of the oracles. He gives his
grounds for this in a very sensible criticism of van Dale's priestly fraud
theory, the absurdity of which he exposes with sound arguments.

Banier is the last author to whom I can point for the demon-theory applied
as an explanation of a phenomenon in ancient religion; I have not found it
in any other mythologist of the eighteenth century, and even in Banier,
with the exception of this single point, everything is explained quite
naturally according to the best Euhemeristic models. But in the positive
understanding of the nature of ancient paganism no very considerable
advance had actually been made withal. A characteristic example of this is
the treatment of ancient religion by such an eminent intellect as
Giambattista Vico. In his _Scienza Nuova_, which appeared in 1725, as the
foundation of his exposition of the religion of antiquity he gives a
characterisation of the mode of thought of primitive mankind, which is so
pertinent and psychologically so correct that it anticipates the results
of more than a hundred years of research. Of any supernatural explanation
no trace is found in him, though otherwise he speaks as a good Catholic.
But when he proceeds to explain the nature of the ancient ideas of the
gods in detail, all that it comes to is a series of allegories, among
which the politico-social play a main part. Vico sees the earliest history
of mankind in the light of the traditions about Rome; the Graeco-Roman
gods, then, and the myths about them, become to him largely an expression
of struggles between the "patricians and plebeians" of remote antiquity.

Most of the mythology of the eighteenth century is like this. The
Euhemeristic school gradually gave up the hypothesis of the Jewish
religion as the origin of paganism; Banier, the chief representative of
the school, still argues at length against Hebraism. In its place,
Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians and, above all, Egyptians, are brought
into play, or, as in the case of the Englishman Bryant, the whole of
mythology is explained as reminiscences of the exploits of an aboriginal
race, the Cuthites, which never existed. The allegorist school gradually
rallied round the idea of the cult of the heavenly bodies as the origin of
the pagan religions; as late as the days of the French Revolution, Dupuis,
in a voluminous work, tried to trace the whole of ancient religion and
mythology back to astronomy. On the whole the movement diverged mo