Five Stages of Greek Religion 🎧 By Gilbert Murray. FULL Audiobook

Five stages of Greek religion by Gilbert Murray preface to the Third Edition anyone who has been in Greece at Easter time especially among the more remote peasants must have been struck by the emotion of suspense and excitement with which they wait for the announcement Christos anest Christ is risen and the

Response althas anest he has really risen I have referred elsewhere to Mr Lawson’s old peasant woman who explained her anxiety if Christ does not rise tomorrow we shall have no Harvest this year modern Greek folklore page 573 we are evidently in the presence of an emotion and a fear which beneath its

Christian coloring and so to speak Transfiguration is in its Essence like most of man’s deepest emotions A Relic from a very remote pre-christian past Every Spring was to primitive man a time of terrible anxiety his store of food was near its end would the dead World revive or would

It not the old year was dead would the New Year the young King born aresh of sky and Earth come in the old kingk place and bring with him the new growth and the hope of life I hardly realized when writing the earlier editions of this book how Central how on the

Presentes this complex of ideas was an ancient Greek religion Addis Adonis Osiris dionisis and the rest of the year gods were not eccentric divagations in a religion whose proper worship was given to the immortal Olympians they are different names given in different circumstances to this one

Being who dies and is Born Again each year dies old and polluted with past deaths and sins and is reborn young and purified I have tried to trace this line of tradition in an article for the Journal of helenic studies for June 1951 and to show incidentally how many of the

Elements in the Christian tradition it has provided a especially those Elements which are utterly alien from Hebrew monotheism and must indeed have shocked every Orthodox Jew the best starting point is the conception of the series of Old Kings each when the due time comes dethroned and replaced by his son the

Young king with the help of the Queen Mother for Gaia or Earth the Eternal wife and mother of each in turn is always ready to renew herself the new vegetation God each year is born from the union of the sky God and the Earth mother or as in myth and Legend the

Figures become personified he is the son of a God and a mortal princess we all know the sequence of Kings in hessed first Uranus Sky King of the world and his wife Gaia Earth Uranus Reigns till he is dethroned by his son Kronos with the help of Gaia then Kronos

And Ria bir Reign till Kronos is dethroned by his son Zeus with the help of Ria then Zeus Reigns till but here the series stops since according to the Orthodox Olympian system Zeus is the Eternal King but there was another system underlying The Olympian and it is to that other system

That the year Kings belong the Olympians are definite persons they are Immortal they do not die and revive they are not beings who come and go in succession to one another in the other series are the Adis Adonis Osiris type of gods and especially dionisis whose name has been shown by kretchmer

To be simply the thian deos or dios naos Zeus young or Zeus the Sun and in the orphic tradition it is laid down that Zeus yields up his power to dionis and bids all the gods of the cosmos obey him the mother of dionis was semila a name

Which like Gaia and Ria means birth the series is not only continuous but infinite for on one side Uranus sky was himself the son of GA the the Eternal and on the other every year a Zeus was succeeded by a young Zeus the young king bearer of spring in the new summer is

The savior of the earth made cold and lifeless by winter and doomed to barness by all the pollutions of the past the Savior also of mankind from all kinds of evils and bringer of a new ion or age to the world innumerable different figures in Greek mythology are personifications

Of him from dionis and Heracles to the dioscuri and many Heroes of myth he Bears certain distinguishing marks he is always the son of a God and Immortal princess the mother is always persecuted a moer doosa and rescued by her son the son is always a savior very often a champion who saves

His people from enemies or Monsters but sometimes a Healer of the sick like Aus sometimes like dionis a priest or hierophant with a the thasos or band of worshippers sometimes a King’s son who is sacrificed to save his people and mystically identified with some sacrificial animal a lamb a young bull a

Horse or a fawn whose blood has Supernatural power sometimes again he is a Divine or miraculous babe for whose birth the whole world has been waiting who will bring his own age or Kingdom and make all things new his life is almost always threatened by a cruel King like Herod but he always

Escapes the popularity of the Divine babe is probably due to the very widespread worship of the Egyptian child God harpocrates Egyptian also is the virgin mother impregnated by the holy Puma or spirus of the god or sometimes by the laying on of his hand besides the ordinary death and Rebirth of the

Vegetation Year God the general conclusion to which these considerations Point has many parallels elsewhere our own religious idea as are subject to the same Tendencies as those of other civilizations men and women when converted to a new religion or instructed in some new and unaccustomed knowledge are extremely unwilling and

Sometimes absolutely unable to give up their old magical or religious practices and habits of thought when African Negroes are converted to Christianity and forbidden to practice their tribal magic they are apt to steal away into the depths of the forest and do secretly what they have always considered

Necessary to ensure a good harvest not to do so would be too great a risk when Goths were converted by battalions the change must have been more in names than in substance when Greeks of the Mediterranean were forbidden to say prayers to a figure of Helios the son it

Was not difficult to call him the prophet Elias and go on with the same prayers and hopes not difficult to continue your prayers to the age-old mother goddess of all Mediterranean peoples while calling her Mary the Mother of Christ UCB has studied the subject somewhat superficially in his

Preparao evangelica in which he argued that much old Pagan belief was to be explained as an imperfect preparation for the full light of the gospel and it is certainly striking how the Anatolian peoples among whom the seed of the early church was chiefly sown could never in

Spite of Jewish monotheism give up the Beloved mother goddess for whom mankind craves or the Divine faithful son will by his own sacrifice save his people where scientific knowledge fails man cannot but be guided by his felt needs and longings and aspirations the elements in Christianity which derive from what Jews called the

Goam or nations Beyond The Pale seem to be far deeper and more numerous than those which come unchanged from Judaism even the Sabbath had to be changed and the birthday of Jesus conformed to that of the sun Judaism contributed a strong though not quite successful ful resistance to polytheism

And a purification of sexual morality it provided perhaps a general antiseptic which was often needed by the passionate gropings of helenistic religion in the stage which I call the failure of nerve GM September 1951 how do you find this book any thoughts about the book or the author any suggestion for

Improvement please take a moment to share your thoughts in a comment if you like it share it with your friends who might enjoy it as well subscribe to keep in touch visit complete audiobooks.com for more quality content preface to the second edition in revising the four stages of Greek

Religion I have found myself obliged to change its name I felt there was a gap in the story the high water mark of Greek religious thought seems to me to have come just between the Olympian religion and the failure of nerve and the decline if that is the right

Word which is observable in the later ages of antiquity is a decline not from Olympian ISM but from the great spiritual and intellectual effort of the 4th Century BC which culminated in the metaphysics and the diama and the foundation of the stoa and the garden consequently I have

Added a new chapter at this point and raised the number of stages to five my friend Mr E Jenner has kindly enabled me to correct two or three errors in the first edition and I owe special thanks to my old pupil Professor E dods for several interesting observations and

Criticisms on points connected with plotinus and celestius otherwise I have altered little I am only sorry to have left the book so long out of print GM preface to the first edition this small book has taken a long time in growing though the first two essays were

Only put in writing this year for a course of lectures which I had the honor of delivering at Columbia University in 1912 the third which was also used at Columbia had in its main features appeared in the Hibbert journal in 1910 the fourth in part in the English review in

1908 the translation of celestius was made in 1907 for use with a small class at Oxford much of the material is much older in conception and all has been reconsidered I must thank the editors of of both the above named periodicals for their kind permission to

Reprint I think it was the writings of my friend Mister Andrew Lang that first awoke me in my undergraduate days to the importance of anthropology in primitive religion to a Greek scholar certainly I began then to feel that the great works of the ancient Greek imagination are penetrated habitually by religious

Conceptions and postulates which literary Scholars like myself had not observed or understood in the meantime the situation has changed Greek religion is being studied right and left and has revealed itself as a surprisingly rich and attractive though somewhat controversial subject it used to be a deserted territory now it is at least a

Battleground if ever the present differences resolv themselves into a simple fight with chales between the scholars and the anthropologists I should without doubt wield my reluctant weapon on the side of the scholars scholarship is the harder less popular and perhaps the more permanently valuable work and it

Certainly stands more in need of Defense at the moment but in the meantime I can hardly understand how the purest of pure Scholars can fail to feel his knowledge enriched by the savants who have compelled us to dig below the surface of our classical tradition and to realize the imaginative and historical problems

Which so often lie concealed beneath the smooth security of a verbal construe my own essays Do Not For a Moment claim to speak with authority on a subject which is still changing and showing new facets year by year they only claim to represent the way of regarding certain large issues of Greek

Religion which has gradually taken shape and has proved practically helpful and consistent with facts in the mind of a very constant though unsystematic reader of many various periods of Greek literature in the first essay my debt to Miss Harrison is great and obvious my statement of one or two

Points is is probably different from hers but in the main I follow her lead and in either case I cannot adequately describe the advantage I have derived from many years of frequent discussion and comparison of results with a helist whose learning and originality of Mind are only equaled by her Vivid generosity

Towards her fellow workers the second may also be said to have grown out of Miss Harrison’s writings she has by now made the title of Olympian almost a term of reproach and thrown down so many a scornful challenge to the canonical gods of Greece that I have ventured on this

Attempt to explain their historical origin and plead for their religious value when the essay was already written I read Mr Chadwick’s impressive book on the heroic age Cambridge 1912 and was delighted to find in an author whose standpoint and Equipment are so different from mine so much that

Confirmed or clarified my own view the title of the third essay I owe to a conversation with with Professor J bberry we were discussing the change that took place in Greek thought between say Plato and the neoplatonists or even between Aristotle and posidonius and which is seen at its highest power in the

Gnostics I had been calling it a rise of aestheticism or mysticism or religious passion or the like when my friend corrected me it is not a rise it is a fall or failure of something a sort of failure of nerve we are treading here here upon somewhat firmer ground than in

The first two essays the field for mere conjecture is less we are supported more continuously by explicit documents yet the subject is a very difficult one owing to the scattered and chaotic nature of the sources and even where we get away from fragments and reconstructions and reach definite

Treatises with or without authors names I cannot pretend to feel anything like the same clearness about the true meaning of a passage in felo or the Corpus hermetic that one normally feels in a writer of The Classical period consequently in this essay I think I have hugged my modern

Authorities rather close and seldom expressed an opinion for which I could not find some fairly authoritative backing my debt being particularly great to reitzenstein B and the brilliant henis ishish culture of P wendland I must also thank my old pupil Mr Edwin bevon who was kind enough to

Read this book in proof for some valuable criticism the subject is one of such extraordinary interest that I offer no apology for calling further attention to it a word or two about the last brief Revival of the ancient religion under Julian the apostate forms the natural close to this

Series of studies but here our material both historical and literary is so abundant that I have followed a different method after a short historical introduction I have translated in full a very curious and little known ancient text which may be said to constitute something like an authoritative Pagan Creed some readers

May regret that I do not give the Greek as well as the English I am reluctant however to publish a text which I have not examined in the MSS and I feel also that while an addition of celestius is rather urgently needed it ought to be an addition with a full

Commentary one I was first led to these Studies by the wish to fill up certain puzzling blanks of ignorance in my own mind and doubtless the little book Bears marks of this origin It aims largely at the filling of interstices it avoids the great illuminated places and gives its mind to

The stretches of intervening Twilight it deals little with the Harvest of flowers or fruit but watches the inconspicuous Seasons when the soil is beginning to stir the seeds are falling or ripening GM one satina regna many persons who are quite prepared to admit the importance to the world of Greek poetry Greek art

And Greek philosophy may still feel it rather a paradox to be told that Greek religion espcially repays our study at the present day Greek religion associated with a romantic trivial and not very edifying mythology has generally seemed one of the weakest spots in the armor of

Those giants of the old world yet I will venture to make for Greek religion almost as great a claim as for the thought and the literature not only only because the whole mass of it is shot through by those strange lights of feeling and Imagination and the details of it

Constantly wrought into Beauty by that instinctive sense of artistic form which we espcially associate with Classical Greece but also for two definite historical reasons in the first place the student of that dark and fascinating Department of the human mind which we may call religious Origins will find in

Gree an extraordinary mass of material belonging to a very early date for detail variety the Primitive Greek evidence has no equal and secondly in this department as in others ancient Greece has the triumphant if tragic distinction of beginning at the very bottom and struggling however precariously to the very Summits there

Is hardly any horror of primitive Superstition of which we cannot find some distant traces in our Greek record there is hardly any height of spiritual thought attained in the world that has not its archetype or its echo in the stretch of Greek literature that lies between thees and plotinus embracing

Much of the wisdom teachers and of St Paul the progress of Greek religion Falls naturally into three stages all of them historically important first there is the Primitive Etha or age of ignorance before Zeus came to trouble men’s Minds a stage to which our anthropologists and explorers

Have found parallels in every part of the world Dar pruce applies to it the Charming word ERM height or Primal stupidity in some ways characteristically Greek in others it is so typical of similar stages of thought elsewhere that one is tempted to regarded as the normal beginning of all religion or almost as

The normal raw material out of which religion is made there is certainly some repulsiveness but I confess that to me there is also an element of Fascination in the study of these beastly devices of the Heathen at any rate as they appear in early Greece where each single

Beastly device as it passes is somehow touched with beauty and transformed by some Spirit of upward striving secondly there is the Olympian or classical stage a stage in which for good or ill blundering or successfully this primitive vagueness was reduced to a kind of order this is the stage of the

Great Olympian gods who dominated art and poetry ruled the imagination of Rome and extended a kind of romantic Dominion even over the Middle Ages it is the stage that we learn or mis learn from the statues and the handbooks of Mythology critics have said that this

Olympian stage has value only as art and not as religion that is just one of the points into which we shall inquire thirdly there is the helenistic period reaching roughly from Plato to St Paul and the earlier gnostics the first edition of this book treated the whole period as one but I

Have now divided it by writing a new chapter on the movements of the 4th Century BC and making that my third stage this was the time when the Greek mind still in its full creative Vigor made its first response to the two-fold failure of the world in which it had put

Its Faith the open bankruptcy of the Olympian religion and the collapse of the city state both had failed and each tried vainly to supply the place of the other Greece responded by the creation of two great permanent types of philosophy which have influenced human ethics ever since the cynic and stoic

Schools on the one hand and the Epicurean on the other these schools belong properly I think to the history of religion the successors of Aristotle produced rather a school of progressive science those of Plato a school of refined skepticism the religious side of Plato’s thought was not revealed in its full

Power till the time of plotinus in the 3r century ad that of Aristotle one might say without undue Paradox not till its Exposition by aquinus in the 13th the old third stage therefore becomes now a fourth comprising the later and more popular movements of the helenistic age a period based on the

Consciousness of manifold failure and consequently touched both with morbidity and with that spiritual exaltation which is so often the companion of morbidity it not only had behind it the failure of the Olympian Theology and of the free city state now crushed by semi barbarous military monarchies it lived through the gradual

Realization of two other failures the failure of human government even when backed by the power of Rome or the wealth of Egypt to achieve a good life for man and lastly the failure of the great propaganda of helenismo failure this Progressive loss of Hope in the world in sober

Calculation and in organized human effort threw the later Greek back upon his own soul upon the pursuit of personal Holiness upon emotions Mysteries and Revelations upon the comparative neglect of this transitory and imperfect world for the sake of some dream world far off which shall subsist without sin or

Corruption the same yesterday today and forever these four are the really significant and formative periods of Greek religious thought but we may well cast our eyes also on a fifth stage not historically influential perhaps but at least romantic and interesting and worthy of considerable respect when the

Old religion in the time of Julian roused itself for a last spiritual protest against the all-conquering atheism of the Christians I omit plotinus as in earlier chapters one have omitted Plato and Aristotle and for the same reason as a rule in the writings of Julian Circle

And still more in the remains of popular belief the Tendencies of our fourth stage are accentuated by an increased demand for definite dogma and a still deep ER consciousness of worldly defeat I shall not start with any definition of religion religion like poetry and most other living things cannot be defined

But one may perhaps give some description of it or at least some characteristic marks in the first place religion essentially deals with the Uncharted region of Human Experience a large part of human life has been thoroughly surveyed and explored we understand the causes at work and we are not bewildered by the

Problems that is the domain of positive knowledge but all around us on every side there is an Uncharted region just fragments of The Fringe Of It explored and those imperfectly it is with this that religion deals and secondly we may note that religion deals with its own Province not

Tentatively by the normal methods of patient intellectual research but directly and by methods of emotion or subconscious apprehension agriculture for instance used to be entirely a question of religion now it is almost entirely a question of Science in Antiquity if a field was Barren the owner of it would

Probably assume that the barrenness was due to pollution or offense somewhere he would run through all his own possible offenses or at any rate those of his neighbors and ancestors and when he eventually decided the cause of the trouble the steps that he would take

Would all be of a Kind calculated not to affect the chemical constitution of the soil but to satis y his own emotions of guilt and Terror or the imaginary emotions of the imaginary being he had offended a modern man in the same predicament would probably not think of

Religion at all at any rate in the earlier stages he would say it was a case for deeper plowing or for basic slag later on if disaster followed disaster till he began to feel himself A Marked Man even the average modern wood I think begin instinctively to reflect

Upon his sins a third characteristic flows from the first the Uncharted region surrounds us on every side and is apparently infinite consequently when Once the things of the Uncharted region are admitted as factors in our ordinary conduct of Life they are apt to be infinite factors overruling and swamping

All others the thing that religion forbids is a thing never to be done not all the inducements that this life can offer way at all in the balance indeed there is no balance the the man who makes terms with his conscience is essentially non-religious the religious man knows

That it will profit him nothing if he gain all this finite world and lose his stake in the infinite and eternal Point too am I going to draw no distinction then between religion and mere Superstition not at present later on we may perhaps see some way to it

Superstition is the name given to a low or bad form of religion to the kind of religion we disapprove the line of division if we made one would be only an arbitrary bar thrust across a highly complex and continuous process does this amount to an implication that all the

Religions that have existed in the world are false not so it is obvious indeed that most if analyzed into intellectual beliefs are false and I suppose that a thoroughly Orthodox member of any one of the million religious bodies that exist in the world must be clear in his mind

That the other million minus one are wrong if not wickedly wrong that I think we must be clear about yet the fact remains that man must have some relation towards the Uncharted the mysterious Tracks of Life which surround him on every side and for my own part one am

Content to say that his method must be to a large extent very much whatti Paul calls pis Iota or faith that is some attitude not of the conscious intellect but of the whole being using all its powers of sensitiveness all its feeblest and most inarticulate feelers and

Tentacles in the effort somehow to touch by these that which cannot be grasped by the definite senses or analyzed by the conscious reason what we gain thus is an insecure but a precious possession we gain no Dogma at least no safe Dogma but we gain much more we gain something hard

To Define which lies at the heart not only of religion but of Art and poetry and all the higher strivings of human emotion I believe that at times we actually gain practical guidance in some questions where experience and argument fail three that is a great work left for religion

But we must always remember two things about it first that the liability to error is enormous indeed almost infinite and second that the results of confident error are very terrible probably throughout history the worst things ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people have been done in the name

Of religion and I do not think that has entirely ceased to be true at the present day all the Middle Ages held the strange end to our judgment the obviously insane belief that the normal result of religious error was eternal punishment and yet by the crimes to

Which that false belief LED them they almost proved the truth of something very like it the record of early Christian medieval persecutions which were the direct result of that one confident religious error comes curiously near to one’s conception of the wickedness of the Damned to turn to

Our immediate subject I wish to put forward here what is still a rather new and unauthorized view of the development of Greek religion readers will forgive me if in treating so vast a subject I draw my outline very broadly leaving out many qualifications and quoting only a

Fragment of the evidence the things that have misled us moderns in our efforts towards understanding the Primitive stage in Greek religion have been first the widespread and almost ineradicable error of treating Homer as is primitive and more generally our unconscious insistence on starting with the notion of gods Mister Hartland in his address

As president of one of the sections of the international Congress of religions at Oxford for dwelt on the significant fact about Savage religions that wherever the word God is used our trustiest Witnesses tend to contradict one another among the best observers of the Aruna tribes for instance some hold

That they have no conception of God others that they are constantly thinking about God the truth is that this idea of a god far away in the sky I do not say merely a first cause who is without body parts or passions but almost any being

That we should naturally call a god is an idea not easy for primitive man to grasp it is a subtle and rarified idea saturated with ages of philosophy and speculation and we must always remember that one of the chief religions of the world Buddhism has r risen to Great

Moral and intellectual Heights without using the conception of God at all in instead it has Dharma the Eternal law five apart from some few philosophers both Christian and Muslim the gods of the ordinary man have as a rule been as a matter of course anthropomorphic men did not take the

Trouble to try to conceive them otherwise in many cases they have had the actual bodily shape of man in almost all they have possessed of course in their highest development his mind and reason and his mental attributes it causes most of us even now something of a shock to be told by a

Medieval Arab philosopher that to call God benevolent or righteous or to predicate of him any other human quality is just as Pagan and degraded as to say that he has a beard six now the Greek gods seem at First Sight quite particularly solid and anthropomorphic the statues and vases

Speak clearly and they are mostly borne out by the literature of course we we must discount the kind of evidence that misled VLAN the mere Roman and alexandrian art and mythology but even if we go back to the fifth century BC we shall find the ruling conceptions far nobler indeed but still

Anthropomorphic we find firmly established the Olympian patriarchal family Zeus the father of Gods and Men his wife Hera his son Apollo his daughter Athena his brothers Poseidon in Hades and the rest we probably think of each figure more or less as like a statue a habit of Mind obviously wrong

And indeed absurd as if one thought of Labor and grief as statues because Rodan or saint goddin has so represented them and yet it was a habit into which the late Greeks themselves sometimes fell seven their Arts of sculpture and painting as applied to religion had been so dangerously successful they sharpened

And made Vivid an anthropomorphism which in its origin had been mostly the result of normal human laziness the process of making winds and rivers into anthropomorphic Gods is for the most part not the result of using the imagination with special Vigor it is the result of not doing so the wind is

Obviously alive any fool can see that being alive it blows how why naturally just as you and I blow it knocks things down it shouts and dances it Whispers and talks and unless we are going to make a great effort of the imagination and try to realize like a scientific man just

What really happens we naturally assume that it does these things in a normal way in the only way we know even when you worship a beast or a stone you practically anthropomorphize it it happens indeed to have a perfectly clear shape so you accept that but it talks

Acts and fights just like a man as you can see from the Australian folk tales published by Mrs Lango Parker because you do not take the trouble to think out any other way of Behaving this kind of anthropomorphism or as Mis Gladstone used to call it anthropo Humanity of

Nature is primitive and inevitable the sharpcut statue type of God is different and is due in grease directly to the work of the artists we must get back behind these gods of the artists workshop and the romance maker imagination and see if the religious thinkers of the great period

Use or imply that the same highly human conceptions we shall find pereni telling us that God coincides with the universe which is a sphere and immovable at heraclitus that God is day night summer winter or peace satiety hunger xenophanes that God is allseeing all hearing and all mind nine and as for his

Supposed human shape why if bulls and lions were to speak about God they would doubtless tell us that he was a bull or a lion 10 we must notice the instinctive language of The Poets using the word Theta Epsilon in many subtle senses for which our word God is too stiff too

Personal and too anthropomorphic T Epsilon tailon Kai Epsilon new the fact of success is a God and more than a god T gamma Iota Gamma New Sigma Kappa Epsilon iot new filon the thrill of recognizing a friend after long absence is a god wine is a

God whose body is poured out in libation to gods and in the unwritten law of the human conscience a great God liveth and groweth not old 11 you will say that is mere poetry or philosophy it represents a particular Theory or a particular metaphor I think not language of this

Sort is used widely and without any explanation or apology it was evidently understood and felt to be natural by the audience if it is metaphorical all metaphor for have grown from the soil of current thought and normal experience and without going into the point at length I think we may safely

Conclude that the soil from which such language as this grew was not any system of clear-cut personal anthropomorphic theology no doubt any of these poets if he had to make a picture of one of these utterly formless Gods would have given him a human form that was the recognized

Symbol as a veiled woman is St Goden as symbol for grief but we have other evidence too which shows abundantly that these Olympian gods are not primary but are imposed upon a background strangely unlike themselves for a long time their luminous figures dazzled our eyes we were not able to see the half-lit

Regions behind them the dark primeval tangle of desires and fears and dreams from which they drew their Vitality the shest test to apply in this question is the evidence of actual cult Miss Harrison has here shown us the right method and follow following her we will begin with the three great

Festivals of Athens the diasia the thesmophoria and the aneria 12 the Dasia was said to be the chief Festival of Zeus the central figure of the Olympians though our authorities generally add an epithet to him and called him Zeus malikos Zeus of placation a god with an epithet is

Always suspicious like a human being with an alias Miss Harrison’s examination pram pages 28 FF shows that in the right Seuss has no place at all mikos from the beginning has a fairly secure one on some of the reliefs mikos appears not as a God but as an enormous bearded snake a

Well-known representation of Underworld powers or dead ancestors sometimes the Great Snake is alone sometimes he rises gigantic above the small human worshippers approaching him and then in certain reliefs his old barbaran presence vanishes and we have instead a benevolent and human father of Gods and Men trying as Miss Harrison

Somewhere expresses it to look as if he had been there all the time there was a sacrifice at the diasia but it was not a sacrifice given to Zeus to Zeus and all the Heavenly Gods men gave sacrifice in the form of a feast in which the God had

His portion and the worshippers theirs the two parties cemented their friendship and feasted happily together but the sacrifice at the diasia was a holocaust 13 every shred of the victim was burnt to ashes that no man might partake of it we know quite well the meaning of that form of sacrifice it is

A sacrifice to plate or appease the powers below the thonio the dead and the Lords of death it was performed as our authorities tell us mu Epsilon Sigma Upsilon gamma newron with shuttering or repulsion 14 the Dasia was a ritual of plation that is of casting away various elements

Of pollution or danger and appeasing the unknown wraths of the surrounding Darkness the nearest approach to a god contained in this Festival is mikos and mikos as we shall see later belongs to a particular class of shadowy beings who are built up out of ritual Services his name means he of

Appeasement and he is nothing else he is merely the personified Shadow or dream generated by the emotion of the ritual very much to take a familiar instance as Father Christmas is a projection of our Christmas Customs the thesmophoria formed the Great Festival of deer and her daughter Cory though here again deer

Appears with a clinging epithet Theses mophos we know pretty clearly the whole course of the ritual there is the carrying by women of certain magic charms fur cones and snakes and unnamable objects made of paste to ensure fertility there is a sacrifice of pigs who were thrown into a deep Clift of the

Earth and their remains afterwards collected and Scattered as a charm over the fields there is more Magic Ritual more carrying of sacred objects a fast followed by a rejoicing a disappearance of Life below the Earth and a rising again of Life above it but it is hard to

Find definite traces of any personal goddess The Olympian demer and pan dwindle away as we look closer and we are left with the shadow Theros she who carries theses 15 not a substantive personal goddess but merely a personification of the ritual itself an imaginary charm Bearer generated by so

Much charm bearing just as milicos in the diasia was generated from the ritual of appeasement now the Dasia were dominated by a sacred snake is there any similar Divine animal in the thesmophoria alas yes both here and still more markedly in the mysteries of deer and pranie at elusive we regularly

Find the most lovely of all goddesses deer and pany habitually I will not say represented by but dangerously associated with a sacred s a pig is the one animal in Greek religion that actually had sacrifice made to it 16 the third Feast the anthia belongs in classical times to The Olympian dianis

And is said to be the oldest of his feasts on the surface there is a touch of the wine God and he is given due official prominence but as soon as we penetrate anywhere near the heart of the festival dionis and his brother gods are quite forgotten and All That Remains is a

Great ritual for appeasing the Dead all the days of the feast were nef fasty of Il Omen the first day especially was ta p paman fyro on it the wine jars which were also seed and funeral jars were opened and the spirits of the Dead let loose in the world 1 nameless and

Innumerable the ghosts are summoned out of their tombs and are duly feasted each man summoning his own ghosts to his own house and carefully abstaining from any act that would affect his neighbors and then when they are properly appeased and made gentle they are swept back again out of this world

To the place where they properly belong and the streets and houses clean from the presence of death there is one Central stage indeed in which dionis does seem to appear and he appears in a very significant way to conduct a sacred marriage for why do you suppose the dead

Are summoned at all what use to the tribe is the presence of all these dead ancestors they have come I suspect to be born again to begin a new life at the great Spring Festival for the new births of the tribe the new crops the new kids

The new human beings are of course really only the old ones returned to Earth 18 the important thing is to get them properly placed fated and purified free from the contagion of ancient sin or underworld anger for nothing is so dangerous as the presence of what I may

Call Raw ghosts the aneria contained like other feasts of the kind a Epsilon R Gamma mucron or holy marriage between the wife of the basilious or sacred king and the imaginary God 19 whatever reality there ever was in the ceremony has apparently by classical times faded away but the place where the God

Received his bride is curious it was called the Bolan or bullshed it was not originally the home of an anthropomorphic God but of a Divine animal thus in each of these great festivals we find that the Olympian gods vanish away and we are left with three things only first with

An atmosphere of religious dread second with a whole sequence of magical ceremonies which in two at least of the three cases 20 produce a kind of strange personal emanation of themselves the appeasements producing milicos the charm bearings thees mophos and thirdly with a Divine or sacred animal in the diasia we find the

Old superhuman snake who reappears so ubiquitously throughout Greece the regular symbol of the underworld Powers especially the hero or dead ancestor why the snake was so chosen we can only surise he obviously lived underground his home was among the thono the Earth people also says the scholiast to Aristophanes

Plut 533 he was a type of New Birth because he throws off his old skin and renews himself and if that in itself is not enough to show his Supernatural power what normal Earthly being could send his enemies to death by one little pin prick as some snakes can in the

Thesmophoria we found sacred swine and the reason given by the Ancients is no doubt the right one the S is sacred because of its fertility and possibly as practical people we should add because of its cheapness swine are always prominent in Greek agricultural rights and the bull

Well we modern Town dwellers have almost forgotten what a real bull is like for so many centuries we have tamed him and penned him in and utterly deposed him from his place as lord of the forest the bull was the chief of magic or sacred animals in Greece Chief because of his

Enormous strength his size his rage in fine as anthropologists call it his Mana that primitive word which comprises force Vitality Prestige Holiness and power of magic and which may belong equally to a lion a chief a medicine man or a battle axe now in the art and the

Handbooks these sacred animals have all been adopted into the Olympian system they appear regularly as the attributes of particular Gods Zeus is merely accompanied by a snake an eagle a bull or at worst assumes for his private purposes the forms of those animals the cow and the CUO are sacred to Hera The

Owl and the snake to Athena the dolphin the crow the lizard the bull to Apollo dianis always like a Wilder and less middle-aged Zeus appears freely as a snake bull hegot and lion allowing for some isolated exceptions the safest rule in all these cases is that the attribute

Is original and the God is added 21 it comes out very clearly in the case of the snake and the bull the tremendous Mana of the Wild Bull indeed occupies almost half the stage of pre Olympian ritual the religion une Earth by Dr Evans in creit is permeated by the bull of

Minus the heads and horns are in almost every sacred room and on every altar the great religious scene depicted on the sarcophagus of haat Tria 22 centers in the Holy Blood that flows from the neck of a captive and dying bull down into classical times Bull’s blood was a

Sacred thing which it was dangerous to touch in death to taste to drink a cup of it was the most heroic form of suicide 23 the sacrificial bull at Deli was called hoso he was not merely hosio holy he was hoso the sanctifier he who mock holy it was by contact with him

That Holiness was spread to others on a coin and a vase cited by Miss Harrison 24 we have a bull entering a holy cave and a bull standing in a shrine we have holy pillars whose Holiness consists in the fact that they have been touched

With the blood of a bull we have a long record of a bull ritual at magnesia 25 in which Zeus though he makes a kind of external claim to be Lord of The Feast dare not claim that the bull is sacrifice to him Zeus has a ram to

