Myth, Ritual, and NonsenseAuthor(s): Stanley Edgar HymanReviewed work(s):Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1949), pp. 455-475Published by: Kenyon CollegeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4333071 .Accessed: 09/11/2011 19:42

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Stanley Edgar Hyman

MYTH, RITUAL, AND NONSENSE

cc ffYTH" is the new intellectual fashion, apparently, and lVI judging by the recent books on the subject, there is more

than one way to skin a myth. Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series XVII, Pantheon, $4) repre- sents half a dozen different approaches. Campbell states his pur- pose as "to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multi- tude of not-too-difficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself." Where the ancient meaning needs a little prodding, Campbell is willing to help it along with a Jungian analysis showing its analogical representation of "the millennial adventure of the soul" or a tropological and anagogical reading of its "practical teaching" and "spiritual principles." Much of his lore is Eastern, derived through Heinrich Zimmer and German Oriental scholarship, and he balances a special sympathy for such doctrines as Zen Buddhism and Jainism with a mild intolerance toward Christianity and the other monotheisms that make it diffi- cult for their members to "go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity."

It is Campbell's contention that all myth is one, "the great myth," "the monomyth," which can be described as an elaboration of the three stages of Van Gennep's rites de passage, thus: "a sep- aration from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return." Campbell diagrams this cycle and illustrates it with a variety of myths drawn from very different cultures, but his examples at any given point are never very many

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(lest the book enlarge "prodigiously" like The Golden Bough, he says) and some of those are treated in a fairly Procrustean fashion. Thus an optional stage at the beginning entitled "Refusal of the Call" is made to include Sleeping Beauty, Lot's wife, and the Wandering Jew, although the first is much more reasonably a Goal for the Hero (as Campbell himself treats her in a later section), Lot's wife is clearly the motif of Taboo Violation or Test Failure, and the Wandering Jew was never called at all, and represents the traditional figure of the God-Mocker. Campbell is sometimes blind to the implications of his own material, and although he prints all the evidence for Minos as a series of Cretan god-kings ritually embodied as bulls, sons of bulls, and fathers of bulls, he seems nevertheless to see Minos as an historic Cretan king cuck- olded by an ungulate.

The book contains a great many sharp insights, like Jonathan Edwards' Angry God as "the ogre aspect of the father"; its myths, stories, and such nuggets as the Gnostic "Split the stick and there is Jesus" are fascinating (if not as fascinating as hearing Campbell tell them); and it is well-indexed and beautifully and extrava- gantly illustrated. However, the reader has to earn these good things (the Test motif) by bearing a heavy weight of Jung at his wooliest, Oriental "basic truths" that tend to resemble Sunday supplement occultism, and Campbell's own heady theosophical style.

Patrick Mullahy's Oedipus-Myth and Complex (Hermitage Press, $5) is a "review of psychoanalytic theory" combined with "an exposition of the Oedipus complex and myth," written by a psychiatrically-trained philosophy professor, and including Sopho- cles' complete text. Despite this odd combination, the book seems to me to constitute a good and useful (if very slanted) summary of the views of Freud, three principal rebels-Adler, Jung, and Rank-and three major revisionists-Horney, Fromm, and Sulli- van. Mullahy's bias is all in favor of Sullivan, with whom he studied, and Fromm, who writes the Introduction (containing the

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curious claim that Sophocles' plays are "the text of the myth," al- though Homer, Hesiod, and the other playwrights have very dif- ferent stories). Mullahy's outstanding success is his explanation of Freud's theories of symbolism as they affect the analysis of mythology and religion; his outstanding failure lies in their ap- plication to literature, where he reprints only two unauthoritative "Freudian" readings that teeter on the edge of parody; he does not succeed in making the views of Harry Stack Sullivan entirely comprehensible, although it is doubtful whether anyone could; and his book badly lacks a glossary and an index. The Sophocles plays, even in the dreadful Jebb translation ("well wot I," "dreadly, in sooth, dreadly,") far surpass in imaginative grandeur anything in the book but the theories of Freud himself, and if Mullahy's point was to show how psychoanalytic theory explains the Oedipus story, he has probably succeeded in showing the reverse, since Fromm reading the plays as a conflict between Laius and Oedipus over parental authority and the patriarchal principle tells us a good deal about Fromm, not much about Sophocles.

