ABSTRACT
From 1800 to the 1920s, the evolution of mythography both informed and was informed by wider cultural developments: the great and difficult project of replacing the Christian mythos that for so long formed the imaginative core of Western culture; the struggle between the drive toward transcendence and a reviving reverence for the material world and its seasonal cycles; the brief but culturally significant dominance of pessimism; and, in reaction, the celebration of fertility and of the life force. The pressure of these very nineteenth-century concerns redefined the study of ancient Greek religion in this era. Throughout the period, we find a recurrent insistence that the mythology of the ancient Greeks (specifically that of Homer) is less deeply, less truly religious than the Mystery cults of the chthonian deities: Persephone, Dionysos, and Adonis. To trace the variations on this theme through the mythography and literature of the period is to see the era’s religious attitudes in the very process of formation.
