Quotes About Mythology

Each of us lives with a sword over his head. There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.

We all admire geniuses. Before the talents. This is totemism. This is paganism where every genius, as a god, is responsible for his ability. We have become pagans of media mythology.

Some people can read the biography of their gods online. When and where he was born and at what place or at what age he died.

To be a legend, you generally had to be dead.

You never know what Legbara going to take it into he head to do. Him is a trickster. The Eshu-them too love to play games.

When your elders are millennia-old demigods, you'd best take the injunction to respect your elders seriously.

The story of Sita lifting the Shiva dhanushya, which it takes 5000 servants to fetch for Rama to break (Bala Kanda, sarg 66), signifies the onset of puberty. Yet, if we are to take this literally, we have to ask what happened to this strong woman after marriage that she let herself be abducted by Ravana without a fight.

a woman who seems to be a passive character in major portions of the Ramayana, following her husband through thick and thin, insistent in her demand for the suvarnamrig, finally emerges as a strong woman with a will of her own. However, that is not what she is worshipped for.

Fairy tales, as Nell had said, are always complicated.

What separates history from myth is that history takes in the whole picture, whereas myth averts our eyes from the truth when it turns men into heroes and gods.

All illustrate the "theory of courage," which Tolkien called "the great contribution of early Northern literature," meaning both Icelandic and Old English literature. It is a "creed of unyielding will": The heroes refuse to give up even when they know the monsters—evil—will win. For that is the big difference between Snorri's Ragnarok and the Christian Doomsday. Odin and the human army of Valhalla do not win.

And that age was known as the Golden Age, until it was spoiled by the arrival of the women. —Snorri, Edda

The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

History is a myth men want to believe.

Let's reject the notion that men have exclusive rights to the sun. Must Helios, Apollo, Ra, Mithras, and the other golden boys take up every seat in the solar chariot that lights each day and coaxes forth all life? This is a miscarriage of mythology, for a woman's egg resembles nothing so much as the sun at its most electrically alive: the perfect orb, speaking in tongues of fire.

We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better.

Fairy tales are more than true–not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

It is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and power

Scripture has at its core such a powerful mythology that even the residue of that mythology is still sufficient to serve as an exacting control mechanism for some people. It provides, first of all, a theory about the meaning of life and therefore rules on how one is to conduct oneself.

American mythology would have it that divorced or widowed women in their middle years were desperate to remarry. That had not been Polly's experience. Most had made lives they enjoyed and would only compromise for a very shiny white knight with a particularly breathtaking steed.

Someone has said religion lasted longer in Ireland because we were an imaginative people, and so could most vividly picture the fires of Hell.

It must be remembered that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed as epic tales and not as historical texts. To use Shakespeare's Macbeth as a source for 11th-century Scottish politics would rather miss the point of the play, and the same is true of the Homeric epics.

The local legend is of some harried god turning all the snakes into stone so that he could get some peace from the peasants' pitiful petitioning.