scholia - University of Otago

INVENTION, GUILT AND THE FALL FROM INNOCENCE:
REFLECTIONS ON THE ROLE OF FEELING IN MYTH 1
T. E. Knight
Department of Religious Studies, Classics and Philosophy, University of Zimbabwe
Mount Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe
Abstract. As an expression of the psychic faculty identified by Jung as the feeling-function,
myth is a narration of feeling-toned judgements about common experience. Psychologically
considered, primary cultural values subsist in the story-teller and his audience as complexes
of feelings, which myth expounds rationally as narrative. A comparative study of African and
Greek myths reveals that the Promethean myth describes a species of guilt, appearing in
llesiod as a feeling of exi:.tc;ntial retribution.
It is often fashionable among classicists to speak of 'mythic thought' as a
prelogical form of discourse. 2 This conception of myth attributes rational or
proto-scientific motives to the tellers of stories which none the less 'often
appeal', as H. J. Rose put it, 'to the emotions rather than to reason'. 3 The
structuralist treatment of myth altogether discounts the presence of feeling in
mythic narrative with the claim that myth is a logical system in its own right. 4
In this approach, unconscious forms of intellection supply the motive for a
narrati ve whose meanings merge into the schematic exposition of the
1 I wish to thank the Editor and the Editorial Committee of Scholia, and most particularly
the referees, for their encouragement and help with the present paper. Thanks also are due to
my colleagues and friends at Chancellor College in Malawi for their helpful comments on a
first draft.
2 E.g., F. M. Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy (Cambridge 1950) 42; W. K. C.
Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy I (Cambridge 1962) 29. This view is criticized by G.
S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley 1970)
238-5 1.
-' In M. Cary et a/. (edd.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary (London 1949) 594 s.v.
'Mythology'. E. Cassirer (tr. R. Mannheim), The Philosophy of Symbolic Fonns 2: Mythical
111ougltt (New Haven 1955) 69 romanticizes the role of emotion in the elaboration of mythic
thought; cf. the critique by Kirk [2] 263-68 of Cassirer.
4 Cf. C. Levy-Strauss (trr. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf), Structural Anthropology
(London 1968) 229f.: 'The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of
overcoming contradictions .... The kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of
modern science'. For a critical appraisal of Levy-Strauss's methods and logic, cf. C. Hubbard,
'Levy-Strauss: An Anthropological Critique', in A . Cunningham (ed.), The Theory of Myth
(London 1973) 79-103.
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