Over time, metaphors become so overused that any poetic quality they may have initially possessed gradually evaporates (water evaporates, not poetry) and they become everyday workhorse words (horses work, not words). In a word, they become literal. Perhaps an analogous process plays out with mythic-religious notions. Perhaps such notions begin as evocative, poetic, metaphorical ways of looking out on the world that, over an expanse of time, gradually lose their poetry, shed their metaphorical meaning, and transition into literalism.
