Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 17

* _Postea_, "Zeus".

It is G.o.d that takes from man half his virtue on the day of slavery; it is G.o.d that gives to each his lot in life, and ensures that as his day is so shall his strength be. This spiritual conception of deity, undifferentiated by shape or attributes, or even by name, declares itself in the Homeric terms (------------) and in the (------) of Herodotus. These are spiritual forces or tendencies ruling the world, and these conceptions are present to the mind, even of Homer, whose pictures of the G.o.ds are so essentially anthropomorphic; even of Herodotus, in all things so cautiously reverent in his acceptation of the popular creeds and rituals. When Socrates, therefore, was doomed to death for his theories of religion, he was not condemned so much for holding a pure belief in a spiritual divinity, as for bringing that opinion (itself no new thing) into the marketplace, and thereby shocking the popular religion, on which depended the rites that were believed to preserve the fortune of the state.

It is difficult or impossible quite to unravel the tangled threads of mythical legend, of sacerdotal ritual, of local religion, and of refined religious sentiment in Greece. Even in the earliest doc.u.ments, the Homeric poems, religious sentiment deserts, in moments of deep and serious thought, the brilliant a.s.sembly of the Olympians, and takes refuge in that fatherhood of the divine "after which all men yearn".*

* _Odyssey_, iii. 48.

Yet, even in Pausanias, in the second century of the Christian era, and still more in Plutarch and Porphyry, there remains an awful acquiescence in such wild dogmas and sacred traditions as antiquity handed down. We can hardly determine whether even Homer actually believed in his own turbulent cowardly Ares, in his own amorous and capricious Zeus. Did Homer, did any educated Greek, turn in his thoughts, when pain, or sorrow, or fear fell on him, to a hope in the help of Hermes or Athene?

He was ready to perform all their rites and offer all the sacrifices due, but it may be questioned whether, even in such a G.o.d-fearing man as Nicias, this ritualism meant more than a desire to "fulfil all righteousness," and to gratify a religious sentiment in the old traditional forms.

In examining Greek myths, then, it must be remembered that, like all myths, they have far less concern with religion in its true guise--with the yearning after the divine which "is not far from any one of us,"

after the G.o.d "in whom we live, and move, and have our being"--than with the _religio_, which is a tissue of old barbarous fears, misgivings, misapprehensions. The religion which retained most of the myths was that ancient superst.i.tion which is afraid of "changing the luck," and which, therefore, keeps up acts of ritual that have lost their significance in their pa.s.sage from a dark and dateless past. It was the local priesthoods of demes and remote rural places that maintained the old usages of the ancient tribes and kindreds--usages out of keeping with the mental condition of the splendid city state, or with the national sentiment of h.e.l.lenism. But many of the old tales connected with, and explanatory of, these ritual practices, after "winning their way to the mythical," as Thucydides says, won their way into literature, and meet us in the odes of Pindar, the plays of aeschylus and Sophocles, the notes of commentators, and the apologetic efforts of Plutarch and Porphyry.

It is with these antique stories that the mythologist is concerned. But even here he need not loose his reverence for the n.o.bler aspects of the G.o.ds of Greece. Like the archaeologist and excavator, he must touch with careful hand these--

Strange clouded fragments of the ancient glory, Late lingerers of the company divine; For even in ruin of their marble limbs They breathe of that far world wherefrom they came, Of liquid light and harmonies serene, Lost halls of heaven and far Olympian air.*

"Homer and Hesiod named the G.o.ds for the Greeks;" so Herodotus thought, and constructed the divine genealogies. Though the G.o.ds were infinitely older than Homer, though a few of them probably date from before the separation of the Indo-Aryan and h.e.l.lenic stocks, it is certain that Homer and Hesiod stereotyped, to some extent, the opinions about the deities which were current in their time.**

* Ernest Myers, Hermes, in _The Judgment of Prometheus_.

