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Müller’s theory was the most elaborate attempt to account for the mechanics of personification. Among the “Anthropologists” it was, more easily, simply assumed that savages and poets tend to attribute souls to things and to personify.‡ The childlike fantasy of primitive man, his poetic feeling and morbid, dream-ridden imagination, played into his attempts to describe and explain the world around him, and thus produced a phantasmagoric counter-world. But the savage’s effort, at the core, was to discover the causes of things, and then, through spells, prayer, sacrifice, and sacrament, to control them. Mythology, therefore, was only a false etiology; ceremonial a misguided technology. With the gradual, unmethodical, but nevertheless inevitable recognition of error upon error, man progressed through the labyrinth of wonder to the clearer headed stand of to-day.*

Another view (and it rather supplemented than contradicted the descriptive-etiological theory) represented primitive man as terrified by the presences of the grave, hence ever anxious to propitiate and turn them away. The roots of myth and ritual went down to the black subsoil of the grave-cult and fear of death.†

A fourth viewpoint was propounded by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. He argued that the collective superexcitation (surexcitation) of clan, tribal, and intertribal gatherings was experienced by every participating member of the group as an impersonal, infectious power (mana); and this power would be thought to emanate from the clan or tribal emblem (totem); and this emblem, therefore, would be set apart from all other objects as filled with mana (sacred vs. profane). This totem, this first cult object, would then infect with mana all associated objects, and through this contagion there would come into being a system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, uniting in a single moral community all believers.‡ The great contribution of Durkheim’s theory, and what set it apart from all that had gone before, was that it represented religion not as a morbid exaggeration, false hypothesis, or unenlightened fear, but as a truth emotionally experienced, the truth of the relationship of the individual to the group.

This recognition by Durkheim of a kind of truth at the root of the image-world of myth is supported, expanded, and deepened, by the demonstration of the psychoanalysts that dreams are precipitations of unconscious desires, ideals, and fears, and furthermore, that the images of dream resemble—broadly, but then frequently to the detail—the motifs of folk tale and myth. Having selected for their study the symbol-inventing, myth-motif-producing level of the psyche—source of all those universal themes (“Elementary Ideas”) which men have read into the phenomena of nature, into the shadows of the tomb, the lives of the heroes, and the emblems of society—, the psychoanalysts have undoubtedly touched the central moment of the multifarious problem. In the light of their discussion, theories which before seemed mutually contradictory become easily coordinated. Man, nature, death, society—these have served simply as fields into which dream-meanings have been projected. Hence the references of the wild motifs are not really (no matter what the rationalizing consciousness may believe) to the sun, the moon, the stars—the wind and thunder—the grave—the hero—or even the power of the group, but through these, back again to a state of the psyche. Mythology is psychology, misread as cosmology, history, and biography.

A still further step can and must be taken, however, before we shall have reached the bounds of the problem. Myth, as the psychoanalysts declare, is not a mess of errors; myth is a picture language. But the language has to be studied to be read. In the first place, this language is the native speech of dream. But in the second place, it has been studied, clarified, and enriched by the poets, prophets, and visionaries of untold millenniums. Dante, Aquinas and Augustine, al-Ghazali and Mahomet, Zarathustra, Shankārachārya, Nāgārjuna, and T