Note 110.1 — Chapter VI · The Deities as Nature-Powers.

Turning our attention now to the early Hellenic world, and to that part of its religion which we may call Nature-worship, we discern certain general traits that place it on the same plane in some respects with the Mesopotamian. Certain of the higher deities show their power in certain elemental spheres, Poseidon mainly in the water, Demeter in the land, Zeus in the air. But of none of these is the power wholly limited to that element: and each has acquired, like the high gods of Assyria and Babylon and Jahwé of Israel, a complex anthropomorphic character that cannot be derived, though the old generation of scholars wearily attempted to derive it, from the elemental nature-phenomenon. Again, other leading divinities, such as Apollo, Artemis, Athena, are already in the pre-Homeric period, as far as we can discern, pure real personalities like Nebo and Asshur, having no discoverable nature-significance at all. Besides these higher cults, we discern a vast number of popular local cults of winds, springs, rivers, at first animistically and then anthropomorphically imagined. So in Mesopotamia we find direct worship of canals and the river. Finally, we discern in early Hellas a multitude of special “functional” divinities or heroes, “Sondergötter,” like Eunostos, the hero of the harvest: and it may be possible to find their counterparts in the valley of the Euphrates.110.1 We have also the nameless groups of divine potencies in Hellas, such as the Πραξιδίκαι, Μειλίχιοι, these being more frequent in the Hellenic than in the Mesopotamian religion, which presents such parallels as the Annunaki and the Igigi, nameless daimones of the lower and upper world: and these in both regions may be regarded as products of animism not yet developed into theism.