religion. The last example is specially illuminating: the human sacrifice is here practised by the Ionians in their ancient settlements in the land, afterwards called Achaia; and its cessation is connected with the arrival of the cult of Dionysos and the return of the heroes from Troy. The purpose and significance of the rite differed probably in the different cult-centres. In most cases we may interpret it as piacular, the dedication to an offended deity of a valued life, the life of the king’s son or daughter, as a substitute for the life of the people, such vicarious sacrifice being a common human institution; in some few cases we may {53} discern an agricultural motive, the blood being shed as a magic charm to secure fertility.[53.1] At certain cult-centres and at certain times the human victim may have been regarded as the incarnation of the deity or the ‘daimon’; and this idea might explain the legends concerning the slaying of Iphigeneia the priestess of Artemis, or of the priests of Dionysos. Finally, in the ritual of Zeus Lykaios, we may detect a cannibal-sacrament, in which the holy flesh of the victim, whose life was mystically one with the God’s and the people’s, was sacramentally devoured. This ghastly practice is only doubtfully disclosed by legends and by interpretation of later records; a faint reminiscence of it may also have survived in the Argive story of Harpalyke and Klymenos.[53.2] But a close parallel to it will be noted in the Thracian Dionysiac ritual. _Summary account of the first period_.--A detailed account of the pre-Homeric religious age must at many points remain doubtful and hypothetical; but certain definite and important facts may be established. Anthropomorphism, in a degree not found in the earliest Roman religion, was already prevalent, even dominant; and nearly all the leading personal divinities of the later polytheism had already emerged; only Dionysos had not yet crossed the border from Thrace; Asklepios, dimly known to Homer, was merely the local deity of a small Thessalian community, Pan merely the daimon of flocks in remote Arcadia. Cretan religion, also personal in its imagination and mainly anthropomorphic, had left its deep imprint on the mainland; and its divine personalities, such as Rhea, the {54} Mother of the Gods, and Aphrodite were soon adopted by the northern immigrants, but not at first into high positions. The deity was generally imagined not as a spirit or a vague cosmic force, but as glorified man, and therefore the religion became adaptable to human progress in arts, civilisation and morality. But much in the animal world still appeared sacred and weird; and the deity might be at times incarnate in animal form. At the same time the religious imagination was still partly free from the bias of personal theism, and produced vaguer divine forms, of some force and power, but belonging rather to ‘animatism’ or polydaimonism than to polytheism.