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Η. S. Versnel

Religious projection: A Hellenistic instance

1. Introduction

Around 540 B.C. the Ionian philosopher Xenophanes wrote the follow-ing: "If cows and lions had hands and could make drawings or create works of art like men do, horses would make images of gods similar to horses, and cows similar to cows, and they would lend them an appearance like their own." And, in order to make himself perfectly clear, he also said: "It was Homer and Hesiod who attributed to the Gods all blame and blemish that mark mankind: theft, adultery, and deceit." Xenophanes did not draw the conclusion that gods did not exist, but he professed the existence of one God, immaterial and unimaginable, the Great Mind (nous). His views, very revolutionary in that period, made him the father of the notion of "religious projection" as it was formulated 2400 years later by Feuerbach.

Although the issue of religious projection seems to be anathema in modern scholarly discussion, there is a fascination with questions of, first, how and how far social and mental conditions of a particular culture affect the imagery of the divine world and, secondly, to what extent modes of human communication may reflect themselves in attitudes vis-a-vis the gods. Obviously, periods of radical social, political or cultural change offer the best opportunity for comparison and research. If one wishes an illustration it suffices to observe the current substitution of competitive and hierarchic predicates such as "almighty", "father" or "king", by "horizontal" and "soft" qualities such as, for instance, "fellow-sufferer" in the evolution of the Christian God. How-

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ever, these processes are often complicated and, by the very nature of their subject, cannot be consistent. Many modern theologians who are designing a suffering and indeed helpless God, continue to expect a final liberation from misery and pain from His hands. Homer could picture the Olympian divine family as a typically aristocratic society, with Zeus as the anax in the center, enjoying festive banquets dowsed with wine and, by contrast, he could even make the gods suffer from bleeding wounds in combat. But at the same time he also knew of different types of divine food — nectar and ambrosia — and of the specific nature of the divine blood which warranted immortality. Gods could bleed, but not to death. It is precisely the study of similar inconsistencies that may give us a deeper insight into belief systems and religious representations.

My present purpose is to argue that in a particular period of ancient history, namely the Hellenistic age, developments took place which betray so close a parallelism between secular and religious representa-tions and attitudes, that it cannot be accidental: without doubt cultural changes have directly affected religious language and imagery. I shall first give a brief description of the general socio-political development I have in mind and then present four concrete cases that have all been taken from various research projects with which I have been concerned during the last ten years. I thought this conference might be a good opportunity to collect some results and view them in the light of our central issue "religious transformations and socio-political change." I must emphasize, though, that this is a preliminary sketch of what I hope to substantiate in a more elaborate investigation in the near future. What I offer are suggestions rather than theses (let alone theory). For this reason I have completely refrained from adding footnotes, restrict-ing my references in the text almost exclusively to those of my works which may provisionally provide further information.

The Hellenistic period, from Alexander the Great to the reign of the emperor Augustus (or, rather, well into the imperial period), is marked by a number of radical changes as compared to the classical period that preceded it. The classical polis culture had to adapt itself



Religious projection: Λ Hellenistic instance 27

to the emergence of vast world empires. To be sure, this did not mean the end of the Greek cities nor of their political ideology of democracy and autonomy, but they had to accept subjection to a new system of autocratic rulership, for one of the undisputed characteristics of Hel-lenistic culture is the emergence of monocratic, absolute rulership. In the same period, we observe in the cities a ubiquitous tendency towards oligarchy, property instead of citizenship gradually becoming the central requirement for political participation. All this was accompanied by fundamental changes in the forms of social expression, in the rhetorics of social communication, and in the idiom of authority and hierarchy. It is especially here that I descry a marked parallelism between the construction of human society, on the one hand, and the imagery of the divine world on the other.

2. Judicial prayer

I begin by quoting parts of a text from a lead tablet found on the Greek isle of Amorgos. It is dated from the first century B.C. to the second century A.D. by different scholars.

Lady Demeter, Ο Queen, as your suppliant, your slave, I fall at your feet ( K y r i a Demeter, basilissa, hiketes sou prospiptö de ho doulos sou). Lady Demeter, this is what I have been through. Being bereft by a certain Epaphroditos, I seek refuge in You: be merciful to me and grant me my rights (epi se katapheugö sou eugilatou tjcbein kai poisai me tou dikaiou tychein). Grant that the man who has treated me thus shall have no satisfaction either in rest or in motion. [There follows an extensive curse formula.] Lady De-meter, I supplicate you because I have suffered injustice: hear me, Ο goddess, and pass a just sentence (Jitaneuö se pathön adika, epakouson, thea, kai krinai to dikaion). ( . . . ) Ο Queen, hear us who



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suffer and punish those who rejoice in our misery (epakouson hemin pathousi, kolasai tous hemas toioutous hedeos blepontes).

