temple’s ritual routine. Greek purity regulations need not concern the ‘‘pure’’ gods
who inhabit the sacred realm. The author of the Hippocratic treatiseOn the Sacred
Disease, written in the late fifth or early fourth century BC, expresses a widely shared
sentiment about the separation of that realm from the world around it:
the gods we ourselves build boundaries for their sanctuaries and sacred precincts in order
that no one may transgress them unless he is pure [hagneuein], and, upon entering,
besprinkle ourselves with water [perirrainesthai] not as people who defile [miainesthai]
but who purify themselves [aphagnieisthai] from any pollution [musos] that we have
contracted in the past. (Hippocrates,On the Sacred Disease6, 364 Littre ́)The very activities that characterize everyday life – birth, death, sexual intercourse,
defecation, commerce, and others – are excluded from the sanctuary. Therite de
se ́parationbecomes a ritual necessity: purification by water upon entering a sanctuary
is the most economical and hence routinerite de passage; we have already seen how
the superstitious man uses that device to excess. In some cases, as in some mystery
initiations or the Epidaurian incubation ritual, access becomes contingent upon a
particular state of purity (hagneia), attained through a period of ritual fasting, and the
abstention from certain animal foods and sexual intercourse. The actual religious
event is marked by symbolically charged dress codes: white clothing, for instance, and
the absence of the color black. But attaining suchhagneiais intended to prepare for
exceptional religious experiences; it is not necessarily part of religious routine in the
Greek world.
In Greek purity regulations, however, purification on entering, as a ritual of
demarcating the sacred realm, is only one prerequisite of access to the divine. The
literary sources claim that general notions about the sources of pollution – such as
childbirth, death, or homicide – were shared among many. But the details of purity
regulations may differ from region to region or from city to city, and sometimes
display differences in one and the same polis. The Greekleges sacraeor ‘‘sacred laws’’
preserve numerous instances which specify the, or some, common sources of ritual
pollution, the time which has to pass before the polluted person may enter the
sanctuary, and the required purificatory ritual. These sources can include childbirth
or contact therewith, miscarriage or contact therewith, abortion, menstruation,
sexual intercourse, either with one’s own spouse or with the spouse of another
person, the consumption of certain animal foods, contact with a corpse, or blood-
shed. These prohibitions relate to ordinary worshipers; they display considerable
variation with regard to the number of days that need to pass between the pollution
and the purification ritual, the nature of that ritual, and the persons concerned. One
might expect temple personnel, priests, and priestesses to obey requirements which
go beyond these purity regulations; but that seems to hold true only in a minority of
cases.
Several of these leges sacrae date to the hellenistic and Roman periods. In a
significant number of these post-classical texts the prohibitions are related to immi-
grant cults such as Isis, Sarapis, Men, or the Syrian deities. Therefore, it must prima
facie remain doubtful whether they are fully representative of Greek notions of purity
and pollution, particularly in the archaic and classical periods. It would be misguided,
however, to regard them as foreign to Greek religious thought, simply because they
Purity and Pollution 181