Quotes About Mythology

Religions have always adopted rich symbolic languages to signify the different aspects of their respective forms of faith and mythology.

A lot of women wrote to me. Some wrote me long letters on the meaning of the circle and about mythology and about motherhood and the significance or the symbolism of the mermaid and the frogs and the turtles.

According to Norse legend, peas arrived on earth as a punishment sent by the god Thor who, in a fit of pique, dispatched a flight of dragons with peas in their talons to fill up the wells of his unsatisfactory worshippers.

so that there resulted a chaos as disordered as the poets ever feigned

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

In myth, violent death is always justified.

Violence is the divine force that everyone tries to use for his own purposes and that ends by using everyone for its own—the Dionysus of The Bacchae

Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology.

The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.

If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.

It is also said that Genghis Khan wanted to attack the kingdom of Prester John, but that the latter repulsed him by unleashing thunderbolts against his armies.

Les Apsarâs sont les Nymphes célestes, qui symbolisent aussi ces possibilités informelles ; elles correspondent aux Hûris du Paradis islamique (El-Jannah), qui, sauf dans les transpositions dont il est susceptible au point de vue ésotérique et qui lui confèrent des significations d'ordre plus élevé, est proprement l'équivalent du Swarga hindou.

Just as Diana Prince is never around when Wonder Woman shows up, Venus is either a Morning Star or an Evening Star, never both simultaneously.

Neltharion the Earth-Warder.

As it fell upon a dayIn the merry month of May,Sitting in a pleasant shadeWhich a grove of myrtles made.

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

of the story would refer to the deity simply as "God." That is, the doublets lined up into two groups of parallel versions of stories. Each group was almost always consistent about the name of the deity that it used.

Behind every legend, strange to say, can be found a kernel of truth, a group of facts around which the legend was built.

Here's the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It's a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It's the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.

I]t's not the world that needs saving, it's us. For us to be saved, as a lot of the very old myths say, we'll have to come home and be born again.

SIH HSUIN BECOMES WINSTON MA: a simple engineering fix. In myths, people turn into all kinds of things. Birds, animals, trees, flowers, rivers. Why not an American named Winston?

Remember this: pure literalism always leads to a decrease in meaning. Mythology and sacred texts try to lead us and allow us to have the experience for ourselves. Through our experience we discover that encounter is not only possible but desirable. So often we struggle with experiencing our experiences.

The spiritual man in mythology, in literature and in the great world religions has an excess of life, he knows he has it, makes no apology for it, and finally recognizes that he does not even need to protect or guard it. It is not for him. It is for others. His life is not his own. His life is not about him. It is about God.

Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!