Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume I Part 25

(2) Plutarch, Quest. Rom. 32.

(3) ix. 8, 1.

These commutations are familiar all over the world. Even in Mexico, where human sacrifices and ritual cannibalism were daily events, Quetzalcoatl was credited with commuting human sacrifices for blood drawn from the bodies of the religious. In this one matter even the most conservative creeds and the faiths most opposed to change sometimes say with Tartuffe:--

Le ciel defend, de vrai, certains contentements, Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements.

Though the fact has been denied (doubtless without reflection), the fact remains that the Greeks offered human sacrifices. Now what does this imply? Must it be taken as a survival from barbarism, as one of the proofs that the Greeks had pa.s.sed through the barbaric status?

The answer is less obvious than might be supposed. Sacrifice has two origins. First, there are HONORIFIC sacrifices, in which the ghost or G.o.d (or divine beast, if a divine beast be worshipped) is offered the food he is believed to prefer. This does not occur among the lowest savages. To carnivorous totems, Garcila.s.so says, the Indians of Peru offered themselves. The feeding of sacred mice in the temples of Apollo Smintheus is well known. Secondly, there are expiatory or PIACULAR sacrifices, in which the worshipper, as it were, fines himself in a child, an ox, or something else that he treasures. The latter kind of sacrifice (most common in cases of crime done or suspected within the circle of kindred) is not necessarily barbaric, except in its cruelty.

An example is the Attic Thargelia, in which two human scape-goats annually bore "the sins of the congregation," and were flogged, driven to the sea with figs tied round their necks, and burned.(1)

(1) Compare the Ma.r.s.eilles human sacrifice, Petron., 141; and for the Thargelia, Tsetzes, Chiliads, v. 736; h.e.l.lad. in Photius, p. 1590 f. and Harpoc. s. v.

The inst.i.tution of human sacrifice, then, whether the offering be regarded as food, or as a gift to the G.o.d of what is dearest to man (as in the case of Jephtha's daughter), or whether the victim be supposed to carry on his head the sins of the people, does not necessarily date from the period of savagery. Indeed, sacrifice flourishes most, not among savages, but among advancing barbarians. It would probably be impossible to find any examples of human sacrifices of an expiatory or piacular character, any sacrifices at all, among Australians, or Andamanese, or Fuegians. The notion of presenting food to the supernatural powers, whether ghosts or G.o.ds, is relatively rare among savages.(1) The terrible Aztec banquets of which the G.o.ds were partakers are the most noted examples of human sacrifices with a purely cannibal origin. Now there is good reason to guess that human sacrifices with no other origin than cannibalism survived even in ancient Greece. "It may be conjectured," writes Professor Robertson Smith,(2) "that the human sacrifices offered to the Wolf Zeus (Lycaeus) in Arcadia were originally cannibal feasts of a Wolf tribe. The first partic.i.p.ants in the rite were, according to later legend, changed into wolves; and in later times(3) at least one fragment of the human flesh was placed among the sacrificial portions derived from other victims, and the man who ate it was believed to become a were-wolf."(4) It is the almost universal rule with cannibals not to eat members of their own stock, just as they do not eat their own totem. Thus, as Professor Robertson Smith says, when the human victim is a captive or other foreigner, the human sacrifice may be regarded as a survival of cannibalism. Where, on the other hand, the victim is a fellow tribesman, the sacrifice is expiatory or piacular.

(1) Jevons, Introduction to the Science of Religion, pp. 161, 199.

(2) Encyc. Brit., s. v. "Sacrifice".

(3) Plato, Rep., viii. 565, D.

(4) Paus., viii. 2.

Among Greek cannibal G.o.ds we cannot fail to reckon the so-called "Cannibal Dionysus," and probably the Zeus of Orchomenos, Zeus Laphystius, who is explained by Suidas as "the Glutton Zeus". The cognate verb ((Greek text omitted)) means "to eat with mangling and rending," "to devour gluttonously". By Zeus Laphystius, then, men's flesh was gorged in this distressing fashion.

The evidence of human sacrifice (especially when it seems not piacular, but a relic of cannibalism) raises a presumption that Greeks had once been barbarians. The presumption is confirmed by the evidence of early Greek religious art.

When his curiosity about human sacrifices was satisfied, the pilgrim in Greece might turn his attention to the statues and other representations of the G.o.ds. He would find that the modern statues by famous artists were beautiful anthropomorphic works in marble or in gold and ivory.

