A scientist in an underground bunker. A wizard in a crypt. Both are instantly recognizable figures from film and fiction: we feel as if we already know their story when they appear. We have seen them before, again and again in different contexts and costumes. Change the costumes: put the white lab coat on the wizard or the star-embroidered robe on the scientist. Back behind the figure in the dim light, give the scrying stone a keyboard and a Macintosh veneer; change the gleaming retorts and beakers to bubbling cauldrons and alembics. Grow the obsessive tech nerd’s stubble out into the wizard’s beard; the sorcerer’s diamantine gaze eventually shimmers into the scientist’s spectacles. They are more than kin; they are the same. We have uncovered an archetype: the Enchanter in the Cave.

ARCHETYPE AND APOCALYPSE

Myths comprise multiple sets of stories: variations on a theme or even of a single hero tale. The myth of King Arthur encompasses scores of different adventures and varying versions of the same quests, betrayals, and battles. Each mythic story, meanwhile, from the Old Testament to the Star Wars saga, contains a string of events, characters, or items that folklorists call motifs, or mythemes—Jonah and the whale or Luke and the Death Star. Some of these mythemes recur in later myths, in myths from other traditions, or in the enormous mass of film and fiction influenced by mythology: Orestes, Frankenstein’s monster, and Jason Bourne all seek both vengeance, by killing or trying to kill their creators, and  …