Greek Religion

GREEK RELIGION. The religion of the Greeks, now no longer absurdly abused nor foolishly idealized can, in the light of modern scholarship, be seen for what it really was. It comprises elements—savage, barbarous, and civilized, although the first two have been somewhat exaggerated. It developed without any authoritative sacred writing, such as the Bible, or the Koran, or any inflexible and unquestionable tradition to hamper or guide it. It was, according to circumstances, now more backward, now more progressive; yet always retaining certain characteristics which we may describe as normal, namely, a belief in a number, not very large, of gods, generally human in form and largely human in mind (anthropomorphic polytheism), and, for the most part (see, however, MYSTERY) an absence of other-worldliness. Its history extends over some 2,000 years, beginning about the middle of the second millennium B.C.

When the Hellenes entered Greece, probably from the north but perhaps also from Asia Minor (see GREECE : History), they appear to have been advanced and progressive barbarians, rapidly de veloping a civilization of their own, and ready to adopt and modify what they found good in other civilizations. They spoke a common tongue, the language we know as classical Greek, probably already divided into more or less well-defined dialects. They were of the stock variously known as Aryan, Indo-Germanic, Indo-European or Wiro, if indeed this was racially one stock and not a complex. Like some other Wiros at least (notably the Hindus and Italians), they had the cult of a sky-god, the "Bright One" or "Bright Father," in their language Zeus, or Zeus Pater. They had also, or soon acquired, certain other deities, notably Apollo, Poseidon, Demeter, perhaps Ares, Hermes and others. These they may have occasionally conceived of as bestial in shape, but probably for the most part as anthropomorphic.

They found a population already mixed. In Greece there had long dwelt a people, or group of peoples, whom we know as Hel ladic. In Crete, and perhaps on the mainland also, was the advan ced civilization which we call Minoan. Either this was largely adcpted by the Helladic peoples, or the invaders adopted it and imposed it on their new subjects, or both occurred ; at any rate, it reached Greece and formed the Mycenaean (sometimes called the late Helladic) culture., These peoples also had a religion, in which we cannot at present distinguish Cretan from Helladic elements, and therefore are obliged to treat it as a whole. We can say that it included the worship of a great goddess', or of several great goddesses, whom we almost certainly may trace in Hera and Arte mis, probably in Athena, and perhaps in Aphrodite also ; certainly in many minor figures, such as Ariadne and Britomartis. Of gods, other than a child-god, we hear little ; but the figure of Hyacinthus alone (q.v.) would be enough to prove that male figures were not wholly wanting. It is, however, a great mistake to suppose that all goddesses are pre-Greek; Demeter reveals herself as genuine Greek by her name, though no doubt she assimilated pre-Hellenic ele ments; Hestia (q.v.) is the Holy Hearth, a figure well known and widespread among Wiros. We must examine each figure, god or goddess, separately, using all the evidence philology, archaeology, and comparative religion can give us, to determine its origin. Fi nally we must reckon with the possibility that the other great na tions which fringed the Mediterranean—Hittite, Semitic and Egyptian peoples—left their impress on early Greek religion, for, although former scholars may have made rash use of this hypothe sis, the influence, at least, of Egypt on Crete is past all doubt'.

If we try to classify and analyse the facts, we shall at once be struck with the contrast between such civilized cults as those of Zeus, Athena, Apollo, high personal divinities to whom the attri butes of a progressive morality could be attached, and practices that long survived in backward communities, such as the Arcadian worship of the thunder and the winds, the cult of Zeus KEpavvos "the thunder" at Mantineia and Zeus Kairsrc'oTas in Laconia, who is none other than the mysterious meteoric stone that falls from heaven. These are examples of a religious view in which certain natural phenomena or objects are regarded as mysteriously divine or sacred in their own right and a personal divinity has not yet emerged or been separated from them. Hestia is a similar figure. Fetishism.—Akin to animism is fetishism, a term which prop erly denotes the worshipful or superstitious use of objects made by art and invested with mysterious power, so as to be used like amulets for the purposes of protective magic or for higher 'This does not mean that the Cretans were matrilineal, a theory for which there is no real evidence. See L. R. Farnell, in Archiv fiir Religionswissenschaft (1904) ; H. J. Rose, in Folk-Lore, vol. xxii. and xxxvii.

