely know to have been the case—they were, like Clemens of Alexandria, converted Pagans who had been bred up in the Græco-Roman polytheism. Their statements, for instance, about the Greek mysteries are often vague and unconvincing, while in their desire to include them all in one general condemnation they confuse Anatolian rites with Eleusinian. And they are pardonably blind to the often beautiful ritual, the nobler ideas and the higher moral elements in the older Mediterranean religions. Nevertheless, if we make due allowance for prejudice and exaggeration, works such as the Protreptica of Clemens, the treatise of Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, of Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanarum Gentium, Eusebius’ Præparatio Evangelica, Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, Athenagoras’ Legatio, must be ranked among the primary sources of our history.
A special but very important chapter in the later history of Greek religion is the account of the growth and diffusion of the religious brotherhoods, especially the Orphic Dionysiac societies. For these we have something of direct liturgical evidence in the collection of Orphic hymns, mainly the products of the later theosophic period, but throwing light on the theology and ritual of these sects. But our knowledge of this mystic religion which was engrafted upon Hellenism has been in recent times enriched by the priceless discovery of an ancient poetical Orphic liturgy engraved upon gold-leaf found in tombs of Crete and South Italy and probably a product of the fifth century B.C.
Monumental.—The above is a sketch of our more important literary sources. The knowledge to be derived from them would, on the whole and in many important details, remain vague and uncertain, were it not supplemented and secured by the evidence coming from another source which we may term semi-literary, the evidence from inscriptions. These have been accumulated in vast profusion during the last thirty years, and have been, and are still being, reduced to order for our special purpose. The public inscriptions, being dry state-documents, do not reveal to us the heart of any mystery or the religious soul of the people, but rather the State-organisation and the exact minutiæ of ritual and sacrifice from which we can sometimes reconstruct an image of the inward religious thought. And many a local cult of value for our total impression that was unrecorded by any writer is revealed to us by these monuments. But the needs and aspirations of the private man are better attested by the private inscriptions attached to ex-voto dedications or commemorating divine benefits received.
Yet amidst all this wealth of evidence there seems one thing lacking. Of actual temple-liturgies, of formal prayers proffered round the altars, of the hymns chanted in the public service, of all that might constitute a text of Greek church-service there is comparatively little preserved. One or two hymns and a few fragments of the religious lyric of the seventh century—to which we may now add the important recent find of the pæans of Pindar—a strophe of an ancient hymn to Dionysos sung by the Elean women, a fourth-century pæan to Dionysos composed for the Delphic service, the newly discovered hymn of the Kouretes in Crete, a few formulæ of prayers quoted or paraphrased by later writers—all this appears meagre material when we compare it with the profusion of documents of the public and private religion that are streaming in from Babylon.
But in respect of another source of the history of religion, our Greek material is unique, namely, the monuments of art. For the greatest art of Hellas was mainly religious, the greatest artists working for the religious service of the State. And the surviving works of sculpture, painting and glyptic, wrought either for public or private purposes, present us often not only with facts of religion and ritual unrecorded in literature, but also with an impression hard to gain otherwise of the religious consciousness of the people and serve also as witnesses to the strength of the religious feeling. For instance, the knowledge and appreciation of Athena’s personality that we derive from Attic monuments is deeper and more vivid than any that we gain from the literature. Therefore the study of Greek religion is concerned as much with the art and archæology as with the literature.
A summary sketch of so manifold a theme as that with which this short handbook deals will be of more value if it can present the facts in some kind of chronologic sequence.
We may conveniently distinguish four periods: the first, the prehistoric, falling mainly in the second millennium B.C. and closing with the epoch marked by the Homeric poems; the second, extending from 900 to 500 B.C., beginning with the colonial expansion of Hellas and ending before the Persian invasion; the third, from 500 to 338 B.C., including the greatest century of Greek history and closing with the battle of Chæronea and the establishment of Macedonian supremacy; the fourth and last, the Hellenistic and Græco-Roman period.
The chronologic statement is embarrassed by the absence of any record of date for the institution and diffusion of most of the cults and for the growth of certain religious ideas; nor can we safely date a religious fact by the date of the author who first mentions it; a detail of ritual, a myth, a religious concept, only attested by Pausanias or a late scholiast, may descend from an age centuries before the Homeric. And our earliest inscriptions do not as yet reach back to a period earlier than the beginning of the seventh century.
For determining our view of Greek religion in the second millennium B.C., when Hellenism was in the making, the poems of Homer and Hesiod are of priceless value if they are used with cautious and trained criticism. We depend greatly also on the general inductions of comparative religion and anthropology, which may sometimes guide us rightly in this matter, especially if the anthropological comparison is drawn from more or less adjacent communities rather than from the Antipodes. We depend also on the evidence of the monuments of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion, revealing glimpses of the practices and faith of a people of high culture, whom no one would dare now to call, at least in the earlier stage of their life, Hellenic, but from whom the earliest Hellenes doubtless adopted much into their own religion.
