It would be interesting to trace the points of this long development, which has here been hastily sketched, among the higher races of the old world; but a brief and partial indication of its history among some of them must here suffice. We are all acquainted with the final evolution of the idea of purity in Judaic history: but the phenomena of its embryonic stages, as revealed in the ritual books of the Old Testament, may not be so familiar. They present the Hebrew mind in regard to this particular as on the same level with the Zarathustrian Persian, the Vedic Indian, and the Hellene of the seventh century. Purity is the strictest law of Jahvé, the pure god, who intimates that he would punish Aaron with death if he heedlessly entered the holy place without purification.[124.1] But the processes by which it is secured are mechanical, quasi-magical, and the concept itself appears more materialistic than spiritual, ritualistic rather than ethical in our sense: the processes of cleansing are such as the use of incense, lustrations with blood, water, and even fire, cathartic methods which are almost universal: we hear nothing of prayer or repentance. Blood is the chief impurity, whether shed deliberately, accidentally, or righteously. The warriors after battle must be purified before they enter the camp.[125.1] Murder has indeed become a tribal offence, and this marks a great advance in the social development of human society: no satisfaction such as the were-gilt was allowed for murder; but it is regarded as a sin rather than a crime, and its sinfulness is the uncleanness of the land on which the blood is shed. “Blood defileth the land,” and “I the Lord dwell among the children of Israel.”[125.2] Even the accidental homicide must fly to the city of refuge, not merely to escape the avenger of blood, who represents the old family right of the blood-feud, but to rid the land of the impurity of his presence. Nor must he return till the death of the high priest.[125.3] This latter restriction has not yet been explained, so far as I am aware. I venture the explanation that the high priest is regarded here as the temporary representative of Jahvé, and as infected with the impurity that cleaves to the outraged god; but when he dies, the stain that has been put upon the god fades away and his wrath ceases. Finally, we may note the rule that when the murderer could not be discovered, the nearest city must offer cathartic sacrifices, “and thy sin”—that is, the ritualistic sin of having an impure spot of ground in one’s territory—“shall then be forgiven thee.”[126.1] In fact the Judaic law concerning homicide as shown in these books, though it has advanced far beyond savagery, and has even attained to the modern view that manslaying concerns the whole community, is yet barbaric on the whole. The concept of purity aided development up to a certain point and then probably retarded it. On the other hand, in the department of sexual morality its operation was most powerful for good; it consecrated and safeguarded the fundamental laws if it did not actually construct or evoke them; but, as we should expect, the sexual purity of the Hebrew code remains a religious law and does not pass into the domain of secular ethic.
Another religion that is of equal value for our present purpose is the Zarathustrian. Trusting as far as we may the translation and interpretation of its sacred books, we may gather the impression from the study of them that no religion on the earth has ever been under such bondage to the cathartic ideal as this one; nor does it appear very profitable at first sight to put the question here of the influence of the idea of purity on religion, law, and morals, for the idea seems all-absorbing and these three to have no independent existence apart from it. It creates for the Mazdean believer a morality of its own, with which the secular systems have little or nothing to do. “Oh, maker of the world,” asks Zarathustra of Ahura Mazda, “can he be clean again who has eaten of the carcase of a dog or the corpse of a man?” The deity answers—“He cannot, oh holy Zarathustra.”[127.1] Nor is there any purification possible for the unforgivable sin of walking about after fifteen years of age were reached without a girdle or a proper shirt: “such a one goes henceforth with power to destroy the world of righteousness.”[128.1] On the other hand, the highest act of righteousness which brings forgiveness of all sins to him who performs it is the pulling down of a dakhma, the scaffold on which the corpses were hung according to the Persian system of burial, after it had served its purpose; for naturally it was a focus of impurity, and demons congregated there in swarms.[128.2] And the Persian concept of purity makes its own law. As the ritual of cleansing is the prime article of the Zarathustrian code, so the sacrilegious cleanser, that is, the amateur who tried to purify another without knowledge of the Mazdean ceremonies, brought sterility upon the land and was punished with death.[128.3] And death was the penalty for him who dared to carry a corpse alone, for the dead body spread around the contagion of a myriad “drugs” or demons, and two men at least must set hand to it to prevent an intolerable epidemic of impurity.