Euhemerism

I said yesterday that I was going to talk about the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham, and I will, but I want to explain the term Euhemerism first. Euhemerism is an an attempt to shed light on mythology by interpreting it as springing from actual historical events. Or, in the words of an American historian, it is "the taking of a cosmic god and placing him at a definite point in history as an actual person who was later deified." It assumes that real events became exaggerated and fictionalized in the oral transmission. The term comes from a late 4th-century BCE Greek, Euhemerus, who tried to rationalize mythology. Many early Greek philosophers were on-board. in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates offers an explanation of the story of an Athenian princess "taken away" by the north wind, Boreas. Socrates points out the place where there is a temple to Boreas where a wind might have knocked a young woman off her feet and onto rocks where she was killed.Early Christian apologists used Euhemerism…