Lewis Richard Farnell

“ In the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of the Persian religion, Ahura-Mazda is presented as a noble ethical figure, a concrete personal god, like Jahwé of Israel, whatever his original physical significance may have been. Marduk of Babylon, whom Hammurabi, the consolidator of the Babylonian power, raised to the rank of the high god, may once have been a sun-god, but he transcended his elemental nature, and appears in the records of the third millennium as a political deity, the war-god, and leader of the people, as real a personality as Hammurabi himself. ”

“ The transmission of precise rules of ritual from one people to another, implies an intercourse of some duration, and more or less regulated; for while the name of a god or a single myth is volatile, and can be wafted down remote routes by an itinerant trader, or nomad, or hunter, the introduction of any organised ritual implies, as a rule, the presence of the missionary or the foreign priest. If, then, there is any evidence suggesting that Greece in its earliest period learnt its ritual from Babylon, the importance of this for the ethnic history of religion will be great indeed. ”

“ We may profitably compare the Eastern and Western peoples according to their respective conceptions of the divine power. Looking carefully at the Babylonian hymns and liturgies, we cannot say that the idea of divine omnipotence was ever an assured dogma, vividly present to the mind and clearly expressed. Any particular hymn may so exalt the potency of the particular deity to whom it is addressed that, in the ecstasy of prayer and adoration, the worshipper may speak as if he believed him or her to be powerful over all things in heaven and earth. ”

“ Or the goddess may be more merciless than any god, more delighting in bloodshed, more savage in resisting progress: such often was Artemis for the Greeks, such is Kala at this moment in India, a dangerous and living force that threatens our rule. Again, the goddess may encourage purity in the sexual relations; this was the potential value of the ideal of Artemis in Greece, and perhaps the actual value of Mariolatry in the Middle Ages. Or the goddess-cult may be the source of what to us appears gross licentiousness, as was the case in Babylon and some parts of Asia Minor. ”

“ Now there ought to be no prejudice a priori against such a theory, which stands on a different footing from what I may call the Vedic fallacy: and it is childish to allow to the Aryan, or any other racial bias, any malignant influence in these difficult discussions. Those who have worked for years upon the marvellously rich records of Mesopotamian culture, whether at first hand or, like myself, at second hand, cannot fail to receive the deepest impression of its imperial grandeur and its forceful vitality, and of its intensity of thought and purpose in the sphere of religion. ”

“ Finally, I may again protest against the fallacy of supposing that theriomorphism always precedes anthropomorphism: for an ever-increasing mass of evidence forces one to the conviction that they are often co-existent and always compatible one with the other; if this is so, it is rash and unscientific to say, as is so easy to say and is so often said, when one meets in the Mediterranean or elsewhere a human god or goddess accompanied by a lion or a cock, that the anthropomorphic divinity has been evolved from the animal. ”

“ For religious consciousness by no means always draws the full logical corollaries of a religious act. The more mystic idea, that has played a great part in the religion of Europe, can only be detected or suspected, apart from written direct ancient testimony, where the animal is treated with reverence apart from and before his association with the altar, or is regarded as the habitual incarnation of the deity. The immolation and devouring of such a victim would be of the true sacramental type, which Robertson Smith believed was the aboriginal form of all sacrifice. ”

“ I would only express my growing conviction that these two distinct modes of representing the divine personage to the worshipper are not necessarily prior and posterior, the one to the other, in the evolution of religion. They can easily, and frequently do, coexist. The vaguely conceived deity shifts his shape, and the same people may imagine him mainly as a glorified man of human volition and action, and yet think of him as temporarily incarnate in an animal, and embody his type for purposes of worship or religious art in animal forms. ”

“ From these phrases, then, seems to emerge the conception of a virgin-mother. Only we must not press it too far, or suppose at all that it crystallised into a dogma. It is characteristic of the ecstatic Babylonian imagination that in the swoon of rapture the intellect does not sharply hold contradictions apart, and the mystic enthusiasm reconciles contrary ideas as fused in one divine personality. Thus even a divinity naturally and properly male, might be mystically addressed as Father-Mother, for the worshipper craves that the godhead should be all in all to him. ”

“ Assuming that the peoples on the east and west of the Aegean were already on the same religious plane when the first glimmer of what may be called history begins, can we discern certain striking resemblances or differences in their conception and imagination of divinity, sufficient to prove or disprove the theory of borrowing or of a movement across large areas of certain waves of religious influence emanating from a fixed centre? ”

“ From such isolated indications we might conclude that the Babylonian-Assyrian religion was more devoted to the goddess than to the god. We should certainly be wrong, as a more critical and wider survey of the facts, so far as they are at present accessible, would convince us. These hymns imputing supreme omnipotence to the goddess, whether Ishtar or another, may be merely examples of that tendency very marked in the Babylonian liturgies, to exalt the particular divinity to whom worship is at that moment being paid above all others. The ecstatic poet is always contradicting himself. ”

“ He has formulated them in regard to Comparative Religion in such a way that I feel precluded, in handling this part of the whole field, from what may be called the primitive anthropology of religion. I shall not, therefore, deal directly with the embryology of the subject, with merely savage religious psychology, ritual, or institutions. It is not that I do not feel myself the fascination of these subjects of inquiry, and their inevitableness for one who wishes wholly to understand the whole of any one of the higher world-religions. ”

“ Thus, to abstain from eating or injuring mice or weasels is not to worship mice or weasels: to lament over a dead sea-urchin is not to worship sea-urchins: to give a wolf a decorous funeral is not to worship wolves: to throw a piece of sacrificial meat to flies before a great sacrifice to some high divinity is not to worship flies. ”

