We find here very few traces of the chief Olympian divinities, which belong to a later age than the objects of worship or cult of these ancient peoples whom we venture to call Pelasgi. They worshipped powers or dæmons in indefinite numbers, but with no individual names: represented, if at all, by emblems or symbols, very rarely in bodily human form. Of these spirits of death, disease, madness, and calamity there were "thousands upon thousands, from whom man can never escape or hide." So much is mainly a heritage from Paleolithic times. But the conception of spirit has grown more clear, distinct, and elevated, as we saw in our study of burial rites. But Neolithic men lived in communities and devoted themselves largely to tillage of the ground and to raising sheep, goats, swine, and cattle. Their life was still precarious. "Their food depended on the crops of one tiny plot of ground. All the while they knew almost nothing of the real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defilement. It is this state of things that explains the curious cruelty of agricultural works, which like most cruelty had its roots in terror, terror of the breach of taboo--the 'Forbidden Thing.'" Neolithic man, with his new discoveries and industries, had given new hostages to fortune, and a new and wider scope of application to the old doctrine of taboo and of tribal responsibility. This strengthened the hold of the priest or magician on the hopes, fears, and faith of his people. The law is going deeper as well as wider. There arises an individual feeling of pollution and of the need of expiation which will blaze out in the oldest Greek tragedies as almost a veritable sense of sin. We might almost say that a sense of morality toward the spirit world is now appearing in a religion previously almost or quite unmoral. We may easily overestimate the extent and power of the change, but we can hardly be mistaken in recognizing its dawn and the vast germinal possibilities of this dim feeling or conception. In agriculture and throughout nature seed-time was followed by harvest, fall, and winter's gloom and death. Then in the next spring there was a return, a rebirth or a resurrection. If the seed failed to come up, if the blade withered or was blighted, it was because the vegetation spirit or dæmon had failed to reappear or had been reborn weak or sickly, and all this because some one had broken taboo, had touched the forbidden thing. This must be prevented at all cost, they must help the spirit. Hence there must be every year a time of purification, of renovation, when the old garments and utensils and everything which could carry the pollution of death were cast off or cleansed.