The activity of the seer was not confined to foreseeing and foretelling the future. We hear of a “Bakis” who “purified” and delivered the women of Sparta from an attack of madness that had spread like an epidemic among them.[66] The prophetic age of Greece must have seen the origin of what later became part of the regular duties of the “seer”: the cure of diseases, especially those of the mind;[67] the averting of evil of every kind by various strange means, and particularly the supply of help and counsel by “purifications” of a religious nature.[68] The gift or art of prophecy, the purification of “the unclean”, the healing of disease, all seem to be derived from one source. Nor can we be long in doubt as to what the single source of this threefold capacity must have been. The world of invisible spirits surrounding man, which ordinary folk know only by its effects, is familiar and accessible to the ecstatic prophet, the Mantis, the spirit-seer. As exorcist he undertakes to heal disease;[69] the Kathartic process is also essentially and originally an exorcism of the baleful influences of the spirit-world.
The wide popularity and elaboration given to the notion—hardly hinted[70] at as yet in Homer—of the universally present menace of “pollution”, which is only to be averted or got rid of by means of a religious process of purification—this is one of the chief distinguishing features of the over-anxious piety that marked the post-Homeric age when men could no longer be content with the means of salvation handed down to them by their fathers. If we confined our attention to the fact that now we find purification required for such actions as murder and the spilling of blood which seem to imply a moral stain to the doer of them,[71] we might be tempted to see in the development of Kathartic practices a fresh step in the history of Greek ethics, and to suppose that the new practices arose out of a refinement and deepening of the “conscience” which now desired to be free from the taint of “sin” by the help of religion. But such an interpretation of Katharsis (favourite as it is) is disposed of by a consideration of the real essence and meaning of the thing. In later times the methods of Katharsis were nearly always in competition and conflict (rarely in friendly alliance) with “conscience”, with the independently developed ethical thought that based itself upon the unchanging requirements of a moral law transcending all personal will and feeling, and even the will of daimonic powers. In its origin and essence Katharsis [295] had nothing whatever to do with morality or with what we should call the voice of conscience. On the contrary, it usurped the place which in a more advanced and morally developed people would have belonged to a true morality based on an inner feeling for what is right. Nor did it fail to hinder the free and unfettered development of such a morality. Kathartic practices required and implied no feeling of offence, of personal guilt, of personal responsibility. All that we know of these practices serves to bring this out and set the matter in a clearer light.
Ceremonies of “purification” accompany every step of a man’s life from the cradle to the grave. The woman with child is “unclean” and so is anyone who touches her; the new-born child is unclean;[72] marriage is fenced about with a series of purificatory rites; the dead, and everything that approaches them, are unclean. Now, in these instances of the common and almost daily occurrence of purification ceremonies, there can be no moral stain involved that requires to be washed off, not even a symbolical one. Equally little can there be any when ritual purifications are employed after a bad dream,[73] the occurrence of a prodigy,[74] recovery from illness, or when a person has touched an offering made to deities of the lower world or the graves of the dead; or when it is found necessary to purify house and hearth,[75] and even fire and water[76] for sacred or profane purposes. The purification of those who have shed blood stands on exactly the same footing. It was necessary even for those who had killed a man with just cause, or had committed homicide unknowingly or unwillingly; the moral aspect of such cases, the guilt or innocence of the doer, is ignored or unperceived. Even in the case of premeditated murder, the remorse of the criminal or his “will to amend”[77] is quite superfluous to the efficacy of purification.
It could not be otherwise. The “stain” which is wiped out by these mysterious and religious means is not “within the heart of man”. It clings to a man as something hostile, and from without, and that can be spread from him to others like an infectious disease.[78] Hence, the purification is effected by religious processes directed to the external removal of the evil thing; it may be washed off (as by water from a running spring or from the sea), it may be violently effaced and obliterated (as by fire or even smoke alone), it may be absorbed (by wool, fleece of animals, eggs),[79] etc.
It must be something hostile and dangerous to men that is thus removed; since this something can only be attacked by [296] religious means, it must belong to the daimonic world to which alone Religion and its means of salvation have reference. There exists a population of spirits whose neighbourhood or contact with men renders then “unclean”, for it gives them over to the power of the unholy.[80] Anyone who touches their places of abode, or the offerings made to them, falls under their spell; they may send him sickness, insanity, evils of every kind. The priest with his purifications is an “exorcist” who sets free those who have fallen victims to the surrounding powers of darkness. He certainly fulfils this function when he disperses diseases, i.e. the spirits who send the diseases, by his ministrations;[81] when he employs in his purificatory ritual hymns and incantatory formulæ which regularly imply an invisibly listening being to whom they are addressed;[82] when he uses the clang of bronze instruments whose well-known property it is to drive away ghosts.[83] Where human blood has been shed and requires “purification” the Kathartic priest accomplishes this “by driving out murder with murder”,[84] i.e. he lets the blood of a sacrificed animal fall over the hands of the polluted person. Here, the purification is plainly in the nature of a substitution-sacrifice (the animal being offered instead of the murderer).[85] In this way the anger of the dead is washed away—for this anger is itself the pollution that is to be removed.[86] The famous scapegoats were nothing but sacrifices offered to appease the anger of the Unseen, and thereby release a whole city from “pollution”. At the Thargelia or on extraordinary occasions of need in Ionic cities, and even in Athens, unfortunate men were in ancient times slain or stoned to death or burnt “for the purification of the city”.[87] Even the materials of purification that in private life served to free the individual and his house from the claims of invisible powers, were thought of as offerings to these powers: this is proved clearly enough by the custom of removing such materials, when they had served their purpose as “purifications”, to the cross-roads, and of making them over to the unearthly spirits who have their being there. The materials of purification so treated are in fact identical with offerings to the dead or even with “Hekate’s banquets”.[88] In this case we can see most clearly what the forces are which Kathartic processes essentially aim at averting. In them no attempt was made to satisfy a heartfelt consciousness of sin or a moral sense that has become delicate; they were much rather the result of a superstitious fear of uncanny forces surrounding men and stretching out after them with a thousand threatening hands in the darkness. [297] It was the monstrous phantasies of their own imagination that made men call upon the priests of purification and expiation for much-needed aid and protection.