At first sight there is little cause for excitement. A person has been wronged by another person and he invokes a goddess for help and revenge. However, the degree of excitement depends on the novelty or peculiarity of an experience. And if we compare this little prayer with the entire evidence from earlier periods (both the archaic and the classical ages from the eighth to the third century B.C.), it is a peculiar and novel piece of evidence indeed. For from this earlier period we have not one document that is at all comparable with our text. What we do have, of course, is a great number of literary prayers, including many prayers for help, but rarely if ever as a judicial complaint and request for juridical assistance, as is explicitly presented in our text.

Beginning with the Hellenistic period, however, and especially in the imperial age, prayers like the one at issue proliferate. I have recently collected, discussed, and baptized them "judicial prayers" or "prayers for justice" (Versnel 1991). The god invoked is consistently addressed as a superior judge, who has the power to detect every sin, give justice to the wronged and persecute the culprits. I do not say that gods as protectors of justice are lacking in earlier periods — far from it: think of Homer and especially Hesiod, for instance — but we simply do not find similar formal and ceremonious prayers for justice as reactions to concrete experiences from daily life.

One particular element in this prayer strikes the eye: the hierarchical atmosphere that marks both attitude and terminology. The goddess is invoked as Queen (basilissa) and as Lady ( K y r i a ) whereas the mortal is pictured as a slave and suppliant, who, in a definitely servile manner, implores the goddess to do justice. All this, especially the latter feature, is generally foreign to the religious expression of classical Greek prayer. Before returning to this difference in religious mentality, I shall cite a document which betrays a remarkable similarity with our little prayer.

King Ptolemaios (basileu) I am being wronged (adikoumai) by NN. [There follows a series of offences.] So I beg and beseech



Religious projection: A Hellenistic instance 29

you, King (deomai oun sou kai hiketeuö, basileu) not to suffer me to be wronged by NN. For I hope that having sought your protec-tion as a suppliant (hiketes epi se kataphygön) I shall obtain justice (ton dikaiou teuxomai).

Here we have an example of a so-called enteuxis, a petition on papyrus to a king or high magistrate, of which we have numerous specimens in Greek papyri from Egypt for the whole period during which Greek was the official language there. The relationship with our prayer to Demeter cited above is immediately obvious. As a matter of fact, the Demeter prayer is nothing else than an enteuxis, addressed this time, however, not to a mortal king, magistrate or the emperor, but to a goddess. It is one of the most direct and unmistakable instances of "religious projection" I know.

Once we have noticed the sudden appearance of secular enteuxis formulas in Hellenistic prayers for help, we can also attempt to explain the absence of this particular form of prayer in earlier periods. In the classical period of Athens, to which we owe more than ninety-percent of our total written information, democracy prevailed and monarchy — especially in the form of tyranny — was anathema; moreover, justice was not in the hands of all-powerful judges (as it was in the Hellenistic and Roman periods) but in that of a jury. The typical enteuxis formula must have been unimaginable in this situation, either in human com-munication, or — in consequence — in negotiations with the gods. So here we have a first clear indication that changes in human society could have grave consequences for the gods as well. As a corollary of the transference of human judicial codes to the language of prayer, the gods acquired (some of) the qualities that characterize the human sovereign. And this is only one aspect of a far more complex evolution of which we will now discuss a few other exponents.



30 Η. S. Versnel

3. The development of the "prayer of gratitude"

In older collections of ancient prayer it has sometimes been observed that the ancient world, including Old Testament culture, seems to lack the prayer of gratitude. As a matter of fact, words expressing gratitude or recognition are practically absent from prayer in classical Greece. In a study of Greek and Roman prayer (Versnel 1981), I have argued that this absence is less amazing than it may seem at first sight since the very same phenomenon can be observed in human communication. In the numerous official decrees expressing gratitude to a benefactor, we seldom, if ever, find terms like Greek charts, chari^esthai, etc., which express "thanks". What we do find, both in prayer and in expressions of gratitude addressed to mortals, are terms of praise·. "You have shown your benefactions and for that reason we praise and extol you", is the summary of stereotyped formulas. The very same phenomenon can be observed in the Old Testament and generally in ancient Near Eastern prayer. The Christian laus Deo is a direct derivative from this.

