During a meeting of the Surrealist group in December 1934, André Breton marveled at the sudden twitch of so-called jumping beans that Benjamin Péret had brought him from Mexico.

In fact, inside the plant, the larvae of a certain species of moth begin to stir when heated.

Only one person rebelled against Breton's desire to leave the seed pods sealed in order to speculate freely about the possible causes of the miraculous: Roger Caillois, then twenty-two years old, who later explored the boundaries between aesthetics, anthropology, religious studies and biology like no other author of surrealism has explored.

Caillois was never a positivist in the classical sense.

Instead of excluding the irrational, dismissing it as delusion or superstition, he wanted to show its inherent rationality and coherence.

The unity of nature was at the center of his thinking.

The assumption of an uninterrupted continuity of all phenomena allowed the former student of Marcel Mauss and Georges Dumézil to place the forms of animate and inanimate matter in diverse relationships with the creations of the imagination.

The binding quality of myths and legends

Caillois presented the first models for such a phenomenology of the imaginary in the volume Der Mythos und der Mensch, which was published in 1938 and is now available in an excellent translation by Peter Geble.

The inner connection of the seven articles, initially published scattered between 1934 and 1937, may not be immediately apparent in view of the variety of topics dealt with - from mimetic insects to the Chinese Emperor Shi Huangdi to the early Minoan culture.

It's in the method.

According to Caillois, the collective, binding quality of myths and legends cannot be reduced to either social factors or individual-psychological conflicts.

They would only become understandable as nodes of affects, images and obsessions within a biological perspective.

Caillois showed most impressively what that means in his famous study of the praying mantis, the most extensive text in the volume.

A tendency to dissolve the individual in the environment

The human-like shape of the animal and the behavior of the females, devouring the males during or after mating, have fascinated people at all times.

Caillois attributes the fact that the insect was able to become a universal, ambivalent figure of the imagination and lends its traits to so many demonic lovers from myths and sagas to an – mind you, not purely symbolic, but ontological – equivalence between nature and imagination.

The myth takes the place of the animal instinct, it re-enacts the real act as a phantasm.

In this sense, the praying mantis is an "objective ideogram that realizes in the outer world what remains virtual in the emotional world".

Caillois' analysis of the mimetic appearance of various insect species is no less surprising.

For him, the mechanisms of natural selection could only inadequately explain the amazing replicas of leaves, flowers, stones or other animals.

It is not the use that is decisive for such camouflage costumes, but a tendency towards the dissolution of the individual in the environment, towards depersonalization, which Caillois wants to recognize in the striving for equality of magical thinking as well as in certain states of schizophrenics.

Whole cultures are subject to this conflict between self-assertion and self-abandonment, and despite all the polemics that Caillois devotes to psychoanalysis, Freud's death drive is not far off.

"Enjoyment in beauty" does not count here

In what is probably the most interesting essay in the volume for today's literary studies, Caillois deals with the survival of the myth in modern times - with a question that was at the center of the Collège de Sociologie, which he founded together with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris.

The popular literature of the nineteenth century, with its depictions of a nocturnal Paris ruled by invisible villains and secret societies, produced a literary myth of great suggestive power.

Caillois does not argue aesthetically, but in terms of literary sociology and deliberately opposes the "concentration on the masterpiece".

What counts for him is neither the "enjoyment of beauty" nor the self-limitation of modern literature to its "autonomous world".

Rather, he pleads for the creation of a collective consciousness through "an encroachment of the imagination on life".

Roger Caillois: "Myth and Man".

Translated from the French and with an afterword by Peter Geble.

Edited by Anne von der Heiden and Sarah Kolb.

August Verlag, Berlin 2022. 240 p., hardcover, €22.