Chapter XIII (3)

In any case, it may be said, the question of borrowing does not arise within the narrow limits of our inquiry, which is limited to the pre-Homeric period, since all Greek “katharsis” is post-Homeric. The latter dictum is obviously not literally true, as a glance through the Homeric poems will prove. Homer is aware of the necessity of purification by water before making prayer or libation to the gods: Achilles washes his hands and the cups before he pours forth wine and prays to Zeus,[289.1] Telemachos washes his hands in sea-water before he prays to Athena[289.2]; and there is a significant account of the purification of the whole Achaean host after the plague;[289.3] as the later Greeks would have done, the Achaeans throw away into the sea their λύματα, the infected implements of purification, wool or whatever they used, that absorbed the evil from them. But it has been generally observed that Homer does not appear to have been aware of any need for purification from the stain of bloodshed or from the ghostly contagion of death. It is true that Odysseus purifies his hall with fire and sulphur after slaying the suitors, but we are not sure that the act had any further significance than {290} the riddance of the smell of blood from the house. Sulphur is there called κακῶν ἄκος,[290.1] “a remedy against evil things”; but we cannot attach any moral or spiritual sense to κακὰ, nor is Homeric κάθαρσις related, as far as we can see, to any animistic belief. There is one passage where Homer’s silence is valuable and gives positive evidence; Theoklumenos, who has slain a man of his own tribe and fled from his home, in consequence approaches Telemachos when the latter is sacrificing and implores and receives his protection: there is no hint of any feeling that there is a stain upon him, or that he needs purification, or that his presence pollutes the sacrifice.[290.2] All this would have been felt by the later Greek; and in the post-Homeric period we have to reckon with a momentous growth of the idea of impurity and of a complex system of purification, especially in regard to homicide, leading to important developments in the sphere of law and morality which I have tried to trace out on other occasions.[290.3] But Homer may well be regarded as the spokesman of a gifted race, the Achaeans, as we call them, on whom the burden of the doctrine of purification lay lightly, and for whom the ghostly world had comparatively little terror or interest. Besides the Achaeans, however, and their kindred races there was the submerged population of the older culture who enter into the composition of the various Hellenes of history. Therefore the varied development in the post-Homeric period of cathartic ideas may be only a renaissance, a recrudescence of forces that were active enough in the second millennium. {291} Attica may have been the home where the old tradition survived, and cathartic rites such as the Thargelia and the trial of the axe for murder in the Bouphonia have the savour of great antiquity. May not the Minoan religion of Crete have been permeated with the ideas of the impurity of bloodshed and the craving for purification from sin? For at the beginning of the historic period Crete seems to have been the centre of what may be called the cathartic mission; from this island came Apollo Delphinios, the divine purifier _par excellence_, to this island the god came to be purified from the death of Python; and in later times, Crete lent to Athens its purifying prophet Epimenides.[291.1] If we believe, then, that the post-Homeric blood-purification was really a recrudescence of the tradition of an older indigenous culture, we should use this as another argument for the view that the Greece of the second millennium was untouched or scarcely touched by Babylonian influence. For, as we have seen, purification by blood or from blood appears to have been wholly alien to Babylonian religious and legal practice.

The ritual of purification belongs as much to the history of magic as religion. Now, the student of religion is not permitted to refuse to touch the domain of magic; nor can we exclude its consideration even from the highest topics of religious speculation. Some general remarks have already been made[291.2] concerning the part played by magic both in the worship and in the {292} social life of the peoples that we are comparing. Any exact and detailed comparison would be fruitless for our present purpose; for, while the knowledge of early Babylonian magic is beginning to be considerable, we cannot say that we know anything definite concerning the practices in this department of the Hellenic and adjacent peoples in the early period with which we are dealing. From the Homeric poems we can gather little more than that magic of some kind existed; and that Homer and his gifted audience probably despised it as they despised ghosts and demons. It is only by inference that we can venture to ascribe to the earliest period of the Greek race some of the magic rites that are recorded by the later writers. It would require a lengthy investigation and treatise to range through the whole of Greek ritual and to disentangle and expose the magic element which was undoubtedly there, and which in some measure is latent in the ritual of every higher religion yet examined. By way of salient illustration we may quote the ceremonies of the scapegoat and the φαρμακός,[292.1] modes of the magic-transference of sin and evil; the strewing of sacred food-stuff that is instinct with divine potency over the fields in the Thesmophoria; the rain magic performed by the priests of Zeus Lykaios;[292.2] we hear at Kleonai of an official class of “Magi” who controlled the wind and the weather by spells, and occasionally in their excitement gashed their own hands, like the priests of Baal;[292.3] such blood-magic being explicable as a violent mode of discharging personal energy upon the outer objects which one wishes to subdue to one’s will. Another and more {293} thrilling example of blood-magic is the process of water-finding by pouring human blood about the earth, a method revealed by an old legend of Haliartos in Boeotia about the man who desired water, and in order to find it consulted Delphi, and was recommended by the oracle to slay the first person who met him on his return; his own young son met him first, and the father stabbed him with his sword; the wounded youth ran round about, and wherever the blood dripped water sprang up from the earth.[293.1] No one will now venture to say that all these things are post-Homeric; the natural view is that they were an inheritance of crude and primitive thought indigenous to the land. Many of them belong to world-wide custom; on the other hand, some of the striking and specialised rites, such as the blood-magic and the ritual of the φαρμακός, are not found at Babylon.