Berard has recently revived the discredited theory of a prevalent Phoenician influence in his ingenious but uncritical work, L'Origine des cultes arcadiens. M. P. Foucart believes in very early borrowing from Egypt, as explaining much in the religion of Demeter and Dionysus; see Les Grands Mysteres d'Eleusis and Le Culte de Dionysus en Attique.

purposes of communion with the divinity. From the earliest dis coverable period down to the present day fetishism has been a powerful factor in the religion of the Graeco-Roman world. The importance of the sacred stone and pillar in the "Mycenaean" or "Minoan" period which preceded Homer has been impressively shown by Sir Arthur Evans, and the same fetishistic worship con tinued throughout the historic ages of classic paganism. It is a reasonable conjecture that the earliest anthropomorphic images of divinities, which were beginning to make their appearance by the time of Homer, were themselves evolved by slow transformation from the upright sacred column. And the altar itself may have arisen as another form of this; the simple heap of stones, such as those erected to Hermes by the wayside and called `EpµaioL X64oc, may have served both as a place of worship and as an agalma that could attract and absorb a divine potency into itself. Hence the fetishistic power of the altar was fully recognized in Greek ritual, and hence also in the cult of Apollo Agyieus the god and the altar are called by the same name.

It has been supposed that the ancestors of the historic Greeks, before they were habituated to conceive of their divinities as in human form, worshipped divine beasts. But we must not suppose it to be a general law of religious evolution that "theriomorphism" must always precede anthropomorphism and that the latter tran scends and obliterates the former. The two systems can exist side by side, and savages of low religious development can conceive of their deities as assuming at one time human, at another bestial, shape. Now the developed Greek religion was devotedly anthro pomorphic, and herein lay its strength and its weakness; neverthe less, the advanced Hellene could imagine his Dionysus entering temporarily into the body of the sacrificial bull or goat, and the men of Phigaleia in Arcadia were attached to their horse-headed Demeter, and the primitive Laconians possibly to a ram-headed Apollo. Theriolatry in itself, i.e., the worship of certain animals or species of animals as of divine power in their own right, apart from any association with higher divinities, can scarcely be traced among the Greek communities at any period. The wolf might at one time have been regarded as the incarnation of Apollo, the wolf god, and here and there we find faint traces of a wolf-sacrifice and of offerings laid out for wolves. But the occasional propitiation of wild beasts may fall short of actual worship. The Athenian who slew a wolf might give it a sumptuous funeral, probably to avoid a blood-feud with the wolf's relatives, yet the P:thenian State offered rewards for a wolf's head. Nor did any Greek individual or State worship flies as a class, although a small oblation might be thrown to the flies before the great sacrifice to Apollo on the Leucadian rock, to please them and to persuade them not to worry the worshippers at the great solemnity, where the reek of roast flesh would be likely to attract them.

Theriolatry is not totemism (q.v.), and the attempt to find the latter institution in Greece is .now generally recognized as mis taken'. The totemism of savages does not appear to affect Greek religion in any such way as to suggest a natural explanation for any of the peculiar phenomena of early Hellenic polytheism. Here and there we have traces of a snake-tribe in Greece, the 'O4) in Aetolia, the 'O4)co7EVEis in Cyprus and Parium, but we are not told that these worshipped the snake, though the latter clan were on terms of intimacy with it. Where the snake was actually wor shipped in Hellenic cult—the cases are few and doubtful—it may have been regarded as the incarnation of the ancestor or as the avatar of the under-world divinity.

Human Sacrifice.

As to human sacrifice, which is not strictly a savage custom, while encouraged at one time by the Delphic oracle, it was becoming rare and repellent to the conscience by the 6th century B.C. ; but it was not wholly extinct in the Greek world even by the time of Porphyry.

