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Modern Myths

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Extract

The time is past when “myth” could be considered serenely, when μvθoς could be translated as “legend,” or when Littré could define it as follows: “A story pertaining to time or facts that history does not clarify and embracing either a real fact transformed into a religious notion or the invention of a fact with the help of an idea.” It was calmly asserted that the myth concerned formal divinities, that it was the means of expressing the relationship between these divinities and men—hence the historical form it most frequently assumed. But, in any case, it was a matter of the past. The gods were indeed dead, and the stories regarding them no longer concerned us. The nineteenth century, the century of reason, was devoid of myths, and only the “poets” (falsifiers!) regretted this. But along came the psychology of the unconscious, then sociology and history, to give a fresh meaning, and thereby vigor, to these dusty tales incorporated in Greco-Latin mythology. No longer were they a childish invention to lend color to a naïve religion. We perceived instead subtle expressions of the profound and complicated tendencies of man, and the divinities involved in these myths were no longer the simple gods of thunder and of time. Complex characteristics enriched their personalities. They assumed unprecedented dimensions. Cronus and Zeus were cloaked in mystery—the mystery of man. And by a strange reversal, what seemed childish then was not the imaginary myth but the rationalist philosophy that had contested it because of its failure to understand.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1958 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1. See, e.g., C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1933); Roger Caillois, Le Mythe et l'homme; Mircea Eliade, Traité d'histoire des religions (Paris: Payot, 1949), English trans.: Patterns in Comparative Religion (London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958); Georges Dumezil, Les Mythes romains (Paris: Gallimard).

2. La Technique ou l'enjeu du siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 1954).