Chapter IV

Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.

{51}

A comparison made according to the test we have just applied is not so important as that which arises in the second stage of the inquiry. Assuming that the peoples on the east and west of the Aegean were already on the same religious plane when the first glimmer of what may be called history begins, can we discern certain striking resemblances or differences in their conception and imagination of divinity, sufficient to prove or disprove the theory of borrowing or of a movement across large areas of certain waves of religious influence emanating from a fixed centre?

The comparison now becomes more complex, and can only be summarily attempted. The first leading question concerns the way in which the personal divine being is imagined. In Mesopotamia was the religious perception dominatingly anthropomorphic, not merely in the sense that the higher divine attributes were suggested by the higher moral and spiritual life of humanity, but in the more material sense that the deity was imagined and represented habitually in human form? This question has been summarily treated in the first chapter. The Mesopotamian cults are mainly anthropomorphic; in the earliest hymns and liturgies, as well as in the art-monuments, the divinities appear to have been {52} imagined as glorified human forms. The figure of Shamash on the relief, where he sits enthroned inspiring Hammurabi,[52.1] the form of Ninni bringing the captives to Annabanini,[52.2] prove a very early dominance of anthropomorphic art in Mesopotamia. And the rule holds true on the whole of nearly all the great divinities of the Pantheon; the statue of Nebo the scribe-god in the British Museum,[52.3] and the representation of him on the cylinders, are wholly anthropomorphic. The seven planetary deities on the relief from Maltaija are human-shaped entirely;[52.4] we may say the same of the procession of deities on the relief from a palace of Nineveh published by Layard,[52.5] except that Marduk has horns branching from the top of his head; just as on the alabaster relief containing the scene of worship noted above,[52.6] and on the wall-relief in the British Museum he is represented with wings; but even the rigorous anthropomorphism of Greece tolerated both these adjuncts to the pure human type. The types of Ramman the weather-god,[52.7] and the representations of a Babylonian goddess, who is occasionally found with a child on her knee, and whom sometimes we may recognise as Ishtar, show nothing that is theriomorphic. On the other hand, we must note exceptions to this general rule. In one of the cuneiform inscriptions that describe certain types of deities, we read the following: “Horn of a bull, clusters of hair falling on his back; human countenance, and strength of a…; wings… and lion’s body.” And this description {53} agrees exactly, as Jeremias has pointed out, with the winged colossal figures, half-lion, half-man, that guarded the gate of the palace of Nineveh. And we must therefore interpret them as gods, not as mere _genii_; and he gives some reason for regarding them as a type of Nergal, the god of the underworld.[53.1]

Further, we find in an inscription of Asarhaddon the following prayer: “May the gracious bull-god and lion-god ever dwell in that palace, protecting the path of my royalty.”[53.2]

There is some doubt in regard to the winged figures with eagles’ heads on the reliefs from Khorsabad, in the British Museum (pl. 38-40): they are represented holding pine-cones and a “cista mystica” on each side of the sacred tree, and might be _genii_ engaged in worship; but on one of the reliefs Assur-nasir-Pal is standing before one of them in attitude of adoration.

But the most clear and definite evidence on this point is afforded by the legend and monuments of the god whom Berosos calls Oannes,[53.3] but whom modern Assyriology interprets as the ocean-born god Ea or Ae of Eridu, the god of all wisdom and science. According to Berosos, he had entirely a fish body, but a human head had grown under the head of the fish, human feet out of the fish’s tail, and he spoke with human voice: a statue of this type was still existing at Babylon according to this writer in the time of Alexander. Now the exact type is presented in the form that appears on various Babylonian cylinders; there is one that presents the fish-man-god standing before the tree of Life--receiving a ray perhaps from the sun above:[53.4] and half {54} his form from the girdle downwards is preserved on a bas-relief published by Layard,[54.1] showing him holding the bread of life in one hand and in the other a vase containing the water of life. Here, then, is theriomorphism struggling with anthropomorphism as we see it strikingly in the religious monuments of Egypt.

But we have no need of the theory, dear to some anthropologists--that the earliest period of Mesopotamian religion was purely theriomorphic, when the deities were imagined and represented merely as animals, and that the human-shaped deities whom we find standing on lions in the Babylonian art had once been divine lions and nothing more, and had at a later period emerged from the animal into divine manhood. Theriomorphism and anthropomorphism can and generally do confusedly co-exist: neither in the lowest savagery or at the highest culture is there found a purely theriomorphic art or theriomorphic religion; on the other hand, severe anthropomorphism among the ancient religions is to be found only in the Hellenic, and we may add in the Judaic, though here with a quite different mode of expression and far more sternly controlled. In Mesopotamia we have nothing that points to a direct worship of animals,[54.2] but we discern that the anthropomorphism is unstable; {55} the religious artist mainly clung to it, except when he was embodying forms of terror, the destructive demons, and especially the powers of the lower world: for this purpose he selected the most portentous types of bestiality, such as we find on that bronze tablet, which used to be regarded as revealing an interesting glimpse into Babylonian eschatology: at least we may be sure that the lion-headed female above the horse in the canoe, at whose breasts two small lions are sucking, is the goddess of Hell.[55.1] It was probably through his association with the world of death that Nergal acquired something of the lion’s nature, and even the very human goddess Ishtar might assume a lion’s head when she was unusually wroth, though this rests on a doubtful text. We may say, then, with fair degree of accuracy, that the theriomorphic forms of Babylonian religious art belong to demonology; and in this domain the Babylonian artist has shown the same powerful imagination as the Mycenaean: it is the former to whom we are indebted for the attractively alarming type of the scorpion-man.

