Classical scholarship played a vital role in the intellectual concerns of early nineteenthcentury Germany. Situated at the crossroads of religion, history, and explorations of the development of the human mind, Greek mythology in particular was expected to shed light on the origins of civilization. In the search for the true nature of myth, the hermeneutic problems involved in historical understanding were intensified. As myth was held to be of a different nature than rationality, to read the sources was to look for a completely different referent of the texts than was the case in historical reconstruction. In the quests for a scientific mythology, 0. Muller (1797-1840) was often regarded as an opponent of F. Creuzer (1771-1858). Yet an analysis of their published work and of their private documents shows that they had much in common, a fact they both appreciated. In particular they held similar, deeply Romantic views on the religious origin of culture, in Miller's case inspired by Pietism, in Creuzer's by neo-Platonism. Creuzer's influence is revealed in Muller's Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825) and more specifically in his interpretation of the Amazons as worshippers of sexuality in Die Dorier (1824). Nevertheless, Muller differed from Creuzer in his views on the relationship of myth to history. Myth was not the reflection of a universal religion, sustained by a priestly class (as Creuzer had claimed), but the outcome of the encounter between the mental endowment of a people and local, historical circumstances. In the case of the Amazons, however, Muller assessed the connection of myth to history in defiance of his own theory, guided by his views on gender difference and on sexual morality. 1. This article forms a diptych with J. H. Blok, Romantische Poesie, Naturphilosophie, Construktion der Geschichte: 0. Miller's Understanding of and Myth, in 0. Mailer Reconsidered, ed. W. M. Calder III, H. Flashar, and R. Schlesier (Urbana, Ill., forthcoming in 1995). I am deeply indebted to the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for granting me a Fellowship which enabled me to finish this work; and to all participants in the Davis Center Colloquium Standards of Proof and Methods of Persuasion in the Discipline of History (January 1993); in the Davis Center Archeology Colloquium (April 1994); and in the conference on K. 0. Muller: Leben Leistung Wirkung in Bad Homburg (March 1994), for stimulating criticism. In particular I want to express my gratitude to Stephen Larsen for sharing Creuzeriana, to F. R. Ankersmit for his comments on historical hermeneutics, to Suzanne Marchand and H. S. Versnel for overall discussion, to Sue Marchand once more for correcting my English and to Peter Mason for translating several parts of this account, appearing in J. H. Blok, The Early Amazons: Modern and Ancient Perspectives on a Persistent Myth (Leiden [BrilI], 1994). Biographical references are culled from 0. Muller, Kleine deutsche Schriften uber Religion, Kunst, Sprache und Literatur, Leben und Geschichte des A lthertums, nebst Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Verfassers, ed. E. Muller, 2 vols. (Breslau, 1847-1848); the Kleine deutsche Schriften are here abbreviated KdS, E. Miller's biographical sketch as EMB. Letters are quoted from Carl Otfried Maller: Lebensbild in Briefen an seine Eltern, mit dem Tagebuch seiner italienisch-griechischen Reise, ed. Otto und Else Kern (Berlin, 1908), here abbreviated LMK; Aus dem amtlichen und This content downloaded from 157.55.39.249 on Wed, 03 Aug 2016 06:19:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms QUESTS FOR A SCIENTIFIC MYTHOLOGY 27 Classical scholarship played a vital role in the intellectual concerns of early nineteenth-century Germany. Beginning in the final decades of the eighteenth century, the development of historical consciousness engendered fundamental changes in all fields of humanist knowledge. In these years of gradual transition, various points of view competed in defining the subject matter of history and the methodology it required. The intensity of the debates testifies to the urgency of finding common ground to the study of history. The importance of classical studies was not only due to the idealization of Greece which reinvigorated and reshaped the traditional authority of antiquity in European culture. Situated at the crossroads of religion, history, and explorations of the development of the human mind, Greek mythology in particular was held to shed light on the origins of civilization. Romanticism's critique of the Enlightenment could not but intensify the fascination with Greek culture in Germany and the quest for valid methods to establish its essence. In the search for the true nature of myth, hermeneutic problems came to the fore. When reading myth, one was obliged to look for a completely different referent of the texts than was the case in historical reconstruction. In the latter case, it was assumed that the texts reflected real historical events; mythology had to deal with a vast metamorphosis in the human spirit, to reach for a level that lay much deeper than that of historical analysis and to decipher a phenomenon of an entirely different, but as yet undefined quality. The Romantic desire to discern essential distinctions and to probe the soul made it even more pressing to find a perspective from which to reconcile unity and diversity. The more myth was held to be the product of a unique mental faculty, the more problematic its connection with historical discourse became. Investigators urgently sought a reliable method to find the way through the texts in order to reach this mythical entity. The written source material was to be removed layer by layer, until the interpreter left the realm of language altogether. A guide to this process was found in the increasingly popular field of comparative linguistics, particularly in etymology. Etymology's scientific claims were based on laws of linguistic change that, read backwards, gave access to strata of culture otherwise hidden from view. Linguistics was a scholarly endeavor equal to philological source criticism in its meticulous precision, but set on a different axis of time. The perception of myth as a specific, historically defined expression of the human mind made this subject a realm in which judgments on history, philosophy, and religion were both created and contested. In the early 1820s, 0. Muller (1797-1840) engaged in a debate with F. Creuzer (1771-1858) on the meaning of myth. It was not a debate in the regular sense wissenschaftlichen Briefwechsel von Carl Otfried Muller ausgewahite Stucke mit Erlauterungen, ed. 0. Kern (G6ttingen, 1936), here abbreviated BMK; and C. 0. Miller, Briefe aus einem Gelehrtenleben, 1797-1840, ed. S. Reiter (Berlin, 1950, II vols.), here abbreviated BMR. GGA indicates the Gottingsche GelehrteAnzeigen. Almost without exception, the authors discussed here are male; why they, almost without exception, perceived mankind and not humankind as the subject and object of history, I discuss in The Early Amazons, chap. I. Hence the gender vocabulary in this article reflects their contemporary assumptions. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.249 on Wed, 03 Aug 2016 06:19:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms