EUHEMERUS AND EUHEMERISM

EUHEMERUS AND EUHEMERISM . Euhemerus, a Greek (c. 340–260 bce), achieved fame as the result of an imaginative story he wrote that speaks, in a certain fashion, about the origins of divinities. After his death, Euhemerus's name became identified with a special, widely discussed and disputed way of interpreting religion. Euhemerism had an impact for many centuries. Even today, no one dealing with the history of scholarship of religion will leave Euhemerus unmentioned. Very little is known about Euhemerus himself. What is known is precisely what tradition has made him: the originator of euhemerism, an elucidation of religion that explains the gods as elevated images of historical individuals whose acts were beneficial to those around them.

The term euhemerism came to refer to a method of empirical explanation applied to the accounts of gods found in sacred traditions. Indeed, Aristotle, the first great Greek thinker with an empirical sense of inquiry, was part of the generation that preceded Euhemerus. There is no reason to believe that Euhemerus was an empiricist or that he shared Aristotle's analytical views concerning traditional religion. Euhemerus's turn of mind went elsewhere. In Euhemerus's day, well before Strabo (c. 63 bce–c. 24 ce), geography was far from the accurate discipline it would become. Traveling, however, was a most attractive topic, and travel stories were told everywhere, from China to the shores of the Mediterranean. Euhemerus achieved renown in his own time as the teller of a travel story.

The title of a novelette Euhemerus wrote has come down to us as Hiera Anagraphē, a title that is usually rendered as "Treatise on Sacred Matters." It is not known whether this title was given by Euhemerus himself or by someone later, nor is it known whether this title renders Euhemerus's own intentions. In fact, a real impediment to modern access to Euhemerus is the fact that no version of the text he wrote exists. (The understanding of hiera as "sacred" might be misleading; one might just as well translate the title as "treatise on religious matters.") All that exists are summaries of much later date. The two most extensive writings about Euhemerus come from the Christian apologist Lactantius (c. 260–340 ce) and, earlier, Diodorus Siculus (died after 21 bce), who wrote a world history and is one of our best sources for the history of antiquity.

Hiera Anagraphē tells of a voyage to an island in the east called Panchaia, from which—according to the story—on clear days India could be seen. On this island stood a golden pillar with a golden engraving on it. The pillar recounted the life of Zeus, and also of the rulers of Panchaia before him: his father, Kronos, and his grandfather, Ouranos. Zeus, according to this story, traveled through the world, and wherever he went the worship of the gods became established. But Zeus and the kings before him were rulers who bestowed benefits on the inhabitants of Panchaia. The people came to worship them as gods. In other words, Zeus, his father, and his grandfather were royal rulers who were made gods because of their acts on behalf of human beings.

What Euhemerus wrote differs considerably from older, didactic traditions, such as that of Xenophanes of Colophon (sixth century bce), who is known for his emphasis on the difference between gods and men: "But the mortals think that the gods are born and dress, speak and look just like they themselves do," (Diels and Kranz, 1934, fragment 14), and "there is only one single God, the supreme among gods and people, unlike the people both in appearance and in thought," (Diels and Kranz, 1934, fragment 23).

Euhemerus wrote as a storyteller. Storytelling can be a way of conveying the sacred, of speaking about the sacred, which we find in virtually all places and all times. Yet Euhemerus's narrative came to be viewed as an early attempt to find some rational basis of religion, and its author came to be seen as a sort of rationalist explainer. From the time of the early church fathers on, certain trends in Western thought caused theologians and other scholars to approach Euhemerus as if he were a critic or debunker of the gods. Nevertheless, euhemerism lost little of its prestige. The French scholar Abbé Banier (1673–1741) used it eagerly in his work La mythologie et les fables expliqués par l'histoire (Mythology and fables explained by history). From the age of the Enlightenment onward, scholars, among them many a classicist, looked upon Euhemerus as a debunker whose work represented a rational critique of religion. This element of "de-sacralization" was admired by some and regretted by others—but both sides of that argument were missing the boat. Few of Euhemerus's contemporaries were likely to have felt Euhemerus as a critical force. Greek religion was imparted primarily in storytelling.

