"Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissociated from industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire. It is no mere accident that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have followed close on the heels of victory, and that the great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and spread civilization, thus healing in peace the wounds they inflicted in war." (Golden Bough, p. 55)

If that quote was too large and whopping, let's just consider it as a component of dialectical activity, which our blogs are intended to be. Someone ought to come and reprimand Kari for being longwinded, preferably by being more concise and specific.

There was a great quote from Joseph Campbell that was shared today that incapsulates much of the power of myth: 'What is a dream if it isn't a personalized myth, and what is myth if it isn't a de-personalized dream?" What dreams are for the single dreamer, myth is for humanity in toto.
This is why storytellers come from all traditions, whatever the particular beliefs of the individual system may be. Because this is dealing with a different mode of belief all together, that is True, rather than true. Or as Wallace Stevens says in his Adagia: "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." (I'm big into quotes today it seems)

It is when we don't believe in a fiction willingly that we end up encountering the dark side of myth, which is represented by a short story by Shirley Jackson called The Lottery(unread by me, but not forever), and by the application of a literal Bible upon the world in which we happen to corporeally reside. AJ Jacobs gives a humorous vision of this deeply serious issue in his book The Year of Living Biblically. This is a subject I could expound upon at length, but today I choose not to.

It is an undeniable fact of life that human beings are imitative creatures; we like to copy one another and other creatures. What mythology says is "these are the things you must imitate." Myths, according to Eliade, are three things:
1. Sacred
2. Exemplary
3. Significant
(really Eliade offers difficulties with the modes of belief as well. He was a member of the Iron Guard, the Romanian Fascist party, in his youth. Does this mean that we concentrate on his troubling personal history, or on his capacities as a mythic scholar? Probably for our purposes the latter is what matters most. But then what do I know?).

And if you want a really gory creation myth, check out the Babylonian story of Tiamat and Marduk.