derers used thrice to suck in and spit out the gore of their victims, perhaps with some idea of thereby partaking of their blood, and so, by becoming members of their kin, putting it beyond the power of the ghosts to avenge themselves. Similar ideas inspire the worldwide savage custom of making an artificial "blood brotherhood" by mingling the blood of the contracting parties. As to the ceremonies of cleansing from blood-guiltiness among the Greeks, we may conjecture that these too had their primitive side; for Orestes, in the Eumenides, maintains that he has been purified of his mother's slaughter by sufficient blood of swine. But this point will be illustrated presently, when we touch on the mysteries.
Ritual and religion, as might be expected, retained vast masses of savage rites and superstitious habits and customs. To be "in all things too superstitious," too full of deisidaimonia, was even in St. Paul's time the characteristic of the Athenians. Now superstition, or deisidaimonia, is defined by Theophrastus,[1] as "cowardice in regard to the supernatural" (δειλία πρὸς τὸ δαιμόνιον). This "cowardice" has in all ages and countries secured the permanence of ritual and religious traditions. Men have always argued, like one of the persons in M. Renans play, Le Prêtre de Némi, that "l'ordre du monde depend de l'ordre des rites qu'on observe." The familiar endurable sequence of the seasons of spring, and seed-sowing, and harvest depend upon the due performance of immemorial religious acts. "In the mystic deposits," says Dinarchus, "lies