The phrase “unstable anthropomorphism” applies also to the religious literature, to the Sumerian-Babylonian hymns. The imagination of the poets in their highest exaltation was certainly anthropomorphic on the whole; the high divinities are conceived and presented with the corporeal, moral, and spiritual traits of glorified humanity. But often in the ecstasy of invocation the religious poets felt the human image too narrow and straightened for their struggling sense of the Infinite. Then the expression becomes mystic, and by virtue of a curious law that I indicated above, it avails itself of theriomorphic imagery.[55.2] I quoted the hymn {56} to the warrior Marduk that invokes him as “Black Bull of the deep, Lion of the Dark House.” Of still more interest is the invocation of Enlil, the earth-god of Sumer: “Overpowering ox, exalted overpowering ox, at thy word which created the world, O lord of lands, lord of the word of life, O Enlil, Father of Sumer, shepherd of the dark-haired people, thou who hast vision of thyself.”[56.1] Seven times the words “overpowering ox” are added in this mystic incantation. In another hymn Enlil is “the Bull that overwhelms”; Ea, “the Ram of Eridu.”

But this is mystic symbolism, rather than a clear perception of divine personality; and we may say the same of such vaguely picturesque phrases as “Bel, the great mountain,” “Asur, the great rock,” an expression parallel to our “Rock of Ages.”[56.2]

It naturally happens in a religion of unstable anthropomorphism that the different personalities are unfixed and may melt away one into the other, or may become conceived as metaphysical emanations, thus losing concrete individuality. As Dr. Langdon remarks of Babylonian religious phraseology, “the god himself becomes mystified, he retires into the hazy conception of an all-pervading spirit, and his _word_ becomes the active agent.”[56.3] Thus even the strongly personal goddess “Nana” is identified with the word of Enlil; she herself exclaims, “Of the Lord his word am I.” His statement accords with the general impression that the liturgies and monuments of this vast and complex religion make upon the student. One discerns that the religious art, and to some extent the religious poetry, developed {57} and strengthened the anthropomorphic faith and perception of the people, but not so powerfully as to preclude a mysticising tendency towards metaphysical speculation that transcended the limits of a polytheism of concrete personalities. Even Allatu, the goddess of Hell, she who was presented with the dog’s head and the lions at the breast, was half spiritualised by the epithet which is rendered “spirit-wind of the consecrate.”[57.1]

In the other ancient Semitic communities we find the same phenomenon, a prevailing anthropomorphism with some slight admixture of theriomorphic idea. At Bambyke, the later Hierapolis, we have the record and tradition of Atargatis-Derketo, of human and fish-form combined. In the cult of Esmun in Phoenicia, Baudissin[57.2] suspects the incarnation of the god in a snake, which brought about his later identification with Asklepios, and he suggests that the bronze serpent that healed the Israelites in the desert was borrowed from a Canaanite idol of a healing snake. The Astarte-images found in prehistoric Palestine are mainly of human type, but one gives her the curving horns of a ram, and a rude bronze was found at Tel Zakariya of an amphibious goddess with human head and the tail of a fish.[57.3] Something real underlies the statement of Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebios, {58} that Astarte placed on her own head the head of a bull.[58.1]

But these are exceptional phenomena; and as the Hellenes in the later period were usually able to identify the leading Semitic deities with their own, we may see in this another proof that the Western and Eastern religions were nearly on the same plane as regards their perception of divine personality.

Only, we discern signs in Canaan as in Mesopotamia, that the anthropomorphism is, as I have called it, unstable; for not only can the divinity be imagined as embodied in other forms than the human, but the demarcations of individuality tend at certain points to fall away: the most curious instance of this is that the female divinity seems at times to have been almost absorbed in the god. We must, however, distinguish here between what is real belief and what is mere theologic phrasing. In a hymn of praise to Ishtar, composed for the King Ashurbanapal, the equality of the goddess with the great Assyrian god Asshur is quaintly expressed by the phrase, “like Ashur, she wears a beard”; but Jastrow[58.2] protests against the inference that the goddess was therefore really regarded as male in the Mesopotamian religion. And indeed this is probably only a fantastic expression of the idea that Ishtar is the compeer in power of the god, and has much of the masculine temperament. Even in the full vogue of an anthropomorphic religion which insists on the distinctions of sex, a mystical religious thinker could rise to the idea that the divinity might assume the powers {59} of both natures, an idea of which we find a glimpse in the later Greek and Greek-Egyptian theosophy. Thus a Sumerian hymn to Enlil characterises him as “Lord of winds, father and mother who creates himself”;[59.1] and a well-known hymn to Sin speaks of him as “Maternal Body that brings everything to birth,” and in the next line as “Compassionate, gracious father.”[59.2]