** As a proof of the Pre-Homeric antiquity of Zeus, it has often been noticed that Homer makes Achilles pray to Zeus of Dodona (the Zeus, according to Thrasybulus, who aided Deucalion after the deluge) as the "Pelasgian" Zeus (Iliad, xvi. 233). "Pelasgian" may be regarded as equivalent to "

pre-historic Greek ". Sophocles (Trach., 65; see Scholiast) still speaks of the Selli, the priests of Dodonean Zeus, as "mountain-dwelling and couching on the earth ". They retained, it seems, very primitive habits. Be it observed that Achilles has been praying for confusion and ruin to the Achaeans, and so invokes the deity of an older, perhaps hostile, race. Probably the oak-oracle at Dodona, the message given by "the sound of a going in the tree-tops" or by the doves, was even more ancient than Zeus, who, on that theory, fell heir to the rites of a peasant oracle connected with tree-wors.h.i.+p. Zeus, according to Hesiod, "dwelt in the trunk of the oak tree" (cited by Preller, i. 98), much as an Indian forest-G.o.d dwells in the peepul or any other tree. It is rather curious that, according to Eustathius (_Iliad_, xvi. 233), "Pelargicus," "connected with storks," was sometimes written for Pelasgicus; that there was a Dodona in Thessaly, and that storks were sacred to the Thessalians.

Hesiod codified certain priestly and Delphian theories about their origin and genealogies. Homer minutely described their politics and society. His description, however, must inevitably have tended to develop a later scepticism. While men lived in city states under heroic kings, acknowledging more or less the common sway of one king at Argos or Mycenae, it was natural that the G.o.ds (whether in the dark backward of time Greece knew a Moral Creative Being or not) should be conceived as dwelling in a similar society, with Zeus for their Agamemnon, a ruler supreme but not absolute, not safe from attempts at resistance and rebellion. But when Greek politics and society developed into a crowd of republics, with nothing answering to a certain imperial sway, then men must have perceived that the old divine order was a mere survival from the time when human society was similarly ordained. Thus Xenophanes very early proclaimed that men had made the G.o.ds in their own likeness, as a horse, could he draw, would design his deity in equine semblance. But the detection by Xenophanes of the anthropomorphic tendency in religion could not account for the instinct which made Greeks, like other peoples, as Aristotle noticed, figure their G.o.ds not only in human shape, but in the guise of the lower animals. For that zoomorphic element in myth an explanation, as before, will be sought in the early mental condition which takes no great distinction between man and the beasts. The same method will explain, in many cases, the other peculiarly un-h.e.l.lenic elements in Greek divine myth. Yet here, too, allowance must be made for the actual borrowing of rites and legends from contiguous peoples.

The Greeks were an a.s.similative race. The alphabet of their art they obtained, as they obtained their written alphabet, from the kingdoms of the East.* Like the Romans, they readily recognised their own G.o.ds, even under the barbarous and brutal disguises of Egyptian popular religion; and, while recognising their G.o.d under an alien shape, they may have taken over legends alien to their own national character.** Again, we must allow, as in India, for myths which are really late, the inventions, perhaps, of priests or oracle-mongers. But in making these deductions, we must remember that the later myths would be moulded, in many cases, on the ancient models. These ancient models, there is reason to suppose, were often themselves of the irrational and savage character which has so frequently been ill.u.s.trated from the traditions of the lower races.

The elder dynasties of Greek G.o.ds, Ura.n.u.s and Cronos, with their adventures and their fall, have already been examined.***

* Helbig, _Homerwche Epos cms dem Denhmalern_. Perrot and Chipiez, on Mycenaean art, represent a later view.

** On the probable amount of borrowing in Greek religion see Maury, Religions de la Greece, iii. 70-75; Newton, Nineteenth Century, 1878, p. 306. Gruppe, Griech. Culte u. Mythen., pp. 153-163

*** "Greek Cosmogonic Myths," antea.

Ura.n.u.s may have been an ancient sky-G.o.d, like the Samoyed Num, deposed by Cronus, originally, perhaps, one of the deputy-G.o.ds, active where their chief is otiose, whom we find in barbaric theology. But this is mere guess-work. We may now turn to the deity who was the acknowledged sovereign of the Greek Olympus during all the cla.s.sical period from the date of Homer and Hesiod to the establishment of Christianity. We have to consider the legend of Zeus.

