10 



DISCOVERY 



to Achilles is a frequent feature of the communication 

 between hero and worshipper. 



This communication wdth a spirit which has under- 

 gone apotheosis is covered by the definition with which 

 we started, but it will be seen that the analogy to the 

 communication attempted by modern spiritualism is 

 not close. Hero worship is in fact exactly analogous 

 to something quite different — the worship of saints. 



Anxestor Worship 



Some " heroes " were, of course, the imaginary 

 ancestors of their worshippers ; in popular usage the 

 word " heroes " came to be used as equivalent for 

 spirits of the dead, and at several points hero-worship 

 and ancestor-worship touch. Their assimilation was 

 no doubt assisted by the growth of the practice already 

 noticed of deifying distinguished persons immediately 

 after their death. Amongst other less complete 

 documents of similar character we possess the will 

 of Epikteta, a lady of wealth and position in the 

 island of Thera at the close of the third or the beginning 

 of the second centurj' B.C. She makes testamentary 

 provision for the endowment and maintenance of a 

 family religious association to perform in perpetuity 

 commemorative sacrifices in honour of the spirits of 

 her husband, her two sons, and herself. A shrine, 

 heroon, like that dedicated to a " hero " or saint, is 

 to be maintained in their honour, and the living rela- 

 tives assembled at the service are allowed to eat the 

 meat of the sacrifice, which therefore partakes of the 

 nature of a family sacramental meal. This is an 

 interesting feature, emphasising, as it does, the 

 friendly character which is, upon the whole, character- 

 istic of the relations existing between the Greeks and 

 Romans and their ancestral spirits. For the practice 

 enjoined infringes the general rule of Greek religious 

 custom, according to which a distinction was usually 

 drawn between Olympian divinities and gods or 

 powers connected with death, and the underworld. 

 In sacrifices to the former the flesh of the victim was 

 cooked, and the worshippers partook of it ; sacrifices 

 to the latter were normally holocausts in which the 

 victim was completely consumed by fire. 



The wUl of Epikteta belongs to an age in which the 

 belief in personal survival was generally held, but if we 

 may judge from the older ceremonies of Greece and 

 Rome, it would seem that ancestor-worship does not 

 necessarily imply a belief in the survival of personality. 

 In early Rome, before Greek ideas had transformed 

 the native beliefs, it seems improbable that there was 

 any conviction of individual personal survival. At 

 death the spirits joined the undifferentiated collective 

 group of ancestral spirits whom the Romans called 

 Manes, but there is no evidence in early times of any 



religious belief or ceremony directed towards an 

 individual spirit of a dead man or ancestor. In fact 

 the early Roman had no singular noun by which to 

 express such a conception, and even when later the 

 idea of personal survival had been acquired, Latin 

 was forced to use the plural Manes to denote the 

 singular spirit of an individual dead man. 



Relationship between Dead and Living 



I am inclined to think that in early Greece the 

 relationship of the living to the ancestral dead may 

 have been somewhat similar — a relationship, that is 

 to say, between two groups rather than between 

 individuals. At Athens an ancient festival called 

 Genesia seems to have resembled the Roman Paren- 

 talia in general character. The object of its com- 

 memorative rites was the plural " ancestors " (yoi/«is), 

 a collective group of spirits like the Roman Manes. 

 Upon the Attic festival of All Souls, the Anthesteria, 

 offerings of porridge were made to the family dead, 

 and at its close they were bidden to depart until the 

 following year. " Begone, spirits, it is no longer 

 Anthesteria." These ceremonies, and such super- 

 stitions as the belief that the dead members of the 

 family were present unseen at the family meal, and 

 that food accidentally dropped upon the floor must be 

 left undisturbed for their consumption,^ reveeil a kindly 

 relationship as existing between dead and living. 

 Indeed, few societies have been less ghost-ridden than 

 the Greek. 



Such ceremonies as these, concerned with the 

 collective group of spirits of the dead, do not in them- 

 selves presuppose individual personal survival after 

 death. The conviction of the existence of a future 

 life in which the individual soul survived to undergo 

 reward or punishment appeared, as we shall see, at 

 an early date in Greece, although it came from a foreign 

 source. It affected all subsequent religious and 

 metaphysical speculation, and increasingly it passed 

 into common or popular acceptance. But it may be 

 worth while to emphasise, in conclusion of this part 

 of my paper, the markedly social or civic attitude not 

 only towards religion, but towards life in general, 

 which distinguished at least the earlier Greeks and 

 Romans from the moderns with their essentially 

 individualistic outlook. Indeed, as long as the city 

 state retained its full vigour and resisted the encroach- 



' Somewhat similar was the practice at the old Prussian 

 funeral feasts. " If any morsels fell from the table, they were 

 left lying there for the lonely souls that had no living relations 

 or friends to feed them. When the meal was over, the priest 

 took a broom and swept the souls out of the house, saying ■ 

 ' Dear souls, ye have eaten and drunk. Go forth, go forth.' " 

 Frazer, The Golden Bough, pt. ii. Taboo and Perils of the 

 Soul, p. 238. 



