Narcissus and Revelations

I will start out this post with two quotes: the first is from the Golden Bough and the second is from the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes:

Where the shadow is regarded as so intimately bound up with the life of the man that its loss entails debility or death, it is natural to expect that its diminution should be regarded with solicitude and apprehension, as betokening a corresponding decrease in the vital energy of its owner. In Amboyna and Uliase, two islands near the equator, where necessarily there is little or no shadow cast at noon, the people make it a rule not to go out of the house at mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may lose the shadow of his soul. The Mangaians tell of a mighty warrior, Tukaitawa, whose strength waxed and waned with the length of his shadow. In the morning, when his shadow fell longest, his strength was greatest; but as the shadow shortened towards noon his strength ebbed with it, till exactly at noon it reached its lowest point; then, as the shadow stretched out in the afternoon, his strength returned. A certain hero discovered the secret of Tukaitawa’s strength and slew him at noon. (Frazer, Chapter 18: The Perils of the Soul)

When I think of shadows and reflections, I think of the story of Narcissus and how he becomes enraptured by his reflection in both the life and the afterlife. He himself becomes his only friend. Certain cultures see reflections and shadows as extensions of the soul. The shorter the shadow, the less power it has. Every now and then I will run in the wee hours of the evening and I'll marvel at how enormous my shadow stretches. It's as if the light is blowing a giant bubble of a shadow that is pushing against my body and generating a giant space at the same time. With all the technology and resources that we have at our tips, there is still nothing that can replicate a shadow's extension of the body and soul. Instead of covering inches at a time. I am leaping and bounding by school bus lengths. In some instances, I'll be running at night beneath light posts and the shadow seemingly becomes a separate entity. It starts with me and then runs away with each passing light source. What does that say about my soul? Am I on an endless loop that's only as strong as my light source? Do people in cloud covered regions have less of a soul since they rarely see their shadow?

Calvin is acting just like Narcissus in two manners: he is afraid that nothing outside of himself can live up to his expectations and that he is essentially alone since Hobbes is a stuffed animal. The strip not only brings up questions like, "What is the meaning of life?", but it also addresses how Death could be around the corner. What if the "Middles" story is truncated by death? What if the Creation story is actually a short introduction to the story of Death?