THE medieval emissarics of the Catholic Church brought to Great Britain, in addition to the whole corpus of sacred history, a Continental university system based on the Greek and Latin Classics. Such native legends as those of King Arthur, Guy of Warwick, Robin Hood, the Blue Hag of Leicester, and King Lear were considered suitable enough for the masses, yet by early Tudor times the clergy and the educated classes were referring far more frequently to the myths in Ovid, Virgil, and the grammar school summaries of the Trojan War. Though official English literature of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries cannot, therefore, be properly understood except in the light of Greek mytho- logy, the Classics have lately lost so much ground in schools and univer- sities that an educated person is now no longer expected to know (for instance) who Deucalion, Pelops, Daedalus, Oenone, Laocoön, or Anti- gone may have been. Current knowledge of these myths is mostly derived from such fairy-story versions as Kingsley's Heroes and Haw- thorne's Tanglewood Tales; and at first sight this does not sccm to matter much, because for the last two thousand years it has been the fashion to dismiss the myths as bizarre and chimerical fancies, a charming legacy from the childhood of the Greek intelligence, which the Church naturally depreciates in order to emphasize the greater spiritual im- portance of the Bible. Yet it is difficult to overestimate their value in the study of early Europcan history, religion, and sociology. 'Chimerical' is an adjectival form of the noun chimaera, meaning 'she-goat'. Four thousand years ago the Chimaera can have seemed no more bizarre than any religious, heraldic, or commercial emblem does today. She was a formal composite beast with (as Homer records) a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. A Chimaera has been found carved on the walls of a Hittite temple at Carchemish and,.like such other composite beasts as the Sphinx and the Unicorn, will origin- ally have been a calendar symbol: each component represented a season of the Queen of Heaven's sacred year as, according to Diodorus Siculus, the three strings of her tortoise-shell lyre also did. This ancient three-season year is discussed by Nilsson in his Primitive Time Reckoning (1920).
Sign in 
Cart 
