Religion of greece and asia minor
Introduction. A, PRIMITIVE ANATOLIAN AND PRE-HELLENIC RELIGION. L Sacred Stones and other Inanimate Objects: (1) stones, pillars, columns, etc.; (2) thrones; (3) weapons; (4) wooden posts, Il. Sacred Trees. 1.
Sacred Animals; (1) animals as parts of the god ; (2) the bull; (3) the goat; (4) the sheep; (4) the horse; (6) the swine ; (7) the bee; (8) the sacredness of domesti- cated animals; (9) domesticated animals as sacrifice ; (10) the lion, the stag; (11) the serpent; (12) sacred- ness of wild animals. TV.
Sacred Places: (1) mountains; (2) sacred caves and mountain glens; (3) sacred springs and lakes; (4) development of the sacred place into a religious centre or Hieron; (5) sacred places in the religion of Greece. Y. Relation of the original aniconic religion to image- worship : (1) coexistence of the two kinds of worship ; (2) votive images and representations of the Deity ; (3) shrines (aot). VI.
The Divine in human form and character: (1) the Great Mother ; (2) the growth of mythology as the story of the Great Mother ; (3) myths of the goddess and the god ; (4) the birth and death of the Divine nature. VIL Ritual and Ceremonial: (1) the origin of ritual ; (2) the Mysteries ; (3) nature of the Mysteries; (4) the char- acter of the Phrygian and the Greek Mysteries ; (5) the growth of ritual; (6) purification ; i confession ; (8) approaching the Deity ; (9) priests ; (10) hieroi. VIII.
Influence on Society and Life: (i) marriage; (2) hierodouloi; (8) women guards; (4) self-mutilation ; (5) burial; (6) brotherhoods and guilds; (7) govern- ment and administration; (8) household protegés; (9) religious influences on social conditions. IX. History and Chronology : (1) development of the Anatolian Religion in history; (2) local diversity in Anatolian Religion ; (8) chronology B, Tur HEuienic Reiaion. I. Early Greek Religion. Il. Greek Religion and Greek Law. Ill.
The Elements of Hellenic Religion. TV.
The Growth of Hellenic Religion : (1) continuity of de- velopment; (2) growth of mythology ; (3) polytheism and the Hellenic unity ; (4) formation of the Hellenic Pantheon; (6) the Hellenic Religion an ideal; (6) RELIGION OF GREECE 109 theory of the Hellenic Pantheon; (7) moralization of the Hellenic gods ; (8) the Daimones and the Divine in the physical world; (9) restrictions on the nature of the gods; (10) State gods and gods within the State; (11) extension of the worship of a god; (12) State recognition of the Pan-Hellenic Religion; (13) the Hellenic Religion a part of the City-State; (14) the Hellenic conception of piety.
V. The Hellenic classification of deities as Olympian and Chthonian: (1) Hellenism and the thought of death ; (2) the Olympian and the Chthonian gods, VI. The Religion of Apollo and the Delphic Oracle (L. R. F.) C. Later DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION IN THE GREEK WORLD. I. Religion in Literature and Philosophy. Il. The attitude of St. Paul to Greek Philosophy. III.
Degradation of the Hellenic Religion: (1) foreign in- fluence ; (2)'susceptibility to foreign religious influence ; (3) manner in which foreign religion entered Greece ; (4) itinerant priests; (5) magic; (6) the worship of living men as deities. IV. Religion of the Greco-Asiatic cities. V. Decay and death of the Hellenic Religion. Literature.
The religion of the Greek peoples and of the races which lay between Hellas and the strictly Oriental nations, in communication with both, influencing and influenced by both, is a subject which can hardly be omitted in a survey of the religions which came into immediate relation to Christi- anity in the earliest stage of its history; and yet it is a subject which at the present time is hardly susceptible of adequate treatment within narrow space.
The antiquities of the most notable Hellenic cults have been much investigated, though not always in a very intelligent fashion or with a proper conception of the religious bearing of the details so carefully and laboriously collected.
Hence the religious ideas and conceptions entertained by the various tribes of Greece, often differing widely from one another, have hardly been sufficiently observed and studied in their gradual evolution; and, in fact, evidence is so scanty in regard to most of them, that it is doubtful if the attempt could be successful, If the religion of the strictly Greek tribes is still very obscure, much more is this the case with what may be called the half-Greek Peoples of Asia Minor.
This is a subject still almost unstudied, or studied occasionally, in a haphazard way, parti- ally, and as a sort of appendix to the religion of Greece proper. This way of entering on the study, under the bias and colouring influence of Greek pre ossession, is, we believe, injurious, and has caused much misapprehension.
One should rather begin the study of Greek religion from Asia Minor, both as being more primitive in many of its forms, and as having sent into Greece a series of religious waves which strongly affected that coun- try. Ata later period the Greek influence returned over Asia Minor, and overran it in a superficial way ; but this new period in religion was broadly different, and easily distinguishable from the older and truly Anatolian period.
