the margin grey,’Twixt the soul’s night and day.
the margin grey,’Twixt the soul’s night and day.
the margin grey,’Twixt the soul’s night and day.
In the House of Hades is neither reward nor punishment (if we takeOdysseyxi. 570-600 for a late interpolation), but mere lack of vigour and of the sun. Only the prophet Tiresias, like Samuel inSheol, ‘keeps his wits’ and his faculty of precognition.
Yet, in the scene of the Oaths (Iliadiii. 278-9), certain powers are appealed to which ‘beneath the earth punish men outworn’. I do not think this a late interpolation, because the formula of the sacrifices connected with the oath is likely to be very ancient, to be pre-Homeric, and to reflect an old belief no longer popular. In these matters all contradictory notions may coexist, as when the hymn of the Euahlayi tribe of New South Wales prays Baiame to admit the soul of Erin into his paradise, Bullimah, while the myth says that Erin is now incarnate in a little bird. Many of the lowest savages believe in a future of rewards and punishments, but the doctrine of the efficacy of fire has all but driven this faith out of Homer’s ken.
Cremation is the greatcruxof Homeric anthropology, cremation, and the consequent absence of ghost-feeding, and of hero-worship. Archaeology shows that these practices went on unbroken in Greece, and archaeology cannot show us a single example of the Homeric barrow and method of interment. Yet the method is a genuine historic method in Northern Europe of the Age of Bronze. Homer did not invent it; he mentions no other mode of disposing of the dead, but we have never found its traces in Greece. The shaft graves and tholos graves of late Minoan times have left no vestige of tradition in the Epics, and the cremation and barrow are equally absent from the view of thearchaeologist. I cannot venture on any guess at an explanation. We are precluded from supposing that cremation arose in the wanderings after the Dorian invasion, for the purpose of concealing the remains of the dead from desecration by alien foes. The shaft grave might conceal them, the tumulus and pillar above only advertise their whereabouts to the ruthless foe.
It is plain that, on many points, Homer, with his austere taste, is not a very rich source for the anthropologist in search of savage survivals. In Homer no human beings work magic; a witch, like a harlot, is not to be found in the Epics. Both are familiar in the Old Testament. There is a second-sighted man, but his was a natural faculty. Homer never alludes to the humbler necessities of our animal nature; unlike Shakespeare, he never makes old Nestor cough and spit, when roused, as in theDoloneia, by a night alarm. Nobody coughs in Homer. He sings for an audience that has lived down the ape, though the tiger has not wholly died. He knows nothing of our instruments of torture, rack and boot and thumbscrews, which, in Scotland, outlasted the seventeenth century. Historic Greece was not very successful in expelling the beast from human nature. The poets of historical Greece were never so successful as Homer. I infer that theIliadand theOdysseyare prehistoric, the flowers of a brief age of Achaean civilization, an age when the society of princes and ladies had a taste extraordinarily pure and noble. The poems were framed for an aristocratic, not for a popular audience, though I am perfectly ready to grant that the popular audience to which our best ballad minstrels sang also desired a tone of singular purity in the serious romantic lays. It is the nature of the highest objective art, whether in epic or ballad, to be clean: the Muses are maidens.
NOTES
Page 47. The reference to Mr. Verrall refers to his article on Homer inThe Quarterly Review, July, 1908. I myself suppose that some editorial work was done for theIliadandOdysseyat Athens, before the Persian war. There is plenty of smoke in literary tradition, and ‘where there is smoke there is fire’. But the smoke-wreaths are vague and multiform as the misty ghosts in Ossian, and I cannot, with Mr. Verrall, regard the words of a fourth-century orator.
Page 48. Lycurgus is not ‘record’. By ‘record evidence’ for Greece I understand inscriptions, nothing more and nothing less.
Page 57. ‘cuirass,zoster, andmitrê.’ See figure, a copy of a clay seal, of which nearly a hundred impressions have been published inMonumenti Antichi. See for further particulars my article on Homer inBlackwood’s Magazinefor January, 1908, also Mackenzie,Annual of the British School at Athens(1905-6, p. 241).
Page 57. ‘cuirass,zoster, andmitrê.’ See figure, a copy of a clay seal, of which nearly a hundred impressions have been published inMonumenti Antichi. See for further particulars my article on Homer inBlackwood’s Magazinefor January, 1908, also Mackenzie,Annual of the British School at Athens(1905-6, p. 241).
Page 59.Odysseyxvi. 294, xix. 13, for
αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος
αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος
αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος
a friend suggests
αὒτως γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἀνδράσι δῆρις.
αὒτως γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἀνδράσι δῆρις.
αὒτως γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἀνδράσι δῆρις.
This emendation I leave at the mercy of the learned.
In the remains of the earliest Greek poetry we are met by a striking contrast. As Mr. Lang has told us, ‘Homer presents to the anthropologist the spectacle of a society which will have nothing to do with anthropology.’ By Homer of course Mr. Lang means theIliadand theOdyssey; and we may add to those poems a stream of heroic tradition which runs more or less clearly through most of our later literature, and whose spirit is what we call classic, Homeric, or Olympian.
But there is also in the earliest epic tradition another stratum, of which this Olympian character does not hold. A stratum full of the remains, and at times even betraying the actuality, of those ‘beastly devices of the heathen’ which are dear to the heart of us anthropologists—if a mere Greek scholar may venture to class himself among even amateur anthropologists: ceremonies of magic and purification, beast-worship, stone-worship, ghosts and anthropomorphic gods, traces of the peculiar powers of women both as ‘good medicine’ and as titular heads of the family, and especially a most pervading and almost ubiquitous memory of Human Sacrifice.
This stratum is represented by Hesiod and the Rejected Epics—I mean those products of the primitive saga-poetry which were not selected for recitation at the Panathenaea (or the unknown Ionian archetype of the Panathenaea), and which consequently fell into neglect—by the Orphic literature, by a large element in tragedy, most richly perhaps by the antiquarian traditions preserved in Pausanias, and in the hostile comments of certain Christian writers, such as Clement and Eusebius.
