Such a religion as has been sketched might accord with a high social and political morality. On the other hand, it would not be likely to foster and consecrate certain mental moods, ennobled by Christian ethic, such as ‘fear of God,’ humility, faith. Never in the free periods of Greek history was ‘deisidaimonia’ (‘fear of divine powers’) regarded as a virtue, but rather as a vice or weakness. The Hellene was humble in his attitude to God only in the sense that he disliked overweening acts and speech of self-glorification; the phrase, δοῦλος τοῦ θεοῦ, ‘slave of God,’ common in early Christian documents, would be as repugnant to the Hellene as would be the ecstasy of self-abasement congenial to the Babylonian and the Christian religions. As for the Pauline use of the word πίστις, ‘faith,’ its value for religious morality would have been unintelligible for the earlier Greek.[40.1]
Cruder religious conceptions in the earliest period.—So far, the religious phenomena discoverable with some certainty or some probability in the earliest period of Greek history indicate a theistic system of a somewhat advanced type. But doubtless we must reckon with the presence of much else that was cruder and more savage. When we find in the later records ample evidence of the lower products of the religious imagination, the products of ‘animism’ or ‘fetichism’ or ‘theriomorphism’ or ‘polydaimonism,’ more inarticulate and uncouth embodiments of the concept of divinity, or darker and more cruel ritual than that which Homer describes, such as human sacrifice, the driving out of the scapegoat, blood-magic for controlling winds or finding water, no reasonable critic will call all these things post-Homeric because they may not be mentioned in Homer, or suppose that the pure-minded Hellenes were seduced into borrowing them from the Orientals, or that they were spontaneous products of a later degenerate age. The view taken of them by those who have in recent times applied comparative Anthropology to the study of Hellenism is the only one that is possible on the whole; these things are a surviving tradition of a mode of religious thought and feeling proper to the aboriginal ancestors of the Hellenic race, or immemorial indigenous products of the soil upon which that race grew up. There is no cataclysm in the religious history of Greece, no violent breach with its past, no destruction of primitive forms at the advent of a higher enlightenment; no fanatic prophet arose, and the protests of philosophy were comparatively gentle and ineffective. Only a few religious forms of an undeveloped society that might shock a more civilised conscience were gradually abandoned; most of them were tolerated, some in a moribund condition, under a more advanced religion, with which they might be seen to clash if any one cared to reason about them. Therefore a chapter or a statement in Pausanias may really be a record of the pre-Homeric age; and in this way we can supplement the partial picture that has been given above.
Animal-Gods and Animal-worship.—The anthropomorphic principle, which is not necessarily the highest upon which a personal theism could be constructed, is the main force of the higher life of Hellenic polytheism. We may believe that it had begun to work before Homer, but not predominantly or with sufficient effect to produce a stable anthropomorphism in religion. Some worship of animals which is called ‘theriolatry,’ some beliefs in the animal-incarnations of the divinity, were certainly in vogue. A few of the more ancient cult-titles would be evidence sufficient, apart from the later records. One of the most significant and oldest is Λύκειος, an epithet of Apollo marking his association with wolves; we find also that in many legends and even occasionally in ritual the wolf appears as his sacred animal. These facts point back to a period when Apollo was still the hunter-god of the wild wood, and was regarded as occasionally incarnate in the beast of the wild. We have also a few indications of direct reverence being paid to the wolf, apart from its connection with any god.[42.1] Another salient example either of theriolatry or theriomorphic god-cult is snake-worship, proved to have existed in the earliest epoch of the Delphic religion, and in vogue according to later records in Epirus and Macedonia. It may have been reverenced in its own right, or as the incarnation of some personal divinity or hero, as we find it later attached to the chthonian deities, to the Earth-Mother, Zeus Κτήσιος and Μειλίχιος,[42.2] Asklepios, and to the buried hero or heroine, such as Erechtheus, Kychreus. We have also reasons for assuming a very early cult of a Bear-Artemis in Attica[43.1] and Arcadia; and many other examples of similar phenomena will be found in a treatise on the subject by De Visser.[43.2] Later Arcadia was full of the products and of the tradition of this early mode of religious imagination; besides the horse-headed Demeter at Thigaleia, we hear of the worship at the same place of a goddess called Eurynome, represented as half-woman, half-fish; and bronze figures, belonging to the Roman period, have been found at Lykosoura in Arcadia, apparently representations of divinities partly theriomorphic.[43.3]
The first anthropologists who dealt with the primitive forms of Hellenic religion read this special set of phenomena in the light of totemism; but progressive students have now abandoned the totemistic hypothesis, on the ground that there is little or no trace of Totemism in any Greek or any Aryan Society, and that theriolatry, or the direct worship of animals, needs no such explanation. Also, as I have recently pointed out elsewhere,[43.4] the theriomorphic concept of divinity can and frequently does co-exist at certain periods and in certain peoples with the anthropomorphic; nor can we say with assurance that in the mental history of our race the former is prior to the latter, or that generally the anthropomorphic was evolved from the animal-god.
