CHAPTER IX
DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE
ITS AMALGAMATION WITH APOLLINE RELIGION. ECSTATIC PROPHECY. RITUAL PURIFICATION AND EXORCISM. ASCETICISM
The Greeks received from the Thracians and assimilated to their own purposes the worship of Dionysos, just as, in all probability, they received the personality and worship of Ares and the Muses. Of this assimilation we cannot give any further particulars; it took place in a period lying before the beginnings of historical tradition. In this period a multiplicity of separate tendencies and conceptions, freely mingled with features borrowed from foreign creeds, were welded together to form the religion of Greece.
Homer is already acquainted with the fanatical worship of Dionysos; the god is called by the name under which Greek worshippers made themselves familiar with the stranger.[1\9] But in Homer, Dionysos appears only once or twice for a moment in the background. He is not the bountiful giver of wine; he does not belong to the Round Table of the great gods assembled on Olympos. Nowhere in the story told in either of the Homeric poems does he influence the life and destiny of human beings. There is no need to seek far for the reason of Dionysos' subordinate position in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer's silence makes it quite plain that at that time the Thracian god had not yet emerged from a position of insignificance or merely local importance in the life and faith of Greece. Nor is this hard to understand; the cult of Dionysos only gradually won recognition in Greece. Many legends tell of the battles that had to be fought by the new worship and of the opposition that met the invader. We hear how the Dionysiac frenzy and the _ekstasis_ of the Dionysiac dance-festival took possession of the whole female population of many districts of Central Greece and the Peloponnese.[2\9] Sometimes a few women would venture to join the wandering choruses of wild Bacchants who danced upon the mountain tops; here and there the king of the land would oppose the progress of this tumultuous worship. Such stories are told of the daughters of Minyas in Orchomenos, of Proitos in Tiryns, of King Pentheus at Thebes, and Perseus at Argos;[3\9] their opposition to the Dionysiac form of worship, occurring in {283} reality at no precise date, assumed a deceptive distinctness in the artificial systems of the mythologists and developed the character of historical events. In reality what we are told of these individuals--how the opponents of Dionysos themselves fell into even wilder frenzy and in Bacchic delirium slew and tore in pieces their own children instead of the victim-animal, or (as in the case of Pentheus) became themselves the victim slain and torn in pieces by the raging women--all this belongs to the class of _ætiological_ myth. They are legends in which special features of worship (for example, the existing or dimly remembered sacrifice of human beings at the feasts of Dionysos) are provided with a mythical prototype in the supposed historical past of mythology, and thus receive their justification.[4\9] Still, there remains a substratum of historical fact underlying such stories. They all presuppose that the cult of Dionysos arrived from abroad and entered into Greece as something foreign. This presupposition notoriously corresponds to the actual facts of the case, and we are bound to assume that the account which they immediately proceed to give of the violent opposition which this cult, and only this cult, met with in many parts of Greece, is not pure fiction.[5\9] We are obliged to recognize that such stories preserved a trace of real historical memory expressed in the one form which was invariably assumed by the earliest Greek tradition, namely mythology, in which all the accidents and varieties of earthly experience were condensed into types of universal applicability.
It was then not without opposition, it appears, that the worship of Dionysos, descending from the north into Boeotia, spread from thence to the Peloponnese and at an early period invaded even some of the islands as well. In truth, even if we had no evidence at all on the point, we should have expected the Greeks to feel a profound repugnance to this disorderly and tumultuous Thracian worship; a deep-seated instinct must in their case have resisted such extravagance of emotional excitement and refused to lose itself in the limitless abyss of mere feeling. This unchecked roaming over the mountain sides in nocturnal revelry might be suitable enough for Thracian women-folk, but respectable Greek citizens could not give themselves up to such things without a struggle--without, indeed, a break with all inherited propriety and decorum.[6\9] It seems to have been the women who were the first to give in to the invading worship,[7\9] carried away in a real frenzy of inspired enthusiasm, and the new cult may really have owed its first success chiefly to them. What we are told of the irresistible progress and widespread success[8\9] of the {284} Bacchic dance-worship and its exaltation reminds us of the phenomena which have attended similar religious epidemics such as have in more recent times occasionally burst out and overflowed whole countries. We may in particular recall to mind the accounts which we have of the violent and widespread dance-madness which, soon after the severe mental and physical shock suffered by Europe in the Black Death of the fourteenth century, broke out on the Rhine and for centuries could not be entirely stamped out. Those who were attacked by the fever were driven by an irresistible impulse to dance. The bystanders, in convulsions of sympathetic and imitative fury joined in the whirling dance themselves. Thus the malady was spread by contagion, and soon whole companies of men, women, and girls, wandered dancing through the country. In spite of the insufficiency of the surviving records, the religious character of this dance-enthusiasm is unmistakably apparent. The Church regarded it as a "heresy". The dancers called upon the name of St. John or of "certain demons"; hallucinations and visions of a religious nature accompanied their ecstasies.[9\9] Can it have been another such popular religious malady which attacked Greece--perhaps in the train of the disturbance of spiritual equilibrium caused by the destructive migrations which take their name from the Dorians? The circumstances of the time must have predisposed men's minds in that direction and made them ready to accept the Thracian Dionysos and his enthusiastic dance-worship. In any case this invasion did not, like its mediæval counterpart, break down by coming into conflict with a well-established religion and an exclusive ecclesiastical organization of a very different temper from its own. In the deceptive twilight of myth we can only dimly discern the arrival and progress of the Dionysiac religion in Greece. But so much at least is evident: the Bacchic cult, though it had to overcome many obstacles, at last established itself in Greece and triumphantly overran both mainland and islands, until in the course of time it obtained a profound and far-reaching importance in Greek life of which Homer could scarcely give a hint.
