[Stephen Gerringer]

Mars – though Frazer gets short shrift from academics these days for his sloppy scholarship and intuitive leaps (as does Robert Graves), he still speaks to me. I suspect Campbell’s love of The Golden Bough (which he sometimes referred to as his “bible”), along with his affection for Oswald Spengler and Leo Frobenius, might have something to do with the academy’s tendency to hold JC’s work at arm’s length.

The myth of Actaeon and Artemis is also one of my favorites, primarily because it is so simple and straightforward a story, and yet so powerful. It was one of the tales I loved telling my students in the years I taught Literature at the junior high level because of their response: never a question of anyone not “getting it.”