Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

i] Social origin of the Kouretes 29
whole community, especially fruitful seasons, increase of flocks
and herds, and success in war. The individual sufferer, who to us
is the special object of Divine protection, was more or less an out-
cast 1 .
' Hannah with her sad face and silent petition was a strange
figure at the sanctuary of Shiloh ;
the leper and the mourner alike
were unclean and shut out from the exercises of religion as well
as from the privileges of social life.' But necessarily at the time
when Robertson Smith wrote he conceived of a god as something
existing independently of the community, though very closely
related. This brings us to our last point.
.
So long as religion was defined by its object it was, to the
detriment of science, confused with theology. It was currently
supposed that religion was a kind of instinct of the soul after
some sort of god or spirit or—as the doctrine became more rarefied
—some innate power of apprehending the infinite' 2 . The blunder
here made was an elementary one, and took small account of facts.
The most widespread and perhaps potent of all religions, Buddhism,
knows no god. The error arose partly from ignorance or carelessness
as to facts, and partly from the mistake in method common
to all pre-scientific enquiry, the mistake of starting with a general
term religion of which the enquirers had a preconceived idea, and
then trying to fit into it any facts that came to hand.
In the present enquiry we shall at the outset attempt no
definition of the term religion, but we shall collect the facts that
admittedly are religious and see from what human activities they
appear to have sprung. The Kouros and the Kouretes are such
facts. They sprang, we have just seen, from certain social interests
and activities. The worshippers, or rather the social agents, are
prior to the god. The ritual act, what the Greeks called the
Spcofxevov, is prior to the divinity. The psychological genesis of
the Spwfievov will be examined in the next chapter.
1 It is when the old tribal sanctions are hroken down that Aidos and Nemesis
of and for the individual come into force. See Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek
Epic-, p. 103.
- This error, originated I believe by Max Miiller and adopted with various
modifications and extensions by M. Reville in his Prolegouienes a Vhistoire des
religions, and by Morris Jastrow in his Study of Religions, has been well exposed
by Prof. Durkheim in his article De la definition des phenonienes religieux in Annee
Sociologique, n. (1898), pp. 4 ff