GOD AND GODS

The gods of the Hellenes are commonly treated as though they had been fixed and determinate figures—much the same from Homer and Hesiod down to Nonnus, in Thebes and Miletus, in Athens and Antioch, at Comana and Massalia. The evidence is gathered together from all periods and all localities under the several divine names, and one then learns with astonishment how manifold the activity of each individual god has been. Alongside this runs an interpretation of the gods that changes with fashion: for a time they were sun, moon, water, and wind; then the chthonic element came into favour; now it is the vegetation god.

But the gods live in belief. Belief has brought them forth; within it and through it they change, with it they perish, though they may continue to live on as fair shadows. No one doubts this, yet the consequence is seldom drawn, and belief and myth are still more rarely distinguished. I attempt to trace, through the centuries, the coming-into-being, the transformations, and the passing over from belief into myth, and the waning of that belief while cult remains—through the gods of the Hellenes, and through these alone.

When Christianity had become the state religion, it expelled in the Greek East not only the Hellenic gods, but also the Semitic and Egyptian, from their seats of power, and eradicated their memory so completely that even the days of the week did not retain their old names, because these were derived from the planetary gods—although astrology itself could not be extirpated, but belonged rather to that body of knowledge which the Arabs took over. Even as evil demons, the old gods scarcely needed to be combated any longer; the monks of the desert fought fiercely with the devils of sensual desire, but Aphrodite was no longer the temptress she had once been for Antisthenes ¹, as Lady Venus was to become for Tannhäuser. The reason for the complete victory over the old divine figures was, of course, that they had long since vanished from living belief. To be sure, the deified persons of the new faith inherited the ancient sacred sites, sometimes even took up residence in the old temples; but scarcely ever does the former occupant live on within these persons. If, for example, incubation continued to be practised, Asklepios was no longer present in the new wonder-workers. What of the old figures and names persisted in popular belief was slight, and contained features that do not accord, at the very least, with the notion disseminated in literature: Charos is Death; the Nereids are not the harmless, playfully sporting daughters of the sea². The custom preserved much; in inner Syria even today fish are not eaten; above all, the cult of the dead permanently retained a great deal of what was ancient. Much, too, was taken over by cultic practice: the holy water at the door of the sanctuary does not derive from ancient Hellenic usage, but from a later practice that had become widespread; the architectural arrangement of the Greek altar-front is borrowed from the stage-front. Yet everything was thoroughly Christianised. In the poems of the school of Gaza, mythological names still play the same role as, for example, in Claudian and his successors; thereafter this disappears, so far as I know. In the visual arts, elemental beings long retained the traditional human form, but only because nothing divine was felt in it³. Then this, too, fell silent. Byzantium preserved the ancient literature, and with it the tradition of ancient education; but for the people Hellenic meant the same as pagan.

The Roman Church proceeded otherwise. Especially in the superficially Romanised regions, belief in the old gods was still strong, even when they had been renamed in Roman fashion, and this applied all the more to the Germans, to whom the missionaries went. There the new faith proceeded with ruthless violence, but it could not declare the hostile gods to be insubstantial inventions. Thus they remained powerful, performed miracles, and continued to intervene in human life; only they had become idols, against whom the Church helped men to defend themselves with its stronger magic. Christ himself, after all, had driven demons into the swine.

The situation was quite different with the Roman divine names, which everyone who learned the language of the Church encountered in the poets; for the schools continued the old grammatical and rhetorical practice. These gods, under their Latin names, were the figures of Greek poetry, and for the most part were in fact scarcely more than metonymies. Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus meant nothing more than that hunger and thirst are ill compatible with love—and that already stood in Terence. These gods truly no longer concerned religion at all. Thus the names were allowed to continue to appear in Latin school poetry, which over the centuries spread ever more widely, though it also became strongly secularised, especially as Ovid was imitated no less than Vergil. The stories of gods and heroes were a fable-material like any other; between the two there was no distinction. One felt the need to inform oneself briefly about the connections among the persons and stories; thus arose the work of Albericus, then the Genealogia deorum of Boccaccio. With this, the Renaissance of Latin literature had begun, which through poets and schoolmasters soon reached the widest circles.

Painting, too, gradually begins to depict mythological figures and stories—at first without regard to the remnants of ancient art, then this also comes to exert its influence. Thus it comes about that in the centuries of the Baroque and Rococo, which we may well call the Romanic centuries, neither poetry nor painting is intelligible without knowledge of mythology. This holds true for strictly Catholic Spain just as much as for Sweden, where the Latin names cut a strangely incongruous figure in the artless songs of Bellman—especially when Nordic divine names, likened to the ancient ones, stand alongside them. No wonder, then, that mythology was a subject taught in schools—harmless, for no one thought of religion in connection with it, neither of gods nor of devils. One gladly reached for the material, which offered not only naked bodies, but also lascivious scenes; it did not demand reverence. Both Michelangelo and Velázquez presented in Bacchus a drunkard; Correggio painted symplegmata such as no Hellene would ever have permitted. Venus was for all merely a nude figure.

Greek poetry lay wholly remote from these centuries. This changed only when the Germanic spirit began to exert its influence in England and Germany and brought about a general change of style. It was characteristic that the translators of Homer retained the Greek names of the gods (only Zeus had earlier been allowed, because it was as short as the English Jove), though at first this remained something external. Goethe never understood the difference; he merely weaned himself from the metonymies—the moon was no longer called Luna. Still the world of the gods remained a world of fable: Mörike believed himself entitled to invent another of his own. It is chiefly an achievement of scholarship that Aphrodite and Eros are more to the tolerably educated than Venus and Amor, that Dionysus is no longer Bacchus. But the discovery of genuinely Greek images of the gods has also contributed to this. The Medicean and the Melian Venus may bear that name; but no one can call the Athena of Myron or the Hermes of Praxiteles Minerva or Mercury. It is already quite uneducated to name a naked female runner Diana: Artemis would be unthinkable, almost blasphemous. In such a case the connection with the ancient language of forms has been abandoned, whereby the naming becomes wholly senseless. Conversely, it persists in an improper place when one attempts to represent the wholly formless Nordic gods. In the end, some Hellenic inventions live on imperishably. The nymph remains—even when she is appropriately called a spring—and the German will never cease, in defiance of his language, to make love masculine and victory feminine. The work of the ancient Archermos works beyond smoke and will continue to work.

Even if the abundance of forms in this mythology were nothing but a product of poetic and artistic imagination, one would have to admire it to the highest degree; it would still be effective even if its origin were wholly forgotten. But however much the inventive power of poets and artists, in earnest and in play, has added to it, its origin nonetheless lies in the religion of the Hellenes; only because these gods and heroes once lived in serious belief have they not, as forms of a seemingly freely playing imagination, lost their vital force. Hence we demand to penetrate back to those times and to see the gods as genuine belief saw them—if possible, as that belief itself grew in the hearts of men. Then the task is no longer to comprehend mythology, but religion.

The path to this goal was hard to find; for the great mass of Greek writings, and all Latin ones, stem from periods in which religion still clung only outwardly to the divine persons, and mythology had overgrown belief in them. Even Homer, who is nevertheless the earliest witness, seems at first glance already to employ the world of the gods wholly in free play, just as Virgil does, or Goethe in his Achilleis. And what Winckelmann—and even the generations immediately following him—had before their eyes in the Roman museums also derived almost entirely from periods of art that was no longer truly religious. The Apollo of the Belvedere, to whom Winckelmann dedicated his hymn; the Zeus mask from Otricoli; and even the Iuno Ludovisi, which Goethe set up in his house, can at most be compared with works such as Raphael’s Sixtina and Titian’s Assunta, in which art has a greater share than religion.

At that time, however, one also still had no eye for the sombre sublimity of the Pantokrator and the Byzantines’ Theotokos, which repels all familiarity; indeed, not even for the virginal Mother of God of the Florentines, in her blessedness serving the heavenly child, nor for her maternal pain when she holds the corpse of her son upon her knees—forms which the Germans were the first to create. However clumsy the artist may be, whoever knows how to feel religion along with him will find it there. So it is also with the Hellenes—whoever sees in the Capitoline Venus the Aphrodite of Sappho profanes her as well. In the highly archaic goddess of the Solonian age, now in Berlin, every unprejudiced viewer senses the divine; the name is wholly irrelevant. We have learned to see differently from Winckelmann and Goethe; corresponding to this is the fact that we are also capable of reliving the ancient, genuine religion.

It had taken a very long time before the bonds imposed by the Christian churches were loosened to such an extent that the old gods were regarded not as diabolical demons but as empty inventions of priests, statesmen, and poets—an attitude to which ancient Enlightenment itself, as one finds it in Cicero, could lead. Yet the advance of rationalism consisted only in this: that ancient belief was no longer regarded merely as pagan blindness, but that everywhere a “natural” religion was supposed to underlie it—indeed, an outright monotheism. How from this the plurality of the Olympians had come into being remained unexplained, or else one fell back upon ancient explanations. It was likewise only another form of rationalism when all ancient religions were traced back to an oriental primeval wisdom—only that this could also be conceived as divine revelation, so that one felt particularly at ease amid the phantasms of the later Neoplatonists. It is characteristic that G. Hermann, the rationalist, and Creuzer got along with one another not badly at all, and that Goethe remained with mythology precisely because he stood in relation to both, but was ill-disposed towards Welcker⁴.

From the belief in a primitive monotheism, such as rationalistic deism desired, Welcker never entirely freed himself, although W. von Humboldt—who was bound by no Jewish or Christian dogmas, nor by any philosophical school—reproached him for it. “I cannot convince myself that precisely the crude idea of One God was the original idea of mankind and only afterwards became obscured and lost. Since, however, true religion does indeed originally lie in human nature itself, even if its idea does not always come to light, there can also, without transmission, be in all peoples and at all times a glimmer of the eternal truth—and indeed there must be”⁵. In this a thought was expressed whose profound truth, to be sure, does not spring from historical research, but from Humboldt’s religious feeling.

Welcker had acquired in Rome, through intercourse with him and with the brilliant Zoëga—who also communicated to him the thoughts of Vico—the decisive intuitions by which he became one of the founders of true classical scholarship; he bore within his soul a comprehensive image of Hellenic life, in which poetry and the visual arts belonged to the soul of the people, and thus also led to its religion. No one before him had taken it so seriously—unless it be Philipp Buttmann, the founder of Greek grammar, whose deep understanding of the religious content of mythology is attested by a few scattered essays. But Welcker long delivered his teachings only orally, so that Otfried Müller anticipated him with the Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie. There the historian—who by his treatment of the Greek tribes had opened the gate to a history of ancient Hellas—said something about their gods that was of even greater importance than he himself could yet attain. Of religious feeling and thought the book still takes little account. It was a misfortune that Welcker only in old age came to complete his doctrine of the gods, so that it did not receive the attention it deserved. Meanwhile the philologists around Hermann and Böckh had neglected these researches; and in the wake of comparative linguistics a comparative mythology arose, interpreting the names of the gods and the myths of the gods from Indian sources with an ephemeral but very powerful success, and ending in a dissolution of mythology into meteorology—this too once again a relapse into the speculation of an Ionian sophist. There was no lack of special lunar mythologists, and also, in the Germanic field especially, solar mythologists.

