It is easy in all this to detect the intimate associations with Biblical thought and feeling; and we may trace back to Babylon the daimonistic theory of morals that colours the New Testament, and has prevailed throughout the centuries of Christendom, and is only slowly losing its hold. But at the same time all this sharply divides early Babylonian thought from what we can discern of the early Hellenic, and more than any other evidence confirms the belief that the great Eastern and Western races were not in close spiritual contact at the time when Hellenism was in the making. Certainexternal resemblances in the thought and feeling about these matters are to be found in Hellas and in Mesopotamia; that is to say, the germs are identical, for they are broadcast all over the world; but the intensity of their cultivation, and their importance in relation to other life-forces, are immeasurably different. In the earliest Greek legend we discover the reflex of that external unpurposive morality that I have tried to define above: the acts of Oedipus were not according to our moral judgment ethically wrong, for they were wholly unintentional: yet in the oldest legend he is πᾶς ἄναγνος, as he calls himself in Sophocles’ play, and a sinner in the eyes of the gods; nor could all the virtue and valour of Bellerophon save him from the wrath of heaven aroused by the accidental slaying of his brother. Certain acts were supposed to put upon a man a quasi-physical, quasi-spiritual miasma, without reference to will or purpose, and render him hateful to God and man. But the bondage of the Greek mind to this idea was slighter and more temporary. And after all, the external sins in these legends were parricide, incest, and fratricide, dreadful things enough in themselves. We do not hear of any Hellene’s agony of remorse on account of treading accidentally on filth, or eating malodorous food. Homer, indeed, is marvellously untroubled by any ritualistic pharisaic code; we might even take him as a witness that there was none at all in earliest Hellas. We should be undoubtedly wrong. The early Greek must have had, like all mankind, his “tabus” in plenty; for to suppose that all that we find in Hesiod and in the later inscriptions were a sudden discovery, would be childish. I may be able to consider the evidence concerning early Greek tabus when I compare the ritual. I will only say here that we havereason to believe that at no period was the Hellene morbidly perturbed about these, or ever moralised them up to that point where they could exercise a spiritual tyranny over his moral sense. He might object to touching a corpse or to approaching an altar with blood upon him; but it does not seem to have occurred to him, as it did to the Persian, and with almost equal force to the Babylonian, that accidental contact with an impure thing instantly started into existence an army of demons, who would rush abroad to destroy the world of righteousness.157.1
In fact, Hellenic tabus and purification-laws, except, indeed, the law concerning purification from bloodshed, had only this contact with religion, that the breach of them might offend an irritable divinity, which it would be unwise to do; they were not religious, so far as we can discern, in the sense that they were associated with a vivid belief in evil spirits, as they were in the Babylonian and Persian creeds. There were germs indeed which might have developed into a vigorous daimonistic theory in early Hellas. We hear even in Homer of such unpleasant things as “a black Kér”; and a mythic hero of Megara kills a monster called a ποινή, almost, we may say, a devil. Certain days, according to Hesiod, might be unlucky, because perhaps Erinyes or ghosts were walking about, though that popular poet is not clear about this. But certainly not in early nor often in later Greece were men habitually devil-ridden: nor did they see devils in food or blood or mud. Therefore, on the whole and comparatively, early Greek religion, when we first catch a glimpse of it, appears bright and sane, a religion of the healthy-minded and of men in the open air. Andtherefore, when secular philosophy arose, Greek moral theory made no use of evil spirits except in certain Pythagorean circles where we may detect Oriental influence. Superstition and magic must have been more rife in ancient Greece than the Homeric picture would lead us to suppose: yet the higher culture of the people, in the earliest period which we are considering, was comparatively free from these influences and refused to develop by religious speculation or anxious brooding the germs of daimonism always embedded in the lower stratum of the national mind. The Universe could not, therefore, be viewed by the Hellene as it was by the Zarathustrian, and to some extent by the Babylonian, as the arena of a cosmic struggle between the powers of good and the powers of evil. Nor could the Hellene personify the power of evil majestically, in such a guise as Ahriman or Satan; he only was aware of certain little daemon-figures of death and disease, ghostly shadows rather than fully outlined personages; or such vaguely conceived personal agencies as Ate and Eris, which belonged not to religion, but to the poetic-moral thought of the people. When we compare the various rituals, we shall discern that the Hellenic was by no means wholly bright or shallow, but that some of its most ancient forms were gloomy and inspired by a sense of sin or sorrow: nevertheless, it is just in respect of the comparative weakness of this sense that it differed most markedly from the Babylonian.
There are other aspects of the divine character interesting to compare in the religious theory of East and West. Despite the apparent grimness of the Babylonian-Assyrian theology, no divine trait is more movingly insisted on in the liturgies than the mercifulnessof the deity: Nebo is “the merciful, the gracious”;159.1Ishtar is “the mighty lady of the world, queen of humanity, merciful one, whose favour is propitious, who hath received my prayer”;159.2Sarpanitum is addressed as “the intercessor, the protectress of the captive”;159.3Shamash as “the merciful god, who liftest up those that are bowed down and protectest the weak”;159.4Sin as “the compassionate, gracious Father”; and “Gamlat the merciful” is mentioned as a descriptive general epithet of an unknown Assyrian deity.159.5
These phrases may attest in the end a genuine and fervent faith; but originally they were probably inspired by the word-magic of penitence, the sinner believing that he can make the deity merciful by repeatedly calling him so. At any rate, Babylonian religion catches thus the glow of a high ethical ideal; and as the deities were invoked and regarded as by nature merciful, so the private man was required at certain times to show mercy, as the confessional formula proves. The same idea, though a less fervent and ecstatic expression is given to it, is found in the oldest record of Greek religion: “Even the gods are moved to pity… them men turn aside from wrath by sacrifice, libation, and gentle prayers, when a man hath sinned and trespassed against them. For prayers are the daughters of great God,… and if a man do them honour when they come anigh him, to him they bring great blessings, and hear him when he prayeth.” This Homeric utterancein the great speech of Phoenix160.1is the voice of a high and civilised religion; and the idea inspires the ancient cults of Zeus μειλίχιος and ἱκέσιος.
