Some third thoughts on Max Müller and solar mythology

Abstract

Who now reads Max Müller ? Almost nobody, I suspect. If the readers of this article know Müller's name at all, they likely encountered it in some review of the various (and now discredited) theories of myth and religion that were popular in the nineteenth century, and such reviews hardly encourage anyone to seek out Müller's original work. Typically, these reviews present only a very brief and very general summary of Müller's ‘solar mythology’, and then go on to disparage Müller's work, often in a fairly extreme language. Thus, Munz (1973: 75) calls Müller ‘the most flamboyant of all nineteenth century philologists’, Puhvel (cited in Larson, 1974: 4) calls Müller's theory of myth a ’Victorian gingerbread’, and Thompson (1946:371) even suggests that ‘any modern reader who examines it [Müller's theory] begins todoubt his own sanity’.