Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/361

 If tragedy consists in the conflict of deep emotions, and religion in obeying the divine rather than the human, few deeds have been more tragic, none more religious than this. In that scene at Aulis when the warrior-king gave up his child at the prophet's bidding to stay the wrath of Artemis against his host, the tragedy was indeed intensified by the strength of the human tie between the sacrificer and the victim; but blind and awe-struck submission to a prophet's decree is less grandly religious than clear-sighted recognition and courageous application of the belief that the dead pass immediately into the very presence of the gods. Here are the two given conditions: first, the urgency of the present or the peril of the future requires that a request for help be safely conveyed at all costs to that god or saint in whose province the control of the danger lies; secondly, the safest way of sending a message to that god or saint is by the mouth of a human messenger whose road is over the pass of death. There is only one solution of that problem. And if it is true that only some eighty years ago the problem was solved at so cruel a cost, then the faith of this people in their communion with those on whose knees the future lies is more intense, more vital, more courageous than that of more Western nations whose religion has long been subordinated or at least allied to morality, and whose acts of worship are all well-regulated and eminently decorous.

Human sacrifice is known to have been practised in ancient Greece and the custom probably continued well into the Christian era. What was the motive which prompted the continuance of so cruel a rite? Was it the same as that which the old peasant of Santorini assigned for the performance of a like act in his own experience—that conception of the victim as a messenger with which he can have been familiar only from native and oral tradition? Assuredly some strong religious motive must have compelled the ancients to a rite which in the absence of such motive would have been an indelible stigma upon their civilisation, refuting all their claims to emancipation of thought and freedom of intellect, and branding them the very bond-slaves of grossest superstition. Even though they lived on the marches of the East where human life is of small account, the horror of the rite is in too vivid a contrast with Hellenic enlightenment for us to see in it a mere callous retention of an unmeaning and savage custom;