Savitri

    VI

Legends and Myths

      It should be remembered that myths, legends and symbols shade into one another and they are the creations of man, especially poetic man, awake, alert, inquiring and responsive. A.E. (George Russell) wisely says:

      The myths were born

      Out of the spirit of man and drew their meaning

      From that unplumbed profundity...

      ...Yet from fleeting voices

      And visionary lights a meaning came

      That made myth contemporary. And those

      Who read may find titans and king within

      Themselves.¹⁸

      The notion that myths, legends, symbols belong to the childhood of the human race, that humanity in its supposed present adulthood has no use for them, dies hard. But nothing can be further from the truth. George Santayana rightly points out that, "a good mythology cannot be produced without much culture and intelligence. Stupidity is not poetical...A developed mythology shows that man has taken a deep and active interest both in the world and in himself, and has tried to link the two, and interpret the one by the other. Myth is therefore a natural prologue to philosophy, since the love of ideas is the root of both."¹⁹

      But the text doesn't invalidate the prologue; it is often the prologue that offers the real key to the text. A myth like the legendary story of Savitri redeeming Satyavan from the clutches of Yama or of angered Rudra reducing Kama the God of love to a handful of ashes is, in its own sovereign right, an utter rendering of reality, "an ideal interpretation in which the phenomena are digested and transmuted into human energy, into imaginative tissue",²⁰ bearing the same relation to dialectical discourse or philosophical

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statement as a tragedy by Aeschylus bears to an exposition by Socrates.²¹ Max Muller asserted that, "There is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth."²² Modern writers like Joyce, Eliot, Gide and Camus have felt the need for myths appropriate to our times, and Herbert Read categorically observes:

.. .the farther science penetrates into the mystery of life, the more

it reverts to a mythological world. I refer more particularly to the

science of the individual psyche, where all science culminates; for

we know nothing unless we know ourselves. And the more we

learn about ourselves by the objective methods of observation

and analysis, the more we realise that our knowledge is already

crystallised in the ancient myths.. .Myths that were dead are now

alive again, and it may be that in the course of time all the old gods

and heroes, that for centuries peopled and pacified the minds of

men, will return and resume their symbolic functions.²³

It may be that with too many people talking far too often on far too many inessential or superficial things the edges of myths tend to get blunted, the sharp scent of their meaning to be generally diffused if not wholly lost, the shock of recognition to be tamed beyond notice, but Ernest Cassirer finds even in this an advantage, for, under the altered conditions of "civilised existence" today "word and mythic image... have become a light, bright ether in which the spirit can move without let or hindrance."²⁴

      Myths, then, and legendary stories based upon them, have a connotative richness, an endless capacity for extension in significance, and an unbelievable capacity for survival even in a scientific and technological age, perhaps more so now than at other times. The mind returns to the myths, and their bank balance of meaning seems to run no danger of exhaustion. Eliot's recent plays are an attempt to recapture the meaning of the Eumenides, the Alcestis, the Ion and Oedipus Coloneus in a contemporary context; Jean Anouilh

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has likewise sought inspiration in the legendary or mythical stories of Antigone, Medea and Eurydice; other dramatists too—Andre Gide, Jean Giradoux, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Cocteau, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Jack Richardson—have found the ancient Greek myths susceptible to transplantation on the soil of our uncertain, agonised, tortuous modern consciousness.

      Dr Richards is thus right in describing the 'saner and greater' mythologies as, "The utterance of the whole soul of man and, as such, inexhaustible to meditation.. .Through such mythologies our will is collected, our powers unified, our growth controlled... Without his mythogies man is only a cruel animal without a soul—for a soul is a central part of his governing mythology—he is a congeries of possibilities without order and without aim."²⁵ Seminal myths are sources of knowledge, not scientific or experimental knowledge but the knowledge that comes from a renewal of experience,²⁶ and without such knowledge man is but a mass of blind energies.

      While myths may no doubt be read literally (and perhaps dismissed), or interpreted allegorically as a poetic shorthand for the physical sciences attempting "an expression in imaginative terms of the goings-on of the universe", there are more rewarding approaches still, namely the moral and psychological and the analogical and symbolical. The 'moral' and 'psychological' approach attempts to find in myths what John Masefield has called (though in a Shakespearian context) lessons in "deportment on life's scaffold", looking at mythology as though it is but "an exteriorisation of events in the psyche".²⁷ The analogical-symbolic approach is really the true spiritual approach, the way of seeking the straight and narrow gate that opens to the "interior countries" and the blissful home of ultimate Reality.

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