Himself and stands apart showing but a weak and Shadow y figure beside the original Holy One we have immense masses of evidence about the religion of mithis at one time the most serious rival of Christianity which sought its hope and its salvation in the blood of a Divine

Bull now what is the origin of this conception of the sacred animal it was first discovered and explained with almost prophetic Insight by Dr Robertson Smith 26 the origin is what he calls a sacramental feast you eat the Flesh and drink the blood of the Divine animal in

Order here I diverge from Robertson Smith’s language to get into you his Mana his vital power the classical instance is the sacramental eating of a camel by an Arab tribe recorded in the works of St nus 27 the camel was devoured on a particular day at the

Rising of the Morning Star he was cut to Pieces alive and every fragment of him had to be consumed before the sun rose if the life had once gone out of the Flesh and Blood the sacrifice would have been spoiled it was the spirit the Vitality of the

Camel that his tribesmen wanted the only serious error that later students have found in Robertson Smith’s statement is that he spoke too definitely of the sacrifice as affording communion with the tribal God there was no God there only the raw material out of which gods are made you devoured the holy animal to

Get its Mana its swiftness its strength its great endurance just as the Savage now will eat his enemy’s brain or heart or hand to get some particular quality residing there the imagination of the preh helenic tribes was evidently dominated Above All Things by the bull though there were other sacramental

Feasts too combined with sundry horrible rings and drinking of raw blood it is strange to think that even small things like kids and fawns and hairs should have struck primitive man as having some uncanny Vitality which he longed for or at least some uncanny power over the

Weather or the crops yet to him it no doubt appeared obvious VI frogs for instance could always bring rain by croaking for it and who can limit the powers and the knowledge of birds 28 here comes a difficulty if the Olympian God was not there to start with

How did he originate we can understand at least after a course of anthropology this desire of primitive man to acquire for himself the Superhuman forces of the bull but how does he make the transition from the real animal to the imagin human God first let us remember the innate

Tendency of primitive man everywhere and not especially in Greece to imagine a personal cause like himself in all points not otherwise specified for every striking phenomenon if the wind blows it is because some being more or less human though of course superhuman is blowing with his cheeks if a tree is struck by

Lightning it is because someone has thrown his battle axe at it in some Australian tribes there is no belief in natural death if a man dies it is because bad man kill that fellow St Paul we may remember passionately summoned the Heathen to refrain from worshiping Town new Capal Sigma iotu the creation

And go back to town new cap Sigma Alpha newow Alpha the Creator human and masculine it was as a rule a road that they were only too ready to travel 29 but this tendency was helped by a second Factor research has shown us the existence in early Mediterranean

Religion of a peculiar transitional step a man wearing the head or skin of a holy Beast the Egyptian gods are depicted as men with beasts heads that is the best authorities tell us their shapes are derived from the Kings and Priests who on great occasions of sacrifice covered

Their heads with a beast mask 30 minus with his projection the minur was a bull God and wore a bull mask from early Island gems from a fresco at minini from Assyrian reliefs Mr AB cook has collected many examples of this mixed figure a man wearing the protone or mask

And Mane of a beast sometimes we can actually see him offering Libations sometimes the worshipper has become so closely identified with his Divine Beast that he is represented not as a mere man wearing the protome of a lion or bull but actually as a lion or bull wearing the protome of another 31

Hera beta Omicron P Iota with a cow’s head Athena gaml Anda Alpha Upsilon kaaay Iota with an owl’s head or bearing on her breast the head of the Gorgon Heracles clad in a lion’s skin and covering his brow Delta Epsilon iot mu K Sigma mu alpat Iota theto with the awful

Spread jaws of the wild beast belong to the same class so does the Duos at elois and other initiators who let candidates for purification set one foot one only and at the left on the skin of a sacrificial RAM and called The Skin Delta Iota Capa Alpha the fleece not of

A ram but of Zeus 32 the Mana of the slain Beast is in the hide and head in Blood and fur and the man who wants to be in thorough contact with the Divinity gets inside the skin and wraps himself deep in it he begins

By being a man wearing a lion’s skin he ends as we have seen by feeling himself to be a lion wearing a lion’s skin and who is this man he may on particular occasions be only a candidate for purification or initiation but par Excellence he who has

The right is the priest the medicine man the Divine King if an old suggestion of my own is right he is the original Theta Epsilon or Theta Epsilon Sigma the Incarnate medicine or spell or magic power 33 he at first I suspect is the only Theta or God that his Society knows

We commonly speak of ancient Kings being deified we regard the process as due to an outburst of superstition or insane flattery and so no doubt it sometimes was especially in later times when man and God were felt as two utterly distinct things but deification is an unintelligent and misleading word what

We call deification is only the survival of this undifferentiated human Theta with his Mana his caparo tacron and beta Alpha his control of the weather the rain and the Thunder the spring crops and the Autumn floods his knowledge of what was lawful and what was not and his

Innate power to curse or to make dead recent researches have shown Us in abundance the early Greek medicine Chiefs making thunder and lightning and rain 34 we have long known the king as possessor of Dy and theis of justice and tribal custom we have known his effect

On the fertility of the fields and the tribes and the terrible results of a king’s sin or a king’s sickness 35 what is the subsequent history of this medicine Chief or Theta Epsilon he is differentiated as it were the visible part of him becomes merely human the supposed Supernatural Part grows into

What we should call a God the process is simple any particular medicine man is bound to have his failures as Dr Fraser gently reminds us every single pretension which he puts forth on every day of his life is a lie and liable sooner or later to be found

Out doubtless men are tender to their own delusions they do not at once condemn the medicine Chief as a fraudulent institution but they tend gradually to say that he is not the real all powerful Theta Epsilon he is only his representative the real Theta Epsilon tremendous infallible is somewhere far

Away hidden in clouds perhaps on the summit of some inaccessible Mountain if the mountain is once climbed the God will move to the upper Sky the medicine Chief meanwhile stays on Earth still influential he has some connection with the great God more intimate than that of other men at worst he possesses the

God’s sacred instruments his Epsilon row or R gamma iot Alpha he knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him there is therefore a path open from the Divine Beast to the anthropomorphic God from beings like Theses mophos and milicos the road is of course much easier they are already more

Than half anthropomorphic they only lack the concreteness the Lucid shape and the detailed personal history of the Olympians in this connection we must not forget the power of hallucination still fairly strong as the history of religious revivals in America will bear witness 36 but far stronger of course

Among the impressionable hordes of early men the God says M did in his profound study of Algerian magic seod deser Collective personify the collective desire projected as it were or personified 37 think of the Gods who have appeared in great crisis of battle created sometimes by the desperate

Desire of men who have for years prayed to them and who are now at the last extremity for lack of their aid sometimes by the confused and excited remembrances of the survivors after the victory the gods who led the Roman charge at Lake rilis 38 the gigantic figures that were seen fighting

Before the Greeks at Marathon 39 even the celestial signs that promised Constantine victory for the cross 40 these are the effects of great emotion we can all understand them but even in daily life primitive men seem to have dealt more freely than we generally do with apparitions and voices

And demons of every kind one of the most remarkable and no noteworthy sources for this kind of hallucinatory God in early societies is a social custom that we have almost forgotten the religious dance when the initiated young men of cre or elsewhere danced at night over the mountains in the Oria or Mountain

Walk they not only did things that seemed beyond their ordinary workday strength they also felt themselves LED On and On by some power which guided and sustained them this demon has no necessary name a man may be named after him or iasus belonging to the mountain dancer just as others may be named

Abalonus or Dionysus the God is only the spirit of the mountain dance orates though of course he is absorbed at different times in various Olympians there is one God called the Victor the suppliant he who prays for Mercy he is just the projection as M good would say of the intense emotion of

One of those strange processions well known in the ancient world band of despairing men or women who have thrown away all means of self-defense and join together at some holy place in one passionate prayer for pity the highest of all gods Zeus was the special patron

Of the suppliant and it is strange and instructive to find that Zeus the all powerful is actually identified with this aior Zeta Epsilon muu f omaro p Delta Omicron Iota pyro Omicron fonu Omega 41 the assembled prayer the United cry that rises from the oppressed of the

World is itself grown to be a God and the greatest god a similar projection arose from the dance of the kury or initiate youths in the diam the magic dance which was to celebrate or more properly to hasten and strengthen the coming on of spring that dance projected

The megistos kuros the greatest of youths who is the Incarnation of spring or the return of life and lies at the back of so many of the most gracious shapes of the classical Pantheon the Kur OS appears as dionisis as Apollo as Hermes as Aries in our clearest and most

Detailed piece of evidence he actually appears with the characteristic history and attributes of Zeus 42 this Spirit of the dance who leads it or personifies its emotion stands more clearly perhaps than any other demon halfway between Earth and Heaven a number of difficult passages in ureides Baki and other dionysiac literature find

Their explanations when we realize how the god is in part merely identified with the inspired Chief dancer in part he is the intangible projected incarnation of the emotion of the dance the collective desire personified on what does the collective desire or Collective dread of the Primitive Community chiefly

Concentrate on two things the food supply and the tribe Supply the desire not to die of famine and not to be harried or conquered by the neighboring tribe the fertility of the earth and the fertility of the tribe these two are felt in early religion as 1.43 the Earth

Is a mother the human mother is in ro amican yilan ro ala or plowed field this Earth mother is the characteristic and Central feature of the early aian religions the introduction of Agriculture made her a mother of fruits and corn and it is in that form that we

Best know her but in earlier days she had been a mother of the spontaneous growth of the soil of wild beasts and trees and all the life of the Mountain 44 in early cre she stands with lions erect on either side of her or with snakes held in her hands and coiled

About her body and as the Earth is Mother when the Harvest comes so in Spring she is maiden or Cory but a maiden faded each year to be wedded and made fruitful and earlier still there has been a terrible time when fields are bare and lifeless the cor has been

Snatched away underground among the dead peoples and men must wait expect until the first buds begin to show and they call her to rise again with the flowers meantime Earth as she brings forth vegetation in Spring is katros rearer of coroy or the young men of the

Tribe the nymphs and rivers are all katroo the Moon is katros she quickens the young of the tribe in their mother’s womb at one terrible hour especially she is a lion to women who have offended against her Holiness she also marks the seasons of sewing and plowing and the due time for

The ripening of crops when men learn to calculate in longer units the Sun appears they turn to the Sun for their calendar and at all times of course the sun has been a power in agriculture he is not called katros but the young son returning after winter is

Himself a kuros 45 and all the kury have some touch of the Sun in them the cron spring song of the kites praise for new Amicon Iota P Amicon lamba Alpha Iota young citizens quite simply among the other gifts of the spring 46 this is best shown by the rights of

Tribal initiation which seem normally to have formed part of the spring dram or sacred performances the kury as we have said are the initiated young men they pass through their initiation they become no longer P Alpha Delta Epsilon boys but new Delo Epsilon men the actual name kuras is possibly

Connected with cap Epsilon Ro Epsilon iot new to shave 47 and May mean that after this ceremony they first cut their long hair till then the Kappa Omicron Ro Omicron is Kappa Epsilon R Sigma Epsilon Kappa mua with hair unshorn they have now open to them the

Two roads that belong to new Delta Ro Epsilon alone they have the work of begetting children for the tribe and the work of killing the tribes enemies in battle the classification of people according to their age is apt to be sharp and Vivid in primitive communities we for example think of an

Old man as a kind of man and an old woman as a kind of woman but in primitive peoples as soon as a man and woman cease to be able to perform his and her due tribal functions they cease to be men and women new Delta Ro Epsilon

And Gamma Upsilon new Alpha Kappa Epsilon the ex-man becomes a gamma Ro Omega new the exoman a gamaro alpha 48 we distinguish between boy and man between girl and woman but apart from the various words for baby atct Greek would have four sharp divisions Pi Alpha fi beta Omicron nuro gamaro omegan new

49 in Sparta the divisions are still sharper and more numerous centering in the great initiation ceremonies of the irans or full-grown youths to the goddess called orthia or boria 50 these initiation ceremonies are called teeli completions they Mark the great right of transition from the immature Charming

But half useless thing which we call boy or girl to the talanda Epsilon Iota Omicron neuro the full member of the tribe as fighter or counselor or to the T Epsilon Lambda Epsilon Alpha Gamma Upsilon new the full wife and mother this whole subject of Greek initiation ceremonies calls pressingly for more

Investigation it is only in the last few years that we have obtained the material for understanding them and the whole mass of the evidence needs retreatment for one instance it is clear that a great number of rights which were formerly explained as remnants of human sacrifice are simply ceremonies of initiation

51 at the great spring draman the tribe and the growing Earth were renovated together the Earth arises aresh from her dead seeds the tribe from its dead ancestors and the whole process charged as it is with the emotion of pressing human desire projects its anthropomorphic God redeon a vegetation

Spirit we call him very inadequately he is a Divine kuras a year demon a spirit that in the first stage is living then dies with each year then thirdly rises again from the dead raising the whole dead world with him the Greeks called him in this phase the

Third one or the Savior the renovation ceremonies were accompanied by a casting off of the old year the old garments and everything that is polluted by the infection of death and not only of death but clearly I think in spite of the protests of some hellenists of guilt or

Sin also for the life of the Year demon as it seems to be reflected in tragedy is generally a story of Pride and Punishment each year arrives wax is great commits the sin of hubris and then is slain the death is deserved but the slaying is a sin hence comes the next

Year as Avenger or as the wronged one reisen all things pay retribution for their Injustice one to another according to the ordinance of time 52 it is this range of ideas have supressed during The Classical period but evidently still current among the rudder and less heliz peoples which supplied St Paul with some

Of his most famous and deep reaching metaphors thou fool that which thou sest is not quickened except it die 53 as he was raised from the dead we may walk with him in newness of life and this renovation must be preceded by a casting out and killing of the old polluted life

The old man in US must first be crucified the old man must be crucified we observe that in all the three festivals there was a pervasive element of vague fear hither to we have been dealing with early Greek religion chiefly from the point of view of Mana

The positive power or force that man tries to acquire from his totem animal or his God but there is also a negative side to be considered there is not only the Mana but the taboo The Forbidden the thing feared we must Cast Away the old

Year we must put our sins onto a fi Al forom alaaa or scapegoat and drive it out when the ghosts have returned and feasted with us at the anth thyia we must with tar and branches of Buckthorn purge them out of every corner of the rooms till the air is pure from the

Infection of death we must avoid speaking dangerous words in Great Moments we must avoid speaking any words at all lest there should be even in the most innocent of them some unknown danger for we are surrounded above and below by Ces or Spirits winged influences shapeless or of unknown shape

Sometimes the spirits of death sometimes of disease Madness Calamity thousands and thousands of them as sarpedon says from whom man can never Escape nor hide 54 all the air so crowded with them says an unknown ancient poet that there is not one empty into which you could push the

Spike of a blade of corn 55 the extraordinary security of our Modern Life in times of Peace makes it hard for us to realize except by a definite effort of the imagination the constant precariousness the frightful proximity of death that was usual in these weak ancient communities they were in fear of wild

Beasts they were helpless against floods helpless against pestilences their food depended on the crops of one tiny plot of ground and If the Savior was not reborn with the spring they slowly and miserably died and all the while they knew almost nothing of the real causes that made

Crops succeed or fail they only felt sure it was somehow a matter of pollution of unexpe defilement it is this state of things that explains the Curious cruelty of early agricultural doings the human sacrifices the scapegoats the tearing in pieces of living animals and perhaps of

Living men the steeping of the field s in blood like most cruelty it has its roots in terror Terror of the breach of taboo The Forbidden thing I will not dwell on this side of the picture it is well enough known but we have to remember that like so many morbid

Growths of the human mind it has its Sublime side we must not forget that the human victims were often volunteers the records of Carthage and Jerusalem the long list in Greek legend of princes and princesses who died for their country tell the same story in most human societies Savage as well as

Civilized it is not hard to find men who are ready to endure death for their fellow citizens we need not suppose that the martyrs were always the noblest of the human race they were sometimes mad hysterical or megalomaniac sometimes Reckless and desperate sometimes as in The Curious

Case attested of the Roman armies on the danu they were men of strong desires and weak imagination ready to die at the end of a short period if in the meantime they might glut all their senses with unlimited Indulgence 56 still when all is said there is nothing that stirs men’s imagination

Like the contemplation of martyrdom and it is no wonder that the more emotional Cults of antiquity vibrate with the worship of this dying savior the sois the Soder who in so many forms dies with his world or for his world and rises again as the world Rises Tri iant

Through suffering over death and the broken taboo taboo is at first sight a far more prominent element in the Primitive religions than Mana just as Misfortune and crime are more highly colored and striking than prosperity and Decent Behavior to an early Greek tribe the world of possible action was sharply

Divided between what was Themis and what was not Themis between lawful and taboo holy and Unholy correct and forbidden to do a thing that was not Themis was a sure source of public disaster consequently it was of the first necessity in a life full of such perils

To find out the exact rules about them how is that to be managed feus is ancient law it is taaro Iota Alpha the way of our ancestors the thing that has always been done and is therefore divinely right in ordinary life of course feus is clear everyone knows it

But from time to time new emergencies arise the like of which we have never seen and they frighten us we must go to the gerant the old men of the tribe they will perhaps remember what our fathers did what they tell us will be presistin a word which means indifferently oldest

And best Alpha Epsilon Delta new Epsilon to Epsilon Ricon Iota phyro Alpha Delta Omicron yson Sigma Iota new young men are always being foolish of course if there is a basilius a holy king he by his special power May perhaps know best of all though he too

Must take care not to gainsay the old men for the whole problem is to find out taaro Iota Alpha the ways that our fathers followed and suppose the old men themselves fail us what must we needs do here we come to a famous and peculiar Greek custom for which I have never seen

Quoted Any exact parallel or any satisfactory explanation if the old men fail us we must go to those older still go to our great ancestors the Roa the thian people lying in their sacred tombs and asked them to help the word means both to lend money and to give an

Oracle two ways of helping people in an emergency sometimes a tribe might happen to have a real ancestor buried in the neighborhood if so his tomb would be an oracle more often perhaps for the memories of savage tribes are very precarious there would be no well-recorded personal tomb the Oracle

Would be at some place sacred to the thian people in general or to some particular personification of them a deli or a cave of tronus a place of snakes and Earth you go to the thian folk for guidance because they are themselves the oldest of the old ones

And they know the real custom they know what is pres biston what is themus and by an easy extension of this knowledge they are also supposed to know what is he who knows the law fully to the uttermost also knows what will happen if the law is broken it is I think

Important to realize that the normal reason for Consulting an oracle was not to ask questions of fact it was that some emergency had Arisen in which men simply wanted to know how they ought to behave the advice they received in this way varied from The Virtuous to the

Abominable as the religion itself varied a great mass of oracles can be quoted in joining the rules of customary morality Justice honesty piety duty to a man’s parents to the old and to the weak but of necessity the oracles hated change and strangled the progress of knowledge also like most manifestations

Of early religion they throve upon human Terror the more blind the terror the stronger became their hold in such an atmosphere the lowest and most beast-like elements of humanity tended to come to the front and religion no doubt as a rule joined with them in drowning the voice of criticism and of

Civilization that is of reason and of Mercy when really frightened the Oracle generally fell back on some remedy full of pain and blood the medieval plan of burning Heretics alive had not yet been invented but the history of uncivilized man if it were written would provide a

Vast list of victims all of them innocent who died or suffered to expiate some portent or monstrum some reported Taro Alpha with which they had nothing whatever to do which was in no way altered by their suffering which probably never really happened at all all and if it did was of no

Consequence the sins of the modern world in dealing with Heretics and witches have perhaps been more gigantic than those of primitive men but one can Hardy rise from the record of these ancient observances without being haunted by the Judgment of the Roman poet tantum religio swad malam and feeling with him that the

Lightning of this Cloud The Taming of this blind Dragon must rank among the very greatest services that brought for mankind two The Olympian Conquest I origin of the Olympians the historian of early Greece must find himself often on the watch for a particular Cardinal moment generally impossible to date in time and sometimes

Hard even to Define in terms of development when the clear outline that we call Classical Greece begins to take shape out of the Mist it is the moment when as Herodotus puts it the helenic race was marked off from the Barbarian as more intelligent and more emancipated

From silly nonsense 57 in the 8th Century BC for instance so far as our remains indicate there cannot have been much to show that the inhabitants of adeka and biosa and the pipines were markedly Superior to those of say Lisha or friia or even epirus by the middle of the fifth

Century the difference is enormous on the one side is helis on the other the mly tribes of barbaroid when the change does come and is consciously felt we may notice a significant fact about it it does not announce itself as what it was a new

Thing in the world it professes to be a Revival or rather an emphatic realization of something very old the new spirit of Classical Greece with all its Humanity its intellectual life its genius for poetry and art describes itself merely as being helenic like the Helens and the Helens were simp simply

As far as we can make out much the same as the aayo one of the many tribes of predatory northmen who had swept down on the aan kingdoms in the dawn of Greek history 58 this claim of a new thing to be old is in varying degrees a common characteristic of great

Movements the Reformation professed to be a return to the Bible the Evangelical movement in England or return to the gospels the high Church movement or return to the early church a large element even in the French Revolution the greatest of all breaches with the past had for its ideal a return to Roman

Republican virtue or to the Simplicity of the natural man 59 I noticed quite lately a speech of an American Progressive leader claiming that his principles were simply those of Abraham Lincoln the tendency is due in part to the almost insuperable difficulty of really inventing a new word to denote a

New thing it is so much easier to take an existing word especially a famous famous word with fine associations and twist it into a new sense in part no doubt it comes from Mankind’s natural love for these old associations and the fact that nearly all people who are

Worth much have in them some instinctive Spirit of reverence even when striking out A New Path they like to feel that they are following at least the spirit of one greater than themselves the Hellenism of the sixth and fifth centuries was to a great extent what the

An ideal and a standard of culture the classical Greeks were not strictly speaking pure Helens by Blood Herodotus and thusi 60 are quite clear about that the original Helens were a particular conquering tribe of great Prestige which attracted the surrounding tribes to follow it imitate it and call themselves

By its name the Spartans were to Herodotus helenic the Athenians on the other hand were not they were p Ian but by a certain time changed into Helens and learned the language in historical times we cannot really find any tribe of pure Helens in existence though the name

Clings faintly to a particular District not otherwise important in South thy had there been any undoubted Helens with incontrovertible pedigrees still going very likely the ideal would have taken quite a different name but where no one’s ancestry would bear much inspection the only way to show you

Where a true Helen was to behave as such that is to approximate to some constantly Rising ideal of what the true Helen should be in all probability if a Greek of the fifth century like escalus or even Pinder had met a group of the real Helens or a Kyo of the migrations

He would have set them down as so many obvious and flaming barbarians we do not know whether the old Helens had any general word to denote the surrounding peoples pelasgians and diverse other barbarous tribes 61 whom they conquered or accepted as allies 62 in any case by the

Time of the Persian Wars say 500b see all these tribes together considered themselves heliz bore the name of Helens and formed a kind of unity against hordes of barbaroi surrounding them on every side and threatening them especially from the East let us consider for a moment the dates in political history this

Self-realization of the Greek tribes as Helens against barbarians seems to have been first felt in the ionian settlements on the coast of Asia Minor where the sons of Javan Yan equals Omega new clashed as Invaders against the native hittite and Semite it was emphasized by a similar clash in the

Further colonies in pontis and in the west if we wish for a central moment as representing this self-realization of Greece I should be inclined to find it in the reign of pistus 560 to 527 BC when that monarch made as it were the first sketch of an Athenian Empire based

On alliances and took over to Athens the leadership of the ionian race in literature the decisive moment is clear it came when in Mister Mel’s phrase Homer came to helis 63 the date is apparently the same and the influences at work are the same it seems to have

Been under pistus that the homeric poems in some form or other came from Ionia to be recited in a fixed order at the panthic festival and to find a canonical form and a central home in Athens till the end of The Classical period Athens is the center from which

Homeric influence radiates over the mainland of Greece its effect upon literature was of course enormous it can be traced in various Ways by the content of the literature which now begins to be filled with the heroic Saga by a change of style which emerges in say Pinder and escalus when

Compared with what we know of Karina or thespis more objectively and definitely it can be traced in a remarkable change of dialect the old attic poets like Solen were comparatively little affected by the Epic influence the later elegists like ion uus and Plato were steeped in it

64 in religion the Cardinal moment is the same it consists in the coming of Homer Olympian gods and that is to be the subject of the present essay I am not of course going to describe the Cults and characters of the various Olympians for that inquiry the reader

Will naturally go to the five learned volumes of my colleague Dr Farnell I wish merely to face certain difficult and I think hitherto unsolved problems affecting the meaning and origin and history of the Olympians as a whole Herodotus in a famous passage tells us that Homer and hessed made the

Generations of the Gods for the Greeks and gave them their names and distinguished their offices and crafts and portrayed their shapes 253 the date of this wholesale proceeding was he thinks perhaps as much as 400 years before his own day c 430b c but not more before that time the pelasgians

IE the Primitive inhabitants of Greece as opposed to the Helens were worshiping gods in indefinite numbers with no particular names many of them appear as figures carved emblematically with sex emblems to represent the powers of fertility in generation like the Athenian Herms the whole account bristles with points for

Discussion but in general it suits very well with the picture drawn in the first of these essays with its Earth maidens and mothers and its projected kooy the background is the preh helenic erum height the new shape impressed upon it is the great anthropomorphic Olympian family as defined in the homeric epos

And more timidly in hessed but of hessed we must speak later now who are these Olympian gods and where do they come from Homer did not make them out of nothing but the understanding of them is beset with problems in the first place why are they called Olympian are they the gods of

Mount Olympus the old sacred mountain of Homer zakayo or do they belong to the great sanctuary of Olympia in which Zeus the lord of the Olympians had his greatest Festival the two are at opposite ends of Greece Olympus in north thessaly in the Northeast Olympia in Ellis in the

Southwest from which do the Olympians come on the one hand it is clear in Homer that they dwell on Mount Olympus they have Olympian houses Beyond human sight on the top of the Sacred Mountain which in The Odyssey is identified with Heaven on the other hand when pistus introduced the worship of

Olympian Zeus on a great scale into Athens and and built the olympium he seems to have brought him straight from Olympia in Ellis for he introduced the special elen complex of gods Zeus Ria Kronos and go Olympia 65 fortunately this puzzle can be solved the Olympians belong to both places it

Is merely a case of tribal migration history confirmed by the study of the Greek dialects seems to show that these Northern aayo came down across Central Greece and the Gulf of Corinth and settled in Ellis 66 they brought with them their Zeus who was already called Olympian and established him as

Superior to the existing God Kronos the games became Olympian and the sanctuary by which they were performed Olympia 67 as soon as this point is clear we understand also why there is more than one Mount Olympus we can all think of two one in thessy and one across the aan in mishia

But there are many more some 20 odd if I mistake not in the whole Greek region it is a preg Greek word applied to mountains and it seems clear that the Olympian gods wherever their worshippers moved tended to dwell in the highest mountain in the neighborhood and the mountain thereby became

Olympus the name then explains itself the Olympians are the Mountain Gods of the old invading northmen the chieftain and princes each with his commenta or loose following of retainers and minor Chieftains who broke in upon the ordered splendors of the aan Palaces and still more important on the ordered Simplicity

Of tribal life in the preh helenic Villages of the Mainland now it is a cannon of religious study that all gods reflect the social State past repr present of their worshippers from this point of view what appearance do the Olympians of Homer make what are they there for what do

They do and what are their relations one to another the gods of most Nations claim to have created the world the Olympians make no such claim the most they ever did was to conquer it Zeus and his comatus conquered Kronos and his conquered and expelled them sent them migrating Beyond the Horizon heaven

Knows where Zeus took the chief dominion and remained a permanent Overlord but he apportioned large kingdoms to his brothers Hades and posidon and confirmed various of his children and followers in lesser thiefs Apollo went off on his own adventure and conquered Deli Athena conquered the Giants she

Gained Athens by a conquest over posidon a point of which we will speak later and when they have conquered Their Kingdoms what do they do do they attend to the government do they promote agriculture do they practice trades and industries not a bit of it why should

They do any honest work they find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with Thunderbolts the people who do not pay they are conquering Chieftain Royal Buccaneers they fight and feast and play and make music they drink deep and Roar with laughter at the lame Smith who

Waits on them they are never afraid except of their own King they never tell lies except in Love and War a few deductions may be from this statement but they do not affect its main significance one God you may say heists is definitely a Craftsman yes A Smith a maker of weapons

The one Craftsman that a gang of Warriors needed to have by them and they preferred him lame so that he should not run away again Apollo herded for hire the cattle of admetus Apollo and posidon built the walls of Troy for ladan certainly in such stories we have

An intrusion of other elements but in any case the work done is not habitual work it is a special punishment again it is not denied that the Olympians have some effect on agriculture and unjustice they destroy the harvests of those who offend them they punish oathbreakers and the like

Even in the heroic age itself if we may adopt Mister Chadwick’s convenient title for the age of the migrations Chieftain and gods probably retained some vestages of the functions they had exer excised in more normal and settled times and besides we must always realize that in these inquiries we never meet a simple

And uniform figure we must further remember that these gods are not real people with a real character they never existed they are only Concepts exceedingly confused cloudy and changing Concepts in the minds of thousands of diverse worshippers and non-w worshippers they change every time they are thought of as a word changes every

Every time it is pronounced even in the height of the aian wars the concept of any one God would be mixed up with traditions and associations drawn from the surrounding populations and their gods and by the time they come down to us in Homer and our other early literature they have

Passed through the minds of many different ages and places especially Ionia and Athens the Olympians as described in our text of Homer or as described in the Athenian recitations of the 6th Century our ttis mutandis related to the Olympians of the heroic age much as the Helens of the 6th

Century are to the Helens of the heroic age I say mutus mutandis because the historical development of a group of imaginary Concepts shrined in Tradition and romance can never be quite the same as that of the people who conceive them the realm of fiction is apt both to LEAP

In front and to lag in the rear of the march of real life romance will hug picturesque darknesses as well as invent Perfections but the gods of Homer as we have them certainly seem to show traces of the process through which they have passed of An Origin among the old conquering

Aoi a development in the ionian Epic schools and a final home in Athens 68 for example what gods are chiefly prominent in Homer in The Iliad certainly three Zeus Apollo and Athena and much the same would hold for the Odyssey next to them in importance will be posidon Hera and Hermes Zeus stands

Somewhat apart he is one of the very few Gods with recognizable and undoubted indo-germanic names JW the well attested Sky and Rain god of the Aryan race he is a cayan he is helenos the God woried by all Helens he is also curiously enough palasan and Mr a cook 69 can explain to

Us the seeming contradiction but the northern elements in the concept ception of Zeus have on the whole triumphed over any pelasgian or aian Sky god with which they may have mingled and Zeus in spite of his dark hair may be mainly treated as the patriarchal god of the invading northmen

Passing from the upper danub down by his three great sanctuaries daona Olympus and Olympia he had an extraordinary power of ousting or absorbing the various objects of Aboriginal worship which he found in his path the story of malikos above 14 is a common one of course we must not suppose that the Zeus

Of the actual aayo was a figure quite like the Zeus of fidas or of Homer there has been a good deal of experation in the homeric Zeus 70 as Mr cook clearly shows the counselor and cloud compeller of classical Athens was The Wizard and rain maker of earlier times and the all

Father surprises Us in Thea and Creep by appearing both as a babe and as a kuros in spring dances and initiation ritual rituals 71 it is a long way from these conceptions to the Zeus of escalus a figure as Sublime as the Jehovah of JB but the lineage seems clear Zeus is the

Akian sky God his son feus Apollo is of more complex make on one side he is clearly a Northman he has connections with the hyperboreans 72 he has a sacred Road leading far into the north along which offerings are sent back from Shrine to Shrine Beyond on the bounds of Greek

