Chapter XIII (1)

Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

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A comparison of the forms observed in these regions, both in regard to the minute details and to the general underlying ideas, ought to contribute independent evidence to the solution of our question. 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. Therefore it may seem that a detailed comparison of the Eastern and Western ritual is forced upon us at this point: but it would be premature to expect at present any finality in the result, because the Mesopotamian documents have only been very incompletely examined and published by the linguistic experts. However, the material that they have presented to us reveals certain salient facts of immediate value for our present purpose that cannot be wholly illusory, however much we may have to modify our interpretation of them in the light of future discovery.

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As regards the Greek evidence, we are not without fairly ample testimony concerning the earliest period. The Homeric poems present us with the contemporary religious practices of at least a portion of the population whom we may conveniently call the Achaeans; though we have no right to suppose that they give us a complete account even of those. Again, as ritual does not spring up in a day, and has a singular longevity, we may be sure that much of Homeric ritual is a tradition of the second millennium. Furthermore, we can supplement Homer by later testimony, of which the lateness of date is no argument against the primitiveness of the fashions that it may attest.

The first superficial comparison of Mesopotamian and Aegean ceremonies exhibits a general similarity in the mechanism of religion; an established priesthood, temples, images, altars, prayers, sacrifice, religious music, holy days, consultation of the gods by methods of divination, a certain ceremonious tendance of the dead, these are common features of East and West. But if we were comparing Hellenic with Egyptian or Vedic, or even Mexican and Peruvian religion, we should be able to point to the same general agreement in externals, and many of these institutions are found broadcast over the modern world of savage society. It will be more important for the present question, if when we examine the Babylonian, Anatolian, and Hellenic ritual more minutely we discern salient differences, especially if these are found in certain organic centres of the religious life such as was the sacrifice. And we must first try to determine whether the Hellas of the pre-Homeric days already possessed all those religious institutions roughly enumerated above. We can deal to some extent with both these problems together.

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The erection of temples is an important stage in the higher development of anthropomorphic religion. By the beginning of the second millennium B.C. this had become an immemorial tradition of Mesopotamia. But we are not sure at what period the other polytheistic Semites first evolved the architectural shrine, or how long they were content to use the natural cave as the house of a divinity, or a high place or “temenos” with altar or sacred pillar. The recent excavations at Gezer have revealed a glimpse into the religion of the prehistoric Semites of Canaan; and one shrine that seems nothing more than a row of sacred monoliths, but also another that has more the appearance of an elaborate building of a sacred character.[223.1] Of still greater antiquity was the shrine that Professor Petrie has discovered at Serabit in the Sinaitic peninsula, an original cave-temple complicated with the addition of porticoes and chambers, which he believes to have been devoted to a double cult, the Egyptian and Semitic.[223.2] At all events, we may conclude that before 1000 B.C. most of the more cultured Semitic communities in Asia Minor had come to house their divinities in more or less elaborated shrines.

As regards the other race that dominated the early period of Anatolian history, the Hittite, we have the priceless evidence of the Boghaz-Keui monuments: these reveal a complex temple hewn out of and into the rocky ravine with a “Holy of Holies” and what appears to be a sleeping-chamber for the god.[223.3] In Phrygia, the artificial shrine may have been late in supplanting the natural cavern or hole in the rock that was once the sufficient home of the cult of the great goddess.[223.4] From {224} the coast of Asia Minor we have no evidence concerning the site of any ancient temple that carries us back to the early period with which we are dealing.[224.1] But the Homeric poems alone are sufficient proof that the Greeks, for whom they were composed, were beginning to be familiar with some architectural type of the deity’s habitation. Apollo Smintheus already has his shrine and professional priest.[224.2] We hear of the temple and priestess of Athena in Troy,[224.3] of her shrine at Athens, which she shared with Erechtheus,[224.4] and the stone-threshold of Apollo at Delphi, that guarded already many treasures within it.[224.5] And we also know from the excavations of the last few years that the Aryan invaders from the North, the proto-Hellenes, would find temples on some at least of the sites of the Minoan culture. Crete has preserved certain shrines of the second millennium; but except the temple-cave on Dikte all of them so far are found to be merely domestic chapels in the king’s palace, as though the king were personally responsible for the religion of the community: and so at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Athens, the oldest temples have been found on the foundations of “Mycenaean” palaces.[224.6] But the temples of Hera on the public hill of Argos and at Olympia are now dated near to 800 B.C.[224.7]

We have, then, proof sufficient of temple-construction in Greece and the Aegean islands before the period of Homer; and if we must have recourse to the theory that the peoples of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture took {225} their cue in this important evolution from some foreign civilisation, we should look to Egypt rather than to Assyria, as nearer and more closely in touch with early Crete.

