We have already seen something of the earliest strata of religious beliefs on Greek soil. The Ægean worship was principally “aniconic fetishism”--that is, the worship of inanimate, possibly symbolical, objects, such as stones, pillars, crosses, axes, horns, and trees. Then there were animal deities, possibly totemistic in origin, such as the snake-goddess, the dove-goddess, and the bull-man, or Minotaur, powers mainly representing fecundity. There was certainly also ghost-worship; for the dead in the tholos tombs were certainly honoured by sacrifices, and very likely by human sacrifices at first. There seem to have been no temples at all in these stages of religion; it was rather a system of private local cults in great and bewildering variety. But it is certain that the Ægean peoples had developed some wholly anthropomorphic deities before the end. Some of the regular Olympian deities of historical Greece seem to belong partially, and some wholly, to this earlier civilisation. Poseidon, the sea-god, Hermes, the Arcadian shepherd-god, and Demeter or Mother Earth, are of the latter class, with mysterious forms like the Fates, the Curses, the Harpies, and the Sirens. But there was little exclusiveness about ancient religion; new deities are quite readily accepted into polytheistic systems, though in some cases there was a protracted struggle to keep them out. Hesiod remarks that the deities have many names for a single shape, and often a double name reveals assimilation, such as Phœbus Apollo or Pallas Athene. In most cases, indeed, the great name of an Olympian god covers a host of minor deities with varying and sometimes quite opposite attributes. Thus the national Zeus has swallowed up countless local heroes, as when the Laconians worshipped Zeus Agamemnon. All these processes of change are reflected in mythology. It would seem as if mythologists, or, as we should say, expert theologians, set out to reconcile the people to new forms of worship by inventing delightful stories to account for the change. Homer and Hesiod were doing precisely that sort of work. For example, the introduction of the Northern Zeus was effected by means of a curious myth. It was agreed that he had not always been King of Heaven; formerly his old father Cronos had ruled, he whose wife was the earth. Zeus was born in Crete--that is, he was attached to [Illustration: PLATE XIII. HERMES KRIOPHOROS: (THE LAMB-CARRIER)]