Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 2 of 3 / Olympus; or, the Religion of the Homeric Age

by W. E. Gladstone

It would therefore be wonderful if we failed to find in the Greek mythology some traces, however faint, of an element that not only existed in Asia, but displayed so much vigour there, as to have entered deeply into the religion that even now sways a considerable portion of its population, if not, indeed, to form the one really capital and operative article of that religion.

Döllinger[775] has noted the points connected with the state and being of animals, which might suggest ideas capable of being developed into this repulsive system. Such are the unity and tranquillity of animal life—it being borne in mind that domesticated animals were those which supplied the chief type of deity. Such, again, is the instinct of the future, bearing a nearer outward resemblance to foreknowledge than would any anticipations founded on forethought, reasoning, and experience. Above all, there seems to be force in the remark that man, by his marked individuality, and by the freedom of the will, is, as it were, disabled from becoming the mere organ of another existence. The gods in assuming human form, assumed in a great degree human nature also. But the passive and neutral nature of animals offered itself as a medium without taste or colour, such as needed not in any manner to alter or modify the powers of which it was to be the vehicle.

Had the idea been in its origin that of an inherent sacredness of animals as such, it is not probable that we should have seen such extraordinary anomalies in its development as those which permitted the same animal to be adored in one province of Egypt, and immolated in the next[776].

Its vestiges in the Olympian religion.

The grossness of brute-worship was completely refined away by the Greeks during the process of transfer to their own mythology. The vestiges of the system, and they are no more than vestiges, still traceable in the Homeric poems, are apparently as follows:

1. I find the chief note of it in the extraordinary sacredness of the oxen of the Sun: a sacredness inconsistent and inexplicable, if it be tried only by the circumjacent incidents of the Odyssey, and by the laws of the Greek mythology.

The offence of the crew of Ulysses consisted simply in this; that[777], after exhausting every effort to maintain themselves, when they have at length no alternative before them except that of starving, they consumed some of the best among these oxen for food. They observed, as far as they could, all the proper religious rites, but they used leaves instead of barley, and water for wine, inasmuch as neither of the usual requisites were forthcoming. They promised a temple also to the Sun, to be built on their return, and to be enriched with abundant votive offerings. Lastly, I think, any one who reads the manly and just speech of Eurylochus, in which he proposes the sacrilege, will judge that the sympathies of the Poet are with him. In this speech, he states the necessity; he next proceeds to vow the erection of a temple, and dedication of its ornaments in the event of safe return. Then he concludes by declaring, that if vengeance is, notwithstanding, to be taken on them, he for his part would far rather die once for all like a man than famish in the solitary island. There is not in the tone of the speech the slightest indication of impiety[778].

The terrible punishment inflicted was prefigured by extraordinary portents. The empty hides of the animals crawled about[779], and the flesh lowed on the very spits. Here we see at its climax the fine Greek imagination, working upon the foundation supplied by the Egyptian superstition, and extracting from the coarsest earthy matter the means of true poetical sublimity.

It is impossible to conceive a case, in which the offence committed is more exclusively of the kind termed positive, or more entirely severed from moral guilt, until we include the element to which the poems do not expressly refer, of the elevated sanctity attaching to the animal itself. The Homeric fiction is[780], that they were the playthings of the Sun in his leisure hours. But to forbid the use of any of these animals for food, even under the direst necessity, would have been simply to caricature the nature of positive commands, in the very same spirit as that which would have had, not the sabbath made for man, but man made for the sabbath. Still, when once we let in the assumption that these animals had essentially sacred lives, which might not be taken away, then the offence becomes a moral one of frightful profanation, and the vengeance so rigorously exacted is intelligible.

I do not mean that Homer recognises that dogma which the Egyptians then affirmed, and which at this present epoch, after the lapse of three thousand years, has wrought myriads of Hindoos to madness. The religion of Greece included no such idea, and the religious practice of the Greeks wholly precluded it. But in this instance we see a part of the Egyptian religion in transitu, in the very process of transmutation that it was to undergo when passing into the Greek mythology, which utterly repudiated its substance, but strove to retain an image of it under poetic forms, betraying by their inconsistency their exotic origin.