We may mark here a difference between Eastern and Western thought in the religious conception of the temple. It was naturally regarded everywhere as sacrosanct, because permeated with the virtue of the divine presence; but Babylonia developed this idea with greater intensity of conviction than the Hellene, and actually deified the temple itself: the King Nabopolassar (_circ._ 625 B.C.) prays to it in such words as these, “Oh, temple, be gracious to the king thy restorer, and if Marduk enters thee in triumph, report my piety to him.”[225.1] Such exaggeration is not found in Greek religion.[225.2]

As regards the emblem of divinity, the cult-object set up in the shrine to attract and to mark the presence of the deity, the Mesopotamian religion had, as we have seen, already evolved the eikon or image at some period considerably earlier than the second millennium, and the statue of the god or goddess had become an important factor of early ritual: only the emblem of Asshur remained aniconic.[225.3] Of equally early vogue was the image, whether human or theriomorphic, in Egyptian cult. Again, the early Hittite monuments reveal it clearly, though aniconic fetiches appear also on the reliefs of Boghaz-Keui. But it is probable that the Western Semites, and the tribes of Arabia before 1200 B.C., {226} and many of them for centuries after, preferred the aniconic emblem, the “Ashera” or post, or heap of stones or pillar, to the iconic statue; in fact, that temple idolatry in its developed forms as it presents itself in later Mediterranean history was alien to the old and genuine tradition of Semitic public worship. Iconic representations of divinities may indeed be found in Western Semitic regions, and some of these may be of great antiquity; such as the silver statue that Thutmose III. (of the fifteenth century B.C.) carried off from Megiddo and the Lebanon,[226.1] or the “Astarte”-plaques found on the site of Gezer.

But in Semitic communities of the earlier period such objects belonged rather to the private religion, and the public service centred round the sacred pillar or stone, as was the case at Mecca both before and after Islam arose: the evidence for this has been carefully given and estimated by Robertson Smith and Sir Arthur Evans.[226.2]

The same statement holds of many of the non-Semitic peoples of Western Anatolia; in Phrygia, for instance, the earliest emblem of Kybele was the rude pillar or cone-shaped stone, and this survived down to late times in the worship of the Anatolian goddess in some of the Greek cities on the Asiatic coast.

The recent discoveries in the regions of the Minoan and Mycenaean culture reveal the same phenomenon: the cults in this area of the Aegean in the second millennium were in the main aniconic, the favourite emblem being {227} the pillar or tree-trunk, while in ancient Crete the axe and even the cross has been found.[227.1] Where the divinity appears in full human shape, as the snake-goddess in the chapel of the cross, the lion-guarded goddess or the god descending in the air above the pillar on the Minoan seals, these figures cannot, or need not, be interpreted as actual temple-idols. And students of the religion of classical Greece are familiar with the ample evidence of the aniconic tradition in the λίθοι ἀργοί, and the cone-shaped pillars and stocks that served as divine emblems in the later temples of Greece.[227.2]

Now the ethnic question concerning pillar-cult has been critically discussed by Sir Arthur Evans in his treatise mentioned above; and the conclusion at which he arrives, that the striking parallelisms in Semitic Anatolian and Aegean ritual monuments are not to be explained as the result of direct borrowing from one or the other group of peoples, but as the abiding influence of a very early Mediterranean tradition, commends itself as the most reasonable. It is legitimate to maintain that the earliest Hellenes took over much of this aniconic cult from the earlier Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation; but we must not overlook the fact that they also possessed their own, as a tradition derived from Central Europe.[227.3] The most futile hypothesis would be to assume that the early Greeks derived it from Babylon, where it is less in evidence than in any other Semitic community.[227.4]

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The iconic impulse whereby the tree-trunk and pillar were gradually supplanted by the fully human statue was beginning to work by the time that the Homeric poems received their present form; for we have in the _Iliad_[228.1] an undoubted reference to a seated statue of Athena in her temple on the Akropolis of Troy. We see here the working of an instinct that was partly religious, partly, perhaps, aesthetic in its origin. If we are to connect it with foreign influences, Egypt is at least a more “proximate cause” than Babylon.

This comparison of the cult-objects set up in shrines or holy places must take into account the phallic emblem also. This was much in vogue in the worship of Hermes and Dionysos, and was not unknown even in the ritual of Artemis.[228.2] Herodotus maintains that it was adopted by the Hellenes from “the Pelasgians,” but, as I have tried to show elsewhere,[228.3] we cannot attach real value to his induction. It may have descended from an old tradition of European cult, and it was indigenous among other Aryan nations. As regards the Mediterranean races, we find traces of its use in the Samothracian mysteries and in the grave-cult of Phrygia; while some of the records of the Sabazian mysteries suggest that a phallic character attached to them. The Minoan-Mycenaean culture has been regarded as innocent of this, since the phallic emblem does not appear among the monuments yet found; and this opinion is somewhat corroborated by its absence in the ritual of Aphrodite, who may be regarded as a direct descendant of the great Cretan goddess; for only a late and somewhat doubtful text attests the dedication of phalloi to the {229} Cyprian Aphrodite.[229.1] But the evidence from the Phrygian religion, that has many ethnic affinities with Crete, and from such ritual-stories as that of Pasiphae, ought to make us hesitate.

In Semitic ritual the emblem was certainly not commonly in public use, even if it occurred at all; the evidence for it, at present forthcoming, is at least very doubtful; two of the pillars found at Gezer have been supposed to possess phallic attributes;[229.2] but Robertson Smith has well protested against the foolish tendency to interpret sacred pillars generally as phalloi,[229.3] and even regards Lucian’s assertion of the phallic significance of the two sacred pillars, each three hundred feet in height, that flanked the propylaea of the temple at Hierapolis,[229.4] as a mistake suggested to him by the later Hellenic misinterpretation. Other statements of Lucian in that treatise may cause us to believe that a phallic character attached to some part of the ritual of the Syrian goddess; but, if it did, we could not safely regard it as originally Semitic, since so many ethnic strains are mingled in that complex religion.

