Erwin Rhode’s work, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, stands above any other work in its genre. He covers the ancient Greek religion in such vivid detail and clarity.

Although his work is over one hundred years old, it has withstood the test of time. It is not a widely known work outside of scholastic circles, but it deserves more public praise.

Enclosed is Chapter 9 from Erwin Rohde’s Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, (Books for Libraries Press 1972 edition, reprinted from the English translation of 1920. W.B. Hillis translator.)

Many commentators inevitably refer to Rohde when it comes to religion and ecstasy. A number of Greek dictionaries and commentaries refer to him as a primary source for defining the tongues of Corinth, although he himself does not plainly make this correlation.

This book is highly recommended for any student of ancient Greek literature.

The actual Copy

CHAPTER IX

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE

ITS AMALGAMATION WITH APOLLINE RELIGION. ECSTATIC PROPHECY. RITUAL PROPHECY. RITUAL PURIFICATION AND EXORCISM. ASCETICISM

The Greeks received from the Thracians and assimilated

to their own purposes the worship of Dionysos, just as, in all

probability, they received the personality and worship of

Ares and the Muses. Of this assimilation me cannot give any

further particulars ; it took place in a period lying before the

beginnings of historical tradition. In this period a multiplicity

of separate tendencies and conceptions, freely mingled

with features borrowed from foreign creeds, were welded.

together to form the religion of Greece.

Homer is already acquainted with the fanatical worship of

Dionysos ; the god is called by the name under which Greek

worshippers made themselves familiar with the stranger.

But in Homer, Dionysos appears only once or twice for a

moment in the background. He is not the bountiful giver of

wine ; he does not belong to the Round Table of the great

gods assembled on Olympos. Nowhere in the story told in

either of the Homeric poems does he influence the life and

destiny of human beings. There is no need to seek far for the

reason of Dionysos’ subordinate position in the Iliad and the

Odyssey. Homer’s silence makes it quite plain that at that

time the Thracian god had not yet emerged from a position

of insignificance or merely local importance in the life and

faith of Greece. Nor is this hard to understand : the cult of

Dionysus only gradually won recognition in Greece. Many

legends tell of the battles that had to be fought by the new

worship and of the opposition that met the invader. We hear

how the Dionysiac frenzy and the ekstasis of the Dionysiac

dance-festival took possession of the whole female population

of many districts of Central Greece and the Peloponnese.

Sometimes a few women would venture to join the wandering

choruses of wild Bacchants who danced upon the mountain

tops ; here and there the king of the land would oppose the

progress of this tumultuous worship. Such stories are told of

the daughters of Minyas in Orchomenos, of Proitos in Tiryns,

of King Pentheus at Thebes, and Perseus at Argos ; their

opposition to the Dionysiac form of worship, occurring in

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 283

reality at no precise date, assumed at deceptive distinctness in

the artificial systems of the mythologists and developed

the character of historical events. In reality what we are told

of these individuals–how the opponents of Dionysos them-

selves fell into even wilder frenzy and in Bacchic delirium slew

and tore in pieces their own children instead of the victim-

animal, or (as in the case of Pentheus) became themselves the

victim slain and torn in pieces by the raging women–all this

belongs to the class of aetiological myth. They are legends in

which special features of worship (for example, the existing

or dimly remembered sacrifice of human beings at the feasts

of Dionysus) are provided with a mythical prototype in the

supposed historical past of mythology. and thus receive their

justification. Still, there remains a substratum of historical

fact underlying such stories. They all presuppose that the

cult of Dionysus arrived from abroad and entered into Greece

as something foreign. This presupposition notoriously

corresponds to the actual facts of the case, and we are bound

to assume that the account which they intermediately proceed to

give of the violent opposition which this cult, and only this

cult, met with in many parts of Greece, is not pure fiction.

We are obliged to recognize that such stories preserved a trace

of’ real historical memory expressed in the one form which

was invariably assumed by the earliest Greek tradition, namely

mythology, in which all the accidents and varieties of earthly

experience were condensed into types of universal applicability.

It was then not without opposition. it appears, that the

worship of Dionysos, descending from the north into Boeotia,

spread from thence to the Peloponnese and at an early period

invaded even some of the islands as well. In truth, even if

we had no evidence at all on the point, we should have

expected the Greeks to feel a profound repugnance to this

disorderly and tumultuous Thracian worship ; a deep-seated

instinct must in their case have resisted such extravagance

of emotional excitement and refused to lose itself in the limitless

abyss of mere feeling. This unchecked roaming over the

mountain sides in nocturnal revelry might be suitable enough

for Thracian women-folk, but respectable Greek citizens

could not give themselves up to such things without a struggle

–without, indeed, a break with all inherited propriety and

decorum. It seems to have been the women who were the

first to give into the invading worship, carried away in a real

frenzy of inspired enthusiasm, and the new cult may really

have owed its first success chiefly to them. What we are told

of the irresistible progress and widespread success of the

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Bacchic dance-worship and its exaltation reminds us of the

phenomena which have attended similar religious epidemics

such as have in more recent times occasionally burst out

and overflowed whole countries. We may in particular recall

to mind the accounts which we have of the violent and wide-

spread dance-madness which, soon after the severe mental

and physical shock suffered by Europe in the Black Death of

the fourteenth century, broke out on the Rhine and for centuries

could not be entirely stamped out. Those who were attacked

by the fever were driven by an irresistible impulse to dance

The bystanders, in convulsions of sympathetic and imitative

fury joined in the whirling dance themselves. Thus the

malady was spread by contagion, and soon whole companies

of men, women, and girls, wandered dancing through the

country. In spite of the insufficiency of the surviving records,

the religious diameter of this dance-enthusiasm is unmistakably

apparent. The Church regarded it as a “ heresy”.

