ation of truth, at first by the
disciples of the Spurious Freemasonry, and then, more fully and perfectly,
in the development of that system which we now practise. And if there be
any leaven of error still remaining in the interpretation of our masonic
myths, we must seek to disengage them from the corruptions with which they
have been invested by ignorance and by misinterpretation. We must give to
them their true significance, and trace them back to those ancient
doctrines and faith whence the ideas which they are intended to embody
were derived.

The myths or legends which present themselves to our attention in the
course of a complete study of the symbolic system of Freemasonry may be
considered as divided into three classes:--

1. The historical myth.
2. The philosophical myth.
3. The mythical history.

And these three classes may be defined as follows:--

1. The myth may be engaged in the transmission of a narrative of early
deeds and events, having a foundation in truth, which truth, however, has
been greatly distorted and perverted by the omission or introduction of
circumstances and personages, and then it constitutes the _historical
myth_.

2. Or it may have been invented and adopted as the medium of enunciating a
particular thought, or of inculcating a certain doctrine, when it becomes
a _philosophical myth_.

3. Or, lastly, the truthful elements of actual history may greatly
predominate over the fictitious and invented materials of the myth, and
the narrative may be, in the main, made up of facts, with a slight
coloring of imagination, when it forms a _mythical history_.[144]

These form the three divisions of the legend or myth (for I am not
disposed, on the present occasion, like some of the German mythological
writers, to make a distinction between the two words[145]); and to one of
these three divisions we must appropriate every legend which belongs to
the mythical symbolism of Freemasonry.

These masonic myths partake, in their general character, of the nature of
the myths which constituted the foundation of the ancient religions, as
they have just been described in the language of Mr. Grote. Of these
latter myths, Mueller[146] says that "their source is to be found, for the
most part, in oral tradition," and that the real and the ideal--that is to
say, the facts of history and the inventions of imagination--concurred, by
their union and reciprocal fusion, in producing the myth.