There are many ways to myth, yet no clear path, no estabished discipline by which to begin a study of myth.
|
|
|
|
No discipline has fully ignored myth; no discipline does myth justice. A study of myth can be found in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, theology, literature, and even, law. It is not the absence of myth as a study, says Ernst Cassier, that makes our inquiry into myth so daunting, but rather that we are faced with an abundance of speculation. With such far ranging disciplinary attention to myth, how have we come to have so little mythic sensibility? It would be well to remember: "We cannot expect . . . any one-to-one correspondence between our logical forms of thought and the forms of mythical thought. But if there were no connection at all, if they were moving on entirely different planes, every attempt to understand myth would be doomed to failure." [Ernst Cassier, The Myth of the State 5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946)]. Myths are like dreams, always with us, forever excluded from the immediacy of modern everyday life.
|
disciplines and
understanding myth