Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/509

 stead. Was the other rite, cremation, ever so reduced? Could the roar and crackle of the blazing pyre be ceremonially replaced by a small flame lighted in proximity to the dead body? Did the kindling of a fire, however incapable of consuming the dead body, constitute cremation in the same sense that a handful of earth, incapable of concealing the dead body, constituted interment? Prima facie there is nothing wild in the supposition; it is consistent with the Greek conception of the funeral-rite, which looked rather to the intention than to the act; the proven fact of ceremonial inhumation guarantees the likelihood of ceremonial cremation. I take it therefore as a working hypothesis, and base its subsequent claim to be accepted as a fact on its ability to explain consistently a long series of phenomena in Greek funeral usage.

My first proposition, that from the earliest ages of which we have cognisance cremation and inhumation have served the same religious end, would have had an initial obstacle to surmount but for Professor Ridgeway's work on the ethnology of early Greece. Diverse methods of disposing of the dead would at first sight, as I have said, suggest diverse conceptions of after-death existence. But Professor Ridgeway has shown conclusively, to my mind, that inhumation was the rite of the autochthonous Pelasgian people of Greece, and that cremation was introduced by the Achaean immigrants. Now it is improbable of course that these two peoples, when they first came into contact, held similar views concerning the hereafter. But the entry of the Achaean element was, according to all evidence, a long process of infiltration rather than a sudden invasion. The beginnings of it are conjecturally placed well back in the third millennium before Christ. There was ample time therefore, even before the later Mycenaean or the Homeric age, for differences of religious sentiment as between the two races to dwindle or to vanish, while the two rites of cremation and inhumation, with the inveteracy of all custom, still survived.

Thus there is no initial objection to the view that in any period known to us those who used cremation and those who used inhumation were animated by the same religious ideas; and at the same time I am relieved of the necessity of combating both