the wild beasts fawn in the train of the winsome Goddess; and the high
still peaks where Pan wanders among the nymphs, and the glens where
Artemis drives the deer, and the spacious halls and airy palaces of the
Immortals. The Hymns are fragments of the work of a school which had a
great Master and great traditions: they also illustrate many aspects of
Greek religion.

In the essays which follow, the religious aspect of the Hymns is chiefly
dwelt upon: I endeavour to bring out what Greek religion had of human and
sacred, while I try to explain its less majestic features as no less
human: as derived from the earliest attempts at speculation and at
mastering the secrets of the world. In these chapters regions are
visited which scholars have usually neglected or ignored. It may seem
strange to seek the origins of Apollo, and of the renowned Eleusinian
Mysteries, in the tales and rites of the Bora and the Nanga; in the
beliefs and practices of Pawnees and Larrakeah, Yao and Khond. But these
tribes, too, are human, and what they now or lately were, the remote
ancestors of the Greeks must once have been. All races have sought
explanations of their own ritual in the adventures of the Dream Time, the
_Alcheringa_, when beings of a more potent race, Gods or Heroes, were on
earth, and achieved and endured such things as the rites commemorate. And
the things thus endured and achieved, as I try to show, are everywhere of
much the same nature; whether they are now commemorated by painted
savages in the Bora or the Medicine Dance, or whether they were exhibited
and proclaimed by the Eumolpidae in a splendid hall, to the pious of
Hellas and of Rome. My attempt may seem audacious, and to many scholars
may even be repugnant; but it is on these lines, I venture to think, that
the darker problems of Greek religion and rite must be approached. They
are all survivals, however fairly draped and adorned by the unique genius
of the most divinely gifted race of mankind.