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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Euhemerism and Its Uses: The Mortal Gods

Euhemerism and Its Uses: The Mortal Gods

Pugh, Syrithe

Hardcover

Series: Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of

Literary CriticismReligion General General World History

ISBN10: 0367556995
ISBN13: 9780367556990
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Mar 18 2021
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.46
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Euhemerism and Its Uses offers the first interdisciplinary, focussed, and all-round view of the long history of an important but understudied phenomenon in European intellectual and cultural history.

Euhemerism - the claim that the Greek gods were historically mortal men and women - originated in the early third century BCE, in an enigmatic and now fragmentary text by the otherwise unknown author Euhemeros. This work, the Sacred Inscription, has been read variously as a theory of religion, an atheist's manifesto, as justifying or satirizing ruler-worship, as a fantasy travel-narrative, and as an early 'utopia'. Influencing Hellenistic and Roman literature and religious and political thought, and appropriated by early Christians to debunk polytheism while simultaneously justifying the continued study of classical literature, euhemerism was widespread in the middle ages and Renaissance, and its reverberations continue to be felt in modern myth-theory. Yet, though frequently invoked as a powerful and pervasive tradition across several disciplines, it is still under-examined and poorly understood.

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