The Not-So-Silent Years
Work in Progress
By Paul and Robin Jaeckle Grawe
© 2024
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Chapter 12: The Psychological Outgrowth
of Animism
The last chapter saw the development of polytheism from 800 BC to Imperial Roman times in the European Mediterranean as a long progression of ever-increasing numbers of deities, rituals, sanctuaries, temples, customs, stories, and the like, all operating in a tolerant laissez-faire economy of ideas. Animism has within itself a natural dynamic, a movement with a definite bias despite any Brownian-motion sense of random collisions between floating particles resulting in random and essentially senseless activity without direction. The dynamic growth model of ever-increasing numbers illustrated in the previous chapter is exemplary of that directionality. There are other very important directionalities as well for helping us understand the psychological development of European syncretic polytheism.
In this chapter then, despite a paucity of true documentation, we attempt to interpolate a number of dynamic principles and stages that presumably were operating on the European mind even without any influence from Jewish thinking.
Compulsion as Axiomatic
Normally we say that people who keep doing more and more of the same thing, even when doing less would make for a happier situation are compulsive. From what has already been said, the European world of 800 B.C. was religiously, polytheistically, syncretically, animistically, mythologically compulsive. Moreover, it was the whole European world that was compulsive. Compulsion was in the air, ambient everywhere, waiting around every corner, dominating every scene despite anything the individual could do.
Compulsion was not a staged result developing from a distinct original condition. It was, instead, at the heart of the original condition itself. What we propose here is to trace a main, theoretical line of staged movement from that compulsive original condition. We can then at least allude to documentable realities in history to suggest that our theoretical progression has real-world correlatives.
A Quick Check
Let us, however, check. Compulsion is doing more when doing less would be happier. Was the European world in 800 B.C. doing more of making things bad? Particularly, was the multiplication of gods taking a toll on life? Without documentation but with human experience, we can imagine what it must have been like to live in an animistic world:
Compulsive mythological growth was taking up more and more brain space through the centuries to keep all the stories straight. Even in the best sources, the stories often ended up contradicting each other. Such contradictions could be tolerable or even interesting as pure entertainment, but as models for religion and understanding of life, contradiction would induce doubt, unease and worse.
With compulsion, practical costs quickly become prohibitive. Pouring a few drops of wine as a libation to Zeus-Jupiter could make you feel good for having respected a top-tier god. Pouring a second libation for Hera-Juno probably pleased your wife. Pouring a third for Mercury started to demand some attention, and another for Vulcan seemed a bit taxing. Eventually, the more libations that have already been poured, the more likely that some overlooked god will feel slighted.
Wine costs could quickly move out of control. But so could time and attention costs, attending one compulsory ritual after another. The first ritual allowed you to see friends and relatives again. The tenth was another matter.
The Evidence of Drama
Ultimately, having an infinity of gods meant the human mind running into an infinity of dilemmas: one god says this, another says that. In fact, a great play like The Eumenides by a great playwright like Aeschylus created an entire tragedy out of two gods fundamentally in disagreement. Much earlier, gods in contention, according to Homer, caused an indefinite extension of war beneath the walls of Troy. “Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” is thus a very early concept.
Between them, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are thought to largely inform Greek character. As just mentioned, the Iliad is exemplary of the developmental sense that worshipping the major gods is not a good enough solution to keep from being destroyed by conflicting agendas among the Olympians.
The Odyssey is a more personal story, the story of a single, extraordinary hero, the Crafty Odysseus who has invented the Trojan Horse that finally doomed Troy. Odysseus is crafty because he is the favorite of Athena, the goddess of Wisdom and the inspirer of Odysseus’ uncanny ability. Despite these impeccable credentials, on his way home to Ithaca, Odysseus has the misfortune to run into a one-eyed, man-eating giant named Polyphemus. Rather than wait for himself to be eaten as an hors d’oeuvre, Odysseus in his craft devises a plan and blinds Polyphemus. Sadly, Polyphemus has a powerful friend or relation that Odysseus hadn’t built into his plan, Neptune, the god of the Sea.