Functional Deities: polydæmonism.—In attempting to penetrate the pre-Homeric past, we have to reckon with another phenomenon which, though revealed in later records only, has certainly a primitive character and has been regarded as belonging to an age when the concept of definite complex personalities, such as θεοί, had not yet arisen. It was Usener[44.1] who first called attention to a large number of local cults of personages unknown to myth or general literature and designated, not by what are called proper names, such as Hermes, Apollo, Zeus, but by transparent adjectival names, expressing a particular quality or function or activity, to which the essence of the divine power in each case was limited: such, for instance, are Ἔχετλος Ἐχετλαῖος ἤρως, Κυαμίτης, Εὔνοστος, being nothing more, respectively, than the hero of the ploughshare at Marathon, the ‘hero who makes the beans grow’ on the sacred way to Eleusis, ‘the hero who gives the good return of corn’ at Tanagra; for these he invented the term, ‘Sonder-Götter,’ meaning deities of a single function only; and to those of them to whom only a momentary function and therefore only a momentary existence seemed to appertain, he applied the term ‘Augenblick-Götter,’ ‘Momentary Gods’; an Hellenic example of this type might be ‘Μυίαγρος,’ ‘Fly-chaser,’ in Arcadia, and Elis, who at the sacrifice to Athena or Zeus was called upon to chase away the flies that would worry the sacrificers, and who only existed for the purpose and at the time of that call.
We may compare also, for vagueness and inchoateness of personality, certain aggregates of deities having no definite single existence, but grouped by some adjectival functional name, such as θεοὶ Ἀποτροπαῖοι, ‘the deities that avert evil,’ at Sikyon,[44.2] θεαὶ Γενετυλλίδες, the goddesses of birth, in Attica,[45.1] the θεαὶ Πραξιδίκαι, the goddesses of just requital, at Haliartos.[45.2] Such forms seem to hover on the confines of ‘polydaimonism,’ and to be the products of an embryonic perception of divinity, cruder and dimmer than the robust and bright creations of the Hellenic polytheism, to which so rich a mythology and so manifold a personality attached. And another fact seems to fall into line with these; in some cult-centres the deity, though personally and anthropomorphically conceived, might only be designated by some vague descriptive title, like ὁ θεός and ἡ θεά, as occasionally at Eleusis, or ‘Despoina,’ ‘the Mistress,’ the Goddess of Arcadia, or ‘Παρθένος’, the ‘Virgin,’ on the coast of Caria, and in the Chersonnese; even as late as the time of Pausanias the men of Boulis in Phokis never called their highest God[45.3] by any other name than ὁ Μέγιστος, ‘the Greatest.’ And it has been thought that the well-known statement of Herodotus that the Pelasgians had no names for their divinities was based on some such facts as these.
The importance of these phenomena would be all the greater if Usener’s theory were true that they represent the crude material out of which much of Greek polytheism has grown.[45.4] But in any case they claim mention here, because they are the products of a mental operation or instinct that must have been operative in the earliest period of Hellenic religion.
Animism or animatism.—In another set of facts, also attested by later records, we may discern the surviving addition of an animistic period. A large part of the Hellenic, as of other religions, reflects man’s relation and feeling towards the world of nature, his dependence on the fruits of the earth, the winds, the waters, and the phenomena of the sky. The trend of the higher polytheism in the Hellenic mind was to set the personal divinity above and outside these things, which he or she directs as an intellectual will-power. But we have sufficient evidence of another point of view which is that of more primitive religion, from which the deity is imagined as essentially immanent in the thing, not as a distinct personality emerging and separable from it. The Arcadians who worshipped ‘Zeus Keraunos,’[46.1] or ‘Zeus-Thunder,’ at Mantineia, or the people at Gythion in Laconia, who called a sacred meteoric stone, ‘Zeus Καππώτας,’[46.2] ‘the fallen Zeus,’ or the Athenians who worshipped ‘Demeter χλόη,’ ‘Demeter Green Verdure,’[46.3] reveal in these strange titles an attitude of mind that is midway between ‘animatism,’ that religious perception of each striking thing or phenomenon in nature as in itself mysteriously alive and divine, and ‘theism’ which imagines it controlled by a personal deity. At the stage when Demeter could be named and perceived as ‘Chloe,’ ‘Verdure,’ the anthropomorphic conception of divinity, though certainly existing, was not yet stable or crystallised.
But there are other cult-facts reported to us of a still cruder type that seem to reveal animatism pure and simple and the infancy of the Hellenic mind. The Arcadians,[47.1] always the most conservative and backward among the Hellenes, in their colony of Trapezus, ‘offered sacrifice to the lightning and thunder and storms’; it seems that for them these things were animate and divine directly, just as the Air—Bedu—was for the Macedonians. Again, through all the periods of Hellenic religion, the worship of rivers and springs only at certain points approached the borders of theism; sometimes offerings were flung directly into the water, and prayer might be made ‘into the water’—we must not say ‘to the river-god,’ but to the divine water.[47.2]
We discern these two different ways of imagining divinity in the worship and ideas attaching to Helios, ‘Sun,’ and Hestia, ‘Hearth’; as regards the former, we have reason to surmise that his religious prestige was higher in the pre-Homeric than in the later age, and that the exalted position as a great political and cultured God which he enjoyed in the later history of Rhodes was a heritage from the Minoan religious tradition.[47.3] In Homer’s poems we find him personal and anthropomorphised; but we may well doubt if he was so for the average Greek, who merely kissed his hand to him every morning or bowed to him on coming forth from his house, and who, regarding him merely as animate, or ‘Living Sun,’ found it difficult to develop him into a free and complex individual person. As regards Hestia the facts are still clearer.[48.1] In her worship, which belonged to the aboriginal period of Greek religion, she was at first, and in the main she continued to be, nothing more than ‘Holy Hearth,’ the Hearth felt as animate, nor was the attempt to anthropomorphise into a free personal Goddess ever wholly successful.