Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 22

****** Mythol. de la Grece, p. 137.

Muller, on the other hand,* believes the Greeks found in Tauria (i.e., Lemnos) a G.o.ddess with b.l.o.o.d.y "rites, whom they identified by reason of those very human sacrifices, with their own Artemis Iphigenia". Their own wors.h.i.+p of that deity bore so many marks of ancient barbarism that they were willing to consider the northern barbarians as its authors.

Yet it is possible that the Tauric Artemis was no more derived from the Taurians than Artemis aethiopia from the aethiopians.

The nature of the famous Diana of the Ephesians, or Artemis of Ephesus, is probably quite distinct in origin from either the Artemis of Arcadia and Attica or the deity of literary creeds. As late as the time of Tacitus** the Ephesians maintained that Leto's twins had been born in their territory. "The first which showed themselves in the senate were the Ephesians, declaring that Diana and Apollo were not born in the island Delos, as the common people did believe; and there was in their country a river called Cenchrius, and a wood called Ortegia, where Latona, being great with child, and leaning against an olive tree which is yet in that place, brought forth these two G.o.ds, and that by the commandment of the G.o.ds the wood was made sacred."***

* Mythol. de la Grece, ii. 9, 7.

** Annals, iii. 61.

*** Greenwey's _Tacitus_, 1622.

This was a mere adaptation of the Delian legend, the olive (in Athens sacred to Athene) taking the place of the Delian palm-tree. The real Artemis of Ephesus, "the image that fell from heaven," was an Oriental survival. Nothing can be less Greek in taste than her many-breasted idol, which may be compared with the many-breasted G.o.ddess of the beer-producing maguey plant in Mexico.*

The wilder elements in the local rites and myths of Diana are little if at all concerned with the G.o.ddess in her Olympian aspect as the daughter of Leto and sister of Apollo. It is from this lofty rank that she descends in the national epic to combat on the Ilian plain among warring G.o.ds and men. Claus has attempted, from a comparison of the epithets applied to Artemis, to show that the poets of the Iliad and the Odyssey take different views of her character. In the Iliad she is a G.o.ddess of tumult and pa.s.sion; in the Odyssey, a holy maiden with the "gentle darts" that deal sudden and painless death. But in both poems she is a huntress, and the death-dealing shafts are hers both in Iliad and Odyssey. Perhaps the apparent difference is due to nothing but the necessity for allotting her a part in that battle of the Olympians which rages in the Iliad. Thus Hera in the Iliad addresses her thus:**

"How now! art thou mad, bold vixen, to match thyself against me? Hard were it for thee to match my might, bow-bearer though thou art, since against women Zeus made thee a lion, and giveth thee to slay whomso of them thou wilt. Truly it is better on the mountains to slay wild beasts and deer than to fight with one that is mightier than thou."

* For an alabaster statuette of the G.o.ddess, see Roscher's Lexikon, p. 588

** Iliad, xxi. 481.

These taunts of Hera, who always detests the illegitimate children of Zeus, doubtless refer to the character of Artemis as the G.o.ddess of childbirth. Here she becomes confused with Ilithyia and with Hecate; but it is unnecessary to pursue the inquiry into these details.*

Like most of the Olympians, Artemis was connected not only with beast-wors.h.i.+p, but with plant-wors.h.i.+p. She was known by the names Daphnaea and Cedreatis; at Ephesus not only the olive but the oak was sacred to her; at Delos she had her palm tree. Her idol was placed in or hung from the branches of these trees, and it is not improbable that she succeeded to the honours either of a tree wors.h.i.+pped in itself and for itself, or of the spirit or genius which was presumed to dwell in and inform it. Similar examples of one creed inheriting the holy things of its predecessor are common enough where either missionaries, as in Mexico and China, or the early preachers of the gospel in Brittany or Scandinavia, appropriated to Christ the holy days of pagan deities and consecrated fetish stones with the mark of the cross. Unluckily, we have no historical evidence as to the moment in which the ancient tribal totems and fetishes and sacrifices were placed under the protection of the various Olympians, in whose cult they survive, like flies in amber.

