15
Literature and Myth

1967

From Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Study, ed. James Thorpe (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1967), 27–54. French translation by Jacques Ponthoreau published as “Littérature et mythe” in Poétique: revue de théorie et d’analyse littéraires, no. 8 (1971): 489–514. Also translated into German (1977). The essay in its English form was accompanied by a thirteen-page bibliography of myth criticism, not reproduced here, for which Frye provided the following headnote:

This bibliography cannot do more than indicate the general scope and range of myth criticism, and the sort of subject with which it is most likely to be connected: comparative religion, anthropology, psychology, iconography, Biblical typology, allegory, and the like. The arrangement is roughly chronological, and lists mainly secondary sources. It begins with works of Classical and Biblical scholarship, and proceeds to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, taking particular account of the cosmology, iconography, mythological handbooks, and emblem books in those two periods. The next great mythopoeic age is the Romantic one, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth, when a more scientific approach to comparative mythology began, to Frazer and Freud at the end of the century. There follows a selected list of books since Frazer, most of them strongly influenced by him, a number of works of a type of mythical fiction that would hardly have developed without a similar interest in criticism (it is hardly practicable to list all the parallel tendencies in modern poetry, such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Dylan Thomas’s Altarwise by Owl-Light sequence), and a few examples of works of myth criticism in literature, including more specialized studies of single myth figures. Some attempt is made also to document the remark in the essay about the peculiar aptitude of American (and Canadian) literature for this kind of critical treatment.

At every age myth criticism has been close to highly speculative thinking, in or near the occult area, and as applied to literature it is still in an experimental stage, its scholarly organization not yet completed. Hence, while omission from this bibliography proves nothing whatever about the merits of what may have been omitted only by accident or oversight, there has been a real effort to screen out books of doubtful value. One or two have been listed which do not stand on the same level of scholarship or historical interest as the others, but nothing has been included which would really mislead an experienced reader.

I am greatly indebted to my research associate, Professor Jay Macpherson, for her work on this bibliography.

N.F.

A myth, in its simplest and most normal significance, is a certain kind of story, generally about a god or other divine being. Myths in this sense are associated with primitive cultures or with archaic stages of developed ones, and when we describe certain features of our own time as myths, we tend to imply that they are fixations or survivals. A myth may be studied in regard to its content or in regard to its form. The content of a myth relates it to specific social functions. Seen as content, it becomes at once obvious that myths are not stories told just for fun: they are stories told to explain certain features in the society to which they belong. They explain why rituals are performed; they account for the origin of law, of totems, of clans, of the ascendant social class, of the social structure resulting from earlier revolutions or conquests. They chronicle the dealings of gods with man, or describe how certain natural phenomena came to be as they are. Such myths can hardly be understood, in this context, apart from the cultural pattern of the societies that produced them, and they form the main body of what might be called, and in later religion is called, revelation, the understanding of its traditions, its customs, its situation in the world, which a society accepts as primary data. For although every society produces its own myths, it is rare for a society to realize that its myths are its own creations. Myths are usually thought of as given, as dictated by a deity or descending from a remote antiquity existing before history began: in illo tempore, in Mircea Eliade’s phrase.¹ And, of course, as myths continue to be repeated in traditional form, the fact that they are given rather than invented becomes increasingly true.

Thus there is a curious but persistent connection between myth and false history. That is, what the myth presents is not what happened in the past, but what is said to have happened in the past in order to justify what is in the present. Such myth has the social function of rationalizing the status quo: it explains, not merely why we do the things we do, but why we ought to go on doing them. When a mythology becomes codified in a sacred book, this connection with false history still shows itself. Sacred books often turn on an alleged historical event, like the giving of the law to Moses, or purport to record the teachings of a charismatic religious leader. But under historical analysis the event usually turns into a myth and the teachings into the body of doctrine which is already held by those who revere the teacher. The Analects of Confucius, according to Arthur Waley, tell us not so much what Confucius said as what Confucians believed,² and the Christian Gospels are now generally recognized to be written within the framework of the beliefs of the early church. It is often assumed that the mythical features of a religion are later accretions on what was originally a historical event, but no sacred book of any of the great religions allows us to separate the historical from the mythical. That is, we cannot with any certainty reconstruct a premythical stage in the establishment of any religion. In some religions, such as Islam or some of the nineteenth-century cults, the sacred book can be seen emerging as part of the historical process, but even there the beliefs are founded on the acceptance of the sacred book as inspired by something outside history. We notice too how often such religions (Mormonism, Anglo-Israelitism)³ involve a mythical reshaping of history, like the Mosaic contract in the Old Testament.

