The More Things Change ...: Metamorphoses and Conceptual Structure

Given that mythmakers must construct stories that ore comprehensible to their audience, it is reasonable to expect stories to be conceptually natural even when their topics deal with the supernatural. Thus, OS stories ore adapted to human conceptual structure, they should reflect characteristics of that structure. An examination of the types of magical transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses ond Grimms’ Fairy Tales suggests that this is the case. It wos possible to predict the patterns of transformations on the bosis of structural properties of ontological knowledge, which is knowledge of the basic cotegories of existence (e.g., conscious beings, animals, plonts, events). Other characteristics of the transformations seem to reflect the conceptual distinction between animates and inanimates OS well os the relative prototypicality of various taxonomic classes of onimols. It oppeors that aspects of conceptual structure con constrain potterns of thinking even during “the willing suspension of disbelief.”