The Babylonian conception of divine mercy gave rise to an interesting phrase which is attached as a quasi-liturgical formula to many of the leading gods and goddesses—“the awakener of the dead,” “thou who raisest up the dead”: a phrase which has erroneously been supposed to refer to an actual resurrection of the dead:160.2various contexts attest its real significance as an expression of the divine grace shown in restoring the sick to health, in saving men from the hand of death. Hellenic religious vocabulary affords no parallel to this formula nor to that title of Enlil—“Lord of the breath of life of Sumer”;160.3or that of Bel, “Lord of the life of the Land.”160.4In some passages of Babylonian literature we mark the glimmering of the idea that life in its varied forms on the earth is a divine substance sustained by the personal deity. Ishtar is described as the protectress of all animate existence, and all life languishes when she descends to the nether regions.160.5The goddess of Erech, identified with Ishtar, speaking of her own functions, exclaims, “In the place of giving birth in the house of the begetting mother, guardian of the home am I.”160.6It is specially Tammuz who, by the side of Ishtar, impersonates the life of the soil, as appears in the striking refrain recurring in his hymn of lament: “When he slumbers, the sheep and the lambs slumber also;when he slumbers, the she-goats and the kids slumber also”;161.1and the same thought may have inspired a phrase that is doubtfully translated at the end of the hymn: “In the meadows, verily, verily, the soul of life perishes.” Still more explicit is another Tammuz hymn, in which, while bewailing the departed god, they wail for all the life of the earth, “the wailing is for the herbs;… they are not produced: the wailing is for the grain, ears are not produced: the wailing is for the habitations, for the flocks, the flocks bring forth no more. The wailing is for the perishing wedded ones, for the perishing children; the dark-headed people create no more.”
In all this we see the reflection of a pantheistic feeling that links the living world and the personal divine power in a mystic sympathy. Now the idea of divinity immanent in living nature is inconsistent with a severely defined anthropomorphic religion; hence we scarcely find it in the earlier religion of Hellas. Zeus is called the father of men and gods, but in a reverential rather than in any literal creative sense: nor is there found any trace of the idea that divine power is immanent in the life or soul of man, till we come to the later period of philosophic speculation and Orphism. Only here and there behind the anthropomorphism we discern in Hellenic myth or cult the vaguer thought of diffused and immanent divinity; this reveals itself more than once in the myth and cult of Demeter, whose anger and sorrow at the loss of her daughter causes a sympathetic disappearance of the crops and the fruits of the earth; and it is embodied in the Attic cult on the Akropolis of Demeter Χλόη,161.2which title expresses the immanence in the verdure ofthe life-giving potency of the goddess. The ancient folklore of Greece, and a few cult-records of the primitive village-communities, reveal figures that recall faintly the lineaments of Tammuz, Eunostos of Tanagra, Skephros of Tegea, who may belong, as Linos certainly did, to that group of heroes of crop and harvest, who die and are bewailed in the fall of the year, and whose life is sympathetically linked with the life of the earth. But we find this type of personage in other parts of Europe, and there is every reason for believing that the western shores of the Mediterranean had not been touched by the Tammuz-myth and service in the second millennium B.C.
The evidence then suggests that the pregnant idea of the godhead as the source of life was more prominent and more articulate in Babylonian than in Hellenic religion.
Wemay next consider the attribute of purity as a divine characteristic, to see whether in this respect the East differed markedly from the West. As regards ritual-law, all the religions of the old world agree in demanding ritual-purity: the worshipper who approaches the deities must be free from physical taint and impurity: this idea is so world-wide and so deeply embedded in primitive thought, that the mere presence of it is of no service for proving the interdependence of any religions in the historic period. From this ritual-law the concept naturally arises of “pure gods,” deities who themselves are believed to be pure because they insist on purity in their worshippers. Marduk is called “the purifier” in one of the incantation-texts, in allusion to his power of exorcising the evil demon of sickness by cleansing processes.163.1The cathartic rules that the law of ritual prescribes will differ according to the instincts and prejudices of different societies. But the Babylonian service demanded more than mere ritual-purity; for instance, in a fragment of a striking text published by Delitsch, we find this injunction: “In the sight of thy God thou shalt be pure of heart, for that is the distinction of the Godhead.”163.2
As regards the moral and spiritual sense of purity, the sense in which we speak of “purity of heart,” we should naturally include purity in respect of sexual indulgence. But in applying this test to the Mesopotamian religion we are confronted with a singular difficulty. In the first place, the mythology is strikingly pure in our modern sense of the word, so far as the materials have as yet been put before us. It agrees in this respect with the Hebraic, and differs markedly from the Hellenic; the gods live in monogamic marriage with their respective goddesses, and we have as yet found no licentious stories of their intrigues. It may be that generally the Babylonian imagination was restrained by an austerity and shy reverence that did not control the more reckless and lighter spirit of the Hellene; or it may be that the priestly and royal scribes, to whom we owe the whole of the Babylonian religious literature that has come down to us, deliberately excluded any element of licentiousness that they may have found in the lower folklore. But there is one curious exception. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero repulses the proffered love of Ishtar, and taunts her with her cruel amours, giving a long list of her lovers whom she had ruined: one of these is Tammuz, “the spouse of thy youth,” upon whom “thou didst lay affliction every year”: then he mentions her other lovers who suffered at her hands—a singular list: a bird, a lion, a horse, a shepherd of the flock, some Babylonian Paris or Anchises, whom Ishtar treated as Artemis treated Aktaion. We must suppose these allusions are drawn from Babylonian folklore, of which nothing else has survived, concerning the amorous adventures of the goddess. Hence modern accounts are apt to impute a licentious character to Ishtar, as a goddess of violentand lawless passion, and to connect with this aspect of her the institution in her temple at Erech of the service of sacred prostitutes, attested by certain cuneiform texts. In comparing the ritual of East and West, I shall give some consideration to this phenomenal practice. But this view of Ishtar is utterly contrary to that presented of her in the hymns and liturgies. Not only are certain hymns to Ishtar transcendently noble and spiritual in tone, surpassing most of the greatest works of Babylonian religious poetry, but certain phrases specially exalt her as the virgin-goddess. In one of the lamentations we read, “Virgin, virgin, in the temple of my riches, am I.”165.1“The spirit-maid, glory of Heaven: the Maiden Ishtar, glory of Heaven.”165.2In a psalm to Nana, one of the by-names of Ishtar, she is called “Virgin-goddess of Heaven”;165.3in another she speaks of herself, “she of the pure heart, she without fear was I.”165.4This virgin-character of hers must then be regarded as fixed by such epithets and phrases, of which more examples might no doubt be found. Therefore the phrase attached to her in the Epic of Gilgamesh,165.5“Kadisti Ilani,” must not be translated as Dhorme would translate it,165.6“the courtesan of the Gods,” merely on the ground that the same word is applied to her temple-harlots: for the word properly means “pure” from stain, hence “holy,”165.7and in this latter sense it could be applied to her consecrated votaries, in spite of their service, which seems to usimpure: the same word “Kedesh” is used for the votaries of the same ritual in Phoenicia and Syria. This apparent contradiction in the conception of Ishtar’s character is sometimes explained166.1by the suggestion that she was really a combination of two distinct goddesses, a voluptuous and effeminate goddess of Erech, and a pure and warlike Assyrian goddess of Nineveh. But there is no real contradiction; for in Babylonian religious and liturgical literature the lower view of Ishtar is never presented at all. She is always worshipped as pure and holy; the licentiousness of folklore, if there was any such in vogue, was not allowed to intrude into the temple-service. Therefore Ishtar is no real exception to the rule that purity, even in our sense, is a prevailing characteristic of Babylonian divinity, as it was of the Hebraic.
But now another phenomenon claims our interest: while being a virgin-goddess, she is sometimes addressed as a mother. In the inscription of Sargon (722-705 B.C.) she is described as “the Lady of the Heavenly Crown, the Mother of the Gods”;166.2and in some of the older hymns, which have already been quoted, she speaks of herself at one time as mother and at another as maid: “Mother who knows lamentation,” and “I am the Virgin-Goddess.”166.3Similarly, in the hymn to Nana she is called in one place “the Virgin-Goddess of Heaven”; in another, “Mother of the faithful breasts.”166.4Another goddess, Bau, who is eminently the mother or the wife-goddess, the spouse of Ningirsu or Ninib, is characterised in a hymn to the latter god as “thy spouse, the maid, the Lady of Nippur.”166.5
From these phrases, then, seems to emerge the conception of a virgin-mother. Only we must not press it too far, or suppose at all that it crystallised into a dogma. It is characteristic of the ecstatic Babylonian imagination that in the swoon of rapture the intellect does not sharply hold contradictions apart, and the mystic enthusiasm reconciles contrary ideas as fused in one divine personality. Thus even a divinity naturally and properly male, might be mystically addressed as Father-Mother, for the worshipper craves that the godhead should be all in all to him. Thus motherhood is the natural function and interest of the goddess; therefore the Babylonian supplicated his goddess as mother, even as mother of the gods, without thinking of any divine offspring or of any literal genealogy or theogony. Virginity is also beautiful, and a source of divine power and virtue. Therefore the mother Bau might rejoice to be addressed occasionally as maid. As for Ishtar, she was aboriginally, perhaps, a maid, in the sense that no god entered into her worship; and this idea shaped the early spiritual conception of her. But as a great goddess she must show her power in the propagation of life; therefore she must be recognised in prayer and supplication as a mother; the adorer wishing to give her the virtue of both states, probably without dogmatising or feeling the contradiction. This explanation appears more likely, when we consider the psychologic temper of the Babylonian poetry, its often incoherent rapture, than the other obvious one that Ishtar the virgin happened in many places to appropriate to herself the cult of a mother-goddess, though this might easily happen.
As regards the other polytheistic Semitic races, we can infer that the same religious ideas concerning ritual-puritywere in vogue; but our scanty records do not enable us to determine whether and how far they were quickened by spiritual significance.168.1But we can trace through Asia Minor the double concept of mother and virgin in the personality of the goddesses; though it is difficult to decide whether they ever coincided, and with what degree of definiteness, in the same personage. Astarte must have been imagined generally as a mother-goddess, and she appears conspicuously as the female consort of Baal; thus her Hellenic equivalent is often given as Aphrodite; yet in another aspect of her worship she must have appeared as virginal, for she is also often identified with Artemis, just as a similar goddess Anath in Cyprus was identified with Athena.168.2The goddess Atargatis of Hierapolis, described by Lucian, was evidently a mother-goddess, bearing, according to him, a marked resemblance to Rhea, and placed in the temple by the side of her husband, Bel or Zeus. Among the Sabaean inscriptions of South Arabia, we find a dedication by some parents in behalf of their children to the goddess Umm-Attar, a name that signifies “Mother-Attar” (or “Mother Astarte”168.3; and a late record, too late to serve as witness for the early period we are considering, speaks of a virgin-mother among the Arabs.168.4Finally, the earliest Carthaginian inscriptions record the cult of the great goddess Tanit, addressed usually as the “Lady Tanit, the Face of Baal,” and called in one dedication “The Great Mother.”168.5If she is the same as the divinity whom Augustine describes as the Virgo Caelestis, theHeavenly Virgin,169.1then either the dual concept was mystically combined in the same personage, or the Carthaginian goddess was worshipped at different times and at different seasons as the mother and then as the maid. But the evidence is quite uncertain, and we must not combine too rashly the records of different ages.
Looking at the non-Semitic races of Asia Minor, we have noted the monumental evidence among the Hittites for the worship of a mother-goddess, who with her son figures in the procession on the reliefs at Boghaz-Keui. It may be she who appears on a Hittite votive relief as a large seated female with a child on her knees,169.2a type which the Greeks would call κουροτρόφος. Her name may have been Umma; for this divine word is now given us among the names of Hittite divinities in cuneiform texts recently discovered, which have been published and interpreted by Professor Sayce in theJournal of the Royal Asiatic Society.169.3He there connects the word with the Assyrian Umma = Mother, and regards this Hittite goddess as the ancestress both by name and nature of the Cappadocian goddess Mā, famous at Comana in the later period. Now the name Mā designates “the mother,” and yet the Hellenes identified this goddess not only with the great mother Kybele, but freely with Artemis. I believe the external inducement to this latter assimilation was the isolation of Mā in her cult, into which no god entered. From this late evidence it is too hazardous to infer an early Hittite virgin-mother, especially as the processional relief at Boghaz-Keui seems to present us with a ἱερὸς γάμος, the solemn union of a god and a goddess. As regards the great goddess of the Asia-Minor coast, ithas been somewhat hastily concluded that here and there her cult included the mystic idea of a virgin-mother. We have only some evidence from a late period, and in any case it would be a bold leap to argue back from it to the second millennium. But the evidence is weak. I have criticised it elsewhere, and I found it and still find it very frail.170.1I have not been able to detect any clear consciousness of the idea in the cult and cult-legends of Kybele: we must not build much on the Pessinuntian story that Arnobius gives us concerning her resistance to the love of Zeus, for certainly the general legend of Kybele and Attis is inconsistent with any dogma of the goddess’s virginity, nor was she ever called Παρθένος in cult. She was rather the mother-goddess, with whom the worshipper himself in a mystic ritual might be united in corporeal union.170.2
If we search the other parts of the Asia-Minor littoral, neither in the prehistoric nor in the later periods before Christianity is the concept we are seeking clearly to be traced. I cannot find the Leto-Artemis, the goddess who was at once essentially a virgin and a mother. What we discern in Crete is a great mother-goddess and a virgin, Ἀφαία or Britomartis, “the Sweet Maid.” That the prehistoric or later Cretans mystically combinedthe two concepts in one personality we do not know. When we examine legends and ritual, usually dateless, of early Hellas, we are aware that a goddess who was worshipped as a Maid in one locality might be worshipped as a Mother in another; or the same goddess at different times of the year might be worshipped now under one aspect, now under another. Hera of Argos yearly renews her divinity by bathing in a certain stream. Kore, the young earth-goddess, was probably an early emanation from Demeter. How powerful in pre-Hellenic days was the appeal of the virginal aspect of certain goddesses, is shown by the antiquity and the tenacity of the dogma concerning the virginity of Artemis and Athena. Yet the latter was called Μήτηρ at Elis171.1. But it would be very rash to declare that here at last the Virgin-Mother is found in old Greece. Athena has no offspring; there is neither loss nor miraculous preservation of her virginity. Only the Elean women, wishing themselves to be mothers, pray to the Virgin-goddess for offspring, and strengthen their prayer by applying a word to Athena of such powerful spell-efficacy as “Mother.” It would be a misinterpretation of the method of ancient hieratic speech to suppose that Athena Μήτηρ was mystically imagined as herself both Virgin and Mother.171.2
The ritualistic value of purity was probably a postulate of the religious feeling of early Hellas, though Homer gives us only faint glimpses of the idea. Φοῖβος was an old cult-title of Apollo, and its root-significance may well have been “Pure.” We hear of Hagné, “the pure goddess,” probably a reverentialname for Kore at the Messenian Andania:172.1and on the hilltop above the Arcadian Pallantion, Pausanias records the cult of a nameless group of divinities called οἱ καθαροὶ θεοί,172.2a cult which, according to his account of it, appears to have descended from very ancient times. The question of purity in Greek ritual may be reserved for a later stage in our comparative study. I will only remark here on the fact that Greek worship, early and late, was in marked antagonism in this respect to Greek mythology, the former being on the whole solemn and beautiful, the latter often singularly impure. In fact, both in the Phrygian and Hellenic popular imagination we detect an extraordinary vein of grossness, that seems to mark off these Aryan peoples sharply from the Mesopotamians, and equally, as far as we can see, from the other Semites.
Wemay profitably compare the Eastern and Western peoples according to their respective conceptions of the divine power. Looking carefully at the Babylonian hymns and liturgies, we cannot say that the idea of divine omnipotence was ever an assured dogma, vividly present to the mind and clearly expressed. Any particular hymn may so exalt the potency of the particular deity to whom it is addressed that, in the ecstasy of prayer and adoration, the worshipper may speak as if he believed him or her to be powerful over all things in heaven and earth. But this faith was temporary and illusive. The power of the deity in the popular creed, and indeed in the hieratic system, was bound up with his temple and altar. When Sanherib laid waste Babylon and the temples, the “gods must flee like birds up to heaven.” In the Babylonian epic the deities themselves are greatly alarmed by the flood. In one of the hymns of lamentation, Ishtar laments her own overthrow in her ruined city, where she “is as a helpless stranger in her streets.”173.1It is probable that the popular belief of Babylon agreed in this respect with that of all other nations of the same type of religion; for the popular religious mind is incapable of fullyrealising or logically applying the idea of divine omnipotence. But this at least is clear in the Babylonian system, that the higher divinities acting as a group are stronger than any other alien principle in the Universe, from the period when Marduk, or originally, perhaps Ninib, won his victory over Tiamit.174.1The evil power embodied in the demons remains indeed active and strong, and much of the divine agency is devoted to combating them. And the demons are impressive beings, impersonating often the immoral principle, but they do not assume the grandeur of an Ahriman, or rise to his position as compeers of the high god. Thus the Babylonian theology escapes the duality of the Zarathustrian; the god can always exorcise and overpower the demon if the demon-ridden man repents and returns to communion with his deity by penance and confession.
Furthermore, the ancient documents reveal the Babylonian deities as the arbiters of destiny. Marduk is named by King Neriglassar “the Leader of Destiny”;174.2and we have frequent allusions to the gods fixing the yearly fates at an annual meeting. Nebo the scribe is the writer and the keeper of the “Doomsbook” of Heaven, and this book is called “the tablets that cannot be altered, that determine the bounds (or cycle) of Heaven and Earth.”174.3Fate is neither personified nor magnified into a transcendent cosmic force overpowering and shaping the will of the gods.
How the other religions of polytheistic Asia Minor dealt with these matters is not revealed; and thecomparison here, as in many other points, must be immediate between Mesopotamia and Hellas. Much that has just been said of the former may be affirmed of the latter in this respect. In Homer the pre-eminence, even the omnipotence, of Zeus is occasionally expressed as a dogma, and we must believe that this deity had risen to this commanding position before the Homeric period, at least among the progressive tribes;175.1and throughout the systematised theology of Greece his sovereignty was maintained more consistently than, owing to the shifting of the powers of the cities, was that of Marduk or Bel or Enlil in the Sumerian-Babylonian system. Probably the high idea of divine omnipotence was as vaguely and feebly realised by the average primitive Hellene as we have reason to suspect that it was by the average Babylonian. Also, as Hellas was far less centralised than Babylonia, the efficacy of the local or village god or goddess or daimon might often transcend the influence of Zeus. But at least we have no Hellenic evidence of so narrow a theory, as that the deity’s power depended upon his temple or his image, or even upon his sacrifice.
It has often been popularly and lightly maintained that the Hellenic deities were subordinate to a power called Fate. This is a shallow misjudgment, based on a misinterpretation of a few phrases in Homer; we may be certain that the aboriginal Hellene was incapable of so gloomy an abstraction, which would sap the vitality of personal polytheism, and which only appears in strength in the latter periods of religious decay. Were it, indeed, a root-principle of Hellenic religion, it would strongly differentiate it from the Mesopotamian.
