Note 144.1 — The Evolution of Religion

If in any given society the primitive belief in the impurity of bloodshed became intensified beyond a certain point, homicide might easily come to be regarded no longer as a matter to be settled by the families of the slayer and the slain, but as the deep concern of the people of the land. We have seen that it was just this religious concept of impurity that brought the act under the cognisance of the national religious law of Israel: the people are terrified because the soil has been made impure and their god has been stained. In the Zend-Avesta we find that the slaying of a water-dog was an impure act against God, and was avenged by the whole community; and sacrifice was offered to appease the holy soul of the dog.144.1 These facts then offer some analogy for the theory that I would suggest, namely, that the civilised law in Greece concerning homicide arose in the post-Homeric period through an intensification of the feeling concerning the impurity of bloodshed and owing to the greater hold that the terrors of the ghostly world had come to gain over the later Hellenic imagination; for the ghost or the Erinys of the dead is the embodiment of the miasma that arises from the slaying; and the ghost knows how to drive it home, and is no respecter of persons, but can make a whole area uninhabitable. The religious phenomenon and the legal fact that I would connect as cause and effect are not found in the Homeric period: both are found coexisting in the later. And much legendary evidence accords with this hypothesis. Perhaps the earliest indication of the emergence of the idea in Greek society that certain kinds of homicide concern the State, is found in the legends about exile and excommunication for the shedding of kindred blood, the exile, for instance, of Bellerophon and Ixion. Such exile is not the ordinary flight of the homicide to avoid the avenger of blood; for in the cases where a man is of the same kin as the slain, there is no family avenger, but the whole community in horror cast him out lest the curse should infect themselves. Kinsmen’s blood was more sacred than other, therefore the shedding it spread the greater impurity over the land. And the Greek legends suggest that this offence was one of the earliest in the legal history of the race which awoke the religious conscience of the State.145.1 Now if we assume that the old ideas associated with kinship came to be extended to the whole community of the polis—as might easily happen through the intermarriage of the γένη—then a similar miasma would be caused by the slaying of a citizen as by kindred murder: the State would feel the supernatural peril of the act and would take cognisance.