ABSTRACT
Baal was a god already familiar from the Bible. Perhaps the most famous passage concerns Elijah's challenge to the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Throughout the biblical corpus, Baal worship serves as the epitome of Israelite religious apostasy to the ways of their Canaanite neighbors. The researcher is able to access mythical consciousness only through mythical images that are understood to be objectifications resulting from a process of symbolization. Ernst Cassirer presented the history of Western political thought as an ongoing struggle against this totalitarian myth of the state. The politics of the twentieth century look like a regression only if one accepts the Enlightenment story of a progressive movement away from myth. The Myth of the State begins with a discussion of mythical thought reminiscent of Cassirer's work from the 1920s but then proceeds to trace what he calls the struggle against myth in the history of political thought.
