Part 6

As for Zeus and his strange act in swallowing Metis when she was about to give birth to Athena, two quite distinct motives are attributed to him. First, that which we have met with before. ‘He was determined that none but himself should have the king’s rank, βασιληίδα τιμήν, over the immortals. He had heard an oracle that Metis was destined to give birth to’--one expects the motive of the Marriage of Thetis--‘a child who should be mightier than his father.’ But it is not quite so simple; for Athena was the child of Metis, and she was obviously not mightier than Zeus. The oracle takes the curious form that Metis is to bear ‘first Athena, and secondly a child who shall be mightier than his father.’ Zeus seems to have swallowed her rather prematurely. But he had a second motive also. He swallowed Metis ‘that the goddess being inside him should tell him of good and evil’. The name Μῆτις of course means ‘Counsel’ or ‘Wisdom’.

Leaving this last detail aside for the present, I suggest that the main motive in this strange story of the swallowing or hiding of the successive possible pretenders to the crown is the dread which each king naturally felt of him who was coming after. But this still leaves much unexplained; the second main element which I find is the worship of sacred flints or thunder-stones.

When Kronos set about swallowing Zeus, you will remember, Gaia put a big stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to great Kronos. And he ‘put it inside his belly’, ἑὴν ἑσκάτθετο νηδύν (487). Then, ‘in the passing of the years’--whatever that exactly means--‘beguiled by the counsels of Gaia, great crooked-hearted Kronos spewed up his brood again, being conquered by the craft and force of his son’. (Two reasons there, belonging probably to different stories--in one he was overcome by the craft of Gaia, in the other by the _mana_ of his son.) ‘And the first thing he vomited up was the stone, which he had swallowed last.... Then straightway Zeus set loose his father’s brothers, the Titanes. They were grateful, and gave him three gifts, thunder and thunder-bolt and lightning; formerly vast Earth had hidden them away: and it is by them that Zeus rules over mortals and immortals.’[57]

That is to say Zeus in this story is a thunder-god. The thunder or lightning is his _mana_. And not only a thunder-god, he is a thunder-stone. The identity has been, of course, disguised in our present version of the myth. It is muddled, like everything else in Hesiod.[58] But it shows through. When Kronos sets about swallowing Zeus, it is the stone he swallows. And it is only when ‘by the counsels of Earth’ Cronos vomits up the stone that Zeus can take any action; and that action takes the form of thunder and lightning, the special property of a thunder-stone. In the word ‘thunder-stone’, or κεραυνία, the ancients seem to have mixed, and perhaps confused, two ideas: that of a meteorite, which seemed to be the actual bolt which fell in the thunder, and that of an ordinary flint, nephrite, jade, or the like, which has its mysterious fire inside it. The fire is the soul, or indwelling _mana_, of the flint.

A careful reading of Hesiod’s story will, I think, convince most anthropologists that Zeus _is_ the stone. And as a matter of fact it is not uncommon for both Zeus and Jupiter to appear as stones. In the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, the oldest temple of Jupiter in Rome, founded by Romulus, there was a sacred flint which was called _Jupiter Lapis_--it was not _Jovis Lapis_. It was used for killing the victim in solemn treaties. It must have been one of those ‘thunder-stones resembling axes’ of which Pliny speaks; what we should call neolithic axe-heads. There seems to have been more than one _Jupiter Lapis_; for in 201 B.C. the Senate sent several such with the _fetiales_ to Africa. I need not dwell on other cases; the Zeus Kappôtas at Gythîum, apparently a bigger stone, as Orestes could sit upon it; the Zeus Kasios or Keraunios at Seleucîa; the stone of Zeus Sthenios, on the road from Trozên to Hermione; or the thunder-stone on Mount Ida, in Crete, with which Pythagoras was purified by the Idaean Dactyls, the attendants of Zeus. They are all in De Visser’s book.

The best known of these stones is perhaps that which was believed to be--not to belong to, but actually to be--the Mother of the Gods. Livy (xxix. II) tells of the embassy sent from Rome to Attalus to fetch the Great Mother; and how the king took the legates to Pessinûs in Phrygia and handed over to them the sacred stone which the natives affirmed to be the Mother of the Gods. Arnobius describes its appearance: ‘a stone not large, which could be carried in a man’s hand without noticeable weight, in colour black and _furvus_, in shape more or less round with projecting corners, which is now to be seen in the mouth of the image of the Great Mother.’ Superstitious Rome was ready to accept and to worship the Mother in the form of a stone; but common-sense Rome did at least demand that the Great Mother should have a decently anthropomorphic image, and the stone was then placed in the image’s mouth.

So far, then, we are clear. But there remain some difficult questions. Why was the stone in Hesiod wrapped in swaddling clothes? I do not understand this. But the ritual practice is well attested. Pausanias tells how this Kronos stone was anointed and wrapped in wool.[59] A coin in Macdonald’s Hunter Catalogue (ii. 68. 145) represents the Great Mother stone covered with a goat-skin. This may be merely because of the _hagos_ or taboo, just as the omphalos on vases is commonly covered with an ἄγρηνον and Semitic betyls are wrapped in cloths. The actual body of a god would be dangerous to touch; but it looks as if there was some special connexion between stones and infants. The Orphic poem called Lithica is, of course, full of magic stones, which might be cited here. But take one in especial, the ‘Live Siderite’. This stone has to be prayed to, like a god; it has also to be washed daily for ten days and nursed and wrapped in clean robes, like a baby. At the end of that time it will reward its benefactor by uttering the scream of a young baby when hungry; then, the poet remarks, the great thing is not to drop it.[60]

In some Mexican dances, Preuss tells us, the souls of infants come through the air in the likeness of five stones. Among the Kaitish and the Arunta there are stones inhabited by infant souls, which are induced in one way or another to come out of the stones and be born. And we all remember the stones flung by Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the race of man which is--or is not--sprung ἀπὸ δρυὸς ἡδ’ ἁπὸ πέτρης.[61]

But again, why were the stones swallowed? What does all this swallowing mean? Zeus of course swallowed Metis in order to have her _mana_ inside him. That is sensible enough. Do medicine men or Theoi ever actually swallow smooth stones in order to get the fire-power or other magic inside them? In Mexico the devils which are sucked out of the body in curing diseases are usually in the form of stones. For instance, in the ceremony of the Huichol tribe, where the gods are healed of their weariness by the Dawn-Star, Kaiumari, sucking ‘stones and the like’ out of them.[62] The same practice is common among Australian blacks.

Mr. Marett refers me to a still better case. Among the Yuin of New South Wales the word _joïa_, which is almost like _mana_ and is used to denote the immaterial force in sacred animals, is actually the name of certain stones like these. They are commonly quartz-crystals or bits of glass, but also we hear of Kunambrun, a black stone, apparently lydianite. A black stone probably means thunder. The medicine man often carries these stones in his mouth, and when he sends out a curse or a blessing he projects them out of himself into his victim ‘like the wind,’ that is, invisibly and impalpably.[63]

The actual swallowing seems strange, unless it was a mere fraud. But I used to know an Australian blackfellow--I never thought of asking his tribe--who used to put stones in his mouth and give or sell them to the boys of the neighbourhood as bearing a charm in consequence. They were sure to hit what they were aimed at, unless the aim was very bad. I suppose he put a lot of his _mana_ into them. One of the ways in which a Papuan chief causes death, according to the report of Dr. Bellamy in the White Book for 1907, is to send to a man a present of a smooth stone. The man recognizes the meaning of the stone, and wastes away. Dr. Bellamy cured some by the application of strong smelling salts, which drove away the devils. Presumably the chief had put his _mana_ on the stone in some very strong way.

Lastly, there is another element in this story which calls for explanation from better anthropologists than myself; I mean the constant reference to ‘hiding’ or ‘concealment’. Ouranos (157) _hid_ all his children in a secret place of the Earth; this gave pain to Earth, and she groaned, being squeezed by them. Earth again (482) took Zeus and _hid_ him in a cave. Kronos _put the stone inside_ him--surely a form of hiding. The Titans _were hidden away_--κεκρύφατο, by Kronos (729) till Zeus brought them again to light. Lastly and most important, Zeus _hid away fire_ from man, κρύψε δὲ πῦρ.

This last case is pretty clear. Zeus had the fire hidden away in the heart of the flint or in the veins of Earth; Prometheus, or Pramanthas, the Fire-Stick, introduced the more open visible fire. But the other cases seem different. In them it is always a king or a would-be king, a deposed Theos or a conquered aspirant, who is made to disappear. We are reminded of Aeneas and Latinus who vanished in battles, of Romulus and Numa who vanished in thunderstorms.

In one case we find that the hiding was in a ‘monstrous cave’, and a cave in Crete, too. We know from other sources something about the kind of hiding which took place in that particular cave. At the end of the fatal nine years, if we are to believe the authors quoted by me in the _Rise of the Greek Epic_, p. 127, and much more completely by Mr. A. B. Cook in the articles mentioned above, the divine king Minos in his mask, as a god, went up into the Idaean cave to converse with Zeus. Doubtless the divine mask covered his head. A masked Minos went in, and a masked Minos came out; but one strongly suspects that it was not the same man beneath the mask. My friend Mr. Gordon, an education officer in Lower Nigeria, informs me that there is there a great oracle or ordeal in a cave called the Long Juju. It decides cases between litigants, or persons who have some dispute. And the method is that both go up into the cave, and only one returns. The other, presumably the guilty one, has vanished; he is hidden; κέκρυπται.

All through this pre-Hellenic realm of saga and half-history we find ourselves in contact with these god-kings, or medicine-chiefs, these βασιλῆες or, if I am right, Theoi. And we cannot but wonder whether we have not here the explanation of Herodotus’ famous statement about the origins of Greek Religion (Herod. ii. 52). The Pelasgians, he tells us, did not originally know the names of the Olympian gods; ‘they brought offerings and prayed to the Theoi.’ It was only at a later time that they sent to Dodona to ask if they should worship those definite gods with special names and attributes and ‘Olympian Houses’ which had come into Greece but were still in some sense foreign. And the oracle said ‘Yes’. I am quite aware that the passage may be differently interpreted; and I do not suggest that Herodotus knew all that lay behind his words when he spoke of the nameless Theoi of the Pelasgians in contrast to the Olympians of Homer and Hesiod. But I do suspect that the contrast between these medicine-chiefs and the Homeric gods is one of the cardinal differences between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic religion; and, further, that some reminiscence of this difference has shaped the tradition which Herodotus repeats. Clearer evidence will, no doubt, be forthcoming from some better-equipped anthropologist.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] _Primitive Secret Societies_, Macmillan, 1908.

[42] _Theog._ 681.

[43] Wallis, _The Advance of our West African Empire_, p. 239.

[44] Cf. Dieterich, _Archiv für Relig. Wiss._, xi, p. 173.

[45] Soph. _Ant._ 965.

[46] Eumelus, cp. Schol. _Il. Z._ 131.

[47] _British Central Africa_, p. 439.

[48] Cf. Du Chaillu, _A Journey to Ashongo Land_, p. 52.

[49] Alldridge, _The Sherbro and its Hinterland_, pp. 153 ff.

[50] Plat. (_Rep._ 565 d). Cf. De Visser, _Nicht-menschengestaltige Götter_, p. 46.

[51] _Theog._ 386 ff.

[52] Dionys. Hal. _Antiq._ i. 71.

[53] Plut. _Num._ 15.

[54] See _Folklore_, xv. 304.

[55] According to the White Book of Papua for 1907, containing the governor’s report to the Federal Government, the only murder of a white man committed during last year was due to a wish for this medicine. A native called Hariki had built a new house and wished to make it strong and paint it with a mixture of red-clay and coconut-oil. For this purpose, it seems, special medicine was necessary, and in order to have it as strong as possible, Hariki determined to get it from a white man. He obtained it by killing a market-gardener called Weaver, with whom he was on quite friendly terms. Indeed, when the medicine had been obtained, Hariki and his friends ‘proceeded, under the guidance of one of the party who was skilled in charms,’ to bring Weaver back to life. They began at the feet, and succeeded, so they said, in reviving all the lower part of the body; but there was a great wound in the chest which they could not pass. So at last they hid the corpse away, and arranged that it should seem to have been eaten by alligators.

[56] Phorbas, being the strongest of the Phlegyai, was chosen their king. He lived under an oak, wrestled with all comers, and hung their heads on the oak. Kerkyon (et. _quercus_?) of Eleusis did much the same. So did Oinomaos. His daughter’s suitors had to challenge him to a chariot race; he hung up the heads of those whom he defeated. Pelops, having defeated him, slew him and took the kingdom. Apparently the daughter’s hand carried the kingdom with it, as the daughter of Zeus in the _Birds_ is Basileia, ‘Royalty.’ Kyknos made a pyramid of skulls. The others killed their rivals in various ways.

[57] _Theog._ 485 ff. Cf. 690, where Zeus fights with the thunder as his weapon; also 853 ff., where he crushes Typhoeus, who ‘would have become king over mortals and immortals, but that Zeus saw him and used the thunder’.

[58] Thus in our present version of the _Theogony_ Zeus is not swallowed at all: only the stone is swallowed. And when it reappears Zeus sets it to be a sign at Pytho. Comment is hardly needed. No one supposes that we have the stories of the _Theogony_ in their original state. There is ‘contamination’ and ‘conciliation’ visible throughout the book.

[59] Paus. x. 24, 5; cp. ix. 2, 7 and Frazer’s note.

[60] ὄρσει νεογιλοῦ παιδὸς ἁυτὴν μαίης ἑν κόλπῳ κεκληγότος ἁμφὶ γάλακτι (_Lithica_, 360-99).

[61] Cp. Spencer and Gillen, _Central Australia_, p. 337. Several cases are given in Dieterich, _Muttererde_, pp. 20 f. The belief is very widespread.

[62] Preuss, in _Archiv für Rel. Wiss._, xi. 576.

[63] Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp. 371, 533 ff., 546.

LECTURE IV

GRAECO-ITALIAN MAGIC

The Greek words for magic and magician, μαγεία and μάγος, are admittedly of Persian origin, and in all probability did not find their way into Greece before the Persian War, that is, before about 480 B.C. It was therefore an obvious inference, which was drawn in 1863 by O. Hirschfeld (_de incantationibus et devinctionibus amatoriis apud Graecos Romanosque_), that as the name magic was not known in Greece before the Persian Wars, neither was the thing. The inference is indeed obvious, but it is not necessarily correct: magic is practised by tribes who have not developed any general term for magic. It is therefore conceivable, at least, that the Greeks and Italians also before 480 B.C. practised magical rites, even though they then had no word for magic in general. The question is one of facts and not merely of words. What do we know of the facts before 480 B.C.? Unfortunately, according to M. Mauss, in his article on magic in Daremberg and Saglio’s _Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines_, ‘we are in almost complete ignorance of the primitive and original forms of magic in Italy and Greece.’ In view, then, of our almost complete ignorance, it may perhaps be allowable to start from a hypothesis--the hypothesis that the primitive and original forms of magic amongst the Greeks and Romans were much the same as they are amongst the undeveloped peoples who possess them at the present day, and, like the Greeks and Romans of the earliest times, have no general term for magic.

Amongst the tribes of Central Australia, the person who employs magic to cause sickness or death to his enemy does not omit to use what the natives call ‘singing’. This ‘singing’ is conducted ‘in a low voice’ (Frazer, _Golden Bough_^2, i. 13); and the sort of thing the magician ‘in muttered tones hisses out’ is ‘May your heart be rent asunder’, or, ‘May your head and throat be split open’ (Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes_, 534 ff.; _Northern Tribes_, 456 ff.).

In the Torres Straits the sorcerer points a spear in the direction of his victim and ‘sings’ similarly, ‘Into body, go, go. Into hands, go, go. Into head, go, go’ (_Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 228, 229). The ‘singing’ assists, Mr. Haddon says (ib., p. 231), ‘in furthering the injury he wishes to inflict.’ Now, was ‘singing’, of this magical nature, a sort of rhythmical muttering in a low voice, known to the Greeks and Romans? In the first place, we have the Latin words _incantare_, _incantator_, _incantamentum_, all implying a singing which is magical in its intention and effects--incantation or enchantment. Next, we have _carmen_, which means not only song in general but ‘singing’ in the magical sense, in Tibullus (i. 8. 17), Ovid (_Met._ vii. 167, 203, 253; xiv. 57, 20, 34, 44, 366, 387; _Fasti_ iv. 551, 552), Horace (_Ep._ v. 72; xvii. 4, 5, 28; _Sat._ i. 8. 19, 20), Virgil (_Ecl._ viii. 69; _Aen._ iv. 487), Juvenal (_Sat._ vi. 133), Pliny (_Nat. Hist._ xxviii. 10, 18), Tacitus (_Annals_, iv. 22), and in other passages for which I may refer to Adam Abt (_Die Apologie des Apuleius_, 22) and L. Fahz (_De Poetarum Romanorum Doctrina Magica_, 138, 139). In Greek we have the same magical singing expressed by the words ἑπάδειν, ἑπωδνή, ἑπῳδὁς; in Euripides (_Bacchae_ 234, _Hippolytus_ 478, 1038, _Phoenissae_ 1260), Sosiphanes (_Fr._ 1), Aristophanes (_Amphiaraus_, _Fr._ 29), Anaxandrides (_Fr._ 33. 31), Antiphanes (_Fr._ 17. 15), Xenophon (_Mem._ iii. 11. 16, 17), Lucian and Heliodorus, and other passages to be found in Abt (ib., p. 43).

It may, however, be objected that all these quotations are of course later than 480 B.C.; and therefore prove nothing as to ‘the primitive and original forms of magic in Italy and Greece’. Indeed, in the _Bacchae_, for instance, and in Plato, _Rep._ ii. 364 A, the magic referred to may reasonably be regarded as exotic and not native to Greece. But fortunately we find the word ἑπαοιδή, in the magical sense, in Homer (_Od._ xix. 457), which takes this group of words in this sense far back beyond 480 B.C. The Homeric use of the word in this sense, however, will not avail against any one who chooses to maintain--though it is impossible to prove, and difficult to believe--that the Greeks originally knew no magic, and borrowed it in Homeric or pre-Homeric times from some neighbouring people. And though the fact that the Twelve Tables ordained punishment for the man ‘qui malum carmen incantassit’ in all reasonable probability indicates that ‘singing’ in the evil sense was a practice already at the time rooted in Italy and not newly imported from abroad; still in this case, as in the case of the Homeric ἑπαοιδή, the objection may be made--though it cannot be supported by anything approaching proof or even probability--that the Italians, as well as the Romans, alone amongst early peoples were incapable of developing the belief for themselves. As against this objection we can only fall back on the evidence of comparative philology. And that evidence is particularly interesting, because, as interpreted by O. Schrader (_Reallexikon der Indogermanischen Altertumskunde_, ii. 974), it shows that amongst the Indo-European peoples much the most common expression for doing magic is ‘singing’. The presumption that ‘singing’ of the magical kind goes back to Indo-European times is as strong as any that linguistic evidence can produce. For the Slavonian, Lithuanian, and Teutonic words I will refer to Schrader’s _Reallexikon_, ii. 975. Of the Greek and Latin words I may mention βασκαίνω and βασκανία, which are connected with βάζω, ‘speak’; γόης and γοητεύω with γόος, ‘howling’; _fascinum_ and _fascinare_ with _fari_.

If, then, we may with some plausibility illustrate the _carmen_, the _incantatio_, and the ἑπαοιδή of the Greeks and the Romans, with the ‘singing’ of the Torres Straits and Central Australia, the question arises, What exactly is it that the magician ‘sings’? In the Torres Straits it apparently is the spear which is ‘sung’, for the words used are, ‘Into body, go, go’; and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say that in Central Australia also it is the stick or the bone which is ‘sung’. But when we examine the words of the ‘singing’ or charm, as given by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, we find that they do not refer to the stick or the bone which is used in the magical rite, but to the person against whom the rite is directed: ‘May your heart be rent asunder, may your head and throat be split open.’ The inference, therefore, seems to be that it is the victim that the ‘singing’ or spell is originally directed against; and only later that the stick or bone itself comes to be bewitched, just as money, which is valuable for what it will purchase, comes to be regarded by the miser as an end in itself.

If this is so, it opens up another possibility of interest which I must be content merely to suggest for consideration and investigation. It is that the earliest form of ‘singing’ or spell may be connected with cursing. Some forms of cursing or imprecation invoke the assistance of the gods, but not all; and it may be that those are the earliest which operate directly and without reference to gods. Caliban invokes no gods when he cries:

All the infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him By inch-meal a disease!

or

a south-west blow on ye, And blister you all o’er.