Thursday, November 13, 2003

"The wicked thing about both the little and the great 'collective faiths', prehistoric and historic, is that they all, without exception, pretend to hold encompassed in their ritualized mythologies all of the truth ever to be known. They are therefore cursed, and they curse all who accept them, with what I shall call the 'error of the found truth', or, in mythological language, the sin against the Holy Ghost. They set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of their own petrified belief, and therefore, within the ban of their control, mythology, as they shape it, serves the end only of binding potential individuals to whatever system of sentiments may have seemed to the shapers of the past (now sanctified as saints, sages, ancestors, or even gods) to be appropriate to their concept of a great society."
-- Joseph Campbell, from "Myths To Live By"