These interpretations predominate in the otherwise rightly influential book of L. Preller, whose collections of material—augmented by later editors—are of the highest value; in this respect further important work has been accomplished. Indisputably a great advance had been achieved, but admittedly it was still essentially mythology. For the interpretation of the gods was sought predominantly in the myths, as though a god, like a hero or a saint, had first to earn divinity through deeds or sufferings—whereas a god must be present before one gives him parents and invents individual stories about him. Belief merely ascertains the existence of the god.

Cult—namely, the form of the communal veneration of the gods—could first be investigated with some prospect of success when pictorial testimonies were discovered in great numbers, and above all when significant sacred sites as wholes were brought again to light. More important than a thousand individual details of sacrificial ritual and ceremonies, of the δρώμενα and δεικνύμενα, and those utterances of private magic which belong to superstition, is the fact that here the exercise of religion is the concern of the community, often of the entire people. This is a necessary complement to the fact that the doctrine of the gods proceeds from the being that is worshipped. The believers—or at least the participants in worship—must also be taken into account; for a god attains his full personal divinity only when a community venerates him. The forms of his service may long persist, even though they have become empty; but much is gradually cast off, and many a god once highly revered is wholly forgotten.

Everywhere and at all times human life itself leads to the celebration of certain phases—birth, coming of age, marriage, death—as likewise does the change of the seasons and the principal labours determined by them, above all sowing and harvest. This calls for consecration, so that the religious feelings remain essentially the same, however they may express themselves, and the gods to whom prayer and thanksgiving are addressed may change without its making much difference for religion, or even for festal practice. In this respect Mannhardt in particular has become a guide. One must only not demand that the same points of the annual cycle of seasons and of yearly labour must everywhere be sanctified, nor that the forms of sanctification must necessarily coincide.

In recent decades the history of religion has grown into a distinct discipline, for which in Germany posts have even been created within the theological faculties; yet scholars of many nations are engaged in the work. Already in the participation of theologians it becomes apparent that the emergence of belief in gods and its subsequent history are being traced across the whole earth, and that all religions of revelation and of the book are being drawn into it. The impulse to bring into consideration the beliefs and practices of peoples persisting at the lowest level has come from England; that all men once stood at the same level has been accepted as an axiom—however fundamentally false this axiom is—and its application also to the Indo-European peoples is being especially pursued. It can indeed be impressive what has become of “mythology”. Most impressive of all, H. Usener has formulated the programme of this discipline in an essay which still bears the title Mythology⁶. The incomparable learning, the breadth of vision, and above all the ethos of the man—at once scientific and religious—made him its leader; the artistic form of his writings also contributes no little. It is already a mighty advance that the contempt even for the blindest paganism—the errores profanarum religionum, as Firmicus Maternus expressed it when he had scarcely yet abandoned belief in astrology—has been overcome. If anyone attempts to make Greek religion as Catholic as possible, as it was once cast into Lutheran illumination, this can scarcely exert any effect any longer. That, too, has been overcome which a famous “liberal” theologian once said: that religion begins with belief in a revelation—unless one wishes to say that man first became man when, in his soul, an intimation of the divine dawned. The testimonium animae, upon which Tertullian wrote in a happy hour, is indeed a revelation—but one that comes from within, not from a book.

Among historians of religion one all too often has the impression that their history leads to the abolition of religion, to the old verse primus in orbe deos fecit timor, and that divine worship is reduced to magic, which sought to ward off harmful powers and to press beneficial ones into service—or else that fear of the dead formed the seed of religion. In every case religion then becomes a product of “primeval stupidity” (Urdummheit), an expression of K. Th. Preuß which Gilbert Murray took up in his ingenious book Four Stages of Greek Religion. In contrast to this one may perhaps appear a χρονόληρος if one confesses allegiance to Humboldt and, with Welcker, says “that even in the crudest signs and usages which take the place of religion, the sense of God of the human soul manifests itself.” What has once been holy for men we must accept as holy in order to appreciate it—something that is entirely compatible with the sharpest rejection of superstition; for superstition knows that it ought not really to believe and do that to which it surrenders itself, whether from cowardice or from guile.

As I once expressed, when I first treated of a god, that one must believe in him in order to understand him, so Frickenhaus has felt in a very similar way on Hellenic soil; and I gladly set down his words here: “one cannot be a historian of religion without recreating in one’s own heart belief in the ancient gods.”

One will, to be sure, feel such warmth only for the great gods, and only from there go on to accord their due to the others as well. It is solely out of this heartfelt feeling that I write this book; I believe the time is ripe for it, for it is striking that modern historians of religion have little regard for the Olympians. They seem in fact to place the decay of religion precisely where historical time begins, and their interest only awakens again when the old religion is in decomposition and the wild superstition of the magical papyri presses into its place—which is precisely not religion.

The axiom that all men are equal ought by now to have been overthrown, or at least corrected, by natural science. Heredity and physical and intellectual refinement bring it about that one can scarcely speak of an equality of men even within the same people—were it not that a mendacious political catchword presently prevails, which science must not allow to disturb it. In a social order, a state, that takes this axiom seriously, only another form of class domination is founded, that of the mass—ochlocracy—and it is only consistent if this is acknowledged and carried through by the destruction of the more highly bred members of the people. Still more evident should it be that, for the different human races, equality of mind is even less conceivable than it notoriously is for their bodies.

With this I do not in principle deny that the ideas of peoples who have not been able to rise above the lowest level of humanity can contribute something to the embryology of Greek religion; but the latter had its childhood centuries behind it when it separated from the Indo-European primal people; before that it had lived for centuries within it, and from the condition of Ice Age man there were probably millennia. It should therefore be evident that the hypothesis of still everywhere identical religious or pre-religious ideas rests upon very hasty inferences. I do not understand the languages from which the currently fashionable words tabu and totem, mana and orenda are borrowed; but I also regard it as a legitimate course to hold fast to the Greeks and to think Greek matters in a Greek way. Here too it should surely be as with language, where it is in truth the Greek that matters, the we can read—and it is only this that enables us to think and feel, to some extent, as the Greeks did. For what a word meant for the Greeks cannot be taught to us by its etymology, to which comparative linguistics so often helps us. In general, what is distinctive to a people—and to an individual—is usually more important than what is common to all; and there lies a deep truth in Aristotle’s view of the πρότερον φύσει, which is something other than what is merely earlier in appearance. In the earliest Hellenism there lay the seed of Platonic divinity. If I am to need a theology, then that of the Greek philosophers lies closest to my heart—one of which historians of religion rarely take notice; and if I am to compare other religions, I prefer to look to the neighbours of the Greeks, Semites and Egyptians, and to learn from Wellhausen and Erman.

Usener’s gaze is likewise directed toward the Greeks, whose philosophy he mastered and whose expressions of life he surveyed as scarcely anyone else has done; he spies in all periods, even the Christian, for survivals of primitive modes of thought, and considers himself entitled to interpret all phenomena that are in any way similar according to the principles he sets out in the preface to his Götternamen: religious concept-formation, personification, metaphor; only at the very end does cult appear. There everything lies within the domain of the intellect—which is always cleverer than the human being who, in his heart, often also with his eyes, becomes aware of a god because he feels his overpoweringly effective presence. Is Faust wrong, then, when he says, “Gefühl ist alles”? No one prays to a concept. Imagination creates the forms of the gods; only when they are there—or rather, when they are fading—does the intellect come and seek concepts behind them.

Of the Roman special gods to which Usener attached such great weight, after the critique by Otto and Wissowa there still remain some series which were enumerated in certain litanies, sometimes also received priestly sacrifices, and each of which was meant to bestow its blessing upon a particular act of human activity. In this there does indeed lie a theological–juridical splitting of concepts, which recalls the heaven of jurists as R. von Jhering once portrayed it with delightful mockery. For pontifical theology this is important, and with it also for the Roman character in its contrast to the Hellenes, among whom there is nothing comparable; but Vervactor, Redarator, Imporcitor, and the like—Adolenda, Commolenda, Deferunda—never became living gods. The priests might sacrifice to them; for the people they did not exist at all, and in truth they were no gods even for the priests, for the intellect had created them. Quite otherwise stands Aius Locutius: his voice was once heard; for that he receives an altar; with that he will be satisfied, if he does not speak again. The chorus of Euripides (Bacchae 585) experiences an earthquake: in that there is power, there is a god, whom it addresses as “Ἔνοσι πότνια.” Thereby the “Ἔνοσις” does not become a cult-god; for the chorus she exists no further than she acts. We shall find very great gods who are always at work, yet find no cult, because they do not enter into a personal relation with man.

Religion—what is it? All modern languages are compelled to use the foreign word; the Greeks today would in fact have to do so as well. But it is no longer the Latin religio, so that neither etymology nor ancient usage matters here at all⁷. We Germans can well say Glaube, and the definition in Hebrews 11:1 is not bad: πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων. Of course, no specifically Christian overtones need be heard either in faith or in religion. Schiller’s explanation—namely, compelled by religion to profess none of the existing religions—leads to the opposition that must be grasped in its decisive significance and must never be forgotten. Religion is, in the first place, the wholly personal belief in that which, in the metaphysical and moral sphere, counts for the individual as sacred truth and determines his action—or at least ought, in his own feeling, to determine it. It is immaterial whether he holds the content of this belief to be absolute truth, for he needs no cult and makes no propaganda. Precisely when he is capable of thought and free enough, he knows that every metaphysics which imagines it has solved all the riddles of the world—whether it calls itself revelation or science—makes a mockery of itself, and that the old Xenophanes remains right: δόχος ἐπί πᾶσι τέτυχται.

Plato proves his greatness not least in the fact that he did not overlook the limits of scientific knowledge, and had recourse to poetry, to myth, in order to say something about what is inaccessible to genuine knowledge. Then πίστις⁸ enters in—without thereby losing its binding force, even though objectively it can lay no claim to binding validity. Such belief did not, even for Plato, ground the existence of the gods, nor even of his God. Such a religion does not cease when the divine is no longer conceived personally at all; we are entitled to speak of religion wherever man sacrifices himself to an idea, to a cause, because it is sacred to him. For it is not cult or catechism that makes religion, but the believing heart and free action in accordance with that belief.

Alongside this individual religion of the heart—which is doubly sacred to the individual because he has acquired it for himself—stands the religion of the community, with its cult and the binding of its members. The community will at first coincide with the state, whatever its constitution may be; this then engenders not only civic duties but also a civic sentiment that may without hesitation be called religious. Only within the community of men can moral duties arise, which then are taken up into religion—both that of the community (where they lead to law) and likewise that of the heart. It is a fundamental fact, never to be forgotten—however often it is—that morality arises in the life of men together, unlike belief in the gods, who themselves are only at a late stage transformed by men into moral beings.

