The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680-1860 [antikvár]

FOREWORD O. NE IS GRATEFUL TO PROFESSOR BURTON FELDMAN AND PROFESSOR Robert Richardson for reading so many thousands of pages of both illustrious and half-forgotten authors, and for selecting, presenting, and competently annotating the texts of this rich and illuminating anthology. Such a source book on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century myth exegesis and historiography has not existed until now; one may be confident that h will not be equalled for a long period of time. It was to be expected that the interest in myth and mythical thought, which has expanded spectacularly in recent decades, would incite more adequate investigation into the myth historiography of the past. Understandably, attention has been concentrated on nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors: that is to say, on those authors who, following the example of Max Müller, claimed a "scientific" approach to the study of myth. (Strangely enough, we do not as yet have at our disposal a comprehensive source book of this period.) But a great surprise awaits the reader of the present anthology. He will discover that many of the rather "modern" post-Müllerian interpretations of myth prolong, although in a different perspective, some of the theses popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seems as if certain approaches and methodological presuppositions—for instance, the "naturalistic" or "astral," the psychological or historical, and specifically the "diffusionist" interpretations—periodically regain a more or less durable authority or, in some cases, even an unexpected vogue. Authors denouncing myth and mythical thinking as "irrational" abound in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as in modern times (for example, Andrew Lang, Wilhelm Schmidt, fimile Dürkheim, Freud, and others). Likewise, the old and venerable opinion that the myths contain noble and elevated ideas or conceal scientifically correct descriptions of cosmic structures and norms is periodically reformulated. Thus, for example, at the beginning of our century E. Siecke and E. Stucken enthusiastically reactualized the central interpretation of the world mythologies. Siecke protested against the "rationalistic" depreciation of myth. Against E. B. Tylor, he emphatically stated that myths do not reflect animistic experiences and conceptions; they have nothing to do with belief in the soul, or with dreams and nightmares. Myths, argued Siecke, must be understood literally, because their contents always refer to specific celestial phenomena. xiii