lity or significance it takes root all
the more firmly side by side with knowledge. There are many subjects of
which man is naturally so ignorant that only mythical notions can seem
to do them justice; such, for instance, are the minds of other men.
Myth remains for this reason a constituent part even of the most
rational consciousness, and what can at present be profitably attempted
is not so much to abolish myth as to become aware of its mythical
character.

The mark of a myth is that it does not interpret a phenomenon in terms
capable of being subsumed under the same category with that phenomenon
itself, but fills it out instead with images that could never appear
side by side with it or complete it on its own plane of existence. Thus
if meditating on the moon I conceive her other side or the aspect she
would wear if I were travelling on her surface, or the position she
would assume in relation to the earth if viewed from some other planet,
or the structure she would disclose could she be cut in halves, my
thinking, however fanciful, would be on the scientific plane and not
mythical, for it would forecast possible perceptions, complementary to
those I am trying to enlarge. If, on the other hand, I say the moon is
the sun's sister, that she carries a silver bow, that she is a virgin
and once looked lovingly on the sleeping Endymion, only the fool never
knew it--my lucubration is mythical; for I do not pretend that this
embroidery on the aspects which the moon actually wears in my feeling
and in the interstices of my thoughts could ever be translated into
perceptions making one system with the present image. By going closer to
that disc I should not see the silver bow, nor by retreating in time
should I come to the moment when the sun and moon were actually born of
Latona. The elements are incongruous and do not form one existence but
two, the first sensible, the other only to be enacted dramatically, and
having at best to the first the relation of an experience to its symbol.
These fancies are not fore-tastes of possible perceptions, but are free
interpretations or translations of the perceptions I have actually had.

Mythical thinking has its roots in reality, but, like a plant, touches
the ground only at one end. It stands unmoved and flowers wantonly into
the air, transmuting into unexpected and richer forms the substances it
sucks from the soil. It is therefore a fruit of experience, an ornament,
a proof of anima