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that a myth is only “living” when it “supplies models for human behavior
and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life.” 41 Another way to put
this would be to say that myth is always a symbolic ordering of reality that
elevates and secures those supreme human values which anchor a particular
culture's existence. It provides a basic “meaning and orientation,” to borrow
a phrase from Jacques Ellul, that creates a “topography of the world,” an
“organization of action in a space, and at the same time . . . the establish-
ment of a geography of that space in which the action can be undertaken,”
and, more importantly, in which the human experience of good and evil
can be meaningfully interpreted. 42
Whether this sacred reality is otherworldly, as it is in traditional reli-
gious thought, or immanent, as it has tended to be in modernist redac-
tions, its conceptualization will always depend upon a metaphorical mode
of imagining to the extent that it posits an essential reality beyond the reach
of any simpler cognition—a noumenal that is not equal to any of its phe-
nomenal referents. Mythic consciousness always entails thought stretching
beyond itself, from the realm of ordinary being into the realm of the “other.”
Looked at this way, the loss of tension between tenor and vehicle that Mac-
Cormac identifies as myth's defining feature makes sense, not because it is
definitive but because it describes a linguistic pattern that is necessary for
communicating higher meanings.
Metaphor is always a way of “seeing through.” When we look out upon
the earth though an airplane window, we are in some sense looking at two
things, a windowpane and the visage of the terrestrial landscape that it medi-
ates. The passenger has the power to choose which of these objects will have
presence. One can alternate between looking at the windowpane and through
it, but most of the time one simply forgets the window. In such instances it
becomes “empty” of meaning, as Roland Barthes has said of mythic symbol-
ism, so that one loses sight of its role in mediating what is seen through it. 43
It is likewise this transparency in metaphorical vehicles that naturalizes their
signification. In this, Barthes writes, we reach “the very principle of myth: it
transforms history into nature.” The reader of myth experiences it as “inno-
cent speech: not because its intentions are hidden . . . but because they are
nat uralized.” 44 The playful intentionality of the metaphorical imagination
disappears when metaphor becomes myth. Rather than treating B “as if” it
were A, the mythic thinker will have collapsed A and B. The linguistic ten-
sion that preserves this “as if” sense will have ceased to operate.
What authorizes such transformations will differ from one culture to
the next. The special role played by the dominant windows of metaphor
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