Euhemerism

I said yesterday that I was going to talk about the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham, and I will, but I want to explain the term Euhemerism first. Euhemerism is an an attempt to shed light on mythology by interpreting it as springing from actual historical events. Or, in the words of an American historian, it is "the taking of a cosmic god and placing him at a definite point in history as an actual person who was later deified." 

It assumes that real events became exaggerated and fictionalized in the oral transmission. The term comes from a late 4th-century BCE Greek, Euhemerus, who tried to rationalize mythology. Many early Greek philosophers were on-board. in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates offers an explanation of the story of an Athenian princess "taken away" by the north wind, Boreas. Socrates points out the place where there is a temple to Boreas where a wind might have knocked a young woman off her feet and onto rocks where she was killed.

Early Christian apologists used Euhemerism against paganism by declaring:

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.[from St. Cyprian]

The Middle Ages, and writers like Vincent of Beauvais and Roger Bacon, were willing to believe that supernatural beings were not imaginary, but were part of the natural order of things created by God. Men like Marsilius Ficino produced encyclopedic works to explain the hierarchy of demons, spirits, angels, archangels, etc., in God's creation.

Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (c.1220) paints the Norse gods as great leaders and kings, tracing back to that great foundation of so much medieval culture, the Trojan War.

The Modern Era also sometimes looks for historic origins of legendary characters, exaggerating them. Dracula, Paul Bunyan, Robin Hood—searching for the kernel of truth that grew into a legend.

But tomorrow we'll talk about Ælfric of Eynsham. Promise.