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THE RELIGION OF THE GREEKS
AND ROMANS
THE RELIGION OF
THE GREEKS
AND ROMANS

Kftro’K--' /
C. KERENYI

with 124 monochrome plates

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
 Translated by Christopher Holme

© Thames and Hudson 1962

First published in the U.S.A. 1962 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
Text printed in Great Britain by Western Printing Services Ltd Bristol
Plates printed by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd Aylesbury
 CONTENTS

Note on the Plates Page 2

Introduction 10

I The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion 17

II The Feast 49

III Two Styles of Religious Experience 93

IV Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience 141

1 Theoria 141

2 Religio 155

V Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod 177

1 The Greek Idea oj the Sacrifice 177

2 The Laughter of the Gods 192

VI Man and God in the Roman View 219

1 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 219

2 Retrospect 235

Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 261

Notes 280

Index 296
 NOTE ON THE PLATES

The surviving material from which our knowledge of ancient religion is

derived is both literary and visual. Both are abundant, and archaeology and
scholarship in our time have made important additions to both. Thus a
selection of pictures, to represent this abundance of visual material as an
accompaniment to the text, is an essential part of the plan of this book.
These illustrations do not, except in some special cases, refer directly to
passages in the text, but are intended to support it with a background of
actuality.
The idea of religious style, which is the basis of the approach to ancient
religion here adopted, makes particular demands on the illustrator. The
elucidation of words and concepts leads us again and again to the world of
vision, particularly in the case of Greece, where knowing was seeing, religion
was spectacle, and the divine view was the divine act. To concentrate the
understanding, in the spirit of the book, on a few salient features, the pictures
have been arranged in groups. The division is not hard and fast; each head¬
ing applies to the principal illustrations in the group, but not necessarily to all:

OLYMPIA and the cults of Zeus and Hera

THE ACROPOLIS and the cult of Athena

THE CULTS OF DIONYSUS

DELOS and BRAURON and the cults of Apollo

and Artemis

DELPHI and the cult of Delphic Apollo

ROME and the Roman cults.

 THE PLATES

plate
Ivory group of the divine child watched over by two nurses. Mycenae, about i
15th century b.c. National Museum, Athens
Faience earth-goddess with snakes, from the central sanctuary in the Palace of 2
Knossos, c. 1600-1580 b.c. Heraklion Museum
Bronze statue of Artemis, recently found at Piraeus. Piraeus Museum 3
Standing youth (the so-called Apollo of Tenea), found at Tenea near Corinth. 4
Glyptothek, Munich

OLYMPIA AND THE CULTS OF ZEUS AND HERA

A view from the ancient site of Olympia into the surrounding landscape 5
The archway leading from the stadium to the temples of Olympia 6
The ruins of the Temple of Zeus, Olympia 7
The remains of the western end of the Temple of Hera at Olympia 8
The Temple of Hera at Olympia, seen from the east 9
Zeus abducting Ganymede: terracotta statue by a Peloponnesian artist, c. 470 b.c. 10
Olympia Museum
Fragment of a statuette of Hera seated. Paestum, early 4th century b.c. British 11
Museum
A faience statuette of Hera standing. Tegea, early 4th century b.c. British Museum 12

Two girls in a ritual dance. Metope from the Temple of Hera at the mouth of 13
the River Sele, Paestum. Italian-Greek sculptor, late 6th century b.c. Paestum
Museum
Hera unveils herself to Zeus. Metope from the east side of the Temple of Hera at 14
Sehnus, c. 460 b.c. National Museum, Palermo
Head of Hera; a detail from the metope in Plate 14 15
Head of Zeus; a detail from the metope in Plate 14 16
Discus thrower represented on a red-figured vase found at Vulci. 5th century b.c. 17
Vatican Museum
Vase painting showing Hera enthroned from Tomb 127 in the Valle Trebba, 18
Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
4 The Plates
plate
The wedding of Hera and Zeus. Attic black-figured vase from Kameiros. British 19
Museum
Marble statues of Zeus and Pelops: two of the three centre figures from the east 20
pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Before 456 b.c. Olympia Museum
The two Dioscuri, sons of the Gods: Pollux on horseback, Castor on foot. By the 21
Penthesilea painter, c. 460-450 b.c. Tomb 18c in the Valle Pega, Spina. Archaeo¬
logical Museum, Ferrara

THE ACROPOLIS AND THE CULT OF ATHENA

The Acropolis, from the Hill of the Muses. The Propylaea is to the left, the Temple 22
of Athena Nike is in the centre, and the Parthenon to the right

The Parthenon seen from the east 23

The Erechtheum: west fa<pade showing the Ionic columns and the south side with 24
its portico of six maidens turned towards the Parthenon

A youth leading horses; from the Parthenon frieze, west side. Completed 432 b.c. 25
British Museum

Detail of horses, and a youth; from the north frieze of the Parthenon. Acropolis 26
Museum, Athens
The Parthenon. Frieze on the western face of the cella, showing the Panathenaic 27
Procession

Festival organiser and girls, from the Panathenaic Procession. East frieze of the 28
Parthenon. Louvre, Paris

Water-bearers, from the north frieze of the Parthenon. Acropohs Museum, Athens 29

Marble votive relief to Athena showing the goddess leaning on her spear. 30
Acropolis, mid-5th century b.c. Acropohs Museum, Athens

Bronze statue of Athena; a recent find in a sewer at Piraeus, mid-4th century b.c. 31
Piraeus Museum

Pallas Athena in armour; from the west pediment of the temple of Aphaia, on 32
Aegina. About 590 b.c. Glyptothek, Munich

Head of Pallas Athena, in Parian marble, from the east pediment of the Temple 33
of Aphaia, on Aegina. Glyptothek, Munich

Athena with Theseus, Herakles and the heroes of Marathon. Vase by the Niobid 34
painter, from Tomb 579 in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Archaeological Museum,
Ferrara

Athena and one of the heroes of Marathon. Detail from page 34 35

Battle of heroes in the presence of Athena. Vase by the Berlin painter. From Vulci, 36
c. 490 b.c. Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich
 The Plates 5
plate

A warrior and Nike, sacrificing. Detail from an amphora by the Peleus painter, 37
from Tomb 422, in the Valle Trebba, Spina, c. 430-420 b.c. Archaeological
Museum, Ferrara

Herakles brings Athena the Stymphalian birds. Metope from the Temple of Zeus 38
at Olympia; finished in 456 B.c. The torso of Herakles is in the Museum, Olympia;
Athena is in the Louvre, Paris

A head of Athena, from the east pediment of the old Temple of Athena on the 39
Acropolis, c. 520 B.c. Acropolis Museum, Athens

Nike at a sacrifice, undoing a sandal, from the balustrade of the Temple of Athena 40
Nike. Acropolis Museum, Athens
A statue of Demeter seated, from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Cnidos. 41
c. 340-330 b.c. British Museum

A clothed figure of Aphrodite seated. From a bowl by the Lyandros painter. 42

From Cesa near Betolle, c. 460 B.c. Archaeological Museum, Florence

A nude figure of crouching Aphrodite, in Parian marble, from Rhodes (see pp. 43
117-118) c. 100 b.c.; rephca of 3rd century B.c. sculpture. Rhodes Museum

Statue of a priestess of Demeter, from the Sanctuary of Cnidos. British Museum 44

THE CULTS OF DIONYSUS

The Theatre of Dionysus, Athens: view of the auditorium. In its present form. 45
3rd century a.d.

Tragic mask with beard, bronze, found recently in a sewer at Piraeus. Piraeus 46
Museum
Satyr mask from Samos; late 6th century b.c. British Museum 47

The Theatre of Dionysus: altar from the sanctuary of the god, decorated with 48
masks of Silenus
Statuette of a comic actor, seated; probably from Piraeus. Terracotta, mid~4th 49
century b.c. British Museum
Comic actor standing, portraying a slave with a baby. Found in Attica. 50
Terracotta, mid-4th century b.c. British Museum

Satyric actor, representing Papposilenus with Dionysus; from Melos. Terracotta, 51

mid-4th century b.c. British Museum

Head of Dionysus. From Temple of Dionysus at Tarentum. Terracotta, early 5th 52

century b.c. British Museum
Dionysus reclining, from Temple of Dionysus at Tarentum. Terracotta, early 5th 53
century b.c. British Museum
6 The Plates
plate
Comic actor in role of young woman; probably found in Athens. Terracotta, 54
mid-4th century B.c. British Museum

Dionysus Protome, from Boeotia. Terracotta, 390-350 b.c. British Museum 55

Head of the young Dionysus; a late Hellenistic carving, found near Rome. British 56
Museum

Hermes with the little Dionysus on his arm. Statue by Praxiteles, 330-320 b.c., 57
from the Heraion, Olympia. Olympia Museum

Religious ceremony and orgiastic dance before Dionysus as Hades, and the Queen 58
of Hades. A vase painting by Polygnotos. From Tomb 128 in the Valle Trebba,
Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
Silenus plays the double flute before Dionysus. Detail from a vase by the Brygos 59
painter, c. 460 b.c., from Vulci. Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich
Satyr and maenad, a vase painting by the Altamura painter from Tomb 231 in 60
the Valle Trebba, Spina, c. 460 b.c. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara

Dionysus with maenads and satyrs. Vase from Vulci by the Kleophrades painter, 61
c. 500 b.c. Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich

Procession of Dionysus. Detail of a vase by the Niobid painter, from Tomb 313, 62
in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Mid-5th century b.c. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara

Orgiastic dance of girls (from the vase in plate 58) 63

Dionysus feast with Lenae (priestesses of Dionysus) before the idol of the god, by 64
the Dinos painter. Found in Nocera. Archaeological Museum, Naples
Dionysus with Phylax comedy, a vase painting by Astaeas of Paestum, found in 65
Lipari. Lipari Museum

Dionysus at sea, from Vulci, vase painting by Exekias c. 530 B.c. Munich Museum 66

DELOS & BRAURON AND THE CULTS OF

APOLLO AND ARTEMIS

Delos: a bird’s-eye view of the site 67

Delos: one of the lions 68

The sacred way of Delos with the lions. 6th century b.c. 69

Apollo with a deer, from Tomb 559 in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Archaeological 70
Museum, Ferrara

Apollo pours a libation for Artemis. Vase by the Bologna painter, c. 455 b.c. 71
From Tomb 308 in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
Ruins of the Temple of Artemis at Brauron 72

Early statue of Artemis from Brauron. National Museum, Athens 73

 The Plates 7
plate
Early statue of Artemis seated, from Brauron. National Museum, Athens 74

Statue of a young girl, one of the ‘bears’ of Artemis, from Brauron. National 75
Museum, Athens

Portrait heads of young girls, called the ‘bears’, from Brauron. National Museum, 76
Athens

Bas-relief of Artemis with hind and adorants, from Brauron. Late 5th century B.c. 77
National Museum, Athens

Bas-relief of a procession of adorants sacrificing to Artemis, from Brauron. 78

National Museum, Athens

Bas-relief of gods, from Brauron. National Museum, Athens 79

Bas-relief of Artemis with goat and kids, from Brauron 80

Frieze from the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii. Mid-ist century b.c. 81

Relief with a representation of the Nemesis Regina. Middle of the 2nd century 82
a.d. Brindisi Museum

Youths with bulls and sacrificial objects dedicated to Apollo. By the Kleophon 83
painter; from Tomb 57c in the Valle Pega, Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara

Mithras killing the bull. Vatican Museum 84

Athletes preparing for the torch race. Vase from Tomb 563 in the Valle Trebba, 85
Spina, c. 420-410 B.c. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara

DELPHI AND THE CULT OF DELPHIC APOLLO

The Tholos of Delphi, seen from above 86

Delphi: view from the sacred site across the valley 87

The large temple at Delphi, dedicated to Apollo 88

View of the Stadium, the highest building of the site of Delphi, from the hillside 89

Part of the Sacred Way at Delphi with the treasure house of the Athenians 90

Aphrodite, Artemis and Apollo, from the east frieze of the Siphnian Treasure 91
House at Delphi. Shortly before 525 B.c. Delphi Museum

Statue of Apollo, from the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, 92
finished in 456 b.c. Olympia Museum
Scenes in the Palaestra. Vase painting by the Kleophrades painter, from Vulci, 93
c. 500 b.c. Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich

Apollo crossing the sea on a winged tripod. Vase painting by the Berlin painter. 94
500-475 b.c. Vatican Museum
8 The Plates
plate
Procession in honour of Apollo. Detail of the vase by the Kleophon painter, from 95
Tomb 57c in the Valle Pega, Spina. 440-430 b.c. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara

Vase painting showing Apollo on throne at Delphi, omphalos and tripods at either 96
side. (Reverse of the vase in Plate 95)
Apollo, by the Peleus painter, from Tomb 617 in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Archae- 97
ological Museum, Ferrara
Apollo playing the lyre, accompanied by Hermes and Dionysus. A black-figured 98
vase from Vulci. British Museum
Chariot race on the lid of the vase shown in plate 93; from Vulci. By the Kleo- 99
phrades painter. Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich
Sacrifice before Apollo. Inside of a bowl by the Kalliope painter, 430-420 b.c. 100
From Tomb 293 in the Valle Trebba, Spina, Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
Apollo of Piombino, found in the sea off Piombino, Etruria. Second quarter of 101
4th century b.c. Louvre, Paris

ROME AND THE ROMAN CULTS

Marble statue of Augustus as a priest, c. a.d. 20, from the Via Labicana, Rome. 102
Museo Nazionale, Rome
‘Sacrarium’ from the Casa del Cenacolo, Pompeii 103

Shrine of the Lares in the house of the Vettii, Pompeii. Third quarter of 1st cen- 104
tury a.d.

Altar with festoons and bucrania. Archaeological Museum, Naples 105

Altar of Caius Manlius showing a scene of sacrifice, perhaps to the Genius Imperiale. 106
Period of Augustus. Lateran Museum

Altar dedicated to the Lares of Augustus, from the Vicus Sandaliarius. a.d. 2 107
Uffizi, Florence

Frieze from an altar which stood in front of the Temple of Neptune, Rome. 108
Erected by Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, found near the Palazzo Santacroce.
c. 40 b.c. Louvre, Paris

A frieze representing the Sulcus primigenius. Middle 1st century a.d. 109
Aquileia Museum

Relief representing Vicomagistri, the presidents of the Vici, whose duties included no-
in imperial times the upkeep of the cult of the Lares compitales, the Lares Augusti in
and the genius of the emperor; c. a.d. 40 Vatican Museum

Augustan coins: 1 Triumphal Arch; π The birth-sign of Augustus; hi Temple 112

of Mars Ultor; iv Arches for the dead at Actium; v Apollo Palatinus;
vi Curia Julia; vn Triumphal chariot; vili Victoria in the Curia; ix Laurel trees
 The Plates 9
plate
Scene from the haruspicatio on the Capitol (detail). Second decade of 2nd century 113
a.d. Louvre, Paris

Suovetauriha carried out by an Emperor; from the Palazzo San Marco, Rome. 114
Flavian period, Louvre, Paris

Sarcophagus showing the life of a Roman citizen; Flavian period. Uffizi, Florence 115

Sacrifice. Part of the Ara Pietatis of Claudius. Villa Medici, Rome 116

A rehef showing a procession, from the Ara Pacis, Rome; 13-9 b.c. Ara Pacis, 117
Rome

A rehef with priests and the Imperial Family, from the Ara Pacis, Rome; 13-9 b.c. 118
Ara Pacis, Rome

Roman Haruspex, taking the haruspicatio on the Capitol, second decade of 2nd 119
century a.d. This and Plate 113 are details from the same frieze
Trajan pouring a libation on an altar. Trajan’s column, Rome 120

Banquet of the Vestals, a fragment from the Ara Pietatis; c 1st century a.d. Museo 121
dei Conservatori, Rome

Pompa before Ludi of a Sevir, from a tomb at Amiternum. 1st century a.d. Museo 122
Nazionale, Rome
Septimius Severus and his wife Giulia offering a sacrifice, from the Arch of Sep- 123
timius Severus, Rome
A Vota Suscepta before crossing the Danube, Trajan’s Column, Rome 124
 INTRODUCTION

This book sets out to be a guide, not to the cult-places of a single deity,
such as I sought to provide for those of the divine physician in my Asklepios,
but to all the cult-places, so to speak, of the Greek and Roman religion.
The abundance of surviving material, both monumental and written,
demands a more general approach to this task than to the previous one.
This abundance, though not without gaps, is great enough to obscure the
very thing which the various details of Greek religion have in common; and
it is this common characteristic which we need to know before making
excursions into different parts of the whole territory, into the domains, that
is to say, of the individual deities.. In this respect I start from a particular
point of view in my treatment of all ancient religion, and should like to say
a few words in clarification and justification of it before I embark on any
detailed account of the religion of the Greeks and Romans.
The observations which I have made of the two religions from this
point of view are here combined with an appropriate selection of pictures.
But this is not their first appearance in print. The first version of my obser¬
vations, which I wrote for an Italian series, bore the title La Religione Antica
nelle sue Linee Fondamentali. By my use of this term, in English ‘funda¬
mentals’, I meant to limit myself, but in a positive sense, and I was the first,
I think, to introduce such a point of view into the history of religion. The
thing to which I wished to direct attention was religious ‘Style’. I used the
term ‘fundamentals’ metaphorically, as a simplifying expression for what we
call ‘Style’, something immediately apprehended and spiritually real.
I wrote the foreword to the first Italian edition in Olympia. There in
the background was the Altis, the sacred grove of Zeus by the River
Alpheus, where there is little more to be seen today than the outlines of
the buildings. The reader must be prepared to feel as if he were being shown
over a newly excavated sacred precinct. He must accustom his eyes to the
discernment of mere outlines, to winning a sense of‘Style’ from fragmentary
remains. Yet he will be encouraged in this theoretical work by knowing
 Introduction II

what figures they were which presided over these buildings. And he will
get useful help from the chance preservation of some of the statues which
used to adorn their summits. We should never forget to keep these figures
before our eyes—the portraits of the gods and heroes preserved for us by
poetry and art. We should always be ready honestly to examine our
thoughts about the past—in this case the religion of the Greeks—to test
whether they remain valid in the presence of the products of ancient art.
Walter F. Otto gave the radiant divinities of the Homeric religion their
due position in the foreground of his work The Homeric Gods. However,
he confined himself rather too narrowly to the classical representatives of
them in the fifth century b.c., refusing to acknowledge their dark side. I
have taken proper account of their more archaic traits in the tales of the
gods and heroes offered in my two subsequent volumes, The Gods of the
Greeks and The Heroes of the Greeks, and yet there is no lack in them of
references to all that is moving, elevating, or amusing in Greek art. It will
not be the task of this book to penetrate too deeply into those earlier times
which found their religious expression not in Greek, but in Cretan art. A
selection of ancient works of art such as is here offered is the very thing
needed to complete a study of the subject of Style in ancient religion.
Strictly speaking, it was no more than a metaphor when I referred, not
to ‘Style’, but to ‘fundamentals’, foundations, and substructure. My
language, however, was not wholly metaphorical when I came to express my
conviction that a book about the Style of the Greek and Roman religion
should really lay the groundwork for a history of ancient civilisation itself. For
the study could be continued either as a history of religion or in the form of
a comprehensive account of Greek and Roman civilisation—following the
trail laid by Jacob Burckhardt—or even in the form of a history of literature
or art. The historical objects which make it possible to write all these
histories are works, works subject to change as those of religion are, but still
works—myths and doctrines, rites and institutions, ways of hfe and com¬
munities, pictures and buildings—all of which exhibit a Style.
This aspect of religion, that it must be studied through its works, is
emphasised by my book Umgang mit Goettlichen (‘Dealings with the Divine’,
Goettingen 1955). The reason both for the common Style and for the
interconnections of a particular civilisation, in this case the Greek and the
Roman, can be stated in one word—a word for which we need not be
12 Introduction

indebted to the existentialist philosophy—its particular Existence. Let me

explain more fully what I mean. Christianity is no longer concerned with
a ‘particular Existence’ as were those religions from which I selected the
Greek and the Roman as examples. I chose two such religions in order to
demonstrate the differences of style between them; these two in particular
for obvious historical reasons. They are the nearest to us of any except the
Christian and the Jewish religions and they can most naturally be compared
with one another. They occurred side by side. The Greek religion in¬
fluenced the Roman and in late classical times there was certainly also a
counter-influence of the Roman religion on the Greek, even though this has
not yet been investigated. Yet both remained independent. Moreover the
comparison of one with the other can be carried through with a minimum
of prejudice, without any preconceived opinions for or against either.
Finally, everything which I have said about the two religions can be said
about Greek and Roman Existence. They occurred side by side, they
mutually influenced one another, and both stood in the same relation to
ourselves.
How then can we speak of a particular Greek or Roman Existence? If
this were a purely philosophic question, I should not go into it here. We do
not, in speaking of ‘Greek’ Existence, mean the word in the strictly limited
sense of existentialist philosophy. The reality in question is not one that
can be immediately apprehended, but one which has to be mediated to us
through the works of antiquity. There is no denying that this mediation,
especially when the works concerned are works of art, demands an ex¬
perience without which no scholarly treatment of the reality thus mediated
is possible. One approach to Greek Existence, as to something real and
characteristic in the variety of material, was Jacob Burckhardt’s History of
Greek Civilisation. Otherwise only rarely has any special attention been
given to it, and in the study of Greek religion only by one writer—Ellen
Jane Harrison, to whose name I have already paid tribute in the first Italian
edition.
She started out from a review of concrete objects, foremost among them
the surviving monuments, and tried to penetrate from there to ‘life’ itself.
She called herself a pupil of Nietzsche, Bergson, and the sociologist Durk¬
heim. The biological and sociological functions were in her view the keys
to the understanding of the works of Greek religion. She applied the
 Introduction 13
biological point of view in her introductory book, Prolegomena to the
Study of Greek Religion, the sociological in her second great work, Themis.
She directed her attention to something real and universal in the variety
of material, but one thing, quality, was excluded from her consideration,
whether in the sense of artistic merit or in that of style. The quality of a
work of art, when present, was from this point of view a mere addition
to the biological and sociological product. And yet life’, especially com¬
munity life, is responsible in human existence for products which could
never be mistaken for products of mere animal life. The distinction was
enshrined in the Greek language, which had two different words for life.
Zoe was the word for ‘mere’ life, life uncharacterised, while hios meant a
characterised existence.
To give only two extreme instances: zoon means an unspecified living
thing, whereas bios is the highly characterised life of a human being, the life
which, thus named, created a special category of Greek literature. It was
the Greeks who spoke of an arkhaios bios—an ‘ancient life’ (Diodorus
Sic. 4.7), for which ‘archaic existence’ would be an equivalent avoiding the
ambiguity of the word ‘life’ (meaning both zoe and bios). ‘Existence’, as the
equivalent of bios, demands a characteristic style. It is unthinkable as a
historical reality without Style, for even what we call a lack of Style, or its
disintegration, are themselves forms of Style. In the history of science the
concept of‘Style’ was taken over by Leo Frobenius from art and literature
to the study of civilisation, but the works which it was regarded as character¬
ising were always those produced in the course of human Existence. ‘Exis¬
tence’ and ‘Style’ are found together in that reality which the Greeks would
call bios.
What then is the relation between a religion such as the Greek and the
Roman to the bios, or characterised Existence, with which it was so intimately
bound up in history that it vanished with it? One account of this relation
was given by Walter F. Otto in his 1926 lecture ‘The Ancient Greek Idea of
God’ (in the volume Die Gestalt und das Sein, 1955, p. 118). ‘Wherever
religion and culture’ he writes ‘are still found in their native strength, they
are fundamentally one, and more or less to be identified one with another.
In such a case religion is not a value additional to cultural goods but the most
profound revelation of the peculiar content and essence of a culture. Re¬
ligion is no doubt directed to the eternal but not simply to the eternal. In
14 Introduction

its domain of sanctity all the forces and configurations of the cultural com¬
munity expose their eternal aspect. It comprehends and penetrates the
vigorous youth of a culture, as a devout awareness of the unnameable vital
cause of its specific will, and of the infinite and eternal reality in which this
will has its source and into which it flows. Every culture has its particular
will, its own valuations and aims. If this spiritual entity is not aware of its
own special character, it may yet discover its depths in the awe of sanctity.
All national or tribal communities have been able to tell the world just as
much about divine things as they were themselves able to be. Their divine
things are nothing else but the infinite cause of their particular genius.’
Otto’s way of expressing the close relationship of religion with ‘vital
cause’ is to some extent still derived from the ‘philosophy of life’ in which
Jane Harrison believed—not, it is true, in its utilitarian form. It also has
affinities, however, with the cultural theory of Leo Frobenius, and in the
sentence ‘All national or tribal communities have been able to tell the world
just as much about divine things as they were themselves able to be it leads
on to the point of view which was to become peculiar to Otto in his later
works.
This again has affinities with the fundamental idea of this book, which
however in contrast to Otto does not start out from the ‘Philosophy of Life’
but from the human sense of a religious attitude by which we understand man’s
entering the presence of God or his immediate confrontation of the ‘absolute’.
From this point of view it was only necessary to apprehend the Greek and
Roman form of relationship with the absolute in order to apprehend the
Greek and Roman Form in its entirety. Every people exhibits a Form of
its own, a Form which makes it that people and no other, in its immediate
confrontation of the absolute.
I have here used the word ‘absolute’ as a description, as non-committal
as possible, for everything before which a man stands religiously, as before
the divine. We have here the original sense of the word ‘religious’, not
referring to a particular religion, but to an attitude of respect, or beyond that,
of worship, or more still, a feeling of giddiness on the edge of the abyss, of
the Nihil, or ‘nothingness’. This attitude may refer either to a god, who
will be addressed as ‘thou’, or to the festal reality of the world—a godly
world or a world full of gods—or even to the Nihil in a completely godless
world, a kosmos atheos. It is the situation which lets nothing be hidden and
 Introduction 15
causes everything essential to come clearly to the fore. The outline of a
people’s religion which emerges from it at the same time characterises its
inmost essence, the peculiar culture of the people in question. A new form
of the connection between religion and culture came into being with
Christianity, and in the far east with Buddhism. In such a case we have a
religion which aspires to be the rehgion of all mankind, concerned with
Existence pure and simple, while culture remains, as it is likely to do for a
long while yet, peculiar to a people, or gens, thus forming its special Existence.
The historian of rehgion ought to cry out, Tell of your God or gods without
naming them, worship them with bodily movements and rites—all that you
do will betray a Style, whether you are a Greek or Roman, a Jew, Persian,
or Indian.
The religious attitude pure and simple is, in distinction from the attitude
of every day, a festal attitude, in a primitive community the festal attitude of
the whole community. Through it the characterised Existence, the hios, is
clearly manifested in a definite, concrete action. It is always a ‘Here I stand,
I cannot do otherwise’, or a ‘Here I dance, I cannot do otherwise’, or a ‘Here
I sacrifice, I cannot do otherwise’. That is why ancient rehgion lays claim,
not to truth in the dogmatic sense, but to being genuine and in that sense
true—hke art and its works. It becomes false insofar as it moves away from
the bios, or more exactly, since the bios even while maintaining its original
style is more changeable than religion and its works, insofar as the bios
withdraws from it.
The way here indicated of looking at things is no less historical than any
which has claimed to be so in the past study of ancient rehgion. It is neither
Vitalistic’ not ‘existentialist’ but ‘biotic’—in the previously given meaning
of the word ‘bios’. Characterised Existence is within the historian’s reach,
origins are not. Change and development are found in history only as
change in something permanent, in the writing of history only as change in
something recognisable. A description must begin at the point where its
object becomes recognisable, whether the object really has its beginning there
or not. This is ah the more necessary with a description concerned entirely
with the ‘permanent in change’—as Style has been defined by one historian
of literature. I have chosen as starting point one very striking characteristic
of Greek rehgion, and refer to it only in passing because I have extensively
treated it in other books. That is its mythological aspect, which forms the
ι6 Introduction

explicit subject-matter of the two works of mine mentioned at the beginning

and has been theoretically investigated in Introduction to ... or Essays on
a Science of Mythology, published jointly with C. G. Jung, as well as in my
Utngang mit Goettlichen (‘Dealings with the Divine’) and in the essay Work
and Myth in my Griechische Miniaturen (Zurich 1957).
‘Myth’ is substantially ‘content’, and insofar as it is this it is concerned,
like Christianity and Buddhism, with Existence pure and simple. It occurs,
however, only as ‘mythology’, in a definite Form, and is thus always related
to a particular Existence. Ought it not to be possible, however, to perceive
certain elements of the form which first showed its perfection in the Greek
Style even earlier, in another Style, before the Greek Existence completely
established itself in another and ultimately shattered it? Such a possibility
is at any rate not to be excluded without further ado, and since that earlier
Existence has been brought particularly close to us by magnificent works of
art, we should not refrain from looking for a starting-point there. Indeed
we were only justified and compelled to do so as long as the works of Cretan
art were not accompanied by any intelligible word. The words we hear
today are actually Greek, and we read in Cretan characters the names of
Greek gods.
The enrichment of our knowledge with new material which now forms
part of the Greek tradition has contributed, even if only indirectly and not
always explicitly, to the enrichment of this book. The idea which it had
from the beginning, of preparing a ‘Philosophy of Ancient Religion’, has
not for that reason been abandoned. But if the method chosen is ‘biotic’,
it must take with it a good deal of those forms of experience mediated, as
I have said, only by works of art.
 CHAPTER I

The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion

I

The outlines of a definite religious attitude which at the same time

correspond to an inner form appear in perfect clarity on the one hand in
Homer and Hesiod, and on the other in the Roman ritual. In one we see
the Greek, in the other the Roman Style. A first glance, however, at the
rehgious monuments of antiquity in art and literature does not at once
take in these outlines of ancient religion and ancient humanity. The picture
which lives in the memory of the humanistically educated individual of our
civilisation is a different one—much more varied and colourful, more attrac¬
tive, but apparently also more confused.
From near or far we all know this picture; it is the picture of Greek
mythology. Greek, for it was dominant also in the art and literature of the
Romans and through them in the education of modem times, determined
as this was by humanism and classicism. How often this gay society of
gods has looked down on us from Renaissance walls and ceilings ! In such
surroundings how can we be deaf to the scholars who warn us that this
mythology above all others will surely lead us astray if we try to learn
from it about Greek religion—to say nothing of Roman religion? It is
easy to minimise the difference between the pagan Olympus of the palazzi
and the Christian heaven of the Baroque churches. For the same Puritan
voices which objected to the former might express similar doubts about the
latter, asking whether any serious religion could have been practised in such
buildings.
Our experience, by contrast, would have been very different, had we
had the good fortune to set foot in one of the holy precincts of the ancient
religion before it fell into ruins. There, through the mediation of art and
mythology, we could have experienced an instantaneous awareness of a
picture of the universe—the picture peculiar to the older Greek religion,
B
18 The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion

which one commentator on Plato’s myths has described as ‘a temenos, or

precinct, with a forest of statues of prototypes, examples and sureties for the
present’.1 So it already was far back in the archaic period. It had not then,
it is true, the idyllic softness and bodily sensuality which it had taken on by
Hellenistic times, as when, for instance, in one of the mimes of Herondas,
written in the third century b.c., a visitor to the sanctuary of Asclepius on
the island of Cos exclaims: ‘The child there! The naked child! If I pinch
it, I shall leave a visible mark on its body.’ None the less, mythology
dominated by the human form is so characteristic of Greek religion as we
know it that, if at some earlier period it had ever been otherwise, we should
have to say that a revolution had subsequently occurred.
The meaning of the Greek word mythologia has been taught us by Plato,
who as a philosopher has his reserves about it, but in the manner of his
master Socrates does himself recount myths, and has left us his reflections
on this activity. The word which for us has hardened through centuries
of use into a description of a certain material, its collection and treatment,
for him meant, literally, ‘telling of myths’, and this activity was a form of
poetic writing. It seems to be distinguished from the song of the poets only
by being in prose.2 On the other hand, mythologia is possible also in metrical
form.3 That is how the poets practise it. From his philosophical standpoint
Plato takes an equally negative view of the art of poetry and the art of myth¬
telling. However, by considering ‘mythology’ in such association with
poetry, he demonstrates unwittingly, and so all the more surely, that he has
to do with an independent phenomenon of Greek life, one not subject to
philosophical definition and limitation.
He reveals just as unwittingly, in every case where he speaks of mythologia,
a difference between it and poetry. Poetry is, in his usage, as in Greek usage
generally, first of all ‘making’, even though inspired making—poiesis. It is
only subsequently that it turns into something made and therefore existent,
the work itself, which is described by the same name. The other activity
too, mythologia, is so called by analogy with something which went before
it, of which it is always regarded as being a continuation. It presupposes,
in fact, an older mythologia, one in some degree fixed but not yet dead or
rigidly prostrate. A man who pronounces the word poiesis is not looking
back at an archetype but at his own productive activity, which has brought
about the work before him. A man who calls his productive activity a
 The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion 19

mythologia, on the other hand, as Plato called his ‘Republic’ and his ‘Laws’,4
is thinking of a quite definite category of works, a category which he
believes himself to have inherited from the past and used again.
Following Plato, not in his theoretical thinking, but in his actions and
use of language, and in the wake of his experience, we reach a concept of
mythologia which corresponds to the Greek phenomenon of that name,
at least as it existed towards the end of the classical period. Mythology
was an art associated with but distinct from poetry. The two arts fre¬
quently overlap one another. The presuppositions of mythology were
peculiar to itself, and given by its subject matter. For there is a particular
subject matter by which the art of mythology is defined, and is in fact
simply what we think of when we hear the word ‘mythology’—an ancient,
traditional mass of material contained in stories, well known and yet
capable of further adaptation, stories ‘about gods and divine beings and
heroes and all that the underworld contains’. Thus Plato describes it.5
His own mythologia moves in this medium, it is the movement of this medium.
The ‘mythology’ which it offers us is at any rate still alive, fixed but at the
same time in motion, capable of transformation. It can be transformed,
indeed, to the extreme point at which transformation takes place no longer
merely in the subject-matter but, as with the more sophisticated works of
art and with the ‘final myths’ of Plato’s dialogues, in the mind of the story¬
teller himself.
The artists who adorned the temples and whose works were set up in
the holy precincts were at first entitled by the content of their creations to
be called ‘mythologists’. As they became more and more preoccupied with
imitation of the human form for its own sake, this ceased to be so. The new
development only came about because Greek mythology always preferred
human modes of expressing the divine. Mythology in an earlier period was
art, in word as in picture. Mythos means the content, the thing expressed,6
but the second component implies lege in, the telling. Yet if the history of
Greek sculpture and painting ever comes to be written not merely formal-
istically, but also thematically, that is from the point of view of the form
which is inseparable from content, then it will be the story of the emergence
of an anthropomorphic mythology and the story will have to be carried
to the point at which anthropomorphism frees itself from mythology
entirely and becomes pure ‘humanism’. And even at this stage we shall
20 The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion

still feel the necessity of keeping the divine in view. The divine may be
present simply in a festal atmosphere. It gives sense to the idea of perpetuating
what is human. One certain instance of this we see in Tarantine terracottas
and probably in the Tanagra figurines.
The mythological strain in Greek religion is bound up with anthropo¬
morphism, the preference for the human form. But is this not the case with
every mythology, and not the Greek alone? The Greek religion—or the
Roman after it—was not the only one which had or assumed a mythological
aspect, an aspect which was always and everywhere anthropomorphic. A
great exponent in our own time of a religious feeling drawn from the Bible,
Martin Buber, gives the reason for this:7 ‘All anthropomorphism is con¬
nected with the need to preserve the concreteness of the meeting’—the
meeting with God as Buber sees it, or with the divine, the theion, if we wish
to use the more general term derived from the Greeks. The human form
brings the divine nearer to man and is best adapted to giving a plausible
account of the meeting. In respect of the mere fact of anthropomorphism
there seems to be no difference between the Greek stories of the gods,
whether they are accounts of divine appearances—Epiphanies—or purely
mythological tales in which only deities occur, and the corresponding
descriptions and narratives of the ancient Orient. Both kinds make use of
the human form of the gods. What is special about the Greek stories is
not their anthropomorphism but their special version of it.

Before the Cretan script, in the form in which it was in use also on the
mainland, was deciphered, it could already be inferred from Greek heroic
mythology that Greek kings were resident in Mycenae, and in the other
princely residences round about, in the second half of the second millennium.
Now that the texts have been read and found to be in the Greek language,
it is known that the Greeks and their gods were present not only on the
mainland but even on Crete itself, from about 1500 b.c. onwards. From
the citadel of Mycenae in the period between 1400 and 1100 there comes an
ivory group, the style of which is not yet distinct from the Cretan. Greater
 The Adythological Strain in Greek Religion 21

experts will perhaps one day be able to decide whether it is of island or

continental manufacture. The subject, however, is unique. It depicts a
pair of goddesses with a child which is trying to go from one goddess to the
other. Anthropomorphism would here be a minimal, matter-of-course
sort of description. The subject is much more than that, it is human. The
portrayal of a purely human scene, from the women’s quarters of the
palace, so to speak, at this period and in this art, cannot be paralleled with
any other example. Anyone wishing to put such a purely human interpre¬
tation on the group would have to produce positive proof of it. On the
other hand, a humanity such as tins is not foreign to Greek divine mythology.
Something that was already familiar to us from the representation of divine
children in the Homeric hymns appears here in a piece of concrete evidence
five hundred years earlier.
This decisive characteristic, later of such normal occurrence in Greek
remains but for which earlier evidence, other than this ivory, is so far
lacking, will be apparent to anyone who compares the Mycenaean group
with the general run of Cretan ivory and fayence figurines. In the Cretan
religion animals, as forms of divine appearance were, it is true, more in the
service of the divine than in early Greece, but ‘theriomorphism’, the cult of
gods in animal shape, even in its Egyptian form, was never dominant in
that rehgion. Those elegant figures, in their strict hieratic attitudes, testify
with their ceremonial gestures—arms outstretched or raised above their heads
—and also by the snakes they carry in their hands, to a belief in divine
epiphanies, such as were in fact engraved on rings by Cretan masters. The
attitudes are the epiphany attitudes. Whether it is the priestesses who
receive the appearing goddess or the goddess who advances to meet the
priestesses, as if to say, ‘Thus I appear’, the gestures are the same. The
gestures and attitudes in Cretan art generally are of central importance, but
they are always indicative of some festal event or belong to a cult per¬
formance, to a festival play. There is here a clear and general difference of
Style. It distinguishes the Cretan religion from any which, like the Mycen-
aen ivory, expresses its meaning through a particular situation such as might
occur among human beings.
In Crete, man met godhead in the fashion of a cult which, even in its
anthropomorphic form, to say nothing of theriomorphic or other modes
of expression, emphasised the distinctness of the divine nature. The new
22 The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion

way, on the other hand, contrived, in the Greek fashion, to base the meeting
with the gods on their human aspect, hke a meeting between man and
man, or as if the gods allowed men to see them sometimes wholly in human
shape. On this basis the gods, even on the mainland, were worshipped for
a long while yet in stern anthropomorphic cult portraits. In order to
characterise Greek religion’s idea of the gods, the word ‘human’ must be
used in a sense which implies neither the ‘humane’—the gods of Greece,
especially in the archaic period, often showed themselves as terrible—nor
the merely anthropomorphic. The purely human mythology which has
become known to later ages principally through Ovid and through mockers
and opponents like Lucian and the Church fathers is a later outcome not so
much of the religion itself as of a way of looking at things which was
specially Greek.
A genuine, original mythology, the art of telling about gods and thus
enabling them to be visualised, is not only presupposed but also actually
offered us by the group of the two goddesses and the divine child in Mycenae.
This carver in ivory was in his own way a mythologos. He had no need to
name names but took up a tale of gods already known to him, from the
telling. One goddess puts her arm round the other, who grasps the em¬
bracing hand and looks sympathetically at what is happening, at the child
straining away from her lap towards her companion. A tablet from the
palace of Pylos names ‘two (divine) ladies’—in the closest relationship with
one another through the use of the grammatical dual—who receive an
offering together with Poseidon. Here are two isolated pieces from a
mythological puzzle. We do not know whether the pieces belong together
or not, nor, if they do, whether Poseidon is to be regarded as the child or
the father of the child, and in this case whether we have to do with the
Despoina, the Arcadian divine queen, and her mother. This is a warning
to us of the difficulty of taking in the mythological pattern at a glance.
It is always characteristic of Greek religion and yet for us is never free from
gaps. It is thus that the limits of our knowledge are set. Without myth¬
ology there is no knowledge about Greek religion, and this knowledge
ceases at the point where evidence of the cult is not associated with a myth.
The brief text on its own would not even be certain evidence of the existence
of a mythology, still less of its specially human quality. Tiffs evidence is
given by the little work of art.
I ‘A humanity such as this is not foreign to Greek mythology’ (see p. 21)
Ivory group of the divine child watched over hy two nurses. Mycenae, about 15th century B.C.
National Museum, Athens
2 ‘Those elegant
figures, in their strict
hieratic attitudes,
testify with their
cult-like gestures . . .
to a belief in divine
epiphanies’ (see p. 21)
Faience earth-goddess
with snakes, from the
central sanctuary in the
Palace of Knossos,
c. 1600-1580 B.C.
Heraklion Museum
imi

4 ‘The imitation of Apollo by the young

men can be inferred from the Kouros
statues’ (see p. 30)
Standing youth (the so-called Apollo of Tenea),
found at Tenea near Corinth. Glyptothek, Munich
 The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion 27

3
It is Greek mythology we have in mind as example and prototype when the
word ‘mythology’ is mentioned at all. Its humanity, which is more than
mere anthropomorphism, is familiar to us. Yet this very humanity was for
long a barrier to our understanding of the importance of the mythological
strain in Greek religion. This abundance of the merely human seemed to be
irreconcilable with a rehgious aim, whether envisaged in the worship of a
deity or in the fulfilment of a wish by supernatural forces. It does indeed go
beyond what would be needed merely to preserve the concreteness of the
meeting with the divine. If we regard a mythology like the Greek as an
essential component of a religion, then we must considerably enlarge our
conception of what religion was for the peoples of antiquity.
Greek rehgion, however, is only a special case of a general phenomenon
covered by the term ‘mythology’, a spiritual activity and literary form
which, as we know from Sumerian texts, was already flourishing in Mesopo¬
tamia in the third millennium b.c., and in Asia Minor had given rise to the
Hurrian and Hittite myths in the second millennium, to say nothing of
other territories and cultures which also had their mythologies. The
description ‘literary’ is applicable to this form of spiritual creation, while it
still lived, only inasmuch as myths were even at that period written down,
certainly not, however, in the sense that they had the character of enter¬
tainments. What was merely entertaining was more likely to remain
unwritten. Mythology occupies a higher position in the hios, the Existence,
of a people in which it is still alive than poetry, story-telling, or any other
art.
This position is accurately described by the anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski in the light of his discoveries in a Melanesian culture, on the
Trobriand Islands, where he came in contact with a mythology in its
own lifetime.8 ‘Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in its
living primitive form, is not merely a story told, but a reality lived. It is
not of the nature of fiction, such as we read today in a novel, but it is a
living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and
continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies. This
myth is to the savage what, to a fully believing Christian, is the Biblical
story of Creation, of the Fall, of the Redemption by Christ’s Sacrifice on
28 The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion

the Cross. As our sacred story lives in our ritual, in our morality, as it
governs our faith and controls our conduct, even so does his myth for the
savage’ (p. 21).
‘These stories’—so Malinowski continues his precise account—‘live not
by idle interest’ (this is directed against the notion that myths represent a sort
of primitive science, created in answer to intellectual needs) ‘not as fictitious
or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval,
greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and
activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies
man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications
as to how to perform them’ (p. 39).
There is both clarity and acuteness in this definition of the relation of
the mythos to the bios, of the myths to the Existence they form. It can be
made to yield schematic lines which may sometimes seem somewhat rigid
in the light of the historical facts, where these can be ascertained, but which
can for that very reason serve for our orientation. In the domain of myth
is to be found not ordinary truth but a higher truth, which permits ap¬
proaches to itself from the domain of bios. These approaches are provided
by sacred plays, in which man raises himself to the level of the gods, plays
too which bring the gods down from their heights. Mythology, indeed,
especially Greek mythology, could in some sense be considered as the
plays of the gods, in which they approach us. It was because their relation¬
ship to the whole of human existence took this dramatic form that the
world of gods too was invested among the Greeks with a special humanity.
In the language of the Platonists the plane of myth would have to be
called the archetypal, that of the bios the ectypal, plane, and their relationship
that of the archetypal to the ectypal world. Dogmatic philosophers, and
also primitive peoples where they were tied to their social systems, have
tended to let this relationship grow rigid, while poets and artists, and those
peoples capable of development, have been more ready to give scope to
possible ways of bringing the two together. This relationship has been
wonderfully realised, for instance, by Thomas Mann. He found the indication
of it in the mythological sources to Inis Joseph and his Brethren, and in the
novel itself the drama of the passage from one plane to the other has been
incomparably worked out. In Inis commemoration lecture ‘ Freud and the
Future’, in 1936, he treated the question theoretically.
 The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion 29

‘The ancient Ego and its awareness of itself was different from ours, less
exclusive, less sharply defined. It was, so to speak, open to rearward,
absorbing a great deal of the past in its experience, and repeating it in the
present, so that it became “there again”. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y
Gasset expresses this idea by saying that ancient man, before he does anything,
takes a step backwards, like the bullfighter drawing himself back for the
death stroke. He looks into the past for a prototype, into which he slips
as into a diving-bell before plunging, at the same time protected and
disfigured, into the present problem. Thus his life is in a sort of way a
revival, a form of “archaising” behaviour. But this life as revival is just
what the life in myth is. Alexander walked in the footsteps of Miltiades,
and in the case of Caesar his ancient biographers were rightly or wrongly
convinced that he intended to imitate Alexander. This “imitation”, how¬
ever, is much more than is conveyed by the word today. It is mythical
identification, a procedure which was specially familiar to the ancient
world but has retained its efficacy right into modern times and, spiritually
speaking, is open to anyone at any time. Attention has often been drawn
to the archaic traits in the figure assumed by Napoleon. He regretted that
the modern consciousness did not allow him to give himself out as the son
of Jupiter-Ammon, as Alexander had done. But we need not doubt that he
confounded himself mythically with Alexander at the time of his expedition
to the East, and later when he had decided on an empire of the West, he
declared, “I am Charlemagne”. Be it noted that he did not say, “I recall
Charlemagne”, nor “My position is like Charlemagne’s”, nor even “I am as
Charlemagne”, but simply “I am he”. This is the mythical formula’ (p. 33).
The case of Napoleon, treated by Thomas Mann, belongs rather to late
antiquity and has its forerunners in the emperor-worship of the ancient
Orient and Rome, which, in fact, can only be understood in the light of
this possibility of the ‘life in myth’. The coarsening process that set in
during later classical times grossly affected both art and religion. The
emperor cult was associated with the massive style characteristic of this
period. Ancient religion no doubt includes the possibility of the ‘life in
myth’, but in definite modes, each of which must be considered separately.
One of these modes was certainly the ‘quotation’, for which Thomas Mann
coined the phrase ‘life by quotation’. The experience of Sir George Grey
is instructive in this context.9 He was the British administrator who, as
30 The Mythological Strain in Greek Religion

Governor-General of New Zealand, felt the need to collect and write down
the myths of Polynesia, in order to be able to deal with the native chieftains
on terms of real understanding, since they continually quoted them in their
letters and speeches. They lived ‘by quotation’. Sir George Grey published
these myths in his Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of
the New Zealand Race (1855). Similarly, we too have to learn the ancient
mythology when we want to understand the classical authors. A literature
so full of mythological quotations must have been preceded by the life in myth.
The mythological quotation first occurred in the Existence of the
ancient world not, we may be sure, as an exposition in words but as an
imitation. All the same the mythical identification was not carried quite so
far as in Thomas Mann’s account or as it so often was in late classical times.
Even where the identification was strongest, it was supposed to be an
imitatio per ludum, an imitation in play. This exact paraphrase can be inferred
from a late author, the Roman satirist Juvenal, who speaks with disapproval
of what goes on in one of the secret women’s cults (Juvenal 6. 324):

nil ibi per ludum simulabitur, omnia fient

ad veruni . . .

