Greece and Babylon

Chapter XIII Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual

A comparison of the forms observed in these regions, both in regard to the minute details and to the general underlying ideas, ought to contribute independent evidence to the solution of our question. The transmission of precise rules of ritual from one people to another, implies an intercourse of some duration, and more or less regulated; for while the name of a god or a single myth is volatile, and can be wafted down remote routes by an itinerant trader, or nomad, or hunter, the introduction of any organised ritual implies, as a rule, the presence of the missionary or the foreign priest. If, then, there is any evidence suggesting that Greece in its earliest period learnt its ritual from Babylon, the importance of this for the ethnic history of religion will be great indeed. Therefore it may seem that a detailed comparison of the Eastern and Western ritual is forced upon us at this point: but it would be premature to expect at present any finality in the result, because the Mesopotamian documents have only been very incompletely examined and published by the linguistic experts. However, the material that they have presented to us reveals certain salient facts of immediate value for our present purpose that cannot be wholly illusory, however much we may have to modify our interpretation of them in the light of future discovery.

As regards the Greek evidence, we are not without fairly ample testimony concerning the earliest period. The Homeric poems present us with the contemporary religious practices of at least a portion of the population whom we may conveniently call the Achaeans; though we have no right to suppose that they give us a complete account even of those. Again, as ritual does not spring up in a day, and has a singular longevity, we may be sure that much of Homeric ritual is a tradition of the second millennium. Furthermore, we can supplement Homer by later testimony, of which the lateness of date is no argument against the primitiveness of the fashions that it may attest.

The first superficial comparison of Mesopotamian and Aegean ceremonies exhibits a general similarity in the mechanism of religion; an established priesthood, temples, images, altars, prayers, sacrifice, religious music, holy days, consultation of the gods by methods of divination, a certain ceremonious tendance of the dead, these are common features of East and West. But if we were comparing Hellenic with Egyptian or Vedic, or even Mexican and Peruvian religion, we should be able to point to the same general agreement in externals, and many of these institutions are found broadcast over the modern world of savage society. It will be more important for the present question, if when we examine the Babylonian, Anatolian, and Hellenic ritual more minutely we discern salient differences, especially if these are found in certain organic centres of the religious life such as was the sacrifice. And we must first try to determine whether the Hellas of the pre-Homeric days already possessed all those religious institutions roughly enumerated above. We can deal to some extent with both these problems together.

The erection of temples is an important stage in the higher development of anthropomorphic religion. By the beginning of the second millennium B.C. this had become an immemorial tradition of Mesopotamia. But we are not sure at what period the other polytheistic Semites first evolved the architectural shrine, or how long they were content to use the natural cave as the house of a divinity, or a high place or “temenos” with altar or sacred pillar. The recent excavations at Gezer have revealed a glimpse into the religion of the prehistoric Semites of Canaan; and one shrine that seems nothing more than a row of sacred monoliths, but also another that has more the appearance of an elaborate building of a sacred character.^223.1 Of still greater antiquity was the shrine that Professor Petrie has discovered at Serabit in the Sinaitic peninsula, an original cave-temple complicated with the addition of porticoes and chambers, which he believes to have been devoted to a double cult, the Egyptian and Semitic.^223.2 At all events, we may conclude that before 1000 B.C. most of the more cultured Semitic communities in Asia Minor had come to house their divinities in more or less elaborated shrines.

As regards the other race that dominated the early period of Anatolian history, the Hittite, we have the priceless evidence of the Boghaz-Keui monuments: these reveal a complex temple hewn out of and into the rocky ravine with a “Holy of Holies” and what appears to be a sleeping-chamber for the god.^223.3 In Phrygia, the artificial shrine may have been late in supplanting the natural cavern or hole in the rock that was once the sufficient home of the cult of the great goddess.^223.4 From the coast of Asia Minor we have no evidence concerning the site of any ancient temple that carries us back to the early period with which we are dealing.^224.1 But the Homeric poems alone are sufficient proof that the Greeks, for whom they were composed, were beginning to be familiar with some architectural type of the deity’s habitation. Apollo Smintheus already has his shrine and professional priest.^224.2 We hear of the temple and priestess of Athena in Troy,^224.3 of her shrine at Athens, which she shared with Erechtheus,^224.4 and the stone-threshold of Apollo at Delphi, that guarded already many treasures within it.^224.5 And we also know from the excavations of the last few years that the Aryan invaders from the North, the proto-Hellenes, would find temples on some at least of the sites of the Minoan culture. Crete has preserved certain shrines of the second millennium; but except the temple-cave on Dikte all of them so far are found to be merely domestic chapels in the king’s palace, as though the king were personally responsible for the religion of the community: and so at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Athens, the oldest temples have been found on the foundations of “Mycenaean” palaces.^224.6 But the temples of Hera on the public hill of Argos and at Olympia are now dated near to 800 B.C.^224.7

We have, then, proof sufficient of temple-construction in Greece and the Aegean islands before the period of Homer; and if we must have recourse to the theory that the peoples of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture took their cue in this important evolution from some foreign civilisation, we should look to Egypt rather than to Assyria, as nearer and more closely in touch with early Crete.

We may mark here a difference between Eastern and Western thought in the religious conception of the temple. It was naturally regarded everywhere as sacrosanct, because permeated with the virtue of the divine presence; but Babylonia developed this idea with greater intensity of conviction than the Hellene, and actually deified the temple itself: the King Nabopolassar (circ. 625 B.C.) prays to it in such words as these, “Oh, temple, be gracious to the king thy restorer, and if Marduk enters thee in triumph, report my piety to him.”^225.1 Such exaggeration is not found in Greek religion.^225.2

As regards the emblem of divinity, the cult-object set up in the shrine to attract and to mark the presence of the deity, the Mesopotamian religion had, as we have seen, already evolved the eikon or image at some period considerably earlier than the second millennium, and the statue of the god or goddess had become an important factor of early ritual: only the emblem of Asshur remained aniconic.^225.3 Of equally early vogue was the image, whether human or theriomorphic, in Egyptian cult. Again, the early Hittite monuments reveal it clearly, though aniconic fetiches appear also on the reliefs of Boghaz-Keui. But it is probable that the Western Semites, and the tribes of Arabia before 1200 B.C., and many of them for centuries after, preferred the aniconic emblem, the “Ashera” or post, or heap of stones or pillar, to the iconic statue; in fact, that temple idolatry in its developed forms as it presents itself in later Mediterranean history was alien to the old and genuine tradition of Semitic public worship. Iconic representations of divinities may indeed be found in Western Semitic regions, and some of these may be of great antiquity; such as the silver statue that Thutmose III. (of the fifteenth century B.C.) carried off from Megiddo and the Lebanon,^226.1 or the “Astarte”-plaques found on the site of Gezer.

But in Semitic communities of the earlier period such objects belonged rather to the private religion, and the public service centred round the sacred pillar or stone, as was the case at Mecca both before and after Islam arose: the evidence for this has been carefully given and estimated by Robertson Smith and Sir Arthur Evans.^226.2

The same statement holds of many of the non-Semitic peoples of Western Anatolia; in Phrygia, for instance, the earliest emblem of Kybele was the rude pillar or cone-shaped stone, and this survived down to late times in the worship of the Anatolian goddess in some of the Greek cities on the Asiatic coast.

The recent discoveries in the regions of the Minoan and Mycenaean culture reveal the same phenomenon: the cults in this area of the Aegean in the second millennium were in the main aniconic, the favourite emblem being the pillar or tree-trunk, while in ancient Crete the axe and even the cross has been found.^227.1 Where the divinity appears in full human shape, as the snake-goddess in the chapel of the cross, the lion-guarded goddess or the god descending in the air above the pillar on the Minoan seals, these figures cannot, or need not, be interpreted as actual temple-idols. And students of the religion of classical Greece are familiar with the ample evidence of the aniconic tradition in the λίθοι ἀργοί, and the cone-shaped pillars and stocks that served as divine emblems in the later temples of Greece.^227.2

Now the ethnic question concerning pillar-cult has been critically discussed by Sir Arthur Evans in his treatise mentioned above; and the conclusion at which he arrives, that the striking parallelisms in Semitic Anatolian and Aegean ritual monuments are not to be explained as the result of direct borrowing from one or the other group of peoples, but as the abiding influence of a very early Mediterranean tradition, commends itself as the most reasonable. It is legitimate to maintain that the earliest Hellenes took over much of this aniconic cult from the earlier Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation; but we must not overlook the fact that they also possessed their own, as a tradition derived from Central Europe.^227.3 The most futile hypothesis would be to assume that the early Greeks derived it from Babylon, where it is less in evidence than in any other Semitic community.^227.4

The iconic impulse whereby the tree-trunk and pillar were gradually supplanted by the fully human statue was beginning to work by the time that the Homeric poems received their present form; for we have in the Iliad^228.1 an undoubted reference to a seated statue of Athena in her temple on the Akropolis of Troy. We see here the working of an instinct that was partly religious, partly, perhaps, aesthetic in its origin. If we are to connect it with foreign influences, Egypt is at least a more “proximate cause” than Babylon.

This comparison of the cult-objects set up in shrines or holy places must take into account the phallic emblem also. This was much in vogue in the worship of Hermes and Dionysos, and was not unknown even in the ritual of Artemis.^228.2 Herodotus maintains that it was adopted by the Hellenes from “the Pelasgians,” but, as I have tried to show elsewhere,^228.3 we cannot attach real value to his induction. It may have descended from an old tradition of European cult, and it was indigenous among other Aryan nations. As regards the Mediterranean races, we find traces of its use in the Samothracian mysteries and in the grave-cult of Phrygia; while some of the records of the Sabazian mysteries suggest that a phallic character attached to them. The Minoan-Mycenaean culture has been regarded as innocent of this, since the phallic emblem does not appear among the monuments yet found; and this opinion is somewhat corroborated by its absence in the ritual of Aphrodite, who may be regarded as a direct descendant of the great Cretan goddess; for only a late and somewhat doubtful text attests the dedication of phalloi to the Cyprian Aphrodite.^229.1 But the evidence from the Phrygian religion, that has many ethnic affinities with Crete, and from such ritual-stories as that of Pasiphae, ought to make us hesitate.

In Semitic ritual the emblem was certainly not commonly in public use, even if it occurred at all; the evidence for it, at present forthcoming, is at least very doubtful; two of the pillars found at Gezer have been supposed to possess phallic attributes;^229.2 but Robertson Smith has well protested against the foolish tendency to interpret sacred pillars generally as phalloi,^229.3 and even regards Lucian’s assertion of the phallic significance of the two sacred pillars, each three hundred feet in height, that flanked the propylaea of the temple at Hierapolis,^229.4 as a mistake suggested to him by the later Hellenic misinterpretation. Other statements of Lucian in that treatise may cause us to believe that a phallic character attached to some part of the ritual of the Syrian goddess; but, if it did, we could not safely regard it as originally Semitic, since so many ethnic strains are mingled in that complex religion.

It is doubtful whether we can recognise the emblem anywhere in the religious monuments of the Hittites, though Perrot would give this interpretation to one of the cult-objects carved on the relief of Boghaz-Keui.^229.5

Finally, its vogue in Babylonia seems to have been confined to private superstition; from the second millennium onwards it was employed as an amulet, and one of the royal chronicles, about 1110 B.C., is inscribed on a tablet that represents a phallos; but we cannot argue from this or any other evidence yet adduced, so far as I am aware, that the emblem was used in public ritual.

So far as we can discern at present, then, the Babylonian and Hellenic phenomena are divergent in respect of pillar-cult and phallic ritual.^230.1

The most interesting part of our present inquiry is the comparison of the ceremonies and the concept of sacrifice in East and West. At the first glance we note, as usual, a certain general similarity. In the earliest period we find various animals, both wild and domestic, offered upon the altars, but in Babylonia no special rules concerning their sex, such as were prescribed by ancient Greek and Judaic ritual. In all these countries, again, bloodless offerings of cereals and fruits were in common vogue; and in the earliest Babylonian period, these were of great variety, an inscription of Gudea mentioning butter, honey, wine, corn with milk, figs, dates, as the food of the gods, “untouched by fire.”^230.2 We note here the distinction familiar in Greek ritual, between ἔμπυρα and ἄπυρα ἱερά; only in Babylonia it does not seem to have been of religious importance, nor to have been developed, as it was in Hellas, into a ceremonial law that might engender an important variation in the moral ideas and religious concepts of the worshipper; for instance, the altar of Apollo at Delos was called καθαρός, “the pure altar,” because no blood could be shed upon it, the sacrifices of Athena Lindia at Rhodes, and of Zeus in certain mystic rites of Crete, were ἄπυρα, or “fireless,” which was the technical name for the oblations of fruits and cereals; and this fact of ritual suggested to later Greek philosophy the ethical-religious view that the “pure,” that is to say, bloodless, offering was the more acceptable oblation, and was a tradition of the age of man’s innocence. This pregnant idea has not yet been discovered in Mesopotamian or in any other old Semitic religion; the Babylonian deities received both kinds, and perhaps simultaneously, though in certain special ceremonies the sacred cake, or the liquid offerings of milk, honey, wine, and oil, might suffice;^231.1 while, according to the ancient Hebraic view, as the legend of Cain and Abel indicates, the deity appears to prefer blood-sacrifice, though each species is recognised in the pre-exilic sacral literature.^231.2

There is another distinction observed in Greek ritual, that becomes of some importance in the later history of ascetic purity, that between wineless offerings (νηφάλια) and those accompanied with wine: the former being preferred by the powers of the lower world,^231.3 though not invariably, and certainly not by the departed hero. However this distinction arose—and no single hypothesis explains all the cases—it was not a Semitic tradition, taught in early days to Hellas. For the Semitic divinities, including Jahwé, have a genial liking for wine “which cheereth God and man”;^232.1 nor have we any Semitic example of a taboo on it, except possibly a late Nabataean inscription from the neighbourhood of Palmyra, mentioning “the god who drinks no wine.”^232.2 Such a phrase would certainly not apply to the deities of Babylon; even the sun-god, who in Hellas appears to have been a total abstainer, is offered wine in the Babylonian service,^232.3 and, according to one verse in the Epic of Creation, the deities actually get drunk,^232.4 a grossness which, in the mythic imagination of Hellas, is only imagined as possible for Dionysos.

