This is the great problem. The gods of Aegean art are strange if impressive beings, mixed up with tree- and pillar-worship. Their altars, in art, are not adapted for sacrifices for animals, but libations, fruits, and flowers are offered. The gods and goddesses of archaic Greek art are barbaric and unimpressive, and trees and stones, as sacred, endured through all Greek history. The Olympians of Homer are, on the other hand, the Olympians of Pheidias. Turning from Aegean religion before Homer, which shows infinitely more of the worship of high gods than of ghosts, we find, in early historic Greece, that the great Olympians are highly honoured, but that ghost-worship, ignored by Homer, is prevalent. From the seventh century onwards the possession of tombs of heroes, and of miracle-working relics of heroes, their bones, is essential to the well-being of cities. Finally, living men are freely divinised. Thus chthonic as distinct from Olympian worship, while it is ignored by Homer (whose theory of the state of the dead renders it impossible) gets practically the upper hand in historic Greece, though in the Aegean religion it is inconspicuous, and in Homer it is absent. Thus Homer stands apart in religion from the world that preceded and the world that followed him. The solitary passage in which the _Iliad_ recognises sacrifice to a dead man, a hero, is in the description of the case of Erechtheus _in Athens_. In the temple of Athene "the Athenians worship him with bulls and rams as the years return in their courses."[12] Owing, perhaps, to Homer's consistent avoidance of everything Ionian, he never speaks of the Mysteries of Eleusis, in Attica, celebrated in the Ionian Hymn to Demeter, or of the Attic Thesmophoria or the Brauronia, or, indeed, of any mysteries. These are now understood to have begun in savage and barbarous magical rites for the benefit of the objects of the food supply; or in initiatory ceremonies: both practices are still common among all the lower races; and agricultural magic still survives in European folklore, and we have the initiations of Freemasonry. The rites of Eleusis, Athens, and of Artemis Orthia among the Dorians of Sparta are of immense antiquity in their origins. The magic may have been practised in Attica, in Homer's time, and, as folklore, may have existed in the rural classes among the Achaean states. If so, Homer has no interest in the matter, none in initiations. But both magic and initiations were sanctioned by the State in Attica and Dorian Sparta, in historic Hellas.