Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 24

**** De Is. et Os.

***** Elton, Origins of English History, p. 280, and the authorities there quoted.

Dionysus was even called "the G.o.d in the tree,"* reminding us of Artemis Dendritis, and of the village G.o.ds which in India dwell in the peepul or the bo tree.** Thus Pausanias*** tells us that, when Pentheus went to spy on the Dionysiac mysteries, the women found him hidden in a tree, and there and then tore him piecemeal. According to a Corinthian legend, the Delphic oracle bade them seek this tree and wors.h.i.+p it with no less honour than the G.o.d (Dionysus) himself. Hence the wooden images of Dionysus were made of that tree, the fig tree, _non ex quovis ligno_, and the G.o.d had a ritual name, "The fig-tree Dionysus". In the idols the community of nature between the G.o.d and the fig tree was expressed and commemorated. An unhewn stump of wood was the Dionysus idol of the rustic people.****

* Hesychius.

** Cf. Roscher, p. 1062.

*** ii. 2,5.

**** Max. Tyr., 8, 1.

Certain antique elements in the Dionysus cult have now been sketched; we have seen the G.o.d in singularly close relations with animal and plant wors.h.i.+p, and have noted the very archaic character of certain features in his mysteries. Doubtless these things are older than the bright anthropomorphic Dionysus of the poets--the beautiful young deity, vine-crowned, who rises from the sea to comfort Ariadne in Tintoretto's immortal picture. At his highest, at his best, Dionysus is the spirit not only of Bacchic revel and of dramatic poetry, but of youth, health and gaiety. Even in this form he retains something tricksy and enigmatic, the survival perhaps of earlier ideas; or, again, it may be the result of a more or less conscious symbolism. The G.o.d of the vine and of the juice of the vine maketh glad the heart of man; but he also inspires the kind of metamorphosis which the popular speech alludes to when a person is said to be "disguised in drink". For this reason, perhaps, he is now represented in art as a grave and bearded man, now as a manly youth, and again as an effeminate lad of girlish loveliness. The bearded type of the G.o.d is apparently the earlier; the girlish type may possibly be the result merely of decadent art, and its tendency to a s.e.xless or bis.e.xual prettiness.*

Turning from the ritual and local cults of the G.o.d, which, as has been shown, probably retain the earlier elements in his composite nature, and looking at his legend in the national literature of Greece, we find little that throws any light on the origin and primal conception of his character In the _Iliad_ Dionysus is not one of the great G.o.ds whose politics sways Olympus, and whose diplomatic or martial interference is exercised in the leaguer of the Achaeans or in the citadel of Ilios. The longest pa.s.sage in which he is mentioned is _Iliad_, vi. 130, a pa.s.sage which clearly enough declares that the wors.h.i.+p of Dionysus, or at least that certain of his rites were brought in from without, and that his wors.h.i.+ppers endured persecution. Diomedes, encountering Glaucus in battle, refuses to fight him if he is a G.o.d in disguise. "Nay, moreover, even Dryas' son, mighty Lykourgos, was not for long when he strove with heavenly G.o.ds; he that erst chased through the goodly land of Nysa the nursing mothers of frenzied Dionysus; and they all cast their wands upon the ground, smitten with murderous Lykourgos' ox-goad. Then Dionysus fled, and plunged beneath the salt sea-wave, and Thetis took him to her bosom, affrighted, for mighty trembling had seized him at his foe's rebuke. But with Lykourgos the G.o.ds that live at ease were wroth, and Kronos's son made him blind, and he was not for long, because he was hated of all the immortal G.o.ds."

* See Thraemer, in Roscher, pp. 1090-1143.

Though Dionysus is not directly spoken of as the wine-G.o.d here, yet the gear of his attendants, and his own t.i.tle, "the frenzied," seem to identify him with the deity of orgiastic frenzy. As to Nysa, volumes might be written to little or no purpose on the learning connected with this obscure place-name, so popular in the legend of Dionysus. It has been identified as a mountain in Thrace, in Boeotia, in Arabia, India, Libya and Naxos, as a town in Caria or the Caucasus, and as an island in the Nile. The flight of Dionysus into the sea may possibly recall the similar flight of Agni in Indian myth.

The _Odyssey_ only mentions Dionysus in connection with Ariadne, whom Artemis is said to have slain "by reason of the witness of Dionysus,"**

and where the great golden urn of Thetis is said to have been a present from the G.o.d. The famous and beautiful hymn proves, as indeed may be learned from Hesiod,*** that the G.o.d was already looked on as the patron of the vine.

* xi.325.

