he Snake--the fascination
of its mysteriously gliding movement, of its vivid energy, its
glittering eye, its intensity of life, combined with its fatal dart of
Death--is a thing felt even more by women than by men--and for a reason
(from what we have already said) not far to seek. It was the Woman who
in the story of the Fall was the first to listen to its suggestions.
No wonder that, as Professor Murray says, (1) the Greeks worshiped a
gigantic snake (Meilichios) the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies
of appeasement, and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the worship
of Zeus and the Olympian gods.

(1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.

Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people
wonder--hearing nowadays that the folk of old used to worship a
Corn-spirit or Corn-god--wonder that any human beings could have been so
foolish. But probably the good people who wonder thus have never REALLY
LOOKED (with their town-dazed eyes) at a growing spike of wheat. (1) Of
all the wonderful things in Nature I hardly know any that thrills one
more with a sense of wizardry than just this very thing--to observe,
each year, this disclosure of the Ear within the Blade--first a swelling
of the sheath, then a transparency and a whitey-green face within a
hooded shroud, and then the perfect spike of grain disengaging itself
and spiring upward towards the sky--"the resurrection of the wheat with
pale visage appearing out of the ground."

(1) Even the thrice-learned Dr. Famell quotes apparently with
approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) "speaks of the
Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and showing to
the epoptae (initiates) that great and marvelous mystery of perfect
revelation--in solemn silence--a CUT CORNSTALK ([gr teqerismenon] [gr
stacon])."--Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 182.

If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have
aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world
was so much more direct than ours--more 'animistic' if you like! What
wonderment, what gratitude, what deliverance from fear (of starvation),
what certainty that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and
sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen again as a savior
of men, what readiness to make some human sacrifice in return, both as
an acknowledgment of the debt, and as a gift of something which would
no doubt be graciously acce