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

by J. C. Lawson

Plato, Symposium, p. 188.

The short sketch which has been given of the attitude of the Greek peasantry towards the Christian Godhead and all the host of assistant saints, and also the more detailed account of those pagan deities or demons whom the common-folk’s awe, not unmingled with affection, has preserved from oblivion through so many centuries, have, I hope, justified the statement that the religion of Greece both is now, and—if a multitude of coincidences in the very minutiae of ancient and modern beliefs speak at all for the continuity of thought—from the dawn of Greek history onward through its brief bright noontide to its long-drawn dusk and night illumined even now only by borrowed lights has ever been, a form, and a little changed form, of polytheism.

Whatever be the merits and the demerits of such a religion in contrast with the worship of one almighty God, most thinkers will concede to it the property of bringing the divine element within more easy comprehension of the majority of mankind. Proper names, limited attributes, definite duties and spheres of work—these give a starting point from which the peasant can set out towards a conception of gods. He himself bears a name, he himself has qualities, he himself performs his round of work; and though his name be writ smaller than that of the being whom he strives to imagine—though his virtues and perhaps his vices be less pronouncedly white and black—though his daily task be more trivial—yet in one and all of these things he stands on common ground with his deities; they differ from him in degree rather than in kind; he has but to picture a race of beings somewhat stronger and somewhat nobler than the foremost of his own fellow-men, and these whom he thus imagines are gods. A single spirit omniscient and omnipotent is too distant, too inaccessible from any known ground. Lack of the capacity to form or to grasp lofty ideals carries with it at least the compensation of closer intimacy with the supernatural and the divine.

It may therefore be expected that in the course of the intellectual and spiritual development of any primitive people, the more accurately they learn to measure their own imperfections and limitations, and the more imaginatively they magnify the wisdom and power of their gods, the wider and more impassable grows the chasm that divides mortal from immortal, human from divine; communion of man and god becomes less frequent, less direct. Such certainly was the experience of the Greek nation in some measure; but, owing probably to an innate and persistent vanity which at all times has made the race blind to its own failings, that experience was less acute than in the case of other peoples. There had been days indeed when their gods walked the earth with men and counselled them in troubles and fought in their battles; there had been days when the chiefest of all the gods sought a hero’s aid against his giant foes; there had been days when men and women might aspire even to wedlock with immortals, and to possess children half-divine. In those days too death was not the only path by which the heavens or the house of Hades might be gained. Kings and prophets, warriors and fair women passed thither by grace of the gods living and unscathed; nay, even personal skill or prowess emboldened minstrel and hero to match themselves with the gods below, and wielding of club or sweeping of lyre sufficed to open the doors for their return to earth.

But those days soon passed; men walked and spoke and held open fellowship with the gods no more; the very poetry and imagination of the Greek temperament so fast outstripped in rapidity of development the growth of material or moral resources, that the rift between their religious ideals and the realities of their life and character ever widened, until the daily and familiar intercourse of their ancestors with the gods seemed to them a condition of life irretrievable and thenceforth impossible. This result was observed and remarked by the Greeks themselves, but the process by which it had come about was not agreed. To one school of thought, it was the degeneracy of mankind through successive ages—the golden age in which men lived as gods and passed hence, as it were in sleep, to become spirits clothed in air, administering upon earth the purposes of mighty Zeus—the silver age wherein childhood was still long and innocent, and, though men’s riper years brought cares and quarrels and indifference to holy things, yet when the earth covered them they were called blessed and received a measure of honour—the bronze age when all men’s minds were set on war and their stalwart arms were busy with brazen weapons, and by each other’s hands they were sent down to the chill dark house of Hades and their names were no more known—the age of heroes who were called half-divine, who fought in the Theban and the Trojan wars, and when the doom of death overtook them were granted a life apart from other men in the islands of the blest, because they had been nobler and more righteous than those of the age of bronze and had stemmed for a time the current of degeneracy—the fifth age in which the depravity of man grows apace and soon there will be nought but discord between father and son, and no regard will be paid to guest nor comrade nor brother, and children will slight their aged parents, and the voice of gods will be unknown to them[787]—to one school of thought, I say, it was simply and solely this decline of the human race, swift and only once checked, that was held accountable for their estrangement from the powers above them.

