-Caveat Lector- I ran across this passage in Jaan Puhvel, *Comparative Mythology*, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 243, referring to "...the warrior who was not divine but a saga hero manipulated by deity, not a king but merely in the royal service." References to "function" are to the three "functions" or "estates" of traditional Indo-European society, namely priest, warrior, and peasant or merchant. "This is the kind most marked by a tense relationship to the environment where he operated, to his divine and human patrons and his social constituency at large. He had no agglomeration of transfunctional attributes to lose, but he nevertheless managed to offend (or was perceived as offending) all segments of the social order by a structured set of misdeeds. With his flawed willfulness (or perhaps rather his 'programmed,' predestined, predictable nature) he compromised his career by nadir episodes that involved impious/unjust/sacrilegious, cowardly/underhanded/unwarriorlike, and covetous/venal/adulterous acts respectively. ... The varieties described are found in epic, saga, and folklore, from the fells of Scandinavia to the jungles of India, from the Bay of Bengal via the Gulf of Argos and the Tiber to Galway Bay. They kinds are not extinct--they were spotted no long ago on both the Mekong and the Potomac." The reason the myths and legends of our Indo-European heritage (and please remember that this is a *linguistic* heritage, not racial) resonate with us even today is that they embody spiritual and psychological truths about human behavior and our relationship with our gods. We are not so far removed from our ancestors that we can afford to forget that essential fact. If we have advanced at all, we have advanced materially; our weapons are deadlier, our "horses" faster than those of our forebears...but *we* have not changed in essence. We still act out those same ancient stories, time after time after time. It is only because we have largely forgotten the myths, or relegated them to a dusty bookshelf, that anything we do to each other seems "new." I started out to compare Bill Clinton to the "flawed heroes" Puhvel writes about, but realized as I wrote that if these stereotypes and archetypes apply to anyone, they must apply to *all* of us equally. We are *all* flawed heroes, again and again violating the basic code of conduct set forth for us by society. It *is* possible to overcome that interior programming which compels us to misbehave, but it means that we have to, first, trust our selves, and, second, trust each other. If we are not willing to do those two things, we will just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again. And before we rush to blame Bill Clinton, or Slobodan Milosevic, or Li Peng, or Boris Yeltsin, look inside our own selves and decide whether perhaps we don't need some changes *there*, before demanding that the rulers of the world live up a standard which we do not observe in our own lives. I know that's kind of preachy...but I do think it's valid. As the Quaker Elias Hicks wrote two hundred years ago, "We are never tempted by the devil without, but by the devil within." Bob ================================= Robert F. Tatman [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Remove "nospam" from the address to reply. NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. 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