Accordingly, if, like
girls at puberty, divine personages may neither touch the ground nor
see the sun, the reason is, on the one hand, a fear lest their
divinity might, at contact with earth or heaven, discharge itself
with fatal violence on either; and, on the other hand, an
apprehension that the divine being, thus drained of his ethereal
virtue, might thereby be incapacitated for the future performance of
those magical functions, upon the proper discharge of which the
safety of the people and even of the world is believed to hang. Thus
the rules in question fall under the head of the taboos which we
examined in an earlier part of this book; they are intended to
preserve the life of the divine person and with it the life of his
subjects and worshippers. Nowhere, it is thought, can his precious
yet dangerous life be at once so safe and so harmless as when it is
neither in heaven nor in earth, but, as far as possible, suspended
between the two.
LXI. The Myth of Balder
A DEITY whose life might in a sense be said to be neither in heaven
nor on earth but between the two, was the Norse Balder, the good and
beautiful god, the son of the great god Odin, and himself the
wisest, mildest, best beloved of all the immortals.
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