Knowledge such sacred roads are normally the roads by which the God himself has traveled the offerings are sent back from the new Sanctuary to the old on the other side Apollo reaches back to an aan matriarchal kuros his home is delos where he has a mother Leto but no very visible father

He leads the ships of his Islanders sometimes in the form of a dolphin he is no Helen in the fighting at Troy he is against the aayo he destroys the Greek host he Champions Hector he even slays Achilles in the homic him to Apollo we read that when the Great Archer draws

Near to Olympus all the gods tremble and start from their seats Leo alone and of course Zeus hold their ground 73 what this God’s original name was at delos we cannot be sure he has very many names and epithets but he early became identified with a similar God at Deli and adopted

His name aalon or in the delic and Dorian form appelin presumably the kuras projected from the Dorian Gatherings called appell 74 as Foos he is a sun god and from classical times onward we often find him definitely identified with the Sun a distinction which came easily to

Auras in any case and this is the important point he is at Delo the chief god of the ionians the ionians are defined by Herodotus as those tribes and cities who were sprung from Athens and kept the apua they recognized delos as their holy place and worshiped Apollo petrose as

Their ancestor 75 the ionian Homer has naturally brought us the ionian God and significantly enough though the tradition makes him an enemy of the Greeks and The Poets have to accept the tradition there is no tendency to crab or belittle him he is the most Splendid and awful of Homer

Olympians the case of Palace Athena is even simpler though it leads to a somewhat surprising result what Apollo is to Ionia that and more Athena is to Athens there are doubtless foreign elements in Athena some and ionian some Northern 76 but her whole appearance in history and literature

Tells the same story as her name Athens is her City and she is the goddess of Athens the Athena or athore in Athens she can be simply perthena know the maiden elsewhere she is the adic or Athenian Maiden as glop she is identified or associated with the

Owl that was the sacred bird of Athens as Palace she seems to be a thunder Maiden a sort of corania or bride of coronos a padian consists of two Thunder Shields set one above the other like a figure 8 and we can trace an AR types the development of this eight into a

Human figure it seems clear that the old aayo cannot have called their Warrior Maiden daughter of Zeus by the name Athena or atha the Athenian goddess must have come in from Athenian influence and it is strange to find how deep into the heart of the poems that influence must have

Reached if we try to conjecture whose place it is that Athena has taken it is worth remarking that her regular epithet daughter of Zeus belongs in Sanskrit to the Dawn Goddess EOS 77 the transition might be helped by some touches of the Dawn Goddess that see seemed to linger about Athena in

Myth the Rising Sun stayed his horses while Athena was born from the head of Zeus also she was born amid a snowstorm of gold and EOS on the other hand is like Athena sometimes the daughter of the giant Palace 78 our three Chief Olympians then explain themselves very easily a body of

Poetry and tradition in its origin dating from the aayo of the migrations growing for centuries in the hands of ionian bars and reaching its culminating form at Athens has prominent in it the aayan Zeus the ionian Apollo the Athenian cor the same cor who descended in person to restore the exiled pistus

To his throne 79 we need only throw a glance in passing at a few of the other Olympians why for instance should posidon be so prominent in origin he is a puzzling figure besides the aan Earth shaking brother of Zeus in thessy there seems to be some pelasgian or aan God

Present in him he is closely connected with Libya he brings the horse from their point 80 at times he exists in order to be defeated defeated in Athens by Athena in naxis by dianis in Aina by Zeus in Argos by Hera in Acra Corinth by Helios though he continues to hold the

Ismos in trosen he shares a temple on more or less equal terms with Athena 81 even in Troy he is defeated and cast out from the walls his own hands had built Point 82 these problems we need not for the present face by the time that concerns us most the Earth Shaker

Is a sea God especially important to the Sea peoples of Athens niia he is the father of Nas the ancestor of the ionian Kings his Temple at Cape Mel is the scene of the panonia and second only to delos as a religious center of the ionian tribes

He has intimate relations with ateka too besides the ancient contest with Athena for the possession of the land he appears as the father of Theus the chief Athenian hero he is merged in other attic Heroes like Aus and eus he is the special patron of the Athenian Knights thus his prominence in

Homer is very natural what of Hermes his history deserves a long monograph to itself it is so exceptionally instructive originally outside Homer Hermes was simply an old upright Stone a pillar furnished with the regular pelasgian sex symbol of procreation set up over a tomb he is the

Power that generates new lives or in the ancient conception brings the souls back to be born again he is the guide of the Dead the psychop pompus the Divine Herald between the two worlds if you have a message for the dead you speak it to the Herm at the grave

This notion of Hermes as Herald may have been helped by his use as a boundary Stone the Latin Terminus your boundary stone is your representative the deliverer of your message to the Hostile neighbor or alien if you wish to parley with him you advance up to your boundary Stone if you

Go as a Herald peacefully into his territory you place yourself under the protection of the same sacred stone the last sign that remains of your own safe country if you are killed or wronged it is he the immovable Watcher who will avenge you now this phallic Stone post

Was quite unsuitable to Homer it was not decent it was not quite human and every personage in Homer has to be both in The Iliad Hermes is simply removed and a beautiful creation or tradition Iris the rainbow goddess takes his place as the messenger from Heaven to Earth in The

Odyssey he is admitted but so changed and castigated that no no one would recognize the old Herm in the beautiful and gracious youth who performs the God’s messages I can only detect in his language one possible trace of his old pelasgian character 83 penus knew who worked the transformation in speaking of Hermes

Among the other workers who were pillars in square form he says as to Hermes the poems of Homer have given currency to the report that he is a servant of Zeus and leads down the spirits of The Departed to Hades 84 in the magic papyri Hermes returns to something of his old

Functions he is scarcely to be distinguished from the agathos diamon but thanks to Homer he is purified of his old phallicism Hera to the wife of Zeus seems to have a curious past behind her she has certainly ousted the original wife Dion whose worship continued unchallenged in far daona from times

Before Zeus descended upon Greek lands when he invaded Ved thessy he seems to have left Dion behind and wetted the queen of the conquered territory pera’s permanent epithet is ARG arive she is the arive Kore or year Maiden as Athena is the attic Cypress the cyprian but Argos and Homer denotes

Two different places a watered plane in the pelones and a watered plane in thessy Hera was certainly the chief goddess of pelian Argos in historic times and had brought her consort her 85 along with her but at one time she seems to have belonged to the thesan

Argos she helped thesan Jason to launch the ship Argo and they launched it from thesan pagi in the argonautica she is a beautiful figure gracious and strong the lovely patroness of the young hero no element of strife is haunting her but in the ilot for some reason she is

Unpopular she is a shrew a scold and a jealous wife why Miss Harrison suggests that the quarrel with Zeus dates from the time of the invasion when he was the Conquering alien and she the native Queen of the land 86 it may be too that the ionian

Poets who respected their own Apollo and Athena and posidon regarded Hera as representing some race or tribe that they disliked a goddess of Dorian Argos might be as disagreeable as a Dorian it seems to be for some reason like this that aphrodite ID identified with Cyprus or some Center among Oriental barbarians

Is handled with so much disrespect that Aries the thian kuros a sun god and War God is treated as a mere bully in Coward and general pest 87 there is not much faith in these Gods as they appear to us in the homeric poems and not much respect except

Perhaps for aollo and Athena and posidon the buccaneer Kings of the heroic age cut loose from all local local and tribal pieties intent only on personal gain and Glory were not the people to build up a powerful religious Faith they left that as they left Agriculture and

Handiwork to the nameless common folk 88 and it was not likely that the BS of cultivated and scientific Ionia should waste much religious emotion on a system which was clearly meant more for romance than for The Guiding of life yet the power of romance is great in the memory

Of Greece the Kings and gods of the heroic age were transfigured what had been really an age of buccaneering violence became in memory an age of chivalry and Splendid Adventure the traits that were at all tolerable were idealized those that were intolerable were either expirated or if that was

Impossible were Mystic ised and explained away and the Savage old Olympians became to Athens and the mainland of Greece from the 6th Century onward emblems of high humanity and religious reform two the religious value of the Olympians now to some people this statement may seem a willful Paradox yet

I believe it to be true The Olympian religion radiating from Homer at the panthia produced what I will venture to call exactly a religious Reformation let us consider how with all its flaws and falsehoods it was fitted to attempt such a work in the first place the poems represent an aayan

Tradition the tradition of a northern conquering race organized on a patriarchal monogamous system vehemently distinct from the matal linear customs of the aan or hittite races with their polygamy and polyandry their agricultural rights their sex emblems and fertility goddesses contrast for a moment the sort of sexless Valkyrie who appears in The

Iliad under the name of Athena with the core of Ephesus strangely called Artemis a shapeless fertility figure covered with innumerable breasts that suggests the contrast that I mean secondly the poems are by tradition aristocratic they are the literature of Chieftain alien to low popular Superstition true the poems as we have

Them are not Court poems that error ought not to be so often repeated as we have them they are poems recited at a panag gyus or public Festival but they go back in Ultimate origin to something like lay sung in a Royal Hall and the contrast between the

Homeric gods and the Gods found outside Homer is well compared by Mr Chadwick 89 to the difference between the gods of the ETA and the historical traces of religion outside the Eda the gods who Feast with Odin and Asgard forming an organized Community or comatus seem to

Be the gods of the Kings distinct from the gods of the peasants cleaner and more warlike and lordlicorice1 reasons calculated to lead the forward movement against the burum height for one thing Ionia reinforced the old heroic tradition in having much the same inward Freedom the ionians are

The descendants of those who fled from the Invaders across the sea leaving their homes tribes and tribal Traditions willo witz has well remarked how the imagination of the Greek mainland is dominated by the gigantic seers of unknown Kings which the fugitives to Asia had left behind them and have forgot en

90 again when the ionians settled on the Asiatic coasts they were no doubt to some extent influenced but they were far more repelled by the barbaric tribes of the Interior they became conscious as we have said of something that was helenic as distinct from something else that was

Barbaric and the helenic part of them vehemently rejected what struck them as superstitious cruel or unclean and lastly we must remember that Ionia was before the R of Athens not only the most imaginative and intellectual part of Greece but by far the most advanced in knowledge and

Culture the homeric religion is a step in the self-realization of Greece and such self-realization naturally took its rise in Ionia granted then that Homer was calculated to produce a kind of religious Reformation in Greece what kind of reformation was it we are again reminded of St Paul it was a move away

From the beggarly elements toward some imagined person behind them the world was conceived as neither quite without external governance nor as merely subject to the incursions of Mana snakes and Bulls and thunderstones and monsters but as governed by an organized body of personal and reasoning rulers wise and bountiful fathers like

Man in mind and shape only unspeakably higher for a type of this Olympian Spirit we may take a phenomenon that has perhaps sometimes wearied us the reiterated insistence in the beliefs of the best period on The Strife of men against Centaur or of gods against Giants our modern sympathies are apt to

Side with the Giants and centur an age of order likes romantic violence as lands men safe in their houses like storms at sea but to the Greek this battle was full of symbolical meaning it is The Strife the ultimate victory of human intelligence reason and gentleness against what seems at first

The overwhelming power of passion and unguided strength it is helis against the brute world 91 the victory of helenismo barbarism of man over Beast that was the aim but was it ever accomplished The Olympian gods as we see them in art appear so calm so perfect so far removed from the atmosphere of

Acknowledged imperfection and spiritual striving that what I am now about to say may again seem a deliberate Paradox it is nevertheless true that the Olympian religion is only to the full intelligible and admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled Endeavor not a tell us or completion but a movement

And effort of life we may analyze the movement into three main elements a moral experation of the old rights an attempt to bring order into the old chaos and lastly an adaptation to new social needs we will take the three in order in the first place it gradually

Swept out of religion or at least covered with a decent Veil that great mass of rights which was concerned with the food supply and the tribe Supply and aimed at direct stimulation of generative processes 92 it left only a few reverent and Mystic rituals a few licensed outbursts of riotous indecency in comedy

And the agricultural festivals it Swept Away what seems to us a thing less dangerous a large part of the worship of the Dead such worship our evidence shows us gave a loose Reign to Superstition to The Olympian movement it was vulgar it was semi barbarous it was

Often bloody we find that it has almost disappeared from homeric Athens at a time when the monuments show it still flourishing in anomeric Sparta The Olympian movement swept away also at least for two Splendid centuries the worship of the man God with its diseased atmosphere of megalomania and bloodlust

93 these things return with the fall of of Daring and endurance of social organization so it bids him remember that he is a man like other men subject to the same laws and bound to reckon with the same death so much for the moral experation next for the bringing

Of intellectual order to parody the words of anex agaras in the early religion all things were together till the homeric system came and arranged them we constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings who can be described as paman Lambda Lambda new new amran mut Omega new mucron roofi Mu Alpha one form

Of many names each tribe each little Community sometimes one may almost say each cast the children of the bards the children of the Potters had its own special Gods now as soon as there was any general sismos or settling together any effective surmounting of the narrowest local barriers these

Innumerable Gods tended to melt into one another under different historical circumstances this process might have been carried resolutely through and produced an intelligible Pantheon in which each God had his proper function and there was no overlapping one cor one kuras one son God and so on but in Greece that was

Impossible imaginations had been too Vivid and local types had too often become clearly personified and differentiated the maiden of Athens Athena did no doubt absorb some other Kai but she could not possibly combine with her of cther or Cyprus or Ephesus nor with the argive Kore or the Delian or the

Bonian what happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types the korai of Cyprus sthera Corinth Erics and some other places were felt to be one and became absorbed in the great figure of Aphrodite Artemis absorbed a quantity

More including those of delos and Boron of various parts of Arcadia and Sparta and even as we saw the fertility cor of Ephesus doubtless she and the Delian were originally much closer together but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness the Kuro or youths in the

Same way were absorbed into some half dozen great mythological shapes Apollo Aries Hermes dionisis and the like as so often in Greek development we are brought up against the immense formative power of fiction or Romance the simple Kore or kuros was a figure of indistinct outline with no history or

Personality like the Roman functional Gods such beings were hardly persons they melted easily one into another but when the Greek imagination had once done its work upon them a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had become for all practical purposes a definite person almost as definite as Achilles or Odus as McBeth or

Falstaff they cze hard they will no longer melt or blend at least not at an ordinary temperature in the fourth and third centuries we hear a great deal about the gods all being one Zeus the same as Hades Hades as Helios Helios the same as dionisis 94 but the amalgamation only

Takes place in the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rights of religious mysticism the best document preserved to us of this attempt to bring order into chaos is the Poetry of of hessi there are three poems all devoted to this object composed perhaps under the influence of deli and certainly

Under that of Homer and trying in a quasi homeric dialect and under a quasi Olympian system to bring together vast masses of ancient Theology and folklore and Scattered tradition the theogony attempts to make a pedigree and hierarchy of the Gods the catalog of women and the eoi AI preserved only in

Scandy fragments attempt to fix in canonical form the Cloudy mixture of dreams and boasts and legends and hypotheses by which most royal families in Central Greece recorded their descent from a traditional ancestress and a conjectural God the works and days form an attempt to collect and arrange the rules and tabos relating to

Agriculture the work of hessed as a whole is one of the most Valiant failures in literature the confusion and absurdity of it are only equaled by its strange helpless Beauty and its extraordinary AR historical interest the hetic system when compared with that of Homer is much more explicit much less expirated

Infinitely less accomplished and tactful at the back of Homer lay the lordly warrior gods of the heroic age at the back of hessi the crude and Tangled superstitions of the peasantry of the Mainland also The hetic Poets worked in a comparatively backward and unenlightened atmosphere the homeric

Were exposed to the full light of Athens the third element in this homeric Reformation is an attempt to make religion satisfy the needs of a new social order the earliest Greek religion was clearly based on the tribe a band of people all in some sense Kindred and normally living together people with the

Same Customs ancestors initiations flocks and herds and Fields this tribal and agricultural religion can hardly have maintained itself unchanged at the great aan centers like nasus and m95 it certainly did not Main maintain itself among the marauding chiefs of the heroic age it bowed its head beneath the

Scepter of its own Divine Kings and the armed heel of its northern Invaders only to appear again almost undamaged and unimproved when the kings were fallen and the Invaders sunk into the soil like storms of destructive rain but it no longer suited its environment in the age of the migrations

The tribes had been broken scattered remixed they had almost ceased to exist as important social entities the social unit which had taken their place was the political community of men of whatever tribe or tribes who were held together in times of danger and constant War by means of a common

Circuit wall apus 96 the idea of the tribe remained in the earliest Classical period we find every Greek city still nominally composed of tribes but the tribes are fictitious the early City makers could still only conceive of society on a tribal basis every local or accidental Congregation

Of people who wish to act together have to invent an imaginary common ancestor the clash between the old tribal Traditions that have lost their meaning though not their sanctity and the new duties imposed by the actual needs of the polis leads to many strange and interesting compromises the famous constitution of kenes shows

Several an old proverb expresses well the ordinary feeling on the subject Capa Epsilon pil Iota Z Epsilon Iota Epsilon Micron Delta R Kai Alpha Amicon Ro Iota Sigma Amicon whatever the city may do but the old custom is the best now in the contest between City and tribe The

Olympian gods had one great negative Advantage they were not tribal or local and all other gods were they were by this time International with no strong roots anywhere except where one of them could be identified with some native God they were full of Fame and beauty and

Prestige they were ready to be made pooy City holders of any particular City still more ready to be heleno patrons of all helis in the working out of these three aims The Olympian religion achieved much in all three it failed the moral experation failed owing to the

Mere force of inertia possessed by old religious traditions and local Cults we must remember how weak any central government was in ancient civiliz ation the power and influence of a highly civilized society were apt to end a few miles outside its City wall all through the backward parts of Greece

Obscene and cruel rights lingered on the darker and worse the further they were removed from the full light of Hellenism but in this respect the Olympian religion did not merely fail it did worse to make the elements of a nature religion human is inevitably to make them vicious there is no great

Moral harm in worshiping a thunderstorm even though the lightning strikes the good and evil quite recklessly there is no need to pretend that the lightning is exercising a wise and righteous choice but when once you worship an imaginary quasi human being who throws the lightning you are in a

Dilemma either you have to admit that you are worshiping and flattering a being with no moral sense because he happens to be dangerous or else you have to invent reasons for his wrath against the people who happen to be struck and they are pretty sure to bad reasons the

God if personal becomes capricious and cruel when the Ark of Israel was being brought back from the Philistines the cattle slipped by the threshing floor of Nikon and the holy object was in danger of falling a certain Aza as we all know sprang forward to save it and was struck dead for his

Pains now if he was struck dead by the sheer Holiness of the taboo object the Holiness stored inside it like so much electricity his death was a misfortune an interesting accident and no more 97 but when it is made into the deliberate Act of an anthropomorphic God who

Strikes a well-intentioned man dead in explosive rage for a very pardonable mistake a dangerous element has been introduced into the ethics of that religion a being who is the moral equal of man must not behave like a charge of dynamite again to worship emblems of fertility in generation as was done in

Agricultural rights all through the aan area is in itself an intelligible and not necessarily A degrading practice but when those emblems are somehow humanized and the result is an anthropomorphic God of enormous procreative power and innumerable Amores a religion so modified has received a death blow the

Step that was meant to soften its grossness has resulted in its moral degradation this result was intensified by another well- meant effort at elevation the leading tribes of Central Greece were as we we have mentioned apt to count their descent from some heroin ancestors her consort was sometimes

Unknown and in a matal linear Society unimportant sometimes he was a local God or river when the Olympians came to introduce some order and unity among these innumerable local Gods the original tribal ancestor tended naturally enough to be identified with Zeus Apollo or posidon the unfortunate Olympians whose

System really aimed at pure moral and condemned polygamy and polyandry are left with a crowd of consorts that would put Solomon to shame thus a failure in the moral experation was deepened by a failure in the attempt to bring intellectual order into the Welter of primitive Gods the only satisfactory end

Of that effort would have been monotheism if Seuss had only gone further and become completely once and for all the father of all life the scandalous stories would have lost their point and meaning it is curious how near to monotheism and to monotheism of a very profound and impersonal type the

Real religion of Greece came in the 6th and fifth centuries many of the philosophers xenophanes Parmenides and others asserted it clearly or assumed it without hesitation escalus ureides Plato in their deeper moments point the same road indeed a metaphysician might hold that their theology is far deeper than that

To which we are accustomed since they seem not to make any particular difference between Omicron Theta Epsilon Omicron and Theta Epsilon or t Theta Epsilon Omicron new they do not instinctively suppose that the human distinctions between he and it or between one and many apply to the Divine

Certainly Greek monotheism had it really carried the day would have been a far more philosophic thing than the tribal and personal monotheism of the Hebrews but unfortunately too many hardc cake superstitions too many tender and sensitive associations were linked with particular figures in the pantheon or particular rights which had brought the

Worshippers religious peace if there had been some Hebrew prophets about and a tyrant or two Progressive and bloody-minded to agree with them polytheism might perhaps actually have been Stamped Out in Greece at one time but Greek thought always sincere and daring was seldom brutal seldom ruthless or cruel the thinkers of the great

Period felt their own way gently to the holy of holies and did not try to compel others to take the same way Greek theology whether popular or philosophical seldom denied any God seldom forbade any worship what it tried to do was to identify every new god with

Some aspect of one of the old ones and the result was naturally confusion apart from the Epicurean school which though powerful was always unpopular the religious thought of later Antiquity for the most part took refuge in a sort of a pathosis of good taste in which the great care was not to hurt

Other people’s feelings or else it collapsed into helpless mysticism the attempt to make Olympian ISM a religion of the polus failed also the Olympians did not belong to any particular City they were too Universal and no particular City had a very positive faith in them the actual polus

Was real and tangible the homeric gods a little alien and literary the city herself was a most most real power and the true gods of the city who had grown out of the soil and the wall were simply the city herself in her Eternal and personal aspect as

Mother and guide and log ofer the worshiped and beloved being whom each citizen must defend even to the death as the kuros of his day emerged from the social group of kury or the aior from the band of suppliance in like fashion pyron Lambda Iota or pyron Lambda Iota

Epsilon emerged as a personification or projection of the city picon Lambda Iota in Athens was of course Athena picon Lambda Iota Epsilon might as well be called Zeus as anything else in reality such beings fall into the same class as the hero Argos or Corinthos son of Zeus

The city worship was narrow yet to broaden it was except in some rare Minds to sap its life the ordinary man finds it impossible to love his Nextdoor neighbors except by siding with them against the next door but one it proved difficult even in a city like Athens to

Have gods that would appeal to the Loyalty of all ATA on the Acropolis at Athens there seem originally to have been Athena and some kuras corresponding with her some waterer of the earth like Urus then as ateka was United and brought under the lead of its Central

City the gods of the outlying districts began to claim places on the Acropolis Palace the Thunder Maid of Pini in the South came to form a joint personality with Athena oo a town in the Northeast on the way from delos to Deli had for its special God of pithan Apollo

When oo became attic a place for the pithan Apollo had to be found on the Acropolis dionis came from Al deer and cor from ausus Theus himself perhaps from Marathon or even from trosen they were all given official residences on Athena’s Rock and Athens in return sent

Out Athena to new temples built for her and PRI and San and various colonies 98 this development came step by step and grew out of real worships it was quite different from the wholesale adoption of a body of non-national poetical gods yet even this development was too artificial too much

Stamped with the marks of expediency in courtesy in compromise it could not live the personalities of such Gods vanish away their prayers become prayers to all gods and goddesses of the city Theta Epsilon Omicron cap Alpha Theta Epsilon Sigma Iota Pi Sigma Iota cap Alpha Pi Sigma

Iota those who remain chiefly Athena and Theus only mean Athens what then amid all this failure did The Olympian religion really achieve first it Deb barbarized the worship of the leading states of Greece not of all Greece since Antiquity had no means of spreading knowledge comparable to ours

It reduced the horrors of the burm height for the most part to a ROM antic memory and made religion no longer a mortal danger to humanity unlike many religious systems it generally permitted progress it encouraged not only the obedient virtues but the daring virtues as well it had in it the spirit that

Saves from disaster that knows itself fallible and thinks twice before it hates and curses and persecutes it wrapped religion in sopas again it worked for Concord and fellow feeling throughout the Greek communities it is after all a good deal to say that in Greek history we find

Almost no Waring of sex no Mutual tortures or even blasphemies with many ragged edges with many weaknesses it built up something like a United helenic religion to stand against the beastly devices of the Heathen and after all if we are inclined on the purely religious side to judge

The Olympian system harshly we must not forget its sheer Beauty truth no doubt is greater than Beauty but in many matters Beauty can be attained and Truth cannot all we know is that when the best Minds seek for truth the result is apt to be beautiful it was a great thing

That men should envisage the world as governed not by Giants and Gorgons and dealers in Eternal torture but by some human and more than human understanding zinu Epsilon Sigma Iota 99 by beings of quiet Splendor like many a classical Zeus and Hermes and demer if Olympian

ISM was not a religious faith it was at least a vital force in the shaping of cities and societies which remain after 2,000 years a type to the world of beauty and freedom and high Endeavor even the stirring of its ashes when they seemed Long Cold had power to produce

Something of the same result for the classicism of the Italian Renaissance is a child however Fallen of the Olympian Spirit of course I recognize that beauty is not the same as faith there is in one sense far more faith in some hideous Miracle working icon which sends out starving peasants to Massacre

Jews than in the Athena of fidus yet once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology there is religion in Athena also Athena is an ideal an ideal and a mystery the ideal of wisdom of incessant labor of almost terrifying Purity seen through the light of some Mystic and spiritual devotion like but

Transcending the love of man for woman or if the way of Athena is too hard for us common men it is not hard to find a true religious ideal in such a figure as pepan in panie there is more of posos and of mystery she has more recently entered the calm ranks of

Olympus the old Liturgy of the dying and reisen year bribe still clings to her if religion is that which brings us into relation with the great world forces there is the very heart of Life in this homecoming Bride of the underworld life with its broken hopes its disaster its Newfound spiritual Joy life

Seen as mother and daughter not a thing continuous and unchanging but shot through with parting and death Life as a great love or desire ever torn asunder and ever renewed but stay a reader May object is not this the pany the Athena of modern sentiment are these figures

Really the goddesses of The Iliad and of Sophocles the truth is is I think that they are neither the one nor the other they are the goddesses of ancient reflection and allegory the goddesses that is of the best and most characteristic worship that these idealized creations awakened what we have treated hither to

As the Mortal weakness of the Olympians the fact that they have no roots in any particular soil little hold on any definite primeval cult has turned out to be their peculiar strength we must not think of allegory as a late post classical phenomenon in Greece it begins

At least as early as Pythagoras and heraclitus perhaps as early as hessi for hessed seems sometimes to be turning allegory back into myth the Olympians Cut Loose from the soil enthroned only in men’s free imagination have two special regions which they have made their own mythology and allegory the mythology drops for the

Most part very early out of practical religion even in Homer we find it expirated in Pinder escalus and xenophanes it is expirated denied and allegorized the myths survive chiefly as material for literature the shapes of the Gods themselves chiefly as material for art they are both of them objects

Not of belief but of imagination yet when the religious imagination of Greece deepens it twines itself still around these gracious and everm moving shapes the Zeus of escalus moves on into the Zeus of Plato or of cleanthes or of Marcus orelus Hermes Athena Apollo all have their long spiritual history they are

But little impeded by The Echoes of the old frivolous mythology still less by any local roots or sectional prejudices or compulsory details of ritual as the more Highly Educated mind of Greece emerged from a particular local tribal conception of religion the old denationalized Olympians were ready to receive her the

Real religion of of the fifth century was as we have said a Devotion to the city itself it is expressed often in escalus and Sophocles again and again with more Discord and more criticism in Ides and Plato for the indignant blasphemies of the gorgeous and the

Trats bear the same message as the ideal patriotism of the Republic it is expressed best perhaps and that without mention of the name of a single God in the great funeral speech of Pericles it is higher than most patriotism because it is set upon higher ideals it is more fervid because the men

Practicing it lived habitually nearer to the danger point and when they spoke of dying for the city spoke of a thing they had faced last week and might face again tomorrow it was more religious because of the unconscious mysticism in which it is clothed even by such hard heads as

Pericles and fusades the mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no words great enough yet for all its intent it it was condemned by its mere narrowness by the 4th Century the average Athenian must have recognized what philosophers had recognized long

Before that a religion to be true must be Universal and not the privilege of a particular people as soon as the stoics had proclaimed the world to be one great city of Gods and Men the only Gods with which Greece could satisfactorily people that city were the idealized band of the old

Olympians they are artists dreams ideals allegories they are symbols of something Beyond themselves they are gods of half rejected tradition of unconscious make believe of aspiration they are Gods to whom doubtful philosophers can pray with all of philosophers due caution as to so many radiant and heart-searching

Hypotheses they are not gods in whom anyone believes as a hard fact does this condemn them or is it just the other way is it perhaps that one difference between religion and Superstition lies exactly in this that Superstition degrades its worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute

Fact on which it must needs Act without question without striving without any respect for others or any desire for higher or Fuller truth it is only an accident though perhaps an invariable accident that all the supposed facts are false in religion however precious you may consider the truth you draw from it

You know that it is is a truth seen dimly and possibly seen by others better than by you you know that all your Creeds and definitions are merely metaphors attempts to use human language for a purpose for which it was never made your concepts are by the nature of things

Inadequate the truth is not in you but beyond you a thing not conquered but still to be pursued something like this I take it was the character of The Olympian religion in the higher minds of later Greece its Gods could awaken man’s worship and strengthen his higher aspirations but at heart they knew

Themselves to be only metaphors as the most beautiful image carved by man was not the God but only a symbol to help towards conceiving the god 100 o the God himself when conceived was not the reality but only a symbol to help towards conceiving the reality that was the work set before

Them meantime they issued no Creeds that contradicted knowledge no commands that made man sin against his own Inner Light three the Great Schools of the 4th Century BC there is a passage in zenapin describing how One Summer Night in 405 BC people in Athens heard a cry of

Wailing an oo making its way up between the long walls from the pyas and coming nearer and nearer as they listened it was the news of the final disaster of koskei brought at midnight to the pyus by the gal paralos and that night no one slept they

Wept for the dead but far more bitterly for themselves when they reflected what things they had done to the people of Melos when taken by Siege to the people of hisa and skion and toron and EGA and many more of the Helens 101 the echo of that lamentation seems

To ring behind most of the literature of the 4th century and not the Athenian literature alone defeat can on occasion leave men their self-respect or even their pride as it did after kirenia in 338 and after the cronian war in 262 not to speak of thermopolymerization of Pericles had become a tyrant her

Nature poisoned by War her government a byword in Greece for brutality and Greece as a whole felt the tragedy of it it is curious how this defeat of Athens by Sparta seems to have been felt abroad as a defeat for Greece itself and for the hopes of the Greek

City state the fall of Athens mattered more than the victory of Lysander neither Sparta nor any other City ever attempted to take her place and no writer after to the year 400 speaks of any other city as Pericles used to speak of fifth century Athens not even pus 250 years later when he

Stands amazed before the solidity and the fortune of Rome the city state the polus had concentrated upon itself almost all the loyalty and the aspirations of the Greek mind it gave security to life it gave meaning to religion and in the fall of Athens it had failed in the 3r century when things

Begin to recover we find on the one hand the great military monarchies of Alexander successors and on the other a number of federations of tribes which were generally strongest in the backward regions where the city state had been least developed T Kaa iot new new T new

Alpat omega Lambda new or t new K ala iot new had become more important than Athens or Corinth and Sparta was only Strong by means of a league 102 by that time the polus was recognized as a comparatively weak social organism capable of very high culture but not

Quite able as the Covenant of the League of Nations expresses it to hold its own under the strenuous conditions of modern life besides it was not now ruled by the best citizens the best had turned away from politics this great discouragement did not take place at a blow among the