Sketch of Homeric religion.—The poems of Homer present us with an advanced polytheism, a system in which the divinities are already correlated in some sort of hierarchy and organised as a divine family under a supreme God. These divine beings are not mere ‘daimones’ or ‘numina,’ such as were in the main the old deities of Rome, vague and dimly outlined forces animate yet scarcely personal; but rather concrete and individual Θεοί of robust and sharply defined personality, not spirits but immortal beings of superhuman substance and soul, conceived in the glorified image of man. The anthropomorphic bias is dominant in the poems, plastically shaping the figures of all the divinities, except occasionally some of the lower grade, such as the river-god Skamandros. Even the vague group of nymphs, female ‘daimones’ of the rill and the mountain, while lacking individual characterisation, bear the anthropomorphic name, ‘Brides,’ or ‘young women,’ which is the root-meaning of Νύμφη. Though the gods and goddesses are shape-shifters and may manifest or disguise themselves in the form of any animal—birds by choice—yet their abiding type is human; nor has Homer any clear remembrance of a ‘cow-faced’ Hera, still less of an ‘owl-faced’ Athena, since for him at least ‘Hera βοῶπις’ was Hera ‘of the large ox-eyes’—the term is a complimentary epithet of women—and Athena γλαυκῶπις, the goddess ‘of the flashing eyes.’ Also his divinities are moralised beings with human passions and ethical as well as artistic emotions. The highest among them are not imagined as Nature-powers, bound up with or immanent in the forces and departments of the natural world, for such a description applies only to his wind-Gods and nymphs and gods of river and sea; also, though more loosely, to his Helios, the God of the Sun; to beings in fact that count little in his religious world. It scarcely applies to Poseidon, for though his province is the sea, and some of his functions and appellatives ‘the girdler of the earth,’ ‘the earth-shaker,’ ‘he of the dark blue locks’ are derived from it, he is also the builder of the walls of Troy, the family deity of the house of Nestor, and the God of horses. It does not describe at all his mode of imagining and presenting Apollo, Hera, Athena, Hermes and others. There is no hint that these divinities were conceived by him as nature-powers or as evolved from any part of the natural world. The High God, Zeus, though specially responsible for the atmospheric and celestial phenomena, is not identified with the thunder or even with the sky, though a few phrases may reveal the influence of an earlier animistic conception of the divine sky. His religious world, in short, is morphologically neither a system of polydaimonism nor one of pantheism in which a divine force is regarded as universally immanent in the world of things; but is constructed on the lines of personal theism.
We may observe also that the polytheism of the age of Perikles in regard to some of its leading divinities has not markedly advanced beyond the Homeric. Athena, in the Homeric poems, is already the Goddess of war, arts, and counsel; and there are already hints in the Homeric presentation of her of the tender Madonna-like character that is beautifully developed in the later Attic monuments. The Homeric Apollo is already the oracular God who delights in the music of the Pæan, though his artistic and intellectual character is not yet fully developed. Of Hermes and Hephaistos the later Attic conception is not notably different from the Homeric.
Again, in spite of one or two frivolous and licentious passages, the religious tone in the Homeric poems is serious and in many important respects accords with an advanced morality. The deity, though jealous and revengeful of wrongs or slights to himself, is on the whole on the side of righteousness and mercy; his displeasure is aroused by those who spurn the voice of prayer, who injure the suppliant, the guest, or even the beggar; and besides Zeus and the other ‘Olympians,’ who are general guardians of the right, there loom the dark powers of the lower world, who are specially concerned with the sanctity of the oath. Much also of the religious reflection in the poems strikes us as mature and advanced: notably that passage at the beginning of the Odyssey where Zeus declares that it is not the Gods who bring evil to men, but that it is the wickedness of their own hearts that is the cause of all their evils.
Finally, the Homeric ritual appears as on the higher level of theism. We can detect it in no trace of savagery and but little contamination of the religion with magic. The sacrifice is more than a mere bribe; it is a friendly communion with the divinity; and the service is solemn and beautiful with hymn and dance. The cult is furnished with altar and sometimes with temple and a priesthood, but not yet, as a rule, with the idol, though this is beginning to appear.
This slight sketch of Homeric theology is presented here in the belief that the Homeric poems enable us to catch some glimmer of the religion of the centuries preceding the first millennium. This belief is based on the conviction that the poems represent a Greek society existing near the date of 1000 B.C. It is of course opposed to the view still maintained by some scholars that they are, in their finished form, a product of a much later period, and that the religion which they enshrine may be such as was in vogue in Attica about the epoch of Peisistratos. But certain arguments drawn from ethnology and sociology are fatal to this theory, and still more so are the arguments that may be drawn from the history of Greek religion; for at the period of Peisistratos certain religious forces were rife, and certain religious phenomena prominent, of which Homer is entirely silent.
Still less reasonable is it to imagine that Homer constructs a religious world out of his own brain. We must suppose that he reflects something real and contemporary. Only we must guard ourselves from the serious error of supposing that he reflects the whole. Much is doubtless missing in his account which we may be able to supply from Hesiod and other sources by means of reasonable hypotheses.
The assumption is, then, that the Homeric poems present us with a part-picture of the religion that prevailed among some of the leading Greek communities before the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese and the Ionic colonisation of Asia Minor.
Pre-Homeric period of religion.—Now when we consider how slow of growth and enduring are the forms and the moral and metaphysical concepts of religion we have the right to believe that part of what Homer records on these matters is the inherited tradition of an age some centuries earlier than his own. It is probable that those earliest Aryan immigrants from the north, Achæans, Dryopes, Minyai and others—who by mingling with peoples of aboriginal Mediterranean stock and of the Minoan-Mycenæan culture constituted the happy blend that we call the Hellenic race—had already arrived at the stage of personal theism; and that Hellenic religion proper does not start with a ‘godless period’21.1 when the unseen powers were only dimly outlined in the vaguer and more fleeting characters of what is called animism. We now know from the valuable discovery of a cuneiform inscription that the Iranian people had evolved such personal deities as Mitra and Varuna before 1400 B.C.22.1 And we have the right to suppose that their western kinsfolk, who were forcing their way through the Balkans, probably only a century earlier, were at least at the same level of religious imagination. We can best understand the picture of the religious world of Homer and also the later cult-records, if we believe that the kindred tribes coming from the north brought in certain personal deities, some of whom were common to more than one stock, and one at least may have been common to them all. This would best explain the supremacy of Zeus, the Sky-God, the diffusion of his name Olympios, derived from the mountain that dominates the northern frontier, near to which the people that were to lead the history of Greece had at one time temporary settlements and which they regarded as the throne of their high God. The wide geographical area of his cult cannot be naturally explained on the assumption that at any period in Hellenic history he had been merely the special deity of one particular tribe. Also as regards two other high Gods at least, Apollo and Poseidon, we may be reasonably sure that already in the pre-Homeric period certain tribes other than the Achæans had these cult-figures. In the Hyperborean ritual, which reflects at points the earliest days of Hellenism, we can follow the track of Apollo’s invasion from the north; and the evidence is fairly clear that Poseidon was equally a northern immigrant, being the special tribal deity of the Minyai.
We must not then apply to the pre-Homeric period of Greek religion the formula, ‘one tribe one God,’ but must imagine that religion had already surmounted in some degree the tribal barriers; for though the spirit of tribal exclusiveness was strong throughout the earlier periods of this polytheism, certain families and certain tribes having the special prerogative of certain ἱερά and jealously excluding strangers, yet the fact of the common possession of certain worships by various tribes contained the germ of religious expansiveness.
Moreover, at some age indefinitely earlier than the Homeric, the conception of the high God had expanded both cosmically and ethically. Zeus had become more than a ‘departmental God’; the deity of the sky was also in the first period—so far as we can reconstruct it—Zeus ‘Chthonios,’ the Lord of the life of earth and of the world under the earth, and it is likely that Hades was only an emanation from him. Also, we may regard the Homeric appellation of Zeus, πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε Θεῶν τε, as a conventional and crystallised phrase descending from an older poetic tradition. And we are justified in interpreting it as a phrase belonging to the higher plane of theism.23.1
We must also suppose that the anthropomorphic view of the personal deity, of which Homer is so attractive a spokesman, had asserted itself in the period before his. Unlike the early Roman, the early Hellenic divinities could be regarded as married, and ideas derived from the life of the family could be applied to them; although we can often discern that many of the myths concerning divine relationships—the sisterhood of Artemis to Apollo, for instance—do not belong to the earliest Hellenic epoch.
Minoan-Mycenæan religion.—But any account of the Hellenic polytheism of the second millennium demands a critical study of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion as well, and before we can decide what part of the Homeric and later systems belongs to the aboriginal Aryan-Hellenic tradition, we must know what the northerners found indigenous in the lands that they conquered or occupied. We know now that they found in many centres a culture superior to their own and a religion of an advanced theistic type with elaborate, though mainly aniconic, ritual, devoted pre-eminently to a Great Goddess, by whose side a God was only the subordinate partner. It has been pointed out24.1 that where we find in historic Greece the Goddess-cult predominant, and especially the prevalence of a virgin-goddess, we should recognise the Minoan-Mycenæan tradition in antagonism to the ‘Aryan,’ the latter invariably maintaining the predominance of the God. We may therefore believe the cults of Artemis in Arcadia and Attica, of Athena in Attica, the cult—though not the name—of Hera in Argos24.2 and Samos, to have been inherited from the former rather than to have been brought in by the latter. And sometimes linguistic science will be able to assign the different personalities of the polytheism to its different ethnic strains, by determining the group of languages to which the divine name in question belongs. Those that can be explained with certainty or probability as of ‘Aryan’ or Indo-Germanic and may therefore be presumed to have penetrated Greece from the north, are Zeus, Hera, Ares, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysos, probably Poseidon and Apollo. On the other hand, ‘Athena,’ ‘Artemis,’ ‘Aphrodite,’ ‘Hephaistos’ defy explanation on these lines, and probably belong to a primitive Ægean language. We may be doubtful about ‘Hermes,’ though elsewhere I have argued for his ‘non-Hellenic’ origin. That philology has not yet brought us nearer to the solution of many of these problems is due to the lacunæ in our knowledge of the pre-Hellenic Mediterranean languages, and especially to our ignorance of the Minoan script for which we have masses of material but as yet no interpreter. Finally, the evidence of the early geographical area of a certain cult may sometimes be decisive in itself; this is the case in regard to the cults of the ‘Mother of the Gods’ and of Aphrodite, who are aboriginally connected with Crete and Cyprus respectively, that is, with the centres of the Minoan culture.
We assume then that the polytheism of the Greece of history was a blend of Northern and Mediterranean elements; and the poems of Homer may reveal a reflection of the early Achæan period when the fusion was not yet fully accomplished. Thus we find there that Athena, Hephaistos, Hermes and the Goddess of Argos had been already ‘Achæanised or Hellenised,’ and are warm champions of the Hellenic cause; while Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, though genealogically linked to the Olympian family, are equally warm on the side of Troy and are treated by the poet with irreverence and even contumely. The position of Apollo is different. There are overpowering reasons for regarding him as of northern origin, a genuinely Achæan deity, and the Achæan poet treats him with deep respect. And we can only explain his pro-Trojan sympathies by the assumption that when the poems were composed his cult had become dominant on the Trojan shore, which he was therefore supposed to guard.
