6o tHE COMING OF MAN 



needs and fears, wonder, observation and hard experience man 

 came to believe in beings or forces, call them spirits if you 

 will, who kept watch of him and punished severely, the for- 

 bidden act of trespass; some of whom might be willing to 

 help him while others could be placated. Cult and ritual for 

 appeasing the angry and helping the kindly spirits grew very 

 similarly to the growth of Mores and morals. Morals and 

 religion advanced together, man cooperating with his gods. 

 We may call them demons, if we will leave out the necessary 

 implication of evil and malice usually implied in this word. 

 Their character like that of man varied from extremes of evil 

 to those of preponderating good. 



Professor Murray has well pictured the primitive ritual and 

 belief of the ancient Greeks before the arrival of Achaeans or 

 genuine Hellenes. These ancient Pelasgi, if we may call them 

 so, worshipped spirits or demons in indefinitely vast numbers 

 but with no individual names; represented, if at all, by em- 

 blems or symbols very rarely in human bodily form. Of these 

 demons of calamity, disease, death, madness; of fertility and 

 other forms of beneficence, there were " thousands upon thou- 

 sands, from whom man can never escape or hide." ^^ 



Men had become tillers of the ground. Their life was still 

 precarious. " Their food depended on the crops of one tiny 

 plot of ground. All the while they knew almost nothing of 

 the real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only 

 felt sure it was a matter of pollution, or unexpiated defile- 

 ment. It is this state of things that explains the curious 

 cruelty of agricultural works, v/hich like most cruelty had its 

 roots in terror, terror of the breach of taboo — the For- 

 bidden Thing.'' 



Neolithic man, with his new discoveries and industries, had 

 given new hostages to fortune, and a new and wider scope of 

 application to the old doctrine of taboo and of tribal re- 

 sponsibility. This strengthened the hold of the priest or ma- 

 gician on the hopes, fears, and faith of his people. The law 

 is going deeper as well as wider. There arises an individual 



10 6(5. 



