Gza Rheim (1895-1953) was one of the great pioneers in the joint exploration of cultural

anthropology and psychoanalysis. As early as 1911 he had recognized that "the key to the
data furnished by anthropology was in the unconscious or primary process," and shortly thereafter
published the first articles by a trained anthropologist wholly committed to psychoanalysis. His
major contributions to the enrichment of both disciplines lie in such works as Animism, Magic
and the Divine King (1930), The Riddle of the Sphinx (5934), The Origin and Function of
Culture (1943), and Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (1950).
Like Joseph Campbell in the preceding essay, R6heim accepts fully such Freudian ideas as the
similarity of myth and dream and of ritual and neurosis, but his position is by no means
identical with Campbell's. Although he essays a psychoanalytic explanation of the difference
between myth and folktale, he does so in terms of specific myths and folktales which he himself
collected on anthropological field expeditions in central Australia. Thus Rheim finds the crux of
myth in the death and apotheosis of the Primal Father, and he distinguishes between myth and
folktale in terms of their different relations to the Super-Ego. Since `mythic and folktale
elements can be traced in literature (see, for example, Francis Fergusson's essay, pp. 139 ff), it
would seem that a similar classification of literary themes in terms of ego psychology might be
possible.
Whatever the merits of such a view for literature, it raises some difficulties for mythology. Put in
its simplest terms, the problem is to explain ham such tales can be defined through their authors'
mental state when, by general agreement, their origin is largely anonymous and collective.
Another question implicitly raised here is how far R6heim's definition is applicable to tales other
than those in his collection. Can it embrace all those narratives ordinarily called myth and folktale
or is it meaningful only for the specific kinds of tale he cites?

MYTH AND FOLKTALE

Gza Rheim
A psychological explanation of myth and folktale must start out with a definition, and the
difficulty that arises here is that the theory should not be implicit in the definition. Therefore
the safe way would be to differentiate what is generally known as a myth from what is
generally known as a folktale.
In a myth the actors are mostly divine and sometimes human. In a folktale the dramatis
personae are mostly human and especially the hero is human, frequently with supernatural
beings as his opponents. In a myth we have definite locality; in a folktale the actors are
nameless, the scene is just anywhere. A myth is part of a creed; it is believed by the
narrator. The folktale is purely fiction, and not intended to be anything else. According to
a method of interpretation which is now (luckily) extinct a myth always deals with natural
phenomena, while according to another view which had advocates among the

anthropologists of the previous generation and also has many influential

representatives today, a myth is always connected with a ritual. In these views we have the
elements of a theory and they go beyond what we should call a definition. Wundt and von
der Leyen thought that the myth and the "Mrchen," which are so similar to each other in
certain ways and Yet so different, must have had one common origin, a type of narrative
from which both have developed in the course of evolution (Mythen-mrchen).
I have collected myths and folktales in many areas, and if-I just make a hasty mental survey
of my own collections I find that in some areas a clear line of distinction runs between the two,
while in others matters seem to be more confused. Now considering the magnitude of the
task and the avowedly preliminary nature of this effort I will make matters easy for myself
and consider the situation only in central Australia. Here we have a very clear distinction
between a folktale and a mythological narrative so that at least our starting point seems
secure.
Before I went out to the field very little was known about folktales in central Australia.
The narratives recorded by Spencer and Gillen and Strehlow were pure myths and more
than that they were esoteric myths, that is, they were only known to the initiated. I wondered
whether women and children had no narratives of their own; it did not seem probable to me
that this type of sublimation should be absent. I never found it by looking for it; I found it
by pure chance. One of the old women who used to come and tell me her dreams launched
out into a long narrative that did not sound like a dream at all. "Did you really dream this?" I
asked her. No, this is not something she dreamt last night, it is an old altjira (dream). Then I
found out that the Aranda word Altjira meant both dream and folktale. In the western
(Luritja) dialects the situation is the same: tukurpa means myth and folktale.
Once I knew what to ask for there was no difficulty in collecting more than a hundred folktales
from this area. The interesting thing in these folktales is that they are of a type that is
utterly unknown from any other primitive area. Primitive folktales, including other
narratives of this type from Australia, are more varied than my collection. Many of them
are on the lines familiar to students of folklore from Dnhardt's Naturmrchen. They are
explanatory narratives which end up with some peculiarity of an animal species or some
phenomenon in nature. Therefore they are hardly "Mrchen" at all in our sense of the
word, because the ending indicates a certain claim to be believed, an attempt at connecting
the fable with reality.
My collection is quite different. They are variations of one constant theme: the struggle
of human beings against the demons. The hero of a story is always an indatoa (L.
kuninjatu), which translated literally means a good-looking man. The heroine is a tneera, i.e. a
beauty. In a sense it does not really mean beautiful, it is just normal healthy, not monstrous.
On the other hand, however, sometimes it is stressed that the indatoa is really a beautiful man,
big and strong, with fair skin and fair hair, and he is a skilled hunter. His wife the tneera (L.
aneera) is fair and beautiful like her husband. Some of the full-blooded natives actually
have fair hair.