‘Nothing will there be imitated as in play, everything will be done in

earnest. . .’ As in play, the myth might be quoted in life, and the bios thus
remained in its correct relation to the myth, with the Romans as with the
Greeks.
Even the greatest and most general sacrifice of the Greeks, the sacrifice
of oxen, can be viewed as a ‘mythological quotation’.10 It is said to have
been an imitation of the ‘cheat of Prometheus’, who divided the portions
of the sacrificial feast so unequally between gods and men that the men
came off better. Entire ages of man were shaped as ‘quotations’. From their
ninth year till their marriage, the Athenian girls, as little she-bears in
Brauron, used to imitate in play the goddess Artemis.11 The imitation of
Apollo by the young men can be inferred from the Kouros statues and from
Euripides’ tragedy the Ion.12 It is always ‘life in myth’ jor a definite period.
This above all was the purpose served by the festivals, and it is these which,
side by side with mythology, we must now consider.
 OLYMPIA

and the cults of Zeus and Hera

5 A view from the ancient site of Olympia into the surrounding landscape
6 The archway leading from the stadium to the temples oj Olympia
7 The ruins of the Temple of Zeus, Olympia
8 The remains of the western end of the Temple of Hera at Olympia
9 The Temple of Hera at Olympia, seen from the east
io Zeus abducting
Ganymede:
terracotta statue by a
Peloponnesian artist,
c. 470 B.C.
Olympia Museum
12 A faience statuette of
Hera standing. Tegea,
early 4th century B.C.
British Museum

11 Fragment of a statuette
of Hera seated. Paestum,
early 4th century B.C.
British Museum
13 Tu>o girls in a ritual dance. Metope from the Temple of Hera at the mouth of the River Sele,
Paestum, Italian-Greek sculptor, late 6th century B.C. Paestum Museum
 . TtW1 ■ V^L·,' Ife J® T?iI
\ ::4o
,

;| \ Jf; #«W ■■ w"* ■ >v_

14 Hera unveils herself to Zeus. Metope from the east side of the Temple of Hera at Selinus
c. 460 B.C. National Museum, Palermo
15 Head of Hera; a detail from the metope in Plate 14
Head of Zeus; a detail from the metope in Plate 14
17 Discus thrower
represented on a
red-figured vase found at
Vulci. 5th century B.C.
Vatican Museum
18 Vase painting showing Hera enthroned; from Tomb 127 in the Valle Trebba, Spina.
Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
19 The wedding of Hera and Zens. Attic black-figured vase firom Kameiros. British Museum
20 These marble statues of Zeus and Pelops are two of the three centre figures from the east
pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Before 456 B.C. Olympia Museum
21 The two Dioscuri, sons of the Gods: Pollux on horseback, Castor on foot. By the

Penthesilea painter, c. 460-450 B.C. Tomb 18c in the Valle Pepa, Spina.
Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
 CHAPTER II

The Feast
I

Ancient man, the Greek and the roman, when he entered the presence of
godhead, was confronted by a world of gods. And this world which
showed him its mythological aspect in the gods was not another world, but
that in which he lived.13 The figures which peopled his world of gods were
not less real to him because they originated from men and had no basis
outside the world of men. The assurance that certain definite figures would
reappear at definite times was continually sustained by the perception of cos¬
mic recurrences. Ancient religion rests not so much on the behef that the tales
told by mythology in all their contradictory variations are true (the question
of truth never arises), but first and foremost on the certainty that the cosmos,
an ordered universe, exists—a coherent and continuous foundation and back¬
ground for whatever it is which shows its human face in mythology.
The word cosmos is to be understood here in its original Greek meaning,
as the reality of the world in a definite state, involving the validity of a
definite spiritual order.14 This order is one possible mode of being of the
world content, and it can just as well express itself in a mythological way,
through divine figures, as in the various artistic or scientific ways, through
artistic or scientific ideas. The term ‘idea’ must here be understood in a sense
wide enough to include the divine figures themselves as mythological ideas.
The correspondence between an archetypal world of gods and an ectypal world
of men, which is to be found in any living mythology, was best expressed
in the language of the Platonists in the previous chapter. The spiritual
order which for the Greeks showed itself in Nature, as a world order, may
be called the ideal aspect of the world, but the highest manifestation of this
aspect in the feast may be called divine.
The world was not everywhere comprehended in this Greek fashion,
through divine figures which even in their contradictoriness have the effect
c
SO The Feast

of pure ideas. But all world orders—even those of the ancient East, the
ancient American, and the rest—are intellectual in so far as one possible
mode of the world’s existence is realised in them through the knowing and
ordering activity of the intellect, so that instead of the world itself we have a
world picture. The different forms of this activity are spoken of as different
forms of thought. The structure of any such form of thought and the
world picture corresponding to it can be described in the same terms as the
structure of a language.
A religion, however, is never based only on an empty order, an order
without content, but at the same time on what is ordered : never only on a
world picture, but always on the world reahty—that is, on that which the
reality of the world is for man. Whenever the world picture changes with
time, it is always believed that the ‘real world’ has thereby been brought
nearer. This belief is the source of those shocks to immediate certainty
which cause the decline of religions. The reahty of a religious idea—
especially that of a divine figure—never depends on the form of thought
but on the fact that this form—or in the case of divine figures this vision—
is felt as valid. In other words, it depends on the assurance that it is the true
reahty of the world which is being viewed and declared in this way. We
shall be turning our attention to one source of this certainty when we now
concern ourselves with the nature of the religious festival.

‘To know one religion is to know none’—such is the axiom which might
serve as an introductory motto to every work on religion.15 We can
link it with another, expounded in the first chapter, which can be stated as:
‘Living substance can be understood only in the hve state’. Ancient rehgion
—‘the Rehgion of the Greeks and Romans’—is spiritually so close to us
westerners as an historical phenomenon that we can immediately grasp its
structure. It is a rehgion which is not directed towards the other world.
Its gods are the gods of this world and of human Existence. Such divinities
are transcendent only in so far as our Existence does not comprehend them,
but they comprehend it. They are more than gods of hfe, they are also the
 The Feast 51

gods of death and of that which surrounds us. And yet again this religion
is so far away from us in time, its figures, where they are accessible to us at
all, show themselves so complete and perfect, that it is impossible for us also
to grasp it in flagrante, as a live thing, a perpetually self-renewing, living
phenomenon. The explorer of ancient religion must look around him.
What is there to be observed in other religions which can contribute to the
understanding of the Greek and Roman religion?
The religion of peoples which have remained in a savage state appears
to us by contrast quite alien, the most alien thing, indeed, which we can
imagine. But wherever such a religion was still to be found, the anthro¬
pologists encountered it literally still alive, as a perpetually self-renewing,
living entity. Such self-renewal is seldom more than a pure repetition.
Primitive peoples know this. They repeat, consciously and exactly, the
religious acts of their ancestors. This constitutes one principle of their
religion. By repetition life loses strength, the living loses life itself. And
yet at every repetition of a religious act some element of the creative is left
over, something which can never be recovered once the act has ceased to be
repeated. What we expect from anthropological research into religion is
to be brought in closer contact with this live creative element.
It is only made clear what this element is when we turn from the life
of a religion to its intellectual content. The intellectual aspect is more
accessible to scientific study and easier to grasp than the living substance.
In reality, of course, they do not exclude one another. If we wanted to
start by making a separation between the two, between the vital and the
meaningful, we should have to give special reasons for doing so. Neither
the classical nor the anthropological material offers such a separation as a
matter of course. On the contrary.
The most primitive religion has an intellectual content, it contains an
idea. Whether we explain a religion as a matter of faith or as the immediate
certainty of the rehgious person, we must in any event presuppose a state of
affairs in which faith was not yet faith but arresting evidence, in which
rehgious usage was perpetuated and through which it expressed itself,
perhaps without words but with the exclusive force of an emotional act.
Both the historian and the anthropologist must recognise that a state like
this, a state of coming into being, will always be beyond their grasp. Ideas,
however, are timeless. And wherever they occur, wherever they are
52 The Feast
conjured up, they bring with them an immediacy and power of conviction
which tranforms the ordinary passage of time into a creative moment.
All that we can grasp is the idea, the intellectual content. The anthro¬
pologist does come across such times of transformation—‘high times’—
when they still have about them something of the warmth, freshness, and
originality of the creative moment. They are warmed through by life,
penetrated by the force of ideas, and we shall see that the creative element,
too, is not lacking to them. Such times are called feasts or festivals. If there
is one point from which the understanding of ancient rehgion can begin
and in which the religious studies of classical scholarship and the science of
anthropology can assist one another, it is here, in the exploration of the
nature of the feast.
This question does not concern ancient rehgion alone. If we wanted to
classify religions according to the extent of their addiction to the festival—
which would be a perfectly feasible principle—the classical rehgion would
have to be reckoned among those which are most markedly festival relig¬
ions. Roman Catholicism belongs more or less to this group, while
Protestantism must be regarded as tending to the opposite pole. Yet the
thing, whatever it is, which makes a feast festal remains in all its gradations
a religious phenomenon of such outstanding importance that we must
approach it with the closest and most sensitive attention.
We shall not do so from the temporal side. We used to be told about a
peculiar mythico-religious ‘sense of phase’,16 which for primitive peoples
‘ applies to all the occurrences of life, particularly to the most important
transitions from one age or status to another. Even at the lowest levels these
transitions, the most important changes in the life of the species as of the
individual, are in some way distinguished by the cult, are somehow lifted out
of the uniform course of events.’ Just as with biological time, the writer
continued, so it is with the demarcations of cosmic time. They too are
accompanied by a sense of phase. But in both cases, in the small world
of men as well as in the greater universe, some matter of fact, something
happening to the environment, is ‘sensed’, narrowly observed even and
held fast. A phase is that which phainetai, ‘shows itself’. A sense of phase
is a feeling for reality rooted in the universe itself. At this point the con¬
cept of the ‘holy’ was introduced17 and it was found that a point of time
or a segment of time, even time itself, could be just as ‘holy’ as a place
 The Feast 53

or as the whole of space. The weakness of this phraseology was that it

obliterated and failed to give due attention to that special activity by which
points and segments of time are singled out and converted into a ‘work’
of religion. Yet it is that which must be the primary concern of the study
of religions.
For the sake of brevity, we call it ‘the festive sense’. As an experience
it is just as real for the man who has it as his feeling of certainty about the
existence of the world. The festive quality which distinguishes certain
demarcations of time attaches to all things within the compass of the feast
and for those caught up within this compass and breathing this atmosphere
—the festive persons themselves—is a wholly valid spiritual reality. Among
spiritual realities this festive quality is a tiling on its own, never to be con¬
fused with anything else. It can be confidently distinguished from all other
feelings and is itself an absolute distinguishing mark.
Just this attribute, of giving absolute distinction, may serve for the
present as a minimal definition of the festive quality. It was once usual in
comparative religion and anthropology, to say nothing of classical studies,
simply to pass over this quality, as if it did not exist. As an example we
may take the case which was once thought to be the starting point for the
anthropological interpretation of the whole of Greek religion. Only by
neglecting the festive quality was it possible for Jane Harrison,18 with her
biological inspiration, to sustain her thesis that the rites of ancient religion
were originally designed to promote life. In so doing she failed to notice
that the later religious practices which she called in evidence had none of
the marks of being original. By contrast with the great festal performances
of archaic and classical times it is more natural to regard them as the out¬
come of a process of impoverishment and simplification. This simple
instance can serve to show, however, that the festive quality is always
to be presupposed as a distinguishing fact even in cases where, just because
it is a fact and taken for granted, it receives no special mention. The festive
quality is necessarily present in every festal proceeding, even when only in
dead form as an intentional show. And for that reason every explanation
which does not presuppose it is necessarily mistaken.
54 The Feast

Plutarch in his Table Talk 19 tells us of a festal act which was performed
in Chaironeia in the first century a.d. It was carried out once a year by
each father of a household in his own house, and by the archon for the
community as a whole. Plutarch used for this rite the same word thusia
which belonged to the great festival sacrifices although in this case the
whole performance consisted merely in the driving out of a slave with
blows. The shrub from which the switches were cut, the ‘chaste-tree’
(iVitex agnus-castus), is known to us elsewhere from myths and the rites
corresponding to them. It is used for fettering and for the garlanding which
in the case of Prometheus and for men ever since has been a substitute for
fettering. There is no mention here of a mythical precedent, what is
happening is the houlimou exelasis, the expulsion of ravening hunger—or to
translate the first word literally, ‘of ox-hunger’. To understand how this
is to be interpreted we shall after all need a mythological tale. The accom¬
panying words of the rite were, ‘Out with ravening hunger, in with riches
and health’.
Plutarch himself refers to another much more imposing rite addressed
to ‘ravening hunger’, by the people of Smyrna, who burnt a whole ox—
the usual sacrifice to underworld deities. In Smyrna the great hunger was
called houhrostis, ‘ox-devouring’, and it may be that Plutarch did not recog¬
nise that it was synonymous with houlitnos—a word that he did not under¬
stand either—but it evidently refers to a hunger so great as to compel a man
to devour an ox. Both words presuppose a story. According to the
authority quoted by Plutarch, Metrodorus of Chios, the Smymiot sacrifice
was made to the houhrostis itself, as if it were a divine being. But in any
sacrifice to underworld beings the intended deity might be kept secret and
a pseudonym be used for it. This was very probably the case here. One
story of the houhrostis is to be found in the Hymn to Demeter of Calli¬
machus66. The goddess visited it upon Erysichthon, as a punishment for
having felled trees in her sacred grove. It was also the negative guise of
Demeter, who bore Pluto, or ‘wealth’, to Iasion. It is very possible that the
Chaironeia custom in Plutarch’s time was nothing but a poor relic of an
older, more detailed sacrificial procedure, to which there also corresponded
a story from the myths of Demeter.
 The Feast 55
But even the minimal performance described by Plutarch had enough
festive quality attaching to it to suffice for a minimal definition of that
phrase. The act was performed at a level of human existence absolutely
different from the ordinary level to which Plutarch and his friends returned
after the performance, when they had a discussion about the name and
nature of the ailment houlimia. They were the same men as those who had
just gone through the traditional performance—the nenomismenon—yet
outside the festal sphere they could not possibly have done as they did. Not
because their action had no sense ! The sense here is evident and no faith is
necessary to perform a traditional rite. Whether a man has faith or not, he
cannot carry out such an action except in a festive spirit, on a level different
from the everyday level of human existence. Tradition it was that here
replaced the peculiar inner compulsion to step out on to that level. If it
had been intended also to replace the festive quality, the whole performance
would have turned into something dead, grotesque even, like the move¬
ment of the dancers for someone who has suddenly gone deaf and no
longer hears the music. And one who does not hear the music himself does
not dance. Without a festive feeling there is no feast.
The festive is not identical with the joyful. That is shown immediately
by the example just quoted. Here too the comparison with music is
applicable. The festive feeling can be cheerful or gloomy just as one
can sway in time to joyful or to sad music. But there is something
there, in the deepest foundations of the festive, which has more affinity
with cheerfulness than with gloom. Even in gloom itself, when it is festive,
we fmd something which was perceived by Hoelderlin at its highest inten¬
sity in Greek tragedy and expressed in his epigram about the ‘Antigone’ of
Sophocles :
Many attempted in vain with joy to express the most joyful,
Here I have found it at last, here, but in sadness it speaks.
And yet on the other hand at the back of all festivity, however joyful
and gay, there is seriousness. It is the seriousness which raises the most
ordinary joyful act, such as the wine-drawing and wine-drinking of the
Athenians on one of the days sacred to Dionysus, to the festal level. It is,
of course, not seriousness in the sense of being the opposite of playful. For
the festive admits play, every festal act is in a sense a play, though again not
playful in the real sense of the word, not play for play’s sake.
56 The Feast

This elusive something, which has affinities with the cheerful, the serious,
and the playful, which is yet on good terms with what is most gloomy,
boisterous, and severe, in a word the festive, is preserved for us by poetry
and the graphic arts in those works in which the great festivals of the Greeks
and Romans have been taken out of the past and enshrined in the timeless
world of art. Classical examples are the Odes of Pindar and the Carmen
Saeculare of Horace, the frieze of the Parthenon, the sacred scenes of vase
painting,rand those of the Greek and Roman reliefs. And yet on the other
hand the high artistic quality of these works is itself a warning to us to be
careful. Perhaps we may by reason of it be getting too far away from the
living thing, which even at its highest points is not timeless but at most
time transformed. We must first seize the festive quality not where it
appears already raised to the timeless heights of art but where it has not
yet left time behind and is so to speak emerging from it, where time itself
with its content of experience is becoming seizable because distinguished
by the festive quality.

This is certainly the point at which the anthropological study of religion

must take the lead. But at first we shall experience a disappointment.
The phenomenon of the festive seems to have been completely overlooked
by the anthropologists. At most they have noted that ingredient in the
festive which approaches the cheerful. One distinguished anthropologist,
R. R. Marett, has written, in the language of Christian theology, about
'hope in primitive religion’.21
He regarded ‘hope’ as a ‘primal impulse’ of all religion and gave bio¬
logical reasons for his view: ‘The very thrust of the life-process, so far as
it reveals itself, however subliminally, in and for human experience may be
said to consist in a certain hopefulness—a forwardness of reach’. The
festal rules of primitive religion are in fact very apt to follow the rising
line of natural phenomena. Their grimmest mourning customs often
testify to the irreducibility of life. This appears to a certain extent to justify
the biological approach to religion.
 The Feast 57
Its insufficiency as an explanatory principle becomes evident, however,
as soon as an attempt is made to explain a religious phenomenon—in our
case a festival—exclusively from the point of view of a hungry or otherwise
wish-impelled living creature. This is how Marett proceeds when treating
of a festival of the Arunta—primitive inhabitants of the Central Asian
Desert—and without even describing it exactly seeks to explain it by his
own biological and psychological method.22 It is an instructive example
of a very primitive ceremony the festive character of which is immediately
apparent.
The Arunta hold the ceremonies concerned with the propagation of their
totem animals—as Marett himself emphasizes—not in the dry season, when
they must be particularly full of wishes, but at the very time when they
can find abundant food. I should add too that they do it at the season when
the particular totem animal does in fact propagate itself.23 That is when they
dance their festive dances. And they do not simply say, as Marett has it,
'We have eaten much food’. Their procedure is much more complicated.
The chieftain pushes the others in the stomach with a stone, known as
‘churinga unchima’ and specially connected with the totem animal to be
propagated, and as he does it says, ‘You have eaten much food!’ Thus
everyone is supposed to be satisfied.
According to Marett we have here to do with a ‘food dance’. It is
danced with a full stomach as if to exclaim ‘May this happy state of things
continue’. But this is a rather arbitrary distortion of the facts. The perfect
indicative contained in the ceremonial formula just quoted and accompany¬
ing the blow in the stomach is supposed according to Marett to stand for
the present optative. But the Arunta language will not allow such an
interpretation. I say nothing of the fact that such ceremonies strike the
observer today as worn-out survivals rather than as having any originality.
If they are childish, they are also senile. The ‘idea’, which is not lacking
here either, no doubt concerns the relationship of the tribe with the totem
animal. Otherwise we have here a case of a fossilised archaism, such as we
encounter on classical soil in the games of the big-bellied Phlyakes of
Southern Italy.24 These were cult dancers before they acquired their stage,
and kindred figures can be seen on Peloponnesian vase-paintings of the
archaic period.25 Their dances serve at best for an explanation of the ‘food
dance’. They were called forth by the enthusiasm of the full stomach no
58 The Feast

less than by other fullnesses. Intoxication by eating runs like a thread

through Italian folk celebrations from the Atellan games of the ancient period
right up to the macaroni and risotto eating at the Carnivals of today.
There are two features which stand out unambiguously from the
ceremony of the Arunta: the festive character of the whole proceeding and
its close connection with the time of year marked by it. I have described the
festive quality as a special level on which actions are possible which would
otherwise never be performed, and compared it with the way in which
music creates a possibility for otherwise ridiculous and senseless movements.
This level, or this music, is present here too. The carefully performed
ceremony consists of song and stylised movements which can in the broadest
sense be described as ‘dancing’. The dance in this generalised sense is as
it were the fundamental material of all primitive ceremonies and therefore
requires some brief consideration.
The dance with primitive peoples all over the world is something much
more ordinary and at the same time much holier than with the civilised.
Leo Frobenius quotes an old saying on the subject: ‘At full moon all Africa
dances’.23 And the dance remains in essence festal. It often serves, even
among primitive peoples, also for entertainment, but has not there sunk
to the level of mere entertainment as with us. It can be regarded as some¬
thing quite distinctive, as an immediate, though not absolutely inevitable,
manifestation of the festive. No Australian aboriginal would be willing to
perform an ordinary, unfestive, immediately practical act through dancing.
On the level of the dance, however, he will bring himself to do things
which he would never attempt on the level of practical action—as for
instance when in the intoxication of a full stomach he takes part in the
propagation of totem animals. In such a case the dance is not a means to
obtain a wish-object but the representation of something, a rendering of that
which is valid for the dancer as an objective event. Marett tells of a ‘profane’
dance festival, a ‘corroboree’ of the Narrinyeri on the lower Murray River
which he himself attended, and at which these Australian aboriginals
represented by their dance a steamer on the river.
Let us now turn to the second noteworthy feature of the propagation
festival. The ceremony takes place at the season when the totem animal
in any case propagates itself. In so far as the wish plays a part, the reality
of what is wished stands beside and over it, a natural reality and at the
 The Feast 59
same time a myth of the religion in question, compelling participation in
the ceremony. Cosmic reality and intellectual reality cannot here be
separated. The compulsion which they together exert reveals itself as a
possibility of what is otherwise unusual, or rather impossible, reveals itself
as the abundant power and freedom of a higher existence, as a feast. The
biological and psychological reason for such compulsion and such freedom
does not have to be specially given once we have fathomed the structure of the
given phenomenon. The feast here too is life in myth’, the myth of a vital
principle identified with the totem animal and the repletion flowing from it.

The compulsion and the freedom of the feast does not in the cases quoted
come from a sense of immediate obhgation. The force of tradition is there
too and habit plays its part. The anthropologist K. T. Preuss has shown
with many examples how the festivals of primitive peoples are accompanied
by myths which tell the story of how they first originated and hallowed by
a consciousness of very ancient tradition. The same examples show how
this same consciousness, paradoxically enough, is associated with an emphasis
on the originality of what is performed. I quote one such case from his work
on the rehgious content of myths.27
‘Among the festivals of the Cora Indians in the mountains of the Pacific
coast of Mexico’—so Preuss quotes from his expedition records28—‘is one
in which the young corn-cob is fetched from the altar by the woman who
plays the part of the earth-and-moon goddess, his mother, displayed to the
gods of all directions, and after the song winch accompanies all the acted
scenes and dances the fate which awaits him is expounded to them. There
follows a great dance of the goddess with the calabash bowl in which her
son lies. Finally he is handed over to the goddess Kuxkoama, who is
waiting for him at the window. “Now she kills the son of our mother . . .
Our mother weeps for her son because she has killed him. She is sad.
In the next song, however, it is related that Sautari has not died but has
gone to heaven. “It is known already to our mother in heaven” (the earth-
and-moon goddess). Now his mother speaks to him. “Have you really
6o The Feast

not died?” “I have not died. Thus I know (how to arrange it). I shall
deceive them” (men). “They appear only once, my younger brethren
(men). Do they not die really for ever? I on the other hand never die, I
shall appear continually (on earth). . .
The conclusion that Preuss drew agrees with that reached by Malinowski
in the light of his own researches. ‘The song proves that this annually
repeated celebration is here put on as if it were being originated for the
first time. The participating divinities, whose natural destiny is here shown
partly in human guise, go unsuspecting to meet their fate and not until the
end is the perpetually recurrent character of the events revealed to them.
The Indians said also that not only the divine personages occurring in the
festival but also all those who took part in it were gods, that is ancestors
become gods. The song here does duty for the myth, for, as Preuss concludes,
‘its aim is to authenticate the present and the continually recurring pheno¬
mena by means of a single event at the beginning of time’. Preuss further
adds that this explanation is applicable to every scene in the numerous
festivals of the Cora, since the performers always represent gods or deified
ancestors. The performance, he says, is always to be regarded as an event
occurring for the first time. The participation of the gods in the ceremonies
is not only thought of as voluntary, but the ceremonies themselves are
directly described as their ‘play’, that is as a play of the highest divinity, of
‘our father’ the sun god—a play which the Cora are afraid to spoil by their
own mistakes and weaknesses. They say the ceremonies were taught them
by the god of the morning star when they were vainly trying to begin
them on their own.
This saying of the Cora clearly brings out what it is which makes such
performances at all possible. It is the festive quality, the decisive ingredient
which has been overlooked by Preuss just as completely as by the other
anthropologists. He notices and emphasizes only what is given as an
explanation of the festive to unfestive people. Everywhere and always it
is said to be nenomismenon, sacred tradition, pleasing to the gods, their com¬
mand and their directive. It must be remembered, of course, that after
Malinowski, and no doubt independently of him, Preuss was the anthro¬
pologist who demonstrated the great part played by myths in the religion
of an archaic people. He did this by showing, first, that mythical tales
contain the ideas which are carried out in the cult, among them the idea of
 The Feast 61
the divine inauguration of the cult itself, and secondly, that the telling of
a mythological tale is often itself a cult procedure. Between the telling and
the performance there is in fact only a difference of degree, not of essence.
Both cult procedure and mythological tale correspond to the same realities,
psychic and cosmic, which can just as well be performed directly as viewed
in figures or comprehended in narratives.
It is not to be wondered at that Preuss, whose attention was concentrated
on the traditional character of cult procedures, did not notice their im¬
mediacy. For him, as for almost all anthropologists, a cult procedure was
a magical procedure designed to achieve an effect. The fact is, however,
that for most religions it would be too subtle a distinction to say that the
mythological happening brought about the imitation in the cult procedure,
but did not happen in order to bring it about. It was only gradually that
men in their cult imitations allowed the idea of purpose more and more to
gain the upper hand. Such a procedure, moreover, so Preuss explains,
‘in virtue of the myth, is sanctified by ancestral practice from the beginning
of time, and so is by no means a mere human act of will but a heavy duty,
on the execution of which, in a manner corresponding to its first perfor¬
mance, the weal and woe of the people depend’. This illuminating but
one-sided account of the festivals of primitive religions, as given by Preuss,
seems to be in complete contradiction to the phenomena we have been
discussing, the freedom of the festive feeling and the immediacy of cult
procedures. For Preuss these procedures grew out of a sense of duty and
were done from it.
This contradiction disappears when we turn to the statement of the
Cora that they tried in vain to begin their ceremonies until they were
taught them by the god Hatsikan. A purely human effort, the doing of an
ordinary duty, is not a festival, and from a non-festive beginning a festival
can be neither held nor understood. Something divine must be added, to
make possible what is otherwise impossible. We are raised to a level where
everything is ‘as on the first day’, shining, new, and ‘happening for the
first time’ ; where we are in the company of gods, ourselves even become
divine; where the breath of creation is blowing and we ourselves take part
in creation. That is the nature of the feast. And it does not exclude repeti¬
tion. On the contrary. As soon as we are reminded of it by natural signs, by
tradition and habit, we are capable, again and again and on every occasion,
62 The Feast

of participating in an unhabitual state of being and doing. Time and man

become festal. Et renovabitur facies terrae.
This ‘being reminded’ is not incidental. It shows us an aspect of the
feast which enables us not only to recognise it from our own living experi¬
ence, but to understand its real nature. This is its intellectual aspect, by
which its other, its vital aspect is completed. Not even the most primitive
cult procedures are without an intellectual aspect. At the festival already
described the Arunta behave as if the actual increase of the totem animal at
that season had given them the idea, irresistible but agreeing with their wishes
as well, of taking part in that increase. The idea in this case is the objective
reality, become psychic and somewhat distorted by its human clothing
stained with fear and greed. Whether the idea with its compelling force
has been prompted for the first time by some reality of the universe or only
recalled by it makes no essential difference.
The idea shines out from and through the divine figures as each one is
named and represented dramatically, and the maize festival of the Cora
Indians gives a particularly clear view of its structure. At the back of the
maize festival stands the cosmic reality of the maize ‘destiny’, or life cycle,
no matter whether the idea of such a destiny is new or merely remembered.
How is it then that this idea takes shape among a people which live in an
actual symbiosis with maize, as the destiny of an actual divinity, and why
does it arise particularly in the ‘high times’ of maize? Could there be a more
idle question? Something present has given rise to something more present,
one reality to a higher one. And nothing can make the idea more present
than what is visually presented at the ceremony, because in myth the cosmic
reality is modelled in human substance. The nearest thing to man is man
himself. Spontaneous vision or spontaneous drama in human shape—for in
any original thing spontaneity must be presumed—is nearer to man than an
animal epiphany or the imitation of animals in dance. The higher reality is
no less true and its distinguishing element, the divine, stands out all the more
prominently against the human, when it is represented by a human model.
‘They appear only once, my younger brethren. Do they not die really for
ever? I on the other hand never die, I shall appear continually’—such is
the song of the slain maize-god.
It is an idea of perfect clarity and convincing truth. Although it is
revived again and again in the same form through the ripening of the maize,
 The Feast 63

it is immediate and original, for it only arises for men out of this ripening.
The ordinary aspect of the maize life cycle appears again and again new and
divine because of it. For men it is an immeasurably sad idea, yet at the
same time it shows them the glitter of eternal things. Its conscientious
execution in word and deed is a serious duty imposed by the overpowering
strength of the idea and the sacred tradition. Yet to yield to this compulsion
is suddenly to fmd oneself in the free 'play’ of the gods, to raise oneself to a
level of knowledge and achievement such as human beings are always
raised to by a powerful, convincing idea.

Just as the festive quality was easily recognised as one among the experiences
of our life, so too it now becomes immediately conprehensible as an in¬
tellectual experience. Nor have we here to do with a phenomenon falling
exclusively within the field of the psychology of religion. ‘Science has this
in common with art’—so Nietzsche writes of such experience29—‘that the
most everyday things appear to it as completely new and attractive, or as
if by the power of an enchantment just bom and now lived for the first
time’. He continues: ‘Life is worth hving, says art.. . life is worth knowing,
says science’. In this he merely makes inferences appropriate to art and
science from an intellectual experience which lies at the root not only of
these two but also of religion and magic—inferences drawn from a complex
and yet very simple and primary psychic reality, what he calls a sort of
enchantment. Seen from within it is the experience of an idea, seen from
its atmospheric exterior it is the experience of the festal. Our next task is
to examine this atmospheric exterior.
It has long been remarked that these four things, art and science, religion
and magic, are related to one another partly as like to like, partly as opposites.
Attempts have been made to arrange them as stem and branches of a single
genealogy. For Frazer the stem was magic alone, from which religion and
art then branched off, while magic continued as science. According to
Preuss magic and religion before separation formed the stem, and all four
separately the branches. What is here overlooked is that the original
64 The Feast

primitive stem which in four directions divides into four independent forms
of appearance must have contained all four in its own original substance.
The experience of the festal is a point from which we can all start. And
since it is not only part of our living experience but also, in particular, an
intellectual experience, we can say that we understand what happens here.
What we must now seek to understand is a paradox. How is it that the
festive can be in harmony with all four of these forms of activity at the
same time, with art and science, as well as with religion and magic, or
rather that it appears as an atmosphere common to them all? To return to
our previous formulation, the man who yields to the compulsion of the
feast—a compulsion felt with all solemnity—thereby takes part in the ‘free
play’ of the gods. Such play seems to harmonise only with art, but not
with science or magic. It does show some connection with religion, at least
with the religion of primitive and older peoples, and even with mediaeval
Christianity. Let us consider the phenomenon of play on its own.30
Play is something which entails at the same time the greatest com¬
pulsion and the greatest freedom. It entails the greatest compulsion because
the player is completely tied to one aspect of the world, to which he gives
himself over as to a psychic reality. He lives enchanted in it, in a special
world. Boys who play at soldiers live in the soldier’s world, girls who play
with dolls, in the mother’s. For that reason they are free from every idea
of purpose lying outside such a world. Play is free from purpose. And in
this respect it can indeed be compared with science. For the scientist or
scholar plays when he surrenders himself to a self-chosen aspect of the world
and pays no heed to ideas of purpose which might limit the free range of
his exploration. The freedom of play is even greater than this. It is what
the freedom of science can never be, arbitrariness. The man at play shapes
the whole world to a world of his own and becomes thereby its creator and
god. Play is power, and in that it is like magic. Where it is distinct from
magic is in its freedom from the idea of purpose. That is why the freedom
of play is so ethereally free, regardless of its self-chosen constraint. That is
why the playful existence is happier and less substantial than the festive.
The festive atmosphere alternates between the serious and the playful,
between close constraint and absolute freedom. Here is the paradox, and
it disappears when we consider the festive in its essential aspect, in the light
of the idea. Some ingredient of the real world becomes for the celebrant
 The Feast 65

a psychic reality, an idea, lighting up in him and carrying instant conviction.

From something present it becomes something even more present. What
is it, then, this more present thing? Let us for a moment disregard the
human figures which mediate it and consider only the idea which shines
out through them. What is it? Something alien, existing independently
of us and acting upon us, or our own creation which continues to be acted
upon, among other things, by ourselves? Here is the paradox of the idea
as intellectual experience, the paradox of creation itself. Not simply that
creation in its nature does not exclude reality. Not simply that any form
of artistic creation which did not assert something thought of as real in our
universe would be unthinkable. But rather that the artist only has in
himself and awakens in others the consciousness of real making when there
comes forth from his hands something real, existent on its own, and grasped
with respectful devotion. The birth of a reality thus grasped, of an idea, is
constrained like science and play, but powerful and arbitrary like magic; in
short, festal. All that art does is to hold fast the festive quality of such a
birth, to confer permanence on the festive moment and on that which is
pictured there or streams out of it like music : to raise the festal time to a
timeless feast.
Creation is a festive affair in contrast to daily everyday making. (It
was when the study of Greek rehgion began to talk of the ‘making of a
god’ that it removed itself furthest away from any primitive or ancient
rehgion.) And the festival always preserves, so long as it is a real festival,
something of the creative, preserves at least the natural paradox of creation
just described. Without a serious surrender to that reality which in the
feast is represented, by word and deed, as in play such representation would
be neither creative nor festive. Reality and representation together make
up creation, make up the feast. Once the solid reality moves into the
background so that the idea of purpose alone becomes dominant, then
instead of the festal proceeding we have a magical one. There are many
transitions and gradations. The character of play can be extended and the
festive time be filled with special festival plays alongside the ‘play’ of the
ceremonies themselves. Such distinctions become necessary the moment
we turn our attention to individual festivals.31
The festival is in its essence creative rather than magical; good and
efficacious but not practical in spirit. Festivals often demand an enormous
D
66 The Feast

expenditure of energy, and for specially big festivals it seems that strength
was collected for several years in advance. And yet repose too belongs to
the essence of the feast, repose in contrast to the unrest of everyday affairs :
a repose which combines in itself vital intensity and contemplation, and
continues to do so even when vital intensity breaks out in exuberance and
wantonness. The Attic Comedy is a case in point. The officious diligence
of workaday life seems flat and absurd in the light of this repose, and yet
the very things which in workaday life were most workaday and ordinary
appear at the festival in a wonderful new light as worthy of special cele¬
bration. Handworkers and wine-drinkers, women and citizens at a festival
have an insight into what it is which makes up their workaday hfe, a
glimpse of something lofty and eternal, known to them otherwise only as
their daily tasks and their daily business. For it is independent of them and
they are dependent on it. The festival reveals the meaning of workaday
existence, the essence of the things by which men are surrounded and of the
forces which operate in their hfe. The festival as a reality of the world of
men—for so we may call it, fusing its subjective and objective ingredients
—means that humanity is capable, in rhythmically recurring periods of
time, of becoming contemplative and in this condition of directly meeting the
higher realities on which its whole existence rests. This meeting can also
be interpreted as meaning that the world becomes transparent to man’s
intelligence and reveals to him one of its meaningful aspects, or alternatively,
that in his intelligence the world arranges itself under one such aspect. The
distinction of subjective and objective in this experience is entirely without
significance.32
With all this it was not my intention to lay down any absolute rule,
still less to generalise or invert such a rule by saying, for instance, that such
meetings are possible only in rhythmically recurring periods of time, or that
they have always been occasions for recurring festivals. Nothing of the
kind is here intended. All that I may, I think, assert is this : even though we
today cannot experience the religion of the Greeks and Romans as it was
in its original state of coming into existence, as I have put it ‘ in flagrante’,
yet all its cult procedures and myth-telling are accompanied by a festive
quality, which is generated by a system of powerful ideas. This quality is
in itself a proof that the ancient rehgion rests on such ideas and a guarantee
that it can be made as intelligible to us today as the festive quahty itself.
 The Feast 67

7
The festive character of Greek religion, which in this respect also shaped
Roman religion, is balanced by its character as a mythological religion.
The two aspects belong together. To view it not as a mythological festival
religion but instead as a mere cult religion is to make light of the historical
inventory in a way which verges on falsification. Such a view is pseudo-
historical and one reason why it could ever have held the field is to be found
in the condition of what has been handed down to us about the Greek
festivals. We find here a desert with a few marvellous ruins. By contrast
with it the mythological tradition, defective though it is, seems like a
luxuriant jungle. For us today, confronted by this unequal balance in the
survival of historical material, the ‘beginning of wisdom’, the famous
sapientia prima, negative though it may be at first, is not to let ourselves be
influenced by it, either consciously or unconsciously.
From this negative beginning the present book proceeds, like the reality
of which it treats and which is still accessible, to the positive evidences, the
monuments, the works of the artists. These are inexhaustible and allow us
to guess at more than they show. Universal ideas shine through here too,
the idea, for instance, that the gods and goddesses are pleased by beauty in
their worshippers, male and female, or by beautiful animals and objects.
‘Beautiful!’—kalos and kale—is sometimes, though not often, written beside
their portraits on Attic vases.33 We may probably assume that this exclama¬
tion addressed to the numerous beloved creatures on the vases had its
beginning in the atmosphere of the festivals and was originally intended for
the deities present there in their statues. To make oneself beautiful for the
feast and at the feast to be as beautiful as mortal men can be and so become
like the gods—this is a fundamental part of the festive quality, and it is one
which might have been made for art. It is an original relationship of the
festive with the beautiful, which, however, was never so prominent with
any other people and nowhere so dominated the cult as with the Greeks.
No complete calendar of the festivals in the numerous Greek States and
their numberless small communities has been preserved to us. All the same,
by merely surveying and attempting to understand linguistically the names
of festivals and ceremonies which have by chance survived—there are
some three hundred of them—we become aware of a considerable wealth
68 The Feast

of ideas, in that sense of the word ‘idea’ which we have adopted in this
chapter. At any rate the critical investigator is forced to doubt very much
whether they can all be derived from such simple ‘vital needs’ as the want of
protection or aversion. It would on the other hand be pushing the critical
spirit too far if, in the case of festivals associated with the name of a particular
deity, the historians were not in the first place to give some credence to the
Greeks themselves, who brought their worship to the one they named—
to Hera in the Hcraia, to Athena in the Athenaia or Panathenaia. It is only
when the content of the worship, its idea, points in a different direction
from that consciously taken that we must look for another myth beyond those
of the named deity. These latter myths are the ones we must consider
in the first place. It is not often, however, that they have been completely
handed down to us.
Alongside names of festivals like those mentioned, which are derived
from the names of the deity celebrated, we find others which put the
ceremony in the foreground. Such for instance is the Hera festival of the
Daidala, the ‘festival of artistic puppets’ which was held on Mount Kithairon
in Boeotia.34 The art and ingenuity were by no means confined to the
manufacture of the wooden servants of the goddess queen—for that is
what the puppets were. The mythical prototype was the wedding pro¬
cession of Hera. In accordance with a long tradition, care was taken to
ensure the correspondence of cult and myth, even more, to harmonise the
proceedings with the picture of heaven, the cosmic background. Indeed,
the original performance presupposed certain refinements of astronomical
knowledge. The most solemn form of the festival was the ‘Great Daedala’
which was celebrated every sixty years, according to the cycle of the planet
of Zeus, the bridegroom. It seems that we here find an ancient oriental
form of celebration persisting in the Greek world. It makes the impression
of a lonely erratic rock, but only because we know so little about the Greek
festivals.
There is one other festival in which the strength of tradition and the
association of ritual celebration with spontaneity show their power. Its
ceremonies began every year on the Acropolis at Athens with the sacrifice
of a bull, continued in the Prytaneion inside the city with a trial, and finished
on the seashore. The festival was called the Dipoleia, or ‘Festival of the City-
God Zeus’ (Zeus Polieus), but the ceremonies had a special name, Bouphonia,
 The Feast 69

‘Bull-Murder’, although bulls, of course, were killed at numberless other

festivals. Through this name and the performance of the rite the intellectual
aspect of what was happening is put very emphatically in the foreground.
Not just one idea but two ideas in conflict with one another found expression
in the ceremony. According to one the bull sacrifice was holy, according
to the other it was unholy—it was a murder. The offenders were put on
trial. Everyone who had taken part in the killing of the bull put the blame
on the next one, until it reached the axe by which the animal had been
slaughtered, and even the axe was acquitted.35 It was the knife that in the
end was found guilty36—the knife with which the animal’s carcase had been
cut up for the sacrificial meal. And this knife was ‘drowned’ in the sea as
the real ‘doer’ of the deed. We may look in vain among the myths of Zeus
for a correspondence with this duality and this strange judgment. There
was, however, a myth of the murder of a god and his cutting up with the
knife.37 It was the myth of the ‘Bull-Son’,38 of Dionysus incarnate as a
bull. Here again we have a rock standing up from the seas of the older
Greek religion. This is proved by the detail that it was not the axe but the
knife which was punished. Memories of the unholy-holy proceeding in
which the god was the victim and represented by an animal are otherwise
more generally preserved through myths39 than through such rites. These
belong to an older Dionysus religion, not yet in the Greek style.
Thus far we are brought by the tradition in the case of certain Greek
festivals. But the name Bouphonia, just like Daidala, is a neuter plural, and
this is the form of festival name in which the Greek language quite generally
expresses something of the essence of the feast. Festival names in Greek are
plural, as collective names for the events and actions of the festal time. They
are plurals mostly of an adjective which comprehends in its meaning and
links with a common source everything revealed, festally, at that time.
Most frequently it links them with the godhead itself, but often enough
too with cult procedures, with the place of the cult, with cult objects or
cult utensils. At the festivals called Dionysia there were ‘Dionysiac things’
present, in general that is, and not as it might be a quantity of some particular
Dionysiac thing. The stem of the word denotes its outcome, in which all
its details are included. When the grammatical form of the word does not
allow an absolutely precise indication of the source, such precision is probably
superfluous, as for instance in the case of the Lenaia, a winter festival of
70 The Feast