The dancers called upon the name of St. John or of “ certain

demons ”; hallucinations and visions of a-religions nature

accompanied their ecstasies. Can it have been another such

popular religious malady which attacked Greece-perhaps

in the train of the disturbance of spiritual equilibrium caused

by the destructive migrations which take their name from the

Dorians? The circumstances of the time must have

predisposed men’s minds in that direction and made them

ready to accept the Thracian Dionysos and his enthusiastic

dance-worship. In any case this invasion did not, like its

medieval counterpart, break down by coming into conflict

with a well-established religion and an exclusive ecclesiastical

organization of a very different temper from its own. In the

deceptive twilight of myth we can only dimly discern the

arrival and progress of the Dionysiac religion in Greece. But

so much at least is evident : the Bacchic cult, though it had

to overcome many obstacles, at last established itself in

Greece and triumphantly overran both mainland and islands,

until in the course of time it obtained a profound and far-

reaching importance in Greek life of which Homer could

scarcely give a hint.

§2

It was no longer simply the old Thracian Dionysus who now

took his place beside the other great gods of the Greek Olympus

as one of themselves. He had become Hellenized and humanized

in the meantime. Cities and states celebrated him in

yearly festivals as the giver of the vine’s inspiring fruit, as

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 285

the daimonic patron of vegetation, and the whole of Nature’s rich and flourishing growth. He was worshipped as the incarnation of all natural life an vigour in the fullest and widest sense ; as the typical exponent of the most eager enjoyment of life. Even Art, the highest expression of the courage and pride of life, drew much of its inspiration ant is aspiration towards the infinite from the worship of Dionysos ; and the drama, that supreme achievement of Greek poetry, arose out of the choruses of the Dionysiac festival.

Now the art of the actor consists in entering into a strange personality, and in speaking and acting out of a character not his own. At bottom it retains a profound and ultimate connexion with its most primitive source–that strange power of transfusing the self into another being which the really inspired participator in the Dionysiac revels achieved in his ekstasis The essential features of the god as he first arrived Greece from foreign lands, in spite of much alteration and transformation of the primitive type, were thus not entirely lost. There remained also, in addition to the cheerful festivity of the daylight worship of Dionysos, as it was celebrated more particularly in Athens, certain vestiges fo the old ecstatic worship which drove men and women over the mountains in nocturnal revelry. In many places there were still celebrated the trieteric festivals in which recurrent intervals the “ Epiphany ” of Dionysos, his appearance in the world of men and ascent from the underworld, was solemized by night. The primitive character of Dionysos the Lord of Spirits and the Souls of the dead–a very different figure indeed from the tender and delicate Wine-God of later times–was still obscurely present in many features of the Dionysiac festivals, in those of Delphi especially, but even to some extent at Athens too. The ecstasy and the violence, even the dark savagery of the ancient cult did not quite die out in the midst of all the refinements of Greek civilization ; recognizable traces of such things were preserved in the Nuktelia and Agrionia and in the various trieteric festivals that were offered to the god in many different localities. In Greece the awful god received the blood of human victims. Nor did the outward signs of delirious frenzy, such as the eating of raw flesh, the killing and tearing in pieces of snakes, entirely disappear. So little, indeed, did the Bacchic frenzy that could exalt and lift the worshipper to communion with the god and his train, disappear before the gentler attractions of the gracious wine-god and his festival, that the raving and “ possession ” which characterized the cult of Dionysos were

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 286

now actually regarded by foreign peoples as the essentially

Hellenic form of the worship of the god.

Thus, a sympathetic understanding of the orgiastic cult

and its tremendous capabilities lived on. The “ Bacchants ”

of Euripides still preserves for us a breath of its magic, a trace

of the enthusiasm and exaltation that overwhelmed the senses

and enthralled the will and consciousness of those who gave

themselves up to the powerful Dionysiac influence. Like an

irresistible current that overwhelms a swimmer or like the

mysterious helplessness that frustrates the dreamer, the magic

power emanating from the neighbourhood of the god took

complete possession of the worshipper and drove him whither

it willed. Everything in the world was transformed for him ;

he himself was altered. Every character in the play falls under

the spell as soon as he enters into the magic circle. Even the

modern reader who turns over the pages of Euripides’ poem

feels something of that strange power to subdue the soul

wielded by the Dionysiac mysteries and experiences in his

own person a faint reflection of these extraordinary states of

mind.

Probably as a result of this profound Dionysiac fever

which had once raged through Greece like an epidemic and

was liable to periodic returns in the nocturnal festivals of the

god, there remained in the constitution of the Greek people

a certain morbid weakness, a susceptibility to suddenly appearing

and as suddenly disappearing crises in which the normal

powers of perceiving and feeling were temporarily overthrown.

A few stray accounts have come down to us in which we read

how such brief attacks of passing insanity ran through whole

cities like an infectious disease. The Korybantic form of the

malady, which was religious in character and took its name

from the daimonic companions of the Phrygian Mountain

Mothcr, was a phenomenon quite well-known to doctors and

psychologists. Those affected by such fevers saw strange

figures that corresponded to no objective reality, and heard

the sound of invisible flutes, until at last they were excited

to the highest pitch of frenzy and were seized with a violent

desire to dance. The initiation festivals of the Phrygian

deities were specially directed to the discharge and so eventually

to the cure and “ purgation ” of such emotional states ; the

means employed being principally dance and music -more

especially the music composed for the flute by the old Phrygian

masters ; music that could fill the soul with inspiration in

suitably disposed natures. By such methods the ecstatic

element was not simply suppressed or expelled, it was taken

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 287

up as a special disciplinary process by the physician-priesthood

who recognized in it a vital movement and added it to the

regular worship of the god.

In a similar fashion Greece in its most enlightened period

accepted and practised the “ enthusiastic ” cult of Dionysos.

Even the tumultuous night-festivals of’ the Thracian god-

festivals closely related to those of Phrygia from which they

had borrowed and to which they had given so many features-

were made to serve the “ purgation ” of’ the ecstatically

exalted soul. The worshipper in such festivals “initiated

his soul into the company of the god in holy purifications, while

he raged over the mountains in Bacchic frenzy”. The

purification consisted in this case, too, of violent excitement

in which the soul was stimulated to the highest pitch of

religious ecstasy. Dionysos as “ Bakcheus ” awoke the holy

madness which he himself again, alter it had reached its

highest point of intensity, stilled and tranquillized as Lysios

and Meilichios. The old Thracian cult of ecstasy has here

been modified in a fashion that belonged only to Greek soil

and to Greek modes of thought. Legend, allegorizing the

facts, threw back this final development of the Dionysiac

norship into the remotest antiquity. Even Hesiodic poems

related how the daughters of King Proitos of Tiryns wandered

in the holy frenzy of Dionysus over the mountain of Peloponnesesos,

until at last they and all the multitude of women who

had joined them were healed and “ purified ” by Melampous

the seer of Pylos famed in legend. The cure was effected

through the intensification of the Dionysizic frenzy “with

loud crying and inspired dancing,” and, further, by the use

of certain special purificatory devices. Melampous did not

put an end to the Dionysia cult and its “ enthusiasm ”;

he rather regulated and developed it. For this reason Herodotos

can even call him the “ Founder ” of the Dionysiac

cult in Greece. Legend, however, always recognized in this

“ founder ” of the Dionysiac festival an adherent of the

specifically Apolline form of religion. “ Apollo had favoured

him especially,” and bestowed upon him the Seership which

became ancestral in his family. Legend used him as a type

in which the reconciliation between the Apolline and the

Dionysiac was figuratively expressed. The reconciliation is

an historical fact, but it did not happen in the primitive past

of legend.

It is a fact, however, that Apollo did at last, doubtless after

prolonged resistance, enter into the closest alliance with this

remarkable divine brother of his, the Hellenized Dionysos

DlONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 288

The covenant must have been made at Delphi. There at

least on the heights of Parnasos. in the Korykian Cave, the

trieteric festival of Dionysos was held every second year in the

close neighbourhood of Apollo the Lord of Delphi. Nay, more,

in Apollo’s own temple the “ grave ” of Dionysos was shown,

and at this grave, while the Thyiades of the god rushed over

the mountain heights, the priests of Apollo celebrated a

secret festival of their own. The festal year of Delphi was

divided, though unequally it is true. between Apollo and

Dionysus. To such an extent had Dionysus taken root at

Delphi, so closely were the two gods related, that while

the front pediment of the temple showed the form of Apollo,

the back pediment represented Dionysos-and the Dionysus

of the nocturnal ecstatic revels. Apollo, too. shared in the

trieteric festival of Dionysus, while Dionysos in later times

at the penteteric festival of the Pythia. received, as well as

Apollo, his share of sacrifice and the contests of cyclic choruses.

The two divinities have many of their titles and attributes

in common ; in the end the distinction between them seems

to disappear entirely.

Antiquity never forgot that at Delphi, the radiating centre

of his cult, Apollo was an intruder. Among the older deities

whom he supplanted there, the name of Dionysos also

occurred ; but the Delphic priesthood thought it wise to

tolerate the Thracian god and his ecstatic cult that at first

seemed so opposed to that of their own deity. Dionysos

may have been too vigorous a spirit to allow his worship

to lie suppressed like that of the Earth divinity who sent the

prophetic dreams. Apollo is the “ Lord of Delphi ”; but

the priesthood of the Delphic Apollo, following in this the

tendency to religious syncretism which is so recognizable

in them, took the worship of Dionysus under their protection.

The Delphic Oracle in fact introduced Dionysus into localities

where he had hitherto been a stranger, and nowhere so

successfully or with such momentous consequences as at

Athens. It was this promoting of the Dionysiac form of

religion by the great corporation which had the leadership

in Greece in all matters of religion that did more than

anything else to secure for the god and his worship that

found wide-reaching influence on Greek religion that

Homer, who knows little even of the Delphic Oracle, completely

ignores.

But it was a gentler and more civilized Dionysos whom

Delphi popularized and even helped to re-shape ; the extravagance

of the ecstatic abandonment was pruned and moderated

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 289

to suit the more sober temper of ordinary city-life, and the

brighter, daylight festivals of urban and countryside worship.

Hardly a trace of the old Thracian worship of ecstasy and

exaltation is discoverable in the Dionysiac worship of Athens.

In other places, and especially in the districts ruled over by

the Delphic Apollo himself, Dionysiac worship preserved

more of its primitive nocturnal wildness. Even Athens, in

obedience to an oracular command, sent a religious embassy

of elected women to the Delphic Trieteria. It is plain enough

however, that in all this there was nothing but a dim counterpart

of the former tumultuous mountain-worship of the god,

and its profound soul-stirring ceremonies : the worship of

Athens and Delphi had reduced all that to a vague ritual

traditionalism.

§ 3

But in spite of all attempts to moderate and civilize it

outwardly, the cult of Dionysus retained as its most enduring

feature a tendency to the ecstatic and the extravagant that was

continually breaking out in threatening or alluring guise.

So strong indeed was the ecstatic element in Dionysiac worship,

that when the Apolline and Dionysiac forms of religion became

united, as at Delphi, it was the Apolline worship–once so

hostile to anything in the nature of ecstasy–that had to

accept this entirely novel feature.

