A Guide to Mythology

What is a myth? This looks like a simple question, and one that ought to be easy to answer. Yet it is one which has puzzled for centuries the heads of many learned men, who in their attempts to give a satisfactory answer to the question, have written whole libraries of profound books on the subject. It would seem almost hopeless for us to try and find an answer, if it were not that we live in the Twentieth Century, which is like a great hilltop towering above all the past centuries; and from this height we are able to look down and see right into the minds of all these learned and distinguished men, and understand why they found the answer to this question so difficult.

Let us try to imagine all the myths which have come into existence since the beginning of the world shut up in a huge round castle in the midst of a wide plain, and all these learned men like knights of the Middle Ages besieging the castle to find out the secrets that are locked up within it. They come, galloping up on horseback from every quarter of the plain—North, East, South, West—carrying long spears with which they batter away at the castle until they succeed in making a hole through the wall. Then each of these knights of learning becomes so intent upon what he sees in the castle through the hole that he, himself, has made that he is entirely unaware of what the other knights see through the holes they have made. Then they all go off and write their learned books, telling what they have seen, and when they come to read each other’s books, of course, they have terrible battles—all of words fortunately—in their attempts to settle who is right, and each one contends that he has seen all there is to be seen through his own particular little spear hole. But we, upon the hilltop can perceive that every one of the knights saw something about myths which was true, and the way to find the answer we want is to piece together all the fractions of truth which each man saw into a whole truth, or something near a whole truth, for, you know, the whole truth about anything is so immense that it is almost if not quite impossible to find it all out.