The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate: By Richard Broxton Onians. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1951. 547 pp.

The author of this book is the Hildred Carlisle Professor of Latin at the University of London. Not since Jane Ellen Harrison have I read with such profound admiration anything in the field of Greek and Roman religion. Here we have the best tradition of European scholars, a worthy successor to Mannhardt, Frazer, Harrison, Murray, etc. Most modern books in this field try to refute their predecessors but give nothing in exchange. Onians shows among other things that the Roman genius is the equivalent of the Greek yuch, thus confirming a view I have long held on the phallic origin of the concept of the soul. One also learns something about sublimation, that is, how the phallic serpent-soul becomes what we now call a genius. It is based on the well-known, but nowadays seldom mentioned, mechanism of displacement from below upwards.1 He derives the word cerebrum from the verb cereo, or ereo, (I beget, I engender); hence the goddess Ceres, or in the masculine form Cerus, the 'engenderer' (p. 125). A person who is frantic or possessed is cerritus, cerebrosus and this again is kerus, another word for