Myths are thus stories of a peculiar seriousness or importance: the events they recount are believed to have really happened, or at least to explain something of crucial importance to the community. They are mainly stories about the permanent gods of the community who are still worshipped, and so they tend to become permanent stories, attached to others told about the same gods. The power ascribed to the gods, again, gives the stories about them a peculiar significance for and relevance to human destiny. Hence myths expand into a definite canon of stories which we call a mythology. As localities are welded into larger political units, the gods of one locality also tend to become identified with the corresponding gods of another, and this accelerates the growth of a unified mythology. But the more seriously the mythology is taken, the more it acts as a conservative braking force on social change. It presents, in short, a society’s view of its own social contract with gods, ancestors, and the order of nature, and later contract theories are rationalized myths of a most significant kind. The importance of myths, studied in relation to their content, is thus mainly sociological, and their study eventually becomes an aspect of social science, assuming that comparative religion, which is one form of such study, is a social science. The relation of myth to physical science is of little importance. Perhaps some myths may have satisfied some primitive form of scientific curiosity, but it is not easy to find myths which were primarily designed for this purpose. Myths are stories told in connection with natural phenomena, rather than stories told as explanations of those phenomena, however allegorical. And to the extent that they are accepted as explanations, as in the Hebrew myth of creation, the rise of science simply annihilates the myth: there is no mutation of the myth into another form, as there is in theories of social contract.

In characterizing the gods of myths, the obvious models are the human beings of the ruling class, who are privileged to be more passionate and capricious than their inferiors. Gods have also some connection with the order of nature, and the more arbitrary and unpredictable events, such as storms, attract more immediate attention than the orderly circling of the stars in their courses. Hence it is hardly surprising to find gods in myths, even in the myths of a high civilization, presented as cowardly, lustful, or treacherous, as well as taking the high arrogant line with man that masters of indisputable power can afford to take. This causes some conflict when the feeling grows that gods ought to practise what they preach, or have actually been practising it all along and have been libelled by the poets. Hence the attack of Plato on the Homeric mythology,⁴ and Plutarch’s determination to equate what is true of the gods with what is morally acceptable.⁵ But the general conclusion of later Greek philosophy, that all gods were emblems or aspects of a uniform divine or natural order, never coincided with a fixed canon of mythology. The stories told about the gods remained on the “some men say” level. Hebraic religion, on the other hand, did achieve such a canon, as a result of a long and relentless process of editing its traditional myths. The mythological and conceptual aspects of Hebrew religion were unified to such lasting effect that even a century ago Christians were only with great trepidation and soul-searching beginning to admit that the Biblical stories of Adam and Noah were myths. But the conservative and hampering effect of this unified mythology on the development of philosophy and science, even on art and literature, is obvious in Hebrew culture itself, and persisted into the Christian period.

When myths are studied in regard to their form, they are studied primarily as stories, and are to be primarily related, not to their own specific culture, but to other stories of the same shape and kind. If a Greek myth shows a strong similarity in form to an Eskimo one, the similarity is irrelevant to a historian studying the Greeks or to an anthropologist studying the Eskimos: it is not irrelevant to a literary critic. As we shall see more fully later, myths were studied primarily for their content, or supposed content, as long as scholars had only Classical and Biblical myths to study. But the nineteenth-century explosion of knowledge about the myths of other cultures brought about a shift of attention from the content of one specific canon of myths to the forms of many similar ones. The great dividing line is Frazer’s Golden Bough, which collects myths and rituals of the same general shape from all over the world without regard to the cultural differences involved. This work was intended by Frazer to be a work of anthropology using a “comparative” method much in vogue in the nineteenth century. But it has become increasingly obvious that The Golden Bough is not primarily a book on anthropology at all, but, like Frazer’s editions of Pausanias, Apollodorus, and the Fasti, primarily a work of Classical scholarship using anthropological illustrations and parallels. That is, it is a work of literary criticism, the only field in which his type of “comparative method” is really valid. It is much the same method that is used by scholars who catalogue the themes and motifs of folk tales.

