Outline-history of Greek religionFarnell, Lewis Richard
Religion
Outline-history of Greek religion
Farnell, Lewis Richard
Greece -- Religion
Those functional ‘daimones’ mentioned above tend to leave the
amorphous twilight of religious perception, in which the Roman
‘Indigitamenta’ remained, and to be attracted into the stronger life
of personal theism. ‘Kourotrophos,’ once perhaps only a vague
functional power that nurtured children, becomes identified with
Artemis or Ge;[62.1] ‘Χλόη,’ ‘Divine verdure,’ when the cult was
introduced from the Marathonian Tetrapolis to the Akropolis of
Athens--if this indeed is a true account of its career, could only
maintain herself as Demeter Χλόη.[62.2]
Again the name Ἥρως comes to be applied to even the most shadowy of
these functional powers, to Μυίαγρος, the Fly-chaser, the most limited
and momentary of them all, to Eunostos, the daimon of good harvest,
about whom a very human tale is told, and to call them ‘Heroes’
implies that they were imagined as semi-divine men who once lived on
the earth. Even the most immaterial forces, some of those which mark
mental phases or social conditions, such as Ἐρως Love, Φιλία
Friendship, Εἰρήνη Peace, became often for the religious imagination
personal individuals with human relationships;[62.3] thus Eirene {63}
emerges almost as a real goddess with the traits of Demeter, Φιλία on
a relief in the Jacobsen Collection is individualised as the mother of
Zeus Philios, in defiance of the traditional theogony.[63.1] Others
such as ‘Αἰδώς’ ‘Compassion’ remained in the borderland between
animating forces and personal deities.
But we observe in many cases that the name itself was an obstacle to
the emergence of a convincingly personal God or Goddess; and where
this is the case the personality never could play a leading part in
the advanced religion. Thus Ἑστία bore a name that denoted nothing
more than ‘the Hearth,’ considered as animate and holy; Greek
anthropomorphism did its utmost for her, but never or rarely succeeded
in establishing her as a fully formed personal goddess. The same
phenomenon is observable in regard to Ge, Helios and Selene; it was
easy to regard them as animate substances or powers and as such to
worship them; such worship they received throughout all periods of
Greek religion, but no direction of the moral, social and spiritual
progress of the race, for their names connoted so obviously substances
unlike and alien to man that they could not with conviction be
imagined as glorified men or women.[63.2] It was otherwise with such
names as Apollo, Hera, Athena, which could become as real and
individual as Miltiades or Themistokles; and it is these humanised
personalities that alone dominate the higher religion of Greece. The
spiritual career of Demeter only began when men forgot the original
meaning of her name and half forgot that she was {64} only Mother
Earth. The ‘Anemoi’ being mere ‘Winds,’ were scarcely fitted for civic
life; but Boreas, having a personal name, could become a citizen and
was actually worshipped as Πολίτης ‘the Citizen’ at Thourioi.[64.1] A
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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