It may also happen that, on the basis of a particular belief with its cult and its binding force, a community forms which stands alongside the state, yet also itself assumes state functions. For the most part such churches—if one may say so—appeal to a revelation and a sacred book, claim to possess the sole, absolute truth, and seek to bind their members firmly to their doctrines and to their cultic practice. They may come into conflict with the state and its divine service; they may be stifled, but they can also overcome it and take its place. The mass of mankind always consists of beings of the species; their πιστεύειν is a πείθεσθαι—yet there do arise some who attain to independent thought and possess their own belief, even though, for the sake of the community, they do not separate themselves, and take part also in the forms of cult. One need only read Clement to see how early Christianity was compelled to accommodate itself to this. But ecclesiastical metaphysics and its practical morality also shift, even when the formulas remain and the claim to revealed truth prevents the casting off of what has died. Nor is any community without the many whose individual religion venerates the χοιλία as god, as Paul says; τῆι γαστρὶ χαὶ τοῖς αἰσχίστοις μετροῦντες τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν, as Demosthenes expresses it. It is the religion of Euripides’ Cyclops, v. 335. They do not concern us; they are in truth scarcely human at all, but animals like the Cyclops. Yet human society and its communal religion must come to terms with them just as with those who think for themselves and therefore find no satisfaction in what is handed down; science and belief are, after all, asymptotes.

Nor must it ever be lost from sight that in the communal life of men there arise bindings upon the individual which acquire religious sanctification, because they alone preserve that community. Marriage, kinship, tribe—these were such already for the Indo-Europeans, and they do not lose their natural sanctity when the divine exponents have disappeared who once received a cult. It is a pernicious narrowing when religion is restricted to theological metaphysics, to belief in more or less personal deities. Religious is the devotion of man to everything that is sacred to him, for which he is ready to sacrifice himself; whether he may still give it the predicate “god” makes no difference. And this religion can be wholly personal, as with the—fortunately still numerous—men who devote themselves to a “cause”; it can also be a communal feeling, such as devotion to the fatherland, the denial of which would have to entail the expulsion of the traitor from the community, because he has severed himself from it.

In the long history of Hellenic religion all this will confront us; similar things have repeated themselves later and will repeat themselves again. For in the flood-stream of history crest and trough of wave alternate. When the tension becomes too great between what men are able to believe and what the social religion practised in worship presupposes as belief, it often happens that, alongside disdainful contempt for all religion, relapses occur into every kind of the most stupid superstition. Then for the man who can think, the duty becomes all the more urgent to preserve religion within his own heart: to listen to the θεῖοι ἄνδρες—prophets, poets, sages—who were and are granted to proclaim something eternal; and we should also behold, hear, and feel the divine in the works of every genuine art. And finally there remains the revelation of God in nature and in the human heart from eternity.

We cannot dispense with the word religion when we treat the belief of any people, thus also of the Greeks. But it is no less necessary to know what Greek linguistic usage is; for only from the way a people speaks can we infer how it thinks and feels. The Greeks have no word for religion, and even piety cannot really be rendered into Greek. Among the tragedians, it is true, εὐσεβής and the related words bear this sense; but that is because they presuppose or demand that the fulfillment of cultic duties and whatever else counts as a command of the gods should genuinely proceed from a pious disposition. There is no doubt that this conception of εὐσέβεια then governed many hearts; it was regarded as one of the virtues that the ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός ought to possess⁹.

But Plato demonstrates, in his confrontation with the priest Euthyphro, that εὐσέβεια is nothing but a θεραπεία τῶν θεῶν, and has nothing to do with the ὅσιον, the morally pure—whom the conceptions of the gods themselves, as determined by myth, do not satisfy. In the word ὅσιον, which the old epic still lacks¹⁰, a new concept has emerged, elevated from what is cultically unobjectionable and pure to what is morally pure. Apollo is the perfect ὅσιος. By this it is said that, when we seek the proper meaning of εὐσεβής, we must disregard the moral element in general and subjective piety in particular—just as the first commandment of the Hellenic popular doctrine of duties demands τὸ σέβεσθαι θεούς. The Stoa therefore defines εὐσέβεια as δικαιοσύνη πρὸς θεούς, that is, merely a subspecies of that virtue which always concerns our relation to our fellow men¹¹. The gods belong to this sphere; for that they exist is taken as self-evident—otherwise the Greeks do not think.

The treatise of Theophrastus¹² περὶ εὐσεβείας seems to have intended a reform of the form of sacrificial worship; we do not know whether he expressed himself on the origin of belief in the gods, but he presupposes it, and with it the obligation to cultic veneration of the gods. The work of Philodemus, bearing the same title, demands in sharp polemic against the prevailing mythology of the gods and also against their efficacy, while nevertheless an acknowledgement of their existence. Participation by the Epicureans in the prevailing cult is there left optional, and they did not withdraw from it. Most important of all is that both Plato and Aristotle, in the social order of their ideal states, allow the cult of the ancestral gods to remain in force, however irreconcilable these gods may be with their concept of God. This happens, in truth, because they know that the mass of the people is inaccessible to their religion; but this is not stated explicitly, and decisive was the fact that the gods had existed for the people from primeval times, and that a Hellenic state without their cult was unthinkable. With Plato the piety of his childhood without doubt exerted a powerful influence. For both thinkers, however, the heavenly bodies themselves were divine, and in their constant motion a revelation of divinity, ἐπιφανεῖς θεοί. Aristotle even appeals to the πάτριος δόξα and believes that, despite all the catastrophes that have passed over the earth and mankind, from a distant primeval age a knowledge of his true God had been preserved ἐν μύθου σχήματι¹³.

The gods are there. That we recognise and acknowledge this as a given fact together with the Greeks is the first condition for understanding their belief and their cult. That we know they are there rests upon a perception, whether inward or outward—whether the god himself has been perceived, or something in which we recognise the effect of a god. We ourselves, or men upon whose authority we depend, have said of the perception: this is god. This is therefore a predicative concept.

What is predicated we could state more easily if the word θεός¹⁴ were transparent; but thus far it has eluded every reliable interpretation. Half-forgotten, there lies within δῖος, δῖα, θεάων, Διός, διογενής the stem from which the Indian and the Latin derived their word for god—and this denotes an intensified, so to speak absolute, divinity; from θεῖος one can form a comparative. δῖα θεάων shows the difference of degree. The word is preserved only in epic, and even there only in formulaic fashion. Usage confirms that θεός was a predicative concept. Hesiod, Erga 764, has described the power of φήμη—the talk and rumour of society about one of its members—and adds by way of conclusion: θεός νύ τίς ἐστι καὶ αὐτή. By this he sets it as a new god alongside the many of his Theogony—Hunger and Old Age, Strife and Pains, Sleep and Death, and so forth. The case is no different with the double Eris from which his Erga begin. He speaks thus because in ἔρις and φήμη he recognises an effective power, stronger than man, who therefore will take care that φήμη be favourable to him; he could also have expressed this as he does with ἔρις, that one must adhere to the good φήμη and guard oneself against the bad. Aeschylus, Choeph. 60: “τὸ εὐτυχεῖν is for men a god and more than a god.” In the poet’s sense this is a false belief. Sophocles, Oed. 872, says of the νόμοι ἄγραφοι, the eternal moral law, in order to designate its unconditional binding force: μέγας ἐν τούτοις θεός. In Euripides, Helen 560, Helen says, when she recognises her husband, overwhelmed by joyful surprise: ὦ θεοί· θεὸς γὰρ kαὶ τὸ γιγνώσκειν φίλους¹⁵. Predicated is always a power superior to man. τὸ κρατοῦν γὰρ πᾶν νομίζεται θεός, as Menander formulates it¹⁶. The divine is that which is κρεῖττον in relation to us. The gods are often called κρείττονες. And since there are innumerable such powers, the gods too are innumerable.

Life in nature allowed man to perceive these κρείττονα immediately, for everywhere he felt himself dependent upon them. They were harmful and beneficial to him, inaccessible to his dominion. Sunburn and winter frost, storm and flood, gentle rain and hailstorm passed over him, his cattle, his fields. Above, clouds and tempests raced, the stars flashed, the heavenly lights pursued in constant alternation their eternal courses. Before him he saw another life: the greening and blossoming tree lived, the murmuring spring, all the great and small creatures—from the bee that produces the wondrously sweet juice to the wild bear and the buffalo. But this life at the same time displayed the eternal riddle of birth and death, becoming and perishing, and yet persistence in change. Wherever there was life, there was something living; wherever effect issued forth, something acting—and thus something willing—just as man himself is living, acting, willing. For only from himself could he conceive the other. That which acts and wills was overpowering, working upon the earthly, exalted above becoming and perishing: there it was θεός.

It was given through its sensible appearance or through its effect—but not always simultaneously in that appearance, and then all the more divine. Indeed, the god may be in the lightning; but the lightning may also come from the hand of the god who hurls it. The spring may be god; but there may also dwell in the depths of the earth one who drives it upward. Man sows his grain and plants his vine; but that they grow and that the harvest ripens is brought about by the god in the soil, and also by him who sends rain and dry weather for harvest.

It is therefore impossible to determine in advance in what a people has sought and found a creator, a god—and still less to determine how and when this recognition took place, which of the innumerable κρείττονες becomes a full personality that then extends its sphere of action so far that it can be wholly forgotten from what initial perception belief in this god arose. Even if we rightly say that everything elemental has a god within it, the examination of a particular religion can nonetheless yield surprises. Among the Indians fire is a great god, Agni; the Hellenes have lost this word, their πῦρ is a neuter, and there is absolutely no god in fire. If Hephaistos is already used metonymically for fire in Iliad B 4261¹⁷, then he is not a Hellenic god—and in any case not properly fire, but the smith who needs it for his craft. A story such as that of the maid Ocrisia, who is impregnated by a god who rises as a phallus from the hearth-fire, does not exist among the Hellenes. Empedocles seeks names which he can use metonymically for his four elements, but for fire he has none and must make do with Αἰθήρ; admittedly, he also lacked a god of water, ὕδωρ being as neuter as πῦρ, so that he takes up a vanished Νῆστις, which has something related only in the Νηίδες, not νηστεύειν. Light, too—from which moderns, by a petitio principii, spin so many fables—is a neuter. One therefore cannot avoid historical examination; and the demand “it must have existed” is as unjustified as an appeal to the belief of kindred peoples.

