This last case is pretty clear. Zeus had the fire hidden away in the heart of the flint or in the veins of Earth; Prometheus, or Pramanthas, the Fire-Stick, introduced the more open visible fire. But the other cases seem different. In them it is always a king or a would-be king, a deposed Theos or a conquered aspirant, who is made to disappear. We are reminded of Aeneas and Latinus who vanished in battles, of Romulus and Numa who vanished in thunderstorms.
In one case we find that the hiding was in a ‘monstrous cave’, and a cave in Crete, too. We know from other sources something about the kind of hiding which took place in that particular cave. At the end of the fatal nine years, if we are to believe the authors quoted by me in the _Rise of the Greek Epic_, p. 127, and much more completely by Mr. A. B. Cook in the articles mentioned above, the divine king Minos in his mask, as a god, went up into the Idaean cave to converse with Zeus. Doubtless the divine mask covered his head. A masked Minos went in, and a masked Minos came out; but one strongly suspects that it was not the same man beneath the mask. My friend Mr. Gordon, an education officer in Lower Nigeria, informs me that there is there a great oracle or ordeal in a cave called the Long Juju. It decides cases between litigants, or persons who have some dispute. And the method is that both go up into the cave, and only one returns. The other, presumably the guilty one, has vanished; he is hidden; κέκρυπται.
All through this pre-Hellenic realm of saga and half-history we find ourselves in contact with these god-kings, or medicine-chiefs, these βασιλῆες or, if I am right, Theoi. And we cannot but wonder whether we have not here the explanation of Herodotus’ famous statement about the origins of Greek Religion (Herod. ii. 52). The Pelasgians, he tells us, did not originally know the names of the Olympian gods; ‘they brought offerings and prayed to the Theoi.’ It was only at a later time that they sent to Dodona to ask if they should worship those definite gods with special names and attributes and ‘Olympian Houses’ which had come into Greece but were still in some sense foreign. And the oracle said ‘Yes’. I am quite aware that the passage may be differently interpreted; and I do not suggest that Herodotus knew all that lay behind his words when he spoke of the nameless Theoi of the Pelasgians in contrast to the Olympians of Homer and Hesiod. But I do suspect that the contrast between these medicine-chiefs and the Homeric gods is one of the cardinal differences between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic religion; and, further, that some reminiscence of this difference has shaped the tradition which Herodotus repeats. Clearer evidence will, no doubt, be forthcoming from some better-equipped anthropologist.