The Olympian gods had conquered the world. They practise neither agriculture nor industry, nor any honest work. They fight and feast and drink and play. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. The Olympian religion had its time and place, and did its work. It swept out many indecent features of the older cults, many superstitions and abuses. It suited the Achæans and their civilization exactly, and we can never forget its “sheer beauty,” But it went bankrupt, lost its hold on men’s minds and hearts, failed and faded out. Professor Murray compares its end to that of a garden of rare exotic flowers overrun by the rank weeds which it had temporarily displaced. Miss Harrison more justly compares it to a flower withering because cut off from its roots.
There was vastly more vitality in the ancient crude symbols and chaos of conceptions than in the ordered and artistic Olympian hierarchy with its marvellous representations of the gods in human or superhuman form and beauty. Even its art and literature could not save it. It had lost its mysticism. The old Neolithic religion, handed down by peasants and artisans reoccupied the field, transformed sometimes almost beyond recognition, like the Ugly Duckling of the fairy tale. It returned triumphant through sheer power of unlimited vitality and adaptability. Plato draws his finest illustrations from its mysteries, out of which, also, the Greek drama arose. Paul quotes from them or from a similar stratum of belief.
Some of the many sources of its vitality are obvious. It was rooted in the firm conviction of the existence of a spiritual world toward and into which its every rootlet was forcing its way and from which it drew nourishment and power. We might better change the illustration and say that it was slowly developing a spiritual eye which peered into a higher world and developed in keenness and clearness of vision in response to the higher pulsations. By patient experiment and experience, which produced a hope that could not make ashamed and a faith in which hope and experiment combined, it was feeling its way into spiritual knowledge. It knew nothing of practical science or of material cause and effect. But its world pulsated with the universal life. It recognized the law of forbidden things and the sure penalty of law-breaking. It had a tribal conscience and recognized the need of purification. It had the promise, at least, of individual conscience and consciousness of sin.
Its symbol was the mystery which lifted only a corner of the veil and left an abundant opportunity for wonder, imagination, thought, and mysticism, which was entirely lacking in the perfect statue and the finished creed. It made man, through its sympathetic magic, a co worker with his divinities or dæmons in gaining the answer to an intensive desire or prayer acted by all the members of the community with all their united might, instead of expressed merely in words, the utterance of his whole being and life. Such a system or chaos overflows with sublime possibilities.
The introduction of agriculture had produced another most important change in religious views and ritual. In tillage the earth brought forth and gave birth to the crops which furnished their chief food supply, and probably, in their view, to animals and men also; just as the human mother gives birth to the child. Hence there was a wide-spread belief in, and cult of, an earth divinity, of course female, or in a goddess or dæmon of fertility. She is sometimes or usually accompanied by a male partner, companion or son, but he occupies a lower place.
FEMALE IDOLS, THRACE | |
FEMALE IDOL, ANAU Reproduced from “Explorations in Turkestan.” Carnegie Institute of Washington,Publishers. | |
This cult of the goddess seems to have been a marked feature of Neolithic religion.[161] We find it in the remains of the Minoan periods in Crete; Isis and her companion god Osiris were very prominent in Egypt. The cult was wide-spread throughout Asia Minor: Diana, or better Artemis, of the Ephesians, Ma in Anatolia, the great goddess of the Hittites are a few examples. Farther eastward we find Astarte. Pumpelly found a female idol (Astarte?) at Anau. The cult dots, if it does not cover, the old middle migration route. We remember the wide-spread distribution of the painted pottery from Susa to Anau and over to Boghaz-keui in the land of the Hittites. Art and religion are closely related during the early times and a wide-spread type of art suggests, though it does not prove, an accompanying form of religion similar throughout the same wide area. In Greece we find Demeter, and in “Pelasgic Athens” the goddess Athena always held the highest place. Hera may well have been another great goddess of the Pelasgi. When the conquering Achæans came in and their chieftains wedded the princesses of the land, they married their god Zeus to the goddess of the land. Hence this cult has been displaced and its records blotted out by later changes. That so many traces of it outlasted the Bronze Age is a proof of its firm hold and great vitality.
We have studied these ancient cults in Greece and the Mediterranean basin because here they are easily discovered and can be restored. They are covered by only a thin layer of later cults which could not destroy their vitality. When we attempt to explore northern Europe the situation is quite different. Christianity blotted out all traces of the worship of Odin and Thor; what it could not blot out it took over into its own service in a modified form. Behind Thor and Odin we see the shadowy form of Dyaus (Ziu?), perhaps a sky-god akin to the Hellenic Zeus, whose name has come down to us in our weekday, Tuesday. Behind all these we must search for traces of the deeply buried and almost obliterated genuine Neolithic cults. These traces could persist only as superstitions of peasants.
We notice first of all that we find one race extending northward along the coast of France into England and Denmark, the zone of the megalithic monuments. In this zone we find figurines and carvings of divinities. Here Déchelette tells us that the female divinity was undoubtedly preferred as the guardian of the tombs.[162] This zone was so closely connected with the Mediterranean region that we should expect nothing else.