But we have other evidence too which shows abundantly that these Olympian gods are not primary, but are imposed upon a background strangely unlike themselves. For a long time their luminous figures dazzled our eyes; we were not able to see the half-lit regions behind them, the dark primeval tangle of desires and fears and dreams from which they drew their vitality. The surest test to apply in this question is the evidence of actual cult. Miss Harrison has here shown us the right method, and following her we will begin with the three great festivals of Athens, the Diasia, the Thesmophoria, and the Anthesteria.[14:1]
The Diasia was said to be the chief festival of Zeus, the central figure of the Olympians, though our authorities generally add an epithet to him, and call him Zeus Meilichios, Zeus of Placation. A god with an 'epithet' is always suspicious, like a human being with an 'alias'. Miss Harrison's examination (Prolegomena, pp. 28 ff.) shows that in the rites Zeus has no place at all. Meilichios from the beginning has a fairly secure one. On some of the reliefs Meilichios appears not as a god, but as an enormous bearded snake, a well-known representation of underworld powers or dead ancestors. Sometimes the great snake is alone; sometimes he rises gigantic above the small human worshippers approaching him. And then, in certain reliefs, his old barbaric presence vanishes, and we have instead a benevolent and human father of gods and men, trying, as Miss Harrison somewhere expresses it, to look as if he had been there all the time.
There was a sacrifice at the Diasia, but it was not a sacrifice given to Zeus. To Zeus and all the heavenly gods men gave sacrifice in the form of a feast, in which the god had his portion and the worshippers theirs. The two parties cemented their friendship and feasted happily together. But the sacrifice at the Diasia was a holocaust:[14:2] every shred of the victim was burnt to ashes, that no man might partake of it. We know quite well the meaning of that form of sacrifice: it is a sacrifice to placate or appease the powers below, the Chthonioi, the dead and the lords of death. It was performed, as our authorities tell us, μετὰ στυγνότητος, with shuddering or repulsion.[15:1]
The Diasia was a ritual of placation, that is, of casting away various elements of pollution or danger and appeasing the unknown wraths of the surrounding darkness. The nearest approach to a god contained in this festival is Meilichios, and Meilichios, as we shall see later, belongs to a particular class of shadowy beings who are built up out of ritual services. His name means 'He of appeasement', and he is nothing else. He is merely the personified shadow or dream generated by the emotion of the ritual—very much, to take a familiar instance, as Father Christmas is a 'projection' of our Christmas customs.
The Thesmophoria formed the great festival of Demeter and her daughter Korê, though here again Demeter appears with a clinging epithet, Thesmophoros. We know pretty clearly the whole course of the ritual: there is the carrying by women of certain magic charms, fir-cones and snakes and unnameable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there is a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields. There is more magic ritual, more carrying of sacred objects, a fast followed by a rejoicing, a disappearance of life below the earth, and a rising again of life above it; but it is hard to find definite traces of any personal goddess. The Olympian Demeter and Persephone dwindle away as we look closer, and we are left with the shadow Thesmophoros, 'She who carries Thesmoi',[16:1] not a substantive personal goddess, but merely a personification of the ritual itself: an imaginary Charm-bearer generated by so much charm-bearing, just as Meilichios in the Diasia was generated from the ritual of appeasement.
Now the Diasia were dominated by a sacred snake. Is there any similar divine animal in the Thesmophoria? Alas, yes. Both here, and still more markedly in the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, we regularly find the most lovely of all goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, habitually—I will not say represented by, but dangerously associated with, a sacred Sow. A Pig is the one animal in Greek religion that actually had sacrifice made to it.[16:2]
The third feast, the Anthesteria, belongs in classical times to the Olympian Dionysus, and is said to be the oldest of his feasts. On the surface there is a touch of the wine-god, and he is given due official prominence; but as soon as we penetrate anywhere near the heart of the festival, Dionysus and his brother gods are quite forgotten, and all that remains is a great ritual for appeasing the dead. All the days of the Feast were nefasti, of ill omen; the first day especially was ἐς τὸ πᾶν ἀποφράς. On it the Wine Jars which were also Seed and Funeral Jars were opened and the spirits of the Dead let loose in the world.[17:1] Nameless and innumerable, the ghosts are summoned out of their tombs, and are duly feasted, each man summoning his own ghosts to his own house, and carefully abstaining from any act that would affect his neighbours. And then, when they are properly appeased and made gentle, they are swept back again out of this world to the place where they properly belong, and the streets and houses cleaned from the presence of death. There is one central stage indeed in which Dionysus does seem to appear. And he appears in a very significant way, to conduct a Sacred Marriage. For, why do you suppose the dead are summoned at all? What use to the tribe is the presence of all these dead ancestors? They have come, I suspect, to be born again, to begin a new life at the great Spring festival. For the new births of the tribe, the new crops, the new kids, the new human beings, are of course really only the old ones returned to earth.[17:2] The important thing is to get them properly placated and purified, free from the contagion of ancient sin or underworld anger. For nothing is so dangerous as the presence of what I may call raw ghosts. The Anthesteria contained, like other feasts of the kind, a ἱερὸς γάμος, or Holy Marriage, between the wife of the Basileus or Sacred King, and the imaginary god.[18:1] Whatever reality there ever was in the ceremony has apparently by classical times faded away. But the place where the god received his bride is curious. It was called the Boukolion, or Bull's Shed. It was not originally the home of an anthropomorphic god, but of a divine animal.
