Up: [[Myth-Making]] Created: 2022-07-20 Lady Godiva was a woman who wanted to give the poor people of Coventry a gift of some land. In order to wrest money from her miserly husband, she made a bet. She would ride through the streets of Coventry naked. This sounds way more daring than it actually was because she told everyone to stay in their houses and keep their window shutters closed. Everyone in Coventry obeyed her except for one man, Tom, who peeped at her through the crack in a door. Hence the phrase, *a peeping Tom*. This is an interesting little story that I hadn’t known, but its real significance to me is in this long quote by P.L. Travers, the author of *Mary Poppins*. > [!Orbit] P.L. Travers, ‘The World of the Hero’ in *What the Bee Knows: Reflections of myth, symbol and story* > But the fact of the matter is that Tom did not enter the story until it was 200 years old. Gradually and mythologically, the folk must have come to realize that nakedness without an eye to observe it has no meaning whatever…and that an order without somebody to disobey it is somehow incomplete. A story can’t live with a heroine only, it needs a villain to bring her to life. So, of course, the matter was at last put right and Peeping Tom now belongs to the myth. He also is true but he is not a fact. > > So you see how the mythmaking mind works, balancing, clarifying, adjusting, making events somehow correspond to the inner necessity of things. It is this tension, the uncompromising insistence on both ends of the stick — black and white, good and evil, positive and negative, active and passive — that gives the myths their ambivalent power. (p. 15)