The close approximation of the goddess to the god is more clearly discernible in the Canaanite religion. On the Moabite Mesha stone, Ashtar-Chemosh appears as a double divinity; and one of the earlier Carthaginian inscriptions refers to a temple of Moloch-Astarte.[59.3] Again Astarte, in the inscription on the sarcophagus of Eshmounazar of Sidon, is called Astart-Shem-Baal, which signifies Astarte the Face of Baal; and in the Carthaginian inscriptions the same designation occurs for Tanit. Renan has interpreted the phrase as expressing the dogma that the goddess is an emanation of the god, but Dr. Langdon would explain it as arising from the close opposition of the two statues face to face, Astart-Shem-Baal merely meaning, then, “She who fronts Baal.” Whichever interpretation be correct, such close assimilation of the pair might evolve here and there the concept of a bisexual divinity. Unless the evidence of the classical writers is false, it did so at a later period under Phoenician influences in Cyprus. Macrobius tells us that there was in that island a statue of a bearded deity in female dress, regarded as bisexual, and he quotes Philochoros as witness to the fact, and to the curious phenomenon in the ritual in which the {60} men wore female dress and the women male. This explains Catullus’ phrase “duplex Amathusia” of the bisexual goddess. Servius and the Christian fathers repeat the statement, and Joannes Lydus asserts that the Pamphylians at one time worshipped a bearded Aphrodite;[60.1] if we trust his authority, we might explain the fact as due to late Semitic influence, which is somewhat attested by inscriptions on the coinage of Pamphylia under the Persian domination.[60.2] But, at the most, we can only regard this cult as a late phenomenon, a local eccentricity, and a morbid development of a certain vague idea that was working sporadically in the old Semitic religion. We have no right to assert, as some have occasionally ventured, that the Semitic peoples generally accepted the dogma of a bisexual divinity.

Turning now to the other great area of culture that lay between Mesopotamia and the coast, that of the Hittite kingdoms, we find that the Hittite deity is usually presented in human form. On the great relief of Boghaz-Keui, the distinctions of the human family appear in the divine forms, in whom we may recognise the father god, the mother goddess with her young son, or it may be, as Dr. Frazer suggests, with her young lover. And the other Hittite representations of divinity to which I have referred above are of purely human form, and so also are the small Hittite bronze idols in the Ashmolean Museum. Nevertheless here, as in Mesopotamia, the theriomorphic fancy was active at the same time. On the relief at Boghaz-Keui, nearest to the innermost shrine, the Holy of Holies, is an idol {61} of human visage with a body composed of a bizarre arrangement of lion-forms; and in the procession near to the main deities we note a strange representation of two bulls in mitred caps of Hittite fashion, and to these mystic beasts we may apply the name theanthropic, which Robertson Smith suggested for the sacrificial animal that was half-divine, half-human. And clearer evidence still is afforded by another relief found not far from this site at the palace of Euiuk, where a bull is represented on a pedestal with worshippers approaching.[61.1] He is not here the sacrificial animal, for he and the altar before him are on a higher plane, while the priest and priestess below are raising their hands to him as if in adoration, and are leading rams evidently as victims to the bull-god. We may be sure, then, that there was some close association of the Hittite divinity with the bull, as there was with the lions upon which both god and goddess are standing; and this is further illustrated by the horns that adorn the conical cap of the god at Ibriz,[61.2] to whom the grapes and corn were consecrated.

Again, the relief on the gate at Sinjerli[61.3] affords us another clear example of a divinity only partly anthropomorphic: a god with the body of a man and the head of a lion; as he bears a hunting weapon in one hand and a hare in the other, and on each shoulder a bird is sitting, we may regard him as a deity of the chase. Finally, from certain cuneiform texts found at Boghaz-Keui, and recently published and interpreted by Professor Sayce,[61.4] we gather that the eagle, probably the double-headed {62} eagle which appears as an ensign on Hittite monuments, was deified; for we appear to have a reference to “the house” or temple “of the eagle” (Bit Id Khu), and this fact may help to explain the figure of a man’s body with a bird’s head on a relief of Sinjerli.[62.1]

