ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the literary myths other than by misuse of the term or by external analogy, which to all intents and purposes empties the term of any precise content. Primitive myths were linked to a ritual or to collective behaviour, whereas people's modern mythical images have retained only a few traces of participation; for example in a liturgy or in political rallies such as those of Nuremberg or the First of May. In short, they have to give up the unambiguous concept of the myth and think more in terms of a kind of analogical history of myths. Thus from the single and all-encompassing myth of the primitive group. Thus popular Lutheran religion is the context of the primitive myth of Faust, as popular Catholicism is for Don Juan. All these transformations could act on the oral recitation of the primitive myth, but in literary myths they are multiplied indefinitely.
