"The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of the shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest--as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and dissappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustable joy of life invincible. Thus the two are terms of a single mythological theme and the down-going and the up-coming (kathodos and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form).

"All things are changing; nothing dies. The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases....For that which once existed is no more, and that which was not has come to be; and so the whole round of motion is gone through again." [Ovid, Metomorphoses, XV] "Only the bodies, of which this eternal, imperishable Self is the indweller, are said to have an end." [Baghavad Gita 2:18]

It is the business of mythology proper, and of a fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and "unreal": they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs. Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered, not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations; for the point is that, before such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams. The passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward--into depths where where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space; but with its horror visible still, it cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing, all sustaining love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power. Something of the light that blazes invisible wtihin the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth, with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an imminant, imperishable eternity; time yields to glory, and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike."

--Joseph Campbell, Hero With A Thousand Faces, pp 28-30