The spirit today is myth and myth is the spirit. Today is not a day that will one day be yesterday, but today is the day in which we live now, and we are live today, not extinct. World as mythology reveals its innermost secrets, and this is in fact the use of mythology, that it leads us, gently and persuasively, to the heart of that realm where everything that is wanted may be gained merely by asking for it. Also it teaches us how to ask, so that we do not waste time and energy asking for wind when we want power and asking for flame when we want warmth or heat. Far too many of us have made up our minds as to the means to happiness and we ask for those means instead of asking for happiness. So it matters a great deal how we prepare ourselves for the times ahead. The worst scenario is not to love and then not to know we are loved, because then we have no myth as nourishment and none to protect us. Myth nourishes, it repairs, sustains and increases, when we love nonetheless.

In confronting these tension, they provide an outline of the most troubling questions in the field and offer a variety of responses to them.

Max Müller is often referred to as the 'father of Religious Studies', having himself coined the term 'science of religion' (or religionswissenschaft) in 1873. It was he who encouraged the comparative study of myth and ritual, and it was he who introduced the oft-quoted dictum: 'He who knows one [religion], knows none'. Though a German-born and German-educated philologist, he spent the greater part of his career at Oxford, becoming one of the most famous of the Victorian arm-chair scholars. Müller wrote extensively on Indian philosophy and Vedic religion, translated major sections of the Vedas, the Upanisads, and all of the Dhammapada, yet never visited India. To be sure, his work bears the stamp of late Nineteenth-Century sensibilities, but as artifacts of Victorian era scholarship, Müller's essays are helpful in reconstructing and comprehending the intellectual concerns of this highly enlightened though highly imperialistic age.

This is the first book-length critical analysis in any language of Hans Blumenberg’s theory of myth. Blumenberg can be regarded as the most important German theorist of myth of the second half of the twentieth century, and his Work on Myth (1979) has resonated across disciplines ranging from literary theory, via philosophy, religious studies and anthropology, to the history and philosophy of science. Nicholls introduces Anglophone readers to Blumenberg’s biography and to his philosophical contexts. He elucidates Blumenberg’s theory of myth by relating it to three important developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German philosophy (hermeneutics, phenomenology and philosophical anthropology), while also comparing Blumenberg’s ideas with those of other prominent theorists of myth such as Vico, Hume, Schelling, Max Müller, Frazer, Sorel, Freud, Cassirer, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno. According to Nicholls, Blumenberg’s theory of myth can only be understood in relation to the ‘human sciences,’ since it emerges from a speculative hypothesis concerning the emergence of the earliest human beings. For Blumenberg, myth was originally a cultural adaptation that constituted the human attempt to deal with anxieties concerning the threatening forces of nature by anthropomorphizing those forces into mythic images. In the final two chapters, Blumenberg’s theory of myth is placed within the post-war political context of West Germany. Through a consideration of Blumenberg’s exchanges with Carl Schmitt, as well as by analysing unpublished correspondence and parts of the original Work of Myth manuscript that Blumenberg held back from publication, Nicholls shows that Blumenberg’s theory of myth also amounted to a reckoning with the legacy of National Socialism.