PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 637 
accompanied St. John to Ephesus, lodged in a dwelling at some distance from the 
city, and there died—a belief which we know from the French traveller Tournefort 
to have been held locally two centuries ago—identified the holy house with a 
ruined building, standing above a spring in the southern hills, and dedicated by the 
Orthodox Church to Panaghié Kapouli—Our Lady of the Gate. He succeeded in | 
buying the site and much ground about it, fenced it in, found the gardens which 
the Virgin had tended, and the path with its stations by which she had climbed 
daily to Calvary on the hill-top, and when I was there was sanguine of finding 
also her tomb. He proclaimed his discoveries far and wide and instituted two 
pilgrimages which now draw thousands of Catholics every year on the Wednesday 
in Easter week and in the octave of the Assumption. So far we are considering a 
conscious revival, located by a coincidence at the great Asiatic seat of the pagan 
Virgin Goddess. But there is a stranger coincidence of which the good priest was 
not conscious. The holy house stands far from all villages or haunts of men at 
the head of that same glen of Ortygia where we know, from Strabo and Tacitus, 
stood the original shrine of the great Ephesian Mother. It stands too on obviously 
earlier foundations, and, as I have said, over an Aghiasma, as it is called, that is, 
a holy spring. Indeed, very possibly it occupies the actual site of the Ortygian 
temple. How did this coincidence come about? On this wise. When searching 
the Ephesian district the Smyrniote priest asked the Orthodox peasants for places 
sacred to the Virgin, and was directed to this in the glen as the most holy of all. 
It had been, in fact, a place of pilgrimages and of intercession for the sick, for rain 
and fertility, and for the easy delivery of women as far back as local tradition ran. 
This it had been because it was Ortygia, though the villagers of Kirkinji and 
Arvalia knew it not. In virtue of that fact the priest appropriated it, though he 
never suspected the identity ; and thither the faithful flock twice a year, even less 
aware of, but none the less compelled by, the persistent sanctity of Ortygia. 
Such, then, are the religious survivals which are not survivals at all in what 
may be called the pathological sense, not, that is to say, elements in actual religion 
which have survived their utility in the system ; and such should not, I urge, be 
treated by anthropologists without explicit reference to the fact that they are as 
full of meaning, as vital, and as necessary in actual cult as ever they were. They 
offer not so much examples of the conservatism of religion—a much used phrase of 
slightly contemptuous implication—as of the identity of the religious sense through- 
out the life of particular races and within certain geographical areas, and of the 
necessary conditions and limitations of its expression. They claim all the respect 
and tenderness of treatment due to beliefs which still make part of the foundations 
of our social order, and cannot be impaired or cut away, like a pathological sur- 
vival, without the provision of substitutes equally efficient, Even when the 
tudest beliefs of primitive and simple folk are dealt with, maxima debetur pueris 
reverentia; and much, be it remembered, in the content of these great classes of 
religious persistences is concerned with the belief of folk who are by no means 
simple or primitive. 
There remains of course an immense body of religious persistences which are 
more or less rightly to be regarded as survivals in the ordinary pathological sense, 
beliefs, observances, and rites, that is, which have indeed survived from earlier 
religious systems, and have lost or are losing their meaning, because they express 
nothing necessary or vital to the religious sense. So far as this class includes 
beliefs at all, these are of the kind which are called superstitions, and I 
venture, despite the reluctance of some anthropologists to admit a definite distinc- 
tion between religion and superstition, to maintain that there is such a distinction, 
and that it is just this, that superstition includes only those beliefs which are held 
wholly or chiefly because they have always been held ; which are, in effect, results 
of earlier religious systems, or survivals in the narrower pathological sense of the 
word. Some religious beliefs may be survivals in the wider sense; all superstitious 
beliefs are survivals in the narrower sense. 
The most numerous content of the class, however, is composed of observances 
and ceremonies. These may often persist as pathological survivals in connection 
