rationalized world: old cults of the dead, agrarian magic, exorcism of evil spirits, peculiar sacrifices, and animal-headed gods. In the Homeric poems, the avenging Fate was probably originally a daemon acting in parallel with the gods. Later, the cult of Dionysos Zagreus indicates that life-blood of animals was needed to renew that of men. A similar belief may be guessed from the Mycenaean Hagia Triada sarcophagus (1400 BC), which combines features of Minoan civilization and Mycenaean style. It seems that the blood of a bull was used for the regeneration of the reappearing dead. Probably most of these cults existed in the Mycenaean period and survived by immemorial practice. A secondary level of importance was the cult of the heroes, which seems to have started in the Mycenaean era. These were great men of the past who were exalted to honor after death, because of what they had done. According to an old Minoan belief, beyond the sea there was an island called Elysion, where the departed could have a different but happier existence. Later, the Greeks believed that there could live in human form only heroes and the beloved of the gods. The souls of the rest would drift unconsciously in the gloomy space of Hades. Gods and men had common origins, but there was an enormous gap between the immortal gods and mortal men. However, certain elements indicate that the Mycenaeans probably believed in a future existence. Two well-preserved bodies were found in Shaft Grave VI, and Wolfgang Helbig believed that an embalming preceded the burial. In the shaft graves discovered by Heinrich Schliemann, the corpses were lightly exposed to fire in order to preserve them. Mycenaean religion certainly involved offerings and sacrifices to the deities, and some have speculated that their ceremonies involved human sacrifice based on textual evidence and bones found outside tombs. In the Homeric poems, there seems to be a lingering cultural memory of human sacrifice in King Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia; several of the stories of Trojan heroes involve tragic human sacrifice. In the far past, even human beings might be offered to placate inscrutable gods, especially in times of guilty fear. Later sacrifice became a feast at which oxen were slaughtered. Men kept the meat, and gave the gods the bones wrapped in fat. Beyond this speculation we can go no further. Somewhere in the shades of the centuries between