Note 148.1 — Chapter VIII · Religion and Morality.

The idea of the sin of perjury belongs to the earliest stage of religious ethic, and is the starting-point of much moral evolution. It is magical in its origin; for the oath-taker enters into communion with the divinity, by touching some sacred object or eating sacred food charged with divine power, which, being now within him, will blast him if he forswears. This dangerous power becomes interpreted as the anger of the deity by whom the person swears falsely. Hence the belief arose in early Mesopotamia and Greece, and generally in the cults of personal gods, that they punish perjury as a dire offence: such punishment will fall on the community or individual, and often on both: therefore a social moral instinct arises against perjury. This might develop into a moral idea among a progressive people that truthfulness, quite apart from the ritual of the oath, was dear to God in any case, and was therefore a religious virtue. And of this religious virtue attaching to truthfulness, however it came to attach, we have evidence in a Babylonian ritual of confession; before the evil demon can be exorcised, the priest asked certain questions of the penitent, and twice he asks, “Has he said, yea for nay, and nay for yea?”148.1 But in no Hellenic record have I ever been able to find a religious parallel to this. The Hellenic religious spirit was most sensitive in respect to perjury, and no religion ever reprobated it more. In regard to ordinary truthfulness, Hellenic religion had nothing to say, no message to give, and Hellenic ethics very little. In the poetic story, Athena smiles on the audacious mendacities of Odysseus, and Hermes loves the liar Autolykos. Not that the religion consecrated mendacity, only it failed to consecrate truth.