Abstract
In the beginning, there's the myth. Zeus fell in love with Europa, daughter of the African king Agenor, and, transformed into a bull, took her to Crete, where she bore him two sons. Agénor sent Europa's two brothers after her, forbidding them to return home without finding her. They never returned. Myth is, in the essential sense, a displacement, a metaphor, a translation, a "word" (Barthes) that means "carried from one place to another".
Myths are transformed, altered and renewed to suit the needs of a particular time and place. But they remain essentially themselves, for they are not created as fabrications of the human imagination, but (without falling into facile universalism) as concrete manifestations of certain primordial intuitions. In the Middle Ages, Lactantius proposed to trivialize the Greek myth by claiming that the bull was simply the name of a boat. But the myth persisted, giving rise to others derived from the original story: myths of sovereignty (Europa, a princess), of femininity (Zeus' beloved), of cultural pre-eminence (her brothers sent in search of her) and also, more mysteriously, of immigration and settlement (Europa, a foreign resident). The content of these myths is perhaps the touchstone that lends the peoples of Europe an intuitive common identity.
Any definition (of myth, for example) requires both limitation and invention. A limitation of what we believe the object of definition is not, and an invention of what we imagine might constitute something we already know, since we cannot define what we have not yet imagined. The myth of Europa reflects this double necessity.