But before prejudging the question, some salient and peculiar developments of Babylonian magic ought to be considered. One great achievement of Mesopotamian civilisation was the early development of astrology, to which perhaps the whole world has been indebted for good and for evil, and which was associated with magic and put to magic uses. Astrological observation led to the attachment of a magic value to numbers and to certain special numbers, such as number seven. Whether the Judaic name and institution of the Sabbath is of Babylonian origin or not, does not concern our question. But it concerns us to know that the seventh days, the 14th, the 21st, and 28th of certain months, if not of all, were sacred at Babylon, and were days of penance and piacular duties when ordinary occupation was suspended.[293.2] We can discern the origin of the sanctity of this number: the observation of the {294} seven planets, and the division of the lunar month into four quarters of seven days. The early Greeks, doubtless, had their astrological superstitions, as most races have had; the new moon is naturally lucky, the waning moon unlucky; but no one can discover any numerical or other principle in the Hesiodic system, which is our earliest evidence of Hellenic lucky and unlucky days. His scheme is presented in naïve confusion, and he concludes humorously, “one man praises one day, one another, and few know anything about it.”[294.1] His page of verse reflects the anarchy of the Greek calendars; and we should find it hard to credit that either Hesiod or the legislators that drew up those had sat attentively at the feet of Babylonian teachers. But a few coincidences may be noted. Hesiod puts a special tabu on the fifth day of the month; in fact, it is the only one in his list that is wholly unlucky, a day when it would seem to be best to do nothing at all, at least outside the house, for on this day the Erinyes are wandering about.[294.2] Now, a Babylonian text published by Dr. Langdon contains the dogma that on the fifth day of Nisan “he who fears Marduk and Zarpanit shall not go out to work.”[294.3] This Babylonian rule is the earliest example of what may be strictly called Sabbatarianism, abstinence from work through fear of offending the high god. Such would probably not be the true account of Hellenic feeling concerning the “forbidden days,” which were called ἀποφράδες or μιαραί.[294.4] The high god had issued to the Hellene no moral commandment about “keeping the Sabbath-day holy”; his reluctance to do certain work on certain days rested on a more primitive sentiment {295} concerning them. Thus it was unlucky both for himself and the city that Alcibiades should return to the Piraeus when the Plynteria were going on; for this latter was a cathartic ceremony, and evil influences were abroad. Nor, as Xenophon declares, would any one venture to engage in a serious work on this day.[295.1] Nor were these μιαραὶ ᾑμέραι, like the seventh days of the Babylonian months, necessarily days of gloom when offended deities had to be propitiated; on the contrary, the day of Χόες was a day of merry drinking and yet μιαρά: in fact, we best understand the latter phrase by translating it “tabooed,” rather than “sad” or “gloomy.”[295.2]

Another coincidence that may arrest attention is that in Hesiod’s scheme the seventh day of the month was sacred because Apollo was born on it; and throughout the later period this god maintains his connection with the seventh day, also apparently with the first, the fourteenth, and the twentieth of the month.[295.3] This almost coincides with the Sabbatical division of the Babylonian months. But we cannot suppose that in Hellas these were days of mortification as they were in the East; else they would not have been associated with the bright deity Apollo.

Such dubious coincidences, balanced by still more striking diversities, are but frail supports for the hypothesis of race-contact.

In Babylonian thaumaturgy nothing is more significant than the magic power of the Word, whether spoken or written: and the Word, as we have noted, was raised to a cosmic divine power and possessed inherent creative force.[295.4] This is only a reflection upon the heavens of the human use of the magical or mesmeric word or set {296} of words. This use of them is found, indeed, all round the globe. 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; and so inevitably does the shadow of magic dog religion here that Dr. Langdon is justified in his conjecture[296.1] that in a great hymn to Enlil, which contains scarcely a prayer but chiefly ecstatic description of his power, the worshipper is really endeavouring to charge himself with higher religious magic by this outpouring. In fact, here and elsewhere, a magic origin for the practice of theologic exegesis may be obscurely traced; narrative might acquire an apotropaeic effect; thus tablets containing the narrative of the achievements of the plague-god, hung up before the houses, could avert pestilence,[296.2] or, again, the reading aloud the tablet narrating the victory of Shamash and Ramman over the seven demons who attacked the moon-god Sin served to defeat the seven demons by the same sympathetic magic as would be worked by a dramatic representation of that event.[296.3]

There is no record or hint that the Hellenes recited hymns to Demeter or wrote up passages of Homer to avert demons.

