Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/157

 Reviews. 141

are found in ancient literature and monuments ; in early Christian art it is common, particularly in the Byzantine period ; it survives sjioradically down to the Quattrocento, and even appears in works of Luini and John Bellini. The literary evidence and that relating to the appearance of the rite in lay usage point to a Persian origin, and to its adoption in the court ceremonial of the Empire by Diocletian.

The last paper consists of 91 pages, entitled Der Untergang der antiken Religion. Unfortunately only the first chapter was found completed at Dieterich's death ; the remainder has been edited from notes used by the lecturer and those written by his audience. Obviously such a reconstruction will suffer by comparison with finished work ; it is a little bald, and the material would have been arranged somewhat differently in a written essay. But none the less the whole was well worth publishing. It gives an account, admirably clear and intelligible yet based on great learning, of the period of religious history with which Dieterich's studies had been chiefly occupied. He traces the internal causes of the fall of the high gods of Greece to " the revolution from above," manifested in the growth of the scientific spirit, rationalism, scepticism, and that last desperate venture of the Stoics, the attempted solution of religious doubts by allegorical interpretation, and " the revolution from below," beginning with Dionysos and the mysteries and culminating in Orphic magic, i.e. the development of a popular mysticism with its interests centred in a future life and built on the foundations of primitive superstition. "The revolution from without" passes in review the various cults, which invaded the ancient world in increasing numbers, and a chapter follows sketching the superstitious tendencies of the Alexandrian age, and its underworld of magic. The last chapter summarises the struggle and victory of Christianity.

One or two details in a general account are of course open to criticism, but it is a masterly and illuminating sketch. One realises in reading it the debt which Christianity owes to its organisation. It succeeded against its rivals partly because it was less compro- mising. It would never have uttered a plea based on surrender like that of Symmachus defending paganism against its assaults. "To the same stars we look upward, one heaven is above us, one