History Is an Enactment of Myth

The past as viewed from the present always appears to be changeless in conservative. Anything that does not serve the strictly functional purpose is somehow dropped from the remembered record. We are only able to recognize a contemporary sequence of actions as an event and an event with historical implications if we can interpret it in our own language as a transformation of another such sequence which has already occurred in our mythological past. The Hawaiians being faced with the unprecedented appearance of a European ship immediately might apologize the whole sequence of associated occurrences. His movements were interpreted as conforming to the traditional mythological sequence. He died of sacrificial death only because inadvertently he had broken out of the pattern into which he had been so ad