At the outset one preliminary caution is imperative. Our minds are imbued with current classical mythology, our imagination peopled with the vivid personalities, the clear-cut outlines of the Olympian gods; it is only by a somewhat severe mental effort that we realize the fact essential to our study that _there were no gods at all_, that what we have to investigate is not so many actual facts and existences but only conceptions of the human mind, shifting and changing colour with every human mind that conceived them. Art which makes the image, literature which crystallizes attributes and functions, arrest and fix this shifting kaleidoscope; but, until the coming of art and literature and to some extent after, the formulary of theology is ‘all things are in flux’ (πάντα ῥεῖ). Further, not only are we dealing solely with conceptions of the human mind, but often with conceptions of a mind that conceived things in a fashion alien to our own. There is no greater bar to that realizing of mythology[414] which is the first condition of its being understood, than our modern habit of clear analytic thought. The very terms we use are sharpened to an over nice discrimination. The first necessity is that by an effort of the sympathetic imagination we should think back the ‘many’ we have so sharply and strenuously divided, into the haze of the primitive ‘one.’ Nor must we regard this haze of the early morning as a deleterious mental fog, as a sign of disorder, weakness, oscillation. It is not confusion or even synthesis; rather it is as it were a protoplasmic fulness and forcefulness not yet articulate into the diverse forms of its ultimate births. It may even happen, as in the case of the Olympian divinities, that articulation and discrimination sound the note of approaching decadence. As Maeterlinck[415] beautifully puts it, _la clarté parfaite n’est-elle pas d’ordinaire le signe de la lassitude des idées?_ There is a practical reason why it is necessary to bear in mind this primary fusion, though not confusion, of ideas. Theology, after articulating the one into the many and diverse, after a course of exclusive and determined discrimination, after differentiating a number of departmental gods and spirits, usually monotheizes, i.e. resumes the many into the one. Hence, as will be constantly seen, _mutatis mutandis_, a late philosophizing author is often of great use in illustrating a primitive conception: the multiform divinity of an Orphic Hymn is nearer to the primitive mind than the clear-cut outlines of Homer’s Olympians. * * * * *