It is necessary first to remind the reader that all the legends in the epic poems date after the time when an official and national Olympus had been arranged. Probably many tribal G.o.ds, who had originally no connection with G.o.ds of other tribes, had, by Homer's age, thus accepted places and relations.h.i.+ps in the Olympic family. Even rude low-born Pelasgian deities may have been adopted into the highest circles, and fitted out with a divine pedigree in perfect order.

To return to Zeus, his birth (whether as the eldest or the youngest of the children of Cronus) has already been studied; now we have to deal with his exploits and his character.

About the meaning of the name of Zeus the philologists seem more than commonly harmonious. They regard the Greek Zeus as the equivalent of the Sanskrit Dyaus, "the bright one," a term for the sky.*

* Max Muller, _Selected Essays_, ii. 419; Preller, Gr.

Myth., i. 92.

He was especially wors.h.i.+pped on hill-tops (like the Aztec rain-G.o.d); for example, on Ithome, Parnes, Cithgeron, and the Lycaean hill of Arcadia.

On the Arcadian mountain, a centre of the strangest and oldest rites, the priest of Zeus acted as what the African races call a "rainmaker".

There was on the hill the sacred well of the nymph Hagno, one of the nurses of the child Zeus. In time of drought the priest of Zeus offered sacrifice and prayer to the water according to ritual law, and it would be interesting to know what it was that he sacrificed. He then gently stirred the well with a bough from the oak, the holy tree of the G.o.d, and when the water was stirred, a cloud arose like mist, which attracted other clouds and caused rain. As the priest on a mountain practically occupied a meteorological observatory, he probably did not perform these rites till he knew that a "depression" might be expected from one quarter or another.*

* See similar examples of popular magic in Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperiidia; Liebrecht, ii. 146. The citation is due to Freller, i. 102.

Wonderful feats of rain-prophecy are done by Australian seers, according to Mrs. Langloh Parker and others. As soon as we meet Zeus in Homer, we find that he is looked on, not as the sky, but as the deity who "dwells in the heights of air," and who exercises supreme sway over all things, including storm and wind and cloud. He casts the lightning forth (--------) he thunders on high (--------), he has dark clouds for his covering (--------) all these imposing aspects he is _religiously_ regarded by people who approach him in prayer. These aspects would be readily explained by the theory that Zeus, after having been the personal sky, came to be thought a powerful being who dwelt in the sky, if we did not find such beings wors.h.i.+pped where the sky is not yet adored, as in Australia. Much the same occurred if, as M. Maspero points out, in Egypt the animals were wors.h.i.+pped first, and then later the G.o.ds supposed to be present in the animals. So the sky, a personal sky, was first adored, later a G.o.d dwelling in the sky. But it is less easy to show how this important change in opinion took place, if it really occurred. A philological theory of the causes which produced the change is set forth by Mr. Keary in his book _Primitive Belief_. In his opinion the sky was first wors.h.i.+pped as a vast non-personal phenomenon, "the bright thing"(_Dyaus_). But, to adopt the language of Mr. Max Muller, who appears to hold the same views, "Dyaus ceased to be an expressive predicate; it became a traditional name";* it "lost its radical meaning". Thus where a man had originally said, "It thunders," or rather "He thunders," he came to say, "Dyaus" (that is, the sky) "thunders".

* Select Essays, ii. 419.

Next Dyaus, or rather the Greek form Zeus, almost lost its meaning of the sky, and the true sense being partially obscured, became a name supposed to indicate a person. Lastly the expression became "Zeus thunders," Zeus being regarded as a person, because the old meaning of his name, "the sky," was forgotten, or almost forgotten. The _nomen_ (name) has become a _numen_ (G.o.d). As Mr. Keary puts it, "The G.o.d stands out as clear and thinkable in virtue of this name as any living friend can be". The whole doctrine resolves itself into this, a phenomenon originally (according to the theory) considered impersonal, came to be looked on as personal, because a word survived in colloquial expressions after it had lost, or all but lost, its original meaning. As a result, 'all the changes and processes of the impersonal sky came to be spoken of as personal actions performed by a personal being, Zeus. The record of these atmospheric processes on this theory is the legend of Zeus.

