Note 2 — Chapter I · HISTORICAL METHOD

For example, he gravely asserts (Die Weltanschauung des alten Orients, Leipzig, 1904, p. 41) that Saul’s melancholy is explicable as a myth of the monthly eclipsing of the moon’s light! Perhaps Hamlet’s melancholy was of the same mythic origin. A map of the stars is Winckler’s, no less than Jensen’s, guide to all mythologies. But, to do him justice, Winckler never fell into the last absurdity of supposing that Jews at the beginning of our era were engaged in a secret cult of a Sun-god named Joshua; on the contrary, he declares (op. cit., p. 96), that, just in proportion as we descend the course of time, we approach an age in which the heroes of earlier myth are brought down to the level of earth. This humanization of the Joshua myth was, he held, complete when the book of Joshua was compiled. ↑