[mythistorian]

Hi R3,

Thanks so much for your comments and questions. I’ll take up this last one, asking what specific myths are encompassed by the archaic sacrificial rituals. In a word, one could say: all of them! For here we hit the source of the mythic image and our entire spiritual life! This goes back to Giegerich’s phrase I quoted in an earlier mythblast, that in the sacrificial blow, the soul killed itself into being.

We have of course, on the other hand, all the myths of dying and resurrecting gods, which culminate in the radical reformulation of human sacrifice by the Christian myth. At the same time, we can look at the tragedies of Love, such as Tristan and Isolde, which Campbell was so fond of, as well as the Dynosian orgies of dismemberment and sexual abandon for a similar union of love and death. And this is just the tip of this iceberg!