No Such Thing as Academic Authority

Question: How often do you have to strip away euhemerization to get to the actual myths you research?

This is a weird question. Euhemerization - the practice of later interpreters of myths ascribing the deeds of gods and mythic heroes to those of mere overblown historical humans - is definitely a pernicious problem in any kind of religious study, but it's very complicated and hard to get around. After all, if it were easy to just do a little legwork to get around the issue, scholars wouldn't be so eternally disgruntled about it.

Euhemerism basically assumes that mythology is what happens when so much time goes by that history becomes distorted into exaggerated, fanciful or mystical versions of itself that stop becoming a faithful record of things that happened and starts being passed down as a story for other purposes instead. A euhemeristic approach to mythology seeks to pare it down and try to figure out where the core kernel of "real history" occurred that resulted in this story being told; for example, a euhemerist might say that a story about a god fighting a primordial dragon was originally a tale of a person fighting a large and dangerous animal, maybe on a hunt for food, which got exaggerated over time until the original person was transformed into a god and the original animal into a supernatural monster. Pure euhemerism suggests that all myths are actually just distorted history, although various scholars, philosophers and historians have ascribed to some areas' myths being true history and others true folklore in different time periods and fields of study.

The place we run into the most trouble with this concept is when the only, or most of the only, remaining mythology is recorded by someone with euhemeristic tendencies. The Norse and Irish mythologies traditionally have massive problems with this; because almost everyone who recorded their myths was Christian, many of them had a vested interest in proving that no other religions could possibly be valid, and therefore they presented the mythology either with side interpretations suggesting that it was referring to misconstrued historical events (Snorri does this a lot) or just outright rewriting them to be about humans doing human-level things (Saxo Grammaticus' favorite) with only occasional side notes mentioning that silly pagan people later confused them with gods. We actually have very little remaining mythology of the Aesir, Tuatha or Bogovi that isn't pretty heavily euhemerized, and that means that we actually can't "strip away" the result; instead, we have to attempt to interpret what we've got, in the hopes of correctly evaluating where ancient writers inserted their own biases or added material, and where they were faithfully recording things that they had heard, with a side order of trying to guess what they might have left out in the name of humanizing the story.

And while we hear about it more in connection with European mythologies, which get way more attention and press in western scholarship, this is actually an even more rampant problem in the myths of Africa, Australia and the Americas. Because the vast majority of our preserved and written-down mythology for many of those cultures was written down by European invaders who conquered the local cultures, euhemerism is rampant throughout it. Most of these conquerors were monotheists (usually Christian or Muslim) and therefore used euhemerization as a useful tool to discredit the religions of the "heathens" or "savages" as being obvious claptrap dreamed up by silly natives who couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and as imperialist conquerors they also often had a strong motive to assert that the indigenous beliefs of places they had conquered weren't real or valid anyway, and that replacing them with "real" religions was in fact culturally helpful instead of erasing their cultural identities. Scholars referring to the native religions of conquered territories as "folktales", "fairytales", or "distorted stories" was a very large force in ensuring that those cultures were never taken seriously as having legitimate stories, religions or histories of their own.

And really, what that actually means is that most of the time there's no such thing as evaluating a myth without euhemerism influencing any conclusions we can come to. Especially for those of us who don't read ancient languages or have access to firsthand sources or oral histories, most research options come from the pens of old, predominantly European writers, all of whom had their own agenda, opinions and biases when they were recording myths. History and mythology aren't objective; they are always told by people, and people always inject their own biases, and when the people telling the story for the past few centuries aren't even the people who originally came up with the story, things are bound to be skewed a thousand different ways. It's literally impossible to begin from those sources and strip away all, or even most, of the material and interpretation added by centuries of later scholarship from the original stories, even when we have something solid to begin with (which we often don't).

So... there's no answer to your question. Researching mythology for the clearest picture of an ancient culture's beliefs and gods is a neverending journey of interpretation and reinterpretation, reading scholars and questioning whether or not they are saying something legitimate, looking at sources and trying to decide their relative importance, and a thousand other things. We can never be totally accurate, in fact probably never even close, and we have to constantly be aware of the fact that not just our own preconceived notions about various cultures and their myths will shape our thoughts and decisions, but also the preconceived notions of generations of historians, chroniclers and writers before us.

We do our best to try to find out as much information as we can and put it in the best cultural context we can, but euhemerism is only one of the many obstacles on the road to success. We have to just keep doing our best, and accept that we're always learning!