We have the right to say, then, that the avoidance of wine in certain religious services of Hellas helps to confirm the impression of its early independence of Semitic influences. The Hellenic rule may, in certain cases, have been derived from an older Aegean tradition; for two of the deities to whom it was applied, Helios and Aphrodite, may be believed to have been bequeathed to Greece by the Minoan-Mycenaean religion; and wine appears to have been prohibited in certain ceremonies of the Phrygian goddess,^232.5 and of a goddess of Caria.^232.6

These are differences of some importance, and doubtless of great antiquity between the ritual of East and West; more insignificant, yet of considerable value for our present question, is the fact that incense was a regular accompaniment of the Babylonian sacrifice, but did not come into religious use in Greece till some time after the period of Homer. The fact itself we may consider as proved, both by Homer’s silence about it, and by the Homeric use of the word θύος, which means “victim,” and never “incense,” as in later Greek it came to mean. Had the influence of the Mesopotamian culture been as strong on Greece in the second millennium as it came to be from 800 B.C. onwards, we should certainly have expected that the religious use of incense, which is very attractive and spreads easily from one race to another, would have been adopted by Greek ritual before the time of Homer.

A more essential point is the sharp contrast preserved in the Greek rites between the Olympian and the Chthonian ritual; a contrast that demanded a difference of terminology and dictated different sacral laws concerning time, manner, place of sacrifice, and choice of victim. So far, I have not been able to discover any hint of this important bifurcation of ritual in any Mesopotamian record. The only nether-world power who was worshipped at all was Nergal, whether under this or other names; and it does not appear that his worship differed in any essential respect from that of any other high god. In fact, the dualism between powers of the upper and powers of the lower world, which has been generally remarked, and sometimes exaggerated in Hellenic polytheism, only appears slightly in the Babylonian, and seems to have left no impress on the divine service at all.

As regards the animals of sacrifice, the only striking divergence that Hellenic and Semitic custom presents is in respect of the swine. The sanctity or horror with which this animal was regarded by most Semitic societies^234.1 is not reflected in any record of early Greek feeling. Being the Hellene’s common food, he offered it freely to the deity, though in local cults there might occasionally be a taboo on this as elsewhere on other victims, such as sheep or goat. But it is possible that some of the predecessors of the Hellene in Crete and Asia Minor, if not in Greece itself, shared the Semitic sentiment in regard to the pig; and the reverence paid to it in Crete, and especially at Praisos in later times,^234.2 may have been a legacy of Minoan religion; also the Carian worship of Hemithea in which swine were tabooed may have had ancient links with Crete.^234.3 But the facts of swine-sacrifice or swine-reverence, though they serve to distinguish the Hellenic from the ordinary Semitic community, do not bear directly on our present problem, the proofs of early Mesopotamian influence on the proto-Hellenic race. For the usual Semitic taboo has not yet been found in Mesopotamia. The pig is mentioned in a religious text as one of the animals that might be offered to the gods as a vicarious piacular sacrifice, nor is there any hint that the animal is being offered as an unclean animal.^234.4 Certainly, other animals are mentioned much more frequently as victims; and I am not aware of any other text that mentions swine-sacrifice. It was associated in some way with the god Ninib, one of whose appellatives means “swine”;^234.5 but no evidence is yet forthcoming that it was offered to him.

A question now arises of greater moment both for our present purpose and for the wider interests of Comparative Religion. Was the purport and significance of the sacrificial act the same in the Western society as that which is revealed in the sacred literature of Babylonia? No part of the ancient religious system has been the theme of so much study and speculation in recent years as the ancient sacrifice. Robertson Smith in his epoch-making book, The Religion of the Semites, was the pioneer of a new theory; which has since been developed or modified by certain English and a few Continental scholars following on his track. The result of these labours has been to formulate and define various forms of sacrifice that prevailed in the Mediterranean area. Three main types appear to emerge: (a) the gift sacrifice, where an oblation is given over entirely to the deity, whether generally to win his favour, or in special circumstances—for instance, after sin has been committed—to appease his wrath, or as a thank-offering for favour received; (b) the communion sacrifice, where the community or the individual eat with the deity, strengthening their feeling of fellowship by a common meal; (c) the sacramental type, where the community or the individual may be said to “eat the god,” that is, to partake of food or drink made sacred by the infusion of the divine spirit or personality, which is thus communicated to the partaker. It is best for the present to regard these three as separate and independent, without trying to determine which is prior and which posterior.^235.1

The first type, which is almost ubiquitous in the human societies that have arrived at the belief in personal deities, is sufficiently attested by Homer of the early Greeks, who promise and perform the sacrifice partly as an offering to please or to appease the deity. What is more important is the evidence, which I have dealt with elsewhere,^236.1 that Homeric society was familiar also with the more genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal where the worshipper and the deity meet around the altar; this emerges clearly in the accounts that Homer has given us of an Achaean sacrificial feast.^236.2 Even the germs are already visible of the idea from which the third or more mystic type of sacrifice, what I have called the sacramental type, might be evolved; for special significance attaches to the acts described in the phrases οὐλοχύτας προβάλοντο and σπλάγχν᾽ ἐπάσαντο, “they threw forward the barley-shreddings” and “they tasted the entrails”: the first phrase is not wholly clear, but it may signify that stalks of barley are first placed on the altar, and thereby consecrated or filled with the divine virtue that is inherent there, and then the beast is touched with these on the forehead and thereby becomes himself filled with the spirit of godhead;^236.3 the second is also a mystic act, for the σπλάγχνα specially contain the life, which is now infused with divinity, and by tasting them the worshippers partake of the divine life. All this arises solely from the extraordinary degree of supernatural force or “Mana” which the altar itself possesses, a force which may have been an inheritance from long ages of pillar-worship, if we believe the altar to have been evolved from the sacred pillar.^237.1 It explains other details in the old Hellenic sacrificial act; such as the casting the hairs of the victim into the altar-flame,^237.2 which established a communion between the animal and the deity, the practice of solemnly consecrating the lustral water by ceremoniously carrying it round the altar,^237.3 and charging it with a still more potent infusion of divinity by plunging into it a lighted brand from the altar-fire.^237.4

The communion sacrifice must then have been in vogue in pre-Homeric times; and the idea that gave it its meaning never wholly faded from the State-ritual; for the rule, expressed by such formulae as οὐκ ἀποφορά, δαινύσθων αὐτοῦ, bidding the worshipper conclude the feast round the altar and take none of the flesh home, seems to arise partly from the feeling that the ceremony was meaningless unless he feasted wholly with the deity.^237.5 But it was most vividly realised in the religious services of the θίασοι, the later religious orders or fraternities devoted each to the cult of its special divinity; for these a common religious meal formed the chief binding-tie.^237.6

Apart from the Homeric evidence, we have the record of the Attic Bouphonia as attestation of the great antiquity of this type of sacrifice in Greece. To the actual statement of the details given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias, much is added by the curious aetiological legends that grew up around it.^238.1 We see the ox marking himself for sacrifice by voluntarily going up to the altar and eating the corn upon it, being thus called, as it were, by the god into communion with himself. As he is thus full of the spirit of the god, it is regarded a sacrilegious act to slay him; but all the citizens partake of his flesh, and even the stranger who eats becomes himself a citizen, as through this feast he enters into kinship with Zeus Polieus. All this can be explained by the belief that Zeus Polieus is in the altar; and we need not resort to such theories as that the ox is a totem-animal or the spirit of vegetation.

We must, however, beware of concluding that because the victim was thus temporarily possessed with godhead and in this holy state devoured, he was therefore literally regarded as the full incarnation of the god, or that the worshipper consciously believed he was eating his own deity who died in the sacrifice. For religious consciousness by no means always draws the full logical corollaries of a religious act. The more mystic idea, that has played a great part in the religion of Europe, can only be detected or suspected, apart from written direct ancient testimony, where the animal is treated with reverence apart from and before his association with the altar, or is regarded as the habitual incarnation of the deity. The immolation and devouring of such a victim would be of the true sacramental type, which Robertson Smith believed was the aboriginal form of all sacrifice. But we have no clear example of it from the earliest period of genuine Hellenic religion, unless we force the evidence or exaggerate its meaning.^239.1 We have only certain myths that we may doubtfully venture to interpret by means of this hypothesis. And these are no myths about animals, but about human victims devoured in sacrifice: the most significant is the story of the cannibalistic feast held by King Lykaon, who cooked his own son and offered the flesh to Zeus, a ritual of which some survival, whether mimetic or half-real, was witnessed by Pausanias himself on Mount Lykaon.^239.2 This would point to sacramental cannibalism, if we assume that King Lykaon was the human incarnation of Zeus Lykaios and that his son was therefore a divine infant. But it is possible that the story enshrines the remembrance of the more ordinary clan-sacrifice of the life of a clansman to procure them communion with the clan-god by the common partaking of his flesh: the kinsman is offered rather than the animal, not so much that the sacrificers may eat their god, but that the god by consuming their most valued life may be more closely incorporate with them.

Again, in one of the darkest and most perplexing of Greek legends, the story of Klumenos of Argos and his incestuous love of his daughter Harpalyke, who revenges herself by slaying her own child and offering it to the father in a sacrificial meal, we may discern the glimmer of a remembrance of a cannibal sacrament. The associations of the story dimly indicate a Thracian origin.^239.3 And it is in the range of the Greek Dionysiac cult, which according to the most probable view was adopted from Thrace, that we find imprinted on legend and ritual the tradition of a savage type of sacrament, in which the human or animal incarnation of the god was devoured. Such is the significance that we may fairly attach to the Titan-story of the murder of the infant Dionysos, to the σπαραγμός of the goat or bull or snake periodically practised by the Bacchoi or Bacchae, and to the death of Pentheus.^240.1 And in later Greek ritual the consciousness here and there survived that the victim offered to Dionysos incarnated the very deity, even before it acquired the temporary mystic afflatus from contact with the altar. The record of the ritual of Tenedos, in which a sacred pregnant cow was tended reverently and the calf that she bore was dressed in the buskins and then sacrificed to Dionysos, “the render of men,” is the most piquant example.^240.2

This Dionysiac tradition reaches back undoubtedly to the second millennium in Greece; the evidence of a similar sacramental ritual in purely Hellenic worship is shadowy and slight, for the critical examination of the Eleusinian mysteries does not clearly reveal it; and the growth and diffusion of the idea in later Paganism does not concern us now.

But the consideration of the early Hellenic sacrifice, of which the salient features have been slightly sketched above, is of signal value for our present purpose. For it reveals at once a marked contrast to Babylonian ideas so far as these at present are revealed to us. The Babylonian-Assyrian liturgies, epics, and chronicles have failed to disclose any other theory of the sacrifice than that which is called the gift-theory. A general term for the Babylonian sacrifice is “kishtu” or “present.”^241.1 The deities are supposed to eat what is given them; in the Epic of the Deluge the naïve phrase occurs, “The gods smell the savour, the delightful savour, the gods swarm like flies around the sacrificer.” No evidence is as yet forthcoming that the sacrificer was supposed or was allowed to eat with the deity, as in the Hellenic communion-sacrifice. On the contrary, certain texts can be quoted which seem expressly to forbid such a thing.^241.2 The document already cited that was found in Assurbanipal’s library, containing the Job-like lament of the good man who had found no profit in goodness, contains a verse in which he compares himself with the sinner who neglects all religious ordinances, and who has even “eaten the food of God.” And so we find that among the various evil or impure or unlucky deeds that could bring a man under the ban of the gods, the “devouring of sacrificial flesh” is expressly mentioned.^241.3

Unless, then, documents yet to be revealed contradict this positive and negative evidence, we have here a fact of great weight to set against the theory that we are discussing. Whencesoever the Hellenes derived their genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal, they did not derive it from Babylon. And all Robertson Smith’s speculations concerning the inner significance of the Semitic sacrifice cannot yet be applied to Mesopotamia, whence he was not able to glean any evidence. In Babylonia the sacrificer got no share of the victim. He might eat with the spirits of the dead in certain ritual, but he was not, it appears, privileged to eat with the god or goddess. The deity took the victim, or the sacrifice of cereals and fruits, as a present, and the priest got his share. But we are not told that the priest ate with the god, or where he ate; nor can we say that the priest represented the worshipper.

