Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/1004

Rh incarnating the God, may be well applied to the Athamantid sacrifice and to that of King Lycaon; for he derives his name from the divinity himself, and according to one version he offers his own child; and the Lycaonid legend presents one almost unique feature, which is only found elsewhere in legendary Dionysiac sacrifice, the human flesh is eaten, and the sacrifice is a cannibalistic-sacrament, of which the old Mexican religion offers conspicuous example. Yet it is in this religion of Zeus that we see most clearly the achievement of progressive morality; Zeus himself punishes and abolishes the savage practice; the story related by Plutarch, how a kid was substituted miraculously for Helen when she was led to the altar to be offered, is a remarkably close parallel to the biblical legend of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac.

We can now consider the special attributes of the anthropomorphic God. His character and power as a deity of the sky, who ruled the phenomena of the air, so clearly expressed in Homer, explains the greater part of his cult and cult-titles. More personal than Ouranos and Helios—with whom he has only slight associations—he was worshipped and invoked as the deity of the bright day , whosends the rain, the wind and dew, and such a primitive adjective as, applied to things “that fall from heaven,” attests the primeval significance of the name of Zeus. But the thunder was his most striking manifestation, and no doubt he was primevally a thunder-God,, , . These cult-titles had originally the force of magic invocation, and much of his ritual was weather-magic: the priest of Zeus, in time of drought, was wont to ascend Mount Lycaeum and dip an oak-bough in a sacred fountain, and by this sympathetic means produce mist. A god of this character would naturally be worshipped on the mountain-tops, and that these were very frequently consecrated to him is shown by the large number of appellatives derived from the names of mountains. But probably in his earliest Hellenic period the power of Zeus in the natural world was not limited to the sky. A deity who sent the fertilizing rains would come to be regarded as a god of vegetation, who descended into the earth, and whose power worked in the life that wells forth from the earth in plant and tree. Also the close special association of the European Thunder-God and the oak-tree has recently been exposed. Homer calls the God of the lower world, and the title of Zeus which was known to Hesiod, occurred in the worship of Corinth; and there is reason to believe that Eubouleus of Eleusis and Trophonius of Lebadeia are faded forms of the nether Zeus; in the Phrygian religion of Zeus, which no doubt contains primitive Aryan elements, we find the Thunder-God associated also with the nether powers.

A glimpse into a very old stratum of Hellenic religion is afforded us by the records of Dodona. A Dodonean liturgy has been preserved which, though framed in the form of an invocation and a dogma, has the force of a spell-prayer—“Zeus was and is and will be, oh great Zeus: earth gives forth fruits, therefore call on Mother Earth.” Zeus the Sky-God is seen here allied to the Earth-Goddess, of whom his feminine counterpart, Dione, may have been the personal form. And it is at Dodona that his association with the oak is of the closest. His prophet-priests the Selloi “with unwashed feet, couching on the ground,” lived about the sacred oak, which may be regarded as the primeval shrine of the Aryan God, and interpreted its oracular voice, which spoke in the rustling of its leaves or the cooing of its doves. Achilles hails the Dodonean God as, either in the sense of “Thessalian” or

“primitive”; and Zeus, we may believe, long remained at Dodona such as he was when the Hellenic tribes first brought him down from the Balkans, a high God supreme in heaven and in earth.

We may also believe that in the earliest stages of worship he had already acquired a moral and a social character. The Homeric view of him as the All-Father is a high spiritual concept, but one of which many savage religions of our own time are capable. The family, the tribe, the city, the simpler and more complex organisms of the Hellenic polity, were specially under his care and direction. In spite of the popular stories of his amours and infidelities, he is the patron-God of the monogamic marriage, and his union with Hera remained the divine type of human wedlock. “Reverence Zeus, the Father-God”: “all fathers are sacred to Zeus, the Father-God, and all brothers to Zeus the God of the family”: these phrases of Aristophanes and Epictetus express the ideas that engendered his titles ,, , . In the Eumenides of Aeschylus the Erinyes are reproached in that by aiding Clytemnestra, who slew her husband, “they are dishonouring and bringing to naught the pledges of Zeus and Hera, the marriage-goddess”; and these were the divinities to whom sacrifice was offered before the wedding, and it may be that some kind of mimetic representation of the “Holy Marriage,” the, of Zeus and Hera formed a part of the Attic nuptial ceremonies. The “Holy Marriage” was celebrated in many parts of Greece, and certain details of the ritual suggest that it was of great antiquity; here and there it may have had the significance of vegetation-magic, like the marriage of the Lord and Lady of May; but generally it seems to have been only regarded as a divine counterpart to the human ceremony. Society may have at one time been matrilinear in the communities that become the historic Hellenes; but of this there is no trace in the worship of Zeus and Hera.

In fact, the whole of the family morality in Hellas centred in Zeus, whose altar in the courtyard was the bond of the kinsmen; and sins against the family, such as unnatural vice and the exposure of children, are sometimes spoken of as offences against the High God.

He was also the tutelary deity of the larger organization of the phratria; and the altar of Zeus was the meeting-point of the phrateres, when they were assembled to consider the legitimacy of the new applicants for admission into their circle.

His religion also came to assist the development of certain legal ideas, for instance, the rights of private or family property in land; he guarded the allotments as , and the Greek commandment “thou shall not remove thy neighbour's landmark” was maintained by Zeus, the god of boundaries, a more personal power than the Latin Jupiter Terminus.

His highest political functions were summed up in the title , a cult-name of legendary antiquity in Athens, and frequent in the Hellenic world.

His consort in his political life was not Hera, but his daughter Athena Polias. He sat in her judgment court where cases of involuntary homicide were tried. With her he shared the chapel in the Council-Hall of Athens dedicated to them under the titles of and, “the inspirers of counsel,” by which they were worshipped in many parts of