Dionysus in Attica. The word-stem may be lenos, the wine-press, lenai,

the women of the wine-press, of the Lenaion, the holy wine-press house and
courtyard of Dionysus in Athens, all contributors to the source from which,
after the fermentation and first clarification of the wine, the festive state
flowed forth. All this formed with the time of the festival—-the cosmic
background—a distinct atmosphere which was ‘Lenaean’, not to be confused
with anything else, and it called forth from the Athenians the Comedy,
which became a further ‘Lenaean’ element. Or to take another example,
the Dionysiac period next in the Athenian calendar, the festival cycle of the
Athesteria, a name which enshrined the blossom-giving, growth-promoting
properties of the god, included the day of the Pithoigia, on which the
Pithoi, the great jars which held the now mature wine, were opened. The
occurrence of the female substantive Pithoigia to describe this whole day
signifies an impoverishment of the original festive occasion, which only
the atmospheric plural adjective could convey. It has become a ‘fossilised’
piece of observance, nothing more than the cult action.
The Greek usage has an exact counterpart in the names of Roman
festivals, the adjectival plurals with the ending -alia, -ilia, such as the Matron-
aim or Parilia. Ovid in his calendar poem, the Fasti, shows himself no mean
interpreter in feeling out the atmospheric and mythical content of such
names. It is true he brings together a great deal from the most different
times and sources, yet the names really asked to be filled out in this way.
So long as we know no more than we do about the Etruscan festival names,
we cannot judge how much Greek modes of expression contributed to their
formation as well. The culture of the sixth century b.c. was distinguished
not only in Greece but also in Etruria by a special joy in festivals and probably
also by a special art in shaping them. And this Etruscan festival art was
probably just as closely related to the corresponding Greek art as was
Etruscan art generally. In Rome we meet at one and the same time with
late and early, the highly developed and the surviving primitive. We must
attempt at least to distinguish the Roman from the Greek traits, and this
can less easily be accomplished through such complex structures as the
festivals than through the simplest forms of religious experience.
THE ACROPOLIS
and the cult of Athena
22 The Acropolis, from the Hill of the Muses. The Propylaea is to the left, the Temple oj
Athena Nike is in the centre, and the Parthenon to the right
23 The Parthenon seen from the east
 'M :4
* ' yM

■ · ■·.· ,-p

24 The Erechtheum: west facade showing the Ionic columns and the south side with its portico
oj six maidens turned towards the Parthenon
25 A youth leading horses; from the Parthenon frieze, west side. Completed 432 B.C.
British Museum
26 Detail of horses, and a youth; from the north frieze of the Parthenon,
Acropolis Museum, Athens
27 The Parthenon.
Frieze on the western face
of the cella, showing the
Panathenaic Procession
28 Festival organiser and girls, from the Panathenaic Procession. East frieze of the Parthenon.
Louvre, Paris
29 Water-bearers, from the north frieze of the Parthenon
Acropolis Museum, Athens
 31 Bronze statue
of Athena;
a recent find in a
sewer at Piraeus,
mid-4th century B.C.
Piraeus Museum

30 Marble votive reliej

to Athena showing the
goddess leaning on her
spear. Acropolis, mid-$th
century B.C. Acropolis
Museum, Athens
32 Pallas Athena in
armour; from the west
pediment of the temple
of Aphaia, on Aegina.
About 5Q0 B.C.
Glyptothek, Munich
33 Head of Pallas Athena, in Parian marble, from the east pediment of the Temple of Aphaia,
on Aegina. Glyptothek, Munich
34 Athena with Theseus, Herakles and the heroes of Marathon. Upper hand; birth of Pandora.
Behind her, in the centre, Prometheus. Vase by the Niobidpainter, from Tomb 579
in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
 vAlWV

35 Athena and one of the heroes of Marathon.

Detail from the opposite page
36 Battle of heroes in the presence of Athena. Vase by the Berlin painter. From Videi, c. 490 B.C.
Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich
37 A warrior and Nike, sacrificing. Oner the head of Nike is the inscription: ΚΑΛΗ, ‘beautiful
Detail from an amphora by the Peleus painter, from Tomb 422 in the
Valle Trebba, Spina, c. 430-420 B.C. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
38 Herakies brings Athena the Stymphalian birds. Metope from the Tempie of Zeus at Olympia;
finished in 456 B.C. The torso of Herakies is in the Museum, Olympia; Athena is in the Louvre, Paris

39 A head of Athena, from the east pediment of the old

Temple of Athena on the Acropolis, c. 520 B.C.
Acrovolis
x
Museum,7 Athens
40 Nike at a sacrifice,
undoing a sandal, from
the balustrade of the
Temple oj Athena Nike.
Acropolis Museum,
Athens
 CHAPTER III

Two Styles oj Religious Experience

I

There is nothing to justify us in presuming without further enquiry that

the religious experience of the Greeks was identical with that of any other
people, or even only with that of the Romans, or that it was without its
own characteristic features. Anyone who devotes himself to the study of
religions and takes the obvious course of proceeding from a single religion,
the religion of his own childhood or his earliest environment, is at first
astonished to fmd what a variety of things in the history of mankind have
been ‘religion’. If as research worker and scholar he confines himself to
rehgious phenomena, it seems to him as if religion forms a complete world
of its own. This view, moreover, gains support from the analogy of
another historical phenomenon—art too forms a world of its own.
The variety of aspects under which these special ‘worlds’ offer themselves
is evidence of a profusion of forms, not simply in art or religion, but more
fundamentally in the world of men itself. There is the mode of religion
and the mode of art and this formal profusion can show itself in either.
When we go further and say that what manifests itself in art is the artistic
faculty, we make a more far-reaching abstraction which demands the
greatest caution. The artistic faculty of man does manifest itself in this
fashion, and human existence—in contrast to animal existence—does have
this special peculiarity that it is artistic existence. But not all men share
equally in the inherent artistic possibilities of human existence. The artistic
quality is irreducible, distinct from all others, and it makes possible not only
art itself but also a science of art. Yet it is not something additional, but a
quality already given in the nature of human existence.
The religious quality too is of this kind. There are human beings and
there have been peoples who possessed the religious faculty in varying
degrees. But it would be a meaningless statement if we were to go on
E
94 Two Styles of Religious Experience

from there to say that it is the ‘holy’ which manifests itself in religion.41
What does manifest itself there is the religious faculty of man. We may
use the word ‘holy’ to describe an individual who possesses the religious
faculty in a high degree. He is the ‘holy one’—the ‘saint’. But neither the
Israelites nor the Christians have in this sense esteemed God holy. Nor
would they allow that the holy is a quality which merely attaches to their
God. In those cases where something materially existent hke a place or an
object is called holy, there is always a tendency—today as much as ever—
to think of holiness as something special, almost material, which is there
added to it. We are told, of course, everywhere of occurrences—these are the
special theme of mythological tales—which have once sanctified the place or
cult obj ect. There is none the less a universal tendency to conceive in material
terms what this sanctification has there produced. This leads to the ‘holy’
beings, even sometimes the God of a monotheistic religion, being then con¬
ceived of as beings to whom holiness attaches. This is a theme of the history
of religions, but it does not mean that ‘the holy’, as a materialised abstraction,
would be a suitable starting point for the scientific study of religions.
Religious aptitude and religious experience seem in the course of human
history to have stood in the same relation to one another as their artistic
counterparts. For just as artistic experience presupposes a minimum of
artistic aptitude, so without a minimum of rehgious aptitude no religious
experience can be expected. Aptitude and experience belong together,
and in the religious case both derive from that inherent possibility of human
life for which we have no special word except religiosity. On the other
hand, in the history of mankind no aptitude has ever yet exercised itself
except within the Style of a particular Existence, in the sense in which I use
those words in this book. Our task is here limited to understanding the
Greek and Roman religions as the two kinds of rehgious experience
peculiar respectively to the Greeks and to the Romans, and corresponding
to two different religious aptitudes.
Moreover, however highly we rate the importance of the festive quality in
our estimation of the two ancient rehgions, we have had from the very begin¬
ning to take account of two circumstances: first, that different degrees are
possible in the festive quality of religions, and secondly, that the influence of
Greek religion made itself particularly felt in the formation of Roman religion,
either directly or through the medium of the Etruscan. On the other hand
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 95

the linguistic apparatus of Roman religion, unlike the names of its festivals,
is so original and so primitive by contrast with the Greek in its use of ele¬
mentary concepts that a comparative study must put the Roman religion in
the foreground, even when it is still concerned with what is specifically Greek.

The Romans were themselves aware of the difference of their religious

experience from that of all other nations and considered themselves of all
peoples the one distinguished by a special religious aptitude. This religious
consciousness does in fact distinguish them from the Greeks, who in other
respects were quite capable of being the most conscious of all men about
everything. Indeed, it is quite possible that it was their Greek teachers who
first awakened in the Romans the consciousness of their special religiosity.
Polybius described with admiration but in rather disdainful terms the piety
of the Romans.42 Not so the great Greek philosopher from the Syrian city
of Apameia, Poseidonius. He in his great historical work wrote an appreci¬
ation of this religiosity as of something peculiarly Roman.43 If he was the
awakener, the consciousness he awakened was of something already there.
His pupil Cicero makes a distinction which could only be made by one who
had both, that which was there already and the consciousness of it.
Cicero even distinguishes the Roman from the Italian by reason of this
consciousness. ‘Quant volumus licet', so the famous passage runs, in the
speech On the Diviners’ Reply44—‘ ipsi nos amemus, tamen nec numero
Hispanos, nec robore Gallos, nec calliditate Poenos, nec artibus Graecos, nec
denique hoc ipso huius gentis et terrae domestico nativoque sensu Italos ipsos et
Latinos, sed pietate ac religione atque hac una sapientia, quod deorum numine
omnia regi gubernarique perspeximus, omnis gentes nationesque superavimus.'
‘However good an opinion we may have of ourselves, yet we do not excel
the Spaniards in number, the Gauls in strength, the Carthaginians in cunning,
the Greeks in arts, nor the Italians and Latins in the inborn sense of home and
soil. We do however excel all peoples in religiosity and in that unique
wisdom that has brought us to the realisation that everything is subordinate
to the rule and direction of the gods.’
96 Two Styles of Religious Experience

Such was the clarity and determination given to the Roman religious
consciousness by its encounter with the clarifying and awakening power of
the Greek intelligence. But that is the most which can be attributed to the
effect of Greece. The strength of the Roman religious awareness, with its
claim to a peculiar relationship with the divine, may perhaps be compared
with the well-known claim of the Israelites to be God’s chosen people but
certainly not with the Greek religious experience. And yet, so soon as we
try to draw a parallel with Jewish religiosity, we perceive that the religious
consciousness of the Romans belongs to the Roman Style of religious
experience, which is not identical with any other, in particular not with the
Israelite. The Jehovah religion is an experience of unmistakable demands
which the chosen must fulfil. Their being chosen and the fulfilment of these
demands, ‘the knowledge and the fear of Jehovah’—as religion is called in
the Old Testament 45—so exclusively form the content of the lives of the
chosen that we can no more talk of their having a special aptitude for
attuning themselves to the divine, as Cicero has it, than we can talk of an
art of interpretation where everything has only one meaning.
Greek religious experience forms the opposite pole to the Israelite,
opposite indeed only with reference to the specifically Greek features on the
one hand and the specifically Israelite on the other. If we disregard these
for the moment, then both the Greek and the Israelite experience, in contrast
to the Roman, have this in common, that they do not oscillate between
alternatives which allow now a clearer, now a more obscure apprehension
of the divine, but derive directly from presuppositions which are uniformly
clear. These are for the Israelites the commands of Jehovah. For the Greeks
on the other hand, the world which was the foundation of their particular
religious experience showed up with a clearness all the more impressive for
the obscurity of the background from which it arose.

3
The Style of the Greek religion has one characteristic above all. There
is no Greek word or phrase for religious experience as a special experience
or for the attitude produced by it as a special attitude. The Latin word
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 97

religio does betoken such an attitude. Originally this word too was not
restricted in its meaning to what is included in the sphere of religion today.
Religio once meant merely ‘scrupulous carefulness’—so we may render the
content of the word—without necessarily referring to ‘religious’ things.46
It only gradually became charged with the content of a special experience,
the very thing in fact for which in most European languages there is no
other word but the Latin ‘religious’. In Greek the substantive eulabeia,
‘carefulness’, and the corresponding verb and adjective, eulaboumai and
eulabes, went through a similar transformation.47 In our texts this change
first begins in the time of Plato and Demosthenes.48 It was then hastened
forward by the very circumstance that the Greek needed a corresponding
word for the Roman term ‘religio’. The change of meaning was finally
completed by Christianity. Today evlavia is a modern Greek word for
religion.
Eulabeia in its original meaning presupposes no special experience. It
expresses a universal attitude, which it was a duty to observe towards the
divine, but no more so than towards any other reality of human life. Only
the reality of the divine is presupposed by eulabeia, not some special danger
which could only be associated with the divine, not even the danger that it
perhaps exists and must therefore be treated with respect ‘just in case’. At
any rate none of the well-known passages in which the word eulabeia occurs
would justify the interpretation that it is not the divine towards which we
are careful but that we are careful because we are afraid of the possibility
that a god might exist. The reality of the divine is not doubted and this
reality is not feared in any special way. Eulabeia as an attitude is determined
by the universal rule of life that in every one of life’s relationships, and so in
relation to the divine as well, one must guard against positive and negative
exaggeration, against the too-much and the too-little.
Not only the concept of thrasos, of foolhardiness, is opposed to eulabeia,
but also the too great faith which results in deisidaimonia, of which we shall
come to speak shortly, and ‘cult excess’,49 an archaic phenomenon which
struck the Greeks of post-classical times as a relapse into barbarism. The
internal motivation for this attitude is not necessarily religious. And yet
with Plutarch of all writers, who is our chief source for these distinctions,50
it is difficult to say whether they correspond more to the profane,
philosophically refined Greek feeling or to the religio of the Romans—
98 Two Styles of Religious Experience

such is the agreement between the two at this point. We shall have to
return to this agreement when we concern ourselves with religio in more
detail.
The concept of eulabeia, which in its religious use belongs to a fairly
late period, does not take us very far into the nature of Greek religious
experience. It only takes us far enough to be able to determine that for
the Greeks the divine was a self-evident fact of the given world, in respect
of which one raised not the question of its existence—as it might be in the
form of a calculation of probability, like Pascal’s famous bet—but the question
of behaviour worthy oj a human being. Differences in this behaviour at
different times—for instance between pre-classical and post-classical be¬
haviour—are noticeable. When Μ. P. Nilsson speaks of a particularly ‘ popu¬
lar ’ religiosity of the Greeks, this is without historical foundation. The simple
Greek was just as much on his guard against the too-much and the too-
little as the philosophically educated Greek. Anyone who was not so was
an exceptional phenomenon. In face of the self-evidence of the divine in
the Greek world the concept of faith is meaningless. Here too the parallel
with the Israelite religion is instructive. The Israelite’s bond of union with
his God was so much a matter of course that ‘there was no need in the Old
Testament of any special commandment to believe in it’.51 There was the
promise of Jehovah and trust in Him—the Greeks, it is true, had no such
promise. It is no wonder that faith, or pistis, first became a fundamental
religious concept in Christianity. Within the meaning of Greek religion it
could only refer to the belief in the reality of the world. And this is the
case with the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaos.52 When religion is still
in its unreflective state such self-evident trust gets no special mention. One
may perhaps emphasize the credibility of a divine pronouncement—an
oracle—and these demand faith, but only in special cases.
Foolhardiness and too great unbelief53 are at the other extreme. Associ¬
ated with them in Greek opinion are some further contraries of right
behaviour towards the divine. One, an attitude determined by fear, is
deisidaimonia, another, a manner of divine service marked by strict observance
of the rites, apparently a too great concentration on the rites themselves,
is threskeia. The history of this word would detain us, even more than that
of eulabeia, in the later period of Greek religion. The earliest records refer,
characteristically enough, to the Egyptian cult,64 and threskos no less than
 4i A statue of
Demeter seated,
from the Sanctuary
of Demeter and
Kore at Cnidos.
c. 340-330 B.C.
British Museum
42 A clothed figure of Aphrodite seated. From a howl by the Lyandros painter. From Cesa
near Betolle, c. 460 B.C. Archaeological Museum, Florence
43 A nude figure of crouching Aphrodite, in Parian marble, from Rhodes (sec pp. 117-118)
c. 100 B.C.; replica of 3rd century B.C. sculpture. Rhodes Museum
44 Statue of a priestess of
Demeter, from the Sanctuary
of Cnidos. The statue shows
how the priestess set out to
make herself resemble the
goddess in appearance (cf.
pi. 41). British Museum
 Two Styles oj Religious Experience 103

deisidaimon means the ‘superstitious man’. The root verb threomai means the
loud shrieking of women, which occurred, it is true, in the Greek cult, but
was characteristic of Oriental religions.
The Latin translation of the word deisidaimonia by superstitio, which
corresponds to the Greek ekstasis,55 expresses the discovery of a relatively
late period, that supersition and ‘ecstasy’ have a connection with one
another. We should have to speak here of religious excitability. That form
of deisidaimonia which Theophrastus portrays in his ‘Superstitious Man’
(Deisidaimon),66 is no doubt a timeless phenomenon, yet on the whole
characteristic of the later periods of religions. We are not entitled without
evidence to generalise it to a primitive state of Greek religion. One reason
why we may not do so is because deisidaimon, immediately before Theo¬
phrastus’ use of it, that is, denoted in the works of his master Aristotle an
aspect of religiosity which was easily reconcilable with eulabeia. According
to Aristotle 57 the tyrant should try to appear as deisidaimon, that is to show
his dependence on the gods—without exaggeration, however. The word
deisidaimonia means ‘fear of the daimon , and according to the most ancient use
of language daimon is nothing else but that aspect of the divine in which it
appears to man as his destiny.

4
There is a much more important Hellenic concept which would at once
bring us closer to the real nature of Greek religiosity if it did not itself
first have to be explained through a correct understanding of Greek religion.
The fundamental concept of archaic Greek Existence which thus needs to
be explained is the nomos. Nomos, nomizein is at the root of the whole of
Greek religion in historic times, both in its cult and in its views about the
gods—so far, at least, as it is not rooted in another form of the ‘law’, the
themis, which we shall also seek to define more closely in what follows.
One thinks about and worships the gods in the light of the nomos—nomizei
autous. This stands for ‘believing in them’ but has a much more concrete
meaning too, since it also includes the performance of the cult procedures
which again presuppose the myth. The cult procedures are nomizomena,
104 Two Styles of Religious Experience

nenomismena, nomima. An exact translation is virtually impossible. Nor

could it be otherwise, since here we have something specifically Greek,
something belonging to the Greek Style. It means not only a continual
regard for tradition in spirit, but something more: ‘to keep’ what is handed
down ‘in steady, conventional use’.59 Custom and usage by contrast with
the nomos are more unconscious and mechanical, law and order are too
rigid, too reminiscent of express commands such as were never an essential
part of Greek religion. To speak of the development of a sort of ‘legalism’
at a certain phase in the history of Greek religion is to assume what amounts
to a change of Style. But no such thing, to the extent required by such a
formulation, ever in fact occurred.
We can take a decisive step towards the understanding of the original
Greek nomos-concept by recognising that the philosophic term nomos as the
opposite of physis —nature—resulted from a process of reinterpretation and
revaluation by the sophists.60 The nomos of the archaic poets and the older
philosophers, Hesiod, Solon, Pindar, Heraclitus, even the tragedians, can
be paraphrased in the words of Jacob Burckhardt61 : ‘It is the higher purpose
which rules over all individual being, all individual will and does not content
itself as in the more modern world with protecting the individual and
exhorting him to pay his taxes and do his military service but aspires to
be the soul of all. ’ I emphasise these last words because their metaphorical
manner comes very close to the language of Heraclitus, and that was not
far removed from the myth itself. ‘All human nomoi’ writes this archaic
philosopher ‘are nurtured by one, the divine nomos’.62 As a poet Pindar is
still nearer to the myth, and with him the nomos appears as an almighty king
over gods and men. The famous verses about Herakles and Geryoneus63
leave no room for doubt that the source of the law’s almightiness was not an
abstract idea of justice or legality. If it was an idea at all, it was rather that
of kingship. The nomos is basileus—king—and its power is founded in that.
Yet here too it cannot be an abstract basileia which is meant, not the mere
idea of kingship as a source of power, but the existing world sovereignty of
Zeus. There was an event, too which preceded this sovereignty, whether
we consider only Zeus’s ascent of the throne after the dethronement of
Cronos or the whole battle with the Titans as well. For the Greeks them¬
selves the validity of all the nomoi became intelligible and started from this
myth of an event that gave laws to human existence.
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 105

Zeus was the king whose will and might determined the world order.
In the nomos there shows itself side by side with justice, dike—if this reveals
itself at all—also power, kratos and bia. This was already stated by Solon,64
and it follows with certainty from the verses of Hesiod which attribute the
nomos to the ruling power of Zeus.65 Pindar himself sees in the effect pro¬
duced by King Nomos in the case of Herakles and Geryoneus the kingly
pleasure and whim of Zeus.66 In this concept of Nomos, justice is understood
only as far as the nature of Zeus permits it. In virtue of such textual passages
the nomos of the archaic time can be defined as a form of appearance of the
World-King Zeus. Through nomos, nomizein the divine is presupposed at
least as a real, existent power. The best translation for nomizein is ‘acknow¬
ledge’. The presuppositions of Greek religion are neither eulabeia nor
deisidaimonia, neither nomos nor nomizein, but Zeus and the gods.67 The
presuppositions of the nomoi are above all the male deities, while the female
for the most part form a chorus of defining prototypes around the great
goddess Themis.

When the words for religious experience and attitudes are negative, we
must logically expect to encounter an assured presumption of the divine.
We have already found a negative element of this kind in the word religio
and also in eulabeia, in its meaning of carefulness. These words represent
not action but only reaction. Now if there were only one such ‘reaction
word’ occurring in the speech of more archaic times and reserved for the
religious sphere, we should be entitled to call the reaction itself a religious
experience and infer from it a quality of the divine nature by which it was
distinguished from everything else in the world. Such a quality would be
specific in so far as it could be attributed only to the divine. And it would
be universal in so far as it did not belong to the structure of some particular
divine figure, but was itself everywhere and in every respect the reason
and condition of divinity. In Greek religion we never do encounter such a
quality, even through the negative words. What we encounter is myth¬
ology and the festal manifestation of aspects of the world.
io6 Two Styles of Religious Experience

The case is no different with the verb hazesthai which might seem of all
words that most confined to the religious sphere.68 Its meaning is related
to that of dedienai—to be afraid’—and aideisthai—‘to be ashamed’, and it is
used as absolutely synonymous with this latter word and, what is im¬
mediately decisive, moreover, it is not at all confined to the religious
sphere. At the most it corresponds to religio in its original, ‘non-religious’
sense. It does not necessarily presuppose anything sacred of which we might
stand in some particular awe. The circle of people to whom the verb
hazesthai refers in Homer can, without changing its sense, be drawn so
wide as to include the whole household of Odysseus.69 For its slaves the
word means a respectful, but certainly not a ‘religious’ behaviour. If we are
looking for the most primitive relationships, there are points of reference
in the Iliad which we must not neglect. Hazesthai is what Zeus himself
feels towards the sphere of Night. He would not want to do anything
which might displease this great goddess.70 And hazesthai in two im¬
portant passages refers to a deity to whom the epithet hagnos—‘pure’—-
belongs, that is to Apollo.71 In agreement with this is the fact that in the
Odyssey a priest of Apollo is an object of hazesthai,72 while in the Iliad
Agamemnon had to atone for having failed to behave in this way to a
priest of Apollo—here 73 aideisthai is used as a variant for hazesthai occurring
somewhat earlier in the same passage.
The fundamental meaning of any word which is important for the study
of religion is never determined by possible etymologies or linguistic com¬
parisons but by contexts and connections within the language itself. The
verb hazesthai in Greek is connected with the adjective hagnos, epithet of the
pure and purifying god Apollo,74 who in this capacity is also called Phoebus.
In Homer hagnos is an epithet of Artemis75 and Persephone,76 even of an
Apollo festival,77 in Hesiod also of the goddess Demeter.78 It can well be
said that ‘it is used pre-eminently of the uncontaminated elements of
nature’.79 Yet the elements have in the world of men their deathly aspect
as well. They form, like the gods, a boundary to human existence 80 at
which it must become aware of its own cessation, of the difference between
mortality and eternity.
The other adjective from this root, hagios,81 refers more to the cult—
‘pure’ temples, uncontaminated cult statues, mysterious cult procedures,
and it is believed 82 not to be very old, having perhaps originated in Asia
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 107

Minor after the Ionian migration, in the shadow so to speak of the great
oriental-style sanctuaries. The preference shown for the word by the
translators of the Old Testament seems to support tins. But there is nothing
here which would entitle us to identify with any foreign concept that
quite definite thing to which all these words refer and which in the shape of
Apollo and Artemis appeared to the Greeks as a particular higher reality,
the pure, the unapproachable, that which requires us to keep our distance.
Nor should we be justified in using such words as taboo or mana to clarify
a concept which in Greek is quite clear enough. For either these words are
colourless, generalising technical terms which convey nothing of the
peculiarity and uniqueness of this purity, nothing for example of the
different shade of meaning between hagnos and hagios in the passages where
they occur, or else they have a special content which was to be found in
certain foreign cultures but not necessarily in that of the Greeks.
It is uncertain etymologically whether these words are connected with
agos, ‘crime against the divine’.83 In it the ‘crime’ is considered from a
particular point of view, as a defilement from which one has to be made
pure again, for which one has to atone. There is a problem concerning the
relationship between the sphere of purity associated with Apollo and
Artemis and the sphere of impurity denoted by agos, the sphere of sinful
shedding of blood. This problem is not solved by saying that the concept
of the holy was not reached by way of the Greek tradition and was itself
ambivalent, that the most holy can at one and the same time be felt and
regarded as the most impure.84 The problem here presents itself from the
beginning as quite concrete. Agos connects with the underworld, the
sphere of death. The question must be so formulated: Is it unthinkable in
the light of what has been handed down from archaic times that there was
a connection between Apollo and Artemis and this sphere of death? The
figure of holy Persephone, who belongs to the kingdom of the dead and is
closely related to Artemis, guarantees the possibility of such a connection
and the character of Demeter as hagne confirms it. The myths both of
Artemis and Apollo leave us in no doubt of the deathly traits in the characters
of these deities.86 If this is the connection that the word agos in Greek
vocabulary reflects, then we here encounter with special force an aspect,
or more exactly a particular feature, of the existent world, in which two
apparently opposite domains, that of purity and that of death, are in contact.
ιο8 Two Styles of Religious Experience

Not only the figures of Apollo and Artemis but also those of the goddess
Night point the way in this direction.

The ancient concepts of religious purity, expressions which come nearest

to the word ‘holy’ as when we use it without reference to any special
theory, in Latin sacer and sanctus, never presuppose the divine in general,
but always a special sphere of the divine, coinciding with the domain of
Death. By one’s personal purity one makes a constant affirmation of that
sphere, to which one would fall victim if one were to lose it. The homo
sacer—the person who among the Romans was condemned to be so named
and so to be88—had fallen victim to Death. While still alive he belonged to
the di inferi, the gods of the underworld. He might be killed but not sacrificed.87
To make sacrifice was in Latin sacrificium, a proceeding which made the victim
sacer. Anyone who was sacer already belonged to the gods of the underworld
and could not therefore be accepted by them as a present, a sacrifice. Sacer
meant the closest possible relationship to them. Kinship with a more friendly
aspect of the underworld was betokened by the quality sanctus. We read in
Cicero that while pietas refers to the gods, sanctitas refers to the Manes—the
ghosts of the departed—and justitia to our fellow human beings.88
A similar concept with the Greeks is hosion or hosia. In our texts the
substantive hosia occurs earlier than the adjective hosios.89 In the Odyssey
an action is twice described negatively as ίnot-hosίa, 90 and advised against
on religious grounds. In the first passage a plan of murder is under dis¬
cussion, in the second the murdered men are lying there already and it
would be not ‘hosia’ to call on the gods and give expression to feelings of
joy in the presence of the corpses. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo the
hosia takes the very archaic form of the non-use by men of the horses in
the sacred precinct of Poseidon Hippios at Onchestos. It is thus shown
that they are in fact sacred animals.91 It is hosia if Demeter accepts the mixed
drink prepared according to her instructions,92 and hosia too if the gods
partake of the sacrificial meat.93 The dead man who does not receive that
which honours him and is his due remains anosios,9i without hosia, which
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 109

is here simply defined as obsequies of the dead.95 Ho sia is then conceived

of quite concretely as ‘offering’, an offering, moreover, which need not
necessarily be sacrificial,96 but this was a later development.
Negative versions, like the quite general one that it is not hosia to plan
one another’s deaths,97 are to be found quite early in our texts. But this
does not mean that the concept of hosion gets its positive content uniquely
and entirely from its contrary, the anosion,98 In the Greek world a great
deal had to be constantly happening—the gods and the dead getting their due
—so that the hosia might be fully satisfied. For the Bacchants of Euripides 99
the Hosia floats, a great goddess on golden wings, over the earth and, like
another Nemesis, sees that everything is done the neglect of which might
arouse the vengeance of a divine power, sees also that the whole world of
gods, both the Olympians and those of the underworld to which the dead
belong, receives from men the worship due to it, in the form of holy actions
and the observance of what has to be observed.
Such is the picture of the hosia in classical times. But it is nearly always
the underworld which is meant when the gods are thought to have been
offended by a crime against the hosia. In one of his dialogues, the Euthy-
phron, Plato treats of hosiotes (the state of hosia) in a sense equivalent to
piety and religious purity in general. Yet he too starts from a case of murder,
that is from the domain most characteristic of the underworld deities. The
acts of hosioun and aphosiousthai are pre-eminently a precaution against the
vengeful impulses emanating from that territory. Hosios as an adjective is
specially applied to the purifying god, Apollo, who after each of his death-
strokes must purify himself as well.100 A special group of hosioi was made
up of five men who were the assistants of the oracle priest at Delphi101
and whose special character of being the pre-eminently hosioi among all men
derived from the performance of an animal sacrifice, the hosioter. I11
general, in order to be hosios it was sufficient to live the Hellenic life as it was
lived according to the nomizomena of the different States. The dark back¬
ground to this course of life was affirmed, but only received special emphasis
in the case of the five of Delphi, who were said to be the true offspring of
Deucalion through his grandson or great-grandson Delphos102 and were,
so to speak, the exemplary core of humanity.
The comparison of hosiotes with the Roman concept of sanctitas is an
obvious one and also instructive. As we have seen already, sanctitas above
no Two Styles of Religious Experience

all meant a good relationship to the dead. When Aeneas calls on the ghost
of his father with the words ‘salve sancte parens’,103 it is certain that Anchises
first possessed this quality when he was still alive and when he was dead
only because of that. The participial form sanctus, which would be more
exactly translated by ‘made holy’ or ‘purified’ than by ‘holy’ or ‘pure’,
presupposes a purification or ‘sanctification’, an act of entering upon the
good relationship meant by Cicero.104 This must have held good for the
original use of the word. When it is said of living people in our texts it
betokens purity of life, with some religious coloration, but predominantly
in a moral sense—as is the case with hosiotes as well.105
The word hosios is used not only of the person who leads a ‘pure life’
but of anything else to which purity can be applied, for instance a place
where something goes on which is still permitted by the unwritten laws of
life but would be forbidden by the laws of a stricter religious need.106
Every State building that was not specially dedicated as a ‘holy place’, a
hieron or sanctuary, formed part of the ho sia.107 It is accordingly quite clear
that the hosion occupies a middle position between the hieron and the wholly
profane. A division of ancient life into two domains, the sacred on one
side, the profane on the other, is absolutely impossible. The epithetprofanum
—that which has its place before the sanctuary, the fanum—is late and was
formed by elimination. Whatever had not reached that degree of sanctifi¬
cation which had been attained for instance by the initiates to the mysteries
was profanum. Sanctum corresponds to hosion without being sacrum : proprie
dicimus sancta—so runs Ulpian’s legal definition 108—quae neque sacra neque
profana sunt, sed sancitone quadam confirmata . . . quod enim sancitone quadam
subnixum est, id sanctum est, etsi deo nonsit consecratum. (‘What we properly
call sancta are things neither sacred nor profane, but bound by some san¬
ction ... for anything which is based upon a sanction is sanctum, even though
it is not consecrated to a god.’)
But these parallels also show up the difference between Greek and
Roman religiosity. For the Romans the relationship to the underworld is
more emphasised, and this dark zone of the divine stands unmistakably in
the foreground. The sanctum is further extended in the direction of the
death zone by the sacrum. Sacrum means the condition of being given over
entirely to the underworld, while sacrosanctum means that which is protected
by the threat of such a condition. The meaning of the Greek hieron, in its
 Two Styles of Religious Experience Ill

relation to the hosion, must no doubt be sought originally in the same

direction. The slaughtering of the sacrificial animals is called in Homei
hiera rhezein, which exactly corresponds to sacri-ficiutn. In the Creto-
Mycenean texts the priest is already called hiereus and the man who performs
the sacrifice hieroworgos. It seems that the words hierourgos, hierourgein,
hierourgia, always retained a very solemn, almost gloomy sound.109 Yet in
Homer there is a complete absence of gloom about the sacrifice, and a
change has already come about in the aura and atmosphere of the word
hieron. To connect both sacrum and hieron with the alien notion of taboo is
to ignore what is characteristic. Hieros, the adjective for everything which
belongs to the persons or presence of the gods,110 in Homer already has that
radiant colour—if occasionally with a gloomier tinge—which throughout
the historic period was peculiar to the Olympic world of gods, while sacer
remains always unambiguously gloomy.
Even the sanctum contains a decided reference to something dark and
threatening owing to the fact that, linguistically, unlike the hosion, it also
implies the sanctio,111 a ritual proceeding. A characteristic of Greek religion
is the remoteness of the underworld domain, and this remoteness, though it
varies at different times—also keeps the idea of the ‘sanction’ more in the
background. It is part of hosiotes that the underworld domain is known to
be in the background and at the same time kept at a distance. It is the
quality of hosiotes, preserved in all situations, which keeps the menace of the
subterranean beings at a distance. The world is stretched out bright and
clear before the hosios and he has regard to all its aspects, as everyone is
required to have, when he does everything in his power to ensure that the
hosia is constantly happening all the time.

The life of the hosios is a normal life, pleasing to the gods after the Hellenic
style. The characteristic of it is not a negative behaviour, but rather a
laissez-faire, a carefree piety. A way of life distinguished by a special regard
for the divine is called by the Greeks eusebeia.112 Its root is the Greek verb
expressing the highest form of worship—sebein, sebesthai. Here if anywhere
112 Two Styles oj Religious Experience

we might hope to find a way leading through the phenomenon of this

worship—called by the substantive sebas—to a full understanding of the
specifically Greek religious experience. The etymology of the word group
sebein, sebas, semnos (the attribute of being worthy of this kind of worship)
is insufficient for this purpose. The etymological root meaning is on the
face of it fairly clear and certain.113 Sebein, sebesthai originally means some¬
thing like ‘step back from something with awe’. The simplest translation
of sebas is ‘awe’. This is confirmed, too, by the meaning of another verb
derived from the same stem, sobeo—‘I drive away’. This etymology does
not require us to call in aid the mana-taboo kind of interpretation. The
origin of the awe is no more expressed in sebas or sebesthai than the thing
driven away is expressed by sobein. (If birds were meant, we should
have to translate it ‘scare away’.) Talk of the force of magic and its
dangers, of mana or orenda—to mention a grotesque fashion which at
one time invaded the study of ancient religion and of classical scholar¬
ship—is not justified by a single word or turn of phrase of the older
Greek literature. Dynamis or energeia are not used in this sense till very
late, in works which were written in Greek but had long ceased to be
thought hellenically.114
To arrive at a real understanding, therefore, we must start not from the
bare etymology of the words but from the whole phenomenon, an account
of the experience, that is, in which its cause too is given. Opportunities of
this kind are to be found in the Homeric poems. In the Odyssey there
occurs in four different contexts the sentence: ‘Awe takes hold of me at the
sight’.115 In no case can there be the slightest question of a mysterious
secret force. The sebas is everywhere occasioned by something becoming
manifest and present in an actual form, something which by its visible
appearance is able to excite such awe. Thus sebas was excited in Telemachus
by the radiance of the royal palace of Sparta; by the pleasing presence of
Telemachus himself in the old friend of his father and in Helen, who discovers
the likeness of Odysseus in the form of his son; and finally in Odysseus by
the divine beauty of Nausicaa as it appears before his eyes. Gods and men
alike feel sebas at the view of an appearance such as the narcissus, the wonder¬
ful flower which the earth goddess cunningly caused to grow for the entice¬
ment of Persephone and to oblige the god of the underworld—‘a sebas for
all to behold, immortal gods and mortal men’.116
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 113

Sebas can be excited not only by the beauty of an appearance, but also
by a picture of horror, when it is imagined as if before one’s eyes. Thus
Achilles must picture to himself the dreadful state of Patrocles’ dead body—
‘The awe must penetrate his soul. . . .’ 117 When it is the horrifying con¬
dition of a slain man or a dishonoured corpse which is being imagined, the
atrocity itself need not actually occur. The awe of it is in the soul.118
Again, it is the present situation which ought to excite sebas in the Greeks
—‘Does it not strike awe into you?’119 Sebas comes from what is present,
to the imagination or to the view, from a bodily and spiritual manifestation.
For in true Greek fashion it comes really from both at once. In the
visible radiance of the palace of Menelaus Telemachus’ inner eye sees the
radiance, never yet seen, of the palace of Zeus. In Nausicaa Odysseus
beholds the beauty, never yet beheld, of Artemis. In Telemachus the
presence of his absent father is recognised. In the flower the wondrous
radiance 120 of a divine enticement is perceived. In the pictures of horror
and dread there is a mental vision of dishonour, something which from the
viewpoint of an invisible norm is seen as intolerable.
The character of this norm, can be realised from the following argument.
We derive it from a phenomenon which can serve for an understanding of
what was specifically Greek in religious behaviour in the same way as the
phenomenon sebesthai-sebazesthai-sebas led us to the specifically Greek in
rehgious experience. I mean the phenomenon of aidos or as a verb, aideisthai.
It is in accordance with the Greek Style that sebas as a religious reaction
formed part of the experience of a show or vision, a bodily and spiritual
viewing in which the viewer and worshipper played an active part only
insofar as he was the subject and not the object of the show. Sebas could be
called pre-eminently a religious reaction because there was another strand to
its meaning besides that of shrinking-back, of awe·—the sense of worship.
That is why ‘awe’ is only a makeshift translation; it does not render the
whole meaning. Theon sebas for ‘worship of the gods’ is a natural mode of
expression,121 while thauma or thambos, words of wonder and astonishment
which occur in Homer in phrases similar to those in which sebas occurs,122
have no such connotation, and if used in this way give quite a different
effect.123 There is, however, a group of words in Greek which have both
these senses, of shrinking-back and of worship, the aidos-aideisthai group we are
now discussing, for which ‘shame’, ‘to be ashamed’ are similarly no more than
114 Two Styles of Religious Experience

makeshift translations. The sense of worship, for instance, becomes clear in one
specially significant context, where Hesiod describes the older, pre-Olympic
gods as theongenos aidoion, the ‘shame-provoking generation of gods’.124
Relevant to this context also is the complementary relationship of aidos
and thetnis, of which we shall come to speak. Themis as a deity belongs to
the older generation of gods. Hesiod’s phrase is a refutation of some
widespread views on aidos.125 It was seen as containing the central ethical
concept of Homeric society, without the question being asked what was
specifically Greek about the phenomenon as it was represented to us. The
translation ‘feeling of honour’, associated with these views, is no more
adequate on its own than ‘feeling of shame’ and it is the latter which comes
closer to the reality. For it is wholly in accordance with the Greek Style
that aidos too, like sebas, is founded on the experience of a show. The man
who feels shame, however, is even more passive than he who feels sebas
and worships accordingly. When a man also worships the one before whom
he feels shame—for this is an ingredient of the phenomenon—he himself
becomes the object of a show, the one who is ashamed. He is here not the
viewer but the viewed. To feel that one is making a show of oneself, a show
which does not fit into some definite picture of the world, that is aideisthai.
It is this quite definite picture of the world for which the phrase ‘invisible
norm’ which I used above is a temporary and inadequate expression. For
this picture is both visible and invisible at the same time, norm and yet a show
for the mind’s and body’s eye at one and the same time. There is here no
conflict between visible and invisible, moral and natural, spiritual and
physical. It is something else which, on this world view, has not been evened
out—the total world picture itself. The real world has several aspects and offers
various pictures of itself. The show of a disharmony within one of these
pictures is aidos for the one who was the unfortunate maker of the show.
The true quality of aidos is explained not by the particular moral code of a
particular station in life but by a disharmony which can occur in every
station and in every part of the world. As these parts come into conflict
with one another, so aidos can be ranged against aidos. The Homeric poems
are quite clear on this point.
When Hector is waiting for his last fight with Achilles, the two old
people, Priam and Hecuba, try to call their son back into the protecting
walls of the city. The mother bares and shows her breast and with tears
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 115

implores Hector: ‘Hector, my son, before this’—she means her breast—‘feel

aidos and take pity too on me, if ever I gave you the comforting breast.
Remember it, dear son, and defend us against the enemy by staying inside
the walls. . . .’ 126 As Priam had previously sought to soften his son with the
picture of himself, the father, dead, his corpse torn and dishonoured by his
own hounds,127 so Hecuba’s gesture calls up another vision—that of Hector
in conflict with everything which a mother’s breast is and stands for. That
must arouse aidos in him.
The situation is at the same time full of life and full of meaning. It
makes an example for the intellect out of the living reality. The showing
of the breast, the baring of the body of an old woman and a queen, of the
mother’s breast, is here against royal dignity and noble conduct but it is life
itself, immediate and unvarnished. It is no doubt an example also of the
particular art of Homer, which has earned him among all epic poets a particular
esteem. It is quite superfluous to give any special explanation for Hecuba’s
action. Her gesture is entirely natural. Yet with it through every code of
caste behaviour an aspect of the world breaks through, a domain of the
world which possesses its own order. The mother’s breast is a fragment of
bodily reality, and this, its corporeal nature, is what makes it meaningful
—all the more so for exciting the bodily reactions of affection and shame.
It is a symbol, in the sense of Goethe, who calls that ‘symbolic’ which ‘is an
entire agreement with nature’ and ‘immediately declares its meaning’,128
and a symbol too after the fashion in which symbols are used by ancient
art—as abbreviations.129 As a symbol the mother’s breast indicates a
definite world order, the world order of motherhood, and so offers the
mind’s eye also a convincing show, a vision. For this reason, a thing too can
excite aidos, as does her husband’s marriage-bed in Penelope.130 It is the visible
sign of an invisible order, it can, so to speak, be seen through. It is a symbol,
not as an element of a symbolism, but as a transparent part of the world.

Not everything has yet been said about the experience of aidos. That the
highest orders of human existence can have physical and mental attributes
ii6 Two Styles of Religious Experience

inseparable from one another is an important and ill-recognised fact in the

history of thought. We must spend some little time on it. One piece of
evidence has already been noted. Aidos really does mean ‘feeling of shame’
in the purely physical sense, though it also means something more. The
word in Homer also means the sexual organs—aidos or aidoia—the very
things, that is, which by their display, except in one particularly powerful
sphere of the world, could have a disturbing, even destructive effect. Yet
even the sexual sense of shame has its spiritual side, which must be considered
together with the great psychic reality of sex in its more physical paradoxes.
So long as we are talking of aidos, even in the cases where it means ‘feeling
of honour’ in the language of a noble caste or ‘worship’ in the religious
sense, the body is always dancing attendance. And from the bodily life
there proceeds a spiritual order which, alongside the order of the nomoi
and mingled with it, dominates Greek existence. Aidos in its most natural
form, as sexual sense of shame, does not yet betoken an order. The order
which does belong to it and gives it bounds and direction is the Order of Themis.
Themis in its original meaning is not a proper name, but the word for a
concept, the full scope of which will become clear as we discuss it. It is
complementary both to aidos and to nomos. We have already given a
general idea of what is meant by this. Its close relationship to aidos is sup¬
ported by texts, some of which will be quoted here. Everything which in
our idiom is law, morality, and custom was in Greece nomos or themis.
Whether more or less religious is of no consequence, since nothing of this
kind lay entirely outside the religious sphere. When the mother’s bared
breast recalled the whole motherly aspect of the world, an Order of mother¬
hood with its own demands, these demands were demands of themis. The
use of language in the Greek is here quite precise, and brings us close to
mythology. For it could just as well be said that they were demands of
‘Themis’, a great goddess.
The particular Order corresponding to the sovereign realm of Themis,
which was more clearly demarcated for the Greeks than it is for us, was not
a merely theoretical or juristic order set down in written laws. It was less
so even than was the Order of the nomoi, but it was none the less a powerful
Order and in this case one can well say an Order ‘full of power’. Its ‘power¬
fulness’ comes obviously from its physical basis. It is spiritual only insofar as
emphasis is laid on the idea of‘order’. We have to become more and more
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 117

familiar with this paradox. Even in that which is emphatically physical

there can be something appearing to the mind as an idea or a divine form
which makes moral demands. The example of Hecuba just quoted is
evidence of this inherent paradox. It spoke through a naked bodily gesture,
though in this case it was not one of those which concerned the aidoia, the
‘shame-provoking things’, in the narrowest sense.
This meaning of aidoia and aidos is immediate evidence of the fact that
the phenomenon of shame, which was central to the Greek concept of
aidos, was originally concerned with the attitude to nakedness, and at that
not a simple, positive nakedness but the contradictory nakedness of the
sexual organs, both attractive and repellent at the same time. However, a
further narrowing of the sense of aidos in this direction is unthinkable in
terms of Greek development. For in that man’s world nakedness became
less and less shame-provoking, just as aidos in the broader sense of ‘respect
and self-respect’ became more and more dominant. Peoples who go naked
do not feel shame of nakedness itself but of invisible norms. These norms,
however, regulate sexual life and there is nothing here to invalidate the
coexistence of two areas of meaning, the natural ambivalence of nakedness
on the one hand and on the other the invisible Order thereby indicated, the
Greek name of which was Themis.
The relation of the concept of Themis to nakedness is quite clear in
Greek linguistic usage.131 It was an unforgivable offence against aidos of
which Tiresias, whom we know as a blind soothsayer, had made himself
guilty according to the story told by Callimachus in his poem ‘The Bath of
Pallas’. He looked upon the naked Athena and, as the poem has it, ‘saw
what it is not themis to see’.132 As a punishment Tiresias lost the sight of
his eyes. To look upon the complete nakedness of a goddess was an offence
against Themis not only in the case of the virgin goddess Pallas Athena. It
was so in the case of the goddess of love as well. Anchises, the lover of
Aphrodite, shared the fate of Tiresias. He too was punished with blindness.
According to a story alluded to by Theocritus,133 the bees which were wit¬
nesses of the love-making stung out his eyes. Another story, that Anchises
became lame because he boasted of the love of Aphrodite and was therefore
struck with lightning by Zeus, has a less archaic sound.
Of the two statues of the love-goddess which Praxiteles according to the
tradition made to the order of the islanders of Cos, the latter chose the
118 Two Styles of Religious Experience

clothed one.134 The religious scruples they may have had were to be
sought in the domain of Themis. It is probable that the naked Praxiteles
statue set up by the people of Cnidos was permitted them only because they
had previously worshipped a naked, oriental Aphrodite.135 In an epigram
attributed to a poet by the name of Plato Praxiteles is excused on the ground
that he himself had not seen that which was not themis.136 The painted
Aphrodite Anadyomene of Apelles showed only her breast, which is
themis.137 The waves concealed the rest ‘which it is not themis to see’.138
And if this is relatively late evidence, it is confirmed and amplified by a
relatively early testimony in the Iliad, about the making of love, ‘which is
the themis of mankind, both of men and of women’.139
The rule of Themis in this domain, as we may now call it the heart of
her realm, is not by any means only negative. As a goddess she rules it, as
a concept she is herself the rule which must be observed by gods and men
both there and over a wider zone of natural relationships. Themis in Homer
calls the gods into their meetings, as she does also with men when it is a
question of wider themistes, or rules of life.140 She is the first to greet Hera,
the angry wife of Zeus, and feels sympathy with her, being herself one of
the first of the wives of Zeus. Hyhris, or arrogance, which the Homeric
Hymn to Apollo calls the ‘themis of mortal men’, is thus contrasted with a
divine themis.141 Hybris stands in express opposition to aidos.112 It is the
ungodly themis, from which the true Themis holds itself distinct as a divine
norm and rule. The divine Themis operates first in the narrower world of
sex, determined by the strict legality of female life—rape is called in Greek
athemitomixia (copulation in defiance of Themis).143 But thereafter too it
operates in the world of all human and divine communities, as the presence
of an Order, and the power of this Order is attested by a spontaneous mode
of behaviour, Aidos by name, which is a primitive phenomenon of all
humanity.

