The Utility of Mythology

I’m reading Primitive Mythology, book one of Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, and came across this passage:

“…it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally, its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the door.”

I post it here because a) mythology and fantasy literature are closely related (or one in the same?), and therefore the usefulness of one can be attributed to the other,  and b), it approximates my own thoughts on the subject of myth, religion, rite, and ceremony. When I write “the utility of mythology,” I refer to its usefulness in achieving human understanding.

Campbell has an uncanny ability to distill complex metaphysical concepts into terms most people can understand. So far, I’ve come across numerous pithy paragraphs like this that make me feel as if he pulled the very thoughts from my mind–thoughts which I couldn’t quite articulate, or at least not nearly as well–and transcribed them on the page. I highly recommend The Masks of God.

Review of ‘Return of the Sword’ at ‘The Cimmerian’

Deuce Richardson, the heavy-metal-looking blogger at The Cimmerian (a website devoted to “Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the best in heroic fantasy, horror, and historical adventure”), just posted a review of Return of the Sword.

He had some very positive things to say about the anthology, which means a great deal because the praise comes from a gathering place of experts in the heroic fantasy and sword-and-sorcery genres.