We have also direct testimony of a magical dealing with the elements in the titles of officials at Athens called the ‘Heudanemoi’[49.2] and of those at Corinth called Ἁνεμοκοῖται,[49.3] both words denoting ‘wind-lullers,’ those ‘who charmed the winds to sleep’; and again in the description of the rite performed by the magicians at Kleonai who according to Clemens[49.4] “averted the sky’s wrath by incantations and sacrifices”; or in Pausanias’ account of the operations of the priest of the winds at Titane in Sikyon[49.5] who endeavoured to assuage their fierceness by “singing over them the spells that Medea used.” Doubtless these officials are only maintaining the practices of an indefinitely remote past. And these are also reflected in the legend of the ancient Salmoneus of Thessalian and possibly Minyan origin, who drove about in a chariot imitating thunder and, while merely practising a well-known type of weather-magic, was misunderstood by the higher powers and later moralists. The few records that may avail for an opinion concerning the early period with which we are at present concerned entirely fail to suggest any such prevalence of magic as might obstruct intellectual progress or the growth of a higher religion. They reveal generally a type that is harmless or even philanthropic.[49.6] Doubtless some black magic {50} existed in the earliest as in the later Hellas, directed against the life or the property of individuals, and worked by evil means; the more ancient literature is entirely silent about this; but a late record of Pausanias testifies to a barbarous magic practised by the community of Haliartos to discover a water-supply[50.1]: a son of one of the chief men was stabbed by his own father, and as he ran bleeding about the land springs of water were found where his blood dripped. But at no time, we may judge, was the religion or the intellect of Greece so clouded with magic as was the case elsewhere in the ancient civilisations, notably in Egypt and Mesopotamia. _Human sacrifices_.--This attempted presentation of the first era of Greek religion must raise the question as to the practice within it of the ritual of human sacrifice. For we are apt to associate this with a primitive society and with a crude or savage religion. But this association is not borne out by the religious history of mankind. The practice has been found in societies highly developed both in morality and civilisation; and the a priori argument is dangerous, whether we apply it in one way or the other.