If the gods be described as personalities, each one of whom possesses a more or less definite individuality, it is at once evident that the conception of an animated natural phenomenon—the idea, for example, that the setting sun is a being which a dark cloud-demon is devouring—cannot in and of itself as yet be called a god-idea. Just as the character of a man may be known only from the manner in which he reacts towards the objects of his experience, so also is the nature of a god revealed only in his life and activity, and in the motives that determine his conduct. The character of the god is expressed, not in any single mythological picture, but in the myth or mythological tale, in which the god figures as a personal agent. It is significant to note, however, that the form of myth in which god-ideas come to development is not the deity saga, in the proper sense of the term, but the hero saga, which becomes a combined hero and deity saga as soon as both gods and heroes are represented as participating in the action. The deity saga proper, which deals exclusively with the deeds of gods and demons, is, as we shall see below, only of secondary and of later origin. It is not to such deity sagas, therefore, that we must turn if we would learn the original nature of gods. This circumstance in itself offers external evidence of the fact that gods did not precede heroes, but, conversely, that heroes preceded gods. Or, at least, to be more accurate, the idea of the divine personality was developed in constant reciprocity with that of the hero personality, in such wise, however, that with reference to details the hero paved the way for the god, and not conversely.
But how did the idea of hero arise? Was it a free and completely new creation of this age, based merely on actual observations of individuals who were paragons of human ability? Or did it have precursors in the totemic era? As a matter of fact, this second question must be answered unqualifiedly in the affirmative. The hero was not unknown in the preceding age. At that time, however, he was not a hero in the specific sense which the word first acquired in the heroic age; on the contrary, he was a märchen-hero, if we may use the word 'hero' in connection with the concepts of this earlier period. On the threshold of the heroic age, the märchen-hero changes into the hero proper. The former represents the central theme of the earlier form of myth narrative, the märchen-myth, as does the hero that of the more developed form, the saga. The marks that distinguish the märchen-hero, as he still survives in children's tales, from the hero of saga, are important ones and are fraught with significance for the development of myth as a whole. The märchen-hero is usually a child. In the form in which he gradually approximates to the hero proper, he is more especially, as a rule, a boy who goes forth into the world and meets with adventures. In these adventures, he is aided by various powers of magic, which he either himself possesses or which are imparted to him by friendly magical beings. Opposed to him are hostile, demoniacal beings, who seek his destruction. It is in their overthrow that the action usually consists. Thus, fortune comes to this hero, in great part, from without, and magic plays the decisive rôle in his destiny; his own cunning and skill may be co-operating factors, but they rarely determine the outcome. Not so the hero of the saga. This hero is not a boy, but a man. The favourite theme of the saga is particularly the young man in the bloom of life. In his acts, moreover, this hero is dependent, for the most part, upon himself. True, he, as well as the märchen-hero, is familiar with magic and miracle, but it is primarily by his own power that he overcomes the hostile forces that oppose him. A suggestive illustration of this is Hercules, that figure of Greek saga who is pre-eminently the typical hero among the most diverse peoples and in widely different ages. Hercules is an entirely self-dependent hero. He indeed performs marvellous deeds, but these are never more than extreme instances of what an ordinary man might do were his strength multiplied a hundred or a thousand fold. Hercules is not a magician, but a being of transcendent power and strength. As such, he is able even to carry the weight of the sky on his shoulders; as such, he can overcome monsters, such as the Nemean lion and the Lernæan hydra, or bring Cerberus, the most terrible of these monsters, from the nether world. These are deeds which surpass every measure of human power, but which nevertheless still lie in the general plane of human actions. Thus, just as the magic-working boy was superseded by the man of might, so also does the true magical hero disappear from mythology. The saga, then, differs from the märchen-myth in the character of its hero. The Hercules saga itself, however, is an illustration of the fact that the former may have no connection whatsoever with historical events, any more than has the latter. Moreover, the earliest sagas, particularly, not infrequently still remind one of the märchen in that they are obviously a composite of several narratives. Of this fact also, the saga of Hercules offers a conspicuous example. The deeds of the hero appear to have but an accidental connection with one another. True, later sagas represent these deeds as adventures which the hero undertook at the command of King Eurystheus of Mycene. But even here we obviously have only a loose sort of framework which was at some later period imposed upon the original tales in order to bind the cycle together as a whole. It is not improbable that these various sagas of a hero who vanquished monsters, rendered lands habitable, and performed other deeds, originated independently of one another. Not only may their places of origin have been different, but their narratives may have had their settings in different localities. Possibly, therefore, it was not until later that the sagas were combined to portray the character of a single individual, who thus became exalted into the national hero. But, though the hero saga resembles the märchen in the fact that it grows by the agglutination of diverse legendary materials, it differs from it in the possession of a characteristic which is typical of this stage of development. That which binds together the separate elements of the hero saga is a unitary thought, generally associated with great cultural changes or with historical events.