§ 2
It was no longer simply the old Thracian Dionysos who now took his place beside the other great gods of the Greek Olympos as one of themselves. He had become Hellenized and humanized in the meantime. Cities and states celebrated him in yearly festivals as the giver of the vine's inspiring fruit, as {285} the daimonic patron of vegetation, and the whole of Nature's rich and flourishing growth. He was worshipped as the incarnation of all natural life and vigour in the fullest and widest sense: as the typical exponent of the most eager enjoyment of life. Even Art, the highest expression of the courage and pride of life, drew much of its inspiration and its aspiration towards the infinite from the worship of Dionysos; and the drama, that supreme achievement of Greek poetry, arose out of the choruses of the Dionysiac festival.
Now the art of the actor consists in entering into a strange personality, and in speaking and acting out of a character not his own. At bottom it retains a profound and ultimate connexion with its most primitive source--that strange power of transfusing the self into another being which the really inspired participator in the Dionysiac revels achieved in his _ekstasis_. The essential features of the god as he first arrived in Greece from foreign lands, in spite of much alteration and transformation of the primitive type, were thus not entirely lost. There remained also, in addition to the cheerful festivity of the daylight worship of Dionysos, as it was celebrated more particularly in Athens, certain vestiges of the old ecstatic worship which drove men and women over the mountains in nocturnal revelry. In many places there were still celebrated the _trieteric_ festivals[10\9] in which at recurrent intervals the "Epiphany" of Dionysos, his appearance in the world of men and ascent from the underworld, was **solemnized by night. The primitive character of Dionysos the Lord of Spirits and of the Souls of the dead--a very different figure indeed from the tender and delicate Wine-God of later times--was still obscurely present in many features of the Dionysiac festivals, in those of Delphi especially, but even to some extent at Athens too.[11\9] The ecstasy and the violence, even the dark savagery of the ancient cult did not quite die out in the midst of all the refinements of Greek civilization; recognizable traces of such things were preserved in the _Nuktelia_ and _Agrionia_ and in the various trieteric festivals that were offered to the god in many different localities.[12\9] In Greece the awful god received the blood of human victims.[13\9] Nor did the outward signs of delirious frenzy, such as the eating of raw flesh, the killing and tearing in pieces of snakes, entirely disappear.[14\9] So little indeed, did the Bacchic frenzy that could exalt and lift the worshipper to communion with the god and his train, disappear before the gentler attractions of the gracious wine-god and his festival, that the raving and "possession" which characterized the cult of Dionysos were {286} now actually regarded by foreign peoples as the essentially _Hellenic_ form of the worship of the god.[15\9]
Thus, a sympathetic understanding of the orgiastic cult and its tremendous capabilities lived on. The "Bacchants" of Euripides still preserves for us a breath of its magic, a trace of the enthusiasm and exaltation that overwhelmed the senses and enthralled the will and consciousness of those who gave themselves up to the powerful Dionysiac influence. Like an irresistible current that overwhelms a swimmer or like the mysterious helplessness that frustrates the dreamer, the magic power emanating from the neighbourhood of the god took complete possession of the worshipper and drove him whither it willed. Everything in the world was transformed for him; he himself was altered. Every character in the play falls under the spell as soon as he enters into the magic circle. Even the modern reader who turns over the pages of Euripides' poem feels something of that strange power to subdue the soul wielded by the Dionysiac mysteries and experiences in his own person a faint reflexion of these extraordinary states of mind.
Probably as a result of this profound Dionysiac fever which had once raged through Greece like an epidemic and was liable to periodic returns in the nocturnal festivals of the god, there remained in the constitution of the Greek people a certain morbid weakness, a susceptibility to suddenly appearing and as suddenly disappearing crises in which the normal powers of perceiving and feeling were temporarily overthrown. A few stray accounts have come down to us in which we read how such brief attacks of passing insanity ran through whole cities like an infectious disease.[16\9] The Korybantic form of the malady, which was religious in character[17\9] and took its name from the daimonic companions of the Phrygian Mountain Mother, was a phenomenon quite well-known to doctors and psychologists. Those affected by such fevers saw strange figures that corresponded to no objective reality, and heard the sound of invisible flutes, until at last they were excited to the highest pitch of frenzy and were seized with a violent desire to dance.[18\9] The initiation festivals of the Phrygian deities were specially directed to the discharge and so eventually to the cure and "purgation" of such emotional states; the means employed being principally dance and music--more especially the music composed for the flute by the old Phrygian masters; music that could fill the soul with inspiration in suitably disposed natures.[19\9] By such methods the ecstatic element was not simply suppressed or expelled, it was taken {287} up as a special disciplinary process by the physician-priesthood who recognized in it a vital movement and added it to the regular worship of the god.
