, 'Belonging to the Mountain Dancer',
just as others may be named 'Apollonius' or 'Dionysius'. The god is only
the spirit of the Mountain Dance, Oreibates, though of course he is
absorbed at different times in various Olympians. There is one god
called Aphiktor, the Suppliant, He who prays for mercy. He is just the
projection, as M. Doutte would say, of the intense emotion of one of
those strange processions well known in the ancient world, bands of
despairing men or women who have thrown away all means of self-defence
and join together at some holy place in one passionate prayer for pity.
The highest of all gods, Zeus, was the special patron of the suppliant;
and it is strange and instructive to find that Zeus the all-powerful is
actually identified with this Aphiktor: +Zeus men 'Aphiktor epidoi
prophronos+.[28:1] The assembled prayer, the united cry that rises from
the oppressed of the world, is itself grown to be a god, and the
greatest god. A similar projection arose from the dance of the _Kouroi_,
or initiate youths, in the dithyramb--the magic dance which was to
celebrate, or more properly, to hasten and strengthen, the coming on of
spring. That dance projected the Megistos Kouros, the greatest of
youths, who is the incarnation of spring or the return of life, and lies
at the back of so many of the most gracious shapes of the classical
pantheon. The Kouros appears as Dionysus, as Apollo, as Hermes, as Ares:
in our clearest and most detailed piece of evidence he actually appears
with the characteristic history and attributes of Zeus.[28:2]

This spirit of the dance, who leads it or personifies its emotion,
stands more clearly perhaps than any other daemon half-way between
earth and heaven. A number of difficult passages in Euripides' _Bacchae_
and other Dionysiac literature find their explanations when we realize
how the god is in part merely identified with the inspired chief dancer,
in part he is the intangible projected incarnation of the emotion of the
dance.

* * * * *

'The collective desire personified': on what does the collective desire,
or collective dread, of the primitive community chiefly concentrate? On
two things, the food-supply and the tribe-supply, the desire not to die
of famine and not to be harried or conquered by the neighbouring tribe.
The fertility of the earth and the fertility of the tribe, these two are
felt in early religion as one.[29:1] The earth is a m