Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 25

Moreover, the olive tree is one of the sacred plants of Athene. Now why should this be? Clearly, thinks Welcker, because olive-oil gives light from a lamp, and light also comes from aether.* Athene also gives Telemachus a fair wind in the _Odyssey_, and though any Lapland witch could do as much, this goes down to her account as a G.o.ddess of the air.**

* Op. cit. i. 318.

** Mr. Ruskin's _Queen qf the Air_ is full of similar ingenuities.

Leaving Welcker, who has many equally plausible proofs to give, and turning to Mr. Max Muller, we learn that Athene was the dawn. This theory is founded on the belief that Athene = Ahana, which Mr. Max Muller regards as a Sanskrit word for dawn. "Phonetically there is not one word to be said against, Ahana = Athene, and that the morning light offers the best starting-point for the later growth of Athene has been proved, I believe, beyond the reach of doubt, or even of cavil." Mr.

Muller adds that "nothing really important could be brought forward against my equation Ahana = Athene".

It is no part of our province here to decide between the conjectures of rival etymologists, nor to p.r.o.nounce on their relative merits. But the world cannot be expected to be convinced by philological scholars before they have convinced each other. Mr. Max Muller had not convinced Benfey, who offered another etymology of Athene, as the feminine of the Zend _Thraetana athwyana_, an etymology of which Mr. Muller remarks that "whoever will take the trouble to examine its phonetic foundation will be obliged in common honesty to confess that it is untenable".*

Meanwhile Curtius** is neither for Ahana and Sanskrit and Mr. Max Muller, nor for Benfey and Zend. He derives Athene from the root _aio_, whence perhaps comes Athene, the blooming one" = the maiden. Preller, again,*** finds the source of the name Athene in _aio_, whence _aion_, "the air," or a flower". He does not regard these etymologies as certain, though he agrees with Welcker that Athene is the clear height of aether.

Manifestly no one can be expected to accept as matter of faith an etymological solution which is rejected by philologists. The more fashionable theory for the moment is that maintained some time since by Lauer and Schwartz, and now by Furtw.a.n.gler in Roscher's Lexikon, that Athene is the "cloud-G.o.ddess," or the G.o.ddess of the lightning as it springs from the clouds.**** As the lightning in mythology is often a serpent, and as Athene had her sacred serpent, "which might be Erichthonios,"*****

* _Nineteenth Century_, October, 1885, pp. 636, 639.

** Gr. Et., Engl, transl., i. 300.

*** Preller, i. 161.

**** Cf. Lauer, _System der Oriesch. Myth_., Berlin, 1853, p. 220; Schwartz _Ursprung der Mythol_, Berlin, 1863, p.

38.

***** Paus., xxiv. 7.

Schwartz conjectures that the serpent is the lightning and Athene the cloud. A long list of equally cogent reasons for identifying Athene with the lightning and the thunder-cloud has been compiled by Furtw.a.n.gler, and deserves some attention. The pa.s.sage excellently ill.u.s.trates the error of taking poetic details in authors as late as Pindar for survivals of the absolute original form of an elemental myth.

Furtw.a.n.gler finds the proof of his opinion that Athene is originally the G.o.ddess of the thunder-cloud and the lightning that leaps from it in the Olympic ode.* "By Hephaistos' handicraft beneath the bronze-wrought axe from the crown of her father's head Athene leapt to light, and cried aloud an exceeding cry, and heaven trembled at her coming, and earth, the mother." The "cry" she gave is the thunderpeal; the spear she carried is the lightning; the aegis or goat-skin she wore is the cloud again, though the cloud has just been the head of Zeus.** Another proof of Athene's connection with storm is the miracle she works when she sets a flame to fly from the head of Diomede or of Achilles,*** or fleets from the sky like a meteor.**** Her possession, on certain coins, of the thunderbolts of Zeus is another argument. Again, as the Trumpet-Athene she is connected with the thunder-peal, though it seems more rational to account for her supposed invention of a military instrument by the mere fact that she is a warlike G.o.ddess. But Furtw.a.n.gler explains her martial attributes as those of a thunder-G.o.ddess, while Preller finds it just as easy to explain her moral character as G.o.ddess of wisdom by her elemental character as G.o.ddess, not at all of the cloud, but of the clear sky.*****

* Ode, vii. 35, Myers.

