Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/380

 *structive philosophy, lived and moved and had their being, was not dogmatic; the very priests were guardians and exponents of ceremonies rather than preachers of doctrine; there was no organised hierarchy committed to one set creed and prepared to assert the divine revelation of a single formulated answer to these questions. The sum total of orthodoxy amounted to little more than a belief in gods; and each man was free to believe what he would, evil as well as good, concerning them, and to find for himself hope or despair. In determining therefore the views to which the mass of the common-folk inclined with regard to the relations of soul and body, little assistance can be obtained in the first instance from those personal opinions which literature has preserved to us, opinions emanating from poets and philosophers who were not of the people but consciously above them, and who set themselves some to expose, others to reform, the popular religion, but few simply to maintain it. The conservative force of the ancient religion lay in the inherited and almost instinctive beliefs of the common-folk; oral tradition weighed more with them than philosophic reasoning, and their tenacity of customs as barbarous even as human sacrifice defied the softening influences of an humaner civilisation.

That these characteristics of the ancient Greek folk are stamped equally upon the people of to-day is a fact which every page of this book has confirmed; and it is therefore by analysis of modern beliefs and customs relative to death that I propose to discover the fundamental ideas held by the Greek people from the beginning concerning the relations between soul and body. For I venture to think that the great teachers of antiquity, whose doctrines dominate ancient literature, were often more widely removed by their genius, than are the modern folk by the lapse of centuries, from the peasants of those early days, and that the oral tradition of a people who have instinctively clung to every ancient belief and custom is even after more than two thousand years a safer guide than the contemporary writings of men who deliberately discarded or arbitrarily modified tradition in favour of the results of their own personal speculations. First then the peasants of modern Greece must furnish our clue to the popular beliefs of antiquity; afterwards we may profitably consider the use and handling of those beliefs in ancient literature.