Finally a study of all the facts and probabilities may convince a careful student that the origin of Greek polytheism as a whole from simpler forms cannot be found in this earliest period. In the second millennium, which is the starting-point for Hellenic history proper, we cannot discern the ‘making of a God’ (unless we mean the building-up of his more complex character), nor do we start with a godless period. We may well believe that in the history of mankind theism was evolved from animism or polydaimonism; we may believe the much more doubtful theory that anthropomorphism arises from a previous theriomorphism, and there may still be some who are convinced that theriomorphism implies a totemistic society. But, at any rate, these various evolutions had already happened indefinitely before the two strains--the Northern and the Mediterranean--had blended into the Hellenic race. The higher and the lower, the more complex and the simpler, forms of religious imagination {55} operate together throughout Hellenic history; and the higher, though dominant, never wholly absorbs the lower, both being an intellectual tradition of an indefinite past. Much work on the origins of Greek religion has been wasted because its chronology is anachronistic. And the attempt to unlock many of its mysteries by the key of totemism has been abandoned by those who recognise that many of the views concerning this social phenomenon and its religious importance, prevalent in a former generation, were erroneous. CHAPTER III. THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C. {56} We can now pursue the enquiry nearer the borderline of the historic period, as it is conventionally termed.