Whatever is irrational and abominable in the conduct of the G.o.d is explained as originally a simple statement of meteorological phenomena.

"Zeus weds his mother;" that must mean the rain descends on the earth, from which it previously arose in vapour. "Zeus weds his daughter," that is, the rain falls on the crop, which grew up from the rainy embrace of sky and earth.

Here then we have the philological theory of the personality and conduct of Zeus. To ourselves and those who have followed us the system will appear to reverse the known conditions of the working of the human mind among early peoples. On the philological theory, man first regards phenomena in our modern way as impersonal; he then gives them personality as the result of a disease of language, of a forgetfulness of the sense of words. Thus Mr. Keary writes: "The idea of personality as apart from matter must have been growing more distinct when men could attribute personality to such an abstract phenomenon as the sky ". Where is the distinctness in a conception which produces such confusion? We have seen that as the idea of personality becomes more distinct the range of its application becomes narrower, not wider. The savage, it has been thought, attributes personality to everything without exception. As the idea of personality grows more distinct it necessarily becomes less extensive, till we withdraw it from all but intelligent human beings.

Thus we must look for some other explanation of the personality of Zeus, supposing his name to mean the sky. This explanation we find in a survival of the savage mental habit of regarding all phenomena, even the most abstract, as persons. Our theory will receive confirmation from the character of the personality of Zeus in his myth. Not only is he a person, but in myth, as distinct from religion, he is a very savage person, with all the powers of the medicine-man and all the pa.s.sions of the barbarian. Why should this be so on the philological theory? When we examine the legend of Zeus, we shall see which explanation best meets the difficulties of the problem. But the reader must again be reminded that the Zeus of myth, in Homer and elsewhere, is a very different being from the Zeus of religion of Achilles's prayer, from the Zeus whom the Athenians implored to rain on their fields, and from the Zeus who was the supreme being of the tragedians, of the philosophers, and of later Greece.

The early career, _la jeunesse orageuse_, of Zeus has been studied already. The child of Cronus and Rhea, countless places a.s.serted their claim to be the scene of his birth, though the Cretan claim was most popular.*

* Hesiod, _Theog_., 468; Paus., iv. 33, 2.

In Crete too was the grave of Zeus: a scandal to pious heathendom. The euhemerists made this tomb a proof that Zeus was a deified man. Preller takes it for an allegory of winter and the death of the G.o.d of storm, who in winter is especially active. Zeus narrowly escaped being swallowed by his father, and, after expelling and mediatising that deity, he changed his own wife, Metis, into a fly, swallowed her, and was delivered out of his own head of Athene, of whom his wife had been pregnant. He now became ruler of the world, with his brother Poseidon for viceroy, so to speak, of the waters, and his brother Hades for lord of the world of the dead. Like the earlier years of Louis XIV., the earlier centuries of the existence of Zeus were given up to a series of amours, by which he, like Charles II., became the father of many n.o.ble families. His legitimate wife was his sister Hera, whom he seduced before wedlock "without the knowledge of their dear parents," says Homer,* who neglects the myth that one of the "dear parents" ate his own progeny, "like him who makes his generation messes to gorge his appet.i.te". Hera was a jealous wife, and with good cause.** The Christian fathers calculated that he sowed his wild oats and persecuted mortal women with his affections through seventeen generations of men. His amours with his mother and daughters, with Deo and Persephone, are the great scandals of Clemens Alexandrinus and Arn.o.bius.*** Zeus seldom made love _in propria persona_, in all his meteorological pomp. When he thus gratified Semele she was burned to a cinder.****

* It is probable that this myth of the seduction of Hera is of Samian origin, and was circulated to account for and justify the Samian custom by which men seduced their loves first and celebrated the marriage afterwards (Scholia on _Iliad_, xiv. 201). "Others say that Samos was the place where Zeus betrayed Hera, whence it comes that the Samians, when they go a-wooing, antic.i.p.ate the wedding first in secret, and then celebrate it openly." Yet another myth (_Iliad_, xiv. 295, Scholiast) accounts for the hatred which Zeus displayed to Prometheus by the fable that, before her wedding with Zeus, Hera became the mother of Prometheus by the giant Eurymedon. Euphorion was the authority for this tale. Yet another version occurs in the legend of Hephaestus. See also Schol., _Theoc_., xv. 64.

