It is manifest that the epical Upper World of the Gods has receded from the place it occupies in the Iliad and in the other portions of the Odyssey; in fact, it has been largely but not wholly supplanted. A new order of deities is portrayed, subordinate, yet authoritative in their limited domain, which is cut off by the vast sea from united Hellas, and is thus made merely individual and anti-social by its situation. What are these shapes and why? Man has created them that he may indicate his own spiritual state when he has fallen out with the established order. Really they are phases of the development of the hero, who is reaching out through disbelief, denial, defiance, toward a restoration. He is negative to the Greek consciousness, and this negation takes shape by mind, yet has to be put down by mind. The whole process he projects out of himself into two lines of movement: the first is the row of preternatural forms arranged as if in a gallery of antique sculpture, the second is himself passing through these forms, grappling with them, mastering them, or fleeing from them. Such is this Fairy World which has crept in under the grand Olympian order in response to a true necessity. Its beings are not natural, its events are not probable; thus the poet forces us to look inward if we would see his meaning. Spirit is portraying spirit, and not externality, which is here made absurd; in this manner we are driven out of the real into ideal, or we drop by the way in reading those four Books.