The classical historian Truesdell S. Brown quite rightly stressed a simple fact many of his peers had overlooked: the Greek gods were unlike the God of the Bible (and of the Qurʾān, the holy book of the third Abrahamic tradition). Brown emphasized that the entire known Greek religious heritage consists in stories (that is, myths), whereas the vast majority of biblical writings, apart from notable exceptions like the Psalms, present themselves neither as unmythical, or as history. Moreover, the Greeks did not have "holy scripture" or "church dogma."

The Germanist and historian of religions Jan de Vries was more in keeping with certain of his colleagues when he called Euhemerus "a clear example of the triviality to which the fourth century sank in explaining the gods." Joseph Fontenrose, a classicist, by contrast, lauded Euhemerus for his "rationalism" and for the position that mere people are at the root of divinity. These positions of De Vries and Fontenrose nicely exemplify those disagreements regarding Euhemerus wherein both sides miss the point that matters by missing the storytelling structure of the religion of the Greeks.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) accomplished a fateful reunderstanding of Euhemerus (as did many of the early Christian thinkers). Augustine was familiar with Euhemerus's ideas, and for him they only indicate that the "pagans" themselves were of the opinion that their gods were mere people. Moreover, Augustine was convinced that those individuals who were elevated to divinity gained that status as a result of their stupendous evil—and this inversion, we can see, is precisely the opposite of what Euhemerus said. This Euhemerismus inversus of the early Christians had great persistence. Since the nineteenth century (when most missionary societies were established), many a missionary has held the opinion that "pagan" gods are demons. This opinion is an offshoot of those early Christian theologies.

Among more "secular" scholars, it is remarkable that a number have taken Euhemerus very seriously as a rationalist, and some have even developed theories that resemble his supposed rational reductionism. The theory of "animism" proposed by E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) lingers to this day—for example, in the writings of journalists who need a shorthand label ("animist") to identify the religions of peoples in remote parts of the world, peoples who once would have been called "savage," "pagan," or "primitive." Tylor's theory concerns the origin of religion and displays a mechanical cause-and-effect rationalism, which many thought they saw (and liked) in Euhemerus.

Turning away from rationalizing and theorizing about the origins of religion, one can confront the fact of the extraordinary importance of storytelling. The medieval world, Christianized as it was, told stories and performed plays in which Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, and of course the devil, spoke with one another. And, of course, there were songs. And institutions or authorities did not condemn storytelling and songs.

It remains true that most of the time in most of the world the myths of each religious tradition have been stories. Certainly in Greece and in antiquity in general, doctrines of "faith" were inconceivable. The sloppy habit of equating religion with faith is a modern deviation, a by-product of Christian church history; faith cannot be translated, for example, into the languages of classical India or China.

See Also

Animism and Animatism; Apotheosis; Atheism; Deity; Fetishism; Hellenistic Religions; Manism; Utopia.

Bibliography

Bolle, Kees W. "In Defense of Euhemerus." In Myth and Law among the Indo-Europeans: Studies in Indo-European Comparative Mythology, edited by Jaan Puhvel, pp. 19–38. Berkeley, 1970.

Brown, Truesdell S. "Euhemerus and the Historians." Harvard Theological Review 39 (1946): 259–274.

Diels, Hermann, and Walther Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Berlin, 1952.

Ferguson, John. Utopias of the Classical World. London and Ithaca, N.Y., 1975.

Fontenrose, Joseph. Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins. Berkeley, 1959.

Manuel, Frank A. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. Cambridge, Mass., 1959.

Puhvel, Jaan. Comparative Mythology. Baltimore, 1987.

Vallauri, Giovanna. Origine e diffusione dell'evemerismo nel pensiero classico. Torino, Italy, 1960.

Vries, Jan de. Perspectives in the History of Religions. Translated by Kees W. Bolle. Berkeley, 1967.

Winiarczyk, Marek, ed. Euhemeri Messenii reliquiae. Leipzig and Stuttgart, Germany, 1991. Contains the fragments, testimonies, and a full bibliography on Euhemerus.

Kees W. Bolle (2005)