And from there, Odysseus enters a nightmare world of minor gods all intent on his destruction, as, for example, Sirens who sing to him irresistibly, as they sing to all mariners who near them, from murderous rocks. It takes Odysseus twenty years of such wanderings to make it back to Ithaca and to destroy the suitors who have been eating him out of house and home and trying to seduce his wife, Penelope. Penelope is admirable enough to become a household name to this day. That notwithstanding, The Odyssey presents a polytheistic nightmare in which propitiation is a rather vain hope for containing a hostile world.
The Odyssey is great literature, and it wouldn’t be likely to maintain its reputation just for its stark polytheistic psychological undercurrents. Best to keep these for cultural analysis and to enjoy The Odyssey as imaginative comedic adventure.
Growing Helplessness
Starting then from the compulsive societal situation in 800 B.C. Europe, we can assume a relatively few gods, few stories, few rituals, few altars, sanctuaries, and temples. The number of each of these will grow exponentially in coming centuries, and eventually the human in the middle will feel the strain. Compulsion to multiply gods, all of whom will have their own nasty quirks and will require propitiation, over time forces many undesirable socio-psychological adaptations and aberrations.
Originally, this Syncretic Animistic Polytheism offered solace, some precaution against a dangerous world. But then, it turned out there were more dangers, more gods to propitiate, more costs, and a limited number of resources. This is a formula for helplessness, a feeling that everything has become just too much, that you just can’t keep up, that you aren’t up to it when you wake in the morning or when you go to bed at night.
Imagination helps us understand. The relatively few gods of 800 B.C. all had their own high priests in your own neighborhood. They were the big shots in everything else, and you accepted the weight of their superiority as a natural part of a natural order. You might personally hope that you could find a new god for whom you or your descendants could be high priests.
But now imagine a few hundred years elapsing. There are more gods, more high priests, more religious costs to bear. But unfortunately, you yourself never got to be the high priest of one of the newer gods. New big shots managed to get those slots ahead of you. The original, somewhat comforting sense that you have propitiated relatively few gods has gotten compulsively out of control. And you know things are out of control because you can’t keep up with their demands.
Growing Intellectual Need for Basic Principles
You also notice that it is harder and harder to think clearly about anything, since one god and one story quickly contradict others. Moreover, more and more life is becoming “what do I need to propitiate god X, what do I need to propitiate god Y, what do I need . . .?” Thinking has become a very tight, compulsive circle.
Eventually, the combination of helplessness and a much more perceived need to be able to think and move ahead resulted in some wayward and rebellious faction of the population essentially turning away from all the syncretic, animistic, polytheistic realities in a desperate attempt to get about thinking. We can strongly sense this stage having been reached in Greece by the time of the Pythagoreans, around 550 B.C., who were developing mathematical theorems and who experimented with a single god.
Growing Hopelessness, Pessimism, and Perfunctory Religion
As time marches on, the helplessness of the individual works back toward creating a helpless society. The idea for the individual becomes “getting by.” Enough individual decisions of that sort create a society as a whole just getting by. Nobody believes anything very deeply, everyone knows that “things are going to hell in a handbag,” and everyone compulsively goes through more motions with respect to more gods. (The common people in all periods were heavily propagandized to respect the whole range of gods; disrespect for the gods was a dangerous stance—note the fate of Socrates!)
By the late Silent Years, considerable documentary evidence exists of just such a pervasive pessimistic ambience in Mediterranean Europe. The Greeks had had declining birth curves and increased internal bickering for centuries. The Romans had brought a Pax Romana to the Mediterranean world, but by then wars were more fought legion against legion for the prize of the next emperorship.
And people were looking for something new religiously, even if their sense of the new was found in the very antiquated Osiris mythology of Egypt, previously beneath contempt.
Growing Emphasis on Familiar Spirits
As the gods became many too many, people began adopting a saner route: choose one or a very few gods. There is abundant evidence in Roman society for such a movement. Perfunctorily, everyone was a tolerant polytheist going through prescribed motions as required for a multiplicity of gods. But for themselves, they actually focused their religion on their household gods and idols, the Lares and Penates. If they came from a privileged background, they had as well ancestral death masks to venerate and to elevate to ruling deities.
Personal Isolation and Abstraction
Familiarity is at its inception very comforting, seemingly empowering and enriching. Other cults and rituals were controlled by others’ vested interests. In Rome, for example, they were heavily controlled by the Senatorial class with plenty of vested interest matched by money and political power. A familiar spirit, in contrast, would seem to be one’s very own personal, private property.
