Note 44.1 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

Functional Deities: polydæmonism.—In attempting to penetrate the pre-Homeric past, we have to reckon with another phenomenon which, though revealed in later records only, has certainly a primitive character and has been regarded as belonging to an age when the concept of definite complex personalities, such as θεοί, had not yet arisen. It was Usener44.1 who first called attention to a large number of local cults of personages unknown to myth or general literature and designated, not by what are called proper names, such as Hermes, Apollo, Zeus, but by transparent adjectival names, expressing a particular quality or function or activity, to which the essence of the divine power in each case was limited: such, for instance, are Ἔχετλος Ἐχετλαῖος ἤρως, Κυαμίτης, Εὔνοστος, being nothing more, respectively, than the hero of the ploughshare at Marathon, the ‘hero who makes the beans grow’ on the sacred way to Eleusis, ‘the hero who gives the good return of corn’ at Tanagra; for these he invented the term, ‘Sonder-Götter,’ meaning deities of a single function only; and to those of them to whom only a momentary function and therefore only a momentary existence seemed to appertain, he applied the term ‘Augenblick-Götter,’ ‘Momentary Gods’; an Hellenic example of this type might be ‘Μυίαγρος,’ ‘Fly-chaser,’ in Arcadia, and Elis, who at the sacrifice to Athena or Zeus was called upon to chase away the flies that would worry the sacrificers, and who only existed for the purpose and at the time of that call.