anthropology and the student of the higher religions of the world are equally rewarded by its study.
Modern ethnology has arrived at the conviction that the Hellenic nation, like others that have played great parts in history, was the product of a blend of populations, the conquering tribes of Aryan descent coming from the north and settling among and upon certain pre-Hellenic Mediterranean stocks. The conclusion that is naturally drawn from this is that Hellenic religion is also the product of a blend of early Aryan or Indo-Germanic beliefs with the cult-ideas and practices of the Mediterranean area that were from of old indigenous in the lands which the later invaders conquered. But to disentangle these two component parts of the whole, which might seem to be the first problem for the history of the development of this religion, is by no means an easy task; we may advance further towards its solution, when the mysterious pre-Hellenic Mediterranean language or group of languages, of which traces remain in Hellenic place-names, and which may be lying uninterpreted on the brick-tablets of the palace of Cnossus, has found its interpreter. For the first question is naturally one of language. But the comparative study of the Indo-European speech-group, great as its philological triumphs have been, has been meagre in its contributions to our positive knowledge of the original belief of the primitive stock. It is not possible to reconstruct a common Indo-European religion. The greater part of the separate Aryan cult-systems may have developed after the diffusion and may have been the result of contact in prehistoric days with non-Aryan peoples. And many old religious etymological equations, such as Οὐρανός = Sanskrit Varuna, Ἑρμῆς = Sarameyās, Athena = Ahana, were uncritically made and have been abandoned. The chief fact that philology has revealed concerning the religious vocabulary of the Aryan peoples is that many of them are found to have designated a high god by a word derived from a root meaning “bright,” and which appears in Zeus, Jupiter, Sanskrit Dyaus. This is important enough, but we should not exaggerate its importance, nor draw the unwarranted inference that therefore the primitive Indo-Europeans worshipped one supreme God, the Sky-Father. Besides the word “Zeus,” the only other names of the Hellenic pantheon that can be explained wholly or partly as words of Aryan formation are Poseidon, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysus (whose name and cult were derived from the Aryan stock of the Thraco-Phrygians) and probably Pan. But other names, such as Athena, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Hera, Hermes, have no discovered affinities with other Aryan speech-groups; and yet there is nothing suspiciously non-Aryan in the formation of these words, and they may all have belonged to the earliest Hellenic-Aryan vocabulary. In regard to others, such as Rhea, Hephaestus and Aphrodite, it is somewhat more probable that they belonged to an older pre-Hellenic stock that survived in Crete and other islands, and here and there on the mainland; while we know that Zeus derived certain unintelligible titles in Cretan cult from the indigenous Eteo-cretan speech.
A minute consideration of a large mass of evidence justifies the conclusion that the main tribes of the Aryan Hellenes, pushing down from the north, already possessed certain deities in common such as Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo with whom they associated certain goddesses, and that they maintained the cult of Hestia or “Holy Hearth.” Further, a comparison of the developed religions of the respective Aryan peoples suggests that they tended to give predominance to the male divinity, although we have equally good reason to assert that the cult of goddesses, and especially of the earth-goddess, is a genuinely “Aryan” product. But when the tribes of this family poured into the Greek peninsula, it is probable that they would find in certain centres of a very ancient civilization, such as Argolis and Crete, the dominant cult of a female divinity.[1] The recent excavations on the site of the Hera temple at Argos prove that a powerful goddess was worshipped here many centuries before it is probable that the Hellenic invader appeared. He may have even found the name Hera there, or may have brought it with him and applied it to the indigenous divinity. Again, we are certain that the great mother-goddess of Crete, discovered by Dr Arthur Evans, is the ancestress of Rhea and of the Greek “Mother of the gods”: and it is a reasonable conjecture that she accounts for many of the forms of Artemis and perhaps for Athena. But the evidence by no means warrants us in assuming as an axiom that wherever we find a dominant goddess-cult, as that of Demeter at Eleusis, we are confronted with a non-Hellenic religious phenomenon. The very name “Demeter” and the study of other Aryan religions prove the prominence of the worship of the earth-goddess in our own family of the nations. Finally, we must reckon with the possibility that the other great nations which fringed the Mediterranean, Hittite, Semitic and Egyptian peoples, left their impress on early Greek religion, although former scholars may have made rash use of this hypothesis.[2]
Recognizing then the great perplexity of these problems concerning the ethnic origins of Hellenic religion, we may at least reduce the tangle of facts to some order by distinguishing its lower from its higher forms, and thus provide the material for some theory of evolution. We Animism. may collect and sift the phenomena that remain over from a pre-anthropomorphic period, the imprints of a savage past, the beliefs and practices that belong to the animistic or even the pre-animistic period, fetishism, the worship of animals, human sacrifice. 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 attributes 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 Κεραυνός “the thunder” at Mantinea and Zeus Καππώτας 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. A noteworthy product of primitive animistic feeling is the universally prevalent cult of Hestia, who is originally “Holy Hearth” pure and simple, and who even under the developed polytheism, in which she played no small part, was never established as a separate anthropomorphic personage.
The animistic belief that certain material objects can be charged with a divine potency or spirit gives rise to fetishism, a term which properly denotes the worshipful or superstitious use of objects made by art and invested with mysterious power, so as to be used like amulets for Fetishism. the purposes of protective magic or for higher purposes of communion with the divinity. From the earliest discoverable 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 Dr Arthur Evans, and the same fetishistic worship continued throughout the historic ages of classic paganism, the rude aniconic emblem of pillar or tree-trunk surviving often by the side of the iconic masterpiece. 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
- ↑ This has often been explained as a result of Mutterrecht, or reckoning descent through the female: for reasons against this hypothesis see L. R. Farnell in Archiv für vergleichende Religionswissenschaft (1904); cf. A. J. Evans, “Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult,” in Journ. of Hellenic Studies (1901).
- ↑ V. Bérard 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 Mystères d’Éleusis and Le Culte de Dionysos en Attique.