** Iliad, xiv. 307, 340.

*** Arn.o.bius, Adv. Nat., v. 9, where the abominations described defy repet.i.tion. The myth of a rock which became the mother of the offspring of Zeus may recall the maternal flint of Aztec legend and the vagaries of Iroquois tradition. Compare _Clemens Alex_., Oxford, 1719, i. 13, for the amours of Zeus, Deo and Persephone, with their representations in the mysteries; also Arn.o.b., Adv. Cent., v. 20. Zeus adopted the shape of a serpent in his amour with his daughter. An ancient Tarentine sacred ditty is quoted as evidence, _Taurus draconem genuit, et taurum draco_, and certain repulsive performances with serpents in the mysteries are additional testimony.

**** Apollodorus, iii. 4, 3.

The amour with Danae, when Zeus became a shower of gold, might be interpreted as a myth of the yellow suns.h.i.+ne. The amours of Zeus under the disguise of various animal forms were much more usual, and are familiar to all.* As Cronus when in love metamorphosed himself into a stallion, as Praj.a.pati pursued his own daughter in the shape of a roebuck, so Zeus became a serpent, a bull, a swan, an eagle, a dove,**

and, to woo the daughter of Cletor, an ant. Similar disguises are adopted by the sorcerers among the Algonkins for similar purposes. When Pund-jel, in the Australian myth of the Pleiades, was in love with a native girl, he changed himself into one of those grubs in the bark of trees which the Blacks think edible, and succeeded as well as Zeus did when he became an ant.***

* The mythologists, as a rule, like the heathen opponents of Arn.o.bius, Clemens and Eusebius, explain the amours of Zeus as allegories of the fruitful union of heaven and earth, of rain and grain. Preller also allows for the effects of human vanity, n.o.ble families insisting on tracing themselves to G.o.ds. On the whole, says Preller, "Zeugung in der Natur- religion und Mythologie, da.s.selbe ist was Schopfung inden deistischen Religionen" (i. 110). Doubtless all these elements come into the legend; the unions of Zeus with Deo and Persephone especially have much the air of a nature-myth told in an exceedingly primitive and repulsive manner. The amours in animal shape are explained in the text as in many cases survivals of the totemistic belief in descent from beasts, sans phrase.

**Lian., Hist Vwr., i. 15.

*** Dawson, Australian Aborigines; Custom, and Myth, p. 126.

It is not improbable that the metamorphosis of Zeus into an ant is the result of a _volks-etymologie_ which derived "Myrmidons" from (------), an ant. Even in that case the conversion of the ant into an avatar of Zeus would be an example of the process of gravitation or attraction, whereby a great mythical name and personality attracts to itself floating fables.* The remark of Clemens on this last extraordinary intrigue is suggestive. The Thessalians, he says, are reputed to wors.h.i.+p ants because Zeus took the semblance of an ant when he made the daughter of Cletor mother of Myrmidon. Where people wors.h.i.+p any animal from whom they claim descent (in this case through Myrmidon, the ancestor of the famed Myrmidons), we have an example of stiraight forward totemism. To account for the adoration of the animal on the hypothesis that it was the incarnation of a G.o.d, is the device which has been observed in Egyptian as in Samoan religion, and in that of aboriginal Indian tribes, whose animal G.o.ds become saints "when the Brahmans get a turn at them".**

The most natural way of explaining such tales about the amours and animal metamorphoses of so great a G.o.d, is to suggest that Zeus inherited,*** as it were, legends of a lower character long current among separate families and in different localities. In the same way, where a stone had been wors.h.i.+pped, the stone was, in at least one instance, dubbed with the name of Zeus.****

* Clemens, p. 84.

** See Mr. H. H. Risley on "Primitive Marriage in Bengal,"

in _Astatic Quarterly Review_, June, 1886.

*** In Pausanias's opinion Cecrops first introduced the belief in Zeus, the most highest.