The title of this book and its relation to my Prolegomena may call for a word of explanation.

In the Prolegomena I was chiefly concerned to show that the religion of Homer was no more primitive than his language. The Olympian gods—that is, the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Pheidias and the mythographers—seemed to me like a bouquet of cut-flowers whose bloom is brief, because they have been severed from their roots. To find those roots we must burrow deep into a lower stratum of thought, into those chthonic cults which underlay their life and from which sprang all their brilliant blossoming.

So swift has been the advance in science or rather in historical imagination, so complete the shift of standpoint, that it has become difficult to conceive that, in 1903, any such protest was needed. Since the appearance of Professor Murray's Rise of the Greek Epic we realize how late and how enlightened was the compromise represented by these Olympians. We can even picture to ourselves the process by which their divinity was shorn of each and every ‘mystical or monstrous’ attribute.

When in 1907 a second edition of my book was called for, its theories seemed to me already belated. My sense of the superficiality of Homer's gods had deepened to a conviction that these Olympians were not only non-primitive, but positively in a sense non-religious.

More than one theory has recently been put forward by English scholars, to account for the origin of the Olympic Games. It has been felt that the naive view which sees in these athletic contests no more than the survival of an expedient, comparable to the whisky-drinking at an Irish wake, for cheering up the mourners after the funeral of a chieftain, clearly leaves something to be desired; for it entails the rejection of the whole ancient tradition recorded by Pindar, Pausanias, and others. Some part of this tradition is, indeed, undoubtedly fictitious—the deliberate invention of incoming peoples who wished to derive their claims from a spurious antiquity. Nothing is easier than to detect these genealogical forgeries; but when we have put them aside, there remains much that is of a totally different character—the myths, for instance, used by Pindar in his first Olympian. This residuum calls for some explanation; and no theory which dismisses it bodily as so much motiveless ‘poetic fiction’ can be accepted as satisfactory.

The first hypothesis that claims serious consideration is the current view, lately defended by Professor Ridgeway. Games were held, he says, in honour of heroes, beside the tomb, ‘in order doubtless to please the spirit of the dead man within.’ ‘Athletic feats, contests of horsemanship, and tragic dances are all part of the same principle—the honouring and appeasing of the dead.’

In the last two chapters we have examined in some detail two great festivals of the Greeks, the spring Dithyramb, which according to Aristotle gave birth to the drama, and the Olympic Games celebrated every fifth year at or after the summer solstice. We have seen that the primary gist of both these festivals was the promotion of fertility and that each of them alike gave birth to a daimon of fertility who took on various names and shapes. The Dithyramb gave birth to the Greatest Kouros whose matured form in Crete was that of Father Zeus, but elsewhere he crystallized as Kouros into the figure of Dionysos. At Olympia, starting again from the Kouretes the daimon of fertility took various heroic shapes as Oinomaos, as Pelops, and finally again bequeathed something of his nature and functions to the Olympic Zeus himself.

We have by this time a fairly clear notion of one element in the nature of a daimon. We have seen him to be the product, the projection, the representation of collective emotion. Normally and naturally he is attended by the group or thiasos that begets him, but gradually he attains independent personality. We have also seen that in primitive communities this collective emotion focuses around and includes food interests and especially food-animals and fruit-trees.

We have seen how the mystic, at his initiation by the Kouretes, ‘accomplished the Thunders.’ Another rite remains, more dread and, to our modern thinking, utterly repugnant. Before he can become a Bacchos, the candidate must have

The omophagia or Eating of Raw Flesh was a rite not confined to the Kouretic initiation of a Bacchos. We meet it again in the Thracian worship of Dionysos. The Bacchae when they recount τὰ νομισθέντα, their accustomed rites, sing the glory and

The Bacchoi in Crete eat of a bull, the Bacchae in Thrace and Macedon of a hill-goat; the particular animal matters little, the essential is that there should be a communal feast of Raw Flesh, a δαὶς ὠμοφάγος.

Physically repugnant the rite must always be to our modern taste, which prefers to cook its goats and bulls before eating them; but our moral repugnance disappears, or at least suffers profound modification, when the gist of the rite is understood. What specially revolts us is that the tearing and eating of bulls and goats should be supposed to be a sacrifice pleasing to a god. We naturally feel that from the point of view of edification the less said about the worship of such gods the better.