Again we are confronted with an unmistakable instance of the projection of forms of communication between men upon those be-tween men and gods, this time already in the classical period of Greece. My point, however, is that with the radical social and political changes in the early Hellenistic period, both types of expression undergo devel-opment. On the human side, we see the honorary decrees that are addressed to powerful and rich benefactors, more especially to kings, swell up into extended and baroque, if not sycophantic accumulations of the great qualities of the human patrons. Kings, for instance, are praised (already from the fourth century B.C.) with long series of adulatory predicates. They are praised for being: virtuous, humane, righteous, clement, prudent, concerned, benevolent, fair, mild etc., in endless variety. The height of these expressions is reached in the imperial period from which the majority of our inscriptions comes, especially the rich harvest from Asia Minor. But there are sufficient earlier



Religious projection: Λ Hellenistic instance 31

examples from the Hellenistic period to warrant the conclusion that this is the period in which this development really began.

As to the relationship between men and gods, we find an analogous evolution. The epigraphical votive texts in praise of (that is, in gratitude to) a god from archaic and classical times are practically without exception very concise, memorializing the divine intervention and add-ing (if at all) only a few words of praise, sometimes asking (in addition) for another benefaction. Even the literary hymns from that period, which often list the miraculous deeds of the god, do not abound in extended enumerations of the gods' qualities. In the Hellenistic period, however, this changes. In addition to the short votive texts, which, of course, continue to appear (as they still do today), a new type of praise comes into fashion, the aretalogy, the record of the aretai ( 'miracles' or 'miraculous features') of the god. They were especially popular in the cult of Isis and Sarapis, where an Egyptian influence may be perceived, but also other gods are praised with these ample litanies. And, here, just as in the enumerations of human honors, we find extended lists of the benefactions and great qualities of the gods. The most complete is the Isis aretalogy from Kyme in Asia Minor which comprises some 50 lines, each of which acclaims one of the goddess's great founding acts. In order to give the reader an impression and because I shall have to return to some details of this hymn in the next section, I quote the full text of this aretalogy (trans., Grant 1953: 131 — 133). Compared to the praises of kings and benefactors mentioned above, it shows both the extent and the limits of assimilation between human and divine praise. Both generally owe their publication to a concrete act of assistance or rescue: the liberation of, or the spending of large amounts of money for a city, on the human side; a cure from a disease or rescue from a dangerous situation, on the divine. But naturally human benefactors cannot be praised far beyond the positive qualities mentioned above. The great foundation acts of nature and culture, as they appear in the aretalogies, are reserved to the gods, although Roman and Byzantine emperors went a long way in assimilating themselves with the gods also in this respect. If there are clear analogies here, they should be



32 Η. S. Versnel

sought first and foremost in the common inclination to extol the benefactor with long lists of qualities that raise him above other human or divine beings.

4. The Isis aretalogy from Kyme

I am Isis, the mistress of every land, and I was taught by Hermes, and with Hermes I devised letters, both the sacred [hieroglyphs] and the demotic, that all things might not be written with the same [letters]. I gave and ordained laws for men, which no one is able to change. I am eldest daughter of Kronos. I am wife and sister of King Osiris. I am she who findeth fruit for men. I am mother of King Horus. I am she that riseth in the Dog Star. I am she that is called goddess by women. For me was the city of Bubastis built. I divided the earth from the heaven. I showed the paths of the stars. I ordered the course of the sun and the moon. I devised business in the sea. I made strong the right. I brought together woman and man. I appointed to women to bring their infants to birth in the tenth

month. I ordained that parents should be loved by children. I laid punishment upon those disposed without natural affection

toward their parents. I made with my brother Osiris an end to the eating of men.



Religious projection: A Hellenistic instance

I revealed mysteries unto men. I taught [men] to honor images of the gods. I consecrated the precincts of the gods. I broke down the governments of tyrants. I made an end to murders. I compelled women to be loved by men. I made the right to be stronger than gold and silver. I ordained that the true should be thought good. I devised marriage contracts.

I assigned to Greeks and barbarians their languages. I made the beautiful and the shameful to be distinguished

nature. I ordained that nothing should be more feared than an oath. I have delivered the plotter of evil against other men into

hands of the one he plotted against. I established penalties for those who practice injustice. I decreed mercy to suppliants. I protect [or honor] righteous guards. With me the right prevails. I am the Queen of rivers and winds and seas. No one is held in honor without my knowing it. I am the Queen of war. I am the Queen of the thunderbolt. I stir up the sea and I calm it. I am in the rays of the sun. I inspect the courses of the sun. Whatever I please, this too shall come to an end. With me everything is reasonable. I set free those in bonds. I am the Queen of seamanship. I make navigable unnavigable when it pleases me. I created the walls of cities. I am called the Lawgiver.

