Approaches to Myth and Mythology

Abstract

Abstract The chapter discusses new approaches to the study of myth and mythology in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, focusing on four important thinkers or intellectual currents, namely Herder; the Early Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Schelling; Friedrich Creuzer; and the late Schelling. In Herder’s anthropological approach, myth is regarded as a natural form of human cognition. Herder discusses myth as the material of poetry and interprets myths in the Bible. The Early Romantics’ view of myth is based on the idealist philosophy; myth, like art, is an important form of representing the Absolute. Creuzer, in his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, presents a temporally and geographically comprehensive overview of the religious imagery of ancient peoples, suggesting that mythologies share a common origin of a basically monotheistic character. Schelling, on the other hand, in his Philosophie der Mythologie, claims that the mythologies, or theogonies, in different cultures rather develop in parallel; this is because the theogonic process actually involves the true effectuality of God.