Still less could Plutarch realize that what in his mind was a degradation, superstition in our sense, had been to his predecessors a vital reality, the real gist of their only possible religion. He deprecates the attitude of the superstitious man who enters the presence of his gods as though he were approaching the hole of a snake, and forgets that the hole of a snake had been to his ancestors, and indeed was still to many of his contemporaries, literally and actually the sanctuary of a god. He has explained and mysticized away all the primitive realities of his own beloved religion. It can, I think, be shewn that what Plutarch regards as superstition was in the sixth and even the fifth century before the Christian era the _real_ religion of the main bulk of the people, a religion not of cheerful tendance but of fear and deprecation. The formula of that religion was not _do ut des_ ‘I give that you may give,’ but _do ut abeas_ ‘I give that you may go, and keep away.’ The beings worshipped were not rational, human, law-abiding _gods_, but vague, irrational, mainly malevolent δαίμονες, spirit-things, ghosts and bogeys and the like, not yet formulated and enclosed into god-head. The word δεισιδαιμονία tells its own tale, but the thing itself was born long before it was baptized. Arguments drawn from the use of the word δεισιδαιμονία by particular authors are of necessity vague and somewhat unsatisfactory; the use of the word depends much on the attitude of mind of the writer. Xenophon[15] for example uses δεισιδαιμονία in a good sense, as of a bracing confidence rather than a degrading fear. ‘The more men are god-fearing, spirit-fearing (δεισιδαίμονες), the less do they fear man.’ It would be impossible to deduce from such a statement anything as to the existence of a lower and more ‘fearful’ stratum of religion. Fortunately however we have evidence, drawn not from the terminology of religion, but from the certain facts of ritual, evidence which shews beyond the possibility of doubt that the Greeks of the classical period recognised two different classes of rites, one of the nature of ‘service’ addressed to the Olympians, the other of the nature of ‘riddance’ or ‘aversion’ addressed to an order of beings wholly alien. It is this second class of rites which haunts the mind of Plutarch in his protest against the ‘fear of spirits’; it is to this second class of rites that the ‘Superstitious Man’ of Theophrastos was unduly addicted; and this second class of rites, which we are apt to regard as merely decadent, superstitious, and as such unworthy of more than a passing notice and condemnation, is primitive and lies at the very root and base of Greek religion.