Now the material that forms the fabric of these researches is so intricate, the relevant facts so manifold and minute, that it is impossible to consider them in detail within the limits of this present inquiry, of which the leading object is an important question of history concerning the religious influence of the East on the West; and, again, the writers above mentioned are deeply concerned with theories about the origins, or at least the earlier stages in the evolution of religion. And as I am only comparing East and West in a limited and somewhat advanced period of their history, I am not necessarily bound to deal with problems of origin. Nevertheless, a summary survey of this group of facts may provide us with important clues towards the solution of our main question. But a few general criticisms of the assumptions which, whether latent or explicit, are commonly made in the writings just quoted, may be useful at the outset. First, one finds that the word “worship” is used very loosely by the ancients as well as by contemporary writers: and by its vague and indiscriminate employment an effort is made to convince us that the pre-Hellenic and proto-Hellenic world worshipped the lion, the ox, the horse, the ass, the stag, the wolf, the pig, the bird, especially the dove, the eagle, and lastly even the cock. We should have to deal with a savage religion rioting in theriolatry, and we should not need to trouble any longer about the theory of its Mesopotamian origin, for as we have seen theriomorphism played a very small part in the Sumerian-Babylonian cult. But one must ask more precisely, What is worship, and what does lion-worship, for instance, imply? Are we to believe that every one of these animals was worshipped, the whole species being divine? And does their “worship” mean that the superstitious people prayed to them, built altars or sacred columns, or even shrines to them, and offered them sacrifice? It has become urgent to reserve some such strict sense for the word as this, in order to preserve a sense of the distinction between our ritual-service of a real personal divinity and the various, often trifling, acts that may be prompted by the uneasy feeling or reverential awe evoked by the presence of a curious or dangerous animal. Thus, to abstain from eating or injuring mice or weasels is not to worship mice or weasels: to lament over a dead sea-urchin is not to worship sea-urchins: to give a wolf a decorous funeral is not to worship wolves: to throw a piece of sacrificial meat to flies before a great sacrifice to some high divinity is not to worship flies. All these things the civilised Greeks could do, but they ought not for that to be charged with worshipping whole species of animals directly as gods. Next let us bear well in mind that secular animals, like secular things, can become temporarily sacred through contact with the altar: thus the ox who voluntarily approached the altar and ate of the grain or cakes upon it, might be believed by the Hellenes to become instantly divine, full of the life of the divinity, and most ceremonious respect resembling worship might be meted out to him; but we should not hastily believe that the Greeks who might feel like this towards that particular ox worshipped all oxen; or that the society of King Minos worshipped all axes wherever found, because in peculiar circumstances and ritual an axe might become charged with divinity. Finally, I may again protest against the fallacy of supposing that theriomorphism always precedes anthropomorphism: for an ever-increasing mass of evidence forces one to the conviction that they are often co-existent and always compatible one with the other; if this is so, it is rash and unscientific to say, as is so easy to say and is so often said, when one meets in the Mediterranean or elsewhere a human god or goddess accompanied by a lion or a cock, that the anthropomorphic divinity has been evolved from the animal.
Looking now directly to the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments, before we consider the early Hellenic records, we must distinguish between those that are obviously cult-scenes and those that are not obviously but only hypothetically so, and this second class are those with which Mr. Cook’s papers mainly deal. The former have been treated masterfully by Sir Arthur Evans in his paper on “Tree and Pillar Cult”; from these we gather that the worshipper did not usually pray before an idol, but before a pillar or a sacred tree combined often with horns of consecration or an axe; also that he imagined his deity generally in human form, the pillar serving as a spiritual conductor to draw down the divinity from heaven. Therefore I may remark that the phrase “pillar-cult” here, and in Miss Harrison’s paper quoted above, does not express the inwardness of the facts. But the latter writer endeavours to prove the prevalence of a direct cult of birds in this period; and further maintains the dogma that “in the days of pillar and bird anthropomorphism was not yet.” The Minoan monuments on which she relies are the great Phaistos sarcophagus, the trinity of terra-cotta pillars surmounted by doves found in an early shrine of the Palace of Knossos,[69.1] with which are to be compared the dove-shrine of Mycenae and the gold-leafed goddesses of Mycenae with a dove perched on their heads; and finally, the semi-aniconic idol of a dove goddess, with the dove on her head and her arms outspread like wings, found in another shrine of the palace of Knossos, and descending from a pre-Mycenaean traditional type.[70.1] Whatever we may think of these monuments, they cannot be quoted as the memorials of a time “when anthropomorphism was not yet”; for the earliest of them, probably that mentioned last, is of later date than the type of the naked human-formed goddess of the Neolithic Aegean period.
