:It was Euhemerus, a 4th century B . C . Greek mythographer, from whom we get the word " euhemerism ", which is the interpretation of myths as traditional accounts of historical events and persons.
12.
In ancient times, ethnicities often derived their or their rulers'origin from divine or semi-divine founders of a mythical past ( for example, the Anglo-Saxons deriving their dynasties from Woden; see also Euhemerism ).
13.
As a historian and mythographer, Snorri is remarkable for proposing the hypothesis ( in the " Prose Edda " ) that mythological gods begin as human war leaders and kings whose funeral sites develop cults ( see euhemerism ).
14.
The text includes thirty-nine items in which familiar myths are briefly told and then explained; Heraclitus has four methods of explanation, all prominent in late Hellenistic and Roman interpretations : rationalization ( that the myth represents a misunderstanding of a natural event ), euhemerism, allegory, or fanciful etymology.
15.
Thus, while Snorri's euhemerism follows the early Christian tradition, the effect is not simply to discredit the divinity of the gods of a religion on the wane, but also ( on the model of Virgil's " Aeneid " ) to hint that the'divinisation'was done in order to legitimize more recent Scandinavian rulers.
16.
Fairy Euhemerism, as developed by MacRitchie attempts to rationally explain the origin of fairies in British folklore and regards fairies as being a folk-memory of a " small-statured pre-Celtic race " or what Trows of Shetland myth, the Fianna of Old Irish Literature and the Trolls as well as the Svart�lfar and Svart�lfaheimr ( elves or dwarfs ) of Norse mythology.
17.
Religious practices that would later be further developed throughout Mesoamerica were elaborating during the early Middle Preclassic at Kaminaljuyu, including the erection of mounds to serve as substructures for small shrines or funerary / administrative temples, the development of a complex pantheon of deities-probably based on some primordial mythology and cosmology of which the Popol Vuh represents a fragment-and euhemerism, an " incensario " and stela cult, and warfare to procure captives for royal sacrifice.
18.
The supposed Sanchuniathon claimed to have based his work on " collections of secret writings of the " Ammouneis " discovered in the shrines ", sacred lore deciphered from mystic inscriptions on the pillars which stood in the Phoenician temples, lore which exposed the truth later covered up by invented allegories and myths that the gods were originally human beings who came to be worshipped after their deaths and that the Phoenicians had taken what were originally names of their kings and applied them to elements of the cosmos ( compare euhemerism ) as well as also worshipping forces of nature and the sun, moon, and stars.
