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atmet oj? ëa^Ui\ tJlwtfthio ^tmbcüwtóneM by Rebecca L. Briley fvwfliewe "...and the Lord said in His heart, '...While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.' "' So began God's mandate to His creation, and so began the experience of His creation—man's in particular—on earth. Whatever the terms given to describe this reoccuring phenomenon of existence on earth: life, reality, being, all are synonyms for the same single fundamental process set into motion and kept in motion by some supernatural force—whether Christian, pagan, or secular—recognized in every primitive culture from the African tribes to the Indian nations and acknowledged in the known literature of such cultures from the Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran to the mythologies of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations and the folk legends of the Germanic peoples. This conception of powers in the natural world operating like instinct, that is "chthonic 51 powers, divine powers, fates and spells and all mystic agencies, the potency of prayer, ofwill, of love and hate," Susanne Langer points out to be an obvious one. However, these forces involved in the process of birth, life, and death are not ones to be scientifically established or labeled, and when science attempts to do so, the result is less than conclusive.2 Louis Rubin agrees, saying: "Science has stripped the modern world of the possibility for belief, of the possibility for imaginative belief in myth," but as I. A. Richards defends, "Without his mythologies man is only a cruel animal without a soul. ..a congeries of possibilities without order and aim."3 Therefore, this phenomenon, which cannot be measured by mathematical and scientific realities, must be regarded from the philosophical and psychological standpoint, as it is what Hawthorne called "the truths of the human heart."4 Susanne Langer goes on to emphasize that "the business of philosophy is to unravel and organize concepts, to give infinite and satisfactory meanings to the terms we use in talking about the life process. ..in dealing with the age-old problem of 'Being,' " in particular. Philosophers and writers alike must therefore create a symbol, that device whereby abstractions may be experienced, and a language of concrete terms to deal with those abstractions of the life process. That language is myth.5 Claude Levi-Strauss explains that the theological definition of myth is the "expression of unobservable realities in terms of observable phenomena," and goes on to note that "mythology started out as oral tradition associated with religious ritual," that has been "completely divorced from the original religious context" in the process.6 Owen Barfield agrees: "Connexions between discriminate phenomena, connexions which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities." He emphasizes that the connector is mythology, "the ghost of concrete meaning."7 Northrop Frye takes the connection between the life process and mythology one step further. He asserts that the recurrent movement in art is founded on the profound intuition of the natural cycle, and that everything in nature that has some analogy with art, in our way of thinking, stems from the deep "synchronization between an organism and the rhythms of its environment." The expressions of this synchronization in the animal world, as seen in such things as the mating dances of birds, can be regarded as ritual, but in mankind ritual cannot be so much spontaneity as a voluntary effort "to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle."8 Frye goes on to illustrate his point: a farmer's involuntary harvesting of his crops at a certain time of year is not precisely ritual, but the voluntary expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies at that time which produces the folk songs, dances, legends, and customs certainly may be regarded as such. It is in ritual, "a temporal sequence of acts in which the conscious meaning or significance is latent," that the origin of narrative is discovered. Frye concludes that "the myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle." In the cycles of the day...

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