If a true sacrament is yet to be discovered in Babylonian religion, it will probably be found in some document of the Tammuz ritual. For it is probable that Tammuz was identified with the corn as with other parts of vegetation, and that the mourning for him was accompanied with abstinence from bread. His resurrection ended the fast, and if in their joy the worshippers ceremoniously broke bread, they may have supposed they were eating the body of their risen lord. But such a reconstruction of the old Tammuz ritual rests at present only on the indirect evidence of the later records of Attis-Adonis cult and of the Tammuz-worship among the heathen Syrians of Harran in the tenth century of our era.^242.1

It belongs to the Babylonian conception of the sacrifice as a gift, that the animal was often regarded as a ransom for the man’s own life; that is to say, when sin had been committed, the deity might be placated by the gift of an agreeable victim, and be persuaded to accept it in place of the sinner whose life was properly forfeit. For instance, a sick man is always supposed to have sinned; and the priest who is performing an animal sacrifice in his behalf uses the prayer, “Take his present, take his ransom”;^242.2 and the formula of a sacrifice offered by way of exorcism is very explicit: “A male sheep, a female sheep, a living sheep, a dead sheep shall die, but I shall live.”^243.1 Another inscription^243.2 throws further light on the ritual of the vicarious sacrifice: “To the high-priest may one cry out: the kid of substitution for the man, the kid for his soul he hath brought: place the head of the kid to the head of the man, place the neck of the kid to the neck of the man, place the breast of the kid to the breast of the man.” Whether this solemn manipulation was performed after or before the sacrifice, its object must have been to establish by contact a communion between the man and the victim, so that the kid might be his most efficacious representative. It thus became part of the higher ethical teaching of Babylon that “sacrifice brings life,” just as “prayer takes away sin,” a doctrine expressed in a fragmentary tablet that contains a text of striking spiritual import.^243.3

The type of sacrifice that may be called vicarious must have been an ancient as well as a later tradition in Greece; for the legends associated with many sacrifices clearly attest it, explaining certain animal victims as substitutes for a human life that was formerly demanded by the offended deity, the vicarious sacrifice usually carrying with it the ideas of sin and atonement.^243.4 The substitution might occasionally be apologised for by a legal fiction, as, for instance, when in the ritual of the Brauronian Artemis the angry goddess demanded the life of a maiden, and the Athenian parent sacrificed a goat, “calling it his daughter.”^244.1

But though this idea is common to the Mesopotamian and Hellenic communities, they differ widely in respect of the evidence they afford, of the prevalence of human sacrifice. As regards ancient Greece, the evidence is indubitable, though much that has been brought by modern scholars is due to false interpretation of ritual, such as the scourging of the Spartan boys; later, the human sacrifice became repugnant to the advancing ethical thought of the nation, but according to one authority did not wholly die out till the age of Hadrian. On the other hand, no literary text nor any monument has yet been found that proves the existence of such a ritual in Babylonia. In one of his biographical inscriptions Assurbanipal proclaims that he “sacrificed” prisoners of war to avenge his murdered father on the spot where his father was slain.^244.2 He boasts of worse things than this; and we can well believe that he murdered them in cold blood. But the words by no means suggest a ceremonious tomb-ritual with human sacrifice.

Slightly more important is a passage in a legal document, to which Mr. Johns^245.1 calls attention; whence it appears that a forfeit for reopening an already adjudicated cause was the consecration of one’s eldest child by fire to a god or goddess; and, as incense and cedar-wood are mentioned in the same context as concomitants of the threatened ceremony, the conclusion seems natural that this was once at least a real threat of human sacrifice inflicted as a legal punishment. This legal clause gives us the right to conclude that in the earliest period the Semites and Sumerians of Mesopotamia occasionally resorted to this rite. They would be indeed a peculiar people and a favoured nation if they had always been innocent of it. It is sufficiently attested by direct evidence, either of record or excavation, or by the suggestion of legend, of the Arabs, Syrians, the early Canaanites,^245.2 the Israelites, the Phoenicians; also of the Phrygians and other non-Semitic peoples of Anatolia. Yet it must be put to the credit of the Babylonian culture of the second millennium, that the Mesopotamians had either completely or almost abandoned it. At this time it was doubtless in full vogue in Greece; and certainly Babylon could not have been their evil teacher in this matter. But they needed no teachers in what was an ancient tradition of their northern ancestors, and of the people with whom they mingled. Yet only twenty years ago a distinguished writer on Greek ritual could say, “It is certain that the Hellenes borrowed the practice of human sacrifice from the Orientals.”^246.1

As we discover no trace of the idea of communion in the ordinary Babylonian sacrifice, we are the less surprised that scarcely any hint is given by the sacred literature or monuments of any mystic application of the blood of the victim, which was used for so many purposes of communion-ritual by the early Hellenes and Hebrews. I can find no other evidence for this in Mesopotamia except one passage quoted by Zimmern,^246.2 in which the sacrificer is ordered to sprinkle some part of the door with the blood of the lamb. It is not probable that the Babylonians were incapable of the notion that by physical contact with certain sacred objects a temporary communion could be established between the mortal and the divinity: it appears, for instance, in one of the formulae of the purification-ritual—“May the torch of the Fire-god cleanse me”^246.3—in the yearly practice of the king grasping the hands of the idol of the god, perhaps in the custom of attaching the worshipper to the deity with a cord,^246.4 and in the diviner’s habit of grasping the cedar-staff, which is called “the beloved of the gods.”^246.5 But it may be that they never applied this notion to the sacrifice, so as to evolve the institution of the communion-meal; or they may have evolved it in early times, and through long ages of power the priests may have become strong enough to suppress it and to substitute for it the gift-ritual, which would be more profitable for themselves. It accords with this absence of any mystic significance in the sacrifice that we do not find in the Babylonian service any mystic use of the sacrificial skins, of which some evidence can be gathered from various details of Greek ritual.^247.1

Again, the Babylonian records have so far failed to reveal any evidence for any such public ceremony as the sending forth of the scapegoat, whether human or animal, charged with the sins of the community. This ritual was common to the Hellenes, Egyptians, and Hebrews, and probably to other Semitic communities.^247.2 The idea of sin-transference on which it rests was familiar enough to the ancient Babylonian; but he seems only to have built upon this a private system of exorcism and purgation of sin and disease for the individual. As far as we know, it did not occur to him to effect by this method a solemn annual expulsion of all the sins of the nation.

On the other hand, there is another type of sacrifice common to Babylonia and Greece, by which an oath or an engagement might be cemented: the animal is slaughtered with an imprecation that the same fate may befall him who breaks his oath or violates the compact. Zimmern quotes a good example of this, relating to the compact made between the Assyrian king Assurnirari and Mati’ilu, prince of Arpad:^248.1 a sheep is sacrificed and the formula pronounced: “This head is not the head of a sheep, it is the head of Mati’ilu, of his sons, of his great ones, of the people of his land. If Mati’ilu breaks this oath, the head of Mati’ilu will be cut off, like the head of this sheep.” The same idea underlies the oath-sacrifice in the Iliad,^248.2 though it is not expressed with such naïve make-believe or such logic in the detail; but as the beast is slaughtered or wine poured, a curse is uttered invoking on the perjured a similar fate, or with a prayer that “his brains may be poured out like this wine.” The original idea is magical: the symbolic explanation is later. Another parallel is the Latin oath over the stone.^248.3

Such resemblance in special forms by no means weakens the impression that we receive from the striking differences discernible in the Babylonian and Hellenic significance of sacrifice. To those already noted we may add yet another, which concerns the association of sacrifice with divination. It is Professor Jastrow’s opinion^248.4 that the chief motive of the Babylonian sacrifice was the inspection of the liver of the victim, from the markings of which the skilled expert could interpret the future by a conventional system revealed to us in certain ancient Babylonian documents. This superstition is so elaborate and artificial that if we find it in adjacent countries, it is more reasonable to suppose that one borrowed it from the other, than that it was developed independently in each. We find it in later Greece, Etruria, and Rome; but the evidence of the Homeric poems suggests that it was unknown to the Hellenes of the earlier period. They are very likely to have borrowed it from Babylonian sources in post-Homeric times; and we note here, as in other cases where the influence of Babylon upon Greece can be reasonably posited, it reaches the western shores of the Aegean at a post-Homeric rather than a pre-Homeric epoch.

The comparative study of Mesopotamian and Hellenic sacrifice confronts us finally with another problem belonging to the history of religions, and one of the greatest, the dogma of the death of the divinity and the origin and significance of that belief. For where the mystic type of communion-sacrifice is found, where the animal that is slain for the sacrament is regarded as the incarnation of the deity, the divinity may be supposed himself to die temporarily, doubtless to rise again to life, either immediately or at some subsequent festival. This momentous conclusion need not always have been drawn, for religious logic is not often persistently thorough, nor does the evolution of the idea belong necessarily to the sphere of totemism, as Robertson Smith supposed, and M. Reinach is still inclined to maintain. It is not my concern here to discuss the totemistic hypothesis, but I may point out that in the rare examples where the totem-animal is slain, it is not clear that it is slain as a divinity.

Again, the belief in the periodic death of a deity might arise independently of the sacrifice, namely, from the essential idea of the godhead itself, when the divine life is identified with the annual life of vegetation: the phenomena of nature in autumn and spring may suggest to the worshipper the annual death and resurrection of the god or goddess. It is important to note that in this, as in the other source of the belief, the conclusion need not always have been drawn, for the vegetation-deity might be supposed not to die in autumn or winter, but merely to disappear, and the story of his or her disappearance need not carry the same religious consequences as the story of the divine death.

The immolation of the divine victim in a communion-service, wherein the worshippers partake symbolically or realistically of the divine flesh and blood, though suggested by a thought that we must call savage, may be pregnant with consequences momentous for higher religion, as the history of Christian dogma attests. And even the annual death of the nature-god may be raised to a higher significance than its mere nature-meaning, and may be linked with the promise of human immortality.

We may note, finally, that a religion which expresses in its ritual the idea of the deity’s death and resurrection is likely to be charged with a stronger emotional force than one that lacks it; for the two events will excite an ecstasy of sorrow and of joy in the believer.

As the phenomenon, then, is of such importance, it is necessary to be critical and unbiased in the collection of statistics. Our present field of inquiry is the Eastern and Western Mediterranean area; and here our conspicuous example is the ancient Sumerian-Babylonian ritual of Tammuz,^250.1 a folk-service of lamentation and rapture, psychologically akin in many respects to Christianity, and of most powerful appeal.

The Tammuz hymns preserved to us are of the highest Babylonian poetry, and though they are chiefly litanies of lamentation, sorrowing over the death of the young god, yet one or two echoes are heard at their close of the rapturous rejoicing over his resurrection.^251.1 With them is associated the story of the descent of his consort Ishtar, or of his goddess-sister; another great motive of the religious imagination which neighbouring peoples and faiths were quick to capture and adapt to their own religious use. We have seen^251.2 that the evidence is clear that the life of Tammuz is the life of the crops and fruits; and we discern a pure nature-religion unmoralised and without dogma, but evoking a mood and a sentiment that might supply the motive force to more complex and more spiritual creeds. It was not suited to the religious atmosphere of the Assyrian and Babylonian courts; but its influence spread far through Asia Minor. It captivated the other polytheistic Semites, and at times, as Ezekiel shows us, the women of Israel, revealing to these latter, no doubt, a vein of religious sentiment unknown in the austere Mosaic monotheism. The ritual of Adonis is mainly borrowed from the Tammuz service. For instance, the rite of planting the short-lived “garden of Adonis,” of which possibly the earliest record is in Isaiah xvii. 10, appears to be alluded to in a verse of a Tammuz hymn.^251.3 The figure of Tammuz is primevally Sumerian; therefore the diffusion of his cult among the various Semitic communities does not enable us to conclude that the death and resurrection of a divinity is an aboriginal Semitic tradition. As regards other evidence on the strength of which this dogma has been attributed to them by some scholars, it is of late authority and of doubtful validity. Josephus^251.4 tells us that at Tyre the resurrection of Herakles was once celebrated by Hiram; but this might well be a derivative of the non-Semitic Sandon cult of Tarsos, which will be considered below. And the legend of the death of Dido at Carthage, even if there is no doubt that the queen was originally the great goddess of Tyre, is no sufficient proof of a Phoenician ritual in which the divinity died annually.