[129.1] Legislation in the Zend-Avesta is merciless beyond any recorded code; we must suppose that it was mainly idle thunder, or Persia would have been depopulated. The whole universe of Mazdeism is permeated with these cathartic ideas, and a secular or physical view of things scarcely glimmers through: the ritual order dominated what we call the material as well as the spiritual world; the sun, moon, and stars are purified by the Word. On this basis arose a religion of great exaltation and a religious fervour of rare intensity: and the sacred books of Persia are of great value for the present inquiry, for they show us more clearly than any other record the spiritual concept of the pure heart emerging from the ritualistic idea; while it is often hard in any particular text to distinguish between the lower and the higher significance. When God speaks to the prophet thus—“Purity is for man, next to life, the highest good: that purity, O Zarathustra, that is in the religion of Mazda for him who cleanses himself with good thoughts, words, and deeds,”[130.1] we believe we have reached a high ethical conception; but the phrase is supposed by Darmesteter to refer to him who cleanses himself according to the prescriptions of the law. Yet in their cathartic code were the germs of an advanced morality, and truthfulness and chastity were fostered by it.[130.2] The lustrations were partly of the primitive type, taken over, as usual, from a lower stratum of religion; their most interesting features are the cleansing words that accompanied them, which were not usually prayers but spells, formulæ of magic potency, but drawn from a high religion, such as these, for instance:—“The will of the Lord is the Law of Righteousness”; “Holiness is the best of all Good: it is also Happiness.”[131.1] Even the virtue of philanthropy is given cathartic value in a spell-formula, “he who relieves the poor makes Ahura King,” recited before the person was washed with the holy water of Mazda and the “gômêz” of an ox.[131.2]
In a certain sense the Mazdean religion has been the “purest” the world has known; but the high spiritual concept of purity that it evolved never escaped nor struggled to escape, as did the Judaic and Hellenic, from the bondage to ritual. Therefore the religion was doomed to ceremoniousness and sacerdotalism; and the modern student who is fascinated with its frequent outbursts of genius and its deep, whole-hearted conviction must be prepared for the inevitable bathos that awaits him. Its remoteness from the modern and civilised view of things may be estimated from the Zarathustrian text, in which the prophet exalts the priestly medicine-man who heals the diseased limb with a cleansing spell and by the ejection of the demon, above the surgeon who heals it with a knife.[132.1]
It is with a feeling of relief that we now turn to the survey of the Hellenic phenomena, passing by as we must the Vedic and the Islamic, which appear to be of lesser importance so far as I have been able to study them. The Hellenic religion more than all others of the ancient world is the mirror of the manifold civilisation of a people; for its lesser intensity allowed it more varied application, and it was obliged to reconcile itself speedily with the utilitarian and secular forces of rational progress, which there was no sacerdotal caste strong enough to oppose. And it is in the light of this religion therefore that the concept of purity can best be studied in its relations to law and morality. The history of the cathartic ritual in Greece does not begin till the eighth century; for the Homeric age was strikingly sane, cheerful, and secular in its views about such things. Though Hektor feels, as any modern gentleman would feel, that it was wrong to go to a religious service “bedabbled in gore and filth,” though Odysseus purifies his house with sulphur-fumigation after the carnage of the fight, the world for whom Homer sang does not appear to have been burdened with the ceremoniousness of purification or with dread of the impurity of blood and death, or with any sort of care for the vengeance or miasma of the ghost. An age that could rise to the height of such a sentiment as “best of omens is it to fight for one’s country,” was likely to be healthy-minded in all such matters. The first mention of purification for bloodshed is in a poem of Arctinos of the eighth century; and a certain ritual-code of purity begins to emerge in Hesiod. Henceforward cathartic legislation comes to be very rife in Greece, emanating chiefly from two centres as it seems, Delphi and Crete. The gods to whom the domain of ritual-purity belongs especially are Apollo, Zeus, and Dionysos; at the same time the ghostly terrors of the underworld appear to be gaining a greater hold on the Hellenic imagination, and “catharsis” is specially needed to deal with these. Probably all this is only a revival of aboriginal practices and superstitions rooted in the Hellenic soil, a religion which the intellectualism of Homeric civilisation had happily suppressed for a time, but which asserted itself with renewed strength when that civilisation was overthrown. Yet the revival, though apparently a “set-back,” bore fair fruit for morality, law, and even religion. The history of Greek ethic must reckon as it has not yet done with the ritual of purity, and the history of Greek law with the fear of the ghost and the miasma of bloodshed.