But familiarity also cuts off the outside world. Pushed far enough, the individual human being loses contact with all other relationships than the familiar-spirit relationship. (20th century drama explores some of these dimensions in comedy, note in particular Blithe Spirit and Harvey, and the television series, Topper.)
Classical Greek Abstraction and Isolation
Once we focus on familiar spirits, personal isolation, and abstraction, it is easy to make a leap to Greek Classical stances. The ideal figure for the Greek world is the stand-alone and separated colossal statue of one or another god. In more realistic sculpture, the naked gymnast, the discus thrower, the thinker, the human being examining his own navel are all well known. We may want to call it self-centered, self-concentrating, self-absorbed, or even just selfish.
But abstraction and isolation are not limited to the arts. The Greek tendency toward abstractions in logic, mathematics, and philosophy are all world class. In drama, Greek Dionysian tragedy originally required only a single actor, and Aristotle posits a theory of tragedy as the story of a single admirable figure with a single tragic flaw.
Imperial Romans, as a more humble and less heady people, discovered thorough debauchery as a rather congenial familial spirit to characterize Rome’s version of personal insularity as the Silent Years ended.
Growing Dependence on the State as Practical God
There were other ways of packing the gods together in a manageable unit. The Romans would eventually fund a Pantheon where everyone’s totem mascot deity could get together with everyone else’s and all be worshipped in one uniform block.
At a more efficient level still, Roman government was becoming more and more religion itself. People had fled to the Empire as the last great hope of civilization. The empire became what it was all about. In short order, however, many people quickly replaced the Empire with the Emperor, and the Emperor soon expected to be deified as his own legacy to the world.
Growing Sense of Unfathomable World and Undefeatable Fate or Fortune
If all these methods of reasserting self-control over an infinity of demanding gods failed, there was a final trump left: just triumphantly give up.
Life is beyond answers. Que sera sera. What will be will be. The key to life is to learn how to get through it with the least feeling of pain possible. By Marcus Aurelius, philosophy in the form of Cynicism and Stoicism, with a little help from Epicureanism, had arrived at this pinnacle of thought, a pinnacle still strongly represented in practical philosophy almost two millennia later.
For the common, unphilosophic Roman, however, Fortuna, fortune or perhaps fate, had become the primary deity allowing humanity to get back to getting by as best it could.
General Directionality with Room for Argument, Digression, and Circularity
In this description of stages in almost inevitable psychological development of polytheistic European thinking, there is plenty of room for disagreement, alternate routes, and feedback loops for individuals and for multi-generational families. But the general tendency away from complaisance and toward pessimistic acceptance is much too documented to ignore. And wherever the individual found herself or himself in this progression, it had to be galling to look across the street at a Diasporan Jew who didn’t seem to exist in the same conflicted world, however discriminated against by the ambient Gentile society.
Life as Doing
Thus far, we have been considering ancient European psychology as a matter of thought and feeling. We need to remind ourselves, however, that most people in most ages are very poor at working with thought-feeling at all. Articulating something that is both thought and feeling at the same time is very seldom entertained even in the most erudite academic settings today.
Contrastively, everyone in every age is an expert at being something. And being is a form of doing.
A Movement to the Artificial versus the Genuine
Along with the psychological stages described above but perhaps running its own course alongside the others is a movement within polytheism toward artificiality in doing and artificiality in being. However far-fetched it may seem, syncretic animistic polytheism moves through multiplicity and compulsion to artificiality in being as well.
In 800 B.C. with relatively few gods, something like the Iliad milieu, it was possible to be a genuine polytheist. A fairly limited number of stories created some order in the world, overseen, perhaps, by a dozen gods (dozen seems to appeal to the human mind for completeness) who formed a ruling council over the affairs of men. The human mind is easily capable of dealing with such a limited council.
But as we have noted, even in the move to The Odyssey as an imaginative milieu, the number of gods and the types of supernatural realities has exploded.
Along with gods, the number of cults and rituals has also exploded, and people find themselves more and more going through motions—put on one mindset and one way of acting toward one deity, then move on to the next ritual of another god, putting on an appropriate mindset and way of acting toward another. Unfortunately, the number of new roles to play has vastly exceeded human capability to the point where only a superhero with supernatural patronage is at all likely to survive. Things have just become too complex, the neighborhood has become overloaded with potential supernatural dangers, and most humans have simply become victims.
