intellect, but the religious symbolism of everyday light they know no more. The primitive religiousness penetrates everything; the later and individualized religions are self-contained form-worlds of their own. All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the “pre-” periods of the grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of some centuries’ duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? Or why is it that the Mycenæan prelude of the Classical is filled from one end to the other with imaginings of beast-formed deities?[475] They are not the gods of the warriors up in the megaron of the Mycenæan castle, where soul- and ancestor-worship was practised with a high and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments, but the gods of down below, the powers believed in in the peasant’s hut. The great menlike gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen about 1100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their dark past on all sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some cognomen, attribute, or telltale transformation-myth indicative of its origin. To Homer Hera is invariably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan legend as a horse. Apollo comes to be the name for countless primitive numina; now he was wolf (Lycæus) like the Roman Mars, now dolphin (Delphinius), and now serpent (the Pythian Apollo of Delphi). A serpent, too, is the form of Zeus Meilichios on Attic grave-reliefs and of Asclepios, and of the Furies even in Æschylus;[476] and the sacred snake kept on the Acropolis was interpreted as Erichthonios. In Arcadia the horse-headed figure of Demeter in the temple of Phigalia was still to be seen by Pausanias; the Arcadian Artemis-Callisto appears as a she-bear, but in Athens too the priestesses of Artemis Brauronia were called “_arktoi_” (bears).[477] Dionysus--now a bull, now a stag--and Pan retained a certain beast-element to the end. Psyche (like the Egyptian corporal-soul, _bai_) is the soul-bird. And upon all this supervened the innumerable semi-animal figures like sirens and centaurs that completely fill up the Early Classical nature-picture.[478]