BOOKS.
THEMIS.* FIFTY years ago the subject of Greek religion caused few searchings of heart even to the learned. They accepted the saying of Herodotas that "Homer and Hesiod made a theogony for the Greeks," treated mythology as a mere adjunct to classical study, and complacently found in its seeming follies only a fresh proof of "heathen blindness." But to-day all this is changed. We have learned to under- stand that all beliefs, and still more, perhaps, all rites, that may in any sense be called " religious " must, in spite of apparent absurdities, still have in them something which for those who held or practised them was once charged with Life, meaning, and reality. Men do not do weird things wholly without reason. They do not, for instance, "cut themselves with knives and lancets," deuce in frenzy till they drop, or fling themselves beneath an idol's car, except under the influence of what is for them genuine emotion. The emotion may spring from sonic fancy which is wholly false, but the emotion itself is none the less wholly real ; and it is these emotional realities that the student of reli- gion seeks to-day to understand. Beneath all the Protean shapes in which they find outward expression his aim is to penetrate to those deep human impulses and feelings in which they have their common and living source.
• .Where, then, did the Greeks find the source of religious emotion I' Assuredly not altogether, or even chiefly, amid the Olympian dwellers in the Homeric Pantheon. The gods and goddesses of Homer, the moment you study them critically, .1113 seen at once to be the creations of art rather than of feel- ing. Zeus and Apollo, Athens and Aphrodite; as they appear in the Iliad, interest and amuse the fancy, but never touch the heart. They are figures which inspire the sculptor; but seem hardly to suggest worship; and, indeed, throughout Greek literature those great deities who fill so large.a place in out- classical dictionaries, except when they are needed for artistic • Thetnts; a Study of the Soeiat Origins of Greek Religion. By J. .E. aon, LL.D., D.Litt. Cambridge: at tho University Prose. [15e. not.] and decorative purposes, are chiefly treated either with in- difference or contempt, while it may fairly he doubted whether even the Parthenon and the chryselephantine statue- of Athene give proof of any. deepen feeling, than the desire of Pericles and his countrymen to make their city the proudest and most glorious in Greece. For if we would get near truth, get down, as it were, to the bed-rock foundations of Greek beliefs, then we must dismiss the pretty legend that Homer was "the Greek Bible "as an empty tale. The Homeric• gods are not natural reproductions of " primitive " beliefs, but, just like the Homeric hexameter, literary and artistic creations and if we wish to reach the realities of Greek religion we ,must• resolutely turn away from masterpieces of imagination, whether in art or literature, and patiently examine those fragmentary relics of the past in which religious thought has found expression in forms which are often crude nal inartistic, hut which are also, for that very reason, more truthful and of higher evidential value. Let the ordinary Greek scholar, for instance, take up this volume and merely glance at the strange objects there illustrated. They are all the embodiments of thoughts that were once living, and yet he will find that almost all of them seem to him either meaningless or. grotesque. Here, for example, is "an archaic terra-cotta " in which a bearded figure, "wearing a neat chitou," holding an olive spray in one hand and ending in a snake's tail, is placed opposite a helmeted female, while between them, rising from. the base, appear the immense head and shoulders of another female, who with .uplifted bands offers to the first one the image of a naked youth. Or hero are two warriors standing solemnly on either side of a white mound in the centre of which. appears a snake, while on the top appears "a conical stone painted black and roughly finger-shaped." Or, again, you find an altar on which an eight-spoked wheel is carved above a conventional thunderbolt, and you ask wonderingly what these things mean. Yet you are face to face with images that. represent real " religious " feeling far more genuinely than. either the Zeus of Phidias or all the statues of Aphrodite in the world. For the seed of religion is awe and wonder, and to primi- tive man the greatest of all wonders is the perpetual alternation. of life and death. The plant withers, but rises up again ; the beast perishes, but is 'renewed;- the man dies, but the child is born