Primitive Mythology

The picture can perhaps be compared to that of a number of sister and brothers, all representing a family type, yet none more authentically than the rest. And the more numerous the gathered examples, the more fascinating and tantalizing the comparison

Those pre-sexual, pre-mortal ancestral beings of the mythological narrative lived the idyl of the beginning, an age when all things were innocent of the destiny of life in time. But there occurred in that age an event, the “mythological event” par excellence, which brought to an end its timeless way of being and effected a transformation of all things. Whereupon death and sex came into the world as the basic correlates of temporality

From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens), that is to say, we are to enter the play sphere of the festival, acquiescing in a game of belief, where fun, joy, and rapture rule in ascending series. The laws of life in time and space — economics, politics, and even morality — will thereupon dissolve. Whereafter, re-created by that return to paradise before the Fall, before the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, belief and disbelief, we are to carry the point of view and spirit of man the player (Homo ludens) back into life; as in the play of children, where, undaunted by the banal actualities of life’s meager possibilities, the spontaneous impulse of the spirit to identify itself with something other than itself for the sheer delight of play, transubstantiates the world — in which, actually, after all, things are not quite as real or permanent, terrible, important, or logical as they seem

The opaque weight of the world — both of life on earth and of death, heaven, and hell — is dissolved, and spirit freed, not from anything, for there was nothing from which to be freed except a myth too solidly believed, but for something, something fresh and new, a spontaneous act.

then it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sigh of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door.

R.R. Marett, who, in his chapter on “Primitive Credulity” in the Threshold of Religion, develops the idea that a certain element of “make-believe” is operative in all primitive religions. “The savage,” wrote Marett, “is a good actor who can be quite absorbed in his role, like a child at play; and also, like a child, a good spectator who can be frightened to death by the roaring of something he knows perfectly well to be no ‘real’ lion.” [Note 5]

Moreover, the mask in a primitive festival is revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mythical being that it represents — even though everyone knows that a man made the mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing it, furthermore, is identified with the god during the time of the ritual of which the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god; he is the god. The literal fact that the apparition is composed of A, a mask, B, its reference to a mythical being, and C, a man, is dismissed from the mind, and the presentation is allowed to work without correction upon the sentiments of both the beholder and the actor.

Communities that once were comfortable in the consciousness of their own mythologically guaranteed godliness find, abruptly, that they are devils in the eyes of their neighbors

From this momentous decade of the sixties onward, the universality of the basic themes and motifs of mythology was generally conceded, the usual assumption being that some sort of psychological explanation would presently be found; and so it was that from two remote quarters of the learned world the following comparative studies appeared simultaneously: in Philadelphia, Daniel G. Brinton’s The Myths of the New World, comparing the primitive and high-culture mythologies of the Old World and the New; and in Berlin, Adolf Bastian’s Das Beständige in den Menschenrassen und die Spielweite ihrer Veränderlichkeit, applying the point of view of comparative psychology and biology to the problems, first, of the “constants” and then of the “variables” in the mythologies of mankind.

And the major questions, the problems of man’s highest concern, now became, first, whether such mythological themes as death-and-resurrection, the virgin birth, and creation from nothing should be rationally dismissed as mere vestiges of primitive ignorance (superstitions), or, on the contrary, interpreted as rendering values beyond the faculty of reason (transcendent symbols); and, second, whether, as products of the spontaneous operations of the psyche, they can have appeared independently in various quarters of the world (theories of parallel development), or rather, as the inventions of particular times and persons, must have been spread about either by early migrations or by later commerce (theories of diffusion).