2 Rafael Karsten. [N:o 1. 



Mycenaean age was probably not the earliest in the history 

 of Greece. 



There is, I think, only one method which can really help when 

 we try to get an idea of the religious condition of the Greeks 

 in those remote times about which the literary records tell us 

 nothing, a method which in our days seems to receive ever 

 more acknowledgment on the part of classical students.^) Greek 

 religion should be viewed in the light which modern an- 

 thropology has thrown upon the religions of the lower races 

 at large. Thanks to ethnological researches which in our 

 days have been carried on among primitive peoples through- 

 out the world, our knowledge of their beliefs and rites is 

 now comprehensive enough to enable us to make religion 

 as a whole an object of scientific study. There have been 

 established certain laws which seem to have been at work in 

 religious evolution in general and to have determined the way 

 in which the human mind everywhere, independently of racial 

 diiferences and national peculiarities, has formed its iirst ideas 

 of unseen spiritual powers. It is obvious that the results thus 

 arrived at, as far as they are reliable, may afford a valuable 

 guide when we have to elucidate one special religion. 



As a matter of fact Greek religion, as viewed in litera- 

 ture and art, presents many features which belong to a pri- 

 mitive stratum of thought. If we may speak of survival in 

 culture we have still more reason to speak of survival in re- 

 ligion, the couservative character of which is well-known 

 to all students of ist phenomena. There is a great exaggera- 

 tion in the view of those anthropologists who look upon the 

 religious evolution as a steady and contiuual process, who 

 make mankind pass by regular steps through successive 

 stages ot animism, fetishism, totemism, anthropomorphism, and 

 whatever various names are given to them, in the same 

 simple way as we pass from one fioor of a building to the 

 next; or who believe that ideas and customs are changed just 

 as we throw ofif one artide of clothing in order to dress our- 

 selves in another. Empirical reality knows nothing of such a 



1) See Rohde, Kleine Schriften, II, p. 318. Steller, Die griechischen 

 KuUusalterthiimer, p. 7. Usener, Götternamen. Harrison, Prolegomena to the 

 Study of Greek Religion. Kern, Die Anfänge der hellenischen Religion. 



