THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG . 438
I
hilarity prevailed, men ate, drank, and were merry together, rejoicing before their god.” The same attitude of mind was seen among the Germanic tribes; Grimm says (Teutonic Mythology, Eng. transl., i. 42, London, 1879) that the religious rites of the ancient Germans were, as a rule, cheerful, and those which were of this nature were the earliest and the commonest. This, of course, was natural if the first of public rites was one of joyousness, an invitation to the god to be present and partake of a repast spread for him by his worshipers. Purely religious banquets, festal commemorations, and thanksgivings would thus make up a large part of early rites among those religions in which “ the habitual temper of the worshipers is one of joyous confidence in their god, untroubled by any habitual sense of human guilt, and resting on the firm conviction that they and the deity they adore are good friends, who understand each other perfectly and are united by bonds not easily broken.” This temper of mind may be put down to the ease with which in the childhood of the race, as in that of the individual, troublesome thoughts are cast off; but it could never have spread as widely or lasted as long if it had not been for the view that religion was in large measure the affair of the community, and the conviction that the benefits expected from the gods were of a public character. In widely separated regions, the mourner was “ unclean,” excluded from the worship of the tribe; as Robertson Smith puts it, “‘the very occasions of life in which spiritual things are nearest to the Christian, and the comfort of religion is most fervently sought, were in the ancient world the times when a man was forbidden to approach the seat of God’s presence.”
It is not, then, surprising to find in a large number of the later cults of the private or non-official kind, whose history, precisely because they were non-official and more or less secret, has filled far less space than the other in literary records, an effort to propitiate or to drive away supernatural beings
conceived, not as the friends of the
18. Propitia- worshipers, but as hostile, or in some tory and way dangerous. Skilled and scientific Apotropaic investigation of these cults is even Worship. more recent than study of the general subject; but such thorough and pains-
taking work as that done for one group of them by Miss Jane Harrison in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (2d ed., Cambridge, 1908), and the amount of new light thrown by it on a subject which was supposed to be pretty thoroughly known fifty years ago, show conclusively the need of much more research along these lines. In her opening chapter she admits that one factor, and a prominent one, in the Greek religion of the fifth century B.c. was the idea of service (therapeia), in which there was no element of fear; if man did his part in the friendly transaction, the gods would do theirs But the whole tenor of her book, with its wealth of piled-up instances and its acute analysis, goes to show that side by side with the worship of the kindly Olympian deities there existed a whole mass of cult-forms which expressed awe and reverence of spirits or beings of the under-world. Plutarch protests eloquently against the religion of fear; but
Miss Harrison has supplied sufficient evidence to warrant the conclusion that what he regards as superstition (deisidaimonia, in its later and unfavorable sense) was, in the sixth and even in the fifth century B.c., the real religion of the great mass of the Greek people. The formula of this religion is not, like the other, do ut des (‘I give that you may give’), but do ut abeas (“I give that you may go, and keep, away ’\). The evidence consists not only in direct statements such as that of the orator Isocrates (436-338 B.c.), which is worth quoting for its direct completeness: ‘‘ Those of the gods who are the source to us of good things have the title of Olympians, those whose department is that of calamities and punishments have harsher titles; to the first class both private persons and states erect altars and temples, the second is not worshiped either with prayers or burnt-sacrifices, but in their case we perform ceremonies of riddance ” (Oratio, v. 117). His contemporary Plato, in the Laws (717 A), arranges the objects of divine worship in a regular sequence; first, the Olympian gods, together with ‘those who keep the city ’’; second, the underworld gods, whose share are things of unlucky omen; third, the demons, whose worship is characterized as ‘“‘orgiastic”’; fourth, the heroes; and fifth, the ancestral gods—concluding the list with living parents, to whom much honor should be offered. The classification evidenced by ritual is, however, much less minute; the only recognized distinction is that burnt-offerings are the meed of the Olympians, while ‘‘ devoted” offerings (enagismot) belong to the chthonic or underworld gods.
In Greece there was, moreover, a long series of ritual acts intended to propitiate or avert the presence of these latter—the Anthesteria, or spring festival of the revocation and aversion of ghosts; the Thargelia, an early summer festival of first-fruits
(singularly cognate with the Australian
19. The intichiuma for the removal of taboo on
Greek the harvest-store); the women’s fes- Mysteries. tivals—Thesmophoria, Arrhephoria, Skirophoria, Stenia, and Haloa—lead-
ing up to the Eleusinian mysteries, which have acquired a greater fame (owing to their adoption by Athens and their later affiliation to the mysteries of Dionysus), but which originally may have been nothing more than the Haloa, or harvest-festival, of Hleusis. Their development, as shown by Jevons, acquires its significance first from the fact that, by an exception wholly alien to the spirit of the antique religions and strictly confined to an exceptional case, the State threw open to all Greeks, men and women, bond and free, the national worship of a national god, and adopted initiation by purification (myésis) as the qualification for admission to a cult hitherto confined to citizens. The opening of the Eleusinian sanctuary to the Athenians coincided with a wave of religious revivalism, which (spreading from Semitic territory in the sixth century B.c.) infused into men’s minds the idea of a definite possibility of happiness in a future life, conditioned on a closer communion with the gods than was attainable on the gift-theory of sacrifice. Purification is the keynote of the worship in the mysteries; by the word mystery is meant a rite in which certain very sacred
things are exhibited, which can not be safely seen by the worshiper until he has passed through the prescribed purifications. There followed the introduction to these mysteries of the cult of Iacchus, and his identification with Dionysus; the dramatic performances held in his honor (the fact of the close association between the genesis of the drama, both in Greece and in western Hurope—to say nothing of the curious parallel in the recently gained knowledge of Australian tribes—and religious worship can only be alluded to in passing); the spread of the idea, so pregnant with results as a preparation for Christianity, that this communion, with its hopes of future bliss, was open to all who chose to avail themselves of the grace offered; and the conception of a religious community bound together, not by physical or political ties, but by spiritual fellowship and participation in a common worship.
Edward Caird, treating rather in the abstract the evolution of religion, without much detail, reaches the same point in the development by a somewhat different road. Tracing the growth of the human mind from the almost purely objective
view of phenomena which it takes in
20. Influ- its most ignorant form, he says that ence of Sub- “ in so far as God is conceived as mere-
jectivity on ly an object, the worshiper must feel
Worship. toward him as a slave, who obeys with-
out any consciousness of anything that lifts him into unity with the power to which he submits’; while later he remarks that the gradual growth of self-consciousness, subjectiveness (which of course is an indispensable preliminary to a sense of guilt and need of purification), changes all this. “The later Judaism breaks away in the prophets and psalmists from the forms of national worship, and becomes an inner religion of the individual heart—thus preparing the way for the universalism of Christianity ”’ (Evolution of Religion, i. 190-193, London, 1893).
There is no need to give here an extended treatment of Christian worship, which is abundantly illustrated in all its details in other articles (see especially Lrruraey; Mass; etc.); nor is there any need to explain, still less to apologize for, the reappearance in it of many principles familiar to students of the earlier history of the religious ideas of the race, although to some unreflecting minds the
conclusions of advanced modern an- 21. Justifi- thropology have seemed upsetting. cation of There is really nothing to wonder at in
Christian the adoption and consecration of cult-
Analogies principles familiar to earlier genera-
with Ju- tions; the wonder would have been if
dwo-Ethnic Christianity, intended to take root in Cults. a soil impregnated with the germs of old beliefs, had utterly ignored the
centuries of preparation, and had brought a message in no wise recalling what had so long been sacred to the world. In dealing with what primitive Christian worship borrowed from the Jewish rites, it is important to distinguish between the Temple service, which had little direct influence, and that of the synagogue, which in its four main features— reading of the Scriptures, chants, homilies, and prayers—was continued in morphological complete-