The World of Homer

by Andrew Lang

The earlier the period, the more drastic would be the purification. Achaeans, not yet leavened with "Pelasgian" blood and beliefs, could not celebrate what they confessedly did not practise. In their work no later expurgation could cleanse away that which their work could not contain.

Hero-worship; propitiation of the dead; purification of homicides by blood; initiatory ceremonies, mysteries, witchcraft, and so forth, these are practices with which we are familiar in savagery, in barbarism, and, by way of survival, in the rites and customs of the most highly civilised races. They exist in various degrees in different races and societies. In Northern society, as we know it in the sagas, most of these superstitions are comparatively rare. Ghosts were believed in by Gunnar and Grettir; very able-bodied ghosts they were, a kind of vampires. But they were not propitiated, they were met with the steel axe and short sword, or with muscular force in the wrestling match. Their bodies were mutilated and then burned, as in the case of the vampire Glam in the Grettir saga.

There are few, if any, traces of hero-worship in early Teutonic and Scandinavian literature. Of purification from homicide in baths or by aspersions of swine's blood I can remember no Northern example.

The original purpose of this nasty practice is, apparently, to throw the pursuing ghost of the slain man off the trail of the slayer; but the heroes of the Icelandic sagas recked not a fig for the feud of the ghost. "Soul and body, on the whole, are odds against a disembodied soul," in their opinion, hence the absence of the Greek rite of purification by blood.

The Northerners had, doubtless, their various rustic rites and revels, originally intended to promote the fertility of nature. But if they once had initiatory ceremonies and mysteries like savages, these appear to have been forgotten by the time of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas. Witchcraft was an article of belief, but was held in great disesteem. There are legends of sacrifices of kings, but these are somewhat shadowy and remote.

As a consequence, if the Teutonic and Scandinavian people had possessed a great epic poet, working in accordance with the ideas of his people as they existed at the time of the occupation of Iceland, his poem would, I conceive, be as silent as the Homeric epics about hero-worship, ghost-feeding, purification of homicides by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiatory ceremonies, and mysteries like those of Demeter and Dionysus. Of second-sight we would hear, as we do in the Odyssey. The magic would be worked by mortals, not by a fair goddess, Circe. Ravening monsters like Grendel and his mother, in Beowulf, with their refraction in the Grettir saga, and vampires like Glam, would afford sport to the heroes; whereas in the Iliad we have only the Chimaera to represent such monsters, and the Chimaera is alluded to but slightly.

Thus, as regards the whole chapter of the superstitions "characteristic of the conquered races" in Greece[10] (and characteristic of the historical Hellenes and of Athens in her lustre), the supposed Scandinavian epic would be as pure as the Iliad. The absence of mention of hero-worship, ghost-propitiation, divinised mortals, purification by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiations and mysteries, would be quite natural and unaffected.

The poet could not speak of beliefs and rites which were not in the manners of his people. In the same way, and for the same reason, Homer scarcely hints at anything in this chapter of superstitions and usages. Like the Scandinavians of the heroic age, his people had not these things in their manners.

As the oldest Achaean poetry must necessarily have been pure from the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, as the Achaean or Northern spirit ignored what, according to Mr. Murray, it actually persecuted,[11] we need not attribute this ignoring of such beliefs and practices to expurgation in a later age. The Ionians, as soon as we meet them in the dawn of actual history and in the "Cyclic" poems, are believers in ghosts, worshippers of heroes, and they practise purification by blood. People do not expurgate from older poetry the things consecrated by their own law and religion and celebrated in their own poems: things which could not be present, too, in the old poems of the uncontaminated Achaeans. Yet Mr. Murray appears, if I understand him, to incline to a theory that hero-worship, for example, was distasteful to the Ionian cult of the Delian Apollo, and perhaps for that reason was, in early historic times, expurgated from the Iliad. But certainly, given Homeric ideas about the dead, who could not help or hinder, hero-worship did not and could not exist in Homeric society and poetry. Moreover, if the Achaean spirit did "prune away or ignore" such ghostly matters, the Delian expurgators could find nothing here to expurgate. As to blood-purification, Apollo himself was purified, and, in art, holds the purifying pig above the homicide. So purification was "Apolline," and what was Apolline was safe from Apolline expurgation.