Volume I Part 25 (2/2)

That Greeks in certain districts regarded with religious reverence certain plants and animals is beyond dispute. That some stocks even traced their lineage to beasts will be shown in the chapter on Greek Divine Myths, and the presumption is that these creatures, though explained as incarnations and disguises of various G.o.ds, were once totems sans phrase, as will be inferred from various examples. Clemens Alexandrinus, again, after describing the animal-wors.h.i.+p of the Egyptians, mentions cases of zoolatry in Greece.(1) The Thessalians revered storks, the Thebans weasels, and the myth ran that the weasel had in some way aided Alcmena when in labour with Heracles. In another form of the myth the weasel was the foster-mother of the hero.(2) Other Thessalians, the Myrmidons, claimed descent from the ant and revered ants. The religious respect paid to mice in the temple of Apollo Smintheus, in the Troad, Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos and Crete is well known, and a local tribe were alluded to as Mice by an oracle. The G.o.d himself, like the j.a.panese harvest-G.o.d, was represented in art with a mouse at his foot, and mice, as has been said, were fed at his shrine.(3) The Syrians, says Clemens Alexandrinus, wors.h.i.+p doves and fishes, as the Elians wors.h.i.+p Zeus.(4) The people of Delphi adored the wolf,(5) and the Samians the sheep. The Athenians had a hero whom they wors.h.i.+pped in the shape of a wolf.(6) A remarkable testimony is that of the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius, ii. 124. ”The wolf,” he says, ”was a beast held in honour by the Athenians, and whosoever slays a wolf collects what is needful for its burial.” The burial of sacred animals in Egypt is familiar. An Arab tribe mourns over and solemnly buries all dead gazelles.(7) Nay, flies were adored with the sacrifice of an ox near the temple of Apollo in Leucas.(8) Pausanias (iii. 22) mentions certain colonists who were guided by a hare to a site where the animal hid in a myrtle-bush. They therefore adore the myrtle, (Greek text omitted). In the same way a Carian stock, the Ioxidae, revered the asparagus.(9) A remarkable example of descent mythically claimed from one of the lower animals is noted by Otfried Muller.(10) Speaking of the swan of Apollo, he says, ”That deity was wors.h.i.+pped, according to the testimony of the Iliad, in the Trojan island of Tenedos. There, too, was Tennes honoured as the (Greek text omitted) of the island. Now his father was called Cycnus (the swan) in an oft-told and romantic legend.(11)... The swan, therefore, as father to the chief hero on the Apolline island, stands in distinct relation to the G.o.d, who is made to come forward still more prominently from the fact that Apollo himself is also called father of Tennes. I think we can scarcely fail to recognise a mythus which was local at Tenedos.... The fact, too, of calling the swan, instead of Apollo, the father of a hero, demands altogether a simplicity and boldness of fancy which are far more ancient than the poems of Homer.”

(1) Op. cit., i. 34.

(2) Scholiast on Iliad, xix. 119.

(3) Aelian, H. A., xii. 5; Strabo, xiii. 604. Compare ”Apollo and the Mouse, Custom and Myth, pp. 103-120.

(4) Lucian, De Dea Syria.

(5) Aelian, H. A., xii. 40.

(6) Harpocration, (Greek text omitted). Compare an address to the wolf-hero, ”who delights in the flight and tears of men,” in Aristophanes, Vespae, 389.

(7) Robertson Smith, Kins.h.i.+p in Early Arabia, pp. 195-204.

(8) Aelian, xi. 8.

(9) Plutarch, Theseus, 14.

(10) Proleg., Engl. trans., p. 204.

(11) (Canne on Conon, 28.)

Had Muller known that this ”simplicity and boldness of fancy” exist to-day, for example, among the Swan tribe of Australia, he would probably have recognised in Cycnus a survival from totemism. The fancy survives again in Virgil's Cupavo, ”with swan's plumes rising from his crest, the mark of his father's form”.(1) Descent was claimed, not only from a swan Apollo, but from a dog Apollo.

(1) Aeneid, x. 187.

In connection with the same set of ideas, it is pointed out that several (Greek text omitted), or stocks, had eponymous heroes, in whose names the names of the ancestral beast apparently survived. In Attica the Crioeis have their hero (Crio, ”Ram”), the Butadae have Butas (”Bullman”), the Aegidae have Aegeus (”Goat”), and the Cynadae, Cynus (”Dog”). Lycus, according to Harpocration (s. v.) has his statue in the shape of a wolf in the Lyceum. ”The general facts that certain animals might not be sacrificed to certain G.o.ds” (at Athens the Aegidae introduced Athena, to whom no goat might be offered on the Acropolis, while she herself wore the goat skin, aegis), ”while, on the other hand, each deity demanded particular victims, explained by the ancients themselves in certain cases to be hostile animals, find their natural explanation” in totemism.(1) Mr. Evelyn Abbott points out, however, that the names Aegeus, Aegae, Aegina, and others, may be connected with the goat only by an old volks-etymologie, as on coins of Aegina in Achaea.

The real meaning of the words may be different. Compare (Greek text omitted), the sea-sh.o.r.e. Mr. J. G. Frazer does not, at present, regard totemism as proved in the case of Greece.(2)

(1) Some apparent survivals of totemism in ritual will be found in the chapter on Greek G.o.ds, especially Zeus, Dionysus, and Apollo.

(2) See his Golden Bough, an alternative explanation of these animals in connection with ”The Corn Spirit”.

As final examples of survivals from the age of barbarism in the religion of Greece, certain features in the Mysteries may be noted. Plutarch speaks of ”the eating of raw flesh, and tearing to pieces of victims, as also fastings and beatings of the breast, and again in many places abusive language at the sacrifices, and other mad doings”. The mysteries of Demeter, as will appear when her legend is criticised, contained one element all unlike these ”mad doings”; and the evidence of Sophocles, Pindar, Plutarch and others demonstrate that religious consolations were somehow conveyed in the Eleusinia. But Greece had many other local mysteries, and in several of these it is undeniable the Greeks acted much as contemporary Australians, Zunis and Negroes act in their secret initiations which, however, also inculcate moral ideas of considerable excellence. Important as these a.n.a.logies are, they appear to have escaped the notice of most mythologists. M. Alfred Maury, however, in Les Religions de la Grece, published in 1857, offers several instances of hidden rites, common to h.e.l.las and to barbarism.

There seem in the mysteries of savage races to be two chief purposes.

There is the intention of giving to the initiated a certain sacred character, which puts them in close relation with G.o.ds or demons, and there is the introduction of the young to complete or advancing manhood, and to full partic.i.p.ation in the savage Church with its ethical ideas.

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