In Latin ‘shame’, or pudor, occurs with almost the same meaning as religio.144
But a connection between the bodily and the spiritual at the highest level is
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 119

also indicated by the Roman pietas, a phenomenon related to the Greek

aidos.14° Pietas is closely related to religio and is translated by the Greek
writers sometimes as eusebeia and sometimes as eulabeia.lie Cicero and
Christian writers use the word synonymously with religio.147 Pietas has
often been discussed in the literature of Roman religion as a peculiarly
Roman concept, but its peculiarity was not understood. Scholars contented
themselves with noting that pietas betokened an attitude of mind which
showed itself in the mutual relations of parents and children, and in which,
so they emphasised, a sense of duty, or a zeal for duty, was uppermost.148
It was also stressed that pietas was Vergil’s word for religio.149 In this way
the particular characteristic of pietas was overlooked.
We can get an idea of how the Romans thought about this phenomenon
from the legend of the temple which was erected in Rome to the goddess
Pietas. On the site of this temple, so it was related, a mother had once been
imprisoned and had been kept alive by the milk of her own daughter’s
breast.150 The story may have been adapted from a Greek original,151 though
this is by no means certain. But it would have been pointless, had it not
represented pietas in the ideal form in which it appeared to the Romans.
The special thing which here stands out is something bodily and spiritual
at the same time. Pietas here shows itself as a form of absolute reciprocity
in nature, a completely closed circle of giving and receiving. In some
variants of the story the mother’s place is taken by the father.152 But the
example thus revered is always this same natural circle of reciprocity.
While aidos presupposes that one can also stand outside it, pietas as a matter
of course unites those who give nourishment with those who in uninterrupted
thankfulness return it, unites the sources of life with its creatures from which
its sources receive life. The pii and piae are completely enclosed in this
circle.
By comparison with the specifically Roman phenomenon, the specifi¬
cally Greek characteristics of the Hecuba scene now become clearer. In
order to explain the gesture and speech of Hecuba in Roman terms we
should have to say that the mother was appealing to the son’s pietas. In
Greek terms she appeals to his aidos. As the mother’s breast is made visible,
the invisible Order of one whole aspect of the world shines through, and its
showing is intended to call to the son’s mind another vision, the vision of a
hostility to that Order of the world, which he is bound to feel intolerable.
120 Two Styles of Religious Experience

Aidos is worship founded on a convincing vision, yet it does presuppose the

possibility of a revolt against it, a revolt against the visible world no less
than against the invisible Order, for godlessness, or disrespect for themis,
is also a possibility in the world of men.
If none the less in Hector the aidos before the maternal world is not
aroused, it is not because he revolts against this world Order. There stands
before him a still mightier vision which arouses in him another aidos. To
withdraw now would be a violation of a world whose Order has made him
the first among the Trojans, the world, that is to say, of manhood and
responsibility whose symbol the living hero himself is. It is the vision of
himself in an unheroic situation which holds him back. T should be shamed
before the Trojan men and women’—so his words must be translated.
What he actually, says however, reads more exactly ‘I am shamed before
the Trojan men and women’, and he has said the same thing earlier on,
when he takes leave of his wife.153 The experience of a vision or show as
passive as that presupposed by aidos requires also spectators, a viewing from
outside, that is, of which the active agents and performers in this context are
the people who view.
The persons or things before which aidos is felt appear as symbols. They
indicate Orders seen only by the mind’s eye. Not only the mother’s breast
and the marriage bed, but also the hero who so to speak is shamed before
his own ideal image, and the Trojan men and women who physically
represent that Order at the head of which the hero stands, they all are
symbols. A symbolically transparent world like this which corresponds to
aidos is characteristic of the specifically Greek rehgiosity. Only the older
generation of gods was called by Hesiod ‘the aidos-provoking race of gods’
—evidently because those of them who had not been thrown down into
Tartarus were even more closely connected with the realm of Themis than
the Olympian deities who gathered around Zeus and his Nomos. In addition
to Themis there was another of the primeval deities, Night, before whom
Zeus himself felt that kind of respect for which the Greek word is hazesthai.
Hesiod mentions one more of these primeval deities, one who is closely
connected with Aidos and co-operates with her. This was Nemesis. She
will help us to understand the situation which we have come to know as
the Aidos situation and which may be considered as the key situation of
Greek religious experience.
 Two Styles of Religious Experience 121

The Trojan men and women represent for Hector not only the unviolated
world Order which makes him a hero. There lurks in them, so to speak,
concealed but watchful, revenge for the violation of that Order. For every
Order which is violated gives place only to another—the Order of Revenge.
The personification of this last inviolable Order is Nemesis. She appears
in the utterance of men. ‘Nemesis will come upon me from men’, says
Telemachus on one occasion.154 But neither men nor gods here have any
choice. Neither can help making out of the timeless reality of Nemesis,
which can never be confounded with any other, a reality for the soul. They
do so by fulfilling and uttering nemesis—nemesan, nemesasthai, nemesizesthai.155
All these verbs are linguistically and logically later than the substantive.156
But the question whether the linguistic and spiritual figure from which they
all derive was a deity or a concept has no more significance than it had in
the case of Themis. Hesiod says without internal contradiction all there is
to be said about the goddess.157 Nemesis is called a daughter of Night, the
cause of much sorrow to men. But whenever her primeval form fails to
take on reality in men’s souls and cannot express itself, Nemesis, like Aidos,
has already left the earth, she is no longer there. She none the less inhabits
the form of a goddess, a timeless aspect of the universe through which its
Orders revenge themselves, an aspect moreover rich in mythological
possibilities.158
The ‘man of Aidos’—let us so call the one who finds himself in the
situation here described—imposes correct behaviour on the show of spiritual
Orders, a vision of mythological Forms which shine through everywhere,
and Nemesis imposes such behaviour on him. In one epic fragment fear is
named actually as a source of Aidos.159 Yet where in Homer they appear
united with one another,160 dedienai, ‘to be afraid’, always a special kind of
fear, is an aspect of aideisthai, for it too is supported by Nemesis. The
Nemesis hanging over the man of Aidos also comes from the world of
spiritual Orders, even though human spectators are its agents. A man’s
own aidos encounters the nemesis which ‘comes from men’. But just as these
men are not themselves the real avengers, neither are they the real spectators
in a world in which the man of Aidos is confronted by primeval forms or
aspects of the world. Psychologically, Aidos presupposes merely spectators,
no matter whether men or gods. If at the same time she is correlated with a
symbolically transparent world, we are bound to ask what eye it is which
122 Two Styles of Religious Experience

looks upon the man of Aidos when he alone confronts this world. It is
true that in Homer the sun is named as the one who sees and hears every¬
thing.161 He too is a great deity, in Homer doubly present, both in his
visible appearance as Helios and in his spiritual personification as Apollo.162
There is, however, also mentioned by Homer, a more universal, comprehen¬
sive term for the seeing or viewing that is incessantly directed at mankind.
This term is expressly correlated with aidos. It is the the on opis, the eye of
the gods. Thus it is called in the Iliad,163 and in the Odyssey it is said of
Hercules: ‘Neither before the eye of the gods nor before the table did he
feel shame. . . ,’164 The table here stands for, is the symbol of, hospitality.
The eye of divine spectators rests on men. It is a pure looking-on, and
though the lightning flash of Nemesis can dart out of it, it remains essentially
nothing but viewing. Opis means no more and no less than that activity
which is correlated in sense to the passivity of the viewed. And yet funda¬
mentally it too is passive, for it is pure receiving.
Thus in the phenomenon of Aidos a key situation of Greek rehgious
experience is formed by the union of corresponding active and passive
elements, seer and vision, viewer and viewed, a watched and watchful
world. And in this we find that ‘to see’ means also ‘to see through’,
‘physical’ means also ‘mental’, and ‘nature’ means also an artificial ‘norm’.
The Style of this experience is preserved in unity. The words of Goethe’s
Lynkeus are here insufficient to characterise what is specifically Greek.
The Hellene is not only ‘born to see, appointed to view’, he stands there to
be viewed. He mirrors a world which looks upon him with open, intelligent
eyes—with the eyes of Zeus and Themis, of all gods and goddesses both old
and new of which mythology relates.
THE CULTS OF DIONYSUS
45 The Theatre of Dionysus, Athens: view of the auditorium in its present form, yd century A.D.
4Ó Tragic mask with heard,
bronze, found recently in a
sewer at Piraeus.
Piraeus Museum

47 Satyr mask from Samos;

late 6th century B.C.
British Museum
48 The Theatre of Dionysus; altar from the sanctuary of the god, decorated with masks of Silenus
49 Statuette oj a comic actor, 50 Comic actor standing, portraying 51 Satyric actor, representing Papposilenus
seated; probably from Piraeus. a slave with a baby. Found in with Dionysus; from Melos.
Terracotta, mid~4th century B.C. Attica. Terracotta, mid~4th Terracotta, mid~4th
British Museum century B.C. British Museum century B.C. British Museum

52 Head of Dionysus. From 53 Dionysus reclining, from 54 Comic actor in role of young

Temple of Dionysus, at Tarentum. Temple of Dionysus, at Tarentum. woman; probably found in

Terracotta, early 3th century B.C. Terracotta, early 3th century B.C. Athens. Terracotta, mid~4th
British Museum British Museum century B.C. British Museum
eg

55 Dionysus Protome, from Boeotia. Terracotta. 390-350 B.C. British Museum

56 Head of the young Dionysus; a late Hellenistic carving, found near Rome. British Museum
57 Hermes with the little Dionysus on his arm. Statue by Praxiteles, 330-320 B.C.
from the Heraion, Olympia. Olympia Museum
 59 Silenus plays the double flute before Dionysus. Detail from a vase by the Brygos painter,
c. 460 B.C.,from Vulci. Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich

58 Religious ceremony and orgiastic dance before Dionysus

as Hades, and the Queen of Hades. A vase painting by
Polygnotos. From Tomb 128 in the Valle Trebba,
Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
 6i Dionysus with maenads and satyrs. Vase from Videi by the Kleophrades painter,
c. 500 B.C. Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich

60 Satyr and maenad, a vase painting by the Altamura

painter from Tomb 231 in the Valle Trebba, Spina,
c. 460 B.C. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
62 Procession of Dionysus. Detail of a vase by the Niobid painter, from Tomb 313 in the
Valle Trebba, Spina. Mid-jth century B.C. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
 vvw

" -
'
63 Orgiastic dance of the girls (detail from the vase in plate 58)

\
 *MMWXi!A v yiwwvTvrv

64 Dionysus feast with Lenae (priestesses of Dionysus) before the idol of the god, by the
Dinos painter. Found in Nocera. Archaeological Museum, Naples
Ó5 Dionysus with Phyìax comedy, a vase painting by Astaeas of Paestum, found in Lipari.
Lipari Museum
 IP

66 Dionysus at sea, from Vulci, vase painting by Exekias, c. 530 B.C. Munich Museum
 CHAPTER IV

Peaks of Greek and Roman

Religious Experience
I

THEORIA

lx is not ‘theory’ as understood by current usage to which we now

turn our attention. Our consideration of sehas and aidos has confirmed us in
our view that these two concepts together were about equivalent to the
Latin religioX5 Their religious significance is seen most unmistakably in
those passages of the Homeric poems where they do not refer to appearing
deities or to events at divine worship, in the cult. Examples of their purely
religious use, where they do refer to such happenings, are to be found notably
in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
The appearance of the goddess in her unveiled person has an effect on
Queen Metaneira which is described in the following words: ‘She was
seized by aidos and sebas and pale fear.’166 The poet describes the sacred
acts which the goddess has introduced in Eleusis with the word semnos—
which is an epithet also of the dread underworld goddesses, the Erinyes,
on whom no man may look, and has a common root with sebas. He does
not speak of these holy acts and gives as reason for his silence—according to
the most probable reading—a sebas of the gods so great as actually to rob him
of speech.167 To this great awe there corresponded in Eleusis a spectacle,
a vision. This vision is only referred to by the poet, never described, and in
such references all the resources of language are used to express one thing:
that it was really, and not merely in a metaphorical sense, a vision.168
This visual experience which in its concreteness surpassed any mental
vision and which was offered to initiates by the mysteries of Eleusis gave
them a special standing in the ancient religion, transcending the normal
G
142 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

festal atmosphere of the other cults. For this festal atmosphere could indeed
be described as normal in comparison with the great festival of Eleusis—
called the ‘Mysteries’—which laid claim to be quite out of the ordinary.
The Eleusinian mysteries show the direction taken by Greek religiosity
but do not belong in this general survey.169 The Hymn to Demeter, though
still in epic style, marks the transition to Eleusis, while the Homeric epics
themselves do not move out of that atmosphere in which the essence of
Greek religiosity, in its normal classical form, manifests itself, and which the
epics no doubt helped most powerfully to create. This atmosphere is a
distinct phenomenon of Greek Existence, a specifically Greek mode of
appearance of the festive quality. It is for us an immediate demonstration
of the way in which with the Greeks vision and festivity were essentially
connected with one another and together constituted the highest religious
and spiritual revelation.
The appearance of the gods in the Iliad and Odyssey is not an element
of the cult. It is ‘something that happens’, in an atmosphere which is no
less festive than that of the cult. For poetry, insofar as it is true and genuine
art and really has the creative quality, is itself festal. The history of Greek
poetic art shows what are at most variations and changes in the scope of that
festal atmosphere with which ancient poetic writing is always surrounded,
never the complete disappearance of the festive quality. Often indeed it is
no more than a fleeting attitude of festivity which the poet assumes on a
social occasion. That is not the case with Homer, who is festive through
and through. The age of the great Greek festival compositions—the creation
and artistic performance of festival cycles in the archaic and classical period
—includes poetry in its festival arrangements as a pre-eminently festive
phenomenon. Examples are the recitals of Homeric poems at the Pana-
thenaic Festival, the dramatic performances at Dionysus festivals, and so on.
In Hellenistic times this wide range was somewhat narrowed but the festive
quality did not change. Alexandrine poetry withdrew into smaller circles,
which even so were often still circles about the ruler, and the practice of the
poetic art itself became an intimate festival.
Already in the age portrayed by Homer, poetry was a festival and had
all the festival’s characteristic marks, as a special way of human life. Achilles
in the Iliad escapes with his worries into the atmosphere of poetry as though
into another more festive world. There he can occupy himself with the
 Theoria 143
vision of transfigured forms and events, exalted to timeless heights, while
the everyday battle rages around him.170 A banquet anywhere in the
world has festive quality but alone it is not yet a festival. In the Odyssey
its natural festivity needs the art of the singers Phemios and Demodokos
to give it the form of a real feast, accompanied with dance and song. The
relationship of Homeric poetry to the world it portrays is to be under¬
stood in general as nothing more than that of a more festive world to a less
festive.
The appearance of the gods in person befits a more festive world. It
is the privilege and consequence of the festive atmosphere generated by
poetry, and in characteristically Greek fashion signifies a complete ‘trans¬
parency’, a transparency through which eternal forms are seen. For Homer
appearances of the gods are possible, yet he does not believe that such
appearances are the same for everyone. What he asks for is perfect clarity.
Thus Hera in the Iliad says,171 ‘Hard is it to see the gods in perfect clarity’.
Or in the Odyssey, ‘For not to everyone do the gods appear in perfect
clarity’.172 Diomedes for this purpose must have the mist withdrawn
entirely from his eyes.173 Achilles and Diomedes both recognise the gods.
This is the privilege and consequence of a special half-divine form of being,
the heroic form. But it is also the privilege and consequence of the poetic
art. Where the victim of events can detect nothing more precise than the
daimon, that face of the divine which manifests itself in human destiny, or a
divine action in general, the poet in virtue of his special faculty and his
familiarity with the religious tradition can name the particular divine figure
which stands in the background. This could be laid down as a law of
Homer’s narrative art.174
For all that, everything brought about by the gods in Homer happens
quite naturally.175 A great deal of an earlier, less transparent mythology
was excluded by Homer from his poetic writing. His special religiosity
consists in this, that he draws on wholly transparent natural sources for his
inventions but everywhere recognises the divine in what is natural. All his
divine figures can be followed back to their ultimate source in the structure
of the world. It is moreover a mark of his characteristically Greek religiosity
that he always views the divine as a definite figure. The difference between
the knowledge of which ordinary mortals are capable and that realised by
the poet is the difference between a murky vision of everyday and the clear
144 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

vision of a festival. The festal world of Homer rests on a special knowledge

in the poet, a knowing which is a state of being exactly corresponding to the
transparency of the world. The transparency of the world allows the divine
figures of nature to shine through for the poet, as for festive man generally.
The knowledge attained by festive man, which derives from the mythologi¬
cal tradition but also animates the myth from personal experience, is the
vision of divine forms shining through. The first realisation of Greek
religion with which we can make historical contact was the Homeric world
of gods, and this world was also definitive in prescribing for future ages the
objective content of Greek religion. This content was neither changed nor
added to substantially by later ages. The corresponding realisation of Greek
religiosity—considered as a subjective experience—can be paraphrased as a
special kind of vision, the visionary knowledge attained by festive man.
We have characterised the Style of Greek religious experience by this,
that it assumes as its key situation a reciprocal, active and passive, vision,
a spectacle in which men are both viewers and viewed. We have empha¬
sised that ‘viewing’ or ‘looking’ here means also ‘looking through’, that
‘physical’ means also ‘mental’. We have now made the additional point that
it is the poet in whose keeping is the ‘visionary knowledge of festive man’,
and in so saying we may over-simplify but we certainly do not fabricate.
On the contrary, we thereby grasp the structure of a phenomenon which
the Greeks themselves described in one word. In its subjective aspect they
called it ‘knowing’ (eidenai), in its objective aspect by a word of the same
root, ‘form’ (eidos).176 The root meaning is that of‘seeing’, ‘catching sight
of’, and what we have here is not just etymology, but an essential truth in
the derivation of two words either of which on its own describes the same
phenomenon. Although it means ‘knowing’ eidenai in its sound-form
expresses a sense of seeing—it ‘sounds it’.177 Eidos similarly expresses know¬
ing. Less direct evidence of the same phenomenon is to be found in the
fact that though Homer uses another verb for ‘know’ he is fond of combining
it with verbs of‘seeing’,178 or that for Socrates and Plato, when they define
pure knowledge as phronesis, this knowledge always has for its object some¬
thing seen—the idea as a standard form.179 For the Greeks the most self-
evident object both of seeing and of knowing is the form, an object so self-
evident that it finds immediate expression in the language, in ‘sound’. Verb
and object eidenai and eidos form a circle which cannot be broken without a
 Theoria 145

destruction of Style, a unity each half of which defines the other. This circle
is not confined to a single word-group. Knowing for the Greeks, whatever
word they use for it, is based primarily on seeing and includes a ‘viewing’.
The Greek phenomenon eidenai would have to be paraphrased in every
European language of today as ‘seeing knowledge’, simply because for the
Greeks seeing was included in knowing.
Tliis peculiarity of the phenomenon of knowledge is no mere primitive
or elementary stage in the history of Greek thought, but something speci¬
fically Greek which was still valid at least for Aristotle. For it is not a
matter merely of phraseology. Linguistically the fact that the verb eidenai
is formed from the perfect stem must be understood as determining the
result of an act of looking or seeing. For this result need not be a vision, to
the exclusion of all other possibilities, but is so identified by the verb. The
close connection between seeing and knowing long continued to characterise
the history of Greek thought. The Greek logician and ‘ontologisf, a man
of ‘knowledge’ in the most intimate sense of the word, always remained a
man of ‘vision’. Aristotle in the introductory words of his Metaphysics,
his theory of being, praises the joy of seeing and viewing (to horan), which
may be entirely lacking in practical utility, but offers a better basis for
knowledge than all other forms of perception.180 The connection between
horan and eidenai never ceased to assert itself either in the consciousness of
Greek philosophers or in Greek linguistic usage.181 Indeed, the joy in real,
sensual seeing is even more evident with Aristotle than with Plato. Un¬
doubtedly the latter is no less a man of vision than his pupil or than Homer
himself.182 But Plato and his teacher Socrates had more to say about the
transcendental viewing which has for object the transcendental form than
about the seeing of the senses.
The inseparable comiection of knowing and seeing not only had the
consequence that the Greeks at once ‘saw’ as ‘form’ everything that they
‘knew’, but another consequence as well. The known was for them as
actual and consequently as certain, indeed as efficacious, as anything which
is immediately and clearly seen. For Plato a known and therefore also seen
world could actually excel in brilliance the world which was merely seen.
And this was probably the case also with Socrates, for whom this world
had ceased to offer much ground for true knowledge, having virtually
lost its Homeric transparency to divine forms and therewith its brilhance.
146 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

In place of the world touched by the radiance of the divine there remained
for the philosophers of the post-classical period, of whom Socrates was
the first, a world merely visible. A world which was known and radiant,
the Homeric and early classical world, had turned into one which was
merely seen. It may have been full of beauty, but it was also full of im¬
permanence.
Greek ‘knowing’ means a viewing which, directed at the visible world,
encounters something which is timeless and to that extent also eternal,
forms which are invisible and can yet become objects of a vision. When
these forms at the back of the visible world retire still further into that
background, they draw after them that quality which in the eye of the
beholder clings to whatever is perfectly clear and actual—we have called
it ‘radiance’, by a sensual word which comes nearest to the divine in the
domain of Greek religion. Without that festive radiance this world of
ours, thus left behind, must necessarily pale in all its beauty—as if it were
no longer known at all. But so long as this did not happen, this world
together with its beauty and the radiance of its eternal forms was in the Greek
fashion known. This being known did not necessarily involve also being
seen, but it did involve, besides the radiance, what I will call efficacy. By
this 1 mean not the practical effects of divine working but an all-pervading
effective power. Through the pecuharly Greek phenomenon of knowledge
here discussed this efficacy made itself just as strongly felt as the indescribable
radiance which in Greek religion appears distributed over the world in
eternal forms.
Anyone who has tried to conceive of Greek religion without this
radiance—the radiance of divine forms which were known even when they
did not make a bodily appearance—has had to find a special explanation for
the efficacy of the gods and has had to look for it outside Greek Existence
and its Style. It is a peculiarity of this Existence that in it the ‘known’ is also
‘effective’, and that the converse of this relationship is also true—whatever
has an effect upon a living being is conceived as something objectively
known there. It forms a world domain independent of any knower,
which is quite simply known by any being upon whom it has an effect.183
He does not act like one possessed of powers or spirits, he ‘knows’. When
Achilles in the Iliad is savage as a lion, he ‘knows like a lion savage things’.
The Cyclops in the Odyssey ‘knew things against the law of nature’ when
 Theoria 147

he devoured men. Friends are ‘knowing of friendly things towards one

another’. This is far removed from any philosophy, but it does explain a
peculiarity of Socratic thought. By reason of this Greek experience Socrates
looked for the motives of moral decision not in the will but in knowledge.
And Aristotle too remains within the Greek Style when he recognises the
moral value of this sort of knowing and regards it as a special category of
knowledge.184 To know means, as a matter of course, to act accordingly.
Such is the power of the known.
What we have here is not some kind of one-sided approach to the
world, a form of ‘intellectualism’, for instance, but the fundamental phen¬
omenon of Greek Existence, needing no further amplification. It is, to
speak metaphorically, round and whole, as Being was for Parmenides.
That which is acknowledged and understood, the seen-and-known, is an
efficacious power. It can form the basis of genuine rehgious experiences and
warm and living acts of will. That is why the Greeks themselves, when they
think about it from a certain distance, define their piety as episteme,
‘science’.185 This definition of piety as the ‘science’ of divine worship,
assumes the Socratic and Platonic valuation of episteme. Thus it does not
imply any limitation of piety to an observance of empty forms but rather
allowed the highest possible extension of its meaning, to that true know¬
ledge which relates to the eternal and of which only the gods are really
capable. A godless man ‘knows what is godless’, a pious man ‘knows
what is divine’—so it must be expressed in this Style—and must needs act
accordingly, taking part in the divine. The one who possesses this know¬
ledge in the highest degree is himself divine, is God, is Zeus. Not only
Socrates and Plato lived in this rehgious experience, for so we must call it,
since the fundamentally theological strain in Greek philosophy would make
it hard to distinguish here between ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ 186—but
Aristotle too, as his Metaphysics testifies.187 The argument which he there
develops at such length corresponds to the Homeric use of the verb eidenai,
of which examples have been given.
With their concept of a divine knowledge which really belongs only
to one God, to the highest God indeed, the philosophers do not part com¬
pany with Homer. They do not step outside the bounds of Greek Style as
it is already established in Homer. In Greek the occurrence of knowledge
that sees can be formulated as follows: it is God when such a thing occurs.188
148 Peaks oj Greek and Roman Religious Experience

A divine knowledge which may also become effective in human life or

which the philosopher wants to be so belongs to the structure of the Greek
phenomenon ‘ knowing ’ as a complement of human knowledge. For human
knowledge is something passive, it means that we are subject to an ‘efficacy’,
subordinate to the power of knowledge, and act accordingly. The world
is known, so to speak independent of man, but dependent on that higher
knowledge which at the same time exerts an efficacy, has power, and, as we
must add, ‘sees’ the result. This phenomenon of higher knowledge, an
extension of eidenai, is noein. It has apparently freed itself altogether from
seeing.
And yet this verb too is connected by Homer with the eyes, as their
activity, and used with the meaning ‘to notice with the eyes’.189 Hesiod
mentions the eye of Zeus when he speaks of his seeing and noein.190 More¬
over noein, just as much as eidenai, perhaps even more so, can mean the
disposition, the mentality, the direction in which one is driven by a higher
power. This is proved by the mythological names ending in -noos or -noe,
like Hipponoos or Hipponoe, ‘being driven by a horse’s nature’. The
fundamental meaning of noein seems from the beginning to have contained
more than just ‘getting to know’ in the sense of‘comprehending, learning
by eye or ear, perceiving’. With this word in particular it is not etymology
that is decisive, for nothing ‘sounds’ in it except that higher, more powerful
thing which nous was for the Greeks.191 By noein the object of perception
is apprehended from that quarter which escapes the organs of sense, but
which can yet be apprehended by the vehicle of noein, by the nous.192
Nous directs itself towards the world in noein just as the eyes do in seeing.
Yet the eyes merely take in sense-impressions, just as eidenai too is merely
seeing-and-acting-accordingly. The Nous is more than the eye of gods and
men, noein is more than ‘seeing knowledge’.
This ‘more’ shows itself first of all in the fact that nous—although it
seems to exist only in noein and to have no other hold anywhere else—has
an extraordinary reality and consequently also divinity for the Greeks. It
comes easier to them to ascribe nous and noein to a god than to a man, and
easiest of all to the highest god. Besides this, noein is movable. The nous
is able at will to reflect something which lies far away, to be where a far
traveller once was and would like to be again.193 It can transport itself
like a god over all distances and obstacles. And finally, as we have already
 Theoria 149

said, this divine knowledge, without real activity or a special act of will,
exercises ‘efficacy’, has power, and ‘sees’ the result. Indeed noein in itself
means an ‘insight’ which is immediately realised in action. The element of
willing can here be left completely out of account.
There are plenty of examples in Homer. A continually recurring phrase
is, ‘the goddess thought otherwise’ 194—no need to add that she immediately
translated her thought into action. That is a matter of course. In Book XVI
of the Iliad Patroclus might perhaps still withdraw even after the killing of
Sarpedon and so save himself. But—nothing comes of it. The reason is so
given: ‘The Nous of Zeus is more powerful than that of men’.195 We too
have an immediate understanding of this sentence, although in Christian
terms we are accustomed to express ourselves differently and to say, ‘God
willed it otherwise’. Zeus did indeed will it, since Patroclus had killed his
son. Thetis speaks expressly of the ‘will of the gods,196 not in a wise speech,
however, but in a reproachful one. The word she uses indicates something
arbitrary, which can also come from passion or wilfulness.197 Men are
specially fond of blaming the ‘whim’ of the gods.198 In so doing they show
their ignorance. In reality—and this is expressed without additions or
explanations by the poet’s language—what here hovers over men as the
highest thing is not an absolute divine will but a mighty nous. The words
used do not even go so far as to say that an ‘effect’ streams forth from this
nous. It is more like a mirror which reflects the deeds of men together
with their results. To name it is to name a higher and broader insight.
In place of nous mention may be made of a ‘plan’ or ‘resolve’ of Zeus.199
Or the poet may also tell of decrees of Zeus—as for instance at the beginning
of Book II of the Ihad—which punish some human presumption. What
is here presupposed is his Nous. Nothing can escape this Nous, for it is
‘closely wrought’—too opaque for anything to slip through.200 No other
god has power to avoid the nous of Zeus by guile, still less to make it without
effect.201 The noein of Zeus means a perfect intellectual reflection of that
which exists and must happen as a consequence of what exists. Zeus,
however, can still be restrained from noein. His nous can, like the eyes,
be turned off by another powerful reality of the world, like sleep or love in
Book XIV of the Iliad,202 or an incomprehensible bedazzlement.203 For
Zeus is not only his Nous. He has another part to play in the world than
merely noein, which is all that concerns us here.
150 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

In the Greek sense Existence is seeing and. being-seen, or more exactly,

knowing and being-known, or most exactly of all, being and being-known.
It is noein which realises that passive faculty of being by which it can be
known. Thus we can paraphrase with deliberately simplifying words and
the fewest possible strokes of the pen what for the Greeks was a fact of their
Existence and found immediate expression in their language. In such an
Existence and such a language the philosopher can go further and say: ‘For
noein and being are one and the same thing’.204 It is extremely difficult
here to insert a word from another language in place of noein. Parmenides
does not content himself with what Homer knew about the noein of Zeus,
that it is ‘opaque’, so that it absorbs being like a mirror and is not identical
with it, and that it can be turned off. It is open to question which of the
two was wiser, the poet or the philosopher. The latter speaks of noein in a
new way, but he is still speaking of the same thing as Homer, and still
speaking of that form of knowledge which in the Homeric religion was
peculiar to the highest god.
Such higher knowledge does not mean that we have moved away from
that Vision—the ‘eyes of the gods’—in which the man of aidos is placed by
Homer. So far we have only laid bare that aspect of noein according to
which, in a manner not capable of further analysis, it includes within its
meaning also the fact that a decision has been taken and carried out. This
could not be further explained but simply had to be accepted as an essential
expression of the Greek way of thinking. But in the same way, too, noein
also included what we have discussed as Vision. One could call it pure
contemplation, if it were not connected, in the manner just described, with
Being, as this is continually manifest in human affairs. Provided we do not
forget this, we may speak of a contemplative Zeus in the Iliad. The Greek
law of Style demands an onlooker, and Zeus as he is portrayed by Homer
is tireless at looking on.
The Homeric Zeus, whose Nous rules the world, and who can therefore
not be stamped as a deus otiosus, an ‘idle god’ such as the anthropologists
have found among archaic peooles of today—Zeus is the spectator who
completes the picture of the world as it appears to Greek religious experience.
For the Greeks the standpoint of the spectator is in itself divine. To adopt
this standpoint means for them the divine fulfilment of existence. Their
philosophers aspire to it 205 and hope to be able to reach this fulfilment.
 Theoria 151

The reason for their hope lies embedded in the form of Greek religious
experience, and it had two points of highest intensity, or ‘peaks’. The
first of these was seeing the gods face to face. When such a vision occurred,
the Greek word theos would have to be uttered in its exact predicative sense,
for which the Latin ecce deus would be an equivalent.206 The second peak
experience was to see like the gods. Anyone having such a vision could with
the same right exclaim ‘theos!’, so that we here have what are really two
different ways of expressing the same experience. These moments of
intensity were not merely postulated for men by the Greeks but were reached
as a matter of historical fact, on the one hand by the religious Greek, on
the other by the Greek philosopher. The convergence of the two approaches
once more finds expression in the language. Philosophy, to denote the peak
reached by the philosophical approach, borrowed a word from the religious
sphere, where it denoted something well-known and concrete. The word
was theoria, the name by which both these peaks of Greek religious life were
called.
‘Theory’ has in all modern languages a sound different from that which
it once had for the Greek philosophers, though it is they who were responsible
for its change of meaning, in the direction of abstract thought. For the
Greeks theoria had a double sound of ‘looking’ or ‘viewing’, from thea,
‘spectacle’, and horan ‘to see’. The word, compounded of these two elements
expresses a religious love of spectacle which was peculiar to the Greeks.
The looking which is here meant is not ‘looking through’, it referred not to
the transparency of the medium but to the primary, immediate object of
vision—the forms of the gods. The Greek language of today still has no
other word for paganism but the name the Christians gave it, eidololatria
‘service of idols’. By this contemptuous simplification the ancient Christians
hit on a characteristic of Greek life in its dealings with the divine. Greek
religion is characterised by the worship of the visible appearances of the
gods, above all by their appearance in human shape. It was served by the
portraits of the gods and by an art which succeeded in giving these portraits
an ever greater degree of liveliness as an enticement to worship. The word
‘enticement’ is here apt, for the worship was certainly no less directed to
the radiance which streams out from a perfect physical appearance than to
the god of whom the cult portrait was a bodily representation.
The verb theorem which corresponded to the substantive theoria can be
152 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

compared both in its fundamental meaning and in its classical and post-
classical use with the Latin visitare—from video—which has the sense of
heightened seeing and looking and corresponds originally to the institution of
the theoros,207 These official festival ‘visitors’ or envoys combined in their
office the two outstanding characteristics of Greek religiosity, the festive
quality and the standpoint of the onlooker. The festival embassy itself was
called theoria and was sent out by a State on a ‘visit of inspection’, or ‘spec-
tatorship’—to some distant place where a deity had once appeared to men
and where the occasion was now celebrated with a festival. Apollo himself,
who visits his people from a distance, is in this capacity called theorios and
thearios.208 A mere delight in show-going can become a ceremonial visit
to a deity, provided only that it is combined with a fleeting prayer. At
the beginning of Plato’s Republic Socrates describes such a visit. Out of
pure curiosity he went down to the Piraeus with his friends to view the
fire of the Thracian goddess, then he prayed to her, and thus returned not
from a mere sight-seeing visit, but from a theoria209
When Aeschylus used the word theoros instead of theates (the ordinary
word for spectator) he meant a greater, more solemn spectacle. The show
in the theatron, the ‘place of looking on’ at the Dionysus festivals, is not
called theoria, because it takes place in your own city. But when the
daughters of Oceanus come as onlookers from a distance to view the
sufferings of Prometheus, they are theoroi.210 It is only with the younger
Ionians, like Herodotus and Democritus, that theorem and theoria seem to
have lost their colour, so that no special festive quality clings to them any
longer.211 With the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus theorem refers to a
sacred thing, to Number.212 Plato’s use of the word is no less festal.213
And finally there is Aristotle, who compares the theoria of the philosopher
not just with any vision or show, but with that of Olympia, to which
actual embassies, theoriai, were sent out, and with that of the Dionysus
festivals.
Independently of any relation to a cult, Aristotle finds the divine element
in theoria. He connects the experience of theorem, of the festively enhanced
show, with the divine in man, the nous. He is quite conscious of the fact
that by praising the philosophic life, the bios theoretikos, he is showing man
the way to godliness.214 They should try to be hke the immortals—
athanatizein. In this way he postulates, as a peak of Greek religious experi-
 Theoria 153

enee, something which can be reached only by philosophy. But when

Aristotle wants to paraphrase this possibility of the philosophic life more
exactly, he has only two analogies at his disposal, one negative and one
positive. Negatively he contrasts the bios theoretikos with the bios praktikos,
that form of life which is defined by utility.215 On a blessed isle, where we
have nothing else to do, this one good would still be left to us, theoria. Praxis
is useful, theoria is good. Anyone may here perceive the contrast between
the things of everyday and the festal things. Positively, we have the
analogy of the festive show, at Olympia or in the theatre.
What Aristotle does not need to say is that this show, at the great
Hellenic and Athenian festivals, has something divine about it. As a Greek
he assumed this, though a non-Greek would hardly have recognised it.
We on the other hand identified the structure of the Homeric festal world
by this point, that it is a theatron, a show place for divine onlookers. And so
we understand that in a Greek festival this situation of the thea, the spectacle,
repeats itself. The participants are athletes, successors of the Homeric
heroes, who held their competitions at the funeral games, or actors—in
Tragedy performers of the heroes’ parts. To such a festive show gods and
men come festally, come as theoroi.
In the spectacle of the heroic competition, a theoria which is on the
one hand determined by the aidos of those looked on at and is on the other
a sebas for the participants, here too we encounter a peak of Greek religious
experience. Not everything important has thus been said about it, yet the
evident facts of Greek history, at least, have been put in the foreground of
our study of Greek religion. If we do wish to characterise the Style of
Greek rehgion by the experience which dominated it, we may call it the
Religion of Show.
So long as the world constitutes for the Greeks a bodily and spiritual
unity, the self-evident objects of the Greek Show are Forms. Ideal Forms
on which the mind’s eye is bent, Forms colourful and plastic in which the
eyes of all Greeks delight. By once more finding the Hellenic Festal Show
in this world and no longer in another world where Socrates and Plato had
sought it Aristotle succeeded in restoring for later ages an originally unified
world. Greek eyes remain religious even when the world has ceased to
be transparent for them and when humility and resignation have taken the
place of the self-assured archaic life. Menander,216 the poet whose view of
154 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

men was touched with the laughter of the gods, makes one of his heroes
r .217
say:
‘The man that 1
Call happy, Parmenon, is one who takes
A look at what is glorious in this world
And quickly then returns from whence he came.
For these, the sun which shines for all, the stars,
The march of clouds, the sea, the gleam of fire,
You’ll still see though you live to be a hundred,
And if you live no longer than a year
There’s nothing nobler you can see than these’.

