Eleusinian mysteries.—The Eleusinia or Mysteries of Eleusis were a more national and Pan-Hellenic institution than the Orphica, but of somewhat similar influence and purpose. Originally they may have been merely the tribal mysteries of an agrarian society to which only the adult members of the Eleusinian community were admitted. But when our earliest record reveals them, namely, the Homeric hymn to Demeter which cannot be later than the close of the seventh century, they have already enlarged their borders and their scope. For they appear there as appealing to the whole Hellenic world, and their special promise to the initiated is the happiness of the soul after death. Having once transcended the tribal limits, they seem to have imposed no conditions on the aspirants for admission except the possession of Hellenic speech and purity from actual stain; the initiation was open to women and occasionally to slaves. Nor does their influence and the power of their appeal appear to have waned until the introduction of Christianity. Many scholars have laboured to solve the problems concerning their ritual, their doctrine and their inner significance. It has been thought that their chief attractiveness may have lain in their preservation of a higher sacramental conception of the sacrifice that had died out in the ordinary public ritual; that the initiate drank of a sacred cup in which were mystically infused the very life and substance of the kindly Earth-Mother, with whom their own being was thus transcendentally united. But more careful criticism shows that, though a simple form of sacrament was part of the preliminary service, the real pivot of the mystery was not this but a solemn pageant in which certain sacred things fraught with mystic power were shown to the eyes of the initiated, who also were allowed to witness mimetic performances showing the action and passion of a divine drama, the Abduction of the Daughter, the sorrow and long search of the Mother, the Holy Marriage of reconciliation, possibly the birth of a holy infant.
To imagine the thrill and the force of these rites, one must imagine a mediæval passion-play performed with surpassing stateliness and solemnity. Those who saw these things in the Hall of the Mysteries at Eleusis may have carried away with them an abiding sense of a closer communion with the benign powers of the nether world and a resulting hope of a happier posthumous lot. We must regard them as the highest and most spiritual product of the pure Hellenic religion, investing it with an atmosphere of mystery and awe that was generally lacking in the public cult, and which was unperturbed at Eleusis by any violence of morbid ecstasy such as marked the Phrygian and some of the Orphic rites. We may believe that they exercised a healthful influence on the moral and spiritual temperament of the Hellene; but it is not clear that they definitely proclaimed any higher moral theory, nor do they appear like the Orphica to have preached any dogma of metaphysic or theology. But, like the Orphica, they tended to widen the horizon of the religious spirit; for they appealed to a far larger public than the ordinary cults of the city; and while being Pan-Hellenic in this sense they belong to the domain of personal religion, for they satisfied the personal craving of the individual for closer fellowship with the deity and they soothed the troublous apprehensions that were growing up in this second period concerning the individual destiny of the soul. Yet as regards Attica and Athens at least and probably as regards Hellas, they are not to be ranked, as the Orphica may be, among the disruptive forces of individualistic religion, undermining the social fabric of public worship. For the Athenian State administered them—by the help of Eleusinian officials—in its corporate capacity; and one of the catechumens—the παῖς ἀφ᾽ ἑστίας—was initiated, according to the most probable view, in behalf of the whole youth of the city.[87.1]
In the great mysteries the agrarian significance, though discoverable and associated with simple agrarian magic, was overshadowed by higher and more spiritual religion. And elsewhere in the State-festivals we note this same phenomenon of progress in this second period. Old-world utilitarian rites of agriculture and fertility were often taken over by the expanding Polis and received an artistic elaboration that disguised their original significance for the primitive peasant and raised them to a higher plane of social religion. This interesting process can be best studied in following the detailed records of the Laconian Karneia and Hyakinthia, the Delphic Pythia, the Attic Panathenaia: we can feelingly appreciate in these the potent influence of the lyric poetry, the music, and the art of early Greece, shaping and elevating men’s imagination of divinity.
By the close of this second period—c. 500 B.C.—the Hellenic national consciousness had realised itself in respect of intellectual culture, ethics and religion. Zeus Hellanios, the tribal God, is becoming Panhellanios. The age of the tyrants contributed much to the growth of Pan-Hellenism; Peisistratos something to the idea of a national religion, in that he seems to have worked zealously for the organisation and expansion of the Eleusinian mysteries. The cult of Dionysos has penetrated the leading communities and most of the byways of Greece; and nearly everywhere he has been partially tamed and the Mænads either suppressed or disciplined to the more sober purposes of civic worship. But the two most striking phenomena in the spiritual history of the sixth century were, first, the rise and expansion of Ionic philosophy and physical speculation, and, secondly, the development of a new form of literature that came to be known as the Attic Drama. And both must be reckoned with among the forces affecting the life of the popular religion.
