C. APPENDIX C

We might throw further light on the subject by considering how the issue looks, as regards Joseph Fontenrose's book Python, a Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (1959). In an essay, "Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy" (reprinted in Language as Symbolic Action), I use this book as a point of departure for several lines of speculation not directly germane to our present concerns. But it might be mentioned here because of its concern with the "origins" of what the author called the "combat myth." For the discussion obviously involves two quite different kinds of origin: (1) the possible transformations of the myth in the course of time, along with the likely steps of its geographic diffusion; (2) a paradigm summarizing the main themes of the combat myth, in its nature as a story with beginning, middle, and end.

My essay was designed to show how this second kind of origin has nothing to do with temporal succession, but is essentially concerned with such purely formal principles as the first of these two talks discussed with reference to Aristotle's Poetics. In effect the paradigm which Fontenrose sets up, and which all the many versions of the myth are said to exemplify somewhat but not totally, is like Aristotle's definition of tragedy. For it considers all cases in the summarizing terms of a "perfect"

---

combat myth which must be conceptualized, or idealized, with corresponding rules, regardless of the fact that no one "perfect" instance of the pattern need be offered as justification for all the clauses and subdivisions (amounting to forty-three in all) that are included in Fontenrose's all-inclusive list. However, a paradigm of this sort is obviously at a much lower level of generalization than the definition of tragedy in the Poetics.

Also, besides observations analogous to Aristotle's concern with the perfection of tragedy as a form, a somewhat adventitious scenic (or "environmentalist") test of "perfection" had to be introduced when we consider the fact that the champion of the combat is said to have "instituted cult, ritual, festival, and built a temple for himself." In this regard, as distinct from asking just what might be the principles of a "perfect" combat myth (in the sense that Fontenrose's paradigm embodies Aristotle's preference for a "complex" plot with peripety), I felt the need to introduce a kind of Darwinian speculation, by asking exactly how a combat myth, whatever its origins, might happen to be a "perfect" candidate for survival in connection with a cult. We'd here confront the difference between the combat myth's "perfection" sheerly as a form of story, and its nature as a contribution to the sanctioning of the offices performed by the specific priesthood with which one version or another of the myth happened to be identified. For instance, a myth might have special survival value if it was associated with a cult which had perfected rituals for, as it were, "causing" spring to return in the springtime, summer in the summertime, and so on. That is, the best conditions for establishing the authority of a priesthood's magic would be those involving the regularities rather than the uncertainties of nature. And such conditions would be fulfilled insofar as a cult and its corresponding myth became associated with sky-gods, and thus with the annually repeated cycle of the seasons, and the gradually accumulating lore about the recurrent configurations of the heavens. A myth could be perfectly formed as regards poetic tests of perfection, without having this added "Darwinian" kind of aptitude that happened to endow it with summationally cosmic connotations of authority.