Euhemerism

Euhemerus' views were rooted in the deification of men, usually kings, into gods through apotheosis. In numerous cultures, kings were exalted or venerated into the status of divine beings and worshipped after their death, or sometimes even while they ruled. Dion, the tyrant ruler of Syracuse, was deified while he was alive and modern scholars consider his apotheosis to have influenced Euhemerus' views on the origin of all gods.[8] Euhemerus was also living during the contemporaneous deification of the Seleucids and "pharaoization" of the Ptolemies in a fusion of Hellenic and Egyptian traditions.

Euhemerus argued that Zeus was a mortal king who died on Crete, and that his tomb could still be found there with the inscription bearing his name.[9] This claim however did not originate with Euhemerus, as the general sentiment of Crete during the time of Epimenides of Knossos (c. 600 BC) was that Zeus was buried somewhere in Crete. For this reason, the Cretans were often considered atheists, and Epimenides called them all liars (see Epimenides paradox). Callimachus, an opponent of Euhemerus' views on mythology, argued that Zeus' Cretan tomb was fabricated, and that he was eternal:

Cretans always lie. For the Cretans even built a tomb,
Lord, for you. But you did not die, for you are eternal.[10]

A later Latin scholium on the Hymns of Callimachus attempted to account for the tomb of Zeus. According to the scholium, the original tomb inscription read: "The tomb of Minos, the son of Jupiter" but over time the words "Minos, the son" wore away leaving only "the tomb of Jupiter". This had misled the Cretans into thinking that Zeus had died and was buried there.[11]

Influenced by Euhemerus, Porphyry in the 3rd century AD claimed that Pythagoras had discovered the tomb of Zeus on Crete and written on the tomb's surface an inscription reading: "Here died and was buried Zan, whom they call Zeus".[12] Varro also wrote about the tomb of Zeus.

The Wisdom of Solomon, a deuterocanonical book, has a passage, Wisdom 14:12–21, giving a euhemerist explanation of the origin of idols.

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Wisdom (Bible)

The early Christian apologists deployed the euhemerist argument to support their position that pagan mythology was merely an aggregate of fables of human invention. Cyprian, a North African convert to Christianity, wrote a short essay De idolorum vanitate ("On the Vanity of Idols") in AD 247 that assumes the euhemeristic rationale as though it needed no demonstration. Cyprian begins:

That those are no gods whom the common people worship, is known from this: they were formerly kings, who on account of their royal memory subsequently began to be adored by their people even in death. Thence temples were founded to them; thence images were sculptured to retain the countenances of the deceased by the likeness; and men sacrificed victims, and celebrated festal days, by way of giving them honour. Thence to posterity those rites became sacred, which at first had been adopted as a consolation.

Cyprian proceeds directly to examples, the apotheosis of Melicertes and Leucothea; "The Castors [i.e. Castor and Pollux] die by turns, that they may live," a reference to the daily sharing back and forth of their immortality by the Heavenly Twins. "The cave of Jupiter is to be seen in Crete, and his sepulchre is shown," Cyprian says, confounding Zeus and Dionysus but showing that the Minoan cave cult was still alive in Crete in the third century AD. In his exposition, it is to Cyprian's argument to marginalize the syncretism of pagan belief, in order to emphasize the individual variety of local deities:

From this the religion of the gods is variously changed among individual nations and provinces, inasmuch as no one god is worshipped by all, but by each one the worship of its own ancestors is kept peculiar.

Eusebius in his Chronicle employed euhemerism to argue the Babylonian God Baʿal was a deified ruler and that the god Belus was the first Assyrian king.[15]

Euhemeristic views are found expressed also in Tertullian (De idololatria), the Octavius of Marcus Minucius Felix and in Origen.[16] Arnobius' dismissal of paganism in the fifth century, on rationalizing grounds, may have depended on a reading of Cyprian, with the details enormously expanded. Isidore of Seville, compiler of the most influential early medieval encyclopedia, devoted a chapter De diis gentium[17] to elucidating, with numerous examples and elaborated genealogies of gods, the principle drawn from Lactantius, Quos pagani deos asserunt, homines olim fuisse produntur. ("Those whom pagans claim to be gods were once mere men.") Elaborating logically, he attempted to place these deified men in the six great periods of history as he divided it, and created mythological dynasties. Isidore's euhemeristic bent was codified in a rigid parallel with sacred history in Petrus Comestor's appendix to his much translated Historia scholastica (written ca. 1160), further condensing Isidore to provide strict parallels of figures from the pagan legend, as it was now viewed in historicised narrative, and the mighty human spirits of the patriarchs of the Old Testament.[18] Martin of Braga, in his De correctione rusticorum, wrote that idolatry stemmed from post-deluge survivors of Noah's family, who began to worship the Sun and stars instead of God. In his view, the Greek gods were deified descendants of Noah who were once real personages.[19]

Christian writers during the Middle Ages continued to embrace euhemerism, such as Vincent of Beauvais, Petrus Comestor, Roger Bacon and Godfrey of Viterbo.[20][21] “After all, it was during this time that Christian apologists had adopted the views of the rationalist Greek philosophers. And had captured the purpose for Euhemerism, which was to explain the mundane origins of the Hellenistic divinities. Euhemerism explained simply in two ways: first in the strictest sense as a movement which reflected the known views of Euhemerus' Hiera Anagraphe regarding Panchaia and the historicity of the family of Saturn and Uranus. The principal sources of these views are the handed-down accounts of Lactantius and Diodorus; or second, in the widest sense, as a rationalist movement which sought to explain the mundane origins of all the Hellenistic gods and heroes as mortals.” Other modern theorists labeled Euhemerism as a “subject of classical paganism that was fostered in the minds of the people of the Middle Ages through the realization that while in most respects the ancient Greeks and Roman had been superior to themselves, they had been in error regarding their religious beliefs. An examination of the principal writings in Middle English with considerable reading of literature other than English, discloses the fact that the people of the Middle Ages rarely regarded the so-called gods as mere figments of the imagination but rather believed that they were or had been real beings, sometimes possessing actual power.” (John Daniel Cook)

Author Richard Carrier defines "euhemerization" as "the taking of a cosmic god and placing him at a definite point in history as an actual person who was later deified."

Euhemerus ... depicted an imaginary scholar discovering that Zeus and Uranus were once actual kings. In the process Euhemerus invents a history for these 'god kings', even though we know there is no plausible case to be made that either Zeus or Uranus was ever a real person.[38]

In this framing, rather than being presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages, the mythological accounts are claimed to have had such origins, and historical accounts invented accordingly - such that, counter to the usual sense of "Euhemerism", in "euhemerization" a mythological figure is in fact transformed into a (pseudo)historical one.