As thought goes on, such allies compromise their employers; the creator's work reflects the creator's character; and after many timorous ages we find the dragon-guarded deities going down with their cruel defenders. It is not without significance that in the Sanskrit dictionary the most ancient of all words for god, Asura, has for its primary meaning 'demon' or 'devil:' the gods and dragons united to churn the ocean for their own wealth, and in the end they were tarred with one brush. I have already described in the beginning of this work the degradation of deities, and need here barely recall to the reader's memory the forces which operated to that result. The bearing of that force upon the celestial or paradise-guarding Serpent is summed up in one quatrain of Omar Khayyám:-- O Thou who man of baser earth didst make, And e'en in Paradise devised the Snake; For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blackened, man's forgiveness give--and take! The heart of humanity anticipated its logic by many ages, and, long before the daring genius of the Persian poet wrote this immortal epitaph on the divine allies of the Serpent, heroes had given battle to the whole fraternity. Nay, in their place had arisen a new race of gods, whose theoretical omnipotence was gladly surrendered in the interest of their righteousness; and there was now war in heaven; the dragon and his allies were cast down, and man was now free to fight them as enemies of the gods as well as himself. Woe henceforth to any gods suspected of taking sides with the dragon in this man's life-and-death struggle with the ferocities of nature, and with his own terrors reflected from them! The legend of Prometheus was their unconsciously-given 'notice to quit,' though it waited many centuries for its great interpreter. It is Goethe who alone has seen how pale and weak grow Jove's fireworks before the thought-thunderbolts of the artist, launched far beyond the limitations that chain him in nature. Gods are even yet going down in many lands before the sublime sentence of Prometheus:-- Curtain thy heavens, thou Jove, with clouds and mist, And, like a boy that moweth thistles down, Unloose thy spleen on oaks and mountain-tops; Yet canst thou not deprive me of my earth, Nor of my hut, the which thou didst not build, Nor of my hearth, whose little cheerful flame Thou enviest me! I know not aught within the universe More slight, more pitiful than you, ye gods! Who nurse your majesty with scant supplies Of offerings wrung from fear, and muttered prayers, And needs must starve, were't not that babes and beggars Are hope-besotted fools!