I brought up islands out of the depths into the light.



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I am Lord of rainstorms. I overcome Fate. Fate harkens to me. Hail, Ο Egypt, that nourished me!

5. Liberation and subjection

I have recently discussed a curious paradox in the prototypical Isis aretalogy from Kyme (Versnel 1990). Its earliest Greek model must date from the third century B.C. Among the long list of qualities two lines attract our attention. In the opening line the goddess says: "I am the tyrant ( t y ranno s ) of all the land." Some twenty lines further she boasts: "I have destroyed the mastery of tyrants" (again the term tyrannoi). There is a stark paradox here, which as the reader may note, has been conveniently smoothed away in the translation that I have quoted. In the first line, the meaning of tyrannos must be positive, denoting a unique position of sovereignty and majesty. The second time it is negative, denoting bad ruler, usurpator. Instead of glossing over this inconsistency I have tried to show that it reflects a fundamental characteristic of Hellenistic political ideology, namely the ambivalent attitude regarding notions of freedom and subjection, On the one hand, the ancient democratic aversion to tyranny was maintained in the early Hellenistic period. Tyrants should be eliminated and ever since Alex-ander the Great new rulers claimed to have given freedom to a city or cities by expelling an earlier ruler, who, of course, had been a tyrant. This, then, is accurately reflected in line 25 of our aretalogy now transposed to a goddess. But there is also a reverse of the medal. For after dispelling the bad tyrant, and indeed in reward for this act of liberation, the new ruler was immediately acclaimed, lauded and extolled as a superior, unsurpassable, and absolute sovereign and master. And he received honors in accordance with his unique position. In fact, as




we observed earlier, the Hellenistic period is marked by the emergence of autocratic rulership, kings being referred to as kyrios (that is 'master') and even acquiring divine qualities. This absolute sovereignty, again transposed to the goddess, is precisely expressed in the first lines of our aretalogy.

The result is a stark ambiguity: although Hellenistic kings granted freedom by deposing tyrants, they subjugated the freed subjects into a new kind of slavery in the same act, thus becoming tyrants themselves — this time of course in the positive sense of the term. The relevance to our issue is that this ambiguity reflects itself with great precision in the government of the gods, as our aretalogy exemplarily demonstrates. And it is scarcely necessary to underline what a great future this ambiguity was to have in religious thought, for instance in the Christian theology of the apostle Paul, who, on one hand, calls himself a "slave of Christ" and, on the other, proclaims that "Christ has made us free". In 1 Cor. 7:22, the inconsistency is even unequivocally spelled out: "For he that is called in the Lord, being a slave (>doulos), is the Lord's freeman; likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ's slave."

However, the paradox is no less dominant in pagan ideas of deity during the early imperial period. In the final lines of the aretalogy Isis boasts: "I overcome Fate, Fate harkens to me." Like Kyrios Jesus, Queen Isis overcomes the cruel and awful tyrants of the Hellenistic and imperial periods: heimarmene— (destiny, fate), or tyche (willful fortuna), and receives the greatest reward imaginable: sycophantic adoration by those she frees, who become, in turn, her slaves. The author Apuleius (second century A.D.) makes an Isis priest say: "accept of your own free will the yoke of service. For when you have begun to serve the goddess, then you will better realize the results of your freedom." And as I hope to have shown, this is a metaphor, as it were, of the ambivalent relationship between kings and cities in the Hellenistic period.



36 Η. S. Versnel

6. Heis

The subject of my book Ter unus (1990) is the religious phenomenon that we call "henotheism". In a Latin inscription Isis is addressed as una quae es omnia, 'you who alone are all'. Henotheism denotes a personal devotion to one (Gk: heis) god, without necessarily involving the rejec-tion or neglect of other gods. This modern term is derived from the ancient acclamation heis (ho) theos (literally: 'one is [the] god'), that can be found in endless repetition in inscriptions, papyri, engraved in rings and amulets, etc. The bulk of the material was collected by E. Peterson, and many new testimonies have been published since. The expression means something like: 'unique or uniquely great is the god' , or rather, 'is our or my god' , for the acclamation is used in a clearly competitive vein for such rivals as Sarapis, Helios, Mithras, and Jesus. This time it is not possible to discover literal terminological models in the sphere of human communication, though we do find the acclamation heis addressed to mortals in later literature. It is tempting to assume Egyptian influence here, but this temptation is frustrated by the fact that the first known testimony of heis in this "elative" sense is found in the fourth century B.C. in Greece: heis Dionysos, being used as a kind of password to an esoteric cult.