The difference between such terms as “myth,” “folk tale,” and “legend” begins to blur as soon as we think of such things formally, as types of stories. The word “legend” is perhaps more proto-historical in reference. We have myths of Zeus and Aphrodite; we have legends of beings, like Theseus or Oedipus, thought of as culture-heroes or figures whose descendants can still be pointed to as long as the legend and the culture are connected. Legend, then, is an early and easy-going form of tradition, before there is a general demand for history, conceived as the study of what actually happened. But the boundary line between myth and legend is impossible to draw: the same kinds of stories appear in both. Folk tales, again, are stories similar to, even identical with, myths in their structure. The chief difference seems to be that folk tales lack the particular seriousness that is characteristic of myth: even if they are traditional and believed, they are not central to tradition and belief. But myth, folk tale, and legend form a single corpus of stories: whichever category we concentrate on, the other two adhere to it. In the Old Testament, we recognize myth in the story of Adam, legend in the stories of the patriarchs, folk tale in the story of Samson, and what German critics call sage in the story of Elijah. But these are differences of emphasis and context rather than of actual genre. Nowhere is there a clear line between myth, legend, historical reminiscence, history manipulated for didactic purposes, and actual history. It is clear that whatever in the Bible is historically accurate is not there because it is historically accurate, but for reasons that would make inaccurate history (or pure literature, like the Book of Job) equally acceptable.

The total corpus of stories has two characteristics that are important for us. First, it is impossible to trace its origin. Our evidence cannot go back beyond the age of writing, and such story-types vanish into the long ages of oral tradition that must have preceded all written literature. Second, such stories, even when believed to be true, are not obviously credible: that is, they are not plausible. They belong in a world of marvels and mysteries and arbitrary acts, and the obligation to believe them is recognized, from Plato to Sir Thomas Browne and beyond, as an intellectual humiliation, whether the humiliation is resented, as it is by Plato, or gladly accepted as a sacrificium intellectus, as it is by Browne.⁶ What a man really believes, however, is what his actions show that he believes. By this standard Don Quixote’s belief that his windmill was a giant was a genuine belief. But Quixote also remarks to Sancho Panza that the Golden Age would soon return if people would only see things as they are, and not allow themselves to be deluded by enchanters who make giants look like windmills.⁷ In other words, a belief which is voluntarily assumed as an intellectual handicap, as something that conflicts with the rest of one’s experience, soon modulates from actual belief into an anxiety about belief.

Myths, we said, because of their central and permanent importance in a culture, tend to stick together and form a mythology, whereas folk tales simply travel over the world interchanging their motifs and themes. Folk tales thus have a nomadic cultural history, while myths grow up in connection with a culturally rooted religion. It is not any structural feature in the stories of Phaethon or Endymion that makes them myths, for we could have—and do have—folk tales of the same kind: it is their attachment to a growing body of stories told about Apollo and Artemis, and the further attachment of Apollo and Artemis to the Olympian hierarchy, that makes them myths. Apollo does not appear to begin as a sun-god, but he becomes one, and in doing so he eventually absorbs the Helios of the Phaethon story. The true myth thus becomes an episode in a mythology. And as a culture develops, its mythology, or body of traditional and religious data, tends to become encyclopedic. At a certain stage of development a mythology produces a theogony, a connected narrative beginning with the origin of the gods and of the departments of nature they personify, such as heaven and earth, the creation and original state of mankind, the inauguration of law and culture, and so on down to what may be called the cultural present. Some theogonies carry on the story to the end of time and the future annihilation of the world, though this is an extension of their normal function, which is to present a version of society’s original contract. Besides this, mythology supplies a number of episodic tales illustrating the relations of gods with one another or with man, usually with a cautionary moral; it identifies or interrelates the various gods of local cults; it sanctions the law by giving it a divine origin; it provides a divine ancestry for its kings and heroes. Such a mythological canon does not necessarily exist in one specifically codified form, but it has a real existence nonetheless. Thus a mythology expands into an account of the origin, situation, and destiny of mankind, or the relevant portion of mankind, an account which is still, in form, a series of stories, but stories with obvious philosophical and moral implications.