It belongs to the magic use of formulae that minute exactness in respect of every syllable is necessary to the power of the spell or the spell-prayer. An Assyrian {297} king who is consulting the sun-god concerning success in a war with which he is threatened, prays that the ritual which the enemy may be employing may go wrong and fail; and in this context occurs the curious petition, “May the lips of the priest’s son hurry and stumble over a word.”[297.1] The idea seems to be that a single slip in the ritual-formulae destroyed their whole value; and such a view belongs to magic rather than to religion.

Now it is probable that in his earliest mental stage the Hellene had been in bondage to the religious magic of sacred formulae and sacred names; and as a tradition of that stage, the divine epithet whereby he appealed to his deities according to his needs retained always for him a mysterious potency; but otherwise we have no proof that he worked word-magic by means of his sacred texts.

Babylonian sorcery, whether legitimate or illegitimate, was intended to work upon or through demons; and its familiarity with the names and special qualities of demons is its peculiar mark. In the ritual of exorcism of the demons, idols play a prominent and often singular rôle. The following performance is probably unique: in the exorcism of disease two idols, male and female, were set up before the sick man, then the evil spirits of sickness are invited thus: “Oh ye all wicked, all evil, who pursue so-and-so, if thou art male, here is thy wife; if thou art female, here is thy husband.”[297.2] The intent of the exorciser seems to be to attract the demon of disease, of whose sex he is not sure, into one or the other of these images, and he lures it by amorous enticement into the figure of opposite sex to its own; {298} having got the demon into the image, he doubtless takes it out and burns or buries it. Or the evil spirit may be attracted from the patient by means of its own image placed near him. One document prescribes various images of bestial form, all of which are to be taken by night to the bank of the river, probably that they may be thrown in and carry the impurity of sickness away.[298.1] Another shows us how to deal with Labartu, the daughter of Anu;[298.2] her image, made of clay, is placed above the head of the sick man, so as to draw her or her power out from him; it is then taken out, slain, and buried. And this exorcism is all the more notable because Labartu is rather an evil goddess than a mere demon, being styled in another text “August lady,” “Mistress of the dark-haired men.”[298.3] Such magical drama, in which the demon-image might be slain to annul its potency, seems characteristically Babylonian: it entered also into the ritual of the high gods. For, at the feast of the New Year, when Nebo arrived from Borsippa, two images are brought before him and in his presence decapitated with the sword. Dr. Langdon interprets them[298.4] as representing probably “the demons who aided the dragon in her fight with Marduk; they are the captive gods of darkness which ends with the Equinox.” This is dramatic magic helpful to the gods.

The elaboration of exorcism must have led to a minuter articulation of the demon-world; the exorciser is most anxious to know and discover all about his unseen foes: he gives them a name, a sex if possible, and a number: he says of the powerful storm-demons {299} Utuk “they are seven, they are seven, they are neither male nor female, they take no wife and beget no children;”[299.1] for knowledge of the name or nature of the personality gives magic power.

Many of these examples, which might easily be multiplied, show us magic applied to private but beneficent purposes, the healing of disease, the exorcism of spirits of moral and physical evil. It was also in vogue for national purposes--for instance, for the destruction of the enemies of the king; one of our documents describes such a process as the making of a tallow-image of the enemy of the king and binding his face with a cord, so as to render the living foe impotent of will and speech.[299.2]

We have already noticed that the Babylonian gods themselves work magic, and that it was also worked on behalf of the gods.[299.3] And in the ritual-records much that might be interpreted as religion may find its truer account from the other point of view; for instance, the ritual of placing by the bedside of a sick man the image of Nergal or those of the “twins who overthrow the wicked Gallu”[299.4] might appear at first sight as a religious appeal to the deities to come to his aid; but as in form it is exactly similar to the use made on the same occasion, as noted above, of the images of demons, we may rather suppose that the intention was magical in this act also, and that the divine idols were supposed to combat the demon of sickness by their magical influence. Or, again, in part of the ritual of exorcism we find acts that bear the semblance of sacrifice, such as throwing onions and dates into the fire; but they were charged with a curse before thrown, and the act {300} is more naturally interpreted as a magic transference of evil.[300.1]

For the purpose of the exorcism, to deliver a “banned” person, the high god, Marduk or another, might be called in; but Marduk also works the effect by magic: a rope is woven by Ishtar’s maidens, which Marduk (or his priest) turns round the head of the sufferer, then breaks it through and throws it out into the desert.[300.2] This looks like symbolic magic; the knotted rope represents the ban, which is then broken and thrown away.