The chief effect of the book is to confirm the view for which Lionel Trilling has been the chief literary spokesman in our time: that measured against Freud's tragic and passionate vision, all the rebels are bowdlerizers and all the revisionists cheery faith-healers. We see Adler and Jung winning an Anglo-American hearing by denying the sexual nature of complexes and libido; Horney assur- ing us that "genuine warmth and affection" from the parents will solve our problems, or that all we need do is stop making "exces- sive demands on the environment"; Fromm putting forward the cheap and vulgar therapeutic slogan of Love Thyself, and (like Reik recently) making a desexualized "love" the basic drive and need; Sullivan reminding us to look after the "satisfactions and se- curity of the loved one" (Mullahy's phrasing) or basing sex satis- faction on an "intimacy need"; and Mullahy himself insisting that the solution to our problems is "self-respect and respect for others." When, in this Dale Carnegie world, poor old Freud gets tagged

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for a "pessimistic, ultimately hopeless outlook," we can only note that Sophocles would be thrown right out of the milk bar with him.

After a literary man with a metaphysical approach and a phi- losopher with a psychiatric approach, we should be prepared for a professor of anthropology with a religious approach. Earl W. Count, head of the department of anthropology at Hamilton Col- lege, has written 4000 Years of Christmas (Henry Schuman, $2) as a brief survey of the pre-Christian origins of Christmas. He does this in a tacky pulpit style ("To what, then, shall we liken Christmas? It is like a seed which is planted...."), full of state- ments no scientist should make (as of the origin of civilization, first on the Mediterranean, then specifically in Mesopotamia), with Christmas carols between the chapters instead of the rather more necessary bibliographical information or supporting notes. Count so far misunderstands the nature of myth as to argue that the Germanic peoples based the crucifixion of Odin on that of Christ, and that St. Nicholas "must have been a remarkable person" to have all those legends grow up about him; he is so far out of sympathy with it as to give us Christ, "a little Galilean peasant," child of "a simple Jewish peasant woman." Clearly, if the religious approach can be of any use in the study of myth, it will not be this religious approach.

The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by M. Cary and others (Oxford, $17.50) is an earnest and useful labor of scholarship in 971 double-column quarto pages. Although it lacks such essentials as an index, any classified listing of its contents, or any account of the qualifications of its contributors, and is full of inexplicable gaps, on many questions of fact and scholarship it is serviceable, and will reward the casual reader with such fascinating informa- tion as that the Romans had loaded dice, the ancients washed clothes with urine rather than soap, the suitors of Penelope played marbles for the bride, and 147 different wounds are mentioned in the Iliad. Anyone reading through its articles on literature, myth,

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and ritual for a full and authoritative statement on those sub- jects, however, is apt to feel that a cruel joke has been played upon him. The articles on literature are, with few exceptions, wo- fully superficial and incomplete: C. M. Bowra on Homer ignores almost every significant view and controversy on the subject, and ends with an historical blind old Homer, who may, he notes, be two men of the same name; the articles on Antony, Autolycus, Brutus, Caesar, Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Troilus, do not even mention Shakespeare, although the one on Timon inexplicably does; A. W. Pickard-Cambridge's article on tragedy ignores or dismisses every serious treatment of the subject but Aristotle's, which it attacks.

Most of the articles on mythology are done by H. J. Rose, who also does many of the articles on rites and customs, and who would seem to be almost the worst choice imaginable. Rose is the king of the euhemerists, convinced of the possible historicity of everyone from Agamemnon ("probably an historical person") to Theseus ("there is no proof that any real person lies behind the legend, but that is not impossible"), and such discrepancies as Aga- memnon's worship as Zeus at Sparta, and the probable etymology of Theseus' name, do not at all disturb him. Rose gets much of his material from Farnell's two books on Greek cults and Roscher's Lexikon; his chief concern with myth is whether the hero was a god or a man, a question as meaningless as the one about angels and pins; he notes that the Greek deities were consistently therio- morphic and remarks that there is no evidence for Greek totemism, as though that were not major evidence for Greek totemism; he says that the Erinyes "are often confused" with the Eumenides, presumably by Aeschylus; he suggests that the Harpies may be based on the filthy Indian fruit-eating bat; he argues that Hephaes- tus is lame because in early fighting communities lame men would naturally become smiths (as, we might add, Odin is one-eyed be- cause in early fighting communities old men would tend to have lost an eye); he dates many Greek rites as late because they are not

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mentioned in Homer, and finally admits on page 492 that Homer suppressed primitive material "due to his dislike of the grotesque." Almost the only useful thing Rose does with myths, besides tell them in all their muddled detail, is note some motifs in Stith Thompson's index, and it is characteristic that the one time he draws on a non-classical myth for comparison, comparing Prome- theus with the American Indian trickster Coyote, he has learned about Coyote through German scholarship.

