Mythologia
（
μυθολογία, Plato,
De Rep. 394 B).
Mythology; a term sometimes used of the collected myths of a race or nation, and sometimes of
the scientific study of such myths. A myth (
μῦθος) is a
story, more or less poetic, related of gods or heroes. It is not a pure product of the
imagination, but is best regarded as in a way related to fact, whether the fact be a preceding
reality or some often-recurring phase of nature. The Greeks, a people most prolific in the
development and elaboration of myths, themselves took the view that there is necessarily some
meaning in a myth, either an historical occurrence disguised and exaggerated or an operation
of nature veiled in an allegory. Thus Anaxagoras regarded the true meaning of most of the
myths to be psychological; Empedocles, philosophical.
Euhemerus (q.v.) gave a rationalistic turn to mythology, stripping away the element of
the supernatural altogether; though Gruppe takes the ground that the work of Euhemerus is best
regarded as a work of pure fiction, with no ulterior motive behind it. The Stoics at Rome
tried to explain all myths as allegorical descriptions of physical facts, but this failed to
account for just those myths which most required explanation—the hideously immoral
and bestial myths that troubled the minds of men like Plato.
It is safe to say that most myths are the result of man's observations of nature, whose
various forms are personified as powerful beings by the imaginations of primitive men. These
forms were regarded as in part hostile and in part friendly to man. A more advanced stage of
mental development elaborated these crude conceptions, and began to regard these beings as
acting in accordance with fixed moral laws and endowed with human forms. Thus we have
Anthropomorphism. Poets and story-tellers brought the gods into connection with one another by
inventing genealogies for them and building up a whole political system, presided over by
Zeus, the father alike of gods and men. Around the earlier and ruder fancies a wonderful maze
was now woven, adorned by all the arts of poetry and prose and embedded in the nation's
literature. Among the Romans the cruder and simpler notion prevailed much longer—in
fact, throughout the whole period of purely national development. To them the gods were still
only the natural forces—beings strangely impersonal and making little demand upon
the imagination or the affection. They were to be propitiated, but not loved. Their worship
was a State affair, and the early Roman performed his religious duties in much the same
spirit as he paid his taxes. This is shown in the very nature of the deities at Rome
—gods not only of the sky and the earth, the sea and the world below, but gods of
thievery and lust, of typhoid fever and sewers. Later, when the Romans came into contact with
the Greeks and began the systematic study of their literature, they adopted the Greek
conception of the gods and the genealogies worked out by Hesiod and others. They transplanted
the Greek myths and told them of such of their own gods and goddesses as bore the closest
likeness to those of the Greeks, identifying Zeus with Iupiter, Heré with Iuno,
Ares with Mars, Athené with Minerva, and so on. For some of their deities, as, for
instance, Ianus, they could find no Hellenic prototype.
In modern times the Graeco-Roman mythology has been differently viewed. Creuzer made it
wholly symbolical and allegorical; Lobeck overthrew this doctrine in its extreme form and
paved the way for a thoroughly scientific study of the subject. The brothers Grimm taught that
mythology was not, as Creuzer implied, the work of the superior few, of a learned caste, but
was the way in which the multitude expressed their religious feeling. This view is supported
by the fact that in peoples widely apart the same myth is found, varying in its form, but
identical in its main outlines. Hence arose the study of Comparative Mythology, the creation
of two scholars—Adalbert Kuhn
(1812-81) in Germany, and Max
Müller in England. The object of this study is to trace all myths back to the
pre-historic period when the Indo-European peoples were united; and, having done so, to
determine the original forms and the original meanings. More recent mythologists, such as
Mannhardt
(1831-89), view the folk-tales as the earliest stratum accessible to
the comparative mythologist, rejecting the Sanskrit Vedas as a later and literary compilation.
Gruppe, one of the very latest investigators, rejects the comparative method altogether, and
thinks that myths have been simply borrowed by one nation from another, and not handed down
from a common ancestry at all.
For a discussion of the theory of myths, the standard works are: Creuzer,
Symbolik und Mythologie (1810-12);
Lobeck,
Aglaophamus (1829); Max
Müller, Comparative
Mythology (1856); Schrader,
Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan
Peoples (Engl. trans. 1890);
Gruppe, Die griechischen Culte und
Mythen (1887);
Mannhardt, Wald-und Feldkulte
(1876); Tylor,
Primitive Culture (3d Amer. ed. 1888); A.
Lang, Custom and Myth (1884); id.
Myth, Ritual, and
Religion (1887).
Good descriptive works of the Greek and Roman systems of mythology are: Preller,
Griechische Mythologie (4th ed. 1887); id.
Römische Mythologie (3d ed. 1883); Gayley,
Classic Myths (popular, 1893); Guerber,
Myths of
Greece and Rome (popular, 1893); Seelmann,
The Mythology of
Greece and Rome (elementary; Engl. trans. 1892). There is a dictionary of
mythology giving the latest views, in German, by Roscher,
Ausführliches
Lexicon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Leipzig, still in course
of publication). See also
Religio.