But the ethnic decision is at present impossible on a vast number of details in this composite polytheism, in respect both of ritual and of the divine personalities; and the student of Hellenic religion must often abandon temporarily the quest of origins in his investigation of the composite whole.
Proto-Hellenic period.—The very high development of this Mediterranean civilisation from which Hellenism drew so much of its own life is in itself sufficient reason for the belief that the advanced picture that Homer presents of his contemporary polytheism affords us a true estimate of the progress that had been achieved in the centuries before him. And this is corroborated by a careful analysis of the later cult-records.
Family religion.—Society in the latter half of the second millennium had already reached the higher agricultural stage and had evolved the monogamic family. Demeter—whose Aryan descent is proved by her name—was generally recognised by the various Hellenic tribes as the Earth-Goddess of corn, and the very ancient festival of the Thesmophoria was commonly associated with her. Certain forms of the religion of the family, which was the life-source of much of the private ethics of later Greece, can be traced back to the earliest period; the worship, for instance, of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, the God of the garth, around whose altar in the courtyard of the old Aryan house the kinsmen gathered for worship. Another sacred centre of the family life in the pre-Homeric Society was doubtless the hearth and the hearth-stone in the middle of the hall; there are allusions to its sanctity in the Homeric poems, and the cult-records attest the great antiquity of this religious fact; although the development of the personal goddess Hestia is a later phenomenon.
Again, the wider kinship-groups of the φρατρίαι and γένη are obviously pre-Homeric, and doubtless these had been consecrated by aboriginal religion, though we cannot date precisely the emergence of such cult-forms as Zeus Φράτριος and Athena Φρατρία, the deities who were specially concerned with the constitution and rights of the kindred-group.
Political religion.—Further, it is fairly clear that already in this first stage the religion had become closely interfused with the higher political and social life. Although the greater part of the population lived still under the tribal system in scattered villages—κωμηδόν—yet the ‘polis’ had already arisen; and in certain cases we may surmise for it a religious origin, where its name is derived from the personal name or the shrine of some divinity. Examples are ‘Athenai,’ Alalkomenai, Potniai, perhaps Megara. In these cases the temple must have been the nucleus around which grew up the secular habitations; and the deity of the temple would become supreme in the political religion. Athena had won this position at Athens and probably elsewhere in the immemorial pre-Homeric past; and this explains her character in the Homeric poem as the divinity who more than all others inspires political wisdom and counsel. Various indications point in fact to the belief that the earliest development of the city life was closely bound up with the cults of Zeus and Athena; for no other divinity was ever styled Polieus or Polias by any Greek State; and this agrees mainly with the presentation of them in the Homeric poems. The unanimity of the tradition points back to the second millennium, as the period when this political characterisation of the two deities was determined. And this view is strikingly confirmed by the records concerning the ritual and the establishment of the cult of Zeus ‘Polieus’ on the Athenian Akropolis, an institution attributed to Kekrops and marking probably the Hellenisation of Attica; the singular features of the ritual and the association preserved in its legend of Attica with Crete indicate a high antiquity, when agriculture was the economic basis of the political as well as the religious life.
We may believe that other cults besides the two just mentioned played their part in the political growth of the pre-Homeric world. The marketplace, the cradle of political oratory, had become sacred ground, as Homer himself attests; and this consecration was probably marked by the presence of some ‘agalma,’ a sacred stone of Hermes, for instance. Apollo, also, had early divested himself of the aboriginal character of the god of the wood and of the homeless migratory host, had become a builder of cities, and had established himself in the city’s streets with a change in the meaning of his title, Αγυιεύς, once an appellative of the Way-God who guided the host through the wild, now of the deity who guarded the ways of the city. And already, before Homer, his shrine at Pytho was beginning to acquire wealth and political importance as an oracular centre of consultation.
Ethical religion.—The theistic system had been turned to good account in other directions than the political before it appeared on the canvas of Homer. The whole morality of early social life had been nurtured and protected by it; for we may maintain that the ethical religious spirit of Homer—unless we regard him as a man or as a group of men to whom a special revelation had been made—must reflect in some degree a tradition that had grown up in the centuries before him. We see then that current conceptions about the Gods had ceased to be inspired merely by fear; a milder sentiment had come to tinge religious thought; the Deity was regarded not only as a righteous God of vengeance, but as loving mercy and compassion and as a defender of the weak and destitute. Only once, and only in regard to the wild sea-god Poseidon, does a Homeric phrase suggest that the deity might have been regarded as in his own nature malevolent.29.1 The cult of Zeus Ξείνιος, the guardian of the stranger and the wanderer, had already arisen. And the sanctity of the oath taken in the name of the deities of the upper and the lower world was the basis of much private and communal morality.
Art an aspect of religion.—And other parts of the higher activity of man had been consecrated by the polytheism of which Homer inherits and develops the tradition. The earliest imagination of the Hellenes appears to have perceived a daimoniac potency—a ‘numen’ as we may say—in the arts of song and music; and this had sometimes crystallised into the personal forms of divinities, into such interesting embodiments as the Muses or the Charites, who must have belonged to the pre-Homeric popular theism. The latter group had grown up at the Bœotian Orchomenos, an old centre of the Minoan-Mycenæan culture. It may be that at one time they had no other than the purely physical significance of vegetation-powers; but we only understand their value for Homer if we suppose that before his time they had come to be associated with the arts and the delight of human life. We discern also that the higher deities, Apollo and Athena, though by no means merely ‘functional’ or departmental powers, had acquired the special patronage of song and art. It seems, then, that in the earliest as in the later periods of their history the religion of the Hellenes idealised that sphere of human activity in which the Hellenic spirit was to achieve its highest, the sphere of art, and among higher and lower religions it was unique in this.
