The myth of the birth of the hero : a psychological interpretation of mythology / by Otto Rank ; authorized translation by Drs. F. Robbins and Smith Ely Jelliffe.

  • Otto Rank
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The myth of the birth of the hero : a psychological interpretation of mythology / by Otto Rank ; authorized translation by Drs. F. Robbins and Smith Ely Jelliffe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    heavens ;^^ or if, on the contrary, readymade tales of an entirely different [but presumably psychic] origin were only subsequently transferred to the heavenly bodies. Ehrenreich (General Myth- ology, 19ID, p. 104) makes a more positive admission: The mytho- logic evolution certainly begins on a terrestrian soil, in so far as experiences must first be gathered in the immediate surroundings before they can be projected into the heavenly universe. And Wundt tells us (loc. cit., p. 282) that the theory of the evolu- tion of mythology according to which it first originates in the heavens whence at a later period it descends to earth, is not only contradictory to the history of the myth, which is unaware of such a migration, but is likewise contradictory to the psy- chology of m)rth-formation which must repudiate this transloca- tion as internally impossible. We are also convinced that the myths,^^ originally at least, are structures of the human faculty of imagination, which at some time were projected for certain reasons upon the heavens,^ and may be secondarily transferred to the heavenly bodies, with their enigmatical phenomena. The signifi- cance of the unmistakeable traces which this transference has im- printed upon the myths, as the fixed figures, and so forth, must by no means be underrated, although the origin of these figures was possibly psychic in character, and they were subsequently made the basis of the almanac and firmament calculations, precisely on account of this significance. In a general way it would seem as if those investigators who make use of an exclusively natural mythological mode of in- terpretation, in any sense, were unable, in their endeavor to dis- cover the original sense of the mythical tales, to get entirely away from a psychological process, such as must be assumed likewise for the creators of the myths.^* The motive is identical, and led Stucken [Mose, p. 432] says in this sense. The myth transmitted by the ancestors was transferred to natural processes and interpreted in a naturalistic way, not vice versa. Interpretation of nature is a motive in itself [p. 633, annotation]. In a very similar way, we read in Meyer's History of Antiquity, Vol. V, p. 48: In many cases, the natural symbolism, sought in the myths, is only apparently present or has been secondarily
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