In thus comparing the two religions according to their respective conceptions of divine power, we note two striking phenomena in the Eastern world. The Mesopotamian gods are magicians, and part of their work is worked by magic. Marduk and Ea, the wise deity of Eridu, serve as exorcisers of demons in behalf of the other gods.176.1In a panegyric on the former, the strange phrase occurs, “the spittle of life is thine,”176.2which probably alludes to the well-known magical qualities of the saliva. Eridu, the home of Ea, was also the original home of Chaldean magic. When in the early cosmic struggle between the powers of light and darkness, Tiamat, the mother and queen of the latter, selects her champion Qingou as leader, she proclaims, “I have pronounced thy magic formula, in the assembly of the gods I have made thee great.”176.3In magic, great is the power of the spoken word, the λόγος; and the Word, of which the efficacious force arose in the domain of magic, has been exalted, as we are well aware, by higher religion to a great cosmic divine agency, sometimes personified. It was so exalted in early Babylonian religion. The deity acts and controls the order of the world by the divine Word. Many of the Sumerian hymns lay stress on its quasi-personal virtue or “mana”; and often on its terrible and destructive operation; and in one, as we have seen, the goddess Nana is identified with the Word of Enlil.176.4In a great hymn to Sin,176.5the might of his Word is glorified in verses that recall the Psalmist’s phrase: “The voice of the Lord is mightyin operation.” The Word of Bel-Marduk is said to be stronger than any exorciser or diviner, and is the theme of a special hymn.177.1It is described in another as “a net of majesty that encompasseth heaven and earth.” The Word of Marduk shakes the sea,177.2as the Hebrew poet declares that “the voice of the Lord shaketh the cedar-trees.” “The spirit of the Word is Enlil… the Word which stilleth the heavens above… a prophet it hath not, a magician it hath not,”177.3—that is, no prophet can fully interpret, no magician can control, the Word. A most potent word is the name of the divinity, and the partial apotheosis of the name itself is a strange religious phenomenon, which also originated in the domain of magic, and has played a momentous part in the Egyptian, Judaic, Christian, and other high religions.177.4It appears also in Mesopotamian religion. In a hymn to Enlil we find the phrase: “at thy name, which created the world, the heavens were hushed of themselves.”177.5In the Babylonian poem of creation the primal state of Chaos is thus described, “no god had yet been created, no name had yet been named, no destiny fixed.”177.6The gods name the fifty names of Ninib, and the name of fifty becomes sacred to him, so that even in the time of Gudea a temple was actually dedicated to Number Fifty.177.7
Now, in the respects just considered, the earliest aspect of Greek religion that is revealed to us presents a striking contrast. The relations between magic andreligion are markedly different.178.1Magic had doubtless the same hold on early Greece as it has on most societies at a certain stage of culture. We can conclude this from the glimpses of it revealed by Homer and some ancient myths, such as the story of Salmoneus, as well as by the evidence of its practice in later Greece, and as such phenomena are not of sudden growth we can safely believe that they were part of an ancient tradition always alive among the people. But while Babylonian magic proclaims itself loudly in the great religious literature and highest temple ritual, Greek magic is barely mentioned in the older literature of Greece, plays no part at all in the hymns, and can only with difficulty be discovered as latent in the higher ritual. Again, Babylonian magic is essentially demoniac; but we have no evidence suggesting that the pre-Homeric Greek was demon-ridden, or that demonology and exorcism were leading factors of his consciousness and practice: the earliest mythology does not suggest that he habitually imputed his physical or moral disorders to demons, nor does it convey any hint of the existence in the early society of that terrible functionary, the witch-finder, or of the institution of witch-trials.
Had Greek religion and mythology been deeply impregnated with Babylonian influences we should find it difficult to account for this momentous difference.
The same reflection is forced upon us when we observe that the Λόγος or Divine Word conceived as a cosmic power plays no part in the earliest Hellenic theology of which we have any cognisance (we are not here concerned with the later history of the concept): nor can we find in the earliest Greek period the name of God exalted into the position of a divine creative force;although, as I have shown elsewhere, the earliest Hellene, as the later, was fully sensitive to the magico-divine efficacy of names.179.1
We may also gather something for our present purpose from a comparison between the cosmogony or cosmic myths of East and West. Of these it is only the Babylonian and Hebraic that can claim a great antiquity of record. What is reported of Phoenician belief concerning these matters is of late authority, Eusebios quoting from Sanchuniathon or Philo Byblios, and this is too much permeated with later elements to be useful here. As regards the Hellenic theory of the origin of the world and of man, putting aside a few scattered hints in the Homeric poems, we have Hesiod for our first and insufficient witness. If we can detect Babylonian influence in the Hesiodic system, we must not hastily conclude that this was already rife in the second millennium: on the other hand, if Hesiod seems to have escaped it, it is far less likely that it was strong upon the proto-Hellenes.