The “ prophecy of inspiration ”, deriving its knowledge

of the unseen from an elevation of the human soul to the divine,

was not always a. part of Greek religion. Homer, of course,

knows of the prophetic art,/em> in which specially instructed seers

explained such signs of the gods’ will as occurred accidentally

or were purposely sought out by men, and by this means

claimed to discover the will of heaven both at the moment

and for the future. This is, in fact, the sort of prophecy that

Apollo bestowed upon his seers. But the prophecy of

which there was no “ art ” and which “ no man could be

taught ” (for it came in a moment by “ inspiration ”)–

of this Homer shows no trace. In addition to professional

and independently working prophets the Odyssey, and even

the Iliad, too, are aware of the enclosed oracular institutions

belonging to the temple of Zeus at Dodona and that of Apollo

at Pytho. Both these used the names of the gods with

whose service they were concerned to increase the effect and

the credit of their utterances. In the Odyssey (but not the

Iliad) there is at reference to the influence wielded by the oracle

of Apollo in the more important circumstances of a people’s

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 290

life. But whether at that time it was an inspired prophetess

who gave replies at Delphi we cannot he sure from the poet’s

words. There must have been oracles of Sortilege at that

place from an early period under the protection of the god

and it is these we should naturally expect a poet to mean who

nowhere shows any knowledge of the striking phenomena

of ecstatic mantike.

In any case this new mantike of inspired prophets, which

subsequently enjoyed such enormous development and gave

the Delphic oracle such peculiar power, was a late-coming

innovation in the Apolline cult. Over the chasm in the rock

at Pytho, out of which arose a strange and potent vapour

from the depths of the earth, there had once existed an oracle

of Gaia at which perhaps inquirers had received their instruction

through the means of premonitory dreams by night.

The earth-goddess was displaced by Apollo here as at many

other oracular sites. The accuracy of this tradition is

confirmed by the Delphic temple legend which speaks of the

overthrow of the oracular earth-spirit Python by Apollo.

The change may have been gradually wrought about ; in

any case, where once the earth-divinity had spoken directly

in dreams to the souls of’ men, there Apollo now prophesied–

no longer indirectly through the intervening medium of signs

and omens, but directly answering those who, in open-eyed

wakefulness, inquired of him, and speaking to them out of

the mouth of his ecstatically inspired prophetess.

This Delphic prophecy of inspiration is as far removed from

the old Apolline art of interpreting omens as it is closely

allied to the mantike which we found attached from the earliest

times to the Thracian cult of Dionysos. It appears that in

Greece Dionysios but rarely obtained an official priesthood

that could have organized or maintained a permanent oracular

institute attached to a particular place or temple. In the

one Dionysiac oracle in Greece, however, of winch we have

certain knowledge a priest gave prophecies in a state of

“ enthusiasm ” and “ possession ” by the god. Enthusiasm

and ecstasy are invariably the means of the Dionysiac prophecy

just as they were the means of all Dionysiac religious

experience. When we find Apollo in Delphi itself-the place

where he most closely allied himself with Dionysos-deserting

his old omen-interpretation and turning to the prophecy of

ekstasis, we cannot have much doubt as to whence Apollo

got this new thing.

With the mantic ekstasis

, Apollo received a Dionysiac

element into his own religion. Henceforward, he, the cold,

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 291

aloof, sober deity of former times, can be addressed by titles

that imply Bacchic excitement and self-abandonment. He is

now the “ enthusiastic ”, the Bacchic god : Aeschylus strikingly

calls him “ ivy-crowned Apollo, the Bacchic-frenzied prophet ”.

It is now Apollo, who more than any other god, calls

forth in men’s souls the madness that makes them clairvoyant

and enables them to know hidden things. At not a

few places there are founded oracular sites at which priests

or priestesses in frenzied ecstasy utter what Apollo puts into

their mouths. But the Pythian oracle remained the pattern

of them all. There, prophecy was uttered by the Pythia,

the youthful priestess who sat upon the tripod over the earth-

chasm and was inspired by the intoxicating vapour that arose

from it, until she was filled with the god, and with his spirit.

The god, so ran the belief, entered into the earthly body; or

else the soul of the priestess, “ released ” from her body,

received the heavenly revelation with spiritual sense. What

she then “ with frenzied mouth ” proclaimed, that the god

spoke out of her ; when she said “ I Apollo was speaking

of himself and of what concerned him.” It is the god who

lives, thinks, and speaks in her so long as the madness lasts.

§4

A profound and compelling tendency of the human mind

must have been the source of the great religious movement

that could succeed in establishing, with the ecstatic prophecy of

the Delphic priestess, a seed of mysticism in the very heart

of Greek religion. The introduction of ekstasis into the

ordered stability of the Delphic mode of religion was only a

symptom of that religious movement and not its cause.

But now, confirmed hy the god himself, and by the experience

which the mantic practice seemed to make so evident, the

new belief, so long familiar to Dionysiac religion and worship,

must have at last invaded the older and original type of Greek

religion, and taken hold of it in spite of that religion’s natural

antipathy to anything of the kind. And this belief was that

a highly exalt state of feeling could raise man above the

normal level of his limited, everyday consciousness, and

could elevate him to heights of vision and knowledge

unlimited ; that, further, to the human soul it was not denied,

in very truth and not in vain fancy, to live for a moment

the life of divinity. This belief is the fountain-head of all

mysticism, and tradition still records a few traces of the way

in which it grew and spread at that time.

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 292

It is true that the formal and official worship of the gods in

Greece (where their cults were not obviously affected by foreign

influence) remained as fast-bound as ever within the confines

of order and lucidity. We hear very little of the entrance of

ecstatic exaltation into the constitution of the older cults.

The irresistible religious impulse to such things found an

outlet through other channels. Men and women began to

appear who on their own initiative began to act as intermediaries

between the gods and the needs of individual men.

They were natures, we must suppose, of unusual susceptibility

to “ enthusiastic ” exaltation ; having a strange capacity for

projecting themselves into the infinite. Nothing in the

organization of Greek religion prevented such men and

women, if they could not obtain authority from any religious

community of the state itself, from acquiring a real influence

in religious matters simply from their own experience of

divine favour, their own inward communion with divine

powers.

