But happily for the Greek imagination, the divinities of the world of death, abiding below the earth, tended to take on the benign functions of the powers of vegetation. The God of the lower world is scarcely called by the ill-omened name of Hades in cult, but Plouton or Trophonios or Zeus Chthonios, names importing beneficence; for the Homeric and Hesiodic world Demeter is a goddess of blessing, not of terror. And although in the earliest period certain demoniac personages such as Medousa--identical in form and perhaps in character with the snake-locked horse-headed Demeter--may have loomed large and terrible in popular cult, and afterwards faded wholly from actual worship or survived in the lower strata of ineffectual folklore, yet the more civilising imagination had also been operative in the religion of the second millennium. The monuments of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion reveal scarcely an element of terror. And at some period before Homer the kindly deity, Hermes, had assumed the function of the leader of souls. As regards the eschatological views of the prehistoric Greek we can say little, unless we believe that Homer was his spokesman; and such belief would be very hazardous. The earliest communities may have had no special hopes concerning the departed soul; we have no reason for thinking that the mysteries which came to offer some promise of happiness in the world to come had as yet proclaimed such a doctrine; the earliest form of the Eleusinia may have been that of a secret {39} society organised for agrarian purposes. But, on the other hand, there is no proof that the primitive mind of the Hellene brooded much on the problem of death, or was at all possessed with morbid feeling about it; and in pre-Homeric times he must have been freer from care in this matter than he was in the later centuries, if we accept the view of certain scholars that the elaborate ritual of ‘Katharsis’ or purification, which was mainly dependent on the idea of the impurity of death, ghosts and bloodshed, was wholly the creation of post-Homeric days.