It is doubtful whether we can recognise the emblem anywhere in the religious monuments of the Hittites, though Perrot would give this interpretation to one of the cult-objects carved on the relief of Boghaz-Keui.[229.5]

Finally, its vogue in Babylonia seems to have been confined to private superstition; from the second millennium onwards it was employed as an amulet, {230} and one of the royal chronicles, about 1110 B.C., is inscribed on a tablet that represents a phallos; but we cannot argue from this or any other evidence yet adduced, so far as I am aware, that the emblem was used in public ritual.

So far as we can discern at present, then, the Babylonian and Hellenic phenomena are divergent in respect of pillar-cult and phallic ritual.[230.1]

The most interesting part of our present inquiry is the comparison of the ceremonies and the concept of sacrifice in East and West. At the first glance we note, as usual, a certain general similarity. In the earliest period we find various animals, both wild and domestic, offered upon the altars, but in Babylonia no special rules concerning their sex, such as were prescribed by ancient Greek and Judaic ritual. In all these countries, again, bloodless offerings of cereals and fruits were in common vogue; and in the earliest Babylonian period, these were of great variety, an inscription of Gudea mentioning butter, honey, wine, corn with milk, figs, dates, as the food of the gods, “untouched by fire.”[230.2] We note here the distinction familiar in Greek ritual, between ἔμπυρα and ἄπυρα ἱερά; only in Babylonia it does not seem to have been of religious importance, nor to have been developed, as it was in Hellas, into a ceremonial law that might engender an important variation in the moral ideas and religious concepts of the worshipper; for instance, the altar of {231} Apollo at Delos was called καθαρός, “the pure altar,” because no blood could be shed upon it, the sacrifices of Athena Lindia at Rhodes, and of Zeus in certain mystic rites of Crete, were ἄπυρα, or “fireless,” which was the technical name for the oblations of fruits and cereals; and this fact of ritual suggested to later Greek philosophy the ethical-religious view that the “pure,” that is to say, bloodless, offering was the more acceptable oblation, and was a tradition of the age of man’s innocence. This pregnant idea has not yet been discovered in Mesopotamian or in any other old Semitic religion; the Babylonian deities received both kinds, and perhaps simultaneously, though in certain special ceremonies the sacred cake, or the liquid offerings of milk, honey, wine, and oil, might suffice;[231.1] while, according to the ancient Hebraic view, as the legend of Cain and Abel indicates, the deity appears to prefer blood-sacrifice, though each species is recognised in the pre-exilic sacral literature.[231.2]

There is another distinction observed in Greek ritual, that becomes of some importance in the later history of ascetic purity, that between wineless offerings (νηφάλια) and those accompanied with wine: the former being preferred by the powers of the lower world,[231.3] though not invariably, and certainly not by the departed hero. However this distinction arose--and no single hypothesis explains all the cases--it was not a Semitic tradition, taught in early days to Hellas. For the {232} Semitic divinities, including Jahwé, have a genial liking for wine “which cheereth God and man”;[232.1] nor have we any Semitic example of a taboo on it, except possibly a late Nabataean inscription from the neighbourhood of Palmyra, mentioning “the god who drinks no wine.”[232.2] Such a phrase would certainly not apply to the deities of Babylon; even the sun-god, who in Hellas appears to have been a total abstainer, is offered wine in the Babylonian service,[232.3] and, according to one verse in the _Epic of Creation_, the deities actually get drunk,[232.4] a grossness which, in the mythic imagination of Hellas, is only imagined as possible for Dionysos.

We have the right to say, then, that the avoidance of wine in certain religious services of Hellas helps to confirm the impression of its early independence of Semitic influences. The Hellenic rule may, in certain cases, have been derived from an older Aegean tradition; for two of the deities to whom it was applied, Helios and Aphrodite, may be believed to have been bequeathed to Greece by the Minoan-Mycenaean religion; and wine appears to have been prohibited in certain ceremonies of the Phrygian goddess,[232.5] and of a goddess of Caria.[232.6]

These are differences of some importance, and doubtless of great antiquity between the ritual of East and West; more insignificant, yet of considerable value for {233} our present question, is the fact that incense was a regular accompaniment of the Babylonian sacrifice, but did not come into religious use in Greece till some time after the period of Homer. The fact itself we may consider as proved, both by Homer’s silence about it, and by the Homeric use of the word θύος, which means “victim,” and never “incense,” as in later Greek it came to mean. Had the influence of the Mesopotamian culture been as strong on Greece in the second millennium as it came to be from 800 B.C. onwards, we should certainly have expected that the religious use of incense, which is very attractive and spreads easily from one race to another, would have been adopted by Greek ritual before the time of Homer.

A more essential point is the sharp contrast preserved in the Greek rites between the Olympian and the Chthonian ritual; a contrast that demanded a difference of terminology and dictated different sacral laws concerning time, manner, place of sacrifice, and choice of victim. So far, I have not been able to discover any hint of this important bifurcation of ritual in any Mesopotamian record. The only nether-world power who was worshipped at all was Nergal, whether under this or other names; and it does not appear that his worship differed in any essential respect from that of any other high god. In fact, the dualism between powers of the upper and powers of the lower world, which has been generally remarked, and sometimes exaggerated in Hellenic polytheism, only appears slightly in the Babylonian, and seems to have left no impress on the divine service at all.

