ABSTRACT
When an Egyptian god received the call to cure the princess of distant Bekhten, the priests of his temple in Karnak solemnly recorded the honour. Centuries later, a Greek novelist presented a priest in this role and incorporated such a trip as the centre-piece of a love-story. All the novels use divine machinery, yet in ways so totally different that it is next to meaningless to apply any single term to them. And so many religious motifs already occurred in secular literature that it seemed pointless to insist without further evidence that they were essential or original to the genre. Chance and Destiny are often as prominent in the novels as gods themselves, where they are not already identified with divine forces anyway. Dreams are naturally a central part of the religious machinery of the novel, as they were of the ancient world at large. But the novelists use them in a variety of different ways.
