the general nature of
their opinions. In a pious kind of spirit, Friedrich Creuzer sought to
find SYMBOLS of some pure, early, and Oriental theosophy in the myths
and mysteries of Greece. Certainly the Greeks of the philosophical
period explained their own myths as symbols of higher things, but
the explanation was an after-thought.(1) The great Lobeck, in his
Aglaophamus (1829), brought back common sense, and made it the guide of
his vast, his unequalled learning. In a gentler and more genial
spirit, C. Otfried Muller laid the foundation of a truly scientific
and historical mythology.(2) Neither of these writers had, like Alfred
Maury,(3) much knowledge of the myths and faiths of the lower races, but
they often seem on the point of anticipating the ethnological method.

(1) Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, 2d edit., Leipzig, 1836-43.

(2) Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, English trans.,
London, 1844.

(3) Histoire des Religions de la Grece Antique, Paris, 1857.

When philological science in our own century came to maturity, in
philology, as of old in physics and later in symbols, was sought the
key of myths. While physical allegory, religious and esoteric symbolism,
verbal confusion, historical legend, and an original divine tradition,
perverted in ages of darkness, have been the most popular keys in other
ages, the scientific nineteenth century has had a philological key
of its own. The methods of Kuhn, Breal, Max Muller, and generally the
philological method, cannot be examined here at full length.(1) Briefly
speaking, the modern philological method is intended for a scientific
application of the old etymological interpretations. Cadmus in the
Bacchae of Euripides, Socrates in the Cratylus of Plato, dismiss
unpalatable myths as the results of verbal confusion. People had
originally said something quite sensible--so the hypothesis runs--but
when their descendants forgot the meaning of their remarks, a new and
absurd meaning followed from a series of unconscious puns.(2) This view
was supported in ancient times by purely conjectural and impossible
etymologies. Thus the myth that Dionysus was sewn up in the THIGH of
Zeus (Greek text omitted) was explained by Euripides as the result of a
confusion of words. People had originally said that Zeus gave a pledge
(Greek text omitted) to Hera. The modern philological school relies for
explanations of untoward and other myths on similar confusions. Thus