As a society develops, its myths become revised, selected, expurgated, or reinterpreted to suit its changing needs. We have noticed that an immense amount of editorial labour obviously intervened between the origins of the myths in the Old Testament and their present form. The more archaic stories are often felt to be in bad theological taste: as Plutarch says, gods represented as doing unworthy things are no gods [Moralia, 417e–f]. Similarly in the Bible: the mistaken impulse of King David to break an ancient taboo and take a census was prompted by an angry Jehovah in the earlier book of Kings, by Satan in the later book of Chronicles. In this way a tradition develops of explaining or rationalizing earlier and more primitive myths. Myths may be interpreted as allegories illustrating moral truths. Hence the device known in Greek culture as hyponoia, the attempt, say, to save the faces of both Homer and Aphrodite by explaining the story of Hephaestus’s net in the Odyssey as an allegory of something profound and respectable.⁸ Or mythology as a whole may be interpreted allegorically, as primitive science, as esoteric philosophy, as distorted history. The interpreting of myth, chiefly as moral allegory, was one of the cultural heavy industries of Western Europe between Plutarch and the late Renaissance, and survived as late as Ruskin. The natural direction of hyponoia, or the moralizing and allegorizing of myth, is away from the story towards the conception. Thus the story of Narcissus “really means” that pride goes before a fall, or that self-hypnosis is induced by egoism. Story and personality come to be thought of as archaic nuisances or mere disguises for something more serious, intended either to deceive or amuse the superficial. Eventually the story is replaced by the conceptual myth, the abstract ethical or metaphysical doctrine. Even where religious anxieties demand that some myths, at any rate, must still be accepted as true stories, the conceptualizing tendency goes as far as it can.

A second tendency in mythology, already mentioned, is also important for literature: the tendency to identify all the characters, usually gods, who are sufficiently similar for identification to be at all plausible. The most primitive gods appear to be epiphanic or local ones; a large settled civilization develops a definite number of gods, associated with various departments of nature, who absorb a great many of such local divinities by such identification. Sometimes differences in the characters of the local divinities are reflected in some inconsistency in the canonical accounts of the god or hero who absorbs them: the stories of Heracles afford instructive examples. As large civilizations expand into world states, the idea of one God appears, and identification by absorption then becomes total. The wholesale identifying of Greek and Roman gods which has given us Jupiter and Venus as names for Greek deities is a stage in this process. The same tendencies continue after a monotheistic religion has been established: in Christianity the saints play a prominent role in absorbing local gods, and Notre Dame de Chartres is the same person as Notre Dame de Crabtree Mills, Quebec.

It is obvious from what we have said that the corpus of myth, folk tale, legend, and the rest that emerges from the oral tradition is, in one of its aspects, already literature: it is not something else that develops into literature. It is only by a necessary economy of language that we can speak of a myth, a folk tale, or a legend at all: none of these things really exist except in specific verbal forms, and these verbal forms are literary forms. We notice that the development of literature tends to parallel the social development of the corpus. We might expect to find the growing point of literature in folk tale rather than in myth, so far as these areas can be distinguished. Folk tales are often told purely for entertainment; there is not usually any obligation to believe them; they afford more scope to the storyteller’s ingenuity and impulse to vary his material. And of course folk tale, along with legend, is of immense importance in literature. Myths, again, take on a new lease of literary life once their connection with belief and cult disappears, as Classical mythology did in Christian Europe. It seems curious that collections of myths and stories near to myths should be made for purely literary purposes, as they are in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and that poets should be constantly turning to such stories at a time when nobody believed in or worshipped the deities who figure in them, but so it is.

It looks as though there were some inherent connection between myth and poetry that is closer than the connection with folk tale and legend. In the first place, the central and permanent significance of myth is reflected in the history of literature as well. As later critics constantly pointed out, the original mythmakers were the poets, and in Greece, where mythology never quite became theology, Homer and Hesiod had a cultural authority that extended beyond literature. In Christian times, we find Dante and Milton turning to different aspects of the mythical structure of Christianity, in spite of the subordination of poetic genius to other cultural demands that the choice of such themes made necessary. When poets recreate myth, they work in a different direction from the conceptual tendencies of the allegorists. The poet’s impulse is to retell the story, or invent a new one with the same characters, instead of rationalizing the story. His cultural influence is thus in stressing the concrete, personal, storytelling elements in the myth which the conceptualizers tend to pass over or treat as archaic. Thus Plato was enough of a philosopher to want to censor the poets, and ridicule those who tried to justify them, but enough of a poet to invent his own myths, usually with the familiar names of Zeus and Prometheus. The gods, who are the normal characters of myth, are usually identified with various aspects of nature, and identity makes a relationship metaphorical. Neptune can cause a storm at sea because he is a sea-god: in other words he is a metaphor for the sea. This metaphorical link between a natural event and a personality is an obstacle to the allegorist, but essential to the poet. The allegorist tends to try to drop the divine personality and concentrate on the event: the poet tends to see the event only as symbolic of the activity of the personality.

