Primitive people are accustomed to attribute unlimited powers to the disembodied "soul"--powers all the more formidable because they are not seen. Indeed, they refer in part _all_ invisible forces to the action of "souls", and strain anxiously by means of the richest offerings within their power to secure for themselves the goodwill of these powerful spirits. Homer, on the contrary, knows nothing of any influence exerted by the psyche upon the visible world, and, consequently, hardly anything of a cult of the psyche. How, indeed, could the souls (as I may venture to call them without further risk of misunderstanding) have any such influence? They are all without exception collected in the realm of Aïdes, far from the living, separated from them by Okeanos and Acheron, guarded by the relentless god himself, the inexorable doorkeeper. Only a fabled hero like Odysseus may for once, perhaps, reach the entrance of that gloomy kingdom alive: the souls themselves, once they have crossed the river, never come back--so the soul of Patroklos assures his friend. How do they get there? The implication seems to be that on leaving the body the soul passes away, unwilling and complaining of its fate, but, nevertheless, unresisting, to Hades; and after the destruction of the body by fire, disappears for ever into the depths of Erebos. It was only a {9} later poet who, in giving the final touches to the Odyssey, introduced Hermes, the "Guide of the Dead". Whether this is an invention of the poet's, or, as appears more likely, it is borrowed from the ancient folk-belief of some remote corner of Greece, in the completely rounded circle of Homeric belief at any rate it is an innovation and an important one. Doubt has arisen, it appears, whether indeed _all_ the souls must of necessity pass away into the Unseen; and they are provided with a divine guide who by his mysteriously compelling summons (_Od._ xxiv, 1) and the power of his magic wand constrains them to follow him.[10\1]