As regards the animals of sacrifice, the only striking divergence that Hellenic and Semitic custom presents is in respect of the swine. The sanctity or horror with {234} which this animal was regarded by most Semitic societies[234.1] is not reflected in any record of early Greek feeling. Being the Hellene’s common food, he offered it freely to the deity, though in local cults there might occasionally be a taboo on this as elsewhere on other victims, such as sheep or goat. But it is possible that some of the predecessors of the Hellene in Crete and Asia Minor, if not in Greece itself, shared the Semitic sentiment in regard to the pig; and the reverence paid to it in Crete, and especially at Praisos in later times,[234.2] may have been a legacy of Minoan religion; also the Carian worship of Hemithea in which swine were tabooed may have had ancient links with Crete.[234.3] But the facts of swine-sacrifice or swine-reverence, though they serve to distinguish the Hellenic from the ordinary Semitic community, do not bear directly on our present problem, the proofs of early Mesopotamian influence on the proto-Hellenic race. For the usual Semitic taboo has not yet been found in Mesopotamia. The pig is mentioned in a religious text as one of the animals that might be offered to the gods as a vicarious piacular sacrifice, nor is there any hint that the animal is being offered as an unclean animal.[234.4] Certainly, other animals are mentioned much more frequently as victims; and I am not aware of any other text that mentions swine-sacrifice. It was associated in some way with the god Ninib, one of whose appellatives means “swine”;[234.5] but no evidence is yet forthcoming that it was offered to him.

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A question now arises of greater moment both for our present purpose and for the wider interests of Comparative Religion. Was the purport and significance of the sacrificial act the same in the Western society as that which is revealed in the sacred literature of Babylonia? No part of the ancient religious system has been the theme of so much study and speculation in recent years as the ancient sacrifice. Robertson Smith in his epoch-making book, _The Religion of the Semites_, was the pioneer of a new theory; which has since been developed or modified by certain English and a few Continental scholars following on his track. The result of these labours has been to formulate and define various forms of sacrifice that prevailed in the Mediterranean area. Three main types appear to emerge: (_a_) the gift sacrifice, where an oblation is given over entirely to the deity, whether generally to win his favour, or in special circumstances--for instance, after sin has been committed--to appease his wrath, or as a thank-offering for favour received; (_b_) the communion sacrifice, where the community or the individual eat with the deity, strengthening their feeling of fellowship by a common meal; (_c_) the sacramental type, where the community or the individual may be said to “eat the god,” that is, to partake of food or drink made sacred by the infusion of the divine spirit or personality, which is thus communicated to the partaker. It is best for the present to regard these three as separate and independent, without trying to determine which is prior and which posterior.[235.1]

The first type, which is almost ubiquitous in the human societies that have arrived at the belief in personal {236} deities, is sufficiently attested by Homer of the early Greeks, who promise and perform the sacrifice partly as an offering to please or to appease the deity. What is more important is the evidence, which I have dealt with elsewhere,[236.1] that Homeric society was familiar also with the more genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal where the worshipper and the deity meet around the altar; this emerges clearly in the accounts that Homer has given us of an Achaean sacrificial feast.[236.2] Even the germs are already visible of the idea from which the third or more mystic type of sacrifice, what I have called the sacramental type, might be evolved; for special significance attaches to the acts described in the phrases οὐλοχύτας προβάλοντο and σπλάγχν᾽ ἐπάσαντο, “they threw forward the barley-shreddings” and “they tasted the entrails”: the first phrase is not wholly clear, but it may signify that stalks of barley are first placed on the altar, and thereby consecrated or filled with the divine virtue that is inherent there, and then the beast is touched with these on the forehead and thereby becomes himself filled with the spirit of godhead;[236.3] the second is also a mystic act, for the σπλάγχνα specially contain the life, which is now infused with divinity, and by tasting them the worshippers partake of the divine life. All this arises solely from the extraordinary degree of supernatural force or “Mana” which the altar itself possesses, a force which may have {237} been an inheritance from long ages of pillar-worship, if we believe the altar to have been evolved from the sacred pillar.[237.1] It explains other details in the old Hellenic sacrificial act; such as the casting the hairs of the victim into the altar-flame,[237.2] which established a communion between the animal and the deity, the practice of solemnly consecrating the lustral water by ceremoniously carrying it round the altar,[237.3] and charging it with a still more potent infusion of divinity by plunging into it a lighted brand from the altar-fire.[237.4]

The communion sacrifice must then have been in vogue in pre-Homeric times; and the idea that gave it its meaning never wholly faded from the State-ritual; for the rule, expressed by such formulae as οὐκ ἀποφορά, δαινύσθων αὐτοῦ, bidding the worshipper conclude the feast round the altar and take none of the flesh home, seems to arise partly from the feeling that the ceremony was meaningless unless he feasted wholly with the deity.[237.5] But it was most vividly realised in the religious services of the θίασοι, the later religious orders or fraternities devoted each to the cult of its special divinity; for these a common religious meal formed the chief binding-tie.[237.6]

Apart from the Homeric evidence, we have the record of the Attic Bouphonia as attestation of the great antiquity of this type of sacrifice in Greece. To {238} the actual statement of the details given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias, much is added by the curious aetiological legends that grew up around it.[238.1] We see the ox marking himself for sacrifice by voluntarily going up to the altar and eating the corn upon it, being thus called, as it were, by the god into communion with himself. As he is thus full of the spirit of the god, it is regarded a sacrilegious act to slay him; but all the citizens partake of his flesh, and even the stranger who eats becomes himself a citizen, as through this feast he enters into kinship with Zeus Polieus. All this can be explained by the belief that Zeus Polieus is in the altar; and we need not resort to such theories as that the ox is a totem-animal or the spirit of vegetation.

We must, however, beware of concluding that because the victim was thus temporarily possessed with godhead and in this holy state devoured, he was therefore literally regarded as the full incarnation of the god, or that the worshipper consciously believed he was eating his own deity who died in the sacrifice. 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. But we have no clear example of it from the earliest period of genuine Hellenic religion, unless we {239} force the evidence or exaggerate its meaning.[239.1] We have only certain myths that we may doubtfully venture to interpret by means of this hypothesis. And these are no myths about animals, but about human victims devoured in sacrifice: the most significant is the story of the cannibalistic feast held by King Lykaon, who cooked his own son and offered the flesh to Zeus, a ritual of which some survival, whether mimetic or half-real, was witnessed by Pausanias himself on Mount Lykaon.[239.2] This would point to sacramental cannibalism, if we assume that King Lykaon was the human incarnation of Zeus Lykaios and that his son was therefore a divine infant. But it is possible that the story enshrines the remembrance of the more ordinary clan-sacrifice of the life of a clansman to procure them communion with the clan-god by the common partaking of his flesh: the kinsman is offered rather than the animal, not so much that the sacrificers may eat their god, but that the god by consuming their most valued life may be more closely incorporate with them.

Again, in one of the darkest and most perplexing of Greek legends, the story of Klumenos of Argos and his incestuous love of his daughter Harpalyke, who revenges herself by slaying her own child and offering it to the father in a sacrificial meal, we may discern the glimmer of a remembrance of a cannibal sacrament. The associations of the story dimly indicate a Thracian origin.[239.3] And it is in the range of the Greek Dionysiac {240} cult, which according to the most probable view was adopted from Thrace, that we find imprinted on legend and ritual the tradition of a savage type of sacrament, in which the human or animal incarnation of the god was devoured. Such is the significance that we may fairly attach to the Titan-story of the murder of the infant Dionysos, to the σπαραγμός of the goat or bull or snake periodically practised by the Bacchoi or Bacchae, and to the death of Pentheus.[240.1] And in later Greek ritual the consciousness here and there survived that the victim offered to Dionysos incarnated the very deity, even before it acquired the temporary mystic afflatus from contact with the altar. The record of the ritual of Tenedos, in which a sacred pregnant cow was tended reverently and the calf that she bore was dressed in the buskins and then sacrificed to Dionysos, “the render of men,” is the most piquant example.[240.2]

This Dionysiac tradition reaches back undoubtedly to the second millennium in Greece; the evidence of a similar sacramental ritual in purely Hellenic worship is shadowy and slight, for the critical examination of the Eleusinian mysteries does not clearly reveal it; and the growth and diffusion of the idea in later Paganism does not concern us now.

But the consideration of the early Hellenic sacrifice, of which the salient features have been slightly sketched above, is of signal value for our present purpose. For it reveals at once a marked contrast to Babylonian ideas so far as these at present are revealed to us. The Babylonian-Assyrian liturgies, epics, and chronicles have failed to disclose any other theory of the sacrifice than that which is called the gift-theory. A general {241} term for the Babylonian sacrifice is “kishtu” or “present.”[241.1] The deities are supposed to eat what is given them; in the Epic of the Deluge the naïve phrase occurs, “The gods smell the savour, the delightful savour, the gods swarm like flies around the sacrificer.” No evidence is as yet forthcoming that the sacrificer was supposed or was allowed to eat with the deity, as in the Hellenic communion-sacrifice. On the contrary, certain texts can be quoted which seem expressly to forbid such a thing.[241.2] The document already cited that was found in Assurbanipal’s library, containing the Job-like lament of the good man who had found no profit in goodness, contains a verse in which he compares himself with the sinner who neglects all religious ordinances, and who has even “eaten the food of God.” And so we find that among the various evil or impure or unlucky deeds that could bring a man under the ban of the gods, the “devouring of sacrificial flesh” is expressly mentioned.[241.3]

Unless, then, documents yet to be revealed contradict this positive and negative evidence, we have here a fact of great weight to set against the theory that we are discussing. Whencesoever the Hellenes derived their genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal, they did not derive it from Babylon. And all Robertson Smith’s speculations concerning the inner significance of the Semitic sacrifice cannot yet be applied to Mesopotamia, whence he was not able to glean any evidence. In Babylonia the sacrificer got no share of the victim. He might eat with the spirits of the dead in certain ritual, but he was not, it appears, privileged {242} to eat with the god or goddess. The deity took the victim, or the sacrifice of cereals and fruits, as a present, and the priest got his share. But we are not told that the priest ate with the god, or where he ate; nor can we say that the priest represented the worshipper.