In the darkness and ferment of this period of growth, from

the eighth to the sixth centuries, we can vaguely discern many

such shadowy figures ; they look uncommonly like those

strange products of the earliest infancy of Christianity when

prophets, asectics, and exorcists wandered from land to land,

called to their work by nothing but the immediate grace of

god (span class=”greek”>χάρισμα), and not attached to any permanent religious

community. It is true that what we hear of Sibyls and

Bakides–men and women who wandered from land to land

prophesying the future, independently of and uncommissioned

by any particular oracular institute–is mostly legend ; but

these are the sort of legends that preserve real historical

tradition condensed into single types and pictures. The

nomenclature itself tells us much ; Sibyls and Bakides are not

individual names, but titles belonging to various types of

ecstatic prophet, and we are entitled to suppose that the

types so named once existed. The appearance in many places

of Greek Asia Minor and the old mainland of Greece of such

divinely inspired prophets is among the distinguishing marks

of a clearly defined period in Greek history ; the age of

promise that came immediately before the philosophic period

of Greece. The later age, entirely given up as it was to the

pursuit of philosophic enlightenment, made so little claim to

the inheritance in their own time of the divine favour that

had once enabled the Sibyls and Bakides to see their visions

and utter their wisdom, that there actually began to appear

in large numbers prophets at second-hand, who were satisfied

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 293

with preserving the traditional wisdom of the inspired

prophets of the past, and with the judicious interpretation

of their treasures. The age of enthusiastic prophets was

evidently a thing of the past. The very literature of Sibylline

and Bakid oracles, which began to appear just at that time

and showed itself capable of an almost indefinite extension,

was itself largely responsible for the veil of myth and legend

which completely enveloped the original bearers of the

prophetic title. Earlier and earlier became the historic

events of the past which they had foretold ; further and

further into the mythical past, before the time of the events

prophesied, receded the imaginary period of the great prophets.

In spite of which the scientific chronologists of antiquity,

who were far from being imposed upon by the delusive anticipations

of prophetic poems, found reason for fixing the date

of particular Sibyls–which means for our purpose the whole

prophetic age of Greece–in the fully historical period of the

eighth and seventh centuries.

We may recognize, in what we hear of these prophets, the

shadowy representatives of a once real and living past ; they

are reminiscences of a striking and therefore never quite

forgotten phase of Greek religious life. The Bakids and Sibyls

were independent agents–though not entirely without connexion

with the regular worship of the gods, they were

not attached to any particular temple–who wandered from

land to land according to the needs of those who sought their

counsel. In this respect, at least, they resembled the Homeric

amen-interpreters, and continued their work ; but they

differed from them profoundly in the mode of their prophesying.

They were “ seized by the god ” and in ecstatic

clairvoyance saw and proclaimed unseen things. It was

no academic skill that they possessed, enabling them to

interpret the meaning of signs and omens that anyone could

see–they saw what was visible only to God and to the

soul of man filled with God. In hoarse tones and wild words

the Sibyl gave utterance to what the divine impelling power

within her and not her own arbitrary fancy suggested ;

possessed by the god, she spoke in a divine distraction. An

echo of such daimonic session, and of the horrible reality

and terror that it had for the possessed, can still be heard in

the cries and convulsions which Aeschylus in the Agamemnon

gives to his Kassandra–a true picture of the primitive

Sibyl, and a type that the poets of that prophetic

generation had reflected backwards into the earlier past of

legend.

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 294

§5

The activity of the seer was not confined to foreseeing and

foretelling the future. We hear of a “ Bakis ” who “ purified ”

and delivered the women of Sparta from an attack of

madness that had spread like an epidemic among them.

The prophetic age of Greece must have seen the origin of what

later became part of the regular duties of the “ seer ” ; the

cure of diseases, especially those of the mind ; the averting

of evil of every kind by various strange means, and particularly

the supply of help and counsel by “ purifications ” of a

religious nature. The gift or art of prophecy, the purification

of “ the unclean ”, the healing of disease, all seem to be

derived from one source. Nor can we be long in doubt as to

what the single source of this threefold capacity must have

been. The world of invisible spirits surrounding man, which

ordinary folk know only by its effects, is familiar and accessible

to the ecstatic prophet. the Mantis, the spirit-seer. As exorcist

he undertakes to heal disease ; the Kathartic process is

also essentially and originally an exorcism of the baleful

influences of the spirit-world.

The wide popularity and elaboration given to the notion–

hardly hinted at as yet in Homer–of the universally

present menace of “ pollution ” which is only to be averted

or got rid of by means of a religious process of purification–

this is one of the chief distinguishing features of the over-

anxious piety that marked the post-Homeric age when men

could no longer be content with the means of salvation

handed down to them by their fathers. If we confined our

attention to the fact that now we find purification required

for such actions as murder and the spilling of blood which

seem to imply at moral stain to the doer of’ them, we might be

tempted to see in the development of Kathartic practices a

fresh step in the history of Greek ethics, and to suppose

that the new practices arose out of a refinement and deepening

of the “ conscience ” which now desired to be free from the

taint of “ sin ” by the help of religion. But such an interpretation

of Katharsis (favourite as it is) is disposed of by a consideration

of the real essence and meaning of the thing. In

later times the methods of Katharsis were nearly always in

competition and conflict (rarely in friendly alliance) with “ conscience ”,

with the independently developed ethical thought

that based itself upon the unchanging requirements of a moral

law transcending all personal will and feeling, and even the

will of daimonic powers. In its origin and essence Katharsis

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 295

had nothing whatever to do with morality or with what we

should call the voice of conscience, On the contrary, it

usurped the place which in a more advanced and morally

developed people would have belonged to a true morality

based on an inner feeling for what is right. Nor did it fail

to hinder the free and unfettered development of such a

morality. Kathartic practices required and implied no feeling

of offence, of personal guilt, of personal responsibility. All

that we know of these practices serves to bring this out and

set the matter in a clearer light.

