Brewer's Book of Myth & Legend [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The present volume is essentially the work of Brewer, relevant subjects having been taken from his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. No one can study this earlier work without admiring his immense erudition and meticulous scholarship and although most of the great number of books which stand to his name have passed into obUvion, his dictionaries remain classics. Brewer's work, however, was the fruit of the Victorian era when education and culture were grounded on the Greek and Roman classics and but a cursory interest was shown in the texts, religions and mythology of the Eastern and Far Eastern cultures which were largely dismissed as lieathen' or 'pagan'. For example, while the highly erotic antics of Zeus came within the 'classical', the similar activities of Krishna were 'pagan' and their mythological and symboUc significance largely misunderstood or ignored. Even less were the tribal cultures of Oceania, Africa and the American Indians accepted; they, in the estimation and wd^rks of the early anthropologists, were 'savage' or 'primitive'. The rich and fruitful heritage of their philosophies and mythologies had not yet been fully and S3mipathe-tically explored. It is in these provinces that additions have been made to Brewer's original text. Since his time the world has shrunk, East and West have met and, in inter-cultural exchanges, have discovered the importance and the significance of their mythologies and legends, and have a deeper understanding of their unity in diversity. Myth was, for the early anthropologists, that which was untrue, a figment of the imagination, that which was dreamed up by elementary, uncultured minds, whereas it is now recognized as a serious expression of some sacred truth. This century has seen at first an awakening of interest in mythology and the realization of its value and now a full appreciation and interest in its value. As Thomas Mann said: 'Something timeless has once more emerged into the hght and become present.' He also asserts that mythology is 'the legitimization of life; only through and in it does life find self-awareness, sanction, consecration' and that although the mythical is an early stage for the race, for the individual it is a late and mature one. It is this late and mature stage we are now seeing.