** Cf. Schwartz. Ursprung, etc., pp. 68, 83.

*** Iliad, v. 7,18,203.

**** Ibid, iv. 74.

***** Preller, i. 183.

"Lastly, as G.o.ddess of the heavenly clearness, she is also G.o.ddess of spiritual clearness." Again, "As G.o.ddess of the cloudless heaven, she is also G.o.ddess of health",* There could be no more instructive examples of the levity of conjecture than these, in which two scholars interpret a myth with equal ease and freedom, though they start from diametrically opposite conceptions. Let Athene be lightning and cloud, and all is plain to Furtw.a.n.gler. Let Athene be cloudless sky, and Preller finds no difficulties. Athene as the G.o.ddess of woman's work as well as of man's, Athene Ergane, becomes clear to Furtw.a.n.gler as he thinks of the _fleecy_ clouds. Probably the storm-G.o.ddess, when she is not thundering, is regarded as weaving the fleeces of the upper air. Hence the myth that Arachne was once a woman, changed by Athene into a spider because she contended with her in spinning.**

* Preller, i. 179.

** Ovid, Metamorph., vi. 5-146.

The metamorphosis of Arachne is merely one of the half-playful aetiological myths of which we have seen examples all over the world.

The spider, like the swallow, the nightingale, the dolphin, the frog, was once a human being, metamorphosed by an angry deity. As Preller makes Athene G.o.ddess of wisdom because she is G.o.ddess of clearness in the sky, so Furtw.a.n.gler derives her intellectual attributes from her skill in weaving clouds. It is tedious and unprofitable to examine these and similar exercises of facile ingenuity. There is no proof that Athene was ever a nature-G.o.ddess at all, and if she was, there is nothing to show what was her department of nature. When we meet her in Homer, she is patroness of moral and physical excellence in man and woman. Manly virtue she typifies in her martial aspect, the armed and warlike maid of Zeus; womanly excellence she protects in her capacity of _Ergane_, the toiler. She is the companion and guardian of Perseus no less than of Odysseus.*

The sacred animals of Athene were the owl, the snake (which accompanies her effigy in Athens, and is a form of her foster-child Erechtheus), the c.o.c.k,** and the crow.*** Probably she had some connection with the goat, which might not be sacrificed in her fane on the Acropolis, where she was settled by aegeus ("goat-man "?). She wears the goat-skin, _aegis_, in art, but this is usually regarded as another type of the storm-cloud.****

* Pindar, Olymp., x. ad Jin.

** Paus., vi. 262.

*** Ibid., iv. 34, 6.

**** Roscher, in his Lexikon, s.v. aegis, with his arguments there. Compare, on this subject of Athene as the G.o.ddess of a goat-stock. Robertson Smith on "Sacrifice" in the Encycl. Brit. Aphrodite.

Athene's maiden character is stainless in story, despite the brutal love of Hephaestus. This characteristic perhaps is another proof that she neither was in her origin nor became in men's minds one of the amorous deities of natural phenomena. In any case, it is well to maintain a sceptical att.i.tude towards explanations of her myth, which only agree in the determination to make Athene a "nature power" at all costs, and which differ destructively from each other as to whether she was dawn, storm, or clear heaven. Where opinions are so radically divided and so slenderly supported, suspension of belief is natural and necessary.

No polytheism is likely to be without a G.o.ddess of love, and love is the chief, if not the original, department of Aphrodite in the Greek Olympus. In the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ and the Homeric Hymn she is already the queen of desire, with the beauty and the softness of the laughter-loving dame. Her cestus or girdle holds all the magic of pa.s.sion, and is borrowed even by Hera when she wishes to win her fickle lord. She disturbs the society of the G.o.ds by her famous amours with Ares, deceiving her husband, Hephaestus, the lord of fire; and she even stoops to the embraces of mortals, as of Anchises. In the Homeric poems the charm of "Golden Aphrodite" does not prevent the singer from hinting a quiet contempt for her softness and luxury. But in this oldest Greek literature the G.o.ddess is already thoroughly Greek, nor did later ages make any essential changes in her character. Concerning her birth Homer and Hesiod are not in the same tale; for while Homer makes her a daughter of Zeus, Hesiod prefers, as usual, the more repulsive, and probably older story, which tells how she sprang from the sea-foam and the mutilated portions of Cronus.*

* Iliad, v. 312; Theog., 188-206.

But even in the Hesiodic myth it is remarkable that the foam-born G.o.ddess first landed at Cythera, or again "was born in wave-washed Cyprus". Her ancient names--the Cyprian and the Cytherean--with her favoured seats in Paphos, Idalia and the Phoenician settlement of Eryx in Sicily, combine with historical traditions to show that the Greek Aphrodite was, to some extent, of Oriental character and origin. It is probable, or rather certain, that even without foreign influence the polytheism of Greece must have developed a deity of love, as did the Mexican and Scandinavian polytheisms. But it is equally certain that portions of the worship and elements in the myth of Aphrodite are derived from the ritual and the legends of the Oriental queen of heaven, adored from old Babylon to Cyprus and on many other coasts and isles of the Grecian seas. The Greeks themselves recognised Asiatic influence.

