Dream-Webs of Myth : Arborescence and Rhizomatic Ecological Assemblages in Two Early Mythopoetic Cycles

Sammanfattning

The philosophical concept of the rhizome, as introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, describes a network configuration that connects points according to multiplicitous, heterogeneous, and non-hierarchical principles. Arborescence, characterised by its linear, tree-like hierarchy, stands as this model’s antithesis. The distinction between the two is significant for ecocritical analysis because rhizomatic thinking enables exploration of more-than-human relational ecologies, whereas arborescent structures tend to reproduce anthropocentric order. In this study, I apply these two concepts as frameworks to explore and compare the mythopoetic storyworlds of the Pegāna mythos, written by Lord Dunsany, and the Hyperborean cycle by Clark Ashton Smith. The investigation shows that what appears as arborescent cosmological hierarchies in the myth cycles is continually destabilised by rhizomatic formations of relation operating across divine, biological, and eschatological levels, thereby opening up avenues for broader scholarly examination of early 20th-century mythopoeia as an experimental site of ecological thought.