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These divinities, moreover, were not manifestations of supreme power and intelligence, but were creations of the fancy, as they came from popular legends, or the brains of poets, or the hands of artists, or the speculations of philosophers.
They were almost suffocated with smoke, and scorched with the unbearable heat, for the conflagration had already reached the lower branches on their side of the OMBU. To extinguish it or check its progress was impossible; and they saw themselves irrevocably condemned to a torturing death, like the victims of Hindoo divinities. At last, their situation was absolutely intolerable.
The Greek colonists in Naukratis had prepared a feast to celebrate the departure of their protector's daughter. Numerous animals had been slaughtered in sacrifice on the altars of the Greek divinities, and the Nile-boats were greeted with a loud cry of "Ailinos" on their arrival in the harbor.
The reasons appear from what has been said, and therefore two sorts of oracles ought to be distinguished, the one dictated by the spirits of darkness, who deceived men by their obscure and doubtful answers, the other the pure artifice and deceit of the priests of false divinities.
She moved him with the sense of community in suffering: hers was the greater share, and he gave her the twopence he had left. Prudence is but one of the minor divinities, if indeed she be anything better than the shadow of a virtue, and he took no counsel with her, knowing that the real divinity, Love, would not cast him out for the deed.
Oceanus was an old god with a long beard and horned head who lived in a maritime cavern with his wife, Tethys, and his three hundred daughters, the Oceanides. No Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious divinities. Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the Oceanides virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock to which Prometheus was bound.
Thus it is, that by the power of fancy, material forms are clothed in supernatural attributes; and in the same manner imaginary divinities have all the forms of mortality bestowed upon them.
But nearly all those divinities who appear in the legend of the Master of the Great Land are still believed to dwell here with him, and here their shrines are: the beautiful one, magically born from the jewel worn in the tresses of the Goddess of the Sun, and called by men the Torrent-Mist Princess and the daughter of the Lord of the World of Shadows, she who loved the Master of the Great Land, and followed him out of the place of ghosts to become his wife and the deity called 'Wondrous-Eight-Spirits, grandson of the 'Deity of Water-Gates, who first made a fire-drill and platters of red clay for the august banquet of the god at Kitzuki and many of the heavenly kindred of these.
They were in the main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and comprised divinities of a very different character from those the girl was accustomed to see portrayed, among them being a Venus of standard pattern, a Diana, and, of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus, and Mars.
"I perceive you are a Greek," he said to me, "and the Greeks," he continued, "notwithstanding their distinguished accomplishments, were an idolatrous people. They worshipped gods that did not exist. They built temples to divinities which were merely empty names empty names," he repeated. "Apollo and Athene and the entire Olympian lot were no more than inventions of the fancy."
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