Note 44.2 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

We may compare also, for vagueness and inchoateness of personality, certain aggregates of deities having no definite single existence, but grouped by some adjectival functional name, such as θεοὶ Ἀποτροπαῖοι, ‘the deities that avert evil,’ at Sikyon,44.2 θεαὶ Γενετυλλίδες, the goddesses of birth, in Attica,45.1 the θεαὶ Πραξιδίκαι, the goddesses of just requital, at Haliartos.45.2 Such forms seem to hover on the confines of ‘polydaimonism,’ and to be the products of an embryonic perception of divinity, cruder and dimmer than the robust and bright creations of the Hellenic polytheism, to which so rich a mythology and so manifold a personality attached. And another fact seems to fall into line with these; in some cult-centres the deity, though personally and anthropomorphically conceived, might only be designated by some vague descriptive title, like ὁ θεός and ἡ θεά, as occasionally at Eleusis, or ‘Despoina,’ ‘the Mistress,’ the Goddess of Arcadia, or ‘Παρθένος’, the ‘Virgin,’ on the coast of Caria, and in the Chersonnese; even as late as the time of Pausanias the men of Boulis in Phokis never called their highest God45.3 by any other name than ὁ Μέγιστος, ‘the Greatest.’ And it has been thought that the well-known statement of Herodotus that the Pelasgians had no names for their divinities was based on some such facts as these.