Quotes About Mythology

As a result of Malory's plangent and often elaborate prose, the song of Arthur has never ended. Le Morte d'Arthur inspired both Milton and Dryden with dreams of Arthurian epic, and in the nineteenth century Tennyson revived the themes of Malory in Idylls of the King. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere , and Algernon Swinburne composed Tristram of Liones. The Round Table was reconstituted in the libraries of nineteenth-century England.

The kings of these territories were executed in the ritual of the 'blood eagle', whereby the lungs were ripped out of the body and draped across the shoulders so that they resembled an eagle's folded wings.

It was then that Lugh Lámhfada, Lugh of the Long Arm, approached the battlefield. Now Lugh was the son of Cian, which means "Enduring One", who was in turn son of Cainte, the god of speech. Now the council of the Children of Danu had forbidden him to come to the battle, for Lugh was all-wise and all-knowledgeable and it was thought that his life was too valuable to risk in battle, for his was the wisdom needed to serve humankind.

Lugh Lámhfada, Lugh of the Long Hand, the senior of the gods and patron of all arts and crafts, was eventually demoted into Lugh-chromain, "stooping Lugh", and from there Anglicized into "leprechaun".

What is that thing? Vampires. Or, as it was spelled at the time, vampyres. Yes, we know: It is difficult to accept, a strain to wrap your head around. Go and take the time to do so. Watch some television programs, or read some books in which vampyres are heroic and charming and sparkle in the daylight, and then return here and brace yourself for a return to a time that vampyres were things that went bump in the night.

Jungians call the "collective unconscious".

Where cobras come from. And not the hot ones, like Ian.

In either mythology, ancient Irish or modern Jungian, we see the struggle to arrive at a workable arrangement with the forces of Nature, so that we neither try to triumph over her nor naively succumb to her. The first strategy leads to a sense of inflation and emotional sterility, the second to madness.

Shapeshifting in folklore is clearly connected with hallucination in morbid psychology.

I'm a queer crabbed old man, pent like Merlin in his tree trunk. Samolxis, the Thracian bear god, hibernating in his cave. The Last of the Seven Sleepers.

The deeds of the heroes, in the sacred dream-time...the only time, according to the bushmen, that was real.

Yaldaboath is a monster spawned by Sophia who fell from the Pleroma," Fat said. "He imagines he's the only god but he's wrong. There's something the matter with him; he can't see. He creates our world but because he's blind he botches the job. The real God sees down from far above and in his pity sets to work to save us. Fragments of light from the Pleroma are—

All things from the north are devilish.

She is the goddess of the dead. She comes to you smiling and kindly, and you know it is time to die.

Tell them stories

No ancient story, not even Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, has remained as popular through the course of time. The story of Rama appears as old as civilization and has a fresh appeal for every generation.

Beware the wooden horse, Agamemnon King, Conqueror, for it will roar to the skies on wings of thunder and herald the death of nations.

Artemis does not accept the blood of women. Artemis will accept my blood.

But war makes heroes. Herakles and Ormenion were warriors, and tey have been made immortal. Father Zeus turned them into stars in the night sky. Oniacus scowled. 'In a drunken rage Herakles clubbed his wife to death, and Ormenion sacrificed his youngest daughter in order that Poseidon might grant fair winds for his attack on Kretos.

The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more

What did Pandora do with her box after she'd unleashed despair into the world? Did she keep it on her mantel as a reminder of what she'd done?

What did Pandora do with her box after she'd unleashed despair into the world? Did she keep it in her mantel, as a reminder of what she'd done?

It re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam's journey to the Greek camp. But its primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling – and much of what it has to tell are 'untold tales' found only in the margins of earlier writers.

It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman's right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the most important test of the Liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to the ultimate right of a postreligious Paganism.