We can now observe the higher aspects of the advanced poly theism. And at the outset we must distinguish between mythology and religion strictly understood, between the stories about the divinities and the private or public religious service. It is true that the former often arise from the latter, as in the case of Dionysus (q.v.). Yet Greek mythology as a whole was irresponsible, with 'See H. J. Rose, Primitive Culture in Greece (1925), P. 47 ff.

out reserve, and unchecked by dogma or sacerdotal prohibition ; and frequently it sank below the level of the current religion, which was almost free from the impurities which shock the modern reader of Hellenic myths. Nor again did anyone feel himself called upon to believe any particular myth; in fact, faith, understood as the will to believe certain dogmatic statements about the nature and action of divinity, is a concept which was neither named nor recognized in Hellenic ethics or religious doctrine ; only, if a man proclaimed his disbelief in the existence of the gods and refused to join in the ritual of the community, he would become "suspect," and might at times be persecuted by his fellows. Greek religion was not so much an affair of doctrine as of ritual, and the most illuminative sources of our knowledge of it are the ritual-inscrip tions and other State documents, the private dedications, the mon uments of religious art and certain passages in the literature, phi lology and archaeology being equally necessary to the equipment of the student.

Homer and Post-Homeric Period.

We are tempted to turn to Homer as the earliest authority. But Homer's audience was a relatively enlightened nobility, in no way primitive. He shows us a pantheon already to some extent systematized, a certain hier archy and family of divinities in which the supremacy of Zeus is established as incontestable. And the characteristically Greek anthropomorphic impulse is already at its height in the Homeric poems. The deities are already clear-cut, individual personalities of distinct ethos, plastically shaped figures such as the later sculp ture and painting could work upon, not vaguely conceived nurnina like the forms of the old Roman religion, nor "personifications" of natural phenomena. Athena and Apollo are simply Athena and Apollo, divine personages with certain powers and character, as real for their people as Christ and the Virgin for Christendom. By the side of these, though generally in a subordinate position, we find that Homer recognized certain divinities that we may properly call nature-powers, such as Helios, Gaia, and the river deities, forms descending probably from a remote animistic period, but maintaining themselves within the popular religion till the end of paganism. Again, though Homer may talk and think at times with levity and banalite about his deities, his deeper utterances impute an advanced morality to the supreme God. His Zeus is on the whole a power of righteousness, never being himself the author of evil—an idea revealed in the opening passage of the Odyssey—but protecting the good and punishing the wicked. Vengeance, indeed, was one of the attributes of divinity both for Homer and the aver age Greek of the later period, as it is in Judaic and Christian the ology, though Plato and Euripides protested strongly against such a view. But the Homeric Zeus is equally a god of pity and mercy, and the man who neglects the prayers of the sorrowful and afflict ed, who violates the sanctity of the suppliant and guest, or op presses the poor or the wanderer, may look for divine punishment. Though not regarded as the physical author of the universe or the Creator, he is, in a moral sense, the father of gods and men. And though the sense of sin and the need of piacular sacrifice are ex pressed in the Homeric poems, the relations between gods and men that they reveal are on the whole genial and social; the deity sits unseen at the good man's festal sacrifice, and there is a simple apprehension of the idea of divine communion. There is also in deed a glimmering of the dark background of the nether world, and the chthonian powers that might send up the Erinys to fulfil the curse of the wronged. Yet on the whole the religious atmos phere is generally cheerful and bright ; freer than that of the later ages from the taint of magic and superstition ; nor is Homer troubled much about the life after death ; he scarcely recognizes the cult of the dead (see HERO) and is not oppressed by fear of the ghost-world.