Now the first thing for the historian to observe about this non-Homeric stratum is this: that non-Homeric is by no means the same thing as post-Homeric. We used to be taught that it was. We used to be taught that Homer was, practically speaking, primitive: that we started from a pure epic atmosphere and then passed into an age of romantic degradation. The extant remains of the non-Homeric poems frequently show in their form, and sometimes even in their content, definite signs of presupposing theIliad, just as theIliadhere and there shows signs of presupposing them; and it is not until recently that we have been able to understand properly the nature and the method of composition of an ancient Traditional Book. I will not go into that point in detail here. Even supposing that theCypria, as a poem, could definitely be called ‘later’ than theIliad, it is enough to say that a later literary whole may often contain an older kernel or a more primitive mass of material, and in the case of the non-Homeric saga-poems it is fairly clear that they do so.
Two arguments will suffice. First the argument from analogy. Few anthropologists, with the knowledge now at our command, will regard the high, austere, knightly atmosphere of theIliadas primitivewhen compared with that of Hesiod. In the second place, a great proportion of our anthropological material is already to be found in prehistoric Crete. The an-iconic worship, the stones, the beasts, the pillars, and the ouranian birds: the great mother goddess of Anatolia, the human sacrifices, and the royal and divine bull. I speak under correction from those who know the Cretan finds better than I; but to me it seems that there are many bridges visible from Crete to Hesiod or Eumelus or even Pausanias; but the gulf between Crete and Homer seems, in certain places, to have no bridge.
Thus the later literary whole contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion.
Now this fact in itself, though it may be stated in different ways, is not much disputed among scholars. But the explanations of the fact are various. That which seems to me much the most probable is the theory of Expurgation. As Mr. Lang seems not quite to have understood what I tried to say about this in myRise of the Greek Epic, I will restate it in this way: We know that the great mass of saga-poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century on; and we find, to judge from our fragments, that it remained in its semi-savage state. Two poems, on the contrary, were selected at some early time for public recitation at the solemn four-yearly meeting of ‘all Ionians’, and afterwards of ‘all Athenians’. The poems were demonstrably still in a fluid condition; and the intellect of Greece was focussed upon them. This process lasted on through the period of that great movement which raised the shores of the Aegean from a land of semi-savages to theHellas of Thales, of Aeschylus, and of Euripides. And we find, naturally, that amid all the colour of an ideal past, in which these two epics, like all other epics, have steeped their story, there has been a gradual but drastic rejection of all the uglier and uncleaner elements. That is a very broad statement; it omits both the evidence and the additional causes and qualifications. But it serves to explain why I treat the non-Homeric sagas as representing more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought, the mere slough out of which Hellas rose.
Now to one lecturing on Anthropology in Homer, the difficulty is to find enough material. In the case of the early saga outside Homer, the difficulty is only what to choose and where to stop.
One might begin by discussing the remnants of primitive secret societies. The remains are fairly rich. Mr. Webster, in his instructive book,[41]has traced the normal genesis of these bodies which exercise such an enormous influence over savage life. The first stage he takes to be the ordinary system of ordeals and puberty rites through which all males of the tribe have to pass before they can be admitted as full men. The ordeals of the Arunta and of the various Red Indian tribes are familiar to most of us. These ceremonies are often involved in a good deal both of mystery and of charlatanry. The youths initiated, for instance, sometimes are supposed to die and be born again. The process is secret.The women of the tribe are kept carefully away. The neighbourhood is filled with the warning sound of the Rhombos or Bull-roarer—that ‘whirring of immortal things’ which Hesiod perhaps means when he speaks of the air resounding ῥιπᾖ ὑπ’ ἀθανάτων.[42]The next stage begins when this initiation ceremony ceases to be compulsory. This sometimes depends on the separation of the War Chief from the medicine-man or the elders. For of course the initiation ceremonies are specially the department of the last named. In the third stage we find a full-flown Secret Society. The initiated form a definite body and work together for the maintenance of such conduct as is pleasing to the gods and themselves.
Take the case of Dukduk, a powerful society in the Bismarck Archipelago, north-east of New Guinea. I will not dwell on its power nor on the advantages which accrue to its worshippers. But I cite from Mr. Webster an eyewitness’s account of an epiphany of Dukduk.
Dukduk arrives about six times a year, and always on the day of the new moon. His arrival is announced a month beforehand by the Old Men—the Gerontes. During that month great quantities of food are made ready for Dukduk, and are ‘taken care of’ by the Old Men, his votaries. The day before the epiphany all women disappear from sight. It is death to them to look on the divine being. Before daybreak all the males of the tribe assemble on the beach, most of the young men looking frightened. At the first streak of dawn singing and drum-beating is heard out at sea, and as soon as there is enough light five or six canoes are seen at adistance, lashed together and with a platform built over them. On this platform are two Dukduks, dancing and uttering shrill cries. They are got up like gigantic cassowaries, some ten feet high, surmounted by a grotesque human mask. At least, says Mr. Romilly, the witness whom I cite, the body looks much like the body of the cassowary, but the head is like nothing but the head of a Dukduk. The canoes make the beach. The natives fall back in apprehension, for if Dukduk is touched he frequently tomahawks the offender on the spot. They proceed through the settlement, always dancing and screaming, to the secret house which has been prepared for them in the bush. They stay about a fortnight. They beat people a good deal, and exact money from suitable sources, especially plundering the women; if any one has shown disrespect of any sort to any member of the Dukduk society, not to speak of Dukduk himself, the punishment is swift and terrible.