To sum up our argument thus far: myths are a part of the corpus of stories that every society has in its earlier phases of development. They are similar in form to other stories, some of which we distinguish as legends or folk tales, but are regarded as having in their content an element of peculiar and central importance. The question arises, How are we to respond to this importance? One obvious answer is, By believing what the myth says; by attaching its content to the rest of our experience. This is the answer primarily insisted on in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and for centuries the notion persists that, for example, if the Bible says a great fish swallowed Jonah, there are special rewards for the reader who can swallow both. But even a dogmatic mythology deals with divine beings who can do anything, and who, being so often identified with elements of nature, take little pains to be credible or even moral. Sometimes attempts are made to rationalize a myth on a literal basis: thus either the fish were exempted from the curse of Noah’s flood or some special act must have drowned them too. But such efforts soon perish through their inherent fatuity. From here the response to the myth takes one of two directions. Either the myth represents something which is true in spite of the story, or it is a story to be responded to as a story. We may call the first type of response allegorical, the second archetypal. They are not mutually exclusive: they are distinguishable, but they coexist, and help each other to develop. The allegorical response is a semi-poetic one: it shifts the basis, as Aristotle says the poet does in comparison with the historian, from what was true, or did happen, to the kind of thing that is true, or does happen.⁹ Hence it rescues the dignity of a mythology no longer believed in, like the Classical mythology in the Christian period, as well as providing what Browne calls “an easie and Platonick description” of matters of faith.¹⁰ But it sets up a drift away from the story into the moral or historical truths illustrated by the story. To the allegorist, a myth’s nearest relations are with other myths closest to it in subject matter: the stories of Narcissus and of Phaethon are both exempla of pride, different in their fabulous disguise, but identical in their moral truth.

But mythology, regarded as a corpus of stories, united in form to legend and folk tale (and of course to other literary forms, such as hymns, which attach themselves to the myths that are part of a cult), has literary characteristics. The essential link is indicated by the Greek word mythos, which means the plot or narrative of a story. Literature inherits a mythology: in this sense the poet finds before him certain stories to which a good deal of traditional weight and authority has already been attached. The distinction between canonical and apocryphal stories reappears in literature, as when European poets inherited a Judaeo-Christian mythology related to what Tillich calls ultimate concern,¹¹ and a Classical mythology which had lost its connection with belief and had become purely imaginative and poetic. One would expect poets to concentrate entirely on the latter, as their peculiar province, but in fact we find that the central position of Christianity in Western culture is reflected in its literature. Now just as the allegorical interpretation of myth is semi-poetic, so the poetic recreation of it is semi-conceptual. The poet tries to make his traditional story imaginatively credible, and he also interprets it incidentally. His primary task, however, is not to interpret but to represent; he transfers an ancient tale from the past to the present, from something inherited to something that confronts the reader immediately; from (if the myth is canonical) the particular event in the past, the truth of which is believed, to the universal event, the significance of which is comprehended.

Individual myths form a mythology; individual works of literature form an imaginative body for which there is (as Aristotle remarked two thousand years ago) no word.¹² If there were such a word, it would be much easier to understand that literature, conceived as such a total imaginative body, is in fact a civilized, expanded, and developed mythology. We saw that one important social function of a mythology is to give a society an imaginative sense of its contract, of its abiding relations with the gods, with the order of nature, and within itself. When a mythology becomes a literature, its social function of providing a society with an imaginative vision of the human situation directly descends from its mythological parent. In this development the typical forms of myth become the conventions and genres of literature, and it is only when convention and genre are recognized to be essential aspects of literary form that the connection of literature with myth becomes self-evident. The mythical Golden Age thus becomes the pastoral convention; the mythical accounts of man’s fallen and helpless state become the conventions of irony; the mythical sense of the separation between the power of the gods and the pride of man becomes the convention of tragedy; myths of heroic adventures become the conventions of romance.