“ What seems unique in the Mesopotamian culture is that religion, religious literature, and poetry should have reached so high a pitch and yet never have risen above or shaken off the magic which is its constant accompaniment. Men and gods equally use magic against the demons; the most fervid hymn of praise, the most pathetic litany, is only part of an exorcism-ritual ”

“ The bias that is felt in the religious poetry of Homer comes to determine the course of the later religious art, so that the religion, art, and literature of historic Greece may be called the most anthropomorphic or anthropocentric in the world. Yet we have sufficient proof that in the pre-Homeric age the popular mind was by no means bound by any such law, and that the religious imagination was unfixed and wavering in its perception of divinity: and the belief must have been general that the god, usually imagined as a man, might manifest himself at times in the form of some animal. ”

“ A war or a slaughter is called fanatical, if its leading motive is the extermination of a rival religion, not for the sake of morality or civilisation, but as an act in itself acceptable to one’s own jealous god. ”

“ Here the political, secular, utilitarian interest dominates the religion. The high divinities become politicians, and immersed in secular affairs, and even take sides in the party strife, as some of the religious titles attest. Thus Greek religion escaped morbidity and insanity, becoming genial and human, and compensating by its adaptability to the common needs of social life for what it lacked of mystery and aloofness. Therefore, also, in Greek invocations and hymns we do not often hear the echo of that sublimity that resounds in the Iranian, Assyrian, and still more in the Hebrew liturgies. ”

“ Wilde has made his wishes clear that the exposition of Comparative Religion should be mainly an elucidation and comparison of the higher forms and ideas in the more advanced religions. And I can cheerfully accept this limitation, as for years I have been occupied with the minute study of the religion of Greece, in which one finds much, indeed, that is primitive, even savage, but much also of religious thought and religious ethic, unsuspected by former generations of scholars, that has become a rich inheritance of our higher culture. ”

“ We can only distinguish the Greek from the Oriental in respect of Nature-religion by the lesser degree of devotion that the Hellene showed to it. Only those of his divinities whose names connoted nothing in the material or natural world, could develop into free moral personalities, and dominate the religious imagination of the people. Nowhere, for instance, had Helios any high position in the Greek world except at Rhodes, where we must reckon with pre-Hellenic, Minoan, and later with Semitic influences. ”

“ We may affirm generally, then, that the Mesopotamian and Hellenic religions are more or less on the same level of thought in respect of the moral and beneficent character of the deities. But careful study of the Hellenic will give us the impression that the terrible and destructive power of divinity is far less emphasised by cult than it was in the Eastern Semitic world. Every deity might be dangerous if neglected, and certainly would be if insulted. ”

“ Speaking generally, and in comparison with the ancient Semitic and the mediaeval and even later spirit of Europe, we must pronounce the Hellenic temperament of the earlier and classical period as wholly innocent of fanaticism. The history of Hellas is not stained by any “war of religion”; and no religious hierarchy in Hellas ever possessed the power or displayed the will to suppress art or persecute science and thought. It might occasionally happen that individuals were in danger of punishment if they insulted or openly flouted the civic worship or introduced new deities ”

“ Our knowledge, of course, of the relation of religion to the social order of life, law, and morality in the second millennium in Greece, is only dim and hypothetical: here and there Homer affords us glimpses; for the rest, we have legends and cult evidence which must be carefully and tactfully used. I have already touched on the religious character of the ancient kingship, and the evidence of the religious origin of some of the Hellenic πόλεις. It is probable that some of the deities had already in the proto-Hellenic period a political character, as deities of the assembly or the “agora.” ”

“ I will now sketch what I have perceived to be the higher elements or more developed features in Hellenic religion, and will consider in regard to each of these how it contrasts with or resembles the cults of the other leading peoples of this area. The Hellenic high divinity is, in the first place, no mere shadowy “numen,” no vague spirit-power or semi-personal divine force, such as the old Roman belief often seems to present us with, nor is he usually conceived as a divine element immanent in certain things ”

“ Coming now to the Asia-Minor shore, where in the first millennium B.C. the Hellenic colonisation and culture flourished, we find the traces of a great goddess-cult discoverable on every important site; though recorded only by later writers, as a rule, and interpreted to us by the later Greek names, such as Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite, more rarely Athena, we can still discern clearly that she belongs to a pre-Hellenic stock. ”

“ On the other hand, the function of religion as a constructive force in early Greek society, in the evolution of tribal and intertribal law, is more obvious and transparent, for in this land we are fortunate enough to catch glimpses of civilised society in its making, which are denied to us in Mesopotamia. Hellenic religion penetrated every domain and department of Hellenic life to an even greater degree than did Babylonian religion the society of Babylon. And yet the Greek mind as it develops becomes pronouncedly secular, at least in comparison with the Oriental. ”

“ The narrower systems of family and phratry tell the same story of the constructive power of religion. The primitive grouping into septs and phratries and tribal subdivisions, of which the traces are not yet discovered in the civilisation of Babylon, has left its deep imprint on historic Greek society; and religion is intimately interwoven with the domestic and phratric cults, not only in that these are much concerned with worship of heroes and ancestors, but that the high divinities also, Zeus Φράτριος, Athena Φρατρία and Ἀπατουρία, take these institutions under their charge. ”

“ The motives for a war appear to be of the ordinary human and secular kind; Palestine, for instance, is attacked, not because Marduk or Asshur personally hates Jahwé, but because the country holds the key of the route to Egypt. Such Biblical narratives as the destruction of Jericho, Ai, and the Amalekites find no real parallel in Mesopotamian chronicles. Yet in these also the temper of homicidal religion is strong enough to be dangerous. Neither in the Babylonian nor in the Assyrian divinities is there any spirit of mercy to the conquered. ”