The Palaeolithic Myth

Jung once misquoted a monk from Lerins, claiming that he defined myth as ‘what is believed everywhere, always, by all’. In reality, the monk, Vincent of Lerins, was trying to develop a formula for determining true doctrines from false. In any case, I like it as a definition of myth (probably for the same reasons that Jung did) because it captures the way in which myth is inescapable as a sort of background assumption. Jung goes on to say that a man can live without myth, but that it would not be an easy thing to do:

The man who thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, is an exception. He is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He does not live in a house like other men, does not eat and drink like other men, but lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth. This plaything of his reason never grips his vitals. It may occasionally lie heavy on his stomach, for that organ is apt to reject the products of reason as indigestible. The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of…