to people, in which process their ætiological character has been lost or obscured.
The classification of narratives, then, which I propose is into historical traditions, myths, and tales. According to my use of the word, a myth is the pure product of the human imagination, an attempt to express the wonderful and the mysterious.
My definition of myth does not include a frequent feature of narratives in which actions or sayings are assigned to persons other than the real agent. Wonderful stories tend to cluster round the lives of exceptional men and round superhuman beings, and such stories are often called myths, but, except in so far as they help to show the divine or superhuman character of the being to whom they are attributed and thus assist in accounting for the mysteries of the universe, they would not come under my definition.
I may point out that my mode of defining myth corresponds closely with that of current English usage as indicated by the definition of Murray's dictionary, viz. "a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena." My usage is more definite in its omission of the qualification beginning with the word "usually," and it has the advantage of avoiding the ambiguous word "supernatural," but the two agree in the important point that the term applies to all natural or historical, i.e. social, phenomena.
My definition also agrees in essence with current German usage as indicated by Bockh's Encyclopaedie, which is accepted by Ehrenreich,[1] viz. "der sinnliche in Personifikationen gegebene Ausdruck der gesammten ethischen und physischen Erkenntnis." Here again the word is made to cover the whole of human experience, and it also clearly implies the explanatory purpose of myth. The definition might be freely translated "the concrete expression of
- ↑ Die allgemeine Mythologie, Leipzig, 1910, p. 6.