As antagonists we have the nanananas, and bankalangas. They are hairy giants with big
penises and testicles, with some of the characteristics of the "stupid devils" of European
folklore. The females of the species have big breasts and genitals, sometimes they are
superhuman in size. Besides these two opposing groups there is a third actor on the scene, the
malpakara, who seems to be halfway between the hero and the villain of the melodrama. The
malpakara is always a young man with an unbridled craving for intercourse. This is about the
only thing he can do, but the folktales give hyperbolistic description of his sexual prowess. He
will go on having intercourse for several days and nights or he will push a w oman along with
his penis inserted into her vagina. Moreover, the malpakara is always represented as thin, ugly,
and a very poor hunter. After his initiation he becomes a real human being, a kuninjatu.
The kulaia (L. muruntu), a fabulous serpentwho rises out of the waterholes right up to
the sky in a whirlwind and swallows peoplemay be on either side; he may appear in the
role of a demon or of a normal human being who has been transformed into a serpent by evil
magic.
But the most outstanding feature of all these narratives is cannibalism. The war between
human beings and ogres is being waged with equal ruthlessness on both sides but whereas the
ogres always eat the indatoas, human beings never retaliate in kind. Neither do they bury the
body of the ogre or put it up on a kind of scaffold, which would be the two ways these tribes
have of disposing of their dead. The ogre is always burnt at the end and the human beings are
always victorious. Besiues cannibalism the other outstanding feature of these narratives is the
happy end:
The story starts with a sentence like this:
"An indatoa lived with a meera" or "an old man lived with his grandson" and ends with the
formula "then they came to a big camp and lived there for ever." It is quite striking that while
most primitive folktales have no such beginning and end formulas, the beginning and the end
of an Australian folktale finds its closest parallels in Europe, "Once upon a time"and
"they lived happily ever afterwards." The other striking analogy with European Mrchen is
the transformation motive in its particular setting. Just as in the European folktale, the
animal metamorphosis of the hero is frequently the result of a curse of an injured person;
there the serpent form is due to the evil magic of-a man whose wife the other man has
captured.
When taken in conjunction with another feature of these folktales, their peculiar and
sometimes even weird archaism and savagery, one is certainly tempted to believe that here
"our plummets have touched bottom" 1 and that we have here actually a type of narrative
which is the fore-runner of folktales.* * *
Our Central Australians are "savage" enough from a European point of view, but the
folktales are far more so. There is less native culture in them, some institutions like the
marriage classes are completely absent, others like totemism barely mentioned. And
there is more "savagery," more sadism, more unbridled lust and aggression. Perhaps
they actually reflect a phase of culture that is more primitive than that of the Central
Australians as we find them today. Some of the customs described by D. Bates
certainly give me the impression of a society far more savage than any I have known

among the Aranda or Yurnu or Pitjentara. I have heard nothing like her account of the
Koogurda who hunted and ate kangaroo, and emu, and human flesh on much the same
level, or the Kaalurwonga who pursued fat men, women, and girls and at e them. Or the
account of Dowie who was given four baby sisters to eat and was rubbed over with their fat to
make him grow big and strong. He hated his mother,"13ildana, and his other mothers and his
sisters and his brothers. He would have eaten them all but they were older than he was, and so
they could not be given to him to eat. At the blood drinking he drank greedily and swallowed the
big pieces of raw liver at initiation. He brought home many human bodies, for he would stalk
human game in murderer's slippers and he loved the flesh of man, woman and child. More than
this even; he killed and ate his own four wives.
Dowie is certainly behaving like the bankalangas and nanananas of our folktales and one
possible explanation of these narratives would therefore be historical. They represent the past
of native civilization, social and cultural conditions that antedate those we find at the present
time. Then we should also have to assume that they are accounts of warfare between two tribes,
one of them cannibalistic (the bankalangas) and the other net cannibalistic. Since Central
Australian tribes are actually in the habit of confusing their concepts of a demon with those of
the neighboring tribe, since there is in their minds not much difference between the leltja
(avenger, human being), the Irana (ghost), and the erintja (demon) such a theory would seem
quite plausible. Yet, while admitting that acne of the features of the folktale in Central
Australia might well be accounted for on these lines, there are some obvious difficulties. Why is
the folktale called a dream? Why does it usually end with marriage? What is the role of the
malpakara, who becomes a normal person after initiation? What is the explanation of the
demons' huge genital organs? If the narrative is historical we should expect names and localities,
especially the latter since we see that locality is such an important factor in their myths.
I think we can account for these aspects of the story from a different angle. The prevailing
form of cannibalism in central, south and western Australia is baby-eating " The Pitjentara
eat every second child. The infant is knocked on the head by the father and then eaten by the
mother and the siblings who are supposed to acquire double strength by this proceeding. With
the Pindupi Yumu and Ngali the proceeding is more irregular; they seem to eat the babies
whenever they are hungry and especially when the mother gets a strong craving to do so. They
even go to the length of pulling the fetus out of the womb and eating itwhich is exactly the
practice ascribed to the demons in the story.
The cannibal demons represent the cannibal parents. The Australian child has to face a
peculiar difficulty in his attitude towards his parents, that is, in growing up. He has really
loving parents who grant him nearly everything. His mother and the other mothers of the tribe
never refuse their nipple; both parents are always ready to play with him and they rarely
restrict even his aggression against their own person. Yet these same parents have eaten his
siblings and therefore might have eaten him also. Now compare the motives of some of my
folktales to this situation.
a. A manatatai (another name for the cannibal demon) steals a boy and takes him to his
camp to be eaten.
2. The father follows on the track and attacks the giants with his magic stick.
3. The giants kill each other. Father and son go home.
The paternal imago has undergone a fission. The kind, loving father of everyday life is the one
who protects and rescues his son while the cannibal father appears in the guise of the cannibal

