A golden age, the Age of Kronos. Echoes of the festival of Kronia, of the bee goddess, of human sacrifice, of the earth yielding its fruit without human toil. The golden age refracted and pleasantly distorted itself onto the mythologies of widely varying people from all over the world.

Searching for the right lens through which to interpret mythology created artistically compelling literature and many of these efforts still influence the discipline.

Further Research:

Ascent of Olympus by Rendel Harris (garden)

Symbols and Mythology by Georg Creuzer (secret knowledge)

Paradise Lost Book 2 by Milton (gods of ancient faiths as devils)

Sacred History by Euhemerus (historical distortion)

Nomadic and pastoral groups migrating and interacting with settled populations in fertile agricultural regions gave birth to a characteristic style of mythology.

The darker background to the Olympian pantheon.

• Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch (1:47, 4:16)

• The Greek Myths by Robert Graves (6:38, 17:04, 23:04)

• Genesis 3 KJV (9:02)

• Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius (10:42)

• Tzetzes on Lycophronem’s Alexandria (14:35)

• Ancient Greece by HB Cotterell (20:26)

Age of Fable guides us through the ancient Greek cosmos as we elaborate and compare.

We will use The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch to guide us through the study of mythology. The book covers Greece and Rome but also touches on Nordic and Eastern mythology. Bulfinch's work is exceptional in its presentation of this large area of study as a cohesive story.

Searching out and reading the earliest written sources is one way to learn about mythology. There are many other ways: studying performances, costumes, music, rites, dances of various groups and tribes. Many of these observations were made at the end of the 1800s by anthropologists looking at tribal life when technology was less pervasive.

In 1903 a pair of lectures by German scholar Friedrich Delitzsch was published claiming that many stories and ideas traditionally traced to biblical sources have more ancient origins in Mesopotamian mythology. Babel and Bible had a significant impact on the development of biblical scholarship, theology, and German history.