The subject that has been discussed at some length is also connected with the whole question of ritual-purity and purification. The primitive conception of purity had at an early stage in its evolution been adopted by higher religion; and the essential effect of impurity was to debar a person from intercourse with God and with his fellow-men. Hence arises a code of rules to regulate temple-ritual. So far as I am aware, the Babylonian rules for safeguarding the purity of the shrines were not conspicuously different from the Greek or the Hebraic.[283.1] The taint of bloodshed and other physical impurities was kept aloof; and it is in the highest degree probable that the function of the “hetairai” was only performed outside the temple, for Herodotus specially tells us that this rule was observed in the Mylitta-rite. The cathartic methods of East and West agree in many points. The use of holy water for purifying purposes was known to the early Greeks.[283.2] It was still more in evidence in the Babylonian ritual: the holy water of the Euphrates or Tigris was used for a variety of purposes, for the washing of the king’s hands before he touched the statues, for the washing of the idol’s mouths,[283.3] perhaps also for baptism. For we hear of some such rite in a hymn to Enlil translated by Dr. Langdon[284.1]—the line that he renders “Son whom in the sacred bowl she baptized,” seems to refer to a human child. Ablution was prominent also in the exorcism-ritual, and the “House of Washing” or “House of Baptism” was the centre of a liturgy that had for its object deliverance from demons.[284.2] The whole State was at times purified by water.[284.3] And in all this ritual the water must itself be of a peculiar purity—rain-water, for instance,[284.4] or the water of the Euphrates, whence came probably the Water of Life that was kept in Marduk’s temple with which the Gods and the Annunaki washed their faces, and which was used in the feast of the Doom-fixing.[284.5] According to the Babylonian view ordinary water was naturally impure (we may well believe that it was so at Babylon, where the river and canals were so pressed into the service of man), and a person incurred impurity by stepping over a puddle or other unpurified water.[284.6] The Greek did not need to be so scrupulous, for most water in his land was naturally pure, being spring or brook; yet in his cathartic rules we find often that only a special water was suitable for the religious purpose, running water especially, or sea-water, or in a particular locality one sacred fountain only.[284.7] But though it was to him as to most peoples, the simple and natural means of purification, he did not apply it to such various cathartic purposes as the Babylonian. Nor as far as we can discover had he developed in old days the interesting rite of baptism: we hear of it first in the records of the fifth century, and in relation to alien cults like that of the Thracian goddess Kotytto.[285.1]
Equally prominent in the cathartic ritual of Mesopotamia was the element of fire: in the prayer that followed upon the purification-ceremonies we find the formula, “May the torch of the gleaming Fire-God cleanse me.”[285.2] The Fire-God, Nusku, is implored “to burn away the evil magicians,”[285.3] and we may believe that he owes his development and exalted position as a high spiritual god to the ritual use of fire, just as in the Vedic religion did Agni. The conception of fire as a mighty purifying element, which appears in the Old and New Testaments and in Christian eschatology, has arisen, no doubt, from the cathartic ritual of the ancient Semites. Doubtless also the spiritual or magic potency of this element was known in ancient Europe: it is clearly revealed in the primitive ceremonies of the old German “Notfeuer,” with which the cattle, fields, and men were purified in time of pestilence.[285.4] And there are several indications of its use in Greek cathartic ritual; a noteworthy example is the purification of Lemnos by the bringing of holy fire from Delos;[285.5] the curious Attic ritual of running with the new-born babe round the hearth, called the Amphidromia, may have had a similar intention;[286.1] even the holy water, the χέρνιψ, seems to have been hallowed by the insertion of a torch;[286.2] and in the later records fire is often mentioned among the usual implements of cleansing.[286.3] The Eleusinian myth concerning Demeter holding the infant Demophon in the flame to make him immortal was suggested probably by some purificatory rite in which fire was used. Finally, the fire-ordeal, which was practised both in Babylonia and Greece,[286.4] may have been associated at a certain period with the cathartic properties of fire. Nevertheless, the Hellenic divinities specially concerned with this element, Hestia and Hephaistos, had little personal interest in this ritual, and did not rise to the same height in the national theology as Nusku rose in the Babylonian.
