Note 172.1 — Chapter IX · Purity a Divine Attribute.

The ritualistic value of purity was probably a postulate of the religious feeling of early Hellas, though Homer gives us only faint glimpses of the idea. Φοῖβος was an old cult-title of Apollo, and its root-significance may well have been “Pure.” We hear of Hagné, “the pure goddess,” probably a reverential name for Kore at the Messenian Andania:172.1 and on the hilltop above the Arcadian Pallantion, Pausanias records the cult of a nameless group of divinities called οἱ καθαροὶ θεοί,172.2 a cult which, according to his account of it, appears to have descended from very ancient times. The question of purity in Greek ritual may be reserved for a later stage in our comparative study. I will only remark here on the fact that Greek worship, early and late, was in marked antagonism in this respect to Greek mythology, the former being on the whole solemn and beautiful, the latter often singularly impure. In fact, both in the Phrygian and Hellenic popular imagination we detect an extraordinary vein of grossness, that seems to mark off these Aryan peoples sharply from the Mesopotamians, and equally, as far as we can see, from the other Semites.