Note 161.2 — Chapter VIII · Religion and Morality.

In all this we see the reflection of a pantheistic feeling that links the living world and the personal divine power in a mystic sympathy. Now the idea of divinity immanent in living nature is inconsistent with a severely defined anthropomorphic religion; hence we scarcely find it in the earlier religion of Hellas. Zeus is called the father of men and gods, but in a reverential rather than in any literal creative sense: nor is there found any trace of the idea that divine power is immanent in the life or soul of man, till we come to the later period of philosophic speculation and Orphism. Only here and there behind the anthropomorphism we discern in Hellenic myth or cult the vaguer thought of diffused and immanent divinity; this reveals itself more than once in the myth and cult of Demeter, whose anger and sorrow at the loss of her daughter causes a sympathetic disappearance of the crops and the fruits of the earth; and it is embodied in the Attic cult on the Akropolis of Demeter Χλόη,161.2 which title expresses the immanence in the verdure of the life-giving potency of the goddess. The ancient folklore of Greece, and a few cult-records of the primitive village-communities, reveal figures that recall faintly the lineaments of Tammuz, Eunostos of Tanagra, Skephros of Tegea, who may belong, as Linos certainly did, to that group of heroes of crop and harvest, who die and are bewailed in the fall of the year, and whose life is sympathetically linked with the life of the earth. But we find this type of personage in other parts of Europe, and there is every reason for believing that the western shores of the Mediterranean had not been touched by the Tammuz-myth and service in the second millennium B.C.