As regards the test, then, that we are at present applying, it seems that the Hittite and the Mesopotamian religions were more or less on the same plane, though we may suspect that theriolatry was stronger in the former. It is also important for our purpose to register in passing the clear proof of certain religious approximations, probably in the second millennium B.C., between the Hittites and the Assyrian-Babylonian kingdom. The Hittite god Teshup, with the double-headed hammer or axe and the forked lightning in his hand, is of close kin and similar in type to the Canaanite, Syrian, and Babylonian Ramman-Adad, the god of storms.[62.2] But the evidence does not yet seem to me to make it clear which people or group of peoples was in this case the borrower, which the lender. And the same doubt arises in respect of the striking art-type of the divinity standing on the lion; we find it in the early Hittite monuments, such as the Boghaz-Keui sculptured slabs; and again on the relief of Gargamich, on which is a winged male deity standing on a lion and a priest behind him, also on a lion;[62.3] and later among the Tarsos representations of the Hittite Sandon: it was in vogue at the Syrian Bambyke and at Babylon. The assumption of Perrot[62.4] is that it was {63} of Babylonian origin, but the art-chronology does not seem to speak decisively in this matter. It is not necessary here to prejudge this difficult problem: it does not directly affect our present question, as the type of the goddess with lions comes into Hellas only at a later period. As regards the other Anatolian peoples who came into close contact with the Hellenes, we may find abiding influences of certain Hittite religious ideas and motives of religious art. We may admit that the lion-borne goddess of Boghaz-Keui is the prototype of Kybele, even the crenelated headdress that she wears suggesting the turreted diadem of the later goddess: it is likely that the ancient type of Teshup, the weather-god with hammer or axe and the lightning, survived in Commagene in the cult-figure that was afterwards interpreted as Jupiter Dolichenus: and it may have influenced the ideas about the thunder-god in Pontus, as a primitive relief of a god brandishing a thunderbolt and holding a shield has been found near Amasia.[63.1] Speaking generally, we must pronounce the native pre-Hellenic religious art of the Asia Minor littoral, of Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, anthropomorphic, so far as it tried at all to embody the imagined form of the divinity. The record is generally blurred by the later Hellenic influences. But we have at least in Phrygia rude images of the pre-Hellenic Cybele; the intention of these is anthropomorphic, and in the rough outline of the goddess’s form as hewn out of the rock of Sipylos above Smyrna, the Hellenes could discern their sorrowing Niobe. Where the anthropomorphism fails, as in the Phrygian monument, which shows Cybele seated with a phiale and human-shaped in other respects, but with a head fashioned like “the round capital of a {64} pillar,”[64.1] the influence of the aniconic fetich may be the cause. At any rate, we have no clear trace of theriomorphism either in the legend nor in the monuments of the great mother, the Kybele of Phrygia, or the Mā of Cappadocia. The power of the mountain-goddess was incarnate in the lions, but we have no ground for saying that she herself was ever worshipped as a lion.

We turn at last to the Minoan-Mycenaean and proto-Hellenic periods; for our present purpose the two cannot well be kept apart, as much of the evidence concerning the former is derived from records of myths and religious customs that were in vogue in the later period. Our first glimpse of the Minoan religion, which Sir Arthur Evans more than any one else has revealed to us,[64.2] gave us the impression of an aniconic worship that had for its sacred “agalmata” such fetich objects as the sacred pillar or double-headed axe, but which did not express its actual imagination of its divinities in any art-type. If this were so, we should not be able to answer the question how far the Minoan religion was purely anthropomorphic until we have found the interpretation of Minoan writing. But our store of monuments has been much enriched by later discoveries in the Palace of Knossos, and in one of its private chapels in which the Cross was the central sacred emblem, Sir Arthur Evans found the interesting figure of the snake-goddess--purely human, but holding snakes in her hands and girdled with snakes, while before her stands a votary {65} brandishing a snake:[65.1] again, a Minoan signet-ring published by him[65.2] revealed the great mountain-goddess herself on the summit of a peak flanked by lions and holding a spear. These may be actual reproductions of cult-images; and many other gems and other works have now been published by him and others proving that the people who belonged to this great Aegean culture of the second millennium habitually conceived of their gods in human form, even if they did not as a rule erect their idols in their temples. Thus on a gem which shows us an act of worship performed by a female votary before a sacred pillar, a human-shaped god with rays round his head and holding a spear is hovering in the air above it;[65.3] and on the great sarcophagus of Praisos we have on the one side a complex scene of ritual, conspicuous for the absence of any idol or eikon of the divinity, and at the other end a human form of god, or it may be hero, standing as if he had just come forth from his shrine or heroön.[65.4] In fact, the Minoan-Mycenaean religious monuments have revealed to us at least three personages, anthropomorphically conceived, of the popular religion of the period that we may call pre-Hellenic: a great goddess, often represented as throned, with fruits and emblems of vegetation around her, or as standing on a mountain and associated with lions; a god who is sometimes conversing with her or is descending from the sky armed with spear and shield,[65.5] and sometimes rayed; thirdly, the goddess with the snake as her familiar. {66} To this extent, then, the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples were on the same plane of religion as those of Mesopotamia: and the record of the anthropomorphic divinity can be traced in the Aegean area back to the fourth millennium B.C. by the nude figures in stone of a goddess of fecundity with arms pressed across her breasts, a type belonging to the Neolithic period.

In passing, let us observe that neither the earliest prehistoric art of the Mediterranean nor the great religious types of the Minoan divinities recall the art style of Mesopotamia.

