"Death, alas, is not vague, or abstract, or difficult to grasp for any human being. It is only too hauntingly real, too concrete, too easy to comprehend for anyone who has had an expierence affecting his near relatives or a personal foreboding. If it were vague or unreal, man would not have desire so much as to mention it; but the idea of death is fraught with horror, with a desire to remove it's threat, with the vague hope that it may be, not explained, but rather explained away, made unreal, and actually denied. Myth, warranting the belief in immortality, in eternal youth, in a life beyond the grave, is not an intellectual reaction upon a puzzle, but an explicit act of faith born from the innermost instinctive and emotional reaction to the most formidable and haunting idea."

- Bronislaw Malinowski, "Myth in Primitive Psychology".