giant. The giants fighting against each other represents this ambivalence of the father-imago.
The next story shows this process of fission quite clearly.
I. A boy lives with his grandfather who is half a demon.
2. The grandfather has a mate in a cave who is a real demon.
3. The old man and the boy hunt wallabies; the old man is always trying to entice the
boy into the cave.
4. He lights a fire at the entrance of the cave and kills both old men. The boy goes to
another camp.
A favorite trick of the demons in these stories again reminds us of European folklore. In
European Mrchen" we find the episode in the following form. The hero meets an old witch
whose jaws reach to the sky and who is otherwise as hideous as she can be. He says, "Good
morning, grandmother," and the witch says, "It's lucky you called me grandmother, otherwise
I would have killed you." In my Australian collection the male or female demon always poses
as some relation of the unsuspecting human being in order to eat him afterwards.
A bankalanga lived with his wife and with them lived a human (kuninjatu) child whom they
had stolen. They had a big but with a partition in it. The bankalanga slept on the partition and
his wife and the child slept on the ground. The child thought he was alone in the hut with his
mother because he never saw the bankalanga. She sent him out for rats and when he brought
them in she passed them to her husband who was hidden behind the partition. One day the
child said, "It is raining into the hut." But it was not rain; it was the bankalanga's urine. The
old woman said, "Make a big fire and dry yourself." He did this but next day he could still
smell the wet sand. "This is not water, it is urine," he says. He called the old woman to go
hunting but he stayed at home and hid. Then he saw the male bankalanga corning out of the hut
and going back again. He set fire to the but and burnt it with the bankalanga in it and he went
to the real people. When the old woman returned she found the husband dead and followed the
boy's footsteps, weeping. The real people killed her too and burnt her with her husband. The
boy was initiated and lived there always.
The child transforms the "bad parents" into demons; he is not their child at all, they have
stolen him from his real parents. In the beginning there is no such thing as a father, the world for
the infant consists in himself and his mother. But father and mother are doing something
mysterious in the hut and finally the father's presence becomes obvious and emotionally
significant through his sexual activity (primal scene). The father's urine stands for his semen
and we know that enuresis or in general urinating is an infantile form of rivalry with the
father's sexual activity.
Fire and water, as in this narrative, are exactly the most widespread symbols for urine; and if
the bankalanga is regularly burnt, in the end this might well mean that the father conflict is here
fought out on the urethral level. The end of the story is that the boy gets initiated or marries
and lives happily ever afterwards. It is a young childs dream about growing up.* * *
Now something about the myth, again from a central Australian point of view. The mythical
heroes have definite names and their wanderings take place in definite localities. Indeed the myth is
mainly concerned with explaining these localities, it is definitely trying to link up phantasy and
reality. The map is marked by ceremonies and the rites of the present day are merely
repetitions of the rites celebrated by the primeval ancestors.
All these rites form a part of the initiation ritual and the ancestors seem to have nothing else
to do than to initiate their young men. But the story is not about the young people, net about
the initiated but about the initiators. The difference in the final sentence is significant. In the
folktale it is the central Australian equivalent of "they were married and lived happily ever

afterwards." In the myth it is borkerake tjurungeraka: he was tired and became transformed into
a tjurunga, i.e. he died. Becoming a tjurunga ends the story and the career of the hero, it is death
and apotheosis. A folktale is a narrative with a happy end, a myth a tragedy ; a god must die
before he can be truly divine.2
A detailed analysis of my myth material reveals that certain heroes of the altjiranga mitjina
(the eternal ones of the dream) are merely adjectives of the one great hero Malpunga, the
phallic originator of the tjurunga cult. Malpunga is often called the great father and he is the
leader of a group of young men. The significant thing is, however, that these mythical
personages who are derived from adjectives originally applied to Malpunga always have names
that imply a curse (like "Rough anus," etc.), i.e. that the names represent the aggression of the
brothers against the Primal Father. In a version collected by Strehlow subincision is performed
on the Father by his son out of jealousy. Some of the tribes in Western New Guinea have myths
of the Australian type in which the wanderings of a totemistic ancestral hero are told ending
with his death and apotheosis. After finishing their life on earth these ancestors become
petrified or changed hate trees and they are honored as the patron spirits of certain localities
and groups. In these narratives the Oedipus and Primal Horde theme is strongly marked.*
**
The Kiwai myth of Marunogere is very instructive. Marunogere, the great leader, swallows a
lump of sago like a cassowary and defecates it back unchanged, but the sago is then rapidly
transformed into a pig which he names after himself, Marunogere. All the people hunt the pig
and his youngest son shoots it so he dies but comes to life again for a short time. He opens the
vulva of the women and teaches people to have intercourse. Then he dies again and after his
death people cut up and preserved his flesh as strong "medicine" and in some places they
have preserved small pieces of dried human flesh which is said to be that of Marunogere's body.
So far we see a clear Oedipus and Primal Horde myth. It starts with a phantasy, frequently
found in our analysis, and the enhanced magical power of the father who has become a
representative of both parents in the anal delivery phantasy. Then we have the attack of the
group, the youngest son as murderer of the Primal Father, the death of the latter as origin
of death in general. When the father is dead human beings grow up; they have
intercourse. If the youngest son were the hero of the narrative and the story were to end at
this point, we should have what I regard as the kernel of all "Mrchen" plots. However, the
hero in this narrative is the father and the revolt is regarded as a crime and an outrage. The
psychological background of the story is a strong father identification. The sequel of the
narrative is that besides Marunogere there was another great man called Gibogu. This chief
wanted everybody to take part in the moguru. (The myth is the first moguru and the prototype
of all subsequent rites.) Marunogere wished to keep the ceremony secret and to give prominence
to the sexual aspects which were to take place in the dark. On account of the quarrel Gibogu
and his followers left the rest and went up into the sky where they cause the thunder to
frighten Marunogere and his people. The second chief, introduced at the end of Marunogere,
is the part that opposes sexuality and frightens people from the sky by his thunder. Like so
many of his thunder wielding colleagues he represents law and order, the Super-Ego.
If we believe that the nucleus of myth is the death and apotheosis of the Primal Father we
suppose a theory once so very popular among anthropologists according to which the gods are
the dead. If at the same time we assume as a regular or at least frequent phase of evolution the
type of totemistic myth found in Australia and New Guinea in which mythological ancestors
are identified with an animal species or natural phenomena, this would be one of the
channels through which a "nature mythology" could develop. Whereas some of these myths
may be handed down directly as oral tradition from the Primal Horde period3 others may
have been created by later generations on the old lines, and in these we may find the marks

