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.