An Introduction to Mythology

Lewis Spence's 1921 survey takes readers on a journey through the world's mythologies, arguing that these stories once served as what religion and science do for us: attempts to explain the universe. He traces how ancient peoples across continents developed remarkably similar answers to the same fundamental questions, where did the world come from? Why do we die? What powers govern our lives?, while never losing sight of what makes each tradition distinct. Spence treats these narratives with genuine intellectual seriousness, examining creation myths, divine hierarchies, flood legends, and hero cycles as the legitimate science and theology of their time. Most provocatively, he suggests that these "fossil" ideas persist invisibly in modern superstitions and religious practice, lingering in our thinking like geological traces of older elevations. For anyone curious about where modern thought came from and how we stopped believing the sun was a god, this book offers a fascinating window into early twentieth-century scholarship at its most ambitious.