But that this process did take place is the most obvious explanation of the rude factors in the religion of Artemis, as of Apollo, Zeus or Dionysus.

* Cf. Preller, i. 256, 257. Bacchylides make Hecate the daughter of "deep-bosomed Night". (40). The Scholiast on the second idyll of Theocritus, in which the sorceress appeals to the magic of the moon, makes her a daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and identified with Artemis. Here, more clearly than elsewhere, the Artemis appears _sub luce maligna_, under the wan uncertain light of the moon.

It was ever the tendency of Greek thought to turn from the contemplation of dark and inscrutable things in the character of the G.o.ds and to endow them with the fairest attributes. The primitive formless _Zoana_ give place to the ideal statues of gold and ivory. The Artemis to whom a fawn in a maiden's dress is sacrificed does not haunt the memory of Euripides; his Artemis is fair and honourable, pure and maidenly, a G.o.ddess wandering in lonely places unbeholden of man. It is thus, if one may rhyme the speech of Hippolytus, that her votary addresses her:--

For thee soft crowns in thine untrampled mead I weave, my lady, and to thee I bear; Thither no shepherd drives his flocks to feed, Nor scythe of steel has ever laboured there; Nay, through the spring among the blossoms fair The brown bee comes and goes, and with good heed Thy maiden, Reverence, sweet streams doth lead About the gra.s.sy close that is her care!

Souls only that are gracious and serene By gift of G.o.d, in human lore unread, May pluck these holy blooms and gra.s.ses green That now I wreathe for thine immortal head, I who may walk with thee, thyself unseen, And by thy whispered voice am comforted.

In pa.s.sages like this we find the truly _natural_ religion, the religion to which man's nature tends, "groaning and travailing" till the goal is won, But it is long in the winning; the paths are rough; humanity is "led by a way that it knew not".

DIONYSUS.

Among deities whose origin has been sought in the personification, if not of the phenomena, at least of the forces of Nature, Dionysus is prominent.* He is regarded by many mythologists** as the "spiritual form" of the new vernal life, the sap and pulse of vegetation and of the new-born year, especially as manifest in the vine and the juice of the grape. Thus Preller*** looks on his mother, Semele, as a personification of the pregnant soil in spring.**** The name of Semele is explained with the familiar diversity of conjecture. Whether the human intellect, at the time of the first development of myth, was capable of such abstract thought as is employed in the recognition of a deity presiding over "the revival of earth-life" or not, and whether, having attained to this abstraction, men would go on to clothe it in all manner of animal and other symbolisms, are questions which mythologists seem to take for granted. The popular story of the birth of Dionysus is well known.

* It is needless to occupy s.p.a.ce with the etymological guesses at the sense of the name "Dionysus". Greek, Sanskrit and a.s.syrian have been tortured by the philologists, but refuse to give up their secret, and Curtis does not even offer a conjecture (Or. Etym., 609).

** Preller, i. 544.

*** i. 546.

**** The birth of Dionysus is recorded (Iliad, xiv. 323; Hesiod, Theog., 940) without the story of the death of Semele, which occurs in aeschylus, Frg., 217-218; Eurip., Bacchae, i. 3.

His mother, Semele, desired to see Zeus in all his glory, as he appeared when he made love to Hera. Having promised to grant all the nymph's requests, Zeus was constrained to approach her in thunder and lightning.

She was burned to death, but the G.o.d rescued her unborn child and sowed him up in his own thigh. In this wild narrative Preller finds the wedlock of heaven and earth, "the first day that it thunders in March".

The thigh of Zeus is to be interpreted as "the cool moist clouds". If, on the other hand, we may take Dionysus himself to be the rain, as Kuhn does, and explain the thigh of Zeus by comparison with certain details in the soma sacrifice and the right thigh of Indra, as described in one of the Brahmanas, why then, of course, Preller's explanation cannot be admitted.*

* Kuhn, Herabkunft, pp. 166, 167, where it appears that the G.o.ds buy soma and place it on the right thigh of Indra.

