Introduction to Part II

Summary

The late singer-poet-novelist Leonard Cohen entitled one book of verse Let Us Compare Mythologies. In a sense, all of the chapters in this Part ask us to do exactly that. I do not mean “mythology” in a pejorative sense, but in all its anthropological splendor: taking facts on the ground and understanding them as part of a coherent sense-making worldview, albeit one that may not be falsifiable in a standard sense. But if that still seems pejorative, perhaps we might instead say “Let Us Compare View-Masters,” a reference to the red stereoscopic viewers that have delighted children (and adults) for decades by allowing us to enter static renderings with depth perception of lands real and imagined.