The first line of cleavage of narratives and of their elements, then, is into the historical and the imaginative. The latter class may be further broken up into two main sections, viz. those which purport to give an account of or explain any portion of the universe, and those which have no such purpose but are purely fictive, and I propose to distinguish these two sections as myth and fiction respectively. According to this mode of classification a myth is a narrative which gives an account of the coming into being of man himself or of any feature of his environment, natural or social.[1] Not only will it include narratives which account for and justify man's religious practices, and thus extend to all which describe the doings of gods and serve to explain the general character as well as the details of ritual, but it will also include narratives which tell how there arose features and motions of any objects in sky, sea, or land. It will range in its connotation from the most elaborate doings of a god, in so far as these are not historical, to the origin of the elephant's trunk or the cause of a cleft in a rock.
I am not concerned in this paper with the group of narratives I include under fiction, and need only say that, though they often take the form of tales which give an account of events supposed to have happened, they differ from myths in having no explanatory motive. Their purpose is purely æsthetic, and, though such fictive tales undoubtedly exist among people of rude culture, they are probably less frequent and less important than among the civilised. Only one point need be noted here, viz. that a large proportion of the narratives of lowly culture are probably myths which have been transmitted from people
- ↑ This definition limits the term "myth" to narratives which have an cetiological or explanatory motive. I have, however, expressly avoided the use of the word "explain" in the definition, because this term bears a rationalistic connotation which makes it a very inexact means of expressing the mental attitude of those among whom myths arise. For want of a fully appropriate word, however, I shall speak of myths as explanatory in the general body of the paper.
