TEMPLES. ALTARS. RITUAL. PURIFICATION
Homeric religion is so advanced that we cannot expect to learn from it anything about the earliest origins, or to illustrate it from what we know of the most primitive forms of belief (it would be absurd to look in Homer for any trace of totemism or exogamy). Yet Homeric religion is so far naïf and fresh, in that it is not the work of a priestly caste; its services have not been elaborated by the mummeries of interested medicine-men. As for sacrifice itself, it were superfluous to quote passages in which sacrifice pleases the gods, and is counted to men for righteousness. But it appears that the Olympians valued sacrifice rather as a proof that men were mindful of them, and wished to stand well in their eyes, than for any good they got from the smoke and savour. They had their own nectar and ambrosia.
There were priests and there were prophets, but the State was decidedly "Erastian." The Commander-in-chief superintended sacrifices in the general interest, where the welfare of the host was concerned, and individuals sought the favour of the gods by sacrifices offered at their own expense. These were most elaborate after a theophany, or visit from a visible and friendly god, as when Athene sat at meat with Nestor in his house at Pylos. The rite is minutely described: the household of Nestor and the crew of Telemachus are summoned, the cow is driven up from the meadow; the goldsmith brings his tools: seats are set out, wood is collected, water for hand-washing is brought; Nestor provides gold to gild the horns of the victim, and make it seem splendid in the eyes of the goddess. The son of Nestor, Thrasymedes, holds the axe; Perseus has the vessel into which its blood fell,—whether to avoid making a mess, or because the ground must not be ceremonially polluted by the gore. But of ceremonial pollution of any kind, Homer is ignorant. He says nothing suggestive of a sacramental theory of the blood as apt "to pollute the earth or even cry for vengeance."[1]
Nestor, then, does the rite of hand-washing and scattering barley grain: Thrasymedes hamstrings the cow, which falls; and the women raise a cry, not a wail of sympathy as among the Todas in India. (It may be a cry of joyful vengeance. Odysseus forbids Eurycleia to raise this cry (ὀλυλύξαι) over the blood of the dead wooers.[2]) "The ὀλυλυγή was a joyful cry, uttered by women, especially at the moment of the consummation of a sacrifice."[3] Pisistratus then slaughters the victim; "the black blood flowed from it, and the life left the bones." The limbs are carved, fat is laid on them; the flesh is roasted, cut up, and put on spits; then follows the feast.[4] The same rites are practised on solemn occasions in time of war and in a hostile country, when a whole hecatomb is sent with Chryseis to Chryses, priest of Apollo.[5] We do not hear in this case of the gilding of the horns of the victims,—there were too many of them,—but Diomede promises a sacrifice of a heifer with gilded horns to Athene, before setting forth to slay the sleeping Thracians in the Trojan camp.[6] Sacrifice may be offered in a temple, or at an altar in the open air. Twelve kine are sacrificed in the Trojan temple of Athene,[7] but a temple could not accommodate a hecatomb.