** xxiv. 74.

*** Works and Days, 614.

When the pirates had seized the beautiful young man with the dark-blue eyes, and had bound him in their s.h.i.+p, he "showed marvels among them,"

changed into the shape of a bear, and turned his captors into dolphins, while wine welled up from the timbers of the vessel, and vines and ivy trees wreathed themselves on the mast and about the rigging. Leaving aside the Orphic poems, which contain most of the facts in the legend of Dionysus Zagreus, the _Bacchae_ of Euripides is the chief cla.s.sical record of ideas about the G.o.d. Dionysus was the patron of the drama, which itself was an artistic development of the old rural songs and dances of his Athenian festival. In the _Bacchae_, then, Euripides had to honour the very patron of his art. It must be said that his praise is but half-hearted. A certain ironical spirit, breaking out here and there (as when old Cadmus dances, and shakes a grey head and a stiff knee) into actual burlesque, pervades the play. Tradition and myth doubtless retained some historical truth when they averred that the orgies of the G.o.d had been accepted with reluctance into state religion. The tales about Lycurgus and Pentheus, who persecuted the Bacchae in Thebes, and was dismembered by his own mother in a divine madness, are survivals of this old distrust of Dionysus. It was impossible for Euripides, a sceptic, even in a sceptical age, to approve sincerely of the G.o.d whom he was obliged to celebrate. He falls back on queer etymological explanations of the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus. This myth, as Cadmus very learnedly sets forth, was the result of forgetfulness of the meaning of words, was born of a _Volks-etymologie_. Zeus gave a hostage to Hera, says Cadmus, and in "process of time" (a very short time) men forgot what they meant when they said this, and supposed that Dionysus had been sewnup in the thigh of his father.* The explanation is absurd, but it shows how Euripides could transfer the doubt and distrust of his own age, and its attempt at a philological interpretation of myth, to the remote heroic tunes. Throughout the play the character and conduct of the G.o.d, and his hideous revenge on the people who reject his wild and cruel rites, can only be justified because they are articles of faith. The chorus may sing--"Ah! blessed he who dwelleth in happiness, expert in the rites of the G.o.ds, and so hallows his life, fulfilling his soul with the spirit of Dionysus, revelling on the hills with charms of holy purity ".** This was the interpretation which the religious mind thrust upon rites which in themselves were so barbarously obscene that they were feigned to have been brought by Dionysus from the barbaric East,*** and to be the invention of Rhea, an alien and orgiastic G.o.ddess.**** The bull-horned, snake-wreathed G.o.d,***** the G.o.d who, when bound, turns into a bull (618); who manifests himself as a bull to Pentheus (920), and is implored by the chorus to appear "as bull, or burning lion, or many-headed snake" (1017-19), this G.o.d is the ancient barbarous deity of myth, in manifest contrast with the artistic Greek conception of him as "a youth with cl.u.s.ters of golden hair, and in his dark eyes the grace of Aphrodite" (235, 236).

* Bacchae, 291, 296.

** Ibid., 73, 76.

*** Ibid., 10-20.

**** Ibid., i. 59.

***** Ibid., 100, 101.

The _Bacchae_, then, expresses the sentiments of a moment which must often have occurred in Greek religion. The Greek reverence accepts, hallows and adorns an older faith, which it feels to be repugnant and even alien, but none the less recognises as human and inevitable. From modern human nature the ancient orgiastic impulse of savage revelry has almost died away. In Greece it was dying, but before it expired it sanctified and perpetuated itself by a.s.suming a religious form, by draping its naked limbs in the fawn-skin or the bull-skin of Dionysus.

In precisely the same spirit Christianity, among the Negroes of the Southern States, has been constrained to throw its mantle over what the race cannot discard. The orgies have become camp-meetings; the Voodoo-dance is consecrated as the "Jerusalem jump". In England the primitive impulse is but occasionally recognised at "revivals". This orgiastic impulse, the impulse of Australian corroboree and Cherokee fetish-dances, and of the "dancing Dervishes" themselves, occasionally seizes girls in modern Greece. They dance themselves to death on the hills, and are said by the peasants to be victims of the Nereids. In the old cla.s.sic world they would have been saluted as the nurses and companions of Dionysus, and their disease would have been hallowed by religion. Of that religion the "bull-horned," "bull-eating," "cannibal"

Dionysus was the deity; and he was refined away into the youth with yellow-cl.u.s.tered curls, and sleepy eyes, and smiling lips, the girlish youth of the art of Praxiteles. So we see him in surviving statues, and seeing him, forget his ghastly rites, and his succession to the rites of goats, and deer, and bulls.

ATHENE.

Among deities for whom an origin has been sought in the personification of elemental phenomena, Athene is remarkable. Perhaps no divine figure has caused more diverse speculations. The study of her legend is rather valuable for the varieties of opinion which it ill.u.s.trates than for any real contribution to actual knowledge which it supplies. We can discover little, if anything, about the rise and development of the conception of Athene. Her local myths and local _sacra_ seem, on the whole, less barbaric than those of many other Olympians. But in comparing the conjectures of the learned, one lesson comes out with astonis.h.i.+ng clearness. It is most perilous, as this comparison demonstrates, to guess at an origin of any G.o.d in natural phenomena, and then to explain the details of the G.o.d's legend with exclusive reference to that fancied elemental origin.

As usual, the oldest literary references to Athene are found in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. It were superfluous to collect and compare texts so numerous and so familiar. Athene appears in the _Iliad_ as a martial maiden, daughter of Zeus, and, apparently, of Zeus alone without female mate.*

* Iliad, v. 875, 880. This is stated explicitly in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where Athene is said to have been born from the head of Zeus (Pindar, Olympic Odes, vii.).

