The Pelasgic Zeus, however, is not quite the same being as is the Zeus whom we are to fancy as the supreme god of the Hellenic race. This last, we know, is called the Olympic Zeus. The Pelasgic god is a being who loves solitary mountain heights or dark groves of trees. In this aspect of his character he is very like the chief divinity of the Northmen, Odin. And there can be no doubt that in his nature he is a god of storms and wind. He is not the clear sky, as is the Vedic Dyâus (from the root _div_, shining), and as had once been the supreme god of the Aryan race. From that condition to the condition of a god of storms, Zeus had already passed before we catch any sight of him under this name Zeus--in other words, before we catch any sight of _him_ at all.
These Pelasgi were before all things the worshippers of pure nature. Theirs were all those primitive elements in the Greek religion which were caught up into the more developed creed, and, though they were softened in the process of amalgamation with it, still showed above its surface as masses of rock show upon a hillside, albeit they are covered over by a thin covering of green. Those strange half-human beings like Pan, the Arcadian god, like the Thessalian centaurs,--these belong to the primitive creed of the Greeks. So long as they were confounded with the phenomena of nature in which they took their rise, they were, in every sense, natural enough. But when art took possession of them, and tried to body them forth in visible shapes, they became monsters, unformed, neither man nor beast.
The fact that the greatest shrines of Zeus were at Dodona in Epirus, and in Elis, both states on the _western_ coast of Greece, would almost of itself show that the worship of Zeus belonged more especially to the first comers of the Greek race, who got pushed further westward as the more enlightened people came in from the east; and while _these_ were worshipping their gods in temples, the Pelasgic Greeks still worshipped their Zeus in sacred groves like those of Dodona and of Elis.
The god, on the other hand, who is more especially the god of the newer Greek people, the Dorians and the Ionians,
those who reformed the Greek race, and through whom the Pelasgic people grew into the Hellenes, this god is Apollo.