An army in the field has no temples, and does sacrifice in the open air; indeed, even where temples exist there are abundant altars in the open air; for example, where Hector did sacrifice, "amid the crests of many-folded Ida," and at other times on the city height.[8]
Temples are not often mentioned in the Epics, where the host usually worships under the sky, and has no temples of its own; or Odysseus is wandering "in fairy lands forlorn." An army on the march or in the trenches would build no temples, nor would Odysseus find them among cannibals. But that fairy isle, Phaeacia, had its temples of the gods built by the first settler, Nausithous.[9] Altars at the siege of Troy are set up in the field, as at Orleans during the two solemn masses on the day of the raising of the siege (May 8, 1429). The Gods have their groves, whether a temple was in each of them or not. Originally it is probable that caves, as at Delos, or the Dictaean cave of Crete, or gorges, as at Delphi, were the sacred places; but Homer knows the stone threshold of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the wealth of offerings within,[10] where Agamemnon consulted the Oracle.[11] The priest, Chryses, had "roofed a shrine" for Apollo.[12] Apollo, in Troy, had a temple, with a great adyton; and Athene's temple had a sacred seated image of the goddess.[13] Athene also in Athens[14] went to the temple of Erechtheus. Given the circumstances of the heroes in both Epics, an army in the field, a wanderer in unknown lands, the rare mention of temples is no proof that, when they appear, they mark "late" passages, while the altars in the open air mark "early" passages: moreover, hecatombs could not be slain in temples, nor could a large army be accommodated in the house of a god. When the Achaeans were sacrificing several hecatombs at once to Zeus, in Aulis, they naturally could not do so in a temple, but under a fair plane tree, by a clear running stream.[15]
In the symbolical sacrifices that sanctioned the taking of oaths, the rite was extremely simple. Agamemnon cuts the hair from the lambs' heads, utters the appeal to Zeus and all powers to bear witness, then cuts the throats of the victims, and libation of wine is made. Priam carries the dead lambs away in his chariot; but when a boar is the victim, in the oath of Agamemnon to Achilles, it is thrown into the sea.[16] We see no sacrifice within the temple of a city except that in association with which Theano, a married priestess of a maiden goddess, lays a robe on the knees of Athene, while the attendant ladies raise the ὀλoλυγή.[17]
In peace, as in war, Homer's people are free from the lower superstitions, if we except the belief in augury and the omens from the flight of birds. Hector's famous phrase, "one omen is best, to fight for our own country," would have shocked most of the Generals of Republican Rome. A phantasm of the dead, as we saw, may appear only in a dream or a "border-land case," to a man in bed, if the dead man has not been cremated. The boding visions of the second-sighted man in the Odyssey, the shroud of mist about the bodies of the doomed Wooers, may indicate a superstitious belief—to those who do not believe in second sight! The fairies of Homer, nymphs of mountain and well, wood and sea, are creatures of poetry, rather than of superstition; they are fair and frail, but their kisses, unlike those of their kindred from Argyll to the Pacific, are not fatal.
Homer knows nothing of taboos. That the Achaeans "let their hair grow long" is true enough, but does not suggest that they were under a vow not to cut it till they took Troy.[18] The representations of men in many works of Aegean art, such as the gold cups of Vaphio, show them wearing clustering love-locks that fall beneath the shoulder. We might as well accuse the Spartans and the Cavaliers as the Achaeans of wearing love-locks because of a vow. That the Achaeans were tabooed from love during the siege is a fact entirely unknown to their poet. "To every man a damsel or two" is his version, and the heroes couch with their fair captives; while Agamemnon takes a solemn oath that he has never done so with Briseis, and Thetis advises Achilles to rejoice in love. A goddess would not advise the breach of a religious vow of continence.[19]
To the folklorist it is almost annoying to find, in so ancient a poet, so little of the seamy side of folklore. But the later poets of Greece apply it very abundantly: it was rampant in their temple-rites and temple-legends. Homer speaks of no witches, of no incantations save the song for the staunching of the blood of Odysseus, when his thigh had been gored by the boar. The belief in such staunching is still common in Cumberland and in Ireland, as it was when Jeanne d'Arc refused to let the charm be sung over her arrow wound at Orleans.
Magic done for the good of the crops, as in the Eleusinian and other mysteries, does not appear in the Epics. A good king has good luck, under him all things prosper; but the idea of sacrificing an unlucky king, or any other human being, would have surprised the poet. In all such matters he is on another plane than the authors of the Ionian epics, whose tales of constant human sacrifices are perhaps adapted from Märchen (where cannibalism is the horror) rather than inspired by veridical traditions. The great rite which Homer ignores, and which the pre-Achaean population probably, and certainly all post-Homeric Greece from the eighth century to the arrival of Christianity held in most regard, was the purification of manslayers by the blood of beasts. Achilles in the Cyclic poems is purified by Odysseus after the slaying of Thersites; Apollo is purified after the slaying of the dragon of Delphi.
