Chapter IL 



Hypochtonic deities. 



The divine powers we have hitherto been discussing, and 

 which all were supposed to originate from or to be in essential 

 connectjon with the visible earth, may be called chtonic dei- 

 ties in a broad sense of the word. But there was also an- 

 other important class of beings whose abode and sphere of action 

 were located in the under world. There is no reason to doubt 

 that even these hypochtonic deities had a place in the world 

 of supernatural powers believed in b}^ the early Greeks. True, 

 the idea of an Aides as a personal being, thought of as a 

 watcher of the de ad together with his direful wife Proserpine, 

 was, no doubt, a låter creation of Hellenic imagination just 

 as was the definite idea of a Hades as a wast subterranean 

 place where all the ghosts of departed men were assembled. 

 Nor can we assume that the notion of a special earth-spirit, 

 a riqf.nqtriQ, conceived of as a begetter and sustainer of things 

 agricultural, and also as a queen of the under-world, was at- 

 tained to by a people among whom agriculture, if practiced 

 at all, was at any råte of inferior importance. But ou 

 the other hand it can hardly be doubted that the primitive 

 Greeks already possessed some vague ideas of an unseen, 

 mysterious world underneath this visible earth, and believed, 

 moreover, that the former like the latter was peopled with 

 supernatural powers. In the previous pages we have, indeed, 

 incidents lly referred to the dominion of such hypochtonic 

 deities and even touched on some of these deities themselves. 

 Thus in discussing the cult of the winds we found that where- 

 as some of them were supposed to emanate from the waters 

 on the surface of the earth there were others, as for instance 



