Part 8

They have been rarely discovered by us, for the simple reason that the person who hid them away was particularly anxious that they should not be discovered. It was important that the person ‘defixed’ should not know by whom or in what way he had been ‘defixed’, for, if he knew, he might undo the spell and retaliate on its worker. The tablet was concealed--often enough in tombs, for graves are avoided--for the same reason that the authors of these tablets often take care not to put their own names to them, viz. in order that the spell might not be frustrated. But though we cannot attach any great importance to the fact that most of our tablets have been found in tombs, still it is true that many of the Attic tablets, and perhaps most of the Latin tablets, contain a direct and explicit appeal to the gods. Hence it is possible to maintain, and indeed it is usually maintained, as by Wuensch, in the _Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum_, that in all cases these tablets are addressed to the gods; and that, where no gods are mentioned, we must yet suppose that the gods, or some gods, were prayed to fulfil the evil wishes of the person who wrote the name of his victim and pierced it with the nail. The alternative which I venture to suggest is that originally the _defixio_ or κατάδεσμος was purely magical; that, later, an appeal to the gods was added to the original spell; and, last of all, the magical element was overpowered by the religious, or the religious by the magical. In order to decide between these two alternative explanations, what we have to do is to inquire who it is that is supposed by the writer of a tablet of this kind to nail or ‘defix’ or pierce the person who is to suffer. Is it the writer of the tablet, or is it a god? If it is the writer, the proceeding is magical in its nature; if a god, it is religious in its nature. From this point of view we may go so far as to concede that the absence of any mention of the gods on the tablet does not of itself suffice to prove that no thought of them was present in the mind of the writer of the tablet. The decisive question is, Who does the nailing or defixing? Has the writer the power to do it, or must he get a god to do it? The question is perfectly simple, and the answer is perfectly plain; in many or most of the Attic tablets it is the writer who has the power, and he exercises it. He says, τούτους ἄπαντας καταδῶ (43), τούτους ἑγὼ καταδίδημι ἄπαντας (55); and he exercises his power with no more reference to the gods, and no more thought of them, than the Australian magician when he ‘points’ his stick, or the German peasant girl when she ‘sticht um Mitternacht in eine unter Beschwörungen angezündete Kerze einige Nadeln und spricht: “ich stech das Licht, ich stech das Licht, ich stech das Herz, das ich liebe”’ (Schönwerth, _Aus der Oberpfalz: Sitten und Sagen_, i, p. 127).

On the other hand are the tablets in which the writer does not profess to ‘defix’ his adversary, and does not claim to be able to ‘defix’ him, but prays to a god to do it, and uses an imperative, κέντησον αὐτοῦ τὴν γλῶσσαν (97), ἄξον καὶ κατάδησον (xxiii).

