Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/22

 It is obvious that in point of simplicity and consistency the monotheistic system must prove superior. As the worshipper's intellectual and spiritual capacities develop, he discards the older and cruder notions in favour of a more enlightened ideal. Abraham's crude conception of the deity as a being to whom even human sacrifice would be acceptable was necessarily rejected by an humaner age to whom was delivered the message 'I will have mercy and not sacrifice.' In the growth of Greek polytheism, on the contrary, the new did not supersede the old, but was superimposed upon it. Fresh conceptions were expressed by the creation or acceptance of fresh gods, but the venerable embodiments of more primitive beliefs were not necessarily displaced by them. The development of humaner ideas in one cult was no bar to the retention of barbarous rites by another. The same deity under different titles of invocation ([Greek: epônymiai]) was invested with different and even conflicting characters: and reversely the same religious idea found several expressions in the cults of widely different deities. The forms of worship, viewed in the mass, were of an inconsistent and chaotic complexity. Human sacrifice, we may be sure, was a thing abhorrent to the majority of the cults of Zeus: yet Lycaean Zeus continued to exact his toll of human life down to the time of Pausanias. The worship of Dionysus embodied something of the same religious spirit which pervaded the teachings of Orpheus and the mysteries of Demeter, and came to be closely allied with them: yet neither the austerity of Orphism nor the real spirituality of the Eleusinian cult succeeded in mitigating the wild orgies of the Bacchant or in repressing the savage rite of omophagia in which drunken fanatics tore a bull to pieces with their teeth. Aphrodite was worshipped under two incompatible titles: in the rôle of the 'Heavenly' ([Greek: ourania]), says Artemidorus, she looks favourably upon marriage and childbirth and the home life, while under her title of 'Popular' ([Greek: pandêmos]) she is hostile to the matron, and patroness of laxer ties. It is needless to multiply illustrations. The forms in which the religious spirit of Greece found embodiment are beyond question confused and mutually inconsistent. The same religious idea might be expressed in so great a variety of rites, and the same divine personality might be associated with so great a