Note 47.1 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

But there are other cult-facts reported to us of a still cruder type that seem to reveal animatism pure and simple and the infancy of the Hellenic mind. The Arcadians,47.1 always the most conservative and backward among the Hellenes, in their colony of Trapezus, ‘offered sacrifice to the lightning and thunder and storms’; it seems that for them these things were animate and divine directly, just as the Air—Bedu—was for the Macedonians. Again, through all the periods of Hellenic religion, the worship of rivers and springs only at certain points approached the borders of theism; sometimes offerings were flung directly into the water, and prayer might be made ‘into the water’—we must not say ‘to the river-god,’ but to the divine water.47.2