of rich earth present you with the good gods’ gift of fortune[19]: ... on the young men I forbid to fall the stroke of death untimely: and that the lovely maids find each her husband—do ye grant it, O ye who reign, and ye, O Fates divine![20]... May the roar of Faction, thirsting for evil, never in this place be heard, nor the dust that drinks the dark blood of fellow-citizens bring to the State, from passion for revenge, the doom of retaliation. But may the citizens rejoice one another with a common love and hate only in union as one man.’[21] The modern European, taught in childhood to accept the Christian doctrine of the divine creation of the world, must exert himself considerably if he is to realise that in Greek religion the notion of such a creation is not found before the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and even then it existed only in the atmosphere of a pious philosophic sect. To the ancient Greek mind, the earth was not created; it had been from everlasting: it was itself divine. Gilbert Murray rightly says[22] that the chief objects of primitive man’s emotional activity are the food-supply and the tribe-supply. By a well-known confusion of cause and effect characteristic of the primitive mind, the earth became the object of universal worship, because of its association with the production of food. Similarly, animals came to be regarded as sacred, though different races adopted different viewpoints in regard to their sacred character. In some instances a certain animal was ‘sacred’ simply because it was eaten: in others it was ‘sacred’ because it was ‘tabu’ or sinful to eat it. We shall see that the animal slain in certain Chthonian rites could not be eaten,[23] but it was ‘sacred’ all the same. The ancient notion, which has survived so long in witchcraft, of the magical power of placation by images or effigies led to the widespread construction of those animal images which are so familiar to the students of primitive religion.[24] When divinities in human form, when anthropomorphic _sacra_, take precedence of the animal god, traces of a fusion in image-magic are clearly visible. Whether by accident, or by reason of some traditional connexion, certain human gods came to be associated with certain species of animals. The sacrifice of such animals was regarded as particularly pleasing to such gods, and it is therefore arbitrary to assume that the sacrifice of animals was originally accepted as a substitute for a previous human sacrifice. Herodotus says[25] that the image of Isis in Egypt was that of a woman with cow’s horns: that a statue of Zeus in Egypt showed the figure of a man with the face of a ram. When the people of Egyptian Thebes sacrificed, annually, a ram to Zeus, they covered the statue of Zeus with the skin of the ram.[26] We know that the worshippers of the orgiastic Dionysus clothed themselves in fawn-skins,[27] and that the satyric choruses from which, we may suppose, Greek tragedy