Prometheus is the creative and rebellious spirit which, rejected by God, angrily defies him and asserts itself; Ganymede is the boyish self which is adored and seduced by God. One is the lone defiant, the other the yielding acolyte. As the humanist poet, Goethe presents both identities as aspects or forms of the human condition.

Beginning in the 18th century, the relation of mythos and logos flipped into reverse. Not entirely: variants of traditional allegory persist all the way to the present. But among some thinkers – Vico, Herder, and Christian Gottlob Heyne – a different, historicist approach emerged. There were two key shifts. First, these writers claim that mythos has its own philosophical content, without being translated into logos. Second, the philosophical content of myth isn’t a universally valid, timeless logos, but is specific to the era when the myth was formulated. That is, these thinkers insisted on “the pluralization of forms of Logos” (40).

William Nestle’s Vom Mythos zum Logos (1940) is the classical statement of this reading. On the opening page, Nestle claims mythos and logos are “the two poles between which man’s mental life oscillates. Mythic imagination and logical thought are opposites,” the former being “imagistic and involuntary,” rooted in the unconscious, while the latter is “conceptual and intentional, and analyzes and synthesizes by means of consciousness” (quoted in Glenn Most, “From Logos to Mythos,” in From Myth to Reason?, 27).