RELIGIO

A simplification such as ‘religion of show’ only has sense it it really seizes

what is essential in a Style. If we now turn to Roman rehgion and first
of all consider it in the form of pietas, there is, in contrast to the Greek
transparency and joy in seeing, a striking impression of something blind.
The kind of circular motion which, as we have seen, the Roman idea of
pietas imposes on the world has no suggestion of transparency about it, and
can keep its internal consistency without the help of mental or physical
vision. Vision implies distance, pietas nearness. The portrait of Aeneas,
in whom Vergil created the ideal form of a man of pietas, exactly confirms
this impression. He carried his father like a small child—his own—on his
shoulder and saved his life, just as the daughter who was the prototype of
pietas saved her mother’s or father’s life with her own milk. The invisible
nearness of his gods surrounds Aeneas and creates about him an opaque
atmosphere in which he moves like a blind man. He must be led—and
is led. He needs signs—and gets them.
This is how the natural extension of pietas shows itself, as a world full of
signs. Signs are not identical with symbols. Symbols in the ancient sense
are abbreviations, epitomes of divine or sacred events.218 They are clear
for anyone who knows the detailed mythological story or ritual procedure
of which they are an abbreviation. Signs on the other hand admit of
 Religio 155

interpretations, often have several meanings, and are always tied to the
moment. Or to put it metaphorically, they are voices of the age. The
continual respect for such a world of signs, unfolding itself in time, is
called religio. It stands in the same relation to pietas as theoria to aidos. For
the Greeks it was natural to define the pious man as ‘the one who has the
gods before his eyes’.219 Cicero, in a context which according to our ideas
is far removed from the religious sphere, describes the ears as ‘religious’.
He speaks of the aures religiosae of the Attic orators.220
As with the Greeks we found, in Aristotle’s use of theoria, a tendency
for two peaks of rehgious experience to merge in one, so with the Romans
we find a similar convergence in the case of religio, and it is Cicero in
particular whom we must consult if we want to learn something of the
essence of Roman religion. This is not because of a chance phrase like
aures religiosae above, though this does express something important about
the original, not solely religious, character of the word. For though
Cicero’s approach is that of a philosopher, not of the simple pious folk, his
religious consciousness speaks out clearly enough in the passage already
quoted from his speech ‘On the Diviners’ Reply’. He talks of this con¬
sciousness, for which the Romans were indebted to the Greeks, in the
Greek fashion. He records an insight such as a Greek philosopher might
have had (perspeximus). The object of tins insight, however, is specifically
Roman—that everything is subject to the rule and directed by the numeri
of the gods. A Greek here instead of numen would have said nous, as we
know that Anaxagoras in fact did say.221 Nous has put everything in
order because it knew about order, and this meant the realisation of order.
Numen is something quite different from Nous. The root meaning of the
word could be paraphrased somewhat as follows : to produce an effect by a
sign of movement (nutus). Man according to Aristotle must be like the
gods because he too is in possession of nous. No man on the other hand
could claim possession of numen, unless perhaps by a special apotheosis of
quite a different kind from that meant by Aristotle. Nor is it Aristotle
from whom Cicero’s way of thinking derives but Academic skepsis, a
line of thought which runs parallel with the Aristotelian, and which means
a mere human ‘looking-on’, a viewing with ‘restraint’ (epoche) and doubt.
Here is the convergence with religio.
In the third book of his work ‘ On the nature of the gods ’ (De Natura
156 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

Deorum), Cicero chose a holder of the highest Roman priestly dignity, the
Pontifex C. Aurelius Cotta, as an upholder of his own philosophical views,
the views of the Academics.222 Like Cicero himself, Cotta was faithful to
the critical spirit of the later Platonic school, the so-called New Academy.
The school was not dominated by any form of strict dogmatism, and the
scepticism which it professed was not of a nihilistic kind. Cotta emphasises
that he is interested not in refutation for its own sake but in verifying the
arguments used by others. In his first book he deals critically with the
Epicureans, and subjects their reasoning to close scrutiny. The Stoics are
his next target. Here he makes a profession of faith which to the modern
reader will appear surprising. He prefaces his sharply critical discussion with
a remarkable passage which shows how much the Romans themselves knew
about the peculiarity of their religio. Any study of Roman religious experi¬
ence could take it as a starting point.
In Cicero’s dialogue the Stoic who speaks before Cotta dehvers a
defence of the Roman State religion by interpreting it in the sense of Stoic
Pantheism, and expects the Roman Pontifex thus far to agree with him.
Cotta does indeed take his position as Pontifex seriously and is determined
to defend the Roman religion unconditionally, in its entirety, and in all
circumstances. But he does not want a defence based on interpretation,
and roundly rejects the assistance of Greek philosophy. When it is a
question of religion, he argues, attention must be paid not to the leaders of
Stoic thought but to men who have held the highest Roman priestly
dignity. He relies particularly on Laelius, who was both an augur and a
philosopher, and on a famous speech in which Laelius defended the ancient
aristocratic forms of the Roman cult. The fact that Laelius had been a
philosopher is important to him because his example shows that the two
attitudes, the augur’s and the philosopher’s, are compatible. Cotta’s own
attitude to the representative of Stoic philosophy who speaks before him is
quite different from the recognition he accords to his priestly predecessors.
The Stoic is required first of all to give reasons for the religion he preaches,
whereas Cotta put faith in his ancestors without asking for reasons.
Modern commentators find a lack of consistency in this willingness of
the philosopher-priest and so also of Cicero himself223 to be sceptical about
everything except their own religion. It was natural to compare such
split thinking with that of an eighteenth-century prince of the Church,
 Religio 157

whose enlightenment and free-ranging philosophy would stop short of the

actual doctrines of the Church. A general similarity cannot be denied,
especially as the Ciceronian age gives evidence of other similar internal
discords. None the less, we must not judge ancient paganism by Christian
standards. The commentator should consider what he himself as a student
of religion would do in the Academician Cotta’s place. He too, when
Roman religion is being discussed, must reject any Greek philosophic
interpretation, especially a Stoic one. And he must put faith in the priestly
authorities cited by Cotta and believe that the gods and ceremonies in their
own ancient Roman world were as they described.
Neither Cotta nor the modern student of religion are here ‘believers’
in the Christian sense. A faith given in this way is not direct experience,
not like Christian faith a victory won with God’s help over doubt. Nor is
it here religious faith in the sense which the word ‘religious’ has for us, but
a substitute for such faith, an adjunct of his other beliefs. Both the academ¬
ician Cotta and the historian of today stand outside that archaic Roman
Existence in which Roman religion was direct experience. Even Cotta is
already too far out on the boundary of that experience, he too must ‘put
faith’ in others who were still inside it. But he can do it easily, sincerely,
and without reservations. His faith in the authority of his ancestors is a
natural adjunct to that religion which as a Roman is still his, but is yet no
longer like a direct experience or even like an unthinking traditional accep¬
tance. His rehgious attitude has one thing in common with that of the
modern student of religion. Both wish to show regard for what is historically
given and therefore respect it.
Cotta, the Pontifex, unintentionally fulfils one of the requirements of
genuine historical research. He respectfully stops short at what is given.
But he has no such respect for the Stoic naturalis ideologia. He overthrows
its proofs of the existence of God, as had already been done by the Greek
masters whom Cicero follows, the great academicians Arcesilaus and Came-
ades. In the Academy it seems to have been an anticipation of a state of
affairs which we encounter later on in the history of Christianity. The
theologia naturalis or rationale is attacked while the traditional religion is left
alone. The only difference is that for the Christian his religion is derived
from supernatural and non-rational guarantees, from a revelation which is
not of this world.
H
t58 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

From what then do we derive the religion of an Arcesilaus, who intro¬

duced the Sceptic ‘restraint’, the epoche, into the Academy at the beginning
of the third century? Greek and Roman religion are founded on this
world and belong with their Style to special forms of Existence, the Greek
and the Roman. One religion is a pre-philosophic, and yet not unintellec¬
tual, fact of Roman history, the other of Greek history. Greek religion
continues to exist as a fact alongside Greek philosophy. Arcesilaus can use
the language of Greek religion to express his belief in a divine, philoso¬
phically unattainable knowledge. He does it by substituting the word nous
for bios in a line of Hesiod 224 : ‘The gods keep the nous always hidden from
men’. A sentence like this is a strong confirmation of what we have already
said about nous. If the gods did not keep it hidden, men would be like
Zeus. But Arcesilaus, like Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, saw that truth is
attainable only for God, not for Man. Truth, according to the Greek
meaning of nous, would be also supreme power. In this humility we see
the kind of ‘vision’ which the New Academy had chosen in opposition to
Aristotle. The world has become opaque. The only possibility of vision
is that kind which in Greek is called skepsis.225
Thus there began a movement of Greek philosophic thought in the
direction of what the Romans meant by religio. Aristotle started out from
man’s faculty for athanatizein, his participation in Nous. Theoria, which
originally implied distance, a mere viewing of the divine forms, emerges
in his individual and yet truly Greek religion as a divine victory over
distance, not ‘viewing’ but ‘touching’, thinganein.226 For any Greek who
did not follow Aristotle but continued to feel this distance as unconquerable
there was still the life of a Socrates to be lived, a tireless search for truth,
with the consciousness that it was still far off. Or when one was no longer
a Socrates believing himself confirmed in his mission by the Delphic god,
there was human skepsis and human epoche, the withholding of judgment
about a world whose divinity had lost its clearness and become invisible.
Gods and Nous even then belonged incontestably to the Style of Greek
Existence.
Carneades, who lived about a hundred years later, has made a con¬
fession of his negative dependence on the Stoa. He is said to have remarked
jokingly,227 ‘If Chrysippus had not existed, I should not exist either.’ Thus
he defined the sense and purpose of the New Academy. Opposition to the
 Religio 159

dogmatism of the Stoics, and in Carneades’ case particularly to the dogma

of providence as it had been preached by Chrysippus, is our reason for the
sceptical turn finally taken by the Platonic school. The attitude of not-
knowing, preached by Plato as a preliminary to his doctrine of the ideas or
eternal prototypes, was not only taught in the New Academy but extended
to the point where even not-knowing could not be claimed with certainty.
In the Stoa, whose founders and best-known teachers came from the East,
the intellectual premises of Greek religion, the predilection for viewing and
seeing, the joy in form and in human appearance, were no longer effective.
The limits of Style within which a ‘knowing vision’ or a ‘seeing knowledge’
of the gods was possible, disappeared. The deity now could be formless,
without contours, and without the intensity of a special event in which to
show itself. The theologia naturalis and rationalis of the Stoa was intended
to replace the real foundations, known and unknown, of the ancient religion.
Its incapacity to do so was proved by the Academics in the spirit and with
the weapons of Greek philosophy, while its claims to do so were rejected by
Cicero on the ground of Roman tradition.
There was one line of philosophic development which came close to
Roman piety, as exemplified by Cotta. The epoche of the Greek Academics,
the withholding of judgment, corresponded to the negative aspect of that
attitude of carefulness and regard which, in its complete form, combining
the negative and positive aspects, was specifically Roman. For this the
Latin language had the word religio. A human attitude like religio can never
be understood from the external causes which may occasion it, but only
from the human being who is capable of it. The words once addressed,
with complete self-confidence, to the supreme head of a dogmatic church,
that the chief thing was the homo religiosus 228 showed great wisdom and a
wonderful knowledge of human nature. The ‘primitive’ Roman, though
we know nothing of him, must certainly have been a homo religiosus if he
was the source of the religion of those priestly Romans on whom Cotta
relied. The homo religiosus need not necessarily be the holder of a priestly
office. It is wrong to think that the Greek and Roman priesthood had no
spiritual basis because it rested neither on a special vocation (ivocatio)229 nor on
special knowledge, but was attainable under certain legal conditions by
every citizen. Its spiritual basis was religio and no less positive for the fact
that everyone—or nearly everyone—had it. On the contrary, it was
i6o Peaks oj Greek and Roman Religious Experience

positive enough and rich enough in content even for the highest members
of the priesthood.
This richness of content in religio, the attention and carefulness exercised
by the Romans in all circumstances, did not necessarily mean a personal
richness of religious feelings proceeding out of a man’s own self. Its content
was formed, not by a theory of the gods, at least not necessarily, but by
the ‘being’ of the gods, which presupposes them and uninterruptedly
affirms them in a natural, unemphatic way, just as pietas does. To ‘be
open’ to the ‘being’ of the gods, not just physically, but also mentally —
so we might paraphrase religio. But it would not sufficiently express its
meaning. For merely to be open to the immense pressure of the gods,
who laid on the Romans the burden of countless minute ceremonies and
rites, would not be the same as the susceptibility which was part of religio.
Such openness might merely mean being full of a uniform, motionless,
undifferentiated substance, like a sponge in still water, or using another
metaphor, a complete deafness. But this is just what we cannot say of the
Romans. Their religio was more than merely being open, it was the com¬
plete opposite of deafness. That is why they regarded it as a special Roman
aptitude, a particular faculty. It was a refined talent for listening and the
continual exercise of this talent. Not a clear festive Show, not the exercise
of a visual or visionary faculty, not prophetic ecstasy but an attitude for
which there is no more obvious phrase than ‘attentively listening in and
acting accordingly’—that is religio. Finally there is a ‘selective’ element in
religio—an operation of choosing by which it may even become creative.
We shall return to this in the sixth chapter.
Apart from the Being of the gods, there are two further assumptions
involved in religio. One is Nous, which according to Arcesilaus is withheld
from men. For the Greek philosopher nous meant knowledge itself, a
knowledge identical with divine being, unattainable for men, existing in its
own right, continuing unshakably to be. The assumption of Roman
religion was numen, divine causation, in which however the nous of the gods
made itself known. This Roman nous was not quite hke the Greek. A
different aspect came to the fore—not reflection, the knowledge of being,
but the plan and the decision. It is as if the religious Roman had had an
original text for everything that happened—a ‘text’ because it could be
‘uttered’, if the gods, and above all Jupiter, wish it. Indeed, it already had
 Religio ι6ι

been uttered, and so was called fatum, ‘that which has been uttered’, and
Jovis fatum, because it was uttered by Jupiter. It was not identical with the
providence (pronoia) of the Stoics although the Roman Stoics tried to
make it so. Providence, pro-noia, put the emphasis on seeing and knowing,
whereas in fatum the divine act of will was emphasised. This already uttered
thing was hidden from men and was realised only gradually. Meanwhile
it continued to find utterance, in signs. Alongside the being of the Gods
these were the two assumptions of religio, first that something divine was
being realised in what was happening all the time and secondly that this
divine something was audible to anyone who ‘listened’ well.
Not to listen would actually be against religio. Cicero in his dialogue
On Soothsaying’—the supplement to his ‘On the Nature of the Gods’—
emphasises that the ancient Romans had recourse to every kind of oracle,
‘so that there might be no sign of truth neglected by them’.230 To neglect,
negligere, is the opposite of religere and religio.231 On the other hand, the
type of man who believes every kind of oracle unconditionally and arranges
his whole life in accordance with oracles, treating them as signs of provi¬
dence, is considered by Cicero not religious but superstitiosus, an ‘enthusiast’.
Cicero in this dialogue does not succeed in distinguishing clearly and
unambiguously between superstitio and religio. Yet there remain certain
characteristics on the one hand of the religens—as an old saying calls the
‘religious man’ 232—and of the superstitiosus on the other, and these enable
us to identify negative and positive aspects of the religious experience which
was specifically Roman. The negative aspects were given by superstitio.
By translating superstitiosus as ‘enthusiast’ I mean to stress the view that
it was the Latin translation of the Greek ekstasis.233 Its use in the sense of
, the modern ‘superstition’ and ‘superstitious’ is in keeping with the Roman
condemnation of all enthusiasm, indeed any form of exaggeration in the
religious sphere. As an exaggeration of religio, superstitio meant to be
helplessly subservient to signs and to think them always and everywhere
as referring to oneself. Positive, genuine religio by contrast kept within
bounds, like eulabeia. It was to be absolutely open to divine world events,
to listen acutely for signals and to direct one’s life accordingly.
The Style is just as evident here as in that aspect of Greek religious
experience which was indicated by the word theoria. The essence of Greek
Style was there summed up in the simple phrase ‘Religion of Show’. The
162 Peaks of Greek and Roman Religious Experience

essence of religio, by contrast, the fundamental characteristic of Roman

religion, can scarcely be comprehended in one word. It is an attitude of
listening, open to every sign and continually adjusting itself to them. A
further difference is that religio does not possess a clear, festal quality like
theoria. It is in some sense fulfilment, but only as given by a universal
prudence and reserve or by the general susceptibility to signs, which almost
all the peoples of the ancient world possessed to some extent. Religio is
scarcely to be compared with a single ‘peak experience’ like the ‘vision of
the gods’ in its two meanings of seeing the gods and seeing like the gods.
Rather it is like a line running at a constant level, on which religio is poten¬
tially present everywhere, as a simple, worshipping openness. When it is
actually present, when, as the Romans say, religio est, then we have a special
condition which presents the greatest possible contrast to the festive quality
—the condition of the dies religiosi. On such days everything has regard
only for the divine, tries to recover its adjustment to the divine, to atone for
any deviation from the ‘line’ of religio. Just as the great Agonistic festivals
were an objective form of appearance of the Show of the Gods, so one may
consider the whole course of Roman history as an objective realisation of
religio.234.
Our attempt to define the Style of Greek and Roman religious experience
and its ‘peaks’ must necessarily lead us into the wider regions of Greek and
Roman Existence, the Greek and Roman bios, and must necessarily be
confronted in either case by that which constitutes the essence of these two
forms of existence. In Greece it was the Show which included not only
religion but also philosophy and art, in Rome the ability to follow jatum
in the course of a duller, less philosophic, and less artistic life and yet a hfe
of listening and obeying, a life of compliance. What we now have to do is
to turn from the general to the special, from the most extensive to the most
concrete, the ‘form’ of the Greek and of the Roman cult. From these
forms we here need to seize only the principal element, the Greek and
Roman fashion of relating man to god.
 DELOS and BRAURON
and the cults of Apollo and Artemis
Ó7 Delos: a bird’s-eye view of the site
68 Delos: one of the lions
6g The sacred way of Delos with the lions. 6th century B.C.

\
 *****

70 Apollo with deer, from Tomb 559 in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
7i Apollo pours a libation for Artemis. Vase by the Bologna painter, c. 455 B.C.
From Tomb 308 in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
72 Ruins of the Temple of Artemis at Brauron
 73 Early statue of Artemis from
Brauron. National Museum, Athens

74 Early statue oj Artemis seated,

from Brauron.
National Museum, Athens
 75 Statue of a young girl,
one of the ‘bears’ of Artemis,
from Brauron.
National Museum, Athens
7Ó Portrait heads of young girls, called the ‘bears’, from Brauron. National Museum, Athens
77 Bas-relief of Artemis with hind and adorants, from Brauron. Late jth century B.C. National Museum, Athens

79 Bas-relief of Zeus, Leto, Apollo, Artemis, awaiting a host of adorants, from Brauron. National Museum, Athens
78 Bas-relief of a procession of odorants sacrificing to Artemis, from Brauron. National Museum, Athens

80 Bas-relief of Artemis with goat and kids, from Brauron

8i Frieze from the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii. Mid-ist century B.C
 CHAPTER V

Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

I

THE GREEK IDEA OF THE SACRIFICE

The Greek and the roman types of religious experience are both, in their
own Style, phenomena of the history of man, objective realities which once
existed in their own right, whether or not we succeed in describing them
correctly. They do have their subjective aspect, but this is never adequate
to define them. Greek religious experience is not merely sebas and aidos,
two words which indicate subjective feelings. For these feelings were an
accompaniment to a particular kind of imaginative representation, in
which one particular aspect of the world’s potential variety became actual.
The world of men can really show itself in a variety of different ways, and
in no other religion did the world show its abundance of Forms as it did
through Greek religious experience. The case is similar with Roman
religious experience. Religio too is associated with a special kind of repre¬
sentation, in which another of the world’s potential aspects is made to give
an actual manifestation of its presence.
Representation, the making present of what was remote, what was
thought of as possible but was not yet real and actual, this is a creative act.
Man and the world take part in it together. It happens in works of art
or in the experiences of religion and the works which result from them.
And none of it can happen without Style. We are here speaking of two
modes of representation, as different from one another as are the Greek
and the Roman Style. To the Greek Style there correspond bodily mani¬
festations of gods to which the poetry and art of the sculptors and painters
powerfully contributed. From later times we have accounts of epiphanies,
stories in which the gods were awake and frequently showed themselves
to dreaming men.235 There is no evidence of anything in these epiphanies
178 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

which might be regarded as a breach of the Style appropriate to the art in

which they are commemorated. Divine appearances in their truest Greek
form are marked by an intellectual and at the same time sculptural clarity,
an enargeia, and with that by an aptitude for ‘viewing knowledge’ which
found its greatest fulfilment among the poets and artists. The Roman
mode of representation, on the other hand, implies the passage of the world’s
time. Yet this passage of time itself has two ways of revealing its actual
presence, ways in which man himself is passive but yet not absent.
One of these ways is given by the recurring phases of time. In its
periodical course time passes through regular peaks at which it is festal,
that is, more present. I used this paraphrase for the festive quality earher
on, when I had not yet come to speak of different kinds of representation,
or looking at it objectively, of the world’s presence. From this point of
view time appears as a series of festival years, or longer festival periods like
the Greek Olympiads. This time becomes the content of Calendars, and
‘the Calendar is essentially a Festival Calendar’.236 The refined aptitude of
the Romans to which they gave the name religio is matched by the refined
elaboration of the Roman Calendar. The Roman way is here distinguished
from the Greek only by a difference of emphasis, a different choice of what
is important. The festival time-phases constitute points of contact between
the Roman and Greek Styles. As phases of time they have their temporal
aspect. As phases, a word which originally meant the phaseis, or ‘appear¬
ances’, of constellations in ancient astronomy, they imply also a standing
still of time, not in the mystical 237 but in the intellectual sense, not as an
eternity ‘dove s’appunta ogni uhi ed ogni quando’, but as a point from which
clear Forms become visible to the mind’s eye outside ‘every where and
every when’. The Roman has a greater preference than the Greek for
giving objective expression to something which appears in the passage of
time. The life of the Flamen Dialis will serve us as an example. The Greek
demand is more for a festival phase which ensures that time is worthily
represented even when its passage is felt in Roman fashion. It is the essence
of the feast that it is, so to speak, a standstill in the world’s course, a moment
at which eternal Forms may show themselves and by showing themselves
extend it to a motionless eternity.
Another way for time to become more present than normal is given,
as we have already said, by the dies religiosi. These are festive in a negative
 The Greek Idea oj the Sacrifice 179
sense. What is characteristically Roman is that such days are not only
observed—the Greeks regularly accepted such unlucky days, as for instance
the fifth day of the month in Hesiod 238—but when specially unlucky are
even taken into the Calendar. For the Greeks such days are there, so to
speak, to provide a regular representation of the harmful and lethal realities
of the world. The Romans on such days commemorate the possibility
of a disturbance of their good relationship with the gods, the pax et venia
deum. For them such days are historical warnings not to deviate from the
way partly prescribed in the Festival Calendar. To them every way was
not periodically closed, but open to the future, just as the world itself is
open in the passage of time. The openness of religio is matched by this
openness of the world. For that reason religio is more than the observance
of temporal obligations which can be fixed in time. Religio also includes
another faculty, that of perceiving as a divine gesture something winch is
not fixed but only becomes present in the moment, and of fulfilling it
accordingly.
Not every representation of the deity can be called a cult, in the narrower
sense of the word, though in the wider sense it was always natural to regard
the representation of the divine in the works of poets and artists as a kind of
‘cult’. The oldest sources which have anything to tell us, directly or
indirectly, about Greek religion, in connected texts that is, and not just in
the form of hsts or fragments, are poetic works. There is one question we
cannot avoid. How is the divine in its relation to men represented in the
works which have been transmitted to us under the names of Homer and
Hesiod? Both were regarded by the Greeks as authorities on religion,
almost as religious founders or at least as arrangers and interpreters of the
world of gods. The first historic surmise about the origin of Greek religion
in the form in which it was generally valid in Greece and later became known
as classical comes from Herodotus.239 According to the ‘father of history’
it was Hesiod and Homer who gave the Hellenes a doctrine about the origin
of the gods, gave the gods themselves their appellations, defined their
‘offices’, their spheres of sovereignty, and described their natures and Forms
(eidea). The way in which Homer introduces the gods in the Iliad allows us
a glimpse of the age which came before this poem.
From the fifteenth century onward, when the names of Greek gods occur
in the written records of Cretan and Mycenean palaces, first at Cnossus,
i8o Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

then at Pylos and Mycenae itself, there was a lapse of at least six centuries
before Homer.240 Yet every step we take into the pre-Homeric period for
the present requires a special scrutiny.241 It is becoming more and more
possible, however, to distinguish a pre-Homeric Style in Greek religion.
Most of what lived on into later times and determined Greek Existence,
alongside, or to some extent in opposition to, Homer, was associated with
the name Dionysus, a great god of the pre-Homeric and post-Homeric age.242
At the Dionysiac festivals the whole of Greek hfe became more agitated.
Yet these agitations too fit into one great context in which the ruler was
not Dionysus but Zeus. Even the greatest of all Dionysiac events, the
reappearance of the ancestors from the kingdom of the dead, so that they
may ‘be viewed’ in the theatre,243 took place in the Style of general Greek
religious experience and the appearing ghosts assumed the shapes in which
they had emerged from the Epic poems. Still, the presence of Dionysus was
demonstrated not only by the celebrations in which the dead awoke, like
the Anthesteria and the great Dionysia at Athens, or by the periodical
drunken occasions, or by states of ecstasy to which the women surrendered
themselves, at greater intervals, in the special Dionysiac women’s festivals,
but also continuously by the vine and its products, in all phases of its growth
into fruit and manufacture into wine. And so one piece of Nature under a
special name became a common foundation for all the great cultures about
the Mediterranean. As with corn, the element of Demeter, so with the
fundamental Dionysiac element a piece of Nature entered at all times and
everywhere into the Style of those cultures winch were built upon it.
The natural foundation is always taken for granted, however much the
radiance of the divine may rest upon it. Homer took the vine as a matter
of course but regarded it as less divine than the figures which gathered on
his Olympus. To be concerned with it was for him the business of peasants
or, in the prescribed manner, of women. Homer seldom mentioned
Dionysus by name, though he existed for him no less than the other gods.
There is one way of representing the divine which comes closest to
expressing the religious experience of the average ancient man. This is
always the cult in its narrowest sense. Conversely, a cult which represented
nothing and wanted only to cast a wish, so to speak, into a godless world,
to cast it out into the unknown, would not be a cult. Even if we
chose to start from the supposition that cults originally created their own
 The Greek Idea of the Sacrifice 181
gods, we should still have to suppose that each cult had an object of which
it was a representation—in this case the god created by the cult. Cults which
are merely magical performances make an effort to represent the performers
themselves as divine. And the cult is primarily representation, and only
secondarily a request and a gift 244 to one who is represented. Examples
which point unambiguously in this direction can easily be found in the
Greek cult as known to history. The cult performance at Tanagra, as
described by Pausanias and interpreted by Walter F. Otto,245 is particularly
clear. At a festival of Hermes the best-looking of the young men walked
round the city with a ram on his shoulders. He did this as one who was
deputising for the god through his own bodily appearance. According to
the tradition at Tanagra this performance commemorated an epiphany of
Hermes. Though the ceremony was intended to serve also as a preventive
against epidemics, its primary significance is clear—representation. There
were also less transparent representations, like the leap from the Leukas
Rock, a leap which originally only a god could make, while the man who
performed it often lost his life in the act.246
Such actions were repetitions of mythological events, stories of gods
which were abbreviated to ritual gestures,247 but which the drama of
the ceremony made more present to those taking part than mere narrations
would have done. In the intensity of the representation the cult dominated
the myth and even caused it to be forgotten. The more detailed the cere¬
mony still was, the more the original myth shone through it. Thus it was
with the bull sacrifice when performed with the archaic elaboration of the
Bouphonia at Athens.248 But what about the sacrifice of‘a hundred cattle’,
a ‘hecatomb’, even several hecatombs, which in its quantitative exaggeration
was rather the reverse of elaborate? The Homeric descriptions of the
ceremony of sacrifice leave us in no doubt that the really festive part of the
business was the slaughtering of the animal and its preparation as food.
There was something divine about this event, something which had at the
same time a life-giving and a death-dealing aspect. When women were
present at the ceremony, they shrieked aloud at the moment when the
sacrificial animal received the blow.249 This belonged to the rite of the
ox-sacrifice, but was none the less a direct, natural utterance, like the
symbolic action of Hecuba in Book XXII of the Iliad. A cry uttered by
women when they saw an event of death before their eyes does not have to
182 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

be explained in terms of a special purpose. Perhaps they were driving off

ghosts? No, the sort of ghosts known to the archaic Greek religion, such as
the Harpies, could not have been so easily driven off. Or perhaps it was
even a cry of joy, lamentations being forbidden in a holy place? 250 Such
speculations only take us further and further away from the reality. Of
course it is not lamentation which rings out at the climax of the whole
sacrificial act. There is joy in it among other things, joy in a feast of nature,
but contradictory like nature itself, Fundamentally what is heard here is
a natural awe of that which is made present in the feast. Food springs forth
from the death of noble creatures, who themselves stand under the protection
of the gods, and in the archaic period are also akin to them—thus we may
paraphrase the divine event which was brought about by the great cattle
sacrifices of the Greeks.
This is confirmed by very ancient customs connected with the killing
of cattle which have been preserved outside the Homeric poems.251 The
ceremony of the Athenian bouphonia is a clear enough indication of the
murder aspect of the cattle killing. The Greeks themselves explained the
holiness of cattle by reference to their idea that all cultivation of the soil
was a domain of holiness presided over by the goddess Demeter. The
plough animals were objects of respect and loving care.252 We find our¬
selves here in the primitive Mediterranean world and not far removed
from those cultures in which the cow and the ox were holy animals and a
form of appearance of the divine. For us, however, in order to understand
the naturally festive character of the cattle-killing, it is enough to visuahse
the aspect assumed by this animal in the dominions of Demeter. This
aspect is Greek and not entirely absent from the world of Homer, although
in the Homeric poems it remains in the background. That which feeds us
and is itself also food, so we might describe it, that which gives food and
must be killed in order to become food. In this the cow and the ox are
kin to Demeter’s fruit, the corn which must similarly be mown to the
ground. It is known that com too has an inherently festive character which
was long preserved.
The slain animal was not thought of as an individual any more than
the mown corn. It was always the whole race which suffered in it, which
laboured, died, and became food.253 Nor was the slain animal identical, in
Demeter’s domain, with the goddess herself. It was not even her form of
82 Nemesis, ‘daughter of Night, the cause of much sorrow to men’ (see p. 121)
Relief with a representation of the Nemesis Regina. Middle of the 2nd century A.D.
Brindisi Museum
 83 Youths with bulls and sacrificial objects dedicated to Apollo. By the Kleophon painter;
from Tomb 57c in the Valle Pega, Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
84 Mithras killing the bull (sec p. 187). Vatican Museum
 r mjf jmmTfWb) 1 j
V BSSlpiJL

85 Athletes preparing for the torch race. Vase from Tomb 563 in the Valle Trebba, Spina,
c. 420-410 B.C. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
 The Greek Idea of the Sacrifice 187

appearance, as elsewhere for instance the cow is the form of appearance

of the moon goddess or of great moon-like goddesses. As a participant in
the cultivation of the fields it stands close to her and under her protection.
Yet even when great gods like Zeus or Poseidon, not to mention Dionysus,
appear in bull form, the cattle species is singled out, as sacrificial animal, for
unique suffering—the suffering imposed by the gods’ bounty to men. As
participant in the cultivation of the fields and as food it belongs to the
world domain of Demeter. One particularly clear example of this was
to be found in the central miracle of a religion which was a close neighbour
of the Mediterranean group—the bull-killing of Mithras. According to
the myth of the Persian religion the fruit of the earth is actually identical
with the sacrificed primeval bull, for corn comes out of its entrails.254
Greek rehgion with its sense of reality did not make this kind of identifi¬
cation. It contented itself with kinship. It incorporated the cow or ox as
sacrificial animal and the fruit of Demeter, the sacrificial barley, in a single
ceremonial structure, that which is common to all the great sacrifices.
Homer treats the ritual details of the preliminary sacrifice less fully than the
main act, the killing of the animal. One part of the preliminaries, however,
he does emphasise, the scattering about the victim of special grain, the oulai
or oulochytai, that is barley specially bruised for the sacrifice.255 In this
barley, the material of the preliminary sacrifice, the same divine aspect of
the world was present as in the principal material, the sacrificial animal itself.
This was the aspect of food. As we saw among the Australian aboriginals,256
one can be intoxicated by this aspect of the world and represent it in cult
dances. We saw how it there became festal, that is wholly present, with
its face of life and its face of death, and the whole dark background of death.
In the foreground is the sacrificial meal. This is the fulfilment of the
sacrifice. We have learnt to know the natural festivity which resides in every
banquet. All over the world a banquet is festive, though by itself alone,
at least in the ancient world, not yet a feast. For its own sake a banquet, so
to speak, positively demands the presence of the gods, even when the meal
is not a real sacrificial one. The gods are called upon and receive their
share.257 Everywhere in the ancient world it is difficult to distinguish
between the sacrificial meal and an ordinary banquet. From what we
know about the historical period we have to suppose that every slaughtered
animal was actually regarded as a sacrificial animal and treated accordingly.258
188 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

And there is no doubt at all that this was so on State occasions and in the life
of the heroic period as depicted by Homer. Great meals in the Ihad are
‘meals of the gods’. A divine presence is part of the whole idea of the
sacrificial meal. It is a presence which goes beyond the mere divinity of
food and drink, and is more spiritual.
At a festive meal man and god are present to one another, in the Greek
sense ‘knowing of’ one another. This is the fundamental idea of the Greek
cult. The memorials of Greek religion, both literary and epigraphic, are
full of appeals—invitations and summonses—to the gods, of songs of
invitation, and songs of advent which celebrate their coming.259 Besides
the sacrificial meals there were also special entertainments carried out with
all the symbols of hospitality—theoxenia and theodaisia—for wandering or
distant gods, hke the Dioscuri, Aesculapius, or Apollo who in this respect
was also called Theoxenios. This phenomenon may be contrasted with the
omni-presence of god among the Israelites. ‘Am I a God at hand, saith the
Lord, and not a God afar off? . . . Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the
Lord? \260 The prophet thus consciously distinguishes his God from the
gods of the other ancient oriental religions which are closer to the Greek
gods. His last question is unintentionally apt in the context of the Greek
sacrificial rite, one special feature of which was that the animal was lifted
from the earth so that it was no longer touching it when the sacrifice was
offered to the high gods of Heaven and Olympus, and pressed to the earth
when it was to the underworld gods or the dead.261
The Greek gods in this behaviour to the world are different from the
God of the Israelites. Their movements are extensively bound up with the
movements of the heavens. It is false to explain their comings and goings
by saying that their spheres of influence are limited in space and tied to their
cult sites. Every cult-place was situated in the centre of the round world and
every Greek sanctuary was a natural sactuary. Not only in its relation to the
landscape, when the place of sacrifice lay outside the city, but in relation to
one of the two hemispheres, either to the upper one, the heavens, or the
lower one, the underworld. This was shown by the position of the altar,
which still remained in the open air even when a temple had been added to
the site. An eschara, an altar for the underworld deities, had its connection
with these deities everywhere. Every Greek place of sacrifice was waiting
for the advent of the deity, unless he or she was already present. When a
 The Greek Idea of the Sacrifice 189

Greek addressed a summons to his gods and they came in answer to it, it was
because they were able to he in any place where they were expected, not
because their power was limited to a particular place. Not only is there no
traditional support for such an idea, but it is indeed unthinkable. On the
other hand they may perhaps have been limited in the time when they might
appear. There were among the gods those who had the special character of
being ‘the far god’ or ‘the arriving god’.262 What is characteristic of the
Greek religion is not the place relationship of its gods with men but the fact
that it could he entirely suspended, so as to make their meeting possible.
Did the Greeks of the historical period ever really experience such
meetings? This question has two answers. The first is that of the religious
man of all periods, which was given by Walter F. Otto:263 ‘There is only
one experience which could open our eyes and which it would be presump¬
tion even to hope for. It would be if we could feel what it means for a god
to be in our immediate neighbourhood.’ The other answer was given by
the Greeks in their myth about the performer of the first sacrifice, who was
himself a god but as representative of men slaughtered the sacrificial animal
for a common meal with the gods—the myth of Prometheus, which is at
the same time the myth of human existence, of the distance between gods
and men.264 After Prometheus had cheated the gods, by keeping the best
parts of the victim for men, though the ceremony of sacrifice always con¬
tinued to be valid for the Greeks, the gods could never again appear at it in
earnest, but at most in play or in appearance. Yet this myth too assumes
the idea of the meeting. It was in harmony with the Style of Greek religious
experience that the gods in the festive atmosphere of cult and of poetry could
mix with men.
The idea of the Greek sacrifice could only be realised by a completely clear
epiphany and a real meeting with the gods. The nearness to the gods ex¬
perienced by the Greeks in Homeric times and right into the modern period
was not a real meeting, yet the idea was always present to the Greek mind.
Such meetings with the gods at the sacrificial meal were experienced in
complete clarity only by those peoples—as Homer knew—whose Existence
fluctuated between divinity and humanity, who were indeed closer to the
gods than to men—the Ethiopians and the Phaeacians.265 Their King
Alcinous says of the Phaeacians: ‘For the gods, at least until now, always
appear clearly to us when we sacrifice glorious hecatombs and they banquet
190 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

with us, sitting where we sit.’ The idea of the meeting with the gods—as
an idea which was once realised in an ideal Existence and is realised no more
—could hardly be more sharply and clearly expressed. Such an Existence is
a fundamental spiritual reality of the Greek nature. It is complementary to
it, and even contrasted with it in the consciousness of a great poet. But it was
not by any means only Homer who thought like this. The religions of
archaic peoples like to give reasons for their cult procedures in the form that
these were introduced in primeval times, when gods and men had immediate
intercourse with one another. This idea may be regarded as an explanation
of the whole of Greek religion in its mythological character. In the spirit
of the feast a religious idea like that of the sacrifice so to speak flares up and
takes on time and substance. Meanwhile the same festive spirit is separated
off from the passage of time and change, to become a special kind of time,
primordial time.
The golden shine of festivity which for Pindar still clung to the branches
carried by the victors in the festival games and transformed them to golden
boughs 266 also converted this primordial time to a Golden Age. Similarly
the ideas which men of the historical period tried to realise through the cult
were converted to realities of the Golden Age. The Phaeacian condition
described by Alcinous appears in Hesiod as the condition of the whole world
in that happy period. It has been transmitted, to us as to the Greeks, as a
bare quotation without context, a condition of man which must always
have seemed to be the prototype of the Theoxenia—the Greek festival at
which the gods themselves were guests. In an excellent work on Hesiod it
was described as the ‘primal phenomenon of Greek cult feeling’ and ‘as such
not capable of logical analysis’.267 ‘They took their meals in those days in
common, and the places at table were common to mortal men and immortal
gods’—so Hesiod has it.
The idea of the meeting of man with the deity appears also in a mystical
form. Absolutely, it is called the henosis, the ‘being one’. In later Anti¬
quity the different mystical versions are better known than the non-mystical
meeting with the gods. In the text I have quoted we find this latter in
absolute purity. Starting from Homer and Hesiod it can be slightly para¬
phrased: to sit together, and to have seeing knowledge of one another in
the primal condition of being. This would be a quite general expression
for it. As a general idea it can also be expressed in non-Greek terms. Apart
 The Greek Idea of the Sacrifice 191

from numberless examples from the so-called nature religions it appears

among the Israelites as the visit of God and his two angels to Abraham in
the plains of Mamre.288 The absolute form is expressed in Greek by Homer
as the condition of the Ethiopians and Phaeacians, and in Hesiod as the con¬
dition described in the fragment about the common meals of gods and men.
It lives on as the idea of the hearth and table fellowship of all divine beings
among men and ‘of the other immortals’ in the archaic philosophy and in
the hero cult. Here it is the actual happening which ‘ unites the departed hero
with the gods as with his race in indestructible communion’. A classical
expression of its other aspect is to be found in the last verse of Vergil’s
Fourth Eclogue, where it is said of the non-divine man,
nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubili est
(him no god has honoured with his table nor goddess with her bed).
Such a form certainly does not admit of logical analysis. It can, however,
be traced back to its assumptions, to the idea from which it derives. This
idea, which is fundamental not only to the Greek cult but also to the Greek
rehgion and to Greek Existence, is expounded by Hesiod himself. It is
included as a fundamental idea in the idea of the Golden Age. For Hesiod
the myth of the Golden Age was simply an assertion of this other idea. He
speaks of the Golden Age in two forms. Either it is an initial condition with
no special name, in which human and divine Existence were not yet separ¬
ated, or it is an exactly delimited Age which could not be better named than
after the metal gold. It was followed by the less precious Ages of decadence
—with the exception of the entirely peculiar and unique Greek Age of
Heroes. This doctrine of Ages, which Hesiod took over from the Orient,269
is expounded by him in his Works and Days. In it the ‘Golden Race of
Men’ was also a creation of the Olympic gods. Yet he introduces his
account of this race with a clear formulation of another idea implicit in the
idea of the Golden Age,270 that ‘gods and mortal men are of the same origin’.
The apparent inconsequence is here a sure sign that we have to do with
the original text: 271 no one would make an interpolation contradicting the
whole of what followed it. The hard directness of the sentence, however, is
also an indication that the idea it contains was really self-evident for the
Greeks, so self-evident that we can call it a fundamental idea of the Greek
religion. Pindar said the same:272 ‘The race of men and gods is one. From
one mother do we draw our breath.’ Hesiod nowhere speaks of a first man,
192 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

although primal men were known to Greek mythology 273 and he himself
twice describes the creation of the primal woman. Where he is propounding
the doctrine of the Ages, which assumes the creation of the particular ‘race’
identical with each such Age, he tells of a race of men which was formed of
the stufi of ash trees and which fitted the Bronze Age 274 as the ashen shaft of
a spear fits the bronze head. Elsewhere the human race is for him identical
with the Ash-Tree Race.275 The ash-trees were generated in the earth from
the drops of the blood of Uranus as divine beings—nymphs called ash-trees
—at the same time as their siblings the Erinyes (‘Furies’) and Giants.276 Of
the same origin as the gods, who are similarly offspring of Uranus and Gaia,
Heaven and Earth, and yet a much darker race—that is what men are. The
human race, on the other hand, is not doomed to destruction like the race
of Giants.277 Only Zeus could destroy it, but he does not do so, since
Prometheus’ theft of fire for men. There is no contradiction here with
Hesiod’s doctrine of the Ages of the World. For even he wants to go on
living after the last Race; evidently because the great cycle of the Races
will begin again.278 This idea of humanity, of its sibling relationship to the
godhead, is assumed by the idea of the Greek sacrifice and its fulfilment
there.

THE LAUGHTER OF THE GODS

The Greek idea of the sacrifice has given us one view of the maimer in which
the Greeks understood the relation between man and god. A different view
is given us by the laughter of the gods. Here we must first except the
malicious laughter of Zeus at the end of his contest with Prometheus, as the
story is told in Works and Days. Hesiod’s narrative is based on the differ¬
ence between the Nous of Zeus and the Titanic cast of mind of Prometheus.
With Zeus the Nous shows itself pure and perfect, and is thus calm and
motionless, like a mirror. It discovers everything without seeking, indeed
everything discovers itself to it. The Titan’s mind, on the other hand, is
restless, inventive, and, with foreknowledge and sagacity, always on the
 The Laughter of the Gods 193
search for something. The object of nous is what really is. The object of
the Titanic intelligence is invention, even if only an artful lie, a deception
which the gods themselves admire and are entertained by. Corresponding
to nous is aletheia, the Greek ‘truth’, to be paraphrased as ‘absence of conceal¬
ment’, which is actually the etymological meaning of the word.279 The
word has the sound of the denial of concealment and forgetting, of lethe. The
Titanic intelligence loves what is ‘crooked’, and the epithet of Cronos in
Hesiod 280 is derived from that. The lie is ‘crooked’ by nature, but so too
is a clever invention, like the noose, which in Greek is so-called.281
The necessary complement of nous is being. When the nous is ex¬
tinguished, being remains blind. The necessary complement of the Titanic
intelligence is intellectual and general misery—stupidity, thoughtlessness,
clumsiness. Each of Prometheus’ inventions leaves behind it a trail of new
misery for men. After his successful trick over the sacrifice, Zeus takes fire
away from men. And when, after he had managed to steal back the fire,
Prometheus himself was taken away from men to suffer punishment,
Epimetheus was left as the representative of men—instead of the crafty
one, as his complement the stupid one. The profound relatedness of these
two figures is expressed in the idea that they were brothers. We might say
that a single crafty and stupid being is here resolved into two persons.282
Prometheus is the one with forethought, Epimetheus the one whose after¬
thought comes too late. It is he who in his thoughtlessness receives as a gift
from the gods the last inexhaustible source of misery for mankind, Pandora.
And as Hesiod tells us the story of this last act in the competition between
the two kinds of intellect, Zeus, who has seeing knowledge of the fact that
men will be entertained by the woman Pandora and love their own mis¬
fortune, laughs aloud.283
But elsewhere too the Greek gods laugh, and laugh differently. The
famous ‘Homeric laughter’ is their laughter, and they laugh at their own
kind. Most commentators have found this so strange that they have denied
all religious meaning to Homer’s scenes of divine life. Such scenes have
been interpreted as creations of a mind become more or less irrehgious or
of a wholly non-religious mind.284 This is completely contradicted by the
attitude of the Greeks themselves, who held Elomer responsible for the form
of their religion, whether they did so negatively like Xenophanes or positively
like Herodotus. However, it is evident that a phenomenon which impresses
K
194 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

us as so strange ought first to be understood as characteristic, regardless of

whether it strikes us today as religious or irreligious.
The characteristic element becomes particularly clear when the laughter
of Zeus, who sees the nature of men and foresees its consequences, is com¬
pared with situations in other religions in which god and man confront one
another. In order to understand that specific form of the divine which is
above all characteristic of the Israelite religion, we may quote the words of
Abraham, in his converse with the Lord about the fate of the men of Sodom.
‘Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but
dust and ashes.’285 Thus Abraham declares the nature of men, corresponding
to a special form of the divine as it affects the feelings of men.286 This form
appears against the Sodomites as a destroying fire. Fire and ashes or dust
(dry earth of which the first man was made) correspond to one another.
The fire is not God but a simile to express God’s relations with men, as dust
and ashes are a simile of man in relation to God. Fire is the anger of God
of which His creature has knowledge through the feeling of its own ‘des¬
truction’.
In comparison with this, the idea of the gods’ superior laughter is no
less entitled to be considered religious. The comparison also shows how
characteristic it is of Greek religion. There is this characteristic difference.
In the Jewish Israelite religious experience God’s anger stands over against
His creature’s feeling of its own destruction, feeling against feeling. There
can, however, stand on the one hand not anger but God’s love for man—
as it does overwhelmingly in the religion of Christ—and on the other again
the feeling of man’s own destruction—in face of so great a love ! Compared
with this the Greek religion must appear as without feeling. With the
Greeks idea confronts idea. Hesiod expounds the idea which corresponds
to the laughter of Zeus, the idea of the contradictoriness of human existence,
in which men are entertained by their own ruin and love their own mis¬
fortune. In the oriental religions there is a murderously fatal,287 an ‘abys¬
mal’,288 and also a creative laughter of the deity.289 The laughter of Zeus
is perhaps destructive, yet nobody dies oj it. By this laughter nothing is
changed in contradictory human existence, which both Prometheus and
Epimetheus are equally entitled to represent. What is destroyed by this
laughter? The importance of the whole Titanic misery, which was ex¬
pressed by the figures of both Titans together. Before the angry Jehovah all
 The Laughter of the Gods 195

creatures turn to ashes. Before Zeus, the laughing onlooker, the eternal
human race plays its eternal human comedy.
Would this have been endurable, if the Greeks had always viewed their
existence in such a way? Assuredly not, had not the gods also been the
bountifully giving ones. What was expected of them was not election or
love but friendship and abundance, the very things which it was the idea of
the Greek sacrifice in its fulfilment to bring about, so far as possible through
the actual feast of sacrifice. The word philos, which occurs in compounds
with theos, is nearest to ‘friend’, hlan with his contradictions could seem
altogether comic to the gods. From Zeus’s point of view there showed
through humanity the behaviour of crafty and stupid Titans. Yet ordinary
mortals in Greece were glad to partake of this kind of nature, although for
Greek sensibilities it bordered on the comic. There were others who wore
this nature, less crafty beings, the Sileni and the Satyrs, the wildness of whose
way of life did not mean unhappiness. But to be the unfortunate sister-
race of the gods—this Greek idea of humanity is in its essence tragic. Tragic
because of its kinship with the gods. ‘From one mother both are sprung’
said Pindar of the human and divine race. ‘Yet we are separated’ he con¬
tinues ‘by the whole division of powers so that here is nothing, while there
stands a secure seat of adamant, the heavens.’ Such separation, simply
because it is separation, the result of a primeval division and decision, is
more than painful—it is tragic. This tragic character with Pindar still has
its peculiarly Greek form of polarity—on the one hand ... on the other. . . .
On the one hand he knows humanity with Apollo-like clarity as a nothing.
On the other, since mankind is bound by ties of brotherhood to the gods,
he sees it touched by the radiance of Zeus and celebrates that vision of the
heroic Existence which is afforded by the spectacles of the great Agonistic
festivals. To the Greek idea of mankind there belongs not only the half
Titanic, half Silenic, comic aspect, but also the heroic aspect. And it is here
that the kinship with the gods becomes most clearly evident.
Just as the Titanic and Silenic nature of man is the seat of the comic, so
his heroic nature is the seat of the tragic. If the Greek idea of humanity
derives its tragic aspect from the brotherhood of men and gods, it must be
most purely tragic where that kinship is most purely realised—in the hero.
According to Hesiod the heroes are ‘demi-gods’, their race, to which Hesiod
has assigned a special Age, is ‘a divine race’.290 In Achilles, who in Homer
196 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

represents the hero in his purest form, the polarity of nothingness and
divinity are blended into a single destiny. Achilles is a demi-god, the son of
a goddess. Other heroes only have the mist snatched from before their
eyes in a rare moment, only exceptionally are they granted clear vision, like
Diomedes in the press of battle, in which he is allowed to see the gods, or
Hector, when he foresees the end of Troy and the house of Priam. Achilles
through his mother has his eyes open to that which is hidden from ordinary
men. He chooses with open eyes the nothingness of human existence when he
walks into the chain of consequences provoked by Epimethean actions—the
actions of Patroclus and Hector. He chooses destruction. Not in order to give
divinity to human nothingness, but to preserve his own image, of which the
hero’s loyalty to his squire forms part. With such a death self-chosen, he
cannot be otherwise than the hero ! It is a simplification, but not one contrary
to the spirit of Homer, to say that the world in the Iliad takes on a heroic
aspect pre-eminently because of this destruction chosen with open eyes.291
This heroic world depicted for us by Homer honours the gods with
sacrifices, sacrifices according to a Promethean rite inherited from a still
more ancient world, but which the poet has brought as near as he could to
the pure idea of the Greek sacrifice. But over this world, too, the laughter
of the gods resounds. What is the meaning of their laughter in relation to
the tragic aspect of the idea of humanity? They do not laugh because of
some intention of the poet, but with the most natural spontaneity. Nor
do they laugh over the fate of the heroes, although these heroes are not at
all free from human contradictions ! Zeus least of all laughs at them, for it
is he would so gladly save Hector from the death that is the consequence of
his Epimethean action.292 When there is something destructive in Zeus’s
laughter, this in Homer is not directed against mankind, and this is especially
not the case with the puzzling laughter of Zeus in Book XXI of the Iliad.
And yet this laughter has its meaning in relation to tragic mankind, just as
in Hesiod it had its meaning in relation to comic mankind.
The scenes in which the gods laugh in Homer are not burlesque and in
no way detract from the perfection of the divine image. Certainly their
laughter clings to them. They are both laughers and laughed at. It is this
laughter of the gods among themselves which is so strange and calls for an
effort of understanding. One such attempt was based on Schelling’s philo¬
sophy of art. It asserted that the laughter of the gods gave a sharper and
 The Laughter of the Gods 197

