The fourth is the worship of the inferior creation, or of animate nature in its lower ranks.
We have considered, in a former section, how far the Greek mythology was indebted to the first of these sources, the true and pure one.
The second, or anthropophuism, appears to have formed its most proper and distinctive characteristic. Further, it was the intellectual rather than the carnal nature of man, which originally determined a law for the construction of the Olympian system. The great traditive deities were remodelled according to what Scripture calls the ‘lust of the mind,’ long before the ‘lust of the flesh’ had touched them. We see, too, that, of the deities of invention, those which were purely Hellenic, such as Juno and Themis in particular, represent either noble and commanding, or else pure, ideas, connected with the development of human life and society; while it is generally in deities that have not undergone a full Hellenic remodelling, that we see animal passion prevail; such as Mars, Venus, Ceres, and Aurora.
Nature-worship.
The third basis of religion is admirably described, together with its apology, and its condemnation, in the Book entitled the Wisdom of Solomon[772]:
‘Neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the workmaster; but deemed either fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the violent water, or the lights of heaven, to be the gods which govern the world. With whose beauty if they being delighted took them to be gods; let them know how much better the Lord of them is: for the first author of beauty hath created them. But if they were astonished at their power and virtue, let them understand by them, how much mightier he is that made them. For, by the greatness and beauty of the creatures, proportionably the maker of them is seen. But yet for this they are the less to be blamed; for they peradventure err, seeking God, and desirous to find him. For, being conversant in his works, they search him diligently, and believe their sight: because the things are beautiful that are seen. Howbeit, neither are they to be pardoned. For if they were able to know so much, that they could aim at the world; how did they not sooner find out the Lord thereof?’
And then the Wise Man proceeds to show, that far inferior, again, to this, is the worship of mere images as gods.
The worship of the elemental powers enters, I think, only as a very secondary ingredient into the Homeric or Olympian system: it is everywhere surmounted and circumscribed by developments drawn from tradition or from the principle of anthropophuism.
It is true that most of the great physical agents are either personified by him, or else are in immediate connection with some one of his deities: but there is every appearance that the Greeks sometimes expelled, sometimes reduced and depressed the principle of Nature-worship, in their adaptation of foreign materials to Hellenic uses.
1. Jupiter and Neptune, as we have seen, preside over elements, but they are not elemental. Their relations to air and sea are entirely different from those of Vulcan to fire, and yet even he very greatly transcends the dimensions of a merely elemental god. Their brotherhood with Aidoneus, who is not elemental at all, indicates, together with all other signs, that the air and sea are their respective territories, and are not the basis of their divinity.