Modern ethnology has arrived at the conviction that the Hellenic nation, like others that have played great parts in history, was the product of a blend of populations, the conquering tribes of Aryan descent coming from the north and settling among and upon certain pre-Hellenic Mediterranean stocks. The conclusion that is naturally drawn from this is that Hellenic religion is also the product of a blend of early Aryan or Indo-Germanic beliefs with the cult-ideas and practices of the Mediterranean area that were from of old indigenous in the lands which the later invaders conquered. But to disentangle these two component parts of the whole, which might seem to be the first problem for the history of the development of this religion, is by no means an easy task; we may advance further towards its solution, when the mysterious pre-Hellenic Mediterranean language or group of languages, of which traces remain in Hellenic place-names, and which may be lying uninterpreted on the brick-tablets of the palace of Cnossus, has found its interpreter. For the first question is naturally one of language. But the comparative study of the Indo-European speech-group, great as its philological triumphs have been, has been meagre in its contributions to our positive knowledge of the original belief of the primitive stock. It is not possible to reconstruct a common Indo-European religion. The greater part of the separate Aryan cult-systems may have developed after the diffusion and may have been the result of contact in prehistoric days with non-Aryan peoples. And many old religious etymological equations, such as [Greek: Ouranos] = Sanskrit Varuna, [Greek: Hermes] = Saramey[=a]s, Athena = Ahana, were uncritically made and have been abandoned. The chief fact that philology has revealed concerning the religious vocabulary of the Aryan peoples is that many of them are found to have designated a high god by a word derived from a root meaning "bright," and which appears in Zeus, Jupiter, Sanskrit _Dyaus_. This is important enough, but we should not exaggerate its importance, nor draw the unwarranted inference that therefore the primitive Indo-Europeans worshipped one supreme God, the Sky-Father. Besides the word "Zeus," the only other names of the Hellenic pantheon that can be explained wholly or partly as words of Aryan formation are Poseidon, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysus (whose name and cult were derived from the Aryan stock of the Thraco-Phrygians) and probably Pan. But other names, such as Athena, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Hera, Hermes, have no discovered affinities with other Aryan speech-groups; and yet there is nothing suspiciously non-Aryan in the formation of these words, and they may all have belonged to the earliest Hellenic-Aryan vocabulary. In regard to others, such as Rhea, Hephaestus and Aphrodite, it is somewhat more probable that they belonged to an older pre-Hellenic stock that survived in Crete and other islands, and