Mythological stories involving magic and deities point to a belief in a universe that has been designed by a creator. C.S. Lewis, a renowned Christian author, was converted to Christianity through a contemplation of mythology. He once ridiculed christian expressions about sacrifice and the “blood of the Lamb” calling them silly. Lewis could not comprehend how “the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to the world.” One evening he discussed the subject with authors J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson who were fellow members of the Inklings writing club. He recorded the substance of his conversation in a letter to Arthur Greeves.

“Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself... I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant.”

“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expresssing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things'. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a 'description' of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The 'doctrines' we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."

From C.S. Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914 - 1963), Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1979, p. 427