This too can only be established through historical examination: whether the acknowledgement of a divine power has condensed into the creation of a corporeal divine person. How often do the Greeks say that οἱ θεοί or θεός (τις), or also ὁ θεός, has brought something about; only in the last case is a god so far determined that the particular operation belongs to him; but just as little as he receives a particular name does he acquire a personal existence of his own. ὁ θεὸς ὕει¹⁸: that is, the one who sends the rain; it must obviously be a god who does this, but nothing more is asserted. Only ὁ Ζεὺς ὕει introduces a god as such: he is the weather-god in general, who can then, in a particular case, be called ὑετός. Only when Zeus sends the rain can one, with the Athenians, pray ὗσον ὗσον, ὦ φίλε Ζεῦ . An indeterminate θεός can receive no cult, because he has not become a person. How is one to invite him to sacrifice? And could he come? Whoever cannot come received no sacrifice in ancient times. As a beautiful metonymy one may place beside this the Theocritean χώ Ζεὺς ἄλλοxα μὲν πέλει αἴθριος, ἄλλοxa δ’ ὕει: there Zeus is the sky. That something material, which cannot become θεός, is at least called θεῖον is rare. Salt is called θεῖον (I 214), the indispensable, powerful seasoning. Since sulphur was called θεῖον (from θέειον), the Greeks will also have understood something divine in this means of purification and expiation. It is important only that a man can be called θεῖος when he has a divine gift, as the ἀοιδός; then the term is transferred to individual outstanding persons—thus like δῖος, among the Spartans the designation of one who has become what the perfect Spartiate ought to be. In this way the path was entered upon of finding a θεός in a man: here too, in the last resort, it is the power that lies in his person and acts upon us.

One must sharply distinguish from the divine (θεῖον) the ἱερόν, which means “belonging to a god”; yet usage goes so far that comparative linguists see in it two originally different words. The translation “holy” is misleading. Buildings, adornments, and household equipment of a god may be so called; whoever steals them is an ἱερόσυλος. When a man is called ἱερός, he may be a temple-slave, a cult-official like the ἱεροί at Delphi, a mortal carried off by the gods (Callimachus, Epigr. 22), but also a homo sacer, one forfeited to the gods. The sacrificial animal becomes an ἱερεῖον because the priest dedicates it to the gods, ἱερεύει. The king, who has his office from Zeus, possesses an ἱερὸν μένος (Alcinous); ancient kings who receive heroic honours are ἱεροί (Pindar, Pyth. 5.97). Telemachus, the legitimate heir to a throne, has an ἱερὴ ἰς. It is perhaps a degeneration that a field-watch should be an ἱερὸν τέλος (K 56; Ψ 681), but when they are ἐν τέλει they possess an authority that comes from Zeus, just as truly as that of the king. Fish are not eaten by the men of the Iliad; therefore a fish can be called ἱερός, even if someone commits a transgression against it (Ξ 407). Later the term is used of a particular fish that is spared (Athenaeus VII 283). In Alcman the χηρύλος is a sacred bird: the poet wishes to fly over the sea like it. The bee, from which the food of the gods comes, is ἱερά. All this is readily intelligible; at first sight it seems more difficult that in epic ἧμαρ and χνέφας are ἱερά, for here there is no direct connection with the gods. But listen to how Andromeda in Euripides begins her aria with ὦ νύξ ἱερά; we soon hear that night moves across the sky—there she is a person, even if not the primal power of the Theogonies. Yet we feel that Euripides is following epic usage because it gives the mood. The solitary woman doomed to death shudders in the lonely stillness: this night belongs to the gods. The elemental itself is no longer felt as god, but behind it, within it, a god lies hidden. We say “the dear godly sun” in much the same way; and whoever does not feel such a mood himself can find it in poets of all ages. Thus an ancient epic poet already felt at dawn and at dusk and coined the formulas. I think we should praise him—but then we also set beside this epilepsy, the ἱερὴ νοῦσος, in which the word designates the uncanny supernatural; θεία νόσος and the like are sent by gods, θεήλατος.

ἁγνός is castus; it can therefore be said of gods, likewise of men, and also of a purity with respect to a particular defilement, for example blood-guilt, similarly ἁγνὰ θύματα, bloodless sacrifices. ἅγιος is not an old word, of Ionic origin, used only of a particularly holy place—thus ἱερὸν ἅγιον, sacrosanctum—and only exceptionally, like this Latin term, of a human being. It is an intensification of ἁγνῶς in Isocrates (Busiris 25), and thus occurs sporadically in good Attic. The Christians took it up for their holy men¹⁹.

That the gods are there man knows above all from sense-perception; many have seen them, and they show themselves on occasion, so that one may be prepared for their appearance. Belief had not died out so long as one could recount individual epiphanies of the great gods—even if these were rare wonders and art had already given these gods fixed human form. Apollonius, II 675, has beautifully described such an epiphany in this period: the Argonauts see Apollo at daybreak as he flies through the air to the Hyperboreans, and they found an altar to him. For the poet this may be myth, an αἴτιον of the cult on an island of the Pontus; but the altar of the ἑῶιος was there, and the belief in such an epiphany—which could be repeated—had founded it²⁰. In the old epic every such scene may be an invention of the poet, but it was possible only because the belief existed.

Already the gods have human form; hence in an unknown person who is suddenly noticed and admired a god may be suspected. Odysseus doubts whether Nausicaa with her maidens might not be Artemis with her nymphs²¹. Poseidon, in the form of Calchas, addressed a warning speech to the two Ajaxes and vanished as swiftly as a hawk. Then the Locrian Ajax says (Ν 70): “That was not Calchas; when he departed I recognised the stride of a god; gods are indeed easy to recognise.” On the other hand, the much later poet of κ 161 says: οὐ γὰρ πω πάντεσσι θεοὶ φαίνονται ἐναργεῖς, when Athena is visible to Odysseus in her customary divine form, but is not noticed at all by Telemachus standing beside him²². And at Υ 131 Hera herself says χαλεποί δέ θεοὶ φαίνονται ἐναργεῖς—man can scarcely endure this sight. Hence they mostly assume the form of a human being, usually of someone known to the person with whom they wish to enter into contact. Yet the animal form is not forgotten. As birds Apollo and Athena sit upon an oak (Η 59); as a swallow Athena flies to the roof-beam of the hall (γ 240); as a gull Leucothea flies over the waves (ε 352). The Athenian phalanx rejoiced when an owl flew through its ranks, in which they saw the messenger of their goddess²³; once it had been she herself in the form of an owl. The dolphin accompanies ships; it is spared and therefore sanctified, and when a perilous voyage succeeds, a god has been in it—Apollo δελφίνιος in the Pythian Hymn. Apollo led the Cyrenaeans to the spring Kyra in the form of a raven. The gods later have their favourite animals as companions—Artemis the hind, Dionysus the panther, Zeus the eagle: once they had borne these forms themselves. This is because men once had the feeling that a hind which escaped them, a bear that suddenly appeared and vanished, had been the mistress of the forest, who chose to assume this form. For there was as yet no fixed conception of the gods’ own corporeality. It is intelligible that it was the animals of the wild, not the tame domestic animals, in which the imagination of believing men perceived a god, and that the fleeting bird is still especially chosen by the gods in epic.

We shall have occasion repeatedly to deal with theriomorphic gods; here it need only be emphatically stated that the animals by no means receive worship on that account. Whoever speaks of totemism among the Hellenes merely proves that he knows nothing about them. The Arcadians are named after the bear, but they soon exterminated the bears; one of their tribes is named after the wolf, Λυχᾶνες²⁴; the ancestor had been a wolf, and because the wolf was a dangerous beast, a corresponding story accrues to the son; no people will choose a werewolf as its forefather. The Phocians have quite forgotten that Phōkos is the seal. Among the Encheleians no one speaks of the eels from which they were once to have sprung, and it is a late interpretation that finds in Βοιωτός the ox. Sacred species of animals scarcely exist, and the gods have nothing to do with them. The house-snake, in which a dead man shows himself, is an exception that belongs to another sphere. In the temples of Asia sacred animals are repeatedly kept; not in Hellas²⁵; the Delphic doves in Euripides’ Ion are no more sacred than those in St Mark’s Square at Venice.

Gods who dwell in their element—an element known and accessible to men—in tree and bush, spring and meadow, need not assume a form for man to become conscious of their divinity, he can bring them his reverence and his gifts to their element itself. But in his belief they become persons, and then he imagines them according to the impression he receives from bush and spring and meadow—kindly, lovely, playful; and in the evening mist that spreads from the river over the meadow, the moonlight shows him how the maidens, the nymphs, dance. Sun and moon immediately display their form, prove daily their power and divinity; ἐπιφανεῖς θεοί they have always been and remained, and for receptive souls will always have their epiphanies. But they are unapproachable to man, and a god with whom he cannot come into contact is also unreceptive to prayer and sacrifice: why establish a cult for him?

It was a great advance when men became aware that within their own inner being there were also κρείττονα—powers to which they did not offer resistance, but which they were compelled to follow despite better insight, or even despite the pressure of their own desires. Then they deserved the predicate θεός. The Stoics speak of the deification of the πάθη, the passions; but the matter reaches much further. We moderns are tempted to speak of personification and allegory, and thus to regard the many abstractions on Roman imperial coinage, and even the figures who pay homage to the poet on the Apotheosis of Homer, as being of the same kind as the countless gods enumerated in Hesiod’s Theogony. And indeed the same mode of expression runs through all of this, so that the transitions from real belief to the use of an empty figure become uncertain. One might say that language itself began with personification when it assigned masculine and feminine gender to abstract nouns. Aristophanes of Byzantium dealt wisely with this Homeric εἰδωλοποιία²⁶, for he already saw no more than this in the Homeric divine figures of this type; he will likewise have seen no more in Charis and the Horai, in Sleep and Death. Ate and the Litai in Iliad I, too, we can scarcely call anything other than a poetic εἰδωλοποιία; yet Ate, the daughter of Zeus, was even for Homer something more than this, and it was a long path from Homer to the rationalism of the grammarian.

Along this path deeply religious poems and splendid works of art came into being; for creations of high art possess life and power not only for the souls of understanding hearers and viewers, but already for their creators themselves—hence also something divine. One must have lived oneself into this Hellenic manner of thinking and seeing, and every new figure, or even every new poetic passage, demands this interpretation of words and feelings.

A Homeric example may illustrate the freedom of the poet and the transitions from the abstract to the personal. At Α 164 Zeus snatches Hector away from slaughter of men, blood, and tumult—κυδοιμός. At Ε 593 there stride before the host of the Trojans Ares and Enyo, ἔχουσα Κυδοιμόν ἀναιδέα δηόιτητος. Here, today as in antiquity, one hesitates whether it is a god Κυδοιμός (which is correct), or a τέρας κυδοιμοῦ, some force that by magic raises tumult—just as “Ἔρις”, itself a much more personally felt divinity, holds a τέρας πολέμοιο (Α 2). At Ε 535 Kydoimos himself appears beside Eris in battle, and is therefore fashioned as a person upon the shield. That such divine persons—whose origin for the most part lies in poetic imagination—receive no cult is natural; yet examination is still necessary, for the Charites and the Horai, for example, we know only as gods, and many a Hesiodic personification has received altar and sacrifice. Eros and Nike have remained more alive than many great gods.

