Myth, Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (review)

272 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY But those comparisons are ruled out on the theory that the forms are the world. Gunnell has not, I believe, resolved the issue of whether the relationship between the natural world and the symbolic world is a natural one or a (merely) symbolic one, and this leaves a tension in his work which he resolves only by arbitrarily taking one side and then another. STANLEY M. DAUGERT Western Washington State College Myth, Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures. By G. S. Kirk. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1970. Pp. xii+299. $7.95) Why is myth of such compelling interest? All mythographers have addressed themselves to that question. The trouble is they have tended to make myths in the act of interpreting them. In Frazer and Jane Harrison, not to mention the even freer fancies of Robert Graves, one sees sacrificial kings and great mothers rutting in new plowed furrows behind ritual facades in every myth. There may be partial historical truth in this, but it leaves the strange fascination myth has for us untouched. Mythographers like Levi-Strauss or Eliade address themselves more specifically to our psychological problems with myth, and in consequence large scale philosophical theories about the meaning of social life and its relation to the cosmos are invoked as ways of translating myth into current idiom. Thus Levi-Strauss sees large-scale polarities in human life, like that between the social and the wild, the ruled and the lawless, the civilized and natural, the raw and the cooked, exemplified in virtually every cosmology under the sun. These theories have the same kind of fascination as the myths themselves. They speak to universals of human experience--love and strife, community and individuality, generation and corruption. It is no great task to read these themes into tales, ancient or modern. All the same such mythography is literary criticism. It explains the value of the stories to us. Does it also explain the genesis or historical use of myth? Most mythographers say so, and rely on the ubiquity of certain story-types and themes to give historical force to their literary exegeses. However widely their interpretations vary, all of them manage to make justificatory use of that fact. That has to make us wonder. Consider just one case--the flood. We never hear the end of the remarkable diffusion of that story--including places as remote from the possibility of flood as the globe affords. Well, did the story get carried about in the course of migration and trade? Or does it represent some common idea of catastrophe, some obscure reference to amniotic fluid, some racial memory, ritual device, or astronomical observation ~ indigenous to all the tribes of men? How can one do other than despair in the face of such a question? For one thing these explanations are surely compatible, as anthropologists after their tiresome battle over diffusion came to realize. For another, though the ubiquity of a myth, and par- ! 1 This last according to the recent remarkable affair with mythmaking by Giorgio di Santillana and Bertha yon Dechend in Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, Inc., 1969), where the authors suggest that myths tell a story in codes about the movements of sun, moon and planets, and a more awesome tale about the precession of the equinoxes. No one will challenge the authors' ingenuity, but their interpretation does require us to believe that at least three to four thousand years before Hipparchos, neolithic farmers knew that the pole shifted among the stars and that the sun's position at any point in the year slipped backward at approximately one zodiacal sign per 2000 years. BOOK REVIEWS 273 ticularly its localization in contexts that make its terms almost unintelligible, is a fascinating question, it is not clear how we could have the means to answer it. What we have of myth except for cases of living tales (i.e., told and believed by a community), is always and by admission late compilation, itself (more than likely) an interpretation of some long tortuous affair of oral hand-me-downs, and therefore more on a par with mythography than with...