If a true sacrament is yet to be discovered in Babylonian religion, it will probably be found in some document of the Tammuz ritual. For it is probable that Tammuz was identified with the corn as with other parts of vegetation, and that the mourning for him was accompanied with abstinence from bread. His resurrection ended the fast, and if in their joy the worshippers ceremoniously broke bread, they may have supposed they were eating the body of their risen lord. But such a reconstruction of the old Tammuz ritual rests at present only on the indirect evidence of the later records of Attis-Adonis cult and of the Tammuz-worship among the heathen Syrians of Harran in the tenth century of our era.[242.1]

It belongs to the Babylonian conception of the sacrifice as a gift, that the animal was often regarded as a ransom for the man’s own life; that is to say, when sin had been committed, the deity might be placated by the gift of an agreeable victim, and be persuaded to accept it in place of the sinner whose life was properly forfeit. For instance, a sick man is always supposed to have sinned; and the priest who is performing an animal sacrifice in his behalf uses the prayer, “Take his present, take his ransom”;[242.2] and the formula of a sacrifice offered by way of exorcism is very explicit: “A male sheep, a female sheep, a living sheep, a dead {243} sheep shall die, but I shall live.”[243.1] Another inscription[243.2] throws further light on the ritual of the vicarious sacrifice: “To the high-priest may one cry out: the kid of substitution for the man, the kid for his soul he hath brought: place the head of the kid to the head of the man, place the neck of the kid to the neck of the man, place the breast of the kid to the breast of the man.” Whether this solemn manipulation was performed after or before the sacrifice, its object must have been to establish by contact a communion between the man and the victim, so that the kid might be his most efficacious representative. It thus became part of the higher ethical teaching of Babylon that “sacrifice brings life,” just as “prayer takes away sin,” a doctrine expressed in a fragmentary tablet that contains a text of striking spiritual import.[243.3]

The type of sacrifice that may be called vicarious must have been an ancient as well as a later tradition in Greece; for the legends associated with many sacrifices clearly attest it, explaining certain animal victims as substitutes for a human life that was formerly demanded by the offended deity, the vicarious sacrifice usually carrying with it the ideas of sin and atonement.[243.4] The substitution might occasionally {244} be apologised for by a legal fiction, as, for instance, when in the ritual of the Brauronian Artemis the angry goddess demanded the life of a maiden, and the Athenian parent sacrificed a goat, “calling it his daughter.”[244.1]

But though this idea is common to the Mesopotamian and Hellenic communities, they differ widely in respect of the evidence they afford, of the prevalence of human sacrifice. As regards ancient Greece, the evidence is indubitable, though much that has been brought by modern scholars is due to false interpretation of ritual, such as the scourging of the Spartan boys; later, the human sacrifice became repugnant to the advancing ethical thought of the nation, but according to one authority did not wholly die out till the age of Hadrian. On the other hand, no literary text nor any monument has yet been found that proves the existence of such a ritual in Babylonia. In one of his biographical inscriptions Assurbanipal proclaims that he “sacrificed” prisoners of war to avenge his murdered father on the spot where his father was slain.[244.2] He boasts of worse things than this; and we can well believe that he murdered them in cold blood. But the {245} words by no means suggest a ceremonious tomb-ritual with human sacrifice.

Slightly more important is a passage in a legal document, to which Mr. Johns[245.1] calls attention; whence it appears that a forfeit for reopening an already adjudicated cause was the consecration of one’s eldest child by fire to a god or goddess; and, as incense and cedar-wood are mentioned in the same context as concomitants of the threatened ceremony, the conclusion seems natural that this was once at least a real threat of human sacrifice inflicted as a legal punishment. This legal clause gives us the right to conclude that in the earliest period the Semites and Sumerians of Mesopotamia occasionally resorted to this rite. They would be indeed a peculiar people and a favoured nation if they had always been innocent of it. It is sufficiently attested by direct evidence, either of record or excavation, or by the suggestion of legend, of the Arabs, Syrians, the early Canaanites,[245.2] the Israelites, the Phoenicians; also of the Phrygians and other non-Semitic peoples of Anatolia. Yet it must be put to the credit of the Babylonian culture of the second millennium, that the Mesopotamians had either completely or almost abandoned it. At this time it was doubtless in full vogue in Greece; and certainly Babylon could not have been their evil teacher in this matter. But they needed no teachers in what was an ancient tradition of their northern ancestors, and of the people with whom they mingled. Yet only twenty years ago a distinguished writer on Greek ritual could say, “It is certain that the {246} Hellenes borrowed the practice of human sacrifice from the Orientals.”[246.1]

As we discover no trace of the idea of communion in the ordinary Babylonian sacrifice, we are the less surprised that scarcely any hint is given by the sacred literature or monuments of any mystic application of the blood of the victim, which was used for so many purposes of communion-ritual by the early Hellenes and Hebrews. I can find no other evidence for this in Mesopotamia except one passage quoted by Zimmern,[246.2] in which the sacrificer is ordered to sprinkle some part of the door with the blood of the lamb. It is not probable that the Babylonians were incapable of the notion that by physical contact with certain sacred objects a temporary communion could be established between the mortal and the divinity: it appears, for instance, in one of the formulae of the purification-ritual--“May the torch of the Fire-god cleanse me”[246.3]--in the yearly practice of the king grasping the hands of the idol of the god, perhaps in the custom of attaching the worshipper to the deity with a cord,[246.4] and in the diviner’s habit of grasping the cedar-staff, which is called “the beloved of the gods.”[246.5] But it may be that they never applied this notion to the sacrifice, so as to evolve the institution of the communion-meal; or they may have evolved it in early times, and through long ages {247} of power the priests may have become strong enough to suppress it and to substitute for it the gift-ritual, which would be more profitable for themselves. It accords with this absence of any mystic significance in the sacrifice that we do not find in the Babylonian service any mystic use of the sacrificial skins, of which some evidence can be gathered from various details of Greek ritual.[247.1]

Again, the Babylonian records have so far failed to reveal any evidence for any such public ceremony as the sending forth of the scapegoat, whether human or animal, charged with the sins of the community. This ritual was common to the Hellenes, Egyptians, and Hebrews, and probably to other Semitic communities.[247.2] The idea of sin-transference on which it rests was familiar enough to the ancient Babylonian; but he seems only to have built upon this a private system of exorcism and purgation of sin and disease for the individual. As far as we know, it did not occur to him to effect by this method a solemn annual expulsion of all the sins of the nation.