Now Dukduk, like Egbo and Mumbo-Jumbo, is an anti-feminist, whereas Dionysus was essentially worshipped by women. There are several West African parallels to this. The Bundu of the Mendi country is a very powerful woman‘s society.[43]But otherwise is not the whole of this story curiously reminiscent of the Dionysus myths, as they occur, for instance, in the early Corinthian epos attributed to Eumelos? In his native Thrace, very possibly, everybody was initiated to Dionysus; but in Greece his worshippers form a special society. Dionysus arrives in a ship from unknown seas: when he moves inland this ship is set bodilyupon a wagon.[44]He makes his epiphany at various places, claiming worship for himself and honours for his worshippers. In the regular propagandist legend that comes down to us, Lycurgus perished for wrongs done to the Bacchic society and the god himself. He ‘sought to stay the women possessed of god and the Bacchic fire’.[45]He smote or drove into the sea Dionysus himself and his Nurses.[46]The same with Pentheus. In the actual ritual, we can have little doubt, a man personated Dionysus, exactly as a man personates the Dukduk or Egbo or Mumbo-Jumbo. And presumably, in just the same way, the uninitiated, as Mungo Park says, ‘were so ignorant, or at least were obliged to pretend to be so,’ as to take the figure on the ship for a divine being.
The Mysteries are all intimately connected with Secret Societies. The Demeter mystery has an epiphany in it; it has the arrival of Demeter at Eleusis; it has the Rhombos or Bull-roarer and the exclusion of the uninitiated. And, a sign perhaps of declining influence in this actual world, it professes, like many of these societies, to do wonderful things in the next.
There are, to my mind, traces in prehistoric Greece of another kind of secret society, resembling the Human Leopards or Human Lions of West Africa. I must refer here to the long expected book of my friend Mr. Penmorlan Maine on Werewolves. But, to give the mere outlines of the subject, the members of these societies are apt to turn, at certain seasons, into leopards or lions, and then kill human beings in aleopard-like or lion-like way. Their object is partly to obtain human fat for ‘medicine’, partly to remove or discourage their enemies. Sir H. H. Johnston[47]tells of a series of murders committed by an old man, who concealed himself in long grass and leaped out on solitary travellers. He killed them and then mutilated the bodies. He confessed the murders freely, but explained that he at times turned into a lion, and had to act as such.[48]The leopard societies have special three-pronged forks or gloves with knives at the end to imitate the wound of a leopard’s claw. And I have seen a long club ending in claws like a wild beast’s, which I suspect had the same purpose. My father-in-law bought it in Khartoum from a negro from the south, who professed not to know what it was. He said it was a ‘fantasia’—as no doubt it was.
To take a particular instance, the mode of initiation in the Sherbro leopard society strongly recalls certain pre-Hellenic myths. The society chooses some stranger and asks him to a dinner at which human flesh is secretly mixed among the other food. At the end of the meal they reveal to him what he has eaten, and in proof (I think) show him the hands, and sometimes the head, of the murdered human being. He has shared the leopard feast, and is now a leopard.[49]
Was it not exactly like this that Atreus kept the hands and feet of the murdered children apart, hidden with a cloth, and at the end of the feast removed the cloth to show Thyestes what he had eaten? Lykaon too,though his name can scarcely be derived from λύκος, turned into a wolf because he had ‘sacrificed a child on the altar of Zeus Lykaios’. As he himself can scarcely be different from Zeus Lykaios, this must originally have implied some cannibal act. And you will remember that ever afterwards in the ritual of Zeus Lykaios legend said that one piece of human flesh was mixed up with the rest of the sacrificial meat, and the man who unknowingly tasted that bit was doomed to turn into a wolf.[50]
There are the burning questions of totems and of matriarchy; there is Earth-magic, there is Purification, there is Fetichism: there are many other marks of ‘the Religions of the Lower Culture’ to be found in the ancient pre-Hellenic myths. But I must turn to the special point which I wish to illustrate in the remainder of this lecture.
I wish to deal with a most familiar part of the subject, the Divine King, or, as I prefer to call him, the Medicine-King, and then to apply the results which we reach to the most obvious remnant of non-Homeric poetry that has come down to us, the Theogony of Hesiod.
We all know about this medicine-king. If we like we can call him divine. On his force and hismana—what Hesiod, I venture to suggest, calls his κράτος τε βία τε—depends the welfare of his people, in the way of rain and thunderstorms, of abundance of game, of crops, of success in war. He also affects floods, earthquake, and pestilence. If he suffers in any way, if hismanais weakened, his whole peoplesuffers and is weakened too. Consequently he is encouraged and kept strong as long as possible; if he shows any weakness, he must be got rid of and a better man found to take his place. There seem to be three main methods. Either he is set aside periodically, at the end of five years, or nine years, or the like; or he is quietly deposed when he shows signs of age, like Peleus, Oineus, Aison, in the legends; or, and this is our main subject to-day, when some one else shows superiormanaby killing him. At present mymanais supreme; I am king; my will carries itself out. But if yourmana, your Kratos and Bia, conquer mine, then you are king. If you can also get mymanainto you, so much the better. For κράτος and βία are tricky things and may desert any one of us, or, according to Hesiod, any except Zeus: ‘No house of Zeus is without them, no seat of Zeus, there is no going forth of the god where they do not follow him, and they sit for ever beside the Thunderer.’[51]Already, in Hesiod, thesemanaqualities have become half anthropomorphic; much more so, of course, in Aeschylus’Prometheus.
