Greece and Babylon

by Lewis Richard Farnell

Now, much remains still to be thought out, especially for those interested in Mediterranean culture, concerning the influence of idolatry on religion; and not only the history, but the psychology of religion, must note and estimate the influence of religious art. It may well be that the primitive Greeks, like the primitive Roman, the early Teuton, and Indo-Iranian stocks, were non-idolatrous, and this appears to have been true to some extent of the Minoan culture. Nevertheless, the Mediterranean area has from time immemorial been the centre of the fabric and the worship of the eikon and the idol. The impulse may have come from the East or from Egypt to the Hellene; he in his turn imparted it to the Indian Aryans, as we now know, and in great measure at least to the Roman, just as the Assyrian-Babylonian temple-worship imparted it to the Persian. Nowhere, we may well believe, has the influence of idolatry been so strong upon the religious temperament as it was upon that of the Hellenes; for to it they owed works of the type that may be called the human-divine, which surpass any other art-achievement of man.

I can here only indicate briefly its main effects. It intensified the perception of the real personal god as a material fact. It increased polytheism by multiplying the separate figures of worship, often, perhaps, without intention. It assisted the imagination to discard what was uncouth and terrifying in the Hellenic religion, and was at once the effect and the cause of the attachment of the Hellenic mind towards mild and gracious types of godhead. The aniconic emblem and uncouth fetich-formed figures were here and there retained, because of vague ideas about luck or for superstitious fetichistic reasons; but the beautiful idol was cherished because it could arouse the enthusiastic affection of a sensitive people, and could bring them to the very presence of a friendly divine person. The saying that the Olympian deities died of their own loveliness means a wrong interpretation of the facts and the people. But for a beautiful idolatry, Hellenic polytheism would have passed away some centuries before it did, the deities fading into alien types or becoming fused one with the other. Nor was its force and influence exhausted by the introduction of Christianity, for it shaped the destinies of the Greek Church, and threw down a victorious challenge to the iconoclastic Emperors.

If now we were to look across the Mediterranean, and could survey the religious monuments of Persia, Assyria and Babylonia, Phoenicia, and the Hittite people, we should find a general acceptance of the anthropomorphic idea. The high personal deities are represented mainly in human form, but the art is not able to interpret the polytheistic beliefs with skilfully differentiated types. In Chaldaic and Assyrian art one type of countenance is used for various divinities, and this such as might inspire awe rather than affection. And the anthropomorphism is unstable. Often animal traits appear in parts of the divine figure. Nergal has a lion’s head; even the warrior Marduk is invoked in the mystic incantations as “Black Bull of the Deep, Lion of the dark house.”^[14.1] In fact, over a large part of anterior Asia, anthropomorphism and theriomorphism exist side by side in religious concept and religious art. We may say the same of Egypt, but here theriomorphism is the dominating factor.

As regards the explanation of this phenomenon, many questions are involved which are outside my present province. I would only express my growing conviction that these two distinct modes of representing the divine personage to the worshipper are not necessarily prior and posterior, the one to the other, in the evolution of religion. They can easily, and frequently do, coexist. The vaguely conceived deity shifts his shape, and the same people may imagine him mainly as a glorified man of human volition and action, and yet think of him as temporarily incarnate in an animal, and embody his type for purposes of worship or religious art in animal forms.

I would further indicate here what I cannot prove in detail—that theriomorphism lends itself to mysticism, while the anthropomorphic idolatry of Greece was strongly in opposition to it. The mystic theosophy that pervaded later paganism, and from which early Christianity could not escape, originated, as Reitzenstein has well shown, mainly in Egypt, and it arose partly, I think, in connection with the hieratic and allegorical interpretation of the theriomorphic idol. There was nothing mystic about the Zeus of Pheidias, so far as the form of the god was concerned. The forms were entirely adequate to the expression of the physical, moral, and spiritual nature of the god. The god was just that, and there was nothing behind, and, as the ancient enthusiast avers, “having once seen him thus, you could not imagine him otherwise.” But when a divinity to whom high religious conceptions have already come to attach is presented, as it might be in Egyptian religious art, with the head of a jackal or an ape, the feeling is certain to arise sooner or later in the mind of the worshipper that the sense-form is inadequate to the idea. Then his troubled questioning will receive a mystic answer, and the animal type of godhead will be given an esoteric interpretation.