For early Babylonian cosmogony our main evidence is the epic poem of creation, preserved on tablets found in the library of King Assurbanipal, which elucidates, and in the main corroborates, the fragments of the story given by Berosos in the third century B.C. Our earliest record, then, is actually of the seventh century, but Assyriologists have given reasons for the view that the epic copied for Assurbanipal descends from a period as early as B.C. 2000; for part of it accords with an old Babylonian hymn that has been discovered.179.2The document is therefore ancient enough for the purposes of our comparison. It is well known through variouspublications, and can be read conveniently in the detailed exposition of King in his handbook on Babylonian religion.180.1
When we consider carefully the more significant features in this cosmogony, we are struck with its almost total unlikeness to anything that we can discover or surmise in early Hellenic thought. It is true that the Babylonian theory starts with the dogma that the earliest cosmic fact was the element of water. Apsu and Tiâmat are the first powers in an unordered universe, and these seem to be the personal forms of the upper and lower waters, the fresh and the salt. We find the parallel thought in Homer, who speaks of Okeanos as “the source of all things,”180.2including even the gods. But the value of such a parallelism is of the slightest, for the vague theory of a watery origin of created things appears widely diffused in the myths of remote peoples, for instance, North-American Indians, Aztecs, the Vedic Aryans, and there is a glimmer of it in the old Norse.180.3No conclusion, then, can be drawn from so slight a coincidence. If we know anything of the cosmogony of the pre-Homeric society we know it from Hesiod, for Homer himself shows no interest and makes no revelation on the subject. With certain reservations and after careful criticism we may be able to regard some parts of the Hesiodic statement as reflecting the thought of an age anterior to Homer’s. Therefore it is of some present value to observe how little of characteristically Babylonian speculation appears in the Hesiodic Theogony orWorks and Days. Both systems agree with each other, and—it may be said—with all theogonies and religious cosmogonies, in regarding the primeval creative forces as personal powers who work either by the method of sexual generation or through mechanical processes of creation: the first of these methods, which though mythical in form has more affinity with organic science, is predominant over the other in the Hesiodic narrative. But the personal powers are different in the two systems. In the Babylonian the greatest of the primeval dynasts is Tiâmat, the sea, the mother of the gods and also of all monsters: in the Hesiodic it is Gaia, the Earth-mother, who does not appear at all in the Eastern cosmogony, but who claimed this position in the Hellenic through her deep-seated influence in the ancient religion. We note also that the Babylonian Sea is decidedly evil, the aboriginal foe of the gods of light, a conception alien to ordinary Hellenic thought. Again, the Babylonian creation of an ordered cosmos is a result of the great struggle between Marduk and Tiâmat, the power of light and the sovereign of chaos: it is preceded by hate and terror. In the Hellenic account the generation of the heavens, the mountains, the sea, and the early dynasty of Titan-powers is peaceful and is stimulated by the power of love, Eros, who has his obvious double in the Kāma or principle of desire in a cosmogonic hymn of the Rig-Veda, but is not mentioned by the Babylonian poet. (Nor does it concern us for the moment that this Eros is in respect of mere literary tradition post-Homeric: we may surmise at least that he was a pre-Homeric power in Boeotia.) Again, when we come to the theomachy in Hesiod, as an event it has no cosmogonic value at all: it has the air merely of a dynastic struggle between elder and younger divinities,and the myth may really have arisen in part from the religious history of a shifting of cults corresponding to a shifting of population: nor are the Titans more representative of evil or of a lower order of things than the Olympian deities; and cosmic creation, so far as Hesiod treats of it at all, seems over before the struggle begins. On the other hand, after Marduk has destroyed Tiâmat he constructs his cosmos out of her limbs, and then proceeds to assign their various stations to the great gods, his compeers. Thus the struggle of the god with the principle of disorder has a cosmic significance which is not expressed in the Titanomachy. The curious conception also that the universe was compacted out of the dismembered limbs of a divine personage, which reminds us of the Vedic story of the giant Purusa182.1and of the Norse legend of Ymir, is not clearly discoverable in Hellenic mythology: for the Hesiodic myth of the forms and growths that spring from the blood of the mutilated Ouranos is no real parallel. And there is another trait in the Babylonian theory of a world-conflict that distinguishes it from the Hellenic myths of a Titanomachy or Gigantomachy; it was sometimes regarded not as a single event, finished with once for all, but as a struggle liable to be repeated at certain periods.182.2On the other hand, Hesiod’s narrative of the oppression of Gaia’s children by Ouranos and the outrage inflicted on him by Kronos has its parallels in Maori and savage legend,182.3but none in Mesopotamian, so far as our knowledge goes at present.
A different Babylonian mythological text from the library of Assurbanipal speaks of another battle wagedby Marduk against Labbu, a male monster imagined mainly as a huge snake; and Marduk is described as descending to the conflict in clouds and lightning:183.1the legend has no obvious significance for cosmogony, for it places the event after the creation of the world and of men and cities. But it has this interest for us, that it may be the prototype for the legend of Zeus’ struggle with Typhoeus, which is known to Homer, and which he places in the country of the Arimoi, regarded by many of the ancient interpreters, including Pindar, as Cilicia.183.2Now, the story of this conflict in Hesiod’s theogony has no connections with the Titanomachy or the Gigantomachy, nor is it there linked by any device to any known Hellenic myth; nor is it derived, like the legend of Apollo and Python, from genuine Hellenic cult-history. It has an alien air and character. Typhoeus is on the whole regarded as a monstrous dragon, but one of his voices is that of a lion, another that of a bull. The resemblance of this narrative to the Babylonian one just mentioned is striking, and becomes all the more salient when we compare certain Babylonian cylinders which picture Marduk in combat with a monster, sometimes of serpent form, sometimes with the body of a lion or a bull.183.3The Typhoeus-legend belongs also essentially to the Asia-Minor shores, and if Cilicia was really the country whence it came to the knowledge of the Homeric Greeks, it is a significant fact that it was just this corner of the Asia-Minor coast that felt the arms of the earliest Assyrian conquerors in the fourteenth century B.C.; and it is just such myths that travel fast and far.
If the hypothesis of Assyrian origin is reasonable here, many will regard it as still more reasonable in regard to the Deukalion flood-story. Certain details in it remind us, no doubt, of the Babylonian flood-myth; and as this latter was far diffused through Asia Minor, it was quite easy for it to wander across the Aegean and touch Hellas. But if it did, we have no indication that it reached the Hellenes in the early period with which we are here concerned, as Hesiod is our earliest authority for it.
The last theme of high interest in the cosmogonic theory of ancient Babylonia is the creation of man. According to Berosos, this momentous act was attributed to Bel, who, after the victory over Chaos, commanded one of the gods to cut off his head and to make men and animals out of earth mixed with his own blood, and this story is partly corroborated by an old cuneiform text that is derived from the beginning of the second millennium.184.1This interesting theory was not universally accepted, for another and independent text ascribes the creation of man to Marduk and a goddess called Aruru, simply as a mechanical act of power.184.2The idea implicit in the former account, of the blood-relationship of man to god, is of the greater potentiality for religious metaphysic, and a similar notion is found, developed into a high spiritual doctrine, in the later Orphic Zagreus-mystery. But there is no trace of it in genuine Hellenic thought or literature. We have no provedly early Greek version of the origin of man: only, in theWorks and Days, we are told that the Immortals or Zeus made the men of the five ages, the third generation, out of ash-trees: it may be that the story of Prometheusforming them out of clay was known to Hesiod, as Lactantius Placidus attests;185.1in any case we may judge it to be of great antiquity on account of its wide vogue in the later period, and its occurrence in other primitive folklore. But nothing like it has as yet been found in the ἱερὸς λόγος of Mesopotamia.
Generally we may say that the Hesiodic cosmogony bears no significant resemblance to the Babylonian, and this negative fact makes against the theory of Mesopotamian influence upon pre-Homeric Hellas.