Now in anthropology we are always making fresh efforts at the imaginative understanding of men far removed from us, and naturally, therefore, we are always slightly correcting and modifying our conceptions. I want here to suggest that with regard to this Divine King the ordinary classical conception is slightly wrong. We speak of deification; and this deification always remains rather a puzzle for us. It may be all very well for the mysterious Minos: but when applied to Julius Caesar or to Hadrian, in the full light and plain prose ofhistory, it seems such an absurd and gratuitous blasphemy. I think the mistake lies in applying our highly abstract conception ‘God’, a conception rarefied and ennobled during many centuries by the philosophic and religious thought of the highest of mankind, to a stratum of human ideas to which it does not belong. In one of the presidential addresses delivered to the recent Congress of Religions, Mr. Hartland dwelt on a significant fact with regard to this idea of God, viz. that whenever this word is used our best witnesses tend to contradict one another. Among the most competent observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance, some hold that they had no conception of a God, others that they were constantly thinking about God. Much may be said about this; but one thing, I think, emerges with some clearness: that this idea of a god far away in the sky—I do not say merely a god who is ‘without body, parts, or passions’, but even a god who is very remote and is a cause behind the regular phenomena of the world—this idea is one which practically does not enter their minds at all, or, if by an effort they can reach and accept it, it has little working value and is soon forgotten. For most primitive races, I suspect, the medicine-chief, the βασιλεύς, with his immensemana, is Theos, and equally the Theos is the medicine-chief. The rainmaker, the bringer of game, the possessor of the power to make dead and to make alive—there he is, the visible doer of all those things which later races have delegated to higher and more shadowy beings, walking palpably before you with his medicine and perhaps his pipe, his grand manner, his fits, and his terrific dress.
The Basileus, the possessor of greatmana, wants people to obey him, and by will-power, by force of character, aided by impressive ritual, he makes them. In the same way he makes rain; he says so vehemently ‘It shall rain’ that it cannot help itself. It does. This lies at the back of what we somewhat erroneously call mimetic magic. For the real rainmaker does not imitate rain, he just makes it. One must bear in mind always the extreme sensitiveness of savages to suggestion—to hocus-pocus, to bullying, to paroxysms of rage. When Kyknos-Ares, who presumably belonged to this class of Basileus, was waiting for Heracles to attack him in histemenos, he did not simply make suitable arrangements and stay on guard; no, περιμαίνετο, he ‘raged round’, working up hismanaand inspiring all the terror possible. Think of the scolding priests of the Middle Ages. Think even of the Bull ‘Ausculta Fili’. Think of the rages that are characteristic of ancient prophets, such as Tiresias, just as they are of modern yogis and Maroccan saints.
In the first place, then, on sociological grounds, I think we should not conceive this primitive king as a man deified, but rather as a pre-deistic medicine-man possessed of those powers which more cultured ages have relegated to the gods. In the second place, though I know that etymological arguments are often like broken reeds and pierce the hand of him who leans thereon, I cannot but remember that Curtius derived θεός from the rootthes-which appears in πολύθεστος, ἀπόθεστος, θέσσασθαι, perhaps θεσμός, the Latinfestusandferiae, and which has the special connotation of ‘spell’ or ‘magic prayer’.Professor Conway, who prefers another derivation (Lith. dvãse, ‘spirit, breath,’ MHG. ge-twas, ‘ghost,’ see Brugmann,Gr. Gr.s.v.), writes to me that the fatal objection to thethes-derivation is that θεσός could not mean God; it could only mean ‘prayer’ or ‘one who prays’. Now, except that the word suggests ‘spell’ rather than ‘prayer’, that is exactly what I want it to mean. If the word θεός was originally neuter it meant magic or medicine, like φάρμακον. If masculine, it was the medicine-man or magic-man—not very far from φαρμακός.
The process of thought, if I may over-simplify it a little, seems to be like this. First the Theos or Rainmaker on earth makes his rain. Then it is found that he does not always or unconditionally make the rain, and you reach the hypothesis that a greater rainmaker lives far away, on some remote mountain, or perhaps in the sky. That is the true Theos. The Theos on earth only knows his ways, belongs to him, partly controls him; sometimes indeed he can only humbly pray to him. The so-called Theos on earth, in fact, is not Theos at all. Here comes one of the strongest antitheses between Homeric and non-Homeric, between the reformed Olympian religion and the old savage stuff from which it was made. Homer drew clear the line between mortal and immortal, between God in Olympus and man here. And most early Greek poetry rings with the antithesis. Μὴ μάτευε Ζεὺς γενέσθαι. θνητὸν ὄντα θνητὰ χρὴ φρονεῖν. By the fifth century the time was long past when ‘gods and mortal men strove in Mêkônê’, and the gods had carried the day. Yet even Sophocles makes his Thebans go with prayer and supplication to a Basileus, to stop the plague; and it seems significant that he makes the priest explain
θεοῖσι μέν νυν οὐκ ἱσούμενόν σ’ ἑγὼοὑδ’ οἴδε παῖδες ἑζόμεσθ’ ἑφέστιοιἁνδρῶν δὲ πρῶτον ἔν τε συμφοραῖς βίουκρίνοντες ἒν τε δαιμόνων συναλλαγαῖς (O.T.31 ff.).
θεοῖσι μέν νυν οὐκ ἱσούμενόν σ’ ἑγὼοὑδ’ οἴδε παῖδες ἑζόμεσθ’ ἑφέστιοιἁνδρῶν δὲ πρῶτον ἔν τε συμφοραῖς βίουκρίνοντες ἒν τε δαιμόνων συναλλαγαῖς (O.T.31 ff.).
θεοῖσι μέν νυν οὐκ ἱσούμενόν σ’ ἑγὼοὑδ’ οἴδε παῖδες ἑζόμεσθ’ ἑφέστιοιἁνδρῶν δὲ πρῶτον ἔν τε συμφοραῖς βίουκρίνοντες ἒν τε δαιμόνων συναλλαγαῖς (O.T.31 ff.).
The suppliant comes to him not exactly as a God, but as the first of men and as holding some special intercourse with the δαίμονες.
A great collection of these medicine-kings, especially of rain and thunder-makers, is to be found in Mr. A. B. Cook’s very remarkable articles on ‘Zeus, Jupiter and the Oak’, published in theClassical Reviewfor 1903, and again in his ‘European Sky God’ inFolk Lore, xv, pp. 371-90. I will run briefly through a few of them.
The clearest of all is Salmoneus. His nature was explained, I believe, partly by M. Salomon Reinach and partly by Miss Jane Harrison. ‘He declared that he was Zeus,’ says Apollodorus (i. 9, 7), ‘and depriving Zeus of his sacrifices bade men offer them to himself. He attached to a chariot leather thongs with bronze caldrons and, trailing them after him, said he was thundering; he tossed blazing torches into the air and said he was lightening.’—So he was; at least, he was doing his best. Mr. Cook shows that he had also some justification for saying that he was Zeus. For he was an Olympian victor; and thereby became Basileus, or Zeus, of Olympia, and had the thunder-making as part of his official duties.