In a similar fashion Greece in its most enlightened period accepted and practised the "enthusiastic" cult of Dionysos. Even the tumultuous night-festivals of the Thracian god--festivals closely related to those of Phrygia from which they had borrowed and to which they had given so many features--were made to serve the "purgation" of the ecstatically exalted soul. The worshipper in such festivals "initiated his soul into the company of the god in holy purifications, while he raged over the mountains in Bacchic frenzy".[20\9] The purification consisted in this case, too, of violent excitement in which the soul was stimulated to the highest pitch of religious ecstasy. Dionysos as "Bakcheus" awoke the holy madness which he himself again, after it had reached its highest point of intensity, stilled and tranquillized as Lysios and Meilichios.[21\9] The old Thracian cult of ecstasy has here been modified in a fashion that belonged only to Greek soil and to Greek modes of thought. Legend, allegorizing the facts, threw back this final development of the Dionysiac worship into the remotest antiquity. Even Hesiodic poems[22\9] related how the daughters of King Proitos of Tiryns wandered in the holy frenzy of Dionysos[23\9] over the mountain of Peloponnesus, until at last they and all the **multitude of women who had joined them were healed and "purified" by Melampous the Seer of Pylos famed in legend.[24\9] The cure was effected through the intensification of the Dionysiac frenzy "with loud crying and inspired dancing,"[25\9] and, further, by the use of certain special purificatory devices.[26\9] Melampous did not put an end to the Dionysiac cult and its "enthusiasm"; he rather regulated and developed it. For this reason Herodotus can even call him the "Founder" of the Dionysiac cult in Greece.[27\9] Legend, however, always recognized in this "founder" of the Dionysiac festival an adherent of the specifically _Apolline_ form of religion. "Apollo had favoured him especially," and bestowed upon him the Seership which became ancestral in his family.[28\9] Legend used him as a type in which the reconciliation between the Apolline and the Dionysiac was figuratively expressed. The reconciliation is an historical fact, but it did not happen in the primitive past of legend.
It is a fact, however, that Apollo did at last, doubtless after prolonged resistance, enter into the closest alliance with this remarkable divine brother of his, the Hellenized Dionysos. {288} The covenant must have been made at Delphi. There at least on the heights of Parnasos, in the Korykian Cave, the trieteric festival of Dionysos was held every second year in the close neighbourhood of Apollo the Lord of Delphi. Nay, more, in Apollo's own temple the "grave" of Dionysos was shown,[29\9] and at this grave, while the Thyiades of the god rushed over the mountain heights, the priests of Apollo celebrated a secret festival of their own.[30\9] The festal year of Delphi was divided, though unequally it is true, between Apollo and Dionysos.[31\9] To such an extent had Dionysos taken root at Delphi,[32\9] so closely were the two gods related, that while the front pediment of the temple showed the form of Apollo, the back pediment represented Dionysos--and the Dionysos of the nocturnal ecstatic revels. Apollo, too, shared in the trieteric festival of Dionysos,[33\9] while Dionysos in later times at the penteteric festival of the Pythia, received, as well as Apollo, his share of sacrifice and the contests of cyclic choruses.[34\9] The two divinities have many of their titles and attributes in common; in the end the distinction between them seems to disappear entirely.[35\9]
Antiquity never forgot that at Delphi, the radiating centre of his cult, Apollo was an intruder. Among the older deities whom he supplanted there, the name of Dionysos also occurred;[36\9] but the Delphic priesthood thought it wise to tolerate the Thracian god and his ecstatic cult that at first seemed so opposed to that of their own deity. Dionysos may have been too vigorous a spirit to allow his worship to be suppressed like that of the Earth divinity who sent the prophetic dreams. Apollo is the "Lord of Delphi"; but the priesthood of the Delphic Apollo, following in this the tendency to religious syncretism which is so recognizable in them, took the worship of Dionysos under their protection. The Delphic Oracle in fact introduced Dionysos into localities where he had hitherto been a stranger, and nowhere so successfully or with such momentous consequences as at Athens.[37\9] It was this promoting of the Dionysiac form of religion by the great corporation which had the leadership in Greece in all matters of religion, that did more than anything else to secure for the god and his worship that profound, wide-reaching influence on Greek religion that Homer, who knows little even of the Delphic Oracle, completely ignores.
But it was a gentler and more civilized Dionysos whom Delphi popularized and even helped to re-shape; the extravagance of his ecstatic abandonment was pruned and moderated {289} to suit the more sober temper of ordinary city-life, and the brighter, daylight festivals of urban and countryside worship. Hardly a trace of the old Thracian worship of ecstasy and exaltation is discoverable in the Dionysiac worship of Athens. In other places, and especially in the districts ruled over by the Delphic Apollo himself, Dionysiac worship preserved more of its primitive nocturnal wildness. Even Athens, in obedience to an oracular command, sent a religious embassy of elected women to the Delphic Trieteria. It is plain enough however, that in all this there was nothing but a dim counterpart of the former tumultuous mountain-worship of the god, and its profound soul-stirring ceremonies; the worship of Athens and Delphi had reduced all that to a vague ritual traditionalism.[38\9]
§ 3
But in spite of all attempts to moderate and civilize it outwardly, the cult of Dionysos retained as its most enduring feature a tendency to the ecstatic and the extravagant that was continually breaking out in threatening or alluring guise. So strong indeed was the ecstatic element in Dionysiac worship, that when the Apolline and Dionysiac forms of religion became united, as at Delphi, it was the Apolline worship--once so hostile to anything in the nature of ecstasy--that had to accept this entirely novel feature.
