Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/338

 unshaken. The fact seems to be that the custom of consulting entrails was not native to Greece. In Homeric times the liver was not dissected in search of omens, and such observations as were made were directed to the brightness of the flame and the ascent of the smoke from burnt offerings and not to any malformation or discoloration of the victim's inward parts. All that could be learnt was whether the sacrifice, and therefore also the prayers accompanying it, were accepted or rejected. The complexities of post-Homeric divination from burnt sacrifice and the whole system of inspecting the entrails seem to have been a foreign importation. Whether the source was Etruscan, Carian, Cyprian, Babylonian, or Egyptian, does not here concern us ; the practices were in origin foreign to Greece, and the ancients, in referring the invention of them to Delphus, son of Poseidon, to Prometheus, to Sisyphus, or to Orpheus, were guilty not only of sheer fabrication but of manifest anachronism. Homer convicts them.

It is then the foreign origin of these methods of divination which explains the attitude of the ancient Greeks towards them. It was a practice, not a theory—a custom, not an idea—a conglomeration of usages, not a coherent and reasoned system—which was introduced from abroad. The Greeks accepted it readily as furnishing them with one more means to that communion with their gods which to them was a spiritual necessity. The principle of the machinery employed was unknown to them; but what matter? Its operation was commended by the experience of others and soon tested by their own. The unknown principle long continued to excite interest, conjecture, speculation, among the educated and enlightened, but their failures to reach any final and unanimous conclusion never moved them to dispute the tested fact. And if this was the attitude of the educated, the common-*folk of those days must surely have been in the same position as the people of to-day—gladly accepting the usage and avowedly ignorant of the principle. Such blind acquiescence during so many centuries may seem indeed a disparagement of the Greeks' intelligence; but it is equally a testimonial to their religious faith;