The other writers on myth and ritual in the dictionary, chiefly F. R. Walton, M. P. Nilsson, and G. M. A. Hanfmann, are little better: almost equally euhemerist, superficial, and oblivious to or biased against all the theories of our century. The book displays very little over-all consistency. Rose notes that Cadmus was both a culture-hero and a serpent-figure, then J. E. Fontenrose notes the same thing of Cecrops, then Rose states the same curious cor- relation in connection with Erichthonius; in no case is any expla- nation attempted, or any reference made to the other two. Some- times we get flat contradictions of fact between authorities: Hanf- mann says Nessus gave Deianira the garment that later killed Her- cules; Rose says Nessus gave Deianira some of his poisoned blood, which she smeared on a garment; both cite Sophocles' Trachiniae as their authority. Sometimes the contradictions come in the same article: Walton says that the goddess Atargatis punished with ill- ness eaters of fish, and suggests that the taboo "may have origi- nated in the unwholesomeness of the local species" (a theory of primitive taboo as hygienic measure that no one has taken seri- ously for a generation); he then remarks in the next sentence that the priests of Atargatis ate fish daily in a ritual meal. In short, the Oxford Classical Dictionary, if it is as unreliable and useless in general as it is on these topics, might better be pulped now and the paper used for comic books.

Richard Chase's book, Quest for Myth (Louisiana State Univer- sity Press, $3.25) speaks up for still another approach, the anthro- pological. The book itself is largely a useful and informed brief

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history of the theories of myth from the Greeks to the present, presumably Chase's Ph.D. thesis. Much of it is very perceptive, and were it not for several major eccentricities that vitiate key areas, the book would stand as an important contribution to our knowledge. The approach Chase favors is that of "the American anthropologists," which he finally, in the notes at the end of the book, admits means only "those who came under the influence of Franz Boas at Columbia." Chase seems to be under a curious de- lusion that all American anthropologists, or all Boas-influenced anthropologists, or all Columbia anthropologists, are in substan- tial agreement-he keeps saying "the modern anthropologists agree," or "the best opinion" says, or "with few exceptions, mod- ern anthropologists agree," or "the American anthropologists" as a body "consider." Here, he would profit by attending any con- vention of the American Anthropological Association, with its endless theoretical and personal warfare, and exactly as many po- sitions present as anthropologists, and he might learn (since "the shackles of evolution" are one of the things "modern anthropolo- gists" have thrown off) of the "neo-evolutionary" movement led by, among others, Julian H. Steward, of Columbia.

Actually, the people Chase cites for his anthropological state- ments and his "general agreement" are almost entirely the late Ruth Benedict and Paul Radin, both of them more often regarded as imaginative literary operators in the field than as social scientists, and themselves in agreement nowhere along the line. Chase is very scornful of Tylor as an "armchair anthropologist" (an odd charge from a library-stacks mythologist) and he seems to have a great respect for field work, although his book gives no evidence of familiarity with field studies. The most amusing ex- ample of this curious ambivalence is Chase on the categorical: he notes that modern anthropologists accept no such monist cross- cultural generalization as "the primitive," "the savage," and him- self uses both of them throughout, and even generalizes immedi- ately from specific cultural references:

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To the Eskimo, writes Professor Boas, "the world has always been as it is now." To primitive man the mythological past is an emotion felt and not an epoch conceived. The savage's sense of past- ness is....

In the same fashion, Chase approves the Boas doctrine of cultural relativism and the absurdity of making cross-cultural evaluations, and soon afterwards remarks that "the shaman is distinguished among his fellows by being deeply neurotic"; that is, among Chase's fellows.

