, that what I am now
about to say may again seem a deliberate paradox. It is nevertheless
true that the Olympian Religion is only to the full intelligible and
admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled endeavour, not a
_telos_ or completion but a movement and effort of life.

We may analyse the movement into three main elements: a moral
expurgation of the old rites, an attempt to bring order into the old
chaos, and lastly an adaptation to new social needs. We will take the
three in order.

In the first place, it gradually swept out of religion, or at least
covered with a decent veil, that great mass of rites which was concerned
with the Food-supply and the Tribe-supply and aimed at direct
stimulation of generative processes.[62:1] It left only a few reverent
and mystic rituals, a few licensed outbursts of riotous indecency in
comedy and the agricultural festivals. It swept away what seems to us a
thing less dangerous, a large part of the worship of the dead. Such
worship, our evidence shows us, gave a loose rein to superstition. To
the Olympian movement it was vulgar, it was semi-barbarous, it was often
bloody. We find that it has almost disappeared from Homeric Athens at a
time when the monuments show it still flourishing in un-Homeric Sparta.
The Olympian movement swept away also, at least for two splendid
centuries, the worship of the man-god, with its diseased atmosphere of
megalomania and blood-lust.[62:2] These things return with the fall of
Hellenism; but the great period, as it urges man to use all his powers
of thought, of daring and endurance, of social organization, so it bids
him remember that he is a man like other men, subject to the same laws
and bound to reckon with the same death.

So much for the moral expurgation: next for the bringing of intellectual
order. To parody the words of Anaxagoras, 'In the early religion all
things were together, till the Homeric system came and arranged them'.

We constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings who can be described as
+pollon onomaton morphe mia+, 'one form of many names'. Each tribe, each
little community, sometimes one may almost say each caste--the Children
of the Bards, the Children of the Potters--had its own special gods. Now
as soon as there was any general 'Sunoikismos' or 'Settling-together',
any effective surmounting of the narrowest local barriers, these
innumerable gods tended to melt into one another. Under different
historical circum