left on myth by history. Others may have stepped into the Primal Father's shoes. But the
main thing is that this type of narrative is only conceivable on a super-ego level, that is, it
must be based on a strong father identification. This is the "tragic conflict" of the herorebel. And this difference in ontogenetic stage, the folktale with its fight against "Super-Ego
precursors," "wicked parent" imagos, and the myth with its roots in the fully fledged
super-ego, may account for the different attitude to reality that we find in myth: The fully
developed super- ego represents the real father or at least the real father enters into the
picture beside the phantasy image of infancy. Moreover in the overlying, conscious
strata, the super-ego also stands for society. Myths in the "Primal Horde style," that is,
myths that represent the brothers revolting against a single father, might very well arise later,
not by inherited memory but by the idea of shared responsibility and identification as defences
against super-ego anxiety. It is too much to be against the father and against the group at
the same time; therefore by introducing the device of representation by the opposite, the
father becomes the Lone Hero and the enemy of society. The son becomes part of the
group, and by this fission in the super-ego his anxiety is reduced and revolt becomes
imaginable. As this conflict is partly real, as it is a more adult form of the same conflict
which we find in "Mrchen" on a more infantile level, myth is a phantasy that demands
to be believed and is hound up with group activity in the form of ritual.
In the folktale we relate how we overcome the anxiety connected with the "bad parents" and
grow up; in myth we confess that only death can end the tragic awbivalence of human nature.
Eros triumphs in the folktale, Thanatos in the myths.
1.
2.
3.

Sir James G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London: Macmillan, 191o), I, 161.
This hypothesis aims at what I have conic to regard as the kernel of the folktale and of the myth; it
cannot account for every narrative which, according to our definition, should be called a myth.
I again emphasize that I am trying to give an explanation which does not necessitate the
assumption of an "inherited unconsciousness.

American Imago, II (1941), 266-279. Some of the reference notes have been omitted; also some
parenthetical native phrases. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected and the punctuation
regularized.

Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-5960) was one of the most eminent of American anthropologists, as books
like The Navaho (5946) and Mirror For Man (5949) attest. Although basically he held to a
"functionalist" theory, his functionalism was modified by receptivity to psychoanalytic insights that
pointed toward a synthesis of the two approaches. This attitude compels him, in the present essay,
to criticize both anthropological failures and psychoanalytic excesses.
Apart from the general cogency of Kluckhohn's ideas, which serve as an admirable coda to those of
Bidney, Campbell, and Rheim, several of his points have a special relevance for students of literature.
For instance, by showing that neither myth nor ritual can claim universal priority, he implicitly
qualifies Stanley Hyman's Cambridge-influenced insistence on the primary character of ritual (pp.
47 ff.). Also, his differentiation of cultures by the relative richness or poverty of their mythological
and ritualistic forms suggests that the homologue of a poem or novel may lie in myth or in ritual as
well as in a combination of both. Thus, there is no point in looking for complex myths in, for example,
Hemingway or Ionesco when their work is predominantly ritualistic. Finally, by his detailed
exploration of myth's role as a symbolic expression of society's unconscious desires and attitudes,
we see more clearly the close relation literature has to myth.

MYTHS AND RITUALS: A GENERAL THEORY

Clyde Kluckhohn
Nineteenth century students strongly tended to study mythology apart from associated rituals
(and indeed apart from the life of the people generally). Myths were held to be symbolic
descriptions of phenomena of nature. One prominent school, in fact, tried to find an astral
basis for all mythic tales. Others, among whom Andrew Lang was prominent, saw in the myth a
kind of primitive scientific theory. Mythology answered the insistent human HOW? and WHY?
How and why was the world made? How and why were living creatures brought into being?
Why, if there was life must there be death? To early psychoanalysts such as Abraham and
Rank myths were "group phantasies," wish-fulfillments for a society strictly analogous to the
dream and daydream of individuals. Mythology for these psychoanalysts was also a
symbolic structure par excellence, but the symbolism which required interpretation was
primarily a sex symbolism which was postulated as universal and all-pervasive. Reik recognized a
connection between rite and myth, and he, with Freud, verbally agreed to Robertson Smith's
proposition that mythology was mainly a description of ritual. To the psychoanalysts,
however, mythology was essentially (so far as what they did with it is concerned) societal
phantasy material which reflected impulse repression. There was no attempt to discover the
practical function of mythology in the daily behaviors of the members of a society nor to
demonstrate specific interactions of mythology and ceremonials. The interest was in supposedly
pan-human symbolic meanings, not in to make something more of the word, for he also spoke
of "myths or fairy tales or dreams, where again the people act under compulsion, toward fatally
predetermined ends."2 Presumably it is this representative quality that another critic refers
to when he says: "Words open out into the larger symbolizations on all levelsfor example,
into archetypal symbol, ritual and myth."3 In a slightly more complex use "myth" becomes a
heavy synonym for "belief" or sometimes "convention"; 4 as when Shakespeare's themes of
love, Christianity, and governance are described as "mythic."5 This meaning very easily
acquires connotation's of value; for example, when the neutral idea of " belief ' is changed into
something like "the received forms, the symbolic versions of human wisdom,"6 or when a myth is

