Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/510

 the old theory that cremation was adopted by the Greeks as a convenient substitute for inhumation during some period of migration or nomadic life, and Rohde's more recent theory that fear of the spirits of the dead, which were believed to hover about graves where their bodies lay buried, led men to adopt cremation as a means of annihilating the body and thereby ridding themselves of the unwelcome spirit. Both those theories fail, apart from certain intrinsic defects, because they are attempts to explain a thing which never took place—a supposed substitution of cremation for inhumation between the Mycenaean and the Homeric ages. Professor Ridgeway has shown that the Mycenaean rite was that of the Pelasgians; the Homeric rite that of the Achaeans. It is an accident only that our earliest information respecting the two rites happens to be drawn from different periods of time; the real distinction between the two was a racial distinction; from the age when the Achaeans first entered Greece down to the Christian era cremation and inhumation were both continuously practised.

The positive evidence for my view that these two rites were mere racial survivals, which had already, in the earliest ages known to us, ceased to differ in religious import, is to be found not only in the fact that in historical times, or even earlier, the two rites were used side by side by the people of a single city in the same cemetery, but in an early tendency to fuse the two rites into one and to give to the same body the double treatment of cremation and inhumation combined; for clearly the only condition under which two such rites could be amalgamated must have been that there had ceased to be any conflict of religious significance between them.

How early this fusion began it is difficult to determine; but it is at least worth while to note a point which is apt to be overlooked, that the Homeric funeral-rite comprised inhumation. Cremation certainly was the main part of the rite, the actual means by which the corpse was disintegrated; but the funeral was not complete until the ashes had been collected and inhumed. This is an act of ceremonial inhumation just as much as the burial of an effigy dressed in a dead man's clothes.