Last Friday to this very hour - Graduation of Victoria University.

Professor Pat Walsh Vice-Chancellor.. - rigour in academic thinking.

- a group of distinguished and innovative thinkers. - critical thinking skills.

Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Mythology is not about opting out of this world but enabling us to live more intensely within it.

Since the 18^th century we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned about what actually happened !! But in the pre modern world when people wrote about the past they were concerned with what an event had MEANT. A myth was an event which in some sense had happened once, but which also happened all the time.

Because of our strictly chronological view of history we have no word or indeed place, for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events and glimpse the core or reality.

Mythology was about human experience. People thought that 'gods', humans, animals & nature were inextricably bound up together, subject to the same Laws and composed of the same divine substance. The very existence of the gods was inseparable from that of a storm, a sea, a river or from the powerful human emotions of love, rage or sexual passion that seemed for a moment to lift men and women onto a different plane of existence so that they saw the world with new eyes. MYTHOLOGY -designed to help people cope with the human predicament. It helped people find their place in the world.