Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But as regards the non-Semitic peoples of anterior Asia, the question of borrowing is more difficult to answer with certainty.
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.
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.
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.
This reconstruction then, and the a priori deduction emphasised above, may claim to be at least legitimate.
Shall we say that all these are merely reflections cast afar by the great cult-figure of Babylon?
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 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.
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.
Such dubious coincidences, balanced by still more striking diversities, are but frail supports for the hypothesis of race-contact.
There is no record or hint that the Hellenes recited hymns to Demeter or wrote up passages of Homer to avert demons.
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.
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.
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.
In any case, the theory that primitive Hellas was indebted to Babylonia for its divination-system is strongly repugnant to the facts.