All poetry is born of play: sacred play of worship, the festive play of courtship, the martial play of the contest, the disputatious play of braggadocio, mockery, and invective, the nimble play of wit and readiness. How far is the play-quality of poetry preserved when civilization grows more complicated?
...Myth rightly understood and not in the corrupt sense which modern propaganda has tried to force upon the word, is the appropriate vehicle for primitive human’s ideas about the cosmos. In it, the line between the barely conceivable and the flatly impossible has not yet been drawn with any sharpness. For the savage, with one’s extremely limited powers of logical coordination and arrangement, practically everything is possible. Despite its absurdities and enormities, its boundless exaggeration and confusion of proportions, its carefree inconsistencies and whimsical variations, the myth does not strike him/her as anything impossible. For all that, however, we would like to ask whether the savage’s belief in one’s holiest myths is not, even from the beginning, tinged with a certain element of humour. Myth and poetry both come from the play-sphere; hence it is at least probable that the savage’s belief lies partly, as one’s life does entirely, in this same sphere.
...We are all so familiar with the figures of Greek mythology and so predisposed to accept them into our poetic consciousness that we are apt to overlook their absolutely barbaric character. In the Eddic mythology we may perhaps have some inkling of it – unless Wagner has rendered us immune and deadened our senses; but on the whole it remains true that only mythology without direct hold on our aesthetic sensibilities can reveal to us the full measure of its savageness. We see this clearly enough in the ancient Hindu myths and the wild phantasmagorias with which ethnologists regale us from all over the world. Yet to an unbiased eye the figures of Greek and Germanic mythology are as lacking in consistency and good taste – let alone ethics – as the unbridled fantasies of the Hindu, the African, American, or Australian aborigine. Judged by our standards (which of course are not the final ones) the Hellenic and Eddic divinities are no less tasteless, disorderly, and depraved in their conduct, and there is little to choose between Hermes, Thor, and a god from Central Africa. It cannot be doubted that all these mythological figures as handed down by tradition are remnants of a barbarous society no longer compatible with the spiritual level that had been reached in the mean time.