and the tribe remains. The mystery of the process is insoluble, and yet ever present to his thought. He has the closest concern in it—for unless corn grows and beasts multiply wherewithal shall he live F—and being conscious of his own vitality, knowing himself to have the strange, incomprehensible power of producing life, he begins some- how to feel that, as he shares in life, So also it may be possible for kim to assist, as it were, and strengthen those unknown forces which everywhere around him are making for life and the renewal of life. Hence come the numberless rites whose aim is to render stronger and more vigorous the Tree-Spirit, the Corn-Spirit, or what Miss Harrison calla the minutes- daimon, the spirit and potency of the recurring year. Hence, too, those weird Feasts of Raw Flesh in which . some animal is torn into pieces and eaten at "a shared meal" Oa(s) in order that the communicants may share in his mane, or principle of life; and if he is a holy animal, like "Dionysus the Bull," become themselves sacramentally participants in his divine and life-giving powers. Hence also those phallic rites of universal, prevalence which to us seem merely obscene, but under which lies a deep sense of the eternal mystery of birth. . And then, using these brief hints for at least some guidance in a vast and obscure theme, look back at the grotesque images we have just described. The male figure in the first is Oecrops, the eponym and embodiment of the whole Cecropid tribe : his snake is the symbol of perpetuity and his olive-spray of fruit- fulness, while the female head is that of mother Earth handing to Athena, his foster-mother, the youngErichthonius, the new snake-king in whom the whole race of " earthborn" Athenians finds the pledge of its own perpetual renewal. The mound by which the two warriors stand, possibly to pledge an oath, is a grave-mound, whitened because, like "the whited sepnl- chres "of the Jews, to touch it was iabu, and both by the snake within and still more by the surmounting cone it unites to the memorial of death the symbols of life and generation; while, in the third sketch, the thunderbolt on the altar marks man's awe for that power of the germ which brings down the sky into the lap of earth in fertilizing rain—ge kUe was the Orphic cry—and the wheel his reverence for that
circular and ordered movement. of San and Moon front which the changing seasons draw their influence over decay and growth. Assuredly there is nothing grotesqueur unintelligible here, The symbolism differs widely from our own ; we can only in these days grasp its meaning vaguely and in part; but even ao it speaks to us with a living voice as the real expression of human feeling mid desire.
We cannot, however, attempt to follow Miss Harrison at length. Her learning is inexhaustible; the facts she brings together are so numerous and so novel; her argument so depends on detailed examination of them all, and on the cumulative force of the inferences she draws from them, that no critic, even if by rare chance be possessed the requisite knowledge, could pregame .adequately to discuss her work within the • limits of a brief article. "We shall have to consider," she herself writes, "magic, mono, tabu, the Olympics Games, the Drama, Sateramentalism, Carnivals, Hero-worship, Initiation Ceremonies, and the Platonic doctrine of Anainnesis," and as the list should certainly also include her own Peolegontena, the philosophy of Bergson, and the social Psychology of Professor Durkheitn, a • theme so multifarious snight well deter the most daring of reviewers. And yet there are two points that stand out with eminent clearness. One is that this is a great book; the other that, quite apart from its main argument, it is everywhere full of living interest. When, indeed, Miss Harrison puts forward as her chief contention that "among primitive peoples" religion always "reflects," not individual, but " collective feeling and collective thinking," and that." primitive gods are to a large extent collective enthn- eiasms uttered, formulated," then "externalized," or, as it were, "projected" outside the group (Micros) and finally " per- sonified," so that, for example, when the group of Kouretes, or young men who have just reached puberty, call upon their leader, "the greatest Kouros," to "leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks, and leap for fields of fruit," their joint emotional desire by a ritual " leaping " to influence fer- tility is poured, so to speak, into him, become gathered up and incarnate in him, so that he becomes almost a divine embodiment of increase-giving