These examples show the difficulty, or rather indicate the error, of attempting to interpret all the details in any myth as so many statements about natural phenomena and natural forces. Such interpretations are necessarily conjectural. Certainly Dionysus, the G.o.d of orgies, of wine, of poetry, became in later Greek thought something very like the "spiritual form" of the vine, and the patron of Nature's moods of revelry. But that he was originally conceived of thus, or that this conception may be minutely traced through each incident of his legend, cannot be scientifically established. Each mythologist, as has been said before, is, in fact, asking himself, "What meaning would I have had if I told this or that story of the G.o.d of the vine or the G.o.d of the year's renewal?" The imaginations in which the tale of the double birth of Dionysus arose were so unlike the imagination of an erudite modern German that these guesses are absolutely baseless. Nay, when we are told that the child was sheltered in his father's body, and was actually brought to birth by the father, we may be reminded, like Bachofen, of that widespread savage custom, the _couvade_.

From Brazil to the Basque country it has been common for the father to pretend to lie-in while the mother is in childbed; the husband undergoes medical treatment, in many cases being put to bed for days.* This custom, "world-wide," as Mr. Tylor calls it, has been used by Bachofen as the source of the myth of the double birth of Dionysus. Though other explanations of the _couvade_ have been given, the most plausible theory represents it as a recognition of paternity by the father. Bachofen compares the ceremony by which, when Hera became reconciled to Herakles, she adopted him as her own through the legal fiction of his second birth. The custom by which, in old French marriage rites, illegitimate children were legitimised by being brought to the altar under the veil of the bride is also in point.** Diodorus says that barbarians still practise the rite of adoption by a fict.i.tious birth. Men who returned home safely after they were believed to be dead had to undergo a similar ceremony.*** Bachofen therefore explains the names and myths of the "double-mothered Dionysus" as relics of the custom of the _couvade_, and of the legal recognition of children by the father, after a period of kins.h.i.+p through women only.

*** Tylor, Prim. Oult., I 94; Early History of Mankind, p.

293.

** Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1861, p. 254.

*** Plutarch, Quaest. Rom., 5.

This theory is put by Lucian in his usual bantering manner. Poseidon wishes to enter the chamber of Zeus, but is refused admission by Hermes.

"Is Zeus _en bonne fortune?_" he asks.

"No, the reverse. Zeus has just had a baby."

"A baby! why there was nothing in his figure...! Perhaps the child was born from his head, like Athene?"

"Not at all--his _thigh_; the child is Semele's."

"Wonderful G.o.d! what varied accomplishments! But who is Semele?"

"A Theban girl, a daughter of Cadmus, much noticed by Zeus."

"And so he kindly was confined for her?"

"Exactly!"

"So Zeus is both father and mother of the child?"

"Naturally! And now I must go and make him comfortable."*

* Dial. Deor., xi.

We need not necessarily accept Bachofen's view. This learned author employed indeed a widely comparative method, but he saw everything through certain mystic speculations of his own. It may be deemed, however, that the authors of the myth of the double birth of Dionysus were rather in the condition of men who practise the _couvade_ than capable of such vast abstract ideas and such complicated symbolism as are required in the system of Preller. It is probable enough that the struggle between the two systems of kindred--maternal and paternal--has left its mark in Greek mythology. Undeniably it is present in the _Eumenides_ of aeschylus, and perhaps it inspires the tales which represent Hera and Zeus as emulously producing offspring (Athene and Hephaestus) without the aid of the opposite s.e.x.*

In any case, Dionysus, Semele's son, the patron of the vine, the conqueror of India, is an enigmatic figure of dubious origin, but less repulsive than Dionysus Zagreus.

Even among the adventures of Zeus the amour which resulted in the birth of Dionysus Zagreus was conspicuous. "Jupiter ipse filiam incestavit, natum hinc Zagreum."** Persephone, fleeing her hateful lover, took the shape of a serpent, and Zeus became the male dragon. The story is on a footing with the Brahmanic myth of Praj.a.pati and his daughter as buck and doe. The Platonists explained the legend, as usual, by their "absurd symbolism ".***