Georg Friedrich Creuzer

"If there is a country on earth which can justly claim the honor of having been the cradle of the human race or at least the scene of pnmitive claIm the honor of having been the cradle of the human race or at least the scene of primitive civilization, the successive developments of which carried mto all parts of the ancient world and even beyond, the blessmgs of knowledge which is the second hfe of man, that country assuredly is India."

"You must read Voss’s review of the Symbolik to learn how entirely misguided and crazy we are to believe that before Homer and in addition to this great hero, there were actually other people in the world. Yes, we must be burnt, along with all others who think anything of the Orient, and of Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha and whatever else the liars are called. We are mystagogues and seducers of the young. In a word, we should renounce the devil and embrace Voss’s Mythologische Briefe as the book of books."

"By the 1830s, with the exception of a few archaeologists, Ernest Renan recalled, scholars had all united in defending “the originality of Greek mythology against M. Creuzer. All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient.“"

"But Creuzer was also a product of his age and its aspirations; like Friedrich Schlegel, he was seeking a supra-confessional history of religion, and his combination of Neo- platonic sources and romantic ideas allowed him to craft a story of the western migration of myths and symbols, mysterious puzzles created by a small elite, who hoped to transfer true knowledge only to those intellectuals suited to understand it. That Creuzer’s argument dealt centrally with the Eleusinian mysteries, perhaps the most irrational, mystical, and overtly sexual aspect of the Greek cultural tradition, was certainly noted by his audience, which included liberal Protestant classicists as well as Catholic romantics; that it challenged F. A. Wolf’s conception of scientific philology as well as Winckelmann’s sharp divide between Greek and Egyptian cultures gave the text even more polemical valence. It is also instructive that Creuzer permitted his student Franz Josef Mone to add two additional volumes to the second edition of the Symbolik in 1819-23; these volumes traced the evolution of German prehistorical symbols and mythology. This was clearly a Schlegelian means to hitch the Orient to Germanic history and to make both seem more relevant to modern cultural life than was the study of the strange and short- lived world of the ancient Athenians... In the end, of course, he far preferred Greek art, philosophy, and literature to that produced by the East; but then again, in his view, no real lover of the Greeks — especially those of the Hellenistic age — could have failed to understand Greece’s debts to or even dependence upon the East."