Almost exactly similar is Remulus Silvius,Remulus ... imitator fulminis, as Ovid calls him. ‘In contempt of the gods he contrivedmock thunderbolts and noises like thunder, wherewith he thought to frighten men as though he were a god. But a storm fraught with rain and lightning falling upon his house, and the lake near which it stood swelling in an unusual manner, he was drowned with his whole family.’[52]As with Salmoneus, amid his mock thunder-storms came the real thunder-storm and slew him.
More modest and more in accord with later beliefs was Numa. No impiety was to be found in his thunder-making.[53]‘Picus and Faunus taught Numa many things, including a charm for thunder and lightning, composed of onions, hair, and pilchards, which is used to this day.’ You may remember the story told by Livy, Ovid, and others, how Numa cheated Jupiter of his human sacrifice. He conjured Jupiter by a spell to come to him and reveal a charm for thunder. The god came, but was angry at being brought, and meant to have blood. ‘I want heads’ ... ‘Of onions,’ said Numa. ‘I want human’ ... ‘Hairs,’ said Numa. ‘I want living’ ... ‘Pilchards,’ put in the pious king, and Jupiter gave the matter up.
Minos in much the same way had the power to thunder, but only had it by means of a prayer to his father Zeus.
Now observe that most of these early Roman heroes appear both as men and as gods. The explanation is, I think, that when the celestial gods were introduced the oldTheoiorBasilêeshad to be either condemned, like Mezentius, Remulus Silvius, Salmoneus, or else deified.Numa and Romulus suggest themselves at once. Aeneas, too, while engaged in battle with Turnus, or some say Mezentius, vanished and became Jupiter Indiges. Latinus vanished while fighting Mezentius, and became Jupiter Latiaris. In later times there were numbers of these ‘Humani Ioves’. It is one of the most important social facts to remember about antiquity, that the spread of education was very difficult and slow, and in consequence it was almost impossible for a whole nation at once ever to rise entirely above that primitive state of superstition which Preuss describes by the pleasant word ‘Urdummheit’.
Julius Caesar was worshipped as Jupiter, with M. Antonius for his Flamen Dialis. Caligula was worshipped as Optimus Maximus and also as Jupiter Latiaris; it was perhaps in this capacity that he put to death his rival the Rex Nemorensis at Nemi. Domitian is constantly referred to as Jupiter in the poets. Coins are found inscribedΛΙΒΙΑ ΗΡΑ, andHADRIANO IOVI OLYMPIO.
We have further the somewhat mysterious statement of Macrobius (Sat.iii. 7. 6) that ‘the souls of consecrated men were called by the Greeks Zânes’, and the express and frequently repeated statement of Tzetzes ‘that the ancients called all their kings Zeus and their queens goddesses’. Οἱ γὰρ πρίν τε Δίας πάντας κάλεον βασιλῆας.[54]
I will not dwell on Zeus-Agamemnon or on Zeus-Minos; nor on the number of priests of Zeus at Corycus who bear the name Zâs. But I will just draw attention to one fact. Two classes of people who are not kings, and I believe two only, are found bearing the title of Zeus. They areprophets—like Zeus-Amphiaraos and Zeus-Trophonios; and doctors—like the celebrated Menekrates, who called himself Zeus and his various attendants by other divine names. That is to say the old conception of medicine-chief has split up into those three channels, king, prophet, and doctor; and to all three the name of Zeus occasionally belongs. It was for a medical miracle at Lystra that Barnabas was hailed as Zeus and Paul as Hermes (Acts xiv. 12).
Now, as has been observed before now, the history of theseHumani Iovesis written in blood, and that for two special reasons. First, it is by blood that they come to the throne and by blood that they leave it. Secondly, they are always appealed to in times of great strait or danger, when ‘strong medicine’ is wanted. And the strongest and most favourite medicine in such cases is human blood, of one sort or another. The main object of the Leopard Societies is said to be the wish to obtain human fat as ‘medicine’. The same motive leads to murders in Australia.[55]
We should perhaps add a third cause for the stain of blood which lies so deep on these primitive medicine-kings. I mean, the mere wish to inspire terror and obedience and to keep off as long as possible that inevitable successor who filled their days with dread. Kyknos, Phorbas, Oinomaos, Kerkyon, Amykos, Philomeleides, Sinis, and Procrustes, all those ogres of Greek myth who race or wrestle with all comers and, having defeated them, hang their heads on trees or tear their bodies asunder or fling them to wild beasts or the like, have their parallel in many an African king, whose hut is ringed by heads stuck on poles.[56]
Now I wish to apply these conceptions, as I said, to the most obvious piece of Greek Epic poetry outside Homer, and illustrate anthropologically the main legend of the Theogony. You will remember the outlines of the story. The first possessor of the kingly office—βασιληίδα τιμήν—is Ouranos. He is afraid of his children, and ‘hides’ or imprisons them. At last his son Kronos conquers and mutilates him, and he passes out of sight. Kronos becomes king and isequally afraid of his children; he ‘swallows’ them one after another; eventually Zeus conquers and ‘binds’ him. Zeus now reigns; but Zeus took the precaution of swallowing Metis, when Metis was about to give birth to Athena.
I omit details for the moment. I refrain also from discussing the Maori parallel, first pointed out, I believe, in Mr. Lang’sCustom and Myth. This series of conflicts has been explained as referring to a change of religion, an early Pelasgian worship being ousted by that of the incoming Achaeans. There may be that in it: but such an explanation obviously does not explain the whole series of swallowings. There were not three, certainly not four, different religions in question.
Analysing the story I find in it the following elements.
