Note 61.2 — Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

Idolatry.—Another phenomenon of importance at the beginning of this second period is the rise of idolatry, the prevalence of the use of the ‘eikon’ in actual worship in place of the older aniconic ‘agalma,’ which had sufficed for the Minoan and the Homeric world as a token of the divine presence or as a magnet attracting it to the worshipper. This important change in the object of cult may have been beginning in the tenth century, for we have one indication of it in the Homeric poems, and recently on one of a series of vases of the early geometric style found in a grave near Knossos of the post-Minoan period the figures of an armed God and Goddess are depicted on low bases, evidently idols, and perhaps the earliest surviving of any Hellenic divinity.61.2 Henceforth, although the old fetich-object, the aniconic ‘agalma,’ lingered long in certain shrines and holy places, the impulse towards idolatry became imperious and almost universal, exercising a mighty influence on the religious sentiment of the Hellenes both before and after the triumph of Christianity. The worship before the idol intensified the already powerful anthropomorphic instinct of the polytheism; and was at once a source of strength and a cause of narrowness. It brought to the people a strong conviction of the real presence of the concrete and individual divinity; and, as it gave its mandate to the greatest art of the world, it evolved the ideal of divinity as the ideal of humanity, expressible in forms of beauty, strength, and majesty. On the other hand, it was a force working against the development of a more mystic, more immaterial religion, or of a consciousness of Godhead as an all-pervading spirit, such as might arise out of the vaguer religious perception of those half-personal ‘daimones’ or ‘numina,’ which never wholly faded from the popular creed.