But this developed anthropomorphism of the early Aegean civilisation is not the whole story. Modern research has accumulated evidence that seems to point to a theriomorphic religion in Crete and in Mycenaean Greece which has been supposed by some to have preceded the former in order of time and in the logical process of evolution, and which at any rate survived by the side of it. Traces of the same phenomenon have been noted in the Hittite area, and more faintly in the valley of the Euphrates. The first modern writer who proclaimed with emphasis the theriomorphic elements in the prehistoric religions of Greece was Mr. A. Lang in his _Custom and Myth_, connecting it with a theory of totemism that does not concern us here. Afterwards, a systematic treatment of the problem in the light of the monuments of the Cretan and Mycenaean periods was presented by Mr. Cook in a paper published in the _Hellenic Journal_ of 1894 on “Animal Worship in the Mycenaean Age”; and again in 1895 by an essay on “The Bee in Greek Mythology”: a very full collection of the materials, with some exposition of important religious theory, will be found in De Visser’s treatise, _De Graecorum Diis non referentibus speciem humanam_ {67} (1900). Miss J. Harrison has worked further along the same lines, and has published some special results in her paper read before the Congress of the History of Religions, 1908, and published in its _Transactions_, on “Bird and Pillar Worship in relation to Ouranian Divinities.”

Now the material that forms the fabric of these researches is so intricate, the relevant facts so manifold and minute, that it is impossible to consider them in detail within the limits of this present inquiry, of which the leading object is an important question of history concerning the religious influence of the East on the West; and, again, the writers above mentioned are deeply concerned with theories about the origins, or at least the earlier stages in the evolution of religion. And as I am only comparing East and West in a limited and somewhat advanced period of their history, I am not necessarily bound to deal with problems of origin. Nevertheless, a summary survey of this group of facts may provide us with important clues towards the solution of our main question. But a few general criticisms of the assumptions which, whether latent or explicit, are commonly made in the writings just quoted, may be useful at the outset. First, one finds that the word “worship” is used very loosely by the ancients as well as by contemporary writers: and by its vague and indiscriminate employment an effort is made to convince us that the pre-Hellenic and proto-Hellenic world worshipped the lion, the ox, the horse, the ass, the stag, the wolf, the pig, the bird, especially the dove, the eagle, and lastly even the cock. We should have to deal with a savage religion rioting in theriolatry, and we should not need to trouble any longer about the theory of its Mesopotamian origin, for as we have seen theriomorphism played a very small part in the Sumerian-Babylonian cult. But one {68} must ask more precisely, What is worship, and what does lion-worship, for instance, imply? Are we to believe that every one of these animals was worshipped, the whole species being divine? And does their “worship” mean that the superstitious people prayed to them, built altars or sacred columns, or even shrines to them, and offered them sacrifice? It has become urgent to reserve some such strict sense for the word as this, in order to preserve a sense of the distinction between our ritual-service of a real personal divinity and the various, often trifling, acts that may be prompted by the uneasy feeling or reverential awe evoked by the presence of a curious or dangerous animal. Thus, to abstain from eating or injuring mice or weasels is not to worship mice or weasels: to lament over a dead sea-urchin is not to worship sea-urchins: to give a wolf a decorous funeral is not to worship wolves: to throw a piece of sacrificial meat to flies before a great sacrifice to some high divinity is not to worship flies. All these things the civilised Greeks could do, but they ought not for that to be charged with worshipping whole species of animals directly as gods. Next let us bear well in mind that secular animals, like secular things, can become temporarily sacred through contact with the altar: thus the ox who voluntarily approached the altar and ate of the grain or cakes upon it, might be believed by the Hellenes to become instantly divine, full of the life of the divinity, and most ceremonious respect resembling worship might be meted out to him; but we should not hastily believe that the Greeks who might feel like this towards that particular ox worshipped all oxen; or that the society of King Minos worshipped all axes wherever found, because in peculiar circumstances and ritual an axe might become charged with {69} divinity. Finally, I may again protest against the fallacy of supposing that theriomorphism always precedes anthropomorphism: for an ever-increasing mass of evidence forces one to the conviction that they are often co-existent and always compatible one with the other; if this is so, it is rash and unscientific to say, as is so easy to say and is so often said, when one meets in the Mediterranean or elsewhere a human god or goddess accompanied by a lion or a cock, that the anthropomorphic divinity has been evolved from the animal.

Looking now directly to the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments, before we consider the early Hellenic records, we must distinguish between those that are obviously cult-scenes and those that are not obviously but only hypothetically so, and this second class are those with which Mr. Cook’s papers mainly deal. The former have been treated masterfully by Sir Arthur Evans in his paper on “Tree and Pillar Cult”; from these we gather that the worshipper did not usually pray before an idol, but before a pillar or a sacred tree combined often with horns of consecration or an axe; also that he imagined his deity generally in human form, the pillar serving as a spiritual conductor to draw down the divinity from heaven. Therefore I may remark that the phrase “pillar-cult” here, and in Miss Harrison’s paper quoted above, does not express the inwardness of the facts. But the latter writer endeavours to prove the prevalence of a direct cult of birds in this period; and further maintains the dogma that “in the days of pillar and bird anthropomorphism was not yet.” The Minoan monuments on which she relies are the great Phaistos sarcophagus, the trinity of terra-cotta pillars surmounted by doves found in an early shrine of the Palace of Knossos,[69.1] with {70} which are to be compared the dove-shrine of Mycenae and the gold-leafed goddesses of Mycenae with a dove perched on their heads; and finally, the semi-aniconic idol of a dove goddess, with the dove on her head and her arms outspread like wings, found in another shrine of the palace of Knossos, and descending from a pre-Mycenaean traditional type.[70.1] Whatever we may think of these monuments, they cannot be quoted as the memorials of a time “when anthropomorphism was not yet”; for the earliest of them, probably that mentioned last, is of later date than the type of the naked human-formed goddess of the Neolithic Aegean period.

