Theologia mythologica
Encyclopedia
Theologia mythologica is a 1532 book by Georg Pictorius
Georg Pictorius
Georg Pictorius of Villingen was a physician and an author of the German Renaissance.He became active as a physician from 1540 in Ensisheim...

. It was one of the first treatises of Classical mythology
Classical mythology
Classical mythology or Greco-Roman mythology is the cultural reception of myths from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Along with philosophy and political thought, mythology represents one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture.Classical mythology has provided...

 in the German Renaissance
German Renaissance
The German Renaissance, part of the Northern Renaissance, was a cultural and artistic movement that spread among German thinkers in the 15th and 16th centuries, which originated from the Italian Renaissance in Italy...

. Pictorius interprets the Greek pantheon as allegory
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

, e.g. Cybele
Cybele
Cybele , was a Phrygian form of the Earth Mother or Great Mother. As with Greek Gaia , her Minoan equivalent Rhea and some aspects of Demeter, Cybele embodies the fertile Earth...

 as the Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

, her chariot wheels as symbolizing the rotation of the Earth.
editions
  • Theologia mythologica ex doctiss. uirorum promptuario, labore Pictorij Vill. in compendium congesta. : Videlicet De nominum deorum gentilium ratione. De imaginibus, aut formis, insignibusque eorundem et omnium imaginum explanationes allegoricæ, Antwerpen, Michiel Hillen (1532)
  • Theologia mythologica : videlicet de nominum deorum gentilium ratione, de imaginibus aut formis, insignibusque eorundem, et omnium imaginum explanationes allegoricae, Franeker, J. Horreus (1696).

Literature

  • Peter S. Hawkins, From Mythography to Myth-Making: Spenser and the Magna Mater Cybele, Sixteenth Century Journal, (1981).
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