It was impossible, then, that the cult of the souls should produce out of itself the idea of a true immortality of the soul or of the independent life of the soul indestructible by its very nature. Greek religion as it existed among the people of Homer could not shape such a belief of its own accord, and even if it were offered from outside could not have accepted it. It would have meant giving up its own essential character.
If the soul is immortal, it must be in its essential nature like God; it must itself be a creature of the realm of Gods. When a Greek says “immortal” he says “God”: they are interchangeable ideas. But the real first principle of the religion of the Greek people is this—that in the divine ordering of the world, humanity and divinity are absolutely divided in place and nature, and so they must ever remain. A deep [254] gulf is fixed between the worlds of mortality and divinity. The relations between man and God promoted by religion depend entirely upon this distinction. The ethical ideas of the Greek popular conscience were rooted in the frank admission of the limitations proper to human capacity which was conditioned by an existence and a fate so different from that enjoyed by the gods; in the renunciation of all human claims to happiness and independence. Poetic fancies about the “Translation” of individual mortals to an unending life enjoyed by the soul still united to the body might make their appeal to popular belief; but such things remained miracles in which divine omnipotence had broken down the barriers of the natural order on a special occasion. It was but a miracle, too, if the souls of certain mortals were raised to the rank of Heroes, and so promoted to everlasting life. The gulf between the human and the divine was not made any narrower on that account; it remained unbridged, abysmal. The bare idea that the gulf did not in reality exist, that actually in the order of nature the inner man, the “Soul” of man belonged to the realm of gods; that as a divine being it had everlasting life—such an idea would involve further consequences about which no one can be in much doubt: it would have contradicted every single idea of Greek popular religion. It never could have become widely held and believed in by the Greek populace.
Nevertheless, at a certain period in Greek history, and nowhere earlier or more unmistakably than in Greece, appeared the idea of the divinity, and the immortality implicit in the divinity, of the human soul. That idea belonged entirely to mysticism—a second order of religion which, though little remarked by the religion of the people and by orthodox believers, gained a footing in isolated sects and influenced certain philosophical schools. Thence it has affected all subsequent ages and has transmitted to East and West the elementary principles of all true mysticism: the essential unity of the divine and the human spirit; their unification as the aim of religion; the divine nature of the human soul and its immortality.
The theory and doctrine of mysticism grew up in the soil of an older cult-practice. Greece received from abroad a deeply emotional religious cult, accompanied by practices that stimulated mysterious and extraordinary imaginings. The sparks of momentary illumination struck out by this faith were fed and fanned by mysticism till they became a vivid and enduring flame. For the first time, clearly [255] discernible through its mystical wrappings, we meet with the belief in the indestructibility and eternal life of the soul: we meet it in the doctrines of a mystical sect which united in the worship of Dionysos. The worship of Dionysos must have sown the first seed of the belief in an immortal life of the soul. To explain how this may have happened; to make clear to the mind of the reader how the essence and inner reality of that worship was bound to stir up the belief in an immortal life—such is our next task.
§ 2
In the spiritual life of men and nations, it is not by any means the extravagant or, in one sense or another, the abnormal that is most difficult for our sympathetic understanding to grasp. By clinging to a traditional and too narrow formula for the Greek spirit we make difficulties for ourselves; but it is not really a matter of serious perplexity, if we reflect upon it, to understand how Greek religion at the height of its development regarded “madness” (μανία) as a religious phenomenon of wide-reaching importance. Madness, in this sense, is a temporary destruction of physical balance, a condition in which the self-conscious spirit is overwhelmed, “possessed” by a foreign power, as our authorities explain it to us. This madness “which comes not from mortal weakness or disease, but from a divine banishment of the commonplace”[1] found effective application in the mantic and telestic arts. Its effects were so common and well recognized that the truth and importance of such religious madness (entirely distinguishable from bodily disease) was treated as a fact of experience not merely by philosophers, but by the doctors themselves.[2] For us it only remains obscure how such “divine mania” was fitted into the regular working order of the religious life; the sensations and experiences themselves belonging to this condition are made intelligible enough by a whole host of analogies. In fact if the truth were told we should rather have to admit that it is easier for us to sympathize with such overflowing of sensation and all that goes with it than with the opposite pole of Greek religious life, the calm and measured composure with which man lifted up heart and eye to the gods, as the patterns of all life and the patrons of a serenity as brilliant and unmoved as that of the clear heavens themselves.
