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Hercules, Zeus, Thor, Gilgamesh - they are the statistics that leap in your thoughts whenever we think of misconception. But to David Leeming, myths are usually more than experiences of deities and fantastic beings from non-Christian civilizations. Myth is at once the most particular and the most common feature of civilization, representing common concerns that each world voices in its own idiom. Whether an Egyptian storyline of creation or the big-bang theory of modern physics, misconception is metaphor, mirroring our deepest sense of ourselves in relation to existence itself. Now, in the wonderful world of Myth, Leeming offers a sweeping anthology of myths, ranging from early Egypt and Greece to the Polynesian islands and modern knowledge. We read experiences of great floods from the early Babylonians, Hebrews, Chinese language, and Mayans; stories of apocalypse from India, the Norse, Christianity, and modern knowledge; myths of the mom goddess from Native American Hopi culture and James Lovelock's Gaia. Leeming has culled myths from Aztec, Greek, African, Australian Aboriginal, Japanese, Moslem, Hittite, Celtic, Chinese language, and Persian civilizations, offering one of the very most wide-ranging choices of what he telephone calls the collective dreams of humanity.More important, he has sorted out these myths according to a number of themes, contrasting and contrasting how various societies have dealt with similar concerns, or have informed similar stories. Inside the section on dying gods, for example, both Odin and Jesus sacrifice themselves to renew the globe, each dying on a tree. Such traditions, he proposes, may have their root base in societies of the distant former, which would ritually sacrifice their kings to renew the tribe.In The World of Misconception, David Leeming calls for us on a journey "not via a maze of falsehood but via a marvellous world of metaphor," metaphor for "the story of the partnership between the known and the undiscovered, both all around us and within us." Fantastic, tragic, bizarre, sometimes funny, the myths he presents speak of the most important human experience, an integral part of what Joseph Campbell called "the wonderful tune of the soul's high excitement."

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