quote · Words worth keeping
Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.
Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.
Approximate author period: c. 1969 AD · modern
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- Author or tradition
- Lev Grossman
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- Approximate author period: c. 1969 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from documented birth year 1969; activity date not established; Wikidata Q2558063, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2558063 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 305259; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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