Sublime

Large assertions are made in the text, for example, that the reality we experience had a beginning, an idea disputed by major scientists into the twentieth century. An emergent universe brings innumerable mysteries, scientific as well as theological—Why did it happen? How will it end?—which the ancients both anticipated and variously addressed in

The Egyptian myth of Osiris is the primal myth of the Mystery godman and reaches back to prehistory.

Many religious myths reflect a culture’s intuitive apprehension of transcendent aspects of reality. They aren’t merely roundabout ways to refer to something literal, but the most direct and accurate utterance of transcendent truths. A religious myth is symbolic—never literal—because it emerges from the obfuscated mind.

the mythic premises of a religion are systematized, beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events;

"myth can be defined as a metaphor at…

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In a culture reliant on oral traditions for preserving and mediating history, it would not be surprising if, two hundred years later, the trauma was still clearly embedded in stories—a terrifying vision of endings and beginnings that were also part of a longer cycle. After all, the preordination of fate, the inevitability of the Ragnarök, and the

layers. This had to be one of those cases where there had been some early culture predating the Greeks and the Norse alike that had featured the Norns/Fates and laid it down in a base layer on which their various descendants had then added more stuff. Consequently, they always read like an add-on to the more fleshed-out mythology.