A myth relates a sacred story, that is to say, it recounts a primordial event that occurred at the beginning of time. But to tell a sacred story is equivalent to revealing a mystery, because the characters in a myth are not human beings. They are either gods or civilizing heroes, and therefore their gesta constitute mysteries: man would not know these tales if they were not revealed to him. Consequently, a myth is a story of what happened—what the gods and supernatural beings did—at the beginning of time. “To recount” a myth is to proclaim what occurred then. Once “told,” in other words, once revealed, the myth becomes the apodictic truth: it establishes truth. “It is so because it is said to be so,” the Netsilik Eskimos declared in order to justify the validity of their sacred history and their religious traditions. The myth proclaims the advent of a new cosmic situation or narrates a primordial event, and so it is always the story of a “creation”; it tells how something has been effectuated, has begun to be. That is why the myth is interdependent with ontology; it deals solely with realities, with what really happened, with what was clearly manifest.

When, in the year 1516, Sir Thomas More wrote his book about the ideal state, he located it on the Island of Utopia, which was supposed to have been discovered by Raphael Hythlodaeus, a companion of Vespucci on his fourth voyage. At first a fictitious geographical name, the term “utopia” continues to live in the minds of men, although it no longer is relevant to geography or to voyages of discovery and is by no means necessarily connected with the description of ideal states. Today, according to dictionaries and encyclopedias, “utopian” describes any plan which seems impossible to realize; the word is weighted either with resigned regret or with the forbearance of the sensible soul who well knows that the ideal state would in the end prove no better than the existing one.

The time is past when “myth” could be considered serenely, when μvθoς could be translated as “legend,” or when Littré could define it as follows: “A story pertaining to time or facts that history does not clarify and embracing either a real fact transformed into a religious notion or the invention of a fact with the help of an idea.” It was calmly asserted that the myth concerned formal divinities, that it was the means of expressing the relationship between these divinities and men—hence the historical form it most frequently assumed. But, in any case, it was a matter of the past. The gods were indeed dead, and the stories regarding them no longer concerned us. The nineteenth century, the century of reason, was devoid of myths, and only the “poets” (falsifiers!) regretted this. But along came the psychology of the unconscious, then sociology and history, to give a fresh meaning, and thereby vigor, to these dusty tales incorporated in Greco-Latin mythology. No longer were they a childish invention to lend color to a naïve religion. We perceived instead subtle expressions of the profound and complicated tendencies of man, and the divinities involved in these myths were no longer the simple gods of thunder and of time. Complex characteristics enriched their personalities. They assumed unprecedented dimensions. Cronus and Zeus were cloaked in mystery—the mystery of man. And by a strange reversal, what seemed childish then was not the imaginary myth but the rationalist philosophy that had contested it because of its failure to understand.

The possibility of the development of comparative thought made the Renaissance an era particularly favorable to the awakening of the scientific understanding of social phenomena. Isolated elements of such an attitude had already appeared, but now their accumulation became of decisive importance.

The simplest and no doubt the most persistent of the ideas held on the relationship between society and power, from Menenius Agrippa to Auguste Comte, is that of an analogy between the social body and the human body. Both these men deduced that power is nothing other than the supreme regulating function of all functional activities, as harmoniously integrated in society as they are in human physiology. Ethnographic study often strengthened this organicist conception through description of the various social functions as necessary or vital for the cohesion and the existence of primitive society. But historic societies provide a spectacle quite different from that of an integrated organism. In them social functions are not abstractions but are seen rather in the form of human groups whose relationships can scarcely be said to show an organic solidarity. Within these groups and working to set them against each other, powers have their own interests which they must protect against the inroads of ambitions. The permanence of certain functions (military, religious, and economic, for example) does not imply permanence in the structures which implement them or in the real or fictional power which accompanies them. Their meaning is ambivalent. Obviously, they contribute to the architecture of a society; they may have a latent content which is a disintegrating factor from the moment when their hierarchy no longer suits the changing stratifications of the social body.

Not many of the answers, true enough, are known: what is really new in the study of recent African history—the two millenniums, let us say, before A.D. 1500—is not so much that the answers are being supplied as that the questions are being put. That in itself is something of a milestone. Few may have denied the eventual possibility of tracing firm outlines for that place and period; all but the merest handful have had other fish to fry. These fish have been, and are, extremely important—as important as the study of human origins through the slow millenniums of the Pleistocene or, at the other end of time, as the story of colonial beginnings through the scurried decades of the last century. It is no small thing that Dart, Breuil, Leakey, and their colleagues can now assert with solid evidence behind them that Homo sapiens first saw the light in Africa; while in another direction the astonishing continuity of the African story has acquired spectacular emphasis from the recovery in southeast African waters of coelacanth, a most ancient creature whose latest known fossils had occurred in rocks that are older than seventy million years. Compared with that majestic gap in time, the centuries before European preoccupation with Africa may have seemed small and unimportant; they were in any case, and for one reason or another, largely ignored.

The origins of the American mentality bear the imprint of a “tabula rasa pattern” which the Mayflowers Pilgrim Fathers brought with them to the shores of Massachusetts. To the Puritan conscience, the founding of English colonies on the virgin soil of North America seemed a complete departure, the first step in the establishment of a new society. It was an incredible experience, marked by infinite hope, and one toward which, according to one American historiographer, “the eyes of God, of the world, and of posterity were turned.” The dream and the hope recurred from generation to generation; during the course of the centuries millions of emigrants, settling between the Atlantic and the Pacific, sought a better world than they had known.