This passion for an anthropology he neither knows nor under- stands is fairly characteristic, but the chief faults of Quest for Myth are basic muddles in Chase's mind. He begins with an absurd con- fusion between myth and art and defines myth as "the aesthetic activity of a man's mind," then tries to put some collective base under it by defining "myths of the people" as "imaginary tales about human life," then returns, in hot italics, to the idea that it is a story, literature, "an aesthetic creation of the human imagi- nation." He solves the problem of the relationship of myth to religion by erecting a wholly false and unworkable distinction, even "an enmity," between them, which would make myth what poetry was for Santayana, "religion in literary form." He then sneaks religion back in as ritual practices underlying myth, but fails to understand the essential distinction between the idea that myth is based on a single historic figure or event, and the idea that it is based on a regular series of ritual performances by human actors, takes these as the same thing, an historical basis, and votes for euhemerism. Finally, to make the muddle complete, he states on page 108 that poetry consists of "mythical symbols," and on page 109 that "poetry is the indispensable substructure of myth"; that is, that poetry consists of poetry based on poetry. It is no wonder, then, that Chase's principal bias is in favor of irrational- ism: he frequently equates "the irrational" and "the mythical," he finds that things happen "for reasons mostly inscrutable," and he insists that the study of myth is little more than the question,

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"What is the relation between myth and the hearts of men?" It follows logically, then, that his principal injustice in the book

should be to the Cambridge group, the movement he sneeringly calls "the English rationalists" (when he is not summarizing Gil- bert Murray and Jane Harrison as "old Edwardians"), and there is no evidence in the book that he is familiar with any more of their work and their forerunners' than a single book of Murray's, some Andrew Lang, several chapters of an E. B. Tylor book, and the one-volume Frazer condensation. Finally, Quest for Myth con- cludes with a chapter of literary analysis in which half a dozen English poems are discussed as though they were myths, and inter- preted with great poverty of imagination or academic timidity. After which, trailing a cloud of blurred distinctions behind him, Chase bows out.

A book more or less reflecting the ritual approach of the Cam- bridge group, E. M. Butler's The Myth of the Magus (Macmillan, $3.75) has recently been published. Since I have already reviewed it elsewhere, and since it has been amply discussed in The Kenyon Review by Philip Blair Rice in connection with Mann's Doctor Faustus, nothing more need be said about it here than to note that the book represents an attempt by Miss Butler to test the Harrison-Murray-Raglan theory of ritual origins on the figure of the Faustian magician, that its Introduction represents an excellent brief summary of that view, and that although the book itself does not seem to have done the job successfully, Miss Butler would seem to have proposed a remarkably fertile approach to the magician figure and similar archetypes.

2. Three brief sentences will state the core of the ritual theory: Myth is neither a record of historical fact nor an explanation of nature. It is the spoken correlative of a ritual, the story which the rite enacts or once enacted. It arises out of the ritual, and not vice versa. This theory was not invented by Gilbert Murray and Jane

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Harrison, nor even by Sir James G. Frazer. Chase's book fur- nished a respectable ancestry for every part of it: Fontenelle ar- gued that myths are primitive survivals, Bayle saw the Adonis myth as a vegetation cycle and rite, Bishop Huet saw that all the gods and heroes are essentially the same figure, Vico anticipated the view of Homer as a collective name for folk bards, Herder derived Greek drama from primitive tribal life and dithyrambic rites, Otfried Muller flatly based myth on ritual, although he saw its function as explanatory; Lang based myth on ritual and saw its function as "sanctifying" the rite. The publication of Jane Har- rison's Themis in 1912, with an outline of the ritual forms under- lying Greek tragedy by Gilbert Murray, and a chapter on the ritual origin of the Olympic Games by F. M. Cornford, along with ma- terial from A. B. Cook's forthcoming Zeus, constituted merely the collective manifesto of the movement, and its first detailed appli- cation in a scholarly field.

Long before this, Tylor, Lang, Edward Clodd, and R. R. Marett in one line, and Frazer, E. S. Hartland, and A. E. Crawley in another had furnished the theoretical underpinnings of the movement; foreign scholars like W. Mannhardt and Smile Durk- heim had been drawn on for contributions; and Miss Harrison and Murray themselves had published preliminary statements of the position, the former's Prolegonmena to the Study of Greek Religion in 1903, Murray's Rise of the Greek Epic and contribution to Anthropology and the Classics in 1907, and others. Specific ritual studies had been done in various fields: Henry Carrington Bolton's The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children, deriving them from an- cient rites of divination, in 1888; William Simpson's The Jonah Legend, showing the Jonah story to be an initiation rite, 1889; Lina Eckenstein's Conmparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes, rooting children's rhymes in ancient sacrificial rituals, in 1906; and a number of important books by J. M. Robertson, W. B. Smith, Arthur Drews, and others, on the historicity of Jesus, showing Christ to be a ritual cult figure rather than an historic man.