Ate is a destructive power, and thus Hesiod enumerates many of her kind. In popular consciousness they are not alive. The Hesiodic poem of Pandora, which has nothing to do with religion, tells of the many κακά that fly about everywhere and afflict mankind. They do not become persons, still less does man seek to appease them by cult—nor even diseases. An altar of Λοιμός, who is counted among the evil powers by Hesiod, is unthinkable. In Rome Febris has her altar; the contrast is significant. Evil, or the Evil One, is no god for the Hellene. To his gods and heroes he turns for protection against the κακά. Indeed destructive monsters have appeared, but they are slain or driven away—the Sphinx, the Ποινή whom Coroebus slew, the Harpies, who were killed by the Boreads or banished into a cave. If a visitation comes, such as the plague before Ilios, Apollo has sent it to punish human transgression. Against the κακά many a charm is employed, this still happens today. When a harmful power threatens or is in the land, one tries to drive it away, ἔξω τὸν Βόλιμον; στρίγγ’ ἀποπομπεῖν. Naturally one must know it. Isocrates (Philipp. 117) contrasts with the Olympians, who do good, those gods who receive no sacrifices, but for whom one arranges ἀποπομπαί, because they are ἐπὶ συμφοραῖς καὶ τιμωρίαις τεταγμένοι. It is an antithesis that holds true only in rough outline, but always has in view known divine persons and powers.

If, however, it is fashionable today to explain all manner of customs—for example at marriage, or at the reception of a slave into the household—as a warding-off of evil spirits, then one must ask the believers in spirits to express themselves in Greek. Do they perhaps mean Κῆρες? Mimnermus names two Κῆρες that seize every man—old age and death. Against these no magic helps. This name, incidentally confined to poetry, does not fit. Or were there the πονηρὰ δαιμόνια, of which Stoic theology and later superstition speak, already in existence when marriage customs took shape? That is a way of thinking which may exist elsewhere, but is incompatible with Greek belief, which conceives everything that acts—and can therefore become god—personally, and therefore names it. Whoever speaks of evil spirits has never read Hesiod’s Theogony with attentiosun²⁷.

Against what is harmful and evil, which continually threatens man and his possessions from all sides, he seeks to protect and defend himself—not only through invocations of saving gods, who alone can help against the forces of nature, drought and cloudburst, lightning-stroke and earthquake, but also through manifold precautions which one may compare with the extermination of vermin and with prophylaxis against infectious diseases. This does not belong to religion, but rests upon the same spiritual disposition which is also decisive for the practice of cult. If we consider all this from our intellect and our insight into nature, it is all magic and sorcery, at once ineffective and absurd, and then one comes to speak of primeval stupidity. Such practices do not die out. Perhaps no one paints a pentagram any longer, but a horseshoe is still nailed above many a stable threshold so that evil may not enter. Today this is called superstition; but for ancient times—into whose mode of thought we must live ourselves—this designation does not apply; for superstition is conscious that it does something that runs counter to reason, believes something which it ought not really to believe. By contrast, in earlier times the same practices not only accorded with general belief, but belonged to knowledge confirmed by experience just as much as what we count as such today. Our own medicine long employed remedies that later proved worthless, and practised procedures that were harmful—doing so in the best faith, convinced that it was applying something both tested by experience and even scientifically grounded.

Even in the period which predominantly practised what we call magic, people will have been very content if they knew a blood-stanching or otherwise healing herb, such as Chiron had shown to Peleus, instead of resorting to incantations or waiting at a sacred place for the counsel of a god. And even today, all too many, when the physician knows no remedy, seek out an unlicensed adviser whose secret knowledge amounts to magic. Not infrequently this too has success, to which belief contributes no little. It has done so at all times.

But mankind—which had succeeded in taming domestic animals, cultivating food-plants, grinding the stone knife, plaiting the mat, determining the course of the seasons by the stars—had long since risen far above “primeval stupidity”; and with the first ornamentation of its pots, indeed already with the painting of its bodies, the first step toward art had been taken. What in the course of development became science and magic as opposites issues from the same root. Man wishes to become master of the powers that are in nature, or seem to him to be there, so far as he can; there are enough against which he is too weak to defend himself. Nor is it otherwise with the most modern technology. Even in primitive man there is wonder, θαυμάζειν; there is the urge to know. To seek understanding, συνιέναι, and to rise to philosophy—that is, to science—was in truth achieved only by the Greeks. Sorcerers (μάγοι γόητες) have always existed, but their names already had an ill sound in the fifth century; they are quite paltry medicine-men. It is very significant that no great god has involved himself so deeply with magic as Odin²⁸. There was likewise no doctrine of magic, and therefore no books of magic, whereas dream-books and collections of usable oracular responses did exist.

In the cult of the gods there is much that was originally intended to possess magical efficacy and that is permanently and carefully observed in ritual—sometimes interpreted symbolically, sometimes also motivated by an aetiological fable. Rarely does it have religious significance that would merit mention. One god demands this sacrificial animal, another that one; he also lays special requirements upon its condition, has a preference for certain flowers and for this or that incense. Not every kind of wood is suitable for every fire; there are also ἄγορα ξύλα, on which one burns what is evil or impure, but not the sacrificial portions. The posture of those praying may vary: covering of the head, sometimes also of the hands, is required. Right and left become meaningful, as do colours—black, white, red. Fixed forms for the invocation of the god, especially for the sacred cries of the community, are preserved even in foreign cults that have become Hellenised. In this respect things are no different today. The Jewish god requires that the man cover his head; the Christian, that he remove his hat. Holy water, taken over from Oriental cult, has been retained at the door of the house of God. The sign of the cross is still made; its magical effect is widely believed in; and over the position of the fingers a schism has arisen in Russia. Hallelujah stands in the same case as εὐοῖ, and Amen has a solemn effect because it is not understood. All this has its historical justification and its right to exist.

But it must equally be evident that these externalities, to whose observance the believing community clings, do not belong to religion itself, but rather only their observance—the preservation of tradition, in essence therefore submission to the will of the god, the sacred law. Whether the community knows this, or only the priest of that god, whether it is the same in all sanctuaries or, as often among the later Greeks, very different, makes no difference. Hesiod, Erga 337, expresses the principle briefly and aptly: everything is to be done ἁγνῶς καὶ καθαρῶς. The first demands the pure observance of the prescribed usages; the second the purity of the person who performs them and of the other participants²⁹, which leads to exacting regulations—dietary prohibitions, fasting, sexual abstinence—and finally transference to the moral sphere.

Only one form of magic must be emphatically singled out, in which there lies a tremendous power, immaterial, flowing from the soul of one man into the soul of another: the magic of the living word, “whose force was so mighty there because it was a spoken word.” We all know what the sound of the commanding word can effect over animal and man, and we call this suggestion. The true leader transmits his will through a word to a multitude; but even in many a once authoritatively spoken watchword there lies a power that reaches far beyond the circle of those who heard it: ζῶντα περιποτᾶται, as Sophocles says of the Delphic god’s utterances. The Athenian homicide court, sanctified by this god, reckons with the power of the spoken prohibition against entering consecrated places, even over the conscience of the unknown murderer³⁰. Thus the correctly spoken word is also meant to summon the god, to ward off a hostile power, and prayer is meant to determine the divine will. This finally sinks down to the absurdities of hocus-pocus and perlicke, perlacke, to the bawling of the seven vowels and the abracadabra of the magical papyri; but at the beginning it is wholly serious, and the magical use of speech in worship is readily intelligible. For in his soul the god always remains anthropomorphic, even when his corporeality is relinquished; therefore he will respond to what has been tested among men.

In the curse the power of the word operates most strongly; the curse of Oedipus is for us the most luminous example, since Aeschylus follows it down to the destruction of the lineage upon which it rests. The ban that strikes a fugitive high traitor—thus also a traitor to the ancestral gods—and that proscribes certain crimes in advance, belongs as a necessary complement to the state’s penal law and is pronounced at Athens before every popular assembly. Then of necessity the curse itself, the ἀρά, must become an effective person; but already Homer knows the Erinyes as its executors (Ι 571), though other gods had been invoked, and therefore they call themselves Ἀραί (Aesch. Eum. 417). The curse of the murdered man summons the avenger to his work (Choeph. 406).

Far more powerfully still does the oath intervene in life; and this is intelligible at all only as a self-curse in the event of perjury, and it remains so even when the formula gradually obscures the fact. For the gods who are invoked are only witnesses; that they should specifically undertake the pursuit of perjurers does not lie in this—but gods will see to it³¹. The state does not intervene, although it everywhere requires and demands oaths, both promissory and assertory. This has indeed led to the fact that many a man, like Autolycus (τ 396), dared to deceive by oaths; but even so, even when disregard for the Greek oath was as great as in the time of Polybius, no one ever questioned the impunity of perjury. All the more seriously, then, must one take it in earlier times when in Gortyn the judge gives his verdict “under oath,” and when the Homeric treaty of state includes self-imprecation (Τ 279)³². If today the wholly secular state uses the oath only as a formula intended to confirm a statement, and punishes violations of truthfulness with severe penalties, then the oath is merely a survival from a religiously oriented age, and the consequence of ochlocracy may well abolish it. The promissory oath in particular is commonly regarded by jurists and laymen alike as a mere form; thus those who feel themselves bound by it are at a disadvantage in life vis-à-vis the kindred spirits of Autolycus. To be sure, these will be people who would tell the truth even without an oath.

In all curses and incantations everything depends upon the scrupulous observance of the magically efficacious words—and therefore also upon calling the god by his correct name. How men came to know this can no longer be asked; but what the name means was asked early on, and Hesiod began with an etymology of Aphrodite. Ancient theology never ceased to seek the essence of the god in the name, into which it forced whatever it wished to hear; and the moderns have only gone further astray, when Greek, despite all violence, was insufficient, and recourse was had to Semitic, Indian, sometimes even Latin. It is as though the gods wished to tease us like Rumpelstiltskin, and as though we might seize them if we knew their name. Probably very many divine names will always remain σιγῶντα, as Euripides calls them (Phaethon 781, 13). Precisely therein lies the problem: that although the Greeks have many immediately intelligible divine names, those of the greatest gods are for the most part unintelligible and un-Greek. Etymology cannot provide the solution; history alone can. If the name is not Greek, then the god is not Greek either. We shall moreover see that a god can also be designated without a proper name, after the place where he dwells.