The relation of literature to mythology may be explicit or implicit. We have explicit relation when Dante and Milton recreate the central Christian myths of redemption or fall, or when Keats and Shelley recreate the myths of Endymion or Prometheus, or when French dramatists from Racine to Cocteau recreate the Greek myths that were already recreated in Greek drama. One reason for the explicit attraction of poets to mythology is technical. Because myths so often deal with divine beings who are identified with aspects of nature or society, the language of myth is metaphorical, and it is the metaphorical freedom that, for instance, the myth of Prometheus gives to Shelley that attracts him to the myth rather than to a contemporary social or political theme, where such mythical conceptions as the return of Atlantis would be absurd. Again, we spoke of the tendency on the part of a mythology to become encyclopedic, providing a vision of the human situation from myths of beginning (creation, fall, Golden Age, lost paradise, killing the dragon of chaos, etc.) to myths of end (apocalypse, millennium, Utopia; or else visions of annihilation and Götterdämmerung). Sacred books, notably the Bible, show a tendency to reflect this encyclopedic form in their structure, and a work of literature, when explicitly mythological, finds an implicit context for its myth in relation to literature as a whole, as a total imaginative body. Thus while the interpreter or commentator on a myth finds the profundity of the myth in its meaning as allegory, the poet, in recreating the myth, finds its profundity in its archetypal framework.

On the other hand, it often happens that a specific language of mythology petrifies into highbrow slang, as Philomela became a merely facile substitute for the imaginative experience of a nightingale’s song in the eighteenth century. Keats’s nightingale ode is no less mythical in its treatment of this experience than it would have been if Keats had explicitly alluded to the Ovidian story; the poem is not different in kind from the Ode to Psyche, which is explicitly mythical. But the nightingale ode follows the Wordsworthian practice, the theory of which appears to be the principle that archetypes of myth are most vividly experienced when they are not directly named, but when they are rediscovered in ordinary experience. This is one form of the implicit approach to mythology; another form is exemplified by Shakespeare, whose basis of operations is not myth, but legend in tragedy and history and folk tale in comedy. In modern times a great deal of realistic and ironic literature is implicitly mythical in the same way, but may be made explicitly so by a single allusion or sometimes by a title (Resurrection, Germinal, Sodome et Gomorrhe, Absalom! Absalom!, etc.).¹³ The allusion indicates the author’s view of the archetypal context of his work, its place in the total framework that literature reveals to the imagination. The fact that poets think archetypally is often indicated by a reference to myth. When Yeats hopes that his daughter will think opinions are accursed because he once knew a woman who was beautiful and opinionated,¹⁴ a reader may feel that Yeats should have made a statistical survey before making assertions about the correlation between female beauty and female opinions, or that no daughter’s opinions were likely to be more absurd than some that Yeats himself held. But Yeats’s thought, being poetic thought, is moving up towards the vision of an archetype, to Venus in her aspect as the wife of Vulcan, and to this archetype both his daughter and Maud Gonne, as well as everything else in that area of his experience, are assimilated.

The moral allegorization of myth depends on a general belief in a permanent body of moral truths which the wisdom of all ages has endeavoured to express. As the sense of the relativity of moral and philosophical truth grows, the study of myth tends to become the anthropological and historical placing of the myth in its cultural context which we spoke of at first. The historical student of myth, however, inherits the conception of the myth as a disguise for a real truth. In this new context a great many myths tend to become historical reminiscences, allegories of something that happened earlier. The Biblical flood story is Sumerian in origin, and a layer of mud in Sumerian excavations indicates that a deluge did occur there. Frazer, in his Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, finds that there are flood stories all over the world (except in Africa, where a story about the sky falling seems to have replaced it) and ascribes them all to local catastrophes of the same type. This, however, seems a kind of unconscious reductio ad absurdum of the method, perhaps even an example of the way that Frazer’s industry often seems to be part of a curious imaginative obtuseness. Any given myth may have resulted from a local accident, but if it resembles dozens of other myths in form, surely we may suspect a feature in that form which does not oblige us to believe in an indefinite number of local accidents.

I have mentioned this point because it illustrates the difficulty of dealing with similarities of form among myths of different cultures and periods on a purely historical basis. If we keep to the disguise conception of myth, all similarities among myths must result from similarities in the phenomena which they obliquely describe. Hence the student of myth, unless he ignores these similarities and confines himself to the myths of one culture, is strongly tempted to account for them on some general theory of origin. There have been many such theories. Once upon a time there was a school of wise men who concealed all mysteries in fables, and our existing myths are all distortions of these. This version, originally developed to explain the resemblances between Biblical and extra-Biblical myths, keeps turning up in various occult forms, the school of wise men being located in Atlantis or India or ancient Egypt, whence their doctrines and symbols were diffused around the world like the trade winds. Traces of this view still linger in, for instance, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. Once upon a time there was a worldwide mythology of tree-worship, sun-worship, megalithic monuments, and reincarnation: this is the eighteenth-century “Druid” theory, still doing duty in H.G. Wells’s Outline of History. Once upon a time there was a matriarchal and lunar mythology with a dying god who was the Great Mother’s lover, perverted by a later patriarchal and solar myth which made the dying god a sacrifice offered by a father. Thus in Robert Graves, who adopts this version, our present notion of the Judgment of Paris must be the result of a misunderstanding: originally Paris must have been getting the apple from the triple goddess, not giving it.¹⁵ The Golden Bough itself, read in the same way, seems to suggest that once upon a time all mankind was organized into tribes with divine leaders who were killed and ceremonially eaten as soon as their strength began to fail. Other schematizations of the origin of myths, reducing them all to sun myths, zodiacal or astrological myths, ancestor or dead-hero myths, and the like, are by-products of the same tendencies.

