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.
