§ 4
A profound and compelling tendency of the human mind must have been the source of the great religious movement that could succeed in establishing, with the ecstatic prophecy of the Delphic priestess, a seed of mysticism in the very heart of Greek religion. The introduction of ekstasis into the ordered stability of the Delphic mode of religion was only a symptom of that religious movement and not its cause. But now, confirmed by the god himself, and by the experience which the mantic practice seemed to make so evident, the new belief, so long familiar to Dionysiac religion and worship, must have at last invaded the older and original type of Greek religion, and taken hold of it in spite of that religion’s natural antipathy to anything of the kind. And this belief was that a highly exalted state of feeling could raise man above the normal level of his limited, everyday consciousness, and could elevate him to heights of vision and knowledge unlimited; that, further, to the human soul it was not denied, in very truth and not in vain fancy, to live for a moment the life of divinity. This belief is the fountain-head of all mysticism, and tradition still records a few traces of the way in which it grew and spread at that time. [292]
It is true that the formal and official worship of the gods in Greece (where their cults were not obviously affected by foreign influence) remained as fast-bound as ever within the confines of order and lucidity. We hear very little of the entrance of ecstatic exaltation into the constitution of the older cults.[56] The irresistible religious impulse to such things found an outlet through other channels. Men and women began to appear who on their own initiative began to act as intermediaries between the gods and the needs of individual men. They were natures, we must suppose, of unusual susceptibility to “enthusiastic” exaltation; having a strange capacity for projecting themselves into the infinite. Nothing in the organization of Greek religion prevented such men and women, if they could not obtain authority from any religious community of the state itself, from acquiring a real influence in religious matters simply from their own experience of divine favour,[57] their own inward communion with divine powers.
In the darkness and ferment of this period of growth, from the eighth to the sixth centuries, we can vaguely discern many such shadowy figures; they look uncommonly like those strange products of the earliest infancy of Christianity when prophets, ascetics, and exorcists wandered from land to land, called to their work by nothing but the immediate grace of god (χάρισμα), and not attached to any permanent religious community. It is true that what we hear of Sibyls and Bakides—men and women who wandered from land to land prophesying the future, independently of and uncommissioned by any particular oracular institute—is mostly legend; but these are the sort of legends that preserve real historical tradition condensed into single types and pictures. The nomenclature itself tells us much: Sibyls and Bakides are not individual names, but titles belonging to various types[58] of ecstatic prophet, and we are entitled to suppose that the types so named once existed. The appearance in many places of Greek Asia Minor and the old mainland of Greece of such divinely inspired prophets is among the distinguishing marks of a clearly defined period in Greek history; the age of promise that came immediately before the philosophic period of Greece. The later age, entirely given up as it was to the pursuit of philosophic enlightenment, made so little claim to the inheritance in their own time of the divine favour that had once enabled the Sibyls and Bakides to see their visions and utter their wisdom, that there actually began to appear in large numbers prophets at second-hand, who were satisfied [293] with preserving the traditional wisdom of the inspired prophets of the past, and with the judicious interpretation of their treasures.[59] The age of enthusiastic prophets was evidently a thing of the past. The very literature of Sibylline and Bakid oracles, which began to appear just at that time and showed itself capable of an almost indefinite extension, was itself largely responsible for the veil of myth and legend which completely enveloped the original bearers of the prophetic title. Earlier and earlier became the historic events of the past which they had foretold; further and further into the mythical past, before the time of the events prophesied, receded the imaginary period of the great prophets.[60] In spite of which the scientific chronologists of antiquity, who were far from being imposed upon by the delusive anticipations of prophetic poems, found reason for fixing the date of particular Sibyls—which means for our purpose the whole prophetic age of Greece—in the fully historical period of the eighth and seventh centuries.[61]
We may recognize, in what we hear of these prophets, the shadowy representatives of a once real and living past; they are reminiscences of a striking and therefore never quite forgotten phase of Greek religious life. The Bakids and Sibyls were independent agents—though not entirely without connexion with the regular worship of the gods, they were not attached to any particular temple—who wandered from land to land according to the needs of those who sought their counsel. In this respect, at least, they resembled the Homeric omen-interpreters,[62] and continued their work; but they differed from them profoundly in the mode of their prophesying. They were “seized by the god” and in ecstatic clairvoyance saw and proclaimed unseen things. It was no academic skill that they possessed, enabling them to interpret the meaning of signs and omens that anyone could see—they saw what was visible only to God and to the soul of man filled with God.[63] In hoarse tones and wild words[64] the Sibyl gave utterance to what the divine impelling power within her and not her own arbitrary fancy suggested; possessed by the god, she spoke in a divine distraction. An echo of such daimonic possession, and of the horrible reality and terror that it had for the possessed, can still be heard in the cries and convulsions which Aeschylus in the Agamemnon gives to his Kassandra—a true picture of the primitive Sibyl, and a type that the poets of that prophetic generation had reflected backwards into the earlier past of legend.[65] [294]