Anthropomorphism

Hello.

My name is Emma Aston, and I'm an associate professor

of classics at the University of Reading.

I'm going to be talking to you today

about some aspects of Greek religion,

and in particular, I'm going to begin

with the discussion of what we call anthropomorphism.

That's to say the depiction of Greek deities

in human or humanoid form.

So this is something which affects how Greek deities were

actually viewed, how they were depicted,

but also a great deal about their characters.

So the interaction between gods and mortals in Greek culture

took forms which would have been recognizable

from aspects of social behavior between different humans

and human groups.

Scholars will often talk about Greek religion

being based, for example, upon the principle of reciprocity.

That's to say, humans give deities

gifts of various sorts, offerings and sacrifice,

and we'll talk a bit more about that later on.

And in return, they expect the deities

to do certain things for them.

Provide successful harvests, military enterprises,

safe childbirth and child rearing, and so on.

And this is very much how human society

was organized in the ancient Greek world as well.

Reciprocal favors reciprocal hospitality,

and on the negative scale, revenge.

So if somebody does you a bad turn,

you do them a bad turn in return if you're able to.

So it was with gods.

And this principle of religion often

gets labeled with a Latin phrase, "do ut des,"

"I give in order that you might give."

We give gods favors so that they may return them to us.

So in many ways, both physical and in terms of habits, ideals,

wishes, preferences, Greek gods resembled the human beings who

created and worshipped them.

And this, we may put under the umbrella

term of anthropomorphism.

In physical terms, anthropomorphism

allowed for a really strong belief

in contact and encounters in the ancient world.

So the Greeks really did believe that they

were able, under certain circumstances,

to meet one of their deities.

A god appearing before a mortal is what we termed an epiphany.

So ancient deities staged epiphanies quite often,

that's to say, they made surprising and often startling

appearances before their human worshippers.

This is not to say that Greek deities did not operate

through indirect agency.

They didn't have to be present in order

to influence human lives.

They were quite capable of sending good or bad effects

from a distance.

For example, blighting crops or making them grow well.

But epiphanies, direct encounters,

direct appearances by deities were something

that the Greeks really firmly believed in.

And I think this is something that we perhaps

struggle a little bit to understand fully nowadays where

we are not used to the idea of gods

being their physical corporeal, and able to take

a direct involvement in our lives, but so it was.

To give you an example of an epiphany,

during the first Persian invasion of Greece in 490 BC,

the Athenians who are having difficulty

confronting the Persians on their own

and needed assistance from the Spartans

and other community of Southern Greece,

sent a runner, Pheidippides, down

to implore Spartan assistance.

Pheidippides went down to Sparta,

failed to secure Spartan assistance,

incidentally because the Spartans

were too busy holding a religious festival at the time.

And then on his way back through the Peloponnese,

through Southern Greece, encountered

a deity who leapt out of the undergrowth and greeted him.

We are told about this by the 5th century BC historian

Herodotus who says as follows.

According to the account he gave the Athenians on his return,

Pheidippides met the god Pan or Mount Parthenium, near Tegea.

Pan, he said, called him by name,

Pheidippides, and told him to ask the Athenians

why they paid him no attention.

And we are told by Herodotus that subsequently the Athenians

started to pay Pan attention and instituted

his cult, his worship in Athens itself,

and fared a great deal better as a consequence.

So this is one example of god being able actually

to appear before a selected mortal

in a physical corporeal way.

Pheidippides would not have been able to put a hand through Pan.

Pan would have been solid and physical and there.

I thought I would show you another interesting example

of a slightly different type of epiphany

which tells us a great deal about how in real life

the Greeks thought they might encounter deities.

Because we might regard Herodotus' account

of the encounter with Pan as being a literary elaboration,

just a nice story.

But the following was a real account, I think.

So in the Northeast Peloponnese, there

was a healing sanctuary dedicated to the god Asclepius

at a place called Epidaurus.

You might be familiar with it.

It contains one of the really famous theaters of

the ancient world.

And the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus

was decorated in part with some really elaborate inscriptions,

inscribed texts, and these recorded cures

which supposedly took place in the sanctuary.

And these would have been regarded

by the people in the sanctuary as genuine testimonies

of real life events.

Here is one such inscription which

recounts what happened to a character called Euhippos

when he visited the sanctuary.

Euhippos conducted the practice we call incubation, that's

to say he slept the night in the sanctuary in the hope

that the god or one of his ministers

would help him cure a longstanding and dangerous

medical complaint.

And the inscription reads as follows.

Euhippos bore a spearhead in his jaw for six years.

While he was sleeping here, the god drew the spearhead from him

and gave it to him in his hands.

When day came, he walked out well,

having the spearhead in his hands.

So it was obviously believed possible

that somebody coming and sleeping in the sanctuary

would encounter Asclepius.

We can interpolate that this would

be a dream that god would appear to the man

or woman in their dreams.

But the way the text presents it is very direct.

Asclepius is right there.

Not only does he appear, but he actually involves himself

in this man's cure.

Takes out the spearhead which has

been lodged in this poor man's face and hands it to him.

And it is such a sense of immediacy

which really permeates Greek religion, very different

from the rather abstract theological notions with which

we tend to operate today.

Literary accounts of epiphany tell us

a lot about how the Greeks actually

thought their deities looked.

So one of my favorite texts which

I recommend everybody look at if they

want to understand this business is one of the so-called Homeric

Hymns.

And these were hymns to deities, they

were not actually composed by the same poet who composed

the Iliad and the Odyssey.

But they were composed in a very similar style,

a similar rhythm, similar use of language, and so on.

Number 5, Homeric Hymn number 5 is

in honor of the goddess Aphrodite, goddess

of love and passion.

And in it, it tells of an encounter between a mortal man

Anchises, the father of Aeneas and the goddess.

And the goddess is cursed by giving

a dose of her own medicine, so to speak.

Zeus, in order to humble her, makes her fall

in love with a mere mortal which is a humiliation

for a goddess of her stature.

So she falls in love with Anchises

and decides that she's going to seduce him.

And the encounter between them has,

I think, some latent if not patent humor.

So here, the hymn describes Aphrodite appearing, staging

an epiphany before Anchises.

Standing in front of Anchises, the daughter

of Zeus, Aphrodite, made herself look

like an unmarried girl in appearance and stature,

lest he should be badly frightened to recognize her

when he saw her.

So the first point we draw from this

is that if a god appears before a mortal,

the risk is that the mortal will just

be terribly frightened by a being of supernatural power

and majesty.

So Aphrodite puts on a mortal disguise

like an attractive but human girl.

When he beheld her, the poem goes on,

Anchises was filled with amazement

and wondered at her appearance and stature and also

her shimmering raiment.

When we hear about epiphanies, very often the deities

described as having a sort of luminosity

about them, an unearthly light.

That's how you spotted a deity.

If you want to know how to recognize one,

a certain amount of radiance is one of the key signs.

And we are told by the poet that her radiance

is partly because she is wearing a mantle outshining

in brightness the firelight.

Talks that were twisted in spirals and glittering

flower-shaped earrings.

And a great deal of time is spent

by the poet on her adornment and also

her natural and inherent radiance.

The humorous sequel to this is that so far from succumbing

immediately to her embrace, Anchises is actually

genuinely frightened.

He says, greetings, milady, whichever

you are of the blessed who come here visiting?

Artemis?

Leto?

Perhaps Aphrodite, the golden?

And he has actually guessed her true identity there.

I shall construct you an altar upon a conspicuous station,

high on a lookout, and there I shall offer you

beautiful holy sacrifice at every season.

Do you of your own inclination kindly see

that I become preeminent among the Trojans?

He's a Trojan, Anchises.

So the humor in this episode resides in the fact

that Aphrodite's attempt to disguise herself as mortal

is not actually successful.

Anchises sees through her despite her attempt

at simulation.

