quare id faciam?

An excerpt

From Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (previous excerpts: 1, 2), toward the close of Chap. 6, 'Life-symbols: the roots of sacrament':

'A god with an epithet,' says Murray [Five Stages of Greek Religion, 1925], 'is always suspicious, like a human being with an "alias." Miss Harrison's examination [Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 1908] shows that in the rites Zeus has no place at all. Meilichios from the beginning has a fairly secure one. On some of the reliefs Meilichios appears not as a god, but as an enormous, bearded snake....
   'The Diasia was a ritual of placation, 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 Meilichios.... His name means "He of appeasement," and he is nothing else.'
   ... The first entirely anthropomorphic conception seems to have come into Greece with the conquering Achaeans, whose Olympian Zeus, a mountain god, had attained human form, at a time when the native Pelasgian gods still retained their animal shapes or were at best monstrous hybrids; Athena still identified with an owl, or figured as the Diver-Bird or bird-headed 'Diver Maid' of Megara. The effect of this personified Achaean god on the barbarian worship then current in Aegean lands was probably spectacular; for a single higher conception can be a marvellous leaven in the heavy, amorphous mass of human thought. The local gods took shape in the new human pattern, so obvious once it had been conceived; and it is not surprising that this Achaean mountain-god, or rather mountain-dwelling sky-god, became either father or conqueror of those divinities who grew up in his image.
   'He had an extraordinary power of ousting or absorbing the various objects of aboriginal worship which he found in his path,' says Professor Murray. 'The story of Meilichios [whose cult he usurped] is a common one.'
   But even this great Olympian could not attain his perfect form, his definite relations to the heavens, the gods, and the human world, until he became a figure in something more than ritual; it is in the great realm of myth that human conceptions of divinity really become articulated. A symbol may give identity to a god, a mimetic dance may express his favors, but what really fixes his character is the tradition of his origin, actions, and past adventures. Like the hero of a novel or a drama, he becomes a personality, not by his sheer appearance, but by his story.
   ... Divinities are born of ritual, but theologies spring from myth. Miss Harrison, in describing the origin of a Korê or primitive earth-goddess, says: 'The May-pole or harvest-sheaf is half-way to a harvest Maiden; it is thus ... that a goddess is made. A song is sung, a story told, and the very telling fixes the outline of the personality. It is possible to worship long in the spirit, but as soon as the story-telling and myth-making instinct awakes you have anthropomorphism and theology.'

posted by paul bowman @ 11:30 AM