Proto-Hellenic ritual.—It seems, then, that even in the earliest period the polytheism was no longer on the most primitive plane. And we gather the same impression from what is revealed to us of the earliest forms of Greek ritual. The Homeric and Hesiodic poems are full of information concerning the liturgy or cult-service with which the poets were familiar; what they tell us avails first of all for the period of the eleventh to the eighth century. But ritual takes long to develop, and once fixed is the most abiding element in religion. It is not too bold, then, to take the Homeric account as vouching for a tradition that goes back at least to the later centuries of the second millennium.
The sacred place of worship might be a natural cave, or a ‘temenos,’ a fenced clearing in a grove, containing as the ἄγαλμα of the deity a tree-trunk or holy pillar or heap of stones, whence gradually an artificial altar might be evolved; the latter had become, some time before Homer, the usual receptacle of sacrifice and was a prominent figure in the Minoan-Mycenæan religion, which usually associated it with a sacred tree or pillar, the token of the deity’s presence or a magnet for attracting it, but not with any iconic statue or idol. Personal religion could content itself with such equipment, but, if the anthropomorphic instinct is strong in it, it prompts the construction of the temple or the house of God. And temples must have been found in the land in the pre-Homeric period; the few that have as yet been revealed in the area of Minoan-Mycenæan culture were built, with one exception,31.1 within the royal palaces, and must be regarded as domestic chapels of the king, marking his sacred character as head of the religion of the State, the character with which the legends invest King Minos and King Aiakos. The earliest that have been excavated on free sites are the temples of Hera at Argos and Olympia, and these are now dated not earlier than the ninth century B.C. But the traditions of the earliest temple at Delphi, and of that of Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, suggest a greater antiquity than this.
With the multiplication of temples special priesthoods must also have multiplied. But the professional priest had already arisen in pre-Homeric times; Homer knows of the brotherhood called the Selloi,32.1 who tended the oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona, “who slept on the ground and never washed their feet,” and he mentions others who were attached to special deities, and two of these at least administered cults without a temple, the priest of Zeus of Mount Ida,32.2 and the priest of the river Skamandros,32.3 of each of whom he says, “he was honoured like a god among the people.” These words suggest a high and sacrosanct position; yet these two priests are also warriors fighting in the ranks, which is the mark of a secular priesthood; and there is no legend nor any hint of evidence suggesting that a professional priesthood enjoyed a political and social power in the prehistoric that we know was never achieved by them in the historic period of Greece. For the evolution of many of the earliest Hellenic institutions evidence is almost wholly lacking. But on general comparative grounds we can surmise that the religious character of the monarchy was most prominent in the earliest times and that as its secular power and functions developed, the priest-expert was attached to him to assist in the national cults, over which the Basileus retained a general supervision. We have scarcely a hint, either in the earliest or later days of Greece, of any conflict between Church and State; we know that, at least, historic Greece escaped sacerdotalism; and its earliest societies, whatever their danger or their struggles may have been, had escaped it by the days of Homer.33.1 Bearing on this point is the other negative fact, that for this earliest age we have little or no evidence of the prevalence of what is called ‘Shamanism,’ divine seizures, ecstatic outbursts of wild prophesying, by which a society can be terrified and captured. The professional ‘Mantis,’ the prophet or soothsayer, existed as distinct from the priest; but his methods generally—so far as our earliest witness informs us—were cool and quasi-scientific.33.2
The ritual at the altar in the early period with which we are at present dealing consisted of an oblation to the deity of an animal victim or an offering of fruits and cereals; the sacrifice might be accompanied with wine or might be wineless, a ‘sober’ sacrifice which was called νηφάλια, the latter being perhaps the more ancient tradition. We may interpret the earliest form of Hellenic animal-sacrifice as in some sense a simple tribal or family communion-meal with the deity, whereby the sense of comradeship and clan-feeling between man and God was strengthened and nourished. This is the view that Homer has inherited, and it endures throughout the later history of the ritual; and it expresses the general genial temper of Hellenic religion, a trait which Robertson Smith marked as characteristic of other religions of the same social type.33.3 Similarly the description given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias of the ancient ritual of Zeus Polieus on the Athenian Akropolis reveals to us a typical example of the civic communion feast.34.1 Such a sacrifice is merely a transference into the divine circle of the practice of the common feast of the tribesmen. But we can also discern a mystic element in the Homeric ritual text, which is evidently based on a tradition indefinitely older than the poems; the sacrificial victim, usually the ox, is first consecrated by being touched with the barley-stalks, which had been placed on the altar and which fill him by their contact with the altar’s divine spirit: then when he has been immolated and cut up, the sacrificers are specially said “to taste the entrails”34.2 invariably before the real sacred meal begins; as the entrails are the inner seat of the life which has been consecrated by the hallowing contact of the altar, we are justified in supposing that the object of this solemn act was to establish the real and corporeal communion of the worshipper with the divinity.34.2