He recognizes her divinity, it shines out despite her efforts.

And his response is to offer her sacrifices, altars,

and all the other pertinences of the god.

She's irritated by this because she actually

wants an erotic encounter, and he's not

prepared to offer it at first.

He does, in the end, and they have a child together--

the hero Aeneas.

So we can see another offshoot, another ramification

of anthropomorphism is that gods and humans

are able to produce children together.

Another sign of their immediacy and the possibility

of close contact between them.

So, so far, you might think that this makes Greek religion seem

quite simple.

The gods are like us.

We make them.

We created the gods so, of course,

they resemble us in every way.

In their looks, except for unearthly radiance and stature,

in their habits, in their desires,

in their practices and customs.

But the matter is, of course, more complicated than that

as you can imagine.

There is a really sizable number of deities

that don't follow the standard template

of anthropomorphic depiction in their physical form.

One example, we've already met, the god Pan.

If you remember, he was the one who leapt out at the run

off Pheidippides in the center of the Peloponnese.

Now, Pan, as you will see from the image on the screen

at this point, is half human or at least he

tends to have human posture.

You'll see from the picture that he's standing.

But as you'll see, quite large portions of his body

are actually goat form rather than human.

And he is what we call a hybrid or sometimes

a theriomorphic deity.

Theriomorphic is a term meaning animal form.

It's a counterpart to anthropomorphic

in the form of an animal rather than the form of a human being.

The image you see is a picture on a pot from ancient Athens

created about 490 BC, and it would

have been a mixing bowl for stirring

wine and water together.

The figure on the left who is fully human

is the God Hermes who is actually associated

with flocks and pasture ridge.

And so a suitable companion for a Pan, and he's

playing the pipes and Pan is having a good sing

to accompany him.

The goat part of Pan expresses his association

with flocks and herds and wild spaces, which he always had.

Even though Pan was worshipped in the center

of the city of Athens, nonetheless, he never

lost that association with the wild domain.

And his goat part expressed that and kept it in view.

Another example of an animal hybrid deity

of which I'm particularly fond is the river god, Achelous.

And you can see on the screen an example of his rather striking

depiction.

This is a little South Italian bronze statuette

from, we think, the early 5th century BC.

It's in a private collection now.

And you can see that he has a human face, bearded

with rather nice long braids of hair,

but his back-end is that of a bull.

And this is the standard depiction

of the river god Achelous.

He turns up in this form also in a lot of relief sculptures.

So large flat stone panels carved with a relief scene.

Generally, he's accompanied by female divinities called

the nymphs who are rustic demi-goddesses.

So this would have been his standard, as we call it,

iconography, the form in which he is depicted,

the form which he takes.

And we can rationalize that to some extent

because there was an association in the Greek imagination

between bulls and various water sources, particularly

rivers and the sea.

Rivers and the sea supply fertility to crops and humans,

and the bull was also associated with fertility as well.

So we can explain Achelous' hybrid form to some extent.

So we have to recognize that anthropomorphism

is an important part of Greek religion,

but it's not the end of the story.

Plenty of Greek deities were thought

to be more appropriately represented

with known animal forms.

But across the board, I think what

we want to take from all these examples is

one very important fact, that whatever

form Greek divinities took, they were

what we might call embodied, they had corporeal form.

The Greeks didn't really deal in abstractions.

They didn't really deal in elemental divinities.

So Achelous is a nice example of that.

He's a river god but the Greeks are not

content to worship a river.

What they want is a physical being who stands for the river,

sometimes occupies the river or exist nearby the river,

is named after the river--

Achelous is actually a river in Northwestern Greece--

but is separate from the flowing stream.

It's not limited to it.

The Greeks wanted to be able to encounter and interact

with their deities.

It wasn't enough for them just to regard, for example,

the sun and the moon as divine, a numinous,

and having supernatural powers.

They wanted physical forms whom they

could meet on their own level.

And that's a really fundamental part of Greek religion

and a good place to start.