First, the medicine-king, or Theos, is afraid of his successor. In this case the possible successors are represented as his children. That may be a mere piece of convenience in story-telling; it may be the influence of a time when kingship was hereditary.
In all three cases the motive assigned by Hesiod seems to be the fear of a successor. The motive of Ouranos, indeed, is not very clearly stated. He began by hiding his children in the earth because they were ‘the most dangerous of sons’ (155). They ‘were hated of their father’, and ‘he rejoiced in the evil work’.
Kronos arose and conquered him: the exact meaning of the mutilation I leave aside. Kronos proceeded to swallow his children ‘intending that none other of the proud sons of Ouranos should have king’s rank among the immortals; for he had heard from Gaia and Ouranos that he was destined to be vanquished by his son’ (461 ff.). Here the motive is clearly given.
As for Zeus and his strange act in swallowing Metis when she was about to give birth to Athena, two quite distinct motives are attributed to him. First, that which we have met with before. ‘He was determined that none but himself should have the king’s rank, βασιληίδα τιμήν, over the immortals. He had heard an oracle that Metis was destined to give birth to’—one expects the motive of the Marriage of Thetis—‘a child who should be mightier than his father.’ But it is not quite so simple; for Athena was the child of Metis, and she was obviously not mightier than Zeus. The oracle takes the curious form that Metis is to bear ‘first Athena, and secondly a child who shall be mightier than his father.’ Zeus seems to have swallowed her rather prematurely. But he had a second motive also. He swallowed Metis ‘that the goddess being inside him should tell him of good and evil’. The name Μῆτις of course means ‘Counsel’ or ‘Wisdom’.
Leaving this last detail aside for the present, I suggest that the main motive in this strange story of the swallowing or hiding of the successive possible pretenders to the crown is the dread which each king naturally felt of him who was coming after. But this still leaves much unexplained; the second main element which I find is the worship of sacred flints or thunder-stones.
When Kronos set about swallowing Zeus, you will remember, Gaia put a big stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to great Kronos. And he ‘put it inside his belly’, ἑὴν ἑσκάτθετο νηδύν (487). Then, ‘in the passingof the years’—whatever that exactly means—‘beguiled by the counsels of Gaia, great crooked-hearted Kronos spewed up his brood again, being conquered by the craft and force of his son’. (Two reasons there, belonging probably to different stories—in one he was overcome by the craft of Gaia, in the other by themanaof his son.) ‘And the first thing he vomited up was the stone, which he had swallowed last.... Then straightway Zeus set loose his father’s brothers, the Titanes. They were grateful, and gave him three gifts, thunder and thunder-bolt and lightning; formerly vast Earth had hidden them away: and it is by them that Zeus rules over mortals and immortals.’[57]
That is to say Zeus in this story is a thunder-god. The thunder or lightning is hismana. And not only a thunder-god, he is a thunder-stone. The identity has been, of course, disguised in our present version of the myth. It is muddled, like everything else in Hesiod.[58]But it shows through. When Kronos sets about swallowing Zeus, it is the stone he swallows. And it is only when ‘by the counsels of Earth’ Cronos vomits up the stone that Zeus can take any action; and that action takes the form of thunder and lightning, the special propertyof a thunder-stone. In the word ‘thunder-stone’, or κεραυνία, the ancients seem to have mixed, and perhaps confused, two ideas: that of a meteorite, which seemed to be the actual bolt which fell in the thunder, and that of an ordinary flint, nephrite, jade, or the like, which has its mysterious fire inside it. The fire is the soul, or indwellingmana, of the flint.
A careful reading of Hesiod’s story will, I think, convince most anthropologists that Zeusisthe stone. And as a matter of fact it is not uncommon for both Zeus and Jupiter to appear as stones. In the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, the oldest temple of Jupiter in Rome, founded by Romulus, there was a sacred flint which was calledJupiter Lapis—it was notJovis Lapis. It was used for killing the victim in solemn treaties. It must have been one of those ‘thunder-stones resembling axes’ of which Pliny speaks; what we should call neolithic axe-heads. There seems to have been more than oneJupiter Lapis; for in 201b.c.the Senate sent several such with thefetialesto Africa. I need not dwell on other cases; the Zeus Kappôtas at Gythîum, apparently a bigger stone, as Orestes could sit upon it; the Zeus Kasios or Keraunios at Seleucîa; the stone of Zeus Sthenios, on the road from Trozên to Hermione; or the thunder-stone on Mount Ida, in Crete, with which Pythagoras was purified by the Idaean Dactyls, the attendants of Zeus. They are all in De Visser’s book.
The best known of these stones is perhaps that which was believed to be—not to belong to, but actually to be—the Mother of the Gods. Livy (xxix.ii) tells of the embassy sent from Rome to Attalus to fetch the Great Mother; and how the king took the legates to Pessinûsin Phrygia and handed over to them the sacred stone which the natives affirmed to be the Mother of the Gods. Arnobius describes its appearance: ‘a stone not large, which could be carried in a man’s hand without noticeable weight, in colour black andfurvus, in shape more or less round with projecting corners, which is now to be seen in the mouth of the image of the Great Mother.’ Superstitious Rome was ready to accept and to worship the Mother in the form of a stone; but common-sense Rome did at least demand that the Great Mother should have a decently anthropomorphic image, and the stone was then placed in the image’s mouth.
