That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief.

...more men and women were slaughtered in a couple of weeks of the terror of the atheistic French Revolution than in a century of the Inquisition.

The artist eye has a mythical slant upon life; therefore, the mythological realm - the world of the gods & demons, the carnival of their masks and the curious game 'as if' in which the festival of the lived myth abrogates all the laws of time, letting the dead swim back to life, and the 'once upon a time' become the very present.

Many of us view the bible and other religious teachings as mythology.

Combine two words, Myth and History. What do you get? Mystery.