The "prophecy of inspiration", deriving its knowledge of the unseen from an elevation of the human soul to the divine, was not always a part of Greek religion. Homer, of course, knows of the prophetic _art_ in which specially instructed seers explained such signs of the gods' will as occurred accidentally or were purposely sought out by men, and by this means claimed to discover the will of heaven both at the moment and for the future. This is, in fact, the sort of prophecy that Apollo bestowed upon his seers.[39\9] But the prophecy of which there was no "art" and which "no man could be taught"[40\9] (for it came in a moment by "inspiration")--of this Homer shows no trace.[41\9] In addition to professional and independently working prophets the Odyssey, and even the Iliad, too, are aware of the enclosed oracular institutions belonging to the temple of Zeus at Dodona and that of Apollo at Pytho.[42\9] Both these used the names of the gods with whose service they were concerned to increase the effect and the credit of their utterances. In the Odyssey (but not the Iliad) there is a reference to the influence wielded by the oracle of Apollo in the more important circumstances of a people's {290} life. But whether at that time it was an inspired prophetess who gave replies at Delphi we cannot be sure from the poet's words. There must have been oracles of sortilege[43\9] at that place from an early period under the protection of the god and it is these we should naturally expect a poet to mean who nowhere[44\9] shows any knowledge of the striking phenomena of ecstatic _mantikê_.[45\9]
In any case this new _mantikê_ of inspired prophets, which subsequently enjoyed such enormous development and gave the Delphic oracle such peculiar power, was a late-coming innovation in the Apolline cult. Over the chasm in the rock at Pytho, out of which arose a strange and potent vapour from the depths of the earth, there had once existed an oracle of Gaia at which perhaps inquirers had received their instruction through the means of premonitory dreams by night.[46\9] The earth-goddess was displaced by Apollo here as at many other oracular sites.[47\9] The accuracy of this tradition is confirmed by the Delphic temple legend which speaks of the overthrow of the oracular earth-spirit Python by Apollo.[48\9] The change may have been gradually brought about; in any case, where once the earth-divinity had spoken directly in dreams to the souls of men, there Apollo now prophesied--no longer indirectly through the intervening medium of signs and omens, but directly answering those who, in open-eyed wakefulness, inquired of him, and speaking to them out of the mouth of his ecstatically inspired prophetess.
This Delphic prophecy of inspiration is as far removed from the old Apolline art of interpreting omens as it is closely allied to the _mantikê_ which we found attached from the earliest times to the Thracian cult of Dionysos.[49\9] It appears that in Greece Dionysos but rarely obtained an official priesthood that could have organized or maintained a permanent oracular institute attached to a
## particular place or temple. In the one Dionysiac oracle in Greece,
however, of which we have certain knowledge a priest gave prophecies in a state of "enthusiasm" and "possession" by the god.[50\9] Enthusiasm and ecstasy are invariably the means of the Dionysiac prophecy just as they were the means of all Dionysiac religious experience. When we find Apollo in Delphi itself--the place where he most closely allied himself with Dionysos--deserting his old omen-interpretation and turning to the prophecy of _ekstasis_, we cannot have much doubt as to whence Apollo got this new thing.[51\9]
With the mantic _ekstasis_, Apollo received a Dionysiac element into his own religion. Henceforward, he, the cold, {291} aloof, sober deity of former times, can be addressed by titles that imply Bacchic excitement and self-abandonment. He is now the "enthusiastic", the Bacchic god: Aeschylus strikingly calls him "ivy-crowned Apollo, the Bacchic-frenzied prophet" (_fr._ 341). It is now Apollo, who more than any other god, calls forth in men's souls the madness[52\9] that makes them clairvoyant and enables them to know hidden things. At not a few places there are founded oracular sites at which priests or priestesses in frenzied ecstasy utter what Apollo puts into their mouths. But the Pythian oracle remained the pattern of them all. There, prophecy was uttered by the Pythia, the youthful priestess who sat upon the tripod over the earth-chasm and was inspired by the intoxicating vapour that arose from it, until she was filled with the god, and with his spirit.[53\9] The god, so ran the belief, entered into the earthly body; or else the soul of the priestess, "released" from her body, received the heavenly revelation with spiritual sense.[54\9] What she then "with frenzied mouth" proclaimed, that the god spoke out of her; when she said "I", Apollo was speaking of himself and of what concerned him.[55\9] It is the god who lives, thinks, and speaks in her so long as the madness lasts.
§ 4
A profound and compelling tendency of the human mind must have been the source of the great religious movement that could succeed in establishing, with the ecstatic prophecy of the Delphic priestess, a seed of mysticism in the very heart of Greek religion. The introduction of _ekstasis_ into the ordered stability of the Delphic mode of religion was only a symptom of that religious movement and not its cause. But now, confirmed by the god himself, and by the experience which the mantic practice seemed to make so evident, the new belief, so long familiar to Dionysiac religion and worship, must have at last invaded the older and original type of Greek religion, and taken hold of it in spite of that religion's natural antipathy to anything of the kind. And this belief was that a highly exalted state of feeling could raise man above the normal level of his limited, everyday consciousness, and could elevate him to heights of vision and knowledge unlimited; that, further, to the human soul it was not denied, in very truth and not in vain fancy, to live for a moment the life of divinity. This belief is the fountain-head of all mysticism, and tradition still records a few traces of the way in which it grew and spread at that time. {292}
It is true that the formal and official worship of the gods in Greece (where their cults were not obviously affected by foreign influence) remained as fast-bound as ever within the confines of order and lucidity. We hear very little of the entrance of ecstatic exaltation into the constitution of the older cults.[56\9] The irresistible religious impulse to such things found an outlet through other channels. Men and women began to appear who on their own initiative began to act as intermediaries between the gods and the needs of individual men. They were natures, we must suppose, of unusual susceptibility to "enthusiastic" exaltation; having a strange capacity for projecting themselves into the infinite. Nothing in the organization of Greek religion prevented such men and women, if they could not obtain authority from any religious community of the state itself, from acquiring a real influence in religious matters simply from their own experience of divine favour,[57\9] their own inward communion with divine powers.