Practical Statesmen probably most did not form any theory about the cause of the failure but went on as practical Statesmen must doing as best they could from difficulty to difficulty but many saw that the Fatal danger to Greece was disunion as many see it in Europe now when Macedon proved indisputably

Stronger than Athens isocrates purged Philip to accept the leadership of Greece against the Barbarian and against barbarism he might thus both unite the Greek cities and also evangelized the world lius the Democratic and anti Spartan oror had been groping for a similar solution as early as 384 BC and

Was prepared to make an even sharper sacrifice for it he appealed at Olympia for a crusade of all the free Greek cities against Dionysus of Syracuse and begged Sparta herself to lead it the Spartans are of right the leaders of helis by their natural nobleness and

Their skill in war they alone live still in a city unack unwalled unconquered uncorrupted by faction and have followed always the same modes of Life they have been the saviors of helis in the past and one may hope that their freedom will be Everlasting 103 a great and generous

Change in one who had learned by suffering in the pelian war others no doubt merely gave their submission to the stronger powers that were now Rising there were openings for counselors for mercenary soldiers for court sants and philosophers and Poets and of course for agents in every free City who were

Prepared for one motive or another not to kick against the Pricks and there were always also those who had neither learned nor forgotten the unrepentant idealists too passionate or too heroic or as some will say too blind to abandon their lifelong Devotion to Athens or to freedom because the world considered

Such ideals out ofd they could look the ruined Athenians in the face after the Lost battle and say with demosthenes Omicron Kappa Sigma tootu Omicron Kappa Sigma iotu P Omega Muro Epsilon Epsilon it cannot be that you did wrong it cannot be 104 but in Practical Politics the currents of thought are inevitably

Limited it is in philosophy and speculation that we find the richest and most varied reaction to the great failure it takes different shapes in those writers like Plato and zenfan who were educated in theth century and had once believed in the great City and those whose whole thinking life belonged

To the time of disillusion Plato was disgusted with democracy and with Athens but he retained his faith in the city if only the city could be set on the right Road there can be little doubt that he attributes to the bad government of the Demo’s many evils which were really due

To extraneous causes or to the mere fallibility of human nature still his analysis of democracy is one of the most brilliant things in the history of political Theory it is so acute so humorous so affectionate and at many different ages of the world has seemed like a portrait of the actual contemporary

Society like a modern popular newspaper Plato’s democracy makes it its business to satisfy existing desires and give people a good time it does not distinguish between higher and lower anyone man is as good as another and so is any impulse or any idea consequently the commoner have the pull even the

Great Democratic Statesmen of the past he now sees have been ministers to mob desires they have filled the city with harbors and docks and walls and revenues and such like trash without sop sign and righteousness the sage or saint has no place in Practical

Politics he would be like a man in a den of wild beasts let him and his like seek shelter as best they can standing up behind some wall while the storm of dust and sleep rages past the world does not want truth which is all that he could give it it

Goes by appearances and judges its great men with their clothes on and their Rich relations around them after death the judges will judge them naked and alone and then we shall see 105 yet in spite of all this the child of the fifth century cannot keep his mind from

Politics the speculations which would be scouted by the mass in the Marketplace can still be discussed with intimate friends and disciples or written in books for the wise to read Plato’s two longest works are attempts to construct an ideal Society first what may be called a city of righteousness in the Republic and

Afterwards in his old age in the laws something more like a City of Refuge uncontaminated by the world a little city on a Hilltop away in creit remote from Commerce and riches and a bitter and corrupting sea which carries them a city where life shall move in music

And discipline and reverence for the things that are greater than man and the songs men sing shall be not common songs but the preambles of the city’s laws showing their purpose and their principle where no wall will be needed to keep out the possible enemy because the courage and Temperance of the

Citizens will be wall enough and if War comes the women equally with the men will fight for their young as birds do this hope is very like despair but such as it is Plato’s thought is always directed towards the city no other form of social life ever tempts him away and

He anticipates no insuperable difficulty in keeping the city in the right path if once he can get it started right the first step the necessary Revolution is what makes the difficulty and he sees Only One Way in real life he had supported the conspiracy of the extreme

Oligarchs in 404 which led to the rule of the 30 tyrants but the exper erence sickened him of such methods there was no hope unless by some lucky combination a philosopher should become a king or some young king turned philosopher give me a city governed by a

Tyrant he says in the laws 106 and let the Tyrant be young with a good memory quick at learning of high courage and a generous nature and besides let him have a wise counselor ironical Fortune granted him an opportunity to try the experiment himself at the court of Syra

First with the Elder and then 20 years later with the younger dionysius 387 and 367 BC it is a story of disappointment of course bitter humiliating ludicrous disappointment but with a touch of that Sublimity which seems so often to hang about the errors of the wise one can

Study them in Sena at the court of Nero or in too with Lewis not so well perhaps in voler with Frederick play PL failed in his Enterprise but he did keep Faith with the righteous City another of the socratic Circle turned in a different direction zenfan an exile from his

Country a brilliant Soldier and adventurer as well as a man of letters is perhaps the first Greek on record who openly lost interest in the city he thought less about cities and constitutions than about great men and Nations or generals and armies to him it was idle to spin cobweb formations of

Ideal law and communities Society is right enough if you have a really fine man to lead it it may be that his ideal was formed in childhood by stories of Pericles and the great age when Athens was in name a democracy but in truth an Empire of one

Leading man he gave form to his dream in the education of Cyrus an imaginary account of the training which formed Cyrus the Great into an ideal King and Soldier the coped DIA is said to have been intended as a counterblast to Plato’s Republic and it may have provoked Plato’s casual remark in the

Laws that Cyrus never so much as touched education no doubt the book suffered in persuasiveness from being so obviously fictitious 107 for example the Cyrus of zenfan dies peacefully in his bed after much affectionate and edifying advice to his family whereas all Athens knew from Herodotus how the real Cyrus had been

Killed in a war against the mte and his head to slake its thirst for that liquid plunged into a wineskin full of human blood perhaps also the monarchical rule of Cyrus was too absolute for Greek taste at any rate later on zenfan adopted a more real hero whom he had personally known and

Admired aesus King of Sparta had been taken as a type of virtue even by The Bitter historian theopompus aesus was not only a great General he knew how to honor the gods do his duty in the the field and to practice obedience he was true to friend and Foe

On one memorable occasion he kept his word even to an enemy who had broken his he enjoined kindness to enemy captives when he found small children left behind by The Barbarians in some town that he occupied because either their parents or the slave Merchants had no room for them

He always took care of them or gave them to guardians of their own race he never let the dogs and wolves get them on the other hand when he sold his Barbarian prisoners he sent them to Market naked regardless of their modesty because it cheered his own soldiers to

See how white and fat they were he wept when he won a victory over Greeks for he loved all Greeks and only hated barbarians when he returned home after his successful campaigns he obeyed the orders of e ephus without question his house and Furniture were as simple as

Those of a common man and his daughter the prince princess when she went to and fro to amicay went simply in the public Omnibus he reared Chargers and hunting dogs the rearing of Chariot horses he thought effeminate but he advised his sister sinisa about hers and she won The Chariot race at

Olympia have a king like that says zenfan and all will be well he will govern right he will beat your enemies and he will set an example of good life if you want virtue in the state look for it in a good man not in a speculative tangle of laws the Spartan Constitution

As it stands is good enough for anyone but it was another of the great socratics who uttered first the characteristic message of the 4th century and met the blows of Fortune with a direct challenge antien was a man 20 years older than Plato he had fought at tanagra in 426

BC he had been friends with gorgius and produs the the great sophists of the perican age he seems to have been at any rate till younger and more brilliant men cut him out the recognized philosophic heir of Socrates 108 and late in life after the fall of Athens and the condemnation and

Death of his master the man underwent a curious change of heart he is taunted more than once with the lateness of his discovery of Truth 109 and with his childish subservience to the old Judas spr of the Skeptics which professed to prove the Imp possibility of knowledge

110 it seems that he had lost faith in speculation and dialectic and the elaborate super structures which Plato and others had built upon them and he felt like many moralists after him a sort of hostility to all knowledge that was not immediately convertible into conduct but this skepticism was only

Part of a general disbelief in the world Greek philosophy had from the first been concerned with a fundamental question which we modern seldom put clearly to to ourselves it asked what is the good meaning thereby what is the element of value in Life or what should be our

Chief aim in living a medieval Christian would have answered without hesitation to go to heaven and not be damned and would have been prepared with the necessary prescriptions for attaining that end but the modern world is not intensely enough convinced of the reality of sin and judgment hell and

Heaven to accept this answer as an authoritative guide in life and has not clearly thought out any other the ancient Greek spent a great part of his philosophical activity in trying without propounding Supernatural rewards and punishments or at least without laying stress on them to think out what the

Good of man really was the answers given by mankind to this question seemed to fall under two main heads before a battle if both parties were asked what aim they were pursuing both would say without hesitation Victory after the battle the Conqueror would probably say that his purpose was in some way to

Consolidate or extend his victory but the beaten party as soon as he had time to think would perhaps explain that after all victory was not everything it was better to have fought for the right to have done your best and to have failed than to Revel in the prosperity of the

Unjust and since it is difficult to maintain in the midst of the Triumph of the enemy and your own obvious misery and humiliation that all is well and you yourself thoroughly contented this second answer easily develops a third wait a little till God’s judgment asserts itself and see who has the best

Of it then there will be a rich reward Hereafter for the suffering virtuous the typical Athenian of the percan age would have been in the first state of mind his good would be in the nature of success to spread Justice and freedom to make Athens happy and strong

And her laws wise and equal for rich and poor an tanes had Fallen violently into the second he was defeated together with all that he most cared for and he comforted himself with the thought that nothing matters except to have done your best as he phrased it ID is the good ID

Meaning virtue or goodness the quality of a good citizen a good father a good dog a good sword the things of the world are vanity and philosophy as vain as the rest nothing but goodness is good and the first step towards attaining it is to repent there was in Athens a

Gymnasium built for those who were baseborn and could not attend the gymnasia of true citizens it was called kares and was dedicated to the great bastard Heracles antisthenes though he had moved hither to in the somewhat Patrician circle of the socratics remembered how that his mother was a thian slave and

Set up his school in kosaras among the disinherited of the earth he made friends with the tbad who needed befriending he dressed like the poorest workmen he would accept no disciples except those who could bear hardship and was apt to drive newcomers away with his stick yet

He also preached in the streets both in Athens and Corinth he preached rhetorically with Parables and Vivid emotional phrases compelling the attention of the crowd his eloquence was held to be bad style and it started the form of literature known to the cynics as Cairo Epsilon Alpha a help or a study

And by the Christians as muot Alpha homy or sermon this passionate and aesthetic old man would have attracted the interest of the world even more had it not been for one of his disciples this was a young man from copi on the yukine whom he did not take to at

First sight the son of a disreputable money changer who had been sent to prison for defacing the coinage antan ordered the lad away but he paid no attention he beat him with his stick but he never moved he wanted wisdom and saw that antan had it to give his aim in

Life was to do as his father had done to deface the coinage but on a much larger scale he would deface all the coinage current in the world every conventional stamp was false the men stamped as generals and Kings the things stamped as honor and wisdom and happiness and

Riches all were base metal with lying superscriptions all must have the stamp defaced 111 this young man was diogenes afterwards the most famous of all the cynics he started by rejecting all stamps and superscriptions and holding that nothing but a Worth or goodness was good he rejected tradition he rejected

The current religion and the rules and customs of Temple worship true religion was a thing of the spirit and needed no forms he despised divination he rejected Civil Life and marriage he mocked at the general interest in the public games and the respect paid to birth wealth or

Reputation let man put aside these delusions and know himself and for his defenses let him arm himself against Fortune with courage against convention with nature against passion with reason for reason is the God within us the salvation for man was to return to Nature and diogenes interpreted this

Return in the simplest and crudest way he should live like the beasts like primeval men like barbarians were not the beasts blessed Epsilon Alpha Zeta Omicron nut Epsilon like the Gods in Homer and so though in less Perfection were primitive men not vexing their hearts with imaginary sins and

Conventions Travelers told of savages who married their sisters or ate human flesh or left their dead unburied why should they not if they wish to no wonder Zeus punished Prometheus the firebringer who had brought all this progress upon us and left man civilized and more unhappy than any Beast he

Deserved his crack and his vulture diogenes took his mission with great earnestness he was leader in a great battle against pleasures and desires he was the servant the message Bearer sent by Zeus the setter free of mankind and the Healer of passions the life that he personally meant to live

And which he recommended to the wise was what he called Town capan new Iota capu beta Amicon new a dog’s life and he himself wished to be a cynic or canine a dog was Brave and faithful it had no bodily shame no false theories and few

Wants a dog needed no clothes no house no City no possessions no titles what he did did need was virtue ority to catch his prey to fight wild beasts and to defend his master and that he could provide for himself diogenes found of course that he needed a little more than

An ordinary dog a blanket a wallet or Bowl to hold his food and a staffa to beat off dogs and bad men it was the regular uniform of a beggar he asked for no house there was a huge earn pitchure not a tub outside the Temple of the

Great mother the sort of vessel that was used for burial in primitive Greece and which still had about it the associations of a coffin diogenes slept there when he wanted shelter and it became the nearest approach to a home that he had like a dog he performed any

Bodily Act without shame when and where he chose he obeyed no human laws because he recognized no City he was cosmopolites citizen of the universe all men and all beasts too were were his brothers he lived preaching in the streets and begging his bread except that he did not beg he

Commanded other folk obeyed his commands because they were still slaves while he had never been a slave again since anti set him free he had no fear because there was nothing to take from him only slaves are afraid Greece rang with stories of his Mor than wit and every

Bitter saying became fed on diynes everyone knew how Alex Ander the great had come to see the famous beggar and standing before him where he sat in the open air had asked if there was any Boon he could confer on him yes move from between me and the son they knew

The king saying if I were not Alexander the would be diogenes and the polite answer if I were not diogenes I would be Alexander the master of the world and the rejector of the world met on inequality people told too how the cynic walked about with a lamp in the daytime

Search ing so he said for a man they knew his scorn of the Mysteries with their doctrine of exclusive salvation was a thief to be in Bliss because he was initiated while aesus and aamin Andis were in outer Darkness a few of the stories are more Whimsical a Workman carrying a pole

Accidentally hit diogenes and cried look out why said he are you going to hit me again he had rejected patriotism as he rejected culture yet he suffered as he saw Greece under the macedonians and Greek Liberties disappearing when his death was approaching some disciple asked his

Wishes about his burial let the dogs and wolves have me he said I should like to be of some use to my brothers when I die when this request was refused his thoughts turned again to the Macedonian Wars bury me face downwards everything is soon going to be turned the other way

Up he remains the permanent and unsurpassed type of one way of grappling with the hor horor of Life fear nothing desire nothing possess nothing and then life with all its Ingenuity of malice cannot disappoint you if man cannot enter into life nor yet depart from it save through Agony and filth let him

Learn to endure the one and be indifferent to the other the Watchdog of Zeus on Earth has to fulfill his special duty to warn mankind of the truth and to set slaves free Nothing Else Matters the criticism of this solution is not that it is selfish it is not the cynic lives

For the Salvation of his fellow creatures and it is worth remembering that before the Roman gladiatorial games were eventually stopped by the self- imulation of the monk telemates two cynic philosophers had thrown themselves into the arena in The Same Spirit its weakness lies in a false psychology

Common to all the world at that time which imagined that salvation or Freedom consists in living utterly without desire or fear that such a life is biologically possible and that diogenes lived it to a subtler Critic it is obvious that diogenes was a man of very strong and successful Ambitions though

His Ambitions were different from those of most men he solved the problem of his own life by following with all the force and courage of his genius a line of conduct which made him next to Alexander the most famous man in Greece to be really without fear or desire would mean

Death and to die is not to solve the riddle of living the difference between the cynic view of life and that of Plato’s Republic is interesting Plato also rejected the most fundamental conventions of existing Society the accepted methods of government the laws of property and of marriage the traditional religion and

Even the Poetry which was a second religion to the Greeks but he rejected the existing culture only because he wanted it to be better he condemned the concrete existing City in order to build a more perfect City to to proceed in infinite searching and longing towards

The idea of good the son of the spiritual Universe diogenes rejected the civilization which he saw and admitted the reality of no other his crude realistic attitude of Mind had no use for Plato’s ideas I can see a table he said I cannot see tabular too Alpha Pi Epsilon Zeta

TAA I know Athens and Corinth and other cities and can see that they are all bad as for the ideal Society show it me and I will say what I think in spite of its false psychology the cynic conception of Life had a great effect in Greece it

Came almost as a revelation to both men and women 112 and profoundly influenced all the schools here indeed it seemed was a way to baffle fortune and to make one’s own soul unafraid what men wanted was T Theta alpharo Epsilon new to be of good cheer

As we say now to regain their morale after bewildering defeats the cynic answer afterwards corrected and humanized by the stoics was to look at life as a long and arduous campaign the loyal Soldier does not trouble about his comfort or his Rewards or his Pleasures he obeys his Commander orders

Without fear or failing whether they lead to easy victories or merely to wounds captivity or death only goodness is good and for the soldier goodness Ro Epsilon is the doing of Duty that is his true prize which no external power can take away from him but after all what is

Duty diynes preached virtue and assumed that his way of life was virtue but was it really so and if so on what evidence to live like a beast to be indifferent to Art Beauty letters science philosophy to the amenities of Civic life to all that raised helenic man above the Beast

Or the Savage how could this be the true end of man the stoic School whose founder Zeno was a disciple of old anti gradually built up a theory of moral life which has on the whole weathered the storms of time with great success it largely dominated later Antiquity by its imaginative and

Emotional power it gave form to the aspirations of early Christianity it lasts now as the nearest approach to an acceptable system of conduct for those who do not accept Revelation but still keep some faith in the purpose of things the problem is to combine the absolute value of that

Goodness which as we say saves the soul with the relative values of the various good things that soothe or beautify life for if there is any value at all I will not say in health and happiness but in art poetry knowledge refinement public esteem or human affection and if their

Claims do clash as in common opinion they sometimes do with the demands of absolute sanctity how is the balance to be struck are we to be content with the principle of accepting a little moral wrong for the sake of much material or artistic or intellectual advantage that is the rule which the

Practical World follows though without talking about it but the stoics would have none of any such compromise Zeno first like anti denied any value whatever to these Earthly things that are not virt to health or sickness riches or poverty beauty or ugliness pain or pleasure who would ever mention them when the soul

Stood naked before God all that would then matter and consequently all that can ever matter is the goodness of the man’s self that is of his free and living will the stoics improved on the military metaphor for to the soldier after all it does matter whether in his

Part of the field he wins or loses life is not not like a battle but like a play in which God has handed each man his part unread and the good man proceeds to act it to the best of his power not knowing what may happen in the

Last scene he may become a crowned King he may be a slave dying in torment what matters it the good actor can play either part all that matters is that he shall act his best except the order of the cosmos and obey the purpose of the great

Dram the answer seems absolute and un building with no concession to the weakness of the flesh yet in truth it contains in itself The Germ of a Sublime practical compromise which makes stoicism human it accepts the cosmos and it obeys the purpose therefore there is a cosmos and

There is a purpose in the world stoicism like much of ancient thought at this period was permeated by the new discoveries of astronomy and their formation into a coherent scientific system which remained unshaken till the days of Copernicus the Stars which had always moved men’s wonder and even worship were

Now seen and proved to be no wandering fires but parts of an immense and apparently Eternal order one star might differ from another star in glory but they were all alike in their obedience to law they had their fixed courses Divine though they were which had been

Laid down for them by a being greater than they the order or Cosmos was a proven fact therefore the purpose was a proven fact and though in its completeness inscrutable it could at least in part be divined from the fact that all these varied and eternal splendors had for their Center our earth

And its ephemeral Master the purpose though it is not our purpose is especially concerned with us and circles around us it is the purpose of a God who loves man let us forget that this system of astronomy has been overthrown and that we now know that man is not the

Center of the universe let let us forget that the Majestic order which Reigns or seems to Reign Among the Stars is matched by a brutal conflict and a chaos of jarring purposes in the Realms of those Sciences which deal with life 113 if we can recover the imaginative Outlook of the generations which

Stretched from say metan in the 5ifth century before Christ to Copernicus in the 16th after we shall be able to understand the spiritual exaltation with which men like Zeno or posidonius regarded the world we are part of an order a cosmos which we see to be infinitely above our

Comprehension but which we know to be an expression of love for man what can we do but accept it not with resignation but with enthusiasm and offer to it with pride any sacrifice which it may demand of us it is a glory to suffer for such

An end and there is more for the Stars show only what may be called a stationary purpose an order which is and remains forever but in the rest of the world we can see a moving purpose it is fusus the word which the Romans unfortunately translated Natura but

Which means growing or the way things grow almost what we call Evolution but to the stoic it is a living and conscious evolution a forethought or Pyon Amicon Iota Alpha in the mind of God what the Romans called Providentia guiding all things that grow in a direction which Accords with the

Divine will and the direction the stoic pointed out was not towards mere happiness but towards Aid or the Perfection of each thing or each species after its kind fusus shapes the acorn to grow into the perfect Oak the blind puppy into the Good Hound it makes the

Deer grow in swiftness to perform the function of a deer and man grow in power and wisdom to perform the function of a man if a man is an artist it is his function to produce Beauty if he a governor it is his function to produce a FL flourishing and virtuous City true

The things that he produces are but shadows and in themselves utterly valueless it matters not one straw whether the deer goes at 10 m an hour or 20 whether the population of a city die this year of famine and sickness or 20 years hence of old age but it belongs to

The good Governor to avert famine and to produce healthy conditions as it belongs to the deer to run its best so it is the part of a friend if need arise to give his comfort or his life for a friend of a mother to love and defend her children

Though it is true that in the light of Eternity these creaturely affections shrivel into their native worthlessness if the will of God is done and done willingly all is well you may if it brings you great suffering feel the pain you may even through human weakness weep or groan that can be

Forgiven Sigma Omega Theta Epsilon new micron Iota mu Sigma Epsilon newa but in the center of your being grown not accept the cosmos will joyously that which God wills and make the Eternal purpose your own I will say no more of this great body of teaching as I have dealt with it

In a separate publication 114 but I would point out two special advantages of a psychological kind which distinguish stoicism from many systems of philosophy first though it never consciously faced the Psy ological problem of instinct it did see clearly that man does not necessarily pursue what pleases him most or what is most

Profitable to him or even his good it saw that man can determine his end and may well choose pain in preference to pleasure this saved the school from a great deal of that false schematization which besets most forms of rationalistic psychology secondly it did build up a

System of thought on which both in good days and evil a life can be lived with which is not only saintly but practically wise and human and beneficent it did for practical purposes solve the problem of living without Despair and without grave or at least without gross

Illusion the other great School of the 4th Century a school which in the matter of Ethics may be called the only true rival of stoicism was also rooted in defeat but it me defeat in a different Spirit 115 epicurus son of neocol of the oldest Athenian Clan of the Fadi was

Born on a colony in seas in 341 BC his father was evidently poor else he would hardly have left Athens to live on a colonial Farm nor have had to eek out his farming by teaching an elementary school we do not know how much the small boy learned from his father but for

Older students there was a famous school on the neighboring island of teos where a certain nazan taught the ionian tradition of mathematics and physics as well as as rhetoric and literary subjects epicurus went to this school when he was 14 and seems among other things to have em bibed the atomic

Theory of democratus without realizing that it was anything peculiar he felt afterwards as if his school days had been merely a waste of time at the age of 18 he went to Athens the center of the philosophic world but he only went as Athenian citizens were in Duty bound

To perform his year of military service as a febus study was to come later the next year however 322 predicas of th made an attack on seas and drove out the Athenian colonists neocol had by then lived on his bit of land for 30 years and was old

To begin life again the ruined family took refuge in kalifon and their epicurus joined them they were now too poor for the boy to go abroad to study philosophy he could only make the best of a hard time and puzz pule alone over the problems of Life recent years have

Taught us that there are few forms of misery harder than that endured by a family of refugees and it is not likely to have been easier in ancient conditions epicurus built up his philosophy it would seem while helping his parents and brothers through this bad time the problem was how to make the

Life of their little Colony tolerable and he somehow solved it it was not the kind of problem which stoicism and the great religion specially set the M themselves it was at once too unpretending and too practical one can easily imagine the condition for which he had to prescribe for one thing the

Unfortunate refugees all about him would torment themselves with unnecessary Terrors the thians were pursuing them the gods hated them they must obviously have committed some offense or impiety it is always easy for disheartened men to discover in themselves some sin that deserves punishment it would sure surely be

Better to die at once except that with that sin upon them they would only suffer more dreadfully beyond the grave in their distress they Jarred doubtless on one another’s nerves and mutual bitterness doubled their miseries epicurus is said to have had poor health and the situation was one

Where even the best health would be sorely tried but he had superhuman courage and what does not always go with such courage a very affectionate and gentle nature in later life all his three brothers were his devoted disciples a testimonial accorded to few prophets or founders of

Religions and he is the first man in the record of European history whose mother was an important element in his life some of his letters to her have been preserved and show a touch of intimate affection which of course must have existed between human beings from the

Remotest times but of which we possess no earlier record and fragments of his letters to his friend strike the same note point1 116 his first discovery was that men torture themselves with unnecessary fears he must teach them courage Theta Alp Epson new Theta Epsilon new Theta

Alp Epsilon new new Theta Omega new to fear no evil from either man or God God is a blessed being and no blessed being either suffers evil or inflicts evil on others and as for men most of the evils you fear from them can be avoided by

Justice and if they do come they can be born death is like sleep an unconscious State no wise to be feared pain when it comes can be endured it is the anticipation that makes men miserable and saps their Courage the refugees were forgotten by the world and had no hope

Of any great change in their condition well he argued so much the better let them till the Earth and love one another and they would find that they had already in them that natural happiness which is man’s possession until he throws it away and of all things that

Contribute to happiness the greatest is affection fota L Alpha like the cynics and stoics he rejected the world and all its conventions and prizes its desires and passions and futility but where the stoic and cynic proclaimed that in spite of all the pain and suffering of a wicked world man can

By the force of his own will be virtuous epicurus brought the more surprising good news that man can after all be happy but to make this good news credible he had to construct a system of thought he had to answer the temple authorities and their adherence among the vulgar who threatened his followers

With the torments of Hades for their impiety he had to answer the stoics and cynics preaching that all is worthless except arid and the Skeptics who dwelt on the fallibility of the senses and The Logical impossibility of knowledge he met the last of these by the traditional ionian doctrine of of sense Impressions

Ingeniously developed we can he argued know the outer world because our sense impressions are literally Impressions or stamps made by external objects Upon Our organs to see for instance is to be struck by an infinitely tenuous stream of images flowing from the object and directly impinging upon the retina such

Streams are flowing from all objects in every direction an idea which seemed incredible until the modern discoveries about light sound and radiation thus there is direct contact with reality and consequently knowledge besides direct Vision however we have anticipations or pyro Omicron Lambda cepsilon Iota sometimes called common conceptions EG the general conception

Which we have of a horse when we are not seeing one these are merely the result of repeated acts of vision a curious result of this Doctrine was that all our anticipations or common ideas are true mistakes occur through some interpretation of our own which we add to the simple

Sensation we can know the world how then are we to understand it here again epicurus found refuge in the old ionian theory of atoms and the void which is supposed to have originated with democratus and Lucius a century before but epicurus seems to have worked out

The atomic theory more in detail as we have it expounded in lucious magnificent poem in particular it was possibly he who first combined the atomic theory with hylozoism ie he conceived of the atoms as possessing some rudimentary power of movement and therefore able to Swerve slightly in their regular downward

Course that explains how they have become infinitely Tangled and mingled how plants and animals are alive and how men have free will it also enables epicurus to build up a world without the assistance of a God he set man free as lucretius says from the burden of religion though his doctrine of the

Blessed being which neither has pain nor gives pain enables him to elude the dangerous accusation of atheism he can leave people believing in all their traditional Gods including even if so they wish the bearded Zeus and the helm Athena which they see in dreams and in their common ideas while

At the same time having no fear of them there Remains the foolish fancy of the cynics and stoics that pu is the only good of of course he answers bid is good but that is because it produces happy life or blessedness or pleasure or whatever you call it he used normally

The word Delta Omicron new sweetness and counted the good as that which makes life sweet he seems never to have entered into small disputes as to the difference between sweetness or pleasure and happiness and well-being deltaic new Epsilon Delta Alpha iot mu new Alpha Epsilon Epsilon Sigma capital n Lambda

Though sometimes instead of sweetness he spoke of blessedness mu alphaa Alpo Iota TAA ultimately the dispute between him and the stoics seems to resolve itself into a question whether the good lies in P Sigma kilon iot new war in experience or in action an average human being seem

Generally to think that the good for a conscious being must be something of which he is conscious thus the great system is built simple intelligible dogmatic and as such systems go remarkably watertight it enables man to be unafraid and it helps him to be happy the strange

Thing is that although on more than one point it seems to anticipate most surprisingly the discoveries of modern science it was accepted in a spirit more religious than scientific as we can see from lucretius it was taken almost as a revelation from one who had saved mankind whose

Intellect had pierced Beyond The Flaming walls of Heaven and brought back to man The Gospel of an intelligible Universe 117 in 310 BC when epicurus was 32 things had so far improved that he left kalifon and set up a school of philosophy in mellini but soon moved to lampsacus on the sea

Of marora where he had friends disciples gathered about him among them were some of the leading men of the city like leontius and ID Dominus the doctrine thrilled them and seemed to bring freedom with it they felt that such a teacher must be set up in Athens the home of the great

Philosophers they bought by subscription a house and Garden in Athens for 80 Min about £320 1118 and presented it to the master he crossed to Athens in 306 and though he four times Revisited lampsacus and has left letters addressed to friends in lampsacus he lived in a famous garden

For the rest of his life friends from lampus us and elsewhere came and lived with him or near him the garden was not only a philosophical school it was also a sort of retreat or religious community there lived there not only philosophers like metrodorus kotes her Marcus and

Others there were slaves like mice and free women like fista the wife of leontius to both of whom the master as the extant fragments testify wrote letters of intimate friendship and not only free women but women with names that show that they were slaves leonin Micky Deon mamian they were hitie perhaps victims

Of war like many of the unfortunate heroins in the new comedy free women from conquered cities who had been sold in the slave market or reduced to misery as refugees and to whom now the garden afforded a true and spiritual refuge for almost as much as diynes epicurus had

Obliterated the stamp on the conventional currency the values of the world no longer held good after you had passed the wicked gate of the garden and spoken with the deliverer the epicurian lived simply they took neither flesh nor wine and there is a letter extent asking

Someone to send them a present of potted cheese 119 as a special luxury their enemies who were numerous and Lively make the obvious accusations about the hitie and cite an alleged letter of the master to leonin Lord peen my dear little leonin your note fills me with such a bubble of

Excitement 120 the problem of this letter well illustrates the difficulty of forming clear judgments about the details of ancient life probably the letter is a forgery we are definitely informed that there was a collection of such forgeries made in order to damage epicurus but if genuine would it have

Seemed to a fair-minded contemporary a permissible or an impermissible letter for a philosopher to write by modern stand standards it would be about the borderline and again suppose it is a definite Love Letter what means have we of deciding whether epicurus or for that matter Zeno or Plato or any

Unconventional philosopher of this period would have thought it blameworthy or would merely have called our attention to the legal difficulties of Contracting marriage with one who had been a hitia and asked us how we expect men and women to live curiously enough we happen to have the recorded sayings

Of epicurus himself the wise man will not fall in love and physical Union of the sex is never did good it is much if it does not do harm this philosophy is often unjustly criticized it is called selfish but that it is certainly not it is always aiming

At the Deliverance of mankind 121 And it bases its happiness on fi Iota Lambda Alpha friendship or affection just as the early Christians based it on gamma Paya a word know which stronger than fi Iota Lambda Alpha though it is conventionally translated Love by this conception it becomes at once more human

