(December 16, 2011 at 1:23 am)whateverist Wrote: That is precisely the question Campbell addresses..
“Primitive Mythology” by Joseph Campbell.
Prologue, Page 4:
And though man who bow with closed eyes in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally scrutinize and disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison immediately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mythological motifs –variously selected, organized, interpreted, and ritualized, according to local need, but revered by every people on earth.
A fascinating psychological, as well as historical, problem is thus presented. Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth.
[…]
And why should it be that whenever men looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination?
To commence a study on mythology with a preconception of the magnitude that myth is the product of the imagination was his fatal mistake.
No matter the wealth of information he used, time will prove him wrong because he committed the sin of an unforgivable mistake: he crossed the road without looking both ways.
