In most regions we have evidence of the practice of human sacrifice, either as an established system or as an occasional expedient. The motives that prompted it present an important and intricate question to the modern inquirer. The two nations that grew to abhor it and to protest against it were the Hebrew and the Greek, though the latter did not wholly escape the taint of it; for he had inherited the practice from his ancestral past, and he found it indigenous in the lands he conquered. Repellent as the rite may be, it much concerns the study of the religions of the cultured races.
Now, an interesting theory concerning sacrifice was expounded and brought into prominent discussion by Professor Robertson Smith in his Religion of the Semites, and in an earlier article in the Encyclopædia Britannica—namely, that a certain type of ancient sacrifice was a mystic sacramental communion, the worshipper partaking of some sacred food or drink in which the spirit of the deity was temporarily lodged. This mystic act, of which there is no clear trace in the Old Testament, is reported from Egypt,[25.1] and it appears to have been part of the Attis ritual of Phrygia. We find doubtful traces of it in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries; also a glimpse of it here and there in the public religion of Hellas. But it is best attested as a potent force in the Dionysiac worship, especially in a certain savage ritual that we may call Thracian, but also in the refined and Hellenised service as well.
I cannot dwell here on the various aspects of this problem. The Hellenic statistics and their significance I have partly collected and estimated in a paper published some years ago.[25.2] The application of the sacramental idea to the explanation of the Eleusinian mysteries, ingeniously attempted by Dr. Jevons, I have discussed in the third volume of my Cults of the Greek States; and the Dionysiac communion-service is considered at length in the fifth.
The attractiveness of the mystic appeal of the Sacrament appears to have increased in the later days of paganism, especially in its period of struggle with Christianity. That strangest rite of the expiring polytheism, the ταυροβόλιον, or the baptism in bull’s blood, in the worship of Kybele, has been successfully traced back by M. Cumont to the worship of the Babylonian Anaitis. The sacramental concept was the stronghold of Mithraism, but can hardly be regarded as part of its heritage from Persia, for it does not seem to have been familiar to the Iranian religion nor to the Vedic Indian. In fact, the religious history of no other Aryan race discloses it with clearness, save that of the Thraco-Phrygian and Hellenic. Was it, then, a special product of ancient “Mediterranean” religious thought? It would be important to know, and Crete may one day be able to tell us, whether King Minos took the sacrament. Meantime, I would urge upon those who are studying this phenomenon in the various religions the necessity of precise definition, so as to distinguish the different grades of the sacramental concept, for loose statements are somewhat rife about it.
Apart from the ritual of the altar, there is another mode of attaining mystic union with the divinity—namely, by means of a sacred marriage or simulated corporeal union. This is suggested by the initiation formulæ of the mysteries of Attis-Kybele. The cult of Kybele was connected with that of the Minoan goddess, and the strange legend of Pasiphae and the bull-god lends itself naturally to this interpretation. The Hellenic religion also presents us with a few examples of the holy marriage of the human bride with the god, the most notable being the annual ceremony of the union of the “Queen,” the wife of the King Archon, at Athens, with Dionysos. And in the mysteries of later paganism, as well as in certain forms and symbolism of early Christianity, Professor Dieterich has traced the surviving influence of this rite.
Among all the phenomena of ritual, none are more interesting or in their effects more momentous than the rites that are associated with the dogma of the death of the divinity. That the high gods are naturally mortal and liable to death is an idea that is certainly rare, though it may be found in Egyptian and old Teutonic mythology; but the dogma of the annual or periodic death and resurrection of the divinity has been, and is, enacted in much peasant ritual, and worked for the purposes of agrarian magic in Europe and elsewhere. More rarely we find the belief attached to the mystic forms and faith of some advanced religion, and it is specially in the Mediterranean area where it appears in a high stage of development. It is a salient feature of the Egyptian worship of Isis; of the Sumerian-Babylonian ritual, in which the dead Thammuz was bewailed, and which penetrated Syria and other parts of Asia Minor; of the worship of Attis and Adonis in Phrygia and the Lebanon; and of certain shrines of the Oriental Aphrodite. It is associated often with orgiastic sorrow and ecstatic joy, and with the belief in human immortality of which the resurrection of the deity is the symbol and the efficacious means. This idea and this ritual appears to have been alien to the native Hellenic religion. The Hellenic gods and goddesses do not die and rise again.
Only in one Aryan nation of antiquity, so far as I am aware, was the idea clear and operative—the Thraco-Phrygian, in the religion of Dionysos-Sabazios. This alien cult, when transplanted into Greece, retained still some savagery in the rite that enacted the death of the god; but in the Orphic sects the ritual idea was developed into a doctrine of posthumous salvation, from which the later pre-Christian world drew spiritual comfort and some fertile moral conceptions. This Thracian-Dionysiac influence in Hellas, though chastened and sobered by the sanity of the national temperament, initiated the Hellene into a certain spiritual mood that was not naturally evoked by the native religion; for it brought into his polytheism a higher measure of enthusiasm, a more ecstatic spirit of self-abandonment, than it possessed by its own traditional bent. Many civilised religions appear to have passed beyond the phase of orgiastic fervour. It emerges in the old Egyptian ritual, and most powerfully in the religion of Phrygia and of certain districts of Syria; but it seems to have been alien to the higher Semitic and the Iranian religions, as it was to the native Hellenic.
I have only been able here, without argument or detailed exposition, to present a short summary of the more striking phenomena in the religious systems of our spiritual ancestors. Many of the problems I have stated still invite further research, which may considerably modify our theories. I claim that the subject possesses a masterful interest both in its own right and for the light it sheds on ancient philosophy, ancient art, and ancient institutions. And it ought in the future to attract more and more the devotion of some of our post-graduate students. Much remains to be done even for the Hellenic and Roman religions, still more for those of Egypt and Assyria. Here, in our University of Oxford, under whose auspices the Sacred Books of the East were translated, and where the equipment for the study is at least equal to that of any other centre of learning, this appeal ought not to be made in vain.
CHAPTER II.
Statement of the Problem and the Evidence.
The subject I have chosen for this course may appear over-ambitious; and the attempt to pass critical judgment upon the facts that arise in this wide comparative survey may be thought premature. For not only is the area vast, but large tracts of it are still unexplored, while certain regions have yielded materials that are ample and promising, but of which the true interpretation has not yet been found. We have, for instance, abundant evidence flowing in with ever-increasing volume of the Sumerian-Babylonian religion, but only a portion of the cuneiform texts has as yet been authoritatively translated and made available for the service of Comparative Religion. The Hittite monuments are witnesses of primary value concerning Hittite religion: but the Hittite script may reveal much more that is vital to our view of it, and without the help of that script we are not sure of the exact interpretation of those religious monuments; but though we have recently heard certain encouraging expressions of hope, the master-word has not yet been found that can open the door to this buried treasure of knowledge. And again, the attempt to gauge accurately the relation and the indebtedness of Greek religion to that of the near East cannot be wholly successful, until we know more of the Minoan-Mycenaean religion; and our hope hangs here partly on the discovery of more monuments, but mainly, I am convinced, on the decipherment of the mysterious Minoan writing, to which great achievement Sir Arthur Evans’ recent work on the Scripta Minoa is a valuable contribution. Therefore the time is certainly not yet ripe for a final and authoritative pronouncement on the great questions that I am venturing upon in this course.