At first the idea is, as usual, ritualistic and non-moral: and much that we find in savage communities, and in Judæa, Persia, and India, we find again in Greece. As the Hebrew warriors were purified before returning to camp, so the Macedonian army was purified in spring before the campaign,[135.1] and the misunderstood story of the Phokians daubing themselves with gypsum before battle points to a cathartic ritual.[135.2] And the Hellenic ceremonies agreed with those of most other nations in regard to the causes of uncleanness and the methods of deliverance: fire, water, blood, onions, the skins of animals sacrificed, even clay and bran, are the usual purifying media. In one method of κάθαρσις only the Hellenic ritual is unique so far as I know: sacrificial communion with God was sometimes considered an effective means of obliterating the impurity which the kinsmen contracted by a death in the family: at Argos the mourners put off the “tapu” by eating of the sacrifice to Apollo, believing that the spirit of the pure god in the sacred food could destroy the miasma within and around them.[136.1] The strongholds of Pharisaic purification were the religious brotherhoods of Orphism and the earlier Pythagoreanism, a religious-philosophic school closely associated with the former; in these the law of “the pure life” is a ceremonious law, specially concerned with abstinence from certain food. But Greek thought did not remain long on this level: a saying is attributed to Charondas of Catana, but perhaps of later origin, which asserts that “foul speech is a defilement of the soul”;[136.2] and in a fragment of Epicharmos of the fifth century, we have the utterance of the higher gospel, “If thou art pure of soul, thou art pure of all thy body”; and the later Pythagorean literature, such as the “Golden Song” of Hierocles, contains the doctrine that “purity of soul is the only divine service”; “God has no more familiar abode on the earth than the pure soul.” And to an unknown writer, probably of the same school,[137.1] we owe the dogma, “We worship God most meetly if we render our own soul pure from every stain of evil.” There are two epigrams in the Anthology, included in the fanciful collection of Pythian oracles, expressing the same idea that holiness is a spiritual fact independent of ceremonies or lustrations: “Oh stranger, if holy of soul, enter the shrine of the holy God, having but touched the lustral water: lustration is an easy matter for the good, but all ocean with its streams cannot cleanse the evil man.”[137.2] The other maintains as clearly as Isaiah or the New Testament the uselessness of all mere washing of hands: “The temples of the gods are open to all good men, nor is there any need of purification: no stain can ever cleave to virtue. But depart, whosoever is baneful at heart, for thy soul will never be washed by the cleansing of the body.”[137.3] The better Greek mind attained this freedom the more easily in that it was not strongly or generally possessed with the belief in the aboriginal impurity or sinfulness of the flesh and the earthly life. And Greek ritual itself, conservative as it was and never abandoning its code of purification, comes at last to be influenced by this freer atmosphere and to reconcile ceremonious purity with a higher moral law. Before the temple of Asclepios at Epidauros stood the text, “Within the incense-filled sanctuary one must be pure; and purity is to have righteous thoughts.”[138.1] An inscription on a temple in Rhodes of the time of Hadrian[138.2] shows a strange blend of primitive and advanced thought. Its preamble mentions “rules concerning righteous entrance into the shrine.” “The first and greatest rule is to be pure and unblemished in hand and heart and to be free from an evil conscience.” Then follows the usual ceremonious code of rules concerning the impurities of food, funerals, and natural affections of the body: and the last clause shows the ethical idea penetrating even these, for the code prescribes that a person may enter the shrine “on the same day after lawful married intercourse.” This means that the adulteress was excluded, as she was at Athens by a law quoted by Demosthenes.[139.1] It appears then that the liberal ethic judgment attributed to Theano, the female Pythagorean teacher, that while lawful intercourse was no bar to participating in a religious service on the same day, the adulteress was to be for ever excluded,[139.2] was not wholly out of accordance with the advanced ritualistic code of Greece.
