ABSTRACT
The consummatory myth, as Philip Wheelwright conceive it, is a product of a somewhat late and sophisticated stage of cultural development: a post-romantic attempt to recapture the lost innocence of the primitive mythopoeic attitude by transcending the narrative, logical, and linguistic forms which romantic mythologizing accepts and utilizes. The nature of myth is so stubbornly opposed to the nature of these sterner disciplines as to appear, from the empirio-logical standpoint, arbitrary and false. Primitive myths may be regarded as the early expressions of man's storytelling urge so far as it is still conditioned by such proto-linguistic tendencies as diaphoric ambiguity and the several kinds of sentential polarity. Later myths, and later retellings of die earlier myths, betray their essentially romantic character by die degree to which such semantic fluidity and plenitude have been exchanged for tidier narratives relying on firmer grammatical, logical, and causal relationships.
