Summary outline of Frye's "Creation and Recreation", 2

An outline and summary of Chapter 2 of Creation and Recreation by Northrup Frye. University of Toronto Press. 1980. Web. 2016.  See the previous post for Chapter 1. The numbering used below corresponds to paragraph placement within the chapter in the original text.

Two

1. A myth is a narrative.
   A myth is a "mythos, or narrative, words arranged in a sequential order." They can be stories, arguments, descriptions, etc.
   
   
2. Literature develops from the "patterns" found in early stories.
   Frye restricts myth to "culturally early narratives ... stories, or sequential acts of personified beings" that are found in every culture. Literature develops from the "story patterns" found in such mythology.
   
   
3. A myth becomes a literary myth and accumulates meaning over time.
   A "literary myth" is a mature myth, one whose meaning "emerges slowly" and whose "meaning includes everything it has been effectively made to mean" in its lifetime.
   
   
4. Myth became indistinguishable from literature long before biblical times.
   "[T]he free play of ... creative imagination turns ... [myth] into literature." Pre-literary myth, what anthropologists and others commonly mean by myth, is rare; myth and literature, long before biblical times, became pretty much indistinguishable.
   
   
5. The Bible's creation myths are not historical fact.
   The Bible has a "strongly doctrinal emphasis;" its creation story is not meant to be "literary or imaginative" but neither is it factual -- it is myth and it tells what happened.
   
   
6. A myth can be a model for human experience.
   A myth, when accepted as an imaginative story, becomes a model of human experience. Its power depends on its ability "to convey the present sense of alienation in human consciousness."
   
   
7. Milton's Paradise Lost implies that the only appropriate form of teaching for a free man is by parables and that any knowledge of a per-determined future is forbidden knowledge.
   
   
8. Two basic myth types in Mediterranean and Mid-Eastern culture.
   Story myths tend to form an interconnected series of stories. There are creation myths in every society and in the Mid-Eastern and Mediterranean cultures two types of creation myth tend to dominate and depend on whether the myth maker was looking up or down.
   
   
9. Sexual creation myth.
   If looking down, the myth maker sees the Earth and seasonal changes in living things being born from the Earth and dying. This leads to a "sexual creation myth".  Organisms are new when they are born.
   
   
10. Everything that is born, dies.
    Death is built in to such a myth, everything that is born of the Earth will die. The "life-force ... uses the individual but does not exist for his sake."
    
    
11. Motion in the sky suggests an intelligent creator.
    The myth maker who looks up sees the unchanging cycle in the sky -- the same Sun, Moon, planets and stars follow a set pattern that suggests an intelligent being like the God of the Old Testament.
    
    
12. Artificial creation myth.
    This sky myth would deem creation starts not from sexual union but from a superior power. It is an "artificial creation" and implies a sky-father, not an earth-mother; a father who goes about his own mysterious business.
    
    
13. An artificial myth requires an alienation myth.
    An artificial myth suggests planning and intelligence and the creation of a perfect world, as in Genesis. As our world is not perfect, an alienation myth is also required, one which attributes the imperfections to some cause other than the sky-father.
    
    
14. Beginnings and endings are more important than continuing.
    It is impossible to say when creation took place as we cannot conceive of the beginning of time. This is also true for sexual creation myths since who came first, the chicken or the egg? Yet because we have our beginning and end [birth and death] we insist that beginning and ending is "much more important than continuing."
    
    
15. Death was not part of the original creation scheme.
    Because there is an "absolute beginning" there must be an absolute end but it must be the end of death, not life. Which means death is "some how wrong, not part of the original scheme of things." [By corollary, we must have been meant to be immortal.]
    
    
16. This idea, in Christianity, of the world having an absolute beginning and end has produced bizarre notions, such as Galileo and Newton's claim that the world began on the Spring Equinox, 400 BC, at approximately 2 PM and the rise, over the centuries, of a variety of end-of-the-world cults whose members climb mountains in anticipation of the promised end.
    
    
17. The main metaphor for the artificial creation myth is wakening from sleep.
    The main metaphor, in the artificial creation myth, is waking from sleep, "the process of awakening to consciousness." The importance of the metaphor is indicated by "the recurring refrain" in the Genesis story: "and the evening and the morning were the first day,..."
    
    
18. How the first days were measured is an old puzzle.
    How the first days were marked when the Sun was not created until the fourth day is an old puzzle but it does not remove the emphasis given to the Sabbath and the days of the week.
    
    
19. The Jahwist creation myth at Genesis 2:7 is an older earth-mother myth.
    The earth-mother, sexual creation myth is seen as the older myth as is the second Jahwist myth in the Bible (Genesis 2:7) which starts with the watering of a garden, the general symbol of the female body in the Bible, and in which Adam is formed from feminine dust.
    
    
20. Use of the Biblical creation myth as support for the natural dominance of males over females in society is a rationalization.
    The Biblical creation myths have been perverted to rationalize male dominance over the female in society; however, there is an element of male/female symbolism in the myths that is not connected to the social relations of men and women.
    
    
21. Male emphasis is a resistance to earth-mother religions.
    The alienation myth (the fall of man) gives a sense that we are born with an unkown identity that is both ourselves and something greater that we inherit from the father. This male emphasis in the Bible is a "resistance to the cyclical fatality of all religions founded on Mother Nature."
    
    
22. Tree of life and tree of forbidden knowledge are metaphorically one and the same tree.
    Metaphorically, the bible's tree of life and tree of forbidden knowledge are the same tree. The tree of forbidden knowledge "is symbolized by a limp serpent crawling away on the ground," the tree of life is symbolized by "a fully erect serpent of wisdom climbing up its branches." The symbolism is connected with "the myth of the lost phallus, the power of sexual experience ... free from the sado-masochistic  cycle that dominates much of our attitude towards sex."
    
    
23. Earth-mother cults took to the fatalistic skies.
    The early earth-mother (pagan) cults saw nature as the "animating spirits of trees, rivers, mountains, and stones." In later stages of the myth,  the nature spirits moved to the sky where nature became a system of cycles based on three fatalistic stages associated with three goddesses.
    
    
24. The creation myth is part of the larger myth known as the social contract.
    The myth of creation is part of a larger myth known as "the social contract." In paganism the social contract was between the gods, man, and nature. Eventually the gods, who came from nature-spirits, fell away and Caesar became divine; in the New Testament he is the Anti-Christ, the link between moral and natural law. The social contract in the Biblical creation myth is between man and God who eventually become one in Christ, God incarnated as man.
    
    
25. Christian writers reject all cyclic theories of history.
    While early Christians latched on to the idea of new larger cycles (Age of Pisces, Aquarius, etc.) ushering in the promise of a new messiah, Christian writers "totally rejected all cyclic theories of history" whether for good or for ill.
    
    
26. Artificial creation myths carry hazards.
    An artificial creation myth carries some problems "reduces us to a passive role." We inherit mistakes from our ancestors, Adam in particular, and can do nothing about them.
    
    
27. Artists often in peril.
    As well, an "artificer God" who has made everything is a pretty tough act to follow, especially for artists. Painters and sculptors are often forbidden from working or risk being accused of "making idols" to rival God.
    
    
28. Where painting and sculpture is tolerated, it is often written off as "merely second-hand copies of nature."
    
    
29. Science depersonalized the cosmos.
    The "slow and steady advance of science" offered up another hazard, it turned God into little more than a watch-maker and "divine creation" into a "complicated mechanism," depersonalizing the cosmos.
    
    
30. Darwin destroyed the mechanical, designed world.
    Darwin threw cold water on the creation by design theory when he ascribed creation to natural processes.
    
    
31. In Genesis, we are not explicitly told that nature fell with man.
    The creation story in Genesis is close to a group of folk tales, many older than the Bible, that tell how man lost his chance at immortality due to malicious and frightened deities. And it is not easy to recognize, in the myth, that nature also fell with man. We are only told the ground was cursed and that the curse was removed after the flood.
    
    
32. Divine consciousness becomes human consciousness.
    "Divine consciousness descend[s] into experience" when it follows man into the lower level of nature. The process is completed when "the Word becomes flesh" and "identical with human consciousness so far as it is human."
    
    
33. The Word is connected with ordinary speech.
    The assumption is that "the Word" is connected to ordinary speech, the words that are "elements of articulate consciousness." In the Mayan Popol Vuh, man is given authority because he speaks, rather than grunts and, as in the Biblical and Mid-Eastern myths, the gods, out of fear, send a flood to destroy him.
    
    
34. God condemns himself to death with his first Word.
    In Genesis, man is thrown out of Eden (falls) because "the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us;" he has gained a "formidable knowledge." There is an implication that "as soon as God speaks he becomes the Word of God" and so condemns himself to death and that fallen man, with his power of speech, becomes God's potential murderer. [Christ is the Word of God so in speaking God became Christ who is condemned to die on the cross.]
    
    
35. Genuine education moves man closer to his original state.
    Genuine education moves man closer to his original unfallen state. The arts, especially the verbal arts, echo the principles of morality and religion and "persuade man" of their truth.
    
    
36. Man's goal, from birth, is to return to the original state God envisioned for him.
    In traditional Christianity, man is born with the goal of returning to his original state; of raising his human level closer to what God intended for him. The central literary image of this is Dante "climbing the mountain of purgatory, shedding one of the seven sins at each spiral turn" until he reaches Eden at the top.
    
    
37. Two visions of opposing movement, one ascending, the other descending.
    We now have "a vision of two opposing movements:"
1. divine consciousness descending through experience into incarnation
2. human consciousness surrounded by experience ascending towards the state it was meant to occupy
"[T]he end of human effort is also recognition of something at the beginning" [The descending/ascending motion repeats or rather forms a circular motion. Not cycles of fate but the movement of eternity?]


38. Two visions of art: past and future.
    The first chapter [of this work] presented two visions:
    
    1. the vision of the tradition of art [creative achievement] in the past
    2. the vision of an ideal future society
    Both visions "arise from the partial release of repression, a qualified escape from the encumbrances of ordinary experience."
    
39. Today we have only a horizontal vision of mutation and change.
    In the time of Dante and, later, of Milton, "the initiative" for their writing came from "the divine word" descending through experience. In today's world the "central characteristic of myth that constantly repeats itself in human life, has totally disappeared." Poets and thinkers today see "only various mutations imposed by cultural and social change."