Euhemerus

Euhemerus (Ευημερος) (flourished around 316 BCE) was a Greek mythographer at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedonia. Euhemerus' birthplace is disputed, with Messana in Sicily or Messene in the Peloponnese as the most probable locations, while others champion Chios, or Tegea.

He is chiefly known for a rationalizing method of interpretation, known as Euhemerism, that treats mythological accounts as a reflection of actual historical events shaped by retelling and traditional mores. In the skeptic philosophical tradition of the Cyrenaics, Euhemerism forged a new method of interpretation for the contemporary religious beliefs. The reputation of Euhemerus was that he believed that much of Greek mythology could be interpreted as natural events given supernatural characteristics. It has been compared, specifically by David Friedrich Strauss, with many 19th century German rationalists, such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and Heinrich Paulus, in their interpretations of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Euhemerus's rationalizing, skeptical method, which reduces religion to what we would now call anthropology or sociology, has seemed like the forerunner of those sciences. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, makes religion into a kind of hopeful mirage seen by pre-scientific pre-psychoanalytic humankind. The reader should be aware, therefore, that "euhemerism"-- lowercase "e"-- is not praise, when used by contemporary comparative religious scholars. Even Freud, rebuked by Jules Romain and other friends, worried that he-- too much the humanist-- had failed to understand the spiritual experience. "Euhemerism" is sometimes used to mean naive reductionisms by modern secular thinkers, who mis-understand religious people and behavior by attributing to them only those motives (economic, psychological, utilitarian) which the secular thinkers comprehend.

The Sacred History

Only quoted fragments remain from his main work, a Sacred History ("Hiera Anagraphê"), which may have been a philosophical fictionalized travelogue, based upon possibly imagined archaic inscriptions, which he claimed to have found during his travels. He particularly relies upon a register of the births and deaths of many of the gods, which his narrator persona discovered inscribed on a golden pillar in a temple on the invented island of Panchaea, when on a voyage round the coast of Arabia, undertaken at the request of Cassander of Macedon, according to Eusebius, He is said to have sailed down the Red Sea and round the southern coast of Asia to an island called Panchaea.

In this work Euhemerus apparently systematized a method of interpreting the popular myths, which was consistent with the attempts of Hellenistic culture to explain traditional religious beliefs in terms of a rational naturalism. Euhemerus asserted that the Greek gods had been originally kings, heroes and conquerors, or benefactors to men, who had thus earned a claim to the veneration of their subjects. Zeus for example, was according to him, a king of Crete, who had been a great conqueror.

Euhemerism and the Early Christians

Cyprian

The early Christian apologists deployed the euhemerist argument to support their position that pagan mythology was merely an aggregate of fables of human invention. Cyprian, a North African convert to Christianity, wrote a short essay, De idolorum vanitate ("On the Vanity of Idols") in 247 CE that takes the euhemeristic rationale as if needing no demonstration. Cyprian begins:

"That those are no gods whom the common people worship, is known from this: they were formerly kings, who on account of their royal memory subsequently began to be adored by their people even in death. Thence temples were founded to them; thence images were sculptured to retain the countenances of the deceased by the likeness; and men sacrificed victims, and celebrated festal days, by way of giving them honour. Thence to posterity those rites became sacred, which at first had been adopted as a consolation."

Cyprian proceeds directly to examples, the apotheosis of Melicertes and Leucotheia; "The Castors Dioscuri die by turns, that they may live," a reference to the daily sharing back and forth of their immortality by the Heavenly Twins. "The cave of Jupiter is to be seen in Crete, and his sepulchre is shown," Cyprian says, confounding Zeus and Dionysus but showing that the Minoan cave cult was still alive in Crete in the 3rd century CE. In his exposition, it is to Cyprian's argument to marginalize the syncretism of pagan belief, in order to emphasize the individual variety of local deities:

"From this the religion of the gods is variously changed among individual nations and provinces, inasmuch as no one god is worshipped by all, but by each one the worship of its own ancestors is kept peculiar."

Arnobius

Arnobius' dismissal of paganism in the 5th century, on rationalizing grounds, may have depended on a reading of Cyprian, with the details enormously expanded (to the satisfaction of the modern mythographer). Of the Latin translation, only a few brief fragments have come down to us, where they were quoted in patristic writers, especially in a fragment said to be from Diodorus Siculus, preserved by Eusebius in his history of the Church. Other fragments survive quoted by Lactantius in his treatise De Falsa religione ("Concerning False Religion," 1.11), not a context sympathetic to non-Christian mythography.

As among archaic tribes it is possible to trace the evolution of family and tribal gods from great eponymous chiefs and warriors, so, euhemerism claims, it is equally possible to see those gods as abstractions of the tribal ethos, personalized with names. All theories of religion which give prominence to ancestor worship and the cult of the dead are to a certain extent Euhemeristic. However, euhemerism is not generally accepted by comparative religion scholars today as the sole explanation of the origin of the idea of gods. In 18th century France, the abbé Banier, in his Mythologie et la fable expliqués par l'histoire, was frankly Euhemeristic; other leading Euhemerists were Étienne Clavier, Sainte-Croix, Desiré-Raoul Rochette, Emile Hoffmann and, to a great extent, Herbert Spencer.

Among the Romans the gradual deification of ancestors and the apotheosis of emperors were prominent features of cult, and extension of Greek veneration of heroes.

Euhemerism in the Modern World

Rationalizing methods of interpretation that treat some myths as traditional accounts based upon actual historical events are a feature of some modern readings of Greek mythology. The 20th century poet and mythographer Robert Graves offered many such "euhemerist" interpretations in his telling of The Greek Myths (1955). His suggestions that such myths record and justify the political and religious overthrow of earlier cult systems have been received with skepticism.

Euhemeristic belief within Mormonism

Among the tenets of some Latter Day Saints or Mormons, the archangel Michael lived a mortal life as the patriarch Adam. Michael and Adam are regarded as the same person, but Michael alone is regarded as the immortal resurrected being, or angel. Thus a human being regarded as historical within theology becomes a supernatural angelic being.

External links

Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities 1898: Euhemerus
Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: Euhemerus
Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol V: Cyprian, "On the Vanity of Idols" e-text
The Ancient Library

References

Smith, William. 1870. "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology." (London: C. Little and J. Brown) sub "Evemerus"

Greek mythology

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