Recent research has provided us with abundant material for the study
of the varying forms of this Nature Cult, the extraordinary importance
of which as an evolutionary factor in what we may term the concrete
expression of human thought and feeling is only gradually becoming
realized.[2]
Before turning our attention to this, the most important, section of
our investigation, it may be well to consider one characteristic
difference between the Nature ritual of the Rig-Veda, and that
preserved to us in the later monuments of Greek antiquity.
In the Rig-Veda, early as it is, we find the process of religious
evolution already far advanced; the god has separated himself from his
worshippers, and assumed an anthropomorphic form. Indra, while still
retaining traces of his 'weather' origin, is no longer, to borrow Miss
Harrison's descriptive phrase, 'an automatic explosive thunder-storm,'
he wields the thunderbolt certainly, but he appears in heroic form to
receive the offerings made to him, and to celebrate his victory in a
solemn ritual dance. In Greek art and literature, on the other hand,
where we might expect to find an even more advanced conception, we are
faced with one seemingly more primitive and inchoate, i.e., the idea
of a constantly recurring cycle of Birth, Death, and Resurrection, or
Re-Birth, of all things in Nature, this cycle depending upon the
activities of an entity at first vaguely conceived of as the 'Luck of
the Year,' the Eniautos Daimon.
Pages:
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75