The sacred place of worship might be a natural cave, or a ‘temenos,’ a fenced clearing in a grove, containing as the ἄγαλμα of the deity a tree-trunk or holy pillar or heap of stones, whence gradually an artificial altar might be evolved; the latter had become, some time before Homer, the usual receptacle of sacrifice and was a prominent figure in the Minoan-Mycenæan religion, which usually associated it with a sacred tree or pillar, the token of the deity’s presence or a magnet for attracting it, but not with any iconic statue or idol. Personal religion could content itself with such equipment, but, if the anthropomorphic instinct is strong in it, it prompts the construction of the temple or the house of God. And temples must have been found in the land in the pre-Homeric period; the few that have as yet been revealed in the area of Minoan-Mycenæan culture were built, with one exception,[31.1] within the royal palaces, and must be regarded as domestic chapels of the king, marking his sacred character as head of the religion of the State, the character with which the legends invest King Minos and King Aiakos. The earliest that have been excavated on free sites are the temples of Hera at Argos and Olympia, and these are now dated not earlier than the ninth century B.C. But the traditions of the earliest temple at Delphi, and of that of Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, suggest a greater antiquity than this.
With the multiplication of temples special priesthoods must also have multiplied. But the professional priest had already arisen in pre-Homeric times; Homer knows of the brotherhood called the Selloi,[32.1] who tended the oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona, “who slept on the ground and never washed their feet,” and he mentions others who were attached to special deities, and two of these at least administered cults without a temple, the priest of Zeus of Mount Ida,[32.2] and the priest of the river Skamandros,[32.3] of each of whom he says, “he was honoured like a god among the people.” These words suggest a high and sacrosanct position; yet these two priests are also warriors fighting in the ranks, which is the mark of a secular priesthood; and there is no legend nor any hint of evidence suggesting that a professional priesthood enjoyed a political and social power in the prehistoric that we know was never achieved by them in the historic period of Greece. For the evolution of many of the earliest Hellenic institutions evidence is almost wholly lacking. But on general comparative grounds we can surmise that the religious character of the monarchy was most prominent in the earliest times and that as its secular power and functions developed, the priest-expert was attached to him to assist in the national cults, over which the Basileus retained a general supervision. We have scarcely a hint, either in the earliest or later days of Greece, of any conflict between Church and State; we know that, at least, historic Greece escaped sacerdotalism; and its earliest societies, whatever their danger or their struggles may have been, had escaped it by the days of Homer.[33.1] Bearing on this point is the other negative fact, that for this earliest age we have little or no evidence of the prevalence of what is called ‘Shamanism,’ divine seizures, ecstatic outbursts of wild prophesying, by which a society can be terrified and captured. The professional ‘Mantis,’ the prophet or soothsayer, existed as distinct from the priest; but his methods generally—so far as our earliest witness informs us—were cool and quasi-scientific.[33.2]
The ritual at the altar in the early period with which we are at present dealing consisted of an oblation to the deity of an animal victim or an offering of fruits and cereals; the sacrifice might be accompanied with wine or might be wineless, a ‘sober’ sacrifice which was called νηφάλια, the latter being perhaps the more ancient tradition. We may interpret the earliest form of Hellenic animal-sacrifice as in some sense a simple tribal or family communion-meal with the deity, whereby the sense of comradeship and clan-feeling between man and God was strengthened and nourished. This is the view that Homer has inherited, and it endures throughout the later history of the ritual; and it expresses the general genial temper of Hellenic religion, a trait which Robertson Smith marked as characteristic of other religions of the same social type.[33.3] Similarly the description given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias of the ancient ritual of Zeus Polieus on the Athenian Akropolis reveals to us a typical example of the civic communion feast.