But "the whole idea of pollution as a consequence of wrong-doing is foreign to Homer," says Mr. Monro.[20] When the house of Odysseus is cleansed of the blood of the slain Wooers, and when, on restoring Chryseis, Agamemnon "bade the folk purify themselves, so they purified themselves, and cast the defilements into the sea, and did sacrifice to Apollo,"[21] the pollution is mere physical filth of house and camp. There is no idea of magical riddance from either sin or danger at the hands of a pursuing ghost. Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonica, remarks, in his Homeric commentary, "on the cardinal difference between the religion of Homer and that of later (and earlier) Greece...."[22] It would have been safer to discriminate between Homeric religion on one hand, and Ionian, Attic, and historic Greek religion on the other.
The idea at the root of the purification of a man-slayer by a bath of blood is not, I think, that his sin is being removed by the "sympathetic magic" of new blood, but that the swine's blood poured over him throws the avenging ghost of his victim off his scent, confusing the trail; or that the angry ghost accepts the pig's blood washed from the slayer as atonement. Plato says that the myth held that the ghost of the victim communicates its own uneasy emotions to the slayer, telepathically.[23] Scores of savage and one or two Hellenic practices aim at actually disarming or mutilating the avenging ghost, by binding or dismembering the corpse which he tenanted. Homer believes that, a man once burned and buried, his ghost is confined, powerless, to Hades. Hence his Achaeans neither worship the dead nor practise purification to avoid avenging ghosts. These rites are Ionic, Attic, and, in historic Greece, are Hellenic, also Asiatic. They make an insuperable barrier between Homeric and Ionian religion.
It is certain that among the Ionians of the seventh century B.C. a mystic purification from blood-guilt was the usual practice. Herodotus tells us that it was, in the sixth century, the practice of the Phrygians, Lydians, and, in his own day, of the Hellenes. "The manner of cleansing among the Lydians is the same, almost, as that which the Hellenes use."[24] 3 Aeschylus informs us that the blood of swine was employed in purification.[25] The purifier, in historic Greece, "washed off the blood from the suppliant who is being purified, and, having stirred up the washing, poured it into a trench to the west of the tomb."[26]
Possibly the Ionians had adopted, in Asia, the Oriental idea of pollution and the Oriental mode of cleansing. Homer not only ignores, but knows not these things. Nor, I think, do we find purification in early Celtic and Teutonic and Scandinavian "saga."
We have more light on the method of purification from works of art. On an Apulian vase, Apollo holds a little pig above the head of the polluted matricide, Orestes, with one hand, in the other he grasps a long bough of laurel, which in Roman lustrations had a purifying effect. Melampus, on a Greek cameo, purifies the daughter of Proetus in the same fashion.[27]
NOTE
There is a singular case in which later tradition introduced purification where Homer says nothing about it. In Odyssey, xxi. 1-41, the poet explains how Odysseus came to possess the Bow of Eurytus. When he was but a lad he was sent to recover certain sheep stolen by men of Messenia. He met Iphitus, son of Eurytus, of Oechalia, looking for his lost mares and mules, and Iphitus presented him with the Bow. Thence Iphitus went to the house of Heracles in Tiryns, and there was murdered by his host.
Now we know at first hand, from Nestor himself (Iliad, xi. 685-692), that Heracles, before Nestor's first feat of arms, had attacked his family in Pylos, and that out of Nestor's twelve brothers he alone had escaped. "For the mighty Heracles had come and oppressed us, in former years, and all our best men were slain. For twelve sons were we of noble Neleus, whereof I alone was left, and all the others perished," but Neleus survived.
This feud of Heracles was a famous theme; the legend included the fairy story of Periclymenus, brother of Nestor. Poseidon had given him the gift of taking all sorts of shapes, but when he settled on the chariot of Heracles in the shape of a bee, Athene pointed out the bee to Heracles, who shot it. In Iliad, v. 393, we learn that Heracles once wounded Hades and Hera. The later Pylians conceived Nestor's wounding of Hades to have occurred at their town, when the hero attacked the household of Neleus. Nestor, in the passage quoted, says nothing about the help of Hades on this occasion, but Dione (v. 397) says that Heracles wounded Hades ἐν πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι, "in Pylos among the dead." Aristarchus took this to mean in the gate, in the country of the dead. The incident would be part of the journey of Heracles to hell, to bring back "the dog" Cerberus. On this showing Homer is not saying that Hades fought vainly against Heracles in his raid on Nestor's town. But Homer never elsewhere uses pylos for "a gate."