clearer outline to their image. They had to laugh, as it were, in order to

appear more themselves. Image, or form, meant limitation and limitation
meant something finite. Laughter, however, ‘eternally dances attendance
on the spiritually finite. . . . And even an angel is laughable—for an arch¬
angel’.293 That is why the Homeric gods, too, become laughable when
they reach the limits of their suzerainty and their power. It is in the contact
between finite and infinite, according to this explanation, that laughter rings
out.294 This seems to be particularly apt when Hephaestus, for instance, in
Book I of the Iliad plays the part of Ganymede.295 The god himself seems
here consciously to avail himself of the aesthetic recipe, that a violation of the
limits of one’s own form arouses laughter. Even if Homer’s art was not so
conscious as all that, we cannot but admire it. But he has also depicted the
form ot the god in the same way. The actual figure of the smith-god emerges
all the more clearly by an effect of contrast, from the comparison with the
lovely Ganymede. But is not this figure distinct in general from those of
the Olympian gods?
This is not a question of forms which can only be judged aesthetically
but of the actual difference between gods and Titans. This manual worker
among the gods is fundamentally a Titanic form, in his nature and in his
cult close to Prometheus.296 The first and most classic of all the scenes of
laughing gods brings us to the Titanic as an original form of the comic. The
form of the Titans, it is true, has its prototypes in the Near East.297 Origin¬
ally it belonged to strange gods of strange shapes, which appeared to the
Greeks, from a certain distance, as having special, characteristic outlines.
Hephaestus was in this way a god of a strange form, and so remained. Yet
this is not the reason why he is laughed at. It was the Titanic itself which had
been admitted to the Greek world of gods in the shape of Hephaestus. The
other famous scene of laughing gods, the story of Aphrodite’s adultery with
Ares and the inventive cunning of the cuckolded Hephaestus,298 also brings
us quite close to the Titanic element. It is Hephaestus who with his Prome¬
thean cunning and inventiveness catches the adulterers, puts his own shame
on show, and thus makes himself all the more ridiculous. The impatient
words of Poseidon 299 would make him feel how comically he was behaving,
if the comic was not already part of his nature. But then there is the second
hero of this story, the one who is laughed at—Ares. It is true to say that
‘none of the other gods could for a moment be thought of in his position,
198 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

not even Hermes who says that he would be glad to change places with
him’.300 The two sons of Hera are worthy of one another. Ares, with his
insatiable love of battle, represents the very thing which in contrast to the
divine could be called ‘Titanic’. And there is yet a third element, an aspect
of what the Greeks themselves call ‘the work of Aphrodite’. The goddess
herself is not comic. The poet in fact leaves her entirely in the background,
and ‘by letting her person almost vanish shows the working of her eternal
power’.301 In the aspect of her working which here comes to the fore the
indecent and the comic are eternally combined, just as they are combined by
the words of Hephaestus, who calls out ‘ridiculous’ and ‘not allowed’.302
A special mode of speech, for expressing the indecent and the comic, the
‘Priapic’, was similarly attributed to the Titans in the ancient world.303 It
is not divine behaviour, but in this sense Titanic behaviour which arouses
laughter among the gods.
Yet it must not be supposed that the poet forgot he was portraying his
gods ! Nor can it be believed that he in some sense wished to destroy the
gods whom he was portraying with such artistry. The effect of the laughter
of the gods is a different one. The comic behaviour of Hephaestus in Book
I of the Iliad, through which he betrays the Titanic strain in his nature, his
uncouthness and crippled form, and thus provokes that loud laughter, is
intended to provoke it. In his good humour, characteristic like his innocent
cruelty of a creature of the wild, he would like to reheve the tension between
the great divine consorts, his parents Zeus and Hera—a tension in which the
darker Titanic side of the characters of these two children of Cronos had
shown itself. Quarrelling and tension, fighting and bloodshed are in their
nature Titanic. Their Titanic seriousness is destroyed in this laughter. That
is the sense of it. The laughter too, of course, wells up from an original
Titanic source, from the very nature of the gods, as it was described certainly
with greater freedom and probably also in agreement with mythological
poems of the Near East, in an epic poem of pre-homeric character.304 In
the Titanomachia of Eumelos or Arctinus, still composed in the style of the
older epic, there was this verse: ‘In the midst danced the father of men and
gods’.305 The style of Homer, which is at the same time the Style of his
rehgion, did not allow him to go so far.
The sense of the divine laughter and the essential unity of its two compo¬
nents—the laughter itself and the object of its relieving power, the Titanic—
 The Laughter of the Gods 199
becomes clear in the puzzling laughter of Zeus in Book XXI of the Iliad.
The gods are fighting. The earth groans under them, the sky resounds.
Zeus looks on—‘and his heart laughs aloud for pleasure when he sees the
gods meeting in battle’.306 It is his Titan’s heart which laughs, having woken
in him memories of the old battle of the Titans. This is not a meaningless
relic of an older poem, as it might be of the Titanomachia. The laughter of
Zeus here has its reason and its meaning. Its reason is in the Titanic situation
of fighting, but its meaning is that, once laughed at, the fighting of the gods
loses its Titanic character. It may rather be called a blessed fight.307 Gentle
is the laughter of Zeus when Artemis, beaten by the smiling Hera, tearfully
seeks refuge at his knee.308 Even at an earlier time when, in Book V, divine
blood was shed, the blood of the blessed goddess Aphrodite, Zeus’s smile
softened the pain and calmed the goddesses’ strife.309
Like being and noein, so the Titanic element in the world of men and
the laughter of the gods correspond to one another. Human Existence,
being completely entangled in this element, and so far as it is not helped by
Demeter and Dionysus or other sons of the gods like Asclepius, the Dioscuri,
and Herakles, is miserable and from the divine point of view ridiculous,
unimportant, in a way which cannot be further explained. But it becomes
tragic, in its nothingness inexplicably important, in relation to the divine
laughter. Zeus laughs aloud, the quarrel of indestructible forms becomes a
divine comedy. Zeus let the gods quarrel but men moved him to pity.310
The seriousness of the strife and tension, the fights and bloodshed of the
unhappy sister-race of the gods attains, in comparison with the unseriousness
of a ‘blessed’ fight, an enormous importance, and grows into a tragedy which
demands divine spectators. In order to enhance the greatness and purity
of the tragedy, Homer even allows nature to break its own laws. While
Achilles is going into the battle in which gods will take part, his horses
acquire human speech and strengthen the tragic certainty of his approaching
end.311 The battle of the gods is there only to increase the tragic impor¬
tance of the battle of heroes. The effect of contrast here is not merely poetic
or aesthetic, but an existential one.
The pure idea of the Greek religion even emphasises the illusion of the
sacrificial cult—the self-deceit of men, as if they could deceive the gods !
The sole illusion which it allows men in relation to the gods is the tragic
importance of heroic existence as a spectacle for the gods. The most tragic
200 Man and God according to Homer and Hesiod

thing about this importance is that it must after all disappear and turn to
nothing before the laughter of the gods, when the eyes of the tragic hero
are completely opened. For the divine laughter is not, as from the viewpoint
of human misery it may seem to be, the laughter of an empty ‘absolute
blessedness’, but it is the token of the complete all-embracing Existence which
comprehends even the human and the Titanic.
 DELPHI
and the cult of Delphic Apollo

L
86 The Tholos of Delphi, seen from above
 m&É&'

87 Delphi: view from the sacred site across the valley

88 The large temple at Delphi, dedicated to Apollo
89 View of the Stadium, the highest building of the site of Delphi, from the hillside
 SPip
.
CR
Ba Kb
^3B-

90 Part of the Sacred Way at Delphi with the treasure house of the Athenians

\
9i Aphrodite, Artemis and Apollo, from the east frieze of the Siphnian Treasure House at Delphi.
Shortly before 525 B.C. Delphi Museum

92 Statue of Apollo, from the west pediment of the

Temple of Zeus at Olympia, finished in 456 B.C.
Olympia Museum
93 Scenes in the Palaestra. Vase painting by the Kleophrades painter, from Vulci, c. 500 B.C.
Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich

94 Apollo crossing the sea on a winged tripod. Vase

painting by the Berlin painter, 500-475 B.C.
Vatican Museum
95 Procession in honour of Apollo. Detail of the vase by the Kleophon painter, from Tomb 37c
in the Valle Pega, Spina. 440-430 B.C. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
mMCI 1,
.. -j
'(.A]

1Λ.

SEj

96 Vase painting showing Apollo on throne at Delphi, omphalos and tripods at either side.
(Reverse of the vase in plate 95)
97 Apollo, by the Peleus painter, from Tomb 617 in the Valle Trebba, Spina.
Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
98 Apollo playing the
lyre, accompanied by
Hermes and Dionysus.
A black-figured vase
from Vulci.
British Museum
99 Chariot race on the lid of the vase shown in plate 93; from Vaici. By the Kleophradcs painter.
Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich
ioo Sacrifice before Apollo. Inside of a bowl by the Kalliopc painter, 430-420 B.C.
From Tomb 293 in the Valle Trebba, Spina. Archaeological Museum, Ferrara
ιοί Apollo of Piombino, found
in the sea off Piombino, Etruria.
Second quarter of qth century B.C.
Louvre, Paris
 CHAPTER VI

Man and God in the Roman View

I

THE LIFE OF THE FLAMEN DIALIS

With the Greeks it is their poetry which provides a basis for characterising
the form of the relation between god and man. Greek poetry contains actual
accounts of the performance of the great Greek sacrifice in the Heroic Age.
It even tells of the original, primordial performance of the sacrifice—in a
narrative which may be classed with a whole series of similar myths in the
archaic religions about the introduction of their sacred acts. In such prime¬
val stories it is not the ordinary men of historical times nor—among the
Greeks—the heroes who play the principal part, but primordial beings. The
dominant beings of primeval times, who in their nature expressed the
primordial character of the world, were identified by the Greeks with the
uncouth forms of the Titans, whose name probably means ‘kings’.312 A
whole world is conveyed by this name, a primordial world separate and
remote from the new world of Zeus’s sovereignty, yet at the same time a
world made present and actual as the opposite of Zeus’s world and therewith
lifted altogether out of time. Just as raw, primitive Nature continues to
exist even when the world is showing its spiritual face, so Zeus’s sovereignty
is completed by its opposite. As a background to it and to that of all the
Olympian forms included in it there stands the sovereignty, defeated but
still possible, of the Titans.
We see here the same polarity as in Heraclitus’ pairs of opposites or as
in Hesiod’s statement that it is Night, with darkest Erebos, which gives birth
to Day and brightest Ether, and continues to exist alongside them.313 In
the acts of the Greek cult, on the other hand, primordial things are always
to some extent still present. They rise up not only in the worship of the
great primordial goddesses but also when the Olympians are represented
220 Man and God in the Roman View

in the cult. The substance of the new gods is seen against this older back¬
ground. It is, however, a pure substance, not mixed with temporal and
corporeal matter, as it might be for instance with the form and colour of
the sacrificial animals. For in early archaic times these must have played a
big part. Such relationships, however, are completely archaic and by his¬
toric times had been pushed right into the background. The bulls sacrificed
to Poseidon, for instance, were not only black, the colour which harmonised
with the dark god, the husband of the earth-goddess Da, but also white and
reddish.314 The cult was still essentially representation, but it was always
mythology, as interpreted in this later phase by poets and sculptors, which
did the representing. In the Roman cult the picture is quite different. Here
mythology and art seem to be lacking. Negative judgments like these, it
is true, are always hazardous, in a field to which there is no immediate
historical access—for the evidences date from periods which had already been
subjected to the influence of classical Greek religion. But we may be all
the more certain of what we know positively about the Roman case. For
if we eliminate mythology and art, the only possible form of representation
of the divine left to us is the cult itself. And in fact Roman religion does lay
almost exclusive emphasis on the cult act, the ceremony, the life of the priests
and priestesses. The corresponding phenomena of Greek religion do not
bear comparison. They are far from being as characteristic of Greek religious
Style as the instances known to us from Rome are of the Roman. For the
principle which nearly all recent writers on Roman religion have taken as
fundamental to their work is fully accounted for by the Roman Style.
According to this principle, the religion of Rome is based exclusively on the
exactly (rite) performed ceremonial act. Such performance fulfils and
exhausts the jus divinum, or divine justice, the relation of the divine to men,315
and correspondingly also the relation of men to the deity. Both for pietas
and for religio Cicero gives this definition: justitia adversum deos, justice
towards the gods.316 In the sense of our detailed discussion oh pietas and
religio, we could say that the ‘ritually’ (rite) performed human act belongs to
the ‘sphere’ oh pietas. And this too belongs to the essence of religio, that no
gap should be left, that nothing should be omitted, that no negative should
show itself in respect of rightful action.
The cult act stands so characteristically in the centre of Roman rehgion
that mythology, insofar as a Roman mythology existed at all, was com-
 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 221

pletely overshadowed by it. Even art could play only a very small part there,
and that only under Etruscan and Greek influence. We must, it is true, have
a clear understanding of the meaning of a cult act. Many scholars believe
that the strongly emphasised cult acts which are so characteristic of Roman
rehgion can be explained only by an unattainable ‘pre-deistic’ period, in
which there were no myths, a period before any worship of gods, and that
they were originally acts of magic. But anyone who believes this must face
the consequence that the historical religion of the Romans, who were so
proud of their religiosity and so famed for it, was based on meaningless
survivals from a primitive, exclusively magical period.317 Before this,
of course, the existence of such a primitive period must first be proved, and
no such proof has ever been given. All we have, generally speaking, is a
belief, in an assumption derived from a preconceived theory about the
development of religions. In keeping with this assumption is a picture of
Roman rehgion which sees only the formal side of what the Romans
understood by the relation between man and god, that is to say ‘just deal¬
ing’,318 and will hear nothing of any religious content in the Roman cult.
Such a consequence is hard to accept in view of the evidences of history and
the literary testimonies to the grandeur and purity of Roman pietas and
religio. And it cannot be accepted at all when we know how little founda¬
tion there is for the assumption of a ‘pre-deistic’ period in Roman rehgious
319

Religio in its fundamental meaning was a selecting and preserving activity.

It contains the sound of the verb religere, even though the fathers of the
Church preferred religare. One of the results of the selective activity of
religio is undoubtedly to be seen in Rome’s official attitude of reserve towards
mythology, in the light of which the importance of the cult is brought out
all the more strongly. This attitude corresponds to that same epoche—
‘restraint’—which we have shown to be the negative aspect of religio. It is
also evident, however, that the attitude of reserve, when it functions as a
selective activity, does contain something positive—what we may describe
as an ‘inner form’. It defines a Style which shows itself in all the phenomena
of Roman Existence. At tiffs point the question arises whether the Roman
religion is not only not pre-mythological but actually post-mythological—
retrospectively rid of its myths, ‘demythologised’. This is a theory which
must be taken seriously, and though in this extreme phrasing it too is mis-
M
222 Man and God in the Roman View

taken, yet the myth-free atmosphere of the official Roman cult in comparison
with the abundance of myths in the surrounding world does testify to an
inner Form which chooses only the cult and rejects mythology. When we
add that this anti-mythological tendency is paralleled by a similar feeling
against images of the gods,320 it is clearly tempting to recognise in this Form
a more general type of rehgion which is found elsewhere in the history of
religions and not only at Rome. A comparison could be made with the
Israelite religion, as we did in the case of the Roman religious consciousness.
For that reason the Roman Form must be scrutinised with special care,
independently of any theory and with reference only to the conditions in
which it originally arose.
The enquiry in which one set out to clarify the man-god relation as
understood by the Romans was in two stages. In the first of these one
supposed 321 that the great number of names of gods and the multitude
of divine beings in ancient Roman religion was not due to some special
many-sidedness in their religious approach but only to their need of recog¬
nising the divine rule in everyday things, in what was near to them, and to
harmonise themselves with it. Their limited view that all these gods existed
only for the Roman State, so it was argued, would have precluded the
possibility of their enquiring more deeply into the reasons for existence
and other questions of this kind. There was no possibility of a Roman
saga about the origin of the world because the gods of the Roman State,
which would have had to be the bearers of such a myth, had only come
into existence with or after the creation of a Roman State. Neither dogma
nor saga could have given any information about what existed before that.
If there were differences of age and rank among the gods, these could not
be determined by the time and manner of their appearance at the creation
of the world or in the history of the gods, but only by their having joined
the circle of Roman State deities at an earlier or later date, and by the extent
of their influence on the well-being of that State. Personal qualities and
individual characteristics were supposed to have been lacking in these gods,
with their attachment to places and things. They were simply ranged side
by side, without any other connection than that of neighbourhood and a
similarity in the manner of their influence. Above all, according to this
view of Roman rehgion, divine marriages and divine genealogies were
unknown. The accounts of such things given in later times were supposed
 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 223

to be based entirely on poetic invention or on analogies drawn by scholars

from Greek religion.
Such was, and today still is, the general view of Roman religion. A
higher stage in the development of our knowledge, however, was reached
when it was realised, in opposition to this view,322 that there were on
Roman soil definite traces of a mythology outside literature, untouched by
the influence of Greek poetry. It was seen, too, that these traces were
uniformly distributed among the ancient Roman, Etruscan, and Greek
components of the historical Roman religion, and that the image of the
divine as it appeared in them was not different from that which was expressed
by the historical Roman cult. But a living intellectual exchange between
myth and cult seemed no longer to exist in historical times. In its songs
and formulae the cult was evidently concerned to avoid mythical things.
It even passed over in silence those legendary ideas which seem so inseparable
from the gods it had taken over from the Greeks. And in this behaviour
we find a contrast between Roman religion and that of Italy. In the latter,
tradition provides us with plenty of evidence for a lively interchange between
cult and legend. From this set of facts it was inferred that the historical
Roman cult—or the historical Roman religion (owing to the overriding
importance of the cult the two were not kept distinct)—had been ‘demythol-
ogised’. Historical evidence for such a process was found in Dionysius of
Halicarnassus,323 who describes the introduction of the cult of the Great
Mother of Asia Minor, the Magna Mater, and makes a point of the manner
in which the whole of the ceremonial determined by myth was discarded.
On the other hand it was also a fact that the cult, though it made no reference
to the myth in its formulae, yet did not dare to be inconsistent with it. The
grouping of the pairs of gods at the Lectisternia, the Roman Theoxenia,
showed that the order laid down by myth was being exactly followed.
Thus the theory of a mythless Roman religion, which represented only
half the truth and gave rise to a false history of Roman religion, was followed
in the scholarship of the twentieth century by that of a ‘demythologised’
religion. But this theory, too, could not be logically worked out, and it had
to make one important concession. It had to allow that the myth was
after all present in Roman religion, in its own way. For this theory the
type of the ‘demythologised’ deity was the Roman Jupiter. Yet it is the
figure of Jupiter winch was perhaps the best demonstration of the presence
224 Man and God in the Roman View

of the myth and of the manner in which it found expression in the cult. It
is in certain negative features of the Jupiter cult that a mythical prototype
was so unmistakably outlined. We see from this example how the selective
activity which is meant by religio in the strict sense was guided by the myth
and how the myth conversely was translated into life by religio. A life which
in fact originated in this way was central to the whole Jupiter cult. This,
the hfe of the Flamen Dialis, was nothing else but a cult of Jupiter. When
we come to consider this life we find ourselves at the very heart of the
Roman religion. All the more important is it that our interpretation of
this life should concern itself simply with the phenomena, and be content
merely to describe them without seeking the help of analogies which would
distract our attention from what is characteristically Roman. It should
refrain also from introducing into the material handed down to us premature
assumptions about the origin and nature of these phenomena.
One such premature assumption was the attempt to interpret everything
we know about the Flamen Dialis as a survival of an ancient Roman priest-
king.324 Another was to explain all thtflamines, holders of priestly offices
attached to different Roman deities, in terms of an historical development
for which there was no evidence. The sacred duties of the king, so it was
supposed, had gradually been taken over by the flamen Dialis, the special
priest of Jupiter, and the remaining duties had been transferred, after the
abolition of the kingship, to the rex sacrorum.325 Assumptions hke these—
apart from the origin of the office of rex sacrorum, as the obvious successor
of the rex—are not supported by tradition and in fact explain nothing of
what a flamen, and th e flamen Dialis in particular, really was. Another view
for which there is equally little foundation was that which understood the
flamen himself as a thing, a sacred object,326 a sort of fetish which had to be
preserved with anxious care from any kind of harm or pollution. On the
contrary, the flamen, especially the flamen Dialis, was identical with the hfe
he lived. It was a hfe which was not his own but the realisation of a special
manner of life. In this mamier of life the wife of the flamen Dialis, the
fiammica, also shared, with her children the camilli and camillae. It was a
complete reversal of actual conditions in the ancient world to suppose that
this manner of life was no more than an exemplary family hfe, the artificially
realised ideal of a Roman family, and that its members worshipped Jupiter
in a perfect way only because they had nothing else to do in a hfe given over
 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 225

to exemplary living.327 The position of the wife and children of the flamen
Dialis did of course represent an essential aspect of his life. But we do not
need any special explanation of this aspect when we realise that the sole
purpose of this life was to represent a mythological figure.
The fives of all three great famines—the priests of Jupiter, Mars, and
Quirinus designated by this name—had the character of a permanent
festival.328 The flamen must not work, he must not even see other people
at work. Every day he keeps festival, and he bears the festival around with
him. Heralds run before him to order all work to stop within the range of
his vision. The sacra—the caerimoniae, or cult usages, which filled his life329—
were defiled if he saw the unfestive work of hands.330 Festivity and cult in
the life of the flamen were by no means confined to the times of sacrifice and
the actual sacrifices which he offered to his god—Jupiter in the case of the
Dialis—but his whole life must be considered festal, the performance of a
cult. A necessary part of this existence—this too is common to all three
great famines—was the ancient form of marriage by confarreatio. Those
chosen for it must be the offspring of marriages solemnised by this rite and
must themselves be so married. All these requirements, which applied not
only to the flamen Dialis, served primarily to define a distinct, a festal manner
of life, and the form of marriage was prescribed merely as a quite general
condition for it. It remains none the less remarkable that confarreatio itself
belonged to the domain of Jupiter and that it was thus his priest, the Dialis,
who at this ceremony performed the sacrifice together with the pontifex
maximus.331 Moreover, the word fiammica without other additions always
refers to the wife of the Dialis.332 He is the flamen whose wife plays her
part beside him as a cult personage, sharing in the priestly dignity, while
the wives of the Martialis and Quirinalis remain more in the background.
The hfe of the Dialis was more particularly characterised by its negative
rules, which were exceptionally strict. It is they which so sharply defined
the festal manner of life which was characteristic of him alone. Yet he is not
called, for instance, flamen Iovialis, priest of Jupiter, but Dialis, priest of‘Day’
or of‘Father Day’, Diespiter. Dialis is connected with dies. It was the name
given jokingly to one who was consul only for a day—consul dialis, ‘consul
of the day’.333 Varrò gave the correct linguistic definition of Diespiter:
id est dies pater,334 This name enshrines one aspect of Jupiter, while the
name Veiovis stands for another aspect of the same god. The different
22 6 Man and God in the Roman View

single aspects of the great god Jupiter were never completely split off, either
in the case of Diespiter or in that of Veiovis. This latter too is spoken of in
the literature as if obviously a ‘Jupiter’.335 The darker aspect of Jupiter
indicated by the name Veiovis and translated by the Greek Zeus Katachthonios,
the ‘underworld Zeus’,336 is a much more sharply defined figure than that
which among the Greeks was surrounded by the darkness of secret cults.
Veiovis is much associated in Italy with the figure of Apollo,337 always as the
darker aspect of the Greek god. In Rome, however, his separation from
the parent figure was never quite completed. Veiovis remained for the
Romans Ve-jovis—no doubt different from Jupiter, whatever the syllable
ve- may have meant,338 and yet a sort of Jupiter. The unity of a Jupiter
figure which was not only heavenly but also subterranean was never finally
broken. We must still be aware of the darker aspect even when, as in the
life of the flamen Dialis, only the bright side is spread out before us.
Everything in which death, an aspect of the ‘chthonic’ sphere, has part,
was kept strictly away from this festal manner of life. The flamen Dialis
must touch nothing dead nor walk in any place where there was a grave.339
He must not look upon an army ready for battle. He must not mount a
horse, whereas the flamen Martialis,340 for instance, at the sacrifice of the
October Horse, was concerned with horse and killing both at once.341
This, and the circumstance that both he and the flamen Quirinalis were
allowed to engage continually in warlike activities,342 corresponds to the
‘martial’ character of their lives. The only thing permitted to the Dialis,
on the other hand, was to take part in the Procession of the Dead, in which
the ancestors were represented by their imagines or death-masks.343 Thus
there was no fear for his pollution when, for reasons which are not quite
obvious, emphasis was being laid on the contact between the heavenly and
the underworld spheres. There are various examples of this. Thus in the
fasti Praenestini, or Praenestine Calendar, on 23 December there appears
the festival of the dead called the Larentalia, with the gloss fleriae Jovis’ ; and
in the fasti Amiternini, the Calendar of Amiternum, on 5 July, another grim
celebration, the Poplifugia, carried the same gloss.
The dog and the bean were dear to the underworld beings, and were
sacrificed to them. Th eflamen Dialis might not touch or even name either
of them.344 With equal strictness everything was forbidden him by which
this sphere was known to the Greeks as belonging to Dionysus—an archaic
 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 227
Dionysus who was a ruler of the underworld and a great hunter.345 Un¬
cooked meat was forbidden to the flamen Dialis, whereas in the cult of
Dionysus Omestes raw meat was eaten.346 Similar rules marked him off
from the realm of Demeter, or Ceres among the Romans. The flamen
Dialis was forbidden flour and yeast.347 The realms themselves here matter
much more than the Greek or Roman names of the deities in question.
They probably had equivalent names in all the languages of ancient Italy.
One animal and one plant of the Dionysiac domain were the goat and the
ivy. Both were forbidden the Dialis no less than dog and bean.348 Nor
was an exception made of the highest plant representative of the Dionysiac
domain, the plant in which the powers of the god were at their most
exuberant.349 For the Dialis was forbidden to go into a vineyard with
overhanging vine-shoots.350 On the other hand, he did have a part to play
in the Lupercalia, at which a he-goat was sacrificed,351 and it was he who
introduced the vintage, by sacrificing a lamb to Jupiter and cutting the
first bunch of grapes while the internal parts of the victim were being cut
out. The vineyards around Rome stood under the dominion of Jupiter 352
at least from the time of the first ripe grapes in August. Perhaps this
represented a limitation of the rule of an older and more savage wine-god.
Of the five positive duties of the flamen Dialis known to us 353 we have
mentioned two. Two others were the sacrifice of the ovis Idulis, the white
lamb, on the Ides of the month, and the sacrifice to Fides, both cult perform¬
ances concerned with the brightest aspect of Jupiter. The fifth was his
function at the confarreatio, the form of solemnisation of marriage which
also had to precede his own birth. The confarreate marriage ranked among
the Romans as the holiest form of union.354 It was the only one in which
the Dialis shared, both as priest who functioned at the ceremony and passively
as the man who lived in a confarreate marriage. Otherwise the life of the
Dialis was not permitted any form of union. He was not allowed to swear
an oath,355 to wear any knot in his clothing or headgear.356 Even his ring
had to be cut.357 Anyone who entered his house in bonds had to be unbound
and the fetters taken out again through the impluvium, the unroofed section
of the atrium, or inner court.358 His hair must not be cut by an unfree
person.359 Everything which grew upon him was subject to special treat¬
ment. The hair and nail clippings of the Dialis were buried under an arbor
felix, a tree which did not belong to the underworld beings.360 This was
228 Man and God in the Roman View
the positive counterpart to his being kept clear of every union. The essential
thing in the life of theflamen Dialis, protected by so many negative rules,
was thus shown to be free, unhampered growth.
Growth and freedom were both equally important in this pattern of
life, and fastening is opposed to either. The domain of Veiovis represented
the transition from the unfree sphere to that of freedom. In his sacred
precinct lay the Asylon, through which slaves climbed out of the condition
of slavery to the first stage of a free life.361 Veiovis protected the Order of
freedom at this lowest stage, with the rules and regulations of the client
relationship.362 Distinct from this was the next higher stage of freedom,
represented by the life of the Dialis. This was manifested, as we have seen,
in a complete freedom of growth. It was marked also by a special covering
for the head. There is a striking analogy between the headgear by which
the slave became a free man, the pileus, and that of the Dialis, the apex.363
It shows that the life of the Dialis, though so far above the domain of Veiovis,
was not entirely unconnected with it. The connection was that between
two stages of growth. Growth here was considered not as historical pro¬
gression but as a phenomenon which could take on different forms, stages
of one another, in a process of free development. There was already
development of a kind in the dark realm of Veiovis. Those set free were
at the same time new-born, still at the childhood stage of growth and
remaining there.364 On the other hand the life of the Dialis, which was
growth in full development, must have roots. Up in those radiant heights
it must still have some connection with the dark underside of the world.
It becomes clear what this was when we consider the one form of union
permitted, and indeed essential, to th eflamen Dialis.
The part played by the Dialis at the act of confarreatio may be assigned,
undoubtedly, to the brightest aspect of Jupiter. The division of the Roman
month, too, was connected with this aspect. It was divided in two parts
by the day of the Ides, which itself was called ‘Jupiter’s surety,’365 or ‘Faith’
(fides—in business, ‘credit’). But Jupiter was also Jupiter Farreus 366 the
god through whom the spelt cake, the far of confarreatio, became divine and
so expressed, by means of a sort of physical union, a spiritual union. It was
this real union which emerged from the ceremony in full clarity and truth.
The instrument of the physical act was a thing, and the more colourless and
less specific a thing it was—like the piece of flint in the Fetiales, for instance,
 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 229

where it was the instrument of an international act—the more suitable it

was for representing a spiritual reality, firm, clear and impersonal. Jupiter
was there in the accomplishment of the rightful act, sure and hard as
the stone. Was the act then accomplished by the stone? Yes, by Jupiter
Lapis,367 by ‘Jupiter the Stone’ ! One ancient formula, with more exactness,
uses the name Diespiter in this context.368
‘If I knowingly betray this trust, may Diespiter sling me, without harm
to city and citadel, out of all good, as I now sling this stone.’ The marriage
which comes about by confarreatio, a legal act before ten witnesses,369 is a
similar event. It is union—union however with another less clear and less
sure kingdom in the world of men. It is a kingdom with which the Dialis
is connected, through the fiammica, with whom he too shares a confarreate
marriage. There is certainly good reason for the fact that she, the ‘sacred
wife of the Dialis’,370 can advise on favourable and unfavourable times for
solemnising marriage.371 Through her husband she is in relation with
Jupiter, she is his priestess, sacerdos Iovis.372 But she is also the one who as a
woman has immediate knowledge, from her own experience, of that other
darker and more dangerous realm. For the fiammica must be supposed to
have had at least as close a relationship to Juno, the great goddess of that other
realm, as every Roman woman had. According to our sources, indeed, the
wife of the Dialis was related even more closely than that to the domain of
Juno and so, through her, was the Dialis himself.
The flaminica was ‘so to speak sacred to Juno’.373 This is said in a context
which makes it immediately intelligible why she was thought of as in the
closest possible relationship to the goddess. She mourned as the twenty-
seven rush dolls, called Argei, were thrown into the Tiber. The meaning
of this performance is problematical. But the name Argei, ‘those of Argos’,
indicates the favourites of Imo Argiva, the inhabitants of Argos and in a
wider sense the Greeks generally.374 It is known that at the time when
the Argei ceremony was introduced the Romans were conscious of a close
relationship of the fiammica to the goddess who was then certainly identified
with Hera. Tradition, which calls her only ‘Dialis’, is against her having
been also the priestess of Juno. But her relationship to Juno was altogether
natural. For th & fiammica was a woman, and one united in matrimony with
th e flamen Dialis as Juno with Jupiter. As a woman she had part in something
which the Romans called luno. The fundamental meaning of this word
230 Man and God in the Roman View

is the female counterpart of ‘youth’, a young female creature. As the

Romans saw it, there was on the one hand the great goddess Juno, and on
the other every woman possessed a young Female Nature, her special Inno.
This state of affairs may seem unclear at first but its peculiarity must be
understood. For it will illuminate the relationship of the Dialis to the whole
domain of Juno, which at first seems to have similar contradictions.
The great goddess Juno shows herself as the complementary half of
Jupiter in the moving universe. To Jupiter belongs the bright time of the
Ides, to Juno the dark time of the Kalends.375 Just as on the one hand
heavenly clarity and Jupiter, in his character as Diespiter, are inseparable
for the Romans, so Juno on the other is inseparable from the dark time of
new moon and the subterranean depths. The goat and the snake, which
theflamen Dialis might not even name, are her dearest animals. At the cave
of Lanuvium, where her domestic snake dwelt, the goat skin was part of
her official clothing.376 It is at least probable that, at a time and in a sphere
where there could not yet be any question of an apparent ‘demythologisa-
tion’, there was a common worship of Juno Lucina and Jupiter.377 Juno
Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, in keeping with her nature lived in
places where light and life come forth from dark depths. A point of time
with this character was the day of the Kalends each month, which
was presided over by Juno Lucina in common with Janus. A similar con¬
junction corresponded to Jupiter as Veiovis, as is attested by the dates
of temple dedications.378 Jupiter and Juno are like two hemispheres in their
relation to one another. The brighter hemisphere reaches down into the
dark depths, where it is in contact with the darker, and the darker receives
just enough light from the brighter to raise it into the heavens.
The clear and firm relationship in which the great goddess Juno stands
to Jupiter was reproduced by that between the luno of each individual
woman and the Genius of every man. Everything which can be said of
the Genius in the masculine domain was balanced by a corresponding
feature of the luno in the feminine domain. Genius meant the ‘begetter’
by which a man was procreated and which continued his procreation. For
that reason a man’s birthday, on which his procreation first became manifest,
was sacred to the Genius.379 In the same way the birthdays of a woman were
sacred to her luno natalis,380 by the agency of which she entered upon a
time to be filled with womanly life. Neither the Genius of man nor the
 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 231

Iuno of women referred to any other life but the real earthly one. Roman
women regarded their eyebrows as sacred to Juno.381 There is a striking
parallel to this notion in modern popular superstition and some rational
ground for it has actually been supplied by recent medical observation.
For there does appear to be a connection between the health and fertility
of a woman’s life and the growth of her eyebrows.382 Corresponding to
this attribution of the eyebrows to the domain of Juno was the fact that the
male forehead was dedicated to the Genius.383
The divine element experienced in herself by every individual woman
as her own Juno, her eternally self-renewing youthful femininity, was
identified with one half of the world. It thus reached over into the universe
itself and formed a hemisphere, complementary to the other hemisphere
which on the cosmic scale was called ‘Jupiter’. It remained, however,
within the limits of a domain in which youth is the only determinant, the
eternally fruitful youth of the world with the capacity for giving birth. Its
counterpart in this same animal territory was the Genius as ‘procreator’.
In the Roman view the Genius with its relationship to the forehead reached out
beyond this sphere. It soared into the domain of the high heavens, of
Jupiter, even though it could not be said that ‘the men had their “Jupiter” ’.
The Iunones of the women are at the same time the Juno of the world.
On the male side there was nothing with a similar sort of name to correspond
to this identity. Jupiter possessed his own Genius.384 Between that which
we can call the ‘Genial’ and that which we can call the ‘Jovial’—to adopt a
later linguistic usage—there was none the less a gap.
It is this gap which was filled, more or less, by the life of the Dialis.
This life can be called, according to the later usage, ‘Jovial’, even when only
those features of it are in evidence which correspond to the special epithet
dialis. The confarreate marriage belongs to this life not only as a union, as
a spiritual reality which must be preserved with exemplary faithfulness, but
as a reality of life; not only as form but also as content. Not only was
divorce forbidden the Dialis, but with the death of his wife he ceased to be
flamen.365 This has a matriarchal ring, as if it were a survival of a system
in which the woman was the real holder of the priesthood.386 Against this
there is the fact that the flaminica could only be a univira—a remarried
widow or a divorced wife were ineligible 387—which would not usually
have been the case with a matriarchal sovereign. What was required
232 Man and God in the Roman View

cannot be explained, only described—a whole consisting of two halves so

applied to one another that they make a formally perfect pair. Strict rules
ensured that this formal perfection, which corresponded rather to a myth¬
ological than to a formal idea, remained full of life. They have been handed
down to us only in respect of the Dialis. In the case of one of them—the
prohibition on long absence from Rome—it is known that the Dialis was at
a disadvantage in his State life compared with the Martialis and the
Quirinalis.388
They were rules affecting domestic life, as it were the nocturnal side of
his ‘genial’ life. What we previously paraphrased as ‘freedom and growth’
coincides with the bright daytime side of his life. As the forehead is related
to the head, so can the relation of the Genius to Jupiter be expressed in the
Roman view. The impressive headgear of the Roman priests—not only
the flamines, but also the pontifices and the Salii—the high cone-shaped
apex, was pre-eminently characteristic of the Dialis. He was the only one
who had to wear this uncomfortable hat continually. Not till the ist century
a.d. was he allowed to take off the apex at home.389 And he had to take it off
when he was preparing for death.390 This forerunner of the Bishop’s
mitre seems to have been connected with the brightest ‘jovial’ sphere. The
apex indeed gave distinction not only to the head but also to the forehead,
which was sacred to the Genius. In the open air the Diahs was forbidden
to take his shirt off, ‘lest he should stand naked, so to speak, under the eye
of Jupiter’, thus it was expressly formulated,391 and therewith once more
the respect for the higher sphere was emphasised, whereas the Genius was
related to the other, less bright sphere—as also was the life of the flamen
Dialis, again regulated by strict rules.
His bed was as sacred as his hearth. Just as no one might bring fire out
of his house for a sacred purpose,392 so equally no one else might sleep in
his bed.393 Like the marriage bed of every Roman,394 it was sacred to the
Genius, but it had the additional peculiarity that its feet were painted with
clay.395 The intimate connection between this resting place and the earth
was thus made obvious to the eye. A container with sacrificial cakes had
to stand next to the bed,396 an indication of ceremonies which made his
repose into a cult act. Such an act was usually performed in honour of the
Genius. At the wedding, for instance, it was the Genius in whose honour
and with prayers to whom the marriage bed was prepared and from whom
 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 233
the bed had the name lectus genialis. The importance of the nocturnal side
of the life of the Dialis was emphasised by the fact that though he might
spend a day outside Rome, he must never spend a night outside it.397 Later
he was allowed two nights in which he might sleep in a bed other than his
own, but never three successive nights.398 The positive and negative
rules together formed a meaningful whole. In this the nights of the Dialis
were no less significant than his days. The fact that the nights of the man
dedicated to Day were thus sanctified gave a clear outline to his mythological
picture. It was simply the idea that the Heavens, usually so bright and clear,
rested during the night in dark, procreative union on the earth.
Here we have a myth translated into human life. That was the meaning
of all the prohibitions and ceremonies, which they declared and made in¬
telligible. They made the myth as actual as it is humanly possible for it to
be. In the life of his priest the Roman god of heaven walked among men.
We have here a classical example of the truth that representation, or actual-
isation, is the essence of the cult. The view which denied all profundity
to Roman religion because it had no myths about the origin of the world
was evidently false. For here a comprehensive religious idea shone through
as a myth continually realised in the life of the flamen Dialis. Something
bright and exalted here turned its face to men and thus hinted also at a
turning away from the darker spheres of existence—not in hatred but like a
flower which turns away from its root, in growth and development. The
roots reach down into those depths in which light and dark are united,
giving rise to the living thing, so that what is free emerges from what is
bound. There is nothing which conforms more exactly to the Roman
idea of the State than this notion of cosmic brightness and clarity, the
notion of a true Diespiter. Yet this notion cannot be detached from the
more comprehensive one of Jupiter. It includes that which lies deepest, in
which men directly participate and through which they have contact with
the highest. As Jupiter in one of his aspects was Diespiter, so in another
aspect he was Jupiter Indiges, the primordial procreative father, as this
name must probably be interpreted.399 The fact that Aeneas could be
identified with Iuppiter Indiges is a sufficient proof of the existence of this
aspect. To be primordial procreative father is divine, but it is also very
human. The idea of a god who comprehends in himself procreative father¬
hood and the highest spiritual clarity is necessarily both cosmic and merely
N
234 Man and God in the Roman View

human. It is more or less realised in every spiritual man capable of father¬

hood.
Instead of a cosmogonic myth in words we have here a cult represen¬
tation, in which the origin and ‘Jovial unfolding’ of life, that is, the content
of a cosmogonic myth, is not recited but actualised in the substance of a
human life. In view of the wide dissemination of a mythical story of the
separation of heaven and earth,400 which of course presupposes their
previous union, the question whether this form of representation was not
in fact preceded by a myth in words must in all probability be answered in
the affirmative. What we have here is a Roman form of representation, and
at the same time a Roman form of the relation between man and god. It
contains something more than a mere ‘legal intercourse’ although the
Roman cult also includes the legalistic formalities of this relationship. The
Dialis is ‘so to speak a living holy statue’—so Plutarch formulates the
relationship in this case.401 Later accounts tended to the view of the flamen
as a sacred object. We by contrast spoke of the life of the Dialis, but this
view can be combined with that of Plutarch if we think of this ‘life’ as a
‘substance’, a substance composed of ‘time’ out of which is formed a living
statue of Jupiter. This view is justified by ancient tradition. Nowhere is
there a word about what the person of the Dialis may not suffer, only
about what he must do or omit, so that his manner of life may be preserved
from all disturbances. A sick Dialis was thinkable,402 but a Dialis who
deviated from the prescribed manner of life was unthinkable. The temporal
course of his life was the cult act through which Jupiter was actualised.
Further support for this view may be found in another case, which illustrates
even more precisely the relation between man and god in such a form of
representation.
A culminating point of the Roman cult of Jupiter was an act in which
the god, in his capacity as conqueror, was represented by a man, the trium¬
phant general. Originally the triumphus, to judge from his name, which
comes from the Greek thriambos, a Dionysiac celebration, was probably not
associated with that idea of Jupiter Optimus Maximus which is characteristic
of the historic Roman religion. None the less, the god in triumph was here
represented by a piece of human life, a duration of time raised to high tension
by the festival spirit. The view was not that Jupiter had brought about
and effected the victory, but that he was himself the victor. The triumph
 The Life of the Flamen Dialis 235

was not held in his honour but it was he himself who triumphed. That is
why the triumphant general drove around in the insignia of the god.403
This corresponded to the Roman concept of godhead, insofar as a god for
the Romans was always an agent.404 Just for that reason he could not have
that concreteness and abundance which we admire in the Greek gods. For
the Romans the godhead expresses itself not in Form, but in a temporal
sequence of decisive acts. One such act was the victory to which a cult act,
the Triumph, corresponded. The general performed this act as Jupiter,
just as in the act of victory he had not really been himself but Jupiter. And
that was what he was in the Triumph, but only in one single act, during a
procession to the Capitol, until the moment when he laid down his bay
wreath before the god.405
The flamen Dialis, on the other hand, did not merely perform one act
of Jupiter, but entered into a whole aspect of the god. In this case we see
that the Roman concept of godhead was reduced to that of an agent not
in the historical Roman religion but later on, in the Roman theology of
Varro’s time, in the first century b.c. The Roman gods appear as abstract
and without abundance only when we think of time as empty and not
filled with the stuff of life. The Dialis with his life entered into an aspect of
divinity which in its form was an idea but in its content appeared in time,
formed so to speak from the stuff of life. It had kinship with human hfe and
could be represented by human life. But it stood also above it. For so long
as human hfe existed, it would always be able to represent it. Such an
aspect had its own kind of concreteness, empirical rather than intelligible.
It was experienced, lived: in a passive, devout fashion when one followed
it involuntarily and could not do otherwise; in an active fashion when one
by choice—in Roman terms ‘religiously’—entered into an aspect of the
world evolving in time. That is what theflamen Dialis did as an example
to everyone.

