Magic.—Now that which is here called ‘animatism’ is a religious feeling which may inspire real worship, but is more liable than pure theism to be associated with magic; and it is reasonable to believe that magic was in vogue in prehistoric Hellas, not necessarily in antagonism to religion, but practised for purposes of the community as well as for private ends.
It is true that the records which tell us about these things are all of a period much later than Homer’s, and that he is almost silent about such matters.[48.2] But we know now how to appreciate Homer’s silences. And general anthropology compels us to believe that some of those records reveal facts of immemorial antiquity in Greece. The Thesmophoria, one of the most ancient of the Hellenic services, was partly magical; that is, it included rites that had a direct efficacy, apart from the appeal to any divinity, such as the strewing the fields with the decaying remains of the pigs that had been consecrated to the earth-Goddesses and thrown down into their vault.[48.3] So also in the Thargelia of Attica and other Greek communities, the ceremonies connected with the scapegoat, the ritualistic whipping and transference of sin, belong to the domain of magic rather than to religion.[49.1]
We have also direct testimony of a magical dealing with the elements in the titles of officials at Athens called the ‘Heudanemoi’[49.2] and of those at Corinth called Ἁνεμοκοῖται,[49.3] both words denoting ‘wind-lullers,’ those ‘who charmed the winds to sleep’; and again in the description of the rite performed by the magicians at Kleonai who according to Clemens[49.4] “averted the sky’s wrath by incantations and sacrifices”; or in Pausanias’ account of the operations of the priest of the winds at Titane in Sikyon[49.5] who endeavoured to assuage their fierceness by “singing over them the spells that Medea used.” Doubtless these officials are only maintaining the practices of an indefinitely remote past. And these are also reflected in the legend of the ancient Salmoneus of Thessalian and possibly Minyan origin, who drove about in a chariot imitating thunder and, while merely practising a well-known type of weather-magic, was misunderstood by the higher powers and later moralists.
The few records that may avail for an opinion concerning the early period with which we are at present concerned entirely fail to suggest any such prevalence of magic as might obstruct intellectual progress or the growth of a higher religion. They reveal generally a type that is harmless or even philanthropic.[49.6] Doubtless some black magic existed in the earliest as in the later Hellas, directed against the life or the property of individuals, and worked by evil means; the more ancient literature is entirely silent about this; but a late record of Pausanias testifies to a barbarous magic practised by the community of Haliartos to discover a water-supply[50.1]: a son of one of the chief men was stabbed by his own father, and as he ran bleeding about the land springs of water were found where his blood dripped. But at no time, we may judge, was the religion or the intellect of Greece so clouded with magic as was the case elsewhere in the ancient civilisations, notably in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Human sacrifices.—This attempted presentation of the first era of Greek religion must raise the question as to the practice within it of the ritual of human sacrifice. For we are apt to associate this with a primitive society and with a crude or savage religion. But this association is not borne out by the religious history of mankind. The practice has been found in societies highly developed both in morality and civilisation; and the a priori argument is dangerous, whether we apply it in one way or the other.
It has been said that the Homeric poems show no consciousness of the existence of the cruel rite in the Greek world of the period; and it has been argued on this ground that the Achæan society of which they are the voice was innocent of it.[50.2] A doubt may arise concerning the slaughter of the Trojan captives at the pyre of Patroklos,[50.3] an act of ferocity for which Homer outspokenly blames Achilles. The passage certainly suggests that the poet was aware that such things were occasionally done at contemporary funerals; in Mycenæan tombs at Argos and Mycenæ human remains have been found before the entrance-door that point to an offering of slaves or captives.[51.1] But this need not have been an act of worship or strictly of religion. The dead might be imagined as needing slaves; and to kill slaves to accompany the departed, just as to kill horses over the pyre, may only imply ‘tendance’ and no worship of the spirit. But Homer’s silence concerning human sacrifice as a rite of religion is of no value as evidence for our present question, as I have argued elsewhere.[51.2] How are we to account for the fairly numerous records of actual human sacrifice, or of the semblance or reminiscence of it, in later Greek worship, records that are found sporadically among most of the leading Greek stocks? The old shift of attributing to Oriental influences everything in Hellenic religion that clashed with our ideal of Hellenism was naïvely unscientific. That the practice should have sprung up spontaneously and suddenly in the later society, when civic life and morality were advancing, is hard to believe. It is more natural to suppose that it was an immemorial and enduring tradition of the race, which was only with difficulty abolished and which lingered here and there till the end of paganism. It has been found among many other Aryan races, and it was especially in vogue among the Thraco-Phrygian stock, of near kin to the Hellenic. These general grounds for believing that it was a feature of the earliest Greek religion are confirmed by some special evidence derivable from the legends and cult-records. It is generally impossible to date the birth of legends; but some can be discerned to belong to an earlier stratum than others; such are the legends concerning the human sacrifice to Zeus Αύκαιος on Mount Lykaion in Arcadia, to which is attached the story of King Lykaon and the banquet that he offers to Zeus on the flesh of his own son;[52.1] the Achæan or Minyan story of the sacrifice to Zeus Laphystios—Zeus the Ravening—of the king’s son of the house of Athamas;[52.2] Kyknos’ sacrifice of pilgrims and the dedication of their skulls to Apollo on the Hyperborean pilgrims’-way at the Achæan Pagasos;[52.3] the sacrifice of a boy and a maiden to Artemis Τρικλαρία by the Ionians on the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth.[52.4] A careful study of the legends of these various rites will convince one that they belong to the earliest period of Greek religion. The last example is specially illuminating: the human sacrifice is here practised by the Ionians in their ancient settlements in the land, afterwards called Achaia; and its cessation is connected with the arrival of the cult of Dionysos and the return of the heroes from Troy.
