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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
One of the characteristic features of English and of continental Romanticism was a widespread interest in the origins, nature, and meaning of the myths of the ancient world. Especially in England among classical scholars, antiquarians, and learned churchmen there was a zealous desire to resurrect divinities long forgotten and to find in them and their exploits a relevance for the modern age. One of the most characteristic and influential treatises on myth in the period was the Reverend Jacob Bryant's A New System, or, An Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774–76), an ambitious project whose purpose was “to rectify what time has impaired: to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament, and to display the truth in its native simplicity.” He hoped thereby to give a “new turn to antient history, and to place it upon a surer foundation.” By hypothesizing that the Noachian Deluge was the focal event in ancient history and by seeking to show that its symbolism explained or elucidated the bulk of universal mythology, Bryant was confident that he was not only doing a service to knowledge but also that he was strengthening the premises of Christian truth. On similar diluvian hypotheses Thomas Maurice's Indian Antiquities (1793–1800), Edward Davies' The Mythology and the Rites of the British Druids (1809), and George Stanley Faber's The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) attempted to achieve the same ends. Other notable researches in myth at the turn of the nineteenth century in England were those of Sir William Jones, the Orientalist, Sir William Drummond, the skeptic philosopher, and Richard Payne Knight, the art connoisseur. Well known also in learned circles was the more radically speculative mythologizing of such Frenchmen as Pierre Hugues (D'Hancarville), Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Charles François Dupuis.
1 Third ed. (1807), I, 45. (Where relevant, first editions are indicated in parentheses in the text, and unless otherwise noted the place of publication is London.)
2 In allegorically reading the Old Testament and in reducing Scriptural accounts and symbols to an astronomical origin, Sir William Drummond's The Oedipus Judaicus (privately ptd., 1811) owed much to Dupuis' Origine de tous les cultes, ou la religion universelle (Paris, 1795), which postulated that the zodiac was the key to an explanation of all religions.
3 Anacalypsis, An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis; or an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations, and Religions (1836), i, xiv.
4 The most significant studies of the influence of the syncretic mythographers upon the Romantic poets are Edward Hungerford's Shores of Darkness (New York, 1940), Ruthven Todd's chapter on 18th-century mythologizers in his Tracks in the Snow (New York, 1947), Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1947), and Earl R. Wasserman's recent article, “Adonais: Progressive Revelation as a Poetic Mode,” ELB, xxi (1954), 274–326. My own unpublished dissertation, “Conceptions of Mythology and Their Relations to English Literature: 1700–1830” (Johns Hopkins Univ., 1954), from which the present study is excerpted, also seeks to show the influence of syncretism on several of the Romantic poets.
6 The History of the Royal-Society of London (1667), p. 414.
6 Lectures on Poetry, trans, from the Latin ed. (1742), p. 33.
7 The Letters of Sir Thomas Fitzosborne (1742), 10th ed. (1795), pp. 300–301.
8 Polymetis: or an Enquiry Concerning the Agreement Between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Ancient Artists (1747), p. 319.
9 New ed. (1836), i, 215.
10 Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), p. 8.
11 Letters Concerning the English Nation, trans, from the French, 2nd ed. (1741), p. 131.
12 The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Bollingen Ser. xxviii (New York, 1953), p. 98.
13 The Anlient Religion of the Gentiles, trans, from the Latin (1705), p. 32.
14 Letters to Serena (1704), p. 71.
15 The Travels of Cyrus, to Which is Annexed, A Discourse upon the Theology and Mythology of the Pagans (Albany, 1814), p. 326.
16 Christianity as Old as the Creation (1732), p. 7.
17 The Miscellaneous Works of Conyers Middlelon, 2nd ed. (1755), ii, 450.
18 Remarks Upon a Late Discourse of Freethinking, 8th ed. (1743), p. 45.“
19 New ed. (1837), i, 448.
20 The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, new ed. (1814), iv, 480.
21 Slonehenge, A Temple Restored to the British Druids (1740), p. 3.
22 Abury, A Temple of the British Druids (1743), p. 63.
23 Second ed. (1769), p. 75.
24 An Enquiry into the Patriarchal and Druidical Religion … (1754), p. 28.
25 The Covenant in the Cherubim, in The Philosophical and Theological Works of the Late Truly Learned John Hutchinson (London, 1749), vii, 9. Using this and other Hutchinsonian hypotheses, Robert Spearman in his Letters to a Friend Concerning the Septuagini Translation and the Heathen Mythology (Edinburg, 1759) tried to show that mythology “when traced up to its original, is a traditional detail of the actions, sufferings, and offices of the Great Redeemer, couched under the veil of fables, or a scenic representation of the life and death of that divine hero … ” (p. 68).
26 Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756), i, 335.