But as regards the non-Semitic peoples of anterior Asia, the question of borrowing is more difficult to answer with certainty.

No Hittite monument nor any Hittite text has as yet revealed to us any figure that we can identify with Tammuz. But certain indications incline us to believe that the idea of the death of the god was not unfamiliar to the Hittite religion or to some of the communities under Hittite influence. On the Boghaz-Keui relief we have noted the presence in the religious procession of those mysterious animals, calves, or bulls, wearing caps of peculiar Hittite fashion.^252.1 Are not these “theanthropic animals” to be sacrificed as a communion-link between man and God? We know that the bull was worshipped as an incarnation of a Hittite deity; and therefore from the sacrifice of the bull might emerge the dogma that the deity ceremoniously died at certain periods. From the sanctity of the bull in ancient Hittite cult-centres may have descended the mystic communion rite of the Taurobolion or Tauropolion, which Cumont has shown good reason for supposing to have arisen in the worship of the Persian Anahita, and to have been adopted into the service of Kybele.^253.1

More direct evidence is to be gleaned from the cult of Sandon or Sandes of Tarsos, a city which was once within the area of Hittite culture. The god of Tarsos comes later to be identified with the Tyrian Baal and the Hellenic Herakles; and the legend of the death of the latter hero may be an echo of a ἱερὸς λόγος of Tarsos, inspired by an annual rite in which the god of the city was consumed on a funeral pyre, and was supposed to rise again from the flames in the form of an eagle.^253.2 The later Tarsian coins display the image of the god, the pyre, the eagle, the double-headed axe, and the lion;^253.3 and the last three of these symbols belong to the oldest religious art of the Hittites. The proof would be complete if it could be shown that the name Sandon or Sandes belongs to the Hittite language. All we know at present is that it is not a Babylonian or Sumerian word, or found in the vocabulary of any Semitic people. Prof. Sayce believes himself to have found it in a cuneiform inscription of Boghaz-Keui. This would be the direct proof that we require; but the word that he transliterates as Sandes is said to be the ideogram of Hadad, the Syrian Semitic god, and that Hadad is used as the Semitic equivalent of Sandes is merely a conjuncture.^253.4

A still clearer and more striking example of the phenomenon with which we are dealing is the Phrygian and Lydian cult and legend of Attis. The various and often conflicting details in the story of his birth, life, and death, the various elements in his cult, are known to us from late sources; the consideration of the whole question would not be relevant here; but it is necessary for our purpose to determine, if possible, what are the aboriginal motives of the myth and cult. It seems likely that the earliest form of the Phrygian religion was the worship of the great mother-goddess, coupled with a son or lover,^254.1 a young and beautiful god who dies prematurely, and whose death was bewailed in an annual ritual, whose resurrection was presented in a subsequent or accompanying service. Of the death and the lamentation we have older evidence than for the resurrection and the rejoicing, but the one seems to be a necessary complement of the other. The family likeness of Attis to Tammuz strikes us at first sight. As Tammuz appears as a young vegetation deity, identified partly with the life of trees, partly with the corn, so Attis in the Phrygian legend and ritual is presented as a tree-divinity, and in the verse of a late hymn, which is inspired by an ancient tradition, is invoked as “the corn cut by the reaper.”

And these two personalities of the Sumerian and Phrygian religions evoked the same psychologic sentiment, sorrowful, romantic, and yearning. The hypothesis naturally suggests itself that the more Western people borrowed the cult from Mesopotamia, and that this had happened as early as B.C. 1500.^254.2 All scholars are agreed at all events that the figure of Attis belongs to the older pre-Aryan stratum of the population of Phrygia; modern speculation is sometimes inclined to regard this as Hittite, and we know that the Hittites adopted some part of the Babylonian religion. But the name Attis itself is a stumbling-block to the hypothesis of borrowing from Mesopotamia. Believing Adonis to be a Western-Semitic form of Tammuz, we can explain the name as meaning merely “the Lord,” a natural appellative of the Sumerian god. But we cannot so explain “Attis.” It is non-Semitic, and must be regarded as belonging to an Anatolian language-group, nor can we yet discover its root-meaning.

Again, there are many features of the Attis-worship and legend that are not found in the corresponding Sumerian, and one at least that seems essentially alien to it. The death of the vegetation-god, originally suggested by the annual phenomenon of nature, may be explained by various myths, when the personal deity has so far emerged from his nature-shell that he is capable of personal drama. The death of Tammuz does not appear to have been mythologically explained at all. We may suppose that the killing of Adonis by the boar was borrowed from the Attis legend, for in Phrygia, and also in Lydia—as the Herodotean Ates story proves—this animal was sometimes regarded as the enemy that slew the god. It is a reasonable belief that the boar came to play this part in the story through a misunderstanding of certain ritual, in which this victim was annually offered as incarnating the deity, or was reverentially spared through a sacrificial law of tabu. If this is an original fact of Attis-cult, it counts somewhat against the hypothesis of derivation from Mesopotamia, for the pig does not appear to have played any such part, positive or negative, in Mesopotamian, as in the ritual of the Western Semites and on the shores of Asia Minor; nor can any connection at present be discovered between Tammuz and this animal.

But another version of the death of Attis, current at some time among his worshippers, was that he died from the effects of self-mutilation, a motive suggested by the emasculation of the Phrygian Galloi. We have here a phenomenon in the cult and myth that was alien to the religious habits of the Mesopotamian communities. The eunuch as a secular functionary is a figure belonging to an immemorial social tradition of the East; but the eunuch-priest is the morbid product of a very few religions, and there is no trace of such in Mesopotamia. The Babylonian church-law demanded an unblemished priesthood of strong virility, agreeing in this respect with the Judaic and the Hellenic, and according with an ancient sentiment that the vigour of the priest was the pledge of that continued flow of divine power which supported the vigour of the community. Self-emasculation was penalised in the religious rule of Jahwé, and the Gallos was excluded from temple-worship by the ritual code of Lesbos. The records of modern savagery and the history of asceticism, whether in modern and mediaeval India or in early Christianity, afford us varied illustration of the wildest excesses of self-inflicted cruelty against the human body, but not—so far as I am aware—of this particular form of self-destruction.^256.1

As a religious practice it is a special characteristic of Phrygia, a land always fascinating to the student on account of its strange freaks of religious psychology; and from Phrygia the practice spread into some adjacent communities, such as Bambyke. One may be allowed to pause a little to consider the original motive that prompted it. At first sight one is tempted to explain it as due to a morbid exaggeration of the craving for purity. But elsewhere, where this impulse was most powerful, for instance, in the later Orphic and Isis cults, and in early and mediaeval Christianity, it produced many mental aberrations but not this particular one. Nor, again, have we any reason for supposing this craving to have been strong in the devotees of Phrygia; the Galloi of Bambyke, according to Lucian, were possessed by strong though impotent sexual desires and were allowed full license with women. The form of communion most ardently sought with the Phrygian goddess and with the later Sabazios was a marriage symbolised by a sexual act; and Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, agree in reprobating the obscenities of Kybele-Attis worship; we may note also that Phrygian sacred mythology is somewhat grosser than the Hellenic.

We are compelled to seek another explanation, and I can suggest none other than that which I have hazarded elsewhere; namely, that Phrygian religious emasculation was an act performed in a frenzy of exaltation by the priest or mystes desirous of assimilating himself as far as possible to the female nature of the great divinity.^257.1 The worship was under male ministration for the highest part; but for the full exercise of divine power the male priest must become quasi-female and wear a female dress, the latter part of the rôle being common enough in primitive “theurgy.” The priest is himself at times the incarnation of the young god, and is called Attis. Therefore Attis was himself supposed to have performed the same act, even at the cost of his life. How early was this institution of a eunuch priesthood in Phrygia we have no direct evidence to prove. It may be a “Hittite” tradition; for figures that Perrot reasonably interprets as eunuch-priests are seen on the reliefs of Boghaz-Keui.

Returning to the topic of the death of the divinity, we may assume that in Phrygia this was a very ancient tradition, enacted yearly by a ceremonious laying out of the vegetation puppet on a bier, or the suspension of it on a pine-tree. We have no direct or otherwise trusty evidence for the immolation of the priest who incarnates the god; doubtless the stories about the death of Marsyas and the harvest-sacrifice of Lityerses point to a ritual of human-sacrifice; whom Marsyas stands for is doubtful, but in the Lityerses legend it is merely the passing stranger who is slain, and neither of these traditions is explicitly linked with Attis-cult.

Finally, we may pronounce the hypothesis of the derivation of the Phrygian cult from Mesopotamia to be unproved and unnecessary.

Pursuing this phenomenon further afield, we come to the area of Minoan-Mycenaean culture. If the legend of the death of the Minotaur could be safely interpreted as arising from the periodic immolation of a bull-god, the idea that we are in quest of would be proved to belong to the Minoan Cretans; but the frescoes of Knossos present that event with such a gay and sporting entourage that one feels shy of forcing a solemn religious significance into it. More important for our purpose is the traditional Zeus-legend of Crete. It is generally felt to be alien to the genuine Hellenic tradition concerning their high god, as something adopted by the immigrant Hellenes from an earlier Eteocretan ritual and creed.^259.1 We have a glimpse of a ritual in which the deity is born, is worshipped as an infant, and then as a boy—κοῦρος, as he is invoked in the new fragment of the hymn of the Kouretes—and especially as the son of a great mother, not as a mature independent personality. Again, there appears an orgiastic emotion and passion in the ritual that strikes a note in harmony with the Phrygian Kybele-Attis worship. The very early associations of Crete and the countries adjacent to the Troad are now being revealed by accumulating evidence, and may point to an affinity of stock. It may well have been, then, that the Minoan Cretans had their counterpart to Attis, a young god who was born and died periodically, whom they may have named Velchanos, the name of the young deity seen sitting under a tree on a Cretan coin of the fifth century. Though in age and character so unlike the Hellenic Zeus, we may suppose that the incoming Hellenes named him so because they found him the chief god of the island. We can also understand why the later Bacchic mystery flourished so fruitfully in Crete, if it found here already the ritual of a young god who died and rose again, and why in later times the inhabitants celebrated with such enthusiasm the Hilaria,^259.2 the Easter festival of the resurrection of the Phrygian divinity.

This attempt to reconstruct a portion of old Cretan religion on the lines of the early Phrygian has only a precarious value, until some more positive evidence is forthcoming from the Minoan art-record, which hitherto has revealed to us nothing concerning an annual divine birth and death. The ritual-legend is incomplete: we hear sufficiently of the birth, and we may argue a priori that a periodic ritual of the god’s birth implies a periodic death. Unfortunately all that we glean from ancient literature is that there was a grave of Zeus, perhaps in the Idaean cave, on which Pythagoras is said to have written an epitaph.^260.1 But a sceptical doubt arises here from the fact which was pointed out by Rohde, that the grave of a divine personage was often a misnomer of the underground sanctuary of a chthonian deity; and either the Idaean cave or the great cavern on Mount Dikte, whence the interesting relics of an immemorial cult have recently been gathered,^260.2 might at a later period have come to be regarded as a grave. Still, we may ask, could the phrase “the grave of Zeus” have become prevalent among a people with whom the worship of this god was still a living creed, unless the faith also prevailed that the god who died rose again to power? In that case the “grave of Zeus” could be a name for a sanctuary where the ritual of the death was enacted preliminary to the ritual of the birth.

This reconstruction then, and the a priori deduction emphasised above, may claim to be at least legitimate.

Finally, some evidence may be added from Cyprian cult for the view that the Minoan civilisation was cognisant of the dogma of the death of the divinity. We hear of the grave of Ariadne-Aphrodite which was shown in later times in Cyprus,^261.1 and the Cretan and Cypriote legends of the maidens called Gorgo, Parakuptousa, and Galatea^261.2 reveal to us an Aphrodite who died periodically and was laid out on a bier and revived. The Aphrodite of Cyprus is most probably of “Minoan” origin; and, being a goddess of vegetation, the idea of periodic death and resurrection might naturally attach to her, and might be associated with another type of ritual also, the annual casting of her puppet into the sea, which probably gave rise to such stories as the leap of Britomartis or Derketo into the waves.^261.3

We can now deal with the purely Hellenic evidence. Confining our view first to the cults and legends of the higher divinities of Hellas, we cannot affirm that the death and resurrection of the deity is a primitive tradition of the Hellenes. We may suspect it to have been a leading motive in some of the local Arcadian cults of Artemis, if, for instance, we interpret the Arcadian Kallisto as a form of the great goddess herself; but it is very probable that Artemis in Arcadia and many other of her cult-centres represents the pre-Hellenic divinity of birth and fruitfulness. What we may dare to call the Hellenic spirit seems to speak in the answer given by Xenophanes to the people of Elea when they asked him whether they ought to sacrifice to Leukothea and bewail her: “If you regard her as a deity, do not bewail her; if as human, do not sacrifice.”^261.4

But when we descend from the higher religion to the old Hellenic agrarian cults associated with the heroes or daimones of the soil and field, we find evidence of sorrowful rites, ceremonies of bewailing, which belong to the same type as that of Tammuz; and in the Greek, as in the Babylonian, the personage to whom they are attached is a youthful hero or heroine of vegetation: such are Linos, perhaps the earliest theme of a melancholy harvest-song of pre-Homeric days; Hyakinthos, the “youth” of the Laconian land who may or may not have been Hellenic, to whom the greater part of the Hyakinthia were consecrated; Eunostos of Tanagra; Erigone, “the early-born,” of Ikaria. The life of all these passes away as the verdure passes, or as the crops are gathered in; and to one of them at least, Hyakinthos, and perhaps to the others, the idea of an annual resurrection was attached. But none of these came like Tammuz to play a world-part; they remain the naïve, half-realised forms of poetic folk-religion. Like to them is Bormos of Bithynia,^262.1 whose death was bewailed at the harvest-time with melancholy songs, accompanied by sad flute-music, and Lityerses of Phrygia, whom the reapers lamented around the threshing-floor.

Shall we say that all these are merely reflections cast afar by the great cult-figure of Babylon?

Then we must say the same of the peasant-hero “German” whom the modern Bulgarians adore and bewail, of the Russian Yarilo,^262.2 and our own John Barleycorn. And at this point we shall probably fall back on the theory of independent similar developments, and shall believe that peasant religion in different parts of the world is capable of evolving strikingly parallel figures in obedience to the stimulus of similar circumstances and needs.

We have no surety, then, for a belief that Tammuz, or any shadow of Tammuz, was borne to the western shores of the Aegean in the days before Homer. And we know that Adonis, his nearest Anatolian representative, only arrived late in the post-Homeric period. Meantime, whatever view we may hold concerning prehistoric religious commerce between East and West, this vital difference between Mesopotamian and Hellenic religion must be strongly emphasised: Babylonian liturgy is mainly a service of sorrow, and part of that sorrow is for Tammuz; Hellenic worship was mainly cheerful and social, and only in a few chthonian cults is a gloomier tone discernible, nor can we anywhere hear the outbursts of violent and ecstatic grief. In this respect, and in its remoteness from any idea of the death and resurrection of the deity, Hellenic religion was further removed from that of Catholic Europe than was the old Phrygian or the Sumerian.

The Babylonian temple-service was complex and varied, and offers many problems of interest to the comparative student. We gather that a Holy Marriage was part of a religious drama perhaps performed annually; for instance, we find reference to the solemn nuptials of Ninib and Bau, and to the marriage presents given to Bau.^263.1 In every anthropomorphic polytheism, especially when idolatry provides images that could be used for religious drama, this ritual act is likely to occur. It is recorded of the southern Arabians in the days before Islam, an ancient inscription speaking of the marriage ceremony of Athtar.^263.2 It is a marriage of the great God and Goddess that according to the most reasonable interpretation is represented on the Hittite reliefs of Boghaz-Keui. We may conjecture that it was a ceremony of Minoan worship; a Mycenaean signet-ring shows us a seated goddess with a young god standing before her and joining his forearm to hers, while both make a peculiar gesture with their fingers that may indicate troth-plighting;^264.1 also, the later legends and the later ritual commemorating the marriages of Aphrodite and Ariadne may descend from the pre-Hellenic religious tradition. Finally, we have fairly full evidence of the same religious act in purely Hellenic cult. The ἱερὸς γάμος of Zeus and Hera was enacted in many communities with certain traits of primitive custom;^264.2 the nuptials of Kore and the lower-world god might be found in the ceremonies of certain temples;^264.3 while the central scene of the Eleusinia, the greater if not the lesser, included a Holy Marriage.^264.4 The Roman religion, in the original form of which there may have been no marrying or giving in marriage, no family ties or genealogies of divinities, no doubt borrowed its “Orci nuptiae” from the Greek. But for the other cases, there is no need to resort to any theory of borrowing to explain a phenomenon so natural at a certain stage of religion.

Nor is it an important phenomenon, so long as the ceremony was enacted merely by puppets or idols, as in the Boeotian Daidala.^264.5 It only begins to be of higher significance for the history of religious practice and thought, when the part of one of the divinities in this drama is played by a human representative. For not only does this offer indefinite possibilities of exaltation for the mortal, but it may engender the mystic ideal and practice of communion with the divinity through sexual intercourse, which played a great part in Phrygian religion, and left a deep impress on early Christian symbolism. The question whether the Mesopotamian religion presents us with evidence of a “holy marriage” solemnised between a mortal and the divinity must finally involve the more difficult question as to the function and purpose of that strange Mesopotamian institution of temple-prostitutes. But, leaving this latter alone for the moment, we find explicit testimony in Herodotus to the fact with which we are immediately concerned. In describing the great temple of Bel at Babylon,^265.1 he asserts, on the authority of his “Chaldean priests,” that the deity chose as his nightly partner some native woman, who was supposed to pass the night on the couch with him, and who was obliged to abstain from all other intercourse with men; and he compares a similar practice of belief found in the temple of Zeus in Egyptian Thebes, and in the oracular shrine of Apollo at Patara in Lycia. Now Herodotus’ trustworthiness in this matter has been doubted by Assyriologists;^265.2 nevertheless, a phrase used in the code of Hammurabi concerning a holy woman dedicated to temple service, calling her “a wife of Marduk,” seems to give some colour to the Herodotean statement.^265.3 Only, this term might have merely a spiritual-symbolic significance, like the designation of a nun as “the bride of Christ”; for the original Babylonian documents have supplied as yet, so far as I am aware, no evidence of a woman fulfilling the rôle of Belit, the wife of Bel.

As regards the adjacent religions, the idea that a mortal might enter into this mode of communion with the divinity was probably an ancient heritage of the Phrygian religions, for it crops up in various forms. The priest of Attis was himself called Attis, and, therefore, probably had loving intercourse with the goddess, and the later mysteries of Kybele extended this idea and offered to every votary the glory of a mystic marriage;^266.1 it was the unconscious stimulus of an immemorial tradition that prompted the Phrygian heresiarch Montanus to give himself out as the husband of the Virgin Mary.^266.2 It also appears as a fundamental tenet of the Sabazian mystery and of the Hellenistic-Egyptian Hermetic theosophy. The simple ritual-fact, namely, that a woman serves as the bride of the god, could probably be traced far afield through many widely distant peoples. According to Sahagun,^266.3 the human sacrifices of the Mexicans had sometimes the purpose of sending away a woman victim into divine wedlock. In pre-Christian Sweden we find a priestess generally regarded as the wife of the god Freyr, and enjoying considerable power from the connection.^266.4 Similar examples can be quoted from modern savage communities. Therefore if we find the same institution in the Mediterranean, we shall not think it necessary to suppose that it was an import from Babylon or from any Semitic people. As regards the Minoan worship, it is legitimate at least to regard the legend of Pasiphaë and her amour with the bull-god as an unfortunate aetiologic myth distorting the true sense of a ritual in which a mortal woman enjoyed this kind of divine communion, and here again we should mark a religious affinity between Crete and Phrygia. And it is likely that the idea was not unfamiliar to the Hellenes, though the record of it is scanty and uncertain. According to the early Christian fathers, the inspiration of the Pythia of Delphi was due to a corporeal union with Apollo akin at least to—if not identical with—sexual intercourse. Of more value is Herodotus’ definite assertion that the priestess of Patara gained her inspiration by her nuptial union with Apollo. In the rare cases where the cult of a Hellenic god was administered by a priestess we may suspect that a ἱερὸς γάμος was part of the temple-ritual; in the two examples that I have been able to find, the cults of Poseidon at Kalaureia and of Heracles at Thespiai, the priestess must be a maiden, as on this theory would be natural.^267.1 The maiden-priestesses of the Leukippides, the divine brides of the Dioskouroi at Sparta, were themselves called Leukippides; in all probability because they were their mortal representatives in some ceremony of holy marriage.^267.2 But the most salient and explicitly recorded example is the yearly marriage of the Queen-Archon at Athens with Dionysos, the bull-god, in the feast of Anthesteria, the significance of which I have discussed elsewhere.^267.3 It seems that the Queen by uniting her body with the god’s, unites to him the whole Athenian state and secures its prosperity and fruitfulness; this historic fact may also explain the myth of the union of Althaia, Queen of Kalydon, with the same god. Finally, let us observe that nothing in any of these Hellenic records suggests any element of what we should call impurity in the ritual; we are not told that these holy marriages were ever consummated by the priest as the human representative of the god; or that the ceremony involved any real loss of virginity in the maiden-priestess. The marriage could have been consummated symbolically by use of a puppet or image of the deity. We may believe that the rite descends from pre-Homeric antiquity; the ritual which the Queen-Archon performed might naturally have been established at the time of the adoption into Athens of the Dionysiac cult, and there are reasons for dating this event earlier than 1000 B.C.^268.1

We now come to a very difficult and important question concerning the position of women in the old Mesopotamian temple-ritual. Our first document of value is the code of Hammurabi, in which we find certain social regulations concerning the status of a class of women designated by a name which Winckler translates doubtfully as “God’s-sisters,” regarding it, however, as equivalent to consecrated, while Johns translates it merely as “votary.”^268.2 At least, we have proof of a class of holy women who have certain privileges and are under certain restrictions. They were the daughters of good families dedicated by their fathers to religion; they could inherit property, which was exempt from the burden of army-tax; they could not marry, and were prohibited from setting-up or even entering a wine-shop under penalty of death. It is something to know even as much as this about them, but we would very gladly learn more. Is it to their order that the personage described as “the wife of Marduk”^269.1 belongs, who has been considered above? Is it from among them that the priestesses of Ishtar were chosen, who interpreted the oracles of the goddess?^269.2 It seems clear that a father could dedicate his daughter to any divinity, that their position was honourable, and that they are not to be identified with the temple-prostitutes of Babylon or Erech, who excited the wonder and often the reprobation of the later Greek world. This peculiar order of temple-harlots is also recognised—according to some of the best authorities^269.3—in Hammurabi’s code, where they are mentioned in the same context with the “consecrated” or the “God-sisters,” and yet are clearly distinct from them; another clause seems to refer to male prostitutes (§ 187). Certain rules are laid down concerning their inheritance of property, and concerning the rearing of their children, if they had any, who might be adopted into private families. Evidently these “Qadishtu” were a permanent institution, and there is no hint of any dishonour. There may be other references in Babylonian literature to these temple-women; in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the courtesan who won over Eabani evidently belongs to the retinue of Ishtar of Erech.

From these two institutions we must distinguish that other, for which Herodotus is our earliest authority:^269.4 according to his explicit statement, once in her lifetime every Babylonian woman, high or low, had to stand in the temple-precincts of the goddess Mylitta—probably a functional appellative of Ishtar, meaning “the helper of childbirth”—and to prostitute herself to any stranger who threw money into her lap and claimed her with the formula, “I invoke the goddess Mylitta for you.” Herodotus hastens to assure us that this single act of unchastity—which took place outside the temple—did not afterwards lower the morality of the women, who, as he declares, were otherwise exemplary in this respect. But he is evidently shocked by the custom, and the early Christian and modern writers have quoted it as the worst example of gross pagan or Oriental licentiousness. Some devoted Assyriologists have tried to throw doubt on the historian’s veracity:^270.1 the wish is father to the thought: and it is indeed difficult for the ordinary civilised man to understand how an ancient civilisation of otherwise advanced morality could have sanctioned such a practice. But Herodotus’ testimony ought not to be so impugned; nor is it sufficient evidence for rejecting it that no reference to the custom which he describes has been found hitherto in the cuneiform literature. Strabo merely repeats what Herodotus has said; but independent evidence of some value is gathered from the apocryphal Epistle of Jeremias:^270.2 “The women also with cords about them sit in the ways, burning bran for incense; but if any of them, drawn by some that pass by, lie with them, she reproacheth her fellow that she was not thought as worthy as herself, nor her cord broken.” The context is altogether religious, and this is no ordinary secular immorality; certain details in the narrative remind us of Herodotus, and make it clear that the writer has in mind the same social usage that the historian vouches for. This usage may be described as the consecration to the goddess of the first-fruits of the woman’s virginity before marriage; for, though Herodotus does not explicitly say that it was a rite preliminary to marriage, yet the records of similar practices elsewhere in Asia Minor assure us on this point.

We have now to begin the comparative search in the adjacent regions, keeping distinct the three types of consecration which I have specified above, which are too often confused.^271.1

The first type has its close analogies with the early Christian, mediaeval, and modern conventual life of women. The code of Hammurabi presents us with the earliest example of what may be called the religious sisterhood; the Babylonian votaries were dedicated to religion, and while the Christian nuns are often called the brides of Christ, their earliest prototypes enjoyed the less questionable title of “God’s-sisters.” We find no exact parallel to this practice in ancient Greece; from the earliest period, no doubt, the custom prevailed of consecrating individual women of certain families as priestesses to serve certain cults, and sometimes chastity was enforced upon them; but these did not form a conventual society; and usually, apart from their occasional religious duties, they could lead a secular life. In fact, the monastic system was of Eastern origin and only reached Europe in later times, being opposed to the civic character of the religion of the old Aryan states.

The second class of consecrated women served as temple-harlots in certain cult-centres of Asia Minor. We cannot say that the custom in all cases emanated from Babylon; for there is reason to think that it was a tradition attaching to the cult of the goddess among the polytheistic Semitic stocks. We have clear allusions in the Bible to temple-prostitution practised by both sexes in the Canaanite communities adjacent to the Israelites, who were themselves sometimes contaminated by the practice.^272.1 We hear of “hierodouli” among the pagan Arabs,^272.2 of women “of the congregation of the people of Astarte” at Carthage,^272.3 of numbers of dedicated slave women in the cult of Aphrodite at Eryx,^272.4 which was at least semi-Semitic; and it is likely that some of these at least were devoted to the impure religious practice. As regards non-Semitic worships, it is only clearly attested of two, namely, of the worship of Mā at Comana in Pontos,^272.5 and of Aphrodite Ourania in Corinth.^272.6 In these cases we have the right to assume Semitic influences at work; for we do not find traces of this practice in the ancient cult of Kybele; and Ma of Cappadocia and Pontus, who had affinities with her, was partly contaminated with Anahita, a Persian goddess, who had taken on Babylonian fashions. Nor can we doubt that the practice gained recognition at Corinth in post-Homeric times through its Oriental trade; for it was attached to the cult of Aphrodite Ourania, whose personality, partly at least, was identical with that of the Semitic goddess. The practice survived in Lydia in the later period of the Graeco-Roman culture. For a woman of Tralles, by name Aurelia Aemilia, erected a column with an inscription that has been published by Sir William Ramsay,^273.1 in which she proclaims with pride that she had prostituted herself in the temple service “at the command of an oracle,” and that her female ancestors had done likewise. Finally, we may find the cult-practice reflected in certain legends; in the legend of Iconium, for instance, of the woman who enticed all strangers to her embraces and afterwards slew them, but was herself turned to stone by Perseus, and whose stone image gave the name to the State.^273.2

The other custom recorded by Herodotus of Babylon, the consecration of the first-fruits of virginity to the goddess before marriage, which I have considered as distinct from the foregoing, may often have been combined or confused with it; for the temple-harlotry, carried on for some considerable period, might be occasionally a preliminary to marriage. The most exact parallels to the Babylonian custom are found in the records of Byblos, Cyprus, and the Syrian Heliopolis or Baalbec. Lucian attests the rule prevailing at Byblos, that in the festival of Adonis women exposed themselves for purchase on one single day, and that only strangers were allowed to enjoy them; but that this service was only imposed upon them if they refused to cut off their hair in lamentation for Adonis.^274.1 Similarly the Byzantine historian Sozomenos declared that at Heliopolis (Baalbec), in the temple of Astarte, each maiden was obliged to prostitute herself before marriage, until the custom and the cult were abolished by Constantine.^274.2 The statements about Cyprus, though less explicit, point to the same institution: Herodotus, having described at length the Babylonian practice, declares that it prevailed in Cyprus also, and Justin^274.3 that it was a custom of the Cyprians “to send their virgins before marriage on fixed days to the shore, to earn their dowry by prostitution, so as to pay a first-offering to Venus for their virtue henceforth (pro reliqua pudicitia libamenta Veneri soluturas).” The procession to the shore may indicate the rule that intercourse was only allowed them with strangers,^274.4 and nothing points to prolonged prostitution. It is probably the same rite that the Locrians of the West vowed to perform in honour of Aphrodite in the event of deliverance from a dangerous war.^275.1 But in the worship of Anaitis at Akilisene in Armenia, according to Strabo,^275.2 the unmarried women served as temple-harlots for an indefinite time until they married; and Aurelia Aemilia of Tralles may have been only maintaining the same ancient ritual in Lydia. In these two countries, then, it seems as if there had been a fusion of two institutions that elsewhere were distinct one from another, harlot-service for a prolonged period in a temple, and the consecration of each maiden’s virginity as a preliminary to marriage.

Such institutions mark the sharpest antagonism between the early religious sentiment of the East and the West. Of no European State is there any record, religious or other, that the sacrifice before marriage of a woman’s virginity to a mortal was at any time regarded as demanded by temple ritual. Such a rite was abhorrent to the genuine Hellenic, as it was to the Hebraic, spirit; and only in later times do we find one or two Hellenic cult-centres catching the taint of the Oriental tradition: while such legends as that of Melanippos and Komaitho and the story of Laokoon’s sin express the feeling of horror which any sexual licence in a temple aroused in the Greek.^275.3

It is imperative to try to understand the original purpose or significance of the Semitic and Anatolian rites that we have been dealing with. To regard them as the early Christian and some modern writers have done, as mere examples of unbridled Oriental lust masquerading in the guise of religion, is a false and unjust view. According to Herodotus, the same society that ordained this sacrifice of virginity upon the daughters of families maintained in other respects a high standard of virtue, which appears also attested by Babylonian religious and secular documents. Modern anthropology has handled the problem with greater insight and seriousness; but certain current explanations are not convincing. To take the rite described by Herodotus first, which is always to be distinguished from the permanent institution of “hierodulai” in the sense of temple-harlots: Mannhardt, who was the first to apply modern science to the problem, explained it as a development of vegetation-ritual.^276.1 Aphrodite and Adonis, Ishtar and Tammuz, represent vegetation, and their yearly union causes general fertility; the women are playing the part of the goddess, and the stranger represents Adonis! The Babylonian rite, then, is partly religious μιμησις, the human acting of a divine drama, partly religious magic good for the crops. But in spite of Mannhardt’s great and real services to science, his vegetation-theory leads him often astray, and only one who was desperately defending a thesis would explain that stranger, a necessary personage in the ritual at Babylon, Byblos, Cyprus, and Baalbec, as the native god. There is no kind of reason for connecting the Babylonian rite with Tammuz, or for supposing that the women were representing the goddess,^277.1 or that their act directly influenced the crops, except in the sense that all due performance of religious ceremonies has been considered at certain stages of belief as favouring the prosperity of the land. Sir William Ramsay, in his Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia,^277.2 would explain the custom as preserving the tradition of the communism of women before regular marriage was instituted. Dr. Frazer, who has dealt more fully with the question, accepts this explanation,^277.3 as he also accepts Mannhardt’s in full; and, while he associates—as I think, wrongly—the Babylonian rite with general temple-prostitution, he adds a third suggestion, prompted by his theory of kingship: the king himself might have to mate with one or more of the temple-harlots “who played Astarte to his Adonis”:^277.4 such unions might serve to maintain the supply of human deities, one of whom might succeed to the throne, and another might be sacrificed in his father’s stead when religion demanded the life of the royal man-god. I do not find this theory coherent even with itself; and, like the others, it fails to explain all the facts, and, on the other hand, it imagines data which are not given us by the records.

That state of communism when sexual union was entirely promiscuous is receding further and further into the anthropological background: it is dangerous to predicate it of the most backward Anatolian State in any period which can come into our ken. When the Byzantine Sokrates gravely tells us that the men of Heliopolis had their wives in common, he does not know what he is saying. And if this sacrifice of virginity before marriage was a recognition of the original rights of all the males of the community, why did not some representative of the community take the virginity, the priest or some head-man? This ill-considered sociologic hypothesis shipwrecks on that mysterious stranger.^278.1

Prof. Westermarck, in his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,^278.2 regards the Mylitta-rite as intended to ensure fertility in women through direct appeal to the goddess of fertility, and he explains the formula which the stranger uttered—ἐπικαλέω τοι τὴν θεὸν Μύλιττα—as signifying generally “May the goddess Mylitta prosper thee.” Obviously the phrase, “I invoke the goddess for thee,” could as naturally mean, “I claim thee in the name of the goddess,” the stranger basing his right to the woman on this appeal. But his general theory appears not so unsound as those which have just been noted.

The comparative method ought to help us here; and though we have no exact parallel, as far as I am aware, recorded of any people outside the Mediterranean area to the Babylonian custom, we find usages reported elsewhere that agree with it in one essential. Lubbock quotes instances from modern India of the rule imposed upon women of presenting themselves before marriage in the temple of Juggernaut for the purpose—as he implies—of offering up their virginity, though no such custom is recorded in the Vedic period of religion;^278.3 cases also are chronicled of the rule prevailing among uncultured or semi-cultured tribes that the medicine-man or the priest should take the virginity of the bride before the marriage ceremony.^279.1 These are probably illustrations of the working of the same idea as that which inspired the Babylonian custom. Marriage involves the entering upon a new state; change of life is generally dangerous, and must be safeguarded by what Van Gennep has called “rites de passage”; more especially is the sexual union with a virgin dangerous and liable to be regarded with awe by primitive sentiment; before it is safe to marry her, the tabu that is upon her must first be removed by a religious act securing the divinity’s sanction for the removal; just as the ripe cornfield must not be reaped before religious rites, such as the consecration of first-fruits, have loosened the tabu upon it: we may believe that Hellenic marriage ritual secured the same end as the Babylonian by what seems to us the more innocent method of offering the προτέλεια. So the Babylonian safeguards the coming marriage by offering the first-fruits of his daughter to the goddess who presides over the powers and processes of life and birth. Under her protection, after appeal to her, the process loses its special danger; or if there is danger still, it falls upon the head of the stranger.^279.2 For I can find no other way of accounting for his presence as a necessary agent, in the ritual of at least four widely separate communities of Semitic race: this comparative ubiquity prevents us explaining it as due to some capricious accidental impulse of delicacy, as if the act would become less indelicate if a stranger who would not continue in the place participated in it.

In his essay on the question, Mr. Hartland explains the Babylonian rite as belonging to the class of puberty-ceremonies; nor would this account of it conflict with the view here put forth, if, as he maintains, primitive puberty-ceremonies to which girls are subjected are usually preliminary to the marriage which speedily follows.^280.1 But puberty-ceremonies are generally performed at initiation-mysteries, and none of the rites that we are considering appear to have been associated with mysteries except, perhaps, at Cyprus, where the late record speaks of mysteries instituted by Kinyras that had a sexual significance, and which may have been the occasion of the consecration of virginity that Justin describes;^280.2 but the institution of mysteries has not yet been proved for any purely Semitic religion. In any case, Mr. Hartland’s statement does not explain why the loss of virginity should be considered desirable in a puberty-ceremony or as a preliminary to marriage.

The significance of the action, as I have interpreted it, is negative rather than positive, the avoidance of a vague peril or the removal of a tabu rather than the attainment of the blessing of fertility, as Dr. Westermarck would regard it. And this idea, the removal of a tabu, seems expressed in the phrase of Herodotus^281.1 by which he describes the state of the woman after the ceremony—ἀποσιωσαμένη τῇ θεῷ; and the parallel that I have suggested, the consecration of the first-fruits of the harvest to remove the tabu from the rest of the crop, is somewhat justified by the words of Justin already quoted—“pro reliqua pudicitia libamenta Veneri soluturas.”

As regards the other institution, the maintenance of “hierodoulai” in temples as “consecrated” women, “kadeschim,” unmarried, who for a period of years indulged in sexual intercourse with visitors, the original intention and significance of it is hard to decide. We may be sure that it did not originate in mere profligacy, and the inscription of Tralles shows that even in the later Roman period it had not lost its religious prestige.^281.2 Such a custom could naturally arise in a society that allowed freedom of sexual intercourse among young unmarried persons—and this is not uncommonly found at a primitive level of culture—and that was devoted to the worship of a goddess of sexual fertility. The rituals in the temples of Ishtar of Erech, Anaitis of Armenia, Mā of Comana, must have been instituted for some national and social purpose; therefore Mr. Hartland’s suggestion, that the original object of the Armenian rite was to give the maidens a chance of securing themselves a suitable husband by experience, seems insufficient. Dr. Frazer’s theory, that connects the institution with some of the mystic purposes of kingship,^282.1 floats in the air; for there is not a particle of evidence showing any relation between these women and the monarch or the royal harem or the monarchical succession or the death of a royal victim. A simpler suggestion is that the “hierodoulai,” or temple-women, were the human vehicles for diffusing through the community the peculiar virtue or potency of the goddess, the much-coveted blessing of human fertility. Thus to consecrate slaves or even daughters to this service was a pious social act.

The significance of the facts that we have been examining is of the highest for the history of religious morality, especially for the varied history of the idea of purity. We call this temple-harlotry vile and impure; the civilised Babylonian, who in private life valued purity and morality, called the women “kadistu,” that is, “pure” or clean in the ritualistic sense, or as Zimmern interprets the ideogram, “not unclean.”^282.2 In fact, the Mediterranean old-world religions, all save the Hebraic, agreed in regarding the processes of the propagation of life as divine, at least as something not alien or abhorrent to godhead. But the early Christian propagandists, working here on Hebraic lines, intensified the isolation of God from the simple phenomena of birth, thereby engendering at times an anti-sexual bias, and preparing a discord between any possible biological view and the current religious dogma, and modern ethical thought has not been wholly a gainer thereby.