The purpose and significance of the rite differed probably in the different cult-centres. In most cases we may interpret it as piacular, the dedication to an offended deity of a valued life, the life of the king’s son or daughter, as a substitute for the life of the people, such vicarious sacrifice being a common human institution; in some few cases we may discern an agricultural motive, the blood being shed as a magic charm to secure fertility.[53.1] At certain cult-centres and at certain times the human victim may have been regarded as the incarnation of the deity or the ‘daimon’; and this idea might explain the legends concerning the slaying of Iphigeneia the priestess of Artemis, or of the priests of Dionysos. Finally, in the ritual of Zeus Lykaios, we may detect a cannibal-sacrament, in which the holy flesh of the victim, whose life was mystically one with the God’s and the people’s, was sacramentally devoured. This ghastly practice is only doubtfully disclosed by legends and by interpretation of later records; a faint reminiscence of it may also have survived in the Argive story of Harpalyke and Klymenos.[53.2] But a close parallel to it will be noted in the Thracian Dionysiac ritual.
Summary account of the first period.—A detailed account of the pre-Homeric religious age must at many points remain doubtful and hypothetical; but certain definite and important facts may be established. Anthropomorphism, in a degree not found in the earliest Roman religion, was already prevalent, even dominant; and nearly all the leading personal divinities of the later polytheism had already emerged; only Dionysos had not yet crossed the border from Thrace; Asklepios, dimly known to Homer, was merely the local deity of a small Thessalian community, Pan merely the daimon of flocks in remote Arcadia. Cretan religion, also personal in its imagination and mainly anthropomorphic, had left its deep imprint on the mainland; and its divine personalities, such as Rhea, the Mother of the Gods, and Aphrodite were soon adopted by the northern immigrants, but not at first into high positions. The deity was generally imagined not as a spirit or a vague cosmic force, but as glorified man, and therefore the religion became adaptable to human progress in arts, civilisation and morality. But much in the animal world still appeared sacred and weird; and the deity might be at times incarnate in animal form. At the same time the religious imagination was still partly free from the bias of personal theism, and produced vaguer divine forms, of some force and power, but belonging rather to ‘animatism’ or polydaimonism than to polytheism.
Finally a study of all the facts and probabilities may convince a careful student that the origin of Greek polytheism as a whole from simpler forms cannot be found in this earliest period. In the second millennium, which is the starting-point for Hellenic history proper, we cannot discern the ‘making of a God’ (unless we mean the building-up of his more complex character), nor do we start with a godless period. We may well believe that in the history of mankind theism was evolved from animism or polydaimonism; we may believe the much more doubtful theory that anthropomorphism arises from a previous theriomorphism, and there may still be some who are convinced that theriomorphism implies a totemistic society. But, at any rate, these various evolutions had already happened indefinitely before the two strains—the Northern and the Mediterranean—had blended into the Hellenic race. The higher and the lower, the more complex and the simpler, forms of religious imagination operate together throughout Hellenic history; and the higher, though dominant, never wholly absorbs the lower, both being an intellectual tradition of an indefinite past. Much work on the origins of Greek religion has been wasted because its chronology is anachronistic. And the attempt to unlock many of its mysteries by the key of totemism has been abandoned by those who recognise that many of the views concerning this social phenomenon and its religious importance, prevalent in a former generation, were erroneous.