ATo. XVII. 



ORIGIN OF MYTHOLOGY 



BY NOAH WEBSTER, JUN, ESQ. 



NO subject of antiquity has more seriously engaged 

 the attention, or confounded the ingenuity of mo- 

 dern historians and antiquaries, than the origin of heathen 

 mythology. It is a field of inquiry in which conjecture 

 has long rambled without control, imagination supplying 

 what authentic history cannot furnish, and the toils of la- 

 borious erudition producing but a scanty harvest of truth. 

 Yet the student who finds, in every page of the Greek 

 and Roman classics, some deity intermeddling with hu- 

 man affairs, or presiding over the elements and the opera -< 

 tions of nature ; the traveller who examines the stupen- 

 dous temples erected to Jupiter and Mars, to Juno and 

 Venus, or walks over the majestic ruins of Balbec and 

 Palmyra ; and the philosopher who traces the progress of 

 man, his customs, institutions and religious ceremonies, 

 is solicitous to pry into the origin of that multifarious ma- 

 chinery of gods and goddesses, whose worship exhausted 

 the wealth, and controlled the passions of the pagan world. 

 In attempting to unravel this intricate subject, we find, 

 in history, no safe clue to guide us ; for the origin of the 

 mythological deities was in ages long anterior to the in- 

 vention of letters and the art of writing. To increase 

 the perplexity, we meet with an immense mass of fictions 