This Homeric or "Olympian" system retains a certain life almost to the end of paganism, and it is a serious mistake to suppose that it had lost its hold upon the people of the 5th and 4th century B.C. We find it, indeed, enriched in the post-Homeric period with new figures of prestige and power; Dionysus, of whom Homer had only faintly heard, becomes a high god with a worship full of promise for the future. Demeter and Kore, whom Homer knew well enough, but could not use for his epic purposes, attract the ardent affections and hopes of the people ; and Asclepios, whom the old poet did not recognize as a god, wins a conspicuous place in the later shrines. The deities remain anthropomorphic, and appear as clearly defined individuals. Zeus is still supreme; the other gods are clear-cut personalities, but in function rather less clear, for a popular god tended to take on new departments and a once rustic deity to go to town with his people. The moral ideas that we find in the Homeric religion are amply attested by cult records of the later period, which are nearly always euphemistic, the doubtful title of Demeter Erinys being possibly an exception. The impor tant cults of Zeus Hikesios and Prostropaios, the suppliant's pro tecting deity, embody the ideas of pity and mercy that mark ad vanced religion ; and many momentous steps in the development of morality and law were either suggested or assisted by the State religion. For example, the sanctity of the oath, the main source of the secular virtue of truthfulness, was originally a religious sanc tion, and though the Greek may have been prone to perjury, yet the Hellenic, like the Hebraic religious ethics, regarded it as a heinous sin. The sanctity of family duties, the sacredness of the life of the kinsman, were ideas fostered by early Hellenic religion before they generated principles of secular ethics. In the post Homeric period, .the development of the doctrine of purity, which was associated with the Apolline religion, combining with a grow ing dread of the ghost-world, stimulated and influenced in many important ways the evolution of the Greek law concerning homi cide'. And the beginnings of international law and morality were rooted in religious sanctions and taboo. In fact, Greek state-life was indebted in manifold ways to Greek religion, and the study of the Greek oracles alone would supply sufficient testimony of this. In many cases the very origin of the State was religious, the ear liest polis sometimes having arisen under the shadow of the temple.

Yet as Greek religion was always in the service of the State, and the priest a State official, society was the reverse of theocratic. Secular advance, moral progress, and the march of science could never long be thwarted by religious tradition ; on the contrary, speculative thought and artistic creation were considered as attri butes of divinity. We may say that the religion of Hellas pene trated the whole life of the people, but rather as a servant than as a master.

Distinct and apart from these public worships and those of the clan and family were the mystic cults of Eleusis, Andania and Samothrace, and the private services of the mystic brotherhoods. (See MYSTERY.) Here we find a strong salvationist tendency, the promise of salvation relying on mystic communion with the deity. Also a new and vital principle is at work; Orphism is the only force in Greek religion of a clear missionary and universalist tendency'.

The later history of Greek paganism is mainly concerned with its gradual penetration by oriental ideas and worships, the result being Norcpaoia or syncretism, mysticism and a tendency towards monotheism. In its turn the resulting Hellenistic religion influ enced the doctrine, organization, and terminology of Christianity: to what extent is one of the most interesting problems of compara tive religion, for the study of which a minute knowledge of the ritual and the mystic cults of Hellas is one of the essential condi tions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Preller,

Griechische Mythologie (4th ed. by C.Bibliography.-Preller, Griechische Mythologie (4th ed. by C.

Robert, 1887) is antiquated in regard to theory, but still of some value for collection of materials. Recent literature, besides that quoted in the text: (a) General treatises: L. R. Farnell's Cults of the Greek States 0896-1908) ; O. Gruppe, "Griechische Mythologie and Re ligionsgeschichte," in Iwan von Muller's Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, v. 2. 2 (1902- o6) ; Miss Jane Harrison's Pro legomena to the Study of Greek Religion (ed. 1908) ; L. R. Farnell's Greek Hero-Cults and Ideas of Immortality (1921). (b) Special works or dissertations: Immerwahr, Kulte and Mythen Arkadiens (1891) ; Wide, Lakonische Kulte articles in Roscher's Ausf iihrliches Lexikon der griechischen and romischen Mythologie, and Pauly-Wissowa, Encyklopddie (1894) ; de Visser, Die nicht menschengestaltigen Glitter der Griechen (1903) . (c) Greek ritual and festivals: A. Mommsen, Feste der Stadt Athen (18q8) ; P. Stengel, "Die griechischen Sacralaltertiimer" (1898) ; W. H. D. Rouse, Greek Votive Offerings (1902) ; S. Eitrem, Opferritus and V oropf er (1915) ; M. P. Nilson, The Minoan-Mycaenaean Religion (1927). (d) Greek re ligious thought and speculation: L. Campbell's Religion in Greek Literature (18q8) ; Ducharme, La Critique des traditions religieuses chez les Grecs des origines au temps de Plutarque (1904) . See also articles on individual deities, and cf. ROMAN RELIGION ; MYSTERY ; MITHRAS. (L. R. F.; H. J. R.)