As olympian and chthonian

This distine- tion, so characteristic of and peculiar to Hellenic thought, has already been anticipated as if familiar. One can hardly speak about Hellenic religious thought without assuming it. (1) Hellenism and the thought of death.—In the thought which belongs to and constitutes Hellenism, looked at in its relation to religion, the first moment was the revolt of man against the hard law of nature—a revolt s oe from the energetic, joyous consciousness of individual power and freedom.

This thought expressed itself in the gods whom it pictured to itseli—gods of beauty and of enjoyment. There was a tendency to eliminate trom the traditional conception of the Divine beings everything that conflicted with this sentiment, and leave only gods of life and bright- ness.

The Athenaia of actual Attic cult died, and was mourned for every year according to the old religious idea of the annual death and rebirth of the life of nature; but the Athena of Hellenic thought was lifted far above death. The grave of Dionysos was a central fact in the actual ritual, but drops out of the literature almost entirely.

The older views as to the dead, which made them into and wore ee them as gods, were not in accordance with the Hellenic spirit, and are not conspicuous in Greek literature. But the continuance of the ritual and worship of the dead in practice among the Greeks is everywhere pre- supposed and sometimes alluded to. There wag | in this ae a deep gap between the educated spirit of Hellenism and the actual conduct of the ordinary Greek man or woman.

The Hellenic spirit hated and avoided the thought of death. It was concerned with life and brightness and enjoy- ment, with show and festival and art. Homer * Plat. Huth. bE; Ar. Nub. 905, 1080; Eur. Hipp. 451, Ion 449; Ter. Hun, iii. 6. 3¢ RELIGION OF GREECE RELIGION OF GREECE 143 describes the Hidola of the dead as preserving in the realm of death a shadowy and wretched ex- istence which is worse than the most miserable lot in life.

Yet in the Homeric poems the old rites are seen in ee at the graves of Patroclus and Achilles (Odyss. xxiv. 65, etc.) That old ritual was systematized and formulated under the influence of the Delphic Oracle (whose rule always was to recognize and regulate the ancient religious usages); and this systematization was repeated in the Solonian legislation, and doubtless all over Greece.

* Hellenism could not maintain itself at this stage: the hard facts of the world and of life demand and force recognition. Thus comes in the second moment in the Hellenic religious idea — the inevitable awe before this irresistible power, the power of nature, stern, inexorable, irresistible, which may be regarded either impersonally as Fate or Necessity (Eipapyévy, ’Avdyxn), or person- ally as a oa whose power or will constitutes and moves and orders the course of nature.

Here the gods of the old régime returned into the Hellenic consciousness. They were more closely connected in the Greek mind with the power of nature and the one great fact in nature, Death. Life, the other side of that great fact, was not, as a rule, apprehended by the Greeks in its true relation to Death. The Greek mind had sought to make for itself gods of life alone; and the two antithetic sides of the religious conception were to a great extent developed separately from one another.

In this way, ret , must be explained the remark- able fact that in the Hellenic religion life and death _ are apportioned, so far as that is possible, to two different moods of thought and two different sets of deities. Only in the highest development of Greek thought in some rare minds, and there only in a very imperfect way, was the antithesis recon- ciled in a higher conception of the Divine nature (see C, § I, below).

(2) The Olympian and the Chthonian gods,— The difference between the gods of the old religious ideas and of the newer or Hellenic thought tended to crystallize in the distinction between Chthonian and Olympian gods, though this dis- tinction never became absolute and universal, and there is hardly any deity who belonged every- | where and at all times to the one class and never | tothe other. But the worship of the dead, t.e.

of the heroes, and of the Chthonian gods, was marked | off by broad lines from that of the Olympian gods ; and most of what was really deep and heart- | felt religion in Greece belongs to the former, | while most of what is artistic and a permanent | ay ion for the civilized world belongs to the The even numbers and the left hand belonged to the Chthonian deities, the odd numbers and the right hand to the gods of heaven (Plat. Legg. _ iy. 717A).

White was the appropriate colour of | the Olympian gods, the East their abode, and the direction to which their temples looked and their worshippers turned when sacrificing tothem. The forenoon was the time suitable for their worship. | The Chthonian gods preferred blood-red or black ; _ the West was the direction to which their wor- ae faced, the afternoon their chosen time. erings to the Olympian gods were shared in by men ; offerings to the Chthonian gods were burnt whole.

Men had community in the sacrifice with the former, with the latter they had none. One who had partaken of the black sheep offered to the hero Pelops in his grove in the Altis might not enter the temple of Zeus (Paus. v. 13). The priestess Theano refused to curse Alcibiades and * See U. Kéhler’s commentary on the famous Cean inscription, Athen, Mittheil. i. 139; Plutarch, Solon, 21. devote him to the infernal gods, on the ground that her duty was only to bless (Plut. Adc. 22).

The worship of the Chthonian deities was for the most part mystic ; and a very brief description of the character of the ritual of the Mysteries has already been given in A, § VII. This mystic and secret character shielded the Chthonian gods against the Hellenizing tendency; and thus the awe that attached to them remained unimpaired. Awe was foreign to the spirit of Hellenism; but the human spirit demands an element of awe, and the Hellenes were human.

Accordingly, Hellenism proteuted the Chthonian gods against itself by eeping them private, mysterious, and apart. VI. THE RELIGION OF APOLLO AND THE DELPHIC