Note 842 — Chapter VII · THE MAKING OF A GOD.

The materials for the study of hero-worship are well collected in Roscher’s Lexicon, s.v. Heroes, and for English readers there is an excellent survey in Mr W. H. D. Rouse’s Greek Votive Offerings, c. I. In the pages that follow I confine myself for the most part to such aspects of hero-worship as affect my main argument, and to certain evidence from art which seems to me to have been neglected, or misunderstood. I must also note that, advisedly, I only deal with the ‘Making of a God’ in so far as the god developes out of the hero. The most important and far more difficult question of the relation between totemism and god-making, a problem for the solution of which Greek tradition provides but scanty material, I leave for the present untouched. It can only be decided by much wider anthropological investigation than is within my scope.