Now any (or possibly all) of these general theories of origin may eventually be confirmed by archaeology, but in the meantime they are somewhat conjectural. We have so little evidence even from archaeology. Stonehenge appears to be carefully oriented to the sun, but we do not know that its builders had a verbalized mythology. But this kind of prehistoric hypothesis, of a type so remarkably similar to the mythical histories of sacred books, already mentioned, becomes unnecessary if we think of myths as potential literary forms. For the literary critic, at least, the real meaning of a myth is revealed, not by its origin, which we know nothing about, but by its later literary career, as it becomes recreated by the poets. As Ruskin says, in a fine passage of The Queen of the Air: “The great question in reading a story is always, not what wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it; but what wise man first perfectly told, and what strong people first perfectly lived by it. And the real meaning of any myth is that which it has at the noblest age of the nations among whom it is current.”¹⁶ Thus a mythical story or theme is not a Platonic idea of which all later treatments are approximations, but an informing structural principle of literature, and the more we study the literary developments of a myth the more we learn about the myth. The book in the Bible known as the Song of Songs may have developed from village festival songs centring on a fertility-and-marriage myth like that of the Lord and Lady of the May in medieval England. Once in the Bible, it became assimilated to the mythical structure of the Bible and had a flourishing career in mystical poetry as an allegory of God’s love for the Church or human soul. The word “allegory” indicates that the tradition of allegorical interpretation played an important role in this literary development, as it often has done, but it would be uncritical to think of the development as a distortion or corruption of the original myth—so far as there was one.

Normally, however, mythical stories tend to develop by response to a public’s growing demand for the plausible or credible, and the waning of its taste for the marvellous. I have elsewhere given the term (borrowed from Freud, though naturally the context is different in him) “displacement”¹⁷ to the process by which mythical stories about gods who can do anything become romances about heroes who can do almost anything, or heroines of tantalizing elusiveness or unshakable fidelity, and from there become stories of the foundling Tom Jones, the whorish but unquenchable Moll Flanders, or the virtue-rewarded Pamela. In this development the preservation of the original mythical outline of the story, as the feature that continues to give it shape, suspense, and denouement, is something that it is the concern of the critic to call to our attention.

In literary criticism itself the allegorical tendency reappears in two types of criticism. A work of literature may be studied in relation to its time: that is, it may be studied as a historical allegory. Or it may be studied in relation to the life and experience of the man who wrote it, as a biographical or psychological allegory.

As a historical allegory, the work of literature reflects the social facts of its own age: its historical events, its obsessive ideas, the conflicts and tensions in the social structure. Shelley’s treatment of the Prometheus myth is unintelligible unless we relate it to the situation of Europe as Shelley saw it in 1819, after the French Revolution and Napoleon, before the greater revolution that he saw as imminent. We have to think of it also as a product of the cultural Zeitgeist that we sum up in the word “Romanticism.” There are many other elements in the relation of a literary work to its time that the critic is concerned with, and historical criticism gets out of proportion only when it freezes into a dogma, as it tends to do in most if not all Marxist criticism, asserting that what a poem is in relation to the life of its time outside it is in fact what the poem “really means,” and that the work of the critic is done when he has established that relation. I have phrased this in such a way as to show that such a critical doctrine is directly descended from the allegorical tradition. Yet the mere fact that Shelley’s poem is about Prometheus, and that Shelley in his preface explicitly links his hero with the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the Satan of Milton, indicates that there is another dimension to the myth that is to be sought within literature itself. All literary works have pedigrees of this kind whether they say so or not, even whether the author realizes it or not. Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, besides being a work of its time, impresses us also as a portent of the future: we see in it an anticipation of later portrayals of conflicts between an establishment and an antihero. But if Rameau’s Nephew has this literary extension into the future it must have one into the past as well, and if we see it as belonging to the tradition of the Solomon-and-Saturn dialogue, the opposition between socially accepted and socially rejected wisdom, we are, again, seeing it in its archetypal framework or total cultural context.

