Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals

by J. C. Lawson

There are few grounds on which to argue for or against the credibility of this story. Historically Thera along with some other islands is recorded to have maintained the position of a neutral by paying contributions to both sides; but that does not in any way militate against the supposition that a few young men from the island were patriotic enough to volunteer for service in some of the Greek ships which may have touched—perhaps to secure that contribution—at Santorini. The story itself was narrated to me, I am persuaded, in all good faith, and the old man really believed himself to have taken part in the events described. His age would certainly have permitted him to fight as a young man in the revolution; he himself estimated (in the year 1899) that he had lived more than a century, and other old men of the village who were well past their threescore years and ten reckoned him senior to themselves by a full generation; moreover his own reminiscences of the war argued a personal share in the fighting. But whether the savage episode which he described was really a prelude to that most savage war, or some traditional event of the island’s history post-dated and inserted in the most glorious epoch of modern Greek history, is a question which cannot be finally determined. Chronology to a peasant who does not know the year of his own birth is naturally a matter of some indifference, and excitability of imagination coupled with the habit, or rather the instinct, of self-glorification in the Greek character, would account for an unconscious and not intentionally dishonest transference of the stirring events of earlier days to a date at which their narrator could have personally participated in them; there is no one so easily deceived by a Greek as himself, and no one half so honestly. Yet on the whole I incline to believe the story.

Fortunately the chronological exactitude and detailed precision of the story do not much matter. Accurate or inaccurate in itself it contains a clear expression of the view held by the old peasant of the purpose of human sacrifice. ‘We thought things over and decided to send a man to St Nicolas to ask him that our ships might prosper in the war.’ This is our text, and its very terseness and directness of expression prove how familiar and native to the speaker’s mind was this aspect of sacrifice. The human victim was simply and solely a messenger. St Nicolas, to whom he was sent, has supplanted Poseidon, as has been remarked above[916], in the government of the sea and the patronage of sailors; but how he came to be associated with the hall which was deemed a right place for the sacrifice, unless perhaps he had succeeded to the possession of the site of some temple of Poseidon, I cannot say. It is of little avail to press for further elucidation of a peasant’s story. I would gladly have learnt more about the hall now wholly buried but then partially at least visible above ground, into which none the less a descent by steps is mentioned; I would gladly have learnt more about the appearance of God with a bright torch in his hand, and what was the significance to the peasant’s mind of the appearance of God himself[917] (ὁ θεός) instead of St Nicolas to whom the messenger was sent. These uncertainties and obscurities must remain. The only additional fact which I elicited was that the man taken and sent to St Nicolas was in Greek parlance a ‘Christian,’ that is to say neither a Turk nor a member of the Roman Church which has long held a footing in the island. There was therefore no admixture of either racial or religious hatred in the feelings which prompted, as it is alleged, this human sacrifice.

If then the story be accepted, the motive assigned must be accepted with it; but if the story be discredited, the motive assigned has still a value. For even if the old man had deliberately invented the tale and claimed complicity in so ghastly a deed, whence could he have obtained that conception of human sacrifice which furnished the motive of the action? It is inconceivable that he should have evolved the idea from personal meditations on the subject of sacrifice. It is equally inconceivable that he could have obtained it from any literary source; for he could not read, and the only book of which he could have had any knowledge would have been the Bible, to which this view of sacrifice is unknown. The only source from which he could have received the idea is native and oral tradition.

So distinct an expression of the idea is naturally rare, because human sacrifice is not an every-day topic of conversation among peasantry; but such a theory of sacrifice is perfectly harmonious with that chord of Greek religion of which several notes have already been struck. To obey dreams, to enquire of oracles, to observe birds, to hear omens in chance words, to read divine messages in the flesh of sacrificial victims, to make presents to the powers above for the purpose of securing blessings or averting wrath—these are the ways of a people from whose mind the primitive belief in close contact and converse with their gods has not been expelled by the invasion of education; whose religion has not paid the price of ennobling its conceptions and elevating its ideals by making the worshipper feel too acutely his debasement and his distance from the godhead; whose instinctive judgement divides the domain of faith from the domain of reason, and accepts poetical beauty rather than logical probability as the evidence of things unseen. True indeed it is that of all the practices by which this people’s belief in intercourse with their gods is attested none is so remarkable as acquiescence or complicity in murder prompted solely by the belief that the victim by passing the gates of death can carry a message in person to one in whose power the future lies. But all that is painful and gruesome in such a deed only accentuates the more the unflinching faith of a people who, not in blind devotion to custom nor in fear of a prophet’s command, but intelligently and of piety prepense, could sacrifice a compatriot and co-religionist to ensure the safe carriage of their most urgent prayers.