The above is some slight illustration of the development of the Greek concept of purity and of its ethical influence. It remains to trace its action in a very important department of law—the law of homicide. Perhaps the most significant distinction between the code of a civilised and that of a savage or barbaric community lies in their respective attitudes towards manslaughter or murder: in the latter society it is mainly an affair between the families concerned, to be settled by the were-gilt or the blood-feud: in the former the whole community feels itself to be deeply concerned. Our Teutonic ancestors, at the time of Tacitus and for centuries after, remained at the lower stage, though we discern that the legal genius of the Icelanders was impelling them towards the higher even before Christianity reached them. What is strange is that some societies appear to have attained a high general level of civilisation without making this momentous advance: the Homeric world, for instance, was scarcely abreast with the early Icelandic in this respect, although we may see signs that the higher idea was ready to emerge in the later Homeric period.[140.1] Then follows a blank in our record which may be tentatively filled up by the interpretation of mythology, until in the developed Attic law—which we know better than the law of any other Greek state—we find the modern idea fully recognised and applied to a criminal code, probably from the sixth century onward, though traces of legal barbarism still survive. We would gladly discover the constructive forces, spiritual or political, that brought this great reform about. The anthropology of our contemporary savage societies has not yet supplied us with analogies that we could apply to Greek history: a few savage states have indeed spontaneously achieved the great advance from the blood-feud to a public law of homicide, but there is no record showing how they have achieved it. Some writers have supposed that the emergence of criminal law in general is always due to some great increase of power in the central government, probably to the development of the monarchy. But as a universal axiom this cannot be accepted; for, as Steinmetz in his treatise on “The Development of Punishment”[142.1] has shown, such a suggested cause is not found operative in the backward communities of modern times that have developed a public criminal law. Nor would it be reasonable to urge that the central authority was stronger in Greece of the seventh century than in the earlier monarchical period. Probably Steinmetz is right in his belief that among savage societies the earliest criminal law arises from some intense feeling of hatred or dread excited by acts that violate religious feeling or secular interests. One of the earliest crimes to be punished by death at the hands of the society is incest: the horror that it excites among savages is a feeling that we may call religious. We may not be able to show indeed that the primitive ideas of purity would explain the earliest complicated codes of human marriage: but the circles of kinship that are thus established seem certainly to have been consecrated at a very early time by the concept of purity that came to be attached to them.[143.1] Now it is probable that a similar religious feeling was operative in the case of homicide.
If in any given society the primitive belief in the impurity of bloodshed became intensified beyond a certain point, homicide might easily come to be regarded no longer as a matter to be settled by the families of the slayer and the slain, but as the deep concern of the people of the land. We have seen that it was just this religious concept of impurity that brought the act under the cognisance of the national religious law of Israel: the people are terrified because the soil has been made impure and their god has been stained. In the Zend-Avesta we find that the slaying of a water-dog was an impure act against God, and was avenged by the whole community; and sacrifice was offered to appease the holy soul of the dog.[144.1] These facts then offer some analogy for the theory that I would suggest, namely, that the civilised law in Greece concerning homicide arose in the post-Homeric period through an intensification of the feeling concerning the impurity of bloodshed and owing to the greater hold that the terrors of the ghostly world had come to gain over the later Hellenic imagination; for the ghost or the Erinys of the dead is the embodiment of the miasma that arises from the slaying; and the ghost knows how to drive it home, and is no respecter of persons, but can make a whole area uninhabitable. The religious phenomenon and the legal fact that I would connect as cause and effect are not found in the Homeric period: both are found coexisting in the later. And much legendary evidence accords with this hypothesis. Perhaps the earliest indication of the emergence of the idea in Greek society that certain kinds of homicide concern the State, is found in the legends about exile and excommunication for the shedding of kindred blood, the exile, for instance, of Bellerophon and Ixion. Such exile is not the ordinary flight of the homicide to avoid the avenger of blood; for in the cases where a man is of the same kin as the slain, there is no family avenger, but the whole community in horror cast him out lest the curse should infect themselves. Kinsmen’s blood was more sacred than other, therefore the shedding it spread the greater impurity over the land. And the Greek legends suggest that this offence was one of the earliest in the legal history of the race which awoke the religious conscience of the State.[145.1] Now if we assume that the old ideas associated with kinship came to be extended to the whole community of the polis—as might easily happen through the intermarriage of the γένη—then a similar miasma would be caused by the slaying of a citizen as by kindred murder: the State would feel the supernatural peril of the act and would take cognisance.