The question depends wholly on the true interpretation of the monuments; as regards the Phaistos sarcophagus, the exact significance of the ritual is still a matter of controversy, to which I may return later, when I compare the ritual of east and west; this much is clear, that a holy service of blood-oblation is being performed before two sacred trees, into the top of which two axes are inserted and on the axes are two birds painted black. Is it immediately clear that “the birds are objects of a definite cult,” as Miss Harrison maintains?[70.2] This may be strongly disputed; otherwise we must say that the axe and the tree are equally direct objects of cult. But the illuminative scene on the signet-ring described above[70.3] suggests that the function of the pillar was to serve as a powerful magnet to attract a personal divinity. And Sir Arthur Evans has well shown that the tree and the pillar were of equal value as sacred objects in Minoan-Mycenaean religion. A sacrifice doubtless of mystic and magical power is {71} being performed before them here: the worshippers may well believe that the combined influence of blood-offering, sacred tree, and sacred axe will draw down the divinity of the skies. In what form visible to the eye would he descend? The carver of that signet-ring dared to show him above the pillar in human form, as the mind’s eye though not the sense-organ of the worshipper discerned him. But the artist of the Phaistos sarcophagus is more reserved. As the Holy Ghost descended in the form of a dove, so the unseen celestial divinity of Crete might use any bird of the air as his messenger, perhaps by preference the woodpecker or dove. And this natural idea would be supported by the fact that occasionally birds did alight on the top of sacred columns, and they would then instantly be charged with the sanctity of that object and would be regarded as a sign of the deity’s presence and as an auspicious answer to prayer and sacrifice. Thus many birds in Greece became sacred by haunting temples; and Dr. Frazer has suggested that the swallows and sparrows that nested on the temple or on the altar at Jerusalem acquired sanctity by the same simple religious logic.[71.1] But it is futile to argue that therefore the Hellenes and Hebrews once worshipped either the whole species of swallows and sparrows or any single one. And Sir Arthur Evans’ own interpretation of the doves on the triple group of columns, as being merely “the image of the divine descent, and of the consequent possession of the bactylic column by a spiritual being,” is sane and convincing.[71.2] This does not prove or necessarily lead to “bird-worship.” Further, he suggests[71.3] that as the dove was originally posed on the top of the column {72} as a gracious sign of the divine presence, so when the human form was beginning to take the place of the column the dove would then be seen on the human head, as in the case of the statuettes of goddesses mentioned above, and as it appeared on the head of the golden image at Bambyke, which some called Semiramis.[72.1] The close association of the Mediterranean goddess and of the goddess of Askalon, Phoenicia, and Bambyke with doves may have been caused by several independent reasons; one may well have been the habitual frequenting of her temple by the birds. This would easily grow into a belief that the goddess when she wished to reveal something of her presence and power to the external eye would manifest herself in the bird. This we may call theriomorphic imagination that goes _pari passu_ easily with the anthropomorphic. But none of these monuments come near to proving that this Mediterranean race directly worshipped birds, nor do they suggest any such theory as that the human divinity emerged from the bird. We shall, in fact, find that evidence of this kind that I have been examining, used recklessly in similar cases, leads to absurd results.[72.2]

Here it is well to remark in passing that the cult of {73} the Dove-goddess is a test case for trying the question of Oriental influence on the west. It cannot be traced back to Babylon, and no one would now maintain the old theory that the dove-shrines of Mycenae were an import from the Phoenician Astarte cult. Sir Arthur Evans’ discoveries enable us to carry back this particular worship in the Aegean to pre-Mycenaean times. We could with better right maintain that the Syrians borrowed it from the Aegean or possibly from Askalon, where, as Dr. Evans has pointed out, Minoan influences were strong. But the most reasonable view is that which he expresses that “the divine associations of the dove were a primitive heritage of primitive Greece and Anatolia.”[73.1]

