Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/598

 stern punishment of iniquity, has yet admitted brave heroes to her embrace in the mountain-cavern where, as of old in Arcady, she still dwells.

Nor did the cults of Demeter and Kore monopolise these hopes and beliefs. In the religious drama of Aphrodite and Adonis, in the Sabazian mysteries, in the holiest rites of Dionysus, in the wild worship of Cybele, the same thought seems ever to recur. It matters little whether these gods and their rites were foreign or Hellenic in origin. If they were not native, at least they were soon naturalised, and that for the simple reason that they satisfied the religious cravings of the Greek race. The essential spirit of their worship, whatever the accidents of form and expression, was the spirit of the old Pelasgian worship of Demeter; and therefore, though Dionysus may have been an immigrant from northern barbarous peoples, the Greeks did not hesitate to give him room and honour beside Demeter in the very sanctuary of Eleusis. Similar, we may well believe, was the lot of other foreign gods and rites. Whencesoever derived, they owed their reception in Greece to the fact that their character appealed to certain native religious instincts of the Greek folk. Once transplanted to Hellenic soil, they were soon completely Hellenized; those elements which were foreign or distasteful to Greek religion were quickly eradicated or of themselves faded into oblivion, while all that accorded with the Hellenic spirit throve into fuller perfection; for the character of a deity and of a cult depends ultimately upon the character of the worshippers.

It is fair therefore to treat of Aphrodite as of a genuinely Greek deity; for, though she may have entered Greece from Eastern lands, doubtless long before the Homeric age her worship no less than her personality was permeated with the spirit of genuinely Greek religion. Too well known to need re-telling here is the story of how—to use the words of Theocritus once more—'the beautiful Cytherea was brought by Adonis, as he pastured his flock upon the mountain-side, so far beyond the verge of frenzy, that not even in his death doth she put him from her bosom .' Such was the plot of one of the most famous religious dramas of old time. And what was its moral for those who