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With the publication of Themis in 1912, a formalized ritual approach became available, and documented, in regard to Greek tragedy, and all that remained to do was to test it by application in other areas. The same year, Cornford published From Religion to Philosophy, showing the ritual origins of Greek (and thus Western) philosophic ideas. The next year, Miss Harrison pub- lished Ancient Art and Ritual, carrying the approach to the Greek plastic arts as shaped by rite and magic, and in 1914 Cornford published The Origin of Attic Comedy, finding ritual origins comparable to those Murray had found underlying tragedy. In 1920, there was the first application to non-Greek material, with Jesse Weston's From Ritual to Romance treating the Grail ro- mances as the "misinterpreted" record of a fertility rite. In 1921, in The Witch Cult in Western Europe (and later, in God of the Witches), Margaret A. Murray found an ancient cult underlying witchcraft. Cook's Zeus, an enormous compilation of Greek mythic material ritually interpreted, appeared volume by volume after 1925. In 1927, A. M. Hocart published Kingship, a full study of the rituals involved and a hypothesis of their common origin in a yearly king-killing ceremony.

In the 'thirties, S. H. Hooke edited two symposia, Myth and Ritual (1933) and The Labyrinth (1935), in which a number of scholars explored the basis of Near Eastern, principally Hebraic- Christian, myth in ritual; Enid Welsford in The Fool (1935) rather tentatively applied some of the ideas of the ritual school to her subject (as Miss Butler was to do later in connection with the magician); and Lord Raglan published his preliminary Jocasta's Crime in 1933, investigating the incest-taboo in myth and ritual, and his epochal The Hero in 1936, the latter a study of the com- mon features of all hero myths, written in a fittingly popular and aggressive style, and constituting the first general statement of the ritual theory for all areas of myth and folk literature, and the first general attack on historicity and the whole euhemerist posi- tion. In the 'forties, George Thomson in Aeschylus and Athens

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(1941) attempted a detailed study of a body of plays from the Cambridge position (combined with Marxism); Rhys Carpenter in Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics (1946) ana- lysed the ritual roots of the Iliad and the Odyssey, particularly the Bear Cult and the Bearson tale that Friedrich Panzer had earlier found underlying the Beowulf story; Lewis Spence in Myth and Ritual in Dance, Game, and Rhyme (1947) reinterpreted folk custom and children's lore in ritual terms (as William Wells Newell had suggested in Games and Songs of American Children as far back as 1883); and Hugh Ross Williamson, in The Arrow and the Sword (1947) extended Margaret Murray's cult researches into a fascinating conjecture of the murders of William Rufus and Thomas a Becket as ritual sacrifices. Although almost all this work was done in England, the only consistent attempt to apply the rit- ual approach to non-folk literature seems to have been that of William Troy and Francis Fergusson in the United States during the 'thirties and 'forties, although in the last few years a number of critics have apparently adopted the position. Although a few areas, like the Child ballads, have never been explored, the ritual view would seem to embrace so much general theoretical material and successful specific application as to be relatively unassailable.

3. The ritual position is not so unassailable, however, that where it has not been generally ignored it has been sharply attacked from two quarters, the type of old-fashioned scholarship represented by the sniping in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, and the type of new-fashioned criticism represented by two recent attacks in American periodicals, one by Richard Chase in The Nation (De- cember 4, 1948), and the other by Irving Howe in Partisan Review (April, 1949). Chase's essay, in the guise of a review of Miss Butler's book, amplifies the rather summary treatment in Quest for Myth and attacks a number of the Cambridge people by name, as well as such "epigoni" of the group as the present writer. The

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article reveals a basic and rather common misunderstanding, and its objections would thus seem to warrant answering in some detail. They are principally five: (1) the Cambridge view insists that all myth derives from the ritual of the dying god; (2) myth cannot and should not be distinguished from literature; (3) the move- ment seems particularly to appeal to women-Miss Harrison, Miss Weston, Miss Edith Sitwell, and "Bennington College"; (4) the Cambridge people are not anthropologists, and their anthropology, chiefly of the Frazerian school, is not reliable; and (5) ritual some- times derives from myth, instead of vice versa. These points will be discussed in order.

(1) The problem here is that Chase has not read the works of the Cambridge people, as his book makes clear, and is general- izing principally from the one-volume Frazer and secondhand accounts. (It is significant that his piece quotes not a word from any of the ritual school.) All the Cambridge view maintains is that myth derives from some rite, and although individual writers holding the view have tried conjecturally to trace all rite to fer- tility ceremonies and king-killing, none of them start from any- thing Chase properly calls as "characteristic of high barbaric cul- tures in the Mediterranean basin" as the Dying God.

