Abstract

Social order is constituted by individual and communal self-consciousness and self-understanding, so as to determine the existence, structures, and workings of society. That social structure is affected by identity recalls the purpose and form of myth in traditional society, as they are being recovered in modern social theory of the meaning, structure and function of symbolic myth for consensus or disruption. Myth is, at once, the myth of identity and the myth of order. ;That society is a system of agreement in relation and communication based on symbols is most clearly evident, and comprehensively represented in myth, fountainhead of all other forms of individual and communal expression, including history. An avenue of approach to this psychic area in individual and collective unconscious, to which myth refers, is provided in language, as it issues in story of history and literature describing sensible and tangible qualities of a particular Irish mythic identity. ;The purpose of my writing is to illustrate both a thesis and a method, through the reference to a particular situation ; to help illuminate and resolve the particular situation in turn, and ultimately, to discover principles of universal validity. ;Thus the individual and communal Irish experience and history are considered as a specific manifestation of myth. The Irish identity--and the symbolic story of Irish history that is the chief repository of their identity, serve to test and illustrate the existence, power and effect of myth, i.e., myth of identity. ;Besides the fact that it is myth, Irish history is the raw material of individual and racial biography, and, at the same time, the process of its transformation and appropriation is both auto-biographic and mythic. This manner of living the myth is exemplified in the literature in Ireland, that is individually and collectively biographic. The prose of James Joyce and the poetry of Seamus Heaney are considered relevant examples, which are paradigmatic of the socially creative act, that is work-in-progress ongoing. This act of self-understanding is symbolic, mythic process, and ordering principle; its "autobiography" functions as a metaphor for the mythic processes of individual and society