§ 7
The mantic and Kathartic practices, together with what arose out of them, are known to us almost exclusively as they were in the time of their decay. Even in the brief sketch just attempted of this notable by-way of Greek religion, many details have had to be taken from the accounts left to us by later ages that had quite outgrown the whole idea of mantic and Kathartic procedure. Compared on the one hand with science, seriously engaged in studying the real and inward sources of being and becoming throughout the world, together with the limitations of man’s estate, and on the other hand with the practical and cautious medical study of the physical conditions of human life in health and sickness, the mantic and Kathartic practices and all the myriad superstitions arising from them seemed like a legacy from a forgotten and discredited past. But such things persisted in many circles of old-fashioned and primitive-minded people, though by the emancipated and cultured they were despised as the silly and dangerous quackery of mendicant priests and wizards.
But this product of the religious instinct cannot always have appeared in such a light; it certainly was not so regarded when it first came into prominence. A movement that was zealously taken up by the Delphic oracle, which influenced many Greek states in the organization of their religious cults, must have had a period when its right to exist was incontestable. It must have answered to the needs of a time when the dawning sense of the profound unity and interconnexion of all being and becoming in the world still contented itself with a religious explanation of what seemed mysterious, and when a few chosen natures were seriously credited with the power to communicate with the all-embracing spirit-world. Every age has its own ideal of Wisdom; and there came a time when the ideal of the Wise Man, who by his own innate powers has achieved a commanding spiritual position and insight, became embodied in the persons of certain great men who seemed to fulfil the highest conceptions of wisdom and power that were attributed to the ecstatic seer and priest of purification. The half-mythical stories in which later ages preserved the memory of the times lying just before the [300] age of the philosophic exploration of nature tell us of certain great masters of a mysterious and occult Wisdom. It is true that they are credited with powers over nature of a magical kind rather than with a purely intellectual insight into the laws of nature; but even in the scanty accounts of them which have come down to us there are clear indications that their work already included the first attempts at a mode of study based on theory. We cannot call them philosophers—not even the forerunners of Greek philosophy. More often their point of view was one which the real philosophic impulse towards self-determination and the freedom of the soul consciously and decisively rejected, and continued to reject, though not indeed without occasional wavering and backsliding. These men must be counted among the magicians and exorcists who so often appear in the earliest dawn of the spiritual history of civilized nations, and, as primitive and marvellous types of the spirit of inquiry, precede the philosophers. They all belong to the class of ecstatic seers and Kathartic priests.
Legend related how, out of the country of the Hyperboreans, that distant Wonderland where Apollo hid himself in winter, there came to Greece one Abaris, sent by the god himself. He was a saint and needed no earthly food. Carrying in his hand the golden arrow, the proof of his Apolline origin and mission, he passed through many lands dispelling sickness and pestilence by sacrifices of a magic kind, giving warning of earthquakes and other disasters. Even in later times prophecies and “purifications”, going under his name, were still to be read.[108]—This man, and also another like him, called Aristeas, were already mentioned by Pindar (fr. 271). Aristeas, a man of high rank in his native city of Prokonnesos, had the magic gift of prolonged ekstasis. When his soul left his body behind, being “seized by Phoibos”, it (as his second self made visible) was seen in distant places.[109] As Apollo’s attendant he also appeared together with the god in Metapontum. A bronze statue in the market-place of that city remained to testify to his presence there, and to the astonishment awakened by his inspired utterances.[110] But among all these examples of the type,[111] Hermotimos of Klazomenai is the most striking. His soul could desert his body “for many years”, and on its return from its ecstatic voyages, brought with it much mantic lore and knowledge of the future. At last, enemies set fire to the tenantless body of Hermotimos when his soul was away, and the latter returned no more.[112]
The greatest master of all these magically gifted men was, [301] according to tradition, Epimenides. His home was in Crete, an ancient centre of Kathartic wisdom,[113] where Epimenides was instructed in this lore as an adherent of the cult of the underworld Zeus.[114] Through a mist of legend and fable we hear of his prolonged stay in the mysterious cave of Zeus on Mt. Ida, his intercourse with the spirits of the darkness, his severe fasting,[115] the long ecstasy of his soul,[116] and his final return from solitude to the light of day, much experienced and far-travelled in “enthusiastic wisdom”.[117] Next he journeyed through many lands bringing his health-giving arts with him, prophesying the future as an ecstatic seer,[118] interpreting the hidden meaning of past occurrences, and as Kathartic priest expelling the daimonic evils that arose from specially foul misdeeds of the past. The Kathartic activity of Epimenides in Delos and other Greek cities was famous.[119] It was in particular never forgotten how in Athens at the end of the seventh century he brought to a satisfactory close the expiation of the godless murder of the followers of Kylon.[120] With potent ceremonies of which his wisdom alone knew the secret, with sacrifice of animals and men, he appeased[121] the anger of the offended spirits of the depth who in their rage were “polluting” and harming the city . . .
