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Descending like a meteor from the heavens, then wafted gently earthward on the streams of the terrestrial atmosphere, in a boat especially fashioned to protect him from the terrors of the sun-filled darkness of outer space, the first cosmonaut of history emerged from his capsule. In less than twenty-four hours, at a speed incomparably greater than any ever ascribed to the winged Hermes, messenger of the Gods, there raced around the world the echoes of an ancient story. This hero, the son of a Soviet carpenter, the report said, was actually descended from distinguished nobility. Within the day, the mythopoetic function of mankind had already embraced the first hero of the space age.
Joseph Campbell (11) writes:
Man apparently cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth. In fact, the fullness of his life would even seem to stand in direct ratio to the depth and range not of his rational thought, but of his local mythology. Whence the force of these insubstantial themes, by which they are empowered to galvanize populations, creating of them civilizations, each with a beauty and self-compelling destiny of its own? And why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination—preferring even to make life a hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the name of some violent God, rather than to accept gracefully the bounty the world affords?
From Freud on, psychoanalysts have studied the compelling, unknown, and ofttimes irrational forces of the human mind. In neurosis, art, character, and religion, in the sum of the individual's