In all this we see the reflection of a pantheistic feeling that links
the living world and the personal divine power in a mystic sympathy.
Now the idea of divinity immanent in living nature is inconsistent
with a severely defined anthropomorphic religion; hence we scarcely
find it in the earlier religion of Hellas. Zeus is called the father
of men and gods, but in a reverential rather than in any literal
creative sense: nor is there found any trace of the idea that divine
power is immanent in the life or soul of man, till we come to the
later period of philosophic speculation and Orphism. Only here and
there behind the anthropomorphism we discern in Hellenic myth or cult
the vaguer thought of diffused and immanent divinity; this reveals
itself more than once in the myth and cult of Demeter, whose anger and
sorrow at the loss of her daughter causes a sympathetic disappearance
of the crops and the fruits of the earth; and it is embodied in the
Attic cult on the Akropolis of Demeter Χλόη,[161.2] which title
expresses the immanence in the verdure of {162} the life-giving
potency of the goddess. The ancient folklore of Greece, and a few
cult-records of the primitive village-communities, reveal figures that
recall faintly the lineaments of Tammuz, Eunostos of Tanagra, Skephros
of Tegea, who may belong, as Linos certainly did, to that group of
heroes of crop and harvest, who die and are bewailed in the fall of
the year, and whose life is sympathetically linked with the life of
the earth. But we find this type of personage in other parts of
Europe, and there is every reason for believing that the western
shores of the Mediterranean had not been touched by the Tammuz-myth
and service in the second millennium B.C.
The evidence then suggests that the pregnant idea of the godhead as
the source of life was more prominent and more articulate in
Babylonian than in Hellenic religion.
CHAPTER IX.
Purity a Divine Attribute.
{163}
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