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.But theman who lived under the tree said, "What both of you havesaid is true.But the fact is that the creature is sometimes red,sometimes green, sometimes yellow, and sometimes has nocolor at all." 2Every student of comparative mythology knows that when theorthodox mind talks and writes of God the nations go asunder;the deÅ›%2Å‚, the local, historical, ethical aspect of the cult symbol istaken with absolute seriousness and the chameleon is green, notred.Whereas, when the mystics talk, no matter what their deÅ›%2Å‚,their words in a profound sense meet and the nations too.Thenames of Shiva, Allah, Buddha, and Christ lose their historicalforce and come together as adequate pointers of a way (mârga)that all must go who would transcend their time-bound, earth-bound faculties and limitations.We have summarized in Parts Two to Four the history and 464 PRI MI TI VE MYTHOLOGYdistribution of the mythological forms according to the plane ofinterest of history and ethnology.It remains now to indicate verybriefly the psychological levels in terms of which symbols areexperienced and utilized.And here it will be useful to turn toIndia for a system of classification.For in India, where an essentially psychological orientation to the forms of myth has prevailedfor millenniums in the disciplines of yoga, and a vast number ofnative and alien cults have existed side by side, a cross-cultural,non-sectarian, syncretic analysis of myth and ritual in psychological terms has yielded a number of very clear, well-defined ordersof comparative interpretation of which we may choose thesimplest for our present introductory sketch of a unitary mythological science.n.The Bondages of Love, Power, and VirtueIn classical Indian philosophy a distinction is made between theends for which men strive in the world and the aim of absoluterelease from these ends.The ends for which men strive in theworld are three no more, no less; namely: love and pleasure(kma), power and success (artha: pronounced "art-ha"), andlawful order and moral virtue (dharma).The first, kma, corresponds to the aim or interest conceived byFreud to be fundamental to all life and thought, and as a vastliterature of psychoanalytic research now lets us know anyonemotivated by this urge, whether he be the patient or the doctor,sees sex in everything and everything in sex.The symbolism ofmythology, like the world itself, means sex and nothing else tosuch a psyche: food, shelter, sex, and parenthood.And all mythology and cult then (including the cult of psychoanalysis itself) issimply a means to the harmonious realization of this vegetal system of interests.The second category of worldly aims, artha, "power and success," corresponds to that conceived by the philosophy of Fried-rich Nietzsche and the later psychology of Alfred Adler 3 to bethe fundamental impulse and interest of all life and thought; andagain, we have a considerable clinical literature to let us knowthat any psyche fully mastered by this drive, desiring to conquer, THE FUNCTI ONI NG OF MYTH 465eat, consume, and turn all things into itself or into its own, discovers in the myths, gods, and rituals of religion, no more thansupernatural means for self- and tribal aggrandizement.These two systems of interest, then the erotic and aggressive may be taken to represent, together, the sum of man'sprimary biological urges.They do not have to be infused; they areimplicit at birth and supply the animal foundations of all experience and reaction.We have already observed that in many animal species the innate releasing mechanisms (IRMs) respond immediately and appropriately to specific stimuli of which the individual animal inquestion has had no previous experience, the reacting, "knowing"subject in such cases being not the individual but the species;whereas in others an individual experience (an "imprint") supplies the sign stimulus to which the affected IRM thereafter responds.And we have observed, further, that in the species manthe majority of the responses are to sign stimuli established byimprint.But then we found that such imprints are in large measureconstant to the species, so that a considerable series can be namedof fundamental imprints or engrams to which the whole raceresponds.In other words, we found that there are certain fundamental biological urges ingrained from birth in the human centralnervous system and that these are released by sign stimuli which,in the main, are also constant to the species, though not innate.And so we may say that a substantial trans-cultural system of constants has been found to exist, on the level of which no greatlysignificant historical or sociological differentiations can be discerned.Furthermore, we now must note, in addition, that these twoelementary systems of interest, kma and artha, pleasure andpower, do not necessarily support each other but often are in conflict.For example, even among the fish, the little fellow known asthe stickleback has a highly effective concealing color pattern outside of the breeding season, but when he is ready for mating everything changes.As Professor Tinbergen describes the case: "Theback is much darker than the ventral side, thus counterfeiting theeffect of dorsal illumination ('counter-shading'), and the sides 466 PRIMI TI VE MYTHOLOGYshow a pattern of vertical bars, thus breaking up the visual out-line of the body ('disruptive pattern')." 4 During the short court-ship period, however, the coloration of the little fish changes,"leaving the back a radiant bluish-white, while the ventral sidebecomes deep red.The result is a total reversal of the counter-shading while the disruptive coloration disappears.The fish is nowvery conspicuous indeed, which is an adaptation to attract females.At the same time such a male is extremely mobile and practicallyloses its escape reactions
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