Zeus, the central figure
of the Olympians, though our authorities generally add an epithet to
him, and call him Zeus Meilichios, Zeus of Placation. A god with an
'epithet' is always suspicious, like a human being with an 'alias'. Miss
Harrison's examination (_Prolegomena_, pp. 28 ff.) shows that in the
rites Zeus has no place at all. Meilichios from the beginning has a
fairly secure one. On some of the reliefs Meilichios appears not as a
god, but as an enormous bearded snake, a well-known representation of
underworld powers or dead ancestors. Sometimes the great snake is alone;
sometimes he rises gigantic above the small human worshippers
approaching him. And then, in certain reliefs, his old barbaric presence
vanishes, and we have instead a benevolent and human father of gods and
men, trying, as Miss Harrison somewhere expresses it, to look as if he
had been there all the time.

There was a sacrifice at the Diasia, but it was not a sacrifice given to
Zeus. To Zeus and all the heavenly gods men gave sacrifice in the form
of a feast, in which the god had his portion and the worshippers theirs.
The two parties cemented their friendship and feasted happily together.
But the sacrifice at the Diasia was a holocaust:[14:2] every shred of
the victim was burnt to ashes, that no man might partake of it. We know
quite well the meaning of that form of sacrifice: it is a sacrifice to
placate or appease the powers below, the Chthonioi, the dead and the
lords of death. It was performed, as our authorities tell us, +meta
stygnotetos+, with shuddering or repulsion.[15:1]

The Diasia was a ritual of placation, that is, of casting away various
elements of pollution or danger and appeasing the unknown wraths of the
surrounding darkness. The nearest approach to a god contained in this
festival is Meilichios, and Meilichios, as we shall see later, belongs
to a particular class of shadowy beings who are built up out of ritual
services. His name means '_He of appeasement_', and he is nothing else.
He is merely the personified shadow or dream generated by the emotion of
the ritual--very much, to take a familiar instance, as Father Christmas
is a 'projection' of our Christmas customs.

* * * * *

The Thesmophoria formed the great festival of Demeter and her daughter
Kore, though here again Demeter appears with a clinging epithet,
Thesmophoros. We know pretty clearly the whole course of the ritual:
there is th