Than the stoa to which as to a Christian monk human affection was merely a weakness of the flesh which might often conflict with the Soul’s Duty towards God epicurus passionately protested against this unnatural apathy it was also human in that it recognized degrees of good or bad of virtue or error to the

Stoic that which was not right was wrong a calculator who says that 7 sevens make 48 is just as wrong as one who says they make a thousand and a sailor 1 in below the surface of the water drowns just as surely as one who is a furlong deep just

So in human life wrong is wrong falsehood is falsehood and to talk of degrees is childish epicureanism had an easy and natural answer to these arguments since Pleasure and Pain obviously admit of degrees 122 the the school is blamed also for pursuing pleasure on the ground that the direct pursuit of pleasure is

Self-defeating but epicurus never makes that mistake he says that pleasure or sweetness of life is the good but he never counsels the direct pursuit of it quite the reverse he says that if you conquer your desires and fears and live simply and love those about you the natural

Sweetness of life will reveal itself a truer criticism is one which appears dimly in Plutarch and cicero1 123 there is a strange shadow of sadness hanging over this wise and kindly Faith which proceeds from the essential distrust of life that lies at its heart the best

That epicurus has really to say of the world is that if you are very wise and do not attract its notice Lambda Theta Epsilon beta Iota Sigma Alpha it will not hurt you it is a philosophy not of Conquest but of escape this was a weakness from which few of the fourth

Century thinkers completely escaped to aim at what we should call positive happiness was to the epicurian only to court disappointment better make it your aim to live without strong passion or desire without High Hopes or Ambitions their professed ideals P Alpha new Omicron lamb gamma Omicron new

Omicron Pi Epsilon Z Alpha Epsilon Sigma Iota to alpha alpha Z Alpha Epsilon Ro Amicon iot Alpha the removal of all active suffering un disturb a smooth flow seemed to result in rather a low tension in a life that is only half alive we know that as a matter of fact

This was not so the epicurian felt their Doctrine to bring Not Mere Comfort but inspiration and blessedness the Young kotes on first hearing the master speak fell on his knees with tears and hailed him as a god. one24 we may compare the rapturous phrases of lucretius what can be the explanation of this

Perhaps it is that a deep distrust of the world produces its own inward reaction as starving men dream of Rich Banquets and persecuted sects have apocalyptic visions of paradise the hopes and desires that are starved of their natural sustenance project themselves onto some plane of the imagination the Martyr even the most

Heretical martyr sees the vision of his crown in the skies the lover sees in obvious defects only rare in esoteric Beauties epicurus avoided sedulously the transcendental optimism of the stoics he avoided mysticism avoided allegory avoided Faith he tried to set the feet of his philosophy on Solid

Ground he can make a strong case for the probable happiness of a man of kindly affections and few desires who asks little from the outside world but after all it is only probable misfortunes and miseries may come to any man most of the evils you fear are false he answers

Still reasonable L Death does not hurt poverty need never make a man less happy an actual pain yes pain may come but you can endure it intense pains are brief long-drawn pains are not excruciating or seldom so is that Common Sense Comfort not enough the doctrine becomes more

Intense both in its promises and its demands if intense suffering comes he enjoins turn away your mind and Conquer The Pain by the sweetness of memory there are in every wise man’s life moments of intense Beauty and Delight if he has strength of mind he will call

Them back to him at will and live in the blessedness of the past not in the mere dull Agony of the moment nay can he not actually enjoy the intellectual interest of this or that pain has he not that within him which can make the quality of

Its own life on hearing of the death of a friend he will call back back the sweetness of that friend’s Converse in the burning bull of feris he will think his thoughts and be glad illusion the old Sirin with whom man cannot live in peace nor yet without her has crept back

Unseen to the center of the Citadel it was epicurus and not a stoic or cynic who asserts that a wise man will be happy on the rack 125 strangely obliging ironic Fortune gave to him also a chance of testing of his own Doctrine there is extant a letter written on his

Deathbed I write to you on this Blissful day which is the last of my life the obstruction of my bladder and internal pains have reached the extreme point but there is marshaled against them the Delight of my mind in thinking over our talks together take care of the children

Of metrodorus in a way worthy of your lifelong Devotion to me and to philosophy 126 at least his courage and his kindness did not fail epicureanism had certainly its Sublime side and from this very Sublimity perhaps arose the greatest flaw in the system regarded as a rational

Philosophy it was accepted too much as a revelation too little as a mere step in the search for truth it was based no doubt on careful and even profound scientific studies and was expounded by the master in a vast array of volumes but the results so attained was considered

Sufficient further research was not encouraged heterodoxy was condemned as something almost approaching paraside 127 the pursuit of needless knowledge was deliberately frowned upon 128 when other philosophers were working out calculations about the size of the sun and the commensurability of the sun cycle and the moon cycle epicurus

Contemptuously remarked that the sun was probably about as big as it looked or perhaps smaller since Fires at a distance generally look bigger than they are the various theories of of learned men were all possible but none certain and as for the Cycles how did anyone

Know that there was not a new son shot off and extinguished every day 129 it is not surprising to find that none of the great discoveries of the helenistic age were due to the epicurian school lucretius writing 250 years later appears to very hardly in any detail

From the doctrines of the master and diogenes of Eno Anda 500 years later actually repeats his letters and sayings word for word it is sad this it is UNH helenic it is a clear symptom of decadence from the free intellectual movement and the High Hopes which had made the fifth century

Glorious only in one great school does the true helenic Soper sign continue flourishing a school whose modesty of pretention and quietness of language form a curious contrast with the wrapped ecstasies of stoic and cynic and even as we have seen of epicurian just as its immense richness of scientific achievement contrasts with their

Comparative sterility the porch and the garden offered new religions to raise from the dust men and women whose Spirits were broken Aristotle in his open walk or parapad brought philosophy and Science and literature to guide the feet and interest the minds of those who still saw life steadily and tried their best

To see it whole Aristotle was not lacking in religious insight and Imagination as he certainly was not without profound influence on a future history of religion his complete rejection of Mythology and of anthropomorphism his Resolute attempt to combine religion and science not by sacrificing one to the other but by

Building the highest spiritual aspirations on ascertained truth and the probable conclusions to which it pointed his Splendid imaginative conception of the Divine being or first cause as unmoved itself while moving all the universe as the Beloved moves the lover all these are high services to religion ious speculation and justify the

Position he held even when known only through a distorting Arabic translation in medieval Christianity if he had not written his other books he might well be famous now as a great religious teacher but his theology is dwarfed by the magnificence and mass of his other work and as a

Philosopher and man of science he does not belong to our present subject he is only mentioned here as a standard of that characteristic quality in rest of this book records a downfall one variant of a well-known story tells how a certain philosopher after frequenting the paretic school

Went to hear cipus the stoic and was transfixed it was like turning from men to Gods it was really turning from Greeks to semites from philosophy to religion from a school of very sober professions and high performance to one whose professions dazzled the reason come unto me cried the stoic all ye who

Are in storm or delusion ion I will show you the truth and the world will never grieve you more Aristotle made no such profession he merely thought and worked and taught better than other men Aristotle is always surprising us not merely by the immense volume of clear thinking and coordinated knowledge of

Which he was Master but by the steady Sofer sign of his temper son of the Court physician of Philip tutor for some years to Alexander the Great he never throughout his extant writings utters one syllable of flattery to his Royal and World conquering employers nor yet one syllable which suggests a grievance

He saw at Close Quarters and from The Winning Side the conquest of the Greek city states by the Macedonian ethnos or Nation but he judges dispassionately that the city is the higher Social form it seems characteristic that in his will which is extent after providing a doy

For his widow her pillis to facilitate her getting a second husband and thanking her for her goodness to him he directed that his bones are to be laid in the same grave with those of his first wife pus whom he had rescued from robbers more than 20 years before

130 other philosophers disliked him because he wore no long beard dressed neatly and had good normal manners and they despised his Philosophy for very similar reasons it was a school which took the existing world and tried to understand it instead of inventing some intense ecstatic Doctrine which should

Transform it or reduce it to nothingness it possessed no open sesame to unlock the prison of mankind yet it is not haunted by that ooj of koskei while armies sweep Greece this way and that while the old gods are vanquished and the cities lose their freedom and their meaning the parapatics

Instead of passionately saving Souls diligently pursued knowledge and in generation after generation produced scientific results which put all their Rivals into the shade 131 in mathematics astronomy physics botany zoology and biology as well as the human Sciences of literature and history the helenistic age was one of the most creative known

To our record and it is not only that among the savants responsible for these advances the proportion of parapatics is overwhelming one may also notice that in this school alone it is assumed As Natural that further research will take place and will probably correct as well as increase our knowledge and that when

Such Corrections or differences of opinion do take place there is no cry raised of heresy it is the old difference between philosophy and religion between the search of the intellect for truth and the Cry of the heart for salvation as the interest in Truth for its own sake gradually abetted in the

Ancient world The Works of Aristotle might still find commentators but his example was forgotten and his influence confined to a small circle the porch and the garden for the most part divid divided between them the allegiance of thoughtful men both systems had begun in days of discomfort and aimed originally

More at providing a refuge for the soul than at ordering the course of society but after the turmoil of the 4th Century had subsided when governments began again to approach more nearly to peace and consequently to Justice and public life once more to be attractive to decent men both philosophies showed

Themselves adaptable to the needs of prosperity as well as adversity many many kings and great Roman governors professed stoicism it held before them the ideal of universal Brotherhood and of Duty to the Great Society of Gods and Men it enabled them to work indifferent to Mere pain and pleasure as Servants of the

Divine Purpose and fellow workers with God in building up a human Cosmos within the Eternal Cosmos it is perhaps at First Sight strange that many kings and governors also followed epicurus yet after all the work of of a public man is not hindered by a slight irony as to the value of worldly

Greatness and a conviction that a dinner of bread and water with love to season it is better than all the crowns of the Greeks to hate cruelty and Superstition to avoid passion and luxury to regard human pleasure or sweetness of life as the goal to be aimed at and friendship

Or kindliness as the principal element in that pleasure are by no means doctrines incompatible with wise and effective Administration both systems were good and both in a way complimentary one to another they still divide between them the Practical philosophy of Western mankind at times to most of us it seems

As though Nothing in life had value except to do right and to fear not at others that the only true aim is to make mankind happy at times man’s best hope seems to lie in that part of him which is prepared to defy or condemn the world

Of fact if it diverges from the ideal in that intensity of reverence which will accept many impossibilities rather than ever reject a holy thing above all in that uncompromising moral sensitiveness to which not merely the Corruptions of society but the fundamental and necessary facts of animal existence seem

Both nauseous and wicked links and chains in a system which can never be the true home of the human Spirit at other times men feel the need to adapt their beliefs and actions to the world as it is to brush themselves free from cobwebs to face plain facts with common

Sense and as much kindliness as life permits meeting the ordinary needs of a perishable and imperfect species without illusion and without make believe at one time we are stoics at another epicurian but amid their differences there is one Faith which was held by both schools in common it is the great

Characteristic faith of the ancient world revealing itself in many Divergent guises and seldom fully intelligible to Modern Men faith in the the absolute supremacy of the inward life over things external these men really believe that wisdom is more precious than jewels that poverty and ill health are things of no

Import that the good man is Happy whatever befall him and all the rest and in generation after generation many of the ablest men and women also acted upon the belief they lived by free choice lives whose Simplicity and privation would horrify a modern labor and the world about them seems to have respected

Rather than despised their poverty to the middle age with its monks and mendicants expectant of reward in heaven such an attitude except for its disinterestedness would be easily understood to some Eastern nations with their Cults of aestheticism and contemplation the same doctrines have appealed almost like a physical passion

Or A Dangerous Drug running riot in their veins but modern Western man cannot believe them nor believe seriously that others believe them on us the power power of the material world has through our very Mastery of it and the dependence which results from that Mastery both inwardly and outwardly

Increased its hold cap faram victorum sepit we have taken possession of it and now we cannot move without it the material element in Modern Life is far greater than in ancient but it does not follow that the spiritual element is correspondingly less no doubt it is true

That a naval officer in a conning Tower in a modern battle does not need less courage and character than a naked Savage who meets his enemy with a stick and a spear yet probably in the first case the battle is mainly decided by the weight and accuracy of the guns in the

Second by the qualities of the fighter consequently the modern world thinks more incessantly and anxiously about the guns that is about money and mechanism the ancient devotes its thought more to human character and Duty and it is curious to observe how in general each tries to remedy what is wrong with the

World by the method that is habitually in its thoughts speaking broadly apart from certain religious movements the enlightened modern reformer if confronted with some ordinary complex of misery and wickedness instinctively proposes to cure it by higher wages better food more comfort and Leisure to make people comfortable and Trust to

Their becoming good the typical ancient reformer would appeal to us to care for none of those things since riches notoriously do not make men virtuous but with all our powers to pursue wisdom or righteousness and the life of the spirit to be good men as we can be if we

Will and to know that all else will follow this is one of the regions in which the Ancients might have learned much from us and in which we still have much to learn from them if once we can shake off our temporal obsessions and listen note as an example it is worth

Noticing even in a bare catalog the work done by one of Aristotle’s own pupils a paretic of the second rank dius of missini his fluit is given as 310 BC Dorian by birth when theophrastus was made head of the school he retired to the peloponese and shows a certain

Prejudice against Athens one of the discoveries of the time was biography and by a brilliant stroke of imagination dius termed one of his books beta Omicron Lambda Lambda Alpha Delta Omicron the life of helis he saw saw civilization as the biography of the world first the age of Kronos when man

As a simple Savage made no effort after higher things next the ancient river civilizations of the Orient third the helenic system among his scandy fragments we find notes on such ideas as pyaro alpha fyro alpharo alpha Filan Landa as Greek institutions the life of helis was much

Used by late writers it formed the model for another beta Omicron Lambda Lambda Alpha Delta Omicron by a certain Jason and for vero’s Vita popul Romani then like his Great Master dius made studies of the Constitutions of various States EG Pini Athens and Corinth his Treatise on the constitution

Of Sparta was read aloud annually in that City by order of the effers it was evidently appreciative a more speculative work was his triolic arguing that the best Constitution ought to be compounded of the three species monarchic aristocratic and Democratic as in Sparta only then would it be sure to last polius accepted

The principle of the mixed Constitution but found his ideal in the constitution of Rome which later history was to prove so violently unstable Cicero the Republica takes the same line poip 6 2 to 10 cic the Republic i 4 5 2 65 dierk is treated of similar political subjects in

His public addresses at Olympia and at the panthia we hear more about his work on the history of literature though his generation was almost the first to realize that such a subject had any existence he wrote lives of philosophers a subject hitherto not considered worth recording giving the biographical facts

Followed by philosophic and aesthetic criticism we here for example example of his life of Plato of Pythagoras in which he laid emphasis on the philosophers practical work of xenophanes and of the seven wise men he also wrote lives of poets we hear of books on alus and on

Homer in which latter he is said to have made the startling remark that the poems should be pronounced in the yolic dialect whatever this remark exactly meant and we cannot tell without the context it seems an extraordinary anticipation of modern philological discoveries he wrote on the hypothesis

I.E the subject matter of Sophocles and Ides also on musical contests psilon R muan yson Sigma Iota capu Gamma New Omega new carrying further Aristotle’s own collection of the dacal or official notices of the production of tragedies in Athens the book dealt both with dates and with Customs it told how scolia were

Sung with a oral or Myrtle twig in the hand how Sophocles introduced a third actor and the like in philosophy proper he wrote on the soul P Epsilon R sailon Kai his first book The corinthus proved that the soul was a Harmony or right blending of the four elements and was

Identical with the force of the living body the second the lesbis drew the conclusion that if a compound it was destructible hence a great controversy with his master he wrote Pi Epsilon r f Theta Omicron R new Theta Pi Omega new on the perishing of mankind

IE on the way in which large masses of men have perished off the Earth through famine pestilence wild beasts War and the like he decides that man’s most destructive enemy is man the subject may have been suggested to him by a fine imaginative passage in Aristotle’s meteorology I 147 dealing with the vast

Changes that have taken place on the Earth’s surface and the unrecorded perishing of races and communities he wrote A Treatise against divination and a satirical descent to the cave of tronus he seems however to have allowed some importance to dreams and to the phenomena of possession and with all this we have not

Touched on his greatest work which was in the sphere of geography he wrote a pi Epsilon R Omicron Delta omicon gamma a journey round the Earth accompanied with a map he used for this map the greatly increased stores of knowledge gained by the Macedonian Expeditions over all Asia as far as the

Ganges he also seems to have devised the method of denoting the position of a place by means of two coordinates the method soon after developed by eratosthenes into latitude and longitude he attempted calculations of the measurements of large Geographic distances for which of course both his d and his instruments were

Inadequate nevertheless his measurements remained a well-known standard we find them quoted and criticized by strabo and pus and lastly he published measurements of the heights of mountains in the peloponese but the title seems to have been unduly modest for we find in the fragment statements about mountains far

Outside that area about pean and Olympus in thessaly and of adiran in rhs he had a subvention plyy tells us NH H2 162 regam Kura prenses Montes from the king of Macedon probably either cassander or as one would like to believe the philosophic antigonous gadus and he calculated the heights so

We are told by trigonometry using the Delta Omicron pitaro Alpha an instrument of hollow reads without lenses which serve for his primitive theodolite it is an extraordinary record and illustrates the true parap IC Spirit four the failure of nerve anyone who turns from the great writers of classical Athens say Sophocles or

Aristotle to those of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone there is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world about him the new quality is not specifically Christian it is just as marked in the gnostics and mythus

Worshippers as in the gospels and the Apocalypse in Julian and plotinus as in Gregory and J Rome it is hard to describe it is a rise of asceticism of mysticism in a sense of pessimism a loss of self-confidence of Hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort a

Despair of patient inquiry a cry for infallible Revelation an indifference to the welfare of the state a conversion of the soul to God it is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly to help the society to

Which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures but rather by means of a burning Faith by contempt for the world and its standards by ecstasy suffering and martyrdom to be granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness his immeasurable sins there is an intensifying of certain spiritual

Emotions an increase of sensitiveness a failure of nerve now this antithesis is often exaggerated by the admirers of one side or the other a 100 people write as if Sophocles had no mysticism and practically speaking no conscience half a dozen retort as if St Paul had no public spirit and no common

Sense I have protested often against this exaggeration but stated reasonably as a change of proportion and not a creation of new Hearts the antithesis is certainly based on fact the historical reasons for it are suggested above in the first of these essays my description of this complicated change is of course

Inadequate but not I hope one-sided I do not depreciate the religions that followed on this Movement by describing the movement itself as a failure of nerve mankind has not yet decided which of two opposite methods leads to the Fuller and deeper knowledge of the world the patient and sympathetic

Study of the good citizen who lives in it or the ecstatic vision of the saint who rejects it but probably most Christians are inclined to believe that without some failure and sense of failure without a contrite heart and conviction of sin man can hardly attain the religious life I can imagine an

Historian of this temper believing that the period we are about to discuss was a necessary softening of human Pride a preparo evangelica 132 I am concerned in this paper with the lower country lying between two great ranges the one range is Greek philosophy culminating in Plato Aristotle the PO

And the garden the other is Christianity culminating in St Paul and his successors the one is the work of helis using some few foreign elements the second is the work of helenistic culture on a Hebrew stock the books of Christianity are Greek the philosophical background is helenistic

The result of the interplay in the free atmosphere of Greek philosophy of religious ideas derived from Egypt Anatolia Syria and Babylon the preaching is carried on in Greek among the greek-speaking workmen of the great manufacturing and Commercial cities the first preachers are Jews the central scene is set in

Jerusalem I wish in this essay to indicate how a period of religious history which seems broken is really continuous and to trace the LIE of the main valleys which lead from the one range to the other through a large and imperfectly explored territory the territory in question is

The so-called helenistic age the period during which the schools of Greece were heliz the world it is a time of great Enlightenment a vigorous propaganda of high importance to history it is a Time full of great names in one school of philosophy alone we have Zeno cleanthes cipus panus

Posidonius yet curiously enough it is represented in our tradition by something very like a mere void there are practically no complete books preserved only fragments and indirect quotations consequently in the search for information about this age we must throw our Nets wide beside books and inscriptions of the helenistic period

Proper I have drawn on Cicero plini senica and the like for evidence about their teachers and Masters I have used many Christian and Gnostic documents and works like the Corpus of hermetic writings and the mythis Liturgy among modern writers I must acknowledge a special debt to the researches of trick cumont Bay wendland

And reitzenstein the helenistic age seems at first sight to have entered on an inheritance such as our speculative anarchists sometimes long for a tabular Raza on which a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers might write clean and certain the book of their discoveries about life what Herodotus

Would call their history for as we have seen in the last essay it is clear that by the time of Plato the traditional religion of the Greek States was if taken at its face value a bankrupt concern there was hardly one aspect in which it could bear

Criticism and in the kind of test that chiefly matters the satisfaction of men’s ethical requirements and aspirations it was if anything weaker than elsewhere now a religious belief that is scientifically Preposterous may still have a long and comfortable life before it any worshipper can suspend the scientific part of his mind while

Worshiping but a religious belie Bel that is morally contemptible is in serious danger because when the religious emotions surge up the moral emotions are not far away and The Clash cannot be hidden this collapse of the traditional religion of Greece might not have mattered so much if the form of

Greek social life had remained if a good Greek had his polus he had an adequate substitute in most respects for any mythological Gods but the pulus too as we have seen in the last essay fell with the rise of mcadon done it fell perhaps not from any special spiritual fault of

Its own it had few faults except its fatal narrowness but simply because there now existed another social hole which whether higher or lower in civilization was at any rate utterly Superior in brute force and in money Devotion to the polus lost its reality when the polus with all that it represented of rights

And laws and ideals of Life lay at the mercy of a military desperate who might of course be a hero but might equally well be a vulgar s or a corrupt Adventurer what the succeeding ages built upon the ruins of the polus is not our immediate concern in the realm of

Thought on the whole the polus triumphed Aristotle based his social theory on the polus not the nation dorus dimus and posidonius followed him and we still use his language Rome herself was a polus as well as an Empire and Professor hfield has pointed out that a city has more chance of taking in

The whole world to its freedoms and privileges than a nation has of making men of alien birth its compatriots a Jew of Tarsus could easily be granted the Civic rights of Rome he could never have been made an Italian or a Frenchman the stoic ideal of the world

As one great city of Gods and Men has not been surpassed by any ideal based on the nation what we have to consider is the general trend of religious thought from say the parapatics to the gnostics it is a fairly clear history a soil once teeming with wild weeds was to

All appearance swept bare and made ready for new sewing skilled gardeners chose carefully the best of herbs and plants and tended the garden sedulously but the bounds of the garden kept spreading all the while into strange untended ground and even within the original walls the weeding had been Hasty and

Incomplete at the end of a few Generations all was a Wilderness of weeds again weeds Rank and luxuriant and sometimes extremely beautiful with a half strangled garden flower or two gleaming here and there in the tangle of them does that comparison seem disrespectful to religion is philosophy all flowers and traditional belief all

Weeds well think what a weed is it is only a name for all the natural wild vegetation which the Earth sends up of herself which lives and will live without the conscious labor of man the flowers are what we keep alive with difficulty the weeds are what conquer us

It has been well observed by zel that the great weakness of all ancient thought not accepting Socratic thought was that instead of appealing to objective experiment it appealed to some subjective sense of Fitness there were exceptions of course democratus eratosthenes hypocrates and to a great extent Aristotle but in general there was a

Strong tendency to follow Plato in opposing that people could really solve questions by an appeal to their inner Consciousness one result of this no doubt was a tendency to lay too much stress on mere agreement it is obvious when one thinks about it that quite often a large number of people who know

Nothing about a subject will all agree and all be wrong yet we find the most radical of ancient philosophers unconsciously dominated by the argument X consensus gentium it is hard to find two more uncompromising think than Zeno and epicurus yet both of them when they are almost free from the popular

Superstitions when they have constructed complete systems which if not absolutely logic proof are calculated at least to keep out the weather for a century or so open Curious side doors at the last moment and let in all the gods of Mythology 133 true they are admitted as suspicious characters and under promise

Of good behavior epicurus explains that they do not and cannot do anything whatever to anybody Zeno explains that they are not anthropomorphic and are only symbols or emanations or subordinates of the all ruling Unity both parties get rid of the myths but the two great reformers have admitted a dangerous

Principle the general consensus of humanity they say shows that there are gods and gods which in mind if not also in visual appearance resemble man epicurus succeeded in barring the door and and admitted nothing more but the stoics presently found themselves admitting or insisting that the same consensus proved the existence of demons

Of Witchcraft of divination and when they combined with the platonic School of more dangerous elements still I take the stoics and epicurian as the two most radical schools on the whole both of them fought steadily and strongly against the growth of superstition or if you like to put it in other language

Against the dumb demands of man’s infar rational nature nature the glory of the stoics is to have built up a religion of extraordinary nobleness the glory of the epicurian is to have upheld an ideal of Sanity in humanity Stark upright amid a reeling world and like the old Spartans never to

Have yielded one inch of ground to the common foe the great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions there is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand and the mind that desires such

Things that is the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty will as soon as its devils are cast out proceed to fill itself with their relations let us first consider the result of the mere denial of the Olympian religion the essential

Postulate of that religion was that the world is governed by a number of definite personal Gods possessed of a human sense of justice and fairness and capable of being in influenced by normal human motives in general they helped the good and punish the bad though doubtless

They tended too much to regard as good those who paid them proper attention and as bad those who did not speaking broadly what was left when this conception proved inadequate if it was not these personal Gods who made things happen what was it if the Tower of salom was not

Deliberately thrown down by the God so as to kill and hurt a carefully collected number of wicked people while letting the good Escape what was the explanation of its falling the answer is obvious but it can be put in two ways you can either say it was just chance

That the tower fell at that particular moment when so and so was under it or you can say with rather more reflection but not any more common sense it fell because of a definite chain of causes a certain degree of progressive decay in the building a certain definite pressure

And it was bound to fall there is no real difference in these statements at least in the meaning of those who ordinarily utter them both are compatible with a reasonable and scientific view of the world but in the helenistic age when Greek thought was spreading rapidly and superficially over

Vast semi barbarous populations whose Minds were not ripe for it both views turned back instinctively into a theology as personal as that of the Olympians it was not of course Zeus or Apollo who willed this everyone knew so much it happened by chance that is chance or Fortune wield

It and Taya became a goddess like the rest the great catastrophes the great transformations of the Mediterranean World which marked the helenistic period had a strong influence here if Alexander and his generals had practiced some severely Orthodox Macedonian religion it would have been easy to see that the

Gods of Macedon were the real rulers of the world but they most markedly did not they accepted hospitably all the religions that crossed their path some power or other was disturbing the world that was clear it was not exactly the work of man because sometimes the good

Were exalted sometimes the bad there was no consistent purpose in the story it was just Fortune happy is the man who knows how to Plate fortune and make her smile upon him it is worth remembering that the best sea ground for Superstition is a society in which the fortunes of men

Seem to Bear practically no relation to their merits and efforts a stable and well-governed Society does tend speaking roughly to ensure that The Virtuous and industrious Apprentice shall succeed in life while the wicked and Idol Apprentice fails and in such a society people tend to lay stress on the

Reasonable or visible chains of cation but in a country suffering from earthquakes or pestilences in a court governed by the whim of a desperate in a a district which is habitually the seed of a war between alien armies the ordinary virtues of diligence honesty and kindliness seemed to be of little

Avail the only way to escape destruction is to win the favor of the prevailing Powers take the side of the strongest Invader flatter the desperate plate the fate or fortune or angry God that is sending the earthquake or the pestilence the helenistic period pretty certainly Falls in some degree under all

Of these categories and one result is the sudden and enormous spread of the worship of Fortune of course there was always a protest there is the famous nullam Newman haves SI sit prudentia no te no fmus Fortuna De taken by juvenal from the Greek there are many unguarded

Phrases and at least three Corrections in polius 134 most interesting of all perhaps there is the first oration of Plutarch on the fortune of Alexander 135 a sentence in Ply’s Natural History 2 22 seems to go back to helenistic sources throughout the whole world at every place and hour by every voice

Fortune alone is invoked in her name spoken she is the one defendant the one culprit the one thought in men’s Minds the one object of praise the one cause she is worshiped with insults counted as fickle and often as blind wandering inconsistent Elusive changeful and friend of the

Unworthy we are so much at the mercy of chance that chance is our God the word used is first Fortuna and then Sor this shows how little real difference there is between the two apparently contradictory conceptions dot chance would have it so it was faded to be the sting of both phrases their

Pleasant bitterness when played with their quality of poison when believed lies in their denial of the value of human endeavor yet on the whole as one might expect the Believers in Destiny are a more respectable congregation than the worshippers of chance it requires a certain amount of thoughtfulness to rise

To the conception that nothing really happens without a cause it is the beginning perhaps of science ionic philosophers of the fifth century had laid stress on the new gamma Capa F Sigma Iota Omicron 136 what we should call the chain of causes in nature after the rise of stoicism fate

Becomes something less physical more related to conscious purpose it is not aneni but himine himine in the Striking simile of Zeno 137 is like a fine thread running through the whole of existence the world we must remember was to the stoics a live thing like that Invisible Thread of Life which in

Heredity passes on from generation to generation of living species and keeps the type alive it runs causing causing Forever both the infinitesimal and the infinite it is the Lamb gamma Amron T Amicon Capa Sigma mu Omicron Upsilon 138 the new Omicron Delta Iota the reason of

The world for the mind of Zeus rather difficult to distinguish from the pronoia or Providence which is the work of God and indeed the very essence of God thus it is not really an external and Alien Force for the human soul itself is a fragment or effluence of the

Divine and this law of God is also the law of man’s own fusus as long as you act in accordance with your true self you are complying with that Divine Epsilon mu alphar muua or Pyon amanota Alpha whose service is perfect Freedom only when you are false

To your own nature and become a rebel against the kingdom of God which is within you are you dragged perforce behind the chariot wheels the doctrine is implied in cleanthes celebrated him to Destiny and is explained clearly by plotinus 139 that is a noble conception but the

Vulgar of course can turn Kismet into a stupid Idol as easily as they can Fortune an epicurus may have had some excuse for exclaiming that he would sooner be a slave to the old gods of the vulgar than to the destiny of the philosophers 140 so much for the result

In superstitious minds of the denial or rather the removal of the Olympian gods it landed men in the worship of Fortune or of Fate next let us consider what happened when instead of merely rejecting the gods and mass people tried carefully to collect what remained of religion after the Olympian system fell

Aristotle himself gives us a fairly clear answer he held that the origins of man’s idea Nunu amican Iota Alpha of the Divine were twofold 141 the phenomena of the sky and the phenomena of the human soul it is very much what Kant found 2,000 years later the spectacle of the

Vast and ordered movements of the heavenly bodies are compared by him in a famous fragment with the marching forth of Homer’s armies Before Troy behind such various order and strength there must surely be a conscious mind capable Kappa amican Sigma mu Sigma Alpha Iota roro amran Upsilon T Epsilon Kappa Alpha

Neuro Alpha Sigma Pi Iota Delta Iota to Alpha to order steeds of war and mailed men it is only a step from this to regarding the sun moon and stars as themselves Divine and it is a step which both Plato and Aristotle following Pythagoras and followed by the stoics take with

Confidence cipus gives practically the same list of gods the sun moon and stars and law and men who have become Gods 142 both the wandering stars and the fixed stars are animate beings Divine and eternal self-acting subordinate gods as to the Divinity of the Soul or the mind of man the earlier

Generations are shy about it but in the later stoics it is itself a portion of the Divine Life it shows this ordinarily by its power of reason and more conspicuously by becoming new Theta Epsilon Omicron or filled with God in its exalted moments of provision ecstasy and prophetic dreams if reason itself is

Divine there is something else in the soul which is even higher than reason or at least more surprising ly Divine let us follow the history of both these remaining substitutes for the Olympian gods first for the heavenly bodies if they are to be made Divine we can hardly

Stop there the Earth is also a Divine being old tradition has always said so and Plato has repeated it and if Earth is divine so surely are the other elements the sto Chaya water air and above all fire for the Gods themselves are said by Plato to be made of fire and

The Stars visibly are so though perhaps the Heavenly Fire is really not our fire at all but a picon new Sigma Mu Alpha fifth body seeing that it seems not to burn nor the Stars to be consumed this is persuasive enough and philosophic but withi has it led us back

To the Olympians or rather behind the Olympians as St Paul puts it gal for 9 to the beggarly elements the old cor or Earth maiden and mother seems to have held her own unshaken by the changes of time all over the aan area she is there in prehistoric cre with her two lions

With the same lions orientalized in Olympia and Ephesus in Sparta with her great Marsh birds in biosa with her horse she runs riot in a number of the Gnostic systems both pre-christian and post-christian she forms a Divine Triad with the father and the son that is ancient and natural but she also becomes

The Divine wisdom Sophia the Divine truth althia the holy breath or Spirit the Numa since the word for spirit is neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin this last is rather a surprise it is explained when we remember that in Hebrew the word for Spirit Rua is mostly feminine in the

Meantime let us notice one curious development in the life of this goddess in the old religion of Greece and Western Asia she begins as a maiden then in fullness of time becomes a mother there is evidence also for a third stage the widowhood of withering Autumn 143 to the classical Greek this

Motherhood was quite as it should be a due fulfillment of normal functions but to the Gnostic and His Kind it connoted a fall a passage from the glory of virginity to a state of sin 144 the cor becomes a fallen virgin sometimes a temptress or even a female

Devil sometimes she has to be saved by her son the Redeemer 145 as far as I have observed she loses most of her Earthly agricultural quality though as Seline or even Helen she keeps up her Affinity with the moon almost all the writers of the helenistic age agree in regarding

The sun moon and stars as Gods the rationalists heus and yeris before going on to their deified men always start with the heavenly bodies when Plutarch explains in his beautiful and kindly way that all religions are really attempts towards the same goal he clenches his argument

By observing that we all see the same sun and moon though we call them by different names in all languages 146 but the belief does not seem to have had much religious intensity in it until it was reinforced by two alien influences first we have the ancient

Worship of the son implicit if not explicit in a great part of the old oldest Greek rituals and then idealized by Plato in the Republic where the son is the author of all light and life in the material world as the idea of good is in the ideal world this worship came

Gradually into contact with the traditional and definite Sun worship of Persia the final comination took place curiously late it was the Roman conquests of cicia capadia kajin and Armenia that gave the decisive moment 47 to men who had wearied of the myths of The Poets who could draw no

More inspiration from their Apollo and Hyperion but still had the habits and a craving left by their old gods a fresh breath of reality came with the entrance of lambot Amicon newron muo Alpha mithis the unconquered son but long before the Triumph of mithraism as the military religion of

The Roman Frontier Greek literature is permeated with a kind of intense language about the sun which seem seems derived from Plato 148 in later times in the 4th Century a d for instance it has absorb some more full-blooded and less critical element as well secondly all the seven planets these had a curious

History the planets were of course Divine and living bodies so much Plato gave us then come arguments and questions scattered through the stoic and eclectic literature is it the planet itself that is divine or is the planet under the guidance of a Divine Spirit the latter seems to win the day

Anthropomorphism has stolen back upon us we can use the old language and speak simply of the planet Mercury as romu amcron sigaro it is the star of Hermes and Hermes is the spirit who guides it 149 even Plato in his old age had much to say about the souls of the seven

Planets further each planet has its sphere the Earth is is in the center then comes the sphere of the Moon then that of the Sun and so on through a range of seven spheres If All Things Are full of gods as the wise ancients have said what

About those parts of the sphere in which The Shining planet for the moment is not are they without God obviously not the whole sphere is filled with innumerable Spirits everywhere it is all Hermes all Aphrodite we are more familiar with the Latin names Mercury and Venus but one

Part only is visible the voice of one school as usual is raised in opposition one veteran had seen clearly from the beginning with all this sort of thing was sure to lead epicurus approves none of these things 150 it was no good his having destroyed the old traditional

Superstition if people by deifying the stars were to fill the sky with seven X seven as many objects of worship as had been there before he allows no schwarmer ey about the Stars they are not Divine animate beings or Guided by gods why cannot the astrologers leave God in

Peace when their orbits are irregular it is not because they are looking for food they are just conglomerations of ordinary atoms of air or fire it does not matter which they are not even very large only about as large as they look or perhaps smaller since most fires tend

To look bigger at a distance they are not at all certainly Everlasting it is quite likely that the Sun comes to an end every day and a new one rises in the morning all kinds of explanations are possible and none certain munu Omicron new Mutha Omicron P

Sigmaa Omega in any case as you value your life and your reason do not begin making myths about them on other lines came what might have been the effective protest of real science when arist starus of seamos 250 BC argued that the Earth was not really the center of the universe but revolved

Round the Sun but his hypothesis did not account for the phenomena as completely as the current theory with its epicycles his fellow astronomers were against him cleanthes the stoic denounced him for disturbing The Hearth of the universe and his heresy made little Headway 151 the planets in their seven spheres

Surrounding the earth continued to be objects of adoration they had their special gods or guiding Spirits assigned them their ordered movements through space it was held produce a vast and eternal Harmony it is beautiful beyond all Earthly music This Music of the Spheres beyond all human dreams of what music might be the

Only pity is that except for a few individuals in trances nobody has ever heard it circumstances seem always to be unfavorable it may be that we are too far off though considering the vastness of the orchestra this seems improbable more likely we are merely deaf to it because

It never stops and we have been in the middle of it since we first Drew breath 152 the planets also become elements in the cosmos stoa it is significant that in helenistic theology the word stoian element gets to mean a demon as methos greatness means an

Angel3 but Behold a mystery the word sto Chaya elementa had long been used for the Greek ABC and in particular for the seven vowels Alpha Epsilon Ada Iota Omicron Upsilon Omega that is no chance no mere coincidence the vowels are the Mystic signs of the planets they have control

Over the planets hence strange prayers and magic formula innumerable even the way of Reckoning time changed under the influence of the planets instead of the old division of the month into three periods of 9 days we find gradually establishing itself the week of seven days with each day named after

Its planet Sun Moon Aries Hermes Zeus Aphrodite Kronos the history of the planet weak is given by dioes 37 18 in his account of the Jewish campaign of ppus but it was not the Jewish week the Jews scorned such idolatrous polytheistic proceedings it was the old week of

Babylon the original home of astronomy and Planet worship 154 for here again a great foreign religion came like water in the desert to mindes reluctantly and superficially enlightened but secretly longing for the old Terrors and raptures from which they had been set free even in the old days

Escalus had called the planets bright potentates shining in the fire of heaven and Ides had spoken of the sh hurled from a star 155 but we are told that the first teaching of astrology in helenic lands was in the time of Alexander when baraso the caldian set up a school in

KAS and according to Sena belum interpretated aest this must mean that he translated into Greek the high of bell a tretis in 70 tablets found in the library of aurban pal 686 to 626 BC but composed for Sargon I in the third millennium BC even the philosopher theophrastus is

Reported by procus 156 as saying that the most extraordinary thing of his age was the lore of the calans who foretold not only events of public interest but even the lives and deaths of individuals one wonders slightly whether theophrastus spoke with as much implicit Faith as procus

Suggests but the chief account is given by diodorus 2 30 perhaps from heus other nations despise the philosophy of Greece it is so recent and so constantly changing they have Traditions which come from vast Antiquity and never change notably the caldan have collected observations of the Stars through long ages and teach

How every event in the heavens has its meaning as part of the Eternal scheme of divine forethought especially the seven Wanderers or planets are called by them hermanus interpreters and among them The Interpreter in Chief is Saturn their work is to interpret beforehand Town new to new Theta Epsilon new new new Omicron

Iota Alpha new the thought that is in the mind of the Gods by their risings and settings and by the colors they assume the calans predict great winds and storms and waves of excessive heat comets and earthquakes and in general all changes fraught with wheel or woe not only to

Nations and regions of the world but to Kings and to ordinary men and women Ben beneath the seven are 30 gods of councel half below and half above the Earth every 10 days a messenger or Angel star passes from above below and another from below above above these gods are 12

Masters who are the TW signs of the zodiac and the planets pass through all the houses of these 12 in turn the calans have made prophecies for various Kings such as Alexander who conquered Darius and antigonous and ccus Nicor and have always been right and private persons who have consulted them consider

Their wisdom as marvelous and above human power astrology fell upon the helenistic Mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people the tomb of O amandas as described by diodorus I 495 was covered with astrological symbols and that of Antiochus I which has been discovered in kagene is of the

Same character it was natural for monarchs to believe that the Stars watched over them but everyone was ready to receive the germ the epicurian of course held out and so did panus the coolest head among the stoics but the stoics as a whole gave way they formed with good reason

The leading School of philosophy and it would have been a service to mankind if they had resisted but they were already committed to a belief in the deity of the stars and to the doctrine of H Marine or destiny they believed in the pervading pronoia one 57 or fourthought

Of the Divine mind and in the sigma Upsilon new Theta Epsilon Iota Alpha to new lamb Omega new the sympathy of all creation 158 whereby whatever happens to any one part however remote or insignificant affects all the rest it seemed only a natural and beautiful illustration of this sympathy that the

Movements of the Stars should be bound up with the sufferings of man they also appeal to the general belief in Prophecy and divination 159 if a prophet can foretell that such and such an event will happen then it is obviously faded to happen for knowledge implies predestination this belief in Prophecy

Was in reality a sort of appeal to fact and to Common Sense people could produce then as they can now a large number of striking cases of Second Sight presentiment Clairvoyance actual prophecy and the like 160 and it was more difficult than to test them the argument involves stoicism with some questionable

Allies epicurian and Skeptics of the academy might well mock at the sight of a great man like cipus or posidonius resting an important part of his religion on the undetected frauds of a shady lentine medium still the stoics could not but welcome the arrival of a system of Prophecy and predestination

Which however the incredulous might rail at it possessed at least great Antiquity in great stores of learning which was respectable Rec andite and in a way Sublime in all the religious systems of later Antiquity if I mistake not the seven planets play some lordly or terrifying part the great mithis liturgy

Unearthed by Dietrich from a magical papyrus in Paris 161 repeatedly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels as names of the seven deathless cosmocrator or Lords of the universe and seams under their influence to go off into its seven m with heads of serpents in white rment and its divers other

Sevens the various hermetic and mithraic communities the nasini is described by hippius 162 and other Gnostic bodies authors like macrobius and even Cicero in his somi chiponis are full of the influence of the seven planets and of the longing to escape Beyond them for by some simple psychological law of the Stars which

Have inexorably pronounced Our Fate and decreed or at least registered the decree that in spite of all striving we must needs tread their prescribed path still more perhaps the stars who know in the midst of our laughter how that laughter will end become inevitably powers of evil rather than good beings

Malignant as well as pitiless making life a vain thing and Saturn the chief of them becomes the most malignant to some of the gnostics he becomes jalath the lion-headed god the evil Jehovah 163 the religion of later Antiquity is overpoweringly absorbed in plans of escape from the prison of the

Seven planets in author after author in one Community after another the subject recurs and on the whole there is the same answer here on the earth we are the sport of Fate nay on the Earth itself we are worse off still we are beneath the moon and beneath the moon there is not

Only fate but something more unworthy and equally malignant chance to say nothing of damp and the ills of of Earth and bad demons above the Moon there is no chance only necessity there is the will of the other six cosmocrator rulers of the universe but above them all there is an

Eighth region they call it simply the ogdo the home of the ultimate God 164 whatever he is named whose being was before the cosmos in this sphere is true being and freedom and more than Freedom there is the ultimate Union with God for that spark of divine life which is man’s soul

Is not merely as some have said and Pyro Iota Alpha sigaro Omega new and effluence of the Stars it comes direct from the first and ultimate God the Alpha and Omega who is beyond the planets though the cosmocrator cast us to and fro like their slaves or dead

Chatles in Soul at least we are of equal birth with them the mithraic voter when their wrathful and tremendous faces break in upon his vision answers them unterrified Gam Epsilon mu Iota Sigma mu lamb Alpha newron muu sigaro I am your fellow Wanderer your fellow star the

Oric carried to the Grave on his golden scroll the same boast first I am the child of Earth and of the starry heaven then later I too am become God 165 the Gnostic writings consist largely of charms to be uttered by the soul to each of the planets in turn as

It pursues its perilous path past all of them to its ultimate home that Journey awaits after death but in the meantime in the meantime there are initiations sacraments Mystic ways of communion with God to see God face to face is to the ordinary unprepared man sheer death but

To see him after do purification to be led to him along the true Way by an initiating priest is the ultimate blessing of human life it is to die and be born again there were regular official initiations we have one in the mithis Liturgy more than one in the Corpus

Hermeticum appus 166 tells us that some length though in guarded language how he was initiated to Isis and became Her Image after much fasting clad in holy garments and led by the high priest he crossed the threshold of death and passed through all the elements the sun Shone upon him at

Midnight and he saw the gods of heaven and of Hades in the morning he was clad in the robe of Heaven set up on a pedestal in front of the goddess and worshiped by the congregation as a God he had been made one with Osiris or Horus or whatever name it pleased that

Son God to be called appus does not reveal it there were also of course the irregular personal initiations and visions of God vouch safe to persons of special prophetic Powers St Paul we may remember knew personally a man who had actually been snatched up into the third heaven and another who was similar

Wrapped into Paradise where he heard unspeakable words 167 whether in the body or not the Apostle leaves undecided he himself on the road to Damascus had seen the Christ in glory not after the flesh the philosopher plotinus so his disciple tells us was United with God in trance four times in 5 years

168 we seem to have traveled far from the Simplicity of early Greek religion yet a apart always from plotinus who is singularly aloof most of the movement has been a reaction under Oriental and barbarous influences towards the most primitive preh helenic Cults the union of man with God came

Regularly through ecstasis the soul must get clear of its body and enthusiasms that God must enter and dwell inside the worshipper but the means to this Union while sometimes allegorized and spiritualized to the last degree are sometimes of the most primitive sort the vagaries of religious emotion are apt to

Reach very low as well as very high in the scale of human nature certainly the Primitive thian Savages who drank themselves mad with the hot blood of their God Beast would have been quite at home in some of these rituals though in others they would have been put off with some substitute for

The actual blood the Primitive priestesses who waited in a bridal chamber for the Divine bridegroom even the kites with their Zeus K 169 and those strange Hier fans of the men’s house whose initiations are written on the rocks of Thea would have found writes very like their own re blossoming

On Earth after the fall of helenismo receive her bridegroom says Marcos the Gnostic 170 that thou may be what I am and I what Thou Art I in thee and thou in me is the ecstatic Cry of one of the Hermes liturgies before that the prayer has

Been enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman1 71 in almost all the liturgies that I have read need is felt for a mediator between the Seeker after God and his goal mithis himself saw a maites a mediator between orz and Aran but the

Ordinary mediator is more like an interpreter or an Adept with inner knowledge which he reveals to The Outsider the circumstances out of which these systems grew have left their mark on the new Gods themselves as usual the social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their objects of worship

When the calans came to KAS when the thians and the pyas set up their National worship of Bendis when the Egyptians in the same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual of Isis when the Jews at Aswan in the 5th Century BC establish their own temple in each

Case there would come prelit to whom the truth must be explained and interpreted sometimes perhaps softened and in each case there is behind the particular priest or initiator their present some greater Authority in the land he comes from behind any explanation that can be made in the pyas there is a deeper and

Higher explanation known only to the Great Master in Jerusalem in Egypt in Babylon or perhaps in some unexplored and ever receding region of the East this series of Revelations one behind the other is a characteristic of all these mixed Greco Oriental religions most of the Hermetic treatises

Are put in the form of initiations or lessons revealed by father to a son by T to Hermes by Hermes to TH or escos and by one of them to us it was an ancient formula a natural vehicle for traditional wisdom in Egypt where the young priest became regularly the son of

The old priest it is a form that we find in Greece itself as early as ureides whose melany says of her cosmological doctrines it is not my word but my mother’s word 172 it was doubtless the language of the old medicine man to his disciple in one

Fine liturgy th wrestles with Hermes in agony of spirit till Hermes is forced to reveal to him the path to Union with God which he himself has trotten before at the end of the mithis Liturgy the devotee who has passed through the Mystic ordeals and seen his God face to

Face is told after this you can show the way to others but this leads us to the Second Great division of our subject we turn from the phenom of the sky to those of the Soul if what I have written elsewhere is right one of the greatest works of the helenic spirit and

Especially a fifth century Athens was to insist on what seems to us such a commonplace truism the difference between man and God sop sign in religion was the message of the classical age but the ages before and after had no belief in such a lesson the old medicine man

Was perhaps himself the first Theos at any rate the primeval kings and queens were treated as Divine 173 just for a few great Generations it would seem Humanity Rose to a sufficient height of self-criticism and self-restraint to reject these dreams of self-abasement or megalomania but the effort was too great

For the average world and in a later age nearly all the kings and rulers all people in fact who can command an adequate number of flatterers become Divine beings again let us consider how it came about first there was the explicit recognition by the soberest philosophers of the Divine element in

Man’s Soul 174 Aristotle himself built an altar to Plato he did nothing superstitious he did not call Plato a God but we can see from his beautiful elegy to udus that he naturally and easily used language of worship which would seem a little strange to us it is

The same emotion a noble and just emotion on the whole which led the philosophic schools to treat their Founders as Heroes and which has peopled most of Europe and Asia with the memories and the worship of saints but we should remember that only a rare mind will make its Divine man of such

Material as Plato the common way to Dazzle men’s eyes is a more brutal and obvious one to people who were at all accustomed to the conception of a God man it was difficult not to feel that the conception was realized in Alexander his tremendous power His Brilliant personality his achievements

Beggaring the fables of The Poets put people in the right mind for worship then came the fact that the Kings whom he conquered were as a matter of fact mostly regarded by their subjects as Divine beings 175 it was easy it was almost inevitable for those who

Worshiped the god 176 Darius to feel that it was no man but a greater God who had overthrown Darius the incense which had been burned before those conquered Gods was naturally offered to to their conqueror he did not refuse it it was not good policy to do so and self-depreciation is

Not apt to be one of the weaknesses of the born ruler 177 but besides all this if you are to judge a God by his fruits what God could produce better credentials men had often seen Zeus defied with impunity they had seen Faithful Servants of Apollo come to bad

Ends but those who defied Alexander however great they might be always rued their Defiance and those who were faithful to him always received their reward with his successors the worship became more official ccus tus antigonus Demetrius all in different degrees and different styles are deified by the acclamations of adoring

Subjects tmy philadelphus seems to have been the first to claim definite Divine honors during his own life on the death of his wife in 271 he proclaimed her deity and his own as well in the worship of the Theo ad deloy that God’s Brethren of course there was flattery in all this

Ordinary self-interested lying flattery and its inevitable accompaniment megalomania any reading of the personal history of the tmes the solocity or the Caesar shows it but that is not the whole explanation one of the characteristics of the period of the dakai is the accumulation of capital and military force in the hands of

Individuals the tmes and solocity had at any moment at their disposal Powers very much greater than any Pericles or nus or Lysander 178 the folk of the small cities of the aan Hinterlands must have felt towards these great strangers almost as poor Indian peasants in time of flood and famine feel towards an

English official there were men now on Earth who could do the things that had hitherto been beyond the power of man were several cities thrown down by earthquake here was one who by his nod could could build them again famines had always occurred and been mostly incurable here was one who could without

Effort aay a famine provinces were harried and Wasted by habitual Wars the eventual conqueror had destroyed whole provinces in making the wars now as he had destroyed he could also save what do you mean by a God the simple man might say if these men are not Gods the only

Difference is that these gods are visible and the old gods no man has seen the titles assumed by all the Divine Kings tell the story clearly Antiochus epifanes the God made manifest too urits too Soder occasionally we have a corano or a nicator thunderbolt or a god of

Mana but mostly it is Soder urits and epiphanes the Savior the benefactor the God made manifest in constant alternation in the honorific inscriptions and in the writings of the Learned philanthropy fi Iota Lambda Alpha new Theta Omega Pi Alpha is by far the most prominent characteristic of the

God upon Earth was it that people really felt that to save or benefit mankind was a more Godlike thing than to blast and Destroy them philosophers have generally said that and the vulgar pretended to believe them it was at least politic when ministering to the half insane

Pride of one of these princes to remind him of his Mercy rather than of his Wrath wendland in His Brilliant book helist is Shish culture calls attention to an inscription of the Year 196 BC in honor of the young too epiphanes who was made manifest at the age of 12 Years 179 it

Is a typical document of Greco Egyptian king Worship in the reign of the young king by inheritance from his father lord of the diadems great in glory pacificator of Egypt and Pious towards the gods Superior over his adversaries restorer of the life of man lord of the

Periods of 30 years like hephestos the great king like the son the great king of the upper and lower lands offspring of the Gods of the love of the father whom hephestos has approved to whom the son has given Victory living image of Zeus son of the

Son toos the everliving Beloved by th in the ninth year of idos son of idos priest of Alexander and the god saviors and the God’s Brethren and the God’s benefactors and the gods of the love of the father and the god manifest for whom thanks be given the priests who came to

His coronation ceremony at Memphis Proclaim seeing that King too everliving beloved Of Tha God manifest for whom thanks be given born of King toos and queen arino the gods of the love of the father has done many benefactions to the temples and those in them and all those beneath his rule

Being from the beginning God born of god and goddess like Horus son of Isis and Osiris who came to the help of his father Osiris and in his benevolent disposition towards the gods has consecrated to the temples revenues of silver and of corn and has undergone many expenses in order to lead Egypt

Into the sunlight and give peace to the temples and has with all his powers shown love of mankind when the people of lopis revolted we hear in a short time he took the City by storm and slew all the EMP Pas who dwelt in it even as Hermes and

Horus son of Isis and Osiris conquered those who of old revolted in the same regions in return for which the gods have granted him Health Victory power and all other good things the kingdom remaining to him and his sons for time Everlasting 180 the conclusion which the priests

Draw from these facts is that the young King’s titles and honors are insufficient and should be increased it is a typical and terribly unh helenic document of the helenistic god man in his appearance as king now the early successors of Alexander mostly profess themselves members of the stoic school

And in the mouth of a stoic this doctrine of the potential Divinity of man was an inspiring one to them virtue was the really Divine thing in man and the most Divine kind of virtue was that of helping Humanity to love and help humanity is according to stoic Doctrine

The work and the very essence of God if you take away pronoia from God says cipus 181 it is like taking away light and heat from fire this Doctrine is magnificently expressed by plenty in a phrase that is probably translated from posidonius God is the helping of Man by

Man and that is the way to eternal glory 182 The conception took root in the minds of many Romans a great Roman Governor often had the chance of thus helping Humanity on a vast scale and like to think that such a life opened the way to heaven one should conceive

Says cisero Tusk I 32 the gods as like men who feel themselves born for the work of helping defending and saving Humanity Hercules has passed into the number of the Gods he would never have so passed if he had not built up that road for himself while he was among

Mankind I have been using some rather late authors though the ideas seem largely to come from posidonius 183 but before posidonius the sort of fact on which we have been dwelling had had its influence on religious speculation when Alexander made his conquering journey to India and afterwards was created a God it was

Impossible not to reflect that almost exactly the same story was related in myth about dionis dionis had started from India and traveled in the other direction that was the only difference a flood of light seemed to be thrown on all the traditional mythology which of of course

Had always been a puzzle to thoughtful men it was impossible to believe it as it stood and yet hard in an age which had not the conception of any science of Mythology to think it was all a mass of falsehood and the great Homer and hessi had know better than Liars but the

Generation which witnessed the official deification of the various solocity and toames seemed suddenly to see light the traditional Gods from Heracles and dionisis up to Zeus and Kronos and even aus were simply old world rulers and benefactors of mankind who had by their own insistence or the Gratitude of their

Subjects been transferred to the ranks of Heaven for that is the exact meaning of making them Divine they are classed among the true Immortals the sun and moon and stars and corn and wine and the Everlasting elements the philosophic romance of yeris published early in the 3r century BC had instantaneous success and

Enormous influence 184 it was one of the first Greek books translated into Latin and became long afterwards a favorite weapon of the Christian fathers in their polemics against polytheism U humorism was on the face of it a very brilliant Theory and it had as we have noticed a special appeal for the

Romans yet if such a conception might please the Leisure of a Statesman it could hardly satisfy the serious thought of a philosopher or a religious man if man’s Soul really holds a fragment of God and is itself a Divine being its godhead cannot depend on the possession

Of great riches and armies and organized subordinates if the helping of Man by man is God the help in question cannot be material help the religion which ends in deifying only Kings and millionaires may be vulgarly popular but is self-condemned as a matter of fact the whole tendency of Greek philosophy after

Plato with some illustrious exceptions especially among the romanizing stoics was away from the outer World towards the world of the Soul we find in the religious writings of this period that the real savior of men is not he who protects them against earthquake and famine but he who in some sense saves

Their souls he reveals to them the nois theu the knowledge of God that the knowledge in question is not a mere intellectual knowledge it is a complete Union a merging of beings and as we have always to keep reminding our cold modern intelligence he who has known God is himself thereby

Deified he is the image of God the Son of God in a sense he is God 185 the strum of ideas described in the first of the studies will explain the ease with which transition took place the worshipper of bachos became bachos simply enough because in reality the God

Bachos was originally only the projection of the human back Choy and in the helenistic age the notion of these secondary mediate ating Gods was made easier by the analogy of the human interpreters of course we have abundant instances of actual preachers and miracle workers who on their own

Authority posed and were accepted as Gods the adventure of Paul and Barnabas at listra 186 shows how easily such things could happen but as a rule I suspect the most zealous priest or preacher preferred to have his God in the background he preaches he heals the

Sick and casts out devils not in his own name but in the name of one who sent him this actual present priest who initiates you or me is himself already in image of God but above him there are greater and wiser priests above them others and above all there is the one Eternal

Divine mediator who being in Perfection both man and God can alone fully reveal God to man and Lead man’s soul up the Heavenly path Beyond change and fate and the houses of the seven rulers to its ultimate peace I have seen somewhere a gnostic or early Christian emblem which

Indicates this Doctrine some Shepherd or savior stands his feet on the earth his head towering above the planets lifting his follower in his outstretched arms the gnostics are still commonly thought of as a body of Christian Heretics in reality there were Gnostic sects scattered over the helenistic world before Christianity as well as

After they must have been established in Antioch and probably in Tarsus well before the days of Paul or Apollos their savior like the Jewish Messiah was established in men’s Minds before the savior of the Christians if we look close says Professor Bay the result emerges with great clearness that the figure of the

Redeemer as such did not wait for Christianity to force its way into the religion of nosis but was already present there under various forms 187 he occurs notably in two pre-christian documents discovered by the Keen analysis and profound learning of Dr writen Stein the pandra Revelation printed in the Corpus hermeticum and the

Sermon of the ninis in hippus refuto omnium harium which is combined with Addis worship 188 the violent anti-jewish bias of most of the sects they speak of the accursed god of the Jews and identify him with Saturn and the devil points on the hold to pre-christian conditions and a completely non-Christian standpoint is

Still visible in the mandian and manikian systems their redeemer is descended by a fairly clear genealogy from the trto Soder of early Greece contaminated with similar figures like Addis and Adonis from Asia Minor Osiris from Egypt and the special Jewish conception of the Messiah of the chosen people he has

Various names which the name of Jesus or Christos the anointed tends gradually to supersede above all he is in some sense man or the second man or the son of man the origin of this phrase needs a word of explanation since the ultimate unseen God Spirit though he is made Man In His

Image since holy men and divine kings are images of God it follows that he is himself man he is the real the ultimate the perfect and eternal man of whom all bodily men are feeble copies he is also the Father the savior is his son the

Image of the Father the second man the son of man the method in which he performs his mystery of redemption varies it is haunted by the memory of the old suffering and Dying God of whom we spoke in the first of these studies it is vividly affected by the ideal

Righteous man of Plato who shall be scourged tortured bound his eyes burnt out and at last after suffering every evil shall be impaled or crucified 18 n but in the main he descends of his free will or by the Eternal purpose of the father from Heaven through the Spheres of all the

Arandis or Cosmic crators the planets to save mankind or sometimes to save the Fallen virgin the soul wisdom or the Pearl 190 the arandis let him pass because he is disguised they do not know him cf1 Core 2 7 FF when his work is done he ascends to

Heaven to sit by the side of the father in glory he conquers the arandis leads them captive in his Triumph strips them of their armor Colonel 2 15 CF the previous verse sometimes even crucifies them forever in their places in the sky point1 the Epistles to the Colossians

And the Ephesians are much influenced by these doctrines Paul himself constantly uses the language of them but in the main we find him discouraging the excesses of superstition reforming ignoring rejecting his Jewish blood was perhaps enough to keep him to strict monotheism though he admits angels and Arantes principalities and Powers he

Scorns the elements and he seems deliberately to reverse the doctrine of the first and 2 man 1992 he says nothing about the Trinity of divine beings that was usual in gnosticism nothing about the Divine mother his mind for all its vehement mysticism has something of that clean antiseptic quality that makes such early

Christian works as the Octavius of minucius Felix and the epistle to dagnus so infinitely refreshing he is certainly one of the great figures in Greek literature but his system lies outside the subject of this essay we are concerned only with those last manifestations of helenistic religion which probably formed the background of his

Philosophy it is a strange experience and it shows what queer stuff we humans are made of to study these obscure congregations drawn from the proletariat of the Levant superstitious charlatan ridden and helplessly ignorant who still believed in God’s begetting Children of mortal mothers who took the word the the spirit and the Divine

Wisdom to be persons called by those names and turned the immortality of the Soul into the standing up of the corpses 193 and to reflect that it was these who held the main road of Advance towards the greatest religion of the West world I have tried to sketch and outline

The main forms of belief to which helenistic philosophy moved or drifted let me dwell for a few pages more upon the characteristic method by which it reached them it may be summed up in one word allegory all helenistic Philosophy from the first stoics onward is permeated by

Allegory it is applied to Homer to the religious Traditions to the ancient rituals to the whole world to celestius after the end of our period the whole material world is only a great myth thing whose value lies not in itself but in the spiritual meaning which it hides

And reveals to cleanthes at the beginning of it the universe was a Mystic pageant in which the immortal stars were the dancers and the son the Priestly torchbearer 194 cipus reduced the homeric gods to physical or ethical principles and crates the great critic applied allegory in detail to his

Interpretation of the all- wise po 195 we possess two small but complete treatises which illustrate well the results of this tendency Cornus R Epsilon Pi Theta Epsilon new and the homeric allegories of heraclitis a brilliant little work of the first century BC I will not dwell upon details they are abundantly accessible and

Individually often ridiculous a byproduct of the same activity is the Mystic treatment of language a certain Titan in hessi is named coos why because the Titans are the elements and one of them is naturally the element of cap Amicon Iota TAA the ionic Greek forth quality the Egyptian Isis is

Derived from the root of the Greek Epsilon Delta new Alpha Iota knowledge and the Egyptian Osiris from the Greek Sigma Iota Omicron and row holy and sacred or perhaps more exactly lawful and taboo is this totally absurd I think not if all human language is as most of these thinkers believed a Divine

Institution a cap filled to the brim with Divine meaning so that by reflecting deeply upon a word a Pious philosopher can reach the secret that it holds then there is no difficulty whatever in supposing that the special secret held by an Egyptian word may be

Found in Greek or the secret of a Greek word in Babylonian language is one the gods who made all these languages equally could use them all and win them all intricately in and out out for the building up of their Divine Enigma we must make a certain effort of

Imagination to understand this method of allegory it is not the frigid thing that it seems to us in the first place we should remember that as applied to the ancient literature and religious ritual allegory was at least a veraa it was a phenomenon which actually existed heraclitus of easis is an obvious

Instance he deliberately expressed himself in language which should not be understood of the vulgar and which bore a hidden meaning to his disciples Pythagoras did the same the prophets and religious writers must have done so to an even greater extent 196 and we know enough of the history of

Ritual to be sure that a great deal of it is definitely allegorical the helenistic age did not wanly invent the theory of allegory and secondly we must remember what states of Mind tend especially to produce this kind of belief they are not contemptible states of mind it needs

Only a strong idealism with which the facts of experience clash and allegory follows almost of necessity the facts cannot be accepted as they are they must needs be explained as meaning something different take an Earnest stoic or platonist a man of fervent mind who is possessed by the

Ideals of his philosophy and at the same time feels his heart thrilled by the beauty of the old poetry what is he to do on one side he can find zoilus or Plato himself or the cynic preachers condemning Homer and The Poets without remorse as teachers of

Foolishness he can treat poetry as the English Puritans treated the stage but is that a satisfactory solution remember that these Generations were trained habitually to give great weight to the voice of their inner Consciousness and the inner consciousness of a sensitive man cries out that any such solution is

False that Homer is is not a liar but Noble and great as our fathers have always taught us on the other side comes heraclitus the allegorist if Homer used no allegories he committed all impieties on this Theory the words can be allowed to possess all their old

Beauty and Magic but an inner meaning is added quite different from that which they bear on the surface it may very likely be a duller and less poetic meaning but I am not sure that the verses will not gain by the mere process of brooding study fully as much as they

Lose by the ultimate Badness of the interpretation anyhow that was the road followed the men of whom I speak were not likely to give up any experience that seemed to make the world more Godlike or to feed their spiritual and emotional Cravings they left that to the barefooted

Cynics they craved poetry and they craved philosophy if the two spoke like enemies their words must needs be explained Away by one who loved both the same process was applied to the world itself something like it is habitually applied by the religious idealists of all ages a fundamental doctrine of

Stoicism and most of the idealist Creeds was the Perfection and utter blessedness of the world and the absolute fulfillment of the purpose of God now obviously this belief was not based on experience the poor world to do it justice amid all its misdoings has never lent its self to any such barefaced

Deception as that no doubt it shrieked against the doctrine then as loud as it has always shrieked so that even a posidonius or a Pythagorean his ears straining For The Music of the Spheres was sometimes forced to listen and what was his answer it is repeated in all the literature of these

Sections our Human Experience is so small the things of the earth may be bad and more than bad but a if you only went beyond the Moon Moon that is where the true Cosmos begins and of course if we did ever go there we all know they would say it

Began beyond the sun idealism of a certain type will have its way if hard life produces an ounce or a pound or a million tons of fact in the scale against it it merely dreams of infinite millions in its own scale and the enemy is outweighed and smothered I do not

Wish to mock at these posidonius stoics and hermetics and gnostics and neopor Ians they loved goodness and their faith is strong and even terrible one feels rather inclined to bow down before their altars and cry Magna s delusio ET previt yet on the whole one rises from

These books with the impression that all this allegory and mysticism is bad for men it may make the emotions sensitive it certainly weakens the understanding and of course in this paper I have left out of account many of the grosser forms of Superstition in any consideration of the

Balance they should not be forgotten if a reader of procus and the Corpus herum wants relief he will find it perhaps best in the writings of a gentle old epicurian who lived at Ino Anda in capid doia about D200 his name was diogenes 197 his works are preserved in

A fragmentary state not on Papyrus or parchment but on the wall of a large Portico where he engraved them for passers by to read he lived in a world of superstition and foolish Terror and he wrote up the great doctrines of epicurus for the saving of mankind being brought by age to the

Sunset of my life and expecting at any moment to take my departure from the world with a glad song for the fullness of my happiness I have resolved lest I be taken too soon to give help to those of good temperament if one person or two or

Three or four or any small number you choose were in distress and I were summoned out to help one after another I would do all in my power to give the best counsel to each but now as I have said the most of men lie sick as it were

Of a pestilence in their false beliefs about the world and the tale of them increases for by imitation they take the disease from one another like sheep and further it is only just to bring help to those who shall come after us for they too are ours though they be yet unborn

And love for man commands us also to help strangers who may pass by since therefore the good message of the book has this wall and to set forth in public the medicine of the healing of mankind the people of his time and neighborhood seemed to have fancied that

The old man must have some bad motive they understood Mysteries and redemptions and Revelations they understood magic and curses but they were puzzled apparently by this simple message which only told them to use their reason their courage and their sympathy and not to be afraid of death or of angry Gods the doctrine

Was condensed into four sentences of a concentrated eloquence that make a translator despair 1 198 nothing to fear in God nothing to feel in death good can be attained evil can be endured of course the doctrines of this good old man do not represent the whole truth to

Be guided by one’s aversions is always a sign of weakness or defeat and it is as much a failure of nerve to reject blindly for fear of being a fool as to believe blindly for fear of missing some emotional stimulus there is no Royal Road in these

Matters I confess it seems strange to me as I write here to reflect that at this moment many of my friends and most of my fellow creatures are as far as one can judge quite confident that they possess Supernatural knowledge as a rule each individual belongs to some body which

Has received in writing the results of a divine revelation I cannot share in any such Fe feeling the Uncharted surrounds us on every side and we must needs have some relation towards it a relation which will depend on the general discipline of a man’s mind and the bias of his whole

Character as far as knowledge and conscious reason will go we should follow resolutely their aere guidance when they cease as cease they must we must use as best we can those fainter powers of apprehension and surmise and sensitiveness by which after all most high truth has been reached as well as

Most high art and poetry careful always really to seek for truth and not for our own emotional satisfaction careful not to neglect the real needs of men and women through basing our life on dreams and remembering above all to walk gently in a world where the lights are dim and

The Very Stars wander bibliographical note it is not my purpose to make anything like a systematic biblography but a few recommendations may be useful to some students who approach this subject as I have done from the side of classical Greek for Greek philosophy I have used besides Plato and Aristotle

Diogenes lus and philodemus de fragment dorer de theography greasy vau arnim stoorm veterum fragmenta usner epicuria also the old fragmenta philosoph of mik for later paganism and gnosticism reitzenstein pandas reitzenstein Di helenistic and mysterian religion Dietrich I’m mythras liturgic also a brais Nikia Mard and P wendland

Helen to Shish culture kumant Tex CD monuments relatives Au Myster to Metra also the mysteries of Metra Chicago 1903 and less religions arals Dawn L Empire Romain seik un ganger antien W volume 3 filo D contemplativa con bear grup greish religion and mythology Pages 1458 to

1676 B hop problem drosis 1907 with good bibliography in the introduction articles by E Bevan in the quarterly review number 424 June 1910 and the Hibert Journal 11 1 October 1912 documented theosis by W Schultz Jenna 1910 gives a highly subjective translation in reconstruction of most of the Gnostic documents the Corpus

Hermeticum is translated into English by G RS me Thrice greatest Hermes 1906 the first volume of Dr Scott’s Monumental edition of the hermetica Clarendon press 1924 has appeared just too late to be used in the present volume for Jewish thought before the Christian era Dr Charles’s Testaments of the 12

Patriarchs also the same writer’s Book of Enoch and the religions Jes Chang denan Testaments by Carl Clemen gon 1909 of Christian writers apart from the New Testament those that come most into account are hippius Latin cross d250 refuto omnium heresi epiphanius 367 to 43 panan and arenus Latin crossy d202 Contra heresies

I2 for a simple introduction to the problems presented by the New Testament literature I would venture to recommend Professor Bacon’s new testament in the home University library and Dr ESN Carpenter’s first three gospels in such a vast literature I dare not make any further recommendations but for a general introduction to the

History of religions with a good and brief bibliography I would refer the reader to Salomon renox orus Paris 1909 English translation the same year a book of wide learning and vigorous thought five the last protest in the last essay we have followed Greek popular religion to the very threshold

Of Christianity till we found not only a soil ready for the seed of Christian metaphysic but a large number of the plants already in full and exuberant growth a complete history of Greek religion ought without doubt to include at least the rise of Christianity in the growth of the Orthodox church but of

Course the present series of studies does not aim at completeness we will take the CHR Christian theology for granted as we took the classical Greek philosophy and will finish with a brief glance at the Pagan reaction of the 4th century when the old religion already full of allegory mysticism aestheticism and Oriental influences

Raised itself for a last indignant stand against the all prevailing deniers of the Gods this period however admits a rather simpler treatment than the others it so happens that for the last period of paganism we actually possess an authoritative statement of Doctrine something between a Creed and a

Catechism it seems to me a document so singularly important and as far as I can make out so little known that I shall venture to print it entire a Creed or catechism is of course not at all the same thing as the real religion of those

Who subscribe to it the rules of meter are not the same thing as poetry the rules of Cricut if the analogy may be excused are not the same thing as is good play nay more a man States in his Creed only the Articles which he thinks it right to assert positively against

Those who think otherwise his deepest and most practical beliefs are those on which he acts without question which have never occurred to him as being open to doubt if you take on the one hand a number of persons who have accepted the same Creed but lived in marketly different ages and

Societies with markedly different standards of thought and conduct and on the other and equal number who profess different Creeds but live in the same general environment I think there will probably be more real identity of religion in the latter group take three Orthodox Christians enlightened according to the standards of their time

In the 4th the 16th and the 20th centuries respectively I think you will find more profound differences of religion between them than between a Methodist a Catholic a freeth thinker and even perhaps a well-educated Buddhist or Brahman at the present day provided you take the most generally enlightened representatives of each

Class still when a student is trying to understand the inner religion of the Ancients he realizes how immensely valuable a Creed or even a regular liturgy would be literature enables us sometimes to approach pretty close in various ways to the minds of certain of the Great Men of antiquity and

Understand how they thought and felt about a good many subjects at times one of these subjects is the accepted religion of their society we can see how they criticized it or rejected it but it is very hard to know from their reaction against it what that accepted religion really was who

For instance knows Herodotus as religion he talks in his penetrating and gelous way sometimes for children and sometimes for philosophers as given puts it about everything in the world but at the end of his book you find that he has not opened his heart on this subject no

Doubt his profession as a Ider and Storyteller prevented him we can see that fusades was skeptical but can we fully see what his skepticism was directed against or where for instance Nikas would have disagreed with him and where he and Nikas both agreed against us we have of course the systems of the

Great philosophers especially of Plato and Aristotle better than either perhaps we can make out the religion of M aelius amid all the harshness and and plainness of his literary style Marcus possessed a gift which has been granted to few the power of writing down what

Was in his heart just as it was not obscured by any consciousness of the presence of witnesses or any striving after effect he does not seem to have tried deliberately to reveal himself yet he has revealed himself in that short personal notebook almost as much as the great inspired egotists Russo and St

Augustine true there are some passages in the book which are unintelligible to us that is natural in a work which was not meant to be read by the public broken flames of the white passion that consumed him bursting through the armor of his habitual accuracy and self-restraint people fail to understand

Marcus not because of his lack of self-expression but because it is hard for most men to breathe at that intense height of spiritual life or at least to breathe soberly they can do it if they are allowed to abandon themselves to floods of emotion and to lose self- judgment and

Self-control I am often rather surprised at good critics speaking of Marcus as cold there is as much intensity of feeling in t Epsilon Alpha Upsilon T new as in most of the nobler modern books of religion only there is a Sterner power controlling it the feeling never amounts to complete self-abandonment the guiding

Power never trembles upon its throne and the emotion is severely purged of Earthly draws that being so we children of Earth respond to it less readily still whether or no we can share marcus’ religion we can at any rate understand most of it but even then we

Reach only the personal religion of a very extraordinary man we are not much nearer to the religion of the average educated person the background against which Marcus like Plato ought to stand out I believe that our conceptions of it are really very vague and various our great-grandfathers who read Tully’s

Offices and ends were better informed than we but there are many large and apparently simple questions about which even after reading Cicero’s philosophical translations Scholars probably feel quite uncertain were the morals of Epictetus or the morals of part five of the Anthology most near to those of real life among respectable

Persons are there not subjects on which Plato himself sometimes makes our flesh creep what are we to feel about slavery about the exposing of children true slavery was not peculiar to Antiquity it flourished in a civilized and peculiarly Humane people of English blood till a generation ago and the history of

Infanticide among the finest modern Nations is such as to make one reluctant to throw stones and even doubtful in which direction to throw them still these great facts and others like them have to be understood and are rather hard to understand in their bearing on the religious life of the Ancients

Points of minor morals again are apt to surprise a reader of ancient literature we must remember of course that they always do surprise one in every age of history as soon as its manners are studied in detail one need not go beyond Salam Bean’s Chronicle one need hardly

Go beyond macau’s history or any of the famous French Memoirs to realize that was it really an ordinary thing in the first century as felo seems to say for gentlemen at dinner parties to black one another’s eyes or B one another’s ears off 199 or were such practices confined

To some smart set or was felo for his own purposes using some particular scandalous occurrence as if it was typical St Augustine mentions among the virtues of his mother her unusual meekness and tact although her husband had a fiery temper she never had bruises on her face which made her a Rara Avis

Among the matrons of her Circle point2 200 her Circle presumably included Christians as well as as pagans and manans and filo’s circle can scarcely be considered Pagan indeed as for the difference of religion we should bear in mind that just at the time we are about to consider the middle of the 4th

Century the conduct of the Christians either to the rest of the world or to one another was very far from Evangelical amiana says that no savage beasts could equal its cruelty amanus was a pagan but St Gregory himself says it was like hell point 2011 I have expressed elsewhere my own

General answer to this puzzle 202 not only in early Greek times but throughout the whole of antiquity the possibility of all sorts of absurd and atrocious things lay much nearer the protective forces of society were much weaker The Strain on personal character the need for real wisdom and virtue was much

Greater than it is at the present day that is one of the causes that make Antiquity so interesting of of course different periods of antiquity varied greatly both in the conventional standard demanded and in the spiritual Force which answered or surpassed the demand but in general the strong governments and orderly societies of

Modern Europe have made it infinitely easier for men of no particular virtue to live a decent life infinitely easier also for men of no particular reasoning power or scientific knowledge to have a more or less scientific or same view of the world that however does not carry us

Far toward solving the main problem it brings us no nearer to knowledge of anything that we may call typically a religious Creed or an authorized code of morals in any age from Hess to M orelus the book which I have ventured to call a Creed or catechism is the work of

Celestius about the gods and the world a book I should say about the length of the Scottish Shorter Catechism it is printed in the third volume of mica’s fragmenta philosoph apart from that the only Edition generally accessible and that is rare is a du aimal published by acius in

1539 orell’s brochure of 1821 seems to be unprocurable the author was in all probability that celestius who is known to us as a close friend of Julian before his accession and a backer or inspirer of The Emperor’s efforts to restore the old religion he was concerned in an educational addition of Sophocles the

Seven selected plays now extent with a comment AR he was given the rank of prefect in 362 that of console in 363 one must remember of course that in that rigorous and aesthetic Court high rank connoted no pump or luxury Julian had dismissed the Thousand hairdressers the innumerable cooks and Unix of his

Christian predecessor it probably brought with it only an increased obligation to live on pulse and to do without such pampering of the body as fine clothes or warmth or washing Julian’s fourth oration appros him to King son pyro land Iota Omicron new beta Alpha Sigma Iota land Alpha is

Dedicated to celestius his eighth is a consolation to himself upon the departure of celestius he had been with Julian in the wars in Gaul and was recalled by the jealousy of the emperor constantius it is a touching and even a noble tretis the nervous self-distrust which was habitual in Julian makes him right

Always with a certain expectation but no one could mistake the real feeling of loss and loneliness that runs through the consolation he has lost his comrad in the ranks and now is odius left alone so he writes quoting The Iliad celestius has been carried by God outside the Spears and arrows which

Malignant men were always aiming at you or rather at me trying to wound me through you and believing that the only way to beat me down was by depriving me of the fellowship of my true friend and fellow Soldier the comrade who never flinched from sharing my

Dangers one note recurs four times he has lost the one man to whom he could talk as a brother the man of guess and clean Free Speech 203 who was honest and unafraid and able to contradict the emperor freely because of their Mutual trust if one thinks of it Julian for all

His gentleness must have been an alarming Emperor to converse with his standard of conduct was not only uncomfortably High it was also a little unaccountable the most correct and blameless Court officials must often have suspected that their Master looked upon them as simply wallowing in sin and

That feeling does not promote ease or truthfulness Julian Compares his friendship with celestius to that of cypio and leus people said of cpio that he only carried out what leus told him is that true of me Julian asks himself have I only done what celestius told me his answer is sincere and beautiful

Kaa fand omanu it little matters who suggested and who agreed to the suggestion his thoughts and any credit that came from the thoughts are his friends as much as his own we happen to hear from the Christian theoret history 3 11 that on one occasion when Julian was nearly

Goated into persecution of the Christians it was celestius who recalled him to their fixed policy of eration celestius then may be taken to represent in the most authoritative way the Pagan reaction of Julian’s time in its final struggle against Christianity he was roughly speaking a neoplatonist but it is not as a

Professed philosopher that he writes it is only that neoplatonism had permeated the whole atmosphere of the age2 for The Strife of the philosophical sex had almost ceased just as Julian’s mysticism made all gods in almost all forms of worship into one so his enthusiasm for Hellenism revered nay idolized almost all the

Great philosophers of the past they were all trying to say the same ineffable thing all lifting mankind towards the knowledge of God I say almost in both cases for the Christians are outside the pale in one domain and the epicurian and a few cynics in the other both had

Committed the cardinal sin they had denied the Gods they are sometimes lumped together as AO lism VOA El enemy this may surprise us at First Sight but the explanation is easy to Julian the one great truth that matters is the presence and glory of the Gods no doubt they are all ultimately

One they are Delta Upsilon num Epsilon Iota forces not persons but for reasons above our comprehension they are manifest only under conditions of form time and personality and have so been revealed and worshiped and partly known by the great minds of the past in Julian’s mind the religious emotion itself becomes the

Thing to live for every object that has been touched by that emotion is thereby glorified and made sacred every Shrine where men have worshiped in truth of heart is thereby a house of God the worship may be mixed up with all sorts of folly all sorts of unedifying

Practice such things must be purged away or still better must be properly understood for to the pure all things are pure and the myths that shock the vulgar are noble allegories to the wise and reverent Purge religion from dross if you like but remember that you do so

At your peril one false step one self-confident rejection of a thing which is merely too high for you to grasp and you are darkening the sun casting God out of the world and that was just what the Christians deliberately did in many of the early Christian writings

Denial is a much greater element than assertion the beautiful Octavius of minius Felix about D 130 to 60 is an example such denial was of course to our judgment eminently needed and rendered a great service to the world but to Julian it seemed impiety in other Christian writings the

Misrepresentation of pagan rights and beliefs is decidedly foul mouth and malicious quite apart from his personal wrongs and his contempt for the character of constantius Julian could have no sympathy for men who overturned altars and heaped blasphemy on Old deserted shrines defilers of every sacred object that was not protected by

Popularity the most that such people could expect from him was that they should not be prescribed by law but meantime what were the multitudes of the God-fearing to believe the arm of the state was not very strong or effective labor as he might to supply good teaching to all provincial towns Julian

Could not hope to educate the poor and ignorant to understand Plato and M aelius for them he seems to say all that is necessary is that they should be Pious and God-fearing in their own way but for more or less educated people not blankly ignorant and yet not professed

Students of philosophy there might be some simple and authoritative Treatise issued a sort of reason Creed to lay down in a convincing manner the outlines of the old helenic religion before the Christians and atheists should have swept all fear of the Gods from off the Earth the Treatise is this work of

Celestius the Christian fathers from minucius Felix onward have shown us what was the most vulnerable point of paganism the traditional mythology celestius deals with it at once the acrot or pupil he says in section one need some preliminary training he should have been well brought up should not be incurably

Stupid and should not have been familiarized with foolish fables evidently the mythology was not to be taught to Children he enunciates certain postulates of religious thought VI that God is always good and not subject to Passion or to change and then proceed straight to the traditional

Myths in the first place he insists that they are what he calls Divine that is they are inspired or have some touch of divine truth truth in them this is proved by the fact that they have been uttered and sometimes invented by the most inspired poets and philosophers and by the gods themselves

In oracles a very characteristic argument the myths are all expressions of God and of the goodness of God but they follow the usual method of divine revelation to wit mystery and allegory the myths State clearly the one tremendous fact that the gods are that is what Julian cared about and the

Christians denied what they are the myths reveal only to those who have understanding the world itself is a great myth in which bodies and inanimate things are visible souls and Minds invisible but admitting all this how comes it that the myths are so often absurd and even immoral for the usual

Purpose of mystery in allegory in order to make people think the soul that wishes to know God must make its own effort it cannot expect simply to lie still and be told the myths by their obvious falsity and absurdity on the surface stimulate the Mind capable of religion to probe deeper

He proceeds to give instances and chooses at once myths that had been for Generations the mock of the skeptic and in his own day furnished abundant ammunition for the artillery of Christian pmic he takes first hess’s story of Kronos swallowing his children then the Judgment of Paris then comes a

Long and Earnest explanation of the myth of Addis and the mother of the Gods it is on the face of it a story highly discreditable both to the heart and the head of those August beings and though the rights themselves do not seem to have been in any way improper the Christians naturally

Attacked the pagans and Julian personally for countenancing the worship celestius explanation is taken directly from Julian’s fifth oration In Praise of the great mother and reduces the myth and the ritual to an expression of The Adventures of the Soul seeking God so much for the whole traditional meth

Ology it has been explained completely away and made subservient to philosophy and edification while it can still be used as a great Wellspring of religious emotion for the explanations given by celestius and Julian are never rationalistic they never stimulate a spirit of skepticism always a spirit of mysticism and

Reverence and lest by chance even this reverent theorizing should have been somehow lacking in Insight or true piety celestius ends with the prayer PR when I say these things concerning the myths May the gods themselves and the spirits of those who wrote the myths be gracious

To me he now leaves mythology and turns to the first cause it must be one and it must be present in all things thus it cannot be life for if it were all things would be alive by a platonic argument in which he will still find some philosophers to follow him he

Proves that everything which exists exists because of some goodness in it and thus arrives at the conclusion that the first cause is TA gamma Alpha Theta new The Good the gods are emanations or forces issuing from The Good the makers of this world are secondary Gods above

Them are the makers of the makers above all the one next comes a proof that the world is eternal a very important point of Doctrine next that the soul is Immortal next a definition of the workings of Divine Providence fate and Fortune a fairly skillful piece of dialectic dealing with a hopeless

Difficulty next come virtue and vice and in a dead and perfunctory echo of Plato’s Republic an enumeration of the good and bad forms of human society the questions which vibrated with life in free Athens had become meaningless to a desperate governed world then follows more adventurous matter first a chapter

Headed whence evil things come and that there is no fusus Kaku evil is not a real thing it is perhaps best he says to observe at once that since the gods are good and make everything there is no positive evil there is only absence of good just

As there is no positive Darkness only absence of light what we call evils arise only in the activities of men and even here no one ever does evil for the sake of evil one who indulges in some pleasant Vice thinks the vice bad but his pleasure good a murderer thinks the

Murder bad but the money he will will get by it good one who injures an enemy thinks the injury bad but the being quits with his enemy good and so on the evil acts are all done for the sake of some good but human Souls being very far removed from the original Flawless

Divine nature make mistakes or sins one of the great objects of the world he goes on to explain of gods men and spirits of religious institutions and human laws alike is to keep the souls from these errors and to purge them again when they have fallen next comes a speculative difficulty celestius has

Called the world Eternal in the fullest sense that is it always has been and always will be and yet it is made by the gods how are these statements compatible if it was made there must have been a time before it was made the answer is ingenious it is not made by handicraft

As a table is it is not begotten as a Son by a father it is the result of a quality of God just as light is the result of a quality of the son the Sun causes light but the light is there as soon as the sun is there the world is

Simply the other side as it were of the goodness of God and has existed as long as that goodness has existed next come some simpler questions about man’s relation to the Gods in what sense do we say that the gods are angry with the wicked or are appeased by repentance

Celestius is quite firm the gods cannot ever be glad for that which is glad is also sorry cannot be angry for anger is a passion and obviously they cannot be appeased by gifts or prayers even men if they are honest require higher motives than that God is unchangeable always good always doing

Good if we are good we are nearer to the gods and we feel it if we are evil we are separated further from them it is not they that are angry it is our sins that hide them from us and prevent the goodness of God from shining into us if

We repent again we do not make any change in God we only by the conversion of our soul towards the Divine heal our own Badness and enjoy again the goodness of the Gods to say that the gods turn away from the wicked would be like saying that the son turns away from a

Blind man why then do we make offerings and sacrifices to the gods when the gods need nothing and can have nothing added to them we do so in order to have more communion with the gods the whole Temple service in fact is an elaborate allegory a representation of the Divine

Government of the world the custom of sacrificing animals had died out some time before this the Jews of the dispersion had given it up long since because the law forbade any such sacrifice outside the temple Point 2 205 when Jerusalem was destroyed Jewish sacrific ceased altogether the Christians seem from the

Beginning to have generally followed the Jewish practice but sacrifice was in itself not likely to continue in a society of large towns it meant turning your temples into very ill- conducted slaughter houses and was also associated with a great deal of muddled and indiscriminate charity 2061 might have

Hoped that men so high-minded and spiritual as Julian and lusus would have considered this practice unnecessary or even have reformed it away but no it was part of the genuine helenic tradition and no jot or tit of that tradition should if they could help it be allowed to die sacrifice is desirable argues

Celestius because it is a gift of life God has given us life as he has given us all else we must therefore pay to him some emblematic tithe of life again prayers in themselves are merely words but with sacrifice they are words plus life living

Words lastly we are life of a sort and God is life of an infinitely higher sort to approach him we need always a medium or a mediator the medium between life and life must needs be life we find that life in the sacrificed animal 207 the argument shows what Ingenuity

These religious men had at their command and what trouble they would take to avoid having to face a fact and reform a bad system there follows a long and rather difficult argument to show that the world is in itself Eternal the former discussion on this point had only

Shown that the gods would not destroy it this shows that its own nature is indestructible the arguments are very inconclusive though clever and one wonders why the author is at so much pains indeed he is so Earnest that at the end of the chapter he finds it

Necessary to apologize to the cosmos in case his language should have been Indiscreet the reason I think is that the Christians were still as in Apostolic times pinning their faith to the approaching End of the World by Fire Point 208 they announced the end of the

World as near and they rejoiced in the prospect of its destruction history has shown more than once what terrible results can be produced by such beliefs as these in the minds of excitable and suffering populations especially those of East blood it was widely believed that Christian Fanatics had from time to time

Actually tried to light fires which should consume the accursed world and thus hasten the coming of the Kingdom which should bring such incalculable rewards to their own organization and plunged the rest of mankind in Everlasting torment to any respectable Pagan such action was an insane crime made worse by a diabolical motive the

Destruction of the world therefore seems to have become a subject of profound irritation a if not actually of Terror at any rate the doctrine lay at the very heart of the perniciosa superstitio and celestius uses his best dialectic against it the title of chapter 18 has a

Somewhat pathetic ring why are a thei atheism or rejections of God permitted and that God is Not injured thereby Theta Epsilon Omicron beta lopy to Epsilon to Alpha Iota if over certain parts of the world there have occurred and will occur more Hereafter rejections of the Gods a wise man need not be

Disturbed at that we have always known that the human soul was prone to error God’s Providence is there but we cannot expect all men at all times and places to enjoy it equally in the human body it is only the eye that sees the light the

Rest of the body is ignorant of the light so are many parts of the earth ignorant of God very likely also this rejection of God is a punishment persons who in a previous life have known the gods but disregarded them are perhaps now born as it were

Blind unable to see God persons who have committed the blasphemy of worshiping their own Kings as Gods May perhaps now be cast out from the knowledge of God philosophy had always rejected the man God especially in the form of King worship but opposition to Christianity no doubt intensifies the protest the

Last chapter is very short Souls that have lived in virtue being otherwise blessed and especially separated from their irrational part and purged of all body are joined with the gods and sway the whole world together with them so far triumphant Faith then the afterthought of the Brave man who means

To live his best life even if Faith fail him but even if none of these rewards came to them still virtue itself and the joy and Glory of virtue and the life that is subject to no grief and no master would be enough to make blessed those

Who have set themselves to live in virtue and have succeeded there the book ends it ends upon that well-worn Paradox which from the second book of the Republic onwards seems to have brought so much comfort to the nobler spirits of the ancient world strange how we moderns

Cannot rise to it we seem simply to lack the intensity of moral enthusiasm when we speak of Martyrs being happy on the rack in the first first place we rarely believe it and in the second we are usually supposing that the rack will soon be over and that

Harps and golden crowns will presently follow the ancient moralist believed that the good man was happy then and there because the joy being in his soul was not affected by the torture of his body 209 not being able fully to feel this conviction we naturally inclined to think it affected or

Unreal but taking the conditions of the ancient world into account account we must admit that the men who uttered this belief at least understood better than most of us what suffering was many of them were slaves many had been captives of War they knew what they were talking

About I think on a careful study of M aelius Epictetus and some of these neoplatonic philosophers that we shall be forced to realize that these men could rise to much the same Heights of religious heroism as the Catholic saints of the middle age and that they often

Did so if I may use such a phrase on a purer and thinner diet of sensuous emotion with less wallowing in the dust and less delirium be that as it may we have now seen and outline the kind of religion which ancient paganism had become at the time of its final reaction against

Christianity it is a more or less intelligible whole and succeeds better than most religions in combining two great appeals it appeals to the philosopher and the thoughtful man as a fairly complete and rational system of thought which speculative and enlightened Minds in any age might believe without

Disgrace I do not mean that it is probably true to me all these overpowering optimism which by means of a few untested aior postulates effect triumphantly to disprove the most obvious Facts of Life seem very soon to become meaningless I conceive it to be no Comfort at all to a man suffering

Agonies a frostbite to be told by science that cold is merely negative and does not exist so far as the statement is true it is irrelevant so far as it pretends to be relevant it is false I only mean that a system like that of celestius is judged

By any standard High civilized and enlightened at the same time this religion appeals to the ignorant and the humble-minded it takes from the pious villager no single object of worship that has turned his thoughts heavenwards it may explain and Purge it never condemns or ridicules in its own eyes that was its

Great glory in the eyes of History perhaps its most fatal weakness Christianity apart from its positive doctrines had inherited from Judaism the noble courage of its disbeliefs to compare this paganism in detail with its great rival would be even if I possessed the necessary learning a laborious and unsatisfactory

Task but if a student with very imperfect knowledge May Venture a personal opinion on this obscure subject it seems to me that we often look at such problems from a wrong angle harac somewhere in discussing the comparative success or failure of various early Christian sects makes the illuminating

Remark that the main determining cause in each case was not their comparative reasonableness of Doctrine or skill in controversy for they practically never converted one another but simply the comparative increase or decrease of the birth rate in the respective population on somewhat similar lines it always appears to me that historically speaking

The character of Christianity in these early centuries is to be sought not so much in the doctrines which it professed nearly all of which had their roots and their close parallels in older helenistic or Hebrew thought but in the organization on which it rested for my own part when I try to understand

Christianity as a mass of doctrines Gnostic trinitarian monophysite Aryan and the rest I get no further when I try to realize it as a sort of semi-secret society for mutual help with a mystical religious basis resting first on the proletariat of Antioch and the great commercial and Manufacturing towns of the

Levant then spreading by instinctive sympathy to similar classes in Rome and the west and rising in influence like certain other mystical Cults by the special appeal it made to women the various historical puzzles begin to fall into place among other things this explains the strange Subterranean Power by which the emperor dioclesian was

Baffled and to which The Pretender Constantine had to capitulate it explains its Humanity its intense feeling of Brotherhood within its own bounds its incessant care for the poor and also its comparative indifference to the virtues which are specially incumbent on a governing class such as statesmanship moderation truthfulness active courage learning culture and

Public Spirit of course such indifference was only comparative after the time of Constantine the governing classes come into the fold bringing with them their normal qualities and thereafter it is paganism not Christianity that must uphold the flag of a desperate Fidelity in the face of a hostile World a task to which naturally

Enough paganism was not equal but I never wished to pit the two systems against one another the battle is over and it is poor work to Jer at the wounded and and the dead if we read the literature of the time especially some records of the martyrs under Diocesan we

Shall at first perhaps imagine that apart from some startling exceptions the conquered party were all vicious and hateful the conquerors all wise and saintly then looking a little deeper we shall see that this great controversy does not stand altogether by itself as in other Wars each side had

Its wise men and its foolish its good men and its evil like other conquerors these conquerors were often treacherous and brutal like other vanquished these vanquished have been tried at the bar of History without benefit of counsel have been condemned in their absence and died with their lips sealed the polemic

Literature of Christianity is loud and triumphant the books of the pagans have been destroyed only an ignorant man will pronounce a violent or bitter judgment here the minds that are now tender timid and reverent in their Orthodoxy would probably in the 3rd or fourth Century have sided with the old gods those of

More daring and Puritan temper with the Christians the historian will only try to have sympathy and understanding for both they are all dead now Diocesan and Ignatius sirel and HIPAA Julian and basil aanus and arus every party has yielded up its persecutors and its Martyrs its hates and Slanders and aspirations and

Heroisms to the arms of that great silence whose secrets all claimed so loudly to have read even the dogmas for which they fought might seem to be dead too for if Julian and celestius Gregory and John christom were to rise again and see the world as it now is they would

Probably feel their personal differences melt away in comparison with the vast difference between their world and this they fought to the death about this Credo and that but the Same Spirit was in all of them in the words of one who speaks with greater knowledge than mine

The most inward man in these four contemporaries is the same it is the spirit of the 4th Century 210 diesel be seen stiman D be spiritualism also the same passionate asceticism all through Antiquity the fight against luxury was a fiercer and stronger fight than comes into our modern

Experience there was not more objective luxury in any period of ancient history than there is now there was never anything like so much but there does seem to have been more subjective abandonment to physical pleasure and concomitantly a stronger protest against it from some time before the Christian

Era it seems as if the subconscious Instinct of humanity was slowly rousing itself for a great revolt against the long intolerable tyranny of the senses over the soul and by the 4th Century the Revolt threatened to become all-absorbing the emperor Julian was probably as proud of his fireless cell

And the crowding lice in his beard and cassic as an average Egyptian monk the aesthetic movement grew as we all know to be measureless and insane it seemed to be almost another form of lust and to have the same affinities with cruelty but it has probably rendered Priceless help to us who come

Afterwards the insane ages have often done service for the sane the harsh and suffering ages for the gentle and well-to-do sop sign however we try to translate it Temperance gentleness the spirit that in any trouble thinks and is patient that saves and not destroys is the right

Spirit and it is to be feared that none of these fourth Century leaders neither the fierce Bishops with their homilies on charity nor Julian and celestius with their worship of helenismo that classic ideal to bring back that note of Soper sign I will venture before proceeding to the 4th

Century Pagan Creed to give some sentences from an earlier Pagan prayer it is cited by stoas from a certain ubian a late ionic platonist of whom almost nothing is known not even the date at which he lived 211 but the voice sounds like that of a stronger and more

Sober age may I be No Man’s enemy it begins and may I be the friend of that which is eternal and abides may I never quarrel with those nearest to me and if I do may I be reconciled quickly may I never devise evil against any man if any

Devise evil against me may I escape uninjured and without the need of hurting him may I love seek and attain only that which is good may I wish for all men’s happiness and envy none may I never rejoice in the ill Fortune of one who has wronged me when I have done or

Said what is wrong may I never wait for the rebuke of others but always rebuke myself until I make amends may I win no victory that harms either me or my opponent may I reconcile friends who are wroth with one another may I I to the

Extent of my power give all needful help to my friends and to all who are in want may I never fail a friend in danger when visiting those in grief may I be able by gentle and healing words to soften their pain may I respect myself may I always keep tame that which

Rages within me may I accustom myself to be gentle and never be angry with people because of circumstances may I never discuss who is wicked and what wicked things he has done but no good men and follow in their footsteps there is more of it how unpretending it is and yet how searching

And in the whole there is no petition for any material blessing and most striking of all it is addressed to no personal God it is pure prayer of course to some it will feel thin and cold most men demand of their religion more outward and personal help more physical

Ecstasy a more heady atmosphere of Illusion no one man’s attitude towards the Uncharted can be quite the same as his neighbors in part instinctively in part superficially and self-consciously each generation of mankind reacts against the last the grown man turns from the lights that were thrust upon his eyes in

Childhood the son shrugs his shoulders at the watchwords that thrilled his father and with varying degrees of sensitiveness or dullness a fuller or more fragmentary experience writes out for him self the manuscript of his Creed yet even for the wildest or bravest Rebel that manuscript is only a

Palimpsest on the surface all is new writing clean and self assertive underneath dim but indelible in the very fibers of the parchment lie the characters of many ancient aspirations and raptures and battles which his conscious mind has rejected or utterly forgotten and forgotten things if there be real life in them will sometimes

Return Out of the Dust Vivid to help still in the forward groping of humanity a religious system like that of uus or Marcus or even celestius was not built up without much Noble life and strenuous thought and a steady passion for the knowledge of God things of that make do

Not as a rule die Forever celestius on the gods and the world I translate Capa Sigma mucron generally as World sometimes as cosmos it always has the connotation of divine order saup Salan Kai always soul to keep it distinct from zet Omega physical life though often life would be

A more natural English equivalent mson Kay Omicron new to animate Omicron Sigma Alpha sometimes Essence sometimes being never substance or nature F Sigma Iota nature Sigma Mu Alpha sometimes body sometimes matter I what the disciple should be and concerning common con conceptions those who wish to hear about

The gods should have been well guided from childhood and not habituated to foolish beliefs they should also be in disposition good and sensible that they may properly attend to the teaching they ought also to know the common conceptions common conceptions are those to which all men agree as soon as they

Are asked for instance that all God is good free from Passion free from change for whatever suffers change does so for the worse or the better if for the worse it is made bad if for the better it must have been bad at first two that God is unchanging unbegotten Eternal

Incorporeal and not in space let the disciple be thus let the teachings be of the following sort the Essences of the Gods never came into existence for that which always is never comes into existence and that exists forever which possesses primary force and by Nature suffers nothing neither do they consist

Of bodies for even in bodies the powers are incorporeal neither are they contained by space for that is a property of bodies neither are they separate from the first cause nor from one another just as thoughts are not separate from mind nor acts of Knowledge from the soul

Three concerning myths that they are Divine and why we may well inquire then why the Ancients forsook these doctrines and made use of myths there is this first benefit from myths that we have to search and do not have our minds idle that the myths are Divine can be seen

From those who have used them myths have been used by inspired poets by the best of philosophers by those who established the Mysteries and by the gods themselves in oracles but why the myths are Divine it is the duty of philosophy to inquire since all existing things

Rejoice in that which is like them and reject that which is unlik like the stories about the gods ought to be like the gods so that they may both be worthy of the Divine Essence and make the gods well disposed to those who speak of them

Which could only be done by means of myths now the myths represent the gods themselves and the goodness of the Gods subject always to the distinction of the speakable and the Unspeakable the revealed and the unrevealed that which is clear and that which is hidden since just as the gods have made the

Goods of sense common to all but those of intellect only to the wise so the myths State the existence of gods to all but who and what they are only to those who can understand they also represent the activities of the Gods for one may call the world a myth in which bodies

And things are visible but souls and Minds hidden besides to wish to teach the whole truth about the gods to all produces contempt in the foolish because they cannot understand and lack of zeal in the good whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the

Foolish and compels the good to practice philosophy but why have they put in a myth stories of adultery robbery father binding and all the other absurdity is not that perhaps a thing worthy of admiration done so that by means of the visible absurdity the soul may immediately feel that the words are

Veils and believe the truth to be a mystery four that the species of myth are five with examples of each of myth some are theological some physical some psychic and again some material and some mixed from these last two the theological are those myths which use no bodily form but

Contemplate the very Essences of the Gods EG Kronos swallowing his children since God is intellectual and all intellect returns into itself this myth Expresses in allegory the essence of God myths may be regarded physically when they express the activities of the Gods in the world e G people before now have

Regarded Kronos as time and calling the divisions of time his sons say that the sons are swallowed by the Father the psychic way is to regard the activities of the Soul itself the Soul’s acts of thought though they pass on to other objects nevertheless remain inside their

Begetters the material and last is that which the Egyptians have mostly used going to their ignorance believing material objects actually to be gods and so calling them e G they call the Earth Isis moisture Osiris heat Typhon or again water Kronos the fruits of the earth Adonis and wine

Dionisis to say that these objects are sacred to the Gods like various herbs and stones and animals is possible to sensible men but to say that they are Gods is the notion of Madmen except perhaps in the sense in which both the orb of the sun and the ray which comes

From the orb are colloquially called the Sun 212 the mixed kind of myth may be seen in many instances for example they say that in a banquet of the God’s Discord threw down a golden apple the goddesses contended for it and were sent by Zeus to Paris to be judged Paris saw

Aphrodite to be beautiful and gave her the Apple here the banquet signifies the hyper Cosmic powers of the gods that is why they are all together the golden apple is the world which being formed out of opposites is naturally said to be thrown by Discord the different gods

Bestow different gifts upon the world and are thus said to contend for the apple and the Soul which lives according to sense for that is what Paris is not seeing the other powers in the world but only Beauty declares that the Apple belongs to Aphrodite theological myths suit philosophers physical and psychic suit

Poets mixed suit religious initiations since every initiation aims at uniting us with the world and the gods to take another myth they say that the mother of the god seeing Addis Lying by the river gas fell in love with him took him crowned him with her cap of stars and

Thereafter kept him with her he fell in love with a nymph and left the mother to live with her for this the mother of the gods made Addis go mad and cut off his genital organs and leave them with the nymph and then return and dwell with her

Now the mother of the Gods is the principle that generates life that is why she is called mother Addis is the creator of all things which are born and die that is why he is said to have been found by the river Gus for gas signifies

The Galaxy or Milky Way the point at which body subject to passion begins 213 now as the primary Gods make perfect the secondary the mother loves Addis and gives him Celestial powers that is what the cap means Addis loves a nymph the nymphs preside over generation since all that is generated

Is fluid but since the process of generation Must Be Stopped somewhere and not allowed to generate something worse than the worst the Creator who makes these things casts away his generative Powers into the creation and is joined to the gods again now these things never happened but always are and mind sees

All things at once but reason or speech expresses some first and others after thus as the myth is in accord with with the cosmos we for that reason keep a festival imitating the cosmos for how could we attain higher order and at first we ourselves having fallen from

Heaven and living with the nymph are in despondency and abstain from corn and all rich and unclean food for both are hostile to the soul then comes the cutting of the tree and the fast as though we also were cutting off the further process of generation after that the feeding on

Milk as though we were being born again after which come rejoicings and garlands and as it were a return up to the gods the season of the ritual is evidence to the truth of these explanations the rights are performed about the vernal equinox when the fruits

Of the Earth are ceasing to be produced and day is becoming longer than night which applies well to Spirits Rising higher at least the other Equinox is in mythology the time of the rape of Kore which is The Descent of the souls May these explanations of the myths find

Favor in the eyes of the Gods themselves and The Souls of those who wrote the myths V on the first cause next in order comes knowledge of the first cause and the subsequent orders of the Gods then the nature of the world the essence of intellect and of Soul than Providence

Fate and Fortune then to see virtue and vice and the various forms of social Constitution good and bad that are formed from them and from what possible Source evil came into the world each of these subjects needs many long discussions but there is perhaps no harm in stating them briefly so that a

Disciple may not be completely ignorant about them it is proper to the first cause to be one for Unity precedes multitude and to surpass all things in power and goodness consequently All Things Must partake of it for owing to its power nothing else can hinder it and owing to

Its goodness it will not hold itself apart if the first cause were Soul all things would possess Soul if it were mind all things would possess mind if it were being all things would partake of being and seeing this quality I.E being in all things some men have thought that

It was being now if things simply were without being good this argument would be true but if things that are are because of their goodness and partake in the good the first thing must needs be both Beyond being and good if it is strong evidence of this that Noble Souls

Despise being for the sake of the good when they face death for their country or friends or for the sake of virtue dot after this inexpressible power come the orders of the Gods six on gods Cosmic and Hyper Cosmic of the god some are of the world Cosmic and some above the

World hyper Cosmic by The Cosmic I mean those who make the cosmos of the hyper Cosmic God some create Essence some mind and some soul thus they have three orders all of which may be found in treatises on the subject of the cosmic Gods some make the world

Be others animate it others harmonize it consisting as it does of different elements the fourth class keep it when harmonized these are four actions Each of which has a beginning middle and end consequently there must be 12 gods governing the world those who make the world are Zeus posid and

Hephestos those who animate it are demer Hera and Artemis those who harmonize it are Apollo Aphrodite and Hermes those who watch over it are Hestia Athena and Aries one can see secret suggestions of this in their images Apollo Tunes a liar Athena is armed Aphrodite is naked because Harmony

Creates Beauty and Beauty in things seen is not covered while these 12 in the primary sense possess the world we should consider that the other gods are contained in these dionisis and Zeus for instance aios in Apollo the charites in Aphrodite we can also discern their various spheres to hesa belongs the

Earth to posidon water to Hera a to hephestos Fire and the six Superior spheres to the gods to whom they are usually attributed for Apollo and Artemis are to be taken for the Sun and Moon the sphere of Kronos should be attributed to demer The Ether to Athena

While the heaven is common to all thus the orders powers and spheres of the TW gods have been explained and celebrated in hymns seven on the nature of the world and its eternity the cosmos itself must of necessity be indestructible and uncreated indestructible because suppose it destroyed the only possibility is to

Make one better than this or worse or the same or a chaos if worse the power which out of the better makes the worse must be bad if better the maker who did not make the better at first must be imperfect in power if the same there will be no use

In making it if a chaos it is impious even to hear such a thing suggested these reasons would suffice to show that the world is also uncreated for if not destroyed neither is it created everything that is created is subject to destruction and further since the cosmos

Exists by the goodness of God it follows that God must always be good and the world exist just as light coexists with the sun and with fire and Shadow coexists with a body of the bodies in the cosmos some imitate mind and move in orbits some imitate soul and move in a

Straight line Fire and Air upward earth and water downward of those that move in orbits the fixed sphere goes from the East the seven from the West this is so for various causes especially lest the creation should be imperfect owing to the rapid Circuit of the Spheres 214 the movement being different the

Nature of the bodies must also be different hence the celestial body does not burn or freeze what it touches or do anything else that pertains to the four elements 215 and since the cosmos is a sphere the Zodiac proves that and in every sphere down means towards the center for for

The center is farthest distant from every point and heavy Things fall down and fall to the Earth less than it follows that the Earth is in the center of the cosmos greater than all these things are made by the gods ordered by mind moved by Soul about the gods we

Have spoken already eight on mind and soul and that the latter is Immortal there is a certain Force 216 less primary than being but more primary than the soul which draws its existence from being and completes the soul as the sun completes the eyes of souls some are rational and Immortal some irrational

And Mortal the former are derived from the first Gods the latter from the secondary first we must consider what soul is it is then that by which the animate differs from the inanimate the difference lies in motion sensation imagination intelligence so therefore when irrational is the life of sense and

Imagination when rational it is the life which controls sense and Imagination and uses reason the irrational Soul depends on the affections of the body it feels desire and anger irrationally the rational Soul both with the help of Reason despises the body and fighting against the irrational Soul produces either virtue or vice according

As it is Victorious or defeated it must be immortal both because it knows the gods and nothing mortal knows 217 what is Immortal it looks down upon human Affairs as though it stood outside them and like an unbodied thing it is affected in the opposite way to the body

For while the body is Young and fine the soul blunders but as the body grows old it attains its highest power again every good Soul uses mind but no body can produce mind for how should that which is without mind produce mind again while Soul uses the body as an instrument it

Is not in it just as the engineer is not in his engines although many engines move without being touched by anyone and if the soul is often made to air by the body that is not surprising for the Arts cannot perform their work when their instruments are spoiled nine on

Providence fate and Fortune This is enough to show the Providence of the Gods for whence comes the ordering of the world if there is no ordering power and whence comes the fact that all things are for a purpose EG irrational soul that there may be sensation and

Rational that the Earth may be set in order but one can deduce the same result from the evidences of Providence in nature e g the eyes have been made transparent with a view to seeing the nostrils are above the mouth to distinguish bad smelling Foods the front

Teeth are sharp to cut food the back teeth broad to grind it and we find every part of every object arranged on a similar principle it is impossible that there should be so much Providence in the last details and none in the first principles then the Arts of Prophecy and

Of healing which are part of the cosmos come of the good Providence of the Gods all this care for the world we must believe is taken by the gods without any Act of will or labor as bodies which possess some power produce their Effects by merely existing e the sun gives light

And heat by merely existing so and far more so the Providence of the Gods acts without effort to itself and for the good of the objects of its forethought this solves the problems of the epicurian who argue that what is divine neither has trouble itself nor gives trouble to others the incorporeal

Providence of the Gods both for bodies and for Souls is of this sort but that which is of bodies and in bodies is different from this and is called fate himine because the chain of causes Heros is more visible in the case of bodies and it is for dealing with this fate

That the science of mathematic has been discovered 218 therefore to believe that human things especially their material Constitution are ordered not only by Celestial beings but by the celestial bodies is a reasonable and true belief reason shows that health and sickness good fortune and bad fortune arise

According to to our deserts from that Source but to attribute men’s acts of Injustice and lust to fate is to make ourselves good and the gods bad unless by chance a man meant by such a statement that in general all things are for the good of the world and for those

Who are in a natural state but that bad education or weakness of nature changes the goods of Fate for the worse just as it happens that the sun which is good for all may be injurious to persons with athalia or fever else why do the m s eat their fathers the Hebrews practice

Circumcision and the Persians preserve rules of rank 219 why do astrologers while calling Saturn and Mars malignant proceed to make them good attributing to them philosophy and royalty General ships and treasures and if they are going to talk of triangles and squares it is absurd that Gods should change

Their Natures according to their position in space while human virtue Remains the Same everywhere also the fact that the star Stars predict high or low rank for the father of the person whose horoscope is taken teaches that they do not always make things happen but sometimes only indicate things for how could things

Which preceded the birth depend upon the birth further as there is Providence and fate concerned with Nations and cities and also concerned with each individual so there is also Fortune which should next be treated that power of the Gods which orders for the good things which are not uniform and which happen

Contrary to expectation is commonly called fortune and it is for this reason that the goddess is especially worshiped in public by cities for every city consists of elements which are not uniform Fortune has power beneath the moon since above the moon no single thing Can Happen by Fortune if Fortune

Makes a wicked man prosperous and a Good Man Poor there is no need to wonder for the wicked regard wealth as everything the good as nothing and the Good Fortune of the bad cannot take away their Badness while virtue alone will be enough for the good x concerning virtue

And vice the doctrine of virtue and vice depends on that of the Soul when the irrational Soul enters into the body and immediately produces fight and desire the rational Soul put in authority over all these makes the soul tripartite composed of Reason fight and desire virtue in the region of reason is wisdom

In the region of fight is courage in the region of desire it is temperance the virtue of the whole soul is righteousness it is for reason to judge what is right for fight in obedience to reason to despise things that appear terrible for desire to pursue not the

Apparently desirable but that which is with reason desirable when these things are so we have a righteous life for righteousness in matters of property is but a small part of virtue and thus we shall find all four virtues in properly trained men but among the untrained one may be brave

And unjust another temperate and stupid another prudent and unprincipled indeed these qualities should not be called virtues when they are devoid of reason and imperfect and found in irrational beings Vice should be regarded as consisting of the opposite elements in reason it is folly in fight cowardice in

Desire in Temperance in the whole soul unrighteousness the virtues are produced by the right social organization and by good rearing education the vice is by the opposite 11 concerning right and wrong social organization Point 220 constitutions also depend on the tripartite nature of the soul the rulers

Are analogous to reason the soldiers to fight the common folk to desires where all things are done according to reason and the best man in the nation rules it is a kingdom where more than one rule according to reason and fight it is an ER aristocracy where the government is

According to desire and offices depend on money that constitution is called a ocracy the contraries are to Kingdom tyranny for kingdom does all things with the guidance of reason and tyranny nothing to aristocracy oligarchy when not the best people but a few of the worst are rulers to ocracy democracy

When not the rich but the common folk possess the whole power 12 the origin of evil things and that there is no positive evil the gods being good and making all things how do evils exist in the world or perhaps it is better first to State the fact that the gods being

Good and making all things there is no positive evil it only comes by absence of good just as Darkness itself does not exist but only comes about by absence of light if evil exists it must exist either in gods or minds or souls or bodies it does not EX exist in any God

For all God is good if anyone speaks of a bad mind he means a mind without mind if of a bad Soul he will make Soul inferior to body for no body in itself is evil if he says that evil is made up of soul and body together it is absurd

That separately they should not be evil but join should create evil suppose it is said that there are evil spirits if they have their power from the gods they cannot be evil if from else elsewhere the gods do not make all things if they do not make all things then either they

Wish to and cannot or they can and do not wish neither of which is consistent with the idea of God we may see therefore from these arguments that there is no positive evil in the world it is in the activities of men that the evils appear and that not of all men nor

Always and as to these if men sin for the sake of evil nature itself would be evil but if the adulterer thinks his adultery bad but his pleasure good and the murderer thinks the murder bad but the money he gets by it good and the man who

Does evil to an enemy thinks that to do evil is bad but to punish his enemy good and if the soul commits all its sins in that way then The Evils are done for the sake of goodness in the same way because in a given Place light does not exist

There comes darkness which has no positive existence the soul sins therefore because while aiming at good it makes mistakes about the good because it is not primary Essence and we see many things done by the gods to prevent it from making mistakes and to heal it when

It has made them Arts and Sciences curses and prayers sacrifices and initiations laws and constitutions judgments and punishments all came into existence for the sake of preventing Souls from sinning and when they are gone forth from the body gods and spirits of purification cleanse them of their sin

13 how things Eternal are said to be made gamma gamma new Epsilon Sig Theta Alpha Iota concerning the gods and the world and human things this account will suffice for those who are not able to go through the whole course of philosophy but yet have not Souls beyond help it

Remains to explain how these objects were never made and are never separated one from another since we ourselves have said above that the secondary substances were made by the first everything made is made either either by art or by a physical process or According to some

Power 221 now in art or nature the maker must needs be prior to the maid but the maker according to power constitutes the ma absolutely together with itself since its power is inseparable from it as the sun makes light fire makes heat snow makes cold now in art or nature the

Maker must needs be prior to the maid but the maker according to power constitutes the maid absolutely together with itself since its power is inseparable from it as the sun makes light fire makes heat snow makes cold now if the gods make the world by Art

They do not make it be they make it be such as it is for all art makes the form of the object what therefore makes it to be if by a physical process how in that case can the maker help giving part of himself to the maid as the gods are

Incorporeal the world ought to be incorporeal too if it were argued that the gods were bodies then where would the power of incorporeal things come from and if we were to admit it it would follow that when the world decays its maker must be decaying too if he is a maker by physical

Process if the gods make the world neither by Art nor by physical process it only remains that they make it by power everything so made subsists together with that which possesses the power neither can things so made be destroyed except the power of the maker be taken away so that those who believe

In the destruction of the world either deny the existence of the gods or while admitting it deny God’s power therefore he who makes all things by his own power makes all things subsist together with himself and since his power is the greatest power he must needs be the

Maker not only of men and animals but of gods men and Spirits 222 and the further remov the first God is from our nature the more Powers there must be between us and him for all things that are very far apart have many intermediate points between them

14 in what sense though the gods never change they are said to be made angry and appeased if anyone thinks the doctrine of the unchangeableness of the Gods is reasonable and true and then wonders how it is that they rejoice in the good and reject the bad are angry with Sinners

And become propitious when appeased the answer is as follows 223 God does not rejoice for that which rejoices also Grieves nor is he angered for to be angered is a passion nor is he appeased by gifts if he were he would be conquered by Pleasure it is impious to

Suppose that the Divine is affected for good or ill by human things the gods are always good and always do good and never harm being always in the same state and like themselves the truth simply is that when we are good we are joined to the

Gods by our likeness to them when bad we are separated from them by our unlikeness and when we live according to Virtue we cling to the gods and when we become evil we make the gods our enemies not because they are angered against us but because our sins prevent the light

Of the Gods from shining upon us and put us in communion with spirits of punishment and if by prayers and sacrifices we find forgiveness of sins we do not appease or change the gods but by what we do and by our turning towards the Divine we heal our own Badness and

So enjoy again the goodness of the Gods to say that God turns away from the evil is like saying that the son hides himself from the blind 15 why we give worship to the gods when they need nothing this solves the question about sacrifices and other rights performed to

The gods the Divine itself is without needs and the worship is paid for our own benefit the Providence of the Gods reaches everywhere and needs only some congruity for its reception all congruity comes about by representation and likeness for which reason the temples are made in representation of Heaven the

Altar of Earth the images of life that is why they are made like living things the prayers of the element of thought the Mystic letters 224 of the Unspeakable Celestial forces the herbs and stones of matter and the sacrificial animals of the irrational life in US from all these things the gods gain

Nothing what gain could there be to God it is we who gain some communion with them 16 concerning sacrifices and other worships that we benefit Man by them but not the gods I think it well to add some remarks about sacrifices in the first place since we have received everything from the gods

And it is right to pay the giver some tithe of his gifts we pay such a tithe of possessions in votive offerings of bodies in Gifts of less than hair and greater than adornment and of life in sacrifices then secondly prayers without sacrifices are only words with

Sacrifices they are live words the word gives meaning to the life while the life animates the word thirdly the happiness of every object is its own Perfection and Perfection for each is communion with its own cause for this reason we pray for communion with the Gods since therefore the first life is the

Life of the Gods but human life is also life of a kind and human life wishes for communion with Divine Life a mean term is needed for things very far apart cannot have communion without a mean term and the mean term must be like the things joined therefore the mean term

Between life and life must be life that is why men sacrifice animals only the rich do so now but in Old Days everybody did and that not indiscriminately but giving the suitable offerings to each God together with a great deal of other worship enough of this

Subject 17 that the world is by nature Eternal we have shown above that the gods will not destroy the world it remains to show that its nature is indestructible everything that is destroyed is either destroyed by itself or by something else if the world is destroyed by itself fire must needs burn

Itself and water dry itself if by something else it must be either by a body or by something incorporeal by something incorporeal is impossible for incorporeal things preserve bodies nature for instance and soul and nothing is destroyed by a cause whose nature is to preserve it if it is

Destroyed by some body it must be either by those which exist or by others if by those which exist then either those moving in a straight line must be destroyed by those that revolve or vice versa but those that revolve have no destructive nature else why do we never

See anything destroyed from that cause nor yet can those which are moving straight touch the others else why have they never been able to do so yet but neither can those Moving Straight be destroyed by one another for the destruction of one is the creation of

Another and that is not to be destroyed but to change but if the world is to be destroyed by other bodies than these it is impossible to say where such bodies are or whence they are to arise again everything destroyed is destroyed either in form or matter form

Is the shape of a thing matter the body now if the form is destroyed and the matter remains we see other things come into being if matter is destroyed how is it that the supply has not failed in all these years if when matter is destroyed other matter takes its place the new

Matter must come either from something that is or from something that is not if from that which is as long as that which is always remains matter always remains but if that which is is destroyed such a theory means that not the world only but everything in the universe is destroyed

If again matter comes from that which is not in the first place it is impossible for anything to come from that which is not but suppose it to happen and that matter did arise from that which is not then as long as there are things which

Are not matter will exist for I presume there can never be an end of things which are not if they say that matter less then will become greater than formless in the first place why does this happen to the world as a whole when it does not happen to any part secondly

By this hypothesis they do not destroy the being of bodies but only their beauty further everything destroyed is either resolved into the elements from which it came or else vanishes into not being if things are resolved into the elements from which they came then there will be others else how did they come

Into being at all if that which is is to depart into not being what prevents that happening to God himself which is absurd or if God’s power prevents that it is not a mark of power to be able to save nothing but oneself and it is equally impossible for

That which is to come out of nothing and to depart into nothing again if the world is destroyed it must needs th be destroyed according to Nature or against nature against nature is impossible for that which is against nature is not stronger than nature 225 if according to

Nature there must be another nature which changes the nature of the world which does not appear again anything that is naturally destructible we can ourselves destroy but no one has ever destroyed or altered the round body of the world and the elements though they can be changed cannot be be

Destroyed again everything destructible is changed by time and grows old but the world through all these years has remained utterly unchanged having said so much for the help of those who feel the need of very strong demonstrations I pray the world himself to be gracious to me

18 why there are rejections of God and that God is Not injured nor need the fact that rejections of God have taken place in certain parts of the earth and will often take Place Hereafter disturb the mind of the wise both because these things do not affect the gods just as we

Saw that worship did not benefit them and because the soul being of middle Essence cannot be always right and because the whole world cannot enjoy the Providence of the Gods equally but some parts may partake of it eternally some at certain times some in the Primal manner some in the

Secondary just as the head enjoys all the senses but the rest of the body only 1 for this reason it seems those who ordained festivals ordained also forbidden days in which some temples lay idle some were shut some had their adornment removed in experation of the weakness of our nature it is not

Unlikely to that the rejection of God is a kind of punishment we may well believe that those who knew the gods and neglected them in one life may in another life be deprived of the knowledge of them altogether also those who have worshiped their own Kings as gods have deserved as

Their punishment to lose all knowledge of God 19 why Sinners are not punished at once there is no need to be surprised if neither these sins nor yet others bring immediate punishment upon Sinners for it is not only Spirits 226 who punish the soul the soul brings itself

To judgment and also it is not right for those who endure forever to attain everything in a short time and also there is need of human virtue if punishment followed in instantly upon sin men would act justly from fear and have no virtue souls are punished when

They have gone forth from the body some wandering among us some going to hot or cold places of the earth some harassed by Spirits under all circumstances they suffer with the irrational part of their nature with which they also sinned for its sake 227 there subsist that shadowy

Body which is seen about Graves especially the graves of evil livers XX on transmigration of Souls and how souls are said to migrate into brute beasts if the transmigration of a soul takes place into a rational being it simply becomes the soul of that body but if the soul

Migrates into a brute Beast it follows the body outside as a guardian Spirit follows a man for there could never be a rational soul in an irrational being the transmigration of souls can be proved from the congenital afflictions of persons for why are some born blind others paralytic others with some

Sickness in the soul itself again it is the natural duty of souls to do their work in the body are we to suppose that when once they leave the body they spend all eternity in idleness again if the souls did not again enter into bodies they must either

Be infinite in number or God must constantly be making new ones but there is nothing infinite in the world for in a finite hold there cannot be an infinite part neither can others be made for everything in which something new goes on being created must be

Imperfect and the world being made by a perfect author ought naturally to be perfect xxi that the good are happy both living and dead Souls that have lived in virtue are in general happy 228 and when separated from the irrational part of their nature and made clean from all

Matter have communion with the gods and join them in the governing of the whole world yet even if none of this happiness fell to their lot virtue itself and the joy and Glory of virtue and the life that is subject to no grief and no master are

Enough to make happy those who have set themselves to live according to Virtue and have achieved it

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