In the darkness and ferment of this period of growth, from the eighth to the sixth centuries, we can vaguely discern many such shadowy figures; they look uncommonly like those strange products of the earliest infancy of Christianity when prophets, ascetics, and exorcists wandered from land to land, called to their work by nothing but the immediate grace of god (~cha/risma~), and not attached to any permanent religious community. It is true that what we hear of Sibyls and Bakides--men and women who wandered from land to land prophesying the future, independently of and uncommissioned by any particular oracular institute--is mostly legend; but these are the sort of legends that preserve real historical tradition condensed into single types and pictures. The nomenclature itself tells us much: Sibyls and Bakides are not individual names, but _titles_ belonging to various types[58\9] of ecstatic prophet, and we are entitled to suppose that the types so named once existed. The appearance in many places of Greek Asia Minor and the old mainland of Greece of such divinely inspired prophets is among the distinguishing marks of a clearly defined period in Greek history; the age of promise that came immediately before the philosophic period of Greece. The later age, entirely given up as it was to the pursuit of philosophic enlightenment, made so little claim to the inheritance in their own time of the divine favour that had once enabled the Sibyls and Bakides to see their visions and utter their wisdom, that there actually began to appear in large numbers prophets at second-hand, who were satisfied {293} with preserving the traditional wisdom of the inspired prophets of the past, and with the judicious interpretation of their treasures.[59\9] The age of _enthusiastic_ prophets was evidently a thing of the past. The very literature of Sibylline and Bakid oracles, which began to appear just at that time and showed itself capable of an almost indefinite extension, was itself largely responsible for the veil of myth and legend which completely enveloped the original bearers of the prophetic title. Earlier and earlier became the historic events of the past which they had foretold; further and further into the mythical past, _before_ the time of the events prophesied, receded the imaginary period of the great prophets.[60\9] In spite of which the scientific chronologists of antiquity, who were far from being imposed upon by the delusive anticipations of prophetic poems, found reason for fixing the date of particular Sibyls--which means for our purpose the whole prophetic age of Greece--in the fully historical period of the eighth and seventh centuries.[61\9]
We may recognize, in what we hear of these prophets, the shadowy representatives of a once real and living past; they are reminiscences of a striking and therefore never quite forgotten phase of Greek religious life. The Bakids and Sibyls were independent agents--though not entirely without connexion with the regular worship of the gods, they were not attached to any
## particular temple--who wandered from land to land according to the
needs of those who sought their counsel. In this respect, at least, they resembled the Homeric omen-interpreters,[62\9] and continued their work; but they differed from them profoundly in the mode of their prophesying. They were "seized by the god" and in ecstatic clairvoyance saw and proclaimed unseen things. It was no academic skill that they possessed, enabling them to interpret the meaning of signs and omens that anyone could see--they saw what was visible only to God and to the soul of man filled with God.[63\9] In hoarse tones and wild words[64\9] the Sibyl gave utterance to what the divine impelling power within her and not her own arbitrary fancy suggested; possessed by the god, she spoke in a divine distraction. An echo of such daimonic possession, and of the horrible reality and terror that it had for the possessed, can still be heard in the cries and convulsions which Aeschylus in the _Agamemnon_ gives to his Kassandra--a true picture of the primitive Sibyl, and a type that the poets of that prophetic generation had reflected backwards into the earlier past of legend.[65\9] {294}
§ 5
The activity of the seer was not confined to foreseeing and foretelling the future. We hear of a "Bakis" who "purified" and delivered the women of Sparta from an attack of madness that had spread like an epidemic among them.[66\9] The prophetic age of Greece must have seen the origin of what later became part of the regular duties of the "seer": the cure of diseases, especially those of the mind;[67\9] the averting of evil of every kind by various strange means, and particularly the supply of help and counsel by "purifications" of a religious nature.[68\9] The gift or art of prophecy, the purification of "the unclean", the healing of disease, all seem to be derived from one source. Nor can we be long in doubt as to what the single source of this threefold capacity must have been. The world of invisible spirits surrounding man, which ordinary folk know only by its effects, is familiar and accessible to the ecstatic prophet, the _Mantis_, the spirit-seer. As exorcist he undertakes to heal disease;[69\9] the _Kathartic_ process is also essentially and originally an exorcism of the baleful influences of the spirit-world.
The wide popularity and elaboration given to the notion--hardly hinted[70\9] at as yet in Homer--of the universally present menace of "pollution", which is only to be averted or got rid of by means of a religious process of purification--this is one of the chief distinguishing features of the over-anxious piety that marked the post-Homeric age when men could no longer be content with the means of salvation handed down to them by their fathers. If we confined our attention to the fact that now we find purification required for such actions as murder and the spilling of blood which seem to imply a moral stain to the doer of them,[71\9] we might be tempted to see in the development of Kathartic practices a fresh step in the history of Greek ethics, and to suppose that the new practices arose out of a refinement and deepening of the "conscience" which now desired to be free from the taint of "sin" by the help of religion. But such an interpretation of Katharsis (favourite as it is) is disposed of by a consideration of the real essence and meaning of the thing. In later times the methods of Katharsis were nearly always in competition and conflict (rarely in friendly alliance) with "conscience", with the independently developed ethical thought that based itself upon the unchanging requirements of a moral law transcending all personal will and feeling, and even the will of daimonic powers. In its origin and essence Katharsis {295} had nothing whatever to do with morality or with what we should call the voice of conscience. On the contrary, it usurped the place which in a more advanced and morally developed people would have belonged to a true morality based on an inner feeling for what is right. Nor did it fail to hinder the free and unfettered development of such a morality. Kathartic practices required and implied no feeling of offence, of personal guilt, of personal responsibility. All that we know of these practices serves to bring this out and set the matter in a clearer light.
