Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/545

 difficult to understand that the Pelasgians, conscious though they must have been that in religion they were as far in advance of the Achaeans as in material civilisation they were behind, should have early adopted the use of fire in the interests of the dead. But no matter which rite was employed, the ultimate effect was the same; the heavy, helpless corpse that had been laid upon the pyre or in the grave vanished, and nought but the bones remained. Whither then had it vanished? How had the visible become invisible? Surely by passing from this visible world to the world invisible. There is nothing to suggest that this disappearance meant to the Greeks annihilation; that word indeed had no counterpart in their speech; the strongest term of the Greek language by which one might attempt, and would still fail, to render the word 'annihilate,' would be [Greek: aphanizein] or [Greek: aistoun], 'to make unseen.' And on the other hand their conception of future happiness in another world is positive evidence that they believed dissolution to mean not annihilation, but the vanishing of the body to be re-united with the soul in the unseen world.

I am of course far from suggesting that these views which I have sketched formed a definite religious doctrine to which every Greek would have subscribed. No people have evinced greater liberty of thought on religious matters; no people have been less hampered by hierarchical limitations and the claims of authority; nowhere have wider divergences of religious opinion been tolerated; nowhere else have the advocates of material philosophies and of spiritual philosophies been brought into sharper contrast and yet held in equal repute. But it is not with the vagaries of individuals and the new departures of great thinkers that I am concerned; my purpose is simply to trace the general trend of thought as regards the relation of body and soul after death among the mass of the Greek people.

And in so doing I fully realise the danger of over-statement. Probably the mass of mankind in religious matters perform many acts without full consciousness of their motive; they instinctively follow tradition without enquiring into the meaning and the mutual relation of the customs with which they comply; and if ever they try to justify to their reason the acts to which instinct prompts them, they may be at a loss to form a consistent theory out of the several motives which they would assign to the