Chapter IV · Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.

A comparison made according to the test we have just applied is not so important as that which arises in the second stage of the inquiry. Assuming that the peoples on the east and west of the Aegean were already on the same religious plane when the first glimmer of what may be called history begins, can we discern certain striking resemblances or differences in their conception and imagination of divinity, sufficient to prove or disprove the theory of borrowing or of a movement across large areas of certain waves of religious influence emanating from a fixed centre?

There is some doubt in regard to the winged figures with eagles’ heads on the reliefs from Khorsabad, in the British Museum (pl. 38-40): they are represented holding pine-cones and a “cista mystica” on each side of the sacred tree, and might be genii engaged in worship; but on one of the reliefs Assur-nasir-Pal is standing before one of them in attitude of adoration.

But these are exceptional phenomena; and as the Hellenes in the later period were usually able to identify the leading Semitic deities with their own, we may see in this another proof that the Western and Eastern religions were nearly on the same plane as regards their perception of divine personality.

In passing, let us observe that neither the earliest prehistoric art of the Mediterranean nor the great religious types of the Minoan divinities recall the art style of Mesopotamia.

But this developed anthropomorphism of the early Aegean civilisation is not the whole story. Modern research has accumulated evidence that seems to point to a theriomorphic religion in Crete and in Mycenaean Greece which has been supposed by some to have preceded the former in order of time and in the logical process of evolution, and which at any rate survived by the side of it. Traces of the same phenomenon have been noted in the Hittite area, and more faintly in the valley of the Euphrates. The first modern writer who proclaimed with emphasis the theriomorphic elements in the prehistoric religions of Greece was Mr. A. Lang in his Custom and Myth, connecting it with a theory of totemism that does not concern us here. Afterwards, a systematic treatment of the problem in the light of the monuments of the Cretan and Mycenaean periods was presented by Mr. Cook in a paper published in the Hellenic Journal of 1894 on “Animal Worship in the Mycenaean Age”; and again in 1895 by an essay on “The Bee in Greek Mythology”: a very full collection of the materials, with some exposition of important religious theory, will be found in De Visser’s treatise, De Graecorum Diis non referentibus speciem humanam (1900). Miss J. Harrison has worked further along the same lines, and has published some special results in her paper read before the Congress of the History of Religions, 1908, and published in its Transactions, on “Bird and Pillar Worship in relation to Ouranian Divinities.”

Now the material that forms the fabric of these researches is so intricate, the relevant facts so manifold and minute, that it is impossible to consider them in detail within the limits of this present inquiry, of which the leading object is an important question of history concerning the religious influence of the East on the West; and, again, the writers above mentioned are deeply concerned with theories about the origins, or at least the earlier stages in the evolution of religion. And as I am only comparing East and West in a limited and somewhat advanced period of their history, I am not necessarily bound to deal with problems of origin. Nevertheless, a summary survey of this group of facts may provide us with important clues towards the solution of our main question. But a few general criticisms of the assumptions which, whether latent or explicit, are commonly made in the writings just quoted, may be useful at the outset. First, one finds that the word “worship” is used very loosely by the ancients as well as by contemporary writers: and by its vague and indiscriminate employment an effort is made to convince us that the pre-Hellenic and proto-Hellenic world worshipped the lion, the ox, the horse, the ass, the stag, the wolf, the pig, the bird, especially the dove, the eagle, and lastly even the cock. We should have to deal with a savage religion rioting in theriolatry, and we should not need to trouble any longer about the theory of its Mesopotamian origin, for as we have seen theriomorphism played a very small part in the Sumerian-Babylonian cult. But one must ask more precisely, What is worship, and what does lion-worship, for instance, imply? Are we to believe that every one of these animals was worshipped, the whole species being divine? And does their “worship” mean that the superstitious people prayed to them, built altars or sacred columns, or even shrines to them, and offered them sacrifice? It has become urgent to reserve some such strict sense for the word as this, in order to preserve a sense of the distinction between our ritual-service of a real personal divinity and the various, often trifling, acts that may be prompted by the uneasy feeling or reverential awe evoked by the presence of a curious or dangerous animal. Thus, to abstain from eating or injuring mice or weasels is not to worship mice or weasels: to lament over a dead sea-urchin is not to worship sea-urchins: to give a wolf a decorous funeral is not to worship wolves: to throw a piece of sacrificial meat to flies before a great sacrifice to some high divinity is not to worship flies. All these things the civilised Greeks could do, but they ought not for that to be charged with worshipping whole species of animals directly as gods. Next let us bear well in mind that secular animals, like secular things, can become temporarily sacred through contact with the altar: thus the ox who voluntarily approached the altar and ate of the grain or cakes upon it, might be believed by the Hellenes to become instantly divine, full of the life of the divinity, and most ceremonious respect resembling worship might be meted out to him; but we should not hastily believe that the Greeks who might feel like this towards that particular ox worshipped all oxen; or that the society of King Minos worshipped all axes wherever found, because in peculiar circumstances and ritual an axe might become charged with divinity. Finally, I may again protest against the fallacy of supposing that theriomorphism always precedes anthropomorphism: for an ever-increasing mass of evidence forces one to the conviction that they are often co-existent and always compatible one with the other; if this is so, it is rash and unscientific to say, as is so easy to say and is so often said, when one meets in the Mediterranean or elsewhere a human god or goddess accompanied by a lion or a cock, that the anthropomorphic divinity has been evolved from the animal.

To conclude, this brief survey of the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments points to a contemporary religion that preferred the aniconic agalma to the human idol, but imagined the divinity mainly as anthropomorphic, though this imagination was probably not so fixed as to discard the theriomorphic type entirely. Therefore this religion is on the same plane with that of Mesopotamia rather than with that of Egypt.

This résumé of the facts, so far as it has gone, appears to justify the theorem with which it started, that the “Mycenaean” peoples and proto-Hellenes in the second millennium were on the whole, in respect of the morphology of their religion, on the same plane as those of the Euphrates valley; only it appears that theriomorphism played slightly more part in the cults and legends of the West than in those of the Sumerian-Babylonian culture. It is obvious to any student of comparative religion that such general similarity which we have here observed, and which we might observe if we compared early Greece with Vedic India, neither proves nor disproves a theory of borrowing. And so far there seems no occasion for resorting to such a theory, unless the type of the fish-goddess at Phigaleia be considered a reason for supposing Semitic influences here at work and for tracing her ancestry to Derketo of Bambyke. For such transference of cult we might have to invoke the help of Phoenicians, who arrive on the scene too late to help us in the present quest, and who are not likely to have been attracted into the interior of Arcadia.