Volume I Part 25 (1/2)
(2) Plutarch, Quest. Rom. 32.
(3) ix. 8, 1.
These commutations are familiar all over the world. Even in Mexico, where human sacrifices and ritual cannibalism were daily events, Quetzalcoatl was credited with commuting human sacrifices for blood drawn from the bodies of the religious. In this one matter even the most conservative creeds and the faiths most opposed to change sometimes say with Tartuffe:--
Le ciel defend, de vrai, certains contentements, Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements.
Though the fact has been denied (doubtless without reflection), the fact remains that the Greeks offered human sacrifices. Now what does this imply? Must it be taken as a survival from barbarism, as one of the proofs that the Greeks had pa.s.sed through the barbaric status?
The answer is less obvious than might be supposed. Sacrifice has two origins. First, there are HONORIFIC sacrifices, in which the ghost or G.o.d (or divine beast, if a divine beast be wors.h.i.+pped) is offered the food he is believed to prefer. This does not occur among the lowest savages. To carnivorous totems, Garcila.s.so says, the Indians of Peru offered themselves. The feeding of sacred mice in the temples of Apollo Smintheus is well known. Secondly, there are expiatory or PIACULAR sacrifices, in which the wors.h.i.+pper, as it were, fines himself in a child, an ox, or something else that he treasures. The latter kind of sacrifice (most common in cases of crime done or suspected within the circle of kindred) is not necessarily barbaric, except in its cruelty.
An example is the Attic Thargelia, in which two human scape-goats annually bore ”the sins of the congregation,” and were flogged, driven to the sea with figs tied round their necks, and burned.(1)
(1) Compare the Ma.r.s.eilles human sacrifice, Petron., 141; and for the Thargelia, Tsetzes, Chiliads, v. 736; h.e.l.lad. in Photius, p. 1590 f. and Harpoc. s. v.
The inst.i.tution of human sacrifice, then, whether the offering be regarded as food, or as a gift to the G.o.d of what is dearest to man (as in the case of Jephtha's daughter), or whether the victim be supposed to carry on his head the sins of the people, does not necessarily date from the period of savagery. Indeed, sacrifice flourishes most, not among savages, but among advancing barbarians. It would probably be impossible to find any examples of human sacrifices of an expiatory or piacular character, any sacrifices at all, among Australians, or Andamanese, or Fuegians. The notion of presenting food to the supernatural powers, whether ghosts or G.o.ds, is relatively rare among savages.(1) The terrible Aztec banquets of which the G.o.ds were partakers are the most noted examples of human sacrifices with a purely cannibal origin. Now there is good reason to guess that human sacrifices with no other origin than cannibalism survived even in ancient Greece. ”It may be conjectured,” writes Professor Robertson Smith,(2) ”that the human sacrifices offered to the Wolf Zeus (Lycaeus) in Arcadia were originally cannibal feasts of a Wolf tribe. The first partic.i.p.ants in the rite were, according to later legend, changed into wolves; and in later times(3) at least one fragment of the human flesh was placed among the sacrificial portions derived from other victims, and the man who ate it was believed to become a were-wolf.”(4) It is the almost universal rule with cannibals not to eat members of their own stock, just as they do not eat their own totem. Thus, as Professor Robertson Smith says, when the human victim is a captive or other foreigner, the human sacrifice may be regarded as a survival of cannibalism. Where, on the other hand, the victim is a fellow tribesman, the sacrifice is expiatory or piacular.
(1) Jevons, Introduction to the Science of Religion, pp. 161, 199.
(2) Encyc. Brit., s. v. ”Sacrifice”.
(3) Plato, Rep., viii. 565, D.
(4) Paus., viii. 2.