As a divine cosmogony implies some organic theory of the Universe, so the polytheisms that attempted such speculations would be confronted also with the problem of finding some principle of order by which they might regulate the relations of the various divinities, one to the other. We find such attempts in Mesopotamian religion. Certain deities are affiliated to others, Marduk to Ea, Nebo to Marduk, though such divine relationships are less clear and less insisted on than in Hellenic theology; and the grouping of divinities shifts according to the political vicissitudes of the peoples and cities. We may discern a tendency at times to use the triad as a unifying principle, giving us such trinities as Anu, Bel, Ea, or Sin, Shamash, Adad;185.2we have glimpses of a trinitarian cult in early Carthage,185.3and slight indications of it in the Minoan-Mycenaean pillar-ritual.185.4But I cannot find anything to suggest that among the cultured or uncultured Semites it was ever in the ancient period a powerful and constructive idea, ableto beget a living dogma that might capture the popular mind and spread and germinate in adjacent lands.186.1We have perhaps as much right to regard the number seven as a grouping principle of Babylonian polytheism, in the later period at least, when we find a group of seven high deities corresponding to the seven planets.186.2We might discover a Hittite trinity of Father, Mother, and Son if we concentrated our attention on the Boghaz-Keui reliefs; but the other Hittite evidence, both literary and monumental, gives no hint of this as a working idea in the religion. In fact, in most polytheisms of the Mediterranean type it is easy to discover trinities and easy to deceive oneself about them.
The human family reflected into the heavens naturally suggests the divine trio of Father, Mother, Child. And this may be found on the Asia-Minor shore and in Hellas. It would be more important if we could discover the worship of this triad in an indissoluble union from which the mystic idea of a triune godhead might arise. This is not discernible clearly in the older period on either side of the Aegean. The cult-complex of Zeus, Semele, and Dionysos does not belong to ancient Hellas and is rare at any period; that of Hades Demeter Kore is occasionally found in cults of doubtful antiquity, but usually the mother and daughter were worshipped without the male deity. The Homeric triad so often invoked in adjurations of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo, which misled Mr. Gladstone, is due probably to the exigencies of hexameter verse, and is not guaranteed by genuine cult. No divine triad in Hellas can be proved to have descended from the earliest period ofGreek religion, except probably that of the Charites at Orchomenos.187.1We have later evidence of a trinity of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, expressing the triad that Nature presents to us of sky, sea, and earth. But probably one of these figures is an emanation of Zeus himself; the sky-god having become “chthonian” in a very early period.187.2We cannot say, then, that the earliest period of Hellenic religion shows a trinitarian tendency; and if it were so, we could not impute it to early Mesopotamian influence, for the idea of a trinity does not appear in the Eastern religion with such force and strength as to be likely to travel far.
As for the artificial group of the twelve Olympians, we should certainly have been tempted to connect this with Babylonian lore, the number twelve being of importance in astronomical numeration; only that the divine group of twelve does not happen to occur in Babylonian religious records at all. Nor does the complex cult of the Δώδεκα θεοί appear to belong to the earliest period of Greek religion.187.3And so far I have been able to discern nothing that justifies the suggestion187.4that the principle of unification or divine grouping in early Mediterranean polytheism came from Babylon.
A severely organised polytheism with one chief divinity, to whom all the others were in definite degrees subordinated, might evolve a monotheism. And in Babylonian literature we can mark certain tendencies making in this direction. One tablet contains an inscription proclaiming all the high gods to be forms of Marduk, Nergal the Marduk of war, Nebo the Mardukof land.188.1That all the deities were mere forms or emanations of the Eternal might have been an esoteric doctrine of certain gifted minds, though it was difficult thus to explain away and to de-individualise the powerful self-asserting personality of Ishtar, for an attractive goddess-cult is always a strong obstacle to pure monotheism. A particular king might wish at times to exalt the cult of a particular god into a monotheistic ideal; the attempt was seriously made in Egypt and failed. It may have been seriously intended by King Rammannirari III. (B.C. 811-782), who introduced the cult of Nebo, always one of the most spiritual figures of the Pantheon, into Kelach; hence comes a long inscription on two statues now in the British Museum, set up by a governor in honour of the king, which is valuable for its ethical import, and still more interesting for its monotheistic exhortation at the close:188.2“Oh man, yet to be born, believe in Nebo, and trust in no other gods but him.” Here is the seed that might have been developed by a powerful prophet into pure monotheism. But the ecstatic Babylonian votary is always falling into contradiction, for in the earlier part of this hymn he has called Nebo, “The beloved of Bel, the Lord of Lords.” What, then, must the congregation think of Bel?
In Greek religion the germs of monotheistic thought were still weaker and still less likely to fructify. The earliest Hellenic tribes had already certain deities in common, and the leading stocks at least must have regarded Zeus as the supreme god. They must have also adopted many indigenous deities that they found powerful in their new homes, whose cult could not beuprooted even if they wished to do so. We must therefore imagine the pre-Homeric societies as maintaining a complex polytheism, with some principle of divine hierarchy struggling to assert itself. Homer, if it is ever true to speak of him as preaching, seems certainly the preacher of the supremacy of Zeus. How far this idea was accepted in the various localities of cult we have not sufficient material for deciding: much would depend on the degree to which the individuals were penetrated by the higher literature, which from Homer onwards proclaimed the same religious tenet.189.1We can at the same time be sure that in many localities the countryfolk would be more under the spell of some ancient deity of the place than of the sky-father of the Aryan Hellenes. And though his cult was high placed by the progressive races, and his personality powerfully pervading in the realm of nature and human society, so that the higher thinkers entered on a track of speculation that leads to monotheism, the masses did not and could not follow them, having, in fact, the contrary bias. The popular polytheism showed itself most tenacious of divine personalities; and owing partly to the sacred power of divine names, the various titles of a single divinity tend occasionally to engender distinct divine entities. I have also already indicated that art contributed to the same effect through multiplying idols. So far, then, from displaying monotheistic potentialities, Greek polytheism, from the pre-Homeric period we may suspect, and certainly after the Homeric age, tended to become more polytheistic.
A moreinteresting and fruitful ground of comparison is that which looks at the inward sentiment or psychic emotion of the different religions, at the personal emotional relation of the individual towards the godhead. As I observed before, a clear judgment on this question is only possible when the religious memorials of a people are numerous, varied, and personal, so that some of them at least may be regarded as the expression of the individual spirit. Even if the priest or the ritual dictates the expression, the pious and frequent votary may come to feel genuinely what is dictated to him. Hence we can gather direct testimony concerning the ancient Babylonian as we can of the ancient Hebrew religious temper and emotion; for though most of the Mesopotamian documents are concerned with the royal ceremonial, which does not usually reveal genuine personal feeling, yet in this case the royal inscriptions, whether religious narrative or liturgies or prayers, are unusually convincing as revelations of self. And besides these, we have many private hymns of penance and formulae of exorcism.
