recourse to a seer. Only Hades was inexorable, but he had no influence upon earthly affairs, and no rights that might be transgressed during life. For these reasons the relations of men to their gods seem to have been singularly unhampered and direct; the divinities might act like spoiled children, but were easily cajoled.
Further, the system was surprisingly free from ritual. There were no sacrifices which called for extended formulas and complicated ceremony; any man could attend to his own or his family's sacrifices, and the king was competent to perform the public ones. There were no ceremonies of purification, nor of atonement for sin; no flagellation, humiliation, or mourning in connection with religious rites.[1] For these reasons, and because of the conditions recounted in the last paragraph, there was no need of a differentiation of function calling for a trained functionary — least of all for a hereditary group or gild, with a special jargon, initiation, novitiate, and so on. As there was no need for a mediating agency, the priest-class was scarcely represented. There was really ho native magic, and hence no need of the shaman. What this meant to the society the student of comparative culture-history is in the position to estimate; it certainly obviated the oppressiveness and gloom that are characteristic of a priest-ridden religious system. This is a further and an important reason why the Homeric religion was such an extraordinarily bright and cheerful affair compared with many another type to be found existing together with a societal system evolved along analogous lines with that of the Homeric Age. And it can hardly be going too far to say that this is one of the chief reasons why the Homeric narrative is not damaged for the social scientist through the entrance into it of the elsewhere all too prevalent sacerdotal bias.
Another of the points of distinction between the Homeric religious system and others which, from general considerations, might be ranged along beside it, is the occasional presence in the former of an almost modern rationalization. No student of the science of society needs to be told that such rationalization was not constant or consistent; it is not so even today. One of the
- ↑ Seymour, Life in the Homeric Age, pp. 497-498.
