Five Stages of Greek Religion   By: Gilbert Murray (1866-1957)

There are diacritical accents in the original. In this text, [=a] represents the letter "a" with a macron.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected. A complete list follows the text.

FIVE STAGES OF GREEK RELIGION

BY GILBERT MURRAY

Boston THE BEACON PRESS

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

Anyone who has been in Greece at Easter time, especially among the more remote peasants, must have been struck by the emotion of suspense and excitement with which they wait for the announcement " Christos anestê ," "Christ is risen!" and the response " Alêthôs anestê ," "He has really risen!" I have referred elsewhere to Mr. Lawson's old peasant woman, who explained her anxiety: "If Christ does not rise tomorrow we shall have no harvest this year" ( Modern Greek Folklore , p. 573). We are evidently in the presence of an emotion and a fear which, beneath its Christian colouring and, so to speak, transfiguration, is in its essence, like most of man's deepest emotions, a relic from a very remote pre Christian past. Every spring was to primitive man a time of terrible anxiety. His store of food was near its end. Would the dead world revive, or would it not? The Old Year was dead; would the New Year, the Young King, born afresh of Sky and Earth, come in the Old King's place and bring with him the new growth and the hope of life?

I hardly realized, when writing the earlier editions of this book, how central, how omnipresent, this complex of ideas was in ancient Greek religion. Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and the rest of the "Year Gods" were not eccentric divagations in a religion whose proper worship was given to the immortal Olympians; they are different names given in different circumstances to this one being who dies and is born again each year, dies old and polluted with past deaths and sins, and is reborn young and purified. I have tried to trace this line of tradition in an article for the Journal of Hellenic Studies for June 1951, and to show, incidentally, how many of the elements in the Christian tradition it has provided, especially those elements which are utterly alien from Hebrew monotheism and must, indeed, have shocked every orthodox Jew.

The best starting point is the conception of the series of Old Kings, each, when the due time comes, dethroned and replaced by his son, the Young King, with the help of the Queen Mother; for Gaia or Earth, the eternal Wife and Mother of each in turn, is always ready to renew herself. The new vegetation God each year is born from the union of the Sky God and the Earth Mother; or, as in myth and legend the figures become personified, he is the Son of a God and a mortal princess.