Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/360

 accepted with it; but if the story be discredited, the motive assigned has still a value. For even if the old man had deliberately invented the tale and claimed complicity in so ghastly a deed, whence could he have obtained that conception of human sacrifice which furnished the motive of the action? It is inconceivable that he should have evolved the idea from personal meditations on the subject of sacrifice. It is equally inconceivable that he could have obtained it from any literary source; for he could not read, and the only book of which he could have had any knowledge would have been the Bible, to which this view of sacrifice is unknown. The only source from which he could have received the idea is native and oral tradition.

So distinct an expression of the idea is naturally rare, because human sacrifice is not an every-day topic of conversation among peasantry; but such a theory of sacrifice is perfectly harmonious with that chord of Greek religion of which several notes have already been struck. To obey dreams, to enquire of oracles, to observe birds, to hear omens in chance words, to read divine messages in the flesh of sacrificial victims, to make presents to the powers above for the purpose of securing blessings or averting wrath—these are the ways of a people from whose mind the primitive belief in close contact and converse with their gods has not been expelled by the invasion of education; whose religion has not paid the price of ennobling its conceptions and elevating its ideals by making the worshipper feel too acutely his debasement and his distance from the godhead; whose instinctive judgement divides the domain of faith from the domain of reason, and accepts poetical beauty rather than logical probability as the evidence of things unseen. True indeed it is that of all the practices by which this people's belief in intercourse with their gods is attested none is so remarkable as acquiescence or complicity in murder prompted solely by the belief that the victim by passing the gates of death can carry a message in person to one in whose power the future lies. But all that is painful and gruesome in such a deed only accentuates the more the unflinching faith of a people who, not in blind devotion to custom nor in fear of a prophet's command, but intelligently and of piety prepense, could sacrifice a compatriot and co-religionist to ensure the safe carriage of their most urgent prayers.