Thus in each of these great festivals we find that the Olympian gods vanish away, and we are left with three things only: first, with an atmosphere of religious dread; second, with a whole sequence of magical ceremonies which, in two at least of the three cases,[18:2] produce a kind of strange personal emanation of themselves, the Appeasements producing Meilichios, the Charm-bearings Thesmophoros; and thirdly, with a divine or sacred animal. In the Diasia we find the old superhuman snake, who reappears so ubiquitously throughout Greece, the regular symbol of the underworld powers, especially the hero or dead ancestor. Why the snake was so chosen we can only surmise. He obviously lived underground: his home was among the Chthonioi, the Earth-People. Also, says the Scholiast to Aristophanes (Plut. 533), he was a type of new birth because he throws off his old skin and renews himself. And if that in itself is not enough to show his supernatural power, what normal earthly being could send his enemies to death by one little pin-prick, as some snakes can?
In the Thesmophoria we found sacred swine, and the reason given by the ancients is no doubt the right one. The sow is sacred because of its fertility, and possibly as practical people we should add, because of its cheapness. Swine are always prominent in Greek agricultural rites. And the bull? Well, we modern town-dwellers have almost forgotten what a real bull is like. For so many centuries we have tamed him and penned him in, and utterly deposed him from his place as lord of the forest. The bull was the chief of magic or sacred animals in Greece, chief because of his enormous strength, his size, his rage, in fine, as anthropologists call it, his mana; that primitive word which comprises force, vitality, prestige, holiness, and power of magic, and which may belong equally to a lion, a chief, a medicine-man, or a battle-axe.
Now in the art and the handbooks these sacred animals have all been adopted into the Olympian system. They appear regularly as the 'attributes' of particular gods. Zeus is merely accompanied by a snake, an eagle, a bull, or at worst assumes for his private purposes the forms of those animals. The cow and the cuckoo are sacred to Hera; the owl and the snake to Athena; the dolphin, the crow, the lizard, the bull, to Apollo. Dionysus, always like a wilder and less middle-aged Zeus, appears freely as a snake, bull, he-goat, and lion. Allowing for some isolated exceptions, the safest rule in all these cases is that the attribute is original and the god is added.[20:1] It comes out very clearly in the case of the snake and the bull. The tremendous mana of the wild bull indeed occupies almost half the stage of pre-Olympian ritual. The religion unearthed by Dr. Evans in Crete is permeated by the bull of Minos. The heads and horns are in almost every sacred room and on every altar. The great religious scene depicted on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada[20:2] centres in the holy blood that flows from the neck of a captive and dying bull. Down into classical times bull's blood was a sacred thing which it was dangerous to touch and death to taste: to drink a cup of it was the most heroic form of suicide.[20:3] The sacrificial bull at Delphi was called Hosiôtêr: he was not merely hosios, holy; he was Hosiôtêr, the Sanctifier, He who maketh Holy. It was by contact with him that holiness was spread to others. On a coin and a vase, cited by Miss Harrison,[21:1] we have a bull entering a holy cave and a bull standing in a shrine. We have holy pillars whose holiness consists in the fact that they have been touched with the blood of a bull. We have a long record of a bull-ritual at Magnesia,[21:2] in which Zeus, though he makes a kind of external claim to be lord of the feast, dare not claim that the bull is sacrificed to him. Zeus has a ram to himself and stands apart, showing but a weak and shadowy figure beside the original Holy One. We have immense masses of evidence about the religion of Mithras, at one time the most serious rival of Christianity, which sought its hope and its salvation in the blood of a divine bull.