There is a further differentia of the saga as compared with the märchen. Wherever magic enters into the saga to affect the course of events, the chief vehicle of magical powers is not the hero himself—at most, he has been equipped by others with magical powers and implements. Such demoniacal powers as the saga may introduce into its narrative are usually vested in accessory persons. This fact is closely connected with the self-dependent character of the hero-personality, who may, it is true, employ magic in so far as he has received such power from external sources, but who himself possesses none but human attributes. The saga of the Argonauts, for example, is so replete with magic as not to be surpassed in this respect even by the magical märchen. Moreover, the various elements incorporated in the saga are all pure märchen motives—the golden fleece, the talking ship, the closing cliffs, as well as the sorceress Medea and the whole wonderland of Colchis. Those who man the Argo, however, are not magicians, but heroes in the strictly human sense of the word. The same fact stands out even more strikingly in the case of the saga of Odysseus, at any rate in the form in which the Homeric epic presents it. We may here discern an entire cycle of tales, whose separate elements are also to be found elsewhere, some of them in wide distribution. But in the midst of this märchen-world stands the absolutely human hero, contrasting with whom the fabulous events of the narrative run their course as a fantastic show. The hero overcomes all obstacles that block the course of his journey by his own never-failing shrewdness and resourcefulness. Herein again the märchen-myth gives evidence of being preparatory to the hero saga. At the time when the hero ideal arose, the old märchen ideas were as yet everywhere current. Together with the belief in demons and magic, they, also, found their way into the heroic age. For a long time they continued to be favourite secondary themes, introduced in portraying the destiny of heroes. Nevertheless märchen ideas became subordinate to the delineation of heroic figures, whose surpassing strength was described, very largely, in terms of victory over demoniacal powers. Thus, in the course of the development, the heroic elements gradually increased; the märchen ideas, on the other hand, disappeared, except when some poet intentionally selected them for the enrichment of his tale, as was obviously done by the author of the Odyssey.