If it is known where a god dwells, or at least is fond of resorting, one can go to him in order to venerate or to petition him—hence the processions that ascend even to the mountains. Otherwise one consecrates a place to him—grove, meadow, sacrificial precinct—and invites him there, prepares for him a sacrificial table on which he may find the offerings, even a seat in front of it. Very early one demands some visible sign that represents the invisibly present god. This may be a rough stone, a plank; two joined beams could at Therapnae represent the divine twins. But these are by no means images, still less the gods whom they represent. The stones were not gods which at Thespiae represented Eros, at Orchomenus the Charites—although it could hardly be avoided that a stone at Fréjus should say, “I am Aphrodite’s servant Terpon,” in order to make clear what it signifies. Zeus ἐνδένδρος on Rhodes and Paros³³, Dionysus ἐνδένδρος in Boeotia, undoubtedly dwelt in trees, and their branches will have been laden with votive offerings; in that sense there is a tree-cult, but the tree is not the god—it belongs to the god, it is ἱερός. To be sure the tree has a soul, because it lives—that is the Δρυάς, as its name indicates³⁴—but it is not that which receives the cult, rather the great gods.

So too the anthropomorphic cult-images of later times are only ἱερὰ ἀγάλματα, even if they are said to have fallen from heaven; for this is told only because they are held to be particularly holy—like black Madonnas which St Luke is supposed to have painted. They remain images even when wonders occur in connection with them: Athena of Ilion turns away her gaze when her priestess is violated, just as Christian images have done; these themselves work miracles, which those of the Greek gods do not. The rough wooden xoana had to be washed, newly painted, and clothed; from this a festival arose, and the presence of Athena at this festival was once certainly believed; but for all that the image remained an image, and the goddess herself was not undressed and washed. When Arcadian boys, and similarly Abruzzese youths, vent their disappointment at the lack of help from their gods upon their little images, such excesses decide nothing about religion, but merely confirm that even the crudest presentations never entirely die out. Yet people of this kind have never determined even cult, still less religion. The Portuguese, who saw fetishes in the images or symbols³⁵of the Negroes and thus passed this word on to us, were themselves fetish-worshippers; we, however, should not fail to recognise in all these “fetishes” the god whom the believer worships.

The purpose of cult, with all its practices, is to enter into contact with the god and to exert an influence upon him. This proceeds along two lines: to win the god’s goodwill and favour, or to appease his wrath. In the first case the same means are employed as have proved effective with men, especially with the powerful—words of flattery, promises, gifts. One invites him to the meal, delights him with fragrances, with music, song, and dance. Against threatening wrath much is done in advance; but if the effects of divine anger have already made themselves felt, then man feels himself guilty and seeks to transfer the guilt to an animal or a human being, whose death carries it away with itself into fire or water. These generalities may suffice here—at least for the Hellenic cult; among other peoples it may pursue additional aims.

The main point is that the veneration of the gods is the concern of the community—thus, in early times, of the tribe, and of the state insofar as there is a state. And so it has always remained; we readily say that state and church coincide. From this it follows that the priest is and remains an organ of the state. To be sure, he alone possesses—however acquired—the knowledge of the rites, he alone knows how the god wishes things to be done, and must therefore perform the sacrifice on behalf of the state. Yet within his own household the master is responsible for sacrificing to the gods of that household; and precisely the regular “ancestral” duties that are most necessary for the welfare of the tribe, the θεραπεία of the gods, devolve upon the head of the tribe, the king—it will originally have been the cults of his own lineage.

A consequence of this position of the priest is that, although he enjoys certain honours and also derives income from his office, he has no influence whatsoever, either politically or as a teacher of the people. Only his god concerns the priest; outside the state there exists no authority that could decide which gods ought to be honoured by general festivals³⁶, thus neither a college of priests nor a high priest. The contrast with Indians, Romans, and Celts—to remain within the Indo-Europeans—is striking. The Germans acted like the Greeks. The women of the tribe have their own cults, inaccessible to men, and thus also their own priestesses. Virgins are often summoned for processions and choral dances in honour of goddesses. At times the entire people, or even the host under arms, advances in procession in honour of the tribal god or on occasions of expiatory festivals. Later on, virtually every substantial full citizen was at one time or another drawn into active participation in the state cult. His personal belief remained entirely free in this; but εὐσέβεια toward the recognised gods of the state was an inviolable civic duty. No period ever called this into question. Even in the Roman Empire, when the cults of individual communities had lost their binding force, participation in the imperial cult—which had assumed the form of the cult of the emperor—belonged to the duties of the citizen of the Empire. By refusing to take part in this cult, the Christians therefore consciously denied their membership in the Empire, and thus the struggle became one of life and death.

Between the tribe and the households—thus the lineages (γένη οἶκοι)—there later stand intermediate groupings: fatherhoods (πατριαί), among the Ionians brotherhoods (φρατρίαι, though the meaning of the name is forgotten), often also over these φυλαί, that is, properly speaking, tribes; and the association of small tribes will also have been the earliest form. In all these cases blood-relationship is present or believed to be present; the fiction is maintained even where the entire structure is created by an act of will. All these communities possess a cult in which the communal feeling expresses itself. One might expect that the exponent of this feeling would be the ancestor, and then the state would rest upon an ancestor cult, and the origin of the gods from such a cult—assumed by some theorists—might be considered. But matters are quite otherwise.

Among the Hebrews Jacob, Joseph, and the like are at once heroic and tribal names. But when at the beginning of genealogies we find a Lacedaemon, Sicyon, Locros, Aetolus, Ion, and so forth, these are bloodless phantoms, many of them simple inventions of the genealogists. The actual tutelary gods of tribes and states belong to the great gods; even the Attic phratries, which name themselves after an ancestor, have Zeus and Athena as their gods. The Greek name itself proves that the lineage did not have the significance it had in Rome: Δημοσθένης Δημοσθένους as against M. Tullius M. f. In general one does not go back beyond the grandfather, so that in the grandson the grandfather is renewed—a fact which naming practices also take into account³⁷. So many ancestors democracy demands of the archon (Pollux VIII 85), and it accordingly also speaks of δοῦλος ἐκ τριγονίας. Names of lineages are already known to the Iliad; Achilles is an Aiacid, admittedly named after his grandfather. Such names have existed in the age of aristocratic rule; but the Cypselids, Orthagorids, Peisistratids show how this shifted in practice, and under democracy the Buselids of the Makartatos-speech. True nobility was supposed to rest upon divine blood, as the genealogies of the heroes in the Ehoiai did. This was the case with the kings of Sparta; otherwise it is rare, and even a derivation from a hero was already much—his divine ancestor was scarcely thought of³⁸.

At times a general cult of the forefathers did exist; and precisely here the τριτοπάτορες or τριτοπατρεῖς in Athens and Cyrene again shows te τριγονία . The deceased members of the family were originally—and so as a rule—not powers that acted back into this life. Of an ancestor cult that led to belief in gods or to the formation of the tribe there can therefore be no question.

It is open to the individual household, alongside the gods of the tribe, to venerate others as well. Through contact with nearer and more distant, related and foreign tribes, other gods become known—sometimes the same powers that have merely received different cultic forms and different names, but sometimes powers that under different conditions of life have truly become new gods. Even more strongly does the migration of the tribe contribute to the increase of their number: on new soil it encounters the gods of the former inhabitants and must take over their cult, for the land belongs to them. How this happened in detail cannot be reconstructed; we know only the result—the wide diffusion of certain gods, the veneration of the same power under different names, and the adoption of gods foreign to the tribe. This must be examined case by case. Of principled importance is only the fact that alongside the obligatory cult of the tribal gods, others gradually intrude and finally gain general recognition. The number of gods believed in—and then also worshipped—thus increases, and there are added those which, being found already worshipped, win a place for themselves in belief. Migration brings with it that gods originally bound to a particular place become detached from it, and even if they are resettled elsewhere, their nature can nevertheless develop more freely and more personally. Richer inner experience, too, will make itself felt in belief. But this remains: the gods are the κρείττονες, not moral powers. For the order of society and the duties that arise from it for the individual do not proceed from religion, and it takes a long time before man comes to feel himself religiously bound to these duties as well. Only then will he demand from his gods the ἀρεταί which man himself is to practise.

It appears to us as though men of ancient times were far more strongly beings of the species than they have remained ever since the unleashing of individualism. In contrast to the upper strata cultivated by deeper education, the cult of the communal religion concerns all alike, and the tribe—later the state, with its morality and its system of education—strives to suppress individualism. Yet physical strength and courage have nonetheless brought leaders to the fore, and the self-consciousness of the lord, who is a king on his own estate, scarcely yields to that of the tribal chief. Nor was there any lack of differences in intellect and imagination, in men and in women (who must not be underestimated here), whom the god within their breast enabled to attain a deeper apprehension of religion and morality. Thus belief gradually changes—more slowly or more rapidly, in calm progress or in struggles whose outcome may even be enhanced by the downfall of the innovators. We hear of such figures, or infer their activity, admittedly only from much later times; but progress in religion and in cult alike demands the assumption of their existence.

Where, then, are we to seek the bearers of this advancing intellectual and religious development? Every householder himself performs the divine service on his estate according to inherited custom. The perception of the gods and the ordering of their veneration lay far back in the past, but once they had occurred as a great innovation. It was much the same with the priests: they offered no doctrine and confined themselves to fulfilling the fixed forms of their cultic practice and to exhorting the faithful to observe the same.

They will have offered certain explanations for the individual ceremonies; but these aetiologies are of little value—certainly of no religious value³⁹. There are seers⁴⁰, endowed by the gods with the ability to interpret portents, to understand divine utterances, to foresee the future. This too becomes a craft that is handed down, and the seer is often a travelling man, protected by his art, like other itinerant artists or craftsmen. From these circles much may have come—especially in the rites of expiation intended to ward off calamity; but for the belief of the people one can attribute to them no decisive importance. Where a god gives oracles, he needs ὑποφῆται, who transmit or interpret his answer. From such a priesthood a powerful new doctrine could arise and spread; in Delphi this did indeed happen—but it is late and unique⁴¹.

Decisive for the Hellenes of the period of florescence are the poets. They always have been so—long before Homer and Hesiod. Who else told of the gods, gave them parents and children, introduced them as acting among themselves? Who else spoke of the coming-into-being of the earth, of the successive generations of the gods and of mankind. The singers too were poets—a profession like that of seers and craftsmen, without a fixed abode, but gladly taken into service by the powerful⁴². We first know them as the bearers of historical memory, and thus recognise that they must reach back into the heroic age—for us, into prehistory—for only in song could the memory of the wars of the motherland and the gold-rich strongholds of the Argolid pass over to Asia and continue to live on. Worship will always have required song and dance, that is, ritual hymns; but it was not in these that the instructive inventive power of the poets found expression, at most only indirectly. For even if those songs might mention the stories in which the god had manifested his power, his ἀρεταί, that already presupposed the stories; here there was no opportunity to tell them. Nor do the poets stand in the service of any gods other than the Muses, their own Olympian goddess: in this lies the fact that with their knowledge and their art they stand on their own. As epic poets, as narrators, they also told of the gods. Homer and Hesiod have innumerable poets as their predecessors; and of this whole estate it may be said that it created for the Hellenes their theogony—let us at once say more precisely: their mythology.

