Myth as Historical Reference
If is one of the prime mistakes of many interpreters of mythological symbols to
read them as references, not to mysteries of the human spirit, but to earthly or
unearthly scenes and to actual or imagined historical events – he Promised Land
of Canaan, for example, and heaven as a district of the sky – or to see the
Israelites’ passage of the Red Sea as an event such as a newspaper reporter
might have witnessed. It is one of the glories, on the other
hand, of the Celtic tradition that in its handling even of religious themes it
retranslates them from the languages of imagined fact into a mythological idiom,
so that they may be experienced not as time-conditioned but as timeless, telling
not of miracles long past but of miracles potential within ourselves, here, now,
and forever. This aim is basic to the Grail tradition, basic
to Arthurian romance, as it was basic, also, to the earlier Celtic way of
storytelling, whether of pagan heroes or of Christian knights and saints.
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The two relationships working simultaneously has one linking you to the social duty and world of history, and the other linking you to that which is beyond duty, beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond good and evil. It links you through that door of the clashing rocks, which those two leopards represented, into the realm that is both of the sun lion and the moon serpent; and there the Goddess, the mother of us all, shows Herself in both aspects. That’s the important point of this whole subject. Once you get it, the whole thing begins to talk and when you haven’t got it, it links you into historical exercises that sometimes drive you crazy. G 54