Chapter III · The Morphology of the Compared Religions.

Nevertheless the phenomena of animism coexist in all this region with those of developed theism. By the side of these high personal deities we find vague companies of divine powers such as the Igigi and the Anunnaki, who are conceived more or less as personal but without clearly imagined individuality, the former being perhaps definable as the daimones of heaven, the latter as the daimones of earth. Similarly, in the Hellenic system we note such nameless companies of divine agencies as the Ἐρινύες and Πραξιδίκαι, conceived independently of the concrete figures of the polytheism. But, further, in the Mesopotamian religion we must reckon seriously with lower products of polydaemonism than these, the demons of evil and disease who so dominated the imagination and much of the religious life of the private person that the chief object of the elaborate ritual was, as we shall see, to combat these. Only, as the curtain gradually rolls away from the remote past of this earliest home of human culture, it is not given us to see the gradual emergence of the divine personalities, or trace—as perhaps we may elsewhere—the process from polydaimonism to theism. The gods, as far as we can discern, were always there, and at least it is not in the second millennium B.C. that me may hope to find the origins of theistic religion.

As we draw nearer to the Mediterranean, the facts are too well known to need reiteration here. Everywhere we find proofs of a personal theism reaching far back into prehistoric times: whether it be the cult of a high god such as the Cilician divinity, called Zeus or Herakles by the later Greeks, or the Lycian “Apollo,” or a great goddess such as Ma of Comana, Cybele of Phrygia and Lydia. And now to all this testimony we can add the recently discovered monuments of a developed Minoan-Mycenaean religion with the elaborate ritual and worship of personal divinities, anthropomorphically imagined on the whole.