_Tabu_ is at first sight a far more prominent element in the primitive religions than _Mana_, just as misfortune and crime are more highly coloured and striking than prosperity and decent behaviour. To an early Greek tribe the world of possible action was sharply divided between what was Themis and what was Not Themis, between lawful and _tabu_, holy and unholy, correct and forbidden. To do a thing that was not Themis was a sure source of public disaster. Consequently it was of the first necessity in a life full of such perils to find out the exact rules about them. How is that to be managed? Themis is ancient law: it is +ta patria+, the way of our ancestors, the thing that has always been done and is therefore divinely right. In ordinary life, of course, Themis is clear. Every one knows it. But from time to time new emergencies arise, the like of which we have never seen, and they frighten us. We must go to the Gerontes, the Old Men of the Tribe; they will perhaps remember what our fathers did. What they tell us will be _Presbiston_, a word which means indifferently 'oldest' and 'best'--+aiei de neôteroi aphradeousin+, 'Young men are always being foolish'. Of course, if there is a Basileus, a holy King, he by his special power may perhaps know best of all, though he too must take care not to gainsay the Old Men.
For the whole problem is to find out +ta patria+, the ways that our fathers followed. And suppose the Old Men themselves fail us, what must we needs do? Here we come to a famous and peculiar Greek custom, for which I have never seen quoted any exact parallel or any satisfactory explanation. If the Old Men fail us, we must go to those older still, go to our great ancestors, the +hêrôes+, the Chthonian people, lying in their sacred tombs, and ask them to help. The word +chran+ means both 'to lend money' and 'to give an oracle', two ways of helping people in an emergency. Sometimes a tribe might happen to have a real ancestor buried in the neighbourhood; if so, his tomb would be an oracle. More often perhaps, for the memories of savage tribes are very precarious, there would be no well-recorded personal tomb. The oracle would be at some place sacred to the Chthonian people in general, or to some particular personification of them, a Delphi or a cave of Trophônius, a place of Snakes and Earth. You go to the Chthonian folk for guidance because they are themselves the Oldest of the Old Ones, and they know the real custom: they know what is Presbiston, what is Themis. And by an easy extension of this knowledge they are also supposed to know what is. He who knows the law fully to the uttermost also knows what will happen if the law is broken. It is, I think, important to realize that the normal reason for consulting an oracle was not to ask questions of fact. It was that some emergency had arisen in which men simply wanted to know how they ought to behave. The advice they received in this way varied from the virtuous to the abominable, as the religion itself varied. A great mass of oracles can be quoted enjoining the rules of customary morality, justice, honesty, piety, duty to a man's parents, to the old, and to the weak. But of necessity the oracles hated change and strangled the progress of knowledge. Also, like most manifestations of early religion, they throve upon human terror: the more blind the terror the stronger became their hold. In such an atmosphere the lowest and most beastlike elements of humanity tended to come to the front; and religion no doubt as a rule joined with them in drowning the voice of criticism and of civilization, that is, of reason and of mercy. When really frightened the oracle generally fell back on some remedy full of pain and blood. The medieval plan of burning heretics alive had not yet been invented. But the history of uncivilized man, if it were written, would provide a vast list of victims, all of them innocent, who died or suffered to expiate some portent or _monstrum_--some reported +teras+--with which they had nothing whatever to do, which was in no way altered by their suffering, which probably never really happened at all, and if it did was of no consequence. The sins of the modern world in dealing with heretics and witches have perhaps been more gigantic than those of primitive men, but one can hardy rise from the record of these ancient observances without being haunted by the judgement of the Roman poet: