Greek shrines of his day ; and this by-and-by develops into the idol statue of the highest artistic type.
Thus in India we find the early ritual prescribing that the altar for the reception of the Soma was to be constructed in the form of a woman.[1] So in Greece, to quote Mr. Farnell,[2] "at the earliest stages of iconism of which literature and the monuments have left record, we find the form of the god darkly emerging from the inorganic block, the λίθος ξεστός, but the features of the embryo form are human ;" and he goes on to say: "It concerns the history of the people's religion to know in what way the image was regarded. Was it merely a symbol bringing home to the senses the invisible and remote divinity ? Probably this was never the popular view, nor was it original. We may believe that for the early and cultivated Greek, as for all less advanced peoples, 'the nature and power of the divinity were there in the image.' It is hard, indeed, to find any passage that establishes the exact identity of the deity and the image in ancient belief, but many show the view that the statue was in the most intimate sense the shrine, or the έδος, of the divinity, and often animated by its presence."
It is certainly remarkable that, as far as I am aware, no distinct statement in the classical literature of Greece or Rome points to the adoption of any definite method of infusing the divinity into the image which expressed and represented its attributes. That some idea of the necessity of such procedure was at one time recognised may perhaps be inferred from the facts that the Greeks had a technical term, ίδρύσις, which is applied by Dionysius of Halicarnassus[3] to the inauguration of the ξόανον, or wooden statue ; but of the exact ritual no details, so far as I am aware, survive. We may, however, perhaps guess that the ritual followed the
