Note 46.1 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

Animism or animatism.—In another set of facts, also attested by later records, we may discern the surviving addition of an animistic period. A large part of the Hellenic, as of other religions, reflects man’s relation and feeling towards the world of nature, his dependence on the fruits of the earth, the winds, the waters, and the phenomena of the sky. The trend of the higher polytheism in the Hellenic mind was to set the personal divinity above and outside these things, which he or she directs as an intellectual will-power. But we have sufficient evidence of another point of view which is that of more primitive religion, from which the deity is imagined as essentially immanent in the thing, not as a distinct personality emerging and separable from it. The Arcadians who worshipped ‘Zeus Keraunos,’46.1 or ‘Zeus-Thunder,’ at Mantineia, or the people at Gythion in Laconia, who called a sacred meteoric stone, ‘Zeus Καππώτας,’46.2 ‘the fallen Zeus,’ or the Athenians who worshipped ‘Demeter χλόη,’ ‘Demeter Green Verdure,’46.3 reveal in these strange titles an attitude of mind that is midway between ‘animatism,’ that religious perception of each striking thing or phenomenon in nature as in itself mysteriously alive and divine, and ‘theism’ which imagines it controlled by a personal deity. At the stage when Demeter could be named and perceived as ‘Chloe,’ ‘Verdure,’ the anthropomorphic conception of divinity, though certainly existing, was not yet stable or crystallised.