or initiate youths, in the dithyramb--the magic dance which was to celebrate, or more properly, to hasten and strengthen, the coming on of spring. That dance projected the Megistos Kouros, the greatest of youths, who is the incarnation of spring or the return of life, and lies at the back of so many of the most gracious shapes of the classical pantheon. The Kouros appears as Dionysus, as Apollo, as Hermes, as Ares: in our clearest and most detailed piece of evidence he actually appears with the characteristic history and attributes of Zeus.[28:2] This spirit of the dance, who leads it or personifies its emotion, stands more clearly perhaps than any other daemon half-way between earth and heaven. A number of difficult passages in Euripides' _Bacchae_ and other Dionysiac literature find their explanations when we realize how the god is in part merely identified with the inspired chief dancer, in part he is the intangible projected incarnation of the emotion of the dance. * * * * * 'The collective desire personified': on what does the collective desire, or collective dread, of the primitive community chiefly concentrate? On two things, the food-supply and the tribe-supply, the desire not to die of famine and not to be harried or conquered by the neighbouring tribe. The fertility of the earth and the fertility of the tribe, these two are felt in early religion as one.[29:1] The earth is a mother: the human mother is an ἄρουρα, or ploughed field. This earth-mother is the characteristic and central feature of the early Aegean religions. The introduction of agriculture made her a mother of fruits and corn, and it is in that form that we best know her. But in earlier days she had been a mother of the spontaneous growth of the soil, of wild beasts and trees and all the life of the mountain.[29:2] In early Crete she stands with lions erect on either side of her or with snakes held in her hands and coiled about her body. And as the earth is mother when the harvest comes, so in spring she is maiden or Korê, but a maiden fated each year to be wedded and made fruitful; and earlier still there has been the terrible time when fields are bare and lifeless. The Korê has been snatched away underground, among the dead peoples, and men must wait expectant till the first buds begin to show and they call her to rise again with the flowers. Meantime earth as she brings forth vegetation in spring is Kourotrophos, rearer of Kouroi, or the young men of the tribe. The nymphs and rivers are all Kourotrophoi. The Moon is Kourotrophos. She quickens the young of the tribe in their mother's womb; at one terrible hour especially she is 'a lion to women' who have offended against her holiness. She also marks the seasons of sowing and ploughing, and the due time for the ripening of crops. When men learn to calculate in longer units, the Sun appears: they turn to the Sun for their calendar, and at all times of course the Sun has been a power in