We might find other coincidences in detail between Hellenic and Assyrian ritual, such as the purificatory employment of salt, onions, and the sacrificial skin of the animal-victim.[286.5] One of the most interesting phenomena presented by the cathartic law of old Babylonia is a rule that possessed an obvious moral value; we find, namely, on one of the cylinders of Gudea, that during the period when Gudea was purifying the city the master must not strike the slave, and no action at law must be brought against any one; for seven days perfect equality reigned, no bad word was uttered, the widow and the orphan went free from wrong.[287.1] The conception underlying this rule is intelligible: all quarrelling and oppression, being often accompanied with bloodshed and death, disturbs the general purity which is desired to prevail; and I have indicated elsewhere a similar law regulating the conduct of the Eleusinian mysteries and the Dionysiac festival at Athens, both ceremonies of cathartic value,[287.2] and I have pointed out a similar ordinance observed recently by a North-American Indian tribe, and formerly by the Peruvians; to these instances may be added the statement by Livy,[287.3] that in the Roman “lectisternia,” when a table with offerings was laid before the gods, no quarrelling was allowed and prisoners were released, and the historian gives to the institution of the lectisternia a piacular significance.
We must also bear in mind certain striking differences between the Hellenic and the Babylonian cathartic systems. In certain purification-ceremonies of Hellas, those in which the homicide was purged from his stain, the washing with the blood of the piacular victim was the most potent means of grace.[287.4] We may find analogies in Vedic, Roman, and Hebraic ritual, but hitherto none have been presented by the religious documents of Babylon, where, as has been already pointed out, scarcely any mystic use appears to have been made of the blood of the victim.[288.1] Again, the Babylonian purification included the confession of sins, a purgation unknown and apparently unnatural to the Hellene;[288.2] and generally the Babylonian, while most of its methods, like the Hellenic, are modes of transference or physical riddance of impurity, had a higher spiritual and religious significance; for it includes lamentations for sin and prayers to the divinity that are not mentioned in the record of any Greek “katharsis.”
A long ritual-document is preserved containing the details of the purification of the king:[288.3] certain forms agree with the Hellenic, but one who was only versed in the latter would find much that was strange and unintelligible both in the particulars and in general atmosphere. We discern an interesting mixture of magic and religion. The gods are partly entreated, partly bribed, partly constrained; and at the end the evil is physically expelled from the palace. The purifier puts on dark garments, just as the ministers of the underworld-deities did occasionally in Greece. The king himself performs much of the ceremony, and utters words of power: “May my sins be rent away, may I be pure and live before Shamash.” The ordering of the cathartic apparatus is guided partly by astrology. It is curious also to find that every article used in the process is identified by name with some divinity: the cypress is the god Adad, the fragrant spices the god Ninib, the censer the god Ib, etc.; and the commentary that accompanies the ritual-text explains that these substances compel the deities thus associated with them to come and give aid.
In fact, the differences between East and West in this religious sphere are so important that we should not be able to believe that the cathartic system of Greece was borrowed from Babylonia, even if the points of resemblance were much more numerous and striking than they are. For it would be possible to draw up a striking list of coincidences between Hellenic and Vedic cathartic rites, and yet no one would be able on the strength of it to establish a hypothesis of borrowing.
In any case, it may be said, the question of borrowing does not arise within the narrow limits of our inquiry, which is limited to the pre-Homeric period, since all Greek “katharsis” is post-Homeric. The latter dictum is obviously not literally true, as a glance through the Homeric poems will prove. Homer is aware of the necessity of purification by water before making prayer or libation to the gods: Achilles washes his hands and the cups before he pours forth wine and prays to Zeus,[289.1] Telemachos washes his hands in sea-water before he prays to Athena[289.2]; and there is a significant account of the purification of the whole Achaean host after the plague;[289.3] as the later Greeks would have done, the Achaeans throw away into the sea their λύματα, the infected implements of purification, wool or whatever they used, that absorbed the evil from them. But it has been generally observed that Homer does not appear to have been aware of any need for purification from the stain of bloodshed or from the ghostly contagion of death. It is true that Odysseus purifies his hall with fire and sulphur after slaying the suitors, but we are not sure that the act had any further significance than the riddance of the smell of blood from the house. Sulphur is there called κακῶν ἄκος,[290.1] “a remedy against evil things”; but we cannot attach any moral or spiritual sense to κακὰ, nor is Homeric κάθαρσις related, as far as we can see, to any animistic belief. There is one passage where Homer’s silence is valuable and gives positive evidence; Theoklumenos, who has slain a man of his own tribe and fled from his home, in consequence approaches Telemachos when the latter is sacrificing and implores and receives his protection: there is no hint of any feeling that there is a stain upon him, or that he needs purification, or that his presence pollutes the sacrifice.[290.2] All this would have been felt by the later Greek; and in the post-Homeric period we have to reckon with a momentous growth of the idea of impurity and of a complex system of purification, especially in regard to homicide, leading to important developments in the sphere of law and morality which I have tried to trace out on other occasions.[290.3] But Homer may well be regarded as the spokesman of a gifted race, the Achaeans, as we call them, on whom the burden of the doctrine of purification lay lightly, and for whom the ghostly world had comparatively little terror or interest. Besides the Achaeans, however, and their kindred races there was the submerged population of the older culture who enter into the composition of the various Hellenes of history. Therefore the varied development in the post-Homeric period of cathartic ideas may be only a renaissance, a recrudescence of forces that were active enough in the second millennium. Attica may have been the home where the old tradition survived, and cathartic rites such as the Thargelia and the trial of the axe for murder in the Bouphonia have the savour of great antiquity. May not the Minoan religion of Crete have been permeated with the ideas of the impurity of bloodshed and the craving for purification from sin? For at the beginning of the historic period Crete seems to have been the centre of what may be called the cathartic mission; from this island came Apollo Delphinios, the divine purifier par excellence, to this island the god came to be purified from the death of Python; and in later times, Crete lent to Athens its purifying prophet Epimenides.[291.1] If we believe, then, that the post-Homeric blood-purification was really a recrudescence of the tradition of an older indigenous culture, we should use this as another argument for the view that the Greece of the second millennium was untouched or scarcely touched by Babylonian influence. For, as we have seen, purification by blood or from blood appears to have been wholly alien to Babylonian religious and legal practice.
The ritual of purification belongs as much to the history of magic as religion. Now, the student of religion is not permitted to refuse to touch the domain of magic; nor can we exclude its consideration even from the highest topics of religious speculation. Some general remarks have already been made[291.2] concerning the part played by magic both in the worship and in the social life of the peoples that we are comparing. Any exact and detailed comparison would be fruitless for our present purpose; for, while the knowledge of early Babylonian magic is beginning to be considerable, we cannot say that we know anything definite concerning the practices in this department of the Hellenic and adjacent peoples in the early period with which we are dealing. From the Homeric poems we can gather little more than that magic of some kind existed; and that Homer and his gifted audience probably despised it as they despised ghosts and demons. It is only by inference that we can venture to ascribe to the earliest period of the Greek race some of the magic rites that are recorded by the later writers. It would require a lengthy investigation and treatise to range through the whole of Greek ritual and to disentangle and expose the magic element which was undoubtedly there, and which in some measure is latent in the ritual of every higher religion yet examined. By way of salient illustration we may quote the ceremonies of the scapegoat and the φαρμακός,[292.1] modes of the magic-transference of sin and evil; the strewing of sacred food-stuff that is instinct with divine potency over the fields in the Thesmophoria; the rain magic performed by the priests of Zeus Lykaios;[292.2] we hear at Kleonai of an official class of “Magi” who controlled the wind and the weather by spells, and occasionally in their excitement gashed their own hands, like the priests of Baal;[292.3] such blood-magic being explicable as a violent mode of discharging personal energy upon the outer objects which one wishes to subdue to one’s will. Another and more thrilling example of blood-magic is the process of water-finding by pouring human blood about the earth, a method revealed by an old legend of Haliartos in Boeotia about the man who desired water, and in order to find it consulted Delphi, and was recommended by the oracle to slay the first person who met him on his return; his own young son met him first, and the father stabbed him with his sword; the wounded youth ran round about, and wherever the blood dripped water sprang up from the earth.[293.1] No one will now venture to say that all these things are post-Homeric; the natural view is that they were an inheritance of crude and primitive thought indigenous to the land. Many of them belong to world-wide custom; on the other hand, some of the striking and specialised rites, such as the blood-magic and the ritual of the φαρμακός, are not found at Babylon.