[34.1] Such a sacrifice is merely a transference into the divine circle of the practice of the common feast of the tribesmen. But we can also discern a mystic element in the Homeric ritual text, which is evidently based on a tradition indefinitely older than the poems; the sacrificial victim, usually the ox, is first consecrated by being touched with the barley-stalks, which had been placed on the altar and which fill him by their contact with the altar’s divine spirit: then when he has been immolated and cut up, the sacrificers are specially said “to taste the entrails”[34.2] invariably before the real sacred meal begins; as the entrails are the inner seat of the life which has been consecrated by the hallowing contact of the altar, we are justified in supposing that the object of this solemn act was to establish the real and corporeal communion of the worshipper with the divinity.[34.2]
Chthonian worship.—The important distinction which is well attested of the later ages between the ‘chthonian’ and the ‘Olympian’ ritual—to use these two conventional terms for convenience—may already have been in vogue in the earliest period of the polytheism. In the first type of sacrifice, where the offering was made to the nether divinities, the victim’s head was held down above a hole in the ground—a βόθρος—and the blood from the severed throat was shed into it. In the second, where the upper powers, whose region was the air or the sky, were the recipients, the victim was held up erect off the ground, his face lifted towards the sky, and in this attitude his throat was cut. Homer shows himself aware of this form of sacrifice; and that the other, the chthonian, was also in vogue in his time is to be inferred from his account of the ritual performed by Odysseus in honour of the shades, where he mentions the βόθρος, the sacrifice of black sheep, with their heads turned downwards towards the lower world, and the triple libation of honey, wine and water.[35.1] For the ritual of the dead in the Greek religious tradition was closely modelled on the service of the nether divinities. The triple libation is known to have been part of Minoan-Cretan cult, as the altar table found in the cave of Mount Dikte attests.[35.2] And a shrine with a βόθρος in the middle of the cella has been found at Priniá in Crete, consecrated to a chthonian goddess, of which the foundation is ascribed to the ninth century.[35.3]
From these indications and from the prevalence of chthonian cults attested by later records, in which we can discern features of great antiquity, we can gather that the earliest period of Greek religion was not wholly characterised by the brightness of ritual and the geniality of religious feeling that appear on the surface of Homeric poetry. The Homeric sacrifice was often accompanied by a sense of sin,[35.4] though the poet shows no cognisance of any peculiar ritual of a specially piacular type. Also he was aware of the dark world of powers who avenged the broken oath and punished sinners even after death. Long before his time, we may suppose, gloomy worship, such as that of the Θεοὶ Μειλίχιοι described by Pausanias at Myonia in Lokris,[36.1] of which the rites were performed by night, was in vogue in parts of Greece. Mother-Earth, prophesying through phantom-dreams, had held rule at Delphi before Apollo came, and that was long before Homer’s work began.[36.2]
There are strong reasons also for believing that the cult of hero-ancestors was already a part of the pre-Homeric religion, as it was a prominent part of the post-Homeric. The elaborate tendance of the dead attested of the Mycenæan period by the graves discovered at Tiryns and Mycenæ, could easily develop into actual worship if it was maintained through many generations, as it was at Menidi in Attica. Doubtless, the common and promiscuous worship of the dead was a morbid development of the later polytheism. But Homer, who is generally silent about such cults, and in a well-known passage about the Twin-Brethren[36.3] seems to ignore deliberately their divine or semi-divine character, almost reveals his knowledge of the worship of Herakles,[36.4] and certainly was aware of the Attic cult of Erechtheus, unless the passage that refers to it was the work of the interpolator.[36.5]
It is a difficult question how we are to estimate and how far we can trust the Homeric evidence on this important point of religion. Even if we trust it so far as to say that the Achæans at least practised no real worship of the dead, it yet remains probable that they found it existing here and there in the lands in which they settled.
