volution through the lower and higher barbarism.
The worst features of savage ritual are different--taking the lines of
sorcery, of cruel initiations, and, perhaps, of revival of the licence of
promiscuity, or of Group Marriage. Of these things the traces are not
absent from Greek faith, but they are comparatively inconspicuous.

Buffoonery, as we have seen, exists in all grades of civilised or savage
rites, and was not absent from the popular festivals of the mediaeval
Church: religion throwing her mantle over every human field of action, as
over Folk Medicine. On these lines I venture to explain what seem to me
the strange and repugnant elements of the religion of a people so
refined, and so capable of high moral ideas, as the Greeks. Aphrodite is
personified desire, but religion did not throw her mantle over desire
alone; the cloistered life, the frank charm of maidenhood, were as dear
to the Greek genius, and were consecrated by the examples of Athene,
Artemis, and Hestia. She presides over the pure element of the fire of
the hearth, just as in the household did the daughter of the king or
chief. Hers are the first libations at feasts (xxviii. 5), though in
Homer they are poured forth to Hermes.

We may explain the Gods of the minor hymns in the same way. Pan, for
instance, as the son of Hermes, inherits the wild, frolicsome, rural
aspect of his character. The Dioscuri answer to the Vedic Asvins, twin
rescuers of men in danger on land or sea: perhaps the Evening and Morning
Star. Dionysus is another aspect of the joy of life and of the world and
the vintaging. Moon and Sun, Selene and Helios, appear as quite distinct
from Artemis and Apollo; Gaea, the Earth, is equally distinct from
Demeter. The Hymn to Ares is quite un-Homeric in character, and is oddly
conceived in the spirit of the Scottish poltroon, who cries to his
friend, "Haud me, haud me, or I'll fecht!" The war-god is implored to
moderate the martial eagerness of the poet. The original collector here
showed lack of discrimination. At no time, however, was Ares a popular
God in Greece; in Homer he is a braggart and coward.

THE HYMN TO DEMETER

The beautiful Hymn to Demeter, an example of Greek religious faith in its
most pensive and most romantic aspects, was found in the last century
(1780), in Moscow. _Inter pullos et porcos latitabat_: the song of the
rural deity had found its way into the haunts of the humble creatures
whom she