Finally, its vogue in Babylonia seems to have been confined to private superstition; from the second millennium onwards it was employed as an amulet, and one of the royal chronicles, about 1110 B.C., is inscribed on a tablet that represents a phallos; but we cannot argue from this or any other evidence yet adduced, so far as I am aware, that the emblem was used in public ritual.
So far as we can discern at present, then, the Babylonian and Hellenic phenomena are divergent in respect of pillar-cult and phallic ritual.[230.1]
The most interesting part of our present inquiry is the comparison of the ceremonies and the concept of sacrifice in East and West. At the first glance we note, as usual, a certain general similarity. In the earliest period we find various animals, both wild and domestic, offered upon the altars, but in Babylonia no special rules concerning their sex, such as were prescribed by ancient Greek and Judaic ritual. In all these countries, again, bloodless offerings of cereals and fruits were in common vogue; and in the earliest Babylonian period, these were of great variety, an inscription of Gudea mentioning butter, honey, wine, corn with milk, figs, dates, as the food of the gods, “untouched by fire.”[230.2] We note here the distinction familiar in Greek ritual, between ἔμπυρα and ἄπυρα ἱερά; only in Babylonia it does not seem to have been of religious importance, nor to have been developed, as it was in Hellas, into a ceremonial law that might engender an important variation in the moral ideas and religious concepts of the worshipper; for instance, the altar of Apollo at Delos was called καθαρός, “the pure altar,” because no blood could be shed upon it, the sacrifices of Athena Lindia at Rhodes, and of Zeus in certain mystic rites of Crete, were ἄπυρα, or “fireless,” which was the technical name for the oblations of fruits and cereals; and this fact of ritual suggested to later Greek philosophy the ethical-religious view that the “pure,” that is to say, bloodless, offering was the more acceptable oblation, and was a tradition of the age of man’s innocence. This pregnant idea has not yet been discovered in Mesopotamian or in any other old Semitic religion; the Babylonian deities received both kinds, and perhaps simultaneously, though in certain special ceremonies the sacred cake, or the liquid offerings of milk, honey, wine, and oil, might suffice;[231.1] while, according to the ancient Hebraic view, as the legend of Cain and Abel indicates, the deity appears to prefer blood-sacrifice, though each species is recognised in the pre-exilic sacral literature.[231.2]
There is another distinction observed in Greek ritual, that becomes of some importance in the later history of ascetic purity, that between wineless offerings (νηφάλια) and those accompanied with wine: the former being preferred by the powers of the lower world,[231.3] though not invariably, and certainly not by the departed hero. However this distinction arose—and no single hypothesis explains all the cases—it was not a Semitic tradition, taught in early days to Hellas. For the Semitic divinities, including Jahwé, have a genial liking for wine “which cheereth God and man”;[232.1] nor have we any Semitic example of a taboo on it, except possibly a late Nabataean inscription from the neighbourhood of Palmyra, mentioning “the god who drinks no wine.”[232.2] Such a phrase would certainly not apply to the deities of Babylon; even the sun-god, who in Hellas appears to have been a total abstainer, is offered wine in the Babylonian service,[232.3] and, according to one verse in the Epic of Creation, the deities actually get drunk,[232.4] a grossness which, in the mythic imagination of Hellas, is only imagined as possible for Dionysos.
We have the right to say, then, that the avoidance of wine in certain religious services of Hellas helps to confirm the impression of its early independence of Semitic influences. The Hellenic rule may, in certain cases, have been derived from an older Aegean tradition; for two of the deities to whom it was applied, Helios and Aphrodite, may be believed to have been bequeathed to Greece by the Minoan-Mycenaean religion; and wine appears to have been prohibited in certain ceremonies of the Phrygian goddess,[232.5] and of a goddess of Caria.[232.6]
These are differences of some importance, and doubtless of great antiquity between the ritual of East and West; more insignificant, yet of considerable value for our present question, is the fact that incense was a regular accompaniment of the Babylonian sacrifice, but did not come into religious use in Greece till some time after the period of Homer. The fact itself we may consider as proved, both by Homer’s silence about it, and by the Homeric use of the word θύος, which means “victim,” and never “incense,” as in later Greek it came to mean. Had the influence of the Mesopotamian culture been as strong on Greece in the second millennium as it came to be from 800 B.C. onwards, we should certainly have expected that the religious use of incense, which is very attractive and spreads easily from one race to another, would have been adopted by Greek ritual before the time of Homer.