She is the patron of valour and the inspirer of counsel; she arrests the hand of Achilles when his sword is half drawn from the sheath in his quarrel with Agamemnon; she is the constant companion and protector of Odysseus; and though she is wors.h.i.+pped in the citadel of Troy, she is constant to the cause of the Achaeans. Occasionally it is recorded of her that she a.s.sumed the shape of various birds; a sea-bird and a swallow are among her metamorphoses; and she could put on the form of any man she pleased; for example, of Deiphobus.* It has often been observed that among the lower races the G.o.ds habitually appear in the form of animals. "Entre ces facultes qui possedent les immortels, l'une des plus frappantes est celle de se metamorphoser, de prendre des apparences non seulement animales, mais encore de se transformer en objets inanimes."**

Of this faculty, inherited from the savage stage of thought, Athene has her due share even in Homer. But in almost every other respect she is free from the heritage of barbarism, and might very well be regarded as the ideal representative of wisdom, valour and manfulness in man, of purity, courage and n.o.bility in woman, as in the Phaeacian maid Nausicae.

* _Iliad_, xxii. 227, xvii. 351, Od. iii. 372. v. 353; _Iliad_, vii. 59.

** Maury, _Religion de la Grece_, i. 256.

In Hesiod, as has already been shown, the myth of the birth of Athene retains the old barbaric stamp. It is the peculiarity of the Hesiodic poems to preserve the very features of religious narrative which Homer disregards. According to Hesiod, Zeus, the youngest child of child-swallowing Cronus, married Metis after he had conquered and expelled his father. Now Metis, like other G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, had the power of transforming herself into any shape she pleased. Her husband learned that her child--for she was pregnant--would be greater than its father, as in the case of the child of Thetis. Zeus, therefore, persuaded Metis to transform herself into a fly. No sooner was the metamorphosis complete than he swallowed the fly, and himself produced the child of Metis out of his head.* The later philosophers explained this myth** by a variety of metaphysical interpretations, in which the G.o.d is said to contain the all in himself, and again to reproduce it.

Any such ideas must have been alien to the inventors of a tale which, as we have shown, possesses many counterparts among the lowest and least Platonic races.*** C. O. Muller remarks plausibly that "the figure of the swallowing is employed in imitation of still older legends," such as those of Africa and Australia. This leaves him free to imagine a philosophic explanation of the myth based on the word Metis.**** We may agree with Muller that the "swallow-myth" is extremely archaic in character, as it is so common among the backward races. As to the precise amount, however, of philosophic reflection and allegory which was present to the cosmogonic poet's mind when he used Metis as the name of the being who could become a fly, and so be swallowed by her husband, it is impossible to speak with confidence. Very probably the poet meant to read a moral and speculative meaning into a barbaric _marchen_ surviving in religious tradition.

To the birth of Athene from her father's head savage parallels are not lacking. In the legends of the South Pacific, especially of Mangaia, Tangaroa is fabled to have been born from the head of Papa.*****

* Hesiod, Theog., 886, and the Scholiast

** Lobeck, i. 613, note 2.

*** See the Cronus myth.

**** Proleg. Engl. transl., p. 308.

***** Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 10.

In the _Vafthrudismal_ (31) a maid and a man-child are born from under the armpits of a primeval gigantic being. The remarks of Lucian on miraculous birth have already been quoted.*

With this mythical birth for a starting-point, and relying on their private interpretations of the _cognomina_ of the G.o.ddess, of her _sacra_, and of her actions in other parts of her legend, the modern mythologists have built up their various theories. Athene is now the personification of wisdom, now the dawn, now the air or aether, now the lightning as it leaps from the thunder-cloud; and if she has not been recognised as the moon, it is not for lack of opportunity.** These explanations rest on the habit of twisting each detail of a divine legend into conformity with aspects of certain natural and elemental forces, or they rely on etymological conjecture. For example, Welcker***

maintains that Athene is "a feminine personification of the upper air, daughter of Zeus, the dweller in aether". Her name Tritogenia is derived**** from an ancient word for water, which, like fire, has its source in aether.***** Welcker presses the t.i.tle of the G.o.ddess, "Glaucopis," the "grey-green-eyed," into the service. The heaven in Attica _oft ebenfalls wunderbar grun ist_.******

* Cf. Dionysus.

** Welcker, i. 305.

*** Griechische Gotterlehre, Gottingen, 1857, i. 303.

**** Op. cit., 311.

***** The ancients themselves were in doubt whether Trito were the name of a river or mere, or whether the Cretan for the head was intended. See Odyssey, Butcher and Lang, note 10, p. 415.

****** Op. cit., i. 303.

Moreover, there was a temple at Methone of Athene of the Winds (Anemotis), which would be a better argument had there not been also temples of Athene of the Pathway, Athene of the Ivy, Athene of the Crag, Athene of the Market-place, Athene of the Trumpet, and so forth.