Ceremonies of "purification" accompany every step of a man's life from the cradle to the grave. The woman with child is "unclean" and so is anyone who touches her; the new-born child is unclean;[72\9] marriage is fenced about with a series of purificatory rites; the dead, and everything that approaches them, are unclean. Now, in these instances of the common and almost daily occurrence of purification ceremonies, there can be no moral stain involved that requires to be washed off, not even a symbolical one. Equally little can there be any when ritual purifications are employed after a bad dream,[73\9] the occurrence of a prodigy,[74\9] recovery from illness, or when a person has touched an offering made to deities of the lower world or the graves of the dead; or when it is found necessary to purify house and hearth,[75\9] and even fire and water[76\9] for sacred or profane purposes. The purification of those who have shed blood stands on exactly the same footing. It was necessary even for those who had killed a man with just cause, or had committed homicide unknowingly or unwillingly; the moral aspect of such cases, the guilt or innocence of the doer, is ignored or unperceived. Even in the case of premeditated murder, the remorse of the criminal or his "will to amend"[77\9] is quite superfluous to the efficacy of purification.
It could not be otherwise. The "stain" which is wiped out by these mysterious and religious means is not "within the heart of man". It clings to a man as something hostile, and from without, and that can be spread from him to others like an infectious disease.[78\9] Hence, the purification is effected by religious processes directed to the _external_ removal of the evil thing; it may be washed off (as by water from a running spring or from the sea), it may be violently effaced and obliterated (as by fire or even smoke alone), it may be absorbed (by wool, fleece of animals, eggs),[79\9] etc.
It must be something hostile and dangerous to men that is thus removed; since this something can only be attacked by {296} religious means, it must belong to the daimonic world to which alone Religion and its means of salvation have reference. There exists a population of spirits whose neighbourhood or contact with men renders then "unclean", for it gives them over to the power of the unholy.[80\9] Anyone who touches their places of abode, or the offerings made to them, falls under their spell; they may send him sickness, insanity, evils of every kind. The priest with his purifications is an "exorcist" who sets free those who have fallen victims to the surrounding powers of darkness. He certainly fulfils this function when he disperses diseases, i.e. the spirits who send the diseases, by his ministrations;[81\9] when he employs in his purificatory ritual hymns and incantatory formulæ which regularly imply an invisibly listening being to whom they are addressed;[82\9] when he uses the clang of bronze instruments whose well-known property it is to drive away ghosts.[83\9] Where human blood has been shed and requires "purification" the Kathartic priest accomplishes this "by driving out murder with murder",[84\9] i.e. he lets the blood of a sacrificed animal fall over the hands of the polluted person. Here, the purification is plainly in the nature of a substitution-sacrifice (the animal being offered instead of the murderer).[85\9] In this way the anger of the dead is washed away--for this anger is itself the pollution that is to be removed.[86\9] The famous scapegoats were nothing but sacrifices offered to appease the anger of the Unseen, and thereby release a whole city from "pollution". At the _Thargelia_ or on extraordinary occasions of need in Ionic cities, and even in Athens, unfortunate men were in ancient times slain or stoned to death or burnt "for the purification of the city".[87\9] Even the materials of purification that in private life served to free the individual and his house from the claims of invisible powers, were thought of as offerings to these powers: this is proved clearly enough by the custom of removing such materials, when they had served their purpose as "purifications", to the cross-roads, and of making them over to the unearthly spirits who have their being there. The materials of purification so treated are in fact identical with offerings to the dead or even with "Hekate's banquets".[88\9] In this case we can see most clearly what the forces are which Kathartic processes essentially aim at averting. In them no attempt was made to satisfy a heartfelt consciousness of sin or a moral sense that has become delicate; they were much rather the result of a superstitious fear of uncanny forces surrounding men and stretching out after them with a thousand threatening hands in the darkness. {297} It was the monstrous phantasies of their own imagination that made men call upon the priests of purification and expiation for much-needed aid and protection.
§ 6
It is simply the invasion of human life by the sinister creatures of the daimonic world that the clairvoyant _mantis_ is supposed to avert with his "purifications". Among these sinister influences Hekate and her crew are particularly noticeable. This is without doubt an ancient product of religious phantasy--though it is not mentioned by Homer--which did not till a late period emerge from the obscurity of local observance and obtain general popularity: even then it only here and there ceased to be a private and domestic cult and reached the dignity of public city-worship.[89\9] The cult of Hekate fled the light of day, as did the wild farrago of weird and sinister phantoms that surrounded her. She is _chthonic_, a goddess of the lower world,[90\9] where she is at home; but, more easily than other lower-world creatures, she finds her way to the living world of men. Wherever a soul is entering into partnership with a body--at birth or in child bed--she is at hand;[91\9] where a soul is separating from a body, in burials of the dead, she is there. Amidst the dwelling-places of the departed, the monuments of the dead and the gloomy ritual of their worship, she is in her element.[92\9] She is the queen of the souls who are still fast bound to the upper world. It shows her deep-seated connexion with the primeval worship of the dead at the household hearth,[93\9] when we hear of Hekate as dwelling "in the depth of the hearth",[94\9] and being honoured together with the underworld Hermes, her masculine counterpart, among the domestic gods who "were left to us by our forefathers".[95\9]
This domestic cult may be a legacy from times when in familiar intercourse with the lower world men did not yet fear "pollution" therefrom.[95a\9] To later ages Hekate was the principal source and originator of all that was ghostly and uncanny. Men came upon her suddenly and to their hurt by night, or in the dreamy solitudes of midday's blinding heat; they see her in monstrous shapes that, like the figures in a dream, are continually changing.[96\9] The names of many female deities of the underworld of whom the common people had much to say--Gorgyra (Gorgo), Mormo, Lamia, Gello or Empousa, the ghost of midday--denote in reality so many different personifications and variations of Hekate.[97\9] {298} She appeared most frequently by night, under the half-light of the moon, at the cross-roads. She is not alone but is accompanied by her "crew", the hand-maidens who follow in her train. These are the souls of those who have not had their share of burial and the holy rites that accompany it; who have been violently done to death, or who have died "before their time".[98\9] Such souls find no rest after death; they travel on the wind now, in the company of Hekate and her daimonic pack of hounds.[99\9] It is not without reason that we are reminded of the legends of "wild hunters" and the "furious host", so familiar in modern times in many countries.[100\9] Similar beliefs produced similar results in each case; perhaps there is even some historical connexion between them.[101\9] These night-wandering spirits and souls of the dead bring pollution and disaster upon all who meet them or fall into their hands; they send evil dreams, nightmares, nocturnal apparitions, madness and epilepsy.[102\9] It is for them, the unquiet souls of the dead and Hekate their queen, that men set out the "banquets of Hekate" at the cross-roads.[103\9] To them men consign with averted faces the remains of the purificatory sacrifices[104\9] that they may not come too close to human dwelling places. Puppies, too, were sacrificed to Hekate for "purifications", i.e. "apotropaic" sacrifices.
