Mythical being

“ One of the chief difficulties in dealing with a myth lies in distinguishing the essential from the non-essential portions of the legend to which it has given rise.
On the other hand, the moment we understand the nature of a myth, all impossibilities, contradictions and immoralities disappear. If a mythical personage really be nothing more than a name of the sun, his birth may be derived from ever so many different mothers. ”

“ And if the mythical tales of Plutarch had ever fallen into your hands you would have failed to observe what a difference there is between inventing a myth from the beginning and adapting to one's own purpose a myth that already exists. ”

“ In a general way it would seem as if those investigators who make use of an exclusively natural mythological mode of interpretation, in any sense, were unable, in their endeavor to discover the original sense of the mythical tales, to get entirely away from a psychological process, such as must be assumed likewise for the creators of the myths. ”

“ Definitely, the attainment of the mythical viewpoint is of decisive importance in the life of the narrator; it signifies a peculiar enhancement of his artistic mood, a new serenity in recognizing and shaping which, as said before, is ordinarily reserved for the later years of life: for the mythical, it is true, represents an early and primitive stage in the life of humanity, but a late and mature one in the life of the individual. ”

“ But the myth-makers, deserting any such ideas they may possess, find it necessary, like the child of whom we spoke, to postulate a PLACE for the divine energy to work from, and that place is the earth or the heavens. Then, again, heaven and earth are themselves often regarded in the usual mythical way, as animated, as persons with parts and passions, and finally, among advancing races, as gods. ”

“ Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when her Consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity ... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...." ”

“ Many myths contain moral and philosophical ideas conveyed in parables, and some of them have indubitable reference to real events and persons. But in no case of a primitive and genuine mythus are we to expect deliberate fiction or conscious symbolism, or, again, to seek for a discoverable substratum of solid fact. Entering the sphere of mythology, facts become etherealized into fancies, the actual value of which lies in the expression of the national mind, so that mythical and spiritual are in this respect synonymous. ”

“ In that case the mythical elements can do no harm whatever, for, in so far as they are inconsistent with religious feeling, their effect is decidedly repellent, and renders an excess of illusion impossible. ”

“ The dramas are played, the mysteries are performed, not to teach the spectators the doctrines of their creed, still less to entertain them, but for the purpose of bringing about those natural effects which they represent in mythical disguise; in a word, they are magical ceremonies and their mode of operation is mimicry or sympathy. We shall probably not err in assuming that many myths, which we now know only as myths, had once their counterpart in magic ”

“ He had evolved the myth of a water-nymph or naiad, and there he stopped. The characteristic of these mythical explanations—as of all philosophies, past, present and to come—was that they were limited by human experience. Early man's experience showed him that effects were produced by conscious, sentient, personal causes like himself. He sprang to the conclusion that all hidden causes were also persons. ”

“ The mythical figures have to be the invisibly omnipresent genii, under the care of which the young soul grows to maturity, by the signs of which the man gives a meaning to his life and struggles: and the state itself knows no more powerful unwritten law than the mythical foundation which vouches for its connection with religion and its growth from mythical ideas. ”

“ As we have noted under Mythology, myths do seem to have carried a few mythical conceptions from the Old World to the New, but these have remained as mere parts of tales and do not function in practical life. ”

“ These relics exhibit in their germs the myths which afterwards became the legends of gods and heroes with human [Pg 471] forms, and furnished the groundwork of the epic poems, whether of the eastern or the western world.
"The mythical or mythmaking language of mankind had no partialities; and if the career of the Sun occupies a large extent of the horizon, we cannot fairly simulate ignorance of the cause. ”

“ But that dead men have thus been raised to the rank of deities in many lands, there is abundant evidence to prove. And quite apart from the worship paid to those spirits which are admitted by their worshippers to have once animated the bodies of living men, there is good reason to suspect that many gods, who rank as purely mythical beings, were once men of flesh and blood, though their true history has passed out of memory or rather been transformed by legend into a myth, which veils more or less completely the real character of the imaginary deity. ”

“ MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN THE HEROIC POEMS.
We have now to consider the question whether myth is a necessary element in the formation of heroic poetry. It has been noticed that historical persons figure in many stories of the Heroic Age, while others do not contain a single character whose historical existence can be authenticated. These latter stories are believed to be wholly mythical in origin, though they may not show any supernatural features in their final form. ”

“ The end of the life of the myth coincides with the moment at which is formed out of the elements of the myth a religious conception of the world peopled with gods. The living and conscious existence of the myth is finished when the mythical figures become gods. Theology hurls the myth from its throne. ”

“ Nor, let it be observed, do I say that such a mythical faculty persists as such only among the ignorant masses in town or country, in the form of those very ancient superstitions which have been collected with immense labour by learned mythologists and ethnologists; on the contrary, I maintain that the mythical faculty still exists in all men, independently of this survival of old superstitions, to whatever people and class they may belong ”

“ For, after all, the typical is already the mythical, insofar as it is pristine pattern and pristine form of life, timeless model and formula of eld, into which life enters by reproducing its traits out of the unconscious. ”