The subject that has been discussed at some length is also connected with the whole question of ritual-purity and purification. The primitive conception of purity had at an early stage in its evolution been adopted by higher religion; and the essential effect of impurity was to debar a person from intercourse with God and with his fellow-men. Hence arises a code of rules to regulate temple-ritual. So far as I am aware, the Babylonian rules for safeguarding the purity of the shrines were not conspicuously different from the Greek or the Hebraic.^283.1 The taint of bloodshed and other physical impurities was kept aloof; and it is in the highest degree probable that the function of the “hetairai” was only performed outside the temple, for Herodotus specially tells us that this rule was observed in the Mylitta-rite. The cathartic methods of East and West agree in many points. The use of holy water for purifying purposes was known to the early Greeks.^283.2 It was still more in evidence in the Babylonian ritual: the holy water of the Euphrates or Tigris was used for a variety of purposes, for the washing of the king’s hands before he touched the statues, for the washing of the idol’s mouths,^283.3 perhaps also for baptism. For we hear of some such rite in a hymn to Enlil translated by Dr. Langdon^284.1—the line that he renders “Son whom in the sacred bowl she baptized,” seems to refer to a human child. Ablution was prominent also in the exorcism-ritual, and the “House of Washing” or “House of Baptism” was the centre of a liturgy that had for its object deliverance from demons.^284.2 The whole State was at times purified by water.^284.3 And in all this ritual the water must itself be of a peculiar purity—rain-water, for instance,^284.4 or the water of the Euphrates, whence came probably the Water of Life that was kept in Marduk’s temple with which the Gods and the Annunaki washed their faces, and which was used in the feast of the Doom-fixing.^284.5 According to the Babylonian view ordinary water was naturally impure (we may well believe that it was so at Babylon, where the river and canals were so pressed into the service of man), and a person incurred impurity by stepping over a puddle or other unpurified water.^284.6 The Greek did not need to be so scrupulous, for most water in his land was naturally pure, being spring or brook; yet in his cathartic rules we find often that only a special water was suitable for the religious purpose, running water especially, or sea-water, or in a particular locality one sacred fountain only.^284.7 But though it was to him as to most peoples, the simple and natural means of purification, he did not apply it to such various cathartic purposes as the Babylonian. Nor as far as we can discover had he developed in old days the interesting rite of baptism: we hear of it first in the records of the fifth century, and in relation to alien cults like that of the Thracian goddess Kotytto.^285.1

Equally prominent in the cathartic ritual of Mesopotamia was the element of fire: in the prayer that followed upon the purification-ceremonies we find the formula, “May the torch of the gleaming Fire-God cleanse me.”^285.2 The Fire-God, Nusku, is implored “to burn away the evil magicians,”^285.3 and we may believe that he owes his development and exalted position as a high spiritual god to the ritual use of fire, just as in the Vedic religion did Agni. The conception of fire as a mighty purifying element, which appears in the Old and New Testaments and in Christian eschatology, has arisen, no doubt, from the cathartic ritual of the ancient Semites. Doubtless also the spiritual or magic potency of this element was known in ancient Europe: it is clearly revealed in the primitive ceremonies of the old German “Notfeuer,” with which the cattle, fields, and men were purified in time of pestilence.^285.4 And there are several indications of its use in Greek cathartic ritual; a noteworthy example is the purification of Lemnos by the bringing of holy fire from Delos;^285.5 the curious Attic ritual of running with the new-born babe round the hearth, called the Amphidromia, may have had a similar intention;^286.1 even the holy water, the χέρνιψ, seems to have been hallowed by the insertion of a torch;^286.2 and in the later records fire is often mentioned among the usual implements of cleansing.^286.3 The Eleusinian myth concerning Demeter holding the infant Demophon in the flame to make him immortal was suggested probably by some purificatory rite in which fire was used. Finally, the fire-ordeal, which was practised both in Babylonia and Greece,^286.4 may have been associated at a certain period with the cathartic properties of fire. Nevertheless, the Hellenic divinities specially concerned with this element, Hestia and Hephaistos, had little personal interest in this ritual, and did not rise to the same height in the national theology as Nusku rose in the Babylonian.

We might find other coincidences in detail between Hellenic and Assyrian ritual, such as the purificatory employment of salt, onions, and the sacrificial skin of the animal-victim.^286.5 One of the most interesting phenomena presented by the cathartic law of old Babylonia is a rule that possessed an obvious moral value; we find, namely, on one of the cylinders of Gudea, that during the period when Gudea was purifying the city the master must not strike the slave, and no action at law must be brought against any one; for seven days perfect equality reigned, no bad word was uttered, the widow and the orphan went free from wrong.^287.1 The conception underlying this rule is intelligible: all quarrelling and oppression, being often accompanied with bloodshed and death, disturbs the general purity which is desired to prevail; and I have indicated elsewhere a similar law regulating the conduct of the Eleusinian mysteries and the Dionysiac festival at Athens, both ceremonies of cathartic value,^287.2 and I have pointed out a similar ordinance observed recently by a North-American Indian tribe, and formerly by the Peruvians; to these instances may be added the statement by Livy,^287.3 that in the Roman “lectisternia,” when a table with offerings was laid before the gods, no quarrelling was allowed and prisoners were released, and the historian gives to the institution of the lectisternia a piacular significance.

We must also bear in mind certain striking differences between the Hellenic and the Babylonian cathartic systems. In certain purification-ceremonies of Hellas, those in which the homicide was purged from his stain, the washing with the blood of the piacular victim was the most potent means of grace.^287.4 We may find analogies in Vedic, Roman, and Hebraic ritual, but hitherto none have been presented by the religious documents of Babylon, where, as has been already pointed out, scarcely any mystic use appears to have been made of the blood of the victim.^288.1 Again, the Babylonian purification included the confession of sins, a purgation unknown and apparently unnatural to the Hellene;^288.2 and generally the Babylonian, while most of its methods, like the Hellenic, are modes of transference or physical riddance of impurity, had a higher spiritual and religious significance; for it includes lamentations for sin and prayers to the divinity that are not mentioned in the record of any Greek “katharsis.”

A long ritual-document is preserved containing the details of the purification of the king:^288.3 certain forms agree with the Hellenic, but one who was only versed in the latter would find much that was strange and unintelligible both in the particulars and in general atmosphere. We discern an interesting mixture of magic and religion. The gods are partly entreated, partly bribed, partly constrained; and at the end the evil is physically expelled from the palace. The purifier puts on dark garments, just as the ministers of the underworld-deities did occasionally in Greece. The king himself performs much of the ceremony, and utters words of power: “May my sins be rent away, may I be pure and live before Shamash.” The ordering of the cathartic apparatus is guided partly by astrology. It is curious also to find that every article used in the process is identified by name with some divinity: the cypress is the god Adad, the fragrant spices the god Ninib, the censer the god Ib, etc.; and the commentary that accompanies the ritual-text explains that these substances compel the deities thus associated with them to come and give aid.

In fact, the differences between East and West in this religious sphere are so important that we should not be able to believe that the cathartic system of Greece was borrowed from Babylonia, even if the points of resemblance were much more numerous and striking than they are. For it would be possible to draw up a striking list of coincidences between Hellenic and Vedic cathartic rites, and yet no one would be able on the strength of it to establish a hypothesis of borrowing.

In any case, it may be said, the question of borrowing does not arise within the narrow limits of our inquiry, which is limited to the pre-Homeric period, since all Greek “katharsis” is post-Homeric. The latter dictum is obviously not literally true, as a glance through the Homeric poems will prove. Homer is aware of the necessity of purification by water before making prayer or libation to the gods: Achilles washes his hands and the cups before he pours forth wine and prays to Zeus,^289.1 Telemachos washes his hands in sea-water before he prays to Athena^289.2; and there is a significant account of the purification of the whole Achaean host after the plague;^289.3 as the later Greeks would have done, the Achaeans throw away into the sea their λύματα, the infected implements of purification, wool or whatever they used, that absorbed the evil from them. But it has been generally observed that Homer does not appear to have been aware of any need for purification from the stain of bloodshed or from the ghostly contagion of death. It is true that Odysseus purifies his hall with fire and sulphur after slaying the suitors, but we are not sure that the act had any further significance than the riddance of the smell of blood from the house. Sulphur is there called κακῶν ἄκος,^290.1 “a remedy against evil things”; but we cannot attach any moral or spiritual sense to κακὰ, nor is Homeric κάθαρσις related, as far as we can see, to any animistic belief. There is one passage where Homer’s silence is valuable and gives positive evidence; Theoklumenos, who has slain a man of his own tribe and fled from his home, in consequence approaches Telemachos when the latter is sacrificing and implores and receives his protection: there is no hint of any feeling that there is a stain upon him, or that he needs purification, or that his presence pollutes the sacrifice.^290.2 All this would have been felt by the later Greek; and in the post-Homeric period we have to reckon with a momentous growth of the idea of impurity and of a complex system of purification, especially in regard to homicide, leading to important developments in the sphere of law and morality which I have tried to trace out on other occasions.^290.3 But Homer may well be regarded as the spokesman of a gifted race, the Achaeans, as we call them, on whom the burden of the doctrine of purification lay lightly, and for whom the ghostly world had comparatively little terror or interest. Besides the Achaeans, however, and their kindred races there was the submerged population of the older culture who enter into the composition of the various Hellenes of history. Therefore the varied development in the post-Homeric period of cathartic ideas may be only a renaissance, a recrudescence of forces that were active enough in the second millennium. Attica may have been the home where the old tradition survived, and cathartic rites such as the Thargelia and the trial of the axe for murder in the Bouphonia have the savour of great antiquity. May not the Minoan religion of Crete have been permeated with the ideas of the impurity of bloodshed and the craving for purification from sin? For at the beginning of the historic period Crete seems to have been the centre of what may be called the cathartic mission; from this island came Apollo Delphinios, the divine purifier par excellence, to this island the god came to be purified from the death of Python; and in later times, Crete lent to Athens its purifying prophet Epimenides.^291.1 If we believe, then, that the post-Homeric blood-purification was really a recrudescence of the tradition of an older indigenous culture, we should use this as another argument for the view that the Greece of the second millennium was untouched or scarcely touched by Babylonian influence. For, as we have seen, purification by blood or from blood appears to have been wholly alien to Babylonian religious and legal practice.

The ritual of purification belongs as much to the history of magic as religion. Now, the student of religion is not permitted to refuse to touch the domain of magic; nor can we exclude its consideration even from the highest topics of religious speculation. Some general remarks have already been made^291.2 concerning the part played by magic both in the worship and in the social life of the peoples that we are comparing. Any exact and detailed comparison would be fruitless for our present purpose; for, while the knowledge of early Babylonian magic is beginning to be considerable, we cannot say that we know anything definite concerning the practices in this department of the Hellenic and adjacent peoples in the early period with which we are dealing. From the Homeric poems we can gather little more than that magic of some kind existed; and that Homer and his gifted audience probably despised it as they despised ghosts and demons. It is only by inference that we can venture to ascribe to the earliest period of the Greek race some of the magic rites that are recorded by the later writers. It would require a lengthy investigation and treatise to range through the whole of Greek ritual and to disentangle and expose the magic element which was undoubtedly there, and which in some measure is latent in the ritual of every higher religion yet examined. By way of salient illustration we may quote the ceremonies of the scapegoat and the φαρμακός,^292.1 modes of the magic-transference of sin and evil; the strewing of sacred food-stuff that is instinct with divine potency over the fields in the Thesmophoria; the rain magic performed by the priests of Zeus Lykaios;^292.2 we hear at Kleonai of an official class of “Magi” who controlled the wind and the weather by spells, and occasionally in their excitement gashed their own hands, like the priests of Baal;^292.3 such blood-magic being explicable as a violent mode of discharging personal energy upon the outer objects which one wishes to subdue to one’s will. Another and more thrilling example of blood-magic is the process of water-finding by pouring human blood about the earth, a method revealed by an old legend of Haliartos in Boeotia about the man who desired water, and in order to find it consulted Delphi, and was recommended by the oracle to slay the first person who met him on his return; his own young son met him first, and the father stabbed him with his sword; the wounded youth ran round about, and wherever the blood dripped water sprang up from the earth.^293.1 No one will now venture to say that all these things are post-Homeric; the natural view is that they were an inheritance of crude and primitive thought indigenous to the land. Many of them belong to world-wide custom; on the other hand, some of the striking and specialised rites, such as the blood-magic and the ritual of the φαρμακός, are not found at Babylon.