As regards Mr. Cook’s theory of Mycenaean animal-worship, it is not now necessary to examine it at any length. It was based mainly on a comparison of a fairly large number of “Mycenaean” seals and gems from Crete and elsewhere showing monsters bearing animals on their shoulders or standing by them. He interpreted the “monsters” as men engaged in a religious mummery, wearing the skins of lions, asses, horses, bulls, stags, swine, that is, as ministers of a divine lion, ass, etc., bringing sacrificial animals to these animal-deities, and he raised the large questions of totemism and totemistic cult-practices. His theory presents a picture of zoolatric ritual that cannot be paralleled elsewhere in the world either among primitive or advanced societies. And we begin to distrust it when it asks us to interpret the figures in a gem-representation as an ass-man bearing two lions to sacrifice; for neither in Greece, Egypt, or {74} Asia is there any record of a lion-sacrifice, a ceremony which would be difficult to carry out with due solemnity. The more recent discovery of a set of clay-sealings at Zakro in Crete by Dr. Hogarth, who published them in the _Hellenic Journal_ of 1902, has rendered Mr. Cook’s view of the cult-value of these “monsters” now untenable. They are found in combinations too widely fantastic to be of any value for totemistic or a zoolatric theory, and the opinion of archaeologists like Sir Arthur Evans and Winter[74.1] that these bizarre forms arose from modifications of foreign types, such as the Egyptian hippopotamus goddess, crossed at times with the hippokamp and the lion, has received interesting confirmation from the discovery of a shell relief at Phaistos showing a series of monsters with hippopotamus heads, and in a pose derived undoubtedly from a Nilotic type.[74.2] We may venture to say that the exuberant fancy of the Minoan-Mycenaean artist ran riot and amused itself with wild combinations of monsters, men and animals, to which no serious meaning was attached.

Only rarely, when the monsters are ritualistically engaged in watering a sacred palm tree or column,[74.3] does the religious question arise. And here we may find a parallelism in Assyrian religious art, in the representation of “winged genii fertilising the adult palms with the male cones”; but according to Sir Arthur Evans this motive is later in the Eastern art than in the Mycenaean. Perhaps only one type of monster found on these gems and seals is derived from a real theriomorphic figure of the contemporary religion, namely, the Minotaur {75} type. A few of the Zakro sealings show the sealed figure of a human body with bovine head, ears, and tail[75.1]; and a clay seal-impression found at Knossos presents a bovine human figure with possibly a bovine head sealed in a hieratic attitude before a warrior in armour.[75.2] Such archaeological evidence is precarious, but when we compare it with the indigenous Cretan legends of the bull-Zeus and the union of Pasiphae with the bull, we are tempted to believe that a bull-headed god or a wholly bovine deity had once a place in Minoan cult.

To conclude, this brief survey of the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments points to a contemporary religion that preferred the aniconic agalma to the human idol, but imagined the divinity mainly as anthropomorphic, though this imagination was probably not so fixed as to discard the theriomorphic type entirely. Therefore this religion is on the same plane with that of Mesopotamia rather than with that of Egypt.

Turning now to the proto-Hellenic period, which, without prejudging any ethnic question, I have kept distinct from the Mycenaean, we have here the advantage of literary records to assist the archaeological evidence. I have stated my conviction that the earliest Hellenes had already reached the stage of personal polytheism before conquering the southern Peninsula; and the combined evidence of the facts of myths and cults justifies the belief that their imagination of the deity was mainly anthropomorphic. By the period of the Homeric poems, composed perhaps some five centuries after the earliest entrance of the Hellenes, we must conclude that the anthropomorphism as a religious {76} principle was predominant in the more progressive minds that shaped the culture of the race: a minute but speaking example of this is the change that ensued in accordance with Homeric taste in the meaning of the old hieratic epithet βοῶπις; in all probability it originally designated a cow-faced goddess, but it is clear that he intends it for ox-eyed, an epithet signifying the beauty of the large and lustrous human eye. The bias that is felt in the religious poetry of Homer comes to determine the course of the later religious art, so that the religion, art, and literature of historic Greece may be called the most anthropomorphic or anthropocentric in the world. Yet we have sufficient proof that in the pre-Homeric age the popular mind was by no means bound by any such law, and that the religious imagination was unfixed and wavering in its perception of divinity: and the belief must have been general that the god, usually imagined as a man, might manifest himself at times in the form of some animal. Apollo Lykeios, the wild god of the woods, was evidently in the habit of incarnating himself in the wolf, so that wolves might be sacramentally offered to him or sacrifice offered to certain wolves.[76.1] In the Artemis legend of Brauron and Aulis we detect the same close communion of the goddess with the bear. Now, upon the fairly numerous indications in cult-legend and ritual that the deity was occasionally incarnate in the animal, much fallacious anthropological theory has been built. It is not now my cue to pursue this matter _au fond_. But it is necessary for my purpose to emphasise the fact that there is fair evidence for some direct zoolatry in the proto-Hellenic period, though there is less than is often supposed, and it needs always careful criticism. {77} As I have already said, the ancients of the later learned period were often vague and unprecise when they spoke of “the worship” of animals. Thus Clemens informs us[77.1] that the Thessalians “worshipped” ants, and on the authority of Euphorion that the Samians “worshipped” a sheep: the word used in each case being σέβειν. But accurate statements concerning religious psychology demand the nicest discrimination: “a little more, and how much it is.” We may suspect that the word σέβειν was as vaguely used in antiquity as the term “worship” in loose modern writing: and it is to be remarked that when one authority uses this word, another may employ the verb τιμᾶν, which does not imply so much. For instance, Clemens states that the Thebans “honoured” the weasel; Aelian, that they “worshipped” it.[77.2] We are nearly always left in doubt how much is meant: whether the animal was merely treated reverentially and its life spared, or whether sacrifice and prayers were offered to it: the former practice may be found in almost any society modern or ancient, the latter is savage zoolatry, and is a fact of importance for the religious estimate of a people.

