ame." Obviously if the Eleusinian Mysteries are of Phrygian origin
(Ramsay), they cannot also be of Egyptian origin (Foucart). In truth
they are no more specially of Phrygian or Egyptian than of Pawnee or
Peruvian origin. Mankind can and does evolve such ideas and rites in any
region of the world. {95b}

CONCLUSION

"What has all this farrago about savages to do with Dionysus?" I conceive
some scholar, or literary critic asking, if such an one looks into this
book. Certainly it would have been easier for me to abound in aesthetic
criticism of the Hymns, and on the aspect of Greek literary art which
they illustrate. But the Hymns, if read even through the pale medium of
a translation, speak for themselves. Their beauties and defects as
poetry are patent: patent, too, are the charm and geniality of the
national character which they express. The glad Ionian gatherings; the
archaic humour; the delight in life, and love, and nature; the pious
domesticities of the sacred Hearth; the peopling of woods, hills, and
streams with exquisite fairy forms; all these make the poetic delight of
the Hymns. But all these need no pointing out to any reader. The poets
can speak for themselves.

On the other hand the confusions of sacred and profane; the origins of
the Mysteries; the beginnings of the Gods in a mental condition long left
behind by Greece when the Hymns were composed; all these matters need
elucidation. I have tried to elucidate them as results of evolution from
the remote prehistoric past of Greece, which, as it seems, must in many
points have been identical with the historic present of the lowest
contemporary races. In the same way, if dealing with ornament, I would
derive the spirals, volutes, and concentric circles of Mycenaean gold
work, from the identical motives, on the oldest incised rocks and kists
of our Islands, of North and South America, and of the tribes of Central
Australia, recently described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, and Mr.
Carnegie. The material of the Mycenaean artist may be gold, his work may
be elegant and firm, but he traces the selfsame ornament as the naked
Arunta, with feebler hand, paints on sacred rocks or on the bodies of his
tribesmen. What is true of ornament is true of myth, rite, and belief.
Greece only offers a gracious modification of the beliefs, rites, and
myths of the races who now are "nearest the beginning," however remote
from that unknown beginning they may