Ceremonies of “ purification ” accompany every step of

a man’s life from the cradle to the grave. The woman with

child is “ unclean ” and so is anyone who touches her ; the

new-born child is unclean ; marriage is fenced about with

a series of purificatory rites ; the dead, and everything that

approaches them, are unclean. Now, in these instances of

the common and almost daily occurrence of purification

ceremonies, there can be no moral stain involved that requires

to be washed off, not even a symbolical one. Equally little

can there be any when ritual purifications are employed

after a bad dream, the occurrence of a prodigy, recovery

from illness, or when a person has touched an offering made to

deities of the lower world or the graves of the dead ; or when

it is found necessary to purify house and hearth, and even

fire and water for sacred or profane purposes. The purification

of those who have shed blood stands on exactly the same

footing. It was necessary even for those who had killed a

man with just cause, or had committed homicide unknowingly

or unwillingly; the moral aspect of such cases, the guilt

or innocence of the doer is ignored or unperceived. Even in

the case of premeditated murder, the remorse of the criminal

or his “ will to amend ” is quite superfluous to the efficacy

of purification.

It could not be otherwise. The “ stain ” which is wiped

out by these mysterious and religious means is not within

the heart of man. It clings to a man as something hostile,

and from without, and that can he spread from him to others

like an infectious disease. Hence, the purification is effected

by religious processes directed to the external removal of the

evil thing ; it may be washed off (as by water from a running

:spring or from the sea), it may be violently effaced and obliterated

(as by fire or even smoke alone), it may be absorbed (by

wool, fleece of animals, eggs), etc.

It must be something hostile and dangerous to men that is

thus removed ; since this something can only he attacked by

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 296

religious means, it must belong to the daimonic world to

which alone Religion and its means of salvation have reference.

There exists a population of spirits whose neighbourhood or

contact with men renders then “ unclean ”, for it gives them

over to the power of the unholy. Anyone who touches their

places of abode, or the offerings made to them, falls under

their spell ; they may send him sickness, insanity, evils of

every kind. The priest with his purifications is an “ exorcist ”

who sets free those who have fallen victims to the surrounding

powers of darkness. He certainly fulfils this function when

he dispenses diseases. i.e. the spirits who send the diseases,

by his ministrations ; when he employs in his purificatory

ritual hymns and incantatory formulæ which regularly imply

an invisibly listening being to whom they are addressed ;

when he uses the clang of bronze instruments whose well-

known property it is to drive away ghosts. Where human

blood has been shed and requires “ purification ” the Kathartic

priest accomplishes this “ by driving out murder with

murder ” i.e. he lets the blood of a sacrificed animal fall

over the hands of the polluted person. Here, the purification

is plainly in the nature of a substitution-sacrifice (the animal

being offered instead of the murderer). In this way the

anger of the dead is washed-away–for this anger is itself the

pollution that is to be removed. The famous scapegoats

were nothing but sacrifices offered to appease the anger of the

Unseen, and thereby release a whole city from “ pollution ”.

At the Thargelia or on extraordinary occasions of need in

Ionic cities, and even in Athens, unfortunate men were in

ancient times slain or stoned to death or burnt “ for the

purification of the city ” Even the materials of purification

that in private life served to free the individual and his

house from the claims of invisible powers, were thought of as

offerings to these powers ; this is proved clearly enough by the

custom of removing such materials, when they had served

their purpose as “ purifications ”, to the cross-roads, and of

making them over to the unearthly spirits who have their

being there. The materials of purification so treated are in

fact identical with offerings to the dead or even with “ Hekate’s

banquets ” In this case we can see most clearly what the

forces are which Kathartic processes essentially aim at

averting. In them no attempt was made to satisfy a heartfelt

consciousness of sin or a moral sense that has become delicate ;

they were much rather the result of a superstitious fear of

uncanny forces surrounding men and stretching out after

them with a thousand threatening hands in the darkness.

DIONYSIAC RELlGlON IN GREECE 297

It was the monstrous phantasies of their own imagination

that made men call upon the priests of purification and

expiation for much-needed aid and protection.

§6

It is simply the invasion of human life by the sinister

creatures of the daimonic world that the clairvoyant mantis

is supposed to avert with his “ purifications ”. Among

these sinister influences Hekate and her crew are particularly

noticeable. This is without doubt an ancient product of

religious phantasy–though it is not mentioned by Homer

–which did not till a late period emerge from the obscurity

of local observance and obtain general popularity ; even then

it only here and there ceased to be a private and domestic

cult and reached the dignity of public city-worship. The

cult of Hekate fled the light of day, as did the wild farrago of

weird and sinister phantoms that surrounded her. She is

cthonic, a goddess of the lower world, where she is at home ;

but, more easily than other lower-world creatures, she finds

her way to the living world of men. Wherever a soul is

entering into partnership with a body–at birth or in child

bed-she is at hand ; where a soul is separating from a

body, in burials of the dead, she is there. Amidst the dwelling-

places of the departed, the monuments of the dead and

the gloomy ritual of their worship, she is in her element.

She is the queen of the souls who are still fast bound to the

upper world. It shows her deep-seated connexion with

the primeval worship of’ the dead at the household hearth,

when we hear of Hekate as dwelling “ in the depth of the

hearth ”, and being honoured together with the underworld

Hermes, her masculine counterpart, among the domestic gods

who “ were left to us by our forefathers ”.

