od Hermes was
represented in every period by a slab of stone set upright, a human
head and other human features being indicated on it. Even in later
Greece, boards or blocks of wood were in some places exhibited on
rare occasions, which were the oldest images of the Artemis or the
Aphrodite there adored. Though for the public eye splendid statues
had taken the place of the goddess, the original image was still
thought to have a sanctity all its own. We also notice that the gods
of Greece are associated with animals. Zeus is a bull in Crete; he
has also other transformations: Pan is a goat; Artemis is a bear in
some provinces, elsewhere a doe. The Athene of the Acropolis is a
serpent. Apollo is sometimes connected with the mouse. Along with
these identifications of the gods with animals we may mention the
animal emblems with which they are generally represented. The eagle
is the bird of Zeus, the owl of Athene, the peacock of Hera, the dove
of Aphrodite. In this connection we cannot help thinking of the
sacred animals of the Egyptian nomes; and the question may be asked
whether such animals must be taken to be in Greece also the signs of
a primitive totemism?

Of the tree-worship of Greece much has been written of late. The oak
was the sacred tree of Zeus; he must have been conceived as living in
it; he gave oracles at Dodona by the rustling of the branches of the
tree. Athene has the olive, Apollo the palm, and also the laurel.
After the introduction of agriculture rustic cults arose, in which
the inhabitants of a village followed in sympathetic rites the
fortunes of the gods who live in the life of the plants in summer and
die with them in autumn. The god of the Semites is generally a
changeless being, who himself conducts and orders the changes of the
seasons, but in Greece we find gods whom man can accompany in the
tragedy of their fall and the triumph of their rise. We shall see
afterwards that the rustic worships of Demeter and Proserpine were
brought forward at a critical period in Greek religion, to supply an
element which was much required in it. These worships, similar, as
Mr. Frazer suggests,[1] to those still kept up by our own peasantry,
were doubtless of immemorial antiquity in Greece, though in the
earlier period they are little heard of.

[Footnote 1: _Golden Bough_, vol. i. p. 356.]

Thus the Greek gods grew up in the period before Greece was awakened
to new thoughts by contact with foreign peoples.