There are many features in these methods of exorcism, such as the apotropaeic use of idols, that are common to other peoples at a certain stage of culture; there remains much also that seems peculiar to Babylon.

But what is uniquely characteristic of this Mesopotamian people, and at the same time most un-Hellenic, is the all-pervading atmosphere of magic, which colours their view of life and their theory of the visible and invisible world. Babylonia, at least, was the one salient exception to the historic induction that a distinguished writer[300.3] has recently sanctioned--“religion once firmly established invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to discredit the magician.” The psalmody of Babylon, with its occasional outbursts {301} of inspiration and its gleams of spiritual insight, would have appealed to an Isaiah; its magic would have appealed to many a modern African. The Babylonian prophet does not frown on it; the high gods accept it, the priest is its skilled and beneficent practitioner. And at no other point, perhaps, is the contrast between the Hellenic and the Mesopotamian religions so glaring as at this.

This comparison of Eastern and Western ritual may close with some observations on another religious function that may be of some value for the question of early ethnic influence.

It has been remarked that divination played an important, perhaps a dominant part in the Babylonian ritual of sacrifice, divination, that is, by inspection of the victim’s entrails, especially the liver; and that this method was adopted in Greece only in the later centuries.[301.1] But there are other salient differences between the Babylonian and the more ancient mantic art of Hellas.[301.2] Another method much in vogue in the former was a curious mode of divining by mixing oil and water and watching the movements and behaviour of the two liquids.[301.3] The first and only indication of a similar practice in Hellas is a passage in the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus, of which the true meaning has hitherto escaped the interpreters.[301.4] And here, as usual, an obvious example of Mesopotamian influence on Hellenic custom belongs only to a late epoch. It is also true {302} that the ancient divination of the two peoples agreed in certain respects, namely, in that both used, like most communities at a certain stage of culture, the auguries of birds and the revelations of dreams. As regards the facts relating to the former, we know more about Greece than at present about Babylon. But in the matter of dream-oracles, it is manifest that the Hellenic phenomena are entirely independent of Mesopotamian fashion. The Assyrian and Babylonian documents reveal the fashion of dream-prophecy in its simplest and highest form: the high deity of his own pleasure sends a dream, and the divining priest or skilled interpreter interprets it. No hint has so far been detected of that artificial method of provoking prophetic dreams by “incubation” or ἐγκοίμησις, the fashion of laying oneself down in some sacred shrine and sleeping with one’s ear to the ground, that was much in vogue in ancient Hellas and still survives in parts of the modern Greek world and which may be regarded as an immemorial tradition. In this divination, the divine spokesman was the power of the underworld. And this was the most important difference between the Western and the Eastern society in respect of the divine agency. In an early period of Hellenic history that may be called pre-Apolline, the earth-mother was conspicuously oracular by the vehicle of dreams; and this power of hers was generally shared by the nether god and buried heroes. Nor could the religion of Apollo suppress this “chthonian” divination. But in Mesopotamia the earth-powers and the nether world have no part or lot in this matter. It is almost the prerogative of Shamash, the sun-god, though Adad is sometimes associated with him;[302.1] {303} both being designated as “Bēlē-Biri” or “Lords of Oracles.”[303.1]

Another remarkable distinction is the fact that the ecstatic or enthusiastic form of prophecy, that of the Shaman or Pythoness possessed and maddened by the inworking spirit of god, is not found in the Babylonian record, which only attests the cool and scientific method of interpreting by signs and dreams and the stars. Perhaps Mesopotamia from the third millennium onward was too civilised to admit the mad prophet and prophetess to its counsels. But such characters were attached to certain Anatolian cults, especially to those of Kybele,[303.2] and also to the Syrian goddess at Hierapolis;[303.3] we have evidence of them also in a record of the Cretan Phaistos in the service of the Great Mother.[303.4] Some scholars have supposed that prophetic ecstasy was only a late phenomenon in Hellas, because Homer is silent about it. But there are reasons for suspecting that demoniac possession was occasionally found in the pre-Homeric divination of Hellas,[303.5] an inheritance perhaps from the pre-Hellenic period.

In any case, the theory that primitive Hellas was indebted to Babylonia for its divination-system is strongly repugnant to the facts.