Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/165

Rh moon, and the rest likewise. This was a current opinion among the Stoics. Cicero makes some philosophers, in his treatise "De Natura Deorum," say that the gods recruited either from among the phenomena that strike the imagination, or from among the natural objects that render services to man.

These views have been confirmed in our days, not only for the Greek and Roman Pantheon, but also for the gods of all known peoples. Only here again we must take account of other theogonic factors. Among the gods there are some who are certainly men or animals deified. Others are derived exclusively from moral abstractions, such as Virtue, Good Faith, Prudence, Fortune, etc., or from metaphysical speculations, like the supreme Brahm of the Hindoos. It should also be remembered that the gods of Nature tend, among some peoples, to become transformed into gods superior to Nature, so that their primitive significance is at last obscured and lost, as Assur among the Assyrians, Ahura Mazda among the Persians, and Jahveh among the Israelites. It was through the failure to grasp these shades that Dupuis, at the end of the last century, wasted his time and learning in maintaining the astronomical significance of all ancient and modern gods and cults.

We can easily explain how the personification of the celestial bodies and of natural phenomena has led to the representation of their movements and relations as adventures of heroes or of gods. Antiquity had already penetrated the sense of its most transparent myths. But the interpretation of mythology has found its methods only in our own days.

Otfried Müller regarded myths as local legends that translated into a form of personality some particular features of geography or circumstances of history.

Others with Mr. Max Müller have insisted on the solar signification of myths; they have seen in them a reflection of the impression produced on the imagination of infantile people by the periodical succession of light and darkness, of day and night, of summer and winter. Thus, the labors of Hercules are simply the works of the sun during the twelve months of the year. Œdipus personifies the day-star; son of the Dawn, he kills his father every morning; son of the Night, he marries his mother every evening.

Others still, among them Adalbert Kuhn, have set forth that the mind of primitive men was most manifestly affected by the irregular phenomena of Nature and sudden changes of the atmosphere; by this theory the principal myths dramatized the apparent struggles of the sky and the storm, of the sun and the cloud, of the fire and the dark. Developing this view, M. Darmesteter has shown how among the