ation.[248] Accordingly, if, like
girls at puberty, divine personages may neither touch the ground nor see
the sun, the reason is, on the one hand, a fear lest their divinity
might, at contact with earth or heaven, discharge itself with fatal
violence on either; and, on the other hand, an apprehension that the
divine being, thus drained of his ethereal virtue, might thereby be
incapacitated for the future performance of those magical functions,
upon the proper discharge of which the safety of the people and even of
the world is believed to hang. Thus the rules in question fall under the
head of the taboos which we examined in the second part of this
work;[249] they are intended to preserve the life of the divine person
and with it the life of his subjects and worshippers. Nowhere, it is
thought, can his precious yet dangerous life be at once so safe and so
harmless as when it is neither in heaven nor in earth, but, as far as
possible, suspended between the two.[250]

[Stories of immortality attained by suspension between heaven and
earth.]

In legends and folk-tales, which reflect the ideas of earlier ages, we
find this suspension between heaven and earth attributed to beings who
have been endowed with the coveted yet burdensome gift of immortality.
The wizened remains of the deathless Sibyl are said to have been
preserved in a jar or urn which hung in a temple of Apollo at Cumae; and
when a group of merry children, tired, perhaps, of playing in the sunny
streets, sought the shade of the temple and amused themselves by
gathering underneath the familiar jar and calling out, "Sibyl, what do
you wish?" a hollow voice, like an echo, used to answer from the urn, "I
wish to die."[251] A story, taken down from the lips of a German peasant
at Thomsdorf, relates that once upon a time there was a girl in London
who wished to live for ever, so they say:

"_London, London is a fine town.
A maiden prayed to live for ever._"

And still she lives and hangs in a basket in a church, and every St.
John's Day, about the hour of noon, she eats a roll of bread.[252]
Another German story tells of a lady who resided at Danzig and was so
rich and so blest with all that life can give that she wished to live
always. So when she came to her latter end, she did not really die but
only looked like dead, and very soon they found her in a hollow of a
pillar in the church, half standing and half sitting, motionless. She
stirred never a limb, but