However, the phenomenon is no generatio spontanea. Already from the fifth century B.C. we know proverbial expressions praising persons who have done remarkable feats, for instance, in war, sport or politics. They are often acclaimed as monos kai prötos, 'first and only', and, indeed, these expressions are so common that various authors made puns on them. Apparently, Greeks, already in the classical period but increasingly in Hellenistic and Roman times (Romans had the same expression: primus et solus), praised a human being by emphasizing his "uniqueness" as embodied in his superiority. And it needs no further substantiation that the emergence of the unique and superior individual is one of the most characteristic phenomena of the Hellenistic period. After the examples of analogy presented in the first three sections of




this paper, I cannot believe that it is only by chance that we see the very same development in the divine world, where in the same period some gods take pride of place among and above others (alternately being called heis and monos) and thus lay claim to an adoration which, besides henotheism, has been sometimes labelled "affective monothe-ism".

7. Conclusion

We have seen four concrete instances of direct and sometimes literal projection of forms of human communication onto forms of contact with the gods, and we have traced this parallelism in the process of changes during the Hellenistic period. There are many questions which can and should now be put forward but I have neither the time nor the intention to discuss or even mention them at the present occasion. For the moment I would single out two inferences that to my mind deserve further consideration. One is of general purport, the other regards the interpretation of some focal changes in the Hellenistic period.

1. My four examples have above all demonstrated the basic impor-tance of rhetoric for the process of what I called "religious projection". In all four instances, it is first and foremost rhetorical expressions that were transposed upon the communication with gods. Of course, in the minds of the believers these gods must already have possessed the potential status and stature necessary to bear the burden of the new qualifications. All the same, the expressions must have considerably contributed to the shaping of this new status: by being addressed in terms reserved for exceptional individuals, benefactors and kings, the gods {some gods, that is) acquired a unique position among and above their fellow-gods which they had never had before. The formulations borrowed from human social expression inevitably presented the divine



38 Η. S. Versnel

addressees with their implied unique qualities. This gives me the cour-age to suggest that generally in dealing with phenomena of religious projection we should pay more attention to the possible contributions of social linguistics, to the rhetoric of social and political relationships.

2. The traditional view of Hellenistic civilization is that Greek culture was deeply influenced and transformed by Oriental elements, both on the human socio-political side and on the religious one. Absolute rulership, and especially the emergence of ruler cult, were attributed to Oriental models. Accordingly, in this view, the new picture of absolute, autocratic and henotheistic gods had its roots in Oriental religions. Curiously, the socio-political and the religious developments generally have been distinguished from each other and kept apart.

Now with regard to the first idea, it has long been observed that the emergence of both autocracy and ruler cult had its roots in an internally Greek evolution that can be discerned already in, or even before, the fourth century B.C. And for the second, it has been shown that, for some elements in the divine sphere as well as on the human level, the option of an internally Greek evolution (side by side with obvious Oriental influences) should be seriously considered (Pleket 1981; van Straten 1974). The insights gained from the samples of religious projection presented above may help us to construct a more differentiated view of the Hellenistic period in both the social and the religious sphere, and how the one may have influenced the other.

Bibliography

Grant, Frederick C. 1953 Hellenistic religions: The age of syncretism. Indianapolis, IN: The

Bobbs-Merrill Company. Peterson, Erik

1926 Heis theos. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.




Pieket, H. W. 1981 "Religious history as the history of mentality: The 'believer' as

servant of the deity in the Greek world", in: Versnel (ed.), 1981: 152-192.

Van Straten, F. Τ. 1974 "Did the Greeks kneel before their gods?" Bulletin Antieke Bes-

chaving 49: 159-189. Versnel, H. S.

1990 Ter unus. Isis, Dionysos, Hermes: Three studies in henotheism. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

1991 "Beyond cursing: The appeal to justice in judicial prayers," in: Chr. A. Faraone and D. Obbink (eds.). Magika hiera: Ancient Greek magic and religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 60—106.

Versnel, H. S. (ed.) 1981 Faith, hope and worship: Aspects of religious mentality in the ancient

world. Leiden: E. J. Brill.



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