It is important to emphasise this gloomier side of Greek religion; but it is detrimental to exaggerate it, as has been the tendency of some modern writers in a pardonable revolt from the old shallow theories of orthodox classicism. We ought to recognise that at no period of his history was the ordinary Hellene ghost-ridden, worried and dismayed by demoniac terrors, or by morbid anxiety about the other world or his destiny after death; at least he will not appear so, when we compare his religious and mythologic records with those of Babylon, Egypt, and Christendom.[37.1] Nor dare we affirm that the prehistoric Hellene was weaker-minded and more timorous in respect of such matters than the later. He may even have been stronger-minded, and at least as willing to eat a sacramental meal in company with the ‘Theoi Meilichioi’ (shadowy powers of the lower world), or with the Nether-Zeus, or the Nether Earth-Mother, and with his departed family-spirits, as were his later descendants at Lokris, Mykonos and other places.[37.2] The earliest myths have little of the goblin element. Homer indeed himself was cognisant of such forms of terror as a black ‘Ker’—Penelope likens Antinoos to one;[37.3] the ancient folklore of Argolis was aware of a bad spirit that once ravaged its homes.[37.4] The early popular imagination was sure to have inherited or to have evolved such creations of fear; and a black Earth-Goddess with a horse’s head and snake-locks, who lived in a dark cave at Phigaleia, almost certainly in the pre-Homeric period, was a sufficiently terrifying personality.[38.1]
But happily for the Greek imagination, the divinities of the world of death, abiding below the earth, tended to take on the benign functions of the powers of vegetation. The God of the lower world is scarcely called by the ill-omened name of Hades in cult, but Plouton or Trophonios or Zeus Chthonios, names importing beneficence; for the Homeric and Hesiodic world Demeter is a goddess of blessing, not of terror. And although in the earliest period certain demoniac personages such as Medousa—identical in form and perhaps in character with the snake-locked horse-headed Demeter—may have loomed large and terrible in popular cult, and afterwards faded wholly from actual worship or survived in the lower strata of ineffectual folklore, yet the more civilising imagination had also been operative in the religion of the second millennium. The monuments of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion reveal scarcely an element of terror. And at some period before Homer the kindly deity, Hermes, had assumed the function of the leader of souls. As regards the eschatological views of the prehistoric Greek we can say little, unless we believe that Homer was his spokesman; and such belief would be very hazardous. The earliest communities may have had no special hopes concerning the departed soul; we have no reason for thinking that the mysteries which came to offer some promise of happiness in the world to come had as yet proclaimed such a doctrine; the earliest form of the Eleusinia may have been that of a secret society organised for agrarian purposes. But, on the other hand, there is no proof that the primitive mind of the Hellene brooded much on the problem of death, or was at all possessed with morbid feeling about it; and in pre-Homeric times he must have been freer from care in this matter than he was in the later centuries, if we accept the view of certain scholars that the elaborate ritual of ‘Katharsis’ or purification, which was mainly dependent on the idea of the impurity of death, ghosts and bloodshed, was wholly the creation of post-Homeric days.
Earliest ritual of purification.—It has been even said that the very idea of the need of purification on special occasions was unknown to Homer. This is demonstrably false; it is enough to mention one passage alone: at the close of the first book of the Iliad, the Achæans at Agamemnon’s bidding, purify themselves from the plague, and throw the infected media of purification into the sea; this is a religious lustration. And when Hesiod mentions the rule that a man returning from an ‘ill-omened’ funeral could not without peril attempt to beget a child on that day,[39.1] he happens to be the first literary witness to the Greek tabu of death; but we may be sure that he is giving us a tradition of indefinite age, and that the ‘Achæan’ society, of which Homer is supposed to be the spokesman, had some of the Kathartic rules and superstitions that are found broadcast in later Greece. It may not have elaborated or laid marked stress on them; it may have had no strong sense of the impurity of homicide nor devised any special code for its expiation. But if it was entirely without any instinctive feeling for the impurity of birth and death, and for the danger of the ‘miasma’ arising from certain acts and states, it was almost unique among the races of man. Only, a progressive people does not overstrain such feelings.