Quotes About Mythology

Somewhere along the way we identified ourselves with them, and came to associate birds with the realm of spirits, as opposed to that of bodies and their carnal appetites.

She once said her songs were "mostly about myths, spirits, that kind of thing. Not fairies, stronger than that." Not fairies. Stronger than that: there's a fine phrase to bear in mind. Her lyrics are about the things that drive, or repulse, or empower the human spirit. Not escapism, in fact, but its exact opposite.

Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong," says Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

More than 500 deluge legends are known around the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.

Mor-Rioghain is a bean-sidhe, a banshee

I was there the day that Horus fell.

For the early English farmer, the world around was full of spiritual beings, half divine, half devilish.

We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.

These superhero and mythical stories have, in many cases, replaced Biblical stories as vehicles for communal myths, but they are hardly any better than ancient magical adventures tinged with mythical archetypes and the decidedly unnuanced black-and-white struggle between good and evil.

Sigmund Freud en Tótem y tabú cuando aseveró que los hijos debían matar simbólica o literalmente al padre.

how the word janitor came from Janus, the god of entrances and exits,

AN oracle had informed King Acrisius of Argos that his grandson would deprive him of his throne and his life. Because of this he had his daughter Danae and Perseus, her child by Zeus, shut in a chest and cast into the sea.

Heimthra' was the word used for longing: for home, for the past, for things to be as they once had been. Even the gods were said to know that yearning, from when the worlds were broken.

The presiding spirit of Welsh history has been the shape-shifter Gwydion the Magician, who always changed his shape and always stayed the same.

Even in terms of fiction, nothing in their lives became them like the leaving of it. King Fjolnir rose in the night to make water, fell into a vat of mead and drowned instead; Sveigdir ran after a dwarf when drunk and vanished into a boulder; Vanlandi was trampled to death by a nightmare; Domaldi was sacrificed for good seasons; Dag was struck on the head with a pitchfork when seeking revenge for his sparrow; and so on down to the fifth century.

Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning?

Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex. That's because they need femininity to be associated with death; it's the jitters that gives them a hard-on! for themselves! They need to be afraid of us. Look at the trembling Perseuses moving backward toward us, clad in apotropes. What lovely backs! Not another minute to lose. Let's get out of here.

Denn sie, die uns das himmlische Feuer leihen, die Götter, schenken heiliges Leid uns auch.

in 1910 a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene. He was at pains to correct the common mythology and thought a word might help. The myth was this: that "personal qualities" are transmitted from parent to progeny. This is "the most naïve and oldest conception of heredity," Johanssen said in a speech to the American Society of Naturalists. It was understandable.

Not all the gods who appear in these tales and fancies became more than mythological figures. Many of them continued merely in this role, without temple or form of worship; they had but a folklore or finally a theological existence. Others became the great gods of Egypt.

was man, mortal bloody man, who created the myths.

L.P. So your work must fight religion? J.H. No, not at all! It fights the unconsciousness, the blindness, that all myth creates about itself. You never can see the actual myth you are in or only through a glass darkly.

We live in a similarly shattered Weltanschauung where cultural distractions urgently seek to mask the demise of tribal mythologies, where sex, power, money are offered up as "connections" to replace the linking to the transcendent mythic images once granted.

ere the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea