and sacrifices.  It also happened that the supreme god of one state would be adored as a subordinate power in another.  Every place had its favorite protector.  As different cities in Italy have their different Madonnas, whom they consider more powerful than the Madonna of their neighbors, so in Greece the same god was invoked in various localities under different surnames.  The Arcadian Zeus had the surname of Lycaeus, derived, probably, from [Greek:  Lux], Lux, light.  The Cretan Jupiter was called Asterios.  At Karia he was Stratios.  Iolaus in Euripides (the Herakleidae, 347) says:  “We have gods as our allies not inferior to those of the Argives, O king; for Juno, the wife of Jove, is their champion, but Minerva ours; and I say, to have the best gods tends to success, for Pallas will not endure to be conquered."[260] So, in the “Suppliants” of Aeschylus, the Egyptian Herald says (838):  “By no means do I dread the deities of this place; for they have not nourished me nor preserved me to old age."[261]

Two modes of worship met in Greece, together with two classes of gods.  The Pelasgi, as we have seen, worshipped unnamed impersonal powers of the universe, without image or temple.  But to this was added a worship which probably came through Thrace, from Asia and Egypt.  This element introduced religious poetry and music, the adoration of the muses, the rites and mysteries of Demeter, and the reverence for the Kabiri, or dark divinities of the lower world.

Of these, the MYSTERIES were the most significant and important.  Their origin must be referred to a great antiquity, and they continued to be practised down to the times of the Roman Emperors.  They seem not to belong to the genuine Greek religion, but to be an alien element introduced into it.  The gods of the Mysteries are not the beings of light, but of darkness, not the gods of Olympus, but of the under-world.  Everything connected with the Mysteries is foreign to the Hellenic mind.  This worship is secret; its spirit is of awe, terror, remorse; its object is expiation of sin.  Finally, it is a hieratic worship, in the hands of priests.

All this suggests Egypt as the origin of the Mysteries.  The oldest were those celebrated in the island of Samothrace, near the coast of Asia Minor.  Here Orpheus is reputed to have come and founded the Bacchic Mysteries; while another legend reports him to have been killed by the Bacchantes for wishing to substitute the worship of Apollo for that of Dionysos.  This latter story, taken in connection with the civilizing influence ascribed to Orpheus, indicates his introducing a purer form of worship.  He reformed the licentious drunken rites, and established in place of them a more serious religion.  He died a martyr to this purer faith, killed by the women, who were incited to this, no doubt, by the priests of the old Bacchic worship.

The worship of Dionysos Zagreus, which was the Orphic form of Bacchism, contained the doctrines of retribution in another life,—­a doctrine common to all the Greek Mysteries.