Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/469

 THEORIES OF LEARNED MEN. 437 ments all disengaged from the corruptions of poets, as well as from the symbols and allegories under which they still remained buried in the eyes of the vulgar. The mysteries of Greece were thus traced up to the earliest ages, and represented as the only faithful depository channels of that purer theology and physics which had originally been communicated, though under the unavoidable inconvenience of a symbolical expression, by an enlightened priesthood coming from abroad to the then rude barbarians of the country. 1 1 For this general character of the Grecian mysteries, with their concealed treasure of doctrine, see Warburton. Divine Legation of Moses, book ii. sect. 4. Payne Knight, On the Symbolical Language of ancient Art and Mytholo- gy, sect. 6, 10, 11,40, etc. Saint Croix, Rechcrches sur les Mysteres du Paganisme, sect. 3, p. 106; sect 4, p. 404, etc. Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der Alton Volker, sect. 2, 3, 23, 39, 42, etc. Meiners and Hceren adopt generally the same view, though there are many divergences of opinion between these different authors, on a sub- ject essentially obscure. Warburton maintained that the interior doctrine communicated in the mysteries was the existence of one Supreme Divinity, combined with the Eucmeristic creed, that the pagan gods had been mere men. Sec Clemens Alex. Strom, v. p. 582, Sylb. The view taken by Hermann of the ancient Greek mythology is in many points similar to that of Creuzer, though with some considerable difference. He thinks that it is an aggregate of doctrine philosophical, theological, physical, and moral expressed under a scheme of systematic personifica- tions, each person being called by a name significant of the function personi- fied : this doctrine was imported from the East into Greece, where the poets, retaining or translating the names, but forgetting their meaning and connec- tion, distorted the primitive stories, the sense of which came to be retained only in the ancient mysteries. That true sense, however, (he thinks,) maybe recovered by a careful analysis of the significant names : and his two disser- tations (Dc Mythologii Grrecorum Antiqnissima, in the Opuscula, vol. ii.) exhibit a specimen of this systematic expansion of etymology into narrative. The dissent from Creuzer is set forth in their published correspondence, especially in his concluding " Brief an Creuzer iibcr das Wesen und die Behandlung der Mythologie," Leipzig, 1819. The following citation from his Latin dissertation sets forth his general doctrine : Hermann, De Mythologii Graecorum Antiquissima, p. 4 (Opuscula, vol. ii. p. 171): " Videmus rerum divinarum humanarumque scientiam ex Asii per Lyciam migrantcm in Europam : videmus fabulosos poetas pere- grinam doctrinam, monstruoso tumore orientis sive exutam, sive nondtrwj