Mythology

Generally considered as a legend, this author presents Pantika as a religion, a culture, and a way of life as observed by the ancients. These legends were as real to that people as Christianity is to its adherents.

The history of monsters forms an interesting division in the annals of mankind, and I should like in conclusion to call attention to the persistency of this belief down to the threshhold almost of our own days. Among the Romans up to the latest period the old law of either burning the monsters or of throwing them into the sea was generally carried out.

The New System, or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology," here presented to the public, is a literary phenomenon, which will remain the admiration of scholars, as long as a curiosity after antiquity shall continue to be a prevailing passion among mankind

Tales from America's FIRST citizens are being lost over time. These tales are probably greater than Aesop's tales in their ability to teach morals and truths through the fabled myths and stories.

The object aimed at in the following pages has been to offer to the general reader a plain account of the wonderful investigations which have revolutionized all ideas as to the antiquity and the level of the earliest European culture, and to endeavour to make intelligible the bearing and significance of the results of these investigations. In the hope that the extraordinary resurrection of the first European civilization may appeal to a more extended constituency than that of professed students of ancient origins, the book has been kept as free as possible from technicalities and the discussion of controverted points; and throughout I have endeavoured to write for those who, while from their school days they have loved the noble and romantic story of Ancient Greece, have been denied the opportunity of a more thorough study of it than comes within the limits of an ordinary education.

The Cakchiquels, whose traditions and early history are given in the present work from the pen of one of their own authors, were a nation of somewhat advanced culture, who occupied a portion of the area of the present State of Guatemala.

MYTHOLOGY, since it began to receive a scientific handling at all, has been treated as a subordinate branch of history or of ethnology. The "science of religion," as we know it in the works of Burnouf, Muller, and others, is a comparison of systems of worship in their historic development. The deeper inquiry as to what in the mind of man gave birth to religion in any of its forms, what spirit breathed and is ever breathing life into these dry bones, this, the final and highest question of all, has had but passing or prejudiced attention. To its investigation this book is devoted.