Pausanias speaks of the temple of heavenly Aphrodite in Cythera as the holiest and most ancient of all her shrines among the h.e.l.lenes.*

Herodotus, again, calls the fane of the G.o.ddess in Askalon of the Philistines "the oldest of all, and the place whence her worship travelled to Cyprus," as the Cyprians say, and the Phoenicians planted it in Cythera, being themselves emigrants from Syria. The Semitic element in this Greek G.o.ddess and her cult first demand attention.

Among the Semitic races with whose G.o.ddess of love Aphrodite was thus connected the deity had many names. She was regarded as at once the patroness of the moon, and of fertility in plants beasts, and women.

Among the Phoenicians her t.i.tle is Astarte among the a.s.syrians she was Istar; among the Syrians, Aschera; in Babylon, Mylitta.** Common practices in the ritual of the Eastern and Western G.o.ddesses were the licence of the temple-girls, the sacrifices of animals supposed to be peculiarly amorous (sparrows, doves, he-goats), and, above all, the festivals and fasts for Adonis.

* Paus., Hi. 28, 1.

** So Roscher, Ausfuhr. Lexik., pp. 391, 647. See also Astarte, p. 656.

There can scarcely be a doubt that Adonis--the young hunter beloved by Aphrodite, slain by the boar, and mourned by his mistress--is a symbol of the young season, the _renouveau_, and of the spring vegetation, ruined by the extreme heats, and pa.s.sing the rest of the year in the underworld. Adonis was already known to Hesiod, who called him, with obvious meaning, the son of _Phoenix_ and Alphesiboea, while Pausanias attributed to him, with equal significance, a.s.syrian descent.* The name of Adonis is manifestly a form of the Phoenician Adon, "Lord".

The nature of his worship among the Greeks is most familiar from the fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, with its lively picture of dead Adonis lying in state, of the wailing for him by Aphrodite, of the little "gardens" of quickly-growing flowers which personified him, and with the beautiful nuptial hymn for his resurrection and reunion to Aphrodite.

Similar rites were customary at Athens.** Mannhardt gives the main points in the ritual of the Adonis-feast thus: The fresh vegetation is personified as a fair young man, who in ritual is represented by a kind of idol, and also by the plants of the "Adonis-gardens". The youth comes in spring, the bridegroom to the bride, the vernal year is their honeymoon. In the heat of summer the bridegroom perishes for the nonce, and pa.s.ses the winter in the land of the dead. His burial is bewailed, his resurrection is rejoiced in. The occasions of the rite are spring and midsummer. The idol and the plants are finally cast into the sea, or into well-water.

* Apollod., _Bibliothec_, iii. 14, 4.

** Aristoph., _Lysistrata_, 389; Mannhardt, _Feld und Wold Kultus_, ii. 276.

The union of the divine lovers is represented by pairing of men and maidens in bonds of a kindly sentimental sort,--the flowery bonds of valentines.

The Oriental influence in all these rites has now been recognised; it is perfectly attested both by the Phoenican settlements, whence Aphrodite-worship spread, and by the very name of her lover, the spring.

But all this may probably be regarded as little more than the Semitic colouring of a ritual and a belief which exist among Indo-European peoples, quite apart from Phoenican influence. Mannhardt traces the various points in the Aphrodite cult already enumerated through the folk-lore of the German peasants. The young lover, the spring, is the Maikonig or Laubmann; his effigy is a clothed and crowned idol or puppet, or the Maibaum. The figure is thrown into the water and bewailed in Russia, or buried or burned with lamentations.* He is wakened and kissed by a maiden, who acts as the bride.** Finally, we have the "May-pairs," a kind of valentines united in a nominal troth.

* i. 418; ii. 287.

** i 436.

The probable conclusion seems to be that the Adonis ritual expresses certain natural human ways of regarding the vernal year. It is not unlikely that the ancestors of the Greeks possessed these forms of folk-lore previous to their contact with the Semitic races, and their borrowing of the very marked Semitic features in the festivals.

For the rest, the concern of Aphrodite with the pa.s.sion of love in men and with general productiveness in nature is a commonplace of Greek literature.

It would be waste of s.p.a.ce to recount the numerous and familiar fables in which she inspires a happy or an ill-fated affection in G.o.ds or mortals. Like most other mythical figures, Aphrodite has been recognised by Mr. Max Muller as the dawn; but the suggestion has not been generally accepted.* If Aphrodite retains any traces of an elemental origin, they show chiefly in that part of her legend which is peculiarly Semitic in colour. For the rest, though she, like Hermes, gives good luck in general, she is a recognised personification of pa.s.sion and the queen of love.

* Roscher, Lexikon, p. 406.