mythbetween ritual and myth. When a myth migrates from one culture to
another, for instance, it is not connected to any ritual.
If many of the scholars reviewed want to replace religion with some-
thing more enlightening, Müller calls for a science of religion, which is
the last of the sciences to be developed. Müller’s science of religion
would be historical and trace the evolution of its subject, and it would
also be inductive and adhere to the laws of causation. For Müller, the
early development of religion is characterized by sacred human speech,
giving religion and language an intimate connection. If there is thus a
genetic relationship between languages, Müller thinks that the same
should hold true for religions of the world. He is convinced that the lan-
guage of religion possesses a dialectic nature that helps to explain the
decay of religion. Therefore, myth represents a disease of language,
which degenerates from an original monotheism.
A different perspective is offered by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939),
who stresses the social nature of myth, which he thinks expresses the
social solidarity of a group and that of surrounding groups. In addition to
social solidarity, myth reflects a native imagination that is impressed by
natural phenomena. Lévy-Bruhl is primarily concerned about myth for
what it teaches about what he calls “primitive mentality,” which he argues
is different from that of Europeans because primitive minds are prelogi-
cal, or indifferent to the laws of logical contradiction. This means that
so-called primitives possess minds that are concerned with collective rep-
resentations, manifest a mystic mentality, and are pervaded by a sense of
affectional participation, or a feeling of connectedness with other persons
and objects that results in the data of experience flowing together and
associating with each other in many complex ways rather than being
regulated by strictly cause and effect relationships. There are, for instance,
people who think of themselves as animals or birds, such as the Bororo
of Brazil who call themselves parakeets and humans. Lévy-Bruhl argues
that these kinds of people are not thinking metaphorically or symboli-
cally, but their equation is actual participatory identity.
Philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also make con-
tributions to the conceptualization of myth. For the German philosophers
Hegel and Marx, myth is false consciousness. Another German philoso-
pher Friedrich Nietzsche argues that myth is a pragmatically necessary
fiction, whereas the Neo-Kantian thinker Ernst Cassirer advocates myth
as symbolic thought. Myth, an important life form for Cassier, is a major
mode of cultural objectification and a form of thought and intuition.
In the twentieth century, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who devises the struc-
tural method to study his subject in a scientific manner that includes all
its variants, identifies myth as a structured story. Myths are repetitive,