Mythologie & Sprookjes

We bevinden ons dan op het terrein van de mythologie, waar Joseph Campbell in zijn boek ‘’The masks of God’’ over zegt: “Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilisations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries, from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed, in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly(…….)to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on the concepts of the good society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small and men’s insanity far too great, for any more of those old games(…….) of Chosen Folks (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or (…….) the Devil. By which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk.”