The customs and beliefs, the superstitious practices and supernatural beings, of modern European folk-lore are sometimes explained as the wrecks and remnants of the Pagan polytheism which preceded Christianity. And if the Aryan peoples were from the very beginning polytheists; if the Hellenes and the Hindoos, the Teutons and the Scandinavians, brought their myths and their cults with them from the original Aryan home, then this explanation seems more reasonable than that which proceeds on a mere conjecture, a pure assumption that the Aryan religion was animistic ere it was polytheistic; for then we are obliged to relegate Aryan animism almost to the æon "of chaos and eternal night,"—at any rate, to an abysm of time which is such that neither linguistic palæontology nor any other science has dared "to venture down The dark descent and up to reascend." But if the proposition submitted in the previous sections be sound, if in early but still historic times Italian religion was still in a stage anterior to polytheism, then Aryan animism is no longer a mere assumption, and need no longer be thrust back into pro-ethnic times. Early Italian customs and beliefs will not be the _débris_ of a previous polytheism, and it will therefore be unreasonable to explain their counterparts in modern folk-lore as mutilated myths or as the cult of gods degraded but worshipped still. Plutarch, in the fifth of his _Romane Questions_ (p. 8 below), propounds an interesting problem: _Why are they who have beene falsly reported dead in a strange countrey, although they returne home alive, not received nor suffred to enter directly at the dores, but forced to climbe up to the tiles of the house, and so to get down from the roufe into the house?_ This remarkable custom continued to be practised long after its origin and object had been forgotten; for Plutarch relates a tale which is obviously a popular explanation, invented to account for a practice the _rationale_ of which had become unintelligible.[30] Hard, however, as Plutarch's question appears at first sight, it may by the aid of modern folk-lore and savage custom be explained. We have to note, in the first place, that the mode of entry prescribed for the returned traveller is not spontaneously adopted by him; and presumably, therefore, is not prescribed in his interest: it is enforced by his relatives, and probably for their own protection. In the next place, though the traveller himself knows, of course, that he has not returned from that bourne from which no traveller returns, his relatives have no such assurance: it may be, indeed, that he did not die whilst away, as they were informed or led to believe; but, on the other hand, he may be "the ghost of their dear friend dead," seeking to obtain an entrance into his old home. The reasonable course for them to pursue, therefore, is to treat him as though he were a ghost: if he is no ghost, it will do him no