It is necessary to begin afresh in that country, to collect and classify and value the religious facts, and on this basis to give an account of the religion of the peoples; but that is a great work, which is far too large for the narrow limits of an article.
Probably the most useful way at present will be to state as simply and clearly as possible the views which the writer is disposed to hold, avoiding disputation and argu- ment, and therefore making little reference to discrepant views, except where such reference is the shortest way of stating the subject clearly.
This gives unavoidably an appearance of dog- matism, which the writer can only apologize for as the necessary result of the attempt to make the subject clear in small space: if the views of others were stated, either the article would become a confusing congeries of irreconcilable theories, or it would grow too large in estimating and discussing * On the meaning which we attach to this term ‘half-Greok, see the following paragraph. 110 RELIGION OF GREECE RELIGION OF GREECE eee other views.
It is also necessary to explain that the writer’s views are founded on a far from com- plete survey of the facts, and are liable to correc- tion, doubtless, in many details, if the opportunity should ever be granted him of writing a complete account of Anatolian religion; but the general principles are the result of more than twenty ears of interest and occasional study, and are not likely to be much changed by further thought.
* The phrase ‘half-Greek races’ is not used in an ethnological sense in this article. It does not imply a mixture of Greek and non-Greek blood in any race. It is employed to indicate a gradual shading off of character, as one proceeds from Greece proper towards the East. The view which we take is that even the tribes of Greece proper were far from uniform in blood and stock.
The Hellenic idea and civilization which those tribes evolved was far too many-sided to arise among a homogeneous nation: there were combined in its composition a great variety of characteristics con- tributed by various tribes of very diverse character, nursed and matured amid the peculiar circum- stances of the seas and lands that touch and mingle in south-eastern Europeand Asia Minor.
The lands that border on the A’gean Sea were pre-eminently the nursing-home of Hellenism, and the further we go from it the more faint and evanescent become the traces of the Greek spirit. Hellenism is only partially a racial fact; it denotes also a general type of intellectual and political development, of industrial education and artistic achievement. The point of view from which we start may be stated in outline as follows.
(1) The religion of the Anatolian race or races, in its origin, was to a considerable extent an idealized presentation of the actual life of the time, exhibiting a Divine model and authorization for the existing customs and institutions in family and society and the State as a whole, (2) Their religion was the authority for the laws and rules on which rested their industry and agri- culture and general well-being.
Perhaps it origin- ally taught those rules to a simple people, in which case the knowledge embodied in them probably belonged at one time to the priests alone. Cer- ‘tainly, the sanction for the rules was religious: the violation of them was punished by the Divine power through sickness, whether disease of any ee of the body or the general indefinite fact of ever, which was considered to be a consuming of the body and strength by Divine fire.
(3) The Divine power was the ruler of the people, acting through its visible representatives, namely, the kings or priests: there is every probability that the king was the priest: the priest-kings or priest-dynasts are a most characteristic feature of Anatolia. This is obviously the religion of a comparatively civilized people, not of a barbarous race.
And it must be distinctly understood from the outset that we are not investigating the origin of the religious forms which are described in the following pages: we are attempting to understand clearly and state precisely the religious ideas of a population, possessing an ordered system of government of a pee and well-marked character, surrounded y many equipments and devices and implements of an artificial and developed character, practising both agriculture and a very highly developed * In the Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, i.
and ii., the present writer was groping his way to the views now expressed in part A. A considerable portion of part B was written in 1879-81, and needed hardly any change to adapt it to the writer’s present views. In view of recent theories it should be added that the view here advocated, as to the way in which pre-Hellenic religion developed into Hellenic, remains practically unchanged since 1881, but the name ‘Pelasgian’ was not used in that eld sketch of the subject.
system of treating domesticated animals and adapting them to the benefit of mankind. A question of extreme interest and importance is, how far any signs of progress and development can be observed in the religion which we are studying. It may be doubted whether there can be detected anything in the way of growth from within, of elevation of the religious idea and of the moral standard in the application of religion to life, such as is the most striking feature in the history of Hebrew religion.
On the whole, the history is one of deterioration and degradation rather than one of elevation.
y improvement that does take place seems rather attributable to, and fully explained by, the meeting of different races with different religious ideas corresponding to their differing social and family organization; and is probably not caused by any mind working fl from within the religion, unfolding and vitalizing the germs of truth which it contained, and burnin away the envelope and accretion of acciden idolatrous forms that aay toit.
We use inten- tionally these last words, for it will appear that the fundamental and essential idea in|the Anatolian religion is not strictly idolatrous, and that the de- velopment in polytheism and image-worship was gradual, and was external and accidental rather than natural and necessary. A. PRIMITIVE ANATOLIAN AND PRE-HELLENIC