In the extreme case of human
sacrifice, it was retained in the form of surrogates--little wooden
images, or even actual animals, being sacrificed in lieu of the older
victims. But all along the line, while the new gods brought their
spiritual conceptions, the older ones held men to a cruder and more
fleshly way of thinking. There is a similar blend of new and old in all
such movements as that of the Holy Grail and the Arthurian legends,
where we can see the combination of Christian and pagan elements so
clearly as to be able to calculate the moral and spiritual effect of
each. Thus we have in the early Greek mythology much of real paganism
involved in the retention of the old and earth-bound gods which attached
themselves to the nobler Olympians as they came, and dragged them down
to the ancient level.
This blending may be seen very clearly in the mythology of Homer and
Hesiod. There it has been so thorough that the only trace of
superposition which we can find is the succession of the dynasties of
Chronos and Jupiter. The result is the most appalling conception of the
morality of celestial society.
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