In our preliminary examination of Athenian festivals we found underlying the Diasia the worship of a snake, underlying the Anthesteria the revocation of souls. In the case of the Thesmophoria we found magical ceremonies for the promotion of fertility addressed as it would seem directly to the earth itself: in the Thargelia we had ceremonies of purification not primarily addressed to any one. In the Diasia and Anthesteria only was there clear evidence of some sort of definite being or beings as the object of worship. The meaning of snake-worship will come up for discussion later (p. 326), for the present we must confine ourselves to the theology or demonology of the beings worshipped in the Anthesteria, the Keres, sprites, or ghosts, and the theological shapes into which they are developed and discriminated. THE KER AS GHOST AND SPRITE. That the Keres dealt with in the Anthesteria—‘worshipped’ is of course too modern a word—were primarily ghosts, admits, in the face of the evidence previously adduced (pp. 43, 44), of no doubt. That in the fifth century B.C. they were thought of as little winged sprites the vase-painting in fig. 7 clearly shows, and to it might be added the evidence of countless other Athenian white lekythi where the _eidolon_ or ghost is shown fluttering about the grave. But to the ancients _Keres_ was a word of far larger and vaguer connotation than our modern _ghosts_, and we must grasp this wider connotation if we would understand the later developments of the term. Something of their nature has already appeared in the apotropaic precautions of the Anthesteria. Pitch was smeared on the doors to catch them, cathartic buckthorn was chewed to eject them; they were dreaded as sources of evil; they were, if not exactly evil spirits, certainly spirits that brought evil: else why these precautions? Plato has this in his mind when he says[416] ‘There are many fair things in the life of mortals, but in most of them there are as it were adherent Keres which pollute and disfigure them.’ Here we have not merely a philosophical notion, that there is a soul of evil in things good, but the reminiscence surely of an actual popular faith, i.e. the belief that Keres, like a sort of personified bacilli, engendered corruption and pollution[417]. To such influences all things mortal are exposed. Conon[418] in telling the story of the miraculous head of Orpheus (p. 468) says that when it was found by the fisherman ‘it was still singing, nor had it suffered any change from the sea nor any other of the outrages that human Keres inflict on the dead, but it was still blooming and bleeding with fresh blood.’ Conon is of course a late writer, and full of borrowed poetical phrases, but the expression human Keres (ἀνθρώπιναι κῆρες) is not equivalent to the Destiny of man, it means rather sources of corruption inherent in man. [Illustration: FIG. 17.]