WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 45 



originally lay at the root of some myths, the full significance of which had been 

 lost so early as Homer, but in the partial and one-sided application of a few 

 favourite ideas to all physical facts, and in the broad denial of any historical 

 elements underlying any personality of early tradition. 



XVII. Among the ancients, the extreme of the rationalising interpretation 

 of the Greek theological myths is what may be called the irreligious, godless, 

 and altogether prosaic system of Euhemerus (b.c. 300), who wrote a book to 

 prove that all the Greek gods, not even excepting Jove, had been originally 

 dead men deified. The error of this system consisted, not in the assertion that 

 the elevation of extraordinary human characters to a divine rank with religious 

 honour after death, is an element traceable in the Hellenic, as in some other 

 popular theologies, but in the wholesale declaration that religious worship had 

 no other origin, and that this element, which is always secondary and derivative 

 in the popular creed, is primitive and exclusive. 



XVIII. In order to ascertain how far the principle of Euhemerus may apply 

 to any particular case, the general religious tendencies and habits of the nation 

 or people must be considered in the first place, and then the whole circum- 

 stances and features of the mythical narrative must be accurately surveyed and 

 carefully weighed, and a separation of the canonised man from the deified nature 

 element with which he may have been mixed up, made accordingly. 



XIX. Euhemerus, however, was altogether wrong in supposing that this 

 system of interpretation could be applied on any extensive scale to the mythical 

 theology of the Greeks ; and the few French and English writers who, in the 

 flatness of the last century, gave a limited currency to this idea, have found no 

 followers in the present. 



XX. An opposite theory to that of Euhemerus, much in fashion with the 

 Germans, is that, whereas he said the gods were elevated men, we ought rather 

 to say that many men, perhaps all the heroes of legendary story, are degraded 

 gods. That in the course of religious development, especially when mixed up 

 with great changes in the political relations of different races, such a degrada- 

 tion may have taken place is certain ; that it has taken place in certain special 

 cases will be a just conclusion from an analysis of the character and worship of 

 certain heroes, when a cumulative view of the myths connected with them 

 suggests the theory of a divine rather than a human significance ; but there is 

 no scientific warrant for the assertion which it is now the fashion to make 

 (Baring Gould, Rel. bel. vol. i. p. 167), that the old heroic names of a country, 

 as King Arthur, for instance, are in the mass to be treated as degraded gods. 



VOL. XXVI. PART I. M 



