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Updated: May 5, 2025
Throughout the whole myth-making period a progression may be recognized in the character of the myths: from the earlier animal and human creators we pass to the higher anthropomorphic forms, the great gods; there is increased literary excellence, a molding and a remolding of the old crude stories, with a combination of them into well-ordered histories; they are constantly modified by the growing acquaintance with the laws of nature and by the higher intellectual conceptions of the deity; and they are more and more infused with ethical significance.
In dreams of this character we find it necessary to predicate a creative, myth-making tendency in the structure of the mind by means of which currents of life flowing beneath all thought become articulate. Coming now to examples of reasoning by analogy directly expressive of the desire for maternity, I wish to make still more plain my view of the reason for symbolism.
The great myths; that is to say, myths made by great people. For the first plain fact about myth-making is one which has been most strangely lost sight of, that you cannot make a myth unless you have something to make it of. You cannot tell a secret which you don't know. If the myth is about the sky, it must have been made by somebody who has looked at the sky.
It is to be remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive superstition.
The Greek conquest was the one Rome did not survive. Conquered Greece overflowed her, and washed her out; changed her traditions, her religion, the whole color of her life. If Greece had not stepped in, myth-making and euhemerizing, who would have saved the day at Lake Regillus? Not the Great Twin Brothers from lordly Lace-daemon, be sure. Who then? Some queer uncouth Italian nature-spirit gods?
Within a couple of centuries after his death Charlemagne became the centre of innumerable legends; and the myth-making process does not seem to have been sensibly interfered with by the existence of sober and truthful histories of the Emperor and of the times which immediately preceded and followed his reign, by a contemporary writer who occupied a high and confidential position in his court, and in that of his successor.
I submit, with great respect, that my Artificer comes a little less out of the blue than his Invisible King that is all I claim for him. But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not without indignation. Myth-making, he declares, is not the order of the day. Had he wanted to indulge in myth-making, he could easily have found some metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King.
He lives, in fact, we are told by the authorities on the subject, in the myth-making period of the world; in the period when such incidents as occur in the tales of fairyland and in the stories of mythology are matter of common belief, and even, it is thought, of common experience, so that when the story is put in a good form, it lives and is believed as a true record of what has actually taken place.
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