“ MYTH, HISTORICAL. An historical myth is a myth that has a known and recognized foundation in historical truth, but with the admixture of a preponderating amount of fiction in the introduction of personages and circumstances. Between the historical myth and the mythical history, the distinction as laid down in the text cannot always be preserved, because we are not always able to determine whether there is a preponderance of truth or of fiction in the legend or narrative under examination. ”

“ After these illustrations, we shall run no risk of being misunderstood when we define a myth as, in its origin, an explanation, by the uncivilized mind, of some natural phenomenon; not an allegory, not an esoteric symbol,—for the ingenuity is wasted which strives to detect in myths the remnants of a refined primeval science,—but an explanation. ”

“ The classical gods, with all their immortal might, are capable of fear and pain, and are led into scrapes as ludicrous as those of Brer Wolf or Brer Terrapin in the tales of the Negroes of the Southern States of America. The stars, again, in mythology, are mixed up with beasts, planets, and men in the same embroglio of fantastic opinion. The dead and the living, men, beasts, and gods, trees and stars, and rivers, and sun, and moon, dance through the region of myths in a burlesque ballet of Priapus, where everything may be anything, where nature has no laws and imagination no limits. ”

“ A myth, even when it contains a universal principle, expresses it in a special form, using with its peculiar personages the language and accessories of a particular people, time, and place; persons to whom this particular people, with the connected accidents of time and place, are familiar and dear, receive the highest enjoyment from the myth, and the truth goes with it as the soul with the body. ”

“ Whatever is visible or tangible to the senses in our types and emblems--such as the implements of operative masonry, the furniture and ornaments of a lodge, or the ladder of seven steps--is a material symbol; while whatever derives its existence from tradition, and presents itself in the form of an allegory or legend, is a mythical symbol. ”

“ Now there are certain characteristics of ours that derive benefit from that occult and unknown nature, which nourishes not our souls alone but our bodies also, and brings us into the presence of the gods, and this I think often comes about by means of myths; when through riddles and the dramatic setting of myths that knowledge is insinuated into the ears of the multitude who cannot receive divine truths in their purest form.
It is now evident what branch and what sort of philosophy may properly on occasion employ myths. ”

“ Now the myths represent the Gods themselves and the goodness of the Gods—subject always to the distinction of the speakable and the unspeakable, the revealed and the unrevealed, that which is clear and that which is hidden: since, just as the Gods have made the goods of sense common to all, but those of intellect only to the wise, so the myths state the existence of Gods to all, but who and what they are only to those who can understand.
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They also represent the activities of the Gods. For one may call the World a Myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden. ”

“ The latter help us not only to understand the dreams themselves, but also show their symbolism and close relationship with all psychic phenomena in general, especially with the day dreams or phantasies, with artistic creativeness, and with certain disturbances of the normal psychic function. A common share in all these productions belongs to a single psychic function, the human imagination. It is to this imaginative faculty—of humanity at large rather than individual—that the modern myth theory is obliged to concede a high rank, perhaps the first, for the ultimate origin of all myths. ”

“ Thus departs yet another of the little fictions which past writers on armory have fostered and perpetuated. Whether the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians knew they were depicting mythical animals, and did it, intending them to be symbolical of attributes of their deities, something beyond what they were familiar with in their ordinary life, we do not know; nor indeed have we any certain knowledge that there have never been animals of which their figures are but imperfect and crude representations. ”

“ Power Myth—In the second stage of myth or romance we discover a radical development in the personages of the story. A new class of deities is found. From the same linguistic cause which we have set forth, the conspicuous phenomena of nature are personified as gods. The powers of the universe as they are known in that stage of society become the heroes of myth. The animal gods remain, and with them the human beings; but all the gods of savagery are assigned minor parts, and the new gods constitute a superior order of beings. ”

“ Now that simplifying act, which is the preliminary of all mystical experience, that gathering of the scattered bits of personality into the one which is really you--into the "unity of your spirit," as the mystics say--the great forces of love, beauty, wonder, grief, may do for you now and again. These lift you perforce from the consideration of the details to the contemplation of the All: turn you from the tidy world of image to the ineffable world of fact. But they are fleeting and ungovernable experiences, descending with dreadful violence on the soul. ”

“ But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility. The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience....' And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be condemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. ”

“ If we remember that the explanation of nature and the philosophizing of unschooled humanity is consummated in the form of myths, we can deduce from the preceding an analogy between myth making and dreaming. ”

“ Among the fancies embodied in the myths was noted the theory that the world, or various parts of it, had been formed out of the body of some huge non-natural being, a god, or giant, or a member of some ancient mysterious race. ”

“ When we have stripped off those features which some mystics accept and some reject—all that is merely due to tradition, temperament or unconscious allegorism—what do we find as the necessary and abiding character of all true mystical experience? ”

“ And to the student of the history of humanity who rejoices in the sure foundation on which, tested in manifold ways, the convictions of the highest and noblest of the race rest, the value of myth is increased in its being a natural outgrowth of the mind when, having advanced to the point at which curiosity concerning the causes of surrounding things arises, it frames its crude explanations. ”