Now what is the origin of this conception of the sacred animal? It was first discovered and explained with almost prophetic insight by Dr. Robertson Smith.[21:3] The origin is what he calls a sacramental feast: you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the divine animal in order—here I diverge from Robertson Smith's language—to get into you his mana, his vital power. The classical instance is the sacramental eating of a camel by an Arab tribe, recorded in the works of St. Nilus.[21:4] The camel was devoured on a particular day at the rising of the morning star. He was cut to pieces alive, and every fragment of him had to be consumed before the sun rose. If the life had once gone out of the flesh and blood the sacrifice would have been spoilt; it was the spirit, the vitality, of the camel that his tribesmen wanted. The only serious error that later students have found in Robertson Smith's statement is that he spoke too definitely of the sacrifice as affording communion with the tribal god. There was no god there, only the raw material out of which gods are made. You devoured the holy animal to get its mana, its swiftness, its strength, its great endurance, just as the savage now will eat his enemy's brain or heart or hands to get some particular quality residing there. The imagination of the pre-Hellenic tribes was evidently dominated above all things by the bull, though there were other sacramental feasts too, combined with sundry horrible rendings and drinkings of raw blood. It is strange to think that even small things like kids and fawns and hares should have struck primitive man as having some uncanny vitality which he longed for, or at least some uncanny power over the weather or the crops. Yet to him it no doubt appeared obvious. Frogs, for instance, could always bring rain by croaking for it, and who can limit the powers and the knowledge of birds?[22:1]
Here comes a difficulty. If the Olympian god was not there to start with, how did he originate? We can understand—at least after a course of anthropology—this desire of primitive man to acquire for himself the superhuman forces of the bull; but how does he make the transition from the real animal to the imaginary human god? First let us remember the innate tendency of primitive man everywhere, and not especially in Greece, to imagine a personal cause, like himself in all points not otherwise specified, for every striking phenomenon. If the wind blows it is because some being more or less human, though of course superhuman, is blowing with his cheeks. If a tree is struck by lightning it is because some one has thrown his battle-axe at it. In some Australian tribes there is no belief in natural death. If a man dies it is because 'bad man kill that fellow'. St. Paul, we may remember, passionately summoned the heathen to refrain from worshipping τὴν κτίσιν, the creation, and go back to τὸν κτίσαντα, the creator, human and masculine. It was as a rule a road that they were only too ready to travel.[23:1]
But this tendency was helped by a second factor. Research has shown us the existence in early Mediterranean religion of a peculiar transitional step, a man wearing the head or skin of a holy beast. The Egyptian gods are depicted as men with beasts' heads: that is, the best authorities tell us, their shapes are derived from the kings and priests who on great occasions of sacrifice covered their heads with a beast-mask.[23:2] Minos, with his projection the Minotaur, was a bull-god and wore a bull-mask. From early Island gems, from a fresco at Mycenae, from Assyrian reliefs, Mr. A. B. Cook has collected many examples of this mixed figure—a man wearing the protomê, or mask and mane, of a beast. Sometimes we can actually see him offering libations. Sometimes the worshipper has become so closely identified with his divine beast that he is represented not as a mere man wearing the protomê of a lion or bull, but actually as a lion or bull wearing the protomê of another.[24:1] Hera, βοῶπις, with a cow's head; Athena, γλαυκῶπις, with an owl's head, or bearing on her breast the head of the Gorgon; Heracles clad in a lion's skin and covering his brow δεινῷ χάσματι θηρός, 'with the awful spread jaws of the wild beast', belong to the same class. So does the Dadouchos at Eleusis and other initiators who let candidates for purification set one foot—one only and that the left—on the skin of a sacrificial ram, and called the skin Διὸς κῶας, the fleece not of a ram, but of Zeus.[24:2]
The mana of the slain beast is in the hide and head and blood and fur, and the man who wants to be in thorough contact with the divinity gets inside the skin and wraps himself deep in it. He begins by being a man wearing a lion's skin: he ends, as we have seen, by feeling himself to be a lion wearing a lion's skin. And who is this man? He may on particular occasions be only a candidate for purification or initiation. But par excellence he who has the right is the priest, the medicine-man, the divine king. If an old suggestion of my own is right, he is the original θεός or θεσός, the incarnate medicine or spell or magic power.[24:3] He at first, I suspect, is the only θεός or 'God' that his society knows. We commonly speak of ancient kings being 'deified'; we regard the process as due to an outburst of superstition or insane flattery. And so no doubt it sometimes was, especially in later times—when man and god were felt as two utterly distinct things. But 'deification' is an unintelligent and misleading word. What we call 'deification' is only the survival of this undifferentiated human θεός, with his mana, his κράτος and βία, his control of the weather, the rain and the thunder, the spring crops and the autumn floods; his knowledge of what was lawful and what was not, and his innate power to curse or to 'make dead'. Recent researches have shown us in abundance the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning and rain.[25:1] We have long known the king as possessor of Dike and Themis, of justice and tribal custom; we have known his effect on the fertility of the fields and the tribes, and the terrible results of a king's sin or a king's sickness.[25:2]
What is the subsequent history of this medicine-chief or θεός? He is differentiated, as it were: the visible part of him becomes merely human; the supposed supernatural part grows into what we should call a God. The process is simple. Any particular medicine-man is bound to have his failures. As Dr. Frazer gently reminds us, every single pretension which he puts forth on every day of his life is a lie, and liable sooner or later to be found out. Doubtless men are tender to their own delusions. They do not at once condemn the medicine-chief as a fraudulent institution, but they tend gradually to say that he is not the real all-powerful θεός. He is only his representative. The real θεός, tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain. If the mountain is once climbed the god will move to the upper sky. The medicine-chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He has some connexion with the great god more intimate than that of other men; at worst he possesses the god's sacred instruments, his ἱερά or ὄργια; he knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him.
