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The Mythological Process in Ancient Paganism 3 A M O S T I M P O RTA N T TA S K of historical study consists in the explanation of humanity’s primitive pagan life, which constitutes the material basis of all later development, and since this life was wholly determined by one principle—religious belief—then its understanding, the understanding of paganism, is fully conditional on an understanding of pagan religion. In fact, the multiplicity of principles that deWne life as we see it in our time is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The ancient world (until its collapse) had no knowledge of a particular principle separate from religious belief in the intellectual realm—it had no knowledge of abstract selfdetermining science, just as in the sphere of social life it had no knowledge of abstract juridical principle, which determines the contemporary state (for the ancient state was absolute, i.e., religious), so that both intellectual life and social relations were identically conditional at the time upon a single principle of religion, and thus an explanation of this principle explains all of paganism and provides a basis for explaining the entire history of humanity as well. But the difWculty of this task is equal to its importance, and so we see that until now the study of ancient religions is still at the level of gathering materials, on the one hand, and the construction of more or less abstract and arbitrary theories on the other. The most widespread among these theories now is the theory of a so-called mythology of nature. The content of primitive or mythological religions is given, according to this theory, by a few phenomena of extrinsic nature, chieXy those that are connected with thunder and with the annual and daily course of the sun, a mythological model that is conditional on the properties of primitive languages. Although the basic idea of this theory is noted neither for its novelty nor its profundity, its scholarly elaboration does have signiWcance: it is thanks to this scholarly elaboration that certain important theses, which though previously known lacked any positive basis, became Wrmly established. Thus, scholarly followers of this theory were the Wrst to actually demonstrate the essential unity of all peoples ’ beliefs, forever eliminating previous assumptions about their incidental or individual origin; they demonstrated, at length, that they all represent a deWnite essential character, found in permanent relation to the phenomena of nature, in an indissoluble connection with these phenomena. But such results without doubt have only a formal signiWcance. The essential content of pagan religions is not at all determined and explained by bringing all mythology under the phenomena of nature: only their general form is shown. It is apparent, in fact, that the phenomena of nature in and of themselves in no way give religious content; in and of themselves they exist as unchanging for us as they did for the ancients: however, they do not have any religious signiWcance for us; consequently, the ancients saw in the phenomena of nature not at all what we see in them, and this—the fact that they saw what we do not see—also constitutes the proper content of mythology. It is said that the content of a myth is a phenomenon of nature; but one must not forget that in paganism the same thing that constituted the content of a myth was also the subject of a cult; consequently, according to the prevailing theory, it has to be conWrmed that a phenomenon of nature was the subject of a cult, that is, phenomena of nature were worshiped, prayed to, and sacriWced to. But here it now becomes apparent that a natural phenomenon in this sense, that is, to which one can pray and bring sacriWces, does not have anything in common with what we call a phenomenon of nature. Therefore nothing is yet explained, while it remains uncertain as to what ancient people saw in nature. The prevailing school proposes a very facile, but not new, resolution of this problem. Primitive man, they say, analogizing with their own actions, also saw in extrinsic nature the activity of living personal beings, which he also worshiped as having power over us. It is sufWcient to note that such an explanation, again, does not explain anything. We cannot Wnd any analogy between the arbitrary actions of people and the essential phenomena of nature —the ancients did Wnd such an analogy; consequently, they looked and thought not as we do. What...

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