In Song of Solomon Toni Morrison has faced the tale-spinner's recurring problem-making contemporary, localized events and characters speak to those who cannot share her characters' background or experiences.' Morrison's solution in this dilemma is not new. She turns to myth to underpin her narrative, but does so without transforming her novel into pure fantasy or overloading her story with literary allusions. Morrison's success in making one black man's struggle for identity universal is partly explained by her structural use of myth to show man's constant search for reassurance in myths. According to Mircea Eliade, myth is sacred history, the breakthrough of the supernatural or divine into the human to explain the origins, destiny, and cultural concerns of a people.2 Man, then, has always turned to myth to explain the inexplicable and to tie narratives into a larger cultural and perceptual framework. We would expect our modern predilection for scientific fact, psychological speculation, and historical verification to have supplanted the role of myth in explaining reality. In fact, genuine myth, living myth, has traditionally been associated with primitive societies in which the myth presupposes not "a tale told but a reality lived."3 Even our sophistication, however, does not preclude our depending on myth for more than entertainment. If we no longer look to myth for reality, we are still drawn to mythopoesis, where gods, heroes, and supernatural conflicts exist on a purely symbolic level, tying us to our past and showing us our origins. Myths become "agents of stability,"4 not restricting us to a specific place or even to a specific culture but using the specific to ponder the enduring questions of all men. Perhaps mythic absolutes reassure us because, as Kerenyi proposes, the constant themes of myth involve not the "why?" (the causes) but the "whence?" (the groundwork of human nature, belief, and endeavor), which remains as timely as it is timeless.5 In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, we have genuine mythopoesis, the mythic impulse shaped and translated into symbolic art. Morrison fuses Afro-American myth with the cultural, moral, and religious beliefs of both MELUS, Volume 7, No. 3, Fall 1980.