Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/662

 648 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Taken as a whole, Homeric religion is distinctly that. First of all, it is animistic: the Homeric idea of the soul is the stock idea of primitive peoples, and is rationalized very little, if at all. The psyche is the inessential double of the individual — man, animal, or inanimate thing — closely connected with the breath, capable, before its crossing of the restraining stream, of appear- ing to the living in dreams, and so on. Fire, water, and the dog discharge their common function as ghost-restrainers. In many respects the Homeric ideas of the soul would be capable of align- ment with those of the Central Africans or the Malays.^ Further, the Homeric gods are clearly, and not seldom crassly, anthropo- morphic; prayers are oral bargains and sacrifices their consum- mation; cult-operations are heavy and exacting; mortuary cere- monies are performed with the scrupulous primitive attention to detail; dreams and the phenomena of nature are invested with deep prophetic portent; such prophecy is normally implicitly relied upon ; oaths, ordeals, fetishes,^ and the rest are in constant and serious evidence.

I hasten to add, parenthetically, that, in my opinion, very little of the religious system is not indigenous. There are certain striking likenesses, as, for instance, in the pseudo-knowledge about the form and construction of the universe, that point to Assyrian or Egyptian borrowings ; but beyond these, the contrasts presented are generally far more striking than the similarities; and where there are likenesses, it is very much more simple to refer them to parallelism than to acculturation. Practically the only agency of acculturation in those days was the Phoenicians ; and while they were very eager, as befits a merchant-people, to disperse the products of the industrial arts — and the results of

•Cf. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, § 201.

are no fetishes in Homer, seems to me an example of the neglect on the part of classicists to acquaint themselves with the ordinary usage of a special science. I do not see how anyone can read Spencer, let alone Lippert, and still deny the existence of fetishes in Homer. There may be none in the old Portuguese sense. of the word ; but if an oak tree which was consulted to discover the will of a god is not a fetish in the scientific sense of that term, then the whole modern conception must be challenged.
 * Seymour's statement {Life in the Homeric Age, pp. 40, 302) that there