Note 47.3 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

We discern these two different ways of imagining divinity in the worship and ideas attaching to Helios, ‘Sun,’ and Hestia, ‘Hearth’; as regards the former, we have reason to surmise that his religious prestige was higher in the pre-Homeric than in the later age, and that the exalted position as a great political and cultured God which he enjoyed in the later history of Rhodes was a heritage from the Minoan religious tradition.47.3 In Homer’s poems we find him personal and anthropomorphised; but we may well doubt if he was so for the average Greek, who merely kissed his hand to him every morning or bowed to him on coming forth from his house, and who, regarding him merely as animate, or ‘Living Sun,’ found it difficult to develop him into a free and complex individual person. As regards Hestia the facts are still clearer.48.1 In her worship, which belonged to the aboriginal period of Greek religion, she was at first, and in the main she continued to be, nothing more than ‘Holy Hearth,’ the Hearth felt as animate, nor was the attempt to anthropomorphise into a free personal Goddess ever wholly successful.