The Nature Of Myth

"Myth enables man to experience imaginatively what logic might deny, that there is an essential link between the ultimate nature of reality and his own passions, his sexuality, his very biology and anatomy. It draws its power from the strange and satisfying paradox that there is a beautiful and compelling isomorphism between all that is marked by mutability, transience, and decay in human life and the stuff of eternity."
- Robert Alter, in the foreword to Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism