MYTH and MYTHOLOGY. The word myth (Gr. mythos) originally signified speech or discourse, and was identical with the word logos. After the age of Pinda• and Herodo tus, however, it came to be synonymous with the Latin word fabula, .,fable or legend. According to the present use of our language, a myth is an idea or fancy presented in the historical form; and though, of course, any fiction at any time in this shape might be called a myth, yet by usage the word is confined to those fictions made in the early periods of a people's existence, for the purpose of presenting their religious belief, and generally their oldest traditions, in an attractive form. The tendency to create myths in this way seems inherent in every people; certainly there is no people so sunk into the brute as to be without them. A myth is not to be confounded with an allegory; the one being an unconscious act of the pufmlie mind at an early stage of society, the other a con scious act of the individual mind at any stag,e of social progress. The parables of the New Testament are allegorical; so are no one mistakes them for realities; they are known to have been invented for a special didactic purpose, and so received. But the peculiarity of myths is, that they are not only conceived iu the narrative form, but generally taken for real narrations by the people to whom they belong, so long as they do not pass a certain stage of intellectual culture. Even myths of which the alle gorical significance is pretty plain, such as the well-known Greek myth of Promethus and Epimetheus, were received as facts of eariy tradition by the Greeks. Myths may be divided into several classes, of which the first and most important is the theological and moral. The oldest theology of all nations is in the form of myths; hence the great importance of mythological study, now universally recognized; for it is not occupied merely or mainly with strange fancies and marvelous fictions, invented for the sake of amusement, but contains the fundamental ideas belonging to the moral and religious nature of man as they have been embodied by the imaginative faculty of the most favored races. It is this dominance of the imagination, so characteristic of the early
stages of society, which gives to myth its peculiar dramatic expression, and stamps the popular creed of all nations with the character of a poetry of nature, of man, and of God. From the very nature of the case, the myth-producing faculty exercises itself with exuberance only under the polytheistic form of religion; for there only does a sufficient number of celestial personages exist, whose attributes and actions may he exhibited in a narrative form; there is nothing, however, to prevent even a monotheistic people from exhibiting certain great ideas of their faith in a narrative form. so as by prosaic minds to be taken for literal historical facts. But besides strictly theological myths, there are physical myths, that is, fictions representing the most striking appearances and changes of external nature in the form of political history; in which view, the connection of legends about giants, chimeras, etc., with regions marked by peculiar volcanic phenom ena, has been often reinarited. It is difficult indeed, in polytheistic religion, to draw strict line between physical and theological myths; as the divinity of all the operations of nature is the first postulate of polytheism, and every physical phenomenon becomes the manifestation of a god. Again, though it may appear a contradiction, there are his torical myths; that is, marvelous legends about persons, who may with probability be supposed to have actually existed. So intermingled, indeed, is fact with fable in early times, that there must always be a kind of debatable laud between plaiu theological myth and recognized historical fact. This land is occupied by what are called the heroic myths; that is, legends about heroes. concerning whom it may often be doubtful whether they are merely a sort of inferior, and more hnman-like gods, or only men of more than ordi 'nary powers whom the popular imagination has elevated into demi-gods.