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Updated: May 22, 2025
Hypothesis, imagined by a few visionaries of Memphis and Babylon, constitute even now the foundations of a science, whose obscurity makes it revered as marvellous and divine. The first legislators were priests; the first mythologists, poets, learned men, and physicians were priests. In their hands science became sacred and was withheld from the profane.
All the corruptions that have taken place, in theology and in religion have been produced by admitting of what man calls 'revealed religion. The mythologists pretended to more revealed religion than the christians do. They had their oracles and their priests, who were supposed to receive and deliver the word of God verbally on almost all occasions.
Men's attention would never have been surprised into the perpetual study and questioning of mythology if it had been intelligible and dignified, and if its report had been in accordance with the reason of civilised and cultivated races. What mythologists wish to discover is the origin of the countless disgusting, amazing, and incongruous legends which occur in the myths of all known peoples.
And when mythologists, archaeologists, and philologists once recognize the one central, cardinal truth, they will cease to wonder why nations, so widely separated by time and space, possess the same basic mythology. They will then no longer attempt its explanation by impossible migrations of races, carrying the rudiments with them.
The mythologists would have made it with justice hell's mouth. "Newton," said Barbicane, "is the most perfect type of the circular mountains, of which the earth possesses no specimen.
The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything.
A myth so extremely composite as that of Osiris must be a stream flowing from many springs, and, as in the case of certain rivers, it is difficult or impossible to say which is the real fountain-head. One would respectfully recommend to young mythologists great reserve in their hypotheses of origins. All this, of course, is the familiar thought of writers like Mr. Frazer and Mr.
L. x. Endymion, a Comedy, presented before Queen Elizabeth, by the children of her Majesty's chaple, printed in 12mo. 1632. The story of Endymion's being beloved by the moon, with comments upon it, may be met with in most of the Mythologists. See Lucian's Dialogues, between Venus and the Moon. Mr. Gambauld has writ a romance called Endymion, translated into English, 8vo. 1639.
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.
Why has this silly world still persisted in putting long ears upon Midas? I do not know whether he sang better or worse than Apollo; and I am sure it is much better, and bespeaks more sense, to play the flute ill than to play it well. Depend upon it, his Majesty of Phrygia has been very much abused by the mythologists.
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