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German-born British scholar Max Müller concluded that the Rig-Veda of ancient India-the oldest preserved body of literature written in an Indo-European language-reflected the earliest stages of an Indo-European mythology. M ller attributed all later myths to misunderstandings that arose from the picturesque terms in which early peoples described natural phenomena.
The myth and ritual theory, as this approach came to be called, was developed most fully by British scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. Using insight gained from the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim, Harrison argued that all myths have their origin in collective rituals of a society.
Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud held that myths—like dreams—condense the material of experience and represent it in symbols.
This approach can be seen in the work of British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor. In Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor organized the religious and philosophical development of humanity into separate and distinct evolutionary stages.
The studies made in this period were consolidated in the work of German scholar Christian Gottolob Heyne, who was the first scholar to use the Latin term myths (instead of fibula, meaning “fable”) to refer to the tales of heroes and gods.
German scholar Karl Otfried M ller followed this line of inquiry in his Prolegomena to a Scientific Mythology, 1825).