(2) As argued above, myth must always be distinguished from literature, and the insistence that they are the same thing, rather than analogous and related phenomena, is the worst sort of dis- tinction-blurring.

(3) The idea that the movement is female, whatever sort of charge that may constitute, is amply refuted by the list of a few of its works above. Miss Sitwell, aside from the same sort of poetic use of ritual conclusions that Eliot inaugurated in The Waste Land, has no connection with the movement. The three teachers who taught their own varieties of a ritual approach at Bennington College at different times in the past are all male. Does Chase believe that the Bennington students are a ritual cult?

(4) Chase's pretensions to speak for modern anthropology

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have been discussed above. Apart from this, this is the only one of his charges with a degree of validity. There is no doubt that a good deal of Frazer's anthropology, as well as that of his 19th Century followers, is unscientific by modern standards: un- reliable, full of unwarranted cross-cultural generalizations, the material amputated from its specific cultural context. All of which is true of any early anthropology, or early theoretic work, includ- ing that of Darwin, Marx, and Freud. The solution, since Frazer's basic theoretic structure has never been successfully questioned (Chase has never even found it-see page 141) would seem to lie in revising his work along the lines of modern knowledge and techniques, rather than in rejecting it, and producing a neo-Frazer- ian generalizing anthropology on the basis of the fullest possible accurate knowledge of specific cultures. It is absurd to argue, however, as the Boas students seem to in their theory (never for very long in their practice) that no cross-cultural generalizations may ever be made, or that they cannot be made until all the evi- dence is in, since it will never all be in. It is equally absurd to assume, as Chase and many others seem to, that Frazer did not know what he was doing, that he was unaware of amputating data from its cultural context for the purpose of generalization. (Here the published correspondence between Frazer and Sir Baldwin Spencer, the great field-worker on the Arunta, is very revealing.) It is as though a man writing a book on football-playing in Ameri- can colleges were told his aim was invalid, that football at Dart- mouth is part of one gestalt and football at Notre Dame part of another, that only studies of these individual configurations are legitimate, and the general survey not. He would argue, as I think Frazer would, that both approaches are complementary and essen- tial, that it is as legitimate and necessary to emphasize broad simi- larities as it is to emphasize differences, and that although the emphasis on differences and the specific studies are currently the fashion in Boas-influenced quarters, they must eventually be sup- plemented by general theoretic conclusions, principles, and "laws"

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if anthropology (or football-study) is ever to become a science. (5) Chase's claim that "ritual can derive from myth" is based,

he says, on "the most cursory glance at a book by one of the American anthropologists," Boas' Race, Language, and Culture. My less cursory reading of the same book shows no such evidence, nor am I familiar with such evidence in Boas' other work or in other modern anthropology.

Finally, Chase's conclusion, quoting Ruth Benedict, implies that any theory of the origin, nature, or meaning of myth slights the "unconfined role of the human imagination in the creation of mythology." This would seem to suggest that any account of men- tal or imaginative operation, whether in mythology, anthropology, psychology, or any area of human study, is reductive or "confin- ing." This is an odder statement from an anthropologist than from an irrationalist like Chase, but despite its source those of us who believe that all knowledge about man is good per se, not bad, need give it no great attention.

Irving Howe's attack is a rather shriller protest against what he calls "the reading of works of art in terms of myth" by Fergus- son, Troy, and this writer. Since, as this essay has attempted to make clear and all the quotations Howe gives amply demonstrate, the approach is in terms of ritual, a basic human activity, even among modern writers, not myth, Howe's protest would seem pointless from the start. His real point is apparently a resentment of any critical approach not dealing with what he euphemistically calls "contemporary social and psychoanalytic content," which in his own reviewing seems generally to mean straight leftist political puffery or slanting.

