In the Chinese heaven the gods hold office like magistrates, and like magistrates they can be removed by death. Werner's Myths & Legends of China (a 1922 compilation of Chinese myth) describes a pantheon modelled precisely on the imperial bureaucracy: the gods "differ in rank," they keep court and audiences, and they "may be promoted for distinguished services," rising toward the Pearly Emperor as a good official rises toward the throne. Bound by "the rules and conditions existing on this earth", they are not spared its last one. The gods, the record says, "indulge in amusements, marry, sin, are punished" — and then, plainly, they "are resurrected, or die and are transformed, or die finally."

The strangeness is in that turnover. A god here is less a person than a post. The clay image in the temple endures, but the "spirit which dwells in the clay tabernacle changes" as the tenants of divine office rotate, so that a worshipper cannot be sure the god he prayed to yesterday still lodges in the idol today. How, the chapter asks, are the people to "know gods which are not the same to-day as yesterday"? Divinity, on this shelf, is a lease, and death is only the ending of a term.

The shelf is thin for a motif so large. Only the Chinese witness is wired to served text; the Norse gods who fall "at the Doom" in Thompson's Icelandic citation, and his Irish, Indian, Hawaiian and Tahitian authorities, all wait unread. What the served page offers is stranger than any twilight of the gods — not one great dying but a quiet clerical mortality, deities expiring and being replaced like officials at the end of a posting. If a god can "die finally", what is it that dies: the spirit, the office, or only the name on the door?