RETROSPECT
\

At the beginning of this chapter we started out by comparing the Greek

and the Roman religion. We showed that the religion of the Greeks
23 6 Man and God in the Roman View

might with more justice be called a ‘mythological religion’ than that of

the Romans. For classical scholarship both of them were—in contrast to
the doctrinal religions—cult religions. This description, however, must
remain an empty one so long as we only consider what kinds of religious
content they excluded and not what they actually contained. We may, if
we choose, call the positive content of the ancient religion ‘cult’. But we
must realise that this word signifies a relationship which is in its essence
actualisation—the representation of something real, something which is
never simple, but manifold and various, as manifold and various as the
aspects of the world in fact are to men. This real thing has the capacity to
become actual in a festive way, that is to say even more present than are the
most present things of everyday. To this higher form of reality, which
belongs only to the festal world, there correspond those special forms of
representation which can in the widest sense be called ‘cult’. Besides the
cult in the narrowest sense they include also poetic and artistic representation.
In this sense mythology too would be ‘cult’ if it were not, above all, word,
statement, speech, with its own movement and development, knowing no
bounds. The cult on the other hand is sharply bounded. Within its bounds
it consists of actions which run their course in time but also of pictorial
elements with which it approaches the timeless. Our comparison of the
Greek and Roman religion attributed the more pictorial cult to the Greeks,
while we saw the Roman cult as one which exhausted its possibilities in
action. In this sense, of the two ancient religions, the Roman could be
called pre-eminently the religion of cult.
The fact that it was so for so long—throughout Roman history as known
to us—we attributed to the efficacy of religio, of careful ‘choice’. This
selective activity of religio used to be all too readily interpreted as mere
traditionalism, based on a primitive, ‘pre-deistic’ state of Roman religion.
The existence of any such state in Roman religious history remains, however,
an unproved hypothesis. There was an opposing view which had to be
treated with more respect. It may perhaps have been possible that the
Roman cult represented not a pre-mythological past but a ‘demythologised’
one. This view merits special consideration in view of the picture we today
have of the Mediterranean world. For reasons of historical insight, more¬
over, we were bound to give preference to the view that it was not a barren
conservatism which was realised in religio but a living inner form—the
 Retrospect 237

Roman form. The theory of ‘demythologisation’ is based on a painstaking

interpretation of the tradition. It positively demanded a view of religio
which accorded it more than a mere power of conservation.
Just as the aptitude of the Greeks for theoria helped them to create clear
images of the divine, so the Romans were enabled by their religio to realise
the divine deliberately in life and action. An example of such deliberate
realisation, which was as much exalted above the ordinary life of man as a
Greek Zeus-image was above the bodily appearance of Zeus-like men, was
the life of the βamen Dialis. This life was just as much an actuahsation of
the divine as the famous work of Pheidias or its predecessors, Homer’s
descriptions of the father of gods and men. It was, however, an actuahsation
in Roman Style. An activity of religio which makes divine images out of
the stuff of life, as the Greek sculptors made them from marble, goes beyond
anything which could be implied by a negative word like ‘demythologisa¬
tion’. This is a very one-sided, and therefore false, term for anything as
positive and creative as the activities of priestly Romans in working out a
relationship between the archetypal world of mythology and the ectypal
world of hfe and history—to use the terms I introduced in the first chapter
of this book. This relation between myth and hfe—mythos and bios, the
myth as prototype, the life as imitation—is itself archetypal. It was never
more than approximately realised, and there were many forms of realisation,
various in style. The purest form was that defined by Malinowski in the
light of his experience—‘the statement of an original, greater and more
important reality by which the present life, destiny, and activity of men is
determined’—‘something which happened once upon a time’.
The Romans had remained even closer to this conception than the
Greeks. The Greek stories about the gods take place, it is true, in primeval
times, but they are presented under a timeless aspect—as though in a special
part of space in which, in contrast to the world of men, time does not exist.
Whatever men do, it is not regarded either as the continuation of the stories
about the gods nor as their repetition. It was otherwise with the Romans.
For them, any remnant of a great earlier myth which was not already
embodied in a cult life, as in the hfe of the flamen Dialis (and doubtless the
hfe of the Vestal Virgins was also of this kind), constituted the history of the
Italian primeval age. It only became ‘cosmic’ when the Romans made it
so by turning it into their own great history. They were consciously
238 Man and God in the Roman View

repeating themselves. Vergil’s Aeneid is an expression of the Roman

concern to realise the myth. His poetic effort operates within Roman
religion just as faithfully as Dante’s within his Catholic religion. The Roman
attitude to myth shows itself, apart from the cult, in the fact that for them
the past was continually effective in the present. There was no frontier of
time between myth and history, both were lines which met one another in
the uniform flow of time. ‘Thus myth became bistorta sacra, of normalising
importance for the present.’406
Thus myth in ancient religion has two forms corresponding to the two
classical cultures of the Mediterranean world. The Greeks developed it in
images which require the greatest openness of mind and are intelligible to
such openness. With the Romans the myth appears more conceptual,
abstract, schematic,407 but it demands a special kind of openness of mind for
everything which belongs to time, and above all for one’s own life with
which one directly experiences time. They are two aspects which mutually
complete one another, since they are aspects of one and the same world, the
world which in its festive quality was actual for the people of antiquity and
could become even more so. Both aspects united make the world of the
religious Greek or Roman accessible to us, so far as this is still possible. This
access can only be attempted through ideas, which we may consider as the
fundamental ideas of ancient religion.
These fundamental ideas derive, so far as their form is concerned, from
the Greek and Roman Existence. In their content they are primordial
experiences of man expressed in myths. The observations which I have
here set down dealt with them from the viewpoint of the stylistic Form in
which they appeared to the Greeks and Romans. The two people were at
the same time characterised by this Form. The character portrait thus
obtained consists, it is true, only of outlines. It is more geometrical than
pictorial. Nor can it be argued that this outline drawing is as valid for the
pre-Homeric and old Itahan period, or for the late period, as it is for the
post-Homeric and in Rome for the historical period of religion. All that
can be said is that a study of these Forms—even for those who take a different
view of their content—does bring us closer to a picture, which can never be
completely accessible, of the two ancient religions and ancient civilisation
as a whole.
 ROME

and the Roman cults

102 Marble statue of Augustus as a
priest, c. A.D. 20, from the
Via Labicana, Rome.
Museo Nazionale, Rome
103 ‘Sacrarium' from the Casa del Cenacolo, Pompeii
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104 Shrine of the Lares in the house of the Vettii, Pompeii. Third quarter of 1st century A.D.
105 Altar with festoons and hucrania. Archaeological Museum, Naples
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106 Altar of Cains Manlius showing a scene of sacrifice, perhaps to the Genius Imperiale.
Period oj Augustus. Laterali Museum
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107 Aitar dedicateci to the Lares oj Augustus, from the Vicus Sandaiiarius. A.D. 2. Uffizi, Florence
io8 Frieze from an altar which stood in front of the Temple of Neptune, Rome. Erected by
Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, found near the Palazzo Santacroce, c. 40 B.C. Louvre, Paris

■~ύ--—L.

109 A frieze representing the Sulcus primigenius. Middle 1st century A.D. Aquileia Museum
 ■

no-m Relief representing Vicomagistri, the presidents of the Vici, whose duties included in
imperial times the upkeep of the cult of the Lares compitales, the Lares Augusti and the genius
of the emperor; c. A.D. 40. Vatican Museum
 i Triumphal Arch a The birth-sign oj Augustus in Temple oj Mars Ultor

iv Arches Jor the dead at Actium v Apollo Palatinus vi Curia Julia

vii Triumphal chariot via Victoria in the Curia ix Laurel trees

112 AUGUSTAN COINS

113 Scenes from the haruspicatio on the Capitol [detail). Second decade of 2nd century A.D. Louvre, Paris
 mesM

114 Suovetaurilia carried out by an Emperor; from the Palazzo San Marco, Rome;
Flavian period. Louvre, Paris

115 Sarcophagus showing the life of a Roman citizen; Flavian period. Uffizi, Florence
II6 Sacrifice. Part of the Ara Pietatis of Claudius. Villa Medici, Rome
ii7 A relief showing a procession, from the Ara Pads, Rome; 13-9 B.C.
118 relief with priests and the Imperial Family, from the Ara Pads, Rome; 13-9 B.C
119 Roman Haruspex, taking the haruspicatio on the Capitol, second decade of 2nd century A.D
This and Pi. 113 are details from the same frieze
120 Trajan pouring a libation on an altar. Trajan’s column, Rome
I2i Banquet of the Vestals, a fragment from the Ara Pietatis; c. ist century A.D.
Museo dei Conservatori, Rome

122 Pompa before Ludi of a Sevir,from a tomb at Amiternum. ist century A.D.
Museo Nazionale, Rome
123 Septimius Severus and his wife Giulia offering a sacrifice, from the Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome
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 Epilogue
THE RELIGIOUS IDEA OF

NON-EXISTENCE

One human experience from which attempts have been made to derive
not merely ancient religion but all religion is death. We have been offered
statements like this : ‘All faith is faith in another world, the fate of the soul
after death constitutes in all religions the centre of religious thought.’408
No doubt this is an extreme generalisation. Yet here, at the end of a book
which has sought to understand the ancient religions as ‘religions of the
certainty of the universe’, certainty, that is, of the non-human foundations
of the world of men, we must give some consideration to the question how
the ‘other world’ is regarded in these and similar religions of ‘this world’.
We have spoken of the fundamental outlines of the ancient religion without
having said a word about Greek and Roman notions of the soul. There is
need of a new, exhaustive treatment of this subject,409 and we shall be making
only a small, though indispensable, step towards it if we now deal with the
question here.
Death was taken very seriously by the ancient Greeks and Romans. It
was not doubted that man is subject to death as to a ruler over existence.
It would be easy to say that religious man in antiquity was always preoccupied
with the problem of death and that it was his religion, with its ideas about
death, which first gave him answers to it. In reality the ideas of the most
ancient Greek philosophers have not been transmitted to us in such a form
that we can say what questions they asked and how they asked them. The
art of asking questions was a much later achievement of ancient philosophy
than that of viewing and stating what was important in the world. Philoso¬
phic ideas existed before philosophic questions were asked. Ideas do not
presuppose the asking of questions, especially not child-like questions.
There is no justification for assuming that such questions were in fact asked
by serious thinkers of antiquity. Questions are first formulated for the
o
 2Ó2 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

benefit of ignorant people and schoolchildren after knowledge and vision

have already been consolidated. Or they emerge when the solid founda¬
tions begin to dissolve.
Least of all do religious ideas exist in order to answer questions.
Religions are not solutions of primeval problems. Rather they add con¬
siderably to the number of problems. The religious ideas and the myth¬
ological accounts of them themselves become assumptions on which ques¬
tions and answers are based. Even when a god has appeared to a man, he
can put questions about that appearance. All the more will questions be
put as the end of a religion is approached. In the end the gods and all
religious ideas become ‘questionable’. In their original, living, valid form
religious ideas belong to a quite different sphere from the asking of questions
and posing of problems or from the giving of answers and solutions. They
do, however, show a certain similarity with the oldest philosophic ideas in
that they do, like them, contain an attitude of man to the world. The
reality of the world manifests itself in them in one of the forms which the
world itself offers. It shows itself to man, who as knower and perceiver
confronts both form and content and holds firm what is offered him, as one
aspect of the world, a sort of idea of the world.
We have learnt to know this attitude of ancient religious man as the
attitude of aidos and sebas or else as the attitude of observance, of regulating
one’s life according to rule, of religio. In its highest form, the Greek, it is
in contact with the attitude of the philosopher. However, the noein of the
philosopher is directed at a special transparency of the world, at penetrating
to naked being. This was particularly the case in archaic Greek philosophy.
Plato and Aristotle did at least give pride of place to ‘wonder’ as the origin
of philosophy.410 Thaumazein, thauma, and thamhos are connected with
sebas, but on the evidence of the Greek language they had no religious
, consequences.411 Yet not even thauma originally meant what was there to
provoke questions and make a starting point for philosophising, but only
that which it was worth while to view.412 The archaic philosopher was not
the man of thaumazein in this sense, but nor was he in the later, Socratic
sense. Without putting questions he was convinced of the necessity of
holding fast to the one essential thing in the world, its meaning and its
truth, the logos and the aletheia. And all he did was to proclaim this essential
thing as the man who looks out over the many particular aspects of the
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 263

world and thinks about them, about the gods. He was the man, as we have
put it, of ultimate penetration. —λ
The ideas of ancient rehgion about death are not answers to questions. \
They express the attitude of ancient man to the reality of death and are
founded in the idea of death itself, on the knowledge of death, and they
particularise that knowledge. Men are mortal. This is how the most
general and the simplest knowledge of death has always had to be formu¬
lated. Yet this knowledge, insofar as it represents a religious idea, is not the
mere result of an inference which can be reached by thinking and ivhich
is formulated purely as thought. It is a knowledge which wakes a peculiar
‘echo’ in us, even when it proceeds from experiences of human society. It
is only through this echo, through our knowledge of the fact that this
simplest and most general knowledge of death concerns us too, that its
effect on us is so convincing. It becomes like the other world realities, a
festal idea—as the idea of death always is.413 Only this echo is for us the
token that death belongs to the realities at all. _/
It cannot be denied. If there is any reality in the world then death is
one, a mighty, spiritual reality which leaves no one ‘cold’. It is not like any
other subject of knowledge, but touches everyone with dread. If the study
of religion attempted to ignore this fact and to treat the idea of death only as
a logical inference and not as a psychic reality, it could rightly be accused
of unreality, of detaching itself from all actuality, and therewith also of
being unscientific. What is real in the case is the death of an individual, the
very one who has the idea about death. It is this which seems to provide
a clear and firm foundation for ideas of death in general. The difficulties
for the view of ancient religion taken by this book seem to begin when we
look for the objective content of these ideas. For it is not the world which
seems to be expressed in them but thoughts which go much further than
that, having to do with a world beyond this one and lying far outside it.
Ideas about death seem to represent an exclusive, one-sided affair of the
soul, so that there is nothing corresponding to them in the world, unless it
be in some supernatural order of things.
This is how it seems. For the simplest knowledge of death which is at
the same time a psychic reality for us, because it also includes our own
death, can probably be taken as a firm foundation for all religious ideas of
death. It cannot, however, be maintained that it is a clear idea for the
2Ó4 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

religious man or for the science of religion. There is one reproach which
can be levelled at all earlier research into notions about the soul and the
world beyond. It has neglected the important distinction between a man’s
own death and that of another. The first to make this distinction were Rilke
and recent philosophers. If I quote them in what follows, it is not in ad¬
herence to any particular school of philosophy but simply to make use of
their clear-cut formulations in order to throw light on a universal human
topic.

Even if we wanted to choose, as the starting point for an investigation of

the religious idea of death, experiences of the soul which belong in the
domain of parapsychology, we should still have to start from the reality
of death and its given content of ideas, with their apparent contradictions.
We have to say with Max Scheler, ‘The first condition for a life after death
is death itself.’ It was this philosopher who remarked, no doubt rightly,
that the chief reason why modem man is not much interested in a hfe after
death is that, essentially, he denies death.414 The definitions of death given by
natural science are in fact uncertain.415 The medical view is that the
departure of life can be delayed ad infinitum. That is why Scheler begins
his examination of the after-life by elaborating a theory of the knowledge
of death. This is probably the only correct scientific procedure. It was
expressed by Heidegger perhaps even more sharply: ‘We cannot even ask
at all, with sense or reason, what is after death, until we have understood
death in its complete ontological essence.’416 This methodological principle
and the axiom of the priority of death over the after-life is just as valid
when our subject of consideration is not the life after death in general, but
the ideas of ancient religion about death and the after-life.
Religious knowledge is far ahead of philosophic knowledge in direct¬
ness. Heidegger correctly recognised that the problem presenting itself for
his ‘existential’ analysis could be most directly illuminated from a primary
source—the views of death among ‘primitives’ and their actual behaviour
towards death in cult and magic.417 One of the most genuinely prehistoric
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 2Ó5

views of death, that which we find in the labyrinth image, to give only one
example, shows how much richer, more complex, and meaningful a
mythological idea can be than an ancient philosophical one.418
The ancient philosopher conceives death as a ‘polar’ opposite of life,
connected with it in such a way that the one can only be present in the
absence of the other. For Heraclitus this form of connection was equivalent
to a deeper identity—let the name of the ‘bow’ (bids equated with bios)
be ‘life’, but let its work be ‘death’. Or to take an example from the
archaic Greek religion, let Dionysus and Hades be the same.419 In Plato’s
Phaedo this opposition is the guarantee that death can do nothing to the
soul. The one excludes the other, understanding psyche in the sense of ‘soul’
and ‘life.’420 Epicurus takes his stand on this exclusiveness of life when he
says: ‘When we are present, death is not present, and when death is present
we are not.’421 On the other hand, mythological narratives of the origin
of death are everywhere found as part of the myth of the origin of the
normal life of humanity.422 Death is neither identical with life nor does
it exclude it, but it belongs to it as an essential component—a component
of the infinite lifeline of the tribe, which is continued by every death, in the
succession hfe-death-life. This idea of the relatedness of life and death as a
beginning and a setting, followed in succession by a new beginning, could
be derived from the heavenly bodies, especially the moon, or from plant
growth and the generation of animals. It is experienced in divine Forms
which die and are yet eternal, especially in moon-like goddesses.

The idea here indicated of‘life-death-life’ stands over the difference between
‘one’s own’ and ‘another’s death’, but does not exclude this or the mytho¬
logical ideas based on it. Above all it does not exclude the idea of the
Hades frontier. The determination that death has occurred is on the one
hand a practical matter—today a medico-legal one. Theoretical science
with its definitions, as we have seen, is uncertain on this point. On the
other hand the determination of death is also a religious and mythological
matter. With the consciousness that death has occurred, truth in the form
266 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

of myth springs up in the soul of the survivor. This truth is now the
frontier which finally divides the dead from the living, no matter how near
or how far the place where they are laid to rest or thought to be.423 The
one thing about the realm of the dead which is today still unshakably real
is its frontier. It has a psychic reality, but not only a psychic one. It becomes
noticeable, beyond all dispute, when someone dies. Attic grave urns
(lekythoi) show the dead as in life, at home with their relations and friends,
receiving them, adorning themselves. But in the same picture the grave
too is visible, and Hermes or Charon in an Acherontian landscape.424 For
the one who crosses the frontier the realm of the dead has sprung up in his
life, at home. For the survivors the frontier is there, invisible.
What does it consist of, this psychic reality? What is this inconceivable
something, so hard to determine scientifically and yet fatally real, for which
the only appropriate determination is the mythological ‘frontier of Hades’ ?
The dead body and the transformation of a living man into a corpse belong
to the world and not to the soul. The ‘death of another’ is not an internal
concern of man except insofar as it awakens that peculiar ‘echo’. However
real the Hades frontier may be for a living man, what he experiences in it
is only the ‘death of another’. His ‘own death’ is yet more real for him,
it is the really real thing from which the other death, the death of another,
gets its psychic reality. There is a difference between the two deaths which
is directly experienced by all of us, even when it is not even admitted by us
and for that reason not clearly imagined. This difference has been given a
precise philosophical formulation: ‘We do not in any real sense experience
the death of others but are at most “present” at it.’425 What is real and
primary is the psychic reality conveyed to us by that echo. To quote the
philosopher further, ‘Death, if it “is” at all, is essentially my death.’426
Only as ‘one’s own death’ does death have any psychic reality.
But is the idea of‘one’s own death’ conceivable at all from its subjective,
spiritual side? From the objective side, of course it is conceivable. Objec¬
tively, the world contains, first as a possibility, then as its fulfilment, our
own death, just as it contains in the past all completed death and all the
dead.427 But how is it with our own perishable nature ? Is it at all possible
for us to have a direct attitude to it? Can we directly experience ‘our own
death’ in our own life, or read it in the book of the world, as we read there
the idea of the inter-connectedness of life and death?
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 267

The saying of Epicurus argues against it. ‘Death is no concern of ours.

For when we are present, death is not present, and when death is present,
we are not.’ And yet it was Epicurus in particular for whom death in an
important fashion was always present. His thorough treatment of the
subject was criticised in this sense by his ancient opponents.428 But it is
not until much later times that we find a special sense of ‘one’s own death’.
Rilke was the first who spoke of it as the ‘great death’, the death ‘which
everyone has in him’, ‘of which we are nothing but the husk and the leaf’.
For, he said, ‘this is the fruit on which everything depends’.429 But we
must first acquaint ourselves with the bare facts as they are experienced by
modern man. We shall find Scheler’s ‘theory of the knowledge of death’
in some measure suitable for this purpose. We shall not use his system of
thought to prove that ‘our own death’ is for us the primary one. His
genuine experience is shared as living experience by every one of us, however
paradoxical that may sound. But we may succeed in making this experience
intelligible, rather as we did with the experience of the festival, and in
endowing it with some needed clarity.
A man, even if he were the only living thing on earth, in some sort of
way would know that death was going to overtake him—so runs Scheler’s
train of thought.430 The certainty of this is involved in every phase of life,
however small, and in the structure of his experience. The ‘idea and nature
of death’ is one of the constituent elements of all vital consciousness. We
experience and see in every indivisible moment of our life process some¬
thing ‘passing’ and something ‘coming’. In every present moment we are
affected by the feeling that something in general is ‘passing away’ and that
something else in general is ‘to be expected’, independently of what it may
contain. The total extent of what is ‘passing’ and what is ‘to come’, with
the advance of the life process, is always being distributed afresh in a charac¬
teristic direction. That which is passing increases, while that which is to
come decreases. The extent of what is present existence gets more and
more strongly ‘compressed’ between these two. For the child the present
is a broad, bright surface of the most colourful existence. This surface
decreases in extent with every advance of the life process. It becomes
smaller and smaller, more and more compressed. For the young person
the future is there like a broad, bright corridor stretching out into the
invisible distance. But with every piece of life that is lived there is per-
268 Ep ilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

ceptibly less room for life still to be lived. The livable life is steadily con¬
sumed while life already lived increases. This is the ‘direction of death’.
We experience it, in the natural structure of every living moment, as a
sense of an increasing difference between two lengths. The future shrinks
as the past grows longer. Death is not just an empirical constituent of our
experience, but it is of the nature of every life experience, our own among
them, that it has the direction of death. Death belongs to thaiorrmand
structure, internal and external, of every life as it is given, our own among
the rest. It is not a frame which has by chance been added to the picture
of particular psychic and physiological processes, but a frame that is itself
part of the picture. Without it the picture would not be a picture of life.
The modern philosopher speaks to us men of today in our own language.
He remains in the realm of the subjective, and at that is not even exhaustive.
In every life he ignores its spiritual content, which for an individual who sees
life hurrying away from him with advancing age may well be of most
value.431 By contrast with this philosopher we may turn to a man much
richer in the experience of life—Berdyaev, who says, ‘ Suffering passes, the
having suffered never passes. . . . Victory may indeed be achieved over what
has been experienced, and yet that experience is still in our possession as a
permanent enhancement and extension of the reality of our spiritual life.
What has once been lived through cannot possibly be effaced. That which
has been continues to exist in a transfigured form. Man is by no means a
completely finished product. Rather he moulds and creates himself in and
through his experience of life.’432 Yet insofar as man is a living being, the
structure of bis life corresponds exactly to that idea of the interconnection
of life and death in which this important, natural component of life is to be
found. What Goethe would call the entelechy, or full development, of the
spiritual form of an individual may give promise of something more than
one single, unique life, yet everyone in his life must experience ‘his own
death’. Once he has attained a state of spiritual fulfilment, he may perhaps
contemplate the world with the openness of mind of the ancients, culminat¬
ing in their theoria or religio. Yet there too he cannot fail to read the message
that human existence is in its nature transitory.
Scheler describes the death-direction from the point of view of a man
turned in on himself. For the ancients the corresponding description,
although it also included a man’s own death, would have to be a description
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 269

not of his inner life, but of the world of men. This is the world which
contracts around us in our experience of the death-direction, indeed inde¬
pendently of our actual experience, and which in its relation to ourselves
approaches closer and closer to rejection and complete negation. In our
experience of our own death a real aspect of the world reveals itself to us,
announcing non-existence, the total absence of room for life. It is not easy
to formulate the idea of non-existence philosophically and the task of doing
so was left for relatively late times. But in the study of religions this
philosophically ‘difficult’ idea of non-existence is the very one which can
serve as a model to show how an ancient religious idea is constructed, for
it is one which is at the heart of many mythological tales, incorporated in
images of the gods and descriptions of another world.

We say the religious idea of non-existence. Could we not just as well

talk of the ‘myth of non-existence’, a myth worked into particular mythical
tales, incorporated in images of the gods and descriptions of another world?
It can be done. The choice of the word ‘idea’ instead of‘myth’, however,
gives more prominence to the visual appearance, while ‘myth’ emphasises
the content of what is stated or appears as a picture.433 When the dying
Greek invokes ‘the gates of Hades’,434 this is a picture, but not only a picture.
It is also the viewing and naming of a reality. In particular, since an ‘after
life’ in Hades is not necessarily implied by it nor self-evident in it, the reality
viewed is that of non-existence. It is real because the impending non¬
existence of the speaker is an actual part of the world. It will be that he will
not be ! Nor is the god Hades himself only an image. He too is an ‘actual’
god. Because of him and in company with him the other death deities of
the ancient world, which do not guarantee an ‘after life’ but only the
reality of death, we are forced to recognise that the ancient religious view,
in its unreflective fashion, includes non-existence among the forms of
existence, that it extends the all-embracing realm of being to non-being
itself.435 It is rare for an ancient ‘religious idea’ to be found in such exem¬
plary form as here, where its content—non-existence—although really there
270 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

for us all in the world, is conceivable only as an idea and only in pictorial
form, by the one who experiences and knows it, and only by him.
There is a big series of Roman tomb inscriptions which describe the
reality of death as a world of negation and privation—a world of evil, of
darkness, of stillness, of cold, of ugliness. A survey made in the spirit of these
interpretations436 yielded the following statement: ‘The mythical view
clothes even non-existence with a shape and gives a form to nothingness.
The Greek and Roman belief in immortality is almost always treated by
historians of religion as if we here had to do with ideas about an actual
afterlife in the grave or in the underworld—a mistake which more than
anything else shows up the immense gulf dividing the ancient from the
modern view. For these ideas are far removed from a behef in immortality.
On the contrary, they are direct forms of expression of the human condition
in death.’ The apotheosis of the dead which we encounter in archaic and
then in later imperialistic times was something quite different. This too was
a highly contradictory idea. Generally speaking, the state of death is
described in the tomb inscriptions as something objective. It appears as a
paraphrase for ‘objective non-existence’, the thing we are headed for as we
move in the direction of death.
These paraphrases have nothing to do with a capacity or incapacity for
abstraction. The withdrawal of itself which life in fact performs was
expressed by analogy, in terms of existence. It is quite in the spirit of
Greece and of antiquity when Plato says, ‘Non-Existence in some sense
exists.’437 The language of the unreflected experience of life puts for ‘non-
existence’—‘death’. Yet death too has its place assigned to it in the Greek
conception of the universe. Death and its domain are bounded. The world
which contains our non-existence therein displays one of its aspects, whether
a monstrous, beast-like, or man-like, or even a motherly face, or only
emptiness and cold and gloom—an aspect at any rate which we know and
recognise. We know it from inside as a capacity of the world to undergo
a transformation which for us is final. The dread of this change springs from
the negation and privation which it means for us. And what makes it all
the more dreadful is that it does not face us with the possibility that the
existence of the world itself could be shattered, but only with our own
reduction to nothingness. For in this aspect of the world there is displayed
to everyone his own death. The death-aspect of the world is, in a primary
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 271

and immediate fashion, identical with the experience that the whole universe
stands before us, but with diminishing room for ourselves. Some room
in another world is not excluded by this knowledge, yet it must be more
appropriate to the state of death than to that of life.
We recognise this non-existence in the death of others. The transforma¬
tion of those who have just died, which announces that they have crossed
the frontier of Hades, is the external counterpart of that transformation
which we all gradually undergo and experience in the direction of death.
Our internal experience finds an external support and justification. It
announces itself in that ‘echo’ of which we have spoken. It is at the same
time evoked and completed by the external experience, just as our idea of a
fruit which we have known only in its unripe state is completed by the sight
of the ripe fruit. Parmenides said that the dead body does not indeed
perceive light or warmth or sounds because its fire has gone out but that
it does perceive cold and silence and whatever else is opposed to them.438
This cold and quiet, the state of being dead, is experienced by us only
exceptionally. The dead experience it for ever. In them the world accom¬
plishes and shows us the ‘ripe fruit’.
Yet Epicurus too had right on his side when he said, ‘When we are
present, death is not present, and when death is present we are not.’ The
transformation is so thorough and complete that anyone who has under¬
gone it is no longer the self that he was. Being dead means being quite
other, the death direction is the direction towards the ‘quite other’. This
quite-other is contained in the world. It is a feature of the death-face of
the world. It is what distinguishes it, together with all the gods which are
its aspects and everyone of which represents a special face of the world,
from mortal creatures. What makes the world ‘quite other’ is just this
quality, that it supports non-existence lightly and eternally, while for living
creatures it is the occasion of the most complete of all their transformations,
so complete that it does not even exclude the notion ol apotheosis, that the
dead may become gods. Yet for living man the shock of the ‘quite other’
remains, for it includes also his own coming otherness. Here we encounter
one of the fundamental elements of all religion, but only one among many.
The idea of non-existence as a world aspect is only one among many
aspects of the universe to which it is related. First let us grasp the idea itself.
It is evoked, or is echoed, in songs and stories, as ideas are evoked, not as a
27 2 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

sum of internal and external experiences, but as a unity. It is the unity of our
own death, cherished and ripening in us, and of the world’s death towards
which every living creature is moving and which in our own death concerns
us too. Thus it is expressed in a song of the Dinka by the Upper Nile:439
On the day when God created all tilings,
he created the sun
and the sun rises and sets and returns again,
he created the moon
and the moon rises and sets and returns again,
he created the stars
and the stars rise and set and return again,
he created man
and man comes forth, goes into the earth,
and does not return again.
That is the death-face of the world which it turns to men. This face
intruded also into the maize festival of the Cora Indians. ‘They appear
only once, my younger brethren. Do they not die really for ever? But
I never die, I shall appear continually.’ Such an intrusion of the death-face
of the world does not have the effect of something alien in the festive
atmosphere. Where divinity is present to man, this difference too is
present—mortality in its purest form, a form of non-existence contrasted
with the existence of the gods. This characteristic of the festal phenomenon
corresponds to the festal character of the phenomenon of death.
The inherent festiveness of Nature, its eternal and periodic character,
which makes Nature itself the primal calendar, the true festival calendar,
also causes the death-face of the world to appear. Evidence of this is to be
found not only in primitive poetry but also in the classics. The joy of life
in Catullus’s Vivamus mea Lesbia acquires a special festivity from the reminder
which it gives of the death-face of the world. It has playful licence, in¬
tensity, and seriousness all at the same time :
Soles occidere et redire possunt,
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
‘Suns may set and still return,
When our brief light has set, for us
There’s one perpetual night of sleep.’
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 273
For the classical treatment of the same divine appearance we have the two
spring poems of Horace, Solvitur acris hiems and Diffugere nives. The
experience of the divine found by the poet in the seasons of the year is
realised not so much through the images of particular gods, or at any rate
not only by this means, but in his concluding argument. It is particularly
sharp and clear in the second poem :
Damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae ;
nos uhi decidimus,
quo pius Aeneas, quo Tullus dives et Ancus,
pulvis et umbra sumus.
Swift-following moons make good their heavenly losses.
When we are dead and gone
the way of pious Aeneas, rich Tullus, Ancus,
we’ll be but dust and shade.
The death-face of the world is clear for all to see.

On the other hand, it is never or almost never this face alone by which
man is confronted. The rising up of the death idea does not mean the sinking
of the opposite idea which is necessarily connected with it, the idea of life.
By this we must understand not an abstraction, not a mere concept.
Just as in the idea of death the reality of non-existence appears in one aspect
of the world, its death-face, so in the idea of life there appears the reality
of existence as an aspect of the world. If non-existence shows itself in this
world as pure negation and privation, yet in this same experience, the ex¬
perience of death, there accumulates on the other side everything that is
positive, and the life face of the world comes into view. If all these positive
things, light, heat, gaiety, sound, did not evoke the idea of life, then there
would be in the world no mode of appearance for death at all, there would
be no ‘idea’ for non-existence. And not only that ! If by an experiment of
thought we were to think life out of the world, then there would no longer
be any force or power left for non-existence. If we had not known life, we
should never have experienced the power of death. It is only by life that
274 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

non-existence has been raised to the rank of a reality which appears in the
world and is powerful there.
The one idea leads inevitably to the other. Life makes the idea of death
possible, even powerful, and the idea of death enables life in all its reality,
its strength and power, to become actual. As the room for livable life
steadily contracts about every mortal creature, our first thought might be
that the grey and gloomy colours would increasingly dominate his land¬
scape. But it is rather the other way round. The contraction causes all
the colours of life, all that the world has to show, to glow more brightly.440
The experience of this polarity may vary from one individual to another.
The fact that it is experienced is just as much an ingredient of the structure of
all living things, and consequently of the structure of the world, as the
death direction. And it is not merely an external and literal manifestation,
in which the idea of life and the idea of death appear together as the colourful
splendour of the world. It is an aspect of the world in which we can fully
participate without distinguishing between external vision and internal
experience. To the slumbering and fitful consciousness of life the idea of
death comes at times like water thrown on a dying fire, at times like oil
to stir it into a blaze.
Yet this idea of life, the reality which so to speak blazes up in its fullest
intensity under the pressure of death, is not to be confused with notions of
another world. It is an essence, really existent and irreplaceable. We
experience it simply as life, undiluted by its no less real opposite. Indeed we
only experience what real existence is when we face that condition which is
its total negation—the state of death. And this thing whose place can be
taken only by something other, never by something like, is in truth irre¬
placeable.

The ideas of ancient religion, like the idea of death or the idea of life, are
not only themselves aspects of the world, but also have various aspects of
their own. We have only to consider in how many deities the life-aspect
of the world appears. And the negation of existence in death, the pure
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea oj Non-Existence 275
privation of non-existence, may well be repugnant to us in comparison
with all the positive gifts of life, its feelings and experience. Yet life too
can be so painful and agonising that the purely negative aspect, the world
of Hades, may appear mild and beneficent by contrast. There is a natural
fear of death, and death is bitter for it. But there is also, just as natural,
our urge towards death, which can build itself up into a longing for death.
For this longing non-existence is sweet, and the mild and beneficent face
of non-existence corresponds to it.
The bitterness and the sweetness of death are both realities. Poets
give accounts of them as credible as those they give of love. Death was
listed as one of the muses of great lyric poetry.441 This was doubtless the
case, too, in the period we are considering, though we have lost the choral
songs which were sung in honour of Persephone, the goddess of death.
But the fact that she is beautiful, though she may also be the sender of the
dreaded Gorgon head,442 should give students of religion food for thought.
We should learn from the ancient artists and more recent poets that there
is more in the case than a wish for some outward embellishment of death.
True, students of religion are more inclined to follow natural science than
poetry, but that would lead us here into a blind alley.
For natural science, natural death is really inconceivable. Anthropology
has taught us that there are primitive peoples who are unwilling to consider
death as a natural end.443 Even in cases of natural death they look for an
evil will which was the cause of death. This remarkable attitude can be
explained psychologically. It is always tempting to explain away an
unpleasant and well-known fact by a lie. One such fact is our inevitable
natural death. Moreover, psychic research has drawn attention to the fact
that even in cases of natural death the survivors have a feeling of guilt.
The separation of a living creature from life appears always as an injustice
of which we are helpless spectators. The propitiation of the dead is found
among the mourning ceremonies of many societies. We can easily under¬
stand how the guilt may be pushed off on to some foreign magician.
On the other hand, there is nothing which could excuse the student of
religion from concerning himself with that human behaviour in the face of
death which is really felt as death. To do this, he is not absolutely obliged
to make use of the experiences of poets. Psychology and biology have
arrived at a common conclusion 444 that there is not only a life instinct—
276 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

and the fear of death bound up with it—but also a death instinct. The
existence of this instinct follows from the structure of the living creature.
‘Life instinct’ and ‘death instinct’ are nothing but scientific terms for the fact
that every living thing is continually in process of construction and des¬
truction. These two, construction and destruction, can be thought of as
two tracks, one directed upwards, the other downwards. But both together
coincide with the direction of death. Construction proceeds just as much in
the direction of death as destruction. It is really only one track, along which
the living creature moves, and no one can tell at what point of life the
movement begins to go downward. From the beginning the track is a
track and not a stopping place, it is the track of life and therewith also the
slope of death. ‘Movement’, ‘track’, ‘slope’, are obvious metaphors. Their
real meanings are: ‘movement’—‘life’; ‘life track’—‘keeping oneself alive’;
‘slope of death’—‘giving oneself over to death’.445
Life and death instinct together, inseparably joined to one another,
make up the nature of the living creature. They are two aspects of the
living creature, which could just as well be called the ‘dying creature’. In
one and the same individual the ‘dying creature’ can even assume the pre¬
dominance over the ‘living creature’—in advanced years or in illness or,
what is not the same, in tragic circumstances. Both creatures which make
up the one living-dying creature, have their own fears and longings—fear
of death and longing for life, fear of life and longing for death. The
bitterness of death is connected with the first pair, the sweetness of death
with the second.
Both are possible because man as a living and dying creature is in con¬
tinual, structural contact with his own death, and yet has no direct experience
of it as an actual state. Only the dead man experiences the state of death.
However, we have the possibility of hurrying ahead along the track which
is both the track of life and the slope of death and anticipating the end, not
in reality but in dream and imagination. But there is a reason even for the
anxious and wishful pictures of a dreaming or imagining mind. The reason
is given by the track, which is at the same time a slope and has for its end
an unwished-for, even terrifying, break, which can yet appear as a longed-for
goal. But however this end may appear to the anticipating soul, whether
dreadful or longed-for, the subject matter of the pictures in which it shows
itself cannot be taken from death itself. Non-existence contains nothing.
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 277

That being-other is something different from any experience of life. Thus

it is that even those fancies which make death seem pleasant come from life.
The end is so imagined as if it were a continuation, wished for or not.
Such an ‘as if’, felt by everyone whether they admit it or no, sets a
clear distinction between all notions of another world and the memories
and experiences we have of the real world. Behind the experiences of life
there stands the world as an uninterrupted, continuous background, here
and now and always. Notions of another world are strictly no more than
imaginative projections of the soul as, questioning and fearful, it anticipates
the end. They take the soul into the ‘other world’, the world ‘beyond’ the
end, which it has not yet reached. The background to such notions is
neither this world nor that ‘other world’, for they do not refer to this
world, which is here and now, and the other world to which they do refer
is not here and now. That is why notions of the Beyond can never be
confused with the knowledge that everyone has in himself about life—·
unless perhaps in exceptional states of ecstasy. But whence could such
notions be generated if not from the storehouse of the soul and from possi¬
bilities of the mind, all of which form part of the content of this world?
In preference to the dreadful aspect of death we choose, quite naturally
and unconsciously, its other, seductive aspect. The horrors of death are
partly the fears of the soul as it anticipates the end. They are partly due,
here and now, to the fact that the advance of privation and negation, that
aspect of the world in which death shows itself, is in fact horrifying. To set
against the fears of the soul we have its pleasant expectations and longings.
These are as well founded as the fears and like them have a deep-lying cause
and are supported by a real aspect of the world. For the natural inclina¬
tion towards death of every living creature is balanced by the soul’s capacity
for self-deception, here stimulated by the fear of death itself. Thus hopes
of another world arise, with sounds and colours more compelling than
anything else the soul can dream of, even in its finest and deepest moments.
It is characteristic of other-world notions that even the most seductive
among them are not powerful enough to prevent the dread aspect of death
from presenting itself as a possibility which we ourselves shall perhaps escape,
but to which others will all the more certainly fall victim. In this unequal
distribution of the other world the demand for justice has played a varying
part. It depends on the particular ethical mission of the religion to which
278 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence

the promise of an after-life belongs. Alongside ‘Paradiso’ even in antiquity

there stands ‘Inferno’, to satisfy the requirement of an unavoidable polarity.
Not till the terrors of death had been philosophically ‘overcome’ were the
soul’s anxieties, at least in theory, removed. In this case, it is true, the loss
of ‘Inferno’ has entailed that of ‘Paradiso’ too. Other-world notions of this
crude kind, however, were in ancient religion secondary or peripheral phe¬
nomena. What is primary and central from the viewpoint of ancient religion
is the comprehension of the reality of death, its complete acknowledgement,
not its anticipatory veiling with pictures, dreadful or pleasant, of another
world. It was this acknowledgement which figured in the cults of the ancient
death deities.

Objective non-existence, reahsed in the death of living creatures, has

appeared to us, as it necessarily did also to the ancients, in two aspects, as a
dreaded end, and as a confining framework for all living creatures, on
which they begin and on which, just as naturally, they cease to exist, as if
arrived at a destination down a pleasant slope. On the other hand, for
ancient man non-existence had another characteristic, different from those
with which we are familiar. The modern idea of non-existence is com¬
pletely empty. For ancient religious man non-existence, as the enclosing
framework of organic life, was both full and empty at the same time.
It is not a logically bounded, exactly defined idea, like the non-existence
of the philosophers, but a reality bordering on all living things. It is only
in its border region that it can be comprehended at all, for its real core
remains the inconceivable. In its border region, however, we do approach
this inconceivable. We do it by intermediate stages, just as we approach
non-existence. Between the light of day and the complete absence of light,
for which the Greeks had the name Erebos, there is night. Before the fully
formed state of an organism there is the germ. As ground of every living
movement there is the resting earth. But where is the frontier between
night, the germinal state, the earth in motherly repose, and a realm of non¬
existence conceived as lightless, germless, and totally dead?
 Epilogue: The Religious Idea of Non-Existence 279

We can indicate a domain of reality lying midway, so to speak, between

the domain of wholly negative, pure non-existence and the domain of total
existence, containing within itself every stage and every possibility. This
intermediate realm of all the small life that swarms in darkness is the bottom¬
most layer in the great realm of life.448 As the domain of incompleteness
and motherly protection it is not closed to the realm of non-existence. For
ancient man, indeed, it was so much a part of this realm that non-existence
itself was joined to it. For non-existence could not be conceived as a sheer
yawning void, but only as completely and inseparably bound up with the
idea of mother earth and as one of her aspects. Thus it was that the fullness
of germination itself became an aspect of non-existence.
We may speak here of a root aspect of existence.447 ‘The roots of the
earth and of the sea’, the two realms of swarming and germinating creatures,
according to Hesiod 448 would be visible to the Titans in Tartaros if it were
not for the total darkness called Erebos. It is a motherly domain which
bore the world and now supports it and is always capable of bearing it anew.
In terms of the labyrinth idea, the endless line of life, it is a stage before and
after life. It was only for the philosopher among the Greeks, and not before
him, that pure non-existence could be separated from existence, the me on
from the on. Ancient religion worshipped the gods of heaven and of the
underworld, the Olympic and the Chthonic deities. Their world was even
more of a single whole than the world of later pantheistic philosophy. Non¬
existence had its place in it as a reality of the soul, a ‘being-other’ for man.
In it both existence and non-existence were equally powerful, and capable
of appearing in a rout of divine figures which surrounded and penetrated
the universal whole with radiance and meaning.
 NOTES

1 K. Reinhardt, Platos My then (Bonn, 1927).

2 Plato, Republic, 392b.
3 ibid., 380c.
4 ibid., 501; Laws, 752a.
5 Plato, Republic, 392a.
6 W. F. Otto, Die Gestalt und das Sein (Darmstadt, 1955), 68.
7 Gottesfinsternis (Zurich, 1953), 19.
8 Myth in Primitive Psychology (London, 1926).
9 Treated more fully in my The Gods of the Greeks (London and New York,
1957), 5-
10 cf. my ‘Prometheus’ in Rowohlt’s Deutsche Enzyklopcidie (Hamburg, 1959).
Also Note 264, below.
11 cf. my Apollon (3rd ed., Diisseldorf, 1953), 271.
12 cf. my Griechische Miniaturen (Zurich, 1957), 77.
13 cf. my Apollon, op. cit., 28.
14 A different ‘state of the world’ could equally be assumed and called ‘Cosmos’;
cf. K. Reinhardt, Parmenides, 174.
15 Due to Max Muller.
16 E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, 1953-57), Π, 109.
17 G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation. A Study in Pheno¬
menology (London, 1938. Sir Hedley Stewart Pubi. no. 5).
18 Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1921).
19 Quaestiones Conviviales, 6.8.
20 Phanodemos quoted by Athenaeus 456a.
21 Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1932).
22 ibid., 39. The ceremony is exactly described by B. Spencer, The Arunta (1927),
I, 194; cf. Notes 150 and 161.
23 For these corrections I am indebted to a great authority on the Arunta, Géza
Róheim.
24 cf. Jung, Kerényi and Radin, The Trickster (London, 1956), 178.
25 G. Loeschke in Ath. Mitt. 19 (1894), 523; E. Buschor in Ath. Mitt. 53 (1928),
105; Kerényi in Studi e Mat. di storia delle rei. 9 (1933), 144.
26 Das sterbende Afrika (Frankfurt a.M., 1928), 259.
 Notes 281

27 Der religióse Gehalt der Mythen (Tubingen, 1933), 7.

28 Die Nayarit-Expeditionl (Leipzig, 1912), 106.
29 Homer und die klassische Philologie ( Werke III, 159; Munich, n.d.).
30 cf.J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, of which the first Dutch edition appeared almost
simultaneously with the first version of this chapter, the lecture ‘ Vom Wesen
des Festes’ in Paideuma I (1938), 59. In later editions Huizinga adopted my
view of the nature of the festival.
31 cf. Father W. Schmidt, ‘Spiele, Feste, Festspiele’, in Paideuma 4 (1950), 11,
who enlarges on the first version of this chapter. I attach no less importance
to these distinctions than Father Schmidt, or than E. Jensen in his Mythos und
Kult bei Naturvolkern (Wiesbaden, 1951), 6iff.
32 The wording of this sentence is derived from a conversation with W. F.
Otto.
33 cf. Robinson-Fluck, A Study of the Greek Love-Names (Baltimore, 1937), 6.
As an addition to the deities and heroes there mentioned we have the Krater
of Polygnotos from the Valle Trebba with its pair of gods, on which formerly
εκλοε was mistakenly read for καλέ and ιακος for καλός. (See Pi. 58.)
34 cf my article ‘Zeus and Hera’ in Saeculum I (1950), 253; and for the Jupiter
Cycle of sixty years, Klio 29 (1936), 16.
35 Pausanias 1.28.10.
36 Porphyry De Abst. 2.30; the two most thorough analyses of this rite,
L. Deubner, Attische Feste, 158, and W. F. Otto in Paideuma 4 (1950), hi, pay
no special attention to this important detail.
37 cf my article ‘Dramatische Gottesgegenwart in der griechischen Religion’ in
Eranos fahrbuch 29 (1950), 25; Dioniso 1950, Nos. 3-4.
38 Plutarch De Is. et Os. 35; Quaest Gr. 3 6.
39 Dionysos in my The Gods of the Greeks, 254; Pelops in my The Heroes of the
Greeks, 59; Aison, Jason, Pelias, ibid., 273 Jf.; Orpheus, ibid., Pi. 65; Itys, ibid.,
289; children of Thyestes, ibid., 305.
40 cf my study ‘Die Herkunft der Dionysosreligion’ in Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur
Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen 58 (1956), and my book Der friihe
Dionysos (Oslo, 1961).
41 This is an unscientific generalization of the ideas of two original theologians,
Rudolf Otto in his The Idea of the Holy (London, 1950), and Gerardus van der
Leeuw in his Phanomenologie der Religion.
42 6.56.6. Polybius calls the religio of the Romans deisidaimonia and in speaking of
it uses the verb ektragodein, which with him is derogatory.
43 Athen. 274a.
44 De har. resp. 19.
282 Notes