It is true that the faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth were smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or Africa.(1) As a rule, however, the statues of historic times were beautiful representations of kindly and gracious beings. The older works were stiff and rigid images, with the lips screwed into an unmeaning smile. Older yet were the bronze G.o.ds, made before the art of soldering was invented, and formed of beaten plates joined by small nails. Still more ancient were the wooden images, which probably bore but a slight resemblance to the human frame, and which were often mere "stocks".(2) Perhaps once a year were shown the very early G.o.ds, the Demeter with the horse's head, the Artemis with the fish's tails, the cuckoo Hera, whose image was of pear-wood, the Zeus with three eyes, the Hermes, made after the fashion of the pictures on the walls of sacred caves among the Bushmen. But the oldest G.o.ds of all, says Pausanias repeatedly, were rude stones in the temple or the temple precinct. In Achaean Pharae he found some thirty squared stones, named each after a G.o.d. "Among all the Greeks in the oldest times rude stones were worshipped in place of statues." The superst.i.tious man in Theophrastus's Characters used to anoint the sacred stones with oil. The stone which Cronus swallowed in mistake for Zeus was honoured at Delphi, and kept warm with wool wrappings. There was another sacred stone among the Troezenians, and the Megarians worshipped as Apollo a stone cut roughly into a pyramidal form. The Argives had a big stone called Zeus Kappotas. The Thespians worshipped a stone which they called Eros; "their oldest idol is a rude stone".(3) It is well known that the original fetish-stone has been found in situ below the feet of the statue of Apollo in Delos. On this showing, then, the religion of very early Greeks in Greece was not unlike that of modern Negroes. The artistic evolution of the G.o.ds, a remarkably rapid one after a certain point, could be traced in every temple. It began with the rude stone, and rose to the wooden idol, in which, as we have seen, Pausanias and Porphyry found such sanct.i.ty.

Next it reached the hammered bronze image, pa.s.sed through the archaic marbles, and culminated in the finer marbles and the chryselephantine statues of Zeus and Athena. But none of the ancient sacred objects lost their sacredness. The oldest were always the holiest idols; the oldest of all were stumps and stones, like savage fetish-stones.

(1) Pausanias, ii. 2.

(2) Clemens Alex., Protrept. (Oxford, 1715). p. 41.

(3) Gill, Myths of South Pacific, p. 60. Compare a G.o.d, which proved to be merely pumice-stone, and was regarded as the G.o.d of winds and waves, having been drifted to Puka-Puka. Offerings of food were made to it during hurricanes.

Another argument in favour of the general thesis that savagery left deep marks on Greek life in general, and on myth in particular, may be derived from survivals of totemism in ritual and legend. The following instances need not necessarily be accepted, but it may be admitted that they are precisely the traces which totemism would leave had it once existed, and then waned away on the advance of civilisation.(1)

(1) The argument to be derived from the character of the Greek (Greek text omitted) as a modified form of the totem-kindred is too long and complex to be put forward here. It is stated in Custom and Myth, "The history of the Family," in M'Lennan's Studies in Early history, and is a.s.sumed, if not proved, in Ancient Society by the late Mr. Lewis Morgan.

That Greeks in certain districts regarded with religious reverence certain plants and animals is beyond dispute. That some stocks even traced their lineage to beasts will be shown in the chapter on Greek Divine Myths, and the presumption is that these creatures, though explained as incarnations and disguises of various G.o.ds, were once totems sans phrase, as will be inferred from various examples. Clemens Alexandrinus, again, after describing the animal-worship of the Egyptians, mentions cases of zoolatry in Greece.(1) The Thessalians revered storks, the Thebans weasels, and the myth ran that the weasel had in some way aided Alcmena when in labour with Heracles. In another form of the myth the weasel was the foster-mother of the hero.(2) Other Thessalians, the Myrmidons, claimed descent from the ant and revered ants. The religious respect paid to mice in the temple of Apollo Smintheus, in the Troad, Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos and Crete is well known, and a local tribe were alluded to as Mice by an oracle. The G.o.d himself, like the j.a.panese harvest-G.o.d, was represented in art with a mouse at his foot, and mice, as has been said, were fed at his shrine.(3) The Syrians, says Clemens Alexandrinus, worship doves and fishes, as the Elians worship Zeus.(4) The people of Delphi adored the wolf,(5) and the Samians the sheep. The Athenians had a hero whom they worshipped in the shape of a wolf.(6) A remarkable testimony is that of the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius, ii. 124. "The wolf," he says, "was a beast held in honour by the Athenians, and whosoever slays a wolf collects what is needful for its burial." The burial of sacred animals in Egypt is familiar. An Arab tribe mourns over and solemnly buries all dead gazelles.(7) Nay, flies were adored with the sacrifice of an ox near the temple of Apollo in Leucas.(8) Pausanias (iii. 22) mentions certain colonists who were guided by a hare to a site where the animal hid in a myrtle-bush. They therefore adore the myrtle, (Greek text omitted). In the same way a Carian stock, the Ioxidae, revered the asparagus.(9) A remarkable example of descent mythically claimed from one of the lower animals is noted by Otfried Muller.(10) Speaking of the swan of Apollo, he says, "That deity was worshipped, according to the testimony of the Iliad, in the Trojan island of Tenedos. There, too, was Tennes honoured as the (Greek text omitted) of the island. Now his father was called Cycnus (the swan) in an oft-told and romantic legend.(11)... The swan, therefore, as father to the chief hero on the Apolline island, stands in distinct relation to the G.o.d, who is made to come forward still more prominently from the fact that Apollo himself is also called father of Tennes. I think we can scarcely fail to recognise a mythus which was local at Tenedos.... The fact, too, of calling the swan, instead of Apollo, the father of a hero, demands altogether a simplicity and boldness of fancy which are far more ancient than the poems of Homer."

