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His book called forth an answering pamphlet from a Jesuit advocating the traditional view; the little controversy seems to have made some stir in France about the year 1700. At any rate Banier, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, treated ancient mythology from a Euhemeristic point of view, gave some consideration to it.
It is a theory of some, both ancient and modern writers, that all the pagan gods were once human beings, and that the legends and traditions of mythology are mere embellishments of the acts of these personages when alive. It was the doctrine taught by Euhemerus among the ancients, and has been maintained among the moderns by such distinguished authorities as Bochart, Bryant, Voss, and Banier.
What, then, is a myth? The theory of Euhemeros, which was so fashionable a century ago, in the days of the Abbe Banier, has long since been so utterly abandoned that to refute it now is but to slay the slain.
This is a long text for our remarks on Hottentot mythology; but it is necessary to prove that there are not two schools only of mythologists: that there are inquirers who neither follow the path of the Abbe Banier, nor of the philologists, but a third way, unknown to, or ignored by Mr. Muller. We certainly were quite unaware that Banier and Euhemeros were very specially concerned, as Mr.
"There is no people whose religion is known to us," says the Abbé Banier, "neither in our own continent nor in that of America, that has not paid the sun a religious worship, if we except some inhabitants of the torrid zone, who are continually cursing the sun for scorching them with his beams." Mythology, lib. iii. ch. iii.
The theories of Banier, which limped and stumbled awkwardly enough when it was only a question of Hermes and Minos and Odin, have fallen never to rise again since the problems of Punchkin and Cinderella and the Blue Belt have begun to demand solution.
Banier is the last author to whom I can point for the demon-theory applied as an explanation of a phenomenon in ancient religion; I have not found it in any other mythologist of the eighteenth century, and even in Banier, with the exception of this single point, everything is explained quite naturally according to the best Euhemeristic models.
Look at his captains: that wonderful Duke of Weimar, only thirty-six when he died. Banier himself, after all his miracles, died at forty-five. Cortes was little more than thirty when he gazed upon the golden cupolas of Mexico. When Maurice of Saxony died at thirty-two, all Europe acknowledged the loss of the greatest captain and the profoundest statesman of the age.
In addressing scholars it is needless to refute the Euhemeristic hypothesis, worthy of the Abbe Banier, that the cow is a real cow, offered by a real historical Gladstone, or by his companion, Jo, to the ignorant populace of the rural districts. We have already shown that Jo is a mythological name.
Of the true origin of his epic story he knew as little as Euhemeros, or Lord Bacon, or the Abbe Banier.
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