A mythological pantheon is fluid and as the needs and the realizations of the society change, so do the relationships and the gods. Deities are really time- and space-conditioned; they are shaped from inherited ideas, inherited traditional imageries, but they are put together in terms of a local context of time and space. One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion. One of the functions of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos in such a way that it becomes the carrier of this mystical realization, so that wherever you look it’s as though you are looking at an icon, a holy picture, and the walls of space and time open out into the deep dimension of mystery, which is a dimension within ourselves, as well as out there. This dimension can open through the science of today even more wonderfully than it opened through the science of the second millennium B.C. There is absolutely no conflict between science and the religious mood or the mythological realization—but there IS a conflict between the science of the twentieth century A.D. and the twentieth century B.C. Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, p.107
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 23:49:57 +0000
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