Chthonian worship.—The important distinction which is well attested of the later ages between the ‘chthonian’ and the ‘Olympian’ ritual—to use these two conventional terms for convenience—may already have been in vogue in the earliest period of the polytheism. In the first type of sacrifice, where the offering was made to the nether divinities, the victim’s head was held down above a hole in the ground—a βόθρος—and the blood from the severed throat was shed into it. In the second, where the upper powers, whose region was the air or the sky, were the recipients, the victim was held up erect off the ground, his face lifted towards the sky, and in this attitude his throat was cut. Homer shows himself aware of this form of sacrifice; and that the other, the chthonian, was also in vogue in his time is to be inferred from his account of the ritual performed by Odysseus in honour of the shades, where he mentions the βόθρος, the sacrifice of black sheep, with their heads turned downwards towards the lower world, and the triple libation of honey, wine and water.35.1 For the ritual of the dead in the Greek religious tradition was closely modelled on the service of the nether divinities. The triple libation is known to have been part of Minoan-Cretan cult, as the altar table found in the cave of Mount Dikte attests.35.2 And a shrine with a βόθρος in the middle of the cella has been found at Priniá in Crete, consecrated to a chthonian goddess, of which the foundation is ascribed to the ninth century.35.3
From these indications and from the prevalence of chthonian cults attested by later records, in which we can discern features of great antiquity, we can gather that the earliest period of Greek religion was not wholly characterised by the brightness of ritual and the geniality of religious feeling that appear on the surface of Homeric poetry. The Homeric sacrifice was often accompanied by a sense of sin,35.4 though the poet shows no cognisance of any peculiar ritual of a specially piacular type. Also he was aware of the dark world of powers who avenged the broken oath and punished sinners even after death. Long before his time, we may suppose, gloomy worship, such as that of the Θεοὶ Μειλίχιοι described by Pausanias at Myonia in Lokris,36.1 of which the rites were performed by night, was in vogue in parts of Greece. Mother-Earth, prophesying through phantom-dreams, had held rule at Delphi before Apollo came, and that was long before Homer’s work began.36.2
There are strong reasons also for believing that the cult of hero-ancestors was already a part of the pre-Homeric religion, as it was a prominent part of the post-Homeric. The elaborate tendance of the dead attested of the Mycenæan period by the graves discovered at Tiryns and Mycenæ, could easily develop into actual worship if it was maintained through many generations, as it was at Menidi in Attica. Doubtless, the common and promiscuous worship of the dead was a morbid development of the later polytheism. But Homer, who is generally silent about such cults, and in a well-known passage about the Twin-Brethren36.3 seems to ignore deliberately their divine or semi-divine character, almost reveals his knowledge of the worship of Herakles,36.4 and certainly was aware of the Attic cult of Erechtheus, unless the passage that refers to it was the work of the interpolator.36.5
It is a difficult question how we are to estimate and how far we can trust the Homeric evidence on this important point of religion. Even if we trust it so far as to say that the Achæans at least practised no real worship of the dead, it yet remains probable that they found it existing here and there in the lands in which they settled.
It is important to emphasise this gloomier side of Greek religion; but it is detrimental to exaggerate it, as has been the tendency of some modern writers in a pardonable revolt from the old shallow theories of orthodox classicism. We ought to recognise that at no period of his history was the ordinary Hellene ghost-ridden, worried and dismayed by demoniac terrors, or by morbid anxiety about the other world or his destiny after death; at least he will not appear so, when we compare his religious and mythologic records with those of Babylon, Egypt, and Christendom.37.1 Nor dare we affirm that the prehistoric Hellene was weaker-minded and more timorous in respect of such matters than the later. He may even have been stronger-minded, and at least as willing to eat a sacramental meal in company with the ‘Theoi Meilichioi’ (shadowy powers of the lower world), or with the Nether-Zeus, or the Nether Earth-Mother, and with his departed family-spirits, as were his later descendants at Lokris, Mykonos and other places.37.2 The earliest myths have little of the goblin element. Homer indeed himself was cognisant of such forms of terror as a black ‘Ker’—Penelope likens Antinoos to one;37.3 the ancient folklore of Argolis was aware of a bad spirit that once ravaged its homes.37.4 The early popular imagination was sure to have inherited or to have evolved such creations of fear; and a black Earth-Goddess with a horse’s head and snake-locks, who lived in a dark cave at Phigaleia, almost certainly in the pre-Homeric period, was a sufficiently terrifying personality.38.1
But happily for the Greek imagination, the divinities of the world of death, abiding below the earth, tended to take on the benign functions of the powers of vegetation. The God of the lower world is scarcely called by the ill-omened name of Hades in cult, but Plouton or Trophonios or Zeus Chthonios, names importing beneficence; for the Homeric and Hesiodic world Demeter is a goddess of blessing, not of terror. And although in the earliest period certain demoniac personages such as Medousa—identical in form and perhaps in character with the snake-locked horse-headed Demeter—may have loomed large and terrible in popular cult, and afterwards faded wholly from actual worship or survived in the lower strata of ineffectual folklore, yet the more civilising imagination had also been operative in the religion of the second millennium. The monuments of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion reveal scarcely an element of terror. And at some period before Homer the kindly deity, Hermes, had assumed the function of the leader of souls. As regards the eschatological views of the prehistoric Greek we can say little, unless we believe that Homer was his spokesman; and such belief would be very hazardous. The earliest communities may have had no special hopes concerning the departed soul; we have no reason for thinking that the mysteries which came to offer some promise of happiness in the world to come had as yet proclaimed such a doctrine; the earliest form of the Eleusinia may have been that of a secret society organised for agrarian purposes. But, on the other hand, there is no proof that the primitive mind of the Hellene brooded much on the problem of death, or was at all possessed with morbid feeling about it; and in pre-Homeric times he must have been freer from care in this matter than he was in the later centuries, if we accept the view of certain scholars that the elaborate ritual of ‘Katharsis’ or purification, which was mainly dependent on the idea of the impurity of death, ghosts and bloodshed, was wholly the creation of post-Homeric days.