The reasons for supposing that this was the actual order in the Hellenic evolution of the homicide law may appear to rest on mere legends, but legends are often direct and firsthand evidence of early thought, and the stories about the slayers of kindred who were driven out of the communities and who were the first applicants for the ritual of purification, such as Ixion, Orestes, Theseus, accord well with the early belief that the Erinyes were the ghostly avengers of kindred slaughter. Then we find that in the Aithiopis, the poem of Arctinos of Miletus, Achilles has to leave the army and retire to Lesbos for purification, although Thersites, whom he has slain, is no real kinsman of his: whence we may draw the conclusion that the State of Miletus, in the eighth century, had come to take cognisance of the slaying of any citizen. And the Argives, in the fifth or fourth century, offer atonement to Zeus Meilichios for a civic massacre, the god who has a legendary association with purification for the shedding of kindred blood. By the fifth century in Athens the religious feeling concerning the sacredness of all life within the city had so deepened that even the slaying of a slave caused a miasma and was a State offence.[147.1]
Now when we examine certain details of Attic law, together with certain expressions of sentiment concerning homicide in the classical writers of Attica, we see the clear imprint of its origin. Accidental homicide was as gravely regarded by the Athens of the fourth century as by the old Hebrew code: such homicides must fly over the border, but if they went by a certain road, the State refused to allow the avenger of blood to follow them: they must remain in exile until they have won the forgiveness of one of the kinsmen of the dead.[148.1] We may suppose that the kinsmen are regarded as taking up the feud of the ghost, who is likely to be vindictive, even when the slaying was accidental. Finally, when the pardoned homicide returns he must go through elaborate purifications. These latter were to wipe off the miasma, not to ease what we might call the burden of conscience. And the community were obliged to expel temporarily even a perfectly innocent man, because of their fear of the wrath of the dead. This dread of the ghost is appealed to by an Attic orator as a motive that should influence the judges to condemn the prisoner.[148.2] The first legal preliminary in a case of murder, which reveals clearly the religious origin of the State law, was the solemn proclamation, made by one of the relatives holding a spear at the funeral, that the murderer should keep aloof from all the holy and public places of the community.[149.1] And Antiphon strongly expresses the popular sentiment that the unpunished murderer pollutes the public altars and vitiates the atmosphere of the city:[149.2] and the whole of Plato’s legislation[149.3] concerning homicide is based on the idea of the miasma arising from bloodshed, and is quite in accord with Attic law. The exile of the murderer purges the city as well as his execution; therefore the accused was allowed to go out of the country before the verdict.[149.4] The contagion was worse under a roof than in the open air; therefore the Athenian judges insisted on trying homicide in an unroofed court, “lest they should be under one roof with the slayer.”[149.5] Also it is part of primitive animistic belief that such miasma could cleave to things which had caused the death of a man: hence the inanimate object such as an axe or bar of iron might be solemnly tried and, if found guilty, would be thrown into the sea to rid the State of infection:[150.1] the same superstition explains the old English law that a waggon which ran over a man and caused his death should be given to God—“deodand”: that is, it was to become a perquisite of the King, who represented God.
So far we seem to discern clearly the concept of purity evolving State law in a very vital matter. And this is a great achievement. But it might easily evolve law which from our point of view would be unjust and superstitious. The terrors of the ghost, the inequitable wrath of a pure god, the insistence on the ritualistic view of impurity, might retard progress and prevent the evolution of the highest law which regards extenuating circumstances and admits justifiable homicide. Such law is not heard of in the Mosaic books, but it existed in the Attic code,[151.1] which specially on this account may be called civilised. The court which tried admitted cases of homicide where the plea of justification was raised was the Delphinion, and its foundation legend claimed that it was instituted to try Theseus for slaying the Pallantids who attacked him, and that the plea of justifiable homicide was allowed.[151.2] The name of the court shows that its patron is the pure god, and points to Crete and Delphi, the chief centres of the ritual of purification. Now it is quite possible that this momentous advance in law may have been prompted by the healthy rationalism of the early Greek mind, to some extent by secular utilitarian thought, which reacted on the religious view of purity. We shall then say that the religion adapted itself dexterously to a secular movement, as it usually did in Greece. Or it may be the truth that the advance was due to a spontaneous movement within the religion itself, beginning perhaps in the seventh century, and to the growing consciousness that the purity or impurity of an act depended on motive and will. If this idea penetrated at an early time, as it certainly did at a later, into the sacerdotal circle, then the priest of Apollo might grant or withhold purification according to the degree of justification the homicide might prove:[152.1] in this case a court would be established at the instigation of the purifying god to consider the circumstances. This explanation must remain a hypothesis, but it is one that assumes the action of real forces.