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Ay: there were deities in Mardi far greater and taller than I: right royal monarchs to boot, living in jolly round tabernacles of jolly brown clay; and feasting, and roystering, and lording it in yellow tabernacles of bamboo. These demi-gods had wherewithal to sustain their lofty pretensions. If need were, could crush out of him the infidelity of a non-conformist.
The Romans also, as nature is the same in all places, though they knew nothing of those Grecian demi-gods, nor had any communication with Greece, yet had certain young men who at their festivals danced and sang after their uncouth manner to a certain kind of verse which they called Saturnian.
It is a period abounding in splendid fictions of heroes and demi-gods, embracing, among others, the twelve wonderful labors of Hercules; the exploits of the Athenian king The'seus, and of Mi'nos, King of Crete, the founder of Grecian law and civilization; the events of the Argonautic expedition; the Theban and Argol'ic wars; the adventures of Beller'ophon, Per'seus, and many others; and concluding with the Trojan war and the supposed fall of Troy.
For be it known, that in due time we met with several decayed, broken down demi-gods: magnificos of no mark in Mardi; having no temples wherein to feast personal admirers, or spiritual devotees. They wandered about forlorn and friendless. And oftentimes in their dinnerless despair hugely gluttonized, and would fain have grown fat, by reflecting upon the magnificence of their genealogies.
James Stephens was not widely known until the year 1912, when he published a novel called The Crock of Gold; this excited many readers in Great Britain and in America, an excitement considerably heightened by the appearance of another work of prose fiction, The Demi-Gods, in 1914; and general curiosity about the author became rampant.
Most of the kings of the Archipelago, besides Media, claiming homage as demi-gods; and that, too, by virtue of hereditary descent, the divine spark being transmissable from father to son. In illustration of this, was the fact, that in several instances the people of the land addressed the supreme god Oro, in the very same terms employed in the political adoration of their sublunary rulers.
I used to gaze at him, when he appeared on military parade, as if he were one of the demi-gods of the ancient world.
Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's religious thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality restricted to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan derivation for such were the heroes and demi-gods which sometimes shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are many that are called and few that are chosen.
It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion.
What a sweet hero is Raleigh, who was a farmer of piracy; what a grand Admiral was Drake; what demi-gods the fighting Americans who murdered Indians for the crime of wanting their own! History hath charms to move an infant breast to savagery. Good strong novels are the best pabulum to nourish difference between virtue and vice. Don't I know?
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