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Mircea Eliade – Patterns in Comparative religion

 Thetis, the sea nymph, or Proteus, Glaucos, Nereus, Triton – all Neptunian divinities still displaying in their appearance their connection with water, having the bodies of sea monsters, or the tails of fishes, or something of the sort.  They live and govern in the depths of the sea.  Like the element from which they are only imperfectly and never finally detached, these divinities are odd and capricious; they do good and evil with equal carelessness, and like the sea, they generally do evil.  More than any other gods they live outside time and history.  Closely bound up with the origin of the world, they only participate occasionally in what passes there.  Their life is perhaps less divine than that of the other gods, but it is more regular and more closely connected with the element they represent.