CHAPTER III. THE COMMUNION OF GODS AND MEN. 292-360✦

CHAPTER IV. THE RELATION OF SOUL AND BODY.✦

§ 1. The Modern Greek Vampire 361-376 § 2. The Composition of the Superstition: Slavonic, Ecclesiastical, and Hellenic Contributions 376-412 § 3. Revenants in Ancient Greece 412-434 § 4. Revenants as Avengers of Blood 434-484

CHAPTER V. CREMATION AND INHUMATION 485-514✦

CHAPTER VI. THE BENEFIT OF DISSOLUTION 515-542✦

CHAPTER VII. THE UNION OF GODS AND MEN 543-606✦

GENERAL INDEX 607-617

INDEX OF GREEK WORDS AND PHRASES 618-620

CHAPTER I.✦

INTRODUCTORY.

§ 1. MODERN FOLKLORE AS A SOURCE FOR THE STUDY OF ANCIENT RELIGION.

The sources of information most obviously open to the student of ancient Greek religion are the Art and the Literature of ancient Greece; and the idea that modern Greece can have any teaching to impart concerning the beliefs of more than two thousand years ago seems seldom to have been entertained. Just as we speak of ancient Greek as a dead language, and too often forget that many of the words and inflexions in popular use at the present day are identical with those of the classical period and even of the Homeric age, while many others, no longer identical, have suffered only a slight modification, so are we apt to think of Greek paganism as a dead religion, and do not enquire whether the beliefs and customs of the modern peasant may not be a direct heritage from his classical forefathers. And yet, if any such heritage exist, there is clearly a fresh source of knowledge open to us, from which to supplement and to correct the lessons of Art and Literature.

Art, by its very nature, serves rather as illustration than as proof of any theory of ancient religion. Sculpture has preserved to us the old conceptions of the divine personalities. Vase-paintings record many acts of ritual and scenes of worship. Architectural remains allow us to restore in imagination the grandeur of holy places. But these things are only the externals of religion: they need an interpreter, if we would understand the spirit which informed them: and however able the interpreter, the material with which he deals is so small a remnant of the treasures of ancient art, that from day to day some fresh discovery may subvert his precariously founded theories. Though all would acknowledge how fruitful in religious suggestion the evidence of art has proved when handled by competent critics, none would claim that that evidence either in its scope, which the losses of time have limited, or in its accuracy, which depends upon conjectural interpretation, is a complete or infallible guide to the knowledge of ancient religion.

From literature more might be expected, and more indeed is forthcoming, though not perhaps where the modern mind, with its tendency to methodical analysis, would look for it. If anyone should attempt to classify ancient Greek literature in modern fashion, under the headings of religion, science, history, drama, and so forth, he would remark one apparent deficiency. While history, philosophy, and poetry of every kind are amply represented and, however much has perished to be read no more, the choicest blossoms and richest fruit of Greek toil in these fields have been preserved to us, religion seems at first sight to have been almost barren of literary produce. The department of religion pure and simple would have little beyond an Hesiodic Theogony or some Orphic Hymns to exhibit,--and even these have little enough bearing upon real religion. In short, it is not on any special branch of Greek literature, but rather upon the whole bulk thereof, that the student of Greek religion must rely. He must recognize that a religious spirit pervades the whole; that there is hardly a book in the language but has some allusion to religious beliefs and customs, to cults and ceremonies and divine personalities. And while recognizing this, he must still admit the fact that nowhere is there found any definite exposition of accepted beliefs as a whole, any statement of doctrine, any creed which except a man believe he cannot be saved. How are we to reconcile these two facts,--the constant presence of religion in all Greek literature, and the almost total absence of any literature appertaining to religion only? The answer to this question must be sought in the character of the religion itself.

