the Greeks themselves were to repeat more than once in after centuries--a period in which the mind after it has at least half succeeded in winning its freedom from disquieting and oppressive beliefs in invisible powers shrinks back once more. Under the influence of adversity it feels the need of some comforting illusions behind which it may take shelter and be relieved in part of the burden of responsibility. The obscurity of this period of growth hides also from our sight the origin and development of beliefs about the soul very different from the Homeric. The results of the process are however visible enough and we can still discern how a regular cult of the disembodied soul and eventually a belief in immortality fully worthy of the name were being built up at this time. These things are the result of phenomena which partly represent the re-emergence of elements in religious life which had been submerged in the previous period, and partly the entry of fresh forces which in conjunction with the resuscitated old give rise between them to a third and new creation. I CULT OF THE CHTHONIC DEITIES The chief new feature revealing itself to comparative study in the development of religion in the post-Homeric period is the worship of _chthonic_ deities, that is, of deities dwelling in the interior of the earth. And yet it is an undoubted fact that these divinities are among the oldest possessions of Greek religious faith. Indeed, bound as they are to the soil of the country, they are the true local deities, the real gods of home and country. They are also not unknown to Homer; but epic poetry had transferred them, divested of all local limitation, to a distant subterranean region, inaccessible to living men, beyond the limits of Okeanos. There Aïdes and the terrible Persephoneia rule as guardians of the dead. From that distant and unapproachable place they can have no influence upon the life and doings of men on earth. Religious cult, too, only knows these deities in connexion with particular localities and particular groups of worshippers. Each of these worships the deities of the underworld as denizens of their soil and their countryside alone. They are untroubled by any considerations of a general and uniform kingdom of the gods such as the epic had set up; nor are they disturbed by similar and conflicting claims made by neighbouring {159} communities. And only in these local cults are the gods of the lower world seen in their true nature as they were conceived by the faith of their worshippers. They are the gods of a settled, agricultural, inland population. Dwelling beneath the soil they guarantee two things to their worshippers: they bless the cultivation of the ground and ensure the increase of the fruits of the soil to the living; they receive the souls of the dead into their underworld.[1\5] In certain places they also send up from the spirit-world revelations of future events.