But before prejudging the question, some salient and peculiar developments of Babylonian magic ought to be considered. One great achievement of Mesopotamian civilisation was the early development of astrology, to which perhaps the whole world has been indebted for good and for evil, and which was associated with magic and put to magic uses. Astrological observation led to the attachment of a magic value to numbers and to certain special numbers, such as number seven. Whether the Judaic name and institution of the Sabbath is of Babylonian origin or not, does not concern our question. But it concerns us to know that the seventh days, the 14th, the 21st, and 28th of certain months, if not of all, were sacred at Babylon, and were days of penance and piacular duties when ordinary occupation was suspended.^293.2 We can discern the origin of the sanctity of this number: the observation of the seven planets, and the division of the lunar month into four quarters of seven days. The early Greeks, doubtless, had their astrological superstitions, as most races have had; the new moon is naturally lucky, the waning moon unlucky; but no one can discover any numerical or other principle in the Hesiodic system, which is our earliest evidence of Hellenic lucky and unlucky days. His scheme is presented in naïve confusion, and he concludes humorously, “one man praises one day, one another, and few know anything about it.”^294.1 His page of verse reflects the anarchy of the Greek calendars; and we should find it hard to credit that either Hesiod or the legislators that drew up those had sat attentively at the feet of Babylonian teachers. But a few coincidences may be noted. Hesiod puts a special tabu on the fifth day of the month; in fact, it is the only one in his list that is wholly unlucky, a day when it would seem to be best to do nothing at all, at least outside the house, for on this day the Erinyes are wandering about.^294.2 Now, a Babylonian text published by Dr. Langdon contains the dogma that on the fifth day of Nisan “he who fears Marduk and Zarpanit shall not go out to work.”^294.3 This Babylonian rule is the earliest example of what may be strictly called Sabbatarianism, abstinence from work through fear of offending the high god. Such would probably not be the true account of Hellenic feeling concerning the “forbidden days,” which were called ἀποφράδες or μιαραί.^294.4 The high god had issued to the Hellene no moral commandment about “keeping the Sabbath-day holy”; his reluctance to do certain work on certain days rested on a more primitive sentiment concerning them. Thus it was unlucky both for himself and the city that Alcibiades should return to the Piraeus when the Plynteria were going on; for this latter was a cathartic ceremony, and evil influences were abroad. Nor, as Xenophon declares, would any one venture to engage in a serious work on this day.^295.1 Nor were these μιαραὶ ᾑμέραι, like the seventh days of the Babylonian months, necessarily days of gloom when offended deities had to be propitiated; on the contrary, the day of Χόες was a day of merry drinking and yet μιαρά: in fact, we best understand the latter phrase by translating it “tabooed,” rather than “sad” or “gloomy.”^295.2

Another coincidence that may arrest attention is that in Hesiod’s scheme the seventh day of the month was sacred because Apollo was born on it; and throughout the later period this god maintains his connection with the seventh day, also apparently with the first, the fourteenth, and the twentieth of the month.^295.3 This almost coincides with the Sabbatical division of the Babylonian months. But we cannot suppose that in Hellas these were days of mortification as they were in the East; else they would not have been associated with the bright deity Apollo.

Such dubious coincidences, balanced by still more striking diversities, are but frail supports for the hypothesis of race-contact.

In Babylonian thaumaturgy nothing is more significant than the magic power of the Word, whether spoken or written: and the Word, as we have noted, was raised to a cosmic divine power and possessed inherent creative force.^295.4 This is only a reflection upon the heavens of the human use of the magical or mesmeric word or set of words. This use of them is found, indeed, all round the globe. What seems unique in the Mesopotamian culture is that religion, religious literature, and poetry should have reached so high a pitch and yet never have risen above or shaken off the magic which is its constant accompaniment. Men and gods equally use magic against the demons; the most fervid hymn of praise, the most pathetic litany, is only part of an exorcism-ritual; and so inevitably does the shadow of magic dog religion here that Dr. Langdon is justified in his conjecture^296.1 that in a great hymn to Enlil, which contains scarcely a prayer but chiefly ecstatic description of his power, the worshipper is really endeavouring to charge himself with higher religious magic by this outpouring. In fact, here and elsewhere, a magic origin for the practice of theologic exegesis may be obscurely traced; narrative might acquire an apotropaeic effect; thus tablets containing the narrative of the achievements of the plague-god, hung up before the houses, could avert pestilence,^296.2 or, again, the reading aloud the tablet narrating the victory of Shamash and Ramman over the seven demons who attacked the moon-god Sin served to defeat the seven demons by the same sympathetic magic as would be worked by a dramatic representation of that event.^296.3

There is no record or hint that the Hellenes recited hymns to Demeter or wrote up passages of Homer to avert demons.

It belongs to the magic use of formulae that minute exactness in respect of every syllable is necessary to the power of the spell or the spell-prayer. An Assyrian king who is consulting the sun-god concerning success in a war with which he is threatened, prays that the ritual which the enemy may be employing may go wrong and fail; and in this context occurs the curious petition, “May the lips of the priest’s son hurry and stumble over a word.”^297.1 The idea seems to be that a single slip in the ritual-formulae destroyed their whole value; and such a view belongs to magic rather than to religion.

Now it is probable that in his earliest mental stage the Hellene had been in bondage to the religious magic of sacred formulae and sacred names; and as a tradition of that stage, the divine epithet whereby he appealed to his deities according to his needs retained always for him a mysterious potency; but otherwise we have no proof that he worked word-magic by means of his sacred texts.

Babylonian sorcery, whether legitimate or illegitimate, was intended to work upon or through demons; and its familiarity with the names and special qualities of demons is its peculiar mark. In the ritual of exorcism of the demons, idols play a prominent and often singular rôle. The following performance is probably unique: in the exorcism of disease two idols, male and female, were set up before the sick man, then the evil spirits of sickness are invited thus: “Oh ye all wicked, all evil, who pursue so-and-so, if thou art male, here is thy wife; if thou art female, here is thy husband.”^297.2 The intent of the exorciser seems to be to attract the demon of disease, of whose sex he is not sure, into one or the other of these images, and he lures it by amorous enticement into the figure of opposite sex to its own; having got the demon into the image, he doubtless takes it out and burns or buries it. Or the evil spirit may be attracted from the patient by means of its own image placed near him. One document prescribes various images of bestial form, all of which are to be taken by night to the bank of the river, probably that they may be thrown in and carry the impurity of sickness away.^298.1 Another shows us how to deal with Labartu, the daughter of Anu;^298.2 her image, made of clay, is placed above the head of the sick man, so as to draw her or her power out from him; it is then taken out, slain, and buried. And this exorcism is all the more notable because Labartu is rather an evil goddess than a mere demon, being styled in another text “August lady,” “Mistress of the dark-haired men.”^298.3 Such magical drama, in which the demon-image might be slain to annul its potency, seems characteristically Babylonian: it entered also into the ritual of the high gods. For, at the feast of the New Year, when Nebo arrived from Borsippa, two images are brought before him and in his presence decapitated with the sword. Dr. Langdon interprets them^298.4 as representing probably “the demons who aided the dragon in her fight with Marduk; they are the captive gods of darkness which ends with the Equinox.” This is dramatic magic helpful to the gods.

The elaboration of exorcism must have led to a minuter articulation of the demon-world; the exorciser is most anxious to know and discover all about his unseen foes: he gives them a name, a sex if possible, and a number: he says of the powerful storm-demons Utuk “they are seven, they are seven, they are neither male nor female, they take no wife and beget no children;”^299.1 for knowledge of the name or nature of the personality gives magic power.

Many of these examples, which might easily be multiplied, show us magic applied to private but beneficent purposes, the healing of disease, the exorcism of spirits of moral and physical evil. It was also in vogue for national purposes—for instance, for the destruction of the enemies of the king; one of our documents describes such a process as the making of a tallow-image of the enemy of the king and binding his face with a cord, so as to render the living foe impotent of will and speech.^299.2

We have already noticed that the Babylonian gods themselves work magic, and that it was also worked on behalf of the gods.^299.3 And in the ritual-records much that might be interpreted as religion may find its truer account from the other point of view; for instance, the ritual of placing by the bedside of a sick man the image of Nergal or those of the “twins who overthrow the wicked Gallu”^299.4 might appear at first sight as a religious appeal to the deities to come to his aid; but as in form it is exactly similar to the use made on the same occasion, as noted above, of the images of demons, we may rather suppose that the intention was magical in this act also, and that the divine idols were supposed to combat the demon of sickness by their magical influence. Or, again, in part of the ritual of exorcism we find acts that bear the semblance of sacrifice, such as throwing onions and dates into the fire; but they were charged with a curse before thrown, and the act is more naturally interpreted as a magic transference of evil.^300.1

For the purpose of the exorcism, to deliver a “banned” person, the high god, Marduk or another, might be called in; but Marduk also works the effect by magic: a rope is woven by Ishtar’s maidens, which Marduk (or his priest) turns round the head of the sufferer, then breaks it through and throws it out into the desert.^300.2 This looks like symbolic magic; the knotted rope represents the ban, which is then broken and thrown away.

There are many features in these methods of exorcism, such as the apotropaeic use of idols, that are common to other peoples at a certain stage of culture; there remains much also that seems peculiar to Babylon.

But what is uniquely characteristic of this Mesopotamian people, and at the same time most un-Hellenic, is the all-pervading atmosphere of magic, which colours their view of life and their theory of the visible and invisible world. Babylonia, at least, was the one salient exception to the historic induction that a distinguished writer^300.3 has recently sanctioned—“religion once firmly established invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to discredit the magician.” The psalmody of Babylon, with its occasional outbursts of inspiration and its gleams of spiritual insight, would have appealed to an Isaiah; its magic would have appealed to many a modern African. The Babylonian prophet does not frown on it; the high gods accept it, the priest is its skilled and beneficent practitioner. And at no other point, perhaps, is the contrast between the Hellenic and the Mesopotamian religions so glaring as at this.

This comparison of Eastern and Western ritual may close with some observations on another religious function that may be of some value for the question of early ethnic influence.

It has been remarked that divination played an important, perhaps a dominant part in the Babylonian ritual of sacrifice, divination, that is, by inspection of the victim’s entrails, especially the liver; and that this method was adopted in Greece only in the later centuries.^301.1 But there are other salient differences between the Babylonian and the more ancient mantic art of Hellas.^301.2 Another method much in vogue in the former was a curious mode of divining by mixing oil and water and watching the movements and behaviour of the two liquids.^301.3 The first and only indication of a similar practice in Hellas is a passage in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, of which the true meaning has hitherto escaped the interpreters.^301.4 And here, as usual, an obvious example of Mesopotamian influence on Hellenic custom belongs only to a late epoch. It is also true that the ancient divination of the two peoples agreed in certain respects, namely, in that both used, like most communities at a certain stage of culture, the auguries of birds and the revelations of dreams. As regards the facts relating to the former, we know more about Greece than at present about Babylon. But in the matter of dream-oracles, it is manifest that the Hellenic phenomena are entirely independent of Mesopotamian fashion. The Assyrian and Babylonian documents reveal the fashion of dream-prophecy in its simplest and highest form: the high deity of his own pleasure sends a dream, and the divining priest or skilled interpreter interprets it. No hint has so far been detected of that artificial method of provoking prophetic dreams by “incubation” or ἐγκοίμησις, the fashion of laying oneself down in some sacred shrine and sleeping with one’s ear to the ground, that was much in vogue in ancient Hellas and still survives in parts of the modern Greek world and which may be regarded as an immemorial tradition. In this divination, the divine spokesman was the power of the underworld. And this was the most important difference between the Western and the Eastern society in respect of the divine agency. In an early period of Hellenic history that may be called pre-Apolline, the earth-mother was conspicuously oracular by the vehicle of dreams; and this power of hers was generally shared by the nether god and buried heroes. Nor could the religion of Apollo suppress this “chthonian” divination. But in Mesopotamia the earth-powers and the nether world have no part or lot in this matter. It is almost the prerogative of Shamash, the sun-god, though Adad is sometimes associated with him;^302.1 both being designated as “Bēlē-Biri” or “Lords of Oracles.”^303.1

Another remarkable distinction is the fact that the ecstatic or enthusiastic form of prophecy, that of the Shaman or Pythoness possessed and maddened by the inworking spirit of god, is not found in the Babylonian record, which only attests the cool and scientific method of interpreting by signs and dreams and the stars. Perhaps Mesopotamia from the third millennium onward was too civilised to admit the mad prophet and prophetess to its counsels. But such characters were attached to certain Anatolian cults, especially to those of Kybele,^303.2 and also to the Syrian goddess at Hierapolis;^303.3 we have evidence of them also in a record of the Cretan Phaistos in the service of the Great Mother.^303.4 Some scholars have supposed that prophetic ecstasy was only a late phenomenon in Hellas, because Homer is silent about it. But there are reasons for suspecting that demoniac possession was occasionally found in the pre-Homeric divination of Hellas,^303.5 an inheritance perhaps from the pre-Hellenic period.

In any case, the theory that primitive Hellas was indebted to Babylonia for its divination-system is strongly repugnant to the facts.