But such thinkers were in a minority. Humility and self-dissatisfaction were and are qualities foreign to the ordinary Greek. He observed the wide gulf that separated him from those whom he worshipped, but without any sense of unworthiness, without any depression of spirit. He was not despondent over his own shortcomings and limitations, but was filled rather with a larger complacency in the thought that, incapable though he might be to reproduce actually in his own life and character much of the beauty and nobility of his gods, he was so gifted in mind and godlike in understanding, that in his moments of highest imagination and most spiritual exaltation he could soar to that loftier plane whereon was enacted all the divine life, and could visualise his gods and feel the closeness of their presence. The motive of the highest acts of Greek worship seems to have been not the self-abasement of the worshipper and the glorification of the worshipped, but rather an obliteration of the distinctions between man and god, and a temporary attainment by the human of spiritual equality and companionship with the divine. The votary of Bacchus in his hours of wildest ecstacy enjoyed so completely this sense of equality and of real union with the god, that even to others it seemed fitting that he should be called by the god’s own name[788].

But the hours, in which the Greeks of the historical age attained by a sort of religious frenzy such intimacy with their gods as their ancestors were famed to have enjoyed all their life long, were few and far between. The means of communion had become in general less direct, less personal. Yet even so the desire for communion continued unabated, and the belief in it still pervaded every phase of life. Intellectual progress had curiously little effect upon the dominant religious ideas. A strongly conservative attachment to ancient tradition and custom was strangely blended with that progressive spirit which made the intellectual development of the Athenians unique in its swiftness, as in its scope, among all peoples known to history. Their minds welcomed new speculations, new doctrines; but their hearts clung to the old unreasonable faith. Ancestral ideas remained for them the sole foundation of religion. Each poet or philosopher in drama or in dialogue, each man in his own heart, was free to build upon it and to ornament his superstructure as he would; and his work found a certain sanction in the appeal which it made to other men’s sense of truth and of beauty. But for the foundation the fiat of antiquity had been pronounced and was immutable. Plato’s reasoned exposition of the soul’s immortality culminates in an Apocalypse ratified by the old mythology; and a quotation from Homer ever served to quash or to confirm the subtlest argument.

That the foundation-stone was not, in the estimate of reason, well and truly laid, that the basis of religion was insecure, must have been obvious to many. Pindar saw it, and, by refusing to impute to the gods any deed or purpose which his own heart condemned as ungodly, strove to repair its defects; Euripides too saw it, and scoffed at those who would build on so unstable a base. But the mass of men, though they also must have seen, were little troubled, it would seem, either to demolish or to repair. They accepted the old beliefs and ceremonies because they were sanctioned by the authority or the experience of past ages; and if sober reasoning and criticism exposed flaws and inconsistencies therein, what matter? They were, as they still are, a people incapable of any mental equilibrium; the mood of the hour swayed them now to emotions, now to reasonings; they did not cultivate consistency; they could not sit still and preserve an even balance between the passions of the heart and the judgements of the intellect, but threw their whole selves into the one scale, and the other for the moment was as vanity.

In the whole complex and irrational scheme of religion thus accepted, nothing was more highly valued than the means by which divine counsel was obtained for the conduct both of public and of private affairs. Omens were regularly taken before battle, at the critical moment when we should prefer to trust experience and generalship. Oracles were consulted as to the sites for planting colonies, in cases where a surveyor’s report might have seemed more decisive. But the efficacy of these old methods of consulting the gods went almost unchallenged. It seems seldom to have occurred to men’s minds that those untoward signs in the victim’s entrails, which perhaps delayed tactics on which victory depended, were the symptoms of an internal disease and not the handiwork of a deity, or that the inferior and ambiguous verse, in which the gods condescended to give counsel, more often confused than confirmed human judgement. Even of the philosophers, according to Cicero[789], two only, Xenophanes and Epicurus, went so far as to deny the validity of all means of communion; and Socrates, for all his questioning and testing of truth, obeyed without question the whispered warnings of a daemon, and in deference to the ambiguous exhortations of a vision spent some of his last days in turning Aesop’s fables into verse, that so he might go into the presence of the gods with his conscience clear. Thus, though men no longer expected to look upon the faces or to hear the voices of the gods, they still felt them to be close at hand, easy of access, ready to counsel, to warn, to encourage; and the methods of communion, in proportion as they stand condemned by reason, commend so much the more the steady faith of the people who used them and never doubted their efficacy. The answer of the ordinary man to those critics, who questioned the validity of divination merely because they could not understand the way in which it operated, is well expressed by Cicero: ‘It is a poor sort of cleverness to try to upset by sophistry facts which are confirmed by the experience of ages. The reason of those facts I cannot discover; the dark ways of Nature, I suppose, conceal it from my view. God has not willed that I should know the reason, but only that I should use the means[790].’

The Greek nation saw many philosophies rise and fall, but it clung always to the religion which it had inherited. The doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus, became for the Greek people as though they had never been; but the old polytheism of the Homeric and earlier ages lived. Faith justified by experience was a living force; the conclusions of reason a mere fabrication. And an essential part of that polytheism which was almost instinctive in the Greeks was their belief in the possibility of close and frequent communion with their gods.