4. What relationship can the ritual view have to the various ap- proaches to myth represented by the six books discussed above? Granting that here, as everywhere, pluralism is the desirable con- dition, and that a number of approaches will enrich and stimu-

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late each other, it may still be possible to work out some functional adjustments. The Hero with a Thousand Faces clearly seems mystic and metaphysical only because Campbell's "myth" is divorced from the concrete human behavior of the rite: thus his "Belly of the Whale" section lacks precisely the dimension readily furnished by Simpson's Jonah book. Campbell's approach would appear to be readily adaptable, however, since his "nuclear unit" of myth is confessedly Van Gennep's rite, and his monomyth in its entirety resembles nothing so much as the hypothetical "monoritual" of Hooke and Hocart. Mullahy's book generally reflects the import- ance primitive ritual has had in psychoanalytic literature since Totem and Taboo, if only as analogous to neurotic behavior. Count in at least one case, the "lucky fruits" of the Roman Satur- nalia, recognizes myth as an explanation of ritual. Rose sees some myths as conceivably "projected from some widespread rite," and surprisingly remarks of the Curetes that "the origin of the legend is plausibly derived from the Cretan rite" by Jane Harrison. Even Chase in one place criticizes Voltaire for not "supposing that the festivals may have come first-that the myths may be the ration- alization or the sanctification of the festivals." At the same time, the ritual theorists themselves are fairly shabbily treated. Frazer is represented almost everywhere by the one-volume condensa- tion of The Golden Bough, which Campbell and Chase cite in- stead of the book itself, and which Count draws on without credit; Chase alternately calls Frazer a euhemerist and praises him along with Freud for somehow escaping his own "shallow scientific rationalism"; his edition of Ovid's Fasti is much more cited and praised in the Oxford Classical Dictionary than The Golden Bough is; and even Miss Butler lists him in her bibliography and does not mention him in the text. Of the rest: Miss Butler uses everyone from Murray to Raglan; Campbell uses Murray and Miss Harrison, tentatively; Chase sneers; the Oxford Dictionary praises and at- tacks Miss Harrison in about equal proportions, largely ignores Murray, cites Cook for factual information and nothing else,

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mentions Crawley and Lang grudgingly, and ignores Hartland and Cornford even where they have done the definitive work (Hartland on Perseus, Cornford on Comedy, the Olympic Games, and such concepts as Moira).

The chief barrier between these other approaches and the ritual view is their euhemerism, the obsessive idea that some or all myths somehow record historic events or figures. Campbell believes that some legends are "of an actual historical personage," and even that King Arthur was a 6th Century Welsh chieftain; Count insists that Jesus was historical, and worries over the fact that we are not sure of his birthday; Rose argues of such figures as Heracles that "behind all the rest of the story, then, must lie a man, real or, less likely, imaginary," and says of Odysseus, "There is no sufficient reason to suppose him other than a real local chieftain originally"; Chase argues for euhemerism, apparently agrees with Boas that American Indian culture-hero myths prob- ably originated in "an interesting story told of some personage" and "the striking and important exploits ascribed to him," and adds "perhaps sometimes gods are made out of men in the spirit of a jest or a satire"; even Miss Butler, theoretically writing from the ritual point of view, negates her own approach by assuming the historicity of such figures as Zoroaster, Moses, and Jesus.

The advantage of the ritual approach over other theories is that it need not argue any given case of origin or historicity, since it describes a process out of which myth develops, and a definition of what it is and how it functions in terms of that process. Thus the view cannot be confuted by turning up any given medieval deer- thief named Robin Hoodlum or any given topographical Scylla and Charybdis; it must be met with a counter-theory of process to show how myth develops out of history or geography or primitive science, and this has never been successfully done. It is on process that the books under discussion are weakest: Campbell is best, with a beautiful description of the fragmentation of myth into folk tale and its stringing-together into epic, as well as such operational

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features of the "folk work" of transmission as alteration, rationali- zation, secondary interpretation and elaboration, but with the question of origin buried in the Jungian "collective psyche"; Mul- lahy paraphrases Freud's historic account of the dream work as analogous to the folk work in myth, including such operations as splitting, multiplication, and displacement, but concludes that myth is collective phantasy-gratification in origin, where the ritual view would say in function; Chase puts forward the idea of myth as a type of wish-fulfillment created "under the guidance of the conscious intellect," which leaves process up in the air between dream and art; Count sees myth as "a spontaneous drama of the common folk, a prayer, a hymn"; and the Oxford Dictionary re- flects no concept of process beyond the strictly temporal: first this was believed, then this and this.