It was not without reason that later tradition, undeterred by questions of chronological possibility, brought all the names just mentioned into connexion with Pythagoras or his adherents,[122] and was even accustomed to refer to Pherekydes of Syros, the latest of the band, as the teacher of Pythagoras. The practice, if not the philosophy, of the Pythagorean sect grew up among the ideas and what may be called the teaching of these men, and belongs to the epoch which honoured them as Wise Men. We still possess a few scraps of evidence to show that the conceptions guiding their life and work tended to reach some sort of unification in the minds of these visionaries who were yet something more than the mere practicians of a magical species of religion. We cannot, indeed, tell how far the fanciful pictures of the origin of the world of men which Epimenides[123] and Pherekydes drew were connected with the business and professional activity of these men;[124] but when it is related of Hermotimos that he, like his country-man Anaxagoras, attempted a distinction between pure “mind” and matter,[125] we can see very clearly how this theory might arise out of his special “experiences”. The ecstasies of the soul of which Hermotimos himself and this whole generation had such ample experience seemed to point to the separability of the soul from the body[126]—and, indeed, to the superiority of [302] the soul’s essence in its separate state over that of the body—as to a fact of the most firmly established authenticity. In contrast with the soul the body could hardly help appearing as an encumbrance, an obstacle to be got rid of. The conception of an ever-threatening pollution and “uncleanness” which was nourished by the teaching and activities of those innumerable purification-priests of whom Epimenides is known to us as the supreme master, had gradually so penetrated the whole of the official religion itself with purification-ceremonies that it might very well have seemed as though, in the midst of this renovation and development of a type of religious thought that had been more than half forgotten in the Homeric period, Greek religion was fast approaching the condition of Brahmanism or Zoroastrianism and becoming essentially a religion of purification. Those who had become familiar with the contrast between body and soul, especially if they lived in the atmosphere of Kathartic ideas and their practical exercise, were almost bound to proceed to the idea that even the “soul” required to be purified from the polluting embarrassment of the body. That such ideas were almost a commonplace is shown by many stories and turns of phrase which represent the destruction of the body by fire as a “purification” of the man himself.[127] Wherever these ideas—the precise opposite and contrary of the Homeric conception of the relation between body and soul-image—had penetrated more deeply they must have led to the idea that even in the lifetime of the body the purification of the soul should be prepared by the denial and inhibition of the body and its impulses. The first step was thus taken towards a purely negative system of morality, not attempting the inner reformation of the will, but aiming simply at averting from the soul of man a polluting evil threatening it from without—in fact to a morality of religious asceticism such as later became such an important and decisive spiritual movement in Greece. In spite of all the inadequacy of our information about these Wise Men of the early pre-philosophic period, we can still dimly make out the fact that their natural bent lay in this ascetic direction (the abstention from food practised by Abaris and Epimenides are distinct cases of it).[128] How far, exactly, they went in this direction is indeed more than we can say.
Thus, the ascetic ideal was not absent even from Greece. It remained, however—in spite of the influence it had in some quarters—always a foreign thing in Greece, having its obscure home among sects of spiritualistic enthusiasts, and regarded in contrast with the normal and ruling view of life, as a paradox, [303] almost a heresy. The official religion itself is not entirely without the seeds of an ascetic system of morality; but the ascetic ideal, fully developed and distinguished from the simple and normal religious attitude, was in Greece found only among minorities who cut themselves off in closed and exclusive conventicles of a theological or philosophical temper. The “Wise Men” as idealized in the legends of Abaris. Epimenides, etc., were as individuals not far removed from the ideal of asceticism. Nor was it long before the attempt was made to use these ideals as the basis on which to found a society.
NOTES TO CHAPTER IX
[1] We may safely take it for granted that Διόνυσος is the Greek name of the god, though a completely convincing etymology for the word has yet to be found. Recent attempts to derive it from the Thracian language are not very convincing. (Tomaschek, Sitzber. Wien. Ak. 130, 41; Kretschmer, Aus der Anomia, 22 f.; Einl. 241.) Acc. to Kretschmer a Thracian origin for the name is proved by the appearance of the form Δεόνυσο—on inss. found in a few Greek towns surrounded by Thracian influences, e.g. Abdera, Maroneia. Acc. to him the transition from ι to ε before a vowel is regular in Thrako-Phrygian, while on the other hand “it is completely incompatible with all the laws of Greek phonetics”. Others have disagreed with this view, e.g. G. Curtius, certainly an auctor probabilis, to whom the occasional appearance of the transition from ι to ε before a vowel (side by side with the much commoner reverse process) seemed quite compatible with the laws of Greek phonetics. He even counted Διόνυσος—Δεύνυσος (Anakreon) among the examples of this vowel change within the limits of the Greek language (Gr. Etym.5, p. 608 f.). At any rate Ἐάσων = Ἰάσων, and πατρουέαν = πατρωίαν are certain cases of it (see Meister, Gr. Dial. i, 294; G. Meyer, Gr. Gramm.2, p. 162). Kretschmer himself, Einl. 225, supplies Ἀσκληπεόδωρος, Δεί = Διί. To account for these forms he postulates the influence of Thracian surroundings on Greek pronunciation; but in the case of such a purely Greek word as Ἀσκληπιόδωρος the Thracian influence must have been a secondary phenomenon operating to cause the alteration of the old ιο into εο. Why should we not use the same explanation in accounting for the change from Διόνυσος to Δεόνυσος and (if Thracian influence is to be presumed—by no means probable in view of the statement of EM. 259, 30, Δεόνυσος, οὕτω γὰρ Σάμιοι προφέρουσιν) say that this Thracian influence was a secondary one acting upon the original Greek form of the name Διόνυσος?—It is evident that the ancients had no idea that Διόνυσος (Διώνυσος, Διόννυσος) was the indigenous name of the Thracian god, for they would in that case have said so without hesitation. They derived the conception, figure, and cult of the god from Thrace but not this particular name, which they regularly regard as the Greek name of the daimon whom the Thracians spoke of as Σαβάζιος or otherwise. (So too Hdt. regards Διόνυσος as the Greek name of the god whose essential nature is Egyptian.) This is by no means without importance; on the contrary, it provides cogent reason for doubting the (otherwise insecurely founded) derivation of the name from the Thracian.
[2] The women in Boeotia ἐνθεώτατα ἐμάνησαν (cf. Eur., Ba.). ταῖς Λακεδαιμονίων γυναιξὶν ἐνέπεσέ τις οἶστρος βακχικὸς καὶ ταῖς τῶν Χίων, Ael., VH. iii, 42. Hdt. ix, 34, speaks inclusively of the madness of the women in Argos (τῶν ἐν Ἄργεϊ γυναικῶν μανεισέων), where others speak only of the frenzy attacking the daughters of Proitos. Neither is incompatible with the other; they simply represent two different stages of the story. The μαίνεσθαι which attacks the entire female population is not (as later accounts generally make out) the punishment sent by Dionysos: it is simply another way of expressing the general acceptance of his worship which essentially consisted in [305] μαίνεσθαι (= βακχεύειν in Ant. Lib. 10). The μαίνεσθαι of individual women who try to resist the contagious enthusiasm of the Dionysiac revelry going on around them (e.g. the daughters of Eleuther: Suid. μελαναιγ. Δίον.) is, however, a punishment sent by the angry god when it leads them to murder their own children.—The regular and widespread “mania” of the newly introduced cult of Dionysos is referred to also by D.S. 4, 68, 4; [Apollod.] 2, 2, 2, 5; Paus. 2, 18, 4; cf. also Nonn., D. 47, 481 ff.