The question depends wholly on the true interpretation of the monuments; as regards the Phaistos sarcophagus, the exact significance of the ritual is still a matter of controversy, to which I may return later, when I compare the ritual of east and west; this much is clear, that a holy service of blood-oblation is being performed before two sacred trees, into the top of which two axes are inserted and on the axes are two birds painted black. Is it immediately clear that “the birds are objects of a definite cult,” as Miss Harrison maintains?[70.2] This may be strongly disputed; otherwise we must say that the axe and the tree are equally direct objects of cult. But the illuminative scene on the signet-ring described above[70.3] suggests that the function of the pillar was to serve as a powerful magnet to attract a personal divinity. And Sir Arthur Evans has well shown that the tree and the pillar were of equal value as sacred objects in Minoan-Mycenaean religion. A sacrifice doubtless of mystic and magical power is being performed before them here: the worshippers may well believe that the combined influence of blood-offering, sacred tree, and sacred axe will draw down the divinity of the skies. In what form visible to the eye would he descend? The carver of that signet-ring dared to show him above the pillar in human form, as the mind’s eye though not the sense-organ of the worshipper discerned him. But the artist of the Phaistos sarcophagus is more reserved. As the Holy Ghost descended in the form of a dove, so the unseen celestial divinity of Crete might use any bird of the air as his messenger, perhaps by preference the woodpecker or dove. And this natural idea would be supported by the fact that occasionally birds did alight on the top of sacred columns, and they would then instantly be charged with the sanctity of that object and would be regarded as a sign of the deity’s presence and as an auspicious answer to prayer and sacrifice. Thus many birds in Greece became sacred by haunting temples; and Dr. Frazer has suggested that the swallows and sparrows that nested on the temple or on the altar at Jerusalem acquired sanctity by the same simple religious logic.[71.1] But it is futile to argue that therefore the Hellenes and Hebrews once worshipped either the whole species of swallows and sparrows or any single one. And Sir Arthur Evans’ own interpretation of the doves on the triple group of columns, as being merely “the image of the divine descent, and of the consequent possession of the bactylic column by a spiritual being,” is sane and convincing.[71.2] This does not prove or necessarily lead to “bird-worship.” Further, he suggests[71.3] that as the dove was originally posed on the top of the column as a gracious sign of the divine presence, so when the human form was beginning to take the place of the column the dove would then be seen on the human head, as in the case of the statuettes of goddesses mentioned above, and as it appeared on the head of the golden image at Bambyke, which some called Semiramis.[72.1] The close association of the Mediterranean goddess and of the goddess of Askalon, Phoenicia, and Bambyke with doves may have been caused by several independent reasons; one may well have been the habitual frequenting of her temple by the birds. This would easily grow into a belief that the goddess when she wished to reveal something of her presence and power to the external eye would manifest herself in the bird. This we may call theriomorphic imagination that goes pari passu easily with the anthropomorphic. But none of these monuments come near to proving that this Mediterranean race directly worshipped birds, nor do they suggest any such theory as that the human divinity emerged from the bird. We shall, in fact, find that evidence of this kind that I have been examining, used recklessly in similar cases, leads to absurd results.[72.2]
Here it is well to remark in passing that the cult of the Dove-goddess is a test case for trying the question of Oriental influence on the west. It cannot be traced back to Babylon, and no one would now maintain the old theory that the dove-shrines of Mycenae were an import from the Phoenician Astarte cult. Sir Arthur Evans’ discoveries enable us to carry back this particular worship in the Aegean to pre-Mycenaean times. We could with better right maintain that the Syrians borrowed it from the Aegean or possibly from Askalon, where, as Dr. Evans has pointed out, Minoan influences were strong. But the most reasonable view is that which he expresses that “the divine associations of the dove were a primitive heritage of primitive Greece and Anatolia.”[73.1]
As regards Mr. Cook’s theory of Mycenaean animal-worship, it is not now necessary to examine it at any length. It was based mainly on a comparison of a fairly large number of “Mycenaean” seals and gems from Crete and elsewhere showing monsters bearing animals on their shoulders or standing by them. He interpreted the “monsters” as men engaged in a religious mummery, wearing the skins of lions, asses, horses, bulls, stags, swine, that is, as ministers of a divine lion, ass, etc., bringing sacrificial animals to these animal-deities, and he raised the large questions of totemism and totemistic cult-practices. His theory presents a picture of zoolatric ritual that cannot be paralleled elsewhere in the world either among primitive or advanced societies. And we begin to distrust it when it asks us to interpret the figures in a gem-representation as an ass-man bearing two lions to sacrifice; for neither in Greece, Egypt, or Asia is there any record of a lion-sacrifice, a ceremony which would be difficult to carry out with due solemnity. The more recent discovery of a set of clay-sealings at Zakro in Crete by Dr. Hogarth, who published them in the Hellenic Journal of 1902, has rendered Mr. Cook’s view of the cult-value of these “monsters” now untenable. They are found in combinations too widely fantastic to be of any value for totemistic or a zoolatric theory, and the opinion of archaeologists like Sir Arthur Evans and Winter[74.1] that these bizarre forms arose from modifications of foreign types, such as the Egyptian hippopotamus goddess, crossed at times with the hippokamp and the lion, has received interesting confirmation from the discovery of a shell relief at Phaistos showing a series of monsters with hippopotamus heads, and in a pose derived undoubtedly from a Nilotic type.[74.2] We may venture to say that the exuberant fancy of the Minoan-Mycenaean artist ran riot and amused itself with wild combinations of monsters, men and animals, to which no serious meaning was attached.