On the other hand, the ancient Western world and even historic Greece is singularly barren of this kind of religious testimony. We know much about theState religion, but we have very few ritual formulae or public or private prayers. Our evidence is mainly the religious utterances of the higher poetry and literature and a few lyric hymns composed not for the solitary worshipper, but for common and tribal ritual-service. But we have also the mythology and the art and the general manifestations of the Hellenic spirit in other directions that enable us to conclude something concerning the religious psychology of the average man in the historic periods, and if we find this markedly different from that of the oriental, we shall find it hard to believe that the Babylonian spirit could have worked with any strong influence on the proto-Hellene.
A sympathetic study of the Babylonian-Assyrian documents impresses us with certain salient traits of the Mesopotamian religious spirit, some of which are common to other members of the great Semitic race. In a certain sense the Babylonian might be described as “ein Gott-betrunkener Mensch”: as one possessed with the deepest consciousness of the ineffable greatness of God, of his own utter dependence, and at the same time of the close personal association between himself and the divinity. The ecstatic adoration we have marked in the liturgies is the result of a purely mental contemplation, will-power, and conviction, not of mystic initiation—for Babylonia had no mysteries—nor of orgiastic rites that could afford a physico-psychic stimulus. The individual seems to have regarded himself at times as the son, more often as the bond-slave, of his own tutelary divinity, who is angry when he sins and becomes favourable and a mediator in his behalf with other gods when he repents. In private letters of the time of Hammurabi we find the greeting, “May thy protecting god keep thy head well.” Acommon formula occurs in the incantations: “I, whose god is so-and-so, whose goddess is so-and-so.”192.1In the penance-liturgy the priest speaks thus of the suppliant sinner, “Thy slave who bears the weight of thy wrath is covered with dust,… commend him to the god who created him.”192.2With this we may compare certain phrases in a well-known penitential psalm, “Oh mighty Lady of the world, Queen of mankind.… His god and goddess in sorrow with him, cry out unto thee.… As a dove that moans I abound in sighings.”192.3Abject remorse, tears and sighing, casting-down of the countenance, are part of the ritual that turns away the anger of the deity: hence fear of God and humility are recognised religious virtues. Merodach-Baladin of Babylon, in Sargon’s inscription, is described as a fool “who did not fear the name of the Lord of Lords,”192.4and the idea is shaped in a general ethical maxim in another inscription, “He who does not fear his god is cut down like a reed.”192.5“I love the fear of God,” says Nebukadnezar in the record of his life.192.6
Such emotion and mental attitude is consonant with the Hebraic and with much of the modern religious temper; but entirely out of harmony with all that we know of the Hellenic. The religious habit of the Hellene strikes us by comparison as sober, well-tempered, often genial, never ecstatically abject, but even—we may say—self-respecting. Tears for sin, lamentationsand sighs, the countenance bowed to the ground, the body cleaving to the pavement, these are not part of his ritual; the wrath of God was felt as a communal more often than as an individual misfortune, and in any case was averted, not by emotional outpourings of the individual heart, but by ritual acts, solemn choruses, soothing sacrifice and songs, or by special piacular lustrations that wiped off the taint of sin. Tears are never mentioned,193.1except indirectly in the fictitious lamentations for some buried hero, annually and ceremoniously lamented, such as Achilles. Nor can we find in earlier Hellenic ethic the clear recognition of fear and humility among the religious virtues,193.2while both are paraded in the inscriptions of the later Babylonian kings, even in those that reveal a monstrous excess of pride.193.3The Hellenic god might punish the haughty and high-minded, he did not love the grovelling, but rather the man of moderate life, tone, and act. Such is God for the civic religion of the free man; while the Babylonian liturgy reflects the despotic society. The Hellene, for instance, does not try to win for himself the favour of the divinity by calling himself his slave. And the common phrase found on the Greek Christian tombs, ὁ δοῦλος τοῦ Θεοῦ, has passed into Christianity from Semitic sources.193.4This single fact illustrates, perhaps better than any other,the different temper of the old Oriental and old European religions; and there is a curious example of it in the bilingual Graeco-Phoenician inscription found in Malta,194.1commemorating a dedication to Melkarth or to Herakles Ἀρχηγέτης: the Phoenicians recommend themselves to the god as “thy slaves,” the Greeks use neither this nor any other title of subservient flattery. In this connection it is well to note the significance of marking the body of the worshipper by branding, cutting, or tattooing with some sign that consecrated him as slave or familiar follower to the divinity. The practice, which may have been of great antiquity, though the evidence is not earlier than the sixth century B.C., was in vogue in Syria, Phrygia, and in early Israel, and was adopted by some Christian enthusiasts, but no proof of it has yet been adduced from Mesopotamia. It was essentially un-Hellenic, but was apparently followed by some of the Dionysiac thiasoi as a Thracian tradition.194.2
In fact, it is only in the latest periods that we find in Hellas an individual personal religion approaching the Babylonian in intensity. The older cult was communal and tribal rather than personal; even the household gods, such as Zeus Κτήσιος and Ἑρκεῖος, the gods of the closet and storehouse, the hearth-goddess, were shared by the householder in common with the nearest circle of kindred. These cults were partly utilitarian, and the moral emotion that they quickened was the emotion of kinship: they do not appear to have inspired a high personal and emotional faith and trust. Nor usually had the average Hellene of theearlier period the conception of a personal tutelary divinity who brought him to life, and watched over his course, preserving, rebuking, and interceding for him. The Babylonian fancy of the great king sitting in infancy on the lap of the goddess and drinking milk from her breasts would not commend itself to the religious sense in Greece.
In Mesopotamia and in the other Semitic communities the fashion of naming a child after the high god or goddess was very common—commoner I am inclined to think than in Hellas, though in the latter country such names as Demetrios, Apollodoros, Zenon, Diogenes, point to the same religious impulse; but they appear to have arisen only in the later period. The Hellenic language did not admit, and Hellenic thought would not have approved of, those mystic divine names, which express as in a sacred text some quality or action of the divinity, such as we find in the Bible (“the Lord will provide”), and in pre-Islamitic inscriptions of Arabia, Ili-kariba, “My God hath blessed”; Ili-azza, “My God is mighty”; Ili-padaja, “My God hath redeemed.”195.1Such names served as spells for the protection of the child, and are speaking illustrations of the close personal dependence of the individual upon the god.