We are apt to regard the advance to anthropomorphism as necessarily a clear religious gain. A gain it is in so far as a certain element of barbarity is softened or extruded, but with this gain comes loss, the loss of the element of formless, monstrous mystery. The ram-headed Knum of the Egyptians is to the mystic more religious than any of the beautiful divine humanities of the Greek. Anthropomorphism provides a store of lovely motives for art, but that spirit is scarcely religious which makes of Eros a boy trundling a hoop, of Apollo a youth aiming a stone at a lizard, of Nike a woman who stoops to tie her sandal. Xenophanes put his finger on the weak spot of anthropomorphism. He saw that it comprised and confined the god within the limitations of the worshipper. It is not every religion that advances as far as anthropomorphism, but the farthest of anthropomorphism is not very far. Traces of animal form are among the recognized Greek gods few and scattered. Pausanias[679] heard at Phigaleia of a horse-headed Demeter, and again of a fish-bodied Eurynome[680] whom some called Artemis, but for the most part by the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. mixed forms, half animal, half human, belong to beings half-way between man and god, demons rather than full-fledged divinities and demons malignant rather than beneficent. Such are Boreas, Echidna, Typhon and the snake-tailed giants. [Illustration: FIG. 59.] In the design from a black-figured cylix[681] in fig. 59 we have a curious and rare instance of beings of monstrous form, yet obviously beneficent. The scene is a vineyard at the time of vintage. On the reverse (not figured here) we have the same vintage-setting, but goats, the destroyers of the vine, are nibbling at the vine-stems. On the obverse (fig. 59) we have snake-bodied nymphs rejoicing in the grape harvest. Two of them hold a basket of net or wicker in which the grapes will be gathered, a third holds a great cup for the vine-juice, a fourth plays on the double flutes. Unhappily we can give no certain name to these kindly grape-gathering, flute-playing snake-nymphs. They are δρακοντώδεις κόραι, but assuredly they are not Erinyes and we dare not even call them Eumenides. Probably any Athenian child would have named them without a moment’s hesitation, but we must be content to say that, in their essence, they are Charites, givers of grace and increase, and that their snake-bodies mark them not as malevolent, but as earth-daemons, genii of fertility. They are near akin to the local Athenian hero, the snake-tailed Cecrops, and we are tempted to conjecture that in art, though not in literature, he may have lent his snake-tail to the Agraulid nymphs, his daughters. Later it will be seen that earth-born goddesses, though they shed their snake-form, keep as their vehicle and attribute the snake they once were. THE MOTHER AND THE MAID.