Euhemerism
v Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1925)
v “Myth is a form of thought.
v Myth is a fundamental “symbolic form” that, like language, is “a means of responding to, and hence creating our world.”
v “Unlike language of philosophy, myth is nonintellectual, non discursive, typically imagistic. It is the primal, emotion-laden, unmediated ‘language’ of experience. As a consequence, for mythic consciousness there is no reflective separation of the real and the ideal; the mythic ‘image’ does not represent the ‘thing’; it ‘is’ the thing.”