The affair is confusing, but later legend associated Heracles's feud against Neleus with the rites of purification. Nestor does not tell us, but the Venetian scholiast on his speech does tell us that Neleus had refused to purify Heracles for the murder of Iphitus, his guest, under trust.[28]
Was the Homeric poet of Nestor's speech (xi. 693) ignorant of this "cause of wrath," and is it a later invention after the custom of purification came in; or did Homer "expurgate" a rite which he found in pre-Achaean tradition?
The certain fact is that the society for which the Iliad and Odyssey was composed did not practise the sanguinary rite, and took no interest in it. In Mr. Ridgeway's theory, Heracles is not Achaean, he is Pelasgic. If, then, the poet, whether Achaean or, in Mr. Ridgeway's view, a Pelasgian minstrel of an Achaean lord, adopted Heracles from Pelasgian legend, and if that legend spoke of purification, the poet ignored it, as a thing not in the manners of his Achaean audience.
[1] Mr. Murray takes this view, R. G. E. p. 64; but there is no trace of such ideas in Homer.
[2] Odyssey, xxii. 407-416.
[3] Monro, Note to Odyssey, xxii. 408.
[4] Odyssey, iii. 420-472.
[5] Iliad, i. 447-468.
[6] Iliad, x. 291-294. Mr. Murray compares Nestor's "timid, religious, almost tender sacrifice of the ox" with "the habitual sacrifices of the Iliad," which "seem like the massacres of a slaughter-house, followed by the gorging of pirates." In his opinion Nestor's cow was a kind of member of the family, "the common blood running in the veins of all," while the alien cattle at Troy are not the most distant relations of the invaders (R. G. E. pp. 59-65). Homer knows nothing of these ideas, as we see; all depends on the degree of solemnity and on the occasion of the sacrifice. If it be solemn, the same rites are used in Troyland during war as in Pylos during peace.
[7] Iliad, vi. 308-310.
[8] xxii. 170-172.
[9] Odyssey, vi. 10.
[10] Iliad, ix. 404.
[11] Odyssey, viii. 79-81.
[12] Iliad, i. 39.
[13] Iliad, v. 445-448, vi. 297-310.
[14] Od. vii. 81.
[15] Ibid. ii. 305, 306. Mr. Murray supposes that the author of Iliad, i. 39, is later than the author of Iliad, i. 446 ff. The "earlier" poet of i. 446 makes Chryses sacrifice many oxen in the open air. The "later" author of i. 39 makes Chryses talk of roofing a temple. "The writer of that line did not observe that in his original there had been no temple, only an altar. To him an altar implied a temple, so he took the temple for granted" (R. G. E. p. 150). By such devices is the Iliad torn into tatters, later and earlier. Surely a god may have a temple, though the slaughter of hundreds of oxen is not carried on within its walls!
[16] Iliad, iii. 292-310, xix. 250-268.
[17] Ibid. vi. 297-301. Mr. Leaf remarks that "it is needless to seek for Athenian inspiration" in this passage.
[18] R. G. E. p. 123, for another view.
[19] See R. G. E. pp. 123, 124, for the religious vow of celibacy.
[20] Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 362.
[21] Iliad, i. 311-316.
[22] Miss Harrison, Proleg. Greek Rel. p. 29.
[23] Laws, ix. 865.
[24] Hdt. i. 35.
[25] Eumenides, 273.
[26] Proleg. Greek Religion, 59, 60, quoting Athenaeus, ix. 78, 409 E, who cites two writers on Athenian rites, Kleidemus and Doritheus. Miss Harrison supposes that the ghost drinks the blood of the slain animal, washed off the body of the slayer, in place of the slayer's blood.
[27] Frazer, Pausanius, vol. iii pp. 278, 593.