I cannot consider all the cases which are given with sufficient fullness in the work that I have cited by De Visser.[77.3] But the instance cited above--the Samian worship of the sheep [πρόβατον]--shows us how little we have to build our theories on. It is quite possible that such a story arose from some ritual in which the sheep was offered reverentially, treated as a theanthropic {78} animal, half-human, half-divine, like the bull-calf of Tenedos in the cult of Dionysos,[78.1] an interesting form of sacrifice to which I shall have occasion to refer again. Clear records of actual sacrifice to animals in Greece are exceedingly rare. We have the quaint example of the so-called “Sacrifice” to the flies before the feast of Apollo on the promontory of Leukas; this I have discussed elsewhere,[78.2] pointing out that it seems only a ritual trick to persuade the flies to leave the worshippers alone, and certainly does not suggest the “worship” of flies.[78.2] There is also a dim ritual-legend attaching to the temple of Apollo the wolf-god in Sikyon, which appears to point to some sacrifice to wolves in or near the temple at some early period.[78.3] The third case is more important: the “sacrifice to the pig,” which Athenaeus, quoting from Agathokles of Kyzikos, attests was an important service at Praisos in Crete, performed as a προτελὴς θυσία, that is, as a preliminary act in the liturgies of the higher religion.[78.4] The ritual-legend explained the act as prompted by the service that a sow had rendered to the infant Zeus; but it remains mysterious, and we would like to have had more clear information as to the actual rite. Finally, we have the most important type of zoolatric ritual in Greece, the worship of certain sacred snakes: various records attest this in the cult of Trophonios at Lebadeia and in the temple of Athena Polias at Athens; in the cult of Zeus-Meilichios in the Piraeus, in the sacred grove of Apollo in Epeiros, probably in the shrines of Asklepios at Epidauros and Kos, and elsewhere.

{79}

Now it is important to note that these ritual records nowhere suggest that whole species of animals were worshipped, but that only certain individuals of that species, haunting certain places to which a sense of religious mystery attached, such as a cave or a lonely grove, or else found in or near some holy shrine, were thus marked out as divine. Also, we observe that in all the examples just quoted, the cult of the animal is linked to the cult of some personal god or goddess or hero: the snake, for instance, is the natural incarnation of the underworld divinity or hero. The only exception to this latter rule that may be reasonably urged is the prehistoric worship of Python at Delphi, which, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out, is curiously like the ritual and cult of a fetich-snake in Dahomey.[79.1] Yet, for all we know, Python, who in the earliest version of the story is of female sex, may at a very early time have been regarded not as a mere snake, but as an incarnation of the earth-goddess Gaia, who ruled at Delphi before Apollo came. The question whether the ancestors of the Hellenes or the pre-Hellenic peoples with whom they mixed were ever on the lowest plane of theriolatry does not concern us here. What is important is, that the records, both Mycenaean and Hellenic, justify us in believing that the dominant religion in Greece of the second millennium B.C. was the worship of personal divinities humanly conceived who could occasionally incarnate themselves in animal form, and that where animal worship survived it was always linked in this way to the cults of personal polytheism. From the Homeric period onward, the higher Hellenic spirit shows itself averse to the theriomorphic fashion of religion; yet this never disappeared wholly from {80} the lower circles. Arcadia, the most backward and conservative of the Greek communities, never accepted the rigid anthropomorphic canon. This is shown by the record of the Phigaleian Demeter with the horse’s head; the mysterious goddess Eurynome of Phigaleia, half-woman, half-fish; the Arcadian Pan, the daimon of the herds, imagined as with goat legs and sometimes with goat’s head; and, finally, by the Arcadian idols of the Roman period found at Lykosoura in 1898, representing the female form with the head of a cow.[80.1]

This résumé of the facts, so far as it has gone, appears to justify the theorem with which it started, that the “Mycenaean” peoples and proto-Hellenes in the second millennium were on the whole, in respect of the morphology of their religion, on the same plane as those of the Euphrates valley; only it appears that theriomorphism played slightly more part in the cults and legends of the West than in those of the Sumerian-Babylonian culture. It is obvious to any student of comparative religion that such general similarity which we have here observed, and which we might observe if we compared early Greece with Vedic India, neither proves nor disproves a theory of borrowing. And so far there seems no occasion for resorting to such a theory, unless the type of the fish-goddess at Phigaleia be considered a reason for supposing Semitic influences here at work and for tracing her ancestry to Derketo of Bambyke. For such transference of cult we might have to invoke the help of Phoenicians, who arrive on the scene too late to help us in the present quest, and who are not likely to have been attracted into the interior of Arcadia.