The disappearance of the elements derived from the märchen-myth, however, must in part be attributed to another factor. This factor, which is closely bound up with the entire culture of the heroic age, consists in the increasing influence of historical recollections. Particularly illuminative, as regards this point, are the Greek and Germanic sagas. The sagas of Hercules and the Argonauts, which, from this point of view, belong to a relatively early stage, are purely mythical creations. So far as one can see, no actual events are referred to by them. The Trojan saga, on the other hand, clearly exhibits the traces of historical recollections; its historical setting, moreover, seems to cause the events that transpire within it to approximate more nearly to the character of real life. Even here, indeed, ancient magical motives still cast their fantastic shadows over the narrative. Occasionally, however, the miracle appears in a rationalized form. The magician of the märchen gives place to the seer who predicts the future. What the miracle effected is now accomplished by the overpowering might and the baffling cunning of the strong and wily hero. In this change, the external accessories may sometimes remain the same, so that it is only the inner motives that become different. Thus, it is not impossible that the wooden horse which was said to have been invented by Odysseus and to have brought into Troy the secreted warriors of the besieging hosts, was at one time, in märchen or in saga, an actual magical horse, or a help-bringing deity who had assumed this form. In this case, the poet may possibly be presenting a rationalistic reinterpretation of an older magical motive, with the aim of exalting the craftiness of his hero. In the account of Achilles' youth, on the other hand, and in the story of Helen which the poet takes as his starting-point, the märchen-idea of the saga obviously affects the action itself, though it is significant to note that these purely mythical features do not belong to the plot so much as to its antecedent history. In so far as the heroes directly affect the course of action, they are portrayed as purely human. The same is true of the German Niebelungen saga. Just as Achilles, a mythical hero not at all unlike the märchen-hero, was taken over into the historical saga, so also was Siegfried. But here again the märchen motives, such as the fight with the dragon, Siegfried's invulnerability through bathing in its blood, the helmet of invisibility, and others, belong to the past history of the hero, and are mentioned only incidentally in the narrative itself. By referring these specifically märchen miracles to the past, the saga seems to say, as it were, that its heroes were at one time märchen-heroes.
In this course of development from the purely mythical to the historical, the saga may approach no more closely to historical reality than does the purely mythical tale. But while this may be the case, it is nevertheless true that the saga more and more approximates to that which is historically possible. Moreover, it is not those sagas which centre about an historical hero that are particularly apt to be free from elements of the original märchen. Very often the reverse is true. An original märchen-hero may become the central figure of an historical saga, and, conversely, the account of an historical personality may become so thoroughly interwoven with märchen-like tales of all sorts that history entirely disappears. A striking antithesis of this sort occurs in Germanic mythology. Compare the Dietrich saga with the later development of the Niebelungen saga in the form rendered familiar by the Niebelungenlied. Siegfried of the Niebelungen saga originates purely as a märchen-hero; Dietrich of Bern is an historical personage. But, while the Niebelungenlied incorporates a considerable number of historical elements—though, of course, in an unhistorical combination—the Dietrich of the saga retains little more than the name of the actual king of the Goths. There are two different conditions that give rise to sagas. In the first place, historical events that live in folk-memory assimilate materials of ancient märchen and sagas, and thus lead to a connected hero saga. Secondly, an impressive historical personality stimulates the transference of older myths as well as the creation of others, though these, when woven into a whole, resemble a märchen-cycle rather than a hero saga proper.
An important intermediate phenomenon of the sort just mentioned, is not infrequently to be found in a specific form of myth whose general nature is that of the hero saga, even though it is usually distinguished from the latter because of the character of its heroes. I refer to the religious legend. Some of these legends, such as the Buddha, the Mithra, and the Osiris legends, border upon the deity saga. Nevertheless, the religious legend, as exemplified also in the mythological versions of the life of Jesus, represents an offshoot of the hero saga, springing up at those times when the religious impulses are dominant. That it is a hero saga is evidenced particularly by the fact that it recounts the life and deeds of a personality who is throughout exalted above human stature, but who, nevertheless, attains to divinity only through his striving, his suffering, and his final victory. In so far, the religious hero very closely resembles the older class of heroes. Nevertheless, instead of the hero of the heroic period, pre-eminent for his external qualities, we have the religious hero, who is exalted by his inner worth into a redeeming god. But it is only because these divine redeemers fought and conquered as men—a thing that would be impossible to gods proper who are exalted from the beginning in supermundane glory—that they constitute heroes of saga, in spite of the fact that they fought with other weapons and in other ways than the heroes of the heroic age. And, therefore, none of these redeemer personalities, whether they have an historical background, as have Jesus and Buddha, or originate entirely in the realm of the mythological imagination, as in the case of Osiris and Mithra, belong to the realm of the saga once they are finally elevated into deities. Even Buddha's return in the endless sequence of ages is not to be regarded as an exception to this rule, for the hope of salvation here merely keeps projecting into the future the traditional Buddha legend. The redeeming activity of the one who is exalted into a god is to be repeated in essentially the same manner as the saga reports it to have occurred in the past.
