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Updated: June 12, 2025
Our own argument has been successful if we have shown that there are not only two possible schools of mythological interpretation the Euhemeristic, led by Mr. Spencer, and the Philological, led by Mr. Max Muller. Muller supposes. We have explained the legend and worship of a supposed dead conjurer as natural to a race which believes in conjurers and worships dead men.
For not only was the contemplated apotheosis of Tullia in itself a Euhemeristic idea, but Cicero also expressly defended it with Euhemeristic arguments, though speaking as if the departed who were worshipped as gods really had become gods. The attitude of Cicero and his contemporaries towards popular belief was still the general attitude in the first days of the Empire.
They, as usual, are greatly divided among themselves. The Spencerian or Euhemeristic school, if that can be called a school "Where blind and naked Ignorance Delivers brawling judgments all day long On all things, unashamed," protests that the monument is a pedestal of a lost image of Gladstone.
This point of view is taken over by later Jewish authors and completely dominates them. In those acquainted with Greek thought it is combined with Euhemeristic ideas: the images represent dead men. The theory that the gods are really natural objects—elements or heavenly bodies—is occasionally taken into account too.
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.
Whence came the idea of Taa-roa? The Euhemeristic theory that he was a ghost of a dead man is absurd. But as we are now among polytheists it may be argued that, given a crowd of gods on the animistic model, an origin had to be found for them, and that origin was Taa-roa. This would be more plausible if we did not find Supreme Beings where there is no departmental polytheism to develop them out of.
On another side the vast accumulation of the religious ideas and usages of lower tribes led Herbert Spencer to his euhemeristic view. Neither of these theories has seriously affected the growth of the science of mythology. +877+. A saner direction was given to investigation by the great biological and sociological studies made in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The departmental deities of Chinese polytheism are explained by the Chinese on Euhemeristic principles: 'According to legend, the War God, or Military Sage, was once, in human life, a distinguished soldier; the Swine God was a hog-breeder who lost his pigs and died of sorrow; the God of Gamblers was un décavé. These are not statements of fact, but of Chinese Euhemeristic theory.
One of these systems, which played a prominent part, especially in the seventeenth century, is the so-called Hebraism, i.e. the attempt to derive the whole of paganism from Judaism. The allegories are mostly moral, but also physical; Euhemeristic interpretations are not rejected either, and in several places the author gives all three explanations side by side without choosing between them.
Livingstone is ohne zweifel, a mythical form of the midnight sun, now fabled to wander in the "Dark Continent," as Bishop of Natal, the land of the sun's birthplace, now alluded to as lost in the cloud-land of comparative mythology. Of all these cobwebs spun by the spiders of sciolism, the Euhemeristic or Spencerian view that Gladstone is an historical personage has attracted most attention.
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