a world-picture does not "progress"; nor is it a fixed sum of particulars from which this one and that one ought to be (though usually they are) picked out for comparison irrespective of time, land, and people. In reality they form a world of organic religions, which, all over the world, possessed (and, where they linger, still possess) proper and very significant modes of originating, growing, expanding, and fading out, and a well-established specific character in point of structure, style, tempo, and duration. The religions of the high Cultures are not developed from these, but different. They lie clearer and more intellectual in the light, they know what understanding love means, they have problems and ideas, theories and techniques, of strict intellect, but the religious symbolism of everyday light they know no more. The primitive religiousness penetrates everything; the later and individualized religions are self-contained form-worlds of their own.
All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the "pre-" periods of the grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of some centuries' duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? Or why is it that the Mycenæan prelude of the Classical is filled from one end to the other with imaginings of beast-formed deities?[1] They are not the gods of the warriors up in the megaron of the Mycenæan castle, where soul- and ancestor-worship was practised with a high and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments, but the gods of down below, the powers believed in in the peasant's hut. The great menlike gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen about 1100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their dark past on all sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some cognomen, attribute, or telltale transformation-myth indicative of its origin. To Homer Hera is invariably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan
- ↑ Was it that highly civilized Crete, the outpost of Egyptian modes of thought, afforded a pattern (see p. 87)? But, after all, the numerous local and tribal gods of the primitive Thinite time (before 3000), which represented the numina of particular beast-genera, were essentially different in meaning. The more powerful the Egyptian deity of this preliminary period is, the more particular individual spirits (ka) and individual souls (bai) he possesses, and these hide and lurk in the various animals — Bastet in the cat, Sechmet in the lion, Hathor in the cow, Mut in the vulture (hence the human-formed ka that figures behind the beast-head in the figures of the gods) — making of this earliest world-picture a very abortion of monstrous fear, filling it with powers which rage against man even after his death and which only the greatest sacrifices avail to placate. The union of the North and the South lands was represented by the common veneration of the Horus-falcon, whose first ka resided in the Pharaoh of the time. Cf. Eduard Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, §§ 182, et seq. [See also Moret and Davy: Des clans aux empires and Moret: Le Nil et la civilisation égyptienne (available in English translations). — Tr.]