But how came it that in the character of a single people such extravagance of emotion was combined with a fast-bound and regulated equilibrium of temper and behaviour? The answer is that these opposing features sprang from two [256] different sources. They were not originally combined in Greece. The Homeric poems hardly give any hint of that overflowing of religious emotion which later Greek peoples knew and honoured as a heaven-sent madness. It spread among the Greeks themselves in the train of a religious agitation, we might almost say revolution, of which Homer records, at most, only the first faint essays. It had its origin in the religion of Dionysos, and in company with this religion enters as something new and strange into Greek life.
The Homeric poems do not recognize Dionysos as belonging to the gods of Olympos, but they are aware of his existence. It is true they nowhere plainly[3] refer to him as the wine-god honoured in joyful festivals, but we read (in the narrative of Glaukos’ meeting with Diomedes) of the “frenzied” Dionysos and his “Nurses” who were attacked by the Thracian Lykourgos.[4] The Mainas, the frenzied woman of the Dionysos-cult, was such a well-known phenomenon, so familiar in men’s minds, that the word could be used in a simile to explain the meaning of something else.[5] In this form the worship of the god first came to the notice of the Greeks; this was the origin of all the other festivals of Dionysos that later Greece developed in so many different directions.[6] They learnt to know Dionysos Bakcheios, “who makes men frenzied,”[7] as he was worshipped in his own country.
That the original home of Dionysos-worship was in Thrace, that his cult, popular among many of the Thracian peoples,[8] was particularly honoured among the southernmost of the Thracian stocks who were best known to the Greeks and lived on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Hebros and Axios and in the mountainous country behind—to all this the Greeks themselves bore frequent and manifold witness.[9] The god whose name the Greeks knew in its Greek form “Dionysos” had, it appears, among the numerous and divided Thracian peoples various appellations of which those most familiar to the Greeks were Sabos and Sabazios.[10] The Greeks must have known and remarked on the nature and worship of the god at an early period of their history. They may have met with him in Thrace itself. At all periods they had an extensive and varied intercourse with this country and must in the early days of their wanderings have passed through it on their way to their future home. They may have had further opportunities of knowing it from the Thracian races or tribes who, according to a few isolated legends, had dwelt in primitive times in certain localities of Central Greece. The ethnographical material of these [257] legends was regarded as founded on fact by the great historians of the fifth and fourth centuries.[11]
The cult of this Thracian divinity differed in every particular from anything that we know of from Homer as Greek worship of the gods. On the other hand, it was closely related to the cult paid by the Phrygians, a people almost identical with the Thracians, to their mountain-mother Kybele. It was thoroughly orgiastic in character. The festival was held on the mountain tops in the darkness of night amid the flickering and uncertain light of torches. The loud and troubled sound of music was heard; the clash of bronze cymbals; the dull thunderous roar of kettledrums; and through them all penetrated the “maddening unison” of the deep-toned flute,[12] whose soul Phrygian aulêtai had first waked to life. Excited by this wild music, the chorus of worshippers dance with shrill crying and jubilation.[13] We hear nothing about singing:[14] the violence of the dance left no breath for regular songs. These dances were something very different from the measured movement of the dance-step in which Homer’s Greeks advanced and turned about in the Paian. It was in frantic, whirling, headlong eddies and dance-circles[15] that these inspired companies danced over the mountain slopes. They were mostly women who whirled round in these circular dances till the point of exhaustion was reached;[16] they were strangely dressed; they wore bassarai, long flowing garments, as it seems, stitched together out of fox-skins;[17] over these were doeskins,[18] and they even had horns fixed to their heads.[19] Their hair was allowed to float in the wind;[20] they carried snakes sacred to Sabazios[21] in their hands and brandished daggers or else thyrsos-wands, the spear-points of which were concealed in ivy-leaves.[22] In this fashion they raged wildly until every sense was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement, and in the “sacred frenzy” they fell upon the beast selected as their victim[23] and tore their captured prey limb from limb. Then with their teeth they seized the bleeding flesh and devoured it raw.