If tragedy consists in the conflict of deep emotions, and religion in obeying the divine rather than the human, few deeds have been more tragic, none more religious than this. In that scene at Aulis when the warrior-king gave up his child at the prophet’s bidding to stay the wrath of Artemis against his host, the tragedy was indeed intensified by the strength of the human tie between the sacrificer and the victim; but blind and awe-struck submission to a prophet’s decree is less grandly religious than clear-sighted recognition and courageous application of the belief that the dead pass immediately into the very presence of the gods. Here are the two given conditions: first, the urgency of the present or the peril of the future requires that a request for help be safely conveyed at all costs to that god or saint in whose province the control of the danger lies; secondly, the safest way of sending a message to that god or saint is by the mouth of a human messenger whose road is over the pass of death. There is only one solution of that problem. And if it is true that only some eighty years ago the problem was solved at so cruel a cost, then the faith of this people in their communion with those on whose knees the future lies is more intense, more vital, more courageous than that of more Western nations whose religion has long been subordinated or at least allied to morality, and whose acts of worship are all well-regulated and eminently decorous.

Human sacrifice is known to have been practised in ancient Greece and the custom probably continued well into the Christian era. What was the motive which prompted the continuance of so cruel a rite? Was it the same as that which the old peasant of Santorini assigned for the performance of a like act in his own experience—that conception of the victim as a messenger with which he can have been familiar only from native and oral tradition? Assuredly some strong religious motive must have compelled the ancients to a rite which in the absence of such motive would have been an indelible stigma upon their civilisation, refuting all their claims to emancipation of thought and freedom of intellect, and branding them the very bond-slaves of grossest superstition. Even though they lived on the marches of the East where human life is of small account, the horror of the rite is in too vivid a contrast with Hellenic enlightenment for us to see in it a mere callous retention of an unmeaning and savage custom; but that horror is at least mitigated if underlying the practice there was some deep religious motive, if a genuine faith in the possibility of direct intercourse with heaven exalted above the sacredness of human life the sacred privilege of sending a messenger to present the whole people’s petition before their god.

But while it is easy to perceive that such a motive is in harmony with that belief in the possibility of the communion of man with God which is so pronounced a feature in the religion of the ancient Greeks no less than in that of their descendants, it is a far harder task actually, to prove that this motive was the one acknowledged justification for human sacrifice. Ancient literature is extremely reticent on the whole subject; the very fact of the existence of the rite is known chiefly from late writers, Plutarch[918], Porphyry[919], and Tzetzes[920]; and anything like a discussion of the motives which underlay it is nowhere to be found. This reticence however was prompted, we may suppose, simply and solely by the patent barbarity of the act; it in no way impugns the latent beauty of the motive. Rather the persistence in a rite which did violence to men’s humaner feelings and moral sense proves the strength of the appeal which the motive for it must have addressed to their religious convictions. There was no place for shame in the belief that death was the road by which alone a human messenger could gain immediate access to the gods; but if a messenger were required to go at regular intervals, the regular occurrence of deaths required murder. This, I think, was the cause of shame and reticence.

Now if this very simple analysis of the feelings which almost barred the discussion or even mention of human sacrifice by ancient authors is correct, we should expect to find that, where death occurred naturally and not by human intervention, the conception of the dying or the dead as messengers to the unseen world would find ready and unembarrassed expression. And especially is this to be expected among the Greeks with whom grief has never imposed a check upon garrulity, but rather the loudness of the lamentation has always been the test of the poignancy of the sorrow. It is therefore in funeral-dirges and such-like that we must look for the expression of this idea.

An organised ceremony of lamentation is at the present day an essential part of every Greek funeral, and many dirges sung on such occasions have been collected and published. In these the conception of the departed as a messenger, or even as a carrier of goods, abounds[921]. A Laconian dirge runs thus: ‘A prudent lady, a virtuous wife, willed and resolved to go down to Hades. “Whoso has words” (she cried) “let him say them, and messages, let him send them; whoso has a son there unarmed, let him send his arms; whoso has son there a scribe, let him send his papers; whoso has daughter undowered, let him send her dowry; whoso has a little child, let him send his swaddling clothes.”’[922]

The same thought inspires a dirge in Passow’s collection[923], in which the thoughts of a dead man, round whose body the women are sitting and weeping, are thus expressed: ‘Why stand ye round about me, all ye sorrowing women? Have I come forth from Hades, forth from the world below? Nay, now am I making ready, now am I at the point to go. Whoso hath word, let him speak it, and message, let him tell it; whoso hath long complaint, let him write and send it.’ And again in another funeral-song a dead man is described as a ‘trusty courier bound for the world below[924].’