s. As such, myths cannot be viewed as irrational by
the common consciousness in which they originated, and by which they
were accepted and transmitted, any more than they were regarded as
immoral.

Obviously, the common consciousness which produces mythology cannot
pronounce the myths, when it produces them, and accepts them, absurd.
On the contrary, they are rational, in its eyes, and according to its
level of understanding, however absurd the growth of knowledge may
eventually show them to be. Myths, then, in their origin, are told and
heard, narrated and accepted, as rational and intelligible. As
narrated, they are narratives: can we say that they are anything more?
or are they tales told simply for the pleasure of telling? Tales of
this latter kind, pure fiction, are to be found wherever man is. But,
we have already seen some points in which myths differ from tales of
this kind: in fiction the artist creates his hero, but in myths the
being superior to man, of whom the story is told is not the creation
of the teller of the tale; he is a being known to the community to
exist. Another point of difference is that a myth belongs to the god
of whom it is told and cannot properly be told of any other god. These
are two respects in which the imagination is limited, two points on
which, in the case of myths, the creative imagination is, so to speak,
nailed down. Is it subject to any further restriction in the case of
myths? Granted that an adventure, when once it has been set down to
one god, may not be set down to another, is the creative imagination
free, in the case of mythology, as it is in the case of pure fiction,
to invent the incidents and adventures, which eventually--in a lexicon
of mythology--go to make up the biography of the god? The freedom, it
appears, is of a strictly limited character.

It is an induction, as wide as the world--being based on mythologies
from all parts of the world--that myths are aetiological, that their
purpose is to give the reason of things, to explain the origin of
fire, agriculture, civilisation, the world--of anything, in fact, that
to the savage seems to require explanation. In the animistic period,
man found gods everywhere because everywhere he was looking for gods.
To every object that arrested his attention, in the external world, he
put, or might put, the question, 'Art thou there?' Every happening
that arrested the attention of a whole community, and provoked from
the common