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The close was a chorus of all the deities and semi-deities in praise of the old Prince, with the accompaniment of fireworks. Apollo rose through the air like a frog, with his blue legs and yellow arms wide apart; Jupiter's chariot rolled off; Venus bowed herself back against a mouldy cloud; and the Muses came forward in a bunch, with a wreath of laurel, which they placed upon the venerated head.
He suggests that there were earlier gods than the devas, but he tells us nothing about them, except that they were not fully deities; they were only semi-deities, or not deities at all. The worship of spirits he leaves entirely out of consideration; religion did not, in his view, begin with Animism. When he does tell us of the beginnings of religion, what is his view?
Then second, semi-tangible objects; such as trees, mountains, rivers, the sea, the earth, which supply the material for what may be called semi-deities. And third, intangible objects, such as the sky, the stars, the sun, the dawn, the moon; in these are to be seen the germs of deities.
So he watches while we hear the snarling music associated with him; and we can feel all the old-time horror of the malignant semi-deities of the black forests and streams and caves. Mime and he dispute angrily: Siegfried is about to slay the dragon, the "Wurm," and the question is who is to have the gold.
Mr. Muller has a long list of semi-tangible objects 'overwhelming and overawing, like the tree. There are mountains, where 'even a stout heart shivers before the real presence of the infinite'; there are rivers, those instruments of so sudden a religious awakening; there is earth. These supply the material for semi-deities.
And he observes with surprise, that this wickedness, which is at a furnace-heat in the superior gods, becomes fainter and paler as you descend. Amongst the semi-deities, such as the Oreads or Dryads, the Nereids or Naiads, he feels not at all offended. The odor of corruption, the saeva mephitis, has by this time exhaled. The uproar of eternal outrage has ceased.
Max Müller seems to share this view when he says that man was led from the worship of semi-tangible objects, which provided him with semi-deities, to that of intangible objects, which gave him deities proper.
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