Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/540

 answered. But both gods and men are concerned with this upper world only; death closes all relations between them. The gods are unconcerned, unless it be for some special favourite; they live on Olympus as aforetime amid feasting, quarrelling, laughter, and love; but men leave these pursuits and pastimes, and go down to the misery of Hades' house; their souls which fled lamenting from their limbs at the hour of death still exist, else could they not appear to living men in the visions of night; but their existence is all misery, for they lack all that made this life pleasant. Their joys had been the joys of a strenuous, full-blooded life, the joys of battle, of feasting, of song, of comradeship; and these joys were no more. The future existence of the soul was, to the Achaeans, simply the negation of the present bodily life.

But the religion of a later age was by no means so simple. The Homeric gods were still worshipped in the old way, and received their sacrifices in exchange for favours desired or granted. But there was another element in religion of which Homer shows little trace—an element of awe and mystery. Homer indeed names the Erinyes as beings concerned with the punishment of certain sins; but he shows no knowledge of that awful doctrine of blood-guilt which Aeschylus associates with them; the murdered man's power of vengeance is wholly ignored; for among the Achaeans the next of kin might accept a price at the hands of the murderer, and allow him to remain in the land, without himself incurring any pollution or any manifestation of his dead kinsman's wrath. Again Homer knows indeed of Demeter as a goddess connected with the crops; but there is nothing in his casual mention of her to suggest that the mysteries of her worship transcended the rites of all the Olympian gods. Yet no one, I suppose, would imagine that these profounder elements in ancient religion were of post-Homeric growth or could possibly have been evolved from the transparently simple religion of the Achaeans.

On the contrary it is known that the more mysterious rites and doctrines of the Greek religion were a legacy from the Pelasgians. That the mysteries of Demeter were Pelasgian in origin is proved by the localities in which her worship most flourished, and is corroborated by the explicit statement of Herodotus, who was disposed to refer other mystic cults also to