Obviously, the common consciousness which produces mythology cannot pronounce the myths, when it produces them, and accepts them, absurd. On the contrary, they are rational, in its eyes, and according to its level of understanding, however absurd the growth of knowledge may eventually show them to be. Myths, then, in their origin, are told and heard, narrated and accepted, as rational and intelligible. As narrated, they are narratives: can we say that they are anything more? or are they tales told simply for the pleasure of telling? Tales of this latter kind, pure fiction, are to be found wherever man is. But, we have already seen some points in which myths differ from tales of this kind: in fiction the artist creates his hero, but in myths the being superior to man, of whom the story is told is not the creation of the teller of the tale; he is a being known to the community to exist. Another point of difference is that a myth belongs to the god of whom it is told and cannot properly be told of any other god. These are two respects in which the imagination is limited, two points on which, in the case of myths, the creative imagination is, so to speak, nailed down. Is it subject to any further restriction in the case of myths? Granted that an adventure, when once it has been set down to one god, may not be set down to another, is the creative imagination free, in the case of mythology, as it is in the case of pure fiction, to invent the incidents and adventures, which eventually--in a lexicon of mythology--go to make up the biography of the god? The freedom, it appears, is of a strictly limited character.