...As regards the good principle, the same conception prevailed over all the Christian countries of Europe. The Roman Catholic Church took care of that, and whoever deviated from the prescribed faith was a heretic. But in relation to the evil principle and the empire of Satan, different views were held in different countries, and the Germanic North had quite different conceptions from the Latin South. This was caused by the fact that the Christian priesthood did not reject the previously existing national gods as baseless fantasies of the brain, but conceded to them an actual existence; asserting, however, that all these gods were nothing but male and female devils, who, through the victory of Christ, had lost their power over mankind, and now sought through wiles and stratagems to lure them to sin. All Olympus was now transformed into an airy hell; and if a poet of the middle ages sang of Grecian mythology ever so beautifully, the pious Christian would persist in seeing therein only devils and hobgoblins. The gloomy fanaticism of the monks alighted with special severity on poor Venus: she was considered a daughter of Beelzebub, and the good knight Tannhäuser tells her to her face-- "O Venus, lovely wife of mine, You are but a she-devil!" Tannhäuser had been enticed by her into that wondrous mountain-cavern called the Venusburg, where, according to tradition, dwelt the beautiful goddess with her nymphs and her paramours, beguiling the hours with the most wanton carousings and dancing. Even poor Diana was not spared, and, notwithstanding her previous reputation for chastity, similar scandals were fastened on her good name. It is said that she, together with her nymphs, indulged in nightly rides through the forest; hence the legend of a strange midnight chase, by wild and furious hunters. This legend reveals clearly the then pervading Gnostic theory of the degeneration of the former divinities. In this transformation of the ancient national religion the underlying principle of Christianity is most fully manifested. The national religion of Europe in the North, even more than in the South, was pantheism. All the mysteries and symbols of that religion were founded on and had reference to a worship of nature; each of the elements was regarded as the embodiment of some mysterious being, and as such was revered and worshipped; in every tree dwelt a divinity, and all nature swarmed with gods and goddesses. Christianity exactly reversed this, and in place of gods it substituted devils and demons. The cheerful figures of Grecian mythology, beautified as they were by art, had taken root in the South along with Roman civilisation, and were not so easily to be displaced by the hideous, weird, and satanic divinities of the German North. The latter seemed to have been fashioned without any particular artistic design, and even before the advent of Christianity they were as sombre and as gloomy as the North itself.