Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/579

 whereby men in their daily life sought to maintain communication with the powers above them—oracles from which all might enquire and win inspired response; interpretation of the flight and cries of birds that were the messengers of heaven; reading of the signs written by the finger of some god on the flesh of the victim presented to him; divination from sight and sound and dream; sacrifice whereby some message of prayer might be sent with speed and safety to the god who had power to fulfil it. And in general it will, I think, be admitted that the main tendency of Greek religious thought was to draw gods and men nearer together, alike by an anthropomorphic conception of the gods and by an apotheosis of human beauty; that it was to subserve this end that Art became the handmaid of Religion, and strove to express the divine in terms of the human, to discover in man the potentialities of godhead. All religious hope and ambition and effort turned upon communion with the gods. How then in the next world should hope be fulfilled, ambition satisfied, effort rewarded? What should be the glorious consummation? Marriage was the closest communion between mortals in this world; marriage, so sang the poets, bound gods together in closest communion. Men's aspirations for communion with their gods could find no final satisfaction save in marriage. To the few, we may suppose—men of refined and reflective mind, capable of imagining spiritual joys—this marriage of men and gods was but a mystic, figurative expression for the union of man's soul with the soul of God, a thought as chastened and innocent of all sensuous connotation as the thought of many a woman who in a later era, withdrawn from the world, has comforted her loneliness with the hope of being the bride of Christ. But the many, I suspect, flinched not before a bold and literal interpretation of the thought, and, believing that, when death and physical dissolution were past, body as well as soul survived in another world, dared dream that having passed the gates of mortality into the demesne of the immortals they should be wedded, body and soul, in true wedlock with those deities who by veiled communion with them in this world had prepared them for sight and touch and full fruition hereafter.

But, it will be asked, where in all Greek literature can we find a statement, where even a hint, of this strange doctrine? No