Only rarely, when the monsters are ritualistically engaged in watering a sacred palm tree or column,[74.3] does the religious question arise. And here we may find a parallelism in Assyrian religious art, in the representation of “winged genii fertilising the adult palms with the male cones”; but according to Sir Arthur Evans this motive is later in the Eastern art than in the Mycenaean. Perhaps only one type of monster found on these gems and seals is derived from a real theriomorphic figure of the contemporary religion, namely, the Minotaur type. A few of the Zakro sealings show the sealed figure of a human body with bovine head, ears, and tail[75.1]; and a clay seal-impression found at Knossos presents a bovine human figure with possibly a bovine head sealed in a hieratic attitude before a warrior in armour.[75.2] Such archaeological evidence is precarious, but when we compare it with the indigenous Cretan legends of the bull-Zeus and the union of Pasiphae with the bull, we are tempted to believe that a bull-headed god or a wholly bovine deity had once a place in Minoan cult.
To conclude, this brief survey of the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments points to a contemporary religion that preferred the aniconic agalma to the human idol, but imagined the divinity mainly as anthropomorphic, though this imagination was probably not so fixed as to discard the theriomorphic type entirely. Therefore this religion is on the same plane with that of Mesopotamia rather than with that of Egypt.
Turning now to the proto-Hellenic period, which, without prejudging any ethnic question, I have kept distinct from the Mycenaean, we have here the advantage of literary records to assist the archaeological evidence. I have stated my conviction that the earliest Hellenes had already reached the stage of personal polytheism before conquering the southern Peninsula; and the combined evidence of the facts of myths and cults justifies the belief that their imagination of the deity was mainly anthropomorphic. By the period of the Homeric poems, composed perhaps some five centuries after the earliest entrance of the Hellenes, we must conclude that the anthropomorphism as a religious principle was predominant in the more progressive minds that shaped the culture of the race: a minute but speaking example of this is the change that ensued in accordance with Homeric taste in the meaning of the old hieratic epithet βοῶπις; in all probability it originally designated a cow-faced goddess, but it is clear that he intends it for ox-eyed, an epithet signifying the beauty of the large and lustrous human eye. The bias that is felt in the religious poetry of Homer comes to determine the course of the later religious art, so that the religion, art, and literature of historic Greece may be called the most anthropomorphic or anthropocentric in the world. Yet we have sufficient proof that in the pre-Homeric age the popular mind was by no means bound by any such law, and that the religious imagination was unfixed and wavering in its perception of divinity: and the belief must have been general that the god, usually imagined as a man, might manifest himself at times in the form of some animal. Apollo Lykeios, the wild god of the woods, was evidently in the habit of incarnating himself in the wolf, so that wolves might be sacramentally offered to him or sacrifice offered to certain wolves.[76.1] In the Artemis legend of Brauron and Aulis we detect the same close communion of the goddess with the bear. Now, upon the fairly numerous indications in cult-legend and ritual that the deity was occasionally incarnate in the animal, much fallacious anthropological theory has been built. It is not now my cue to pursue this matter au fond. But it is necessary for my purpose to emphasise the fact that there is fair evidence for some direct zoolatry in the proto-Hellenic period, though there is less than is often supposed, and it needs always careful criticism. As I have already said, the ancients of the later learned period were often vague and unprecise when they spoke of “the worship” of animals. Thus Clemens informs us[77.1] that the Thessalians “worshipped” ants, and on the authority of Euphorion that the Samians “worshipped” a sheep: the word used in each case being σέβειν. But accurate statements concerning religious psychology demand the nicest discrimination: “a little more, and how much it is.” We may suspect that the word σέβειν was as vaguely used in antiquity as the term “worship” in loose modern writing: and it is to be remarked that when one authority uses this word, another may employ the verb τιμᾶν, which does not imply so much. For instance, Clemens states that the Thebans “honoured” the weasel; Aelian, that they “worshipped” it.[77.2] We are nearly always left in doubt how much is meant: whether the animal was merely treated reverentially and its life spared, or whether sacrifice and prayers were offered to it: the former practice may be found in almost any society modern or ancient, the latter is savage zoolatry, and is a fact of importance for the religious estimate of a people.