Sixth-century philosophy.—The relations of Greek philosophy to Greek religion is a great and complex subject, the theme of many modern treatises; and in this slight sketch of the whole history of the polytheism there is no room for more than a few most general observations. So far as the new speculation, which gave birth to the free secular science of Europe, was preoccupied with questions of the physical origins of things and elemental theories of cosmogony, it would not necessarily clash with any orthodox prejudice of the average Hellene. For he had no sacred books which dictated to him any views concerning the origin of the world or the constitution of nature, and which he would have considered it immoral to disbelieve. In fact when Herakleitos boldly declared that “neither God nor man made the Kosmos,” there was no authoritative Greek myth or theologic dogma to gainsay him. But the great philosophers of the sixth century, Pythagoras, Empedokles, Xenophanes and Herakleitos were also directly concerned with the philosophy of religion, with speculations on the nature and with the true definition of Godhead; and some of the surviving fragments of their works express ideas and sentiments in sharp antagonism to the concepts and ritual of the contemporary polytheism. The main trend of their speculations ran counter to the anthropomorphic theory of divinity; and they tend to define God not as a person, but rather as the highest spiritual or metaphysical or even physical power or function of the universe; and there is a common tendency in this sixth-century thought away from the theistic to the pantheistic view. Pythagoras is said to have explained the conception of God in terms of mathematics and to have been willing to accept the personages of the popular polytheism on condition of finding their true mathematical equation.[89.1] But this philosopher stands apart from the other leaders of this first period of Hellenic free thought. The mathematical mind is often a prey to mysticism. And Pythagoras was the most powerful champion and apostle of Orphism, the founder of those secret societies that threatened the secular and the intellectual freedom of Hellas. Equally on its mystic as on its rationalistic side the Pythagorean teaching was in tendency inimical to the public religion of Greece, though the members of this sect appear always to have compromised with it. In the fragments of Xenophanes we find the most severe protests against the current religious conceptions of Hellas; his verses quoted by Clemens[89.2] polemise strongly against the folly of anthropomorphism, which is the master-passion of Greek polytheism; and if one or two of his quoted utterances seem to proclaim monotheism, it is clear that for his higher thought Godhead was not a person, but a cosmic principle or a noetic idea. On the whole the same account may be given of the religious theory of Herakleitos so far as this is revealed at all in the fragments. It has indeed been recently maintained that he tolerated and found a place in his system for the contemporary polytheism;[90.1] but it is probably a truer view that he regarded it with half-disguised contempt and only used its terms and figures on occasion as literary expressions; while three of his fragments are scornful exclamations against the excesses of the Bacchic ritual, the methods of purification from blood, and the folly of idolatry.[90.2]
Yet in this early speculation of the sixth century the parting of the ways has not yet been reached for physical science and religion; the cosmic theory is expressed in spiritual and animistic rather than in materialistic terms; for Empedokles Love and Strife are creative principles, in the view of Thales the magnet has a soul and all things are full of divine potencies. The great movement of Ionic thought was indeed adaptable to a high pantheistic or animistic creed, but not to the personal polytheism of the Hellenes, though most of the philosophers do not appear to have been vehement protestants. And at first their protests could have influenced only the minds of a few; not before the fifth century was the popular State-religion obliged to take notice of it.
Rise of tragedy.—The other phenomenon referred to above as marking the close of this period was the rise of tragedy. The question of its influence on the whole popular religion belongs to the history of the fifth century. What concerns us chiefly at this point is its close association with Dionysos-cult. The traditional view that it actually originated in some mimetic form of Bacchic ritual is in the opinion of the present writer still the most reasonable, although this is now denied by some scholars.[91.1] But even if its connection with Dionysos-worship is a secondary or accidental fact, it is still a fact of importance for the history of Greek polytheism. The records concerning Thespis of the Attic village Ikaria, a place dominated by ancient Dionysiac legend, the statement of Herodotus concerning Kleisthenes, the tyrant of Sikyon, who gave to Dionysos the tragic choruses that hitherto had been devoted to the hero-cult of Adrastos, are sufficient proofs that this greatest of all the literary achievements of post-Homeric Hellas was dedicated to the God already in the sixth century; and throughout the glorious career of the Attic stage Dionysos remained its patron-God.
His worship, then, must have received a strong stimulus from this new form of literature which rapidly achieved popularity and appealed directly to a larger public than the other. And his character thus undergoes a singular transformation; the wild God of barbaric origin comes to take rank by the side of Apollo and the Graces as a divinity of culture and education, the inspirer of one of the greatest of Hellenic arts. Here again, as in the cults of Apollo, Athena and the Muses, we mark the characteristically Hellenic fusion of art and religion; and the history of the dithyramb, the Dionysiac hymn which may have been the parent of the drama and which was wedded to a peculiar mode of music and rhythm, is an important chapter in the history of European music.
CHAPTER IV.
THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.
The third period of Greek religion may conveniently include the fifth century and that part of the fourth that ends with the downfall of the system of civic autonomy at the battle of Chaironeia. For the history of Greek religion as of Greek culture, it is of the highest interest, being the richest in respect of religious monuments and literature and the most forceful and momentous in regard to the influences at work. In the sphere of external history it witnessed such world-crises as the struggle of Hellenism against barbarism, the rise and fall of the Imperial City-State, and the emergence of Macedon as a world-power; in the sphere of culture it witnessed the culmination of the greatest art of the world, the bloom and maturity of the Attic drama and Pindar’s lyric, the diffusion of education and the spirit of enquiry through the activity of the Sophists, and the higher development of philosophy and science. To show how the religious practice and theory of the higher and lower members of Hellenic society were affected by the great events and achievements of this greatest period of human history is a necessary but a difficult task.