NOTES ON MYTH
345
and the gods at the disposal of mankind. The priest's task is to trans–
mute magic into religion, to overcome the subjectivism on which
magic depends, to present spirits and gods as clearly conceived objec–
tive beings, to transfer magical power to the gods and make men
obeisant before them. Mythology is full of the tensions created by this
universal struggle, and many myths may be said to array the propa–
ganda of men, animals, and magical beings against the propaganda
of the gods. But art is constructive where life is destructive. Myth
keeps the dilemma operative and resolves the contesting forces into
useful experience.
Stated in somewhat abstract terms, magic, as Radin says,
is
the
coercion of the objective world by the ego; religion is the coercion of
the ego by the objective world, or by the powers and beings in the ob–
jective world. Now I suggest that when literature brings these oppos–
ing forces together so that they interact coercively toward a common
end, literature has become mythical. This interpretation of myth, as
it seems to me, is less immediately valuable to us than are the two in–
terpretations I have offered above; it requires more thorough transla–
tion before it can be applied to our own problems. Yet the war between
magic and religion still goes on, though sometimes under different
names. Certain terms in which this "cathartic function" of myth
might be restated will doubtless occur to any student of Freud.
Myths and Paramyths.
I am aware that what has been said here
cannot fully elucidate those processes of amalgamation by which the
symbols, images, concepts and personified beings of myth are made–
though a complete elaboration of what I have said would lead us a
long way in that direction.
I am aware too that no complete account of myth can be under–
taken without wider references to human needs and aspirations than
those I have chosen here. The method of pragmatic naturalism seems
to me the only fruitful method of studying myth-yet that method
leaves us, as it often does, with the feeling that we have made art too
resolutely functional, too outward looking, too optimistic. Psycho–
analysis may be misleading as psychology, but "the pleasure principle"
and the desperate "instincts" of sex and death give myth a dramatic
richness unknown to contemporary pragmatism, or at least not yet
assimilated by it.
I do not mean, either, to reduce the latitude of reinterpretation
unduly. Those ever recurring writers who find the study of primitive
thought somehow degrading or irrelevant are right at least when they
