The communal nature of actual hunting, and of ritualized hunting thereafter, functioned to assuage anxiety over one’s own aggression and one’s own mortality, and at the same time to cement a bond among participants. The functions were psychological and sociological, not agricultural.
The myth of Adonis would present an ironic case for Burkert. Not only is Adonis’ hunting solitary rather than communal, but Adonis is scarcely a real hunter, let alone one racked by anxiety. For him, hunting is more a sport than a life-and-death encounter. Therefore hunting can hardly abet him either psychologically or socially. Yet his saga can still function as a warning to others, as will be proposed in Chapter 8.
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Chapter 5
Myth and literature
The relationship between myth and literature has taken varying forms. The most obvious form has been the use of myth in works of literature. A standard theme in literature courses has been the tracing of classical figures, events, and themes in Western literature thereafter – beginning with the Church Fathers, who utilized classical mythology even while warring on paganism, and proceeding through Petrarch, Boccacio, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, and then down to Joyce, Eliot, Gide, Cocteau, Anouilh, and Eugene O’Neill. The same has commonly been done for biblical myths. Both groups of myths have alternatively been read literally, been read symbolically, been rearranged, and been outright recreated. And they are to be found in all of the arts, including music and film. Freud used the figures Oedipus and Electra to name the most fundamental human drives, and he took from psychiatrists the figure Narcissus to name self-love.
The pervasiveness of classical, or pagan, mythology is even more of a feat than that of biblical mythology, for classical mythology has survived the demise of the religion of which, two thousand years ago, it was originally a part. By contrast, biblical mythology has been sustained by the near-monolithic presence of the religion of which it remains a part. Indeed, classical mythology has been preserved by the culture tied to the religion that killed off classical religion. Till
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recently, the very term ‘paganism’ has had a negative connotation. That classical mythology has survived where the rest of its religion has not is an ironic reversal of Tylor’s view of the fates of both, though Tylor is referring to the survival of Christianity, not of paganism, and to the survival of Christianity in the face of modern science, not of a rival religion.
Myth
The mythic origin of literature
Another form of the relationship between myth and literature already noted in the previous chapter is the derivation of literature from myth – an approach pioneered by Jane Harrison and her fellow classicists Gilbert Murray and F. M. Cornford. Let’s take some examples of this approach.
In From Ritual to Romance the English medievalist Jessie Weston (1850–1928) applied Frazer’s second myth-ritualist version to the Grail legend. Following Frazer, she maintains that for ancients and primitives alike the fertility of the land depended on the fertility of their king, in whom resided the god of vegetation. But where for Frazer the key ritual was the replacement of an ailing king, for Weston the aim of the Grail quest was the rejuvenation of the king. Furthermore, Weston adds an ethereal, spiritual dimension that transcends Frazer. The aim of the quest turns out to have been mystical oneness with god and not just food from god. It is this spiritual dimension of the legend that inspired T. S. Eliot to use Weston in ‘The Waste Land’. Weston is not reducing the Grail legend to primitive myth and ritual but merely tracing the legend back to primitive myth and ritual. The legend itself is literature, not myth. Because Frazer’s second myth-ritualist scenario is not about the enactment of any myth of the god of vegetation but about the condition of the reigning king, the myth giving rise to the legend is not the life of a god like Adonis but the life of the Grail king himself.
In The Idea of a Theater Francis Fergusson (1904–86), an esteemed American theatre critic, applied Frazer’s second myth-ritualist
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version to the whole genre of tragedy. He argues that the story of the suffering and redemption of the tragic hero derives from Frazer’s scenario of the killing and replacement of the king. For example, Oedipus, King of Thebes, must sacrifice his throne, though not his life, for the sake of his subjects. Only with his abdication will the plague cease. But for Fergusson, as for Weston, the renewal sought is less physical than spiritual, and for Fergusson, Oedipus seeks it for himself as well as for his people.
More than most other literary myth-ritualists, Fergusson is concerned as much with the product – drama – as with the source – myth and ritual. He even criticizes Harrison and especially Murray for taking the meaning of tragedy to be the Frazerian act of regicide rather than, say, the theme of self-sacrifice. For Fergusson, as for Weston, the Frazerian scenario provides the background to literature but is itself myth and ritual rather than literature.
In Anatomy of Criticism famed Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912–91) argued that not one genre but all genres of literature derive from myth – specifically, the myth of the life of the hero. Frye associates the life cycle of the hero with several other cycles: the yearly cycle of the seasons, the daily cycle of the sun, and the nightly cycle of dreaming and awakening. The association with the seasons comes from Frazer. The association with the sun, never attributed, perhaps comes from Max Müller. The association with dreaming comes from Jung. The association of the seasons with heroism, while again never attributed, may come from Raglan, who will shortly be considered in his own right. Frye offers his own heroic pattern, which he calls the ‘quest-myth’, but it consists of just four broad stages: the birth, triumph, isolation, and defeat of the hero.
Each main genre of literature parallels at once a season, a stage in the day, a stage of consciousness, and above all a stage in the heroic myth. Romance parallels at once spring, sunrise, awakening, and the birth of the hero. Comedy parallels summer, midday, waking consciousness, and the triumph of the hero. Tragedy parallels
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Myth
autumn, sunset, daydreaming, and the isolation of the hero. Satire parallels winter, night, sleep, and the defeat of the hero. The literary genres do not merely parallel the heroic myth but derive from it. The myth itself derives from ritual – from the version of Frazer’s myth-ritualism in which divine kings are killed and replaced.
Like most other literary myth-ritualists, Frye does not reduce literature to myth. On the contrary, he, most uncompromisingly of all, insists on the autonomy of literature. Like Fergusson, he faults Murray and Cornford not for speculating about the myth-ritualist origin of tragedy (Murray) and comedy (Cornford) – a nonliterary issue – but for interpreting the meaning of both as the enactment of Frazer’s scenario of regicide – the literary issue.
Yet Frye proceeds to enlist both Frazer and Jung to help extricate the meaning, not just the origin, of literature. For he takes their key works to be themselves works of literary criticism and not merely or even chiefly works of anthropology or psychology:
the fascination which The Golden Bough and Jung’s book on libido symbols [i.e., Symbols of Transformation (Jung’s Collected Works, vol. 5)] have for literary critics is . . . based . . . on the fact that these books are primarily studies in literary criticism. . . . The Golden Bough isn’t really about what people did in a remote and savage past; it is about what human imagination does when it tries to express itself about the greatest mysteries, the mysteries of life and death and afterlife.
(Frye, ‘The Archetpes of Literature’, p. 17; ‘Symbolism of the Unconscious’, p. 89)
Similarly, Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (Jung’s Collected Works, vol. 12), which Frye also singles out, ‘is not a mere specious paralleling of a defunct science [i.e., alchemy] and one of several Viennese schools of psychology, but a grammar of literary symbolism which for all serious students of literature is as important as it is endlessly fascinating’.
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