described as having "an archetypal meaning quite independent of any individual's conscious
exploitation of it,"7 or when it is made superior to philosophy and likened to "the blush of
blood in the face," or when it is said to have a reality that lies far beneath "the words in which it
happens to appear."8
Thus the spread in usage seems to be from "illusion" through "belief" to "higher truth." But
before examining this last area of meaning, in which "myth" becomes a name, so far as I can
tell, for re," elation, l must mention the special way in which Mr. Hyman, Mr. Frye, and Mr.
Fergusson are interested in the concept of myth. They all follow the Cambridge Hellenists in
being more interested in the ritual, which, they hold, is explained by the myth, than in the myth
itself; and they all accept the comparative method of the Cambridge school. According to Mr.
Frye, "a purely structural approach has the same limitations in criticism that it has in biology.
In itself it is simply z discrete series of analyses based on the mere existence of the literary
structure, without developing any explanation of how the structure came to be what it was and
what its nearest relatives are." Literary criticism, he says, needs a central hypothesis, which can
be arrived at inductively from structural analysis by associating data and seeking larger
patterns, or deductively by following out the consequences of what he regards as a necessary
initial postulate of criticism, the postulate of the unity and total coherence of criticism. "Total
literary history moves from the primitive to the sophisticated, and here we glimpse the
possibility of seeing literature as a complication of a relatively restricted and simple group of
formulas that can be studied in primitive culture. If so, then the search for archetypes is a kind
of literary anthropology, concerned with the way that literature is informed by pre-literary
categories such as ritual, myth and folktale." 9 These critics differ, however, in the rituals to
which they would reduce literary patterns: Mr. Fergusson, whose primary source seems to
be in Aristotelian commentary, always finds in works of literature traces of an original
dithyrambic ritual; Mr. Frye discovers signs of fertility rites; and Mr. Hyman expects the
"monomyth" to be an elaboration of Van Gennep's famous rites de passage:" as students of
myth we must separate from the world, penetrate to a source of knowledge, and return with
whatever power or life-enhancement the truth may contain."'
As the quotation from Mr. Hyman suggests, these three critics are ultimately interested
in some special knowledge and, in Mr. Hyman's case at least, also in power, mana, orenda,
virt, which they would discover in literature, if I understand their position, by following
evolutionary anthropology, especially in its use of the theory of survivals, and examining
modern works for traces of such things as "the lost collective rites that enabled the tribe to
function." Thus, though in analyzing works they pay more attention to structure and form
than most modern critics (and have a more systematic conception of literary forms), in the
end they, too, come around to treating a literary work as a repository of truth, of racial
memories, or of unconsciously held values; and to the extent that they do so, they are
connected with the general school of mythical criticism.
In the simplest of the meanings that associate it with revelation or higher truth, "myth" is
taken as a representation in fictional form of truths of values that are sanctioned by general
belief: myth "tells the truth to the extent that people believe that it tells the truth " ;1 I it can
be called "the lie as truth."i2 Sometimes in this view myth seems to be out-and-out
rationalization created by an individual.* * * It may also mean a story in which
historical, scientific, or metaphysical facts, regarded here as "true" but cold and
uninteresting, are endowed with human values, or it may be a concept or system of
concepts which are regarded as worthy of belief, "belief" being then defined as "an
unquestionable basis for action, a mode of reality in which one lives."13 In the roost common

variant of this class of meanings, "myth" becomes the sanctified and dogmatized expression,
not necessarily in the form of literature, of basic social or class conventions and values,
concepts which may be as inclusive as the "togetherness of the community mind," but
which are more likely to be thought of as, for example, "the modern daimon of money" (as
embodied .somewhat anachronistically, it seems to me, in Fafnir) or the now sanctified
assumptions of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution,
and so forth. In all of these meanings there are traces of social or psychological functionalism.*
**
For obvious reasons such a functionalist definition cannot be very popular among critics
oppressed by the spiritual disorder of the age and harried by regret for lost traditions and
conventions; and most critics use "myth" to refer to truths that are inexpressible in discursive
language, in other words, perhaps, as a synonym for "paraphrasable content;" which, in their
system of analysing the relations among the words of a poem, cannot be discussed unless
disguised by some mystical name like " myth."
The play virtually says that wisdom and insight must be sought by a denial of the ordinary
sense and logic of the world and must be found in the intuitions of the especially gifted mind,
the unusual mind, even the disordered mind. Here again, then, we find paradox asserting the
Mystery, and the content of the play taking on a strongly mythical case.14
"Myth" legitimizes the heresy of paraphrase, in the first place, because it implies a whole
series of antitheses that are important, is modern criticism. Myth or myths' are opposed to facts,
to "cataloguable and manageable phenomena," to the logic of ordinary knowledge, to positivism,
the empirical, the finite, to the logos, to the intelligence and will, and to the consciousness,
"Myth" can be a sanctifying word, , in the second place, because its content or form is said to
originate in passionate, poetic, or intuitional views of reality; in the unconscious, the dream;
in memories of the primordial, the Mystery, the primordial Mystery; in the world of spirit,
of value, of an extra dimension; in the imagination; or in man's now suppressed or denied
awareness of his sin. The line here seems to be that "myth" calls attention to the dark places
in which this kind of truth originates, and it suggests the paradox and language of multiple
reference in which it must be expressed: in fiction and myth "a typical human or folk character
or landscape lives in an irrational image, that can only be described but not explained or
referred back any farther than exactly that specific appearance and experience."15 Myth being,
then, a living embodiment of insights, any discussion of it will be descriptive, not analytical, and
the terms of the discussion will be neither manageable words nor cataloguable phenomena, but
semipoetic devices to call attention to the structural paradoxes, ironies, or tensions . (depending
on the critic) which partly suggest the nonrational and hence linguistically indescribable elements of
experience which lie behind the myth that is being described. Thus whatever else he may be doing,
the mythogogic critic is not at least constructing simplistic moral statements about what the poem
says.
It is true that the critics occasionally seem to reduce myths to very simplistic meanings;
indeed, one can sometimes come upon almost Renaissance phrasings. Thus one critic speaks
of the myth of Penelope's farewell to Icarius: "Such was the Greek genius for embodying
eternal truths in stories almost as eternal in their grace." And another critic says that the myths
of Prometheus and Epimetheus record the classical "sense of the whole of life which must not
be too quickly disturbed for the prosecution of special scientific interests." 16 But more often
(and this is the third way in which the concept of " myth" allows critics to talk about the
content of a poem) myth is said to contain either the otherwise inexpressible insights or values
of the individual or group unconscious or the projections of group or individual felt needs or

