We mention (1) that the divine power or life-giving energy in nature was divided up in heathenism into many separate powers, which were personified, and even became to the heathen mind persons, endowed with sep- arate wills, desires, and intelligence. (2) These divine powers, or gods, cast off their connection with the natural object out of which they grew, so that the connection in the end was no longer obvious to the heathen mind. In this way they entered into various relations to a nation, a tribe, or a class of men ; they acquired special moral qualities or attributes of various kinds; and thus all the interests of society in all its subdivisions, all arts and employments, everything in the physical world and among men, was, placed under their care. (3) They were conceived of as having human passions and desires; they had distinctions of sex — originally be- cause active causes, as the sun, were aptly conceived of as masculine, and passive, like the earth, as feminine ; they had marriages among themselves, and as they as- sumed human or other shape at will, they could have connections with human beings also. (4) As objects of nature originally, and as many in number, they all had limited powers, and, while they were immortal, had had a beginning of their existence. The theogony — He- siod's, for instance— is a part of the cosmogony which in several religions of heathenism was devised — somewhat later than the rise of mythology — to explain the origi- nal condition of the world and the way the gods came into existence. As man comes into being by procre- ation, so in general the existence of the gods is in the same way accounted for. Matter itself is for the most part conceived of as eternal. (5) When the mythologi- cal process was in full activity, not only did powers of nature become persons before the imagination and faith of the polytheist, but moral powers or causes also, ab- stract and general conceptions, feelings, and the like, were turned into personitied agents, or even into per- sons. Thus among the Greeks, Themis, or justice, Nem- esis, or retribution, the Moirai (shares, allotments, y«^es, Latin Parcce), became personitied, and even assumed personal existence, together with a multitude of others. And so by the side of the gods, proper!}' so called, a mul- titude of subordinate beings, wlio grew out of such per- sonifications, were worshipped among tlie Greeks and Romans, and formed a portion of a very large class which may be called seconclari/ divinities, consisting, among others, of representatives of the life of smaller objects in nature, such as wood, fountain, and other nymphs and spirits; or of daemons attendant on higher gods, and of heroes, or the spirits of deceased men, as also of demigods, or men with a divine father or moth-
er, who played a part second to no other in classical mythology. (6) The mythological age cannot, on ac- count of our want of historical records, have any exact limits assigned to it. It began in the earliest infancy of nations. We see the mythological spirit in the Yedas, which point back to an age from 1500 to 2000 years an- terior to the birth of Christ. We find the Greek my- thology fully mature in the age when the Homeric poems were written, and a rude philosophy working up its ma- terials in the Hesiodic poems. Centuries must have elapsed before Homer, during which men looked at nat- ure and the world in this spirit. The poets collected the myths of various parts of Greece, and gave to them a general Grecian stamp, but they did not originally in- vent them, nor were the gods imported from Egypt, the affirmation of Herodotus to the contrary notwithstand- ing. The end of this mythologizing spirit is also in- definite. Some few historical events are intermingled with myths, but the connection was later than the myth. To say that they ceased when history began is to say no more, properly speaking, than that for a time my- thology and the historical spirit were in conflict, and that, as the result, mythology was looked on as the history of the past.
So far as the actions and interferences of the gods form a part of mythology, it was in no sense a product of imposiuj-e. No priests or poets, or persons sustaining both characters, invented it. The poet and his hearers had the same faith, and their imaginations were in the same mythological condition : they honestly believed in the general doctrines of the theology, and the general system of divine interference in the affairs of men, of which they introduced the particulars into their poetry. Otherwise they could have met with no responsive chord in the souls of the people; or, if unbelieving themselves, they would not have searched out and reproduced the myths all through the epic age and afterwards. It is foily to suppose that the men of the myth-making times, or of the epic times, played with religion, or looked with critical eyes on the fables of the poets ; or, for a long time, were injured in their moral sensibilities by the im- moralities and grossness of many portions of the stories which were recited to them by the rhapsodists. This, however, is to be observed: (1) That the epic poets of the Homeric period, and of the cyclical school afterwards, must have felt free to transform and work over and add to tlie myths which they received or gathered as their stock in trade. This is no more than Christian believ- ers, such as jMilton or Klopstock, have done, without the least suspicion that they were practicing a fraud, or irrev- erently tampering with sacred things. (2) The logo- graphs or mythographs — the collectors of mythology into one corpus, the translators into prose of the epic saffas — these persons did allow themselves to make alter- ations ; they may have invented connections between myths, so as to make them fit into their framework and form one whole; they may to some extent have given an improved version of one or another of the fables, un- der the conscious or unconscious influence of a rational- izing spirit. (3) The lyric poets in making use of the same materials went a little further. Pindar is offend- ed by the immoral acts imputed to the gods, and thus we see that a higher moral standard is beginning to cause a conflict between religious myths and the moral sense. This is more evident after^vards, and was one of the causes of the scepticism of later Greece. We have on record a remarkable story relating to Stesi- chorus, one of the earliest lyric poets. In the begin- ning of an ode he had indulged in invectives against Helen, and, as a retribution for his evil speaking, lost his eyesight. He then composed his Helena, in which his version of her story was that she never went to Troy, but her phantom, or eidolon, took her place; his eyesight was thereupon restored. This furnished to Euripides the argument of the drama of Helena. The nucleus of truth here is that the poet deserted the re- ceived fable for another which was thought to be new