On the other hand, there is another type of sacrifice common to Babylonia and Greece, by which an oath or an engagement might be cemented: the animal is slaughtered with an imprecation that the same fate may befall him who breaks his oath or violates the compact. Zimmern quotes a good example of this, relating to the compact made between the Assyrian king Assurnirari {248} and Mati’ilu, prince of Arpad:[248.1] a sheep is sacrificed and the formula pronounced: “This head is not the head of a sheep, it is the head of Mati’ilu, of his sons, of his great ones, of the people of his land. If Mati’ilu breaks this oath, the head of Mati’ilu will be cut off, like the head of this sheep.” The same idea underlies the oath-sacrifice in the _Iliad_,[248.2] though it is not expressed with such naïve make-believe or such logic in the detail; but as the beast is slaughtered or wine poured, a curse is uttered invoking on the perjured a similar fate, or with a prayer that “his brains may be poured out like this wine.” The original idea is magical: the symbolic explanation is later. Another parallel is the Latin oath over the stone.[248.3]

Such resemblance in special forms by no means weakens the impression that we receive from the striking differences discernible in the Babylonian and Hellenic significance of sacrifice. To those already noted we may add yet another, which concerns the association of sacrifice with divination. It is Professor Jastrow’s opinion[248.4] that the chief motive of the Babylonian sacrifice was the inspection of the liver of the victim, from the markings of which the skilled expert could interpret the future by a conventional system revealed to us in certain ancient Babylonian documents. This superstition is so elaborate and artificial that if we find it in adjacent countries, it is more reasonable to suppose that one borrowed it from the other, than that it was developed independently in each. We find it in later Greece, Etruria, and Rome; but the evidence of the Homeric poems suggests that it was unknown to the {249} Hellenes of the earlier period. They are very likely to have borrowed it from Babylonian sources in post-Homeric times; and we note here, as in other cases where the influence of Babylon upon Greece can be reasonably posited, it reaches the western shores of the Aegean at a post-Homeric rather than a pre-Homeric epoch.

The comparative study of Mesopotamian and Hellenic sacrifice confronts us finally with another problem belonging to the history of religions, and one of the greatest, the dogma of the death of the divinity and the origin and significance of that belief. For where the mystic type of communion-sacrifice is found, where the animal that is slain for the sacrament is regarded as the incarnation of the deity, the divinity may be supposed himself to die temporarily, doubtless to rise again to life, either immediately or at some subsequent festival. This momentous conclusion need not always have been drawn, for religious logic is not often persistently thorough, nor does the evolution of the idea belong necessarily to the sphere of totemism, as Robertson Smith supposed, and M. Reinach is still inclined to maintain. It is not my concern here to discuss the totemistic hypothesis, but I may point out that in the rare examples where the totem-animal is slain, it is not clear that it is slain as a divinity.

Again, the belief in the periodic death of a deity might arise independently of the sacrifice, namely, from the essential idea of the godhead itself, when the divine life is identified with the annual life of vegetation: the phenomena of nature in autumn and spring may suggest to the worshipper the annual death and resurrection of the god or goddess. It is important to note that in this, as in the other source of the belief, the conclusion need not always have been drawn, for the vegetation-deity {250} might be supposed not to die in autumn or winter, but merely to disappear, and the story of his or her disappearance need not carry the same religious consequences as the story of the divine death.

The immolation of the divine victim in a communion-service, wherein the worshippers partake symbolically or realistically of the divine flesh and blood, though suggested by a thought that we must call savage, may be pregnant with consequences momentous for higher religion, as the history of Christian dogma attests. And even the annual death of the nature-god may be raised to a higher significance than its mere nature-meaning, and may be linked with the promise of human immortality.

We may note, finally, that a religion which expresses in its ritual the idea of the deity’s death and resurrection is likely to be charged with a stronger emotional force than one that lacks it; for the two events will excite an ecstasy of sorrow and of joy in the believer.

As the phenomenon, then, is of such importance, it is necessary to be critical and unbiased in the collection of statistics. Our present field of inquiry is the Eastern and Western Mediterranean area; and here our conspicuous example is the ancient Sumerian-Babylonian ritual of Tammuz,[250.1] a folk-service of lamentation and rapture, psychologically akin in many respects to Christianity, and of most powerful appeal.

The Tammuz hymns preserved to us are of the highest Babylonian poetry, and though they are chiefly litanies of lamentation, sorrowing over the death of the young god, yet one or two echoes are heard at their close of the rapturous rejoicing over his resurrection.[251.1] {251} With them is associated the story of the descent of his consort Ishtar, or of his goddess-sister; another great motive of the religious imagination which neighbouring peoples and faiths were quick to capture and adapt to their own religious use. We have seen[251.2] that the evidence is clear that the life of Tammuz is the life of the crops and fruits; and we discern a pure nature-religion unmoralised and without dogma, but evoking a mood and a sentiment that might supply the motive force to more complex and more spiritual creeds. It was not suited to the religious atmosphere of the Assyrian and Babylonian courts; but its influence spread far through Asia Minor. It captivated the other polytheistic Semites, and at times, as Ezekiel shows us, the women of Israel, revealing to these latter, no doubt, a vein of religious sentiment unknown in the austere Mosaic monotheism. The ritual of Adonis is mainly borrowed from the Tammuz service. For instance, the rite of planting the short-lived “garden of Adonis,” of which possibly the earliest record is in Isaiah xvii. 10, appears to be alluded to in a verse of a Tammuz hymn.[251.3] The figure of Tammuz is primevally Sumerian; therefore the diffusion of his cult among the various Semitic communities does not enable us to conclude that the death and resurrection of a divinity is an aboriginal Semitic tradition. As regards other evidence on the strength of which this dogma has been attributed to them by some scholars, it is of late authority and of doubtful validity. Josephus[251.4] tells us that at Tyre the {252} resurrection of Herakles was once celebrated by Hiram; but this might well be a derivative of the non-Semitic Sandon cult of Tarsos, which will be considered below. And the legend of the death of Dido at Carthage, even if there is no doubt that the queen was originally the great goddess of Tyre, is no sufficient proof of a Phoenician ritual in which the divinity died annually.

But as regards the non-Semitic peoples of anterior Asia, the question of borrowing is more difficult to answer with certainty.

No Hittite monument nor any Hittite text has as yet revealed to us any figure that we can identify with Tammuz. But certain indications incline us to believe that the idea of the death of the god was not unfamiliar to the Hittite religion or to some of the communities under Hittite influence. On the Boghaz-Keui relief we have noted the presence in the religious procession of those mysterious animals, calves, or bulls, wearing caps of peculiar Hittite fashion.[252.1] Are not these “theanthropic animals” to be sacrificed as a communion-link between man and God? We know that the bull was worshipped as an incarnation of a Hittite deity; and therefore from the sacrifice of the bull might emerge the dogma that the deity ceremoniously died at certain periods. From the sanctity of the bull in ancient Hittite cult-centres may have descended the mystic communion {253} rite of the Taurobolion or Tauropolion, which Cumont has shown good reason for supposing to have arisen in the worship of the Persian Anahita, and to have been adopted into the service of Kybele.[253.1]

More direct evidence is to be gleaned from the cult of Sandon or Sandes of Tarsos, a city which was once within the area of Hittite culture. The god of Tarsos comes later to be identified with the Tyrian Baal and the Hellenic Herakles; and the legend of the death of the latter hero may be an echo of a ἱερὸς λόγος of Tarsos, inspired by an annual rite in which the god of the city was consumed on a funeral pyre, and was supposed to rise again from the flames in the form of an eagle.[253.2] The later Tarsian coins display the image of the god, the pyre, the eagle, the double-headed axe, and the lion;[253.3] and the last three of these symbols belong to the oldest religious art of the Hittites. The proof would be complete if it could be shown that the name Sandon or Sandes belongs to the Hittite language. All we know at present is that it is not a Babylonian or Sumerian word, or found in the vocabulary of any Semitic people. Prof. Sayce believes himself to have found it in a cuneiform inscription of Boghaz-Keui. This would be the direct proof that we require; but the word that he transliterates as Sandes is said to be the ideogram of Hadad, the Syrian Semitic god, and that Hadad is used as the Semitic equivalent of Sandes is merely a conjuncture.[253.4]

A still clearer and more striking example of the phenomenon with which we are dealing is the Phrygian {254} and Lydian cult and legend of Attis. The various and often conflicting details in the story of his birth, life, and death, the various elements in his cult, are known to us from late sources; the consideration of the whole question would not be relevant here; but it is necessary for our purpose to determine, if possible, what are the aboriginal motives of the myth and cult. It seems likely that the earliest form of the Phrygian religion was the worship of the great mother-goddess, coupled with a son or lover,[254.1] a young and beautiful god who dies prematurely, and whose death was bewailed in an annual ritual, whose resurrection was presented in a subsequent or accompanying service. Of the death and the lamentation we have older evidence than for the resurrection and the rejoicing, but the one seems to be a necessary complement of the other. The family likeness of Attis to Tammuz strikes us at first sight. As Tammuz appears as a young vegetation deity, identified partly with the life of trees, partly with the corn, so Attis in the Phrygian legend and ritual is presented as a tree-divinity, and in the verse of a late hymn, which is inspired by an ancient tradition, is invoked as “the corn cut by the reaper.”

And these two personalities of the Sumerian and Phrygian religions evoked the same psychologic sentiment, sorrowful, romantic, and yearning. The hypothesis naturally suggests itself that the more Western people borrowed the cult from Mesopotamia, and that this had happened as early as B.C. 1500.[254.2] All scholars are agreed at all events that the figure of Attis belongs to the older pre-Aryan stratum of the population of {255} Phrygia; modern speculation is sometimes inclined to regard this as Hittite, and we know that the Hittites adopted some part of the Babylonian religion. But the name Attis itself is a stumbling-block to the hypothesis of borrowing from Mesopotamia. Believing Adonis to be a Western-Semitic form of Tammuz, we can explain the name as meaning merely “the Lord,” a natural appellative of the Sumerian god. But we cannot so explain “Attis.” It is non-Semitic, and must be regarded as belonging to an Anatolian language-group, nor can we yet discover its root-meaning.