Earliest ritual of purification.—It has been even said that the very idea of the need of purification on special occasions was unknown to Homer. This is demonstrably false; it is enough to mention one passage alone: at the close of the first book of the Iliad, the Achæans at Agamemnon’s bidding, purify themselves from the plague, and throw the infected media of purification into the sea; this is a religious lustration. And when Hesiod mentions the rule that a man returning from an ‘ill-omened’ funeral could not without peril attempt to beget a child on that day,39.1 he happens to be the first literary witness to the Greek tabu of death; but we may be sure that he is giving us a tradition of indefinite age, and that the ‘Achæan’ society, of which Homer is supposed to be the spokesman, had some of the Kathartic rules and superstitions that are found broadcast in later Greece. It may not have elaborated or laid marked stress on them; it may have had no strong sense of the impurity of homicide nor devised any special code for its expiation. But if it was entirely without any instinctive feeling for the impurity of birth and death, and for the danger of the ‘miasma’ arising from certain acts and states, it was almost unique among the races of man. Only, a progressive people does not overstrain such feelings.
Such a religion as has been sketched might accord with a high social and political morality. On the other hand, it would not be likely to foster and consecrate certain mental moods, ennobled by Christian ethic, such as ‘fear of God,’ humility, faith. Never in the free periods of Greek history was ‘deisidaimonia’ (‘fear of divine powers’) regarded as a virtue, but rather as a vice or weakness. The Hellene was humble in his attitude to God only in the sense that he disliked overweening acts and speech of self-glorification; the phrase, δοῦλος τοῦ θεοῦ, ‘slave of God,’ common in early Christian documents, would be as repugnant to the Hellene as would be the ecstasy of self-abasement congenial to the Babylonian and the Christian religions. As for the Pauline use of the word πίστις, ‘faith,’ its value for religious morality would have been unintelligible for the earlier Greek.40.1
Cruder religious conceptions in the earliest period.—So far, the religious phenomena discoverable with some certainty or some probability in the earliest period of Greek history indicate a theistic system of a somewhat advanced type. But doubtless we must reckon with the presence of much else that was cruder and more savage. When we find in the later records ample evidence of the lower products of the religious imagination, the products of ‘animism’ or ‘fetichism’ or ‘theriomorphism’ or ‘polydaimonism,’ more inarticulate and uncouth embodiments of the concept of divinity, or darker and more cruel ritual than that which Homer describes, such as human sacrifice, the driving out of the scapegoat, blood-magic for controlling winds or finding water, no reasonable critic will call all these things post-Homeric because they may not be mentioned in Homer, or suppose that the pure-minded Hellenes were seduced into borrowing them from the Orientals, or that they were spontaneous products of a later degenerate age. The view taken of them by those who have in recent times applied comparative Anthropology to the study of Hellenism is the only one that is possible on the whole; these things are a surviving tradition of a mode of religious thought and feeling proper to the aboriginal ancestors of the Hellenic race, or immemorial indigenous products of the soil upon which that race grew up. There is no cataclysm in the religious history of Greece, no violent breach with its past, no destruction of primitive forms at the advent of a higher enlightenment; no fanatic prophet arose, and the protests of philosophy were comparatively gentle and ineffective. Only a few religious forms of an undeveloped society that might shock a more civilised conscience were gradually abandoned; most of them were tolerated, some in a moribund condition, under a more advanced religion, with which they might be seen to clash if any one cared to reason about them. Therefore a chapter or a statement in Pausanias may really be a record of the pre-Homeric age; and in this way we can supplement the partial picture that has been given above.
Animal-Gods and Animal-worship.—The anthropomorphic principle, which is not necessarily the highest upon which a personal theism could be constructed, is the main force of the higher life of Hellenic polytheism. We may believe that it had begun to work before Homer, but not predominantly or with sufficient effect to produce a stable anthropomorphism in religion. Some worship of animals which is called ‘theriolatry,’ some beliefs in the animal-incarnations of the divinity, were certainly in vogue. A few of the more ancient cult-titles would be evidence sufficient, apart from the later records. One of the most significant and oldest is Λύκειος, an epithet of Apollo marking his association with wolves; we find also that in many legends and even occasionally in ritual the wolf appears as his sacred animal. These facts point back to a period when Apollo was still the hunter-god of the wild wood, and was regarded as occasionally incarnate in the beast of the wild. We have also a few indications of direct reverence being paid to the wolf, apart from its connection with any god.42.1 Another salient example either of theriolatry or theriomorphic god-cult is snake-worship, proved to have existed in the earliest epoch of the Delphic religion, and in vogue according to later records in Epirus and Macedonia. It may have been reverenced in its own right, or as the incarnation of some personal divinity or hero, as we find it later attached to the chthonian deities, to the Earth-Mother, Zeus Κτήσιος and Μειλίχιος,42.2 Asklepios, and to the buried hero or heroine, such as Erechtheus, Kychreus. We have also reasons for assuming a very early cult of a Bear-Artemis in Attica43.1 and Arcadia; and many other examples of similar phenomena will be found in a treatise on the subject by De Visser.43.2 Later Arcadia was full of the products and of the tradition of this early mode of religious imagination; besides the horse-headed Demeter at Thigaleia, we hear of the worship at the same place of a goddess called Eurynome, represented as half-woman, half-fish; and bronze figures, belonging to the Roman period, have been found at Lykosoura in Arcadia, apparently representations of divinities partly theriomorphic.43.3
The first anthropologists who dealt with the primitive forms of Hellenic religion read this special set of phenomena in the light of totemism; but progressive students have now abandoned the totemistic hypothesis, on the ground that there is little or no trace of Totemism in any Greek or any Aryan Society, and that theriolatry, or the direct worship of animals, needs no such explanation. Also, as I have recently pointed out elsewhere,43.4 the theriomorphic concept of divinity can and frequently does co-exist at certain periods and in certain peoples with the anthropomorphic; nor can we say with assurance that in the mental history of our race the former is prior to the latter, or that generally the anthropomorphic was evolved from the animal-god.
