The central motives of his oldest form of ritual were the birth and death of the God, a conception pregnant of ideas that were to develop in the religious future, but alien to the ordinary Hellenic theology, though probably not unfamiliar to the earlier Cretan-Mycenæan creed. But the death of this God was partly a fact of ritual; he was torn to pieces by his mad worshippers and devoured sacramentally, for the bull or the goat or the boy whom they rent and devoured was supposed to be his temporary incarnation, so that by this savage and at times cannibalistic communion they were filled with his blood and his spirit and acquired miraculous powers. By such an act and--we may suppose--by the occasional use of intoxicants and other nervous stimulants the psychic condition that this worship evoked was frenzy and ecstasy, which might show itself in wild outburst of mental and physical force, and the enthusiastic feeling of self-abandonment in which the worshipper escaped the limits of his own {58} nature and achieved a temporary sense of identity with the God; and such union with divinity might avail him even after death. This privilege of ecstasy might be used for the practical purposes of vegetation-magic, yet was desired and proclaimed for its own sake, as a more intense mood of life. This religion preached no morality and could ill adapt itself to civic life; its ideal was supranormal psychic energy. The process whereby it was half captured and half tamed by the young Hellenic spirit forms one of the most interesting chapters in Hellenism. It is convenient for the purposes of religious study to mark off the period between the ninth and the sixth centuries as the second period of Greek religion, in which we can observe the working of new forces and the development of older germs into new life. By the beginning of this period the fusion of the Northerners and the Mediterranean population was mainly complete, and the Hellenic spirit had acquired its definite instincts and bias. The ninth and the eighth centuries witnessed the diffusion of epic literature, the rise of lyric poetry, the emergence of the ‘eikon’ or idol in religious art, and generally the development of cities and civic life; and it is essential to estimate the religious influence of these forces.