ore offensive to our morality.

All early attempts at an interpretation of mythology are so many efforts
to explain the myths on some principle which shall seem not unreasonable
to men living at the time of the explanation. Therefore the pious
remonstrances and the forced constructions of early thinkers like
Xenophanes, of poets like Pindar, of all ancient Homeric scholars and
Pagan apologists, from Theagenes of Rhegium (525 B. C.), the early
Homeric commentator, to Porphyry, almost the last of the heathen
philosophers, are so many proofs that to Greece, as soon as she had
a reflective literature, the myths of Greece seemed impious and
IRRATIONAL. The essays of the native commentators on the Veda, in the
same way, are endeavours to put into myths felt to be irrational and
impious a meaning which does not offend either piety or reason. We may
therefore conclude that it was not men in an early stage of philosophic
thought (as philosophy is now understood)--not men like Empedocles and
Heraclitus, nor reasonably devout men like Eumaeus, the pious swineherd
of the Odyssey--who evolved the blasphemous myths of Greece, of Egypt
and of India. We must look elsewhere for an explanation. We must try to
discover some actual and demonstrable and widely prevalent condition
of the human mind, in which tales that even to remote and rudimentary
civilisations appeared irrational and unnatural would seem natural and
rational. To discover this intellectual condition has been the aim of
all mythologists who did not believe that myth is a divine tradition
depraved by human weakness, or a distorted version of historical events.

Before going further, it is desirable to set forth what our aim is, and
to what extent we are seeking an interpretation of mythology. It is not
our purpose to explain every detail of every ancient legend, either as a
distorted historical fact or as the result of this or that confusion of
thought caused by forgetfulness of the meanings of language, or in any
other way; nay, we must constantly protest against the excursions of
too venturesome ingenuity. Myth is so ancient, so complex, so full of
elements, that it is vain labour to seek a cause for every phenomenon.
We are chiefly occupied with the quest for an historical condition of
the human intellect to which the element in myths, regarded by us as
irrational, shall seem rational enough. If we can prove that such a
state of mind widely exists among men, and has exi