Evening Star Newspaper, November 27, 1927, Page 60

d from Third Paze) showers was imagination as the [Princ nae. shut up in a tower and vi by Zeus in the form of a slden rain and the bounty of the soil was visione: as the return from Hades of the Persephone, stolen after every har vest from he mourning mother Demeter (Ceres), the goddess of the froth and roll and roar so that every corn, In like manner the repr energies of nature were I in Aphrod.te. love. We can trace her splendid wor ship back to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, Astarte. spirit of fertility whe ' nnconsciously com memorate at Easter—once the feast ¢ the reawaken 2. So definitely were Astarte te worship s embodyinz the mys on that it bec ous ¢ for every many parts of the ancient submit to the embraces of a strar and “to dedicate to the goddess earned by this sacrif The sacred precinct.” azer, “was crowded with | o observe the cust had to wait there for Middle Ages were to worship chastity: but ty sus pected it. and valued better a plenti ful fertility. The Greeks feared and reverenced the power of Lros and Aphrodite, and predicted evil (as in who shunned the fine frenzy of love Adonis was als n from Baby- : the s he had be > youthful lover of Istar him Adon, or . and the Greeks took over the title name of their imported go. It is one of a thousand minu disprove the identity of the p nd the philosopher. Adonis, Persephone, w supposed 10 \d part of each vear exiled in Hades, that dark underworld in the the earth to which zood and e departed afte; death. Annu- v the Greeks celejgted the death Adonis, his desce 4 into hell and his resurrection, the gist again a sym- bo! of the renaissance of Spring. Throughout the development of rel gion we find an impersonal process or force transformed poetic: into a person and phrased imaginatively lezend So again the growth of the vine secmed to the simpler Greeks to be the work of the god Dionysus, and they loved him not only because } served as patron deity of an industr al to the life of Greece, but because his ritual frolicked with licen: sanctioned the alcoholic reer: of the people. Dior other gods of vegetation, w 1o have died a violent death and then sen again to life, s celebrated by en: pageant of his sufferings and hi urrection. Out of this ceremor the drama of the Gr somber tragedies with which Eschy- Euripides_and othe reat theater of Dionysus. L 2 worship was the essence of the Dionysian cult, and the phallic emblem was carried at the head of the procession that honored him. Such a festival was called a comus. Out of its Rabelaisian humor and song (0idos) came Grek comedy in form and name Hence the indecency of the comic staze in Athens and the ab sence of respectable women from the theater. It was a stag drama, in honor of the goat god. For Dionysus, like so many gods, had taken the place of a sacred goat in the gradual transformation of totemism—the worship of animals— into the worship of human deities But. as in other cases, the animal ancestor of the god clung to him in myth and ritua a goat sacr ficed to Dionysus. he was often rep. resented as a goat. and was called the “Kid": and those who led his pro- cession dressed themselves in masl Tepresenting gzoats. Hence the pl which brated his feast were named trazedies—i. e.. goat songs. The basis of Greek religion. then, was the zrowth of the soil, the flour- ishing of corn and” vine. and upon this splendid foundation the myth making passion of the people reared an edifice of poetry that reached to the sun and the stars bright) Apollo was the god who shone in the sun: Selene was the zentle lady who' ruled in the moon and sent her soft ravs down to capture En and fill every lover with Even as late as the 0 B.C) we find the philoso. pher Chrysinpus listing as divinities “the sun. the moon. the stars. law nd men who hdve turned into gods. * ¥ ok % The Olympians. The last phrase brings us to the Olympian deities. a set of heroes and heroines invented quite independently of the vezetation zods and the spirits of the skv. To the Greeks no im passable barrier separated zods and men: a great n could hecome a god and be worshiped so (like Alex- ander) even in his lifetime: and the zods themselves did not differ much from lusty men and adventurous women. except that they never died When a: zreat man breathed his last he hecame at’ once a minor deity and. since everv family looked upon its dead prozenitors as zreat. ances tor worship hecame a vital part of rearly all ancient cults. and one of the most carefully nursed forces of conservatism in the state When various gzroups were united in cities incestor-zods nto ) incestars were superim npon the nature.deities of anci davs. Jt was in this way that the Ol*mpians eame ey did not. like later ophic ds. exist from the he The first zod of all. savs old 108 (the earth was without form and void,” savs Cenesis nd darkness was upon the face of the de-p™) Leame 1. the earth. wh irth to Uranos, the skyv. o rezard for morals mar r own son (the earth mingle: the skyvi or ot T Oceanus, Hyperion X ronos and other But 'rano 1 not like thess vast sons hem resolite in the earth mother resentes na 10 have Kr it the ame nos performed tien upon 'ranos threw the hl parts There. mir sorouted Jove avities of Havinz deposed his fathor, Krono. (Time) warried his sister Rhea, and had by her several childven, of whon B : sus. But Kronos feare 1e of his child not Swift chnldren Fous came into existence s ceaied him in 1 cave, and it presented 1o Kronos n stone wrapped 1n swathlin Kronos consumed th Zeus zrew up he led Ainst Kronos and 1 tans wsed them and exiled thom e aven. and to this day nobwdy here they s It is @ story 1t of Natan s rehellion a wre the rebel won red for the | reonitied zoddess of beauty and > lthe Greeks prayed. o|in nature and cause to that which Poebus (ie..| nd bur- | 1if we may o from the way of th | now supreme, took up his e in the clouds of Mount | and divided the universe {among his brothers and other noble | ks who had created him. eptun the Romans called him took charge of the oc and made it even to this day, pays him trib Ares (Mars) inspived warriors and die; Hephaistos (Vuleam | the god of village black | superintended the thun. | a) protected hunt. | ury) inspired (Minerva) “ereate veason, ! they had Feauty Hera Juno) v b self to Zeus, and to restraini his 1t was very | ential cabinet idon was Secretary of the Navy Ares of the A Vulean ¢ Labor er of etary of State, Hermes was di tor of the post offi Hera was & retary of the Interior, and Zeus was President. We must not suppose, however, that |this pantheon was to the Greeks a matter of hum and poetry; it was | ‘lek n seriously enough to beget many | edies and god had to| bave his share in worship, sacrifice, | 1 and prayver, it was no easy | to be a pious Gree Anatole France, if we may believe secretaries, onee said slike the first article | he Decalogue: ‘One God alone thou | shalt adore . < Xo; temples, and | Master liked all the gods because he did not have to pray to them. But * % ok % The Gods and the Philosoph 2. 102I-TART 2. No wonder they rebelled. Gradu- | ally, as science and philosophy grew mong the Greeks, the educated strata |of Athenian socie sed to believ in these multitudinous gods. We e | |seen elsewhere, and need not tell {again, how Thales, Anaximander, An. | aximenes, Pyth Heracl and Anaxage away from supernatural conceptions | and attempted the first naturalist in- | | terpretation of the world; how Ptota goras, Gorgias. Hippias and other “sophists” subjected the ancient faith | to criticism and ridicule; how L | pus and Democr eme of reducing man and the world to the level of machines: how Socrates | was put to death for believing in only | | one zod, and how Plato had to wander | for 12 vears hefore venturing to return | to intolerant Atkens. The philoso- | nearly lost their lives and near- | on their_case. “By the time of | Plato,” savs Gilbert Murray, During the rule of Pericles skepti- | cism spread so swiftly that a moral in- | terregnum set in, remarkably parallel | characterizes our own age. The decay {of the old faith was not replaced by |any sounder basis for co-operation, re: | sponsibility and decency, and a reck | less individualism flourished in moral | and politics and even in the imperial | policy of the state. Moral conserva- | | tives pointed to the career of Alcibia- |des as typical of the unscrupulous | selfishness that seemed to come as a corollary with unbelief. Here was one of the most able and brilliant pupils of Socrates and his most scandalous {lover. He had been born with ever: |advan‘age of wealth and ancestry, he | | had received every aid of education | and opportunity, vet he fomented war | | with Spart-. reckle: he deliberatel deceived their ambassadors by shame- less lving: he joined in every manner | of debauchery and impious revelry; he {sold himself to the enemies of his | county and died prematurely (and yet | not too soon) in a welter of treachery. | What was to come of a nation that had no other god than self and no other virtue than a caleulating. intel- ect? i i e The dramatists struggled to keep | the old deities alive, if only as gods from the machine, conveniences in the disentanglement of a tale, or the rounding of a period. -In their ma- | jestic trilogies the gods were re- molded in a finer image than before; Zeus became greater and nobler when he had been passed through the fiery imagination of Aeschylus, and had been clothed with the serene | | wisdom of Sophocles. But in Euripides |even the dramatic survival of the 2ods became precarious: it was not for nothing that Protagoras had read in the home of Euripides his book | On the Gods” whose first words | | had heen. “Whether there are gods| or not we cannot know™: and the | reckless dramatist had an entire au. | | dience to ts feet in protest when | he opened a play with the insolent ine “O Zeus—if there be a Zeus—for | I know of him only by report.” Even in the theater of Dionysus the philos. | ophers had won i It was among the artists that the | | new conception of the world as the | realm at once of life and law reached {2 synthesis of form and v | which rebel and conservativ | misht find unity and peac - {lizion had helped to zenerate the arts | —architecture in temples. sculpture in sacred monuments. music in ritual —and the arts canceled their debt by |lifting religion to heights unrealized |before. In the hands of Pheidias Zeus hecame the embodiment of power and justice, creative vision and Athene seemed to be after Pheidias had ved her in her calm and majesty When Phryne posed to Praxiteles for Cnidian Aphrodite, and some | Pendsome youth became a new Hermes under the sculptor's hand, a ¢ religion was born. 2 worship of m and beauty: and the gods of cece became worthy of her geniuses. !"The common mind had made fero. < and ridiculous deities. of whose rals the philosophers had forsi bly complained: but the artists slowly {chiseled a_pantheon in which philoso {phy joined with poetry to zive form {and svmbol ta all ideal perfections It was not her statesmen that lifted {Greece on her high plane, not her merchints por her generals: it i her philosophers, her poets and her jartists Let us turn to them (Copymzht. 1927 hy Will Durant.) 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