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."Such a conflict between various 'interests,' of which this isonly a random example, is in fact a basic phenomenon of adaptive-ness," Tinbergen declares; and he concludes: "The conflict isresolved by all animals in such a way as to compromise betweenthe different demands." 5And in man, too, there has to be a compromise.So that in thepsyche itself, even before the factor of the social norms andmores the aim of dharma is introduced, an elementary problemof balance and harmonization exists, which has to be solved andsolved, and solved again, since man, unlike the stickleback, hasno mating season, but is ever alert to the values and offerings ofboth worlds.Dharma, the sense of duty, the knowledge of one's duty and thewill to abide by it, is not innate, but the aim instilled in the youngby education.Since the period of the Renaissance, we of the Westhave come to believe that the proper aim of education is the in-culcation of information about the world in which we live.This,however, was not the aim in the past, nor is it the aim in the Orient(in which I include Russia) to this day.The aim of education inthe primitive, archaic, and Oriental spheres has always been andwill no doubt continue to be, for many centuries, not primarily toenlighten the mind concerning the nature of the universe, but tocreate communities of shared experience for the engagement ofthe sentiments of the growing individual in the matters of chiefconcern to the local group.The unsocialized thought and feelingof the very young child are egocentric but not socially dangerous. THE FUNCTI ONI NG OF MYTH 467When the primary urges of the adolescent remain unsocialized,however, they become inevitably a threat to the harmony of thegroup.The paramount function of all myth and ritual, therefore,has always been, and surely must continue to be, to engage theindividual, both emotionally and intellectually, in the local organization.And this aim is best effected as we have seen through asolemn conjuring up of intensely shared experiences by virtue ofwhich the whole system of childhood fantasy and spontaneous belief is engaged and fused with the functioning system of the community.The infantile ego uncommitted, unaware of itself as distinct from the universe and ranging without bounds, without regard for the conventions of the local scene (like those GreenlandEskimo puppies who could not learn until adolescence the politicalgeography of the packs) * is dissolved for recombination in aritual and actual experience of death and resurrection: death ofthe infantile ego and resurrection of the socially desirable adult.Sothat, thereafter, the man is neither physically nor spiritually ageneral model of the species Homo sapiens, but specifically anexample of a certain local type, developed to function in a certainway in a certain field.Kma, artha, and dharma, then pleasure, power, and the lawsof virtue, the two primary systems of interest of the raw individualcontrolled by the mores of the local group are the fields of forcecomposed in every functioning system of mythology on its planeof address to the common man, the hard-headed, tough-minded,honest hunter, his wife, and his family.And so that the pedagogi-cally furnished system of the law {dharma) should have theweight and authority to work upon the two others {kma andartha), it is presented as the will and nature of some unimpeachable higher might which, according to the level of developmentof the group in question, may be represented as the will and magicof the "ancestors," the will of an omnipotent all-father, themathematics of the universe, the natural order of an ideal humanity, or an abstract, immutable imperative seated in the moralnature of every man who is properly a man.The main pointthroughout, however, is that this third, socially presented principle* Supra, p.36. 468 PRI MI TI VE MYTHOLOGYshould have sovereignty over nature's two, and that the membersof the group who represent it should have the whip hand.Attitudes of love, fear, servitude, pride in achievement, and identification with the law itself are variously fostered by the rites throughwhich the local dharma is imprinted; and the individual, assaultedfrom every side no less from inside than from out is eitherbeaten into form or rendered mad.We should not judge the case of the past, however, by thepresent.Among the paleolithic nomads the groups were relativelysmall and the demands of dharma relatively simple.Furthermore,the roles to be played accorded with the natural capacities of themale and female organisms, which had evolved and been graduallyshaped under conditions of the hunt during the course of a periodof some six hundred thousand years.With the turn, however, toagriculture, c.6000 B.C., and the rapid development then ofsedentary, highly differentiated, and very much larger social units(up to, say, four or five hundred souls), the problem not only ofenforcing but also of rationalizing a dharma in which inequalityand yet coordination were of the essence became acute.It wasthen by a stroke of intuitive genius that the order of the universe, in which inequality and coordination are of the essence, wastaken as a model, and mankind was put to school to the stars.Inevery one of the archaic systems the mythology of a naturalharmony coordinating mankind and the universe poured its forceinto the various social orders, so that the sheer brutality of theinterplay of the three mutually antagonistic interest systems ofkma, artha, and dharma was softened, beautified, and significantly enriched by the operation of a fourth principle, that of themind's awe before the cognized mystery of the world
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