Myth, Ritual And Religion, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Andrew Lang

* Op. Clem. Alex., i. 36.
** Compare Heyne, Observ. in Apollodor., i. 8, 1.
*** Bridges, Prometheus the Firegiver.
**** Clem. Alex., L 31.
(v) Paus., viii. 2, l.

The permanence of Arcadian human sacrifice has already been alluded to, and it is confirmed by the superstition that whoever tasted the human portion in the mess sacrificed to Zeus became a were-wolf, resuming his original shape if for ten years he abstained from the flesh of men.*

A very quaint story of the domestic troubles of Zeus was current in Plataea, where it was related at the festival named Dædala. It was said that Hera, indignant at the amours of her lord, retired to Euboæ. Zeus, wishing to be reconciled to her, sought the advice of Cithæron, at that time king of Platæa. By his counsel the god celebrated a sham marriage with a wooden image, dressed up to personate Plataea, daughter of Asopus. Hera flew to the scene and tore the bridal veil, when, discovering the trick, she laughed, and was reconciled to her husband.** Probably this legend was told to explain some incident of ritual or custom in the feast of the Dædala, and it is certainly a more innocent myth than most that were commemorated in local mystery-plays.

* The wolves connected with the worship of Zeus, like his
rams, goats, and other animals, are commonly explained as
mythical names for elemental phenomena, clouds and storms.
Thus the ram's fleece, (————), used in certain expiatory
rites (Hesych., s. v., Lobeck, p. 183), is presumed by
Preller to be a symbol of the cloud. In the same way his
regis or goat-skin is the storm-wind or the thunder-cloud.
The opposite view will be found in Professor Robertson
Smith's article on "Sacrifice" in Encyc. Brit., where the
similar totemistic rites of the lower races are adduced. The
elemental theory is set forth by Decharme, Mythologie de la
Grece Antique (Paris, 1879), p. 16. For the "storm-wolf,"
see Preller, i. 101. It seems a little curious that the
wolf, which, on the solar hypothesis, was a brilliant beast
connected with the worship of the sun-god, Apollo Lycaeus,
becomes a cloud or storm-wolf when connected with Zeus. On
the whole subject of the use of the skins of animals as
clothing of the god or the ministrant, see Lobeck,
Aglaoph., pp. 188-186, and Robertson Smith, op. cit.
** Paus., ix. 3, 1.

It was not only when he was en bonne fortune that Zeus adopted the guise of a bird or beast. In the very ancient temple of Hera near Mycenae there was a great statue of the goddess, of gold and ivory, the work of Polycletus, and therefore comparatively modern. In one hand the goddess held a pomegranate, in the other a sceptre, on which was perched a cuckoo, like the Latin woodpecker Picus on his wooden post. About the pomegranate there was a myth which Pausanias declines to tell, but he does record the myth of the cuckoo. "They say that when Zeus loved the yet virgin Hera, he changed himself into a cuckoo, which she pursued and caught to be her playmate." Pausanias admits that he did not believe this legend. Probably it was invented to account for the companionship of the cuckoo, which, like the cow, was one of the sacred animals of Hera. Myths of this class are probably later than the period in which we presume the divine relationships of gods and animals to have passed out of the totemistic into the Samoan condition of belief. The more general explanation is, that the cuckoo, as a symbol of the vernal season, represents the heaven in its wooing of the earth. On the whole, as we have tried to show, the symbolic element in myth is late, and was meant to be explanatory of rites and usages whose original significance was forgotten. It would be unfair to assume that a god was disrespectfully viewed by his earliest worshippers because ætiological, genealogical, and other myths, crystallised into his legend.

An extremely wild legend of Zeus was current among the Galatæ, where Pausanias expressly calls it a "local myth," differing from the Lydian variant. Zeus in his sleep became, by the earth, father of Attes, Va being both male and female in his nature. Agdistis was the local name of this enigmatic character, whom the gods feared and mutilated. From the blood grew up, as in so many myths, an almond tree. The daughter of Sangarius, Nana, placed some of the fruit in her bosom, and thereby became pregnant, like the girl in the Kalewala by the berry, or the mother of Huitzilopochtli, in Mexico, by the floating feather. The same set of ideas recurs in Grimm's Märchen Machandelhoom,* if we may suppose that in an older form the juniper tree and its berries aided the miraculous birth.** It is customary to see in these wild myths a reflection of the Phrygian religious tradition, which leads up to the birth of Atys, who again is identified with Adonis as a hero of the spring and the reviving year. But the story has been introduced in this place as an example of the manner in which floating myths from all sources gravitate towards one great name and personality, like that of Zeus. It would probably be erroneous to interpret these and many other myths in the vast legend of Zeus, as if they had originally and intentionally described the phenomena of the heavens. They are, more probably, mere accretions round the figure of Zeus conceived as a personal god, a "magnified non-natural man".***

* Mrs. Hunt's translation, i. 187.
** For parallels to this myth in Chinese, Aztec, Indian,
Phrygian and other languages, see Le Fils de la Vierge, by
M. H. de Charency, Havre, 1879. See also "Les Deux Freres"
in M. Maspero's Contes Egyptians
***As to the Agdistis myth, M. de Charency writes (after
quoting forms of the tale from all parts of the world),
"This resemblance between different shapes of the same
legend, among nations separated by such expanses of land and
sea, may be brought forward as an important proof of the
antiquity of the myth, as well as of the distant date at
which it began to be diffused".

Another example of local accretion is the fable that Zeus, after carrying off Ganymede to be his cupbearer, made atonement to the royal family of Troy by the present of a vine of gold fashioned by Hephaestus.* The whole of the myth of Callisto, again, whom Zeus loved, and who bore Areas, and later was changed into a bear, and again into a star, is clearly of local Arcadian origin. If the Arcadians, in very remote times, traced their descent from a she-bear, and if they also, like other races, recognised a bear in the constellation, they would naturally mix up those fables later with the legend of the all-powerful Zeus.**

* Scholia on Odyssey, xL 521; Iliad, xx. 234; Eurip.,
Orestes, 1392, and Scholiast quoting the Little Iliad.
** Compare C. O. Müller, Introduction to a Scientific
System of Mythology, London, 1884, pp. 16,17; Pausaniaa, i
25, 1, viii. 35, 7.

So far we have studied some of the details in the legend of Zeus which did not conspicuously win their way into the national literature. The object has been to notice a few of the myths which appear the most ancient, and the most truly native and original. These are the traditions preserved in mystery-plays, tribal genealogies, and temple legends, the traditions surviving from the far off period of the village Greeks. It has already been argued, in conformity with the opinion of C. O. Müller, that these myths are most antique and thoroughly local. "Any attempt to explain these myths in order, such, for instance, as we now find them in the collection of Apollodorus, as a system of thought and knowledge, must prove a fruitless task." Equally useless is it to account for them all as stories originally told to describe, consciously or unconsciously, or to explain any atmospheric and meteorological phenomena. Zeus is the bright sky; granted, but the men who told how he became an ant, or a cuckoo, or celebrated a sham wedding with a wooden image, or offered Troy a golden vine, "the work of Hephaestus," like other articles of jewellery, were not thinking of the bright sky when they repeated the story. They were merely strengthening some ancient family or tribal tradition by attaching it to the name of a great, powerful, personal being, an immortal. This being, not the elemental force that was Zeus, not the power "making for righteousness" that is Zeus, not the pure spiritual ruler of the world, the Zeus of philosophy, is the hero of the myths that have been investigated.