Note 199.1 — The Evolution of Religion

Before considering Greek prayer proper, we may note as a last example of an ambiguous formula, standing midway as it seems between spell and prayer, the striking liturgical utterance of the old Dodonæan ritual, employed for an agricultural service: the priestesses chanted the refrain in two hexameters, the old metre of religion, “God was, God is, God will be, oh Great God; the earth brings forth fruits, therefore call on mother earth.”199.1 The resemblance of this to the early English formula quoted above is striking enough. The first line belongs to an elevated religion and seems far removed from the region of magic; but equally spiritual formulæ concerning the nature and the attributes of God were used in the Zarathustrian and Babylonian liturgies for magical purposes, just as texts from the Bible and Koran have been. And the second line employs the same method as the Navajo Shaman employed, for it states that the divinity is doing that very thing which it is the object of the liturgy to bring about. The appeal to mother earth which is enjoined may have been merely the invocation of her name, a spell at least as much as a prayer. The same may be said of the other popular refrains chanted by the husbandmen of ancient Greece to obtain good crops or fair weather—“Give us big sheaves, sheaves,” to Demeter,200.1 or “Come forth, dear sun,” to the sun-god.200.2