values. The mythic is "what the French have traditionally called the 'merveilleux,' the lost
world of dream and disorder and grotesquerie, without which our possibilities of freedom and
power are impoverished."17 Myth implies a belief in a "penumbral reality," which is both the "
psychic extrapolation" of the collective representations of the primitive mind, and a
recognition of an otherness that is "radically different [from man], awful, potentially hostile."
Myth implies a prelogical mentality that is not bound by the law of contradiction but operates
under the law of participation, according to which "objects and phenomena can be, though in a
manner incomprehensible to us, at once themselves and not themselves." The mythic involves
insights into the universal, or "commerce between the community and the mysteries," and
undertakes a part of the ordering of experience.18 Myth deals with the "fundamentals of our
existence"; it is derived from "the word as the most ancient, the original account of the origins
of the world"; it also imbeds a "complex of human problems" or carries "one of the
archetypes from the collective unconsciousness of mankind" or." the timeless meaning" of an
individual's psychic life. In what must be its widest senses, "myth in its union with logos,
comprises the totality of human existence"; or, as "the myth," it is "the totality of all visions of
truth which are untestable, non-demonstrable, non-empirical, non-logieal."19
Perhaps the best way to conclude this description of modern mythogogy is to attempt a
summary of the theories of Professor Chase, who is undoubtedly our most sedulous student of
myth. He begins by assuming a mythopoeie mind or a mythopoeic psychology, which is
superior to, or in its operation more inclusive than, rational or speculative reason. For such a
mind, objects are not perceived "as such but as vehicles of efficacious activity analogous to
and identifiable with the impersonal powers of the universe projected out of human emotions."20
He then argues, asserting that "modern anthropologists" are in agreement with him, that
primitive man lives in two worlds: the matter-of-fact world of the practical reason and the
magico-religious world of the mythopoeic faculty. He argues also that civilized man lives "in
the same world as the savages," by which he means not only that our experience is similarly
divided but also that "Our deepest experience, needs, and aspirations are the same, as surely as
the crucial biological and psychic transitions occur in the life of every human being."21 Of course,
what Mr. Chase wants to do is to validate not only his concept of the double world but also his
approval of the mythopoeic descriptions of the magico-religious experience of. primitive man,
as opposed to that of modern man. So he assumes pan-human needs and aspirations, which he
grounds in the biological process of growth; then he can argue that modern man has
arbitrarily limited experience to that portion subject to analysis by reason; and there is no
health in him.* * *
On the basis of his anthropological analysis of myth as defensive projections of man's unconscious,
Mr. Chase moves on to a definition of myth as "literature which suffuses the natural with
preternatural efficacy (mana)."22 The psychological function of myth is to fuse the perception of
power with the perception of physical qualities. "If these observations are sound, any narrative or
poem which reaffirms the dynamism and vibrancy of the world, which fortifies the ego with
the impression that there is a magically potent brilliancy or dramatic force in the world, may be
called myth."23 Elsewhere he has said that myth is literature "functioning in a special way,
achieving special modes of expression"; it is "literature operating in certain more or less
definable ways which set it off from other kinds of literature." 24 But also it is a magical tale
dealing with critical passages of life, and in several reviews Mr. Chase has written as if myth,
rather than being a quality, were a thing contained in literature, a part of the material of
literature.25 Most often, though, Mr. Chase uses the word just about as Longinus used "the
sublime," as a means of asserting his approval of various works.

II

In all of this mythogogic theorizing there are a good many parallels to the early Nietzsche
of The Birth of Tragedy: not only, for example, such notions as that reason cannot explain all of
experience, that art deals with the ineffably concrete and particular and that there is a "primordial
contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the Primal Unity," in itself a sphere "beyond
and before all phenomena," but also the general world viewin Nietzsche's case a great
melodrama of sin and destruction in which Socrates and Euripides, representing critical
intelligence, accomplish the estrangement of man and nature and the subjugation of the latter to
practical controls. For Nietzsche, at this stage, myths seem to have been legends revealing or
embodying the folk wisdom of the Greeks. "The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of
existence. That he might endure this terror at all, he had to interpose between himself
and life the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians." 26 This was the pre-Socratic Greek, who
stilla little bit like Mr. Chase's pre-eighteenth-century man---felt a wonder which he
expressed in myth, "the concentrated picture of the world, which, as abbreviature of
phenomena, cannot dispense with wonder." Like contemporary critics, Nietzsche assumes a
modern man essentially different in his modes of thinking and feeling from primitive man: he is
"so broken up by the critico-historical spirit of our culture, that he can only make the former
existence of myth credible to himself by learned means through intermediary abstractions."
Without myth, any culture loses a "healthy creative power"; myth gives meaning to the
foundations of the state and to the life of the individual.* * *
Nietzsche, again like contemporary critics, assumes an eternal conflict between what he
calls the theoretic and the tragic world views. The dialectical desire for knowledge destroys
man's power to receive myth, which is "a unique type of universality and truth towering into
the infinite."* * *

