Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

The Transition from Sky to Sky-god 13

about. If, then, the magician or king imitated a storm made by
Zeus, how did Zeus make it ? The spirit of enquiry was awake
(with the Greeks it awoke early), and the obvious answer was that
Zeus must be a Master-mage, a King supreme, beyond the clouds.
Doubtless, said nascent reflexion, Zeus makes his thunder in
heaven much as our magician-king makes it upon earth, only on
a grander, more sonorous scale. But observe: if this was indeed
the sequence of thought, then the change from Sky to Sky-god
was occasioned not by any despair of magic1—for people might
well come to believe that Zeus the Sky-god made thunderstorms
and yet not cease believing that the magician-king could produce
the like—but rather by the discovery that magic, whether effective
or not, was a matter of imitation. In short, the transition from
Sky to Sky-god was a result, perhaps the first result, of conscious
reflexion upon the modus operandi of primitive magic.

On this showing the cult of an anthropomorphic Zeus was the
outcome of a long evolution comprising three well-marked stages,
in which the feelings, the will, and the intellect played successively
the principal part. First in order of development came emotion—
the awe felt by early man as he regarded the live azure above him,
potent to bliss or blight. Feeling in turn called forth will, when
the community was parched with drought and the magician by
his own passionate self-projection made the rushing rain-storm to
satisfy the thirst of man and beast. Later, much later, intellect
was brought to bear upon the process, distinguishing the imitation
from the thing imitated and expressing heaven in terms of earth.

1 Dr Frazer in a memorable chapter (op. cit. i. 220—243) argues that, when little by
little the essential futility of magic was discovered, the shrewder intelligences casting
about for an explanation of its failures would ascribe them to the more powerful magic
of great invisible beings—the gods—and thus would escape from the 'troubled sea of
doubt and uncertainty' into the 'quiet haven' of religion. Magic, he conjectures, every-
where came first, religion second, the latter being directly due to the unmasking of the
former.

The eloquence with which Dr Frazer has stated his case is only less admirable than
his learning. But for all that I believe him to be wrong. The baffled magician would
most plausibly account for his failure by attributing it to the counter-charms of some rival
practitioner on earth, say a neighbouring chief, or else to the machinations of a ghost,
say a dead ancestor of his own. Why should he—how could he—assume a sky-god,
unless the sky was already regarded as a divine Potency? And, if this was the case, then
religion was not subsequent to magic, but either prior to it or coeval with it. No
doubt, as Dr Frazer himself remarks (id. i. 223), much turns upon our exact definition
of religion. But personally I should not refuse the term 'religious' to the attitude of
reverential fear with which I suppose early man to have approached the animate Sky.
Indeed, it would not be absurd to maintain that this pre-anthropomorphic conception
was in some respects higher, because more true, than later anthropomorphism. After
all, 'God is not a man,' and early thought could hardly be drawn nearer to the idea
of the Infinite than by contemplating the endless blue of Heaven.