ABSTRACT
‘Myth’ is a word in process of enlargement. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as: ‘A purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.’ This coincides with ordinary usage. Jove hurling thunderbolts from Olympus, the lost continent of Atlantis, Father Christmas, the Great Sea Serpent, are all ‘myths’. But, already, even in these random examples, there are undertones and overtones showing the direction in which the enlargement is taking place. Jove hurling thunderbolts has become wholly fabulous. He wakes no echoes in our souls. The lost continent of Atlantis is somewhat different. We look on it sceptically perhaps … but, if it were true, it would be very interesting. Father Christmas is pure invention, yet millions of people bring up their children on it; and, moreover, feel it so important that they will go to considerable trouble and expense to enact the myth themselves. Questioned on this strange behaviour they will say that in some way it represents the ‘spirit of Christmas’. As for the Great Sea Serpent, it is of course a sailor’s yarn; but nevertheless there are strange things in the sea. Five miles down, on the sea bottom, there may be extraordinary creatures totally unknown to man, a form of life unguessed at. And when a Loch Ness Monster rears its head, everyone is agog. Why? Because, as we would say, the imagination is moved. And when a hysterical little man with a comic moustache starts talking of blood and soil, of living space, of a mystical unity, Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer, the imagination is again moved; and so moved as to change the whole course of history. The myth itself may be a ‘purely fictitious narrative’. But the living myth is a force.