§ 6
It is simply the invasion of human life by the sinister creatures of the daimonic world that the clairvoyant mantis is supposed to avert with his “purifications”. Among these sinister influences Hekate and her crew are particularly noticeable. This is without doubt an ancient product of religious phantasy—though it is not mentioned by Homer—which did not till a late period emerge from the obscurity of local observance and obtain general popularity: even then it only here and there ceased to be a private and domestic cult and reached the dignity of public city-worship.[89] The cult of Hekate fled the light of day, as did the wild farrago of weird and sinister phantoms that surrounded her. She is chthonic, a goddess of the lower world,[90] where she is at home; but, more easily than other lower-world creatures, she finds her way to the living world of men. Wherever a soul is entering into partnership with a body—at birth or in child bed—she is at hand;[91] where a soul is separating from a body, in burials of the dead, she is there. Amidst the dwelling-places of the departed, the monuments of the dead and the gloomy ritual of their worship, she is in her element.[92] She is the queen of the souls who are still fast bound to the upper world. It shows her deep-seated connexion with the primeval worship of the dead at the household hearth,[93] when we hear of Hekate as dwelling “in the depth of the hearth”,[94] and being honoured together with the underworld Hermes, her masculine counterpart, among the domestic gods who “were left to us by our forefathers”.[95]
This domestic cult may be a legacy from times when in familiar intercourse with the lower world men did not yet fear “pollution” therefrom.[95a] To later ages Hekate was the principal source and originator of all that was ghostly and uncanny. Men came upon her suddenly and to their hurt by night, or in the dreamy solitudes of midday’s blinding heat; they see her in monstrous shapes that, like the figures in a dream, are continually changing.[96] The names of many female deities of the underworld of whom the common people had much to say—Gorgyra (Gorgo), Mormo, Lamia, Gello or Empousa, the ghost of midday—denote in reality so many different personifications and variations of Hekate.[97] [298] She appeared most frequently by night, under the half-light of the moon, at the cross-roads. She is not alone but is accompanied by her “crew”, the hand-maidens who follow in her train. These are the souls of those who have not had their share of burial and the holy rites that accompany it; who have been violently done to death, or who have died “before their time”.[98] Such souls find no rest after death; they travel on the wind now, in the company of Hekate and her daimonic pack of hounds.[99] It is not without reason that we are reminded of the legends of “wild hunters” and the “furious host”, so familiar in modern times in many countries.[100] Similar beliefs produced similar results in each case; perhaps there is even some historical connexion between them.[101] These night-wandering spirits and souls of the dead bring pollution and disaster upon all who meet them or fall into their hands; they send evil dreams, nightmares, nocturnal apparitions, madness and epilepsy.[102] It is for them, the unquiet souls of the dead and Hekate their queen, that men set out the “banquets of Hekate” at the cross-roads.[103] To them men consign with averted faces the remains of the purificatory sacrifices[104] that they may not come too close to human dwelling places. Puppies, too, were sacrificed to Hekate for “purifications”, i.e. “apotropaic” sacrifices.
Gruesome inventions of all kinds were easily attached to this province of supernaturalism: it is one of the sources which, with help from other Greek conceptions and many foreign creations of fancy, let loose a stream of anxious and gloomy superstitiousness that spread through the whole of later antiquity and even reached through the Middle Ages to our own day.
Protection and riddance from such things were sought at the hands of seers and “Kathartic priests” who, in addition to ceremonies of purification and exorcism had other ways of giving help—prescriptions and recipes of many strange sorts which were originally clear and natural enough to the fantastic logic of superstition and were still credited and handed down as magic and inexplicable formulæ after their real meaning had been entirely forgotten. Others, again, were driven by a fearful curiosity to attempt to bring the world of surrounding spirits—of whose doings such strange stories were told in legend[105]—even closer to themselves. By magic arts and incantations, they compelled the wandering ghosts and even Hekate herself to appear before them:[106] the magic power forces them to do the will of the spirit-raiser or to harm his enemies.[107] It was these creatures of the spirit-world that [299] magicians and exorcists claimed to banish or compel. Popular belief was on their side in this, but it is hardly possible that they never resorted to deceit and imposture in making good their claims.