In such tablets the _modus operandi_ is no longer magical, it is wholly religious; the power to punish lies wholly with the gods, and they are called upon to exercise it. And we are able to trace the process by which the one kind of tablet passed into the other, or by which the one kind came to supersede the other. The first step in the process is illustrated by tablets in which the writer begins by announcing in the traditional magical style, ‘I nail or bind my enemies,’ but goes on--in order to make assurance doubly sure--to add an appeal to a god or gods. Thus in 81 he says καταδέω τοὺς ἑμοὶ ἑχθροὺς πρὸς τὸν Ἐρμῆν. One of these inscriptions (87) can be dated back to the fourth century B.C. When Hermes is thus adjured he is nearly always decorated with the epithet κάτοχον, as in 87 τούτους πάντας καταδῶ πρὸς τὸν κάτοχον Ὲρμῆν. The epithet is not an idle one, as is shown by the fact that the corresponding verb, κατέχω, is used in these tablets in the imperative in the same sense as κατάδησον. Thus in 88 the prayer to Hermes runs, Ἑρμῆ κάτοχε, κάτεχε φρένας γλῶτταν τοῦ Καλλίου. Hermes, however, is not the only deity to whom the epithet is applied, and this imperative addressed. In 101 Gê is termed Γῆ κάτοχος, and in 98 the prayer is φίλη Γῆ, κάτεχε Εὑρυπτόλεμον. It so happens that in the tablets that have come down to us Hermes and Gê are the only two deities of whom the epithet κάτοχος and the verb κατέχω are used; and Boeckh was probably right in saying (_C. I. G._ 539) that the earth and Hermes were originally (and, we may add, without any reference to magic at all) called κάτοχοι, because they kept down the dead and prevented them from returning. Then, when the magical practice of nailing down or binding your living foe developed, by an easy transition of ideas the deities, whose business it had originally been to hold down the dead alone, were invoked to hold down and restrain the living also: ‘vocis vis ad καταδέσμων rationem translata videtur, ut iam κάτοχοι θεοί essent ii, qui defixos a magis homines detinerent.’ Thus Earth and Hermes were called in to reinforce the magician’s κατάδεσμος. This is indeed expressly stated on a leaden tablet discovered in Alexandria (Wuensch, p. xv): πότνια Γῆ ὁρκίζω σε κατὰ σοῦ ὁνόματος ποιῆσαι τὴν πρᾶξιν ταύτην καὶ τηρῆσαί μοι τὸν κατάδεσμον τοῦτον καὶ ποιῆσαι αὑτὸν ἑνεργῆ. That the gods are called in to give effect to a magical rite which has been performed is shown by inscriptions 96 and 97, where the tablet begins by saying that the magical rite has been performed, ἑγὼ ἕλαβον καὶ ἔδησα τὴν γλῶτταν καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν κτλ., and then goes on to pray to the god, κέντησον αὑτοῦ τὴν γλῶτταν κτλ. Here the prayer to the gods is in effect a postscript to the magical rite. So, too, in Ovid (_Fasti_ ii. 575) a ceremony of this kind, which is performed as part of the worship of the Dea Muta, ends up with the declaration that we--viz. the old woman who has performed the rite--we, ‘hostiles linguas inimicaque vinximus ora’; she has used an iron nail and driven it through the head of a _maena_. But the tendency which manifests itself in the evolution of the Attic tablets is for the postscript to grow in importance and size, until the magic dwindles and almost disappears. For instance, 98 does indeed begin by saying formally Εὑρυπτόλεμον καταδῶ, but the whole of the rest of the inscription is a genuine prayer, φίλη Γῆ κάτεχε, φίλη Γῆ βοήθει μοι. While recognizing however, that this is the tendency in the genuine Attic tablets, it is desirable to notice that in the Roman empire generally the magical element swells until it entirely drives out the religious. All kinds of deity, from religions of every sort, are indeed invoked in these later inscriptions, both Greek and Latin. But they are invoked only to receive commands from the magician and to do his will: in the Hadrumetan tablet of the third century A.D. the deity adjured is just told to go off and fetch Urbanus, ἄπελθε πρὸς τὸν Οὑρβανὸν καὶ ἅξον αὑτόν (_Wuensch_, p. xvii), and the lady who thus addresses him has the power to order him about because she knows--and bids him hearken to--an ὀνόματος ἑντείμου καὶ φοβεροῦ καὶ μεγάλοῦ. And he is to lose no time about it: the inscription ends, ἥδη ἥδη ταχὺ ταχύ.