III
I am not trying to establish The Birth of Tragedy as a source for contemporary mythogogic
criticism. Instead I want to use it to suggest how, since 1871, such romantic speculation has
been extended, strengthened, freshened, and provided with an apparently firm empirical
foundation by evidence borrowed from psychology and anthropology, especially from the
theorizing about the primitive mind, so-called. Of all anthropological theories, those of LvyBruhl must have been the most persuasive to the critics who have sought to define "myth" in such
a way as to provide themselves with "real" and extra-literary reasons for approving the various
doctrines that from time to time they want to discover in literature. Whatever its intention, the
effect of Levy-Bruhl's work is to create a primitive mind, which, because it does not know the
law of contradiction but only the "law" of participation, lives in a special and vitalizing
relationship with the totality of nature. And in many places he seems to say that the primitive
mind is richer and more complex than the civilized mind because it does not recognize any
separation between images or ideas of objects and the emotions evoked by them; because it
does not differentiate powers and qualities from things; because it does not have any concept
of universal or abstraction; and because it does not operate according to conventional categories
of causation or of abstract reasoning. To critics who presuppose an exhaustion of language
and culture due either to a disruption of some primal connection between man and nature or to
a dissociation of thought and emotion in men, the attractions of this concept are obvious, especially
if the characteristics of contemporary primitive minds are used as evidence from which to infer
the existence and characteristics of a general primitive mind comparable, in relation to the
mental development of man, to the primitive horde in its relation to the social development of

man. Furthermore, there would seem to be involved in this speculation the idea of some great
and total shift in the human way of thinking, a shift in which man's participation with and
feeling of the greater forces of nature (expressed by the idea of mama or in animistic religions;
concepts of great importance in nineteenth-century anthropology and in modern mythogogic
criticism) were destroyed by the effects of the discovery of practical logic and physical causes:
the postulation of such a change would be valuable to the antiscientism of modern criticism.
involved in this speculation the idea of some great and total shift in the human way of
thinking, a shift in which man's participation with and feeling of the greater forces of nature
(expressed by the idea of mama or in animistic religions; concepts of great importance in
nineteenth-century anthropology and in modern mythogogic criticism) were destroyed by the
effects of the discovery of practical logic and physical causes: the postulation of such a change
would be valuable to the antiscientism of modern criticism.
Behind these oddly assorted ideas, and holding them together to the extent that they can be
held together, lie the assumptions of the Cambridge Hellenists, in whose work modern critics
have found a most attractive idea, that of the ritual (i.e., religious, nonpractical, nonscientific)
origin of literary forms. The first assumption is that there is a uniform pattern of cultural
evolution, all societies passing through the same stages from a hypothetical primitive horde to the
differentiated classes of a mature civilization. '['he stages of this evolution can he described by
comparative study of the cultural forms in contemporary "primitive " societies, especially of the
unintegrated forms, which are assumed to be survivals of earlier stages. The second assumption,
derived from the first and controlling the literary theories ,if the critics, is that phenomena
of civilized societies have the same basic values (functionally or symbolically) as apparently
parallel phenomena in primitive societies, either those now existing or others the nature of which
is determined by speculation on the evidence of monuments of quite mature civilizations; and that
ultimate causes and true origins of contemporary phenomena can he determined by this backward
tracing of the evolutionary pattern. The Cambridge school, of course, was most interested in
establishing the ritual origin of Greek literary forms, and they stuck pretty close to the evidence of
Greek monuments, drawing on the world-wide comparisons of scholars like Frazer only for
confirmation. Contemporary literary critics have paid more attention to the confirmatory footnotes

than to the body of the evidence. For them Br'er Rabbit "means" the same as an animal her)
in a totemic culture, both being embodied in "animal stories." For them the shooting of an
albatross by a presumably medieval sailor "meant" to an eighteenth -century audience and
"means" to a modern high school student or sophisticated literary critic precisely whit the real event or
its fictional representation would "mean" to a member of an albatross clan or totemic group, if
any; or at least to a member of a totemicallv organized societyall killings of all animals,
wherever, whenever, or however accomplished, sharing some or all of the characteristics of a
violation of totemic taboo. This persistence of meaning is explained either by the theory of the
survival of cultural forms orperhaps in most cases it is andsome variant of the Jungian theory
of racial memories, itself based, of course, on the theory of survivals. On the basis of these
assumptions, critics are prepared to argue that the literature of Western civilization can he
understood and evaluated by establishing its connection with, or similarity to, the religious rituals
and the literature of an assumed world-wide primitive society and primitive mind, the last being
the important idea, since it is assumed that the primitive or unspecialized mind has a greater
contact with, a more complete view of, total reality than the modern mind.

None of these ideas helps much in discovering the formal literary characteristics of a
myth; and, in general, " myth" seems to be less an analytical than a polemical term, calling
attention rather to a critic's mood or moral attitude than to observed facts in the work under
discussion. And this moral attitude is roughly similar among all critics who use the concept of
"myth," in spite of variations and contradictions among their different descriptions of myth. It

presupposes a radical dualism in man's experience. On the one hand is a material world, in

which atoms blindly run, unaffected by man's needs and aspirations. This is the workaday
world of ordinary logic. it is defined by scientific laws and described by abstractions. It is a world
of facts, of things seen as members of classes rather than in their ineluctable reality, of
phenomena treated as cataloguable and manageable. On the other hand is a magico spiritual world, which is either the projection of man's needs and aspirations or the natural
world viewed as a totality in which there are certain areas (the emotional, the ethical) so
complex as not to be susceptible of scientific analysis, even though they possess a substantive

reality similar to that of any natural fact. This is the world of emotion, value, and quality. It
is a world of unique moments, of things seen as individuals. ti is a world of felt truths,

