Note 21.1 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

Pre-Homeric period of religion.—Now when we consider how slow of growth and enduring are the forms and the moral and metaphysical concepts of religion we have the right to believe that part of what Homer records on these matters is the inherited tradition of an age some centuries earlier than his own. It is probable that those earliest Aryan immigrants from the north, Achæans, Dryopes, Minyai and others—who by mingling with peoples of aboriginal Mediterranean stock and of the Minoan-Mycenæan culture constituted the happy blend that we call the Hellenic race—had already arrived at the stage of personal theism; and that Hellenic religion proper does not start with a ‘godless period’21.1 when the unseen powers were only dimly outlined in the vaguer and more fleeting characters of what is called animism. We now know from the valuable discovery of a cuneiform inscription that the Iranian people had evolved such personal deities as Mitra and Varuna before 1400 B.C.22.1 And we have the right to suppose that their western kinsfolk, who were forcing their way through the Balkans, probably only a century earlier, were at least at the same level of religious imagination. We can best understand the picture of the religious world of Homer and also the later cult-records, if we believe that the kindred tribes coming from the north brought in certain personal deities, some of whom were common to more than one stock, and one at least may have been common to them all. This would best explain the supremacy of Zeus, the Sky-God, the diffusion of his name Olympios, derived from the mountain that dominates the northern frontier, near to which the people that were to lead the history of Greece had at one time temporary settlements and which they regarded as the throne of their high God. The wide geographical area of his cult cannot be naturally explained on the assumption that at any period in Hellenic history he had been merely the special deity of one particular tribe. Also as regards two other high Gods at least, Apollo and Poseidon, we may be reasonably sure that already in the pre-Homeric period certain tribes other than the Achæans had these cult-figures. In the Hyperborean ritual, which reflects at points the earliest days of Hellenism, we can follow the track of Apollo’s invasion from the north; and the evidence is fairly clear that Poseidon was equally a northern immigrant, being the special tribal deity of the Minyai.