that great thinker and
poet, in the year 1854.

I do not mean to say that Schelling and Aristotle looked upon mythology in
the same light, or that they found in it exactly the same problems; yet
there is this common feature in all who have thought or written on
mythology, that they look upon it as something which, whatever it may
mean, does certainly not mean what it seems to mean; as something that
requires an explanation, whether it be a system of religion, or a phase in
the development of the human mind, or an inevitable catastrophe in the
life of language.

According to some, mythology is history changed into fable; according to
others, fable changed into history. Some discover in it the precepts of
moral philosophy enunciated in the poetical language of antiquity; others
see in it a picture of the great forms and forces of nature, particularly
the sun, the moon, and the stars, the changes of day and night, the
succession of the seasons, the return of the years--all this reflected by
the vivid imagination of ancient poets and sages.

Epicharmos, for instance, the pupil of Pythagoras, declared that the gods
of Greece were not what, from the poems of Homer, we might suppose them to
be--personal beings, endowed with superhuman powers, but liable to many of
the passions and frailties of human nature. He maintained that these gods
were really the Wind, the Water, the Earth, the Sun, the Fire, and the
Stars. Not long after his time, another philosopher, Empedokles, holding
that the whole of nature consisted in the mixture and separation of the
four elements, declared that Zeus was the element of Fire, Here the
element of Air, Aidoneus or Pluton the element of Earth, and Nestis the
element of Water. In fact, whatever the free thinkers of Greece discovered
successively as the first principles of Being and Thought, whether the air
of Anaximenes, or the fire of Herakleitos, or the Nous or Mind of
Anaxagoras, was readily identified with Zeus and the other divine persons
of Olympian mythology. Metrodoros, the contemporary of Anaxagoras, went
even farther. While Anaxagoras would have been satisfied with looking upon
Zeus as but another name of his Nous, the highest intellect, the mover,
the disposer, the governor of all things, Metrodoros resolved not only the
persons of Zeus, Here, and Athene, but likewise those of human kings and
heroes--such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hektor--into various combinations
and physical agencies