The gods of this age are likewise patterned entirely after powerful human personalities. They are anthropomorphic in every respect--human beings of a higher order, whose qualities, though found only among men, are magnified to infinitude. Just as the hero is a man endowed with more than ordinary human capacities, so the god is a hero exalted above the measure of earthly heroes. This itself implies that the hero necessarily precedes the god, just as man antedates the hero. Any fairly detailed account of this period, therefore, must deal with the hero before considering the god. The god is created after the image of the hero, and not, as traditional mythology still believes, the hero after the image of the god. It would, indeed, be a strange procedure for man first to create the ideal conception of his god and only subsequently to transform this into human outlines, and thus produce the hero. In the advance from man to the anthropomorphic god, the hero would surely already have been encountered. This, of course, does not imply that gods may not occasionally be transformed into heroes; it simply means that in the development as a whole the hero must have preceded the god. The relation here is precisely the same as that found everywhere else in connection with the development and degeneration of mythological conceptions. The fact of sequence, however, must not be interpreted to mean that we can point to a time in which there were heroes but no gods. Hero and god belong together. Both reflect an effort to exalt human personality into the superhuman. In this process, no fixed line may be drawn separating the hero, whose activity still falls within the human sphere, from the god, who is exalted above it. In fact, the differences between hero and god are by no means merely quantitative, measurable in terms of the elevation above the plane of human characteristics; the differentiating marks are essentially _qualitative_. The hero remains human in all his thought and action. The god, on the other hand, possesses not merely human capacities raised to their highest power, but also characteristics which are lacking in man and therefore also in the hero. Especially noteworthy among the latter is the ability through his own power to perform magical acts, and thus to interfere at will in the course of nature as well as in human life. True, the hero of saga and poetry also employs magical agencies. The means of magic which he controls, however, have been bestowed upon him by some strange demoniacal being, either by one of those demons which, in the form of a man, an animal, or a fantastic monster, are recognized even by the early mythical tales as magical beings, or by a god, who, as such, combines the highest qualities of the hero with those of the demon. The conception of an anthropomorphic god, therefore, results from a fusion of hero with demon. Of these, the hero is a new creation, originating in the mental life of this later age.