Quotes About Mythology

Hero-cults complicate everything in a Sacred Band.

The mythic journey is always about selflessness

Circe: Do you know what they're looking for, Medea? she asked me. They're looking for a woman who'll tell them that they're not guilty of anything; that the gods, whom they worship by chance, compel them in their undertakings. That the track of blood they leave behind is proper to their male nature as the gods have determined it.

But Medea is neither an anthropological retelling of myth in the style of Mary Renault, nor a simpleminded story of men-versus-women, of a sensuous moon-and-earth religion versus a cold and abstract sky theology. It is a study of power, and of the operations of power, and of the behavior of human beings under pressure when power squeezes them tight.

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

the Franco regime's highly tendentious view of the civil war as a war of liberation against those without ethics or value – a mythology on which Franco never ceased to stake his legitimacy.

and this ability of hawks to cross borders that humans cannot is a thing far older than Celtic myth, older than Orpheus – for in ancient shamanic traditions right across Eurasia, hawks and falcons were seen as messengers between this world and the next.

It was important for a Roman of this period to get his Greek mythology right. Being able to identify who was who and what was what was a sign that the viewer was a person of culture and status.

This book aims to capture, and explore, the outrageousness, inventiveness, and sheer fun that characterize classical mythology. But it is also born of the conviction that myth matters. It mattered for the ancient Greeks and Romans, and it matters for us in understanding who we are: our selves, our liberties, and our lies.

However, I have also argued for allegory's positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.

Sweden is still a very peaceful country to live in. I think that people in Britain have created this mythology about Sweden, that it's a perfect democratic society full of erotically charged girls.

Legend a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

From the waterfall he named her,Minnehaha, Laughing Water.

Gaea? Isn't that Mother Nature? She's supposed to have, like, flowers in her hair and birds singing around her and dear and rabbits doing her laundry."

I am intrigued with scriptural mythology that tells us that God created a divine feminine presence to dwell amongst humanity. This concept has had a constant influence on the work. I have imagined her as ubiquitous, watchful, and often in motion. This work is, in effect, the photographic image of the invisible.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

reading the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into beasts. A wonderful picture of antique love.

In the Balkans the peasants say that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you are born under A LILAC-BLEEDING STAR.

All ancient polytheisms revered one high god above all others.

The humma-hah (meaning 'long ago') stories are traditional Pueblo stories that have been told continuously for thousands of years about a time when amazing things were possible, when the plants and animals and even rocks and stars used to converse with human beings. The humma-hah stories describe the various supernatural beings and other worlds and other times that still exist right beside the present world and present time

Tolkienist (n.) Someone who studies the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.

In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat. Where's

Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.