So far, then, we are clear. But there remain some difficult questions. Why was the stone in Hesiod wrapped in swaddling clothes? I do not understand this. But the ritual practice is well attested. Pausanias tells how this Kronos stone was anointed and wrapped in wool.[59]A coin in Macdonald’s Hunter Catalogue (ii. 68. 145) represents the Great Mother stone covered with a goat-skin. This may be merely because of thehagosor taboo, just as the omphalos on vases is commonly covered with an ἄγρηνον and Semitic betyls are wrapped in cloths. The actual body of a god would be dangerous to touch; but it looks as if there was some special connexion between stones and infants. The Orphic poem called Lithica is, of course, full of magic stones, which might be cited here. But take one in especial, the ‘Live Siderite’. This stone has to be prayed to, like a god; it has also to be washed daily for ten days and nursed and wrapped in clean robes, like a baby. At the end ofthat time it will reward its benefactor by uttering the scream of a young baby when hungry; then, the poet remarks, the great thing is not to drop it.[60]
In some Mexican dances, Preuss tells us, the souls of infants come through the air in the likeness of five stones. Among the Kaitish and the Arunta there are stones inhabited by infant souls, which are induced in one way or another to come out of the stones and be born. And we all remember the stones flung by Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the race of man which is—or is not—sprung ἀπὸ δρυὸς ἡδ’ ἁπὸ πέτρης.[61]
But again, why were the stones swallowed? What does all this swallowing mean? Zeus of course swallowed Metis in order to have hermanainside him. That is sensible enough. Do medicine men or Theoi ever actually swallow smooth stones in order to get the fire-power or other magic inside them? In Mexico the devils which are sucked out of the body in curing diseases are usually in the form of stones. For instance, in the ceremony of the Huichol tribe, where the gods are healed of their weariness by the Dawn-Star, Kaiumari, sucking ‘stones and the like’ out of them.[62]The same practice is common among Australian blacks.
Mr. Marett refers me to a still better case. Among the Yuin of New South Wales the wordjoïa, which is almost likemanaand is used to denote the immaterial force in sacred animals, is actually the name ofcertain stones like these. They are commonly quartz-crystals or bits of glass, but also we hear of Kunambrun, a black stone, apparently lydianite. A black stone probably means thunder. The medicine man often carries these stones in his mouth, and when he sends out a curse or a blessing he projects them out of himself into his victim ‘like the wind,’ that is, invisibly and impalpably.[63]
The actual swallowing seems strange, unless it was a mere fraud. But I used to know an Australian blackfellow—I never thought of asking his tribe—who used to put stones in his mouth and give or sell them to the boys of the neighbourhood as bearing a charm in consequence. They were sure to hit what they were aimed at, unless the aim was very bad. I suppose he put a lot of hismanainto them. One of the ways in which a Papuan chief causes death, according to the report of Dr. Bellamy in the White Book for 1907, is to send to a man a present of a smooth stone. The man recognizes the meaning of the stone, and wastes away. Dr. Bellamy cured some by the application of strong smelling salts, which drove away the devils. Presumably the chief had put hismanaon the stone in some very strong way.
Lastly, there is another element in this story which calls for explanation from better anthropologists than myself; I mean the constant reference to ‘hiding’ or ‘concealment’. Ouranos (157)hidall his children in a secret place of the Earth; this gave pain to Earth, and she groaned, being squeezed by them. Earth again (482) tookZeus andhidhim in a cave. Kronosput the stone insidehim—surely a form of hiding. The Titanswere hidden away—κεκρύφατο, by Kronos (729) till Zeus brought them again to light. Lastly and most important, Zeushid away firefrom man, κρύψε δὲ πῦρ.
This last case is pretty clear. Zeus had the fire hidden away in the heart of the flint or in the veins of Earth; Prometheus, or Pramanthas, the Fire-Stick, introduced the more open visible fire. But the other cases seem different. In them it is always a king or a would-be king, a deposed Theos or a conquered aspirant, who is made to disappear. We are reminded of Aeneas and Latinus who vanished in battles, of Romulus and Numa who vanished in thunderstorms.
In one case we find that the hiding was in a ‘monstrous cave’, and a cave in Crete, too. We know from other sources something about the kind of hiding which took place in that particular cave. At the end of the fatal nine years, if we are to believe the authors quoted by me in theRise of the Greek Epic, p. 127, and much more completely by Mr. A. B. Cook in the articles mentioned above, the divine king Minos in his mask, as a god, went up into the Idaean cave to converse with Zeus. Doubtless the divine mask covered his head. A masked Minos went in, and a masked Minos came out; but one strongly suspects that it was not the same man beneath the mask. My friend Mr. Gordon, an education officer in Lower Nigeria, informs me that there is there a great oracle or ordeal in a cave called the Long Juju. It decides cases between litigants, or persons who have some dispute. And the method is that both go up into the cave, and only one returns. The other, presumably the guilty one, has vanished; he is hidden; κέκρυπται.
All through this pre-Hellenic realm of saga and half-history we find ourselves in contact with these god-kings, or medicine-chiefs, these βασιλῆες or, if I am right, Theoi. And we cannot but wonder whether we have not here the explanation of Herodotus’ famous statement about the origins of Greek Religion (Herod. ii. 52). The Pelasgians, he tells us, did not originally know the names of the Olympian gods; ‘they brought offerings and prayed to the Theoi.’ It was only at a later time that they sent to Dodona to ask if they should worship those definite gods with special names and attributes and ‘Olympian Houses’ which had come into Greece but were still in some sense foreign. And the oracle said ‘Yes’. I am quite aware that the passage may be differently interpreted; and I do not suggest that Herodotus knew all that lay behind his words when he spoke of the nameless Theoi of the Pelasgians in contrast to the Olympians of Homer and Hesiod. But I do suspect that the contrast between these medicine-chiefs and the Homeric gods is one of the cardinal differences between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic religion; and, further, that some reminiscence of this difference has shaped the tradition which Herodotus repeats. Clearer evidence will, no doubt, be forthcoming from some better-equipped anthropologist.
The Greek words for magic and magician, μαγεία and μάγος, are admittedly of Persian origin, and in all probability did not find their way into Greece before the Persian War, that is, before about 480b.c.It was therefore an obvious inference, which was drawn in 1863 by O. Hirschfeld (de incantationibus et devinctionibus amatoriis apud Graecos Romanosque), that as the name magic was not known in Greece before the Persian Wars, neither was the thing. The inference is indeed obvious, but it is not necessarily correct: magic is practised by tribes who have not developed any general term for magic. It is therefore conceivable, at least, that the Greeks and Italians also before 480b.c.practised magical rites, even though they then had no word for magic in general. The question is one of facts and not merely of words. What do we know of the facts before 480b.c.? Unfortunately, according to M. Mauss, in his article on magic in Daremberg and Saglio’sDictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines, ‘we are in almost complete ignorance of the primitive and original forms of magic in Italy and Greece.’ In view, then, of our almost complete ignorance, it may perhaps be allowable to start from a hypothesis—the hypothesis that the primitive and original forms of magic amongst the Greeks and Romans were much the same as they are amongst the undeveloped peoples who possess them at the present day, and, like the Greeks and Romans of the earliest times, have no general term for magic.
