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While the child who asks, ‘But who made God?’ may, for his analyst, be harking after some kind of ‘Ur-Primal scene’, it remains important not to dismiss the more general psycho-religious issues involved. Two groups of questions arise. The first is why in the case of some children the problem is more emotionally urgent than it is for others and whether we are dealing with a constitutional fact or a neurotic bent. The second group of questions is whether we are dealing with an irreducible archetypal ‘simple’ and, further, whether myths emerging around this theme hint more at the structure of the human psyche-soma than that of the ultimate reality of which the psyche-soma is a part. More fundamentally still we could ask whether the creation myths as such arise inevitably out of the relationship between the two—albeit with different emphases according to the specialised concern of different cultures.
Maclagan's book, one of the Art and Imagination series of Thames and Hudson, has the merit of compressing into 96 pages of print and copious illustration a great deal of information, both philosophical and in terms of visual aid, about creation mythology. He himself has his own theory about the place of myth in facilitating man's introduction to the world and a plausible one it is—with a touch of Jungian flavouring. Creation mythology, with its interest in ‘In the beginning’, the forefather of ‘Once upon a time’, entertains an ambition that is ‘fantastic’, which means ‘to make visible what must be invisible’ namely, the moment or process of creating. What is involved is a tracing back from ‘everything-that-is’ to ‘something-that was’ and, finally, to ‘nothing-that-was-not’. Creation myths like the Hebrew Genesis, the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Mayan Popul Vish deal with the cosmogenic ‘how’, but implicitly also, on the occasion of something new coming into being, raises the ontogenetic ‘why’—the foundation that existence is built upon.
But why mythology at all? It is beca