We began with a protest against the identification of Hellenic religion with mythology; here we must establish that around religion, as it developed further, there lies a poetic veil of mythology, woven by the poets, who at once promoted the further development of religion and in the long run impeded it. μῦθος is at first the spoken word; the word never concerns itself with its content. It can be the pronouncement of the judge (Α 545; Hesiod, Erga 263), but only as utterance of the verdict without regard to its substance. The contrast with λόγος, which takes the place of μῦθος, is sharp. Hence mythos becomes a story, such as one tells to oneself, and survives only as fabula—the animal fable and the children’s fairy-tale are so called; there does not yet lie in the word itself the implication that its content is playful invention; but it is implied that truth is never inherent in it. “To children one tells myths—τοῦτο δὲ που, ὅς τὸ ὅλον εἰπεῖν, ψεῦδος, ἔν δε καὶ ἀληθῆ,” says Plato (Republic 377). He speaks exceedingly often of mythology and of μυθολογεῖν; indeed he himself composed many myths, in which alone he knew how to utter truths that cannot be proved, but which for that very reason were all the more precious to him. Even what is laid down in his Laws and in part demonstrated he calls mythology. His entire cosmogony is myth, and it is precisely this which has happened to be taken for revealed truth. The divine dynasties of Hesiod are nothing else. Poets before him, and he himself, devised them—with no greater claim to truth than the Timaeus. In μυθοποιεῖν there lies no special mode of thought; it is a poetic activity of the same kind as in Empedocles and in Plato: truth itself, as it were, hands the poet that veil, that he may conceal its sacred nakedness, which even the eye of the soul can never behold.

Welcker (Götterlehre I, 77) has thus praised myth and its origin: “In the times of their emergence the myths were revelation, and produced their deep religious impression by the fact that they were also the sole and surprising expression of great truths, that in these images certain thoughts recognised and understood themselves. The myth sprang up in the spirit as a seed breaks forth from the soil—content and form one, the story itself a truth.” This can be said only of the genesis of belief in the gods; and even there the perception of the gods was first granted to individual men—within the people at large there existed only the receptivity for belief. Myth—the stories of the gods—presupposes their existence just as cult does; and it arises in the imagination of the poet, who can intuitively grasp a great truth and set it forth as such, as Diotima does the ascent to Beauty itself—a truly great religious truth, which nonetheless wears the veil of poetry. In the Republic’s judgement of the dead this veil is far denser, because a story is woven together from old and new myths.

The gods are there. That is here too the decisive presupposition. Then we wish to know how they came to be, what they look like and how they live—among themselves and in their intercourse with men of past generations. The Muse preserves the memory and communicates it to her servants—not only truths, but also inventions akin to truth, as she herself told Hesiod. These are bloodless stories, myths, which are given together with the divine persons and thus also with their cult; and they too can scarcely have taken form otherwise than within the belief of an individual⁴³. Even the birth-stories of certain gods, which play so great a role in belief and in ritual songs, can only be the work of poets—each one gradually grown, yet at some point arisen. They are wholly absent among the Romans and the Germans; we may say, among the Indo-Europeans.

The recognition that the stories of the gods stem from the poets—that they are poetry—by no means deprives them of their value for religion; but it alone enables us to understand the freedom, so disconcerting to many, with which Homer can treat the gods—downright irreverently, as one must concede not only in the battle of the gods, but also Διός ἀπατη. Even from such play much can be gained for religion and its development. The Hymn to Hermes is virtually a farce, and it will become of the highest significance for us. Only because the gods are there, so close to men, is it permissible also to jest with them. Only he for whom it has become entirely natural and properly Hellenic that Aristophanes can allow himself everything against the gods and immediately beside that pray to them in all seriousness and piety—only he can re-experience the living faith that alone opens understanding of the foreign religion. Specifically Hellenic imagination and religiosity, in earnest and in play, flow in one and the same stream from the poets before Homer down to Pindar and to Aristophanes. Their poets have been the teachers—and increasingly also the educators—of the Hellenes, and have made the widest use of their poetic freedom. One may say that the tangled growth of mythic vines eventually sucked all the sap from the trunk of belief in the gods; yet alongside this we must not forget that it was the poets who first drew the moral element into religion—the educators of the people. They are later replaced by the philosophers; and even their metaphysics cannot dispense with μυθολογεῖν, though most are not as clear about this as Plato was. But if he himself could not dispense with myth, then all the more was the popular and civic religion, together with its myths, invincible—of which the consequence necessarily had to be that a new Hellenic communal and popular religion did not arise. Only at this very dear price could the Hellenes bestow upon us science, philosophy, and with them a religion of the heart, more immortal than all personal gods.

In morality too the poets became teachers and educators of the people and brought morality into relation with the gods. At first this was by no means the case; for religion, insofar as we have so far considered it—that is, belief in gods—did not educate men to morality. Morality arose in the intercourse of men with one another, that is, in the society to which a man belonged. No community can exist without presupposing a certain mode of life among its members and compelling the self-will of the individual to observe certain limits. However loosely, man is bound by the community in which he stands. He must accept this, for he is born for life in community, φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον. With this there lies upon him duty and right, which Greek so well designates by τὸ δίκαιον; for in it lies both what he is to practise as just and what he may expect and demand from others as just. What is less important here is what the particular state enforces or at least demands, than what its citizens themselves hold to be just and fitting—thus their sense of right and their morality—hence not external but internal commands. This not absolute sense of right, but the νομιζόμενον δίχαιον, will be different toward the slave, the foreigner, the subordinate or the equal tribesman; different in the warrior, different in the farmer, again otherwise in the trader. But however different what they hold to be right and wrong—let us for once use a word that belongs to Germanic, not Hellenic, thought and speech—whatever is deemed honourable or dishonourable, the feeling for one’s own honour is to decide; and this will not fall silent when passion violates the duties of the ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός, perhaps even when a higher duty demands the violation. A tension between the right prescribed by the civic community and the individual’s sense of right always exists; and this sense is and remains different in different social circles, especially since the pernicious fiction according to which all men are supposed to be equal may indeed be acknowledged by a lawbook, but nature mocks it, and the eternal and divine moral law is eternal and divine precisely because it is no such lawbook.

For this divine law to be recognised, the great step had to be taken that Αἰδώς and Νέμεσις became gods; and they became so only when men became conscious that these powers demanded obedience from them. When they made the κρείττονες into gods, they were not yet so far advanced; hence these gods are not bound by morality, and this too belongs to their “light living.” Hence—especially as they appear in myth—they could not endure that observance of the moral law should be demanded of them, and therefore they increasingly withdrew from religion into mythology.

1. τὴν Ἀφροδίτην χὰν κατατοξεύσαιμι, εἰ λάβοιμι, in Clement (Strom. II 485 P.).↩

2. I once read that on Ceos a holy Artemitos was invoked as a helper in childbirth, whom one can scarcely separate from Artemis. This sounds very questionable.↩

3. If, in the well-known image from the Paris Psalter, a bucolic David suggests the supposition that an illustration to Theocritus underlies it, then the Muse has been stripped of paganism by the accompanying inscription μελωδία.↩

4. From the association with Creuzer sprang the magnificent Urworte. Orphisch; their magnificence, however, is wholly Goethean and least of all Orphic.↩

5. Briefe an Welcker, p. 72.↩

6. Archiv für Religionsgeschichte VII.↩

7. F. W. Otto, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft XII, p. 33.↩

8. Gorgias 524, where behind the myth it is said ἀχηχοὼς πιστεύω ἀληθῆ εἶναι; Republic 534; likewise Laws 966d: δύ' ἐστὸν τὼ περὶ θεῶν ἄγοντε εἰς πίστιν.↩

9. Aeschylus characterises the seer Amphiaraus (Seven 610) as a perfect man, σώφρων δίκαιος ἀγαθός (i.e. ἀνδρεῖος), εὐσεβὴς ἀνήρ. He thus possesses the four Platonic cardinal virtues. I once described the verse as an interpolation, but must confess that I have been refuted. The use of ἀγαθός alone ought to have instructed me.↩

10. 10. At Odyssey γ 412 οὐκ ὁσίη is said of an action that is unpious according to moral feeling. A man can be ὅσιος, like Admetus—whence Apollo came to him and, as a reward, rescued him from early death (Eurip. Alcestis 10). Conversely, a place can be ὅσιος because something is permitted there, ὅσιον, which would be ἀνόσιον on holy ground, in a ἱερόν—for example, giving birth (Aristoph. Lysistr. 743). Viewed from another side, the same place is βέβηλος. This word (βάβαλος in Cyrene) also designates persons who are “profane,” i.e. uninitiated and therefore excluded from the relevant ἱερά. There is no reproach in this. The concept of the “heretic” is unknown to Hellenic thought and language; it would have to say ἄθεοι or ἀνόσιοι. Euripides, Bacchae 370, introduces an Ὅσια who is to punish the ἀνόσιος ὕβρις of Pentheus. Here she is downright true religiosity, which destroys the obdurate unbeliever. The Hymn to Hermes uses the word in a peculiar way. At 470 Zeus loves Apollo ἐκ πάσης ὁσίης and gives him gifts and honours. At 130 Hermes wishes to eat of the slaughtered cattle, ὁσίης κρέαων ἠράσσατο. At 173 Hermes boasts ὁσίῃς ἐπιβήσομαι ἧσπερ Ἀπόλλων. Here it clearly denotes the dignity of the ὅσιος, in which purity can scarcely lie; rather a heightened τιμή is meant, and with this one can probably manage the other passages as well. Hermes wishes, like the elder gods, to receive sacrificial meat—their prerogative—and similarly at 470. Yet everything remains strange, and the silence of the commentators no less so.↩

11. The Skeptics define, following the Euthyphro, ἐπιστήμη θεῶν θεραπείας (Sextus, Adv. phys. I 123). That in practice, κατὰ τὰ πάτρια ἔθη καὶ τοὺς νόμους, they do not deny the existence of the gods and observe εὐσέβεια, Sextus prefaces to the skeptical treatment of εἰ εἰσὶ θεοί.↩

12. Unlike the botanical writings, it is carefully styled, thus intended for a wider educated public, and alone gives us an idea of his pleasing style.↩

13. Metaphysics A 8, at the end. There Aristotle says that the truth once recognised has degenerated πρὸς τὴν πεὶθω τῶν πολλῶν καὶ πρὸς τὴν εἰς τοὺς νόμους καὶ τὸ συμφέρον χρῆσιν—roughly the later, familiar critique of popular religion. Of εὐσέβεια he no longer speaks at all in the Ethics. Earlier he had derived knowledge of the gods roughly as Plato does in the Laws, ἀπὸ τῶν μετεώρων καὶ τῶν περὶ τῆν ψυχὴν συμβάντων. In life he adhered to εὐσέβειαι, as the Delphic dedication to Hermias and his testament show. Of Plato we know nothing of this kind; but there is no doubt that he behaved in this respect like Socrates. The Academy had a cult of the Muses—probably also of the Hero; of the Peripatos too we know of festivals of the Muses.↩