It is with the classical psychoanalysis of Freud that the ritual approach, or any "dramatistic" view, dovetails best. Campbell votes for Jung and his elan vital libido rather than Freud and his, and in many cases betrays a curious resistance to even the most obvious Freudian reading of the dreams and myths he relates; so that a man who dreams of being prevented by a watchman from getting through a gate into a lovely garden with a girl in it, is dreaming about "passage beyond the veil of the known." Mullahy criticizes Freud's tragic view of "the inherent evilness of man"; quotes Hor- ney as opposing her belief in man's capacity and desire "to develop his potentialities and become a decent human being" to Freud's "pessimism" and "disbelief in human goodness and human growth"; and quotes Fromm as opposing his faith in "intelligence and courage" to Freud's "traditional doctrine of the evilness of hu- man nature." Mullahy attacks Freud for using metaphor and topo- graphical imagery for the mind, for "reifying his concepts" and "hypostatizing the id, ego, and superego"; he even notes that Sullivan's formulations are "therapy-oriented," as though Freud's were not! Here Chase at least comes out strongly for Freud as the best psychoanalyst, the most useful and the one whose view is

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truly tragic. Clearly, the study of myth must draw centrally on Freud, for his tragic sense, for the stubbornly materialist quality of his mind, and for the subtlety of his account of process, but not to the exclusion of other insights, and, as in the case of Frazer, Freudianism must be modified to embrace new knowledge without repudiating its central vision.

The basic question in regard to anthropology is frankly raised by Campbell when he argues in his Preface for his right to dis- cuss "the correspondences" rather than "the differences," and he has turned up a remarkable quotation from Boas that "there can be no doubt that in the main the mental characteristics of man are the same all over the world." Miss Butler's list of the features of the archetypal magician, like Raglan's fuller list of the twenty- two points in the life of the world hero, tends to confirm this generalization. "First genus, then differentia," Kenneth Burke writes in The Philosophy of Literary Form, and we can only hope for a collaboration between the traditions of Boas and Frazer, a generalizing anthropology drawing on detailed and accurate field studies. Where function comes into question, we must turn to Malinowski as well as Freud, and ask specific social function in a cultural context as well as basic human "phantasy gratifications." To the extent that we treat function in Marxist terms, we require equally the broad prehistoric hypotheses about the origin of poetry in agricultural rite of Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and Reality, and the detailed study of a specific myth or play in the 5th Century Athens by Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens. Where Campbell would tell us that the function of myth is to teach "basic truths," we must ask "Yes, but when, and to whom ?" and turn on him his own account of the process of alteration, with its recognition of later "secondary interpretations," as we insist that with ritual meaning and function lost, collective rationalization (in a process much like folk etymology) will alter meaning to fit new function and make the myth again intelligible.

When we turn to literature, we see the implications of some of

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these approaches. Campbell can treat literature only by making it myth, just as Chase can treat myth only by making it literature (and then fumbles it). Both agree in not liking folk literature very much. As far as Chase is concerned, folk tales, "despite their occasional brilliance and charm, often seem intolerably pedestrian or childish," and Campbell opposes the "undeveloped or degen- erate" inferior "folk mythologies" to the "great mythologies" of the higher civilizations. Mullahy describes Fromm as believing that "These conditions cannot be eradicated but man must face them," which is surely the insight of tragedy, and then goes on to describe a psychology entirely inadequate to the pity and terror of Sophocles' plays.

The solution here, and the final dimension of the ritual view, would seem to be Burke's extension of Freud's concept of symbolic action, whereby we privately re-enact, in our individualist modern day, the lost collective rites that enabled the tribe to function. Campbell states the traditional Freudian equivalence of dream and myth: "In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream," and in his final paragraph proclaims, at least metaphorically, the comparable equivalence of symbolic ac- tion and rite: "And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal -carries the cross of the redeemer-not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal de- spair." Chase suggests the same relationship: "And we have in- vented numberless surrogates to take the place of primitive ritual," and Mullahy gives Rank's interpretation of Oedipus' blindness and final disappearance through a cleft rock as pure symbolic actions for the return to the earth-womb, the age-old ritual rebirth of going-down-into.

In other words, on the framework of ancient collective ritual and modern individual symbolic action, we can utilize much from these approaches. Almost all of Campbell is useful to our pur- poses, once the free balloon of his "myth" is tied either to a

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specific myth and text (literary study) or a specific culture and rite (anthropology). From Mullahy we can learn the need to bring Freud up to date for our purposes without bowdlerizing him, and from Chase the need to do the same for Frazer without dismembering him. Count's religious approach shows us a layer of secondary interpretation we must work back through, and the Oxford Dictionary's scholarship a body of factual information still capable of being thawed back to life. Like Miss Butler, we may not yet get much milk and honey from the promised land, but we must nevertheless go the journey of Campbell's hero: 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.