Gruesome inventions of all kinds were easily attached to this province of supernaturalism: it is one of the sources which, with help from other Greek conceptions and many foreign creations of fancy, let loose a stream of anxious and gloomy superstitiousness that spread through the whole of later antiquity and even reached through the Middle Ages to our own day.
Protection and riddance from such things were sought at the hands of seers and "Kathartic priests" who, in addition to ceremonies of purification and exorcism had other ways of giving help--prescriptions and recipes of many strange sorts which were originally clear and natural enough to the fantastic logic of superstition and were still credited and handed down as magic and inexplicable formulæ after their real meaning had been entirely forgotten. Others, again, were driven by a fearful curiosity to attempt to bring the world of surrounding spirits--of whose doings such strange stories were told in legend[105\9]--even closer to themselves. By magic arts and incantations, they compelled the wandering ghosts and even Hekate herself to appear before them:[106\9] the magic power forces them to do the will of the spirit-raiser or to harm his enemies.[107\9] It was these creatures of the spirit-world that {299} magicians and exorcists claimed to banish or compel. Popular belief was on their side in this, but it is hardly possible that they never resorted to deceit and imposture in making good their claims.
§ 7
The mantic and Kathartic practices, together with what arose out of them, are known to us almost exclusively as they were in the time of their decay. Even in the brief sketch just attempted of this notable by-way of Greek religion, many details have had to be taken from the accounts left to us by later ages that had quite outgrown the whole idea of mantic and Kathartic procedure. Compared on the one hand with science, seriously engaged in studying the real and inward sources of being and becoming throughout the world, together with the limitations of man's estate, and on the other hand with the practical and cautious medical study of the physical conditions of human life in health and sickness, the mantic and Kathartic practices and all the myriad superstitions arising from them seemed like a legacy from a forgotten and discredited past. But such things persisted in many circles of old-fashioned and primitive-minded people, though by the emancipated and cultured they were despised as the silly and dangerous quackery of mendicant priests and wizards.
But this product of the religious instinct cannot always have appeared in such a light; it certainly was not so regarded when it first came into prominence. A movement that was zealously taken up by the Delphic oracle, which influenced many Greek states in the organization of their religious cults, must have had a period when its right to exist was incontestable. It must have answered to the needs of a time when the dawning sense of the profound unity and interconnexion of all being and becoming in the world still contented itself with a religious explanation of what seemed mysterious, and when a few chosen natures were seriously credited with the power to communicate with the all-embracing spirit-world. Every age has its own ideal of Wisdom; and there came a time when the ideal of the Wise Man, who by his own innate powers has achieved a commanding spiritual position and insight, became embodied in the persons of certain great men who seemed to fulfil the highest conceptions of wisdom and power that were attributed to the ecstatic seer and priest of purification. The half-mythical stories in which later ages preserved the memory of the times lying just before the {300} age of the philosophic exploration of nature tell us of certain great masters of a mysterious and occult Wisdom. It is true that they are credited with powers over nature of a magical kind rather than with a purely intellectual insight into the laws of nature; but even in the scanty accounts of them which have come down to us there are clear indications that their work already included the first attempts at a mode of study based on theory. We cannot call them philosophers--not even the forerunners of Greek philosophy. More often their point of view was one which the real philosophic impulse towards self-determination and the freedom of the soul consciously and decisively rejected, and continued to reject, though not indeed without occasional wavering and backsliding. These men must be counted among the magicians and exorcists who so often appear in the earliest dawn of the spiritual history of civilized nations, and, as primitive and marvellous types of the spirit of inquiry, precede the philosophers. They all belong to the class of ecstatic seers and Kathartic priests.