This domestic cult may be a legacy from times when in

familiar intercourse with the lower world men did not yet

fear “ pollution ” therefrom. To later ages Hekate was

the principal source and originator of all that was ghostly

and uncanny. Men came upon her suddenly and to their

hurt by night, or in the dreamy solitudes of midday’s blinding

heat ; they see her in monstrous shapes that, like the figures

in a dream, are continually changing. The names of many

female deities of the underworld of whom the common

people had much to say–Gorgyra (Gorgo), Mormo. Lamia,

Gello or Empousa, the ghost of midday–denote in reality

so many different personifications and variations of Hekate.

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 298

She appeared most frequently by night, under the half-light

of the moon, at the cross-roads. She is not alone but is

accompanied by her “ crew ”, the hand-maidens who follow

in her train. These are the souls of those who have not had

their share of burial and the holy rites that accompany it ;

who have been violently done to death, or who have died

“ before their time ”. Such souls find no rest after death ;

they travel on the wind now, in the company of Hekate and

her daimonic pack of hounds. It is not without reason that

we are reminded of the legends of “ wild hunters ” and the

“ furious host ”, so familiar in modern times in many countries.

Similar beliefs produced similar results in each case ; perhaps

there is even some historical connexion between them,

These night-wandering spirits and souls of the dead bring

pollution and disaster upon all who meet them or fall into

their hands ; they send evil dreams, nightmares, nocturnal

apparitions, madness and epilepsy. It is for them, the

unquiet souls of the dead and Hekate their queen, that men

set out the “ banquets of Hekate ” at the cross-roads.

To them men consign with averted facts the remains of the

purificatory sacrifices that they may not come too close

to human dwelling places. Puppies, too, were sacrificed to

Hekate for “ purifications ”, i.e. “ apotropaic ” sacrifices.

Gruesome inventions of all kinds were easily attached to

this province of supernaturalism ; it is one of the sources

which, with help from other Greek conceptions and many

foreign creations of fancy, let loose a stream of anxious

and gloomy surreptitiousness that spread through the whole

of later antiquity and even reached through the Middle Ages

to our own day.

Protection and riddance from such things were sought at

the hands of seers and “ Kathartic priests ” who, in addition

to ceremonies of purification and exorcism had other ways of

giving help–prescriptions and recipes of many strange sorts

which were originally clear and natural enough to the fantastic

logic of superstition and were still credited and handed down

as magic and inexplicable formula after their real meaning

had been entirely forgotten. Others, again, were driven by a

fearful curiosity to attempt to bring the world of surrounding

spirits–of whose doings such strange stories were told in

legend–even closer to themselves. By magic arts and

incantations, they compelled the wandering ghosts and even

Hekate herself to appear before them : the magic power

forces them to do the will of the spirit-raiser or to harm his

enemies. It was these creatures of the spirit-world that

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 299

magicians and exorcists claimed to banish or compel. Popular

belief was on their side in this, but it is hardly possible that

they never resorted to deceit and imposture in making good

their claims.

§7

The mantic and Kathartic practices, together with what

arose out of them, are known to us almost exclusively as they

were in the time of their decay. Even in the brief sketch

just attempted of this notable by-way of Greek religion,

many details have had to be taken from the accounts left

to us by later ages that had quite outgrown the whole idea

of mantic and Kathartic procedure. Compared on the one

hand with science, seriously engaged in studying the real and

inward sources of being and becoming throughout the world.

together with the limitations of man’s estate, and on the

other hand with the practical and cautious medical study

of the physical conditions of human life in health and sickness,

the mantic and Kathartic practices and all the myriad

superstitious arising from them seemed like a legacy from a

forgotten and discredited past. But such things persisted

in many circles of old-fashioned and primitive-minded people,

though by the emancipated and cultured they~were despised

as the silly and dangerous quackery of mendicant priests and

wizards.

But this product of the religious instinct cannot always

have appeared in such a light ; it certainly was not so regarded

when it first came into prominence. A movement that was

zealously taken up by the Delphic oracle, which influenced

many Greek states in the organization of their religious

cults, must have had a period when its right to exist was

incontestable. It must have answered to the needs of a time

when the dawning sense of the profound unity and inter-connexion

of all being and becoming in the world still contented

itself with a religious explanation of what seemed mysterious,

and when a few chosen natures were seriously credited with

the power to communicate with the all-embracing spirit-world.

Every age has its own ideal of Wisdom ; and there

came a time when the ideal of the Wise Man, who by his own

innate powers has achieved a commanding spiritual position

and insight, became embodied in the persons of certain great

men who seemed to fulfil the highest conceptions of wisdom

and power that were attributed to the ecstatic seer and priest

of purification. The half-mythical stories in which later

ages preserved the memory of the times lying just before the

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 300

age of the philosophic exploration of nature tell us of certain

great masters of a mysterious and occult Wisdom. It is true

that they are credited with powers over nature of a magical

kind rather than with a purely intellectual insight into the

laws of nature; but even in the scanty accounts of them

which have come down to us there are clear indications that

their work already included the tirst attempts at a mode of

study based on theory. We cannot call them philosophers–

not even the forerunners of Greek philosophy. More often

their point of view was one which the real philosophic impulse

towards self-determination and the freedom of the soul

consciously and decisively rejected, and continued to reject,

though not indeed without occasional wavering and back-

sliding. These men must be counted among the magicians

and exorcists who so often appear in the earliest dawn of the

spiritual history of civilized nations, and, as primitive and

marvellous types of the spirit of inquiry, precede the philosophers.

They all belong to the class of ecstatic seers and

Kathartic priests.

