"The Hero with a Thousand Faces"

[fiefoe]

Classics that we didn't know:

• The name Oedipus, it should be noted, means "the swollen footed".
• Prince Five-weapons: example of the well-nigh universal tar-baby story.  ("A New Classification of the Fundamental Elements of the Tar-baby Story on the Basis of 267 Versions.")
• "Here Phaethon lies: in Phoebus' car he fared, / And though he greatly failed, more greatly dared."
  
• "So Job died, being old and full of days."
• The Japanese gods drink sake... And the redeemed of Yahweh, in their roof garden, are served the inexhaustible, delicious flesh of the monsters Behemoth, Leviathan, and Ziz, while drinking the liquors of the four sweet rivers of paradise.
• Medea persuaded Jason to kill Apsyrtos, her younger brother whom she had carried off, and toss the pieces of the dismembered body into the sea. This force King Aeetes, her father, to put about, rescue the fragments.
• Huang Ti 's distinguishing endowment was his power to dream: in sleep he could visit the remotest regions and consort with immortals in the supernatural realm.
  
• Pope Gregory the Great was born of nobel twins who at the instigation of the evil had committed incest.
• Jains myth: Before this happy age, there had been a period happy still - precisely twice as happy - when men and women had been eight mile tall, possessing each two hundred and fifty-six ribs... men and women... born together in couples to live.
  

    There be now at sea a ship called Welcome, which has on board 100 or more the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is the chief scamp, at the head of them. The General Court has accordingly given sacred orders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the brig Porpoise, to waylay the said Welcome slyly as near the Cape of Cod as may be, and make captive the said Penn and his ungodly crew, so that the Lord may be glorified and not mocked on the soil of this new country with the heathen worship of these people. Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall not only do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for His minister and people.

      Yours in the bowels of Christ, Cotton Mather

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