Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/39

 Egypt. He ridicules, with a good deal of humour, the old  theories  which resolved so many mythical heroes into the sun; he shows that while one system is contented to regard Zeus as mere fire and air, another system recognises in him the higher reason, while Heracles, Dionysus, Apollo, and Asclepius, father and child, are all indifferently the sun.

Granting that the myth-makers were only constructing physical allegories, why did they wrap them up, asks Eusebius, in what we consider abominable fictions? In what state were the people who could not look at the pure processes of Nature without being reminded of the most hideous and unnatural offences? Once more, "the physical interpreters do not even agree in their physical interpretations." All these are equally facile, equally plausible, and equally incapable of proof. Again, Eusebius argues, the interpreters take for granted in the makers of the myths an amount of physical knowledge which they certainly did not possess. For example, if Leto were only another name for Hera, the character of Zeus would be cleared as far as his amour with Leto is concerned. Now the ancient believers in the "physical phenomena theory" of myths made out that Hera, the wife of Zeus, was really the same person under another name as Leto, his mistress. "For Hera is the earth" (they said at other times that Hera was the air), "and Leto is the night; but night is only the shadow of the earth, and therefore Leto is only the shadow of Hera." It was easy, however, to prove that this scientific view of night as the shadow of earth was not likely to be