concretely real, so lucid in shape, and which gave to them detailed 

 personal histories, was a natural development of the early period 

 just mentioned. !n the more primitive stage, as Murray points 

 out, certain animals, because most probably of their peculiar or 

 possibly very valuable qualities, were early held as divine. But, 

 as the development went on, the worship of animals gave place 

 to the worship of the Olympic gods. The transition between the 

 two stages was, no doubt, assisted by that custom, which research 

 has shown to exist among many primitive tribes, of a man's wear- 

 ing the head or skin of a holy beast. "The Mana of the slain beast 

 is in his hide and head and blood and fur and the man who wants 

 to be in thorough contact with the divinity gets inside the skin 

 and wraps himself deep in it." l Here is the original medicine- 

 man, soon looked upon as in part at least divine; but, as Dr. Frazer 

 has suggested, some medicine-men have their failures. The people 

 begin to see that he makes mistakes and then, naturally enough, 

 they make the inference that he is not a god but rather a repre- 

 sentative only. The real god lives far away oh some inaccessible 

 mountain, or possibly in the sky. And so the transition, which 

 likely required generations of human thought and action, is ulti- 

 mately made. In Greece, the way was, no doubt, thus prepared 

 for the second great stage in its religious development, the stage 

 which Murray has called the Olympian Conquest. 



The Homeric poems, whether the work of one writer or more, 

 are the outcome of long processes of growth. True, they transcend 

 in many ways the primitive religion of the earlier period, but they 

 were, nevertheless, much influenced thereby. The multiplicity 

 of myths and the crowd of deities which resulted proved at last, 

 however, a weariness to the developing Greek. " Legends clustered 

 like weeds in a pathless and primaeval forest, obstructed by ever- 

 fresh undergrowth. The thinning axe was wanted, and a hand was 

 presently found to wield it with thew and sinew." 2 Hesiod, a 

 man whose intellect, though clear, was clumsy, attempted this 

 task. He made a brave but unsuccessful attempt to bring order 

 into the chaos, endeavouring to revive many of the dimly-under- 

 stood traditions extant among the Greeks of his day. The final 



1 Four Stages of Greek Religion, P. 38. 



2 Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, Vol. I, P. 38. 