Plutarch, in the De Iside et Osiride,^[15.1] is one of our witnesses. He finds a profounder significance for theosophy in the beetle, the asp, and the weasel than in the most beautiful anthropomorphic work of bronze or marble. He here turns his back on his ancestors, and goes over to the sect of the Egyptian mystic.

But the most curious testimony to my thesis is borne by an inscription on an Egyptian lamp—an invocation of the God Thoth: “O Father of Light, O Word (λόγος) that orderest day and night, come show thyself to me. O God of Gods, in thy ape-form enter.”^[15.2] Here the association of so mystic a concept as the “Logos,” the divine Reason, an emanation of God with the form of an ape, is striking enough, and suggests to us many reflections on the contrast between the Egyptian theriomorphism and the human idolatry of the Greek. The Hermes of Praxiteles was too stubborn a fact before the people’s eyes to fade or to soar into the high vagueness of the “Logos,” too stable in his beautiful humanity to sink into the ape.

But before leaving this subject I would point out a phenomenon in the Hellenic world that shows the working of the same principle. The Orphic god Dionysos-Sabazios-Zagreus was πολύμορφος, a shape-shifter, conceived now as bull, now as serpent, now as man, and the Orphic sects were penetrated with a mystic theosophy; and, again, they were a foreign element embedded in Greek society and religion.

While we were dealing with the subject of anthropomorphism, we should consider also the question of sex, for a religion that gives predominance to the god is certain to differ in some essential respects from one in which a goddess is supreme. Now, although the conception of an All-Father was a recognised belief in every Greek community, and theoretically Zeus was admitted to be the highest god, yet we may believe Athena counted more than he for the Athenians, and Hera more for the Argives. And we have evidence of the passionate devotion of many urban and village communities to the mother Demeter and her daughter Kore, to whom the greatest mysteries of Greece, full of the promise of posthumous salvation, were consecrated. Also, in the adjacent lands of earlier culture we mark the same phenomenon. In Egyptian religion we have the commanding figure of Isis, who, though by no means supreme in the earlier period, seems to dominate the latter age of this polytheism. In the Assyrian-Babylonian Pantheon, though the male deity is at the head, Ishtar appears as his compeer, or as inferior only to Asshur. Coming westward towards Asia Minor, we seem to see the goddess overshadowing the god. On the great Hittite monument at Boghaz-Keui, in Cappadocia, skilfully interpreted by Dr. Frazer, we observe a great goddess with her son coequal with the Father-God. In the lands adjacent to the coast a Mother-Goddess, sometimes also imagined as virgin, Kybele of Phrygia, Ma of Cappadocia, Hipta of Lydia, Astarte of Askalon, Artemis of Ephesos who was probably a blend of Hellenic and Oriental cult-ideas, appears to have been dominant from an immemorial antiquity; and Sir Arthur Evans has discovered the same mysterious feminine power pre-eminent in the Minoan religion. We may even affirm that she has ruled a great part of the Mediterranean down to the present day.

The various questions suggested by this predominance of goddess-worship are fascinating and subtle. The sociological one—how far it is to be connected with a system of counting descent through the female, with a matrilinear society—I have partly discussed elsewhere.^[17.1] I may later be able to enter on the question that is of more interest for the psychology of religion—the effect of such worships on the religious sentiment. Here I can merely point to the phenomenon as a natural and logical product of the principle of anthropomorphism, but would call attention to the fact that in the East it sometimes developed into a form that, from the anthropomorphic point of view, must be called morbid and subversive of this principle; for the rivalry of divine sex was here and there solved by the fusion of the two natures in the divinity, and we find a bisexual type—a male Astarte, a bearded Ishtar.^[17.2] The healthy-minded anthropomorphism of the Hellene rejects this Oriental extravagance.