Quotes About Mythology

How interesting! In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens.

What Joyce called "the grave and constant" in human sufferings Campbell knew to be a principal theme of classic mythology.

mythology is an interior road map of experience, drawn by people who have traveled it.

this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died.

if he failed to send the beasts back to be sacrificed again, the hunters and their kin would starve. Thus early societies learned that "the essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating; that's the great mystery that the myths have to deal with.

The main motifs of the myths are the same, and they have always been the same. If you want to find your own mythology, the key is with what society do you associate? Every mythology has grown up in a certain society in a bounded field. Then they come into collision and relationship, and they amalgamate, and you get a more complex mythology.

My definition of mythology is "other people's religion," which suggests that ours must be something else. My definition of religion, then, is "misunderstood mythology"—and the misunderstanding consists in mistaking the symbol for the reference.

MOYERS: But that's not the Christian idea of creation

matinees had borrowed freely from those ancient tales. And that the stories we learned in Sunday school corresponded with those of other cultures that recognized the soul's high adventure, the quest of mortals to grasp the reality of God. He helped me to see the connections, to understand how the pieces fit, and not merely to fear less but to welcome what he described as "a mighty multicultural future.

Those who tow'rds Acheron do not descend.

Die Götter der Mythen handelten mit einem Maß an Kleinlichkeit, Missgunst und oberflächlicher Moral, das selbst verglichen mit den verkommenen moralischen Maßstäben unserer eigenen Kultur in keinem Verhältnis zu der Macht steht, die sie ausübten.

They couldn't him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Dreirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was miracle ingredient Z-247.

They couldn't touch him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees.

As for this present unhappy time, haunted by ghosts from a dead world and not yet at home in its own, its predicament is not unlike the predicament of the adolescent who has not yet learned to orient himself without reference to the mythology amid which his childhood was passed.

In the time of gods and monsters, what is the worth of a man?

She was married to this dude Osiris, and he croaked," Dan said. "So she freaked and was all wah! and went and cried herself a river." "Amazing! That's just what it says on the hieroglyphs," Theo said.

female deities were gradually overshadowed by or incorporated into the attributes of a number of male gods, then eclipsed by the ascendance of the single male deity that dominates the Judeo-Christian tradition.

El hombre caza y lucha. La mujer intriga y sueña; es la madre de la fantasía, de los dioses. Posee la segunda visión, las alas que le permiten volar hacia el infinito del deseo y de la imaginación. Los dioses son como hombres: nacen y mueren sobre el pecho de una mujer.

The death of one god is the death of all.

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wanderings,Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus.

What the myth founds is a double existence between the upper world and the underworld: a dimension of death is introduced into life, and a dimension of life is introduced into death.

In listening mood she seemed to stand,The guardian Naiad of the strand.

Yet the great "Why?" always at the center of the little "whats" and "hows" that makes religions into mythologies is often stronger in dead temples than in living.

How convenient it would be to many of our great men and great families of doubtful origin, could they have the privilege of the heroes of yore, who, whenever their origin was involved in obscurity, modestly announced themselves descended from a god.