ABSTRACT
The Statue of Liberty, looking out over the sea as a beacon of freedom, has offered the generosity of welcome to the world for over 150 years. It carries perhaps the most inspiring words ever to adorn a statue. Libertas was the Roman goddess of freedom, who in Roman times held a torch, and often a pileus, a soft cap that symbolized the granting of freedom to former slaves sometimes she also carried a rod required in the ritual that freed the slaves. The inalienable right to freedom is one such ideal, given that the country was founded on a magnificent refusal to be a subservient colony, subject to the whims and greed of a tyrannical colonizer, presumably justifying his actions by the pernicious idea of the “Divine Right of Kings.” The great American mythologist Joseph Campbell warned, “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”.
