On Myth, Method, and Madness

ion of the Greek mentality; it is not found in that of the Levantine. In various ways, a Demiurge may bring about an order, or bestow it upon a chaotic "tohu-bohu," from which It has Itself been derived, or with which It is unaccountedly coeval. One is at liberty to interpret Gen. 1:1,2 either way; one is not at liberty to read into the passage a pristine Nothingness, with God evoking a substantive Something out of it. Some other criticisms, relatively minor of themselves, gain a little more weight when taken along with the foregoing, major ones. The DBR paradigm (p. 211), if that is what it is, rather confuses me. It certainly is philology, not linguistics. (This is said in identification, ot in objection.) Very well, "to drive," "to get behind," "to push" are the root meanings of the Hebrew for "said. " Are we then to understand that, in all other instances when the Hebrew spoke expansions of DBR, he intended "drive," etc.? Or is Freilich making of the usage in Gen. 1 an ad hoc application? All folklorists and mythologists are familiar with the magical dynamic of word(s) uttered by one possessed of power; what is the special and peculiar significance in the Hebrew case? My puzzlement increases as Freilich turns to consider the English "word," associates it with the Greek legein, with which it has no affinity whatever, and attaches to the Greek the notion of "to put in order. " Is he thinking here of the Greek logos doctrine-which was a late philosophical development? Linguistically, the root meaning of leg(*le/og-) belongs to "collecting. " "Word" is Anglo-Saxon dialect for a common-Germanic which harks back to an Indo-European *uerdh-, *uer-, which in turn has different connotations in the several linguistic descendants of the parent tongue. What is the point? All this, taken together, demonstrates rather clearly that Freilich is putting together a subjective scheme: what inspiration he is able to draw from a library-for that is what the Hebrew Scriptures are-that was collected over a number of centuries. He "slips in and out of 'different' disciplines" (p. 223), not in the sense that he makes the thinking of one accessible to the other, but rather, it seems to me, by collating without relating. Among scientists, the goodly company is increasing who would see a concert of the sciences, that our Occidental tradition might recover from its Verlust der Mitte (Sedlmayr). Those of us who in any way have been trying it, however, know that it is a stern game, its presiding Goddess of Wisdom an exacting taskmistress. None of us, of course, can be summoned to be a neuropsychologist, a Jung, a Whitehead, a J. W. N. Sullivan molded into one. Still, a "new anthropology" will be worthy of "excitement" only when its perspective transcends a "structural analysis. " Ultimately, a sobering thought obtrudes. Can a structural analysis or a non-sense-in-myth strategy, which believes it can afford to eschew the dimension of history in the name of "conquering the human mind" via textual criticism, be at all certain that it has understood the "messages" of a Zuni or other mythology, which cannot be checked against their historical development? Can these strategies lead us back of the mind of primitive man as philosopher? Freilich, I fear, has unintentionally enhanced the doubt concerning the very thing he purposes to promote.