The Organization of Myth
from other kinds of folktale; still it is worthwhile to reflect, first of all, on the fundamental consequences of this thesis: if myth is a traditional tale, it is a phenomenon of language, and not some special creation analogous to and outside of normal language, as has been maintained from Mann-hardt to Susanne Langer, and if myth is a traditional tale, this should at a stroke dispose of the question which has dominated scholarly mythology ever since Antiquity: 'How is myth created, and by whom?" It is not the"creation," not the 'origin' of myth which constitutes the basic fact, but the transmission and preservation, even without the use of writing in a primitive, oral civilization.
Whatever creative agents have been proposed to account for the origin of myths, whether inspired poets or lying poets, 'Valergeist, the universal human mind, or the unconscious dynamics of the psyche," they seem to belong rather to a creation myth of myth than to a rational approach.
A tale becomes traditional not by virtue of being created, but by being retold and accepted; transmission means interaction, and this process is not explained by isolating just one side. A tale "created'--that is, invented by an individual author may somehow become "myth' if it becomes traditional, to be used as a means of communication in subsequent generations," usually with some distortions and reelaborations.
At any rate, it is a face chat there are tradicional tales in most primitive and even in advanced societies, handed down in a continuous chain of transmission, suffering from omissions and misinterpretations but still maintaining a certain identity and some power of regeneration. The fundamental questions thus would be: How, and to what extent, can traditional tales retain their identity through many stages of telling and retelling, especially in oral transmission, and what, if any, is the role and function of such tales in the evolution of human civilization?
But what is a tale? If, dealing with language, we adopt the triple division worked out by analytical philosophy and linguistics of sign, sense, and reference," a tale belongs evidently to the category of sense, as against an individual text on the one side, and reality on the other. It is taken for granted that cales can be translated without loss or damage: they are therefore not dependent on any particular language; and even within one language the same tale can be told in quite different ways, in longer or in shorter versions, with more or less of detail and of imaginative situations.
Thus, within Greek literature, the same myth may appear in such diverse forms as a book of Homer, a digression in Pindar, a whole tragedy, an allusion in a choral ode, a passage in Apollodorus, or a scholion on Aristophanes.
A myth, qua tale, is not identical with any given text; the interpretation of myth therefore is to be distinguished from the interpretation of a text, though both may evolve in a hermeneutic circle and remain mutually dependent on each other. We know, after all, that we can remember a good tale, and a myth, by hearing it just once, without memorizing the words of a text.
What is it, then, that we do remember?
It is not anything "real.' A tale, while not bound to any given text, is not bound to pragmatic reality either. I think this holds true on quite a fundamental level. A tale has no immediate reference, l in contrast to a word or an atomic sentence: this is a rose, this is red, this rose is red.
Burkert, W. (1982). Structure and history in Greek mythology and ritual (No. 47). Univ of California Press.
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