Legend related how, out of the country of the Hyperboreans.

that distant Wonderland where Apollo hid himself in winter.

there came to Greece one Abaris, sent by the god himself. He

was a saint and needed no earthly food. Carrying in his hand

the golden arrow, the proof of his Apolline origin and mission,

he passed through many lands dispelling sickness and pestilence

by sacrifices of a magic kind, giving warning of earthquakes

and other disasters. Even in later times prophecies

and “ purifications ”, going under his name, were still to be

read. –This man, and also another like him, called Aristeas,

were already mentioned by Pindar. Aristeas, a man

of high rank in his native city of Prokonnesos, had the magic

gift of prolonged ekstasis. When his soul left his body behind,

being seized by Phoibos, it (as his second self made visible)

was seen in distant places. As Apollo’s attendant he also

appeared together with the god in Metapontum. A bronze

statue in the market-place of that city remained to testify

to his presence there, and to the astonishment awakened

by his inspired utterances. But among all these examples

of the type, Hermotimos of Klazomenai is the most striking.

His soul could desert his body “ for many years ”, and on its

return from its ecstatic voyages, brought with it much mantic

lore and knowledge of the future. At last, enemies set fire

to the tenantless body of Hermotimos when his soul was

away. and the latter returned no more.

The greatest master of all these magically gifted men was,

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 301

according to tradition, Epimenides. His home was in Crete.

an ancient centre of Kathartic wisdom, where Epimenides

was instructed in this lore as an adherent of the cult of

the underworld Zeus. Through a mist of legend and fable

we hear of his prolonged stay in the mysterious cave of Zeus

on Mt. Ida, his intercourse with the spirits of the darkness,

his severe fasting, the long ecstasy of his soul, and his

final return from solitude to the light of day, much experienced

and far-travelled in “ enthusiastic wisdom ”. Next he

journeyed through many lands bringing his health-giving

arts with him, prophesying the future as an ecstatic seer,

interpreting the hidden meaning of past occurrences, and as

Kathartic priest expelling the daimonic evils that arose from

specially foul misdeeds of the past. The Kathartic activity of

Epimenides in Delos and other Greek cities was famous.

It was in particular never forgotten how in Athens at the end

of the seventh century he brought to a satisfactory close the

expiation of the godless murder of the followers of Kylon.

With potent ceremonies of which his wisdom alone knew the

secret, with sacrifice of animals and men, he appeased the

anger of the offended spirits of the depth who in their rage

were “ polluting ” and harming the city…

It was not without reason that later tradition, undeterred

by questions of chronological possibility, brought all the names

just mentioned into connexion with Pythagoras or his adherents,

and was even accustomed to refer to Pherekydes of

Syros, the latest of the band, as the teacher of Pythagoras.

The practice, if not the philosophy, of the Pythagorean sect

grew up among the ideas and what may be called the teaching

of these men. and belongs to the epoch which honoured them as

Wise Men. We still possess a few scraps of evidence to show

that the conceptions guiding their life and work tended to

reach some sort of unification in the minds of these visionaries

who were yet something more than the mere practicians of a

magical species of religion. We cannot, indeed, tell how far

the fanciful pictures of the origin of the world of men which

Epimenides and Pherekydes drew were connected with

the business and professional activity of these men ; but

when it is related of Hermotimos that he, like his countryman

Anaxagoras, attempted a distinction between pure “ mind ”

and matter, we can see very clearly how this theory might

arise out of his special “ experiences ”. The ecstasies of the

soul of which Hermotimos himself and this whole generation

had such ample experience seemed to point to the separability

of the soul from the body–and, indeed, to the superiority of

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 302

the sou1’s essence in its separate state over that of the body–

as to a fact of the most firmly established authenticity. In

contrast with the soul the body could hardly help appearing

as an encumbrance, an obstacle to be got rid of. The conception

of an ever-threatening pollution and “ uncleanness ”

which was nourished by the teaching and activities of those

innumerable purification-priests of whom Epimenides is

known to us as the supreme master, had gradually so penetrated

the whole of the official religion itself with purification-

ceremonies that it might very well have seemed as though.

in the midst of this renovation and development of a type of’

religious thought that had been more than half forgotten in

the Homeric period, Greek religion was fast approaching

the condition of Brahmanism or Zoroastrianism and becoming

essentially a religion of purification. Those who had become

familiar with the contrast between body and soul, especially

if they lived in the atmosphere of Kathartic ideas and their

practical exercise, were almost bound to proceed to the idea

that even the “soul ” required to be purified from the polluting

embarrassment of the body. That such ideas were almost a

commonplace is shown by many stories and turns of

phrase which represent the destruction of the body by fire

as a “ purification ” of the man himself. Wherever these

ideas–the precise opposite and contrary of the Homeric

conception of the relation between body and soul-image–

had penetrated more deeply they must have led to the idea

that even in the lifetime of the body the purification of

the soul should be prepared by the denial and inhibition of

the body and its impulses. The first step was thus taken

towards a purely negative system of morality, not attempting

the inner reformation of the will, but aiming simply at averting

from the soul of man a polluting evil threatening it from without

–in fact to a morality of religious asceticism such as later

became such an important and decisive spiritual movement in

Greece. In spite of all the inadequacy of our information about

these Wise Men of the early pre-philosophic period, we can still

dimly make out the fact that their natural bent lay in this

ascetic direction (the abstention from food practised by Abaris

and Epimenides are distinct cases of it). How far exactly,

they went in this direction is indeed more than we can say.

Thus, the ascetic ideal was not absent even from Greece. It

remained, however–in spite of the influence it had in some

quarters–always a foreign thing in Greece, having its obscure

home among sects of spiritualistic enthusiasts, and regarded

in contrast with the normal and ruling view of life as a paradox,

DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE 303

almost a heresy. The official religion itself is not entirely

without the seeds of an ascetic system of morality but the

ascetic ideal, fully developed and distinguished from the

simple and normal religious attitude, was in Greece

found only among minorities who cut themselves off in closed

and exclusive conventicles of a theological or philosophical

temper. The “ Wise Men ”, as idealized in the legends of

Albaris, Epimenides, etc., were as individuals not far removed

from the ideal of asceticism. Nor was it long before the

attempt was made to use these ideals as the basis on which

to found a society.

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