Legend related how, out of the country of the Hyperboreans, that distant Wonderland where Apollo hid himself in winter, there came to Greece one Abaris, sent by the god himself. He was a saint and needed no earthly food. Carrying in his hand the golden arrow, the proof of his Apolline origin and mission, he passed through many lands dispelling sickness and pestilence by sacrifices of a magic kind, giving warning of earthquakes and other disasters. Even in later times prophecies and "purifications", going under his name, were still to be read.[108\9]--This man, and also another like him, called Aristeas, were already mentioned by Pindar (_fr._ 271). Aristeas, a man of high rank in his native city of Prokonnesos, had the magic gift of prolonged _ekstasis_. When his soul left his body behind, being "seized by Phoibos", it (as his second self made visible) was seen in distant places.[109\9] As Apollo's attendant he also appeared together with the god in Metapontum. A bronze statue in the market-place of that city remained to testify to his presence there, and to the astonishment awakened by his inspired utterances.[110\9] But among all these examples of the type,[111\9] Hermotimos of Klazomenai is the most striking. His soul could desert his body "for many years", and on its return from its ecstatic voyages, brought with it much mantic lore and knowledge of the future. At last, enemies set fire to the tenantless body of Hermotimos when his soul was away, and the latter returned no more.[112\9]
The greatest master of all these magically gifted men was, {301} according to tradition, Epimenides. His home was in Crete, an ancient centre of Kathartic wisdom,[113\9] where Epimenides was instructed in this lore as an adherent of the cult of the underworld Zeus.[114\9] Through a mist of legend and fable we hear of his prolonged stay in the mysterious cave of Zeus on Mt. Ida, his intercourse with the spirits of the darkness, his severe fasting,[115\9] the long ecstasy of his soul,[116\9] and his final return from solitude to the light of day, much experienced and far-travelled in "enthusiastic wisdom".[117\9] Next he journeyed through many lands bringing his health-giving arts with him, prophesying the future as an ecstatic seer,[118\9] interpreting the hidden meaning of past occurrences, and as Kathartic priest expelling the daimonic evils that arose from specially foul misdeeds of the past. The Kathartic activity of Epimenides in Delos and other Greek cities was famous.[119\9] It was in particular never forgotten how in Athens at the end of the seventh century he brought to a satisfactory close the expiation of the godless murder of the followers of Kylon.[120\9] With potent ceremonies of which his wisdom alone knew the secret, with sacrifice of animals and men, he appeased[121\9] the anger of the offended spirits of the depth who in their rage were "polluting" and harming the city . . .
It was not without reason that later tradition, undeterred by questions of chronological possibility, brought all the names just mentioned into connexion with Pythagoras or his adherents,[122\9] and was even accustomed to refer to Pherekydes of Syros, the latest of the band, as the teacher of Pythagoras. The practice, if not the philosophy, of the Pythagorean sect grew up among the ideas and what may be called the teaching of these men, and belongs to the epoch which honoured them as Wise Men. We still possess a few scraps of evidence to show that the conceptions guiding their life and work tended to reach some sort of unification in the minds of these visionaries who were yet something more than the mere practicians of a magical species of religion. We cannot, indeed, tell how far the fanciful pictures of the origin of the world of men which Epimenides[123\9] and Pherekydes drew were connected with the business and professional activity of these men;[124\9] but when it is related of Hermotimos that he, like his country-man Anaxagoras, attempted a distinction between pure "mind" and matter,[125\9] we can see very clearly how this theory might arise out of his special "experiences". The ecstasies of the soul of which Hermotimos himself and this whole generation had such ample experience seemed to point to the separability of the soul from the body[126\9]--and, indeed, to the superiority of {302} the soul's essence in its separate state over that of the body--as to a fact of the most firmly established authenticity. In contrast with the soul the body could hardly help appearing as an encumbrance, an obstacle to be got rid of. The conception of an ever-threatening pollution and "uncleanness" which was nourished by the teaching and activities of those innumerable purification-priests of whom Epimenides is known to us as the supreme master, had gradually so penetrated the whole of the official religion itself with purification-ceremonies that it might very well have seemed as though, in the midst of this renovation and development of a type of religious thought that had been more than half forgotten in the Homeric period, Greek religion was fast approaching the condition of Brahmanism or Zoroastrianism and becoming essentially a religion of purification. Those who had become familiar with the contrast between body and soul, especially if they lived in the atmosphere of Kathartic ideas and their practical exercise, were almost bound to proceed to the idea that even the "soul" required to be purified from the polluting embarrassment of the body. That such ideas were almost a commonplace is shown by many stories and turns of phrase which represent the destruction of the body by fire as a "purification" of the man himself.[127\9] Wherever these ideas--the precise opposite and contrary of the Homeric conception of the relation between body and soul-image--had penetrated more deeply they must have led to the idea that even in the lifetime of the body the purification of the soul should be prepared by the denial and inhibition of the body and its impulses. The first step was thus taken towards a purely negative system of morality, not attempting the inner reformation of the will, but aiming simply at averting from the soul of man a polluting evil threatening it from without--in fact to a morality of religious _asceticism_ such as later became such an important and decisive spiritual movement in Greece. In spite of all the inadequacy of our information about these Wise Men of the early pre-philosophic period, we can still dimly make out the fact that their natural bent lay in this ascetic direction (the abstention from food practised by Abaris and Epimenides are distinct cases of it).[128\9] How far, exactly, they went in this direction is indeed more than we can say.
Thus, the ascetic ideal was not absent even from Greece. It remained, however--in spite of the influence it had in some quarters--always a foreign thing in Greece, having its obscure home among sects of spiritualistic enthusiasts, and regarded in contrast with the normal and ruling view of life, as a paradox, {303} almost a heresy. The official religion itself is not entirely without the seeds of an ascetic system of morality; but the ascetic ideal, fully developed and distinguished from the simple and normal religious attitude, was in Greece found only among minorities who cut themselves off in closed and exclusive conventicles of a theological or philosophical temper. The "Wise Men" as idealized in the legends of Abaris. Epimenides, etc., were as individuals not far removed from the ideal of asceticism. Nor was it long before the attempt was made to use these ideals as the basis on which to found a society.
NOTES TO