Note 48.1 — Chapter III · The Morphology of the Compared Religions.

Such was the religious world lying before the feet of the Aryan Hellenes descending from the north; and when their expansion across the islands to the Asiatic shores began, they would find everywhere a religion more or less on the same plane of development. Therefore if, as some students appear to imagine, the aboriginal Hellene had not developed personal gods before he arrived,48.1 it would be irrational to conclude that Babylon had taught him to worship such beings in place of the vague and flitting daimon. His immediate teachers would be the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples; and that their theistic system was derived from Babylon is a theory lacking both positive evidence and a priori probability, as I may afterwards indicate. But that the proto-Hellenic peoples were in that backward condition of religious thought, is in the highest degree improbable. We must suppose that early in the second millennium they were slowly pushing their way down through the Balkans and through the country that is afterwards Thrace. So far as the earliest myths and records of this region throw some light on its prehistoric darkness, it appears to have been dominated by a great god. When the Thraco-Phrygian race, and possibly their kinsmen the Bithynoi, penetrated into the same region, they brought with them a father-god, who accompanied members of these stocks into Asia Minor, and settled in Phrygia, Pontus, and Bithynia by the side of an earlier goddess. Their cousins of the Indo-Iranian stock had certainly reached the stage of personal polytheism before 1400 B.C., as the epoch-making discovery of the Hittite-Mitani inscriptions at Boghaz-Keui, referred to above, sufficiently indicates.48.2 We cannot believe that the Hellenes of the earliest migration were inferior in culture to those Thracians, Bithynians, or even Indo-Iranians; for various reasons we must believe the reverse. And we now know from modern anthropology that peoples at a very low grade of culture, far lower than that which the Aryan stocks had reached at the time of the great migrations, have yet attained to the idea of personal and relatively high gods. In fact, that scepticism of certain philological theorists who, a few years ago, were maintaining that the Aryans before their separation may have had no real gods at all, is beginning to appear audacious and uncritical. At any rate, in regard to the Hellenes, the trend of the evidence is to my mind weighty and clear, making for the conviction that the different stocks not only possessed the cult of personal gods, but had already the common worship of certain deities when first they entered Greece. Otherwise, when we consider the mutual hostility of the various tribes and the geographical difficulties in the way of intercourse in early Greece, it would be difficult to explain the religious facts of the Homeric poems. We might, indeed, if Homer was our only witness, suspect him of representing what was merely local Achaean religion as common to all Greece. But we can check him by many other witnesses, by ancient myths and cults of diverse localities. Zeus was worshipped by some, at least, of the main tribes, when they were in the neighbourhood of Olympus: he is no more Thessalian than he is Dryopian. One of the earliest Hellenic immigrants were perhaps the Minyai, and their aboriginal god was Poseidon. The ritual of Apollo preserves the clearest reminiscence of his entry from the north, and he is the high god of one of the oldest Hellenic tribes, the Dryopes, and the wide diffusion of his cult suggests that aboriginally it was a common inheritance of several stocks. The force of the evidence that may be urged for this view is ignored by Wilamowitz in his brilliant but fallacious theory of the Lycian origin of the god. We must reject the hypothesis of a proto-Hellenic godless period; but, on the other hand, the mere fact that the early Greek religion appears on the same plane as the Mesopotamian, in respect of the worship of personal beings, gives no support at all to the theory of Oriental influence. If it is to be accepted, it must be sustained by more special evidence.