We must not allow ourselves to be misled by metaphors about “the childhood of the race,” though even these, if properly understood, are suggestive enough. Our ideas of the true state of a child’s mind are apt to be coloured by that theory of antenatal existence which has found, perhaps, its highest expression in Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. We transfer these ideas to the race generally, and are thus led to think of the men who made and repeated myths as simple, innocent creatures who were somehow nearer than we are to the beginning of things, and so, perhaps, saw with a clearer vision. A truer view of what a child’s thoughts really are will help to put us on the right track. Left to themselves, children are often tormented by vague terrors of surrounding objects which they fear to confide to any one. Their games are based upon an animistic theory of things, and they are great believers in luck and in the lot. They are devotees, too, of that “cult of odds and ends” which is fetishism; and the unsightly old dolls which they often cherish more fondly than the choicest products of the toy-shop, remind us forcibly of the ungainly stocks and stones which Pausanias found in the Holy of Holies of many a stately Greek temple. At Sparta the Tyndaridai were a couple of boards, while the old image of Hera at Samos was a roughly-hewn log.[[2]]
On the other hand, we must remember that, even in the earliest times of which we have any record, the world was already very old. Those Greeks who first tried to understand nature were not at all in the position of men setting out on a hitherto untrodden path. There was already in the field a tolerably consistent view of the world, though no doubt it was rather implied and assumed in ritual and myth than distinctly realised as such. The early thinkers did a far greater thing than merely to make a beginning. By turning their backs on the savage view of things, they renewed their youth, and with it, as it proved, the youth of the world, at a time when the world seemed in its dotage.
The marvel is that they were able to do this so thoroughly as they did. A savage myth might be preserved here and there to the scandal of philosophers; fetishes, totems, and magic rites might lurk in holes and corners with the moles and with the bats, to be unearthed long afterwards by the curious in such matters. But the all-pervading superstition, which we call primitive because we know not how or whence it came, was gone for ever; and we find Herodotos noting with unfeigned surprise the existence among “barbarians” of beliefs and customs which, not so long ago, his own forefathers had taught and practised quite as zealously as ever did Libyan or Scyth. Even then, he might have found most of them surviving on the “high places” of Hellas.
Traces of the primitive view in early literature.
III. In one respect the way had been prepared already. Long before history begins, the colonisation of the islands and the coasts of Asia Minor had brought about a state of things that was not favourable to the rigid maintenance of traditional customs and ways of thought. A myth is essentially a local thing, and though the emigrants might give the names of ancestral sanctuaries to similar spots in their new homes, they could not transfer with the names the old sentiment of awe. Besides, these were, on the whole, stirring and joyful times. The spirit of adventure is not favourable to superstition, and men whose chief occupation is fighting are not apt to be oppressed by that “fear of the world” which some tell us is the normal state of the savage mind. Even the savage becomes in great measure free from it when he is really happy.
1. Homer.
That is why we find so few traces of the primitive view of the world in Homer. The gods have become frankly human, and everything savage is, so far as may be, kept out of sight. There are, of course, vestiges of early beliefs and practices, but they are exceptional. In that strange episode of the Fourteenth Book of the Iliad known as The Deceiving of Zeus we find a number of theogonical ideas which are otherwise quite foreign to Homer, but they are treated with so little seriousness that the whole thing has even been regarded as a parody or burlesque of some primitive poem on the birth of the gods. That, however, is to mistake the spirit of Homer. He finds the old myth ready to his hand, and sees in it matter for a “joyous tale,” just as Demodokos did in the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. There is no antagonism to traditional views, but rather a complete detachment from them.
It has often been noted that Homer never speaks of the primitive custom of purification for bloodshed. The dead heroes are burned, not buried, as the kings of continental Hellas were. Ghosts play hardly any part. In the Iliad we have, to be sure, the ghost of Patroklos, in close connexion with the solitary instance of human sacrifice in Homer. All that was part of the traditional story, and Homer says as little about it as he can. There is also the Nekyia in the Eleventh Book of the Odyssey, which has been assigned to a late date on the ground that it contains Orphic ideas. The reasoning does not appear cogent. As we shall see, the Orphics did not so much invent new ideas as revive old ones, and if the legend took Odysseus to the abode of the dead, that had to be described in accordance with the accepted views about it.
In fact, we are never entitled to infer from Homer’s silence that the primitive view was unknown to him. The absence of certain things from the poems is due to reticence rather than ignorance; for, wherever anything to his purpose was to be got from an old story, he did not hesitate to use it. On the other hand, when the tradition necessarily brought him into contact with savage ideas, he prefers to treat them with reserve. We may infer, then, that at least in a certain society, that of the princes for whom Homer sang, the primitive view of the world was already discredited by a comparatively early date.[[3]]
2. Hesiod.