Nekyia of the Odyssey. The Penitents in Erebos and the blessed in Elysium correspond: both represent exceptions which do not destroy the rule and do not affect the main outline of Homeric belief. In the first case, as in the second, the omnipotence of Heaven has broken through the rule. Those, however, who owe to the special favour of the gods their escape from death and their translation to Elysium are near relatives of the gods. This seems to be the only reason for the favour shown to them.[21\2] If therefore any more general reason beyond the capricious good-will of some god is to account for the translation of these individuals it might perhaps be found in the belief that near relationship with the gods, that is, the very highest nobility of lineage, could preserve a man from the descent into the common realm of hopeless nothingness after the separation of the psyche from the body. In the same way the beliefs of many primitive peoples represent the ordinary man as departing to a joyless country of the dead (if he is not annihilated altogether) while the descendants of gods and kings, or the aristocracy, go to a land of unending happiness.[22\2] Such a fancy, however, is only dimly apparent in the promise made to Menelaos; nowhere is anything said of a general rule from which the individual case might be deduced.-- § 4 But the individuals who are admitted to an everlasting life in the Elysian land at the end of the world are much too distantly removed from the habitations of the living for them to be credited with the power of influencing the world of men.[23\2] They resemble the gods only in the enjoyment accorded to them of an unendingly conscious life. Of the omnipotence of {62} the gods they have not the smallest share[24\2] any more than the dwellers in Erebos, from whose fate their own is otherwise so different. We must not suppose, therefore, that the origin of the stories of the promotion of individual heroes above their companions and their translation into a distant dwelling-place, is to be sought in any _cultus_ offered to those individuals in their previous earthly dwelling-place. Every religious cult is the worship of something real and powerful; no popular religion and no poet's fancy would have given the national heroes, if they were to be regarded as powerful and worshipped accordingly, such a distant and inaccessible home. It was the free activity of the poetic fancy which created and embellished this last refuge of human aspiration upon the Elysian plain. The needs which this new creation was chiefly intended to satisfy were poetical and not religious.