More Excerpts
From Hero With A Thousand Faces:
Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended upon the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.
To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.
Bam. J. Campbell just served you, fundamentalists. If you have any interest in the spiritual traditions of the entire planet, you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book.