Among Greek cannibal G.o.ds we cannot fail to reckon the so-called ”Cannibal Dionysus,” and probably the Zeus of Orchomenos, Zeus Laphystius, who is explained by Suidas as ”the Glutton Zeus”. The cognate verb ((Greek text omitted)) means ”to eat with mangling and rending,” ”to devour gluttonously”. By Zeus Laphystius, then, men's flesh was gorged in this distressing fas.h.i.+on.
The evidence of human sacrifice (especially when it seems not piacular, but a relic of cannibalism) raises a presumption that Greeks had once been barbarians. The presumption is confirmed by the evidence of early Greek religious art.
When his curiosity about human sacrifices was satisfied, the pilgrim in Greece might turn his attention to the statues and other representations of the G.o.ds. He would find that the modern statues by famous artists were beautiful anthropomorphic works in marble or in gold and ivory.
It is true that the faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth were smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or Africa.(1) As a rule, however, the statues of historic times were beautiful representations of kindly and gracious beings. The older works were stiff and rigid images, with the lips screwed into an unmeaning smile. Older yet were the bronze G.o.ds, made before the art of soldering was invented, and formed of beaten plates joined by small nails. Still more ancient were the wooden images, which probably bore but a slight resemblance to the human frame, and which were often mere ”stocks”.(2) Perhaps once a year were shown the very early G.o.ds, the Demeter with the horse's head, the Artemis with the fish's tails, the cuckoo Hera, whose image was of pear-wood, the Zeus with three eyes, the Hermes, made after the fas.h.i.+on of the pictures on the walls of sacred caves among the Bushmen. But the oldest G.o.ds of all, says Pausanias repeatedly, were rude stones in the temple or the temple precinct. In Achaean Pharae he found some thirty squared stones, named each after a G.o.d. ”Among all the Greeks in the oldest times rude stones were wors.h.i.+pped in place of statues.” The superst.i.tious man in Theophrastus's Characters used to anoint the sacred stones with oil. The stone which Cronus swallowed in mistake for Zeus was honoured at Delphi, and kept warm with wool wrappings. There was another sacred stone among the Troezenians, and the Megarians wors.h.i.+pped as Apollo a stone cut roughly into a pyramidal form. The Argives had a big stone called Zeus Kappotas. The Thespians wors.h.i.+pped a stone which they called Eros; ”their oldest idol is a rude stone”.(3) It is well known that the original fetish-stone has been found in situ below the feet of the statue of Apollo in Delos. On this showing, then, the religion of very early Greeks in Greece was not unlike that of modern Negroes. The artistic evolution of the G.o.ds, a remarkably rapid one after a certain point, could be traced in every temple. It began with the rude stone, and rose to the wooden idol, in which, as we have seen, Pausanias and Porphyry found such sanct.i.ty.
Next it reached the hammered bronze image, pa.s.sed through the archaic marbles, and culminated in the finer marbles and the chryselephantine statues of Zeus and Athena. But none of the ancient sacred objects lost their sacredness. The oldest were always the holiest idols; the oldest of all were stumps and stones, like savage fetish-stones.
(1) Pausanias, ii. 2.
(2) Clemens Alex., Protrept. (Oxford, 1715). p. 41.
(3) Gill, Myths of South Pacific, p. 60. Compare a G.o.d, which proved to be merely pumice-stone, and was regarded as the G.o.d of winds and waves, having been drifted to Puka-Puka. Offerings of food were made to it during hurricanes.
Another argument in favour of the general thesis that savagery left deep marks on Greek life in general, and on myth in particular, may be derived from survivals of totemism in ritual and legend. The following instances need not necessarily be accepted, but it may be admitted that they are precisely the traces which totemism would leave had it once existed, and then waned away on the advance of civilisation.(1)
(1) The argument to be derived from the character of the Greek (Greek text omitted) as a modified form of the totem-kindred is too long and complex to be put forward here. It is stated in Custom and Myth, ”The history of the Family,” in M'Lennan's Studies in Early history, and is a.s.sumed, if not proved, in Ancient Society by the late Mr. Lewis Morgan.