power, then we must allow that her conclusion is so perplexing and difficult as to arouse doubt. But the real greatness of her book consists, we think, in the new light it throws on those parts of Greek religion which have hitherto been most obscure. We have all felt that such subjects as Orpheus and Orphism, the mysteries of Eleusis, the Dionysiac rites which Euripides portrays in the Bacchac, the festival of the Anthesteria, the strange Hermes' figures 'whose mutilation shocked the very soul of Athens, the legends that concern Thesens and the Minotaur, the labours and immoralities of Hercules, and a hundred similar things had for the Greeks a vital interest, though to us they have hitherto been but idlc tales. But Miss Harrison quickens them all with new life. Take Hercules as a single instance. To most of us he is as unreal as Jack the Giant-killer. But turn him into a year-daimon, "a humanized Helios," look at him (Fig. 100) sitting in that boat, or golden cup, in which the Sun, who " has labour all his days," sleeps and sails at sunset, or tearing off from the river Acheloos (Fig. 99) the horn 'which he afterwards (Fig. 98) carries as a cornucopia; learn to see in his club the bough which marks its bearer as ruling over plant life, or think of how lads just grown to manhood (epheboi) offered him libations "before the cutting of their
hair," while in the end he himself receives for bride "the fair Hobe," who is "maiden-youth in its first bloom," and you feel zit once that if Miss Harrison " desiccates " the Olympians into mere outlines of deities, she can at least put something that pulses with life and energy in their place. And, then, too, whether you agree with her or not, she is always interesting.
But, again, a single illustration of her power must suffice, and it shall refer to that Salmoneus whom Virgil, as "an orthodox theologian," consigned to hell 1.•–• " For that he mocked the lightning and the W.:oder Of Jove in high Olympus . .
The iuimito.ble bolt He atiluickod and the .storm cloud with the beat Of brass and clashing horse hooves."
But the character of Salmonella . is cleared at last. He was a good, pious, primitive king who, as the head of his tribe, was, after his own fashion, trying to make thunder, not for theatrical effect, but simply to induce rain, just as other folk try to do the same thing now with that uneanny'instriunent known as "a bull-roarer" (in Scotland they call it S " thunner spell ") or vine growers more scientifically by a discharge of gunpowder. Unhappily, however, for him, Zeus, having now got comfortably settled in Olympus, was annoyed at being reminded that he had once been only it mere thunderstorm, and so hurled Salmoneus into Hades, there to reflect on the danger of playing magical tricks on it
real, fully developed god. • There is, however, one protest which must, we think, be made. When Miss Harrison discusses Greek religion she is dealing with a religion which makes little positive claim to be other than the outcome of human thought, but Christianity asserts a wholly different origin, and it is surely confusing, even, perhaps, unfair, to sot, as she sometimes does, Christian and Greek thoughts side by side as exactly similar,
• while ignoring that belief in direct revelation which separates them by an unbridged chasm. It is, for instance, easy to find analogies between nature worship and St. Paul's references to the death and rebirth of grain, Or to draw parallels between Zeus the Thunderer and words that are still applied by Christians to Jehovah; but assuredly to set at the head of a chapter a quotation which states that "the thunderbolt governs the universe" and then beneath it the words, "For Thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory, for ever. and ever," is to give an equal shock to feeling and intelligence. And although Miss Harrison may be convinced that belief in the renewal of life through death in a recurrent cycle (7raAi7'yneeta(it) is philosophically truer than a belief in immor- tality, yet surely to introduce such a discussion, as she does, almost parenthetically is hardly to recognize either its difficulty or its importance. Or, finally, when in her eagerness• to get rid of any God who is not a mere "projection" of' social feeling she refers—in a footnote—" to the mistake made by Plato when he equated .1-2, '6, with raya06v," does she forget that unless "the one," the ultimate reality which underlies all existence, is somehow " equated " or identified with "the good" the continuation and evolution of life seem to have neither aim nor goal
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