A more essential point is the sharp contrast preserved in the Greek rites between the Olympian and the Chthonian ritual; a contrast that demanded a difference of terminology and dictated different sacral laws concerning time, manner, place of sacrifice, and choice of victim. So far, I have not been able to discover any hint of this important bifurcation of ritual in any Mesopotamian record. The only nether-world power who was worshipped at all was Nergal, whether under this or other names; and it does not appear that his worship differed in any essential respect from that of any other high god. In fact, the dualism between powers of the upper and powers of the lower world, which has been generally remarked, and sometimes exaggerated in Hellenic polytheism, only appears slightly in the Babylonian, and seems to have left no impress on the divine service at all.
As regards the animals of sacrifice, the only striking divergence that Hellenic and Semitic custom presents is in respect of the swine. The sanctity or horror with which this animal was regarded by most Semitic societies[234.1] is not reflected in any record of early Greek feeling. Being the Hellene’s common food, he offered it freely to the deity, though in local cults there might occasionally be a taboo on this as elsewhere on other victims, such as sheep or goat. But it is possible that some of the predecessors of the Hellene in Crete and Asia Minor, if not in Greece itself, shared the Semitic sentiment in regard to the pig; and the reverence paid to it in Crete, and especially at Praisos in later times,[234.2] may have been a legacy of Minoan religion; also the Carian worship of Hemithea in which swine were tabooed may have had ancient links with Crete.[234.3] But the facts of swine-sacrifice or swine-reverence, though they serve to distinguish the Hellenic from the ordinary Semitic community, do not bear directly on our present problem, the proofs of early Mesopotamian influence on the proto-Hellenic race. For the usual Semitic taboo has not yet been found in Mesopotamia. The pig is mentioned in a religious text as one of the animals that might be offered to the gods as a vicarious piacular sacrifice, nor is there any hint that the animal is being offered as an unclean animal.[234.4] Certainly, other animals are mentioned much more frequently as victims; and I am not aware of any other text that mentions swine-sacrifice. It was associated in some way with the god Ninib, one of whose appellatives means “swine”;[234.5] but no evidence is yet forthcoming that it was offered to him.
A question now arises of greater moment both for our present purpose and for the wider interests of Comparative Religion. Was the purport and significance of the sacrificial act the same in the Western society as that which is revealed in the sacred literature of Babylonia? No part of the ancient religious system has been the theme of so much study and speculation in recent years as the ancient sacrifice. Robertson Smith in his epoch-making book, The Religion of the Semites, was the pioneer of a new theory; which has since been developed or modified by certain English and a few Continental scholars following on his track. The result of these labours has been to formulate and define various forms of sacrifice that prevailed in the Mediterranean area. Three main types appear to emerge: (a) the gift sacrifice, where an oblation is given over entirely to the deity, whether generally to win his favour, or in special circumstances—for instance, after sin has been committed—to appease his wrath, or as a thank-offering for favour received; (b) the communion sacrifice, where the community or the individual eat with the deity, strengthening their feeling of fellowship by a common meal; (c) the sacramental type, where the community or the individual may be said to “eat the god,” that is, to partake of food or drink made sacred by the infusion of the divine spirit or personality, which is thus communicated to the partaker. It is best for the present to regard these three as separate and independent, without trying to determine which is prior and which posterior.[235.1]
The first type, which is almost ubiquitous in the human societies that have arrived at the belief in personal deities, is sufficiently attested by Homer of the early Greeks, who promise and perform the sacrifice partly as an offering to please or to appease the deity. What is more important is the evidence, which I have dealt with elsewhere,[236.1] that Homeric society was familiar also with the more genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal where the worshipper and the deity meet around the altar; this emerges clearly in the accounts that Homer has given us of an Achaean sacrificial feast.[236.2] Even the germs are already visible of the idea from which the third or more mystic type of sacrifice, what I have called the sacramental type, might be evolved; for special significance attaches to the acts described in the phrases οὐλοχύτας προβάλοντο and σπλάγχν᾽ ἐπάσαντο, “they threw forward the barley-shreddings” and “they tasted the entrails”: the first phrase is not wholly clear, but it may signify that stalks of barley are first placed on the altar, and thereby consecrated or filled with the divine virtue that is inherent there, and then the beast is touched with these on the forehead and thereby becomes himself filled with the spirit of godhead;[236.3] the second is also a mystic act, for the σπλάγχνα specially contain the life, which is now infused with divinity, and by tasting them the worshippers partake of the divine life. All this arises solely from the extraordinary degree of supernatural force or “Mana” which the altar itself possesses, a force which may have been an inheritance from long ages of pillar-worship, if we believe the altar to have been evolved from the sacred pillar.[237.1] It explains other details in the old Hellenic sacrificial act; such as the casting the hairs of the victim into the altar-flame,[237.2] which established a communion between the animal and the deity, the practice of solemnly consecrating the lustral water by ceremoniously carrying it round the altar,[237.3] and charging it with a still more potent infusion of divinity by plunging into it a lighted brand from the altar-fire.[237.4]