45 Is. xi, 2; cf. Robertson-Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (3rd ed.,
London, 1927), 23.
46 W. F. Otto, Arch. Rei Wiss. 14 (1911), 104; cf. his first essay on the subject
(ibid., 12, 532), and the following chapters IV and VI.
47 cf. my article in Byzont.-Neugriech.fahrb. 1931, 306Jf., and J. C. A. van Herten,
Threskeia, Eulabeia, Hiketes (Diss. Amsterdam, 1934), 28 jf.
48 Plato, Laws 879ε; Demosth. 21.61; 59.74.
49 το πιστεύειν σφοδρά and τύφος.
50 Camillus 6.
51 Seeger in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart II, 1200.
52 According to Theolegumena arithmeticae ed. Ast, p. 60.25; Diels 32A13.
53 το λίαν άπιστεΐν.
54 Herodotus 2.18; 37; 64; van Herten 2.
55 cf W. F. Otto’s essay, already quoted, on religio and superstitio in Arch.f. Rei.
Wiss. 12, 532.
56 Charakt. 16; cf. H. Bolkestein, Theophrastos’ Char alter der Deisidaimonia als
religionsgesch. Urkunde (Giessen, 1929).
57 Polit. 1315a; for the history of the word, P. J. Koets, Deisidaimonia (Pur-
merend, 1929).
58 cf. Wilamowitz, Glaube der Hellenen I (Berlin, 1931), 362.
59 ‘That which is in habitual practice, use or possession’ according to Liddell and
Scott.
60 cf. Η. E. Stier, Nomos Basileus (Diss. Rostock, 1927).
61 Griechische Kulturgeschichte I, 86. He quotes also the words of Demaratus to
Xerxes (Herodot. I, 104) about the despotes nomos, the ‘monarch Law’, and
recalls the worship of the law-givers of the Greek cities: a cult equivalent of
the myth of the divine origin of Law, even when it comes from man.
62 Fr. iiqDiels.
63 Fr. 152 Bowra; cf. Stier, p. 5.
64 Fr. 24.15; cf. Stier, p. 8.
65 Erga 276; cf. Stier, p. 10.
66 Fr. 70 Bowra; Stier, p. 6.
67 Homer never speaks of nomos and nomizein.
68 cf. E. Willinger, Hagios (Giessen, 1922).
69 Od. 17.402.
70 II. 14.261.
71 II. 1.21; 5.434.
72 Od. 9.200.
73 di. 1.23.
 Notes 283

74 Pind. Pyth. 9.64.

75 Od. 5.123; 18.202; 20.71.
76 Od. 11.386.
77 Od. 21.259.
78 Erga 465.
79 W. F. Otto, The Homeric Gods (London, 1955), 83.
80 cf. Greek mythology’s view of life as described in my Prometheus.
81 Weniger, p. 18.
82 U. v. Wilamowitz, Der Glaube der Hellenen (Berlin, 1931, 1932), I, 22; not to
be regarded as certain, Wilamowitz being much given to premature categori¬
cal assertions.
83 See Note 81.
84 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London, 1950), 43; Van der Leeuw,
Phanomenologie der Religion, 29.
85 W. F. Otto, op. cit., 86 Jf.·, and especially in my Apollon, 3rd ed., 41, 61,
concerning Apollo; also W. F. Otto in a posthumous article in Paideuma 7
(i959), 19·
86 cf. W. W. Fowler, Roman Essays and Interpretations (Oxford, 1920), 15 jf.
87 Festus, s.v. homo sacer; Fowler, p. 19.
88 Topica 90; cf. Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London,
1922), 470, according to Nettleship, Contributions to Latin Lexicography, s.v.
sanctus.
89 For the history of the word up to Theophrastus, cf. J. Ch. Bolkestein, Hosios
en Eusebes (Amsterdam, 1936); an interpretation without drawing the neces¬
sary distinctions was given by H. Jeanmaire, in Rev. des et.gr. 58 (1945), 66 Jf.
90 Od. 16.423; 22.412.
91 229-38; cf. my article in the periodical Maia (Rome) 4 (1950), 10Jf.
92 Horn. Hymn. Cer. 211.
93 Horn. Hymn. Merc. 130, 172-3, 469-70.
94 Soph. Ant. 1071, cf 74.
95 Suidas s.v. όσια.
96 Theophr. in Porph. de abst. 27.403.
97 Od. 16.423.
98 Thus U. v. Wilamowitz, Platon I (Berlin, 1920), 61.
99 Eur. Bacch. 370Jf.
100 Eur. Ale. 10.
101 Plut. Quaest. Gr. 292d; Def. or. 437a; Is. et Os. 365a.
102 cf Roscher, Lex., s.v. Delphos; W. R. Halliday, The Greek Questions oj
Plutarch (Oxford, 1928), 57.
284 Notes

103 Verg. Aen. 5.80.

104 Topica go.
105 Wilamowitz, Glaube der Hellenen I, 15 f
106 Thus of childbirth, Aristoph. Lys. 743.
107 cf. Thuc. 2.52.4; J. Ch. Bolkestein, 168 ff.
108 Dig. 1.8.9.3.
109 cf. Plut. Alex. 31—the use of the intensive form ιερουργίας ίερουργούμενος.
no U. v. Wilamowitz, Glaube der Hellenen I, 21 f.
in cf. G. Link, De vocis ‘sanctus’ usupagano (Diss. Konigsberg, 1910), 17.
112 For the history of the concept: Wilamowitz, op. cit.; J. Ch. Bolkestein, op. cit. ;
O. Kern, Die Religion der Griechen I (Berlin, 1926). Not one of these three
treatments is exhaustive.
113 cf. W. F. Otto in Arch. Bel.-Wiss. 12 (1909), 537; C. E. v. Erffa, ‘Aidós’,
Philologus Suppl. 30,2,1937, 27.
114 cf. J. Rohr’s ‘Der okkulte Kraftbegrifl im Altertum’, Philologus Suppl. 17, 1,
1923.
115 σέβας μ’ έχει, είσορόωντα. Od. 3*123; 4-75J Ν2; 6.l6l.
iló Verse 10: σέβας τότε πασι ίδέσθαι/άθανάτοις τε θεοΐς κ.τ.λ.
117 σέβας δέ σε θυμόν ίκέσθω. II. 18.178 jf.
118 σεβάσσατο γάρ τό γε θυμώι. II. 6.167; 4ϊ7·
119 ου νυ σέβασθε; II. 4.242 f
120 Verse ΙΟ: θαυμαστόν γανόωντα.
121 Aesch. Suppl. 755; Cho. 644.
122 θαύμα ίδέσθαι II. 5·725 and elsewhere; θάμβος δ’ έχειν είσορόωντας II. 4-79
at the sight of a sign in which Pallas Athene conceals herself but which
remains opaque and without symbolic meaning.
123 This is directed at A.-J. Festugière.
124 Hes. Theog. 44.
125 R. Schulz, ‘Aidós’ (Diss. Rostock, 1910); W.Jager in Paideia 1 (Berlin, 1934),
28 f; Erffa, op. cit.; W. J. Verdenius in Mnemosyne 3, 12 (1945), 47 Jf.
126 Έκτορ, τέκνον έμόν, τάδε τ’ αΐδεο καί έλέησον
αύτήν, ζ’ί ποτέ τοι. λαθικηδέα μαζον έπέσχον*
των μνήσαι, φίλε τέκνον, άμυνε δέ δήϊον άνδρα
τείχεος έντος έών ... II. 22.82 ff.
127 II. 22.66 ff.
128 Farbenlehre § 916-17.
129 cf. my GriechischeMiniaturen (Zurich, 1957), 27.
130 Od. 16.75; 19.527.
131 This, with the other Themis relationships, has escaped attention: cf J. E.
 Notes 285

Harrison, Themis (2nded., Cambridge, 1927) and further literature quoted by

K. Latte, ‘Themis’, in Paulys R.E. 1934.
132 είδε τά μή θεμιτά. Call. Hymn. 5.78.
133 Theocr. 1.106/7 with the explanation given by U. v. Wilamowitz, Text-
geschichte dergriechischen Bukoliker (Berlin, 1906), 233 f.
134 Plin. Nat. hist. 36.20.
135 Chr. Blinkenberg, Knidia (Copenhagen, 1933), 36.
136 ούκ είδεν ά μή θέμις. Anth. Gr. 16.160.5.
137 τά καί θέμις. Anth. Gr. 16.180.5.
138 δσα μή θέμις όράσθαι. Anacreontica 55·10 Hiller.
139 II. ιι.134·
140 II. 20.4; Od. 2.64.
!4i Horn. Hymn. Ap. 541.
142 ErfFa, op. cit., 19, 49, etc.
143 ‘Union without Themis.’ Scholion in Lycophr. 1141 concerning Ajax and
Cassandra.
144 W. F. Otto in Arch. Rel.-Wiss. 14 (1911), 413, 1.
145 For the later history of the term cf. Th. Ulrich, Pietas (pins) als politischer
Begriff im romischen Staate bis zum Tode des Kaisers Commodus (Diss. Breslau,
1930).

146 Dio Cassius fr. 95, 1 (Ulrich,pp. 2, 3); Plut. Cam. 24; Agis20 (van Her ten, 41).
147 Cic. Har. resp. 19; Lact. 4.3; Fowler rei. Exp. 462.
148 G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Romer (2nd ed. Munich, 1912), 331.
149 For reasons of a stricter prosody; Fowler, op. cit., 412.
150 Plin. Nat. hist. 7.121; Val. Max. 5.4.7.
I5I Val. Max. 5.4 ext. 1; Hy gin fab. 242, the history ofMykon and Pero, a story
which could also have originated in the Roman legend. Either direction of
migration is quite possible.
152 Festus, p. 209.
153 αίδέομαι Τρώας καί Τρωάδας έλκεσιπέπλους. II. 22.106; Ó.442·
154 νέμεσις δέ μοι έξ άνθροδπων έσσεται. Od. 2.136/7.
155 ErfFa, op. cit., 30 ff., 50 f. and 54.
156 cf. P. Kretschmer in Glotta 13, 106.
157 Theog. 223-4; Erga 197 ff.
158 cf. my essay ‘Die Geburt der Helena’ in Albae Vigiliae N.F. Ill (Zurich,
1945), 9-
159 Kypria fr. XXIII Allen.
160 ErfFa, 29 f.
161 II. 3.227; Od. 9.109.
286 Notes

162 This is a consequence of the facts given by W. F. Otto in Paideuma 7 (1959) >
20 ff.
163 II. 16.388.
164 ούδε θεών οπί,ν αίδέσατ’ ούδε τράπεζαν. Od. 21.28.
165 W. F. Otto in Arch. Rel.-Wiss. 14, 421.
166 190.
167 479.
168 480; Find. fr. 121 Bowra; Soph. fr. 837 Pearson.
169 cf. my article ‘ IJber das Geheimnis der eleusinischen Mysterien’, in Paideuma 7
(1959), 69, and my book, published in Dutch, Eleusis (The Hague, i960).
170 II. 9.186-89.
171 20.131 χαλεποί δε θεοί φαίνεσθαι έναργεΐς.
172 IÓ.IÓI ού γάρ πω πάντεσσι θεοί φαίνονται, έναργεΐς.
173 II. 5.127.
174 Ο. Jòrgensen in Hermes 39 (ΐ9°4-)> 357 ff-\ E. Hedén, Homerische Gotterstudien
(Diss. Uppsala, 1912).
175 W. F. Otto, The Homeric Gods, 169-228.
176 The history of the word before Plato in A. E. Taylor, Varia Socratica, I. ser.
(Oxford, 1911), 178 ff.
177 cf. my article ‘MYOOE in verbaler Form’, Festschrift W. Szilasi (Berne,
i960), 121.
178 cf. B. Snell, ‘Die Ausdriicke fur den Begriif des Wissens in der vorplatoni-
schen Philosophic’, in Phil. Unters. 29 (1924), 20 ff.·, J. Bohme, Die Seele und
das Ich im homerischen Epos (Leipzig, 1929), 24.
179 W. Jaeger, Aristoteles (Berlin, 1923), 83.
180 980a.
181 Snell, 26/.
182 cf. Plat. Tim., 47a.
183 The following examples: II. 24.41; Od. 9.189; 3.277.
184 Topika 8.1246b; W. F. Otto, The Gods of the Greeks, 179.
185 Sext. Emp. c. phys. 1.23, p. 242 Mutschmann; cf. Plut. Aem. Paul. 3 and Cic.
De Nat. Deor. 1.116.
186 cf. W. Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford, 1947).
187 983a.
188 cf. my article ‘Das Theta von Samothrake’, in Geist und Werk, Festschrift
D. Brody (Zurich, 1958), 129.
189 II. 15.422; 24.294; cf A. Fulda, Inters, iib. d. Sprache der hom. Gedichte I
(Duisburg, 1865); Bohme, op. cit., 24.
190 Erga 257.
 Notes 287

191 cf. K. Riezler, Parmenides (Frankfurt a.M., 1934), 64.

192 Bòhme, 24 ff.
193 II. 15.80; Od. 7.36.
194 Od. 2.382, etc.
195 686; cf. Bòhme, 54.
196 II. 19.9.
197 II. 5.874; 15.41.
198 Od. 1.349; 6.189; cf. Od. 1.32.
199 II. 1.5; cf. Bòhme 58.
200 II. 15.461 with the explanation of P. Philippson, op. cit., 27, 7.
201 Od. 5.104.
202 14.294; cf. Bòhme 54.
203 II. 19.91-113.
204 Parm. fr. 6 Diels with the explanation of Riezler, op. cit.
205 f. Boll, Vita contemplativa 32 (Kleine Schr. z. Sternkunde des Altertums, Leipzig,
i95°> 303 fff, Jaeger, Aristoteles, 99/.
206 cf. my article ‘Das Theta von Samothrake’, 131.
207 cf. P. Boesch, ‘ΘΕΩΡΟΣ’ (Berlin, 1908).
208 cf Ziehen in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realenc.
209 327b.
210 Prom. 118; 302.
211 Hdt. 1.29; 3.32; Democr. fr. 191; 194.
212 Fr. 11 Diels.
213 Ast : Index Plat.
214 Eth. Nic. 10.7; cf. Metaph. 1072b 14-40.
215 cf. Boll, op. cit., 22 f; Aristot. fr. 58 Rose.
216 Fr. 481 according to Boll 23.
217 cf. my Apollon (3rd ed.), 241 ff.
218 cf. my Griechische Miniatimeli (Zurich, 1957), 27 ff.
219 Schol. Pind. Pyth. 4.151b.
220 Orator 9.27.
221 Fr. 12 Diels.
222 2.2; so far as concerns the mens deorum confirmed by E. Norden, Aus altro-
mischen Priesterbiichern (Lund, 1939), 282.
223 cf the edition ofj. B. Mayor, III, p. xxiv.
224 According to Erga 42 in Eus. Praep. evang. 14.5.15.
225 cf Snell, op. cit., 2.
226 Metaph. 8.10.
227 Diog. Laert. 4.62.
288 Notes

228 Thomas Mann in respect of Pope Pius XII.

229 cf. R. Reitzenstein, Hellenistische Mysterienreligionen (3rd ed., Leipzig and
Berlin, 1927), 252, and my remark in Arch. Rel.-Wiss. 12, 552ff.
230 De divinatione 1.2.
231 Gellius 4.9.5.
232 In Gellius, op. cit.
233 W. F. Otto in Arch. Rel.-Wiss. 12, 552.
234 cf. F. Altheim, A History of Roman Religion (London, 1938), 411.
235 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Univ. of California Press, 1951),
index; cf. Rostowtzew in Clio 16, 203, and my hook Diegriechische-orientalische
Romanliteratur (Tiibingen, 1927), 97.
236 Van der Leeuw, Phànomenologie der Religion, 3 66.
237 Thus van der Leeuw, who quotes the verse from Dante, Par., 29.12.
238 Erga 802.
239 2.53.
240 cf. T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London, 1958).
241 The study of Ventris and Chadwick, ‘Evidence for Greek dialect in the
Mycenaean archives’, in f. Hell. Stud. 73 (1953), 84, is now out of date.
242 cf my study ‘Die Herkunft der Dionysos-Religion’, in Arbeitsgemeinschaft
fur Forschung Nordrhein-Westfalen 58 (1956), and my book Derfriihe Dionysos
(Oslo, 1961).
243 cf. my Streifziige eines Hellenisten (Zurich, i960), p. 45.
244 Van der Leeuw, op. cit., 327.
245 In his Dionysos, 41.
246 Otto, Dionysos, 40, and my remarks on the leap from the Leukas cliffs in Arch.
Rel.-Wiss. 24, 61; also Kinross, Kerényi and Hoegler, Greece in Colour, for the
plate, ‘The cliffs of Leukas’.
247 cf. my Umgang mit Gottlichem (Gottingen, 1955), 34.
248 cf. above, pp. 69/.
249 cf. S. Eitrem, Beitrdge zur griech. Religionsgesch. Ill (Kristiania, 1920), 44 β'.;
L. Deubner, ‘Ololyge und Verwandtes’, in Ahh. Akad. Berlin 1941.
250 P. Stengel, Griech. Kultusaltertiimer (Munich, 1890), 112.
251 Schwenn, op. cit., 100.
252 W. F. Otto in Paideuma 4 (1950), hi.
253 K. Th. Preuss, Diegeistige Kultur der Naturvolker, 38.
254 Fr. Cumont, Die Mysterien des Mithra (2nd ed.), 122.
255 Stengel in Hermes 29, 391; H. v. Fritze, ibid. 32, 235; Ziehen, ibid. 37, 391;
Stengel, ibid. 38, 41, 230; Kultusalt. no; Eitrem, Opferreitung und Voropfer
(Kristiania, 1915), 261.
 Notes 289

256 Above, ρρ. 57 f

257 Athen. 192b.
258 Stengel, Kultusalt. 105.
259 L. Weniger in Arch. Rel.-Wiss. 22, 16ff.
260. Jer. xxiii, 23-24.
261 H. v. Fritze in Arch.Jahrh. 18 (1903), 58.
262 Apollo, ‘the far god’: W. F. Otto, The Homeric Gods, 63 f; Dionysos ‘the
arriving god’: Otto, Dionysos, 7sff.; my Griechische Miniaturen, 119 ff.
263 Dionysos, 23.
264 cf. my Prometheus, in Rowohlt’s Deutsche Enzyklopàdie (Hamburg, 1959),
95; this appeared in English as Voi. 1 of my Archetypal Images of Greek
Religion (London and New York, 1962).
265 Horn II. 1.424-5; Od. 1.22 ff.; 7.201 ff.
266 Ol. 11.13; Pyth. 10.40; New. 1.17, together with my remarks in Hermes 66,
424.
267 P. Phihppson, Untersuchungen uber den griech. Mythos (Zurich, 1944), 37. The
following quotation: fr. 82 Rz. cf. Paus. 8.2.4; Cat. 64, 384-6.
268 Gen. xviii.
269 cf. Reitzenstein-Schader, Studien zum antiken Synkretismus (Leipzig, 1926), 58.
270 Erga 108.
271 Eduard Meyer, Kleine Schrifien II, 35.
272 Nem. 6.1.
273 cf my The Gods of the Greeks, 209 (p. 184 in the Pelican edition).
274 Erga 144-5·
275 Theog. 563; the original reading was probably μελίοισι.
2η6 Theog. 183-7.
277 Od. 7.60; The Gods of the Greeks, 28 (Pelican ed., 24).
278 Erga 175; Reitzenstein, op. cit., 62.
279 Riezler, Parmenides, 47; W. Luther, ‘ WahrheiP und‘Luge’ imdltesten Griechen-
tum (Borna-Leipzig, 1935), 12; Philol. Wochenschr. 1937, 973.
280 Theog. 17; 137 etc.: άγκυλομήτης.
281 άγκύλη.
282 cf. Jung, Kerényi and Radin, The Trickster (London, 1956), 181.
283 Erga 59.
284 cf. E. Drerup, Homerische Poetik (Wurzburg, 1921), 414ff.
285 Gen. xviii, 27.
286 R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 9.
287 Insofar as the ‘sardonic laughter’ was the laughter of the Asia Minor god
Sanda: Hofer in Roschers Lex. IV, 327.
290 Notes

288 cf. H. Zimmer, Maya (Stuttgart, 1936), 468; in contrast to the Homeric
laughter of the gods, P. Friedlander, Die Antike 10, 209.
289 A. Dieterich, Abraxas (Leipzig, 1891), 17 f, and E. Norden, Die Geburt des
Kindes, 66 f
290 Erga 159ff.
291 cf. my Apollon (3rd ed., Dusseldorf, 1953), 123.
292 II. 22.168 ff.
293 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Aesthetik § 30, cited by Friedlander.
294 Friedlander, Die Antike 10, 226.
295 584#
296 Aesch. Prom. 14; 39; L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States V, 381.
297 cf. my Prometheus, p. 34, and Geistiger Weg Europas (Zurich, 1955), pp. 38#
298 Od. 8.267 ff.
299 347·
300 W. F. Otto, The Homeric Gods, 244.
301 Otto, op. cit., 244.
302 307.
303 Diogenian 8.47
304 cf. my Prometheus, op. cit.
305 Fr. V. Allen.
306 389-90.
307 According to Schelling; cf Friedlander, op. cit., 210.
308 II. 4915508.
309 426.
310 II. 20.21.
311 II. 19404#
312 Hesych. 5.ν.τίταξandτιτήνοα; or‘fathers’—J. Sundwallin my Prometheus, 34,3.
313 Theog. 124/.
314 Stengel, Kultusaltertumer, 151.
315 G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Romer (2nd ed., Munich, 1912), 380.
316 De nat. deor. 1.116; Part. orat. 78.
317 cf. W. Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People, 24. ff.
318 Wissowa, op. cit.; Fowler, op. cit.
319 cf. K. Vahlert, Praedeismus und ròmische Religion (Frankfurter Diss., Limburg
a. d. Lahn, 1935).
320 cf. L. R. Taylor in Classical Studies in Honour of J. C. Rolfe (Philadelphia, 1931),
305 ff.; Vahlert, op. cit., 26.
321 Wissowa, op. cit., 26.
322 C. Koch, Der romische Juppiter (Frankfurt a. M., 1937), 30.
 Notes 291

323 Ant. Rom. 2.19.

324 Sir J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (3rd ed.), VI, 227 ff.
325 H. J. Rose, The Roman Questions of Plutarch (Oxford, 1924), hi.
326 H. J. Rose, op. cit., 112.
327 ‘Having nothing else to do’; Rose, op. cit.
328 Geli. Noct. Att. 10.15.16: Dialis quotidie feriatus est.
329 On the term, G. Rohde, Die Kultsatzungen der rom. Pontifices (Berlin, 1936),
27, and Wagenvoort in Gioita 26, 115.
330 Fest. Paul. p. 224.
331 Serv. hi Verg. Georg. 1.31.
332 Wissowa, op. cit., 506, 5.
333 Macr. Sat. 2.2; 7.3; cf. meridialis from meridies Geli. 2.22.14.
334 De Ling. Lat. 5.66.
335 Liv. 36.53.7; Koch, op. cit., 88 f.
336 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.10.3; Wissowa, op. cit., 237.
337 Geli. 5.12.12; Altheim, A History of Roman Religion, 262.
338 cf. Koch, op. cit., 67 ff.
339 Geli. 10.15.24 f.
340 Geli. 10.15.3.
341 Cass. Dio 43.24.4; Wissowa, op. cit., 145.
342 Serv. in Verg. Aen. 8.552; Tac. Ann. 3.58; Wissowa, op. cit., 505.
343 Geli. 10.15.25.
344 Geli. io.15.12; Plut. Quaest. Rom. in.
345 cf. my article ‘Herr der wilden Tiere?’ in Symh. Osi. 33 (1957), 127.
346 Geli., op. cit.·, Plut., op. cit., no; Koch 36.2.
347 Geli. 10.15.19; Plut., op. cit., 109.
348 Geli., op. cit.·, Plut., op. cit., 11 f; Koch, op. cit.
349 cf. my ‘Gedanken iiber Dionysos’, in Studie e mat. di stor. delle rei. η (1935),
34·
350 Geli. 10.15.13; Plut. Quaest. Rom. 112.
351 Ov. Fasti 2.282.
352 Varrò De Ling. Lat. 6.16; Wissowa, op. cit., 118.
353 cf. Rohde, op. cit., 112.
354 Plin. Nat. Hist. 18.10; Wissowa, op. cit., 118.
355 Geli. 10.15.5.
356 Geli. 10.19.9.
357 Geli. 10.15.6.
358 Geli. 10.15.8.
359 Geli. 10.15.8.
292 Notes

360 For the kinds of trees cf. Macr. Sat. 3.20; C. O. Thulin, Die etruskische Dis-
ziplin II (Gothenburg, 1909), 94 ff.; Rohde, op. cit., 168.
361 Ov. Fasti 3.429 ff. The mere sight of him released the condemned from
punishment. He so to speak carried the right of asylum around with him:
Geli. 10.15.10.
362 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.10.3; Wissowa 237; Koch 78.
363 cf. E. Samter, Familienfeste der Griech. u. Rom. (Berlin, 1901), 33.
364 As an ancient Italian form of Jupiter, Veiovis belongs to the same type as the
Jupiter of Praeneste and Jupiter Anxurus, perhaps the type of the ‘divine
child’; cf. my discussion in Jung and Kerényi, Introduction to a Science of
Mythology (London, 1951), 87.
365 Iovisfiducia dicitur, Macr. Sat. 1.15.
366 Gaius 1.112; Wissowa 119.
367 Wissowa, op. cit., 118.
368 Fest. Paul. p. 115; transmitted as Dispiter.
369 Wissowa, op. cit., 119.
370 Coniunx sancta Dialis.
371 Ov. Fasti VI, 226; Festus p. 92; Rose, op. cit., no.
372 Festus p. 92; Rose, op. cit., no.
373 Plut. Quaest. Rom. 86.
374 H. Diels, Sibyllinische Blatter (Berlin, 1890), 43, 2.
375 Macr. Sat. 1.15.18-20.
376 Prop. 4.8.3.
377 Koch, op. cit., 103 ff.
378 The temple of‘Veiovis in insula’ was dedicated on the Kalends of January,
that of ‘Veiovis inter duos lucos’ on the Nones after the Kalends of March
(which were particularly sacred to Juno Lucina).
379 F. Altheim in Klio 30 (1937), 51.
380 Tib. 4.6.1.
381 Varrò De Ling. Lat. 5.6; Festus p. 369 Lindsay.
382 H. J. Rose in Folk-Lore 47 (1936), 397 f.
383 Serv. in Verg. Aen. 3.607.
384 CIL IX 3513 from a temple of Juppiter Liber; cf Altheim, Griech. Goiter im
alien Rom (Giessen, 1939), 47; Terra Mater 24 f.
385 Geli. 10.15.22/.
3 86 Frazer, op. cit.
387 Serv. in Verg. Aen. 4.29.
388 Tac. Ann. 3.58.71.
389 Geli. 10.15.16/·
 Notes 293

390 Appian 1.74; cf. K. Sauer, Untersuchungen zur Darstellung des Todes (Diss.
Frankfurt, 1930), 42.
391 Geli. 10.15.7.
392 Geli. 10.15.7.
393 Geli. 10.15.14.
394 Juvenal 6.22.
395 Geli. 10.15.14.
39Ó Apud eius lecti fulcrum capsulam esse cum strue atque ferto oportet (the preceding
neque must have been interpolated, contrary to the sense).
397 Liv. 5.52.13.
398 de eo lecto trinoctium continuum non decubat, Geli., op. cit.
399 C. Koch, Gestirnverehrung im alien Italien (Frankfurt a. M.), 98 ff.
400 W. Staudacher, Die Trennung von Himmel und Erde. Ein vorgriechischer
Schopfungsmythus (Tubingen, 1942).
401 Quaest. Rom. hi; ώσπερ έμψυχον καί ιερόν καί άγαλμα.
402 cf. Tac. Ann. 3.71·
403 F. Altheim, A History of Roman Religion (London, 1938), 424.
404 W. F. Otto, Die Gestalt und das Sein (Darmstadt, 1955), 356.
405 Altheim, op. cit.
406 V. Niebergall, Griechische Religion und Mythologie in der iilteste Literatur der
Romer (Diss. Giessen, 1937), 16.
407 cf. Th. Mommsen, Rom. Gesch. I, 26 f.
408 C. Schmidt, ‘ Gesprache Jesu mit seinen Jiingern nach der Auferstehung’, in
Text u. Unters. 43, 455.
409 Erwin Rhode’s once-famous work, Psyche, is now partly obsolete. It was
made so by W. F. Otto, Die Manen (2nd ed., Darmstadt, 1958).
410 Plat. Teaet. 153d; Arist. Met. 982b.! 1.
411 cf. above, p. 113.
412 θαΰμα ίδέσθαι.
413 ‘That deep shudder which we are too ready to call fear, whereas it may also
be the expression of a most solemn and sublime mood.’ W. F. Otto, The
Homeric Gods, p. 143.
414 Schriften aus dem Nachlass I (Berlin, 1933), 8.
415 cf. G. Perthes, Uber den Tod (2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1927).
416 Sein und Zeit I, 238.
417 op. cit., 247.
418 cf my Labyrinth-Studien (2nd ed., Zurich, 1950).
419 Fr. 48 and 15 Diels.
420 I05c-e.

Q
294 Notes

421 Ad Menec. 125.

422 African examples in H. Baumann, Schopfung und Urzeit des Menschen im
Mythos der afrihanischen Volker (Berlin, 1936), 268 ff.·, H. Abrahamsson, The
Origin of Death. Studies in African Mythology (Uppsala, 1951).
423 cf my article in Hermes 66 (1931), 418.
424 cf E. Buschor in Munchenerfahrb. hild. Kiinste 2 (1925), 167 ff.
425 Sein und Zeit 239.
426 op. cit., 240.
427 According to W. F. Otto, The Homeric Gods, 142 ff., this ‘having-been’ is the
Homeric Hades.
428 Cic. De Nat. Deor. 240.
429 The quotations are from the Stundenbuch.
430 op. cit., 9 ff.
431 W. F. Otto’s criticism of Scheler.
432 N. Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit (London, 1935), vii.
43 3 cf. my Griechische Miniaturen, 148 ff.
434 Aesch. Agam. 1291; cf. Horn. II. 5.646, 9.313.
435 cf. my lecture Dionysos und das Tragische in der Antigone (Frankfurt a. M.,
1935),9f
436 A. Brelich, Aspetti della morte nelle inscrizioni sepolcrali delΓ impero Romano
(Budapest, 1937), 8.
437 Soph. 24ld το μή ον εστι κατά τι.
43 8 Theophr. De sensu 3.
439 Cited by Scheler from Frobenius.
440 cf. Soph. Ant. 809 ff.
441 F. Brunetière.
442 Od. 11.634-5; puledra Prosperpina Verg. Aen. 6.142.
443 Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieurs (Paris, 1922), 321.
444 S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Voi. 18 of the Standard Edition; Lon¬
don, 1955).
445 Dionysos und das Tragische in der Antigone, 13.
446 cf. my remarks in Gnomon 1933, 305/.
447 Dionysos und das Tragische in der Antigone, 10.
448 Theog. 728.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Alinari: 102, 105, 107-109, 113-115, 118-120, 123

Anderson, Rome: 17, 84, 94, 103, 106, 116, 117
By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum: 11, 12, 19, 25, 47, 49-56, 97
Ronald Doyle: 87
German Archaeological Institute, Rome: 82, 122, 124
Hirmer Verlag, Munich: 1, 4, 10, 13-16, 18, 20-23, 26-30, 32-43, 57-66, 70, 71,
83-85, 91-93, 95, 96, 98-101
S. Lang: 5-9
Musei Communali, Rome: 121
Rosmarie Pierer: 67-69, 86, 88-90
Josephine Powell: 2
H. Roger-Viollet: 24, 45, 48
Edwin Smith: 25, 56
Thames & Hudson archives: 81
V. & N. Tombazi, Athens: 3, 31, 46, 72-80
Vatican Museum: no, in

The pubhsher and the author are grateful to Professor Papadimitriou for his
courtesy in providing the originals of Plates 3, 31, 46 and 72-80.

The publisher’s and the author’s thanks are also due to Professor H. Kahler for
the loan of photographs for Plates 44, 102, 104, 109 and 112. These are taken
from bis Rom und seine Welt (Bayrischer Schulbuchverlag, Munich.)
 INDEX

A Aristotle, 145, 146, 147, 155, 158

arkhaios hios, 13
Abraham, 191, 194
art, Cretan, 21
Academy, Greek, 156, 157, 158, 159
Artemis, 30, 106, 107, 108, 113, 199,
Achilles, 113, 114, 142, 143, 146, 195,
Pis. 73-8i, 91, 98
196, 199
Arunta, 43, 47, 57, 58, 62
Acropolis, 69, Pi. 22
Asclepius, 199
Aeneas, no, 154, 234
sanctuary, 18
Aeschylus, 152
see also Aesculapius
Aesculapius, 188
Ash-Tree Race, 192
see also Asclepius
Asylon, 228
agos, 107
Atellan games, 58
aideisthai, 106, 113, 121
athanatizein, 158
aidos, 113, 114, 115,118, 119, 120, 121,
athemitomixia, 118
122, 141, 150, 154, 177, 262
Athena, 68, 117, Pis. 30-40, 98
Alcinous, King, 189, 190
Athenaia, 68
alethia, 262
Athens, 69, 180, 181
Alexander, 29
Athesteria, 70
Alpheus, river, 10
Attic Comedy, 66
Aids, 10
aures religiosae, 155
Anchises, no, 117
Australian aboriginals, 58, 187
anosios, 108, 109
Anthesteria, 180
anthropomorphism, 19, 20, 21, 22
apex, 232
Aphrodite, 117, 118, 197, 198, Pis. 42, B
43, 91 basileus, 104
Apollo, 30, 106, 107, 108, 109, 188, Berdyaev, N., 268
Pis. 91, 92, 94-101 Bergson, Henri, 12
archon, 54 bios, 13, 27, 28, 158, 162
Arctinus, 198 bios praktikos, 153
Ares, 197, 198 bios theoretikos, 152, 153
Argei, 229 Boeotia, 68
 Index 297
boubrostis, 54
D
boulimou exelasis, 40, 54, 55
Da, 220
Bouphonia, 69, 181, 182
Daidala, 68
Bronze Age, 192
death, 108, 261-279
Buber, Martin, 20
dedienai, 106, 121
Buddhism, 15, 16
deisidaimonia, 97, 98, 103, 105
bull-sacrifice, 220, Pis. 82, 83
Delphi, 109, Pis. 86-91, 96
Bull-son, 69
Demeter, 54, 106, 107, 108, 180, 182,
Burckhardt, Jacob, 11, 12, 104
199, 227, Pi. 41
Democritus, 152
Demodokus, 143
Dephos, 109
c Despoina, 22
Caesar, 29 Deucalion, 109
calendar of Greek festivals, 68 Dialis, 228, 231
Calendars, 178, 226 see also Flamen Dialis
Callimachus, 54, 117 Diespiter, 225, 229, 233, 234
camilli, camillae, 224 dies religiosi, 178
Cameades, 157, 158 di inferi, 108
Catullus, 272 Dinka, of the Upper Nile, 272
Ceres, 227 Diomedes, 143, 196
Chair oneia, 54 Dionysia, 70
Charlemagne, 29 Dionysus, 55, 69, 70, 180, 187, 199,
Charon, 266 227, 265, Pis. 45, 46, 56-66, 97
Christianity, 12, 15, 16, 27, 64, 94, Dionysus festivals, 142, 152, 180
194 Dionysus of Halicarnassus, 223
Chrysippus, 158, 159 Dioscuri, 188, 199, Pi. 85
Chthonic deities, 279 Dipoleia, 69
Cicero, 95, 96, 108, no, 155, 156, 161, Durkheim, Emile, 12
220 dynatnis, 112
Cnossus, 179
confarreatio, 225, 227, 228
Cora Indians, 59, 60, 61, 62, 272
‘corroborree’, 58 E
Cotta, C. Aurelius, 156, 157, 159 eidenai, 144, 145, 147, 148
Crete, 20, 21 eidololatria, 151
Cronos, 104, 193, 198 eidos, 144
Cyclops, 146 ekstasis, 161
298 Index

Eleusinian mysteries, 142 fiammica, 231

Eleusis, 141-2 forehead, dedicated to Genius, 231
energia, 112 Frazer, Sir James, 63
Epicureans, 156 Frobenius, Leo, 13, 14, 58
Epicurus, 265, 267, 271
Epimetheus, 193
epiphanies, 20, 21, 177, Pi. 2
episteme, 147
epoche, 158, 159, 221 G
Erebos, 219, 278, 279 Gaia, 192
Erinyes, 141, 192 Ganymede, 197
Erysichthon, 54 Genius, 230, 231
eschar a, 188 Geryon, 104, 105
Ethiopians, 189, 191 goat sacrifice, 227
Etruria, 70, 94 gods, Roman, 222-223
eulabeia, 97, 98, 103, 105, 119, 161 Goethe, 115, 122, 268
Eumelos, 198 grave urns, Attic, 266
Euripedes, 30, 109 Grey, Sir George, 29-30
eusebeia, hi, 119
Existence, 12,13,16,27,28, 30, 50,162
eyebrows, sacred to Juno, 231

H
Hades, 265, 266, 269, 271
F hagios, 106
fanum, no haanos, 106
fasti Amitemini, 226 Harpies, 182
fasti Praenestini, 226 Harrison, Ellen Jane, 12, 13,
fatum, 161, 162 53
feasts or festivals, 49-71 Hatsikan, god of Cora Indians, 61
Greek, 142-144 hazesthai, 106
figurines: headgear of Roman priests, 232
Cretan, 21 hecatomb, 181
Tanagra, 20 Hector, 114, 115, 120, 121, 196
famen, 225, 232 Hecuba, 114, 115, 117, 119, 181
Flamen Dialis, 178, 224, 225, 226, 232, Heidegger, Martin, 264
235, 237 Helen, 112
duties of, 227-228, 232-233 Hephaestus, 197, 198
 Index 299

Hera, 68, 118, 143, 198, 229, Pis. io, Inferno, 278
il, 13-15, 18, 19 Israelites, 94, 96, 98, 188, 191, 194
Heraclitus, 104, 219, 265 limo, 230
Heraia, 68 ivory groups, Mycenaean, 20, 21, 22
Herakles, 104,105,199, Pls. 34,38,40,98
Hermes, 181, 198, 266, Pi. 97
Herodotus, 152, 179, 193
Herondas, 18
Hesiod, 17, 104, 105, 120, 121, 148, JJanus, 230
158, 179, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195,
Jehovah, 96, 194
196, 219, 279
Judaism, 12
hiereus, in
Jung, C. G., 16
hieron, no
Juno, 229, 230
hieroworgos, in
Juno Lucina, 230
Hipponoos, 148
Jupiter, 68, 160, 161, 223-224, 225,
Hittites, 27
226, 228, 233, 234
Hoelderlin, F., 55
Jupiter Farreus, 228
Homer, 17,106,108, in, 112,115,122,
Jupiter Indiges, 234
141,142,143,144,147,148,149,150,
Jupiter Lapis, 229
179, 180,187,188, 189, 190, 199
jus divinum, 220
homo religiosus, 159
justitia, 108
homo sacer, 108
Juvenal, 30
Horace, 56, 273
horse sacrifice, 226
hosia, 108, 109, no
hosios, in
Hurrians, 27 K
hyhris, 118 Kalends, 230
Hymn to Apollo, 108, 118 kalos, 67
Hymn to Demeter, 141, 142 Knossos, see Cnossus
kosmos atheos, 14
Kouros statues, 30, Pi. 4

I
Ides, 227, 228
Iliad, 106, 122, 141, 146, 150, 181, 188, L
197 Laelius, 156
immortality, 270 lamb sacrifice, 227
300 Index

Larentalia, 226 ‘Mysteries’, 142, Pi. 3

Lectisternia, 223 mythologia, 18, 19, 22
ìectus genialis, 233 mythology, 17-22
legein, 19 Greek, 27
lekythoi, 266 Hittite, 27
Lenaia, 70 Hurrian, 27
lethe, 193 Near Eastern, 198
Leukas cliffs, leap from, 181 Persian, 187
logos, 262 Roman, 220
Lucian, 22 mythos, 19, 28

M N
maize, 62 Napoleon, 29
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 27, 28, 60,237 Narrinyeri, 58
mana, 107, 112 naturalis theologia, 157
Manes, 108 Nausicaa, 112, 113
Mann, Thomas, 28, 29, 30 Nemesis, 109, 120, 121, 122, Pi. 44
Marett, R. R., 56, 57, 58 nenomismena, 55
marriage, confarreate, 225, 227, 229, Nietzsche, F. W., 12, 63
231 night, 106, 108, 120, 121, 219
Mars, 225 Nihil, 14
Martialis, 225, 232 Nilsson, Μ. P., 98
Matronalia, 70 noein, 148, 149
Melanesia, 27 nomizomena, 109
Menander, 153 nomos, 103, 104, 105, 116, 120
Menelaus, 113 non-existence, 273-276
Mesopotamia, 27 Nous, 148, 149, 155, 158, 160, 192,
Metaneira, Queen, 141 193
Metrodorus of Chios, 54 nutnen, 155
Mexico, 59
Miltiades, 29
Mithras, 187, Pi. 82
Mount Kithairon, 68 o
Murray River, 58 Oceanus, daughters of, 152
Mycenae, 20, 180 Odysseus, 106, 112, 113
ivory group from, 20-21, 22, Pi. 1 Odyssey, 106, 108, 112, 141, 143
 Index 301

Olympia, io, 152, Pls. 5-9 pietas, 108, 119, 154, 155, 160, 220,
Olympiads, 178 221
Olympic deities, 279 Pindar, 56, 104, 105, 190, 195
Olympus, 180, 188 pistis, 98
Onchestos, 108 Pithoigia, 70
orenda, 112 Plato, 18, 19, 109, 118, 144, 145, 152,
Ortega y Gasset, 29 153, 158, 159, 265, 270
Otto, Walter F., 11, 13, 14, 181, play, 64, 65
189 Plutarch, 54, 55, 234
oulai, 187 Pluto, 54
oulochtai, 187 poetry, Alexandrine, 142
Ovid, 22, 70 Greek, 142
poiesis, 18
Polybius, 95
Polynesia, 30
P pontifices, 232
Poplifugia, 226
Panathenaia, 68
Poseidon, 22, 187, 220
Panathenaic Festival, 142, Pls. 27,
Poseidon Hippios, 108
28
Poseidonius, 95
Pandora, 193
Praenestine Calendar, 226
Paradiso, 278
Praxiteles, 117
Parilia, 70
Preuss, K. T., 59, 60, 63
Parmenides, 147, 150, 271
Priam, 114, 115, 196
Parthenon, 56, Pls. 22, 24-29
profanum, no
Pascal, Blaise, 98
Prometheus, 189, 192
Patroclus, 113, 149, 196
pronoia, 161
Pausanias, 181
Protestantism, 52
Penelope, 115
Prytaneion, 69
Persephone, 106, 107, 112
pudor, 118
Phaeacians, 189, 191
puppets, 68
phainetai, 52
Pylos, Palace of, 22, 180
Pheidias, 237
Phemios, 143
Philolaos, 98, 152
Phlyakes, 57, Pi. 65
Phoebus, 106 Q
phronesis, 144 Quirinalis, 225, 232
physis, 104 Quirinus, 225
302 Index

Sumerian texts, 27
R
superstitio, 103
religio, 97, 105, 118,119, 141, 155, 156,
159, 160, 161, 162, 177, 179, 220,
221, 224, 236, 237, 262, 268
rex sacrorum, 224
Rilke, R. M., 264, 267 T
rings, Cretan, 21 taboo, 107
Roman Catholicism, 52 Tanagra, cult performance, 181
figurines, 20
Tarantine terracottas, 20
Tartarus, 120, 279
Telemachus, 112, 113
s temenos, 18
sacer, 108, in thambos, 113, 262
sacrosanctum, no thauma, 113, 262
Salii, 232 thaumazein, 262
sanctio, in theion, 20
sanctus, 108, 109, no themis, 105, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121
Sarpedon, 149 Theocritus, 117
Satyrs, 195, Pls. 60, 61 theologia naturalis, 157, 159
Scheler, Max, 264, 267, 268 Theophrastus, 103
script, Cretan, 20 theorem, 151
sehas, 112, 113, 141, 177, 262 theoria, 151, 152, 153, 155, 161,
sehein, in, 112 268
semnos, 141 theos, 151
Sileni, 195, Pi. 59 Theoxenios, 188, 190, 223
skepsis, 155, 158 ‘theriomorphism’, 21, Pi. 2
Smyrna, 54 Thetis, 149
sobein, 112 thinganein, 158
Socrates, 18, 144, 145, 147, 152, 153, thrasos, 97
158 threskeia, 98
Sodom, 194 thriambos, 235
Solon, 104 thusia, 54
Sophocles, 55 Tiber, River, 229
Stoa, 158, 159 Tiresias, 117
Stoics, 156, 157, 159 Titanomachia, 198, 199, Pi. 84
‘Style’, religious, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, Titans, 104, 195, 197, 219, 279
and passim tomb inscriptions, Roman, 270
 Index 303

triumphus, 235 Virgil, 154

Trobriand Islanders, 27 Vitex agnus-castus, 54
vocatio, 159

u
Ulpian, no X
univira, 232 Xenophon, 193
Uranus, 192

z
V Zeus, 68, 104, 105, 117, 118, 120, 122,
Varrò, 225, 235 148, 149, 150, 158, 180, 187, 192,
vase paintings, 56 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 219,
Attic, 67 Pis. 12, 16, 19, 21
Peloponnesian, 57 Zeus Katachthonios, 226
Veiovis, 226, 228, 230 Zeus Polieus, 61
vineyards, under protection ofjupiter, zoe, 13
227 zoon, 13
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