posterous to deny some sort of
idealism to almost any pagan who has ever lived. The contrast between
pagan and idealist is largely a matter of proportion and preponderating
tendency: yet the lines are clear enough to enable us to work with this
distinction and to find it valuable and illuminating.

The fundamental fact to remember in studying any of the myths of Greece
is, that we have here a composite and not a simple system of thought and
imagination. There are always at least two layers: the primitive, and
the Olympian which came later. The primitive conceptions were those
afforded by the worship of ghosts, of dead persons, and of animals. Miss
Jane Harrison has pointed out in great detail the primitive elements
which lingered on through the Olympian worship. Perhaps the most
striking instance which she quotes is the Anthesteria, or festival of
flowers, at the close of which the spirits were dismissed with the
formula, "Depart, ye ghosts, the revels now are ended." Mr. Andrew Lang
has suggested that the animals associated with gods and goddesses (such
as the mouse which is found in the hand, or the hair, or beside the feet
of the statues of Apollo, the owl of Minerva, etc.) are relics of the
earlier worship. This would satisfactorily explain much of the
disreputable element which lingered on side by side with the noble
thoughts of Greek religion. The Olympians, a splendid race of gods,
representing the highest human ideals, arrived with the Greeks; but for
the sake of safety, or of old association, the primitive worship was
retained and blended with the new. In the extreme case of human
sacrifice, it was retained in the form of surrogates--little wooden
images, or even actual animals, being sacrificed in lieu of the older
victims. But all along the line, while the new gods brought their
spiritual conceptions, the older ones held men to a cruder and more
fleshly way of thinking. There is a similar blend of new and old in all
such movements as that of the Holy Grail and the Arthurian legends,
where we can see the combination of Christian and pagan elements so
clearly as to be able to calculate the moral and spiritual effect of
each. Thus we have in the early Greek mythology much of real paganism
involved in the retention of the old and earth-bound gods which attached
themselves to the nobler Olympians as they came, and dragged them down
to the ancient level.

This blending may be seen very clearly in the mythology of