mythsituation, and it thereby can guide one to properly adjust to normative
attitudes, statuses, and roles.
Almost from their inception, myths are believed to refer to that which is
fictitious or imaginatively invented by someone. Not only did Plato compare
myth unfavorably to the truth, but the Romans classify it with fibula or that
which is false. The association of myth with untruth persists for many centu-
ries in the West until the eighteenth century when they are associated with true
stories. According to the French thinker Voltaire (d. 1778), myth is, however,
nothing more than superstition, historical distortion, and false fables. The
modern notion of myth, its rediscovery, and invention can be traced to the
scholarship of Gottlieb Christian Heyne, a German Hellenist scholar, who
rejects assertions that myth is an absurd creation. Instead, he argues for its
evidence as a form of primeval human thinking and ancient examples of
human memory. Many other scholars follow Heyne’s lead, developing elabo-
rate and often conflicting theories about the nature of myth.
Myth is also viewed more favorably by the Italian thinker Vico (d.
1744) in his work The New Science in which he demonstrates the three
ages of humankind that represent a gradual growth of maturity and ratio-
nality until a final stage of decline. The infancy of humankind is the age
of myth, a time in which humans have not discovered themselves because
they attribute all causal action to supernatural beings and express their
understanding about the divine beings and their relations to them in oral
narrations. Although myths have been subject to evolution and degenera-
tion over time, there are original myths that embody a true account of the
experience of humans which are later misappropriated, misunderstood,
corrupted, and falsified. In order to understand myths, they must be
placed in their historical context and reconstructed by semantic, etymo-
logical analysis by an interpreter.
Eighteenth-century German romantic figures, such as Herder (d. 1908)
and Goethe (d. 1832), recognize myth as creative wisdom and a form of
truth. Friedrich Schlegel (d. 1829), a revolutionary literary critic called
the apostle of a new religion by Novalis (d. 1801), conceives of myth as
a unity of thought, art, and belief. Calling for a new mythology because
of its creative and dynamic nature, Schlegel thinks that myth possesses
the ability to transform and transfigure the objective world. The German
philosopher Shelling (d. 1854) also sees the potential of myth because of
its metaphysical importance by serving as the key to the purpose of the
Absolute Spirit. Moreover, myth reconciles the finite with the infinite and
gives an individual an initial glimpse of the pre-established harmony of
the real and ideal worlds because it corresponds to the lower principle in
God. Myth is something experienced, lived, more primary than history,
and an unfolding of the truth.