Greek religion differed from the chief now existing religions of the world in its origin and development. It had no founder. Its sanction was not the ipse dixit of some inspired teacher. It possessed nothing analogous to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or the Koran. It was a free, autochthonous growth, evolved from the various hopes and fears of a whole people. If we could catch a glimpse of it in its infancy, we should probably deny to it the very name of religion, and call it superstition or folklore. Great teachers indeed arose, like Orpheus, advocating special doctrines and imposing upon their followers special rules of life. Great centres of religious influence were developed, such as Delphi, exercising a general control over rites and ceremonies. But no single preacher, no priesthood, succeeded in dominating over the free conscience of the people. Nothing was imposed by authority. In belief and in worship each man was a law unto himself; and so far as there were any accepted doctrines and established observances, these were not the subtle inventions of professional theologians or an interested priesthood, but were based upon the hereditary and innate convictions of the whole Greek race. The individual was free to believe what he would and what he could; it was the general, if vague, consensus of the masses which constituted the real religion of Greece. The vox populi fully established itself as the vox dei.

Again in this popular religion, when it had emerged from its earliest and crudest form and had reached the definitely anthropomorphic stage in which we know it, we can discern no trace of any tendency towards monotheism. The idea of a single supreme deity, personal or impersonal, appealed only to some of the greatest thinkers: the mass of the people remained frankly polytheistic. For this reason the development of Greek religion proceeded on very different lines from that of Hebrew religion. The earliest Jewish conception of a God ‘walking in the garden in the cool of the day’ was certainly no less anthropomorphic than the Homeric presentation of the Olympian deities: but the subsequent growth of Judaism was like that of some tall straight palm tree lifting its head to purer air than is breathed by men; whereas Greek religion resembled rather the cedar spreading wide its branches nearer the earth. The Jew, by concentrating in one unique being every transcendent quality and function, exalted gradually his idea of godhead far above the anthropomorphic plane: the Greek multiplied his gods to be the several incarnations of passions and powers and activities pertaining also, though in less fulness, to mankind.

It is obvious that in point of simplicity and consistency the monotheistic system must prove superior. As the worshipper’s intellectual and spiritual capacities develop, he discards the older and cruder notions in favour of a more enlightened ideal. Abraham’s crude conception of the deity as a being to whom even human sacrifice would be acceptable was necessarily rejected by an humaner age to whom was delivered the message ‘I will have mercy and not sacrifice.’ In the growth of Greek polytheism, on the contrary, the new did not supersede the old, but was superimposed upon it. Fresh conceptions were expressed by the creation or acceptance of fresh gods, but the venerable embodiments of more primitive beliefs were not necessarily displaced by them. The development of humaner ideas in one cult was no bar to the retention of barbarous rites by another. The same deity under different titles of invocation (ἐπωνυμίαι) was invested with different and even conflicting characters: and reversely the same religious idea found several expressions in the cults of widely different deities. The forms of worship, viewed in the mass, were of an inconsistent and chaotic complexity. Human sacrifice, we may be sure, was a thing abhorrent to the majority of the cults of Zeus: yet Lycaean Zeus continued to exact his toll of human life down to the time of Pausanias[1]. The worship of Dionysus embodied something of the same religious spirit which pervaded the teachings of Orpheus and the mysteries of Demeter, and came to be closely allied with them: yet neither the austerity of Orphism nor the real spirituality of the Eleusinian cult succeeded in mitigating the wild orgies of the Bacchant or in repressing the savage rite of omophagia in which drunken fanatics tore a bull to pieces with their teeth. Aphrodite was worshipped under two incompatible titles: in the rôle of the ‘Heavenly’ (οὐρανία), says Artemidorus[2], she looks favourably upon marriage and childbirth and the home life, while under her title of ‘Popular’ (πάνδημος) she is hostile to the matron, and patroness of laxer ties. It is needless to multiply illustrations. The forms in which the religious spirit of Greece found embodiment are beyond question confused and mutually inconsistent. The same religious idea might be expressed in so great a variety of rites, and the same divine personality might be associated with so great a variety of ideas, that no formal exposition of Greek religion as a whole was possible. The verbal limitations of a creed, a summa theologiae, would have been too narrow for the free, imaginative faith of Greece. It was a necessary condition of Hellenic polytheism that, as it came into being without any personal founder, without any authoritative sacred books, so in its development it should be hampered and confined neither by priestcraft nor by any literature purely and distinctively religious. The spirit which manifested itself in a myriad forms of worship could not brook the restraint of any one form of words.