14. On δαίμων, whose treatment one might expect here, I cannot yet enter for a long time. He has no cult, and his significance can appropriately be elucidated only after the Homeric world of the gods.↩

15. The disposition from which Euripides lets his Helen speak is in fact quite different. In the fact that she now knows that Menelaus is truly her husband (hence the infinitive of the present) there lies the revelation of a divine power, for only such a power could have effected the miracle. Thus there really are gods. The same is implied as in the confession in the Hiketides 732 after the liberation of the corpses: νῦν θεοὺς νομίζω. “What we could no longer hope for has been fulfilled: yes, a just god lives.” A believing Christian might well speak similarly; but for him it is the confirmation of his faith, whereas in Euripides it is the joyful refutation of doubt. Very characteristic is the fact that Laertes, when Odysseus reports his victory to him, can say, “There are still gods on Olympus, if the suitors have truly paid the penalty” (ω 351)—already very Euripidean; in the Iliad such a thing would be unthinkable. A good illustration of what people lump together as “Homeric.”↩

16. Καρίνη in Stobaeus III 32, 11. πᾶν for νῦν is supplied by Cobet from another recension.↩

17. Metonymy is by no means very frequent. Something like the allegedly Homeric verse γρυνοὶ μὲν δαίοντο, μέγας δ’ Ἥφαιστος ἀνεστή (Schol. Lycophr. 86) sounds strange to us, whereas Vulcanum naribus efflant (Ovid, Met. VII 104) strikes us as entirely natural. A dithyrambic poet had said σπινθῆρες Ἡφαίστου σταλαγμοί, which was felt to be bold (Philodem., Rhet. I 179); far bolder still is the expression Ἡφαίστου κόνες for sparks, which a tragedian will have ventured (taken up by comedians—Alexis Μιλησίαι, Eubulus Ὀρθάννηι). But there the god is indeed the lord of fire, not the fire itself. ↩

18. I cannot believe that in ὕει νίφει there lies an unexpressed god; if the hidden subject is to be named, it is ὑετός—and the rain, it raineth every day. ↩

19. One would have to know the context in order to understand how it could mean μιαρός in Cratinus (Bekker, Anecdota 337). ↩

20. Herodorus, whom Apollonius knew, eliminated the miracle and had the altar founded because the Argonauts had landed at dawn. He evidently regarded Apollo as the sun, which showed them the land.↩

21. Euripides (Iphigenia Taurica 270) has the Scythian herdsman suppose that the two Hellenic youths are sea-gods. This serves him to characterise the barbarian, who still harbours such childish notions. Thoas is therefore easily deceived by Iphigenia; he takes it seriously that the cult-image has been defiled and must be washed. Among the spectators there were many who thought quite like the Scythians, and the washing of the image was familiar to them from the Plynteria.↩

22. This is indeed a scene that already presupposes a degeneration of the intercourse between gods and men, as frequently occurs in the later parts of the Odyssey. There is scarcely any belief left behind the poet’s invention. Later the poet of the Rhesus ventured the extreme: Athena speaks to the Greeks in her own person, to Aeneas as Aphrodite. Since it is night, the characters hear only her voice, but the spectators see the goddess. Whoever ascribes such a thing to Euripides and to the fifth century thereby confesses that he is as unreceptive to belief as to the stylisation of ancient tragedy.↩

23. Aristophanes, Wasps 1086.↩

24. The form is attested by Theognostus (26 Cramer) alongside Ἀζάν (which is of course the correct reading). In Stephanus the same form appears under Λυκαονία, but the passage is defective and cannot be referred to the Asians. If, however, it appears among the Ethnika, it is not a secondary form of the heroic name Λύκαων.↩

25. In the Sicilian Arethusa the fish are spared, because their presence appears miraculous. The dogs and snakes of Asclepius are servants of the present god, who himself comes to his branch-sanctuaries in the form of a serpent. This is a revival of a belief that has been overcome; in such cases it is always distorted.↩

26. Porphyry on the Iliad Σ 42 (Schrader): Άριστοφάνης … λέγει δὲ Ὅμηρος τοῖς πάθεσι καὶ τοῖς δι’ αὐτῶν ἀποτελουμένοις πράγμασιν ὁμωνύμους τινὰς ἐφισιαῖ δαίμονας εἰδωλοποιουμένους μυθικῶς, ἐφ’ ὧν καὶ τὸ ἀποτελοῦν ἤγουν παρασκευαστικὸν νοεῖται καὶ τὸ ἀποτελούν ἐναργῶς. ↩

27. Ernst Samter, whom I held in high esteem both as a scholar and as a man, made extensive use of evil spirits. How he came to do so has become clear to me through the very readable book by Lidzbarski, Auf rauhen Wegen. From the experiences of his youth he describes Jewish religion as it existed in Płock: alongside rabbinical theological casuistry there prevailed in practice a childish fear of demons. The God whose name may not be pronounced is remote. Evil spirits lurk everywhere and at all times, and man is their slave. It is evident that Samter had experienced something similar—or, if not experienced it himself, at least come into close contact with it. ↩

28. Individual gods possess attributes endowed with magical power: Zeus the Aegis, which will originally have been a goatskin; he passes it on to other gods, so that in the end it becomes merely an ornament of Athena. Aphrodite has her κεστός, Hermes his staff. At most the Aegis is more than a poet’s invention. There is outright magic in the πολέμοιο τέρας that Eris holds in her hands (Α 4); the Gorgon’s head and Phobos are things of this kind, and because men bear them on their shields, Athena comes to possess it as well. ↩

29. In Athens the priest called out τίς τῆιδε; and the congregation answered πολλοὶ κἀγαθοί (Aristoph. Peace 968 with schol.). In this the state of ritual purity is attested.↩

30. Antiphon VI 4—an especially important passage for ancient religiosity.↩

31. Horkos himself runs after the verdict of the unjust—i.e. perjured—judge (Hesiod, Erga 219). In the author of the Hēmerai 803 it is already the Erinyes who carry out the vengeance (ὅρκον τινυμένας can alone be the genuine reading, even if the variant γινόμενον is more widespread and was read by Vergil, Georg. I 278). Achilles in Iliad Α 234 calls no gods at all as witnesses, but says ναὶ μὰ τόδε σκῆπτρον and concludes ὃ δέ τοι μέγας ἔσσεται ὅρκος. By this he does not make the staff into a god or into a symbol of a god. One need only listen carefully to what he says of the staff: that it will not put forth shoots again, but that it is now in the hands of those to whom Zeus has entrusted the θέμιστες; just as surely as the staff will never grow green again, so surely will Agamemnon one day long for the help of Achilles. Not even Zeus is conceived as the avenger; Achilles speaks the irrevocability of his resolve, and the consequence that follows from it is equally irrevocable. In Aristophanes, Lysistrata 203, before the swearing of the oath, the one who administers it invokes, alongside the Πείθω, the κύλιξ φιλοτησία, from which the swearers are to drink together. Is the cup to become an “instant-god” there? The φιλία that exists within the community is also meant to ensure that they keep the oath: it is godlike just as much as Πειθώ, the power of persuasion by reasons which have led to the communal decision.↩

32. The Roman foedus likewise includes self-imprecation (Livy I 24; Mommsen, Staatsrecht I, p. 252). ↩

33. Hesychius s.v. ἐνδένδρος; IG XII 5, 1027, with the regulation μέλιτι σπένδεται. The tree will have been an oak, and the god who liked to dwell in it was lord of a grove and received offerings from the honey that the sacred bees prepared in hollow oak trunks.↩

34. If belief in a Dryas inhabiting every tree had been taken in earnest, men could never have felled wood. Hence only a single tree or a grove is consecrated—and even then preferably to a great god.↩

35. The expression is convenient; but for the Negroes the fetish did not signify the god—the god was actually present in the object. In this way many things in cult and in profane usage become symbols. Both the king’s sceptre and the general’s staff go back to the stick, the support (σκῆπτρον) of the worthy man, already borne in Homer by the prince, and also by the speaker in the popular—properly speaking, the army—assembly. Yet Odysseus uses his staff against Thersites in the same way as the Spartan officer in occupied Athens, who in turn corresponds to the centurion, marked by his virga. This, again, can lead back to the rod of Hermes, to the magic wand. All this is remarkable—the symbols on coins and coats of arms; the wreathing as a sign first of consecration, then of office in Athens; everything that may be called uniform, which at the outset distinguished those dressed alike from the mass, and by special insignia marked differences within the uniformed. Much of this concerns cult and its participants, but none of it belongs to religion itself. ↩

36. Hence the arrangements of the annual festivals of the ecclesiastical year give, as it were, an impression of arbitrariness; they are therefore important for the individual city, but unproductive for religion as a whole. ↩

37. In the few genealogies that extend further back, the names are indeed not repeated—not even in those of the heroes. The custom of name-giving may therefore have changed. ↩

38. The Philaids of Athens continued to name themselves after a presumably historical ancestor, Philaeus, even after they had made him a son of Ajax—a step that could in fact only be taken once Athens, together with Salamis, had annexed Ajax son of Telamon. ↩

39. Such explanations were not called myths—although myths are often presupposed by them—but one spoke instead of a ἱερὸς λόγος. Pausanias is full of such aitia, almost always worthless, yet treated by him in all seriousness. Much of this may be quite late. But already the Attic exegetes—the Atthidographers—produce no small amount of material of this kind, also by drawing on heroic legend (for example in connection with the homicide courts). Religion itself is not concerned with this. Hesiod already introduces into the Prometheus story of the Theogony an invention whose only value lies in the fact that it shows that even then people took offence at the division of the sacrificial animal between gods and men.↩

40. μάντις seems not to admit of an explanation. μηνύειν would fit, if grammar allowed it. μαίνεσθαι does not suit Hellenic seers at all, but it does suit the Asiatic Sibyl and the φοιβόληπτοι—that is, the women possessed by the spirit of the foreign god: the Pythia and Cassandra.↩

41. The Iamids at Olympia had the oracles in their hands (Pindar, Olymp. 8.1), but they did not thereby attain any far-reaching influence. Individual figures who became itinerant seers succeeded better. Only the gods who were invoked in order to lend Olympia—never authoritative for the general religion—a higher dignity, Kronos, Heracles, the Dactyls, reveal that theologians were at work there early on with their ἱεροὶ λόγοι.↩

42. The skalds are comparable; but the singer does not have the task of spreading the fame of his patron. He does not serve the present. ↩

43. Adonis must die and rise again; this foreign god never became one who intervened in human life. In him the Hellenes perceived only the symbolism of the annual life of nature and the tragedy that “even what is beautiful must die,” and his festival always remained alien. In Asia the orgies of the Mother of the Gods with Attis had a quite different religious significance. The Anodos of Kore is comparable; but there the creation of the myth is also local—hence the work of a particular place, and unmistakably so. ↩