f our view is correct, it is obvious that in a better knowledge of the Anatolian worship lies the key to an extremely early stage of human development ; and that this religion has to be compared with the most primitive stages of the known ancient religions of the east Mediterranean lands. As a rule, even the most ancient Semitic cults are known to us chiefly in a consider- ably developed stage ; and the Anatolian religion takes us behind them. In that land true religious development was arrested by causes at which we might guess; and the primitive revelation of the Mother-Goddess found no prophets and seers to carry it to completion: see § VIII (9).
B. THE HELLENIC RELIGION.—In studying the development of thought in the strictly Greek lands, we are inevitably carried back to an ancient form of religion there prevalent, which presented a marked similarity to the simple primitive Ana- tolian cultus, The extent and the limits of the similarity cannot be determined with our present knowledge. But everywhere, in attempting to comprehend the developed Hellenic religion, one finds that it rests on this substratum of deep religious feeling, which sometimes was hardly articulate, and in that case was often rather looked down upon as superstition and devodarpovla ( Ac 17”) by the more educated and philosophic minds.
I. EARLY GREEK RELIGION.—Frequent refer- ences occur in Herodotus to an older Greek or Pelasgian religion different in character from the religion of which he conceived Homer and Hesiod to be the organizers (ii. 53). Arcadia he believed to contain more of the Pelasgian character than any other part of Greece. Precisely in Arcadia and the adjoining parts of the Peloponnesus, the strongest traces of such a pre-Hellenic religion are shown in the description of Pausanias. According to Herodotus (ii. 53), the gods of that old religion
* The ‘nomadization’ of Asia Minor has been the chief cause of the present desolation : see Impressions of Turkey, p. 103, and the paper already quoted in Geographical Journal, Sept. 1902.
had no names and no images. The meaning of this statement is that statues (dyé\uara) in the later sense were not used. Symbols of various kinds, however, existed in greater number and variety perhaps in Arcadia than in other parts of Greece ; but Herodotus, who was speaking of the anthropomorphizing tendency in religion, would not call those rude and non-human embodiments dyd\para. Epithets of a more general character were attached to these gods, but not proper indi- vidual names: among these epithets we may reckon ‘the Great God or Gods’ (@eds péyioros, Geol uéyioro), ‘the Pure Gods’ (Geol xaapol), ‘the Good God or Genius’ (dya6ds Geds or Saluwy), as well as ‘the Propitiated Gods’ (@eot jmeAlyeor), ‘the Revered Ones’ (Zeuvat), ‘the Kings’ (d&vaxres).
In this religion the worship of the Earth-Goddess appears in various aspects. She is sometimes the physical conception, but more generally is con- ceived in a more moral aspect, as the orderly harmonious march of physical phenomena, under such epithets as Themis, Harmonia, etc. This order is an avenging power that punishes all offence against itself: it is then Praxidike, Adra- steia, Nemesis, etc. It is also connected with happiness, wealth, and prosperity, and the god- dess is then Tyche, Chryse, ete. The goddess is often accompanied by a male genius or deity, described as her husband or brother or attendant or child. He appears as the dyaAds daluwy, the pro- tecting hero, or the genius of fertilizing power.
Traces of this religion may be found in most parts of Greece: in Attica, in Boeotia, and the Northern islands, as well as in the Peloponnesus. The goddess is akin in nature to the Italian Bona Dea. It is a pre-Hellenic religion, but it has much of the Greek spirit about it. The deities have in many cases as much of moral as of physical character ; Themis becomes a Hellenic conception. The relation of such older forms of belief to the true Hellenic religion is well given by Adschylus (Eumen. 1 ff.) in his history of the oracle at Delphi, where the gradual change from the first Gaia to the latest Apollo is clearly shown. No conflict is there said to take place, but the older religion merges in and is recognized by the later, so that the purely physical conception of the Earth (Gaia) is moralized and harmonized into Themis, and Themis is elevated into the highest Hellenic type, Phoebus Apollo, through the inter- mediate stage Phoebe, who is evidently a mere device to facilitate the transition in sex, as the god Pheebus inherits in right of his sister Phoebe. On the other hand, Aischylus (Agamemnon, 178 ff.) describes the relation of the Hellenic Zeus to the older dynasty as that of a conqueror and almost a destroyer.
These passages are important as showing that the Greeks always retained the recollection of a certain succession and development in religion, and occasionally they connect it—and in our view rightly—with the succession of races in Greece, where the later conquered without destroying the older.
The development of the Earth-Goddess into Themis was exactly paralleled by that of the older Demeter into Demeter Thesmophoros, ‘the intro- ducer of thesmoz’ (Gecpol, ‘ordinances’), whois known chiefly in Beotia, the plain of Athens, and Paros. The agricultural idea lies at the bottom of her chief festival at the time of the autumn ploughing and sowing, But that fundamental reference was merged in another idea, viz. the analogy between the continuation of the human family and the operations of agriculture.* The goddess Thesmo-