There is therefore a path open from the divine beast to the anthropomorphic god. From beings like Thesmophoros and Meilichios the road is of course much easier. They are already more than half anthropomorphic; they only lack the concreteness, the lucid shape and the detailed personal history of the Olympians. In this connexion we must not forget the power of hallucination, still fairly strong, as the history of religious revivals in America will bear witness,[26:1] but far stronger, of course, among the impressionable hordes of early men. 'The god', says M. Doutté in his profound study of Algerian magic, 'c'est le désir collectif personnifié', the collective desire projected, as it were, or personified.[27:1] Think of the gods who have appeared in great crises of battle, created sometimes by the desperate desire of men who have for years prayed to them, and who are now at the last extremity for lack of their aid, sometimes by the confused and excited remembrances of the survivors after the victory. The gods who led the Roman charge at Lake Regillus,[27:2] the gigantic figures that were seen fighting before the Greeks at Marathon,[27:3] even the celestial signs that promised Constantine victory for the cross:[27:4]—these are the effects of great emotion: we can all understand them. But even in daily life primitive men seem to have dealt more freely than we generally do with apparitions and voices and daemons of every kind. One of the most remarkable and noteworthy sources for this kind of hallucinatory god in early societies is a social custom that we have almost forgotten, the religious Dance. When the initiated young men of Crete or elsewhere danced at night over the mountains in the Oreibasia or Mountain Walk they not only did things that seemed beyond their ordinary workaday strength; they also felt themselves led on and on by some power which guided and sustained them. This daemon has no necessary name: a man may be named after him 'Oreibasius', 'Belonging to the Mountain Dancer', just as others may be named 'Apollonius' or 'Dionysius'. The god is only the spirit of the Mountain Dance, Oreibates, though of course he is absorbed at different times in various Olympians. There is one god called Aphiktor, the Suppliant, He who prays for mercy. He is just the projection, as M. Doutté would say, of the intense emotion of one of those strange processions well known in the ancient world, bands of despairing men or women who have thrown away all means of self-defence and join together at some holy place in one passionate prayer for pity. The highest of all gods, Zeus, was the special patron of the suppliant; and it is strange and instructive to find that Zeus the all-powerful is actually identified with this Aphiktor: Ζεὺς μὲν Ἀφίκτωρ ἐπίδοι προφρόνως.[28:1] The assembled prayer, the united cry that rises from the oppressed of the world, is itself grown to be a god, and the greatest god. A similar projection arose from the dance of the Kouroi, or initiate youths, in the dithyramb—the magic dance which was to celebrate, or more properly, to hasten and strengthen, the coming on of spring. That dance projected the Megistos Kouros, the greatest of youths, who is the incarnation of spring or the return of life, and lies at the back of so many of the most gracious shapes of the classical pantheon. The Kouros appears as Dionysus, as Apollo, as Hermes, as Ares: in our clearest and most detailed piece of evidence he actually appears with the characteristic history and attributes of Zeus.[28:2]
This spirit of the dance, who leads it or personifies its emotion, stands more clearly perhaps than any other daemon half-way between earth and heaven. A number of difficult passages in Euripides' Bacchae and other Dionysiac literature find their explanations when we realize how the god is in part merely identified with the inspired chief dancer, in part he is the intangible projected incarnation of the emotion of the dance.