Contrasting with the redemption legend is the saint legend. The former portrays the fortunes and final victory of a god in the making; the latter tells of the awakening of a human being to a pure religious life, of his temptations and sufferings, and his final triumph. Thus, it has a resemblance to the redeemer legend, and yet it differs from it in that its hero remains human even when he ascends into heaven to receive the victor's crown; the lot that thus befalls him is identical with that of all the devout, except that he is more favoured. This leads to further differences. The hero of the redemption legend is conscious of his mission from the very beginning; in the case of the saint, conversion to a new faith not infrequently forms the starting-point of the legend. Common to the two forms, however, is the fact that suffering precedes the final triumph. The traits that we have mentioned constitute the essential difference between these forms of the legend and the hero saga proper. The latter, also, is not without the element of suffering; the Greek saga has developed the specific type of a suffering hero in the figure of Hercules, as has the German saga in that of Balder. In the case of religious legends, however, the strife-motives of the saga are transferred to the inner life; similarly, the suffering of the saint, and especially that of the redeemer, is not merely physical but also mental. Indeed, the original form of the Buddha legend, which is freest from mythological accretions, is an illustration of the fact that this suffering may be caused exclusively by the evils of the world to be redeemed. The suffering due to a most intense sympathy is so intimate a part of the very nature of the redeeming god-man, that it is precisely this which constitutes the most essential difference between the religious legend and the ordinary hero saga, whose interest is centred upon the actions and motives of external life. And yet the external martyrdom of the redeemer intensifies this difference in a twofold way. In the first place, it directly enhances the impression of the inner suffering; secondly, it gives heightened expression both to the evil which evokes the sympathy of the redeemer, and to the nobility of this sympathy itself. In all of these characteristics, however, the redemption legend belongs to the following era rather than to hero saga and the heroic age.
The saint legend exhibits a number of essential differences. It is frequently only through a miracle of conversion, due to external powers, that the saint becomes holy; moreover, it is not, as a rule, through miracles of his own performance that he manifests himself as a saint in the course of his later life and sufferings. The miracles that transpire come as divine dispensations from without, whether they effect his conversion or surround him, particularly at the close of his life's journey, with the halo of sanctity. Thus, to whatever extent the saint may come, in later cult, to supersede the protective undergods and demons of early times, he nevertheless remains human. It is for this very reason, however, that magic and miracle gain a large place in his life. The latter is all the more possible by virtue of the fact that the mythological imagination is not bound by any fixed tradition, and need, therefore, set itself no limits whatsoever either in the number of saints or in the nature of their deeds. Moreover, the legend is almost totally lacking in those factual elements which the hero saga acquires, in its later development, as a result of the historical events that are woven into it. This is not the case with the legend. Here it is at most the name of an historical personality that is retained, while everything else clearly bears the marks of imagination and of myth creation. Hence the saint legend is not to be counted among the factors that underlie the development from the purely mythical tale to the saga, whose content, though not real, is at any rate possible. On the contrary, the tendency of the saint legend is retrogressive, namely, toward a return to the märchen stage of myth. This is all the more true, not merely because elements that are generally characteristic of märchen are disseminated from legend to legend, but also because the saint legend appropriates widely current märchen conceptions. Märchen of very diverse origins found their way into the Christian, as well as the Buddhistic, legends; moreover, occasional Buddhistic legends, with the clear marks of an Oriental origin upon them, were changed into Christian legends. Thus, the saint legend combines two characteristics. As compared with the hero saga, its motives are internalized; moreover, it represents a decided relapse into the pure märchen form of myth. Though apparently contradictory, these characteristics are really closely related, inasmuch as the internalization of motives itself removes any barriers imposed by historical recollection upon the free play of the mythological imagination.