Even if the average person is overwhelmed, however, that person has also become thoroughly artificial, the artifice required for one cult and then the next ritual. Technically one should tolerantly believe in all of them—one should be genuine. In fact. However, there is no human ability to be that adaptable.
Becoming a Performer
But one can become a better and better artificialist or as we are more likely to say, a better and better actor. Like a troupe of Shakespearean actors doubling in many roles, humanity rushes off stage to throw off the garments and the person of the last scene in order to be ready for a new entrance as a new person in the succeeding scene. It can be exhilarating—the rush, that is, can be exhilarating. Remember to pinch your cheeks, don’t forget new buckles for your shoes, change your posture to move from the aristocratic woman to wardrobe maid, and on and on and on.
Moreover, people caught up in all that activity become shrewd judges of others’ acting abilities. And how well they have acted in the currently necessary part becomes the sine qua non of success. Genuine feeling, genuine decision, genuine personality disappear.
Working Backward from the End of the Silent Years
If we start at the end, in Imperial Rome, there are innumerable evidences of an artificial world. The populace waits for the next public performance, whether in the theatre, the hippodrome, or the gladiatorial arena. The Coliseum becomes the hallmark of the age. And, of course, any self-respecting city around the Mediterranean has to have its own Coliseum theatre as well—it is, after all, theatre—and the audience is more than encouraged to judge the acting, pointing thumbs down when disappointed and thumbs up when enthralled. Exotic wild animal shows, orgies, and elaborate banqueting of the upper classes, so at odds with the genuine simplicity admired throughout Roman Republican times, became all the rage. An Empress like Julia or Messalina is the centerpiece of orgiastic performance. The Emperor Nero himself dreams of becoming a star actor and forces himself literally onto the professional stage.
Dionysian Theatre
Move back to 500 B.C. and at Athens we find the infancy of Dionysian tragedy. It is magnificently artificial. There are rules of competition—trust the Greeks for rules—including a rule for a single main actor and for a set-number chorus divided into a strophe and an antistrophe with a single group spokesperson as leader of the Chorus. Comparatively, the Roman gladiatorial combat was the new kid on the block. Every self-respecting city had had an amphitheater for Greek drama a hundred years or more earlier.
Study of Performance
Early in the Silent Year period, drama became worth being studied and defined and found its greatest theoretician in Aristotle. But the Romans were themselves not so interested in theatre as they were in oratory, acted-out political stances with a view to persuasion. From the Sophists and Aristotle to Horace and Longinus, the Silent Years became years of intense study of rhetoric and oratory never perhaps equaled until the advent of motion picture drama and mass media polemics.
Cult and Ritual Performance
The Greeks had emphasized theatre even before the Dionysian in a great many ways. After all, all cults and all rituals require acting out. The Delphic Oracle with its drugged Pythoness sitting on a tripod surrounded by real pythons and mumbling unintelligible words for the world to live by is a wonderful and persistent picture from a theatre world. It is worth noting that the picture as recited above does not include the priest who writes down the mumblings, turns them into intelligible and even poetic language, and delivers them to the expectant, paying audience.
Athletic Performance: The Olympics
Probably the greatest of the Greek theatrical productions, however, were the Olympics, produced for their potential unifying effects on the ever-bickering Greeks as far back as the first Olympiad in 776 BC. Greek rules again dominated, all rather secondary to the rule that athletes perform and compete in the nude. Such costuming is inherently compelling, as the motion picture celebrating the first modern Olympics, The First Olympics (1984 TV miniseries), makes both jarringly and comically apparent.
Theatre, Artifice, Performance, and the Jews
Theatre was one of the ways the Gentiles influenced and annoyed the Jews in their Palestinian backwater. The Greeks brought the dramatic theatre and the gymnasium with them everywhere that Alexander conquered. These performnce institutions were meant to make everybody Greek.
They didn’t, however, make the Jews Greek. Rather, the presence of the theatre and the gymnasium along with its nude contestants is given substantial credit for Jewish revolt under the Macabbees. The Jewish God had always asserted Himself to be The Genuine God, with genuine history and genuine inter-relationsip with his human followers and was, in fact, offended by artifice.
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