[Stephen Gerringer]

Thanks, Mary, for emphasizing Johanna’s point about the suffering of Christ.

All too often those of us drawn to myth tend to overlook or ignore the Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythological nexus that informs modern society. Could be we are just drawn to what is sparkly and exotic, whereas the myths of the culture we grew up seems just the same-old same-old to many of us.

That’s a fruitful area for research for mythologists (maybe those from a culture outside the western nexus could better explore this, unencumbered by our baggage). Campbell does touch on this in Occidental Mythology (the third of four volumes in The Masks of God tetralogy), and Thou Art That. And then David Miller, professor emeritus of comparative religion and friend and colleague of Joe’s who served on JCF’s Board of Directors, goes there in his Christs: Meditations on Archetypal Images in Christian Theology, and Hells and Holy Ghosts: A Theopoetics of Christian Belief . . . and, of course, Carl Jung really dives deep throughout his Collected Works.