I cannot consider all the cases which are given with sufficient fullness in the work that I have cited by De Visser.[77.3] But the instance cited above—the Samian worship of the sheep [πρόβατον]—shows us how little we have to build our theories on. It is quite possible that such a story arose from some ritual in which the sheep was offered reverentially, treated as a theanthropic animal, half-human, half-divine, like the bull-calf of Tenedos in the cult of Dionysos,[78.1] an interesting form of sacrifice to which I shall have occasion to refer again. Clear records of actual sacrifice to animals in Greece are exceedingly rare. We have the quaint example of the so-called “Sacrifice” to the flies before the feast of Apollo on the promontory of Leukas; this I have discussed elsewhere,[78.2] pointing out that it seems only a ritual trick to persuade the flies to leave the worshippers alone, and certainly does not suggest the “worship” of flies.[78.2] There is also a dim ritual-legend attaching to the temple of Apollo the wolf-god in Sikyon, which appears to point to some sacrifice to wolves in or near the temple at some early period.[78.3] The third case is more important: the “sacrifice to the pig,” which Athenaeus, quoting from Agathokles of Kyzikos, attests was an important service at Praisos in Crete, performed as a προτελὴς θυσία, that is, as a preliminary act in the liturgies of the higher religion.[78.4] The ritual-legend explained the act as prompted by the service that a sow had rendered to the infant Zeus; but it remains mysterious, and we would like to have had more clear information as to the actual rite. Finally, we have the most important type of zoolatric ritual in Greece, the worship of certain sacred snakes: various records attest this in the cult of Trophonios at Lebadeia and in the temple of Athena Polias at Athens; in the cult of Zeus-Meilichios in the Piraeus, in the sacred grove of Apollo in Epeiros, probably in the shrines of Asklepios at Epidauros and Kos, and elsewhere.
Now it is important to note that these ritual records nowhere suggest that whole species of animals were worshipped, but that only certain individuals of that species, haunting certain places to which a sense of religious mystery attached, such as a cave or a lonely grove, or else found in or near some holy shrine, were thus marked out as divine. Also, we observe that in all the examples just quoted, the cult of the animal is linked to the cult of some personal god or goddess or hero: the snake, for instance, is the natural incarnation of the underworld divinity or hero. The only exception to this latter rule that may be reasonably urged is the prehistoric worship of Python at Delphi, which, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out, is curiously like the ritual and cult of a fetich-snake in Dahomey.[79.1] Yet, for all we know, Python, who in the earliest version of the story is of female sex, may at a very early time have been regarded not as a mere snake, but as an incarnation of the earth-goddess Gaia, who ruled at Delphi before Apollo came. The question whether the ancestors of the Hellenes or the pre-Hellenic peoples with whom they mixed were ever on the lowest plane of theriolatry does not concern us here. What is important is, that the records, both Mycenaean and Hellenic, justify us in believing that the dominant religion in Greece of the second millennium B.C. was the worship of personal divinities humanly conceived who could occasionally incarnate themselves in animal form, and that where animal worship survived it was always linked in this way to the cults of personal polytheism. From the Homeric period onward, the higher Hellenic spirit shows itself averse to the theriomorphic fashion of religion; yet this never disappeared wholly from the lower circles. Arcadia, the most backward and conservative of the Greek communities, never accepted the rigid anthropomorphic canon. This is shown by the record of the Phigaleian Demeter with the horse’s head; the mysterious goddess Eurynome of Phigaleia, half-woman, half-fish; the Arcadian Pan, the daimon of the herds, imagined as with goat legs and sometimes with goat’s head; and, finally, by the Arcadian idols of the Roman period found at Lykosoura in 1898, representing the female form with the head of a cow.[80.1]