Functional Deities: polydæmonism.—In attempting to penetrate the pre-Homeric past, we have to reckon with another phenomenon which, though revealed in later records only, has certainly a primitive character and has been regarded as belonging to an age when the concept of definite complex personalities, such as θεοί, had not yet arisen. It was Usener44.1 who first called attention to a large number of local cults of personages unknown to myth or general literature and designated, not by what are called proper names, such as Hermes, Apollo, Zeus, but by transparent adjectival names, expressing a particular quality or function or activity, to which the essence of the divine power in each case was limited: such, for instance, are Ἔχετλος Ἐχετλαῖος ἤρως, Κυαμίτης, Εὔνοστος, being nothing more, respectively, than the hero of the ploughshare at Marathon, the ‘hero who makes the beans grow’ on the sacred way to Eleusis, ‘the hero who gives the good return of corn’ at Tanagra; for these he invented the term, ‘Sonder-Götter,’ meaning deities of a single function only; and to those of them to whom only a momentary function and therefore only a momentary existence seemed to appertain, he applied the term ‘Augenblick-Götter,’ ‘Momentary Gods’; an Hellenic example of this type might be ‘Μυίαγρος,’ ‘Fly-chaser,’ in Arcadia, and Elis, who at the sacrifice to Athena or Zeus was called upon to chase away the flies that would worry the sacrificers, and who only existed for the purpose and at the time of that call.
We may compare also, for vagueness and inchoateness of personality, certain aggregates of deities having no definite single existence, but grouped by some adjectival functional name, such as θεοὶ Ἀποτροπαῖοι, ‘the deities that avert evil,’ at Sikyon,44.2 θεαὶ Γενετυλλίδες, the goddesses of birth, in Attica,45.1 the θεαὶ Πραξιδίκαι, the goddesses of just requital, at Haliartos.45.2 Such forms seem to hover on the confines of ‘polydaimonism,’ and to be the products of an embryonic perception of divinity, cruder and dimmer than the robust and bright creations of the Hellenic polytheism, to which so rich a mythology and so manifold a personality attached. And another fact seems to fall into line with these; in some cult-centres the deity, though personally and anthropomorphically conceived, might only be designated by some vague descriptive title, like ὁ θεός and ἡ θεά, as occasionally at Eleusis, or ‘Despoina,’ ‘the Mistress,’ the Goddess of Arcadia, or ‘Παρθένος’, the ‘Virgin,’ on the coast of Caria, and in the Chersonnese; even as late as the time of Pausanias the men of Boulis in Phokis never called their highest God45.3 by any other name than ὁ Μέγιστος, ‘the Greatest.’ And it has been thought that the well-known statement of Herodotus that the Pelasgians had no names for their divinities was based on some such facts as these.
The importance of these phenomena would be all the greater if Usener’s theory were true that they represent the crude material out of which much of Greek polytheism has grown.45.4 But in any case they claim mention here, because they are the products of a mental operation or instinct that must have been operative in the earliest period of Hellenic religion.
Animism or animatism.—In another set of facts, also attested by later records, we may discern the surviving addition of an animistic period. A large part of the Hellenic, as of other religions, reflects man’s relation and feeling towards the world of nature, his dependence on the fruits of the earth, the winds, the waters, and the phenomena of the sky. The trend of the higher polytheism in the Hellenic mind was to set the personal divinity above and outside these things, which he or she directs as an intellectual will-power. But we have sufficient evidence of another point of view which is that of more primitive religion, from which the deity is imagined as essentially immanent in the thing, not as a distinct personality emerging and separable from it. The Arcadians who worshipped ‘Zeus Keraunos,’46.1 or ‘Zeus-Thunder,’ at Mantineia, or the people at Gythion in Laconia, who called a sacred meteoric stone, ‘Zeus Καππώτας,’46.2 ‘the fallen Zeus,’ or the Athenians who worshipped ‘Demeter χλόη,’ ‘Demeter Green Verdure,’46.3 reveal in these strange titles an attitude of mind that is midway between ‘animatism,’ that religious perception of each striking thing or phenomenon in nature as in itself mysteriously alive and divine, and ‘theism’ which imagines it controlled by a personal deity. At the stage when Demeter could be named and perceived as ‘Chloe,’ ‘Verdure,’ the anthropomorphic conception of divinity, though certainly existing, was not yet stable or crystallised.
But there are other cult-facts reported to us of a still cruder type that seem to reveal animatism pure and simple and the infancy of the Hellenic mind. The Arcadians,47.1 always the most conservative and backward among the Hellenes, in their colony of Trapezus, ‘offered sacrifice to the lightning and thunder and storms’; it seems that for them these things were animate and divine directly, just as the Air—Bedu—was for the Macedonians. Again, through all the periods of Hellenic religion, the worship of rivers and springs only at certain points approached the borders of theism; sometimes offerings were flung directly into the water, and prayer might be made ‘into the water’—we must not say ‘to the river-god,’ but to the divine water.47.2