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THE FALL.
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poisonous fumes of this harmful draught must, therefore, first of all overpower this arch enemy of mankind.
The stronghold of the monster is an interminable maze of winding passages, like the Cretan labyrinth where Minos of old kept his fearsome Minotaur ; and the conditions of the combat are also not unlike those which Theseus had to accept at the time, except that there is no Minos' daughter to furnish us the ball of clue and the magic sword wherewith to destroy the fiend. We must, however, make the best of our opportunity, and bowing to the Great Sarasvati, the Goddess of Wisdom, accept the ball of clue of Cause and Effect and the sword of Discrimination which intellect places in our hands at Her bidding. Thus armed, we run no risk of being lost in the winding turns and blind alleys of the indiscriminate jumble of fiction and fact into which we are about to plunge ourselves, and shall also be spared the unholy dread of the residents of this strange land of Fantasy that constitutes the Foe.
For, as we hope to make it clear by and by, mythology is mind's underground rendezvous for all those whose inability to bear the strong rays of the midday Sun of intellectualism forces them to wear the tinted glasses of poesy. They resemble the suppositional prisoners of Plato, who, securely tied to their seats in a cave, with their backs towards its entrance, have to rely, for their knowledge of the world, upon the shadows cast on the wall in their front by all that pass by their prison. Occasionally they also overhear what those in light say when passing the cave, and amuse themselves by robing the unadorned, matter-of-fact
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