Meantime, for the vegetative life of Earth, wedded to the Heavens, and bearing herbs and fruits, the Greek mind substitutes the intelligent life of a Queen-divinity, who with her husband becomes the nucleus of the Olympian order, and marks the transition from elemental religion to anthropophuism.
Secondary in the Olympian religion.
There is then a greatly qualified sense, in which assent may be given to the proposition, that the Olympian dynasty of Homer sits enthroned upon the ruins of a more ancient Nature-worship, and the sense is this: that, before Hellenism had an historical existence, there were systems founded on Nature-worship in the east; that these systems were tributary to the religion of Olympus, and that its framers made such use of them as they found convenient.
But from Homer we are not authorized to believe that such a system of Nature-worship ever preceded in Greece the Olympian system. On the contrary, the Κρόνος and Ῥέα, the Oceanus and Tethys of Homer, appear to be younger and not older than his chief Olympian gods; that is, they appear to be metaphysical creations, called into being to supply an ideal basis, a matrix or mould, walled in with time and space, for Jupiter and his wife and brothers to be cast in.
It is not before, but after the time of Homer, namely, in Hesiod, that we see such development given to this pseudo-archaic system as can alone allow it to be taken for the image of something that had really existed as a religion. For example, it would be quite out of keeping with the tone of Homer were we to find in him the sentiment which is contained in a fragment of Euripides[773];
ὁρᾶς τὸν ὑψοῦ τόνδ’ ἄπειρον αἰθέρα;
τοῦτον νόμιζε Ζῆνα.
Brute-worship.
We have still to consider the relation of the Olympian scheme to the last of the four στοιχεῖα. The principle of brute-worship was so marked a characteristic of the Egyptian idolatry, that it seems to lie at the very foundation of the system. Perhaps we should be justified in associating with this principle the inability of the Egyptians to attain to any high conceptions of beauty. They scarcely could soar in this respect above the standard of that which they regarded as a tabernacle meet for divinity to dwell in.
The same principle appears to have found its way into Persia probably at a late date, and from the Median, not the Eteo-persian, source of the religious traditions of the country. Malcolm[774] has given us the copies, from remains found in the country, of the Persian representations, probably however late ones, of their divinities, exhibiting strange mixtures of human form with that of the brute.