Lewis Richard Farnell

A chief centre or “nidus” of impurity is child-birth; but still more dangerously impure is its counterpart, death and all the phenomena of death. A small book on a great and difficult subject must explain and apologise for itself, especially if it cannot claim a raison d’être as a handbook for beginners. These subjects do not appear to have been as yet exhaustively treated by modern anthropology or scientific and comparative theology, and I had already worked upon them to some extent as “parerga” of the treatise that I am completing for the Clarendon Press on the history of Greek cults. [...] by an irony of fortune we owe much of our knowledge of Hellenic and other religions of the Mediterranean area to the Christian controversialists, who reveal many of the essential features of the various pagan creeds in order to expose them to obloquy: they could not anticipate that we should gather as the fruit of their labours a better appreciation than we could otherwise have gained of the religions which they strove to destroy, and possibly of Christianity itself. In ancient Greece the fetich was common enough: sacred axes, sacred sceptres, pyramidical or cone-shaped stones, rudely hewn tree-stumps, are examples which we find in the literature and art of the historic or prehistoric periods; the most common kind of private fetich was the gem, carried as an amulet.