Thus the history of these _defixionum tabellae_ shows how a ceremony, in its origin purely magical, may in the course of its evolution run out in either of two directions: it may either end in what is in effect a prayer, or it may develop into that form of magic in which the magician undertakes boldly to constrain the gods. In the earliest, and purely magical, form of ‘defixion’, the witch or wizard drives a nail or a needle through the written name of the victim, just as he would through a waxen image of the victim. From _Ovid_ (_Amores_ iii. 7. 29) we learn that the witch wrote the victim’s name on wax and then pierced it: ‘sagave poenicea defixit nomina cera.’ In the Parisian Papyrus 316 it is τὸ ὄνομα τῆς ἀγομένης which is thus treated; and in a Latin ‘defixion’ the expression is ‘neca illa nomina’ (Fahz, _de poetarum Romanorum doctrina magica_, p. 127, n. 4). Then, as the worker of magic drove nails through the head of the waxen image, and is instructed, in the Parisian Papyrus (_Rhein. Mus._ xlix. 45 ff.), to say, as he does so, περονῶ σου τὸν ἐγκέφαλον, so in the Attic tablets he says (54) τὴν γλῶτταν καταδῶ χεῖρα αὑτοῦ καταδῶ, and drives a nail or nails through the leaden tablet bearing the words. Again, as in course of time the piercing or melting of the waxen image comes to be regarded not as effective in itself but as merely symbolical of the effect which is to be produced, and the words come to be ‘haec ut cera liquescit, sic nostro Daphnis amore’, so in the ‘defixionum tabellae’ (e. g. _C. I. L._ viii, suppl. n. 12511), after the gods have been adjured, and the order given κατάδησον αὑτῶν τὰ σκέλη κτλ., then, to make it quite clear, it is explained that the legs and hands and head of the victim are to be ‘defixed’ or nailed down in the same way as the feet and hands and head of this fowl: ὡς οὗτος ὁ ἀλέκτωρ καταδέδεται τοῖς ποσὶ καὶ ταῖς χερσὶ καὶ τῇ κεφαλῇ, οὔτως καταδήσατε τὰ σκέλη καὶ τὰς χεῖρας καὶ τὴν κεφαλὴν καὶ τὴν καρδίαν Βικτωρικοῦ τοῦ ἡνιόχου. This tablet, which was found in Carthage, is late, and the adjuration is made in the name of the god of heaven that sits upon the Cherubim, τοῦ καθημένου ἐπὶ τῶν Χερουβί. What is noticeable in this tablet and some others of similar date and style is that they contain no allegation that the person on whose behalf the magic is worked and constraint is put upon the gods has been wronged. On the other hand, in the earlier and Attic tablets, especially those which tend in effect to become prayers, the ground of appeal to the gods is some wrong that has been done. Thus 98 ends with the words, φίλη Γῆ βοήθει μοι’ ἀδικούμενος γὰρ ὑπὸ Εὐρυπτολέμου καὶ Ξενοφῶντος καταδῶ αὐτούς. Or it may be some injury that is feared: εἴ τι μέλλειε ὑπὲρ Φίλωνος ῥῆμα μοχθηρὸν φθέγγεσθαι, then τὴν γλῶσσαν καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτῶν κέντησον (97). In Cyprus if what an adversary might say is feared, then the powers invoked are adjured to muzzle him: φιμώσουσιν τὸν ἀντίδικον ἐμοῦ, and the exorcism is termed a φιμωτικοῦ καταθέματος, or a παραθήκην φιμωτικήν. It is, of course, probable, we may even venture to say certain, that in these tablets the appeal to the justice of the gods is essentially religious in its character. And in that case the combination, in these tablets, of magic with religion shows that in the minds of some worshippers of the gods there was no irreconcilable opposition between magic and religion. On the contrary, the feeling evidently was that the gods might properly be invoked to favour and bless a magical rite, just as they might be prayed to assist any other steps of a more ordinary nature that might be taken. Magic is but one way or means of effecting your end; and it is a means which is just as efficacious for a good end as it is for an evil purpose. The magician is a person who has power, which he may use for evil, or may use for good. He may use his power to cause sickness or to bring misfortune. But he may use it to avert sickness and to muzzle the mouth of the evil-doer. He may use it to make rain, and, while doing so, may pray to the gods for the same purpose. Such a man may have, as he is certainly often believed to have, extraordinary personal power; and there is no obvious reason why he should not pray to the gods to exercise that power in accordance with their will. But he can only pray to the gods if there are gods to whom he can pray. On the other hand, even where there are such gods, he may prefer--and if his purpose be such as the gods condemn, he must prefer--to disregard the gods or, if needs be, to put constraint upon them. That is to say, the extraordinary personal power which he possesses, or is believed to possess, is not in itself either necessarily religious or necessarily irreligious. It may become, or come to be regarded as, either the one or the other. If it is regarded, or rather so far as it is regarded, as irreligious it is condemned: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ is exactly paralleled by the Athenian law quoted by Demosthenes, φαρμακέα καὶ φαρμακίδα, καὶ αὐτοὺς καὶ τὸ γένος ἅπαν ἀποκτεῖναι (_c. Aristogit._ i. 793). If we start from this point of view nothing seems more reasonable than to assert a fundamental opposition between magic and religion. On the other hand, if we consider the beneficent use which is made of magic and the fact that, as in the defixion tablets already quoted, magic and religion may and do work harmoniously together, the relation between them does not seem to be fundamentally one of opposition. The fact would seem to be that this extraordinary personal power, as it is in itself neither good nor bad, but becomes the one or the other according as it is used for good ends or for bad, so it is in itself neither magical nor religious but comes to be regarded as religious if used in the service of the gods, and as magic if used otherwise. But it is not until gods are believed in that this power can be used in their service or regarded as their gift: only when belief in the gods has arisen can the person possessing power be regarded as having derived his power from them, or believe himself so to have derived it. It may well be that his power confirms his belief and strengthens it; it may perhaps even be that his power is the first thing to awaken him to belief in gods and to the possibility of communing with them in his heart. But the belief that there are superior beings, with whom it is possible to commune in one’s heart, is not the same thing as the extraordinary personal power which some men exert over others. Such belief and such power may indeed go together, but they do not by any means always go together; and accordingly the power cannot be regarded as the cause of the belief.

Again, it is not until men come to believe that there are gods, who have the interests of their worshippers at heart, that the man who possesses this power and uses it for evil purposes can be condemned by the opinion of the community as one who works against the community, and therefore against the god who protects the community. In other words, we may say that this extraordinary personal power does not come to be regarded as magic--indeed, that magic does not come into existence--until religion has come into existence. When exercised by ‘a man of God’, it is religious; when exerted by any one else it is magical. The magician may use, and more often than not, does use his power in a way injurious to other members of the community, and therefore offensive to the god under whose protection they are. From this point of view, therefore, we may justifiably speak of a fundamental opposition between magic and religion. On the other hand, though the magician ordinarily uses his power to injure people, he is not restricted to this use of it. His power may be used to recall an errant lover, as it is by the lady in the Hadrumetan tablet already quoted, or for the recovery of lost or stolen property. One of the ‘defixion’ tablets is directed to the recovery of τὸ ἱμάτιον τὸ πελλόν, τὸ ἔλαβεν ὁ δεῖνα καὶ οὐκ ἀποδίδωτι καὶ ἀρνεῖται καὶ χρῆται (_I. G. S. I._ 644), another seeks to recover τὰ ὑπ’ ἐμοῦ καταλίφθεντα ἱμάτια καὶ ἔνδυμα (Bechtel, 3537) or τὴν σπατάλην ἢν ἀπώλεσα ἐν τοῖς κήποις τοῖε Ῥοδοκλεῦς (Bechtel, 3541). The magician, that is to say, may use his power for innocent and even laudable purposes. Hence it is that magic is not wholly condemned by any community in which it flourishes; and hence it is that we find magic reinforced by religion not only in the _defixionum tabellae_, as has already been pointed out, but in numerous rites of uncultured peoples, and from time to time, as survivals, in the religious ceremonies of civilized nations. If we dwell upon this set of facts exclusively, we shall be in danger of inferring, not a fundamental opposition but a fundamental identity between magic and religion. Yet, as we have seen, the opposition is quite as marked as the similarity; and this seems to indicate that the extraordinary personal power which some men possess, or are believed to possess, is fundamentally the same, whether it is, or whether it is not, exercised in the service of the gods of the community; but the spirit in which it is used, when employed in the one way, is fundamentally opposed to that in which it is used in the other. Such power may in the course of evolution come to be regarded, or come to manifest itself, either as religious or as magical. But in itself, and at the start, inasmuch as it may become either hereafter, it is at the beginning neither. It is the power--whether of ‘suggestion’ or of actual control--which some exceptional men exercise over others.

LECTURE V

HERODOTUS AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Earlier lectures of this course have dealt with topics suggested by the first civilization of the Aegean, by the first literature of the Greeks, and by the survival in Graeco-Roman culture of traces of a quite unhellenic barbarism.

To-day we come to the fifth century and to the work of the man who stands next after Homer as exponent, on a generous scale, of his country’s thought and life. Homer has shown us Aegean life in a lull between the storms of the Age of Wanderings, between the Achaean and the Dorian Migrations. Herodotus shows us adolescent Greece, the child of Earth and Planet, strangling, like Heracles, the snakes about its cradle, and rising thence to strike down Giants and Monsters, and to enter into its kingdom. This kingdom, for him, is nothing less than the περίοδος γῆς, the _orbis terrarum_, a rim of convergent coastlands encircling the Midland Sea, which is ‘Our Sea’.

But there is this difference between Homer and Herodotus, when we see them from our present point of view. Homer, and to a great extent the post-Homeric Epic, sang of the world in sheer delight of its objective goodness. Their contribution to anthropological science is the picture which they have given of the world as they saw it and lived in it. The contribution of anthropology to them is an interpretation of that picture based on comparative study of other worlds than theirs. With Herodotus, too, what first strikes the eye of the anthropological reader is the wealth of detail about the manners and customs of Greeks and their neighbours, a collection unrivalled in Greek literature before the Roman Age in extent and variety, and quite unique in its quality. And for Herodotus, too, the first duty of anthropology is to interpret his picture of mankind; to illustrate by parallel cases; to extract by comparison the genuine observation from the blundered folk-tale commentary; to fill the blanks in the picture itself with such fragments of fifth-century knowledge as have been preserved in other hands than his. To do this adequately would require many lectures, even were his picture of ancient life far more complete than it is; and in the fragmentary state in which Herodotus has transmitted our share of his knowledge, the commentator’s difficulty is increased manifold. A sketch of a single custom, a casual footnote to a footnote of apparently disjointed matter, may well need a monograph to itself. I need only instance, for an Oxford public, the two Herodotean papers in last year’s _Anthropological Essays presented to Edward Burnett Tylor_.

To this extent Herodotus falls into line with Homer as the subject of lectures like these; but in proportion as he is regarded so, he falls for this practical reason wholly beyond their scope. But there is another aspect of Herodotean anthropology, which is almost wholly absent from Homeric, and is only partially present even in Hesiodic. Between Homer and Herodotus, Greek Reason has come into the world. After Homer, Greek literature, whether poetry or prose, has its subjective, its reflective side. Man has become the measure of all things; and things are worth observing and recording--they become ἀξιαπήγητα, θέας ἄξια or the reverse, according as they do, or do not, amplify human knowledge already acquired, or prompt or guide human attempts to classify and interpret them. In this high meaning of the word all Greek thought and records are utilitarian, relative to an end in view: and this end is ever anthropocentric, it is nothing less, but it is also nothing more, than the Good Life, the Wellbeing of Mankind. On this broad ground, pre-Socratic and Socratic thought are at one, alike Hellenic in spirit, because alike utilitarian. ‘It is not for this that I speculate,’ said Thales, when he ‘struck oil’. It was precisely for this, to make philosophy useful, that Socrates brought it from heaven down to earth.

So what is proposed, in this lecture, is to attempt an answer to the question, How far was a science of anthropology, in the sense in which we understand it, contemplated as possible in the Great Age of Greece? What were the principles on which it rested? How far had Herodotus and his contemporaries gone in the way of realizing their conceptions of such a science? And what were the causes, external to the study itself, which helped or hindered their realization of it?

It will be clear, I think, from the outset, that this inquiry has nothing to do with the question whether this or that observation on the part of Herodotus was accurately made or not. The only way in which Herodotean error or ‘malignity’ will concern us at all is if the sources of an error can be so far exposed as to betray what he was thinking about when he made it. For there are two kinds of anthropologists, as there are two kinds of workers in every department of knowledge. But in a science which is still in so infantile a stage as ours, there is more than common distinctness between them.

There is an anthropologist to whom we go for our facts: the painful accurate observer of data, the storehouse of infinite detail; sometimes himself the traveller and explorer, by cunning speech or wiser silence opening the secrets of aboriginal hearts; sometimes the middleman, the broker of traveller’s winnings, insatiate after some new thing, unerring by instinct rather than by experience, to detect false coin, to disinter the pearl of great price, βιβλιοθήκη τις ἔμψυχος καὶ περιπατοῦν μουσεῖον. To him we go for our facts. His views may matter little; his great book may be put together upon whatever ephemeral hypothesis he may choose. We learn his doctrine as we master the method of an index; it will guide us, more or less securely, to the data we want; but it is the document in the footnote that we are looking for, and the compiler’s voucher (express or implicit) that in his judgement ‘this is evidence’.

And there is an anthropologist to whom we look for our light. His learning may be fragmentary, as some men count learning; his memory faulty; his inaccuracy beyond dispute; his inconsistency the one consistent thing about him. But with shattered and rickety instruments he attains results; heedless of epicycles, disrespectful to the equator, he bequeaths his paradoxes to be demonstrated by another generation of men. He may not know, or reason, perhaps; but he has learnt to see; and what he sees he says. For he too is a μουσεῖον--only in another sense--a Walking Tabernacle of the Nine.[64]