But before prejudging the question, some salient and peculiar developments of Babylonian magic ought to be considered. One great achievement of Mesopotamian civilisation was the early development of astrology, to which perhaps the whole world has been indebted for good and for evil, and which was associated with magic and put to magic uses. Astrological observation led to the attachment of a magic value to numbers and to certain special numbers, such as number seven. Whether the Judaic name and institution of the Sabbath is of Babylonian origin or not, does not concern our question. But it concerns us to know that the seventh days, the 14th, the 21st, and 28th of certain months, if not of all, were sacred at Babylon, and were days of penance and piacular duties when ordinary occupation was suspended.[293.2] We can discern the origin of the sanctity of this number: the observation of the seven planets, and the division of the lunar month into four quarters of seven days. The early Greeks, doubtless, had their astrological superstitions, as most races have had; the new moon is naturally lucky, the waning moon unlucky; but no one can discover any numerical or other principle in the Hesiodic system, which is our earliest evidence of Hellenic lucky and unlucky days. His scheme is presented in naïve confusion, and he concludes humorously, “one man praises one day, one another, and few know anything about it.”[294.1] His page of verse reflects the anarchy of the Greek calendars; and we should find it hard to credit that either Hesiod or the legislators that drew up those had sat attentively at the feet of Babylonian teachers. But a few coincidences may be noted. Hesiod puts a special tabu on the fifth day of the month; in fact, it is the only one in his list that is wholly unlucky, a day when it would seem to be best to do nothing at all, at least outside the house, for on this day the Erinyes are wandering about.[294.2] Now, a Babylonian text published by Dr. Langdon contains the dogma that on the fifth day of Nisan “he who fears Marduk and Zarpanit shall not go out to work.”[294.3] This Babylonian rule is the earliest example of what may be strictly called Sabbatarianism, abstinence from work through fear of offending the high god. Such would probably not be the true account of Hellenic feeling concerning the “forbidden days,” which were called ἀποφράδες or μιαραί.[294.4] The high god had issued to the Hellene no moral commandment about “keeping the Sabbath-day holy”; his reluctance to do certain work on certain days rested on a more primitive sentiment concerning them. Thus it was unlucky both for himself and the city that Alcibiades should return to the Piraeus when the Plynteria were going on; for this latter was a cathartic ceremony, and evil influences were abroad. Nor, as Xenophon declares, would any one venture to engage in a serious work on this day.[295.1] Nor were these μιαραὶ ᾑμέραι, like the seventh days of the Babylonian months, necessarily days of gloom when offended deities had to be propitiated; on the contrary, the day of Χόες was a day of merry drinking and yet μιαρά: in fact, we best understand the latter phrase by translating it “tabooed,” rather than “sad” or “gloomy.”[295.2]
Another coincidence that may arrest attention is that in Hesiod’s scheme the seventh day of the month was sacred because Apollo was born on it; and throughout the later period this god maintains his connection with the seventh day, also apparently with the first, the fourteenth, and the twentieth of the month.[295.3] This almost coincides with the Sabbatical division of the Babylonian months. But we cannot suppose that in Hellas these were days of mortification as they were in the East; else they would not have been associated with the bright deity Apollo.