CHARLES LEONARD-STUART, Editorial Staff of The Americana. GREEK MYTHOLOGY. Mythology cludes both those explanations which the agination of man, primitive or civilized, has devised to account for natural phenomena and for the relations between the various parts of the universe, and also a wide range of other tales, probably invented solely to please the narrator and his audience. Both classes of stories frequently deal with powers superior to man so that in ordinary speech, mythology is generally understood to mean tales with regard to superhuman beings.
It is natural for man to refer whatever he thinks strange or marvelous to beings more powerful than himself, who have a superior control over both animate and inanimate worlds; between these two realms, however, simple man knows no distinction; all nature is animate to him. In classical antiquity, as in modern times, many theories and explana tions of the origin of myths were offered_ Since myths are often of immemorial antiq uity, and therefore may contain many ele ments which seem crude and repulsive to men of an enlightened age, it frequently comes to pass that the rude tales about the gods are felt to conflict with the more advanced religious beliefs, so that it is necessary to explain the myths in some reconciling fashion, or to reject them altogether; the latter course is not easy, for nothing is more deeply rooted in the minds of a people than its mythology. In the 6th century B.C. the bolder thinkers among the Greeks began openly to protest against the epic stories concerning the gods. Xenophanes of Col ophon (fl. 540-500 a.c.) declared that "Homer and Hesiod have imputed to the gods all that is shame among men? On the other hand de fenders of the poets, like Theagnes of Rhegium c. 525 a.c.), maintained that there was a eeper mcaning in their works than that which lay on the surface ; that the gods represented elements of nature or mental powers of man. So Athene was wisdom; Ares, folly; Hermes, reason; Leto, forgetfulness; Apollo, fire; Pose idon, water; Hera, air; and so forth. Thus arose the school of allegorical interpretation, which has had an influence down to the present time. At the end of the 4th century before our era, Euhemerus offered a rationalizing explana tion of myths in his 'Sacred History,' where he set forth the view that the gods were only mortals who by their deeds had won high renown.
Views of modern mythol ogists three schools deserve mention; the philo logical, the animistic, and the anthropological or historical schools. The leader of the philo logical school was Max Muller, who sought by a comparative study of the Indo-European languages to determine the original meaning of the names of the gods, and so to arrive at a knowledge of their original functions. This method failed, in part because it is impossible in many cases to find etymologies upon which scholars agree, and above all because, even if general agreement were attained, the etymolo gies would prove nothing. The myths have had too long a life, and have suffered too many accretions and modifications, to yield their meaning to etymology.
Herbert Spencer and E. B. Taylor were the chief exponents of the animistic views, ac cording to which man endows each phenomenon with personality, with an anima, which is its cause, and attributes to the phenomena of na ture activities which properly belong to men or to animals. All religion, according to Sven cer, begins with the worship of ghosts. There is undoubtedly much truth in the views of the animistic school, but on the whole their explana tions are inadequate and incomplete.
The anthropological or historical school is the least ambitious, for it' appreciates the im possibility of detecting in detail the varied im pulses to which myths owe their births; but it recognizes that human minds, at any given stage of racial development, operate in very much the same ways, so that we find among peoples all over the world myths so similar that an earlier generation insisted that there must have been prehistoric borrowing even between very remote races. Some myths undoubtedly had their origin in the worship of dead an cestors, others in attempts to explain natural phenomena or social institutions, still others in ritual. Again many, if not most, myths have been recast, provided with new details, and variously manipulated at an advanced stage of civilization, as by the Greek poets and by even historians as well; finally many myths defy classification or satisfactory explanation.