Imagery of Divine World
Frye’s most prolonged discussions of imagery are in the Third Essay. There, he discusses “myths” as groupings of imagery. There are seven main domains of imagery, dealing with the seven levels of the Great Chain of Being, from the divine world down to the mineral world. Here is Frye’s discussion of the divine world:
In the divine world the central process or movement is that of the death and rebirth, or the disappearance and return, or the in- carnation and withdrawal, of a god. This divine activity is usually identified or associated with one or more of the cyclical processes of nature. The god may be a sun-god, dying at night and reborn at dawn, or else with an annual rebirth at the winter solstice; or he may be a god of vegetation, dying in autumn and reviving in spring, or (as in the birth stories of the Buddha) he may be an incarnate god going through a series of human or animal life-cycles. As a god is almost by definition immortal, it is a regular feature of all such myths that the dying god is reborn as the same person. Hence the mythical or abstract structural principle of the cycle is that the continuum of identity in the individual life from birth to death is extended from death to rebirth. To this pattern of identical recurrence, the death and revival of the same individual, all other cyclical patterns are as a rule assimilated. The assimilation can be of course much closer in Eastern culture, where the doctrine of reincarnation is generally accepted, than in the West. (158-9)
An important thing to notice in this discussion is the range of Frye’s examples, from the East to the West. In surveying such a large number of traditions, Frye is trying to argue for a universal set of images. Across all cultures, gods have a lifecycle that give to divine imagery a sense of birth, death, and renewal.
Image of Fire World
One of Frye’s innovations in discussing the imagery at each level of the Great Chain of Being is to add a level dealing with the world of fire. This includes the celestial world. Here is Frye’s explanation:
The fire-world of heavenly bodies presents us with three important cyclical rhythms. Most obvious is the daily journey of the sun-god across the sky, often thought of as guiding a boat or chariot, followed by a mysterious passage through a dark underworld, sometimes conceived as the belly of a devouring monster, back to the starting point. The solstitial cycle of the solar year supplies an extension of the same symbolism, incorporated in our Christmas literature. Here there is more emphasis on the theme of a newborn light threatened by the powers of darkness. The lunar cycle has been on the whole of less importance to Western poetry in historic times, whatever its prehistoric role. But its crucial sequence of old moon, "interlunar cave," and new moon may be the source, as it is clearly a close analogy, of the three-day rhythm of death, disappearance, and resurrection which we have in our Easter symbolism. (159)
Notice that the discussion of the fire world mirrors the discussion of the divine world. The moon and sun have a birth and rebirth just like the gods. What Frye is after is a pattern that transcends each level of imagery. The lifecycle is one such pattern. Every level of imagery has its own cycle of birth, death, and resurrection.
Imagery of Human World
Immediately following the discussion of imagery from the world of fire, Frye makes connections with the world of man:
The human world is midway between the spiritual and the animal, and reflects that duality in its cyclical rhythms. Closely parallel to the solar cycle of light and darkness is the imaginative cycle of waking and of dreaming life. This cycle underlies the antithesis of the imagination of experience and of innocence already dealt with. For the human rhythm is the opposite of the solar one: a titanic libido wakes when the sun sleeps, and the light of day is often the darkness of desire. Then again, in common with animals, man exhibits the ordinary cycle of life and death, in which there is generic but not individual rebirth. (159)
This is a fascinating passage because it shows how the world of man is in some ways opposite to the world of fire, but still has a formally similar cycle. Our desires come alive when the sun goes to sleep, Frye says. But the point is that our lifecycle still has the same phases as the other levels of imagery. We, too, have birth and rebirth, for instance; it’s just that they happen at opposite times as the celestial world. This shows that two worlds that at first seem opposed can still be found to have the same patterns, just not synchronized.
Imagery of Vegetable World
The vegetable world is the world of plants. Like all the other levels of imagery, it has a cycle of life and death. But the vegetable world helps us better understand the cycles of the other levels because of the rhythms of harvest. Here is how Frye discusses it:
The vegetable world supplies us of course with the annual cycle of seasons, often identified with or represented by a divine figure which dies in the autumn or is killed with the gathering of the harvest and the vintage, disappears in winter, and revives in spring. The divine figure may be male (Adonis) or female (Proserpine), but the symbolic structures resulting differ somewhat. (160)
Because the vegetable world stages its different phases of the life cycle in different seasons, from the birth of spring to the death of winter, it gives us a way of organizing the lifecycles. In other words, we can think not just about birth and death, but also about a spring, summer, autumn, and winter in each of the levels of imagery. Humans, too, have a spring, summer, autumn, and winter, except instead of happening each year, this cycle unfolds over the course of a life: the spring of childhood, the summer of adolescence, the autumn of maturity, and the winter of dying. Seeing a four-part pattern in each level of imagery is important, because it will end up being the basis of Frye’s definition of the four “mythoi”: comedy (spring), romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), and satire (winter).
