A GUIDE TO MYTHOLOGY
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS A MYTH?
What is a myth? This looks like a simple question, and one that ought to be easy to answer. Yet it is one which has puzzled for centuries the heads of many learned men, who in their attempts to give a satisfactory answer to the question, have written whole libraries of profound books on the subject. It would seem almost hopeless for us to try and find an answer, if it were not that we live in the Twentieth Century, which is like a great hilltop towering above all the past centuries; and from this height we are able to look down and see right into the minds of all these learned and distinguished men, and understand why they found the answer to this question so difficult.
Let us try to imagine all the myths which have come into existence since the beginning of the world shut up in a huge round castle in the midst of a wide plain, and all these learned men like knights of the Middle Ages besieging the castle to find out the secrets that are locked up within it. They come, galloping up on horseback from every quarter of the plain—North, East, South, West—carrying long spears with which they batter away at the castle until they succeed in making a hole through the wall. Then each of these knights of learning becomes so intent upon what he sees in the castle through the hole that he, himself, has made that he is entirely unaware of what the other knights see through the holes they have made. Then they all go off and write their learned books, telling what they have seen, and when they come to read each other’s books, of course, they have terrible battles—all of words fortunately—in their attempts to settle who is right, and each one contends that he has seen all there is to be seen through his own particular little spear hole. But we, upon the hilltop can perceive that every one of the knights saw something about myths which was true, and the way to find the answer we want is to piece together all the fractions of truth which each man saw into a whole truth, or something near a whole truth, for, you know, the whole truth about anything is so immense that it is almost if not quite impossible to find it all out.
For example, it would not be possible for me to tell you in this one short chapter all the secrets which all the knights of learning saw as they looked into the castle; but I shall tell you a few of them, for it will help you to understand more intelligently what a myth really is.
The first knight to be seen galloping out of a very far-distant past is the Greek Theognis of Rhegium. He lived six hundred years B.C., but even as long ago as that there had come to be such an immense number of myths in Greece, that their existence was already a cause for much wonder. He carried a spear, called “allegory,” and when he battered into the castle, the only truth he could see was that all myths were allegories. According to him the Greek mythical gods, Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestos, were fire under different aspects: Hera was the air; Posidon, the water; Artemis, the moon, and so on. Other learned Greeks followed in his footsteps and saw much the same things. For example, three hundred years later, Aristotle said that myths were the attempt of the world before his time to express philosophical speculations, and Plutarch four hundred and sixty years later said that myths were metaphysical statements in disguise. That is, they all thought that myths had been invented to stand as symbols of objects in nature or of ideas which men had expressed.
Now, if we look again, we shall see another Greek knight galloping out of the past whose name was Euhemeros. He was a historian, a philosopher, and a traveller, and he lived about three hundred years B.C. He was the friend of the King of Macedon, who sent him off on missions to various countries. The spear he carried was called “history,” and the way he came to decide that myths were historical accounts of real persons is told in the following little story. Once when he was off on his travels, after sailing about for several days, he arrived in the Indian Ocean, where he found a group of islands the most important of which was Panchaia. The inhabitants of this island were distinguished for their piety and honored the gods by the most magnificent sacrifices and offerings of gold and silver. Among the wonderful works of art in this island was an immensely tall column on the top of which was a temple to Jupiter Triumphant. This was supposed to have been erected by Jupiter himself, when, an earthly monarch, he marched through the country victorious. Inside this temple was a column upon which were recorded the doings of Jupiter and of his father and grandfather, Kronos and Uranos.