(1) Op. cit., i. 34.

(2) Scholiast on Iliad, xix. 119.

(3) Aelian, H. A., xii. 5; Strabo, xiii. 604. Compare "Apollo and the Mouse, Custom and Myth, pp. 103-120.

(4) Lucian, De Dea Syria.

(5) Aelian, H. A., xii. 40.

(6) Harpocration, (Greek text omitted). Compare an address to the wolf-hero, "who delights in the flight and tears of men," in Aristophanes, Vespae, 389.

(7) Robertson Smith, Kinship in Early Arabia, pp. 195-204.

(8) Aelian, xi. 8.

(9) Plutarch, Theseus, 14.

(10) Proleg., Engl. trans., p. 204.

(11) (Canne on Conon, 28.)

Had Muller known that this "simplicity and boldness of fancy" exist to-day, for example, among the Swan tribe of Australia, he would probably have recognised in Cycnus a survival from totemism. The fancy survives again in Virgil's Cupavo, "with swan's plumes rising from his crest, the mark of his father's form".(1) Descent was claimed, not only from a swan Apollo, but from a dog Apollo.

(1) Aeneid, x. 187.

In connection with the same set of ideas, it is pointed out that several (Greek text omitted), or stocks, had eponymous heroes, in whose names the names of the ancestral beast apparently survived. In Attica the Crioeis have their hero (Crio, "Ram"), the Butadae have Butas ("Bullman"), the Aegidae have Aegeus ("Goat"), and the Cynadae, Cynus ("Dog"). Lycus, according to Harpocration (s. v.) has his statue in the shape of a wolf in the Lyceum. "The general facts that certain animals might not be sacrificed to certain G.o.ds" (at Athens the Aegidae introduced Athena, to whom no goat might be offered on the Acropolis, while she herself wore the goat skin, aegis), "while, on the other hand, each deity demanded particular victims, explained by the ancients themselves in certain cases to be hostile animals, find their natural explanation" in totemism.(1) Mr. Evelyn Abbott points out, however, that the names Aegeus, Aegae, Aegina, and others, may be connected with the goat only by an old volks-etymologie, as on coins of Aegina in Achaea.

The real meaning of the words may be different. Compare (Greek text omitted), the sea-sh.o.r.e. Mr. J. G. Frazer does not, at present, regard totemism as proved in the case of Greece.(2)

(1) Some apparent survivals of totemism in ritual will be found in the chapter on Greek G.o.ds, especially Zeus, Dionysus, and Apollo.

(2) See his Golden Bough, an alternative explanation of these animals in connection with "The Corn Spirit".

As final examples of survivals from the age of barbarism in the religion of Greece, certain features in the Mysteries may be noted. Plutarch speaks of "the eating of raw flesh, and tearing to pieces of victims, as also fastings and beatings of the breast, and again in many places abusive language at the sacrifices, and other mad doings". The mysteries of Demeter, as will appear when her legend is criticised, contained one element all unlike these "mad doings"; and the evidence of Sophocles, Pindar, Plutarch and others demonstrate that religious consolations were somehow conveyed in the Eleusinia. But Greece had many other local mysteries, and in several of these it is undeniable the Greeks acted much as contemporary Australians, Zunis and Negroes act in their secret initiations which, however, also inculcate moral ideas of considerable excellence. Important as these a.n.a.logies are, they appear to have escaped the notice of most mythologists. M. Alfred Maury, however, in Les Religions de la Grece, published in 1857, offers several instances of hidden rites, common to h.e.l.las and to barbarism.

There seem in the mysteries of savage races to be two chief purposes.

There is the intention of giving to the initiated a certain sacred character, which puts them in close relation with G.o.ds or demons, and there is the introduction of the young to complete or advancing manhood, and to full partic.i.p.ation in the savage Church with its ethical ideas.