So far as the work of literature is to be thought of as a conscious and voluntary production of its author, there is little if any difference between its historical and its biographical aspects: the author is simply seen as a man of his time. Since Romanticism we have been increasingly impressed by the involuntary aspects of imaginative work, and by the way, in particular, in which the specifically mythopoeic faculty, the creation of the central metaphorical form of a literary work, seems to be associated with the mental powers which are or seem to be below consciousness. The more thoroughly the unconscious mind has been explored, the more remarkable are the parallels of literature with the dream and other aspects of the struggles of desire and reality in the mind. Certainly since Freud we have been accustomed to see creation as revealing tensions and conflicts within the poet’s own psyche as well as in his society. Thus a poem may also be, to some extent, an allegory of the poet’s inner life, and there are not lacking those who would claim that what the poet unconsciously reveals of himself in his poem is what that poem “really means.” But however remarkable the analogies between the mythopoeic faculty and the unconscious mind, and however true the fact poets do unconsciously reveal and to some extent release their inner tensions in their work, still the mythopoeic faculty can hardly be the same thing as the Freudian repressed unconscious. Unlike the dream, it seeks communication and is aware of an audience, hence it must be something much nearer to consciousness. The poet’s craftsmanship may work on a purely conscious level, or it may operate on a level that we vaguely describe as instinctive, intuitive, inspired, or involuntary, when his skill as a writer tells him that something belongs or fits, whether he can explain why or not. And so, just as a poet may consciously relate his work to literary tradition, as Shelley does by his use of the name Prometheus, so he may unconsciously establish similar links in his diction, his imagery, his echoes of work that has influenced him, and the like.

What is called myth criticism in literature, then, is not the study of a certain kind or aspect of literature, much less a patented critical methodology, but the study of the structural principles of literature itself, more particularly its conventions, its genres, and its archetypes or recurring images. As this process goes on, certain external relations of literature come into view, though they have not been much explored as yet, and we can only hint briefly here what they are. In the first place, the identity of mythology and literature indicates that even matters of belief, in religion, have much more to do with vision and with an imaginative response than with the kind of belief that is based on evidence and sense experience. The connection of myth with assumed history, already mentioned, does not mean that such mythical structures as the Gospels and the Pentateuch are fraudulent: it means that they have been written in the only form which can address a reader in the present tense, as something confronting him with an imperative rather than revealing a mystery out of the past. Myth, in short, is the only possible language of concern, just as science, with its appeal to evidence, accurate measurement, and rational deduction, is the only possible language of detachment. Myth begins in a projected form, in stories about gods who are largely powers of nature and are often indifferent to man, but as a mythology develops it increasingly recovers for its human creators what it originally projected, and finally becomes purely existential, dependent not on assumptions about external reality, whether in time or space, but on imaginative experience. Its truth is not descriptive or evidential, but implicit, contained in the mythos or story which is the expression of experience. That is one reason why the real meaning of a myth emerges from its historical development and not from any guess about its original form.

Thus literature is only a part, though a central part, of the total mythopoeic structure of concern which extends into religion, philosophy, political theory, and many aspects of history, the vision a society has of its situation, destiny, and ideals, and of reality in terms of those human factors. It expresses not so much the world that man lives in as the world that he builds. I call it a structure, and sometimes, as in the Middle Ages, it really looks like one, unifying a vast number of imaginative patterns in the different mythopoeic fields just mentioned. Our own age is more aware of the variety and inner disagreements in our visions of concern, yet it is still true that those who have most effectively changed the attitudes of society—Rousseau, Freud, Marx—are those who changed its mythology. This mythology comes to us on every level, from the greatest works of imagination to the steady rain of clichés that come through conversation and mass media. It is particularly in American culture that critics can see the connection between literary and social mythology, between, say, pastoral conventions in Thoreau or Melville and the same conventions in popular pastoral (e.g., the Western story) or in the pastoral mythology of cliché (the cottage away from it all, the simple log-cabin life corrupted by the big city, etc.). Here we return to the point at which we began, that while the study of myth is an essential activity of literary criticism, it is also essential to the study of the structure of society.