in the myth, so eagerly and widely believed in the decade after World
War II, that electricity produced in nuclear power plants would be "too
cheap to meter."

In the real world, of course, these two forms of myth intercalate.
But experience tends to show up the delusory stories for what they are,
and they are eventually, if sometimes reluctantly, discarded as useless or
even harmful. Mythology in the religious or cosmological sense generally
has a longer lifetime, being a true, if poetic, reflection of the human
spirit.

In this volume we have attempted to introduce, by selective example,
the astonishing breadth of mythology that has guided the successive
waves of inhabitants of what has become the United States. As noted,
all these peoples brought their own mythologies with them, and all of
them, confronting so new and astounding a place, began to adapt their
mythologies to new conditions and new needs. The American Indians
did not bring the animal called Coyote with them across the Bering
Strait, but they did bring trickster tales.

As another example, with the arrival of the Spanish and the Roman
Catholic Church in Mexico, a new ethnic group came about--the
Hispano-Indian--and before long an Aztec goddess had metamorphosed
into the Virgin Mary with a brown skin, Our Lady of Guadalupe.

To the many different groups of people arriving on these shores,
eventually to create a new nation, it was almost all alien--enormous,
wild, lush, harsh, promising, varied to the extreme, terrifying. No one
dwelling in Europe, for example, had seen such unbroken expanses of
forest since the time of Christ. For many of these newcomers, new gods
and new heroes were called for--new explanations and meanings. New
religions would spring up, and Americans would deify or try to deify
people, nature, and even machines in an attempt to create a psychically
true secular mythology to go along with, or supplant, the ones they
brought with them. The wilderness of nature needed to be tamed, its
monsters exiled, before it could be worshiped.

At the same time, to knit a nation from such various materials,
Americans produced what might be thought of as sociological myths to
explain and enforce the sense of "a new people." The self-made man (a
phrase invented by Henry Clay to describe frontier Kentucky entrepre-
neurs but apotheosized in the works of Horatio Alger) is such a myth,
as is the melting pot. Manifest destiny--the idea that the United States
should stretch across the continent from sea to shining sea--may be
thought of as another, but of course it has been fulfilled . . . and then
some. The frontier may or may not have shaped our national character,
if there is one, but the same is true of the myth of the city.

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