8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.

unverifiable, but none the less absolute. It is indefinable and can only be described by poetry.
It is not clear how the mind is related to these worlds," though, on the whole, the critics seem

to assume a parallel dualism of mind and matter. At any rate, they talk as if the mind had two
functions or faculties, the speculative reason and the mythopoeic imagination, which correspond
to the "worid" of fact and the "world" of nonfact. This is the important assumption, for on it
are grounded the moral attitudes that are the ultimate subjects of modern criticism. This view of
the mind validates the critics' dramatization of modern history as a constant and furious struggle
between these two aspects of mind, or more often between two kinds of mind, the predominantly
rational and the predominantly rnythopoeic. It also prepares for a whole series of antitheses,
both mural and "critical": tradition and disorder, poetry and science, symbol and statement,
convention and originality, the particular and the abstraction, metaphysical poetry and Platonic
poetry, aristocratic order and democratic chaos, intension and extension, texture and structure,
myth and logosthe list is infinite The concepts of myth and of the mvthopoeic mind and the
anthropological evidence supporting them constitute a "pragmatic charter" for the beliefs,
cravings, social attitudes, and standards of the critics. The word "myth" itself, whether used to
refer to the assumed insights of primitive literature or to the content of modern literature,
simply calls attention to the complex of ideas constituting this charter; it is, in other words, a
sign by which critics can indicate their approval of the doctrine they find 'n whatever work they
happen to be exploring. Somewhere in the background there is, perhaps, a valid literary problem:
that of accounting for the continuing interest shown by men in the great classical works. And
farther in the background may be the philosophical problem that was at least suggested by
Hazlitt's dictum: "wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion
of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a lower . . . there is poetry, in its birth." But, with the
problem formulated as it is and with the discussion carried on as it is, the result has been to turn
attention away from literature as literature and to import into criticism confusing terms and

concepts drawn from a social science that is itself so insight-ridden as to be peculiarly agreeable
to critics who in other contexts seem to feel that the sin without name is that of committing a
social science.
2.
3.
4.

5.
6.
7.

Malcolm Cowley, "William Faulkner's Legend of the South," in A Southern Vanguard, ed. Allen Tate
(New York: Prentice-Hall, 1947), p. 26.
Cleanth Brooks, "Foreword" in Stallman, Critiques and Essays, p. xix.
E. L Hubler, "Three Shakespearian Myths: Mutability, Plenitude, and Reputation." English Institute Essays,
1948 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 97. Mr. Hubler's point is that, so far as he can tell,
that is all that "myth" really means.
R. B. Heilman, "The Lear World," English Institute Essays, r948, p. 36; Leslie A. Fiedler, "The Defense of the
Illusion and the Creation of Myth," English Institute Essays, 1948, p. 76.
R. P. Blackmur, "Between Myth and Philosophy: Fragments of W. B. Yeats," Southern Review, VII (1942),
408.
Fiedler, "The Defense of the Illusion and the Creation of Myth," p. 76. Mr. Fiedler is talking about the play
within the play, in Hamlet and in general, which he calls a "technical or structural myth." It is difficult to

17.
18.
19.

20.
21.
22.

23.
24.
25.

26.

see here what other purpose is served by "myth" than that of allowing the critic to express approval of a
convention which most modern audiences would find awkward and "unnatural."
Blackmur, "Between Myth and Philosophy," pp. 417 418.
Nort hrop Frye, "The Archet ypes of Lit erature," Kenyon Review, XIII (195r), 95, 99-100. ro.
S.
E. Hyman, Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense," Kenyon Review, XI (1949), 455. (The connection with Van
Gennep is my inference.)
Donald A. Stauffer, "The Modern Myth of the Modern Myth," English Institute Essays, 1947 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 59481 , p. 23.
Fiedler, "The Defense of the Illusion and the Creation of Myth," p. 78.
Heilman, "The Lear World. p.43.
Ibid., p. 43.
/5. Ibid., pp. 41, 43.
F L. Lucas, Literature and Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1951), p. 65. The interpretation of
the Promethean myth is from Allen Tate, "To Whom is the Poet Responsible ?" Hudson Review.
Leslie A. Fiedler, "The Critic's Excluded Middle," Kenyon Review, X11 (rip), 689_ Isn't this
a somewhat extended meaning for the French word ?
Levy-Bruhl, as quoted by Philip Wheelwright, "Notes on Mythopoeia," Sewanee Review, LIX (1951) 577;
Heilman, "The Lear World," p. 41, quoting Wheelwright.
Erich Kahler, "The Persistence of Myth," Chimera, IV (1946), 2-3; William Troy,
"Postlude: Myt h, Method, and the Future," Chimera, IV (1946), 83; Graham Hough, The
Last Romantics (London: Duckworth, 1949), p. Is2; Francis Fergusson, "The Pilgrim on
the Threshold of Purgation," Hudson Review, IV (1952), 558; Herman Brock, "The
Heritage of Myth in Literature," Chimera, IV ( 1 946), 34; Heilman, "The Lear World," p.
32.
Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), p. 20.

Ibid., p. 78.
Ibid., p. 78.
Richard Chase, "Myth as Literature," English Institute Essays, 7947 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1948), p. ii. But reaffirms how ? By statement? In its form?
Ibid., p. 10; "Myth Revisited," Partisan Review, XVII (x95o), 885.
Ibid., p. 890; of his review of Professor Howards Melville in Nation, CLXXIV (1952), 255; "A
Poet's Economy," Hopkins Review, V (r95t), 37; and "Sense and Sensibility," Kenyon Review,
XIII (r95r), 688.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Modern'
Library, 1937), p. 962.

Modern Philology, L (1953), 232-242. Some reference notes have been omitted; others have
been shortened.