Amongst the tribes of Central Australia, the person who employs magic to cause sickness or death to his enemy does not omit to use what the natives call ‘singing’. This ‘singing’ is conducted ‘in a low voice’ (Frazer,Golden Bough2, i. 13); and the sort of thing the magician ‘in muttered tones hisses out’ is ‘May your heart be rent asunder’, or, ‘May your head and throat be split open’ (Spencer and Gillen,Native Tribes, 534 ff.;Northern Tribes, 456 ff.).
In the Torres Straits the sorcerer points a spear in the direction of his victim and ‘sings’ similarly, ‘Into body, go, go. Into hands, go, go. Into head, go, go’ (Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, vi. 228, 229). The ‘singing’ assists, Mr. Haddon says (ib., p. 231), ‘in furthering the injury he wishes to inflict.’ Now, was ‘singing’, of this magical nature, a sort of rhythmical muttering in a low voice, known to the Greeks and Romans? In the first place, we have the Latin wordsincantare,incantator,incantamentum, all implying a singing which is magical in its intention and effects—incantation or enchantment. Next, we havecarmen, which means not only song in general but ‘singing’ in the magical sense, in Tibullus (i. 8. 17), Ovid (Met.vii. 167, 203, 253; xiv. 57, 20, 34, 44, 366, 387;Fastiiv. 551, 552), Horace (Ep.v. 72; xvii. 4, 5, 28;Sat.i. 8. 19, 20), Virgil (Ecl.viii. 69;Aen.iv. 487), Juvenal (Sat.vi. 133), Pliny (Nat. Hist.xxviii. 10, 18), Tacitus (Annals, iv. 22), and in other passages for which I may refer to Adam Abt (Die Apologie des Apuleius, 22) and L. Fahz (De Poetarum Romanorum DoctrinaMagica,138, 139). In Greek we have the same magical singing expressed by the words ἑπάδειν, ἑπωδνή, ἑπῳδὁς; in Euripides (Bacchae234,Hippolytus478, 1038,Phoenissae1260), Sosiphanes (Fr.1), Aristophanes (Amphiaraus,Fr.29), Anaxandrides (Fr.33. 31), Antiphanes (Fr.17. 15), Xenophon (Mem.iii. 11. 16, 17), Lucian and Heliodorus, and other passages to be found in Abt (ib., p. 43).
It may, however, be objected that all these quotations are of course later than 480b.c.; and therefore prove nothing as to ‘the primitive and original forms of magic in Italy and Greece’. Indeed, in theBacchae, for instance, and in Plato,Rep.ii. 364a, the magic referred to may reasonably be regarded as exotic and not native to Greece. But fortunately we find the word ἑπαοιδή, in the magical sense, in Homer (Od.xix. 457), which takes this group of words in this sense far back beyond 480b.c.The Homeric use of the word in this sense, however, will not avail against any one who chooses to maintain—though it is impossible to prove, and difficult to believe—that the Greeks originally knew no magic, and borrowed it in Homeric or pre-Homeric times from some neighbouring people. And though the fact that the Twelve Tables ordained punishment for the man ‘qui malum carmen incantassit’ in all reasonable probability indicates that ‘singing’ in the evil sense was a practice already at the time rooted in Italy and not newly imported from abroad; still in this case, as in the case of the Homeric ἑπαοιδή, the objection may be made—though it cannot be supported by anything approaching proof or even probability—that the Italians, as well as the Romans, alone amongst early peoples were incapable of developing the belief for themselves.As against this objection we can only fall back on the evidence of comparative philology. And that evidence is particularly interesting, because, as interpreted by O. Schrader (Reallexikon der Indogermanischen Altertumskunde, ii. 974), it shows that amongst the Indo-European peoples much the most common expression for doing magic is ‘singing’. The presumption that ‘singing’ of the magical kind goes back to Indo-European times is as strong as any that linguistic evidence can produce. For the Slavonian, Lithuanian, and Teutonic words I will refer to Schrader’sReallexikon, ii. 975. Of the Greek and Latin words I may mention βασκαίνω and βασκανία, which are connected with βάζω, ‘speak’; γόης and γοητεύω with γόος, ‘howling’;fascinumandfascinarewithfari.
If, then, we may with some plausibility illustrate thecarmen, theincantatio, and the ἑπαοιδή of the Greeks and the Romans, with the ‘singing’ of the Torres Straits and Central Australia, the question arises, What exactly is it that the magician ‘sings’? In the Torres Straits it apparently is the spear which is ‘sung’, for the words used are, ‘Into body, go, go’; and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say that in Central Australia also it is the stick or the bone which is ‘sung’. But when we examine the words of the ‘singing’ or charm, as given by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, we find that they do not refer to the stick or the bone which is used in the magical rite, but to the person against whom the rite is directed: ‘May your heart be rent asunder, may your head and throat be split open.’ The inference, therefore, seems to be that it is the victim that the ‘singing’ or spell is originally directed against; and only later that the stick or bone itself comes to be bewitched, just as money, which is valuable for what it will purchase, comes to be regarded by the miser as an end in itself.
If this is so, it opens up another possibility of interest which I must be content merely to suggest for consideration and investigation. It is that the earliest form of ‘singing’ or spell may be connected with cursing. Some forms of cursing or imprecation invoke the assistance of the gods, but not all; and it may be that those are the earliest which operate directly and without reference to gods. Caliban invokes no gods when he cries: