Greece and Babylon : a comparative sketch of Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Hellenic religions / by Lewis R. Farnell.

  • Lewis Richard Farnell
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Greece and Babylon : a comparative sketch of Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Hellenic religions / by Lewis R. Farnell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of it ; for he had inherited the practice from his ancestral past, and he found it indigenous in the lands he conquered. Repellent as the rite may be, it much concerns the study of the religions of the cultured races. Now, an interesting theory concerning sacrifice was expounded and brought into prominent discussion by Professor Robertson Smith in his Religion of the Semites, and in an earlier article in the Encyclopedia Britannica —namely, that a certain type of ancient sacrifice was a mystic sacramental communion, the worshipper par¬ taking of some sacred food or drink in which the spirit of the deity was temporarily lodged. This mystic act, of which there is no clear trace in the Old Testament, is reported from Egypt,1 and it appears to have been part of the Attis ritual of Phrygia. We find doubtful traces of it in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries ; also a glimpse of it here and there in the public religion of Hellas. But it is best attested as a potent force in the Dionysiac worship, especially in a certain savage ritual that we may call Thracian, but also in the refined and Hellenised service as well. I cannot dwell here on the various aspects of this problem. The Hellenic statistics and their significance I have partly collected and estimated in a paper pub¬ lished some years ago.2 The application of the sacra¬ mental idea to the explanation of the Eleusinian mysteries, ingeniously attempted by Dr. Jevons, I have discussed in the third volume of my Cults of the Greek States; and the Dionysiac communion-service is considered at length in the fifth. The attractiveness of the mystic appeal of the 1 Transactions of Congress of History of Religions, 1908, vol. i. p. 192. 2 Hibbert Journal, 1904, “ Sacrificial Communion in Greek Religion.
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