Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative TheologyClarke, James Freeman
Islamic
Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology
Clarke, James Freeman
Christianity and other religions; Religions
The Doric race, the second great source of the Hellenic family, entered
Greece many hundreds of years after[221] the first great Pelasgic
migration had spread itself through Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. It
brought with it another class of gods and a different tone of worship.
Their principal deities were Apollo and Artemis, though with these they
also worshipped, as secondary deities, the Pelasgic gods whose homes they
had invaded. The chief difference between the Pelasgic and Dorian
conception of religion was, that with the first it was more emotional,
with the second more moral; the first was a mystic natural religion, the
second an intellectual human religion. Ottfried Müller[222] says that the
Dorian piety was strong, cheerful, and bright. They worshipped Daylight
and Moonlight, while the Pelasgians also reverenced Night, Darkness, and
Storm. Funeral solemnities and enthusiastic orgies did not suit the Dorian
character. The Spartans had no splendid processions like the Athenians,
but they prayed the gods "to give them what was honorable and good"; and
Zeus Ammon declared that the "calm solemnity of the prayers of the
Spartans was dearer to him than all the sacrifices of the Greeks."[223]
Two facts are to be noticed in connection with this primitive religion.
One is the local distribution of the different deities and modes of
worship through Greece. Every tribe had its own god and its own worship.
In one place it was Zeus and Gaia; in another, Zeus and Cybele; in a
third, Apollo and Artemis. At Samothrace prevailed the worship of the
Heaven and the Earth.[224] Dione was worshipped with Zeus at Dodona.[225]
The Ionians were devoted to Poseidôn, god of the sea. In Arcadia, Athênê
was worshipped as Tritonia. Hermês was adored on Mount Cyllene; Erôs, in
Boeotia; Pan, in Arcadia. These local deities long remained as secondary
gods, after the Pan-Hellenic worship of Olympus had overthrown their
supremacy. But one peculiarity of the Pre-Homeric religion was, that it
consisted in the adoration of different gods in different places. The
religion of Hellas, after Homer, was the worship of the twelve great
deities united on Mount Olympus.
The second fact to be observed in this early mythology is the change of
name and of character through which each deity proceeds. Zeus alone
retains the same name from the first.[226]
Among all Indo-European nations, the Heaven and the Earth were the two
primordial divinities. The Rig-Veda calls them "the two great parents of
the world." At Dodona, Samothrace, and Sparta they were worshipped
together. But while in India, Varuna, the Heavens, continued to be an
object of adoration in the Vedic or second period, in Greece it faded
early from the popular thought. This already shows the opposite genius of
the two nations. To the Hindoos the infinite was all important, to the
Greeks the finite. The former, therefore, retain the adoration of the
Heavens, the latter that of the Earth.
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