THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE
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sirer observes, the romantic philosophers and poets in Germany were
the first to embrace myth with rapture, identifying it with reality in
the same way as they identified poetry with truth: from then on
"they sawall things in a new shape. They could not return to the
common world-the world of the
pro/anum vulgus.
m
The cultism of
myth is patently a revival of romantic longings and attitudes.
It seems as if in the modern world there is no having done with
romanticism-no having done with it because of its enormous re–
sourcefulness in accommodating the neo-primitivistic urge that per–
vades our culture, in providing it with objects of nostalgia upon which
to fasten and haunting forms of the past that it can fill with its own
content. And the literary sensibility, disquieted by the effects of the
growing division of labor and the differentiation of consciousness, is
of course especially responsive to the vision of the lost unities and
simplicities of times past. Now myth, the appeal of which lies pre–
cisely in its archaism, promises above all to heal the wounds of time.
For the one essential function of myth stressed by all writers is that
in merging past and present it releases us from the flux of temporality,
arresting change in the timeless, the permanent, the ever-recurrent
conceived as "sacred repetition." Hence the mythic is the polar oppo–
site of what we mean by the historical, which stands for process, inex–
orable change, incessant permutation and innovation. Myth is reas–
suring in its stability, whereas history is that powerhouse of change
which destroys custom and tradition in producing the future-the
future that at present, with the fading away of the optimism of pro–
gress, many have learned to associate with the danger and menace
of the unknown. In our time the movement of history has been so
rapid that the mind longs for nothing so much as something perma–
nent to steady it. Hence what the craze for myth represents most of
all is the fear of history. But of that later. First let us turn to the
genetic approach to myth developed by the scholars in this field, com–
paring it with some of the literary notions which, by infusing myth
with the qualities that properly belong to art, have brought about
widespread confusion as to the differences between the mythic and
the aesthetic mode of expression.
The most commonly accepted theory among scholars is the so–
called ritual theory defining myth as a narrative linked with a rite.
