The difference between factitious and fictitious tends to dissolve.

The reason we find myths difficult to grasp is just this fact, that they do not exclude any facet of experience as literate cultures do. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous. Thus natives, when asked Freudian questions about the symbolism of their thoughts or dreams, insist that all the meanings are right there in the verbal statement. The work of Jung and Freud is a laborious translation of non-literate awareness into literary terms, and like any translation distorts and omits.

For myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects.

Whitehead does not elaborate on the great nineteenth century discovery of the method of invention. But it is, quite simply, the technique of beginning at the end of any operation whatever, and of working backwards from that point to the beginning. It is the method inherent in the Gutenberg technique of homogeneous segmentation, but not until the nineteenth century was the method extended from production to consumption. Planned production means that the total process must be worked out in exact stages, backwards, like a detective story. In the first great age of mass production of commodities, and of literature as a commodity for the market, it became necessary to study the consumer's experience. In a word it became necessary to examine the effect of art and literature before producing anything at all. This is the literal entrance to the world of myth.

A kind of myth-making process is often associated with Hollywood and with Madison Avenue advertising agencies. So far as advertisements are concerned, they do, in intention at least, strive to comprise in a single image the total social action or process that is imagined as desirable. That is, an advertisement tries both to inform us about, and also to produce in us by anticipation, all the stages of a metamorphosis, private and social. So that whereas a myth might appear as the record of such extended metamorphosis, an advertisement proceeds by anticipation of change, simultaneously anticipating causes with effects and effects with causes. In myth this fusion and telescoping of phases of process becomes a kind of explanation or mode of intelligibility.

…it could be argued that Superman is the comic-strip brother of the medieval angels.

Having outered ourselves in new materials, we have to behold ourselves anew. And we then become what we behold. This was Blake’s mythic version of social change.

Mythic structuring of situations becomes natural under information overload, you can’t cope with it in classification terms, so you build myths. We now live mythically, we can’t think mythically, but we live mythically.

The only order that the young can create, in a very fast-moving world of information overload, the only order they can create is that of myth.

Myth is a structure in which there are at least two narratives simultaneously, as when we are told that “King Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth and they sprang up armed men.” The simultaneous awareness of these diverse actions and of their interplay constitutes the mythic vision.

We're living mythically now. We've continued to think in the old rational patterns of the older technologies. But we are suddenly forced to live in such complex and compressed and high-speed systems that we inevitably switch into mythic patterns.

In the electronic age, when time and space factors are very much reduced in information flow, it is once more natural for us, as for men in small oral communities, to think mythically. For today it is easy to perceive consequences embedded in any kind of innovation. If we don’t see them, they clobber us very quickly.

Mr. Eliot is quite explicit about myth as a structure of parallels without connectives. Mythic form is necessarily double. Its double-ness is a matter not of matching but of making, not of the mirror and reflection but of the lamp and illumination.

In all-at-once world is structurally like the subconscious. It tends to be mythical and archetypal. Consciousness becomes incidental rather than structural.

Languages old and new, as macromyths, have that relation to words and word-making that characterizes the fullest scope of myth. The collective skills and experience that constitute both spoken languages and such new languages as movies or radio can also be considered with preliterate myths as static models of the universe. But do they not tend, like languages in general, to be dynamic models of the universe in action? As such, languages old and new would seem to be for participation rather than for contemplation or for reference and classification.

You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds, so the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on. It´s a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience.

And [we] became intensely interested in the mythic consciousness, in the corporate consciousness of the mythic man, and in the Jungian archetype.

Myth is highly speeded up information and experience, as in dreams – where you begin to move at the speed of your own nervous systems, you inevitably come up with mythic structure. You do not have classified data in dream life, you have myth – multi-layered, rich, fast-moving data. It is collage, transparency, etc.